M The crumbling rift

[A_Bibor_Farkas]

OPERATIONAL INCIDENT REPORT: “Threshold Bloom”

Location: Sector AEG-4, Resheph Basin Perimeter, Erishkigal
Operatives Involved:
OIA Handler Selene Vireya – Codename: Belladonna
Liquidator Juno Kael – Codename: LOVERBOY
Attached Support: Witchtrip Recon Team (OIA Hypergeometric Containment Division)



Belladonna:
07:14 Local Time

The downpour had softened to a whisper, mist curling around the broken stone of an abandoned relay tower. Bioluminescent moss pulsed like the breath of the dead, and the air vibrated with the low hum of spatial friction..a rift forming, unannounced, uncontained. Selene Vireya stood at the edge of the crater where it bloomed. Her silhouette cut against the glow, a dark line of control in the chaos. Rain slicked the seams of her coat, neon-thread accents flickering faintly. Her retinal UI blinked a pulsing grid across her vision;Hypergeometric Fluctuation: Unstable. Threshold Breach: Imminent. "Containment drones offline," came the clipped voice of the Witchtrip attaché. "Spectral interference scrambled command uplink. This isn’t local bleed...it’s a full collapse event." Selene didn’t blink. “Patch the voidband. I want a live model built from the breach vectors.”

“No known analog in the Codex,” another Witchtrip analyst murmured, scanning the warping sphere ahead of them, which hung like a bruise in midair..seething, luminous, quantum...Then it ripped open. There was no roar...only silence, like sound had bowed before something older.
And from that rift stepped her. She looked human...almost. Barefoot, soaked in light that moved wrong. Hair in radiant pink strands like filaments of burning gas. Horns arched backward from her brow, trailing sparks. Her skin shimmered with residual interference patterns, as if still half-coded in some alternate dimensional syntax. Selene’s systems flagged a dozen impossibilities at once.

Vitals: Present
Species: Unknown
Hypergeometric Signature: Non-native / Uncalibrated
Danger Rating: Pending

The anomaly’s eyes locked on her. No fear. No question. Just a gaze like gravity.
Selene’s voice was even. “LOVERBOY. Sweep perimeter. Intercept with escalation threshold zero. Assume hypergeometric contagion until proven otherwise.” She didn’t flinch as the figure moved..fluid, languid, alien. She simply adjusted her grip on the override in her coat pocket. Just in case.

LOVERBOY: 07:17 Local Time
700 Meters East

He moved through the trees like breath..silent, precise. The biosensors fed him pulses through his HUD, but he barely needed them. He felt her tension before her voice hit his comms. He knew what that meant. Juno Kael’s boots found the ruin of an old shuttle pad, half-swallowed by fungus and earth. His hand fell to the grip of his Pugio. The moment Selene’s voice reached him...flat, measured...he was already moving to obey. Then the sky bent. A second rift bloomed to the east, a “micro-tear” as Witchtrip called them. But Juno didn’t need the science. He just knew this wasn’t right. The air pulled inward.... And then, a shape formed...shuddering through layers of incomprehensible angles. He raised his weapon. No hesitation. Out came the second anomalysmaller, childlike, and entirely unstable. Screaming in a tone no human could replicate. Skin oscillating between shapes. Mouth stretching in glyphs that broke the eye.
He put a round through its chest.
It didn’t die. But it stopped. He was already moving again, heading back toward Selene, silent as a whisper. Blood painting his sleeve, his face calm.
Because she’d called. And because the universe had just cracked...and whatever was crawling through it wasn’t fiction. It was Hypergeometry gone wild.

 

[SouthernRage]

Alma:
07:16

Alma wasn't greater into the world with sound, but with weight. The kind that clings and...knows you. The veil peeled back like wet silk, clinging to her skin, her horns, and her mind. She stepped forward onto the bare stones with practiced and fluid footsteps, not those earned with years of practice but with grace that were given by the universe itself. Rain sickened her bare shoulders, beading against interference shimmer dancing across her form like static clinging to a dream. Her body was there..mostly.

A soft glow pulsed beneath her skin, tracing veins of power written in a syntax older than speech. Dimensional residue curled in lazy spirals around her, fractals folding and unfolding like breathing equations. Her hair trailed behind her like strands of aurora. Flaring pinks, molten gold, glints of something...wrong at the edge of sight. Not quite light. Not quite color. Just... presence. And then Alma looked up.

