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| Archmage Blackwell himself |
Journal Addendum – June 21, 2097
Wizkid’s Log (Encrypted – Paranoia Mode Enabled)
Let’s start with the boring stuff: I started a private military contractor. Yep. That’s a thing now. Blackwell Incorporated. Totally original name, don’t look it up.
Look, we were short on bodies, and we’re bleeding security staff like it’s a full-time job. So I dug into my rainy-day fund and stood up a shell corp. Fully licensed in the UCAS. Kind of. Might be a forged license. Jury’s out.
The muscle? Mostly orks and trolls. A couple of dwarves. Humans if I must. Elves? Yeah, no thanks. This is a meritocracy, not a fashion shoot. What I want is loyalty, violence potential, and a glimmer in the eye when you say the word “Halo.” If they believe in her mystery, they might respond to future... let’s call it conditioning. Still testing that hypothesis.
Hired a dozen after running deep searches and high-intensity VR interviews. Nothing fancy, just grilling them in simulated hostage rescues and bar brawls. Standard stuff. Shipped them out of Seattle on the 20th. Ran them through some team-based VR sims on the way over. They have potential. Or some of them do anyway. By the 21st, they’d landed and were being handed off to Philip for his in-person gut check. It’s not a perfect vetting process, but it’s a start.
Now, for the weird part.
Got a message through encrypted channels. Dr. Evelyn Winters. The technomancer researcher from Eldritch Dynamics. Real sharp, real composed. Perfectly formed—if you like the petite blondes with legs up to the Zürich Orbital.
Seems our mutual friend Greyskull—technomancer, Resonance freak, lovable dork—has gone fully recursive. Built an entire fantasy world inside the Matrix. Named everything after himself. I mean, it’s kind of adorable if you ignore the part where he’s comatose in the real world and warding off anyone who tries to reach him with astral booby traps and recursive logic loops.
They tried sending people in. One’s in the ICU, the other one’s trapped inside Greyskull’s own fairy-tale RPG like it’s the Year of the Drekking Unicorn. Winters is stuck. I’m intrigued.
So, I do what any responsible digital wizard would do: I dive in, cape and all. Adopted the persona of the Archmage of Blackwell (branding matters). Winters plays my elven sidekick (her performance was sub-par, cringeworthy even), and together we fought brigands, visited the inn, completed all the side quests, braved the Caves of Greyskull, explored Castle of Greyskull, faced the Lich-King of Greyskull (that would be our Greyskull, of course), and the learned that Evelyn was his precious daughter (I called that as soon as we entered the realm.
Turns out he didn’t want to be found—was trying to hide from the Resonance itself or some shit like that. His head isn't working properly. Probably something the corps did to him. Evelyn says not, and maybe she believes that, but there are more people at the facility than just here.
Anyway. I talked him down. Then talk him back out into boring reality.
After that, I flipped the script. Sent a ping to Philip. He brought Winters over to the other side—Aztechnology. All tidy. All legal. She gets a lab, some funding, and the safety net she never had with Eldritch Dynamics.
Just to be sure, I sent a discreet extraction team to collect both her and Greyskull. Just so nothing "happens" to them while the paperwork is in the mail, so to speak. They’re en route to the Aztech facility on Vancouver Island now.
Sometimes, the Matrix plays fair.
Sometimes, you just have to out-weird it.
— Wizkid
(aka Paddy, aka Patrick, aka Archmage of Blackwell)
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| Evelyn, my elf sidekick |
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