Doors to the Unknown (Worm/D&D, Fusion/Crossover) (2024)

13:08, Wednesday the 22nd of June, 2011 CE
Die Bendehuis Bar & Restaurant, Windhoek, Namibia, Earth Bet
Valigan Talaire

"No sh*t, there I was," Robin said in Afrikaans as he leaned in and lowered his voice, his audience listening with rapt attention, "Blitz and Krieg out front covering the main entrance, a squad of skinhead assholes with rifles circling around to the side of the warehouse…."

I smiled faintly from my vantage point at the bar. It was good to see the locals coming around, as Robin's first day here had been quite an unpleasant one.

While I'd spent the morning in Moord Nag's palace, subjecting Aasdier to a variety of tests and divinations as the warlord herself looked on with impatience and deep suspicion, Robin had chosen to visit one of the city's museums, only to find that most people who saw him kept their distance and clutched at silver skull talismans whenever he passed as though he had been afflicted with a deadly curse.

And no wonder, when Moord Nag had publicly declared that he and I would suffer fates worse than death for setting foot upon her lands uninvited, in front of a crowd that had quickly spread her word and our descriptions throughout the surrounding neighborhoods.

While I'd spent the afternoon researching the port city of Swakopmund in preparation for its rebuilding, an increasingly nervous Robin had found some of the locals' fear turning to distrust and aggression, believing that he had somehow slipped the warlord's clutches and was attempting to escape his rightful punishment at her hands—or her companion's claws.

He had, he said, been confronted by a small mob intending violence, and only his quickly telling them that Whoa, hey now, if Moord Nag wanted to kill me I'd already be dead, right? You don't think I could do anything to stop her, right? She forgave us! Ask her when she gets back! You don't think I'd lie about that and make things worse for us, do you? had defused their anger sufficiently for him to get away without having to reveal his parahuman nature in self-defense.

I'd brought the matter to Moord Nag's attention, and during her daily radio broadcast to her subjects this morning she had declared that she'd chosen to spare us from torment—after we'd begged abjectly for her mercy, of course—and so we should be left in peace as long as we otherwise obeyed her laws.

A much calmer Robin had asked me to join him for breakfast, to sample the local cuisine; as the warlord was off seeing to one of her outlying territories and Aasdier was therefore currently unavailable for study, I agreed.

The restaurant he'd been recommended was said to be one of the best in the area, having minimal structural damage from old cape battles, no recent casualties among the staff, a menu carefully constructed to lessen the impact of food rationing, and backup generators in the case of a power outage. We'd found the place without difficulty and had been seated and served without delay, despite the flecks of hesitance and discomfort in the auras of the servers and patrons alike.

And then Robin, seeing a group of locals eyeing us warily from another table, had decided to approach them in the hopes of assuring them of our peaceful intentions and finding common ground.

It hadn't taken him long. Between his just so happening to speak the local tongue of Oshiwambo (with my discreet assistance) and his turning out to not be a hated prejudiced American but rather a friendly and personable man who hunted down and arrested hated prejudiced American villains for a living, he'd quickly won them over.

Word had spread through the restaurant from there and been passed along to new diners as they arrived for a late breakfast and then eventually lunch, and now for the past few hours Robin had been at the center of a small crowd that was hanging on his every word as he shared tales from his heroic career.

People who lived in constant fear of potential raids by Afrikaner villains whenever Moord Nag was out of the city could, it seemed, derive a great vicarious enjoyment from hearing a very similar group of prejudiced parahumans receive their just deserts.

"These skinheads, they think we don't know they're there, right? They've got no idea Armsmaster's scanners clocked them the moment they showed up," Robin continued, grinning slyly as if to let his listeners in on a great secret, "and that we're already waiting for them, rifles and foam sprayers at the ready."

(As Robin was unwilling to reveal his cape identity to strangers, he'd presented himself as a mundane PRT soldier, using his military experience to lend authenticity to his claimed background. Velocity, in his edited recountings, was merely a cape who happened to accompany his squadron on every mission.)

"Velocity zips up to the second floor to check on them, zips back down, and tells us they're advancing slowly in two groups, one on either side of the main door. Sarge gives the order, and we all take up positions covering the windows." He tilted his head and lifted his arms as if aiming a rifle.

"We're all crouched behind the shelving units; they're sheet metal and plywood and hardly bulletproof, but we'll take any cover we can get, you know?" Two of his listeners, their vests painted with Moord Nag's emblem and the rifles slung over their backs marking them as member of the Windhoek militia, nodded in grim agreement. "Yeah. Plus, it's the Empire's own warehouse we're holed up in, so we're guessing they won't want to shoot their own stuff."

He paused to take a long, slow sip of his beer, letting the tension build.

"So what happened next?" called an eager young woman in the crowd.

"I'm glad you asked. We had a third cape with us: Battery. She has super-speed like Velocity—though not nearly as fast—plus she's invulnerable and has a couple other powers too, but only in short bursts. Now, Battery's not all tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome like Armsmaster and Velocity, right?" he continued, without a hint of shame at the self-aggrandizement. "She's lean and quick, and can't be much taller than you are."

Robin smiled. "But she can kick more ass than any four of us squaddies put together, that's for sure. She can turn invulnerable, right, so she asks Velocity roughly where all the skinheads are standing outside, she charges up her power..." he paused briefly for effect, then made a twisting motion as if lunging forward shoulder-first "...and she ran right through the f*ckin' wall and knocked the nearest two flat on their asses!"

Approving cheers rang out from the crowd, but Robin held up his hands. "Wait, wait, that's not the best part!" he said. "So, when she's charged up she has super-strength, too, but only for maybe a minute at a time, so she has to deal with all these guys fast. Not enough time for her to zig-zag back and forth to take out all of them one by one, right?"

His smile broadened. "So she reaches down and grabs each guy by his ankle…" he hunched his shoulders and stretched his arms out to the side to mime the motion himself "...and lifts them up to each side, about so high off the ground, gives them a little underhand spin…."

Riotous laughter broke out among the listeners as they realized where the story was headed. "And she chucks 'em at the two groups," Robin concluded, raising his voice to be heard above the din, "and knocks over every single bastard out there like a bunch of bowling pins! They never even saw what hit 'em!"

As the crowd raised their drinks in a toast, I took a sip from the latest glass in my own tasting flight, concealing a frown.

Turning foes into friends with a few words and a smile, spinning carefully-altered tales to entertain the locals without their having any idea whence those tales truly originated, dark and wavy hair fluttering in the breeze coming through the open doorway nearby...Robin hadn't ever reminded me of Aldric more than he did in this very moment.

I stood, nudged the minds of those near me with Faint Memory so that no one present would notice my departure, and strode outside to be alone.

~*~*~

It was raining somewhat heavily by the time Robin extricated himself from the crowd and left the restaurant to come find me.

Children were running gleefully through the rain and jumping from puddle to puddle, taking simple pleasure in an experience they likely hadn't had for quite some time. The auras of their parents and other adult passers-by filled the street with a haze of relief and optimism at the breaking of the drought.

Robin wore no coat—he'd packed only light and thin clothing, he said, so as not to interfere with the use of his power—and there was no tree cover in the expanse of dirt and brush that served as the restaurant's parking lot, so he ducked his head, pulled his shirt collar up, and shielded his face with a forearm as he hurried over to me.

He waved up at the sky. "Is this you?" he asked, voice raised against the drumming of rain on car roofs.

"It is." I evoked a Tenser's Greater Floating Disk above his head and inverted it, to serve as shelter against the rain, then prestidigitated him dry.

He straightened and tugged his shirt back down. "Thanks."

"Of course."

"When it didn't rain here last night, I figured you were only going to make it rain out on the farms," he said, a question in his tone.

"I could have, by the letter of our agreement," I agreed, "but leaving the cities parched would have had disastrous effects at the boundaries between wet and dry, and the local water table was in dire need of replenishment. A more gradual and uniform approach was required if the local folk were to be kept safe from flash flooding and freed of their water rationing."

Even the gentlest touch upon the atmosphere had the potential to destabilize things long past our stay here. While I'd studied meteorological phenomena on dozens of worlds, I had no practical expertise in long-term climatic engineering, as in Jhaamdath it was primarily the Church of Auppenser's responsibility to maintain optimal and sustainable weather patterns throughout the empire.

The nobility did usually hold that responsibility in our outlying colonies, granted, but even if I'd been inclined to volunteer for that duty, I hadn't actually grown strong enough to learn any atmokinetic powers until long after my homeland's fall.

Thus, I'd created four additional mind-seeded duplicates yesterday—or rather branched duplicates, as I'd decided to call them.

I found the metaphor of seeding an invasive weed in foreign soil to be a distasteful one, and wished to give minimal thought to the Precept-violating applications for which Mind Seed was originally designed, so I instead chose to think of these duplicates as merely being branches growing from a tree, lesser in substance and form than the central trunk but no less a natural and welcome part of the originating plant.

Two duplicates had been granted powers of invisibility, flight, teleportation, weather prediction, and weather control. Such a varied selection was of course far too broad to fit in the limited repertoire of a single duplicate when added to the necessary suite of personal warding powers, hence my splitting the chosen powers across two who would work in concert.

After Robin and I departed in two days' time, they would remain behind for several weeks in order to monitor the local climate and make any discreet adjustments that might be required to stave off unseasonable storms, droughts, or similar in the surrounding nations.

The third duplicate was granted technopathic powers, plus Greater Teleport and Disguise Self. He would travel to a neighboring nation and seek out a library with internet-capable computers in order to research historical weather and climate information for this part of Africa, to supplement the other duplicates' assigned tasks. It would be a tedious and painstaking effort, as he lacked an Inner Eye to ease digital manipulation, but that was why he had only the one task with which to concern himself.

The fourth duplicate was inspired by my creation of the other three. The branched duplicate I'd left in Egypt hadn't had room in his repertoire for all the powers I though he might find useful, and no technopathic powers at all, so this most recent duplicate had been granted those additional powers and teleported off to join the one in Cairo the moment my telepathic link with him had been established.

"I guess that makes sense," Robin said after a thoughtful pause.

His aura was tinged with both approval and resentment at the thought of my going beyond the letter of my agreement with Moord Nag; according to his surface thoughts, the former was because I'd done it to help the common folk, the latter because providing water security would only strengthen the warlord's hold on her people.

We stood in silence for a while, watching the restaurant patrons walk in and out and the cars go by.

I even suppressed my environmental wards for a time, to enjoy the scent of petrichor and the feel of a cool breeze on my skin.

"What are your plans for the afternoon?" I eventually asked.

"Not sure. I've seen a couple of museums that are right around here, but it's kind of hard to look up what else is nearby when they don't have wi-fi and the cell service is practically nonexistent."

"May I see your phone?"

"Sure."

He handed it to me, I manifested Imbue With Connectivity upon it, and to my technopathic senses the phone's irregular off-tune melody smoothed out into something steady and clear. The power only functioned within the area of an existing cellular network, but the resulting connection bypassed interference and intervening space to grant the device the highest signal strength that the local network was theoretically able to deliver.

Robin checked his phone and his eyebrows rose. "Pulling wi-fi out of thin air, huh? All the technopaths and software Tinkers I've heard of still need an actual internet connection to do anything."

In a tone that was partly humorous and partly wary, he added, "Is there anything you can't do?"

"Rescuing my transmuted allies without first studying Aasdier to develop a method of doing so, for one."

<Or showing your psicrystal to your traveling companion, for two,> Aspect noted pointedly.

"Well, yeah. I meant in general," Robin said. "Kinds of powers you can't do, like how Eidolon doesn't do tinkertech."

"There are far more of those than I'd prefer, I'm afraid," I blandly replied, shoving down the ensuing twinges of grief and impatience. "Other than the internet issues," I continued, unsubtly changing the subject, "have you enjoyed your time here thus far?"

"Other than that, and almost having to out myself yesterday? I'd say so. It's colder here than I'd like, especially after Egypt, but otherwise it's very...normal."

"You sound surprised."

"Well, yeah. I'm not one of those people who thinks Africa is all savannas and poor people in huts, or anything, but I'd expected a city that's been under a warlord's iron fist for seven or eight years now to be…."

He shrugged. "Well, more like Egypt. She's already got the adoring people, the armed followers, and the other warlords under her thumb; as soon as the PRT found out she was recruiting other warlords instead of killing any challengers like most of the villains around here tend to do, everyone got worried she was planning to expand, and fast. She's got the kind of feedback-loop power that would get her a pre-signed kill order if she were a villain in the States, and with other people to hold down the fort while she goes out killing and conquering…."

"And yet," I said.

