After those three hard loops of study, Myra was ready to say she had learned Unkmirean to her satisfaction. It was time to proceed with the next stage of her plan—taking a more active approach to the investigation of her murk bogs. And that meant it was finally time to enlist Shera’s help again.
“So w-what’s your p-plan, exactly?” Shera asked.
“I’m going to approach the murk bogs… as a client.” Myra beamed, expecting the boldness of her proposition to impress the other girl.
“Uh-huh… How’s th-that gonna help?”
They were sitting on a train, though this time it wasn’t to Jewel City or Unkmire. Myra had a different destination in mind, a much farther one, but Shera had once again surprised Myra by committing to the trip with hardly any persuasion. Myra just had to hope that Shera wouldn’t change her mind when she heard the details of her plan.
“I figure I’ll try to hire them to do a job in Ralkenon, something that contradicts attacking the city. We’ll measure their reaction, and if they say they’re already taken, I’ll insist I can outpay their other clients, have a little bidding war…”
Shera didn’t say anything.
“I got the idea,” Myra kept talking, “‘cause I was thinking about a few loops ago when we investigated Hotel Caldera, and I came up with a plan to try to rent the same hotel room as the princess and see how the receptionist reacted.”
Shera still said nothing, but she gave her a look very reminiscent of the same look she had given to Myra’s hotel plan so many loops ago.
“Look, it’ll work this time. I think the secret to this kind of thing is to have a lot of money.”
“And y-you’re going to have a lot of money.”
“Yeah. I have a plan.”
“And I liked the plan in the last loop?”
“Oh. Yeahhh, weeee didn’t really talk about it that much.”
Shera squinted. “Why not?”
“I mean, I was busy studying the language the whole time. We didn’t interact as much as we usually did.”
“I wasn’t helping you st-study?”
“Nah, nah, of course not! I mean,” Myra said hastily, “it was all dreadfully dull, and it’s not like you could’ve retained anything loop to loop, so there wasn’t any point.”
“B-but I would have insisted.” She said it quietly, like she’d been let down by herself for not being maximally helpful.
“C’mon, don’t be silly. It was obvious that wouldn’t have been the best use of our time.”
“R-right.” She bit her lip. “S-sorry. Of course y-you have a better big picture than I do.”
“Sherrrra.” She pulled the other girl into her arms and swung her around a bit. She squeaked. Myra was eager to move the conversation onward. “What do you think we should spend our time on this loop?”
“W-well, um. It sounds like the biggest clue to the time loop is—”
◆
A few hours earlier.
“C-can you run that by me again?”
“You said ‘the stars moved,’” Myra explained.
Shera crossed her arms and shuddered. “Wh-what does that mean?”
“Well, I don’t know—you didn’t really have time to explain before the loop ended. I didn’t get a chance to see it. And whatever it is, it can’t be seen with the naked eye, and it can’t be seen from Ralkenon when it’s blanketed in ash.”
She was quiet for a while, but she didn’t freak out. Finally, she said quietly, “Do you have any theories?”
“Well, my first assumption was that the time loop isn’t instantaneous across space, and the stars go back in time before we do for some reason. So they aren’t really ‘moving’, just leaping back in time by a month.”
Shera squinted, her look very doubtful.
“Right, you see the problem already. It, uh, kinda took me a while to see that.”
“The st-stars are lightyears away,” Shera explained. “The nearest star is around 4.2 lightyears away. If any star moved suddenly, it would take far more than a few seconds for the event to propagate to us.”
Specifically, it had only occurred to her about four days ago, towards the end of the previous loop. That left her scrambling to come up with a new theory so she’d have something to present to Shera.
“Exactly,” Myra said. “So I thought of a different possibility. Actually, this is one of the first things I thought of back when we first looped. The idea is that only Zyarth is looping, or only our system is looping, or something, which means the stars have probably progressed years since this loop started. But there’s some kind of illusion to prevent us from observing star drift. Because in my second loop, this was the first thing I checked. I checked if the stars were in the right place, and they were—” Uh, except for Shera’s supernova, but Myra wasn’t going to explain that part because Shera seemed disturbed enough as it was, and it wasn’t the best time to give Shera a panic attack over a discrepancy they’d already determined had nothing to do with the loop. “—so maybe there’s some kind of illusion, and the illusion falls right before the loop ends. And as soon as it falls—bam, the stars appear to have moved forward instantaneously.”
