I awoke to the sound of a guitar riff, not unlike the warning sound of my magical camp alarm. I leapt up, attempting to ascertain where the threat was coming from, but instead got tangled up in the sheets and fell off of the bed. That was my first sign something was wrong. The bed I had fallen asleep in didn’t have sheets, just a blanket.
My next clue was the fact that while I couldn’t really see anything through the bedding, I could see that it was daylight in the room I was in. I had gone to bed sometime around midnight. Since I sleep only a few hours a night, there was no reason I should be up now.
The third clue was the bedding itself. The sheets were at least six-hundred thread count cotton sheets. Now, I’ve slept in a number of soft fabrics since coming to Golarion. Hell, my sheets in the Voidstrife mansion are silk and soft as hell. Nonetheless, I’ve never seen cotton bedding of this quality anywhere on Golarion.
Then there was the fourth clue. The sound that woke me didn’t stop. And it was music. Familiar music. IN ENGLISH.
On a long and lonesome highway east of Omaha
You can listen to the engines, moanin’ out it’s one old song
You can think about the woman, or the girl you knew the night before.
I laid there for a moment trying to figure out what the hell was going on when I heard the door open. “Kyle,” a voice said. “Are you okay? I heard a crash.” That voice was impossible. There was no way I heard who I thought I had.
As I struggled to untangle myself, I heard footsteps and the music stopped. I managed to work my head free of the sheets and saw an impossible sight. “How?” I asked, at a loss for words as I stared at my bedroom – my bedroom back on Earth – and the woman who couldn’t possibly be there.
My older sister laughed. “I’d guess you got startled by the alarm and fell out of bed, silly. You’re such a spaz.” She helped me untangle myself and pulled me to my feet.
I stared at her, dumbstruck, for several moments before throwing my arms around her. “Onee-sama!” I exclaimed pathetically, using the term as I always had ever since I started doing it to irritate her when I was twelve.
She laughed. “Hey, hey! No hugs before you put on pants!” She looked at my face and her expression darkened. “Kyle, you’re crying. What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t speak. I just hugged her for a while, sobbing. She got over the fact that I was just in my boxers and held me until I could compose myself. I pulled away. “I’m okay,” I said.
“What brought that on?” Katie asked.
“Sorry. Had one heck of a nightmare,” I said.
She shrugged. “Must have been. Well, when you’ve calmed down, put on some pants and hurry downstairs. Dad’s making chocolate waffles.” With that, she left.
My stomach rumbled. That wasn’t right. My magic ring should be keeping me nourished. I looked at my right hand. It was gone! I looked over at my computer chair and saw my bag. I looked inside and it was amazingly empty. It was like it wasn’t even enchanted.
“Yet,” I added as my babe-a-day lingerie calendar caught my eye. I stared at it in disbelief. “It’s the Friday before my paintball trip.” I then stared at my mirror. The person staring back was the young man that had existed before I left, tall and barely muscled. Much different that the man who had been training daily with Aurora, the man I should be now.
I looked at the teddy bear on my bookshelf, Percival. On one side of him was a graduate-level astro-physics textbook and three books on motherboard architecture. On the other was my binder of Ponies fan-comics and a half dozen video game artbooks. “So, Pashibaru. Do you have any idea what the hell is going on?” He didn’t answer. He never does.
I pulled on some pants and a t-shirt then headed downstairs. I somehow managed to not choke up upon seeing my parents and all my other siblings. Katie didn’t show any outward sign of concern, but she was watching me the whole time.
After breakfast, I returned to my room and fired up my computer. I opened up my CAD program and began putting together a design for the batteries from the Technic League member’s journal. I didn’t add in any of my magical upgrades, since I was going to have enough trouble explaining how I came up with the battery without overcomplicating it.
I was so focused on what I was doing that I didn’t hear someone come in. “That’s pretty interesting looking,” Katie said over my shoulder. “What is it?”
“It’s a battery,” I said, motioning for her to shut the door. She closed it and sat down on the edge of my bed. I turned my computer chair to look directly at her. Now, what to tell her? I couldn’t exactly explain to her that I had been on an alien planet for the last ten years or so. Next ten years. Err, both? Yeah, it gets a little confusing when time travel becomes involved.
“A little secretive for just a battery.”
“That’s because it’s one hell of a battery. It represents a breakthrough in quantum physics for humanity. At a few inches across, one of these should be able to run a small car for a couple hours at least. If I’m being honest, I don’t exactly know the energy requirements of a car off the top of my head. I’m just making a best guess estimate.”
“Really? Wow. How does it work?”
“It uses quantum phenomena to story energy. Which is the breakthrough, because it’s beyond our previous understanding of physics.”
“And it works?”
“I’ve already built one.”
“Damn, Kyle. You’re going to win a Nobel prize for this!”
I didn’t want to take full credit for this, but at the same time, what the hell was I going to tell her? Oh yeah, I’ve come from the future, where I flew through space on the back of a Lovecraftian monster to another world and got alien tech? Yeah. That wasn’t gonna happen. I like not living in an asylum, thank you.
Maybe if I could show her some magic, maybe then I could tell her, but I wasn’t sure I could. Even assuming magic was possible on Earth, could I still do it? I mean, I knew how, but some of it is a physical thing. What if I tried and hurt myself? No, that would take days of slow building until I could properly be sure I could do it. For now, I would have to assume I couldn’t until I had time to test it.
So, I guess I just had to take credit for it for now. I’d have plenty of time to work on the magic thing. I mean, I finally had what I wanted. I was home. That’s all I’d wanted for over ten years.
So why did I feel so bad?
Argh. Time travel. There were so many questions. Would everything I’d affected change? Would I just disappear suddenly, Aurora waking up alone and never sure where I had gone? Or would she never have met me? And what if I’m the nail?
In case you’re wondering, I’m referencing Poor Richard’s Almanac. “For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” I don’t think my part is any more important than those of any of my companions, but without me, does Aurora go to Sandpoint? Does Paulie? How about Lenn and Geo? Without the five of us, how many die in the goblin attack? Does Aldern get stopped? What about the things that lie beyond?
I had what I wanted. I was home. But could I really take my happiness at the cost of everyone we’d saved? And what about Aurora? Would she be okay, or would she die of alcoholism? I mean, if I knew she’d be okay, maybe I could. But without knowing? I’m not sure. But even then, I really wanted to.
But your thoughts will soon be wandering the way they always do
When you’re riding sixteen hours and there’s nothing much to do
You don’t feel much like ridin’, you just wish the trip was through
Everyone has that little voice in the back of their minds. Some call it their conscience. Others see it as the little angel that sits on their shoulder. For many, it’s the sense of guilt that makes them do what’s right even when they’d benefit by doing otherwise. Most people don’t hear it actually speak, it’s just a feeling in their guts that tells them to do the right thing.
Mine speaks to me. It always has, though it has gotten much louder lately because of trauma I’d gone through on Golarion. Today, however, she was back to the quiet voice in the back of my mind, suggesting that the greater definition she’d gained was due to actual physiological changes.
“It’s up to you,” Fleur whispered. Yes, Fleur is my inner voice. What you perceive as your conscience is more than just the impulse to do good. It’s not just the little angel on your shoulder. Sometimes, it’s also the little devil on the other shoulder. “No one will ever know.”
I wasn’t prepared for that. If she had argued with me, maybe I could have tried to justify it, but at that moment, my entire soul felt laid bare before me. What I chose in this moment would define me for the rest of my life. What I chose now would reveal who I was now and forever, though, as Fleur had said, no one would ever know.
Almost no one. “I’ll know,” I subvocalized. And just like that, in an instant, my choice had been made. I had learned who I was in the dark, where no one else could see. And, surprisingly, I liked what I found. I had always feared that deep down I was a coward, and unworthy of all the blessings I’d had. But maybe not. Given the chance, I could prove myself worthy.
And that meant that I had to go back to Golarion. I had to find Samantha and set this right.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t take advantage of this opportunity while it was here. “Katie, I’ve been offered a position overseas at a university where I can continue my education while being given free rein to research in a well-stocked laboratory. I didn’t want to tell everyone until I’d made my decision.”
