Shera sat across from Myra on the train, watching Myra intently.
“So…” Myra tried. “Ya ever been outside Casire?”
“I’ve never been outside the c-city.”
The city? God, maybe that’s why she agreed so easily.
To be honest, Myra had expected Shera to be a lot more skeptical about ditching class for an entire month to play detective in Jewel City, no matter what the girl had said in the previous loop. On top of that, Myra herself had been anxious to get out of town quickly, which couldn’t possibly have helped put the other girl at ease, and which left very little time for their relationship to ‘break in.’
In spite of all this, Myra’s worry had proved entirely unfounded. The girl had leaped at the chance.
So Myra had made up some excuses for Cynthia and Iz, and the pair had left late into the evening, taking an overnight train to the imperial capital. The itinerary was four hours to the border, then another four to the capital for an early morning arrival. Despite a small ordeal wherein Shera had overworked herself deciding whether to face forward or backward, she was starting to settle in.
“You’ve got a passport, though, right?” Myra asked.
“Y-yeah, they’re required as part of our mage licensing.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“I-I mean, I actually got one because I thought about visiting my f-father. N-not that I ever did.”
“The count, right? He’s in Halnya?”
“Y-yes. He’s the Count of Sub Fralnasia. It’s by the northern border, in the m-mountains.”
“Huh… does that make him a subordinate of Penrilla?”
“Did I never mention that?”
“Uh… You probably assumed I knew.” Duke Penrilla controlled most of Northern Halnya, a geographic region that made him obscenely wealthy for its rich deposits of heavy metals and rare gemstones. “Not that it matters. I mean, I assume you’ve never met the Penrillas or anything. Is there a mine in Sub Fralnasia?”
“No. Or I mean, it’s one of the wasted ones.”
When people had started mining the heavier, most unstable metals and transactinides, they didn’t really know what they were doing, and they very quickly disturbed the naturally occurring curses that prevented rapid radioactive decay. As a result, the miners burned through a degree of wealth that dwarfed major nations several times over. Now, many of those mines were left with little more than cheap heavy metals that were only barely worthwhile to mine when compared to the cost of simply transmuting them. Those mines—the so-called “wasted mines”—were highly undesirable except to optimistic speculators who thought that something more could be salvaged or reversed. Maybe Count Marcrombie was one of those.
Myra considered asking, but she realized Shera might not even know or want to talk about it. Before she made a decision, Shera moved the conversation for her.
“W-what about you?” she asked. “Have you been out of Casire before?”
“Oh, yeah, plenty of times.” Myra flipped a stray hair out of her eyes. “My father went all over the place for business, and he’d bring me along sometimes. Well, that was before he remarried. Then she’d come along as well, so I’d—I’d ask to stay home.”
“O-oh.”
“But yeah, I’ve been to Jewel City a few times. It’s really something. You’ll love it.” A yawn caught Myra, and she let it course through her, then snapped her mouth shut in satisfaction. “Ahh. Let’s get some shut-eye.” Preparing to sleep, Myra activated an alarm spell so she wouldn’t miss her stop, not that that was particularly likely.
“Okay. H-have fun.”
Myra popped her eyes back open. “Oh. You won’t be able to sleep, will you?”
She shook her head. “D-don’t worry about me. You should sleep.”
“Nah, it’s okay. This won’t be the first time I’ve stayed up late for you on the first night.” The girl flinched, looking embarrassed for some reason. “I’m gonna go get a tea or coffee or something.”
“I-I’ll accompany y-you,” she said, still a little flustered.
◆
They got their drinks from the bored attendant manning the refreshment car, Myra opting for a strong coffee, and then they explored around the train a bit for Shera’s sake. This got old pretty quickly since just about every car looked the same.
They returned to their seats, and Myra looked at her coffee for a while. The stimulating caffeine led her thoughts away from the present and back to the time she tried to drug herself before the loop-back.
She thought about Ben again.
Myra had known it in her gut, at the end of the last loop, just what exactly that red drug was for, but there had been too much shit going on to think about it properly. Now that she’d had a day to think it over, think through what Ben had said and did, she was only more sure.
She looked back to Shera, who was now bobbing her head in sync with the rhythmic clacks of the train.
“So… I think I know what Ben’s drugs do.”
Shera stopped and watched her expectantly. Right, I only explained the puzzle to her a few hours ago. Of course, Shera didn’t see it yet, hearing it second hand, dealing with Myra’s bad explanations…
“So what d-do they do?” she finally asked.
