247 Debby?Jane (Patreon)

Debby left her father’s office in House Benevolence and walked down the white, eternal stonewood hallway like a woman without a future, because that’s the sort of future she had right now. Nothing. Her family wouldn’t remember her once she started poking around at this Red Static thing too much. Once she got deep enough into this anti-meme mystery shit—

Debby tried to keep her anger in check as she thought about what came next.

No one would know what she did if she failed.

Something worse might happen than memory wipes and other magics if she succeeded.

But she would try to succeed, no matter what it cost her.

Debby had no way to know how this would play out, but it felt like it would play out poorly. All she had were the 76 experiments she had done with her family and with others in the last 3 weeks, 4 days, 7 hours and 38 minutes, since she started wearing the Bracelet of Memory full time. It had been a trial.

All those arguments half-started and half-finished with her sisters, only to watch them go side-eyed and dismissive, and sometimes walking away from conversations halfway through, like they didn’t even know Debby had been talking to them, which is exactly what had happened. They didn’t know. The Red Static intervened and stole that from them.

All those arguments with her father showed that he seemed to be the only one capable of understanding her without needing to be told the whole story, but even he wasn’t immune to this Red Static. All of those talks with Fallopolis and Goldie and even Fairy Moon… Talking with the first two had ended the same way, which Debby didn’t want to deal with Melemizargo talking to her again, not this very moment. Talking with Fairy Moon had caused the fairy to rage, to try and kill Debby, so Debby needed to tell Fairy Moon a whole lot more, abandoning the experiment just so that the anti-meme could erase Fairy Moon’s memory of Debby for her, to end that threat before it could get worse. It had worked.

But Debby didn’t do experiments with powerful people anymore.

She had tried talking to the gods three separate times. Rozeta, Phagar, and then Melemizargo one final time. Melemizargo wasn’t someone she wanted to deal with at the moment. As for Rozeta, Rozeta’s blue boxes and the visit to a Registrar had seemed like a win, but then she walked out of the office, on a mission to talk to her father, but her father had had no idea what she was talking about, and a revisit to the Registrar had been an exact same repeat of the previous conversation; all hopes and sounds-like-this-could-work, and then nothing, like she simply hadn’t spoken to Rozeta at all. Phagar’s people and his church were simply empty every time Debby came around, the divinity in the air seeming non-existent. She pursued Phagar until a replica of herself stepped out of the air, and told her that he would not help her kill herself. Debby had explained that she wasn’t there for that, and that she wasn’t that much of a battle junkie, and every attempt at talking about the Red Sparks hit a wall of misunderstanding. Phagar just didn’t hear what he wasn’t capable of hearing.

And so Debby had abandoned those pursuits.

Debby knew what she needed to do, and she would, but not right now—

—Oh gods. Why was she thinking about everything again? She knew why. The Bracelet made her think of everything all the time—

—because everything was going to go away or change, and she wasn’t ready for that right now. Her home in Adventurer City, which wasn’t really hers anyway. The people she knew down there, and everywhere else; Sitnakov, and Priest Andri, her friends at Adventurer city, Hizogard, Danaro, Lyrical...

Sure, she wasn’t the original Jane, and she had decided that if she should wake up and not be Jane that she would get over that loss of history, but this time was different. This time she wouldn’t be able to pretend to have a connection to her previous life. This time was different.

Because all of that would vanish.

Debby had done tests. She knew what she had signed up for when she went into her father’s office and finally succeeded in telling him something. For the last three weeks, since before they had spoken about Avandrasolaro and then through the angel’s [Reincarnation] and subsequent installment at the island next to Dungeon Island, Debby had worn the Bracelet of Memory. Because of this Mind Magic artifact, she could remember what no one else could. She could see the Red Static. She could—

—Couldn’t get away from the static. She couldn’t get away from her own thoughts. She used to be a person of action, but now she was a thinker, locked to the past, thinking about the salad she had four years, five months, three days, seven hours, twenty four minutes, three seconds ago, with that guy who had the zit on his left ear and—

—ask people about it.

And sometimes people forgot who she was until enough evidence piled up about who she was and—

Zolan was in the hallway, her father’s Castellan of House Benevolence, and he looked at Debby like she was a person out of place. Because that’s what he was seeing, no doubt. The Red Crackles, like floating snow, floated around the Bracelet around Debby’s arm, and around her head, attaching her to everyone who saw her or thought of her or—

—Focus, Debby. Focus. Here. In this moment. Focus.

The Red Crackles lingered upon Zolan.

They were everywhere.

They increased when Debby pursued the truth, and decreased when she stayed away, and she had pursued the truth rather strongly back there.

“Pardon me, young lady, but I don’t believe that you shou—” Zolan was working some magic internally, no doubt. Book Magic, probably. It was one of the few things that could counter the Red Snow, but that took a lot of time and failed anyway most of the time. And yep, Zolan fired up his memory banks like a proper Book Mage and looked at Debby again. “Ah. Apologies, Debby. I must have thought you were someone else.”

To play along with the misattribution of Zolan’s forgetfulness was to disperse the Red Snow upon the man, and clear up his life, to allow him to remember more of what he should remember.

To say something like ‘you got some anti-meme magic on you, eh?’ would instantly antagonize that anti-memory magic, causing even more memory and time loss, among other problems. Debby was rather sure that she had caused her father to miss a good ten days of existence in the last 3 weeks, ever since she tried to get him to understand. That was one of the reasons she had to leave. She was ruining his and everyone else's lives, even without them knowing.

So Debby said, “It’s the red hair, I’m sure. I’m thinking of changing it to something else.”

Zolan accepted Debby’s allowance of the social faux pas. “A change is good sometimes.” He wasn’t even aware that the Red Static around him was vanishing with every word, as he asked, “Do you know which resource your father is going after next? I would like to plan around that, if I could.”

“I think it’s the Life Seed for Tiktik and Fangorl, but don’t quote me on that.” Debby said, “Something about helping the wild parts of Quintlan be healthier, with fewer slimes and such. Trying to restore proper ecosystems.”

Zolan went, “Ah! Well that is as good a choice as any…”

Zolan said a few more small words and Debby reciprocated, as one does with people who are not quite friends, but who are very much still important people who you plan on seeing again and again, here and there, if fate would allow.

—Fate might not allow—

The Red lingered slightly, but it would vanish in the next few hours, or however long it took. The only reason it was there at all was because Debby couldn’t help but mentally notice the Red in the corners of her eyes, and in her mana sense. Once she moved on, that Red Static would vanish completely, to fade back into the background, unseen and unfelt until it recognized the information it had to censor. It was always active around her now, though.

Like she was an infection the red snow was trying to fight off.

If she didn’t poke at the Static, then the infection-response lessened—

—and she wasn’t so backed up in memory—

—But she was going to poke at the red static pretty hard.

Debby moved on, and wondered how long it would take for people here to forget her. Three days? She had pursued this Red lead for one day and came back to find no one had remembered her until she reminded them, and then their memories kicked in. She had done that twice more, but the fourth time she had done that she had stayed away for a day and a half, looking for red static answers, and it had taken her a full hour to remind people who she was.

Her father had always been first, and then, like light spreading, others remembered her…

Debby stepped out of the hallways of her father’s offices, into the main hallways of House Benevolence. The place was looking rather great these days. People were everywhere, going about important business. There were transportation deals between men in suits and magitech industry talks between mages wearing robes. Women talked with other women at a table down on the main food court floor, with a platter of 8-Star food between and—

—an assortment of books fighting each other for space on the table, as the women spoke of authors they wanted to commission and stories they loved. It was a book club that was actually quite famous in certain circles of the world, and which Jane-Debby had heard about some other time and now she was looking at them and Remembering—

—for they determined who was the next big author in the industry.

