“A talk?” Mizu asked. “Right now?”


    “Yeah,” Arthur said sheepishly.


    “While you are in a catapult.”


    “I’m on a catapult.” The conversation seemed to be getting sideways on Arthur already, and his attempt to claw back some control of the wildly spinning talk got him the fishy look from Mizu it deserved. “But yeah. A talk.”


    “An important talk?” Mizu asked.


    “I’d say so,” Arthur said.


    “On or in a catapult.”


    “Yes.” Arthur smiled. “It seemed like the time.”


    Mizu chunked the lever so fast that Arthur barely saw her move. His reflexes kicked in, and he attempted a quick, panicked grab at the lever to stop her, but it was much too late to actually do anything. Instead, before the air itself started molding his body into a more streamlined position, Arthur flew the first fifty feet or so with his hand outstretched, grabbing at some invisible nothing.


    I have to pull my arm back before people think I’m trying to be a superhero, Arthur thought. If they have that here.


    Whatever calm thoughts he was capable of having just then were happening on their own level of consciousness, walled off from most of his active thoughts by a year’s worth of constant practice in ignoring weird stuff he didn’t quite know how to react to. The part of his brain that was handling looking cool was its own calm little garden, isolated from everything else and capable of dealing with things like hand positioning and looking adequately cool. Or, failing that, limiting the time people would talk about how uncool he looked.


    If Arthur had to estimate how much of his processing power was going to the project of not looking dumb, he’d have put it at a low number. At most, he thought that maybe ten percent of his brain was working on that, or maybe even less. It was a cheap expenditure of computing resources. Which was good, considering that every last bit of brain-force outside of that little fragment was dedicated to the task of screaming.


    This wasn’t the fastest Arthur had ever moved. Karbo, impatient as he was, would often grab people and carry them wherever he was going. Arthur got involved with enough weird stuff that needed immediate handling when judged by Karbo’s standards of importance that his infernal-ride count had long since tipped over from a once-in-a-lifetime terminology to several-terrifying-rides language. Karbo jumped impossibly fast, and even a full catapult couldn’t really keep up with what he could do.


    That said, Arthur was beginning to really appreciate the complexity of how a Karbo-powered-literal-jump-scare was built at a fundamental level. Whenever Karbo jumped, Arthur had a sense of safety. Mostly, this was because Karbo was constantly using his aura to shield himself and his demon-or-human cargo from the wind when he carried folks.


    Arthur’s extra perception allowed him to see further than that. The aura wasn’t just shielding wind, it was also somehow eating up force related to speeding up and slowing down that would normally be uncomfortable or dangerous for the people he was carrying. It was small, but the differences added up. And there was no doubt Karbo had long since forgotten why he was doing that, relegating the job to his muscle memory rather than distracting himself from finding his next fight or meal.


    It was nice, though, whether Karbo was thinking about it or not. Polite. The catapult had no such training in social niceties.


    Arthur could feel his brain getting yanked back slightly by the sheer g-forces as his eyelids and mouth filled up with air and flapped in the wind despite the efforts he was making to get them under control. Screaming, though? He could still do screaming. Somewhere, someone was lined up right to get the doppler effect of him moving away from them, and he imagined they were hearing what sounded like a very scared motorcycle whipping past them on the street.


    Milo had been right about the light levels being just right to be terrifying. There were enough big-terrain things in his field of view to give him a sense of overwhelming speed, but the rest of the world was just obscured enough by dark to keep him from understanding just how far he had come or what he was headed towards. It was a surprisingly long time before a sudden glint appeared just ahead, and it was only an instant later when he hit the cold water.


    Vitality points were a hell of a thing, as were any points Arthur had dumped into strength and dexterity. He was never much of a swimmer on Earth. The average pool party wasn’t a problem, but he wasn’t fast, and he wasn’t the kind of person who got used to it enough to handle long distances or very fast speeds as he paddled through the water.Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    In the Demon World, the stats Arthur was pushing meant he was about as good at it as a high school swim team member who had kept up on their practicing. His improved perspective almost immediately righted him in the water and got him paddling in the correct direction, and once he broke the surface, he moved back towards the shore at a pretty good clip. For the first time, Arthur actually understood why people liked swimming so much. Being good at it was a whole different experience.


    “That was brutal.” Arthur found Milo sitting on a rock by the lakeside, wringing water from his socks. “Really terrifying on a fundamental level. Good work, Milo.”


    “Thanks!” Milo said. “And while we’re alone, thanks for letting me go first. I couldn’t figure out how to do that without seeming selfish.”


    “I had my suspicions. Are you satisfied with how it works?”


    “Absolutely. Although I don’t think it’s going to work for what I wanted to use it for.”


    “Wait, you had a practical purpose for these?”


