One wasn't sure what exactly had transpired to get him here. It all became a blur after that weird robot-woman gacked the big bitch. All he knew is that there was a lot of running, and a lot of pulsing lights, and then quick as a diarrhetic shit the whole lot of them were on the surface again. They didn't even take a fucking elevator! The guy in charge, Hare, dragged them toward an ambulance which was in retrospect suspiciously close to their exit, throwing the big bitch inside and leaving the skinny guy to drive.

"How much longer do you figure?" Hare asked over his shoulder, while trying to keep the big bitch alive. She was Indian, or maybe Pakistani, and had wider shoulders than One did. And now that she had been stripped of her jacket and jeans, it was clear that she was wearing a skin-tight suit that left just about nothing to the imagination. If she weren't grey with blood-loss and shock, with one leg riding in a cooler and the other one bent in a direction evolution had never intended, he might have even called her hot. But things were as they were. And he found himself shivvering as the ambulance wailed and drove away from this weirdo town north of the border.

"You know Cog sensor towers, you tell me," Louis said tersely, continuing to navigate traffic.

"...Another five minutes. Just get us another five minutes away. That should be far enough," Hare said.

"Look, buddy," One said. "'s much as I appreciates the helping hand getting outta there, I really wanna know what the sweet shit-burger is goin' on here."

"You're being rescued. Please don't resist," Hare said, holding a bag of saline in his hands for a moment before glancing down at the big bitch. He scowled for a moment. "Fuck it, O Neg is still a thing in this universe," and as he said so, the clear substance in the bag flashed red, and he began to feed the bag into the dying woman who took up most of the room here in the back of the Wail Wagon. Hare leaned back, wiping some of the blood on his hands onto his pants before trying to clean a streak of it off of his face. It only ended up smearing. "Okay. She's got a couple of minutes until her organs shut down. Let's hope its enough."

"You're not going to put it down, are you?" Louis asked.

"I don't have a choice. I can't stop time," Hare said.

"Yo! Fill me in on this shit, come on!" One complained.

"Right, you're dying too," Hare said. He reached into the rack of medications near the partition between the driver area and the meat in the back, pulling out a small syringe. He stared at it, and it filled with a small amount of clear fluid. "Okay, that should do you. Mister Sears, this," he waggled the syringe, "is a broad stimulant antagonist. It's not a sedative per se, but in your current state it will act as one. This is not an attempt to subdue you, because trust me, if I wanted to, you couldn't stop me."

"I don't need that shit. I'm fine!" One lied, because he did have shooting pains in his left arm. Hare just gave a flat look at him, and One relented. "Okay, fine. I think I'm havin' a heart attack, but don't fuckin' call me 'Sears'. Nobody calls me that!"

"Brian then?"

"Just call me One," he said. "I earned that name goddamnit!"

"Fair enough. I knew a woman called The Tide once," Hare said, forcing that shit into One's vein. Instantly the freezing air began to feel like it was suddenly warming, and the pain in his heart chose to subside almost as quickly. He immediately felt himself break out in buckets of sweat, and was now very thirsty, but the pain was gone. And though yes, he was feeling much, much drowsier, he still had a history of all-nighters behind him keeping his eyes open. "Okay. So what's all this then?"

"Recruitment," Hare motioned toward the big bitch. "Although you admittedly have a pretty bad Soul Bleed yourself. And I'm not above asking for additional help."

"Help with what? I gotta talk to the President about what Two's done to DHORKS!" One pointed out.

"Remind me, which president is it in this universe, the raging narcissist pedophile grifter, or the geriatric milquetoast do-nothing in a suit? I wasn't a big student of history of a nation which by my reckoning no longer fucking exists," Hare said with a degree of heat in his voice.

"What?" One asked.

"Your President can't do shit, is what he's saying," Louis said from the front seat.

"Then answer me this; who the fuck do you work for? I ain't ever heard of the Canucks doin' the kind a' shit I saw down there," One pointed out.

"What's a Canuck?" Hare asked.

"Nickname for Canadians," Louis answered.

"Oh. Must have been from before my time," Hare said. "I don't represent any government or existing hypercorporation or Foundation. My only allegiance is to the Downfall of Oedipus, and the movement that they started with the purpose of rooting out things like what took you captive, driving them into the light, and then dropping the wrath of a vengeful god on them. No matter where they're hiding. Even amongst the 'good guys'."

"Who leads the Downfall?"

"The Downfall," Hare said. One pulled a face at that. "I know, it's a bit weird that the Downfall is both an organization and the Founder of said organization, but trust me, it's mostly no longer relevant now that they're busy re-invading their home universe."

"So the Many Woylds Theory is true?" One asked.

"In a manner of speaking, yes, painfully so," Hare said. "Be thankful that the Downfall is busy. If they knew we'd bungled things as badly as we did here, they might come and have a 'visit' with us, one that we'd not soon forget."

"What'd he do?" One asked.

"The Downfall is not a man."

"What'd she do, then," One asked.

"See, you've managed to get it wrong twice," Hare said. He paused then glanced to Louis. "Lou, could you show him? I need to keep my tank full."

"If you put it down, it's gonna break and you're not gonna be able to pick it all back up again," Louis warned.

"If a broken base gives me two worthwhile Swarmborn, then it's a price well fucking spent," Hare said. "Now would you please show him why discussing gender in terms of the Downfall is a meaningless concept?"

Louis rolled his eyes. And then, with a twisting of the flesh, Louis began to change. The beard on his face was pulled into his pores, which grew more golden-toned as his hair grew longer and blonde, features plumping and shifting until it was not a skinny, ordinary looking man driving the ambulance, but a pudgy, ordinary looking woman doing it instead. If One hadn't watched the whole thing happen right in front of his fuckin' eyes, he would have called it a bunch of stage-magic bullshit.

"Holy shit," he said. "You fuckers could be anybody."

"There is a reason that the credo of the Downfall of Oedipus is 'They are everywhere; so are we'," Hare said.

"You'd better be sure about this, Hare. We're going to lose a lot," Lou...ise? Said?

"This isn't the Prime and you people aren't infinitely replaceable. Everything I stand to lose in this," he pulled up an attache case from One didn't even see where, "actually is, even if it will take a long time and be a ball ache to do it."

"I'm gonna miss the spa," Louise groused.

"Me too, Lu, me too," Hare commiserated.