Debby sighed a little as her brain practically overheated as she remembered every single book that was on that table, and how she had read three of them. A headache loomed, and Debby knew she shouldn’t have walked this way to get out of House Benevolence, but she had wanted to walk this way. To see, once more.

The Bracelet of Memory did exactly as Poi said it did, but it was worse than ‘not being able to forget’. That was such a simple way to describe what this thing did to her that in its simpleness, it was wro—

—Jane-Debby sat upon a couch in her offices of Adventurer City, thumbing through the book in her hands, feeling excited for the next page, making herself not use her mana sense and Book Magic to read the whole damned thing at once—

Debby was simultaneously there, in the past, and here, in the present, making her way through House Benevolence’s main atrium. She was also in 1831 other parts of her life, remembering all the faces around her as she saw them and the creases in coats and the way that old guy over there was hobbling because he had an old scar acting up and there was [Reincarnation] paperwork in his coat—

Debby breathed.

She remembered everything.

She was simultaneously scattered across 1907 timelines now, with only this timeline here moving under her own power. Everything else was a memory. Nothing was able to be affected, except her feet in front of each other. She moved as best she could.

Debby put one foot in front of the other, told a concerned guard that she was fine, and then told that same guard that same statement another 47 times in her memory as she walked out of House Benevolence…

And then her mind reached a breaking point, as it always did—

—Scattering. Breaking. Harming and healing. Cracks faded and wholeness returned, but cracks reappeared, ready to open up once aga—

—She cackled a laugh, and memory faded. Timelines set aside until she needed to pick them up again, blood freely flowing from her nose, eyes, ears, and all the rest of her body. Blood seeped up from her very skin, like sweat. Her internals were riddled with red static, but it was passing, and Debby remained.

She was not dead yet, and a bit of total body trauma would not kill her. Her core was intact. Red Static invaded her soul, trying to tear her apart from the inside because she knew too much and it could attack her through that knowledge, but she remained. A little bit of soul trauma was nothing right now. She wiped away the blood and [Cleanse] and Healing Magic took care of the rest.

Red static retreated, soaking into her brain and into the flesh of her wrist, but the Bracelet remained, ensuring none of that power soaked too deeply. It was present, but it was not affecting her.

Another thread of thought picked up, though.

Mind Mages couldn’t read her thoughts right now, which was a bit of a problem.

Debby stood under the sun once again. The congested pathways of House Benevolence were absolutely filled with people and some of them were Mind Mages, if those tendrils coming off of their heads were any indication. Debby watched as a Mind Mage woman walked by, guiding her child by the hand into House Benevolence, talking about ‘going to see daddy at the bakery’. Both the woman and little boy had tendrils coming off of their head, and both of them touched Debby, because Mind Mages did that instinctively. They certainly didn’t mean anything by it.

Like a connected circuit, both mother and boy touched Debby’s mind, and Red spread.

You’d think getting such an obvious mental attack would set them off, but it was the opposite. Both mother and child instantly yanked their tendrils back, both of them acting a bit dazed, the woman faltering and the boy almost stumbling, but then the infection settled down. They were past Debby. They went about their business like nothing happened at all, not even acknowledging that Debby existed.

Which was a problem sometimes.

Mind Mages instinctively ignored Debby when she was deep in the Red. Poi completely ignored her until her Static level was very low, and then suddenly she became a visible, recognizable person again, and Poi recalled all he knew of her, like she had always been there. Once, he had forgotten to make dinner for 9, but then he remembered and Erick solved the problem with [Duplicate], so there was no problem at all.

Luckily, Mind Mages weren’t prone to altering the surface of the world as her father was sometimes, otherwise Debby might have found herself in dangerous situations. There was a reason [Invisibility] was outlawed in most societies, and not just because it could easily be abused. It only took one person running out into a busy road while invisible to make everyone realize the other reason why [Invisibility] was bad. Debby had learned that lesson herself, but not through this Static mess or through [Invisibility], but through [Polymorph], back when she was calling herself Jane—

Debby moved on.

As soon as she got away from the Mind Mages and this anti-meme was allowed to settle down, it would settle down. And then Debby could get on with the search once again.

Debby walked down the street toward the Gate Network, thinking about what came next.

For all purposes, ‘Debby’ would vanish to the world—

—Godsdammit. Stop overthinking—

The ground under her feet would not vanish, though. The walls of House Benevolence would remain. The sky above, with its crisscrossing lines of light and dense node network would remain. The world would go on.

But Debby would become a piece removed.

Hopefully this Worldly Path she was on would actually help her with this Quest. It was Fate Magic, right? All the others were on the Worldly Path, too, because Jane had originally thought that Fate could only help this situation, and now there were 6 ‘Janes’ on the Worldly Path, and all of them had begun to differentiate—

—Abigail was probably on the Path to become a mother; a part of Jane which wanted children and love, above all else. But how could she find love when her father was the practical king of the world? Suitors and boyfriends would always be suspect.

Beth was on the Path of exploration; a part of Jane which Jane had mostly abandoned, because what else was there left to explore on Veird except for nuances of space and time. Apparently Beth didn’t feel that way, because she loved delving perhaps more than any of the rest of them. There were always new places to explore in the Dark.

Candice was on the Path of murder; a part of Jane which Jane had tempered and held in check. But Candice was not Jane, and Candice loved ripping and tearing and giving into that impetus to annihilate for the good of them all. At least she was capable of directing herself properly. Debby looked at Candice these days like she was a little bit crazy for her antics, like when she tried to slurp down the insides of a monster while she clung hard to the monster’s back, her fangs deep inside the thrashing beast.

Emily was on the Path of governance; a part of Jane that wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. All the rest of Jane’s parts had been embarrassed that Emily was willing to actually go that way, for following their father was like accepting his help… But Emily also wanted a dick, and that was weird, too, so she could do what she wanted, just like the rest of them.

Jane was on the Path of Balance, or whatever that meant. She would go back to Adventurer City after this was over, if she survived. Whatever the case, all of them had made a pact behind her back to make sure that Jane survived this, if only to keep their father not-insane and happy—

Debby was on the Path toward Magic, and she loved it. But it had brought her here. It had brought this Bracelet onto her wrist. It had brought this Static to her eyes and to her thoughts. She remembered too much. She saw too much. She remembered nothing, under a tide of time.

She did what she had to do.

Debby walked into the international Gate checkpoint, and spied upon the world.

Ten Gates lay before her, beyond a line that was moving fast, for this close to House Benevolence they had the absolute best of the best guarding and sorting this traffic. Debby had her little Delver’s Badge under her shirt, and the people on duty mana sensed that, and so the ground under her feet turned green with wardlight, just like it turned green under all the others walking by—

One guy’s feet turned red. Some guards asked him to step out of line and he walked out of line just fine, but looking dejected. His papers weren’t good enough, or something.

Debby continued forward, her eyes open toward the Gates ahead.

She did not head back to Dungeon Island.

She went elsewhere.

- - - -

She had to get away from it all before she took the next step of her Path, and so she had chosen here.

A desolate mountaintop on an island in Archipelago Nergal, 10,000 kilometers removed from House Benevolence.

