Lilith frowned as she looked down at the note she had left on her chair, an uncomfortable itch in the back of her mind as she read. She was forgetting something important, and it wasn’t just an idle thought; she knew deep in her gut that whatever she had written this note about was something that she couldn’t afford to forget.

It was made all the more maddening by the fact that none of the Parallels remembered what it was. What was even weirder was that Eve also had the sensation, but none of the other Parallels did. Pandora and Jerry postulated that there had maybe been some event that only Lilith and Eve were part of, and it had somehow prevented them from sharing their memories and the other Parallels from noticing anything amiss.

Lilith wasn’t quite so sure. What would be able to abduct her and Eve, wipe their memories, and make sure no one else noticed? Why would something capable of that do it, when nothing seems to have changed otherwise? Of course, it could be that something was radically different and everyone’s memories of the past had been altered, but going down that line of thinking without more concrete evidence would only lead to madness.

So, she sat and puzzled on it, trying to remember as best she could. And that didn’t mean just sitting and thinking hard; it meant carefully using magic to prod the depths of her mind, probing for even the slightest inconsistencies. It was a painstakingly slow process, and one that required her full attention.

She was so absorbed in it her work that she didn’t even fully process that Jerry and Amelia had arrived, not until Amelia entered the room and called out to her. “And what are you doing that’s got you so engrossed?” Amelia asked. “Usually you’re more prepared for these sessions to begin.”

“What? Oh, sorry.” Lilith said. “Did Jerry not tell you about the situation?”

“No, what situation? Is it something I need to worry about?”

Lilith gave her a quick rundown of the situation, and as she did Amelia frowned deeper and deeper. “You know,” Amelia said once Lilith had finished, “I felt something similar once. I did a deep scan of my mind and couldn’t find anything, and this was right after I was freed from the Urge, so I just chalked it up to lingering remnants of that. But…for you to experience the same thing…I’m not so sure anymore.”

“You…have?” Lilith asked. “That’s…concerning, to say the least. Have you felt it recently at all?”

Amelia shook her head. “It was just the once.”

Lilith stood up and began to pace along one of the room’s walls. “Okay, so this isn’t an isolated incident.” She said. “We need to get with the others and see if they’ve felt anything similar.”

“Already on it.” Pandora said, skittering back into the room. She had, after much deliberation, chosen to return to the body of an arachne for the foreseeable future, claiming it felt better than the other things she had tried. Instead of cycling through forms, she was working on “upgrading” her body so that it was more convenient.

Those upgrades were generally not visible until the time came for them to be used. For instance, she had implemented mechanisms that made retrieving things from the ground easier, greatly increasing the range of motion of her legs and making the ends able to become sticky on command. When there was something she wanted to pick up, she’d simply put a front leg on it, make it sticky, then rotate the leg so it pointed up instead of down, allowing her to grab the object with her hands.

“I only got a few responses so far, but it looks like no one else has felt anythin’ like this.” Pandora continued. “Really, though, I’m more curious why Amelia’s felt it. I mean, we assumed our eldritch-ness is what let you and Eve feel it, but Amelia’s not eldritch like we are.”

“I might just be the most experienced person alive when it comes to modifying your own mind.” Amelia said, a touch of pride in her tone. “At first it was giving myself emotions, and then it became adding increasingly strong layers of security and alarms to make sure my mind stayed my own. I’m not letting anything like the Urge take hold of me again, much less more…pedestrian manipulation.”

Pandora’s eyes lit up. “You have?” She said excitedly. “May I see the work you’ve done? I have this hypothesis I’ve been kicking around, and if I’m right then your warding will both prove it and let us know why you felt it.”

Amelia paused, eyes narrowing as she looked at Pandora. “That’s a big ask.” She said. “What’s in it for me?”

“Twenty points of Worship. Or one million Blood Money, if you want it that way.” Pandora said quickly. “And I won’t touch or anythin’ without asking, just look. The moment you feel like I went too far, lemme know and I’ll stop.”

Amelia though that over for a moment. “Fine.” She said. “Payment first, in raw Worship.”

“Done and done.” Pandora said, laying a hand on Amelia’s arm. “Alright, gimme a bit, this is gonna be a bit fiddly. I’m gonna have to poke pretty thoroughly at your work, since what I’m looking for is subtle, so don’t freak out. But, if I’m right…”

Amelia rolled her eyes. “Just do it.” She said. “And don’t take too long about it.”