The woman at the crater’s edge, tall, poised, braided in silence, met her eyes.
Alma tilted her head. Something in the lines of this place whispered parameters. Measured things. Cold control. The scent of ozone, metal, and nerves cloaked in professionalism. Her gaze held it all, and more. She saw Selene Vireya. The one with the grip on the kill switch.

“I remember you,” Alma said softly, though her voice vibrated like a bell struck beneath the skin. “Not in form. But in shape. You’ve stood at thresholds before.”
She smiled faintly, and the rain bent sideways around her for just a moment..uncertain of gravity, or permission. Then she looked down at her hands. Fingers long, delicate, sparking lightly with motes of dimensional ash. Her voice shifted tones, layered in harmonic overtones like wind through hollow bones.

“I didn’t mean to arrive like this. But your boundary was frayed. Something else tried to force its way through...I closed it behind me. You’re welcome.” Her eyes flicked east. She felt it—a scream in child-form, clawing its way through a different aperture. Something feral. Something that shouldn’t. "Although I might have brought a piece with me.”

Her gaze returned to Selene’s. The override flickered faintly under the handler’s coat. Alma’s voice softened. "Sorry about that."

 

[A_Bibor_Farkas]

Selene didn’t move.....Not when the rain parted. Not when the equations curled like breath over that creature’s skin.
Not even when the anomaly..Alma, if that was a name....spoke in wavelengths more than sound. Instead, Selene watched. She absorbed. And behind the retinal overlay, a second script unfolded..Witchtrip code parsing waveforms, modeling threat indexes, mapping every tremor in the harmonic lattice. She let it run. Data meant distance. Emotion compromised it. "You talk like a ghost," Selene said at last. Her voice carried no venom. Just gravity. "But you’re here. In our frame. Which makes you observable. Measurable." A slow blink. "And eventually… containable." The words didn’t need volume. The override chip pulsed against her palm...dormant, but ready. Not meant for Alma. Not yet. But old habits were scaffolding.
The woman...no..entity..before her shimmered in impossible ways. An error in light. A breach held together by poise and regret. She looked fragile.

Selene didn’t believe it.....
"You closed a gate," she said slowly. “But something still came through. That wasn't our boundary you patched, was it?” Behind her, Witchtrip’s secondary team was already triangulating the collapsed rift signature. Juno had gone silent on the east line. No panic in that. Just focus. But Selene knew what silence from him meant...it meant blood. Her eyes flicked back to Alma. Measured. Cold. "You didn’t break protocol because you don’t understand it. You broke it because you think you precede it. Like our laws aren’t yours. Like our science is late to your party." She stepped forward once, just one heel grinding into the mud of a planet that never dried.

"But this is our world. And your syntax? However elegant? It bends here. It decays. Just like anything else outside controlled theory." A pause.....Then, almost kindly: “Tell me what you are. Before someone else decides for you.” There was no threat in her tone. Only inevitability. Because this wasn’t magic.This wasn’t mysticism.This was Hypergeometry. And nothing...not even beautiful anomalies with voices like bells..got to rewrite Babel’s parameters without permission. Not without cost.

 

[SouthernRage]

Alma’s smile didn’t fade. It deepened. Not smug. Not cruel. Just… tired, like a song played one too many times in an empty room. The kind of tired that isn’t about energy, but age. That sits behind the eyes like dust in cathedral rafters, settled, quiet, undisturbed for epochs.

"You speak like a warden," she said, softly. “Steel voice, science heart. Every word like a blade in velvet.”
She tilted her head the other way now, strands of aurora-pink hair floating outward, resisting gravity just enough to make the moment feel... tilted.

Selene’s words had weight. Alma didn’t flinch beneath them, she felt their gravity, welcomed it even. The clarity of them. The attempt to define her. Contain her. That was comforting, in its own way.

“I’ve been called a ghost before,” she admitted. “Oracle. Virus. Saint. Symptom. The names blur after the fourth collapse.”
A pause, her eyes narrowing, not hostile, but pointed. “But never ‘fragile.’”

