247, 1/2, Debby?Jane

Debby left her father’s office in House Benevolence and walked down the white, eternal stonewood hallway like a woman without a future, because that’s the sort of future she had right now. Nothing. Her family wouldn’t remember her once she started poking around at this Red Static thing too much. Once she got deep enough into this anti-meme mystery shit—

Debby tried to keep her anger in check as she thought about what came next.

No one would know what she did if she failed.

Something worse might happen than memory wipes and other magics if she succeeded.

But she would try to succeed, no matter what it cost her.

Debby had no way to know how this would play out, but it felt like it would play out poorly. All she had were the 76 experiments she had done with her family and with others in the last 3 weeks, 4 days, 7 hours and 38 minutes, since she started wearing the Bracelet of Memory full time. It had been a trial.

All those arguments half-started and half-finished with her sisters, only to watch them go side-eyed and dismissive, and sometimes walking away from conversations halfway through, like they didn’t even know Debby had been talking to them, which is exactly what had happened. They didn’t know. The Red Static intervened and stole that from them.

All those arguments with her father showed that he seemed to be the only one capable of understanding her without needing to be told the whole story, but even he wasn’t immune to this Red Static. All of those talks with Fallopolis and Goldie and even Fairy Moon… Talking with the first two had ended the same way, which Debby didn’t want to deal with Melemizargo talking to her again, not this very moment. Talking with Fairy Moon had caused the fairy to rage, to try and kill Debby, so Debby needed to tell Fairy Moon a whole lot more, abandoning the experiment just so that the anti-meme could erase Fairy Moon’s memory of Debby for her, to end that threat before it could get worse. It had worked.

But Debby didn’t do experiments with powerful people anymore.

She had tried talking to the gods three separate times. Rozeta, Phagar, and then Melemizargo one final time. Melemizargo wasn’t someone she wanted to deal with at the moment. As for Rozeta, Rozeta’s blue boxes and the visit to a Registrar had seemed like a win, but then she walked out of the office, on a mission to talk to her father, but her father had had no idea what she was talking about, and a revisit to the Registrar had been an exact same repeat of the previous conversation; all hopes and sounds-like-this-could-work, and then nothing, like she simply hadn’t spoken to Rozeta at all. Phagar’s people and his church were simply empty every time Debby came around, the divinity in the air seeming non-existent. She pursued Phagar until a replica of herself stepped out of the air, and told her that he would not help her kill herself. Debby had explained that she wasn’t there for that, and that she wasn’t that much of a battle junkie, and every attempt at talking about the Red Sparks hit a wall of misunderstanding. Phagar just didn’t hear what he wasn’t capable of hearing.

And so Debby had abandoned those pursuits.

Debby knew what she needed to do, and she would, but not right now—

—Oh gods. Why was she thinking about everything again? She knew why. The Bracelet made her think of everything all the time—

—because everything was going to go away or change, and she wasn’t ready for that right now. Her home in Adventurer City, which wasn’t really hers anyway. The people she knew down there, and everywhere else; Sitnakov, and Priest Andri, her friends at Adventurer city, Hizogard, Danaro, Lyrical…

Sure, she wasn’t the original Jane, and she had decided that if she should wake up and not be Jane that she would get over that loss of history, but this time was different. This time she wouldn’t be able to pretend to have a connection to her previous life. This time was different.

Because all of that would vanish.

Debby had done tests. She knew what she had signed up for when she went into her father’s office and finally succeeded in telling him something. For the last three weeks, since before they had spoken about Avandrasolaro and then through the angel’s [Reincarnation] and subsequent installment at the island next to Dungeon Island, Debby had worn the Bracelet of Memory. Because of this Mind Magic artifact, she could remember what no one else could. She could see the Red Static. She could—

—Couldn’t get away from the static. She couldn’t get away from her own thoughts. She used to be a person of action, but now she was a thinker, locked to the past, thinking about the salad she had four years, five months, three days, seven hours, twenty four minutes, three seconds ago, with that guy who had the zit on his left ear and—

—ask people about it.

