System Lost: My Own Best Friend

I wake to the heat of the sun's rays on my face and groan. I've definitely overslept, and I'm sweating uncomfortably in my pajamas beneath the covers as the sun cruelly tries to bake me alive. I throw off the duvet with a sigh and sit up to rub my eyes blearily at a pair of vague pink blobs with a frown. Even without the gift of sight, I recognize the warm, fuzzy socks that I apparently wore to bed last night—no wonder I'm sweating so much. I must have been cold.

Didn't I dream about...?

The thought passes quickly, but I find the socks oddly comforting for some reason, so I leave them on for now as I stand up and stretch. Without looking, I snatch my glasses off of my bedside table—the clunky, sturdy pair with a full prescription.

Odd. I went out last night. No way I wore these to a party.

I've got more fashionable glasses with weaker prescriptions, compromising my vision slightly in exchange for a cuter look. Worth the headaches, though I wouldn't want to wear them all day. Speaking of which, I can't remember how I got home last night. With a yawn, I open the top drawer of the bedside table and flip open my diary.

This is exactly why I started keeping one. Let's see, yesterday...yesterday...

Paging through it, I quickly find what I'm looking for.

Friday ██—██—████

Can't wait to try on the new outfit for the party tonight! █████ is going to be drooling for sure. He better be for how much it cost me. Remind me not to let ███████ take me shopping again unless she's footing the bill—her tastes are way too rich for my blood.

I'm pretty proud of my handwriting. It's in a neat cursive, even though barely anybody I know still practices it, complete with little circles for the "I"s. I don't do anything quite so cliche as dot them with hearts...anymore, but it's a cute little flair. The next line is just as neat, but printed in stiff, blocky letters and terse language. I must have been tired.

We had to walk home drunk. Again. By ourselves. Again. ███████ cannot be trusted as a designated driver. This is the third time in a month. We need to stop drinking, attend fewer parties, or get better friends—it's not safe and rideshares are too expensive. Game night tomorrow, don't forget again.

Oh, frick! That's right, I keep forgetting those are every other Saturday. ███████ invited me to another party tonight but...maybe I can do both? I'll need to double check the calendar, but I really don't want to disappoint anybody...

There's one more entry and—I don't really want to read it. I recognize the tell-tale messy scrawl. Everything I write like that, I regret. But I promised myself to read back every entry at least once, so with a heavy sigh, I check the last entry.

█████ is a fucking pig. I don't care who you fuck, but he's not boyfriend material. Dump his ass ASAP. You can do better. Maybe try finally picking up some of the hints ███████ has been dropping or stop leading her on. You can't please everyone, Allison, and some people aren't worth pleasing. Do better. - M

It hurts to read. I must have been upset—and drunk—to swear like that. It's not even a diary entry, just a ranting chastisement addressed to myself. With a weary sigh, I pull the pen out of its slot on the spine and start the next entry, but the words don't come out right.

I miss this so much. I miss waking up in a familiar place, in comfort and safety. I'm sorry, Maggie. I should have listened. I don't want to wake up. Please, just let me keep dreaming a little—

* * *

The moment I realize I'm dreaming, I wake up. It's always been like that for me. I know some people can learn how to lucid dream and even control their dreams to some degree, but I don't have the knack.

I wish I did.

Ignoring the stiffness in my neck and the now omnipresent soreness that plagues my joints from sleeping on cold hard stone, I push myself up into a sitting position and rub the moisture from my eyes before blinking them open. I've gotten used to the aches and pains by now, but the dreams are new. Was I crying?

I sniffle, as if to prove that yes I was indeed crying in my sleep, and fetch my glasses—the same ones from my dream, now that I think about it. I try not to sleep in them, if I can help it, and keep them tucked away against the wall of the pillar near the spot where I sleep so I don't lose them. My eyesight is truly atrocious without them, and I thank my lucky stars every day that they haven't suffered anything worse than a few smudges and scratches.

Case in point—I slide them in place only to be immediately startled by the toothy worm staring eyelessly right next to me.

"Ah!" I cry with a start before heaving a sigh as my sleepy brain recalls the events of yesterday. "Oh, right. Nipper. I guess you didn't kill me in my sleep, huh? Good boy!"