Her feet shifted slightly against the stone, a motion too fluid to be defensive, too intentional to be passive. Her body, such as it was, seemed caught between frames. One moment breathing. The next, rendered.
And then fully here again.
Whole. Centered.

"You want to know what I am?" Alma asked, voice cooling like a forge after flame. "I’m the wrong answer to a question your universe hasn’t asked yet. A survivor of a place where theory became hunger. I was written to fit somewhere else. You feel the mismatch. That ache behind your teeth? That’s not threat response. It’s recognition."

She didn’t step forward. Didn’t need to. The world around her did it for her, rain recoiling, light shifting slightly toward her, moss pulsing in her frequency.
“I didn’t come here to rewrite your rules. But I know what breaks them. What feeds on them.”

Her gaze flicked toward the horizon again east, where the screaming had begun and abruptly stopped. Her voice thinned into something almost human again. Almost.

"Whatever followed me through the tear… it’s not like me. It doesn’t want to speak. It doesn’t even want to be. It just… undoes.”

She looked back at Selene now, and this time, something sharper sat in the air between them. Not threat. Promise.

"You want taxonomy? A name? Fine. I’m Alma. I was a guardian once. A mirror, then a prison, then a breach." Her hands slowly opened at her sides, haloed in slow, drifting ash.

“And now I’m here. In your frame. In your rules. But only because I chose to be.” Then, quieter something nearly soft. “Don’t make me regret that.”

The silence afterward wasn’t passive. It listened. Awaiting judgment. Or understanding. Or the first shot.

 

[A_Bibor_Farkas]

The moment seemed stretched. Alma's words...impossible, beautiful, dangerous, hung in the air like smoke that refused to dissipate. The light around her bent, but it wasn’t just physics, it was recognition in a language the human nervous system wasn’t designed to parse. Behind Selene, Witchtrip agents shifted. Subtle. Unspoken. But real....One tech, Velez, had gone pale beneath the faceplate of her helmet, her lips moving silently as if whispering formulas—prayers in quantum. Another, Hartmann, gripped his transcriber too tightly, the flex polymers creaking against his gloves. He hadn’t blinked in nearly a minute, his pupils quivering behind ocular HUDs feeding back overlapping threat flags: UNKNOWN ONTOLOGICAL CLASS. SENTIENCE LEVEL 4+. HOSTILE POTENTIAL: UNDEFINED.

One of the junior field analysts turned to vomit behind a rock. She tried to hide it. Failed. They weren’t green. Witchtrip didn’t recruit green. But this wasn’t a rogue Augur. This wasn’t a flare of unstable math or a localized distortion field that needed to be lanced like a tumor. This was a person. Fully aware. Fully sentient. Speaking in metaphors that weren’t metaphors, but lived experience carved through realities no human should survive. It rattled them. It didn’t rattle Selene. Not visibly. Her jaw flexed once, the only outward sign of pressure. Her neural implants...sub-dermal and elegant, kept pulse, blood chemistry, adrenal spike all in tight regulation. But her hand hovered subtly over her coat seam where the override was clipped, the signal collar still synced to Juno’s spinal hardware. She didn’t press it. Not yet...


Juno was already moving. Not in aggression. Not even in defense. Just...circling. Like gravity with shoes. He flanked left without a word, boots sinking into the mud with the soft inevitability of tide. His cybernetics, adjusted constantly, filtering spectrum, measuring pattern resonance, mapping muscle tension against dimensional residue. When Alma's gaze flicked east, his head turned with it. Not just to follow...but to mark. Selene finally stepped forward again. Deliberate. Controlled. “You speak like you’re beyond threat,” she said. “But you understand it.” A short breath. “That's good. That’s what will keep this from escalating.” Her voice sliced through the tension like a filament blade through veil silk. Sharp, but almost gentle. It wasn’t fearlessness. It was dominion.

