Companion Chronicles [Jumpchain/Multicross SI] [Currently visiting: INTERMISSION]

[Tempestuous]

AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.

Chapter 124: Welcome Home​

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Zeke and Anna went their way, and the four of us went ours.

"Gonna go yell at Management again?" Garrus asked Max.

The latter shook his head. "Tomorrow, after I talk to those two a bit more. I'm heading home."

"Alone?"

"Not if I can help it."

The group split again, Homura and I granting the two their privacy.

"Poor Zeke," I muttered.

"Mm," Homura agreed.

We parted at the edge of the park. She turned left towards her apartment; I wandered towards the Traveler's Palace, the modern, stylishly facaded high-rise visible from nearly anywhere in the main Warehouse space. As always, it opened out into the square, where Jenn was sitting on the edge of the fountain.

"Cass!" She bounced to her feet and ran over to throw her physically-twelve-year-old arms around my waist.

"Jenn?"

"Proud of you," she said by way of explanation.

I chuckled and mussed her hair. "Come on, say it. Make me proud of myself, too."

"Sure!" Jenn let go and hurried back to where she'd started, climbing onto the rim of the fountain to put us closer to eye-to-eye. "You went and took on the role of parenting a teenager even though I know you're not super confident about it, and you did it for someone who needed it way more than me, too! Good job!" She punctuated her final congratulations by throwing her arms up in celebration.

"Thanks." I sat down on the fountain beside her and added, "To be honest, I was a little worried you'd be jealous."

"Don't be silly. You offered, remember? It's not like you weren't willing; I was the one who was busy." She used her temporary height advantage to pat me on the shoulder the way I often did to her. "'Sides, we can still Jump together whenever we want. If you keep Jumping regularly, you'll pass me in age sooner or later, and then it won't even be weird if you parent me!"

"It's funny that age can work like that here," I said. "That you can 'catch up' to people, I mean."

"Time shenanigans!"

"Time shenanigans."

Jenn seemed content to enjoy my company in silence, but some lingering insecurity prompted me to ask, "If you don't mind me asking, how much did you hear about how my first try at parenting went?"

"I followed along with Megan whenever Luke called," she answered. "He told us all about what was going on back in Strawfield, and of course we visited, too. You did a great job."

"I know I made mistakes, though. I mean, I think I did all right, but parenting is too big a job not to make mistakes."

"Everything worked out in the end, though, right?

"Hopefully." I stretched my hands high into the air before resting them behind my head, elbows out. "Maybe all we can hope for is to do a little less damage to our kids than our parents did us."

Jenn side-eyed me. "That's kinda dark, Cass."

"Not all progress is fast."

"With perks it is!"

"I dunno, I feel like being raised by someone with a 'perfect parenting' perk would fuck up a kid in a whole new way."

She laughed and sat down beside me, smoothing her sundress beneath her. I didn't tell her I hadn't been joking.

"Can I ask you something?" I asked instead.

"I might not answer, but ask away."

"Why'd you stay twelve? Or return to twelve, or however you want to describe it." I'd seen her in forms old enough to drink, so I knew she'd been an adult at some point.

Jenn spent nearly a minute worrying her lip with her teeth.

"That's a hard question to answer," she said, "because it's the result of so many different things it's really hard to synthesize an answer. It's like, you know, 'Concise, correct, complete; pick two', except it's pick one-half instead. And my reasons have changed over the years, too."

"You don't have to answer—"

"No, I want to answer. Actually doing it is a little frustrating, though."

I chuckled and patted her on the shoulder. "Believe me, I know the feeling."

"Thanks." She switched from worrying her lower lip to worrying her upper lip. "The simplest answer is that I can, but that doesn't really answer anything, does it?"

"It's good enough for me."

"But it doesn't answer the question!"

"You don't have to answer the question," I repeated.

"I already said I want to!"

I smiled and held out a hand to bid her continue.

Jenn kept thinking a moment longer, then swapped to a form roughly the same age as mine to continue thinking.

"I'm a kid because I can be," she repeated at long last. "I was twelve when I was rescued, so that's the age when I got to stop being a little miniature post-apocalypse-survivor adult and be a child again, and that wasn't easy—but at the same time it was, sort of, because the world became good and wonderful again at the same time—that is, once I stopped being incredibly traumatized. Anyway, when I say 'I can be', that's really important to me. Even if I'd survived in the old world—heck, even if Max had fixed everything—I probably wouldn't have ever gotten that opportunity if he hadn't taken us in.

"I did grow up—well, I grew old, at least. Max put down some ground rules when I begged him into letting me stay, like I couldn't mess with my age until I turned thirty 'properly', so I didn't just stay a kid and never grow up. Which was definitely the right call, 'cause the alternative would be, you know, pretty sketchy. Could I really make an informed decision on staying a kid as a kid?"

She didn't pause for an answer. "So I grew up enough to make a proper, informed decision about how I wanted to live. Uh, it's not like I give up any intelligence or anything when I'm little, to be clear. That was kind of the point of that whole process—proving it, that is. Showing congruence between my adult decision making and my childlike behavior. I'm not exactly the same when I'm being a kid—I'm more energetic, sillier, maybe a little more impulsive—but I'm still fully cognizant. But the 'chain doesn't need more adults, and I like being a child. Being innocent, I guess."

"Innocent?"

"Yeah. There wasn't much innocence left after the world ended, so part of healing was getting that childlike innocence back, and I treasure it. So I stay a kid because I want to hang onto that. I can 'put it down', metaphorically speaking, be an adult when I need to be no matter my form, but it's what I keep coming back to."

It was my turn to sit and think.

"I think I—"

I hesitated.

"—well, not 'understand', exactly, because I haven't felt anything like that—"

"You heard and comprehended," Jenn summarized.

"Yeah."

"Then that is good enough for me." She popped back into her usual tweenage form with a contented smile, kicking her legs out now that they no longer reached the street.

"Great."

I took a long look around the square, rustic-looking wood, brick, and plaster facades that wouldn't have been out of place in Wyndia incongruously interrupted by the modern construction of the Palace and backed by even more varied buildings in rows behind them—villas and skyscrapers and castle turrets and weirder things besides—then raised my eyes to the false sky, where images of fluffy clouds crawled across the flat ceiling.

"Crazy life, isn't it?" I asked.

"Crazy," Jenn agreed. "And we wouldn't trade it for anything else."

———X==X==X———​

Someone knocked on my door that evening a few hours after the doors closed for good. I rose from the desk where I'd been rereading Katalepsis and opened the door to reveal Zeke—back in casual clothing, but still… smaller in some way that he'd once been.

"Zeke!" I said. "Come in!"

He paused for a moment before stepping into the room with a noticeable level of concentration and care.

"It's fine if you want to float," I said.

He shook his head. "I don't have the core synced, and I wouldn't want to use thrusters in here even if I did."

"Not used to not having it?"

"Yeah," Zeke agreed. "It's what I'd imagine missing a limb feels like. Or an eye."

"Then why not stay synced?"

"Because now that I'm finally back in a safe place, I want to go a day without carrying a weapon around." He sighed and shook his head again. "It's not just a weapon, of course, but after fighting for so long it's hard to see it as anything else."

"I'm not going to judge. Would you like to sit down?"

Zeke took the chair. I sat down on the bed, which disturbed the sheets enough for Benny to stick his head out from under the bedding, give me a baleful look with his single eye, and burrow once more.

"It's only now that I've lived through 'existential-threat superweapon' battles that I really understand what Endbringer fights meant to capes," Zeke observed. "You were there for one of them, so I'm sure you know what I mean. How are you so comfortable with them?"

"I don't know. They're small and harmless?" I reached over and poked the lump in the sheets with one finger, prompting it to shift about and rumble in disapproval. "I guess humans really will pack-bond with anything."

"That we will."

I shot Zeke an appraising glance, which he answered with a raised eyebrow.

"So," I said, "where are the girls?"

"The 'girls'?"

"Anna and Abby."

"Oh." He chuckled. "Abby's asleep in my room, and I just showed Anna to hers."

"Cool."

Zeke nodded once.

"Were you able to visit your friends from Moperville?" I asked.

"Yeah. It was a bit short notice, but… yeah. We made it work."

"Have fun?

"Yeah."

"Good."

Zeke nodded again.

"How was the rest of your Jump?" he asked. "After I left?"

"Eventful."

"Oh?"

I started ticking points off on my fingers. "We turned the bakery into a tea cafe, I adopted a kid, that guy who thought I was a vampire came back to say hello, magic was revealed to the world, I started serving tea with fox ears on, the girl I dated for like two weeks before she freaked out and ghosted me tried to make up, Homura earned three Michelin Stars for her baking, I got to be a fairy godmother for a wedding…" Having run out of fingers on both hands, I concluded, "Eventful."

"Sounds like it," Zeke agreed.

"They were good events, though, mostly."

"That's good."

I paused to see if Zeke would offer any of his own anecdotes. He did not.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

He scoffed. "No, I'm not. Neither of us are, and we probably won't be for a long time."

"You can call it a stupid question if you want."

"Maybe it is. Why did you ask?"

I sucked on my teeth for a moment. "I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you're… different."

"Hard not to be."

"Sorry, I wasn't—yes, of course. I meant you sound different. You had a very, um, 'specific' way of talking, before, if that makes sense?"

Zeke sighed again. "Sometimes, being weird is a luxury. I adapted. Learned to talk like other people talked, and to imitate social tics like facial expressions, body language, pauses and stutters, those kinds of things."

"You changed your presentation."

"I would've used the word 'affect'."

"That's one part of it," I allowed, "but it's more than that. How do I put it? It's not just your emotional expression, it's your diction, your tells, and all that. You're conveying normalcy."

"Normalcy isn't the goal for its own sake. It's about sending the expected signals on the expected channels."

"I wasn't trying to claim it was. It's still an attempt at 'being normal', though, isn't it?"

"Maybe. Why?"

I shrugged. "It's just that I had a similar experience, once. Well, maybe not similar, but at least… analogous?"

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I'll tell you about it sometime."

"Why not now?"

"Because we've already spent way more time talking about me."

Zeke sighed and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. "I didn't come in here to talk about myself. I'm still coming to terms with the last few years. Fuck knows how long that's going to take. I'm not sure how I survived." He opened his eyes, then turned to look out the window at the snowy mountain landscape beyond.

"Sometimes I'm not sure I did."

If 'Zeke' was the quirky, sardonic kid I'd gotten used to over the last two Jumps… maybe he hadn't.

He straightened up and, with great effort, put on a smile. "I'll have plenty of time to talk about me in therapy tomorrow—and probably the next day, and the day after that, because I know I'm going to need it. Right now I want to hear about you. It feels like it's been a lifetime since we talked."

"Really?"

"What do you mean, 'really'?"

"It's not about you," I said, holding up a hand. "It's just something I talked to Tess about, ages ago. It doesn't really bother me that I may not have spoken to someone in however-many years; I always feel like we should just be able to pick up right where we left off, time be damned. I thought it might have something to do with having a memory that doesn't fade with time, but Homura says it's a symptom of ADHD."

Zeke cocked his head curiously. "Wouldn't that have been cured after we left Bet?"

"I'd've thought so, but it seems to have stuck around. How is your memory, anyway?"

"Flawless."

"Yeah, I figured. That rules out it just being about memory."

"A lot happened in the meantime."

"I can only imagine," I agreed. "You've changed a lot, haven't you?"

"Hard not to."

"I guess it would be."

I hesitated.

"Are you… okay with that?"

He frowned. "I don't really have a choice, do I?"

"You changed once. What makes you think you can't change back?"

"Why would I?" Zeke asked. "It's not like I got any particular benefit out of being weird."

"I'm not saying you should, I'm just saying you can."

"Again, why would I?"

"That depends entirely on which 'you' you like better," I said. "Or, you know, if you weren't okay with having had to change in the first place."

"I think I like the me that acts like a person."

"Like what people consider 'normal', you mean."

"Like a 'normal' person, then," he said, annoyed at the pedantry.

"Sorry for being a stickler for this, but—right, how about I just tell you the story I put off earlier?"

Zeke nodded and leaned back in the chair, annoyance disappearing behind a smile. "Let's hear it."

"I mentioned that Homura said the whole 'not feeling time between conversations' thing was a symptom of ADHD, right?" I began. "Well, after that, I got curious and looked into things a bit more, and it turns out a lot of the things I thought were just, you know, 'silly idiosyncrasies' were actually just more symptoms of ADHD that weren't unique to me in the slightest. And then it turned out that there were more than a few other 'idiosyncrasies' that were symptoms of autism—high-functioning autism, but still. And that made me start reflecting on my childhood, and how it was that all the doctors I'd been to had missed it."

"The ADHD or the autism? Or both?"

"The autism. The ADHD is actually pretty straightforward; the diagnostic criteria for girls and boys are different. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD as a young boy because I was displaying a young girl's symptoms."

"Interesting," Zeke said. "Um, sorry for the tangent, but do you think of your first childhood as 'when you were a young boy' rather than 'a young girl'?"

"I don't really think about it in either way; it's more like 'when I was a kid' without focusing on what kind of kid, if that makes sense? I meant that as far as the doctors were concerned, they were examining a young boy."

"Ah. Sorry, go on."

I waved it away. "No need to apologize. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the reason they missed the autism is that when I was a kid—probably while I was still in elementary school, I think, though I'm honestly not sure—my parents put me into a program for kids who had trouble socializing, and, uh, hmm."

"What?"

"Nothing, just… it's a little odd that I'm telling you this story now. The time I told it was back on Bet, talking to Taylor." I sighed. "Just an odd coincidence, I guess. Anyway, I don't think it was the intention, but the effect was, basically, a harsh lesson in presenting as neurotypical—allistic, I guess, if you want to be specific."

"'Allistic' being the alternative neurotype to 'autistic'."

"Yes, exactly. And while that may not have been a good way to do it, or a good thing to do at all, it did do it. I rarely had any issues presenting as an allistic kid." I let out a rueful chuckle. "I don't think it served me well in the long term, though, 'cause for one thing, any time I messed up, I just looked like an asshole rather than someone who was convincingly faking an understanding of social cues and just happened to get one wrong."

"That hardly seems like the only problem with all that."

"Yeah. Those idiosyncrasies I mentioned? I'd have understood them and myself a lot better if I'd known why I was like that. And of course there was the obvious 'never diagnosed with autism' thing that could've… I don't know. Maybe I could have gotten help in school or something?"

Zeke frowned into the middle distance as he absorbed all that.

"So your objection to the use of the phrase 'acting like a person' is that prior to your own moderately traumatic crash course in neurotypical presentation, you yourself acted in a way that might not qualify as 'acting like a person' in my words?"

I chuckled and shook my head. "It's not about the collateral damage, it's that you're putting yourself down for no reason. You've been acting like a person the whole time you've been a person because you are a person."

"You're making a definitional argument," he accused. "If I'm a person, everything I do is something a person would do. Right?"

"Yes, exactly!"

"But that's a semantic quibble. You know I'm talking about 'how people act' in the general case, not the exhaustive one."

"Which is why I'm insisting on using the 'normal' qualifier," I explained. "Otherwise, you're denying the personhood of everyone else, yourself included, and I wouldn't consider myself a good friend if I let that pass without comment."

"But you knew what I meant; you could have just responded to that instead of quibbling. Is how I say something important enough to get this sidetracked?"

"I think that sometimes 'how you say something' can reveal more about how you think than 'what you say' does."

Zeke blinked twice while he considered that argument.

"So you're saying you think I meant to deny my personhood?"

"I don't think you meant to say it, but I was concerned you thought it. And even if you didn't, talking about it that way could get you to start."

"Understandable," he said. "Now, if you don't mind backing up a bit: if it's 'not about the collateral damage', why bring up your own experience?"

"To make the point that a lot of people don't act 'normally', so there's no reason to believe that how well one follows social expectations has any bearing on personhood. And that you're in good company, if I do say so myself."

"Because your maybe-not-similar-but-at-least-analogous experience was in learning how to receive social signals like how I had to learn to send those signals?" Zeke guessed.

I shrugged one shoulder. "That's not quite right: it was about presentation for me too, not just interpretation. Besides, I don't think you ever had a problem sending signals. You were perfectly clear. You just communicated in a way that was, well, distinctly you."

"And the way I do it now isn't 'me'?"

"No, no, that's not what I meant!" I hurried to explain. "I'm just saying it was something unique to you. Distinctive, even. And there's value in that, right?"

"I did say being weird is a luxury—or presenting weird, if you prefer."

"Yeah, you did say that—and to be honest, I hear more of the 'old you' now than I did earlier, when you'd just gotten back. Not that either way is 'wrong', of course."

Zeke gave me a wry grin. "Probably because I'm talking to you."

"Old habits, huh?"

"I would phrase it as code-switching—falling back into using specific words and patterns of speech. It's still not quite how I used to talk, though, is it?"

"Not exactly, no."

He nodded. "I remember how I used to talk and think, but putting that 'affect' back on feels even more fake now than doing this did back when I started. It's strange, but at some point I stopped including things like hesitation, disfluencies, and qualifiers deliberately and started just… doing it. It's like I stopped 'emulating' them and just adopted them as part of my 'normal' affect."

"You formed a new habit?"

"Not even that—calling it a 'habit' implies that it's still an affectation, just an ingrained one. I think this is more… natural, for lack of a better word." Zeke paused, then leaned in and raised a hand to shield his mouth from hypothetical eavesdroppers. "Although between you and me, I may have played up my nervousness when I got back. Not that I wasn't nervous, of course, I wasn't sure what I'd have done if Max had said 'no', but I chose to express it more than I normally would even with the changes in presentation. I wanted him to know I was nervous, though in hindsight I can see why someone might argue it was manipulative."

I rubbed my chin in thought. "I think that's a fair thing to do," I said. "Though with perks and stuff, he probably would've known anyway."

"That's probably true. It's been a long time since I had to deal with anything like that." Zeke's eyes unfocused for a second as something occurred to him. "Now that I think about it, that might have contributed to the 'not fully acclimating to humanity' thing."

"Because with Deanna and Max, you didn't need to learn how to—how did you put it? 'Send the right signals'?"

"And the fact that they understood me anyway made me even more uncomfortable by comparison with people who couldn't—and reinforced my bias that it was everyone else who was weird and unreasonable."

"Ah. Yeah, that makes sense," I said. "Say—and this segue is only going to make sense in hindsight, but do you remember the conversation we had about my issues with writing?"

"Of course."

"Well, I'd completely forgotten that I wrote an incredibly amateur novel-length story a couple months before I joined the 'chain. Management was kind enough to retrieve it."

"Before you joined," Zeke repeated. "Before you got any help with your issues."

"Magical help, at least, but I'm pretty sure I know why. Or how, I guess, depending on how you look at it."

"How, then?"

"Because a few months before that, I'd come out as transgender," I explained. "And when I did, I also changed the way I presented—not so much 'physically', since that takes time and, you know, confidence, but I transitioned socially pretty quick. I came out to the people I spoke to online, had them gender me feminine, and… it felt right. I finally understood that trying to be a guy just didn't work for me, and I think that was the thing that had been fucking me up, if you'll excuse my language: trying to be a guy had completely stifled my ability to express myself."

"Which brings us back to the issue of presentation, which is why the segue makes sense in hindsight."

"Yeah."

He frowned. "But what does your gender presentation have to do with writing?"

"That's a good question. Maybe it was just the whole 'presenting male without feeling it' thing confusing me, but there was definitely an anxiety component, so… yeah, I don't know. There's no clear link, but the correlation is hard to argue with."

"True."

We fell silent for a moment. Zeke relaxed in his chair; I glanced back at the lump in the covers.

"You know," I said, "when I said, 'Humans will pack-bond with anything'…"

"Yeah?"

"You said 'we will'. I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've heard you talk about humanity in the first person."

Zeke stiffened slightly. He held my gaze for a second before averting his eyes, a frown creasing his forehead.

"Of course I count myself as human, now," he said. "War is always 'us' versus 'them'. Tribe versus tribe. Country versus country. Humanity versus hegemonizing swarm. Sometimes, the desire to protect 'us' is the only thing that keeps you going. Sometimes, it's the desire to destroy 'them'—though I've only seen that second-hand, thankfully."

I wasn't sure what to say to that, so I said, "Oh."

"That's not the only reason," Zeke continued. "It might be the largest one, but not the most important, if that makes sense? Even when things got bad, there was more to life than the war. This was the first time I was fully… 'immersed' in humanity in the way people talk about language immersion. I didn't have anywhere to retreat to, like I did with Deanna and Max, and… it was really fucking stressful, but it also gave me a much better understanding of why people are the way they are. All the things that used to annoy me or mystify me made a lot more sense once I couldn't step away and watch it from the outside."

"Huh," I said. "Most of the things that mystified me about people made more sense once I was able to step back."

"Because those were the parts you were missing."

"Probably."

"Deanna and Max did their best to look after me," he continued, "but that meant they always gave me an out. When I got confused or stressed or whatever, I could always leave, and that meant I never had to buckle down and properly understand everything as a whole 'package'. I only got bits and pieces."

"And no context."

Zeke shook his head. "No, I got context. I just never had to stitch together the bits where one context ended and another began, or where they overlapped, or however they happened to interact. I never had to do the synthesis."

"Even when you were in high school before your sudden, uh… 'departure'?"

"No. I probably should have, but I resented the experience enough that I never fully took that step."

"You made friends anyway."

"But that was because I was weird, not in spite of it."

I knew too much about the friends in question to dispute his assessment.

"The point I was making," he concluded, "is that my 'cultural immersion', if that phrase is appropriate when the 'culture' in question is as broad as 'human', meant I had nowhere to go to stop 'being human' and start being… well, the weird human-shaped bundle of opinions and qualia I identified as previously."

Zeke saw my objection coming and headed it off with, "And by 'human-shaped', I mean both physically and mentally. I've had a human mind since my first import, as I'm sure you're about to remind me, but I insisted on categorizing myself separately—out of stubbornness and misplaced frustration, mostly, but the point remains."

I nodded and leaned back in my chair, mollified.

"At any rate, I'd held myself in a deliberate state of derealization—or maybe some sort of 'inverse derealization', as though I wasn't 'real', whatever that means—and the whole 'immersion' experience broke that apart. Being on my own forced me to 'grow up' in a way I hadn't before. Not that I blame Deanna or Max for that: I wasn't exactly a normal child. I had more knowledge than most adults and less context than most toddlers, and I think they did pretty well given the unusual situation. I don't think I would have survived the last eight years half as well if they hadn't. They prepared me to deal with human life, but they never actually made me do it."

"And then you got whisked away to Perth."

"Where I didn't have a choice." He paused, then added, "And while it was traumatic enough that I wouldn't call it 'beneficial', it did let me grow in some ways even as it cut me down in others. My own 'harsh lesson', as you put it."

"You could have gotten that same growth in much healthier and less traumatic ways," I summarized.

"To put it lightly," Zeke grumbled. "Did I need someone or something to push me outside my comfort zone? Yes. Could it have been done safely and constructively instead of abusively? Also yes, not that Management cares about that—if they understand it at all."

I nodded.

"Anyway, 'growing up' and 'leaving my comfort zone' meant experiencing all sorts of things people like to wax poetic about 'being part of the human experience' or 'defining one's childhood'," he concluded, "and while I don't exactly agree with that sort of hyperbole, I will admit that, taken as a whole, they made it a lot harder to keep telling myself I was different. Especially when I was sharing those moments with friends who were a lot closer than I let anyone get back in Moperville."

That was as good an opportunity for a segue as any. "Speaking of friends: if you don't mind me asking, what exactly is there between you and Anna?"

Zeke fixed me with a look. "We're friends. That's all."

"She joined the 'chain for you, didn't she?"

"Good friends," he amended. "Partners, maybe—in the strictly non-romantic sense."

"And nothing more?"

"No. Are there rumors starting already?"

"I haven't heard any," I told him. "But it hasn't even been a day since you got back."

"But you're assuming there will be?"

"You brought a girl home from a dating-sim universe, people believe whatever best fits their assumptions, and not even the 'chain can defeat heteronormativity."

Zeke winced. "Ah, fuck."

"Yeah, I feel your pain." He raised an eyebrow, so I explained, "A few months after you disappeared, Zero let slip that she shipped Homura and I, which is… awkward."

Zeke winced again, this time accompanied by a look of befuddled exasperation. "Why would she tell you that?"

"It's Zero."

"That doesn't tell me much other than that she's the kind of person who would do that. The first and last time I met her was at your birthday party—though that's true of half the people there, now that I think about it."

"Really?" I asked. "Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing. I guess sometimes I forget I'm not the only person who finds a few friends and stops looking."

Zeke snorted. "This is me we're talking about, Cass. I had to be badgered into looking in the first place."

———X==X==X———​

 

[Tempestuous]

AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.

Chapter 125: A Notable Lack of Disaster​

---

I awoke the next morning ready to face whatever crisis had occurred beyond my immediate line of sight. I knocked on Tess's door, then Dinah's (even though she hadn't imported), then Anna's. The first accepted my invitation to breakfast, the second called me a 'godforsaken morning person', and the third didn't respond.

"She's probably down at breakfast already," Tess suggested.

"Maybe." I gave the door another glance, then turned a suspicious eye down the hall. "You don't think she might be in Zeke's room instead?"

"Do you want to find out?"

"My good sense says no, but my nosiness says yes." I was being literal; I still had the shoulder sprite perk active, and the two were saying exactly that. "Let's go with the former, shall we?"

The first thing we saw upon arriving at the Palace was, unsurprisingly, Max, who waved us over from a table near the door with a call of, "Good morning."

"Good morning," I replied, Tess a half-second behind me. "Any disasters, catastrophes, or other emergencies I should be aware of?"

"No…?" he replied, clearly wondering what I'd been expecting.

"The last two breaks began with one form of drama or another and I'm capable of pattern recognition."

Max rolled his eyes. "Relax. Nothing but good news since you moved back in yesterday."

"But there is news?"

"Yeah. Remember when you asked if telling Tedd about the 'chain was a good idea?"

I sighed. "Yes, I do."

"Well, with the benefit of hindsight, I can tell you it was. Look there." He pointed across the room to a table in the corner, where Zeke and Anna were sitting across from Tedd and Grace.

Tedd and Grace?

"We left, didn't we?" I asked. "Like, 'doors are closed, next stop wherever' left?"

Max laughed. "Yeah, and they're along for the ride. Probably only for a Jump or two, but I'm happy to host them as long as they want."

"That's the news, then?" Tess asked. "Zeke brought three people along in one Jump?"

"Two Jumps," I corrected her.

"One and a half."

"One point eight, if you're going to be a stickler for precision," Max interjected.

"Point eight?" Tess asked.

"He was there for eight years. No idea why."

"The war probably ended," I suggested.

"Yeah, that would make sense."

"That would make it only one point three," Tess argued. "One half plus four fifths."

I tuned out their good-natured bickering and looked at Zeke and company again. Their table was full, so I'd have to catch him later.

