Ar'Kendrithyst - Chapter 247, 2/2, Debby?Jane

Once again Jane was at Candlepoint.

The night sky here was filled with the bright lines of the node network while the land itself was brighter still. The shadows ran deeper here than in Storm’s Edge, but the light was brighter, too. It was nice. Jane stepped toward the light-crowned, white mountain that was House Benevolence, at the center of the Gate District, at the center of the world.

She was glad to see that the Red Sparks were not here; not unless she made them appear. She’d try to do less of that, if she could help it. The anti-meme couldn’t read her mind so she didn’t cause any disturbances in that way…

She couldn’t walk openly, though. She had to remain Unseen, Unfelt, Unknown, or else the many Mind Mages of the House would spontaneously burst into cascades of Red Sparks, spreading the infection far and wide.

No talking to anyone, it seemed, for that would simply be counterproductive. Instead, she would simply be infiltrating one of the highest security areas of the world, and then picking apart their books.

Jane kinda instantly loved the whole idea.

… It was almost embarrassing about how much she realized that she loved this; that something like this, exactly, was all who she had ever wanted to be, back on Earth. Time had changed a lot about a lot, but apparently not that much at all.

“It’s almost like you were Fated to come to Veird.”

“… Fate has nothing to do with my choices in life,” Jane said, knowing she was being needlessly defensive.

“I agree. Take heart that this series of events most certainly did notstart with you and your father. This Fate probably tried ten thousand times to get here, but it never passed the major thresholds to get to this point, to survive this long, for Fate is never absolute, though it certainly tries to be; like a fairy that just doesn’t know how to die. Atomic Magic was the only other time we got anywhere near this level of clarity.”

“… That actually does make me feel better.”

“It shouldn’t. It means you and this whole operation could die and be buried in history, and I could go insane again, and Fate would need to try some other time.”

Jane had no response to that.

House Benevolence loomed like a series of domed, white cones, ringed in light. People were everywhere. Security was tight as always, with thick walls of detection and scanning and Book Magic of all sorts layered across every wall and door and walkway. As people passed through those security measures, they sent out tiny pings to the watchtowers and the security rooms. Here and there [Scry] eyes watched it all happen.

And Jane walked through it all; Unseen, Unfelt, Unknown.

“And a bunch of other ‘Un’s, too.”

Melemizargo appeared to be a chatterbox sometimes.

“Fine fine fine. I’m out.”

People accidentally bouncing into Jane were still a problem, of course, so she kept her profile small and agile, making sure not to open any doors that were not being opened by others, and keeping her mana close to her core. She avoided the Mind Mages most of all, for though she was protected by Melemizargo’s magic, his magic was also telling her that those people with thought tendrils coming off of them were the most dangerous to her cover. And yet…

If she got into a real spot of trouble with a Mind Mage she could just allow her Unknown to slip and automatically fill the area with the anti-meme, and give the Mind Mages the slip that way.

… Probably not a good idea to abuse that, though. Too many incidents like that and Jane would poison the area with Red and cause a time reversion that would result in an alteration of the present down some more dangerous path. But what was infiltration without a little bit of danger?

Jane smirked as she slipped through the crowds of people, making her way past guards and through Scanning Magics, deeper and deeper into the secure hallways of House Benevolence.

– – – –

Jane tripped her first failsafe half an hour in, when she tried to look past the security measures and Privacy magic on a filing cabinet inside Enforcement’s headquarters. Since she was unable to Look past the Privacy since the cabinet was closed and Book Magic made everything inside illegible while the cabinet was closed, she had tried to slip into the shadows inside as discreetly as she could.

This set off alarms.

She easily stepped away from that sudden lockdown of the building, but it did have her reconsidering how she went about the search. Getting information from physical sources would be her preferred method, because talking to people would invariably expose them to the anti-meme and herself as a Paladin of Melemizargo, if the people she spoke with knew what to look for. And they would, no doubt, know what to look for.

Perhaps she could try getting Goldie involved?

“I would prefer not to have her involved, for as soon as she is involved, Erick becomes even more suspicious of everything I do, and I don’t want to give the anti-meme that particular ammunition. Besides, you almost had that infiltration; you just failed to properly use the powers I have granted you.”

Solo it is, then…

And shouldn’t you be letting Fate work its course?

If Melemizargo was here, then Fate had less influence over Jane’s timeline, and since Fate was heavily on their side right now—

“Yes yes yes. I’m going now. Pah! Just when it was getting good.”

Melemizargo peeled away from Jane, his pressure vanishing. Again.

Jane got to work.

– – – –

Jane had known that going into this work that it would be work. She had known that she would be prowling through record rooms and pulling apart security codes used in House Benevolence and trying to understand the ordering system that only a few people at the top of the House actually understood and which she very much did not know. And she was prepared for that.

But she had been here three days, with less to show for it than she had hoped, but more to show than she had planned.

It had taken a few hours of watching over Burhendurur and the Office of Enforcement to even begin to understand the record system. Many more hours were spent waiting for other people to access those systems, so she didn’t trigger any Privacy or [Sealed Book] magics. But people came along and looked at records, and Jane watched over their shoulders. Luckily, her Bracelet of Memory was very much in-tune with her desires and she was able to recall everything she snooped on perfectly, without the usual accompanying headache of being split into a hundred different times and places. So she only had to see a piece of information once in order to remember it well.

A day into her investigation and she found her first ‘real lead’ when Burhendurur requested an update on the Storm’s Edge Storm Prophecy. The traffic to Storm’s Edge was growing quite a lot, with many people preparing for the storm, and ‘Vanya’s’ dungeon opening last weekend. Subsequently, the LAGN for Archipelago Nergal was booked to capacity and more. Everyone was either escaping, or hunkering down.

Mostly, the reports were normal.

But Jane felt one thing was more suspicious than most. People from the Wake Up House were headed down, for one reason or another, along with a bunch of known Benevolence dragons. The dragons were theorized to be headed that way to settle in to combat the coming Storm, which was maybe 38-ish days at the earliest. The Wake Up House people were a collection of Avandrasolaro’s people and otherwise, with Avandrasolaro’s people having heard of the Storm Prophecy and having gained the desire to see what that meant, for themselves.

“Of course they immediately ran afoul of the Storm Priestesses,” said the analyst giving the report to Burhendurur. “Most everyone that the priestesses could tag as being allied with House Benevolence in some way got kicked back through the gatehouse. Most of the dragons made it through, though, since they could just go around the Local Area Gate Network and arrive directly. This is all causing a headache for Gatemaster Kiri, in the form of state-level complaints directed at her, since the Wizard is out of office right now.”

Burhendurur hummed as he looked over the paperwork. “Carry on as usual.”

The analyst took his orders and left.

Jane scanned the paperwork, too, wishing she could just tell them what to look out for, but she had already tried leaving a note on Burhendurur’s to check on the ‘skinny red-haired man’, along with times and dates of last known locations. That note ended up crawling with Red Sparks, ignored, and then filed in the round bin with other such uncared-for papers.

