"Wait, no, hang on," Sev said. "Back up. The universe did what now?"

"It ended." Clyde cocked his head towards Sev, a flicker of shadow dancing across his eyes; his equivalent of a blink. "Do you not know about that?"

"No?" Sev said, the lilt at the end of his words turning it into a question. Unspoken was the thought that came with it: what the fuck?

Clyde frowned at him slightly, then leaned back against the counter, apparently debating what to say next. "You're visitors, I know that much," he said, his eyes flashing briefly. Derivan recognized the glow of an active [Mana Sight] — or something close to it, anyway. This place didn't have the system. "But you're not visitors from... Ah, I see. This is an echo?" He frowned. "That's unfortunate."

"I feel like Misa should be here for this conversation," Vex ventured, looking a little nervously up the stairs.

There was a small pause, and then Sev sighed softly.

"If she said she needs time, then she needs time," Sev said gently. "If she keeps avoiding us then we'll try to talk to her, sure, but anything we learn here we can just tell her later. It'll be okay."

"...If you say so." Vex looked a little unconvinced. Derivan gave him a little nudge in the shoulder and smiled at him.

"It will be fine," Derivan said.

"Yeah." Vex blew a breath out through his mouth, looking a little less tense.

"Oh, so you listen when Derivan tells you," Sev teased, trying to lighten the mood; he at Vex to show he was kidding when the lizardkin glanced over at him.

Clyde watched the three of them with interested eyes, and then gave a polite cough when they glanced back at him. "I think I'm gonna need my wife for this conversation," he said. "She's a little more versed in planar echoes than I am."

"Is that what this is?" Vex asked, looking around.

"It's the best word you have for it," Clyde said, waving vaguely. "Accounts for all the weird stuff, like me speaking the same language you guys do. But it's not a great word, probably? Look, my wife will be able to explain this better than I can. I'll go get her. Give me ten minutes."

Clyde disappeared behind a door behind the counter.

"...You don't think he's running away, do you?" Sev said, after a minute had passed.

"What? No, why would he?" Vex blinked.

"Honestly, entirely because I think the idea of him just booking it is kind of funny."

Vex snorted, but didn't say anything further. The three of them sat in a comfortable silence, with Derivan watching Vex silently look around. He could practically see the lizardkin making little notes in his head, details he was noticing that he wanted to ask about...

Clyde returned after the requested ten minutes, though, and Derivan watched in mild amusement as Vex promptly forgot about the last ten minutes of careful observation. Clyde was back with not one but two other shadow elementals trailing behind him. Neither of them were dressed in the immaculate suit that everyone else they saw was wearing. One was wearing a light-purple dress that flowed over her shoulders and shimmered at the edges with vibrant violet flame, and the other wore... a shirt.

Just a really long, garishly bright yellow shirt. If he was wearing shorts, they weren't visible. He looked like he'd just woken up. He didn't have hair, exactly, but the shadows did drape themselves over his head in a very messy, tousled sort of way.

"My husband wanted to join in," Clyde said by way of explanation. The elemental in the shirt yawned and waved.

"I hear it's time for a lesson about echoes," the elemental in the dress said. She gave them a gentle smile, and opened her mouth to begin — and then Clyde poked her in the shoulder.

"Introductions first."

"Oh, right." She blinked once, then bowed gracefully. "My name is Belle. This doofus over here is Elliot."

The elemental in the shirt yawned. "Yeah, I'm the historian," he said. "Clyde said we had visitors, and I thought that sounded cool, so now I'm here. He would've given you the short version of the end of the universe talk. I'll give you the long one. After Belle is done with her whole thing, though."

"Let's all take a seat," Belle said. "It's not... a long explanation, exactly, but it is a discussion better had sitting down."

They all sat down at one of the larger tables in the inn.

"Your names are interesting," Sev remarked as they sat. "They sound like they're from Earth."

