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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 132, The Last Days II
🕑 Added 2022-09-05 17:51:57 +0000 UTC~~~~
In the interests of trying to follow Kell through time, Alfric stayed at the house with Vertex. This was partly to watch, and partly to set himself up for the next day. There were a number of ways in which that wasn’t ideal, but he didn’t want to miss it if Kell had a midnight visitor. Obviously Alfric couldn’t stay awake through the entire night, but he would wake at the witching hour as was custom, and then follow Kell starting in the morning, mostly to make sure he knew where the wizard was going.
With his aunt Penelope in Pucklechurch, Alfric would be doing the day multiple times, and using the window in various ways, or the other forms of watching the past available to them. He had a direct line to Penelope in the form of an entad earring, to help them coordinate, and when he went to sleep, it would be with the understanding that he might be called in any number of directions, either back to Pucklechurch, or to follow some other lead.
“It’s really not like him,” said Grig. He was leaning up against a wall. “I mean, he’s dependable. That he’d leave isn’t hugely surprising, but that he’d do it like this is.” He clucked his tongue. “I liked Kell.”
“I didn’t really know him,” said Alfric. “He seemed fine.”
“‘Fine’?” asked Grig with a raised eyebrow.
Alfric shrugged. “Like I said, I didn’t know him, I hope you don’t take ‘fine’ as a slight, I just never really saw anything that impressed me.”
“Not even when we were doing the dungeon escape?” asked Grig. “That was when I first thought he had something. I was thrilled to have him on the team, even with the elevation mismatch and the fact that we already had Josen — have Josen, I guess.”
It was just the two of them in the second floor dining room, though Lena, the young widow who ran the boarding house, had been in and out. Kell, in the past, was eating a very late dinner. The offset of the window was a bit more than three full days. He was talking with Lena, but Alfric had taken the glasses off so he couldn’t hear. If he needed to know what was said in that conversation, he would ask Lena, but it seemed unlikely that it would provide information, which would mean intruding on Kell’s privacy for essentially no reason. In theory, Alfric could have gotten permission from Lena, but he preferred not to do that.
“Do either of you need anything from me?” asked Lena. She was wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m about to turn in, but from what you’ve said, we’ve had this conversation before.”
“We haven’t,” said Alfric. “But it has been had. I was given information from my aunt. Nothing that needs to be discussed.”
“I had a dalliance with Kell,” said Lena, unprompted. “You know that?”
“I do,” said Alfric. He glanced at Grig. “It’s not the sort of thing that I would have mentioned in mixed company.”
“I don’t mind if he knows,” said Lena, sparing a glance at Grig.
Grig’s eyebrows were raised. “That, uh, is very … unexpected.”
Lena came around and looked at the window that Alfric was holding, where their conversation was taking place. “He was very sweet, but unexpectedly lonely.”
“When was this?” asked Grig. “Sorry, not to snoop, but —”
“The night after this,” said Lena, gesturing at the window. She was watching her own lips move.
Alfric felt uncomfortable. There was no need for her to share. The entire thing was a catastrophe of disclosure and stepping over the bounds of privacy, and Alfric thought it likely that he’d have dropped it entirely if he could have been assured that everyone who’d been taken had been taken voluntarily. Unfortunately, because of how the adversary operated, it was impossible to know whether coercion was used in certain circumstances. There was something that rankled about the way it was done, the total circumvention of provincial and national controls. Alfric really did believe that everyone had secrets and should be allowed them, but this felt like a step too far.
“Let me know if you want to talk, but if we’ve already gone over it, I suppose it’s not necessary.” Lena took her eyes from the window and looked at Alfric. “I do hope you find him.”
Alfric gave her a slow nod.
He didn’t really know the details. He didn’t want to know the details. From what Penelope had told him, it didn’t appear to have much to do with Kell leaving, except maybe that it spoke to his state of mind. The short version was that this late night talk they were having three days in the past wasn’t the first time they’d had an intimate conversation. She’d been widowed very early, a tragedy by any accounting, and hosting dungeon parties had never been her plan. The liaison they’d had was, in her version, one born of a mutual yearning for something that wasn’t each other. Alfric didn’t really understand that — he couldn’t imagine sleeping with someone because there was something else he really wanted.
When Lena left, off to bed, it was just him and Grig again.
“We had some rules,” said Grig. “For living with a chrono.”
Alfric was watching the window. “With Lola.”