My older sister hugged me. “Kyle! That’s amazing!”
“I need to do some teleconferencing tomorrow morning, but I had also wanted to go to the mall in Tucson to pick up a few things for my paintball trip. Were you planning to do anything then?”
“Not really. I can take the girls and make a morning of it, if you want.”
That would keep my younger sisters out of my hair. “What about Kenneth?”
“He goes by ‘Ken’ now.”
“Oh, really?” Somehow I’d missed that on the last trip. My brothers and I don’t get along, so I rarely chat with either of them. But I knew a girl with a younger sister named Barbara. I’d have to set her and my brother up if I had the chance.
“Yep. Asserting his independence. Anyway, he has practice tomorrow.”
“Ah, yes.” Right. Band nerd. Forgot about that.
“But, in exchange, I want you to come with me to see Father Alejandro tonight. He’s been bugging me to come do a couple music videos for his Youtube channel and I know he’d love to see you too.”
“Fair enough.” Let me explain. Father Alejandro was a good friend of the family, in addition to being a trusted priest at our local church. He had also been in a band before the car crash that killed his band mates and turned him to the services of the Lord. But he still liked to play his guitar, so we often hung out and played music together. Not just me, but a number of folks in the community would get together with the priest and rock out – or not, if you were into a different kind of music. What would you call it if you were getting really into something like country music? Tonking it? I dunno. Random rambling. Moving on. Chaika moment. Shocking truth.
And it wasn’t just music that made him such a cool priest. The man was also into video games. Fact of the matter is that it was he who had gotten me into my World of Warcraft guild. I had been sixteen at the time and looking for someone to raid with. He was the main tank for one of the top guilds on the server and got his guild leader to bend the rules for me and let me in, despite the fact that the guild didn’t allow anyone in who was under the age of eighteen.
In thanks, I got him a good webcam and taught him about music videos on Youtube. He wasn’t sure if he should be making videos since he was a priest, but ended up doing it anyway. He just wore a luchador mask while doing it. It became his gimmick. I don’t remember what his channel was called, but those of us who knew him just called him Padre Lucha Libre. His channel had over ten thousand subs, which isn’t bad for a guy in a luchador mask and a cassock singing rock or video game theme covers and hymns while strumming on a guitar.
It’s more than I had on my channel. Granted, all I ever did was rants on games or whatever. And that one time I spent fifteen minutes discussing required material strengths for certain Gundam scenes. That’s my most popular video, actually, with views in the near hundreds, despite all the calculus involved. Or maybe because of it. It’s not that I wasn’t planning on doing more, I just hadn’t gotten around to it.
Anyway, he’d been bugging several of us to come join him for some collab videos. Katie had always put a ton more time into practicing piano than I ever had the violin, at least before Golarion, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the one he bugged the most.
“Good,” Katie said. “I’m holding you to that.” She, like Aurora, was a lot stronger than me. When she said she’d be holding me to it, she meant by the arm twisted behind my back if necessary. “So tell me, how else are things at school? Any lovely young women in your life?”
Lying to Katie is an art. You can fudge information, you can leave out details, but it has to be mostly true or she’ll figure it out. For instance, I was planning on finding a way back to Golarion, so I had told her I would be going overseas. The core truth was the same. I was going away. It was just the scale I had fudged.
So it was with this. I couldn’t completely lie. I could either tell her a truth scaled based on time period, or I could clam up. I would do better preparing if I had her help, so I needed to use a delicate touch here. “I’ve been to a few parties. May have enjoyed the company of a few young women.” I said it nonchalantly.
“Anyone serious?”
Now that was going to be difficult to lie about. So I’d go with the truth. “It’s complicated.”
“Now I’m really curious.”
I shrugged. I could use the advice. “What does it mean when a girl who says she isn’t interested in you sleeps naked with you and cuddles your back?”
“You’re…going to need to explain that one further.”
“You may want to get a beverage. This is gonna take a bit.” I laid out the basicness of my relationship with Aurora, making her sound like a foreign student – Romanian, if you’re wondering – at my school. I explained that I had laid out my feelings for her several times, but that she had let me down easy.
Katie thought about it for a bit. “Well, as I see it, there are a couple possibilities. It could be some kind of foreign thing we don’t get. It could be that she’s interested but afraid of commitment. Or…” she laughed.
That worried me. “Or?”
“Maybe she just likes messing with you.” I hadn’t considered that. Was Aurora trolling me? If she was, two could play that game. Though I guess I’d probably have to eat something to retaliate with a Dutch Oven. “But it does say one thing about how she feels about you.”
“Oh?”
“She trusts you. She’s putting herself in a very vulnerable position and she trusts that you won’t do anything to her without her permission.”
I laughed. “Maybe. Or it could just be the fact that she’s strong enough to break me with her pinkie.”
“Kyle, a stiff breeze could break you as long as it was carrying a long black wig.” Hey, I was little kid when I first saw the Japanese version of The Ring. Shut up.
“She could probably beat you in a fight, with one hand tied behind her back.”
She looked surprised. “Okay, then maybe she doesn’t have anything to worry about from you. But my point stands. I think she trusts you completely. Either that or she wants you to make a move but has some kind of hang up making it hard for her to say anything.”
“Thanks. It’s all clear as mud now.”
“Glad to help.”
She left to go work on her studies and I got back to work on putting my knowledge into schematics. I had a lot to do. I had a great number of designs I could choose from, but only a limited time to do so. So I focused on those things that could most help the world as well as a few things that could make me a lot of damn money while I was gone.
Because I gots to get paid, yo.
(Margin Note: You really didn’t just write that.)
(Margin Note: Don’t be a hater, Fleur.)
That evening, we had Taco Bell for dinner. I ate five Doritos tacos. Considering how long I’ve gone without those and how often I have sex, I can almost literally say that they were better than sex. Almost. Sex is still pretty damn good.
After dinner, Katie and I swung by the church to visit Father Alejandro. We arrived just after the Friday evening Spanish mass. The jovial middle-aged Hispanic man waved us over once the last of the regular Friday parishioners had left. “Hey kids! What brings you to the house of the Lord this fine Friday evening?” He suddenly noticed what I was carrying. “Can it really be? Has the man-in-black finally come to grace us with his musical talent?”
“Dubious as that talent may be,” Katie added.
“Ha. Funny,” I said deadpan. They had no idea what they were in for.
“Let’s go back to the studio,” Father Alejandro interjected mildly.
The “studio” was a small room in the back of the church. As I understand it, it had been a storeroom before the padre had cleaned it out and put up a bunch of those foam sound-dampening squares all over the wall. It wasn’t really what one would call a professional studio, but it was pretty good for some amateur performances.
“So, you two need to warm up?” he asked us.
“I’m good,” I said, drawing a look from Katie. “What? You think I can’t keep up?”
“It’s just that you’ve never been one to practice much. You can play versions of some simple eight bit tunes.”
I turned to the padre. “Fire up the webcam. You have a mask for me?”
“I only have the one spare,” he said. “We’ll need to make one of you one out of a bandanna.”
I picked a long one and cut some holes in it, looking very “Dread Pirate Roberts-y” once I had it on. I then pulled out my violin and handed my sister the sheet music that I’d put in there the day I’d gotten in. “Locatelli’s Caprice in D Major Op. 3 No. 23?”
“Il labirinto armonico.”
“This looks really complicated,” she replied.
“It’s one of the hardest pieces for a soloist in existence,” I said, throwing on my coat – which I had only brought for the look, it was March in Arizona – in a dramatic fashion. “Fire up the webcam and prepare to be amazed.”
“Watch out,” Father Alejandro said. “We’ve got a badass over here.”
For the next few minutes, I played my heart out. The instrument’s sound wasn’t what it could be. I hadn’t used magic to improve it yet. In the future, it would be better than any Stradivarius, but now it was just a fairly good quality instrument. Hell, it was capable of supernatural feats, allowing me to be able to play two different parts at once. Still, notes poured out sweet and joyous and I played flawlessly without any signs of strain.
