Chapter Text

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Haley, Capital Wasteland

Present Day

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It didn’t take long, before hell found us. We drove across the barren wasteland that should have been our capital for what felt like hours. The crew muttered and I poked at my interface. This whole phenomenon was new. Previously we’d seen narrators summon characters and even story elements into our world. Whoever had summoned this had replaced our world, intentionally or not. Old DC was just- gone. In its place this horrifying vision of a future that could never have been. The age of the storms would seem to indicate that this had appeared at the same time as the other story elements, but I wondered- were there other places like this, where the fabric of our reality was coming apart like old cloth, revealing near facsimiles underneath? What would happen if the person driving this place were to die and lose control of it? Was there a person driving it? Questions without answers, for now.

The… metaphysics of this world, I guessed, didn’t expand far enough to allow other game systems to exist. My Pathfinder statistics had translated into some kind of level system, and I had… quite a few of them. My pile of hit dice had proven to be good for something, I guessed. If I used all these points I was probably quite lethal compared to your average human, but I had no illusions about invulnerability here. I distributed what I could, maxing out anything that could give me more skill points early on, then anything that would improve my gunplay. If this really was Fallout then I had a good idea what was going to go down when we finally got out of this vehicle. I hadn’t even played the games but it was hard to escape some understanding just through cultural osmosis. A lot of shooting and dismemberment, unless I missed my guess.

I maxed small guns and sneak, leaving the rest for future contingencies. My first option would be a stealth approach, but if it came time for violence, I wanted to hit anything I shot at. Meanwhile the rest of the crew peered at the displays that substituted for windows in the armored tub, and tried to make out where we were. “This doesn’t look anything like 95” muttered the captain, trying to puzzle out our location on his paper map. Honestly I hadn’t even realized they printed those anymore, but it wasn’t going to be much good here. “I don’t get it, it looks like a bomb went off and everyone just rebuilt from the nearest trash laying around,” grumbled the driver.

“That’s the aesthetic of the Fallout universe, yeah” I said, going through our small-arms locker and trying to find something useful. Roy glared at me suspiciously and I shrugged at him. I’m not going out there without self defense. “They never put much thought into it- hundreds of years after the bombs fell and everyone still living with holes in their roofs and sheet-metal nailed to their walls, it always seemed like a ham-handed way to signal apocalypse conditions to me.” I grabbed a taser and as many charges as I could fit in my pockets. I didn’t even have the Vorpal Sword here- I’d left it at the stadium in my treasure hoard, after the events with the Ring. I felt like I might as well have been naked.

Finally we found a place that looked… active, for lack of a better term. A great big shopping mall done in a future-retro 60s sci-fi style, then blown to pieces, then reassembled from barbed wire and driftwood. There was a statue of some alternate-universe ice cream mascot standing tall over the place and holding up a cone, but his nose had rotted off and the whole thing had taken on a vaguely skeletal appearance. A weathered and broken billboard along the single entryway said “Paradise Falls.” The road itself was lined with fences and obstacles, turning it into an almost perfect one-way road, straight into the heart of the mall proper. This couldn’t be more obviously a trap.

I said as much. “Stow it,” said the captain. “We haven’t seen hide or hair of a single person so far. They look like they’ve had a rough month in here. If anyone’s alive I bet they’ll be grateful for us. And whatever they built all this to defend against… well, we’re not it. We go in, get the locals to tell us what’s been going on, and then we get back out. If your story’s on the up-and-up… I’ll owe you an apology. But it sure as hell looks like something magic went down, out there.”

I crossed my arms. This was several steps too far, despite my respect for him. “Okay. You drive into the kill zone, in a box that’s too big to reverse easily. But let me out here. I’ll take another path into the place. I can go pretty much unnoticed, and if they’re unfriendly you’ll have someone on the outside ready to help you.” To demonstrate I crouched to activate my new unbelievably-high “Sneak” mode and more-or-less disappeared from their perceptions for an instant. Once they had calmed down about that, they considered, agreed, and lowered the ramp. I turned to go- “Listen. If some of us don’t make it back from this… no.” I shook my head. “I promise, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure all of you come back from this.” They stared silently. Having said that, I found myself stepping out of the back of the APC before it rumbled down the narrow, winding road lined with sandbags and tall fences capped with barbed wire. Within seconds it was out of sight.

