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Thresholder, ch 36, The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 3 (Bonus)
🕑 Added 2023-05-05 17:12:57 +0000 UTCI believe this will be the last "bonus" chapter for a bit, in part because I really do need to get the Worth the Candle exclusions doc out, and in part because the backlog has been appropriately shrunken down.
Early Birds are now 5 chapters ahead on Thresholder.
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Look, it’s late, but I want to get through these, because I promised I would.
It’s been a little scary, talking like this, wondering whether something I said would set you off. Sometimes someone can seem totally chill, and then a casual something sets them off. Maybe you heard me mention getting a tattoo, and that was where you drew the line, thinking that it was a degradation of the divinity of human form or something. Maybe I talked about keeping my bed warm and you assumed that Ming was right about me.
No, no, I’m not — I don’t need reassurance from you, okay? I’m not asking you to say that we’re still cool. I’m telling my story to you, as straightforward as I can, and if you’ve got a problem with any of it, I’ll stab you in your sleep.
Yes, that’s a joke, ha ha.
Anyway, we were on world five of seven. I was badly beaten, and spent some time in a field hospital at an outpost deep within a jungle. I probably could have kept moving if I’d really had to, but one of the locals saw me and exclaimed ‘my god!’, and I got put on bed rest until I stopped peeing blood.
The ‘locals’ weren’t local, they were from a far-off land and had spent two months crossing the ocean, then another two weeks traveling upriver on a steamer ship to get to where we were. They mistook me for a local, probably because of some differences in pigmentation. To make a long story short, I got invited to go on one of these expeditions once I was feeling better, and I took them up on it, mostly because my other option was being a nurse’s assistant. Lest you think I was exceptionally skilled at the medical arts, they mostly wanted a warm body, and there were plenty of brown-skinned porters with them, not locals either, but more local than from across the sea. That I had a weird black bracer and a needle for a sword was taken as an odd affectation, and seemed, to them, proof that I was some kind of jungle person.
Eventually I gave up and leaned into it.
We carried steamer trunks through the jungles, forded rivers, made camp after sometimes having only moved less than a mile through thick brush or with a heavy elevation change. There were twenty men when we started, and a combination of accidents and disease started picking them off one by one. I had the armor, but didn’t use it, keeping it hidden most of the time and never showing off its capabilities. Similarly, I didn’t tell anyone that I could bounce. I think maybe I was hoping that the next thresholder would push me off a cliff or something.
The expedition was looking for riches, following a myth that was apparently compelling enough to have drawn the attention of all kinds of explorers. The ones that had come back home had exotic plants in vivariums, stuffed animals to delight their friends, and occasionally riches, which I think was the big thing. The ‘sylvomania’ that gripped their continent was one of those curious things that attracted both the very rich and the very poor, and the expedition was a combination of down-on-their-luck men looking to score big and wealthy men who were almost certainly pissing away money.
I have to admit, I was a little checked out. I was thinking about the beating I had taken, still holding a lot of anger about that, and I spent my time looking outward, trying to find the next thresholder, watching the skies because I’d experienced one too many screaming arrows from the heavens. I wasn’t looking at the expedition too hard, I was rolling with it, going through the motions, that kind of thing.
There were a few sour notes. My job in the expedition, the thing they were bringing me along for, was mostly just menial work, stuff like serving tea, preparing food, setting up tents, that sort of thing. There were a few other hire-ons that did that too, but I was the expedition’s token woman. They called me surly more than once, and I guess I kind of thought that ‘okay, that’s who I am now, I’m the surly maid of this expedition’. A few of them came on to me, but I snapped at them, and it became one of those unfunny running jokes. I wasn’t just the surly maid, I was surly and didn’t like advances, which they thought was the height of comedy. I slept with my needle wrapped up beneath me, and I had my armor, but in spite of what I was worried about, I never ended up having to stab anyone in the middle of the night. Their liquor was weak as shit though, so maybe that was what held them back.
