Nero Walker, Book 4 Ch.75 (306)

Not having access to the Thought Hub, all she could do was steam in her somewhat violent thoughts. Over and over again she replayed recent events on a loop in her mind. And having been waiting for over an hour, she found herself reaching the end of her patience.

‘Either that hells be damned man-child gets back here soon, or he’ll return to find that I’ve already handled it. And for once, he’ll find himself having to clean up after ME!’ Queen Merrissa Newling promised herself.

Trying to distract herself, she took another look around the ritual room. The meticulously carved runes and enchantments filled the walls, floor, and ceiling with their pale blue light. While not all that large, the circular room was tall enough to make the room feel expansive. Or, perhaps that feeling was just due to the essence in the ether, the subtle promise of a connection to other planes.

Her husband, the king, had come here immediately after learning of the portal closing in Dorchester. Rather than take charge of the aftermath, he’d chosen to retreat to his private plane for some reason. Likely to work on his fate calculations or another one of his hells-be-damned plots.

Knowing that the plane he’d gone to had a vastly different time stream, and that months for him there could pass in minutes here, every second he remained on the other side of the rift grated on her nerves.

“What in all the hells below is taking so long,” she muttered to herself in a lifeless growl.

Hearing her own voice come out in the androgynous and neutered tone that her armor caused, she once again contemplated heading back to the palace so she could change into something more appropriate. Considering her station, being in her Populator armor when unneeded was something she tried to avoid. However, with how her day had been going, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the moment she left he’d return and she’d miss him.

Feeling a pulse in the ether, she whipped her head around to confirm that her incorrigible husband was finally returning. There, in the middle of the ritual circle, she glared at the forming rift. Forcing herself to calm down, she waited patiently for it to stabilize. The 5-unit wide by 10-unit high rectangular planar tear in space solidified into a doorway in under a minute. With the aid of the numerous enchantments in the room, the watery and tumultuous pattern became a dull silver finish, solid and corporeal.

Crossing her arms and adopting a confrontational stance, she readied herself for the argument she had been preparing and waited for her husband to appear.

Seconds later, the moment he stepped through the rift, she noted with satisfaction the surprise on his face at seeing her here. Having known him for most of their lives, she was probably only one of a handful of people in the entire kingdom who could see past the unshakable and expressionless mask that he always wore.

‘HA! He thought I didn’t know where he went! ‘All-knowing’ my perfectly shaped ass,’ she thought to herself with a smug grin hidden under her helmet.

Before the portal behind him finished closing, she had already begun shouting at him.

“How do you plan to deal with Lord Williams and the fools he’s tricked into helping him?” she demanded without preamble.

Quite obviously caught off guard, King Oliver replied, “Lord Williams?”

Not letting him off, she began to quickly recount everything she’d learned from her/their consort’s intelligence services.

Lord Williams, the Divisional Head of Natural Sciences at the Royal Academy, had been quickly gaining support through private meetings and rushed committee gatherings. Many of the stronger Great Houses and pillars of the community have already begun expressing their public support of his opinions and have voiced their intention to vote in favor of his policy changes.

“... If these idiots succeed in altering the Unique Citizenship Accords, even if you veto them, both The Siren and The Mechanic are going to become problems again. Unless you plan to allow for multiple inter-kingdom military engagements to suppress them, you’re going to have to do something.”

While the queen detailed her concerns, she watched his expressions carefully, not missing a thing.

Surprisingly, she found herself discovering that he likely hadn’t been paying attention to what Lord Williams and his compatriots had been doing. A lot of what she was telling him, he hadn’t been aware of, despite how effortlessly informed he pretended to be.

‘If this wasn’t what he’d gone to the other plane to fateweave, then what was he doing over there?’ she wondered.

His tone subdued by solid, he replied quietly, “Lord Williams isn’t interested in forcing Lord Walker to the capital to close portals for us. Nor is he interested in how the young anomaly is able to do so. No, his interest is in learning how Lord Walker was able to reconstitute himself after discoporealization.”

Shifting her hands to her hips, the queen returned his statement with a glare. “That’s not the issue! The issue is how he’s going about it!”

Slowly holding up his hands as if he were trying to calm her down, he replied, “I’m aware of what the issue is. My point is that his efforts to change the relevant accords are built on a false foundation. They want to control Lord Walker, who is a unique. They’re only using his ability to easily close portals as a smokescreen. And even with how beneficial for the kingdom that ability would be, it won’t be enough for the rest of the council to risk upsetting the balance of power which has been established over centuries of hard work.”

