"The foreigner! Not dead yet, eh?"

The old woman was covered in blue ink tattoos, and leaned precariously off the edge of the roof ahead of me. I had to scramble to remember her name.

"Um. Kalyssi! Yeah, not dead so far. Had a close call the first night though, one of those tximinue you warned us about nearly pulled my arm off. Anything fun come down the river in the past few weeks?"

"War's all but over. Halenvar is under siege, and they recalled all the troops. Lord Protector Hammersmith is there herself, smart money says they surrender any day now. Big bounty on the Behemoth and a few others. Let's see... Hellar, a merchant here in town, was selling tainted grain. He tried to pay off the town council, they took his money and then declared him guilty anyway. Strung him up behind one of the boats, a river monster got him. Good riddance. Oh, and the auction house in Radagan got robbed - probably an inside job, they said one of the people whose shit was stolen paid for the funeral of the one thief that got killed in the attack so I'm thinking it's some sort of scam. I think that's all the news."

"Yeah that's... interesting. Cool. Well I'm just here for some supplies, but I owe you one so if there's any merchants here that you've got some sort of deal with you can point me to them."

"Hah! Clever foreigner. Yeah, I know a guy that'll owe me one if I send him business. Come on."

Kalyssi headed off, still on the roof, and I did my best to follow. She had her own barge, and had been the one to take us down the Nubasarri river away from civilization a few weeks back. More importantly, she'd told us about another group that had been doing the same thing we were and who had built up a little fort out in the jungle. It wasn't much, it had been abandoned for the better part of a year which was long enough for the plants and weather to take a toll, but it meant that - once we found it - we had some walls we could repair to keep the wild animals away. It also meant we could almost immediately let the moskar loose to graze, and they were hostile enough to intruders that they acted as another layer of security. Getting the walls shored up, digging out the garden, digging out a latrine - it was a lot of work, but having a place where it had all been done before was a godsend and now it was finally looking like a proper homestead. Katrin and Errod had originally planned on going in to town - a three day round trip - but at the last minute I'd started to have a panic attack and it didn't stop until I suggested I take Katrin's place. It didn't take a whole lot of self reflection to think of what had freaked me out, but I did my best to avoid thinking of it anyway.

I had put just enough into mana and enchantment magic to make little pools of higher mana that would stick around for a while - there was a fairly cheap unlock I could get that would let me make that enchantment self-sustaining so long as the mana didn't drop too low, but even without that it was ridiculously cheap and would keep the mana pooling up for more than an hour. We'd used it to make little meditation spots where Katrin and I could practice. Of course it had turned out that this also attracted some sort of huge magic-eating bugs which I somehow hadn't seen coming - it made a ton of sense in retrospect, I already knew some animals partially subsisted on magical energy so I was pretty much making a water hole, but I guess I was just so focused on the big scary predators that I hadn't considered the rest of the food chain. The bugs were obnoxious, and gross, and sometimes bit and so one of the things on the shopping list for the day was some sort of netting.

Without the mana pools the little compound we'd inherited had slightly lower mana than the surrounding jungle, as if its occupation had left some sort of scar on the magical landscape. It wasn't a big difference, not like walking into a city, but I could still sense it. I'd also started to notice that the mana was always just slightly denser about two feet off the ground for some reason - it made me want to go to a cave and look at how it behaved, or make a detour to the ocean to see if the mana floated over the water or followed the curve of the sea floor. Probably I could also just look up the answer at the library in Sentortzi, if we weren't wanted for murder or manslaughter or being a public nuisance or whatever. Of course even then, it wasn't the top of my library research list - an actual literal list I had started to make - and I also knew that it was stupidly optimistic to think I would ever actually learn all that stuff when I still had barely cracked open The Paradox of Fate. The problem was that the academic writing style was not remotely like anything on Earth and I couldn't get into it so the whole thing was a slog. It also make a lot of references to things I was just assumed to already know, or to other books I didn't have. I was making progress on it, but would burn out on it pretty quickly.

Kalyssi led us to a merchant and we got almost everything we wanted plus a few impulse buys. We also handed over some rather grisly trophies, remains from some of the monsters we'd encountered in the jungle - Errod had thought to ask ahead of time what we were likely to run into and what if anything we should try to harvest from them. The main thing we'd been warned about were the tximinue, some things that looked a lot like gorillas with catlike faces. They weren't particularly smart, but they were impossibly strong and would literally uproot trees to throw at you - and one had grabbed me by the arm and swung me around before thumping me into the ground, something that probably would have killed me without our fancy healing bed thing - it had taken the place of the main actual bed in Errod's wagon, but it wasn't great for sleeping in so he was using the fold-down. Katrin had moved into my wagon with Elba gone, and so far we weren't driving each other insane. Of course for this trip into town I was sharing a wagon with Errod, which was a little rougher because last night he'd been talking in his sleep non-stop. I caught the occasional word, but mostly it was either too mumbled to hear or just random nonsense. I had managed to tune it out from inside my memory palace, but that had just reminded me that it was time to start digging around in my memories.