“You say you closed the breach. We’ll verify that. You say you chose to enter this frame. That we can’t verify. But I’ll accept the premise....for now.” She turned her head slightly, just enough for Juno to catch the movement. “Containment protocols are suspended,” she said aloud, clearly enough for the Witchtrip team behind her to hear. “This is an observation state. Classify the anomaly as Autonomous Hypergeometric Entity, self-aware, provisional ID: Alma. Eyes on at all times. No first contact engagement unless signaled.” A beat. A moment between the two... Her attention returned to the radiant figure before her. “You’ve been a prison. A breach. A mirror. I won’t pretend to understand what that means. But we’ve studied frames that collapse under their own mass of identity. We’ve seen what happens when language loses correspondence.” She narrowed her gaze.....“I believe you. That you didn’t come to undo. But belief isn’t doctrine here. Doctrine is structure. And structure is what keeps reality from falling in on itself.” A pause. Just a moment.......“And if something followed you...something feral...we will find it.” Behind her, Juno’s voice broke the air for the first time, low and metallic from the throat implant. “If it’s already gone quiet,” he said, nodding eastward, “then it’s feeding.” Not a suggestion. Just a conclusion. Selene didn't contradict him. Her eyes flicked once more to Alma. “You’re here now. Which means you’re our problem to solve.. or preserve. Don’t make me regret that either.” Silence followed again....... But this time, it wasn’t dread that filled it. It was decision. And in that breathless interval, something between them held, like the pause before a new equation is solved, or a weapon drawn.

 

[SouthernRage]

Alma exhaled, slow and deep. The kind of breath that felt like it hadn’t been taken in centuries. Rain beaded along her collarbones, steaming gently as it touched her skin—sheer heat or a rejection of this realm’s water, it was hard to say. But when Selene spoke. calm, clear, dominion laced in precision, something in Alma shifted. Not visibly, at first. Not in any way the Witchtrip techs could record with their instruments.

But then she stepped forward. One measured pace. Barefoot into the mud. The moss recoiled and then bloomed beneath her, flaring briefly with bioluminescence, not sickly, not warning. Recognition. Reverence. And then her form settled. No more shimmer at the edges. No more half-wrapped in afterlight. Alma came into full focus.

She was tall. Not towering, but commanding, with a presence that filled space in a way that had nothing to do with volume. Her skin held a deep, copper-glow undertone, kissed by light that clung to her like memory. Her body was curvaceous, athletic, built as much for movement as for allure—but nothing about her seemed designed. She was. Her shape made sense in a language older than muscle and symmetry.

Her hair which once flowed in multicolored bands now fell about her shoulders in a cascade of rose-silk strands, that covered her breasts as her tail coiled around her to cover any other exposed bits. "Would you happen to have some clothing that I might could borrow until some can be..assigned to me?"

 

[A_Bibor_Farkas]

Selene didn’t move immediately.
She let the silence stretch...long enough for command satellites to finish triangulation, for the Witchtrip sensor techs to stop whispering about gods and ghosts.

Her HUD flickered.
Entity: Stabilized. Hypergeometric signature: ACTIVE but non-aggressive. Conscious threat: Indeterminate. Containment probability: 37%.
Recommended Action: Liquidation or Site-9 Retrieval.

She dismissed the prompt with a blink. No one fired. No one moved....Selene exhaled slowly, the kind of breath measured not by lungs, but by judgment. And then she stepped forward, boots cutting clean tracks in the glowing moss where Alma’s bare feet had passed. She made no show of dominance. She didn’t raise her voice. But when she spoke, it carved through the static-charged silence like a scalpel. “Jacket,” she ordered. A tech behind her stuttered. “Ma’am?” Selene didn’t repeat herself. Velez unzipped her field cloak with trembling hands and began to step forward...But Selene halted her with a flick of the wrist.

She would deliver it herself. Three paces closed the gap. She held the cloak at chest level, offering—not demanding. No ceremony. Just function. And the moment Alma took it, Selene’s fingers made brief contact. Skin. Warmth. Static charge. Sensory analysis flooded her retinal overlay, but her face remained unreadable. “Comfort is a courtesy,” she said. “Compliance is not.” Her voice remained calm, level, but clinical. A tone sharpened through years of OIA field interrogations and high-value asset negotiations. Her next words came colder. “This area is now designated a Class-Three Anomalous Impact Zone. Anything...anything...that emerges from this rift after you will be contained or destroyed.” She didn’t wait for a response. “LOVERBOY.” Juno was already moving, silent, smooth, one hand brushing the hilt of his collapsed blade as he kept half an eye on Alma, the rest scanning for anything that would follow. Selene continued. “We’ll transport you to a provisional site. Non-disclosed. Shielded. We’ll provide environmental regulation, sustenance, and limited autonomy during analysis. Standard for hypergeometric origin entities.” Behind her, the Witchtrip squad fanned out with renewed purpose, scanners clicking, handheld altimeters spiking from the still-glowing rift. Selene stepped back half a pace, adjusting the hem of her coat. The override toggle beneath flickered softly. She didn’t touch it. She didn’t need to. Then her voice lowered, just enough for Alma...and the comms link to catch. “You’re not a prisoner,” Selene said. “But if you become a variable we can’t predict, you will be treated like one.”