"And yet," he agreed. "If they didn't have all the flags around, you'd never know this was Moord Nag's capital. Sure, it's got trucks full of bullet holes and bombed-out buildings from the latest raids, but that could be some random city in Arizona or Nevada that just happened to have an above-average gang presence."

He grinned. "Add a few more bombed-out buildings, and it could even be Detroit."

I hadn't heard of the city, but the implication was clear, and I chuckled politely in response.

Robin glanced up at the sky and held his hand out beyond the bounds of the Floating Disk to feel the rain. His grin faded.

"I assume you're going to be busy with Aasdier again, as soon as Moord Nag gets back?" he said.

"She returned twenty-three minutes ago, and I've already resumed my experiments."

"Duplication, right." He hesitated. "You mind if we take a walk? There are some things I've been meaning to ask you about."

"I'd be glad to. Lead the way."

~*~*~

Robin wasn't the only one curious about the weather: Just over a mile away in Moord Nag's palace, the warlord looked away from the windows and broke her customary taciturn vigil to ask, "You've brought rain to the fields as well, yes?"

My second self glanced up from my poking and prodding of Aasdier. "Of course."

"All of them?"

"From one end of your 'night countries' to the other," I confirmed.

"Good."

"You thought I wouldn't keep my word?"

"Not that." She lifted one shoulder in a jerky shrug that was close as she was likely to come to a gesture of apology. "It is over seven hundred kilometers to the southern border from here. I thought the stories of your strength to be exaggerated."

Even I would have struggled to weave a mythal that large without prior research, so I'd simply sent my two duplicates around to manifest as many localized instances of Control Weather as were needed to cover her entire territory. But she had no need to know that.

"I'm sure they have been, but I would imagine they are more true than not on the whole," I replied.

She said nothing in response, so I turned back to Aasdier. I moved my hand in a gesture he'd come to recognize, and he extruded a head-sized mass of his shadow-flesh to serve as the focus of my next divination.

If Moord Nag was willing to question me unprompted, perhaps she could be persuaded to continue conversing. I had a strong suspicion that Robin intended to ask my first self about my attitude toward the warlord, so any more information I might be able to gather would be useful.

"How did you hear stories about me?" I asked.

The next divination in my sequence, one to sense nearby life essence, failed to distinguish any distinct sparks of vitality within Aasdier's form. Disappointing, but not unexpected; on to the next one.

"In my time here I've seen no smartphones," I continued, "no news broadcasts from America…."

"We are largely cut off from the rest of the world," she agreed with a scowl. "Our neighbors try to keep me ignorant of their activities, hoping to prevent me from catching their raids in time. Most international radio stations cannot penetrate the interference from the jamming towers just across the border, and all of my people's attempts to connect our internal telephone network with the Angolan networks survive only for days, weeks at most, before cables are cut and antennas are destroyed."

Robin likely wouldn't be pleased when he discovered that lack of connection to the greater internet.

"But I do have some outside allies." She jerked her chin up and to the left, indicating a room upstairs in which several of her subjects were seated before some rather decrepit-looking computers, typing away. "Satellite internet. Only accessible from this building, as one account is easier for them to hide than many. It is hardly anything, but it is enough."

Internet access via some manner of artificial satellite?

Intriguing. Perhaps I should move investigation of this world's spacefaring capabilities higher on my priority list.

For now, the presence of internet connectivity here would at least make my third duplicate's task considerably easier.

~*~*~

A few minutes' walk took Robin and my first self far enough down the street from the restaurant that distance and the rain would shield our conversation from the ears of any passers-by.

"What was it you wanted to know?" I prompted him.

"A lot of things."

He didn't continue immediately, instead looking thoughtfully into the distance, his gaze playing across the pedestrians walking along the opposite side of the street and the occasional car passing between us and them.

"I guess my first question is, why are you so...arbitrary, when it comes to picking who to help? You helped out lots of civvies in Brockton Bay from what I hear, and the Protectorate too, but you didn't do anything anywhere near the scale of changing the weather for us. Then we came here, and you bent over backwards to help Moord Nag herself, but you haven't done things for," he waved back to the restaurant, "anyone else."

He let out a frustrated breath. "And you didn't do anything in Egypt, when they could use the rain a lot more than the people here could. At first I thought you were just doing whatever people asked, but you offered to help us during the Bakuda situation without anyone asking and you didn't take out the Ennead when I did ask, so...I don't get it. What's the pattern I'm missing?"

"It's quite simple, really," I replied. "My motives are purely selfish. When someone has something I find useful or interesting, I bargain with them to obtain it in exchange for goods or deeds of equivalent value. If they've nothing to offer me, I offer them nothing."

He shook his head in fervent disagreement. "Nope, no, I don't believe that. You keep saying you're a rogue and not a hero, but you obviously don't just not care about people so I don't buy the 'just trading favors' story. And I heard about how you dropped everything when you were meeting with Renick to go rescue someone you knew; that doesn't sound very rogue-ish to me."

How annoyingly insightful of him.

The reason I'd initially kept my activities in Brockton Bay very limited and discreet was of course that I'd been laboring under the Society's usual strictures at the time, but reminding him of their non-intervention policy would likely lead to his questioning why I was now able to intervene much more freely, and that was a topic I'd rather not broach with any locals just yet.

Perhaps a more oblique approach to the truth would suffice.

"I suppose they aren't entirely selfish," I conceded. "Trading favors in pursuit of my goals is indeed my primary concern at the moment, but when it comes to deciding precisely what favors should be traded and with whom, I do have a certain set of guiding principles by which I abide."

"And those would be…?"

"Some personal, some professional, some cultural. At their core are the Three Precepts that were the foundation of my people's theology and moral philosophy…."

~*~*~

Basic divinations, elemental composition scans with my ring Eternity, careful incisions with a conjured thinaun blade...I was quickly exhausting the most promising avenues of investigation into Aasdier's nature.

Should all of the more basic methods fail to bear fruit, I would have to attempt some that were much more involved, perhaps designing bespoke curses or performing a semantic truename analysis.

And to successfully manage either of those things, I would need to know more about the familiar as a person, and about the meaning behind his name.

"An interesting name, Aasdier; I don't know that it truly fits him," I commented casually. I gently pulsed telekinetic force against the shadow-flesh beneath her familiar's skull, as if scratching an animal under the chin, and in response he shifted the shape of his skull from avian to leonine and leaned into the motion.

"Too fearsome for the gentle and protective behavior he exhibits toward you, not fearsome enough for the reaction I presume you hoped to instill in your foes," I continued. "Was it a name you chose, or one that you sensed was his already?"

"It was my choice."

She did not elaborate.

"Might I ask your reasoning?" I prodded. "I'm aware that dredging up memories surrounding the origins of one's powers can be quite painful, but it could be important. Names, whether assumed oneself or bestowed by another, hold a subtle but immense significance."

Moord Nag's aura pulsed with reluctance, so I added, "I would be quite grateful for the information, enough to extend the rains by another day, or perhaps to a full week."

The reluctance was gradually overwhelmed by a deep shade of determination surrounded by flecks of pride.

"I met him in an AWB camp," she began, her tone devoid of emotion. Seeing that I did not recognize the initialism, she explained, "Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, a nationalist separatist group. A fading fringe group, once, before the emergence of parahumans handed them a sudden surge in strength, numbers, and influence. Nearly a quarter of South Africa's white warlords now owe it their allegiance."

Anger began to bleed into her aura and her tone. "After the coup, dissidents and rebels were rounded up and imprisoned. Any who spoke up against the oppression were targeted—churches, schools, entire neighborhoods, even groups of white 'traitors' who stood with us. Our families urged us to stay silent and ignore the violence. To bow and scrape before the murderers in power, as if that would protect us."

She shook her head, her aura taking on a rueful tinge before that, too, disappeared under the determination. "My university friends and I ignored them. We marched, we armed ourselves, we would not be silent. So they came for us in the night. Us, and our families."

There was a brief pause. When she resumed, her tone was more subdued.

"What was done in the camps...I cannot speak of it. I will only say that many people I once knew left in chains, with their bodies empowered but their minds broken. Some would call them the lucky ones."

Moord Nag turned to look into the eye sockets of Aasdier's skull. Speaking more to him than to me, she continued, "There was an escape attempt. We planned for weeks. We failed. Most died. I was badly wounded and left for dead. I woke in a mass grave, slowly bleeding out, buried under the corpses of nearly everyone I had ever known, with more being tossed onto the pile by the minute."

She paused again, leaving entire volumes unspoken.

"And then he was there."

Her gaze returned to me. "My friends and family could not help me escape in life, but they could aid me in death. Them, and then the guards digging the grave. And then, after night fell, every other guard and collaborator in the camp."

Despite the many horrors implied by her tale, there was no sorrow in her aura, no mourning. Only defiance.

"He has been called the Night That Murders, while I have been called a murderer in the night; I took those names and made them my own. He has also been called the Killing Darkness, the Devouring Emptiness, the Eater of Souls, and worse, by those who deserve every evil I have inflicted upon them and more."

The warlord shook her head slightly. "But his name is Scavenger, because I cannot allow myself to forget that the first order I gave him was to desecrate the bodies of my countrymen and deprive them of a proper burial, simply to let me survive to see another day."

I inclined my head in a shallow bow of solemn respect. "Thank you for sharing that with me. I know well the pain of losing many loved ones at once, and I sympathize greatly with your loss."

She scoffed in dismissal of my words. "Keep your sympathy. Pain is a weakness, regret is a weakness. I only look forward, now."

Expressing the degree to which I vehemently disagreed with such a sentiment would ruin the moment, so I merely nodded in acknowledgment and turned to Aasdier.

"Loss and triumph, Scavenger and harbinger," I murmured, mulling over what she had said and considering possible lexemes in Aasdier's truename to which those concepts might correspond. Then I called to mind my rudimentary understanding of Truespeech and set to work.

~*~*~

"...which means any warlord who takes power illegally should count as 'coercing' the populace under your First Precept, right?" Robin asked.

"Not so. Their legitimacy or lack thereof is irrelevant, only the ways in which they choose to exercise authority matters."

He gave me an incredulous look. "How does everyone living under an unelected dictatorship not count as coercion!?"

I sighed. "A lack of elections does not make a government either tyrannical or oppressive. Your insistence on conflating America's peculiar form of representative democracy with 'real freedom' isn't even shared by most other nations on this world, from what I understand, let alone those on the countless others that exist."

Robin rolled his eyes. "It's not my insistence, it's basic political philosophy. Look, just because you have a fancy noble title and don't see any of the problems with that—"

"Systems of nobility are the platinum standard for governments the multiverse over, Good ones as well as Evil, and on the whole they function exceptionally well."

"For who?" he shot back. "The nobles in charge, or the 'commoners' who are being ruled?"

"Both."

"Bullsh*t."

He paused briefly as we crossed the street, there being many fewer puddles for him to avoid on the opposite side, and then continued: "Democratic countries are more peaceful, healthier, wealthier, safer, and just...better, on every metric, than monarchies. There's a reason most countries who used to have monarchs either got rid of them or made them figureheads."

Noticing a blotch of slight dishonesty and guilt in his aura when he mentioned his first two parameters, of the sort usually seen when one is glossing over uncomfortable truths, I asked, "I suppose if I were to research said metrics I would find that every democracy is uniformly better than every other nation, with no variation based on culture or other local variables, and that their degree of 'freedom' directly relates to these improved outcomes?"

"No country's perfect," he replied, sounding more than a little defensive. "But overall? Yeah. Compare America and western Europe to Russia, or China, or anywhere ruled by a warlord, and it's no contest."

"You've admitted already to being surprised by the circ*mstances of daily life in Egypt and Namibia. If a warlord's rule can bring peace, prosperity, and security, and democracy can come with all manner of flaws, why would you assume that democracy causes better outcomes, instead of the correlation being an accident of history on this world?"

"Because every single example we have shows countries getting better when they become democratic, and getting worse if they regress. Why are you so opposed to the thought that elections are a good idea and democracy is a good form of government? Not even the best form—which it is—but just a good one?"

"Elections can be a useful tool, in the right circ*mstances," I corrected. "Guildmasters selecting a guild leader from among themselves, for instance, or other informed decisions made by a curated group of experts."

I shook my head. "No, the idea to which I object is that of choosing a nation's rulers according to the mercurial whims of the entire populace, from the actually qualified down to the ignorant and uneducated, with no guarantee that those chosen will possess any more aptitude for rule than any of their fellow citizens. That this would produce a remotely functional form of government is a ludicrous suggestion at every level."

"Doesn't matter if you think it's ludicrous, America's been a democracy for two-hundred-thirty-some years. Empirically, we know it works."

Not even a full three centuries? I scoffed internally. Even a dynasty of inbred hobgoblins could keep a government staggering along for that long, given sufficient numbers, wealth, and military strength.

