The stars moved?

Myra rushed to the usual meeting spot by the fountain, where she knew that Shera would pass by. She stopped herself from grabbing the girl’s shoulders and shouting “the stars moved!” right back at her. A vision bubbled to the forefront of her mind’s eye, the sight of Shera curled on her bed, nearly catatonic after being told that the date of her supernova was wrong.

Damn, how am I going to handle it this time? She hated playing this game—she’d gotten lucky with Shera the last couple of loops by simply being forthright, but right now, the stars didn’t seem like they’d make a good opener. Myra looked at the warm-up period ahead of her with a lump of despair in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to just talk to Shera the way she’d talked to her ten minutes ago. She didn’t want to walk on eggshells.

While she hemmed and hawed to herself, Shera walked by, vanishing into the training gym for her first class of the day.

What am I doing this loop, anyway?

She had some rough plans, but as she played them out in her head, it was increasingly unclear how she was going to involve Shera in a meaningful way. In the end, she decided to think on her approach as she proceeded with the first thing she had planned. But deep down, she probably knew that she’d already made up her mind.

◆

Logokinesis described a mage’s ability to sense and manipulate the world around them through different mathematical interpretations. Ninety-nine percent of the time, mages used a framework based around ‘the laws of physics’, resulting in the art of telekinesis.

In the other one percent of the time, mages utilized the wider spectrum of mathematical interpretations that led to other, useful ways of interacting with the world. The topological interpretation of the world, which Myra had learned from Ben; the coordinate transformations that Zirphilia had taught her to help with rock dodging; the relational interpretations that Massiel’s security system used to summarize his physical property into X-did-Y items.

(To say that telekinesis was a form of logokinesis was actually kind of pedantic. Colloquially, logokinesis referred to everything but telekinesis. Telekinesis had a different feel to it, being based on intuition rather than technical precision.)

Anyway, by studying mathematical logic—the ‘mathematics of mathematics’ in some sense—one could extend and manipulate the mathematical interpretations themselves as objects in Abstract Space. It was through this means that mages had worked out how to construct spells by carefully writing out mathematical definitions, spells that anyone could use without all the training needed to understand them.

Myra was average at it. She preferred runes. A well-written runic diagram was like a nice instruction manual or recipe; abstract objects were like textbooks. But there was no doubt Myra and many people like her got enormous use out of the Common Library. Among its many useful offerings, for example, there was a representation of every city in the empire as a graph: a network of nodes (locations of interest) and edges (roads and other paths). This freely available information turned traveling and navigation into a breeze.

The Common Library even had the capability to translate between languages, though the mathematical understanding of language was somewhat nascent. Nonetheless, it theoretically allowed Myra to have productive conversations with individuals who didn’t share a common language with her. The Common Library really was a thing of beauty, and its potential usefulness when traveling to a foreign country couldn’t be overstated.

It was just too bad she couldn’t use it in Unkmire.

◆

See, Myra’s plans for the next few loops centered around Unkmire.

Until now, her view into Unkmire, and into the actual status of the relationship between the empire and its neighbor, continued to be highly inadequate. The peace talks and Unkmire’s possible admission into the empire were at the heart of things, somehow, and she only had a couple of pieces of information about it. First, there was Sky’s tip that multiple mages had been taking secretive trips into Unkmire. Second, there was Myra’s encounter with the murk bogs, the mercenary group had shot her at the end of her second loop, evidently on the way to attack the city.

Myra had only been outside the empire once, for a ski vacation in a country called Fishnia up near the Ptolkeran mountains. She had been with her father, who did business there and spoke the language. It had been a long time ago, but despite it being so far away, Myra didn’t recall ever feeling too out of place.

Unkmire, though, was widely considered to be a difficult tourist destination, despite bordering Casire. The language barrier was just a small part of it; rather, the complex geography and city structure tended to freak people out. With those two factors combined, people had a lot of difficulty navigating. That’s what she’d heard, anyway.

