An Unbound Soul

"(We still have no idea who tried to open that portal, or where from,)" said Gregory on the other side of the interdimensional rift that Darren had casually torn in our respective universes. "(We had more luck with Maximilian, though.)"

"(Oh?)" asked Harry, looking suddenly interested.

"(Not that I'd have believed any of this, if I wasn't discussing it with someone standing in another universe. Maximilian is an alias. He was born as William Taylor. In eighteen-forty-three.)"

"Uh..." I commented, not entirely sure I'd heard that correctly.

"(Yes. Eighteen-forty-three. He's not far off his two-hundredth birthday.)"

Well, that certainly raised a few more questions than it answered.

"(Wow...)" opined Cara, seemingly in full agreement.

"(Abandoned at a rural church as a baby, along with a note that contained little more than his name, a claim that he was possessed by evil, and for the church to please do what needed to be done. The local vicar wasn't the sort of person to burn babies without evidence, so handed him over to a nearby orphanage. Well, more of a workhouse, really. Five years later, he supposedly healed the wife of the workhouse owner of something that sounds very much like tuberculosis; we're only going off a diary the vicar kept, and he wasn't exactly a doctor. Anyway, the church declared it a miracle, he was absolved of any suspicion of demonic possession, and everyone started a big fight over him.)"

Healing tuberculosis at age five? I wasn't sure when the first antibiotic treatment for TB was invented, but I was fairly sure it wasn't that early. That was certainly compatible with my theory of reincarnation, but he still couldn't be from here. Even at that ridiculous age, it still placed his birth date in the era of Erryn's Law.

"(He ended up getting adopted by the local landowner. Diary entries involving him are sparse after that, but there's one in particular about how a teacher that had been hired for him had come to confession and talked about how the boy had 'otherworldly knowledge', that he believed it was blasphemous, but that he was being threatened to keep his mouth shut. According to other historical records, that landowner gained some amount of fame over the next decade, mostly from new crop varieties developed in the area that were far more productive and disease resistant than their predecessors.)"

Yup. Reincarnation. And it sounded like he had a strong background in biology. Isolating something like penicillin wasn't that hard if someone knew what they were doing—which I didn't—but would penicillin treat tuberculosis? Selectively breeding crops wasn't complicated either, and I could probably even manage to do that myself, given enough time. A decade would be cutting it fine, though, especially for a result that was 'far' more productive, rather than only slightly.

"(This sounds like the sort of thing I'd have heard of...)" commented Harry.

"(If it had carried on, you probably would have. But those local successes were relatively minor, and lasted little more than a decade, after which the entire family died in a fire, and Maximilian's paper trail vanished.)"

"(Suspicious...)" I commented.

"(Indeed.)"

"(How do you know it's the same person?)" asked Calvin.

"(We followed the money that went into your research. Found a few properties that had been bought by the same holding company and searched them. We didn't find much, but we did find his birth certificate. There was also evidence that he'd been funding other groups. Yours was actually unusual, by his standards; he was mostly focused on biological work, particularly genetic engineering. Also epidemiology, virology, that sort of thing.)"

Was that related to all the rats? How, though?

"(But no sign of where he is now?)" asked Abigail.

"(No, I'm afraid not.)"

Interesting information, and I'm sure these researchers would be thrilled to learn that they'd been dancing in the palm of someone a hundred and eighty years old, but none of it seemed useful.

"(So he's likely a reincarnate from a third world, with extensive biological knowledge, seemingly including something that lets him extend his lifespan. Probably somewhere more advanced than Earth. That doesn't explain why he's fixated on this world, though.)"

"(Maybe he's mixing them up?)"

Could be. It wasn't as if they'd publicly announced that no-one on this world had much biological knowledge beyond what they'd been implanted with by Erryn a few centuries ago. The System was public knowledge, but if he's been away for well over a century, he might think it a recent development.

"(I don't think there's anything else to do. We should schedule our next meeting for a week from now,)" said Harry, leading to a brief side debate on whose definition of a week we were supposed to be using.

"(Before you go, I have one more thing to try,)" I said, pulling out Grover's over-engineered flash bomb. He'd decided against water after realising just how much would be produced, even from a level one core. Turning their portal chamber into a swimming pool wouldn't be polite. "(I want to test if this works on Earth.)"

"(What does it do?)" asked Gregory with suspicion.

"(Glows. It's a magical light bulb, tweaked to work in a manaless environment.)"

"(Interesting. So if that works, you think you'll be able to trade usable magical equipment?)"

"(That's certainly a possibility,)" I answered, rolling with his assumption. It was true, after all, and it was probably best not to mention that the first thing we 'traded' would be a bomb.

"(Fine. Go ahead. I'm fairly sure I shouldn't be deciding that on my own, but whatever.)"

The people manning the room backed well away from the portal, and I inserted a monster core into the slot on the football-sized device and tossed it through. It hit the floor with a very interesting whumpf as the mechanism tapped the monster core for mana, after which it started glowing dimly.