“No promises, you make some pretty intricate stuff, and you need time to properly appreciate work like that.” Pandora said distractedly. “Now…I’m going to poke at one of your alarms, I want to see what it looks like when it trips and I try to suppress it, that cool?”

“Is this necessary?” Amelia asked. “I would rather you don’t.”

“I’m gonna use an eldritch ability to poke at it, I wanna see what it looks like when it goes off. And, no, I’m not looking in the normal way, it’s in the like…weird eldritch way that only Lilith and us Parallels can see. I think there might be some artifacting left since your wards are trying to process information they’re not ready for.”

“My alarms have teeth, but if you’re brave enough then go ahead.” Amelia said, giving Pandora a smirk.

“Many thanks.” Pandora replied.

There was a moment of silence, then Amelia’s smirk turned into a frown. “Are you not even going to react?”

“Hm?” Pandora asked.

“Surely the alarm did something to you.” Amelia said.

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“Oh, that, yeah.” Pandora said. “Sorry, Jerry and I have been testing some pretty funky stuff on me, so this isn’t that bad by comparison. I’ve got a lotta really heavy-duty wards on my brain at the moment, and your trap only took off a layer or two. And no, not traditional wards, I’m talking really strong, eldritchly-enhanced wards. The fact that your trap even scratched them is impressive, let alone taking a layer off.”

“Whatever.” Amelia pouted. “Did you find what you wanted?”

“Uh…maybe?” Pandora replied. “I’m gonna have to take this back to the lab later to look at it for sure though.”

“You are not taking me back to a lab!” Amelia said sharply.

“Huh? Oh, nah, I don’t need you in the lab, I basically took a screenshot and I’m taking that to the lab. Or, will take it back to the lab when I’m done poking around in here.”

“Are you not done?” Amelia groaned. “What else do you want?”

“Well, for one, I need pictures of all of your constructs. If one of them has been messed up, then I can’t exactly tell unless I have pictures of all of them.”

“And how would you tell without knowing how it looked before?” Amelia asked impatiently. “For all we know it might have even been the construct you poked at and we wouldn’t even know because you messed it up!”

“I took a before picture too. And I can just trip another alarm and I can use that to find commonalities between the changes.”

“Just be quick about it.” Amelia sighed.

“Look, do you want to remember whatever it is we’re forgetting or not?” Pandora asked.

Amelia paused. “I…suppose I want to know.” Amelia admitted. “I’m just not a fan of this method of finding out.”

“If you have a better suggestion, I’m more than happy to oblige.” Pandora said patiently. “I just thought this was the best way to find out. I know you’re uncomfortable with it, but it’s not something you absolutely won’t do either, right?”

“I guess not.” Amelia admitted. “I just feel so vulnerable, it’s making me antsy.”

“I’ll be as quick as I can, okay?” Pandora replied gently. “But this could have huge consequences for everyone, including you and your wives, so I’d ask that you bear with it for just a bit more, for their sake if nothing else.”

Amelia was silent for a while, then nodded. “I understand. I won’t complain anymore, just…be gentle.”

“Of course.” Pandora said. “I don’t want to hurt you, just…find answers.”

The process ended up taking about an hour, but by the end of it, Pandora was feeling quite optimistic that she would be able to tease something out of what she had found. That was all well and good, but as the process went on, Lilith couldn’t help but get more and more concerned. Amelia was acting…different; she was still prickly, but she didn’t have the edge to her that she usually had.

Maybe on another day Lilith might have ignored it, but today wasn’t any other day; Lilith couldn’t afford to ignore a sudden shift in behavior, no matter how minor. Perhaps Amelia’s lovers had talked to her, and she was making an effort to change more or something, but Lilith just had to ask her about it, so after Pandora had finished, she pulled Amelia aside.

“Amelia, are you okay?” She asked worriedly. “You’ve been acting different.”

Amelia frowned. “It’s probably because you were just probing my mind. I tend to get a little snippy about stuff like that.”

Lilith shook her head. “That’s the problem.” She said. “You weren’t as snippy as I expected. And…well, given what we’re investigating right now, I can’t help but worry that it has something to do with this.”

