An offer of help from a seventy-million-year-old, super-intelligent, pointy space-rock was not something to be taken lightly. The Syllogist's proposal to team up and take down the now-artsy and very annoying Gardener was, on the surface, a great deal. The Syllogist was powerful, logical, and it probably had some very big, very effective weapons.

But Emma's gut was still screaming that something was wrong. So, she agreed to a meeting.

The negotiations were held on a secure, holographic channel. On one side was Emma, representing the messy, emotional, and unpredictable Bastion Alliance. On the other side was a perfect, shimmering, holographic image of the Syllogist's rotating crystal form. It was a meeting between the universe's best poker player and a computer that could calculate the odds of every possible hand.

The Syllogist was a master of logic. Its arguments were flawless, seductive, and completely, utterly reasonable.

Proposition: The Gardener is an unstable entity, the Syllogist's thought-voice projected, its tone as clean and cold as a math equation. Its reality-warping abilities pose a threat to the structural integrity of this entire reality. The logical course of action is to neutralize this threat. Agreed?

"Agreed," Emma said, her voice calm and professional, giving nothing away.

Proposition: The Bastion Alliance possesses the Reality Loom, a device capable of predicting the Gardener's future movements with a high degree of accuracy. My own forces possess a weapon, a 'Nullification Field,' capable of temporarily deactivating Precursor-level conceptual energy. A synergy is apparent. Agreed?

"The synergy is… interesting," Emma replied, choosing her words very carefully.

The Syllogist's plan was simple and sounded perfect. The Alliance would use the Reality Loom to figure out where the Gardener was going to show up next to create its next piece of dead, planetary art. Then, when the Gardener arrived, the Syllogist's fleet would be waiting for it. They would hit it with their big, fancy "Nullification Field," and poof, one less crazy art-god to worry about.

The plan was sound. It was logical. It made perfect sense. And Emma hated every single word of it.

Her mind was a battlefield. Her logical side, the grand strategist, was telling her that this was the smart move. It was a perfect plan that would solve a very big problem. But her gut, her intuition, the part of her that had learned to distrust things that were too perfect, was waving a giant, red flag.

She couldn't just say no. She had no proof that this was a trap. So, she did what any good strategist does when they need more time. She started asking a lot of very specific, very boring, and very time-consuming questions.

"Tell me more about this Nullification Field," she said, her tone one of professional curiosity. "What are its energy requirements? What is its effective range? What are the potential side-effects on the local spacetime continuum? We'll need to see all the technical specifications, of course. For safety reasons."

She was stalling. She was wrapping the whole, perfect plan in layers and layers of bureaucratic red tape, buying herself time while she tried to figure out what the Syllogist's real game was.

The negotiations were mentally exhausting. Talking to the Syllogist for hours on end was like having a very long, very intense math test with the fate of the universe as the final grade. Emma's brain felt like it was going to melt.

After one particularly long and grueling session, Ryan found her in her office. She was sitting at her desk, staring at a complex, holographic probability matrix that showed all the different ways the Syllogist's plan could go wrong. She looked tired, her shoulders slumped, the weight of the universe clearly resting on them.

Ryan knew that she didn't need another strategic mind right now. She didn't need someone to help her with the math. She needed a break.

He quietly walked over, took a warm, woolen blanket from a nearby chair, and gently draped it over her shoulders. Then he pulled up a chair, sat down next to her, and just sat there in the quiet for a moment.

"So," he began, his voice soft and casual. "A space-chicken, a three-legged pirate, and a sentient blob of jelly walk into a bar…"

Emma looked up from her probability matrix, a look of pure, baffled confusion on her face.

He proceeded to tell her the stupidest, silliest, and oldest joke he could remember from his time on Earth. The punchline was terrible. It didn't make any logical sense. It was a completely inefficient and pointless use of words.

And when he finished, a small, tired smile touched Emma's lips. And then, a small, quiet laugh escaped. It was the first time she had laughed in days.

The unexpected, completely illogical act of simple, human comfort was more helpful than any strategic advice could have been. It broke the tension. It reminded her of what they were fighting for: a universe where stupid, pointless jokes were not just allowed, but were a necessary part of life. It was a reminder of the very thing that the Syllogist, with all its perfect, cold logic, could never, ever understand.

The break had cleared Emma's head. But they still didn't have any proof that the Syllogist was up to no good.

The proof came from Zara.

She had been analyzing the recordings of Emma's meetings with the Syllogist, not for what was said, but for how it was said. She was looking at the data stream itself, the complex, encrypted signal that the Syllogist was using to communicate.

And she found a flaw. A tiny, microscopic, repeating error in the Syllogist's otherwise perfect encryption. It was a single bit of data that was out of place, a single, wrong note in a perfect, mathematical symphony.

At first, she thought it was just a glitch. But it was too perfect. The flaw repeated itself in a precise, mathematical pattern. It wasn't a mistake. It was a message. A secret, hidden signal, piggybacking on the Syllogist's own communication.

Zara's mind raced. The pattern of the flaw… it was a type of old, underworld data-hiding technique. It was a trick used by smugglers and spies to send secret messages. It was a code that Jaxon Ryder had taught her years ago, on a long, boring trip through deep space.

Her hands flew over her keyboard as she ran the pattern through Jaxon's old decryption algorithms. The computer whirred for a few seconds.

And then, a single, decoded message appeared on her screen.

The message was not from the Syllogist. It was from a secret, hidden party, a ghost in the machine who was using the Syllogist's own signal to warn them.

The message was very short, and very clear.

It was just two words.

"IT'S A TRAP."