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lost Epic in Nexus
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The new worldleapers can do targeted dimensional travel, which leaves them strictly worse than the teleport but slightly safer to distribute and, more urgently, is the step before stable dimensional portals. It's a significant breakthrough. He reads the report while flying and he is so excited and he conjures the latest worldleaper prototype and then remembers he's not supposed to leap at random, in case of Materias and so forth, and he still wants to test it so he checks if he has mana for the wizardly dimensional transit spell instead, and jumps.

Check for written works - yep. Not much, so low-tech. Checks for humans - nope, so it can't cheaply be fixed up by going over and dropping vaccines and germ theory - or, at least, it'd have to be a different kind of vaccines and some checking to figure out the relevant germ theory - 

Now he wants to test the new worldleapers, have them target for Warp. He sets up the parameters. 

It drops him somewhere that isn't Warp.

 

He scowls at his worldleaper, makes a rock in vacuum that he can leap back to, and heads back to the previous dimension, from where he can presumably get to Warp with a standard teleport. 

 

Except he can't. 

It takes him about half an hour to determine what happened, because he wants to be very very careful with his experimentation. 

Half an hour later he conjures a piece of paper that says letter to Cam: don't make a wizardry teleport with the new experimental worldleaper in hand; I think I leapt two dimensions at once. Can't return to any mapped worlds, I checked. I'm going to leave flags in the worlds I've found. 

 

Then he throws a tantrum. He's a demon in vacuum very far from any inhabited worlds so it can be a very very elaborate tantrum. He builds entire cities but on fire; he builds other entire cities and then sets them on fire; he feeds all the flaming cities to a sun which he makes on the brink of going supernova; he sits there waiting for it to do that, but gets impatient before it's done and starts messing with its core to destabilize it faster. The sun goes supernova. It hurts. He doesn't heal himself instantly. He teleports clear and curls up and cries.

 

And then he goes, world to world, leaving flags so if they find any of these worlds they know how to find him, conjuring for the complete works of a Bell.

 

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"Brain - yeah, that'd work -

 

 

- wait, how do they do that without demons?"

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"They don't do it very much, there's only one planet where it's legal, but clones."

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"Well. Let's head over there and trade them. Now."

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"We can't do it now we are small children with unverified powers. We do the ansibles thing first and then when we can pay people to take us seriously and represent us to everybody else I have an idea."

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"We could steal all their clones now."

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"And do what with them?"

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"...bring them back here? Or wherever they want to go?"

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"They bring the clones up to have their brains transplanted when they're like ten - and look eighteen, they rapid-grow them - not to go lead independent lives."

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"I could make us some grownups. To represent us to everybody."

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"Do you want to hear my idea or not? Because it won't work if anybody sees it coming and it's way more people than the clones."

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"I'm listening."

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"The people who get brain transplanted are old rich evil people from Jackson's Whole and it's like a few dozen a year, that might sound like a lot but it's not. People other places besides Jackson's Whole when they're going to die sometimes get cryopreserved to wait until whatever was killing them can be fixed. There's a planet where everybody does this, so there's millions and millions of frozen people who can be thawed out and saved, but the rights to control their medical care belong to some companies who get to use them to vote - like if you're the corporation for five million frozen people you get five million votes. So they don't try all that hard to get them woken up. But we could buy the rights off them as long as we didn't want the votes, buy all of them at once, and then wake them all - we'd need surgeons for the transplants though."

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"...we'd still need surgeons but I could make a new body around a brain just fine, they probably wouldn't have to be incredibly specialized -"

 

Sigh. "A few dozen a year isn't a lot, I do know how many people there are in the multiverse, but it's hard when I could give the old evil rich people exactly what they want even more efficiently -"

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"Well, yes, you do that too, you just wait until there are millions of people walking around Kibou-Daini making it incredibly obvious that the thing is real."

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"...and eventually we find the peals and get them all back." Wing-flomp. "Okay. How're we doing on the ansibles?"

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"Pretty good! It's all definitely legal on Escobar and Tau Ceti and they're two of the biggest hubs. Once they can talk to each other fast people will be very excited to make it easier for us to offer the service to more planets and also we will have enough money to hire a lawyer."

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"Excellent. I'm trying to interpret my alts' notes on worldleapers with persistent targeting, so I can keep looking for more worlds to check for adjacency to either peal without worrying about running into a Materia and leaving you two - well, not stranded, you have the teleport, but without arbitrary matter."

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"The arbitrary matter is very good especially if you can do the brain transplants thing, so please don't get lost, but if you do we will be okay."

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"I will not get lost. ....I could ask Pen if she wants to be the one to do the worldleaping but I dunno how she'd feel about that -" Pen?

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Yeah?

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Linyabel and I were talking about how to look for the peals more. I don't want to jump somewhere bad and get stuck, and I think I can make it safer but I could still make a mistake. And then I thought, if you wanted to jump worlds, then I still have a little mana for emergencies and I could summon you back if you were stuck. But it'd be a lot of responsibility, you'd need the teleport and you'd probably just land in space but it wouldn't be comfy space, it wouldn't have air, and you could land somewhere scary. Do you want to do it?

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I can go in space. How long it take summoning?

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Not long at all, a minute? We could go together and have you jump back to me right away if it's not a mean world, and then if you're not back within ten seconds I'll know right away it's a mean world and I should grab you back.

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And can summon okay from mean world?

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Yeah, Boots is stealing everybody who wants to come from Materia to Warp and Materia hasn't done anything at all about it.

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