Thresholder

Perry sat in the shelf space, healing up. The reactor had been undamaged, and he was poaching its energy, using it to shunt into repairing both his body and the armor itself. That stopped the blood loss, and after that was done, the blood itself began to be whisked away by the ‘cleaning’ aspect. He was trying to work the fracture, but that was much more difficult. Second sphere could heal, but most of its healing worked by returning him to some ideal, rather than doing a more rapid process of the natural work a body would normally do.

After three hours, Perry transformed, letting the energy of the Wolf Vessel explode through him and Marchand. He became the mechawolf, a machine of flesh and steel, and the desire to rip and rend consumed him, but there were only shelves around. The ring was a part of him now, under the metal skin like a piece of shrapnel embedded in him, and he turned toward the place where it would conjoin with the outside world, the deep ocean. There were monsters out there, and he could dig his claws into them, eat their flesh —

He stopped himself just in time, and changed back into a human with metal around him.

The leg was fully healed and the armor had all the last traces of damage removed from it. He examined it all carefully, then removed the armor piece by piece and sat down. Without the moon to drive it, the werewolf transformation took energy that he was only getting from the reactor.

He tried to plan for the next time he had to face down Third Fervor. The staff was good, the portals were good, and the armor was incredible. She had some kind of voice amplification thing, but with Richter’s armor, it hadn’t been that much of a problem. In the context of combat between the two of them, her book power was trash. That left just one more power he didn’t know about, which was either something to be kept for the very end of a fight in a final moment of desperation, or something that was hot garbage. And of course it was possible to get more than one power per world, that was just the rule of thumb, some machination of the overspell.

Perry was skeptical that the mechawolf’s teeth or claws could get through that armor. If they couldn’t, then that was taking away the main advantage of the form. The bullets from the shoulder gun had done nothing but maybe stun her, and not for long. He’d have to use blunt force trauma, which meant he was going to have to get better equipment.

Having fought against her once, he wasn’t sure lanterns or masks offered him anything of value.

“I need an airlock,” said Perry, looking around at the shelfspace, which had been flooded again, and would get another inrush of water as soon as he left, given that the shelfspace was at the bottom of the ocean.

“It seems as though it would be difficult to build, sir,” said Marchand. “At least, if we intend to overcome oceanic pressures.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. He stretched his leg, which was feeling completely fine. He was going to have to slip the armor back on soon, to get more of the power from the reactor into his vessels and make sure he was topped up. That could come later.

When he’d fought in Seraphinus, he’d run into continual problems with his weapons breaking. The power armor was just too strong, and if he had used the swords and spears in a way that preserved them, he wouldn’t have been taking advantage of the brute strength that was the armor’s greatest offensive power. He would need to have a hammer made to smash against Third Fervor’s armor, possibly one with a very long handle that could give him some reach he was lacking, but he would need one that didn’t bend or break at first use.

“How long do we wait?” asked Perry.

“That’s at your discretion, sir,” said Marchand.

The power armor wasn’t good at swimming. It was heavy metal, not designed for high mobility. When he’d gone into the Pacific with Richter, they had motors outside the suit to grip onto, and most of the time, they had just walked along the ocean floor. Perry was worried about the monsters out there, but there weren’t that many of them, and with the armor running in dark mode, there was a good chance he could just run across the ocean floor and get to the island.

Perry waited with the armor off, stretching out and making sure that he was in good fighting shape. The transformation always took a toll, not on his body, but on his psyche, especially now. Being on the verge of racing out into the ocean to fight a monster just because he was hungry … that was a good reason never to pull out the stops unless it was dire and there weren’t civilians around. When he was ready, he slipped the armor back on and sat there for a while, letting the reactor fill his vessels. It was much slower than doing it through moonlight, but with the reactor fully repaired, it was mostly just a matter of time. He’d used a surprising amount of power running at top speed, which had ended up being pretty pointless.

It was about eight hours after the fight that Perry stepped out of the shelfspace. He was anticipating another fight with Third Fervor, though there was a slim chance that she had been killed with the beast as it had come in rather than portaling or teleporting away.

He closed the shelf right after him, letting as little water in as possible, which was probably still another thousand gallons. He grimaced. Jeff would be so pissed.

