Fry's Day. And Fry's sister was…

I actually don't think the Freya in SO3 was the same as the one from VP. Her appearance, for one thing, was more than a little creepy. The character model made much more sense after playing Radiata Stories, but in a game with more realistic proportions…

Something a class I took pointed out is that the real world and how we perceive stuff isn't really linear. We take in all sorts of data at once, not a bunch of things in sequence. We think with a neural net, not any sort of linear process. Intelligence is fundamentally the ability to make connections and draw conclusions efficiently, and this needs to be figured out.

Due to her powers, chibi!Sophia was getting a whole ton of mixed signals, and while all of us want the world to make sense, children especially need to make it do so, because getting the world to make sense is a child's job. The human thought process is more akin to hyperlinking than a linear narrative. Think of all the links between pages on Wikipedia: we draw on all sorts of other data to think about anything. Like, when we think about going to the store with someone, we're calling up our data on that person, the priority list of the trip, data on the store in question, logistical information…

Sophia's mental model is that framework, which on the one hand is incredibly good for understanding things but on the other is incredibly bad for staying on topic. Sophia is… a bright young girl who cares about people. Letting her look at the connections is like dropping someone in TVTropes. Without the ability to disconnect from the site or close the windows. Then, there's the childhood programming to take in data and fiddle with it in order to understand it- Oooh, lookit the pretty lights! And kittens!

It's fun to write that thought process. Being faced with a situation, calling up background data relevant to what sort of thing it would take to cause it and how important it is to fix it, what are her options for dealing with it… and trying not to stare out the window at the birdies. Luther thinks it's adorable, of course, since we tend to judge people by how much they agree with us, and chibi!Sophia thinks that making things that make people happy is the best thing. In societies with apprenticeship, this kind of thing leads to de facto adoption (or even legal adoption): mentoring is important.

Cuteness is a measure of how much something invokes parental instincts/how worthy it is of being looked after. Given the amount of… not quite fate, but connections between everything going on here, powers at play here, I actually have to wonder whether it was a coincidence or hitsuzen that Luther's first contact with a denizen of the sphere was one so perfectly suited to making him react with, 'I shall teach it, and guide it, and call it Mini-Me!' Kind of like Mirage is to Maria, where it's not a coincidence that they clicked. 'Why doesn't daddy love us?' is a big angst thing in the game, believing themselves rejected by their creator.

Sophia gasped. "What happened?" The world around her suddenly freezing didn't startle her: she was used to it. She wasn't used to seeing Luther, Ashton, whichever, bleeding. Well, not that he was bleeding now, but there was blood on his clothes and this was the battle form he'd shown her. The one that looked more like his real body, except it glowed slightly, had the robes and could grow wings. "Are you alright? Did you get in a fight?" Those were silly questions, really, but they were honest ones. She was a child, after all, and seeing him like this had made her so worried, made her rush up and grab his hand so he didn't go away without telling her what was wrong, leaving her to worry.

So many secrets in her world, so many lies, her father not wanting to look her in the eye but pat her on the head, her mother staying away so she didn't have to look at Sophia and hate herself for bringing her into this world as a tool, Uncle Robert looking at her with a mask that showed nothing but contemplation, searching for something, some sign, some hope and never saying what he wanted to see or what he had found. What she could do.

They were family, they should have been connected to her, but they didn't want to be. She'd known that subconsciously before she was born. She was family, that was a connection, and she was also both a creation of their knowledge and skill and a tool: three ties. Yet they knew they had to be impartial when it came to their tool, their weapon, and they didn't want to look at the girl they had done this to, didn't want to face what they had been forced to do.

She'd known: the Connection gene had been in her as her brain developed, nearly from the beginning, unlike Fayt and Maria. It was how she was, as basic as breathing, and like breathing if it wasn't controlled consciously it would be unconsciously. Always there.

She'd wanted to be with them, but they'd wanted to push her away and pull her closer at the same time, and she'd tried to be good so they would only like her instead of tying her down and rejecting her at the same time. Always this feeling that something was wrong, no matter how hard she'd tried to smile.

