***Tirnanog, The Old Camp***

***Magnus***

Chloe was crunching away on a pack of salty snacks, looking as happy as she could be after having won her bet with Jakob. 'Gunnar' sat next to the two, holding a hand against his chest while allowing the others to do the talking.

Him staying quiet was for the best, because I didn't trust myself not to deck him a second time. There had to be a certain amount of audacity involved to reveal himself to be an uncle who died while I was still a teenager, and then claim the identities of various friends my family and I had been close to.

“Before we begin: What's your mission identification?” Jakob asked. “I am sorry, but I have to ask and you look quite a bit different from when we last saw each other. Going all in on the mutations I see.”

I looked down at myself, only belatedly realizing the difference between the old me and the changes I had undergone after coming to this world. It was only thanks to my former familiarity with the three people in front of me that they recognized me at all.

Also, the others still had a lot to learn. Back on Earth, psychic abilities weren’t a thing – at least to my knowledge. The organisation had to change their ways if they wished to remain independent. However, I still had to see what their plan was. The scale of their exodus was certainly a surprise even to me.

“Sisyphus,” I answered, remembering all too well why I had chosen this codeword for my exile. After all, I had expected to take the risk of coming here in vain.

Jakob nodded and cleared his throat. “I will try to make this as short as possible, Magnus. Since Gunnar has currently ‘breathing’ problems. Or would you rather explain this yourself, Gunnar?”

He looked towards the shapeshifter who shook his head and let out a clipped, “Tried.”

Nodding, Jakob began his story, “I am sure Gunnar could give you some deeper insight into his reasoning for hiding his identity from you for so long, but here is the gist of it. Your family, the Elrods, were deeply tied to the organisation. Your parents, your uncle, and before them, your grandparents have been working with us.”

Jakob gestured at Gunnar. “Gunnar here has been one of our best agents for decades. Your parents were using their jobs to influence the government in a more public manner. Whenever they ran into a wall put up by bureaucracy, they handed the matter over to someone like Gunnar who could dig deeper and blow the whistle if he found something.”

I frowned. “So you are trying to tell me there is more to my parents' death than you told me?”

Jakob shook his head. “Everything is just as you know. The only thing we kept under wraps was their ties to us. It was Gunnar's wish to keep everyone in the dark about them and himself after their assassination. The same reason why you went undercover after joining us and learning your sisters might be still alive.”

I wanted to protest, but purely from a logical point of view, their reasoning was sound. Gunnar had cut ties with the family to protect his brother. Although, remaining silent after I joined the organisation went a little too far in my eyes.

Gunnar pushed against his side and something popped, allowing him to draw in a deep breath. “Oh, that's so much better! Ribs being misaligned is the worst, I tell ya.”

Jakob ignored him and continued, “Gunnar is one of the very few agents we got whose modifications are on par with what the government has. It is next to impossible to get someone with such extensive combat and spy modifications without leaving a paper trail reaching the moon. So our first thought upon your parents' death was that Gunnar's identity had been revealed. That they attacked his brother’s family to get to him.”

Gunnar gave us a short nod. “I was afraid they would try to use the girls and you against me. But even months after their ‘accident’ there was never a threat. For a time I told myself it might have been a genuine accident. Knowing the dangers of the job, I nonetheless dug into the matter. Just to make sure. I had to know. Finding out was easier than I thought. Your parents were true bureaucrats. They should have never caught the eye of the government. Sadly, this didn’t protect them from misfortune. They got killed because they stumbled on something big enough to trigger a response and the rest is history, so to speak. The system is pretty good at pretending to be just by prosecuting one or the other politician now and then, but step on the foot of a truly big fish and…”

He snapped his fingers and shook his head. “I decided it to be best to stay quiet nonetheless. The authorities hadn't aimed for me, but learning of my connection to you and your sisters would have surely ended in them trying to use you or them. There is nothing the World Government hates more than people with shapeshifting mods walking through their sacrosanct offices and rummaging through their dirty toilet paper and waste bins.”

Chloe rolled her eyes. “Gunnar, please.”

“You would be surprised at how much you can find by studying-”

“Gunnar!”

“Why do you think the government monitors sewer water?” Gunnar asked insistently.

I raised a hand and, ignoring Gunnar, asked the other two, “And you knew about this?”

“Please understand,” Jakob responded. “It was dangerous and more importantly, not our place to tell.” He looked at Gunnar.

“Okay.” I gestured for them to move on. “This isn’t over, but not important right now. What caused this… colonization effort I might call it?”

Jakob massaged his chin. “Well, that was a rather surprising change of plans owed to the circumstances. While you were scouting out Tirnanog we were running interference on Earth’s side. Of course, we couldn’t get to the truly big fish, but after Gunnar made sure you got the good nanites at the Tibet facility, he dug a little bit deeper into the research there.”

I frowned at the revelation of Gunnar being involved in this too. Was he the operative who gave me the injection?

“We managed to get a pretty good view into the inner workings of the research division and their supervision. Gunnar managed to liquidate some key figures who would have been tasked with putting some roadblocks in your way.”

I raised a hand to stop him. “Wait, wait. You are saying that Earth doesn’t have any particular interest in Tirnanog? How does that make sense? We had some assassination attempts on our side which we attribute to leftover Earth assets.”