I began picking my way through debris and rubble towards the structure of the mall itself. Everything about this was sitting poorly with me. The growing distrust of my team, I understood- but not their inability to recognize how out of place all of this was. None of this looked like the world they were used to. We had clearly stepped into someplace else, with different rules. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe not having their own story logic was making them susceptible to the madly skewed perspective that this game world clearly ran on. A brief discussion with Sean from our time at the bunker, about the nature of all the “non-player characters” in our stories came to mind, and I shuddered. It was really unsettling to think that everyone around you might not have their own free will, their own agency. I still rejected the concept outright. If I had any narrative authority here whatsoever, I’d give them their minds.

I heard the APC enter the main yard of the mall, and the engine cut out. Now that the vehicle had passed, I could see people rising from blinds and hidden foxholes by the roadside and swiftly dragging barricades across it. Uh-oh, that doesn’t look friendly. The people didn’t look great either- like some combination of desert raider and Mad Max cosplayer, covered in leathers and torn strips of clothing. The vast majority were wearing blinking, bulky collars. I was genre-savvy enough to guess that those were going to be some kind of bomb-collars. A slaving operation, then. I snuck close and listened to their interactions from behind some rubble, to make sure.

“Get moving you assholes, you let them escape and Eulogy’s gonna have all our asses,” snarled one of the only guys without a collar on, as he shoved a couple of them around. Yeah definitely video game slavers. I was going to have a hard time not killing any of them on principle. If it came to a fight, I’d make it happen somehow.

One of the ones with a collar, a slim woman who looked like she’d seen some hard years, muttered rebelliously. “Not like Eulogy’s in charge round here anymore, anyway.” To her great misfortune the guy with the detonator heard her. He swung around and pointed a device and I heard her shout “No! No! I didn’t mean-” before a soft pop removed everything about her from the neck up. Gore splashed her comrades and stained the road underneath her as the body collapsed.

He turned to the rest of them. “I don’t want to hear that shit from none of you, you get me? Eulogy’s got his finger on your triggers, don’t matter who or what he works for, he’s your own personal god, got it?” They nodded rapidly and he turned away, satisfied. I felt sick. I couldn’t imagine they were making a habit of killing slaves for such minor offenses, which either meant the situation was very unstable, or… that was exposition for my benefit by the world itself?

I didn’t know if this place had a narrator. It seemed like a setting, not a story, necessarily. But I could see it being the kind of setting that, on some level, simply didn’t care about murdering NPC’s if it delivered a message to the protagonist. “Please don’t send your communications to me with an attached body count,” I hissed at nobody in particular as I resumed scaling the rubble to the back of the mall. I couldn’t be certain anyone was listening, but- “I don’t know if you’re a person or just the rules this world operates on but you and I may have a very different opinion on the value of a life, and if you keep killing people just to talk to me I will find you and express it.”

I seemed to have an instinctive understanding of whether or not any of them could see me and I leaned on it, moving swiftly whenever they weren’t looking in order to cover more ground. Interestingly enough I didn’t hear a single peep from the APC- not voices, not gunfire. I wondered if the interior of the mall was on pause until I got there. This world had unsettled me when we first arrived in it but I was beginning to think I hadn’t been scared enough. I don’t understand the rules of this place. We need to load up and get out.

Sure enough when I finally worked my way around the rubble piles and onto the second story of the mall, I heard a conversation beginning. It made no sense- the APC had arrived several minutes ago, they had plenty of time- I shook my head to dismiss such thoughts and listened. Roy’s voice rang through air- “Captain Kitchener, Contact team 13, here to assess the situation and offer you assistance. Who are we speaking to?” I poked around a corner and finally saw them. They were parked in the center of what used to be the mall parking lot but had at some point become the town square for the shanties that dotted the area. In front of my team were arrayed a dozen armed men, and more took up positions on the balcony around me. All were dressed in wasteland leathers except for the man in front, who seemed remarkably out of place. He looked like a clone of James McAvoy, wearing a three-piece oxford suit with not one hair out of place. He had a confidence and control about him that marked him as the one in charge without him raising a finger. At his side paced an enormous snow leopard, totally incongruous to the situation. This must be the guy who took over from Eulogy, then. Looks like a Bond villain.

