Right, so I was going to help Gaia-from-the-past track down the spaceship that had abducted poor Millersby. The idea of which raised all sorts of questions, but I had to believe that saving one guy for a town out in the middle of nowhere in what was still mostly pre-colonized North America wouldn’t change that much, even if he originally hadn’t survived. And given my presence had nothing to do with Gaia finding her way here, even that wasn’t exactly a given. She very well could have saved him even without any input from me at all, because she was Gaia.
And boy was that a whole big can of worms. I had to be very careful here. It would be so easy for me to say the wrong thing and end up changing the future in a dramatic way. Yes, I had my promise to myself that if I changed anything too severely I would send a message back to myself to stop me from doing it, but still. That was a pretty untested thing. And what if whatever changed ended up making it so I couldn’t actually do that for whatever reason? What if I didn’t actually exist? The time travel rules were very confusing and I wasn’t going to pretend that I had created a completely foolproof way of dealing with it. I was on thin ice and walking closer to the middle of the lake.
But I also wasn’t going to walk away from this if I didn’t have to. I liked all these people that I was staying with. I liked Millersby. If I could help him, I was damn sure going to.
Of course, the more immediate situation involved letting Gaia meet Persephone. But I didn’t have her come inside. Instead, Gaia and I left the cave to meet both her and Cerberus. Persephone I simply introduced as Percy, while Cerberus being a three-headed mechanical dog could easily be seen as being named for the mythological creature rather than literally being the one who inspired the name himself.
I briefly wondered if I should introduce them under more elaborate pseudonyms, but then I decided it didn’t really matter that much. This version of Gaia wouldn’t know about the Seosten for another few hundred years, and once she did, I didn’t think she’d immediately connect this situation to that one, or push too hard if she did.
Once everyone was introduced as much as I was willing to, I caught Percy up on what we had found out. “So if we’ve got any luck at all, maybe these aliens who abducted Millersby left some sort of sign around here about why they came or where they might be going. I know it’s a long shot, but–”
“I know how to find out where they went,” Percy immediately announced. She was smiling brightly and pointing toward the middle of the lake. “You can ask the fish!”
I found myself blinking at her a few times before looking over at Gaia, who was watching me expectantly and curiously, as though expecting me to start talking to underwater life any moment. And, well, to be fair, it wasn’t exactly far-fetched. So, I turned back to Percy and shook my head. “Uh, I can’t talk to fish.” I could release my sharks from my bigger-on-the-inside vial (of course I kept adding more fish for them to eat from the nearby lakes around the village), but I didn’t think they’d get much information out of the aquatic life in this place either. At least nothing beyond the fish version of frantic screaming.
Percy giggled. “Not the live ones, of course. Look. There’s a lot of dead fish out there on the water. You can see them floating in the middle of the lake. They’ve been dead for a couple days, but nothing has eaten them yet. I didn’t know why before, but then you said there was a ship. I think the ship flew down and hovered over the lake and the engines killed the fish. So the fish were close to the surface. The energy from the engines probably made them taste or smell bad to the other animals, and that’s why they’re not eating them. You can bring their ghosts up and check what they saw in their memories, like you’ve been practicing. Maybe they saw enough to tell us what kind of ship it was, then we might be able to figure out where they went. Like real detectives!”
Oh, right. I had been doing a little bit of seeing through the eyes of dead animals and looking into their memories. It wasn’t exactly second nature yet, but I was gradually getting the hang of it. Still, I’d mostly done it with animals like deer and a few hawks. I wasn’t sure how it would work with fish, who probably couldn’t see very well, to say the least. I was pretty sure most fish relied mostly on color and motion, and that was in the water. Who knew what sort of formless blob they would see over it? Maybe I could get lucky and some of them had been jumping when the ship fried them.
Either way, this was probably the best chance we had. So, while Gaia watched me curiously, I sat down at the edge of the lake and put my hands in the water. It really did help to have some sort of physical connection, and I could get that by touching the same water those dead fish were floating in. Some quiet part of me recognized how disturbed and gross that sounded, but it was barely a whisper by that point. I’d been doing way too much of this sort of thing, and far worse, to let something like that make me squeamish.
On the other hand, I couldn’t shake the strange feelings that came from doing this while Gaia was watching. Yes, it wasn’t exactly the same Gaia I knew from the year before. She still had several hundred years to go before she became that person entirely. But still, in a way it made me miss the Gaia I knew even more. It had been a constant ache this whole year, and I knew it was worse for Avalon. We had to get her back. Having this younger version standing behind me watching as I focused on my necromancy just reminded me of that even more.
