Chapter Text

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Haley, At The Stadium

Present Day

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When the vision of Sean cleared, I was still on the ground of the stadium. For a moment, I was stunned into silence. I’d known that he was alive of course, after I got the letter from him- but to see him, even if he was in a child’s body, and to know he missed me as much as I missed him- it helped, somehow. Healed something in me that had started to break. Skylar and Delmutt were still looking at me with concern. Nobody had moved from their positions- I’d been out of it for a few seconds at most. I knew what I’d seen was real. He was alive, he’d made it to Hogwarts, we’d see each other again. I had work to do here in the meantime. If I hadn’t fucked everything up.

I stood up and the others backed away warily. “It’s fine. I’m not… crazy, anymore. Can you have a completely autonomous drone handle that ring until Greg wakes up? We need to decide what to do until then.” Delmutt nodded and Skylar came over to hug me. I shifted down to human size and hugged her back, careful not to squeeze too hard. A full month of being a dragon was enough for a little while. The human contact felt good.

The rest of the stadium had risen from their kneeling positions but most looked like they didn’t want anything to do with me, in the moment. I felt the same awkwardness but there was no time for polite distance. I used a wand of Major Illusion to project my voice across the stadium. “Everyone- I’m sorry. What just happened- this is why I insist that we don’t have a strict hierarchy in Contact. Memetic hazards are very real and I’m just as vulnerable as anyone. If you got hurt in all that, please talk to a clone me, they’ll fix you right up.” It occurred to me that wands were going to be in short supply in the very near future, without Wish replenishment. We stocked up but… only enough for weeks, not years. And not enough for the whole human race. Damn the Efreet for putting me in this position! But it hadn’t been the Efreet, in the end. It was my own inability. Why didn’t I come up with some kind of backup- it seems so obvious in hindsight! Had it been my desire for the easy path, the quick victory? My eye twitched- I wrote it off as agitation and focused elsewhere. “I’m going… to be stepping back, for a while,” I continued through my megaphone. “My trip to Washington will be my last operation with you all for the time being.”

Delmutt nodded and walked forward. I could see Roy approaching from the crowd, as well. He had grass stains on the knees of his camo from kneeling, and I felt a fresh wave of shame. I’m sorry. Delmutt looked me in the eyes for a moment, making sure I was okay. “I’m going to be leaving too, for a while.”

I blinked in surprise. “What? Where will you go?”

She turned and looked out past the ruins of the tower, toward the horizon. “You remember our conversation of a few weeks ago?” I did- I’d brought her some promising leads. “Out, into this world. We need other options, if we’re going to save as many of my people as we can. More technologies. Your world isn’t the only set of rules we can play by. There will be other narrators here, with settings that may work to our advantage. I’ll go and find them.”

It made sense. I wanted to help, but it seemed like I was always out of step with her rescue operations. “Look for the science fiction stories. Near earth orbit, maybe. If you got ahold of Star Trek replicators… it would solve a lot of problems for all of us.” She nodded, and moved to hug me as Skylar had. The infomorphs weren’t a physical race, for the most part, but she’d been more adaptable than most. “Keep an eye out for Zeno,” I said, referring to her partner, whom she still hadn’t found. So many dead, out there- she might never. “I’ll be in touch if I see him.” She nodded and turned to leave as Roy arrived.

“So,” he said. “That happened.” He’d been present or at least on the line for most of the adventures of the last month. He knew that stuff like this was happening all over. But it was different, when it happened to you. “You had quite a power boost there, discounting side effects. Felt like looking at Aslan all over again. But you let it go. What changed?” A valid question. He had a right to answers from me.

“Nothing changed,” I said, gesturing at the Ring now being scooped up by an autonomous drone. “I never wanted that kind of power. You’re familiar with Lord of the Rings, Captain?” He nodded. “Then you know what that thing can do. It got to me, briefly. But it was… is … an artificial desire. I found something I wanted more.”

He considered the boxy little drone flying off with what was easily the most dangerous artifact we’d encountered, to date. “Do you really not desire that?” He turned back to me. “I look at everything you’ve done, and I wonder. After the last month, after all you’ve done- there would be plenty of people who would back you, if you decided it was time that you ran everything.”

Would you, Captain? After the Colonel and his massacres, somehow I don’t think you’ll ever back a tyrant again. I crossed my arms. “If I did, I just had my opportunity and I let it fly away. Take that as a demonstration of my sincerity, Captain. I’m here to help the rest of the world become what it needs to be, in the face of this new reality. Not to rule it. All I want…” is to go home. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I asked a question that had been bothering me for a while. “Do you have a family, Roy? You never mention them.”