Another blink. Her HUD pinged: Site-9 Ready. Transport inbound. Atmospheric shield deployed. She looked once toward the east, where the rain had warped strangely, where the silence of something missing made the horizon twitch at the edges of vision. Then she turned. “Escort in formation. Witchtrip stays behind to trace the residual field. Juno...rear guard.” Selene didn’t look back. She never needed to. She had already made the decision that mattered. The anomaly had been acquired.
And the Remnant Conglomerate never let go of what it touched.

 

[SouthernRage]

Alma accepted the jacket like it was a relic, not with reverence, she wasn’t built for that. But with something near it. A gesture of dignity, perhaps. A recognition of the moment. Of what it meant. Of who Selene had chosen to be.

The fabric was coarse, standard-issue field weave. Heavy. Practical. It smelled faintly of ozone and antiseptic.
But Alma wrapped it around her shoulders like it was silk. Clasped it at her collar with careful fingers. The movement was intimate in a way that had nothing to do with seduction, just survival. The kind of practiced modesty learned from crossing too many thresholds uninvited. She said nothing at first. Let Selene speak, let the field quiet, let the rift finish mourning whatever had slipped free, but when the declaration was made, not a prisoner, but a variable, Alma’s head tilted. Slowly. Precisely. Her eyes, glowing faintly now with heat that had nothing to do with emotion, found Selene’s.

And for the first time since she emerged from the breach…She laughed. A small thing. A dry, velvet sound. Like smoke curling under a locked door.

“Variable.” She repeated the word, softly, letting it sit on her tongue like a vintage she wasn’t sure she missed. “You handle things well, Selene Vireya. I’ve met gods who blinked more than you do.”

The rain no longer steamed on her skin. The shift in temperature was minor..almost imperceptible. But the moss underfoot no longer recoiled. Her body, now fully realized in this frame, had begun to sync, to settle. “And I understand,” she continued, her voice a breath above a whisper, just for Selene, just for the comms. “You’re a knife sheathed in diplomacy. A threat that wears restraint like armor. That’s why they follow you. Why he,” her gaze flicked to Juno without moving her head, “circles, instead of pounces.”


The jacket shifted as she moved. One step to the side, not toward Selene, never toward her, but with her. Along the same vector. Unspoken consent to direction, if not to control.

“I’ll go with you,” Alma said at last. “To your site. Your shielded bunker in the bones of the world.” Her smile, faint, but unmistakably sharp, returned. “You’ll study me. Probe me. Try to write my truths in your language.”
A small shrug. “You won’t get far. But I’ll cooperate. Because I know what’s coming.” She looked back over her shoulder, toward the rift. Her voice dropped again, not in tone but in weight, like a storm front, like the edge of prophecy.

“What followed me through that breach doesn’t just feed. It unroots. It takes meaning and unthreads it. Leaves behind only mimicry and hunger. It knows you now. It knows your shape. Your tactics. Your voices.” She turned back to Selene. Not as a threat. But as the only person here who seemed built for truth. “I’m not the variable you need to worry about. I’m the constant you haven’t accounted for.” A pause..then..softer, barely audible over the rising hum of incoming transport, “But I don’t want to be your problem. I want to be your equal. Help me do that.”

She didn’t wait for permission. She moved to formation. Quietly. Shoulders squared. Back straight. Eyes forward.
Like someone who had worn chains before. And didn’t fear them now. And as the transport’s lights swept the basin and the squad moved into escort pattern, Alma’s voice laced through the comms one last time. “Let me help you hold the line. Before whatever’s out there decides to finish crossing it.” And behind her in the rift, something growled.