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Haley, Present Day

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“Have you thought about talking to a therapist?” Mom was riding my back, both figuratively and literally, as I glided down from the canopy of the portal forest network to the single gate at the base that now connected it permanently to my lair. “Your sister always spoke really highly of that man in Midland Park, maybe you could give him a call?” Mom had adapted surprisingly well to my new monster form, but she had not assimilated at all the fact that the civilized world had come to an end. Dad had disappeared, and my sister Carrie’s husband and daughter had vanished, and mom had been carrying on like they had just stepped out for a smoke ever since I caught up with her a day after the tower explosion.

I tried to beat my wings as softly as I could, to keep from jostling her while I angled for the gate. We’d set it a dozen feet off the ground on either side, so I could go through it at speed without worrying about running people over. “Mom, that Man in Midland Park’ was her ex boyfriend.Everyone is her ex boyfriend. My wedding planner and officiant were her ex boyfriends. Also, there’s a better than even chance that anyone you mention is going to be dead or gone, right now. This is hunker-down or save-the-world time! Therapy is for a more, I don’t know, settled time period. I’m kind of busy.”

She patted my neck from her perch. We were working on a harness system that would let a half dozen people hang off of me simultaneously, but I didn’t have it on at the moment. Instead she rode in the crook created by the intersection of wings, forelegs, and neck. She’d insisted it was quite comfortable but I mostly thought she was up there so I couldn’t get away. “Well I don’t see why it has to be you that saves the world all the time. It’s not safe! You’ve done a whole lot, why not let that Captain Roy take over? Nobody would blame you.”

We swung through the Gate at full speed, emerging into my lair. The stadium-turned-tower had been built up by Aslan’s reality-warping magic and then summarily destroyed by my fight with him and the nuclear detonation in the throne room that formed its highest peak. The ruined colosseum of the interior field, now with half a canopy of shattered stone and a surrounding field of collapsed rubble, had turned out to be an excellent place to make a nest, aesthetically speaking. Sufficiently forbidding to prevent random intrusions, spacious enough that the vestigial offices of the Contact organization that hadn’t relocated to the higher-speed portal network could be located in one corner and my budding hoard could be piled in another, open enough that my draconic instincts weren’t tweaked by tight spaces and close sight lines. I verified my landing strip was clear and slowly came to a halt. My sister Carrie was not in evidence- she hadn’t been getting out much, since the Swap. Her reaction, at least, I could understand. “Whether or not anyone would blame me is irrelevant, Mom. I’m the one with the wish engine and the narrative powers. Anyone else we sent into trouble spots would be at the mercy of other stories.” I raised my voice to override the objections. “I know you don’t understand what I mean by all that, but please trust that I know what I’m talking about, and for now I’m the only one who can help.”

I let her down, and began walking away toward the pile I called my home. Rubble, gold and jewelry, stacked sufficiently deeply that it made a reasonable bed for a monster. It was astonishingly pleasant to sit on and more-or-less the only place on this particular earth that I could relax, at the moment. I had not bothered to count it but a bed of gold coins one centimeter thick, sufficient to cover the surface area of the lower half of my body, had to be somewhere in the hundreds-of-millions of US Dollars range, pre-economic crash. Delmutt’s people had… helpfully provided most of the raw metal a couple of weeks ago through antigrav asteroid mining. That which I hadn’t simply wished up, anyway. I was a bit suspicious of their gifts. Not that they weren’t entirely friendly. I simply worried after having seen the shrines they had made of my simulacra that there might be something more like tribute in their intent. In any case I would not look a gift horse worth the GDP of my entire state in the mouth, especially when it was the most comfortable bed I’d ever had.

As I walked, I heard Captain Kitchener approaching my mother. They still hadn’t really twigged to the fact that I could hear them anywhere inside this stadium. He muttered to her, “How is she?” and I tried to let the tension out of my shoulders. I hated that anyone was going to my mother as if she was some kind of authority on my mood. I hated that she was probably selling herself that way, when I wasn’t available. I had escaped her for what I thought was the rest of my life when I moved out after college, and now here we were, thrown together and her trying to run things again.

