Leftover Apocalypse

I walked into the private room of the Cheese Cave, relieved to see it was just me and my double. She was leaned way back in her chair, legs up on the table, and she was wearing silky blue and gold dress with her hair all done up. I'd never really worn anything fancy, and I was caught off guard by how good I could look. "Holy shit. You better not be hitting on me, because I am... surprisingly a teeny bit into it, but it also feels kinda fucked up."

She winked at me, then laughed. "No, they made me wear this to go to my demigod appointment and I figured it was silly to only wear it in a basement. It's not like I can wear it when we go on our expedition either so... ta-dah! So, you... wait. What's wrong. That's our 'I fucked up' face."

I sat down, biting my lip. "Um. I fucked up. I guess. I don't know, maybe I should have just stayed in the apartment, but I got made. Someone I ran into yesterday, I didn't think much of it but then this other asshole - unrelated - said he knew I was from Earth and -"

"Wait. He mentioned Earth? Seriously?"

I thought back. "Not by name? But he focused right in on me and said he knew where I was from. Is Earth something people know about here?"

"Not so far as I can tell," she said, "I ended up with some access to miscellaneous strange news stories in the old timeline, I was digging through them for the Grand Alignment task force and helping to look for anything they might need to keep an eye on. And there was one mention of something that sounded like they knew about Earth and wanted to visit to sample plants of all things, can you imagine? But they were in Steel Tooth which was right on the border of Halenvar's territory and got burned down during the war. I don't remember when, it's possible it hasn't happened yet. But either way that was an outlier, I don't think people in general know about it." As before, her slightly manic energy had her giving much more answer than I needed.

"Well anyway, he looked like he wanted to stab me and the other guy, the one that seemed like he wanted to hang out or take me on a date or something - he got in the dude's way and I ran. But then a few miles later there he was waiting for me, and he called me Calliope."

"I assume that's not the name you used?" she asked.

"No, I told him I was Zoey."

"Ugh, why her? The one that called us goat licker? What did that even mean? When did we say anything that remotely involved goats around her?"

"Right? But if we'd asked it would have just made it worse."

She sighed. "Okay. Uh. Was he a kinda handsome, kinda charming guy? About my age, little scar under his ear?"

"Sounds right. I don't know if I'm remembering the scar for real or just because you said it. But he was telling this really long bad joke," I started, only to have her almost fall down as she righted her chair to point at me.

"Yes! The cooking one that goes on for an hour and then at the end it turns out the animal is still alive and biting him? Ugh. Okay, that's Bert - as opposed to Ernie. Those two fuckers are my handlers, and also bodyguards for Hammersmith. Their actual names are Betrad and Kern. Bert is... eh. He's not an asshole like Kern at least." She looked up at the ceiling, thoughtful. "He must have tried to track me for some reason? They keep tabs on me when I'm here for lunch, because they've learned it's not worth the trouble caused by trying to stand right at my side. Really they hover like one street over. Normally that bracelet should keep you from being detected by shunting everything to me - It's not a trick they saw coming because nobody but us could possibly use it - but with me off in Sentortzi if he checked it would have pinged off of you. I just don't know why he even did that.

"Too late to worry about it. Okay. So at this point, assume they're watching you. There's no chance he didn't figure out where you're staying. It's fine. I was looking forward to talking to you about how Dumineres work and what kinds of powers you can get and stuff and if they haven't interrupted us yet I don't see why we can't still do some of that. That way when I get Hammersmith to let you into the one here you know what deals it's worth taking - hopefully for helping her with my secret project I can't tell you about they'll let you in for free, but she's a stickler for rules so you might have to sign up for a few years of service or something."

Okay, it was clear she didn't want to talk about the lost Duminere right now, or anything she supposedly was bound by her contract for. I was surprised she was worried considering we were speaking English, but for all I knew someone had copied the bracelet somehow before sending it off or they had some other magic that would translate things. "Yeah, I was going to ask what the easiest jobs she'd be likely to let me have are. I assume there are some more in demand than others?"

She looked relieved that I had gotten the message. "They always want healers, for obvious reasons, and one of the gifts - they call them gifts most places, just not in Erathik where Hugh is from because those guys never liked the Old Empire - one of the gifts is good for healing and for growing crops which they like too. Generally anything that makes or changes matter is good shit, and if you get three - which I assume you will because I did - you could make alchemical metals which means if there's nothing better to do you can literally make money."

I'd figured that the money was alchemical metal, it made at least as much sense as coins made from gold. As she was talking, she pulled a folded-up tarp out of a bag and started writing on it. I decided not to call attention to it. "Okay so speaking of. What did you get?"