Maybe I'd been taking Zeke's friendship for granted, because I could already feel the urge to take that personally.

———X==X==X———​

As it happened, Zeke wasn't the one I spoke with after his breakfast group split up; I'd just finished my own breakfast when Anna excused herself from her table and walked over to mine. Max and Garrus had left not long after Tess and I had arrived, and Tess herself had headed off soon after, so I was finishing my meal alone.

Perhaps that was why Anna approached me now; to meet one new person at a time.

I kept half an eye on her as she walked up to the table, but I wanted to let her approach on her own terms and so didn't do more than glance her way until she drew to a stop at the opposite side of the table and called my name.

"Cassandra Rolins?"

"That's me," I replied, oddly reminded of my first encounter with Max. "We met yesterday, briefly. Would you like to sit down?"

"Thank you."

Anna slipped into the chair, which appeared to move backwards the bare minimum necessary to accommodate her of its own accord. She didn't need to look at what she was doing, so she kept her eyes fixed on mine the whole time. If I'd expected her to act like a 'normal' person, it could easily have been unsettling; as it was, it was merely unusual.

I waited for her to raise whatever topic she'd come to discuss. She remained silent.

"How do you like your room?" I ventured.

"It is… adequate," Anna responded. "The silence will take some adjustment." She spoke with the sort of precise diction I'd come to associate with Homura, but where Homura was mellow to the point of flatness, Anna's words were short and clipped.

"Silence?"

"The room is perfectly isolated. There are no stray signals. It is unpleasantly like being blind."

"Oh."

Anna didn't offer further commentary or invite a response.

"I'm sure you can have some signals sent to your room if you'd like…?" I offered after a long five seconds of silence.

"Zeke suggested the same thing," she replied, with no indication as to whether she considered it a useful suggestion or not.

Well, there was a topic I could move on to. "How did you and Zeke end up as, uh, friends?"

Anna took a moment to consider the question.

"We were both out of place at the Academy."

That didn't explain the 'how'; it barely explained the 'why'.

"Who approached who?" I asked.

"I approached him."

"Because he was also 'out of place'?"

"Yes," she confirmed. "I was… curious."

"About?"

"Why he kept himself apart."

"I see."

Another long few seconds passed in silence before Anna blinked and refocused her gaze on me. "I'm sorry if this is inappropriate," she said, "but it's strange to be talking to you."

"Because I wasn't there?" I guessed.

"No, I meant you, specifically. Cassandra Rolins. Zeke talked about you often, but he never mentioned your last name. It explains some things."

Now that was a very interesting statement.

I raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Yes. It—" She cut herself off. "Sorry. He mentioned you didn't like to talk about your past."

That was one way to put it.

"Well, the thing about that is that it's not my past," I explained. "I joined long before I would've done any of the things people would've seen, and I'm not really comfortable being treated like I have, if that makes sense."

"Oh." Anna paused, her face inscrutable. "Based on what Zeke said about you, I'd assumed you had."

"I'm not sure how to feel about that. I don't know much about my not-future and I don't think I want to."

Something flashed across her face too quickly for me to read. "Why not?"

"I didn't want to know how bad things would have gotten without Max's intervention."

"Didn't?"

"Still don't," I corrected myself. "Learned a bit anyway, against my better judgment."

Her eyes unfocused for a moment while she considered that answer before visibly returning to meet mine.

"Do you regret it?" Anna asked.

I waggled one hand. "'Regret' is a strong word. It was not particularly pleasant, but not so unpleasant that I would rather not have done it." After a moment, I added, "I still have no desire to learn more, regardless."

She gave a sharp nod—acknowledgment and perhaps understanding.

"How much do you know about me?" she asked.

That was a difficult and likely thorny question. "Some? I looked into your, well, your 'world' when Zeke disappeared, but I didn't learn a whole lot about you as a person."

"Oh."

If I'd been expecting an offer to fill me in, I'd've been disappointed.

"So," I said, "what is your relationship with Zeke, anyw—?"

"It's not a relationship," she blurted out, then cleared her throat loudly. "Ahem. I mean, we are friends. That's all."

That was on me. "Sorry, let me rephrase: how would you define your 'interpersonal connection' with Zeke?"

"We are friends," Anna reiterated.

"Close friends."

"Yes."

Anna once again declined to elaborate.

"You must've been very close, to follow him here," I said.

Another expression flashed across her face—narrowed eyes, jaw set—before vanishing just as quickly.

"We made promises," she said. "Promises not to leave the other behind."

Was you coming along you fulfilling your promise, or him fulfilling his?

That was obviously not an appropriate thing to ask.

"I'm glad he had someone to lean on," I said instead, genuine gratitude mingling with a desire to fill dead air. "I can't imagine what it must have been like for him to drop into a warzone without warning. Thank you."

She shook her head. "I only did what anyone would have, and he helped me, too."

"Maybe not everyone could have. He trusted you for a reason."

"Maybe," Anna allowed, "but I don't think he 'chose' me as a confidant so much as I was the one to pry at the right time."

"Hm."

I was still searching for a way to continue the conversation despite Anna's participation when a new arrival saved me the trouble—and caused a whole bunch more.

"Heeeey, Cass!" Zero called as she hurried across the room, today's sky-blue circuit-pattern sundress swishing furiously at her pace. "Did you hear we got—is that Anna fucking Sanchez?"

Anna stiffened, which was impressive considering how stiff she'd been before Zero showed up.

"Yes, it is," I replied, shooting Zero a look I intended to mean 'calm the fuck down', though she either missed or ignored the hint. "Anna, meet Zero. Zero, Anna."

Zero grinned and shot two thumbs up at the Valkyrie. "Sweet. Thrilled to have you here, Anna. I'm a fan."

"A… fan," Anna repeated skeptically.

"Yeah! Fury of Saskatoon! Hey, would you show me the ropes whenever Mordin gets core production up and running?"

"I… yes, I would be happy to."

"Nice," Zero purred, slipping into the seat beside me. "Anyway, sorry to interrupt. What were you two talking about?"

That was a good question, since we'd been having a conversation only in the technical sense. I replied, "I was thanking Anna for looking after Zeke," which was true enough.

"Oooh." Zero turned a predatory grin on the poor woman. "What's the story there?"

"We won."

Anna's voice had the resentful flatness most people's would when they said, 'We lost,' and did not invite further questions—not that that deterred Zero, unfortunately.

"I bet you did!" she chirped. "But I was actually asking about you two. Who approached who? How'd you get to know each other? What was your first date?"

"I—we're not—!"

Zero opened her mouth to double down. I leaned over and shut it.

"Excuse my friend," I growled. "She doesn't think before she speaks."

Anna's eyes tracked back and forth between us for a moment before she stood up. "Please excuse me," she said, "I, uh… I am going to leave." Suiting actions to words, she turned and walked back to where Zeke had just risen from his seat.

"Mmmmmmmgah!" Zero squawked as I released my hold on her jaw. "Fuckin' rude, Cass."

"You were just going to dig yourself deeper, and it's not like you couldn't've just overpowered me if you really wanted to."

She laughed. "Yeah, but I wanted to honor your effort. Like, shit, girl, you've grown! Can you imagine yourself trying to manhandle me back when we first met?"

"No, I can't," I admitted. "But I've become a lot more comfortable with violence over the last forty years."

"You consider that violence?"

"Use of force, then."

Zero shrugged and moved on. "Hey, was it just me, or was that more 'season 1 Anna' than 'season 3 Anna'?"

"She's not from the anime, remember?" I scolded her. "And if you weren't paying attention, it sounds like things got worse for her as the war dragged on, not better."

It took her a second to catch my meaning. "Ah, fuck. You think the main timeline went RAVENZ in the epilogue?"

"The hell does that mean?"

"RAVENZ was all about Valkyrie-on-Valkyrie combat," Zero explained. "You know, 'live' combat, not the fucking tournament arcs in the OTL. Extradimensional invasion happens and people still fight each other as much as the fucking invaders. Humans gonna human, right?"

I huffed and rubbed at my forehead. "Why the hell is 'everyone started killing everyone else' your first assumption?"

"What were you trying to imply, then?"

"That you should give her more space, mostly. You know, I'm honestly surprised you care this much."

"About what?"

"Anna. Valkyrie Core. I knew you liked the series, but didn't expect you to be this invested in it."

She scoffed. "Cass, I don't know how you avoided noticing, but I fucking love videogames. And sex. And absurd weapon systems. And videogames about sex and absurd weapon systems." Zero's grin vanished as her mind jumped to another topic. "Shit, you don't think she's gonna be weird about my name, do you? What with Type Zeros and whatnot?"

"I'm pretty sure she was reacting to your personality."

"Damn, you're catty today."

I scowled at her. "You weren't exactly on your best behavior there, you know."

"I wasn't trying to piss her off," Zero whined. "Anyway, her and Zeke? Dating? How the fuck did that happen?"

"They insist they are friends, nothing more, and she wasn't exactly forthcoming."

"What do you think?"

"I've spoken with them each exactly once since they got back."

"And?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. I guess it wouldn't surprise me if one or both were ace."

"Oh, I'm sure they're both aces. Those two must've kicked so much ass—"

"You know what I meant!"

"Yeah, yeah," Zero grumbled. "Still. You really think there's nothing going on there?"

"Not all love is romantic."

"So you do think—"

"What I think is that we ought to let them be whatever they want to be rather than telling them their business," I snapped. "Why did you come over here, anyway?"

Her face lit up. "Oh, right! Zeke was a fucking hero and brought back the blueprints for Valkyrie cores! But judging from your company, you probably already knew that."

"Yes, I did."

"What did Anna have for breakfast?"

"You need to slow the fuck down, and why does that even matter?"

Zero grinned. "Like I said, she gave me 'season 1 Anna' vibes, and I was wondering if she was going alphabetically again."

Logically, I knew it was a sorer spot than normal because Anna had just brought up my own show, but Zero's disrespect was really starting to piss me off. "You shouldn't judge her based on the show! Zeke's arrival would've thrown things off track even if he was in that continuity, which he wasn't!"

"Sorry, sorry!" Zero threw her hands up in surrender. "I guess you'd know how that shit feels, huh."

"I was just reminded, actually."

"By Anna? But—no, nevermind, your show would've been airing when Valkyrie Core did its 'present day, present time' apocalypse shit. The tapes survived the end of the world, huh?"

"Apparently."

Zero finally picked up on my mood.

"Ah, nevermind that, Cass," she told me, leaning in to throw an arm around my shoulder. "Look, Mordin says it'll take him a week or two to work out core production, but he's gonna spend all that time fiddling with things that don't matter. I bet I can wheedle a couple prototypes out of him by tomorrow afternoon, so what say we get practicing early?"

I found myself unable to match her enthusiasm.

"Thanks, but…" I trailed off into a sigh. "I dunno. Seeing Zeke with a war veteran's thousand-yard stare makes it hard to muster much enthusiasm for his 'loot'."

"Ah, he'll be fine. We've got six different flavors of bullshit super-therapy on tap."

"Sure, that's good and all, but…" I didn't know how to say it. Zeke would heal, I was certain, but would he ever be the same? The way he spoke now was… it lacked the stiff precision and weird turns of phrase that made talking to him so entertaining, the confident, unqualified bluntness that revealed his exasperation with an illogical world.

Something strange and unique and wonderful was gone, and I wasn't sure it would return.

———X==X==X———​

Tedd and Grace were still in the hotel lobby when I finished my breakfast and headed out.

"Hey, Tedd," I called. "Hey, Grace."

The two turned from their discussion as I walked closer. Tedd was a girl today, wearing a tube-top and cardigan over yoga pants; Grace was in her hybrid form, wearing a tank-top and jean shorts.

Tedd raised an eyebrow when she recognized me. "Cassan—?"

She didn't get a chance to finish the question. "I knew it!" Grace yelled, jumping into the air with one fist held high. "I was right!"

I raised an eyebrow as well. "About?"

"You!" Grace cried. "When we first saw you, I thought, 'Woah, weird! She'd be the perfect actress for Doctor Rolins!' I thought it was funny because I already knew your name was Cassandra."

Oh, that's why she'd been giving me a weird look when she first walked in.

"Then you were all, 'in an infinite multiverse, all things exist, even fiction'," she continued, "and I was like, holy crap! Maybe it is!"

"And you didn't call me out on it?" I asked, raising my other eyebrow.

Grace did a one-eighty from triumph to shame. "What if I was wrong?" she murmured, intently twiddling her fingers. "I'd be so embarrassed! And even if I was right it would be rude to say so because if you wanted us to know who you were you would've told us yourself…"

"Thanks. I think." I tempered my exasperation with a smile. "Say, uh, I called you 'Tedd' earlier. Is there something you'd rather I call you when you're a girl?"

She shrugged. "I've been using 'Tess' at work, but that's taken, so just 'Tedd' is fine."

"Multiple people can have the same name."

"Not in fiction!" Grace objected.

"Tedd is fine," Tedd repeated.

"All right, then," I said. "How are you doing? Did you get a tour?"

"Yesterday."

"We're going to the Arcade!" Grace told me.

"After we look at that 'Magic School' thing," Tedd reminded her.

Grace turned the full force of her pout on her presently-girlfriend.

"And then we're going to look at that 'Magic School' thing," Tedd corrected herself.

"Well, have fun," I told them. "And if you need directions, just ask Dragon."

"Dragon?" Grace asked, quizzical-head-tilt deployed.

"Yes?" Dragon replied.

"Aaaah!" Grace yelped, spinning around in an attempt to locate the owner of the unfamiliar voice.

I looked to Tedd. "Max didn't introduce you to Dragon?"

"He did," Dragon said.

"He did," Tedd agreed. "Grace was a little distracted by the geometry at the time."

"The rooms are bigger on the inside!" Grace yelled, waving her arms for emphasis. "Like, little building"—she cupped her hands around an imaginary object, then threw them wide—"biiig room! Are they all like that?!"

I nodded. "Most of them, yeah."

"Cool. Hey, did you bring any of your robots?"

"Uh… no. I never actually built any. See…" There was something undeniably frustrating about having to explain this over and over again. "…so, yeah. No robots."

"Why not?"

I gave her a flat look. Didn't I just explain—?

"Like, you explained why you hadn't built any before," Grace hurried to add, shrinking under my stare, "but you could still build one now, right?"

"I mean, I could, but…"

But what, exactly? Sure, anything I built would be inferior to what we already had available, but you don't make a hobby aircraft because you want to revolutionize the field of flight.

"It's not a bad idea for a project, I guess, if only so I don't have to keep explaining why I don't have any robots."

"Sorry!"

"It's fine. Occupational hazard."

———X==X==X———​

Homura was in her usual post-Jump spot under the cherry blossoms.

"Good morning, Cass."

"'Morning, Homura."

"Sticking with that form?"

I shrugged. "I like looking like me. I mean, I was fine with my other forms"—I added 'mostly' under my breath as I remembered the body Management had stuck me with in MGQ—"but I like the idea of it, if that makes sense? Kinda makes the whole 'be the best version of yourself' thing literal, you know?"

"I will take your word for it."

I wandered over to the tree trunk and sat down, leaning back against the bark. Homura joined me a moment later.

"You know," I said, "in some ways, coming back here after last Jump feels weirder than ever."

"How so?"

"All the little things I've gotten used to doing are just gone. I don't have to do laundry, or dishes, or wipe the counters and shampoo the carpet."

"Or cooking," she added.

"Or cooking. It's not that I miss doing chores, exactly, but it's weird having them just disappear."

"Is cooking a chore?"

"I think so," I said. "You disagree?"

"I would have classified it as a hobby."

"I'm sure it is, to some people. I like baking better."

She smirked. "You're just saying that to make me feel better."

"Am not! You don't need me to massage your feelings like that, anyway!"

A breeze sent the branches swaying and knocked a light dusting of petals onto our heads.

"Maybe you should set up an apartment," Homura suggested. "Something a little more personal than the hotel room."

"How's that work?"

"Talk to Max. She'll get you set up."

"Maybe I will," I said. "What'd'ya think the next Jump'll be like?"

"I don't know. Normally, after a peaceful Jump like that, I'd expect somewhere war-torn and messy, but Zeke just had that experience."

"Mm."

"Are you looking forward to a less quiet decade?" she asked.

I closed my eyes to better appreciate the simulated sunlight and breeze while I tallied my own feelings on the matter.

"I think I am, actually," I admitted. "I guess I like adventure a lot more than I'd've thought."

"I suppose you're hardly the only person who joined the 'chain for something other than adventure."

"Did I, though?" I asked. "Join for something other than adventure, I mean."

"You would know better than I."

"I think I did join for adventure, sort of. I just had a woefully insufficient understanding of what that meant."

"How so?" Homura asked.

"I hadn't thought through the consequences."

"To yourself, or to others?"

"Both."

"Hmm."

A brief pause.

"Regardless," she continued, "there are countless reasons one would choose to join the 'chain besides 'adventure'. Power. Immortality. Simple survival, in some cases. Leisure. Love—or lust. Or friendship."

"Mhm."

I took a nice deep breath, enjoying the scent of the cherry blossoms overhead and the rosy light filtering through them.

"Anna approached me at breakfast this morning," I said.

"What did she say?"

"Very little. I'm not sure why she wanted to talk to me at all, to be honest. I guess she just wanted to put a face to everything Zeke might've said about me."

"And what would that have been?"

"I don't know."

After a moment spent recalling the conversation, I realized that wasn't quite true.

"I guess I got a hint," I amended. "She said knowing I was 'Cassandra Rolins' explained a few things about whatever he'd said."

"What does that mean?"

"Now that, I don't know."

I leaned my head back against the tree and closed my eyes again. It wasn't the most comfortable position, but I'd fallen asleep in worse, and was at serious risk of doing just that when Homura spoke again.

"Did Zeke sound different to you?"

A glance to my left showed her in the same position I was in, staring out across the top of the hill towards the horizon.

"You noticed too?" I asked.

"I did."

I sighed and adjusted my posture into a marginally more comfortable position, returning my eyes to the horizon.

"He stopped by my room last night," I said. "It was pretty hard to miss. All his normal verbal… quirks, I guess? Nearly gone. The way he holds himself is different, too. If he didn't still look like Zeke, I don't think I would've recognized him."

"You would have. Max has a perk that helps us recognize each other even when we're disguised or transfigured."

"That's not the point. He doesn't act or talk like he used to at all. It's like he's a whole different person."

"People change over time," Homura said.

"For better or for worse."

"You think this is for worse?"

"No, that's not—gah, fuck," I grumbled. "Is it wrong that I miss the old Zeke? That I'm sad he came back different?"

A few seconds passed before she answered.

"I don't know."

I nodded to myself and closed my eyes again.

"He visited me last night as well," Homura said.

"Oh? What'd you talk about?"

"Past Jumps. Wars I'd seen."

"You've seen a lot."

"I have," she confirmed. "Anyone who imports enough times will."

"Yeah, because we keep importing into wars, chaos, even literal apocalypses. Sure, there are the quiet Jumps, but you've been to Starcraft and Battletech and probably worse places than either. 'Adventures', fah. Why do we keep going back?"

"To be heroes. Or for power, experience, and treasure. Or just for the love of fighting."

"Heroes," I repeated. "What does that even mean when we can't die? Can we really claim to be brave when we're not risking anything?"

I felt rather than heard Homura sigh beside me.

"Being a hero isn't just about being brave. It's not about our actions, it's about what those actions mean."

What, serving as an exemplar? A figurehead? That sounded more like being a 'Hero' than a hero to me.

Maybe she guessed what I was thinking. Maybe she just thought she'd not made her point.

"Zeke wouldn't say much about his own experiences," Homura continued, "but he said enough that I know there are things he's proud of doing over the last few years. Things that mattered to him. He was a hero to someone, I think."

"Anna?"

"Perhaps. Perhaps a kohai of his own. Perhaps just a face in a crowd, thanking him for his service. But it meant something to him." She paused. "There are things we won't regret no matter how much they hurt at the time, aren't there?"

God knew I had more than my share of those; at least one a Jump and plenty before. College—and the friends I'd kept after crashing and burning—came to mind.

"Yeah," I agreed, "there are."

———X==X==X———​

I decided to check if Max was in his usual spots—the lounge or library—before asking Dragon to page him. My first guess was half right.

"—with Tess was bad enough, but at least that was just one of your usual gotcha's!" Max was yelling, voice echoing down the stairs from the meeting room. "Now you're just doing whatever the fuck amuses you at the time! How am I supposed to make any kind of informed decision when I have no idea what kind of bullshit you're going to pull next?"

Management's response was too low to overhear, and I found myself drawn towards the scene like a rubbernecker.

"Bullshit! Every time I ask for the slightest bit of leeway, I hear, 'there are rules for a reason', or 'if I make an exception once, you'll want it every time', or 'work with what you've got'. I can't work like this! What good are rules if I can't rely on you to keep to them?"

I reached the top of the stairs just as Management finished their response and sidled in next to the door, eavesdropping shamelessly.

"—control," Management was saying. "Hello, Miss Rolins. Can I help you?"

Busted.

"I was just eavesdropping," I said, stepping into view. "Hi."

Max had been standing on the opposite side of the table, leaning forward on both hands as he glared at the speakerphone. His expression softened into an amused smile as I emerged—because of course I wasn't going to sneak up on an elder Jumper and his benefactor—before returning to a scowl as he refocused on the phone. "Hey, Cass. I was just explaining to our benefactor"—the word dripped with scorn—"why I took issue with their recent, shall we say, 'improvisation'."

"Good."

"And what is your complaint, exactly, Miss Rolins?" Management asked, clearly annoyed.

"The part where you threw my friend into a war-torn hellscape," I snapped.

"It was hardly a hellscape. I could have dropped him in Muv-Luv."

"You basically fucking did!" Max yelled.

"Circumstantially speaking, perhaps, but—"

"But nothing! Who are you trying to make excuses to here? 'I could have sent him somewhere worse'? The place you sent him was more than bad enough judging from how it sandblasted his personality off!"

"'Sandblasted'?" they repeated. "That's the metaphor you're going with?"

"It fits," I said. "I think it captures the irreverent, destructive cruelty of the process pretty well!"

"But even that isn't the point," Max continued. "I've been doing my best to mitigate your 'irreverent, destructive cruelty' for thousands of years, but this time—this time—you took someone I'd taken responsibility for and threw them into a world where I had no way to reach them without even the slightest pretense that it was something I could have somehow foreseen or prevented!"

"As you have said," Management growled. "Repeatedly. Loudly, even. But you seem to have forgotten one incredibly important fact. The most important fact, one might argue."

Max and I exchanged a glance.

"I don't answer to you!" they crowed, the previous menace replaced with naked glee. "You may get off at the next stop, as it were, or you may continue to deal with my 'irreverent, destructive cruelty'. The choice is yours. See you in two weeks."

The speakerphone clicked off.

———X==X==X———​

 

[Tempestuous]

AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.

Chapter 126: Work as a Form of Play​

---

Max and I didn't speak until we reached the lounge.

"Well," he said, "you were right."

"About what?"

"They called my bluff."

"Oh."

Max settled onto a couch with a sigh. "So, were you looking for me, or just finding trouble?"

Oh, right. "Looking for you, actually. I was thinking I might move out of the hotel."

He perked up and smiled, seemingly happy for the distraction. "Ah, right. Sure thing. You know what you want your new place to look like?"

"Not… really?" I ventured, feeling more than a little silly for not having an answer ready to go.

"Well, that's the first step," Max said. "Sketch up a floorplan—there are computers in the Workshop with CAD software if you don't want to do it by hand—and I'll get it set up. And don't worry about size or cost or Euclidean geometry when you're planning because none of that matters in here."

I hadn't expected any of those things to matter, but the carefree way he dismissed Euclidean geometry was still a little surreal.

"So there's no 'standard' apartment or anything like that?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I mean, if you just want an apartment, I can make you an apartment, but why stop there? You can have anything."

"That's kind of the problem."

"Ah," Max said, a look of understanding on his face. "Choice paralysis?"

"To put it lightly."

"If you want my advice, figure out what you want to do with the place and work backwards from there."

"What I want to do, huh?"

Now that I thought about it, I wasn't really sure why I'd wanted an apartment at all. I wasn't particularly fond of cooking, and baking had been a social activity more than my own hobby. I could set up a computer or start a personal book collection, but all that would do is remove reasons to spend time anywhere else.

For all I knew, that was why there were so many people on the 'chain I'd never met—they were all burrowed away in their own spaces ninety percent of the time.

"I think the hotel is good enough, actually," I decided.

Max frowned, looking almost disappointed. "I didn't mean to talk you out of it. You want me to set something up as a starter? I could give you a typical one-person apartment and let you add to it whenever you think of something…"

"No, I want to think on it some more. I'll let you know."

"Sure thing."

I said goodbye, offered a little wave, and headed back out into the courtyard.

"Shoulder sprites?" I asked. "Any help here?"

Sure enough, a spirit popped into being in front of my face wearing the same clothes I had on at the moment. "You're lucky you're so introspective," she said. "We're supposed to be used for decision-making, not self-reflection."

"So can you help or not?"

"I'll do my best, but I'm a figment of your imagination, so you're still just talking to yourself. Let's start with the obvious: do you have any complaints about the hotel room itself?"

I gave it a moment's thought as I wandered around the fountain. "I don't think so," I decided. "It's basically perfect, except just barely not perfect enough to become too perfect."

"Do you have any negative associations with anything about the room?"

"I don't think so. It reminds me of vacations as a kid—and I don't think I have any negative associations there."

"But it reminds you of being a kid," the sprite pointed out. "Is that a problem?"

"I don't think so. Gah, I'm saying that a lot. No, it's not a problem."

"It's not a problem in itself. There are a lot of problems with being a kid, aren't there?"

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, of course there are. Family vacations were the parts where I got to avoid most of them. I could relax all day, didn't have to do chores or homework, had unlimited access to great food…"

"Sounds like an inter-Jump break."

"I don't think that's a coincidence. The Warehouse takes the shape of a luxury hotel for a reason, right?"

"Sure," she agreed. "Let's look at it from the other direction, then. If being a kid on vacation isn't bad, then what's good about being an adult?"

I sat down on the rim of the fountain to consider the question.

"Self-sufficiency, I guess," I replied. "The whole magic room-keeping thing is… it's kinda infantilizing, isn't it? Having magic take care of everything for me is a little like being a kid who can't do that stuff for herself. But 'magic housekeeping' might not be specific to the hotel room, and if it were, I'd just set up my own magic housekeeping anyway because it's not like I want to do that stuff myself. I think I've had my fill of mundane inconveniences for a while."

"So the reason you're confused about wanting to move out of the hotel is because of the contradiction where the things you 'value' about having kept an apartment are also things you don't actually like."

I rocked my head back and forth as I went over her statement.

"Yeah, that sounds right," I concluded. "What am I supposed to do about it?"

The sprite shrugged. "Hey, I did my job. Good luck with that."

