He watched as Graves took a step forward, leaning down to squat in front of the prone scientist.

"You are a scientist, yes?" she hissed between her teeth.

He nodded, not responding in words.

"So you know what scientists do. We study nature, we learn from it, and we use that knowledge to further our abilities."

He nodded again when she paused expectantly. The bitterness in her words was palpable.

"Back on Earth, where I came from," she said, nostrils flaring, "where I was taken from, I studied microbiology. Do you know what that is? No, of course you don't. It's the study of the living world too small to see, everything that crawls, squirms and oozes inside your body and on it, including your body itself. I liked my job. I was good at it. And then you brought me here. Away from my family, friends, my entire life."

Oliver debated whether to stop her or let her continue. The man was frightened enough. But Tiro didn't seem inclined to get in her way, and Oliver didn't see the need to either. Yet. The more compliant the man was, the easier their job would be.

"And then I learned magic. One little bright spot in a world of horror. I learned what I could use magic to do to the human body, and, I have to say, for all the time you've had to study it, I'm not impressed. In a week's time I'd developed more new strains of diseases than you even know about here."

She paused and looked back and up at Oliver and Tiro, noting their stoic gazes.

"I learned about ways to make your body eat itself alive. I learned about ways to recreate plagues that could destroy entire populations in days. I synthesized poisons that could kill you without even coming into contact with you; could convince their cells that they were already dead."

He cringed back even further.

"And you know what? The difference between you and I? I didn't use them just to see what would happen."

If he'd had a defense it wasn't going to be coming out, judging from the way he was quivering and frozen in place.

"But don't forget for a second that I could destroy an entire town from a distance without even using a single spell. Don't forget that I could make your body eat itself alive if I wanted to, that I could keep you conscious during the whole thing too."

"What—what do you want?" he asked weakly, even more thoroughly defeated than he'd been after they dragged him out of the ring the first time, too terrified even to move; a deer in the headlights, if Oliver had ever seen one.

Honestly, the whole routine seemed more like therapy for Graves than anything she wanted from the scientist, because it took her a second to catch her breath and formulate her next thought. Nevertheless, in that moment, Oliver stepped forward, put a hand on Graves's shoulder. She flinched at the contact.

"I think what my friend is trying to say," he suggested gently, "is that you should tell us everything you know about the spell and if you know whether or not it's possible to reverse it. To send people back home."

The scientist's eyes widened. "Reverse it? Send you back home? Yes—yes, of course! I can explain everything. Listen, here's how it works—"

Graves rocked back onto her heels, mingled anger and surprise on her features as he began to garble out an explanation of how the spell locked onto a particular soul by referencing the caster's memories of them, and then snatched them from the point in time right before they died.

Oliver listened with increasing incredulity as he described the way the spell would snatch them from their original timeline and bring them to the point in time the caster resides in.

"But—but that violates causality!" he said as the scientist wound down his explanation. "You can't just take somebody from the place before they died and have them come back, that, that doesn't make any sense. They wouldn't have died at all in that case, so how would the spell even know where to look?"

"We don't, ah, we don't exactly know how it works," admitted the scientist. "It just does. And if you don't specify a target, well, every once in a while you get somebody, or something, from… somewhere else. We don't know where."

"So, what, you're telling me the spell just happened to randomly grab a bunch of people from my world all at the same time, over and over again?"

"No, no, of course not, that wouldn't have worked at all. We learned the hard way, and quickly. The spell is random, you see, unless the caster has a memory of a particular person in mind. And the things it brings back, well, they aren't always human. We lost several of my colleagues discovering that."

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"So what does having a memory of a particular person do and how did that help you?"

"Well, once you get the memories, you just summon them! It was a genius breakthrough, really," said the scientist, growing more animated as he got into the details of discussing his work. "We just interrogated the prisoners—ah, ah, the Earthlings, found their memories of other people from your planet, and used those memories to summon those people as well! It totally overcame the whole randomness issue, and believe me, that was a major hangup at first."

Oliver struggled to wrap his mind around what the scientist was saying; they'd kidnapped and tortured people, into yielding their memories of friends? family? acquaintances?, knowing that to do so was to condemn them to the same fate? Along with just about everything else in this world, it was pretty awful.

"Look, can it be reversed? That's all we want to know," he said after a moment, running his hands through his hair. As terrible as that line of thought was, it wasn't as important right now as figuring out what they needed to do next. What they could do next.

"Yes, it can, but it's expensive," said the scientist. "That's why we set up shop here, at the Crucible, of course. One of the largest natural mana wells ever found. You'd need the mana of an… archmage… to power it…" he trailed off, staring at Oliver uncertainly.

