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Chapter 175: Parallel Universes
🕑 Added 2024-09-17 14:12:49 +0000 UTCShap, snap. Iron chafed over slate.
Snap, snap. Isobel smiled at the small group assembled on the yard in front of her.
Dema had made good on her promise to make the area easier to traverse. Paths of crystallised blood snaked elegantly around the large tree trunk in the centre. They glittered under the spots of sunlight shining through the leaves up in the canopy, and the roots the paths encased sat well-preserved and gorgeously framed underneath, like at the bottom of a still, red lake.
Dema’s construction was perhaps a little slippery, but she seemed fine walking over it barefoot, and Isobel had made herself little clogs coated with moss so her feet didn’t cut into the crystal surfaces while pacing around.
That wasn’t all Dema had done to the place. Right now, one could leave the house into the yard from the main entrance and find paths connecting to the kitchen door on the left and two more entries into the wings on either side, or take a few thin steps straight ahead where the crystal structure suspended in the air to form a hugging path around Treeka’s trunk with a bench attached.
Dema had also thought of putting little engravings down the sides to warn Antankla off the edges and written directions down in Relief.
For their meeting right now, Dema had conjured something like an open treehouse around the point where Treeka’s trunk split in two.
Isobel was the only one standing up. It still didn’t make her much taller than the others, but she did have a head on most this way.
Snap, snap. This time, she shaved the pair of scissors around her finger — not to cut it off, obviously, since it was made of rock. Instead she seemed to… sharpen the blades? She’d been doing that for a while, honing them along shale and slate surfaces on her arms, performing dry-cuts against her fingers or mandibles, testing the sharpness on patches of moss.
“Are we going to start?” Bell asked, sounding only slightly impatient, sizzling cross-legged on a footstool of limestone, her acid skin bubbling against the surface of the mineral, discolouring it. Apparently, Dema had made this footstool for her for fun, and now Bell was very much having fun with it.
“Yes!” Isobel cheered out in her cute voice. “Sorry, got a little distracted there.” She stopped chafing herself against the pair of scissors, reluctantly. She visibly strained at the urge to snap the pair of scissors together again, and tore her gaze off them, instead pushing them into a thick patch of moss on her shoulder like a needle into a pincushion. “So…” she started, “I gathered you four here because we found out a lot about Theora’s side quest, after doing some digging in her logs. And I figured we should bring each other up to speed!”
Bell laughed sharply, but not unkindly. “Digging is quite a good word for it. It took ages.”
Isobel beamed at her. “So, first off… the weird thing.”
Theora looked at the weird thing. A thing that had never happened before. Treeka, Bell, Dema, and Iso had joined Theora’s party so she could share the weird thing, which was now hovering in front of everyone. A system notification Theora had received after returning to this world.
Target date for the completion of [Fetch Quest: Find the Thirteen Fragments of Time] has expired.
Target date has been extended.
Time remaining: 67 years, 2 months, 10 days, 22 hours, 3 minutes, 27 seconds, 842 milliseconds.
“Wow, that System sure looks passive aggressive,” Treeka commented. Even though the tree looked healthy, her spirit still showed her heart exposed through the missing parts of her body’s side underneath her backless dress.
Seeing Treeka like this still caused a little pang of guilt, so Theora looked at the ground. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of quest times being extended — that’s what makes this very weird. Originally, the System only gave me 250 years. The quest should have expired around five years ago because I was too slow.”
“Has this, like, ever happened?” Bell asked, shifting one of her legs on the footstool and causing the surface to flare up in bubbles again.
Theora scratched her head. “I’m not sure. I don’t remember.”
“I checked her — give or take — six thousand years of quest logs,” Isobel announced, “and it turns out she’s just never missed a deadline before.”
That brought silence.
Theora slumped into herself. “What? Why are you all staring at me like that?”
“Dunno,” Dema said, “I just assumed you’d, like, sleep through a quest every now and then?”
Isobel smiled and bobbed from side to side like a fish in water. “It seems, according to the logs, that when Theora decides not to do a quest, she declines it formally. And outside of her Main Quest, the System lets her. So, if Theora accepts quests, she tends to actually do them.” Iso cleared her throat. “That said, she has a tendency to complete them at the last second.”
