It hasn't kidnapped anyone. Yet.
...More curiously, the opening isn't opaque black, ringed with red; it glows a soft purple, but you can also see the forest on the other side through it. If you watch the forest for long enough, you can see insects or small birds moving through it, but none of those attempt to leave through the portal.
It can't see her.
She steps into the dungeon to find out, from a blank slate of zero backlash, how hard it is trying to see her.
Nope.
...Or, well, the birds and the bugs have a bird-and-bug normal amount of trying to perceive her? But they aren't trying particularly hard to perceive her the way a dungeon monster might. None of them are even trying as hard as a mosquito would be to find a snack.
Huh. It's not trying to see her, it's not trying to mind-control her, she could just be hanging out in a forest arbitrarily insisting on being invisible for no reason. That at least means she doesn't need to be in a huge hurry to case the joint.
How big is the dungeon?
It's a little over a hundred acres, in a very tidy circle.
It isn't unbroken forest--there are streams that start at the edge and flow inwards, or flow to the edge and disappear, and a few of those have ponds within seeing distance even with the trees reducing that quite a bit. The ground isn't perfectly level, either; there are hilly bits of varying sizes, and rocky outcroppings, and so on. Also, she may notice that it doesn't stay the same kind of forest throughout; there are clumps of different kinds of trees, and a correlation between different trees and different birdsongs.
She takes lots of pictures and some video, pacing the whole circumference, and then makes sure the exit still works, and then starts spiraling in toward the center.
May is not actually excited to murder a dungeon that hasn't done anybody any harm, but it won't hurt to know where it is, just in case. She is being racist against dungeons but she has a really good reason, okay. Inward and inward.
As soon as the trees have become sparse enough to give her a clear view inwards, she sees the castle.
It's a very traditional--perhaps even stereotypical--Western construction; pale grey stone forming towers that quite clearly resemble chess rooks, with stone walls stretching between them, and a taller tower rising from the center, a red and white pennant flapping in a wind she can't feel at ground level.
Pretty. It will be sad if they have to kill it. They probably will. It's in an unusually low population density area for a dungeon but you don't want to evacuate even a small town if you don't have to, and nobody's going to want to live near a dungeon even if it looks like it's just hanging out. Is the pennant in a recognizable pattern at all? Has the castle got a door?
The pennant is a white field with a red object taller than it is wide on it, but it's hard to see more details than that while it's whipping around and at a distance. The castle has a big portcullis on one side--the front, presumably--and also smaller, less obvious doors in assorted other locations.
There's a dirt road extending from the portcullis, that goes for a little ways, splits and merges to form a circle around an alabaster platform, and meanders off a ways before terminating not far from the end of the treeline.
Anything sus about the alabaster platform besides that it exists in a dungeon? Is the portcullis open?
The portcullis is open.
The platform is tall enough that you can't clearly see what's on it from the ground, but if she climbs its terraced rings, she'll find--a girl.
The woman is perhaps a little older than May, but not by a whole lot, and she's definitely not a kidnap victim. The wings that stretch out beside her put paid to that idea, as do her pointed, elf-like ears.
She's fast asleep, her hands folded over her chest, a wand in the same white with red accents palette as the pennant and her dress held beneath them, and a small white dragon-like creature snoozes curled up on her belly.
May is almost completely not backlashed, because being invisible to bugs is not very expensive, but she can sure imagine being backlashed enough to try to wake this entity up and say hello.
She takes a picture, and another one focused on the dragon.
Is there anything else in the castle?
The castle has a number of rooms, many of which contain normal castle accoutrements like beds and chairs. Some of them also contains non-normal castle accoutrements, like hot and cold running water, in the case of what are clearly bathrooms. The castle has a cellar, full of various comestibles; it does not have a visible dungeon.
The central tower--the keep--contains a reasonable supply of things like bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens, but most of its space is dedicated to books. Lots of books. Lots and lots of books.
...Relatively few of them in languages May can read, though. A small number are in English, and smaller numbers in other languages she recognizes as being either real or based on real languages by someone who had any idea what, say, Arabic, looks like. If she searches she can find a few in French. But a solid majority are in what look to be completely made-up scripts.
The keep has a basement, but the door to it is locked.
The courtyard, between the outer wall and the keep, is filled with marble pedestals, each with a ?glass? object in a unique shape and color on it.
She might decide to walk through the door to the basement but that's best saved for the end of this excursion.
She's never heard of a dungeon with books in it, and looking at the titles will cost her fuckall since there aren't even any animals inside the library; what are the titles, of the English and French ones?
Does anything happen if she tries to collect objects? A walnut, a book, a glass thing? The glass things are especially good candidates for being industrially useful dungeon materials.
The French ones are a book of poetry and what seems to be some sort of expedition log; English ones run the gamut between real literature written prior to the twentieth century to diaries to what claim to be grimoires of magic.
If she tries to pick up a glass thing it is SUDDENLY NO LONGER THE CASE THAT THE DUNGEON IS NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO HER.
Okay. That's another thing best saved for end of run, then. This... might be coming up on the end of the run, actually? She'll go phase through the basement door to see if there's cool shit down there.
There are corpses down there.
...Not of kidnapping victims. The bodies in the basement, each one laid out on an alabaster slab with a thin sheet of fabric draped over them, all have the same wings-and-pointy-ears thing going on that the girl outside did, but they aren't breathing, and the basement is chilly enough to see her own breath.
No dungeon core, though.
It would actually be a little less weird for a dungeon to put wings and pointy ears on people than for it to have readable books in normal languages. She pulls the fabric back to get pictures of all their faces.
There are two women and two men. One of the women is as pale as the girl outside; the other woman and both men have dark hair.
All four of them have some level of plausible family resemblance to the girl outside, although obviously it's strongest in the white-haired woman.
Well, that makes it less likely they'll be identifiable, if their faces are also getting changed to match the sleepy boss monster. She politely replaces all the fabric. Is there another level of the dungeon, "four" would be a surprising number.
Unless she has a particular advantage at finding hidden doors she cannot be certain it does not. But it's not identifying any such to her.
She has no particular secret door expertise. Back up - can she let herself out from this side or does she have to go insubstantial again?
Doing it for the length of a heartbeat isn't too bad.
Okay. How far apart are those glass things, she wants to swipe two at once and make a run for it.
None of them are closer together than a meter but there's a couple of small ones just a little farther apart than that nearish the portcullis.
And when she reaches the circle around the alabaster platform, the sleepy boss monster is actually visible from the base, because she is significantly more vertical and substantially less sleepy.
Not none, though.
She yawns and rubs her eye with the heel of one palm as she looks around.
She frowns and looks around and does not spot May and heads in towards the castle, tiny dragon winging circles around her head.
The swag does not vanish. It continues being a sort of rounded blue chip and magenta-ish not-quite-a-hershey's-kiss shape made out of a material not totally unlike glass.
It was not expected to vanish! It is expected to be sold to industrial R&D departments so they can reverse engineer it.
Cricket's waiting for her outside the dungeon. She calls her agent to talk about auctioning the loot. And also just to talk. She sends June an emoji.
If she's monitoring the situation with the portal at all, she may find out that Sleepy Boss Monster walks out of it and then it vanishes.
Yeah she notices that! That's bad! That gets called in to her agent and also the provincial government!
Sleepy Boss Monster looks around, spots a winged cat, and walks over.
"Hello."
Shit shit shit. May texts more frantically. Forces herself to loosen her hold on Cricket so he can fly away on his own two wings if he needs to.
Blinkblink.
"...What, tal...king? To you? If I'm supposed to make an appointment first then..." she pointedly looks around at the lack of (visible) other people in the vicinity. "There would rather have to be someone to make an appointment with."
"Well, actually you probably aren't worth my talking to at all whether you found my secretary or not, but mostly the dungeon." Paw-lick.
"...Is this some meaning of the word 'dungeon' that I'm not familiar with? Because dungeons are for imprisoning people, and my pocket dimension isn't."
"Well, I don't know what there is that could be objectionable about a 'dungeon' if it doesn't involve imprisoning people! --Although, actually--I don't suppose you know of anyone who went in--or if you went in yourself--I promise I'm not mad but something was--well--I guess it's arguable between 'stolen' and 'kidnapped' but, like, going with the latter would be sort of difficult to explain so I'm going to go with 'stolen.' I'm not going to be mean about it but I really need them back."
"...Well I'm going to start by asking questions, and if that doesn't get me anywhere I will start trying to figure out how to do magic to track them down, even though that's not really in my wheelhouse. I'm not going to have a panic attack or assault anyone about it, the situation isn't urgent, just important." And she's not going to admit that she'll absolutely steal them back if she has to unless someone asks her point blank.
boss monster walked out of dungeon. saw cricket. TALKING TO CRICKET POLITELY IN ENGLISH
I CANNOT decide whether or not to talk to her backlashed I NEED go/no-go from somebody whose brain is working NOW
NOW, PAULA
"My...pocket dimension...isn't exactly an organism, but it's fine, I just closed the portal to it."
Holy shit??
The place isn't evac'd, if it gets mad it'll just eat a bunch of civilians, if you want to talk to it go for it
"Taking your presentation at face value for the moment: here on this planet sometimes a pocket dimension opens up, kidnaps people sooner or later, takes its time about killing them, sometimes lets monsters out to roam around the normal world. This phenomenon is called a 'dungeon'. Your portal was funny looking and the place was weird in other ways but that's the paradigm in which it was first assessed."
"Oh no! I'm sorry, I did not know that--I have not kidnapped anybody and I am not going to kidnap anybody and I am definitely not going to kill anybody, killing people results in them being dead and that's bad. I'm a magical girl. The pocket dimension comes with."
"There... are dead people. In your basement. There are only four of them, but there are those."
"--I didn't kill them! Those are my family. They--they came about in the same way I did but not--not all the way."
"--Wait, if you know that, were you in my pocket dimension, did you take--a couple of colorful things--I really do need those back."
May hands over the bag. "I also took a couple books and a walnut. A lot of the funding for people to go in and rescue people from dungeons and kill the dungeons comes from the exploitation of exotic materials found in some dungeons, I wasn't just swiping stuff for kicks."
"I don't care about the books and the walnut--I mean, I might care a little about the books, but not a lot." She extracts the two colorful things reverently, kisses each of them, and hands the bag back. "I sort of just came to exist a little while ago, and the people in the basement are--people who didn't finish getting made, sort of--and then there's people who got made even less, and," she carefully displays the two not-glass objects in the palm of her hand, making sure she can snatch her hand back if some additional person appears out of thin air and tries to take them, "that's these. And the other ones like them. They're--little pieces of soul, sort of."
"So, again, the paradigm I have to understand - entities coming to exist through processes that aren't mundane biological ones - is dungeons spawning monsters. Which isn't necessarily - I mean, Cricket here was a monster, he just changed a lot when his dungeon died, but - perhaps you could clarify more about what you mean."
"...So, I'm still sorting through my own memories, but I think what happened was that a glob of magic hit a whole bunch of universes and--picked up--bits of me--and also people I was close to--and then landed here. And if one of the mes was from here then it's from before the pocket dimension dungeon monster thing. ...Several of the mes I can sort of remember being are from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries but I think there's at least one of me who's from a world that's...nowish...because your clothes don't look weird but the part of me that's from the eighteen nineties is going 'but why would a woman wear pants.' Um. I'm sorry, this is, actually, weird for me too. If it helps."
"Wow that does sound incredibly weird.
"Do you mind if I record this conversation."
May pokes her phone and props it up against Cricket. In the process she pulls down the time and date display to show the ?boss monster?. "The pocket dimension monster thing is in fact a historically recent thing, it started in the seventies. Do you... have a name. I'm May."
"...I have a magic name in a magic language but you can call me Lucy, a bunch of me were named that and a bunch more were named things like it."
"It is honestly incredibly cool to meet you apart from how this is objectively a terrifying thing to be doing, you would not be the first dungeon monster to talk." Gesture at Cricket.
"Well, I'm sorry to be terrifying you! That's so not what I'm about, my magic is for helping people. It's good to meet you too, though, and I'm really glad to have been informed of the scary context before I scared more people."
"Quite. Speaking of, I should update various people I scared when you came out."
"I'm sorry to have done that but, like, not really actionably so, because I wasn't just going to hang out by myself in my pocket dimension forever. ...Even for definitions of 'by myself' that take into account managing to finish the people in the basement."
Text text text. "Dungeons usually spawn in population centers. The wings are certainly something but if you'd opened the portal in the middle of some anonymous patch of tundra and walked into town I think people'd guess 'weird esper' before 'polite monster'."
"Good to know but unfortunately I did not actually consciously place that portal."
"The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is that it--and by it I mean the portal, not the pocket dimension--doesn't actually exist right now since I closed it; I could open a new one in the same spot as the old one but it is not in any way easier to do that than to open a new one somewhere else."
"I will ask the provincial guy where a good place for it might be that I can reasonably transport you to in my car."
"I don't have to open another one immediately, or anything. There...isn't anyone, who's--awake--in there. Except my familiar and I can call him to me without opening a portal."
"Okay. What are your immediate - plans, desiderata for possible prospective plans, whatever -"
"Healing, probably. My powers have a theme--not everything I can do adheres to the theme, but I'm a lot better at things that do--and that theme is more or less 'making things better,' and in terms of people that mostly cashes out to healing and--chasing away adverse influences--you actually seem like you have some adverse influence on you right now, I sort of have a sense for it."
"I don't really have the context on 'backlash' or 'esper' to know if that maps to what I'm sensing but it seems sort of curse-ish?"
"Esper derives from ESP stands for extrasensory perception but it's a catchall for the thing where magic humans started popping up at the same time dungeons did in the seventies even when our powers do not involve extrasensory perception. Power use causes idiosyncratic acute symptoms, generic chronic ones if we don't get it taken care of quick enough. It is very curse-ish, but we can tame it down by hanging out with other espers, but not every pair of us works well. I have a partner but I am not currently dramatically insane with backlash enough that I have to run to her immediately instead of talking to you."
