I walked up to the reception desk to see if someone could help show me around. Since I was notoriously bad at directions because of my amnesia, I had to ask the receptionist, “Can you take me to the executive office? Or get someone to take me there?” 

“I’m sorry ma’am, you can’t get access without ID.” She politely declined. Her name tag read ‘Sally, New Hire’. Since she was new, they probably fired the usual person who takes me up. I’m not surprised that she didn’t recognize me because the face of the supreme ruler is withheld from the public to prevent assainations. On one hand, that’s a good thing because I can sneak out much easier. On the other, it means I’ve yet to succeed in my plan. 

“I don’t think you heard me before. Can you take me to the executive office?” This time, I tucked my dark hair behind my ears, then adjusted my cap up whilst lifting my bangs to show my celestial mark. In Universe society, a celestial mark is ID, it says what kind of light you are, your job/status, and your birthplace. All with a simple magic scan. Similar to a human driver’s license. With this proof, she immediately jumped up hurriedly rushing around the counter. 

“I’m so sorry Miss! I’ll show you the way myself. Follow me and please don’t revoke my title.” The last part was a whisper, assuring that none of the humans in the lobby would hear. Sally walked me to the elevators and pressed the call button. 

“Be at rest. You are a new hire, it’s nothing but a simple mistake. That won’t happen again, right?” I turned to look into her eyes, confirming my point. 

“O-of course! I would never,” she slightly bowed, stumbling across her words. The elevator dinged, and we walked on. Sally pressed floor 67, and we began our ascent. 

The control room would look big to anyone else, but to me, it was about half the size of my room. It had four big TV screens at the back and multiple chairs lined up to watch. Similar to the human ATCT where they track airplane traffic and other things. Here, though, we monitored human life. To harvest the best energy, we had to maintain a good quality of life. This meant little to no stress and amazing mental health. Physical age didn’t matter as much, except for health conditions. Health conditions meant that a human’s body was using up more energy to heal itself than it was to produce energy. Therefore, lowering the energy quality, which needed to be spectacular due to it being used for practically everything. Our meals, crops, cars, buildings, roads, bridges, you name it. I looked around the room for my favorite control worker. Sally left the room shortly after taking me there. 

There she was. Her name was Amelia. She had brown wavy locks, golden eyes, tanned skin laced with freckles, and a warm smile. The reason I liked Amelia so much was because she was one of the few people I could trust. I know Amelia from Society school. She was one of my closest friends and always stood up for me. She always encouraged me to leave Him, even when I wasn’t strong enough. He successfully pushed away all of my friends except for Amelia and her sister. "Amelia! It’s so great to see you.” I ran up to her and squeezed her so tight, a slight gasp escaped her lips.

“Selene! Oh my goodness, I haven’t seen you in forever.” She returned my hug and then pulled away, smiling big at me. “How’s life at the castle?”

“It’s great, but it would be even better if you visited the castle,” I replied, smiling. She aged well, so well she looks like her mother.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to decline, unfortunately, I may move to Lumin.” I frowned, Lumin was on the other side of Universe. “Oh my gosh, I was joking! Got you! I would love to see what you’ve done with the castle. Especially Silas too.” With the last statement, she smirked just a little then smiled big and chuckled. When I messaged Silas for help I also sent out a few letters as well. One was for Amelia and her sister, requesting if they would like to be part of my cabinet, along with Silas.

“Haha, hilarious. You haven’t changed in the slightest.” I replied dryly, my eyes smiled but he rest of my face did not match the sentiment. Her way of joking never changed. That was another thing I liked about her; she stayed consistent. “Silas is doing well, enough to force me to do requests after this.” 

“What did you say?” Amelia asked. She titled her head quizzically to one side, eyebrow raised. 

“I thought we learned this in school. Basically the supreme ruler holds these one on one meetings with different citizens at the end of each month. Most citizens are from Mona because of its close proximity to the castle. In these meetings, citizens ask for one wish from the supreme ruler. Whether it be a home, healthcare, or clothes.” I answered. The only way for me to remember this was to consult my books at the end of each day. I seriously needed to do something about that.

“Ah, I see, you meant 'requests'. You always did have a weird way of pronouncing words.” She responded, her lips curving into a small smile. Everyone always told me the same thing; why do you say your words funny. During my brief stay on Earth, multiple people picked up on it and called it an 'accent'. They often complimented me and said I sounded proper. Sadly, Universeans didn’t feel the same. I often got bullied for my improper pronunciation as a child. "We can catch up later. For now, let's get to the main reason why you are here.” Amelia said, walking us down the main path, past rows of long gray tables all lined with computers and high techl She then stopped at the very front, a few paces away from the one-way glass with us being able to see out. One of the main TVs sprung from the wall, but was still flush with the other four..

Inspecting the scene, I leaned in closer trying to see what Amelia would see. After enough squinting and blurry vision, I finally bit the bullet and asked, "What am I looking at?” From what I could gather, there were four separate graphs each representing different light levels, with small notes at the bottom. There was also an analysis of the human brain and its reception to Enlightenment's stimuli. 

