Leftover Apocalypse

"This is all part of the plan," Connie said. She looked relaxed, her feet up on the table and a paper airplane in her hand.

"It was your plan for General Telen and some guy that can turn into King Kong to sneak deep behind enemy lines with sixty troops and assault the fortress looking for you - and I guess also to try and destroy one of the few remaining gateways to Brinkmar - and then for us to come close enough to dying that Hammersmith decides we should be kept under lock and key for our own good until Brinkmar is in alignment and you can take the army across?"

She paused, airplane poised for throwing, and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. "...No," she conceded, "not all of that. Also if they decide those Halenvar goons fucked the gateway up enough that it's not usable Hammersmith will for sure not let us stay in this city which would be very bad. But... this last part, where we're locked up in a windowless basement room? That was part of the plan."

The paper airplane soared across the room and managed to wedge itself into the gap between the door frame and the top of the door itself. Connie threw both hands in the air in a victory pose. "See, I complimented this room in front of Hammersmith once or twice. Not enough to be weird. It's nice and cool down here, and the walls have that neat wavy pattern, and it's quiet. I've moved meetings down here a couple of times, and when I was acting like I was considering letting them move you into the fort rather than the apartment I muttered something about how maybe the two of us could stay in here, since it's nice and spacious. And then, just to be safe, I made sure I was close to Hammersmith when she made her decision to keep us down here."

I stopped pacing and stared at her. What was that supposed to mean? She waggled her eyebrows at me, closed her eyes, and threw another paper airplane. It landed on top of the first one.

I didn't want to give her the satisfaction, but that throw should have been impossible. "What the fuck?"

"Probability magic, my friend," she said, folding another paper airplane. "I'm not great at it, I couldn't power it up because as I have bitterly mentioned before I was forced to focus almost entirely on my little rewind trick. But I had to get it to the point where I could at least use it outside of combat, for stuff where I could calmly visualize it. It seemed like it might be important if the end of the world was on the line. So I was close to Hammersmith, and I just... put the vibes out there."

I stared at her in horror. "You mind controlled Hammersmith?"

"Pfft. No. Even someone with actual thought magic would have trouble with her. I provided the teeniest tiniest little nudge to a previously existing possibility. Very low power stuff. Probability magic is strange, you don't get to tell it how to work. You just ask for a result, and give it some juice, and hope that it's enough. It's about visualization. I couldn't make something impossible happen, or convince Hammersmith to just let us go entirely. But if she was possibly already going to remember how much I liked this room, and possibly going to think about how it's nice and secure what with the lack of windows... well... a nudge is all you need. If you want to see something really funny, we should go back to Earth and hit Vegas."

"No shit," I said. "Wait, how does anyone gamble in this world?"

"Games of skill, partly. Or they put a lock on your Dumine. Also there are gambling places that only let you in if you've got a dud, and that leads to people making fake duds and gluing them on or whatever. If you want a good fake it's expensive, I looked into it."

I reached up and pulled the paper airplanes down. "Wait. Shit. You did it again." She'd been getting me off topic for hours. After the fight we'd been separated and questioned and then given time to wash up and sleep. In the morning, we were moved down to the basement and given a long speech about how we weren't prisoners, were totally free and able to go anywhere and do anything we wanted, and also would need to stay put for 'a while' until they figured out how so many enemy troops made it to us.

As soon as that was over and we were alone I'd tried to talk to Connie about escape plans - I didn't actually think it was a good idea, but I was certain that she would be on the verge of mental collapse and planning an escape would make her feel better. But when I tried to sketch out some ideas of how we might get past the guards she stole my paper for airplanes and told me not to worry about it. It had been at least three hours (with a recent break for lunch), and every single time I'd gotten her close to talking about whatever she had planned - because there was no way she was actually just fine with this - she turned the conversation around somehow.

"I did nothing. You keep distracting yourself. It's not my fault if every offhand comment I make causes you to lose your train of thought. Besides, it's good for you to think about potential application of magic powers before we get to the Duminere. I'd skip the probability stuff though, I've already got that. We don't need duplicates."

"They all seem so powerful," I said. I'd looked at the list Connie had given me a hundred times and was no closer to picking what I wanted. "That guy became an enormous monster, how did he do that?"