Then being taken to the lab, and trying to be good while they experimented. Now, she knew that they'd been trying to see whether or not the ability to access 4-d space was there. At the minimum, she would have had to be able to use the Time Gate as a connection point, but then they'd used a photo of it. A recording of that voice, while she was drugged and wouldn't remember, too. The symbol was the thing, after all.

All sorts of symbols inscribed all around the chair, trying to cause the symbol inside her to connect with those images in a certain way, and it had been terrifying. Like having control of her own body taken away from her, some impersonal force using her like a puppet, and this was her father and uncle doing this to her! They wouldn't stop!

There hadn't been any way to get out of it except to go through. They were forcing her to do something, so the only thing she could do was that thing. She'd created that path and she'd flung herself down it, wanting to get away from the sickness and the symbol chains and the feeling of betrayal. The knowledge that this was what it was all about, the wrongness in her family's ties. That this had something to do with why they had always rejected her on some level.

She'd wanted it to stop and she'd wanted to know why. Why it was this way and why wasn't there anything she could do to fix it? If they'd not wanted her at all, it would have been easy, but they did so she had to want them back, and it hurt that they also didn't want her.

She knew all sorts of words for this now, kinds of connections and complications, but then there had only been feelings.

There had been somewhere they wanted her to go, the concept of that connection forced into her mind by the symbols, and she'd thought there might be an answer there. Someone there who would answer her, and make it all better.

Or so she'd hoped, but mostly she'd been running, when she flung herself into that world. Out of a very big computer screen, and even though he hadn't been looking up at the time the connection she'd been spelled to strengthen let him catch her, body moving, alerted when she saw him and saw that she was going to crash on him and the desk if she wasn't caught.

Shock/surprise/concern – Where had she come from?

Alarm/condemnation/anger – She'd almost landed on him and the equipment! Who just threw a small child around like that?

Distraction/anticipation/musing – Some part of him was still focused on what he had been doing: it was something very important to him, that he'd been waiting to do for a long time but knew he'd probably still have to fine-tune, run fixes.

Once he took care of the immediate problem, anyway.

Sophia had felt him looking around for two people, only she'd felt it as pinging those connections, seeing if they were there, which they weren't.

She'd already been crying when she arrived, from the spell and… everything, even if she'd been startled into stopping when she actually escaped, found herself in this place. Now they started again and she gripped his clothing, not noticing how strange it was. Why did he want her to go away already? Did everybody want her to go away? They were connected, she could feel it, and…

That was when her mind's eye opened, all the way, trying to see him and realizing that he was connected to everybody. Seeing first that, and then their connections to each other, not just family but love and hate, friendship and bargains. Through all of time, because there was really only now in the sphere, so lovers for one night were lovers for all time, and grudges also lasted forever, piled in upon each other in dimensions and tesseracts of far too many…

It was beautiful and horrifying and overwhelming, when she'd already been overwhelmed, had far too much happen that day that she couldn't deal with. So she'd clung to him, and buried her face in his chest, because she wanted to not see, she wanted to hide.

She'd felt his arms tightening around her, felt him wanting to ask what was wrong but she couldn't speak so she tried to show him by letting him feel, except he couldn't see the way she could. His mind wasn't like that. No one's was but hers, she knew now.

The bit he could see made him have to sit down again, after lunging up to catch her, and he'd held her to steady them both. The shock of that made him afraid, which made her more afraid of rejection and not having a hiding place, and that had made him more shocked, and confused, just like her.

Then he'd figured out some of what was going on (he'd told her later that it was called a feedback loop) and started trying to calm himself down, and her down, before they melted down.

She hadn't been held or hugged in a long time, not by anyone but Fayt. He'd wanted to know what she wanted, what would calm her, so she'd let him feel, and that meant feeling what he felt more.

He didn't have any answers for her, he had no idea what was going on, but he'd find out. He wasn't going to put up with poor probably-abused children being thrown into his office and abandoned, it was just outrageous. Security would find out who was responsible for this and whoever it was would lose their job and wish they'd never been born.

She'd been trying to see only him, because that eye wouldn't close again and seeing everything was too overwhelming. So she'd focused on seeing him, thought of seeing what he knew and letting him see the answers to his questions.