And sometimes people forgot who she was until enough evidence piled up about who she was and—

Zolan was in the hallway, her father’s Castellan of House Benevolence, and he looked at Debby like she was a person out of place. Because that’s what he was seeing, no doubt. The Red Crackles, like floating snow, floated around the Bracelet around Debby’s arm, and around her head, attaching her to everyone who saw her or thought of her or—

—Focus, Debby. Focus. Here. In this moment. Focus.

The Red Crackles lingered upon Zolan.

They were everywhere.

They increased when Debby pursued the truth, and decreased when she stayed away, and she had pursued the truth rather strongly back there.

“Pardon me, young lady, but I don’t believe that you shou—” Zolan was working some magic internally, no doubt. Book Magic, probably. It was one of the few things that could counter the Red Snow, but that took a lot of time and failed anyway most of the time. And yep, Zolan fired up his memory banks like a proper Book Mage and looked at Debby again. “Ah. Apologies, Debby. I must have thought you were someone else.”

To play along with the misattribution of Zolan’s forgetfulness was to disperse the Red Snow upon the man, and clear up his life, to allow him to remember more of what he should remember.

To say something like ‘you got some anti-meme magic on you, eh?’ would instantly antagonize that anti-memory magic, causing even more memory and time loss, among other problems. Debby was rather sure that she had caused her father to miss a good ten days of existence in the last 3 weeks, ever since she tried to get him to understand. That was one of the reasons she had to leave. She was ruining his and everyone else’s lives, even without them knowing.

So Debby said, “It’s the red hair, I’m sure. I’m thinking of changing it to something else.”

Zolan accepted Debby’s allowance of the social faux pas. “A change is good sometimes.” He wasn’t even aware that the Red Static around him was vanishing with every word, as he asked, “Do you know which resource your father is going after next? I would like to plan around that, if I could.”

“I think it’s the Life Seed for Tiktik and Fangorl, but don’t quote me on that.” Debby said, “Something about helping the wild parts of Quintlan be healthier, with fewer slimes and such. Trying to restore proper ecosystems.”

Zolan went, “Ah! Well that is as good a choice as any…”

Zolan said a few more small words and Debby reciprocated, as one does with people who are not quite friends, but who are very much still important people who you plan on seeing again and again, here and there, if fate would allow.

—Fate might not allow—

The Red lingered slightly, but it would vanish in the next few hours, or however long it took. The only reason it was there at all was because Debby couldn’t help but mentally notice the Red in the corners of her eyes, and in her mana sense. Once she moved on, that Red Static would vanish completely, to fade back into the background, unseen and unfelt until it recognized the information it had to censor. It was always active around her now, though.

Like she was an infection the red snow was trying to fight off.

If she didn’t poke at the Static, then the infection-response lessened—

—and she wasn’t so backed up in memory—

—But she was going to poke at the red static pretty hard.

Debby moved on, and wondered how long it would take for people here to forget her. Three days? She had pursued this Red lead for one day and came back to find no one had remembered her until she reminded them, and then their memories kicked in. She had done that twice more, but the fourth time she had done that she had stayed away for a day and a half, looking for red static answers, and it had taken her a full hour to remind people who she was.

Her father had always been first, and then, like light spreading, others remembered her…

Debby stepped out of the hallways of her father’s offices, into the main hallways of House Benevolence. The place was looking rather great these days. People were everywhere, going about important business. There were transportation deals between men in suits and magitech industry talks between mages wearing robes. Women talked with other women at a table down on the main food court floor, with a platter of 8-Star food between and—

—an assortment of books fighting each other for space on the table, as the women spoke of authors they wanted to commission and stories they loved. It was a book club that was actually quite famous in certain circles of the world, and which Jane-Debby had heard about some other time and now she was looking at them and Remembering—

—for they determined who was the next big author in the industry.

Debby sighed a little as her brain practically overheated as she remembered every single book that was on that table, and how she had read three of them. A headache loomed, and Debby knew she shouldn’t have walked this way to get out of House Benevolence, but she had wanted to walk this way. To see, once more.

