Leftover Apocalypse

The next day was spent with Connie working to get a permit to go down into the depths of the Necropolis, something that was looking like it would have been almost impossible without Cyne having gone through the process before. There were also apparently only a small number of people who were cleared to lower people down - we certainly didn't want to have to start at the very top - although that at least sounded like it would resolve itself as soon as we had the permit.

Sige and Aestrid took turns hanging around for protection but they were clearly half-assing it, as confident as everyone else that no harm could possibly befall us while we were here. I still hadn't gotten a very clear explanation why. I'd heard Telen threaten a toddler, I had trouble believing that he wouldn't try to have me kidnapped or killed just because of some cultural taboo. There was only so much I could do if nobody else was worried though, and we hadn't seen any sign of anyone from Halenvar or the Endless Empire.

"Well maybe that's why Cyne likes it here," I said, "since he's a pacifist and stuff. You know, even he said that the zombies are just randomly animated and not the souls of dead people or whatever. I don't get why he would have a problem with smashing them."

Katrin was staring at the little movable tiles in the cover of her spellbook, copying the glyphs into a notebook. "I don't know," she said, "I never thought it made sense. I've met one other person with the same beliefs, but we didn't talk about it much - he ran a stall where I bought vegetables, so we just made the normal small talk. I don't think the plants were grown in low mana environments so they must have had a little life mana in them, and he was okay harvesting and selling those. So it can't just be about that."

"He mentioned life mana, said that the pit is filled with life mana but specifically for animating things. Just, naturally. I talked to Connie about that some, so I basically get the idea. Easier to use for that purpose, harder to use for anything else. She was telling me about it because of her thingy, the device she wears filled with crystalized bird-destroying temporal mana."

Katrin nodded and kept writing, but then stopped and looked at me in confusion a few seconds later. "Bird-destroying?"

"Yeah, she said when she messed up the lab she stole it from a bunch of canisters like it failed and turned the whole place into a radioactive crater. Shit, that didn't translate well. Radiation is like... a frequency of light that you can't see but fucks up your body and... man, I don't know how to explain it. It doesn't matter, it wasn't literally radioactive I don't think. It was just... too much time mana I guess, and she said a bird flew in and just turned to dust."

Katrin shook her head, eyes wide. "That's... terrifying. But that's a really extreme case, and it's rare for people to have that much crystalized mana because it's a pain to make. They usually use mana capacitors instead, I don't know if you've seen them - they're magic items that just power other magic items. Anyway, you can use crystalized mana for that and they sometimes do, but it's hard to get anything past a certain mana grade. Back before Brinkmar fell that was the main export, actually. They had some way to create these super dense mana crystals, after the collapse it caused a bunch of wars when nobody could get them anymore."

"Huh. And yeah, I think I saw one of those capacitor things when I sold some stuff I'd found and got these silent shoes. The shopkeeper was using it, swapped it between a few different magic gadgets to power them. Strange that Ulren didn't use something like that, if crystalized mana is so dangerous."

"Life mana isn't so bad," Katrin said, "There's a little of it everywhere. Your lutore turns a trickle of your mana into it all the time to keep you healthier, and even non-magical animals and plants tend to have some. It's harmless, it'll just make things grow slightly faster most of the time, because other life-adjacent stuff like animating things would be way harder and more specific."

"Is that life mana what you burned up when you used too much energy casting spells?"

Katrin completely ignored me. "It can be very interesting, if you focus on learning to do it. It's easiest with organic material, which is why zombies and plant creatures are the most common example, but you can do it with anything. It typically gains a little bit of... flexibility? You would think that would need a different type of magic entirely, but if you shove enough life mana into a steel rod it might start wiggling around like a snake. That won't happen in the pit - or if it does it would be deeper than anyone has ever gone and lived to return. For us it will just be the zombies."

"So... how smart are they, if it's just random mana animating them? How do they even know how to walk?"

Katrin got that look on her face that said "I want to lecture you on this but I'm worried I'm wrong about it". She had that look a lot when we talked about this sort of thing.