But Jane had a good feeling about the Wake Up House and the Benevolent Dragon connections, so she went to that paperwork which her father kept in his personal office.

The ferocity of those defenses near her father’s offices left Jane a little slack-jawed.

When Jane stepped into the hallways that led to ‘the Wizard’s’ secret chambers, it was a lot different looking than the last time she had been here, just a few days ago. Back then the place looked normal. But now, with Melemizargo’s Sight, it looked like a magical fortress of ten-thousand layers of defense, each of them attuned to anyone except for Erick and a few other people. Jane slipped through most of them, not setting off any of them at all, but Melemizargo’s claws caught her before she went through a particularly brilliant-white sheet of power. That had to be Wizardry, enacted there as one more big defense. When had he done that? Maybe when he passed through the place in the last month, or maybe it had always been there and Jane simply hadn’t known, because she had been allowed.

There was a hole carved in the barrier meant for Shades, though. A small spot, to the side, with a darkness to it that was almost like a black infection in the magic.

Jane went through that key-hole sized space, and Melemizargo’s presence left her.

Her father’s private notes were a good place to start, so that is what she did.

Thankfully, all of Erick’s private cabinets had tiny little black ‘keyholes’ carved in all of their wards… Which was quite concerning, actually, but it was what it was. Her father had to know, right?

Right.

But even beyond the Privacys in those filing cabinets, they were written in dense code that Jane would have needed Book Magic to understand, and yet activating Book Magic in this place would get her found out, for sure. She was confident about being able to hide her personal mana signature if she needed, but not the exterior signature of any sort of external Scanning-type spellwork; she couldn’t actually Scan the paperwork at all. She could only Scan her recollection of the paperwork.

… Which turned out to be easier than she imagined it would be.

Still took her two more days to figure that out. In those two days, she saw no fewer than 13 attempts at breaking and entering into this very same office. Each time Goldie stepped out of nowhere and grabbed the perpetrator and hauled them off, and sometimes a lot faster than Jane could even react to knowing there was a perpetrator at all.

Anyway. This had been the right move; coming here to these files.

The Benevolence Dragons were not a lead, but the Wake Up House looked promising. One of the forms of a man from there had a basic description of ‘gangly, male, average, skinny, red hair, red features, eyes like red suns with black spots for pupils’. It didn’t even have any Red Sparks on it though, which meant Jane learned something new about the Red Sparks; they could appear if they wished, but not always when called. They were more than just an antigen-reaction; they were semi-sapient.

Or maybe something like this just fell beyond the notice of the Red Sparks? Maybe.

Whatever the case, the Wake Up House was her next destination.

As Jane extricated herself from House Benevolence and headed toward the Gate to the Wake Up House, thinking about the Red Man, she felt that she had touched upon a memory that she already knew, but which she couldn’t quite place. She knew who the Red Spark guy was, didn’t she? She felt that she did, and because she didn’t, that pissed her off a lot.

It seemed like her body and mind and magic needed a lot longer to fight off the infection…

Jane got a sudden hankering for some more good food, but of the junk variety. She had eaten at House Benevolence for the last few days, sneaking food and causing no end to people wondering where supplies were going. Truly, the culinary experience at the House was not to be denied, and many people came here from all over the world just to sample all the various eateries in the place.

But Jane wanted junk food.

She stopped by Spur and marveled at how nice the place had grown in the last decade. She barely visited this place at all… So why had she gotten the sudden urge to come here? Well. Maybe she just wanted a proper meat sandwich? Whatever the case, she went to ‘Meat! Bread! Cheese!’ to get one of those, and a bunch of fries. The line was out the door at this time of day, so she… She really, really wanted to skip the line. So she did.

She stole someone’s order right out from under their noses and left them gold in return.

There was some anger there at the missing food, just as there had been some anger at the eateries of House Benevolence, but gold soothed most hurts of that nature, and it wasn’t like she could show herself in public anymore. She was a shadow, now, living on the edge of reality.

She didn’t even want to try showing herself.

As she ate her meal in private, Jane realized she had gone to ‘Meat! Bread! Cheese!’ because when she faced the Moon Reachers that first time she had ended up at that very same restaurant, and the people there had given her a great meal, and some warmth of civilization. With a casual glance back toward that restaurant, she saw the original owners, Julli and Rendar Skytouch, still working the register and the line as they had all those years ago. Their restaurant was pretty damned famous, though, so they had other people catching money, slinging meat, and frying fries. The two dragonkin, one blue, the other red, seemed to have a young purplescale working the register right now, and the family resemblance was uncanny.

Jane smiled a whole lot as she finished her sandwich. It was a good sandwich.

– – – –

Jane wandered through the Wake Up House, looking for any signs of the Red Man, but, of course, she found none.

Until she stopped by the Revived Gallery.

It was the place where people sometimes displayed the artwork they made while they were coming to terms or reveling in their new body, and what that all meant to them. The gallery itself was perfectly normal; a bunch of paintings on the walls with some metal or clay sculptures on plinths. People painted in all sorts of colors, and some of it seemed professional, or semi professional. Some of it was less professional, with paint applied to canvas through the use of the feathers of one’s new harpy body, or with the horns of new incani, or with the giant fingers of orcols. Painting with new fingers was a popular method of impressionist style painting that was actually catching on in a lot of the world. Jane had talked to her father about that in a sarcastic manner once or twice, in an ‘are you happy you’ve regressed society from painting with brushes and getting actual style out of their work, to using their fingers’, sort of way. Her father had happily replied, ‘Just be glad I stopped them from painting with their genitals’.

Every painting in the Revived Gallery was a work of newfound joy, which was the general theme of the Wake Up House, and this whole artistic style.

But one painting stood out to Jane. It probably didn’t stand out to anyone else.

It was a red painting that was done with brushstrokes, and it wasn’t lit by any of the spotlights. In an orderly sort of way, paintings hung on walls every meter or so, each of them lit with their own private wardlight. But this red painting was between wardlights, crammed between smaller paintings just so it could exist on the wall at all, as though it had been put there as a last ditch effort to simply do what everyone else was doing, and yet which had been denied to the painter.

Which is probably exactly what had happened. Probably not out of malice, though.

But did the painter feel that way? Hard to say.

It was a sunset painted in red. All reds. No other colors. It would have been an odd choice if there weren’t other paintings in the single-color style here and there in other parts of the gallery, and even in this very same gallery.

But this one had Red Sparks crowding the sun in the sunset.

It was as though someone had stuck a spot of red light in the middle of a darkened wall, and then surrounded that darkness with shades of red. Dangerous red, too. Not normal red. That tree looked like it was made of flesh, with veins poking in and out of heavy red paint. That ground looked like it was made of dried gore that cracked in the sunlight. Red lightning flickered in the sky of the painting, crawling between mounds of red clouds like the painting was a hole into another world, and the clouds were large enough for lightning to truly play upon.

Jane focused on the sun.