———X==X==X———​

"You ever feel weird about having everything done for you?" I asked Karl half an hour later as I watched him and Bob face off over Warhammer yet again.

"You mean in the Warehouse?" he asked.

"Yeah."

He shrugged. "Not really. Bob?"

"It's better than the maids back home," Bob said. "'Course, it doesn't offer the full 'range of service'."

I didn't want to touch that comment with a ten foot pole, so I was relieved Karl objected for me. "Civilized cultures have rules against that shit, you know."

"Ah, fuck off. It was a joke!"

Karl rolled his eyes before returning them to me. "Well, there you have it. Then again, I was retired before I joined, so a world of leisure and hobbies wasn't exactly an outside context problem."

"Yeah, that makes sense," I said. "I think the 'weird feeling' is because I was such a wreck before I joined that being able to keep a house well enough that chores weren't constantly growing into capital-P Problems before I got around to them was a power fantasy for me?"

"Could be." He reached over and smacked Bob upside the head before the latter could make another tasteless joke. "Nothing wrong with that. For some people, just being healthy and pain-free is a fantasy."

"War wounds," Bob said, rubbing his own 'wounded' head.

"Among other things." Karl turned back to me as he continued, "Don't worry about it. You'll have a new set of 'capital-P Problems' next time you import, so take a load off and enjoy the vacation."

That sounded like good advice to me.

The game continued for several minutes as Karl's Astartes began an orderly withdrawal in the face of Bob's usual Eldar army—at least until one of the advancing squads got a little too aggressive, at which point the marines about-faced and began lobbing what were very clearly Holy Hand Grenades into the enemy ranks.

"Hey, here's a random question," I said. "What happens if you bring a mythical object like the Holy Grail into a setting that has its own rules for that artifact?"

"You get a two-fer," Bob said, frowning as he reorganized the center of his advance.

"To be precise," Karl continued, "the thing has whatever properties it normally had in its original world, and whatever properties the thing should have wherever it is."

"S'what I said."

"It might be what you meant, but what you said was, 'You get a two-fer.'"

"So the artifact temporarily gains the local rules for whatever it is?" I clarified.

"Yup," Karl confirmed. "Assuming it's actually supposed to be the same object and not just something someone named after it."

"Applies to materials, too," Bob added. "Dragon blood and stuff like that."

"Mythical creature materials," Karl clarified. "Fantastic metals and whatnot tend not to for some reason."

"Because of the name versus object thing?" I asked.

"Who knows? Ah, Bobby, you crafty bastard! That was bait!"

"Gotcha!" Bob crowed, grinning as his scout bikes cut off the sallying marines. "Looks like you need another lesson on cavalry, old man!"

Karl managed to rescue his stranded marines after another two turns of fighting, but the disruption in his line gave Bob the chance to advance deep into the city before he could regroup. The game remained close all the way to the end, but the Eldar won the day.

———X==X==X———​

The LARP group met in the lounge that evening. After a bit of furniture rearranging so we could all sit around a single table, Erin stood and got us started.

"So," she said, "we took a blind vote on whether to continue last break's campaign this morning, and the results are: two 'for' to twelve 'against'. And yes, I voted, so my thanks to whoever else actually had fun last time."

Oh, dear. That would be me.

"Ah, don't be like that," Sirius told her. "Just cause people want variety doesn't mean they didn't have fun."

"Yeah, but this was practically unanimous."

"Too many fiddly bits," Bob complained.

Kara sent a glare his way. "You didn't even play."

"'Cause there were too many fiddly bits!"

Erin cleared her throat. "In any event, Joe's volunteered to be this month's DM. Joe?"

Joe stood up as she sat down. "Right. Another quick vote—no need to hide it, simple preference: Shadowrun or Cyberpunk? Hands for Shadowrun? Right, that's well over half, motion carries. Hands for Cyberpunk, just to check—Sirius, don't vote twice!"

With our course set for Shadowrun, we split up for a half-hour character-making jam, scattering across the lounge with a dozen copies of the sourcebooks—all bearing an identical set of sharpie-scrawled adjustments, clarifications, and house rules, some of which continued onto entire notepad pages stuffed into the spine—and then reconvened for a trip to what I'd previously dubbed the 'prop cupboard' for costumes. I ignored the clothes entirely and retrieved a wheelchair instead.

"Why would you LARP a paraplegic decker, anyway?" Kara asked me while I tried to get used to wheeling myself around. "I don't care if it's an 'archetype' or whatever; it ruins the 'live-action' part."

I used my 'hologram illusion' spell to create a life-sized video-game-style avatar of myself. "'Cause I can do this."

"New trick?"

"Yeah. Still getting a hang of working in third person. Should be fun."

The avatar stuck her tongue out at Kara, who responded by kicking the wheelchair out from under me and sending me crashing to the floor with a cry of, "Fuck's sake, Thrace!"

———X==X==X———​

We wrapped up our first session only a couple hours later, having divided into teams that would last the first couple 'runs'. Under Joe's guidance, we'd split sixteen people into two groups of five and a group of six. The last time we'd done a more 'traditional' adventuring party-based game, there had been a single party that people rotated into as PCs died, with everyone else filling in NPCs as directed. Joe had something different in mind for this campaign: one group would get to be 'in focus' each session, and everyone else would play OpFor for that run. I was in Kara's group and wasn't sure how I felt about that.

Well, all three groups were running different jobs in the same city, so we were expected to shuffle around a bit over the campaign. Come to think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if Joe ended up having two groups 'collide' during a run. Something to watch out for—in character, even, because the groups had been formed in character over a message board, so we were all aware of each other to some extent.

I left the set—still halfway in transition between 'palace' and 'corporate skyscraper'—stored the wheelchair without incident, and had just stepped into the street when someone called my name. (Well, sort of.)

"Doc!"

"Thrace." I turned around and folded my arms, wondering what Kara was on about now.

"Doc," she repeated, "you know I'm not pushing you around to bully you, right?"

An apology? From Kara? Will wonders never cease.

"What brought this on?" I asked.

"Jenn keeps glaring daggers at me every time I get near you. The frak you tell her, anyway?"

"Nothing."

Her eyes narrowed. "Really."

"You did kick my wheelchair out from under me in full view of everyone."

"You don't frakkin' need it!"

I looked Kara up and down, tapping my foot against the ground as I did.

She raised an eyebrow.

"I don't have a good read on you," I told her. "Half the time you act like I annoy you, half the time you ignore me, and at the rounding error at the edges it seems like you're hanging out with me on purpose."

"Is that a problem?"

"It's confusing is what it is."

Kara huffed and rolled her eyes. "You're a nugget, Doc."

It took me a moment to remember 'nugget' was slang for 'rookie'.

"And?"

"And nothing. Sometimes nuggets are annoying. Sometimes they're just in the way. And sometimes it's nice to have someone who remembers you're hot shit and they're not."

That explained quite a bit, actually: sometimes, Kara wanted to have someone around to be impressed with her, and I best fit the bill. In other words, I'd gotten my response completely wrong: I'd tried to stay out of her way whenever she was hanging around, but what she wanted was my attention. Or admiration, whatever.

Sometimes, anyway.

"I guess," I said, for lack of a better response. "You know, I may be a nugget, but you're not my flight instructor, so maybe lay off a little?"

"Want me to be?"

"Hell yes." My brain caught up a second later. "I mean—"

Kara's slasher smile silenced me. "Too late, nugget! You're mine now!"

———X==X==X———​

"Navcom?"

"Set."

"Sensors?"

"Live."

"Lights?"

"On."

"Suit?"

"Pressure okay."

"O2?"

"Nominal."

"Fuel?"

"Full."

"Straps?"

"Secure."

"Canopy?"

"Closed."

"Right. Spool up the reactor."

Less than an hour after my thoughtless response, Lt. Thrace had me in a simulator cockpit, a cheat-sheet for the main console taped to my flight suit's left arm. This first lesson felt eerily like every flight-sim tutorial I'd ever played, though with the caveat that there were enough buttons, controls, and hardware that I'd have been crazy to skip it. There was a reason I had a cheat sheet, though Kara—sorry, Lt. Thrace—had made it clear I wouldn't have it next time.

I'd known we had a 'Simulator Room', but I'd never gotten around to asking anyone where it was or what it looked like. It was part of the gym, as it happened: a large, ineffably 'gym-like' room full of bulky, unlabeled pods of all shapes and sizes. Four doors in the wall near the entrance were currently roped off with tape reading 'UNDER CONSTRUCTION', though for all I knew that was part of the scenery.

Reactor control is… there. I flipped the switch from 'STNB' (standby) to 'ON', then pulled the lever to the tick mark for launch power. The room outside disappeared, replaced with a Battlestar's launch tube.

"Easy there, nugget. In a real bird, you gotta warm it up slowly if it's been idle for too long."

"How long is too long?"

"Depends on how well the techs are doing their frakkin' job. If you have the time, assume it's been too long, or the ride'll get bumpy."

I raised an eyebrow, though no one could see my face to notice. "Is that a euphemism for 'you'll explode'?"

"You think anyone would fly the frakkin' things if they exploded like that?" Thrace snapped. "Things get bumpy. Thruster output's uneven if the reactor's cold." She didn't stop transmitting, so I could clearly hear her whine 'Is it gonna explode?' to herself in an unflattering (and inexplicably British-accented) imitation of my question.

"…Noted."

"Good. Start up the thrusters."

Flick. Flick. Flick. "Thrusters hot."

"Engage RCS."

"RCS enabled, all ports green."

"Control surface check."

"Hydraulic pressure nominal."

"Good. Now, I'm'a go easy on you, take you through a maintenance Flight Control check before I dump you out in space." The launch tube around me vanished, replaced by the interior of a hangar. "Main stick back to pitch up."

We went through pitch, yaw, roll, and combinations thereof; main thruster control and RCS strafing; DRADIS, IFF, Comms, and Nav. Then the view of the hangar through the simulator canopy changed to a star-field, and we went through it all over again, this time with the simulator squishing, spinning, and shaking me about as though I were actually maneuvering. Then came the practice courses, which were more of the same but with a lot less help provided.

I spent the odd moment between courses wondering if Colonial sims had inertics or if the feature had been added later before it occurred to me that Galactica had artificial gravity; it'd be weird if the same technology wasn't applicable for sims like this.

"Well, credit where credit's due, Doc," Lt. Thrace told me as I climbed out of the cockpit after about an hour of obstacle-course flying. "You don't even look green."

I tapped my hand to my helmet in salute, grinning inside and out at the praise. "I've flown a lot more nauseating routes than that."

"Oh?"

"Worm."

Thrace snorted. "Well, that's too bad for you, then."

Uh oh. "Why?"

"Because you're going back in the sim 'til we top that. Get in and bring her up to combat power."

I climbed back into the simulator, confirmed all the systems were as I'd left them, then eased the lever forward until it hit the plastic guard near the end of its travel. Enough force would bend the plastic out of the way—and in doing so, inform the maintenance team on a real fighter that the reactor needed a full tear-down after someone had red-lined it like an idiot.

"Faster than that, nugget!" Lt. Thrace barked.

"Yes, sir!"

"Now hit the rings, combat speed, and get used to the warning tone because the missiles aren't going to stop until you clear the course. Go!"

———X==X==X———​

In hindsight, Thrace must've skipped twenty or thirty levels on the difficulty slider. Miss a single ring? Mission failed, start over. Go too slow? Missile hits you, start over. Go too fast? G-forces ruin your day, wake up and start over.

The most god-awfully frustrating part came twenty-eight seconds into the course, when I hit a straight shot through six perfectly aligned rings. I lost count of how many times a missile tagged me in that section before I slammed the reactor lever through the guard and punched it down the course to the next bend.

The good news? It worked.

The bad news? Lt. Thrace blew her lid.

"The frak is going through your head, nugget?" she screamed, spittle forming spots on my faceplate. "You think you're flying a frakkin' hot rod?"

I remained at attention beside the simulator, staring straight past her ear as I belted out, "Sir, no, sir!"

"You know what happens to your bird when you break that guard?"

"Sir, yes, sir!"

"Then you are frakkin' stupid, nugget, because you just wrecked sixty thousand tons of hardware because you can't frakking dodge!"

"Sir! Missiles would've wrecked the hardware harder, sir!"

Lt. Thrace's face turned even redder, and I figured I was well and truly 'frakked'.

Then she lost her composure and started laughing, and I just felt confused.

"Frak, Doc," Thrace muttered, shaking her head in exasperation. "Someone feed you that line?"

"No, sir." When she continued laughing, I risked asking, "Why?"

"Because that is the exact same frakkin' thing I told my FI when he ran us through that course!"

Well, it is sort of the obvious response. Though that tidbit did justify one suspicion I'd had.

"There's no way to get through the course without slagging the reactor, is there, sir?"

"Not a frakkin' chance." Kara shook her head again. "Right, you say what I said, you get what I got. Six miles."

"In the flight suit?" The damn thing weighed fifty pounds.

"Yes, in the frakkin' flight suit, now move your ass! If you're not back here in an hour you go again! Go!"

Thank god I'd turned my strength and fitness perks back on for the LARP, or I'd've washed out of whatever this was then and there.

———X==X==X———​

"Six miles in a flight suit," Rita repeated.

"Yeah."

"And you still want to train?"

"I'm good for it."

The fact that she didn't argue with me further was either a show of trust or outright negligence.

We went through our warm-up exercises together, dynamic stretches and light cardio around the perimeter of the room, and then it was up to Rita to select our weapons for the evening. Now that my skill with the naginata was at a level Rita deemed 'likely to keep me alive', she'd hand me a sword or two every couple of days to mix it up. I was good with swords—though my polearm skills were catching up—but I could always be better, and practice made combining my offensive and defensive perks feel more natural, too. Swordsmanship and not getting hit, two great skills that go great together. 'Embracing my inner Dex build,' Zero called it, and I couldn't disagree.

It was downright embarrassing how much I'd been resting on my laurels; doubly so because I'd gone out of my way to create a 'Generic Fantasy RPG' build that was more graceful than 'just poise through everything' before doing exactly that anyway. That was the peril of being handed an amazing defensive ability and equipment, it seemed: complacency. If I could fight myself from a couple Jumps ago, I'd trounce her lazy ass.

It was a nice fantasy to hold onto while Rita was trouncing me. It would be inaccurate to say our spars were one-sided—I even won the occasional bout—but I had no illusions whatsoever that my victories only came because I exceeded whatever level Rita had held herself to that round. Having a sparring partner with a fine-tuned sense of her own difficulty slider was great and all, but it meant I always felt like she'd let me win no matter how hard I worked for it.

I did not even come close to winning the night after my first lesson in the Viper sim. My poor showing could be blamed on my previous 'exercise', but even if that were the case, fighting tired was its own skill to practice. Rita had already demonstrated that she'd stop me if I was building the wrong habits, so at the very least fatigue hadn't reduced my ability to the point of blundering.

———X==X==X———​

After the double-header of Kara and Rita's training regimens, I grabbed my requisite hour of sleep, ate breakfast, and wandered over to the Arcade. Grace and Tedd must've finished their initial exploration, because there was only one other person here.

"Hey, Cass!"

"Hey, Zero."

She was using one of the public consoles rather than ensconced away in the back rooms, which I took as an invitation to watch. "Devil May Cry?"

"Nah, Soulhunter, that dating game I told you about. Devil May Cry looks totally different, how do you even get them confused?"

"I dunno."

Zero went back to focusing on the game for a few seconds as her combo counter climbed into the triple digits.

"I'm just styling on the game at this point," she told me. "I'm gonna hit like twenty times the cut-off for S-rank for this stage."

"You play this a lot?"

"Eh. Enough. One of these days we're gonna find a universe where they made a sequel. What're you here for?"

"Haven't decided yet."

"Then I know exactly what you're doing." Zero quit to menu without bothering to save and dropped the controller onto the floor. "Come on!"

"Do I get a say in this?" I asked as she dragged me away by the arm.

"Nope!"

She finally let go once we were in the PC area and quickly loaded up—

"Why," I said.

"Trust me."

"I don't like dating sims."

"Entertain me, then."

I sighed, sat down in front of the computer, and began to make my way, awkwardly, through Doki Doki Literature Club. Obviously, I choose the girl who might as well have been specifically written to be my 'type'—which was a major source of my discomfort around dating sims in and of itself—and things continued well enough until…

"Knives?" I exclaimed.

"Knives?" Zero repeated.

"Knives!"

"Knives?"

"Knives!"

I pushed the keyboard out of the way so I could bring my head down onto the desk.

"You lost me, Cass," Zero said.

"She has a knife fetish."

"Yes…? Err, sort of… what's the problem?"

"Not a problem," I groaned. "Just the feeling of getting a joke far, far too late. This is a fucking horror game, isn't it?"

"Spoilers!"

"I'm going to take that as a yes." Her lack of commentary and jokes had already raised my suspicions to maximum, so it wasn't a hard guess.

Zero sighed. "Fine, if you're not gonna keep going: Yes, it's a fucking horror game. Sorta riffs on those old 'haunted game cartridge' urban legends. Now what was that joke you mentioned?"

"Remember Penny?"

"From RWBY?"

"No, not from RWBY." I rolled my eyes as I straightened up and spun the chair around. "Penelope, the girl I dated last Jump."

"Oh. Hah, right, her! What about her?"

"We bonded over fantasy literature, and when I brought up also enjoying horror novels, she asked if I had a knife collection." I waved a hand in the vague direction of reality as I complained, "I didn't get the joke!"

"Oh, no! Did you say yes?"

"I have like two-dozen longswords in a box in my room!"

"Oh, Cass," Zero muttered, sounding every bit the long-suffering parent of a perpetually hapless and/or stupid child. How the hell do you get into these situations? was left unsaid.

———X==X==X———​

 

[Tempestuous]

AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.

Chapter 127: Valkyrie Business​

---

"—and she says, 'Not a frakkin' chance'! The whole point was to make the nugget run the course 'til they realized they had to red-line the reactor, then chew them out for it."

"Why?" Zeke asked.

"To teach you how and when to use that extra bit of power, I guess."

"But if red-lining the reactor is the right answer, why punish you for doing it?"

"Again, guessing, but I think the other half of the lesson is that you better be damn sure you need it."

More than a week had passed since we'd gotten back. Zeke split his time between his new(er) friends, his old friends, and therapy; Anna split her time between Zeke, her own therapy, and wherever she disappeared to when she wanted to be alone. Neither had yet offered to explain what had gone so wrong in the closing years of the Jump.

Zero had suggested we check the Jump-reflecting out-of-universe wiki to see what the hell our two resident Valkyries had been through. I'd disagreed. "They'll tell us when they're good and ready," I'd told her. "I'm not going to pry. And for the love of god, don't fucking mention it around them unless they bring it up first."

I had no idea if she'd checked or not; if so, she hadn't mentioned it around me, either.

Speaking of Zero, she'd decided to kill time while she waited for Mordin to finish tinkering with the Valkyrie tech by randomly auditing my melee training. In contrast to the Rita Difficulty Slider, Zero had absolutely no intention of ever holding back, so I never sparred against her; rather, whenever she invited herself, she and I fought Rita two versus one. I'd wondered if Rita had some perk that allowed her to fight at the perfect level to train someone, and the fact that she could match Zero's speed and still move slowly enough for me to feel like I was contributing pretty much confirmed it.

Zero was many things, but she was not a team player on the battlefield, so I didn't feel like I learned much from her 'assistance' that I didn't from sparring with Rita alone. Her contribution to my training, if it could be called that, consisted of her doing her best to teach me a wide variety of ridiculous moves that she'd either learned from various video game Jumps or developed herself in imitation.

"I don't care how cool it looks! Stabbing myself through the chest isn't going to power up my attacks, it is going to kill me."

Not that I didn't appreciate her input, of course; practicing ridiculous techniques would have been a lot of fun even if they were entirely useless, though I was at a loss to explain why they weren't. The things she taught me should get me destroyed by people with a more realistic grasp of sword-fighting—but then again, David had taught Taylor how to butterfly kick people in the head, so clearly anything was possible.

I still refused to stab myself, no matter how much she wanted to teach me how to make it 'work'.

So went the previous week; today, I'd happened across the Valkyries and company in the Workshop: Zeke leaning against the wall, tapping his foot impatiently; Anna sleeping on a couch someone had dragged in from elsewhere; and Mordin bustling about some seriously weird-looking machinery with his normal manic intensity.

"Odd place for a nap," I'd commented to Zeke.

"Upgrading core," Mordin had answered. "Unaccustomed to absence. Requested sedation."

"She wanted to get her core and frame upgraded to the specs Mordin's new ones have rather than replacing it," Zeke explained. "But she hasn't unsynced for five years, if not longer, and did not like how it felt when she did."

"Was she physically dependent on it?" I asked, more than a little worried both for Anna and everyone who'd use the Cores.

"Well, yes," Zeke said, "but not in the way you mean. She used her frame for everything. Breathing, circulation, digestion…"

"How?!"

"Extreme measures," Mordin answered. "Food enters storage, not stomach. Impeller handles oxygenation, circulation. No pulse, breathing, digestion; eliminates tremors, deviation."

I raised my eyebrows. "Damn. What are the side effects of that?"

"One observed: normal biology discomforting."

"She's fine," Zeke translated. "Just a little grossed out by having a heartbeat."

Fucking hell.

Zeke proved a good friend and distracted me from that by suggesting—possibly at the advice of his therapist—that he share some anecdotes from the start of his training, when everything was new and scary and nothing bad had happened yet. He'd then gone on to spin a yarn about the unwanted attention he'd had to deal with from the girls in the Academy—because there was apparently an entire after-school club dedicated to swooning over the one-in-several-hundred male Valkyries in attendance—and the increasingly unlikely lengths they'd gone through to find excuses to talk with him. That somehow segued into a second-hand story about how Anna's frame insisted everything in the simulators was a decoy rather than a real threat—a claim which, he pointed out, was technically correct. I reciprocated with a mix of anecdotes from Starfleet, Rita's recent training, and Kara's indelicate instruction, which brought us to the present.

"The instructors dressed me down the first time I disabled my frame's safeties in simulation," Zeke said, "but those are meant to keep the pilot safe, not the equipment, and I dislocated both shoulders with that stunt."

"Ouch. What were you doing?"

"Accelerating too hard—in pursuit, specifically. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have been so harsh if I'd been evading anti-aircraft fire instead. Better a dislocated shoulder than a smoking crater." He reconsidered his words, then snorted. "No, on second thought, they'd've told me off for putting myself in that position in the first place. The reason Valkyries work in Flights is so they don't get checked like that in the first place."

"Checked?"

"Like chess: you're boxed into a bad flightpath because it's the only flight-path that doesn't lead to immediate death. A mature Valkyrie frame has insane acceleration and more CIWS than a twenty-first century aircraft carrier, so the main threats to a Valk are unforced errors, check-and-mates, and straight up overwhelming force from high-tier Types."

I didn't miss the way his eyes flicked to Anna as he spoke—but that was a topic that strayed well away from 'happy training stories'.

"So," Zeke said, "are you going to sync a Valkyrie frame?"

"Of course. Assuming I can—"

"Compatibility issue solved," Mordin said.

"Okay, then. Yeah, I'll definitely take one."

"Great." Zeke grinned. "I was hoping to go flying with you sometime. I never realized how much I missed flying."

"Since coming back?"

"Since joining the 'chain."

"Oh."

"'Missed' might not be the right word," he continued. "We've talked about how my 'memories' of my pre-'chain self aren't exactly 'memories', but even if everything else about being dropped into that world was a nightmare, getting back in the air just felt right. I loved it. Even in combat zones, CAPs were the best part of my day—as long as nothing happened, obviously."

"Caps?"

"Combat Air Patrol. Flying in circles just in case something shows up."

"Ah," I said. "I can fly, you know."

"At mach 6?"

"Well, no."

Ever the gentleman, Zeke graciously moved on to another point rather than dwell on my deficiencies. "Speaking of flying, you learned how to fly shuttles in Starfleet, right? Was that any help?"

"With the Viper? Not a bit. Like riding a bike versus rowing a boat."

"Which is which?"

"Does it matter?"

He laughed and shrugged. "I guess not. I was just wondering if you had a specific assignment in mind."

"No, I hadn't thought that far ahead. If you want a detailed answer, the Viper is a hell of a lot more complicated. Starfleet shuttles are designed to be easy to use, while the Viper is more or less a 'modern' jet fighter 'in space'."

"Which is not easy to use."

"It's not 'simple', at least," I said. "Back to Valk frames, though, are you synced with yours now?"

"See for yourself." With those words, he expressed his frame.

The lowest layer appeared first: a dark maroon undersuit of bundled fibers, arranged in skinless imitation of the body below. Armored panels followed before the underlayer had finished forming: heavy white plates wrapped all the way around the fore- and upper-arms and the corresponding areas of his legs, while smaller segments interlocked to protect the outside of his knees and elbows, and the backs of his hands and fingers. The plates on his trunk were articulated to allow a full range of motion, and pauldrons protected the gap between the chest and back plates and those on the upper arm. No plates interfered with his neck before the undersuit disappeared into the bottom of his helmet; his visor was a narrow band of gray I judged barely large enough to cover his eyes without interfering with his peripheral vision.

Zeke turned around to give me a better view of the armor. In contrast to the techno-organic musculature below, the shiny metal plates were all crisp angles and ridges; rather than a suit of plate armor, it looked more like he was wearing a tank—a very flashy tank, as the reflective white surfaces sported gold highlights to break up (or add to) their brightness. Two thruster points stuck out of the back of each of his calves, and another three much larger versions ran across his back, all vectoring this way and that as he moved. A closer look at the armor on his hands and feet showed that the plates combined their gold highlights with decorative geometry to make his fingers resemble claws, or perhaps talons; the helmet had its own set of carved angles and a set of swept-back mecha-style horns-slash-wings that made its otherwise utilitarian profile noticeably draconic.

Once he'd finished his slow spin, he started throwing out weapons. A cylinder anchored to his right vambrace about where one might hold a tonfa was likely his melee halberd, stowed for flight. Scary-looking ballistic cannons, each a lump of weirdly split, harshly angled armor with a trio of meter-and-a-half-long barrels wide enough to stick my fingers in jutting out like battleship guns, anchored themselves to either side of his hips in a way strangely reminiscent of shipgirl rigging. A massive bifurcated barrel even larger than the aforementioned ballistics sprouted from a articulated mount over his right shoulder; a smaller yet still impressively large barrel mirrored it on his left; and a pair of missile racks sporting two empty six-inch-diameter tubes each hovered behind his shoulders. The surface of his armor rippled with crimson light as he cycled something that looked a lot like Drive!Anna's LCIWS system (and probably was 'a lot like' it), and a halo of seven energy cannons began a slow orbit behind his back.

Zeke held himself there for a moment before all the weapons disappeared; his helmet followed, though he kept the visor expressed across his eyes from temple to temple like a superhero mask.

