Thresholder, ch 119-120, NOT Spam, pt 1 and pt 2

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Yes, this is two chapters stacked on top of each other, because that's how it was written! Rather than build a backlog, because who needs that, I'm giving you both at once, though the RR readers will be getting them on separate publishing days, putting them another chapter back.

~~~~ pt 1

Perry sat in the shelf space, healing up. The reactor had been undamaged, and he was poaching its energy, using it to shunt into repairing both his body and the armor itself. That stopped the blood loss, and after that was done, the blood itself began to be whisked away by the ‘cleaning’ aspect. He was trying to work the fracture, but that was much more difficult. Second sphere could heal, but most of its healing worked by returning him to some ideal, rather than doing a more rapid process of the natural work a body would normally do.

After three hours, Perry transformed, letting the energy of the Wolf Vessel explode through him and Marchand. He became the mechawolf, a machine of flesh and steel, and the desire to rip and rend consumed him, but there were only shelves around. The ring was a part of him now, under the metal skin like a piece of shrapnel embedded in him, and he turned toward the place where it would conjoin with the outside world, the deep ocean. There were monsters out there, and he could dig his claws into them, eat their flesh —

He stopped himself just in time, and changed back into a human with metal around him.

The leg was fully healed and the armor had all the last traces of damage removed from it. He examined it all carefully, then removed the armor piece by piece and sat down. Without the moon to drive it, the werewolf transformation took energy that he was only getting from the reactor.

He tried to plan for the next time he had to face down Third Fervor. The staff was good, the portals were good, and the armor was incredible. She had some kind of voice amplification thing, but Richter’s armor, it hadn’t been that much of a problem. In the context of combat between the two of them, her book power was trash. That left just one more power he didn’t know about, which was either something to be kept for the very end of a fight in a final moment of desperation, or something that was hot garbage. And of course it was possible to get more than one power per world, that was just the rule of thumb, some machination of the overspell.

Perry was skeptical that the mechawolf’s teeth or claws could get through that armor. If they couldn’t, then that was taking away the main advantage of the form. The bullets from the shoulder gun had done nothing but maybe stun her, and not for long. He’d have to use blunt force trauma, which meant he was going to have to get better equipment.

Having fought against her once, he wasn’t sure lanterns or masks offered him anything of value.

“I need an airlock,” said Perry, looking around at the shelfspace, which had been flooded again, and would get another inrush of water as soon as he left, given that the shelfspace was at the bottom of the ocean.

“It seems as though it would be difficult to build, sir,” said Marchand. “At least, if we intend to overcome oceanic pressures.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. He stretched his leg, which was feeling completely fine. He was going to have to slip the armor back on soon, to get more of the power from the reactor into his vessels and make sure he was topped up. That could come later.

When he’d fought in Seraphinus, he’d run into continual problems with his weapons breaking. The power armor was just too strong, and if he had used the swords and spears in a way that preserved him, he wouldn’t have been taking advantage of the brute strength that was the armor’s greatest offensive power. He would need to have a hammer made to smash against Third Fervor’s armor, possibly one with a very long handle that could give him some reach he was lacking, but he would need one that didn’t bend or break at first use.

“How long do we wait?” asked Perry.

“That’s at your discretion, sir,” said Marchand.

The power armor wasn’t good at swimming. It was heavy metal, not designed for high mobility. When he’d gone into the Pacific with Richter, they had motors outside the suit to grip onto, and most of the time, they had just walked along the ocean floor. Perry was worried about the monsters out there, but there weren’t that many of them, and with the armor running in dark mode, there was a good chance he could just run across the ocean floor and get to the island.

Perry waited with the armor off, stretching out and making sure that he was in good fighting shape. The transformation always took a toll, not on his body, but on his psyche, especially now. Being on the verge of racing out into the ocean to fight a monster just because he was hungry … that was a good reason never to pull out the stops unless it was dire and there weren’t civilians around. When he was ready, he slipped the armor back on and sat there for a while, letting the reactor fill his vessels. It was much slower than doing it through moonlight, but with the reactor fully repaired, it was mostly just a matter of time. He’d used a surprising amount of power running at top speed, which had ended up being pretty pointless.

It was about eight hours after the fight that Perry stepped out of the shelfspace. He was anticipating another fight with Third Fervor, though there was a slim chance that she had been killed with the beast as it had come in rather than portaling or teleporting away.

He closed the shelf right after him, letting as little water in as possible, which was probably still another thousand gallons. He grimaced. Jeff would be so pissed.

All lights on the armor were off, and the sword was in the new sheath he’d picked up for it in Berus. It was pitch black, and the pressure was again setting off his sensors, telling him to rise before something was compromised. If they had been another hundred meters down, Marchand thought that the armor would probably have failed and Perry would have died, but Marchand also thought that the sudden pressure change should have killed them both. Perry could feel it around him, and suspected that second sphere was putting in yet more work.

He rose slowly, carefully watching for more alerts from Marchand. The pressure alerts gradually faded away, and when Perry reached the surface, he paused before breaking through. There was no sign of Third Fervor, but he’d been teleported by her, and had no idea where he was. He was hoping like hell that he was somewhere close to Thirlwell, or better, close to Berus, but he didn’t know whether that was likely. Third Fervor had said that her spear teleported her to a specific place, which he assumed she could change, but he had never gotten any confirmation.

“Any idea where we are?” asked Perry.

“Not a clue, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry broke the surface, rising high into the air. There was only the open ocean, with no islands in sight, and there continued to be no islands in sight the higher he rose. He was very much in the middle of nowhere. He’d been worried about men in masks watching from a tower or something like that, lookouts or something like that, but there was nothing.

“I’ve narrowed down our location, sir,” said Marchand.

They knew their planet to be a sphere, and it was fully mapped out, though with a fair bit of guesswork when it came to the barren regions. Marchand had taken the maps and synthesized a virtual globe, which he’d then laid flat like an orange peel. Berus and Thirlwell were fairly far off from two of the main continents, large island nations that must have been the result of some intense volcanic activity at some point. Across the wide ocean, there were two other continents, and Perry wondered whether two “sets” of continents separated by oceans was similar to Earth’s geological configuration for some cosmic reason.

Marchand tinted the continents and the edges of the oceans red, including areas around a few of the islands.

“The fuck is this?” asked Perry.

“Assuming we’re still on the same planet, sir,” said Marchand. “I’ve narrowed down our possible location by 73%.”

“Of the entire planet,” said Perry.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “Given that we’re not in range of land, we can eliminate all those places we’d be able to see land from.”