We were searching for a lost city in the jungle, one that was supposed to have known wonders beyond comprehension before it had fallen. There promised to be hillocks of gold and magic gems, all kinds of tall tales that I wasn’t certain weren’t true. I had seen enough in my travels to be willing to believe anything, no matter how outlandish.
The scenery was mostly trees and vines, brush and wild animals, life that had been crammed into a place that somehow seemed to go on forever and like there wasn’t enough room. Humanity wasn’t at the top of the food chain there, not by a long shot, but the predators were few and far between. We encountered them only rarely, a giant cat once and a snake as thick around as my waist another time. I was off gathering firewood with two other men when we got attacked by a baboon whose eyes, I swear, glowed red, his fur like needles. I slammed my armor around me and got a close shave in the process, then went toe to toe with the beast, bouncing off trees like a gumball until finally finding a place where the needle went in. The two men I’d been with had died, and I chose to act like a damsel in distress, lucky to have escaped with my life. They still thought that my armguard was a weird bit of jewelry.
There were lots of setbacks looking for the lost city, in part because it was lost. We would spend huge amounts of effort moving a few miles, get to the place where we thought the city would lay, and surprise surprise, find that it wasn’t there. We were losing men, drained of resources, and running out of places to check for a big city, which meant the men were getting testy.
Things came to a head when we decided to go into one of the tiny little villages that were dotted around the jungle, tucked in under the trees like a squirrel hiding nuts for the winter. They were small, skittish people, which made sense given the monsters they had to deal with. I got a few shocks there. The first was that I did speak the language, though poorly. I speak three languages, one from mom, one from dad. The natives spoke dad’s language, which was bizarre to me, more than all the magic powers and lost cities and showdowns in a space station.
The second shock came from the expedition, men I’d been with for almost two months at that point. They were trying to trade, working through the language barrier, with me as the intermediary, but the problem was that the villagers didn’t want to trade. They didn’t want anything to do with these strange men coming into the village, and soon there was shouting on both sides, with me in the middle, trying my best and utterly unable to keep up. They didn’t understand each other, but they did understand the emotions in the air, primarily anger.
The argument heated up, and at some point the expedition got out of control. They abandoned the notion of trade and started taking whatever they wanted, stealing food and supplies, whatever was at hand. A fight broke out, and I picked my side. It wasn’t with the men I’d been traveling through the jungle with.
It was lopsided. I had gotten pretty damned good with a sword, and my armor let me shrug off their attacks. It was payback for every little jab at me, every unfunny joke, the occasional leer, and they dropped one by one. I surprised them, no doubt about it, but I had been keeping my needle by my side the whole time, so they shouldn’t have been that surprised when I actually used it. Two of them tried to run when it became clear I was threshing my way through their numbers, and I bounced after them in my skintight black suit, leaping through the forest like some kind of deranged puma.
To be honest with you, I kind of thought that after I’d killed all those guys, a portal would open up and take me to the next world. I didn’t know how it worked, and thought maybe it was enough to right some wrongs, like that was the meaning of all this world-hopping. Instead, I ended up kicking around the jungle with the natives after we’d buried the bodies together. We knew that if anyone found out what I’d done, there was a chance for retribution, but expeditions got lost in the jungle all the time, and it was simple enough to cover the tracks.
I spent three weeks there, brushing up on my language skills and learning a bit about how the locals did things. They were grateful that I had defended them from the outsiders, even though I was an outsider myself. I took up work as a hunter, which I proved to be quite good at, and I learned to throw the needle like a spear, which was their tool of choice. I almost lost the needle a few times, which was always scary, but it was shiny and easy to see in the leaves if I looked around long enough.
We were attacked at the end of that three weeks, not by the other thresholder, who I thought was probably still out there, but by slavers. Slavery was alive and well in the world, though it had been treated with disdain by the members of the expedition. I had broached the subject carefully with them, worried that they’d say something like ‘oh, I have a fine slave back home’, because if they had said that, I’d have had to kill them all. I mean, I killed them all anyway, but I would have had to do it earlier, leaving me on my own in the jungle.