Gunnar rubbed the back of his head and looked sheepish. “Well, that was pretty much the doing of one low-level research official who thought a little too much of himself. I had him dealt with as soon as I found out he was sending assets after you and sharing information with those Thich people. From there things went a little out of hand as I had to silence a few researchers left and right to delay the information from spreading too quickly. But with such big organisations, there is always some email you don't catch or an employee who checks the wrong statistic.”

Chloe sucked in a deep, judgemental breath and crossed her arms while glaring at Gunnar who was unwilling to meet her eyes. “Okay, things got a lot out of hand.”

Jakob nodded. “Suffice it to say, what you have seen from Earth was everything but a coordinated effort at interfering with Tirnanog. More like their little finger going out of line. We shouldn’t rely on a repeat performance.”

“Still not explaining why you are here,” I urged.

This time, Chloe answered, “While Gunnar’s efforts at blind-sighting the real big bosses on Earth by throwing bricks into their information chain worked out.”

Gunnar smiled.

“His actions were the equivalent of sitting into a truck and running it through the local glasshouse. It will take the government time to pick up the pieces and put them back together so they can figure out what happened. But they will do so without fail and once they are done we would have had big trouble on our end.”

Gunnar stopped smiling.

“There was no way they wouldn’t have found out at some point that someone with heavy spy mods was running amok in their midst. From there it would have been just a matter of time to connect Gunnar’s actions to you and back to us. The organisation is surviving by staying quiet so the government doesn’t know where their people should look.”

Jakob nodded. “With the level of ‘noise’ Gunnar made we judged it to be only a question of time until a host of government agents with Gunnar’s modifications went after us. A scenario our resistance cell certainly wouldn’t have survived. So we decided to cut and run.”

“Gunnar knew the Tibet facility like the back of his hand,” Chloe continued. “It made us fairly confident that a large raid would succeed, so we had a quick chat with the other resistance cells and had them take in everyone who didn’t want to leave Earth. Meanwhile, they sent everyone who got a little too much attention from the authorities our way.”

Gunnar nodded. “And then we stormed the Tibet facility with everything we could carry, threw everyone who worked there through the gate to have a sip of their own medicine, and then we nuked the shit out of the hellhole. Rest assured, we won’t hear anything from Earth any time soon.”

“You… nuked the entire facility?” I asked, finding it still hard to believe.

Gunnar nodded. “If they want to follow us they will have to build an entirely new one.”

“Why wouldn’t they use any of their other facilities?” Astra spoke up for the first time. “They have others, don’t they?”

“Tibet was responsible for the Asian regions,” Chloe explained. “There are other facilities in Europe, Africa, North and South America. And I believe they were building another one exclusively for Australia.”

“There is no need to worry about them using another gateway to get here,” Jakob said in a somewhat relaxed manner. “We wouldn’t have started this operation if this was the case.”

“The gateway facilities all work under the same umbrella,” Gunnar continued. “But during my time there I found out that besides technical difficulties, opening one-way wormholes isn’t that easy. I am no scientist, but the way I understand it is that the facilities home in on certain focal points here on Tirnanog. This explains why the exiles are always dropped at the same spots. Each of the Earth Gateway Facilities sends their exiles to another more or less centralized location in this world. The most they manage is an offset of a few kilometres.”

Conla leaned forward, for the first time interested in the conversation. “Does that mean there are other colonies out there besides the clans?”

He nodded. “I am fairly certain there is one for each gateway facility. But they would be on other continents. Nothing to worry about right now. Travelling between them is next to impossible as far as I understand. And from what I have seen the clans are settled on a single continent roughly comparable to Australia.”

That got my attention. “You have a world map of Tirnanog!?”

“A rough one,” Jakob moderated my expectations. “The various gateway facilities are about as cooperative among each other as rival organisations. The remnants of the Tibet facility may ask for assistance from the others, but there will be board meetings to discuss the economic value of hunting us down. And whether diverging resources from the other projects makes sense, now that the others will have to take over the exiles Tibet can no longer take care of. We should be relatively safe at least till they rebuild the Tibet Gateway. Which might take a few years.”

“Still, other colonies.” I massaged my earlobe in thought. “This is the first time I truly thought about it, but there are far too few exiles in the Old Camp to account for Earth’s combined exiles. Even if they aren’t as old and established as the clans, a few decades of sending people to various places might have amounted to some permanent settlements.”

“So we are good?” Gunnar asked

I wrinkled my nose. “That remains to be seen. I am not a hundred per cent sold we are relatives at all.”

Astra sighed. “Dear, I am afraid he is far too similar to you to deny kinship. Must run in the family. I only hope Isaac doesn’t turn out like you two.”

“Isaac?” Gunnar asked.

“Our son,” Astra said.

“I am a great uncle?” Gunnar asked, grasping his heart while his thoughts spilt forth. “Wait, but it's been only a few months- but who cares! You have no idea how happy I am. When Magnus joined the organisation I was afraid our line would end with us.”

“We will still talk about that! In private!” I shot back.

“Yes, yes.” Conla massaged her temple. “We will talk about everything. There is so much to talk about, why don’t we start with a mind map to get our thoughts sorted out instead of drifting from one topic to another.”

As much as I desired to get my answers sooner rather than later, I had to admit the current situation required some minimal effort at organisation.