He shook his head in the negative. “Used to. Wife and a little girl. Couple years ago I shipped to Afghanistan. We called every week while I was on deployment. I always thought I was the one in danger. One week, they didn’t pick up. Then the next. It took three fucking weeks for the Army to get word to me- there’d been a car crash. Lost my wife instantly… my daughter, we turned off her ventilator a year later. Nobody left, now.” His voice was detached, raw. “When all this started, I thought- for a minute, I thought- maybe I’d see them again, with the rules changed. But not that rule.” He looked at me with eyes full of pain that, by all rights, shouldn’t have moved me. Half the world disappeared, Haley. Everyone had the kind of loss he carried, these days. But I felt it more keenly when I looked at him. “I guess that’s why I can’t fully trust you. Knowing your family might still be out there, you’re still here. How can you stay? What kind of person could?”

My god. I didn’t know whether to step towards him or stay perfectly still. The question burned, and it was one part anger and one part fear that he was right. That I was some kind of monster, for staying instead of running to Sean. Save yourself, save the ones you love, save the world. In that order. Did you forget? Is that the piece of you that you feel deep inside is still missing? You know there’s something wrong. My eye twitched again. “No.” I denied my own internal monologue, and him, in the same breath. “I’m not still here. Every moment of every day I’m out there with him, in my head, worrying and waiting and hoping for word. But I wouldn’t leave this world to die any more than you would have left men on the battlefield, Captain. I’m bound here, so long as I have the power to save one more life. If we went to our loved ones, having left others to die for us- could we look them in the eyes?” I looked into his, and he met my gaze for a second before looking down. I couldn’t tell what he thought of it.

“She’s a hero,” piped up Skylar, and I jumped. I honestly had forgotten she was standing right there. “She’ll never stop until we’re all safe. That’s what it means.” She hugged me again and I was glad for her presence, even if I disagreed with her assessment. A hero would want this.

He considered us both for a long moment, but I noticed that he couldn’t look long at Skylar. Now I had a good idea why. “A hero, huh. I heard a quote, once. ‘True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.’” He considered me, for another long moment. For some reason I felt like worlds hung in the balance of his judgement. Eventually he nodded. “Slip-ups aside, it fits. You want me on your side, I want you to do something for the world. Find a way to stop you, if something like this happens again. Hand it off. Can you do that?” I nodded. That gap in my soul twinged again. I wonder if I already have. He took my reassurance and moved on. “Listen, there’s another contingent coming in from France, they apparently made contact with the English last night and they’ve got something they want you to see, they say it’s urgent-”

I sighed. “Surely it can wait, Roy. I need more than a few hours away from here, I’m going to get this Washington job out of the way.”

He nodded in understanding. “I’m sure it’ll keep or someone else can handle it. I’ll pass word, and round up a cell to meet you at the Baltimore gate.” He turned to leave but I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Roy.” He didn’t turn to look at me. “Don’t give up on hope. These are strange times, and… once we know why my resurrection spells won’t work, we might-”

He cut me off. “Don’t.” It sounded like he was holding back a deep well of emotion. “Don’t offer me that. I can’t go through it again.” He looked like he was going to walk away, but then he added. “Just… don’t wait too long. You have a second chance to see the people you love. Don’t leave it to the last minute.” I let my hand drop.

Skylar was still at my side. “Do you really mean it, about bringing everyone back?” She still missed her brother, I knew. How could she not? It had only been a month. I squeezed her shoulders.

“I do. Sean knows more about what’s really going on with the stories than I do, I think. I’ve been too focused on… fire-fighting. I think I need to start paying attention to what it is that caught fire in the first place.” After I got to Washington. “Are you going to be okay? Do you have a way to get home?”

She smiled. “It’s fine! The gates let me get anywhere, and the ‘morphs always keep an eye out for me. They don’t follow me like the others but all I have to do is wave and they’ll help me. She demonstrated, and indeed, a flyer landed shortly after. It looked like they were the ones tasked with attending to Greg- I saw that the ring-bearer drone had made its way back to him, though he was still unconscious. More shame welled up, and I suppressed it ruthlessly. Focus, do the right thing now.

