We skulked through the undercity, where Chasm City ended and Perseverance's End did not yet begin. We were quiet and attentive, although there wasn't much need for that because the city could not see nor hear us as we moved, entering from below and approaching a seemingly empty warehouse. Stone blocks bigger than houses were stacked in tall piles that almost reached the ceiling of the lithos block, some of them white and others dark—Blackstone.
"Boo," I whispered, dropping the invisibility mere centimeters away from Ted's snoozing figure.
Several things happened at once. First, he literally jumped up from his reclining chair, as if propelled into the air by a piston or something. He yelped, cursed, screamed and then reoriented himself, twisting in mid-air while still slinging a series of expletives in all directions.
"MOTHER OF ALL MORTAR AND IGNEOUS ROCKS, GEARS OF MY FUCKING BALLSACK AND ENCLOSED SPACES, IF I—"
Then he saw me, but it was too late to abort whatever he was doing. His eyes glowed and his forehead filled with sweat as he battled with whatever interface he used to command his technology, attempting to stop a sequence of events that would result in me getting obliterated by stuff that had no right to exist in a fantasy magic world.
I suppose he managed to keep the worst from happening, but he failed to completely stop the sequence. Within moments, he was enclosed in a shimmering purple shield, a cube of containment fields cutting him off from everything around him.
The same happened all over the warehouse, with all sorts of containment fields springing up all over the place.
"Well," I said, grinning and rapping my knuckles against the purple pane of force. "I'll be damned. A Class-8 containment field."
Then, looking around, I pointed at the green, yellow and blue panes of force all over the place. "Class-4, interdiction field, scrambler field, that one I don't recognize but it seems to be cutting the flow of magic, and then the evergreen—the Tachyon-field."
They vanished before I was done calling them all out, leaving the place shrouded in darkness. My girls appeared soon after, providing some light with their magic before Ted clapped his hands and made the crystal-lights above flicker to life.
He stared at me with his hands on his hips. "What the fuck, lad? Scaring me like that?"
"Wanted to test something," I said, shrugging.
It infuriated him for a moment, before he chuckled. "And you thought to test it on me?"
"I tested it on Fredrick and Brigitte Slyzarik first, actually," I replied.
"Oh?" the dwarf asked, intrigued. "How did it go? No, wait. Fuck you, lad, you threw me off again. How did you get here without my noticing?"
I grinned. "New invisibility spell."
"In the city?" Ted asked, then shook his head. "No, they alert me when you come in. You entered the city without anyone knowing."
"Woah," I pretended to recoil. "They alert you? Paranoid anyone?"
He leveled a stare at me that spoke eloquently. "Lad," he said. "You don't take over a city by being an idiot. Of course they tell me everything. And it's all thanks to you and your stunt during the beast tide, I'll have you know. Trellen is ours now. As is Bib."
I nodded, surprised. "You move quickly."
"I need to keep pace with a certain someone. How did you get into the city, lad? I needa know."
"There's a secret tunnel near the sewage treatment plant. Well, if that's what it is. It sure smells like it, but then again looking at the river one would think you just dump raw sewage there."
Ted shrugged. "It's a pump. For Chasmers," then as if remembering that not everyone knew everything, he added, "Because they live below the river, so gravity ain't helpin them."
"And they dump the crap in the river?" I asked.
"Beast tides reset everything, if you didn't notice. The crap just vanishes."
I nodded. It made sense, honestly. As for the guards, I had heard somewhere that sewage could lead to slimes and oozes, so it also made sense that there would be people and guards around there. The tunnel, though?
Ted was thinking the same thing. "You'll need to show it to me. And your invisibility."
"We can take you there, if you want."
Turns out, he did want us to. Elyra cast the invisibility again and we checked out the tunnel before returning to the warehouse. I could see the gears spinning in his head, thinking all sorts of ways he could use this new information. As for the invisibility, he had been more than surprised to learn just how powerful it was. Enough that it allowed us to fly under the nose of guards, powerful guilders, and evade the security systems he left active on purpose when we returned to the warehouse.
"We will not be lending our Elyra for you to make use of her ability to cloak people," Zery said, crossing her arms. "We do not split up."
Ted smirked. "Practicing for when you finally cast that ritual? Well, I was thinking—"
"Political assassinations?" Vespera teased, licking her lips. "My, my, it just so happens that I was thinking the same thing myself!"
The dwarf grumbled about being interrupted. "I might have a list, but it might be a tad too much too soon, actually. I will need to think about it. In the meantime, how did it go with Brigitte? She your new guide?"
"What," I asked. "You can't wait to send your favorite assassins away from the city?"
"In all honesty? Yeah. Even with your new power, I'd rather have you away after the marriage for a little while so I can focus on actually using the chaos you are going to cause. Until then, though…"
"Alright," I conceded, pulling a chair and sitting near Ted's empty reclining one. Motioning for him to join me, I continued. "But enough deflecting. Don't think I forgot about all those containment shields I saw when I spooked you. They aren't proper magic, are they? They are tech."
