Ruby squared her shoulders and drew herself up to her full height of just slightly over five feet. Her hair was sticking up in every direction, she knew she had pastry crumbs all over her floral shirt, and she desperately needed a shower. Coffee mug clutched in her hand, she did her best to seem very imposing in the face of the beautifully alien creatures standing awkwardly on her building’s roof.

“I’m gonna stand. First of all, how can you be sure I’m your… your Auth…” she started, when there was the bright chime of the game. Her heart dropped as she looked around for her phone, but Alice pulled hers out of her back pocket.

“Oh, yeah. I downloaded Biblioteka Æterna while you were out and they were… y’know. It’s fun as hell.” Alice held up the phone to show tiny sprites of the men before them, instead, all beautiful women in various idle animations. Tiny animated Caim flipped her iridescent hair and shot the viewer a finger gun and a wink. “You battle clown monsters to take control of your library back, and you can evolve them up like digimon.”

“Two hundred ninety eight thousand four hundred and sixty two... eighty nine... ninety four…” Cerberos said, eyes unfocused, stopping only when Berith gently elbowed him. “It’s been downloaded nearly three hundred thousand times and you’re the only one who’s actually summoned us, so…” He made an enormous shrug.

Ruby grabbed the phone from her. The interface was entirely in English, with none of the odd looping script hers had. When she flipped to the menu screens, the books were all unblemished, unlike the fragile, scarred objects in her own. “You read the tutorial,” she hissed, eyes narrowed.

“It wasn’t that hard, Rubes.” Alice reached over and tapped the corner of the screen.

The daemons gathered around them both as an animation started. A woman appeared on the screen, her long green hair caught in elaborate wooden combs and jeweled flowers, pink and green silken robes flowing around her deep olive skin. Her eyes were the colour of roses. They narrowed just a bit.

In that same velvet voice Ruby had heard over and over, she gave a little speech that explained the controls and wished the player good luck.

“She kinda looks like you,” Alice said archly as the music played, then glanced around at Ruby and the daemons. “You want some alone time with the book club?”

“Yeah, if that’s ok?” Ruby wandered back into the conservatory and sat down, looking at her own phone on the chaise.

“I’ll be downstairs if you need me.” Alice stalked up to Caim. “Do not fuck this up, pretty pony,” she said, passing Valefor through the service exit.

Ruby tapped the tutorial button on her screen, waiting for the error message to pop up again.

Instead, the animation started but this time, the woman in green and pink seemed to climb right out of the phone and look Ruby straight in the eye.

“If you’re listening to this, you probably got Cerberos to hack the phone,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t look at this straight out. You never do because apparently my brains never quite carry over to my incarnations. You should have seen the one I just lived through, great goddess he was a pain in the... right. Anyways. My name is now and once again Yosaka Datza, sage of the sixth element, lady of the woods, and you, gods help you, are whomever I became next.”

Caim bowed, and the other daemons shifted nervously as birds fluttered through the conservatory’s branches.

“I don’t know what to call you because you haven’t been born yet. As soon as I get done with this, I’m going to overwrite myself again. The process is coming undone in shorter and shorter intervals, and pretty soon, I probably won’t be able to at all, so it looks like we’re going to have to fight,” she said, and Ruby tried to avoid her rose-hued gaze. “I don’t have a lot of room to leave you more of an explanation. The coding needed to create the summoning paths creates a data sink. It works better than previous versions of the game, but still. Caim and the others will protect you and can explain things better than this tiny animated version of us can. But I just have one important thing to tell you, Self who isn’t born yet. We made a lot of mistakes. Try not fuck up. And don’t die. Caim, be useful. You have your orders to protect me, so don’t you fuck it up either.”

Ruby glanced over to see Caim’s gaze fixed firmly on the mosaicked floor, pretty mouth set in a hard line. The woman looked like her in only the most superficial of ways, but Ruby knew it was her own self on the deepest of levels.

It was, she thought, like looking in a funhouse mirror that showed only the absolute truth.

Yosaka Datza was beautiful and imposing. And Ruby didn’t like her one single bit.

“If that’s me... Old me, at any rate. I’m very sorry I was kind of an asshole. You don’t deserve that, Caim. None of you do.” Ruby set the phone down.

“To be fair, kind of an asshole is an understatement,” Grendel said pleasantly.

“You were always the kindest to us,” Caim said quickly, forcing his eyes up.

“Caim said Lady Yosaka… you... came to him, told him you were finally going to help us, but that it would be better if we hid separately for a while. To keep from attracting attention.” Amon put an arm around Caim’s shoulders. “You said we’d be safer that way.”

“And because we were apart, another Author was able to take me and recase me so I would…” Valefor’s voice broke. Fenix squeezed his arm with a sad smile and Valefor flinched.

“How many Authors are there?” Ruby asked, remembering Maria’s whispered warning (But we must be careful, trust no one. Not even your own daemons).

“Seven in total. We haven’t seen the others since we lost our home.” Caim squeezed Amon’s hand.

“Just their greasy abominations,” one of the twins muttered, perched in a little tree.

“For countless ages, we’ve been running, hiding, doing the last thing Lady Yosaka told us to do before she left us to fend for ourselves.'Keep recording what humanity learns. Protect their knowledge, and their stories, save their dreams even when you cannot save them',"Grendel tapped his cane on the floor. “In your presence, we have unfettered access to our powers, access we didn’t have before. You brought us all here.”

“She... I... uh, she said you could explain everything further.” Ruby looked at the plate of fruit and pastries Caim had prepared for her and poured more coffee. “What’s the fastest way to do this?”

“Let’s put on a show!” the twins said in unison as Liath - she thought maybe the curly haired one was Liath, maybe- jumped from the tree into his brother’s arms. Alice’s nickname popped into her brain.

(Chips. It starts with a C. Curly. Chips. Salsa with the shaggy hair. Christ, why don’t they wear nametags?)

“Like the old days. When we were all mysteries, not movie stars,” the other said. “Grendel can open the door, but I’ll take you through.”

“You have to commit to the role. It’s why they wear masks, you know.” Liath plopped down on the chaise beside her. “Shamans and actors and…”

“You have to be who you want to be, to be who you need to be!” Dubh’s bracelet chimed softly and broke apart on his wrist. “GLASS MASK.”

Ruby shot Caim a panicked look and he gave her that smile that had calmed her so before. “You can trust them.” He tilted his head. “None of us would ever hurt you.”

“Except with the truth,” Dubh mused, looking at the glittering object in his hand. “The truth always hurts, even when you’re ready to get stabbed in the butt by it.”

“Or is it punched in the gut? I can never remember,” Liath added, giving Ruby’s shoulders a squeeze. He smelled like peach blossoms up close. Like golden apples.

Before she could say anything else, Dubh placed the mask on her face. It was cold and hot and made of rainbows and storms, lightning turning her skin inside out. Somewhere, someone dropped a coffee mug and it shattered on a tiled stone floor.

Somewhere, someone screamed.

But it wasn’t her.