The sun was a crowd of Red Sparks. Crawling. Feasting like a tiny carpet of ants.

Melemizargo’s claws wrapped around her shoulders, his presence heavy behind her as she read the name on the artist’s signature, which did not look like an artist’s signature at all. It was not stylistic. The signature was the simple writing of a name, in red; blocky and bold.

Jane knew that name. Why had she not recognized the Red Man?

Why did she not know who Oozy was?

Because she knew him. She knew of Oozy Stormcaller. She had heard her father talk about the last scion of the Stormcallers of Storm’s Edge and how the Regency was operating just fine without a king, and how Oozy did not want to be a king. She had even seen him… Recently. Hadn’t she?

Had she? No. Jane touched her head as she tried to think. To REMEMBER. She had been at the dungeon every time her father had gone to this very same Wake Up House after they started pulling people from the Dark. And yet, she remembered being with him at least once, coming to this place when he brought the people from the Censer to the Red Wing.

But no. Edward had gone every time with her father, hadn’t he? He had been Jane’s repro who had decided to be a man, because everyone desired to try out the other sex at least once, right? And Jane was all about polymorphing anyway, so Edward had… wanted to see how other people transitioned…

What…

What…

She had two sets of memories?

She was Jane and she was… Also Jane?

“What the fuck?”

In a fury born from rapid anger, without an outlet, Jane slapped the painting to the ground, her hand turning into a giant black claw and then turning back to red-nailed—

The red painting crashed to the ground, partially broken.

Red Sparks exploded out in every direction like an ephemeral bomb going off, touching nothing and yet hitting everything. Jane held onto herself, and she had no idea why—

And then she gazed upon the painting on the ground, flakes of red having fallen off from the thick-painted ground where the signature had been, the name disturbed and unreadable, and the Sparks trying to crawl back into position, back onto the sun—

Jane felt her heart still and Melemizargo’s claws dig into her shoulders.

There was another color to the painting.

Black. A single squiggle upon the sun. The entire orb, together, was not the shape of an eye, for that was Jane’s first, largest worry. It was the shape of something hiding below the surface, and only surfacing from the sun in parts, like a leviathan prowling in the depths of—

Red Sparks filled the air, crawling out of every part of reality, clawing towards—

“Run.”

Jane ran.

– – – –

“What the FUCK, Melemizargo?”

“Whatever could you be referring to?” the God of Magic said, playing dumb.

Jane was ten thousand kilometers away from the spilling of Red Sparks, all the way on the endless plains of Nelboor and on the other side of the planet from the sun, before those Red Sparks finally stopped coming after her, and her Unseen, Unsensed, Unknown finally started working as it was supposed to work. She had triggered something hard back there. Even now, if she thought too much about there being something living inside the sun—

Sparks flickered out of the air.

Jane shadowstepped far away from that point, and the Sparks stopped chasing her.

She had no idea how come she hadn’t triggered an [Area Return]. Perhaps because she had run so fast, and not had any more sun-leviathan-shaped thoughts…

Jane rounded on her shoulder-riding voyeur, saying, “You know exactly what the fuck—”

Claws pressed Jane down to the ground and then materialized. Jane could barely turn her head, but she could see the full body of Melemizargo towering over her, his claws ten times the size of her body, holding her down without fully crushing. Melemizargo’s eyes bore down on her, and she stared right back as much as she could from the corner of her own eyes. His jaw opened, and hot breath spilled forth between radiant white teeth.

“A little bit of civility, please. I am trying to think. I am also angry, and I am deflecting with humorinstead of answering you like I am some [Book Familiar]—” He stopped. He lifted his claws. He stepped away from Jane. When he started talking again it was much softer. “And to answer the question you have, instead of the ones you should be having, is that you and all the other repros are actually people taken from timelines and realities that don’t exist without us gazing upon them. The reason you remember your time slightly different from the Jane of this reality is that you are from one of those different realities, but until just now, until you fully shed your ‘Debby’ persona, you were still halfway in that other reality. Now you are here, fully.

“Thus, the double memories.

“All shadelings not made from the real soul of a person are exactly that, and you were a ‘shadeling’ until you woke up just now. All repros are alternate selves with different triggering methods for waking up, and one major way to wake up; if they can see the anti-meme. Why do you think I guided Fallopolis and Lapis and others to make the dungeons work how they work? For fun? For ease of dungeon use? I could have done that many other ways, but I wanted to create people who could SEE, and so, here you are, finally able to See.

“Maybe if enough repros suddenly wake all the way, we might be able to overload the anti-meme. Most singular magics have a breaking point, after all.” The Dark Dragon shrugged his wings a little, adding, “But I doubt it would work that way. The Mind Mages never worked out properly.

“Now. Do you need time to process that? Or can we get on with the investigation?”

Jane had slowly reoriented herself to sitting on the ground as she listened. Melemizargo had taken a lay-down, too, shrinking to be less domineering, but he was still giant. Jane stared at him as he spoke. When he finished, Jane said, “I would like a moment.”

Melemizargo nodded.

He stayed right where he was.

Jane thought. First, she noticed how the anti-meme wasn’t coming back, even though Melemizargo was talking about it—

“I had my mind in a hundred different spots but now I am here making us both Unknown.”

“… So I’m from another reality.”

“Not really. But that is the easiest way to explain it. 50% correct.”

“What’s the other 50%?”

“Wizardry. Creation and Paradox, specifically, leaning toward Creation. Paradox with a side of Creation is what your father is doing in the slime dungeon with pulling things from the Dark.”

“… Why do I have memories of a different life from after the split into a dungeon master slime? And not before?”

“Because that particular slice of reality where you come from did not exist prior to that moment of creation. It stilldoesn’t really exist; you are the only part of that reality that truly exists.”

Jane looked at the black tattoo around her left wrist. “… I was Debby, and then I was pulled from a side reality onto this one.”

“Somewhatcorrect. You’re both. Like a shadeling waking up, but not quite that either, for I make shadelings from this reality and not a side reality. Shadelings are easy to make whole-cloth when the cloth is already here, but when making a copy of a person then it is best to steal the cloth from realities that don’t exist and then make them whole-cloth from that… Now that I think about it, it’s quite strange that your specific deviation of reality happened afteryour creation. I would have assumed that it would have occurred before your dungeon slime deviation… Eh! Sometimes these things happen strangely. It is possible that you aren’t even truly aware of howyou are deviated from this world’s Jane. I doubt whatever memories you have are the whole story. Wizardry can get veryweird, Jane.”

Jane was absolutely sure that she wasn’t understanding a lot of things in all of that, and there were at least one or two logical fallacies within all of Melemizargo’s diatribe. All of that was likely covered by ‘It’s a Paradox’ which was just a variation on ‘A Wizard Did It’. It was not truly satisfying.

“I’m sure I can explain it better for you some other time, Jane,” Melemizargo said, “But I really would like to get to the problem at hand. This Oozy fellow. What he is probably doing to Sininindi must be… I’m not sure. Stopped? Used to expose the problem? … Actually, this break of me explaining the simple things has been good, and I probably need a longer one. I see that now.” He stared off into the distance. “I must decide how to proceed.”

