"Good evening," Laya said with a slight bow. "It isn't often that I get guests anymore. How about I grab us some tea?"

I stared breathlessly at her. Did she--did she know? Did she think I was Marianna? And if she did, would I tell her the truth? Of course. I had to. Even if she would stab me, I promised myself that I couldn't lie to her again.

"I, uh," I stammered. "The truth is--"

"I know," she said. "I can see the color of your soul."

"Oh."

She stared patiently at me. Her large and expressive eyes were calm.

I took a deep breath. "Look, Laya," I said. "Sorry. We never really had a chance to talk since then, and I just wanna lay it out there. I was a terrible person. Still am, probably. Using brainwashing magic to coerce you to do those things, it was--" I sighed. "It was unforgivable. I can't even forgive myself for it. I trespassed on damn near every right you had, and even your killing me once couldn't make it even."

"I know," she said. "But I can no longer hold hard feelings for you. So much time had passed, and besides, I had my fill of revenge." She chuckled. "Don't worry; I won't stab you again."

I breathed a sigh of relief.

She tilted her head at me. "And what about you?" she asked. "Do you hate me, Imsi?"

"What? No." I chuckled and scratched my nose. "You mean the whole stabbing me through the chest thing?"

She nodded.

"Yeah, nah," I eased out. "I kinda deserved that. And I guess you did too."

She grinned and looked me up and down. "A normal person would ask how you ended up in Marianna's body, but I have the gist of what happened. I was there, after all. Just not for all of it."

"Right." My stomach whined, and I tried to look away and play it off.

She smirked. "Tea and sandwiches it is, then. Find me at the gazebo, and we'll catch up."

"Thanks."

She headed off into her cabin, and I stepped over to the gazebo beneath the tree. I took a seat--there were three padded benches here painted white--but only one bench seemed faded from use. Poor thing probably never had a guest, and it had been, what? Two hundred fucking years? I shook my head in sadness for her. That kind of solitude...

She stepped up on the wood platform, the trays in her hands rattling as she set them down. She served the tea in these cute little flower print cups, and she offered my plate of tunafish sandwiches. The crust had been peeled off, and they were cut in perfect little triangles with the softest goddamn bread I had ever heard of, and it just melted in my mouth--goddamn--and I whined back in my seat not unlike how a lady would.

She giggled at the sight of me. "My, Imsi, how you've changed."

"It's the body," I said.

"No, it's the color of your soul," she said back. "You've grown quite a bit."

"I suppose." I dabbed the corners of my mouth like a polite little lady.

"So tell me," she said. "What happened after?"

I gave it some quick thought about how best to tie the story together, and I told her. She nodded along, eyes drifting elsewhere in thought, almost as though my experience was just non-conflicting information to things she already halfway knew.

"I was given this magic," I said. "Recyclemancy."

Her eyes widened with excitement at me. "You can recycle!? Like... as you did?" A smile began to widen.

"Yeah. I'm already in the mid-levels."

"The Grand Magi must've given you that." She stroked her chin in thought. "He must've also sent you here and to this point of time, knowing that someone would wait for you."

"You... waited for me?"

"Something like that."

"But... why?"

"The world was dying, Imsi. What else was there to do?"

I looked away in thought. That seemed less than genuine, but I couldn't make out why.

Laya tilted her head as she watched me think it over. "Don't you want to know what happened to your friends?"

I felt a punch in my gut. Out of anyone who could've met me here, it was Laya. So that meant, "They're dead. Right?"

She nodded. "But rest easy, Imsi. They lived relatively long lives and continued on to become heroes of other people, protecting what they could from the entropic storms."

I lowered my head and stared at my feet. They were all dead now. Gone. Those happy days of BDSM orgies and shit-talking and whacky adventures were behind me now. Never again. I felt a great loneliness seep into me. Finally, I took a long, deep breath and eased it out. "So now what?" I asked. "The world is dying. Marianna won. Everyone lost. Is there anything we can do, even at this point?"