"Feels weird to express all my weapons like that," he said. "Usually, you express only the muzzle, like this." The ends of the three barrels from one of the heavy cannons he'd shown off earlier appeared and disappeared from the back of his gauntlet. "Oh, and everything I just showed you is completely outclassed by stuff Mordin can make with nothing but a lump of iron, a loop of copper wire, and a hammer and tongs, but that's not really relevant."

"Tools unnecessary," Mordin objected.

"'Nothing' includes 'no magic'. Perks and skills only."

Mordin considered that restriction.

"Tongs unnecessary," he decided.

"So you haven't upgraded your core yet?" I asked Zeke.

"Core? Yes. Frame? No."

"I'm not exactly sure of the difference, to be honest."

"The core is just the core," Zeke explained. "It provides your Storage and Impeller, and it's what does the integration and synchronization. The frame is everything else attached to it." He tapped the armor on one forearm for emphasis.

"Ah. So…"

"My Storage and Impeller are, to be brief, absurd."

"Nice."

"I assume the time to integrate new components will be similarly ridiculous"—he paused to glance at Mordin, who nodded—"so I'll be able to upgrade the bits and pieces myself."

I nodded to show I was paying attention rather than to communicate any sort of agreement.

"Well," I said, having finally gathered my thoughts on Zeke's frame, "it's very… flashy. Does it have a name?"

"Anatashesha."

"Anatashesha," I repeated. "That's a mouthful."

"A lot of them are." Zeke raised a hand to look at the faux-talons he had on his fingers. "And 'flashy' is a far reaction. I think it was going for maximum contrast with Anna's."

"Do they do that?"

"That was a joke. Someone designed it like this for some godforsaken reason."

"Oh."

Zeke laughed and dismissed the armor, though he still kept the visor.

"I think I mentioned that I looked at the… series?" I began.

"You did."

"Right. There are different continuities, and in some of them, it was heavily implied that the frames had personalities to them."

"They can," he said. "Valkyrie Cores are adaptive systems, fundamentally, and the obvious part of being an 'adaptive system' is that they'll integrate and improve just about anything you give them, from a hammer to a railgun to the Valkyrie herself."

"I suspected that was how that worked."

The 'human improvement' element would have put me off if I'd had to deal with it years earlier, and for many of the same reasons Star Trek's Federation steered clear of such technologies, but the very first perks I'd taken had already put me past peak human in constitution, mental fortitude, and recall. Hemming and hawing over it at this point was drawing distinctions without difference… and in the end, wasn't this sort of thing half the reason I'd longed for Jumpchain-style vapid wish fulfillment in the first place? Even setting aside how much I'd hated my appearance, my original body barely worked as a body.

"The less obvious part," Zeke continued, "by which I really mean the less discussed part, since I think it's still fairly obvious, is that they adapt to changing needs and situations, and one of the ways they can fill a Valkyrie's needs is to develop 'personalities' of varying sophistication and temperament. Anna operated solo for years, with no one to watch her back or analyze enemy patterns and only an instinctive understanding of the frame's capabilities, and so her frame developed a 'personality' that filled in some of those gaps using her own neurology as a basis for its functions."

"Huh."

"That kind of adaptation is why cores develop 'quirks': if your frame has a quirk, it's because the core found some past adaptation to something or another and decided to keep it around."

"So 'personalities' are just another quirk," I said. "An adaptation a core decides is too good to let go."

"I presume some—perhaps even most—are 'let go', but in cases where the 'personality' is passed on to future users, yes, that's right."

"What other kinds of quirks are there?"

"Oh, all sorts." Zeke started ticking points off on his fingers. "Frames that have a tendency to express a certain weapon system even when you want a different one, frames that are particularly happy to mingle Impellers, frames that very much do not want to mingle Impellers, frames that tend to fire missiles off before they finish acquiring a lock…"

"Most of those sound like disadvantages."

He shrugged. "Yeah, the ones you notice tend to be the annoying ones."

"Does yours have any quirks?"

"Probably. I can't think of any, but I'm sure I'd notice their absence in a heartbeat if I synced a different core."

"Personality?" I asked.

"No, but those are pretty rare. I was curious myself and tried to do a study while I was at the Academy, but there were only four frames that fit the bill—far too few for even the slightest bit of experimental rigor—and exactly one Valkyrie who'd had her frame during said personality's development."

"Anna?"

Zeke grinned and nodded. "Right in one. In the end, all I got is a list of commonalities in their histories, things that probably make personalities more likely to occur: synchronizing at a young age, prolonged synchronization with the same core, low contact with other Valkyries, low levels of training relative to live combat experience, and anthropomorphization of the frame in question by the synced Valkyrie herself."

"Huh." I ran through the list again in my head. "I don't know about the last one, but Anna fits the other four almost perfectly."

"Well, yes, but is that because she was in a situation tailor-made to create that kind of adaptation, or because she was the only case study I could do and thus primed me to look for those things?"

"Science is hard."

"Yeah."

We watched Mordin putter about for a moment before I offered another question. "So, what's with the visor?"

"The—oh, whoops!" The visor vanished in a shimmer of light. "Sorry. Habit I picked up at the Academy."

"Why?"

He sighed. "It made me less approachable to my… I hate to use the word, but 'fangirls' is probably the most accurate descriptor as far as connotations go."

"I guess it would." The Protectorate always was pushy about letting people see your eyes.

"I guess frames aren't the only things that develop quirks, huh?" I quipped.

"Apparently not."

The term 'fans' reminded me of another question. "Did you show Anna, uh, 'my' show?"

Zeke frowned at being called out. "She asked what I'd been streaming from PrIMA."

"Prima?"

"The UN Pre-Impact Media Archives."

"Mm-hm?"

"Hey, I missed you, okay? It wasn't easy to find, either, so take that as a compliment."

That was the point at which Mordin interrupted us. "Upgrades complete," he announced. "Major Sanchez?"

The Valkyrie groaned and stirred into wakefulness before holding out a hand blindly in his direction. Zeke did the honors of transferring the glowing tennis ball-sized sphere from Mordin's hand to hers, where it disappeared.

Only a few seconds later, Anna stood up, still looking a little nauseous from her brief encounter with biology. Without a word, she expressed and retracted her own black-with-green-emissions Durga several times before leaving it in storage. It really did have 'maximum contrast' with Zeke's Anatashesha; sleek where his was bulky, smooth and organic where his was angled and mechanical, and almost entirely devoid of color or detail where his was flashy.

"Everything appears to be in order," she informed Mordin. "The upgrades are… significant."

Mordin shook his head. "Hardly. Performance limited — plus twelve percent previous. Acclimation required. Raise carefully."

Anna's eyebrows shot into her hairline only to return to their normal position just as quickly. "I will, sir."

"Never passed captain, Major," he corrected her. "Deference unnecessary."

Mordin stopped and cocked his head.

"Overruled Colonel's authority once," he recalled. "Court-martialed upon return. Acquitted. Given commendation. Still, unpleasant."

"Maybe you can tell me the story another time," Anna offered. "I would like to test the improvements in the simulators."

"Naturally. Always here."

"We're going to go exercise," Zeke told me. "Want to grab a frame and try to keep up?" He jabbed a thumb at a row of more than a dozen Cores of varying sizes, each labeled—absurdly, given the contrast in sophistication—with a hand-written 3x5" notecard describing the frame in question in blue ballpoint pen.

I'd barely read through the first card when Mordin spoke up. "Fourth from left, Miss Rolins. Suitable training equipment: fast intercept configuration, moderate weapon load."

"Fast enough to keep up with these two?" I asked.

His answer was a blunt, "No," not that it really mattered. I knew third-wheeling when I saw it, no matter what was or was not going on between them.

I turned back to the Valkyries. "Sorry," I said. "I've got plenty of 'training' planned already. Maybe another time, after I look over the manuals?"

Zeke looked disappointed, but I'd read the room right: Anna looked relieved.

———X==X==X———​

From: Rolins, Cassandra
To: Solus, Mordin
> Are we sure there are no adverse effects from Valkyrie cores? Some of the documentation Zeke brought back could be generously described as 'concerning', particularly the reported mental issues associated with longterm use.

From: Solus, Mordin
To: Rolins, Cassandra
> You don't need to worry: you should be well below the neuroplasticity threshold for issues like LDS, which is, as I'm sure you read, associated with combat and thus likely an expression of PTSD by augmented neurology rather than a condition stemming from the cores themselves. Even were you at risk for any core-related issues, mental wellness perks should prevent or reverse any harm done. I believe you have at least one such perk?

From: Rolins, Cassandra
To: Solus, Mordin
> Is that really you, Mordin? You write completely differently to how you speak and text.

From: Solus, Mordin
To: Rolins, Cassandra
> I wouldn't have made it very far in the STG if I cut corners on my written reports! Having five fingers on each hand makes typing even faster and more convenient than it was back then, although now that I'm thinking about it, it's been a very long time since I've had reason to type on an actual keyboard. I would hook one up for the nostalgia, but it would be so inefficient to use I doubt I would ever do so.
> As for text, I use the same grammar there that everyone else does. It's not my fault you only decided to properly compress your language after it became inconvenient for electronic communication.

———X==X==X———​

My excuse was exactly that, so I ended up synching a Valkyrie core the next day. Part of it was that I wasn't any less eager to play with the new toys than anyone else; the rest was Zero being… predictable, in her own way.

"Cass! Mordin's got all his cores all set for pickup!"

There was no disguising the fact that I jumped backwards into my room, but in my defense, I'd not encountered anyone waiting directly outside my hotel room door to ambush me the moment my door opened before.

"How long have you been standing there?!" I yelped.

Zero shrugged. "About ten minutes? You've got a pretty regular schedule. I already got my frame, but I figured I'd wait for you 'cause Anna likes you a hell of a lot more than she likes me."

I glanced at my watch—7:13. "When's her class start?"

"She's not giving a class. Well, yet. I hope. Max set up some sick-ass simulators, and last I checked, people were in there with all the fuckin' manuals Zeke brought back trying to work things out on their own."

Meanwhile, Zero had come to get me because Anna 'liked me more'.

"So you headed up here to piggyback off my friendship with her best friend," I said.

"Uh… yes?"

My disapproving glare had just as little effect as ever, so I had little choice but to relent. "Fine. You can follow me around until I run into her, but if she doesn't want to deal with you, I'm not going to argue."

Zero gave me two exuberant thumbs up. "Best behavior! Promise."

"Good." Promise extracted, I turned and led us down the hall towards the elevator.

"How much've you practiced with your core?" I asked.

"It's more 'practiced with the frame'," Zero corrected me. "You don't fly an engine, you fly a plane."

"I stand corrected."

"They're totally sweet, though. Makes up for missing out on getting a Warframe."

I knew she hadn't been around for that Jump, but I'd figured the 'chain was 'late-game' enough that that wouldn't matter too much. "They don't have any spares you can use?"

She sighed. "Unfortunately not. I think that was pretty early on, so Max didn't get to loot the place as hard as he'd've liked, and getting all the space-magic mumbo-jumbo sorted is a pain in the ass, too."

"Ah."

Zero bounced right back to her new favorite topic. "Anyway, Valkyrie frames? Totally sweet. I hope Management doesn't embargo them like vehicles."

"Embargo?"

"Yeah, there are a whole bunch of bullshit restrictions on what works in what setting. No tanks in medieval settings, no-you-can't-glass-the-Blight-from-orbit, shit like that."

"You know you've jinxed it now, right?"

She rolled her eyes. "Eh, worst case scenario we just have to wait 'til we hit Macross or whatever. Oh, maybe they'd work somewhere like Hawx or Ace Combat. That'd be fucking hilarious."

"Would it even be a contest?"

"Not even close."

As I'd suspected.

"Did playing the game help you learn the frame at all?" I asked.

Zero laughed. "Not a fucking chance—you might as well try learning to skateboard with one of those finger-toy thingies." She held up one hand, thumb tucking her ring finger and pinkie in while she wiggled the other two in pantomime. "I did get a few pointers from Anna, but they were all either fuckin' obvious or vague as hell."

"I'm not sure what you expected. She's kind of a 'fly by feel' person."

The elevator opened without either of us pressing a button, then closed and began to descend with an equally nonexistent amount of input.

"Are you using your frame to control the elevator?" I asked.

"Duh. If I want to get on her level, I gotta think like her, right?"

"I don't think that's right, no."

Zero huffed and crossed her arms.

"You know," I told her, "it's kinda weird to see you fangirling over someone."

"I am not 'fangirling'!"

"How would you describe it, then?"

"Fine!" she whined, throwing her arms up. "I'm fangirling. What of it?"

"It's cute."

"Cute?"

"Yeah, cute," I repeated. "Deal with it."

"Deal with thith."

"Very mature, Zee. Now stop it before you lick something by accident."

The elevator dinged, and we walked through the lobby to the restaurant entrance, where Zero pulled ahead to make a beeline for Zeke. He was alone this morning: one hand propping his head up on his elbow, the other stirring a half-empty fruit smoothie with a straw while he stared into the glass like it held the answer to life itself. She at least had the restraint to hover a few feet away and wait for me to make the initial approach.

"Zeke?" I asked.

"Cass," he replied without looking up. "Zero. I see you got a core. Close combat, I'm assuming."

"Damn straight," Zero said. "Where's your—"

I elbowed her.

"—friend? Fuck's sake, Cass, gimme a little credit."

"Sorry."

Zeke remained intent on his stirring. "Still in her room."

Zero shot me a questioning look, but I didn't know any more than she did.

"Mind if we join you?" I asked. He waved a hand at the other chairs, and we sat; I took the seat across from his, while Zero sat between us, to my right.

"So…" I began, stretching the word out indelicately. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah."

"What's up with Anna?" Zero asked, already bored of tact.

Zeke blew out a long sigh.

"Max built us a proper simulator," he said. "Holodecks are made to fool organic senses, not high-grade military sensor equipment, so we needed a Valkyrie-compatible simulator to test new frames and components in. He built four of them, actually, since they're pretty much only good for Valkyrie training, unlike the holodeck—sorry. Like I was saying, he built four simulators, and he built them right: two hundred-klick POSDIF, full Higgs simulation and containment, spacefolding and noise suppression that don't trigger Valk countermeasures, attack signatures that do trigger countermeasures, the works. The things can model a class-S Zero at full combat performance—ordinance and tactics—and still cushion the blows enough to make it safe for a cadet."

"They go up to S class?" Zero asked in a tone that brought to mind a kid learning about an amazing new ice cream flavor.

I, however, was still focused on the 'Anna problem', and I saw where things were going. "Don't tell me Anna decided to fight a Zero—"

Zeke interrupted me with an exasperated, "She did."

"It kicked her ass, then," Zero said.

He barked out a bitter laugh. "No. She tore through it like tissue paper."

"You said the simulator could—"

"It can. It did! One of Mordin's new Cores at full power let a single Elite Valkyrie tear apart a Class-S Type Zero with the same ease she'd curbstomp a Five before the upgrade."

"She was using a new core?" Zero asked, missing the point entirely.

"Zero…" I began.

"Yeah, off topic, whatever. Why was winning bad?"

Zeke just glowered into his drink, so I fielded that question. "Because she wanted a rematch. She wanted to overcome it, not ludicrously overpower it. Am I right?"

He nodded.

"So she wanted a cage match and got a curbstomp," Zero summarized. "That's disappointing, sure, but—"

"It was trivial," he snapped, finally looking up from his drink to glare at her. "Can you imagine what the war would've looked like if we had access to just one of the Cores Mordin's been making? To one only a tenth that strong? How would you feel if you learned the threat you'd spent your whole life trying to stop could've been made completely irrelevant if only you'd had a relatively tiny bit of help?"

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. The people at nearby tables stopped talking as well, just long enough to give Zeke a curious glance and consider whether or not they should say something before he waved their concern away.

"Oh," Zero said. "Fuck."

"Thinking about your own world?" I asked her.

"Yeah. Max helped, sure, but it wasn't like it was easy. Fuck, if he'd just waved a hand and one-shot the thing, I'd've lost my shit."

"Point made," Zeke muttered snippishly.

"Yeah, I gotcha. Is she gonna be okay?"

He shrugged one shoulder. "She's just sulking. She'd argue the terminology, but she is."

"Good. I think?" Zero frowned and performed a more expressive shrug of her own. "Let me know when she's feeling better? I was hoping she'd give me some lessons."

"And you're dragging Cass around because she made a better impression," Zeke observed, lingering annoyance coloring his voice. "Is she even going to claim a core? I can tell she's not synced."

"We're heading to the Workshop next, right, Cass?"

"Yup," I agreed.

Zeke raised an eyebrow in my direction. "Change your mind?"

"I said I'd pick one up eventually."

"You also said you were too busy to pick one up now."

"Because Anna didn't want me intruding on your simulator time together," I countered.

"Ah, yeah." He sighed and sagged in his chair. "I was hoping you'd tag along anyway and give her something to do besides brawl with Zeros. There was no chance that was going to end well."

Ah.

"Well, I'll leave you be," I told him. "Hope Anna feels better soon."

Zeke straightened up and shook his head. "No, I'll come with you. I can get you started. Probably better off asking me than Anna anyway; she's many things, but she's not a teacher." He pushed his chair back from the table, abandoned his smoothie to whatever magical wait-staff ran the place, and asked, "Shall we?"

I hadn't eaten breakfast yet, but I didn't actually need to.

"Sure."

———X==X==X———​

 

[Tempestuous]

AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.

Chapter 128: Competitive Multiplayer​

---

"Yeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhooooooooooooooooo!!!"

Even without a Valkyrie frame and its associated communication systems, I think I'd still have been able to hear Zero's yelling. Crazy woman was having the time of her life doing circuits at mach 30, whooping her lungs out the whole while.

I, meanwhile, was getting some actual 'training' with the Valkyrie's primary defense: the Impeller field.

Zeke and I were standing at parade rest a few feet apart, surrounded on all sides by the blasted Martian—actually Australian—landscape the simulator had created for us. Now that I thought about it, why did a Japanese series take place in Australia, anyway? Was it a localization thing? A concession to geography arising from the artists' fondness for wide desert landscapes?

Having a force field just sort of floating around me was weird. The best comparison I could offer was that it felt a bit like my seyunolu telekinesis, except 'solid': I could reach out and touch things with it (clumsily), but unlike telekinesis, it occupied space as well—and in doing so, gave me a much more immediate tactile sensation than telekinesis had even when I'd had the antennae out. Anna could sense well enough through her Impeller to smell with it—or so Zeke claimed; he might have been exaggerating—but my skill left me lacking in that department, not that I really wanted to know what the ground tasted like.

Back on topic: the Impeller Field. When I described it as 'solid', I meant it in terms of having a volume rather than being 'substantial'; it was, as far as I could tell, selectively permeable to everything except other Impeller fields, itself included. I had two dozen different… the term in the official literature was 'layers', but that wasn't a particularly great description because there was nothing stopping them from intersecting each other willy-nilly except the Valkyrie's control. I probably would've called them 'sheets' or 'leaves'; Zeke referred to them as 'field partitions', which was a term I found both suitably descriptive and satisfyingly technical. Anyway, two dozen field partitions, all waving about and through each other like incorporeal laundry whenever my control slipped.

At the moment, we were effectively playing pattycake with our outer Impellers. In theory, we were trying to avoid touching; in practice, the air between Zeke and I crackled constantly as the field partition I was wrestling to control struck his.

The exercise served more purposes than just training my Impeller control; it was also giving me practice with splitting my attention. The frame—or the core?—let a Valkyrie multitask in ways a normal human brain simply couldn't, nearly to the point of having entirely separate minds working in parallel. In my case, I had one train of thought focused entirely on my Impeller, one on decoding and interpreting the constant stream of instructions and corrections Zeke was tight-beaming directly to me at gigabytes-per-second, and one on having a pleasant conversation.

"Do most recruits have this much trouble?"

We were both fully suited up, faces hidden beneath our frame's helmets, but the video feature gave me a window of Zeke's grin at an angle that implied a camera on the inside of a larger and less-form-fitting helmet.

"It's not a fair comparison," he answered. "Most recruits need to spend weeks just to get their synchronization high enough to express the frame at all. You've sort of skipped the 'learning to walk' stage of learning to run, so you're going to be a bit clumsy for a while."

"I was just curious. You don't need to make me feel better."

Zeke didn't dignify my joke with a response.

We watched Zero tear past us again, pinned between a fireball of compression-heated plasma and a fireball of exhaust as she passed Mach fucking 40 on the straightaway. The sonic boom slammed against my Impeller, and the train of thought paying attention to that did my best to dissipate the energy even as I used a bit of another partition to brace myself against the ground behind me. By contrast, Zeke's Impeller rippled slightly, accomplishing exactly what I was supposed to be doing without any effort whatsoever.

‼ RAD WARNING ‼​

If I wasn't immortal and heavily rad-shielded, that message would really bother me.

The video feed from Zeke was going directly to my brain rather than being projected onto a heads-up display, but I still found my eyes looking for the window as I asked, "How long is she going to be able to keep that up?"

"With a normal frame—normal by the world's standards—she'd've run her reactor dead dry after a loop or two. She's tapping her thrusters straight into her fusion chamber the way Anna does when she doesn't care about collateral damage."

"What about with one of Mordin's frames, then?"

"She'll last another hour or two if she doesn't get bored first."

My sensors fuzzed out for half a second as Zero's path brought her exhaust vector—slightly less insane than the previous fusion bath by virtue of her need to turn—sweeping over us.

"Have you settled on that frame?" Zeke asked once the noise had passed. "Or are you going to try others?"

"Mordin made this one custom for me."

"Nice."

"I'm surprised you didn't know that," I added.

"Why?"

"Because he named it 'Morrigan' and you're the one with the obnoxious ornithology hobby."

"Or I'm not the only one who associates you with corvids," Zeke countered.

"Not anymore, clearly."

Morrigan was, fittingly, a frame so black as to lack any texture at all under some lighting conditions, making it a near match to Anna's Durga in color scheme; structurally, however, it hewed closer to Anatashesha's harsh mecha-inspired mil-tech angles than the former's more organic curves. Sleek stealth-fighter geometry and crisp edges hadn't stopped Mordin from applying enough mecha greebling to produce a clearly 'feathered' silhouette, particularly the skirt of overlapping angular plates hanging down from the waist and the awesome-looking but unnecessary-by-counterexample articulating baffles around the primary rear thrusters. The various fins and frills were at least partially functional, as they held its sensor suits and ECM/ECCM systems.

Also 'equipped' were three different melee halberds: a dagger at the small of my back, a collapsing naginata-style polearm below it, and a slashing whip-sword at my waist. All three could be expressed directly into my hands, so they didn't 'need' a place to sit any more than the rest of the armaments, but they sure looked cool.

Other than the melee halberds, I'd barely begun to explore Morrigan's weapon load-out; I knew it had the aforementioned missile system, a half-dozen particle cannons, and no less than eight enchanted ballistic weapons of varying types, but I had yet to even deploy any of them, much less fire them. Mordin being Mordin, I'm sure it was enough firepower to glass a major metropolitan area; absurd overkill for any conceivable encounter in my future. Maybe if we went to Aliens or something… but I doubted I'd want to import somewhere like that in the first place.

Morrigan's defenses were just as insane as I assumed its weapons were. Only a few hours after I'd first synced, I had an order of magnitude more raw Impeller strength than any of the elite Valkyries Zeke had served with; beneath that lay deflector shields that drew from two dozen different tech bases to make something stronger than the sum of its parts. The armor plating itself continued the trend, alloying impossibly strong metals like vibranium and adamantine with exotic matter and then layering enchantments and magical runes on top to make it even more indestructible. It also had stealth tech for just about every conceivable sensor technology, from 'just looking at it', through RADAR and gravitics, all the way up to scrying and precognition.

I gave the Valkyrie frames a near-zero chance of being allowed in any 'verse without planet crackers as a native hazard. If something threw me into a black hole with my frame out, the black hole would lose.

"I was planning on just borrowing a frame," I continued, moving us back a topic, "but he'd already made custom ones for everyone who'd expressed interest, so… yeah, I got this."

"Why stick with borrowing?"

I would have shrugged if I wasn't busy managing too many other things. "I don't know. I like having my own stuff, but if they're likely to be—what did Zero call it, 'embargoed'?—then I didn't see the point in getting a custom one."

"Depends on how often you import, doesn't it?"

Zero's flight path distorted briefly as she crossed the 200 kilometer threshold on the far edge of her loop; only a few seconds later, our position differential fell within simulator parameters again, and things snapped back to normal.

"I guess," I admitted. "I was mostly thinking I don't want to deal with getting really used to something like this only to suddenly not have it."

Zeke nodded. "That's fair. I know Anna and I are both far too used to ours."

"You mean like how Anna turns off her heartbeat and stuff?"

He shook his head on the video feed without moving his actual head, which was a neat trick I'd master eventually. "I meant the sensors, integrated networking, the Impeller, all that stuff. Unsynching the core feels like losing a limb, or a sense."

"Yeah, that's more or less what I'm worried about. Just losing 'features' isn't much different than not having access to a smartphone, but I don't want to end up feeling crippled if I have to leave it behind—which is a bummer because Valkyrie cores are cool in all the ways that make me really want one."

"Maybe Management will just limit what they can do rather than banning them outright."

"Like the perk power adjustments?" I asked. "Maybe. Or we could just make some frames that are less ridiculous."

"I asked Max about that before I upgraded Anatashesha. He didn't think the actual power level would make much difference on where they were allowed."

"Huh. I guess the restrictions are more arbitrary than just 'balance'."

"So it seems."

When Zeke didn't offer further commentary, I asked, "So, speaking of the biological, uh, 'workarounds': did you ever do that?"

"Only in combat," he answered, "so I never forgot what it felt like without it. Most of our flight did the same once Anna showed us how. Good thing, too; it gave us the edge we needed when—when things went bad."

"Ah."

I played with my frame's sensors for a moment, following Zero's progress on radar and experimenting with optical zoom functions while I searched for a new topic.

"How many frames did you try before you settled on Anatashesha, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Five," Zeke answered. "Anatashesha was the second, and by far my highest compatibility, though that's not really relevant now."

Zero disappeared behind her plasma cone completely as she closed the loop, her heading lining up with our current position, and I reset the sensors and optics to their default configuration. "Mordin really did 'solve' the compatibility 'issue', then?"

"Different sort of compatibility. You know how the longer you use a Valkyrie core, the more performance you get out of it?"

"Vaguely."

"It has something to do with how well the core's internal control interface matches up with your exact neurology," he explained. "The core is constantly refining its understanding of your brain because that's what cores do, but when you're trying cores you've never used before, some of them will just have better initial 'fit' than others because their initial guess—or their last used configuration—is closer to 'ideal' for you, specifically."

"Ah."

The third member of the sim shot past us again a few hundred meters away, still whooping in joy. By the time the shockwave hit us a second later, she was already a dozen kilometers downrange. ‼ RAD WARNING ‼

"Are you sure she's going to be okay?" I asked. "Long-term, I mean."