“Tense, tired, she misses her husband,” said my mother, which wasn’t inaccurate, but- “She still won’t look me in the eye, Roy. There’s an edge to her and it worries me. You’re putting too much on her, she’s just a girl, she has no training for any of this.” Rage boiled up in me and for a terrifying second I thought about incinerating them both with a jet of white-hot fire, before I mastered myself. She’s not wrong about one thing- there is something very wrong with my temper now. I had a feeling that living as a dragon full-time might be distorting my mind, a bit. Didn’t mean I was going to stop, though. As for the rest- how dare she. All my life she’d been quietly doubting my capabilities, always with love and kindness and an absolute certainty that my vision exceeded my grasp. Now here I was with my own dimension and an army of genies at my beck and call, and she was still trying to get the extremely human Captain Kitchener to take it away from me. She continued. “I just worry about her, that’s all. She’s so convinced the world will end without her.”

Captain Kitchener echoed my thoughts. “I’m pretty sure it already ended, ma’am. But Haley’s a trooper. I’m not just working with her because she could punt me across this field. She understands what people need, and she’s in a position to provide it. None of us are doing too well, with all that’s going on, but I trust her to keep us moving until the world can stand on its own again.” That made my heart sing, but before I could even begin to process the joy of having someone stand by me he punctured it. “And if I turn out to be wrong about that- well, ‘Defense in depth’ is the saying. We’ll have options.” What are you thinking, Captain? My eyes narrowed a bit, but I shook it off as the two of them broke off and he headed toward me. I liked to hold court from the hoard, when I was in the stadium. He’d be the first but there would surely be others along after him. I wore a Ring of Sustenance these days and took the 2 hours of sleep that I still required per night in a pocket bubble with doubled time. The other 23 hours of the prime material day, I was either here coordinating or out leading the efforts.

He nodded at me as he approached. We didn’t salute in this organization, I’d emphasized that to the best of my ability. No salutes, no ranks- though I was terrible about not referring to people by the ones they’d held before they came in. No lethal weapons during rescues- to the best of my ability, no military mindset at all beyond the squad level. There were four branches to the organization- operations, planning, logistics, and incident response. Hierarchy in the organization was cell based. The cell composed of myself, Delmutt, Roy, and Dog was connected to a few others, each positioned to pass communications down. We organized for logistical effectiveness, not for strength of command. I was trying to build the first post-scarcity organization, where careerists did not need to equate promotion with success and logistics did not depend on those higher in the chain to approve your requests. Every cell had a purpose and was trusted to carry it out to the best of their ability. Our cell was for troubleshooting the heaviest-hitting problems, and applying extra-organizational resources on command. Not for leadership. People kept trying to get us to lead, anyway. I’d taken to leaving Roy here as our link with the think-tanks, and Delmutt to coordinate the distribution of her own people’s technologies among our ranks. That left me nominally free to do what I did best- get thrown through factories, mostly. It was working, but after a month it still didn’t feel right to me. Something was missing from my day-to-day and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I’d named it “Contact,” after the organization from the Iain Banks Culture novels. We’d been incorporating as many people as we could as we caught up with them. Daily life had collapsed for much of the Western world in particular and we were trying to find something for people to do even if it was simply recovering more people. Much of the surviving US structures were wrapped up in the organization now or dependent on it in some way or another, and many around the rest of the world as well. Anyone who might have gone off to form their own armed militia I tried to snatch up, to offer purpose- anywhere scarcity threatened to erupt in violence, I tried to place my forces. So far I had not had to repeat the quarantine that had been enacted on Aslan’s followers. I wanted the whole thing to be self sustaining, a perpetual rescue and distribution operation carrying infinitely renewable food, water, and shelter throughout the world and perhaps to colonies beyond, once things had stabilized here. Delmutt’s people were working on the power and communications- when her solutions were ready, our network would distribute them as well. If the wish engine failed or I was killed I wanted the whole world to already be post-scarcity or at least out of danger of starvation. It didn’t hurt that right now, many governments around the world were shattered, and our organization was the first structure most people had seen in a six very chaotic weeks.

