"...You're going to have to explain that one," Misa said. She took a seat on one of the nearby benches—because why not, really—and was only slightly surprised when one of the tiles beneath her feet suddenly lurched to life and launched itself at her.

She didn't even bother fighting this one. It was a level 10 Floor Tile. It could chew on her arm for hours and not scratch her health enough to take it below her default health regeneration. She just stared at it for a moment, then back at Tinsel.

"Is this one alive?" she asked. "The same way you are, I mean. I don't want to smash it and then feel bad about it later."

"Uh," Tinsel said. "No, you can kill that one."

"Cool." Misa flicked it off her arm, trying not to feel too bad about the way it shattered against the floor. "You were saying?"

"So, the flowers out there are called soulbloom flowers," Tinsel said. "It's a really popular ingredient for alchemy—excellent for magic-boosting potions. Stuff that boosts your spells, or increases your connection with the mana. That kind of thing."

"Right." Misa nodded. "I'm following so far."

"The reason it can do that is because soulbloom flowers are..." Tinsel trailed off, struggling to find the right words to describe them. "They're really good at processing mana into something that's kind of like an artificial soul. When it's consumed by something living, it usually enhances their connection to their soul, which lets them do all kinds of stuff with mana."

"Huh," Sev said thoughtfully next to her. "I've never heard of soulblooms before, and that's saying something. I wonder if they're something the dungeon just created..."

Tinsel, thankfully, ignored what Sev was saying; Misa wasn't sure she knew how to deal with whatever existential crisis it would have if it found out it was the creation of a dungeon. Or, heck, maybe it already knew.

"The thing is, soulblooms don't really have a limiter on when they should stop," Tinsel explained. "Over the course of a few months, a soulbloom is still non-sentient; all its doing is drawing in the mana around it and kind of enhancing it. But after a few months, the root structure becomes complicated enough to sustain a living, artificial soul."

Misa blinked. "So if a soulbloom flower isn't processed into something like a potion so it can enhance someone's... uh, connection to their soul, as you put it, it just... creates the soul?"

"Exactly!" Tinsel nodded vigorously, the shadows around it shifting wildly as it did so. "Cause all of the soul-enhancing stuff has nowhere to go, and it just kind of creates a soul out of nothing."

"That's... worrying for a number of reasons," Misa said. "But go on."

"Long story short, we need your help," Tinsel said. There it was—whatever they needed to do for this station. "This station's been abandoned for years. The soulblooms here have all mostly gone out of control. There's a bunch of us just... loose, because the soulblooms separate from the souls they create once those souls are, uh, ripe."

"So this station is haunted," Misa said, a little disbelievingly. She glanced around. "Because the soulblooms around it have been releasing souls for generations?"

"Kinda, yeah." Tinsel nodded again. "We just attach to whatever resonates with us the most. It's not like there's anything here that's more... people-shaped for us to possess. So we're a lot of living objects, and we can kinda move from one thing to another. Technically we don't even really die when you smash us, we just move on to possess something else."

Misa felt a little relieved by that. "But you said you needed help?"

"Right, yeah," Tinsel said. "Um, like I said, we're normally... released. When we're ripe. Fully grown souls."

"Right," Misa said slowly. "I feel like I'm not going to like where this is going."This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Well," Tinsel said. "Probably not. One of the soulblooms is sick. Its roots got tangled, so it can't release any of the souls its made. None of us can get any close, and uh... now there are more than a hundred tangled souls in there. And counting."

Ah. Misa felt her heart sink a little at the thought. The whole thing about souls went a little over her head, but the idea of a hundred souls all tangled together was uncomfortable; she couldn't imagine what it was like for them.

"Related to the giant worm-crab thing we saw in the fields, by any chance?" Sev asked.

"Yeah, that's the one," Tinsel said, wincing a little. "The tangle of souls, I mean. It's all made of dirt. If you look closely you can see the soulbloom's roots tangled through the whole thing. It's not usually active a lot of the time, but when it is, it's a problem, because it's eating all the other flowers. And sometimes it attacks us and tries to eat us, too. I lost a couple friends to it before."

Sev and Misa glanced at each other. "I guess we know what we have to do here," Sev said. "I think I want to investigate these soulblooms, too. I have a feeling they're going to be useful down the road."

"So do I," Misa admitted.

"If you help us, I can help you find some fresh ones!" Tinsel immediately offered. "Ones that don't have whole souls growing in them already. Those aren't as good for the alchemy thing—they get a little poisonous, actually. You can get soul sickness from them. I know all the best places for the new ones!"

"Sure." Misa smiled at Tinsel, who had leapt to his feet and was doing an enthusiastic little twirl. What an interesting fellow. It had been a while since she'd had an interesting fight, and a giant rock-worm-crab-thing seemed like the perfect opportunity to let loose for a bit.

"I bet it's what's interfering with the system, too," Sev said thoughtfully. "The system relies on having a metaphysical connection to your soul. But there's basically a giant soul-beacon here—it's probably rerouting half the system messages to the soulbloom by accident."

"What, you didn't consider the possibility of a hundred-soul tangle when you were making the system?" Misa asked, half-joking.

"First of all, I wasn't the one that made it," Sev said, grumbling. "And second, no, we didn't! That's not something that should ever be happening!"

"I gotta agree with your friend there," Tinsel said.

"I know, I know," Misa said. "Right. So. We need a plan. How are we going to take this thing down, and what do we want to do with it?"

It took them a few minutes to hash out the details of the plan with Tinsel's help.

They did not, in fact, want to kill the errant soulbloom. That was the first thing they'd needed to establish—whether they were going to kill the thing or find a way to repair it. Tinsel had been insistent that as the eldest of the soulbloom flowers, its souls would have insights that few others did. Killing it would be a significant loss to the people of Soulbloom Station.

"Like I said, you can destroy our physical forms no problem," Tinsel said. "And you're probably going to need to trim the roots down so the souls don't get tangled up again. Just don't damage the petals of the flower."

"That's a bit of an ask," Misa said. "It's going to be hard to avoid damaging it if we're crushing the body and cutting off the roots."

"It's more durable than you'd think," Tinsel said. "As long as you're not targeting it directly, it should be fine!"

"If you say so." She was willing to take Tinsel at its word, anyway; it wasn't like they had many other options. They could adapt if they needed to. "So, Tinsel, you stay out of the way."

"Done," Tinsel said immediately.

"I'll be the distraction," Misa said. "And I'm pretty sure I can do enough damage to it to break it apart. Sev, you're going to try healing it?"

"Makes more sense than most of the other options I've got," Sev said with a shrug, and then he reconsidered the statement slightly. "Well, there are divinities I could try to channel that would help with this—but there's no reason to waste divine power if a regular heal is going to work. And I don't see any reason that it shouldn't."

"Besides the system trying to stop you from healing something you shouldn't," Misa pointed out.

"Besides that." Sev sighed. "Hopefully it's not going to be a problem this time. We only ever ran into that issue once, anyway; I think it was probably just that dungeon..."

"I have no idea what you two are talking about," Tinsel said. "But it sounds fascinating! You should tell me more. Once we've pruned the soulblooms. Soulbloom."

"...Is there a reason you said that with a plural at first?" Misa glanced at Tinsel.

"Nope!" Tinsel said, a little too quickly, and then with a little more guilt in his voice: "Well, uh, there might be more than one. But it's okay! We haven't seen the second one for ages. I doubt it's gonna turn up now."

Misa sighed, bracing her mace on her shoulder as she began walking out of the station and into the soulbloom field.

"Believe me," she said. "It's definitely going to turn up now."