It had been very strange to see him think. Pretty, though. It had made her cheer up a bit, watching all the quickquick connections being made and going off in different directions. No, she wasn't trying to trick him, he reassured her that he believed that. This was very strange, though, but… symbology?

He drew it out for her as he thought of it, the connections between him and what was in the computer, the Sphere and her world and her, the symbols her father and uncle had used and what they meant. She wouldn't have been able to understand the words, but she could understand the connections.

Sophia had been so happy, that someone was finally explaining. And that someone was family? It made her start crying again, but a quieter happy crying.

Family, he'd agreed, redefining the creator-creation connection as a family connection as well, only one that wasn't like what she had with her family. She'd wanted to know more about that, so he'd shown her the connection between him and his parents. They'd also wanted to make him be a certain way, because they had hopes, but it wasn't quite using. He certainly hadn't resented them for it and they hadn't felt guilty or been afraid he would. It was like hers, but healthier. She'd liked it much better.

Since that one had cheered her up, he showed her his connection to someone else (big sister), and it was a little like her and Fayt's connection, but much stronger. She wanted one like that. It was a really nice thing, they both were, so she'd tweaked the connection between the two of them so that it was more like that, because when she'd looked at the connections between the two of them some of them had frightened her.

She hadn't recognized destined enemy then. She hadn't been able to look at a connection and say right away that it was the fact her father wanted her to kill her new friend, but they had still been made of fear, anger, protective wrath, self-hatred, yearning, self-doubt, all kinds of terrible things. She didn't want there to be any hurting, not of her new friend/family, so since it wasn't possible to get rid of connections, she made these the strongest so he would be safe and they would stay connected and she could have the nice ties.

Didn't he like the nice connections?

She honestly didn't understand what he was feeling when he reacted with alarm and a bit of (proper) paranoia to suddenly having his emotions tampered with deliberately, as opposed to either a panicked child's projections or her making suggestions. Had she done something wrong? She didn't feel that she did, but she may have? Or he thought she might have?

She'd blinked up at him, and he'd just squeezed her again, having no idea what to say, feel, or show her once again. What she had done wasn't a bad thing, he supposed, but it was certainly something to ask about first.

Even if she had been able to tell through their connection that he wouldn't really mind. Asking mattered. Connections mattered, right?

He wasn't able to draw out the connections between the consent issues, rights and emotions for her because it was just feelings for him, at that point. He looked it up and drew it out for her later, though.

Then, he'd started thinking of safeguards, and if there was some way to keep her from having to see so much she was overwhelmed. Then he'd realized that she was going to have to go back to her family, that had done this to her. Go back inside his creation. People in there.

At that point, the connections and emotions about them had started happening so fast between so many things she really hadn't been able to follow them, but she was exhausted from what had happened anyway, so she didn't mind closing her eyes while he thought. It was pretty.

He was surprised by the 'pretty' description, so she tried to draw connections to what it make her think of. Like kollideascopes? Or… Um, she didn't know what exactly it was like. It was pretty, though. She liked it.

Of course she wouldn't hurt him, and she knew he wouldn't hurt her. That was the nice family connections, and she really liked that. She wanted that, he didn't have to ask.

He'd wondered what was making seeing all of it so hard for her, and she tried to draw out the complexity before he took the barely-sketched diagram and just crunched it together, showing her that what she had thought was a lot of complicated different things was all one thing. Yes, if all time was one thing that made it much simpler, she didn't have to try to figure out where 'now' was relative to the beginning and end of the manifestation of every single connection from the temporal perspective. Not unless it mattered at the time. She'd been trying to orient herself in way too many directions at once when they were imaginary directions, too. Like seasickness, but much, much worse.

Or something, it took her awhile to understand because the connection of 'this equals this' didn't help if she didn't understand the second this either. She just let him define a lot of things as things she didn't need to worry about right then, because she trusted him.

Even now, there were still a lot of things that she grasped in terms of connections but hadn't put into words yet. She'd gotten in the habit of saying even things that most people thought were sort of obvious out loud, just to be sure they weren't too weird and that she was putting them in the right words.