And then the siren of the ambulance shut off, and One could see that they were turning off and making a slower, but still abrupt left turn. Now they were driving on gravel. He chanced to half-rise and look through the back-windows, and saw that they were heading into a wooded area, snaking away from the common view of the road and into places unseen. There, two turns from spectacle, the ambulance finally came to a halt, and Hare pushed the doors of the ambulance open. He stared at the attache case in his hand for a moment, before idly lobbing it toward the treeline of firs. When it landed it did not thump or clink, but instead splatted, throwing up an upward ripple of strange, coruscating grey matter which first formed a steep dome, then settled into a circle, before growing flatter and seeming to dig into the ground. After about a minute, lights began to shine faintly around the perimeter of the circle. Hare snapped his fingers and pointed back at the ambulance.

"Go grab Delilah. I'm almost done here," he said.

"I've got the cat!" Louise said, holding up a cat carrier with a very bilious, very poofy grey and white cat inside it. Then she held up what was in her other hand. "Oh yeah, and Delilah's leg!"

One just stared agape at it for a moment, then decided better to do something than stand around like a moron. Lifting Delilah wasn't easy, because she was easily as heavy as him if not more so. Still, though his muscles felt increasingly leaden, he was able to fireman-carry the big bitch to the circle. He poked it with his shoe, but Lu gave him a roll of her eyes, grabbed his shoulder and pulled him into its center with she and Hare.

"Where does this even go?"

"Into what's left of my home base. Say goodbye to it. It's the last time any of us is gonna see it before we cannibalize it for spare parts," Hare said. And then with a loud electric whirr, the floor began to descend and an iris closed above them, the ground and this impossible structure swallowing them whole.


Helldiver II

Recruitment and Orientation: Delilah & One


This place was weird.

When the lift descended, One had expected it to open to either a cave or into a hollow cube of concrete. Instead there were corridors with built-in lighting, potted plants, and a track system seemingly built for heavy-hauling built into the floor. And weirder still was the form it took; not as a pristine complex, but as a half-remembered nightmare of one. The corridors twisted like a drill bit along their lengths, so that one was often walking on a wall by the end of them if not their ceiling. The potted plants were made out of concrete, metal, or wires. The track system emitted sparks which were nearly more consistent lighting than the light-strips which flickered pitifully in their settings.

It was like this place was trying to recall how to be a supervillain's secret lair, but it couldn't quite sort the details out.

"Frankly, I'm glad it's working as well as it is," Hare said, upon taking the facility in and motioning forward. "But luckily, the one part which is absolutely still going to be working is that way."

"Have you ever had an HQ this damaged before?" Lu asked.

"Once or twice over the years," Hare admitted. He leaned in toward One as though offering a secret. "It's what you get when you have to set off a couple of nukes directly above your own head, if you get my meaning."

"I really don't," One said, continuing to carry Delilah with him. He was getting honestly shit-tired now. And though the corridor turned and shot away to the left, Hare kept walking straight forward. As One watched, the wall he was walking toward dissolved, falling apart into dust, dust which then faded out of existence, leaving a roughly round hole that they used to bypass the normal directions of this hidden base to plunge directly toward something.

"I'll go salvage what we can still salvage," Lu said, taking a turn off from the dining area that they were now walking through. The table and chairs were just vague shapes that seemed to grow up out of the floor, and the refrigerator was a single piece of seamless metal, only recognizable for what it was by the utterly useless 'handle' on its face.

"You do that," Hare said with a nod. "Let's talk some turkey, One. How much do you know about hyperreal physics?"

"'Bout what now?" One asked.

"Nothing then. I'm not surprised, until we started getting our shit pushed in by it where I'm from we didn't understand it either," Hare said. He reached out and tapped his fingers against One's chest, right at the sternum. "Simply put, you, my fortunate friend, are afflicted by a horrifying disability called Soul Bleed, which is the result of your personhood being fucked with by things from outside of Reality. Because of this, you are catnip to any Noumenon out there in the world. Soul Bleed calls to them. Blood in the water when sharks are around, you get me?"

"I think," One said, as they now passed through what could have been a bedroom if the details hadn't so thoroughly betrayed it. It was a poor bed that had a metal mattress resting on a linen box-spring, after all. "Okay... what the fuck is this?"

"It was decided pretty early on by the Downfall that maximum mobility led to maximum survival and maximum stealth," Hare said. "We take our entire home-base with us wherever we go; the problem is if the base is damaged, particularly the way that ours was damaged, it glitches out, and the results are what you see before you."

"Is this a folded space thing?"

"No, not at all. We're Gnostic, not Fundamental," he said. "This place is, 1 to 1, present in New Brunswick's dirt and stone. The issue is that when it tried to build it there, it couldn't read the blueprints correctly, causing some grievous errors."

"Building... this place builds itself? It's got AI?"

"Well, yes, but no," Hare said. "It doesn't need AI. It's got me. And to a lesser but not insignificant extent Lulu. But as for building? Yup."

"How? I don't see any machinery," One asked.

Hare chuckled for a bit, and opened one more wall, to showcase a recessed room that for the first time looked utterly intact, with everything in the place that good sense would put it. There were lights embedded in the wall, catwalks spanning a pool of murmurating grey something or other. There was at the center of the catwalk a cobalt-blue crystal spike which reached up out of it. And from the place they'd come in, no catwalk's connected; regardless of that shortcoming, a catwalk quickly appeared, extending from the existing lattice and joining to the wall they'd come from.

"Nanomachines, son," Hare said. "This is the Swarm Controller, the only part of the base which actually matters. And this is the only one in all Creation. If this thing is ever destroyed, it's the work of decades to replace it. And I'm not completely convinced that this Realm has decades left in it."

"Is that fuckin' grey goo?" One demanded.

"Again, yes but no," Hare answered, bringing them along the gantries until they were in front of the pillar of dull blue crystal. "These are universal disassembler/reassemblers, able to make anything, including more of themselves, from the feedstock of literally any matter at all, capable of even transforming individual atoms at the electron-level. But they're not driven by AI. One of the great shortcomings of the universe is one of bandwidth, One. There's not enough electromagnetic spectrum for all of the individuals of even a tiny Swarm to do its thing while communicating amongst itself, let alone if it needs to talk to another Swarm. And at this point, I'm more Swarm than meat. You can set her down here. We're pretty much were we need to be."

"So how do they run?" One asked.

