Mariana
We’re at the West Forest Ranger station, which is where Mariana directed us after she woke up. She kept asking about her companions Rafe and Darren (we had no idea who she was talking about; Sorin had been the only other person in the apartment), and gave us a confused story of a routine Ranger mission going very wrong. Instead of dealing with a minor mon problem, they had found mutated Plaguelocks, a pie-fueled construction conspiracy, and a green gem which mysteriously recharged their mediums.
“After a while, it gave me a spell, or maybe it was a mon, I don’t remember. It was just suddenly there in my medium. Cost 7 energy, which is ridiculous. But I was at full energy now, so I really wanted to try it to see what it did. Rafe kept saying we should wait for the research team but I was so curious, I had to know what would happen.”
After which point she didn’t remember anything else, until she woke up on the cloud. Not very surprising, given the memory loss we’d seen in Vidriot and Penitencia.
“Twenty years?” she’d asked incredulously when we told her what year it was. “Really?” She heaved a sigh of extreme weariness. “Do you have any idea how much paperwork going missing for twenty years is going to be?”
She asked us to take her to her old Ranger station, to see if they had a better idea what happened to her, or her companions. Rangers are meticulous record keepers, so if anyone had information, they would. On the way, she asked a seemingly infinite stream of questions about recent developments in the study of mons and world events of the past 20 years, undeterred by our unsatisfying lack of knowledge due to having lived in this time for three months.
Two hours later, we landed in a clearing in the wilderness, finding a large wooden building surrounded by smaller brick ones clustered around an open space. Mariana hopped off the cloud and sprinted towards the big house. “Sally! Hey, Sally! Guess what? I’m not dead!”
The uniformed woman who had been poking something with a stick looked up, then froze in shock. “Mariana!? What? Where have you been? It’s been twenty years!”
“I don’t know. They said they found me in Lluvia City with a glowing green gem attached to my heart.”
“A glowing green…? Huh, that sounds like the artifact you described in your report.”
“My report! You got it? Darren and Rafe made it back okay then?”
“Your report is all we got!” Sally frowned. “You three were gone. We sent Jessica and Thomas over from research, and Jessica disappeared, too! Thomas came back with no useful information and no idea why we found your report sewn into the lining of his backpack, and when we went back to talk to the villagers they had no idea what we were talking about! They kept offering us pie.”
“Oh.” Mariana deflated. “I was kind of hoping you’d know what happened to me, because I sure don’t.”
“Nope, but you’re back now!” said Sally cheerfully. “Let’s go make some tea. We can figure the rest out later.” She noticed the rest of us, who had approached more slowly than Mariana. “Welcome to the West Forest station. I’m Sally Lynne, the director. Thank you for bringing Mariana back.”
“What’s with him?” Mariana had noticed Rupert, who was slung over Otto’s shoulder. She had been too busy asking questions on the flight over to take much notice of someone who wasn’t giving any answers. “Did you Nullify him, too?”
“No, he’s just a wimp,” said Otto, setting Rupert on the ground.
“Oh, okay,” said Mariana, heading inside after Sally.
“Nullified?” Sally asked, stopping with the door partway open to look back at us. “Is that—why do you have a Nullified copy of Mariana?”
“There were a bunch of Marianas, but we killed one of them by accident,” Citrine explained. “So Jacqueline turned her into a Nullified. I think Mariana should keep her, since they’re sort of the same person except one’s undead.”
“Hmph!” Sally didn’t look like she particularly approved of Nullified. Or vampires like Jacqueline who could raise them. “She had multiple bodies? I don’t like the sound of that.”
“You’ll probably want to investigate the apartment we found Mariana in as well,” Otto added. “The walls were covered in Ranger uniforms and badges. I don’t think Mariana did it since we know she only arrived in the city yesterday, but whoever was living there before might have a grudge against the Rangers.”
“What? Why would someone…? Yes, that’s very concerning. Give me the location and I’ll send someone over. I don’t suppose you saw any badges for Rafael Still or Darren Miller? They were with Mariana when she went missing.”
Oh. So Rafe had been a nickname for Rafael. Who Jacqueline had Nullified and was now residing in her box. And Darren Miller could be a match for the name on the partially intact badge of the third Ranger we’d found in the power plant.