The Bracelet of Memory did exactly as Poi said it did, but it was worse than ‘not being able to forget’. That was such a simple way to describe what this thing did to her that in its simpleness, it was wro—

—Jane-Debby sat upon a couch in her offices of Adventurer City, thumbing through the book in her hands, feeling excited for the next page, making herself not use her mana sense and Book Magic to read the whole damned thing at once—

Debby was simultaneously there, in the past, and here, in the present, making her way through House Benevolence’s main atrium. She was also in 1831 other parts of her life, remembering all the faces around her as she saw them and the creases in coats and the way that old guy over there was hobbling because he had an old scar acting up and there was [Reincarnation] paperwork in his coat—

Debby breathed.

She remembered everything.

She was simultaneously scattered across 1907 timelines now, with only this timeline here moving under her own power. Everything else was a memory. Nothing was able to be affected, except her feet in front of each other. She moved as best she could.

Debby put one foot in front of the other, told a concerned guard that she was fine, and then told that same guard that same statement another 47 times in her memory as she walked out of House Benevolence…

And then her mind reached a breaking point, as it always did—

—Scattering. Breaking. Harming and healing. Cracks faded and wholeness returned, but cracks reappeared, ready to open up once aga—

—She cackled a laugh, and memory faded. Timelines set aside until she needed to pick them up again, blood freely flowing from her nose, eyes, ears, and all the rest of her body. Blood seeped up from her very skin, like sweat. Her internals were riddled with red static, but it was passing, and Debby remained.

She was not dead yet, and a bit of total body trauma would not kill her. Her core was intact. Red Static invaded her soul, trying to tear her apart from the inside because she knew too much and it could attack her through that knowledge, but she remained. A little bit of soul trauma was nothing right now. She wiped away the blood and [Cleanse] and Healing Magic took care of the rest.

Red static retreated, soaking into her brain and into the flesh of her wrist, but the Bracelet remained, ensuring none of that power soaked too deeply. It was present, but it was not affecting her.

Another thread of thought picked up, though.

Mind Mages couldn’t read her thoughts right now, which was a bit of a problem.

Debby stood under the sun once again. The congested pathways of House Benevolence were absolutely filled with people and some of them were Mind Mages, if those tendrils coming off of their heads were any indication. Debby watched as a Mind Mage woman walked by, guiding her child by the hand into House Benevolence, talking about ‘going to see daddy at the bakery’. Both the woman and little boy had tendrils coming off of their head, and both of them touched Debby, because Mind Mages did that instinctively. They certainly didn’t mean anything by it.

Like a connected circuit, both mother and boy touched Debby’s mind, and Red spread.

You’d think getting such an obvious mental attack would set them off, but it was the opposite. Both mother and child instantly yanked their tendrils back, both of them acting a bit dazed, the woman faltering and the boy almost stumbling, but then the infection settled down. They were past Debby. They went about their business like nothing happened at all, not even acknowledging that Debby existed.

Which was a problem sometimes.

Mind Mages instinctively ignored Debby when she was deep in the Red. Poi completely ignored her until her Static level was very low, and then suddenly she became a visible, recognizable person again, and Poi recalled all he knew of her, like she had always been there. Once, he had forgotten to make dinner for 9, but then he remembered and Erick solved the problem with [Duplicate], so there was no problem at all.

Luckily, Mind Mages weren’t prone to altering the surface of the world as her father was sometimes, otherwise Debby might have found herself in dangerous situations. There was a reason [Invisibility] was outlawed in most societies, and not just because it could easily be abused. It only took one person running out into a busy road while invisible to make everyone realize the other reason why [Invisibility] was bad. Debby had learned that lesson herself, but not through this Static mess or through [Invisibility], but through [Polymorph], back when she was calling herself Jane—

Debby moved on.

As soon as she got away from the Mind Mages and this anti-meme was allowed to settle down, it would settle down. And then Debby could get on with the search once again.

Debby walked down the street toward the Gate Network, thinking about what came next.

For all purposes, ‘Debby’ would vanish to the world—

—Godsdammit. Stop overthinking—

The ground under her feet would not vanish, though. The walls of House Benevolence would remain. The sky above, with its crisscrossing lines of light and dense node network would remain. The world would go on.