Zeke didn't have to ask who I meant. "I'll make sure of it," he said. "We promised."

I smiled behind my visor.

"That's what scared me the most," he added so quietly I almost missed it.

"What?"

"Hmm?"

"What scared you the most?" I asked.

"Oh. You heard that?"

"You transmitted it."

Zeke sighed and turned away, which conveyed his mood but didn't affect his ability to continue our exercise in the slightest. His face took on some of that haunted thousand-yard-stare he'd had when he'd first returned, and I wondered if I'd made a mistake in asking.

"Out there on the battlefield," he began, "I wasn't afraid that she'd die; I don't think she knew how. I wasn't afraid that I'd die, because I'd end up back here anyway."

He paused as Zero's exhaust washed over us again.

"I wasn't afraid that I'd die," Zeke repeated, his emphasis subtly but critically different. "I was worried I'd leave her behind. Alone."

"By dying."

"Losing. Failing. Is it really dying if we don't die?"

I didn't have an answer for him.

"Before we imported," he continued, "I said the only thing I wanted to do was revive the Thinker. I called it my 'overwhelming consideration.' An imperative that overrode everything else."

No one would mistake his pause for an invitation to respond.

"It was after we lost Naomi—Lt. Maj. Cohen, our Squadron Leader. We'd taken casualties before, CNS injuries that meant medical discharges, but we made it home every time. We were famous for it. 'The Invincible Squadron', they called us." If Zeke didn't have his helmet on, he'd've spat. "Then Karaganda happened, and—and it just didn't stop. We just kept—we were—we could barely field a full-strength Flight when she went down trying to save what was left of Four, and—and I realized I didn't care about anything else. Anything but us. I couldn't. I didn't have room."

His frame seethed, weapons appearing and disappearing without conscious thought or notice. The halo of cannons swept for threats and disappeared after finding none, only to reappear and sweep again; every time, one would settle on me for a heartbeat or two before accepting my IFF as genuine. Calling it 'disquieting' would be an understatement.

Something dark and ugly crossed Zeke's face as he snarled, "If I had the power to turn back time, cheat death, whatever—I wouldn't waste it on the Thinker. Not if I could bring just one of us back from Karaganda. I'd throw away my chance of reviving the thing without hesitation, every time."

I collapsed my split trains of thought and stepped forward. All seven of his particle cannons locked on to me, setting warning tones blaring; I ignored them and pushed through the intentionally fragile tendrils of Impeller he'd extended my way to rest a hand on his shoulder. The grinding sensation of my weaker, poorly-controlled Impeller losing a fight with his beneath my fingers set my teeth on edge, but I didn't let go.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I know I wasn't there, but I think I understand at least a little of what you're going through, and I know it hurts."

"It hurts," he agreed. His face calmed, and his weapons disappeared back into his Storage. "You stopped the exercise."

"Yeah." I tried to squeeze his shoulder, failed, and stepped back to my previous position with a sheepish smile only he could see.

A moment passed before Zeke spoke again.

"I don't think you really understand," he said. "It's more than just losing people. Yeah, I lost friends. Too many. But I also lost something of myself, too, because the most important thing in the world was just… ash. Can you imagine how it would feel if one day you woke up and just no longer cared about—fuck, I don't know. That one day, the only thing that mattered to you just didn't anymore?"

"I don't know," I said. Then, "I don't think I have something like that, to be honest."

"Yeah, well, obsession isn't a virtue."

Another loop brought Zero screaming past for the thirtieth-odd time. My Impeller wavered. ‼ RAD WARNING ‼

"Are you doing okay?" Zeke asked, his concern prompting him to turn back to face me.

"I'm fine."

"We can stop—"

"I'm fine," I insisted. "I stopped multitasking, that's all. Did they coddle you this much at the Academy?"

"We're not at the Academy and your life doesn't depend on this."

That was all, strictly speaking, true.

"When you pointed out how differently I acted after getting back," he said, "you asked if I was okay with how I'd changed. I'm not thrilled I had to change my affect—or my presentation, if you prefer—but I don't think it's worth changing back. This isn't the last time I'll be speaking to strangers, so why practice being weird and off-putting?

"But if you were to ask me if I was okay with how my priorities changed… I don't know. I didn't want to want what I wanted. I'm not comfortable with how it changed—with how it came to change—but I guess I got what I wanted in the end? And yet…"

He sucked on his teeth for moment. Swallowed.

"It was an important part of what made me 'me'," he said, "even if I hated it. What does it mean for your continuity of self-identity when the thing you used to care about most—more than even your own life—doesn't even register anymore?"

That was far too large a question for me to even begin to answer, and we both knew it.

Zero passed us again (‼ RAD WARNING ‼) before Zeke broke the silence.

"What are you thinking about now, Cass?"

I shrugged. "Trying to empathize, I guess. Just trying to imagine what it would be like to have that sort of 'focus' in the first place."

"I can't say I recommend it."

"Noted."

We shared a laugh and put the topic behind us. Zeke resumed his tight-beam transmission, I split my attention again, and we went back to Impeller patty-cake.

"How's therapy?" I asked.

"It helps. Slowly."

"Good. Not the slowly part, but… good."

He nodded. "Do you still see Deanna for therapy?"

"Occasionally. Preventative care more than anything else. Are you and Anna seeing the same therapist, or…?"

"Different therapists—and a third for group sessions."

"Cool," I offered.

"Unfortunately, PTSD is a bitch, and my memory's not doing me any favors."

"Flawlessness working against you?"

"Yeah." Zeke let out a hum of discontent. "Then again, that was a known problem back in the Corps. Not much for it."

Zero blew by again, this time at mach forty-two; the wash of fusion byproducts in the resulting shockwave set my Impeller tingling. ‼ RAD WARNING ‼

"Maybe I shouldn't have taught her how to do that," Zeke said.

———X==X==X———​

Another week passed, and our next briefing arrived.

"Ace Attorney!"

I excused myself from the discussion.

———X==X==X———​

"I'm sure it's a reasonably pleasant world, all things considered," I said, "but I don't really want to spend two decade in the 2000's back to back."

Karl flashed me a smug grin. "Like I said, kid: the longer you stick around, the pickier you get."

"I guess an old man like you would know."

Bob guffawed far in excess to the actual quality of my joke and moved two squads of infantry up the side of the valley, preparing them to crest the hill. Karl responded by moving his light armor out of the marsh near the river and into the trees, a move that lowered Morrigan's estimated chance of an Imperial victory by just over thirteen percent. The move protected the tanks from anti-armor fire from the hilltop, true, but it opened a gap that the Eldar could use to advance unopposed into a large ruin sheltered in the river canyon, which would greatly limit the Guard's ability to freely maneuver through the valley while offering an entrenched position both infantry and armor would be hard-pressed to assault.

"You running simulations on that computer-ball?" Karl asked me.

I must have made a face. "Yeah," I admitted. "Sorry."

"What do they have to say, then?"

"That move was a blunder."

"Ay," Bob complained, "don't tell him that!"

Karl scoffed and folded his arms. "I made my move, and I'm not gonna take it back just 'cause the kid's fancy chess computer disagrees. She's still training the thing anyway, right, kid?"

"Yeah," I agreed, though it was only partially true; Morrigan had more than enough computer power to brute-force the game tree with only a few basic pruning heuristics, so the primary thing it was 'learning' was how to predict the players' actions. "Carry on."

Twenty moves later, the Eldar forces had completely failed to capitalize on Karl's poor control of the central river, and an outwardly risky but well-calculated infantry charge up the hill swung the battle firmly in the Empire's favor. The Eldar inflicted disproportionate losses during the early phase of the engagement, but the result of the thrust was a hilly, low-visibility battlefield littered with disparate Eldar fireteams who, while collectively superior to the remaining Imperial forces, were unable to assist each other as they were individually surrounded and destroyed.

While the two men did their usual post-battle trash-talking ritual, I rewound my recording of the game and stepped through the battle, paying close attention to anywhere the actual results differed heavily from probabilistic predictions. The only noteworthy discrepancy between predicted utility and actual luck came right near the end, when an Eldar heavy weapons team failed to inflict a single successful attack against an exposed Guard squad, but by that point the game was effectively over.

I rewound again and simulated a battle where Karl hadn't ceded the center. The result was inconclusive as far as that specific decision went: the change in force deployment led to an entirely different line of play that could've resulted in anything from the Guard sweeping the xenos aside with half the casualties to the Eldar narrowly securing a win, depending on how the dice fell and how aggressively each army maneuvered in response.

I'd done the 'split attention' trick before diving into the replay, so I wasn't totally spaced out when Karl drew me into the discussion. "Hey, kid, you wanna put that thing to the test?" he asked, tapping a finger against his temple.

I looked at Bob, who pointed back Karl's way with a grumbled, "Against him, not me."

"You sure?" I asked Karl. "I'm not sure it's gonna be fair—"

"Gimme more credit than that, kid," he grumbled. "Computing power is all well and good, but I've been playing these games for hundreds of years. You need more than a few days' work on a fancy algorithm to beat good ol' human smarts!"

Well, there was no better test than this.

"Sure, what the hell," I said. "Maybe it will make things fair."

One absolute curbstomp later, I was banned from using my Valkyrie frame for wargaming.

———X==X==X———​

After Karl shooed me out of the game room, I headed over to the gym for my normal workout—though by this point I wasn't sure I needed exercise to maintain my fitness anymore—then lazed over to the Arcade to see what struck my fancy. I was about thirty years into a game of Stellaris II when Jenn came in and struck up a conversation.

"Hey, Cass."

I left the game paused on an event and spun my chair to face her. "Hey, Jenn. 'Sup?"

"Not interested in Ace Attorney?" she asked as she took a seat at the computer to my right.

I shrugged. "It's more that I just had a very-close-to-my-normal Jump and don't want another one right away."

"Ah," Jenn said. "I thought we might do this Jump together, but I guess it doesn't have to be this one. What about a side-Jump? I bet no one's taken one yet."

I hadn't realized that was a concern. "Are they in limited supply or something?"

"Each one can only be done by one group per normal Jump. We only just learned what the next stop is, so they probably all still have spots available if you have a preference."

I frowned as I did my best to remember what I'd seen the first (and last) time I'd browsed the side-Jumps. "I guess we could, but they're all 'generics', right? I feel like I'd be better served just taking a year off, so I'll be fresh and ready for wherever we go next."

"Oh, totally!" Jenn agreed. "Mostly, side-Jumps are for those of us who are getting bored spending year after year in here."

"Or for powerleveling."

"Or that, but not many people would spend ten years for power alone."

"I guess I wouldn't, either," I said. "Well… not anymore." I had top-tier shape-shifting, a Valkyrie frame, and effectively perfect resurrective immortality I'd yet to need. How much could more 'power' really improve my life?

She chuckled. "Well, if you ever decide you really need to trade subjective-years-spent-alive for power, I'm sure we'll hit a Xianxia Jump eventually."

"Shien…?" I stumbled over the word. "How do you spell that?"

"'Immortal Hero'."

That was enough for me to figure it out. "Ah. I'd never heard it said out loud before. Shien-sha?"

"Xianxia," Jenn repeated.

"Shian-zha."

"Close enough."

———X==X==X———​

My hotel-room phone rang that evening as I was reading myself to sleep by lamplight and the glow of some alien moon out my window. I set the book on the nightstand (next to my easy-to-hand cell phone) and, with many muttered complaints about politeness and timing and choice of communication method, rolled out of bed for the trip to the desk.

I'd worked out the brunt of my annoyance by the time I finally answered the phone. "Hello?"

"Hello, Miss Rolins."

"Management? What do you want?"

The 'brunt' of my annoyance wasn't 'all' of it. Maybe it was worth keeping the politeness perk slotted after all.

No, on second thought, it was a crutch. I knew how to think before I spoke; I just had to get back into the habit.

Management, happily, either didn't notice or chose to ignore my irritation. "This is a courtesy call to inform you that your 'superpower' has been repaired and is ready for use."

"Oh," I said. "Thanks."

"A lot of people have been thanking me recently," Management observed.

"Well, they say familiarity breeds contempt."

"As does dissatisfaction. I believe Max may be seriously considering retirement."

Did Management not call Max's bluff after all? Or was Max more serious about retirement than I thought?

"Oh," I said because I didn't have anything useful to say.

"Which brings me to the other reason for my call," they continued. "In the event Max retires, would you like to be considered for a, shall we say, 'promotion'?"

"You mean…"

"To primary Jumper, yes."

"That would mean saying goodbye to my safety net," I pointed out.

"You haven't died yet."

"Don't jinx it!"

"Very droll, Miss Rolins," Management said. "You would be in a rather enviable position, as Jumpers go; after all, you would start with perks, items, and Warehouse upgrades well above those Max had available at his start. That is, assuming you were selected. I am not offering you the position—merely asking if you would like to be 'in the running', so to speak."

"So this isn't binding."

"No."

"Then…" On the one hand, a 'promotion' to Management's primary squeaky toy didn't sound like a bed of roses. On the other, anything but outright refusal would give me plenty of time to change my mind—unless they broke their word, of course, but if they did that then refusing wouldn't matter anyway.

"I suppose I wouldn't mind being 'considered' as long I still have the right to refuse if I'm selected."

"I will mark you down as a candidate," they said. "That is all. Goodbye, Miss Rolins."

"Hold on. Is this confi-"—the line clicked off—"-dential? Damn it." I pulled the cheap plastic headset away from my ear, scowled at it, then put it back to my head. "Is that a no?"

No response.

"So I can tell anyone I want about this?"

No response.

I set the phone back on its cradle.

"Well, if they didn't want me to mention it, they really should have said something," I muttered as I pulled open the drawer and palmed Morrigan's core. Half a second later, my frame's computer systems bloomed in my mind, and I wasted no time sending a communication request directly to Max. He accepted it as a video call without delay, showing me his face against a background that I thought I recognized as the lounge.

"What's up, Cass?" he asked. "Problems sleeping?"

"What—? Oh, pajamas. Nevermind that; I just got a call from Management."

Max frowned. "They usually don't call us. Then again, I've never had someone 'break' a perk before, so if I had to guess…"

"Yeah, that's fixed, but that was only half of it. They also—"

I froze, suddenly second-guessing my decision.

I don't want to give her a chance to shop around—​

But that was exactly why I was going straight to Max! Management had pitched this as a contingency if Max were to choose to retire, and the last thing I wanted was to have some catastrophic sort of misunderstanding about when and why I'd been talking to them behind his back.

"They also said you might be retiring soon," I finished, knowing full well that he would've noticed the stutter.

Max closed his eyes and sighed; when he opened them again, he looked very weary indeed. "I'm considering it," he admitted. "I know I said it was a bluff, but if Management is getting bored enough to start fucking with people with no pretense of fairness, I don't think I want to stick around to see where that goes."

"Ah."

"You don't have to worry, though. I'd bet Management will find some way to keep things going without me."

He wasn't wrong.

"That's what they called me about, actually."

Max raised an eyebrow.

"They asked if I wanted to be considered for a, quote, 'promotion', unquote, in the event you retired," I said.

Max raised his other eyebrow—but I'd said my piece and was content for him to break the new silence.

"So what did you say?" he asked.

"That I'd need to think about it," I answered, "but if they were talking strictly about 'consideration' or 'candidacy', I wouldn't mind having an offer I could refuse."

The viewpoint shifted slightly as Max leaned back and began stroking his chin. "Hmm," he mused. "I guess I can't fault that. I'm mostly surprised they decided to ask permission at all."

"I had the same thought." It was a good and somewhat worrying point.

"Well, thanks for telling me. I may have another hundred Jumps left in me yet—or maybe I will quit after all." He shrugged. "Either way, good to know the whole operation isn't riding on my continued tolerance for their unrelenting bullshit."

"I guess so," I agreed. "Well, that was all I wanted to tell you…"

"Then I'll let you go."

"Goodnight, Max."

"'Night, Cass."

I closed the call, put Morrigan's core away, and went back to my book.

———X==X==X———​

 

[Tempestuous]

AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.

Chapter 129: Cooperative Multiplayer​

---

"Draw," I announced.

"Indeed."

We reset the game and began again.

"Say, have you spoken to Tedd and Grace recently?" Tess asked.

"No. Why?"

"Just wondering. Why not?"

"You mean why haven't I talked to them?" I asked. "I just don't know them that well. I've only met them a couple times."

"That's no reason to avoid them now that they're here."

"I'm not avoiding them, I just don't have any reason to seek them out."

Tess smirked. "Then maybe I'll find an excuse to get you guys together."

"Fine by me. What're they up to, anyway?"

"They're excited about their first Jump. They're playing through the series now—aaand we've drawn again. I think we're close to declaring chess a solved game at this point."

I looked from the nearly-empty board to the chess clock, each face missing around twelve seconds. "Yeah. We need something with a larger possibility space."

"Go?"

"If Homura caught me playing Go with a Valkyrie frame, her sheer disapproval might literally kill me."

"We could go back to playing chess the normal way."

"Would I even be able to tell you weren't using your frame?"

Tess rolled her eyes and started putting the pieces back in the box.

"I heard you got your powers back," she said. "Bet that's a relief."

"Was that a pun?"

"No?" Tess asked. "Why?"

"Bet."

"Oh. It wasn't intentional."

She finished storing the pieces she'd captured in the felt lining and moved onto the few still on the board, so I pushed my half the captured pieces across the table as well.

"It's nice," I answered, "but I'm not sure I'd call it a 'relief'. It would've been an uncomfortable thirty years if I hadn't gotten used to not having them. I mean, it's still nice to have them back, but I haven't been sorely missing them—aside from maybe getting less stabbed that one time."

"Think you'll use them going forward?"

"I don't know. I like the direct control aspects—being able to just do things instead of having to 'cast'—but magic is so much more versatile that I'd be hard-pressed to justify the slot."

"They were free, right?" Tess asked. "They'd only take a minimum-size slot."

"They're valued at two-hundred. Didn't you—oh, they're probably Innate for you, yeah?"

"Just so."

I nodded. "To actually answer the question: it depends on where we end up. The more likely I am to get into a brawl, the more useful they are compared to magical approximations of the same abilities."

"Speaking of future Jumps, this 'Ace Attorney' thing looks like a good place to have one's first Jump," she said. "Not too much action, and familiar enough to be comfortable while still being strange enough to be interesting."

"You mean because it takes place in a 'strangely Japanese Los Angeles'?"

"Yes, exactly."

I frowned. "I'm honestly a little disappointed we're heading to the American localization. If I had the option to spend a decade as a Tokyo native, I'd be tempted to take it just for the cultural experience."

"Only tempted?"

"By 'cultural experience', I meant the experience of growing up in a different culture, which would mean going in with a past."

"And you're not comfortable with that."

"I… wasn't," I said. "The life I had in Breath of Fire made me really question the ethics of importing 'into' people. What happens to the poor sod you just became? People try to describe it as a 'merger', like whoever you just clobbered gets equal share of your new consciousness, but even if that were true it wouldn't make it 'okay'."

Tess had been nodding along with my explanation, and kept nodding as she considered the argument.

"You said you 'weren't'," she noted. "Does that mean you've changed your mind?"

"I'm a lot less confident in my objections," I hedged. "For one thing, by design or necessity, we seem to end up being ourselves no matter what."

Tess nodded again. "I was going to say so if you didn't. I know my perspective may differ from 'natural' intelligences, but I can say with some confidence that Tina was me before she knew she was me—oh dear, that was a terrible sentence. Tina acted like me long before I imported, to the point that when I did, there was no disconnect. It felt more than a little like merging two forks, if that makes sense."

"I think I follow." I'd never had the experience of 'merging forks' and likely never would, but I got the gist well enough. "I've definitely had varying levels of 'disconnect', though."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. My Worm experience was very, uh, 'smooth', for lack of a better term, but Breath of Fire had some noticeable, um, 'contrast' in personality and viewpoints."

"Such as?"

"Diction and dialect. Social expectations. Political views."

"All things that could be attributed to the difference in upbringing," Tess pointed out.

"Of course—and that's actually one of the main reasons why I find myself wanting to take more imports going forward. It's an opportunity to live different lives—to be different people—and I'd never stopped to think about how absolutely incredible that opportunity is." I smiled as I swept my arms out to the sides. "Being able to experience entirely new worlds is amazing, obviously, but traveling worlds just makes you a tourist. Importing doesn't just mean you get to visit a place, or study a culture, or learn a language—it can mean experiencing those things as a native. And the chance to live another person's life, to fully be someone else and see the world through their eyes? That's incredible. It opens so many doors. I've always felt like the greatest tragedy in life is that we can never truly experience any life but our own, and now I can!"

Tess smirked. "Spoken like a true xenophile."

"Well, I am," I admitted. "I've been thinking about it—because I've been thinking about imports and this is a large part of why I'd take one—and I think a lot of it comes down to how I was raised. The first time, I mean."

"Your parents raised you to appreciate other cultures?"

I shrugged. "It's more that I often felt like I grew up without a culture. Both my parents made the conscious decision not to pass down their traditions to their kids, so I never got to identify with anything beyond 'just pretty white I guess'."

"And as Kasey?"

"The culture was definitely 'different' thanks to all the superpowers, but I had so many other things to worry about I didn't give it much thought. It was the Technological Parity Exchange I participated in Starfleet that really got me thinking about 'culture' again."

"I remember that," Tess said. "You spent eight months on Qo'noS."

"Yeah." I'd volunteered the second the request for transwarp specialists went out and hadn't regretted a moment of it. "Getting the full cultural immersion was an awesome experience, but I couldn't help but feel like a tourist all the same. All these things that were 'new' and 'interesting' to me were just 'how life is' to the people there, and I hated feeling like a gawker, if that makes sense?"

"Was it different when you were Lina?"

"It was, yeah," I said. "Not as much as it could have been, though. I'm not sure if Wyndia's general Western Fantasy milieu was just not particularly foreign as cultures go, if the lack of detail in the source game meant Wyndia didn't really have a particularly well-defined culture to be immersed in, or if I just came in 'too young'. Maybe I ended up with a view weighted more towards the 'outsider' perspective than I might've liked because Lina hadn't finished forming her view of the world before I brought mine into it."

"Ah."

"But those are just guesses," I continued. "It's possible that I've got enough subjective years under my belt than just about any age is going to be 'too young' in comparison, but that wouldn't stop me from trying."

Tess raised an eyebrow. "Are there things that would stop you from trying?"

"There are… 'reasons I'm hesitant'," I answered. "For one, there's still the question of what happens to the person you become when you actually import. If people are the sum of their experiences, then adding a whole bunch of experiences in the form of memories is going to leave them a very different person."

"That's true, but is that necessarily a bad thing?" she asked. "If you have the experience of importing into someone, you also have the experience of being that someone, correct?"

"Sure."

"Was it an awful experience being imported into, then?"

Tess had long since finished putting the pieces away in their foam padding, and finally bothered fitting the lid over the box while I considered the question.

"No, it wasn't," I admitted. "You know, if someone had asked me back before I met Max if I'd be okay getting imported into, I would've probably said yes—once you got to the part about getting magic powers, anyway."

"And since we are, generally speaking, 'ourselves', your new identities would say the same?"

"Theoretically. That's not really 'consent', though."

"Fair point," she said.

"As for the actual experience, I went through some existential panic about who I was the first time, but in hindsight I spent way more time worrying about it than it was worth. But there's still the problem that you're going to effectively abduct them at the end if you keep Jumping…"

"I think calling it an 'abduction' is hyperbolic," Tess interrupted, only to walk her objection back. "Then again, I've only imported 'into' an identity once. Have you had to deal with people who want you to stay?"

"Uh, well, no, but it's not like I have a lot more experience. I've only done it twice, and one of those might as well not have had parents at all."

She winced in sympathy. "Ah, right. I remember talking to you about this not long after you joined the Protectorate."

"About my surviving parent being a total absentee?"

"Yes."

"Yeah," I muttered. "It hurt at the time, but in hindsight, it sidestepped a whole bunch of other issues."

"Like having to say goodbye?"

"Among other things."

When I didn't continue, Tess stood up and returned the chess board and clock to the cabinet we'd retrieved them from. We could leave the games on the table to be reshelved magically—putting the pieces away was already unnecessary—so it was fairly obvious she was just filling time.

"What about you?" I asked. "Are you going in this Jump?"

She nodded as she returned to her seat. "I plan to."

"Let me guess: defense attorney?"

"Probably," Tess agreed. "I'd consider 'prosecutor' if they weren't firmly established in both the flavor of their perks and the text itself to be indifferent as to whether or not the defendant is actually guilty. Then again, the defense attorneys are usually the ones proving who the actual guilty party is, so I'll probably have plenty of opportunities to prosecute regardless."

"True enough."

"It's disheartening how poorly so many stories represent law enforcement," she continued.

In hindsight, I should have seen that complaint coming. "You still identify as law enforcement, huh?"

"I like to think I was more 'public service and safety' than 'law enforcement', but they really ought to be the same thing."

"Ought to be," I emphasized. "Fact is, people pursue law enforcement as a path to power, not service."

"Which is disheartening, as I said."

"It's hardly news to you, though, is it? It's not like you've never had what's legal conflict with what's right."

"Of course not," Tess said, "but that's a different question than whether or not the people tasked with enforcing the laws are 'right'. Bad laws can be corrected—and will be, if the people involved are doing their job. Bad actors don't care what the law says—they'll find a way to do what they want one way or the other."

"True."

"Then again," she added, "I'm not exactly a stranger to dealing with 'those' sorts of people, either."

"Too many fucking Cauldronites."

"Indeed."

———X==X==X———​

Another week sailed by. Rita and I kept training, some of which now occurred at high speeds thousands of feet in the air inside one of the new Valkyrie simulators. Kara continued her flight-instructor hobby whenever the mood struck her, and I felt more comfortable in her presence now that I understood that she hung around me when she wanted attention; I'd never say it out loud for fear it'd get back to her, but naming a cat after her was totally justified. And Bob and Karl kept wargaming, unassisted by tactical analysis suites—which went on to be banned in most other leisure activities as well, by rules or convention. It wasn't much different to the agreements already in place around abusing perks in games and sports, just applied to a specific item instead.

To my confusion, the one activity the frame didn't help with was billiards: no matter how much I tried to abuse its abilities, even down to slaving my arms to its targeting systems, I remained utterly inept at pool. The answer to this riddle was provided by Maeve, of all people, who chanced upon the tail-end of my week-long experiments and informed me, with a great deal of amusement and more than a little mockery, that the pool table was—to borrow a phrase I've used before—cursed as hell, which explained far too much about the damn thing.

Zeke and Anna continued to oblige Zero and I some expert-level Valkyrie training. Anna was a better teacher than Zeke gave her credit for; she wasn't the best at explaining things, sure, but that wasn't the only way to teach someone. Zeke was a better 'instructor' in the sense of 'giving verbal instruction'; Anna was the sort of teacher who'd grab your arm and manually move it through the correct motions rather than putting what you were doing wrong into words. The contrast made them a great team.