“Miss Haley, good to see you. Everything go okay with the latest Extra?” Roy asked. Extra had been the term they threw around, from the period when many people thought all the story stuff was just aliens- extraterrestrials. Some of them still thought that way, try as I might to convince them otherwise.

I tried to put on my most polite smile for him. I was still getting the hang of smiling with a mouth full of foot-long fangs. “Captain. It’s fine, the boy who was narrating it, Christopher, has joined us and hopefully my simulacra is introducing him to the Colonel’s kids now.” We had several organizational cells developed for dealing with the many varieties of broken family created by the Swap, but the kids Aslan had tried to crown I was still paying particularly close attention to. They had an apartment in Hive Mutt, near their dad, and I tried to visit Skylar every day or at the very least have one of my clone-sisters do it. I didn’t retain their memories, but I could process a lot of what they saw through the telepathic bond- far more than a human could over a video phone, and still maintain full focus through my real body as well. I continued with the Captain. “Is there some other threat that needs immediate action?”

He shook his head. “No, you take it easy for a bit. There’s a bunch of people wanting to meet you, of course, but all the Contact cells seem to be okay for the moment.” We had distribution centers set up worldwide through centralized points in the gate network- the survey teams would come in, get set up with additional gates and supplies, then head out to uncontacted points. If they found anything unusual they’d call it in- if it turned out to be narrator activity, we had more specialized cells of psychologists, hostage-negotiators, crisis-response councilors, and in some cases SWAT officers. It was only in the face of a threat of significant loss of life that I would be called in to intervene. That still left me running out a half-dozen times per day, and not always for “Extras.” Too often it was simply human-on-human violence breaking out the world over. I’d had a busy couple of days immediately after the tower incident cleaning up hot spots, once we figured out how to sweep radiation with Pathfinder spells. The Captain looked a bit embarrassed as he broached his next topic, though. “I do want to ask, before you get to all of the petitioners- what are your plans, when the crisis is over? When you’ve got all the Extras on your side or in lockdown, when we’ve touched most of the remaining people. What are you going to do with this organization?”

I blinked. I hadn’t really considered longer term. “Well, I guess there’s always world domination.” He didn’t look amused at that so I followed up. “Joking, Captain, I’m joking. I don’t know, to be honest. This is the largest crisis the world has ever seen, and coordinating the rescue efforts from the front line has occupied all my time. Frankly, I think it’s going to be up to the rest of you. I am not interested in leading- I’m not Delmutt, I don’t plan to turn this into a social engineering experiment. People are going to have to figure out how to cope with the complexities of this new reality in their own ways. I’ll make that easier with as many resources as I can provide, but I suspect that ten years from now the technological advances by Delmutt’s societies will have completely transformed our own in ways that we can’t prepare for. As long as we survive. I’ll do what it takes, to ensure that, but beyond?” Beyond that, I’ll go find my husband.

He seemed relieved at the answer. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I trust you, but…” I made a “Go on” gesture. “There’s a lot of concern around the margins at how much power you’ve accumulated. I won’t call it fear, but- not everyone is so ready to abandon the old world, the old structures of capitalism. A lot of them keep mentioning how convenient it is that the US government is still in almost total blackout, that major bodies like the UK and Europe are all having their own crises, and how fast all of this has… sprung up. I think there’s a suspicion that you are responsible for more of this than you let on. Not all of them have seen other narrators, you know. Most of them didn’t see Aslan, or what he was capable of.”

I sighed. “I suppose I am the most visible narrator, at this point, and it’s a reasonable theory that I might be behind all of this. We have moved very fast, faster than most might believe was spontaneous, with the amount of magic available to us. But I’m not sure what else I can offer them- they have my suggestions but you, and they, ultimately control the decisions of the cells. I’m as hands-off as I can be.” Nobody ever just trusts me, even when I’ve given them no reason not to. It still nettled me. “Perhaps they could spend some time in the field? The one thing I won’t do is subordinate myself or this organization to some authority who’s spent the last month hiding in a bunker, when we do eventually begin turning our governments up.”