"It is possible that you have something else on you and I'm sensing the something else and not the backlash but it shouldn't hurt to let me clear it up anyway but it occurs to me that I did just start existing as my current self a very short time ago and the things I think I know about how I work could be wrong. I would like to try but won't without your consent and it would be totally reasonable for you to withhold it."
"It is plausible I should not be the test subject and you should be talking to, say, somebody who is in the hospital because their partner died while they were under stupid amounts of backlash and they haven't been able to find a new one. Mine doesn't generally put me in the hospital."
"Totally fair." She can probably do something about the dead partner bit, too, but she doesn't want to say that out loud until she's actually tried, say on her own currently-dead loved ones, who are actually something more complicated than 'dead' and should hopefully be comparatively easy. ...But some of her abilities are complicated and she really doesn't want to claim to be able to solve death, even not at scale, and then fuck it up. "And if I'm in a hospital I can also do normal healing, I'm very confident I can do that."
"There's probably red tape about that. I will bother my agent about it." She sends Paula the recording so far.
Just to make absolutely sure she can do regular healing, she carefully bites the webbing between her thumb and forefinger on her non-dominant hand until it bleeds, then lets a flicker of light dance over the wound and then it's gone.
"I'm sorry they're rare, having enough healing is really important, non-magical medicine can do some stuff but there's stuff it just can't. That I know of. Yet."
"...Depends on what I'm doing? The more complicated something is to fix the more time I have to spend on one person--and if it's complicated at all I have to do it one at a time, I think, I could," little flash of healing light, "over a wide area, I think, but the most finesse I'd have is excluding, like, bones that'd heal crooked."
"...Depends how much mana I have. Uh, instead of getting backlash, I have an amount of a thing called 'mana' that I use up to do magic with. Right now I have enough mana to do a parking lot but not a stadium, I think."
"So, as a magical girl, I have a 'theme' and a 'virtue,' and I already told you my theme, and my virtue is--I think the best English word is 'benevolence,' or maybe 'agape'--and the more I'm in the headspace of my virtue the faster I accumulate mana. Probably I could be in a headspace where I don't accumulate any at all but I haven't yet."
"You say 'a' magical girl. Are there more, are magical girls the new espers and pocket dimensions the new dungeons?"
She considers this.
"I don't think so. I mean--um--there are definitely things, in other worlds, called magical girls, but I don't think I'm the same as any of them. But...hm. I think I could make someone else a magical girl. Not right now, it'd take more mana than I have and I'd have to figure out how to do it. I think I'm the only one but as a matter of--happenstance, and only for now."
"Is there any kind of support system you need for meditating on the concept of agape?"
"I...don't...think...so? But it could be that there's a support structure that could be constructed that would help and there just aren't instructions for it in my brain archive of how I work."
"It's neat that you come with an instruction manual, espers didn't and people in the seventies had such a time about it."
"It would be so obnoxious if I didn't, the brain manual also sort of covers not instinctively expecting to work like a whole bunch of people I remember being, it would be bad to have to not only learn everything from scratch but also unlearn everything else first."
"...Ask me again when I've had more time to comb through them? Kind of a lot, though."
"Out of those three options more like a hundred I think. But I'm not even a hundred percent sure on that, there's a lot of stuff in here," she taps her head, "and it really isn't organized well yet."
"Do you need a support system of any kind about that? We have a pretty well developed 'support system for people with weird needs who have magical powers' industry because of espers and backlash. Maybe your pocket dimension is already set up with everything you need though - is it going to replenish the pantry or will you need to get groceries?"
"I...think it will not replenish the pantry and I need to get groceries? But there might be alternatives to groceries, just, located in me and not the pocket dimension, aaaaand probably I have better things to do in the immediate term. I'm...sure I could manage by myself if I had to."
"I'm pretty sure you don't! I think you can basically fold into society in the same niche as an esper. Only with wings. Is this a compromise look or just one of your many forms or did you all look this way and there are Earths where people speak English but also have wings? Espers often wind up with funky hair or eye colors, my eyes are actually sorta navy blue now but it's not obvious in most lighting, but not wings."
"Some but not all of my previous selves had wings, some but not all of my previous selves had pointed ears, some but not all of my previous selves had other stuff I don't have right now. I can't shapeshift physically but I am technically in a transformed state; I can switch between 'active' and 'inactive' and I won't physically transform as such but I can do less magic while 'inactive' and every time I become 'active' the clothes I'm wearing will switch out for this," she gestures at her dress. "Also I need to do a pose and say a thing in order to activate."
"How Saturday morning cartoon of you. Well, most people don't learn very much about espers and one being an angelf or whatever will make the papers but only the academic ones."
"Works for me. ...Ugh, I'm going to need a legal name, aren't I, there's enough consistency in first names to make settling on Lucy easy but the surnames are more varied. ...And it would be weird to pick a family name before waking any of my family up to give their input."
"Actually, in Canada and the US you're allowed to have a magical identity that is usually linked to but not officially dependent on your real identity and there's no particular reason you couldn't go around in your magical identity alone at all times, and lots of people's magical identities have corny superhero names so there'd be nothing weird about just calling yours 'Lucy'. Most people don't go so far as to actually have secret identities but there are different rules for active espers about international borders and carrying guns and joining the military and paying capital gains tax and medical privacy and stuff, so we operate with our esper ID for situations where it's preferable. I guess there might be some weird edge case like maybe you can't get a driver's license with only an esper ID? I haven't tried it because I could already drive before I awakened."
"I think I would have trouble fitting into a car anyway." She flexes her wings, which are definitely large enough to interfere with, like, most forms of chair.
"I have a pickup truck since sometimes I'm carrying around artillery and you'd fit in the flatbed, but you could also just follow a car from the air, s'pose."
"Fitting into the flatbed of a pickup works but I definitely do not need a driver's license to do it."
"That's true! And I guess you'd have a lot of drag on a motorcycle. - if you would rather I leave you alone I can go back to my partner's silo at any time and stop bugging you, it's hard for me to calibrate that while I'm backlashed."
"No, it's fine! I am an extrovert and also, like, not sure how to interface with anything, or talk to anyone who is not you without scaring them. Like you did say the thing about wandering out of the wilderness sans portal but I uh do notice that there isn't anyone else around so people have I assume noticed the portal and are currently an amount passively freaked out about that and possibly also me."
"Yeah, the town wasn't evacuated but people are staying indoors, the provincials should be on telling them all it's probably safe to come out soon but it's possible you have soured your reception in this particular town, population: one thousand four hundred and six. I live in Toronto and so does my partner, do you wanna get in the truck or fly? Big cities get way way more dungeons, people who choose to live in Toronto won't blink unless sirens are going off."
"...I'm not sure how fast I can fly so for now I will get in the truck."
"Alrighty."
The truck isn't parked too far from the dungeon and doesn't have artillery in it right now. Cricket hops into the passenger seat and May drives. If Lucy is watching them she will notice that they are carrying on a conversation the whole time, though it's hard to hear between being in the flatbed instead of the cab and the traffic-and-wind noise surrounding.
Lucy is mostly going to watch the scenery go by, actually. After a while her little dragon appears, curling up on her shoulders.
The dragon peeps back. If the prospect of being eaten has crossed its mind it doesn't show it.
They were not especially near Toronto, so it's a longish drive. May makes a rest stop for gas. "You want anything?" she asks Lucy.
May goes and spends kind of a weirdly long amount of time in the convenience store and comes out with potato chips, a bottle of apple juice, and a banana. "This work?"
"That's great."
...Lucy has a lot of components from very low-tech societies and she is just so not inured to the fact that you can get tropical fruits like bananas just. Anywhere. Landsailor sail on time...
May packed snacks for herself and has them in the car already. There's a little cooler with some treats for Cricket too.
Eventually they are in Toronto proper, and then the garage under May's house. It's a big garage, with room for the pickup and also a cute Prius and also what may be a weapons safe.
Lucy doesn’t inquire about weapons. She’s not great with anything except her wand. …She could handle a dagger, probably? This is so not important.
"This is my and my mom's place. I need to go debacklash with my partner for a couple hours but would be happy to put you on the landline here on a call to my cell if you have more questions or speculations about the multiverse or anything!"
"That would be convenient. --And because of how your backlash works this would be convenient for you too and not an imposition, right?"
May gets her set up on the landline and then begins her walk to June's place with Cricket on her shoulder. "What's your little dragon's name?"
"...You know what, that's a good question. Little Dragon is made of...a lot of familiars that ones of me have had, and they had less in common in terms of names than I did."
"Can - he? she? pick a name, or are they less persony than they'd have to be?"
Lucy skritches their head. "They're...hm. They're more persony than most animals are, but they're not really verbal. I think they might have opinions but not generate ideas."
"Fair enough. I used up the only good pet name idea I really had on Cricket, and I don't even know if 'name a critter after another critter' is your style."
"My style is broad enough to encompass the possibility, I think, but I'm not especially drawn to it in this case..."
"What are the dragon's... traits, besides being a cute little dragon? Do they have powers? A favorite food or anything like that?"
"They can breathe the healing-stuff I showed you earlier. Like western dragons are supposed to breathe fire. I can summon them to wherever I am, or go to wherever they are. And...I can see through their eyes, if I want."
"Oh, that's useful. Cricket can navigate in four dimensions but if I call him my familiar I'm mostly just being fanciful. Hmmmm. Crystal, as in crystal ball?"
"Yeah, I just thought maybe you'd get a sense of whether it's too girly, they don't like L endings, they don't want to be named after a substance..."
"Cute! I don't know if, uh, any of you, have read the books, they're fun if you like YA fantasy."
"Tamora Pierce, series about teenagers with magic powers about stuff like gardening and sewing. One of them makes a glass dragon by accident and they name it Chime."
"I don't think Chime had any idea of the name's cool origin when they okayed it. ...And Chime's gender is an 'I'll get back to you on that' situation, not a definitely they in the long run situation."
"If I remember right they 'she' the book Chime but it's not a very strongly girly name, could go either way. And I could be remembering wrong and find it incredibly hard to read when I'm backlashed or I'd offer to look it up."
"--Oh, yikes, that sounds awful, I'm pretty extroverted but I do like to read."
"Yeah. I fit it in during downtime. If your thing turns out to be a miracle instant backlash cure I will do so many more dungeons and still have more time to read."
"I could find a book about espers, or something, if you have one lying around, and you could interrupt to give me context or details or something topical. If there's such a book you'd find it useful or pleasant to have read to you."
"I have Espers Since The Seventies, my room's the one with the blue door and it should be on the shelf, second from the top, leftish I think."
"Okay, I'll go get it, I will leave this stationary phone behind for just a minute. With Chime. Chime?"
There is the soft clack of the landline's receiver being put down on the table, and then a fluttering sound, and Chime begins making dragon noises into the phone.
Chirp. Cheep!
Lucy is back shortly and opens the book to read from the beginning.
May has commentary about the espers book:
"Yeah so esper awakening takes a week, puts us at real bad backlash levels and just sits there, and some of it can mimick normal medical conditions but rare ones..."
"There's a decent movie about that case, they stretched 'we don't know what esper compatibility is but somehow I want to keep touching this stranger' into an entire two-hour romance, I haven't seen the whole thing but Ren loves it."
"Esper is a stupid name, honestly, it has a nice mouthfeel but a lot of us don't have any extrasensory perception abilities at all."
"Yeah they didn't know back then that if you don't kill a dungeon dead it will come back meaner."
"Man, I really want to take a look at a dungeon at some point. Espers don't have some kind of vaguely core-like organ that if you destroy it it kills them, right?"
"--So remember how I said I remembered being mes that had powers unlike my own but were also called magical girls? In one of those, magical girls fought sorta dungeon-like things called witches, and then it turned out that witches are what happen when a magical girl, uh, accumulates too much backlash--that's not it exactly but the thing in question is more like backlash than most things I've encountered."
"Wow. No, excess backlash just causes organ failure and shit. Also dungeons and espers started being things around the same time so you'd be positing some time travel or something."
"The magical girl and witch ecology was being actively managed by some critters called incubators, if magical girls and witches had shown up at the same time I would assume that some of them had created magical girls and then immediately force-witched them. Anyway, even if dungeons aren't what happens when an esper goes critical I still wanna take a look at one, see if my Fuckery Detector detects any low-hanging fuckery fruit."
"Sounds good, I don't actually love the equilibrium where I run around genociding proto-Crickets just because they started it."
"The fact that Cricket stopped being incredibly dangerous once the dungeon died suggests that...the proto-Crickets may not be culpable for the dungeon starting it...which is not to say I'm opposing self-defense against evil pocket dimensions or anything, just, hm. Don't like this."
"He doesn't remember very much about before his dungeon died, I waffle on whether he has meaningful personal continuity with the giant venomous most-dangerous-game-ing version of him."
"There are a whole bunch of things that could imply and I am going to very deliberately not pick the worst ones and freak out about them. Anyway," she goes back to reading the book.
"Yeah, we do codenames here because of the whole superhero comic book culture - not sure why we still wound up saying 'espers' instead of 'supers' or something though. My codename is Traceless. Some places don't do it at all but Traceless has her own passport and everything."
"Yeah that's one of the big awful dungeons that comes up during confluences - this book doesn't really explain confluences, it's like the dungeons are cicadas or something and a bunch of them regularly come due in the same general time period every few years -"
"That assertion turns out to be based on a math error, it's actually the square of the population that increases dungeon probability."
"I might do my whole magical name thing for my legal 'esper' name, or at least the English translation of it. 'Magical Girl Ascendant Lucy' sounds more like a codename than Lucy does."
"Well, you know. I am not in fact an esper, I'm a magical girl, and magical girl names are about that long. I don't mind being called Lucy but I feel like the whole thing should be on the paperwork."
"Valid! And I think long names might come back into fashion soon anyway because we're like racehorses and aren't supposed to have duplicates. Since we can't corroborate things with our birthdates or anything on what is supposed to function as secret identity documentation if we're doing that."
"Some kinds of magical girl are supposed to have a secret identity but I am temperamentally as well as circumstantially inclined to skip it."
