Harnessing the capability of his two highlight cursors and his mental capabilities, Inkaro dragged the flat oak log icon across his vision and placed it into the bottom left slot of the two-by-two grid. Following a second of waiting, a pop-up displaying the phrase 'Craft Oak Planks +4?' appeared below the square-shaped grid of squares. He stared intently at the pop-up, leading Lizu to stare intently at him, matching his intense stare from thinking he was messing with her.

  "Figure something out?" Lizu asked as she balanced on her dragony tail, feeling somewhat bored at having to watch the other girls doing more physically intensive activities, while she was stuck doing nothing from losing the rock-paper-scissors match against Inkaro.

  "I believe so; it says something about crafting," Inkaro murmured before tapping the pop-up. Instantly upon clicking it, the pop-up and the two-by-two disappeared, leaving behind an oak plank icon in the first slot with a digital four in the bottom right corner. Hearing what he had to say, Lizu turned on her tail and scooped up the mini oak log she had absentmindedly chopped down, before turning back to Inkaro: "Really? Let me try."

  Following his instruction, Lizu repeated the process, with her dark pink(right) and pink(left) grid highlights, and got the oak planks placed into her left hand. Block in hand, Lizu swiped it at the group and placed an oak plank beside her, retaining the miniature oak plank in her hand and the icon in the first slot, only now sporting a three beside it instead of a four. Lizu happily clapped her hands at the achievement of catching up to Inkaro's game progression, just like she wished she could do with magic creation. But in the midst of her acclaim, the mortified gasps of Yuuvia rang through Lizu's ears, cutting off her sense of pride and replacing it with mean-spirited amusement, shown to the blocky world in the form of her condescending grin.

  Just a little off from Lizu and back by the pond, Yuuvia held her three-dimensional rectangular hands up, dripping with a slimy gel, with a pitifully disgusted frown, whining about the frogs being all slimy. "Why is it so slimy? The frogs don't even look like it. The gel doesn't even look like real, so why does it feel like it?"

  Yuuvia's whining was music to Lizu's ears, like a serenade of karmic retribution finally rearing its head at the girl whom Lizu would deem a pompous show-off. The noble girl, desperate to rid her hands of the slimy sensation, plunged her hand in the small pond of a lake and frantically thrashed her hands free of the slime, only to jump like a cat as her hand hit something colder than the water itself.

  "What should we do with all these?" Enetha asked as she and Anazenpha returned before each of them dropped well over a hundred mini oak logs on the ground. The parade of the small duo drew in Inkaro's attention whilst Lizu remained focused on Yuuvi as she was not willing to risk missing a second of her archrival's discomfort.

  Just like an annoying tutorial screen popping up in the middle of a player doing something and causing them to mess up, a collection of golden mana, shaped like pixels, swirled down from above and joined together into words.

  [Hellow- I mean, hello. I see you lot have gotten your bearing of this game's rules. Now, and not to take up too much of your time, you're task to get out is very simple: acquire a diamond. If you can do it before what your daughters said was everyone's dinnertime, I'll allow you to... hey, are you listening?]

  Staring at the floating text, undoubtedly from Gamai, Lizu peered through the text, gazing at Yuuvia and Nuenala in the middle of bewilderedly staring at a teardrop-cut diamond on the floor: "You mean that thing?"

  [I- that damned Rimai]

  The floating test practically crumbled from the frustration coursing through them before they fizzled away into pixels once again. Following the text fully crumbling, the sensation and heartstopping pressure of a stigmai's presence fully vanished, much to only Inkaro's disappointment, and a new icon appeared in the top left corner of everyone's vision: a house icon.

  "Did we win?" Enetha asked with a perplexed tone but a neutral face, leaving Anazenpha confused about how the little princess achieved such a feat.

  "If you're referring to the stigmai's challenge, then I would say so, but if you mean the game itself, then no; this is a sandbox game after all," Nuenala said cheekily as she and Yuuvia, clutching the diamond in her right hand, strolled their way back to the group.