“Well… let me put it this way.” She thought about how to put it, so the conclusion would make sense. “This question was driving me insane: What caused me to enter the loop? Nothing unusual happened in the first loop, right, or that’s what I was convinced. But something did happen. Ben tried to drug me with that red drug—”
“He didn’t.”
“He didn’t, but only because of a series of flukes. Then, because I was alert, I avoided it for several more loops—in other words, in all four iterations that I remember, Ben has never successfully drugged me.”
“Okay…”
“That’s not to say he’s never drugged me. He has obviously been looping for more than four loops, so it makes sense that he succeeded in the past. But he never drugged me in the loops that I remember.”
“Oh.” She scratched her head. It seemed to dawn on her. “I th-think I see.”
“Yeah. If nothing happens, then I loop back. Ben’s drugs prevent me from looping.”
“—prevent y-you from looping,” Shera finished at the same time. “Except he’s been failing to do so—”
“Right. After the first time, he thought it would be easy to fix. So he approached me, confident, certain he was about to fix his mistake. He wasn’t in a rush, and he casually asked me questions. I caught him off guard again with the lava marble. And he’s been desperately trying to reset me ever since then.”
“B-but I don’t get what the drug does… does it wipe your memory, or what?”
“I guess? Though I wonder, I mean—Is it really possible to erase memories that cleanly? Like… memories aren’t just stored in chronological order like a textbook. It’s not like you can just rip some pages out of a book, you know? And there’s not just episodic memory, there’s semantic memory, there’s uh… muscle memory? Implicit memory? Not to mention that memories fade over time, they all get mixed around together…”
“Y-you said Vikram was a neurologist, right? Or whatever his name was, the alchemist at Mirkas-Ballam?”
“Yeah, Vikram. He also described his work as ‘tangential,’ though… That’s weird if the whole thing is about memory wiping, right? That also doesn’t address my objection, anyway.”
Maybe this is the wrong track after all? I already determined that drugs don’t carry over their effects anyway—and Vikram was adamant that you needed some kind of continuous dose to have an effect. The strange ‘green drug’ that Ben didn’t even have…
But there was definitely something that corporate alchemist wasn’t telling me.
“You need to be more defensive. If he gets you, even once—”
“I know, I know. That’s part of why I’m getting the hell out of town. And there’s no chance I’m going back at the end of the loop either. Investigating that fucking event hall is going to have to go on pause for a bit.”
“He can still ambush y-you before you wake up—Kidnap you and keep you in a cage all month until Mirkas-Ballam finishes the synthesis.”
“Yes, I know.” You didn’t need to be so detailed, though.
“Do you know why he hasn’t done that yet?”
“Well…” She considered it for a bit. She didn’t have a whole lot to go on, outside what seemed to be his priorities. He was worried about the event hall massacre, for one, much more than he let on. During the second loop, he had been concerned about a masked person approaching Myra. “I do have a guess… I think Ben is trying to avoid the attention of someone. If I were to disappear early in the loop, it’d make a huge splash, it’d probably make the news… I mean, when Ben disappeared in my second loop, it was all over the newspaper. ‘Please report if you know anything,’ that kind of thing.”
“Okay, but he didn’t seem to care about that.”
Myra scratched her head. “Right. Maybe it was an… oversight? I mean, he seemed surprised when I pointed it out, but it’s still a strange oversight if it’s that important…”
What is this? Is it just impossible to get into the head of that psycho?
Does he have some kind of fucked up moral code I can’t understand?
Or am I still missing a major piece?
◆
“Is there, like, a butterfly effect?” Shera was working her way through some of the usual questions. “Does the news change near the end of the loop due to seemingly small perturbations early on?”
“The news? Like world news?”
“Local news. Or either.”
“Not really. I think it’s pretty much always the same, excepting loop two with Ben. But, like, the stuff around me changes a ton. Towards the end of the loop, all my friends’ actions get way out of sync with what I expect. I mean, some of that’s directly attributable, like last loop we all did an outing together… But some stuff just seems totally random. In the last loop, Cynthia had a bunch of study sessions with a guy in her herbological alchemy class. That had never happened before, and that started really early, like the third day? It seems like it really catches up to the whole campus about a week in. Different club events get advertised… there are different sports outcomes…”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“Do you kn-know why those things are different?”
Myra shrugged. “I mean, if you think about it, our lives are shaped by all sorts of tiny happenstances. Accidental meetings in the hall, who you sit next to in class… even a small timing difference can set you on a different trajectory, right?”
