“Now, why in the name of God did you not push the Domain left? We’ve been doing this for hours, and we haven’t gotten this right a single time!” Bug Jacob screamed, grooming their antenna aggressively.

  My eyelid twitched, “Because it was the most natural way, like you said to do, maybe actually take your own advice for once!”

  “How was moving the domain to the right the most natural way, it certainly wasn’t for me!”

  “Maybe you’re fucking with me!”

  “I don’t know! Maybe it’s different for both of us?”

  “What, how would the domain feel different to us? That shouldn’t be possible, it’s the exact same domain, no reason it should feel different.”

  I remembered something Terra had told me, “Everybody has a different relationship to their Domain, even if it’s the exact same, and you’re a distinct person from me.”

  “Oh… wait, I… I think that means we’re screwed in the Domain control department.”

  I shook my head, “No, there has to be a way.”

  Bug Jacob slumped, “It is, though. To use Domain, you have to have a focused will, doing it with a single person was hard enough, two was almost impossible, almost. But having our instincts going in opposing directions, that’s just impossible, it’s like using a controller on something that’s supposed to use a keyboard.”

  An incongruity popped up, “Well, then, how was I able to use my Domain at all? Like when I pushed my senses into it.”

  Bug Jacob looked up, “Oh, that. Whenever you used your domain, I just tried to, what’s the best way to put this… turn myself off? So you have no interference, but it’s impossible for me to just be gone, so it still limits you, and doing it in the first place is unpleasant to say the least.”

  “So it’s off the table entirely?”

  “Well, since there doesn’t seem to be any other-”

  I cut him off, “I think there is.”

  I left space for Bug Jacob to ask what it was, but they didn’t. Ah, you’ve learned well, my padawan.

  I grinned and said, “How do you think Terra gave us this Domain?”

  I left more space for them to ask out of habit, and I thought I’d have to talk again, but Bug Jacob didn’t leave any opportunity to insult me unused, “By separating it from herself and giving it to us, duh. Pretty elementary, my dear Watson.”

  “And what’s stopping us from separating the Domain into two separate pieces, one for each of us?”

  Bug Jacob was silent for a moment, probably in awe of my genius, before saying, “You… you just doubled the pieces of domain we can’t use, and it would make whatever we can do weaker.”

  “... It seems I have vastly overestimated my genius.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  I sat on the floor, chewing the inside of my cheek, “Why wouldn’t it work exactly?”

  “Domain is connected to our core, and the Domain needs the input from the core to work. If the input is wrong, then adding a second output would just double the amount of incorrect inputs.”

  “Then we fix the input.”

  Bug Jacob didn’t dare dain me with an answer.

  “All we need to do is split the core into two pieces, one for each.”

  Bug Jacob gave me the moth equivalent of the ‘bitch, you crazy’ look, and said with a half-hearted laugh, “Oh, and how do you think we’re going to do that?”

  “Uh… well, I was hoping you would know?”

  “This fucking guy,” they whispered under their breath, “Well, I don’t. And I don’t think doing it with Terra and the Systems domain connected to us is a good idea, especially since they’re currently pumping us full of Domain. And I don’t want my soul to nearly be torn in half again.”

  “Fair, but maybe after that’s over?”

  They shifted around, “Better than nothing, I guess.”

  Then I caught on an incongruent detail from something they said before, “You said your soul was nearly torn in half when you messed with the system, wouldn’t I have been able to sense that since we share the same core?”

  “Hmm, oh, no, you’re mixing things up, the soul and the core are two distinct things. The core is like a mix between a power source and an airplane's black box. The soul is the thing controlling it, and the body. Our core just has two souls, there’s no connection between us soul wise.”

  “Oh, thanks for the information.”

  There was another spell of silence before Bug Jacob said, “So what are we going to do? We've got about eighteen - seventeen hours before you can wake up. And we can’t train, or do anything productive really.”

