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Haley, Vault 101
Present Day
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“-are or where you came from, but I’d like to congratulate you on getting far enough to trigger one of the security robots. If you’d like to avoid being shot in the next few minutes, please walk to the nearest terminal and stare directly into the light. Actually, I’m not sure they’d know not to shoot you if that were the case- they’re not terribly bright, sorry. If you’d really like to avoid being shot, you should probably run. Message repeats: I’m away from the Overseer’s terminal right now, so pardon this recording. I don’t know who you...”
Oh good, Asriel’s message was on a loop. So he hadn’t betrayed me yet. The flying robot had some radio alarm capability, I guessed, and now whatever Asriel had set up for internal security was coming directly here. I couldn’t hear anything in the hall- the problem with these zombies was that they were so damn silent. I had one ace left up my sleeve, and now I had confirmation that this place had some kind of central control panel, which was something I’d been hoping for. Before I played my last card, I dipped back into the interface. Moving swiftly in case the whole vault was coming down on me, I took my armor off and swapped to the civilian vault suit I’d taken off the body in the entrance. Then I engaged the Stealth Boy he’d had- I shimmered, and became totally invisible. How is this not just magic?
I wished I’d known that was how it worked from the start! I slipped out of the closet and past an armed and armored posse that looked like it had wandered straight out of the set of “Lost In Space.” There were half a dozen humans and another half-dozen well-armed robots in the response force, but it didn’t look like anything that would subdue a more sustained or violent assault. Was everything in this world set up to pose a nearly-beatable challenge to a single lone intruder? I supposed it might be, at that. Thank goodness for video games, I guess. I wonder if he has anything worse up his sleeve. He was only here for a few days, how much could he have prepared? I really had to stop thinking things like that, I told myself as I slipped by the armed mob.
My invisibility appeared like it would last at least an hour, and the place was still well-marked, though looking at the signs was a pain without the ability to just glance at them at any time. Still, I made it work, and found my way to the medbay without too much trouble. I’d hoped to find more mentats, but instead there was- what the hell? There was an unconverted human here! He had an armed guard posted at the door, but he was functioning in his actual capacity as a doctor, treating burns and injuries. Zombified people didn’t tend to notice minor cuts and scrapes, I’d observed. Only the really bad cases were here. He was currently tending to someone who looked like he’d been on the receiving end of an energy weapon discharge or possibly explosion- half the skin on the right side of his face was charred and blistered, but he sat without complaint, staring straight forward as the doctor muttered and sprayed something on him. It was damn unnerving.
“Damn it John, you really did it to yourself this time. You stay alive until we get through this, you hear me?” He continued to speak to the zombies. He knows them, of course. Two days ago they’d been his friends and family- now he was stuck trying to patch them up faster than they fell apart. He was probably better at it than if he’d been mind wiped so Asriel left him to it, I thought. This could work to my advantage.
The zombies in there didn’t seem to be on alert- the one with the gun on the doctor was clearly set to watch his behavior. So I simply found an out of the way corner and spoke out loud. “Hey. You there, doctor. Don’t look up- keep doing what you’re doing.” His head whipped up when I started speaking, but he did as instructed. “I’m sneaking through this place. I’d try to get you out, but- there are too many of them for me to sneak you with me. I need to know what Asriel was doing here, and stop it if possible. I also need as many mentats as you can scrounge up- they overwhelm the memetic control as long as they’re in effect. Can you help?”
He considered and nodded grimly. “You want to blow this place up, you’ll need the-”
No no no. “What is it with everyone and violence today? I’m not going to kill anyone if I can help it. If I can seal this place off, I’ll come back in a few days with enough copies of myself to subdue everyone in here and drag them off for magical healing. But I need to make sure it isn’t going to blow up in my face in the meantime.”
