A half-rotted document under the ruins of a large pentagonal building.

***TOP SECRET***

SEAL team 5 debrief

Transcript text coded by speaker:

***General Abrams***

***Lieutenant Tom Grisham***

Having confirmed that the environment on the other side of Site 14 was nontoxic, the brass decided that the government needed to get some eyes on the situation on the other side of the portal.

The other sites exist in the public space. They have way too many eyes on them for the government to probe this ‘Manita’ world without every Tom, Dick and Harry second-guessing Uncle Sam every step of the way.

Thankfully site 14 only had a small group of non-humans we were able to neutralize and keep their portal under wraps.

We needed to know what kind of danger was on the other side, and whether the good folks of the U.S. of A. could stand to benefit from reclaiming their land for them…for a modest price. That’s why we sent your team in.

Fancy sparkles ain’t nothing against a good .44.

Well, that’s the idea anyway. Tell me what happened, son.

We were assigned to escort one of those egghead types. A professor named Jessica Kline; Astrobiologist, from Berkeley.

The op started well enough. Everyone had the usual jitters before an assignment. Maybe a bit more on edge, because of the whole…going off-planet thing. I bought some extra chew and passed it out before we went through.

What did crossing over feel like?

Kind of a tearing sensation? Like tearing through a sheet of paper…but it’s you.

The air was heavy on the other side. There was a weight to it I’d never experienced before or since.

Can you describe it?

Like when you move to a new deployment in the islands. Like moving from the high desert to Hawaii, but WAY stronger, and a sense of…something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. I don’t want to make assumptions, but Essence, maybe?

Don’t make assumptions, just relay the facts as you know them.

Jessica looked like a kid in a candy store, completely forgot about Opsec, and we basically had to put her on a leash to stop her from running off. I had to assign Brown to act as her herd dog.

If she didn’t stop every couple minutes to take samples, she might’ve left us behind. Everything went…fine at first. A few animals approached but ran away as soon as they got a good whiff of us.

There were…flying snakes in the treetops. They had some kind of miniature cloud formation around them. It was weird. I could swear the squirrels were intelligent. It felt like being watched by a bunch of tailgators.

The team began to relax and fall into a groove, then we stopped to take a sample from a nearby stream.

Jessica saw something in the stream and immediately began to run upstream. She managed to lose Brown.

I see. Do you know what she saw that made her run?

Yessir. The stream was practically choked with blood.

And she ran towards it?

Eggheads, sir. Sometimes they…lose touch with reality.

Don’t I know it. continue.

Brown was after her like a bloodhound, but he only managed to stop the professor when she found what she was looking for.

What did she find?

A cave. It was…bleeding into the nearby stream. The professor wanted samples, but we couldn’t afford to let her get got, so I sent two of us in there to make sure whatever was in there was dead, and another two to get our bearings and clear a path back to the portal.

We’d been there for a couple hours, the professor’s pack was getting pretty damn full, and the deadline was closing in.

Higgins and Barnuche gave the all clear and Jessica and I went into the cave.

Inside was…

***Extended Pause***

What was inside, son?

I’m not sure. It was torn to shreds. It was big though. I mean BIG.

Give me a comparison.

Bigger than a fighter jet, but smaller than an airliner.

We found a mostly intact paw. It had claws…about this big.

I see.

Jessica was having a field day in that place. We’d set up the big guns on the cave entrance in case whatever did the damage came back, and sat down for lunch while the boys did recon.

Recon or looting? Jessica’s Debrief…

Hey, I admit it, there was a lot of weird shit there, and the guys lost their grip a bit.

What kind of weird shit?

Well…it looked a lot like…gold. Weapons, weird, floaty orbs. Mirrors that reflected ‘us’ that didn’t move the same as we did. Weird shit. The inside of that unassuming cave was set up like an oil-baron’s pleasure palace. I’d got some info from the non-humans about ‘cursed objects,’ so I kept the ‘looting’ to a minimum. Didn’t let them take any of the gold or obviously magical swag.

They weren’t super happy about that, so Higgins got to talking with the others during chow and they tried to take one of the claws off the paw as a souvenir under the guise of helping the professor ‘take samples’. He broke his knife on it.

You let them take souvenirs?

Wasn’t gonna let him keep it, sir. My only priority was getting them back to the other side of the portal. Plenty of time for the decon team to take it off of him, and if it kept them happy until we made it back, then my job was done.

In any case, they found out that nearly every part of this corpse was stronger than steel by a wide margin. That’s when it began dawning on us that whatever took this thing down might not give two shits about ‘the big guns’.

That’s when we definitively called it: It was time to go back home. The boys were going a little wild exploring the place, so me and the sarge had to round ‘em up and give ‘em a kick in the ass. We were getting them ready to go when Jessica came up to us with The Egg. She’d modified the straps of her backpack to allow her to carry it, but the damn thing was almost as big as she was.

So you let her keep it?