Theora blushed. She came out here to learn about Fragments of Time, not to have her habits laid bare like that. “I figure if I am granted time, I should use it,” she murmured. “But if I take on a responsibility, I should fulfil it.”
“I don’t know Theora very well yet, and I hope she starts talking to me more from now on,” Treeka started, “but if what you all say is really the case, then isn’t the biggest anomaly here not that her deadline got extended, but that she missed it at all?” She searched in the other’s eyes for confirmation. “Like, you don’t start breaking habits like that for no reason after thousands of years?”
Dema and Isobel both nodded a long, and even Bell gave an affirmative shrug.
“True…” Dema murmured. “I wonder what was different this time?” She put on a thoughtful expression like she had no clue.
Bell laughed. “Well, probably you?”
“Wha! Me? But we’ve known each other for—” She halted, then scraped through her ragged cloak until she produced a crumpled piece of paper. She unfolded it, and read: “Lots of years!”
In a very low and quiet voice, Theora murmured, “Three-hundred seventy one years.”
Dema gaped at her.
“What?” Theora went, defensively. “I will not get caught out like last time when you knew how long we’d been ‘dating’ and I didn’t.”
Dema just muttered a little, “Damn!”
Bell cleared her throat. “Anyway, what I’m saying is, Theora had never had the chance to enjoy time away from the System”—Isobel looked like she wanted to object, but Bell pressed on—“after sealing away her own memories”—and this time it was Theora who wanted to object, because—“to live with the love of her life,” Bell finally closed with emphasis, and, well yes, that was new.
“To be fair,” Isobel added, “Mom and Mommy only started living together in that world during the last few weeks of their stay, but yes, I assume that’s it. Theora forgot and the System had no way to remind her like it might have usually done, since she was out of range.”
“I want to say something in my defence,” Theora declared. Eyes went to her, and she, a bit quieter, continued, “The System may not have been able to notify me, but [Beyond the Horizon, a Scry For Help], as well as [Head in the Clouds] likely could have, had the situation become urgent.”
“What do those do?” Treeka asked.
“I’m not sure about the first,” Theora answered, “other than that it calls out to me when Fragments of Time are nearby. I think. It’s a cuckoo Skill that I got a while ago, it apparently does not belong to me. It was probably partly responsible for drawing me to Lostina’s grave. I believe especially that first Skill would have objected if Time’s situation had gotten dire, since it seems to have a vested interest in helping me find the Fragments.”
“Actually, yeah,” Isobel said. She tapped a mandible against her lips, then caught it between her teeth as if it was unbehaving. After a few nibbles, she said, “Wait, that means… Oh. That’s curious, isn’t it? It means—”
“It’s a trap.” Bell said it in a deadpan voice, as if stating the obvious. Everyone looked at her, and when she noticed, she huffed, pushing herself up on her tendrils to gain height, and folded her legs, sitting on her thickest tentacles. “I know from checking my old adventuring logs. The System only attaches time frames if the quest becomes unsolvable afterwards. Like, when a [Sealer] seals a monster to be dispatched later, it will attach a date, because that quest can’t be completed if the time on the seal runs out. Otherwise, the time frames are ‘best before’ dates, so to speak. The System has a certain time window during which it will benefit from the completion the most. If you miss that window, you might receive a new quest with new rewards. The deadline will not be extended, though, it will count as a failed quest. It’s the System’s way of punishing you.”
Theora nodded slowly. It seemed reasonable enough.
“Well,” Bell continued, “in this case, though, there doesn’t seem to be a punishment. And apparently, if we understand the ‘Scrying for Help’ Skill correctly, Time is fine. That means the whole deadline was a scam from the start. But the System still wants her to complete the quest. Because… it’s a trap. You’re being coaxed.”
Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone to disagree; to defend the System, or give it the benefit of the doubt. But in the past, Bell would have been the one to do that. Though, perhaps this was so obviously a scam that even Bell couldn’t deny it. After all, her position didn’t used to be that the System never utilised underhanded methods; it was that the System used them for good reasons that may lie beyond anyone else’s understanding.
“Sounds about right,” Isobel said eventually. “250 years is quite an arbitrary time frame to begin with. It made sense for the Devil of Truth to be assigned exactly one hundred years, since that was how long the legendary seal would last. But there didn’t appear to be an associated event that would make this fetch quest run out after 250 years. It appears the System just made that up.”
