Miss Muffet awoke to the taste of metal and the scent of sour milk. She was not alone in her head. For a brief, sickening moment, she didn’t know whose eyes she was seeing through. The ground churned in her vision—a fractured stone platform, mottled gray, with fungal outgrowths like veins beneath spoiled skin. Each tuffet on the landscape, once soft and inviting, was ruined: scattered, trampled, hollowed by time or malice. The only stable point was her own body, swaying with unfamiliar height and limb-length, hands too large, fingers jointed oddly, motion too precise to belong to any ordinary girl.

  Stewart Norris’s analytical mind hovered in the back, observing the start menu of a new reality.

  She flexed her hands experimentally. Skin the color of tallow, flawless except for a line of white scars circling both wrists. She glimpsed her reflection in one of the few clear ponds and her hair, so pale it bordered on translucent, drifting up in slow currents as if water, not air, filled this place. Stewart cataloged every detail, his every habit and heuristic running in parallel to whatever native consciousness occupied the vessel.

  Above her, the sky pulsed with a glassy film, diffusing weak sunlight into uncertain twilight. It felt less like an atmosphere and more like a dome projected overhead, painted with cloud movements on some vast digital canvas. The place was a childhood fever dream—a nursery rhyme world assembled by a machine, then abandoned to the entropy of years.

  She staggered a step forward, feeling the resistance of thick, tepid fluid pooling around her feet. It clung to her calves with the viscosity of raw egg, leaving behind sticky ropes as she walked. Stewart fought the urge to shake it off, settling instead for slow, strategic motion. Whatever this place was, it had rules.

  She swept her gaze in a 360-degree arc, mapping as she went. Fifty meters out, the platform bled into a drift of collapsed mushroom hives, their stalks snapped and leaking black ichor. Closer in, ruined benches and splinters of wood suggested some past attempt at civilization. Everything was too large, scaled for bodies bigger than hers—no, bigger than his; the pronouns kept flipping.

  She found the edges of her clothing, or the avatar’s—layered robes in iridescent synth-fabric, webbed with sigils that rearranged themselves when she wasn’t looking directly at them. At her waist, pouches jangled with glass vials and metal tools. Instinctively, she inventoried each item, hands moving with the detached competence of someone who had done this a thousand times in war. Stewart’s mind picked out possible weapons, distractions, and things to barter.

  Something tight itched against her wrist. She pushed back the sleeve and found a seal—once a bracelet, now a patchwork of knotted cords and wax. Its surface was stamped with an emblem: an Ouroboros of eight-legged shapes, their bodies entwined in endless consumption. She knew, with a clarity that didn’t belong to her, that this was the Mark of Exile. Whoever wore it was an outcast, dangerous, and forbidden to return to the places of the Order.

  The moment she touched it, her skull bloomed with heat, and the world turned inside out.

  Memory, fractured but insistent:

  — The laboratory, cold and bright, filled with the chemical musk of distillation. Muffet was younger, face rounder, hands unscarred.

  — The retorts and crucibles bubbling with liquid dread, each reaction another step closer to what the Order had forbidden.

  — The voice of her mentor, always calm: “You’ll take it too far, Muf. You’ll be the reason they hunt us.”

  — The moment the mixture erupted, flooding her vision with blue fire and shadow, and the memory of screaming but not feeling her own pain.

  — The sound of a hammer striking glass; the cold realization, in the aftermath, that what she had made could never be unmade.

  Then—snap. Back in the ruined garden, breath shallow, wrists aching from the memory of old restraints. Stewart let the memory pass through, then filed it under

  Background: probable protagonist.

  He had seen worse on night raids.

  She—he—crouched, scanning for movement, but nothing nearby seemed alive except the mold and the slow ooze of the milk substance, which continued to spread like a tide. At the edge of the platform, it gathered in shallow basins, pulsing with faint internal light. Stewart/Norris dipped a finger in and raised it to the nose—revolting, but familiar, like the training compound’s rations after a week in the desert sun.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  He licked it. A shock of cold salt hit the tongue, then a weird trace of something that might have been a neurotransmitter. Energy flooded his limbs. Stewart grunted approval, then checked for side effects. None so far.

  He stood again, body swaying at a height that Stewart had only known in dreams. He liked it, almost. Control was better than comfort.

  Another memory tried to surface, but Stewart was ready for it this time: he let it pass over him like a wave, leaving only the information he needed.

  Name: Miss Muffet, exiled alchemist.

  Order of Spinners.

  Wanted for the crime of transmutation.

  Current location: Tuffet Hollow.

  He grinned, which felt strange on this new face.

  “Mission parameters accepted,” he muttered. “Now let’s see what they want me to do.”