“I-I don’t know. I usually plan out wh-what I’m going to do in a day and do it.”
“Shera, the whole reason we’re here today is that you happened to trip over Ben’s shoulder bag and decided to act on what you saw.”
“Oh. R-right. But I mean on a normal day.”
“Well, Cynthia’s pretty spontaneous on a normal day, I guess. I bet you’re more spontaneous than you think, too.” Honestly, Myra wasn’t even sure the distinction Shera was trying to make was a sound one. After all, it was random happenstance that made the difference between a so-called ‘normal’ day and an abnormal one in the first place.
Suddenly, something lit up in her eyes. “Oh! You can tell me how all the world news is gonna go!”
“What, you wanna check I’m not pulling your chain?”
She flinched in embarrassment. “N-no, that’s not what I meant! I j-just th-think it’d be fun to know stuff in advance…”
“No, no, I getcha,” Myra said hurriedly. Though, really… “Um… well, Emmett Massiel’s death takes up a ton of news space for a while… You know that offbeat opinion column in the Halnya Times? Someone always writes in to make this really bizarre comment about his hair, like, ‘he’s got the scalp equivalent of a neckbeard’ or something. Erm… towards the end, some marine mages in Miirun announce troubling trends about the jellyfish population, and they present evidence that they’re gaining sapience. In a few days, there’s an announcement that Minji has written a new play, some kind of philosophical sex comedy, but the first performance won’t be for a few months, which sucks for me. God, what else…”
“What about this break-in at the trebuchet? Does that ever get solved?”
“The…” Myra wracked her brain. “The what?”
“The break-in at th-the imperial trebuchet,” Shera clarified. “It’s all over the second page?”
“Uh…”
Myra snatched the paper from her hand.
Break-in at Imperial Trebuchet Foiled
At 6:45 A.M. this morning, alarms detected an intruder at the Raine Eastern Trebuchet (REaT) launch site in Kanre, Halnya. The intruder, a battlemage, escaped after a confrontation with the imperial army, in which three soldiers were killed and an unconfirmed number were wounded. The intruder remains unidentified, and no description of the intruder has been reported. REaT reports that the intruder did not access the trebuchet at any time and that no significant damage to the building took place. It is believed the intruder was after confidential documents held in a secure area where blueprints and other confidential documents are kept. REaT did not comment on potential motives or targets. The launch site is expected to resume operations by Nov 9.
Jay Thrustma, a momentum expert at Halnya Upper Institute of Magecraft, offered commentary: “Due to its position, REaT has strategic importance and is a major military asset in conflicts with near-eastern nations. Beyond direct use as a weapon, it also plays a crucial role in other imperial infrastructure, being leveraged for high-energy atmospheric collision experiments and launching orbital satellites. For this reason, it is not hard to imagine a Trentoffish terrorist or Miirunian rebel wanting to sabotage its operation; however, doing so would certainly require access to the launch pad. Given the information available, it is more likely that the culprit sought blueprints or other trade secrets regarding its construction. REaT is a state-of-the-art trebuchet, capable of launching projectiles to more than 0.7 of the speed of light, and it can handle a range of payloads, from pure aura to mundane matter, sized as small as an electron or as large as a house. It is even rumored to possess an ‘Abstract Mode’, rendering it capable of launching pure mathematical concepts, such as the number 58008.”
“Uh, that usually doesn’t happen,” Myra said. “This page is usually about the crater—” She turned the page. The article about the crater and the cyclist’s death was still there on the next page, mostly unchanged except for the column layout. “Oh, weird.”
“It must be a looper, right? Ben or someone else?”
Ben gets up at 6 A.M., as far as I know… It’s an awfully short time to prepare to break into a military building, isn’t it?
“No matter who it is, I don’t have a clue what they’d want a military-grade trebuchet.”
◆
Halfway through the trip, they reached the border to Halnya, where they had a quick stop to check passports. From there, it would be only four more hours. Shera kept looking out the window, squinting into the fields zooming past, barely lit by the train lights in the night’s darkness, trying to take in the foreign country for her first time.
Once the small novelty wore off, she turned her attention back to Myra. “S-so are you gonna tell me what’s in the case?” She looked pointedly at a small box sitting with Myra’s luggage.
“Oh, yeah, I didn’t realize you were wondering about that.”
“You k-kept eyeing it as we went through the inspection.”
