--- FORA - CLONE ---

“So are you like… a vampire or something?”

Netun blinked at her, seeming baffled, “a what?”

Fora grinned, picking up a crystal and examining it, “It’s this creature I’ve been hearing rumors about, they burn up in the sunlight, they have glowing red eyes, stuff like that.”

Netun frowned, “Well, I do do those things.”

“Oh sweet!” She exclaimed, her mind racing at the implications, “I’ve always wanted to meet someone who drinks blood.” Though, preferably as long as they didn’t drink my blood.

“I’m sorry, what? They drink blood?”

Fora sighed, somewhat disappointed. In all likelihood that meant he wasn’t a vampire… “I take it you don’t drink blood then.”

“Who in the stars would drink blood!” He paused, “Though, it is high in nutrients and I could easily see it being a replacement for many vital— no no no, I don’t drink blood, that’s crossing the line.”

“What about like… absorbing the blood.” She prompted, flipping the crystal over and frowning at a decorative rune carved into the bottom.

“That’s the same thing for me, remember?”

“Sparking shifter thing.”

Netun massaged his temples, a clear sign of annoyance on his part, “Why do you keep calling me that?”

Fora set the crystal down and picked up another one, “I would explain it, but then it wouldn’t be funny anymore.”

“I’m not a shifter, I don’t change into something I’m not.”

She squinted at the rune on this one, deciding that it was the same one. Probably some sort of signature from this Kolen guy they were ransacking. “Preeeettttyyyyy sure you said you’re actually a mushroom earlier, and right now you look more like a person, so therefore you’re a shifter.”

“I am a mushroom.” Netun said, he sounded slightly offended, “I’m literally made of mushrooms.”

“And I’m a person, I’m literally made of person things.” Fora picked up a third crystal and glanced at the rune.

“You’re just trying to annoy me.”

The clone set the crystal down so she could grin at him properly, “Yeah, but the fact that it’s still working is far more entertaining than the actual annoying part, usually people start ignoring me entirely after the fifth intellectual debate about the nature of the soul.”

“I still think you’re wrong about souls being made of little pieces of gods.”

“And I still think you’re wrong about souls coming from some guy’s violent sneeze.”

Netun actually looked offended at that part, “That’s a gross oversimplification and it’s highly—”

“I know, it’s inaccurate. It sounded better in my head. You know what, I’ll just shut up now, okay?”

There was silence for a long moment. Eventually Netun opened his mouth, “But if you think about it, Divarian souls come from snow and that could be considered a frozen sneeze.”

“Oh sparks, you’re right, I wonder if Gium has a nasal cavity.”

“I guarantee you that he’ll get rid of it after listening to this conversation.”

The clone grinned at him, her mind whirring about in ways she kept forgetting it could do. Netun just kind of… brought out the chaos in her she supposed. “We keep getting distracted.” Fora finally said with a sigh, picking up the journal that had belonged to Netun’s artificer friend as she reflected upon the various odd places this conversation had gone in the last hour. Sparks, had she only known him for an hour? “You said he was Yeran, right? Why didn’t the Mis-born Dragon go after him sooner?”

Netun glanced at the journal from his position rifling through drawers. He was a very good ransacker. “When I first brought him here, he was barely fifteen and I hid him well. Because of the holes in my memory I wasn’t even able to contact him, which just meant he was safer. They probably didn’t realize he was even Yeran until he started selling crystals.”

“And that’s how the entire continent adopted recording crystals in the last fifteen years.” The clone surmised, having wondered who had first had the idea to use illusion magic to capture an image or sound inside a crystal. It was getting to the point where they were a bit out of hand, which was exactly the type of thing the Mis-born Dragon had literally been founded to prevent.

Netun nodded, tilting his head at what looked like a financial record. “Stars… he never got over his tax evasion tendencies.”

Fora laughed from her side of the room, where she’d been going through a stack of recording crystals filled with information. I know I called it a stack, but that’s only because they were meticulously sorted, not because they were on top of each other. “I don’t remember the last time I paid taxes.” My clone realized, since she was legally an adult again already. People should just stop aging, that would make things significantly easier.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Netun frowned at her with that disapproving way of his, “And yet you reap the benefits of a society…”

“I would pay them if the tax collectors actually came by, but apparently they’re all scared of me after the incident with the oranges. They also only go by birth records for some reason, and by that measurement I’m about sixty seven years old. Which would be fine but they stop making people pay taxes when they get old enough that a strong breeze might kill them.”

“It sounds like you’re making excuses.”

“Thank you, I’ve worked very hard to come up with all those excuses.”

Netun shook his head slowly and flipped to the next page of the financial records while my clone activated a crystal and peered at the contents. she got distracted halfway through again by this guy's journal.

“Hey, Netun, did you know that this journal goes all the way back to 771?! That’s the year I died!”

He glanced up again, an eyebrow raised, “Does it have anything interesting?”

“Nope, it’s mostly illegible, I think he was like ten when he wrote this.” Fora paused for a long moment, “Ahah! you can use spirits to re-align the functions of a crystal!!” she paused again, “What does that even mean?”