All lights on the armor were off, and the sword was in the new sheath he’d picked up for it in Berus. It was pitch black, and the pressure was again setting off his sensors, telling him to rise before something was compromised. If they had been another hundred meters down, Marchand thought that the armor would probably have failed and Perry would have died, but Marchand also thought that the sudden pressure change should have killed them both. Perry could feel it around him, and suspected that second sphere was putting in yet more work.

He rose slowly, carefully watching for more alerts from Marchand. The pressure alerts gradually faded away, and when Perry reached the surface, he paused before breaking through. There was no sign of Third Fervor, but he’d been teleported by her, and had no idea where he was. He was hoping like hell that he was somewhere close to Thirlwell, or better, close to Berus, but he didn’t know whether that was likely. Third Fervor had said that her spear teleported her to a specific place, which he assumed she could change, but he had never gotten any confirmation.

“Any idea where we are?” asked Perry.

“Not a clue, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry broke the surface, rising high into the air. There was only the open ocean, with no islands in sight, and there continued to be no islands in sight the higher he rose. He was very much in the middle of nowhere. He’d been worried about men in masks watching from a tower or something like that, lookouts or something like that, but there was nothing.

“I’ve narrowed down our location, sir,” said Marchand.

They knew their planet to be a sphere, and it was fully mapped out, though with a fair bit of guesswork when it came to the barren regions. Marchand had taken the maps and synthesized a virtual globe, which he’d then laid flat like an orange peel. Berus and Thirlwell were fairly far off from two of the main continents, large island nations that must have been the result of some intense volcanic activity at some point. Across the wide ocean, there were two other continents, and Perry wondered whether two “sets” of continents separated by oceans was similar to Earth’s geological configuration for some cosmic reason.

Marchand tinted the continents and the edges of the oceans red, including areas around a few of the islands.

“The fuck is this?” asked Perry.

“Assuming we’re still on the same planet, sir,” said Marchand. “I’ve narrowed down our possible location by 73%.”

“Of the entire planet,” said Perry.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “Given that we’re not in range of land, we can eliminate all those places we’d be able to see land from.”

Perry grit his teeth. “Are you doing this on purpose?”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” said Marchand.

“Never mind, we’ll just go higher,” said Perry. “Eventually we’ll be staring down at the planet and we can go from there.”

He rose higher, dripping water down below him. Marchand’s map stayed on the HUD, and the areas they could possibly be in shrunk down, receding from the coastlines of the world, and eventually, banished from what people called the Eastern Ocean. Eventually they were up past the atmosphere, and Perry was left staring down at a dark circle outlined with a blue corona. This all took a great deal of time, given that the sword was capped on speed.

“How the hell did she even get out here?” asked Perry.

“She likely used magic, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry closed his eyes and took a breath. “Was that one on purpose?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I apologize, but Miss Richter wished that I have a sense of humor.”

“Third Fervor probably did use portals though,” said Perry. “It’s just … a very far way away from anything of interest.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I believe that might have been part of the point.”

“I was never going to win that fight,” said Perry. “I mean never. If she’d thought she would lose, she could just leave me behind. She’s going to be an absolute bitch to kill.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

Perry tried to work the problem while he rose further. Eventually they would be free of the atmosphere, and he’d be able to return to Thirlwell, but it would take some time. There were probably a lot of people who were going to be pissed off at him, even if he explained that it was Marchand’s fault. Dirk would probably explain that Perry wasn’t free to just go speak with heads of state all on his own, and definitely wasn’t supposed to kill them.

“Sir, I don’t mean to alarm you, but you have an email,” said Marchand.

“A … what?” asked Perry, then immediately regretted it.

“Sir, an email, or electronic mail, is a form of communication that —”

“Yup, yup, that one was on me, got it,” said Perry. “You’re saying that someone sent me an email?”

“I am not certain I can conclusively say that, sir,” said Marchand. “You have an email, dated to thirty minutes ago, but I have no record of it arriving in your inbox, and have been maintaining radio silence as a matter of caution. It is possible that this is an error of some kind.”