“I’m sure you know this by now, but energy is a simple term for light. Light is what we Universeans use for everything because light is in everything. Universeans have two different light cores. Our first core is our life core, which produces energy automatically, and the second core is our magic core. Most of the energy Universeans produce goes to our magic core. This core is where we turn energy into glamour which we can use to do neat things like disguise ourselves, teleport, and make illusions. Technically, all forms of glamour are illusions. Your illusion is as strong as your persuasive ability. However, humans don’t have a magic core, so they produce ten times as much life energy as they would have used for their magic core. But this extra-life energy can be too much for the human body. So we harvest it and use it in our health care, infrastructure, stories, food, etc. Light increases the overall strength of existing items, so when we combine Light with persuasion and glamour, illusions become way stronger. We harvest light using heat, which is super easy as our bodies already expell excess light. This heat is extracted by condensing it into its purest form, which is literal light. Most Universeans love light because it makes them strong. Which is why the first Supreme Ruler felt the need to harvest light from humans.” She responded effortlessly as if she had said this before. Well, she probably had. Amelia spun around, hair flying with the motion, to a nearby desk and grabbed a clipboard off of it. “Look at this.”

On the clipboard was a pie char, bar graph, and base levels to compare the rest of the data to. Looking at the pie chart, it showed the amount of high-quality light we harvested compared to low and mid-quality light. The bar graph, however, showed how many humans had good mental health, health conditions, and signs of stress. For now, all the levels seemed good. The stress level and health conditions were on the lower side, but mental health was on the up, however I noticed one minor detail. 

“Population is going down. Why? We need a high population. Our light consumption in the past few years has tripled because of the increased birth rate.” My voice hiked up a few notes, but otherwise stayed steady. This would set back my, our, plan, we needed consistent levels for the new buildings. "Bring me the reports from the past few years.” 

Amelia walked down white marble path she took me down earlier, and then took a sharp left where all the data storages were. I couldn't really see from here, but there was an opening and closing of drawers for a few minutes, before she finally walked back and handed me three files. I set right to work, reading all of the files, trying to form some sort of connection in my mind. 

“Increased death rate,” I read aloud, “higher signs of stress, more low-quality energy produced." Each report I read seemed to add a new problem. "Interesting. Bring me the records from forty years ago.” I went over to an empty table, laying out the reports in oldest to youngest order. Amelia brought me the report from forty years ago and I put that one first, suddenly it all made sense. “Son of a bitch.” I cursed, “I knew she had another plan up her sleeve.”

“What, what is it?” In response to my outburst, Amelia stepped in closer to see the lined-up reports, “Oh wow. This needs to be handled immediately. We should bring this up at the next ambassador meeting.”

“I don’t think so. Ciwe and Wiln won’t like it one bit, and if Wiln doesn’t like it then neither will their gang.” I responded bitterly, my mouth tugging downwards in a frown. I desperately needed to reconcile a new plan. This would literally change everything.

“You’re right, for now though, we need to be doing as much as we can to reverse these changes. I’ll have my team see what they can do,” Amelia said. She was the control center boss, after all. “I’ll also have Sally take you down. Oh, and before you go, let me give you a copy of these reports.”

~~~

Our trip to Enlightenment revealed some strange things. Silas was also given a copy of his findings. As soon as we got back, we immediately went to my office to converse. You can probably guess by now but it had the same decor to match my room and the rest of the castle. However, it was most similar to the meeting room. Once we entered, I sat down at my desk and got to work rereading the papers and brainstorming a possible solution. Silas sat infront of me, in this big ass fluffy chair that I'm pretty sure is from my couch, extremely focused on the task at hand. His curls shined like never before in the on coming sunset.

“I could force schools to train more tellers, completing more stories and bringing more humans in.” I offered, showing him the population decrease by lining up the reports the same way I did in the control room.

 

“That wouldn’t work, the orb handpicks jobs. If we try to force it, we could end up with even more of a shortage.” He responded grimly, looking up from the reports, grabbing his report, and placing it in the middle. “That could also lead to more poor quality Light being produced.” 

Suddenly, I had a great idea. “What if tellers got more of a workload? I know it takes a long time for tellers to complete one story, but what if we had them working on five at a time? Currently, they only have two stories making the double life easier, but if we increase it and teach them clone illusions, we would get more humans per teller.” 

“That might just work, but that means that our force would have to be retrained because most don’t know how to clone.” He responded. I could see the wheels turning in his head. He rose from his chair, pacing the room slowly.

“What if we made it part of the schooling program?” I offered.

“No, that would take too long.” He replied. Then muttered to himself. Going on about our light consumption, clearly trying to think of an ideal solution. But no solution is truly perfect. “I got it!” He snapped. Pulling out my chalkboard from the back closet. 

He scribbled some words like ‘tellers,’ ‘human population,’ and ‘light quality,’ on the board. Then he made a pie chart of our light consumption. I saw where this was going now, “So you’re going to tell me that if we decrease the amount of light we spend significantly we could slowly make the population of tellers and humans go up causing more high-quality light to be produced?” 

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he finished writing, out of breath from his drastic movements. He turned to face me, obviously satisfied with himself but also slightly surprised.

“Silas, you are a fucking genius!” I exclaimed with excitement, standing up to ‘high five’ him. “Starting tomorrow, we will act out this plan.” I said, walking out the office door, which slammed shut behind me.