I killed the slavers, naturally, preventing these people from being forced to work on colonial plantations a hundred miles away. Hopefully you don’t consider this a hot take, but I hate slavery, always have. At any rate, once that was all over and done with, the villagers gave me the location of the lost city, which did exist after all. They said that it was a dangerous place that no one ever returned from, which definitely piqued my interest.
Looking back, maybe it was dumb to try to take on a lost city on my own, but I did it, and came out the other side with sun powers. I’m glossing over two very tough weeks here, a good helping of magic, and at least two times I nearly died. In addition to the power of the sun, which you got to witness firsthand, I had a sack of gold coins.
I’d gone this whole time and still seen neither hide nor hair of the other thresholder. I knew from past experience that sometimes one person is early and the other late, and sometimes they showed up pretty far from each other, but I wondered whether it ever happened that two thresholders came into the same world and just never ran across each other.
Once I had been blessed with the power of the sun by a lost civilization, I took the next obvious step and put a stop to slavery.
A lot of what I did was kill people. My armor made me pretty much impervious to gunfire and bladed weapons, and you need to be some kind of monster to bruise me with something blunt. I suppose a cannon would have been enough to put a dent in me, but cannons are nearly impossible to aim against a person, especially one that’s bouncing toward you. I did what I’d done with Gunther, but much more successfully and on a larger scale: I snuck into houses and slit throats. I mostly did this wearing only the armor, so black that I almost stood out, shiny needle in hand, and I left a calling card just so people wouldn’t think that Spontaneous Throat Opening was a new disease that was going around.
The first phase of this took place in a port town at the mouth of the river leading out from the jungle, the one you had to take a steamer ship up if you wanted to get into the heart of darkness. Once that was done, all the local companies involved in the slave trade demolished, all the slaves freed, I went abroad, to where the heart of the problem was.
I do not have any regrets about doing this whatsoever, by the way. I worry — worry is a strong word — that you’ll think that rational people should talk things out, that democracy will always save the day, that you shouldn’t kill people just because of a disagreement, but nah, they were responsible for all kinds of atrocities. I’d fuckin’ do it again.
My campaign against slavery through copious violence is what eventually ran me right into the other thresholder, which I had sort of expected might happen given that I was making waves large enough to swamp whole cities.
Clarence wasn’t some pro-slavery fanatic, he was an anti-extrajudicial-killing fanatic, or at least enough of a fanatic that he thought it was his duty to stop me. I thought this was pretty stupid, and explained so to his face on more than one occasion. If the law says that it’s okay to own another person, fuck the law. We fought about this a lot, but didn’t come to blows right away, in part because Clarence was — unusually for a thresholder — allergic to conflict.
The typical conversation would go like this:
“Hey,” he’d say, “You shouldn’t sneak into people’s homes and kill them.”
“Well, they could free their slaves and then I wouldn’t kill them,” I would respond.
“But they’d be financially ruined!” he would say. This was mostly true, because I was mostly going after people who were very rich, and whose riches depended on hundreds of slaves.
“I care more about destroying the institution of slavery than I do about whether these bastards have money,” I would reply.
“You need to stop, this can’t be how things are done, it has to happen with proper discussion, with checks and balances.” He’d get emotional, try to plead with me. “There are other avenues, the Manumission Society.”
“The Manumission Society celebrated their fiftieth anniversary,” I would say. “They celebrated like it was something to be proud of, rather than a mark of how slow they’d been going.”
And it always came down to the same thing from him, “Maya, you have to stop.”
My answer never changed. “No, I don’t think I will.”
It wasn’t like I was breaking into random houses and killing people. I picked my targets carefully. I made sure I knew what they looked like. No one knew what I looked like, because the armor conceals everything, and usually I wore a cloak for style and to make people shit their pants before they died. Clarence certainly didn’t know what I looked like, not until the very end. I felt bad for him sometimes, because he was just so damned empathic all the time, and he didn’t want to hurt me, didn’t want to fight. Problem was, a lot of that empathy was directed toward the people most directly involved in the slave trade, rather than toward the slaves themselves.