It was a normal sort of place, rocky and green, while all the land beyond the mountain was tropical forest and deep, white beaches. There were monsters, of course. Most of the big ones were inside the dungeons of the island, while the smaller, more opportunistic monsters crawled here and there, trying to eat each other. They didn’t come up the mountain, though. Stone elementals crushed everything up here, while Air elementals tossed living things off of cliffs, to have them fall to their deaths.

Debby had cleared out a small part of the mountain top for herself. It was just her, the sun overhead, and the shadows among the rocks. She called out to those shadows.

“Hello, Melemizargo. I’d like to talk now.”

The shadows whirled and stood up. The Dragon God of Magic was not a dragon right now; he was just a shadow of himself, floating in the air like a particularly short winged lizard. He still gave off an air of menace.

“Hello, Debby. Ready to be a Paladin, like you always wanted?”

His tone was light. His words were not.

“I would ask you, please, to lay out the terms once again.”

Debby recalled perfectly the terms, but she was in 758 different times and spaces right now, and her mind could only hold so much. She was struggling.

“Prudent.”

Melemizargo’s word echoed in the sky—

And suddenly Debby was only here, only now, grounded in this time and this place.

Melemizargo’s shadow took on a deeper quality as the blue sky above turned dimmer, the sun vanishing behind nothing at all. Shadows prowled the land, and Melemizargo’s shadow became more than that. He was still not fully in this place, but he was closer.

“The terms are thus: I grant you the power to See, and you use your own power to Change The World How I Desire Until I Am Done With You. My primary Desire is in the form of a Quest for you to find the causes of the Red Static, and then report them to me. If that Quest should bring you back to Erick Flatt and Ascendant Mountain and the Sundering Search, then so be it, but I am not sure it will.

“If you choose to do this, I will charge you with Fate Most Demanding. I will gift unto you the power to be Unseen and Unknown and Untouched by all Magic and Masteries aside from those you choose for yourself, or those you fail to use my protection adequately against. You will never again gain a reprieve from the pain of that Bracelet, for it will forever become a part of you. But you will gain power to stabilize yourself when you are wearing it, as I am stabilizing you right now.

“I will See through your eyes at my whim.

“I will hear what you hear. Sense what you sense. Know what you know.

“You will strike with the power of My Claws.

“You will mold possibilities with the power of My Words.

“The Script will be lost to you, but don’t expect Rozeta to come calling, for you are already half-Unknown to her and all others through the machinations of this Red Static. You will become isolated until the time that you find out what is causing this Red Static, or else you will die trying to discover the cause.

“I will demand things of you, Debby, but nothing that you wouldn’t be comfortable with doing if I explained my reasonings well enough. However! I will not always explain myself, and you must follow through regardless. Failure in my demands might be catastrophic.”

Melemizargo stood resplendent and Dark, his body half shadow and all menace, hanging in the sky in front of Debby like a dream of impending death sized to the mountain underneath Debby’s feet. He leaned down, his white fangs shining in the Dark, like his eyes, like his claws, like the white-inferno tunnel leading down into that endless maw.

“If you disobey enough, or at times when I most deem it necessary, I will take control of you myself, and you will become a watcher of your life until I decide you have learned your lesson.” He pulled back, and his voice was softer, “I do not desire to hurt you, but you must understand that this is a serious issue, Debby Flatt. The Red Static must either be eliminated or solved for. Either outcome is good enough. Do that, and your Quest will be over. If you should succeed, I will leave you with all the power I will grant you, and none of the restrictions.”

Debby hadn’t been able to think clearly whenever she wore the Bracelet, but she thought clearly now.

“I have questions.”

“I have patience for some questions.”

“Are you causing the Red Static?”

“No, I am not,” Melemizargo said, narrowing his eyes and moving closer. “Don’t be impertinent.” He backed up a fraction, but Debby still felt his hot breath upon her face as he said, “To answer a few other of your questions before you get rude about them:

“I am not going to ask you to harm the people you love or anyone else that doesn’t deserve it. I am not going to ask you to sabotage anything that does not deserve it. I and the people I have influence over are not going to destroy this world or any other… Unless it needs it, but certainly not without finding homes and security for all these people and other living things that exist here before such destruction should occur.” He stared again. “And that is the extent of my promises to you. Keep in mind, Debby, that I wish this to be a fruitful joining, and that I value your father’s presence much too much to put you into too much danger. But the danger you get into yourself is not something I will be able to fully protect against.

“Make your choice.”

Debby had choices; many of them, in fact.

She made what she thought was the best one.

Debby took a knee, bowed her head, and said the words that Melemizargo had asked her to say the last time she had been in this position, “I pledge my life and my soul to the Dark. May my loyalty be rewarded, and may I walk forever in your welcoming shadow.”

“I accept your pledge.”

Darkness descended.

- - - -

The sky was a tangle of tendrils and white eyes.

Debby-Jane stood upon a black field of Everything.

She was nude, save for a black mark upon her left wrist like an oily shadow. That flickering shadow held silver letters that briefly appeared and then vanished, spelling out a power of Memory, vibrating through the cosmos, touching upon something much greater than itself, and then solidifying down into a not-simple Bracelet—

A woman stood in front of Jane-Debby. She had a black shadow on her right wrist. It was a mirror to Jane’s own oily shadow. The woman was not a mirror to Jane at all. She was pale blue. She was incani, or maybe demi. She was also red and violet and green and yellow and orange and the simple color of a person, all those other colors spreading out to the left and right.

She held out her hands, cupped and waiting for Jane’s own.

Jane grasped those hands and fractured into a thousand versions of herself. She was Abigail, Beth, Candice, Debby, Emily, and a hundred other names never chosen. She was a man, she was a woman. She spread out left and right in countless colors.

And she was also just Jane.

The other woman was just herself; just a pale blue incani, with a fading smile.

She let go.

- - - -

Jane woke up under the bright sun, breathing deep, prismatic light effervescing away from her and her core, her entire body already disconnected from the Script in a way she was intimately familiar with. But this time was different. This time… There was no going back. She couldn’t bring up a Script interface, and she couldn’t change anything about her in that normal way. Maybe a properly-made dungeon could do it, but no. This was her life now…

All strings except Melemizargo’s had been removed.

And she felt pretty damned good about that.

Her mind was clear for the first time since she put on the Bracelet. Everything was still in deep focus, and Jane felt that she would remember a lot about a lot if she wanted to take the plunge over that cliff, but here she was, stabilized at the top of the mountain, overlooking it all instead of drowning in memories and her past.

She was still physically on top of a mountain, too; the same mountain where she had started talking to Melemizargo. With open eyes she faced a bright sky, and she… She felt different. She had been Debby and now… She was just herself. Debby was just a persona she had been wearing for a while, and now Debby was gone. She was ‘just Jane’ again. And that felt great. No need to hide herself anymore, to pretend not to be Jane because she was, and had always been, Jane.

A Jane of a different color, but not really.

Jane sat up.

Disconnecting from the Script had some side effects. All of this had some side effects. But the disconnection was the most noticeable.

Prismatic light flowed away from Jane’s skin like a thick fog, pushing away at the Red Static still lingering in the air, still trying to find purchase. Well then.

That was a waste of mana. With practiced control, Jane pulled her mana into herself, and began filling up her core with mana, ready to be used to cast her magic. As the Red Sparks settled down onto her skin and her body, they began to dissipate instead of latch on…

Jane wasn’t quite sure what was going on there, as she watched the sparks with her mana sense and her eyes turned inward. The controlled mana in her body seemed to be tricking the red infection somehow, and within minutes, the Sparks were gone.