(That wasn't a hypothetical; I'd encountered one such dynasty on Caer Sidi that had done just that.)

Hells, I'd even taught single classes at the Udoclian for over three centuries! America's supposed longevity was hardly the steel-clad evidence Robin thought it to be.

"'Works' is very much a matter of opinion," I rejoined. "You forget, I've spoken with several of your leaders. I was not impressed."

"Sure, not everyone we elect is a winner—"

"That's precisely the point! You've no way to ensure competence or good character. Nobles are raised from birth with the knowledge and expectation that they will rule, and are educated and trained accordingly to ensure they will be capable rulers. The average citizen is not, focusing instead on a career or other pursuits."

Robin tried to respond, but I continued over him: "And then there's the chaos of frequent transitions of power! A noble serves for life unless deposed, providing their subjects with a stable and predictable rule. With an elected ruler, you could come back a mere three or four decades later and find that there's already someone else in their place!"

"That's precisely the point," he said, echoing my earlier words with a slight mocking edge to his tone. "The biggest problem with dictators is that while you might get lucky enough to get a 'good' one, it's really hard to get rid of a bad one. Frequent elections let you vote out bad politicians as soon as possible."

"How frequently, exactly?"

"In America? Every four years for a president, two or six years for a member of Congress."

"Six? Gods above and between. An inability to plan beyond a six-year horizon...how do they ever get anything done?"

Robin smirked. "Eh, if you ask most people, they usually don't."

Perhaps realizing that his jest hadn't helped his argument, he hurriedly added, "But the short terms don't matter much, since everyone under them stays around longer. I'm pretty sure Congressional staffers stick around if someone from the same party gets elected to that seat, and federal employees tend to work at the same agency for twenty, thirty, forty years before they retire."

"Accumulating knowledge, experience, and connections all the while, one assumes."

"Yeah."

"Your government thus recognizes the need to maintain a hierarchy of competent, highly-skilled, and specially-trained individuals for decades at a time to keep itself functioning, exactly like a noble house would...except for its highest and most influential positions, which it hands out to significantly less-qualified and -experienced individuals?"

Robin frowned. "You're framing it that way to make it sound bad."

"Because it is. The leader of an organization should have the most competence in the relevant fields, not the least."

Although I was forced to admit, privately, that if the American system did rely more on its bureaucrats than on its ostensible leaders—and it certainly did love its bureaucracy, as I'd experienced firsthand with the PRT and then the State Department—then the harm done by a less-than-competent ruler could perhaps be mitigated and leave various sections of the government decently functional despite themselves.

"You wouldn't place a melophobe in charge of a musician's guild," I continued, "you wouldn't place a misotheist in charge of a church, and you wouldn't place a civilian in charge of a navy—"

"Actually, we do," he retorted. "Most US presidents have had some military experience, but it's not an actual requirement and none of them since Reagan has served. In fact, the Commander in Chief being a civilian who can't hold military rank is a key principle of our democracy, as a check against tyranny."

I turned to stare at him. For a few moments, there was no sound but the tread of boots on asphalt and the patter of rain on my Floating Disk.

"All right," I said eventually, "now this I have to hear."

~*~*~

Moord Nag strode back into the room, Aasdier at her side.

She refused to leave him with me whenever she was called away to attend to some task or request from her subjects; her aura didn't contain a single trace of fear for her life or distrust of her people when she bade him to follow her, so I assumed she simply didn't wish to give me the opportunity to experiment on Aasdier when she wasn't present.

Not that it mattered, really, seeing as she hadn't the slightest idea what I was doing or what effect a given test might have on her familiar, but I could understand the impulse.

Aldric had always been reluctant to let Chelior out of his sight, never using his familiar for scouting or spying as some arcanists did, because he hated the thought of the raven coming to the slightest harm despite knowing intellectually that the protective wards around his familiar were nearly as all-encompassing as those around himself.

And, admittedly, while Aspect can be incredibly irritating at the best of times, and his attitude could probably be improved considerably if I handed him off to Lady Penumbra with a set of adamantine jeweler's tools and an invitation to incorporate him into one of her art projects—

—I do bear a similar attachment to Aspect, against my better judgment, and were anyone to cause even a single crack to mar one of his facets I would surely visit such wrath upon them as to make a month's internment in the Ninth Hell seem like a pleasant island vacation.

Aasdier's shadow-flesh flowed around me as the warlord resumed her seat and crossed her arms. "Continue," she said.

For a time, I honed my guesses regarding Aasdier's truename. I was sensing some minor resonance with my latest utterances, but nothing substantial enough that I could yet use it as the basis for a High Science as I'd planned.

Eventually Moord Nag called a halt to my recitation. Truespeech tangibly warps reality when spoken, even by a rank amateur such as myself, and apparently she'd felt something of the effect my words had on Aasdier through their bond and was concerned for his well-being.

I agreed to take a break to let him recover, not that he actually needed it. While I waited, my thoughts wandered back to the warlord's mention of diamond and uranium shipments. I'd initially been intrigued because investigation of so-called nuclear radiation was on my priority list, but she'd given me another reason to be interested.

"You mentioned earlier that you are largely cut off from the rest of the world, yet when we first spoke you implied you are able to ship incredibly valuable goods elsewhere without interference," I said. "If your neighbors will not trade with you, who will?"

"What has that to do with Aasdier?" she asked warily.

"Nothing. I'm merely curious."

She eyed me suspiciously for a moment, then replied, "China will. They approached me several years ago seeking raw materials and a political alliance, just as they have every other African warlord with a stable territory and long-lasting rule. They have made enemies of all their neighbors with their aggression and so they have sought allies farther from home."

"Have they offered to aid you in breaking the communications blockade, in addition to the trade embargo?"

"Only if I formally allied with them. I refused."

"Why is that?"

She scoffed. "They can't be trusted. The Union-Imperial conquers, it does not ally. I will use their ships and take their money for as long as I can, and if they extend a grasping hand to demand more, Aasdier will bite it off."

~*~*~

What had begun as a brief walk and a friendly chat had metamorphosed into an intense debate on political philosophy over the course of multiple long loops around a nearby field.

It was currently occupied by two competing teams playing "field hockey," according to Robin, as I'd left sports fields and other open-air gathering places free of rain to avoid impacting any scheduled events. Apart from his naming and briefly describing the game's rules, however, we both ignored the spectacle to focus on our discussion.

He'd described the American government structure and process in much more detail than my own cursory research had supplied—including, at my prompting, its many faults and foibles. I'd learned all manner of interesting new terms, such as lobbyist and gerrymandering and voter suppression and especially government shutdown, which only reinforced my belief that democracy was irretrievably flawed.

In exchange, I had explained how systems of nobility actually functioned on the worlds I'd visited, as it seemed that he knew of such systems on this world only through historical and entertainment media.

There were countless local quirks and variations in every nation on every world that made it impossible to explain every system in detail, but I chose several examples to use as reasonable reference implementations, from the absolute hereditary monarchy of the Kingdom of Cormyr on Toril to the limited constitutional tetrarchy of the Topside Dominion on Lirak's Cube.

Robin of course expressed curiosity about how Jhaamdath's own government functioned, and I of course obliged him with a brief overview of that as well.

It was not to his taste.

"The idea of someone's political power being based on their 'psionic' power seems ridiculously unfair," Robin was arguing.

"Not at all. Psionic strength necessarily correlates with intellect, self-discipline, and scholastic achievement; it is external evidence of one's internal suitability for rule."

"How does that make any sense? Triggers are completely random, there's no guarantee that getting powers makes you good at learning or governing, even for Thinkers—some would argue especially for Thinkers. And every single country where capes took over has taken a nosedive. Even in the US, we've had to quarantine cities that villains take over because things just get that bad."

"Most magocracies in which heirs are chosen based on the strength of their sorcerous blood over all other factors do suffer from that problem," I admitted. "But you misunderstand: In Jhaamdath, psionic ability was not random, it was universally taught."

"...What?"

"Most of its noble families were originally founded to retain and strengthen the innate psionic potential of the original Dath dynasty through careful breeding, excepting the Talairic Houses," I explained, "but by the Golden Age, advancements in the psionic sciences meant that the noble wilders were actually less capable than trained psionicists—"

"What do you mean, 'trained' psionicists? And how do you teach 'psionic ability'?"

There followed a brief digression on that subject, one that took us halfway around the hockey field as I assured him that I was telling the truth and answered his skeptical objections.

For the sake of fairness, I did make sure to emphasize that there were plenty of tyrants on the Prime with sorcerous or wilding talents who had done nothing to earn their power and had no more training in governance than a random parahuman would in their position, and that wielding divine magic was no guarantee of competence given that many gods would accept any old lackwit as a priest so long as they were properly obsequious.

"So basically," Robin said once I'd finished my explanation, "you're saying that magocracies where people can luck into being a 'sorcerer-king' because they were born with magic power tend to be terrible for people to live under, but ones where the nobles all have to 'earn' their magic are a lot better because there's more education and much less disparity, and your country is best of all because every single person learns magic and there's practically no difference between a 'bladelord' who was born into a noble family and one who was adopted into it as an adult so they could be given that rank?"

"A fitting summation."

Smugness flooded his aura, and he grinned triumphantly. "In other words, you saw that normal systems of magic nobility where they hoarded all the magic powers for themselves were a terrible idea, so to make society better for everyone, you kicked them off their pedestals and democratized magic."

…

<Huh. Haven't heard it put that way before. I have to admit, I'm impressed.>

<Oh, come on, Val, he does have a point. A flawed and very stretched point, but a point nonetheless.>

"I suppose you could attempt to characterize Jhaamdath's superiority through that lens," I grudgingly admitted. "But the fact that Jhaamdath was an enlightened society does not mean it was a democracy, nor that it shared all of America's values."

"Really? They didn't believe everyone deserved life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

"They did, but that is hardly uniquely democratic. Any non-Evil government will value those highly."

"How about everyone being endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights and being created equal?"

"Of course not."

Robin goggled at me, clearly not expecting that answer. "Uh...what?"

"The gods are fickle and play favorites; Auppenser, Jhaamdath's patron, favored us much more than most deities do their worshipers, while drow seem to exist solely to suffer for Lolth's amusem*nt. There are many creatures superior to humanity, dragons being the most obvious example, and plenty that are inferior."

"Dragons," he said slowly. "As in, not human capes like Lung, but real fire-breathing lizards?"

"They aren't lizards, taxonomically, and only a minority breathe fire, but yes."

"Huh." He shook his head. "Just talking about humans, then: Do you agree that we're all equal?"

"Not even remotely." I gestured to the side, where one team of field hockey players was dashing down the field toward the other. "The man in the viridian shirt is clearly stronger and faster than the rest of the defending team; his opponent in the scarlet shirt is clearly more skilled than the rest of his own team. Would you say that they are all equal?"

"I'm not just talking about being equally good at sports," he replied testily.

"Then how about other attributes? Your own, even? You have the talent and training necessary to speak at least seven languages with reasonable fluency, while I've heard no one here speak more than four, and met no one in America who spoke more than two. You've educated yourself extensively on the workings of government and other topics, above and beyond the standard education most will receive. You are quite physically fit, where many of your fellow Americans care little for their fitness; you are healthy and well-fed, where rationing has rendered many of Moord Nag's subjects undernourished; you are charismatic and eloquent, where most lack your training in public speaking and etiquette—"

"All right, okay," he interrupted, "I have a lot of advantages compared to a lot of people, I'm well aware. But that doesn't make me better than them in some fundamental way."

I gave him a look. "Clearly it does. In multiple areas."

"No it doesn't!" A hint of tension appeared in his shoulders, accompanied by frustration and dismay in his aura. "Being smarter or stronger or whatever doesn't matter when it comes to real equality."

"And I suppose you don't think being a parahuman matters either?"

"It doesn't, no matter what the anti-cape people say."

"It clearly does."

We went back and forth about that a few times, getting nowhere, before I grew exasperated enough to rummage through his surface thoughts for the source of our disagreement.

"Ah, you're speaking of moral equality," I realized. "In that case, yes, I wholeheartedly agree that no human soul bears any more inherent worth than any other."

The tension faded from Robin's posture at my words. "Thank you."

"That is irrelevant, however, when it comes to the question of whether you should let citizens choose their leaders arbitrarily, based on their popularity, wealth, or rhetorical skill. Rulers should be appointed to positions of authority commensurate with their proven aptitude, to serve and provide for the citizenry as best they are able, and they should be concerned with meeting the actual needs of the populace, not satisfying its petty desires."

Robin opened his mouth to let loose a heated reply, then frowned and glanced to the side in thought, his aura tinged with faint recognition.

"...From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs?" he ventured, sounding as though he were quoting someone.

