247, 2/2, Debby?Jane

Once again Jane was at Candlepoint.

The night sky here was filled with the bright lines of the node network while the land itself was brighter still. The shadows ran deeper here than in Storm’s Edge, but the light was brighter, too. It was nice. Jane stepped toward the light-crowned, white mountain that was House Benevolence, at the center of the Gate District, at the center of the world.

She was glad to see that the Red Sparks were not here; not unless she made them appear. She’d try to do less of that, if she could help it. The anti-meme couldn’t read her mind so she didn’t cause any disturbances in that way…

She couldn’t walk openly, though. She had to remain Unseen, Unfelt, Unknown, or else the many Mind Mages of the House would spontaneously burst into cascades of Red Sparks, spreading the infection far and wide.

No talking to anyone, it seemed, for that would simply be counterproductive. Instead, she would simply be infiltrating one of the highest security areas of the world, and then picking apart their books.

Jane kinda instantly loved the whole idea.

… It was almost embarrassing about how much she realized that she loved this; that something like this, exactly, was all who she had ever wanted to be, back on Earth. Time had changed a lot about a lot, but apparently not that much at all.

“It’s almost like you were Fated to come to Veird.”

“… Fate has nothing to do with my choices in life,” Jane said, knowing she was being needlessly defensive.

“I agree. Take heart that this series of events most certainly did not start with you and your father. This Fate probably tried ten thousand times to get here, but it never passed the major thresholds to get to this point, to survive this long, for Fate is never absolute, though it certainly tries to be; like a fairy that just doesn’t know how to die. Atomic Magic was the only other time we got anywhere near this level of clarity.”

“… That actually does make me feel better.”

“It shouldn’t. It means you and this whole operation could die and be buried in history, and I could go insane again, and Fate would need to try some other time.”

Jane had no response to that.

House Benevolence loomed like a series of domed, white cones, ringed in light. People were everywhere. Security was tight as always, with thick walls of detection and scanning and Book Magic of all sorts layered across every wall and door and walkway. As people passed through those security measures, they sent out tiny pings to the watchtowers and the security rooms. Here and there [Scry] eyes watched it all happen.

And Jane walked through it all; Unseen, Unfelt, Unknown.

“And a bunch of other ‘Un’s, too.”

Melemizargo appeared to be a chatterbox sometimes.

“Fine fine fine. I’m out.”

People accidentally bouncing into Jane were still a problem, of course, so she kept her profile small and agile, making sure not to open any doors that were not being opened by others, and keeping her mana close to her core. She avoided the Mind Mages most of all, for though she was protected by Melemizargo’s magic, his magic was also telling her that those people with thought tendrils coming off of them were the most dangerous to her cover. And yet…

If she got into a real spot of trouble with a Mind Mage she could just allow her Unknown to slip and automatically fill the area with the anti-meme, and give the Mind Mages the slip that way.

… Probably not a good idea to abuse that, though. Too many incidents like that and Jane would poison the area with Red and cause a time reversion that would result in an alteration of the present down some more dangerous path. But what was infiltration without a little bit of danger?

Jane smirked as she slipped through the crowds of people, making her way past guards and through Scanning Magics, deeper and deeper into the secure hallways of House Benevolence.

– – – –

Jane tripped her first failsafe half an hour in, when she tried to look past the security measures and Privacy magic on a filing cabinet inside Enforcement’s headquarters. Since she was unable to Look past the Privacy since the cabinet was closed and Book Magic made everything inside illegible while the cabinet was closed, she had tried to slip into the shadows inside as discreetly as she could.

This set off alarms.

She easily stepped away from that sudden lockdown of the building, but it did have her reconsidering how she went about the search. Getting information from physical sources would be her preferred method, because talking to people would invariably expose them to the anti-meme and herself as a Paladin of Melemizargo, if the people she spoke with knew what to look for. And they would, no doubt, know what to look for.

Perhaps she could try getting Goldie involved?

