Monkey sex aside, Dom and I had a lovely interlude before I kissed him goodbye and hit the button again. I went into the forest and awaited Sammi. I didn’t need several tries before this one. I brought my husband over again. It didn’t last long. I just wanted to see if he’d remember it. He didn’t, but he managed to whisper that Kat had noticed his previous absence on a loop. I wanted to reassure him, but he wouldn’t remember any of it, so it would only torture us both. I logged the experience under stuff I wanted to repeat in some secluded portion of my brain behind a zoo of oddly colored animals, because purple elephants just weren’t enough last time.
“So, who do you want to bring from your world?” Sammi popped in.
“I want my best friend Cliff,” I answered with the assurance of someone who knew exactly what she was asking for. The idiot that I was.
“Not your daughter or your husband?” Sammi asked this time.
“Not this time,” I smiled, knowing Sammi remembered and knew what I meant. Sammi was really good at pretending they didn’t know anything about all this. The Quill had shown up this time, letting me realize that it had been absent a bit lately.
“Grant…ed,” Sammi started to announce, but we were both startled at the result.
A young woman I’d never met stood in between Sammi and me. She was about an inch shorter than me with bright red hair that fell in tumbling waves down to a waist that belonged on a cartoon character. She put Marlo to shame. She turned hazel eyes to me, and my eyes widened. She ran into my arms, and I was at a loss of what to think.
“What’s wrong?” she asked when I didn’t return the embrace right away. “Hey, you got taller!”
“What the hell?” I stared at Sammi for an explanation Sammi didn’t seem to have.
“I swear I brought Cliff,” Sammi insisted.
“I’m Cliff,” she said, and my mind caught up with the hazel eyes of my buddy, my pal, my ex-husband, and my daughter’s second dad? It didn’t catch up fast.
Cliff had plenty of time to scan what she could see of her body. “Is it me or am I actually a pretty girl?”
“As opposed to what? A unicorn?” Sammi asked.
“That was an option?” Cliff gave a sniff. She had a little button nose and slightly chubby cheeks. You don’t understand. Cliff was a big guy. He walked like a bull with shoulders wide enough to play football, but a mind that would rather read a book.
“No,” Sammi breathed out a quick denial. “I’m not turning you into a unicorn.”
“A rainbow unicorn with wings?” I stuttered out.
“That’s my best friend.” Cliff dove back into my arms and I had no choice really but to hug back. And he felt like my friend when I closed my eyes. Cliff of the manic depressive mood swings, lumbering girth, quick smile, and open heart was a cute little thing that defied definition.
“Cliff.” I took a minute, still processing. I’d always accepted his feelings. I’d had to. I knew how he felt about life, the universe, and everything. He’d talked about a change, but he had decided against it thinking that going from guy to girl wouldn’t make him any less the bull he didn’t feel he was inside. That change. We’d played around with Sammi-like stuff when we’d been married. I’d always known that he didn’t accept any definition of who he was.
“Now is when we pick a class and you initiate the next Nemesis Quest,” Sammi droned out, their eyes stuck on Cliff.
“Right.” I nodded.
“That’s easy,” Cliff exclaimed, totally oblivious to any need for subtlety or subterfuge. “I want to be a Shapeshifter and I want my. name to be Destiny and I want a familiar. I can’t wait to see what Damon has to say about absolutely everything.”
“Uh,” I stammered as he blurted out things he wasn’t supposed to know. I scanned the bushes for a stampede of Fizzbarren wrath and then snapped my eyes to Sammi’s eyes to see if they were Fizzbarren instead. Maybe summoning Cliff had been a bad idea.
“You’re not going to keep me first anyway,” Cliff blundered right through.
“Destiny is a stripper name,” I bungled out.
“But your name is Karma and I’m your sidekick as Destiny, get it?” Cliff went on and I hovered over that button. He couldn’t know that stuff. “I’ve been thinking and thinking about it, and this is it. I just wanted to bop in and let you see… well, you know. It worked, so if you get Kat again, tell her it worked so I know, okay? Oh, and I love you and totally understand. We’re closing up everything we need to take care of so we’re ready. And this is so cool. Can’t wait. We love you and we understand. We all do.”
