4.50 Three to Get Ready

Milo is out of town playing an away game for The Gnomes, making his garage the only private place in the house to perform dangerous occult rituals.

Acheron pauses before activating the sigil. What if the dreams are just dreams?

"Then I wouldn't know how to do this at all," he answers aloud.

Izalee certainly didn't teach this spell.

Starting the channel...

Energy transfer completed, Acheron flops down on the floor, arms curled around himself. Powering the spell took a lot out of him.

All that's left to do now is wait.

"My father didn't tell you about the true nature of our reality so you could preserve it. He told you so you'd have the strength to destroy it," Chet snaps.

"I'll let you in on a secret, Chet." Acheron leans in closer to her. "Kir is still going down."

Confusion shocks her out of her composure. "Then... then why did you stop us..."

"Because I'm saving all of us."

Grief, betrayal, rage. Acheron has seen this look on her face in many nightmares before. It barely registers to him now. He uncorks the small vial of concentrated sunlight and dumps it unceremoniously into Chet's eyes, turning that look on her face to ashes.

"Don't fall into the same despair as Eris. What we do still matters," Loki cautions.

Acheron smiles humorlessly. "Easy for you to say. You're the only one who can remember it."

Loki looks hurt for a moment. "...There's still the cat, I suppose. I'm not completely alone."

"Kay's memories are fragmented and difficult for him to comprehend even when he finds ways to access them." Acheron just wants to be contrary, apparently.

"I gave up on Kay a long time ago..." Loki covers his face with his hands, masking a sob. "And now I have to give up on Eris too."

Loki says Eris's name and reaches out to her, but a closed-mouth growl from her stops him. Trapping her was not easy, and she doesn't seem inclined to forgive it.

"She's remade her childhood clothes but she's not herself," Loki laments. "She'll be just as cruel and violent after the reset, and we'll have to do stop her all over again... only to imprison her because she can't even die."

"There won't be another reset," Acheron reminds him, keeping his distance from the feral elf woman.

"I've said that before," Loki mutters. "I always fail."

"Should you step any further into this circle... I will end you," Eris swears, in elvish, so to Acheron it sounds more like cute chirping than it sounds like a threat.

Eris is surrounded by many layers of hexes, some inspired by containment fields Claire crafted when she was still alive. Eris cannot move out of the circle. Acheron is already plotting to extend the containment fields throughout the temple, but a big prison is still a prison. She's too destructive to be released, her mind too unraveled to be reasoned with.

She brought this on her herself, Acheron has to remember. She lashed out violently at Scarlett Goldbeard—Dysen's great-great-grandfather, or whatever—and ended up cursed to forget why she did that. How was Greta to know the reasoning was so complicated her spell would destroy Eris's mind? 

Chet forcibly pulls Loki away from the circle, concerned for his safety. "Once Kir is gone, we'll come back for her. We'll find a way to heal her."

"If you could heal her you'd do it before then," Acheron points out. "So she could assist us."

Loki's expression melts to despair, "Without Eris I don't think we can help Jaysen."

Acheron frowns. "Do you want to call the whole thing off then?"

"Call the whole thing off?" Chet is incredulous. "How could we live with ourselves if we did that?"

"It just doesn't seem fair..." Loki whimpers.

"Kir killed Jaysen. Not you." Chet looks to Eris after saying those words, but Eris shows no sign of recognizing what they mean.

"Jaysen and Eris were the last of our kind left alive before Kir started the time loop," Cayenne explains, in a different time, a different place, "Kir killed all of the others... myself and Loki included... only to realize he needed elven magic to bring his Kamala back."

"He needed an admin's authorization if he wanted to play with life," Acheron rephrases.

Cayenne nods. "So far as I understand it from psychic linking with my brother... yes? Kay saved Eris, but wasn't finished linking the protection enchantment over Jay before... before Kir struck and used Jay's life to power the reset."

"You'd think he'd be the key to all this then."

"Jaysen always... always... grows deathly ill in childhood before his abilities can manifest properly, much less mature enough for him to... to do anything about all this."

"What happens when he dies off? Immediate reset?"

"It takes a few hours. We've tried capturing his soul, apparently, but it doesn't work. The djinn magic is as beyond us as our magic is beyond them."

"What are they then, really? And what are we?"

"I... don't know, Acheron."

Jaysen doesn't look like he has elven blood, but almost nobody with it does anymore.