“I would prefer not to have her involved, for as soon as she is involved, Erick becomes even more suspicious of everything I do, and I don’t want to give the anti-meme that particular ammunition. Besides, you almost had that infiltration; you just failed to properly use the powers I have granted you.”

Solo it is, then…

And shouldn’t you be letting Fate work its course?

If Melemizargo was here, then Fate had less influence over Jane’s timeline, and since Fate was heavily on their side right now—

“Yes yes yes. I’m going now. Pah! Just when it was getting good.”

Melemizargo peeled away from Jane, his pressure vanishing. Again.

Jane got to work.

– – – –

Jane had known that going into this work that it would be work. She had known that she would be prowling through record rooms and pulling apart security codes used in House Benevolence and trying to understand the ordering system that only a few people at the top of the House actually understood and which she very much did not know. And she was prepared for that.

But she had been here three days, with less to show for it than she had hoped, but more to show than she had planned.

It had taken a few hours of watching over Burhendurur and the Office of Enforcement to even begin to understand the record system. Many more hours were spent waiting for other people to access those systems, so she didn’t trigger any Privacy or [Sealed Book] magics. But people came along and looked at records, and Jane watched over their shoulders. Luckily, her Bracelet of Memory was very much in-tune with her desires and she was able to recall everything she snooped on perfectly, without the usual accompanying headache of being split into a hundred different times and places. So she only had to see a piece of information once in order to remember it well.

A day into her investigation and she found her first ‘real lead’ when Burhendurur requested an update on the Storm’s Edge Storm Prophecy. The traffic to Storm’s Edge was growing quite a lot, with many people preparing for the storm, and ‘Vanya’s’ dungeon opening last weekend. Subsequently, the LAGN for Archipelago Nergal was booked to capacity and more. Everyone was either escaping, or hunkering down.

Mostly, the reports were normal.

But Jane felt one thing was more suspicious than most. People from the Wake Up House were headed down, for one reason or another, along with a bunch of known Benevolence dragons. The dragons were theorized to be headed that way to settle in to combat the coming Storm, which was maybe 38-ish days at the earliest. The Wake Up House people were a collection of Avandrasolaro’s people and otherwise, with Avandrasolaro’s people having heard of the Storm Prophecy and having gained the desire to see what that meant, for themselves.

“Of course they immediately ran afoul of the Storm Priestesses,” said the analyst giving the report to Burhendurur. “Most everyone that the priestesses could tag as being allied with House Benevolence in some way got kicked back through the gatehouse. Most of the dragons made it through, though, since they could just go around the Local Area Gate Network and arrive directly. This is all causing a headache for Gatemaster Kiri, in the form of state-level complaints directed at her, since the Wizard is out of office right now.”

Burhendurur hummed as he looked over the paperwork. “Carry on as usual.”

The analyst took his orders and left.

Jane scanned the paperwork, too, wishing she could just tell them what to look out for, but she had already tried leaving a note on Burhendurur’s to check on the ‘skinny red-haired man’, along with times and dates of last known locations. That note ended up crawling with Red Sparks, ignored, and then filed in the round bin with other such uncared-for papers.

But Jane had a good feeling about the Wake Up House and the Benevolent Dragon connections, so she went to that paperwork which her father kept in his personal office.

The ferocity of those defenses near her father’s offices left Jane a little slack-jawed.

When Jane stepped into the hallways that led to ‘the Wizard’s’ secret chambers, it was a lot different looking than the last time she had been here, just a few days ago. Back then the place looked normal. But now, with Melemizargo’s Sight, it looked like a magical fortress of ten-thousand layers of defense, each of them attuned to anyone except for Erick and a few other people. Jane slipped through most of them, not setting off any of them at all, but Melemizargo’s claws caught her before she went through a particularly brilliant-white sheet of power. That had to be Wizardry, enacted there as one more big defense. When had he done that? Maybe when he passed through the place in the last month, or maybe it had always been there and Jane simply hadn’t known, because she had been allowed.