"Explain," said Oliver. The scientist did so reluctantly; their guide had chosen their target well. He was the head researcher of the entire project, and was deeply familiar with every aspect of it.

"You said it brings people back to life as well, does it?" asked Oliver, continuing to grasp for information.

"Yes, it does, the newest version that I just shared with you does."

Oliver looked at Graves. "I'm going to try something. I might be a few minutes. Just keep an eye on me, and don't let him get away."

She nodded, hard eyes locked onto the scientist. Oliver didn't find himself feeling concerned that the scientist would try to get away.

He glanced at Tiro, nodded when they made eye contact, then cast his mind into the Underpinnings and searched for the spell; having just been granted the reference to it, the spell was directly before him as soon as he entered. He viewed the node. It was a simple thing to extract the technique and view its history; he was able to see each time the spell had been cast, the chain of iterations having also been granted to him at the same time as the original, going all the way back to the very first time the spell was cast.

That was unsurprising, given how he'd come to understand the Underpinning to work.

He could see the times the spell had been used to attempt to resurrect somebody, watched the times that it dragged some unsuspecting humans from who knows where into their, only for them to be dragged off by armed guards, under the watchful eye of the archmage. He watched as nameless horrors, inhuman yet clearly still sapient monsters all tentacles or crystalline planes or, in one notable case, a floating cloud, from places unknown were summoned into what was unmistakably a laboratory teeming with scientists, only to be killed or disposed of immediately. And he watched as time and time again human bodies were conjured up only to remain lifeless.

Only in the last iteration spell had they managed to restore a man to life, a soldier who woke up screaming in the intensity of the battle-rage only to find himself not where he had remembered himself to be; and Oliver watched as the man felt at his chest, shocked to find himself alive and whole.

And watching this, the idea Oliver'd been resisting all this time out of an abundance of caution finally became too much to resist. He triggered that latest version of the spell, locking onto his memories of Gideon, hale and vibrant and alive, and felt mana flood out of him, more than he'd ever spent before yet still leaving his reserves undiminished.

When it was done he left the Underpinnings to the sounds of Graves' and Tiro's exclamations of surprise, joined by the familiar timbre of Gideon's gravelly tones. The man himself stood with his back to Oliver, conversing in shock with Graves and Tiro. Oliver had done it. The spell had worked.

Before he could give himself a chance to question it, he went back into the Underpinning where his mind still hovered before the spell and cast it several more times in quick succession, bringing back Tallahassee next, then Sindra, Galen, and finally Galen's friend who'd died on Oliver's account back in the city where they'd battled the mana hound and her companions; Arlo.

He opened his eyes again to find them all standing there, the up-until-recently deceased and their living friends; the former confused and the latter in tears.

The scene was about what one would expect; the joyful reunion marred only by precarity of their present position, far from home in the mountains of Shadowveil. But even that was of no concern to the joy of the reunion.

It was only a matter of moments before Tallahassee demanded that he cast the spell again, naming Luke as the subject, her eyes shining with hope.

Oliver spoke with the scientist and the scientist granted Tallahassee the means of transferring memories (it had much in common with the means by which Oliver would review the castings of spells, a similar kind of suspension of the senses taking place while the memory played out). It was enough for him to cast the spell and return Luke to life, making their joy complete. The man turned out to be a thin RAF pilot with a British accent and a rather cliche, yet still fashionable pencil-thin mustache above his upper lip.

Tallahassee took him by the hand and led him off to re-orient him to their current situation before Oliver could get a word in edgewise, her head held high with hope. Her glance back to him spoke of gratitude so profound it could not be voiced; yet something in him knew she would try, and he felt that it was unwarranted; he merely had done what any man could do, though he was grateful the power of the doing had fallen to him, for it was a salve to his sore conscience to be able to make right some of the wrongs of this world.

Oliver, meanwhile, felt that his mana reserves had fallen sufficiently that he was hesitant to restore any others to life, though he was sure there would be plenty more requests to follow; this world had been harsh to those of Earth.

It left many open questions; could one be restored to life after having died of old age? There was much research to be done, and much magic to be learned, but even as his mind whirled down these tracks something else took precedent, and as the reborn Earthlings set up camp he took off by himself some distance from the epicenter of the activity. It was all well and good to be able to cast a single spell at a time dredged up from the depths of the Underpinnings, but he would need to be able to do more than that should the need arise; in order to return home, he was going to need to rebuild his system one final time.