The first thing she decided to do was take a train to Krinph, the capital and largest city, just to see what she was dealing with and get a feel if all the warnings were overblown or not. It was a short trip, forty-five minutes to the border, fifteen minutes through the border control, and then three hours to Krinph. The train was a bit slower and much bumpier in Unkmire since it was difficult to build stable train tracks with no ground underneath.

Well, no, that wasn’t quite right. The area she was in was called “The Groundless Realm,” but there really was a ground. Probably.

All Myra could see when she looked out the train window was a lush, green forest canopy that stretched as far as the horizon. Unkmirean society sat just under this canopy, nested at the top of the forest whose height was measured in kilometers. The actual ground, so far below, was blanketed in a dense fog that was toxic to breathe, and nobody lived there.

The platform at her destination was a massive rectangle of wooden planks, resting on top of the canopy. From the platform, she descended a staircase into a giant tree fort, which served as the ticketing area, an area that had only one exit. That exit was a rope suspension bridge that led to a complex of similar platforms. Crossing it, she couldn’t help but look down, down into the blackness where all the trunks vanished, and her stomach jolted in a fit of nausea.

This was the first challenge that foreigners faced in a city like Krinph: the vertigo. Myra was a mage, so she had less reason to be afraid of heights than most, but that didn’t matter to the wooziness in her gut.

There really is a ground, she reminded herself. Probably.

Some kids, probably natives of the Groundless Realm, were jumping around at the other end of the bridge, causing the wooden boards to bounce and clatter under her feet. Myra gripped the rope railing tightly while passersby continued unperturbed. It took a moment to collect herself and continue, and it was an enormous relief to reach the other side, though she knew it was far from the last bridge she’d have to cross.

The second challenge visitors faced was that the city was naturally three-dimensional, but all she had to navigate with was a physical map that came in the form of a little paper booklet with different pages for different elevations. In principle, it should have been possible to make a small, abstract three-dimensional map she could carry around and interface with the way she was accustomed to… However, she didn’t know where she could acquire such a thing. Certainly not from the Common Library.

She decided to put the map away and just navigate by looking around and trying to map out the bridge system with her eyes. That wasn’t any easier, but at least it was more enjoyable.

There seemed to be two kinds of structures in the Unkmirean city: the ‘buildings’, which to Myra looked like tree forts, usually situated between several trees at the corners, and ‘platforms’, usually situated as a wide ring around a single tree. The platforms were open to the air, and they seemed to be popular locations for restaurants and bars.

She chose one of the restaurant platforms and (with some struggle) was able to order some food by thrusting money into the bartender’s hands with a pleading look that conveyed something like, “Just serve me anything, please.” In the end, she got a spherical, purple fruit she didn’t know the name of, something that looked way too large for a serving, but which turned out to be very light, so light that it felt like biting into air.

With a table to herself and hunger quenched, she could finally relax and actually enjoy the novelty of where she was. The city was incredibly beautiful—it was mostly blocked off from the sunlight, with only a few persistent rays of light trickling in through the leaves, but the city was lit up with thousands of lamps hanging from tree branches. They dimmed as the day gave way into evening. There was something in every direction, whether up or down or slantways: a school, a library, a playground.

…

Now what?

Even more so than in Jewel City, the starting point for an actual investigation was unclear. Even so, there was something she knew she would need to do before any proper investigation could begin. Because like it or not, there was no getting around the fact that learning the language would be near-essential to making any headway. If she’d had any hope that the investment wouldn’t really be necessary, the notion seemed absurd now that she was here. Thus, her plans crystalized, and she knew she would be spending the next few loops doing little more than cramming the language into her head.