Perry grit his teeth. “Are you doing this on purpose?”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” said Marchand.

“Never mind, we’ll just go higher,” said Perry. “Eventually we’ll be staring down at the planet and we can go from there.”

He rose higher, dripping water down below him. Marchand’s map stayed on the HUD, and the areas they could possibly be in shrunk down, receding from the coastlines of the world, and eventually, banished from what people called the Eastern Ocean. Eventually they were up past the atmosphere, and Perry was left staring down at a dark circle outlined with a blue corona. This all took a great deal of time, given that the sword was capped on speed.

“How the hell did she even get out here?” asked Perry.

“She likely used magic, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry closed his eyes and took a breath. “Was that one on purpose?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I apologize, but Miss Richter wishes that I have a sense of humor.”

“Third Fervor probably did use portals though,” said Perry. “It’s just … a very far way away from anything of interest.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I believe that might have been part of the point.”

“I was never going to win that fight,” said Perry. “I mean never. If she’d thought she would lose, she could just leave me behind. She’s going to be an absolute bitch to kill.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

Perry tried to work the problem while he rose further. Eventually they would be free of the atmosphere, and he’d be able to return to Thirlwell, but it would take some time. There were probably a lot of people who were going to be pissed off at him, even if he explained that it was Marchand’s fault. Dirk would probably explain that Perry wasn’t free to just go speak with heads of state all on his own, and definitely wasn’t supposed to kill them.

“Sir, I don’t mean to alarm you, but you have an email,” said Marchand.

“A … what?” asked Perry, then immediately regretted it.

“Sir, an email, or electronic mail, is a form of communication that —”

“Yup, yup, that one was on me, got it,” said Perry. “You’re saying that someone sent me an email?”

“I am not certain I can conclusively say that, sir,” said Marchand. “You have an email, dated to thirty minutes ago, but I have no record of it arriving in your inbox, and have been maintaining radio silence as a matter of caution. It is possible that this is an error of some kind.”

“Uh, don’t open any attachments,” said Perry. “But it’s readable by you? It’s got the proper encoding and headers and stuff that emails are supposed to have?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “Though I should clarify that what you have always called ‘email’ has a number of substantial differences with the ‘notes’ of my world, and while I am normally happy to indulge your dimensional vernacular, I believe it pertinent to point out that the formatting and metadata are those of a ‘note’ rather than an ‘email’.”

Very early on, when they were still on Earth 2, Perry had Marchand rename everything just so it would make better intuitive sense to him. So many of the words involving computers post-dated the point of divergence between their worlds, which meant that they called pretty much everything by a different name, even if a lot of the UI and control elements had converged towards similarity. ‘Note’ was the one that Perry hated the most, because Richter would talk about her ‘notebox’ and say she ‘noted’ someone, and every time it was just a little bit grating. The etymology descended from ‘notice’, which their version of the internet had originally used quite a lot before technology had improved.

“Who’s it from?” asked Perry. “Put it on screen.”

Marchand obliged. They were high up in the atmosphere, at the point where the air was thin.

Subject: Introductions

To: Peregrin Holzmann

Sorry if the method of getting you this message isn’t to your liking. We have access to a technopathy device that can communicate across great distances. I don’t want to lie about our capabilities — in this world, they’re considerable. You have nothing to fear from us though, and trust me, if we could find you, we would have done this some other way, using radio or just sending you a letter through their postal service. You may have been hearing us over the radio and just ignoring us, which I think would also warrant this approach.

Introductions, before this letter gets too long: I am Hella Farrin, captain of the SS Farfinder. I come from a world far, far away from here. Many years ago, we suffered a thresholder battle, and when it had passed, we were left searching for answers. We found magic they had left in their wake, and a hole punctured straight through our universe. The Farfinder was a project to go into the unknown, following the surviving thresholder to another universe. That was our mission at the time, but getting back proved impossible, and the mission evolved.

I’m the only remaining member of that initial crew. I’ve picked up more like-minded people along the way, people with skills and powers, people who understand the collection of universes, what I’ve taken to calling the ‘multiverse’. We’ve been on your trail since the Great Arc. We follow the holes that thresholders leave, which is one of the only potential ways to move between worlds.

I’d like to meet with you, in person. Given everything you just went through with the Last King, I know you might not be up for that, but I swear the last thing we want to do is get involved in a battle with a thresholder of your caliber. It would help you to understand if I could show you things in person, and this method of communication is unfortunately one way. I would suggest radio, but I don’t think that’s secure, even with your assistant encrypting.

You’re in danger, Peregrin. This whole world is. Maybe the whole multiverse.

If you’re up for it, meet me in the museum you went to when you first came to this world. I’ll be there for the next two days. If you don’t want the face-to-face, then hopefully your radio is still working. Send a blast of radio anywhere from Berus, Thirlwell, or the city you started in and we should be able to get it, but again, I can’t guarantee that it’ll be secure. I’d suggest that you don’t name things outright, only refer to them obliquely. Speak in riddles. We’ve seen most of what happened with you on the Great Arc and Esperide, so you can encode information that way.

A potential ally,
Captain Hella Farrin,
SS Farfinder

Perry read it, then read it again.

“Which of our many enemies do you think sent this, sir?” asked Marchand.

“I think it’s legitimate,” said Perry.

“We just came out of walking into a trap, sir,” said Marchand.

“The email is a show of power,” said Perry. “It’s a way of saying ‘hey, you’re pwned, but we’re the good guys’. I think.”

“What is ‘pwned’, sir?” asked Marchand. “The wonders of your world’s slang never cease to amaze me.”

“If they can slip an email into my inbox without actually transmitting it, they can fuck you up,” said Perry. “Right? You also presume that to be true?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

“So … we can either go to Berus, or we can fly straight to Kerry Coast, and of the two of those, I know which I prefer.” He sighed. “Except I would have to shelve the armor to have a conversation in a public place, and if it is a trap, I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“You’d prefer radio then?” asked Marchand.

“I think I have to assume that they could compromise you,” said Perry. “And if I assume that, then I’m thinking that the only thing worse than having no armor on is having on armor that locks me in place and tries to … I don’t know.”

“If I were turned against you, I would break your arms and legs,” said Marchand. “While I was doing that, I would blind and deafen you. Sir.”

“Right,” said Perry. “Glad you’ve had those thoughts, that’s great.”

“It’s my job to keep you safe, sir,” said Marchand. “It is of course vital that I think about what might happen if I were to turn against you, the better to avoid causing you harm.”

“We go to Kerry Coast City then,” said Perry with a sigh. He started rising again, up to thinner air. “Plot a course.”