But Debby would become a piece removed.

Hopefully this Worldly Path she was on would actually help her with this Quest. It was Fate Magic, right? All the others were on the Worldly Path, too, because Jane had originally thought that Fate could only help this situation, and now there were 6 ‘Janes’ on the Worldly Path, and all of them had begun to differentiate—

—Abigail was probably on the Path to become a mother; a part of Jane which wanted children and love, above all else. But how could she find love when her father was the practical king of the world? Suitors and boyfriends would always be suspect.

Beth was on the Path of exploration; a part of Jane which Jane had mostly abandoned, because what else was there left to explore on Veird except for nuances of space and time. Apparently Beth didn’t feel that way, because she loved delving perhaps more than any of the rest of them. There were always new places to explore in the Dark.

Candice was on the Path of murder; a part of Jane which Jane had tempered and held in check. But Candice was not Jane, and Candice loved ripping and tearing and giving into that impetus to annihilate for the good of them all. At least she was capable of directing herself properly. Debby looked at Candice these days like she was a little bit crazy for her antics, like when she tried to slurp down the insides of a monster while she clung hard to the monster’s back, her fangs deep inside the thrashing beast.

Emily was on the Path of governance; a part of Jane that wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. All the rest of Jane’s parts had been embarrassed that Emily was willing to actually go that way, for following their father was like accepting his help… But Debby also wanted a dick, and that was weird, too, so she could do what she wanted, just like the rest of them.

Jane was on the Path of Balance, or whatever that meant. She would go back to Adventurer City after this was over, if she survived. Whatever the case, all of them had made a pact behind her back to make sure that Jane survived this, if only to keep their father not-insane and happy—

Debby was on the Path toward Magic, and she loved it. But it had brought her here. It had brought this Bracelet onto her wrist. It had brought this Static to her eyes and to her thoughts. She remembered too much. She saw too much. She remembered nothing, under a tide of time.

She did what she had to do.

Debby walked into the international Gate checkpoint, and spied upon the world.

Ten Gates lay before her, beyond a line that was moving fast, for this close to House Benevolence they had the absolute best of the best guarding and sorting this traffic. Debby had her little Delver’s Badge under her shirt, and the people on duty mana sensed that, and so the ground under her feet turned green with wardlight, just like it turned green under all the others walking by—

One guy’s feet turned red. Some guards asked him to step out of line and he walked out of line just fine, but looking dejected. His papers weren’t good enough, or something.

Debby continued forward, her eyes open toward the Gates ahead.

She did not head back to Dungeon Island.

She went elsewhere.

– – – –

She had to get away from it all before she took the next step of her Path, and so she had chosen here.

A desolate mountaintop on an island in Archipelago Nergal, 10,000 kilometers removed from House Benevolence.

It was a normal sort of place, rocky and green, while all the land beyond the mountain was tropical forest and deep, white beaches. There were monsters, of course. Most of the big ones were inside the dungeons of the island, while the smaller, more opportunistic monsters crawled here and there, trying to eat each other. They didn’t come up the mountain, though. Stone elementals crushed everything up here, while Air elementals tossed living things off of cliffs, to have them fall to their deaths.

Debby had cleared out a small part of the mountain top for herself. It was just her, the sun overhead, and the shadows among the rocks. She called out to those shadows.

“Hello, Melemizargo. I’d like to talk now.”

The shadows whirled and stood up. The Dragon God of Magic was not a dragon right now; he was just a shadow of himself, floating in the air like a particularly short winged lizard. He still gave off an air of menace.

“Hello, Debby. Ready to be a Paladin, like you always wanted?”

His tone was light. His words were not.

“I would ask you, please, to lay out the terms once again.”

Debby recalled perfectly the terms, but she was in 758 different times and spaces right now, and her mind could only hold so much. She was struggling.

“Prudent.”

Melemizargo’s word echoed in the sky—

And suddenly Debby was only here, only now, grounded in this time and this place.