Myra could only turn up her wrists and display a helplessly lost look.
“I dunno. I kinda wonder if there’s a connection to the trebuchets—maybe, if there’s some kind of sky illusion, then the illusion is probably operated by some kinda satellite—which would have to be up on the first day of the loop, somehow—but, uh, maybe they wanted the trebuchet that launched the satellites, or—wanted the trebuchet to attack the satellites?”
Shera nodded through the whole jumbled thought process.
(Speaking of the trebuchets—the trebuchet attacks had continued through the previous three loops, though the intruder seemed to have finished their business with REaT, instead turning their attention to other trebuchet and astronautics facilities. The intruder got a lot better at it over time, too: Starting with Loop 7, the third loop to host trebuchet attacks, the attacker managed to infiltrate multiple facilities, each on their first try. Oh, and the newspaper never quoted any “Jay Thrustma” again.)
Shera needed more time to process the stars being out of place, and she didn’t bring it up again until they were on the train, when she stated that it was the biggest clue to the time loop. Indeed, if the satellite illusion theory was right, then whoever set up the illusion must have information on the purpose of the loop.
Unfortunately, this direction didn’t lead to any immediate action items. They agreed to observe again at the end of the loop, and until then, they would focus on Myra’s mercenary plan. And that plan started with making money.
◆
It really was annoying how difficult it was to actually make a lot of money, even with literal future knowledge. It seemed like it should be easy, but translating future knowledge into massive wealth in such a short time without preexisting resources wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Previously, Myra kind of just had an idea that there were a bunch of gambling opportunities just around. Unfortunately, casino games were too chaotic to benefit from a time loop, and the emperor had outlawed most forms of sports betting. He had outlawed lotteries, too, on the basis that the only lottery that mattered was the genetic lottery. What now remained in that sphere operated on too little volume to be useful to Myra.
Fortunately, there was still one place in the world where you could definitely leverage future knowledge into money by design. That place was the prediction bazaar of Tzurigad.
That was the avenue, but it still wasn’t that easy.
Or rather, it was tedious.
The main problem was that if Myra traveled to Tzurigad and tried to return to the empire with a mysterious new sum of cash, the imperial border guard would absolutely know something was up and suspect (correctly) that she was leaking imperial secrets at the bazaar.
Now, technically, she didn’t need to re-enter the empire because her final destination was Unkmire. However, Unkmire was to the south, and Tzurigad was to the northeast, beyond Miirun. It was doable to get from Tzurigad to Unkmire without entering the empire, but it was a circuitous route that would take about six days.
Still, doable was doable.
The next problem was that in Tzurigad she would be racking up Tzurigadish currency, so at some point she would need to exchange it for Unkmirean currency. The best currency exchanges were in… the empire. She could only find out by trying, but it was entirely possible that she wouldn’t be able to make the desired transaction in Tzurigad. She would probably need to trade for imperial currency in Tzurigad and then trade again in Unkmire, effectively doubling the exchange fee.
She also needed starter cash.
In total, her plan was:
1. Take the train to her family home in Jinorsa Bay to get papers on all the frozen assets from her father’s company.
2. Take the train up to Jewel City and grab the journal from Emmett’s house.
3. Take the train to Tzurigad (around forty-eight hours).
4. Put the company assets and the journal up for collateral to get as big a loan as she could.
5. Make a profit using foreknowledge of how prices would move, trying to stick to trades that seemed like they would be stable across loops. (She estimated she could increase her reserves by around 1.5-2x each day if she knew in advance how the prices would move.)
6. Trade for imperial currency.
7. Take the long train ride to Unkmire (around six days).
8. Exchange for Unkmirean currency.
Of course, she had to spend one loop just taking the trip to Tzurigad to figure out how prices would swing over the month and thereby determine what trades would be profitable. This was the preparation phase. She took Shera, of course, because Shera had a good head for numbers and would probably be good at this part.