Out there in the spotlight, you’re a million miles away
Every ounce of energy, you try to give away
And the sweat pours out your body, like the music that you play.
Once I was done, I twirled my bow like some kind of Final Fantasy character doing a victory pose, then went and ended the recording, since the other two were far too stunned to do so.
I considered going and making some tea to give them time to regain their composure, but my sister finally spoke up. “Where the heck did that come from?”
I looked her dead in the eye. “I’m a time traveler. I’ve spent over ten years on an alien planet, during which time I had to become a better violinist in order to earn money for schooling I needed to get home.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that. Fortunately for her, Father Alejandro interjected. “You’ve been practicing to impress a pretty girl, eh?” he asked, clapping me on the shoulder.
I gave him my best fake sheepish grin. “That’s the one.”
“Good boy. Well, then let’s throw out this kiddy level music I had planned and rock out.”
We spent just under two hours recording a number of songs before Katie and I headed home. When we got there, I decided to do things differently than I had before. So what if it changed the past? I wanted to spend time with my family. So I went up to my mother’s study and knocked lightly.
“Come in,” came her voice from within. I opened the door, revealing the woman that looked like a simply older version of Katie. “Kyle? What’s up? I figured you would be in your room playing some game or something.”
I shrugged. “Servers are down.” I didn’t want to worry her. “What are you up to?”
“Just looking through some old scrap books. You can join me if you want.”
Ouch. Scrap books. Oh well, it was the time with Mom I wanted. What we did really didn’t matter. “Sure. But you’ll have to explain to me what any of these pictures are.” I had always managed to get out of looking at these somehow, but I was committed now.
Twenty or thirty minutes – or maybe hours, I dunno, it was really boring – into it, Mom pulled out something she thought I might find more interesting. She flipped it open and looked for a moment. “You were such a cute kid,” she said, handing me my baby book.
I flipped through it. She was right. I was “totes adorbs” as they say in the modern vernacular. After reaching the end, I went back to the beginning, to a page before where she’d started me. I was surprised at what I found. “Mom? What’s this?”
She looked at what I was showing her. Her face blanched. “Oh. That. Well, I guess you’re old enough to know now.” She inhaled to regain her composure. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about it for a long time, but the time never felt right.” She pointed at one part of the ultrasound. “That’s you.” She then pointed at another portion. “That’s your twin sister, Kira.”
“I have a twin sister?!”
“No. Something went horribly wrong about a month before you were scheduled to be born. I’m still not sure on the details. They had to perform an emergency caesarean. You spent the first two and a half weeks of your life in the NICU. Kira died before they could deliver her. There was nothing they could do.”
That certainly explained why my birthdays always seemed a bit more somber than others. They tried their best to hide it, but my parents were grieving the loss of their daughter while also trying to celebrate the birth of their son.
Suddenly, I had one of those weird thoughts that I sometimes get. “Mom? What happened to Kira’s body? Did you bury her?”
“She’s at the cemetery. Your father can take you there tomorrow if you want.”
I was relieved. Last thing I needed was to discover that her body had broken down in utero and been absorbed into mine. Hell, maybe we had been conjoined and half my brain was hers. That would certainly explain Fleur, but God would it be creepy. And that kind of thing does happen. Something like one in eight multiple pregnancies ends with one fewer child than originally expected. Hell, I’ve even heard of a case where a man was found not to be the father of his own child due to having his fraternal twin brother’s testicles.
“I think I’d like that.” Time for a less somber subject. “Okay, so we’re done with that book. Got anything in the ‘great-grandpa kicking Nazi butt in dubya dubya two’ genre?”
Mom laughed. “Actually, I think I might. Your great grandmother was the one who got me into this scrapbooking thing.”
Curse you, Nana! CURSE YOU!
Nana had three – THREE! – books filled with photos and memorabilia of my great grandfather and other world war two memorabilia. For the most part, it was pretty simple stuff. But there was one thing that was pretty shocking.
My mom, who must have noticed that I was staring at a single photograph for an incredibly long time, nudged my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t look away. How could I? There was a woman in the picture, dressed in a can-can outfit and chatting with my great-grandfather and one of his friends. I knew that woman. I’d seen her many times before, but this time I wasn’t looking in a mirror or seeing a face with my mind’s eye. “Who is this woman?” I asked, pointing at the photograph that just couldn’t be.
“I’m not sure what her name was. Let me check the back of the photograph.” She took the book from me and checked. “Ah, here it is. Her name is Fleur Renaud. She was a dancer. Apparently she and her brother worked for the French Resistance. He saved granddad’s life, but she was the one who got the intelligence.”
“A dancer?”
“Yeah. Says here that she had a stage name. She apparently called herself Fleur de Lis.”
“What.” I must have hit my head. That was it. This was just some weird ass dream. There was no way this was real life.
We continued looking through books for another hour before I excused myself and went back to my computer to do some more research. I didn’t find much on the Renauds, but I did find a few more pictures. Both of them looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn’t place why. It was driving me crazy.
That night I had an extremely vivid dream. I was the woman from the photograph. It almost felt like I was seeing her memories. But that was impossible. Unless what I thought of as a part of me was maybe some kind of ghost dwelling in my body with me. And now she was sharing her memories with me. Maybe?
It wasn’t a great theory, but let’s be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised at this point. My life is weird.
The next morning, Katie and I discussed what I needed from the mall. “Big list for a paintball trip,” she said.
“It’s not all for the trip. I just figured that since you were gonna be there anyway, you could grab me a couple other things.”
“Fair enough. But you’re paying for lunch.”
“Done,” I said with a grin. “I had a couple of stocks go up over twenty five points unexpectedly yesterday.” It was true. I also happened to know that they would drop thirty points on Monday thanks to time travel, so I had sold them off. I made a crap ton of money.
“Really? What you up to?”
“More than two hundred thousand now.”
“What the heck?! Why are you not managing my finances again?”
“Not bad for someone who started with a couple hundred bucks of Christmas and birthday savings.” It had started during my sophomore year in high school. I knew that, starting that summer, I would be expected to get a part time job. I didn’t want that, since it would cut into my reading, gaming and studying time, so I decided to do something about it.
I had been saving a portion of my birthday and Christmas monies for five years, so I had a couple hundred bucks in my credit union account. I took that and spent a weekend devoted to understanding the stock market. I then spent a week researching companies. After that, I created an account on an online trading site using my father’s info and began investing. By May, I had turned my two hundred dollars into an amount of money that gave me an excuse to dust off the old Vegeta meme. What I’m saying was that I had an account worth more than nine thousand dollars. I closed the online brokerage account and put the money into my bank account.
When my parents told me I needed to start looking for a job, I pulled up my account and showed them. They were so impressed that they couldn’t even be mad that I had basically stolen my father’s identity to do it. After that, my part time job was managing their retirement fund. By the time I graduated from high school, I managed to get them nearly a ten-fold increase on their investments – and my own, for that matter – doing only about eight hours of research a week, usually watching anime while I did so. Beat the hell out of pushing carts at the local Walmart like my older brother did.
To be fair, some of that was luck. But it was the kind of luck you make yourself by giving yourself good odds and understanding where risks aren’t as high as they look and rewards are better than they seem. It was like being The House in Vegas. Yeah, it was a gamble, but The House always wins.
I set up a schedule to transfer ten grand into my sister’s account over the course of a week, the ability to do so being a benefit of registering hers as a preferred account with my online bank. “Kyle! What the hell?!” she exclaimed.
“You’ll spend about a grand on the stuff I want. Then, of course, I owe you lunch. You can also buy the girls a few things if you want. I hear that Maggie’s been bugging for a PS4 and Molly always wants jewelry. Keep the rest. It’s only money and I can make more. Even if I’m wrong and somehow can’t just get a ton more from investing, it’s not like I’m dipping into my food budget or retirement fund. Besides, with the money I’m going to make from that new battery, I’ll be a multi-millionaire by the time I’m twenty five, and that’s a conservative estimate.”
“Fair enough. See you this afternoon.”