“With Lola, yeah,” said Grig. “One of the rules was that you don’t tell a chrono anything, ever, because they could use it against you in an undone day. And another rule was that you never admit to anything that a chrono says you’ve done in an undone day, never take it for granted, because that might just be a way of eliciting a confession, or maybe she’s just trying to get in your head.”
Alfric looked at him. “That’s the sort of thing we’d really like to avoid people thinking,” said Alfric. “There are reasons that I try to be a stickler about the rules.”
“You’re a stickler because that’s who you are,” said Grig. “Which we never really appreciated about you, at the time. We were fools, I guess.”
In the window, Lena reached over and touched Kell’s hand. It was tender, and he turned his hand up to meet hers. It was hard to tell without sound, but Alfric thought they were silent. He tried to stay clinical about it, to treat this as a cleric would treat viewing a body, but it was difficult. He found himself liking Kell a little more, empathizing with him.
“Water under the bridge, so far as I’m concerned,” said Alfric. He looked at Grig. There were changes, he thought, from when they’d known each other a year ago. Grig seemed to have put more effort into his appearance, with more prominently cut clothes and a bit more attention to his grooming. “Or … maybe not. Maybe there’s still some resentment.”
“Yeah, I would think that was, uh, understandable,” said Grig. He shifted his weight a moment. “Most of how we — our teams — talk together is through Marsh and Hannah. I had floated the idea of us doing a dungeon together, same location, same day, and Marsh had passed it along to Hannah, and then I never really heard anything more about it.”
Alfric sighed. He glanced at the window, where not much had changed. Lena was saying something, lips barely moving, murmuring. “We had a string of failures, you must know that.”
“Yeah,” said Grig. “I understood, I never pressed, I just … I don’t know.”
“You want to be friends,” said Alfric.
“Eventually we’re going to leave the area,” said Grig. “I mean, we would have, if Kell hadn’t left us. I was thinking it would be good if we could leave together, set up some kind of pooling of resources, especially if the Hannah and Marsh thing keeps working out for them. Your dungeoneering years are supposed to be a time when you go out and see the world, and I figured it would be nice to be in Tarbin or Kiromo or somewhere if we all knew each other. I know Mizuki well enough, and Hannah a bit, since she’s here sometimes, and you.”
“What are you going to do without Kell?” asked Alfric, turning his eyes to Grig.
“Ah,” said Grig. He looked away. “I’ve got no idea. Recruit again, I guess, though I’m not sure how long we should give it. Maybe he’ll come back. Maybe you’ll find him. I think we had a good string of dungeons with him on the team, kind of opposite your own luck, and it felt like that was proof that we would survive without Lola. Josen is back on board with the whole idea of dungeoneering, Mardin is looking at our growing funds with a smile, and Marsh is — with Hannah, mostly, but in high spirits, even if he talks about her a bit too much.”
Alfric sighed. The past-Lena got up from the table, her fingers momentarily lingering with Kell’s, and she left. “Why tell me all that chrono stuff, about how it was with Lola?”
“I don’t know,” said Grig. “I think … I didn’t really tell you?”
“Didn’t you?” asked Alfric.
“I’m a bard,” said Grig, placing a hand against his chest. “We’re storytellers by nature. Even if we’re lousy musicians, even if we place our emphasis on the magic, it’s part of the tradition. So I told you, but I didn’t tell you. But I do want to, if you’ll listen.”
Alfric looked in the window. He had volunteered to come watch Kell, before anyone else could do it, and he’d known that it would mean spending time with Vertex. Maybe this was what he’d been after, though he wasn’t entirely sure. “Go ahead.”
“Lola would tell us these stories about what had happened in the dungeons,” said Grig. “She would say that I had broken and run when a monster came bearing down, dropping my song and ensuring the deaths of others. She would tell Josen that his staff had a defect and had exploded, blinding him before his head was lopped off by a monster. He’d spend the rest of the day checking over and rebuilding his constructs. She was, I think, trying to get at our insecurities, or maybe she was just poking us to see what would happen. These were in days that she kept, mind you. She told Mardin that he’d frayed his relationship with Oeyr so badly that he’d begged for a reset. It often felt like she was lying, but it was so hard to say, and there was a germ of the truth, I think, though not necessarily because it had happened, just because it was what we feared would happen.”
Alfric pursed his lips. “That’s worse than I’d thought.”
“I talked to your parents,” said Grig. “Mostly to make sure that she wouldn’t get out.”
“Good,” said Alfric.
“There was other stuff,” said Grig. “Things that were more personal. She sat me down to tell me that she’d slept with me on an undone day, that it was something she needed to get off her chest in the interests of disclosure. It threw me for a loop. I mean, she was attractive, in a scary way — no offense.”
