A Fortress of Pebbles

Tassadu told them to put the pebbles to their foreheads and to imagine “any color in the world.” Both kids must have imagined the exact same shade of purple because they ended up with matching bioluminescent bacterial colonies that, when the demonstration was complete, became matching purple plants.

Their cries of delight were as genuine as it gets.

“Can we keep them?” asked Orion.

“Of course you can!” said Tassadu, giving everybody a wink. The way he looked at Aissaba told her he was feeling optimistic.

They sloshed the perimeter of the Room of Soup, all the way to the hidden door on the far side. The twins acted like they’d won new pets at the carnival, eagerly pointing out when the purple vines did something new: perching upon their shoulders, sprouting glowing wing-like leaves, and even evolving a pair of blinking eyestalks.

Yes, Tassadu was quite the artist. Might have become Master of Life in a century or two.

They took the stairwell up to the Hall of Mind, which (as Cassandra immediately observed) ought to have been called the Hall of Brains. The lush biodiversity of the Hall of Life gave way to a single organic substance – a gray biomatter comprising the walls, floors, and ceiling. It was soft underfoot and seemed to absorb all sound, giving the place a reverent silence, almost creepy after the endless symphony of birds and reptiles.

Some of the silent walls bore ridges like the human brain; others, the surface was smooth like a balloon. There were eyeballs embedded every few yards, ones that blinked and tracked your movement as you walked by.

There wasn’t much difference between the Hall of Mind and the Master of Mind these days – though presumably the Master had once been human, like almost everyone else in the fortress. Aissaba waved at a cluster of eyes, in case she was paying attention. Under normal circumstances, the Master would be focused on more important things, but after the events of today, Aissaba would have been surprised if she wasn’t watching.

The eyes just blinked. Unclear if they were observing.

Stealing mind pebbles in a place like this, where the walls could literally see you, wasn’t exactly easy. But Aissaba and the Master of Mind went way back. Which was to say: Aissaba knew how to pull it off and had only been caught a few times.

Step one, find a place without eyeballs – like a restroom or closet. The hallways up here were a labyrinth, as if the floorplan aspired to be as complex as whatever was happening at the cellular level in the graymatter. Orifices that Orion said looked “like buttholes” served as doors, and the light came from bioluminescent patches of brain stuff that hung from the ceiling. These, Orion observed, looked “like bad tonsillitis” and also (on second thought) “like radioactive scrotums.”

Aissaba ignored him, hoping he might eventually forget how his mouth worked. Meanwhile, she went off script, trying to see if she could work some kid-magic and connect with one of them. Probably, Cassandra was the best bet.

“So, Cassandra,” said Aissaba, walking backwards through an orifice, heading generally toward one of the restrooms near the illegal pebble vaults, “Can you guess why mind magic is one of the most restricted kinds of magic in the Fortress?”

“Well,” Orion butted in, “map magic is for large-scale changes, whereas life magic affects the genetic level. I’m guessing mind magic literally screws with your brain.”

“Very good, Cassandra!” said Aissaba to Orion, which made Cassandra giggle. “So, Orion…” she said to Cassandra, “...can you guess what kind of apocalypses are prevented by the scribes who work under the Master of Mind?”

Cassandra cocked her head thoughtfully, glancing at the eyestalks growing from her pet plant. It had evolved to make purring noises whenever it caught someone looking at it – a feature that derailed the conversation entirely until the four of them had stopped in front of the bathroom orifice.

Aissaba was just about to excuse herself when Cassandra said, “Maybe from bad education? Dad always says that the world is filled with dumbasses because–” (She switched to dad-voice) “–dumbasses run the schools, so the schools make more dumbasses.”

Aissaba counted herself lucky that she would never have to meet Mr. Johnson. “Good guess, but education is a form of communication, so it’s under the Mastery of Language.”

“Lead poisoning, then?” said Cassandra, a little too excitedly. “That’s what happened to the Roman Empire. They had lead in their pipes, so they all went batshit crazy, like Nero. Oh! Or, maybe fluoride in the water? The United Nations puts it in the world’s water supply to make the population more docile. Dumps it right in the ocean. It’s literally mind control.”

The more Cassandra went on, the more Aissaba despaired.

New theory: the twins had lead poisoning. Parents too, probably.

Aissaba listened politely to the rest of Cassandra’s monologue then excused herself through the bathroom orifice, saying, “Hang out with Tassadu for a sec. I gotta take a dump.” This won her several million points from both twins. Mental note: make more poop jokes.