I hit the button. Cliff wasn’t subtle. Cliff wasn’t normal by any definition of the word, and if you managed to define the word normal by something that was Cliff, he still wouldn’t fit. I love him as a brother as another person who, like me, didn’t fit anywhere. That was our wacked out family.
“So, who do you want to bring from your world?” Sammi popped in.
“I’m ready for Kat,” I replied.
“Thank God,” Sammi muttered under their breath, and I bit back a smile.
“Granted,” Sammi said louder.
“Mom?” Kat blinked away the mists of the in-between. “I’m dizzy.”
I’d had the time to think about Cliff and Dom. I pulled my daughter into a hug and held home to my heart. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” she breathed back.
“Destiny said it worked,” I whispered to her and felt her sigh.
We pulled back from each other and looked in each other’s eyes. You know, I was wrong. Kat and I could have conversations without words just like her dad and I could.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“I can’t stay, can I?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I answered her as honestly as I could.
“Quest?” Sammi prodded us, the Quill scribbling in a way that reminded me that what we said was being written down somewhere.
“Kat wants to be a Mage, and if you can give us a cottage and a spell book full of spells, I’ll take the Nemesis Quest,” I shortcut the conversation, wanting to get her alone in some boring space before we talked.
“I can do that,” Sammi’s eyebrows rose, but they took the win like a trooper. Only I would have seen the slight eyeroll that meant they knew we’d be back. “I feel compelled to tell you that spells cost mana, and mana is only restored with rest.”
I thought about that as Kat and I walked back to the cottage talking about things that meant nothing. She told me things about college that none of us cared about and I talked about how I’d defeated Beau this time. I had been pressing that button a lot. If that button was a spell, then it would take mana. It wasn’t taking anything out of my current mana pool, so it had to be pulling from my future mana. That was a little more disturbing.
My mana in the future would be based on our readers. Yeah, that’s YOU. I had a healthy pool, but it only refilled as people read the chapters that I’m churning out right here and now. What Sammi was saying was that there was a limit to how many times I could press that button. Unless I did something here, as I’m writing, I didn’t have the mana for all those reboots. What had I, was I, am I doing? I changed things, of course.
Take a little wibbly wobbly trip with me. See, I set up some recordings. Just little things that the family and I did together to try to increase our mana pool. The mana pool that is wibbly wobbling right into this little part of the story. Let’s just say, this set of recordings out there on Patreon are helping a lot. At least they will be by the time you are reading this, thanks to people that came before you, unless you’re one of the you’s that wibbled this wobble. In which case, thank you, and I now take you back to the regularly scheduled program… book… yeah.
Kat and I collapsed onto the cottage beds with a promise to talk in the morning.
I woke up to Kat playing with Terra. I stretched and took a moment to remember the current reality. The sun sparkled annoyingly through the window. Part of me wanted to stay right here forever. I stared at the button and tried to focus on the mana behind it. I ran into a wall.
“I have plans,” I announced softly so I didn’t disturb the mood of the early morning laziness.
“Great,” she replied, focused on the string she dangled over Terra.
“I need variables,” I tried to explain.
“Then let’s do this.” She smiled at me. I could tell she’d changed in a way that hurt and failure could deepen a person, but it was tempered by something, maybe time.
“How much time has passed in your world?”
“That’s complicated by things,” she hedged. Terra flopped onto her side to use all her legs to bat at the long string. I thought about what she wasn’t saying. Time was something she was experiencing the long way, so she’d had more time than most in this.
“What does everyone remember?” I asked.
“Also complicated.” She bit her lip. “Things happened that just didn’t matter to me anymore. I broke it off with Joey, a lot. That was fun. That was the easy part. The best way to explain is that Dad, Cliff and I started playing DnD a lot more when you left.”
I tried to parse what she was saying, letting my mind file it away for later.
“We ran scenarios,” she continued, “and we started to map out a book that we are sort of writing together.”
“A book about?” I asked.
“About a mom who disappears and how her family goes to another world to save her from the life there.” Terra flopped from one side to the other, half-heartedly following the string. “Only we all find out that we like that world. As long as we’re together, it works.”