“None taken,” said Alfric. “I don’t think I ever forget that she was my girlfriend, but I’m far enough past it that sometimes it sits below the surface.”
“I don’t know if it happened, or if it happened in the way that she said it happened,” said Grig. “It was a ‘disclosure’ she made a few times, and not just to me, though I never found out about the others until after she was gone.”
“You didn’t talk?” asked Alfric.
“I don’t know,” said Grig with a shrug. “Not about that. Mardin always thought she was harmless, and if I’d gone to him, I think he’d have laughed and said it was hilarious, even if he really didn’t think that was true. Josen never talks about basically anything but magic or dungeons. When I said before about how we understood living with a chrono, it’s not just that you should clam up around the chrono, it’s that you should clam up around other people too. Part of that was just because she’d drop things like ‘oh, so and so told me in an undone day’.”
Alfric sighed. “She was the worst.”
“She could have been more awful,” said Grig. “But I think part of why I’m telling you this is that we talked about Lola with Kell, and he didn’t really understand it. He felt like he’d have just gotten out of a bad situation. For him, you make your own way in the world and if things are going wrong, it’s up to you to change that. Self-reliance, I guess.”
Alfric thought about that for a bit. “I think part of why you’re telling me is because you want to show that you suffered,” said Alfric. “You want to say that you’ve done your penance and should be forgiven.”
Grig stared at him for a moment, open-mouthed. “I — that might be true.” He kept his mouth closed and his eyes on Alfric. “I do think some of the suffering was, kind of, ‘well, I guess this is what we signed up for’, like we’d decided our own fates and anything bad that happened was kind of, uh, our own fault.” He frowned. “‘Penance’.”
“Or you were just trying to connect in a way that we never did when we were on the same team,” said Alfric. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You’re not over it,” said Grig. “Which I knew.”
“I think about it sometimes,” said Alfric. “Aside from the unstable dungeons we’ve been getting — which is admittedly a big sticking point — we’re a good team. I like them all. But I do wonder what it would have been like to have that other life, which was taken from me.”
“You know how it was though,” said Grig. He waved a hand. “I know what you mean, I don’t want to get into it, I want to move past it.”
“We can just not be friends,” said Alfric. “Having friends now, I’m not sure that we were ever friends. But it’s fine by me if we just don’t see each other.”
“Is it fine?” asked Grig. “For me, it’s been like a rock in the bottom of my shoe.” He shifted his position against the wall. “Sorry, I don’t mean to hold you captive.”
Alfric looked at the window. Kell was writing in a small notebook. It was a draft of a letter to Mizuki. He didn’t need to read it though, since in a different version of the day, they had found the notebook and read through it. The message they’d given to themselves was that there was nothing much to be gleaned from it, since there didn’t seem to be any missing pages. They had an entad that could show ‘history’ of papers, so had already seen Kell writing this note, along with virtually every time the individual pieces of paper were touched by Kell. It never hurt to get some perspective on the past from multiple angles, but he trusted his undone self to have done a good job, and didn’t need an additional look into Kell’s private thoughts about Mizuki.
“I think a rock in the shoe is a good way to describe it,” said Alfric.
“I don’t expect all to be forgiven,” said Grig. “I just … would like a path forward. Let the past be the past?”
Alfric looked down at the window and started to laugh, and after a moment, Grig chuckled, though he didn’t seem to find it quite so funny.
“It’s even funnier because I’m a chrononaut,” said Alfric. He smiled at Grig. “From what I know of Kell’s schedule, he’s going to bed soon. I’ll stay in the room, wake at the witching hour, check that he’s still there, then follow him in the morning or do whatever else my aunt tells me to do.”
“You let me know if you need anything,” said Grig, rapping his knuckles on the wall. “It would be great if we got Kell back, but even if you do figure out where he went, I’m not sure he’s going to be back in the party. I’ll be searching for replacements, I guess, going through the people we rejected the first time around, I suppose.”
“Good luck,” said Alfric.
Grig gave a nod, and a last look, then made his exit. In Alfric’s opinion, that was probably what he should have done fifteen minutes prior.
Kell had his own room, which was small, meant for a child that had never come. Alfric was diligent, and waited until Kell was actually in bed, then left for his own ‘room’, the garden stone, which he’d brought with him using the lute they were calling the Packer’s Lute. It could ‘mark’ objects and then call them to him with a chord, which meant that it was almost like having them in extradimensional storage, except that they would hang around wherever they’d been.