Melemizargo’s shadow took on a deeper quality as the blue sky above turned dimmer, the sun vanishing behind nothing at all. Shadows prowled the land, and Melemizargo’s shadow became more than that. He was still not fully in this place, but he was closer.

“The terms are thus: I grant you the power to See, and you use your own power to Change The World How I Desire Until I Am Done With You. My primary Desire is in the form of a Quest for you to find the causes of the Red Static, and then report them to me. If that Quest should bring you back to Erick Flatt and Ascendant Mountain and the Sundering Search, then so be it, but I am not sure it will.

“If you choose to do this, I will charge you with Fate Most Demanding. I will gift unto you the power to be Unseen and Unknown and Untouched by all Magic and Masteries aside from those you choose for yourself, or those you fail to use my protection adequately against. You will never again gain a reprieve from the pain of that Bracelet, for it will forever become a part of you. But you will gain power to stabilize yourself when you are wearing it, as I am stabilizing you right now.

“I will See through your eyes at my whim.

“I will hear what you hear. Sense what you sense. Know what you know.

“You will strike with the power of My Claws.

“You will mold possibilities with the power of My Words.

“The Script will be lost to you, but don’t expect Rozeta to come calling, for you are already half-Unknown to her and all others through the machinations of this Red Static. You will become isolated until the time that you find out what is causing this Red Static, or else you will die trying to discover the cause.

“I will demand things of you, Debby, but nothing that you wouldn’t be comfortable with doing if I explained my reasonings well enough. However! I will not always explain myself, and you must follow through regardless. Failure in my demands might be catastrophic.”

Melemizargo stood resplendent and Dark, his body half shadow and all menace, hanging in the sky in front of Debby like a dream of impending death sized to the mountain underneath Debby’s feet. He leaned down, his white fangs shining in the Dark, like his eyes, like his claws, like the white-inferno tunnel leading down into that endless maw.

“If you disobey enough, or at times when I most deem it necessary, I will take control of you myself, and you will become a watcher of your life until I decide you have learned your lesson.” He pulled back, and his voice was softer, “I do not desire to hurt you, but you must understand that this is a serious issue, Debby Flatt. The Red Static must either be eliminated or solved for. Either outcome is good enough. Do that, and your Quest will be over. If you should succeed, I will leave you with all the power I will grant you, and none of the restrictions.”

Debby hadn’t been able to think clearly whenever she wore the Bracelet, but she thought clearly now.

“I have questions.”

“I have patience for some questions.”

“Are you causing the Red Static?”

“No, I am not,” Melemizargo said, narrowing his eyes and moving closer. “Don’t be impertinent.” He backed up a fraction, but Debby still felt his hot breath upon her face as he said, “To answer a few other of your questions before you get rude about them:

“I am not going to ask you to harm the people you love or anyone else that doesn’t deserve it. I am not going to ask you to sabotage anything that does not deserve it. I and the people I have influence over are not going to destroy this world or any other… Unless it needs it, but certainly not without finding homes and security for all these people and other living things that exist here before such destruction should occur.” He stared again. “And that is the extent of my promises to you. Keep in mind, Debby, that I wish this to be a fruitful joining, and that I value your father’s presence much too much to put you into too much danger. But the danger you get into yourself is not something I will be able to fully protect against.

“Make your choice.”

Debby had choices; many of them, in fact.

She made what she thought was the best one.

Debby took a knee, bowed her head, and said the words that Melemizargo had asked her to say the last time she had been in this position, “I pledge my life and my soul to the Dark. May my loyalty be rewarded, and may I walk forever in your welcoming shadow.”

“I accept your pledge.”

Darkness descended.

– – – –

The sky was a tangle of tendrils and white eyes.

Debby-Jane stood upon a black field of Everything.

She was nude, save for a black mark upon her left wrist like an oily shadow. That flickering shadow held silver letters that briefly appeared and then vanished, spelling out a power of Memory, vibrating through the cosmos, touching upon something much greater than itself, and then solidifying down into a not-simple Bracelet—

A woman stood in front of Jane-Debby. She had a black shadow on her right wrist. It was a mirror to Jane’s own oily shadow. The woman was not a mirror to Jane at all. She was pale blue. She was incani, or maybe demi. She was also red and violet and green and yellow and orange and the simple color of a person, all those other colors spreading out to the left and right.