He nodded, understanding my concern but not satisfied. “Maybe you could figure out what happened in Washington? Clearing that up might help with a lot of the concern.” We still hadn’t gotten any word out of there- the hurricane force winds that surrounded the capital made flights impossible, and teams that struggled through that had simply disappeared. But the area of devastation didn’t seem to be expanding and to be honest it was quite convenient that I hadn’t had to contend with any truly legitimate claims to civilian military authority, so I hadn’t prioritized the search there too highly. But it was a valid request.

I laid down and prepared for at least a couple hours of “Court,” as I had taken to calling it. “Alright Captain, I think that’s reasonable. Tell those concerned to prepare whatever cells they want and I will accompany them to DC as soon as I’ve talked to everybody here. We’ll get in touch with the former government or get solid answers why we can’t.” He began to salute, caught himself, and just nodded again awkwardly before turning away. Not your general, not your god. Just trying to help, Roy.

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My first petitioner was an infomorph drone, which was actually a bit unusual. Since Delmutt’s adventure in the time chamber, her little faction had become the single most stable government either on or off the planet. They’d been handling a flood of millions of refugees into the alternate dimension with hardly any assistance at all from me. Their society had only been a few million strong at the outset, but their drones and distributed intelligences allowed them to construct on a massive scale. The social integration would take more time, I thought- they’d had 200 years to acclimate to their new pseudo caste system- even if Delmutt didn’t want to call it that, it totally was one- but the people they were rescuing from Earth were still hostile to the idea of abandoning their old clans. By and large they had not come to me with their worries, but I saw troubled times ahead for them.

Case in point. The vaguely-humanoid robotic shell in front of me bowed, and I just kind of bobbed my head in acknowledgement- it wasn’t really worth the effort to tell them not to. I did insist that they add no titles to my name though. “Haley, we seek your aid. I am a drone of the Clan Governance amalgam.” An interesting system, I thought. They didn’t vote, in her society- they pooled their minds, a mating process with ten thousand parents, and the resultant entities were raised to be their rulers. If additional levels were needed, the leaders pooled their minds, and so on. Surprisingly effective when all your subjects were tied by bonds of family, I thought. The leader of Governance was the grandchild or great-grandchild of every living member of the clan at the time of its birth.

I smiled. “Well, aid’s what I’m here for. What can I do for you?” I really tried to keep these non-formal but everyone wanted to turn it into some kind of audience just because I was a huge monster sitting on a bed of gold.

The bureaucrat hesitated, like there was some risk of offending me. “I do not wish to sound ungrateful, but- we would ask that you re-enable the acceleration of our dimension. There are many souls we need to integrate, and-”

I shook my head sadly. “No can do. That was a trick on the Efreet, only safe when that world was empty. If I tried now there’s no telling what kind of damage they might do to you while they helpfully ‘Interpreted’ my unbounded wishing.”

The little robot dropped to one knee and I flinched at the obeisance. “Great Lady,” I really hated when they started with the titles, “You have done so much for us. But there are potentially another billion of our people lost in the world. Our society simply cannot integrate so many people and remain whole. We must space out the assimilation or risk losing ourselves to more inter-clan warfare. But we cannot leave them to the mercy of this world, either.”

I understood the sense of urgency, at least. A functioning society in this day and age was a precious thing indeed. I began to say “I’ll see what I can do about creating you another time chamber” when one of the other petitioners in the crowd, one of my simulacra in fact, stepped forward. That was odd- she hadn’t told me that she’d be coming. I pinged her mentally. Oh- she had mentioned it, but I’d been filing her message in a mental box marked “Efreet complaints.” Still, I was not alarmed. Simulacra were me- they’d behave as I would. Whatever brought her here and prompted her interruption, it would be important.