"I had to get Comprehension, which most people think of as the thing that lets you learn magic better but really is about language and understanding in general. Magic is all about shared understanding, in fact the most important thing is what's called the Common Local Understanding. So you know how a biscuit in the United States and a biscuit in England are two different things? If I wanted to I could make a spell that specifically targets biscuits. But if I tried to cast it in England, well, it would target cookies. The new kind of magic - new being thousands of years old - has some sort of guiding entity that helps with that shit so there's no linguistic drift, but it still has to rely on what people mean by things. Anyway. Comprehension lets you vibe with all that better, learn languages faster, read and write runes, all sorts of good stuff.

"So I'm fluent now, and even technically can do some magic with runes - I haven't practiced spellcasting other than learning one spell to light fires so it does work in theory. That bracelet uses Comprehension too, since it's a language thing. Lots of overlap between that and Thought which I don't have. Actually that brings me to the next bit. So each of the gifts... picture them as points in space, with an atmosphere around them. Sometimes they call them nodes, because there's other ways to get them that aren't the gifts themselves. If you want to build out an ability, it has to be within that atmosphere because... space. I dunno, go with it. And if it's in an area of overlap between two of them you can have support from both sides so it's better.

"So you tie your ability to one or more of your gifts, and as you develop it you can stretch things a little further, building off of the abilities you already have. Your own body - or actually your core, your 'lutore' they call it - is always a sort of node too, and there are things that are vital to your gift that you can easily define. So you can focus on making an ability generally stronger, or cheaper in terms of mana, but that takes a lot of your development. Instead, if you want it to be powerful faster, you can also use those nodes to limit it. So if I make it so I can only use probability to do stuff that effects time somehow, that's going to be automatically a stronger thing. Someone with Planar magic could do stuff specific to a certain plane, someone with Force magic could focus on a specific shape they want to make the force, but there's limits to it. I can't just say 'this power only works on grass' because I would need to define grass using the common local understanding and I don't have a way to do that.

"There's a gift for that, though. You can add more nodes with Affinity, that's what Hammersmith did. She's got an affinity to this alchemical metal that's like... basically it's adamantium. That plus her other gifts, Transmutation which lets her change and shape matter and Enhancement which lets you change people's bodies, means she's made her skin into armor which normally wouldn't be possible." She paused, looking over what she'd written on the tarp that was now spread over the table. It was runes, but I had no idea what they did. After a moment she continued writing and talking. "Gifts like Affinity seem like a waste because they don't do a lot by themselves, but the fact is since you're best off mainly tying everything to one or two core abilities it's okay to use one of your gifts on something like that if you get more than one.

"Anyway, back to me. I had to get the Comprehension one because I was still bad at speaking the language and I also needed to learn runes to read some stuff we'd gotten that I'm not allowed to talk about. I told you about the task force, the Grand Alignment, all that shit. Obviously a ton of what they have to look into is about various spells or people trying to make dangerous artifacts, and either one involves runes and stuff. So one of these things... uh... what can I say here? You know I'm you. You know I'm older than you. So. Yeah. Anyway, I took Temporal too, and Probability. Both of which were mentioned, in the thing. By the guy. That we can't discuss." She winked.

Unless I'd totally misunderstood that would be Ulren, the guy that was helping Halenvar get into some old vaults of dangerous stuff which somehow led to the end of the world. Briefly. "So you can time travel now?"

"I wish! I mean. Kind of. Yes. But very little, and it uses way too much mana. Probability is cool for lots of stuff in theory, but I took it just to help build out my time travel thing - don't ask me why it helps, it's hard to describe - so there's not a lot else I can do with it. Little things, sometimes, if I have time to work on them. And honestly as cool as it is, I hate that all my potential is tied up in the Temporal stuff and I'm still this one trick pony. I had to do it to convince them though, and they put me in this really nasty training course to get my Dumine developed really fast and it was fucking miserable. I should have been able to control gravity, or go to other planes, or make illusions. Ugh. I can burn out my Dumine and start over, you just use up all your mana and then force it and it... spends itself, sort of. But even then, it's still the same gifts. Comprehension, Probability, Temporal. Not terrible I guess but it's not what I wanted. I shouldn't have had to do this."

"I'm sorry."

"It's fine," she said, "Let's just... take a break from this and eat for a minute."

And then she threw the tarp over my head. "Okay, they shouldn't be able to hear us in here. That wasn't bullshit, I don't like the powers I had to take, but this is still cool, right? Great news, I got into a fight with Hammersmith the night before last when we were maybe going to meet for dinner -"

"I heard, I was hiding in the cheese."