She held out her hands, cupped and waiting for Jane’s own.

Jane grasped those hands and fractured into a thousand versions of herself. She was Abigail, Beth, Candice, Debby, Emily, and a hundred other names never chosen. She was a man, she was a woman. She spread out left and right in countless colors.

And she was also just Jane.

The other woman was just herself; just a pale blue incani, with a fading smile.

She let go.

– – – –

Jane woke up under the bright sun, breathing deep, prismatic light effervescing away from her and her core, her entire body already disconnected from the Script in a way she was intimately familiar with. But this time was different. This time… There was no going back. She couldn’t bring up a Script interface, and she couldn’t change anything about her in that normal way. Maybe a properly-made dungeon could do it, but no. This was her life now…

All strings except Melemizargo’s had been removed.

And she felt pretty damned good about that.

Her mind was clear for the first time since she put on the Bracelet. Everything was still in deep focus, and Jane felt that she would remember a lot about a lot if she wanted to take the plunge over that cliff, but here she was, stabilized at the top of the mountain, overlooking it all instead of drowning in memories and her past.

She was still physically on top of a mountain, too; the same mountain where she had started talking to Melemizargo. With open eyes she faced a bright sky, and she… She felt different. She had been Debby and now… She was just herself. Debby was just a persona she had been wearing for a while, and now Debby was gone. She was ‘just Jane’ again. And that felt great. No need to hide herself anymore, to pretend not to be Jane because she was, and had always been, Jane.

A Jane of a different color, but not really.

Jane sat up.

Disconnecting from the Script had some side effects. All of this had some side effects. But the disconnection was the most noticeable.

Prismatic light flowed away from Jane’s skin like a thick fog, pushing away at the Red Static still lingering in the air, still trying to find purchase. Well then.

That was a waste of mana. With practiced control, Jane pulled her mana into herself, and began filling up her core with mana, ready to be used to cast her magic. As the Red Sparks settled down onto her skin and her body, they began to dissipate instead of latch on…

Jane wasn’t quite sure what was going on there, as she watched the sparks with her mana sense and her eyes turned inward. The controlled mana in her body seemed to be tricking the red infection somehow, and within minutes, the Sparks were gone.

Huh.

Anyway. Jane controlled her mana to refill her core instead of spilling everywhere, because she would have to be conservative with her mana from now on. No longer would the Script supply her with endless regen based on her ‘Focus’ stat. No, only her natural production mattered, along with whatever mana she could steal from the cores of others, eating them as would a Shade or shadeling to restore their mana.

At 550,000 mana per day, though, she was probably good for normal expenditures of power, especially when she wove Elemental Mystical into her magic, to drop the 250 mana cost of a full-body [Polymorph] down to something like 50 mana. And that’s not even taking into account whatever powers Melemizargo had given her.

One of those powers was clear from looking at her left wrist.

The Bracelet had been transformed. What was once a shackle of black, rusted metal, with tiny silver inlays that had been scratched to hell, was now a black ring tattoo of an adamantium bangle. Tiny silver writing held inside that blackness, inside a diamond of silver something on the top center of the tattoo, but it was too thin and broken for anyone to read. Jane knew what it said anyway.

‘REMEMBER’.

Well she certainly remembered, alright.

Time to try out some magic.

Jane focused on her hand and tried a partial-[Polymo—

Claws appeared in the place of her final joints, her hand becoming like that of a dragonkin with especially large claws, each of those claws shiny black while the skin on her fingers grew black scales. Jane’s eyes were a little wide at that. It had been an easier transformation than she was used to. It had been less like she had molded her flesh into something new and more…

“More like I pulled possibility from the side, into this reality— oh, wow. Okay,” she said to herself, gasping a little bit at the end as she fully realized what she was doing.