According to Luther, most people thought in words, made sentences, instead of the connections between things. Sometimes she seemed a little slow, because she had to translate from how she saw things to how other people did, and remember what of what she saw they wouldn't see and what she had to pretend she didn't know because an ordinary person wouldn't have seen it, but that was alright. Luther had assured her that she had a few years before she needed to learn how to impress people in order to try to get a job. Although she wouldn't have to fight here, and he'd make sure she had whatever she needed to do whatever she wanted.

Because, as he'd showed her then, the thing in the computer that was her world was his precious creation, his masterpiece, every hope and joy and wonderful thing bundled up, trying to make something that would live and, "It's alive, alive!" he thought, drawing a connection to a story of creating life from something else and laughing inside, smiling outside, feeling happy enough to consider getting up, spinning around, tossing her up in the air and catching her, although she'd been tossed around enough for one day and she was tired. She was happy that everything had gone so well though, or he'd gotten some unexpected good luck… She was good luck? A gift? A nice surprise, instead of a bad one?

At the time, he had just been so happy that the Eternal Sphere was working and there had been this miracle, a bit of magic in a world without it. A bit of magic that he was responsible for.

It hadn't taken him long to figure out what had made her father and uncle so worried, and that made him worried, but he didn't reject her because of it. He just started drawing more lines and connections and protections, things to keep her safe. To keep everyone safe. He hadn't wanted her to tell anyone about him, but that was alright. She'd been afraid of what would happen if he met them, perhaps because of what she saw in the connections and perhaps because she didn't want him to become like them, and start blaming himself, beating himself up at the thought of her and not wanting to think of her because of that.

A shared secret was also a connection.

Luther dealt with words and concepts, connecting them together to make things. Like programs. Like plans. Like her world.

Really, she thought that what Maria had done was right, except for the fact that she hadn't asked first, because the connections she'd seen had added up to enemy and thus to way to save her people. It fit, and Luther had been excited, telling her about making the planet once he'd come back the day before. Then about making dragons, and how he'd felt like playing around and testing if he could use this in battle by making anvils fall on the dragon's heads, like in cartoons.

He liked making things. New connections, all the time. People in the Sphere did that too, but the world ran on symbols, underneath everything.

Now he had a symbol too, he was more like her. And Fayt, but they were even more family now. Maria had just made him who he would have been here, too, so that explained why he seemed more right now. Like this was the way he should be. He'd already been connecting his thought to the Sphere more, thinking in symbols so it could understand. He liked the Sphere so the Sphere liked him. She wasn't doing anything with their connection, but it was interesting to watch. He was showing the Sphere things, helping it make connections, all the time. That was how he was, really.

It had seemed right that he had a power equal to hers, or better. Since he was older and wiser and everything. It was the one he'd always wanted, too.

She wondered if a person like that would have to be born with that symbol in their dna here. Supposedly only Expellians did, but symbols made up everything. So they had to be there, just not useful for symbology. Encrypted, that was the word. Encrypted in the shape of DNA, the molecules, so people didn't see that it was all programming so easily. Players, too. Graphics. Like the animation of the bird she was doing. Fayt had said he'd find out how to project it in his game holo room, too, and then it could fly around and they could touch it and stuff, once she learned textures. It would be like a pet. She didn't know how to give it a mind yet, but watching Luther and the Sphere was interesting.

It would take a long time to do the rest of the stuff for their bird, anyway.

Symbology was easy, though. It was just memorization, and that was easy when she could just create a connection between the symbological formula and the effect. Once she figured out how to make connections between theoretical effects and any spells that existed, she wouldn't need to be told new ones at all.

Luckily, she knew a healing one. Or was a clothes-cleaning one better, because he was healed already? She didn't know any clothes-cleaning ones. He surely could, so the fact he hadn't meant that the bad thing that had happened wasn't over and it was an emergency and what if whatever bad person had attacked him tried again? She wouldn't let them!

"Sophia? Sophia, calm down." Luther had to kneel down to look her in the eye and put his hands on her shoulders to get her attention, get him to look at him. "Sophia, you need to calm down… and put those back where you found them." At first his voice was soothing, but the second part was sharper.