Jane was thankful for that. She also needed a large break to digest whatever had—

“I have decided. We kill him.”

“… Okay.” Jane asked, “Could you maybe reconsider such a drastic move, because murder is hard to come back from, especially when such murder could easily be misconstrued as something else, considering the targets and nearby-targets involved?”

Melemizargo looked like he was about to say something cross. But then he mellowed for a moment. “We likely do have time to make better decisions, if that Prophesied Storm is any indication… And murder is notmy preferred method of solving things. This is true. This damned anti-meme would probably cause a large problem if we attacked it directly…” He looked away. “It has done that before.” He fell silent.

Jane wondered exactly how many times the God of Magic had been thought of as insane, when really he was just furious and caged, and no one else could see the cage.

Melemizargo stared at the distance, saying, “More times than I wish to count… But I was also insane for a great deal of the last 1451 years. That fact doesn’t vanish just because now you know some of the truth, whatever that ‘truth’ might be.” He stared at the night sky for a long moment, and then he looked back down at Jane. “I’ve decided. We’re killing him.”

“Can we please look for other targets? That guy might not be the only one.”

“I have already looked. He is the only one.”

Jane kept her voice even as she said, “If you were capable of seeing everyone that was so afflicted like that man, then why am I here?”

“To give me deniability for killing the man you have discovered, and to help me See…” Melemizargo frowned. “Maybe you have a small point.”

“…”

“Very small.”

“Please let me try to talk to my father, to get him to intercede, and to that end, I request a week of preparation, to try and figure out how to speak to him with this new clear mind of mine.”

“… You have one chance, and when he cannot understand you at all… I wantto tell you to execute that carrier of the Red Sparks, but in truth, we likely should go looking for more people like him. Maybe there are connections out there I am missing.”

“Thank you.”

 

– – – –

Jane’s experiments with talking to people about the Red Sparks and about Oozy involved those who were not crucial to anything she was doing, for she did not want to potentially mess up later, very important conversations with her father, who would surely be checking up on everything she said after she gave her report…

If he could even remember her.

Hmm.

Melemizargo was not happy with the delay, but he still let her delay, explore, and refine her new powers. It wasn’t dealing with the known problem, which is what he wanted, but it was investigating for other people like Oozy, which he begrudgingly accepted as probably necessary.

For her first action, Jane spoke with people from Clan Star Song in the Songli Highlands, with Patriarch Xue, who acted as a good intermediary between her and the Mind Mages and any mental threats in the area. After a few tries, a few failures, and a need to circle back the next day lest she cause an [Area Return], Jane discovered she was able to tell Xue something approaching the truth in order to get him to act as she wanted.

“I’m infected with a memetic threat, and while it is secure in my mind, if a Mind Mage should see me then they would be subject to that threat. Also, you cannot tell them about this, Xue, for that triggers it, too. You just have to trust me that I know what I am doing, and that I need the Mind Mages to tell you about any potential memetic threats in the area. I’m crossing them off the list of threats to the world.” Which was true! She could do that rather easily with Melemizargo’s direct help. Xue didn’t look convinced, though, but he was willing to hear Jane out. And then Jane handed him an anti-mind reading helmet. “Here. Wear this when talking to them.”

Xue stared at the helmet. And then he put it on, saying, “I will do this, Miss Flatt. I’ll have your locations of memetic threat noted within the hour. I do not appreciate this. Do not let this blow up in our faces.”

“Heard and understood, Patriarch Xue.”

“I only do this because my wife —rest her soul— had a good opinion of you, and for all the other good you have done for us, from the Delver Guild to all those associated monster exterminations, to the ease of this particular task which does not seem that onerous. But this is still onerous, Miss Flatt. Coming at me with mental threats… It is not a good look.”

Jane smiled, nodded, then said, “I know. Apologies.”

And then she left.

An hour later, Jane returned, and Xue had his list of locations of potential memetic threats. Melemizargo was readily protecting her against all threats, so the warning the Mind Mages had given Xue alongside the list was nice of them, but unneeded.

After that, Jane spent a week going around the Highlands, checking memetic containment zones and dodging Mind Mages who were wondering who the fuck was looking into Mind Magic threats. And because Xue was not immune to disbelief among the Mind Mages, the Mind Mages eventually went checking up on him, which caused a major Red Spark infection. The entire Crossing above the Songli Highlands got infected, briefly, which caused a memetic containment threat to escape containment briefly.

Jane personally intervened in that case to erase a written-word-monster that escaped its bindings and which almost escaped into some books ten kilometers away from the containment site. Normally, the Mind Mages would just try to kill it, but they could not, which was why it had been contained in the first place.

But then Jane used some of her Melemizargo-gifted claws, and managed to turn the ‘bookwyrm’ into dead, sloppy ink. The Mind Mages were wondering who the fuck had come through and killed the thing they had been keeping in check for the last few centuries, but more than that, they were simply happy it was gone.

Similar battles eventually played out all across northern Nelboor, and then in the Forest of Glaquin.

It was during a trip near Treehome that Jane saw her first Red Devoured person, or at least what she assumed was one of those unlucky people to meet their end to the Red. This one happened in a dark hole under a bridge far outside of town. Jane only noticed the location because of the scattering of Red everywhere. Kilometers outside of the purview of an Arbor, Jane found Red Sparks crawling over scratchy blankets, a piece of moldy, untouched bread, and a faded picture of a young woman and man, holding each other beneath a wedding tree. The man who had been ‘living’ there was gone. Nothing remained except for stuff that no one would miss. Jane took the man’s small photo-realistic painting and set it down in town, near Arbor Home, the closest one. Maybe Home would remember the man in the painting, or maybe the woman.

But probably not. The man’s face had a few Red Sparks upon it that lingered long.

Jane decided to sit and watch the tiny painting instead of just leaving it there. She watched as the man’s entire body was eaten away by Red Sparks, leaving nothing behind except for a gap in the painting.

Jane moved on to other memetic threat areas.

– – – –

Jane breached four containment zones in Continental Nergal, in the deep, Decay-filled jungles where Atomic Magic had played with the landscape several hundred years ago and across a handful of nearby realities, to hear Melemizargo speak of it.

It had been 3 weeks since the start of Jane’s anti-meme worldwide threat assessment, and she had yet to find a better lead than Oozy, in Storm’s Edge, and who knew what he was doing down there. Even the missing homeless man wasn’t a real lead, and none of these memetic threats were either. But they were still threats that needed to be eliminated, and Jane felt really good about doing those eliminations.

As Jane was skipping along the frozen forests of deep southern Nergal, near the southern pole. She had just cleared out a spectral anti-meme threat that had been contained to a square kilometer cube of space, half buried in the frozen forest and at a tilted angle, and that was the last major threat on her list. Those people had been the last separated group of Mind Mages which could have possibly been slowly eaten by the Red Menace, unbeknownst to anyone, but that Mind Mage security station had had no Red Sparks at all. None of them had.