~~~~

It was just past dawn when Perry landed outside the city. He’d stashed the armor in the shelfspace, and was wearing pretty standard library clothes, nothing that particularly stood out. He’d roughed up his hair and beard a bit, to make him look less fastidiously clean, and with some effort, he would stay looking a little rough, rather than like a supermodel who’d had an hour sitting for hair and makeup. He was hoping that no one had seen him drop from the sky, but he started moving right away, just in case someone came to investigate. Given the attack, they were going to be on the lookout for things in the sky.

The city was exactly as he remembered it. It was bright and colorful, with artwork on many of the walls and lots of plants getting whatever sun they could. But as he looked at the murals, he could see a bit of a lack of craft that was only evident when compared with some of what the kings had built. Granted, the kings hadn’t actually built anything, only taxed heavily and then spent that money on craftsmen, and most of the things the kings and nobles had made were for the glorification of nobility, but there was something about looking at a kind of wonky flower that made Perry just a touch sympathetic to Nima. Only a touch though.

He made his way into the city, down streets he had pretty well mapped. He had the earpiece, but with Marchand in the shelf, it wasn’t going to do much without opening the shelf, and that couldn’t be done without drawing attention or finding a private location. He wondered how much this Hella knew, and whether she had picked a public place specific to hamstring him. Maybe it would have been better to use the radio, but he was willing to hear her out. If it went hot, he’d duck into the shelf and hope that she couldn’t pierce it, but she seemed to know a lot more than he did.

He went into the museum and didn’t immediately see her. He was greeted by a statue of Fenilor the Gilded though, the same one he’d initially seen. There was nothing suspect about it, no hint that he was secretly the mastermind behind the culture, though of course the sculptor wouldn’t have known about any of that, and by Fenilor’s own account he was only one of the founders, and not the most important one. Perry was curious whether that was true. He was hopeful that Hella would have some insight.

He sensed her before he saw her, but kept his eyes on the statue. She had her hair in a tight bun and wore cargo pants with many pockets. Her shirt was odd, not at all in the style of this world, like a long-sleeved spandex gymnastics top with a thicker tank top built into it. She had freckles on her cheeks and a serious look on her face, and she watched Perry for a moment, perhaps unaware that he’d already clocked her. He was keeping his eyes on the statue.

She stepped up to him and turned so she was facing the statue too. “Do you go by Peregrin or Perry?”

“Perry is fine,” said Peregrin. “You’re Hella?”

“I am,” she nodded. “It would probably be better to have our conversation elsewhere, but I thought it was best to meet you in public. You seem hesitant to make a scene unless the needs demand it.”

“Better to keep a low profile,” said Perry. “We’re far away from the action right now though.”

“Mmm,” said Hella. “We’re closer than you might think.” She looked around. It was a pretty slow day, but from the frown on her face, there were still too many people for her taste. “Care to get out of here?”

“We’ll talk a bit first,” said Perry. “You let me know half of what you know, then we’ll agree on a second place to meet at. Somewhere I can wear my armor, hold my sword, and feel a little more secure about not getting shot in the face.”

“Fair,” she said with a sigh. “I would call it paranoia, but I know how life can be for you people, and I saw what happened with Xiyan.”

“If you saw me, I didn’t see you,” said Perry.

“We have past vision, of a sort,” said Hella. She kept her voice low. “Similar to what Jeff had, but not as accurate. Sometimes it gets things wrong. And once I was sure we wanted to make contact with you, I stopped trying to pry into your life. We didn’t arrive until after the whole thing was long over. In fact, we were only able to catch up to you thanks to the two-year gap on Esperide. Before we followed your trail, we were following Maya’s, and before hers … there were a lot.”

“I appreciate you being upfront about it,” said Perry. “Relatively speaking. But I don’t know who you are or what you want from me. I’m at a pretty severe disadvantage.”