Still concerned, she asked, “Are you sure? Have you run the numbers, or are you making an educated guess from a place of optimism?”

Chuckling at her audacity, he replied, “Don’t worry, my dear. I have it under control. They can bark all they want, they won’t -”

Suddenly going silent, his expression instantly became guarded. Turning his head, he looked over at the walls as if he were staring past them into the distance.

Seeing her beloved act so out of character, she asked quickly, “What is it? What happened?”

His reply was quiet, almost a whisper. “I… I don’t know,” he said in a tone that almost came across as baffled.

She couldn’t recall any time in her life that she heard him sound so confused.

‘Well, whatever it is, it better not cause him to hide from his responsibilities again,’ she thought to herself with a grimace.

—--

The meeting continued on without his inclusion in the proceedings, the army’s leadership focusing entirely on Angelton and Cathleen. Rather than feeling like what he expected a debrief to feel like, Nero thought it felt more like a trial. Their questions were repeated by multiple people, with each and every answer probed for any inconsistencies.

Were it not for Angelton and Cathleen remaining so calm, Nero might have expressed his dissatisfaction with what the assholes on the other side of the table were doing in a more vocal and no doubt quite physical manner. However, seeing as both Cathleen and Angelton weren’t getting upset, all he could do was sit there and glare while returning to his meal.

Surprisingly, Jennings had chosen to remain in the room, still seated at Nero’s side.

Occasionally, Nero glanced over at the man. He looked deep in thought, constantly rubbing his chin and muttering to himself. If it weren’t for his intermittent stares and evaluations of what Nero was doing, Nero might have thought he’d forgotten about him.

But rather than engage with him, Nero chose to focus on the room. His newfound control of his mind allowed him to sense and understand much more than he ever had before. Everyone’s essence fields were whispering their states of mind and emotions in a constant buzz around him. And his eyes were catching hints of body language and tonal changes in their voices with alarming regularity. But what really blew his ‘mind’ was how quickly he was able to interpret everything he was seeing.

Instead of his imagination running wild with crazy theories based on his fears and stories he’d read, his mind was instead formulating likely backstories and conclusions entirely based on facts that he could ‘see’ and ‘sense’. It was as if the more his mind developed, the more his imagination was made irrelevant.

‘I wonder if this is why their fiction is so shit here. The smarter they are, the harder they find it to think outside the box. If that’s true, then I’m going to have to be careful. I don’t want to end up like some stuffy physics professor who hates superheroes for not making sense,’ he thought to himself.

Noticing that Cathleen had chosen to present her memory engram as evidence, Nero couldn’t help but chuckle as she narrated the images being shown on the projection hovering above the table.

“And this is when we first encountered the defenses outside the throne room. As you can see, they had created a tiered system of defense to protect the throne room doors…” she declared while pointing out the formations she’d chosen to use and how the kobalds had responded.

Nero had thought seeing evidence of what happened would have deterred them, but the army’s leadership immediately began questioning her decisions, emulating nit-picking critics bitching about the details.

Once again Nero found himself impressed at how well Cathleen and Angelton were handling them. If he were the one being grilled like this, he would have already flipped the table and begun testing some of his more inventive combat spells.

“Nero, my boy, would you kindly accept my communications request?” Jennings whispered so quietly that Nero questioned whether or not he’d actually heard anything.

Looking over at the man, Nero noticed the small eye tick that made it clear he was barely holding his patience together.

Nero had noticed that for a while people had been trying to contact him through his link, but he’d been ignoring them. His mind was finally working in harmony, and the last thing he wanted was to experiment with splitting his mind again. Since he would rather test his newfound concentration abilities by watching the proceedings, he’d pushed all those connection requests into the very back of his mind… placing them right alongside his lamentations of no longer having access to his favorite pair of Crocs and the constant disappointment he felt over the ever-present unavailability of his preferred soft drink.

Sighing at the sight of the man visibly restraining himself, Nero relented. He filtered through the connection requests, finding Jennings’ almost immediately. Rather than going through the link, Jennings had been trying to create a private connection directly, which Nero had ignored just as easily as he had with the ones going through the Thought Hub. He did, however, note that both Angelton and Cathleen had been keeping a connection request open with him, despite being in the middle of the interrogation passing itself off as a ‘debrief’.

