Loop 13


    How many damn layers are there to this thing?


    The room immediately after the gargoyle room was blocked by a massive combination lock. It was crystalline, taking up the entire wall, consisting of a large number of concentric rings, each with numeric labels all the way around.


    Myra didn’t even have a clue how to proceed. Maybe this was the kind of thing the murk bogs would actually know something about, but she had cut the last loop short, and that was as good an excuse as any to extend her ‘vacation.’ She would put off going back to that group for at least one more loop.


    She took note of everything worthwhile and exited the vault the way she came.


    Should I try and find that dodgy guy…?


    If she recalled correctly, the young man she’d run into last time had showed up a little after dark. That was a few hours from now, so she found an out-of-the-way place to observe. As she had learned doing the same thing in the previous loop, the nice thing about Unkmire was that there were always a lot of trees to hide behind. She set up some extra lights so she’d been able to see after dusk, trying best she could to make it inconspicuous.


    The man showed up at the expected time, looking just as Myra remembered. Lanky, with pitch black, braided hair, notebooks under his arm and a sack over his shoulder. He was paranoid as all hell, stopping every couple of meters to look in every possible direction.


    Come on… just keep walking. You don’t need to have anything to do with the vault… Show me I’m just paranoid…


    But Myra’s plea fell on no one’s ears. The anxious man entered the safe house—the exact same one the murk bogs had used. From inside, he did who-knew-what.


    Damn!


    What the hell? Is this guy with the murk bogs after all? Why’d I never see him? Why’d he go in alone instead of in a group of three?


    Is he a competitor…?


    Myra realized she didn’t actually know who owned that safe house. All she knew was that the murk bogs thought it was a good teleport spot.


    The man left the house about half an hour later, still radiating distress and paranoia. He stopped to peer off the edge of one of the city bridges. He stood like that, peering down into the abyss, standing still save for a slight, steady teeter back and forth.


    Well, I’m not going to learn anything just standing here.


    Bravely, Myra made an approach, though she was unsure what she’d do differently than the last time. As she got closer to the man, though, her unease got stronger and stronger as her impression of the man sharpened through myriad details: he was breathing heavily, his face was caked in sweat, and his pupils were dilated behind his glasses which looked like they were about to slip down to his nose.


    Faced with such, whatever opening she’d thrown together in her head was wiped clean away. Instead what slipped out was, “Are you okay?”


    He looked at her and opened his mouth. He tried and failed to say ‘yes.’


    She tried again. “Are you feeling ill?”


    “Who are you?” His voice was deep but raspy. “What are you doing here?”


    “I’m just passing by,” Myra said quickly, answering nothing. No, actually, she could answer one thing: “My name’s Myrabelle.”


    “Thank you, Myrabelle, but I’m fine.”


    “You really don’t look fine,” she said forcefully. “Could I, uhh—” What can I do, what can I do, what “—buy you something to eat?”


    He was taken aback, but his look of annoyance slowly turned to a mild fascination. Finally, he nodded. “A-all right.”


    “Is there anywhere you like?”


    His face flushed, more than it already was, somehow. “I don’t know the city.”


    Myra had to pick, so she just went to a nearby bar that she’d been frequenting, seemingly the only place that was even open this late all the way out on the edge of the city. It was structured like most restaurants in Krinph, on a circular platform surrounding a thick tree. Barely saying a word to each other, they took a table to themselves, and Myra ordered one of the large purple fruits that were growing on her. (She still didn’t know the name of the fruit; she just asked for the ‘purple fruit,’ and the server knew what she meant but didn’t feel the need to clarify the fruit’s name for future reference or anything.) Her mysterious partner ordered a tomato and leaf sandwich.


    “So,” Myra said, “what was your name, again?”


    “I didn’t say,” the man said. “But it’s Lukai.”


    She belatedly realized they’d been speaking imperial the entire time. His command of the language was excellent.


    “So, Lukai, what troubles you?”


    “I just had a bit of a nausea spell,” he said bluntly.


    “I think it’s a bit more than that,” Myra said, trying to be encouraging.


    He shook his head.


    Myra worried that she had waited too long to be pushy, that he had accepted her invitation in a short window of vulnerability that had since closed.


    “What are you doing in the city? You acted like you weren’t from here.”