Huh.

Anyway. Jane controlled her mana to refill her core instead of spilling everywhere, because she would have to be conservative with her mana from now on. No longer would the Script supply her with endless regen based on her ‘Focus’ stat. No, only her natural production mattered, along with whatever mana she could steal from the cores of others, eating them as would a Shade or shadeling to restore their mana.

At 550,000 mana per day, though, she was probably good for normal expenditures of power, especially when she wove Elemental Mystical into her magic, to drop the 250 mana cost of a full-body [Polymorph] down to something like 50 mana. And that’s not even taking into account whatever powers Melemizargo had given her.

One of those powers was clear from looking at her left wrist.

The Bracelet had been transformed. What was once a shackle of black, rusted metal, with tiny silver inlays that had been scratched to hell, was now a black ring tattoo of an adamantium bangle. Tiny silver writing held inside that blackness, inside a diamond of silver something on the top center of the tattoo, but it was too thin and broken for anyone to read. Jane knew what it said anyway.

‘REMEMBER’.

Well she certainly remembered, alright.

Time to try out some magic.

Jane focused on her hand and tried a partial-[Polymo—

Claws appeared in the place of her final joints, her hand becoming like that of a dragonkin with especially large claws, each of those claws shiny black while the skin on her fingers grew black scales. Jane’s eyes were a little wide at that. It had been an easier transformation than she was used to. It had been less like she had molded her flesh into something new and more…

“More like I pulled possibility from the side, into this reality— oh, wow. Okay,” she said to herself, gasping a little bit at the end as she fully realized what she was doing.

Jane had made a deep study of her father’s recent multiversal theories of magic, but she hadn’t truly gotten it until that moment. It was like she had been adding 2 + 2 into 4 her whole life just because she had been told that it worked that way, but she didn’t understand it until now. It was simple, truly. All magic was simple. All magic was just pulling possibilities from Elsewhere into Here.

“Like feeling infinity between 0 and 1 and picking out the exact right number to solve for reality.”

“That’s a more apt expression of magic than the first. Really now. 2+2?”

Jane winced. “Ah. Are you just… There now?”

Melemizargo was not around at all. Not visually. Not within Jane’s mana sense. But she had gained a new sense; she could feel his presence there at her back, watching over her, his clawed hands upon her shoulders like a phantom feeling.

“Correct. I’ll mostly leave you alone, of course, for that is how Fate Magic works best, and you are on the Worldly Path. As time moves on, and your scope of Sight increases and you learn more of your powers, you will learn all that I cannot teach you directly. To that end, you will move among the mortals and among the important places of this world, and you will discover the cause of this Red Static.”

At the naming of the enemy, the enemy appeared like 1492 gnats of various size and ferocity, buzzing at Jane and then passing her by to vanish back into the ether.

… Jane was thrilled and surprised that they didn’t stick around, that they had slipped past her that easily. It got a lot harder to think when they lodged themselves into her brain. And now that her brain was her own, she had more questions.

“I have a few questions, Melemizargo. Why me?”

Jane knew most of his reasoning, but she wanted to hear those reasonings again, to know if she knew the whole story.

From Melemizargo’s tension on her shoulders and the failure to produce an answer, Jane got the impression that he did not want to interfere too much. He wanted to let Fate take its course and for his personal presence to fade away.

But instead, he spoke,

“I have not chosen you because you are your father’s daughter. All the other Janes are for that, for helping with the Sundering Search. I would have preferred if this arrangement did not happen to you, because your death would be a setback with my dealings with your father. But you are the one who picked up the Bracelet and you stuck with it. That means something, Jane. At its least meaning: you have a resonance with this Red Static mess, and this Red Static is what I believe is the root cause of my previous insanity. Where your resonance started, I do not know. Where that resonance ends, I do not know. But I am glad that it happened with you, because you might actually be able to share and expand on the understanding I already have of this menace. We’re going to find out what all this means, together.”

As Melemizargo spoke, Red Static descended, and Jane was a bit flummoxed by his answer.

“That is not what I expected,” Jane said, waving away the Red Static, and instantly regretting it.

Red sparks stuck to her when she actively touched it. Melemizargo and Jane both watched her right arm, as the Static crawled across her skin. Her own mana, under that skin, eventually dissuaded the Static from sticking around. Like mosquitoes finding prey that had nothing to give them, the little bastards flew away.

“That’s not what I expected either,” Jane said, watching the Static float afar, to vanish into the manasphere.

“It tends to do that, but you were unable to notice it until now. I expect a great deal more revelations like that to take place now that you are actually working with me, and now that you are properly attuned to the Bracelet.”

Jane hummed, not quite satisfied at all with this relationship, and for a lot of different reasons.

“My dear Jane. You are important because of what you have done and where you are going; not because of who you are related to. That fact is rather more a detriment if anything should happen to you. I would have rather someone else gotten the Bracelet, but I will take you for this task, since you are here. Honestly would have preferred you staying with your fathers for the Sundering Search; that’s what our original arrangement became, after all. This Red Static stuff is completely beyond what I expected from you, or from the Sundering Search, though I am glad to see that the two are… Maybe connected. All we have right now is circumstantial evidence to that effect. But I am eager to see what you can do!”

Jane felt her face redden. She got to her feet, her gaze cast wide across the oceanic horizon. “You’ve already got me under your claw; further buttering is nice, but not required.”

“I will do what I want, and you will do what I want, too. There. How about that?”

Jane chuckled. “Much more expected.”

“Take some time and get to know yourself outside of the Script, and then go exploring. I’m too tempted to stay and tell you everything I have discovered, but that would influence your Path to the Truth too much, and you might end up not solving any problems at all. We will talk later.”

Melemizargo began to step away—

“Wait. Before you go…”

Melemizargo sighed.

He waited.

Jane had a lot of questions, but Melemizargo’s desire not to overly influence her Path had been heard and understood. She still wanted one series of questions answered, though. “How does Particle Magic and this Bracelet relate to each other? Why did Particle Magic bring you back to yourself? Does this Bracelet do the same? Somehow?”

“Ahh… A complicated topic with a simple-yet-deep answer that will probably be unsatisfying to you because all I can tell you are generalities, because that is all that is left of that time, because when Wizards go to war, the world goes wonky.

“You know of Atomic Magic, yes?

“It is a well-kept secret, but you are close enough to your father that you have heard of this before, and yes, I see that you have. That is the history of that Bracelet. The Mind Mage Wizard who made that Bracelet also made Atomic Magic, all in the pursuit of freeing her fellow slaves down in Continental Nergal, all those centuries ago. She blew up a continent filled with slavers and slaves alike and almost destroyed the world, and that Bracelet right there is the only surviving bit of Atomic Magic from the subsequent Forgotten Campaign. And yet, that’s not the truest Truth.

“The story is rather complicated and confusing for mortal minds to comprehend beyond that bit of pseudo-factual information, so we will move past that story for now, and focus on the Bracelet. This is a fine thing to do, because the Bracelet is not really Atomic Magic at all, so the Relevant Entities and Mind Mages never caught on to this little bit of their not-quite-Forgotten Campaign. The anti-meme also latched onto that Bracelet in a constant, yet failed attempt to erase it from the world, so that’s yet another reason why no one really thought about it overmuch; anyone not specifically wearing it was always constantly infected by the Red. The only reason people know about the Bracelet at all is because the Bracelet composes that Wizard’s entire existence. She put most of herself into that Bracelet to remind her why she did what she did, so she would never forget the horrors she caused, and thus the world would never forget.