After the girls went to the mall and Ken left for band practice, I changed into something respectful and went with Dad to the cemetery. He led me to the site of my twin sister’s grave. The tombstone had been meticulously cared for, as though someone had been by to clean it every few weeks since she had died.
“Take your time,” my father said, his strong hand upon my shoulder. “I’ll be waiting by the car when you’re ready.” Then I was alone.
What do you say to the sister you never knew you had? How do you apologize for never coming to see her? I was at a loss for words, so I rambled. I told her everything that had happened – everything that was going to happen. I apologized several times. I lose track of just how many times I said that I was sorry.
Then, making sure there was no one around to be bothered by it, I pulled out my violin and played a couple songs for my long dead twin, my other half that I had never known about but suddenly realized I had been missing my entire life. I’m not even exaggerating. There were times when I was younger that I felt like I had to share something I’d learned with someone, but upon thinking about it, would realize that I didn’t know who it was I wanted to talk to. Perhaps that person had been Kira.
After I finished the third song, my favorite hymn, I stood in silence and said a prayer, asking that Kira be watched over. When I finished, I put away the violin and prepared to leave, but was stopped by a young woman. “I’ve always loved that one,” she said.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize there was anyone else here,” I said. “I hope my playing didn’t bother you.”
“It’s fine,” she said. I got a good look at her. She was wearing a nun’s habit. I didn’t know we had nuns in this town.
“Oh, sorry Sister.” I’m a Catholic boy. There will always be a part of me that’s terrified of nuns.
“I’m sure she’ll be happy you finally came to visit,” she said, indicating the gravestone.
I turned and looked without thinking. “How did you know that…” but when I turned back, she was gone. Yeah, too spooky for me. I rushed to Dad’s car as quick as I could without looking disrespectful.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Dad said to me. I told him about the nun. He laughed. “Nice try. Tell your mom you almost had me there.”
“What are you talking about?”
He looked at me critically. “Your mom didn’t put you up to this?”
I shook my head. “Why would mom have put me up to anything?”
“You really don’t know. Oh, wow. Umm, well, the day you were born, I spoke with a nun while standing outside the NICU trying to deal with what had happened with your sister. She tried to comfort me for a while and disappeared when I turned away to get a coffee from the machine. At my request, they pulled the security tapes and there was never anyone in the room with me, despite how sure I was that I had seen her. And you just described her.”
Wow. “She wasn’t in the footage at all?”
“Well, sort of. There was a figure reflected in the observation window, but you can’t really make her out. But no one was actually in the room, if you believe the footage.”
“Well, there goes all sleep I was going to have tonight.” I had encountered a lot of things on Golarion, but never anything like this on Earth. It spooked me more than I cared to admit. Earth was safe from spooky stuff. Here, everything was all in my head, right?
Says the man who left Earth on the back of a Lovecraftian horror and flew through space without a space suit. The Nile isn’t just a river in Egypt, apparently.
When we got home, I made the mistake of looking up the video. It was actually on the net. It was spooky. I also got to see baby me being amused by his own reflection in a rare moment of not sleeping. Good to see some things never change.
I got back to work, preparing things for while I was gone and studying information I could use when I returned to Golarion. On the latter front, I gathered schematics and read up on a number of engineering principles I needed a refresher on. It was pretty straightforward.
On the former, I set up timed releases going up for twelve years. It wasn’t too difficult. What was difficult was having them come from different sources so they would be more difficult to track down. I didn’t want anyone get ahold of the tech before the previous steps were in place, since it would make more money to do it this way.
Satisfied that I had done everything I could, I leaned back and stretched. “And for my next trick, decoding the Voynich Manuscript.” Huh. “Well, let’s take a look at it.” I went ahead and loaded it up.
The damn thing was in Draconic. That left me with a whole new set of questions. First of all, it proved that there were dragons on Earth at some point. But that made me wonder why they had the same language as the dragons of Golarion. Was that the language that their gods created them with?
I wrote up my translation and sent it out anonymously – well, I signed them with a pseudonym – to a number of universities. Then, for the heck of it, I loaded up some other ancient untranslatable texts. Many of them seemed to be gibberish, but a few – particularly ones said to be in Enochian – were in the language of the celestial realms. Those translations I sent out anonymously to some religious scholars, as the texts concerned such things.
Then I began to wonder about the “gibberish”. What if it was just another language I didn’t recognize? It was too bad Aurora wasn’t there. I’m sure her magical angel language powers would make quick work of it if it really was a language.
If anyone figured out I was behind all these seemingly dissimilar events, my disappearance was going to become LEGENDARY. There might be a whole fleet of documentaries about me. Then I could come back like a rock star.
Focus, Kyle. You have to get back home first. Let’s not get ahead of myself here.
I still had time before my sisters would get home, so I ran by the hardware store. Rather than listing what I bought, let me ask you something. Are you aware that you can build a forge from things you can get from your local hardware store? Well, you can, so I did. It was very easy to set up, too. I mean, it wasn’t built to last, but it would get the job done.
After that, I spent time under a canopy in my parents’ back yard, listening to heavy metal while working some heavy metals on the forge. In the end, what I crafted wasn’t my most elegant work, but it didn’t need to be pretty. It just needed to be functional. It was too bad that I didn’t have more time, though. I could have made some jewelry for my mom before I left.
When my sisters got home, Maggie rushed upstairs and flung open my door. I shook my head. Twelve years old and still no sense of privacy. “Oh my god! Best big brother ever!” she shouted, throwing her arms around my neck. “I can’t believe you got me a Playstation!”
I laughed. “What games did you get?”
“I got five games! And a year of Plus!”
“Killzone? Extra controller?” I asked. She nodded. “Well, go get it set up then. I’ll be down in ten minutes to school you so hard that you’ll forget that it’s Spring Break.” She laughed the whole way down the stairs. Truth is that she’s better than me at most shooters.
I closed the website I had been browsing – research on defensive architecture, if you’re curious – and headed downstairs. Molly showed me the new phone Katie had used my money to buy for her. I was impressed that she didn’t blow it on fancy jewelry. Then we all spent the rest of the evening hanging out and gaming. We even busted out our instruments for an impromptu jam session, culminating in me performing for them a song I had written about Aurora though I’ve never sung it for her, “The Knight and the Maiden Fair”, sung completely in Taldan. They couldn’t understand the words and thus were unaware of anything but the title, but not a dry eye remained in the room by the time I had finished.
Actually, it’s probably better that they didn’t understand the words. I’m confident in the music itself, but I’m no poet. That is why I won’t share the lyrics here. But, if you’re interested, the song is a ballad. It starts telling the story of a young maiden, alone in the world. Then it transitions to the story of a gallant knight. Several verses weave the stories of the Knight and the Maiden together and it seems inevitable that the two will meet and fall in love. But at the end, the narrator reveals that the knight and the maiden are the same person and that the person the knight has spent the song saving is the narrator himself, who has fallen deeply in love with her. Basically, it’s a true story, is what I’m saying.
Before bed, Katie gave me the MP3 player I had asked her to get. “I’ve already put a bit of music on there for you.”
“Sweet.” My sister and I don’t always have the same taste in music, but I had the space to spare, so no worries. “Thanks.”
The next morning, I spent more time with my family before they took me into Tucson so I could fly back to Denver. During the afternoon, I recorded a few songs for my family, embedded them into vlogs and set them up to be sent every year on my birthday.
I had dinner with a couple buddies and then headed back home to finish packing. I did everything like before, except this time I put the new MP3 player in the radiation shielded case I had forged and carefully sewed it into a hidden spot in my bag. It would not be perfectly shielded, but my other player survived the trip, so I figured it would be good enough.
With time left on my hands and nothing to do, I browsed the internet. “Breaking into the Pathfinder Society Library,” I typed on a whim. I was not prepared for what I found.
“168,000 results,” read the display before me. And they looked relevant. The hell?
“Absalom Pathfinder Society,” I typed. More than thirty-eight thousand results. I followed the first to a wiki. I was amazed by what I read. The next hour was me wiki-walking my way through hundreds of articles.
