"Sige," a lady with chains wrapped around her forearms said, "she's a Sahrger."

Sige glanced over at me and grinned. "Yeah, I know. She's also a fucking friend, whereas you're a leaky asshole. Since Mama probably doesn't wants us starting shit in the courtyard I'm going to give you to the count of three to fuck off, and then I'm going to twist you into a knot and throw you on the fucking roof."

They all shared looks back and forth, some more nervous and some more annoyed.

"Three," said Sige, catching them all off guard, and in a blink he had grabbed the one guy's metal gauntlet and put him into a very uncomfortable-looking hold before using him as a weapon against one of the others, who was knocked backwards into a potted plant. The plant instantly started wrapping around him, and while the vines didn't look super strong it would probably make it awkward for him to stand.

The others jumped back. Lightning crackled around one pale skinny guy, and the woman with the chains let the ends of them dangle so she could swing them. "Humiliate, maim, or murder?" I asked. I knew he wasn't going to say murder, but I kinda wanted these dicks to hear that it was an option.

Sige laughed. "Humiliate sounds like fun."

The tips of the woman's chains were glowing a little, which made me nervous that they could hit my ghost. Still, to end this quickly I was going to want to use every weapon at my disposal. Simultaneously. I charged ghost-first, but as I did I threw a knife just to one side and launched my whole self at the other. She did what I had expected and swung at the ghost while dodging the knife - it was the smart call all things considered, but I'd been practicing and managed to pop the ghost back to Ematse before the chain could connect and immediately drop it back out behind lightning guy.

This meant that while my body came in low and took the woman's leg out from under her, my ghost was able to shove its hand through the lightning guy's back and add some substance to its fist right inside the poor bastard's scrotum. He went down howling, and since he'd been preparing an attack in front of him my ghost barely got zapped at all. Using a technique that even worked on Hugh once, I got the woman into a hold, and managed to wrap her own chain around her neck to keep it there while I hauled us both up.

Sparky had partially recovered, but Sige and I both had human shields - in fact, Sige had two and was clapping them together like cymbals. He wasn't even doing it that hard, he was just idly bouncing them off each other while grinning. I moved my ghost closer to lightning guy from his side, and when he detected the movement and spun I popped it away to Ematse while shoving chain lady at him. As I'd hoped, in his panicked state he spun back and fried her, then as he recoiled I punched him as hard as I could in the face.

I can punch really well these days.

Sige tossed his two onto the pile, all four groaning miserably. "Nice. You've been training, kid! Fucking solid moves, I might need to get a turn myself. Come on, you can buy me dinner."

We walked out of the courtyard, and I made eye contact with the one who had run and was now lurking across the street. "Good call! You should get your buddies a healer." I turned to Sige and lowered my voice. "I'll buy you dinner this time, but remind me how much your cut of that Duminere job was? I'm surprised you're even still working here."

He grinned sheepishly. "Yeah, well, I had some people I owed money to. And they have the stipend part pretty much tied up too, something about interest?"

"Interest? Wait, the lump payment wasn't enough to get you clear?" I'd gotten way more than anyone else, even before figuring in the fact that I got double shares by inheriting Connie's cut, but Sige still should have been set for a long time. Wait. He hadn't cursed at all in that reply... this was probably bad.

"I was going to pay them off, but you know how it is. They tell you to wait while they figure out the latest odds for the games, and you overhear stuff and think you have a sure thing..."

Stronger than it had been in ages, I felt that twinge. My natural impulse was to just be glad I wasn't addicted to gambling and change the subject to something less depressing. But instead... okay, what would Bill do? Probably not storm in and murder a bunch of loan sharks, which was my first idea of a solution. To be fair, I couldn't picture that working in the long run - but I also couldn't really picture Bill talking his way out. Okay, what would a Bill / Calliope hybrid do? "What are the games, Sige?"

The answer lasted until halfway through dinner, because we kept going off onto tangents. A lot of it was about what I would have expected. People fighting each other, in duels or teams or free-for-all matches. People fighting monsters. Monsters fighting monsters, like cockfighting. Various games of skill or chance in heavily-warded rooms, which was interesting to me because I was pretty sure my fucked up fate layer tethers would let me use divination through almost anything now.