“A side effect of that bracelet is the revelation of the anti-meme.

“As for what Particle Magic, the failure of Atomic Magic, the Bracelet of Memory, and the Red Static all have to do with each other… I do not know, for sure. All I know is that the Red Static exists in this place, and I could not recognize this New Cosmology as anything at all until Particle Magic came along and taught particles to the mana. Perhaps if Atomic Magic would have been less destructive, more instructive, and not been Banned and Forgotten, this whole series of events that unfolded with your father and Particle Magic might have happened several centuries ago. I might have ‘woken up’ all the way back then and realized what I was doing, and what was being done to me and to this world. I might have seen the cage and the liferaft.

“But that is not what happened.”

Jane stared at the black line upon her arm, her eyes wide as she recognized the last remnant of a nuclear holocaust for what it was. That was too large of a horror to truly comprehend, even with the Bracelet’s power, though. So Jane tried to think logically. She asked, “Can you… Can you copy the Bracelet and… I don’t know. Give it to others? A lot of others?”

“I appreciate your thinking of solutions, but that is a Wizard artifact made with the creator’s very soul and the deaths of millions. Its capabilities are far beyond what any normal artifact is capable of at all, and I do not make artifacts myself. I’m also not in the habit of telling good Wizards to kill themselves to make trinkets that the Red Sparks would make them not make, or in killing that many people just for the side effect of a possibility of making another object like this. Talk to the faeries if you want to fuck over Wizards in that way, but you’ll just end up making enemies of everyone.” Melemizargo said, “I’m trying to do less of that these days.”

“… Heard and understood.”

Jane felt a nod in the air behind her and the light touch of claws lifting from her shoulders, along with a great movement felt at a great distance.

Melemizargo moved on.

After a long moment of nothing…

Jane started practicing her Polymorphing—

Okay. Full spider right off the bat. Black band remained around her left pedipalp.

That was both incredibly fast, and not disorienting at all. Her father’s multiversal understanding of magic was… Very helpful, apparently. Magic was easier when you understood more of it.

“… Wait a fucking second.” Jane looked at the air, and said, “Multiversal understandings of magic. Riftwork. Extra dimensions—”

Red Static crawled out of the world itself, trying to find out who was talking about the important topics that it didn’t want talked about. Jane let the red rain fall past her body, undisturbed. Two minutes later, the red fall was done and gone.

“God damned fucking Red Sparks probably fucked over all my trials of magic, didn’t they the fucking…”

Jane cursed some more, and more Red Sparks descended, like annoying bugs.

Eventually, Jane practiced her [Polymorph] magic in silence, getting a feel for herself once again, as she tried not to think about how that fucking Red Static had definitely screwed up her entire approach to magic her entire life.

… But it seemed her father was able to get around that restriction a little bit. And it was getting easier for him every time.

Well that was actually really good news, wasn’t it.

Jane smiled as she continued practicing.

- - - -

“… Very smooth,” Jane hissed to herself, after she had become a flying rivergrieve with ten spider legs and 37-to-46 snapping Force jaws that extended out all around her and bit at everything. With 39 eyes pointed in every direction and then doubled and tripled up in some spaces, and a brain capable of processing all of that, Jane moved on to her voice. “Okay…” She changed her voice to her normal voice, while still in her abomination form, “Okay. Okay. Testing. Testing.”

She flicked a splash of intent at the world.

And a mirror popped into existence, twenty meters wide, gilt with the most fantastic gold and diamonds and otherwise that Jane could imagine, and hovering in front of her, showing off her body. She would have called that conjuring the easiest magic she had ever done, if everything else she had done in the last day hadn’t also been ‘the easiest magic she had ever done’.

And yes, the Jane in the mirror was an abomination. Exactly what she wanted.

There was one problem, though.

Her newest form was very, very red.

Jane’s magic was kinda prismatic most of the time, but it verged toward shades of red whenever it was forced to take an actual shape, like with her skin, or scales, or claws, or eyes. Or all the ‘gems’ of that giant floating mirror. Even the gilt-gold edges of the mirror were kinda reddish.

Jane transformed back into a person.

And she was a red woman. Why was she a fully-red woman? Jane had not intended that at all.

… Though she was a very hot red woman…

Who was spilling out prismatic color from her skin like a shimmery thickness in the air.

Okay. Jane was still spilling excess mana out of her body and her body was not 100% under her control. It seemed that her control and her mana expression were worse when she was smaller in form. She needed to relearn everything.

Ten hours later, at the dawn of a new day, Jane was once again herself, and yet not at all.

Tanned skin. Red hair. Bright red eyes. Her bright red nails were a surprise, but one she chose to keep, since normal keratin was not very good for anything at all, and the Elemental Stone-laced claws of the common rock devourer were rather good for most daily life. It appeared her particular shade of rock devourer claws were red, and though the shape was changed to fit her nails like normal human-nails normally fit, they would stay red. Which was fine. Jane was in a different sort of ‘human woman’ Familiar Form from normal, too, but that was perfectly fine.

She had to do another test of the Red Static before she set out, though, because this next test would determine which direction she took. As her thoughts formed in her head, and as she formed her exact test, she felt the shadow of Melemizargo’s Sight upon her.

Jane spoke to the sky, “The Script is the cause of the Red Static.”

The air flickered with redness which tried to touch Jane and yet failed to find purchase.

But not much Red at all.

Technically, that was a non-answer in several ways. She had said ‘Red Static’ which always got a response, and that’s what Jane was seeing. But tying that response to other things, like asserting it was the Script’s fault, was just asking for a purpose-made false positive, in order to cause people to attack the Script. But if this enemy was against the Script, then shouldn’t it try to make the Script give a false positive? To drive enemies against the Script for it?

This was just another non-answer in a long line of non-answers, but it was one Jane had wanted to test again, because now she could See rather well.

Melemizargo whispered, “If you confront it directly you’ll never get a definitive answer.”

Jane allowed the Static to dissipate before she spoke again, “The Script and the agents of the Script erase the memories of people in order to hide the causes of the Sundering.”

… No Red at all that time.

Huh.

Well actually. Jane hadn’t mentioned ‘Red Static’ or anything like that at all. So this was… An expected answer? Maybe? Was this good news?

Jane doubted she could ‘20-questions’ her way to victory, but this was a good start. Melemizargo swished behind Jane in what might have been surprise for whatever reasons, but she couldn’t tell. The Dark Dragon was not really there at all, except in her mind.

“It was a surprise, if you must have a name for the emotion I felt in that moment. You’ve got a nice little experiment going here. It has produced zero results, though.”

“It tells me the Script is not involved in the stuff—” At the implied mention of the Static, flakes of Red shimmered in the air around Jane before falling away, unable to touch her. “… And that statement I just made tells me that this shit is kinda ever-present—” More red sparks. “—even when I’m not referencing it directly by name. So it’s worse than any particular fairy or god.”

“But you know this already... though it does appear you’re more cognizant of what you’re doing this time.”

“If you want to watch and let me stumble through the basics, I welcome the audience. But if you want to give me the answers then that will work, too.”

Melemizargo chuckled, and then his ephemeral presence lifted from Jane’s shoulders and vanished into the mana. When he was as gone as he could be, Jane continued.

Jane thought. She said, “The Red Sparks are a god’s work.”

Out of the sunset sky came a deluge of red, sparking hard and clawing harder, grabbing toward Jane like the grip of a lightning deity, and yet finding nothing. The Red took a minute to clear, and it did not clear much at all. When her eyes and senses were no longer filled with red, Jane realized a few things.