He looked puzzled, but apparently not dying was still preferable even for a Fallout NPC, so he assented. “Secret tunnels within the overseer’s office. He was working on something. Had the others bring… monsters, to defend it. I don’t know what they are, but I’ve seen the injuries they leave on the zombies. I don’t know what was in that final room. But they finished it while he’s been out and nobody’s been in there since. As for mentats, I can do you one better. We’ve got a machine in here, can spit out any pill I request- enough supply stock for centuries. If they work like you say I can make enough mentats to deprogram everyone in this building, keep them deprogrammed. But I can’t do anything about his robots, or the memes that keep flashing on the terminals.”
I had an idea about both of those. “This place had a centralized control system, yes?” He nodded. “Get an oxygen system rigged up or something.” He looked at me quizzically but pointed the way down the hall. I was already moving. “Just do it. When everyone starts to drop, hook it up to yourself, and be ready to start slipping pills to them as fast as possible.” I heard him scrambling to get equipment out as I slipped down the hall. I took a couple mentats for myself, just in case. If the rest of the mentats could be used to free this place even temporarily… Roy and Mac would just have to wait.
I finally found another of the armored guards, posted outside the Overseer’s office. I’d been pondering how to deal with these guys but while I was invisible I didn’t really have to. I just rolled on by- but then, on second thought, I stopped and turned. Another old Fallout glitch occurred to me. My power suit helmet looked to be newer and in better condition than his- if I gave it to him, he was likely to put it on without thinking about it. A second’s quick work damaged the rebreather system in there- he’d have no internal air supply now. Then I reverse-pickpocketed my copy of the suit helmet onto him. Sure enough, within a minute he pulled his off and put the sabotaged copy on, and I grabbed his older version off his inventory. That was him dealt with, if I could just get to this terminal and put my plan into action. I stole his laser rifle for good measure.
Inside, the office was surprisingly spartan. Just a desk and a terminal on a raised platform, some monitoring and comms equipment, some other bits I didn’t recognize. They ran a whole underground city from in here? Things must have been more automated than I’d thought. My Science skill was as high as it could go, but in the end actual hacking wasn’t really needed. I initiated the back door protocols and an unbelievably silly password-guessing minigame sprang up, but one look at the array of possible passwords and I saw the one that had to be it. “ Lyra,” of course. His daughter. But not Silvertongue. Had he been steering me wrong?
I moved on to the next screen and prepared to put my plan into action. The Overseer’s console was not designed for a highly technical person- smart move, given that it was intended to support an unknown society for hundreds of years- but still the actual operation was astonishingly simple. There were the environmental controls, there were the settings governing automatons throughout the facility, there was a button literally labelled “Unlock secret tunnels.” I paused, at that, nonplussed by how obvious it was. Video games. I hit that first. Best to figure out what he was working on before I finished the rest of my plan, and while I was still invisible.
That turned out to be an enormous mistake. A section of the raised platform began to sink into the ground- but before it did, the monitor changed. He’d left some kind of booby trap, one last stab at anyone sneaking around- paranoid to a fault. The background of the terminal came alive and it was that damned pulsing, whirling light- but this time I was looking at it dead on. I couldn’t tear my eyes away in time. I saw it, comprehended it, and I felt the meme beginning to trigger in my head. “Looks kind of like a parrot-” was all I got out before I fell to the ground and convulsed. None of that mattered. It was beautiful, as it expanded and grabbed more and more of my conscious attention. Perfectly sticky- every thought that turned towards it stayed there. It was another gravity well for my conscious mind. But I’d fallen down one of these recently- as recently as yesterday, going by local time. Compared to the One Ring, the pull of this meme was moderate at best, and I was mentally a bit tougher than your average player. Loss of my mind was still inevitable but I had seconds of executive function, maybe. I forced my seizing hand to grab the mentats in my pocket, and took a tablet.
My mind blew open- I felt my consciousness expanding on one side and filling with blue on the other, and cried out involuntarily. Within a minute everything that wasn’t chemically boosted was filled with thoughts of the Concept, mad compulsions that seemed to trigger just from steady contemplation of the meme. Everything that was boosted, the capacity granted me by the pill, remained in my posession, but I had… substantially less room in my head, than before. Still, if that had been all that happened, things might have been okay. But then they came up from the tunnels, drawn by the opening door and my cries.