  “Cards?”

  Bug Jacob shrugged their wings.

  Then we got to it, playing Old Maid till we realized the deck was just giving us whatever card we wanted, since it wasn’t real, and we couldn’t visualize an entire deck card by card. So we tried chess next, but ran into a similar problem. This time, the pieces would duplicate and move around since we couldn’t remember exactly where we put them.

  That one drove us insane for a while, since we knew something was wrong with the board, but not being able to remember what the problem was was the exact problem. And it was never egregious enough that it couldn’t be accounted for by faulty memory. We only solved that one when I counted the pawns on the board and those taken, the numbers not adding up. After I figured that out, we eventually realized what was happening.

  So we decided on the ever popular would you rather. Bug Jacob was lying on their belly in the grass, with their legs spread out in a rather cute way, while I was laying on my back. Looking up at the void in the sky where the sun was, since I’ve never looked at the sun directly (to my optometrist's delight), I didn’t actually know what it would look like, hence the void.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  And I asked Bug Jacob, “Would you rather fight Spiderman after you’ve killed Aunt May, or the Arkham games Batman after you’ve killed Alfred?”

  “You haven’t read enough Spiderman comics, or played the Arkham games, you haven’t even watched a let's play. How am I supposed to answer that when I can't read your memory of those?”

  “Just base it off vibes, it’s how 90% of people on the internet argue.”

  Bug Jacob sighed, “Why would people so willingly be idiots and assholes where you’re from?”

  “The internet allows anonymity; none of it can be traced back to you.”

  “Could also be survivors' bias.”

  I furrowed my brow, “How so?”

  “The internet, almost everything is preserved there. So people being idiots in some subreddit is going to be around for people to see it for a while, and the actually smart and kind people are just not going to interact with it. Hence, no record of them being kind or smart, and so the amount of idiots is overblown.”

  “Hmm, never thought of it like that before. But I still think it’s the anonymity.”

  “Could be both, probably is.”

  “Well, anyway, you didn’t actually answer my question. Spiderman or Batman.”

  “I don’t have enough information,” Bug Jacob said with a long suffering sigh.

  “Spiderman or Batman,” I pushed.

  “Fine! Batman, since he doesn’t have powers.”

  “Oof, don’t let anyone else hear you say that. I know some people would crucify you for saying that second part.”

  “Ok, now it’s my turn, would you rather eat… oh.”

  I sat up, “What is it?”

  Bug Jacob pointed towards our core, I looked over and saw Terra and the Systems threads weren’t pumping power into it anymore. A bright green glow surrounding the core, and I felt myself being pulled into the real world again.

  “I suppose this is goodbye for now,” I said.

  “Yeah,” they shuffled their feet around a bit, “Just remember to listen to me when you get out.”

  I raised my hand for a fistbump, “Of course.”

  Then Bug Jacob bumped his head into my hand as the real world took me.

  When I woke up and broke out of my cocoon, a flood of water enveloped me. I thrashed around, closing the air tubes that I breathed through, trying to find anything that could help me. An air pocket, light, one of my minions, but there was nothing. I was just flailing around.

  Oh, god, I'm going to die, no no no no.

  I felt Bug Jacob in the back of my head, and I instinctively suppressed him, but quickly remembered my promise and undid it.

  Then he said, “First of all, dick move. Second, calm down, you’re not going to die.”

  “The hell you mean I'm not going to die, I am surrounded by water in the pitch black, and I’m half a mile underground!”

  “Well, we can hold our breath for like… three hours, roughly.”

  “Eh…?”

  “We’re a moth, remember, you’re not a mammal anymore, insects can hold our breath for quite a while.”

  I stopped thrashing around, “Oh… oh, thank God.”

  “Yes, my child?” Bug Jacob said with Mirth

  “Oh shut up, you stole that from me.”

  “And you stole that from your brother.”

  “I didn’t steal it, I improved on it.”