Reminding himself that he should probably touch base with them at some point since they were the ones currently in charge of defending House Walker from these idiots, Nero took a moment to consider what they might want.

‘Eh, they’re handling everything fine. I’ll step in if they need me to,’ he told himself.

Setting that aside for the moment, Nero allowed the connection with Jennings to solidify. Carefully separating a part of his mind to continue monitoring what was going on around him, Nero turned his attention to Jennings’ arriving presence in his mind.

“What’s up?” he asked. His tone made it clear that he felt completely justified in having been ignoring Jennings for however long the old man had been trying to contact him.

Physically, Nero remained focused on his plate of food which he’d been picking at. And anyone watching him wouldn’t know that his mind was actually now focused on Jennings. For the first time, Nero felt like he was able to hold a conversation while effortlessly doing something else. Before, it had been a struggle to hide his split attention, but now he found it no harder than breathing.

“I’ll tell you what’s up! Do you have any idea what you did? I’ve been trying to recreate your impossible feat, and I haven’t come close to figuring out how you did it!” Jennings barked, his tone audibly portraying his frustration while his body remained almost expressionless.

Nero had to admit he was impressed. Even Jennings’ essence field felt tranquil, as if the man were just sitting in his chair thinking. But, in his mind, Jennings’ presence felt completely different. It was a thunderhead of anger and curiosity.

Nero replied quickly, “Actually, yeah. I think I figured out what happened. I’m also pretty sure I know why you can’t do it.”

Jennings’ presence rocked back on its heels in shock. Even his body’s essence field trembled at hearing what Nero had just said.

“Oh? You have, have you? Do tell?” Jennings replied, his presence’s anger evaporating as if it had never been there leaving only his all-encompassing curiosity.

“Well, it’s like this. I was feeling overwhelmed by all the information I was receiving through the ether. And if you remember, my original world didn’t have anything like that there. My frame of reference for what is ‘normal’ is completely different from yours. You see magic and all this kind of stuff as part of reality, while I see it as an addition… or maybe a reinterpretation. You get what I’m saying?” Nero asked.

“I’m following so far,” Jennings’ replied cautiously, eager for Nero to get to his point.

“Ok, so what I’m pretty sure happened was that I temporarily enforced my concept of reality on the surrounding area. The exact mechanics of how I did it, I have no clue about. But, I’m almost positive that’s what happened,” Nero replied happily.

Jennings’ presence felt like it was growing. Nero quickly concluded that the man was likely increasing the amount of brainpower he was allocating toward the conversation they were having.

“I see… Oh, that is interesting. If we consider only the effects of what you did, we can make a few assumptions by contrasting your idea of reality with the standardized models of planar mechanics which over the years have been proven most accurate. You solidified the reality, mimicking a more distinct and non-interpretative material plane. But why then… Wait! Oh, so in a world without essence, materials and bodies are much less malleable and are in fact more self-contained… like eternalized enchantments vs. constructs…” he babbled half to himself and to Nero.

Nero listened to what he was saying, attempting to understand and imagine the man’s perspective.

It was interesting in a way to see how Jennings came at the concept of a more ‘real’ reality from his perspective of everything being a construct created by the world around him. For him, that was just how reality worked. But to Nero, it seemed somewhat backward, although he was somewhat able to see where the old man was coming from.

“But, HOW did you do it? You shouldn’t have the ability to freeze reality in place like that. What you did was similar to what a planar lord could do within their own personal planes. Granted, you only accomplished your feat in an isolated area, but still…” Jennings said, now sounding somewhat worried.

Mentally shrugging, Nero replied, “No idea. I just got fed up with reality no longer making sense and lashed out. I’ve tried doing it again off and on for the past hour, and haven’t figured out it out. Even the memory of what I did is missing when I went and looked for it.”

Concerned, Jennings asked, “Your memory of the event is gone? That’s… but then how are you able to speak about it now?”

Within the confines of their private conversation, Nero’s mental presence shook his head. “No, I still remember it. What I mean is that the ‘experience’ of the event is missing. Do you remember how I mentioned my personal little hallucination I use to go over my memories and grow? Well, whatever I did to cause reality to temporarily become normal… that’s missing. It’s like I either didn’t record it, or it was instantly uploaded into my soul. For that small frame of time, the automatic capture of the essence of the memory didn’t work at all like it normally does,” Nero concluded.