Well of course there’s a boss encounter. They were horrifying. Lovecraftian. I suddenly understood why his protagonists were constantly losing their minds, as a fear like I’d never felt before gripped me. They looked like demons- 12 feet tall, hunched and scaley, claws a foot long. They had snakelike, whipping tails and forward-thrust horns that only accentuated their terrifying skull faces and razor sharp teeth. I knew these things by reputation, though I had only heard of them, not having played the games- Deathclaws. They were kind of like Fallout’s equivalent of dragons, I thought. Horrifying enough, but the worst part was the electronics. They’d been… wired up, somehow. I knew where a part of the high-tech factory equipment was going now, at least. Each of the three wore some kind of jury-rigged helmet with their tiny eye-sockets fully covered. From within that helmet, the blue-white light splashed. He built or repurposed mind control hats for deathclaws. Of course he did.
Not having their eyes available didn’t seem to be slowing them down much. I was still invisible and they just didn’t care. They boiled out of that narrow passage like a hive of locusts, the three of them utterly filling the room and beginning to sniff around for me. Damn it all. They caught my scent fast as well- the first of them pivoted toward me like he’d been pulled and the other two followed suit. My head was swimming with thoughts of the Concept and I was out of new tricks. Well, all but one- but it was going to require that terminal. This was going to hurt, I thought for the second time today.
I dropped into my inventory and donned the entire suit of armor in an instant. No stealth now- they were on me the instant I stood up, and vicious claw marks raked the armor, several actually penetrating on the first swipe, but the lacerations were contained. I bullied my way through, shoving through and between their wild swipes to get back to the terminal. I just needed one shot at this- another vicious swipe hit my back, thoroughly ripping apart the fusion battery or whatever was powering this suit as well as tearing a chunk out of me, and the whole thing became dead weight on my body. No goddamn it - my hand was on the computer, I forced myself to lift the dead metal and hit the controls for environmental support- then oxygen- then dial it all the way down to zero. I wrapped up with the button to reseal the vault, and then used every last erg of my strength to throw myself and the armored suit away from the terminal and down the secret stairs. I felt every blow of the fall, trapped inside a lifeless metal shell on the way down.
The plan had been to do this, use my suit as a breather for about 4 minutes until everyone in the vault had choked unconscious, and then turn the air back on. Then the doctor and I could clean the place up at our leisure, disabling the robots or repurposing them from the terminal. But Asriel’s damned contingencies kept getting in the way. Would it have been any different, had you killed him? Not really. But I’d have felt some satisfaction. Instead, here I was- torn, bloody, broken and trapped in a tin can at the bottom of a staircase in a great concrete bunker. The three monsters above were circling, ready to come down the stairs. I had no more magic, no more aces up my sleeve. I unsealed the armor and partially crawled out, pulling around the laser rifle I’d stolen as I moved backwards down the tunnel. It would be like a tickle to them. But I’d go out shooting, unless the lack of oxygen got me first. The environmental controls were unrealistically fast- already I could see blackness ringing my vision. Wait- this was something else-
For the second time in as many days, I was pulled from my body and flew through an infinite void. Just as suddenly I snapped back to reality- floating through the air in a lovely sitting room full of sunlight and bright green plants. As I fell I realized Sean and- was that Hermione- were staring at me in shock. Another of those visions he was triggering, and at the worst possible time. “Sean send me back!” I stammered, “I can’t be unconscious send me back right now!” Just as suddenly I was yanked back, away from all of that. And not in the direction of my body.
I flew through the void again but this time there was something else with me. It pulsed and it glowed in this place where light didn’t exist- somehow it was blue. The Concept of blue. I couldn’t see, but I could sense in some way I couldn’t define, and it was vast and growing bigger. It was a weed that spanned universes- it was a many-tentacled thing and there was nothing outside its grasp. It pulled me back from Sean with one of those tendrils. It didn’t have words yet but I knew what it was thinking. You don’t get to escape me that easily.