“Is Jessica the researcher Jessica Abbot?” I asked tentatively. I didn’t want to explain that we’d Nullified her, too, I didn’t think Sally would approve.
“We found their bodies about a month ago, Jessica, Rafael and a third one who could have been Darren,” Otto explained, tactfully neglecting to mention the part where we Nullified two of them. “They were in a freezer in a power plant run by mons.”
Mariana looked like she was going to cry. Sally took the news much more in stride. Probably because she’d had 20 conscious years to get used to the idea of them being gone, while to Mariana it would feel like she’d seen them yesterday. “Huh!” she said, looking thoughtful. “So you’re the ones who did that foolhardy expedition. We got a report from Vidriot about a month ago, but they didn’t share many details. Let’s have tea and you can tell me more about it.”
Over several cups of tea and some very nice biscuits, we told Sally and Mariana most of what we’d found in the power plant, including their experiments on mon-human hybridization (we left out the fact that Citrine was the result of a successful experiment). Sally was worried about the display of coordination on the part of the mons, which implied the capacity to launch a very effective attack against nearby humans. Mariana was more sanguine, instead focusing on the exciting idea of a more powerful variant of Monitor, and demanded we show her Parasonico. I take it theorizing about the origins of mons is her hobby, given her long-winded rambling about the Plaguelings (her term for the mutated Plaguelocks) she’d encountered the day they found the Chaos Emerald.
“Sure,” said Clarence, transforming. “And I wanted to try Analyze on that spell you used, find out what it was. I can do it on whatever transportable form you can get out, like the marbles you get from a Gauntlet Launcher.”
Mariana had a lot of stuff in her soul storage. All the mons we’d seen in the water tanks on the roof, several spells, seven copies of Locator, and six of one we hadn’t seen before called Locator Locator. There was one more spell, which cost seven energy and summoned a Botfly.
“That’s what messed me up so badly?” Mariana asked, regarding the Botfly marble with suspicion. “But from what you said it really didn’t sound quite all that dangerous.”
“It froze most of us for about ten seconds,” I pointed out. “I can’t remember anything that happened during that time. It definitely does something to mess with your mind.”
“I’m more interested in these Locator Locators,” said Clarence. “I’m surprised enough that there’s another copy of Locator, but why would there be spells to find them?”
We tried it and Locator Locator did in fact point to the seven copies of Locator on the table, and the one in my medium. As well as one more arrow pointing northeast.
“Seems like generally the same direction as the emerald in Roto-Mar,” I said after trying it out and comparing with the arrows plain Locator provided. “Could be the same person has both of them.”
“I’m a little worried about the Locator Locators, though,” said Otto. “Not as much as I’d be if there were exactly eight Locators, though. Eight emeralds, eight locators, we’d expect there to be eight Locator Locators. But nine and six is believable. We might be holding the only copies of it.”
“Or April has one, and that’s how she’s tracking us!” I burst out. “It all makes sense! We know she doesn’t have a Locator, or she’d have gotten more emeralds by now. But she’s tracking us somehow, and she didn’t show up until we’d already gotten a copy of Locator from the power plant.”
“Then why hasn’t she taken our Locator?” Jacqueline asked skeptically. “It would be very useful for her if she’s trying to get more emeralds.”
“Maybe she wants us to collect them for her,” Otto pointed out. “Get us to do all the hard work, then swoop in and take them from us.”
“That sounds like exactly the sort of thing she’d do,” said Clarence glumly. “Here we are trying to stop her but all we’re doing is playing into her hands.”
“Who is April and why is she looking for emeralds?” Sally asked. I had forgotten we had an audience, but Sally and Mariana were looking at us with expressions of mixed concern and curiosity.
“None of your business!” said Clarence and I.
“April is a very not-nice lady,” said Citrine. “She won’t tell us why she wants to find the spooky rocks, but we think it might be so she cause the end of the world and turn into the giant April we saw in the future.”
Sally and Mariana stared at her. “What?”
“Hey, do you happen to have any signal-tracking capabilities?” Jacqueline interrupted quickly.
“Yes, why?” Sally asked, momentarily distracted from Citrine’s pronouncement.
“Parasonico sometimes get updates and we’ve wondered where they come from, only we don’t have the equipment to track the signal.”
“Nice save,” I told Jacqueline after Mariana and Sally left to fetch the equipment.