The man that I assumed was named Eulogy stood right behind him, in a wasteland-chic worn red suit. All his attention was fixated on the well-dressed man, but as he moved around I caught sight of his face and my breath hitched- his eyes were glowing. A soft blue light came from them. What could that mean? Once again I shook my head. Whatever was going on here, I needed to focus. This was going to end one way- poorly, and I had an opportunity to mitigate the damage. I had a blackjack among my effects and the ability to go more-or-less unseen, and I moved to put it to work on the balcony, disabling as many people as I could before this turned into a gun fight.

I didn’t even make it to the first sniper before the man in the suit spoke and all thought fled, for a moment. He had a crisp English accent that clearly spoke of an upper-class upbringing, but it was what he said that caused my brain to crash and reboot. “Lord Asriel, of Jordan College and the Royal Arctic Society,” he said with a touch of grim humor, “Though, of late, I have not been in touch with either.” I was already in full-on panic mode. Everything I knew about the Golden Compass flashed past me- he was another world-walker, like Flagg, but Asriel’s motives had been even more ambitious, and by-and-large he had succeeded.

I hesitated behind the man I was about to ambush. Asriel was ambitious to the point of madness to be sure, but he might still see that it was to his benefit not to murder a team in cold blood. We could possibly get out of this without bloodshed.

“In fact,” he said, “We could use your assistance. Have any of you seen something like this, before?” From his waistcoat he withdrew what looked like a wrist-mounted computer with a pulsing light coming from it- the screen was facing the wrong way, for me, but he flashed it toward Byers and his crew, and every single one of them stared at it, transfixed.” Ah fuck, that can’t be a good sign. Within seconds they’d all collapsed. But he didn’t order them shot.

I considered the first gunman. Jam my knife into his skull at a 45 degree angle, severing his vertebrae and scrambling his medula oblongata. He’ll drop without making a sound. The knowledge came to me unbidden and I had no idea if it was the stealth skill or just my own morbidity talking. But… I wouldn’t. I’d only killed men once before, in a combat situation when my blood was up, and I still regretted it. This world so clearly wanted me to kill. It clearly didn’t value these lives, and didn’t want me to either. The pressure to ease my path with murder was enormous. I wouldn’t give it the satisfaction, even with the odds so heavily stacked against me. I clubbed him hard in the back of the head instead, and dragged his unconscious body with me around the corner. Then I made for the second man on the balcony.

Down below the gunmen were not advancing on Byers or his team, oddly enough. They seemed to be waiting patiently for… something. I had enough time to club two more men unconscious, occasionally looking over the side to the courtyard below, before I found out what. The captain’s eyes snapped open, and they were glowing with that same soft blue light as Eulogy’s. “Ah, welcome back,” said Lord Asriel. “Coherent, I hope? The Concept has matured a little, but it is still… quite obstructive of the synaptic pathways.” Whatever that was I don’t think it was local, but he used local tech to flash them- memetic attack, delivered via setting-relevant transmission? The other three in the captain’s group opened their eyes, all with that same glow, and stood unsteadily. Asriel continued. “Now, hopefully one of you still retains enough to talk. Was there anything you had prepared in case of capture? Any unpleasant surprises in the vehicle, or waiting outside?”

Roy nodded, slowly, and I cursed. He could barely form complete sentences, all of a sudden. “A woman. Haley. She… powers, not sure- careful.” I stepped up my speed, trying to club a fourth man.

Asriel’s eyebrows shot up at the name. “ Her, here? When Emrys set the timetable I didn’t think for a second she would be-” He caught himself, cleared his throat and turned to the others. “Find her. Shoot to kill.” Well, that was the end of any nonlethal amnesty for him from me. It was almost the end of me, period. The fourth man on the balcony turned the instant the order was given and spotted me immediately, given that I was just feet from him. He gave a warning shout and fired his rifle into the air, and that was my cover blown.

I dropped into the other skill I had felt waiting for me, some sort of time-dilated targeting system that let me choose my shots with utmost precision. With small arms at 100, a taser from beyond this world, and every perk related to gunplay I could find, I was easily able to place three shots however I wanted. The fourth, fifth, and sixth men on the balcony all jerked as the prongs stung them and then the lightning arcs froze every muscle in their bodies. That’s definitely not how a taser works. I hoped that headshots wouldn’t kill but I no longer had any kind of luxury of time. The seventh and final man on the balcony, around the interior corner from me, leveled his rifle but I ducked behind the thin sheet-metal siding of the balcony, which proved totally invulnerable to the return fire of his ramshackle automatic weapon. The little details of this world really unnerved me.