The wildest thing about Clarence was how many worlds he claimed to have been to: twenty-seven. He had mostly lost, and given how violent some of my conflicts had been, it was a real head-scratcher how he’d made it through that many and not wound up with a fractured skull. I never had a long sit-down with him to get the details on any of it, but he’d been through the most worlds of any thresholder I’ve met by a long shot.
I think in some ways he was the worst kind of asshole, a well-meaning asshole.
We fought a lot — physically, as well as words. He didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to kill me, and let me get away from him more times than I can count. I didn’t care if he lived or died, and given how often he interfered with my plans, would have preferred him dead, but he was a tough little cockroach. I think it was at about this point that other thresholders started having so many powers that it was hard to keep track of them all.
Clarence could make holes in himself, little cutaway places that showed his internal organs, and he could do it fast enough that a sword aimed at his guts would instead go through a hole there. I tried slicing through the side of the hole, and there was a barrier that the needle couldn’t slash though. He could teleport and leave behind ice sculptures, which I must have crashed through at least two dozen times. He had some kind of hold over scaly things, mostly snakes and lizards, which acted as his eyes and ears, and a few times, larger things he used to go on the attack. The last bit of kit he had was some kind of crazy scifi gun, powerful enough to put a pinprick hole straight through a mile of city, bursting pipes and drilling through walls, with seven different modes. It worked just fine on flesh too, and on my armor, in case you were wondering. He hit me with it a few times, but I had the energy of the sun, and could heal back eventually.
My little campaign against slavery continued apace, city after city as I made my tour of the continent. Turns out that if you present a credible threat to the lives of the people in charge, eventually they change their tune. You know, I had always wondered whether that would work, and it turns out that it does. There were bumps along the road, but the surest way for any of these people to reach their end was to stand up for the institution of slavery. It had a real chilling effect.
I’ve got to tell you about what has to be one of the single best moments of my life. One of these fucking politicians had gotten up on a stage, making a big show of it, and gave this speech in defense of the institution of slavery. He had a crowd there, some of them also slave owners, but most of them just the rabble, stirred up by my rampage. People were pissed about it, obviously, I hope that goes without saying. Anyway, this guy is up there, a big slavery booster, talking about how it’s necessary for the economy, how the slaves were being brought to a better life, how they were inferior, all this garbage. I was watching from up on top of a roof, across the street from the place he was giving this big speech — it was on some courthouse steps, ironically, or maybe not ironically, I don’t know.
So then he starts slagging me off, saying that I’m a villain, that I’m employing violence, the tool of the dimwit, that I’m skulking in the night like a ghoul, that I’m a coward who can and will be beaten by the strength and decency of the common man.
I threw my needle like a spear, as the villagers had taught me, and got him right in the chest.
It was a thing of beauty. I hope I can match it some day. It was also kind of a stupid thing to do, since I had to go down and retrieve my needle, which involved a lot more fighting and wading my way through the panicked crowd, but the government folded to my demands three days later, so maybe that kind of shock and awe was worth it just on the face of it.
I’m very serious that I ended slavery in that world. Maybe they’ll start it up again after enough years of me being gone, but I’m pretty hopeful that the reign of terror worked, and once the slaves were freed, the status quo had shifted. I’m sure there was some resentment about how it happened, and it’s not a great precedent, but that’s Clarence’s voice in my head.
I didn’t end up killing him, as much as I sometimes wanted to. He was absolutely on the wrong side of a very straightforward subject, his oozing reasonableness and dogged insistence on seeing ‘all sides’ repulsed me, but when it came down to it … I don’t know. I went soft on him, even though he wouldn’t admit that he’d been wrong.
Our final fight was in private, in the woods outside a country estate. I think with my work done, we both knew that it was time for it to be over. There was more for me in that world, if I was willing to stay, but I’d been there for what felt like too long, and after what I’d done, I thought I would probably be hunted for the rest of my life. Clarence had been a thorn in my side, but he’d ultimately failed to stop me, and he knew it. What was left but to do the thing that thresholders do?
