--------- Fraya ---------

  It had been a long time since anyone in the guild had seen Az, or heard from him. A good few months even.

  While things between Xyke and I have been progressing nicely, and everyone else got busy dealing with the Adamantium sales, Az had slowly just vanished from everyone's mind from the hectic orders from other Guilds and several governments.

  I was flirting with Xyke when a system notice made all activity in the Guild HQ cease.

  The silence was deafening has I stared at the message that everyone else was also seeing.

  "...What?" I whispered softly, feeling a rush of emotion and my eyes burned as I began to comprehend what I was reading.

  Moments passed, and everything was starting to spin around me. Xyke was holding me as everything fell apart.

  I did not know the impossible and quite frankly insanely weird alien child for long, but for him to suddenly die? The death of something so young, so pure despite the strange power and mannerisms, was soul shattering.

  "He's not dead." Christinia, the Guild leader, sounded confused as her voice entered my mind.

  "But the system-!" I said around my tears.

  "Is only half right. I'm currently watching him fight... something. I cannot see it, but I can see our Az regenerating from thin air and battling something." Christinia explained, slightly more confident.

  I shuddered as I started to calm down, almost giggling in relief. 'Az is an impossible child of some incomprehensible species, of course he doesn't die.' I was still crying hysterically, a bit of an overreaction that I can't seem to control.

  Extreme mood swings involved with children or offspring, even with other species, is a very large hint to something huge.

  I wrapped my arms around Xyke tightly and looked up into his concerned eyes while bawling and laughing for a new reason.

  "Xyke... I think I'm pregnant." I said softly, giggling at his now shocked expression.

  ...

  --------- Bale, an Administrator ---------

  Watching the Human 'train' was entertaining, in how absurd it was.

  What kind of level 6 kid drops itself into a sun? Hell, what kind of kid falls into a sun and becomes immune to the nuclear reactions in the core?

  The Dark Lord Azurath, the Human in question, is something that I was glad we only had one of. I could not imagine how bad it would be if we had just a thousand of them wandering around the universe.

  That is assuming the invader really is some kind of fake Human, but it's not like we've seen such things before.

  I watched the Human sit in the sun, move so fast it's body evaporated in the vacuum of space, and then use tiny rocks to erase several sections of forest to kill monsters. With the absolute flood of experience gained from doing that, they reached a whopping... Level 10.

  It's impressive to level up that quickly sure, since it should take a year to go up one level, but I was starting to think the species that is Human will forever be some abomination to balance and natural order.

  The Dark Lord Azurath is probably less than a year old with how fast he can level up, what a truly horrifying species!

  Once he hit level 10, he was in his bland looking personal quarters in the city he built. The Human then proved that he can in fact be in more places in the same instance of time. He fell to the ground shortly after like some unimaginable weight just hit him. What a paradoxical freak. Nothing could tell me what had happened, as the System still couldn't connect to him after that first death.

  Speaking of death, dead things don't come back to life. Resurrection magic was studied several eons ago, but was quickly banned when the bodies that came back did not have souls. They were one of two possibilities. They were either a husk with no emotion or function at all, or monstrous ravenous creatures hellbent on slaughtering whatever moved.

  Development proved we could grab the soul and force it back into the body, but that brought on ethical issues with the natural process for the afterlife. So the project was abandoned.

  At least officially.

  What really happened was what could only be described as death itself showing up and severing the connection grabbing the soul. Those who witnessed this event would go mad and would then kill themselves shortly after the event.

  We settled with making it so we can't die in the first place, ensuring we would never need to attempt resurrection.

  The Human appears to be completely beyond even death, as he regenerated each time he died. It was extremely unnerving to watch.

  Azurath finally got up off the ground, and after a few moments teleported to a small lab. Snatched some unknown item that was actually unidentifiable with The System, and simply went limp.

  I stared at my personal projection view, watching as the Human laid crumpled on the floor of the lab. Fingers clenched around the nondescript cube and drones moving about around him, completely ignoring their collapsed user.