To put it bluntly, the idea worried me. What do you do if you find out your memories have been tampered with? Plus quite a few of my memories were traumatic or embarrassing or something, so it wouldn't be any fun. I'd thought about unlocking the ability to bring others in first, but I was worried that Katrin and Errod would be able to wander into my memories once they were inside the memory palace - I was chaining the abilities together to make it all cheaper because I was both impatient and greedy, so if I was understanding the vibe I was getting right my memories were going to just be... rooms, probably? So I would have to do that first and see if I could get things organized, set some ground rules, things like that. Then I could invite the others and show them some very carefully curated memories of Earth.

Errod and I had a nice lunch in town together and relaxed, not getting back on the road until late in the day. When we packed it in for the night, on the nearly invisible trail that would eventually lead us to our little camp, I warned him I was going to be out of it and meditated until I could feel my Dumines. It still wasn't truly visual, but it was such a strong impression that it seemed like I'd be able to reach out and feel them hanging there in space. Of course the skill trees themselves were an impossible shape, with branches that should have run into each other and connections between them that all felt like the same length regardless of where the thing they were connecting to seemed to be. I found the main line for thought and could sense all the possibilities reaching out, some of which were very tempting. But no, I'd already made my decision. I felt that glowing energy travel down the branches or roots or veins or wires or whatever they were, and then I dropped into my memory palace to look around.

At a glance, everything was the same. That made-up room was still there, and the door still led to room 217 in Uncle Roy's hotel - but now it was coming in through the closet. The bathroom door still led to my childhood bedroom, but now the main entrance led... to exactly where I would have expected it to. The Long Haul Hotel's generic hallway, with its ugly orange carpet and mass-produced artwork. Okay. Cool. I stepped out, and began to walk along the hallway noticing flickering light coming from under some of the doors. The numbers were all seemingly random symbols, and the hallway went on way too long.

"Everything okay?" Errod's voice said, crackling over a loudspeaker set into the wall.

"Yeah. We're good. I'm... um. I'm going to try going back into my memories."

"Okay well I'm here, if you need me."

"Thanks Errod. I'll be fine."

I picked a door at random and opened it, and could see the little apartment I'd so briefly lived in when we were in Theramas. I was in the memory as well, which was a bit trippy, so there were three of me as I watched Connie and I attempt to re-create Solitaire with a very unfamiliar deck of cards.

"No," she said, "that doesn't work because there are five suits."

"Well one of them could be wild, I guess? Or would that make it too easy?"

"Wild just for the color you mean? Hmm. Or you could have to do all three?"

"That would be too hard. What about just not having two of the same color in a row?"

They didn't seem to notice me. I peeked into one of the bedrooms and Katrin was making her bed - but of course I couldn't know that, right? I'd been on the other side of the room playing cards, so the real me wouldn't have been able to see into the bedroom. So that meant that some of these memories were... approximated. I was filling in the blanks. "Errod, you know anything about divination magic?"

"No, sorry," his voice said, this time coming from the open window as if he were out on the street, "I just know the basics. Why?"

"Just a thought. These memories aren't totally right - I guess memories probably never are, no matter how you look at them - but if I could use divination on myself maybe I could... I don't know, see where I've been and fill in the details accurately. Maybe even see things that I had missed the first time around."

"Maybe. I do know people can see where items had been in the past. But I thought you were focused on the future?"

"Sure. Mainly. I had this idea I could get a spider-sense and know if people were going to attack me."

"Spider sense? Is that a thing spiders can do?"

"Earth thing. I mean... no, not even on Earth, but... nevermind."

He laughed. "Okay. So are you seeing anything... tampered with?"

"No, but I'm in a pretty recent one. I think I need to go back to Earth. Hang on."

I walked back out into the Long Haul Hotel and found the elevator - it just seemed right. The buttons inside were labeled from one to eighteen, along with a basement button and the usual "close doors" kind of things.

"Okay so I think I can jump to specific ages, and presumably that's correct since it's my brain. But also I don't really remember how old I was when some stuff happened, so it might be scrambled around a bit."