I heard the sound of the rest of the Mad Max gunmen in the courtyard below running to the stairwell. This position was untenable- the physics of this world made it advantageous for me to sneak away and kill these men one at a time, but he had my team, my ride out of here, and likely some answers. This world wanted me to steal a gun off a body and become a vessel for somebody’s pent-up rage as I killed every one of these people. I could feel a pressure in the back of my mind trying to insist that the minute you picked up a gun and opposed a protagonist you were just nameless, faceless cannon fodder and your death was nobody’s fault but your own. I couldn’t accept that. Visions of the men I’d killed in Aslan’s army kept flashing through my mind- regrets I couldn’t erase. These men meant something, even as my enemies, and I was not going to murder them if it was at all within my power. I crouched and headed back the way I’d come, grabbing the first man I’d clubbed unconscious on the way. Roy wasn’t in immediate danger. He’d have to fend for himself for a moment while I used my maxed-out Sneak to retreat.

Down the rubble pile we went, and far enough away that I thought I’d have at least a few minutes before they caught up. I could hear them calling out- ordinarily having lost sight of me they might have called off the search, but Asriel was driving them to form search parties, to come after me.

I slapped the man I’d brought until he woke up. I couldn’t worry about concussions now- he’d be alive, at least. As he woke up blearily I jammed the barrel of the taser under his chin, hard. “Raise your voice and I end you here and now.” I whispered. His eyes went wide and he nodded, unable to distinguish one barrel for another. “I want to know what you know about the guy in the suit down there. What’s he here for, what does he want?” How does he know my name? If I wasn’t killing these slavers I might as well pump them for information.

The thug’s brow darkened- he was clearly not a fan of the man. “Bastard got here two days ago. Flashing that blue pipboy at anyone who crossed him- makes ‘em a zombie.” That confirms it- he can ignore the barriers we’ve encountered for mind control if he spreads it with local tech. He’s a threat far beyond this world. “He didn’t do all of us though, just the bosses- said he wanted relatively intelligent workers. Asshole. He’s got us out scouting, pumping the wasteland for tech and scraps. He was real interested in the Brotherhood suits, taking some of that back where he came from. I don’t think he plans to keep us alive when he’s done.” He eyed me curiously. “What about you? You ain’t killed anyone yet.”

I nodded absentmindedly. If he’s a story from our world’s disaster and oh I just know he is, he must have come across some memetic strain and made use of it. What’s his goal? Why does it make them obedient to him? What’s he need wasteland technology for, or is this just opportunistic scavenging? “What’s your name? And how do you know I haven’t killed anyone?” I asked the thug.

He looked at me for a moment, and then his eyes crossed. “I don’t- ain’t nobody ever asked me that. I gotta have a name, right?” The question was distressing him, he was starting to panic. I shook my head and dismissed it. Unsettling implications flashed through my mind again- literally nameless thugs- but I tried to stay on target. He moved on and his eyes refocused- “we can see it, if you done bad shit like us. You’re clean.” Clean in this world, anyway, I thought with a grimace. “Let me go, I’ll tell the others I didn’t see you.”

I really missed Sense Motive. “I can’t tell if you’re telling the truth or not. Why would you do that?”

He shrugged. “We kill you, we die in a couple days probably. When he’s done with us. You stop him, maybe something better happens. I’ll take my chances.” Not the most advanced moral calculus and I wasn’t happy about working with slavers and murderers but my top priority was escaping with my people and getting them help, somehow. Solving this society’s problems was going to be a distant tertiary for the time being, but I made a mental note about it. I let him up and he ran off, calling out to the others when he was a good distance away. Drawing them off. Score one for mercy.

I had a limited window where the courtyard might be uncovered but I was going to make use of it. Still crouching to keep my stealth up, I made my way back to the mall and down to the parking lot where Lord Asriel, the Contact team, and the APC were all still situated. He had a pistol in hand, I saw, but he didn’t seem to pick up on me immediately. His daemon was pacing around him, putting her finely tuned senses to use, but that gave me an idea. I began covering the distance while he spoke to the captain.