“Did I really?” Damn. Myra pulled her contraband out to show it to Shera. “I, uh, kinda swiped this from Professor Bandine’s building before we left.” The item she’d stolen was a model arm from one of Professor Bandine’s cabinets, the one that was meant for training anatomically precise self-telekinesis. She figured if she’d be away from campus, it still made sense to work on something, and her miserable attempt at piloting the mega-golem was fresh in her mind, so it had seemed as good as anything.
She relayed the purpose of the device as Bandine had explained it to her, going as far as to repeat all the historical motivation, and they inspected the object together. Shera shivered when she touched it, and Myra couldn’t blame her: the professor’s special skin-mimicking material, though completely transparent, really felt like skin, although it was kind of cold. If Myra had been blindfolded, she probably would have thought it was a real arm.
“Here, I’m gonna give it a try,” Myra said. The objective, to start, was to rotate the forearm by tensing the pronator teres and the supinator muscles, but that was easier said than done. It was simple enough to telekinetically latch onto the material, but she struggled to induce the desired effect, involving as it did a somewhat complicated material property. “Okay, this is hard.”
“You wanna try with your staff?”
“Ugh, I guess. I don’t think it’ll help. Do you want to try first?”
Shera gave it a go, not even bothering to try it staffless. Come to think of it, Myra had yet to see Shera ever perform anything without a staff—maybe she couldn’t?
Whatever the case, Shera was actually the first to succeed in properly contracting the synthetic muscle. Though Myra was initially quite proud of her, this immediately led to the girl trying to over-explain her method at a mechanical level that just wasn’t even remotely applicable to the way Myra intuited aura flow. This caused her own progress to grind to a halt as she couldn’t find a polite way to give Shera a hint that didn’t fly over her head.
“I think I’m too tired to make any progress on this,” Myra finally said, giving up. “I’ll try again later after I get some sleep.”
Shera nodded. “Hey, d-do you usually do staffless magic?”
“Not really… I’m trying to get better. I mean, I learned to do telekinesis without a staff because it’s just so common. And it absolutely saved my ass last night—last loop, I mean. I want to make it second nature.”
“I’ve never been able to do anything without a staff.”
“I’ll teach you if you want.”
“Ah, n-no! That w-would just waste time, it wouldn’t be able to carry over—”
“I don’t mind,” Myra said, her mouth ahead of her thoughts on the matter. No, teaching Shera magic sounds terrible! Don’t you remember pairing with her in Instructor Yam’s classes?? “It’d be a nice way for us to bond.” No!!!
She blushed. “Is it h-hard?”
“Welll… it’s not easy, but I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it out to be. You have to start by sort of ‘pretending’ you’re holding your staff—there are all these tricks to it, and slowly you learn to get by with fewer tricks. After you do that for a few different kinds of spells, you reach the stage I’m at, where you’re supposed to learn new spells without doing the step-by-step.” She shrugged. “I mean, it’s conceptually the same process we used to learn to cast spells without relying on incantations.”
“O-oh.” She was quiet for a bit. “I d-don’t know that process.”
Myra sipped her coffee. “What d’you mean?” she asked absentmindedly. “You must have gone through that at some point.”
“I c-could never, uh—” She trailed off. “I never incanted.”
Myra blinked. “Huh? Why not?” Who doesn’t get started in magic by learning incantations?
“I—” She hesitated, her mouth hanging open for a bit, her expression vaguely suggesting that Myra was being a little thick. “I c-can’t say them, Myra,” she finally said. “I c-can’t enunciate th-them right.”
“Oh. Uh—Right. I guess I just assumed you could, uh—” She finished off the rest of her coffee, holding her cup to her mouth longer than necessary. Finally, she admitted, “I don’t know what I assumed.”
“Y-you assumed I could speak right if I just tried really hard, r-right?”
“I think I… I don’t think I’d thought about it,” Myra said quickly. “How did you learn magic?”
“Well, I h-had to give up on all the standard intro texts. There are s-some resources meant for people who can’t speak, but I d-didn’t have any of those. I thought I’d never l-learn b-but I finally found a book that spelled out exactly how the aura flow was supposed to work for some b-basic spells. Usually, the books just s-say to do it with the incantation, feel how the aura flows, and then copy th-that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, th-the book I finally found had all the numbers, it was some k-kinda reference manual for rune scripters, I think—and there was this one spell, that one th-that just moves small units of aura. It’s incanted like ka-ja. And I c-could kind of do that one, I’d go like, um—ka-ja-ka-ja-ka-ja-ka-ka-ja—” She rattled it off quickly like a ticking clock. “—ka-da-ka-ja-da-da-daaaa—Oo-oo-oops.” She fumbled it and got flustered. “S-see, even that was p-pretty hard, but I c-could mostly do it, so I just moved the aura exactly b-by the numbers—And then I just kinda stopped needing th-the incantation one day, th-there wasn’t really a process to it—What?”