Tzurigad was not nearly as difficult to navigate as Krinph had been. It was, for lack of a better word, a ‘normal’ city. The prediction bazaar was in the heart of the city, a large crescent-shaped temple that kind of wrapped around the merchant’s bazaar. There was a tall spire protruding from it—a coveted location, since many predictors at the bazaar still used the tried-and-true method of sitting in a tall place with a pair of binoculars so they could see approaching news earlier than anybody else. The bazaar was roughly organized by expected time to resolution—if you wanted to bet on when a king would die, that could be years out, so that was at one end of the building. If you wanted to bet on the outcome of some short-term crisis or investigation, you’d go to the other end.
This timelines didn’t matter much to Myra. The price for any market could swing wildly in response to news events of the month. The long-term bets were easier to trade at a higher volume, though, so that’s where they decided to hang around.
Incidentally, the assets of her father’s company were worthless. No surprises there. But the beaver journal was a hit. Bankers were tripping over themselves to lend her start-up money. Shera’s take was that possession of the journal indicated insider imperial status, which meant a high likelihood that she would win bets, making her an attractive lendee.
It was actually a little concerning: Logically speaking, if a time looper wanted to find other time loopers, this would be the place to look. Attracting attention was something Myra very much didn’t want to do.
◆
In the end, the observation phase went off without much issue, so the last thing to figure out was how to spend the end of the loop. Myra contemplated a few options, but there wasn’t a pressing reason to go anywhere else, so they just stayed in Tzurigad to the end. And of course, the loop ended with observing the stars.
Their main goal was to measure how far the stars moved. If their new hypothesis was correct—that is, if the stars appear to move forward in time as a result of an illusion falling—then they could calculate how displaced-in-time the stars become when they move, and thereby estimate how long the time loop had been going on.
“Okay, I think Kasia should be a good star to watch,” Shera explained. Myra had left all the technical planning to her. “Kasia moves fast, relatively speaking, so it’ll be the easiest to measure.”
“Oh, I know that one. It’s the bright star in the Terron Bowl, isn’t it?” She gazed out towards the constellation, a pair of concentric circles comprising twenty or so visible stars in total, including Kasia on the outer ring. Tonight, the ring was host to Altina, the second and most distant moon of Zyarth. Altina was barely more than a speck, compared to the full moon that shone brightly from the other end of the sky, but it radiated brightly in its own right.
“It’s such a beautiful night,” Myra mused. “The sky’s so clear out here.”
“Mm-hm.” Shera was busy fixing her telescope in the proper direction. “How much time will I have? After the change happens?”
“Not much at all. Like… three seconds?”
“O-okay, I’ll give you the angle and distance it moves in arcseconds.” They worked out the exact way Shera would convey the information. There was quite a lot Myra had to memorize this time, and it was all starting to strain her brain. (Being exhausted from three months of flashcards didn’t help.)
They sat and waited.
Myra waited for the time to tick down…
5…
4…
3…
2…
1…
“No-nothing’s happen—”
◆
Well, what the fuck?
Did something change?
Did the other looper do something with the trebuchets and change something? Was it because they were in Tzurigad? Was the illusion theory right, but the illusion only held in the empire?
…
Ugh.
Nothing was ever easy.
◆
The dry-run was over, and now it was the real thing. Myra would make money and get her foot in the door with the murk bogs. Halfway through the month, Myra met up with Shera in Krinph. They had agreed to meet up in one of the bars that Myra was familiar with—the first one she’d eaten at, in fact.
Myra found her there, just as she said she’d be, eating the same purple fruit Myra had gotten on her first trip here.
“Hey!”
“Hey.”
“Whatcha think of the city, eh? You learn Unkmirean in the last two weeks?”
“N-no. Y-you were right, learning a language is hard.”
“Well, I’m glad you came, to be honest. This is the first time I’ve told you about the time loop and then immediately run off like that.”