"Super valid, Traceless has her own passport because it makes it much easier to go to and from the States with a truckload of ammo but not many people are leaning real hard on the secret thing. Backlashes are sometimes secret, though, because they can be embarrassing and debilitating."
"Yeah, that part makes perfect sense."
She goes back to reading the book.
May continues to have commentary. Cricket purrs on her. She lets herself into June's apartment and puts her feet on the presented feet.
Not doing more than putting feet on feet feels deeply sad but Lucy's pretty sure that her own touch needs are unusually high.
Lucy finishes the book and then has non-book-related questions. Mostly about how to go about clearing red tape to go visit a hospital and try to clear someone's backlash and maybe also obliterate some cancer or whatever.
"If you don't think there's any conflict of interest concerns - I don't think there are but I mention this for completeness and also because I cannot shut up - then I can connect you with my agent, and she could take you on or recommend somebody else in her agency. Her name's Paula Bescond. Her texting style takes some getting used to but I've found her good to work with."
Lucy takes a moment to think about this, because it's important, actually.
"I don't think there are any conflict of interest concerns. If it's inconvenient that I took the soul-shards back I can make other magic stuff. I think probably I need my own phone before how she texts matters? But that's probably easier than anything involving an agent."
"It's inconvenient in the sense that I was going to auction them off but I don't get saleable swag out of every dungeon. I'm sure you can auction other magic stuff too. I can probably figure out how to order a phone to my house if you at least vaguely intend to pay me back someday."
"I absolutely intend to pay you back as soon as it's convenient. Which is hopefully sooner rather than later. For most of the magic substances I can make it's more efficient for me to work with them than to hand them out to other people--including via auction--but there actually is one that I can make a lot of very quickly, my wand has the property that I can sort of draw in the air--or not in the air, actually--with it, and then there's a solid chunk of stuff-my-wand-is-made-of there. The white part, not the red part."
"Does it have interesting material properties? Dungeon materials are mostly exciting when they turn out to be, like, reverse-engineerable superconductors or something like that."
"...I do not know. It has useful magical properties; I have no idea what physical properties it has. I mean, besides the ones I can directly perceive by holding it in my hand."
"Well, a sample of it'll sell, not everything pans out and R&D departments buy on speculation. What are its magical properties?"
"It's a sort of a magical...amplifier, or catalyst? It's easier to do magic with it, I get a little more oomph out of my spells when I cast them with the wand, and they cost a little less mana, and the wand can do a handful of things that I just can't without it, like the making more of itself thing. I can also use the material as a substitute in a lot of magical workings that require specific materials, as long as I, uh, shape it, correctly, except I sort of mean a magical shape thing, not the physical shape of the material."
"If the amplifier thing works for espers you will be very very rich very very fast."
"That would be deeply cool. --I can probably figure out some way to amplify esper powers, that definitely falls within my theme's remit of making things better and more themselves."
"The backlash curse removal thing too, that would be big, but harder to distribute globally than a substance you make a bunch of to put in boxes and ship out."
"Yeah, the difficulty of scaling my abilities is...a good reason to try to figure out how to make more magical girls, actually. Even if my theme turns out to be more applicable than average. It's not like I can't do anything off-theme."
"I would love to be a magical girl probably unless it sucks a lot more than it looks like."
"Well so far it doesn't seem to but I haven't been one very long, and also most of the mes that I remember being died horribly so my standards might not be excellent."
"Yyyyes? Or, like, not horrible deaths necessarily, but there aren't a lot of good ways to die that aren't 'old age' and I do not remember any of those and I'm pretty sure the process was selecting for mes who were dead. Or, you know, things like being dead, like being from a doomed timeline."
"I think I would have to remember the undoomed version of the timeline to know for sure, and I don't, but at a guess it would be the evil god."
"Do we need to be on the lookout for more interdimensional visitors who might... be evil gods?"
"I don't think so? The evil god, uh, showed up in that universe through an established importing-people feature the universe had. And only ascended to godhood afterwards. This universe doesn't have an established importing-people feature, unless the dungeons or dungeon-monsters secretly work that way, and it doesn't have an established ascending-to-godhood feature, so...not any more than before I showed up? I think?"
"Man, I hope dungeons don't secretly work that way. Do you have multiverse-travel powers? Can we go exploring?"
"...We can't go exploring yet, I bet I can figure something out, I have a pocket dimension and I can teleport and there's gotta be a way to put those together to get dimensional travel, but the brain manual does not have instructions on how to do that and I have a sort of intuition that it's gonna take a whole bucketload of mana."
"One of the ones I grabbed says it's a magic textbook, is that likely to work outside of its universe of origin? Do you think they all came through without transcription errors even if you didn't have them memorized?"
"I think they would have come through without transcription errors? The contents of my demiplane seem pretty centered around what I want, and I'd rather have, like, blank journals or something, than reference books that are wrong. And...depends on the magic system, I think? I didn't actually pay attention to anything in that bag besides the soul fragments so I'm not sure."
"Espers are strong but I didn't want to load up on lots of any one thing without knowing more and as soon as I grabbed the soul fragments something was trying real hard to perceive me so I skedaddled."
"Ah. Yeah, uh, I'm not shocked, I'm again not mad, you had no idea what was going on and some very specific priors, but if some less scrupulous person had run off with those and I couldn't get ahold of them again that'd be. Not good."
"Yeah, I get that, I'm sorry. What exactly was trying to perceive me, I don't think it could have just been you, you didn't have a good angle."
"The demiplane isn't alive but the castle especially has some...automated systems? That makes them sound more, uh, computer-y and less vibes-y than I think they are, but I'm not thinking of a better analogy."
"Huh. Was it just trying to see me or was it trying to do anything? It feels about the same to shrug off attempts at mental influence, I can only tell when those things are happening by my backlash ticking up."
"I think it was trying to put the fragments back on the pedestals but I'm not sure."
"Huh. Like directly or by making me do it? I didn't feel them trying to move at all."
"I'm not sure. Exactly how the vibes-based systems work isn't in my brain manual. I think. It is possible I will find it later next to a ritual for pie, I don't know."
"Uh...well, I was joking, but I do actually apparently have a ritual to make approximately arbitrary food. Which I had not realized when we were discussing groceries."
"Oh, nifty! Not a big gamechanger in a first world country but if it takes less time than baking it sounds convenient."
"Also it means I can make stuff I remember without worrying about whether this world has the ingredients."
"Ooh, are there ingredients we definitely don't have, I wanna hear about those."
"Um...there are ingredients I don't know this world to have, but I don't know of any that it definitely doesn't. But, like, a bunch of vegetables, some spices--actually there are some animals I'd bet they don't have here, I don't think Earth comes with six-limbed vertebrates."
"Well if we're counting stuff that comes out of dungeons there is absolutely nothing I can definitely guarantee this planet doesn't have."
"It's actually kind of - concerningly narrowed to things that are recognizable and interesting to humans. Most of the universe is empty space, most of the rest is stellar plasma, most of the planet is molten, most of the surface is ocean, and there's lava dungeons and ocean dungeons but - in proportions far closer to 'how often do humans think about these things' than to 'how often do these things exist'. There are cats with wings, there aren't snakes with elephant trunks, it's the kind of remixes that a human would not just toss off but find ongoingly interesting."
"Yeah but I don't get the impression that anybody knows enough about dungeons that that means there won't suddenly be one or more dungeons based off stuff I know."
"Can't guarantee it, no, but you don't usually see a dungeon themed around, like, some specific child's imaginary friend, it's more like - mythology, mass market genre fiction. I wouldn't particularly expect you as one person to start theming dungeons. It'd be really interesting if you did though!"
"I don't expect it, either, but--yeah. Anyway, there are definitely going to be forms of meat I have experienced not previously seen on this Earth."
"Oh, there's this one that's sort of like a cross between a cow and an anteater--I mean, not really, but it sort of looks that way--it tastes more like venison, but not a lot like venison. That's good! Oh! Also, woolly mammoth, that's been eaten on this planet but not for a long time."
"I, hm. No live specimens yet, although I wonder if the thing to pursue wouldn't be some means of cloning...I can make raw ingredients, not just entrees..."
"I don't think we have cloning at quite the requisite level of functionality yet but I don't actually know, maybe somebody can whip it up if they'll get a mammoth out of it."
"Yeah, I dunno. Actually, if I were going to figure out how to make critters directly, I think I would want to start with some things that are, like, direly endangered, but their whole ecological system hasn't been replaced by one that doesn't have them in it? After talking to some conservationists and ecologists."
"I think with a lot of those just generating new baby ones wouldn't necessarily help that much because there aren't enough adult ones competent to raise young. A mammoth would have a guaranteed spot in a zoo, I wasn't even thinking of releasing them wild."
"Well, I think that at least with some populations a small gene pool is a bigger immediate problem than there not being adults to raise babies? But, like, this is why I would talk to conservationists. The zoo is a good point but I would rather stabilize a collapsing ecosystem than make some zoo exhibits, if I have to prioritize."
"Valid! I haven't looked into this very much so I don't know where to point you but I bet the Internet has you covered."
"I bet it does...hm. I bet reversing genetic damage from inbreeding is more on-theme than making new critters..."
"Your powerset has opinions on which genes are damaged as opposed to just the set of genes an individual happens to have?"
"...I mean, some genes...are bad? Like, hemophilia is genetic, or at least some kinds are, I think, I don't think my power would take a whole lot of convincing on 'hemophilia is bad and genes that cause hemophilia are worse than genes that do not cause hemophilia,' f'r instance. I figure that probably generalizes? But, also, I have not in fact figured out how to do that yet."
"I think a lot of inbreeding just means multiple copies of genes that would be okay if there were only one? But again this is not my area of expertise, I am just unable to shut up, feel free to steer me onto whatever other topic."
"Oh, no, it's fine--so, as far as I understand it, the genes that are fine if they're only one is, the gene is broken, but as long as there's one unbroken copy it's okay, because you only actually need one copy to do the job? So, like, in theory, it would also work to repair these genes in recessive carriers, there's just not as much need to. Assuming this is a thing I can do at all."
"If you can do this I'd probably suggest doing it on people once you discover it works on animals."
"Yeah I was thinking of it for population bottlenecks but also I would really like to cure Huntington's."
"That's a good choice! I have other methods at my disposal so I've been throwing money at malaria but Huntington's is a bitch."
"I should look into how they eradicated smallpox. I think even polio isn't quite dead yet. That seems important to fix."
"It would be really cool to get a magical girl with a theme about eradicating diseases. I should try recruiting from like the WHO or something."
"Uh--I have an intuition for it but the intuition is kind of fuzzy and I expect my actual understanding of the process to improve once I figure out how to make people magical girls and have done it a few times. But--your theme and your virtue are both going to be, like, based on who you are as a person, to an extent, and people who are actively attempting to eradicate diseases seem likely to be strongly selected for being eradicating-diseases kinds of people? I'm not certain I'd get someone with the kind of powerset I'm looking for by that method, but it seems like the obvious thing to try."
"Not a clue! None of my mysterious intuition or handy dandy brain manual has anything whatever to say about espers."
"Because there are probably things that are the case about me as a person that would lead to powers that might dovetail really inefficiently with my esper powers... is it steerable?"
"It, hm. mmmmaybe. I think...that might depend on the developmental path I take towards being able to do that? But it's also possible there will be tradeoffs and steering ability will come at the cost of something else."
"It's like...hm. Becoming able to do a thing involves growing, and there are multiple ways you can grow to get the same result? It's not, like, a skill tree with multiple paths to a skill, it's much more free-form and organic than that. Alternately I could figure out how to do something using the abilities I already have, like by developing a ritual, and if I do that then details are going to depend on the exact details of a ritual."
"Man, that's like asking how many species of citrus there are. It's complicated and they don't have bright line boundaries."
"Huh. Were all of you magic or is it at least going to be a smaller vague number than the number of yous there were?"
"Oh, that'd really bug me if it were me. But were you all magic to begin with?"
"Um...maybe. I'm not sure. I haven't specifically identified any who weren't but I don't have a specific intuition that I won't?"
"Do you think it's a special you-property that you are or were so numerous or - no, your family is also numerous? Who are they? I took pictures of them, should I delete them?"
"I don't think so? But I might not be thinking of all the reasons why someone might want that. Uh, I don't know if--so, like, I'm pretty sure the magic thing was specifically hitting mes--so, like, I know there are a bunch of mes in absolute terms, but the number of worlds that got hit could be absolutely tiny compared to the worlds that exist? I don't actually know how universes work."
"It's also interesting how--okay, so, the four bodies in the basement, one of them is my brother and then the other three are all my parents. As in, all three of them are my parents, not, the three of them are all of the parents that I have."
"The woman who had white hair like mine, she's there almost all the time. Actually, the other two are there less than half the time, but I guess that's still enough to make it into the corpse vault instead of the soul garden. ...Sometimes she or the other mom in there is trans, or there's magic, is how I can have one mom almost all the time and the other one oftener than almost never."
"And there's... additional parents who didn't get incorporated, or are only present as soul glass things?"
"I mean, it seems likely, for sure, but most of the situations I remember involved monogamy and I'm not sure how some of them are going to react to, uh, logistically speaking, not that."
"And they're all - glommed together. Yeah that sounds complicated. None of you had a situation that - either involved or did not involve monogamy? - there has to have been a more elegant way to put that."
"Of the mes that I remember being, all of them died or were otherwise interrupted young and had not yet picked up one or more significant others. Lotsa friends, though, hence the largeness of the garden. There aren't that many extra dads, and I only had a couple other siblings besides the one brother ever."
"You are remarkably coherent for a person agglomeration. How long have you been a person agglomeration?"
"Since...I...woke up? I have no idea how long I was asleep, and if I dreamed anything I don't remember it."
"You are especially remarkably coherent for a person agglomeration if you only woke up around when I was trying to burgle you!"
"The fact that all the people I am made up of are, like, the same person, is really helping. I'm pretty sure. But you're right, it's weird that I'm handling this as well as I am."