So I beat him and let him live. He went off to world twenty-eight with another loss under his belt. I had fought him more than any other person, had stayed in that world a long time, and I almost felt an affection for him, except that the principal thing he’d done was to argue in favor of letting people own slaves, which is unforgivable.
I took my time with the portal, a half hour to gather up clothes, a bit of leftover gold that hadn’t been given to the slave-relocation funds, a fully stocked pack with food and water, all that kind of thing.
I found myself in a rain-slicked city, the smell of fumes hanging heavy in the air, glowing lights blotting out the night sky, and grime clinging to the graffiti-splashed walls. My first impression was that it felt like home, but I got picked up as a vagrant on my first night when I couldn’t find a place to sleep, and the differences between this place and my original world became apparent pretty quickly.
I’ve got a relationship with tech. The company I worked at, the one where I did marketing, they were a tech company. I got to know my way around the industry well enough to have some serious doubts. There were lots of promises without a hope of delivering, lots of breaking things and hoping that they would be fixed later, racing ahead without a plan, that kind of thing.
This was an urban hellscape, helped along by tech. I had been with the pirate crew around the dying stars, and they had prosthetics, but those prosthetics worked. The ones I was seeing around this place, they were dodgy, installed without safeguards because government oversight had been neutered, regular bad batches that had to be recalled, limbs and organs that would phone home to the corpo offices to get their marching orders.
Most of it was some kind of fanciful biotech, the kind that I couldn’t be sure wasn’t magic, which meant that instead of having bits of metal sticking out from their heads, they’d instead have white bumps like giant zits which would let them hook up to computers that you weren’t supposed to move too much for fear of damaging the tissue inside. The new limbs were lab-grown hypermuscle around a titanium core. They’d get reskinned with a lab-grown dermal layer to let them have makeup on demand and tattoos wherever they wanted. You get the idea.
So I got picked up as a vagrant thanks to a citywide surveillance system — genen birds that would spend their time watching people and then dock with something that would lick their brains. I was put into a home for about a week as they tried to get a sense of me, but I didn’t have any records in their system, and there was no protocol for registering someone like me. They took my needle for ‘safekeeping’ and tried to take my armor, but it couldn’t be removed from my wrist no matter how they tried to grease me up, and eventually they decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. I probably could have fought my way out instead of going with the cops that first night, but that seemed like a braindead move when I’d only been in the world for twenty-four hours.
Eventually I got kicked out onto the street with a pitiful stipend, matched up with a service that would house me and feed me in return for menial labor, part of some semi-indentured servitude scheme that also put tax dollars in the pocket of the plutos. The corpo life at the bottom of the ladder was a rat pod where I did number slinging. I kept up with that for approximately two days, then got the groove with some biohackers.
There was a lot of slang, almost a painful amount, and they thought I was hexane for a long time until I thrust my plug. I’m still shaking it off, honestly. Sometimes they’d talk and it was jargang — which I later found out was a portmanteau of jargon and slang. But I got along with them, maybe because I had some experience with the pirates and knew how an underground outlaw group operated. I also had some wild stories that I was sure they didn’t believe, even after I’d demonstrated the armor and the light-bending. Even though they couldn’t explain the stuff that I could do, they thought I was probably a labbie — lab-grown human — or an escaped testie — test subject. I swear half the slang they made up on the spot, like they were allergic to straightforward language. Some of that was because of the eyes in the sky and the ears on the ‘teers — uh, from volunteers, I think, a derogatory word for all kinds of people who opted into the corpo bullshit. But these were also literal extra ears, which acted as listening devices. Anyway, there were lots of people who would rat us out for some extra cred — and again, these are literal rats, bioengineered to be fed anonymous gossip.
I was riding high off the last world, feeling good about myself, so I looked up at those big corpo towers, then down at the slimy streets and thought ‘you know what, I can do something about this’.