Hella let out a breath. “This is the sort of thing that I would rather not say in public. They have listening devices, and while they don’t have anything on the ones that you have, I would rather the locals didn’t know about me and my crew.”

“I’m not going to a second location without something,” said Perry.

Hella looked around a bit, then began walking. Perry followed her. They went to a darkly lit room off the main thoroughfare of the museum, which wasn’t currently occupied by anyone else. The light in the room came down from above, but was directed to suits of armor and ancient weapons.

“We have a spaceship,” said Hella. “We have a crew of five, including myself. I would love for you to meet them. We know you well enough to know that you’re a good person, especially by thresholder standards, where half of you are the worst ideologues and the other half are sociopaths. Our ultimate goal is to stop thresholding itself, which is currently nowhere near happening. The reason we’ve come to you is because we think you can help.”

“Okay,” Perry said slowly. “How could I help?”

“I want to make sure we’re aligned,” said Hella. “We’re not a part of the thresholder system. We’re not a consequence of an algorithm that’s putting people into direct conflict. But if you’re not aligned with the general idea of stopping the portals from connecting worlds right from the start, then I’ll give you an email dump of information as a way of saying thanks for hearing me out, and we don’t need to see each other again. We’ll move on when the portals open and go our separate ways.”

“I’m not sure that thresholding is a net negative,” said Perry. “There are uplift opportunities, a proliferation of technology, maybe some magic spreading through worlds and increasing the quality of life … balanced against the raw destruction of the fights, worlds falling into ruin from plagues, that sort of thing. I guess I would believe it was a net negative, if you told me that, but I would also want to see your numbers. Call me half aligned.”

Hella nodded. “We can show you what we’ve seen, what we know. If it were people coming in to give gifts to the locals and then fighting to death in an out-of-the-way corner, I might feel differently. If it were only the ideologues and not the sociopaths … but it’s not.”

“Then how can I help?” asked Perry. “I’ve heard it called a Grand Spell, but I’m a subject of that spell, not its controller.”

“We want to study you,” said Hella. “That’s a start. And then, once we’ve studied you, we think there might be a method of bringing the Grand Spell to a close, depending on what we feel is its ultimate purpose.”

“And … what are the theories?” asked Perry. He was feeling a little gobsmacked by her presence. It felt like after five worlds, he was finally getting some answers, and not the vague, contradictory, and incomplete answers that he’d gotten before.

“It’s complicated,” said Hella. “We haven’t been able to touch the spell, we’ve only been trailing it. We see the holes it punches through the universes, the threads of cosmological damage and metaphysical mingling. But the leading theory is that it’s building up to something, that in the end, it’s going to pull someone out for use in … something.”

“No,” said Perry. “I don’t buy that. Too many ideologues, as you said. Too much randomness. If they were selecting for the ultimate hero, or the ultimate fighter, then this would be an insane way to do that.”

“I don’t think that’s it either,” said Hella. “But we have a crew of five, including myself, and I keep getting outvoted.” She hesitated. “I would love for you to meet them.”

Perry considered that. “If you attacked me, how much danger would I be in?”

“You would duck into your shelf and I wouldn’t be able to touch you there, not without a week’s worth of work, and maybe not even then,” said Hella. “If I had wanted to kill you from a distance while you waited in the main hall … there’s a chance, but I wouldn’t underestimate a thresholder, and … we’re not actually sure whether the Grand Spell takes us into account. If it does, then the chance that things would go your way is much, much higher.”

“Okay,” said Perry. “And how much danger are you in from me?”

“Given what we’ve seen of your abilities, it depends on how fast I was able to extract,” said Hella. She hadn’t gotten more tense at the question, but she had seemed a bit tightly wound since he’d first laid eyes on her. “I think you would need to become the wolf in order to kill me, and you would need to do it quickly. With the armor on, you’d have better chances.”

“Just curious,” said Perry. “It’s naturally hard to trust anything you say. For all I know, you could be a fifth thresholder.”

“Sixth,” said Hella. “Mette counts. It’s you, Nima, Third Fervor, Fenilor, and Mette. But the Farfinder isn’t a part of it, and we hope isn’t accounted for in the equations. We haven’t wanted to test it, and ideally, we’ll stay out of the central conflict.”

“Alright,” said Perry. “If you have a second location, I want to be armored.”

Hella bit her lip, then nodded. “Go into the bathroom,” she said, pointing down the hall. “Use your shelf in a stall, I’ll wait outside, then when you’re suited up, I’ll take you to the Farfinder.”

Perry slipped into the stall and opened the shelf, then went through the process of putting Marchand on. He was really going to have to find a better way of dealing with the shelfspace, especially if his enemies insisted on going underwater.

He felt more secure with the armor on, even given the gaping hole in its security that meant an enemy could simply deposit and email. He was going to have to ask about that.

He stepped back out in full armor fifteen minutes later, with nanite ‘clothing’ beneath that.

“Ready to go,” said Perry.

Hella looked him over and nodded. He wondered whether she was thinking about the gun hidden in his shoulder. She had seen him shoot the king, and he hoped she knew that this was something that Marchand had done.

Rather than opening a portal or holding onto his arm and teleporting him, she went to the bathroom door and opened it. It opened out into a cramped metal ship, and she went through, holding the door open for him.

The interior of what he assumed was the Farfinder was pretty tight. There were five stations and a long hallway leading out the back, and only tiny porthole windows that let in minimal light from outside. Each of the stations had two large monitors, though only two of the stations were occupied, one by a woman with bright red lipstick, and the other by a lizard.

“He’s arrived!” said the woman, who had just enough space to spin around her chair. She was a complete contrast to Hella, with a floral print on her dress.