I kind of wanted to summon Doctor Manakel to get his advice on this whole thing, but I definitely couldn’t do that. There was no chance that the future Gaia wouldn’t remember him. Hell, the fact that I was using Necromancy like this in the first place was probably too much. But she had to have met multiple necromancers over the years. Multiple ones besides those who had been completely evil monsters, that was. I couldn’t be the only decent one she ran into. Brom Bones, for one. But regardless, I couldn’t bring the ghost of Manakel out. There was no chance that that wouldn’t change the future.
Closing my eyes, I tried to ignore all those feelings and focus. Thinking about how much trouble Millersby had to be in helped with that. I pictured small tendrils of my own magical energy extending out from my fingers and going through the water. I could sense other dead things out there, but most of them were either too recent or too late. I needed the fish that had died days earlier and weren’t being eaten yet, despite being in plain sight right at the top of the lake.
It wasn’t hard to find them. Percy was right about the energy they were giving off. They’ve been tainted by whatever was in those engines as the ship hovered low over the lake. I didn’t know what it would taste like to animals, but it felt wrong through my power. I couldn’t blame all the other fish and birds for leaving them alone. Hell, there weren’t even any bugs on them.
Now that I was really paying attention, I could feel just how many dead fish were out there. There had to be thirty or so all spread out in that one general area. Had the ship actually attracted the fish somehow as it came down?
When I did this with other animals, I sat next to the corpse, put my fingers on its body, and focused on putting myself into its mind. That mostly consisted of picturing my body merging with the animal almost like I was possessing it, but in a mental sense, and then playing its memories in my own head. It was difficult for me to even describe, but that was the general gist of it. It was like a cross between my own memories and having someone vividly describe their own to me. Somewhere in the middle of that, or like remembering a movie I had seen. But that was with those animals, I had no idea how it would work with fish.
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Boy, if Tabbris was here, she would have been very upset, both with the dead fish in general, and at me for insinuating that they were too simple to be very good eye witnesses.
God, I missed her. I missed all of them. But now wasn’t the time to think about that. I pushed all of it out of my head, including the fact that I could tell Gaia had a lot of questions she wanted to ask.
I managed to connect my little tendrils to all the dead fish at once. They were fish, it wasn’t incredibly complicated, because they weren’t complicated. At least not as far as this went. Unfortunately, that whole not being complicated thing had a drawback. First I tried bringing up the memories of one fish, playing back its last moments. But that didn’t really work very well. The fish was so simple I could barely work out the idea of its vision. Or maybe it was because I was an amateur at this, or because of the way it had died, or some combination. Whatever the reasoning, when I tried to simply look through its last vision, it was basically static with a very vague moving shape. It was sort of like a very old TV on a channel that didn’t come in, with all the ‘snow’ across the screen.
It was like that with all the fish. But on the other hand, the static for all of them was a little bit different. They each had their memory-vision broken in a slightly different way. Which made me think that connecting to all of them had been a good idea. I focused for a minute, very carefully collecting every image I could from their ghost minds. Bit by bit, I layered the images together and mentally erased the static parts while keeping just the vague shape. And bit by bit, the image gradually became more clear. The fish had all seen the ship at very different angles as they lurked either just under the surface of the water, or literally jumped out of it. Which helped in some ways, since it meant that layering them all together like this helped give a more complete idea of what the ship looked like. I was essentially assembling a three dimensional model of the ship from all the angles I had. All of it was from below, of course, but still. It was more than we had a few minutes ago.
Finally, I had everything I was going to get from them. Releasing my hold on the dead fish, I slept backward and panting a little. My throat felt parched. “Boy, that was a trip.”
Gaia was crouched next to me. She held out a cup with cold water in it. “A trip? You didn’t go anywhere. And you should drink this, I am surprised you lasted so long without a break.”
Accepting the drink gratefully, I coughed it down while shaking my head. “Never mind, it’s just a figure of speech. And if I say this whole situation is heavy, you can ignore that too.” Then I caught what she had said. “What do you mean that long? It’s only been a few… it hasn’t been a few minutes, has it?” I was starting to realize how hungry I was.
Percy answered for her. “You were working on that for two hours and thirty-four minutes! It was very impressive. You barely moved at all. It was very obvious you were focusing.”
Cerberus gave an enthusiastic series of nods, his soft and somewhat pained woofs making it clear that he was very proud of me for whatever it was I was doing, but he was also extremely bored and would like to move on now, please.