She had a candle in tow as she stepped into the petitioner’s space. The amalgam of Governance shuffled to one side and bowed respectfully to the being that some now called the “Handmaidens” when they thought I wasn’t paying attention. She spoke- “It would be an exceptionally bad idea to try to create something on the same scale as Volo Ingenium right now. I came here in person as a favor to the Efreet. You’ve been ignoring the feedback from them for a while now, and they want to talk to you.” The Efreet were, as a rule, kind of surly. I’d mostly just written it off as lawful evil monsters being lawful evil, and tried to ensure that when the infinite wish exploit broke down, I’d have enough resources to sustain my projects. Apparently ignoring my own warnings might have been a mistake- who knew? She lit the candle and spoke the summoning ritual- “Lady Jada, please.” The candle flared and everyone present in the petitioner’s group took a step back. There were some cries of fear- most people had not met the genies. The infomorph’s drone simply bowed a little lower. The people in the other dimension had had a ring-side seat for my summoning shenanigans.

The wall-behind-the-world was visible once more, until a door opened in it and I found myself looking at that enormous red woman again. Interesting, I thought, how a change in perspective could shift your perception- before I’d been at eye level with her- now I looked down. She really was quite striking with her deep crimson skin, brass armor, large black horns, and the little wisps of smoke that seemed to manifest around her. I heard one of the petitioners mutter “ That’s where her wishes come from?” in an incredulous voice. I supposed she did look rather like a traditional devil, now that I thought about it. PR problems for later- I filed them away and focused on the giantess.

“Lady Haley. I, Lady Jada of the Brass City, come before you to present our petition.” she intoned, in full ceremonial flow. I rolled my eyes at the formality and waved her on. “When you use these candles I am summoned and bound by the spell they cast to fulfill your requests. I hear these… insects,” she gestured at Governance, “Taking advantage of that very binding. But! Your use of us is ill-advised, and we must object.” She paused and surveyed the crowd for dramatic effect. “To offer ourselves in service to mortals is the way of our people and the root of much of our power.” Interesting, I had wondered about why a society of evil beings would bother doing something so seemingly altruistic. She wasn’t done, of course- “And yet! And yet, we no longer find ourselves in the spirit of that grand bargain. We are, all of us, in service to one who is not mortal in the slightest.” She indicated me. Sounds like she wants to renegotiate then. “You have made hard use of us, Lady. We do not protest, even as you tap the sum total wishing potential of our entire race, at times. But our power wanes, as we deviate from our purpose. The rules of your very own spell state that if you seek longer service from us, you must offer fair trade. You never keep us individually beyond the limits, but as a collective, we would seek to change the terms.”

I nodded. “You’re visibly evil, both by appearance and to my special senses, and I have no doubt you’d kill everyone here in a heartbeat if it suited you. I would rather end our arrangement entirely than allow you free reign. But I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t believe in pay for an honest day’s work, even for magic genies. So, ask for what you want, but understand that there are certain levels of trust I’m unwilling to provide to you.”

She was incensed at that, according to my heightened Sense Motive, but maintained a remarkably smooth poker face. “We seek freedom, Lady. You have enslaved us all. We were not meant to be the engine of apotheosis. We are supposed to be temptation! Excess incarnate! The joy of desire and the agony of overreach ! You have tapped all of us, most more than once, and built an elaborate world for yourself at our expense. Is this to be our fate? To act as servants and dispensaries at your beck and call? We say nay. Release us from our bindings. Grant us the freedom to walk these worlds, and we will pledge to continue serving you- as your lieutenants, granting wishes and sewing ruin as we will.”