"Aptly put."

He closed his eyes and sighed heavily. "How the hell do you, of all people, agree with Marx more than Madison?"

"Who, pray tell, is 'Marx'?"

~*~*~

The phone at Moord Nag's belt buzzed loudly in a distinct pattern, first to my technopathic senses and then audibly a moment later, and she rose to her feet and opened the phone in one smooth motion.

"Speak," she ordered.

"Great One! Oormore says she sees Tokolotshe and Suurreën attacking Lüderitz and Terre'Blanche forces attacking Walvis Bay!" a voice said, naming Namibia's only two ports—soon to be two of three, once my third self finished rebuilding Swakopmund—and what sounded like several capes.

"How soon?" she demanded.

"Likely two and a half hours, no more than three."

Hatred and righteous rage shone forth from her aura, prompting Aasdier to rear up in sympathetic agitation.

"You'll be responding to those attacks, I assume?" I asked.

"Only one. They're two hours apart at Aasdier's best speed, and he could barely make it to the southern coast in time. Walvis Bay is closer, and more critical, but I cannot be seen to abandon Lüderitz, a city so far from the capital."

Her blazing anger swiftly settled into a cold fury. For several long moments she stood motionless, her aura thrumming with calculation and indecision.

Then she spoke into the phone: "Summon Duisend Staal and Gaob ǂGūi and send them to Walvis Bay with four platoons. I'll handle Lüderitz."

"Yes, Great One!"

Moord Nag moved to leave, but I held out a hand. "Before you go—"

"There's no time. You can continue whenever we return."

"Do your enemies possess flight?"

Her eyes narrowed. "Suurreën flies as a cloud, Tokolotshe rides the water. The mercenaries have helicopters. Why?"

I sent telepathic messages to two of my branched duplicates, then smiled. "I understand the forecast in both cities calls for severe thunderstorms this evening."

She hesitated, clearly trying to decide whether to reject my help so as not to give me any leverage over her.

"If you or Aasdier die today, my research comes to naught. Consider it granting a favor to myself," I assured her. "Go."

She nodded sharply and grasped Aasdier's nearest limb, and then in a blur of motion they were gone.

~*~*~

Two more circuits of the field saw Robin expound at length on the details of (and many deficiencies in) communism and socialism, two other relatively popular forms of government on this world, as well as a few other forms that were mentioned in passing.

His bias against those two was quite evident—as was his distaste for Russia, widely considered to be the current exemplar of said forms of government.

He did at least try his best to be even-handed in his explanations, and the fact that I was able to supplement his explanation with internet resources my second self accessed through Moord Nag's internet connection helped to give me a more balanced understanding.

And to give me pause.

Robin's diatribe concerning the currently-communist Russia and formerly-communist China decried the supposed immorality of those nations' governments, but when reading the online articles about those nations and their history I couldn't help but admire their economic and military effectiveness compared to the more standard aristocratic governments that had come before (and, in China's case, after).

And according to the sources I'd consulted, for all its manifold failings American democracy had proven to be decisively economically and militarily superior to those other systems of government, thus indirectly proving it superior to the local systems of nobility in those areas as well.

My first reaction had been to note that the presence of a god of nobility in this sphere would have assuredly led to much more effective and beneficial monarchies in both nations...and then it had suddenly struck me that this world was the one singular case study among all the known spheres in which multiple kinds of government had engaged in competition without any gods aiding or impeding their favored or disliked forms of government, and nobility had effectively lost the competition in every scenario.

It was one thing to know, intellectually, that this world's inhabitants had been struggling along for at least the past several millennia and possibly longer without any divine aid whatsoever, and quite another thing to truly internalize that fact for the first time.

Democracy was an objectionable form of government in many ways, kept afloat only by a very non-democratic bureaucracy, riddled with corruption, and burdened with obvious failure states...but if Realmspace had no Siamorphe or the various gods of justice and honor to keep most nobles scrupulously virtuous, and no Oghma or the various other gods of knowledge and writing to enlighten the earliest political scholars, might not Cormyr and Tethyr and all the other kingdoms of Faerûn suffer corruption and failure at similar rates?

If Auppenser had not granted visions of the ideal societal structure to Laszik Silvermind for him to implement, and had instead left Jhaam the Unifier to his own devices, would Jhaamdath have thrived to nearly the same degree—or even survived at all?

If some patron deities of democracy or communism were to somehow arise in modern Faerûn, might their favored nations avoid the flaws of American democracy and Russian communism and compete with surrounding kingdoms on equal terms?

If Auppenser had originally provided Jhaamdath with a different system of government entirely…?

Many things to ponder.

Though none to mention to Robin, just yet.

As with my perspective on democracy, I found myself agreeing with many of the overarching principles of communism and socialism while objecting strenuously to several of their core tenets, something that Robin found amusing.

"Well, I can tell you this much: If you ever ran for office, you'd finally unite all the political parties behind a single candidate," he said.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Whichever one was running against you." He grinned. "The Democrats would hate you for being a monarchist who loves prayer in schools, the Republicans would hate you for being a pinko commie who loves big government, the Greens would hate you for being a pro-military technocrat, and the Libertarians would hate you for being anti-capitalist and pro-cape."

"It is the solemn duty of any leader to help the citizenry come together despite their differences," I replied in a tone of mock humility. "I'll begin devising 'campaign slogans' immediately."

"Ha! I guess I'll be your veep."

"You certainly would be a superior choice of running mate."

"Oh, don't you start with that sh*t again," he replied, but his tone was light and his face bore an easy smile.

We came to a halt, and Robin looked to the darkening sky. Surprise dappled his aura as he noticed the late hour and the lack of hockey players on the field.

"Wow, so much for having just a few questions, huh? I didn't mean to keep us out here all afternoon. Sorry if you had any other plans."

"It was no trouble at all. The opportunity to have discussions of that sort was precisely why I invited you along."

"Glad I could help."

We stood in companionable silence for a few minutes, watching the sun set. I'd given him more than a few things to think about, I could tell...and he'd done the same for me.

My secondary mind would be cogitating on what he'd said and what I'd read for some time yet.

"You want to head back for some more sword practice and then grab dinner?" Robin eventually asked.

"That would be delightful."

"Great." Robin pulled out his phone as we turned toward the road and began walking northeast to his shelter. "Let me look up a good place."

"Actually, I've unfortunate news about the internet situation…."

~*~*~

07:38, Friday the 24th of June, 2011 CE
National Botanical Gardens, Windhoek, Namibia, Earth Bet

There was no grand ceremony surrounding our departure from Moord Nag's territory, or even a terse farewell from the warlord herself, because as far as she was aware we weren't actually leaving.

While Robin and one of myselves proceeded on to the next stage of our trip, a second self remained behind to continue my studies with Aasdier, which had yet to produce any solid results. Moord Nag, having paid no attention to Robin's whereabouts while I was at her palace and being unaware of my ability to partition myself, noticed no change in my daily routine.

She hadn't even requested any further favors when agreeing to my request to remain behind, as her gratitude had more than covered the balance of obligation between us.

My duplicates' electrical bombardment, disguised as serendipitous lightning strikes, had ensured that the raids upon her ports ended with no casualties among her soldiers, and her newly-reconstructed third port was already seeing displaced citizens return to the the homes that they'd been forced to flee when the city had initially been rendered uninhabitable.

And so, while one of me continued experimenting with an alloy of thinaun, azoth, zinc, and antimony that seemed as though it might be promising as the focus for a High Science that might split Aasdier asunder (or rather a fissioned duplicate of him; no need to risk actually harming him), and another self returned to my demiplane to resume work on my projects, my third self waited for Robin to finish packing and then dismissed his shelter.

"Ethiopia, here we come!" he said enthusiastically, and then we were on our way.

~*~*~

11:47, Tuesday the 28th of June, 2011 CE
Ruins of Mehrauli Archaeological Park, New Delhi, India, Earth Bet

It was with mingled anticipation and annoyance that I arrived on the outskirts of New Delhi.

Annoyance, because my investigations at the last two stops on our tour had not met with any more success than had the first two.

Anticipation, because I could already tell that this stop would be much more promising.

~*~*~

After Cairo and Windhoek, our third destination had been Addis Ababa, in which the warlord Ogun had embarked upon a rather violent six-year journey from lone villain to gang leader to political dissident to leader of a long and bloody insurrection.

His career had finally come to an end several months ago when a joint operation by the American military, the Protectorate, the Kenyan Defense Forces, the Monrovian League, and the local warlords Adroa and Yekebere managed to dethrone him.

Ogun's power had seemingly let him craft enchanted items through mere proximity without any effort or expenditure of resources on his part, an ability I'd been quite eager to study and replicate if possible.

Unfortunately, after exploring his former lair for any leftover creations and interviewing the few former associates of his who still remained alive and unincarcerated, I discovered that the articles written about him had exaggerated his capabilities greatly. He did not create actual magic items but instead merely temporarily infused items that were near him, as Dauntless might, or as might several "Tinkers" I'd met during my journey across America.

The specific effects Ogun could create sounded interesting, especially his ability to propagate his power further through already-infused devices...but at a practical level, the ability to infuse items was nothing new to me. Quite disappointing.

Next on the itinerary was N'Gaoundéré, a city in Cameroon that served as a local transit hub but was otherwise unremarkable. It had a relatively light cape presence for a city of its size, having only a single villainous gang: Les Calamités, a six-cape team themed around natural disasters who focused on petty crimes such as robbing train shipments and burgling local businesses.

None of those villains had particularly noteworthy powers; Frémir possessed minor geokinesis and a fear-inducing aura, Cendrée created minions of smoke and ash, and so forth, nothing new there.

Except for one of their number, Éclater, who could greatly enhance the powers of any parahuman in ways that were only vaguely described in the reports about her. When the local authorities came after the gang, Éclater's touch could allow Frémir to collapse buildings with a single stomp or cause a handful of Cendrée's minions to blot out the sun over entire neighborhoods.

I could think of all sorts of interesting uses for such a power or powers, if only I could determine the precise nature of the enhancement in question.

I arranged a meeting with the gang, and once introductions were exchanged it took very little time for me to discover that the power "enhancements" consisted solely of allowing a cape to bypass some of the artificial limitations placed upon their powers by their companions, at the cost of potentially injuring themselves in the process.

There was thus no metapsionic power in her repertoire for me to acquire, and even if there had been a power involved, a means of communicating with or perhaps even compelling the companions would be very interesting for research purposes but not actually useful to my current efforts in any way.

I thanked them for their time, signaled Robin that he could now come in to arrest the gang and turn them over to the authorities as he'd requested to be allowed to do, and that was the end of our time in Cameroon.

~*~*~

And now here we stood in the midst of what had once been a lush and beautiful park, full of ancient temples and monuments known for their exquisite architecture and historical importance, before it had been struck by a very un-natural disaster.

The entire area was a wasteland, nothing but splintered wood and shattered stone, and the soil was pockmarked with craters for nearly a mile around.

"What happened here?" Robin breathed, gazing around in dismay.

"A villain's last stand," I said, and used Inner Eye to send him several links to the news articles and reports that I'd read.

In summary, a villain with very potent gravitational powers, named Nanda Devi after one of the nation's highest mountains, had fallen afoul of the protocols by which the local capes operated and had paid the price for her actions.

The Garama, the so-called "hot" capes of India, operated according to an extremely restrictive code of behavior, according to PRT records. It was much stricter and more codified than the Protectorate's own rules of engagement, or those of most of its allied cape organizations—so strict, in fact, that the "fights" between Garama heroes and villains were much closer to theater productions than actual battles, with harsh penalties for inflicting even the slightest injury upon one's opponents or even the slightest collateral damage upon one's surroundings.

Any cape who trained under such conditions from the start of their career would likely be utterly useless in any sort of real fight, I judged.

Alas, control of gravity is not the sort of ability that lends itself to great finesse in combat, and one day Nanda Devi had let loose an errant blast that had injured several bystanders and nearly crippled two opposing capes.

A forgivable misstep, perhaps, if she'd chosen to submit herself to her foes and make amends to her victims...but she had not.

The local news coverage of Nanda Devi did not detail what followed, but the PRT reports continued on, explaining what their diviners had managed to reconstruct of the situation.

The villain was approached by capes of the Thanda, the so-called "cold" capes who did not adhere to the same restrictions as the Garama and did not hesitate to remove any capes they perceived to be a threat to the social order, a category that included any Garama capes who violated their rules and then did not immediately discard their former cape identity to seek out a Thanda cell instead.

When they demanded her surrender, she instead fled to this park, believing that the Thanda heroes would not risk the collateral damage that might ensue from a pitched battle.

Unfortunately for her, the heroes in question either didn't realize the danger, didn't care, or didn't believe she would actually harm the park, and engaged her in combat anyway.