“Skylar, can you talk to Greg, and get word to the Dog? I need that Ring off of our planet as fast as possible. Tell them to get it back to his world. If we can help him avoid consequences that’s okay. But… he can’t bring that war here. He can’t.” She nodded solemnly. For all that she was barely eleven, I trusted her more than most of the adults around here to actually execute on those instructions. “You’re a good kid, Skylar. I may be gone for a while. ...Take care of your brother and sisters, okay?” She nodded again and tears welled up. We hugged a while longer, and then I left her there, heading into the gates and whatever strange fate had befallen our former capital.

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It was a perspective shift to walk the branching paths of the gate network while knowing there wouldn’t be any further expansion for a while, without wishes to draw on. A month was a short time, but this had become my world, however briefly. The biggest portals were all lined with empty drone bodies, ready for infomorph consciousnesses to hot-drop in the moment there was a sign of trouble. It had only been minutes since Jada disappeared, but so far there was no reported activity inside Volo Ingenium. They all knew it was coming. The infomorphs were digging in, the humans were mostly withdrawing their operations entirely. With luck they’d be done before it broke.

I wouldn’t give my dimension up. The Efreet deserved a place in it, if they could be peaceable- but I didn’t trust them. If they came in force, I’d respond- I regretted the deaths of Aslan’s men, but I didn’t feel that I would have many options besides lethal force, against something as threatening as a genie invasion. And what had Jada meant, about a force from the East? Was she referring to the Ring? It seemed a little too pat. Well, if I knew how these things went, she’d have phrased it in such a way that I wouldn’t know until the very last- no, that was defeatist. I paused in my walk and turned my whole attention towards her words. Intelligence 33 had not gifted me with eidetic memory, but it was a close thing. “Lest your best laid plans become a study in scarlet,” she’d said. I cross referenced in my head. A story title occurred. Arthur Conan Doyle? “Holmes,” I muttered. “She was referencing Sherlock Holmes.” It didn’t get me very far. I couldn’t understand how he could be much of a threat- he had no powers beside his mind, though I wouldn’t discount that - but also wouldn’t he be on my side? Still, one step closer. “You aren’t going to blindside me, you cherry-red bitch,” I muttered as I resumed walking. I’d keep thinking about it.

The Contact cell was waiting for me at the branch that lead to the eastern seaboard. They were good people- I’d resisted incorporating the more militant elements we’d encountered as much as possible. Half of this team had come from a division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that we’d picked up in the first week. The other half were veterans from one of Roy’s squads. They’d seen a couple of deployments when the food riots had begun to get bad, around week two. They’d calmed the situations with no casualties on any side, and I trusted they’d know what the appropriate level of force was here- I’d asked that we all go in armed with nonlethal weapons for the time being.

The Captain was here as well- he hadn’t actually said he wouldn’t be attending, but it was surprising. He tossed me a salute for the sake of his underlings and I waved him aside. “I’m not in charge of this operation, Roy, you are. I’m here to provide muscle and help you with any narrative jams. You know the mission as well as I do, you make the tactical calls on the ground.” I was no soldier- I was more like the world’s most heavily armed civilian. I knew they’d listen but I didn’t want any life to hinge on my inability, down there. Not with my missing pieces hanging over my head.

He eyed me. “Did you have a chance to think about what I asked from you?”

I was about to deny him but something tickled my memory. “No, I- wait. I did.” That was weird. I didn’t remember doing this at all, but I remembered that I had the results. A single manila envelope marked “Emergencies Only.” I handed it off to him. He nodded, and handed it in turn to one of his soldiers. Where the hell did I get that? That feeling of absence intensified. All the more reason not to take charge here.

He turned to the rest of the group. Six men and three women looked back. They wore a variety of tactical gear- body armor, of course, but they also carried a high powered drone kit, night vision equipment, thermal imaging gear, and a variety of non-lethal weaponry like stun grenades and beanbag shotguns. Each carried a knife as a last line of self defense, but I had been fairly adamant about limiting the killing power of these teams. In almost no circumstance was it going to be enough to deal with narrative threats, and I did not want to meet human issues with force as a first response. If it needed killed, I would be the one getting dirty.