    “I was just working on a… school assignment.” He probably could have left it that, but he didn’t. “A puzzle challenge thing.”


    “You like puzzles?”


    “Usually.” He laughed, but it was hollow. “Right now I’m a bit sick of them.”


    “I know the feeling. I hate to say it, but right now I kind of miss doing homework from university. It’s not that I liked doing it, but there was a simple predictability to it, stimulating but always designed to be doable…” Oh my god, why am I gushing about how great homework is, what the fuck am I talking about? “Uh, not like anything I deal with now.”


    “You went to university?”


    Was he interested? Intrigued?


    … Envious?


    “Well, I do. It’s… complicated.”


    “What’s it like there?”


    So Myra got roped into telling him a bit about Ralkenon’s mage curriculum. She described Instructor Yam’s Mastery class and some of the classroom classes, and the excitement of being at the beating heart of research and intellectual pursuit, the activities and the events. As she watched the other man’s expression, she increasingly got the impression it was envy.


    But maybe she was just projecting. After all, she was envious of the earlier Myrabelle, the Myrabelle from before fall break, who didn’t have a care in the world. She regretted letting the conversation go down this road. Eventually, there was a lull while they ate their food.


    “Lukai,” she said. “This challenge you’re working on.”


    He tensed, and she leaned over to speak in a whisper.


    “You’re breaking into the vault, aren’t you?”


    “W-what?”


    “Do you know the murk bogs?” He flinched in shock, and Myra took an intuitive leap. “Have they been threatening you?”


    “I don’t understand—” He cut himself off, and while he didn’t move or speak for a moment, Myra could practically see his thoughts racing at kilometers a minute behind his eyes. “I don’t understand why you would think that,” he finally said.


    “Well, I know the murk bogs are trying to get into that vault,” Myra explained, “but I know you’re not one of them.”


    He looked baffled.You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    Fuck! Was I way off? I thought I was onto something!


    “Are you working for… Briktone?” They must have had other spies involved in the project, right?


    “Are you accusing me of treason?”


    “No, no!” Myra said quickly. “Look, I want to help!”


    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked terrified. Confused and cornered, terrified, but… god, maybe it was her imagination, or just what she wanted to be true, but she was sure something behind those eyes wanted her help. He had agreed to eat with her, after all. And he wasn’t running away.


    “If you tell me what’s going on, I can help,” she insisted.


    “It’s nothing to do with that vault,” he said. “You’re… not… wrong about that,” he said. “But that’s not—” He picked up his sandwich, maybe in an effort to stall, but he was shaking so much he could barely even do that. “That’s not something you can help with.”


    “I can help with quite a lot.” It probably didn’t sound as cool as it did in her head, but it was probably true, objectively. She could probably help with a lot if she had another hundred loops to get good at stuff.


    “No, I mean, it’s not—it’s not the source of my problems. The source of my woes.”


    “Oh.”


    He nodded.


    “So what is?”


    “You’re not from around here, right?”


    Myra shook her head.


    “You wouldn’t understand it, then.”


    “Try me.”


    “Imagine… that one day, your life turns upside-down.” That’s… easy to imagine. “You lose everything. But when you look back, you wonder what was there to begin with.”


    “I do know what you’re talking about!” Myra half-stood up and slammed her hand on the table, startling the man slightly. “Sorry—” She sat down and collected herself. “I do know what you’re talking about, though… Never mind.”


    “No, you can g-go ahead,” he said. Maybe he wanted to shift the focus off himself.


    “All right.” Well, it couldn’t hurt. She took a deep breath. “A few weeks ago, a family member was—” Why am I speaking in vagueries? “—my father was convicted of a bunch of crimes. And when this happened, you know how it goes, the stages of grief or whatever…”


    “Stages of grief…?” He tilted his head.


    “You know, denial, uhh… acceptance, and there’s some in the middle.” He continued to look blankly. “Er, never mind. Anyway, at first I was like, my father couldn’t possibly have done all these things, he’s being framed, that kind of thing. But the more and more evidence that came out, I had to acknowledge he really had committed these crimes, but—sorry, I’ll get to the point.”


    “Take your time.”


    “Well he was tried, it was quick and decisive, and he went to jail. So—”


    “A quick trial?” He looked suspicious. “Was it a sham?”