Outnumbered, wounded, and fearing for her life, Nanda Devi decided to make one final statement and unleashed a blast that not only leveled the park and crushed many of her attackers but actually altered the local gravitational field in a way that persisted beyond her death. The craters in the area were what remained when large chunks of soil and stone were suddenly ripped from the ground by an antigravitational force, left to hang in the air as a maze of earth.

My interest in this villain and her final actions derived from what came next:

Several days after the disaster occurred, Scion swooped in to fix the damage.

Beams of that ever-so-mysterious golden energy had disintegrated the floating debris and most of the rubble, and had returned the local gravity to normal except for a few spots around the edges where he hadn't bothered to be entirely thorough.

Local news reports on the incident omitted the Thanda capes' involvement in the interim, claiming instead that Nanda Devi had gone directly to the park after her last disastrous combat in order to destroy the area out of spite, and had been slain by Scion in retribution for harming a cherished historical site.

Videos taken by faraway observers purported to show Scion blasting Nanda Devi out of the sky during his cleanup efforts, though PRT analysts claimed that the videos had been edited by parties unknown to place her there and conceal Thanda involvement, and Inner Eye allowed me to confirm that supposition.

This park was hardly unique; there were many sites on Earth Bet at which Scion had exerted his powers to an intense and widespread degree over the years, from the summits of now-dormant volcanoes that had threatened entire cities with an eruption to the empty fields across which opposing armies had once prepared to face each other before he intervened.

According to the sorts of individuals on the internet who made a habit of obsessively tracking Scion's movements and activities, however, this particular site was one of the most recent incidents to which he had responded at such a scale...and so it should be one of the sites at which the lingering magical auras would be the strongest and most easily studied.

The moment we'd arrived I'd felt a certain something at the site, a remnant of Scion's power in the movement of the air or in the play of shadows across the ruins or some other factor I did not consciously recognize, that told me this stop on the tour would almost certainly bear fruit.

I manifested my power for detecting Far Realm influence and began to amble through the devastation; Robin trailed behind me, keeping one eye on our surroundings while he read through the articles I'd provided him.

I halted a few minutes later, the faint glimmer of impossible eldritch colors catching my eye at the very edge of my augmented sight.

Gesturing to Robin that he should halt where he was and not come closer, I settled into a crouch and began to study the alien energies before me.

~*~*~

"—gan? Hey, Valigan?" Robin said.

I blinked slowly. "Mmm?"

"I finished going through those reports. It's a real shame what happened here; I'd heard the Thanda were a real piece of work, but it seems like even their 'heroes' are barely better than the villains back home."

"Mmm," I acknowledged.

"...You've been sitting there staring at nothing for almost fifteen minutes now," he said, a hint of concern in his voice. "Is...everything okay?"

With immense effort, I dragged my attention away from the auras dancing in my vision, noting absently that I seemed to be sitting slightly closer to them than I had been originally.

For all that the energies of the Far Realm were an abomination against existence itself...from a certain perspective, they were surprisingly beautiful.

"I'm perfectly fine," I assured Robin.

"If you say so. Any reason why you're just...meditating there?"

"I'm analyzing the ambient energies of the space," I replied, truthfully but entirely unhelpfully, "which requires a certain degree of focus. It's nothing that need concern you."

"Any time estimates for when you'll be done?"

"Unfortunately not. I'd have told you beforehand if I knew how long this would take, but these particular energies are less predictable than most."

"All right." He clasped his hands behind his back and fell into a parade rest posture, curiosity warring with mild impatience in his aura.

<Are you fine?> Aspect prodded me.

<I'm perfectly fine,> I repeated. <Truly.>

<I'm not rushing things at all,> I disagreed. <Think of Aldric's artificial ley line project after our expedition to Aebrynis, and how it might have been much less rushed toward the end had he started it earlier. I don't have years to finish this, perhaps not even months, so I'm simply setting sail when the tide is highest.>

A suspicious tone entered his mental voice. <And working out stronger wards is all you're attempting to do, right?>

<Of course,> I sent carefully. <That's all we'll need should Scion prove less than friendly.>

I felt a pressure in the back of my mind as Aspect peered more deeply through our bond than he had in quite some time.

<Val,> he sent flatly.

<Yes?>

<Val.>

<Yes, Aspect?>

<You're not just planning to work out some stronger wards. Are you.>

My gaze drifted back to the alluring shimmer of the aura before me. <Scion has been known to use his 'energy beams' for much more than destruction and dispelling,> I blandly remarked.

Aspect flitted directly into my face, hovering angrily just past the tip of my nose.

<Valigan naer Aleith ar'Vaymin naer Corun dyr'Novar, why in reason's name would you ever even consider attempting to harness Far Realm energies yourself!?> he demanded.

I gestured discreetly at the aura of Scion's spell. <This scenario is completely unlike what those arcanists encountered.>

<Obviously it is; the Far Realm is nothing if not inconsistent in its effects on reality. Everyone who tries to work with it says something like that!>

I directed a pulse of exasperation across our bond. <Scion's companion seems to have discovered a relatively safe and non-invasive means of channeling Far Realm energies—>

<Relatively safe,> I reiterated. <Despite existing in that state for multiple years, if not his entire cape career, he has remained at least sane enough to devote himself entirely to the pursuit of Good, with not a single recorded evil deed or irrational act to his name.>

There was a pause. <That's true,> Aspect grudgingly admitted.

<Everyone knows that the most dangerous part of dealing with the Far Realm is when a new breach is opened,> I explained patiently, <as the idiosyncratic effects of each one can be neither predicted nor prepared for. The oddness in this sphere's cosmology must derive from an existing breach, and seemingly a fairly stable one. We should be able to learn enough about it to deal with it much more readily than we would most such breaches.>

Aspect sent a heavy mental sigh. <Look, Val, I've got two words for you: hubris and tentacles. Neither of those is a good look on you.>

I sent a burst of amusem*nt back to him. <I'll do my best not to become mutated beyond recognition along the way—>

<—but I simply can't pass up this chance. Juroth said it himself: This is the closest we've ever come to having the opportunity to explore the Far Realm, and I very much doubt we'll ever have an opportunity like this again. If there's even the slimmest possibility that the most infinitesimal insight into Scion's spells will bring Aldric back to me….>

We sat there motionless for a time, staring eye to facet.

Eventually he bobbed slightly in acquiescence.

<Swear to me, on our love for Aldric and the souls of every man, woman, and child of Jhouram whom you hope to restore to life with this insane plan of yours,> he solemnly sent, <that you will only study Scion's magic, never attempting to channel any Far Realm energies yourself, until you have entirely finished Juroth's notes, come up with at least three plans for how to safely manipulate those energies, and have received my approval on all three of those plans.>

I sent a pulse of utmost sincerity across our bond.

~*~*~

Robin cleared his throat. "It's almost twelve thirty. If you're planning to stay here all afternoon, do you mind if I go get some lunch? Maybe find a laundromat?"

"I've largely finished my studies for the time being, actually. Now we're waiting for a representative of the Thanda to meet with us."

His expression hardened. "Why do you want to meet with them?"

"There is one particular cape among them whose power I wish to study."

"What's their name?"

"I've no idea. Hence waiting for the Thanda to approach us first."

While searching the PRT database in New York City, I'd come across records of a cape whose described powers strongly resembled an ability to create slipgates, portals to Temporal Prime that would allow travel forward or backward between fixed locations in time.

The reports were vague and fragmentary enough that I couldn't be certain about the nature of his power—and of course after Ogun and Éclater there was a chance that his power had been misreported entirely—but I'd stood by Aldric's side as he created literally tens of thousands of slipgates over the millennia, and so I would know the truth the moment I saw this cape use his power.

Unfortunately, there was no name attached to this cape in the database, and physical descriptions were too incomplete for me to attempt to scry him on that basis alone.

Hence my deciding to study this particular site, instead of the most recent one Scion had visited.

Robin and I were currently standing and sitting in the center of a blasted gravitationally-anomalous ruin at which over a dozen Thanda capes had recently lost their lives and to which no visitors had come since the battle with Nanda Devi, having no cover from foliage or structures and making no attempt to hide ourselves, and we had been doing so for nearly an hour while giving no sign of intending to depart any time soon.

If this park was being monitored by the Thanda (and the divinations I'd manifested before teleporting here had implied that it was) then it was only a matter of time before they sent someone to investigate.

The Thanda were decentralized and varied widely in their moral inclinations, much like the American Elite, so there was no guarantee that any investigator they might send would be acquainted with the cape I sought...but the fact that we were currently located on the outskirts of the city where he had most frequently been sighted meant that said investigator was fairly likely to know of him, at least, or to know of another cape who would know of him.

I would be able to pluck the requisite knowledge from the investigator's mind, and then we could be on our way.

All very neat and tidy.

<If only the Thanda were slightly more punctual,> Aspect dryly opined.

<Indeed.>

~*~*~

My divinations were not nearly precise enough to tell me the time of the Thanda capes' arrival; they could only give me the general omen that staying here until we were approached was likely to have a positive outcome. Thus, I waited patiently, not knowing whom to expect or from where they might arrive.

When two figures finally emerged from the tree line at the far end of the devastation, I murmured to Robin, "Do not move. There are two people behind you; pretend for now that you are unaware of them, and say nothing."

He followed my direction and did not speak, but he subtly adjusted his footing and his aura gleamed with attentiveness.

The figures projected the image of a married couple, a woman and a darker-skinned man strolling through the grass hand-in-hand, each wearing a knapsack as if hiking or otherwise exploring the outdoors.

They were out of range of my extra senses and enhanced hearing, so I pushed a teleportation thoughtform over my bond with Aspect. <If you wouldn't mind?>

He teleported to a spot just behind them in midair, still hovering imperceptibly, and I observed them through his senses.

The woman was surrounded by the aura of an active clairvoyance power, while the man was clad in a protective field of invisible force. They were speaking softly in a different tongue, their smiling faces giving the impression they were chatting idly about nothing in particular. Each wore a discreet earpiece, though my radiovision detected no transmissions from either of them.

"[—thought you said there was only one?]" the man was saying when Aspect arrived.

"[I said I only saw one. My second sight still does see only one.]"

"[Which, the Punjabi or the Brit?]"

"[The Brit,]" the woman replied. "[Or the American, more likely; look at that tacky watch he's wearing.]"

"[Ah, true. So, the other is a cape...cold, you think?]"

"[It's possible he's a medley cape who goes hot with his other powers, but yes, more likely cold. As to hero or villain...hard to say.]"

"[What about the American?]"

"[More likely a mercenary, with that haircut and the ex-military stance, but I wouldn't rule it out.]"

"[Have they noticed us yet?]"

"[The American hasn't spoken or changed his expression, so likely not.]"

"[Masks on, then.]"

The woman nodded, and each withdrew a mask from their respective pocket. The woman's was a stiff half-mask that only covered her upper face, glossy black with a stylized orange eye on the forehead; the man's was a full-face mask of pliable fabric with no eye or mouth holes, covered in an abstract swirl in blue and gray.

Once they donned their masks, the woman ducked gracefully to the side to walk behind the man while hidden by his silhouette, clearly a practiced maneuver. She reached into the upper pouch of his knapsack and pulled out a black cloak that she quickly swirled around herself to hide her clothing. As she did that, the man's armor of force turned opaque, concealing his form beneath a dark blue shroud.

Just under two minutes later, they were close enough that we could plausibly have caught sight of them with unenhanced vision. I made a show of glancing discreetly over my shoulder. "They cannot hear me at the moment, and believe you are likely an unpowered mercenary. Whether you play along is up to you."

Robin looked back as well. "I don't know, they look friendly to me," he said, as if addressing a concern I'd raised. Turning to face them, he offered a friendly wave and called, "Nice day for a walk, isn't it?"

"It certainly is," the man replied in accented English. "Though this hasn't been a popular park to walk through, lately."

Robin didn't respond immediately. When neither cape filled the silence, nor did anything to signal potential hostility, Robin glanced at me. "Do you mind if we skip the small talk? I'm getting kind of hungry."

"Certainly." I levitated to my feet and gave them a nod of greetings. "Good afternoon. I am Valigan Talaire."

They stiffened immediately at the mention of my name. The woman discreetly reached into a pocket, the motion hidden by her cloak but clear to my deepsight, and pressed a button on the phone secreted there; I heard a faint melodious chime as their earpieces began transmitting what they heard to whomever was on the other end.

"I'm here seeking one of your number whom I hope you recognize: a man who creates time portals," I continued, Robin's eyes widening at that statement, "taking the form of rings of golden light. Do you know him?"