"I hope there are more of me. Though I don't think I'd care to agglomerate with them."
"It seems like a preferable alternative to total death, or being on a destroyed timeline, or other ways of unexistifying all the way, and emphatically not to continuing to be alive and doing things on your own."
"Is 'ritual' as in 'for pie' a catchall term for several magic systems or is there one specific one that's ritual based?"
"Uh...hm...how to give an answer that's not only technically correct but also not misleading...okay, all the rituals I can think of off the top of my head go in a sort of clump together, but I don't know if that's going to keep being the case going forward, and also there's some not-ritual stuff that's sort of clumped together with them? Not as closely connected as they are to each other but more closely connected to them than anything else."
"...is this clumping about being from the same universe or about a different thing?"
"Almost none of the magic I have now is exactly the same as magic that a previous me had. A lot of different magics got sort of melted together, like, Chime isn't made of a bunch of familiars I had because those familiars were all the same like all the mes are the same, they're like that because the various having-a-familiar magics sort of got piled on top of each other and syncretized. A bunch of the magic I have I can correlate with several different things I've had in the past, like, a lot of mes had various healing abilities, but the accretion process that created me was a lot more complicated than just taking individual fragments and stapling them together. ...I think that's part of why I'm so coherent, too, actually."
"The magic material that my wand is made of is a specific material from a specific universe! Not a weird combination of other materials. Also, because there's so much stuff I haven't figured out yet, I'm doing a lot of adding qualifiers even if something looks like an absolute right now."
"Did the material your wand is made of previously exist in that universe and go through a process from there to become wand shaped, or did it get created ex nihilo by your whole shtick and merely is materially and magically identical to the substance found in that universe?"
"What format is all your information in, like, it sounds like you remember being all your yous, but you also know a bunch of stuff that none of them would have known, does that feel like more memories or what?"
"Even stuff like what the deal is with the soul glass stuff and whatnot, that's procedural? What procedures do you know how to do about it?"
"Oh. No, that's more...uh...ha...bit? Like, um, there are songs that I couldn't tell all the words to off the top of my head, but once I start singing it each one reminds me of the next one and I can sing it all the way through just fine. If you had been like 'glass things' or 'soul garden' while I was waking up in front of the castle I would have been like 'what are you on' but then as soon as I saw them it was obvious what was going on. The procedural knowledge bit is, like, how my powers work, mostly, I think."
"Huh! You should probably tour your own pocket dimension at some point then, see what prompts what."
"Oh, yeah, I totally should, just hasn't been at the top of my to-do list yet."
"Mostly at the moment it's, like, getting to the point where I can heal people. Various substeps thereof, etcetera. Right now I could in theory go do that since nobody is going to freak out about a temporary portal inside your home but, like, I can do that when your backlash is down, orienting myself and building social rapport with you are, not exactly urgent but timely?"
"This is gonna take me at least six hours, and that's if June wants to wait around that long."
"Well I don't promise not to get bored or anything but you're also being helpful untangling some of the stuff that's in my brain, I don't especially plan to stop until at least one of us would rather be doing something else."
"That's very convenient of you! I actually do often use this kind of time to conduct interviews but usually they're much closer to an established template and I schedule them in advance so this one is very scattered."
"Well, see also how it is a miracle that I am as coherent as I am right now. Also I just like you."
"Thanks! You are getting a very specific subset of my personality but I appreciate it anyway! I like you too."
"I'm modeling you-without-backlash as basically, like, like this but an introvert, plausibly needing to go hide in a dark room from all human contact for a while? But, like--the thing about you that's standing out to me is that, like, all your questions are good, you don't necessarily immediately understand what I'm trying to convey but you don't go off in bonkers directions about it if you don't, you, like, immediately re-oriented around my not being a horrible murderkidnapmonster instead of continuing to be suspicious of me, you don't want to genocide the proto-Crickets if there's a better option..."
"Aliens made contact in the seventies and started abducting people! The fact that they come to us in the form of asshole pocket dimensions does not diminish the significance of this eventuality!"
"And proud of it! None of your yous remember anything like dungeons being a thing?"
"Like I think I said something about earlier, there was this one world with people-called-magical-girls and also 'witches' that had evil pocket dimensions with monsters inside, and magical girls turned into witches if they didn't manage their magic correctly. And there were fluffy aliens managing the magical girls to prevent knowledge of this becoming common. Anyway, that's definitely 100% the closest thing I can think of right now."
"Right, I remember now. Was there a way to fix them, once they'd turned into witches?"
"...I don't know. The fact that witches are ex-magical girls was really not common knowledge, mis-managing your magic being bad was common knowledge but, like, we mostly thought you just died of it, I actually died not long after finding out."
"Yeah. I think the revelation was supposed to witch me--based on the way it was presented--but before I had even finished processing the horror of it I had started brainstorming ways to turn witches back, so my soul gem didn't fill up all the way--uh, the thing that happens to a magical girl when she uses magic is that her soul gem, which is a magical jewel attached to her in the same way that grief seeds are attached to witches, darkens, and strong negative emotions also make a soul gem darker, and you more or less can't be any happier than your soul gem is bright. And if it goes all the way dark, well. Anyway, that revelation darkened my gem some but I did not witch on the spot and I was absolutely 100% going to tell some more magical girls what was up and then--I'm pretty sure something happened to my soul gem. If your soul gem breaks you die. But the happening was fast and did not happen in my field of vision, so."
"There are all sorts of things I don't know about their deal because I didn't get a chance to find out before biting it." And this is deeply frustrating actually.
"Are there a lot of - ongoing emergencies you left behind as distinct from doomed timelines that aren't getting any doomeder and worlds that are chugging along tolerably well?"
"Hm, let me think...um, lots of ongoing problems I was trying to solve that, uh, solved me first, not so much actively unstable situations...might depend on your definition of emergency? But also again standard caveats about remembering things later apply."
"Naturally! And in the very longest of runs even a world that could be described as chugging along tolerably is going to turn out to have fractal problem depth."
"I know, right? I mean, there's problems and there's problems, but, like--you'd think that dungeons and witches would be the main thing, in either universe, but do you know how much cancer there is? Fuck cancer! And malaria, and Huntington's, and that's just things that are at this time killing people who are still alive, and not even beginning to get into the billions of people who are, you know, dead, and I didn't see anything in that book about any espers having resurrection powers."
"They don't, it sucks! I donate, like, most of my income that I'm not reinvesting in equipment to malaria control."
"Good for you! ...I think I should be able to develop resurrection, off healing, it's not a stretch, but, hm, scaling it would be more difficult."
"Scaling! Please imagine me shaking my fist, I'm not doing it but you can't see me so that doesn't have to be an impediment."
"Oh, for sure. The number of things I can do and the number of things I can scale, haha, they don't know each other."
"Making more magical girls might be promising? Will the more magical girls also be able to make more?"
"I...think so. That's probably my best bet for scaling, yeah. But I haven't figured out how to do it yet so my initial statement stands despite the very promising caveat."
"And of course you don't want to create more problems than you solve but vetting slows you down and isn't perfect anyway, though, like, nobody vets espers before we awaken, we just happen, and so far that is mostly okay, so maybe this is a relatively robust planet on which to go nuts on magical girling everybody."
"...I feel like, there might be a problem that I haven't identified yet," she says slowly, "but I haven't identified it yet, and might not want it spread around when I do."
"A problem like... a drawback of being a magical girl, or some other kind of problem."
"...Some other kind of problem. I'm pretty sure. A problem with the process, maybe? Hm."
"Maybe. Maybe it's going to turn out that steering has some obnoxious tradeoff. I'll know more when I have a better idea of how to do it, I think."
"Will getting there take the form of introspection or of experimentation?"
"Um...more of the latter than the former, but organizing the brain manual certainly ought to help."
"Is bumbling along through whatever the first thought to come into my mind is the best way to do that?"
"Fair enough! You get mana from just sort of being an agape-ish person, right? What helps you with that, do you need to, like, meditate, or peoplewatch, or anything?"
"I will try those and get back to you on it. Not, like, right now, but at some point."
"If I were an esper my backlash would not be losing my sense of timing! Probably. It'd be a hell of a coincidence."
"It would be! ...since we don't know how espers work we can't rule out that you could have an awakening now that you're here."
"Well, if that happens, I sincerely hope it has the good timing to wait until after I know if I can clear backlash or not."
"It happens within a fairly narrow age band and I have no idea how that would interact with any of the various ages you could be construed to be."
"Orrrr how it interacts with, uh, nonsenescence. I do not know for a fact that I won't age past the point where I am but, like, a buncha me wouldn't have, so. I'm pretty sure it's less of a divergence from humanity than the wings are."
"Espers get to be in excellent health without having to maintain it much but we do age like a normal very healthy human."
"There are kinds of people out there who don't age past maturity at all! There are kinds of people out there that don't have the concept of aging past maturity."
"How's your magical smorgasbord in terms of terraforming or faster than light travel or any of that cool shit?"
"Not terrible? I mean, it's very much not the focus of my power, I wouldn't be surprised if some other magical girl is better at it once there are more, but I can teleport and I can do some neat stuff with plants."
"Right now I can only go about a hundred meters at a time but I expect to be able to grow that."
"You'd have to be able to grow it fuck of a lot to handle interstellar. Easier or harder than interdimensional?"
"...Good question, I don't know. I expect that deriving interstellar FTL from my teleport to involve iterating on it conceptually to create a new spell, not to work by expanding the range of the spell I have now. And for interdimensional I would try to iterate off my pocket dimension. Or if I can figure out something interesting about dungeons, maybe."
"...I have an intuition for that but unfortunately the brain manual is not actually made of words so I might need to actually try it before I can come up with an explanation that makes sense to anyone who is not me. Orrrrr possibly I could use the magic language about it. I don't know if the magic language works over the phone."
"Remember when I said that I had a magically attached name, and 'Magical Girl Ascendant Lucy' was an English translation of it?"
"Right, so, the kind of Magical Girl I am comes with a magic language, that--is magically comprehensible and also packs a lot of layers of meaning into every word. The original version is [Magical]* [Girl]** [Ascendant]*** [Lucy]****"
*Magical both in the sense of being magic, breaking the laws of physics and such, but also in the more figurative sense of being really cool and emotionally moving, like sunsets and soap bubbles can be magical despite definitely not being supernatural.
**Suffix denoting a bearer of the preceding characteristic; connotationally but not denotationally feminine.
***The process of transitioning into a greater, more actualized version of oneself; most centrally implies increasing in capability but, like, going to therapy doesn't not count.
****The person that she and all her component selves are/have been
"I think that works over phones! That's so cool and I don't know how to pronounce any of it."
"Oh, excellent! So, uh, [the non-spatial meta-shapes that magical energies form when they're Doing Things] [the particular ways those shapes interact with her particular magic-self to form viable combinations] [a spectrum that encompasses both precise controlled-variable science experiments and throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks]."
"Coinages as in--quantized units? No, you mean like coining a term, don't you."
"Yeah trying to actually translate that into English would be, uh, hard, but explaining in more general terms might be possible?"
"Go ahead! - wow the speech to text program I have recording this conversation for later consultation and editing has just absolutely no idea what to make of anything you said in the magic language. It's printed a bunch of punctuation marks and the number three."
"Not that my phone's ever contacted in its life but I am suddenly way more interested in calligraphy than I was five minutes ago."
"I am not surprised your phone doesn't know it from cuneiform but also, yeah, it's neat--I don't know how much calligraphy is necessary, I...haven't actually ever tried to write the language down in a normal way..."
"In what abnormal way do you write it? Cricket watched a movie where the aliens have some kind of weird relationship to time and they'd just touch a surface and simultaneously ink an entire hypercomplicated radially oriented sentence - I don't watch a lot of movies but Cricket does and he tells me about them because he is a very good kitty who loves me."
"Remember how I told you about my wand tracing the material it's made of into existence?"
"Yes. The tracing process would still imply a linearity to the composition of a character, though? I guess you could do it in three dimensions. Sculptural writing. You could hang legible magical Christmas ornaments all over a tree."
"I think I have more control over the shape in which the material comes out than just the movements of my hand would imply, that's not a weird intuition thing that's an I've been messing around with my wand while we talk and I have observations thing."
"Huh, like the equivalent of being able to control the flow of ink separately from the pressure of a pen?"
"A little of that, a little of--being able to dictate what the counterfactual 'surface' I'm writing against in the air is shaped like?"
"Good question!"
She looks around for some kind of writing implement and Thing What Is For Writing On.
There is a mug with pens on it and a little notepad near the phone she's on!
Perfect.
"...Yes, I can write them down," she concludes, "but, hm. They're legible, but the thing where you automatically perceive their meaning? I am also automatically perceiving the places where my handwriting deviates from the 'correct' version."
"Sssorta? It's possible the word 'typo' has inapplicable connotations. Like, it's that I did the right thing wrong, not the wrong thing right, if that makes any sense."
"Writing magic language with a pen is which thing and typos are which thing?"
"Typos are wrong thing right--you put down the wrong letter, but the letter itself is fine. Magic language is right thing wrong--it's still recognizably the correct shape, you haven't swapped out elements of the character for elements of a different character--but the lines aren't quite straight enough and the curves aren't quite smooth enough."
"Huh. How hard do you think it would be to conventionally manufacture a correct glyph?"
"I don't know! Probably not too hard, the ones I make with my wand are fine."
"It'd be fun if you could, like, 3D print them and put them up as informative signage - does it work on people who can't read at all?"
"Ren could bring one in to her kindergarteners... except that's very much like experimenting on children, probably she shouldn't do that."
"Yikes, yeah, I can't imagine it would hurt the kiddos but let's draw the line a very generous distance away from actual harm."
"I was mostly thinking about it as a PR minefield because I feel no trepidation about myself looking at the written form of the thing you've spoken several of... whatever the unit of meaning is in that language... at me, but that too."
"Well, fair, but they're sorta the same thing from my perspective, like, if it gets out that I did Thing, I expect this to result in some very stupid people wanting to know how I can object to them doing Thing, and if the two things are only technically the same thing and actually completely different I do not expect to be able to get this through their head. All the worlds contain many wonders, but also, some astonishingly creatively stupid people."