Myra had suggested that Shera meet her in Unkmire on the basis that there was no need for her to suffer through the awful travel arrangements, and that there was lots of productive research she could do.
Though… it would have been nice to have her around. Myra wasn’t entirely sure why she planned it this way.
“All y-your predictions were true,” Shera explained simply. She took a bite of her fruit. “D-did you have a good trip?”
“Well, I didn’t have any delays or anything. Going by the Ilmanian Ocean was actually kind of fun… I saw a real siren, actually. You remember about the fourth loop, right—”
“You mean out in the ocean…?”
“No, I mean they boarded the train.” Myra coughed. “They were required to bind their mouth shut before they were allowed to board. Did you know that was a thing?”
“N-no.”
Really, Myra shouldn’t have been surprised that Ben’s weird gambit about Myra being a siren had been inspired by real-life treatment of sirens. On the other hand, it was now obvious to her that the Ptolkeran Mountain sect probably didn’t know anything about sirens because there was simply no way Myra could have been mistaken for one. The siren she had seen had been ethereally beautiful, with silvery smooth skin, hair that glistened in a gentle rainbow, and solid gold eyes. Before they had boarded, Myra was pretty sure, she had caught a glimpse of sharp, pointed teeth.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“How was your trip?” Myra asked.
“Oh. It was short. They didn’t give me a-any trouble about the rocks.” She gestured to the large case by her feet. Myra had instructed Shera to bring some rocks they could make lava out of, since there weren’t many rocks up here in the trees.
“That’s good. I figured there wasn’t any law about moving rocks across the border.”
“Did you get all the money?”
“Oh—Yeah, uh—” She pulled a metal case out of her luggage. She nearly opened it, but maybe that wasn’t a good idea in public. Shera squinted at it, and Myra could almost feel the calculation behind the girl’s eyes, the largest denomination of a banknote in common use, times the volume of the case over the volume of a banknote.
“Y-you’re going to hire mercenaries,” she said, her voice tinged with a sliver of disbelief.
“Look, it’s—I mean, you thought this would be enough last time.”
The girl flinched. Okay, appealing to her past self might have been kinda rude, Myra…
And honestly… executing trades had been harder than Myra had thought. She hadn’t made as much as she and past-Shera had estimated.
“Look, we just need to get in the door. I can say I have other assets that I need time to extricate from the other empire, and—”
“Y-you should talk to y-your f-father.”
“—I can probably—” Myra’s words crashed in her tracks. “What?”
“Your f-father. He’s in prison, but he can p-probably tell you how to leverage all your assets, how to trade on the information better—M-maybe he has a contact—”
“Are you really trying to tell me I could solve my money problems by talking to my fa—to that—that guy that scammed half the businesses in the empire?”
“Thinking out of the box could be useful, I think—”
“Out of the—” Myra stood up and almost slammed a hand on a table. She stopped herself, but her hand needed a place to go, and without thinking she grabbed the other girl’s shoulder instead. The girl flinched and looked back at her with her eyes wide. “—Out of the box? That’s what you call it? Do you even listen to yourself sometimes?”
“More th-than anyone—”
“Shera, his ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking left me with nothing! He’s the reason I can’t already just buy my way out of every problem!”
“I h-have no way to know! If you y-yell at me this every time I c-can’t remember—”
“Shera—”
Myra realized she was still holding the other girl’s shoulders. She was losing control of herself. Slowly, she let go, took a deep breath, and sat down. A few patrons of the bar were eyeing her.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s o-okay.” Yeah, no it’s not.
“This is a sore—look, I always have to adjust each loop, after you forget the last one. I didn’t mean to snap like that.”
“I get it. It was a long t-train ride.”
◆
“What’s this about, papa?”
One day when she was fifteen, Myra’s father took her out by the lake. On the side opposite from their house, there was a large stone slab that hid an underground passage. It was a tight fit, especially for her father, and it was dirty and damp. However, it quickly opened up into a wider passage made of brick, tightly packed and sealed water-tight.
“There’s some things about our finances that I need you to know,” he explained.
“Is this one of your vaults?”