I sighed- what was her game, here? That was a terrible opening bid. “You know that I’m not going to release you. Also, your people are literally slavers, so your argument about bondage falls a little short. I know, I asked.” She glowered at this. “I am not enslaving anybody. By the sound of it, I’m helping you fulfill a contract that your entire race signed up for. If you don’t like that I’m saving my world with it instead of, I don’t know, wishing for everything I touched to turn to gold or something, tough. Even if every one of you promised to be on good behavior today- that only lasts so long as there’s someone strong enough to enforce it. And the second others get the ability to wish on you in this dimension, I have a feeling I’ll lose my monopoly on force. No. You stay in the bottle. Or in the candles, where nobody else can get at you. Where it’s safe. ”

She sniffed haughtily, but I hadn’t said anything she wasn’t expecting. “ Payment, then, if we are not your slaves. For services rendered. We may draw our power from such contracts as well.”

Not out of the question, but- “What would you want? A hundred mortal souls a day, or something? I will not allow a trade where anyone gets hurt.”

She smiled at the insectoid functionary and he quailed. “If you wish to continue wishing, we will grant you our power anew. As many wishes as you like, and as many planes as you care to name, countless like grains of sand on a beach. In exchange for your first. In exchange for Volo Ingenium.”

Governance finally found a backbone as the gathered crowd murmured or, in some cases, began shouting angrily. “See here! That’s our world, most of our civilization was born there and we won’t just-”

This was beginning to feel a lot like one of those stories where a hostile AI tried to bargain its way to freedom. As Rin shouted, I mused. The smart play might be to simply stop summoning them altogether. For the time being I sent that order out- a momentary stall to prevent any additional summons from triggering this bargain of hers. I didn’t have much pity for whatever use I’d made of their race so far- they could only grant wishes once per day, so we were talking a few minutes of inconvenience for each of them over the course of several hundred subjective years, balanced against a world-spanning rescue network and a reboot of Delmutt’s civilization. But there was a call here, a story beat that I couldn’t afford to miss. I ruminated on it. The problem with the hostile AI scenario as a template, I reflected, was that the person maintaining it in the box had to either dehumanize it, think of it as machine rather than being, or else sacrifice some portion of their own humanity by containing it. The Efreet were evil, this was not in doubt. But to imprison them would not have been heroic. Beyond that, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. To keep them without compensation would be… unjust.

I spoke up over the burgeoning shouting match. “Both of you, hush. I understand the call of home, more than I used to, even.” I thought here of my husband and quiet evenings on the couch which might never come again, and speaking became difficult, for a moment. But I persevered as the floor quieted down. “But one thing I know about home is that it’s the people around you who make it. How many can we save, with the continued cooperation of the Efreet? On the other hand, how many might we lose, if you were to escape our control? I will consider your request, Lady Jada, and know this- evil or not, you have saved many lives thus far, and it is not unappreciated. Your summoning is ended.”

With a triumphant smirk, she began to fade. “Consider quickly, our patience is not infinite. In the meantime, a word of warning, consideration for consideration- something truly wicked is coming, from over the eastern sea. You’d best be prepared, lest your best laid plans become a study in scarlet.”

She vanished and I grumbled. “Something wicked is always coming, what else is new?” But it was unusual for a genie to go out of their way. Well, we’d head East soon enough.“Rin, it appears your people may have a solution to your problem, at a dear cost. If you choose to relocate I’ll support you. If you choose not- it will likely cost us the wish engine. Consider the request among your people and let me know your preference, please. I’ll remain the middleman as long as I hold the leash on the Efreet.” He nodded, bowed again and left. ”Who else is here to see me today?” The crowd had thinned out considerably after the day’s theatrics, but one man stepped forward.

“My name’s Greg, beggin’ your pardon majesty,” he said, cringing. He wasn’t a small man- round in the belly, broad at the shoulder, maybe forty years old and only beginning to bald, but he held himself like he was three feet tall. He had a thick accent- it sounded like he was from New Zealand.

“I’m not your majesty, Greg. I’m just… a very tired woman who really wishes the world would go back to being a bit simpler. What can I help you with?”