“The extension is an odd number of years,” Theora said. “Even broken into months and days, it doesn’t align to an even number of years with any associated reference. So maybe this time, it’s real.”
Bell shrugged. “It probably thinks you called its bluff and is bluffing back now.”
Treeka had been following the discussion with an increasingly concerned expression, but that appeared to break the straw. She snapped: “So what. It’s a trap, so you’ll just not do it?”
Theora thought of the Fragments she already had. The arm, and the eye. “Even if it’s a trap, I’m inclined to piece Time back together.”
Treeka let out a breath of relief. “Thank you. Deciding this based on the System’s behaviour without factoring in that it’s a damn person stuck in the middle of nowhere whom we cannot even consult… That would have been awful.”
“Yeah,” Isobel said, nodding. “We just need to be wary of the System’s aims, but for now, collecting more pieces sounds like a good approach, for old Time’s sake. But! On that note, we must take into consideration the other big discovery of recent days.”
Her eyes went over to Theora. And it was apparently now that she could no longer hold back — she grabbed the pair of scissors from her moss cushion and snap, snapped them twice.
“Turns out, mom’s not been very kind to herself,” she spilled the beans. “I don’t say this to chastise you — [Obliterate] has swallowed up all your other fighting Skills, so sometimes, you’re just stuck with using it. But! I want us to find a way to make sure she has to use the Skill as few times as possible going forward. Preferably, never again! Which — admittedly is a bit of a stretch — all my current ideas involve her using it again for testing. Sorry about that.” She softly knocked her own head.
Treeka hummed. “Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding this, but isn’t the very reason why she got this Fragment quest in the first place because she has access to [Obliterate]?” She gave Isobel a second to object, but continued when she didn’t. “Like, that’s the point, right? She can [Obliterate] the fabric between worlds and retrieve the items from beyond our world. Nobody else can do that. She’s the only one who exists who can save Time.”
“Well, yeah,” Isobel said, chewing her lower lip with remarkably sharp cracking sounds. She was absentmindedly chafing the scissors against her underarms again. “That’s true. We’ve got some pretty strong people sitting around by now, so having to rely on Theora to win fights may not be as necessary as it used to be — especially if we can hold out for sixty two more years and retrieve Gonell from the Frame of the Lost, since she’s probably about as strong as Theora, in terms of offensive power. And more flexible since she has access to a varied Skill set.”
“She can also fly,” Theora supplied. “She’s amazing.”
“Really?” Bell asked. “If I am reading the archives correctly, Gonell spent a lot more time in her home world than Lostina did, before joining the Frame. Would she want to help us?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Dema said. “I think she left her home world for good — that’s why she was in there longer, to get everything sorted out. She then decided to spend the rest of her life with Lostina, and Lossi wants to spend it with Theora too. So there we are. I think Gonell’s gonna help us.”
Isobel nodded. Snap, snap. “So how do we recover the Fragments of Time without [Obliterate]? It’s an unsolved problem, but luckily, we have some possible avenues to consider. For one — if I may, I would like to use our Brat as an allegory. It is a complex system of countless rules and interactions, but crucially, there are… errors in them. And if we learn to exploit them, we can do things to the System that otherwise should not have been possible. And I was thinking — after seeing the destruction caused by [Obliterate], and how that doesn’t correspond to anything that should be possible in the world at all… what if we could use the same logic to coax some impossibilities from different realities as well?”
“You wanna hack reality?” Dema asked.
When Bell and Iso gave her questioning looks, Theora told them, “some kind of computer term from DespairLit. Exploiting loopholes, or something like that.”
They didn’t look entirely satisfied by the answer, but everyone winced at the sound Isobel suddenly made by scraping the pair of scissors over one of her slate surfaces again. Snap, snap.
“Now,” she said cheerily after grabbing the attention, “you might be wondering what I’m going to need this pair of scissors for. After all, I’ve been sharpening it for the past eleven hours. But to answer that, we need to talk about parallel universes!”
“How is there any of those scissors left?” Dema asked.
“I think they were making a joke,” Bell supplied.
Those scissors are just like me, Theora thought.