"There are ways to make them intelligent, but that doesn't have anything to do with life mana - or not by itself. Normally if a person animates them they're sort of... given a set of rules? Enough to seem intelligent, but they don't actually understand what they're doing. I think. But in this case, I suppose it would be based on the Common Local Understanding."

"Okay, so they're like NPCs in a video game - which of course means nothing to you - and these ones are just running on basic instincts provided by the collective consciousness. Fuck, I miss video games. I wish my phone worked, I have some old emulator games on there, and a Tetris knock-off I made when I was trying to learn to code, and a bunch of pictures. I want you to see where I'm from. Oh! Shit!"

Katrin jumped up and spun around, looking everywhere. "Is there a bug? Or?"

"No, shit, sorry. I just got excited. Okay so once you're all... recovered, or whatever, and you can practice spells again -"

"I'm fine now, it wasn't that bad."

"In a week, when you're all recovered and can practice spells again..."

"Yes mom."

"Hey I don't actually give a shit, but Sige is going to physically steal your spellbook if you don't take it easy. Anyway! When you can, you should look for something that would access my mind and let me... I don't know, project my memories to someone else or something."

Katrin opened the spell book and began to flip through. "Maybe. To be honest, I think even if something like that is in here there's no chance I would be able to use that sort of spell without either getting the Comprehension gift in a Duminere or spending years practicing with this book. The parts I've been able to understand are fairly basic applications of light, and heat, and force. The tether one was way harder, and I almost didn't get it to cast at all."

She hesitated, still turning pages but clearly not really looking at the book. "And really, it may be best to have a professional look at your memories considering what Connie told you."

"Yeah. Maybe. Man, now I'm thinking about Earth and I really want a chocolate milkshake. I can't even imagine what to compare one to, I guess I need to learn more about the food here. Here, what's this?" I held up one of the little leaves from the salad I'd been half-heartedly munching on.

"You've had that before. That's kinat, it's in everything. We had it last night, too, but a different kind. The little ball things?"

It didn't look anything like what I'd eaten the night before. "Seriously? That's the same plant?"

"Oh sure, it just depends on how you grow it I think, or... like, different breeds. Any time you eat a vegetable, it's probably kinat. Do they not have something like that where you're from?"

I thought about it, but I'd never really paid any attention to farming. "I don't think so. We don't just do variations on the same thing, we have tons of different plants. Like broccoli, or kale, or cabbage, or brussels sprouts, or cauliflower, or... I don't know. Some of it is pretty similar to here. The animals, too - I saw a cat the other day, it looked exactly like the cats on Earth. There must have been some point where things just freely crossed over, I think."

"Would you ever want to go back?"

"If I could be sure I would be able to end up back here, I think I'd go back to go shopping. I'd snag a solar charger for my phone, and some other stuff you can't get here."

I'd actually made a whole shopping list in my head, especially when we were camped out somewhere uncomfortable. Jeans, underwear, and socks. A laptop, and some solar panels. A bunch of camping gear, if I was going to be traveling in the wilderness. Maybe a gun - couldn't hurt, right?

"You mention the 'phone' a lot, I've started to recognize that word."

"Oh, have I showed it to you? I actually have it with me, there was nowhere good to lock up my stuff and the stowaway kids were getting comfortable enough to snoop through our shit. Hang on."

I dug it out, and unwrapped it from its protective scrap of leather - I was unlikely to ever get it charged, but it seemed wrong to let it get smashed or something - and I handed it over to Katrin. She stared at it, slowly turning it over in her hands. I took it back and popped the case off so she could get a better look, but she was more interested in the case itself.

"What is this made out of?"

"Uh. It's a kind of plastic, it's made from... oil? Kind of? I don't know. This kind is... well I know it's called TPU but those are just letters in my language and I don't remember what they stand for and even if I did it would probably be some fancy chemical name that would be meaningless to you. The point is, there are a bunch of kinds of plastic and some are hard and some are flexible like this is. Some are brittle, some are super strong, some you can't see through. We use plastic for everything on Earth. There's actually some inside me, probably - just teeny little bits, because it doesn't break down all the way and it gets into the dirt and water and then we eat it. But it's probably fine. Hopefully."