Someone had made a game like Dungeons and Dragons and set it on Golarion. And they had gotten a lot of things incredibly close to correct. Not all of it, but more than enough to be more than coincidence, though unfortunately not enough to help me. But still, was I not the only person from Earth to ever visit Golarion?
I utilized all my skills and within a few minutes of setting out to do so, had not only the name of the game’s creator but a private phone number as well. I called. Someone answered fairly quickly. “Hello?” a voice asked, sounding startled.
“Are you the creator of Pathfinder?”
“Who is this?”
“You’re not going to believe me, but I’ve been there. I’ve been to Golarion.”
There was stunned silence at the other end. After a moment, I heard a voice that sounded muffled, like someone not properly covering a phone. “Dad. It’s actually him.”
The phone made some noises, as though someone else had taken it. “You must be Kyle,” an older gentleman’s voice said.
It was my turn to be stunned. “How do you know that name?”
“That is a bit of a long story. Do you have time to listen?”
If I didn’t, I would make time. “Yes.”
“I will make it as short as I can. My father fought in World War 2. His unit liberated one of the German POW camps. One of the prisoners was a Russian soldier, Corporal Kuznetsov, with whom he became friends. They stayed in the area for several nights helping coordinate moving the freed prisoners to places where they could return home.
“One night, his Russian friend told him a fantastic story. He told of how, during the first world war, he had met a young woman who had performed fantastical magical feats. She told him that she had traveled from another world to hunt the Mad Monk, Rasputin. Her Russian was excellent, but she had a terrible American accent, he told my father.
“During a battle, they were attacked by mustard gas. In her haste to protect herself with a magical barrier, she wound up dropping her diary. She and her friends left before he could tell her, so he picked it up. Immediately upon opening it, a letter addressed to him materialized out of nowhere in his hands.”
I began working out the magic required for that. It was doable, if perhaps not something I could do. “What did it say?”
“He opened the note. Inside, in perfect Russian, was a set of instructions. It gave my father’s name and told him to give the diary to him when he met him. Story told, he did just that. Curious, my father opened it immediately.
“A letter addressed to my father appeared immediately when he did so. He opened it and inside were instructions that he pass it down to his child on my twentieth birthday. I also received instructions. Mine were that my own child would receive a phone call from a man named Kyle today at this time and that I should have the diary handy. It was only off by a few minutes.”
“What else was in the diary?”
“Descriptions of cities, organizations and peoples as well as a number of personal details, including some of a very salacious nature.”
Samantha had to be involved. “Can you read me a passage? I think I might recognize the writing style if I hear it.”
“Of course,” he replied. “Just give me a moment to – huh.”
“’Huh’?”
“A letter appeared when I opened it. It’s addressed to ‘Kyle, The American Wizard’.”
“Read it to me, please.”
I heard the sounds of an envelope opening. “I can’t. I don’t recognize the language.”
“Can you scan it and email it to me?”
“Sure, give me a moment and tell me your address.” Less than five minutes later, I was looking at a scan of a letter in Ancient Thassilonian. But even more shocking: It was in my own handwriting. “What does it say?” asked the voice at the other end of the phone.
“It’s a note to me from myself,” I said.
“That’s impossible.”
I actually laughed. “You’d be surprised what I’ve discovered is possible. This actually fits consistently with what I’ve learned in the last few days. The gist of the note is that the girl whose diary that is hasn’t been born yet. Apparently she’s my daughter. Beyond that, it’s some advice, which it suggests to keep to myself.”
“If the girl who wrote that is your daughter, then I probably shouldn’t read any of it to you. She’ll probably want to keep certain of these details from her father.”
He might have a point. “Okay. Fair enough. Do me a favor, okay? Exactly two years from today, open the diary again and see if another note appears. I want to ask you to send something to my family about that, but I don’t want to make the decision on the spot. So if it is a good idea, I’ll enchant the diary with another request for you.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“Yeah, time travel’s annoying.”
“I’m still not sure why I believe any of this. I guess I wouldn’t, if I hadn’t seen those letters appear out of nowhere like that.”
“Yeah. I can’t blame you. It’s amazing the things I’m willing to accept these days.”
We said our goodbyes and I turned again to the letter.
“Kyle, as you know, I can’t tell you any more than the bare minimum, for fear of creating a time paradox. But be comforted by the fact that I get as annoyed at time travel as you do. Exactly as much as you do, in fact.
“Do try to remember that my survival may not necessarily mean you will also survive as you may be on a different branching timeline. However, we’re going to assume you’re on the same one as I went through, since I can’t give you any advice at all if not.
“So here it is, my one piece of advice. You need to start carrying around a pair of swords balanced for dual wielding. They need to be on you and easily accessible, but hidden. I will leave it up to you as to how you do so. Hell, make lightsabers if you want and have the resources. But they need to be on hand and light enough for someone who isn’t as strong as Aurora. You’ll know when their time has come and I don’t think you can screw it up. But failing to have them when the time comes will be a problem. Additionally, you can’t tell anyone at all what you’re doing. It would be bad if the wrong people found out. So make them concealable.
“Finally, I must tell you that things will get worse. There are hardships before you. But there is so much worth fighting for and the future gets better. So, no matter what happens, don’t lose sight of who you are. Do what you think is right. And most of all, never, ever give up. Because failing will potentially mean disaster for two worlds.
“So, you know. No pressure.”
After reading that, I had come to one conclusion. Future me is an a-hole. But I’ll show him. I’m going to eat a ton of ice cream and then he’ll have to deal with being fat. That’ll show that jerk.
But he had given me potentially important information. I would need to get a pair of swords. Honestly, I’m not even sure I needed to make them anything all that special. Just make a couple basic but functional one handed swords, something in a twenty-five to thirty inch blade and then stick them in one of those closed tubes architects use to carry blueprints. Boom, done.
But he had suggested light sabers, probably as a joke. Or was it? I mean, blades made out of hard light like that might be beyond my capabilities, but I bet if I tried I could come up with a way to make swords out of molten metal or superheated plasma suspended in an electromagnetic field. The costs, however, might be prohibitive. I would have to consider it. There had to be a happy medium, something that would be cheap enough to make but not a burden for me to carry.
As I prepared for bed, I remembered one last thing I needed to do. I hadn’t shredded my documentation of my older brother’s attack on me when we were younger. It would serve no purpose for him to get blamed for my disappearance. So I ran it through the shredder, ran the scraps through again and then soaked the whole wad in laundry bluing.
What? I take identity theft seriously. You should too. The stuff is like two bucks for a thirty two ounce bottle. The identity you save could be your own.
After tossing my gloves, I sat down to check my email one last time before getting some sleep. My main accounts had nothing of interest, but one of the burner accounts I’d created to send out all those translations and tech schematics did have a new message that looked interesting, so I opened it.
“To the Crimson Scholar,” it began. Yeah, I’m still bitter they never made another season of Maoyuu. “I have enclosed my Skype contact information. Please contact me as soon as possible, any time day or night. During an archaeological dig in the UK, we located another document written at least partially in the same language as the Voynich Manuscript. We were planning to wait until archivists could finish touching it up before releasing the information. However, as it seems that you have managed to decipher the language, we would love to have you take a look at it for us.” It was signed, “Elizabeth Whitworth.”
I looked her up and she was indeed the head of Archaeology at a recognizable university. “What the hell,” I said to myself. “Might as well see what they’ve found.” It was five in the morning over where she was, but she did say to call any time. I fired up Skype and, bouncing the call through three proxies, I dialed her up.
A respectable-looking middle-aged British woman answered. “Hello?”
“Greetings,” I said. While I could see her, she was seeing just my silhouette thanks to some special filters I’d installed on my feed. “You said you wished to speak with me?”
“You’re the Crimson Scholar?”
“I am,” I replied. “Tell me of this document you found.”
“Yes, of course.” She pulled up a page and displayed it over the feed. “This is the first page of a journal we found in what can only be described as a vault discovered in Wales. Most of the writing within the trove was in an older, pre-Welsh dialect, suggesting that it was built somewhere between the years five-fifty and eight hundred or so. This was the only piece of material out of place. The journal is written in two languages. The first is the same as the Voynich document, while the second is another unknown.”