"Fuck, that's embarrassing. Cool that it worked and they couldn't sense you though. Anyway! She said the agreement wasn't with her. She made a distinction between this Empire, and the one that was destroyed. Remember I said it was still hard to talk to you because I was trying to break the contract in conflicting ways? One was insisting that it's all the same and so you're me and I can talk to you, the other was the opposite - that the contract was with a nation that doesn't exist anymore because it was destroyed. And I was leaning on the one before, but now that she's said it herself I think I can force it the other way and get out of it entirely. And Hammersmith will think the contract is still solid, but I can already feel it, it's still there but all... loose. Before I couldn't take any hostile action, but I stabbed her in the neck! I mean, she gave me permission kinda and I knew it wouldn't work, but it's a start. I have to be careful for now, but if the time comes I can actually put my plan into effect."

"You have a plan?"

"Even with the soundproofing, it's best you don't know the plan. But yes. It's... insane. You'll love it. Okay, listen, I cut these pages out of a book about the shit you can get from a Dumine, sorry I couldn't bring you the whole book but it's a start. Read that, and don't worry about Bert and Ernie for now. It'll be fine. Trust the plan."

She swept the tarp off, folded it up, and handed it to me while making chewing noises. I tucked it into my bag along with the pages she'd shoved at me. "Hey. Who gets to be Calliope? I've been calling you my doppelganger, or my paradox twin, or older Callie. I guess since you're the original it would be you, and I would need a new name? Or?"

"Nah. I... this world is yours. You're the one that belongs here, you keep the name. I'll figure something out."

She looked sad when she said that, and I thought again about her and Hammersmith implying she was dying when they were talking the other day. Neither of us had brought it up here.

"Well it'll be nice to have a big sister, I guess. We always wanted a sister."

She grinned. "We made one up, back... when? Was it when mom left us at the Walmart and we slept in there overnight?"

"Yeah," I said, grinning at the memory even though at the time I'd been scared. That was the first time I slept in a random building, the first of many. "And then we used to tell people she was in foster care too, just at a different house. Oh, yeah, my sister Constance is at a foster home and they're building on a new bedroom for me so I'll be leaving soon."

"Oh, sure, I have a sister." she added, "Connie ran away when CPS came for us though, she's living in the woods in a treehouse with the fairies."

"Constance is in witness protection, actually, which is why she's not here right now. But after the trial she'll be back - assuming the mob doesn't send another hit man."

She laughed. "Oh god, the witness protection thing! I still think some of the other kids bought it."

I got up to leave, making sure the tarp was fully tucked away. "Well. Um. Assuming they hold up the deal they made with you and are happy enough just having guards watching me, I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Connie."

We walked out together, and were met at the door by a guard that sneered at us like we were something he'd scraped off his shoe. Connie, as I was already starting to think of her, sneered right back. "Ugh," she groaned, "it's Ernie. What happened to waiting down the street, you prick?"

"That was before you tried to sneak your freak clone in here," he said. "But Betrad found your little secret this morning, and now we're keeping you right where we can see you."

This morning? Huh. That discrepancy was worth noting.

"Well you can see me from further away, where I can't smell you. Gods, wash those pants once a year for me, would you?"

Ernie got right up in her face. "First of all, that's not my name. You'll refer to me as Guardsman Kern, or I'll make sure you don't get to leave the fort ever again. You think you're so special, but you're not in charge of me. Do you understand? You're not in the army, you're not a noble, and you're not an emissary. So you had best stop looking down your nose at me, because I'm the one in charge here and you'll do what I say because I'm the one that gets to decide what is and isn't a security risk and I think your whole existence is one big security risk, do you understand? Do you?"

Connie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then slashed Ernie's throat wide open with my knife, which she'd expertly snatched from my belt. His eyes bulged. One hand clamped over his neck while the other reached for his sword, but she grabbed his wrist and headbutted him, breaking his nose with a crunch. He stumbled backwards, fell down, and turned to crawl away while trying desperately to call out... and then he was standing in front of her.

"Yes, Kern," Connie said, "I understand."

There was no blood. Nobody was injured. More than that, nobody was reacting to what had just happened - I seemed to be the only person aware of the brutal attack. I turned away to hide the look on my face while subtly confirming my knife was still in my belt, and then muttered my goodbyes and hurried down the street - Betrad, Bert, Lunch Bet, whoever he was stepped into view as I walked but let me get ahead by twenty feet or so.

I caught myself wiping my face where hot blood had sprayed across it a moment before, though of course it was clean. Had that been Connie rewinding time? She'd said she could time travel 'very little'. How far had she rewound? The slash, the headbutt, him crawling away... it felt like so much, but it probably hadn't actually been more than five seconds.

I'd killed those soldiers in battle, but to just slash someone's throat as they were standing in front of you... although... he was fine, right? And she'd said she was testing the limits of the contract, presumably that was part of that test. It was no big deal. No harm was done. But as I remembered the look of joy on her face I was forced to consider the other option, the one that had been lurking in the back of my head for a while. It could just be that I was a monster like mom had always told me.