“Honestly, someonein one of those stations should have been eaten by now. I did not lie to you about who the Red Sparks eat, Jane.”

“And I am not calling you a liar.”

“Hmm!”

… Jane considered it might be time to go back to Storm’s Edge, to check on that lead and see if Oozy was reachable, or a problem.

That was when Destiny appeared.

The Wizard of Benevolent Chaos slipped onto the frozen canopy in front of Jane, looking summer-fresh in a ray of sunshine out of the cloudy sky and wearing a light yellow dress, along with big black boots. Her hair flipped as she shot Jane a smile, calling out, “Ohhh, Jaaaane!”

Jane stopped. She was still Unknowable right now and the Red Sparks should have already erased her from the world, but…

Destiny called out, “Talk to me, please! This will be good practice for your father. For how you will explain to him what the fuck you’re doing.”

… Her father remembered her?

“Well what did you expect? You haven’t actually been affected by the Red Sparks much, thanks to me.”

Melemizargo’s voice was silent to everyone but Jane right now, as it usually was, so Destiny did not react to that.

Jane revealed herself ten trees over from Destiny.

Destiny locked eyes with her. “Hello, Jane. You’ve been a naughty girl, leaving your father all worried about you while you went off tackling big memetic and antimemetic threats.”

“… What’s the problem, Destiny?” Jane asked, keeping her eyes peeled for Red Sparks.

“Well…. No problem, actually. He thinks it’s great that you’re clearing out problems that we didn’t even know were problems while they’re adding stability to the world in other ways —I like that Life Seed they gave to Tiktik, and the Fishery they gave me— but it’s about 7 days from the start of the Prophesied Storm Season, and your father tasked me with catching you if I should see you. And lo! Here you are…” Destiny paused. “I don’t actually want to capture you, though. But I do want to know what you’re doing. From my understanding, you’re in my backyard and plucking up weeds in one space and setting down deep fire in others, burning out everything that could possibly survive. Not to mention you destroyed that entire Mind Mage facility the other day.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “No one died.”

“And how can we know that? These places were top secret hush-hush with people living in them and dying in them with zero checks except for visual and from a very, very far distance… if I have that right. I haven’t been fully read in.” Destiny said, “I would like to be read in now, Jane.”

Destiny was not a demanding person, until she became a demanding person.

Well.

Jane could play ball.

Jane had been testing what she could say to people here and there for the last 30 days, and her ability with that had improved a lot, since she could See the Red Sparks so much better.

“When I say move, you move with me,” Jane said. “It will be random. Try to keep up.”

A few Red Sparks appeared, because they were a Time-based anti-meme, and they could react backward and forward in time and space. In that way they were a little proactive, even when Jane didn’t even touch upon the anti-meme.

Destiny paused. “… I agree.”

“Use your Wizardry to keep yourself unaffected by the anti-meme—” Jane was already moving, ten kilometers west and then four north.

Destiny appeared right in front of her. Brilliant Benevolence and something deeper wrapped around the Wizard of Chaos’ entire body, like lightning made physical. It zapped away some of the clawing Red Sparks, because powerful Domain magic had a way of doing that, but it wasn’t perfect. The ‘Domain’ of the Red Sparks was greater still.

Jane stared for a little bit, looking straight at Destiny, not Looking at the Sparks at all. In fact, most of her senses were off. Over a month ago her father had turned off his senses and turned away from Jane, allowing her to finally impart some sort of clue about what she had been about to do. And that is what Jane did now; don’t acknowledge the Sparks and they had a tendency to go away.

Which is what happened over the next ten minutes of Destiny flaring power, and no new information passing that would inflame the Sparks.

Destiny calmly waited.

Jane did not watch the air, but she did see when the air was clearer of Sparks.

Jane softly asked, “Did you feel it crawling upon you?”

“What the fuck— No!” Destiny spat, her eyes going wide as she looked all around.

Sparks appeared.

Jane moved.

Destiny moved, too.

Jane waited for the Wizard to appear, but this time Destiny did not appear like she did earlier. This time the Wizard tried to directly fight off whatever she knew to be there, which, of course, was the wrong thing to do. Jane hadn’t been able to tell her that, though. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Looking back to where Jane had been, she saw Red bloom on the horizon—

Brilliant white light erupted—

Dark claws yanked Jane backward, pulling her into the Dark and then puffing her out of Melemizargo’s domain far from the explosion which detonated the world. It was a shattering of white, a scream of absolute hatred like a raging banshee, and then a descent of Red from the sky above, like the [Luminous Beam] of the sun itself. And maybe that’s what it was, considering the Enemy was on the sun; inside the sun.

Jane had never seen such a reaction before.

That Beam of Red expanded wide, and then wider. Red Sparks flew across the world like the release of an ocean—

– – – –

Destiny said, “I would like to be read in now, Jane.”

They were back on the treetops from earlier. Time had been reversed in a major way, and Red Sparks littered the world in every direction—

Destiny’s expression shifted. She stared. “You’re not Jane. You’re one of Melemizargo’s pets.”

And this would be how the Red Sparks fucked over proper communication of itself.

Right.

Well Destiny was fucking pissed. Probably not gonna listen to reason, either.

“The Red Sparks come from the sun because something lives up there and causes this whole antimeme.”

Jane didn’t even get to see the Red Sparks move.

Time shifted.

– – – –

The world was awash in Red, and Jane had just stepped onto a frozen canopy, kilometers away from her first interaction with Desti—

A meter-thick cascade of Benevolent Lightning shattered through the sky, aimed right at Jane, yet Jane just lifted a black wing and the Lightning went wide, scattered on her perfect [Dark Dragonhide], or whatever Melemizargo felt like calling the skill. Jane instantly knew something was wrong, but also, maybe right? Destiny was obviously able to retain something through Time shifts just like Jane could, now that the Bracelet of Memory had been melded with her soul, so there was no point in trying to hide her new allegiances.

Benevolent Lightning continued to shatter in every direction, turning the frozen forest to kindling and lighting fires here and there among the charred and blackened trees. It was a soft sort of flame that gave off no heat, and yet felt absolutely Destructive to all of Jane’s gifted Senses. All the world was Red, though, as though it was lit with natural fire but not at all.

Jane waited, midair, black wings extended from her back, her red hair and red eyes shining bright, as black scales crawled up from beneath her skin.

Destiny appeared, looking absolutely filthy with Red Sparks. She stared.

Jane asked, “What’s up, Destiny?”

“I seem to have some conflicting memories, and you seem to be an agent of Melemizargo now, Debby.”

Jane wanted to tell her everything, but that would be bad. She was already poised to hate, and if she was this far along…

“Leaving her be is the correct choice. I was not aware her power was progressing in this direction, but I approve. Do not interact with her further.”