"I would like them all to be okay forever and far away from the controls for anything important and maybe with time they'll grow out of it. Like. Some of them, anyway."
"--I have things in my bag of tricks about immortality, I don't have things in my bag of tricks about making people use immortality to grow the fuck up. Possibly there is a way to do that that isn't mind control but if there is I don't know 'er."
"Aw, I would like my very own magic intelligence hat if those were a thing."
"--Making people smarter is, like, plausibly a thing, but like, if you are making someone smarter with the intention that this will turn them into a person who will make different decisions and have different values than they have now, that sounds, uh, sketchy as fuck?"
"Hmm, I think making an intelligence hat available for consensual acquisition with full disclosure of its parameters is still fine even if you have this ulterior motive for doing so. Obviously I would not go around shoving them onto people's heads."
"They will not, but if there are enough hats in circulation it will become a mark of status and superiority to have one!"
"I sure hope so. It'll be important to make sure the hats have the right kind of intelligence boosting, though, you can get real good at, like, math, and still make completely inexplicable life choices."
"It is a known problem in locales without intelligence hats! But also yes emphatically moreso, in this one world they basically divide mental capacity into sensibleness, ability to juggle complex concepts including but not limited to math, and social skills, and you can boost any of them independently, and there are, like, memes, about the risks of having too much more of two than one."
"Excess sensibleness no, excess social skills some but, you see, if you are making mistakes because you are too good at persuading other people that things are a good idea, the people around you are less likely to make fun of you than if you are making mistakes because you were asking if you could make dinosaurs out of mosquito rocks and not whether you should."
"Any obvious differences between the places apart from the nature of the pocket dimensions and the superheroes who fight 'em?"
She peers at a calendar hanging nearby. "Well, in witchworld it was only 1999."
"...how long ago was that. You probably have no idea but like, could it have been 1999 when we were also having 1999?"
"That's what I thought but unfortunately I cannot not ask a question solely because I already have a good guess, I need a stronger reason than that to not ask a question right now."
"That's fair. It would have been really cool if I knew the answer. There are a bunch of earlier ones that I also don't know how long it's been since."
"...Small but not negligible proportion of Earth. And more Earth than any one other thing."
"Duplicates, yes...if there are any other triads then I haven't found them."
"No, no, there's more than three Earths, just, I haven't found any others with as many as three. Yet."
"Latest Earth is I think witch one. Earliest is hard to say because there's some worlds that could be Earths, I'm not sure, I don't know or remember or whatever enough early history to be sure."
"Huh. You could try triangulating by which languages you remember from there, maybe."
"You must speak so many. I've just got English and French and I'm getting started on Tagalog."
"Loads. Keeping 'em straight's harder, like, English is fine because I'm talking to you and you're speaking English, but a lot of sentences are running through my head that have words from half a dozen languages in them."
"Like the Canadian I am I took French in school, like most people I did not by this experience attain fluency, and then I awakened and it turned out language-learning conversations are a really good sweet spot for almost the entire range of possible backlash without making me internally cringe at what a waste of time it is, so I am now fluent in French and paying a friend of Ren's to accept phone calls post-dungeon in which he teaches me Tagalog."
"That is so cool and I would be delighted to teach you weird languages at some point when that's the best use of conversational time."
"Uh...I think you could learn, like, words, in it, but one of the ways it is magical is that it can generate new words when it encounters new concepts, so I don't think learning it could get you the same level of utility in it as magically having it."
"You will definitely get it if you become a magical girl! I do not know of any way to bestow it separately from that but could maybe figure it out."
"The kind of magical girl I am right now isn't from a specific universe, it's made of a bunch of things piled up on top of each other, including other kinds of magical girl I have been. The magic language likewise, actually, 'generates new words as needed' is actually a fairly recurring magic-language trait."
"Your new phone is expected at the house in... another thirty to ninety minutes, but if I were you I'd want an entire laptop to make a spreadsheet on... do I need to catch you up on any tech things if the last time you were having an Earth experience it was 1999? I assume you're deriving a lot of phone related information from having seen me use mine."
"It looked like something out of Star Trek but I am not, like, shocked by the future-ish being sci-fi-ish."
"Probably makes sense to practice terraforming on Mars before working on exosystem travel, so we don't go anywhere too hostile to life before we can fix that. Also, I like the color red."
"I don't think it'd be very red after a thorough job of terraforming, surely? Red-er maybe but you need ocean and plants."
"Earth isn't very brown from space but if you go outside and interact with stuff you see plenty of dirt."
"That's true, but I'm not sure the red dirt would make very good topsoil, by itself, I think it might need to be mixed with stuff and wind up also brown."
"...Figuring out how to magic it so the dirt ends up red anyway is not a good use of my time and I am not going to do it."
"It sure isn't! ...I mean I guess I could do an illusion of red dirt but that is really not saliently satisfying."
"Maybe I will terraform it with lots and lots of plants with red flowers. And I think there are kinds of plant that have red leaves, at least some of them. This is a very silly line of inquiry."
"It'll be so cool to finally have Mars, though. How about zeppelins in the upper atmosphere of Venus, anything you've got for those?"
"...Venus is, like, really toxic, right? Gonna have to seal those really well...or detoxify the place...I will get back to you on options for Venus after, like, doing research about it."
"I think the idea is that breatheable air would be light enough to keep a balloon aloft so you could just live inside the balloon."
"Sure but again you'd have to be really careful about leaks, and I don't know what the agriculture would look like."
"For sure! --But also, like, if you're just doing Magic Habitable Bubbles, it doesn't need to be Venus specifically, like, Venus is a rocky planet that's adjacent to the Earth! I feel like there's some stuff you could do with that specifically, whereas, like, if you're doing magic bubbles, you could do that on, like, Jupiter, which is also cool."
"Depends on what part of the bubble situation you're applying magic to! Like, the pressure differential is completely different."
"Yeah...one possibility is making the bubbles on Venus first, then figuring out the extra stuff for Jupiter, then moving them to Jupiter and terraforming Venus more traditionally? But it's possible I'm overthinking it."
"Wow, that's so cool. I never would have thought! It's so close to the sun!"
"That sounds correct but actually I cannot recall details about its correctness."
"It's one of the big moons. I remember thinking it sounded promising but I don't recall why and can't look it up right now. Does it help you sort out all your you if I ask questions that point out specific ones? Like how there's a single latest Earth. Is there one where you lived the longest, say?"
"The Earth timeline one was actually easier because I could use technology as a benchmark, like, I thought about the computers and stuff we had in 1999 and concluded that I did not know what came next."
"Lulu was a cat. She had a beautiful tortie coloring, and she was very affectionate but was also extremely willing to laugh at me when I did something dumb..."
She remembers a whole bunch of familiars and has feelings about all of them!
Aww what good familiars. May holds down the interruptions with Cricket Facts to a minimum.
"I'm really glad that Chime--is, it's not the same as being combined with more of yourself but it's still a lot better than just not being," she concludes.
"Yeah. I don't think being a tiny dragon comes with a brain manual either."
"She's super cute. I would love to put pictures of her on my blog. - a blog is like a, like, magazine column, that I publish all by itself on the internet."
"Oh, cool! What's yours about? ...I mean, like, obviously magic stuff, but is it more specific than that."
"It wouldn't technically have to be about magic stuff! I started it before I awakened! It's about dungeons and espers and monsters. It's got a lot of interviews in it, now, and photographs I take in dungeons."
"Some. Uh, I have pictures of your family because I thought they might have been kidnap victims who weren't reported missing, the thing where they don't look like humans would have been weird but I snapped pictures just in case."
"Oh, yeah, that totally makes sense. I think that one shouldn't go on the blog though."
"Yeah, they won't, I'll run anything about you and your stuff and your folks by you before it goes up anywhere."
"I appreciate it. I don't think they'd love the idea of pictures of them all corpsy being around once they're up and about. Little awkward."
"It would be! Those wouldn't have gone up anyway, they'd have been like missing persons evidence."
"Wouldn't it be funny if there was a me here, and you got a hit for them, like, yeah these guys died of unrelated causes back in the sixties?"
"You don't think they'd have agglomerated? I guess they could have and they wouldn't have stood out, this place'd've looked like a nonmagical Earth in the sixties."
"Yeah! --In fact the reason I specified the sixties is I have in fact identified a non-magical earth in that decade, haven't found anywhere else without magic yet but who knows."
"The whole thing, I think I can type it if I'm getting every letter from you one at a time."
"That's what it's named after, though they changed the spelling. It's a way to search the Internet."
"Oh. I do know what a search engine is, just couldn't offhand recall one named google."
"It's so overwhelmingly popular it's a verb now. Though I hear it used to work better, it's gotten kinda co-opted by ads and stuff."
"Ah well."
Lucy Wayne was a nurse at a large hospital in Boston, until a former-patient-turned-stalker killed her, dismembered her, and hid the bits in lots of different places. The police ultimately found...most of them. Not all.
"Oh my god, even the headline is disturbing. Cricket my sweet kitty will you read us this and paw any words that trip you -"
Cricket can read the article with possibly disturbing relish and frequent pauses to ask May for help with words.
"--Wow okay I had realized that that asshole got me, I did not realize what he did afterwards."
"Oh well. We'll see if the impulse is still there when we scale resurrection to the point where it makes sense to get even him."
"Well, you know, I don't have any plans to die again, and I'm only going to get more abilities over time, I'm not going to just leave anyone dead forever."
"Hm, but if you don't scale very well you might wind up with the population growing faster than the resurrection capacity."
"Even if I completely failed to scale resurrection I'm sure I could figure out a way to scale making people immortal."
"Then whether you get around to him might depend on how many other universes there are to go immortalize!"
"Well, that's true, but--if I never get around to that guy--I mean, he sucks, but he's not the worst person ever. If I never get around to him then there's whole bunches of people who stay dead forever, and I'm not interested in accepting that."
"I hope you find a way to scale it! But it would be weird if there were, like, exactly a hundred and seven universes all of which have had a you in them at some point who specifically died-or-whatever? It'd be weirdly specific. It seems more likely there's zillions, maybe more of them all the time. At some point exploring more universes and gobbling up their magic is going to be a more promising approach than resurrecting people at a steady drip and there's no guarantee either approach will work."
"That's true. But there are probably mes who didn't die, right, that'd be weird if there weren't, and I can't be the only person interested in solving death. Like, yeah, the project could be impossibly big in scope, but--I think until it is confirmed to be so I'd rather not borrow too much trouble."
"At some point I'm going to have to look into if there's anyone I knew back then who's still alive and who I should let know I'm okay."
"Anyone you want to check now as opposed to after I have had a chance to introduce you to your phone?"
"...if your mom or brother from here is still alive would they... agglomerate upon death, or... how would that work."
"--Uh, good question. If there's anyone from the soul garden who's alive, I can give them their soul-glass and they can absorb their other selves, but...if there's anyone from in the basement I don't know."
"Well, that--if they don't do that then their other selves stay dead? And their other selves are them? And most people don't want to be dead? Um."
"Right, but I can imagine someone thinking, like, well, here I am, already not dead, and this weird person from another universe wants me to absorb a magical artifact which would reportedly give me memories of my alternate lives but that sounds weird and scary?"
"If you had me in there - you don't, as far as you know, right, I don't seem familiar even adjusting for backlash? - then I'd probably be interested but I would at least take some convincing, I like to know more about what's going on before I make major life changes."
"No, I don't think so. Actually, I did have a thought earlier, for something to do with soul-glass where there wasn't an existing relevant alt, which is--depending on how the transition from a dungeon monster to an ex-dungeon monster works, I might be able to rig something up so that a monster cut off from its dungeon absorbs a piece of glass and becomes that person, instead of a randomly generated new person. But that of course only works if the new person is randomly generated, and not in some way meaningfully continuous with their dungeony self, or in some other way there's a specific person who would be being overwritten."
"They don't all talk, and they also don't all last sans dungeon, Cricket's not unique but he is special."
"Yeah, 'is this a specific person' is not the only bit of science I would need to do to find out if this approach is viable. Though, I won't lie, I'm getting my hopes up that it is, because Cricket is really cool."
"Next time I'm in a dungeon with relatively kidnappable monsters I can grab you one."
"Sweet! I appreciate that! ...I might actually want to do dungeons too, because--I can make a portal to my pocket dimension from wherever I am, which seems like it could be really useful for rescuing kidnap victims. Or escaping a collapsing dungeon without having to make it to the exit."
"There's dungeons where I wouldn't recommend trying it but more where that'd be useful! Having an entrance into a dungeon while it collapses wouldn't be bad for your pocket dimension?"
"It seems like at worst it'd close the portal but I can't rule out being unpleasantly surprised."
"Yeah, if you can't replace the pocket dimension I wouldn't personally want to try it, stuff in a collapsing dungeon doesn't come back."
"I also had the thought of--deliberately staying inside an S-rank dungeon that was sealing itself, during a confluence, to keep rescuing people--but, uh, that definitely falls into the category of ambitions that are not currently within reach."
"Save it for when you can, like, remotely operate a surplus body or something. Can you do that? Even if you can it might not work, comms generally don't across dungeon apertures."
"Uh...well, I'd probably need to make a portal in the sky of my demiplane for it to connect to a satellite? But, like, walkie-talkies should work fine by default? I don't know exactly how future tech does signalling but, like, the portal is the only point of connection, so if you have radio waves not pointed directly through the portal then they'd be cut off?"
"Someone bad at naming things! I don't know more specifically than that though."
"In their defense, I did translate it a little bit. In not their defense, it sounded just as stupid in the original."
"What's the original? 'Chai tea' is stupid but it doesn't sound stupid, we can borrow it and then it won't have to sound stupid here."
"I might end up re-naming some stuff, since I'm the only source of information on a lot of this stuff. Like, there's a different magical substance I can make, called Orichalcum, which could get confusing for anybody who has ever read a fantasy novel."