Perry looked the other way, and saw a long hallway that led down to stairs. It reminded him of being inside of a submarine, which he’d done once as part of a tour, though it was slightly less cramped than the USS Alabama. He had expected something more like on Star Trek, sleek and clean, but it was clear that a lot of things had been made under less than ideal conditions and without the proper materials. There was a suspicious amount of things made with wood, which he couldn’t fathom being anyone’s first choice if they had that much metalwork.

“Hello,” said Perry, waving at the woman. His eyes went to the big green lizard, who was clicking away at what looked to be a computer.

“Perry, this is Eggeltina and L’onso,” said Hella. “Eggy is our science officer and L’onso is our security detail.”

Eggy came over to them, smiling as she did. “Neat armor,” she said, looking it over. “Marchand, was it?”

“Yes,” replied Marchand from the speakers.

“I want one of those fusion reactors,” said Eggy, pointing at Perry’s chest. “They don’t work in every world, but when they do, it seems like a great power source.” She looked up from the center of the chest to Perry’s helmet. “Any chance you can spare it for a half hour?”

“No,” said Perry.

“Eggy, now isn’t the time,” said Hella. “We’re going into my quarters, I’m going to explain the nature of the multiverse, you can come with us if you’d like, but you have to keep to the assigned task. Okay?”

“Can do, ma’am,” said Eggy, giving a lazy salute.

“L’onso?” Hella called to the lizard, who hadn’t left his post.

“No thank you,” he grumbled. Perry tried not to stare, but it seemed like the sounds had come from the lizardman’s nose rather than his mouth.

“We have two others,” said Hella. “Nitta is working on the ship right now — the bowels — and Cark is out.”

“Out where?” asked Perry. “Where are we?”

“We’re in a cloud over Berus,” said Eggy. “Or, not an actual cloud, but a cloud that we’re making that blends in with the real clouds. Someone watching closely might notice, but the waters aren’t safe, and we didn’t want to land on the island, not with five thresholders running around.”

She slipped past Perry and went to one of the doors down the hallway, which she went in without another word, and Hella followed her with a sigh.