"I tell them what to do. They do it," he said. He laid a hand on the crystal. "This is a Goetic Beacon. It's big because it can afford to be. When I cure your and Delilah's Soul Bleed, it'll be by putting a microscopic version of it inside of you both. And from that point on, you'll be able to consciously and subconsciously bend these Swarms to your will." When he finished, the crystal shifted, growing wider here at the level of the catwalk and its extra height descending down, flaring out until it formed a roughly bathtub sized and shaped object, which was filled with teeming black, silver, and blue particles. "Be a pal and put her into there, would you?"

"What? Why?"

"So we can save her life and fix her injuries," Hare said. One sighed, rubbing his head, but nodded and flopped Delilah into the bathtub of nanites. She sank in and without even causing a splash. Likewise not causing a splash was the bloody leg that Hare extracted from the cooler and threw in after. He gave a second to look at the plastic cooler, then shrugged and threw that too into the tub. One must have pulled another face. "Don't worry about it. It'll all get put into the right forms and structures."

"Is that safe?"

"We've literally put dogshit and medical cobalt in there. She'll be fine," Hare said.

"Why dogshit?" One fixated on the question that twigged him hardest.

"Long story, the dog was really big and had a strain of super-rabies. Had to kill it from the inside."

"You killed a…"

"No, not me. I was the guy laughing at the one who did," Hare cut One off. At this point, the door at the actual wall of the chamber irised open, and Lu was pushing a cart of metal boxes ahead of her into the room. "What'd you find?"

"A bunch of things but I think they might be broken," she said. "I'll keep looking for more."

"It'd be just my luck," Hare groused. "All that trouble I went through to steal this shit and now look at it," He said, picking up a box. He scowled. "Broken," he threw it over his shoulder into the tub containing Delilah, her leg, and a beer-cooler. The box, despite being as tall as Hare's chest and head, disappeared into the tub which didn't seem to have enough depth to contain it. Hare picked up a few more in succession, grunting 'broken' and throwing them in likewise.

"And yer sure this ain't gonna fuck something up?" One said, pointing at the pool.

"Delilah's fine," Hare said. "She's probably already back to fighting fit. Anything I throw in now just makes her more fine."

"...I somehow doubt that throwin' garbage onto a hospital bed will increase her prognosis, if you get my meaning," One said.

"Think of it less as a hospital bed and more of a… actually, you'll see for yourself, because you're the next one going in there," Hare pointed out. He then paused from chucking boxes into the 'soup' and stared thoughtfully at one that looked fuck-heavy and took a lot of room on the cart, one hand on its case.

"The fuck you say?" One asked.

"To solve your Soul Bleed. I thought I'd made that clear to you," Hare said, flicking a glance at him. "You know this one might actually still function."

"Yer gonna dump me in that soup and wait a damned minute ain't she drowning right now?" One asked.

"She doesn't need to breathe in her current state," Hare said. He then seemed to weigh something in his head, before nodding and grunting deeply and throwing that big box into the tub. The tub had to resize itself so that it could even cross its lip, but within a few seconds, the box was gone. Hare then sunk his hand into the 'soup', questing around like looking for a dirty spoon in a sudsy sink. "Aha!" Hare said, and then pulled. And when he did, he extracted a brown arm, and attached to it, a Delilah. He paused, looking at the catwalk, and stared there for a moment. A swirl of grey mounted, growing upward from the catwalks and consolidating until there was a medical gurney there, complete with blanket, constructed out of nothing. He pulled and somewhat awkwardly deposited still unconscious Delilah onto it; she was stark naked, so he quickly put the blanket over her. Something about her was different, though. "Shit. I probably should have pulled the Underweave off of her. Oh well."

"What the shit… why does she have both of her legs?" One asked.

"Because she's had her first Reset. You probably didn't notice that her soul's no longer bleeding. It solved that problem, too," Hare said. One leaned down, looking at her. There was some sort of metal tracing, only barely visible against her dark complexion, that could be seen at her shoulders as though something had been implanted into her. She was breathing normally, but was out of it. "I'll have to tell everything to her that I just told to you, which makes me think I should have probably just given you vague mentor-ly bullshit so I wouldn't have to repeat myself," Hare gave a shrug. "Don't look at me, this is only the second time I've been in charge of doing this."

"That's looking a bit obvious," One said.

"So get in," he said, gesturing to the pool. As he said that, Lu appeared with another cart, this of obviously broken tech-trash, and without a word depositing it on the catwalks beside the first. Hare put the last box on the first cart into the pool, then hoisted the cart itself and fed it in after.

"Excuse me?" One asked.

"Into the pool. It's called a Reset and it's in this very specific case the cure for what's ailing you," he said. "Just submerge yourself and concentrate on a memory of yours. Preferably a good one. It'll make things go faster."

"And then what?" One asked, looking dubiously at the swirling tub.

"And then I fish you out and go in myself. I need a Reset my own self," Hare said.

"...so it's as simple as that. Think about happy days and get into the soup," One said.

"This wasn't intended to be difficult. It's not like we have a written test; some of the people we used to recruit were illiterate," Hare pointed out.

"You must'a been properly desperate," One said.

"If only you knew," Hare said. One sighed, then pulled himself up so that he was squatting on the edge of the tub. He sunk a foot in. It didn't even feel wet, and he couldn't reach the bottom of the tub with his questing foot as he did so. "Think happy thoughts," Hare repeated.

"What?" One asked.

And then Hare shoved hard on One's back, overbalancing and dumping him face first into that blue-black, teeming, none aqueous substance. The instant his face went under, he was blind. And a few seconds after that, he was numb, feeling as though he were floating.

And a part of him that he didn't even know felt like there was a visceral clunk, as though his soul had finally been slotted into place.


Lu waited even while Hare pulled One out of the Swarm Controller, naked as the day he was born and insensate. Of course, Lu was somewhat unique in that she wasn't knocked on her ass by the Integration process. One of the few benefits of being broken in exactly the way she was broken was that she could understand in her gut exactly what had happened to her as it happened, so her mind didn't need to struggle and flail to catch up. She actually pulled herself out of the Controller under her own power, in a properly forgettable form.

"So one Swarmborn, and one lucky bastard," Hare said, leaning with his back against the base of the 'pool' that the Swarm Controller created for situations such as these.

"Her Resonance isn't much stronger than his," she pointed out.

"It's significant enough that she won't want to Reset-out until she's at least as much stronger than she is than she currently is stronger than One," Hare said. It took Lu a second to parse what that sentence even meant. "Who, as you'll attest, is a nice, normal Swarmborn. Even you didn't give me that luxury."