She shrugged, adjusting the flaps on her airplane. "Enhancement and fabrication, I think. Enhancement to modify your body, Fabrication to make matter - it's not really real unless you spend a ton of mana, but he can probably get it pretty close and then it just... dissolves later? Or something? He probably has a third, I dunno. I forget his name, he's one of the big strike team leaders for Halenvar."

She paused to throw the airplane, which did a perfect loop right back to her hand. "There's one that's been off the radar for a few months and is probably in Brinkmar, one that just got killed because of my amazing future knowledge fucking their battle plans, and one on the front lines. Oh, and Telen. Anyway they call the big guy Behemoth, which... eh. I feel like there's got to be a more creative name to give him. He got away, him and Telen both. Oh, and the witch."

"Yeah, and what the fuck was up with her? Why was she using wild magic, and why did she steal Errod's toe?"

"Okay first of all, wild magic is badass. It's just super dangerous and unpredictable. But the language is more flexible, more conversational as opposed to being like a programming language, so you can make up spells on the fly way easier. You just... also fuck it up easier. I guess in the old days, like three thousand years ago or something before the Clockmaker, there were a hundred languages. Anyone could just make one up and teach it to enough people that the Common Local Understanding would recognize it and bam, instant magic. But then if they didn't agree on what a word meant, or what was possible, or whatever... it's a mess."

"Wait," I said, "any language would work? So all those Harry Potter fans..."

"Oh absolutely! If they'd had mana and were all hanging out together back before the Clockmaker locked shit down those spells one hundred percent would have worked. That many people that all agreed about what the words were and what it was supposed to do? No problem. But! The Imperial language, the Clockmaker one, it's objectively better in a lot of ways. Sorry you can't read the spells right, the complex ones are like those fucking... magic eye pictures, I could never get those things to work."

I almost said 'yeah, me either' before realizing what a dumb statement that would be.

"But speaking of the witch," she continued, "I listened in on part of what Errod said and he was pretty clear that it wasn't the one that took his toe. He said the hair was different, the staff was wood rather than metal, the height was different, and he was even sure the skin tone wasn't right. That's a lot of differences."

"Sure, but what are the odds two crazy masked magic users were following us?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Not as bad as you'd think. I've killed like... four? Yeah, four people with masks. Two were fanatics that were guarding the portal to Brinkmar, one was a Klunlesh or something which was fucked up because when I pulled the mask off it was my own face looking back at me, and then one of them was an assassin that was trying to kill Hammersmith. The other Hammersmith, of course. These were all in the old timeline."

"How would you even kill her?" I muttered, remembering he fighting Telen, "She's unstoppable."

Connie gave me a funny look. "Oh come on. We're more creative than that. She can choke on something, she can be cooked to death or electrocuted or poisoned or teleported into a hostile dimension or any number of things. That's why she normally keeps... uh... well, she normally keeps some other soldiers around her. All she can do is fight and not have to wear armor."

"What were you about to say?"

"Nothing," she said, unconvincingly.

"I'll shave half your head in your sleep."

Connie sighed. "She... normally keeps someone nearby to act as a lightning rod. Someone with entropy magic, to drain attacks that could otherwise kill her."

"Okay. So why didn't you want to just say... oh."

I pictured it again, Betrad's body sliding down off of the blade. He'd been hit by lightning at least twice, and whatever that distortion was around the other soldier had stopped when he got up close. I hadn't known him that well, but he had seemed nice. "I feel bad for not feeling worse. Like I'm very coldly logically sad about Bert, but I'm not... sad-sad. Katrin was bawling. What's wrong with us? Okay, now I actually want you to do the thing where you derail my train of thought. Give it your best shot."

"Okay." Connie considered for a moment. "Did I tell you what happened to my phone? Hah, I knew that would get your attention. So I got some money, and I was desperate to get the phone working again. All it needed was a charge, right? Well we're not stupid, so right away I knew that shoving electricity into it wouldn't solve anything; there's voltages and shit you have to get right, and obviously we have no clue how that would work. So I take it to this guy, he's super expensive but he gives me a discount just because he wants to see what the fuck the cell phone even is.

