"Let's see... some of my items have been answered in passing... ah. Just to clarify," the stern-faced woman asked, "what was your intention when you requested assistance from the Good Charl city watch?"

I had to wait to finish yawning before I answered. "Only to report that Kraiklin and the archer guy - I never got his name - had tried to kill me. I didn't want to take matters into my own hands and get in trouble."

The wiry Truth Officer nodded. "Truth."

I wasn't sure who all they'd talked to, since they kept us apart in order to prevent us from comparing stories. They'd been cranky but professional, and polite enough about asking us to cooperate. Not for the first time I found myself thinking about the fact that most people didn't have magic; they knew some spell for starting a fire, or one for pointing their way back home, or something simple like that. They didn't have Dumines, and even when they did it was likely to be Transmutation or Growth or something so they could contribute to society in a way much more important than fighting. So when guards had to deal with people like us, mercenaries or eccentrics or military types that had actual combat experience with magic to multiply our effectiveness... yeah, they had to ask nicely.

I was, in a low level way, a superhero. Well maybe not a hero, but super-powered. With my ghost trick, I could walk through any given town on the continent and murder everyone I could catch... well, until some random hunter sniped me. Hmm. Anyway, the point was that even in larger cities where plenty of people had Dumines, the vast majority of the ones we interacted with could - at best - do some parlor tricks, and that included city guards. In contrast to that, I suspected the woman asking the questions had some tricks up her sleeve, though she hadn't hinted at what.

"And the bounties that Kraiklin and his team were pursuing when you encountered him before... to the best of your knowledge, what were they in regards to?"

I hadn't really wanted to mention the bounty thing, but it had come up and I figured they would probably already know. "One was from Halenvar, specifically the Behemoth. He tried to kill me a few times. The other was from the Endless Empire, they wanted my help with something. I did that, so that one should for sure be canceled. I mean they both should be, but somehow I doubt the Behemoth ever bothered to drop it. I'm not aware of any other bounties, and the details of why I had bounties on me aren't relevant to any of this."

"Truth."

She nodded, and referred to a little book. I'd be reading it later with divination, just in case, but from what I could see it was either in code or illegible shorthand. "And what specific abilities do you have?"

"I won't be answering that question."

The Truth Officer's eyes widened a little. "Truth."

The stern woman sighed. "Henril, you don't need to say that - it's not a statement of fact."

"Respectfully... it very much is, in this case. I have rarely felt such certainty. She will not discuss that topic, and even if she were a convicted criminal under enhanced questioning I wouldn't be able to force her. In fact, I should be clear that she is voluntarily allowing me to detect truth, and could at any time shut me out. I feel... walls... around every answer. So I suppose I can partially answer the question for her, since I am certain she has Thought at a minimum."

It looked like the woman was going to say something, but instead she just sighed again and stood up, stretching. She put her notebook away, and then gave me a curt nod. "Thank you for your cooperation. I think we have everything we need. Incidentally, the bounty from the Endless Empire was canceled more than a month ago, and the one from Halenvar was marked as invalid along with quite a few others once they conceded the war officially. I just wanted to see if you'd mention one I hadn't heard of. We'll send out information about these assholes to the rest of the Free States, but if they're smart there's a lot of places they can go. If you ever go after them yourself, check with us to see if there's a bounty - I'll be pushing for one, considering the fact that we have one watchman dead and another... confused."

The damage from that sword wasn't healing properly. The actual cut on Sige's finger had closed up just fine, but he couldn't move that hand at all and the guard that had gotten a haircut from it was acting like he had a bad concussion. Errod had some headaches, since it had come close to his head a few times too. The healer hadn't seen anything like it before, and while she had seemed confident Errod and the guard would recover soon, she didn't hazard a guess about how long it would take for Sige. Considering a cut on one finger had taken his whole hand out of action, it wasn't surprising that cut to the neck had killed the archer.

Meanwhile, I had my own minor medical issue. The spot on my chest where I'd been exposed to the magical slag and then healed had sprouted a single leaf while I slept in a chair, waiting for it to be my turn to be questioned. I'd plucked it off, and it felt like getting a nose hair pulled. The healer had examined it, and looked just... exhausted.

"Well, you're part plant now I guess. I don't know what to tell you. It's not a big section, but I couldn't say if it's spreading or not. Keep an eye on it, I suppose. Probably the safest thing would be to get a whole team of healers and remove as much of the surrounding area as possible, but in this case that might also require you to cut out your Dumine, which I assume you'd like to avoid. Look, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the damage caused by that sword, so... right now I'm going to just say you don't seem to be in immediate danger. Beyond that, you'll have to hire someone with your own pins."