"But…" But he'd been hurt!

"Put them back right now, young lady."

"But…"

"Sophia Esteed, what have I told you about summoning executioners?" He said slowly and clearly, drawing it out. She should know this already.

"They are for erasing bugs in the system and dealing with really bad people." Not, for example, giving her a ride home when she missed the bus, since it caused panic, or providing company when she was lonely, since they were so big they broke things in the apartment, like load-bearing walls. "But you were hurt!"

Luther made another mental note that he really had to create something else, something that wasn't just smaller but obviously more powerful. Sophia would obviously go for the big guns if she thought it was serious, and apparently children kept thinking that everything the adults didn't know what to do about was the end of the world, and it was hard to get her to believe that it wouldn't be when, actually, if anything went wrong the end of the world was a very real possibility and she was smart enough to know it. "It's alright, I've dealt with it, I just need your help for one little thing."

What did he need her to do? What could she do to help, so he wouldn't be hurt or go away?

"First, I need you to calm down and put the executioners back." He hadn't even tried ordering them to turn off, not when this was Sophia and she was this upset and determined. At least he'd frozen this place already: he'd just restore it to before he'd frozen it and before the executioners had done things like clip the side of the Applied Biology building with a wing and send the skyscraper falling to the ground or try perching on things that weren't designed for spaceship-sized (and even heavier) behemoths with really sharp claws. As Luther, he was well aware that no one would actually be hurt by any of that destruction: they wouldn't have felt a thing while paused and it was simple to put it all back. As Ashton, he couldn't help but think of this as 'real life' and be hit with how many people would have died just now, including people he knew.

While it was good that the immersion was working and he would probably react properly instead of callously to what would certainly happen a few years from now? He, like Sophia, needed to focus, not worry about… he didn't want to call them friends per se, after what Sophia had pointed out, but he'd almost gone into Applied Biology, as a roundabout way of approaching Dr. Leingod's interest in symbological genetics, before his undergraduate advisor had made him realize that if he studied something he wasn't especially interested in, the experts would pick up on that, and an ounce of real feeling was worth a pound of strategy. The best lies were made up of as much truth as humanly possible. People didn't make it here unless they were obsessed with and loved their field: this university held the best of the best among trillions. He actually was fascinated by Drs. Leingod and Esteed's work, so he'd tried to stop trying to seem perfect, stop playing the metagame as he'd grown up playing it, and he actually thought the part that had hooked Leingod, although he was a paranoid and slippery fish (and hooking and reeling in were two different things), was the time he'd let himself be bossly at some people for being lazy and leaving something for the custodians that wasn't their damn job.

He'd thought it was both horribly embarrassing and a massive slip at the time, but it wasn't like they knew anything about 4d culture, now was it?

He still knew everyone in Applied Biology that mattered, because if being interested in both symbology and genetics might have been a red flag, just dropping those connections wouldn't have seemed very friendly, now would it? The whole point was to seem trustworthy. The people there were also doing a few things relevant to his interests, especially character design.

…He was going to have to give in and raise the level cap, wasn't he. He'd wanted the Eternal Sphere to be realistic, not someplace that encouraged excess grinding or other means of becoming overpowered, but it was clear that not everyone had his principles.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure." The executioners, as they were, wouldn't have done all much good if she'd broken loose and come after him anyway. "There, that's better. Sophia, I gave you access to them for emergencies. You can't just use them at the drop of a hat…" Well, telling her that wasn't going to work. She was right, technically. It had been an emergency. "The Sphere was invaded again."

"…Oh." Now Sophia felt silly. "I'm sorry for panicking. Did you have fun?"

Luther opened his mouth to reply, then paused, because while his initial reaction was to say no, that wasn't really an honest answer. In real life, it was probably a sort of mental illness to enjoy that kind of thing, what with all the agony of the injuries and what would have happened if he'd lost, but he'd been running on an endorphin high the whole time, and he was probably still a little high off the thrill of victory. The challenge of a direct, honest fight, the adrenaline that came from a real threat, the feeling of being alive, of beating an ungodly difficult opponent? No one who didn't understand that had the right to call themselves a game designer.