"He's got Reinforcement magic, and his husband has Temporal and Perception. Their whole thing is that they swear they can return anything to its prior state. Like, you've got a painting and it gets something spilled on it that strips the paint? Normal repairs can't do anything for that. But these guys can get the original painting back for you. So I think, okay, the battery is a chemical thing and maybe they can return it to a time when it was charged. Makes sense, right? They get to work, and the they both look really confused, and then the back of the phone pops right off. The battery falls out, and it's swollen up like a balloon and the one guy is flipping out, he has no idea why his powers have failed him.

"He starts to apologize, and then it explodes. Like actually explodes. The guy screams, we all make a run for it, and a minute later we're watching his whole shop burn down. They weren't as pissed as you'd think, they were crazy rich and anyway some of the stuff wasn't that badly burnt and obviously they were just the guys you'd call to fix even the burnt stuff. But the one dude wouldn't even look at me, just kept muttering that he shouldn't have tampered with a device made by demons."

"Well I still have mine, so if you think of a better idea we could try one more time. God, I really miss that stupid phone sometimes. This place has magic and dinosaurs and whatever but a couple times now I've just... I don't know, I've wanted to sit back and play that shitty Tetris knock-off we made, or listen to music or whatever. When we're rich I'm going to buy magic devices that just do dumb entertaining stuff."

"I could code up some stuff, maybe. I'm not great with the runic shit, but with enough time and maybe resetting my Dumine I could be a magic item programmer. I've been tweaking my rig," she said, gesturing to the terrifying device sitting on the bed.

It was made from black metal with leather straps, and looked like some sort of vaguely kinky steampunk mad scientist gear. The part that went on Connie's back had cylinders which contained very powerful time-aligned mana crystals, and then there were chains that lead to cuffs for her wrists and thighs and allowed the device's effects to better hit her whole body evenly. In theory it could help her speed up and slow down time, but in practice she'd modified it to keep her stable - thereby holding off the seemingly incurable wasting sickness that kept trying to kill her.

"Sure," I said, "but also we'll be filthy rich so if we need to you can just hire people, be their patron or whatever. No real responsibilities, just traveling the world and... I was talking to Katrin and Errod about maybe being a, like, mercenary or something - but for good shit. Like a bounty hunter, monster hunter, hero for hire kinda thing. It's stupid, I know."

She smiled. "There's a mercenary company that makes people sign magic contracts that say they won't be evil, basically. You could work for them. They're in Good Charl, we're going there to hire people to help us get to the Duminere - although I don't know we'll use that company."

"I wouldn't want to sign a magic contract," I said. "But as I keep reminding you, we'll be rich. So I could do it pro bono, they'll be all 'oh how can I repay you' and I'll just dramatically ride off into the sunset. And then maybe I'll come back to whatever little shit town some day, and people will remember me and buy me a drink or something. Best of both worlds. No attachment, no acting like I care about people, but you still get to be a goodguy. It's the social equivalent of the cool uncle."

"We didn't have a cool uncle," Connie said, "We had uncle Roy."

"Hey, he never made us go to school that whole time. That was pretty cool." Child Protective Services hadn't thought so. "Anyway, that's a possible plan. Unless everyone sucks, although so far most people have been pretty nice."

Connie went around the room collecting paper airplanes, then perched on the chest by the bed so she could start throwing them at my head. "I didn't travel much. I guess they're okay. Way less racism and sexism and homophobia and shit here, probably because it's hard to get upset about skin color or gender stuff when you can change them whenever you want."

"Wait. Oh, shit. Right. Enhancement?"

"Yeah. The fast and dirty way of doing it means it also reverts after a while, so rich people - or people that can do that stuff themselves - sometimes alter themselves just for fun, or to be artsy. For the most part nobody gives a shit. I considered doing a short term sex change at one point when I had run away and was trying to hide - I thought it might make it harder for them to find me - but I didn't actually go through with it. Anyway, less sexism and racism unless you're talking about people from other planes. There's some tension there, in a few cases. Oh, and like the whole country of Markonti are kinda awful, but nobody goes there. They basically got shut out from global politics because everyone agreed that they're assholes."

I caught an airplane and threw it back. "What about Halenvar?"

She reached out for it, but it took a nose dive at the last second. "Bah. Um... yeah, they're awful and we're at war with them and everything but as a nation they're not terrible. Like the king is the absolute worst, he's evil and a religious fanatic and is willing to risk destroying the universe but he's never taken much of a hands-on approach with the day to day shit and some of the people a few steps down the ladder from him are pretty decent so... yeah, overall it's not a bad place. Once he's dead and the war is over they'll probably sign some treaty right away and people will act like it all never happened. Of course they also won't ever know about the destroying the universe part."