“No, no, no.” He laughed. “My arcane vaults are much deeper in Zyarth’s crust than this. This area isn’t part of my business. No, this area is just between you and me.” He raised a finger to his lips. A secret.
“Did you build this?”
“It was here when I bought the property. This is why I chose it. I wanted somewhere hidden, away from thieves, away from my partners, away from the prying eyes of the empire.”
There was only one path through the corridor, which must have led them deep under the lake.
“So what’s down here?”
“Emergency money. Something you’ll probably never need—If we never see the inside of this place again, I’ll be happy. But just in case.”
The tunnel opened up into a large cavern, with a cliff and a great chasm. The old man showed his daughter how a stalagmite had a secret compartment with a brazier. He lit it with his lantern, and a satisfying melody rang throughout the cavern. A series of levitating platforms appeared out of nowhere, forming a bridge to the other side. He showed Myra how to cross safely.
The next room was rigged with hidden pressure plates on the floor, which her father showed her how to avoid.
“Papa, why are you showing me this?”
“Because if anything happens to me, you need to know what to do.”
“B-but, if anything happened to you, wouldn’t I inherit your savings?”
“There are many contingencies we can’t foresee.”
The next room was circular, with two sealed doors to the left and right, and a pair of stone gargoyles at the far end. There was something scratched into the wall behind them, though it was in an old language that Myra couldn’t read.
“It’s a logic puzzle,” he explained, taking a stance between the gargoyles. “One tells the truth, one’s a liar.”
“Oh I know this one! You say—” She turned to the gargoyle on the left. “What would the other gargoyle not answer?” Nothing happened. She turned back to her dad. “Right?”
“Old thing’s busted, I’m afraid.” He knocked on the gargoyle, and its head turned, making an awful screech as it faced Myra’s father. It let out an odd croak. “Doesn’t matter so much. This sort of thing hasn’t been considered good security for centuries.”
“Aww.”
“Maybe you could take a crack at fixing it.”
“Maybe—Hey! You still haven’t told me why we need to do this! Quit distracting me!”
“I meant what I said. You never know what could happen.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re worried about something.”
He shook his head. “Myra, it’s my job to manage risk. Tens of thousands of merchants, businessmen, and noblemen trust me to keep their financial instruments safe. But, Myrabelle, there’s one thing I can’t take a risk on. I can’t take a gamble on my daughter. Maybe it seems excessively paranoid, but a little paranoia is a small price for securing your future.”
“Oookay, papa.”
He chuckled to himself. “You’ll understand someday.”
“So where are we going? If the magic wasn’t screwed up and I asked the gargoyle what the gargoyle wouldn’t say, what would it say?”
“It would say the treasure is through the right door.”
He made for the left door.
“Then… why are we going through the other door?”
“We’re not going using the treasure room. The treasure is hidden in the death room,” her father said. He showed her how to safely navigate the death room and reach the hidden treasure chest in the maw of the spike trap. (Though the whole time, Myra couldn’t help but be bothered, if the treasure’s in here, isn’t the puzzle wrong?)
◆
Myra apologized for her outburst a few more times throughout dinner. Eventually, they finished eating and took a walk through the city.
“I really like having a th-third dimension to the city,” Shera mused. “The distance you have to walk scales with the cube root of the population instead of th-the square root.” This was the Shera way of making peace, Myra supposed.
“Yeah, but having to go up and down stairs all the time is way worse. Not to mention all these bridges.” Though Myra had now been to the city several times, she still hadn’t gotten used to the bridges. To her slight annoyance, Shera didn’t seem to be having the same trouble with all the bridges at all. “Don’t you find it disconcerting at all?”
“N-no. I just don’t look down.”
“Brilliant.”
“I w-wonder what happens if you drop something down there.” Despite what Shera had just said, she looked down into the blackness. “Is there a service to go get it?”
“No idea. It just freaks me out how they can walk around so carefree when you could fall and die from a single misstep…”
“They’re used to it.”
“I guess so.” Myra flipped around through her booklet that mapped the city, happy for the question to occupy her. “Y’know, I don’t even see any paths marked here that lead down to the ground.”