    “No, the evidence was—it was incontrovertible. And everything, like, business trips and odd times and things like that, they all kinda clicked and made sense. But it was the scale of what he did that was hard for me to process. Because it’s not just something he did once, on a bad day, I mean, he’d been siphoning off money my entire life. Every day as he was raising me, he’d been scheming in the shadows, and—and every time he spoiled me, it was all bought with money that wasn’t rightfully ours, everything was just a lie. And when I found out that he’d emptied out my entire emergency stash, I—I had to face the fact that he’d—he’d never—loved me at all.”


    She wondered if he’d recognize the event. The whole incident had been international news, and it had probably been reported on in Unkmire, but no recognition was apparent on Lukai’s face.


    His face softened, though. “Why do you think that?” he asked.


    “Think what?”


    “What you just said. That he never loved you. He did something to hurt you, but why does that mean he never loved you?”


    “I just said. He took my entire emergency stash.”


    “But he set it up in the first place.”


    “Well, I don’t know! It was probably for himself the whole time. He probably told me about it as a practical measure or something,” she spat. “You know, in case he ever ended up in a jam and needed me to fetch all the treasure to bail him out.”


    He frowned. “Do you really think that?”


    “I mean… yeah. You know, it’s not just that, for years he’d been paying less and less attention to me, only concerned about grades and careers, and—and for a while I assumed part of that was that I was growing up, I guess. And I was always good at stuff, so I took pride in it myself, so I always felt like, I’m making him proud, not Wow, isn’t he interested in anything else? But now—you know, I see it all in a different light.” She paused. “You think I’m being dramatic.”


    “No, I believe you really feel that way,” he said. “But I also don’t think you should dismiss his feelings out of hand, either. Do his later actions on this… emergency stash, do they change the fact that he raised you or set it up in the first place?”


    Myra looked away.


    “And his interest in your academics—you said yourself you were proud of it. Are you sure he wasn’t just taking interest in what he thought you liked?” Myra didn’t answer. “Sorry. I must be speaking out of turn.”


    “No, it’s fine,” she said automatically.


    “Well, then, here’s what I think.” She still wasn’t looking at him, but she heard what was definitely the deep breath of someone preparing to say something pointed. “At a glance, it sounds like you’ve committed to looking at your own situation in the worst light. Maybe you’re right, the money was never yours, but…” He spoke softly. “It pains me to see someone dismiss their whole past like that. You have a new perception of your father now, and that’s okay, but to warp everything he did to fit into this new narrative… you see what I mean?”


    “It’s… something to think about. Thanks.”


    Myra looked back, and Lukai was at ease now, his arms resting peacefully on the table and his eyes watching her compassionately. He gave her a very soft smile, while a stray hair blew across his face.


    Attentive and comforting like this, he was in fact kind of cute.


    “So…” Myra said.


    “Mm.”


    “What’s going on with you?”


    “Oh.” And then his voice ran cold, and his face became hard. “No. I told you, you wouldn’t understand?”


    “Why not? I—”


    “Despite everything you said, you did have the capacity to lose something, after all.”


    Um. What…?


    “And as I told you, you’re not from around here,” he added.


    “Well, uh, you still haven’t really tried to explain it.”


    He looked down and to the side, towards the edge of the platform. Myra followed his eyes, but he didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular.


    “What do you think of the cities here, Myrabelle?”


    “Uhh… I got used to ’em. I mean, I’m a mage, so ultimately I’m pretty safe even if I fall, but I can’t imagine living here without that safety net.”


    “Well, you don’t have to worry about that.” He forced out a hollow smile. “Do you know the statistics? The Cultural Ambassador loves to brag.”


    The Cultural Ambassador?


    Wait—


    That man, the High Ambassador Lluruma. A fragment of an encounter, one with a different chilling and disturbing voice, flashed through Myra’s mind. He used to carry the bust in. Larpus IV was a peacemaking hero both to the Unkmirians and to many in the empire, so I initially assumed it was a prop for some rhetorical point or other.


    “Myrabelle?”


    “Sorry, I was lost in thought. You said something about the statistics.”