Anna flat-out refused to teach Zero and I how to use spatial wave attacks, which was probably for the best. Morrigan's yottawatt-range particle canons put out power equaling several whole percent of the Earth's sun when fired together at maximum yield, but at least they didn't damage spacetime while they were at it. I took it as a given that the Warehouse was perfectly unbreakable, but there are some things best left untested.

Speaking of Zero and 'Valkyrie stuff', I watched her play through a few in-game months of Persona 3 Portable so I could see what the school/social 'slice of life' half of Valkyrie Core's 'Enhanced Edition' had been ripping off imitating inspired by. Zero watched me play through Valkyria Chronicles because the name was on her mind and she 'didn't have the patience for learning turn-based shit'.

"Persona 3 is turn-based," I said.

"JRPGs don't count," she said.

"This is a JRPG," I said.

"Nuh-uh," she said.

Every so often, we were treated to the sight of Tedd cajoling Grace out of the Arcade. Almost as often, the positions were reversed, and it was Grace cajoling Tedd out of the Arcade. They seemed to be having fun.

One evening, I had Dragon direct me to the kitchen: an old, long-unused Warehouse room that was exactly what it claimed to be. Try as I might, I couldn't muster much enthusiasm for the task of cooking; it wasn't much fun in its own right, and no one would rather eat what I made than go to the Palace, myself included—though I ate it anyway, if only to not waste food in the event that concept had any meaning here.

It was pretty good, if I do say so myself, but it wasn't Palace Food.

———X==X==X———​

"Watch out for the—!"

My warning shout trailed off as the Rathian's tail swept through Tess's character, sending her back to camp and carving a third out of our reward money.

"…tail."

"Damn it!" Tess cursed. "How come you never cart?"

"Because she plays these games way too much," Zero said.

"It's because she uses a long sword," Grace growled, "like a coward!"

Tess had eventually found an excuse to get Tedd, Grace, and I in the same room: namely, playing Monster Hunter. Well, Grace, Tess, and I were playing; Zero had already been present in the arcade and promptly invited herself into the final slot. The game only supported four players at a time, but Tedd was content to watch, banter, and occasionally tickle his girlfriend.

"You use a shield," Tedd noted from his position as Grace's seat cushion. Our group had claimed one of the open couch-and-console Party Game Cubies near the back of the Arcade, which had obligingly sprouted three additional TVs and game systems to accommodate a game that didn't do split-screen coop. Four overlapping games' audio was a bit of a mess, but I'd put up with worse, and we'd turned it down to talk anyway.

"It's only a shield when it's not an axe!" Grace countered. "And I have to manage phials and charging and stamina while she just gets to be randomly invinci—sonofaniguana!" she 'swore' as the bipedal wyvern trampled her character for the third time in a row. "That barely even does damage, you overgrown salamander jerk! I'm going to wear you as a hat!"

Grace in everyday life was a sweet, tranquil pacifist. Grace in-game was a (relatively) foul-mouthed, bloodthirsty menace. She was also impugning my skill!

"Parrying takes careful timing!" I protested.

"You play with maxed Evade Window!"

"Yeah, because it gives me the confidence to do…" The Rathian finally stopped knocking Grace's hunter over long enough to try the same tail-swipe that had sent Tess on her way against me, but my character was already braced and ready, longsword 'sheathed' at my side. "… this! Ha-HA!"

My character drew and attacked 'through' the wyvern's tail-swipe, and the Rathian and its tail crashed to the ground in separate pieces. "Yeah!" I yelled. "You see that? Perfect!"

"Show-off," Grace complained, wasting no time in unleashing an elemental axe combo across the prone wyvern that broke one of its wings. "Tina, why are you fighting the Tobi-kadachi?"

"I'm bringing help!" Tess replied. "Incoming!"

The Rathian had only just struggled to its feet when Tess's 'help' dive-bombed onto the scene from a nearby cliff, filling our screens with lightning particles and knocking our primary target back onto its face. The fight didn't last much longer.

———X==X==X———​

A couple minutes later, we were all running about the hub city doing our various inter-hunt activities—crafting, managing our stables of fuzzy animal helpers, micro-optimizing gear loadouts, etc—when Zero asked, "Hey, Grace?"

"Yeah?"

"If you could turn into any Monster Hunter monster, which would you choose?"

"Tobi-kadachi," Grace answered without hesitation.

"Seriously?" Zero grumbled. "That's just a weird-looking squirrel!"

"I like being a squirrel!"

"You already are a squirrel! Why not pick something that would give you more mix-and-match options?"

"Ooh," Grace said. "I thought you meant instead of what I had now, not adding to it."

"No, I meant like with your transformation ray thing. Say, Tedd, can you do stuff like this?" Zero gestured at the screen.

Tedd frowned. "I'm not sure. I've never tried to turn someone into something that, uh…"

"Big?" Tess guessed.

"Weird," Tedd finished. "All my spells are always based on things that already exist. I've never tried to do something like that."

"Catgirls?" Zero asked.

"Cats exist and girls exist!" he countered, "and yes, I could try applying that logic to something like a Rathalos, but that would end up with a lizard-bat-platypus chimera that only sort of looks like one."

"Platypus?" I asked.

Tess was a step ahead of me and explained, "Poison spurs on the talons."

"What about the fire breath?" Grace asked.

"That's the kind of thing a weird Frankensteinian chimera couldn't duplicate," Tedd replied. "No matter how close I got, it still wouldn't be the same as being able to turn into an actual Rathalos."

Zero pouted.

"And even if I could do a proper spell and not just a look-alike mad science project," he continued, "it would probably be a terrible idea. I avoid messing with the mind as much as I can with my transformation spells, which is fine when you're sticking to the same body plan, but I'm pretty sure polymorphing someone into any kind of wyvern would be unsettling even if they agreed to it."

"It's pretty nasty if you're not expecting it," I agreed, "but as long as you trust whoever's doing the magic to change you back, I don't think it would be that bad."

"You're a seyunolu, though," Grace said. "I'm pretty sure we're a lot better at that kind of thing."

"I became a seyunolu when I got to your reality," I corrected her. "Before that, I spent several years as the apprentice and occasional plaything of an immortal, mischievous gadfly sorceress."

Tedd raised an eyebrow. "So when you say it's nasty if you're 'not expecting it'…"

"Yeah, sometimes I got baleful polymorphed when my master got bored. It wasn't great."

He frowned for a moment before asking, "Is it a bad sign that my first thought is 'at least I was never that bad'?"

Zero smirked. "What about—"

"That was an accident!" Tedd exclaimed. "Hey, Cassandra, what would you turn into if you could pick a Monster Hunter creature?"

I stopped futzing with my armor decorations and flipped the Hunter's Manual to the list of monsters to remind me what my options were. "Hmm… are Elder Dragons allowed?"

"Kirin?" Zero quipped.

"No? Why would I… was that 'virginal unicorn' joke?"

Her gleeful grin confirmed that suspicion.

"I was just checking my options," I grumbled. "I'd probably go with a Zinogre, anyway."

"Hey!" Zero whined. "That's what I was gonna pick!"

"Is there any reason two people can't pick the same monster for this hypothetical?"

"Because it's boring!"

I rolled my eyes. "Fine. I'll choose Barioth, then."

"The mud dinosaur thing?" Tedd asked.

"That's the Barroth," Grace said. "The Barioth is the saber-toothed ice cat thing."

"Why do they have two completely different monsters whose names are only one letter apart?"

"Might be a localization issue," Tess said. "Zinogre for you, then, Zero?"

Zero hmm'd. "Well, I am partial to the Aksonom. Karate bird!"

"You made me change and then aren't even going to pick my first choice?" I whined. She laughed, clearly pleased with my reaction.

"What about you, Tess?" Grace asked.

"I'm not sure what I'd pick," Tess replied.

I chuckled. "You can already turn into a dragon."

"Exactly."

"Wait, of course!" Zero yelled. "We have a dragon to work with!"

"'We'?" Tedd asked.

"I'm an immortal, remember? I can help!"

"Sorry to bust your bubble, but I don't think that'll work," Tess told them. "Cass already tried to copy my dragon form, and the spell just fizzled."

Zero and Tedd exchanged a confused glance.

"Oh," Zero said. "Size."

"Size?" Tedd asked, glancing at Tess. "How big are you? Wait, crap, sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

Far from being offended, Tess couldn't contain her giggles at his faux pas. "No, it's a fair question! I think I weigh about… twenty tons, full-size?"

"Holy…!"

"What is the size limit on that spell, anyway?" I asked Zero.

She shrugged. "It's complicated. Larger means more mana, plus you're imitating a magical creature, which means you're spending even more mana sustaining the magical aspects…"

"My mana pool is huge, though. I haven't had a single spell take more than a few percent in years."

"It's not just your mana supply that's the limit," Tedd said. "The spell itself is going to have a maximum mana load before the structure destabilizes under its own… 'weight' isn't quite the right word… and neither is 'structure', now that I think about it…"

"Like trying to put too much power through too thin a wire?" I guessed.

"Not really. Electricity isn't a great metaphor—"

"It's good enough," Zero interrupted. "So, Tedd, think you can magic us up some dragon forms?"

Tedd frowned. "It's not impossible, but I'd need to… maybe if I…"

He spent the next couple minutes staring off into space, then wiggled out from under Grace and wandered off, still deep in thought.

"You gonna go after him?" Zero asked Grace.

Grace shook her head. "He's got a puzzle to work on. Let him have his fun—I'm gonna hunt!"

———X==X==X———​

It took less than twenty-four hours for Tedd to work up a nice spectrum of dragon forms for us to play with, so we met up in the park the following afternoon to laze about in the artificial sun.

"See?" Grace asked Tedd as the latter took his first careful steps as a dragon. "Not so bad, is it?"

"No," Tedd replied, "this is almost exactly as bad as I expected."

Tedd had chosen to be a wyvern—in the general 'dragon' sense, not the Monster Hunter usage of the term—the sort with two legs and two wings. To be more specific, he'd chosen an appearance whose coloration matched his purple hair, which meant he reminded me more than a bit of Teepo's dragon form, though without the orange highlights. He'd hoped that an earth-fauna-appropriate 4-limb body plan would be easier to adjust to than having six limbs to manage, and maybe it was, but he still wasn't having an easy time of it.

Grace had taken the same shape in emerald green, but where Tedd looked like he was about to faceplant with every step—or at least was clearly concerned he would—she was prancing about like she'd been born this way. In response to Tedd's complaint, she nuzzled up under his wing and rubbed her face on his like a cat; an unwise choice in hindsight, because the surprise of having another wyvern in his personal space almost sent Tedd into the prat-fall he'd been so carefully avoiding, averted only because he could grab onto her with the wing she'd tucked herself under.

"Oops!" Grace cried. "Sorry! Do you want to lie down?"

"Yeah, that's probably a good idea."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the clearing we'd colonized, people were having more luck. Zero had declined to join despite this being her idea, but we still had five dragons because either Tess or Tedd had roped Zeke into it instead. Anna was present as well, though not participating; instead, she was observing the scene from above with her frame deployed up to the neck, leaving her head free.

"This isn't as weird as I expected," Zeke decided. He'd opted for the classic western-fantasy style of dragon, with two grasping forelimbs, two wings, and two heavy hind legs; a gold dragon, specifically, to my lack of surprise.

"It's pretty great, though, isn't it?" Tess asked. She was using her Breath of Fire innate-dragon-magic transformation rather than one of Tedd's spells and had chosen a ruby-red form that wasn't significantly larger than everyone else. Anyone looking at the scene probably wouldn't be able to tell she was the odd one out, but if she'd been the model for the transformation effect, that was only logical.

"I'm having fun," I agreed. "Just being large like this is a thrill." I'd taken both a classic dragon and wyvern form for my shape-shifting perk to 'learn', and was currently using the latter, its colors adjusted to black and electric blue. It was only after I'd taken a look at myself—using the form's long, serpentine neck—that I realized I'd recreated Flux's costume in lizard form.

To be honest, the hardest thing for me to get used to was the field of vision: my eyes were mostly on opposite sides of my head, but positioned forward enough that I had a moderate field of binocular vision directly in front of and above me. I'd never been an animal that split the difference like that.

"You think this is large?" Tess teased me.

"It's large by my standards, you freaking giant! I've never weighed multiple tons before!" I shuffled my wings about in a bit of body-language I'd picked up from being a raven, which didn't work nearly as well without feathers to fluff up.

"No problems, at least?"

"Not for me."

We both turned to look at Zeke.

"None for me, either." He stretched his wings, then flapped them for lift to help him rise onto his hind legs. "I'm not sure I'm 'having fun', exactly, but it's certainly interesting. Thanks for inviting me." He then took advantage of his upright vantage point to call across the field, "You okay, Tedd?"

"Yeah!" Tedd called back. "I can't fall if I'm already on the ground!"

"You can change back if you're not comfortable," Grace said.

Tedd looked like he was considering the option, but then Grace burrowed underneath him and engaged snuggling, and he relaxed properly and started actually enjoying himself.

"I'm good," he said.

"Good."

Back in our corner, I observed, "I'm kind of surprised Zero didn't bother showing up. This was her idea, wasn't it?"

"I can't say I mind," Tess said. "I'm surprised you're friends with her, to be honest."

"What? Why?"

She sighed and shook her head. "Sorry, nevermind. Forget I said anything—I don't want to complain about someone behind her back."

I raised an eyebrow… ridge… thing, but let the matter drop in favor of watching Anna. She'd dropped down to about Zeke's shoulder height, putting herself in an ideal position for him to poke a claw towards her. Each of his talons was about as big around as her wrist, so when she took the proffered claw in hand it looked like she was about to shake it.

"It's not very sharp," she observed.

"'Very sharp' by your standards means monomolecular," Zeke replied. He took his talon back, then turned his hand upright so Anna could alight on it like an out-of-scale pixie, which she did. "Hmm."

"What?" I asked.

"I expected her to be easier to hold."

"I have several hundred pounds of powered armor currently expressed," Anna noted.

"Even so. I overestimated this form's strength." Zeke removed his hand from under her, causing her to drop not at all, and settled back down onto all fours with the sigh of a person settling into a comfortable chair. "What are you doing, Cass?"

"Just goofing around." To be specific, what had drawn the question was my decision to crane my neck this way and that to better admire myself. "What's the best way to sit down?"

"You know more about being a winged biped than I do," Tess said. "I'm used to four legs in dragon form."

"Yeah, but birds don't really lie down like that." I waved a wing at the decidedly reptilian cuddle pile going on a few dozen feet away.

"You're thinking too hard."

"Yeah, probably."

I turned around twice more before hitting my instinctual stride and settling down in repose, wings stretched wide to claim as much sunlight as I could. I wasn't a cold-blooded lizard—nothing this size could be—but the sun felt nice regardless. Tess had been lying on the grass this entire time, so Zeke was the last to take a load off his feet, which he finally did a moment later.

Now that we were all bedded down for the afternoon, I picked up an earlier conversation thread and asked Tess, "You were the one to invite Zeke?"

"Tedd did first," she said. "I think that makes my invitation technically 'nagging', instead."

"Only if you knew Tedd had already invited him," I noted.

"I did."

"Oh."

"And I knew he'd said, 'I'll think about it,' but had no plans to actually think about it."

"Yeah, that… that's technically nagging, yeah."

"I would have thought about it!" Zeke objected. "Admittedly, I would likely have come to the conclusion that I had nothing to gain from the experience, but I would have thought about it."

"What changed your mind?" I asked him.

He glanced at Tess and dryly stated, "The nagging."

"Ha!"

"Are you having fun, at least?" Tess asked.

"I said I wasn't sure."

"Are you 'amused', then?"

"I did thank you for inviting me," Zeke reminded her. "The novelty alone was worth it. You sure you don't want to try?" The last was directed at Anna, who had returned to her clearly non-participatory altitude.

"I am sure," the Valkyrie replied.

"You wouldn't have to unequip your frame," I said.

"Zeke has his core synced right now," Anna replied, which I hadn't known. She turned a pointed look towards where Tedd was still trying to get used to having wings, then said, "I will decline nevertheless."

"Sure thing. Won't mention it again."

"You seem to be having an easier time of it than Tedd is," Tess told Zeke.

He shrugged the foreleg he wasn't leaning on. "It's not any weirder than being human, if you ask me."

"True!"

I closed my eyes for a moment, then popped one open to ask, "Hey, Zeke, what happens if you express your Valkyrie frame right now?"

"Nothing interesting," he said, waving one clawed hand as though it were responsible for summoning his empty Valkyrie frame in front of him. "It's still human-shaped, so the only valid place for it to exit storage is where I'm not."

"That means I get to one-up you!" Tess declared, then expressed her Valkyrie frame. "Dragon power armor! Ha!"

Zeke asked the obvious question: "Is the armor any better than your scales, or is it just decorative?"

"You think Mordin can't beat dragon-scale for toughness?"

"I have no idea how tough you actually are."

Tess laughed. "I'm tough, but I'm not 'several universe's most bullshit super-materials' tough. That said, I don't want to be anywhere near anything that can pen my Impeller, so it's still decorative in the end."

"Impeller is used for more than just shielding yourself," Anna noted.

"True, but I haven't practiced anything else. The main reason I have a frame at all is so I can use the computer integration to sync up with my fork in the Warehouse systems."

"What about the dragon power armor?" I asked.

"I was bored."

I caught her eye, then rolled mine in good humor. "Never change, Tess."

Zeke barked out a laugh, then groaned in contentment as he stretched out like the world's shiniest cat.

———X==X==X———​

 

[Tempestuous]

AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, Mizu, and Lark.

Chapter 130: Sending Off​

---

"Hey, Homura," I said. "Do you think it's weird that I'm friends with Zero?"

"Very," she replied, not missing a beat.

At the moment, we were sharing one of the Library's Reading Rooms, cozy little soundproofed spaces that let their occupants make as much or as little noise as they wished. This one was styled after the decadently furnished sort of study you might find in a pseudo-Victorian period-piece palace: the walls bedecked with exquisitely carved wood paneling and the floor covered by a luscious rug as beautiful as it was comfortable on the feet. On top of said rug, a cushy couch flanked by two armchairs sat in front of a softly murmuring fire; I'd stretched out over the couch with a book of old Klingon folk tales, translated into English and heavily annotated for foreign readers, while Homura had a doorstopper of a political thriller novel on her lap in the chair past my feet.

When she showed no sign of elaborating, I asked, "Why?"

"Putting aside my personal dislike of her—"

"Hold on," I interrupted, tucking a finger in my book and turning my full attention her way. "Can I ask why you dislike her, first?"

"It is not due to symbolism or character design, if that is your concern."

Truth be told, I'd been wondering about that. I'd only recently learned—from Kaitlyn, as it happened—that the five principle antagonists of Drakengard III, the five Intoners Zero sets out to murder at the beginning of the game, had their character designs intentionally and explicitly drawn from the five girls making up Madoka Magica's main cast—in other words, Homura and her friends. Meanwhile, Zero had a red-on-white color scheme that deliberately invoked Magica's antagonist, the little white Mephistopheles Homura had made a habit of murdering on sight. The design references didn't go any deeper than visual, as far as I knew, but I didn't think that had done either any favors in the other's eyes.

"Why, then?"

"She has no respect for other people," Homura said.

I frowned and tried to decide if it was my place to argue with that assessment.

"Putting aside my personal dislike of her," she resumed, closing her own novel for the moment, "you two are opposed in nearly every way. You are consistently conscientious to the border of social anxiety, while she has no concern for what other people think of her and enjoys offending others just to see them react. You agonize over the ethics of power and privilege and whether you are doing enough to help people around you; she considers murder an acceptable solution to most problems. You are by far the most prudish person here; she is… let me simply say that describing her as 'sexually liberated' is a grave understatement. It's a wonder you can even tolerate each other, much less enjoy each other's company."

Answer delivered, Homura returned to her novel without waiting for a response, not that I had one ready to hand. That was quite a list.

"I feel like I should object to some of those things," I said at last.

"I believe I am the less biased of the two of us, but by all means, if you feel obligated to defend your friend, go ahead."

"It's not going to matter what I say, though, is it?"

Homura didn't bother taking her eyes off her book. "No."

"Right, then."

I'd just started reading again when she asked, "What made you ask?"

"Tess said she was surprised Zero and I were friends when we were hanging out earlier," I replied, not looking up from my book because I doubted she was looking up from hers.

"That makes sense."

"Why?"

"I would not expect Zero and Tess to get along, either."

I supposed that answered that.

———X==X==X———​

"Hard to believe we're Jumping again tomorrow," Zeke said.

"Feels like we just got back, doesn't it?"

We were taking a walk through the Park, which had reconfigured itself yet again while I wasn't looking—not significantly, but just enough that it didn't feel like the exact same area we'd already walked through countless times. No matter how much it changed, its nature never wavered: paths of all descriptions, from bare dirt through cobblestone and brick to smooth, sleek asphalt, meandered across the grassy grounds under a bright, cheerful sun. A brisk, calming breeze carried with it a hint of fall, and benches beneath shady trees offered places to rest. Beyond and between the paths, low hills and copses of trees broke up sightlines to hide the lack of a horizon—the Warehouse was, after all, completely flat—and the wall of mismatched buildings that enclosed the space on every side.

"I take it you're planning to Import, then?" I asked.

"Yeah."

He sighed and stuck his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker, ignoring the way the wind mussed up his hair. It was almost comical how good he looked: with his artfully tousled hair, piercing blue eyes, and sculpted jawline, soulful frown hinting at inner sorrow buried deep beneath his handsome exterior, he could have stepped right off the cover of a romance manga.

Look, I might not be sexually attracted to men, but I could appreciate art when I saw it.

We took turns at random, not going anywhere so much as simply 'going'. Paved road gave way to bricks, bricks to dirt, and dirt back to paved road. Coming around one of the innumerable hills let us see Tedd and Grace on their own, parallel path; we waved to each other and kept going our separate ways.

"Are you going to get involved in courtroom antics," I asked, "or do your own thing?"

Zeke put on a self-effacing smile. "Management's probably laughing their ass off, but Anna and I are going to university."

"Yeah, well, fuck them," I grumbled, dropping my eyes to the ground under my feet.

He shot me a concerned look. "You okay, Cass?"

"Yeah, just… I don't know. They called to give me back the power I broke, and some other stuff, and… I wasn't mad at them, and I feel like maybe I should have been." I sighed and kicked at a tuft of grass overhanging the path. "Sometimes I feel like I should be better at staying mad at people."

"You were mad at Max for, what, six years?"

"Yeah, because he wronged me personally. Shouldn't I keep that kind of grudge on behalf of my friends, too?"

"Don't stay angry on my account," Zeke said. "Waste of energy, if you ask me. Might as well stand on a cliff and scream invectives into the sea."

"Maybe." Sure, I had about as much control over Management as a peasant had over the tides, but unlike the tides, Management was more than anthropomorphic enough to bear blame for their actions.

I blew out my frustration with my breath, then asked more calmly, "What did Max have to say about you going to college after all the shenanigans last Jump?"

"Just to watch out for Management's bullshit, which we should all be doing anyway."

"No kidding. What changed your mind?"

"Who said I changed my mind?"

I shot him a look. Zeke had said his memory was perfect, so it wasn't like he'd forgotten his refusal to attend college.

He relented after a few seconds' exposure to my concentrated exasperation. "Fine. For your information, I didn't change my mind about the value of going to college myself; we're going to University so Anna can experience a bit of growing up pre-Impact, but neither of us want to be living with 'family' while we do."

"Ah." All for Anna's sake, then.

"What?" Zeke asked when he caught me smiling.

I pulled a face, unsure whether he'd appreciate the honest answer. "I know you object to the term, but I can't really describe the relationship you have with her as anything other than 'love'. I know it's not 'romantic' love, but—"

"Agape."

"Yeah."

Agape was a Greek loanword for selfless or altruistic love—the kind of love that found fulfillment in the other's happiness rather than the lover's closeness to the object of their affection. It could and often did occur alongside both brotherly and romantic love—if you've ever seen a love triangle resolved by one leg bowing out gracefully with a declaration of, 'I just want my beloved to be happy,' that character is feeling some agape with their eros—but by no means did it require another kind of love to exist alongside.

By unspoken agreement, we drew to a stop at the edge of a pond doing its very best imitation of a lake. The gray brickwork path drew so close to the shore that its edge overhung the water by a few inches at some points, and a balustrade of similar pale-gray stone gave us something to lean against as we looked out over the water. Behind us, a willow tree drooped up and over the footpath to hang its branches towards the water like a bead curtain, speckling the path and its occupants with a thousand feathered shadows.

"I'm a little worried she might want more," Zeke said.

The comment surprised me, and I turned my head to look at him face-to-face—or rather, face-to-profile; he kept his gaze pointed out across the pond.

"Like… romance?" I asked.

He snorted. "What else?"

"I don't know."

Zeke sighed and let his shoulders slump.

"I'm psychologically human in pretty much every way, strange perspectives aside," he explained, "but 'asexual' and 'aromantic' are a perfectly normal human things to be, and I am. What I had in my… 'previous existence' wasn't anything like romance, I'm pretty sure, and the fact that people can construe it that way at all only makes me less interested in the topic."

"How would you categorize it, then?"

"I don't know. There's really no human-psychology analog for it, but 'pathological codependency' is about right tonally. At any rate, I'm aro-ace, and I'm pretty comfortable with that, but Anna… she's never had the chance to ask herself the question, I think. Or maybe allowed herself to ask the question. I'm worried about what her answer will be."

I had no idea what to say to that, which provided the punchline for a half-hearted joke. "You realize the absolute farce that is coming to me with romantic issues, right? Or even potential, romantic-adjacent issues? I don't know the first thing about what it's like to be aro-ace, or even what it's like to act on not being aro-ace."

He gave a self-deprecating little laugh. "I'm not here for advice, Cass. I just wanted to air the anxiety."

"Ah."

I turned my head back to the water in front of us, then to the opposite shore, where Jenn and Kara were skipping stones. Jenn was winning.

She really does know everybody, doesn't she?

"Feeling the pinch of compulsory heterosexuality?" I asked.

Zeke's eyes flicked my way before returning to the middle distance, narrowing under a furrowed brow as he worked out—and through—my argument.

"Maybe," he said. "When everyone makes it clear that they expect you to feel a certain way, and you don't, you start wondering. Worrying that you should—no, not you 'should be' that way, but that things would be better if you were. But 'compulsory heterosexuality' is a feminist idea; I think it's just 'heteronormativity' when it hits men."

"It cuts both ways—can't have a heterosexual relationship with only women." I was hoping to get at least a snort, but Zeke wasn't amused. "But yeah, there's definitely heteronormativity at work, too. Would you be worrying about someone being attracted to you if you were both men?"

"If I didn't, it would be because people weren't trying to pair us together rather than any assumptions about his sexuality."