The garden stone was a nice, familiar place, and Alfric had his own small room there, which was really more of a frame, since he hadn’t seen any need for solid walls. There were thick curtains to block the light and a hammock that reminded him of his room at home, which he slipped into and fell asleep in, knowing that he’d wake up at the witching hour.
~~~~
<What do you mean the days haven’t reset?> asked Mizuki. <What does that mean?>
<It means that we’re fresh,> said Alfric. <No one from the guild has a check in, which means that not even the highest priority chrononaut has taken his day.>
<So what do we do?> asked Verity.
<We go about the day like normal, give any information we find over to Penelope, she attempts to reset the day and probably someone gets the jump on her,> said Alfric. <Which means that she won’t remember, I won’t remember, and none of us will remember. Some uncle or aunt elsewhere in the world remembers, and since we’ve given no information to them, and will get nothing back from them, it’s all essentially moot.>
<Lame,> said Mizuki.
<We’ve probably had this conversation dozens of times before,> said Hannah.
<Thousands, more likely, though I guess I don’t always give a heads up.> said Alfric. <But we need to do everything more or less as we planned to, both for the sake of consistency and to make sure the day is failsafe.>
~~~~
<What do you mean the day has only been reset once?> asked Mizuki. <What does that mean?>
<It means that we’re virtually fresh,> said Alfric. <There’s a single check in from the guild, from my great-grandfather, which means he’s taken the day once. He’s the highest priority within the guild, which means that he’s got a duty to report a provisional all-clear, nothing that needs highest-level activation of resources or a bunch of people pointed at a problem.> He wasn’t the highest among all chronos, just within the guild, which meant that the day had likely been reset a few times, but that was the sort of quibble he’d been finding people really didn’t care for him to make.
<So what do we do?> asked Verity.
<We go about the day as normal, give any information over to Penelope, she attempts to reset the day, and probably someone gets the jump on her,> said Alfric. <Which means that none of us will remember. Some uncle, aunt, or elder elsewhere in the world remembers, and since we’ve given no information to them, and will get nothing back from them. It’s all essentially moot.>
<Lame,> said Mizuki.
<We’ve probably had this conversation dozens of times before, ay?> asked Hannah.
<Thousands, more likely,> said Alfric. <But we need to do everything more or less as we planned to, both to make sure the day is failsafe and for the sake of consistency.>
~~~~
<So chrononauts have this pecking order,> said Mizuki. <And you’re basically right down at the very bottom. And since most people haven’t gone yet, from what you know, and your aunt Penelope hasn’t gone, then most of this is pointless.>
<Not pointless,> said Isra. <Necessary.>
<You’ve said that you have five minutes after the witching hour to write a guild message,> said Verity. <Why doesn’t everyone check in?>
<Some people sleep through the witching hour,> said Alfric. <Waking up in the middle of the night just to get an extra edge that you probably don’t need isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. And besides, it changes things. If I looked at the check-ins, I behave differently, even if I don’t mean to.>
<I think I’d just not look at the guild channel, honestly,> said Mizuki.
<Some people don’t,> said Alfric. <There are ways for people to contact you, if they need you, and guilds aren’t for everyone.>
<Odd to think about how many times we’ve had this conversation and then just not remembered it,> said Hannah. <Dozens, I’d suppose.>
<Realistically, a lot more,> said Alfric. <I guess I don’t usually report on what’s been going through the guild, so maybe not, but my guess would be at least in the thousands. Hang on, let me do some math.>
~~~~
Many of their best resources had been exhausted in the first day — which was actually a great many days, thanks to chrononauts. Looking into the past was a quite rare ability for an entad to have, the same as the ability to affect party channels, guild messages, or things like that. Doing so perfectly was even rarer.
People liked to sometimes talk about a theoretical ‘ultimate’ entad. It was a sort of game that you could play, where you took something, often a pretty junk entad that could be had for relatively little at an entad shop, and imagined what it would be like if all its limitations were stripped away. A bracer that only worked on mice could be more powerful if it worked on all rodents, and more powerful if it was all four-legged mammals, and so on. Part of the trick, if you were playing the game, was trying to expand the scope without jumping up to effortlessly warping all reality. Alfric had always been surprisingly good at the game. He didn’t consider himself to be a creative person, but poking at the hidden assumptions behind entads really appealed to him, and it felt creative to show that he was clever in how he’d minorly relax some limitation that no one had mentioned was there.