◆

Myra’s situation was a little unfortunate—on one hand, the university offered classes on everything she could need—language, culture, history—but on the other hand, she was still trying to avoid being physically present there. If she had been smart, she would have signed up for one of those classes in an earlier loop, but she hadn’t been smart, so it now came down to self-study. She found an introductory textbook to learn the grammar, a flashcard set for vocabulary, and some Unkmirean literature for practice, and she holed herself up in a hotel.

When she wasn’t busy losing herself in the joys of Unkmirean adjective order, she did her reading on the murk bogs. The mercenary group had been formed around forty years ago, though very little was known about its founding. Officially, they mostly did “security,” renting out guards for places, events, and people. Unofficially, their name seemed to pop up in all sorts of armed skirmishes. Furthermore, the group was loathed in Unkmire because of their tendency to accept payments from international sources, including enemies of Unkmire.

Using her new library-searching powers, Myra was able to dig up a smidgeon more than she had previously. There were rumors that the empire had tried to pay them to disrupt Unkmire from the inside in the long-running shadow conflict between the two powers, though they were just rumors, and there was no information on what had become of this (if it had even happened).

The question at the front of Myra’s mind was, who did they work for now?

Originally, Myra had been quick to assume their employer was the same ‘culprit’ responsible for everything else. Thinking about it more, though, there were some other obvious possibilities. They might be working for the Unkmirean government, for example. Unkmire had its own military, but the mercenaries had a lot more experience fighting on international soil, so it was conceivable that they might be contracted for business in the empire.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Finally, there was the possibility that the imperial government had hired them. After all, Aiko Ueno and Hazel Ornobis had been taking trips to Unkmire in secret. Maybe the purpose of those trips had been to negotiate with the mercenaries. If that was the case, it was, what, some kind of false flag operation? Would the empire run a false flag operation against Ralkenon? It seemed kind of absurd—if the emperor were doing that sort of thing, why would they target Ralkenon, an economic and intellectual cornerstone of the empire? It made more sense to sacrifice a location whose value was more cultural, something full of history and landmarks. Something that would get people riled up, but which the accountants wouldn’t consider much of a loss.

Not that Myra was an expert in this kind of thing.

◆

There was still one thing she could do this loop that involved some real footwork. Namely, she could gather some intel on the murk bogs’ movements. Until now, all she had known was that they were just outside the city very shortly before the loop ended. After that, she had done everything to avoid them…

But now that she wanted to find them, it seemed they weren’t anywhere. The murk bogs were a pretty large organization, thought to number in the low hundreds, so she had expected they would be pretty hard to miss. When she wandered through the cliffside forest on the final night, though, she only encountered nature and crickets.

Had they only been present in what Myra thought of as ‘Loop 2’? If that was the case, it had a lot of implications…

Ultimately, she decided to go back to the same location she’d run into them before. She remembered exactly where it was—she had chosen it the first time because she had thought it would be a good vantage point to observe the city—and she knew approximately what time she had been there.

She went to the location several minutes before she expected the mercenaries to show up.

From this spot, she had a better view than ever. A better view of the volcano blowing its top, of the bright red liquid hurling down towards the city. It was only the second time she had seen it happen, as she had been indoors or elsewhere each time other than the first. She had vaguely hoped that watching it from this angle she might see something important, but it just made her sick.

As she watched the ash blanket the sky overhead, she realized she had made yet another misstep. She had planned to watch the sky in the last minute of the loop, but this was going to be impossible.

She was jolted out of her stupor by the sound of approaching footsteps.

They’re here after all? Myra scrambled behind a tree.

Even though they had finally appeared, they were still fewer in number than she had expected. The last time, she had been so overwhelmed that they had probably seemed more numerous as a result…

There were seven of them, five men and two women. Everyone wore forest-green slacks and vests that sported the murk bogs’ insignia, a color-inverted frog. Everyone held either a mage staff, a utility belt with a pistol, or both. One of the mages was emanating a cool, moon-like light from his staff. The group stopped at the cliff’s edge and watched the inferno unfolding across the city.