“Fantasy novel orichalcum is too diverse to be able to answer that precisely; it approximately means ‘fancy magic metal.’ Orichalcum was a word someone in the ancient world used for a metal that may or may not be platinum, but fantasy writers like to use it as a recognizable word for generic fancy magic metal. To the best of my knowledge the use of the word for the real magic metal in another universe has no causal connection to the word on Earth.”
"I think it's fine to name your magic metal that you have after imaginary magic metal that we don't have."
“Fair. I’m probably going to want to, uh, ‘google,’ some things later though, in case they turn out to be offensive, like, imagine if I hadn’t had any selves later than the twenties and showed up with something called Hitlerite.”
Giggle. "It super would! I think probably there is nothing like that but checking is cheap."
"Google is useful that way, yeah. Though it can't completely substitute for research, you're not going to catch everything that sounds like any bad person in any language."
"As long as it's obscure enough that people aren't shocked I didn't pick up on it I can manage."
"Landing in the future is cool, but it could also have been neat to end up in the forties and beat up Nazis. In theory, anyway. In practice it's not massively my style. I'd rather heal people."
"Man, I could've, but if I could just skip the battle lines and throw open the death camps...well, that does have a favorable healing to beating people up ratio."
"Much better than just beating up some soldiers, that's for sure. ...Probably there are not any nazi-themed dungeons but wow, that would be a way."
"Yeah, no, they don't usually go that hard on the - artifacts? One of the ways your pocket dimension was weird for a dungeon."
"Yeah, it'd be less convenient for what it is if it didn't have any stuff in it. I mean, not that monsters and landscape features aren't stuff, but they're not very homey."
"The forest part was actually weird to me too because it just has, like, bugs in it, nothing monstery."
"Yeah. It both has stuff a dungeon wouldn't and doesn't have stuff a dungeon would. Including not only monsters but a core, I would be extremely surprised if it turned out that breaking any physical object in my pocket dimension made the whole thing collapse."
"My top guess was that it was under your pedestal but I was there on a scouting basis so I didn't try."
"Most dungeons don't have a single identifiable boss but it's really memetic when it does happen."
"And dungeons that do have boss monsters generally also have other monsters."
"Hey, Chime? Can I boss you around?" Lucy calls, taking the phone's receiver away from her face.
Chime's cheeping manages a distinctly negatory tone.
"I think my parents would object if I tried to boss them around! That's not the direction these things usually go! My brother would give me such an unimpressed look if I tried. There's a sister in the soul garden that I could probably get away with it with..."
"The one where I was eaten by an angry god...the one with the weird demonish politics...I think a friend I made in the timeline that unhappened was her but we weren't related there...one of the ones with magical girls, not the one with witches...the one where koizumr comes from...I'm pretty sure there's some more besides that but those are the ones I'm immediately thinking of."
"How many worlds did somebody need to be from to get a spot in the basement instead of the garden?"
"Huh, and you can't approximate it by how many worlds the most common garden person is compared to the least common basement one?"
"I could maybe do that if I went around the garden trying to figure out how many worlds everyone is from but I have not at this time done that."
"Legit, you kind of chased right after me after I stole a couple. Who'd I have?"
"Araith--there's only one of her, from the timeline that didn't happen--I actually have several people who only existed in the timeline that didn't happen, I think sort of in an attempt to rescue them because they wouldn't exist in the timeline that replaced it--and, uh, let's call her Ella, several of her, tends to be pretty colorful. Araith's the blue one and Ella's the pinkish one."
"Sometimes! Like, she tends to be species that have coloration different from a human's, if they're available, and sometimes that means pink hair and occasionally that means pink skin but that's on the low end of weirdness."
"Hmmmmm, probably the one where her skin was all shiny and sort of silvery with rainbows?"
"She's generally pretty, yeah. I should see how I am at drawing, depict some things I absolutely do not have photographs of."
"You'd have to do it longhand? No illusions that might work with cameras?"
"We shall have to do a series of photoshoots. I have a really nice phone camera, which is not as fancy as a nice non-phone camera but much more portable."
"They do! It has basically killed the low-end dedicated camera market except for, like, instant ones that print out a physical photo then and there, there's still use cases for that."
"You can't! And they're bigger and most people aren't sophisticated enough photographers to get much out of any features you need the bulk for."
"Oh, I meant, it makes sense that instant-picture film cameras survived, because you can't say a film picture is photoshopped if someone shows it to you."
"It is at least significantly harder, but like it could still be staged like the fairies that fooled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or something."
"Oh, uh, someone faked a bunch of fossils to make it look like humans evolved in England."
"Huh, did they stand to benefit from this in some way or did they just do it for kicks?"
"Well, that depends on who did it! Last I recall, they had, like, a list of suspects, but not a conclusive answer--but the guy who found them, one of the suspects, got a lot of scientific esteem for the find."
"Well, it's a better use of evidence-planting skill than the perfect murder, I guess."
"Hmmm. Kits for children to learn archaeology with? Like chemistry sets, but with bits of rock and bone and those little brushes."
"Thanks! I went to a lot of museums as a kid. As, uh, kids? There were a good handful of me who went to museums."
"Museums are good! Toronto's got good ones if you want to go museum-trawling in downtime. And remain based in Toronto."
"Ooh! Even if I don't remain in Toronto I will probably want to do museums first."
"Well, like, if there's someplace it's better for me to be for coordinating-with-espers reasons."
"All big cities have espers, because dungeons like cities, the bigger the better. We have not literally had Godzilla come for Tokyo but it's where you'd expect that to happen if ever it did."
"If Tokyo ends up with a horrible lizard dungeon and NYC ends up with a horrible primate dungeon I am going to laugh about it."
"Neither of those specific things has happened but we did get dragons in London once."
"That is cool. If the putting people in monsters thing works out I'm going to want to put Araith in a dragon."
"What kind? You can put up a bounty for monsters if you want them caught, usually that's the only time anyone specifically hauls a monster from a dungeon or takes it alive outside of one, and I don't know exactly how picky you can be about the kind of dragon you want in what time frame but I expect you're going to be mega rich."
"I think I'm not going to put up that bounty until I have a better idea of how well the general thing is going to work, and I'm going to do some research into how specific things get and so on, but--Western, generally, the kind with all of arms and legs and wings and a long neck."
"Huh. You know what I might do is just, like, put up a picture of what she looked like last time, and be like, 'as close to this as manageable.'"
"Oh, neat! If we're doing a lot of this I might want to buy you a fancier camera specifically for the purpose. But we'll see how good the phone camera is, first, actually I'll probably be blown out of the water just by that because 1999."
"I've got a hundred twenty megapixels. Which doesn't matter for just putting the pictures on my blog but I want to preserve the possibility of them being useful for research that involve minutely analyzing how light in dungeons works or something so I save all the really high rez versions."
"Yep! It is a lot of pixels. Though other factors also matter, there's a lot of software going on and I needed to be picky about that because some phones make far too many assumptions about what you might be photographing to be good for dungeon documentation."
"I don't know a lot but I know more than timeline displaced Nineties Kids. Phones have all their features silo'd in various applications, to a greater extent than a computer does - phones are basically just little computers with cameras in them now, the underlying functions of the hardware have converged a lot, but people use them differently and prioritize different things about their programs, like phones you usually operate by poking the screen and a computer will still have a keyboard and either a mouse or something standing in for one."
"Your phone will be there... any minute now, actually, though I'm not sure I can walk you through getting it set up over this call."
"Mm. Oh, do you know when your mom's likely to be home, and how much explaining I'm going to have to do?"
"When she comes straight home from work it's at like 16:00 but she usually doesn't. I've texted her about you but not at length and she hasn't called back to get more detail."
"So I may or may not need to do explaining but she is also not going to show up soon enough to conveniently help with the phone, got it."
"Right. I will probably be able to part with Cricket in about forty minutes but he's not amazingly tech savvy."
"Dragging him away from someone he likes to someone he dislikes for a task he's not very good at isn't something I would ask for."
"If I were you I'd feel pretty urgent about having the phone up and running but maybe you'll be able to figure it out out of the box."
The doorbell rings; maybe it's the phone.
She returns to the landline. "Got a little box. I'm assuming there's a Star Trek phone in it." Time to investigate box.
"Star Trek had tricorders and communicators as separate objects."
The box comes open once she's figured out the order of operations on what to pull apart from what, and inside: phone, charger, instruction manual.
"Can this thing tricord? I mean, it can take pictures, but tricorders could do a lot more than that."
What do you have to say for yourself little instruction manual.
"It can't really tricord, no, it's more of an information technology than a sensor technology."
The instruction manual wants her to know that it should NEVER be immersed in water. It wants her to know this in six languages. Also here's the power button etc.
The phone arrived charged, so it boots! "It can talk to satellites to tell where you are, and correlate that with maps and stuff, so that's fun."
"You might need an email address for some steps, I can make you one from here and you can change the password later but I will need spelling help now and then."
The phone comes installed with several native apps including a map app and a phone app and a texting app and a photo app.
Ooh photo app! She investigates it and then snaps some pictures of Chime.
"What do you want your email address to be, it needs to be unique among people using the service and you probably don't want it to be as long as 'magicalgirlascendantlucy'."
"Oh--um--magical girl me from the witch world had the email address whitewitchbane."
"Love it, that's probably free, uh - Cricket, help - there, spell it for me?"
"whitewitchbane@gmail.com is yours now and your temporary password is 'ascendant'."
"Okay--" is there an obvious way to interact with this fact on the phone.
Cool she will attempt to do that. "What's gmail? Is it related to that google thing?"
"Yeah, Google started with the search engine but they now have their fingers in all of the digital pies."
"She's a little bit of a showoff. Oh, and--"
A photo of the table the phone is on, with pictures of a pale blue dragon and a woman with some dragon-like features like horns and a tail. "That's Araith, she could turn humanoid like that."
"Oh, nifty. If I were a dragon hybrid situation I would want the wings and tail to stay with me, not sure how I'd wind up feeling about the horns."
"Oh, for sure. I was one once! It wasn't fun, I had a weird dragon disability."
"A weird dragon disability? Like you couldn't breathe fire or fly or something?"
"Couldn't fly. And the magic dragon language insisted this meant I wasn't a real dragon."
"That's... weird? Were they having ethnic conflict with wingless dragons or something?"
"Oh, no, I had wings, the wings just didn't work. And my parents' wings worked fine; sometimes a dragon baby is just born with the inability to use their wings properly. And dragons could shapeshift, and if a dragon that can't fly gets close enough to a dragon who can fly, in their natural forms, the not being able to fly is contagious. And we don't become able to shapeshift until we're twenty--which, by the way, is still a toddler for dragons--and once we can shapeshift we can be, like, birds, but until then we can't fly at all and a dragon who doesn't fly experiences increasingly horrible chronic pain about it."
"I... was about to say that's a stupid reason to experience chronic pain but I will experience chronic pain if I don't go put my feet on June's feet for hours every time I do a dungeon, so who am I to judge your reasons for having chronic pain."
"The species setup was incredibly terrible but, like, also human women menstruate, sometimes a species is just randomly terrible in ways."
"We do do that and it is randomly terrible. Does your angel elf situation not?"
"It had better not. ...I think even if angelfs usually do I have a fertility control thing that'd prevent it."
She giggles and emails May a handful more pictures; a dragon with scales like moonstone, wings hanging uselessly at her sides; a human girl with moonstone-shining hair; a mildly humanoid moth with moonstone wings, and a hairless flat-nosed mermaid with a moonstone tail.
"Yeah! We get five forms we can turn into--most of us--and it's considered smart to leave one or two slots open for emergencies. So I had a normal humanoid form, a flying form, and a swimming form."
"Oh! I usually don't... look at the middles of moths very much. So it is."
"Fairies and sprites are both insectoid sapient species, and they do magic differently from how humanoids do it, and if you're a dragon and you have a sprite or fairy form and a humanoid form you can learn both!"
"Well part of the magic involves making gestures with your hands, and fairies and sprites have two pair."
"So they cast different spells or something? Can you still cast those spells - the non-insect ones anyway -"
"Oh that world had, like, any idea that other dimensions exist, and that kind of magic straight-up doesn't work out of dimension."
"Huh! Can you get in touch with them? Could they help with the exploring?"
"Good...question? I could try. I don't have a great way to find them specifically though."
"...Figuring out how to target worlds in general? Which is probably going to have to wait until I have any idea how to do dimensional travel in general."
"It seems weirdly - specific and neat - that one world had dimensional travel as an area of study at all and it's one with completely unportable magic. I almost said 'importable' but that would mean something else."
"I mean it's not the only world with dimensional travel at all, it's just the one we were talking about."
"Well the one with the undone timeline had that summoning thing, and the one Lulu is from had some planar stuff and..."
She lists several dimensions and whatever kind of dimensional nonsense they had going on.
"...and I can't be sure that was all of them, obviously."
"The multiverse is so frickin' huge. You'd better make me immortal, I wanna see it all."
"Will it be robust against my occasional flirtations with suicidal solipsism, I fucking hate those but approach them more often than never when I'm saving lives and stuff."
"Making you impossible to kill as well as unaging is harder but I do have some miscellaneously gathered advice for not committing suicide?"
"I'm not a suicide risk when I'm not having delusions of being the only person who exists in the entire universe, it just turns out that's really upsetting!"
"The loneliness isn't a mood, it's a magical curse. I am compelled to talk to people but it doesn't actually help, the only thing that actually helps till you whip a solution out of your magical smorgasbord over there is guiding. So when it's really bad, I notice that nothing that feels like it's supposed to help does, and if I'm too far gone I start coming to loony conclusions about why that might be, like, 'this doesn't feel satisfying the way I'm emotionally convinced talking to a person would be because that's not a person'. I try to stay very far away from that unless June's in the dungeon with me, I can tell she's real. Though I can't really act on it very much because if we're in a nasty dungeon she definitely doesn't wanna talk to me."
"I mean I knew it was a magical curse but I did not have a good enough model of it to predict that specific outcome. Uh, the specific thing I had to share was--a resolution to, if you're going to kill yourself, have some particularly inconvenient way to do it, so that if you ever decide to kill yourself you have to go through some series of steps in order to do so, and then hopefully by the time you make it through the steps you have decided not to."