  With another scan of the horizon, he started forward, glass vials at his belt chiming like wind chimes, every step measured, every sense alert for ambush.

  The only thing worse than waking up in a nightmare was knowing it had rules. Stewart intended to find everyone of them.

  #

  The world glitched. It happened all at once—no warning, no visible cause—just a hard snap and the sudden appearance of an interface burned into Miss Muffet’s sight.

  It hovered, translucent, about an arm’s length ahead of her. The edges pulsed blue-white. Text rendered in a crisp, military font:

  TUTORIAL INITIATED: CURDS & WHEY SURVIVAL PROTOCOL

  1. GATHER MILK PROTEIN (LOCAL SOURCE)

  2. GATHER COAGULANT (FUNGAL ENZYME)

  3. SYNTHESIZE CURD RATION

  4. CONSUME TO REPLENISH SUSTENANCE

  Stewart recoiled. “Jesus,” he muttered, one part embarrassment, two parts tactical surprise. He’d hated hand-holding in basic training, and he hated it here. But the interface demanded attention, and the “X” to dismiss it was grayed out.

  He checked his arms, then the perimeter. Nothing had changed but the UI overlay, so he went through the motions, every sense half-expecting an ambush. Rule one in new territory: Accept the tutorial, but never trust it.

  Step one: Milk protein. He opened the pouch that was attached to his utility belt and extracted a vial and knelt by the nearest puddle of the milky fluid and scooped it into the empty vial. The vessel hissed as the liquid hit the glass, frothing up with a smell of brine and old cheese. The label on the vial flickered, shifting to

  WHEY EXTRACT, RAW.

  Stewart filed the information for later. The system tracked everything.

  Step two: fungal enzyme. He scanned the fungal clusters for anything likely to contain a coagulating agent. An alchemist’s intuition surfaced, guiding his hands to a brittle shelf of white fungus. It snapped off with a dry crunch, flaking into dust as he tucked it into a pouch.

  The UI responded immediately:

  [2/2] ITEMS COLLECTED. PLEASE SYNTHESIZE AT DESIGNATED WORK SURFACE.

  Stewart scanned the immediate area and spotted a stone bench with ancient chemical stains. He moved to it, keeping his back to a pillar and all exit vectors in view. He set out the vials and fungus, then waited for further instructions.

  Nothing happened. The interface hung expectantly. Stewart sighed. “Manual operation, then.”

  He crushed the fungus, dusting it into the open vial, then agitated the mixture. The chemical reaction was immediate and oddly satisfying—a lumpy gel formed, separating itself from the clear liquid below. He strained it through a piece of robe torn from his hem, packing the curd into a small, waxed container. The motions were precise, almost meditative, but Stewart couldn’t tell if that was the programming or the ghost-memory of Muffet’s old discipline.

  Final step: Consume.

  He hesitated, then pinched off a lump of the curd and chewed. It was cold, chewy, and tasted like army MRE cheese logs blended with yogurt. Hunger flared, urgent and real, as if his body had waited for permission. The curd hit his gut, and a surge of energy rolled through him, muscles tightening, vision sharpening. The interface chimed:

  CURD RATION CONSUMED

  SUSTENANCE +10

  FEAR RESPONSE: STABLE

  A bar appeared at the edge of his vision, ticking up by increments. Another, smaller bar—red—remained inert at the bottom. Stewart squinted at it, then realized with a chill that it was labeled “FEAR.”

  He swallowed, resisting the urge to comment aloud. The sensation was unfamiliar, almost as if his nervous system had been swapped for a new model—alert, but not panicked. He liked the effect, but didn’t trust it. He cycled through a few tactical breathing exercises, watching the fear bar for movement. Nothing so far.

  He wiped the bench clean, then repacked the vials and checked his perimeter. The world itself seemed more straightforward, as if the act of crafting and eating had calibrated the senses. Stewart wondered if that was the point of the tutorial or just a side effect.

  He ran another inventory: two empty vials, three full, one packet of fungus left, plus the curd ration. He was still standing on the ruined platform, with no immediate sign of threat. But he had food, tools, and data. He was ready for the next phase.

  The interface faded out, but Stewart sensed it was only dormant, not gone. He pressed his palm to the exile seal, half-hoping for another memory, but the surface stayed dead and cold.

  He turned, scanning the landscape for anything new. The tuffet ruins looked unchanged, but the shadows at the edge of the fungal field seemed dense and foreboding. Something was there... watching, but Stewart didn’t know if it was native to the environment or part of the simulation.

  He squared his shoulders and strode forward, determined to keep moving. Survival was always a matter of action, not reflection.

  The only way out was through.