“Uh, don’t open any attachments,” said Perry. “But it’s readable by you? It’s got the proper encoding and headers and stuff that emails are supposed to have?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “Though I should clarify that what you have always called ‘email’ has a number of substantial differences with the ‘notes’ of my world, and while I am normally happy to indulge your dimensional vernacular, I believe it pertinent to point out that the formatting and metadata are those of a ‘note’ rather than an ‘email’.”

Very early on, when they were still on Earth 2, Perry had Marchand rename everything just so it would make better intuitive sense to him. So many of the words involving computers post-dated the point of divergence between their worlds, which meant that they called pretty much everything by a different name, even if a lot of the UI and control elements had converged towards similarity. ‘Note’ was the one that Perry hated the most, because Richter would talk about her ‘notebox’ and say she ‘noted’ someone, and every time it was just a little bit grating. The etymology descended from ‘notice’, which their version of the internet had originally used quite a lot before technology had improved.

“Who’s it from?” asked Perry. “Put it on screen.”

Marchand obliged. They were high up in the atmosphere, at the point where the air was thin.

Subject: Introductions

To: Peregrin Holzmann

Sorry if the method of getting you this message isn’t to your liking. We have access to a technopathy device that can communicate across great distances. I don’t want to lie about our capabilities — in this world, they’re considerable. You have nothing to fear from us though, and trust me, if we could find you, we would have done this some other way, using radio or just sending you a letter through their postal service. You may have been hearing us over the radio and just ignoring us, which I think would also warrant this approach.

Introductions, before this letter gets too long: I am Hella Farrin, captain of the SS Farfinder. I come from a world far, far away from here. Many years ago, we suffered a thresholder battle, and when it had passed, we were left searching for answers. We found magic they had left in their wake, and a hole punctured straight through our universe. The Farfinder was a project to go into the unknown, following the surviving thresholder to another universe. That was our mission at the time, but getting back proved impossible, and the mission evolved.

I’m the only remaining member of that initial crew. I’ve picked up more like-minded people along the way, people with skills and powers, people who understand the collection of universes, what I’ve taken to calling the ‘multiverse’. We’ve been on your trail since the Great Arc. We follow the holes that thresholders leave, which is one of the only potential ways to move between worlds.

I’d like to meet with you, in person. Given everything you just went through with the Last King, I know you might not be up for that, but I swear the last thing we want to do is get involved in a battle with a thresholder of your caliber. It would help you to understand if I could show you things in person, and this method of communication is unfortunately one way. I would suggest radio, but I don’t think that’s secure, even with your assistant encrypting.

You’re in danger, Peregrin. This whole world is. Maybe the whole multiverse.

If you’re up for it, meet me in the museum you went to when you first came to this world. I’ll be there for the next two days. If you don’t want the face-to-face, then hopefully your radio is still working. Send a blast of radio anywhere from Berus, Thirlwell, or the city you started in and we should be able to get it, but again, I can’t guarantee that it’ll be secure. I’d suggest that you don’t name things outright, only refer to them obliquely. Speak in riddles. We’ve seen most of what happened with you on the Great Arc and Esperide, so you can encode information that way.

A potential ally,

Captain Hella Farrin,

SS Farfinder

Perry read it, then read it again.

“Which of our many enemies do you think sent this, sir?” asked Marchand.

“I think it’s legitimate,” said Perry.

“We just came out of walking into a trap, sir,” said Marchand.

“The email is a show of power,” said Perry. “It’s a way of saying ‘hey, you’re pwned, but we’re the good guys’. I think.”

“What is ‘pwned’, sir?” asked Marchand. “The wonders of your world’s slang never cease to amaze me.”

“If they can slip an email into my inbox without actually transmitting it, they can fuck you up,” said Perry. “Right? You also presume that to be true?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

“So … we can either go to Berus, or we can fly straight to Kerry Coast, and of the two of those, I know which I prefer.” He sighed. “Except I would have to shelve the armor to have a conversation in a public place, and if it is a trap, I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“You’d prefer radio then?” asked Marchand.

“I think I have to assume that they could compromise you,” said Perry. “And if I assume that, then I’m thinking that the only thing worse than having no armor on is having on armor that locks me in place and tries to … I don’t know.”