Myra breathed slowly. As always, her domain would protect them from sensing her, but that didn’t matter if she gave herself away by being noisy. One of them started speaking in fast Unkmirean. She was not nearly far enough along in her studies to follow along. And of course, the Common Library had already been snuffed out, so she still couldn’t use its translation abstractions.

When she got a good look at the speaker’s face, it sent a shiver down her spine.

The man had dark, short-cut hair, a goatee, and shaded glasses. He didn’t have a staff, and he was also the only one to forego a vest, only wearing a dark, tight-fitting shirt (also with the frog insignia). He had bracelets up and down his left arm.

This was the man who had shot her.

She was coming to terms with this when she saw the group do something expected. The goatee man held his hand to his chest and incinerated his insignia with a basic fire spell. The others followed suit, either incinerating their own or ripping them off. Once they’d done that, the goatee man raised his arm and waved them all forward. Some of them flew off the cliff; some of them teleported.

Myra hastened to follow them, trying her best to keep the right distance. They moved fast though, and she nearly lost them at the bottom of the cliff. She tried at first to follow them on foot, but the area was densely wooded, and there wasn’t a dedicated path where they were. Running through the area was also incredibly noisy. Almost immediately, she seemed to catch someone’s attention.

The soldier keeping up the rear stopped and shone a light back in her direction. Myra teleported in the nick of time, just before she was caught. She hid behind a tree while the soldier slowly turned their beam in all directions. She started to believe the man would never give up.

He did eventually give up. Myra had to chain teleport in order to follow them the rest of the way to the city, which was easy at first, though she started to get nauseous and disoriented.

Luckily, it wasn’t that far. They reached the edge city in only a few minutes, entering into a wealthy residential district.

There were screams.

Myra thought she had already hardened her heart over the catastrophe, but she was wrong. Truthfully, she had never really seen the catastrophe. She had never seen the molten red flood crashing through home after home. She had never watched the desperate citizens running as fast as their legs would allow. She had never seen a couple, one fitter and faster than the other, and had to wonder what they were thinking. She had never seen panicked parents with more children than they could carry.

Well, now she had.

The team she was following didn’t spare a citizen a passing glance.

It’s only a couple of minutes until the loop’s end, and they haven’t even done anything. They can’t possibly have been hired by the looper, can they? To what end?

Running towards lava is the kind of thing that makes a person stand out. The mercenaries finally noticed her again, but—

They seemed panicked by something. One of the women had with her a large metallic wheel, and they seemed to be arguing about it. Myra had learned all the Unkmirean curse words already—it had been the first thing she’d learned—and they were using a lot of curse words. They were so caught up they seemed unable to properly react to Myra’s presence.

As the lava was only seconds away, the entire team teleported away. They left the wheel behind, and Myra used her last possible second to inspect it. It was covered in runes.

◆

The loop ended shortly thereafter, and then it was back to the flashcards—with a side of armchair theorizing.

What was all that about?

First of all, why had they torn off their insignia?

Presumably, they usually wore insignia as a form of marketing. When they pulled off a high-value job, they wanted people to know it was them. So what did it mean that they took their insignia off?

No, that was the wrong question.

What did it mean that they did it mid-mission? Were they impostors? Were they not even the real murk bogs? If that was the case, what were they doing before they’d shown up?

Second of all, what had their objective been?

Evidently, the group wanted to reach a point that had already been swallowed in lava—the event hall, probably?—but something had gone wrong. The rune wheel—it was probably a device to part the impending lava, but it hadn’t worked—Oh, that was obvious. It probably relied on the Common Library’s abstractions on fluid dynamics, and so it didn’t work after the library had up and vanished.

Which meant… the team had been prepared for the lava, but they weren’t prepared for the Library’s disappearance…

(Was it weird that the group from Unkmire had been ready to rely on a device dependent on the library? Surely there was an explanation for that… but it was a little weird.)