There was a hole carved in the barrier meant for Shades, though. A small spot, to the side, with a darkness to it that was almost like a black infection in the magic.

Jane went through that key-hole sized space, and Melemizargo’s presence left her.

Her father’s private notes were a good place to start, so that is what she did.

Thankfully, all of Erick’s private cabinets had tiny little black ‘keyholes’ carved in all of their wards… Which was quite concerning, actually, but it was what it was. Her father had to know, right?

Right.

But even beyond the Privacys in those filing cabinets, they were written in dense code that Jane would have needed Book Magic to understand, and yet activating Book Magic in this place would get her found out, for sure. She was confident about being able to hide her personal mana signature if she needed, but not the exterior signature of any sort of external Scanning-type spellwork; she couldn’t actually Scan the paperwork at all. She could only Scan her recollection of the paperwork.

… Which turned out to be easier than she imagined it would be.

Still took her two more days to figure that out. In those two days, she saw no fewer than 13 attempts at breaking and entering into this very same office. Each time Goldie stepped out of nowhere and grabbed the perpetrator and hauled them off, and sometimes a lot faster than Jane could even react to knowing there was a perpetrator at all.

Anyway. This had been the right move; coming here to these files.

The Benevolence Dragons were not a lead, but the Wake Up House looked promising. One of the forms of a man from there had a basic description of ‘gangly, male, average, skinny, red hair, red features, eyes like red suns with black spots for pupils’. It didn’t even have any Red Sparks on it though, which meant Jane learned something new about the Red Sparks; they could appear if they wished, but not always when called. They were more than just an antigen-reaction; they were semi-sapient.

Or maybe something like this just fell beyond the notice of the Red Sparks? Maybe.

Whatever the case, the Wake Up House was her next destination.

As Jane extricated herself from House Benevolence and headed toward the Gate to the Wake Up House, thinking about the Red Man, she felt that she had touched upon a memory that she already knew, but which she couldn’t quite place. She knew who the Red Spark guy was, didn’t she? She felt that she did, and because she didn’t, that pissed her off a lot.

It seemed like her body and mind and magic needed a lot longer to fight off the infection…

Jane got a sudden hankering for some more good food, but of the junk variety. She had eaten at House Benevolence for the last few days, sneaking food and causing no end to people wondering where supplies were going. Truly, the culinary experience at the House was not to be denied, and many people came here from all over the world just to sample all the various eateries in the place.

But Jane wanted junk food.

She stopped by Spur and marveled at how nice the place had grown in the last decade. She barely visited this place at all… So why had she gotten the sudden urge to come here? Well. Maybe she just wanted a proper meat sandwich? Whatever the case, she went to ‘Meat! Bread! Cheese!’ to get one of those, and a bunch of fries. The line was out the door at this time of day, so she… She really, really wanted to skip the line. So she did.

She stole someone’s order right out from under their noses and left them gold in return.

There was some anger there at the missing food, just as there had been some anger at the eateries of House Benevolence, but gold soothed most hurts of that nature, and it wasn’t like she could show herself in public anymore. She was a shadow, now, living on the edge of reality.

She didn’t even want to try showing herself.

As she ate her meal in private, Jane realized she had gone to ‘Meat! Bread! Cheese!’ because when she faced the Moon Reachers that first time she had ended up at that very same restaurant, and the people there had given her a great meal, and some warmth of civilization. With a casual glance back toward that restaurant, she saw the original owners, Julli and Rendar Skytouch, still working the register and the line as they had all those years ago. Their restaurant was pretty damned famous, though, so they had other people catching money, slinging meat, and frying fries. The two dragonkin, one blue, the other red, seemed to have a young purplescale working the register right now, and the family resemblance was uncanny.

Jane smiled a whole lot as she finished her sandwich. It was a good sandwich.

– – – –

Jane wandered through the Wake Up House, looking for any signs of the Red Man, but, of course, she found none.