The lieutenant briefed them. “Night of the Swap we lost contact with a lot of places. Most, we’ve been able to get back into just by walking up to them. Washington is an exception. There’s a band of hurricane-force winds around that place, fifty mile radius, and nobody we’ve sent into them has come back. Weird thing is they’re not centered on the capital, exactly- center is closer to Rockville to the northwest. Our job is to find out what’s going on inside, establish contact with the locals, and extract. We’ll have one of the gates with us-” he gestured to an armored personnel carrier which was parked on the colossal branch behind us. It would be equipped to carry one of the smaller gate entrances, once we drove out of this dimension. “So getting out won’t be much of a problem, unless we need to close it behind us. I hear the robot Extras are a bit busy right now, so we won’t be getting any high tech support, but we’ve got the grandmother of all Extras herself right here for backup. Don’t you make this look like a two-bit Dudley Dooright operation in front of the boss, Mounties.” There was some good natured chuckling and ribbing as they suited up. As I was still in human form, a couple of them shook my hand. “Thought you’d be a bit bigger, miss,” said one whose nametag read Matt Cooper as I walked over to the APC.

“Only when I get excited, sergeant.” That got a laugh, at least. Bring them all home, Haley. I swore then and there I’d do my best. We got in the APC and drove for the Baltimore gate.

----

It wasn’t wind. It was… a tornado, a wall of hurricane force that cut through the lower half of Baltimore like a scythe. The air before it was whipped and roaring, overwhelmed by the sound of it. It stretched from the earth into the sky and, I was reliably informed, right on up to the stratosphere. Satellites couldn’t seem to get good intel on the inside of this thing. The wind moved parallel to the ground, from east to west, just a sheer and towering cliff of flying debris. No wonder nobody’s come in or out. What was this thing and why did I have the strangest feeling that I was standing on some kind of precipice? Baltimore had effectively been cut in half by it- the northern side, where we were at, had long since cleared out within several miles of the wind-wall, which at least hadn’t expanded since it first appeared.

One of the soldiers from Roy’s unit waved to us in the back of the APC. “Geiger counter outside the vehicle’s spiking. I don’t know how to read this thing, someone tell me if shit’s fucked or not.” I walked back and looked at the counter. My heart skipped a beat. This can’t be right. The rest of the crew looked at me expectantly. I wasn’t going to lie to them- “It’s saying… ten thousand microseiverts per hour.”

The soldier who’d called me looked blank. “Is that… bad? I don’t have any context.”

I nodded. “That’s pretty bad, yeah. Fifty thousand is your maximum allowable annual dose by US rules. And we’re not even in the cloud, yet. You’d get lower background radiation if you measured outside Chernobyl, right now. This tub is NBC rated, right?” The captain nodded and banged his fist on the padded interior. “So we should be safe if we don’t leave it. Still, it might be better if everyone who can, waits on the other side of this gate. You can still look through, but that way if it spikes worse you won’t be taking it for nothing.”

The captain considered and I didn’t insist- it was his command. “Half on the other side, half in here. We’ll rotate every fifteen.” They nodded at the wisdom of that and filed back through to the other world, where somebody had thoughtfully set up chairs and a bit of an armory for them if they should happen to need it. While they were moving and out of earshot, I tapped the captain on the shoulder. “What’s the reaction going to be if this turns out to be a… nuclear event? That wind’s not natural but whatever is on the other side might have human causes.”

He nodded, thinking quickly. “We’ll deal with it if it comes to that. Better to know, I think. But this doesn’t feel like nukes to me. Feels like… looking past the end of the world.” That was odd- it wasn’t just me getting that feeling in the back of their mind, then? Either way, he told the driver to press on and the APC rumbled to life down highway 95, or rather, what was left of it.

It was an unpleasant journey. Eighty mile per hour winds didn’t much phase a tracked vehicle, but the occasional SPANG as something like a tree branch or piece of building debris smacked off the side was jarring, and the ride itself was alarmingly bumpy- the road had been torn to pieces by weeks of high winds. Still the remaining concrete path made for reliable enough guidance, and the driver performed admirably. I watched helplessly as the exterior rad counter spiked higher and higher. Deep in the wind wall, we were pushing a hundred thousand microseiverts per hour. My stupid rule system protected me- Pathfinder treated radiation like a poison, and a fort save that I could pass in my sleep was enough to prevent any effects at all. But for the others- this was rapidly approaching life-altering levels of radioactivity. Nobody was going to be operating outside this vehicle for more than seconds, with an immediate Neutralize Poison from me on return.

Then for a second it peaked, spiking so high the counter stopped reading, and my world tilted on its axis. Like we’d just driven over a cliff, but there was no freefall afterwards- we continued plodding on. Was it radiation or something else? I looked up, alarmed, and the others had felt it too. Just as suddenly it was gone. “The hell was that?” asked the driver. “Felt like the world… rebooted or something.” He and the captain peered out while the rest of us huddled in the back, but the winds were still too fierce to see anything.