Meanwhile, Treeka looked around bedazzled. “Am I the only one hung up on the ‘parallel universes’ part? I can barely even leave the yard and y’all are going to be off to other worlds or what?”
Bell scoffed and murmured, “Not like they will take a child with them, either.”
That somehow put Dema in a really good mood. “My, we’ve got some spikey friends, don’t we? Let’s figure out a way for them to join us?”
“I’m not necessarily sure I want to join,” Treeka admitted, sounding a little more reserved. “Was just making a point. I’m happy waiting for y’all as long as someone stays with me in case I need to be chopped down and replanted.”
That had to be a joke, right? Theora couldn’t imagine anyone here would chop down Treeka.
“So, parallel universes!” Dema said, getting them back on topic. She seemed really excited about this. “Like, universes next to ours. You mean, like the one we just came from!”
Isobel nodded. “Yep. When I talked to that charming Invent One, it told me about an inherent constant each reality has, called Verisimilitude. Basically, that constant denotes how resistant that reality is to outwards change. The reality you both went to had one of the highest Verisimilitudes imaginable — in other words, it was very realistic. The laws of its nature are almost impossible to bend. It has great inherent consistency. Meanwhile, our reality allows us more leisure.”
“That’s why we have magic,” Dema says. “Magic’s great!”
“Yes, exactly. Now, my thought is that if we keep exploring other worlds, we could find one with even lower Verisimilitude than ours, and perhaps, someone there might be able to crack open the fabric between worlds even without a Skill like [Obliterate]. Imagine you’re in a reality where everything’s wonky and you run against a wall after building up velocity for countless hours. Right? Who knows what might happen. That said, the Fragments are hidden within different Realities, so while that might net us one or two, it may not be a sustainable solution.”
“I’m not sure I like this,” Treeka admitted.
“The main reason we were gone so long this time,” Theora started, “was because it was difficult to keep my memories of this place, both feeling weighed down by them, and the world itself rejecting them. Now that I am aware such effects can occur, I am reasonably certain I would not lose myself again in this manner when travelling abroad.”
Isobel nodded and turned to a confused looking Treeka. “I think she’s trying to say that next time, she won’t leave you behind again for so long.”
“I won’t leave you or anyone else behind again for so long,” Theora gratefully borrowed Isobel’s eloquent words to confirm the point.
“I will remember this,” Bell proclaimed. “You better don’t end up proving yourself wrong.”
“Okay, but that doesn’t explain the scissors,” Dema said. “Let ’em know about the scissors!”
“Well, the scissors are Dema’s and my idea of how we might be able to excavate Fragments more reliably,” Isobel announced. “I mentioned a Skill someone could use in another world to retrieve a Fragment. But if we’re being honest, Theora will always be the safest person to send anywhere to retrieve one, and she’s a little slow at making Skills. So, I thought, if not a Skill, then maybe we could use a tool. A tool to cut the fabric of reality.”
“Oh,” Bell said. “That’s why it’s a pair of scissors. You think the intuition of fabric and tailoring will make it easier for us to make a Skill to create the tool? Scissors are made of rock, so…” She looked over at Dema who gave a knowing nod.
Isobel smiled wide. “Yeah, exactly! All we need to do is turn this pair of scissors”—Snap, snap—“into a pair of SCISSoRs!”
Treeka frowned. “What’s a SCISSoR?”
Isobel said: “It’s short for ‘Scissors Cutting Incisions Severing Spacetime or Realities’.”
“That’s… a bit of a silly name, no?” Bell pointed out.
Iso swung her hands to point towards Dema. “Mom came up with it.”
Dema beamed. “Took me three hours!”
Bell nodded slowly, already moving past the interaction in her head. “You mentioned that Theora might need to use [Obliterate] again for testing. So I’m guessing you want to make a pair of scissors that operate like [Obliterate] does.”
“Yep!” Isobel chirped. “Exactly. And I know the perfect safe and cool place we can go to hold these experiments.”
Theora felt like she was watching a wonder unfold right in front of her eyes. All it had taken was for her friends to find out her deepest truths, and within a day they’d materialised an entire plan to help her out of the well she’d felt stuck in for so long.
Her cheeks hurt from smiling to herself — and yet she still kept having to wipe her eyes clean of little tears.
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!! Theoras gonna be ok 😊!!