Perry hesitated for a moment, then followed. He had somehow thought that this would be a more military operation, but it was looking more like a ragtag group of individuals. Hella had said she was the only one left of the original crew, but he had still assumed something more organized than this.

~~~~ pt 2

The doorway turned out to lead into a large loft that wouldn’t have been out of place in any major American city. The walls were brick and the furniture was pretty simple, with a few plants here and there for color. A small black cat was curled up on one of the chairs, and there was a flat screen television in front of the couch. Out the large windows there was a city skyline, but it was odd, because the implication was that they were floating on a barge of something like that. The whole place was larger than it should have been, given the rest of the ship.

“This is my room,” said Hella.

“How does it work?” asked Perry, looking around. He looked down at the wooden floorboards, and was thankful that he wasn’t breaking them as he stepped on them.

“I’ll get to that in a bit,” said Hella. She looked Perry over. “Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable with the armor off? This might take a while.”

“I’m fine,” said Perry.

“Alright,” said Hella. She held out a hand, and a sphere appeared in the air. It looked like it was made of liquid gold, though not hot, and she held it there for a moment, working through what she had to say. “This is a universe, a world.”

“Okay,” said Perry.

“You’re from an Earth, which is Aleph-class,” said Hella. “You’re from a high technology civilization, and you’re relatively educated, so there’s a lot you already know and understand, if not intuitively. This is a three-dimensional representation of a multi-dimensional object, alright?”

“How many Earths are there?” asked Perry.

“We have no idea,” said Hella. “My guess is that there are a thousand, but that’s only a guess.”

“My guess is ten thousand, for what it’s worth,” said Eggy. She was still eyeing the armor like she wanted to take it apart.

“Do you understand what a universe is, to your satisfaction?” asked Hella, still holding the sphere.

“Yes, I think so,” said Perry.

“Right,” said Hella. She held up her other hand, and another sphere appeared, identical to the first one. “There are multiple universes, with the number commonly quoted at 1.6 million. When certain conditions are met, which we’ll get to later, a portal opens up. When a person goes through the portal, a connection is made.” A thin golden line formed between the two spheres. It shimmered softly in the loft’s lights — electric, by the look of them. When Perry looked closer, he realized that it was shimmering in a pattern, moving from the first sphere to the second. “With me so far?”

“The connection is made after the person goes through?” asked Perry.

“It is,” nodded Hella. “And the connection is one way. But it doesn’t just let a person travel from one world to another, it brings other things too.” The line thickened at the origin end, so it looked like a long sideways funnel between the two spheres. “It brings physics.”

Perry frowned inside his helmet. “Explain that more.”

“Magical teas,” said Eggy. “Universe A has magical teas, Universe B doesn’t, but when a person portals through, all of a sudden magical teas start working in Universe B. Locally, anyway.”

“Usually this isn’t a problem for Universe B,” said Hella, still holding up the connected orbs. “Most magic — thaumics — isn’t just a set of physics to layer on top of base reality, it’s a set of objects that only interact with that physics. Your sword, for example, is magical, and the reason it works in every world you’ve been to is that you’re dragging its physics along with you.”

She twisted her fingers, and the spheres became a chain of seven worlds, each of a different color, each with a tapered line between them. The spheres changed color too, and Perry realized that it was supposed to be his worlds. Earth in white, Earth 2 in cobalt blue, Seraphinus in silver, Teaguewater in red, the Great Arc in teal, Esperide in brown, and finally, Markat in gold. A bit of color from each world was carried over along the strand, until the final strand, the one that led to Markat, had all the colors.

“I’m … dragging novel physics into these worlds?” asked Perry. “Is that safe? I mean it must be, because —”

“Oh, dude, no, it’s definitely not safe,” said Eggy with a laugh.

“She’s right,” said Hella. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the strand goes between realities and remains small, just connecting one punch to another. Sometimes the alterations to physical reality fade away after the thresholders are gone and only the tether between worlds remains.” She frowned. “But other times, magic spreads like a fungus. Some of them are viral, literally or figuratively. You give someone a werewolf tooth, he eats it, he transforms, he gives his teeth to other people, they transform, and so on until the world is overrun with werewolves and society breaks down because it can’t respond fast enough. Or the spreading magic gives a backdoor into other magic, the kinds that can dip down into metaphysics and rewrite reality. Or sometimes a society discovers this new magic that was brought to them by two thresholders having a fight on another continent and leaving something behind, and they integrate it into their society, and build great wonders, only for something to happen to the strand which snaps it and sends their entire society right down into the dirt.”

“And that’s just the stuff we know about,” said Eggy. “There’s other stuff that’s only theoretical, and that’s some scary business. We think these strands have some pull to them, and that the punches might be weakening the universes. Not a lot, but a little, destabilizing their metaphysics. Show him.”

“I want to make sure he understands the basics, that he has some framework for understanding thresholding,” said Hella.

“I think I do,” said Perry. “It’s not just bad because of the fights, it’s bad because of what the fighters can bring with them.”

“This is Esperide,” said Hella. The balls and strands rearranged themselves into a V-shape, with one of the ends mutated and splitting again. The ball that represented Esperide sat at the crook of the V, and all the worlds that Perry had gone to lined up on the left side, with another curious split coming off the Great Arc.

“What’s that?” asked Perry, pointing.

“You took a substantial fraction of nanites from Maya Singh,” said Hella. “That line represents their descent down the strand. Technically that strand goes through a number of worlds that Maya herself went through, but the magic of every other world didn’t descend down through Esperide.”

“And that’s … Jeff and Marjut?” asked Perry, pointing at the other branch.

“Yes,” said Hella. “Normally it wouldn’t look like that, but he carried her across worlds. If she’d gone through the portal on her own, she’d have been sent somewhere else. Her magic got carried with her, which is … well, interesting, if nothing else, but possibly exploitable.”

“Huh,” said Perry. “If you had that ring, you could drag a lot of physics through the portal, so long as you had a bunch of thresholders moving at once.”

“We could, yes,” said Hella. “However, there are, in theory, risks.”

“Universe-exploding risks,” said Eggy. “Or, maybe not the whole universe, just everything within a lightyear of the portal. I love that term, lightyear, it’s so elegant.”

“Where does the risk come from?” asked Perry. “Too much physics pushed into one place at once?”

“We’re not sure,” said Hella. “Eggy has thoughts, but they’re not well-ordered, and we’re a five person team without much in the way of the kind of scientific muscle we would need to make actual headway.”

“Why not?” asked Perry.

Hella looked him up and down. She let the model fall away again. It was as easy for her as throwing up a hand sign would be for him. It was interesting magic, and he wasn’t entirely sure how she was doing it, given what she’d said about how this all worked.

