There weren't a lot of options when it came time to decide which way to go, because while the land was surprisingly flat for the middle of a forest it still had frequent gullies and boulders and sections where the trees were too close together. At first it felt like we had been fortunate to find a path, but after about two hours of travel I could feel myself becoming paranoid. There was always a route the wagon could take, and while it didn't look at all like a road it might as well have been. At every turn, one path we could follow between the trees - or if there were multiple paths, they all regrouped before too long in the next clearing, like kindergartners being herded back into a line.

I stood up on the wagon and started looking around, seeing all the subtle ways that we were being steered - a fallen log, a thick patch of brambles, a small but steep incline. Forty or sixty feet apart from each other to give the illusion of choice, but nonetheless guiding us.

"You noticed the invisible walls?" It was Aestrid, looking calm as usual. I nodded and carefully climbed down off the wagon to walk next to her. She was still wearing that silk dress - I wasn't sure how she kept it from being damaged as we traveled while still having mana left in case of combat. Did it just use that little energy to keep a weak field up all the time? Did she somehow just protect the parts that were about to get muddy? Did she regenerate mana really quickly? I still didn't have a good feel for how much mana was normal to have or to use.

"Yeah. Should I be worried?"

She shrugged, keeping that same calm look on her face but glancing towards the trees. "Cyne doesn't seem upset, and he's the only one that's been here before. Anyway, this is what we want - isn't it? To be led somewhere?"

"I guess. I don't like it though. It implies they could force us to enter this plane at a particular place, and if they could do that they could have had us show up in a... a walled courtyard or something. Instead they have us trek for a few miles through the forest and they steer us but try to be all sneaky about it? What's the point?"

Aestrid smiled, and we walked in silence for a moment before she finally spoke. "If I understand them correctly, it's likely all part of some game. Probably even us noticing it and having this conversation is some of the fun for them. Not sure what that means for the upcoming negotiations."

By the time it got dark everyone but Mila had noticed, and there was some discussion of deliberately veering from the planned path - but as Aestrid had said, this was in fact what we had wanted. Surely following the subtle trail would take us to someone we could bargain with soon enough. Katrin practiced her magic, and I made a brief attempt to join in but I'd become discouraged at it already and was pinning all my hopes on the Duminere.

It felt silly and immature to give up on learning magic spells so quickly, but I felt like something should have clicked. Instead I just patrolled around the camp, checking on everyone. Errod was putting up a tent for Aestrid while she lounged nearby not helping - I'd noticed him making excuses to hang out near her and it looked like she'd decided to just make the most of it. Mila was pulling a particularly pretty rock out of the dirt to add it to whatever it was she was making. Sige was doing one-handed pull-ups on a tree branch. Cyne was reading, but looked like he was about to nod off. And Connie was presumably up in the back of the wagon. I hadn't spoken to her since she told me my memories were playing tricks on me.

I climbed up and peeked into the wagon and confirmed she was there, getting a brief nod before she went back to tinkering with her temporal stabilization rig. I leaned against a bag of oatmeal - slightly strange fantasyland oatmeal, of course - and watched her work for a while as my mind drifted. I'd learned a little, working at the hardware store, but the main things I knew how to do with my hands involved breaking and entering. What Connie was doing looked more like soldering, as she focused on barely-visible runes covering every inch of the device and prodded at them with a little metal stylus.

She hadn't developed her runic abilities beyond the bare minimum, so the smallest of the runes were still about the size of a dime; from what I'd been told, the really skillful practitioners could write code so small you could barely see it which meant they could cram way more function into a small device. I'd asked some questions and tried to learn how to write runes, but much like spellcasting until something clicked it was really hard. Connie said she hadn't pulled it off before getting it from the Duminere, so I hadn't felt particularly motivated to try.

She stopped, sighed, and fidgeted with the stylus for a moment. "Hey, uh. About earlier. I'm... I'm sorry."

I smiled at her. "No. You're not."