“If I were turned against you, I would break your arms and legs,” said Marchand. “While I was doing that, I would blind and deafen you. Sir.”

“Right,” said Perry. “Glad you’ve had those thoughts, that’s great.”

“It’s my job to keep you safe, sir,” said Marchand. “It is of course vital that I think about what might happen if I were to turn against you, the better to avoid causing you harm.”

“We go to Kerry Coast City then,” said Perry with a sigh. He started rising again, up to thinner air. “Plot a course.”

~~~~

It was just past dawn when Perry landed outside the city. He’d stashed the armor in the shelfspace, and was wearing pretty standard library clothes, nothing that particularly stood out. He’d roughed up his hair and beard a bit, to make him look less fastidiously clean, and with some effort, he would stay looking a little rough, rather than like a supermodel who’d had an hour sitting for hair and makeup. He was hoping that no one had seen him drop from the sky, but he started moving right away, just in case someone came to investigate. Given the attack, they were going to be on the lookout for things in the sky.

The city was exactly as he remembered it. It was bright and colorful, with artwork on many of the walls and lots of plants getting whatever sun they could. But as he looked at the murals, he could see a bit of a lack of craft that was only evident when compared with some of what the kings had built. Granted, the kings hadn’t actually built anything, only taxed heavily and then spent that money on craftsmen, and most of the things the kings and nobles had made were for the glorification of nobility, but there was something about looking at a kind of wonky flower that made Perry just a touch sympathetic to Nima. Only a touch though.

He made his way into the city, down streets he had pretty well mapped. He had the earpiece, but with Marchand in the shelf, it wasn’t going to do much without opening the shelf, and that couldn’t be done without drawing attention or finding a private location. He wondered how much this Hella knew, and whether she had picked a public place specifically to hamstring him. Maybe it would have been better to use the radio, but he was willing to hear her out. If it went hot, he’d duck into the shelf and hope that she couldn’t pierce it, but she seemed to know a lot more than he did.

He went into the museum and didn’t immediately see her. He was greeted by a statue of Fenilor the Gilded though, the same one he’d initially seen. There was nothing suspect about it, no hint that he was secretly the mastermind behind the culture, though of course the sculptor wouldn’t have known about any of that, and by Fenilor’s own account he was only one of the founders, and not the most important one. Perry was curious whether that was true. He was hopeful that Hella would have some insight.

He sensed her before he saw her, but kept his eyes on the statue. She had her hair in a tight bun and wore cargo pants with many pockets. Her shirt was odd, not at all in the style of this world, like a long-sleeved spandex gymnastics top with a thicker tank top built into it. She had freckles on her cheeks and a serious look on her face, and she watched Perry for a moment, perhaps unaware that he’d already clocked her. He was keeping his eyes on the statue.

She stepped up to him and turned so she was facing the statue too. “Do you go by Peregrin or Perry?”

“Perry is fine,” said Peregrin. “You’re Hella?”

“I am,” she nodded. “It would probably be better to have our conversation elsewhere, but I thought it was best to meet you in public. You seem hesitant to make a scene unless the needs demand it.”

“Better to keep a low profile,” said Perry. “We’re far away from the action right now though.”

“Mmm,” said Hella. “We’re closer than you might think.” She looked around. It was a pretty slow day, but from the frown on her face, there were still too many people for her taste. “Care to get out of here?”

“We’ll talk a bit first,” said Perry. “You let me know half of what you know, then we’ll agree on a second place to meet at. Somewhere I can wear my armor, hold my sword, and feel a little more secure about not getting shot in the face.”

“Fair,” she said with a sigh. “I would call it paranoia, but I know how life can be for you people, and I saw what happened with Xiyan.”

“If you saw me, I didn’t see you,” said Perry.

“We have past vision, of a sort,” said Hella. She kept her voice low. “Similar to what Jeff had, but not as accurate. Sometimes it gets things wrong. And once I was sure we wanted to make contact with you, I stopped trying to pry into your life. We didn’t arrive until after the whole thing was long over. In fact, we were only able to catch up to you thanks to the two-year gap on Esperide. Before we followed your trail, we were following Maya’s, and before hers … there were a lot.”