He doesn't look particularly ill either. However, as Acheron gets closer, he can sense something is off. The healers of Moonlight Falls couldn't find anything wrong with Jaysen, but they don't have Acheron's particular style of magic. They can't see the order of things, they can't will a body to regenerate to its basic bluebrints.

"So you're the one all this fuss is about," Acheron greets the child.

Jaysen pauses, shrinking timidly away from the stranger. "I feel better now. I'm not contagious. You should tell my parents I can go back to school."

"I believe you about not being contagious."

"I haven't had a seizure or anything in a while. I'm really okay," Jaysen lies, desperate to not be stuck at home in quarantine. An illness that can't be quickly cured is almost unheard of, and everybody's scared of it.

You can't save him, Loki telepaths to Acheron. Cayenne couldn't.

Shut up, Acheron responds in kind. Unfortunately Loki is right. 

"Are you a healer?" Jaysen asks.

"Sometimes," Acheron says.

"This thing on the wall!" Loki announces suddenly. "Argh, this thing, I can't even."

Acheron stands up and turns to his companion. "Reused assets again?"

Loki wrings his hands together, looking away. "You can't read it can you?"

"No, I can't read it. What does it say?"

"My parents found it at a thrift store," Jaysen says. "They're always picking up weird junk..."

"It's... it's hilarious what it says, actually," Loki laughs his short, creepy laugh.

Acheron studies the wall art. Its bold orange doesn't match the cool blues of the rest of the room. It depicts a stylized sun, probably Sol, though it could conceivably be any star. It might be from some science fiction franchise. Acheron doesn't see what's so entertaining about it. "Okay then."

"It's just, you know, they're all gone now. All of them." Loki's ears sink further and further down. He won't even make eye contact with Acheron. "It's so cold out there. You can't imagine it."

"Let's get out of here before you scare the small child."

"I didn't start this," Acheron tells the fairy. "You did."

"You are still to blame for the loss of one of mine!"

"If you want to blame someone, blame Kir. He failed you."

"Yes..." her tone softens. "My vengeance was perhaps... misplaced."

"The walls. They're wrong." Loki stops pacing the room so he can stare out the window.

"They seem normal to me," Acheron says.

"Just... glitches and reused assets." The elf's high-pitched voice becomes more-so as his levels of distress go up. "I can't take much more of this."

"...I know."

"Well we've got it this time, right? We know what to do." Loki seeks reassurance this will be the last cycle. Reassurance that when it's over, his life will be in his own hands again. Even if all he plans to do with it is end it.

"It'll be over soon," Acheron lies, fully intending to sabotage their efforts to free themselves from how their universe has functioned for... how long? How long have they been trapped in these cycles?

 "Tell me what right you have to do this and maybe I'll let you," Acheron calls out.

"Are you joking?!" she laughs. "Tell me what right Kir has to keep us locked in a time loop!"

"Kir told me I'd stab you in the back. So I made a conscious effort to stab you in the chest," Acheron confesses.

No response. Just bleeding.

"We don't have the right to just decide for everybody, Loki."

"W-what... are you... talking about...?" It takes so much effort to breathe, let alone ask questions. The words are an uneven mess, but Acheron can still make them out.

"At least forty generations have been getting recycled, over and over, for incredible lengths of time. Most of those people aren't here to defend themselves. You're ending their existence."

"They're already dead..."

"Their data obviously still exists. That means there must be some way to extract it. That makes what you're doing a conscious choice to destroy them. You pretend you care about the children who are young today who don't get to grow up or have lives because the world resets on them, but all you really care about is ending your own suffering. It blinds you to other possibilities."

Loki manages to look up, staring at Acheron with confusion.

"I tried to tell you." Acheron sighs. "So many times, but you never see it my way. This isn't even real now. It's just another vision! I think I keep looking for some reason not to do it this way? Yet it... just... keeps happening, because it has to be done? I can't let you go through with your plan."

No tricks this time. He doesn't wait with his back turned, pretending not to notice the witch until he's able to spin around, grab her wrist and take her by surprise. No. This time he faces the problem directly.

And she is pissed. 

The pain is intense but... temporary.

"You know this can't happen," Loki says.

"I just wanted to see what it feels like. Get out of my head."

"You called me here," Loki complains.

"Well I'm kind of dealing with a witch trying to kill me right now, so scram."

"You're really not."

"Oh?"