I pushed the button for fourteen, and the elevator hummed for a moment before the doors slid open to reveal what looked like the exact same hallway. I walked up to a random door and opened it and there I was, back in Universal Servicing Systems.

"That's not good enough," fourteen-year-old me said into a phone that was - like all of them - totally disconnected, "Carl, you want to get the trip to Cabo this year you're going to need to get those sales numbers up." I lifted a mug that said 'World's Greatest Aunt' but stopped right before it reached my lips. "WHAT? What do you mean, nobody is buying? It's a zombie apocalypse and we're a gun company! Who isn't buying guns? Carl, you just... no, no I hadn't seen the news today. A cure? Oh that's terrible, Carl. Shit. I need to talk to the boss. Oh, and I need to make sure nobody cures my ex-wife, I like her better as a shambling undead."

I was a little embarrassed to be seeing myself do one of my stupid imaginary conversations, but it was neat to be back in that place. The odd smell, the rows of abandoned cubicles, the flickering fluorescent lights. For just a split-second something changed, the whole place looked like a war zone with desks having been thrown through the air and a massive hole in one wall - but then it all snapped back to normal. Hmm.

I took a little stress toy thing off one of the desks, and headed back to the hallway to try another memory. The stress toy came with me without any incident, which meant I'd be able to drag all sorts of things back into my rooms - creating items out of thin air had been giving me some trouble, so that was good news. I wandered some Earth streets, popped into a Circle K and got a soda. It was... strange. This whole world, that I'd lived in for eighteen years, and now I was never going back. The music faded from the little ceiling speakers as Errod butted back in. "Find anything strange?"

"No. Haven't looked much yet though, just poking around. Be less eager."

"Sorry. I've been worried."

"That's sweet, but it's fine. Look, I'll try to find one of those memories for you just... hang on."

I headed back to the elevator with my Big Gulp, and punched the button for sixteen. That was - to the best of my ability to guess - where the anomalous soup kitchen memories should be. When the doors opened, the hallway was empty. No doors.

"Oh what the actual fuck. What the hell does that even mean?"

"What is it?"

I did my best to explain to Errod as I walked down the hall, trailing my fingers along the wallpaper. After a moment I headed back to the elevator and ducked down to fifteen, where I the doors looked okay as the elevator opened but...

"Shit, there's a bunch missing from the previous year too. I guess... I guess I'll just try the last door?" It opened to a police station.

I was there, newly sixteen and handcuffed to a chair. They were, presumably, trying to contact Child Protective Services to find out where the hell I was supposed to be - but my case manager was on vacation and I'd run away from the group home so long ago that I had long since been removed from their list. There was nobody else to call. I knew Bill's number but he had quit CPS the year before, and the only other phone numbers I knew were mom's and uncle Roy's. They weren't even in the same state, and it's not like mom would help me out even if she was. So there was nothing to do but sit back and wait for them to send me to another group home. Let's see, after this it was... just some group home. But which one? Or ones. I'd moved a few times, right? I must have. I never stay in the same place for long. The police station had grown... fuzzy, somehow. Indistinct. Someone came to get me, someone whose face was just a blur, and we left together. I followed along and we drove somewhere, ending up at a group home that kept changing whenever I looked too closely at any of the details. The faces were all still indistinct, and I tasted chocolate for some reason. Something cold, like ice cream or a shake.

I walked back into the hallway, and then to a blank spot on the wall.

"Okay, Errod? I'm going to try something strange, so be on standby. It should be fine. Probably."

I punched the wall, as hard as I could, and my fist went through. It hurt like hell, but the pain faded almost immediately since it wasn't real. I peeked through the hole, and there... was another hallway. With doors. Jackpot. I turned and found - as I had known I would - a fire axe in a case on the wall. I took it and began chopping, eventually widening the hole enough to climb through.

"Okay. Crazy thing mostly done. Still sane I think."

"Be careful."

I opened a door and walked in, and was in my high school. The memory was crisp, no blurred out faces or anything. I'd gone to that school for a few years, up until I moved to Sunshine House - the group home I'd aged out of. That one had been on the other side of town and I'd been forced to switch schools for my senior year which always felt sort of cruel. I ducked out, and tried another door. High school again. Another door, and... blurry faces. The voices were messed up too, like they were speaking from under a pile of blankets. One of the people was me, clearly, but I had no guesses for the others. Another door, same thing. Next one was high school. Okay so... all of my memories from school were okay. But the ones from the group home were blurry and messed up and I couldn't... I couldn't remember the name of the group homes from that time. Or where they were, or anything at all. Something stole more than a year from me, and I didn't know why or if it was spreading.