“Making contact is fraught,” said Hella.

“People try to kill us,” said Eggy.

“Not all people,” said Hella. “But we have a bad track record when we talk to a group of people and explain everything we know about what’s going on. That holds even when talking about large-scale, technologically advanced civilizations. It doesn’t help that we’re typically coming in after a large shake up of their existing power structure, or perhaps wide-scale death and destruction. We’re hoping to hit one of these times, to find some people with the power and wherewithal to help us with metaphysics, somewhere we can stay for years, but so far we’ve struck out. And given we haven’t had a thresholder working with us until now …” She left a pregnant pause.

“You want someone to study,” said Perry. “Someone you can wave some instruments at so you can figure out how this is actually working. The models you showed me have gaps in them, large questions that you couldn’t have answered if I had pressed you on them.”

“Yes,” nodded Hella. “A sane thresholder, that ring … you can understand why we wanted to make contact.”

“I’m not sure how much you’ve noticed, but things are going to shit here,” said Perry. “I accidentally kicked the hornet’s nest, and my guess is that Thirlwell is going to be on a war footing right now. There are, as you’ve said, five thresholders right now, which means … I don’t know.”

Hella let out a breath. “There are a few things that you need to know. The first is that we have prognostics, an ability to approximate the future. The bad news, for you, is that before that email was sent, you were on track to die. We had enough time to sample five futures, and in three of them you died to Third Fervor, and in two to Fenilor.”

“He shouldn’t have beef with me,” said Perry. “We’re … practically on the same side, I think. Maybe literally on the same side.”

“I can’t account for it either,” said Hella. “Not at the moment, anyway. It’s been difficult to find the inciting incident, but he does seem to like to turn on you. He’s completely screwed up whatever the portals are doing, and I would very much like to know how, but everything he’s done is too far in the past.”

“Because you can see the past,” said Perry. “Like Jeff.”

“Not really,” said Hella. “We can see a possible past, and the further back we look, the more fuzzy it gets. He came to this world a long time ago, and at any rate, he’s been guarding against the tool we’re using, along with a few others. But there’s one other wrinkle, and it’s something that we need to tell you about.”

She moved her hands again, and the worlds with their tails appeared again. This one was a V shape, and if it was a particular world, Perry couldn’t tell what it was meant to be.

“This is the normal case,” said Hella. “Two thresholder have their own chains of worlds, they meet, they fight, and either we get this,” the shapes formed an X, “or this.” The shapes formed an Y. “Depending if the loser lived or died, obviously.”

“Alright,” said Perry slowly. “And this is …”

“It’s a punch map,” said Hella. “Assuming we have the right thaumics available, we can map out what happened. There are more exotic configurations, team ups that have extra tails, times when both thresholders die, which is only a theory because if we were to run into that, we’d have to go upstream, which would be a challenge.”

“We’re still figuring out how to do it,” said Eggy. “Might be impossible.”

“Anyway,” said Hella. She waved her hand and made a new image, a sphere with a hundred short tails off of it, along with two longer ones. “This is the punch map for this world.”

“What the hell?” asked Perry.

“This is the result of someone sticking around on a world,” said Hella. “This is Fenilor.”

“You said this was dangerous,” said Perry. He was counting the tails. “All these thresholders coming into this world, bringing in their own physics, or those from the worlds they won on, and then … some of them stick around?”

“Some of them do,” said Hella.

“Too many physics makes the universe explode,” said Eggy. “That’s the technical explanation.”

“This world is in danger?” asked Perry.

Hella nodded. “This world is in much more danger if someone tries to bring it all through.”

“Probably everyone dies,” said Eggy.

Perry looked at the model, right up to the point that Hella let it fall away.

“There were too many,” said Perry.

“How do you mean?” asked Hella. “Too many what?”

“Each tail represents a thresholder who came here and presumably died, right?” asked Perry. “Fenilor has been here for maybe seventy years, and he said they come around once every five years, which would only be fourteen or so. So why are there so many?”

Hella frowned and looked at Eggy. “Ideas?”

“Well, the five year thing … I don’t know,” said Eggy. “We’ve only run across how many refusal patterns, two? And neither of those were long term.”

“A refusal pattern being?” asked Perry.

“A thresholder doesn’t go through the portal,” said Hella. “There’s a grace period of some kind, and if you don’t die during it, the Grand Spell throws someone else at you. We’re not sure why.”

“An average of five years,” Eggy continued, “I could buy that being true, and I don’t see why he’d lie about it. But, uh. That means the other solution is that he hasn’t been here seventy years, he’s been here a lot longer. Based on the punch map? Five hundred years, maybe, with a huge margin of error.”

“Shit,” said Perry. He frowned. “What the hell was he doing that whole time?”

“Five hundred years is far beyond our ability to see and search,” said Hella. “Even if we could find the point when he put up defenses … I don’t know. It’s too lossy. That far back, it’s the fog of war.”

“Any idea how he’s winning?” asked Perry. “He shouldn’t be. Right?”

“It’s complicated,” said Hella.

“Not that complicated,” said Eggy. “The selection process is pretty well understood.”

“It’s conflict,” said Perry. “Or … something like it.”

“Sort of,” said Eggy, wrinkling her nose. “Sorry, are you going to be wearing that armor the entire time?”

“I am,” said Perry.

“Because you know we could like, kill you, right?” asked Eggy. She looked over at Hella, then back at Perry. “The armor isn’t doing anything for you? I mean, we have technopath access, we could shut it down fast.”

“Eggy,” said Hella. She looked at Perry. “You’re in no danger here. I need you to understand that.”

“Right, no, I wasn’t saying that we would kill him,” said Eggy. “I’m just trying to explain that now that he’s here, if we wanted to kill him, it would be pretty easy for us to do, and it’s not like he could fight his way out if he wanted to.”

Perry shifted slightly. He could draw his sword in a moment, then go after them.

“We’ve been to many worlds,” said Hella. “We’re following thresholders, jumping from track to track. I’ve seen seventy-eight worlds, some of them briefly, others for a longer time.”

“That’s a lot,” said Perry. He wasn’t quite relaxed. It was possible that coming here was a mistake, but given what they knew, if they were telling the truth, they had answers, power, and a mission that he couldn’t say no to.

“It’s not like being a thresholder, accumulating power as I go,” said Hella. “Or … not quite the same. We follow the paths, but if there are two trails, we don’t know who we’re following, and with the team ups, sometimes we end up going after someone with only a world under their belt. We can’t rely on anything, because it might all fall apart.”

“Okay,” Perry said slowly. “Seventy-eight words, but you have to deal with things breaking down all the time.”

“There’s overlap,” said Eggy. “J-class thaumics, K-class thaumics, you run into some repetition, even if the people of the worlds we’re seeing would be baffled by us saying that their two things are under the same umbrella. So the Farfinder has to be built for pretty much any world we could encounter, and we have a bunch of redundant engines that will work in all kinds of conditions. H-class are the best though.”