Two very similar mental images instantly blossomed in both sets of surface thoughts: a man wearing a robe and mask of deep indigo, with a golden sash across his chest, sapphire-studded gold chains around his neck and waist, a gold circle-within-a-circle design on his forehead of his mask, and golden thread woven through his braided hair and neatly-trimmed beard.

Gold and indigo wasn't quite as refined as gold and violet, but I liked this man already.

The capes traded looks. "We've heard of him," the woman said cautiously. "He's said to be...one of the stronger cold heroes."

The man shuddered slightly, as his thoughts filled with the image of soldiers in bloody uniforms and the sound of a man screaming in pain over the sound of snapping bones.

"Do you know his name, perhaps?"

The name Phir Sē flashed into her thoughts, and she shook her head. "No, and I don't want to. He is a murderer, a butcher."

Now knowing his name and costume, I manifested Remote Viewing, using my secondary mind so that my primary mind would remain aware of my surroundings. A moment later I beheld Phir Sē in civilian garb, walking through a mass of people in what appeared to be a temple.

"How can you call him a hero, then?" Robin demanded.

"His team targets corrupt officials, fraudulent companies, spies, invaders. All deserving targets."

Phir Sē held an urn in one hand and a ladle in the other, and he was walking around dishing out some manner of soup or gruel to the supplicants he passed. My remote viewpoint moved with him, carefully staying within the sensor's very short range.

Robin shook his head. "Targeting other villains doesn't make you a hero."

"It must, in his case." The woman looked at Robin with haunted eyes. "We heroes allowed him into our ranks because the alternative was worse."

Phir Sē moved close enough to an outer wall that I was able to move my viewpoint to a reasonably well-concealed location just outside the temple. I pushed a concealing illusion through the remote sensor, breaking the fragile link and ending the power, then nodded to the Thanda capes.

"Thank you for the information," I said. "You've been very helpful. Enjoy the remainder of your afternoon."

"Wait—" the man said, stretching out a hand reflexively, but I clasped Robin's hand and teleported us—

~*~*~

13:08, Tuesday the 28th of June, 2011 CE
Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, New Delhi, India, Earth Bet

—to the spot hidden by my illusion.

For a few moments, I merely stood there and took in the architecture. The temple's stark white stone edifice, arched colonnades, gilded domes, walkways tiled in colorful geometric patterns, and central reflecting pool reminded me of home, in way that was both pleasing and painful.

Then I carefully gauged the attention of the surrounding passers-by and dismissed the illusion at a point at which no one would notice Robin and myself seemingly appearing out of thin air.

"Come," I told Robin, "let's sample their hospitality."

We stepped out into the flow of foot traffic and soon were completely surrounded by a massive crowd of supplicants headed for the temple's main entrance. Everyone was in high spirits, laughing and chatting with their neighbors.

Before we could reach the entrance, one of the temple workers who was directing the crowd stepped politely into Robin's path and held out a hand. "Ah, no shoe inside," he said apologetically in broken English, "and, ah...dastār, no plain hair," he said, gesturing to the cloth headpiece he wore. "You find clothing room over there, yes?"

He pointed to a second line, where a small number of visitors with bare heads and footwear were walking into a side entrance and emerging with bare feet and headscarves.

"Of course, sorry," Robin said, and we stepped out of line.

We walked a short ways away, then I motioned for him to stop. With a thought, my own clothing altered to suit the guidelines; a nudge with Faint Memory ensured that any nearby onlookers forgot my prior appearance. Then I conjured a scarf upon Robin's head, wrapped in the appropriate fashion.

He twitched at the sudden pressure on his head and reached up to touch it. "Thanks," he said. He doffed his boots and placed them inside his haversack, then we headed inside.

~*~*~

The main hall was very sparsely furnished, only long and plain strips of carpet breaking up the monotony of the white stone floor. Hundreds of people were already seated upon the carpets, and workers were handing out large partitioned plates.

Robin and I sat at the end of one carpet, and while Robin struck up a conversation with the family seated beside us, I scanned the area for Phir Sē.

I found him in the kitchen, where the ashen-edged scarlet of Evil and deeper Law in the inner bands of his aura made it stand out distinctly from the faint gold, silver, and emerald auras surrounding the rest of the workers.

The hero was filling small serving vessels with all manner of food from the large automated vats lining the rear wall, keeping to himself and ignoring the chatter around him. Soon enough the food was ready to be served, and he marched out with the rest of the workers to begin the next service.

Each server paused briefly at the end of each row before moving on to the next; I'd expected as much, hence our choice of location. When Phir Sē paused there, I raised a finger to catch his attention.

"[It is good to see you, once again,]" I said in his native tongue, offering a nonthreatening smile. "[A word, please, after the meal?]"

His eyes flicked over my clothing, then over Robin. He nodded slightly, then continued on his way.

~*~*~

The meal was a hasty affair, the crowd eating quickly to clear the hall for the next wave of supplicants.

Once the crowd had left, the plates were collected, and the floor was swept and cleaned, Phir Sē met us outside the temple, in the shaded colonnade near the reflecting pool.

"[For what you would like to meet?]" he said in English.

"We can speak in your own tongue, if you'd prefer," I said, having gifted Robin with Tongues while we waited—not that he seemed at all enthusiastic to talk to one who had been described as a murderer and a butcher.

"Yes, I would. Thank you," Phir Sē said. "Why did you want to speak with me?"

Giving me a significant look, he added, "Why does the Protectorate want to speak with me?"

"I am not of the Protectorate, nor am I American; I can provide proof, if desired. This is a personal discussion only."

He waved that away. "I will take your word for it."

"Excellent. Then let's not linger at the docks: I have been traveling the world studying parahuman powers that interest me, and I would like to study yours."

"I'll allow this," he said immediately, "if you will do something for me in exchange."

Prompt and to the point; a pleasant change of pace. "I could be persuaded. Did you have anything specific in mind?"

Phir Sē stroked his beard in contemplation, once, twice; it was not threaded with gold, as when he was in costume, but it was still immaculately styled.

"Do you know of the border dispute with the CUI?" he asked.

Robin snorted. "You'll have to be more specific."

Phir Sē let out a warm laugh. "Yes, exactly that. There are many areas of official dispute along the border between China and India. They took Bhutan, they took Nepal, and now the Union-Imperial is constantly testing and prodding the entire length of our border to see if they can take more. Our government cannot afford to push back too strongly, unless they want to start an outright war..."

His expression went flat. "...but the Thanda is not so limited."

"I assume you'd like my help in repelling such an incursion."

He nodded. "You fought Azhdaha, the Second, and survived unscathed. Their armies will be nothing to you."

"Now hold on a second," Robin said. "Him 'doing something' for you is one thing, but killing, what, hundreds of people? Thousands? That's a bridge too far." He scowled. "Not every hero is as willing to kill as you are."

Phir Sē gave me a knowing look. "Protectorate?"

"Yes."

Robin's aura tinted with annoyance at the admission, but it quickly abated; his statement was hardly subtle.

"I'm inclined to agree with my friend," I said. "Their armies would be nothing, but the attention garnered when an army ceased to exist would definitely be something."

"Their armies aren't all that would be there. As they have grown bolder, they have begun sending Yàngbǎn squads. Not with every attack, not at every site, but often enough. If we only asked you to help us against those…?"

Accurate information on the inner workings of the CUI was extremely limited online, as it was an extremely secretive and isolationist nation, verging on xenophobic, but the PRT's records did hold some details on the Yàngbǎn, China's equivalent to the Protectorate.

I had been surprised to discover that the two cape organizations were very similar in size, given that the current Chinese population was roughly four times that of America, but apparently the nation was extremely prejudiced against parahumans to a degree that almost resembled the Athasians' hatred of defilers.

The Chinese government had imposed many laws and social measures that it believed would lower the rate at which parahumans triggered within its borders, an effort that seemed to be more or less successful according to intelligence reports received by the PRT.

It then followed that with purges of ethnic minorities that might trigger at higher-than-normal rates, infiltration and dismantlement of non-government cape organizations, persecution of lone capes who did not join the government, and unilateral execution of capes possessing certain types of powers that it deemed especially problematic: illusionists who could potentially evade government oversight, enchanters who might co-opt government capes, and so on.

And those were only the methods the PRT knew to be in place. Speculations in the records hinted at even worse.

Add to this the fact that when it came to extremely destructive events such as Endbringer attacks the Union-Imperial had absolutely refused to either send aid to or receive aid from foreign nations for the past decade or so and thus suffered casualties far in excess of the norm for such events, and it was no surprise that China was short on parahumans.

Of the capes that survived in such a hostile environment and submitted to government control, the majority were deemed unfit to join the elite Yàngbǎn squads for one reason or another and incorporated into standard military units. Snipers were replaced by capes with long-range evocation powers, scouts by those with flight or glamers at their disposal, and the like.

Those who did join the Yàngbǎn were assigned into squads and linked by a vaguely metaconcert-sounding effect—one that I'd quite like to examine, as they seemed to have managed to exceed the usual nine-other-participants limit of the Metaconcert power and I would very much like to know how—and deployed against criminals and villains in much the same way that the Protectorate deployed its more powerful capes.

I had no idea how India's capes compared to those of China in terms of number, strength, or experience, but if China had begun sending their equivalents of Myrddin, Armsmaster, or even Alexandria against the Indian military in large numbers, a request for assistance was more than understandable.

"Even just dealing with one Yàngbǎn squad means killing over twenty people," Robin argued.

"Not necessarily. Simply incapacitating them is always an option."

"You really think you can go up against twenty capes at once and take the extra time to—?" He paused, blinked. "Right, stupid question. No objections on that part, then, but I still don't think getting involved in something this big is a good idea."

Phir Sē frowned slightly, his aura streaked with frustration, mild resentment, and...desperation?

Hmm.

"This is a rather specific request for you to make," I remarked. "Do you, perhaps, have a personal stake in it?"

He didn't respond immediately. A few moments later, his shoulders slumped.

"Are you family men? Either of you?" he asked.

Robin shook his head.

"I've no children, but I...had a husband," I replied.

"Then you might understand. I lost most of my family, years ago. My wife, my three sons."

Phir Sē gazed across the temple courtyard, where large families with many children were queueing up to enter the main hall.

"It was my own fault. My own choice. My team was attacked near our homes, my family put at risk. The leader of the attack was an utter monster, Kartavirya Arjuna, one whose mountain of sins makes my own look as nothing by comparison, and his followers were barely better. We killed most of them, but not before Kartavirya killed two of my sons."

He shook his head slowly, not taking his eyes off one particular family across the way, consisting of a father, a mother, a daughter, and three sons.

"I went back to save them, but the changes I made meant that my wife and my oldest son died instead. I kept going back, again and again and again, trying to save them all...and eventually I realized that on some loops my actions meant that that monster lived, escaping to come after them another day when my team and I were not there and my family would be unprotected. I also realized that no matter what I tried, I could never save all of them.

"I had to choose. I could save most of my family, but let all of the attackers escape. I could save some of my family, but let Kartavirya and one or two others go free."

He sighed. "Or I could guarantee the deaths of every last villain, at the cost of four of my family's lives. So I...made the heroic choice."

A brief silence followed his tale.

Under no circ*mstances would I have made the same choice that he had, but such a sacrifice was to be respected nonetheless.

"Now only my daughter remains. She gained powers during the battle and wanted to join the cold heroes, but we talked, for a long time, and she joined the hot heroes instead."

Phir Sē turned back to us, a sad smile tugging at his lips. "She can do so much more good than I can, there. I bring safety through assassination, and security through mass destruction. The charity I perform at this gurdwara to salve my conscience cannot possibly make up for my own sins, but she can bring joy to the disheartened and hope to the fearful."

Robin was looking at the man as if he'd not truly seen him before. The same flares of anger and streaks of distaste were still there, but they were now tinted, very slightly, with pity and sympathy.

"The vast majority of India's capes are Garama, are they not?" I asked rhetorically.

"They are."

"And so if the situation with the Union-Imperial escalates..."

"...they will be the ones called upon to face the Yàngbǎn, yes," Phir Sē concluded. "And my daughter, the light of my life, will die."

The hero shook his head. "Oh, she is talented, and very well-trained. She wins most of her matches against her villains. But what the Garama do...it is not battle, it is Bollywood. In a real fight, they stand no chance, and in a real war, the capital would be the Yàngbǎn's first target."

"I understand," I said. "I agree to your terms."

I extended a hand, and we shook.

His repertoire contained Create Slipgate, as expected, but it was a dim thoughtform, not a bright one. Curious.

Other dim thoughtforms included…

Gods above and between.

Conceal Temporal Anomaly? Sever Lifeline?

Timereaver!?

Teleport Through Time!?

