Words roll cleanly into my ears and fill the empty spaces in my mind with sounds that don't leave screeching headaches and nausea in their place. I stare down at Pearl, who stares up at me, and we just… stay like this for a good dozen heartbeats. The construct turns between the two of us and scrunches its many eyes in uncertainty.

"Yeah. I guess I am listening." I say slowly. "How's that possible?"

"The Mind infusion." Pearl whispers with a grin. "It must've pushed you over the threshold to understand this! That's great news!"

I nod in agreement, but something's still on my mind. "Then why didn't I hear what you and Jumble said back at the anomalous apartment?"

Pearl's grin widens. "Because that's even more secret than this. Stuff that only someone who was there would know, not reports the system gathered. But let's leave that for now and focus on the fact that you can FINALLY participate in these conversations! Do I have some things for you to catch up on!"

I raise an eyebrow. "Like what?"

"Lots." Pearl laughs. "I have most of the experiment logs from the system trying to make shellraisers written down in here thanks to Click. We'll take a look at them later, because there's some stuff in there that we can definitely use in this city. The rest is mostly stuff like orb here is telling me; what happened to shellraiser things, how the war finished, how all my people were brutally murdered and hunted down for hundreds of years after the fact."

She shrugs, her small body shaking with rage. "You know. Fun little things like that."

"Aw, Pearl." I raise her to my shoulder and awkwardly pull her into a hug. "Shit, I'm sorry."

"I'm… fine." She slowly says, but accepts the hug anyway. "It hurt to hear, but I guess I always expected it. Heck, all of us started assuming I was the last shellraiser way before I got confirmation. But there was always a little hope that… the best of us survived. Now I'm stuck wondering if they died first defending everyone, or if they were the last to go because the system couldn't kill them."

There are very few shellraiser ruins in this world.

With how littered with wreckage everywhere was after the war, it is very surprising at how little shellraiser technology has been found.

By the system or otherwise.

Melancholy tugs Pearl's cheeks ever so slightly downward. "The final kill switch. I guess it did its job, so only the independents' war machines survived."

"So that workshop we found was independent?"

She nods. "That's why they had blueprints for coin-operated stuff. They must've been arming a rebel group who got classes somehow. Or… no. I refuse to believe any of my people would be stupid enough to work with the system that blatantly showed it wanted all of us dead–regardless of affiliation."

The construct wiggles itself into the shape of a question mark.

Then how'd you survive?

Pearl leans down and gently brushes one of my bite marks. "Because they needed one shellraiser alive–and incapacitated–to keep Illumisia from breaking free."

The megalodane?

As far as I know, she was powerful, but not that powerful.

"Not while burdened by a promise." Pearl murmurs, all the while her eyes are locked on mine. "You can hear that, too. Oh… there's… so many things I can finally tell you, Shelby. So many things I've wanted to say ever since that first sting of censorship put a barrier between us. I didn't think I'd get to say any of this until you had at least seventy-five Mind. Maybe even a hundred."

Honestly, I can't believe it either. This kind of stuff feels like exactly what the system needs to keep censored; having it locked behind a paltry twenty-two mind is unfathomable. It must be the upgrade manual and the quest it gave me fiddling with things behind the scenes. But there's no point questioning it now. Whatever it is, I'm damn ecstatic to not be in censorship hell right about now.

"I'm here now. With ears wide open." I assure her with a toothy smile. "Whatever you want to say, whenever you want to say it, I'll be ready to listen."

Emotion swells in Pearl's throat so much that she has to swallow to get it down. "Thanks, Shelby. I'm… I want to get things in order first. Make sure that when you get the full picture you're getting the real thing; no bias, no emotion, just the facts. There's just one thing I really have to tell you right now. It probably doesn't mean much, but… well… maybe you've already figured it out. Having a promise directly with Illumisia could've tipped you off."

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

She's about to tell me that she's important. Either a high-ranking general, a politician, or maybe even their version of royalty. I can't see her being a frontline fighter, though, and she said herself that she wasn't an engineer. Personally, I'm leaning towards royalty. From the swell in her chest and the glimmer in her eye, doesn't look like I'll have to wonder long.

"I'm three people."

I nearly choke on my disbelief. "Excuse me?! Really?!"