"Maybe the least favorable option is a rarity here," she said, dumping the most important trash off of the side of the catwalk and into the swirling mass of nanites that were stockpiled below. "I've run an inventory. We can either keep the Factory, the HPN and the amenities, or we can keep the Blackroom, the Labs, and the Exploratorium, but not both. And we'll lose literally everything else."

Hare shrugged. "Blackroom, not even a consideration," he said. "If there's a chance of getting Baglole, Lyons and Mussa back, I'm going to take it."

"They're gone, Hare," Lu said, somewhat softly. "Their Echos are already on the other side of the Minus-5R. And as you told me..."

"The Blackroom can't function through Relativities of less than negative 3," Hare and Lu recited as one. He continued. "That doesn't mean I'm going to give up hope. Dark makes all things possible, if incredibly weird. And frankly, I'd love to not be in charge of this again."

"Reality seldom cares what its actors want. It just does what it does, and we have to react to it, and to move on, even if out of nothing but naked spite," Lu said, her eyes growing distant for a moment, as she remembered the old friend who reinforced that lesson in her.

"I know that look in your eye. Tell me about them," Hare said, stretching his legs out before him.

"His name was Sam. And he was the best man I ever knew," she said. She then felt her anger ignite a bit. "And despite being a beacon of light in a miserable place, the people in charge of such things decided that he was a Sinner and deserving Damnation."

"You've mentioned that. I'm asking you about him, not his circumstances," Hare said.

"Sam..." Lu was quiet for a moment. "You know what I looked like when you found me."

"A solid thirty on the Helen Of Troy scale, go on," he said.

"He never wanted anything but for me to be alright. He never took advantage, even when I was confused and lost. He just wanted me to be okay. He was the only person I was glad I looked the way I did around. And I wanted him to be alright. Even after he died, he still came back, one last time, to make sure I'd be okay."

"The Halifax Incident certainly turned a few heads," Hare said. "I'm glad I got you when I did. Those fucking Papists looked like they were going to start some shit if I didn't shift my ass."

"He's down there. In Hell. Despite being nothing short of an angel. And if I can return the favor he gave me, if I can save him the way he saved me… maybe then he can see me for what I am."

"It sounds like he did, in his way," Hare said.

"No. He didn't. Not really. Because I was broken, because I was insane," she said.

"We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad," Hare said.

"Don't you quote Carroll at me, Hare," she said.

"You can't stop me from doing it," he said. She knew without know how that Alice In Wonderland was a formative moment for Hare, a thread that he held on to when his sanity frayed. Not the why, not the whereby. Her vision was still confusing. Since her Integration, though, it became less a matter of hoping that what she saw was real, though. Now it was a matter of choosing what she wanted to be real.

"I'm going to put them somewhere that's more comfortable than here," Lu said.

"You're a peach, Lu," Hare said.

"Enjoy your Reset," she said, beginning to push the dollies ahead of her, out of the chamber of the Swarm Controller.

"I always do," Hare said. And then he launched himself, cannon-ball style, into the tub, disappearing from view.

How delightfully strange her life ended up being.


Delilah felt groggy. For a moment, she just lay there, on the hard bed, staring up at the metal ceiling. So it'd been a dream all along. And from the feeling of the unforgiving and uncomfortable wafer of a mattress under her, she was already likely in prison. Well, that was how things went.

She reached up, digging at the corner of her eye with a finger, getting the crust of sleep out of it which instantly brightened her mood a little. Sure, she was going to spend the rest of her life incarcerated with people who'd kill her on principle, but at least she wouldn't have to deal with that weird shit from her nightmare.

"You're probably hungry," a woman's voice came, and Delilah started, jerking so hard that she actually fell off of the bed, revealing that it was not in fact a bed but a gurney. She lay there, staring up at her own legs which were splayed up on the edge of the bed, and realized that she was stark naked. What the hell? "I'm always hungry after a Reset. The process empties your entire digestive tract unless you specifically tell it not to. And that's usually too much effort to bother."

"Who is that?" Delilah asked, pushing herself to a stand. For a moment, she considered that this was just a weird prison. But then when she turned her glance a few degrees to her left, she saw somebody who should not by any sane extension of reality be here, in a room, with her. She saw the VIP, who was likewise starting to stir under his blanket and atop his gurney. Delilah pulled her own blanket around her, giving herself a layer of symbolic protection if nothing else. She finally leaned hard around a corner in the oddly misshapen room, and saw a pudgy blonde woman stirring a pot of something on a camp-stove. She looked back at Delilah, then motioned to the pot with her spoon. "Hare made fricot."

"Excuse me?" she asked.

"What the fuck is... AGH! WHY AM I NAKED?" Sears demanded, pulling his blanket around his waist and backing until his spine was flat against the wall.

"The Swarm Controller is a bit indiscriminate when it comes to things it didn't make itself," the strange woman said. She lifted the pot off of the stove and plunked it down onto the now unpeopled gurney that was at the center of this roughly 'G' shaped room. She then held out a spoon to each of the naked people who were huddled away from her.

"...Hare?" Delilah asked.

"No, he's Resetting right now," the woman said. "Lu."

"Is... this what you actually look like?"

"I always look like what I look like," Lu said without seeming to grasp Delilah's point.

"No, I mean... is that what you actually are?" Delilah asked, gesturing up and down. Lu sighed and again as Delilah watched, had her skin grow dark as chocolate and gain a few inches of height, but quite a few of flab, becoming an overweight black-man over the course of a minute. "Is... that?"

"Alright, you're delirious from hunger. Eat some chicken fricot and stop asking idiotic questions," Lou said, his expression one of disappointment.

She then looked at Sears. And now that he was standing up, she almost questioned whether that was actually him. Before he'd been a reed of a man, rather plain featured. Now he was chiselled like Greek marble and had a face that could stop a train, and not in the bad way. But as she was admiring his visage, a thought finally bloomed in her.

"Wait a fucking minute that means all of Moncton actually happened!" Delilah snapped. "WHY DO I HAVE LEGS?"

"You were Reset," Lou said, ladling out a bowl of chicken fricot for himself, before sitting on a bump where the wall didn't merge correctly and digging in. "It's much more non-invasive than Cybernetic Augmentation. And I see you've both gone the supermodel path. Eh, enjoy it while you can. Get it out of your system. Apparently everybody makes themselves gorgeous the first few times they Reset."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Delilah asked. But then she turned and found a section of the metal which was shiny and looked at her reflection. And she had a hard time recognizing what was staring back at her. It had all of her little peccadillos, like the thick eyebrows and wide mouth, but instead of detracting from any comeliness she had, they instead were built into something objectively better than her own face in all the subtle ways that she couldn't even measure. Hers, but more so. Hers, but better.