She offered a tight-lipped smile and sat her teacup gently on the saucer. It tapped back on the table. "Come with me. There's something I should show you."

She led me to a basement beneath the storehouse, and our feet tapped with echoes within the darkness here. With a click of her finger, the entire place lit up to reveal every surface colored a sterile white, almost like a fancy laboratory. Here, there were rows and rows of shelves, and on them, display boxes containing rows and columns of little black gems.

She stood up on her tiptoes, slid out a box, and set it on the nearby table. She nodded at the contents, took one, and showed it to me. "This," she said. "Is a time seed."

"A what?"

"A time seed. A snapshot of time. A memory locked away, frozen, retrievable."

"Time magic," I said. "Is this what you've been up to?"

"It is. I intended to reach back into my own past, back when my father was alive. I wanted to see him again and to see the way he smiled at me then." She sighed fondly, but an air of sadness washed over her. "I spent years and years researching time magic in search of a way to go back in time, but I couldn't. It's impossible to go back more than a few minutes. The burden of calculation is too great. Once I accepted this, I began to search for another way, and that's when I discovered the true nature of these time seeds."

She held one up and gripped it in her palm, and with her other hand, she cast a spell. The room somehow faded out of existence, and in its place, a new scene of the ocean and the deck of a ship, and--

Ai-Gee. With Laya and Kisk.

This was a replica of our battle on the battleship, and it was as real as real could be. Ai-Gee shouted some nonsense, and someone else shouted back--me, that was Redrim shouting back. This was an intangible reality. A memory given form.

"Incredible," I said. "But how?"

"These seeds contain data," Laya explained as she filed away the gem. "It's a sort of universal data, a captured state of every atom within a certain range. By taking snapshots of every atom nearby, we can essentially recreate people and places and events and moods and feelings and sounds to their near-truest level."

She drew out another gem and gripped it.

"In my earlier levels, I was only able to capture a single moment in a single room."

She cast it, and a scene of a simple inn room appeared, and within, an empty chair. It was just a still-life image. Nothing interesting besides the sheer detail within.

"But as I leveled and honed in on my skills," she said, "I was able to recreate objects entirely from memory. I could make them tangible."

She took another gem and cast it. It was a scene of a flock of birds, and when the magic flashed off, the birds fluttered around in the room, panicking—real, actual birds!--and they took off outside, crossed the barrier, and vanished into the darkness.

"Eventually," she said. "I was able to move onto larger and larger things, eventually capturing the state of an entire world."

"Of the entire world?"

"Of an entire world," she corrected. "I can recreate the Gate to cross over into other worlds, and I did so. The moments I had captured were, unfortunately, after the systems apocalypse, so I could only freeze in time the suffering and pain of others, but," she grinned. "I could recreate people. I had the data. And within the data of a person is the data of yet another memory."

"So you hopped through a chain of memories," I said in awe.

"Indeed," she said. "By going through every person, one-by-one, and going through their memories, I could recreate people who had lived far in the past. A single person's memory wasn't always reliable, but with enough perspectives from others, and through mathematics, one could extrapolate and interpolate as needed to determine the state of a person in a moment of time. And from that, I could dig into their memories, and so on." She waved her hand around to the time seeds in the room. There were perhaps countless. "I have captured nearly everything, everywhere, every time before now."

"But why?" I asked. "It's mind-boggling that this is even possible, and I don't know how we could use this beyond hopping back into a memory for a little visit."

"It would be easier to show you," she said.

She led me outside and took me to her little garden with the overhanging plants. They were strange in their design, a type of plant I had never seen before, with folding, twirling leaves, and the bulbs were almost perfectly spherical with the strangest salted black color I had seen on a plant. The flakes of white on the black surface seemed to move around, to glitter, and upon closer inspection, I could tell that it was partially see-through.

No. I remembered this. These bulbs were like that weird magic Laya was casting before that final battle with Marianna. These things were like tiny universes, and inside were little constellations and galaxies. There were dozens here.