“Well, I felt that thing ages ago, so it wouldn’t affect my behavior now, right?” Amelia pointed out. “So, what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that we don’t know what this feeling actually signifies.” Lilith said. “For all we know, it’s a sign of the eldritch messing with our souls. Perhaps I got something similar to what Lia has, and it’s affecting you?”

“That can’t be it.” Amelia replied. “Or, if it is, it’s significantly more subtle than what Lia has. After Jerry told us about Lia’s eldritch stuff, I took some time and was able to isolate the results of the effect on me, so I can at least detect when it’s active, even if I can’t see what exactly it does.”

“What if our events are connected in some way?” Lilith asked, beginning to pace the room once again. “And they’re like…resonating or something.”

Amelia raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean…what if your event was dormant until I experienced mine? And then it got set into motion or something.”

Amelia mulled that over for a bit. “That’s possible.” She said. “But I feel like that’s not the case. And, if it is, it should run up against some of my wards, and Pandora will hopefully be able to see any remnants of that.”

“I guess. I just…worry about you, you know.”

“I-I can take care of myself!” Amelia said, turning her head to the side and blushing slightly.

“I know you can, but it doesn’t stop me from worrying.” Lilith replied. “Especially when it’s something neither of us fully understand.”

“W-whatever!” Amelia said quickly. “Let’s just get to work, okay? We can discuss this once Pandora’s finished.”

----------------------------------------

Pandora flitted about her lab, carefully arranging devices and cross-referencing snapshots of Amelia’s wards and eldritch constructs. As she had suspected, Amelia’s techniques were eldritch-adjacent. They didn’t actually dive into that sort of extra dimension that eldritch Mana constructs were made in, but it was almost as if she had taken patterns that Pandora had seen and flattened them, condensing them down so they fit in the space that normal people could work in.

Of course, her techniques didn’t correlate exactly to anything Pandora had seen, and when she had tried to “expand” them into eldritch space they sort of fell apart, but they were similar enough that Pandora couldn’t ignore that.

Fortunately, that came with an upside; though Amelia’s wards wouldn’t actually stop an attack by someone sufficiently talented with the eldritch, they did interact with it, something that Pandora hadn’t seen anywhere except in constructs specifically made to deal with the eldritch. In this case, Amelia’s wards sort of “reached out” into eldritch space, warping and distorting as they tried to do something to the eldritch attack.

It didn’t impact the functionality of the wards against regular magic in any significant capacity, and it wasn’t visible from the point of view of someone who couldn’t see into eldritch space, but it did happen. And, as luck would have it, Amelia’s wards had significant self-repair capacity built into them. Normally this would mean that anything that happened in the past would be next to impossible to see on the wards, but the self-repair didn’t really work with the eldritch.

Or, it did, but it worked extremely slowly. The effect was almost imperceptible, but over the hour Pandora had worked she was able to document a very slight change in the distortion of the ward she had prodded. Following that, Amelia had allowed her to poke a few other wards with different intensity, and she found that the intensity of her prodding didn’t change the intensity of the ward’s response.

In short, provided the event had occurred within…roughly ten years, give or take a couple of years, Pandora was confident that she could backdate such an event through Amelia’s wards. And that was all well and good until Pandora went to look at the distorted wards she hadn’t touched.

The response was…bizarre, to say the least. The ward in question was stretched in ways that just didn’t make sense; it was as if there had been an event that occurred both three to four years prior and simultaneously occurred just yesterday. It wasn’t something a case of the ward reacting once in the past and once now, she had tested what that would look like, but that both events had happened at the same time. Parts of the ward were quite repaired while others were fresh.

Pandora really wanted to call that impossible and move on, but she couldn’t, not with the eldritch. The eldritch didn’t respect the normal laws of time and space, and though it was violently counter-intuitive, Pandora couldn’t discount the possibility of there being a way to have an event happen at the same time in two different time periods.

Unfortunately, she had no way of testing that conjecture at the moment. Time manipulation on that scale was far beyond her skill level, and she suspected it would remain that way until after the war at the soonest, if she ever even reached that level.

Still…Pandora was getting even more data than she had hoped. It would take some time, and she’d probably have to drag Eve along for several long sessions where they probed her mind, but Pandora was optimistic that they could find the block on their memories. And, once they found that, it was only a matter of time before they could remove it. It was just a matter of time, really, so Pandora redoubled her efforts, smiling contentedly as she did.