She shrugged. “We had been meaning to look into it and this seemed like a good time to bring it up.” Jacqueline is not very good at lying directly, but she’s a lot better than I am at being deceiving people by lying with the truth or acting extremely confused.
“I’m still suspicious as to why April wouldn’t have a Locator spell,” Otto said. “We found it in the power plant, and we know April had dealings with the mons there from the logs.”
“And what’s her relationship with Sorin?” I wondered. “Her castle is marked on his map but it didn’t have any dates. So are they allies or enemies?”
“This would be much easier to figure out if we knew what Sorin was up to,” said Clarence ruefully. “I wish there was some way to find out.”
The discussion was broken off by Mariana, Sally, and a short man returning with armfuls of electronics. “We should have this set up in about ten minutes,” said the man. “Have you got the transmission ready?”
“Uh, no, the updates aren’t very predictable, they just seem to happen sometimes when I take a look at something that’s not in my current database. I would kind of have thought I’d get one when I looked at the Botfly marble but apparently it’s not weird enough.”
“If you’re looking for weird, try the dangerous artifact containment shed,” Sally suggested. “We don’t know what most of the stuff in there does since everyone’s too afraid to try it.”
So they set off for the shed while the rest of us helped Mariana and George assemble wires, screens and mysterious pieces of metal into a signal tracking setup. Half an hour later, they were back.
“That was great, we’ve got id on like half the stuff in there and we even know what some of them do!” Sally announced happily. “Finally, we might be able to use some of this stuff. Do you think you could do the rest later?”
“Sure, but let’s get this update over with first.” He lay down on the grass and promptly went limp.
“We’re getting a pretty clear signal here,” reported George, watching one of the screens attached to one end of the mess of wires pointed at Clarence. “It’s coming from the west, probably about… wow, that’s really far, are you sure you calibrated this right?”
“Yes,” said Mariana, who was looking concerned at what she was getting on her screen, “and it’s saying the same thing here. You’ve got it coming from the dark area, right?”
“Yeah, far in the dark area.” George shuddered.
“The dark area?” I asked.
“Anything west of a certain point, near that power plant you went to, isn’t safe. Full of really powerful and dangerous mons.”
“But isn’t that where Babosa is? And Pato?” I’d gone to a conference in Pato once, and spent a few months studying sea slugs in Babosa right after I graduated science school.
Mariana shrugged. “I’ve never heard of those places, they must have been abandoned ages ago. Nobody’s lived in the dark zone for at least 200 years, it’s much too dangerous. The couriers won’t even go there.”
I don’t remember Terrence mentioning anything about a whole area of the continent being unsafe, but maybe it didn’t seem relevant compared to making sure we weren’t going to take the Rain Bird lightly. I assume Babosa and Pato and Muffin and all the other cities met the same fate as the old Lluvia City, only they were abandoned long enough ago that nobody remembers.
“What’s special about this region then?” Jacqueline asked. “Why don’t the really dangerous mons come here?”
“Well, the Rain Bird does, and Hangmon in the north. We’re not really sure of the reasons, but some people think that the world is divided up between the two new gods, the Barbed Wheel and the Star of Oblivion. This side of the chasm has more of the Wheel’s influence, and the Star holds more sway on the other side. But it’s relatively balanced here, so their power cancels out a bit and prevents most of the really dangerous mons. To be clear, this is just a theory I’ve heard. I haven’t even been to the other side of the chasm, so I don’t know whether they have more of the Star’s influence or what that would even look like.”
“Actually, you have been to the east side of the chasm,” Otto pointed out. “We tracked you from near the coast all the way to Lluvia City.”
“I don’t remember that, so it doesn’t let me confirm any theory about what societies which follow the Star of Oblivion might be like. Anyway, that’s the best explanation I’ve heard.”
“Why do they cancel out?” Citrine wondered. “It seems like maybe they’d fight when they meet.”
“Well if they did, we’d all be dead,” George pointed out. “Hey, is he okay? He’s just lying there.”
After many assurances to the three Rangers that Clarence was not dying and was in fact perfectly fine, Clarence woke up. “Two more hit points and another move slot? If only I could attach a firmware debugger we could get them on everything else… Oh right, I was analyzing the Plague Knight. Could I see that again?” Mariana handed him the marble she’d pocketed after it triggered his update. “Oh, cool it turns into a Plaguelock when it dies. It can explode, do Edgequake, oh wow, it even tells me what the moves do, it didn’t used to do that! And it’s got a poison aura, that sure sounds delightful.”