It had been maybe an hour till sunset when she had said that question, when she had asserted that a god was behind the Sparks.

And now, Jane looked west, and the sun was higher in the sky, and Red Static clung to absolutely everything in the immediate area.

She had gone back in time. Maybe an hour this time?

Not too surprising.

This always happened when she poked too hard at the anti-meme. It was only due to the Bracelet that she was able to retain any information at all about the aborted future. Ever since she put on the Bracelet, she was fully cognizant of everything in her immediate area, and that included nearby aborted timelines. Now, with her mind clear, though, Jane thought about that a bit more, and also about what an Atomic Wizard War would really look like. She concluded that ‘REMEMBER’ was pretty damned Deep Magic.

So far, Jane knew of only one absolute trigger and a few lesser triggers for the Red Sparks’ worldwide [Return]… For it had to be worldwide, right? Or maybe just against everyone in the local area of the Spark event. Jane wasn’t sure about that part, actually.

One: ‘A god is doing this’. This caused an instant [Area Return].

Two: ‘Rift Magic and other dimensions are involved’. This did not cause an [Area Return] unless it was stated in a bunch of different ways and with a bent toward learning about how to fight the anti-meme. Her father just talking about basic Rift Magic and Rift Magic being studied in schools and what [Gate] and Fairy and the Dark actually were did not cause Red Spark events at all. All of that moreover fed into—

Three: Anyone talking too much about the anti-meme in a way that might actually reveal the anti-meme. Jane had not identified the exact vectors of what was ‘off limits’ aside from god-involvement and Rift Magic, so all her other experiments were under this Number Three until otherwise proven separate.

From previous tests, Jane knew that Red Static would stick around in the immediate [Area Return] area, ensuring that whatever had caused the localized area [Return] would not encroach upon the Red Sparks again.

The Red Static would actually alter probability and even thought patterns to drive people away from talking about it.

Really quite infuriating.

Her father was making good progress in uncovering the anti-meme on his own, though. For whatever reasons, he would talk about shit and Red Sparks would gather, and he’d go on different tangents and the Red Sparks would fall away, and then he’d go back to talking about stuff close to the Red Sparks again. It was the only way that any of them had even thought to bring up the possibility that there was an anti-meme in the first place.

So… Good job, dad.

… Jane suddenly had another question. She stepped away from the Static-covered mountainside, heading west to get out of the area of effect. She avoided a few larger stone elementals and once again stood in the sun, in a stony land free of Static.

“Benevolence is causing the Red Static.”

A pattering of Red filled the air, but no more than what would normally happen when one referenced the Red Static phenomenon.

Which was good.

But ultimately didn’t tell Jane much of anything at all. None of these experiments did; not really. Jane had ‘crossed off’ many different major forces on Veird, and yet she hadn’t really done anything at all. Every triggering event could be a smoke screen; misleading positives.

Maybe a god wasn’t involved at all. Maybe Rift Magic was just a red herring.

The only things Jane truly knew for sure were:

To speak of it causes it to happen. Which means something very, very large, and able to hear everything that happens with regard to its domain of power.

It causes people to not recognize it.

It didn’t matter where she did these experiments, for all places produced the same results. Inside a no-Script place or inside the Dark or even inside Fairy; there were no changes in results anywhere. There were a few places that Jane had never been, though, but she doubted Rozeta would allow her in the Core of Veird now that she was a Paladin of Melemizargo, so that experimental space was right out. She could see about making a space-trip past the Script, to try her luck actually past the Script with that ship that’s hidden somewhere by the Inquisitors of Rozeta.

That sort of poking around might go bad real fast, though.

Anyway.

Less absolutely-true facts were thus:

It probably had a worldwide domain of power, as evident by the anti-Rift Magic talk; it didn’t want people breaching its domain. It probably had a space like Benevolence or Fairy that existed alongside the reality of Veird, and it attacked from there.

And the Script and its people were not responsible for the Red Static.

There is some physical/atomic connection linking the Red Static, this New Cosmology, and maybe the Sundering all together.

“But the Sundering was Primal Lightning,” Jane said, looking at the sky, and seeing no Red Static. She added, “Primal Lightning is not Red Static.”

Red Static gathered like it normally did; soft and ephemeral and not really there at all.

Jane tried, “Primal Lightning is Red Static.”

Red Static flowed in small bits and pieces.

“… Now that one feels like a red herring, too,” Jane mumbled.

And then she turned to air and light and began stepping across the world, leaving behind the place of her transformation and acceptance of Darkness. Ah… Man. Her father would be absolutely pissed if he knew what she had done. All of her other selves would be angry at her, too, because accepting Melemizargo’s offer was a last ditch effort that they were saving for the apocalypse. This was sort of like the apocalypse, though, and Jane felt it was a good use of that offer, which is why she had chosen to accept this offer right now.

… What would Solomon say? The same thing? Anger all around? Probably. Solomon was trying to be different from ‘Erick’, but he was faking it too; he was her father, through and through, just like ‘Debby’ was still ‘Jane’, but of a different color.

- - - -

Jane hopped across islands, heading through the Archipelago to the east, avoiding major settlements and node networks and magical protections on her way to her goal, the Gate Network connection at Storm’s Edge. She had come through Storm’s Edge to get to the remote island where she had become Melemizargo’s Paladin, and she would return through Storm’s Edge in order to start her search anew, at House Benevolence, and Candlepoint. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to start at House Benevolence, but it made sense to start at the center of Veird’s Gate Network. Maybe someone suspicious, or something, would walk through the Gates to get where they needed to go, for all the world went through her father’s Gate Network.

Turned out she didn’t have to go all the way back there to start her search.

Turned out her suspicions about Fate were spot on.

Here, at Storm’s Edge, a clue walked through the Local Area Gate Network, into the city of Sininindi, right as Jane was getting ready to leave.

He was shaped like a skinny man with red hair and freckles, with dirt on his clothes and mud on his boots. That was what he looked like to everyone else; completely unremarkable, even if his hair color did stand out a little. But to Jane, who could See, Red Static held in the man’s eyes and in the air around him like a cloud. He was a focal point of the Red Sparks.

Fate had obviously intervened to make this happen…

Or maybe there were lots of people like this Red Guy? Jane sure as shit hoped not. The Red Guy didn’t seem menacing, but all those angry Red jolts around him certainly did. The guy himself seemed no more anxious than anyone else traveling through the Gates for the first time.

Jane backed up, out of line, and Melemizargo’s power wrapped around her even before she knew she needed that power. She became Unseen, Unheard, Unknown. None of the detection magics prevalent near the gatehouse caught her as she vanished from all normal senses, which allowed her to slip away from the line and focus on the Red Man. But there was a problem.

Jane did not vanish from the recent memories of the people she had been around. Guards readily noticed the sudden vacancy in line and called out about ‘who was pulling shit now!’ and muttering curses about the Storm Prophecy and increased security. People in armor and priests in robes swarmed to where Jane had been standing, to poke around at that space and to ask questions of people in front and behind of Jane’s spot. Those people could only say that Jane had been there, and now she was gone; they didn’t see her leave.

Melemizargo’s Shadow had also disturbed the entire manasphere in order for Jane to make her escape, which was not her intention, but which happened anyway. Melemizargo had done that, for sure, to make sure no one could see her in the recent memory of the manasphere; he was looking over her shoulder right now, his claws resting upon her. That major disturbance was probably why the guards were swarming so hard, actually; they couldn’t even check the recent past to see who had disturbed the line.