"Are these--"

"Yes," she said. "They're real."

"Like actually real, or like memory real?"

"Really real," she said. "This type of plant is called Chronoflora. Its flower is an actual tiny universe, and within, countless people living their daily lives in a world I had created." She smiled warmly at it. "A world that is as close to perfection as I could create."

"You can create people from their data," I echoed. "So you made these worlds by stitching them all in."

"Yes," she said. She took a little spray water bottle and hit the plants with little refreshing mists. Fsst-fsst-fsst. "I used memory data for the plants and the animals and the trees and clouds."

"And the people inside?"

"Perfect copies."

"So... fake people."

"Imsi, it's no less real than the original, and to them, they couldn't tell the difference. Who is to say that even this world, our world is not the same--a copy split off from a copy elsewhere." She looked at me with those big, inquisitive eyes. "Is it not the same as what the Grand Magi did?"

"I suppose not."

She walked over to the next plant and began to dust off the leaves. "You see, Imsi, I intended to outlive the multiverse, to outlive the entropic death that we all face. I would use the broken planets as fuel. As long as there was material left in the universe, I could keep these things alive. I could shepherd these pocket universes until the end of time, to act as their guardian." She carefully lifted a leaf from one of the plants. It was wilting. "But there's a flaw," she said. "The time garden is delicate. It requires energy and protection, which from me requires mana. I am powerful, but even I have my limits, Imsi, and I'm already sleeping 20 hours a day just to keep up."

She shook her head sadly. "I fear I won't be able to last long enough. I fear my worlds--and my children--would perish with the death of this planet." She sighed. "The world is dying regardless, and eventually, as with all things, I will too. Perhaps it is wrong to postpone it." She looked at me for an answer, and my expression was it.

"That's some bullshit," I said. "Squeeze every ounce of time you can get because you've made paradise for people. A living heaven."

She smiled softly at my words. "But, Imsi. I can't do this myself, and besides," she looked at me like a sly fox, "there's a better way. A way that involves someone else's help."

I stared back, my eyes widening, my mind parsing the idea at a breakneck pace. This was equal parts horrifying and insane, but--

If it worked--

I burst into laughter.

And she joined me.

And after a few minutes of our madness and after wiping the tears of laughter, Laya used her magic to create another time seed. "A new experience," she said.

"So, uh," I trailed off. "Did you want to do that now, or maybe wait until after dinner, or..."

"I've waited long enough, Imsi," she said. "Let's get started."

I took a deep breath and shook off any hint of panic. Things were moving quickly, almost too quickly, and I wasn't sure if I could cope with what needed to be done.

Laya took care of her plants one last time before closing them into stasis, into their own time seeds to be recreated, and she took the bundle into her basement and filed them with the rest.

"Should I get those first?" I asked.

"You'll get them eventually," she said. "You'll get everything eventually."

She hurried around her place, taking care of her other plants one last time. Making her bed, doing her dishes, making everything tidy and neat as if another guest were on their way, and when she was ready, Laya met me in the yard.

She sat on her knees in the grass and felt the sunlight against her face. Outside, the storm raged on, somehow louder than before, and Laya sat there in a meditative posture, waiting.

I stepped up behind her. "Are you ready?" I asked.

"I am."

"Sorry again," I told her. "For everything,"

"No," she said. "I'm sorry for this burden you're about to take."

I smiled. My hands shook. "See you soon," I said.

"See you--"

"Flash reduction."

Laya vanished in a puff of ash.

+225,000 XP

New ability inherited!

Heart of the Time Keeper enabled.

New skills obtained!

Time magic enabled.

You are additionally a level 1 Chronomancer.

Her essence filled my material aura, and I stared emptily at where she had sat just a second ago.

This was a terrible, terrible necessity.

But a necessity nonetheless.

With wide eyes of resolve, I stepped out into the storm, flexed my aura, and began the long process of recycling—

Everything.