Until she stopped by the Revived Gallery.

It was the place where people sometimes displayed the artwork they made while they were coming to terms or reveling in their new body, and what that all meant to them. The gallery itself was perfectly normal; a bunch of paintings on the walls with some metal or clay sculptures on plinths. People painted in all sorts of colors, and some of it seemed professional, or semi professional. Some of it was less professional, with paint applied to canvas through the use of the feathers of one’s new harpy body, or with the horns of new incani, or with the giant fingers of orcols. Painting with new fingers was a popular method of impressionist style painting that was actually catching on in a lot of the world. Jane had talked to her father about that in a sarcastic manner once or twice, in an ‘are you happy you’ve regressed society from painting with brushes and getting actual style out of their work, to using their fingers’, sort of way. Her father had happily replied, ‘Just be glad I stopped them from painting with their genitals’.

Every painting in the Revived Gallery was a work of newfound joy, which was the general theme of the Wake Up House, and this whole artistic style.

But one painting stood out to Jane. It probably didn’t stand out to anyone else.

It was a red painting that was done with brushstrokes, and it wasn’t lit by any of the spotlights. In an orderly sort of way, paintings hung on walls every meter or so, each of them lit with their own private wardlight. But this red painting was between wardlights, crammed between smaller paintings just so it could exist on the wall at all, as though it had been put there as a last ditch effort to simply do what everyone else was doing, and yet which had been denied to the painter.

Which is probably exactly what had happened. Probably not out of malice, though.

But did the painter feel that way? Hard to say.

It was a sunset painted in red. All reds. No other colors. It would have been an odd choice if there weren’t other paintings in the single-color style here and there in other parts of the gallery, and even in this very same gallery.

But this one had Red Sparks crowding the sun in the sunset.

It was as though someone had stuck a spot of red light in the middle of a darkened wall, and then surrounded that darkness with shades of red. Dangerous red, too. Not normal red. That tree looked like it was made of flesh, with veins poking in and out of heavy red paint. That ground looked like it was made of dried gore that cracked in the sunlight. Red lightning flickered in the sky of the painting, crawling between mounds of red clouds like the painting was a hole into another world, and the clouds were large enough for lightning to truly play upon.

Jane focused on the sun.

The sun was a crowd of Red Sparks. Crawling. Feasting like a tiny carpet of ants.

Melemizargo’s claws wrapped around her shoulders, his presence heavy behind her as she read the name on the artist’s signature, which did not look like an artist’s signature at all. It was not stylistic. The signature was the simple writing of a name, in red; blocky and bold.

Jane knew that name. Why had she not recognized the Red Man?

Why did she not know who Oozy was?

Because she knew him. She knew of Oozy Stormcaller. She had heard her father talk about the last scion of the Stormcallers of Storm’s Edge and how the Regency was operating just fine without a king, and how Oozy did not want to be a king. She had even seen him… Recently. Hadn’t she?

Had she? No. Jane touched her head as she tried to think. To REMEMBER. She had been at the dungeon every time her father had gone to this very same Wake Up House after they started pulling people from the Dark. And yet, she remembered being with him at least once, coming to this place when he brought the people from the Censer to the Red Wing.

But no. Edward had gone every time with her father, hadn’t he? He had been Jane’s repro who had decided to be a man, because everyone desired to try out the other sex at least once, right? And Jane was all about polymorphing anyway, so Edward had… wanted to see how other people transitioned…

What…

What…

She had two sets of memories?

She was Jane and she was… Also Jane?

“What the fuck?”

In a fury born from rapid anger, without an outlet, Jane slapped the painting to the ground, her hand turning into a giant black claw and then turning back to red-nailed—

The red painting crashed to the ground, partially broken.

Red Sparks exploded out in every direction like an ephemeral bomb going off, touching nothing and yet hitting everything. Jane held onto herself, and she had no idea why—

And then she gazed upon the painting on the ground, flakes of red having fallen off from the thick-painted ground where the signature had been, the name disturbed and unreadable, and the Sparks trying to crawl back into position, back onto the sun—

Jane felt her heart still and Melemizargo’s claws dig into her shoulders.