  "Oh," Enetha said plainly.

  "Well, this has been interesting, but I think I'll be returning home now," Inkaro stated as he planted a fist against the back of his head and scratched at it for a few seconds.

  "Aww, but why?" Nuenala whined, knowing that if Inkaro leaves, the others would soon follow, in the order of: Lizu, Enetha, Anazenpha, and Yuuvia. Although she was more than willing to play on her own, Nuenala wasn't about to be a bad guest by being a straggler.

  "School night, and we don't know the time dilation in here; so for all we know, it's already morning, or even days could have passed by now, it isn't like stigmai are known for possessing common sense," Inkaro said calmly. The other reactions, ranging from Enetha's mild understanding and Yuuvia's mortified realisation, were swift.

  "So are you a stigmai?" Lizu joked as she lightly nudged Inkaro in the side, getting a few snickers from the others when Inkaro rolled his eyes before the lot of them pressed their house icons.

  Back in reality, following a golden flash, Inkaro and co reappeared in reality and exactly where they had been located prior to the forced teleportation. Oh, and back in their normal, non-voxel bodies. Of all the girls, Yuuvia darted her head around in a frenzy as she clambered over the single seater sofa and used her eyes to inquire the time by looking out the window.

  "So no time dilation?" Yuuvia asked nervously while clutching the air in her right hand, still recalling the sensation of the large diamond that was once in her hand.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Looking out the window and seeing how it looked only slightly darker than before, Yuuvia wasn't entirely sure if a significant amount of time had passed or if the events had just coincidentally occurred during one of twilight's dusk transition periods.

  "Indeed," Morilore stated as she sat her butt down on Lizu's tail, "I detected none of the timey whimy nonsense."

  Yuuvia deeply exhaled at the news, sinking heavily into the one-seater sofa before conking out and going right back to sleeping, like nothing had even happened. For a little bit anyway, until the whiplash from the shock snapped her back awake: "I'm not slacking off."

  If it hadn't been for Inkaro's unexpected scoff at the noble girl's sleep-induced proclamation that caught the others' attention, Yuuvia would've been a burning mess of self-conscious shame; instead, she was only mildly embarrassed, since no one who would rub it in her face had noticed.

  Things from there developed like any normal sleepover: board games, card games, Inkaro cooking dinner for everyone, and extra food an hour later just for Anazenpha, along with the guy having to stop Enulatina from feeding the girl any more honey after she'd consumed three gallons worth of the stuff.

  Eventually, Lizu, Nuenala, and Enetha were the first to fall asleep in the living room-spanning pillow fort, whilst Anazenpha and Yuuvia were in the midst of getting ready to sleep, pre-bedtime routines and all.

  In the middle of the pillow fort and serving as its main support, Enetha's activated Umbra Termination held up the blanket roof and walls, making for the most exemplary pillow fort set-up. In Base Ring Mode, Umbra Termination is a cartoony beach ball-sized, obsidian-coloured octopus plushie with large, goofy googly eyes; it has seven-foot-long tentacles with a purple underside that possesses a faint crystalline texture. And, it has a faint, glowing violet tattoo all over its body that resembles connected jigsaw pieces.

  Inkaro, on the other hand, was up on the second floor and twiddling away at some odd crystal he was working on while Morilore and G.Galore watched in silence.

  Sitting on one of the soft tentacles of the BRM(Base Ring Mode) Umbra Termination, which she and the other girls were using as a bed, Yuuvia pressed her hands into her thighs to massage them before moving further down her legs until reaching the very tips of her toes. As the noble girl finished up her nighttime massages, she heard a little rattling noise to her side. One look to her side revealed the noise to be Anazenpha fiddling with a small bottle.

  "Are those candies?" Anazenpha shook her head at the question, finding it understandable that someone would ask such a question, given it was her, of all people, with the bottle of candy-looking contents.

  "It is the catalysts I take before going to sleep...." The demon snake girl's answer trailed off as she struggled to open her bottle, having reached a level of tiredness which left her fingers barely capable of registering her commands.