She stared at me in horror. "But the druids would... no, wait. You said no magic? So how do you get rid of your waste pits?"

"Like, landfills? Or? We bury our trash, mainly."

"But then it's still there, just underground?"

"Wait. Hang on. How do you deal with your... waste pits?"

"There are druids that come about once a year," she said, though I was sure 'druid' was a totally inaccurate translation, "and they align the waste pits with Lenderatze. And we rotate around the city, which areas are used for farming or foraging or waste, so the land has time to recover."

"Okay but back up, Lenderatze is another plane?"

"Yes, it naturally breaks down man-made materials and... it's dangerous if you do it wrong, but I've seen it turn a waste pit full of broken things and trash into a dense grove - a deer even jumped out." She turned back to looking at my phone as she continued, "It took three of them to do it, and they can only do it when the plane is aligned which is every three and a third months - that's why they only come once a year, they have to rush to several different cities each alignment."

Holy shit, this planar stuff just got stranger and stranger. "Okay but still, you guys have a magical 'fix the environment' thing? Fuck, that is so unfair. Earth just gets worse and worse as shit builds up. Thank god I'm here now. Yeah, I'm done with that place."

Katrin was still examining the phone and its case in disbelief. I had talked to her about Earth a few times but not in a lot of detail, and I guess she hadn't really thought about the technology much. Unless it wasn't just that... hang on... "Katrin? Did you... not believe me about Earth before now?"

She looked up, eyes wide with guilt. "No! I did! Mostly. I just... this is... this is really from somewhere totally different, isn't it?"

"Holy shit, you actually just thought I was crazy."

"Your sister even said you were crazy, actually. And you even made it pretty clear that you think you're crazy."

"No, I'm lacking in affective empathy and impulse control. And maybe now have false memories. But I'm. I'm not..." I'm not my mom. "I'm not crazy. And do you even believe Connie is me from a dead future?"

"I... wasn't sure. But I do think she is now. There are little things, a mole, the specific set of your eyes, that would never be the same even with identical twins unless you paid someone to make you match - and if you'd done that she wouldn't look slightly older. Plus it explains why the Empire and Halenvar are so interested in the two of you. But... no, I don't just believe things without considering the alternatives. I go with them, provisionally, because I wouldn't want to be rude and call you a liar and then be wrong - I wouldn't want to do it if I was right, even, because either way I believed that you believed it."

"And it's the phone that did it, even though I can't turn it on?"

"It's... this material is so strange, and the design of your... phone... is just... It's more foreign than anything I've ever touched. I don't know how to explain it. A whole other world is... it's a big thing to think about. And you really don't want to go back?"

"Other than the shopping thing? Nah. This world is fucked up and there's monsters and shit, but on Earth it's... well like I said there's no magic, and without the chance of learning magic it feels like the people in charge just make it harder and harder for everyone else to catch up to them, you know? Like if poor people could spontaneously learn to control the flow of time I think it would really mix things up. Not that it matters to me right now, since I cannot read this fucking book. I wish my bracelet worked for it."

Katrin looked thoughtful as she reached over and snagged a few more leaves out of my salad bowl and popped them in her mouth. "Well," she said around the half-chewed food, "could be it's making it harder? Fundamentally it's a translation issue, and your bracelet is trying to translate everything but in a different way. Maybe it's trying to translate the book and failing - it might actually be easier with the bracelet off."

It seemed worth a try, so I fiddled with the nearly invisible latch until the bracelet came free and set it aside. I flipped to the page Katrin had marked as being one of the simplest spells - basically the arcane equivalent of a lighter - and stared until I went cross-eyed.

"Anything?" Katrin asked.

"No, this is garbage."

Katrin punched me. I turned to look at her and she was staring at me, eyes wide. "Ouch! What the fuck?"