  “You didn’t change anything, not even the delivery?”

  “Well, it’s me saying it, so that automatically makes it better.”

  Bug Jacob snorted, “Whatever you say, buddy.”

  “Anyway, why the hell is there water in my chamber?”

  “Storm above?”

  “No, I made the ants account for stuff like that when constructing this.”

  “Accidents and mistakes do happen.”

  “No, I think it’s something more.”

  “Urg Floaw?”

  “Right on the money.”

  “I don’t think so. He may be a water manipulator, but this just seems… sloppy. If they were trying to kill you, I mean, they could just get down here and kill you outright, not go through the trouble of flooding miles of tunnels and not even know if it would work. We might not know how strong they are, but if they’re anything like Krath,” they let out a whistle, “Well, it certainly wouldn’t be impossible.”

  “Yeah, that was bothering me, but who or what else could it be?”

  “The aforementioned storm.”

  “Even if I did believe that, we have to assume the worst and treat Urg as an enemy.”

  “Doesn’t seem healthy, but fair.”

  “Ok, quick topic change, how should we get out of here? I kinda have no clue. I’m completely blind on every front.”

  “Use your domain sense, idiot.”

  “Didn’t you say that doing that is uncomfortable for you?"

  “Bit of an understatement, forcing myself to not exist, I would say more ranges from an 11 to Googol on the mental anguish scale. But I don’t think there’s anything else we can do.”

  “There’s gotta be something.”

  “Did you come up with an idea in the past two seconds, because I haven’t.”

  “I’d rather not…”

  “Again, new idea?”

  I grumbled for a moment, “Fine.”

  Then I extended my domain, infusing my sense of touch into it despite the headache. Because it was the only sense I could think of that could help me get an idea of this place, since there was no light, sight was off the table, same with hearing, and I had no idea how smell would work.

  But with it, I was able to create a mental map of the tunnels and used my memory of the place to find a way out, which required a lot more doubling back than my pride was ready to admit. Eventually, my plan turned into just going whatever path was up.

  Then, at one point, I felt a pull from my minions through my antenna, a lot stronger than usual. Especially considering my antenna were submerged underwater and shouldn’t be able to sense anything. Then, through my Domain, I noticed there were faint lines of power occasionally flashing, dozens, no hundreds of them.

  And when I investigated them, I realized they were the connection Lunar Scale Dust made to my minions that allowed me to control them. I was about to ask Bug Jacob about it before I remembered he was gone, and his absence felt weirdly stinging despite only knowing him for less than a day.

  Getting over myself, I investigated the ability on my own, and when I concentrated on one, I was able to tell where they were in space compared to me in a very broad sense. And I was also able to get an impression of their surroundings, the different senses only making my headache worse. So I just generally blocked that part out of my mind

  But with this new ability, I was able to more accurately navigate the tunnels, and even had some of my minions group up and meet me halfway, so I wasn’t defenseless. After around two hours, I was noticeably running low on air, but was thankfully close to my escape. It wasn’t the closest because the flood had destabilized the tunnel, and this was the only steady one I found. But it was still sketchy, so I was careful with what minions I sent through.

  Then, when I was done preparing, I rose to the surface of the water, greeted with a narrow tunnel pointed diagonally upwards. And a four armed Lemur that had claws at the ends of its fingers as long and narrow as toothpicks, helped drag me out of the water. I spent a moment drying myself off, mainly focusing on my antenna because the water stuck in them felt like the worst clogged nose in existence.

  I eventually got it to a bearable level and squeezed through the narrow tunnel with the Lemure behind me. At some of the tighter points in the tunnel, I got stuck. After having a small panic attack, I had the Lemur push me through.

  Finished with what I hoped was my last time spelunking, I reached the end of the tunnel, with two unexpected figures on the other side. Second of the Snow and Urg Floaw, the ape with their weapon drawn, and Urg with a titanic wall of water behind them.