Were it possible for my mental probe to cry tears of utter joy, it would have done so. There were a few other thoughtforms present, but these were the sorts of spells that might let me finally sail against the flow of time to come to Aldric's rescue.

(Assuming I could discover the trick of reverse-enchanting chronomantic spells, and assuming I found a method of evading the Guardians' eternal vigilance. One step at a time.)

And that wasn't even considering his singular bright thoughtform, corresponding to his golden time portals; not being able to identify unfamiliar chronomantic thoughtforms, I hadn't even the faintest idea what that one might be able to do when stretched to its utmost!

For it to arise from a blending of such spells as Teleport Through gods-be-damned Time, it would have to be exceptionally potent indeed.

I withdrew from Phir Sē's mindscape and immediately manifested four soul crystals of Teleport Through Time in my other hand, while extending the handshake for as long as I dared before letting go. I deeply regretted missing out on the other thoughtforms for now; I'd have to visit him again once I deciphered chronomancy to obtain the rest of them.

"We cannot predict with surety when the Union-Imperial will launch its incursions, but we have our ways," he said. "The next one should occur in two days' time, and the position under threat will become clear as the right hour approaches. Meet me outside the gurdwara at dawn, and I will be able to tell you the appointed location."

"Two days' time," I agreed. Robin nodded as well.

With that, we parted.

~*~*~

Robin and I did not speak until we were out of the temple and away from the crowds, ending up on a relatively empty side street.

He turned to regard me. "You remember how you said you'd be fine with handing all the rest of the villains we talked to over to the authorities?"

"I do."

"Does that include him?"

"Should it?"

Stubbornness streaked his aura. "I think so. He may be considered a hero here, and there might be villains here who are much worse than he is, but by my standards, he counts."

"I see."

"You're not going to do it, are you? I saw the way you were looking at him after that sob story."

He must have seen or felt something of my sudden fury at that remark, as he took an involuntary step backward.

"The death of a spouse," I said, enunciating very precisely, "is not a 'sob story'."

"Sorry, sorry," he said, raising his hands in surrender. "I forgot you said you lost yours. That was really insensitive."

"Quite."

"...Still, though. Does taking down villains and spending afternoons doing charity work make up for being a mass murderer who terrifies the people who are supposed to be on his side?"

"Not in the slightest." I paused. "And yet…."

He sighed. "And yet."

~*~*~

05:27, Thursday the 30th of June, 2011 CE
Somewhere in the Kunlun Mountains, Aksai Chin Disputed Territory, Earth Bet

We appeared on the specified plateau, which overlooked several nearby mountain passes.

Four capes stood a short distance away, the rest of Phir Sē's team.

Three were human, but though the fourth appeared human as well, my true sight revealed the actual monstrous form of a Case 53 cape beneath their transmuted disguise: a vaguely reptilian figure with an impossibly-thin neck, pale blue scales, four arms ending in webbed fingers, and two bone ridges running down the back of their head. A mixture of sahuagin, krenshar, and some kind of shapeshifter, most likely.

Robin and Phir Sē let go of my hands (though not before I took the opportunity to manifest a few soul crystals of Timereaver), and then introductions were made.

The shapeshifter was Lakh; she could take on several non-human forms, including a slender winged form for mobility and a sturdy rhinoceros-like form for combat.

The woman in a silver and black armored bodysuit was Chandrama, a so-called "phase tinker" whose devices allowed her to manipulate light, visibility, and tangibility in various ways.

The man in a yellow and pale orange cloak was Skhalit, a large-scale teleporter who could only affect inanimate matter—similar to Shuffle in Chicago, but with full control over his power's expanse and targeting.

The other man, in pale blue armor streaked with white and gray to resemble sky-pattern camouflage, was Rahana, able to fix himself and others in space or cause them to move toward a specified point as if drawn by strong gravity.

Their team was among the most mobile of the heroic Thanda cells, Phir Sē explained, hence their being tapped to respond to Union-Imperial incursions.

"A pleasure to meet you all," I said, before settling in to wait.

"Are you planning to engage the attackers?" I asked Robin.

"Me? No." He looked down at his costume, donned in place of his normal clothing in case the need arose to use his power at maximum acceleration. "Velocity the Protectorate cape showing up in the middle of a China-India conflict would not be a good idea."

"Velocity?" I asked. With a thought, I covered his costume with an illusion, changing the color scheme from red with blue stripes to navy blue with a white electrical motif. "Velocity doesn't have the ability to conjure swords of lightning, does he?"

He looked down at his costume approvingly, then gave his bracelet a considering look. "That's a great point. I guess we'll see."

~*~*~

Less than half an hour later, we caught sight of the vanguard of a Union-Imperial battalion trudging through the nearest pass.

In addition to nearly a thousand footsoldiers shivering in their cold-weather uniforms, there were multiple ground vehicles, some heavily-armored war machines, some trucks carrying supplies.

"Advance force," Chandrama said, a note of distaste in her voice. "Most Yàngbǎn squads have access to teleportation, but only at short ranges or within line of sight. The CUI sends detachments like these to construct and fortify waystations that allow them to strike deeper and deeper into our territory."

"With this plateau being an ideal place to build such an installation."

"Exactly." She gestured behind us, down the length of the pass. "If we do not stop them today, the next waystation will be there, and then there, and then there. The Union-Imperial will not stop until all of Asia is within its grasp."

The more I heard about this Union-Imperial, its methods, and its values, the more and more displeased I grew with its existence.

Not enough to add dismantling its government to my priority list, just yet...but certainly enough to add its monarch to the list of persons with whom I wished to have a rather spirited debate before leaving this sphere, just below the Blue Empress of Earth Shin.

"How long does it usually take for the Yàngbǎn to show up after you spot the convoys?" Robin asked.

"It varies. Sometimes just after they stop, sometimes not until the waystation is finished."

"Do they respond more rapidly if the convoy is attacked?" I asked.

Lakh waggled a hand. "Sometimes. More likely if there's a CUI spy plane in the area."

"Well then."

Phir Sē nodded. "Skhalit, you stay here with Valigan and me; we will wait for the squad to arrive. The rest of you, attack at will."

Chandrama unholstered a pistol-like device with visible enthusiasm, Lakh's shoulders began to expand as she entered her combat form, and Robin flicked his wrists to conjure a pair of lightning blades, aura awash with a somewhat tentative enthusiasm.

I, meanwhile, manifested Greater Anticipate Teleportation, to hold the Yàngbǎn squad in abeyance for a few moments as they teleported in, while Phir Sē opened—

Gods below. Was the man suicidal?

The golden ring that irised open when he used his power was quite possibly the most awe-inspiring feat of chronomantic might I had ever witnessed. It was not a slipgate, taking a traveler safely into Temporal Prime; it was not an instantaneous temporal translocation, aiming a traveler at a certain moment in time and hoping for the best; it was not even an opaque portal, whisking a traveler to a fixed location elsewhere and elsewhen while letting nothing else pass through.

It was a wide-open gate to the past.

I was staring into an alternate timeline with my own two eyes.

It put every temporal spell Aldric had ever used—perhaps even any spell ever cast by his mentor, the great Jeriah Chronos—to shame. I'd never seen its like cast by any arcanist before, living or otherwise.

Because no chronomancer in their right mind would ever think it was a good idea to simply tear a hole in the timestream and let absolutely anything pass through!

Try as I might, I could find no signs of any safety measures in the spell's aura whatsoever. No paradox inhibition, no divergence pruning, no flux polarization, no retrocausal dampening.

Aldric, with his much greater expertise, might have been able to find some more advanced safeguards, but the lack of auric signatures for the nearly-universal components that even I could identify was exceptionally concerning.

That Phir Sē did not permanently rend the fabric of reality everywhere he went, or wipe small towns from history whenever he used his power, was a minor miracle.

<If this is what you eventually use to restore Aldric to life,> Aspect remarked, <he'll kiss you for saving him and then stab you for so badly endangering the timestream. And then he'll shatter me for letting you do it.>

<And he'd be right to do so,> I sent faintly.

"How far into the past or future can you reach with your power?" I asked.

"The farthest I've ever traveled into the past was thirteen minutes and twenty seconds, and only with great effort. Into the future, no more than three or four minutes."

...Ah. Well. That wasn't so bad, then.

Perhaps my alarm was premature; there's only so much irreversible damage one can cause with a variation of less than fourteen minutes.

That didn't mean, however, that his companion itself might not be able to open a gate to a more distant time, without any artificial limitations it placed on Phir Sē's use of the power.

If Earth Bet and all the nearby shadow worlds suddenly imploded in a spasm of worldlines to form an isotemporal singularity, I would know exactly whom to blame.

There was a sort of dragging sensation from the half of the time gate in the present, headaches momentarily assaulting me as for a brief moment a slew of overlapping alternating memories entered my mind at once.

The far end of the time gate reached the present (or perhaps an infinitesimal fraction of a second behind the present) and became visible as well, arcs of light beginning to crackle from one ring to the other.

What on Toril was he…?

Ah. A time loop.

Honestly.

Phir Sē was collecting and amplifying sunlight into a damaging beam, similar to the Air Lens spell. A perfectly reasonable tactic, really, when one lacks knowledge of more straightforward evocation spells—except that instead of shaping hardened air to do so, he was tying the gods-damned timestream into gods-damned knots—

<Focus, Val,> Aspect chided me. <Yàngbǎn now, existential catastrophes later.>

Right.

In the pass below, Robin and the three Thanda capes were taking apart the Union-Imperial convoy with chirurgical precision.

Lakh's armored form was tossing soldiers left and right with every charge, sending them tumbling down the mountainsides with cries of fear and shrieks of pain. Chandrama's energy bolts caused whatever they struck to vanish into thin air—into the Dream-Ethereal, technically, according to my true sight—and thereby let her dismantle the enemy vehicles one bolt and screw at a time.

Rahana was ambling carelessly among the soldiers, every bullet and shell that came anywhere near him freezing in midair only to resume its trajectory once he passed by and released his power's hold upon it. Individual troops found their helmets, breastplates, or even clothing rendered static while the rest of them was still moving; by choosing the right times and points in space at which to hold them, he trapped the soldiers in awkward and painful positions that left them vulnerable to the others.

And Robin was nothing but a blur.

He was far enough away that my secondary mind no longer naturally synchronized our timeframes when he used his power, and so I could see nothing of him but two streaks of lightning twining and dancing across the field of battle. Soldiers fell in droves, helpless to resist.

Some of those soldiers were parahumans.

It didn't help.

Nearly three-quarters of the convoy had been destroyed already, despite the large distances separating the elements of their very spread-out formation.

The quartet was well on their way to finishing the job when I felt the almost proprioceptive mental pressure that signaled an impending teleport. Forty-two creatures, arranged in a rough rectangle.

I evoked a grid of illusory lights in the space that each teleporter would imminently occupy. "Phir Sē," I called, "The Yàngbǎn will be arriving at the designated locations in sixteen seconds."

The hero nodded, and the time-looping construct pivoted slowly around. I prepared to dismiss the anticipation field once the capes arrived.

With a ripple of displaced air, forty-two Yàngbǎn capes appeared upon the plateau, ruby masks glittering in the sunlight—and a heartbeat later nineteen of them were vaporized by the blinding streak of golden light Phir Sē loosed from his temporal cannon, only a few gloved hands and booted feet left behind by the blast.

"[Thirty-sixth path!]" one of them called.

Identical chronomantic auras sprung up around four of the others and around the severed appendages, but practically the entire area from Phir Sē to the edge of the plateau was saturated with the residual aura of his attack, and their attempts to revert their compatriots' deaths were futile in the face of a much stronger temporal power.

"[It's not working!]" replied one of those whose power had failed.

"[Scatter by fours!]" called the first cape, either their leader or simply the surviving member with the highest rank. "[Thirty-first path!]"

The squad broke into six smaller groups, five of four capes and one of three, and each sprinted in a different direction.

Once they felt themselves sufficiently dispersed, every cape thrust forth their left palm and a wrist-thick beam of vibrant crimson light seared forth. Two sets of beams were aimed at each of the three of us, and I was concerned for a moment that the Thanda capes would not react in time.

There was no need to worry. Skhalit dropped into a crouch, a massive slab of stone vanished from the side of a nearby mountaintop, and he was suddenly hidden behind that very slab, which then absorbed both volleys directed at him.

Phir Sē's aura was overcome with a pulse of intense concentration, and eight small time gates opened and closed before him in sequence, each devouring one of the beams directed at him.

I simply willed the beams to bend, and the Friendly Fire power among my ward suite caused each beam to twist back upon itself and strike at the one who had originally launched it. Six of the capes managed to raise a shield of force in time to deflect them, while the other two were a hair too slow and collapsed as the beams burned holes through their chests.