"You're the opposite of dealing with it. You're in denial about what you've seen."

"Do you want to get stabbed right now? Because I've seen that."

"You need to learn to focus."

"Doesn't it bother you for a second that I kill you someday?! Because it's bothering me!"

"...Listen... kid," Loki seems to understand he's speaking to a teenager, "Everything I see in a vision has already happened. Everything you see hasn't."

"Are we really even talking?"

"You took my information and are making calculations with it. So sure, I'm me, but strictly speaking, I'm you."

"So you're a figment of my imagination that just... acts like you."

"Maybe a little more than that. Maybe not."

"...You act like you, alright..."

"You're conflicted about the reset. You're seeing stopping it as murder. It's not. Everyone is locked in this twisted, sick little reenactment, and every one of them has at some point done something you'd consider unspeakably cruel. You have no idea how awful people can be. Infinitely awful, given infinite time."

"We're more than the sum of what we've done wrong," Acheron mumbles.

Loki laces his tone with sarcasm, "I guess I'd just say anything to end my own suffering, right? There's no way I actually care about helping anyone else?"
 

Acheron nods curtly to the vampire standing in the shadows. "Ms Feld. Thank you for allowing us to imprison Eris in your family's ancestral temple."

She bows to him. So far as Shang Simla vampires go, Meela Feld is atypical. "You saved me from her. I owed you a debt."

"I sense you're not particularly fond of your ancestors anyway."

"...You are perceptive," she allows, though it doesn't take much brain activity to see how empty rooms, stripped of the altars, tapestries and statues, might not honor her lineage very well.

"So might I ask one more small favor of you?"

"You may... ask," she stresses the last word carefully, as to imply she isn't in the mood to offer much more.

"The day after your first great-granddaughter is born, something strange will happen." Acheron ignores her slow blink of confusion, as he's digging in his pockets for a vial of magic-imbued liquid. "Gather whoever you can, and use this teleportation anchor."

Meela takes the vial. "Where does it go?"

"Nowhere yet."

"Are you aware I have no children?"

"I am."

"Then you insinuate you have some way of divining the future."

"If I intended to go into more detail, I would have."

Meela's face betrays no emotion, though she is suspicious of the odd request, and silently questions Acheron and Loki's motives for saving her life. Perhaps they weren't as altruistic as she thought. "Very well. Though by the time I have great-grandchildren, I may have forgotten all about this."

"We'll see," he says, unconcerned. Either this timeline is another failure or it's not.

Strange, cybernetic eyes. They emit a faint red glow. The being standing before Acheron trembles, overcome by the horrors within its own mind.  "It's... it's a backronym," he whines. "Sapient... Intelligence... Reharmonization... Key Authorization... Yours."

"Yours?" Acheron questions. Then he seems to get it, "Oh. Everyone's. Everyone who was still alive."

All that's left to do now is wait.

Acheron's powers of precognition have not deemed it necessary to let him know someone else is waiting, too.

And her plan is just as screwy.

 Carlos goes ballistic on a defenseless onion.

Lela busts corrupt cop Karen Kerman for stealing a man's wallet.

It's her 20th solved case.

Lela is squirrelly and completely out of touch with youth culture, but she's still like Acheron's second mom, so he tolerates it when she prances over to him and shares comic book memes.

Lela beams as she chatters on, happy to have these bonding moments with the household children.

Milo returns home with another big win under his belt. He's too stubborn to let an overcast sky and frost keep him from his favorite activity.

 The forecast calls for weeks of misery.

Carlos's garden begins to freeze for the year.

Moby can see his breath in the air.

So Fairuza is surprised one morning to step out to catch the school bus, in full winter wear, only to find it's a humid 85 Fahrenheit.

"Well... back inside to change clothes I guess."

Hot outside or not, Maggie still wants to sit in the warmest lap.

"Aren't you going to shed your coat, too?"  Kay asks.

"Quiet. Fur burritos don't talk."

The plants spring back within a few days, hastily abandoning their dormant state, and expending a lot of energy to do so. Carlos must monitor their health carefully.

"I don't think it's been this hot out since we were little kids," Dysen observes.

"Ugh, yeah," cousin Lysander lets out a long, pained sigh as he glances at his dark jacket. "I'm dying here. All of my very-summery clothes are out of fashion now, so I just don't know what to do."

Lysander's mother, Becky Lack, will not fork over the cash for yet another wardrobe.