I didn’t have a lot of defiance left in me. I’d spent the last month running against my own instincts, trying to drag the world to salvation instead of lifting it up because, I felt, the needs were so urgent. My husband was dead and lost in a distant narrative. I’d broken faith with friends, even if unintentionally. I’d blundered in my wishing and opened my home to invasion, then become stuck and unable to defend it in an unrelentingly hostile game world. Now my body was broken in three different ways and likely dying. And the worst of it was, ever since Aslan there had been nothing to push back against. I’d been lost. I’d just been- surviving. Raging against the slow dying of my world. Secretly despairing that it could ever be saved.
But this, this, crystallized something for me. I had suspected but now I had proof. It wasn’t just a fluke of infomorph disease or an accident of the cataclysm that the Concept had come for us. There was an intentionality behind this latest disaster, on some level. A consciousness. It wanted what was happening. And now I knew that it existed- had baited it out? Wait, had I planned- In whatever in-between space I was in, free of Fallout’s restrictive ruleset, another version of me smiled as wide as she ever had, and for some reason I could hear her thoughts. “Well, there’s the reveal. Time to turn the tables. Haley alpha, permission granted.” And a series of blocked memories clicked back into place. I echoed her grin, leering at the monstrosity. “Oh, you just made the biggest mistake of your brief existence.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
It radiated contempt and curiosity. What could I possibly have done wrong? You’re as good as dead. With you gone, your world’s resistance is effectively ended, it seemed to suggest.
I grinned even wider and every inch of my teeth in that not-space gleamed and came to a point. Draconic, in my self-conception. “Untrue. I know something you don’t know.”
I had lived with my husband long enough to know when someone was rolling their eyes at me, even if I couldn’t see them in person. You know nothing that would help you here.
I shook my head. “Someone once told me I couldn’t be in two places at once. It turns out I enjoy a challenge. You have no idea what the other version of me has been up to. And you just gave us someone to fight.”
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Haley
1 day ago, immediately after the One Ring incident
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I was pacing- I knew there was something wrong. I could feel it. Roy wanted me to build a weapon capable of stopping myself on a rampage. I wanted that. Why hadn’t I already thought of it? What had I been doing, this last month? Also, my simulacra had been fully prepared to take me on- far too prepared, in far too little time. Had I already set something up, already given them autonomy and just forgotten it? I didn’t have any way to assess my memories, but I knew there were gaps- the sensation just kept nagging at me. Stressed, I reached into my pocket and my hand brushed against that thing I kept there and couldn’t think about- and then I was in another world.
Three Haleys were sitting around a campaign table in an open field surrounded by machinery when I popped into existence. They looked up, startled. The one nearest to me sighed. “Damn it, it’s happening faster and faster. We’re too smart for our own good, ladies.” The others chuckled.
Personally I was not amused. I crossed my arms. “What the eff is going on? Is this some secret plan? Did I actually have a secret plan?”
They rolled their eyes but the one nearest to me spoke. “Of course it’s a secret plan, dummy. You started making secret plans the second the tower fell. We probably have a dozen of these and none of us know the full extent. This is the one that matters though. I’ll give you a hint- Bilocation.”
The spell flashed to my mind. High level, better than Simulacra, but- “We can’t be bilocated. That spell makes a perfect copy of the user and each one experiences everything the other one does. I’d remember that. I’d be seeing through your eyes even if you didn’t want me to. And it doesn’t last long enough. Or have any range!”
She shrugged. “Well we got too big for simulacra, and the… other plans haven’t borne out yet. This plane is timeless with respect to magic- it’ll last forever in here. And we’re always close, as long as you keep that ring in your pocket.” I started and reached down- sure enough, her finger was waggling from the ring-gate in there. The very thing I’d touched to get pulled in here. “We put you under a Geas not to think about that, or the half of your incoming perception stream that was on my end, unless given permission. Then we erased the memories of the spell. Bilocation means we both felt the compulsive effects of course, but it was easy enough for the other Haleys to fill me in and ‘Permit’ me to think about it once you were gone.”