“Poison aura, explosions, and it turns into a Plaguelock? That really sounds like the thing we found in the church basement,” said Mariana excitedly. “Let’s summon it and see for sure!”
“Have you got an experimental mon-summoning room then?” Clarence asked as Sally hurried off to get helmets.
“Of course not, experimental summoning is foolish and dangerous,” said Mariana.
Everyone stared at her.
“I had a momentary lapse in judgment, okay? You said the emerald had mental effects besides memory loss, maybe it lured me into trying the Botfly.”
I hadn’t thought of that. I glared suspiciously at the kettle-bell strapped to Otto’s back. Was it trying to get me to do something? No, probably not. I noticed Jacqueline eyeing Clarence’s kettle-bell with utmost distrust and sighed. We were probably being too paranoid. Probably. Is it really paranoia when you know you’re in possession of several mind-altering artifacts that you only think you’ve contained properly?
Sally led us to a fire pit (for setting things on fire, and only occasionally cooking. Apparently the Rangers are fine with pyromania, provided it proceeds in an orderly fashion), directing us to take shelter behind an upended fireproof picnic table. “I’m just taking it out so you can have a look at it, okay? And then I’m putting it back immediately.” With a burst of white light, she summoned a large bronze suit of armor several feet taller than she was. Like Otto’s armor, it was overly spiky and ornately carved, although with geometric patterns instead of religious symbols. Green wisps of mist rose off its surface, quickly forming a cloud which enveloped a coughing Sally.
“Yeah, that’s the same one!” Mariana called. “Put it away, that cloud is poisonous.”
“I know,” said Sally, who had already schlorped the Plague Knight back into her gauntlet. She upended a healy doodad over her head. “That was very unpleasant! This is why we don’t summon mysterious mons, I don’t know why you let me talk you into this…”
“It’s nice to know what it was we were fighting that day,” said Mariana. “So thanks. I’m starting to remember what happened a bit better, at least until the part where I summoned the Botfly.”
“You’ve mentioned writing reports,” Jacqueline said suddenly. “Would you say you are, by personality, someone who takes notes on things? We know the emeralds can amplify people’s existing qualities, so it’s possible you took copious quantities of notes on what you were doing the past 20 years.”
“It’s more training and habit than anything about my personality. We have to write reports about everything, so taking notes is second nature to most of us. But I wasn’t driven to take notes before I joined the Rangers, no. Anyway, I don’t think that would help. I don’t have any notes with me and we don’t know where I was for most of the time.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that will help,” said Otto. “But I have another idea. Would you like to mind-merge with me as Ooziels? I have some skill at recovering memories.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Otto and I turned into Ooziels and split and then merged our two Oozielets,” Citrine explained. “It was pretty neat, I got to see what it was like to be Otto and he says he got useful information out of my memories!”
“This sounds very unsafe,” commented Sally. “Yet for some reason I’m not trying to stop you. What is it with you people that makes crazy ideas sound just sane enough to try?”
“You’ve actually tried this?” Mariana looked apprehensive but intrigued.
“Yeah, as Citrine said, we merged minds. We got access to each other’s memories and current thoughts, but remained separate people. I escaped from a dungeon a little over two months ago and I’ve recovered what seems like the majority of my memory about my life before being imprisoned. I’d like to try doing the same to you, see if we can get back some of yours.”
After a long pause, Mariana agreed. “I feel like I should have learned my lesson about trying dangerous-sounding things just because I’m curious, but you said you tried it before, right? And I really, really want to know what I’ve been doing.”
This merge took longer than Citrine and Otto’s had, but eventually the purple Ooziel spoke. “Well, at least you could make some sense of that. Not nearly as much as I’d hoped. I think we should split up before trying to explain it, unless you think you can get anything else out of my head?” Then the Ooziel split up and the two halves wiggled over to their respective Oozielets and turned back into Otto and Mariana.
“That wasn’t as much of a success as I’d hoped,” said Otto, stretching and twisting his head to the side.
“It’s way more than I had before. Not that it makes that much sense, but I’m not going to be picky, at least I found out something. I’ve got a better idea of how Sorin found me in the first place. I think he pulled me out of a dream the Botfly had put me in. A hallucination, or something.”