Jane said to Destiny, “It’s technically ‘Jane’ and I’m not going into the specifics about all that right now. Speak your piece, please. My father is looking for me, yadda yadda. What else.”

Destiny had a surreal moment, and then she stood straight in the air, and said, “Talk to your father and stay out of my backyard.”

And then she left—

She reappeared, shouting, “I did not attack you first!”

And then she left again.

… She did not reappear.

When Jane was far away from that confrontation, she allowed herself a small smile, because Destiny had a constant small spill of red around her while she spoke. That could mean many different things, but the primary was that she remembered. Maybe not a whole lot. Maybe not much at all. But she was waking up. Anything was better than nothing.

And also—

“Yes, yes. No need to rub it in. I was being hasty with Oozy. Maybe he was simply immune to the Red Sparks, and thus he and all the people around him were constantly being attacked. That does make a whole lot more sense than him being an ‘agent’ of the Sparks. The anti-meme has never had an agent before, as far as I can remember.”

Jane nodded, highly satisfied. As she shadowstepped across the world, heading north back to Dungeon Island, she asked, “Can my father be made aware of his own time, like I am of mine? I thought that was a dangerous magic.”

The world passed underneath Jane’s feet, her wings turning to shadows as her black scales retreated. Hopefully her father wouldn’t freak when she saw her, and likely saw all of her new self, thanks to that All-Seeing Eye… But he probably would freak. And then the anger and the quiet words would come, and Jane would talk and he would talk, and the Other, Sleeping Janes would probably talk, too. Solomon would be there.

Either way, ThisJane had to try to make at least Erick aware of his own sideways-time. If Destiny could do it, Erick certainly could.

Melemizargo eventually spoke like a friend on her shoulder, “People are not meant to know of multiple timestreams at the same time for that way usually leads to insanity, so I have specifically nottold him about that option, and neither has that ghost of Phagar… maybe for similar reasons. I do not know. But he is a Paradox Wizard and Wizards are different from normal people… Perhaps you shouldtell him that option. Destiny seemsto be doing okay with it…” He left the rest unsaid.

Jane finished the thought, “But Destiny is hard to mark as ‘sane’ on any day, so there’s no way to know if she’s been negatively affected.”

“I try not to call others insane. It makes me look bad.”

 

 

– – – –

Jane set down in the grove in front of the dungeon—

She had done this before.

She REMEMBERED.

Many, many times. Many different lives. Many different places. She glanced at her nails. Due to the vagaries of magic and Other Realities brought forth due to her elevation to Melemizargo’s Paladin, Jane’s prismatic magic tended towards red right now. And so, her nails had been red, because that was apparently the type of color her rock devourer nails took on right now.

Except now her nails were of every color of the rainbow; properly prismatic.

And Solomon stood in front of her, and yet he wasn’t Solomon at all.

He was just her dad, as Jane remembered him throughout most timelines. A little frumpy, with a thickness around his waist that Jane hadn’t seen in years, and yet wearing nice clothes that hid most of that fact. His hair was black, but with white here and there. His eyes were not bright white as they had been for the longest, recent time; but simple brownish-blueish, like Jane’s eyes had been. He wore rubber-soled shoes from Earth. He still had his phone that he had lost years ago, stuck in his pocket, but now it was protected by magics and kept running on power, somehow. He had figured that repair out years ago, hadn’t he. Yeah. He had. And now it connected him to node networks here and there. And yet, that’s not true at all.

Her father had no phone. He was tall and strong and built like an orcol.

And then he was an orcol, briefly, because that’s what he liked these days.

And then he was a human again, or an incani.

Wings, and yet no wings.

A devil propped upon one shoulder, an angel on the other, and yet neither angel nor devil saw each other, because they existed in different realities.

In this place, Jane had lost an arm and had it fully replaced with a sentient ooze. She had become an ooze summoner. She had become an ooze destroyer. She had become a dragon of Carnage, or Death, or Fae. But those were the rarer places.

In the most common place, Jane was a ghost, tied down to this reality by a father that could not let her go.

In countless shades of the multiverse, Jane was simply dead. In slightly less countless shades of the multiverse her father was dead, too, and both of them looked across the glade at each other like they were two non-entities, lost to another time—

Red Sparks encroached upon them, hunting outside of the glade, trying to find whatever was causing them concern. The Darkness held back the Red Tide. He could not hold them back forever.

Jane looked to her father, and her father looked to her. How many times had they tried this? How many times had Time Itself been folded back, to get back here, to the beginning? Was this, then, the final try? It seemed like it was the final try. A culmination of all that came before, and one final farewell.

Jane knew how this would end, as it had already ended multiple times.

Seemed unfair, but life was never fair to anyone.

Jane looked to her father who was currently named Solomon, but that wasn’t his real name at all.

“Hey, dad.”

“Hey, Jane,” Solomon-Erick said, with tears in his eyes that had yet to fall. “How about we undo whatever is happening here, and you go back to being here, and I go back to being here, and we don’t have to touch upon the anti-meme.”

Jane chuckled once. “No. This is too important. The infection is all-powerful, and it’ll always infect this world, stopping progress and hurting people unless you do something about it. I saw it eat a homeless man once. I saw it eat a friend in another lifetime. I saw it eat you, and then me. I think it ate a god, too, I am not sure.” She held out her left arm, where the Bracelet of Memory was linked to her very soul, leaving a simple black line and a silver diamond tattooed around her wrist. “And I know just how to make it so that you can see it, too. Give me your hand, dad.”

Erick breathed.

Jane wasn’t sure what he was seeing right now. Was his paranoia acting up again? Was he seeing Melemizargo trying some shit, instead of his daughter, reaching out? Maybe he was seeing a devil’s bargain, for this was surely one of those. Should he trust her? Maybe. Jane wouldn’t trust—

Erick grabbed his daughter’s wrist.

Jane smiled softly, and returned the grip.

– – – –

They were in the middle of the glade outside of the dungeon. The other girls stood back for some reason. Shadows crawled everywhere, even in the light of the bright sun overhead. Erick stood transfixed and wrapped in Darkness, though his eyes shone outward and the Darkness wasn’t impeding him at all. It was just gently holding him back; telling him ‘not your turn, not for you’.

And Debby held out her hand.

Solomon gripped her wrist and Debby gripped his.

Suddenly, Solomon was not Solomon, and Debby was not Debby.

Erick saw the land as his dead daughter saw the land. It was full of Red. He had been here before, and yet not. He had seen the Red before, and yet it had been absent from his life for the longest time. How long? Erick did not know—

Jane was a rainbow of people, standing to the left and right, each holding hands with him at the same time.

Erick was just himself.

And a blue incani woman, unknown to him, stood there at the side, one of her hands gently laid upon where he held his daughter’s wrist, the other hand gently laid upon where Jane gripped him. The unknown woman asked a silent question. Asked if he really wanted this burden. Asked if he would take this burden from his daughter, and probably end up killing his daughter, because that is what happened in these situations, to those who had seen too much and who had lost the solidity of REMEMBRANCE.