The ‘ultimate’ pastwatching entad would be one which gave a complete view of the past at any time or location, and further was capable of finding whatever time and location you might want through some kind of table of contents or index similar to what the wortiers could magic into a book. All you would need to think in the direction of this entad would be ‘Kell meeting with a person’ and it would show, in chronological order, all the times that had ever happened. Of course, if you were playing the ultimate entad game, you could imagine that it would show you precisely what you wanted to see even if you didn’t know how to formulate it. And why stop at the past? Why not the future? Why not just show where Kell was at that very moment?
Nothing like that existed, of course. There was some speculation that the Editors had some powers they held in reserve, tools that they’d embedded into the fabric of reality that only they could access, but so far as Alfric knew, that was something that had come purely from someone’s imagination.
Penelope had acquired some of the best pastwatching entads in private hands, and they weren’t all that good.
Alfric had a bracelet that could give five second glimpses into the past, but which was virtually uncontrolled, showing anywhere between one to thirty days prior in the same location. It could be repeated ad nauseum, but it was unpleasant and undirected. Worse, it gave no hints to when the five second slice of time was, which meant that it had to be figured out from context. You could, in theory, use it more than ten thousand times a day … but you would get almost nothing from it unless you were looking for broad patterns. Alfric had done the math, and a meeting that lasted one hour would represent 1/720th of the available time, which meant that you’d expect to see that meeting ten times over the course of a single day of full-time use. That would be fifty seconds, not nearly enough, but it could be used to prove that a meeting had taken place.
For this particular version of the day, Penelope’s first time through, Alfric would be using a different piece of kit, a garment tracker. It would show where any garment — defined, per a cleric of Qymmos, as a textile used to enclose a person — had been. The time bounding on it was seventy days before the present at the earliest, or five days before present at the latest. There were other limits too, the most important being that you needed to have the actual piece of clothing you wanted to track.
So Alfric was left doing the very boring work of going through Kell’s drawers, picking out articles of clothing, and checking their paths through the past.
That there were clothes at all wasn’t surprising, given what Alfric had known about the other disappearances. Most of the people had left things behind. If you were moving somewhere, you would pack up your entire wardrobe, your belongings, things like that, and there were only one or two cases where it seemed like people had done that. Kell had taken his mana stones, his magical implements, and every entad that was bound to him, but left pretty much everything else. There was something creepy about that, Alfric felt.
Kell’s shirt was an earthy green, a half-robe with thin fabric for the heat of the summer like wizards sometimes wore. Long, flowing fabric was a wizardly affectation that dated back hundreds of years, and Alfric had become quite accustomed to it when he and Josen had been spending lots of time together. Alfric touched the entad drinking cup to it, then made a motion to spill what was inside.
Green spilled out into the air, semi-transparent, and Alfric let it flow. This would take some time, but already Alfric could see a swirl around the bedroom. The vision of green that the glass offered wouldn’t be seen by anyone else, but to Alfric, it was quite clear. He’d been warned that the entad would work on any clothing it touched, even if you didn’t want it to, and wrapped it in a piece of packaging paper that he’d been given for exactly that purpose.
If all the entad did was show you all the places a piece of clothing had been in the last two months, it would have been nearly useless, but this one allowed Alfric to touch the streamers of green and feel when they were from. This was unfortunately measured in hours-from-present, which took some converting, but it was far better than having to make some guesses from context. Alfric looked through the window first, checking to see that Kell was still in bed, then began following the trails the shirt had left.
He was looking for aberrations more than anything. Vertex had been in the boarding house for only a few weeks, but it was enough time that Kell had worn this particular shirt around a lot, making the smears of green in the air into clouds. Alfric moved through the house, looking only briefly at the places the green was smeared. There was a cloud at one particular spot at the table, which must have been the place where Kell routinely sat for meetings or meals. There was a trail leading in and out of Lena’s room on the first floor as well, and Alfric did no more than check to make sure that the timing lined up with what he’d been told.
It was once he was out of the house that he noticed the first oddity. Just outside the door to the house, there was another cloud, less intense than the one in the dining room, but still noticeable, a place where Kell had clearly stood around for a bit. Alfric frowned at that and reached out to touch it. There were three separate instances. Alfric made a note of the times. He’d talk with Vertex about it, to see if they knew anything, but none of those conversations Kell had were a part of their record of Kell’s days.
~~~~
Penelope had used up one of her available days, and that meant Alfric was, with the help of Mizuki, attempting to act on a lead he’d apparently discovered.
“Most entads that can see into the past can only see a single day into the past,” said Alfric. “It’s sort of like how most travel entads — the vast majority — go at most a single hex.”