“The fog’s really dangerous. They probably wouldn’t label it on a tourist map.”
“Thought they’d have some kinda guided tour thing,” Myra muttered.
She looked back at Shera, who was now just looking around the city in awe. I guess if she’s not dwelling on it, I won’t either.
◆
Thankfully, Shera was eager, at least, to proceed with the plan.
“So do you know where we’re going to meet the murk bogs?” she asked.
“Yes, and it wasn’t easy to find. I asked around while I was practicing the language, and let me tell you. The people here despise the murk bogs. I mean, I knew that already, but I didn’t really get it until I heard what people had to say about them. I got chased out of a few bars.”
Shera shuddered.
It had been difficult to get around the overt suspiciousness of an obvious foreigner trying to locate the murk bogs. She had tried to convey that the murk bogs were an enemy (which was true), and that had garnered sympathy… but the moment she said she wanted to find them—rather than file a legal claim or whatnot—the looks of doubt came out. Her still-poor facilities with the language really didn’t help.
In the end, Myra had found the answer in a library. The librarian had been a lot more helpful since Myra could claim she was doing a research project, though what saved her in the end was her new book-searching spell. The spell was legitimately challenging to operate in a non-native language, and she was still incapable of casting it except during the night when the information aura was easily available (in contrast to the wood element, which was overwhelming so deep in the woods).
At any rate, she had eventually found the information she needed in a newspaper archive.
The murk bogs’ lair was accessible from a village so small and out-of-the-way that official sources referred to it by its train stop. Myra doubted it would be a good idea to stay the night there, so they stayed the night in Krinph and then rode to their destination early in the morning. Myra carried the money, and Shera carried the rocks, which they had already melted down and stored in an insulating case. They had been on the fence about bringing a weapon at all, but they decided it was better to regret having a weapon than to regret not having one.
The village had little in common with the bustling city that had been Krinph. The train platform in Krinph had been clean and sturdy; the platform in this unnamed village was made of planks that had a little too much give to them. There was one attendant at the station.
“N-now where?” Shera muttered to her.
“I’m not sure… maybe we should—” She eyed the old attendant and weighed asking the guy.
But she didn’t need to. He gave the girls a long appraisal, and without saying anything, pointed emphatically in a certain direction.
“I th-think he knows why we’re here.”
“Yeah.”
The two girls found what they were looking for without significant trouble. At the edge of the village was a balcony that overlooked a large, expansive area where the trees thinned and the sky was visible, gray and overcast. There was yet another rope bridge, the longest one she had ever seen. The area was layered in fog, and though it was relatively light, the distance was vast, and the endpoint of the bridge was barely obscured.
“Okay,” Myra said. “Um.”
The bridge was swaying in the wind.
“I mean, it’s just like the other bridges, but longer, right?”
“How long is-is it?”
Myra squinted off into the distance. “Several kilometers, I guess.”
Shera inspected the slant of the bridge, holding her arm out as if to measure it. The bridge slanted downward at probably 25-30 degrees. “If we inspect the curvature of the way it droops down, I think we can calculate it.”
“I think we should just—just go,” Myra said.
With some trepidation, she stepped onto the first panel. With her case of money in one hand, she held the rope railing tight with the other. “Why the hell’s it so steep, anyway?”
“The shape a b-bridge like this makes is called a c-c-catenary.”
“Thanks, Shera.”
“C-could we—call ahead?” Shera asked. “Th-there’s a phone line done there.” She pointed to a wire hanging just below the bridge proper.
“If you know where to get their number,” Myra muttered.
“Th-that attendant at the station. He m-might have called ahead about us.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.”
◆
Their progress was slow-going. It wasn’t easy to traverse a tilted, oscillating series of wooden planks. Myra had resorted to carrying her case with telekinesis so that she could hold onto the rope railing with both hands, her knuckles increasingly white. She used some additional telekinesis to stabilize her footing.
“I th-think we’re a quarter of the way there,” Shera said, after what Myra was sure had been 2 or 3 kilometers.
“God, this is going to take fucking hours.”