◆

Myra continued her studies for the next couple of loops. When she got comfortable enough, she started spending more time in Unkmire so she could practice conversing in it.

At the end of the next loop, she left the city so she could watch the sky, but nothing interesting happened. She certainly didn’t see the stars move.

In retrospect, this kind of made sense. The most natural hypothesis was that the stars were “moving” back in time by exactly one month. Somehow, the time loop wasn’t uniform or instantaneous. The stars moved back in time before her planet did. Anyway, the point was, it wouldn’t be possible to observe that kind of distance with the naked eye.

After three loops of study—by the end of “Loop 8”—she was feeling fairly confident in her ability to carry an Unkmirean conversation. She was pretty sure she could listen in on the mercenaries’ conversation now and actually get something out of it.

She also came up with a slightly more advanced plan to cover a bit more ground. Since her ability to teleport was still limited, she settled on a brute-force approach. She purchased a crateload of teleport sticks and prepared them all in advance, setting waypoints in the forests outside the city. To actually set the points, of course, she needed to actually hike around the whole area, which would probably take several days.

She considered foisting the task onto Shera… In the end, she hadn’t roped Shera into her situation since the loop in Jewel City. Maybe this had been a terrible idea, but there would have been so little for her to do during this period, and she would have been a distraction from the study time, and…

Ugh.

Well, anyway. Myra roped Iz and Cynthia into helping out instead.

With all the teleportation sticks prepared in advance, she could sweep over a massive swath of the area in less than an hour. It didn’t make it any easier to find the mercenaries, though. She found the area just as silent as she had the last time. Guess they’re really not here after all…?

When it was time, she finally went to eavesdrop on the team again. She pieced together bits of their conversation and found out what they were trying to do. They were trying to take advantage of the situation to rob a bank. On her list of theories, that one hadn’t been very high.

So their mission isn’t related to the peace talks at all? They have nothing to do with the event hall? The university? They’re just here to loot?

But how were they prepared for the volcano?

Why would someone bring them here?

Myra let out a long sigh—

“Found ‘em.” At the voice, Myra nearly jumped out of her skin.

“What the hell? Iz! Don’t sneak up on me!"

“I teleported in.” Iz was holding a snapped teleportation stick. She casually tossed it aside. “I don’t know how else you expected me to arrive.”

“Sorry, I—I was spying on someone, so I’m in a jumpy mood—Hold on, did you say you found them?”

(Iz had, once again, twigged on to some of what was going on, but only after Myra had asked her for a weird suspicious favor. As a result, she had insisted that she help with the search. Myra had thought it would be redundant, but she ultimately agreed when she realized it would keep Iz from getting slashed up at the campus party.)

“You said you found them? How? I looked everywhere—”

“I used a fire-searching spell.”

“I didn’t see any smoke anywhere!”

“They were well hidden, all kinds of obfuscation spells—”

“Oh. Of-of course. Uh, where’d you even learn a fire-searching spell? Why weren’t they protecting against something like that?”

“Oh, I just invented it.”

Myra blinked. “You… you what?”

“I modified a book-searching spell I learned in class. I modified it to search out chemical reactions, then looked for combustion reactions.”

“What, like, you did this just—Sorry, that’s not important.” Myra turned away, trying to hide her look of embarrassment. It had barely occurred to her that the competent paramilitary organization might have ways of evading detection. Iz had, once again, bailed her out of a problem that turned out to be well beyond her. “Um.” She looked at her watch and saw that time was ticking away. “What did you find? Where were they?”

Iz briefly explained where they were. “There were a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty,” she said of the encampment she’d found.

“And what were they doing?”

“Well… It didn’t look like they were gearing up to attack, that’s for sure.”

“Oh, that’s… good?” Myra said.

Iz bit her lip. “Well, you tell me. There was drinking, dancing. Throwing coins in the air.” She hesitated. “Myra, it looked like they were celebrating.”