My mind made a logical leap. “And you want me to translate this one because you believe that the ancient Welsh documents will confirm whether I’m telling the truth, thus corroborating my story?”
She looked surprised. “That was part of the reason, though in truth I’m more interested in what the journal says. If the other documents are telling the truth, this could be the find of the century.”
Well, that had me interested. “Okay, give me a moment.” I read through the page. Wow, she wasn’t kidding. This could be huge like Xbox. “‘My brother and I went to visit cousin Gwain today. Her new husband seems like a strong man. Having him on our side against the invading Saxons makes me feel better. But what interested me most of all is that sword of his. After Gwain explained to him that I was a smith, he let me take a look at it.
“‘I’ve never seen a finer blade nor have I ever seen the metal it’s made of. I asked for a demonstration of its strength and he obliged. He took another sword and with a single strike, cleaved it in two. Awestruck, I remarked that surely a blade as fine as that must have a name. He told me that it was called Excalibur.’”
She looked surprised. “You really can read it!”
I was just as startled. “Is this right? Is this really the journal of THE Guinevere’s cousin?”
“It would seem so. Here’s the next page.”
“‘When we returned to the village, I could not get the blade out of my mind. A few weeks later, on my naming day, my godmother came to visit. I told her of the fantastical thing I had witnessed, and she listened carefully, as she is wont to do. When I finished my tale, she regarded me thoughtfully for a moment and spoke. ‘This metal you describe is known as Adamantine. I have seen it on many worlds. You would be blessed to find such a rare material to work. Would that I could give you such a gift for your naming day, but it comes from the sky and is beyond my domain. Ask instead for your own weight in mithral or Summer’s Bronze and I will gift it to you, but know that Adamantine is beyond my ability to give.’
“‘‘Beloved Godmother,’ said I, ‘I understand. Instead will I endeavor to make something just as great using materials you can provide. I will use the techniques of the Byzantines of Damascus to create something new and glorious.’
“‘Wise Titania laughed. ‘Were I any but your godmother, I would strike you down for your arrogance. But as I am your godmother, I find myself intrigued. Show me your power, little smith. Tell me what you need and I will provide it, so long as you ask not for adamantine or foul cold-iron.’’”
“Did you just say Titania?” the archaeologist asked.
“Yes.”
“As in, queen of the fairies?”
“I’m as shocked as you, though I’m getting the feeling that there’s something you’re not telling me.”
She nodded. “Perceptive of you. The accompanying documents state that the journal belonged to someone known as the Fairy Blacksmith, born in the ‘Elven village of Dragonlea.’”
It was my turn to be surprised. “Does it say what happened to the village?”
“It was put to the flame by Camelot’s crusade.”
What. “What.”
“Apparently, after driving back the Saxons, the Knights of the Round Table set out to wipe out first dragons, then all numbers of non-human species, including elves, dwarves and even giants. It said that a half-elven woman named the Fairy Blacksmith and her brother were some of the last to fight against Camelot’s campaign of genocide, but in the end, even they fell before the armies of mankind.” She smiled. “Obviously, it’s an exaggeration. But it does suggest that there was another race of people that once lived in ancient Britain that was wiped out.”
“What if it isn’t an exaggeration?” I asked. I turned off my visual feature, revealing my face.
“Of course it is. There’s no such thing as elves or dragons.”
I shook my head. “The language this was written in is the language of dragons.”
“That’s impossible.”
It wasn’t worth arguing about it. “I’m just relaying what my source said.”
“What source?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I found the information on the Deep Web.” It was a good lie. Most normal people have either never heard of or know almost nothing about it, so it’s a mythical land you can use to justify anything. “That’s where I learned the language. I found a hidden spot in the Deep Web where some people were talking about long extinct creatures, including their languages. This was the only one I felt I could get the information I needed to begin learning it without getting caught.”
“So what, some kind of ancient secret society trying to keep ‘the real history’ hidden?”
“Could be. Seemed like a bunch of kids playing around. If it wasn’t for the language, I’m not sure I’d believe any of it.”
“Fair enough. I’m emailing you a scan of the whole journal. If you manage to translate the rest of it, please let me know.”
“Will do. And I promise I won’t go public with any of this. I wouldn’t want to risk those people realizing what I’ve done, anyway.”
“Stay safe,” she said.
“You as well.”
The majority of the rest of the journal was in another language. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Aside from that, it looked like research notes. She was trying to perfect the method to make a material similar to adamantine without using adamantine using the same methods used to make Damascus steel.
I suspect that the reason she used a different language is because Draconic isn’t good at dealing with numbers in general and fractions in particular. Dragons don’t have much use for complex math and use a base eight number system anyway. Base Eight isn’t too hard for me or really anyone nowadays, but for someone working back in the dark ages, it likely wouldn’t have been worth the effort.
I took the time to pull out the MP3 player I’d hidden and added the new document to it. I had some ideas for making a compatible screen for it, so it wouldn’t be too hard to read later. I then carefully replaced it and hid the work from my past(future?) self.
The first two days of the paintball excursion went as before. I walked right into the same traps I had fallen for the previous loop in order to avoid a paradox. As if I hadn’t already changed enough. Yeah, I don’t know. Time travel gives me a headache.
The third night, Samantha didn’t come. I waited an additional hour beyond when she had arrived last time and then decided to set off to find her. I strapped on all my knives, grabbed my bear mace and headed off into the woods.
I crashed around the woods for a while, searching for her with no avail. I had just about given up when I stumbled into a clearing and found a black bear fishing in a stream. I froze and tried to back away, but the damn thing roared at me and began to charge.
I pulled out the bear mace and fumbled with it. I couldn’t even get it open. Why the hell hadn’t I removed the overwrap before going into the woods?! In my panic I dropped the can. I cursed in three languages as I desperately sought an option.
It came naturally. I pulled in the power and focused my mind. A bolt of magical force erupted from my hand and struck the bear in the face. I felt vindicated. My academic side also found it interesting that only one bolt had formed, since future me casts the same spell with a result of five bolts.
The bear seemed surprised, but didn’t stop its charge. I pulled out my knives and prepared to go down fighting. The bear leapt at me with a mighty roar and it’s possible I flinched as I prepared to meet my maker. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Okay, yes, I was there, in a physical sense. But my mind kinda checked out for a bit.
There was a loud crash and, after a few moments, I opened my eyes. The bear’s corpse was lying right in front of me. It had been cut in half with a mighty slash. If I hadn’t known better, I would have called it Lenn’s handiwork. It was that brutal.
I looked around, searching for the one who had saved me. I caught sight of the glint of mithral in the moonlight. An extremely beautiful blonde woman in black scale mail armor was standing before me. I was shocked to realize that her body was no longer asymmetrical, though a mask still covered half of her face.
“The two parts of me have worked out our differences,” Samantha said, sensing my question. “So tell me, are you stupid?”
“What?” I asked, shocked.
“I went to all this trouble to give you what you had been asking for. You’ve spent weeks just bitching and moaning over your situation. So I sent you home through the reaches of time and space. Yet all you can think of is going back. Why?”
It was a good question. And it wasn’t just weeks I’d spent complaining. I had been complaining for years. “Because if I don’t, then things will change. People will die. I don’t know if I can live with myself knowing that I did nothing. One day, I will die. On that day, my twin sister will be waiting for me. I want to be able to tell her that I did what I thought was right.”
“There’s no guarantee that things will be better if you go. There’s no way of knowing if things will work out as you’d like. You may fail and die, and the world may be worse off for your having tried.”
“If I let myself be paralyzed into indecision by what might be, I’ll never be able to act. All I can do is what I think is right and hope it works out.”
“Are you sure it’s not just because you want to see your knight again?”
She had a point. “That might be part of it. But if I knew things would be better without me, I’d live with that. But I can’t know, so I have to do this.”