"[Seventeenth—]" the squad leader began to say, only for his words to end in a strangled gurgle as two of Phir Sē's small gates opened behind him and disgorged the previously-consumed crimson beams. The other three capes with him were each cut down by two beams as well, and then the eight time gates winked closed.

From forty-two down to seventeen remaining, in less than ten seconds. An admirable job all around.

Phir Sē focused again, his aura blazing with the particular mix of alertness and impatience seen in those who are frantically searching for something. A moment later I suddenly possessed an additional set of memories in which the squad leader had managed to call out for the "thirty-first path" instead of being slain.

An additional eight small time gates opened up behind another quartet of Yàngbǎn capes, and then there were thirteen remaining.

Of those thirteen, ten possessed emotions that had not once wavered, any flickers of fear or hesitation being kept to the very edges of their auras.

The other three, however, were clearly failing to do the same despite their best efforts.

"[Surrender!]" I called in the language the leader had used, in deference to Robin's feelings on killing them.

Then, seeing hints of hesitation and confusion in the auras of the three less dedicated Yàngbǎn capes, I called "[Surrender!]" in English as well.

The trio immediately flung themselves to the rocky ground.

The remaining ten moved as if to retaliate against their traitorous comrades—until one group of four was crushed under another massive slab of rock that suddenly appeared above their heads, and another two fell prey to a smaller chunk of stone that dropped out of a time gate.

A moment later, a time gate appeared just in front of Skhalit, and he obligingly teleported an identical chunk of stone above it, where it disappeared a moment later with the closing of the gate.

The remaining four fell to my Concussion Blast; no need to draw things out.

By the time we persuaded the three surrendering capes that they could rise without being slain, the rest of the convoy was in ruins. Robin and Rahana returned to the plateau while the other two took the time to render all of the vehicles utterly inoperable.

"Your names?" Phir Sē asked the Yàngbǎn capes in English once we were all gathered together again.

They glanced uncomfortably among themselves, teeth chattering mildly from the cold, then answered in unison:

"Twenty-Eight." "Th-thirty-Six." "Forty-One."

"Your real names," he insisted.

There was another uncomfortable pause.

"Sarah." "Cody." "Eli."

Based on their behavior, their auras, and their lack of cultural cohesion with the others..."Did any of you join the Yàngbǎn willingly?"

Another pause, more glances, then three head-shakes in unison.

I mentally added "dismantle the Yàngbǎn" to the end of my priority list. Then, after a moment's consideration, I moved it forward a few spaces.

~*~*~

After the surviving Union-Imperial soldiers and Yàngbǎn capes had been gathered up, to be turned over to the Indian government, I opened a wormhole to coordinates Skhalit gave me. They turned out to lead to a subterranean complex containing several large prison cells, and the unconscious prisoners were ferried through the wormhole and into those cells while our three conscious guests walked through under their own power.

Robin, to his credit, refused to let me teleport us out of the complex until he'd received solemn assurances from every Thanda cape on the team that the prisoners would be given the status of "prisoners of war" and treated appropriately.

Back in New Delhi, seated in a Thanda safe house, Lakh and I questioned the three former Yàngbǎn capes about their treatment, their numbers, and other factors.

It took a while for them to grow comfortable speaking with us, but once that point was reached it was as though we'd triggered an avalanche of words. Their feelings of isolation, the mental manipulation tactics applied to them, their hatred for their captors, all of it spilled out in a rush.

They were reluctant to share any personal details about themselves, whether due to lingering indoctrination or a desire to maintain privacy now that they had that right or both, but they were more than happy to describe every other cape they'd ever met in their training facility at great length.

The discussion went late into the night, all of it recorded for later review.

At the end of it all, I offered to teleport each of them back home.

"London, I guess," Sarah ventured when I asked where "home" was for her. "My boyfriend should still be there…."

I looked up coordinates for that city, scried for a promising and out-of-the-way spot, and opened a wormhole for her.

"Atlanta for me," Eli said when it was his turn. "Or Decatur, if you know where that is."

I found Decatur easily enough, and sent him on his way as well.

Cody took a while to think it over. I gave him all the time he needed.

"I'm...actually from Earth Aleph," he admitted at last. "I ended up here with some...some friends; it doesn't matter how."

A snippet of overheard conversation bubbled up in my memory:

"After what happened to Cody—"

"Would you stop bitching about Cody?"

The spike of hatred, betrayal, and desire-for-vengeance that appeared in his aura when he said the word "friends" told me everything I needed to know.

At the time, after hearing the Travelers' story, I'd assumed that this "Cody" was simply one of the friends whom they'd mentioned had not survived the transition when the Simurgh pulled them into Earth Bet, and that some of them felt guilty for not being able to save him.

Now I realized that they bore guilt of an entirely different sort.

I had no interest in reopening communications with the former Travelers now that our business was concluded, but I'd definitely pass along that tidbit of information to Kassalyn to do with as she pleased.

"If my supposition is correct, I know exactly how you arrived in Earth Bet. I also have news about your former friends, though whether it's good news or ill is for you to decide."

~*~*~

"Again, please."

Phir Sē and I were seated in yet another subterranean space; the Thanda seemed to have enough tunnels and concealed rooms honeycombing the ground beneath city to make up a small dwarven town.

I'd asked him to open pairs of time gates to whatever points in space and time he might like, so long as each iteration was different, and I was now studying them intensely with every extra and enhanced sense at my disposal.

"Again, please."

Once one managed to set aside the fact that the mere existence of his power was incredibly irresponsible, his time gates provided a wealth of useful information. While this self catalogued every last observation, my other self in my demiplane cross-referenced them with my memories of Aldric's spellcasting and the notes on the temporal sciences that he'd...left behind.

"Again, please."

Robin was absolutely right; I wouldn't be able to arrest Phir Sē once I was done with him. We were too alike for that.

So alike, in fact, that if his aid allowed me to crack the mystery of translating chronomantic spells into psionic powers, I was considering devising a way to go back and rescue his family as a way to thank him.

"Again, please."

Not in a way that would disrupt history, obviously, there would need to be cloned bodies and the like involved so that everything was perceived to proceed as history recorded it.

That was a lesson Aldric and I had learned quite well on our repeated trips back to Jhaamdath and Netheril, before the Guardians of Time grew fed up with us and barred that approach to resurrecting our homelands.

Regardless, I was sure I'd be able to manage something convincing.

"Again, please."

And while it would take some time and effort away from my other projects, if I was going to use his power (or a variant or adaptation thereof) to restore Aldric I would need to test my ability to alter the past anyway; why not do it in a way that helped relieve another widower's grief?

Restoring Phir Sē's family to him might even convince him to retire from heroing to spend time with them, satisfying Robin's desire to see him taken out of play.

"Again, please."

<First Scion's spells, now Phir Sē's. Suddenly being a lot less rigorous about our safety protocols, aren't we?> Aspect noted dryly.

<...but, to mangle a local idiom, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few timelines.>

Having political discussions and fighting the Commie menace on Memorial Day, how very appropriate.

We've got a bunch of fun cameos in this chapter, from Ogun and Adroa to Skhalit (the unnamed "landmass teleporter" from 26.5) to Rahana (the unnamed time-freezing cape from 27.5) to even Perdition, who the Travelers sadly "forgot" about when they were headed home.

Moord Nag's backstory is largely invented, while Phir Sē's is extrapolated from what he tells Taylor in New Delhi. The idea that the Garama aren't just more unwritten-rule-abiding than the Thanda (more like American capes) but outright completely useless at real combat comes from the fact that literally the only mention of the name in canon is in the context of them being "the capes that are getting killed" by Behemoth in 23.5, plus the fact that India should have had nearly fifty thousand capes in 2011 and yet we see practically no Indian capes during the New Delhi fight, so I took Defiant's statement that the Thanda "fight for real, not for play" pretty strictly and assumed that there probably were lots of Garama capes there, they were just dying in droves before Taylor even got there because Behemoth is waaay out of their weight class.

The CUI's discreet support of Moord Nag and its tussling with India over borders are based on real historical things, just cranked up to 11 because the CUI was the type to just straight-up conquer Thailand in a year or two in canon the moment the rest of the international community was distracted by other stuff.

The free lunch with Phir Sē was held in a langar; check out this video if you want to see something of what that's like. The idea that Phir Sē spends his time doing charity work to make up for what he gets up to as a cape comes from his statements in 24.4 that he prefers to "live in a civilian guise most days" and that the people around him "make [him] smile and feel more human than [he is]."

Regarding Phir Sē's combat tactics, can he canonically do things like pull attacks that people might have made through his time gates? No idea. Does canon make any efforts to explain how his power actually works in order to make his time bomb behave as depicted? Nope. Is that tactic within the capabilities of the 2e chronomancers from whom he gets several of the powers in his repertoire, and does it make for a cool and unique fighting style? Heck yes.

Regarding Lakh, I haven't seen anyone stick any custom Case 53s anywhere outside the US, despite Sveta having been dropped in Russia and saying in 29.7 that there's "names for [them] all over the world," so the Thanda can have one Case 53, as a treat.

Regarding all the foreign names, for anyone who doesn't want to spend a while on Google Translate:

Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging is a real group that was infamously used in several alternate-history stories involving South Africa, so they felt like a good fit here, and the man after whom the Terre'Blanche mercenaries were named was their leader.
Oormore (Afrikaans for "overmorrow" or "day after tomorrow") is a precog, obviously, 'cause there's no chance in hell a single warlord can hold multiple countries basically by herself unless she has someone who can tell her where threats are gonna come from.
Suurreën is Afrikaans for "acid rain" (think Acidbath meets Fog), while Tokolotshe is an evil water spirit, and Ogun's foe Yekebere means "glorious one" in Amharic.
Gaob ǂGūi ("king of many" in Damara, roughly; the ǂ is a click consonant) is the Trump with the red glowy forcefield seen in 4.2.V.
The capes of Les Calamités ("the calamities" in French) are Frémir ("shudder" or "quake," good for both of his powers), Cendrée ("ashen"), and Éclater ("erupt").
The Thanda names followed the canonical "normal words that could be dropped into normal conversation" pattern, with Chandrama ("moon"), Lakh, Rahana ("suspend"), and Skhalit ("dropped" or "fallen"), all in Hindi.
Kartavirya Arjuna is a figure from the Hindu epic Ramayana.

D&D stuff referenced in this chapter:

New spells and powers Valigan used or referenced in this chapter were Tenser's greater floating disk (designed for carrying loot but makes a great umbrella), create slipgate (creates permanent portals to Temporal Prime, where you can then physically move around to travel through time), conceal temporal anomaly (prevent those pesky chronomancers from noticing your historical meddling), sever lifeline (disables some of the normal rules/safeguards around time travel, most notably allowing a chronomancer to meet other versions of himself without going kablooie), timereaver (send others a short distance through time), teleport through time (send yourself a much greater distance through time), greater anticipate teleportation (delays incoming teleporters by 3 rounds so you can prepare for them), air lens (an Athasian spell that lets you turn ambient light into a laser), and friendly fire (redirect any projectiles or rays targeting you during the duration at someone else instead).
- Teleport through time is a general 3.0 spell, not a 2e chronomancy spell, but I'm counting it as a chronomancy one Valigan can't learn (yet...) since the lore has the spell being created pre-Fall of Netheril.
Thinaun is a metal that can trap souls if it's touching someone when they die, so a thinaun blade is just the right tool for trying to literally carve trapped souls out of Aasdier. "Azoth" isn't an official D&D material, but it is an alchemical material, so one can assume it's one of the many background flavor things involved in spell research and magic item creation.
Valigan obviously doesn't have any levels in Truenamer (and thank Auppenser for that, 'cause it's a hilarious design failure of a class from the "let's try random sh*t out to see if people like it for 4e" phase of the edition), but he can use psychic reformation to pick up ranks in the Truespeak skill and some feats that let non-truenamers access utterances the way Martial Study let non-initiators access maneuvers.
- There are very few utterances (or spells involving truenames) he could access that would even theoretically help with the Aasdier project if he thinks the souls within Aasdier might count as trapped separate creatures—those being inertia surge, temporal twist, beckon monster, and spurn the supernatural—but I just found the image of Valigan being so frustrated and desperate that he turns to truenaming, of all things, to be too amusing to pass up.
Lakh is made of a sahuagin (aquatic race that's friendly with sharks and rules the deep sea on many worlds) and a krenshar (monster that can manipulate its skin independently of the rest of its face).
Phir Sē's time bomb was said to be able to hurt Behemoth because of "something temporal" about it, so I'm treating the beam itself as a magical effect, and thus his spell negated the Yàngbǎn's attempt to revert it and restore their buddies with Perdition's power in the same way that [Light] spells of level N override any [Darkness] spells of lower level in their area (and vice versa).