"They are," Belle said with a smile. "Good observation. Our real names are words encoded in mana; not particularly practical for conversation. Since we're in an echo tuned to English, we ended up with names common to the language. This isn't always going to be true in an echo, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

"A planar echo is a bit of a misnomer. It implies that the echo is something lesser, and that's just patently false. An echo is every bit as real as the original piece of reality it comes from. What it isn't, however, is stable."

Belle sat up straight, staring them each in the eyes as she spoke her words, like she wanted to impress upon them what she was saying. "Echoes are fragments of reality that come with a built-in deadline. They end. Sometimes very, very quickly. Frankly, being here isn't safe for you."

"But it's better for us," Clyde added.

"An echo will last longer when part of the original piece of reality exists in it," Belle confirmed.

Derivan wasn't too worried, despite the warning, and it seemed like neither of his two companions were either. Belle's explanation did a remarkable job of describing what bonus rooms were, which meant they were likely safe as long as the dungeon kept the bonus room running.

"This makes so much more sense than the explanation I got," Vex muttered. "My book talked about infinite sets."

"The academic overview is technically accurate and unnecesarily complicated." Belle relaxed a bit, smiling. "A much easier metaphor I like to use is something like eddies in an ocean. If you think of 'reality' as any part of the water that moves, then imagine mainline reality like a river of currents, permanently in place — for a given definition of permanence — but there are plenty of disturbances in the water, and just because those are smaller doesn't mean they are not currents. They just don't last nearly as long."

Belle's smile faded. "If you hadn't come along, though, I don't think I would have noticed. Clyde only noticed because he had you three as a reference point."

"Is that... bad?" Vex ventured. He hesitated. "I'm not sure how I would feel if I found out I was an echo."

"For us? No, not really." Belle exchanged glances with Clyde and Elliot, who still seemed half-asleep. "But we are... something of an exception." Belle tapped her fingers on the table briefly, her own version of hesitation. She shook her head. "Perhaps this will be a longer explanation than I anticipated. The important thing to understand is that you're in an echo of reality — this place will eventually crumble, but it looks like the rate of decay will be slow. The energy fueling this echo is not insignificant."

"How does this tie into the end of the universe?" Derivan asked, bringing the topic back to the first revelation that had been thrown at them. He understood the explanation — sort of, some of the metaphor was going over his head — but he didn't know that he understood the point.

"It doesn't in any direct way," Belle said. "But Clyde thought it was important for you to understand that despite this being an echo, the history of this place is still very real. Echoes are based off of mainline reality. There's always a divergence point, but you can figure out where that divergence point is, and the divergence point here comes after the end of the universe."

"It's also useful to know about," Vex said. "I think it's how most of our skills work. Maybe the system creates an echo, and then manifests it, or something..."

"Shift," Derivan supplied. "It must use Shift to do this."

"Moving something from an echo into your reality?" Belle thought about it. "Clever. Much cheaper than making those things from scratch, if you know what you're doing. Making an echo isn't even that expensive, with the right tools. It's maintaining an echo that costs energy."

"But what about the end of the universe?" Sev persisted. Belle shrugged, and gestured to Elliot, who startled slightly from his half-asleep position on the table.

"Oh. Uh, Clyde, could you get me some coffee? I could really use some coffee," he said, and Clyde chuckled and nodded, disappearing behind the counter. Elliot yawned and shook his head slightly. "Okay. End of the universe. Uh, Belle used the currents analogy, right?" He glanced at Belle, who nodded at him.

"Right, okay. So even that main current won't last forever. Everything ends eventually, right? Most realities, most universes — they don't ever get far enough to do anything about it. Sometimes no life develops in them at all. But in this reality — this echo — we have magic."

Clyde paused, as if for effect, and when no one reacted, he sighed. "Magic doesn't like endings. It is fundamentally opposed to the end of anything. When you get down to it, that's what mana is — a record, a memory, an idea that lasts.