The part that was really disturbing, though, was the golem fights. It made me think of the deadshells - there were constructs that people could put their minds into, and it meant that the fight was theoretically pure skill. Both bodies were the same, neither had magic, just a completely fair match. It was strange, and apparently illegal, but it didn't seem like a huge deal to me. The part that freaked me out was that they used the same magic device to deal with people that were in too much debt. You owe a lot of money and you can't pay? Well, you get to work for the club in a robot body. Your actual body? Work hard, and you'll get it back barely used. Fuck up more, and they'll sell it to someone - in which case maybe you can still earn your way into another, worse, body. Or maybe you just work for the club forever.

It was the third type of body-snatching I'd run into in a very short amount of time. Tindelus, Grunkle, and now this... it made me worry this was another fate thing, but I wasn't sure what I could do about it even if it was - I already wanted to avoid getting taken over by anything. While half of me started flipping through The Paradox of Fate to see if there was anything that might help with my worry that fate was out to get me, the other half continued to talk to Sige about ways we could get him out of his mess.

"Not that I'm offering, not right now at least, but could someone buy your debt? Give them a lump sum to get them to drop it?"

He shrugged. "Fuck, kid. That's what I was going to do, but they fucking reeled me back in like a fish. Yeah, even if they didn't want to let someone else buy the debt I could always do it myself. I just don't have the fucking money anymore."

"Have you thought about... this is probably a rude question, I don't know. If it is just tell me so, I guess. Have you thought about taking an oath not to gamble anymore?"

"Hah! Yeah, that's a very rude fucking question. I don't actually mind, though. I uh, I talked to someone about it. The wording to keep me from gambling at all would be fucking impossible, but I could stop myself from doing it for... money, valuables in general, whatever. I almost did. I told myself I'd do it after I was all paid off."

And then he'd sabotaged himself. Okay. Well... I probably wasn't the right person to get into that mess, but I could offer some assistance. "It's your business, I'm not your mom or anything. If you want to keep gambling, fuck it. You're an adult. But... I'll make you a deal. I'll bet you right now that I can make enough off that club to pay your debt before they kick me out or try to kill me. If I'm wrong, I cover the difference and you get paid off anyway. But if I'm right? You have to help me hunt down a giant spirit whale thing."

"And what, I'm getting my debt paid either way? What's the fucking catch?"

"The catch is that I'm not bothering unless you take that oath. Like I said, I don't actually care if you do or not. That's up to you. But I'm not throwing good money after bad."

He nodded, strangely quiet, and for a little while we just ate in silence. Finally he spoke up, but it wasn't about the gambling stuff. "So what were you doing at Mama Carnage's place? You hiring for another job? Is it the whale thing you were just talking about?"

"Nah. The whale thing I just thought of, since you've got the planar stuff. I actually was... this is silly, I don't need the money or anything, but I was thinking it might be fun to do some jobs."

He grinned, his huge square teeth looking unnaturally big. "Fuck no, that's a great idea! And you not needing the money means you can be picky about which ones you take so you don't have to put up with any bullshit. What do you have going for you? The ghost thing, obviously - risky choice, they're hard to destroy but plenty of people out there have the right skills and if it's gone so are you - but did you pick up on anything else? I don't know what you snagged in that Duminere."

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I'd thought about which ones I needed to admit to, and right now there were several combinations I could claim to have. I clearly was never going to admit to having Fate. It was easy to leave out some of them; Probability, Temporal, and Comprehension had all contributed to my abilities but none were blatantly on display. The ghost thing was some combination of Binding, Spirit, and Thought but I could easily say that I had help from someone for the Binding part - Spirit was probably the most important one for that application, but in this case I figured I'd admit to both Spirit and Thought in case I ever wanted to invite him into my memory palace. Since this was Sige, I wanted to tell him I had Planar since he could possibly teach me some things which meant I needed to pretend not to have Perception - this would normally be hard since I used my divination trick all the time, but I was pretty sure I could pass that off as a thing I could do with spirits.

He nodded, looking excited. "Spirit and Planar are a great fucking combination, you can make good money wrangling spirits for certain customers. I could take you out hunting for avatar spirits for people, or... hell, with Thought you could maybe even get some oydirme for people. They're dream spirits, but people use them sometimes to have like... personal assistants in their heads. Fucking crazy, but I guess it's useful."