"Iiiii don't think that would dovetail that well with my use case but noted in case of applicability."
"I don't suppose it would help to posit the existence of actual people in alternate realities."
"It actually might! Like, it's a delusion, it's not that amenable to reason, it can conclude that everyone everywhere except June if she's within guiding distance is not a person based on the belief that whatever rando I'm rescuing from a dungeon right then isn't, but maybe it will help that I can remind myself that somewhere there are awesome dragons and maybe those are people and the problem could just be that I haven't met any dragons yet."
"Some of the dragons are telepathic so that might help for observing that they're people!"
"That would not help much because my power makes psychic contact attempts bounce off me! It's selective and I could undo it but, like, I'd have to decide to do that, and I so far haven't been even fleetingly tempted to let a psychic dungeon manhandle my brain no matter how lonely I am, even when I want to introduce myself to monsters."
"It's pretty exciting! Backlash isn't amazing but espers'll still be exciting to other people."
"Maybe you can just fix that, who knows. Though guiding actually feels amazing, reportedly more so if one's partner is snugglier than June is, so it would be a little sad to not have it as a phenomenon at all because we were all so perfectly capable of never getting backlashed."
"I expect clearing backlash to be a lot easier to do than preventing more from accumulating."
"Yeah, but I could imagine it winding up just being, poof, you're not backlashed any more. Like at the end of an awakening, which itself felt pretty neat, but not as good as guiding."
"Oh, sure, but like, you can still go get more and get guided about it. Not actually immune."
"I hope you find someone compatible who likes skin contact. I'd probably go nuts in your position, I'm so huggy."
"I'm not huggy as a person but as a backlashed person I get that way, yeah. I go around fistbumping every new esper I meet to find out but it's such a crapshoot."
"I'm huggy just as a person. I expect to cope until I've got my family fixed up, but like, it is a thing to cope with."
"I will hug you if you want but I will not, like, drape myself all over you for hours, unless something really terrible happens to June in which case sure."
"Yeah, I woke up in the middle of the night and yelled for Ren and spent a while digesting the belief that I had secretly been raised all my life by a mom-resembling robot before I got ahold of myself."
Lucy resists the urge to ask "food mom or soft mom?"
"Well, that sounds unpleasant. I'm glad it's over."
"Me too. - you might want to try out your backlash removal ideas on specifically awakening folks, who don't have partners lined up because like a hundred people would have to make a house call to check to match any given one, and some of those backlashes put people in the hospital for the duration."
"I thiiiink I might be down to the point where I can post about this on the messageboard for you."
"Messageboard first, I think." And she will see if she can figure out texting.
"Okay, posting that I have a connect with someone who has an experimental debacklashing procedure, especially interested in awakeners who are in medical danger... aaand... texting Paula. The agent."
"If she says something that has four concerning interpretations and a normal one she means the normal one."
"Sent. She might not be super on top of her texts, I didn't make it a priority alert."
"It says, 'the boss monster I told you about is not a boss monster, she is a magical girl who comes with her own pocket dimension and cool extradimensional magic, do you have room for another client'."
"Let me rephrase, I am also curious about what you told her about the boss monster you thought I was."
"I told her the boss monster walked out of the dungeon, that I needed her to make the call on whether I should let myself talk to you, she gave me the go-ahead, then I said 'she seems chill' and 'I think maybe not a monster at all'."
"So there's leadup on the not a monster thing and it doesn't look totally like I mind-controlled you or something. I mean. If you were mind-controllable."
"Yeah, I really do not trust my backlashed self to decide to talk to things that are at all odd."
"That's so reasonable. I'd've wanted to talk to me too, but that's just because at baselne I'm an incurable optimist. Which has gotten me killed fewer of the times I've died than you'd think. For sure some of them though."
"Well, you've already told me one. Obviously I'm not going to be able to give gory aftermath details, at least not until I wake up some people who outlived me, but..."
Most of the stories she gets into involve her doing Incurable Optimist things, but some of them are just bog-standard accidents.
May's questions come thick and fast at first, but gradually drop off to lower and lower frequency.
"Conceivably someone with my backlash could relate to it like people mostly relate to, say, alcohol, the things it instills in me are not exclusively vices."
"My limited understanding of how backlash works suggests that such a person wouldn't have gotten yours?"
"People do hate them different amounts? But - powers usually oppose backlash and people are usually really fond of their powers, so that would be shockingly convenient, yeah."
"Yeah, I don't think you've got the worst possible one for you--oh man, you know what would be a terrible backlash, illiteracy."
"I think that might be strictly less bad than mine? Like, it already locks me out of most literacy-based activities except for specifically texting people and even that is only possible up to a point."
"I think I would find the sensation of looking at text and not comprehending it more disconcerting than not having the attention to look at it much but fair enough."
"I'll give you that, I'd just take the disconcertion and be able to listen to an audiobook any day."
"My brother--the one in the basement--he's an introvert. If my healing doesn't deal with backlash already I will work something out that does."
"I'm trucking along okay but I could clear so many more dungeons with a quick fix. And so could June, she's amazing in the field."
"If my brother had to talk to someone he'd met the same day as long as you and I have been talking already he'd be thinking very longing thoughts about a dark room and a book."
"Tragically I don't have a lot of particularly long-term friendships. When I awakened my parents tanked the whole thing, there was nobody it would even have slightly made sense to invite. Since then I get Ren to introduce me to her friends more often."
"I guess that would help! But seriously even if I were not backlashed at all and someone else had burgled your pocket dimension you would be the most interesting thing going on right now, your whole deal is very neat."
"I think my deal is pretty neat! In as many as several ways. Not only are my powers cool but I really like not being dead."
"...Good question. Proooobably? Depends on what deglomerating would consist of. Also, like, ideally I would like to make someone else into a magical girl first."
"What will that process be like, I'm trying to figure out if I should volunteer as tribute."
"I'm...not exactly sure...I mentioned having a Virtue and a Theme, right, what d'you think your virtue would be?"
"...can you give me some examples so I can be rummaging around on the right level of abstraction?"
"So, there's basically two factors that go into what makes a good virtue: there's how well you can embody it, and there's how, well, virtuous it is. I...don't really have examples because I...don't have other magical girls to draw examples from."
"Okay, but are we talking about, like, 'charity', or like, 'being a good listener', or... yours is 'agape'?"
"Charity would work in the sense of...being charitable in interpreting things, being sympathetic, steelmanning people--charity as in the act of giving money to charity wouldn't. Being a good listener wouldn't I think but being attentive and caring about people being heard would--it has to be a, a mindstate you can embody. I realize that in real life doing good things matters more than thinking good thoughts but it is in fact mindstates that produce mana."
"I give a lot of money to charity but I admittedly don't hang out occupying a mindstate about it for very long. I... am somewhat constrained in what mindstates I can hang out occupying for very long, considering, maybe I should circle back to this if backlash magic works. - there's a reply to the messageboard, somebody's niece has a suspected awakening and is in the hospital -"
"TGH. Do you want me to go with you, I'll have to go back to June after to get down to zero if your miracle cure doesn't have such promising results that I want it for myself immediately but I'm good to go on an errand now."
"According to her most recent status emoji and what I can feel of her backlash I think she'll cope, I'm certainly not going to ask her."
"The upside potential is way better than times when I have abandoned a guiding session to go get pizza, anyway, dungeoneering is often pretty hungry work."
"Guns 'n ammo since I don't have a direct combat power. And first aid and comms and lights and so forth depending on the situation."
"Oh, huh, that makes sense. Magical girls of the hunt and/or turn into witches variety get a personal magic weapon that they can make for really cheap. They aren't all actually maximally weapony but most of them are."
"Thanks!"
Are they going to have to do paperwork at the hospital, that's pretty reasonable but also Lucy is bouncing up onto the balls of her feet occasionally with impatience.
May produces her esper ID and says Lucy's with her, then meets up with the messageboard poster and they are shown to the awakening teenager's room.
He's in restraints, and he's got a mouth guard, which somewhat muffles the screaming.
Oh no the poor kid--
--it isn't hard. He has GUNK on him and the gunk is to be PURIFIED; this is in fact one of the foundational aspects of her power, alongside healing.
There's a lot of gunk, so it takes more mana than she had guessed it would.
But not more than she has.
Poof.
The kid - well, he's actually more like nineteen - goes limp with the sudden relief. His aunt starts crying and goes to take the mouth guard out so he can talk.
"Don't actually know, a lot of people like to keep it secret." She goes and offers the guy a hand, and he extends his fingers to brush her hand, and then they both flinch back a little and May steps away.
"So we can narrow his secret backlash down as far as 'almost certainly not psychologically harrowing introversion,' and then not any farther on account of not being jerks."
"That's about the size of it." The aunt is pretty distracted catching up with her nephew and trying to flag down a nurse to let him out of the restraints. "Can you be confident that he's not going to - relapse -"
"I...would be surprised if that happened, but don't know enough about espers to say absolutely that it won't? But the backlash is gone, not, like, still there but suppressed."
"I wonder if he... has his powers now, early, or not..."
"I'm not going to check!" snarls the guy in the hospital bed.
"No, no, totally valid, that looked nasty, but I could like, whisper from over here and we can see if you can hear me, that's free."
"...fine."
May whispers, "Pineapple smoothie."
"Pineapple smoothie?" reports the guy incredulously.
"Congrats, looks like esper hearing."
Why is the guy incredulous, is he weirded out that it would be just pineapple and not coconut--no probably he's surprised by the esper senses.
The guy is checked over and discharged from the hospital and leaves with his aunt.
"Congrats," May tells Lucy. "How expensive is it?"
"Kiiind of expensive, but like, not that expensive per unit backlash, it was just a lot of backlash."
"Inconveniently that's going to be... the amount, for awakening espers, and that's going to be one of the higher-value options."
"Yeah. On the other hand I have only been accumulating mana for a couple hours total, and it didn't completely wipe me out, so..."
"D'you have a capacity limit?" she asks, leading the way out of the hospital.
"Pity. ...worth spending more than twelve seconds thinking about involving psychic espers with weird powers in souping up your agape-ing ability?"
"Gosh, okay, I'll have to do some research on those then. What genre of thing would be most promising?"
"Um--increases to attention or working memory, or maybe something communicative."
"What I'm wondering is, if I can--experience someone experiencing my virtue, as well as experiencing it myself, if that does anything. I don't have any insight either way from the brain manual."
"Huh, okay. You can obviously also do this research but I have more background with the range of espers that exist so I will probably be more efficient at it."
"Well, it'd be a good practice project to accustom myself to the google with."
"Ee!" Tiny delighted clap.
While they're at the hospital can she address anything urgently life-threatening, people should not die!
"TGH has a healing esper but I think she can only work four days a week, her wing might be closed today... you have plenty of mana or you'll recharge enough from doing healings?"
"I don't expect healing mundane injuries to drain me faster than I'm charging, not in a normal hospital and not, like, a battlefield medic station."
"Okay, let's go find out what the rules are for that."
The Traceless ID helps a lot with making people classify whatever's going on as "weird esper shit" even though May does mention that Lucy is not technically an esper, and they can open up the healing esper's wing and put people in it for her; it's architected in such a way to make it convenient for a single person with a magical healing ability to access patients at whatever pace is convenient for her with a partner on hand, even if May's role is "native guide" and not "partner". She's specced for injuries, not diseases? What about surgical injuries, is this a good time to get the operating theater arranged for aggressive tumor removal and so on?
"Injuries, diseases, and surgical injuries are all fine. I can also get rid of malignant tumors directly. And clean out any lingering cancerous cells."
They'll keep her pretty busy with that, then, their healing esper is mostly good at symptom management - very important when they'd normally be limited in treatment aggressiveness by the patient's medical delicacy, but it's not like she regularly empties the oncology ward.
Once Lucy's set up to have patient wheeling past her at best speed, May lets herself out to go finish up her guiding.
...Lucy accumulates mana a lot faster when she's actually working than when she's just talking to someone. Or, not necessarily working; if she were trying to puzzle out a new spell that wouldn't necessarily help.
But it is important that these people get healed and they are going to get so, so healed.
Once she has emptied the oncology ward of Toronto General Hospital and they have made a plan for her to come back another day and Lucy looks at her phone, May has sent her a text asking if she needs an escort back to May's house or if she can find her way.
I can find my way, thanks!
Unlike with the truck situation, this is one in which Lucy can Simply Fly.
"Most people think you're an esper and the slightly savvier ones think you're a monster - like Cricket -" (Cricket is napping under a heat lamp) "and they're very excited about the cancer thing too, they got a de-cancered kid on TV with her shiny bald head talking about how you're the bestest prettiest angel, it was so cute."
"I wanna--make that kid a magic stuffed animal or something. That is not an efficient use of power but they're so cute."
"Medical privacy might make that at all tricky, they didn't broadcast her name."
"I could send it care of the hospital or something but you're right and it is in fact a sufficiently inefficient use of power that I will instead get over it. But I am deeply endeared."
"It would be nice to clear up what I actually am but as long as people think I'm a monster like Cricket is and not like Cricket was it's not a priority."
"Oh, yeah, I think that's more than clear, monsters with active dungeons don't show up personably and cure cancer."
"And not kidnap anyone at all--man, that'd be fucked up, if a dungeon got clever enough to send a monster to heal a bunch of people and demand other sick people as payment."
"That would be very alarming and weird! They don't have to ask, they can just yoink whoever they want!"
"Yeah, I don't know if the thing I have in my head even works, but in the thing in my head, most of the point is--moral injury, to anyone who takes the deal."
"I don't... think dungeons are very interested in the outcomes of the people they don't take. So a dungeon like that might be aiming for... specifically self-sacrificing people who volunteered to get dungeoned to cure someone else? Which has its own hypothetical implications."
"So far. They may get more complicated over time, right now the oldest ones are still less than sixty years old."
"I really want to find out if they're people or not, it affects the available routes for solving them."