"I guess as long as Telen gets what's coming to him. Man, you were so close."

She shook her head. "Nah, that was as much damage as I was ever going to do. When you teleport, it clears a path for you - moves air out of the way and stuff - and if there's something in the way that you can't move it just won't teleport you at all. But there's a split second between vanishing and reappearing for whatever reason, and if something ends up in the way right at the perfect moment you're in trouble. But the thing is, I'm not that fast and so even with rewinding time after seeing where he'd appear I barely was able to get part of my dagger into position. With his armor, and the padding they wear under it? Most likely I got an inch or so in there."

"That's what she said. Er, he said? Whatever. Anyway, that still clearly hurt him. If you'd gotten the knife a little deeper, or aimed for the head..."

"Maybe. It was a tough shot, I don't think I would have gotten the head. Look, we'll get him eventually. He... well, a version of him... killed some people I really liked. I would happily trade my life for his. But chances are it won't have anything to do with me, it'll be Hammersmith or some random soldier or he'll slip in the shower and crack his skull on something. We'll hear about it a month later, it'll be totally anticlimactic but we won't care because we'll be off on an adventure."

I crumpled the last paper airplane into a ball and threw it at her head. She didn't bother dodging. "And how will we be on an adventure when we're being kept locked in a basement?"

Connie looked at the clock on the wall. It was similar to the ones I was used to in principle, though not in form; the numbers only went to six rather than twelve, and the whole face rotated instead of having hands. It was about fifteen minutes to noon. "Ugh. Fine. Timing is off anyway. So, you know the walls around cities - and this fort - have runes woven into them, right?"

"Yeah," I said, "to keep people from teleporting past them or coming in from other planes or whatever."

"To stop them from doing all sorts of things, it varies from place to place. Also, for the outer walls, to keep mana out."

"Don't they want mana?"

"They do, but if you don't have a barrier the people suck it all up and not only drain the whole countryside but attract monsters. Having a barrier means there's basically no mana at all in the city which makes it unattractive to monsters, and plenty of mana outside the city which means you can - in moderation - use it for other stuff. Having really good walls with all the layered runes is a big deal for a city - places with shitty walls all eventually have problems.

"But learning how to write runes is relatively easy," she said, "since you can technically do it without even going to a Duminere. It's harder, and most people can't activate the runes themselves, but it would still be easy to slip an extra character in, or just break them. And that would be bad."

I nodded along. "Sure, Betrad -" sliding off the end of the sword, dead eyes staring up at the sky "- said something yesterday before the attack, there was some indication they might have been messed with. Wait. What did you do? Also, did it work? Because he said they tested everything."

"You can't just go in there and change things, because yeah - they'd notice. In fact, they made it so you need a special sequence like a password in order to mess with things or it would immediately be apparent. Think of a checksum. And they change the runes a little every few months, and change the sequence. So even if you knew it, pretty soon it would be outdated. And obviously they keep them extremely secret."

She looked far too pleased with herself. How would she have... oh. "Do they keep the old outdated ones secret?"

Connie sarcastically clapped for me. "Good job. No, they do not. And so if you already suspect you might be... let's call it going back in time although that's not quite what I did... in addition to researching the expedition that found a lost Duminere you could memorize some old sequences. And some other things."

I got up and started pacing. I was excited, but also... was it even a good idea to leave? Who was I kidding, I'd been locked up for less than twenty-four hours and I was feeling the pressure. "Okay so how... what do we do? How does this help? You did something a few days ago, and then you wanted us in this specific room... but I'm not seeing what you would have done. Did you make it so we can teleport out somehow?"

"That's way beyond my ability. But - oh! Finally! Good timing though. Callie, step back from the middle of the floor. Guess what happens when you carefully move some runes to make an area that's not protected from Transmutation?"

As if on cue, the floor opened up. Milanata Hurst, the world's most absent-minded landlord, looked up from the hole. "Oh! I forgot there were two of you! Sorry I'm late dears, I couldn't get the nose right on my latest project and it was going to kill me if I left it like that - especially if I get caught and executed for treason. Anyway, are you both ready to go?"