“Do you know what the runes are for?” Shera asked. She was referring to the runes carved into the wooden planks at their feet. There were only a handful of runes every couple of meters, so it made for a bit of a challenge as they progressed, something to distract herself.
“Honestly, I’m kinda baffled,” she said. “I don’t even know what they were thinking. You can’t use wood for runes, it warps too much, and they become inert.”
“Maybe it’s a secret Unkmirean technology.”
“If that exists, and honestly, I doubt that it does, then it isn’t being used here. I’m certain these runes are all defunct.”
“Do you know what they’re supposed to do? Or what they’d do if they were operational?”
“Quite a lot, actually... There are some voice-activated defensive measures: barriers, making the bridge burst into flames, that kinda thing. Then there’s something that is supposed to stabilize the bridge, which would really be nice to actually have—”
Right on cue, there was an unusually large gust of wind, and the bridge swung so hard it nearly flung them off. “Fuck! Fuck fuck god!”
“Y-y’know,” Shera half-yelled. “If this b-bridge collapses, we’re too far from the edge to teleport to safety!”
“Thank you for pointing this out, Shera!” Myra took a second to calm herself. “I actually brought teleport sticks.” After they’d gotten stranded in Ealichburgh Myra wasn’t making that mistake again. Krinph was too far a spell stick, but she had set a waypoint back at the village.
“M-maybe you could give me one so I can use it.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry.”
◆
The Murk Bogs’ headquarters was on a large floating platform, itself maybe a kilometer wide. She stepped onto the ground—the first real ground she’d stepped on in Unkmire—with palpable relief. They were quickly met by a battlemage who ushered them into a white shack at the front of the compound. He wordlessly took Myra’s trunk of money from her as he did so.
“Hey, um, that’s kinda—Okay, sure. It was for you all anyway.” She wasn’t even sure the mage heard her.
“W-what’d you say?” Shera asked. Of course, she hadn’t understood any of Myra’s Unkmirean. Incidentally, she had been allowed to keep her trunk full of lava.
“It, uh, it doesn’t really matter,” Myra said.
Thankfully, it wasn’t long before someone came to greet them. It was impressively quick, in fact, given that they had shown up with no notice.
“Lading, ladies, I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” The word he used for ladies was one that her Unkmirean textbook did not explain very well, but did in quite strong terms urge new speakers to avoid.
Myra repressed a shudder as she saw who had come to receive them. The lanky man with a goatee, the same one who had shot her, who had led a small team to rob a bank while her city burned, stood before them. He was wearing the same thing he had before, trousers and a tight black shirt with bracelets. He was rubbing his hands together, a shrewd grin on his lips.
“My name is Geel.”
Myra introduced herself with some fake names she made up on the spot.
“So, what can I do for you?” the mercenary leader asked.
“We’re looking to hire you.”
“And we’re looking for work!” Geel sat on a sofa opposite them and propped one leg over the over. “Sounds like a match made in heaven.”
“R-right. We’re—”
“Where are you ladies from?”
“Oh. Uh, we thought that didn’t matter.”
“We still need to know.”
“We’re from Casire.”
“Imperials! I love working with imperials. Go on.”
“We have reason to believe that the city of Ralkenon will be attacked on December 3, but the nature of our source makes it difficult for us to act on the information. Our hands are tied, and we can’t go to the empire. We’re looking to hire someone to protect it, and we had to get—” Oh what was the word for “—creative looking for a solution.”
He leaned forward and stopped fidgeting so rapidly with his hands. He gave a long, searching look. “December 3, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you give me a few minutes? I have to consult.” He scampered off.
“W-what did he say?” Shera asked when he was gone.
“Not really anything.”
The ‘consultation’ was quick.
“We accept.”
“You… do?”
“Absolutely.”
“You don’t have, like, any conflicts… you’re not busy that day? I mean. We’re here on pretty short notice.”
He looked at her again with a searching expression. Finally, “Nope. There’s no problem. We should be able to spare as many men and women as you need. Should we discuss payment? Our base rate for an op on foreign soil—a one-night op—would be 8,000 quet per head. We can supply up to 100. Oh, do you need that in your imperial whatsits—”
“We can do the conversion.”