"And don't think I missed the fact that you very obviously know what they are," Ted replied, angrily sitting on his chair. "You are familiar with them."
Vespera snickered. "You did make it quite obvious, Sol mine."
I shrugged. "That I did. So, who goes first? You wanna know how I know?"
"Please," Ted said, smiling. His amused face was back, now that he had relaxed a little bit, and saw that there was no animosity in my tone of voice.
"What do you know about the universe? Do you know that there are other worlds, up there in the sky?"
Ted scoffed. "Who do you take me for? Of course I know that. There are stars and planets up there, beyond the moon and the sun."
"Good. That makes it easier. I don't know how it is here, but where I'm from the space between planets and stars was almost completely empty. There was an asteroid or two here and there, but there was no air, almost no matter, and the distances were so vast they boggled the mind. And most importantly, there was no magic."
The dwarf's gaze was focused on me as I made it more and more clear that I was hiding some fundamental truth about myself. He looked at the girls, who were sitting on the ground or leaning against the blocks of stone, looking uninterested and offering him nothing.
I continued. "I used to live up there, in the nothingness between planets. You see, I was part of a great civilization of humans who had spread out from their home planet, colonizing inhospitable worlds, moons, gas giants and even building habitats that floated where there used to be nothing."
I told him about space stations. I told him what four and a half trillion humans could do with their ingenuity, their petty wars, their desire to be on top, their willingness to oppress. All the spectrum of emotions and human nature in one, gigantic bubbling pot that ultimately led to our demise. It almost sounded glorious, if one omitted not only the end, but also all the little cogs caught in the mechanism. Cogs like I used to be.
Like what I refused to be now.
"A hauler…" Ted muttered, pensive. "A glorified courier, basically."
I stared at him and he held my gaze for a moment before chuckling. I joined in, and we had a good laugh that dispelled the tension that had built up. I told him about my theories, about the end of civlization and about being transported to this world, where magic was something I had never seen before. I told him everything.
"This is a lot to take in, you know?" he told me. "No wonder you're so weird, man."
"Yeah," I agreed, looking at my girls. "My life is so different now. I would never go back even if I could."
Ted simply shook his head, still trying to come to grips with all that I told him. "Trillions of people," he said. "The number boggles the mind. And they are all dead now?"
"I am the only survivor that I know of."
"But why? Why did whoever brought you here show you the fate of your civilization?"
"Why bring me here at all?" I asked back.
Elyra, who had stayed silent until now, grabbed my hand and went to sit on the floor near me. "So that you could be with us, Sol. You were destined to be with us."
"Fuck destiny," I shot back, making her giggle.
"That's right," Vespera said. "Fuck destiny."
Ted was still stunned, muttering questions under his breath. I chose that moment to bombard him with more details about my bond with the girls, the hauler in the bond-space, the System, the kill code. I came clean, as clean as I could.
"Shiet," he said, blinking. "Now I get it. I get you, man."
"Not lad?" I asked.
"You get to be a man in my eyes now. I won't be calling you a lad no more, that's for sure. I see you for who you are, I think. At least, I can try to see you for who you are. It's hard to wrap my head around all this shit but…"
His eyes glowed and twitched. He blinked, dismissing whatever he was looking at. "And now you are here, and saw tech that seemed to come from your old life and did not belong in this old dwarf's warehouse."
I nodded. "I don't know how I came here. I don't know if this is the same universe or another reality. I don't know shit. What I know, is that there are things I can't ignore anymore. Convergences. The tech you have is just another hint telling me I can't keep pretending to ignore all of this."
He was quick to disagree. "You can," he said. "And maybe you'd live a quieter life for it. But I know you won't. You'd never be truly happy if you did, and I respect it, man, I really do. Alright. Let's start from the beginning. Wanna guess where I got the first glimpses of this tech from?"
"Shoot," I said.
He grinned at me. "Cliff's Edge," he said. "Right by the sea, right where you are about to go look for the Wandering Wife's Collar. There used to be a merchant there, dealing in all sorts of knickknacks, and that's where I saw something in a pile of crap he sold for cheap that tickled my mind in ways I couldn't really explain back then."
"Really?" I snorted. "What a coincidence."
Ted shrugged. "Cliff's Edge is a big mercantile city. It makes sense you'd find stuff there. The merchant had no idea what he had, and neither did I back then. It was a long time ago, though, when my beard was still long and I still pretended to be a proper dwarf. When I pretended to be an adventurer. So there was this pile of stuff, and a little spidery-thingy that caught the light funny. I touched it, and surprisingly, it activated."
His eye glowed.
"Like liquid metal, it wrapped around my finger and then started to flow up and up. It got to my face, and by then I was screaming bloody murder and clawing at my eyes, trying to get it out. I couldn't get it out. The pain, man. The fucking pain. It was horrible. But then I blinked and it was all gone, and I could see things. Like the System windows, but not quite the same. It called itself a prototype neural implant, by Sesdisk Technologies, fabricated in the year 2587. And it changed my life."