It was a few days later, and while Jessica and her Agents continued gathering interesting information and data from the local Realm… Well, John had been holed up in the provided apartment with the girls working on overviewing and recovering what they could of his Pocket.

It was an important task, one he'd probably been putting off for far too long, and the responsible thing to do (that would also keep him out of trouble)!

Plus, he felt awkward trying to explore this world when even minor actions or movements by him literally caused the various watchers around him to scream, faint, or actually poop their pants.

Uh right, about that issue specifically? He suspected someone noticed back when he first woke up how uncomfortable 'Displaced Case 8290001: Subject Alpha' happened to be after nearly scaring some random person into a coma.

And then someone likely suggested that he'd stay put to avoid such things.

So now there were a LOT of easily scared people assigned to watch him, to subtly guilt trip him and prevent John from wandering about the planet or doing anything too 'scary'.

Or else all these people nearby would freak the fuck out and stuff. And poop themselves. Events which Morphy would then dutifully report to him so she could then beg for a treat.

The setup was very clever and effective, but still more than slightly messed up… Sigh.

John winced as something got adjusted again. "Hold up…" System, check the flow pattern of potential energy with that last module change.

[[Confirmed, displaying prior mapping and current variations.]]

Hmm. "Yeah, revert the changes on that one… Something REALLY doesn't like all the 'leakages' being fully cut off. I'm pretty sure something would start to build pressure, or something close to it, if we tried to 'patch' everything."

Grace nodded as she carefully began making changes. "Like how wounds need to be able to drain and be exposed to fully heal?"

Close, but not exactly… "More like a shark I think? Like how they need to move constantly to breathe properly. These energies feel like they need to flow, and if we fully seal off all these issues."

John adjusted the data feeds and stared at them carefully. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure the END result we want is not the System going silent and contained, but more hiding in the ambient flows of power and material… Guiding all this stuff around and through the modules and units, not blocking it away or attempting to make reality ignore it."

Temptation had her OWN interface running, though she was more focused on the offensive and infiltrative aspects of these 'healing sessions' than Grace. "Sis, I'm pretty sure we need to lean more towards the 'Not my problem' filters and not the 'Out of phase with reality' ones. We should be trying to convince people and things that we may exist but not be worth the effort of documentation or being reported and such."

John nodded, pointing at her. "Yeah, that! Plus it should be more energy efficient. Not that I've exactly run into energy issues in a while, but it's best to design things right while it doesn't matter than frantically attempt to fix stuff later when it does."

Grace hummed as she reviewed the other changes that could be made. "At these power levels, the actual amount of energy being saved is negligible. It takes a LOT of power both to hide something from existence OR convince existence that the found object doesn't matter… But I think the real benefit here is ongoing costs and maintenance requirements."

She poked something else that made John wince as she tilted her head. "After all, convincing reality that something isn't there one time isn't enough! It needs to be reapplied every time the occluded object 'interacts' with anything."

Temptation nodded at the side while working on her own modules. "While if we convince reality that something isn't important, we just need to reinforce their own prior data results instead of doing a full 'NOTHING HERE' setup."

Grace nodded. "Exactly! And the costs of convincing OTHER unrelated methods that the older results just happened to be correct about how uninteresting and unimportant our Lord's Pocket happens to be? THOSE costs are vastly lower than the effort required to force all of existence into agreeing that he doesn't exist at every single moment."

John meanwhile frowned while looking at the deployment module. "Hey girls? Has any of us gone over this one yet?" He pulled up the overview screen. "I don't think I realized how crippled this part of me is, and we use it every time we enter a new Realm."

THAT got both of their attention. Grace began to pale the more she looked over the thing… "Almost all the safeties are disabled."

Temptation on the other hand snorted. "Safeties!? Fuck those, this thing can barely even DETECT where it's 'Deploying' Master at all! I don't think it even LOGS how many times it fails to do so properly, it just destroys whichever Body incorrectly got sent out and keeps giving it a shot until the result is stable enough to connect our Master up to it!"

Yep. "There's supposed to be so many options here too, just like with the Transfer module… I've basically been doing something like a 'drop in' every trip, but I could theoretically merge with the version of me that is local, incarnate as an entity or sentient object from the local fate clusters, reclaim a recently deceased Body, dominate and Consume the Soul of some (hopefully evil) target, become a sentient vending machine… Wait, what?"