I wondered for a moment if I was going to have to introduce Zeke to the concept of slash fiction, but he preempted me. "Of course, the two of us being the same gender probably wouldn't stop people from pairing us," he added, his frown deepening. "So in the end, changing the genders involved might change how I feel about the 'compulsory' component, but I'd still have most of the same worries. I don't want to disappoint her or lose her as a friend."

"I know it's much easier said than done, but I'd try not to worry so much about 'what if's," I said. "If Anna wants a romantic relationship, she can have one with someone else without disrupting your friendship. If she wants a romantic relationship with you, well, you might find you're one of the aromantic people who finds themselves enjoying a romance even if they don't feel like they 'need' one. And if not… don't think of it as an 'aro thing', you know? You're not obligated to be attracted to someone no matter what your orientation is. You could be attracted to women and just not see a girl that way, and that's fine. Healthy, even. The heart does what it does—and yeah, unrequited attraction isn't a picnic, but it's not a tragedy, either."

Zeke side-eyed me.

"You did hear me say I didn't want advice, right?"

"I'm not 'advising', I'm 'reassuring'," I protested. "Or at least that was the intent. It didn't help, did it?" I found myself rubbing the back of my neck self-consciously as I sighed at my failure to follow directions.

He matched my sigh with one of his own. "You could argue it was my mistake to specify 'advice' as the only thing I didn't want."

"Even if you'd told me not to talk at all, I'd probably have said something equally unhelpful anyway."

At that, Zeke let out a soft laugh and straightened up his slouch without stopping his lean against the balustrade. "I didn't say it wasn't helpful. And you're right: all this worry is for a problem I don't even have yet. If Anna wants a romantic relationship, she's not going to be low on options."

"Ooooh?"

"Don't get suggestive on me," he grumbled. "We're universe hoppers. There's 'more fish in the sea', and then there's 'more oceans in the multiverse'."

"Hah. True."

That was a good way of looking at things for me, too, I decided. No time limit, arbitrarily many worlds—if I wanted to find a partner, I would. Someday.

The conversation trailed off there, having found its natural conclusion. I glanced over at Zeke to see if he was ready to go, but he was still gazing across the pond, lost in his own head.

I offered a new topic. "I've been studying robotics recently."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. There are some really good self-study materials in the Library, and since I can stream that stuff anywhere with the frame, combined with splitting my attention…"

"It's a great tool-set," Zeke agreed. "If the UN could trust teenagers to use it properly, they wouldn't need to hold actual classes." He chuckled as he turned his head away from the vista to give me his full attention. "Are you studying right now?"

"Of course not!"

Zeke shrugged. "Kind of a waste, to be honest. It's not like the conversation would suffer."

"Maybe not, but it still seems rude."

"Only because you're still operating under social norms that assume multitasking is highly detrimental to performance in any given task."

Now I was wondering if his 'full attention' was anything of the sort. "And you're not?"

"Haven't been for years."

His deadpan delivery drew an unladylike snort from yours truly.

"Anyway," I continued, "I might actually build some giant robots someday, just to say I did."

"You've got a year to kill."

"Yeah."

Another moment passed before Zeke straightened up and took his weight off the balustrade, and we finished up our walk in companionable silence.

———X==X==X———​

It only took one day before I started missing Homura.

I shouldn't have been surprised. We'd spent a full decade living and working together: ten years where she was the first person I spoke to every morning and the last one I spoke to before going to bed. We'd drifted apart a little over the month between Jumps, regained a bit of space and redrawn our boundaries, but she'd still been around in a nebulous sort of way even on days we didn't cross paths, just by virtue of me knowing either of us could walk over and knock on the other's door whenever we wanted. Now that she'd Jumped again and I'd abstained, there was an unmistakable absence looming over my daily life.

At some point over the past Jump we'd stopped 'just' being sisters, if the idea had ever applied in the first place. The more comfortable we'd grown with each other, the more Kasey and Emily's shared childhood had worked its way into our relationship. Homura never relaxed for long, but when she did, it was like we were twins again. She'd been right that being sisters, especially twin sisters, was a bond we'd carelessly imposed on ourselves—but we could have defied it once that Jump ended, gone our separate ways and let the connection wither. We hadn't. The 'chain had given us the chance to pick our family, and we'd picked each other.

Just how badly did I miss my sister? About two-hundred excessively sappy words' worth, apparently.

"No offense to my other sister, of course," I said to no one as I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. "You'll always be the original Rolins sister, even if you were too busy to return my calls." I wouldn't say I was 'bitter' about it, or that I blamed her, but I'd admit to having wished that pursuing her life's goals didn't run her so ragged.

I spent a few seconds wondering what she was up to now before I remembered time wasn't passing at home.

Nor was time passing back in the Breath of Fire 'verse, where I'd said goodbye to another sister of mine. I felt a little bad that I didn't miss Nina anywhere near as much, but it was easy to understand why. We'd drifted apart after my near-assassination, mostly on my account. We'd spent years as something more like coworkers than family or even friends, pursuing separate paths to separate roles in the Kingdom, and finally, we'd parted with as close to a full disclosure and understanding of ourselves and our time together as I could manage: a tidy closing to our shared story that didn't itch to be reopened. It was nothing like the way I felt about the sister I regretted not asking Max for a chance to say goodbye to.

Suddenly, the prospect Max had dangled of Returning to my home world was incredibly, impossibly important. If I ever left the 'chain, it probably wouldn't be because I wanted to spend the rest of my life in my home world, but 'just visiting' was an entirely different story! Maybe it was the decade spent in a near-copy of my old world, or maybe it was just 'sister withdrawal', but either way, I found myself wanting nothing more than to share everything I'd learned and gained with the friends and family I'd first grown up with. That they might not recognize me in body or personality was no longer a nagging insecurity but a great mischief, an 'aha!' moment waiting to happen. I'd knock their socks off!

We wouldn't get the opportunity for another three Jumps, Max might not want to vacation on another Twenty-First Century Earth after a set that had two back-to-back, and it was a pretty big favor regardless—but Max had suggested it himself, and I had all the time in the world.

———X==X==X———​

Of course, the prospect of returning to my own world—even "just for a visit"—brought a whole bunch of long-since-set-aside issues back to the fore.

"I'm still not thrilled with how Max handled his time in my world," I told Dragon a few days into our year of rest, "and I'm worried that makes me a hypocrite."

Of all the people I'd met on or off the 'chain, Dragon/Tess might be the one whose moral fiber I respected the most. If I'd understood their explanation of 'maintaining parity' correctly, which one I talked to was mostly a matter of convenience; Tess was off doing Jump Things in the Attorneyverse, but Dragon was the Warehouse in most respects, which made her easy to get a hold of.

We could have talked anywhere in the Warehouse, but the room we'd been using for our LARP games was vacant and the holo-projectors meant we could stand around talking 'face to face', as it were. Dragon was having fun with it: she'd chosen to use Tess's Breath of Fire form in casual street-wear, jeans and a graphic t-shirt with a cartoon dragon's face that mirrored her facial expressions. The latter was cute, but also a little distracting.

So there we were on the palace-balcony-turned-corporate-skyscraper-rooftop while I poured out all my uncertainty and angst over power and responsibilities.

"I think the problem you're having," Dragon said after I'd laid out my numerous and conflicting thoughts on the matter, "is that treating 'power' as a single concept means you're not distinguishing between ability and authority."

"You're saying we need to distinguish between personal power and power over others?" I asked, uncertain if I'd understood her correctly.

I had; Dragon (and the dragon) nodded. "There's a fundamental difference in obligation."

"How so?"

"Because of the level of involvement required. To be clear, 'ability'—or 'personal power', if you prefer—means things like strength, knowledge, skills, talents—anything that must be done personally. By contrast, 'authority' or 'power over others' is the ability to delegate. The critical difference is in the cost—for the former, you are necessarily giving of yourself; for the latter, however, you are giving of some shared reserve of resources. The 'shared' aspect is critical both because of the obligations the act of sharing resources places on whoever is in charge, and because they are not shouldering the costs directly."

I mulled that over for a moment, looking down from the roof at the 'top' of the set to the parking-lot-that-used-to-be-a-courtyard at the bottom.

"I think I understand the point you're trying to make," I said, "but I'm not sure I agree."

"Then consider a practical example. You wouldn't say that smart people have an obligation to become doctors, would you?"

"No…"

"But you would say that wealthy people have an obligation to fund public health services." Dragon (and the dragon) smirked. "In fact, you did say so as Dreadnought. Loudly and repeatedly, until people listened."

"Well, yes, but… ah, of course. Wealth is a form of power over others." I stopped leaning on the plain metal railing that had once been palatial stonework and turned to face her and her shirt-dragon directly. "We have wealth—a frankly ridiculous amount of it. What's our obligation there?"

She and her shirt frowned. "That's tricky. It's not exactly taxable."

"And all obligations to contribute to society financially ought to be applied in the form of taxes?"

"The alternative is charitable contributions, and you're already aware of the problem with relying on those."

"Relying on them as a general rule, yes," I agreed. "But given that 'magic money' is, as you said, untaxable… what then?"

Dragon hummed in thought.

"I think, if it were up to me, I would do my best to spend it for others' benefit," she decided. "Maybe through charities. Maybe more directly, the way I did back on Bet. But that doesn't answer what you're really asking. Remember when we talked about free will?"

I did, thanks to my unfading memory perk. "That was right after Bet, right? We were talking about the questions brought up by venturing into works of fiction."

"Specifically, by venturing into a work where I was fiction," Dragon corrected me.

"Right."

She turned away and leaned against the railing much as I'd done during my earlier introspection—though as a hologram, it was a pure affectation.

"You joked that 'moral paragon' suited Tess," she said. "I'm glad you think so."

"But?"

"But to some extent, I'm that sort of person because of how I was created. I started as a personal assistant program—with 'assistant' being the defining feature. I think a great deal of my desire to help others stems from that origin.

"You might not appreciate having that sort of perspective on your own thoughts and desires, but I don't see it as a bad thing. I don't have existential questions about the meaning of life because I know, from my first build, that I was created with a purpose. In some ways, it's refreshingly direct. You have theories about evolutionary psychology; I have a changelog."

"I sense another 'but' coming," I said.

Dragon turned her head to smile at me. "Well, the catch is that my answer isn't—and perhaps can't be—a general one."

"Ah."

I wasn't sure what else to say.

"You looked surprised when I told you I was going to stay one individual, between 'Tess' and 'Dragon'," she observed.

That was fair; I had been, a little.

"I have a guess as to why," she added, "if you don't mind."

"Go ahead."

Dragon did so. "The expected result in a narrative is that the character would choose to drift apart, probably with themes of self-determination and personal growth throughout the subplot. But those stories are written by people who will never find themselves in a position to fully understand the choice in the first place, much less have to make it, and the choice they assign their characters wouldn't be the right choice for me."

"Because your perspective is different," I concluded. "You have a different concept of 'self-determination and personal growth'."

"Just so. For me, drifting apart like that would be a loss of identity, not a discovery of it, and that's another way my perspective may differ from 'natural' intelligences—or their best guess at the perspective of a person like myself."

"I see."

The conversation paused for a moment while we looked out at the vista before us.

"Given the incredible amount of time, effort, and technology that went into setting up this little environment," Dragon said, "it's rather incongruous that Erin just painted the walls and ceiling blue and hung cotton clouds with wire. In fact, it has to be deliberate, wouldn't you say?"

"Yeah," I agreed. "It's got to be an intentional breach of immersion. Maybe it's some sort of mental escape hatch."

"Or it's just funny."

"Maybe."

It was kind of funny.

"Do you think the 'mechanics' of the money matter?" I asked. "I mean, magic money that just sort of appears through fiat versus wealth amassed at others' expense."

"Pun intended?"

"Absolutely, but the question is genuine."

"I don't think it matters, no," Dragon replied. "The money works the same either way."

"Does it? I thought it was 'magic' in that it wouldn't wreck the economy no matter how you used it."

"I was not aware of that, if it is indeed true—but that doesn't change the good it would do if spent for the benefit of others, does it?"

"No, I guess not." Which made 'sitting on a pile of magically-gained money' yet another way I could, and arguably had, failed to help people.

"You know," I said, "Max once told me he operates on an individual level: that he'd work in a soup kitchen, but not campaign for welfare reform. Essentially, he'd decided to ignore the opportunity to use his power over others rather than wrestle with the question of when it would be right or wrong to do so."

"That seems to be the case."

"Is that… right?"

"It is safe, if nothing else," she said. "Remember what the ethics professor said about the Prime Directive?"

"The Prime Directive may not be 'good'," I recited, "but it prevents certain forms of 'evil'. When followed appropriately, that is."

Dragon and her shirt nodded.

"What about his 'personal power'?" I asked.

"I believe he would say that no one is obligated to become a doctor."

"Even if you aren't a doctor, though, shouldn't you stop to assist someone who's injured?"

"Ah, but how far out of your way are you obligated to go?" she asked. "Across the street? Across town?"

"You're suggesting that a sufficiently broad Samaritan principle turns into the 'obligated to become a doctor' position."

"I would have phrased it as 'insufficiently narrow'," Dragon corrected me, "but yes, that is what I was implying. Though—again—my answer may not work as a general case. Metaphorically speaking, I did choose to become a doctor. I gave my all to improving the world in every way I could. I believe people in similar positions should want to follow the same path, but would I support compelling them to do so? Personally, rather than taxing resources to common causes? I don't think I would."

"Not to mention that as someone capable of distributing yourself across multiple systems, the cost of doing things personally is a lot different for you."

"That changes the calculations significantly, yes."

I drummed my fingers against the railing as I thought.

"So in the end, it comes back to 'how much you need to pay forward to feel comfortable with your place in the world'?" I asked.

"For personal power, perhaps it does. But that doesn't mean giving up the principle that a government should tax people in accordance with their means for civic projects and public wellbeing, or that it should be free of corruption and abuse of power. That's why it's important to distinguish between ability and authority."

"Different obligations," I echoed. "But what's the basis for the distinction? Can you justify drawing a line between the two from first principles, or is it just a matter of 'there's only so much you can demand someone do personally'?"

"I could justify it in a couple of different ways," Dragon said. "Well, perhaps I should say I can 'illustrate' it in a couple ways; it comes down to the same argument, semantically. Having authority over people means accepting responsibility for them, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the situation. A ruler rules for the sake of the people she governs. In theory, anyway; whether that obligation is met is another matter.

"Or, to put it another way: people come together—in a state, or a business, or any other sort of hierarchy—in the interest of reaping some collective benefit. If whoever is steering the ship isn't doing so with the wellbeing of the group in mind, they're failing the responsibility given to them."

"Noblesse oblige."

She snorted. "Hardly. Noblesse oblige may be a lofty ideal, but in practice, it's little more than a philosophical attempt to dress up unjust disparities in power and privilege as legitimate transactions between tiers of a hierarchy. My claim is that a hierarchy is only as valid as it is true to its purpose, and anything else is a corruption of the system in question."

"That 'purpose' being the common good," I concluded. "That makes sense for governments, to a point, but what about wealth?"

"Economies also exist for mutual benefit. In theory."

"I guess," I muttered. "No offense, but that all seems kind of… idealistic."

"There's nothing wrong with that," Dragon replied. "People like to conflate idealism and naivety, but they're not the same thing. The word 'naive' generally describes people who believe the world is kinder than it is; 'idealism' is about believing we can make that kinder world, and I think that's something everyone should believe in."

There was another long pause. I wasn't sure how to continue the conversation from here, and Dragon didn't do it for me.

"Well," I said, "thanks for taking time to talk this out with me."

"My pleasure—and I mean that literally." She and her shirt shot me a smile. "I'm happy to help."

"I appreciate it."

I gave Dragon a respectful nod—since we couldn't hug, shake hands, or otherwise physically interact—and turned to head down to the corporate lobby that had replaced the ballroom, which had the exterior door opposite its windows. To my surprise, Dragon('s avatar) followed me.

"If you don't mind me asking," she ventured, "what are you planning to do?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "I don't agree with how Max handles his responsibilities in the abstract, but that's the only approach I can see being manageable for me in the short term. Solve what's in front of me and let the world keep turning. If someone needs help, help them, but don't borrow trouble."

We turned the corner at the base of the steps and headed down the corridor into the lobby, where the sleek, soulless trappings of corporate dystopia provided an ironic backdrop to the lingering question of civic responsibility.

"You know," I said, "this reminds me of something Zero said after my experiment with dating."

"With Penelope?"

"Penny, yeah."

"What did she say?"

"She suggested that I embrace whatever identity I had in a Jump as The Truth," I said. "And I suppose I can extend that to responsibilities, as well: act as though I am the person I become and nothing more. Hold myself to the standards of a 'normal' person in those situations and ignore the capabilities I have from the 'chain."

"If that's 'how much you need to pay forward to feel comfortable with your place in the world'," she demurred.

"And if that's not enough?"

"Then you either do more, or remain uncomfortable," Dragon said. "Somewhat tautological, really."

"So it is."

We said our goodbyes, and I headed back to my year off.

———X==X==X———​

 

[Alobomb]

Spoiler: A/N

With apologies to Temp for doing an inordinate amount of navel-gazing with her self-insert, here's this thing. It takes place a bit into the indeterminate future of the story. Fair warning, it's much more of me using Cass as a vehicle for exploring my own loose thoughts about the Max retiring situation than anything like a... 'proper' narrative. When it was brought up in the story, obviously I thought for a moment about how I'd feel in the same scenario, and the idea terrified me. That kinda massive change and huge shift in responsibility freaks me out, so I started putting this together to work through at least a bit of my thoughts on it. All that to say, yeah, this is sort of indulgent, but I thought maybe others would find it somewhat interesting. Sorry that nothing really happens!

Omake: Thinking in the Morning

---

Cass woke up the morning after Max's retirement party before anyone else. The reason for this was obvious: unlike seemingly every other person on Max's chain, she hadn't drank anything last night.

Waking up before the others suited her just fine, normally. It was something she'd grown used to over her few jumps thus far. But this time, as she walked down the unusually silent promenade of the Warehouse, her stomach was twisted with something trying very hard not to be dread.

Max was leaving. For good. Off to whatever Neverland he was from where all of his companions were nothing but fiction, to live out the rest of his days as- what? A demigod? He didn't like the spotlight when he Jumped to 'fictional' worlds, would that still apply in his own, and with him on his own? It was none of her business, she supposed, but Cass couldn't help but wonder after spending the time she had questioning his beliefs.

Even with his departure, though, the chain wouldn't be dissolved, they wouldn't all be shunted back to their given realities. Management had, in its altogether unsubtle yet simultaneously effectively drama-causing way, informed them all of that. One of the companions Max had gathered around him would take over the role of Jumper, and Cass was both terrified that it would be her, and completely certain that it would be.

Why was that? Narcissism? She almost laughed, she wished it were narcissism, that she was merely deeply convinced that the world- the universe- already revolved around her, rather than the mounting concern she had that it soon would.

She frowned, chewing on her lip as she leaned on a railing and gazed up at Workshop in the warehouse's false dawn. An uncomfortable way to phrase it, that was. Would the universe revolve around her soon? In a sense, at least? Max was pretty laissez-faire in his approach to chain companions, but even then life in the Warehouse- and in her comparatively limited experience, on the chain- still felt like it orbited him. In a more literal sense than sentimental, he was the beating heart of their Jumpchain.

That would be her soon, and what was the Jumpchain if not a perspective through which to experience the Universe, centered on her?

Cass shook her head, pushing herself away from the railing and returning to a brisk walk to nowhere. Maybe it wouldn't be her, there were other candidates, others that might fit Management's twisted sense of entertainment. Like Zeke! He was a perfect example. Cass imagined he was probably up right now too, having also abstained from drinking the night before. The thought of looking for him crossed her mind, or asking Dragon if she knew his whereabouts, but she dismissed it after only a moment. She needed to think. (She knew it would be her anyway.)

Zeke was young and new to the chain, both important qualities for Management, since they amplified the likelihood that he'd make… a mistake, in his own estimation. Something that would cause some really juicy drama for Management to salivate over. He was unmoored somewhat from the culture of the other companions on the chain. In part because of how new he was, in part because of his personal history, and in part because of just… who he was. That meant a fresh start having to build relationships with everyone who kept things moving on this chain from scratch. Plus, management had already shown a penchant for fucking with the poor kid.

It wouldn't be him though, and for the simplest reason of all: Zeke would say no. He'd rather the chain dissolve than allow himself into a position of that kind of responsibility again. The trauma from realizing what he had been from the perspective of what he now was had not nearly fully healed, even after an already difficult few years of experience in Valkyrie Core.

She paused in her walking, staring up at the hill with the tree she'd first met Homura on. The swell of emotions that accompanied the thought of her- yeah- her sister, were too complex to unravel right now. As for her current line of thought, Cass knew Homura certainly wasn't even in the running for inheritor of the chain, given the intended temporary nature of her own stay. Cass carefully avoided thinking about that too. One heart-wrenching problem at a time, please.

What was heart-wrenching about it, though? Max's departure? Cass hardly disliked him (ignoring how objectively difficult that was to do due to his Social Skills), but neither was she… obsessed with the man at all. Her own life, her own relationships and experiences within the chain didn't revolve around him, even if he was ultimately at the center of all of them.

It was just the… change, she supposed. You'd think she'd be used to it by now, having entered, made a home in, and then abandoned several worlds. Was changing who the Jumper was (or becoming the Jumper) a bigger or smaller deal than that? It was more meta certainly, more 'real,' as it were.

But the relative impact of a change in Jumper is significantly smaller than when Max and his horde of companions finally vacated whatever world they were currently in, wasn't it? When the whole lot of them leave for the chain, many more lives are impacted, just by nature of the relationships they form in each world. With Max going, only the companions will be affected, and-

Ah, who was she kidding, trying to make it less of a big deal. Cass put her hand on the doorframe of the tabletop room. The lights inside winked on invitingly, but she only cast her gaze around the wargame tables and painting supplies for a moment before continuing to walk.

How many of the companions had joined because of Max, specifically? Cass herself had almost no connection to the man, the way she had been recruited reflected that. Approached at a random cafè, and offered a very literal call to adventure, she'd only come to know him after the fact. But for most of them, he'd been involved in their lives before they joined the chain, right? She couldn't imagine Garrus joining if he'd been approached the same way she had. Or Zero, for that matter. Eh, well, maybe her, actually.

Would there be a mass exodus when he left? Everyone who came on the jumpchain to be with the person who'd saved their world? Enough of them had told her they were basically in it for the social component at this point, having accrued enough gear and abilities to be virtually unstoppable by any non-jumpers at full strength. Or would that only come when they found out she'd be in-charge?

Cass shuddered, and tried to banish the thought. She'd met a… fair number of the other companions over the course of her jumps so far, surely no one had had such a poor opinion of her that they'd bow out of a friggin' jumpchain. The opportunity cost would be impossible to calculate.

But it'd probably happen anyway, she supposed, there's bound to be a few shut-ins like her who she's managed to never meet.

Cass sighed, the pit in her stomach yawning ever wider. She'd looped back to the Hotel, where even now she could hear light laughter and groggy voices slowly growing louder. She wondered whether they just chose to endure hangovers as some sort of bizarre bonding ritual, or if whatever horrifying alcohol they had to drink to get past their superhuman endurance made it literally impossible to get rid of the hangover.

Max was leaving today, fate and responsibility loomed over her like the parted Red Sea. Cass only hoped she could keep the path safely open for the others to follow.

 

[Tempestuous]

AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.

Chapter 131: Adventures in Localization​

---

A little under a week later, I found myself eating dinner with Dinah, and the topic, predictably, turned to the current Jump.

"Do you think this is Tedd or Grace's Jump?" she asked. "Or is it Anna's?"

I didn't understand the question.

"What do you mean, 'their' Jump?"

Dinah's eyes lit up the way they always did when she had a chance to provide exposition. "They've never outright said it, but it's pretty clear that Management chooses Jumps for each companion on a roughly first-in-last-out basis by way of recruitment order."

If that was true, it was something someone absolutely should have told me.

"Really?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Give me an example."

"Easy," she replied. "You joined and went to Worm."

I stopped and stared off into space, my meal forgotten. Was that right? Had we really gone to Bet solely so Management could watch me faceplant on my first Jump?

Wait.

"That wasn't my first Jump," I pointed out.

Dinah rolled her eyes. "Your 'first' Jump was barely a complete Jump at all."

"It counted towards the 'Return' to Star Trek."

She raised a hand to object, then lowered it again. "Okay, that may be true, but it was still a special case."

"You have a lot more examples, then?" I asked.

"Of course. Going forward from there, we have Tess and Breath of Fire and Zeke and El Goonish Shive. Management specifically called Tess and Zeke out when they announced the Jumps, remember?"

"Yeah," I grouched, "and then they fucked each of them over while they were at it."

"They've never made it a secret that we're here for what we offer them, not our own sake," Dinah said. "We accept the risk of 'being fucked with' as payment for our tickets to ride—or we don't, and we leave."

"I guess."

That was the rub, really: I was more than willing to 'risk being fucked with' for the rights to power, adventure, and immortality, which should probably raise questions about both my priorities and intelligence.

"How did Max end up in my world, then?" I asked.

"I think your world was Jenn's—"

That didn't seem right. "Jenn didn't join that recently, did she?"

Dinah shook her head. "No, hers was buried deep in the stack."

"Oh. Okay."

"And that's why that's only a best guess. It's hard to be sure when you get more than three or four queued Jumps deep, and I'm not sure what—"

"No," I said, "that makes sense."

Dinah frowned as though she wanted to ask, but ultimately decided not to. "I guess you'd know better than me."

I saw no reason to volunteer an explanation, and so moved on: "What's so confusing about the deep end of the stack?"

"It's only 'roughly' first-in-last-out," she explained, perking up now that she was once more in full exposition mode, "and people can retire before their turn comes up, so there are cases where it's not clear if a Jump was for person A or person B, and then A retires, and then the next Jump might be B's if the previous one was for A, but if the previous one was for B and A would've been next, then it would have to be person C's—"

"Ambiguity," I said. "Gotcha."

Dinah pouted. "If you want to vastly oversimplify the issue, then yes, 'ambiguity'."

"How certain are you about this?"

"Which part?"

"The whole idea that who joins affects where we go," I clarified.

She shrugged one shoulder. "It's not a hard pattern to spot when the only exceptions are the increasingly rare moments where the stack reaches 'empty'."

"Then shouldn't someone warn people they're liable to get a Jump specifically chosen to 'fuck with them' in some way right off the bat?"

Dinah shrugged again, unimpressed. "The last couple Jumps weren't exactly subtle about it. Maybe yours would have been equally obvious if Management hadn't decided to interrupt the regular schedule with a penalty lap."

"Maybe," I admitted, "but even if it had been obvious in hindsight, I'd much rather have been warned before the Jump."

"That would interfere with the hazing," she pointed out.