"It's not like a universe ends all at once. It happens slowly. The fabric of reality begins to unravel. Things disappear. There are gaps where there weren't before. There's no warning; you don't get to know that the universe is ending. If something disappears, it's wiped from reality as a whole. You can't observe it like you can observe universal heat death — which is pretty easy to stave off with magic, by the way." Elliot accepted the mug from Clyde, gratefully giving it a few sips.

Derivan didn't know how to respond. He knew Vex and Sev were more shell-shocked than he was. He was starting to realize that a lot of his emotional reactions were muted in this way.

He was worried, obviously. But that was about it. He was more focused on finding a solution.

"So, infolocks..." Sev muttered.

"I don't think they're the same thing," Vex said. "Or... maybe not? The fact that some people can remember implies that it's not the same thing, right?"

"Or perhaps the name is simply incorrect," Derivan supplied. "Perhaps an infolock is not a lock on information at all."

Vex narrowed his eyes slightly, thinking, and then they widened. "You're saying that it's not information that's locked away from people," he said. "It's information that's actively being protected from being completely erased? By keying in a few people that are allowed to remember the way things were?"

"I don't know how your branch of reality survived the end," Belle said. "Or what you're talking about, exactly. But if you're talking about some people remembering things and not others, that hypothesis i's a lot more plausible than some magic somehow locking away information from the entire world."

Sev, Vex, and Derivan all went silent. It recontextualized a lot. If it was expensive to preserve information, and the system wanted to limit the people that were allowed to know...

"So you're saying there's no big force that's trying to end the world?" Sev said quietly. "It's just... the end. No big bad, no evil lord, just... the natural conclusion of reality."

"It would have been," Elliot said. He was looking a little brighter now that he'd had his coffee — the 'hair' on his head had returned to being shadowy flames, at least until Clyde reached up and messed with it. Elliot fended him off with a yelp. "Hey!"

"Sorry," Clyde said, not looking sorry at all. "Couldn't resist."

Sev glanced at him, and Derivan noticed the slight spike of irritation — Clyde wasn't taking all this very seriously at all. But Sev kept his irritation to himself, and a second later it bled out of him. It wasn't Clyde's fault at all.

This was just the reality they had been living with, presumably for a long, long time.

"As I was saying," Elliot said. "It would have been, but this reality has mana. Magic. It's alive, and it didn't like the idea that the universe was ending; it decided it could fix it. So it tried."

"You have to understand," Clyde added. He was lounging back with his own glass of what looked like definitely wine, though he didn't bring any attention to it. Somehow his demeanor was a little sad, now. "Mana is not alive in the traditional sense of the word. It is alive, after a fashion, but only because of what it is — a record of everything we are and everything we know. Something like that can't help but be alive. But it's not something you can speak to, nor is it really something that knows how to respond."

"So," Elliot continued, glancing at his husband and picking up on his train of thought. "The mana tried to fix things. It drove people underground to try to protect them from what was happening, because mana itself is somewhat resistant to being erased, and it could flood smaller caverns with thick mana more effectively."

"That explains Teque," Sev muttered.

"And while people were underground," Elliot said, "it tried to figure out how to restore things as they were being erased. Like we've said, mana is a record; in theory, anything in that record can be restored. But it's just a record of life. It doesn't really understand physics, or particles, or any of the laws the world runs on. That's how you get stuff like... well, that."

Elliot gestured at the window — at the pane in the air that reflected grass and greenery, even though there was nothing there.

"...That's kind of messed up," Sev said.

The implications were large. The implications about what the system had been doing this whole time — those were large, too.

"I have a question," Vex finally said. Derivan glanced at him. The lizardkin had managed to center himself a bit, though he still looked a bit shaken. "This is... I mean, this is a lot. But... how do you know all this? Don't take this the wrong way, but what are you?"

"Full of hard questions, aren't you?" Clyde chuckled slightly, and then he turned a little bit more serious. "Your friend over there might know something," he said, and he nodded at Sev.