The threads, those chaotic squiggles, looked way less chaotic and squiggly. They were still there, but there was for sure more structure and fewer colors which I took as a good sign; it seemed they'd settled on an effect. That had been the case with the temporal mana overload as well, at first it could have done practically anything to me but once it stabilized it was pretty firmly tying to age me to death. In that case it was always going to be a time-centered effect, and "go forward" was the simplest which made it likely. For slag, the possibilities were way more diverse... but I did recall that the pendant I bought had been attracted to wood. Hmm.

Errod and I walked Sige back to his place, but when we got there his roommates were cleaning his room out. "Sorry Sige," one said, "but you know the rules we agreed on. Those guys came again, looking for you to pay... your loan. We can't have thugs hanging around waiting for you."

I was ready to argue on his behalf, but he held me back. He grabbed a box loaded up with his things, nearly fumbling it when he forgot his hand didn't work, and then mumbled something about coming back for the rest. I'd never seen Sige look small. Errod took the box from him as soon as we were outside, and we led him back to the airship.

"I can't go on jobs until this fucking heals," he said, "and I spend so much time away from the city that I don't have citizen's housing. I'll have to fucking pay for a room somewhere, and then I'll just get kicked out again - or worse. Shit."

"You dumb motherfucker," I said, "you're going to live on the airship for now. Duh. You can pay your way by keeping Grunkle from starting another cult. And, y'know, I'm still open to that deal we talked about."

He shook his head in disbelief. "You're really eager to add to that list of people who want you dead, aren't you?"

"Well, it's not like I wanted anyone to be trying to kill me, but after a certain point it does feel like a challenge. And you've got to figure that eventually they'll start killing each other by accident."

He said he'd sleep on it, and in fact we all wanted some sleep - most of us had dozed in the city watch building, but that wasn't any replacement for an actual bed. Not that we had beds, those were still being made, like the rest of the furniture. Instead, we had hammocks which were honestly fucking great. We all slept down in the cargo area, while Grunkle corralled the workers that showed up. There weren't a lot of them around with the cult disbanded for the moment; the bulk of the actual work was being done elsewhere at this stage.

In the afternoon, when I woke up and confirmed that the greenish spot on my chest hadn't gotten worse despite forgetting to put the mana exclusion device back on after showering, I headed out to see what the deal was with the doppelganger job. Other than the fact that I was in the small crowd of mercenaries rather than up at the podium, it sure felt familiar. There was only the one sister there, a young and slightly nervous woman with complicated braids woven through with flowers. She had a bit of a Halenvar look to her, but her accent wasn't the same - probably she was either from the edge of Halenvar, or part of the Free States that bordered it.

"While this could be considered two unrelated jobs," she said, "if the first half is successful we plan on embarking on the second half immediately. For the first portion, we'll be going to a long-abandoned area that may still have some lingering magical effects due to permanent planar portals. It's pre-Empire, so it's not likely we'll find anything there, but there's an item we're hoping to locate that will make the second leg of the journey easier."

That part wasn't a perfect match to the Duminere job, of course, but the Necropolis was a pre-Empire permanent planar gateway and we had to go there to get a key for the second part of our job. So... still pretty close.

"Once we have that, we'll be traveling via Nusos to a secret location. When we arrive, we will be gathering and templating samples of the local flora for reproduction. I can say with utmost confidence that these plants are extremely difficult to obtain, and the unique properties guarantee that my family will be able to make a significant amount of money from the endeavor. We're an established group of cultivators, and in fact my great-great-grandmother invented kinat as we know it."

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The questions started flowing in right away. How long before we would get paid, if it could take years to perfect customized commercial plants? She assured everyone that there would be plenty of opportunity for profit right away, and the plant money would come later as a source of long term income. Would it be dangerous? Maybe, but she suspected not. How long would the job take? On this one she hesitated. "It's... possible, if the first part of the job isn't successful, that we would need to stay at our destination until the Grand Alignment. Otherwise, about a month. It's hard to pin things down perfectly, but the pay will make the time worth it."

As with the group when we'd made our very similar pitch, the sparse details meant a few people left right away.

"My brother and I will start by interviewing anyone that can use a template press. Planar experts will be next, at third bell."

I wandered over, and when it was my turn she cheerfully handed me a small barrel-shaped contraption. It looked like it could be a pressure cooker or something, almost. She handed me a fruit that looked like an apple, gave me an encouraging pat on the arm, and stood back. Hmm. As I looked the device over, her brother sighed and pulled out a book to read but didn't try to hurry me up.

"I haven't used this type before, but I really do think I can do it. Hang on."

Okay, first things first. It must start by scanning the apple or something, right? I held sides where it looked like I was supposed to, and started to feel something. There were multiple parts, and they worked independently. One of them felt... hungry? No. Empty. Okay, that wasn't what I needed. I felt the other parts, and one seemed like it made something while the other... saw something? Felt something? Okay, great, that was the scanner then. I tried to activate it, and it did something but I couldn't tell what. Shit.