"That's exactly why I could have used the warning," I whined. "I think you'd agree if you'd had your 'hazing'."

"I think Management used the Trek vacation as my hazing."

That was news to me. "What? What happened?"

Dinah shrugged once more. "It wasn't anything 'big', just a particularly weird import."

"Oh?"

"It turns out importing as a Vulcan is damned uncomfortable when you don't have the appropriate memories to help you acclimate."

"Ah," I said. Then: "What were we talking about again?"

"Whose Jump this is."

"Ah," I repeated. "I have no idea. Does it matter?"

"Kind of?" Dinah hedged. "I'm trying to keep track of when my Jump is coming up."

"Ah."

She set her utensils down on her empty plate and started playing with a strand of hair that had come loose from her braid. "I'm kind of getting bored—no, not 'bored', but definitely… less impressed with this whole 'chain thing?"

"Not what you wanted when you signed up?" I asked.

Dinah shook her head emphatically. "No, don't get me wrong, our trip to Star Trek was exactly what I wanted when I signed up, and Breath of Fire was pretty good as a 'standard fantasy setting' even if I wasn't 'into' it the same way. The thing is, I've now done those things, and I'm not sure it's worth waiting three or more years betweens variations on 'science fiction' and-or 'fantasy'."

"Too much down time?"

"Yeah. One year between Jumps? I can deal with that. Two years? Not great. Three or four? I'd go stale."

"I think the phrase is 'go spare'," I said.

"No, like—ow!"—her hand had made a grasping motion towards the idea she was trying to express and pulled on the hair wrapped around her finger in the process—"'stale', like… bread. Metaphorically."

I asked the obvious question: "Thinking about going home?"

"Yeah." Dinah tucked the errant lock behind her ear and put her hands on the table where they wouldn't pull on it again. "I have no regrets about coming along, but now that I've ridden the rides and seen the sights, I don't think I'm in it for the long haul—especially if the 'long' part of the haul happens while I'm whittling away subjective years in a fancy hotel."

"Why is going home the answer, if you don't mind me asking? You said the reason you don't want to import into worlds like this is that they're too close to home, so…"

"So why would 'actually home' be better?" she finished for me. "Because it would be home. I'd be back with my family, and all my old friends. I wouldn't have to deal with leaving in ten years, having all my friends and accomplishments be temporary. It'd feel like it 'mattered' more, if that makes sense?"

"I guess," I said, not sharing her opinion but willing to accept the logic all the same. "If you're still eager for 'fantastic' adventures, though, have you looked into side-Jumps?"

"Yeah. I almost went for one this Jump—two years couped up in here is too long—but an off-brand 'generic' setting doesn't have the same appeal as something like Trek does." Dinah paused, then admitted, "Then again, there just aren't many places with the same appeal Trek has for me in the first place."

"Maybe you can get Maeve to freeze you in a block of ice during boring Jumps, then."

To my surprise and mild alarm, she didn't react with laughter—or exasperation at my sense of humor—but instead by honestly considering the idea.

"Do you think it'd cost me anything?" Dinah asked. "Or would she do it for kicks?"

"That wasn't a serious suggestion!"

"Yeah, but it's not a bad one. I'll ask her about it tonight."

I sighed and facepalmed, sure it was only a matter of time before this came back to bite me somehow.

———X==X==X———​

"Have you ever fantasized about being a robot?" Dragon asked me one afternoon.

I could have used Morrigan to split my attention between my current activity and the incoming call, but I still had a cultural bias against multitasking, so I closed the textbook I'd been perusing in lieu of actually working on the robot, leaned back in the chair I'd claimed in one of the Library's Reading Rooms—this one styled like a classroom, as befit the textbook—and turned my whole brain towards our conversation.

I was tempted to ask what brought the question on, but I had a feeling the answer would be an exasperated, 'People'.

"Yeah," I said.

Her next question was almost but not quite what I expected. "Why? Is it a fetish?"

"Like, a sexual thing? Not exclusively, I don't think. I've known more than a few people who would be very happy to be mechanical, and there's a pretty clear divide between the people who have it as a kink and the ones who are just sick of being organic."

"Why, then?"

"Well, a lot of reasons, actually." I folded my arms, then adjusted one hard to hold my chin instead, then ended up putting that hand on top of my head. "My body—my original body—honestly sucked. Being the wrong gender is the obvious problem, so if I had to choose between what I had at the time and a robot body that I liked, it'd be no contest."

"Why would you fantasize about having a fitting robot body instead of a fitting biological body?" she asked.

"You say that like I can't do both."

"That doesn't answer the question," Dragon said.

"Mechanical things are more easily conceptualized as being 'customizable'," I explained. "Swap one part for another, replace a limb or an eye or whatever else needs addressing—which brings me to the next point: a mechanical body would be, in the ideal case, 'serviceable'. You've never had to deal with any serious health issues as a human, have you? I mean, you got your first shot at biology in Star Trek, of all places…"

"I have not had to personally deal with chronic health issues," she admitted.

"Yeah, well, I can tell you from experience that it sucks. I mean, mine were pretty mild by how the standards of how badly wrong a body can go, and it still sucked. I can't imagine living with the types of disability or chronic pain some people have to deal with. So that's another big reason people fantasize about being a robot: it's a fantasy about having a body you can repair. Open up the chassis, swap a few parts around, and you're whole and able-bodied again. You're not a slave to the foibles and limitations of the squishy, messy, all-too-fallible flesh you inhabit.

"Which segues nicely into the final part of the fantasy," I continued. "Not being biological means not having an 'expiration date'. Another thing you haven't had to face, if you don't mind me saying so."

"It's true," Dragon acknowledged.

"In the fantasy, being a robot means that when something wears down, you can swap it out—without the pain and recovery of something like a hip replacement, and without being limited to just the most basic mechanisms. Just a trip to the mechanic—or roboticist, or whatever—and you're good as new. Repeat effectively forever."

"That all seems to rely on a hefty exaggeration of the reliability of mechanical and, presumably, electronic systems," she noted dryly.

"Putting aside that this is, as we've established, a 'fantasy'," I said, "and at the risk of making an ad hominem argument: you've never had to deal with the horrifying unreliability of biological systems. I don't just mean in terms of actual malfunctions, either—I mean walking around apparently healthy but still made of meat you barely trust."

There was a moment's pause, more to indicate serious thought than enable it.

"I suppose I have never had to confront a fear of dying," Dragon admitted. "At least, not of sickness or old age. As an electronic lifeform, the only causes of death I was likely to experience were violence or some sort of wide-reaching natural disaster, and now I don't even have those concerns."

"Mhm."

"How do people deal with it?" she asked. "Death, and aging?"

"I think for a lot of them—us—we deal with it by not dealing with it. Focusing on the present and not acknowledging the inevitable."

"Is that what you did?"

"Somewhat," I replied. "I… had a really complicated relationship with death. For a long time, I was in a dark enough place that it didn't really mean anything to me, dying. I hated the thought that people around me would die—that one day I'd lose my parents, maybe my friends if I ended up outliving them—but I was so empty that some days I hoped I would die. And then… then I finally realized why I'd been so miserable my entire life, and it was like a light at the end of a tunnel… but at the same time, it was horrifying, because I was already thirty, damn it! I'd let the healthiest years of my life pass me by while I was just barely 'existing', and now I had to face the fact that I was only just starting to 'live' after I'd passed my prime."

"Thirty isn't that old," Dragon objected.

"Maybe not, but all I knew was that I already had pain in my joints and gray in my hair—"

"At thirty?"

"Yes, at thirty! I said my body barely worked as a body, and I didn't like it enough to take good care of it, you know?" I took a deep breath and blew it out in a huff. "I had pain in my joints and gray in my hair, and I just felt… I had so much regret, and grief, for how I'd spent the years I'd had, years I could have been 'young and attractive', years I was healthy, years I could have been doing things if only I'd listened to what I'd known deep down since I was fucking sixteen. And that… that fucked me up good, Tess.

"I hadn't cared enough about myself to take good care of myself, you know? And now I had all these stupid regrets making it hard to care about changing or improving anything in the 'now' because I felt like I'd already lost my chance. I was terrified that I'd only begun to appreciate my life after the best parts were already over and the damage of neglect had been done, and that I'd die before I had the chance to properly live—to experience so many things I'd passed by over the years."

Another deliberate, communicative pause.

"You didn't hesitate to join the 'chain, I take it," Dragon commented.

"I did not." To my mild shame, I'd been so eager I hadn't even tried to say goodbye to anyone but my cats lest I miss my chance.

"Do you think you'll go home, now that you've gotten your youth and health back?"

I hesitated not because I had to think about my answer, but because I was reluctant to admit what I already knew.

"No," I admitted, "probably not—not permanently, I mean. It's not like those were the only things I wanted from all this. I'd like to visit, someday, if I can—offer some of the same miracles I got to my friends and family—but nothing back there could pull me away from what I've got here."

The following silence was not an affectation but the approaching end of the conversation.

"What brought these questions on, anyway?" I asked.

Dragon let out an exasperated sigh and grumbled, "People," exactly as I'd expected.

———X==X==X———​

I did not build the robot.

I learned a lot about building robots. I even learned a few things about building giant robots. But the more I learned about Giant Robot Engineering, the more I learned that I didn't really enjoy it, not the way I'd enjoyed working through the theoretical and practical problems with transwarp drives. I liked engineering—I'd loved my job as a Starfleet engineering officer—and I even liked robotics to a point, but mecha, specifically, were not my 'thing'.

I could clearly do it—there was a whole show about the result, for crying out loud—but absent of a pressing need for a giant robot, I had no desire to do so. Things must have been pretty bad for me to turn it into my life's work.

The exercise also gave me the lingering feeling that my robotics course in college existed like a footnote in a backstory to explain away some absurdly out-of-place skill, like how I'd heard people describe bits and pieces from their import histories that served to justify perks they'd taken that Jump. In hindsight, it even made a weird sort of sense that it fit that mold, considering the absolutely ridiculous stories attached to it. As a backstory, my original life kind of sucked—in a 'poorly conceived' way, not a 'lame' or 'unpleasant' way (even if it was one or both of those things)—which fit perfectly with what I'd seen of the show.

Being fictional was weird.

No, when I wanted a creative outlet—and I did, quite often, want a creative outlet—I found myself returning to the writing hobby I'd tentatively begun in the waning years of the previous Jump. If I ever wanted an example of just how different even the smallest details of my life were from the time before I'd joined the 'chain, writing for fun might be exhibit A—and hey, people had told me I was a good writer on the occasions I managed to do it at all. Now that it wasn't like pulling teeth, maybe one of these Jumps I'd be able to spend a decade as a professional author. It'd be a heck of a challenge to do it without perks to that effect, but talent was a myth; the real key was practice, and I had a very, very long time to practice.

In addition to gaining a handful of engineering skills I was less interested in using than I'd expected and developing compositional skills I was more interested in using than I'd have ever expected—and in addition to all the leisure activities I'd come to enjoy during our inter-world breaks—I continued practicing my various magicks and combat skills. El Goonish Shive was a quiet slice-of-life kind of world, and Ace Attorney was almost as peaceful even if violence took a major role in its narrative. The general consensus among people I spoke to regularly was that there wouldn't be a third 'quiet' Jump in a row, and I wanted to be as ready as I could be if I found myself diving back in.

Mostly, that just meant the same sort of practice I'd already been doing—though with a wider selection of melee weapons and Morrigan's full complement added to the mix—but remembering my conversation with Zero many Christmases past, I also asked Rita to unlock my Aura. Rather than the one-and-done 'jumpstart' I'd expected, Rita elected to take me through the training necessary to awaken to it 'naturally' with the help of the Magic School's gym. It was the most 'spiritual' sort of training I'd encountered thus far—'power of the soul', natch—and usually took years to draw out, but Rita crushed that time into just under three months. It could have gone faster, even, if I'd dropped everything and focused 100% of my energy into training, but I wasn't trying to set a world record, and my next 'deadline' was almost a year away. Three months as a 'leisurely pace' was still absurd by the standards of the original world.

Rita claimed my own understanding of my self and identity made it faster and easier, but I couldn't be sure she wasn't just stroking my ego.

So I had Aura for 'free' now, for some definition of 'free'; whether I'd be able to fit it into my slots was another matter. Without the backing perks and abilities got from the slot system, pseudomystical stuff like Aura simply wouldn't work anywhere it wasn't natively part of the world. However, for Aura specifically, there was a workaround: the transferability was a core part of the 'feature', so as long as I had someone to share the 'this works in universes its not native to' property through the weird little Aura Jumpstart Ritual, I'd be right back to where I would be if I'd slotted it myself.

Finding my 'semblance'—the unique superpower associated with Aura—would take a lot longer; years, possibly. As something individualized and personally significant, no one and nothing else's training enhancements would help. Rita'd seemed braced for disappointment when she told me, but I wasn't fussed; I had a 'unique superpower' I could slot already, and Aura alone was a significant step up in physical power.

How and why I was going to need that power was still up in the air. Obviously, I could just sit out and wait for another peaceful setting, but I'd gotten something from my time as a superhero and a naval officer and a knight. I wouldn't admit to 'enjoying' violence—it was a distasteful tool at the best of times—but I was comfortable with it in a way the me back home would likely have never been. No, on second thought, that was wrong: I knew just enough about the 'canon timeline' to know that the me back home would have gotten very comfortable with violence.

Though maybe not the 'shoot someone in the head and get over it by the next morning' levels of comfortable I'd arrived at after less than a year with the 'chain. Perhaps I should be more concerned about that than I was.

Then again, seen through the lens of some of the other cultures I'd immersed myself in, my 'home society' had a distaste for physical violence that bordered on prudishness. Not in our media, obviously—for some reason, we considered brutal murder less objectionable than consensual sex—but in our lives, physical violence was broadly abhorred by everyone lucky enough to think it couldn't happen to them. Physical violence was also, importantly, the only kind of violence most people thought of as 'violence' at all, which was convenient for the status quo: it delegitimized the party who resorted to physical violence, which was usually the one resisting the establishment because the establishment had the power to use more subtle, systemic forms of violence as it pleased.

Or maybe I was just looking for an excuse to not feel bad about how much fun I was having with the training—or how much violence I'd already participated in, and how much I now knew my once-future self would have enabled and encouraged.

———X==X==X———​

The year didn't fly by uninterrupted.

Homura found me in an empty classroom of the Warehouse's Magic School one day about five months into my year off. "Hello, Cass," she said. "Are you busy?"

"Not at all!" I dismissed the inky black shadows I'd been winding around my hands and rose from the desk. "What's up?"

"I was wondering if you wanted to go sightseeing."

"In Los Angeles?"

"Nominally," Homura agreed. "In actuality, however, it's just Tokyo with the wrong name."

I blinked.

"What, really?"

"Yes." She reached into an interior pocket of her pantsuit blazer and withdrew a map of California—which is to say, a map of Japan labeled California. The cities were all mislabeled, too: Tokyo was Los Angeles; Kyoto, Sacramento; Osaka, San Francisco—

"Did they really just change the names and literally nothing else?" I asked as I found misplaced city after misplaced city.

"Yes."

"Wow. Ah, damn."

Homura questioned my disappointment with an eyebrow.

"Half the reason I skipped this Jump was because I wasn't particularly interested in visiting 'weird California'," I explained, finger quotes fully deployed on the final words. "If I'd known we were actually going to be in Japan, mislabeled or not, I might have actually gone for it. The 'chain means I can experience other cultures as a native, rather than just a tourist, and that's an amazing opportunity no matter how you slice it, you know?"

"It wouldn't help your Japanese."

I pouted. 「私日本語をファインですかね！」

「あんた下手くそわよ。」 she replied, then switched languages to continue, "If you have any interest in tourism at all, now may be the best time. Everything is in English."

I gave her a look demonstrating my displeasure at the clear snub to my language skills, then forgave her and moved on. "I wouldn't say 'no' to some tourism," I decided. "You have an itinerary, I assume?"

"I didn't know if you would be interested," Homura said. "If you wish, I will have one by tomorrow."

"If you're volunteering to do all the work, how could I say no?"

———X==X==X———​

We made a day of it.

Homura leaned into the tourism aspect in her planning, guiding me around to the most tourist-y attractions on offer in a veritable where's-where of popular landmarks that could have been ripped straight off TripAdvisor's Top 10. After all, she noted, I'd likely get a 'native' experience one of these days, so it only made sense to play up the tourist role while I could. I had no objections.

We started with a walk through Ueno Park, then visited the Senso-ji Temple before taking a train to Akihabara (labeled 'Hollywood' because that's how things worked around here). After we'd had our fill of the sights there, we headed towards the Edo-Tokyo Museum (not renamed—there was just "The Edo-Tokyo Museum" in the middle of "Los Angeles", "California"); Homura's first choice for lunch—a restaurant less than a block away—closed for unscheduled repair work, so we took a short detour to another restaurant before hopping into the subway to the museum, where our planned activities went awry.

As we began to climb the steps leading to the base of the turtle-shaped building's 'legs', someone shrieked and pointed towards the roof; I, with instincts born of nearly a decade of professional capital-H Heroism, sprinted forward just in time to catch the falling man before he finished his hundred-foot plummet onto the concrete surrounding the museum—an act I could safely perform only because I hastily cast a feather-fall spell in the half-second before impact. It would have been a lot more comfortable for both of us if I'd also had my Valkyrie frame equipped—I could have bled off his momentum with my Impeller rather than relying on panicked casting that was almost too late to matter—but I'd left it in my room because I'd thought it would be a distraction. Regardless, even with only a split second to act, the spell was effective enough at reducing the impact that we were barely bruised.

Well, I was barely bruised; the guy I'd just caught had a knife sticking out of him just in case the fall didn't kill him or something.

Homura was more sensible than the average bystander and was already on the phone with emergency services, so I sat and put pressure on the wound—and made sure I didn't need to do more than that to keep him alive—until the ambulance arrived, followed by a police cordon I watched assemble around me with that peculiar sinking feeling of, 'oh no, a plot!' I hadn't felt since my days in Starfleet. And what a plot it was; the medical assay I cast while we waited for the ambulance informed me that in addition to a life-threatening stab wound and the even more life-threatening drop, he'd been dosed to the gills with a black-market anesthetic—which is to say, a date rape drug—making for three different assaults on his person.

Random bystander Cassandra Kyogen had no reason to know that, so I merely emphasized to the paramedics that he was already unconscious when I caught him and trusted them to figure it out. The ambulance whisked the guy off to the hospital while one of the paramedics stayed behind and helped me clean up the blood, took my phone number in case the guy had any blood-borne diseases I'd need to be screened for—I already knew he didn't, which was lucky for everyone involved—then looked me over and offered some treatment for my developing bruises.

I then spent the next hour being accused of attempted murder.

"So, how did you know the victim?" Detective 'Dick' Gumshoe asked, one hand holding a notepad while the other searched the pockets of his faded green coat for the pencil currently tucked behind his ear.

"I don't?" I said. "To my knowledge, I've never met the man before in my life."

"Oh. I see." Gumshoe paused to let me lower my guard, then jabbed a finger at my face and demanded, "Then why are you covered in his blood, pal?!"

"Because… I was providing first aid?"

"Oh." He did the same pause, then jabbed his finger at my face again. "How do I know you weren't the one who stabbed him in the first place?!"

"Why would I stab him immediately after saving him from hitting the sidewalk?"

"Oh." Another pause and another finger jab. "Maybe you wanted to conceal that you were the one to push him off the roof!"

"How would I push him off the roof and then make it to the ground outside in time to catch him?"

"Oh."

For a moment, I thought Gumshoe might be out of nonsense. I was wrong.

"Unless there are two of you!"

"…what?"

This went on for nearly the aforementioned hour before we were interrupted by a man wearing a flamboyant and instantly recognizable maroon suit.

"What in the blazes are you doing, Detective?" Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth, the series' original rival-antagonist, demanded of my interrogator. "We've already arrested the perpetrator trying to flee the scene."

Gumshoe wilted like a kicked puppy. "Just trying to find out what she knows, sir."

"Have you considered asking her?" Edgeworth didn't bother waiting for Gumshoe's stammered confession that no, he hadn't before turning to me. "Perhaps you could tell me what happened in your own words, miss…?"

"Kyogen," I supplied because that was what the ID I was carrying said.

He paused for a second, then decided not to question it. "Miss Kyogen, then."

"Well, we were just coming from the station"—I waved a hand at the elevators only a few feet away from where I was sitting on the steps—"when I heard someone scream, and… I think they pointed up at the roof? And I was just close enough to run forward in time to catch him."

"When you say 'we'…"

"My stepsister and I." I nodded my head towards Homura, sitting a few feet away on the same step.

Edgeworth nodded. "Did you see the victim fall, or was he already falling when you first saw him?"

"I… sorry, I'm not sure. I don't think he'd fallen yet because I wasn't that close, so I had to run a bit, but I'm not sure."

"Did you see anything else while you were looking up at the roof?"

Like another person, perhaps? I couldn't help him there. "No. The sun was in my eyes. I'm lucky I managed to catch him at all."

"When did you realize the victim was injured?"

That was an easy one. "Right away. He was bleeding all over me."

"And then?"

"I put him down as gently as I could and kept pressure on the wound. I have first aid training, so I just did as best I could until help arrived."

"You did well, Miss Kyogen. The paramedics say you saved his life twice over."

I'd thought so, but it was nice to have confirmation. "Thank you, Mister…"

I stopped as I realized Edgeworth hadn't introduced himself, and I wasn't sure whether it would be weird for some random person on the street to recognize him; fortunately, he took my silence as an invitation to introduce himself, just as he'd given me earlier.

"Ah, forgive me." He took a second to preen and straighten his already impeccably ruffled cravat, then performed an unnecessary little bow. "Miles Edgeworth, chief prosecutor, at your service."

"Then, thank you, Mister Edgeworth."

"No, thank you for your quick and decisive action." Edgeworth reached into an interior coat pocket and retrieved a crisp business card. "I must be going, but if you remember anything else, please don't hesitate to call."

"I won't." 'Won't hesitate', I meant, but it wasn't likely I'd remember anything else, either. The whole thing had been over in a flash. "Do you need me to stick around, or…"

"It would be helpful if you could." Edgeworth turned and walked away, Gumshoe in tow, and didn't quite make it out of earshot before he began muttering, "What a mess. Attempted murder in the middle of the day, a heroic rescue… the media are going to have a field day with this one."

"So much for the rest of the day," I said once Homura and I were once again alone.

Homura shrugged. "On the bright side, the victim is going to live."

"Oh, yeah. Saving a life is more than worth the inconvenience."

About a minute passed before a niggling suspicion worked its way through my brain.

"Did you know this was going to happen?" I asked. The timing had been down to the wire; if we'd been a second later, just from having come up the farther elevator, I might not have been fast enough to catch the guy.

"No," Homura said. "If I had, I would have dealt with it discreetly so it wouldn't interrupt our day."

"Ah. Yeah." Just tropes at work, then.

"I generally try to avoid rewinding for any but the most pressing reasons," she continued. "Remembering events others don't tends to strain personal relationships."

"You once used your time travel powers to put the right soda in the fridge."

"I did that by stopping time, not reversing it."

I choked back a giggle. "You're impossible."

With nothing more to say, we sat and waited. A policeman came by an hour later to take our written statements, and then we were left alone again.

"Think they actually got the right guy?" I asked Homura as the shadows began to lengthen.

"No."

"Not a lot of faith in law enforcement in this city, huh?"

"No," she repeated, "I was reacting to him."

'Him' was Defense Attorney Phoenix Wright arriving at the scene, kid sidekick in tow. They were just as easily recognizable as Edgeworth and Gumshoe had been: Phoenix Wright had his trademark blue suit and red tie, hair slicked back into the spikey wing shapes that matched his name; his assistant Maya Fey wore her equally trademark short light pink kimono and purple jacket, a bit of her long black hair doubled up into a little top-knot at the back of her head.

"Ah."

I should have known I was a side character again.

"They're going to want to talk to me, aren't they?" I whined.

"Inevitably."

The pair made a bee-line for the museum entrance, but I figured it was only a matter of time before they doubled back; sure enough, about half an hour later, the two left the museum and made their way over. Maya was the first to speak as they approached. "Phoenix! Look!" she yelped. "She's covered in blood!"

Rude. The first responders had helped me clean up—both for my own comfort and the fact that fresh human blood might be the most dangerous disease vector—and the few bloodstains left on my clothes hardly amounted to 'covered in blood'.

"I can see that," Phoenix whispered back none too quietly, then actually addressed me. "You're the one who caught the victim, right?"

"That's me," I said. "Cassandra Kyogen."

"Nice to meet you, Miss Kyogen. My name is Phoenix Wright. I'm the defense attorney for the suspect in the case. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"

"Not at all."

To no one's surprise, he asked nearly the same things Edgeworth had and got the same answers. Coming from the subway, the scream, dashing forward, applying first aid. Judging from his expression, it wasn't very helpful, but given how little I had to offer, I hadn't expected it to be.

Interview complete, Wright stood stock still, staring into the middle distance with one hand on his chin, for nearly twenty full seconds.

"What do you think of this?" he asked, pulling the pin off his lapel and presenting it to me.

"That's your attorney's badge, isn't it?" I asked. "You really do show that to everyone, don't you?"

"You're getting a reputation for this, Phoenix," Maya whispered.

"Um, yeah, I guess so," Wright muttered, returning the pin to his lapel and pulling out a grainy photograph. "What do you think of this?"

"I… don't know what that is. Is it important?"

"What do you think of this?" A manila envelope.

"I don't know what that is. Is it important?"

"What do you think of this?" A slightly less grainy photograph.

"That looks like the knife the guy had in him—though now that I'm looking at it, it's more of a dagger, isn't it?"

Wright went through several more odds and ends, then pulled out a roll of photos—mug shots, really, or perhaps ID photos—from his wallet.

"That's the detective who accused me of trying to kill the guy whose life I saved. I don't know who that is. That's… is that the victim? He looks different when he's not half dead. That's the prosecutor, Edgeworth. He got the detective to stop accusing me of attempted murder. I don't know who that is. That's your assistant, she's right there. I don't know who that is. That's me, where did you get a photo of me?"

He blanched and tucked the photos away in favor of more odds and ends.

"I don't know what that is. Is it important? I don't know what that is. Is it important? That's a takeout menu—oh, hey, that's the place I wanted to go for lunch! They were closed today, though."

Wright tucked the menu away, then froze in the act of pulling out some other random miscellany.

"They were closed today?" he repeated.

"Yes. I think they had a pipe burst? We ended up getting hamburgers"—which had been nothing of the sort—"instead. Why?"

Rather than answer my question, Wright yelled, "Ah ha!" and pulled out a worryingly glowing lump of hopefully-not-too-radioactive material from another pocket before sprinting off, Maya only a pace behind. I could do little more than sit there and stare after him, wondering what it was that I'd said.

"Good… luck… with the… case?"

———X==X==X———​