The short version is that I got put in my place, and I don’t think I’ll give you the long version. It would probably suffice to say that while I had been virtually invincible in the last world, I was anything but in this one. They had tasers, automated bone-guards, bullet-proof windows, and the aforementioned looking glass spying out over the sprawling city. They had flying robots — flapping feathered wings — which I could never find a way to beat. Best I could do was blind them, and that only worked for so long before they had a counter up.
Worst hit I took in that world wasn’t a hit at all, it was a virus, something handwove for yours truly. I was out for a week, guts boiling, and I probably would have died if it hadn’t been for my biohacker pals doing some truly heinous trial-and-error on my fragile body.
The other thresholder was on the corpo side, and didn’t seem to care one whit about anything we were doing. He was an elf, I’m pretty sure, and not just someone with the mods to look like an elf. He fancied himself an artisan and rocketed up the ranks of the corpo towers, becoming lab-chief in about two months. The guy was cutthroat and bloodthirsty — there was a blood-drinking subculture among the corpo elite, reason being nutrients or something like that.
I spent a lot less time in that world, which was good, because I kind of hated it there. I wasn’t the avatar of a god, I wasn’t a near-invincible abolitionist, the scenery sucked, and I wanted out. It took getting my ass handed to me a few times for me to get to that point, but yeah, not my favorite world, especially once the bioweapons came out to play.
I won, but in another sense, I’d call it a loss, since I had basically no shot at accomplishing what it was I wanted to accomplish. I tried, even killed a few people at the top, but the corpos were resilient to a ‘pick off the leaders’ approach, in addition to being much tougher targets.
I guess you probably want to know about Eli, the elf, but I never got much backstory on him. He had a magical cleaver that he’d whip out at the slightest opportunity, deflecting bullets with it and whipping it at me fast enough that the air would scream. I don’t know if it was one power or a bunch of them working together, but he always had another cleaver, either duplicates or something else. He got stronger the longer we were both in the world, new cutting edge augments added every time we met. I had a few augments of my own, thanks to some hacks to loosen the restrictions on the nanites, but I was using weaker stuff, tried-and-true, most of it from before the corpo takeovers, tested for twenty-some years and without any need for maintenance. Part of it was technophobia, part of it was looking toward the next world and not wanting to outwardly be a freak. My internals are all great, my muscles stronger, bones harder, on top of what the sunlight inside me provides. There’s nothing that needs some special spray every six months, nothing that would require a routine injection at the five-year mark, since that’s the kind of stuff I definitely wouldn’t be able to get.
Eli had a bundle of tricks up his sleeve, including a mud one that I never fully understood, and some kind of plant thing that I only saw him use once — it was pretty much useless given how little plant life there was in the sprawling city, since the green spaces had been gutted by the corpos.
I killed Eli with a virus, and I’m pretty sure that I managed that only because I had help from inside the corpo he was working for. In his race to the top of the ladder, he’d made some enemies, and while the corpos stood together, the insides of them were buzzing anthills of betrayal and politicking. I had lived the corpo life back home, and knew the stock personalities well enough, even if everything was amped up by the greed, corruption, and techno. We had greed and corruption back home, even in the place I worked — maybe especially in the place I worked — but it wasn’t like that.
I went into the next world prepared. Say what you want about that biocorporate hellscape, but they had lots of shops with all kinds of neat stuff, and I spent some time getting stylish, as well as loading up with all the necessities. I’d seen a range of tech through the worlds I’d been in, and knew that it might be a long time before I saw anything like it again.
I landed in a world of magic, quaint by the standards of the megacity I’d spent most of my time in, but not as untechno as I’d been fearing. They had electricity, running water, but no video. I only saw smaller cities, ten thousand or less people in them, and from what they said, that was basically all there was. Each of those cities was protected not by walls, but by an electrical machine they used called a ‘lantern’, which was meant to keep the monsters away. Inside the lantern’s protection, it was pretty idyllic, but outside, you’d be dead meat in twelve seconds flat. Or, maybe not you, and maybe not me, but the common people of that world, yes.
