First Contact Protocol

The transportation tunnel deposited them in what had once been downtown Moscow, though calling it Moscow anymore required a significant suspension of disbelief.

Reality here was... negotiable.

Buildings twisted through dimensions that geometry professors would have nightmares about. The sky shifted between colors that had no names, occasionally displaying what looked like source code written in languages that predated human speech. Street signs pointed toward locations like "Yesterday's Market" and "The District That Might Be."

But it was the people that truly demonstrated how far the Cascade had progressed.

"There," Seraphina pointed toward a small crowd gathered around a street performer. "Our first subject."

The performer—a young woman with paint-stained fingers and eyes that held the particular intensity of someone who had recently discovered they were impossible—sat cross-legged with an ancient accordion across her lap. But the music flowing from it wasn't just sound.

Each note became visible as it left the instrument, hanging in the air like crystallized emotion before sinking into the listeners and changing them. A businessman's tired expression softened into genuine joy. An elderly woman's stooped shoulders straightened as decades of accumulated pain simply edited themselves out of her posture. A crying child's tears transformed into butterflies that scattered into the twisted sky.

Sequence 8 equivalent, the book whispered. Emotional Reality Editing. She's rewriting people's internal states through harmonic resonance.

"She has no training," Aezur observed, his enhanced senses picking up the raw, unrefined nature of her abilities. "No understanding of what she's doing or why it works."

"That's what makes Cascade entities so dangerous," Seraphina replied. "No restrictions, no understanding of consequences, no fear of backlash. They just... do."

As if summoned by their attention, the musician looked up and met Aezur's eyes across the crowd. For a moment, her playing faltered as recognition passed between them—not personal recognition, but something deeper. The acknowledgment of one impossible thing recognizing another.

She smiled and began a new song.

This one was different. Where her earlier music had been gentle, healing, this carried weight that made the air itself seem heavier. The notes didn't just become visible—they became solid, forming structures in the space around her that looked suspiciously like mathematical equations given architectural form.

She's trying to communicate, Aezur realized. The music isn't random—it's language.

He stepped forward, ignoring Seraphina's warning gesture, and let his own Sequence 7 abilities respond to the musical invitation. Reality rippled around him as he began to exist in harmony with her song rather than in contradiction to it.

The effect was immediate and stunning.

The world around them became more real, more vivid, more there than it had any right to be. Colors gained depth that human eyes weren't designed to process. Sounds carried meaning that bypassed the ears entirely. The very air began to taste of possibilities that had never been explored.

"Incredible," Seraphina breathed, her own higher-sequence abilities allowing her to perceive what was happening. "She's not just editing emotional states—she's editing the baseline reality parameters of local space."

The musician's song reached a crescendo, and suddenly Aezur could hear her thoughts as clearly as if she were speaking aloud:

I know what you are. I know what I am. We're the same kind of impossible, aren't we?

Yes, he projected back through the connection her music had created. But you're doing it backwards.

Backwards?

You're changing the world to match your music. We learned to change ourselves to match the world's contradictions.

Her laughter rippled through dimensions, carrying harmonics that made several nearby buildings spontaneously redecorate themselves. Your way sounds harder.

Our way lets us survive contact with the things that hunt impossibilities.

The music stopped abruptly as her expression grew serious. Things hunt us?

Before Aezur could respond, the temperature dropped by thirty degrees in the space of a heartbeat. Frost began forming on surfaces that hadn't existed moments before, and the twisted sky took on the particular quality of light that preceded very bad news.

Contact detected, announced a voice that seemed to come from the architecture itself. Unauthorized interaction between classified anomalies and uncontained Cascade entities. Initiating isolation protocols.

The crowd around the musician froze mid-motion, not paralyzed but simply... paused. As if someone had pressed a cosmic pause button on everything except the three of them.

"Enforcement Construct," Seraphina said grimly. "They were monitoring us."

Of course they were, Aezur thought. We're research subjects now, not partners. They want to see how we handle contact with Cascade entities.

A figure materialized from the frozen crowd—tall, elegant, wearing the appearance of a businessman in an expensive suit that somehow managed to suggest menace despite its conservative cut. When it spoke, its voice carried the particular inflection of someone reading from a script they found tedious.

"Subjects 7-Alpha-Null-1 and 7-Alpha-Null-2. You have exceeded interaction parameters with uncontained anomaly. Please step away from the entity and allow standard collection procedures to commence."