Oh, huh. "Apparently some Transfer Nodes we could visit allow us to just become random stuff. Like, I could be reborn as a sword or shoe or something. It must be one of those Blue Nodes that I don't have a ton of data on just yet…"

Grace was biting her lip with concern. "Theoretically you could, eventually, but not like this. In fact I'm worried that this module is so damaged that it may have been making your issues WORSE over time… Or at least, heavily delayed and slowed your recovery."

Well yeah, that was fair. "But we can go over it NOW, I guess… Honestly, I didn't even realize that my Deployment module was different from the ones that stored and returned stuff from my Pocket itself."

Temptation was glaring at the data. "It ISN'T, not now. It was so broken that it copied what it could from other modules during your emergency escape all the way back in the beginning with the mistress… This is ALSO why you were so injured back then and why Mistress Jessica nearly died at that time."

Grace winced as she saw John's face. "But it's been doing its best! Just… When you have nearly nothing operational to work with, doing your best might not be good enough. The fact things haven't gone worse by now is practically a miracle."

John leaned back in his chair.

So.

His heavily damaged self nearly killed both him and his sister way back when they were nearly assassinated.

That was something.

Not that he had any option at that time. It was do or die, quite literally.

Still… "I remember a LOT of weak bits of myself breaking apart back then. And how much it hurt saving what bits of my sister I could in my Pocket, and how hard it was to 'escape'... If my Transfer and Deployment modules were so damaged, even more damaged than this since they've recovered since then, how did we manage to survive at all?"

Grace sighed. "The logs are too fractured to tell… I think this bit says that there was something about cascading redundancy conflicts and overlapping emergency procedures?

…Holy shit. "Patriarch Wedgie of the Apple Slice Clan."

Both of the girls paused, confused… John on the other hand felt that lost friend once more. "My first Pocket Pal, the first food I was ever given, a slice of apple."

The sisters glanced at each other, before Temptation slid over and pulled John into a hug. "Master?"

He held back a sniffle. "He was my first friend, the first thing I had that proved I existed and that I wasn't alone… basically, the first important thing I ever put in my Pocket."

Grace was hesitant. "And… Was it a magical apple slice? Some sort of uh… Mystical talking…?"

Heh. "No, he was just a normal slice of apple. And I grabbed a bunch more from my following meals, and eventually began liberating his brethren from the hospital when the staff wasn't looking… I'm not sure exactly how many apple bits I ended up storing in my Pocket, but it was a LOT."

John gave a weak smile. "But like I said, he was the first. And my Pocket was not really used for anything else, and I didn't know or care about anyone or anything else… So my greatest fear was losing him."

Damn, he could barely remember it all back then… His System was still very damaged and recovering back in those days… "I spent every moment back then doing one thing to keep Wedgie safe: Applying more precautions to his part of my Pocket."

He began counting… "Time compression, layers of spatial vacuums, raw power used as baffling, aluminum foil, overlapping dimensional shards, bits of conceptual material (Not that I knew that back then), sunscreen, ribbed sound echos in stasis, a hat, duplicate spaces as decoys, automated defense reapplication units, encryption layers, redundancy maskings, you name it? I probably tried it to keep him and his growing family safe."

And all of them had to be left behind when John and Jessica fled. "When we were attacked, he stayed behind so that I'd have his space to try and bring Jessica away to safety. I guess some of those attempts turned out to work after all…"

Grace was starting to frown… "If there were so many precautions, why were you so hurt when the emergency protocols went off?"

Hmm? Oh. "Well, as much as I loved him and his people, at the end of the day Patriarch Wedgie was still an apple slice. And some of the compression methods that work with nearly identical bits of apple would react horribly to something like a human being just shoved in there. There wasn't room for two people… Hell, there was barely room for one!"

John shrugged. "Time was short, space was tight, so I pushed Jessica inside and tried to protect her from the rest." Sure it hurt from what he remembered, but it wasn't like he had cared about himself back then as long as he wasn't alone.

He survived, his future sister was saved, and Wedgie apparently was an even BIGGER hero than John had even expected! Amazing.

Missing the horror on the girls faces, he shrugged as he looked at the data. "Thankfully I got only survivable amounts of maiming back then, and I got to meet Spike the Pinecone and some new local friends, and got to eat a lot of Christmas socks…"

But damn, that was some impressive luck. "I can't wait to tell my other Pocket Pals and the frogs about this! Patriarch Wedgie of the Apple Slice Clan, savior of the future Frog Emperor! That's damn impressive, that's what that is."

