A Fortress of Pebbles

Aissaba knew toilets better than most, having spent an embarrassing amount of time kneeling in front of them. Aissaba: Fortress Fuckup and Master of Toilets.

Everywhere in the Fortress but the Spire of Masteries – the dorms, the cafeteria, the library – you’d just find normal porcelain commodes, taken from Earth. And why not? The modern toilet was a triumph of human engineering – the perfect blend of comfort and function. Add a bidet, and you could argue that it was one of humankind’s greatest gifts to itself.

The bathrooms in the Spire of Masteries, however, were bonkers – different on every floor, and designed by Masters who hadn’t had a normal human body in centuries. The one on the Hall of Mind, thankfully, had no eyeballs growing in the graymatter walls. But it was clear that the architect of the space had felt it necessary to prove that mind magic was up to the task of creating a bathroom.

It wasn’t.

Hands down, the Hall of Maps had the best bathrooms. Sensible stonework and an efficient water system driven by map magic. Not bad. Yes, the stone toilets were cold to sit on, but you could warm them up if you had a map pebble on you. The Hall of Life was okay too – with its lush grottos and toilet tissue plants. But the Hall of Mind… wow.

Aissaba walked by the handwashing station, where the graymatter of the wall jutted outward to create a squishy “countertop” covered in recesses that could fill up with antimicrobial goop if you tickled them just right. The bathroom stalls were beyond various orifices – the standard ones that looked “like buttholes” – and it was into one of these that Aissaba Master of Toilets entered.

She avoided stepping into the smaller butthole protruding up from the ground – the orifice you were supposed to poop and piss into. Aissaba had never done so. Even when she’d been fifteen and studying mind magic, she had always just held her bladder shut during class. Or, in emergencies, she’d snuck down to the Hall of Life. Most people did, students and scribes alike.

Tassadu’s theory had always been that the Master of Mind was insane and that the bathrooms in the Hall of Mind were designed to make everyone else that way. Certainly possible.

Aissaba set her backpack down next to the orifice, which expanded helpfully, eagerly even. Gross. But at least it didn’t smell bad. Whatever happened to human waste in the darkness down there was thorough (the one good thing Aissaba Master of Toilets was willing to concede about the bathroom situation up here).

Aissaba withdrew her tools: a gardening spade and a single illegal mind pebble. She always kept one in good condition, so she could get more. Pebbles tended to disintegrate if you did anything too crazy with them. Usually, not a big deal. But the illegal ones were nice because there were no restrictions built in.

You could wipe your brain like a computer hard drive. Forever. And there would be no “Are you sure?” popup.

Aissaba stabbed into the graymatter of the wall with her gardening spade. You could dig right through the stuff once you punctured the membrane. Shovelful after shovelful went from the wall into the eager orifice, splatting somewhere down there. When she had dug a tiny tunnel, about the length of her arm, she wiped her hands on her robe and put the illegal pebble to her forehead.

When you start to flash a pebble, what you see next depends. This one happened to have been pre-flashed with a protocol that made her hallucinate a HUD in the air before her eyes. Marked with crosshairs was the nearest entity into which she could extend her consciousness. It was the graymatter sphincter at her feet. No thanks.

She blinked her way through the next few targets – ones that, judging by their direction, were the matching sphincters in the other stalls. Nope, nope, nope. Practically everything in the Hall of Mind was controllable, and most would give you nightmares if you were dumb enough to extend your mind into them.

When the crosshairs moved to the wall into which she had dug, she took the pebble from her forehead and shoved it deep into the hole, as close to the target entity as possible. She knew the Hall of Mind’s floor plan well enough to know that the target was likely to be one of the Master of Mind’s avatars. She had hundreds.

With any luck, the avatar was close enough. And if it wasn’t – well, that would suck because she did not want this pebble to disintegrate due to pebble-strain. Technical term.

With a deep breath, she willed the pebble’s protocol to proceed. A moment later, she was opening different eyes in a different room, breathing a sigh of relief with someone else’s lungs.