The musician—who, Aezur realized, they still hadn't properly introduced themselves to—looked back and forth between them with growing alarm. "Collection procedures?"

"They want to study you," Seraphina explained bluntly. "Probably involving some level of vivisection."

"That seems suboptimal," the musician said with the kind of understatement that suggested she was either very brave or very naive.

Probably both, Aezur thought. Then, louder: "No."

The Enforcement Construct tilted its head with mechanical precision. "Clarify refusal parameters."

"We're still conducting our research. The subject is integral to our investigation. Collection would compromise data integrity."

Evaluating claim, the Construct said, its form flickering as it accessed higher processing power. Research Protocol 7-Alpha allows for extended observation periods. However, uncontained anomalies represent escalation risk.

"Then we'll contain her," Seraphina said smoothly. "Temporarily. Under research supervision."

The musician's eyebrows rose. "Excuse me, but don't I get a say in—"

"No," all three other entities said simultaneously.

Compromise acceptable, the Construct decided. Subjects 7-Alpha-Null-1 and 7-Alpha-Null-2 will assume temporary custody of anomaly for research purposes. Standard restrictions apply. Violation of terms results in immediate termination of all parties.

It flickered out of existence, taking the temporal pause with it. The crowd resumed their activities as if nothing had happened, though several people looked around in confusion at the sudden temperature change.

"Well," the musician said, setting down her accordion with careful precision, "this is not how I expected my Tuesday to go."

"Welcome to the world of controlled impossibility," Aezur said. "I'm Aezur. That's Seraphina. And you are?"

"Katya Volkov. Until about six weeks ago, I was a graduate student in musicology with a part-time job giving accordion lessons to rich kids." She looked around at the reality-warped cityscape. "Then I played a song my grandmother taught me, and... this happened."

She gestured at the twisted architecture, the impossible sky, the general state of Moscow's complete inability to decide which laws of physics it wanted to follow.

"You did all this?" Seraphina asked, genuine curiosity in her voice.

"I think the city was already unstable. My music just... encouraged it to be honest about what it wanted to be." Katya stood up, and Aezur noticed that reality seemed more solid in her immediate vicinity, as if her presence had a stabilizing effect. "But yes, mostly this is my fault."

Interesting, the book whispered. Her abilities appear to work through consensus reality manipulation rather than direct contradiction. She's not arguing with the universe—she's convincing it to agree with her.

"Different pathway entirely," Aezur murmured.

"Different pathway from what?" Katya asked.

Seraphina and Aezur exchanged glances. How do you explain sequence classifications, artifact symbiosis, and the fundamental nature of contradiction-based reality manipulation to someone who had stumbled into power through pure accident?

"Long story," Seraphina said finally. "The short version is that reality has rules, some people can break those rules, other people hunt the rule-breakers, and we're all trying to figure out how to survive the experience."

"And I accidentally became a rule-breaker by playing folk songs?"

"Traditional music often contains embedded reality-manipulation techniques," Aezur explained. "Your grandmother probably didn't know what she was teaching you, but the songs themselves carried active modifications to local spacetime."

Katya was quiet for a moment, absorbing this information. Then she laughed—not the bitter laughter of someone whose worldview has been shattered, but the genuine delight of someone who has just been told that magic is real and she's accidentally become a wizard.

"My babushka is going to be so vindicated when I tell her the old songs really could change the world."

If you survive long enough to tell her, Aezur thought but didn't say. Because something else was stirring in the twisted Moscow skyline, something that had been attracted by their extended use of anomalous abilities.

Something much worse than Enforcement Constructs.

Second-phase hunters detected, the book warned. They're sending Synthesis Agents. These don't negotiate.

The sky began to bleed mathematics, and in the distance, something that looked like a geometric storm was moving toward them with predatory intent.

"Time to go," Seraphina said.

"Where?" Katya asked.

Aezur looked at the approaching storm, at his companions, at the impossible city that had become their temporary sanctuary. For the first time since awakening in the ritual chamber, he felt something that might have been optimism.

"Somewhere they'll never think to look for us," he said.

"Which is?"

His smile was sharp enough to cut reality. "The one place in existence where impossibilities are supposed to gather."

"And where's that?"

"We're going to find the Academy of Contradictions."

The storm grew closer, and reality began to scream.