  "Do you have sleeping troubles?" Yuuvia asked as she reached out a hand, followed by her pinching the bottle's lid and easily twisting it off for the other girl.

  "No... I sleep fine. My auntie got them for me after I swallowed one of my toys in my sleep when I was five, I think. Well, that's the reason she told me anyway, I don't really remember," Anazenpha explained as she lightly rubbed her rosy cheeks.

  Finding the answer a little odd, Yuuvia decided to ask, "So they are supposed to be hunger suppressants?"

  With a meek smirk, Anazenpha shook her head, moving with enough force to make the contents of her bottle rattle like the instrument of the same name: "She tried those... they didn't work; then tried some that were supposed to lower how much stomach acid I make, but she said they didn't do anything either. So she switched to giving me very high-calorie sweets mixed with a catalyst that turns acid into water for a set time."

  "Are you saying you are hungry all the time?" Yuuvia asked, cautiously squeezing her neck to stifle the odd feeling building up in her. Was it from the face Anazenpha pulled? Her tone? Perhaps it could be how openly she shared such personal info with her. Or... was it just because the girl possesses the capability to turn into a snake?

  The noble girl couldn't discern the truth with her current mental capabilities.

  "Yeah... most of the time, although something strange happened recently."

  "Which is?" Yuuvia planted an elbow on her crossed legs and chin on both hands, anticipating a lengthy explanation to be shared.

  "The feeling has gottern... well, subdude was the word my auntie said was the one to use. She said it could be because there is more mana in the air than there is back at our old home, with me being a plenchona an dall. Which, I would be happy about, but now at times I get hit by a big hunger spike. It only started when I started going to school here, isn't that strange?"

  Yuuvia slowly blinked with a 'unique' interest from listening to the demon snake girl's words. However, despite wanting to, she desperately tried to cobble together a response to the best of her ability as she struggled to fully follow Anazenpha's explanation from the mix of exhaustion and clouded thoughts building in her mind.

  Ultimately, the noble girl scratched the back of her head, mentally defeated.

  "This... sounds like something you should ask Lizu or Inkaro instead of me," Yuuvia stated, speaking with a faster manner of speech as she pulled her bed covers over herself.

  "You called?" Inkaro asked, having been walking by the pillow fort when his name was mentioned. And so, he poked his head in to check why his name was mentioned, only to be pulled out into the living room by the two artificial intelligences as they stated the pillow fort was a girl-only area, as per the agreement for Inkaro getting to avoid playing a third board game. "Fair enough, discussion can wait."

  Despite him saying that, his two artificial daughters could see the slight frown on his face, unable to ascertain why. Inkaro lowered his gaze to his palm as he thought, "But, a stigmai up and showing themselves so easily isn't a good sign; if one can, then all of them can."

  "You know, mother, isn't going to be happy when she finds out you made another new magic, especially while she was playing games, and that excuse of saying you had your first magic as a guide won't work twice," Morilore and G.Galore said in perfect tandem. Inkaro flinched a little from being knocked out of his serious train of thought, knowing he'll have to think of something to tip the scales before Lizu finds out. The floating crystal in Inkaro's hand made a faint heartbeat sound, unnoticed by all.

  [Clamity Fractal of Connection][Stigmaus-Ode Rewriting: Calamity Fractals][Bond: *SEARCHING*]

  [It is a pale, opaque, ash grey crystal shaped like a teardrop and the size of a shotput. In the middle of the largest part of the teardrop, there is a bright, glowing amaranth pink symbol: the symbol is four Ts with slightly curved tops that are organised/spaced out to create a circle with four gaps. The Ts are positioned so their stems are pointing at the four ordinal directions. With a bit of space from them, there are curved lines near the bottoms of the ordinal direction pointing Ts. There are also four more Ts lined up with those curved lines to create a disconnected circle, and their stems are pointed towards the gaps in the inner disconnected circle.