I wasn’t angry but I was a little bewildered. “But… why?”
She smiled sympathetically. “We needed to be in two places at once. You needed to keep on saving the world. I couldn’t let myself let that ball drop. We also needed to bait out the next story twist while we still had a hidden Uno Reverse card to play. But you also needed to be in here, preparing for the next step, the one that will lift humanity out of this mess. So… we split. Don’t think we abandoned you. I’ve seen everything you’ve seen, felt everything you’ve felt. I mean, I’m literally you, neither of us is a clone. I know how hard it’s been. But we needed the front, while we gathered new resources. And the kill switch, if something went wrong. I just have to take off this portal and we’re back in one body, spell ended. We almost pulled the plug when you got the One Ring just now. ”
I sulked. “You could have let me know.”
She sighed. “It was too risky- we’re still not ready to go live in here. We have the golems and some deeper contingencies but we don’t want to use Aslan’s men as the first test subjects. And If you were compromised and you remembered, you might end the connection from your end. Also, it turns out we’re terrible liars. We decided all of this mutually, though you don’t remember right now. Until today, not even the rest of the Simulacra knew what we were up to, though we’re pulling them in now that you’ve turned them all loose. I don’t want this place vulnerable to the Efreet, and I don’t want to disclose it until it’s ready. We’re operating in just double time now, we don’t have tremendously accelerated speed advantages.”
That reminded me. “Roy wants a weapon to use against me- us- if I lose my mind. Does this count?”
She waved her hand in a sorta motion. “Right now we need test candidates, people to trial run the first generation of heroes. We’ll give you another gate to pass to Roy. Hopefully he’ll give it to someone suitable. But you’re going to forget you were in here, again. Just remember this, when you do get these memories back- even when you’re all by yourself, you are not alone. You contain multitudes.”
----
I plummeted back into my body and awoke with a gasp that did no good- there was no oxygen left. Still human here, at least physically- but some portion of me was coming back to itself. The Concept still existed in my mind, but- it wasn’t winning, anymore. It might even be on the retreat. I couldn’t access other Haley in my mind due to Fallout’s block on my magic, but apparently her ring and connection were still in place because I had permission to think about her now, at least. But it wasn’t the time. The first deathclaw was down the stairs- had I lost any time at all? Seconds, at most. I raised the rifle and dropped into that strange time-shifted firing stance. I placed as many shots as I could, directly into that helmet. If they had to be constantly controlled, there was always a chance- yes- my shots struck true and it roared as the leash was slipped, so loud it was nearly deafening, and turned to fight the nearest living things- its brothers, thankfully.
That was death in the next ten seconds averted. But what about death in the next thirty ? My vision really was greying at the edges, and I knew I probably hadn’t taken any oxygen in forty seconds or more. I whipped the helmet out of my magic inventory space. No power, but surely- yes, the breathing system was some kind of pressurized tank fed by an air recycler. I jammed the laser rifle into the helmet and shot the cap off the tank, ruining it but letting out a blast of good air- I stuffed my head into it and took a deep breath. Okay, death staved off for at least sixty more seconds. We were making progress!
I finally had breathing room, so to speak, and I glanced around the room before almost losing my final breath in astonishment. He didn’t. Oh, he couldn’t have. In only a few days, on an unfamiliar world? But he had. This was what he’d worked so hard to guard. Here in the basement of this vault city, he’d built one of his projectors. Asriel you mad bastard genius. The original, as I recalled from Golden Compass, had required the severing of a child’s soul to power it- this one, it appeared, was running off a nuke-pack. At least you had some sense there. But the power source was secondary- the truly alarming thing was the effect. The projectors were designed to punch holes between worlds. This is key to the Concept’s plan. It’s not aiming for any one world- it wants all of them. I shuddered in horror and ran to it- he’d wired a local terminal to it, and it was asking for a password.