No sir. She was telling me it was likely the egg of either the former inhabitant or whatever killed it, and either way, it would be an excellent research subject.

I was informing the professor that it was a stupid idea and pulled rank, telling her to put it down. Well, that was when…

***Extended Pause***

That was when whatever killed the former inhabitant came back. It was…hard to see. kind of a mirage, like the portal itself. Maybe it had a form, but every time I try to remember…I just can’t make myself do it.

It swept over Clarkson and tore him into pieces.

Sarge and Higgins didn’t last much longer.

Our firearms weren’t having much effect, so we tried to retreat. I don’t know how, but Brown knew about another way out of the cave. I suppose he’d gone spelunking a bit deeper than us. Maybe.

Somehow…somehow the Professor managed to keep up with us, dropping all of her samples except the egg.

We made it outside into a sort of…balcony overlooking the original cave entrance and the stream. We jumped down and ran for it. We’d left flags leading back to the portal.

Brown must’ve got got at some point…I’m not sure how it happened, but Jessica got ahead of me, even carrying that egg. I remember struggling to keep up as the creature thrashed through the woods behind us.

Adrenaline?

I don’t know…my memory is kind of a blur around that point. I remember a light, and a voice…but it happened around the same time as the thing showing up, and when I try to remember…

Do you think you were magically compromised?

Maybe…or maybe the professor was. Or maybe all of us were.

What makes you say that?

She outran two unladen Navy SEALs with an eighty pound weight on her back. No way. Brown knowing the way out? Unlikely. That light…that voice…I wish I could remember what…

Does the professor know about the texts?

No sir. I figured genuine intel from ‘Manita’ was worth the risk of a curse; way more valuable to the U.S. than gold or trinkets, so I stashed all the written works we could find in my pack while the professor was away. Nobody had the opportunity to tell her about it before the shit hit the fan. Berkeley doesn’t know.

Do not mention those texts to anyone. As far as you know, they don’t exist.

Yessir.

The last thing we want is having those eggheads trying to get their grabby hands on that too. At least, not until the government can gauge how dangerous the information is.

***Paradox***

“Can you do FTL communication?” Perry asked Blaine. “Time travel?”

Blaine was ‘Baldy’, the one who threw grenades through miniature folds in space to teleport them into people’s faces.

They’d had some time to make introductions over the last few hours of their ‘capture’.

It wasn’t a traditional capture. The zealots of this Tyrannus fellow were the ones with jurisdiction, and therefore they all still had their weapons and powers and were under no particular control despite being ‘sorta-kinda’ under arrest.

It was an odd situation, but it was generally understood if they tried anything, Perry’s team would come out on top.

Or at the very least, the casualties would be more than they were worth.

“What the heck do you mean, time travel?” Blaine asked.

“The speed of causality is the same as the speed of light,” Perry said. “If the sun blinked out of existence right now, the earth would continue orbiting it and bathing in its rays for a full eight minutes. The change in gravity itself would be unfelt for eight minutes, which implies gravity also moves at the speed of light.”

“On Earth, as far as we’re concerned it would continue existing for eight minutes.”

“Now, if you were standing on the surface of the sun when it ceased to exist and threw a message that was less than a byte of information written in shortand that says ‘hey the sun’s about to stop existing…

“Would the message arrive before the sun ceases to exist for Earth?” Perry continued.

“Ummm…the further I throw something, the harder it is, I don’t think I could throw something that far. The sun is…really far away.

“True, but we’re talking about a handful of atoms. Just enough for a coded message to be received at a predetermined location. Could you, theoretically, send a message to the past?”

“I…don’t know,” Blaine said. “Even if I did, wouldn’t it still be after the sun expires from my perspective?”

“Maybe.” Perry. “What happens if you build something out there millions of miles away that can bounce the message back at the same speed?”

“You just get the message back at the same time you sent it?”

“Probably. But you could do some interesting things with it.” Perry said. “let’s say we have a hypothetical message receiving station out there with a BIGASS telescope, and it’s five light years away, perceiving light five years in our past out there. If it received your message, processed it, then sent back a video of what it was seeing at the same speed, couldn’t you peer into the past?”

“Are you saying I could…spy on stuff that already happened? What good would that be?” Blaine said, scratching his head.

“I don’t know.” Perry said with a shrug. “I’ve never tried it.”

“How are you going to bounce the signal back?” Blaine asked.

“I dunno, maybe make an imprint of your superpower with soul-surgery and Abun’zaul to fill it back in? and hey, have you considered throwing things across time? Time’s just a direction, like every other aspect of spacetime. The thing is, everyone and everything is moving in the same direction, and we’re all kinda stuck in it. One of the only places we can see it being stretched even a little bit, is in some places where there’s a bunch of mass causing a gradient. That’s gravity, by the way. A lot of people think of gravity as its own unique force, but it would be more accurate to define it as a time-gradient caused by mass stretching time.”

Blaine’s eyes began to glaze over, and Perry let him off the hook.