"...Holy shit I'm actually hot, ain't I?" Sears asked.

"That you are, One," Lou answered. "Eat. Hare is taking his time since he Unwound. Who knows what's gonna walk into this room with us."

Delilah turned a glance at Lou, then to 'One', then to the pot. She took a sniff. It smelled good, actually. She took the spoon that had been left on the gurney and took some of it up and tasted it. It was good. But there was something off about it. "Where are the dumplings?" she asked.

"This is Poverty Fricot. We use potatoes instead," Lou said, merrily consuming the soup.

"Hell with it, I am in fact hungry," she said. She took the bowl that had been set beside the spoon and got herself a serving, filling an empty stomach with something that said stomach shouldn't find too objectionable. "So," she said after having inhaled half a bowl worth, while One still picked at it furtively. "Where are we?"

"What until today was our team's home-base," Lou said. He gestured around at the uncanny and malformed room around him with his spoon. "As you can obviously tell, it's broken to all hell, and we're essentially going to have to start again from nothing. At least the Controller still works. If it didn't we'd be properly fucked."

"How long was I out?" she asked of One.

"How should I know? I was out too, once they threw me into that evil bathtub," One said, finally biting into a potato, and discovering that it indeed was a potato.

"That 'Evil bathtub' is the reason both of you are both intact and Integrated right now," Lou said. He set the bowl into his lap and stared at Delilah. "Pause a moment and focus on yourself, imagine if you have to a box, about this big," he described a size with his hands, "that's just under your stomach. Can you feel it?"

"Feel?" she asked. Lou gestured that she actually try. So Delilah did. She pictured a cube inside her body. But even as she started to picture it, the picture began to shift as though taking on a life of its own, forming not a cube but a lattice of flows that she could feel running up and down her arms, coiling with the muscles of her legs, and hardening to stone in her spine and pelvis, before melting and flowing into the middle of her brain. Delilah blinked for a moment. "What was that?"

"It stands to reason you'd feel it stronger," Lou said. "That, Delilah, is Numen. It is the gasoline which fuels our enemy's engines. And now that we've stolen those engines, it fuels you, too. A constantly refilling wellspring of hyperreal energy that empowers everything that Integration has bolted into you, metaphorically speaking."

"What did you put into me?"

"A bunch 'a garbage, and a beer-cooler," One said, now finally beginning to eat in earnest as his hunger finally made itself clear.

"While that is true, it's not as bad as he's making it out to be," Lou said. "It's all matter in the end. No, what we 'put into you', were a number of broken devices from where Hare comes from. Things which now cannot be replaced. One or more of them might function in you. And even if they don't, they offer fodder to build the rest of your new physiology. Congratulations, Delilah. You are now a partially nanomechanical entity."

"What?" Delilah asked.

"I still don't know how this nanomachine shit works. How is it Grey Goo but not Grey Goo?" One lumped in.

"Are all of your bodily cells cancerous?" Lou asked.

"...no," One answered.

"That is the same reasoning by which our swarms are not Grey Goo," Lou said. "Hare will probably get around to explaining the hows and the whys in greater detail. But these nanites gobbling up the world is a non-issue, I assure you."

"So this... Numen," Delilah cut in, before One could divert to another topic. "Why is it called that?"

"It's the power that drives the Noumenon, and humans are lazy linguistically," Lou said.

"Where does it come from?" she asked.

"Good question; nobody's entirely sure. It seems to be a fundamental energy source of the cosmos, underpinning The Big Five of Physics."

"...four," One said. Lou held up a hand, and began extending fingers.

"Gravity, electromagnetism, weak-nuclear, strong-nuclear, and Heavy Energy," Lou said.

"That last one's made up," One crossed his arms in front of him, but regretted it because he had to catch his blanket before it dropped off of him.

"The easiest way to think of Heavy Energy is like... Magic Points. Mostly because in this and many realities akin to it, that's most of what it's used for; powering blatantly magical bullshit," Lou said, pausing to upend his bowl and drink its dregs, before sauntering to the pot and ladling himself another. Once he was reseated, he continued. "Using Numen, you can power the swarms that are now part of your bodies, or the hives that Hare has, or the Endeavors that I've got."

"Why would we want hives?" Delilah asked.

Lou hung his head for a second. "Can we just accept that that's what it's called? There's a pretty good chance Delilah's got a working one in her. I can feel the Weight of it from here," Lou said.

"A... hive?" she asked. She gave her skin a prod in a few places. At no point did she feel itchy, and the skin was smooth and baby-fresh over rock hard muscle and aesthetic fat.

"Not a hive, in your case. An Engine. And the last ones we're likely to ever get, because they were built in a different universe we have no way of reaching anymore," Lou said. "So whatever's going on inside of you, well... hope that it's one of the better ones."

"...Define better," she said.

"Well, for one thing, you ain't covered in living shadows, so the creepy one ain't your huckleberry," Lou said with a chuckle. "My guess is either a Juggernaut Factor, or maybe an Elohim Array."

"Those mean nothing to me," Delilah said. "What's the difference?"

"It's the difference between being the Wolverine and being late-MCU Iron Man," Lou said.

"And what about me? What do I got?" One butted in.

"You? Nothing. You're a nice, normal Swarmborn like I was," Lou said. He tilted his head. "Did you feel your Numen, yet?"

"I feel... something," One admitted, gaining a guarded look on his face.

"It's roughly half of what she's got in terms of volume, but you can do a lot with it, trust me," Lou said. Then he violently gouged the skin of his palm open with his spoon, hissing with pain and causing both of the 'new-hires' to lean back in dismay. He held up the palm, a flap of skin hanging down, and then waggled his fingers lightly. The bleeding stopped quickly, and the flap fell off with new skin replacing it as though materializing out of thin air. "And not the least of it is that you can use it to heal your wounds. I wager a lot of your Numen starting out is going to be plugging bullet holes or stitching shut stabs."

"And how exactly do we... gather... this Numen?" Delilah asked.

"How exactly do you know how to breathe? It just happens. As long as you're not dead or trapped in a hostile Hyperfield – don't worry, I've never seen one of them in this universe, just heard them talked about – you'll always be slowly refilling. Typically you'll refill in somewhere between six hours and a half a day. Sleeping makes it go faster. Don't know why," Lou said.