"I don't have a way to, like, directly detect minds, yet, but I can sense things-being-wrong-with-people and being a dungeon might count as a thing being wrong. I don't know either way yet."
"I can put myself on the docket for a low-intensity dungeon tomorrow and you can come with me? I usually don't do two days in a row but I'm impatient to find out."
"Ooh! Yes! --And I won't be deadweight no matter what, short-range teleporting has got to be pretty good in a dungeon."
"Most teleporting espers don't personally run dungeons, they do logistics for those who do, but it's nothing to sneeze at."
"I think logistics is probably easier when you can currently do more than a tenth of a kilometer."
"Yeah, there's probably shorter-range teleporters who dungeoneer, I just haven't run into them." She alerts Paula.
This is Paula, Traceless's agent
wow, congratulations, cancer angel!
I can refer you to an agent who's specialized in non-dungeon esper applications
That would probably be good.
I'm planning to do a dungeon tomorrow with May though so we can check to see if my powers immediately label them people.
I can be your guy for that sure sure. baby piece of cake dungeon.
do you need gear, backlash/not-technically-backlash management support, anti-pap scarf, whatever
Traceless takes photos with people but you don't have to, just say no to peer pressure, scarf available if you want it
I take 2% of each dungeon bounty
if you auction stuff through me or whatever I have a take there too
Okay. I think for now I will leave off the scarf, I like being cancer angel.
I am angeling it up! I do not know if May told you but the technical term for the thing I am is 'Magical Girl;' I don't actually know if you have that genre here, May didn't say.
Magical Girls have powersets that include transforming into a more-magical form. My wand and dress are actually part of my powers.
If my dress unexists it will put whatever I was wearing before back. Thankfully. Now, anti-pap UNDERWEAR, THAT would be worth investing in.
I was mostly not being serious but actually that's a good idea and I appreciate it!
That makes sense. I am not immediately thinking of anything else I'm likely to need but it could easily be that there's something I'm not thinking of.
Alrighty, let me know when you're going to be active so I can have my phone turned on for last minute whatever
Do you have, like, a specific colleague you're thinking of referring me to, for non-combat espering, and if so do they have a name?
Oh cool. Do you know if the TGH healer has any opinions on the cancer angel stunt.
Checks out. It feels a little bit sad to settle for a minor health deity, but she supposes one must acknowledge one's limitations when one isn't no actually Lucy could really also do with some acknowledging her limitations, considering how many of her have died of not doing that.
...She googles "cancer angel."
News results! Some kind of esper / monster / secret third thing appeared, showed up in TGH, set up shop in the esper wing, and cured a lot of shit, most notably cancer.
Aha, that makes sense! Is anyone arguing one of the other two aware of those and just dismissing them, or...?
Some of them are reporting that "secret third thing" was claimed but aren't willing to endorse this assertion. Somebody's dug up the information that Traceless is known to keep company with another monster.
This is true. Although if they're being judgmental about it she's going to scowl at her "phone."
"Monster", in the context where there's definitely not a live dungeon calling the shots, seems to be used with roughly the connotations of, like, "veteran", where you could draw inferences about potentially objectionable behavior from the entity in the past but you're definitely supposed to be chill about them now.
Okay cool good.
Oh, you know what she's going to spend a while on, she's going to catch up on "current events," both insofar as things have happened since 1999 and insofar as things have been different here than in witchworld, such as, for example, as a result of espers and dungeons. Have any presidents been different between witchworld and this one, for example, and who's been president since, and oops she may end up discovering wikiwalking. In concept if not the specific word.
Wikipedia is there for her, presidents and all, and they are definitely specific identifiable presidents whose elections probably say interesting things about the state of politics in esperworld.
And all of this information is presumably only interesting instead of existentially horrifying because why would you put existentially horrifying presidents in a universe without a specific reason to.
...
Lucy checks a couple of things, then finds a forum where people are discussing cancer angel and makes an account and posts A) a link to a news source about cancer angel with a photograph, and B) a link to a newspaper archive that both mentions her local grisly murder and has a picture of her.
She googles "content warning" and then yeah oops.
She edits her post to contain a content warning for horrible murder on the second link.
Hmmmmm how to respond to that.
Hang on, she knows the correct idiom for this one.
I contain multitudes.
Yeah fair enough.
She's going to have to explain her situation better to Some Kind Of Media Presence, but meanwhile it's getting late.
She locates May.
"Are you okay with brief portal existence in your house?"
"While I am inside the pocket dimension it 'remembers' the last place it was connected to the real world. So, yyyyes but very temporarily?"
"Sure thing!"
And then she goes into the garage and opens a portal to her pocket dimension and picks a bedroom more or less at random and flops into bed and goes to sleep.
She did also close the portal behind her so she would HOPE so.
She wakes up in the morning, gazes blankly at the ceiling for a little while while contemplating finding a book to stick her nose into so she can pretend she's not currently in a version of reality where her loved ones are all dead and people accessible to her have no context for her powers, then hauls herself to her feet, deactivates and reactivates to unmuss her hair and dress and so on, and then portals back into the Swans' garage.
Well yes she also lets herself into the rest of the house. It's actually mildly inconvenient that she doesn't know enough about the Swans' culinary preferences to grab an appropriate gift from the castle larders, she has a vague intuition that those are pretty diverse, and presents are good, and May is neat and also orienting Lucy to (the modern version of) this world.
Cricket is curled up on the windowsill with a blockbuster sword-and-sorcery movie playing on his computer. Nobody else is around right now.
Probably if Cricket is present then May is still home and asleep rather than already up and out of the house? She could ask him but she doesn't want to interrupt his movie. Hm. She is going to tiptoe around the kitchen and see if anything looks like it's been used since last night.
Okay that looks like breakfast has happened. She's going to get on her phone and investigate places where this world's media diverges from witchworld's and catch up on some stuff that doesn't diverge too much that didn't finish until after her point of death.
"--Well, I didn't know if anyone else had eaten yet, and if they hadn't, I was going to make french toast for everyone."
"May went out for coffee but usually doesn't have breakfast at the coffee shop and should be back soon. Ren had to be at work early today for some sort of professional development thing because they have failed to design her job to keep her skills where they want them during her normal work hours."
"Okay, thanks. Do you know if May has any food allergies or anything? And do you also want french toast?"
That makes sense with how he is a cat. "--Would you like bacon? Bacon goes with french toast anyway."
"Ah." Nod. She's learning so much! It will be interesting to find out if any of this generalizes, later on.
She fetches bacon and ingredients for french toast from her pocket dimension, mixes the dip for the bread, and starts frying things.
Lucy flips the last of the toast off the heat, sets aside a small plate for Cricket with a very small piece of toast and a piece of bacon, and turns to May.
"Hi! I made french toast. There's a couple of kinds of jam from weird fruits."
"This one is called Heela fruit, it's a bit like a peach but not very much, just, more like a peach than most of the other fruits I can think of that definitely exist on this planet, this one is called man-eating-plant fruit but even if they actually ate people which they didn't the ones in my castle wouldn't have, and that's snozzberry, and that one's called Traveler's Lime."
May quarters a slice of French toast and dollops different jams on each, starting with the Traveler's Lime.
The traveler's lime actually tastes a bit more like orange or grapefruit than lime; it's definitely a citrus, but whether it's more related to limes specifically than any other citrus fruit is another question. The marmalade itself isn't green, but then again, neither is key lime pie.
Snozzberry is just a touch tarter than raspberry, but doesn't otherwise taste especially like it.
Man eating plant fruit is very mild and sweet.
Heela fruit is, as described, sort of peachy in flavor, but sweeter and also a little richer.
"It would." She has put little dollops of all the available fruit spreads on her toast and mixed them up. "Though I might be biased because smoothies often involve mixing fruits, which I also like."
Omnomf. "I usually just do whatever fruit, and a banana, and maybe yogurt, if there's like five fruits in there it tastes generic."
"Depends on the five fruits, in my experience. There's a lot of overlap in things different mes have done but there's also a lot of non-overlap, so I have more eccentric skills than most people, and one of them is mixology. Which sounds more alcoholic than I meant it to when I say it in English."
"It's pretty alcoholic in English, yeah, though 'mocktails' are maybe catching on."
"In the language I'm calqueing it in from, for this use case specifically I mean, it doesn't even specify beverages particularly. It's more like 'cooking' except things change how they taste when you actually cook them; this is, like, mocktails and salads and sandwiches and stuff all together."
"You're welcome! Cricket let me know you were just out for a bit and wouldn't likely get breakfast with your coffee."
"Sometimes I get a donut but usually I don't. I might've eaten the French toast anyway, though, espers have great metabolisms and can eat breakfast twice if we want."
"Oh, neat. Is that a using-power-is-a-kind-of-exercise thing or is it just a body-getting-all-fixed-up thing?"
"Second thing. We're just kind of working with a best case scenario in terms of all the variable biological stuff. If you'd see a trait on somebody and go 'well that's not superhuman I guess but it's genetically lucky' espers have it."
"...I think I am maybe not the best-calibrated on that. On account of all the...everything."
"Fair enough. There's research on us, if you're the academic paper type. Or Wikipedia has it in a more digested form."
"I am absolutely the academic paper type. And I discovered last night that Wikipedia is surprisingly easy to get lost in."
Lucy attempts to google "academic papers" and discovers JSTOR, which she does not have an account for.
"Thanks!" Ooh science. Magic science specifically. Important nutrient.
...Not so important that she doesn't put her phone down after a minute to finish her french toast though.
Lucy considers disappearing into her pocket dimension to mess around with magic, decides that this would make it harder for May to get ahold of her if she needed her, and heads back into the garage without doing any portals about it to mess around with magic there.
Lucy is drawing elaborate circles on the floor in koizumr with her wand.
Lucy steps out of her way so she can get unblocked photos of some bits.
"This'll all come off the floor really easy," she crouches down and hooks a finger under one koizumr circle, lifting the whole thing off the floor like a hula hoop married an elaborate gothic cathedral windowframe, "it's objects I'm creating by magic, not pigments I'm scraping onto the cement."
"Crossed my mind to ask but I figured you weren't going to be vandalizing my garage without a great reason. What's this design do, or is it just pretty?"
"Trying to work on resurrection. These're ritual circles; if they were for a ritual I was a hundred percent on then it wouldn't be vandalism even if they were scraped onto your floor 'cause they'd all vanish at the end of the ritual. But this way is unrelatedly convenient because of how my wand works."
"...a scrape would disappear? What, would it - reabsorb all the cement that got scraped out -"
"--No, I mean, pigment that scraped off onto the cement. Because that's how chalk or crayons work, is bits of the stick scraping off. If I made a ritual circle with negative space by cutting into a surface then the entire surface in the ritual area would disappear, that would be a deeply bad thing to do to someone's floor. Especially without asking."
"I wouldn't get the whole kitchen floor, fair warning; I have no idea if it would still be helpful."
"Yeah, I don't know either, mostly being facetious. How do you tell if you got a circle that'll work for resurrection?"
"I can't tell for sure without trying it, but there's no point in trying it before I have a circle that might work."
"...I'm not drawing circles at random? Uh, sorry, hang on...okay, what level of explanation are you looking for exactly, like, do you want a general explanation of how I engage with ritual circles or do you want me to try to, like, actually explain what I'm doing in technical detail."
"On the technical-er end but if that'd be tedious I don't mean to impose."
"You're fine, it's just," she taps her temple, "disorganized. So, the ritual thing has been tidily integrated into the magical girl thing, but it still has recognizable pieces from various worlds it draws bits from. So I'm familiar with a lot of different principles for what goes into a ritual circle, and what things mean a ritual will have which effects, but those things map imperfectly to how the version attached to my magical girlness works, and I have a feel for that but a much less detailed one."
"Not necessarily have to, but it's easier? Like, the difference between trying to do a complicated math problem in your head versus writing it out stepwise."
"Huh. Does it help to do it in koizumr instead of drawing it with, like, a pencil?"
"Yeah, it's an inherently magical substance and that--empowers?--the ritual, like, a ritual is sort of a tool for getting more oomph out of a certain amount of mana than a spell would, and there are a bunch of factors there that trade off against each other, but koizumr's magical properties let me, uh, cheat? A little bit? Get more bang for the various axes of buck."
"...the way you described that left me with an image where it only helps for a complete ritual you're going to actually cast and not a draft but the context implies otherwise."
"Because the closer a draft is to something that would actually work, the better I can feel out the places where it doesn't work."
"Fair enough. Like, uh, making a draft garment in muslin instead of just drawing it."
"What are you planing to do with your koizumr objects after, get Paula to sell them to R&D places?"
"I can use 'em for other stuff later, break 'em down or build up on them or whatever. I could fill them all in and then add corners and turn them into tabletops if I didn't have anything better to do with the stuff. Certainly R&D places can have some if they want 'em."
"That would be hilarious and I might do it but I think I want to let the R&D people poke at them first to make sure they won't blow up if the wrong esper pokes them or something first."
"They're not going to explode when you poke them. If they have a weird interaction it's going to be with an esper with a, uh, splashier, power."
"I like the texture." She flicks it with a fingernail to see what noise it makes. "Sort of like how I'd imagine ivory feels but I haven't touched ivory."
"It's usually described as being like a cross between wood and metal..." she tilts it so the light plays across its surface. "Although that's probably partly because--they're subtle, but there's little gradations of hue, they're not that much like woodgrain but they're more like it than like marble..."
"I can see the wood/metal thing too, yeah. It's pretty! On its origin world is a lot of stuff made of it?"
"Very little that isn't magic is made of it. The means by which my wand makes more are rare and not usually in the possession of people who want to go into industrial production, and the other ways of making it are much more difficult and expensive, and there are way more people there who know how to usefully do magic things with it."
"That makes sense, you're making it so casually but if there's not one of you in every factory then they're not gonna make the lawn furniture out of it."
"There is not. And honestly I have better things to do than sit in a factory too, like, I don't mind making some in my spare time but I am not going to industrialize production."
"Still better ongoing production than anything that comes out of a dungeon."