"I asked if you saw anything and you said 'no, this is garbage'," she said, enunciating the last few words super clearly for some reason.

"Right, it..."

Wait. I looked down at the bracelet. Then back up to Katrin. She had asked in Imperial and I had just... answered. How was the bracelet still working when I wasn't wearing it? Had it seeped in over time? I'd only been in this world for a month, but the bracelet did leave me sort of aware of how the words were coming out and so it made sense that I would learn somewhat as I went.

"Holy shit," I said in English, and then "Uh... gurutz sentoe." yeah, that was right. Katrin giggled, and then launched into a whole excited rant that I was catching about every third word of. I waved at her to stop. "Wait. Too much. Too fast. I'm still... shit. I'm still... bad."

That just made her laugh harder.

Soon it was time for me to swap siblings and hang with Errod - I'd promised him that I wouldn't leave him alone with our refugees, but I had to admit I'd been avoiding them as much as possible. They kept treating me like some sort of savior, but all I could see was a bunch of homeless kids and it was dredging up some memories that I really preferred to keep down.

"I had nightmares about them last night. They were all kids I knew from the group homes, and I had somehow adopted them but then fucked up and they got taken away. Put back into foster care, just dragging trash bags of clothes behind them. Fuck. I don't want to be responsible for a bunch of kids, I can barely take care of myself. I'm not even nineteen."

Errod smirked. "You're not anywhere near nineteen. You need to remember to convert your years over."

"Ugh. Fuck these strange long months and long years and base six counting and... I don't know, I think your inches are shorter than mine but I can't really tell because I was never good at eyeballing that anyway. Fine. Sure. I'm not even sixteen years old. Better?"

"Yes. Look, I'm not trying to be a jerk," he said, as if Errod had ever tried to be a jerk in his life, "You don't want to raise any suspicion by getting your own age wrong."

"But giving me shit is part of it, right?"

He seemed to genuinely consider that for a moment. "It's a perk, yes."

"Okay but it turns out I'm not done complaining. Because not only am I almost sixteen rather than almost nineteen, in base six that's almost thirty-one - no wait," I said, realizing that thanks to the bracelet's inconsistent reading of my intent it had come out as saying that nineteen in base-six was nineteen, "Thirty. One. Ugh, there. The point is, I'm either a few years younger than I should be or way older. I hate it. Base ten is better, you guys are hitting triple digits by the time you hit thirty-six."

"But that makes sense. Thirty-six is a very important number. It's the number of planes, the number of days in a month, the number of different types of gifts you can get in the Duminere. Well, if you count the ones you can't actually select."

"Fine. Whatever. It's still stupid." I think we both knew that I was just being cranky because I had started talking about foster care. Things got uncomfortably quiet, and I was just staring at the kids across the room. There were five of them - three girls and two boys. They were uncertain of their ages, and when I had asked their names two of them just burst into tears because they couldn't remember - though Errod said they'd worked past that.

"My daddy is a blacksmith," one had volunteered, "I see him sometimes when I'm sleeping. Hammering, and there's sparks. And I see my mommy sometimes too. In my dreams she braids my hair, and... and sometimes I do bad things. Very bad things. But she still braids my hair, every night."

They all had similar stories. It was impossible to say if the dreams were actual memories or just escapist fantasies, and only one remembered the name of a town. Errod had looked it up at a sort of cartographer's guild, and it was nowhere near us. Still, it was close to a big city - Sentortzi - so someone could presumably take her as soon as we were done finding the lost Duminere. Connie said she had enough money to keep them in our current place until we got back up out of the pit, and then we figured they would just come with us through Nusos which was supposedly not too dangerous as long as everyone stayed together. At that point they could even get a chance to go into the Duminere potentially, so if any actually got gifts then even if we had to just turn them over to some kind of orphanage they would be able to find apprentice work somewhere that their skills would be useful.

"How long do you think they were there? With the Sargher?"

Errod watched them, huddled together across the room playing some sort of game with little sticks in a pile. "I think a long time. I've heard that they stole children, but I was never sure it was true. To have five of them in that one spot, though - it must be fairly common. It makes me want to go back and... well."

