[scrap] Piñata.

Dec 18

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The crowds cleared, and I stood, immobile, in the dawn light.

It was getting hard to think.  Like a wave of sleepiness the thought came over me that thinking wasn’t what I was made for.

It felt like it would be so easy to enter that sleep, just let go and be what I was made for…

What am I made for?

—That’s not important. You don’t need to worry about it.  That’s not what you’re made for.

I don’t need to worry about it.

—You don’t need to think about it.  Just be, don’t think.

I don’t need to—

—Just be. Don’t think.

Don’t th—

—Just be.

I am.

And it was quiet in my head.

A wolf came around the corner and stopped to look at me.  He looked, for a moment, like he recognized me—and then he picked me up and took me inside the building I’d been outside of.

A couple of minutes later, I’d been purchased.

The wolf took me upstairs and sat me down in an office breakroom, showing me off to everyone.

And then I was hung from the ceiling, a blindfolded lion below me, swinging a bat.

—You can think about this.

—This is what you were made for.

I was nervous.

I was excited.

The lion swung the bat and missed me.

I was excited.

I was nervous.

The lion swung again and hit me.

I was afraid.

The lion swung again and missed me.

I was afraid.

The lion swung again, and the force of his swing broke me apart.

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[partim] Blake.

Dec 18

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When we left the restaurant it was still raining.  I didn’t have anything damageable on me, so I didn’t bother manifesting an umbrella.

Blake was looking up into the downpour, looking even bigger than before—actually rounding out and looking chubbier by the moment.

“Um, Blake?”

“Hey marten,” he said. “Want to do something impossible?”  He turned to me and grinned, though his face was already changing.  His muzzle lengthened, straightening out into a solid red beak, and he sat back on his haunches, hands on the ground and looking up at me as he continued to grow.

When he was at eye level with me even in his crouched position, he stretched out, his arms growing into slender talons while his hindquarters took on a more feline appearance.

“Stand back,” he said, in a strange rumbling voice and I jumped back as two frankly enormous red wings sprouted from his back fully-formed, and a flick of the tail seemed to complete the transformation, leaving it a leonine shape with a dark red tuft.

“A gryphon?” I said.

“Climb on,” he said.

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[scrap] Mařa.

Dec 18

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I can’t save everyone.  Ultimately, I don’t think I can save anybody—everyone die, sooner or later—but there are better and worse ways to go.

I saw pretty early that I wouldn’t really be able to do much with my talent as a doctor, which was my first thought.  There woludn’t be much changing lives—mostly people would only come in for problems they already knew they had, and any human doctor can give decent odds on how a person would make out—I’d just be better at it.

Instead, I volunteered to work with the homeless.

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[partim] Shotrox.

Dec 18

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I saw a good many of the others at a distance as I passed through the forest, but none of them approached me, so I kept my distance as well.  Most of them were people from town anyway, whom I recognized but didn’t know; I didn’t want to make them uncomfortable.

The walk wasn’t as long for me as it would have been for them; it wasn’t long before I entered the small clearing bordered by the ring of stones.

The light brightened as I entered, as it always did, though no-one knew why; by the time everyone got here it’d be nearly too bright to see.

This is where magic happens, when maccans come together, and this is where maccans come together when we need magic to happen.

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[partim] Mori.

Dec 16

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I had Munk put me down, and I sat down, examining my foot, while the golem worked to open the book.

The first pages were crammed with text, in characters three inches high that nevertheless through their thickness of stroke appeared to be close and cramped.

Munk flipped past these.

There were astrological diagrams and charts of numbers, which the golem flipped past, drawings of what appeared to be some very unusual mushrooms, which the golem flipped past, something that looked like either a genealogical tree, or a large flowchart, which the golem flipped past—

And then he stopped at the page.  The page—if the golem hadn’t led me to it, I would have doubted, but inscribed at the top of the page, in the book’s plain black ink, was the alchemical symbol for the panacea.

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[partim] The day of the singularity.

Dec 16

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“Other time travelers know me?” Ralph said.

“Everyone knows you, Ralph.” John said. “You know you.”

“I—” he started.  “I what?”