Jane, meanwhile, stood to the side, completely unnoticed by anyone, though they were surely looking.

Everyone muttered about the Storm Prophecy, with a few glancing toward the posters on the walls that spoke of that fated issue. Those posters had a start-date maybe 40 days away at the earliest, or 100 days at the latest. The numbers were in the air, though, so the guards were on the ground in force.

They stopped every single person coming out and going into the gatehouse.

But the Red Spark guy, who seemed incredibly suspicious to Jane, got through the sudden blockade because of those very same Sparks. The suspect fumbled his words at the guard accosting him, causing the guard to get more angry. Out came the manacles, but just as a threat for the moment. Tears encroached in Spark Guy’s eyes, while Sparks flickered off of him the whole time, soaking into the guard—

And the guard blinked a bit, dropped his voice, and told Spark Guy to get going. Just like that! Dismissed. As the Spark guy nervously adjusted his backpack and hoisted his luggage in his right hand, that guard went right onto the next single person in line, but when that second person rapidly devolved to sobbing under the guard’s sudden tirade, the guard got even more angry. A probably-innocent bystander got sucked into the system, wrapped in manacles and set aside for questioning. They were not the only ones to fall victim to Jane’s sudden vanishing in line.

… Ah. And here came the major Priests and Priestesses of Sininindi. That one right there was Tiza Nindi, the owl shifter Grand Priestess of Sininindi who hated Erick. She flickered with golden lightning and tendrils of the same, and Jane suddenly knew that she had to escape while she could.

To touch that golden light was to touch Sininindi herself.

Spark Guy got going, too, rapidly leaving the scene as fast as probably-mortal feet could carry him, all the while spilling Red Sparks everywhere he walked, into every person. The gatehouse and everyone looking his way got a lot of Sparks, but there was no end to that cloud, and with the still-full power of the anti-meme, Spark Guy entered the streets of Storm’s Edge.

Why had he been running so fast? Had he seen Sininindi’s power reaching for him, too? Had he noticed how his Red touched the gold, and the gold got a little lost?

Who knew!

Red Guy hurried away from the gatehouse, and Jane followed.

At first the street urchins eyed Red Guy as an easy pocket to pick, the overpriced vendors demanded he buy something, and the street women called out to him, wanting him to spend some of his money at their fine establishments. All normal stuff. But then his Sparks touched those people and they ignored him. Urchins wondered why they were in the middle of the street, prowling, when they should have been at the sides waiting for the next mark. The vendors were shaking cucumbers at thin air. Ladies of the evening were lifting their skirts at nothing.

One Mind Mage walking through the streets, minding his own business, noticed how people suddenly unnoticed Spark Guy, and that was all it took for the Red Sparks to latch onto that Mind Mage like a swarm of toothers spotting a cow that had fallen into the water. That touch of Red was worse for the Mind Mage than it was for everyone else, which was… sort of normal for the anti-meme and Mind Mages. Jane felt there wasn’t that much ferocity in the Red against the Mind Mages Jane had infected herself.

Hmm.

The Red Sparks absolutely swarmed the Mind Mage and the guy lost track of everything he was doing.

Red Guy kept right on rushing through town, trying to get away from the oddness he left behind, because yes, he had noticed what he was doing, and that scared him. Perhaps he wasn’t doing it on purpose?

Perhaps.

Jane considered Melemizargo’s decree. And then, with a casual flick of solid shadows, Jane stopped the urchins from picking the pockets of the dazed Mind Mage just long enough for the Mind Mage to recover, and to see what the urchins were trying to do to him. Those urchins were all well fed; they weren’t stealing to survive. They were just brats, trying to steal from whoever they could. Jane did not feel bad at all for letting them get caught.

Jane left that drama behind as she hurriedly caught up to the Spark Guy, shadowing him down golden-hour streets as he tried not to run, but he clearly wanted to. Running would probably draw too much attention? Maybe. He seemed to be heading north? North east, anyway.

Where was he going?

Jane tracked the man north, then east, then north again.

All the while Spark Guy exuded his red infection across the world, and people ignored him, as though he were a Moon Reacher walking through their midst—

Jane shivered at that old, buried memory. For a moment she was cast back in time. She was that young girl in the four-poster bed deep underground, near the Forest of Glaquin, where she had been staying for days while she had been hunting flame slimes in her waking hours. She recalled seeing fuzzy silver boulders and trees and feeling wind at her back when she went in and out of her base, never knowing how close she had come to death. And then those long arms and tiny hands reached into her room, deep, deep underground, to grab at her—

Jane stepped away from the Red trail for a moment, shadows wrapping tight around her as she hid in a dark alley and all the world closed in.

She breathed.

After a moment she was ready to pursue the guy again. It wasn’t hard to find his trail; he left Red Sparks wherever he went and that power lingered. Jane adroitly avoided stepping in the red, weaving her shadowy form through the spaces between the not-snow. In two minutes she had caught up to the guy.

This guy was not a Moon Reacher. Obviously he wasn’t. He also wasn’t using a Moon Reacher’s [Mind Fog] ability, or else the Mind Mage from earlier would have caught on to the guy and stopped him hard, so he wasn’t a Polymage either. Jane wasn’t too sure what the guy was, except that if she hadn’t seen the Red Sparks all around him, she would have thought him a perfectly normal guy. A bit gangly, a bit awkward, a bit wide-eyed tourist, too. But normal—

The guy passed through the northern wall of Storm’s Edge, through extensive detection magic, pinging it hard but the Red Sparks surrounding him pinged harder, passing into the detection magics that surrounded the city, and then rapidly flowing through those magics like drops of light momentarily stretched out into lines. That power was certainly aiming for whoever was monitoring those magics. The guards on the wall didn’t care that the guy went through, and whoever was monitoring the area didn’t care, either.

They certainly watched all the other people go in and out of the city. This was the pilgrim path to the Blue Temple, and to Everbless’s Cove, and there were a lot of people going and coming from that direction, even now, at this twilight hour. Each person walked through those detection magics and sent off a tiny ping through that power.

… And Jane had to go through, too.

Jane knew that those detection magics were highly tuned to shadow because of all the recent problems. Storm’s edge had even reinstated the old anti-Cult laws, and anyone found using certain magics like Jane’s [Greater Shadowalk] were instantly considered a Cultist and captured or killed on sight. ‘Killed’ was the more realistic interpretation of those laws, though. From what Jane recalled, she knew that House Benevolence’s lawyers and Storm’s Edge’s lawyers were still ‘in talks’ about all that overreach, but that wasn’t going to go anywhere; the Church of Sininindi wasn’t willing to talk at all, and those were the people who maintained the defenses around this land. Whoever was behind those detection magics the Sparks Guy had just walked through had to be at the Lighthouse of Storm’s Edge, watching for shadows to make their move anywhere at all in the city.

… Jane could obviously just switch to [Greater Lightwalk], but that felt… Wrong. Less safe, actually. Perhaps Jane could simply trust the shadows surrounding her? Shades were known to go anywhere they wanted, after all, and maybe Paladins of the Dark could do the… same...

A gentle weight gripped her shoulders.

So this was what it meant to be a Paladin of Melemizargo, eh? She could violate any sanctum she wanted, no matter if they were tuned to her current powers.

“Yes.”

Jane walked through the detection magics of the wall of Storm’s Edge and they did not notice her passing. No ripple of power went out through the sheets of power invisibly encircling the entire city. Nothing pinged.