“And the Efreet, have they moved yet? No, no, of course you’d have no idea. Damn, it’s been hell getting any information out here. The sooner we convert this whole place and get out, the better. No more faffing about, as soon as they get back I’ll convert them and we’ll simply roll the wasteland with Concept. I’ve seen… nothing to threaten it, here.” He said that last rather oddly. But the captain and my 3 teammates simply nodded along blankly. Whatever they’d been hit with… it had wiped them right out. I could only hope their minds were recoverable if we escaped this. I was halfway across the parking lot to Asriel when his cat finally noticed that something was amiss. Her ears quirked and she growled “She’s here!” Guess she doesn’t play by local rules. Shit.

I’d legitimately forgotten that daemons from Golden Compass could talk but that didn’t alter the plan. Before Asriel could sound the alarm or the others could raise their weapons I dropped back into that targeting system and planted all three taser shots into her. It occurred to me that tasers really didn’t work this way, that it couldn’t discharge multiple blasts simultaneously, but the game world didn’t question it and I wasn’t about to look the gift in the mouth. She yowled and dropped as I raced towards her, and he stumbled back, momentarily stunned. I discarded the empty taser, grabbed the limp form of the cat and absorbed a bean-bag round to the right shoulder from the captain- at such close range it hit hard enough to knock me around and dislocate that arm, but not enough to stop me. Still holding the cat I lowered my other shoulder and barged straight through the other three of my former teammates and into the open side hatch of the APC, slamming it closed and locked as I did so. Two more shots flew in as I pulled it shut, rubber bullets- one clipped the side of my face in a ricochet and drew blood, but I was otherwise okay.

I took a moment while the cat was coming around to relocate my shoulder with a crack and a cry of pain. The others were trying to get into the APC but it was buttoned up pretty tight from the outside. I fished out my hunting knife and the handset for the external speakers, before setting up the confrontation I’d come here to make. “Asriel. Call them off. I’ve got your cat, and that means I’ve got you. She dies, you die, right? Back off and let’s talk.”

Watching through the external cams I could see him groan and shudder in revulsion at the thought that I was touching what was essentially the embodiment of his soul. Everyone in his world had one of these animal manifestations, and he had pioneered the use of severing them to power his ambitions- I wasn’t going to feel too badly about rough handling right now. But he waved the others away and they stood back from the vehicle. Even the goons now filtering back into the lot stood off. I wasn’t too worried about small arms fire in here, but the team outside was still vulnerable. He mastered himself and spoke, eventually. “Damn you, Emrys, you set me up.” I didn’t think that was meant for me. Through the cameras I saw him turn towards me. “You, Haley. What do you want?”

Well that was easy enough. “I want you to let them go, and I want to know why you’re here. How about this- I’ll drive along and you, and they, are going to follow, because you can’t get too far from your cat without serious pain, can you? But that’s it- nobody else follows. We get outside of town and I’ll trade you, cat for my team, unharmed.” She was coming around and beginning to struggle in my arms- I could feel claws unsheathing. I pressed the knife close to her throat. “Ah ah ah, don’t get feisty. You might hurt me but I guarantee I’d take you with me.” She stilled for the time being.

He stood there, looking thoroughly nonplussed. Then he laughed. God damn it they always laugh. “Ah, all this and you don’t have a scrap of power to you right now! You would have been a terror if you’d been born on my Earth! No wonder he was so worried about you.” Then he shook his head, almost sadly. “There is no letting them go. Their minds are gone, and neither I nor anyone else… can restore them.” Again, that weird delay. Sense Motive would be going crazy right now if I had it. “If I could do you think I’d work so willingly for the Concept? It has my narrator too, you know. None of us are free while those telling our stories are held by it. While we could be taken at any time. We only remain free as a function of our utility.” Well, fuck. Stay calm, don’t panic Haley, there are still options. Assuming he’s not bluffing. Get them back to your world, you have restoration magics. “I don’t think I can let you out of here, knowing what you know,” he said. “There is about a ton of dynamite buried underneath you in this parking lot, and I have the lives of your team to bargain with as well. Try to move the vehicle and I detonate it.”

He was bluffing. “You’ll die too!” I shouted. He clearly wasn’t suicidal. “What’s your alternate proposal?” I was losing control of this situation, I felt. I had to get the team in here, subdue them if I could, and get out. The second I was clear of his cat he was going to try to murder me, though, that much was clear.