"... No, I'm not. But probably I will be tomorrow so I'm getting a head start. I feel very judged by you. It's not your fault. But on top of mom abandoning us all those times and dealing with the foster care system and... whatever else... I have all this trauma and shit from my time here. And in a petty, tantrum-y kind of way I gave in and let myself just be an asshole a lot of the time.

"So now you're here and I wanted... I wanted you here to be the better version of me, the one that doesn't have to do that shit and has more freedom and gets to just be the main character of some cheesy fantasy story or something. But part of you being that younger happier better version is that I can feel you looking at me and seeing that I'm fucked up and knowing that I've killed a lot of people including, arguably, the whole universe since I maybe was supposed to... fix it in a different way."

She spun the stylus in her hand and idly scraped at the tip of it with a fingernail. "I was relieved. I was happy when the world ended, because I didn't care that literally everyone had just died so long as I got to have another shot. Also, it was proof that I was right. Anyway... I don't know, I guess... I get to know that I'm a piece of shit, but you're not allowed to think that. Or something."

I scooted over and leaned against her. "You know, this is nice. How often did we get to do this? We were never close with anyone in the group homes. Like, touchy close."

"Yeah, we weren't the hugging type I guess. But this is nice. Mom gave up on the snuggling pretty early on, and then... shit, I don't know. That first foster home I guess a little until we scared them, and then there was that one kid for like a week at the second group home that wanted to hold our hand all the time. And then Bill was pretty affectionate once we settled in."

What? "He was always nice but..."

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

"Right. No, sorry, one of the wrong memories. Like I said, a bunch of those are about Bill for some reason. Sometimes I wonder if we knew him at all. If he was real at all."

"He must have been real. I'm sure I can remember him, and I remember remembering him. Like, memories of memories and stuff."

Connie sat up to put the rig off to one side, then snuggled back in and laid her head on my shoulder. "Yeah but... you know the Jake Ross books? Of course you do, we talked about them before. You remember he gave you those, right?"

"Sure," I said, although some part of me wondered if I remembered it before she said it, "I... complained about not having anything to read and so he gave me a boxed set of the books."

"That's not... quite what I remember. But close enough. Anyway, did he just have them with him?"

"Yeah, I guess. He... I think he went and got them out of his car or something? He..." a memory ticked at the back of my mind, "he had them for some charity raffle or something."

"Okay, and when was this?"

"When? It was... I don't know, not that long ago. I know I lost them in the move to Sunshine House and that's where we aged out of so it must have been from a few years before that at the most since we lost everything a few times."

"Okay but that would put it after Universal Servicing Systems, right?"

"I guess, since we left everything behind there."

"Right, but then the last time you saw Bill was...?"

Right before I ran away and lived in the abandoned Universal Servicing Systems office for the better part of a year. "Um. Okay so... wait. The books are real, they have to be. I remember too much about them, I'm not creative enough to have made those up. I don't remember the third book very well, but I think I only read that one once. Still, they were for sure real."

"Let's say they were. But also, isn't it strange that the one fantasy series you've read all the way through is the one that is real and that you have access to here? You read some other fantasy, bits and pieces, but you don't see any of those showing up do you? And... shit, I didn't mean to get you freaking out on this or anything."

"No, it's a good question."

She sighed. "It's... maybe it's some form of intuition, or maybe it's some powerful being trying to help you adjust to this place, or maybe it's just a coincidence. It doesn't matter. You were being sweet and snuggling up to me and I went right back to fucking with your head. I don't know what's wrong with me. Let's just focus on this adventure, get you some magic powers, and then if you really want to pick apart your memories of Earth we can. Until then I'll shut up about it."

Obviously Connie telling me to not worry about it wasn't going to do anything, but I'd already gotten all worked up about my memories being off just an hour or so ago and couldn't work myself into a full existential crisis. I was dimly aware that there was a lot of processing that I was putting off and pushing into the back of my head and all of that would need dealing with eventually. Mainly I was fine with making that a problem for future Calliope, but...

"Do you think I should pick thought magic to do something about these memories? Or... I mean, I could get professional help if it's a bad idea to fuck around in your own head."