She had been in a green room, where everything was green and calm and floaty. The emerald was embedded in her gauntlet and there were cables connecting her to the Botfly, which was shining a green light on her. She couldn’t tell how much time was passing but at some point Sorin showed up, appearing out of nowhere. He pulled the gem out of her gauntlet and put it in his coat pocket, and the room faded away, placing them back in Callen Pond.
He cast some sort of spell on the Botfly, careful not to look at it, and it vanished but the floaty calm feeling didn’t. Then he teleported them somewhere dark, like it was underground. “Finally, here’s another one,” he said, tossing the green emerald from hand to hand. “One more heart for the pile.”
“And then he took out a knife and stabbed me,” Mariana concluded. “I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I assume that’s when he put the emerald in my heart. I’m kind of glad I don’t remember that, actually, it sounds very unpleasant.”
“We have some more concrete intelligence,” Otto added. “Sorin had another map, like the one we found in the apartment. Get it out and we can add what we remember.”
He and Mariana added four more colors and dates to the map. Lluvia City had a blue dot dated 1009, 150 years ago. The other three were on the other side of the chasm: a red dot on the Township of Fireflower in mid 1039, a white marker on the Bogmire in 988, and a yellow one next to a volcano in the southeast in late 1058.
That last one caught my eye. “A hundred years and eight months ago for the yellow emerald, and it got to Vidriot about 7 months ago. That can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
Clarence ran a finger over the map, checking the dates. “Yeah, you’re right. Every 100 years, he moves them. But why?”
Mariana gave a helpless shrug. “It’s not like he ever told me the plan, at least not that I remember. I remember some diagrams, though, not that they mean much to me. Maybe you can make sense of them.” She and Otto sketched on the back of the map: a heart shaped device and a ring. Next to the heart device, she sketched the spiky symbol of the old chaos gods (I flinched before I remembered that they have no power here with the warp sealed away entirely). The ring was accompanied by a small emerald and an arrow labeled “post threshold.”
“Do you think the heart might be a medium?” Jacqueline asked, turning to Clarence and me.
“Don’t look at us,” I protested. “We just helped someone possessed by Steve accidentally invent flesh-spirals, that doesn’t count as expertise. Go ask Lara.” She was right, though: a lot of the details here smacked of Indra. Especially after Sorin’s “one more heart” comment. And Indra’s affiliation with the power plant that Sorin had delivered an emerald to.
“The details could be a bit wrong,” Mariana apologized. “It’s kind of hard to memorize diagrams even if you’re trying to, and I wasn’t.”
“We’ve got a little more idea where the ring is,” Otto said. “There was something that looked a lot like it stuck in a tree. It was rotating, and the space in the middle looked sort of ripply. There were a lot of Tall Men around, so I would guess this was the Tall Woods. We know there’s an emerald there; the ring probably has something to do with it.”
“Oh, we also found out where all those Locator spells came from,” Mariana added. “Apparently they would drip out of my chest-hole. I remember Sorin hanging me by my wrists and ankles and waiting for them to fall out, then he’d collect them. Or at least they were blobs of the same shade of blue as the Locators, maybe they were something else.”
“That’s really all you got?” Clarence asked. “You were merged for quite a while.”
“A lot of it was boring; I was on guard duty. Guarding what or from what, I have no idea. And the rest, most of it doesn’t make enough sense to explain.” Mariana sighed. “I don’t even remember what I was doing in that apartment in Lluvia City, and that was earlier today. Stupid Tall Man kept me in a haze all the time, every day I’d start to wake up and then the Sorin would bring the Tall Man back and order it to do Proxy. It wouldn’t look like it was doing anything, but I’d get floaty and confused again.”
“Proxy?” Clarence asked. “I’ve never heard of that one.” He checked the Tall Man marbles we had on hand, but none of them had the move equipped.
“It’s banned,” Sally explained. “Chipped mediums won’t let you equip it. I have no idea what it does and I really don’t want to find out.”
“I do!” Clarence argued. “But not by having it used on me. Do you think one of the Tall Men in the Tall Woods might have it? Analyze tells me what equipped moves do, I’d just have to get close enough to see one of them.”
Which didn’t sound like a terrible plan at all.