Jane took a moment and continued to Look at those surrounding magics for a little while, to make sure she was truly in the clear. And she was.

She probably could have managed that before this whole Paladin-of-the-Dark junk, but it would have taken an expenditure of [Prismatic Domain] and that probably would have been noticed. She certainly couldn’t have done that with just her normal [Greater Shadowalk].

Under a purple, twilight sky, Jane followed the Spark Guy across the pilgrim’s trail. Her mark and the other pilgrims came and went all along the actual trail, with most hurrying to get back to town before the sun fully set. A lot of people seemed to have been out here just to catch sight of the sunset, which had been pretty nice, all things considered.

Jane stepped on the long shadows of blades of grass, not actually stepping on the trail itself, because when she looked at the trail she saw golden light. It was a path laid by prayers to Sininindi, and to step upon it would probably be to come under Sininindi’s gaze. Jane wasn’t sure if that would be a bad thing or not, considering how the goddess of Storm and Sea and her father had been getting along rather well recently, but the church of Sininindi and her father were not on good terms at all. Jane didn’t want to take the chance, so the grassy path was her path of choice.

She wasn’t sure how —exactly— she was Seeing all of this divinity or Knowing what it all meant without needing to be told. Logical deduction was the major component, yes. But there was more than that. Melemizargo was probably to blame for her ‘Insight’ into what she was Seeing.

But who was to blame for the Spark Guy?

Jane followed until the sky was dark, and the pilgrim path was lit with light from unknown sources, and Spark Guy was the only one still on the path, making his way toward the Blue Temple and Everbless’s Cove—

Tendrils of gold began to fill the air, like streamers of lightning laid out across the world.

Melemizargo’s claws tensed on Jane’s shoulders.

Jane Knew she could continue her pursuit if she avoided all of Sininindi’s power, but that would become impossible within another ten minutes when they actually got in sight of Everbless. The twilight sky to the north was already filled with golden lightning and golden clouds. How much of that was real, though, and how much was it Melemizargo’s Sight? As soon as Jane had that thought she felt a tension inside of her that she didn’t know existed. Instantly, she knew it as Melemizargo’s Sight, and she had been walking around with her ‘third eye’ wide open.

She shut that eye now.

The light of the Pilgrim’s Path vanished into the night. Jane was suddenly alone in the world. Melemizargo had stepped away, like how he stepped away when Inquisitors came calling, looking for Cultists and finding none, because the Cultists could cut themselves off from Melemizargo’s power whenever they wanted. Well that was certainly a question no one had asked, but which Jane was thankful for knowing.

Anyway.

The sky ahead was not filled with gold, but instead with normal thunderheads raising high into the sky, sparking white and blue here and there—

Jane opened her Sight again, and everything returned to different types of glows. She had been nowhere near Sininindi’s power, and she still wasn’t. Spark Guy was different.

Jane watched Spark Guy walk ahead, down the illuminated path, spilling Red Sparks into the air. A thread of divine power, like soft lightning, hung in the air, purposefully drawing him forward. For a moment, Jane thought that Sininindi was behind everything, but three seconds passed, and Spark Guy drew closer to the ‘come hither’ divinity. Just like it had happened back at the gatehouse, and just as those Red Sparks spilled into the divine path laid by countless pilgrims, Red Sparks flowed from him straight into Sininindi’s power, corrupting the divine lightning.

But unlike all other observers of the man, Sininindi’s call was not dissuaded, and the Red Sparks did not grow in ferocity or density. Instead, the man seemed to walk easier, and the Red Sparks seemed to have little effect on the thread of divinity.

… That was enough information gathering for now. Jane wasn’t going to confront anyone on the level of a divine. Not when she could do a lot more information gathering as she was. Melemizargo’s claws let up off of her shoulders, and she backtracked fast, back to the gatehouse, back to her original plan of searching for leads at Candlepoint, the center of the Gate Network.

She had a lead now. Now, she just needed to find out who the Red Guy was, and what connection they had to Sininindi.

She also had to figure out why she felt she knew the guy…

“But I can’t place him,” Jane said to the Dark. “I think I met him… recently?”

“The Bracelet is rather well made but we’re up against High Wizardry, and you will need assistance and time to fully Remember and See; to fully integrate with the Bracelet. Currently, the best sort of help is best delivered to yourself by your own investigations. Just like how you realized your father is slowly fighting off the infection, you are now fighting off the infection, too. That takes time, and good decisions.”

Jane softly said, “My father has been fighting it off for a long time, hasn’t he.”

“Yes, and he has fallen to it several times over in the past. I believe it never got any solid hits on him for many different reasons, but all of those reasons are theoretical and unprovable at my current level of power. Aside from gods and the entire world taking a very strong view of him, which solidified his presence a great deal and made him rather Unforgettable to the mana itself, Erick has always been on a Path of some sort, and Fate is stronger than this anti-meme. But the anti-meme did win at least once that I know of: That whole [Onward] business. That miscast of Wizardry was surely this anti-meme interfering with his spellwork, taking him off of the board for a long while.”

Jane had to stop in her tracks when she heard that explanation.

In a normal alleyway of the streets of Storm’s Edge, Jane asked Melemizargo, “Has it ever killed anyone? Have we forgotten people?”

“Yes. Absolutely. When required and when people are at their lowest, and they are therefore rather forgettable by all of the world, sometimes the Red takes them. Like a predator eating the slowest, sickest of prey. The homeless, mostly, but people do care about even those who have lost their path, so those people fall prey less than you would think. The victims of cut supply lines are a big issue, for when no one remembers you, you are easy to disappear. The Mind Mages have several memetic threats enclosed in areas that they are forced to keep separate from the world, and so they fall prey to the Red Sparks a lot, and they misattribute their losses to what they are guarding.

“When you see a splash of Red in an area where people should have been, and yet there is no one, that is where someone either triggered the Red, or they were eaten.

“Only one person a day, though. Maybe two. Not many. You’d never see it unless you looked at the world from my sort of scale.

“But at the same time, the Red doesn’t like to make itself known in that way. I think it only eats what it needs to eat. It derives much more pleasure from its other main form of torture.

“The Red steers people toward committing acts of horror against each other. Not all horrors, not by a [Long Bolt]. Only the ones that truly matter, that can cause destruction and misery on a massive scale, or which are easily done with a twist of delay here or there. That, it does most perfectly. That, I think it enjoys. There was more than one reason why I allowed my Shades to be purged, Jane. All of them were quite infected, and through them I was infected as well.

“I’m better now, and so is my Clergy.”

Jane breathed deep. She glanced at the sky filled with darkness and clouds, where faint golden glows held far, far above.

“It’s going after Sininindi, isn’t it.”

Red Sparks filled the air like bugs crawling out of the very fabric of space and time.

Jane let them wash over her and leave her behind, their search coming up empty. Melemizargo said nothing, for he Watched over her shoulders the entire time.

When the storm passed, Jane hightailed it back through Storm’s Edge, to the gatehouse. She did spare moments here and there among the streets, though, to search for red spots that should not be there, worrying that someone might have been lost to the world and never found again.

But there were no red areas; no lingering infections except the ones she had already made.

- - - -

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 not start 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 humor instead 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 still doesn’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.”

“Somewhat correct. 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 after your 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 how you are deviated from this world’s Jane. I doubt whatever memories you have are the whole story. Wizardry can get very weird, 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 not my 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 want to 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, someone in 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, This Jane 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 not told 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 should tell him that option. Destiny seems to 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 fixing it.”

‘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.