    “Right, the statistics.” His voice went colder yet, as if all the nervous hesitation itself had slipped out into the abyss, and a chill ran down her spine. “Nobody,” he said, “and in fact nothing, has ever fallen off the edge.”


    “Er, w-what? That’s impossible to believe.” She said that, and she hadn’t even really processed the second part of his claim, thrown off as she was by his change in tone. Just the idea that ‘nobody’ had ever fallen off the edge was simply out of the realm of possibility. And—what the fuck does that have to do with anything?


    “Consider, what price would you have to pay to believe it?”


    “I’d have to pay my, uh, common sense?”


    He stood up and set a few coins on the table. It was clearly enough to pay for both their meals. “I appreciate you trying to help, Myrabelle, I really do. And I’m sorry about your father… But there’s nothing I can do to explain my current state to you. If there was something to explain, it would be—well, it would not be.”


    What?


    He started to walk away.


    “Wait! Can you tell me about the murk bogs? What are they up to?”


    “I don’t know what you mean…” Just like that, he was jittery and nervous again, as if that whole thing had never happened. He looked genuinely confused. “It seems you’ve already got the gist, don’t you?”


    “I’m… missing a piece.”


    “How about this… come back here tomorrow. If you meet me… I’ll tell you about it then.”


    “Oh.” Myra blinked. “Oh, okay.”


    He teleported away so that Myra couldn’t follow.


    And against his word, he also didn’t show up the next day.


    ◆


    She sat at the bar all evening waiting, increasingly feeling like a girl who’d been stood up for a date. She turned over the things the man had said, trying to make sense of his strange point-of-view. but already, his exact words were slipping away, replaced in her memory by whatever she had last wrongly remembered them as.


    Frustrating.


    On a whim, mostly from anxiety to do something, she decided to throw something off the edge of the platform. Feeling stupid about the whole thing, she took a napkin from the bar, found a secluded spot, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it over the edge. Part of her thought it would strike some invisible barrier or safety net.


    But it just slowly fluttered down into the darkness. It wasn’t impeded, and nobody showed up to arrest Myra for littering.


    Wow, guess I just single-handedly ruined their perfect record, Myra thought to herself wryly.


    Lukai had been unwell when he’d spoken to her, and Myra was inclined not to take much of what he said literally. Still, she was convinced there was something about Unkmirean culture that she was failing to understand.


    She returned to the bar and told the bartender that she’d dropped something over the platform and asked if he knew what to do about it. He said he didn’t know, but suggested she go to the information and citizen services at the city center.


    She went there. The receptionist, though nice, said she couldn’t help. She sent her to the “Foreigner’s Service Center” instead.


    The Foreigners’ Service Center told Myra they could retrieve whatever she dropped for a fee (though it was a massive fee).


    That was weird, though. Why had she been sent to a foreigner’s center for what ought to be a general-purpose service?


    She went to another city. This time, she dressed as Unkmirean as she could, and she even practiced an accent before entering.


    Again: go to the Foreigners’ Service Center. (Admittedly, her accent had probably been atrocious, no matter how much she practiced.)


    What the hell? Do Unkmirean citizens really never drop anything?


    She felt stupid going through all this trouble. She was busy researching Unkmirean lost-and-found services of all things, only because it might help her understand some odd guy named Lukai, only because he might hold a clue to whatever the murk bogs are doing, only because they might be related to the time loop. What was she doing?


    ◆


    Luckily, the remainder of the loop looked a little brighter. Before leaving campus on the previous day, she’d spoken to Iz and proposed that they go on a vacation. She hadn’t acted like a psycho or made predictions or anything, she had just told Iz that she desperately needed something to make up for her fall break. Iz, then, had hesitantly agreed that she could miss a couple of days of class.


    Myra had wanted to go to Jewel City or Unkmire since those were the productive locations, but Iz wasn’t a fan of Jewel City, and Unkmire was too much of a proposition. So they were going to Iz’s hometown in Miirun. Iz was happy about that, and in fact she had invited Myra there before. Meanwhile, Myra was looking forward to some downtime with a… less complicated friendship, and she was optimistic that the bonding time would give her a chance to make inroads on convincing her to help.


    Even so, Iz wasn’t planning to leave until Friday, sensibly planning a weekend trip to minimize academic disruption. Thus, Myra still had a few days to fill.