"So," Delilah clapped her hands, having tied her blanket around her as something of a rob freeing her limbs from maintenance, "if I've got twice as much of this Numen in me as he does..."

"And me, too. I'm closer to you than to him, but still," Lou said with a shrug.

"How much less than Hare do I have?" Delilah asked.

"Much," Lou said.

"How much?" One asked.

"Very much," Lou answered.

Then the door slid open, revealing woman who couldn't be far out of her teens, with strikingly grey eyes and her shining black hair raised in a ridge-mohawk, terminating in a long braid which reached down her back. Who the fuck...? "Did you start the Orientation already?" the woman asked.

"I gave 'em your soup, too," Lou said.

"...Hare I presume?" Delilah asked.

"In the new flesh," Hare said, grinning widely. "Oooh, I feel GREAT! Except for the whole damaged Sync thing, I've never felt better."

"You're going to have to get that looked after, Hare," Lou said.

"The guy who usually deals with it is dead. So until somebody – you – learn how to do it yourself, I'm just going to have to blunder through with perilously low Amp," Hare said with a clear devil-may-care trill to her new voice. She finally took a proper look at the recruits that he'd gone to great lengths to acquire. "Huh. Of course they went Adonis. It was their first time, that's just what people do."

"I didn't," Lou said.

"Wha'd'ya mean by that?" One asked, now confidently crossing his arms as he'd tied his own blanket into a kilt.

"Oh, the first time Swarmborn Reset, they always come out looking like the most attractive possible version that their mind can rationalize. We call it 'going Adonis'. It usually takes your type a couple of Resets to get it out of your system, and start looking average and forgettable like Lou here," Hare gestured at Lou who was happily eating soup.

"You don't look 'forgettable and average'," Delilah pointed out. Now Hare was the same height and build as Delilah, but looking like she came straight out of Ireland and earned every meal by bare-knuckle boxing for it.

"Lou is overcorrecting because of the way that..." Hare began.

"HARE," Lou snapped, eyes snapping with warning. The shapeshifting punk-ette paused and glanced back at him.

"Right. Sorry. Not my story to offer. But needless to say there's a lot of ways to blend in. And besides, it's been a while since I was a woman. I figure I should make it an awesome one," Hare said, making a Hercules pose and showcasing the cordy muscles that a catch-as-catch-can fighter would accrue over enough time.

"Why would we do that again?" Delilah gestured out to where she could now somehow feel the heart of this place. Well that was a mildly disturbing notion, now that she gave thought to it.

"Resetting is important. It resets your system, repairs some of the more grievous damage you can have inflicted on you, lets you respecify a few more esoteric things, and most importantly, it allows you to change your body to what you need it to be. Not every one of us has me and Lou's particular suite of swarms that let us change shape whenever we want. Until you do, you're kinda shackled to The Tub. Now let's take a walk. This room's gonna be eaten in a couple of minutes and it's really inconvenient if we're inside when that happens."

"Eaten?" One asked.

"Yeah, the Controller is reclaiming damaged material. So unless you wanna find yourself flash-buried twenty meters underground, keep up with me."

"That would kill us," Delilah said, following as Hare first picked up the pot and started walking toward the heart of this complex.

"No, I'd rescue you, but it'd be wonderfully unpleasant for the couple of minutes it would take me," Hare said. They left the kitchen (?) and entered a hallway that had doors to nowhere embedded into the floor, twisting itself straight as it continued toward the 'Controller'. Hare leaned toward Lou, who was continuing to eat soup as he walked, keeping abreast of Hare with the two recruits trailed out behind them. "How far did you get with Orientation?"

"Numen, healing, recovery, that Engines are a thing," Lou said. "My money's on Juggernaut Factor in Delilah."

"That'd be fun. What are you betting against?" Hare asked.

"Elohim Array," Lou said. Hare chuckled, briefly propped the pot against one knee, and extended a hand.

"I'll take that bet," Hare said. They shook. "Did you get to the fun part?"

"You mean the part where if we're not careful we destroy civilization?" Lou asked flatly.

"Hey, it's not my fault that you people are locked into a death-cult with an economic system that can't handle post-scarcity," Hare snapped.

"Don't lump me in with them. I'm an anarcho-communist," Lou said.

"Good man," Hare gave Lou's shoulder a swat before retaking the pot and continuing to walk. "I'm talking about our erstwhile enemies, of every stripe and description."

"No, didn't get to that," Lou said.

"Well, listen up, friends, we're at war with the weird and unspeakable," Hare said, striding back into the room she'd later learn was called the Swarm Controller, plunking his pot of soup on a table which materialized over the course of a few seconds out of thin air. "You two have some experience with the Cognoscenti, a machine-intelligence that uses metal to control meat. Well, they've got 'cousins' of a sort, that are a lot more subtle, and I saw a group of them before meeting either of you. So once we're up to speed, I'm going to go and check on a Deus Vox Startup that I found in a town called Banger."

"Bangor," Lou corrected.

"Hey, I'm used to there being one hundred settlements for humans in the entire world. All these little towns are confusing as shit," Hare said.

"That's an exaggeration and you know it," Lou said.

"Okay, maybe a thousand."

"We're goin' back to the US?" One said. "Oh thank gawd."

"Maine, to be exact," Lou piped up.

"Well, those Styrofoam bimbos are the first on my watch-list," Hare said. "This is the kind of thing it pays to nip in the bud. Unlike the Cogs, the Deus Vox seems to have some degree of leadership and isn't waiting for somebody to tell them what to do."

"I'm still worried about the boneless thing," Lou said.

"It had bones," Delilah cut in. "They just didn't... work right."

"Yeah, that bitch turned all her joints around tryin' after you twos," One added.

"Thanks for the save with the sword, by the way," Delilah said.

"What can I tell ya? The Edo period is badass," One seemed pleased with himself.

"Be that as it may, I'll need to spend some time in the 'Torium to figure out what the fuck that was, let alone what its capabilities are," Hare said, starting to pace with one hand rubbing the corners of her mouth. "Beyond the fact that it burns nicely. Which is something we'll have to bear in mind. I've faced way too many things that you can't set on fire for this to seem insignificant."

"The greasers are flammable, noted," One said.

"We're not calling them 'greasers'," Hare said. She shook her head. "And that's besides the point. We've got a Hag Star infestation off the coast of Florida, rumors of Gravekind and Tattered Echos all over Europe, Heterax in Alabama, and some freaky fucking Vanguard species I've never seen before appearing all over the world out of goddamned portals!"