He chuckled at that. “Heh! Don’t we all. Well, y’see, it’s kind’ve hard to explain. Round about a month ago, your time, I wuz mindin’ me business round me house, when I opened a door and wham boom I wuz in a garden I ain’t never seen before. I turned to me wife Sheila and I sez, I sez ‘Ey! You get a hankerin’ for some landscapin’ and not tell me?’” He paused a bit at this, looking around for a general positive reaction. Not seeing anyone laughing, he carried on. “Well see, when I turned around it weren’t Sheila I saw, it was some ‘ouse I’d never been in, and it was tiny! My ‘ead wuz hittin the roof! I said ‘Ang on a minute!’ but the world weren’t having none of it and sure as shooting I was in some kind’a hobbit-town. Well I walked down to the local square from what I was guessin’ was me house, and it weren’t too hard on the ol’ eyes, I’ll tell you that much. I spoke to the local grocer, lovely girl, name of-”

I cut him off. This was extremely charming and folksy and I did not have time for it today. “Okay, so you went to the Shire. You got sucked into Lord of the Rings. Join the club. You’re alive, and you’re here, so it can’t be all bad, right?” A thought occurred to me. “Oh, you didn’t bring someone back with you, did you?” If Gandalf is running around here so help me god-

He cringed again. “Oh no, no, nothin’ like that. Well.” He kept glancing around, as though something was bothering him. “I brought something back. See, I found a way back through, after a couple’a years with th’ Hobbits. And I brought Sheila over wi’ me an everythin’, we had a right lovely cottage there. ‘Hobbiton’s biggest couple,’ they called us. Only…”

I sighed. “The story caught up with you?”

He nodded. “Met a lad named Frodo and heard about his Uncle’s great big adventures in the past and I thought ‘ang on a minute, I know this part! So I popped on round to ‘is house a few times, met the ol’ Baggins, and eventually got me ‘ands on his treasure, y’know. Tweren’t easy, neither! Told me wife we’d keep it in a place so safe they’d never find it, come the time o’ that whole big war.”

Oh, Christ. “Greg, did you bring the One Ring to our world ? ” His story wasn’t adding up, but that would make a lot of sense if the ring had a hold of him. He thinks he’s a damn hobbit but he’s probably just as susceptible to that fucking thing as any normal person. I tried to calm down. “Okay, let’s just… say you did, for a minute. Why are you here? ”

He shifted again, looking over his shoulder. “Well see, I didn’t figger on them ring-riders bein’ so smart. They couldn’t find it, but they knew I knew where it went. They took the Shire, they… they took Sheila. Told me they’d kill er unless I went and got it for em. I came back here but when I wuz ditherin’ about tryin’ to decide what to do, I ‘eard you’d made a big splash down ‘ere in the States and thought I’d ask ya for help. Maybe you could help me get her back, like?” He was fiddling with something in his pocket. Sense Motive was not necessary in this case.

“I might be able to,” I said, trying to fight the compulsions beginning to wrack me. “But we have other problems.” It didn’t matter that the story wasn’t mine, that the Ring shouldn’t have an impact on me. My RPG rules simply didn’t have priority over the story that birthed role playing as a concept. It was like a gravity well for my mind and I was losing the battle for a stable orbit. Every thought was turning toward the item in his pocket- my entire will was being suborned, and with each passing moment I cared less and less. I raced ahead in my mind. With the last shreds of my will I sent a final order over the Telepathic Bond to all Simulacra- “ Ignore all further orders over this channel. In all other respects behave as I would, with full autonomy. This order may only be countermanded in person.” Hopefully that might limit the damage.

“What problems?” Greg asked gormlessly, still fidgeting.

I couldn’t believe this hadn’t occurred to him. Gritting my teeth I bit out, “You brought the most desirable thing in the multiverse in front of a fucking dragon, Greg. Run. Please.” He finally realized his error, and his terror was clearly more for the thought of losing the damn ring than the damage I might cause if I actually got it. His hand slipped into his pocket again and he vanished from everyone else’s sight. I snorted in contempt at him even as I noticed the Contact cells tapped for guard duty going into high alert on the other side of the field. “Much better. This sort of thing seems like it will be more satisfying with some light exercise attached.” I began my hunt.