She smiled softly. “If that’s what you want. Let’s head back to your camp. Once your body is safe, I’ll send your consciousness back forward and reset your current self’s memories back to how they were when I first met you and have my past self come for you as before.”
“Wait,” I said. “We have this perfectly good bear carcass. We should do something with it.”
“Oh?”
I took a piece of flesh off the cut section using light magical telekinesis. I then wrote something on a rock with the blood.
“‘Red like roses fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest’?”
“It was the first thing that popped into my head.”
“Oh. I wanna write something too! Any suggestions?”
“Depends. Do you think Courage would eat pieces of the bear if you bring them?”
“Of course.”
“Then write this…”
I couldn’t wait to get back and find out how people would react to a bear with missing forepaws and the message “…the right of the people to keep bear arms shall not be infringed” written on a nearby rock. I had to explain the joke as best I could to Samantha, but I’m not sure she got it. She was willing to believe my assertion that it was a very funny joke, at the least.
As we walked back, I became curious. “Samantha, there’s something else I have to know. Will you answer if I ask?”
“Why I left you on Castrovel?” she asked. I nodded. “That’s a question that requires a little background. Before I answer, have you ever wondered why it was I chose you to go with me?”
I really hadn’t. “I had always assumed it was more or less blind chance. You were letting Courage rest and heard me playing.”
She shook her head. “I told you back then that I had encountered a dark presence in the depths of space, remember?” I vaguely recalled that. I don’t recall if I’ve ever written about it here, but it’s why she’s different. An eldritch horror in the depths of space came to possess her. But it hadn’t considered the possibility that it would be trying to take over the body of a paladin, one who might actually resist him. “It’s too bad it wasn’t Obrek that the creature ran into,” she said, referring to her comrade-in arms from the city of Valor’s Triumph. “He might have pushed it into a little ball and kept complete control. But it wasn’t him. The girl I was could not overpower the will of the being.”
It hurt me to think about how Samantha, no older than I had been when I left Earth, had been all alone with an alien presence trying to overpower her mind and dominate her body. She must have been terrified. “So you chose your battles?”
She laughed again. “Not exactly. It isn’t so much that one of us overpowered the other. In the end, we came to terms with the differences in ourselves. He’s not evil. Not exactly. It’s more that he doesn’t think the way most people do. He’s a nigh unknowable presence with values that are simply so different from our own that they defy explanation.” She sighed. “I’m not explaining this very well, am I?”
“You’re talking about ‘Blue and Orange’ morality,” I replied. Let me explain. Imagine a graph. A simple one would be a single axis up and down. Good and evil. But there is another axis, from left to right. Order and Chaos. Those aren’t precise terms. You could just as easily label them Tyranny and Freedom. It’s a matter of perspective. Perhaps Order and Freedom would be the best way to go about it.
Now that you have both an X and a Y axis, consider this: Most humanoid beings fit somewhere on that singular plane. But what if there were another axis? What if this Z axis were so out there that we couldn’t comprehend it? This is the Blue-Orange axis. It’s an unknowable morality. There are beings who fit somewhere on one of these axes that interact with humanoids, but even then, they generally fall within a realm we can understand once we know certain base facts about what it means to be one of them.
But what if there were beings so far out there that we had no hope of understanding them? And what if they were like us in that they couldn’t understand Good and Evil? Honestly, we’d probably label them evil and be done with it.
So if Samantha had something like that in her mind, then it explained a lot.
“I forgot how refreshing it was to talk with you,” she said. “You understand the weirdest concepts. It’s almost like talking with Gribbletoo sometimes.”
I decided to take that as the compliment she intended. Gribbletoo’s blue-orange axis had Pancakes at one end. No idea what the other end held. Truth be told, I don’t think I want to know.
“What I’m getting at,” she continued, “is that the being could influence the paladin. But it couldn’t completely control her. As such, it wanted out. Taking you with us was its ploy for escaping this body.”
“Me? How was that supposed to work?”
“It didn’t need you, specifically. What it needed was a man with enough charm to make the paladin fall in love and let her guard down. Which meant that it had to be subtle. It couldn’t afford to let her raise her guard. So it nurtured a sense of loneliness in her, making her think finding someone was her idea.”
“I’m still not seeing the end game. How does that allow it to get free?”
Samantha smirked at me. “Well, you see, Kyle, when a man and woman love each other very much, they do certain things with and to each other.”
A lightbulb clicked on in my mind. “It was trying to get your body pregnant so it could escape into the child?!”
“Picking you was a stroke of luck on the creature’s part. You were timid enough to fear the drama that would occur if you pushed the paladin too far too quickly. But you were charming enough that you wormed your way into her heart over time.” She giggled. “All I could think about was how I was going to tear your clothes off and thoroughly ravish you first thing upon arriving on Golarion. Both of us wanted it, though for very different reasons. It was only luck that made the paladin realize the monster’s intentions at the last moment. But even then, she wasn’t sure that she would be able to resist it if you were the one who initiated things, which seemed to be something you were working up to. So you had to be left behind.” Her voice had grown softer as she spoke. Then she whispered, “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”
The pain in her voice was almost too much to bear. I could tell just how lonely she felt. Without even thinking, I hugged her close to me. “Don’t be. I should have realized what was going on earlier.” We embraced for several moments before letting go, though I could tell she did so very reluctantly. “I realize now that we never could have been together. But if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to lie and tell anyone who’ll listen that I tapped that ass.”
She looked dumbstruck for a moment, then began laughing. It was a hearty, rich sound that rang through the crisp night air. “You’ll always be one of my dearest friends,” she said. “Are you sure that you don’t want to reconsider your decision to go back? I can’t interfere there without alerting some dangerous foes to my presence, so there’s no guarantee that I can protect you.”
“You’ve already done quite a bit,” I said. She gave me a confused look. “Don’t think I’m not on to you. I’ve had a lot of time to think about how I met Aurora. That was no coincidence, was it?”
She laughed again. “It was also really funny. For such a deep voice, you have such a high pitched scream.”
We walked the rest of the way back to camp in silence. When we arrived, she smiled wistfully. “You know, I didn’t finish telling you why I chose you to go with me.”
“No?”
“I told you the monster’s reasons, but the paladin’s motive was a bit more focused.” She laughed softly once more. “You know, it’s funny. On this world, there are so many people who profess beliefs in things like justice, who will tell you all about how they would do whatever it takes to protect the innocent. Yet, when you peel back that thin veneer, it’s not true. Don’t get me wrong. Consciously, they fully believe it. But deep down, it’ll be no more than a passing priority at best. But the propensity towards that belief made my search difficult.”
“So you were looking for a good person? It makes sense. You’d want to be near someone like yourself.”
“It’s more than that,” she said. “The paladin didn’t know what would happen to her. She feared that if she lost the battle for her mind, she would become a monster. She wanted to find someone to carry the torch for her. She needed someone who not only believed in the ideals of Good, but would do what it took to make them a reality. In truth, she sought a replacement.”
That hit me hard. A paladin had wanted me to replace her? It didn’t even make sense. “Then why choose me? I don’t respect authority. I’ll sleep with almost any woman who gives me the opportunity. I’ve spent more than my fair share of time thumbing my nose at society’s rules. I’m no paladin. I’m more of a hedonist. I just do things that I enjoy.”
She nodded. “That’s exactly why I chose you. The paladin I was upheld the ideals of Good because it was my duty. I did good things because it was what I was supposed to do. I also believed in helping those in need, but it was almost a ritualistic thing for me. I did good because the being I worshipped expected it. But you… Do you know what I found in your mind when I looked?”
“What was it you found?”
“I found exactly what you said, a man who did things only because he wanted to. A man that did things that he enjoyed. But, in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, he kept doing things that were good. Not because he was supposed to. Not because it was his job. Not because his god demanded it, though yours does and you do seem to care about that. No, I found a man who does good things because he enjoys them. That’s how I knew you’d make the world better in my place, because it was something you’d enjoy.”
I have never considered myself a good person. Hell, I’m sure I’m the poster boy for at least three of the seven deadly sins. I’m talking about Lust, Wrath and Pride, in case you’re not paying attention, though maybe Gluttony in the non-food sense also fits. But especially pride. I’m at least ten times more prideful than anyone I know. Maybe I’m good on a couple virtues as well, but at best that just means I’m not a completely awful person.