There was another color to the painting.

Black. A single squiggle upon the sun. The entire orb, together, was not the shape of an eye, for that was Jane’s first, largest worry. It was the shape of something hiding below the surface, and only surfacing from the sun in parts, like a leviathan prowling in the depths of—

Red Sparks filled the air, crawling out of every part of reality, clawing towards—

“Run.”

Jane ran.

– – – –

“What the FUCK, Melemizargo?”

“Whatever could you be referring to?” the God of Magic said, playing dumb.

Jane was ten thousand kilometers away from the spilling of Red Sparks, all the way on the endless plains of Nelboor and on the other side of the planet from the sun, before those Red Sparks finally stopped coming after her, and her Unseen, Unsensed, Unknown finally started working as it was supposed to work. She had triggered something hard back there. Even now, if she thought too much about there being something living inside the sun—

Sparks flickered out of the air.

Jane shadowstepped far away from that point, and the Sparks stopped chasing her.

She had no idea how come she hadn’t triggered an [Area Return]. Perhaps because she had run so fast, and not had any more sun-leviathan-shaped thoughts…

Jane rounded on her shoulder-riding voyeur, saying, “You know exactly what the fuck—”

Claws pressed Jane down to the ground and then materialized. Jane could barely turn her head, but she could see the full body of Melemizargo towering over her, his claws ten times the size of her body, holding her down without fully crushing. Melemizargo’s eyes bore down on her, and she stared right back as much as she could from the corner of her own eyes. His jaw opened, and hot breath spilled forth between radiant white teeth.

“A little bit of civility, please. I am trying to think. I am also angry, and I am deflecting with humor instead of answering you like I am some [Book Familiar]—” He stopped. He lifted his claws. He stepped away from Jane. When he started talking again it was much softer. “And to answer the question you have, instead of the ones you should be having, is that you and all the other repros are actually people taken from timelines and realities that don’t exist without us gazing upon them. The reason you remember your time slightly different from the Jane of this reality is that you are from one of those different realities, but until just now, until you fully shed your ‘Debby’ persona, you were still halfway in that other reality. Now you are here, fully.

“Thus, the double memories.

“All shadelings not made from the real soul of a person are exactly that, and you were a ‘shadeling’ until you woke up just now. All repros are alternate selves with different triggering methods for waking up, and one major way to wake up; if they can see the anti-meme. Why do you think I guided Fallopolis and Lapis and others to make the dungeons work how they work? For fun? For ease of dungeon use? I could have done that many other ways, but I wanted to create people who could SEE, and so, here you are, finally able to See.

“Maybe if enough repros suddenly wake all the way, we might be able to overload the anti-meme. Most singular magics have a breaking point, after all.” The Dark Dragon shrugged his wings a little, adding, “But I doubt it would work that way. The Mind Mages never worked out properly.

“Now. Do you need time to process that? Or can we get on with the investigation?”

Jane had slowly reoriented herself to sitting on the ground as she listened. Melemizargo had taken a lay-down, too, shrinking to be less domineering, but he was still giant. Jane stared at him as he spoke. When he finished, Jane said, “I would like a moment.”

Melemizargo nodded.

He stayed right where he was.

Jane thought. First, she noticed how the anti-meme wasn’t coming back, even though Melemizargo was talking about it—

“I had my mind in a hundred different spots but now I am here making us both Unknown.”

“… So I’m from another reality.”

“Not really. But that is the easiest way to explain it. 50% correct.”

“What’s the other 50%?”

“Wizardry. Creation and Paradox, specifically, leaning toward Creation. Paradox with a side of Creation is what your father is doing in the slime dungeon with pulling things from the Dark.”

“… Why do I have memories of a different life from after the split into a dungeon master slime? And not before?”