"Eh. Snag thought magic if you want, but don't feel like you have to. You're fine. You're strange, and your head is all busted up inside for some reason, but... so what? Mila can't go five minutes without getting distracted and it takes her a dozen tries to get out the door because she forgets shit all the time. When I lived with her in the other timeline, with my Errod and Katrin? What a trip. She would just leave things laying around, forget where they were, and then while looking for them she'd find something else instead and get distracted by it. So if she wanted to find a piece of chalk it could take her literally all day because she couldn't stay on track.

"But when it mattered, she remembered my instructions and risked her freedom to come and rescue us and look, we're out! So what if her brain is fucked up? Who cares? And everyone has something. Errod is a sweetheart and he'll - a little too eagerly - sacrifice himself to save your life, but he's genuinely convinced that he's destined to be the greatest swordsman ever which is absolutely insane. Dude had a strange dream and just decided to believe it, one hundred percent. Katrin acts all mature even though she's like a year younger than us. Or... something like that. I hate doing the age conversion here. Anyway she acts all mature because she's been the mom in that family for years, but there's some shit going on with her too. She's a calm surface over a batshit insane interior.

"And these new guys, holy shit. I can't say exactly what their deals are yet, but they all seem a bit off. Sige seems fairly normal other than the fratboy vibe but he'd be considered extremely strange by his people's standards. We've got Cyne with his ridiculous religious beliefs that won't even let him kill a zombie, and Aestrid acting like the cool kid in high school for no fucking reason - and I mean Jesus, you're tromping through the woods, why are you flexing by wearing silk dresses? Get over yourself. But then, you know, she happily wrecked that bat thing in a super badass way so whatever. I don't know.

"I guess I'm saying if you want to try and fuck around in your head and fix yourself that's fine, it's as good a reason to get a power as anything and it's not like thought magic is useless. But there's no amount of fixing that will make you normal, because people aren't normal. So if there's a power you want more, get that one. Also, if you do get thought magic don't... don't do the plastic surgery addiction thing and keep tweaking your brain more and more until it's completely inhuman."

Connie sat up and went back to working on her temporal stabilizer thing, but deliberately positioned herself so her leg was pressed against mine. I watched her work for a moment, and then surprising even myself I blurted out a confession. "I can remember when you rewind time. I saw..." I saw you murder someone just because you were frustrated and then reverse it. "... when Telen killed Errod and Katrin, the version before you stabbed him."

She dropped the stylus and stared at me, eyes wide. "That's... not supposed to be possible. Okay so... not to call you a liar or anything, but purple elevator dishwasher stork."

"What? What is that supposed to -"

Connie turned to look at me, still holding her stylus.

"Did you just reverse time?"

"Maybe. What were we just saying?"

Ah. Okay. "You said purple elevator dishwasher stork."

"Holy shit. Holy shit! What does this even mean? Are we sharing a soul or something? Can we learn telepathy? Are there other strange magic interactions we can exploit? If you get some ability that only works on yourself, will it work on me too? Or... oh, fuck. What if you can't get magic at all? What if the Duminere says you already got one? Shit. We need to think about this. Assuming this hasn't fucked you over entirely it could be really good, there might be some strange thing that we can do with this. I mean...

"Look, honestly I'm not counting on living a lot longer," she gestured to the canister filled with temporal mana, "so I wouldn't want to plan your build around it or whatever. But also... I mean, there has to be something cool we can do with this, I just don't know what. Maybe with enchantment, I know there's something where it's more powerful if you can only attach effects to yourself so if I count as you maybe that could let us... oh, or with things like gravity? I think you can make some of the area of effect stuff ignore you, but that would mean it could ignore both of us. I don't think this is going to be anything that flat out breaks magic, but... we'll have to really sit down and go through each ability and brainstorm."

Instead, Sige's head popped into view at the back of the wagon. "Fucking Sahrger are here. You guys are on, try not to fuck up and get us enslaved or some shit."