“Your dad and I…” I wondered what I could say. Did it matter? She was right in that I wasn’t going to let her stay. I was pressing the button again but before I did that, couldn’t we have a little time?
“Take him,” she told me, her arm falling. “He’s the one who needs it most, and he’ll be better for you here than me.”
Maybe this was why I hadn’t wanted to do this. She couldn’t stay. The pain of losing her again was only bearable if I knew she was still alive and safe. I tried to focus on what I needed her to know; what I needed her to take back to them.
“I’m okay.” Her watery eyes belied the statement.
“I can’t lose you again,” I told her. I didn’t notice the tears falling down in streams over my cheeks, but she did.
“You’re not losing me this way.” She dropped the string and took my hand, Terra bounding away after a more reasonable breakfast.
We ate breakfast. We explored the forest. We became friends with Lily and Chester, who came with us into the forest. We didn’t level. We didn’t get skills. I took a week off of all this madness and spent it with my kid. We didn’t talk about it ending. We didn’t talk about anything of consequence. We were very, very boring for a whole wonderful week of lazy.
Over breakfast, we had our last frantic chat, saying only what was absolutely necessary before I hit that button. It might have been rest for me in this world, but it didn’t make for good reading and therefore it didn’t give me enough extra mana for that spell. I’d spent a week watching the color of it fade a little bit at a time. Until one morning, the button started to get brighter, deeper, and full of more mana. That was when I dared to press the button again, not knowing why, but grateful.
I made it through my lines with Beau, even if my performance was a bit wooden. Only Beau was real enough to notice, and he didn’t because he was too wrapped up in his own collapsing world. I left him to it. I wasn’t thinking of him as I pursued options in my mind. I leaned back on the makeshift bar and drank ale like a barfly with nothing better to do. I ran scenarios in my mind.
I knew that my initial spastic replays had cost me mana that I hadn’t realized I was spending. Now I felt the pressure to provide a really good set of chapters for future readers so that I would continue to have the freedom to press that button. It might look solid now, but in my mind at that time, I was one vacation away from ending up on that bookshelf next to Beau, Chester and Lily.
More than that, pressing that button was starting over in a way I didn’t need anymore. The only reason to replay these actual lives was to make sure that I didn’t have any regrets. I only had one regret left. I had one question that nothing but experience could answer. If I had to replay it later, it might cost me, but I needed to try.
Kat might be better this time around, but the fact was that she didn’t have the killer instinct I needed in a partner for this part and I couldn’t have her used against me. Cliff was fun and a real wildcard of a twist for the story, but it didn’t feel like a story that was right for our next chapters. Kat had once said that Dom and I were like Bonnie and Clyde and while she had a romanticized notion of that duo, she might have had a point.
Maybe I wanted a second honeymoon. Maybe I wanted to know what it would feel like to be an empty nester and have my husband to myself for a while. We’d put everything on hold for Kat and it had been worth every second, but what were Dom and I without that? What would we be once she had moved on to another life? And maybe none of that mattered. I just knew that I had to try one incarnation where my husband and I took on Fizzbarren and his stupid world of pathetic shortcut writing to save our daughter. Yeah, that might be enough of a story to change that world into something else.
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“Family makes you weak!” Fizzbarren’s dream image infiltrated my mind.
“I’m not weak,” I grit out, my arms held but my mind furiously watching for my moment.
“They give you something to lose.” It was more than a dream.
“And something to fight for,” I pursued my ideals without reservation.
“It’s only the loss of that family that has made you willing to fight this hard.” It was a memory of a future I’d put behind me.
“I’d have fought you anyway,” I persisted, knowing in this dream that I would miss that split second.
“You’d like to think so, but it isn’t true.” It was a memory that haunted me, because it made me afraid. It made me afraid that he was right.
In my dream, I missed that moment when he blinked. I missed it in the dream world because Kat was always still there. Still with me. Held next to me. Dying next to me.
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I woke in a sweat to see Dom’s eyes watching me. Terra lay in his lap. He had one of the cottage’s many books in his hand, but he was staring at me.