“I appreciate you being upfront about it,” said Perry. “Relatively speaking. But I don’t know who you are or what you want from me. I’m at a pretty severe disadvantage.”

Hella let out a breath. “This is the sort of thing that I would rather not say in public. They have listening devices, and while they don’t have anything on the ones that you have, I would rather the locals didn’t know about me and my crew.”

“I’m not going to a second location without something,” said Perry.

Hella looked around a bit, then began walking. Perry followed her. They went to a darkly lit room off the main thoroughfare of the museum, which wasn’t currently occupied by anyone else. The light in the room came down from above, but was directed to suits of armor and ancient weapons.

“We have a spaceship,” said Hella. “We have a crew of five, including myself. I would love for you to meet them. We know you well enough to know that you’re a good person, especially by thresholder standards, where half of you are the worst ideologues and the other half are sociopaths. Our ultimate goal is to stop thresholding itself, which is currently nowhere near happening. The reason we’ve come to you is because we think you can help.”

“Okay,” Perry said slowly. “How could I help?”

“I want to make sure we’re aligned,” said Hella. “We’re not a part of the thresholder system. We’re not a consequence of an algorithm that’s putting people into direct conflict. But if you’re not aligned with the general idea of stopping the portals from connecting worlds right from the start, then I’ll give you an email dump of information as a way of saying thanks for hearing me out, and we don’t need to see each other again. We’ll move on when the portals open and go our separate ways.”

“I’m not sure that thresholding is a net negative,” said Perry. “There are uplift opportunities, a proliferation of technology, maybe some magic spreading through worlds and increasing the quality of life … balanced against the raw destruction of the fights, worlds falling into ruin from plagues, that sort of thing. I guess I would believe it was a net negative, if you told me that, but I would also want to see your numbers. Call me half aligned.”

Hella nodded. “We can show you what we’ve seen, what we know. If it were people coming in to give gifts to the locals and then fighting to death in an out-of-the-way corner, I might feel differently. If it were only the ideologues and not the sociopaths … but it’s not.”

“Then how can I help?” asked Perry. “I’ve heard it called a Grand Spell, but I’m a subject of that spell, not its controller.”

“We want to study you,” said Hella. “That’s a start. And then, once we’ve studied you, we think there might be a method of bringing the Grand Spell to a close, depending on what we feel is its ultimate purpose.”

“And … what are the theories?” asked Perry. He was feeling a little gobsmacked by her presence. It felt like after five worlds, he was finally getting some answers, and not the vague, contradictory, and incomplete answers that he’d gotten before.

“It’s complicated,” said Hella. “We haven’t been able to touch the spell, we’ve only been trailing it. We see the holes it punches through the universes, the threads of cosmological damage and metaphysical mingling. But the leading theory is that it’s building up to something, that in the end, it’s going to pull someone out for use in … something.”

“No,” said Perry. “I don’t buy that. Too many ideologues, as you said. Too much randomness. If they were selecting for the ultimate hero, or the ultimate fighter, then this would be an insane way to do that.”

“I don’t think that’s it either,” said Hella. “But we have a crew of five, including myself, and I keep getting outvoted.” She hesitated. “I would love for you to meet them.” It was the second time she’d said it, and this time it sounded almost plaintive. It was also clearly something she’d rehearsed.

Perry considered that. “If you attacked me, how much danger would I be in?”

“You would duck into your shelf and I wouldn’t be able to touch you there, not without a week’s worth of work, and maybe not even then,” said Hella. “If I had wanted to kill you from a distance while you waited in the main hall … there’s a chance, but I wouldn’t underestimate a thresholder, and … we’re not actually sure whether the Grand Spell takes us into account. If it does, then the chance that things would go your way is much, much higher.”

“Okay,” said Perry. “And how much danger are you in from me?”

“Given what we’ve seen of your abilities, it depends on how fast I was able to extract,” said Hella. She hadn’t gotten more tense at the question, but she had seemed a bit tightly wound since he’d first laid eyes on her. “I think you would need to become the wolf in order to kill me, and you would need to do it quickly. With the armor on, you’d have better chances.”