“Is that true?” asked Mizuki. “Thinking about what we have, I’m not sure it is.”
“Wardrobe is one hex,” said Alfric. “With the Packer’s Lute, we can actually chain it indefinitely, but it is a single hex.”
“Wait, what?” asked Mizuki.
“The Packer’s Lute marks things, then you call them to you with a chord,” said Alfric. “Because it’s not limited per day, and because the restrictions on what objects you can take are permissive enough, all you need to do is mark the wardrobe, go through the wardrobe, summon the wardrobe, and so on.”
“Huh,” said Mizuki. “That’s … basically replicating the Commute Lute.”
“More or less,” said Alfric with a shrug. “You’d run into the rate limit on the wardrobe faster than the Commute Lute. But the point is, there are limits, and a lot of those limits are around the same level, which is the major problem with pastwatching.”
“And we’re past the first twenty-four hours,” said Mizuki. “Which means that the pool of entads we have is actually shrinking. Which wouldn’t be a problem if more chronos had pitched in.”
“True,” shrugged Alfric. “But there are some entads that can’t do the immediate past, they can only do the more distant past, so there are some options opening up to us as we go forward in time.”
“Like this one,” said Mizuki, pointing at the hat that was sitting on Alfric’s head.
The black silk top hat was incredibly ugly, particularly on Alfric, at least in his opinion. It was worse because he was wearing his usual outfit, slacks with a plain buttoned-down shirt, which didn’t fit the hat at all. He was sure that his brother Mo would have found some kind of style that worked well enough to pull off, but for Alfric, it was just some time sitting there in a stupid hat.
“Mostly I want to see whether this is anything,” said Alfric. He chewed the inside of his cheek and looked down at the spot again. “Window is still showing nothing?”
Mizuki looked through the window again, pointing it up at the house. “Nothing,” said Mizuki.
They were looking into different pieces of the past, Mizuki peering into three days ago in a somewhat lazy and bored way, Alfric waiting on the hat to build up its charge. You had to wait on the hat, because for some reason things couldn’t ever be easy and straightforward. He’d been waiting for nearly an hour, keeping the exact time and location he’d been told in mind.
“You know, if we follow Kell one day and Lin the next — or not the next, but on undone days — we’re going to have a really finely detailed understanding of their whereabouts,” said Mizuki.
“We already do,” said Alfric. “But yes, we’ll be able to fill in the gaps.”
“I wish we didn’t have to run all this through Penelope,” said Mizuki. “I wish we could just … leave notes for ourselves.”
“I’m sure she wished that too,” said Alfric. “But we need her directing things because I only have a single day to burn. And we’re limited by how much information she can pack into her mind.”
“There are memory entads,” Mizuki offered.
“They don’t typically work across undone days,” said Alfric.
“Really?” she asked.
“We still train memory, there’s a lot you can be very accurate about,” said Alfric.
“Why don’t they work across undone days?” asked Mizuki.
“No one really knows,” said Alfric. “It’s a blessing and a curse. We can’t use entads to boost our own memory, but we also can’t be affected by any kind of memory attack. Both of those are really rare though.”
“Bah, he’s moving,” said Mizuki. “I need to follow him, though I think we know he’s just going shopping.”
“I’ll see you later,” said Alfric. “The hat should be almost done charging, and then I need to do this another two times.”
Kell appeared beside Alfric, insubstantial, already mid-conversation. Alfric was wearing the glasses, so there was sound, but it was only from Kell. The hat required you to think about a specific person, and would show only them. The hope was that they could at least figure out what this aberration in his movements had been, a half-hour conversation just outside the boarding house four days before his disappearance. It hadn’t even been certain that it was a conversation, just that Kell had stopped for a long moment, moving somewhat. The hat had just confirmed it though, and Alfric listened in.
“I’d like to go,” said Kell, the wordless movements of his mouth given sound by the entad glasses. “To just be done with it. I don’t understand why we need to wait.”
There was a long pause. Whoever was on the other end was speaking.
“I think that’s paranoia,” he said, frowning a bit. “And I think it would be better to just tell people — we’ve talked about this before though, and I doubt I’ll change your mind.”
Alfric took the silence as an opportunity to track Kell’s eyeline. Whoever he was talking to, they were relatively tall. It was pretty much impossible to tell anything else about them.