The brother sighed, and the sister slapped his arm. "Don't worry about him," she said, "take a moment. I know they're all different."

The person who had gone before me, a woman with bright pink hair and a badass snake tattoo on her arm, had done it right away. Why did it feel like all the parts of this device were so disconnected? Why did they work independently rather than being one long process? I was looking for something that felt like my templating ability and not finding it, but maybe... could I just do that myself? Was it made so that I could skip a step? I got a divination snapshot of the apple thing and perfectly stored it, then focused on my body's connection to the device and tried to feed it in.

Something whirred.

A metal plate pushed its way out of a slot at the bottom of the device, and the brother leaned forward to take it before putting his book down. He turned it over in his hand and frowned, and then closed his eyes. "Interesting. Extremely high fidelity. I think this one is worth the mana to actually produce so we can get a closer look."

He took a large canister out from a crate, a metal and glass tube that almost looked like a big lantern with no light inside. The metal plate slotted in, and once again he closed his eyes and concentrated. He probably had Fabrication, and was using the device as a way to speed it up or make the process cheaper. A translucent copy of the fruit appeared, and then became increasingly solid. After a minute or so, he opened his eyes and pulled the fruit out.

He took out a knife and cut it open, revealing a jelly-like interior with small seeds. He rooted around inside and removed a small ceramic tile with a symbol painted on it. "Captured the hidden item, interesting. Symbol is correct. Smells good enough..."

He took a bite of the fruit, nodded, and handed one of the seeds to his sister. She put it in the palm of her hand, and it suddenly squirmed around and cracked open, putting out a small sprout. "Seeds are viable. This is good work. What was your name?"

"Connie Runelighter," I said, trying to keep in the habit so that human Connie wouldn't get pissy.

"Connie, my name is Matlyn and this is my brother Orick. This template is wonderful, but there's one more thing I'd like you to try. It's tricky, but can you see if you can do... the idea of the fruit, rather than focusing on being so precise about this specific one?"

"Oh, yeah. No problem." That sounded simple enough, I'd already played with similar things in my memory palace. They handed me a new fruit, this time a thing that looked like a purple bell pepper, and I tried to package up the concept of it, the idea that existed in the Common Local Understanding. Once again, the device spit out a metal plate as if it was a Polaroid delivering a photo.

Orick made two of them this time, and they compared both to the original. There were differences, minor variations in the color and shape, and when Matlyn pulled seeds out and made them sprout she spent a while concentrating very hard on them before grinning ear to ear.

"It's perfect! They have different heritable traits, I'm sure of it! Can you tell how much variation is in the template?"

Orick shook his head. "No, but it's significant. It's packed very densely into the plate, I'd say that the limit is in our tools, not her ability."

That touch of Fate magic that had gone into the ability probably helped, along with the perfect instructions I'd received from Sentortzi. Although... a sudden thought struck me. I'd wondered a few times if fate had had something to do with that series of events, and when it was particularly useful for messing with oydirme I'd worried that I was being manipulated. But now there was a job that had some interesting similarities to the Duminere one, enough to grab my interest anyway, and it turned out I was uniquely qualified.

I was tempted, again, to just tell fate to go fuck itself. Yeah. You know what, that was exactly what I was going to do. I already had too much on my plate, I wasn't going to play into these fucking games. An image flashed through my head, me in some impossible space taking steps and seeing the ground crumble under my feet. It was... something from that nonsensical vision I'd had when I used the loom, I thought.

So, was I going to let myself be intimidated by the memory of a bad dream I had? And even if there was some truth to the vision, that doing the wrong things could fuck something up, who was to say that what I fucked up would have been good anyway? Hadn't fate - probably - been pushing for me to erase everything by going back in time? That plan was already screwed thanks to me ditching the loom.

Maybe fate could put some work in and find a better ending.

Matlyn thanked me and told me she'd be looking for me after she talked to the applicants for the planar portion, and I just nodded and smiled. I could always tell her no later, for now I wanted to make sure I was actually thinking things through. I needed some way to read these fate threads. I should have prioritized that ages ago, but I kept spending my potential on other things. Not for the first time, I wondered if fate itself was distracting me from looking too close.

In my memory palace, I started flipping through The Paradox of Fate. Harmid's book was big, and while I'd skimmed most of it and actually read quite a lot of it there were parts I'd missed. Reading fate... hmm. Some fortune teller types, but they weren't reliable. An oracle that had been killed in a fight with the Clockmaker. Poicelria, prior owner of my airship, who was likewise long dead. The guru that lived in her old palace - that would be Grunkle, who certainly couldn't help. And... hmm. The Queen of Candles.

