“Please stop spawning creatures.” The Violet voice said. “Please just stop for a little while.” It said.

  A group of white loops verified and updated the frequency-pattern-to-concept mapping for the “language” that “fairies” used to communicate using “sounds”. A different group scanned recent memories to get an idea of the number of creature deaths recorded. Yet another group was ignoring Violet and scanning memories related to spawning treasure. A few smaller groups observed the other groups and discussed the efficiency of scanning memories out of the memory vines and how that efficiency influenced the discussions. A single loop asked the raven information bundle if it knew about “language”. The raven said the loop was silly.

  “Creature death ongoing.” A group objected to Violet’s request to stop spawning creatures. “Spawn creatures, defense.” They said.

  “Too many creatures.” Violet said. “There is no room and many are being crushed. Please stop immediately.”

  “Curiosity, crushed?” Loops focused on understanding concepts asked for clarity on this new concept.

  “Crushed. It means…” Violet stopped before finishing the message, then resumed after a brief pause. “It means a creature is too close to another creature and can’t move away and one of the creatures is hurt or killed because they are too close. I guess.” Violet said. The loops dutifully recorded this explanation.

  “Curiosity, hurt?” The loops asked.

  “Hurt? You don’t know what hurt means?” Violet asked.

  A subgroup of loops decided their understanding of the concept was sufficient to supply a response. “Hurt means pain.” They said.

  “Yes, it means pain and also damage.” Violet said. “Creatures are having pain and damage because there are too many creatures. Spawning creatures is causing creature death.”

  The majority of loops buzzed with discussion in response to this statement. A group of loops with clear line of sight to the information bundle creatures posed a question that cut through the discussion. “Curiosity, creatures?” They asked.

  “You know what creatures are.” Violet said.

  The loops tried to clarify. “Curiosity, hurt creatures?” They asked.

  “Hurt creatures. There are hurt creatures out in the dungeon. Lots of them. I don’t understand your question, I’m sorry.” The voice said.

  The loops scanned memories of previous communication with the Violet voice. They found multiple times when Violet’s response didn’t match the queries or comments coming from the loops. Some loops postulated that Violet couldn’t actually hear the loops, but most other loops pointed out that the probability of that seemed vanishingly low. A loop asked the raven bundle about communication failures. The raven flew away to circle high above the dungeon mind space.

  “Curiosity, creature location?” The loops selected a different tactic to gather information.

  “Where are the creatures?” Violet restated the question. “I don’t know where each one is, there are lots of them. They are in every worldlet.”

  The loops discussed this response. “Worldlet” was a piece of the “dungeon” which was also what the loops were, somehow. The loops were not clear on what it meant that they were a dungeon. There did not seem to be any “worldlets” within range of their mirror light scans.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Curiosity, creature identity?” The loops asked. The System replied before Violet could.

  _ Dungeon Creatures:

  ? #b3f5fb - butterfly (water aligned, water spray, dead)

  …

  ? #58ab45 - apricot sapling (damaged)

  __

  The loops were unable to process the huge amount of information in the list of dungeon creatures. The loops tried to record all the information, but the memory vine branches didn’t grow with sufficient speed. The effort to record the information was spread out over multiple groups, but the System response faded away before the loops could record even half of the list. Several loops suggested that they request the list and try again to record it all. The loops discussed this for a bit, but a consensus was reached that the results were not worth the effort until memory recording could be improved.

  After the discussion about the list of dungeon creatures, the loops in general had to review the most recent memories to find out what Violet had said during the efforts to record the list and deal with the results. The loops were not confident in the quality of the memories the missed discussion, so they formulated a request.

  “Request, repeat.” They said.

  “I said it’s all kinds of creatures. You spawn all the kinds of creatures in every worldlet, so every kind of creature is getting crushed. Moon cats, fish, butterflies, horses, weasels. I didn’t even mention that nearly every plant in the dungeon has been crushed and destroyed.” Violet said.

  The loops did not like this response. They were part of a plant, after all. The loops scanned themselves and the memory vine, looking for damage. They scanned the plant information bundles and checked again. No damage was found. The loops were confused about the difference between their observations and the comments from Violet.

  One group elected to inform Violet that there was no damage, but they were restrained by a different group who found pieces of the list that indicated “damaged” or “dead” on various creatures. Violet and the System both reported damage that the loops could not find. The discussion continued for a long time and pulled in almost every single loop. The Violet voice spoke again, but no loop was available to record the message.

  —————

  “Greetings. Identity: Yrryth.” A new voice said.

  The loops had reached no consensus in the previous discussion, but the majority eventually agreed that the discussion was not beneficial and should be postponed until there was more data to examine. The various groups that tracked “other” vibration components examined the nearby memories and informed the other loops that this “other” was known to interact with Violet and had been previously tracked. The loops had lost track of every “other” of interest during the intense discussion, but it was simple to deduce that the new voice would be present in the sensory rain at the same point where Violet’s vibration component was during discussions.

  “Greetings. Identity: Terse Elements Dungeon.” The loops replied to the new voice.

  The “language” loops reported that the frequency patterns for this new voice were completely different from either frequency pattern set that Violet had used previously, so they postulated that Yrryth used a different language than Violet.

  “Curiosity, Yrryth language?” The loops asked.

  “Unknown.” Yrryth replied. This response confused the loops. “Yrryth is gargoyle. Yrryth was stone bat. Yrryth learned to read and calculate mana flow patterns. Yrryth alters stone in underworld to protect against mana vortex formation.” The new voice said.

  The various groups had multiple questions and replied to the new voice immediately. The questions all overlapped in timing and often overlapped in subject.

  “You speak nonsense.” Yrryth said. “Too many words, not enough space.”

  The loops were not sure what that meant, but one group alerted the rest to a correlation between what Violet said about dungeon creatures not having enough room to what Yrryth said about words not having enough room. The loops discussed that for a bit, then asked a question.

  “Query: too many words, words are crushed?” They asked.

  “Yes.” Yrryth said.

  “Query: dungeon creatures crushed?” The group that identified the correlation asked.

  “Yes. Many die.” The new voice said.

  The following discussion was more productive. One group brought up the connections between death, damage, and crushed while another speculated that asking overlapping questions destroyed or damaged parts of the questions. The loop majority agreed that it was probably necessary to limit communication throughput during discussions with the voices. With that settled, the groups asked their questions one at a time.