Pearl snorts out a laugh. "No, not really. I was the emissary of the Fathomless Depths–the place where all shellraisers were created. Day in, day out, I oversaw our dead and newly born taken to and from the Depths. All our people kind of… didn't really believe I existed. Not that I blame them; back then, my awareness was so dang strong that I kind of just… saw everything. So when the war started, It became my job to watch everything."

The construct twists itself into a strange shape–like an exclamation mark mixed with an ampersand.

I didn't think you'd survived.

"Obviously not. Until a little while ago, you all thought the shellraisers were dead and gone." Pearl says bitterly. "Until I got sealed away, I saw every single time a shellraiser died. But I didn't have the power to do anything about it. I was inexorably linked to the Depths, so for every mote of awareness it gave me, it took power in return. All I could do was report to the people actually fighting and hope against hope that it was enough."

It wasn't.

"Wow, thanks for the biting observation." Pearl sneers. "I almost woke up a few times, but whoever tried to wake me wasn't the right person. And when Shelby finally came around… I couldn't feel the Depths anymore. Whether we sealed them off, or… did what had to be done… the system never touched the Depths. Even though I'll never see them again, I have to accept that it's for the best."

I can't nod or shake my head. The idea of losing everything… of my entire species going extinct… it's just too much for my brain to understand. Then top that off with accepting that, somehow, it's the desired alternative to the system gaining control? I just can't fathom it.

Pearl seems to take my silence as agreement. She nods ever so slightly to herself, then rests her chin in her hands and absentmindedly swings her legs through open air. Completely unlike what I'd imagine someone with her… knowledge… would ever manage to do. The burden she carries, the sheer amount of deaths she's witnessed… how can she be so put-together at the end of it all? How can she still be cheerful, and curious, and friendly, and… well…

How can she still be Pearl?

She looks up at me with a small, pinched smile. "I know that face. Please don't wear it for me. Illumisia protected me with everything she had, but when the fighting turned ugly, it wasn't enough. Skip ahead however long it's been and we're here. All I can do for my people now is remember them and make sure nobody is desecrating our legacy."

The construct shudders at the casual weight in Pearl's words. It is, after all, a product of the system's experiments to make artificial shellraisers combined with its project to uplift the paindne. I… can't imagine how Pearl feels being so close to all these things that are mockeries of her people.

"Well, now that that gloomy little detail is out in the open…" Pearl turns to the construct and tilts her chin upwards. "We were in the middle of something."

Grey matter blurs as the construct shifts back to its gaunt paindne form.

Right.

Ask away.

Pearl presses her fingers into her cheeks. "You said the wreckage disappeared, but we have evidence that at least some high-level shellraiser tech survived. Or at least some blueprints did. Were they from independents, or…?"

The small, gaunt paindne construct shrugs.

I have absolutely no idea; all I know is that so little survived that the system couldn't mass-produce it for itself.

From my last memory, there was no shellraiser technology in the world.

"So it's a relatively new development." I surmise. "Whatever made those shitty constructs in the tunnels and the preservation's mech didn't exist when this place did."

I think it's a pretty safe assumption, but Pearl doesn't seem quite as convinced. "All you know is that the system didn't show you any of it. How do you know that it wasn't just keeping secrets from you?"

I don't.

All I can say is that no reports or conversations spoke of shellraiser tech after the war was finished.

If that's because the system took it all for itself, then that's one explanation.

Another is that your people were successful with this 'final kill switch' you mentioned a minute ago.

Whatever the truth is, you would know better than I do, since you have knowledge of the outside world from current times.

Pearl frowns. "I guess. Just one more question before we have to go back to actual quest stuff… wait, no, two more. Let's start with the easier one; if Shelby can untether you from this place, would you want to leave?"

Yes.

Yes, ten thousand times over, yes.

A thinking mind can't handle all this time waiting–anticipating–twisting itself in knots at the thought that the next people it sees might be the last–or that the last group it saw was, in fact, the last.

Please, please tell me that wasn't a theoretical question.

"Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't." Pearl states. "We'll see later. Final question; does the system have any actual power here anymore?"

I blink in surprise, and the construct does too. "Pearl, the system made the quest. Of course it has power… hm."

Does the system actually have direct power here? I know that it can't mess with quests after they've been issued, but I just kind of assumed that because the quest is a sort of living entity that the system was communicating with it. Maybe that's not true.

I look to the construct for its answer. All I see is confliction and uncertainty etched into that molten grey form.

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