Also, the honest answer was the one that would reassure Sophia. "Yes. She was harder than they usually are, though."

"You've got blood on your robes," Sophia said, and Luther wanted to facepalm. What an idiotic thing to forget to fix, of course she'd panicked.

"It's not mine," he told Sophia, and actually that was the literal truth. While plenty of his blood had gotten on his robes during the fight, that had all been fixed by the use of an entirely broken auto-regeneration and auto-life spell that was only supposed to be used by people who were debugging, so they could survive the occasionally lethal bug or just run through an area without having to slow down and care about the enemies present. It was a good thing he'd had the presence of mind to create a debugging tool, otherwise he wouldn't have survived long enough to figure out what to create in order to defeat her. The blood must have gotten on him when he'd picked her up after finally taking her down.

She was so short, and the proportions were off. Who had thought that was a good idea? Not to mention that she was child-sized, and certain things were very much not childish. Whoever had created her had a lot to answer for, but frankly, he wasn't up to it. Fending off challenges and attacks from competitors, sure. That was all part of the game, and he generally incorporated it into the game. Another fun little thing for the PCs, to get them to defend this universe. To think of it as something to defend.

"Who did it this time?"

"Someone from another universe."

Sophia blinked up at him. That was new. Usually it was jealous people, either from other companies or those who had been unable to get jobs and resented his good fortune.

"She called herself Freya. There was a goddess by that name, but I doubt she's the same being." Or had the people of her universe tried to invade his and been fought off? Who would have done something like that? "Utterly, utterly broken stats and techniques." It was almost offensive. She had been so, so cheap. Normally, if he'd been among university students, he might have made a comment relating that cheapness to her clothing involving the phrase 'five fol whore,' but given that Freya had looked underage and Sophia was, he certainly wasn't going to say that now.

Well, an invasion was war, not a game, and in an actual war, the point was to win with the minimum number of casualties on your side. Fair was not fair, in war.

"But you won, right?"

"I cheated," he said, and then thought better of it. It wasn't cheating in a real fight. He had the regen, he'd used the regen, he'd won, and Sophia's world hadn't been taken over by someone who put women the size of children with porportions like that into clothing like that and sent them to invade other universes.

The thought of that removed any feelings of guilt he might possibly have ever had.

Forget 60, forget 99, he was raising the level cap to two hundred. Now that they'd finally launched the new galaxy/server, he needed a new project anyway. The newsies were already speculating. Upgraded executioners, more bonus bosses, laxer oversight on the item crafting standards (let them invent cheap gear and think they were slipping it past him/had come up with something clever) would make them do it for him…

Yes, a tournament; that would be the best way to launch the new changes. They had a planet, alone in the vastness of space, set aside for people who wanted to get together to chat, show off, and do PVP. Create some bonus bosses there, and give himself bonus boss stats, perhaps be the final challenge in the tournament? For now, though, "Can you help me figure out how she got into this universe?" Help him find that hole in his security, how the connection between his Sphere and the universe she'd come from had been made, so he could slam it shut.

For now, he had Freya sealed in sleep and locked in one of the experimental bonus dungeons on Aquaria, the ones they used for testing and debugging. Since this world was real, Luther had been cautious when it came to creating too-powerful beings, which was why a new type of executioner was going to take a lot of thought.

He was probably going to have to deal with whoever sent Freya eventually, but ideally that would only take place after the two universes that were his problem were safe. He didn't need distractions like this.

Well, it really had been a fantastic boss battle, but that wasn't the point. It had also given him more than a few ideas, but it wasn't like more power would help his real problems. Even if it would be really easy to conquer his world… He shook his head, chastising himself for those thoughts. The potential for conquest and destruction was the problem, dammit. He'd been resisting raising the level cap for years because his creations were too powerful already. However, if they were going to be fighting people who were an actual threat?

That made him wonder how likely it was that someone would try to conquer his own universe after the two universes became separated, and if it was right to leave it undefended before he realized that, right, no one would want it. One planet and a few space stations and mining ships and such in a big, cold, dead universe: who would waste their time conquering a place like that when there were decent universes out there? Obviously his Eternal Sphere was real estate of far higher quality.