Panic.

Erick tried to say ‘no’. He tried to reason. To delay. To negotiate.

Jane said, “Yes.”

Time froze. Erick watched multicolor tears fall down his daughter’s face as she smiled nonetheless and a strip of black magic crawled up from her skin like the peeling of old, sticky tape. That magic crawled onto Erick’s fingers and then down his hand. The black inchworm stretched across Wheatly in his bracelet form, avoiding the pseudo-[Familiar], to slip under Jane’s hand and wrap around Erick’s wrist.

The rainbow of Jane, all stretching to the left and right, collapsed down to the one holding his hand.

And Erick multiplied.

He could REMEMBER.

All the talks that they had had about what was happening. All the decisions made to let knowledge carry forth, to those who could use that knowledge. The jumpstarting of ‘Solomon’s’ ‘immunity’, like how Erick was already becoming immune. The talk of Oozy, and of Atomic Magic, and of what had happened to Destiny, and how one might retain knowledge through Time Magics. The Wizard of Chaos’s immunity had probably been jump started by her interaction with Jane today, too.

Which was good.

Erick remembered more than he thought he would.

He remembered discarded timelines.

– – – –

In the Sewerhouse of Spur.

Erick woke up from having invented [Call Lightning].

The Headmaster sent a [Viewing Mirror] toward him, inside Al’s house, where Erick rested, and Al sat beside him. Red Sparks filled the air around Al for a moment too long, dazing him just long enough for him to get caught in the picture frame, and the Headmaster saw Al. Two dragons saw each other from across the world.

Spur had not survived that dragon fight. There were survivors, and Erick was one of them, but the city was gone. Silverite dead. Killzone held back by laughing Shades, except for Fallopolis, who tried to stop the dragon fight. Fallopolis was unsuccessful.

Jane did not survive.

Things went downhill from there.

But that never happened. In this universe Al had jumped away from the [Viewing Screen] in time, and the Red Sparks sparked on nothing at all.

– – – –

In the time of the Daydropper Jane stood as a spider atop a grand statue of a person raising their hands to the heavens, which was made from the mashed-up parts of the Garden of Ar’Kendrithyst, and from the bodies of the adventurers Erick had ‘sent’ in there to kill the Daydropper, and Shade Planter. There was Yetta, the Champion of Atunir, Cyril, prince of Odaali, and Dorthy and Basil, brother and sister and childhood friends of the others. Allan had already died in the fight with Shade Planter. The other four had been transformed into parts of the upper hands of the statue. They were offerings for Melemizargo’s summoning.

Jane had managed to get Yetta and Cyril free, and now she had come back for the other two.

That is when Melemizargo appeared from a rift in the world.

Melemizargo instructed Jane to try a magic —any magic at all!— and he would help her do it properly. He suggested [Polymorph], because that is what she was doing right now.

Red Sparks interfered, and Jane never counter-suggested [Shadowalk].

Jane died to her own malformed body.

Melemizargo brought her back, told her to try again, and she did. This time she got it right.

Ten days later, in an unimportant time and place, Red Sparks interfered again, and Jane died of massive cardiac malformations in her [Polymorph] that she didn’t even catch because she had fiddled with the nerves, too, and she could not feel herself dying.

But that never happened.

– – – –

A parasite of Messalina’s, used by that Lower Trademaster of Pearl, Caradogh Pogi, got into Jane’s brain, because Red Sparks got into one of the orcol guards at Erick’s house just a little bit too much, at the exact right time. That orcol ended up giving Jane a dazed sort of look, which Jane interpreted wrong, and which the guard decided to roll with. Jane ended up in his bed, her head on his pillow, and thus, she got a parasite that was not meant for her.

When the draconic Flare Couatl came to town to attack, Pogi triggered the parasites. Jane and both guards triggered their [Defend]s way too much, zeroing out their Health. Under the onslaught of [Flare], Jane and others became instant ash.

Erick got her revived through Messalina but Jane was never the same. Eventually, Erick confronted the fact that Jane was not the same, and that Messalina had fucked up.

That timeline ended in the Headmaster’s dragonfire.

– – – –

In the fight against Terror Peaks, Red Sparks distracted Melemizargo for a moment, and Jane died to a Soul Spear attack. The Dragon God of Magic asked Erick if he wanted her revived, but she would not be the same. She would be a different person. The Soul Spear had killed too much of her soul for anything more than a 15% revivification, and that Erick would have to find Quilatalap to get that done.

Erick didn’t bother protecting himself when another Soul Spear launched toward him.

– – – –

Some timelines were so different they weren’t even recognizable.

Erick landed without Jane, and he searched for her, but never found her, and he died in the desert.

Jane was killed by Bulgan, and Erick joined the war on the side of the Angels, eventually culminating in the destruction of Hell. The Paladins of all the gods beat down his tower doors in that one.

Food poisoning on the yurts of the grass travelers killed Nirzir and all of Songli turned against him, and Void Song’s assassins eventually won.

Tiza Nindi shot him with a Bolt from Sininindi, right there in the classroom of the Mage’s Guildhouse of Spur, killing him instantly.

– – – –

Erick stood in a glade, holding his daughter’s wrist.

All around them were uncountable stars. Melemizargo stood to the North. Rozeta stood to the South. Fairy Moon was at the West, and Erick was at the East. The starfield zoomed in, culminating in a zoom all the way to this very glade overlapping all of the participants. The imaging finished.

A pulse rang out across the world—

—and struck a barrier of red lightning that materialized just beyond the Edge of the Script. Nothing escaped Veird. No signals went out. Instead, Red Sparks infected the world, and they were a layer of power just outside of the Script. In the void.

Melemizargo broke from the Ritual and looked at the sky from his seated position at the North. He sighed. “That certainly got a reaction… Hmm.”

No one else commented on those words, and so, Melemizargo tried looking on the bright side.

“I’m going to get so many new stars and planets! This is gonna be great!”

– – – –

Erick came back to himself, and yet he was not fully himself. He was still partially Solomon. That Other Name still felt comfortable for him, because something untoward had happened.

Solomon held his daughter’s hand, and Red Sparks had replaced all of Jane’s soul.

She was dead. She had always been dead.

And the Sparks kept eating. Those Sparks had interfered in the transfer of the bracelet like gleeful nails on a chalkboard, pulling apart the black band around Solomon’s wrist, leaving behind a cracked tattoo, damaging the magic of the bracelet. Solomon couldn’t even see that until now, and even as he saw their ravaging, he lost sight of them. Solomon would care about the failure to transfer this power later. He would talk to Guile on his right wrist, silent and observant, and Erick and Melemizargo, watching from afar, about all of what had happened here, and what had failed to happen. But for now…

It was just him and his daughter, under the Sparking Red sky, surrounded by red lightning, thick as wrists and jagged upon everything—

The Atomic Woman from another age held onto Solomon’s and Jane’s hands as she said, “It appears I have touched too much upon this horror, and your daughter was way too deep to ever extract herself safely. Even my own power has been exhausted trying to fulfill her last wishes.” The Red Sparks crawled into the Atomic Woman, replacing her completely, as they had replaced Jane’s soul. Her voice was still there, though, still indelibly marked upon the world. “This is not the ending I would have preferred, but I am okay with this ending, for you and your surviving daughters know of the horrors of that magic that must never be remade, even if you never saw such a thing yourself. As for your own horror, you have gained an uninterrupted moment of Truth about the horror you faced without knowing, until here, until now. I am glad for that. It will have to be enough of an inoculation. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more with the Redness. Your own Path might see you through the rest of this journey through evil.”