“Ah well, perhaps I can just show you,” he said, and reached into his waistcoat to pull out- I knew where this was going. I slapped one hand over the porthole before he could meme me. I had no idea if it would impact me long-term, but short-term was scary enough right now. With the other hand I reached down and cut an ear off the cat. She screamed, he screamed outside and collapsed again, and I flinched. She was actually the soul of a cruel, cruel man but it felt like animal cruelty. And my hands were still covered in her blood as she thrashed and yowled. This is not a good day.

But I kept my calm. “Try it again, you lose more than an ear. Negotiations closed for now. You, the nameless NPC gunmen. Talking to you now.” The men behind him stood up straighter, and looked a little bit puzzled. “He’s going to kill you- or expose you to that meme- the second this is resolved. You answer one question for me, and I’ll remove the problem for you. Who’s holding the detonator for the explosives under this APC?”

They looked back and forth for a minute, clearly unsure what to do- then jumped as a single gunshot rang out, and Eulogy collapsed bonelessly, leaking gore from a neat hole in his head. The gunman who I was pretty sure was the guy I’d interrogated earlier, shouted back at the APC. “Nobody, now.”

I nodded before I remembered they couldn’t see me. “Good enough. We’re leaving. Word of warning- I will be back, about the slaves. If you’re still keeping them when I arrive- well, you may wish he’d zombified you.” I grabbed some emergency rope and hog-tied the hissing cat, then slid into the driver’s seat. We began at a very slow walking pace- just fast enough that Asriel had to break into a trot to keep up or risk feeling whatever that searing pain was, when his soul was pulled too far from his body. The zombies of my team shambled along behind him. Within a half minute we were off the parking lot asphalt, and no detonation had come. I breathed a sigh of relief. One half of this negotiation over, then. But is there any way I can avoid murdering him? He was at my mercy now- stripped of power, for the time being.

“Why are you helping the Concept?” I asked, just to get him talking while we rolled forward, crushing through the trash barricades placed in between us and freedom. “That’s what you called it, right?”

He growled and cursed as he shambled and dragged himself over the barricades I was simply driving through. But he didn’t answer the questions. That was why I was so surprised when a mousy little voice inside the vehicle with me spoke up.

“He told you. He’s a coward!” I looked around, thinking perhaps it was his daemon, but no- there was another talking animal in this cabin with me, a shrunken and hunched little field-mouse. I looked around wildly but didn’t see any other people. What the hell? The mouse continued. “Anna summoned me, and also him, during that awful night, and within weeks everything there had fallen to them. She was so brave! She fought right to the bitter end. But if the… the blue light gets ahold of a narrator… the story they’re telling doesn’t have much of a choice about where it goes.”

I stopped the APC- we were just outside of town. The external mic was on and he could hear this conversation, but that was fine. I wanted him to know he had a leak, and I needed to focus. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

The mouse stood up on its hind legs, well away from the snow leopard, and sniffled. “Telantes, miss. I’m Anna’s daemon.”

Outside, Asriel cursed and spit, practically losing his mind. “You damned rat ! You stowed away all this time!”

I held out a hand and the mouse ran to it. “That was very brave of you. Doesn’t being so far away from her… hurt? And why doesn’t he have a choice? You clearly do.” I thought about it for another minute, recalling the time when Sean was the sole voice of our mutual story. “I’ve been narrated, I wasn’t… forced to do what my narrator said.” Was I?

The mouse shook its tiny, adorable head. “It should hurt to be so far apart but it doesn’t. I think…” it sniffled. “I think my thing with Anna… broke. That can happen but I don’t know what it means. I also don’t know what happens if he chooses to go against her while she’s telling his story. I don’t think he would enjoy it.”

He laughed outside. “You clearly haven’t met a story that has broken with its narrator, yet. I have- I saw it in the first weeks here. I’d rather serve.”

The mouse shook a fist at the microphone defiantly. “You found a way to get rid of the Concept! You found something out here that might get rid of it, but you started gathering it up to destroy! You could have saved her!”

He looked alarmed at that. “And I might have, you idiot, but now you’ve put it out there in a moment when she’s probably narrating I-” then he shut up. It was like a veil fell over him. One second he was animated, the next- rigidly mechanical. “You two.” He indicated the captain and our driver in front of him. “If I die, kill yourselves.” He turned to the final woman, one of Roy’s troops whose name I couldn’t recall, to my shame. “Now. You, on the left, woman with the red hair. Kill yourself immediately.” I cried out over the intercom but it was too late. She pulled out her own combat knife and plunged it into her throat, severing the jugular. Blood arced again in counterpoint to the slave’s death at the start of this misadventure, and she collapsed onto the sand.