Michaelous was the wizard I mentioned, a tall guy who specialized in the multiverse. He found me right away, called by the same signal from before, though he wasn’t using sophisticated signal analysis to isolate a specific wavelength, he had just hooked up a rough-cut pink crystal to a coil of copper wire and was using his own magic through it. When he got to me, I was in the middle of a fight with some tar-skinned creatures. I was holding my own but running low on resources, stored sunlight in particular.
We made it back to his wizard’s tower, fighting off more of the monsters as we went. They came in waves that seemed to be endless, and I’d later learn that was more or less right, that so long as you stayed out, more and more would keep coming, grinding you down until you were tapped out. Michaelous had only left the safety of his tower because he wanted to see what the signal meant, and just from one look at me, he knew that I wasn’t from his world.
His tower was safe, protected by a lantern he kept fed on his own, and he had a laboratory there where he worked on his understanding of the multiverse. He was excited by me, and I was excited by him, and we spent the first few days just talking to each other about what we knew. Some of what I’ve told you here is in order because I talked with him about it a few months ago. I think I’ve told it better the second time through.
Everyone in his world had a unique power of some kind, something you could get from eating the ‘hearts’ of the monsters, and then on top of the unique one, you could branch out into other powers.
My telekinesis is the unique one I got, linked to, at the moment, three objects, though I’m hopeful that it’ll be more once we get to be second sphere, because it seems like something that internal alchemy can help with. The needle is an obvious go-to link, but I rotate the others depending on what I need, weapons, defense, utility, whatever. It takes a bit to change. I think your suit is a bit too big for me to move, but I guess we could test it. Everything else was pretty minor, since I wasn’t in the world for long enough.
Michaelous had a multiverse power, and he thought once he got strong enough, he’d be able to move between worlds, not like a thresholder does, with the portals, but on his own. As it was, he could bring in things from other worlds by concentrating hard enough, holding out his hand and summoning lamps, books, weapons, all kinds of other stuff. His tower was filled with artifacts he’d pulled in from other worlds, most of them junk.
I stayed with him for a month, always worried the other thresholder was going to show up. Michaelous could feel the multiverse, and thought that we would have a day of warning, maybe more, but I didn’t quite trust his magic. I didn’t quite trust him, though part of that was because I knew I was moving up the power rankings. You’ll understand when you grow up into a full-fledged thresholder, but it gets to be a lot, higher stakes, better powers. I do dearly love bouncing around, but it’s weak compared to the armor, which is top tier. Since what you get varies, I figure that there are some real unfair powers out there, stuff that would get me stomped.
I kind of think I’ll die doing this, but I have no intentions of stopping. Maybe I’ll get to stop slavery again. Maybe I’ll assassinate some dictator. Mostly I’ll be going up against incredible assholes, as I think the record shows, and if they’re in this system we’re in, gaining power as they go, then yeah, I think staying a part of it and doing my best to stop them is probably going to be the best thing that I could possibly do with my life.
Right, Michaelous. We were buddy-buddy. He’d been living alone for a long time, sequestered, and I guess I was a breath of fresh air. We set up traps around his wizard’s tower, waiting for the other guy to show up, but we had some breathing room. It took three weeks before Michaelous’ periodic checks turned up anything, and we put on some packs and trekked out to face the monster and the other thresholder.
Michaelous called it The Spell like it was this ominous thing on the horizon, a working whose shape could be felt across the multiverse even with his relatively tame power. He thought that some wizard had done it and the whole thing had gone very, very wrong, multiplied out to every universe somehow. It was a summoning spell, something that was meant to call in people to a time and place that would suit them, but it called in people to both sides, and sometimes the sides were entirely defined by the people that were called in, and it was always the same people. I wasn’t sure I bought it. He didn’t have computers, didn’t have anything really sophisticated to guide him, but he was the expert on the multiverse, and he did predict this allies business, so that’s a point in his favor.
We arrived at the place where the other thresholder was supposed to be and set up a little lantern, not at the site, but at a place up on the hills. I had brought a sniper rifle from the last world.