“Just curious,” said Perry. “It’s naturally hard to trust anything you say. For all I know, you could be a fifth thresholder.”

“Sixth,” said Hella. “Mette counts. It’s you, Nima, Third Fervor, Fenilor, and Mette. But the Farfinder isn’t a part of it, and we hope isn’t accounted for in the equations. We haven’t wanted to test it, and ideally, we’ll stay out of the central conflict.”

“Alright,” said Perry. “If you have a second location, I want to be armored.”

Hella bit her lip, then nodded. “Go into the bathroom,” she said, pointing down the hall. “Use your shelf in a stall, I’ll wait outside, then when you’re suited up, I’ll take you to the Farfinder.”

Perry slipped into the stall and opened the shelf, then went through the process of putting Marchand on. He was really going to have to find a better way of dealing with the shelfspace, especially if his enemies insisted on going underwater.

He felt more secure with the armor on, even given the gaping hole in its security that meant an enemy could simply deposit an email. He was going to have to ask about that.

He stepped back out in full armor fifteen minutes later, with nanite ‘clothing’ beneath that.

“Ready to go,” said Perry.

Hella looked him over and nodded. He wondered whether she was thinking about the gun hidden in his shoulder. She had seen him shoot the king, and he hoped she knew that this was something that Marchand had done.

Rather than opening a portal or holding onto his arm and teleporting him, she went to the bathroom door and opened it. It opened out into a cramped metal ship, and she went through, holding the door open for him.

The interior of what he assumed was the Farfinder was pretty tight. There were five stations and a long hallway leading out the back, and only tiny porthole windows that let in minimal light from outside. Each of the stations had two large monitors, though only two of the stations were occupied, one by a woman with bright red lipstick, and the other by a lizard.

“He’s arrived!” said the woman, who had just enough space to spin around her chair. She was a complete contrast to Hella, with a floral print on her dress.

Perry looked the other way, and saw a long hallway that led down to stairs. It reminded him of being inside of a submarine, which he’d done once as part of a tour, though it was slightly less cramped than the USS Alabama. He had expected something more like on Star Trek, sleek and clean, but it was clear that a lot of things had been made under less than ideal conditions and without the proper materials. There was a suspicious amount of things made with wood, which he couldn’t fathom being anyone’s first choice if they had that much metalwork.

“Hello,” said Perry, waving at the woman. His eyes went to the big green lizard, who was clicking away at what looked to be a computer.

“Perry, this is Eggeltina and L’onso,” said Hella. “Eggy is our science officer and L’onso is our security detail.”

Eggy came over to them, smiling as she did. “Neat armor,” she said, looking it over. “Marchand, was it?”

“Yes,” replied Marchand from the speakers.

“I want one of those fusion reactors,” said Eggy, pointing at Perry’s chest. “They don’t work in every world, but when they do, it seems like a great power source.” She looked up from the center of the chest to Perry’s helmet. “Any chance you can spare it for a half hour?”

“No,” said Perry.

“Eggy, now isn’t the time,” said Hella. “We’re going into my quarters, I’m going to explain the nature of the multiverse, you can come with us if you’d like, but you have to keep to the assigned task. Okay?”

“Can do, ma’am,” said Eggy, giving a lazy salute.

“L’onso?” Hella called to the lizard, who hadn’t left his post.

“No thank you,” he grumbled. Perry tried not to stare, but it seemed like the sounds had come from the lizardman’s nose rather than his mouth.

“We have two others,” said Hella. “Nitta is working on the ship right now — the bowels — and Cark is out.”

“Out where?” asked Perry. “Where are we?”

“We’re in a cloud over Berus,” said Eggy. “Or, not an actual cloud, but a cloud that we’re making that blends in with the real clouds. Someone watching closely might notice, but the waters aren’t safe, and we didn’t want to land on the island, not with five thresholders running around.”

She slipped past Perry and went to one of the doors down the hallway, which she went in without another word, and Hella followed her with a sigh.

Perry hesitated for a moment, then followed. He had somehow thought that this would be a more military operation, but it was looking more like a ragtag group of individuals. Hella had said she was the only one left of the original crew, but he had still assumed something more organized than this.