She was a demigod, who lived in a plane that was possibly only a single room. There was some debate about that. Nobody could get to that plane without her permission, but she'd feel you trying and if she was interested a literal door would appear. Nobody had been in more than once, and she always insisted people told her a true story about their life before deciding if she would grant a boon.

Several of those boons had, supposedly, involved reading or helping to subvert fate. Sounded promising. There was some more background, but it was stuff I'd heard from Harmid in person; the plane she was from was hard to pronounce - Ergizegigeiloek - and it had been larger and filled with followers before being supposedly destroyed by the Clockmaker. That had been done with the same device that had later obliterated all of reality. Nobody was sure how she'd survived, and in fact she hadn't shown her face until the Clockmaker was gone.

Well, she was more immediately accessible than the gods since I could theoretically do it from anywhere. There were tricks to getting to each plane, however, so I'd need to talk to someone that knew about... Ergizegigeiloek. Gods, what an awful name. Sige would probably lend me a hand if he knew, but it didn't seem like his style. Cyne would have known for sure, and in fact I was pretty sure he'd made a reference to her. Ah well.

I was trying to decide if I should stick around for the interviews of the people that would be getting everyone to Nusos. I could do that too, now, but I felt like I was already in if I wanted the job just based on the templating. And anyway, I was still thinking I should bail to spite fate. I saw Errod coming over, and waved until he spotted me and made his way across the hall.

"Well, what's the word? Are the sisters twins? Is one of them a Sahrger? Are there versions of myself and Katrin?"

Oooh, all good questions. "The one sister isn't here, but there's a brother. Maybe these two are the Katrin and Errod, and... no, that wouldn't work. I guess if they are twins one of them could do double duty as both me and Katrin or something. Or, maybe now that both versions of me have merged the one person can count as both."

Errod sighed. "As long as none of us need to be Aestrid."

I squeezed his shoulder, and then dragged him over to where Matlyn was standing. Her brother was just leaving, as they'd finished testing people. "Connie! I'm happy to tell you that you're our first choice for the job, if you're willing."

"Nice, that's good to hear. I'll let you know for sure before everyone leaves, I just have to talk it over with my brother here."

Errod introduced himself, and Matlyn shook his hand and smiled. "Oh, my sister is adopted as well - sorry, not to make assumptions, but you two don't look much alike."

"No, you nailed it. Errod and his sister adopted me just recently, actually."

"That's so nice! My dad adopted my sister almost three years ago. I'll be honest, we didn't get along at first but she's grown up a lot since then. I'm actually going to miss her when she... ah, she's... she's moving out soon. Sorry, I'm getting off on a tangent about family stuff. Errod, are you here to join the expedition?"

He nodded. "Potentially, yes. I provide physical security, I didn't hear if you were hiring for that."

"We were going to do that tomorrow, but we might be open to hiring you directly if you two are a package deal. We don't think we'll need any security for the second part of the trip, however, which is the longer portion, so if you wanted to come for that part we would structure the pay differently - essentially you'd be profiting off of whatever materials you wanted to gather yourself while we were there, which should be quite valuable."

"But the specific location for these exotic plants is a secret?"

Matlyn nodded. "We could tell you more once you've taken an oath of secrecy."

"That's fair. Connie, are you doing the planar passage for them as well?"

Matlyn leaned forward, looking very excited. "You can do planar travel as well?"

"Yeah, I mean... Nusos is easy, so I can do that one. I'm new to it overall though, so I can't make any promises about other planes. But I'm still going to have to talk to Errod about it, we might have a scheduling conflict."

"Of course, of course! But do stick around. Looks like it's almost second bell, I'm just going to kill some time until everyone is back over for the planar talks."

We walked a little ways away, and Errod arched his eyebrow at me. "What's your concern?"

"Partly it really is a scheduling thing, this sounds like it might be a long job. We have other shit we should be doing, and they said if the first part doesn't go well this thing could extend all the way to the Grand Alignment. But also, I just... I think this might be a fate thing, and I don't trust fate. I'm tempted to just... avoid it, if I can."

Errod sighed. "Sadly, it's my understanding that Fate can be very hard to avoid. It has ways of pulling you in, regardless of what choices you make."

"Well, so long as I can be sure this is what fate wants me to do, I can't imagine what it could pull to force me to go along with it. I don't need money, you guys are safe for now... I don't know that it has any tricks up its sleeve."

I glanced back at Matlyn, who was settling down to eat a late lunch before second bell. She had a sort of wrap thing, and as she got comfortable she pulled out her cell phone and put ear buds in so she could listen to some music with her meal. Ah. Fuck you, fate.

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