He was pasty white and bald, and caught the bullet as it was speeding toward his head. Right in the moment, my first thought was that I was fucked, but he was slower when the second one came in, and the third made a stain of blood on his tight white wraps. He turned to white smoke, which drifted away in the wind, and from there the chase was on, like we were hunting a wounded deer.
The inky black monsters were on us the entire time, and we had to fight them off. It was a little better when we kept moving, but we were getting further from the tower, and Michaelous couldn’t move nearly as fast as I could.
Night came, and we lost him. We were too far to go back, so we made for a nearby town. It would be the first time I’d seen a proper city in this world, and we figured that the alabaster malefactor might have gone there.
We were greeted with drawn swords and a few bows at full draw. They didn’t like or trust outsiders, and expected any incoming caravan to give notice well in advance of anyone showing up. Michaelous explained that we were traveling wizards, and they didn’t seem to like that, but they let us in and gave us shelter, with an agreement that we’d pay our way by going beyond the lanterns and hunting monsters for them. The more monsters you hunted, the more hearts you got, the stronger you got, at least until you made one wrong move and died. From where I was standing, it was thresholding in a nutshell, and I took to it in those first few days while we tried to work on next steps.
We’d lost our guy, and didn’t have a good way of finding him, so we spent some time in the town, which was where he would eventually turn up unless he could just camp in the woods with impunity.
We didn’t see him for another two weeks though, and in the meantime, I was powering up, delivering monster hearts by the basketful, gorging on them to fast-track toward powers, and making friends with the locals.
It turned out that the white wraith was around town just like we were, powering himself up just like I was. He had seemed like he’d stick out like a sore thumb, but it turned out that he could borrow someone’s skin by way of killing them. He’d slipped into town ahead of us, found a house with a lonely old guy, killed him, and assumed his life.
When it came time to fight, we fought hard, and when I was winning, he ran off into the woods, I guess hoping that the monsters would help more than they hurt.
The chase went on for a long time. We had thought it might happen, and prepared as much as we could. Michaelous was a wizard, mind you, and had spent some time developing a tracking technique, which meant that there’d be no escaping in the middle of the night. Eventually we reached a giant lake and found on the black sands with driftwood around us and monsters trying their best to join the fray.
I’m sure the ivory specter had some kind of story, and all we did was fight. I don’t even know if I saw all his tricks before we finally got him. He had a superspeed thing that we had to chunk through, the turning to smoke thing which he couldn’t do too much, an amulet that let out blasts of freezing cold that brought my armor to a halt, and three different sets of weapons, though I don’t think all of them were proper powers, not in the sense that Michaelous seemed to think The Spell tried to give us.
I didn’t have my pack with me, we hadn’t had time to grab it, and we were far enough away from the city that I didn’t think we could make it there and back. The portals seem like they stay open for a pretty long time, but not forever.
I said my goodbyes to Michaelous. He was wounded, but promised that he’d find a path back to the city. I hope he made it, but I really wish it had been a sure thing.
The next world was a giant ring, though I really doubted that I’d see all of it. I bounced my way up to the top of a rock to get a good view and found myself in a temple with a bunch of warrior monks. A very short time later, the other thresholder shows up, and we fought right away, except he was super weak, and as I was kicking his ass, I was thinking to myself ‘oh man, maybe this is what Michaelous was talking about, the composite scenario, this nerd had said that he’d only been to three worlds, and he sure fights like it’.
If you’ve got questions, I’ll take them tomorrow. It’s past my bedtime.
Comments
patreonizing
I'd forgotten about Glimwarden...hope that gets finished someday, it was a super interesting setting. Not sure how I'd feel about Thresholder intersecting with Aerb or Inter; those places feel "complete" in such a way that it'd feel weird to retcon/shoehorn in these rather different mechanics. Nevermind the respective in-universe explanations for Exceptionally Powerful Strangers showing up.
Darryl Greensill
So … the second setting is Cyberpunk 20xx, the third is Wales’s own story Glimmerwatch, but what’s the first?
Leaf
Yea she did the thing Perry did with attacking right off. But while Perry has grown a little since then she hasn’t.