"He's got a lot on his plate," Lou said. "What about you two? Did you see anything else we'll need to deal with?"

"Sistah, my entire company got gobbled up by monsters! What more do you want?" One asked.

"I did have sex with a demon once," Delilah raised her hand. "Well, two demons."

"I know and that's likely why you had a Soul Bleed," Hare said.

"Ew, she's got a disease?" One flinched away from her.

"First of all, there is no disease in this universe that can survive a Reset. And two, no, it wasn't the sex that gave her the Soul Bleed... Unless it was," Hare paused. "Where they any good?"

"Good god the little guy could go for days," Delilah noted. "The big owl-looking one got fuck-drunk by the second hour."

"Wait a fuckin' minute; big owl demon thing? Four red eyes? Ten feet tall?" One asked.

"He was never vertical in the entire time I was involved but he did seem about that height," Delilah noted.

"That fucker killed the entire Newark office!"

"You've seen demons before?" Delilah asked.

"Yeah, after gettin' our hands on a little one for a little bit. Little red-and-white bastard had a mouth on him..." One clenched a fist in anger.

"Hold on, red and white as in," she held a hand up to her face, "from here over?"

"Yeah! That guy had a bag 'a guns that almost never ran out!" One complained.

"He's the other one I had sex with," Delilah noted.

"You fucked that lippy demon?"

"And oh, what a mouth he had," Delilah said, delighting in One's discomfort. You had to take pleasure in the little things or the world would drive you insane.

"That 'lippy demon' was about this tall," Hare held out her hand at slightly above waist height, "with long horns, yellow and red eyes, and black blood?"

"I didn't see his blood," Delilah noted. "His dick veins, though..."

"OH GAWD STAAAAHP!" One recoiled physically from her. Oh great, humorless and a prude? This was going to be a laugh riot.

Hare, though, snapped his fingers and pointed at Delilah. "That's the Vanguard I was talking about. So you faced him in New Jersey and you in Halifax. Do you often find yourself involved in demonic orgies?"

"Not as a rule," Delilah noted. She had a hard body and could lift her own weight with her pelvic floor alone. There was no reason to put this much work into her physique and not enjoy it as much as she could, stone-aged father or not. Considering the even crazier hijinks and escapades her sisters had gotten up to growing up she was actually seen as something of a moderate of her family. Still a bitter disappointment to her father, though. He wanted her to be virginal from cradle to grave, including through the arranged marriage she'd torpedoed pretty thoroughly before moving to Halifax.

She hadn't talked to Dad in years, and saw no reason to change that.

"Still, if we can figure out how they get around that would probably solve the biggest problem that this realm has: It's being torn to shreds," he said.

"What?" One asked. Delilah glanced at him, then back to the hall behind them, only to find that the hall was missing, just a panel of featureless wall there where once they had trod.

"Simply put, the Permeability Index is a measure of how threadbare a reality is. A zero is ideal, but if a realm is at a true zero then people like me will never and can never by definition go there. And if The Index reaches a 'one', then the entire Universe has unravelled and there's nothing left of it that isn't also technically fully somewhere else. Our problem is that this universe is at least a .4, which you'll recognize as being troublingly high. We need to solve a few problems, or Creation just uncoils like a badly wound roll of arse-wipes."

"So we're saving the world, then," Delilah asked.

"Of course. And if I get to fuck some demons while doing it, so much the better," Hare said. There was a tone, a sound of something voluminous and metallic pinging with pressure, that caused Hare to pause. "Okay, that's the last of the recycle. What we have left is literally all of the base that there is. Now we just wait for things to move so we can actually leave."

"We'll make do with what we have. You did well enough," Lou began.

"I had a whole home-base to work with before you," Hare said. He sighed, then shook his head. "Alright. No putting this off any longer. I've got a few ground rules to discuss before we start doing our work here. The first and the most important is that we are not a business, we are not trying to live comfortably and make money. If we wanted money I could literally break the world economy over my knee without any help. This is not about aggrandizement. It's not even about thanks. We are a bunch of back-stabbing, conniving, paranoid thieves, assassins, and spies. That is what brought us this far, and this is how we fight our wars. Never start a fight we didn't win before we threw the first punch. If it looks bad, run. Don't get attached to a face, nor a name, you'll be swapping both all the goddamned time."

"It's better to accept that to change is to survive, now," Lou said. Hare nodded, pointing at her having made his point for him.

"And on a more personal bent: the second and third of the ground rules that I will demand of you. Secondly and perhaps most critically; No fascists," Hare said, eyes snapping with fury.

"...what?" One asked.

"I'm not joking, One. I saw what Third Wave Fascism did to human society during the '70s. And I will be damned if I allow a single one of those jackbooted fucks to spread their regressive idiocy inside MY FUCKING HOUSE," Hare thrust her fingers down at the floor under her feet. She pointed hard at Delilah. "I was half-considering just letting her twist in the wind considering what she was. But then I had a talk with her and if she's a Loug, she's the un-Loug-iest one I've ever seen. Still. There will be no fascistic ideology under my roof. There will be no boot-licking of the tools that fascists use to gain and maintain power. There will be no masturbating of capitalism as anything but a laughably failed economic policy. And if you ever start worshipping a living person so help me baby Jesus I will slap the stupid out of the both of you."

"Tell us how you really feel, Jesus," Lou muttered.

"You weren't there in Pisa. You didn't stand in the ash snow. You don't know," Hare said. Lou held up his hands in a warding gesture. And that seemed to calm Hare down a touch. "And to be frank, maybe it's better you don't know. Of all the things that ran roughshod over my homeworld, Fashies have to be the most idiotic of them. I mean for god's sake, the movement was stomped out TWICE before they brought it back for a third time!"

"I, ah... ain't a Neo-Nazi?" One offered.

"Good. Most people would say 'if you can't handle it, there's the door', but frankly if you're so dumb that you fall for the call of ultranationalism in a world where nations are going to quickly vanish into the dusty annals of history, I'm just gonna pitch you into the Macerator and find another Swarmborn who can be trusted not to piss inside his own pants," Hare said. "So yeah. Rule two, is that in this cell, Fashies Get Bashies."

"Noted," Delilah said. Wow. He really had a beef with whatever came after Neo-Nazis.

"And the third rule is that in this cell I will not have you mooning around like love-sick highschoolers when you start getting comfortable with each other. There will be no unresolved sexual tension in this home base, am I being clear?" Hare said, again pointing at the floor.