  Waiting to see if he would get back up after a few minutes like he did last time, I noticed that he did not even stir or twitch.

  He was completely motionless.

  This made me nervous, but I had seen several impossible things already so I waited a bit longer.

  ...

  Then a bit longer...

  ...

  Something was very clearly extremely wrong, and I was starting to have a minor panic attack.

  'Why isn't he moving? What is that thing he's holding, and why is it completely unknown to The System? What did it do to him?' My thoughts were racing as I finally decided to press the emergency alert button specifically made for the Human.

  ...

  --------- Sally-1 ---------

  It had been 2.6 hours since my boss Az told me to hide beneath the city.

  2.6 hours of nothing but radio silence.

  It was worrying.

  Just as I thought about making my way to the surface, I was suddenly teleported to a strange place. The power used in the teleportation was different then how Az usually does it, my sensors experiencing errors the whole time spent in forced transit.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  My cameras spun and adjusted rapidly, trying to intake all the new information as quickly as possible. I saw void... No, I was in an impossibly large room with several impossibly large void beings.

  A few other beings were there too, ones I recognized.

  Members of my boss's Guild, people I haven't met since before I became sapient.

  The last one I recognized... was Az himself, collapsed on some slab in the center of the circle of people and beings. He was holding the Parabox and not moving.

  I sent a quick message, but got no response.

  "No I don't know what that is, sorry." One of the Guild members spoke, but I do not know who he was talking to.

  His name was... Xyke. I had seen Boss interact with him when they extracted Jimmy from the stone they found it in.

  I wheeled over, observing the collection of odd beings surrounding my Boss.

  I sent a message out of habit, forgetting that I cannot message people without connecting to them first.

  So when everyone reacted like they had heard me surprised me.

  "The Parabox?" An extremely tall grey humanoid dressed in formal attire spoke in a feminine tone, one I haven't met before.

  I finally reached the circle and joined it, keeping my cameras on the others while one lens stayed on the slumped form of Az.

  "We do not know. The Dark Lord Azurath picked up the cube we cannot identify and then fell down. He is unresponsive." Another new voice, one that seemed to come from everywhere.

  "Could you tell us what the... Parabox is?" Xyke asked, hands hovering over the Parabox fingers twitching.

  All eyes were on the Parabox, gazes thoughtful.

  "Of course Az has a paradoxical item..." Another new feminine voice trailed off.

  The source of which was holding onto Xyke's arm and looking down at Az with... concern. Facial expressions are hard to learn when your only biological interaction point always wears a visor.

  "Does the Parabox affect things other than itself? It must right? How else would it make the Human like this?" Yet another unknown voice that seems to come from everywhere.

  "That's nice and all, but what do we do now? Can we wake him up?" A somewhat arrogant male voice spoke up, sounding both bored and worried at the same time.

  I do not know him, but my earliest memory shows that I have seen him once. The first day I was turned on.

  "Unlikely. The species 'Human' is as incomprehensible as it is unknowable. What kind of hellish dimension did this thing crawl out of?" Another large voice, coming from an unknown direction.

  "Don't talk like that about what could be our only hope Bale." A different but equally large voice chastised the first.

  "I saw what could possibly be a one year old or younger reach level 10 after purposefully going into the core of a sun to become immune to it, then rip his own body apart trying to go fast in the void of space! The thing doesn't stay dead, and not even we can do that!" The voice that could belong to Bale spoke and the words spoke of a very worrying story.

  "Then let's just be happy he's on our side, and drop it Bale." An annoyed sigh followed the statement.

  "I'm just saying-!"

  "Drop it." The voice was clipped and silence followed.

  I asked, and got a much better retelling of what had happened.

  In short, some kind of false Human or incomprehensibly strong being showed up, killed Az which then disconnected him from the greater System, but then Az came back by regenerating a new body.

  It was a very eventful couple of hours while I was under the city.

  I didn't even know how to fully process what I was hearing, my current knowledge base was too insignificant to grasp the story.

  After everything was spoken about and sides explained, the group fell into silence.

