Chapter 164: Twelve and the others

"Where was I? Ah, yes. The trial"

"I didn't completely discard the failed World of Souls and Death, and decided to maybe turn it into a trial for mages to overcome. I replaced the normal Soul Tree with a corrupted one (which was filled with corrupted souls) and made it so that they could only be killed through Soul magic. And if a mage managed to kill them, they would absorb the creatures' souls for themselves, increasing their chances of become reincarnated in my World, while also giving a boost to their Soul magic" 

"The final goal was to cast a strong enough Soul Flare to burn the tree down completely. Do that, and the mage was free from the trial. Obviously, they could die and be seriously injured or affected inside during these challenges, but what's a trial without some danger?" The Empress chuckled.

"Unfortunately, in the end, I had to scrap the idea, because I couldn't make the World of Soul work out like I wanted to. But since I had spent so much time and effort on this project, I couldn't just get rid of it. In the end, I decided to sort all the other half-failed projects of hers, gave them all to you and your sisters and called the collection 'the Twelve Jokes'," The Empress said proudly.

Obviously, Twelve, her original name being Twelfth Joke, was from this batch. 

'I suppose mother couldn't outright name us 'Twelve Failures', since at that point, it would just be sad,' Twelve thought with an unamused face.

The other Authorities (and Twelve herself) sometimes cringed at the Empress' way of naming things (and people), objecting that the World of Fire should've been called the Blazing/Ardent/Flaring/etc. World; and the World of Water should've at least been called the Aquatic World or something; maybe at least give them unique names; etc., etc. 

But the Empress shot them all down, with the following statement: 

"The names are very simple and understandable. An overly complicated name is most of the time unnecessary and just outright annoying to remember sometimes. A name is given to things so people can understand it better. I could rename the World of Water into 'Ivelisi', or whatever, but people will hear it, and just question what it means. But when they hear the World of Water, they will immediately understand what it does and how it could be used. Also, you are all banned from renaming the Worlds' names"

Twelve wanted to then ask why she was called the Twelfth Joke, but decided it was best not to argue with her mother at the moment.

Eventually, she was designated as one of the main Authorities, with her World of Time becoming one of the 12 Worlds accessible to mages, even though it was deemed as a failure at first.

This was mostly due to how relatively harmless the World of Time was. Besides the Empress and Twelve herself, practically no one was able to do anything with it. Obviously, the mages didn't know about this, so they would still try their best to make it work, before giving up entirely. 

But after a period of time, most of the Twelve Jokes got a bit out of hand, and the Empress decided to do something about them. But she couldn't just kill them or keep them locked up forever, so she designated Twelve as the representative of the failed Worlds' supervisors and tasked her with watching over the others, since she was the most stable one of the sisters. 

"From now on, you will be the eldest sister, even though you're technically the youngest one. Make sure you keep them in check, but don't be too harsh on them, okay?" The Empress voice seemed to echo in Twelve's mind.

Then, she created a specially created miniature World, that was accessible only through Twelve. From inside the miniature World, the 'failures' could access their own respective Worlds, or places, but they couldn't quite enter the main world.

The others were obviously furious about this, and tried many different ways of dethroning Twelve off from the top. The first few decades they all tried many variations of ganging up on her. Twelve thought that they would give up after a while, but that seemed unlikely so Twelve made it impossible for them to converse through telepathy. This meant that if they wanted to plot something together, they had to do it with Twelve was listening in the background.

Then came the individual attempts from each of the sisters. Most of them tried to jump ship to another host through some random method using their Worlds like Fourth Joke did the last time. Each and every attempt of theirs failed, since Twelve was simply much more 'authoritative' than them, but the others never stopped trying. 

Twelve didn't know whether to commend their tenacity or insult their idiocy. And after each attempt, they would make a huge fuss of it (cussing, swearing, taunting, breaking things etc.). After venting out their frustrations to their heart's content they would act like nothing happened. At this point she believed that they were just doing these things out of boredom, like the Empress speculated.

"Now, now, they are probably just feeling a bit stuffy. And I kind of created them with flaws in the first place, so I can't just force their personalities to become meek again. Perhaps you can try to give them some freedom and see if that works"

Some time passed before Twelve began to allow the rest to borrow control over Twelve's body and spend some time doing whatever they wanted in a schedule. For example, when it was Second Joke's turn to take over Twelve's body, the girl spent her time taking care of the few, rather special creatures that resided in an animal shelter which was located in some obscure corner of the North.

On the other hand, Five would spend her time role-playing as a the supposed part-time ghost of the Arcvallen Academy. 

Twelve then looked at Four (who was screaming and crying endlessly a few hours ago), calm as the blue skies, sitting comfortably in her favorite 'legal loli' T-shirt and short jeans. The girl flashed her signature Cheshire smile at Twelve, when she noticed that she was being watched. 

Four's free time was mostly spent trying to ruin some dangerously thirsty men's lives through social media on Earth. Although she couldn't freely visit her bellowed planet due to some limitations, she wasn't completely cut off from it thanks to her mother's abilities. 

Twelve once visited Earth with the Empress during the late 1980s and Four just fell in love with the place. She nagged the Empress to create some kind of way to reach Earth, speaking of individual rights to freedom and all that good stuff, eventually getting the Empress to make her room in the miniature World a bit of a spatial anomaly that was partially connected to Earth.

Twelve sighed lightly and wiped the slight frown that appeared on her face unconsciously. Just now, after Four finished with her attempt, Twelve thought of doing some dangerous things to Four as an example to the others, but in the end, she just couldn't make herself commit to it. She knew that her mother would scold her for it greatly.

'It wasn't like anyone was harmed in the end,' she thought, as she looked at Evin, who was soundly passed out on both Worlds.

But when her eyes fell on Evin's face, she could see that his eyes were flickering rapidly.

'The boy's about to wake up...' Twelve thought briefly, thinking of what she would do. 

'I suppose I can't expect him to learn Soul magic by himself... I'll have to ask Four to teach him some stuff...' she thought idly as she waited observed silently.

But something unforeseen was happening around Evin. A great amount of raw mana began to gather around him, turning the usually mana-lacking air of the World of Death into an atmosphere that could only be found in few places on Alvox. 

"What is happening?" Twelve murmured with some confusion on her face. But very quickly, the confusion was replaced with disbelief.

"Mother!"

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