Sounding deep in thought, Jennings replied, “I suppose in a way that tracks with the theory of you temporarily solidifying reality. Even when I try and delve into what happened, I find nothing. It’s as though this infinitesimally small section of the plane became isolated for that brief moment in time. No history of what occurred was recorded, and no aftereffects still linger in the ether for me to interpret. If we take your conclusions as a baseline, then we can infer that what you did wasn’t so much as shut down magic, but instead, you used your presence to reinforce the local definitions of everything within your scope of control.”

Confused, Nero replied, “Isn’t that what I already said?”

Annoyed, Jennings replied, “No, it’s not. We’ve long since believed that higher tiers of existence are merely stronger realities that have more solidified planes. The idea came from the understanding that the higher level you are, the more solid your identity becomes. When you tier up to level one hundred, you are then logically forced into a different reality. If you haven’t sufficiently prepared for the process, you become ripped apart. That’s why gods exist as higher lifeforms restricted to their planes which they build themselves. It gets a little complicated, but I’ve come to realize that you prefer generalizations over accuracy.”

Nero mentally smirked before replying, “And I appreciate that… You know, the more I learn about this plane, the more I understand why you’ve been so hesitant to explain anything to me. A lot of what I’ve accomplished has been due to my unbiased investigations into how everything works here.”

“I’m glad you’re finally beginning to see reason,” Jennings replied.

Before Jennings could say anything else, Nero went off on a rant. “I mean, I get it now, or at least I think I do. I’ve been looking at everything all wrong. You and Nick have been going on and on about science and how things work. Hell, there are Research Institutes funded by the government entirely dedicated to discovering how essence shapes reality. But, I was misunderstanding the fundamental truth of this world… it’s all relative. Magic is just the medium people use to affect reality. It’s not nearly as codified as I thought it was. I’ve watched multiple people cast the same light spell, and each one of them doing it differently. Sure, there are similarities, but the fact that there are any differences at all should have told me something,” he said with some underlying anger slipping through.

Interested, Jennings asked, “And what exactly should that have told you?”

Turning away from his meal and allowing the entirety of his mind to focus on the conversation, Nero met Jennings’ eyes and replied, “It should have told me that none of you have any clue what you’re talking about. In a world with magic, the concept of a unified theory of science isn’t possible. There is no ‘this is how it works’, or ‘this is the way it is’. Someone sufficiently strong would be able to rewrite reality however the hell they wanted. Honestly, have you ever considered how crazy it is that you have an identity panel imprinted into your very being? Haven’t you ever wondered if it was placed there by someone? It’s a common trope in every fiction I’ve ever read. And the fact that I’ve been ignoring that pisses me off more than someone putting mayonnaise on my hot dog.”

Offended, Jennings replied, “Of course we’ve considered that! But to say that science is pointless is ridiculous. There are fundamental truths of reality that can be explored and proven, and to discount that entire concept as an ‘up to interpretation’ is insulting.”

Shrugging of Jennings’ expected and likely justified anger at what he’d said, Nero replied, “Sure, man. You keep doing you. But keep in mind, aside from proving that the world we see around us is nothing more than a construct built by what the will of the world expects to be here… science here is kind of pointless. At best, I’d call ‘science’ here the arrangement of best practices rather than discoveries. Hell, even your books say that each person has to interpret the spell forms in their own way for them to work. That right there is proof that I’m right.”

Jennings, being caught in a logical recursion loop, sat silently in thought as he tried to work through what Nero had just said.

Smiling to himself, Nero replaced his empty plate with a fresh one from his inventory and returned to his meal. Meanwhile, Angelton had stood up and taken over the debrief from his perspective, narrating his view of how the battle for the portal had progressed.

*Chapter 306 - Magic vs. Science

*Spoiler - The term models in science is interesting.  Most of what 'scientists' have worked out is just an interpretation of how reality works.  It's actually kind of fun to think about how there are multiple ways to solve various problems.  You can track the final speed of a ball rolling down a hill by working with calculations of force, or you could solve for potential vs. kinetic energy conversions.  Both will result in you finding the same result.  Reality itself doesn't care how you find the answer, the ball itself will still keep rolling.  Without a true unified theory, every type of science is just an inaccurate model used to help us understand what we're seeing.