  "What do you think he's dreaming about?" The female sticking to Xyke asked softly, like a concerned mother.

  "We'll have to ask him when he wakes up." Xyke responded.

  "If he's not actually catatonic and mentally broken- OW!" The arrogant one spoke but was slapped on the back of the head by the Tallest one.

  ...

  --------- Greg ---------

  I was experiencing everything on a level no mortal mind could comprehend.

  I could feel the details so vividly with every sense that I felt like I was one with reality.

  My body felt like a shattered clay pot, and my mind was the water that spilled everywhere.

  My eyes stared up at nothing through my visor, barely registering the circle of familiar and not so familiar faces around me.

  My vision was both my own and through their eyes as they looked down at me.

  Molecular bonds, cellular bonds, and even atomic bonds, I felt it all.

  Within my own body, within the beings around me, the very reality binding us all together felt as though I was always a part of it.

  My heart beat in a steady rhythm, thudding my chest.

  I felt the others hears as well, beating out of sync of my own.

  Slowly, they all synced as if they were my own heart.

  As if all of these alien life forms were sharing a body with me, and they only lived because I allowed them to share my existence amongst them.

  My bones felt in tune with the objects around me, changing slightly to either mimic whatever the solid matter was around us or changing the solid matter to mimic my bone density.

  I was not just one with the living beings, but with the non living things.

  Reality was dictated by the observer, and it was all I could do in it's presence.

  It's always been there, I knew, but being aware of the... presence made it impossible to think of anything else.

  It was so beautiful. Mind-numbingly so.

  With it's presence, I felt it's laws.

  I felt how they worked, and how they could bend.

  The presence was not willing to fully listen to whatever will I could muster, but it would bend. Just the tiniest amount.

  I couldn't bring myself to even attempt interacting with this presence.

  My mind utterly collapsing in on itself with each observation of the presence, only for my mind to come back stronger.

  I was in a loop, one impossible to escape.

  My mind imploded.

  Then reconstructed itself.

  Imploded.

  Rebuilt.

  Again, and again.

  The only difference with each mind shattering passive observation, is that it got faster and faster.

  As I experienced flashes of rare thought, I realized that my mind wasn't imploding.

  It was trying to fill an impossibly large vessel, while only being a drop.

  Whatever held my mind before had shattered, yes.

  But it had shattered inside an even bigger bowl.

  My mind growing to fill it one drop at a time.

  The trickle that was my sense of self began slow and small, like catching rain from a leaky roof.

  As it got faster, it was now a small faucet trying to fill a room sized tub.

  Faster still my mind grew, adapting for it's new vessel.

  A vessel not limited by mere physical law.

  My mind could not exist without bending the rules set by Reality.

  And as I could only form a single thought every 2 or 3 minutes for a micro second, I could only rely on my subconscious to manipulate Reality to accommodate me.

  The trickle got faster, but the vessel was still less than 1/7th of the way filled.

  This allowed me to not just see or feel my new senses, but to smell it, hear it, and even taste it.

  My mind filled the vessel faster, and I began to blink for the first time in multiple hours.

  I felt as though I was awakening from a dream extremely slowly.

  My mind stopped being so fragmented, and began to kickstart into action.

  I heard something more than just the ambient sounds of Reality, language.

  I saw more than just the ever present veil of Reality, faces familiar to me.

  I felt more than just the presence of Reality, the surface I was laid on and the being in my hands.

  I gasped for air as a weight I had no idea was there suddenly felt... manageable. I recognized it faintly.

  Muffled words cascaded around me, but I wasn't able to focus on them enough to understand them.

  Something much more important was banging itself against my senses.

  There were 37 beings I could feel, hear, smell, taste, and see.

  My Guild members, the Admins, Sally-1, Jimmy, the green system, Jerald locked away within, and... the thing in my hands sensing the same things I am.

  I could feel the Parabox observing me the same way I could observe it now, putting us in a loop of mirrored observation.

  The Parabox was alive.

  "I knew it!" I whispered in disbelief, smiling wide to myself while I stared down at the box in my hands.