She seemed to read my mind. That’s a thing she can do, in case you’ve forgotten. “You’re better than you think you are,” she said. “And you’re much stronger than you know. Even now, you’re here trying to find a way back into what has felt like hell to you.”
“Shall we get this over with?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.
“If you’re sure. I can’t do much to help you once you’re back. This is your last chance to change your mind.”
“I’m not changing my mind.”
“Even with as much of a baby you’ve been about how scared you are every single day?”
What Samantha didn’t understand was that I had always been afraid. My whole life, I’ve lived in a constant state of fear. There’s a part of me that pipes up every time I do anything to warn me of the risks. I just have another part that has always told that part to shut up and forces me to live my life, regardless. I could feel myself smirk as I answered. “I may be a baby,” I said. “But sometimes a baby’s gotta do what a baby’s gotta do.”
She laughed. “I do so very much miss spending time with you. Close your eyes.” She gently grabbed the back of my head and pulled it forward. I felt the soft touch of her lips on my forehead, then she released me. “Take care of yourself, Kyle.”
“I will,” I started to say, but got only one syllable in before the world began to taste very, very purple. Then I passed out.
I awoke to a feeling of warmth on my back, not too warm but instead exactly the perfect temperature. I felt the strong arm around me, heard the soft, rhythmic breathing of sleep and smelled the faint scent of lilacs. I was back.
I carefully extricated myself from Aurora’s embrace and walked over to my bag. I opened it and searched inside. The enchantments made it hard to find what I sought, since it was much deeper inside than before, but I found it nonetheless. Excitement washed through me as I carefully pulled out the crude metal case. Within, nestled in a bed of memory foam – the remnants of a shredded pillow – was my mp3 player.
I just stared at it for several moments, awash with varied emotions. “I’m not a coward, I’ve just never been tested. I’d like to think that if I was I would pass…” I whispered the first words that came to me. I had been given an out. I could have walked away. But I hadn’t. It wouldn’t have been right. Maybe Samantha was right. Maybe I was stronger than I had given myself credit for.
“Yeah, you did good,” Fleur said. “But does this mean you’re done whining about your predicament?”
“And give up all the fun I have annoying you?”
“Touché.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “Better get back to bed. Someone is waiting.”
I turned and saw that Aurora had stirred. She had crawled over to the foot of the bed and was looking at me inquiringly. In her curiosity, she had forgotten to cover herself with a blanket. In the moonlight, I saw everything.
EVERYTHING.
In the moment, my brain wasn’t functioning properly. But even then, I knew better than to comment on any of the bits my brain wanted to comment on. So, in desperation, I spoke the first words that came to mind. “Huh. I didn’t know you shaved your armpits.” Smooth like buttah.
Aurora’s face went white in horrified realization. She mostly managed to stifle a scream and dove under the blankets.
“Can you just forget you saw that?” Aurora asked after several uncomfortable moments of silence.
“I’m pretty sure that would be impossible, even if I wanted to do so.”
“Oh.” The uncomfortable silence returned.
“Look, I’ll go sleep in my room,” I said, standing. I turned to leave but felt a hand on my arm. I looked back and Aurora had gotten up and stopped me, once more forgetting the blanket.
“Please don’t look,” she pleaded. I closed my eyes and pulled her to me, wrapping her in an embrace. She squeezed me back, burying her face in my chest and conveniently making it impossible for her to notice me sneaking a peek at her glorious backside. “Let’s just go back to bed,” she said.
“Okay,” I replied. “But I’d rather not lay with my back to you anymore.”
“I don’t want to lay with my back to you either,” she responded.
I considered it for a moment. “Well, then I guess one of us will have to lay on their back and have the other rest their head on the first’s chest.”
She giggled. “And I guess you’re volunteering?”
“Mais oui,” I said in a goofy French accent for no reason.
“Well tough. I’ll lay my head on your chest.”
I sighed exaggeratedly. “Well, fine. But you’re going to miss out on my patented Motorboat Alarm Clock.”
I laid back down and Aurora climbed into bed with me, laying her head upon my chest, wrapping her arm around me and pressing her soft body against mine. Carefully, I put left arm around her and rested my hand on her waist.
“I’ll get the blanket,” I whispered, preparing to cast a cantrip to pull it over.
“Wait,” she said, looking up at me. There was a slight tremor in her voice and I could see trepidation in her eyes. She was nervous for some reason. As she closed her eyes and focused, it didn’t take me long to understand why.
Great white feathered wings extended from her back as her halo reappeared, glowing with a very pale light. I was awestruck. “Aurora, those are amazing!” I finally exclaimed after several moments.
“Y-you don’t think they’re weird?”
Of all the things to be self-conscious about. I hugged her gently. “I think they’re beautiful.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
The light of her halo turned to a soft golden and I could see her smile. She hugged me tight. “Thank you,” she said. She stretched out her wings and carefully covered both of us with them. They were comfortably warm.
I lay there for several minutes, just enjoying the warmth of her body and the smell of her hair before a question struck. “So, the wings… is that why you aren’t wearing your other nightgown?”
She blushed. “I was afraid I’d tear it accidently if they came out.”
It was more than that. She’d been working up the courage to reveal that part of herself she’d only recently discovered to me, and she didn’t know how. I was touched that she cared. “You know, that brings up a good point. We’re going to have to modify your clothing so you can pop those out if you need to. And that’s before we even consider your armor, not that it’ll be easy to fly in your armor.”
“You don’t have to go to any trouble on my account.”
“For you, it’ll be no trouble at all. However, now that I think about it, that does bring up another question.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, I understand now why you aren’t wearing a nightgown, but what’s up with the lack of panties?”
“Well, I, that is…”
I grinned. “You also grew a tail, didn’t you?” I teased.
Her eyes grew wide. “NO!”
“Oh, but how can I be sure unless I see for myself? Though I guess there is one way…”
“Kyle, what do you mean by…KYLE!” she protested, giggling as I grabbed her butt.
“Well, I guess you’re right. No tail here.”
“Then you can remove your hand this instant.”
“Sorry. Can’t. It’s stuck and won’t respond.” I goosed her again, prompting another giggling protest.
I could tell that despite the fact that she was somewhat enjoying this, she was also a bit uncomfortable. I decided not to press the matter and moved my hand back to her waste, softly tracing my finger along her skin the entire way. I could feel goosebumps on her arms where they touched me.
It confused the heck out of my subconscious. She was sending signals that she was open to advancing things further, but at the same time, I was getting clear signals that she didn’t want to, though I’m not entirely certain how to describe them here. I decided that I would give her time, let her slowly acclimate to the idea of further physical intimacy between us. Half the fun was in the chase, after all.
Once she fell asleep, I carefully put on my headphones and flicked on the mp3 player, turning it to random. I almost laughed at the irony as the same song that woke me back in my room played once more, though it was the original and not the metal remake. As I listened, I contemplated the events of the last few days and what they meant.
My entire life, I had been afraid. Everything scared me, so long as it had a horrible potential consequence for me to obsess over. But I had always soldiered on. I refused to let my fear define me. But that had started to change. Things have been so far outside of what I had ever encountered that I hadn’t been able to cope. I suspect that’s why Fleur and I had become two somewhat separate entities. I had stopped listening to her. But that had to change. I wouldn’t allow my fear to define who I am. I would not allow fear to blind me.
This world wasn’t my hell. I wasn’t taken here completely unknowing what awaited me. No, not Hell. This is the future I chose. So I will no longer give in to my fear. I shall move forward doing what I think is right and to hell with the consequences. Fiat justitia ruat caelum. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
And if those are the words that end up my epitaph, so be it. If those are the words I’m remembered by, then I can live with it. I could certainly do worse than a legal maxim cited by several heroes of history that chose to do what was right instead of what was easy or popular.
So here I am on the road again. Here I am upon the stage. There I go playing star again. Here I go…
Turn the page.
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