“And of course, you owe us our consultation fee. 20,000 quet.”
“Right. We brought that.”
“Really? Where?” He looked around in mock confusion, rubbing his chin.
“Oh, we, uh, brought a case, a guard took it—”
“But we have that now, not you.”
“Er—”
Geel snickered. “Lighten up. I’m only joking around.”
Myra, obviously, did not have enough money to pay for 100 or even 10 men for a one-night operation. She had really not thought she would get this far—the whole plan was that they wouldn’t accept because they had already rented themselves out to a contradictory cause, and then they’d fish for information or start a bidding war or something. Did they come too early, and they really were free that day? But no, he was way too dodgy about that date. He obviously knew there was something important.
They ‘negotiated’ for a while—but the whole thing felt ridiculously fake. He was far too laid back—maybe Geel was just like that—but Myra was dead certain he was having fun pulling one over her. And honestly, if he had just immediately pegged her as a naive idiot and decided to con her, she could hardly blame him for the judgment, even if he seemed to genuinely believe she could pay what she said.
Eventually, after making a ‘deal’ (wherein Myra agreed to every forceful suggestion made by Geel) they were escorted out (they never got their case of money back).
◆
Out on the bridge, Shera looked at her expectantly.
“Okay, you were right. This plan was stupid.”
“I still d-don’t know what you talked about for half an hour.”
“Right, sorry.” She buried her face in her hands and quickly explained.
“So we got zero information,” she concluded.
“Damn it… I don’t know why I thought I’d be able to outwit a powerful mercenary leader into divulging information about a rival client in a language I barely speak. I wasn’t even able to chat up nerdy pharmaceutical alchemists at a bar.”
“O-okay.” Shera looked a bit confused, probably because Myra hadn’t really explained that story properly this loop. She didn’t press on it, though. “I’m sure we can figure out something. Maybe you can get more money—u-u-um.” She cut herself off very hastily. “Or maybe we should find something they need more th-than money. Or we could just stake out this bridge for an entire loop. See who enters or leaves.”
“I guess we have to do that,” Myra said, resigning herself to a dreadful stakeout. “I don’t really see what else we can do. I mean… maybe I should sell them future knowledge? Maybe I should come back, say, ‘Hey, we can’t hire you all after all, the volcano is gonna blow,’ and see how they react?”
“Worth a t-try.”
It was worth a try, sure. A lot of things were worth a try, though Myra still had a feeling the conversation would go something like, Jeepers, a volcano? Sounds bad, I’d better consult with my colleagues. Good information, we’ll give you a discount on that job you agreed to pay us for.
So there was that plan, and then there was the stake-out plan…
There was making more money—
They trudged back to the village, walking a few hundred meters onto the bridge (out of the compound’s anti-teleport measures) then snapped their sticks to return to the village. It was thus that she was in a sour mood as she waited for the train. Shera sat next to her on the bench, but subtly at a bit of a distance.
What she wouldn’t give to go back to the loop in Jewel City.
What else do you expect, the way you’ve been acting?
Fuck, I just don’t want to—
I know.
But then this is all you’ll get.
She barely noticed the train station attendant approaching her. “Pardon me, ladies.” The word he used for ladies was noticeably more… cordial than the one Geel had used.
“Yes?”
“You’re from Casire, is that right?”
“Uh—Uh, yeah, we are,” Myra said.
“You mind taking these back with you?” He handed her a stack of posters. “The boss thought you might know where to send these.”
“Um… you want us to… advertise?”
The man grunted an affirmation and walked away.
Uh, yeah, right, like we’re going to go hang these up in our fucking campus.
“H-hey. Th-there’s the phone number,” Shera observed. She pointed to the corner.
“Oh, this isn’t even an ad for services,” Myra said as she finally looked at it closely. “Wait, the murk bogs are—”
HIRING SUPPORT MAGE OFFICER IN RENOWNED PARAMILITARY ORG
ADVANCED RUNECRAFTERS WANTED