"What?" Delilah asked.

"It's pretty common that cells degenerate pretty quickly into a fairly fuck-happy polycule as they get established, and those that don't have a lean on their mean tend to leave for a cell that might accept their particular brand of deviancy," Hare said, again pacing. "We can become anybody we want to be, have sex as anybody we want to be. And if you think that doesn't lead to a certain, deeply seated level of unspeakable horniness then you must have lived your entire adult life under a rock. As the demon-fucker can attest," Delilah offered a sharp 'hey!' at that, "we have all the time in the world and can attempt any form of coupling under the sun. So when you two get your bearings and the old sex drives start up, you are expected to put on your adult pants and deal with it like the unspeakably horny adults that you are. Am I clear?"

"Does this really have to be a rule?" One asked.

"Oh sweet mother of mercy yes it does," Hare said very emphatically. He cast a thumb over his shoulder. "You should have seen the bunch of yahoos I Integrated in back before I met The Tide. I swear to Walt Disney that if those four idiots could have gotten any more up their own asses about their 'precious widdle feewings' it would have poisoned the entire Pacific Northwest. I am so glad I got out of there before their own hang-ups literally got them killed. Which they did. Because they were so up their asses they didn't learn to TRUST each other in every way that we can. Yes, One. Desire is an enemy of good team connection if you have to stopper it up like a puritan. There's a reason that Hugo made Frollo a villain and not a hero."

"We're surely not going to turn this horrifying guerrilla war into an orgy, are we?" Delilah asked.

"It happens every time in cells that work, to one extent or another," Hare said. Lou raised his hand. Without glancing back, Hare pointed at the large black man. "Not you, Lou. You're exempt because I know the shit you've been through."

"Much obliged," Lou said.

"Alright, any questions?" Hare asked.

"Why haven't we been given clothes?" Delilah asked.

"Right. I was going to give you a Torq but there's only two of 'em left and I need to stock up on radioactives to make more," Hare said, tugging at the neck-hugging metal ring around her neck. Lou lifted his shirt collar, to show that he wore a similar one. Hare held a hand above the table next to the pot of soup, and with a swirl of grey dust, a slender black suit was formed into being, seemingly tailored for One. Hare swept his hand further, and a pair of blue-jeans appeared, topped by a tee-shirt and a biker jacket that even from this distance Delilah could tell was lined with something. She, being closer, picked up the shirt. And when it flopped open, she glared at Hare.

The shirt had a white-against-black print of 'All Cops Are Bastards'.

"Seriously, Hare?" she asked.

"Gotta rip that bandaid off," he said, while One took his suit and got dressed. There was another thin gong noise, and Hare nodded. "Okay, new questions will have to wait. Welcome to this universe's first outcropping of the Downfall of Oedipus. Let's go kill some alien gods."

"You sound way too happy sayin' that," One said, affixing his tie.

"It's one of the perks of the job," Hare said. "We're going to be packing up the base and moving for Maine inside the hour. Lou, you want to take the first driving shift?"

"Not a problem," Lou said. He gestured to One. "Wanna help me move a few things into that ambulance before he turns it into something more useful?"

"Before he does what?" One asked.

"Long story. He's got a Hive," Lou said, and the two of them walked out of what was now the only path out of the Controller.

"Is it always going to be this crazy, or was today an unusual day?" Delilah asked as she mightily pulled on pants which felt so tight that they could have been painted onto her ass.

"No, today is somewhat middling with regards to the strangeness that you can be expected to interface with," Hare said. She shrugged, and headed to the corridor in the wake of One and Lou. But before he reached the irising portal, she spun on her heel and pointed at Delilah. "Oh and I almost forgot!"

She sighed, pulling on the jacket over her frustrating shirt. It was definitely lined with something thick and smooth, like tailored kevlar. "What did you forget?" she asked with unamused tone.

"That Toxoplasmosis is a part of a nefarious scheme by the Xenomycorrhizal dwellers of Genesis. So to nip that in the bud, I took the initiative and inoculated your cat," Hare said, then spun on her heel and departed. Delilah blinked after her as she went.

"You did WHAT?" Delilah demanded.


The Cultivators

"While the Noumenon have been sending their fingers into reality for a not insignificant amount of time, there is actually very little harm that humans have done to the Noumenon even in their most significant victories. This is because the usual operation procedure by the Noumenon is to indoctrinate humans to use as Proxies, or to kidnap them and forcably convert them into Vessels. While a Proxy may appear to most senses to still be human, as soon as they have accepted the poisoned chalice of Noumenal power, they are by and large lost to humanity at large. And Vessels may look at best mostly human, but there is nothing human animating them. One could massacre Proxies and Vessels until the sun dies in the sky and no harm will have been done to the Noumenon directing them.

The only meaningful avenue of attack is to not attack the puppets, but the ones holding the strings. Every Synergy has its Cultivators, actual living Noumenon that have seeded themselves into Reality so that they can make it a little less real, and spread their own brand of hyperreality into their surroundings. They come in many forms. From the crustacean Cradlemakers feeding the Wyrd with agonising cruelty, to the flying Cognoscenti orbs of the Vivisectionists breathing profane, mechanical life into the discarded flesh of obsolete Proxies, to the Vore Strainbreeders, injecting their endoparasitic young into human bodies to create more chittering, all-consuming Vore. And all of them are a material investment by the Noumenon in their sometimes contradictory and inscrutable desires regarding reality.

To kill a Cultivator is to win an actual victory over the Noumenon, even if a triflingly minor one. This is made almost hideously difficult because, being that the Cultivator is the hand of the Noumenon in the real world, they are protected by layers and layers and layers of protection, be it locations of power, hostile environments cultivated to keep humans and hyperhumans at bay, to hordes and hordes of lesser but still unquestionably puissant Proxies and Vessels, to strange locations such as the sea-floor or a remote crater on the Moon. And just because the Cultivator is important to the plans of the Noumenon for their transformative effects on reality, do not presume for a moment that they are frail and retiring beings; while a Cultivator is weaker than a Vessel of the same Resonance would be, they are the cause of every Noumenal shock-troop of Resonance lower than themselves. And there is not a single beast in all of Hyperreality that will not fight tooth and bloody claw to defend itself, often with terrifying, unspeakable, and deadly powers."

-'The Noumenon Threat, A Primer', by Arthur Flagstaff, New Philadelphia Press, published 2041.