“God DAMN it,” I shouted, and jumped from the driver’s seat, booting his daemon in the head as hard as I could. I surmised he wasn’t in complete control right now but I couldn’t afford to be gentle. If it killed her, it killed her, but I was hoping- his eyes rolled up and he winked out like a light, dropping unconscious to the dusty road. The other two milled for a second before deciding this probably triggered their suicide instructions and raising their weapons. Rubber bullets and beanbags or not, they’d still kill at point-blank range. Their hesitation had given me time to race to the door of the APC and unlock it. Now I kicked it open and launched myself at Roy.

It wasn’t smooth, or calculated. I’d put my points in the wrong spots for this- I had minimal unarmed skill and not a whole lot of strength. I had no weapons and little training. But they had been thoroughly zombified and their reaction times sucked. Plus I was moving faster than normal, desperate not to let them die, not to turn this into a bloodbath. Especially if he had a way to save them that he couldn’t share. Still, I took hits.

As I knocked Roy to the ground, the rubber bullets from the driver broke skin and nicked bone. I decked him in the head, hard enough for his helmet to contact the ground and his head to bounce inside it, knocking him out and breaking two of my fingers. Then I pivoted on my hip, sweeping the legs out from under the man right next to him. I grabbed the riot shotgun with beanbag rounds out of his grasp and deflected a shot off his helmet, as he hit me again with more penetrating shots. The force of it threw him around in a way that didn’t look healthy but left him breathing. Struggling up from my tackle, I raised the shotgun, ready to club either of them back down if I had to. Neither was moving.

It couldn’t have taken more than five seconds but I’d been shot four times and broken my hand. I hate this fucking world. It all came rushing up on me and I fell against the side of the APC, leaving bloody streaks. We didn’t drive far enough away from the slavers. I can’t pass out here. The mall was still in sight, and any of the people I’d just concussed could be up at any moment. “Telantes,” I called. “It’s over. There’s a med kit, in there. Can you bring it?”

He came out in the form of a beautiful silver lynx, carrying the kit in his mouth. Still young enough to shapeshift, then- I remembered that was important in the story. “I’ll take care of myself, you go grab whatever it was that he thought might cure the… Concept infection.”

The lynx looked at me. “Are you going to kill him? You should. He’s too dangerous.”

I was already trying to set my hand. At least I had a lot of points in the Medical skill, so I wasn’t completely useless in the aftermath. “OW. I don’t know. He wasn’t in his right mind, when he killed… god, I really don’t even know her name. What’s wrong with me?” I stopped what I was doing and shuffled on my knees over to the dead woman. Pain and nausea were battling for dominance in me. The sewn patch on her shirt said Maria. “When he killed Maria. It sounds like he hasn’t been in his right mind for a few days. When did… Anna, did you say? When did she get captured?” I found the other item I was looking for- an adrenaline injector. I plunged it into my thigh and gasped as I came wide awake. No passing out now, not for an hour or two at least.

The lynx was going through his pockets. “Not long ago. A couple of weeks I guess, we were trapped in a mansion when Merlin found us. Ah! Here they are.” He pulled out a box from Asriel’s jacket, marked Mentats with that cheesy faux-60s branding. “He flashed someone who was addicted to these and the next time they took them, the blue came right off.”

I had other priorities. “Did you say Merlin?” I had overheard Asriel mention Emrys which was another name for him, now that I thought about it. “Telantes, who else does the Concept have.” That sick feeling was back in my stomach.

He rattled off a list, sounding very pleased with his good memory. “Lord Asriel, the Panserbjorne, Merlin and King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes, a little witch girl, probably others. It got everyone in England, in the end.” That ruined its good mood, and whatever optimism I had begun to accumulate in this scenario. He turned back, resuming field mouse form. “So what will you do?”

I resumed wound dressing. What else could I do? I’d have to tie them all up, tie him up twice, figure out what he was actually doing here and stop it with a localized zombie cure if possible, and then get the hell out. Then all I had to do was stop a likely genie invasion and millions of memetic zombies backed by half the might and minds of all of western literature. And all while some critical piece of me was still missing.

“I don’t know,” I told the little creature honestly. “I really don’t know.”