That made me think of the comatose Mecha-Callie still laying in my memory palace, as well as the one left behind by Betokat. I hadn't really tried to figure out how to make them useful without fully making them a copy of me. The copy thing had been powerful, but had also led to that strange brain fog if we didn't synch up frequently - maybe I could get some knowledge out of that archived copy of Betokat? Hmm. "Yeah, I know oydirme. I lured some in to my domain in Ematse."

"Nice, nice. Shame you don't have Binding, though. Spirit should be enough for you to snag some and drag them back to sell as long as we make the right contacts and move fast, or we could bring someone with us to bind them."

"Yeah... I mean that sounds cool, but don't get too busy planning. I don't know that that's what I want to do."

"Fair. Well, I can get you a meeting with Mama Carnage, and don't worry about the fucking iron over the door. I'll pull that down, or we'll see if formally inviting you lets you past, or something. I guessed that you might be a Sahrger, but I couldn't explain that premonition you had. There's not a lot of options though, right? Only a few planes with people there, and you're clearly not most of them. And... fuck, I probably shouldn't bring this up, I know it was rough on you, but... was Connie... were you guys... was she a human kid you were supposed to replace? But then, like, you ended up here and they didn't grab her or something, and so it was the two of you being sisters and your parents just didn't tell you that they didn't really have two kids?"

Wow, he'd just made up this whole story in his head. And... actually, yeah, that would have kinda made sense. Huh. I could just go with that, for the sake of having a cover story that didn't get into the whole time travel thing. It would have been nice if that had been the truth, honestly. If mom hadn't hated me, and had just raised me as her own, and human Callie had been my sister and... shit, I was depressing myself. Also... fuck, she was coming to Good Charl. Okay, so I should probably tell Sige something different.

"Close, best I can reconstruct what happened there was some fuck-up where two families were fighting over who got to send their kid here, and Connie and I both got made to match the same human. But sending two of us messed things up and they lost us, so we didn't know what we were. The thing with my... with the parent that raised me is complicated, she didn't tell us but she also wasn't nice about it. I'm pretty sure she thought she could get the Sahrger to swap us back if she just played along, or something. Anyway... not sure you saw her, but the wild mage in the mask that we fought in Zistarne? That's the human version, and she was trying to kill me for taking her place. We're cool now. Mostly."

He was staring, with a forkful of kinat halfway to his mouth. "You made friends with the masked witch that tried to kill you? Fuck. That's so cool. What else have you been up to?"

"Eh. Trained with Katrin and Errod, got a bounty on my head and had to fight the bounty hunters by luring them into a monster den, fought the Behemoth but got captured and tortured. Oh, and then all in one day I met a demigod and made a deal with him, fought a supposedly dead guy with time magic that wants to destroy the world at the Grand Alignment, and got shipped off to an extraplanar fortress by the Empire.

"I was stuck there for weeks, but then I broke out and attacked Storm's Keep to save Katrin and Errod who had been captured by the Knights of the Storm. Then I escaped from there into Brinkmar where I fought some guys from Halenvar and a whole lot of mind-controlled people which... that's going to be news soon if it's not already, because they got Lord Protector Hammersmith so the whole Empire is probably compromised.

"Uh... yeah, then I met another demigod and got some training from him, but he tried to kill me. We escaped Brinkmar pursued by the mind control guys and the Behemoth but I got the Behemoth taken over by... I don't know what he is, maybe another demigod or a monster or... whatever, he's not trustworthy but he's not a murderous asshole the way the Behemoth is so it's an upgrade.

"Anyway, the mind control guys and the Hierophants of Oblivion were still right on our heels but I managed to get Poicelria's ancient airship started and flew away on it. Katrin got fucked up by mana exposure when she was getting the airship going so we had to drop her off with her boyfriend - he's a prince of Erathik - but Errod is with me and he's actually super badass now thanks to an ancestral blade and the ghosts of a bunch of master sword fighters training him."

Sige nodded. "So, nothing interesting."

"Pretty much. Anyway, all that shit just kind of happened one thing after another, and probably I should just go relax somewhere on a beach but... I don't know, it seemed like having a smaller, more manageable adventure might be what I need."