He doesn't react to my praise. In fact, he's not moving at all, or even breathing. Wait, I don't think he's got lungs. How does that work? I wish I'd brushed up on my giant magical bug biology in high school.

"Nipper? You good? Still alive, buddy?"

I grab a candle from the nearby stack Maggie made and wave it gently in front of his face. Nothing. I try clapping my hands, calling out, and tapping the ground around him all to no avail. Aw heck, maybe he really is dead. As a final confirmation, I poke Nipper gently in the side with a candle.

The worm whips around with shocking agility and bites the candle by the flame, causing me to recoil in shock.

"Woah!" I exclaim. "Okay, note to self—Nipper can sleep, and he wakes up cranky."

Although Nipper and his yet-unnamed kind are quite slow to travel, they can twist and contort very quickly to get their teeth onto anything in their immediate vicinity. His teeth can't get purchase on the indestructible candles, though, so they are good for poking, prodding, bonking, and otherwise manipulating the weird little creature.

He also really likes nibbling on the candle flames, which was how Maggie distracted him so that we could sleep. Not the most reliable plan, but I guess we're alive so I can't complain. I think Maggie's already thoroughly convinced him that we aren't food, anyway.

Thinking about Maggie causes my thoughts to drift back to that dream. Already a lot of the details are fading. What did my room look like? What was on the cover of my diary? Little holes in the memory that I didn't notice while dreaming.

Was it a memory? Or just a dream?

Maybe a bit of both. I don't...think I—or rather, Maggie—ever signed with her initial like that. It's all so fuzzy. I think I owe her an apology, though. Violet too. I really do appreciate them, and I know they are their own people, no matter what Maggie says about me, I just...

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I've been thinking of them as "guests" or "visitors." Even now I feel like it's my head—my body, and I'm just sharing it with them thanks to [Parallel Wills]. But if there's any truth to that dream at all, that can't be right. I just didn't realize it until—

No, I did. I just didn't want to acknowledge it. I still don't. I'm scared. Lost and confused. I don't understand what's happening to me. I don't know how I got here, or why I can't remember home, and the more I think about it the more terrified I become. The fragmented memories of my past—of who I am—are all I've got, and if I start questioning that, then I don't know what I'd do. Maggie and Vi are handling things, each in their own way, keeping us moving forward. I'm still the weak link, mired in the past and holding us back.

While they think about tomorrow, I'm here dreaming about the past.

"I just want to go home," I whimper, wiping fruitlessly at the tears dripping down my cheeks.

Nipper keeps chewing on his candle impassively. Ignorant and uncaring of my plight.

"Don't we all?" Maggie says quietly, causing me to flinch.

I should have known she was awake. I've been getting better at "feeling" Maggie and Violet with me, but once again I was too lost in my own head to notice. My head—dang it, Maggie's right, I really am selfish, aren't I?

"Morning, Mags," I mutter, trying to move past the fact that I'd been crying. "Nipper didn't eat us."

"I see that," she remarks drily. "Smarter than he looks, isn't he?"

I sniffle and reach over to grab the waterskin, fumbling to untie the slightly looser knot of the "drinking" end as I reply.

"Yeah. Though I still don't see what you think is so cute about him."

She scoffs as I take a few gulps of slightly sour-tasting water, still quite cold.

"Your loss. Look at that winning smile—what's not to love?"

I eye Nipper's lamprey maw with deep suspicion. It's got no tongue or lips, just teeth dripping with mildly venomous saliva at the end of its glossy black worm body. Genuinely, I think Nipper and his siblings might be even grosser than the giant snails.

"I'm having second thoughts about breakfast," I grumble.

"Hah! No Vi yet?"

I shake my head. "She usually takes longer to wake up, if she's not first."

"She always did like sleeping in," Maggie muses.

"How do you...?" I trail off, still thinking of that dream.

"Know? I don't, really. It just feels right," she answers my question anyway.

"I wish I had your confidence," I mutter.

She doesn't respond, and I don't really feel like talking for once, so we just sit in uneasy silence while I work on setting up a makeshift grill out of candles, occasionally swatting Nipper away as he tries to nibble on my construction. I still haven't quite worked out the technicalities of cooking with candles, but I'm determined to make it work now that I know it's possible.