I, on the other hand, was still on my knees in the back cabin. Something was terribly wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be here. My whole body was hurting- the world itself was rejecting my presence. “Captain, I-” I tried to get out, and then I puked. Everything was going grainy for me, like I was losing consciousness. On instinct I flung myself back at the portal. I hit the armored and padded wall of the APC, instead. The captain shouted in alarm and ran back to me.

“The hell was that?” he asked, but I had no answers. “The hell did the portal go? Half our team is on the other side of that! Did we just get fucked?” The other two in the cabin with him stared in alarm. I couldn’t say. Something felt wrong with me. There were glowing worms creeping across the bottom of my vision, and the graininess hadn’t dissipated. But I could still talk. I felt a moment of rising panic as I realized my magic wasn’t working. This wasn’t just a wave of radiation.

“I think we were looking at the end of the world. I think we just crossed… into somewhere else. And it doesn’t like my… rules,” I panted, aching in strange ways. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here. I don’t fit. Can we turn this thing around?”

“Fuck! We need to see what’s on the other side of this wind, first,” he ordered, and the driver moved to comply- I didn’t complain further. We needed to know and I wasn’t dying, just uncomfortable. We’d press on. Another hard half hour passed. My vision didn’t clear, but the radiation climbed back down to momentarily survivable levels. It wasn’t until I tried to cast a spell that the worms in my vision resolved and I realized they had been trying to talk to me all along in the form of Heads-Up messages. “ERROR: Skill not found” they reported.

“Oh no,” I muttered, even as the winds cleared and we saw beyond for the first time. “I really don’t fit. Not here.” Fighting rising panic, I felt for something in my pocket- what I was looking for I couldn’t understand, couldn’t actually think about, but it was still there. I breathed out in relief and tried to look past the driver. As far as we could see, a blasted and irradiated wasteland stretched. Distantly I could make out some outposts along the highway- they looked like they’d been abandoned for centuries. Anemic-looking sunlight filtered through the grainy air, and everything glowed a soft and subtle yellow-green. It looked like… “A video game.” The clues were adding up. Radiation, a capital wasteland, a storm centered around… Bethesda, Maryland. The others looked at me curiously. They weren’t seeing the visual artifacts, apparently. It even looked pixelated, to me.

We knew, now. I’d seen enough. “Captain, we aren’t going to find anyone here. We’ve crossed out of our world and into the Fallout universe. It’s set hundreds of years after nuclear disaster. If there’s anyone alive out here, they aren’t the people we’re looking for.”

He sized me up while the others sat silently. Suspicions were starting to come to the fore, now that things had gone so badly. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You laid out the rules for us, how these stories work. Someone in our world has to invite the Extras in. You telling me someone overwrote the whole of Washington DC with a… video game world? I think you’re shitting me.”

None of my perception or persuasion skills were working. And his disbelief was seriously aggravating after all we’d been through. “Roy I’m just as mystified as you. This shouldn’t be possible. It felt like a hole in the world that we drove through. Look outside - no person did this, not in a month. This is something new, something unfamiliar. We just walked into someone else’s story and it is sending me every possible flag that I shouldn’t be here. There’s nothing for us here but danger and death. The other half of our team is trapped on the other side of that portal, and… the game rules that I work on don’t translate, here. I haven’t got the slightest bit of muscle to lend you. This isn’t our world and it’s beyond saving. We need to leave while we still can. When we’re back, we can figure out what caused this.” And how much more fucked the world is than we previously thought.

He sighed. “You’re asking me to take a lot on faith, Haley. We talked about this, before I came down here. I said I could probably trust you. But there’s a lot of wiggle room in that probably. And here I am, safe on one side of the wind wall but cut off from half the team and my biggest muscle, apparently. I ask you- if you did have something to hide about the capital, what do you think that’d sound like? You trying to spook me?”

I lost my temper, shouted at him. “Captain, use your goddamn mind, it’s why you came on this mission! If I were the kind of murderer you think I am, why would I be begging you? I’d have eaten you and driven back by myself.” They all tensed- that was not the right thing to say, Haley, you idiot. “I’m not going to do that, come on! What have I ever done that makes it seem like I’d behave that way?” The team around me didn’t relax. The answer wasn’t even that hard to come by- I’d done it just a few hours ago.

His hand was drifting close to his sidearm. “We drive on. You put me in charge of this mission?” I nodded in confirmation. “We drive on.” And so we did- rolling down a dusty, broken highway into hell.