Like butterflies in the shape of a corpse, the Red Sparks left the Atomic Woman, leaving nothing behind.

Solomon stared at his daughter, begging her to still be there, to hear her say, ‘I love you’. To be an indelible mark upon the world as the Atomic Woman had been. But that’s not how it was. She had never gotten the chance for one final word, and neither had Solomon.

Jane was gone.

– – – –

The world returned.

Solomon gripped his daughter’s cold wrist as Jane’s grip loosened, as her body fell to the ground. He roared. He cursed. He tried a thousand things to bring her back, from [True Resurrection] to [Reincarnation] to calling out to the mana itself, begging it to bring Jane back, and then cursing it in equal measure from taking her from him.

But there was no soul to bring back. There was no Time to reverse, either, for Melemizargo had done as much of that as possible in this space. Melemizargo spoke of how he had helped as much as he could, and Solomon fell silent as he knew the Dark God was not lying. The other Erick still had his words about him, though. Erick roared at Melemizargo for the liberties he took, for taking Debby as a paladin and then subjecting her to unknown Wizardry. Melemizargo countered about how Debby had known what she was doing, and how Erick should know by now that he would never want to hurt any of his daughters, and how none of this was his fault at all. If he could have picked a different person to resonate with the Bracelet he would have.

“What did you even accomplish?!” Erick demanded, yelling at the God of Magic.

Melemizargo stared right back at him. “I’d tell you if you could understand, but it looks like that’ll take a while longer.” He declared to them all, to every Jane in the glade, to Guile watching from Solomon’s side as Solomon lifelessly gazed upon his dead daughter, to Solomon and Erick, “None of you know the full extent of this anti-meme; this Red Plague upon this world—”

“Shut up,” Solomon declared in a soft, stern voice.

Jane still lay before him as though sleeping on a pure white bed of stone. Solomon had managed that much; had been able to give her that much dignity. He wasn’t sure why, but he knew that the fact that they had a body at all was a miracle in itself. That being able to remember Jane at all was yet another miracle. Melemizargo had probably done that. But Solomon didn’t know.

So he asked, “We have a body because you made that happen, didn’t you, Melemizargo. We have memories of her because of you.”

“I could manage that much without touching upon Grand Wizardry.”

The dragon god of Magic seemed like he wanted to say more, but also that he knew enough to stop right there.

“… Right.”

No one wanted Grand Wizardry from the insane god of magic.

In a divorced, almost clinical sort of way, Solomon moved past the moment of pain, and considered… Everything.

He knew he had experienced this same feeling, this same scenario, ten thousand times already. Jane was dead. Jane had always been dead. He had never gotten to watch her grow older than now; that had been the fate of other Ericks, from other timelines. This Jane, who had been ‘Debby’ for a while, was gone. ‘Debby’ had never been her name; it had always been ‘Jane’. And ‘Solomon’ was not like the Other Ericks.

He was the one who lost.

‘Solomon’ stood. With an anguish he had worn for decades and not at all, Erick said, “We’re not arguing about fault. We’re continuing with the rescues from the Dark. We are securing this world from every possible threat we can envision.” He stared at both This Erick and Melemizargo. “And when I get a chance, when I understand what happened here, I will be fixingit.”

‘Solomon’ brooked no argument.

He went back into the dungeon.

– – – –

Melemizargo watched as Red Sparks swarmed around Solomon, but they could not touch him, not completely. He was waking up. Those same Sparks couldn’t fully touch Erick right now, either, but his immunity was of a different sort than Solomon’s. More of a secure immunity. Solomon’s immunity was that of scars; of alterations unable to reach him through all of his old wounds.

It was similar to Melemizargo’s own immunity, granted to him through centuries of insanity, and then finally waking up to the realities of this reality.

The Janes were less awake; even the ‘original’ was the same sleepiness as her reflections. It would take them a great deal of time to notice the Red Sparks as ‘Debby’ had noticed. They would probably never wake up at all. Most people never did.

When Solomon and Erick met Poi inside the dungeon, Poi got a brief dazed look to him, due to the Red, but he recovered…

He was waking up, too?

Poi was waking up, too. His immunity was one granted to him by Erick and Solomon in a way that neither of them had noticed what they were doing, and which Melemizargo had not noticed either. It was a lesser form of either Ericks’ immunity. But still. Perhaps… Perhaps the Crossing could be saved? It would take a great deal of effort to do that, though. The Mind Mages were mostly a failed attempt at unraveling this cage… But maybe that could change. Maybe Melemizargo would find success if he revisited that project.

All of their various immunities to the Red Sparks were different from Oozy’s immunity, though. Oozy was a focal point. Something different. Something major. Something that hadn’t happened before, and Jane hadn’t been able to see that, so Melemizargo had allowed that dereliction of duty. But Melemizargo had known what he was looking at when he saw it.

Melemizargo should have made Jane kill that man.

 

… But that would have definitely caused an even larger rift between him and Erick than the one that occurred, for Sininindi would have gotten involved, and then the mess would cascade. That might have been exactly what the Red Sparks had wanted when they shoved Oozy in front of Jane—

Rozeta’s voice came to him, “WHAT THE FUCK.”

Melemizargo sighed, and then he planned how best to explain himself without coming across as an insane person, all the while with Red Sparks constantly interfering. Melemizargo wasn’t too worried about his daughter’s rage right now, because Melemizargo was done poking at the problem. For now. Whatever this cage was, it wasn’t overly dangerous until you confronted it directly, and even then the worst it could do was unravel a soul that was already extremely vulnerable to its power.

At least when he talked to Rozeta, Melemizargo was able to honestly say that he did his best to save ‘Debby’ and that he didn’t enact any Grand Wizardry of his own; he had merely been shielding Jane while she went around killing memetic horrors, which was still a valued service that any Paladin would have been honored to enact. It had been her choice to do all of that. Melemizargo hadn’t actually told her to do anything at all except what she wanted to do in the first place. All he had done was help her enact her own choices.

Rozeta called that a weak argument.

Melemizargo did not gainsay that rebuttal.

Of course, the real reason he didn’t enact any Grand Wizardry of his own was because direct confrontations with the Red Sparks was how you ended up with cascading horrors like with Idyrvamikor and the Death of All Halves.

Maybe Melemizargo could have saved Jane.

But maybe it was better for ‘Solomon’ to want to bring Jane back himself.