Maybe it's a curse, but after a while the silence starts getting to me, and I can't help but try to strike up a conversation.

"Did you have any dreams last night?" I ask not-so-casually.

"Me?" Maggie asks, surprised. "Nah, not that I can remember. Why, did you?"

"Yeah," I mumble, half to myself. "Isn't that weird? Shouldn't we all have the same dreams or...something?"

I feel silly as soon as I say it, and I'm expecting Maggie to make fun of me, but instead her voice is thoughtful as she answers.

"You know, that's a good question," she says. "At the end of the day, no matter how many minds we have, we've still only got one brain. Maybe some part of our nature blocks out parts of it, but ultimately we should all be drawing from the same bucket."

It takes me a second to figure out her metaphor. She does that a lot, I've noticed—speaking in analogies and metaphors, expecting us to keep up even when she starts mixing them around or brings things up out of the blue.

"Maybe that's how it was before," I muse. "We were all in one big bucket, and I didn't know how to separate the different parts."

Admittedly, I'm being a bit petty by turning her own habit against her, but I should have known better than to try to beat her at her own game, because I just feel her nodding in agreement.

"Could be, yeah. You were still a bitch about it, though, I'm certain of that."

I frown, wishing I could remember—or even half-remember—what she's talking about beyond the dream I had.

"I'm sorry for upsetting you," I say eventually. "Then and now. You were right, I need to do better."

"I don't remember saying that, but I'll take it," she says, chuckling lightly. "You might be onto something about the buckets, though."

And she's lost me again. "What do you mean?" I ask.

"After last night, I was thinking about what a skill, and especially [Parallel Wills] really is," she explains. "And I think maybe one of the things it does is give us more buckets. Normally we'd only have one brain, and we still do, but the skill is...maybe offsetting some of that?"

"So we have like...magic brains instead of Nipper's magic stomach?"

"Something like that."

"Huh."

I'm not really sure what else to say to that. It's an interesting theory, and I think at the very least, if my dream is anything to go by, all of us being awake and aware at the same time and sharing our experiences is new. Maybe Violet and Maggie existed before—no, they definitely did—but the skill is still doing something.

I blink. Another memory hits me, like a dream I'd long forgotten suddenly being remembered.

"Wait, Maggie, didn't [Parallel Wills] originally have a different name?"

"Uh, no?" she says, confused.

"No, it definitely did!" I insist. "I can't believe I forgot! What was it...what was it?"

I close my eyes and focus, trying to dig up the memory from when I first picked the class. Like my encounter with the [Angel], it's fuzzy. The memory is slippery and hard to grasp, but not missing like the holes in my memory of home.

"[Locus of Thought]!" I shout, a bit too loudly, snapping my fingers. "That was it! I forgot because I passed out right afterwards. But it changed!"

"Wait, really?" she asks. "Lemme see!"

[Locus of Thought]

[ERROR: Skill Description not found. Redirecting to nearest match.]

[Parallel Wills]

Additional minds operating in tandem within one body.

"Huh?"

On a sudden, inexplicable hunch, I check again where my classes are listed.

[Allison: Tier 1 Human]

[Class Slot 1: Tier 1 [Unified Wanderers]** - Level 6/10

[Class Slot 2: Tier 0 [Medic]* - Level 3/10

[Attributes]

Power: 2

Resilience: 24

Awareness: 2

Ego: 27

Will: 2

[Skills]

Locus of Thought

The Beaten Path

First Aid

"It changed back!" I exclaim.

"Try reading the description there," Maggie suggests. "Maybe it's different."

"Right..."

[Locus of Thought]

Communicate and coordinate between yourselves.

"Well, what do you know?" Maggie says, awestruck. "Has the mechanism been lying to us?"

[Level Up!]

Unified Wanderers is now level 7.

+2 Resilience.

+2 Ego.

"What the heck is going on?" I throw my arms up, thoroughly baffled by this strange and apparently broken mechanism that's become such a huge part of my life since arriving here.

"I don't know, but I'm not complaining," Maggie chuckles. "I'm just looking forward to finding out what our real skill does."