"(It doesn't seem to be doing much,)" commented Gregory. "(But I suppose it doing anything counts as a success?)"

"(Actually, it's working fine,)" I countered, knowing just how thoroughly shaded the light crystals were. Had they been exposed, we'd have dazzled everyone in the room at the least. At worst, they could have been blinded.

Drat, we should have made a dark crystal version. Would that have worked on Earth? Missed science opportunity there, because I was too focused on it as a test of whether decay bombs would work.

Alas, the portal had already been open for far too long, so we shut off the magical lightbulb and said our goodbyes.

"I don't like this," complained Harry. "Not any of it. We've apparently been lied to and messed around with, and now we're paying for it by being stuck here, slowly losing our minds. What makes it worse is that he practically told me. The way his appearance never changed. His Victorian dressing habits. The way he talked about television as if it was something that had only been invented yesterday. I just didn't see it, because I foolishly believed the world followed rules rather than... Even guidelines seems optimistic, these days. More like suggestions."

"It's not like there are only negatives. You've got hold of a clean, practically unlimited power source for Earth. On a personal level, if not for this mess, I'd never have met my parents or Cluma. Or Erryn, for that matter."

"Yay. You got to replace your real parents with younger models, get fawned over by a brainwashed cat-girl, and got cosy with a mind-controlling dictator. I can see why you'd prefer it here to Earth."

"I'm... not sure if that was sarcasm?"

"Of course it was!" he snapped.

Actually, my previous parents were currently the younger ones. Cluma, far from fawning, had decided she was going to discipline me with a magical spray bottle whenever I said or did anything stupid. And Erryn... did her best, given her lacking knowledge, and ended up sacrificing herself for the sake of some dwarfs, however temporarily. But Harry had already made it obvious that arguing wasn't going to get me anywhere, so I held my tongue and visited Grover instead to give him the good news. A half hour later, I was the reluctant owner of a decay bomb.

I had a nuke in my [Inventory]. The only difference was that it wouldn't leave behind a radioactive mess. It wouldn't leave behind anything. Still, if anyone opened a portal and tried to wage war through it, I could make them stop with extreme prejudice.

It wasn't until I left the institute to return home that I realised that no-one—not even on the Earth side—had expressed any sort of surprise that one of my arms was suddenly made of metal. Was that considered normal for me now? My fleshy stub—currently detached and abandoned in my bedroom—had grown back some more overnight thanks to [Regeneration], but at the rate it was regrowing, I'd be out of action for weeks without proper healing. It was already late enough that Raymond's shift would be over, so that would have to be tomorrow.

I opened my front door to find Cluma lounging around inside. "Well? How did it go?" she asked.

A quick check with [Mana Sight] uncovered her magical water sprayer in her bedroom, rather than her immediate vicinity.

"Not great. They didn't have any information that was immediately useful. They did have some that was interesting, though."

"Oh?"

If she was interested, why didn't she join us? Actually, now that I thought back a bit, when was the last time she'd visited the institute with me? Had it happened at all since the time after I visited the great dungeon, and she gave away that I'd found a Law 'solution' there that I didn't want to use? It wasn't like I'd told her off for that...

Hopefully it wasn't because of the Earth people having another rant at her for being 'stupid' for failing to understand something that the Law blocked her memories of.

Regardless of if she was deliberately avoiding the place, I filled her in, cooked some non-exploding steak, ate it, then went to bed.

... Didn't I used to cook more stuff for myself when I did steak? Vegetables, for example? When had I stopped doing that? Steak on its own was never a satisfying meal.

Or, at least, it didn't use to be...

I checked my status once more, but as usual, it still called me human. I couldn't help but be a little... not concerned, as such, because I couldn't care less what a line in my status said. Suspicious was a better description. I'd added a tail, but on its own, how did that explain purring when Cluma brushed it?

I wasn't sure about the water thing. Wouldn't anyone jump if they got unexpectedly sprayed with water? But were my diet preferences changing? I prodded my canines with my tongue, but they were still very much human length. Maybe I could put that down to just subconsciously not wanting to cook separate meals for myself and Cluma.

I pulled a monster core from [Inventory] and sniffed it, but I had no impulse whatsoever to bite into it. It didn't smell tasty to me in the slightest. It didn't smell of anything, once the monster remains had been cleaned off it. I certainly wasn't inheriting Cluma's dietary preferences, then. This whole turning catkin thing was just Cluma making a mountain out of one single little purr.

Probably.

Perhaps further investigation was required, in the form of further tail brushing? Lots and lots of tail brushing?

But perhaps some other time, when I didn't have a metallic arm to remind her of a recent dungeon screw up.

Instead, I fell asleep, getting my arm properly healed the next day before we spent another couple of hours fighting boring fights in the dungeon. Cluma was apparently gaining levels, even if I wasn't, but mostly in [Non-detection]. She was already good enough at that, in my opinion, and it made her harder to see with [Soul Perception]. Which, of course, she considered a plus point.

Alas, our training session was once more doomed to premature interruption. Not by injury this time, but by a call from Serlv. It seemed our visitors were back.