Archetypes.

I remember now — you know, that guy from the game about social interactions, where you get stronger each round by hanging out with people. Carl Jung’s theories, the ones about universal symbols and the collective unconscious.

My colleague in psych used to obsess over them, dissecting fairy tales and corporate logos like they held the keys to the human soul. Now, drifting in this absurd cloud-bed dimension, I’d accidentally conjured two of the most loaded images in history.

And now here I was, floating in a cloud-bed in some strange dimension, accidentally reproducing two of the most symbolically loaded images in human history without meaning to.

Which... probably says something about me.

Something I’m not sure I want to think too hard about.

But Jung’s map of the psyche sparked an idea.

So, maybe it’s not useless.

If Jung could map the entire human psyche into a handful of archetypes, maybe I could do the same for the Witnesses of Primordials. Not to psychoanalyze them — well, okay, maybe a little — but to predict them. To know where they’ll move before they move, what they’ll choose before they even realize they’ve chosen it.

And now here I was, floating in a cloud-bed in some bizarre dimension, thinking... maybe I should try it. Assign an archetype to each member of the Witnesses of Primordials. It’s a long list, but hey, even godlike beings need pigeonholes.

The Lover. The Trickster. The Sage. The Hero. The Shadow. The Creator.

It felt absurdly simple, like assigning character classes in a game they hadn’t realized they were playing.

Helena? Easy. Trickster. No contest. She has the charisma of a fox spirit, the moral compass of a greased roulette wheel, and the uncanny ability to derail an entire conversation while still making you think she’s doing you a favor.

So I close my eyes and picture it — a card. Glossy, black-gilded edges, Helena’s smirk printed dead center like some divine joke. In her hand, a coin. In the background, a crescent moon tilted just enough to look like it’s in on the gag.

And then— impossibly, the "image" shifted.

No, not the art — her.

She moves.

Her painted smirk deepened. The coin spins in her fingers.

"Really?" she says, her voice coming from inside the card.

"That’s all I get? Trickster?"

I blinked. The card was just a thought, yet she seemed to lean forward within the mental construct, her gaze locking onto mine with unnerving intensity.

...Which, frankly, I’m not entirely convinced she won’t.

...Okay. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

I didn’t mean for it to actually work.

It started as a sanity-preserving side project while Selene dissected dimensional strata. My "Primordial Witness Archetype Deck." Purely conceptual.

A mental card for everyone, rendered with imagined artistry.

Enough to make even Helena’s ego purr.

The first one was obvious: Selene, The Magician.

Her card came out sharp, deliberate—like every line had been drawn with a scalpel instead of a pen. The background shimmered with tiny equations only she would notice.

Perfect.

Then came Helena. I didn’t even have to think about hers. The Trickster.

Her smile practically sketched itself. I exaggerated it, gave it that cat-who-stole-the-canary tilt, surrounded her with gilded masks and hands plucking at unseen strings.

And then—

Something shifted.

It wasn’t a flash or a puff of smoke. No mystical chanting. Just a click, like a key sliding into place in a lock I didn’t know was there.

Helena’s painted eyes blinked.

I froze.

The paper didn’t warp, didn’t ripple—but the imagined Helena blinked. Tilted her head. Took a step right to the edge of the mental frame before snapping back to stillness.

Was this a hallucination? Or something stranger?

When I blinked, it was just paper again.

The real Helena, lounging on a spectral couch outside my cloud-bed’s boundary, flicked a page in her spectral gossip mag, utterly oblivious.

Drawn inside? Mapped? Encoded? No...

I knew it. Not "knew" in the normal sense—but remembered.

Her soul wouldn’t remember this.

The certainty hit me, cold and clinical. Not a guess, but a memory.

The kind ingrained in muscle and bone: the stink of antiseptic, the rasp of latex gloves, the fluorescent glare of an ER at 2 AM. Setting bones, stitching scalps, pushing gurneys...

The certainty hit me like a reflex—the way I used to know a fracture just by the angle of a limb.

And for the first time in years, I had to stop and ask myself:

When did I stop being a doctor?"

Never mind.

I pushed the thought down, focusing on the mental deck.

I laid the first card on the table.

The Trickster.

Helena’s smirk seemed to curl right through the painted lines. I didn’t even remember deciding the details—one blink, and there she was, lacquered in ink and color, lounging like she owned the space between reality and imagination

As a mental exercise, I visualized her card: glossy black, gilded edges.

Helena’s signature smirk dead center.

A coin in her hand, a conspiratorial crescent moon behind her..

The second card, I thought carefully about.

The Magician.

Except... when the image finished forming, it wasn’t just "a magician." It was Selene.

Her stance was poised, her robes drawn in angular folds, one hand holding a wand, the other raised mid-incantation. Even in paint, she had that cold precision about her. I almost felt like she could step right out of the card.

The image formed – angular robes, poised stance, wand raised in precise invocation.

Undeniably Selene. Perfect.

Selene, standing near my cloud-bed, glanced towards the space where I held the mental image. Her brow furrowed minutely.

"Why am I here?" Her voice was its usual cool monotone, but laced with calculation.

I offered a half-smile. "You’re the Magician. Obviously."

She didn’t react to the label. Instead, she folded her arms, her gaze sharpening.

"Then I suppose that makes me... the agent instead of the real."

"Sleeper agent?" The term felt clumsy, inadequate.

"You tell me," she countered, her expression unreadable.

I didn’t.

However, it’s like this—you plant a directive deep inside someone’s mind, under layers of ordinary memories. They don’t act on it, don’t even know it’s there, until a trigger hits—something specific. Then, the moment it happens, they switch. No hesitation, no questioning, they just become what you programmed them to be.

"It would be a bit too confusing for you to understand the concept."

My mind snagged on the words, unraveling faster than I could catch them.

Agent.

If that’s what I was, then whose orders had I already carried out without knowing?And how many times had I smiled, thinking the thoughts in my head were mine?

To paraphrase my words... the sleeper agent, in its simplest terms, isn’t someone lurking in the shadows waiting for orders.

Not exactly.

They’re already living a life—embedded, breathing, existing in someone else’s world—until the trigger comes. And that’s the thing: the trigger isn’t always a dramatic code phrase or a hidden letter. Sometimes it’s a pattern. A face. Even a coincidence so small that no one else would think twice about it.

The crucial part is that they know. Not in the "I just found out" sense, but in the "I’ve always known, somewhere in the marrow of my bones" sense. They walk around with this quiet certainty, every day, pretending to be normal while carrying the constant hum of a second life beneath their skin.

The mission is like a shadow that never changes shape. Even when they’re laughing, eating, or pretending to care about trivialities, that shadow is there.

It’s not a question of if they’ll act—it’s when.

Looking at her now, I saw it: the stillness in her eyes, the words placed like chess moves. She wasn’t confused or conflicted. She was certain.

Which left only one question hanging between us:

If this Selene is the agent... what happened to the real one?