There was no time to hack. I only had one guess, anyway. I entered it. Silvertongue.
The apparatus clanged and spun to life. Thank you, Asriel. Shimmering curtains of light filled the air- it was like the aurora borealis sprang into being in that tunnel- I couldn’t help but make the joke. “At this time of day, in this part of the country? Localized entirely within this vault?” I chuckled. “You’re going to get yourself killed, Haley. Crack jokes on the side with oxygen.” The portal shimmered into being. I fired some shots at the deathclaws to get their attention and before they could extricate themselves from their furball, or anyone could choke to death, threw myself through it, praying for one thing- please don’t be another video game world.
It wasn’t. It was night, wherever it was, and I didn’t have time to take in the surroundings. As I crossed the threshold my world lurched once again and all the cruft of Fallout’s rules and restrictions dropped away. Oh! Oh I’d missed the feeling of armor and muscle, of magic at my fingertips. And there she was, my also-me, right inside my head. The Deathclaws pelted out right behind me, but they weren’t dealing with a broken human with a shitty flashlight anymore. I stared down at them from my real body, restored at last, more than a match for any deathclaw. “Hello boys. Just between us murder-lizards I’m really not sorry about what I’m going to do to you.” Too many lives at stake to find some way of sparing these horrors even if I’d wanted to- I unleashed my first fire breath in days and oh it felt good. They didn’t stand a chance.
I didn’t waste any time as they fell, charred and smoking, to the ground. Other-me was nagging me about the brutality of that but I shunted it aside- That doesn’t count as sentient murder damn it, they were basically rabid attack dogs. Taking another huge breath I darted back into the portal- with another lurch I was back on Fallout rules, ignoring the ache of my wounds to race up through the concrete tunnel to the Overseer’s terminal. It couldn’t have been much more than three or four minutes, I fervently hoped- long enough that everyone in here should be unconscious, not so long that they’d all be dead or suffering brain damage, but this was a crude methodology at best. I stabbed at the terminal with shaky fingers and set the oxygen back to normal levels, and finally allowed myself to relax.
Spending some minutes at the console to disable the robots and display terminals throughout the vault, I walked unsteadily back out of the Overseer’s office. That had been… entirely too close. I was hurt, pretty badly. Cut and bruised and burnt. But I felt good. Whole, for the first time in a month. I grabbed the sabotaged helmet off the unconscious form of the armored man in the hall- he was breathing, I noted- and tested the radio. Clearer, now that the broadcasts and automation had cut out. “Roy, can you hear me?”
He came back immediately, sounding stressed beyond belief. “Haley, what’s going on in there? Telantes came back and said you made it in but it’s been nearly two hours and a minute ago Mac got really wild in the back compartment, I had to go in and sit on him to keep him from hurting himself.”
I sighed but it wasn’t weary, anymore- “This was a win. This was a pivot. We’re not just reacting anymore, Roy. There’s an enemy now, and we know who and what it is, and we might even be ready for it. Even if I don’t quite know how to fight it. Bring the APC around to the front but don’t get out, the situation isn’t quite secure yet.”
The doctor was already getting busy, I thought, as I saw a crew of bleary but un -zombified people moving outwards from his office, getting mentats into the mouths of every unconscious vault dweller before waking them in turn. I took the helmet off and stepped lightly around their forms. Hopefully they’d get everyone before the Concepters woke up.
“When you said to get an oxygen rig set up, I thought you might have something like that in mind” he said, as I strolled into his office. “Effective, and hopefully not deadly. Thank you. I- wow, you’re really banged up.” He looked me in the eye and appeared startled by what he saw. “It’s got you too, doesn’t it.”
I nodded. “It does, but not for long.” It didn’t seem able to get a grip on me now- it was like knowing that my purpose was to stand in opposition to it was helping me to resist. It was still there, but it was like a nagging tune in the back of my mind instead of a full-throated roar. Still- “I’m going to need as many of those pills as you can give me.” Best not to take chances, if magic couldn’t reverse this.