Almost three hours? I had been working on putting that mental image together from all the fish memories for almost three hours. God, what even was my life?
Gaia spoke carefully. “Whatever you were doing, were you able to discover what the ship looked like?” Yeah, she definitely had a lot of questions about that, but was stopping herself from pursuing them. Which I was grateful for. Because honestly, I wasn’t sure how well I would have held out against intense questioning from her. Especially given how tempting it was to tell her something that could help when all that stuff eventually went down. That whole Back to the Future reference had me thinking about the letter that Marty had given Doc.
Taking a deep breath and forcing myself to focus, I nodded once. “Yeah, I’ve got something we can use. Hang on.” It took me a few minutes, but I managed to set up an image projection spell to create a sort of hologram of what the dead fish had seen. There were bits of the image missing where the fish hadn’t actually seen that part of the ship, even when it was still on the bottom, and the image was a jumbled mess of random colors, probably because the different fish had different types of vision. But still, it gave us an idea of the shape. In this case, the bottom half of the ship looked like an M with an orb shape nestled in the space at the top, or what would be the front of the ship, along with a pair of wings sticking off to either side closer to the bottom, or back of the ship.
“Pirates,” Percy immediately announced while Gaia and I just stared at it blankly. Yeah, it was a good thing she was here because neither of us had any chance of getting anything out of this image. But she pointed at it. “That is a Mesganian medium freighter. Or that main part of it is. The wings indicate that it has been modified for combat, which only a pirate would do. They modify the ships in ways that can be hidden. Such as these wings, which would mount weapons the ship normally wouldn’t have, but are able to be retracted when they want to pose as an ordinary merchant to lure in victims.”
It was immediately apparent that Gaia wanted to ask more about these aliens. Her mouth opened, before I saw her hesitate. Yet again, she didn’t want to ask something that we shouldn’t answer. In the end, she just settled on, “Right, well, is there a way to track where they’ve gone now that you know what type of vessel it is?”
“I think so,” came the quick and cheerful response, “but I have to check something.” And with that, Percy simply stood up, walked to the edge of the lake, and jumped in. She disappeared from sight quickly, going under the water.
Gaia and I watched her disappear, while Cerberus picked himself up and walked over to scan the lake intently. At first I thought he was worried about her, but then one of his heads leaned down and grabbed a rock, crunching it in his teeth a bit before giving it a toss toward me. Then he wagged his tail and whined a little hopefully.
Well what was I supposed to say to that? Catching the large rock with both hands, I turned and threw it as hard as he could for him. He gave a trio of barks before excitedly chasing after it. As I watched him go, Gaia asked, “Is your sister going to be all right down there?”
Realizing immediately that she meant Percy, I glanced that way before nodding. “Yeah, trust me, she’ll be just fine. She’s umm… she’s tough.”
“Is that something you’ve done to her?” she immediately… well, demanded wasn’t the right word, but it was something close to that. Just slightly more polite. “You are a Necromancer, albeit not the sort I’m accustomed to dealing with. And yet, you are clearly a very powerful one. My instinct is to say that your sister died and you put her soul back into her body somehow.”
Her words made me choke a bit. How could she immediately jump to guessing exactly what Fossor had tried to do with his own sister? Hell, she was even right about Percy being a ghost (essentially) stuffed into a dead body, she just had some of the details wrong. Either way, she had figured out a lot very quickly.
I had to think fast about how to answer. In the end, I simply shook my head. “I didn’t do anything to her. She’s different, but I’m not the one who did it, and I can’t really say more than that.”
Gaia seemed to accept that, just as Cerberus came bounding back. So, I threw the rock for him a few more times, silently asking myself if I should say anything else to the woman. Before I could come to any sort of conclusion, Percy returned. She splashed up out of the water before shaking herself off enthusiastically. A lot like a dog, actually. Once she had thrown water in every direction and quite thoroughly soaked me (Gaia somehow remained completely dry), Percy offered a bright smile. “Okay, I know how to track them now!” She held up a glowing bluish cylinder about the length of a tennis racket. “When they came close to the water, they dropped off some of their used fuel cells. It has a very specific power signature. Cerberus can follow it. Right, boy?” She held the thing out for him, prompting one of his heads to sniff curiously before he immediately pivoted and started sniffing the air. After a moment, he seemed to zero in on the scent and started bounding off.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” I asked Percy and Gaia.
“Follow those heads.”