“If you don’t know what that is then why did you sound so excited?”

“Because he wrote that sentence with seventeen exclamation marks and it felt wrong not to at least try to include them.” My clone frowned at the page before flipping it, eventually remembering about the pile of crystals. Right. She put the journal in her dimensional storage so she’d stop getting distracted.

It started an audio recording when she tapped it, and Fora nearly dropped the crystal when music started coming out of it. she’d expected maybe a voice journal or a lecture, but she supposed that music was welcome too.

Netun glanced up again at the noise, “That sounds pretty nice actually.”

“That’s a famous musician around these parts, she’s written more songs than anyone knows what to do with.” Fora laughed slightly, it was such a small world that Illila’s music was everywhere she looked, “I knew her before she was famous.”

Netun nodded, turning back to the page as the music enveloped the room.

-

“Here’s something.” Netun said after a long silence on both of our parts. He held up a page of the financial records, “Smart kid, he hid it coded where no one would ever look, in his charity donations.”

“How do you code a message into a donation?”

“He donated specific amounts each week to represent letters, he donated nothing for spaces.”

The Eliax part of the clone frowned at the page, why the sparks…? “Are you sure this guy wasn’t insane?”

“Very sure.”

She set down her current crystal and leaned over him, squinting at the page, “What does it say?”

Netun frowned at the page again, “All I’ve translated is the word ‘can.’”

Eliax snatched the page, examining the code, “here, let me try…”

She stared at it. Yeah… that first one was a C… and an N? No no… Netun was right, it was an A… and then an N… Eliax sighed and handed him back the page, “You know what, how about you do it?” I was great at codes, but that required them to be interesting codes, like clever misspellings to determine meaning, or specific beats that matched the pattern of a blinking star. Codes like that made me feel like a treasure hunter.

This one was boring, and my clone didn’t really feel like being Eliax at the moment anyway.

Netun examined the page for a moment longer before reading it aloud. Sparks, he was fast. “‘Can you hear their voices singing against the wind?’” He flipped through it for a moment, frowning, “That’s all it says, I’ll try the other records.”

Fora frowned at him, “What could he possibly do, buy specific amounts of groceries to determine letters? I feel like that’s crossing a line.”

Netun examined a different page, and then laughed, “Well, it seems like he did exactly that actually.”

“Sparking—alright what does this one say?”

“It says, ‘He’s immune to the memories.’”

The clone that was Fora narrowed her eyes at him, “Are you sure this guy was sane?”

“You know, I’m starting to doubt his sanity myself.” He flipped to another page, reading it, “‘Something is gone.’”

She sighed, “Well yeah, obviously his sanity is gone.”

“Fora, I’m going to have to ask you to start writing these down and stop complaining about their nonsensical nature. Kolen didn’t strike me as a particularly stable individual, but regardless of any feelings we may have about it, he’s our only source at the moment.”

She glanced down, feeling a bit stupid. Fora nabbed a blank page from one of the nearby flat surfaces and took out a pencil.

It was that exact moment when she felt an anti-dimensionalism barrier go up.

Here we go again.

My clone perked up visibly even as her annoyance surfaced, catching Netun’s attention as the pile of crystals disappeared into her dimensional storage, “Netun, guard up, they’re here!”

A feminine voice sounded from the doorway, “How nice of you to announce my presence for me.”

Fora held up a hand, “No no, give me a moment.” My clone picked up a stack of random pages and started shoving them into her storage as well, followed closely by a few more crystals and that stack of financial records Netun had been going over.

Wela adopted a more aggressive stance once Fora had started moving, and frowned at the clone as she rushed about the room, packing things inside. “Fora…”

“I feel like I deserve at least something from all this effort!” She explained, looking at a receipt paper for a moment too long before it also ended up in her storage. “And we both know how this will end!” Fora tossed three marbles to the side, and she heard as they clinked harmlessly against the wall.

Wela’s eyebrow twitched as she pulled a nasty looking sword out of thin air, it curved into a thin point, promising pain and death as it glowed with various runes that just made me hope it wasn’t cursed on top of all that. Fora felt her movements slow as caution finally surfaced. Sparking dragons and their sparking unfair conjuration magic… sparking… “No,” Wela said, “You’re going to surrender and give me back that gatestone, I knew it wouldn’t work.”

The clone that was Fora smiled at her, handed her dimensional bag to Netun, and proceeded to blow up the wall.

Wela’s mistake had been not watching the clone’s hands, but I’d gotten good at finding people who could make subtle explosives. The three marbles she’d tossed had been noticed, but when they did nothing immediately, they wouldn’t have been remarked upon.

SHE GRABBED NETUN’S ARM IN THE CONFUSION AND RUSHED THROUGH THE SUDDENLY FIERY WALL, OUT INTO THE OPEN WORLD. FORA TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE DOZENS OF WELA’S UNDERLINGS AND ACTIVATED THE SPELL OF RECALL, PULLING BOTH OF THEM THROUGH THE BETWEEN REALM AND FAR, FAR AWAY.