Some hours later, we finished. The doctor tended my wounds while our last teammate was brought out of his Concept-induced zombiehood, and we shared a hug and a few tearful moments. Roy worked with Mac and the vault dwellers to break down Asriel’s projector and pack it into the APC. It had been built to be man-portable- setup would take minutes at most. Literally all of us were infected, so further meme exposure wasn’t a tremendous concern in the short run, but the dwellers were carefully scrubbing every inch of their computer systems and any out-of-the-way places where the meme had been scrawled. The doctor assured us they could run on mentats for ages, and I assured him that we’d be back with a more permanent solution just as soon as I found one. While he checked the other two over for wounds, Roy, Telantes and I settled down to discuss next steps.
“The way I see it we have a major problem,” I said to them as we sat around a table in one of the vault restaurants. “The Concept is obviously going to spread like wildfire, if this world is any indication. Anywhere we aren’t present to check it, we can assume it’s going to be ascendant. That includes our world, most likely. We need to find a way to reverse the infection, or inoculate against it, to stop the spread in the short term and roll it back long term.”
Roy looked pensive. “How do you stop an idea, though? You can’t stop people thinking it.”
I nodded. “You can, if you can change their minds. Heal spells aren’t going to work but I have a wand that can cast Modify Memory. Apparently,” I grimaced, “I’ve been making regular use of it. If we simply replaced the portions where people remember seeing the meme with memories of them, I don’t know, doing taxes or something-”
Telantes spoke up. “If they can’t remember it, it can’t take them!”
“Yes, exactly.” The others perked up at this positive news and I felt compelled to moderate it with a bit of caution. “Well, unless they see it again. But it’s a start. Now, the problem is that Modify Memory only does five minutes at a time, and takes as long to cast as it took to form the initial memories. It’s meant to overwrite conversations, in game terms, I think. Not to wipe whole days. So the principle is sound but the scale is all wrong. As a backup plan we might be able to stack multiple wand casts at once. However, there’s another source that I know of. One that’s really alarmingly good at altering memories.”
Telantes jumped up and down. “Ooh ooh! Are we going to the river Lethe?” Then he paused, puzzled. “Do we even know any narrators who could get us to Hades?”
I smiled. “No but that might be a bit too extreme- I’m pretty sure the waters of the Lethe destroy all memory, which would cause a lot of additional issues. But Harry Potter has a spell that can change-”
Roy was unable to contain himself. “Holy shit, this is all blowing my mind. You’re suggesting that spell is real and we can go find someone to cast it? ” He fell back against the decidedly uncomfortable cushions of the APC.
I laughed- “Not just anyone. It’s time to do what I should have done a month ago, and go find my wayward husband. Asriel just handed us the perfect way to do it. Let’s get back to the real world and take full advantage- I don’t want either side of the portal we open to be set in Fallout. There’s just one thing that’s nagging at me,” I said, turning to Telantes. “How is it that he, and apparently Merlin and even the Concept itself, knew about me? The me that isn’t just from some old romance novel?” I might have been a big deal but I wasn’t world news just yet.
“Oh, that’s easy” said Telantes, happy to be of assistance. “The night the Concept got us, one of your teams with one of your clones ran across us. She’s working with them, now.”
I’m doing what? That sure wasn’t part of my restored memories. They knew about the Efreets then. They had access to the efreets, clone-me could summon them. But how on earth had they convinced even a weeks-old copy of me to- I shook my head. Questions for later. That explained Jada’s recent gambit, and a few other things. But at least the Efreets and hopefully the corrupted Simulacra didn’t know about the rest of me, tucked away in some kind of character-generator dimension. I closed my eyes- this couldn’t inspire the deep despair that it might have, an hour ago. “Okay. One more thing to deal with. In the meantime- let’s get out of Fallout. I need to send some reinforcements back here, reunite with my other half, and then go to Hogwarts and get my other other half.”