“Well, just think about it, maybe we can try it sometime. Would be fun to break the fabric of spacetime sometime, amiright?”

“…sure.” Blaine said, shaking the glaze out of his eyes and refocusing on the road ahead.

The Eternal Empire’s road was damn impressive. The road was almost a living thing. It healed itself, and the surface was similar to prawn shell in that it was harder than stone, yet still flexible.

That flex gave it just a little bit of trampoline feel to it, and it seemed to be actively pushing BoomerWagon’s wheels along, imparting speed without spending any extra effort.

The way it flexed and caught the Acolytes when they arrived implied that there were more uses for the road than simply speeding up transcontinental traffic.

The road itself might be capable of launching people down its length and catching them at the end. It sounded ridiculous, but it made for a damn impressive ‘hero landing’ entrance.

Naturally, their ‘captives’ were a little cagey about the specifics of how the road worked. Perry didn’t hold it against them. either they didn’t know because they weren’t engineers, or it was a state secret, and they would be punished for spilling the beans. Not their fault.

The trip had sped up drastically since they hit the road, but it was still a long damn way, and it gave him time to plan his first contact with The Eternal Empire – aside from this squad – and his next upgrades to his soul.

We’ve got telekinesis, the instant homeground advantage of Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation, and the multi-tool which is the Pernicious Prison. It can do attack, defense, and healing. And finally, light, which can both provide light, and be used as an impromptu laser.

I’d like to get transportation spells, maybe some more utility, crowd control, and possibly a wider variety of attack spells.

But even more than that, Perry wanted to make a unified theory of Essence. They all seemed wildly different and interacted with each other in wildly different ways…but people used to think that way about the elements…until Dmitri Mendeleev noticed the patterns and began organizing them into the periodic table, leaving gaps for things that didn’t exist yet…

And sure enough, future scientists found elements that filled those gaps.

Perry wanted to make his own periodic table of Essences, because he was beginning to see the patterns. If he could create a periodic table of Essences, maybe he could identify Essences that didn’t occur in nature, and then maybe he could synthesize them from scratch using their hypothesized properties and Abun’zaul’s ability to make anything.

That would be a quantum leap forward in magical theory.

Wait a minute.

Talking about time travel always got Perry’s brain loosened up, and this time was no different.

The periodic table of elements represents their relationship to each other in two dimensions. But what about Essences? Maybe I’ve been trying to organize them on paper when charting them in 3-D would make more sense? Or even higher? If they’re charted in 4-D space it would make sense that there would be no apparant link between some of them.

Similar to my 3-d representation of the plans for the framework I’ve installed in my soul, this could cause people to go mad…although I could have dad take a look at it.

That is something to try when we get home.

Already, he was starting to see possible connections.

Perry had to resist steepling his fingers.

“And to your left, you can see Yellowstone National Park.” Karen said, reduced to a tour guide for a handful of gawking teens.

“Oooh!” The three of them gave obligatory noises of appreciation at the vast stretch of natural wild lands that stretched out below them as the road pulled them up the side of a mountain.

There was even a pull-out spot to take pictures, where Natalie and Heather wanted to stop and take pictures of the rugged vistas spreading out beneath them.

“I refuse to pull out,” Perry said, crossing his arms.

They pulled out anyway, taking out their phones and recording the scenery while Perry massaged the growing bruise on his shoulder. You’d think Heather would have more of a sense of humor about it.

“That caldera over there is much newer. It’s from when Yellowstone erupted in two thousand and eight due to an ash devil gone rogue. Acolyte Nash Thompson used his power to contain the explosion and send most of the ash into space. What remained was carefully distributed to non-arable land in order to protect the Eternal Empire’s farms.”

“Oooh!” Nat and Heather took pictures.

“Check it out,” Perry said, pointing southeast at the distant plains, visible from the side of the mountain they were on. “Megabuffalo.”

Megabuffalo were about the size of your typical semi tractor-trailor, and the herds nearly covered the entire valley.

He wound up giving Nat a ride on his shoulders so she could get better pictures of the fauna. Heather just stretched her legs until she was even with Nat.

Should I have brought them with me? Perry considered to himself, wracked with doubt as they enjoyed themselves. The conventional wisdom was to leave the significant other at home to prevent distractions from the upcoming battle.

But conventional wisdom and intuitive logic only got you so far.

By bringing his loved ones, he was basically waving a white flag, calling a truce, demonstrating with real-world consequences that he was ready to sit down at the table and deal with this country.

And anyone who knows what I did to David Manchin will understand that my loved one’s aren’t a weakness: They’re the goddamn triggers to nuclear annihilation, and won’t fuck around with them.

Between Gna’kis, Karth, and the strange behavior of David Manchin, Perry had a sneaking suspicion that their puppet-master lived in this Eternal Empire, and if it wasn’t the emperor himself, it was someone who reported to him.

He would know what happened to his stooge.

And ideally, he would be sweating.