Jane had made a deep study of her father’s recent multiversal theories of magic, but she hadn’t truly gotten it until that moment. It was like she had been adding 2 + 2 into 4 her whole life just because she had been told that it worked that way, but she didn’t understand it until now. It was simple, truly. All magic was simple. All magic was just pulling possibilities from Elsewhere into Here.

“Like feeling infinity between 0 and 1 and picking out the exact right number to solve for reality.”

“That’s a more apt expression of magic than the first. Really now. 2+2?”

Jane winced. “Ah. Are you just… There now?”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Melemizargo was not around at all. Not visually. Not within Jane’s mana sense. But she had gained a new sense; she could feel his presence there at her back, watching over her, his clawed hands upon her shoulders like a phantom feeling.

“Correct. I’ll mostly leave you alone, of course, for that is how Fate Magic works best, and you are on the Worldly Path. As time moves on, and your scope of Sight increases and you learn more of your powers, you will learn all that I cannot teach you directly. To that end, you will move among the mortals and among the important places of this world, and you will discover the cause of this Red Static.”

At the naming of the enemy, the enemy appeared like 1492 gnats of various size and ferocity, buzzing at Jane and then passing her by to vanish back into the ether.

… Jane was thrilled and surprised that they didn’t stick around, that they had slipped past her that easily. It got a lot harder to think when they lodged themselves into her brain. And now that her brain was her own, she had more questions.

“I have a few questions, Melemizargo. Why me?”

Jane knew most of his reasoning, but she wanted to hear those reasonings again, to know if she knew the whole story.

From Melemizargo’s tension on her shoulders and the failure to produce an answer, Jane got the impression that he did not want to interfere too much. He wanted to let Fate take its course and for his personal presence to fade away.

But instead, he spoke,

“I have not chosen you because you are your father’s daughter. All the other Janes are for that, for helping with the Sundering Search. I would have preferred if this arrangement did not happen to you, because your death would be a setback with my dealings with your father. But you are the one who picked up the Bracelet and you stuck with it. That means something, Jane. At its least meaning: you have a resonance with this Red Static mess, and this Red Static is what I believe is the root cause of my previous insanity. Where your resonance started, I do not know. Where that resonance ends, I do not know. But I am glad that it happened with you, because you might actually be able to share and expand on the understanding I already have of this menace. We’re going to find out what all this means, together.”

As Melemizargo spoke, Red Static descended, and Jane was a bit flummoxed by his answer.

“That is not what I expected,” Jane said, waving away the Red Static, and instantly regretting it.

Red sparks stuck to her when she actively touched it. Melemizargo and Jane both watched her right arm, as the Static crawled across her skin. Her own mana, under that skin, eventually dissuaded the Static from sticking around. Like mosquitoes finding prey that had nothing to give them, the little bastards flew away.

“That’s not what I expected either,” Jane said, watching the Static float afar, to vanish into the manasphere.

“It tends to do that, but you were unable to notice it until now. I expect a great deal more revelations like that to take place now that you are actually working with me, and now that you are properly attuned to the Bracelet.”

Jane hummed, not quite satisfied at all with this relationship, and for a lot of different reasons.

“My dear Jane. You are important because of what you have done and where you are going; not because of who you are related to. That fact is rather more a detriment if anything should happen to you. I would have rather someone else gotten the Bracelet, but I will take you for this task, since you are here. Honestly would have preferred you staying with your fathers for the Sundering Search; that’s what our original arrangement became, after all. This Red Static stuff is completely beyond what I expected from you, or from the Sundering Search, though I am glad to see that the two are… Maybe connected. All we have right now is circumstantial evidence to that effect. But I am eager to see what you can do!”

Jane felt her face redden. She got to her feet, her gaze cast wide across the oceanic horizon. “You’ve already got me under your claw; further buttering is nice, but not required.”

“I will do what I want, and you will do what I want, too. There. How about that?”

Jane chuckled. “Much more expected.”

“Take some time and get to know yourself outside of the Script, and then go exploring. I’m too tempted to stay and tell you everything I have discovered, but that would influence your Path to the Truth too much, and you might end up not solving any problems at all. We will talk later.”

Melemizargo began to step away—

“Wait. Before you go…”