“No, I understand. And I accept.” Kell ran his fingers through his hair. “If I haven’t concluded my business by then, I don’t think I will. I’ll write a note.” There was another pause. “Yes, of course.” He looked down, probably to something held in front of him, and Alfric tried his best to track where Kell’s eyes were pointing. “I can be trusted,” he said, looking up at the person he was talking to. “Yes, of course. And when this is over, I’ll remember?”
Whatever the response had been, Kell held his hand out. After that, he withdrew it slowly, eyes slightly glazed, then blinked a few times and retreated into the boarding house.
<I have something,> said Alfric. <Eyes on a meeting with his contact, I think, though I don’t know who it is yet.>
<Nice,> said Mizuki. <I’m watching him going entad shopping, this is super awkward because I’m pretty sure he’s going to go into Rolaj’s shop.>
<We could trade off,> said Isra. <I like Rolaj.>
<Nah,> said Mizuki. <I’ll deal.>
<Some kind of memory erasing — storing? — entad,> said Alfric. <At least, that’s my guess based on what he said. He definitely was planning to leave.>
Alfric stared at the empty space in front of the boarding house. He had gotten only the tail end of the conversation, so he let the hat drop its magic and began charging it again, this time aiming even earlier.
Four hours later, he had seen all three conversations in full. There were oddities there, ones that felt important. Kell introduced himself, or near enough, all three times, and there was confusion and hesitance on his face. He reached out to touch something at the start of the conversation, and touched what was presumably the same thing at the end. The device was explained to him the first time, Alfric was pretty sure, given the long stretch of silence after some pointed questions by Kell. He was asking about memory. But in the second and third meetings, he seemed to take it as a given, and a read of his body language showed that he grew more comfortable with the presumed entad each time.
Mostly, Kell had been listening. He asked questions from time to time, and once spent a long moment talking about how he felt like the world had so few new horizons, but much of it was silent. The longest talk had been the first one, and the ones after that seemed more like check-ins.
“There was a dungeon escape a while back, and no one looked too deeply into the past,” said Kell, during the first meeting. “Do you really think that someone will do that for me, if I leave a note?” A pause. “I suppose you’re right. Well, if someone is watching this from the future, hello, but you really don’t need to worry, I’m leaving of my own free will and would prefer you keep your nose out of it.” He was looking around, in the wrong places, but it still gave Alfric pause.
Once Alfric had made note of the conversations’ contents, there was only one thing left to do, which was to use the bracelet. He didn’t want to, but Penelope was going to reset the day, and so the actual experience of seeing five random seconds over and over again was both vital and wouldn’t be personally remembered.
He saw the road outside the boarding house at night, lit by the two smaller moons and the stars in the sky.
He saw the road outside the boarding house at daybreak, with no one around.
He saw a few people he didn’t recognize, walking at midday, down a street.
He saw nighttime, with everything quiet.
He saw the baking sun of the afternoon.
He saw a loose chicken, and a child chasing after it.
It went back in flashes of five seconds, and each time, Alfric used the bracelet again. Almost all of it was pointless nothing, irrelevant to what he was trying to find, and he found himself fatiguing faster than he’d have thought he would. He had positioned himself so he’d be looking straight at the person Kell had been talking with, as the conversations had been in roughly the same location, but from how relatively brief the talks had been, Alfric figured that he had a roughly one in a thousand chance of actually seeing anything. Maybe it would be higher, for that first meeting, which had been longer, but he wasn’t optimistic.
He saw Vertex, just for a flash, walking together on their way back from a dungeon.
He saw a rainy day when everyone was staying inside.
He saw Lena, sitting on a small bench outside the boarding house, crying.
He saw a windy day when the trees were shaking.
He saw a pitch black night, moonslight blocked by clouds.
He saw Lena leaving the house to get groceries.
He saw Kell, speaking with Cate.
It happened two hours in. Alfric had been finding the work grating and monotonous in a way that made it difficult to focus on. Five seconds was exactly the wrong length of time, not enough that he could get settled in the vision of the past, but also not short enough that it felt like he was moving at a good clip. He had a rising sense of nausea from the constant changes to lighting, and the entad was full-sensory, meaning that he could feel the changes in heat and cold, or brief wetness on his skin.
It took his brain a moment to realize that yes, he actually was seeing the thing that he’d been searching for, and he was so bewildered that there were only really two seconds of the five where he was aware of what he was looking at. It was Cate though, Seeker of Secrets for Plenarch, and Kell was in the same green shirt that had let Alfric track down this conversation in the first place. Kell was talking, speaking lines that Alfric had heard before, and then it was over.
<Alright,> Alfric said into party chat. <I know who took Kell and Lin.>
~~~~
“Does that make sense?” asked Mizuki over breakfast. “I mean, why?”
