The words on the screen shifted:
Penelope Flynn
Level 1 - Caster
4 Power
3 Defense
8 Speed
10 Magic
6 Recovery
3 Aura
“Caster?” Jeru wrinkled his blue nose. “Might have well said your class was a glass cannon.”
“If I’m a Caster, then what spells do I know?” Penelope looked at her hands, then at the blue Elf leaning over her against the stone wall. “I don’t feel like I know any.”
“So impatient…” He ran his hand through his short hair as he sighed. “But it is your first time. Here.” He flicked his wrist and the screen changed.
Choose Element
Light
Acid
Dark
Fire
Air
Water
Earth
Electric
Metal
Ice
Nature
Penelope read the options, then stood up as she looked towards the man next to her. “Which element should I pick?”
“I dunno.”
Penelope put her pale right hand against her chest as she felt it tighten. “What do you mean you don’t know! Haven’t you done this before?”
“7,541.” He forced a grin and looked towards the square as the wind blew the minty smell of the bushes around them. “Which makes this take number 7,542.” He looked over at her. “Ironically, you’re the forty-second person to try it.”
Penelope felt her heart speed up. “If you’ve done it that many times, can’t you tell me something about what I should do to—”
“Tried that. Doesn’t work.” Jeru twirled his hand. “Each looper is different because of how they start and what they do. This affects things the further out you go. You probably have heard of the butterfly effect?”
Penelope looked away from the screen. She couldn’t look Jeru in the face because those voids of eyes drew her in. Not that she could look most people in the eyes for long, but his bottomless orbs made her feel cornered, so she focused on his lips.
“Yes… But don’t you have certain events that you know will happen? Like cause and effect?” Penelope swallowed and focused on leveling her breathing.
“Just breathe.” Jeru shook his head. “I forgot you are like this. Here.”
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The Elf vanished.
“Better?” The man’s voice came from the screen.
The crushing pressure was still there, but it was lifting. Penelope nodded, then her eyes went wide. “Can you still see me?”
“Girlie, I can always see you. I am part of the anchor that is in you, so I see everything around you, all the time.”
“Everything?” She folded her arms tight against her chest. “Is there a way to turn that off?”
“Sure, if you want the loop to end, the universe to be overrun by Demons, and the world as you know it to end.” The Elf growled, then sighed. “I mean, Earth is going to get messed up soon anyway, but that’s a whole different situation that you don’t need to worry about. The point is, is your modesty worth the destruction of the universe?”
Penelope didn’t answer right away.
It’s a simple answer, but why does it feel like I’m giving up a piece of myself for… nothing?
“You don’t have to say it. Let’s get back to your question. There were just over six hundred people in that plaza. When one of them starts doing something, it triggers an entirely new series of events. But what if George or Elle are the ones to beat their wings differently?”
The screen changed from her stats to a graph. It had a line shooting out of the bottom left corner with Penelope on it. Two more lines started growing, one with George and the other with Elle on them. They were close to the same angle, but the further out they got the farther apart they were.
“This is the basic principle; a closer version to reality is more like this.”
Penelope’s line turned red, George’s turned green, and Elle’s turned blue.
Dots appeared all over the graph. The lines bounced off of any dot they touched, turning the graph from a set of three straight lines into a mess of scribbles.
“Each dot is an event, and you’ll notice…” The right half of the lines lit up. “They start behaving differently even when they strike the same event.” The graph split into three layers as the screen got thicker. “That’s not even the closest one I can give you. This…” Each line had its own screen, and each time a line hit a dot, the dot moved, as did all the other dots. Some dots vanished while sometimes new dots appeared that weren’t on the other two graphs. “Is the closest I can show you.”
“You could have just said that Elle wouldn’t react the same way when I said the same thing to her as when George did.” Penelope tapped on her arm.
“Graphs are more fun.” Jeru laughed. “So there is no point in me telling you what others have done because it won’t go the same way.” The pleasant tone in his voice vanished. “Which is good, because they all failed.”
“I really think you’re the one. I really do.”
Penelope pushed the words out of her head. She didn’t want to deal with that right now. That stranger had killed her and given her this burden. She hoped that she didn’t run into him because she wasn’t sure how she would react, especially if he had lost all of his memories.
“What I can tell you is that the natives are slow on the uptake. Since this is an abandoned campus that’s locked down, they don’t realize that there is an incursion here until the Demons on the first floor get out. They can handle the second floor on their own, but on the third floor, things start getting out of hand.”
“I thought you didn’t know what would happen?” Penelope twirled her red ponytail around her finger.
“I know what happens when the looper does nothing.” Jeru huffed. “That’s been one of the few constants.”
“Good to know…” She watched the screen change back to where she needed to pick her element. “Can you tell me which element works the best?”
“Only one person made it to the tenth floor, and he was a brawler.” The Elf somehow clicked his tongue. “That’s not going to help you.”
“What about the deepest a mage got?”
“Some people are better at some elements than others.” Irritation crept into his voice. “Just pick the one that you like the best and experiment. You’re going to do this a lot.”
“Demons are dark, right?” Penelope bit her lip.
“There are Demons of every element in there except light.” Jeru offered.
Still, Demons are always weak against light. It’s obvious, so that's probably the most common choice, but it also feels like what I should try until I learn more.
Penelope tried to push the word ‘Light’, but her hand went through the screen.
His voice groaned as he spoke. “You can’t touch the screen, girlie. Focus on what you want it to do. This Mantle is connected to you. You can think about it and tell it what to do.”
“I already thought about the element I want, but it didn’t do anything.” She grumbled at the screen. “A button you can push would be so much easier!”
“Hey, you copy a system, summon six hundred people with potential whose disappearance wouldn’t affect the timeline, and delay a Demonic incursion while you’re dying, and we’ll see how good yours looks!”
It wasn’t the irritation in his voice that made her flinch. It was being told that her being summoned here hadn’t changed anything back home in a significant way. Her boss would just assume she found somewhere else to work and give her job to someone else. People dropped out of class all the time, and since she was paying for them on her own, there was a low chance that anyone from the college would do anything other than leave a few voice messages on her phone.
Her bills were on autopay, so no one would come looking at the empty house until her money ran out, which was going to take a few years. She didn’t have any family, and what few people she would call friends hadn’t reached out to her in years. Not that she would complain; she liked the peace and quiet to go about her routine. She was just realizing how isolated she had been.
Her gaze hardened as she focused on the word ‘Light’. The screen clicked as all the other words vanished. This was a chance for her to do something where she mattered, and she wasn’t going to waste it.