“Because that particular slice of reality where you come from did not exist prior to that moment of creation. It still doesn’t really exist; you are the only part of that reality that truly exists.”

Jane looked at the black tattoo around her left wrist. “… I was Debby, and then I was pulled from a side reality onto this one.”

“Somewhat correct. You’re both. Like a shadeling waking up, but not quite that either, for I make shadelings from this reality and not a side reality. Shadelings are easy to make whole-cloth when the cloth is already here, but when making a copy of a person then it is best to steal the cloth from realities that don’t exist and then make them whole-cloth from that… Now that I think about it, it’s quite strange that your specific deviation of reality happened after your creation. I would have assumed that it would have occurred before your dungeon slime deviation… Eh! Sometimes these things happen strangely. It is possible that you aren’t even truly aware of how you are deviated from this world’s Jane. I doubt whatever memories you have are the whole story. Wizardry can get very weird, Jane.”

Jane was absolutely sure that she wasn’t understanding a lot of things in all of that, and there were at least one or two logical fallacies within all of Melemizargo’s diatribe. All of that was likely covered by ‘It’s a Paradox’ which was just a variation on ‘A Wizard Did It’. It was not truly satisfying.

“I’m sure I can explain it better for you some other time, Jane,” Melemizargo said, “But I really would like to get to the problem at hand. This Oozy fellow. What he is probably doing to Sininindi must be… I’m not sure. Stopped? Used to expose the problem? … Actually, this break of me explaining the simple things has been good, and I probably need a longer one. I see that now.” He stared off into the distance. “I must decide how to proceed.”

Jane was thankful for that. She also needed a large break to digest whatever had—

“I have decided. We kill him.”

“… Okay.” Jane asked, “Could you maybe reconsider such a drastic move, because murder is hard to come back from, especially when such murder could easily be misconstrued as something else, considering the targets and nearby-targets involved?”

Melemizargo looked like he was about to say something cross. But then he mellowed for a moment. “We likely do have time to make better decisions, if that Prophesied Storm is any indication… And murder is not my preferred method of solving things. This is true. This damned anti-meme would probably cause a large problem if we attacked it directly…” He looked away. “It has done that before.” He fell silent.

Jane wondered exactly how many times the God of Magic had been thought of as insane, when really he was just furious and caged, and no one else could see the cage.

Melemizargo stared at the distance, saying, “More times than I wish to count… But I was also insane for a great deal of the last 1451 years. That fact doesn’t vanish just because now you know some of the truth, whatever that ‘truth’ might be.” He stared at the night sky for a long moment, and then he looked back down at Jane. “I’ve decided. We’re killing him.”

“Can we please look for other targets? That guy might not be the only one.”

“I have already looked. He is the only one.”

Jane kept her voice even as she said, “If you were capable of seeing everyone that was so afflicted like that man, then why am I here?”

“To give me deniability for killing the man you have discovered, and to help me See…” Melemizargo frowned. “Maybe you have a small point.”

“…”

“Very small.”

“Please let me try to talk to my father, to get him to intercede, and to that end, I request a week of preparation, to try and figure out how to speak to him with this new clear mind of mine.”

“… You have one chance, and when he cannot understand you at all… I want to tell you to execute that carrier of the Red Sparks, but in truth, we likely should go looking for more people like him. Maybe there are connections out there I am missing.”

“Thank you.”

– – – –

Jane’s experiments with talking to people about the Red Sparks and about Oozy involved those who were not crucial to anything she was doing, for she did not want to potentially mess up later, very important conversations with her father, who would surely be checking up on everything she said after she gave her report…

If he could even remember her.

Hmm.

Melemizargo was not happy with the delay, but he still let her delay, explore, and refine her new powers. It wasn’t dealing with the known problem, which is what he wanted, but it was investigating for other people like Oozy, which he begrudgingly accepted as probably necessary.