…Hmm. "Hey uh… How about we try and build something like that on purpose? You know, a module designed to keep someone secured during an emergency evacuation when low on stability and resources? Like, a last chance, last hope thing. Just to be safe."

They could call it the Apple 'Core' module. Yeah! He would have probably liked that, if an apple wedge could have feelings at least.

The sniffle made John blink. "Wha… What's wrong? Why are you two crying GAK!"

Oh, okay. Apparently it was hugging time.

That was fine, hugs were awesome!

~~~Pocket System~~~

Jessica waved at the piles of data. "Just store it all for now, analysis and indexing can happen when we leave." The agents nodded, and the virtual information vanished from her interface.

She groaned as she rubbed her eyes… Honestly, before they came here? Her largest concern was that this new 'Dark Yellow' Realm was going to be deadly, or heavily unstable, or something like that.

It had never crossed her mind that there was some automatic self selecting bullshit going on in the background.

After all, if a world COULDN'T come up with all sorts of security measures and policies and so forth when they were invaded by so many outsiders, unintentionally or not, then they'd likely have self destructed YEARS ago. Potentially in a literal sense.

Or got infected by some nightmare, or been converted into orange goo, or whatever.

Heck, by now Jessica suspected that some of the Red Node options John talked about were just places with really unstable crossovers, dumping alien invaders into a Realm dedicated to knitting or combining a bunch of eldritch stories or something.

Whatever.

At least no one here was willing to try something stupid. So far.

Not that it was really a danger, not for John or the rest of them.

After all, the four of them were technically only avatars out here in the 'real world', with all that made them unique safely stored in John's Pocket… Thus attacking or even successfully 'killing' any of them would just piss John off and have Jessica send out the agents to clean someone up.

So they were safe and treated with fearful respect and provided endless benefits for basically no cost! Win win, right?

But even with unlimited access to local information (Thank you very much, yoink!), this was one of the worst stops they'd visited so far. Zero out of ten, would not recommend.

Just seeing her brother slowly slump, basically caged up in their (VERY nice) rooms? That was frustrating.

She herself, as an MIB agent, could care less about being watched, or captured, or (As in this case) politely asked to stay in a restricted area… Which didn't really mean much considering she was sending out small armies of Duel Monster spirits to investigate and infiltrate the local spiritual world.

They were slowly shifting to fully become aspects of her Soul, which apparently was something many Duel Monsters desired as it was one of the deeper connections possible between people, and thus in a very odd way Jessica was sort of out there investigating this world unrestricted…

All while her brother was politely treated like a nuclear bomb.

Were the people here nice? Likely. Some at least.

Was the technological information fascinating? Oh hell yeah! Though there was less advanced science happening here than there was 'I convinced the Morphin Grid to pretend this works' shenanigans going on in the background."

Was it worth this amount of stress? No.

At this point, even if they could adjust her brother's defenses to the point where EVERYONE forgot he existed, it still wouldn't make things right again… And they'd likely get in the way all the time even if she tried.

Selling impossible bread? Nope. Any customers would likely have their purchases confiscated and locked away for safety reasons.

Free food for the homeless? Double nope. That was apparently a warning sign for some of the creatures that needed access to fleshy bodies that few people in society cared about.

Help random people? They were basically banned from interacting with ANYONE, and if they got around it (which wouldn't be hard or even prevented), those poor people would likely be put through the wringer to make sure they had 'survived' their encounter with 'Displaced Case 8290001'.

Hell, even offering assistance to these people keeping them under watch was pretty much off the table by now, even if they wanted to! There was a feeling of growing paranoia and distrust that just felt icky and… Sigh.

Hopefully John hadn't noticed already, but something about him trying to help Ninjor out designing a 'solution' to his 'bleeding problem' had caused the ninja to basically freak out.

It was unclear what exactly the issue was from what her agents could determine, but at this point? Any project John offered assistance with would likely get SET BACK or even abandoned entirely if he tried to work with them.

And she could feel the polite rejection of contact, the inability to help anyone or even cooperate with others? It was hurting her brother. Which was not acceptable.

Jessica sighed again, checking in on her little trio of responsibilities… Good, they were making lots of progress now that they've dedicated so much time to doing a full overhaul of John's modules. Or at least the ones marked as 'most critical' that was, the Pocket was VERY deep in this case and there was a LOT of hardware and software to go through from what she could tell.

Right, that was enough of a break… Let's get this part of the job done so she could offer what little assistance she could to the others and leave this place faster.