    “Yeah. Moving cargo. Or something.” Milo put his sopping socks together, balled them up, threw them in his shoes, and stood. “There’s a class for making thrill-ride type stuff, but I don’t have it. If I wanted to get any real experience out of this whole thing, I needed a practical purpose for it.”


    “No go?”


    “No go. Anything sturdy enough to survive that kind of transport without any damage is too heavy to move that way. Even if they could survive the forces I just felt in the air, the impact with the water would break most things. And there’s no way to slow stuff down in the air that’s gentle enough to keep that from happening.”


    Somewhere in Arthur’s foggy Earth-memories, something pinged. He knew a way to slow down cargo in the air, once. It was… a thing. Earth definitely had this problem handled somehow. And if he could remember how, he could help Milo. He dug deeper.


    It was hard to do. The man-between-places had once handed Arthur a contract that said why. There were certain things Arthur knew he couldn’t remember at all because they had the potential of ruining the Demon World itself. There was a terrible weapon back on Earth that could level big parts of cities, for instance, but he couldn’t even remember what it was called, let alone how it worked.


    Big inventions were like that. Arthur couldn’t remember how streetlights worked, even though he knew they couldn’t have been running on majicka. He had taken pills for an infection once, and could remember knowing about how they had worked. That was gone now. Arthur didn’t mind not knowing about them.


    That didn’t mean everything was gone. He had given Milo and Spiky the idea for Earth-style shock absorbers, once, and the System had played a role then. That might have been because he barely remembered enough to get them on the right track, but Arthur thought it probably mostly had to do with the invention being a pure benefit, something that would help the demons, but not in a way that would have any negative effects.


    And somewhere, deep down in the fogginess of this new memory, he suspected the thing he was trying to dig up was the second kind of invention. It was something the System would allow, if he could just get to it.


    But he couldn’t. It was like grabbing at the shadow of a dream as it ran away. He stopped and concentrated, but the more pressure he put on himself to unearth the memory, the farther it got, until it dissolved away completely like a fog.


    “Are you okay?” Milo asked. “You just stopped. If you’re hurt, Mizu is going to kill me.”


    “I’m fine. I was just trying to remember something from Earth. And couldn’t. I can’t even remember pieces of it.”


    “Ah.” Milo drew back until he was shoulder to shoulder with Arthur and glanced at him. “How is that, anyway? Forgetting things.”


    “It’s mostly just big stuff. Weapons and things like that. Most of it I don’t mind losing.” Arthur sighed. “It’s just the stuff that could help friends that I care about.”


    “I don’t really mean it like that.”


    Milo and Arthur were walking again. They still had a few minutes before they got back to the crowd, and Arthur was glad. For all Milo put on a manic act when he was dealing with crowds and inventions, there was a calmer friend in there at all times, waiting to come out when Arthur needed it. Milo seemed to think this was one of those times.


    “I mean, you have this whole world tucked away in your head. And from what I’ve seen, it’s sort of melting away over time. You talk about it less. You seem to think about it less. Is that… hard? I guess? I worry about it, sometimes. And when I try to imagine it…” Milo shook his head. “I just can’t. There’s no way I can know what it’s like.”


    “Oh. Yeah.” Arthur wasn’t bothered by it. Given the terms of the contract, the memories disappearing wasn’t surprising. The rate at which he forgot, the contract said, was mostly controlled by the rate he even cared to remember. But it was nicer than even that, like the System interpreted it in the softest way it could. “I can’t remember a lot of stuff these days. I remember how cars looked, but not how they worked. I can’t remember a single Earth weapon very well, but I don’t think I ever could. But other stuff I remember better.”


    “Like?”


    “Like hugging my mom. I can remember pretty much every time I ever hugged my mom. It’s foggy, but not in a way that gets rid of the important stuff about that. I can remember how food tasted. I can remember trips I took with my family,” Arthur said with a small smile on his face. “That stuff isn’t really going away. And that’s the stuff I’d care about if I lost.”


    “Ah. It sort of makes sense. The System is pretty nice, but it’s also… it’s like your memories are forged into a shape that makes sense for living here. You keep the nice stuff, you lose the horrors.”


    “There weren’t that many horrors,” Arthur said. “It was mostly okay.”


    “Arthur, you once told me your boss tried to make you work on your birthday. And you told him you were at your own party, and he still kept trying.”


    “Okay, there were some horrors,” Arthur said as the black of the night parted to admit a slip of blue walking towards him. “But nothing I’m not getting over.”


    Mizu shook her head as she drew closer.


    “Did you learn anything, Arthur? Did you figure out any puzzles up there in the sky?”


    “Um…” Arthur tried to pull some revelation out of thin air. It didn’t come. He stalled. “Maybe?”