“I’m not sure ‘makes sense’ is the right framing,” said Alfric. “We don’t know her motivation, and potentially it could all be set up with national or provincial authority, though that would seem highly irregular to me. But in the undone day, at least according to Penelope, I saw her speaking with Kell and using some kind of entad to make sure that he wasn’t even aware that they had spoken. Presumably she was jamming the party channel with some other entad, which is alarming given how rare that kind of power is.”
“Says the man who’s been usin’ half the world’s supply of pastwatching entads?” asked Hannah.
“That’s overstating it,” said Alfric. “But yes, it is alarming that Cate has power equivalent to one of the larger chrononaut clans, especially without being a dungeoneer herself. And from what we know, that’s only a lower bound on what her power is.”
“So what now?” asked Verity. “We … track her down? Ask some pointed questions?”
“No,” said Alfric. “Imagine that you’re her, and that you’re responsible for disappearing somewhere between three dozen and two hundred people, maybe even more. You’ve been doing this entirely in secret for a number of months, being careful to evade a cursory pastwatch, manipulating memories so that no one can tell on you, all that other kind of thing. If someone comes to you with questions, what do you do?”
“Kill them,” said Isra.
“Flee,” said Verity.
“Seems extreme,” said Mizuki. “Cate seemed nice, even if she was a little insistent. She could easily have stolen the dragons, if she was malicious.”
“You deny everything,” said Hannah. “Then, given the plans you made earlier, you disappear forever, goin’ to the same place you sent the others, probably.”
“If you know there are chronos involved, which she certainly does, then yes,” said Alfric. “You deny everything, hope that no one tries to take you in at swordpoint, then leave at the first opportunity.”
“Is any of this actually illegal?” asked Verity.
“Affecting memories is, yes,” said Alfric. “People leaving the country of their own volition, no. But the memory thing, if it wasn’t explained to them beforehand, yes, that’s what would bring the hammer of justice down on her. It might not be enough to bring in the heavy hitters, but the Overguards have strings to pull, and I think they would pull them for Penelope. And depending on where those people actually went, and what happened to them, they might still fall under Inter’s jurisdiction.”
“So that’s what we’re doing today?” asked Mizuki.
“No,” said Alfric. “We’ve burnt through too many days for a confrontation now, we want to be able to iterate on what’s done. Now we need to find more evidence.” He sighed. “Which means that I’m going to have to use that bracelet to look into the past and hopefully get her side of the conversation, five seconds at a time.”
“And … the rest of us?” asked Mizuki.
“Per Penelope, you’ll try to track Lin,” said Alfric. “Track his clothes, look through more of his papers, peer into the past and see if there’s something we’ve missed. We’ll also make a trip to Plenarch, not to confront Cate, but to make sure that she’s there and to poke around as much as we can without raising her hackles. This isn’t the last version of this day, we’ll be sending more information backward.”
~~~~
“So this is the version of the day we’re keeping?” asked Mizuki.
“It pretty much has to be,” said Alfric. “Going one more would mean bringing in one of the other chronos, or for me or Penelope being timesick.”
“And then tomorrow, across dozens of undone days, we’re going to stick a fork in Cate?” asked Mizuki. “Put her in jail, make her reveal her master plan, things like that?”
“From the probing that I did, no,” said Alfric. “Partly because we don’t know where she is. The last people to report having seen her were us, when we sold her the dragons.”
“Huh,” said Mizuki. “You talked to the censusmaster in Plenarch?”
“In Plenarch, in Liberfell, in every hex around Pucklechurch,” said Alfric. “It’s technically possible that she’s cloaked from the census, but things that interfere with the census are extremely rare, even more so than pastwatching. There was a species of rabbit that would show up on the census, and an entad that would add people to it, but — I’d have to go read a book to see, I guess.”
“Nah, I probably came up with that in the undone day, it seems obvious,” said Mizuki.
“It could be she’s done,” said Hannah. “These were rather brazen, I think, and if she’s settin’ up some kind of new life for these people, she might actually be gone.”
“Possibly,” said Alfric. “Our goal, for today, is to get ready for tomorrow and hope that we can find her. It’ll be hard, because she has some kind of movement entad, and a lot of the tricks won’t work. But when we do find her, we’ll have a confrontation with as much might as we can muster.” He let out a breath. “I did manage to convince my mother to come.”
Mizuki gave a small squeal of delight.
Comments
fbt
hmm, verity wasn't in that last convo at all.