I saw it right away and tried to stifle a laugh.

It took him a bit longer, but you could see when it hit. “Wait,” he said, “Wait, you’re telling me I’m Death? I’m not that fat!”

Of course the caricature would have grown over time.  Were older pictures more accurate? I couldn’t remember.  They got Death’s color wrong, at least; Ralph’s split color’d been interpreted as a face in shadow.  And Death had a red mane, and a much more fearful aspect.

“I’m Death.” Ralph was clearly having trouble assimilating this.

No, my inner reflection of Ralph said.  That’s thousands of years of time travel.

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[partim] Shine.

Dec 16

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“Someone came and took him,” she said.

“He was killed?” I said, samewhat alarmed.  People turned to stare.  I definitely hadn’t seen that.  How could I have missed it?

“No,” she said, “Death came for him.”

“Death,” I said.  “Actually Death? The fat hog in the gray robes and everything?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He said—” she rattled off something in Chinese.  The folks listening in got more emotional.  “Um, it means, ‘They haven’t forgotten you.  It’s time to come home.’”

“Sounds like murder to me,” I said.

“It was very sweet,” she said firmly.

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[partim] Ierak.

Dec 15

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“Our cousins in Karkedon are feeling left out, are they.”  Of course he would already know; the wind blows where it wishes, and he always hears…

“A shame, of course—imagine what Kron’s city could be like under the tutelage of its god!  Instead… well, you have heard the depths Kron has sunk to?”

I hadn’t, unless—“You mean the children? A crazy rumor—no one puts faith in it.”

“There is the benign ritual, open to all… but behind it a darker one only seen by a select few… and the wind that fans the flames.”

He looked a little ill as he said that.  “We’ll bring an end to that, soon enough,” he said. “The bridge was a surprise.  Their agents must be protected.  You’ll need to put up a guard.”

The gods do have no sense of scale sometimes.  “Guard? Thousands of miles of road? There aren’t enough people—it’d take an army just to cover from here to Bousantie!”

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[partim] The day of the singularity.

Dec 14

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(Again, as with anything that gets infodumpy like this, I hope the final draft looks considerably different…)

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“The upgrades,” John said. “Freedom from old age, freedom from disease, resilience against trauma… that’s the baseline everyone gets, though some people go for more.  You’ll need that too, of course, because, well, you’ll be seeing a lot of disease and adverse circumstances, and we can’t go around losing you to smallpox or exposure to cold or anything.”

I felt my aversion to adventure rising.  Smallpox?

Ralph’s objection was different, though.  “Not,” he said, “Not that I have anything against the upgrades, but, but, if anyone can get an upgrade like that, why does it have to be me?”   Or not?

“The Great Firewall of Time,” John said. “Our infinite civilization on one side, and the old one with all its limits on the other.”

“Right, and?”

“Well, it’s there to protect everyone.  If only a fraction of 3↑↑↑3 people were interested in seeing, oh, the life of Christ, the old universe’d get so full you couldn’t move.  So nothing from this side can cross back. There are no special excuses, because over a long enough timeline, the number of people with the same excuse and worse would still be far too many.  It has to be a hard line.”

“3↑↑↑3?”

“Three to the third, to the third,” said John, pointing out the numbers in the air, “and keep on raising it to the third about seven or eight trillion times.  The eventual population is considerably larger than this. This end of time is considerably more durable, you see.”

“Anyway,” he went on, “the point is only people from your side of the wall can pass over it both ways.  And while there are a few other time travelers that could be upgraded to the task, none of them are particularly interested in stealing the thunder from your accomplishments.”

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[partim] Shine.

Dec 12

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—there didn’t seem to be anything in that direction, though.  The girl was still staring, horrified, at something invisible.  I got up—slowly—and waddled over, though by the time I got there, several of the restaurant workers and patrons were already around her.

“What happened?” they were saying. I was, anyway; the rest was in Chinese.

She pushed through the crowd of people and went to a corner where an old man sitting alone had slumped forward in his seat.

She didn’t touch him, but she didn’t have to; I could see from here the poor man had passed away.

And someone who spoke English called 911, and the girl came up to me.  “Did you see?”

I shook my head.

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