It's so suddenly and thoroughly warm, Fairuza and Milo hit the soccer nets in the park after he gets off work, when the sun has safely gone down.

"Once my boss had me teaching toddlers to do this," Milo recalls. "That was the worst."

Fairuza laughs. "How many did you kill?"

Some people prefer the heat to the cold, but others are worried. Is something wrong with weather control?

Ceth is one who prefers the heat. She celebrates this turn of good fortune by having a bubble bar installed on a patio in the back yard.

"You touch it, I destroy you," she warns Dysen. "It's not complicated."

"Aw, but you let us drink..." he gives her his sad puppy eyes.

"This is more potent, and more expensive, and it's my stash."

Of course Dysen and Molly find a way to sneak some bubbles.

Molly's reaction is positive. "This is like the beeeeessst, where has it been all my life?"

Dysen's is more neutral. "Why did I go with pineapple? What was I thinking?"

"We're both wearing stripes!" Molly points out. "This is such a beautiful moment."

"I bet if we got Acheron over here, he'd say some really messed up stuff," Dysen says with a giggle.

"Like about our future?"

"You don't even want to know what junk he has to say about that!"

"Noooo, I do," Molly laughs.

"In China he drank too much and he told me about like eight different violent futures where he, like, stabbed people and stuff. In graphic detail."

"Telllll me!" Molly kicks her feet like an excited child.

Dysen is too distracted to tell her. Overwhelmed by the heat and humidity, and the bloody mental images, and too many bubbles for his lack of experience, he stumbles out of his chair and vomits into the wisteria flowers.

Maybe he should have listened to Ceth after all.

Without the burst of cold to force insects into diapause, the beetle population in Starlight Shores explodes. Moby witnesses an infestation, but isn't inclined to do anything about it. His catnip-stuffed mouse toy is more appealing than live prey.

Dysen finds Orazia is up at dawn. "So I know the temperature is a little unseasonable, but—"

"—but today is the day he told you it would be," Orazia finishes for him. "So keep a look out."

"Are you sure we shouldn't try to get to this girl at the train station?"

"No. Acheron told you she would run. We have to be sneakier. Sneakier than both of them."

"Have you ever been in love, Mom?"

Ceth is startled by the random question. "Well I love you, sweetie."

Acheron stares at her. "How did you keep from letting it override your common sense?"

Ceth blushes darkly, thoughts skipping to Carlos, and her brief jealousy over Lela. She hopes her son isn't reading her mind. "Aw, does my Acheron have a crush on someone?"

"Something like that." He frowns. "My head says I should stay away from her... but I don't think I can."

"Oh? Does she already have a boyfriend?"

"I don't think so."

Ceth laughs. "Well you'd better ask her."

"It's not that easy. I don't... want to talk about the specifics."

"Alright, alright, keep your silly teen secrets. But no girl is worth stress."

"I just want to know how you avoided making stupid mistakes for people."

"I never found anyone I wanted to tie myself down to." Ceth tries to be honest with her son. "Maybe it's bad luck or maybe my standards are too high. All that matters is I'm not unhappy about it."

"Right."

"Sweetie, I'd love to talk more about this, but I have to get to the concert."

"Bye," Acheron murmurs.

"It's so hot, I don't even want to go out there," Fairuza moans.

Orazia shrugs, still comfortable in her long sleeves. Style > every other stat. "Where's Acheron?"

"He's out talking to his mom," Dysen answers.

"Momma's boy," Fairuza mouths.

"Daddy's girl," Dysen sneers.

Fairuza flips him off.

Orazia psychically double-checks where Ceth is, "Uhm, no-oo, he is not talking to his mom."

Dysen blinks. "Dammit, I had one job."

Fairuza looks between them. "What's going on?"

"Never mind!" Orazia sighs. "I'll find him..."

Claire has followed the weak signal from her great-grandmother's amulet across many sectors. Pouring energy into the talisman at its core causes it to seek out scions of life magic, and at last, she has found one. They aren't extinct after all.

"A graveyard... how ominous." She smirks to herself, on high alert for signs of a trap. She detects no hidden hex circles on the floor to trap or harm her, no wards she must break to reach her quarry... nothing. She calls out to him: "What evil rituals did you come here to perform, demon?"

"I was waiting for you," he answers, too softly for her to hear at this distance.






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Etc.: Uuuuugggghhhhhh so many plot threads to tie up.

Hi Claire!