"Yeah, I get that. Um. Also, how much of that shit are you serious about?"

"All of it."

He narrowed his eyes, and I just smiled at him and took another bite. "This is pretty good, but it's not my favorite. You know what it could use? There's this red sauce they have in Erathik, it's kinda sweet but also... meaty? Like, I don't think there's meat in it, but... man, what was that stuff called? Dak or something. I should have bought a bottle of it."

Sige seemed to accept that I wasn't going to make further efforts to convince him I wasn't full of shit, and begrudgingly went back to the topic at hand. "Well, I'm more than happy to get you and Errod a meeting with Mama Carnage. Come back first thing tomorrow, second bell maybe."

Second bell would be the Earth equivalent of eight in the morning based on context - people rarely specified if they meant morning, afternoon, evening, or that stretch between midnight and six in the morning that didn't have a great English word I was aware of but was called something I'd best translate to 'dawnside', as in 'the dawn side of midnight'. I headed back to the ship and found Errod already there and got him caught up, then settled in to do some of the many items on my to do list.

First things first, I disassembled a divination-perfect copy of the mana battery. The problem was pretty obvious. Part of the casing was bulged outwards, like a failing phone battery, and when I peeled that away there was a huge chunk of crystalized mana between two layers of metal. This was clearly completely distinct from the mana crystal that was supposed to be there, since that one was a perfect smooth rod in the center with impossibly tiny runes inscribed all through it. The color was also different; the central rod was a deep red, whereas the crystalline tumor was orange in the center and a sort of lime green at the edges.

Its growth had been mostly stopped by the casing, but with the way it had bent that I wasn't confident that it had stopped expanding. This thing was probably ridiculously valuable, but also dangerous. I'd need to have someone - probably the artificer I'd already hired - carefully remove it and stabilize it. It could even be a secondary power source maybe, something Katrin could carry with her so we didn't lug the whole battery around.

I wasn't sure of how much "interest" these crystals gave off, but it was based on what grade they were and for unaligned mana you could estimate that by its color. That orange shade was very potent, I remembered seeing a small turquoise one for sale that was supposed to keep the equivalent of a refrigerator running. Although... well, no two magic refrigerators were the same so that was a shitty metric. Probably there was some academic measurement, the equivalent of how we measured electricity on Earth, but I didn't know it. Whatever. This thing was probably plenty to help keep Katrin topped up between fights.

Not that we'd be fighting anything.

We were done with Brinkmar, and someone would deal with Tindelus. That wasn't our job, we were just a bunch of teenagers. There would be no need to fight anything, other than maybe some monsters if she wanted to join Errod and I on some mercenary work. Even then, we'd probably get bored of it after a few jobs and just fly around, exploring the world and partying. I could almost feel it now, a life of relaxation and adventure. Almost. But not quite.

Because... yeah, this was going to turn into a bunch of bullshit and I was going to have to fight demigods or something. In fact... it was time to make a list again. I started writing things down and pinning them to the wall in my memory palace. Tindelus. The world ending because of some leftover days from the last time it ended. Whoever had erased my memories, and why. There was that thing where I smell bleach sometimes. The possibility of lingering issues with being, somehow, able to access shit in Brinkmar. What to do with Grunkle. Ulren still being out there. Betokat, I guess. How to fully disconnect myself from human Callie, although using one of my own tethers and just turning everything off seemed like a decent fix.

Speaking of, there were my fate threads. I needed to find a way to read them, probably, and I had a list of where a few pointed. Actually... as Katrin had pointed out, one led directly to the Observatory of Jenkutierra, which was a location people went to when they wanted to attempt to talk directly to a god. With all this shit going on... why not, right? Maybe if I could talk to a literal god things would make more sense, or they'd just fix everything. And if that horrifying mass of mouths and eyes I saw really had been a god... well, it had been friendly enough. It - I think - helped me use the Loom and had called me 'doll', or at least it had communicated some idea that my mind had interpreted as 'doll'... and also put in a Southern accent for some reason.

Yeah. Go talk to god really had to be the top of the list once I got moving again. We'd get the ship outfitted and fix the mana battery, maybe do some jobs in the meantime since that would take a while, and then I had an appointment with an alien ball of nightmares that sounded like a teenager from Georgia.

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