For her first action, Jane spoke with people from Clan Star Song in the Songli Highlands, with Patriarch Xue, who acted as a good intermediary between her and the Mind Mages and any mental threats in the area. After a few tries, a few failures, and a need to circle back the next day lest she cause an [Area Return], Jane discovered she was able to tell Xue something approaching the truth in order to get him to act as she wanted.

“I’m infected with a memetic threat, and while it is secure in my mind, if a Mind Mage should see me then they would be subject to that threat. Also, you cannot tell them about this, Xue, for that triggers it, too. You just have to trust me that I know what I am doing, and that I need the Mind Mages to tell you about any potential memetic threats in the area. I’m crossing them off the list of threats to the world.” Which was true! She could do that rather easily with Melemizargo’s direct help. Xue didn’t look convinced, though, but he was willing to hear Jane out. And then Jane handed him an anti-mind reading helmet. “Here. Wear this when talking to them.”

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Xue stared at the helmet. And then he put it on, saying, “I will do this, Miss Flatt. I’ll have your locations of memetic threat noted within the hour. I do not appreciate this. Do not let this blow up in our faces.”

“Heard and understood, Patriarch Xue.”

“I only do this because my wife —rest her soul— had a good opinion of you, and for all the other good you have done for us, from the Delver Guild to all those associated monster exterminations, to the ease of this particular task which does not seem that onerous. But this is still onerous, Miss Flatt. Coming at me with mental threats… It is not a good look.”

Jane smiled, nodded, then said, “I know. Apologies.”

And then she left.

An hour later, Jane returned, and Xue had his list of locations of potential memetic threats. Melemizargo was readily protecting her against all threats, so the warning the Mind Mages had given Xue alongside the list was nice of them, but unneeded.

After that, Jane spent a week going around the Highlands, checking memetic containment zones and dodging Mind Mages who were wondering who the fuck was looking into Mind Magic threats. And because Xue was not immune to disbelief among the Mind Mages, the Mind Mages eventually went checking up on him, which caused a major Red Spark infection. The entire Crossing above the Songli Highlands got infected, briefly, which caused a memetic containment threat to escape containment briefly.

Jane personally intervened in that case to erase a written-word-monster that escaped its bindings and which almost escaped into some books ten kilometers away from the containment site. Normally, the Mind Mages would just try to kill it, but they could not, which was why it had been contained in the first place.

But then Jane used some of her Melemizargo-gifted claws, and managed to turn the ‘bookwyrm’ into dead, sloppy ink. The Mind Mages were wondering who the fuck had come through and killed the thing they had been keeping in check for the last few centuries, but more than that, they were simply happy it was gone.

Similar battles eventually played out all across northern Nelboor, and then in the Forest of Glaquin.

It was during a trip near Treehome that Jane saw her first Red Devoured person, or at least what she assumed was one of those unlucky people to meet their end to the Red. This one happened in a dark hole under a bridge far outside of town. Jane only noticed the location because of the scattering of Red everywhere. Kilometers outside of the purview of an Arbor, Jane found Red Sparks crawling over scratchy blankets, a piece of moldy, untouched bread, and a faded picture of a young woman and man, holding each other beneath a wedding tree. The man who had been ‘living’ there was gone. Nothing remained except for stuff that no one would miss. Jane took the man’s small photo-realistic painting and set it down in town, near Arbor Home, the closest one. Maybe Home would remember the man in the painting, or maybe the woman.

But probably not. The man’s face had a few Red Sparks upon it that lingered long.

Jane decided to sit and watch the tiny painting instead of just leaving it there. She watched as the man’s entire body was eaten away by Red Sparks, leaving nothing behind except for a gap in the painting.

Jane moved on to other memetic threat areas.

– – – –

Jane breached four containment zones in Continental Nergal, in the deep, Decay-filled jungles where Atomic Magic had played with the landscape several hundred years ago and across a handful of nearby realities, to hear Melemizargo speak of it.