“Nothing.” Was I staring? “Sorry, I’m just impressed. Really! I can’t imagine having to figure all that out on my own.”
It explains a lot about her idiosyncratic approach to learning spells, too…
The girl across from her looked away in embarrassment or—well, Myra couldn’t really tell. She fixated back on the window, watching the farmland roll by.
◆
Despite the coffee, Myra did doze off eventually (well, sort of, it didn’t really feel like she fell asleep, but she did close her eyes, and time seemed to pass a little quickly). She woke up as the sun peeked over the horizon, illuminating a wide, grassy plain that felt familiar, that somehow seemed intrinsically tied to a sense of childlike anticipation.
“We’re almost there,” Myra realized.
“We are!” Shera opened one of the windows so she could stick her head out and get a good look. The city was just as Myra remembered it, a swathe of large buildings, sparkling in the sunlight, packed in cozily by the Erurian Bay, curving around them and stretching off to the west. Shera grinned wide like a kid—it might have been the happiest Myra had ever seen her. If nothing else, Myra was glad that dozing off had reset the conversational frame.
“That tower in the middle—” Shera yelled over the wind, pointing to the building in the very center. It reached halfway to the clouds, thinning like a spire and then expanding back into a jewel-shaped structure at the top. The titular jewel of Jewel City: the Imperial Tower, the home of the Raine family and the center of imperial governance. “I-it’s massive! I-is it really made of p-pure gemstone?”
“That’s what they say!” Myra shouted back. “It looks even bigger up close, somehow.” God, I can’t imagine what Iz thinks of this thing.
They watched the city grow closer until their necks grew tired. Finally, the train rolled into the station, and the two girls exited out onto a street that was just beginning to wake up. They were near a market, and the faint smell of fish hung in the air.
“Do you know where we’re gonna stay?”
“I know a few—” Myra stopped in her tracks, realizing something. “Shit, I don’t think I can afford the hotel I stayed at with my dad…”
“Y-you mean because all your family assets were seized.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean, Shera.”
“But c-can’t you s-splurge because of the time loop?”
“That requires money to splurge. I barely have enough left to pay my tuition.”
“But y-you don’t have to pay your tuition. Because of the t-time loop.”
“Look, the hotels are really expensive. Also, my tuition situation is complicated.”
“What’s the t-tuition situation?”
“The short story is debt.”
“C-can you take out more debt?”
Myra let out a long sigh.
The long story of Myra’s finances was that most of her finances had been tied directly to her father or to his company, so pretty much everything she owned either became worthless (because it was invested in the now-worthless company) or it had gotten swept up to pay the company’s debts. She did have one small personal account that had remained unscathed, but it wasn’t enough to pay her tuition.
Of course, her father was a competent businessman, and he had made sensible contingencies. For example, there was supposed to be an emergency chest of gold in a booby-trapped cave under the lake near her family’s property. Myra had sought it out first thing when all her accounts had been locked down, but the money had already vanished. She could only surmise that her father had extracted it all himself in a futile attempt to dig his company out of its hole in the desperate days before the house of cards collapsed.
Anyway, all this had left Myra fucked for her tuition. Ordinarily, it would be easy to get a loan with good terms: The empire wanted to train mages, and Myra was already a student with decent grades. The one problem was that the second half of her last name was now worse than mud for anything involving financial trust. She had gotten a loan, but only because the law guaranteed it, and the resulting interest rate was borderline theft.
“It would be… difficult,” Myra finally said. “I guess I could seek out something really predatory, as long as they leave me alone for 28 days…” Surely there’s gotta be something, right?
“How much d-do organs go for?”
“Shera, I’m not selling my kidney for a nicer hotel room, even if I’m gonna get it back.”
“S-sorry!” She blushed. “I-I-I didn’t mean, just for—”
“It’s fine, Shera, I do need you thinking outside the box.” She threw her arm around the girl. “Don’t worry.” She winked at her. “Even if we have to stay in a cramped hotel room, I’m gonna make sure you have a great time.”