Perry frowned at her. “Seems like a hard way to travel. Also seems like you might die from not having the right tools.”

“There’s a reason I’m the only one left of the original crew,” said Hella. “The ship is unrecognizable.”

“Oh, we’ve come close to dying a ton of times,” said Eggy.

“Sorry,” said Perry, holding up a hand. “We got off track, and — you were saying that you could kill me? That it would be easy? Because — oh.”

“Yeah,” said Hella, nodding.

“This world has magic from a hundred worlds,” said Perry as it clicked into place. “Which means that everything you’ve been stockpiling, everything that worked once and then stopped working, all of it, suddenly comes back to life. And you’ve got power like you’ve never had before.”

Hella nodded.

“It’s been great,” said Eggy.

“And you can help me kill Third Fervor, or Fenilor, if that’s necessary,” said Perry.

Hella frowned. “We can help. Maybe. But … you’ve noticed that every match you’ve had, every match you’ve heard of, has been pretty even?”

“So far as I can tell, that’s one of the constants — or not a constant, but a strong pattern,” said Perry.

“We don’t know how it works,” said Hella. “We think that both threholders and the circumstances they’re chosen for result in a nearly split chance for either of them to win. But we don’t know what that takes into account. We don’t know whether it takes us into account. We think maybe it does.”

“Ah,” said Perry. “Which means if you help me … you might get wiped out. You become a part of the game. So you’re saying no.”

“I wouldn’t have brought you here if the answer was no,” said Hella. “But it’s complicated, and I have a duty to my crew.”

“Understood,” nodded Perry. “I’m hoping that he can just go on his way.”

“I don’t think he can,” said Hella. “I think that puts the whole world at risk, given how many lines he might be tugging, how fouled the system is here. I don’t think the Grand Spell was set up for this. I think he needs to be killed.”

“But not by you?” asked Perry.

“Possibly by us, if we can,” said Hella. “The powers of a thresholder can be very strong though, stronger than what we have. We’re not invincible.”

“We’re kind of invincible,” said Eggy. “I mean, here, in this overstuffed world, we’re not what I would call mortal, especially on this ship.”

“And you won’t help,” said Perry.

Perry stepped away from them and went to the wide windows. The city skyline was scrolling by, but it was on repeat, which was more obvious when he got closer. The view was from a barge, for whatever reason, or a houseboat, though that was obviously inconsistent with this being a refurbished loft with brickwork.

“That was my home,” said Hella, who came to stand beside him. “It was an Earth.”

“Oh,” said Perry. “So … common lineage? Because my Earth didn’t have the capacity to send people across dimensions, I don’t think, not even if it had been following a thresholder fight.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting another Earth,” said Hella. “I hear about them from time to time though. From what I’ve heard, and the logs I’ve looked at, and what our artificial intelligence says, your Earth was pretty close to mine. We had people with powers there though, which in retrospect were probably some kind of backwash from a previous thresholder fight. Some chose to be heroes and others became villains, and —”

“Superheros?” asked Perry.

“I don’t know that term,” said Hella.

Perry knew that, naturally, because it didn’t translate. He had felt it not translate, and felt how it wanted to slip into a different word for her, something that wouldn’t have clarified anything between the two of them.

“I think I get the jist of it,” said Perry. “Were there … spandex?” He let the translation come naturally.

“As part of their powers, yes,” said Hella. “Thresholders are similar to them, the villains, anyway. The heroes … it’s rare to find a thresholder who’s an actual hero. Maya was as close as we’d come, until we found you.”

“No offense,” said Perry. “But that’s kind of sad.”

“Maybe,” nodded Hella. “There have been plenty of ideologues, but if they’re suited to going across the multiverse accruing power, they’re usually fatally flawed in one way or another, if it’s not the ideology itself that’s toxic. You’ve had your ups and downs, but you don’t have the bloodlust of the others, not unless it’s a full moon. You try your best to fit in with the local cultures. You bridge gaps, and help people where you can, without upsetting the apple cart.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. “And you predict that I’m going to die.”

“Possibly,” said Hella. “The predictions are poor things, and we’ve been surprised before.”

“Blindsided, even,” said Eggy.

“They’re also invalid now that we’ve met,” said Hella. “They became invalid the moment we sent you that message, and it’s going to be difficult to generate more of them. Interaction compromises prediction, even if we shoot up into space and observe from a great distance.”

“Well, thank you for the warning, at least,” said Perry. He turned toward the door. “It’s something to think about, something to process. I’ll help you, whether you help me or not. If you can’t do more without risking your crew … I would understand.” He wouldn’t be happy about it, but he would understand. “I should be getting back.”

“Just like that?” asked Hella.

“You said you weren’t going to get involved,” said Perry. “I can play research subject for you, I think that’s the right thing to do, but I have things I need to be doing out there. I need to get back to Berus and make sure that there’s not some retaliatory attack. I need to protect Mette and … the clone, which I suppose you know about already. I would love to stay here and chat, but it’s been many hours since my last fight, and days since I’ve checked in with my allies. I don’t fully know what your capabilities are, but you can apparently watch me from a distance and slide an email into my inbox without having to send it.”

“I didn’t mean that we were going to hang you out to dry,” said Hella. “Eggy, send him everything we have.”

“What, everything?” asked Eggy. “Because everything is a lot, especially for this world.”

“He has the AI to parse it,” said Hella.

“I mean, that’s still interference though, right?” asked Eggy.

“Doesn’t matter, do it,” said Hella.

Eggy didn’t have a visible phone or tablet or anything like that, so Perry wasn’t sure how she was going to send anything. Still, she seemed hesitant.

“Alright, just so you know,” she said to Perry. “The thresholder spell is kind of bad, but also kind of really good. The prediction is, we think, insanely powerful, even if it has its flubs. So if the prediction takes us into account and we send you off with a bunch of weapons and information, then the spell knew that was going to happen, and you’re not actually better off in terms of the odds.”

“Uh, okay,” said Perry.

“It’s powerful like that,” said Eggy. “It’s not time travel, we don’t think, but it looks like time travel, or causality violations, or something like that. If we give you a gun and you accept the gun, then your enemies are strong enough to be taken down by a gun. And I know you have a gun, I’m just saying —”

“I get it,” said Perry. “If we make a bunch of assumptions, then maybe getting help makes no difference. Send me whatever data you have.”

“Alright,” said Eggy with a shrug. There was no visible action taken on her part, but the HUD pinged Perry, indicating the arrival of an email. “Done.”

“Thanks,” said Perry.

“Go see to your people,” said Hella. “Think about what I’ve said, review the information, make sure to warn Mette that she’s part of this, and prepare for the worst. I think it would be better if you didn’t tell anyone we’re here, because we don’t want to be part of a war between powerful thresholders. That said, if it comes down to it … we’ll do what we can.”

“That’s all I can ask for, I guess,” said Perry.