Light Inside

"Light Inside" is the eight episode of Reflection.

*Surprise! It’s time for an inspection from GEIST! Two teams must successfully distract GEIST’s PR team while trying to hide all of OPIA’s dark secrets from their corporate overlords!*

## Summary

The episode opens up deep in the Coda, where a masked female figure breaks through a door, carrying a massive container. She begins opening the container and placing down its contents as she converses with another unknown person over long-distance communications. They discuss the nature of Fuse City, the speed that the current conflict is progressing at, and their personal investment in the cycle this time around. Before hanging up, the masked woman tells her companion to give her regards to the Flame-touched.

Back up in the Undercity, Ulilara enters her home, where she notices that her TV is on. Uno, who has been hiding out in her house since the events of Above and Below, is focused on a newscast on the TV. At OPIA HQ, the party is having another interview with Number Five, an event which doubles as a GEIST inspection of OPIA's facilities. After a few questions, the group is pulled aside by a frantic Ridill, who explains that, after Cam gained otherworldly knowledge from the First Water, uploading his core crystal to the Flame-based OPIA internal network caused the building itself to undergo a form of Burn, allowing various malicious entities to sneak into OPIA HQ and possess the unused simulacrums left behind by the AI body-building process. Arg0s and Basil head off with Ridill to solve this problem, while Ace and Willow remain behind to entertain CEO 5.

Ridill's group enters a section of the ESP Research wing where various otherworld entities are kept, including miscellaneous objects rich in otherworld Elements, and a vault containing dangerous Reflections. Basil asks Ridill if she can go to the "toy room" (the room with Elements), and Ridill says she can after their job is done. They briefly check out the vault, where Basil finds herself compelled to touch a heavily guarded Reflection that apparently will kill its user immediately upon binding. The group then heads to a room at the bottom of the area where various possessed simulacrums of Cam and Mic have been trapped on one side, left to slowly decompose. Basil wants to kill them for being "fakes", but Ridill and Mic convince her to stop. Placated, Basil uses her ESP to discover that the entities inhabiting the simulacrums are rudimentary intelligences tasked with a variety of objectives, mainly to sow chaos, but interestingly, to hunt down data on the creation of AIs. With the information in hand, they head out to restrain the rogue simulacrums loose elsewhere in the building.

Back at the entrance, Ace and Willow continue to be interviewed by CEO 5, deftly dodging some rhetorical slights used by the GEIST official to attempt to push an anti-Burn reducer narrative. After this, Willow swaps out with Basil, who immediately threatens CEO 5 with violence, inquiring as to why GEIST wants to kill her. Disturbed, CEO 5 reveals that *he* never authorized attempting to kill them, and that it's probably the work of another faction in GEIST, which is far less monolithic internally than it presents to the world at large. In the ESP wing, Ridill, Arg0s, and now Willow head off to find rogue simulacrums. After disabling a possessed Cam and Mic, Arg0s notices a masked figure snooping around in the library, and runs off with the real Mic to restrain him. Cornering the burgular, Jasconius (or "Jas"), Arg0s enters close combat, but is outmatched, and Jas escapes by shooting a hole in the wall with a stolen Reflection, Landfall. Ridill runs off to help Arg0s while Willow checks over the hospital rooms, helping Circuit to restrain a possessed Serve body attacking Colt, and restraining a Mic body attempting to attack Charybdis.

The interview group arrives in the research wards of OPIA, where Ace is attempting to convince CEO 5 to increase OPIA's funding. Willow runs by, masking her actual objective, fighting Jas, by pretending to run by with a mop to clean up a mess in the hallway, which helps reinforce Ace's point. The rest of the party is unable to restrain Jasconius, who runs into Basil by complete accident and his stopped in his tracks by "Dino-Hime", another name for the GEIST-brand version of Basil, who he apparently consumes a lot of media of. Basil completely misses the fact that he is invading OPIA HQ, and goes on a walk with him in the garden, where he is convinced to give up the laptop he stole with data on simulacrum production. He reveals he wasn't involved in the Demonic raid on the HQ, and then flies away in an air bubble created by Landfall, promising to speak with FLOW again at a later time.

CEO 5 arrives in the garden, completely unaware of the situation. The interview concluded, the CEO promises to increase OPIA's funding in exchange for the group installing a handful of probes on the first layer of the Coda, which OPIA agrees to. They then find a simulacrum of Cam, and almost believe him to be the real Cam, before the real Cam walks up to them, distinguished from the simulacrum due to the EX Feedback-induced changes to his body from his Reflection, which have given him some fish-like features. The situation mostly resolved, the entire group heads to the Reflection hall to choose a Reflection for Mic, who now has a body of her own. After a lengthy decision process, Mic, wanting to build her own strength, chooses to bind to Hope's Cultivation Seed. After this, Willow visits Charybdis to talk about strength and ESP. Charybdis explains how his pyromantic ESP arose from being a pyrotechnic for the demon-fighting circus of his world, and he's able to use that light to expand his own senses. Using her own experiences with the biolumeniscent foliage of Beleth, Willow channels the Divine Eye she recieved in Sum of Experiences to create her own version of that sensory Anima. She ends the conversation by telling Charybdis that because he's still here, the fires he lit are still burning, which causes him to cry.

Up at the main GEIST building, Ridill talks to CEO 5, who warns her that releasing too much sensitive information about GEIST might cause complications for OPIA as well. Before returning to the formalized negotiations, the GEIST AI manifests in front of Ridill, reminding her that her role is to save the world, not to change it. In the Undercity, Jas makes his way to his apartment, prompting Marco, the landlord, to call him the oddest tenant he's ever had. Returning home, Jas unmasks while he talks to an unknown voice over a phone call, commenting that OPIA might actually help them in the fight against GEIST. Moving into a locked chamber in the corner of his room, he stares at a stolen simulacrum birthing tube, where a recreation of The Muse lies in stasis.

## Characters

### Party

* Ace Galatine
* Arg0s
* Willow Wisp
* Basilisk Id
* Ridill Arondite

### OPIA

* Cam
* Mic
* Circuit

### GEIST

* Number Five
* GEIST AI

### Other

* Jasconius
* Colt
* Charybdis
* Ulilara
* Uno