"Maybe some day. I don't think we're in any position to take on all of fairyland right now."

"Elba over there, she seems pretty sure she was just four years old. She's the most certain of them, and I'd say she's probably eight and a half now."

"And that's your stupid long years."

Errod rolled his eyes. "It's... yes, it's normal years that everyone in this whole world and the planes beyond use like normal people."

"Like stupid people that can't just have a normal year."

"And how long are your years?"

I hesitated. I already knew this wouldn't go well. "Okay so... it's about three hundred and sixty-five days, but really it's three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days which means every four years we need to tack an extra day on."

"So your months are... what, thirty and... thirty and a half days? A little less? That doesn't work."

"Some months are thirty days, some are thirty-one, and one of them is twenty-eight. That's the one we tack the extra day onto every fourth year."

"That's ridiculous."

"It's... okay yes, it's a little ridiculous, but that's what makes it normal! It's not normal for everything to fit so neatly into multiples of six. That's strange."

"Why?"

"The universe is random and meaningless and... I don't know, it just isn't that tidy."

"Sounds like your world is the stupid one."

I didn't really have a rebuttal to that. It was, in fact, the stupid one. Of course everything fit into multiples of six, because magic was real and the gods were real - apparently - and the whole crazy system had been actually really designed rather than being random. I'd been a pretty staunch atheist on Earth and as eager as I was to accept magic and fairies and whatever else it still felt strange and wrong to acknowledge what that meant on a more cosmic scale.

"Do you... are you religious, Errod? I haven't seen you go to church or anything."

He looked uncomfortable, and I was about to apologize for asking when he spoke up. "I was. I am. I just haven't gone since my father was taken away. You've made enough comments about religion that I know none of it is the same for you. Here, we... we know the gods are real and you can even feel their presence in certain situations. Cyne has spoken to one, actually."

"He's... wait, actually? Like, just talked to one? And they talked back?"

Errod waggled his head in a 'kinda' gesture. "They aren't good at talking to us, we're too far below them. Some are better at it than others, or maybe just try harder. For the most part you don't actually want them to notice you. Most of the gods are... well, they're not evil. They aren't. But... it would be like a mouse trying to get the attention of a herogant."

The word mouse had translated fine, but I wasn't sure what the fuck a herogant was. From context it had to be something big and probably dangerous, and I didn't want to interrupt him so I just settled for picturing a hippopotamus. "It wouldn't understand, and might step on it without even noticing. You can go to special places where certain gods' attention naturally rests, and maybe they carefully communicate with you. But people who try to force communication with gods, especially ones that don't normally respond? They almost always end up dead or insane."

So the gods were eldritch horrors. Great. "Doesn't seem like there's any point in worshiping them then, right? Or does that... does that keep them from stepping on you?"

"It's not like that. The main one we worship, the one that my family used to attend church for, is Yesrin. It's the only god that took human form and walked among us, to better understand the world."

"We've got one kinda like that on Earth. Became human, taught some people, got killed."

"Yesrin didn't come to teach, but to learn. It... it hated it. It said that existence as a human was horrible agony and a confusing nightmare of emotions. It shed its body after only six days."

"Big mood."

"What?"

"Nothing. Continue."

"Um. Well, Yesrin felt bad for us, and promised to listen and try to care for us. And... I mean, people disagree on what is and isn't a legitimate intervention but sometimes things do happen. And if nothing else, you know that Yesrin understands how hard life can be when it's bad."

I had to admit, that did make some sense. A god that for sure exists and will listen and say "yeah, that's rough buddy" sounded like it could be comforting even if no miracles were forthcoming.

"Okay, but I know there are tons of churches and some of them worship other gods. If Yesrin is the only one to actually make an appearance, what's the point of the others?"

"You'd have to ask them. I... never really tried to learn about other religions honestly. You have whatever shrine your family set up, and just sort of worship how they do and don't think about it much."

"Well, at least that's basically the same on both of our worlds."