It had been 3 weeks since the start of Jane’s anti-meme worldwide threat assessment, and she had yet to find a better lead than Oozy, in Storm’s Edge, and who knew what he was doing down there. Even the missing homeless man wasn’t a real lead, and none of these memetic threats were either. But they were still threats that needed to be eliminated, and Jane felt really good about doing those eliminations.

As Jane was skipping along the frozen forests of deep southern Nergal, near the southern pole. She had just cleared out a spectral anti-meme threat that had been contained to a square kilometer cube of space, half buried in the frozen forest and at a tilted angle, and that was the last major threat on her list. Those people had been the last separated group of Mind Mages which could have possibly been slowly eaten by the Red Menace, unbeknownst to anyone, but that Mind Mage security station had had no Red Sparks at all. None of them had.

“Honestly, someone in one of those stations should have been eaten by now. I did not lie to you about who the Red Sparks eat, Jane.”

“And I am not calling you a liar.”

“Hmm!”

… Jane considered it might be time to go back to Storm’s Edge, to check on that lead and see if Oozy was reachable, or a problem.

That was when Destiny appeared.

The Wizard of Benevolent Chaos slipped onto the frozen canopy in front of Jane, looking summer-fresh in a ray of sunshine out of the cloudy sky and wearing a light yellow dress, along with big black boots. Her hair flipped as she shot Jane a smile, calling out, “Ohhh, Jaaaane!”

Jane stopped. She was still Unknowable right now and the Red Sparks should have already erased her from the world, but…

Destiny called out, “Talk to me, please! This will be good practice for your father. For how you will explain to him what the fuck you’re doing.”

… Her father remembered her?

“Well what did you expect? You haven’t actually been affected by the Red Sparks much, thanks to me.”

Melemizargo’s voice was silent to everyone but Jane right now, as it usually was, so Destiny did not react to that.

Jane revealed herself ten trees over from Destiny.

Destiny locked eyes with her. “Hello, Jane. You’ve been a naughty girl, leaving your father all worried about you while you went off tackling big memetic and antimemetic threats.”

“… What’s the problem, Destiny?” Jane asked, keeping her eyes peeled for Red Sparks.

“Well…. No problem, actually. He thinks it’s great that you’re clearing out problems that we didn’t even know were problems while they’re adding stability to the world in other ways —I like that Life Seed they gave to Tiktik, and the Fishery they gave me— but it’s about 7 days from the start of the Prophesied Storm Season, and your father tasked me with catching you if I should see you. And lo! Here you are…” Destiny paused. “I don’t actually want to capture you, though. But I do want to know what you’re doing. From my understanding, you’re in my backyard and plucking up weeds in one space and setting down deep fire in others, burning out everything that could possibly survive. Not to mention you destroyed that entire Mind Mage facility the other day.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “No one died.”

“And how can we know that? These places were top secret hush-hush with people living in them and dying in them with zero checks except for visual and from a very, very far distance… if I have that right. I haven’t been fully read in.” Destiny said, “I would like to be read in now, Jane.”

Destiny was not a demanding person, until she became a demanding person.

Well.

Jane could play ball.

Jane had been testing what she could say to people here and there for the last 30 days, and her ability with that had improved a lot, since she could See the Red Sparks so much better.

“When I say move, you move with me,” Jane said. “It will be random. Try to keep up.”

A few Red Sparks appeared, because they were a Time-based anti-meme, and they could react backward and forward in time and space. In that way they were a little proactive, even when Jane didn’t even touch upon the anti-meme.

Destiny paused. “… I agree.”

“Use your Wizardry to keep yourself unaffected by the anti-meme—” Jane was already moving, ten kilometers west and then four north.

Destiny appeared right in front of her. Brilliant Benevolence and something deeper wrapped around the Wizard of Chaos’ entire body, like lightning made physical. It zapped away some of the clawing Red Sparks, because powerful Domain magic had a way of doing that, but it wasn’t perfect. The ‘Domain’ of the Red Sparks was greater still.