Thereafter Chapter 11: Forgetting the Unforgettable
Our heroes wake up to the king of all hangovers, have breakfast and emphatically do not talk about what happened under the haze of alcohol.
Michael awoke in a strange place. No, that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t the place that was strange. As he blearily blinked the sleep out of his eyes he could recognize the blurry shape of the Exalted Room just fine. What was strange, however, was the situation he woke up to.
In a word, the situation was a tangle. Michael could feel limbs that weren’t his own over and under his own, and the dead weight of at least two bodies in deep repose. Whatever else had happened the night before, he had fallen asleep together with someone else. Multiple someones, actually.
As he began to extricate himself from the tangle, Michael realized the two someones were Alicia and Felipe. Judging by their shared state of dress, considerable skin contact had been at least one goal of the bundling, but he couldn’t say for sure what else.
Michael’s head hurt, a dull heartbeat throb behind his forehead that made the world swim around him as he scavenged for his street clothes on the floor and chairs of the Exalted room. He wasn’t sure it was quite bad enough to swear off alcohol forever, but it certainly was uncomfortable enough to consider the measure. Granted, Michael had been here before, and while he didn’t particularly cherish the feeling, he knew he’d be back some day. The particular powerful despair that often accompanied a bad hangover was one of the reasons, Michael figured, that he did not drink more. It was thus a mercy of a kind, these hangovers. A particular “Mother Theresa, pain is piety”-mercy but still, any port in a storm.
As he finished getting back into his own clothes, Michael started to realize the challenges inherent to his position. He had a killer headache, and he severely doubted painkillers existed in Thereafter. That said, his position wasn’t hopeless. If he could find some water to drink and maybe some food he could start the journey out of feeling like existence was pain and nausea was its deity.
On the door, someone had fastened a note reading “FOOD + WATER” and underneath an arrow that, upon further inspection, actually moved, animating like an arrow on a LCD screen might.
“Huh,” Michael said dully, it would seem that his capacity to be surprised for the day was already spent. “That’s strange.”
As he walked through the halls in the direction suggested by the arrow, Michael felt his limp more pronounced. It wasn’t that his knee hurt any more today, although granted it was plenty sore and stiff after the taxing day yesterday. It was more, Michael figured, that he allowed himself to limp. He wasn’t putting in the effort to appear fully functional. It was liberating in a way, but also made the situation clearer. He should get a cane, the aesthetics of the situation be damned.
The scrap of paper marked with “FOOD + WATER” and a rough smiley face that appeared to wink at regular intervals had been fastened to a heavy-looking wood door with something as normally incongruous as a thumbtack. Michael made mental note to ask Lex whether the thumbtacks were somehow indigenous to one of the ruined worlds or if they had a stash. Once he opened the door, though, all thoughts of such sensible questions fled his mind like shadows at sunrise.
In a word, Michael would describe the scene that laid out in front of him as pandemonium. The room was undoubtedly some sort of kitchen, the fire pit along the opposite wall, for the moment drenched in what appeared to be muddy water, made that clear. The fact that there was a pit dedicated to fire did not stop the fire that had made the right-hand counter its home, and in the middle of it all was Lex and some strange companions that nonetheless tickled a faint sense of recognition in Michael’s miserably throbbing mind.
Lex squatted on the floor, delivering some sort of sermon, if it wasn’t instruction to four small humanoid forms.
“And so we are not going to use our powers for this one, you understand? Only boring old Human Methods, hm? Now go help your siblings clean up the mess, shoo, shoo.”
The little creatures sprang into action, now that they moved, Michael’s eyes struggled to take in the nature of the things. They were, in the lack of a better word, elementals. One was shaped like a primitive parody of a bodybuilder out of soil and rocks, another like a whip-thin athlete made out of flame, yet another like a crone made out of water, and the last, more of a mini funnel cloud than a person per se. As Michael took in the little creatures, Lex noticed his ingress.
“Ah, you are alive I see,” They said.
“Alive or close enough to it,” Michael said. “What’s… uh.. Going on here?”
“Oh nothing much,” Lex brushed their hands off on their thighs and rose to their admittedly humble full height. “I’m just teaching the Empedoclings here to clean up after themselves.”
“Empedoclings, huh…” Michael said as he appraised the tiny elementals dutifully going on their business to clean the muddy water out of the fire pit and smack out the fire on the counter. “Like Empedocles, the elements guy?”
Lex made a noise that somehow brought to mind a contented cat.
“The very same,” They said. “Anyway, I summoned them last night… I’m pretty sure, the vodka fog is thick today.”
“Oh you can say that again,” Michael hesitated. “Things got… a little out of hand maybe?”
A quick feline grin passed over Lex’s face. “You’re talking about how we shared the couch, yes?”
“Yeah. I’m just trying to find out if, uh, anything happened… uh happened happened, you know?”
Michael didn’t have to ask. Lex knew what he meant, and they knew it well.
“Oh we didn’t fuck or anything. We were just very into the talk and got kinda cuddly, then we got a little hot so we took of some clothes off… I think. Can’t quite remember if anyone suggested it or if we just kinda happened like that.”
“Huh,”
“It’s cute, if not a little disappointing if you ask me. And to make it more complicated I have now become the caretaker of these little disasters.”
Lex motioned to the little elementals, attempting with little luck to sweep the mud out of the fire pit. Their sheer slapstick-y ineptitude made Michael think of an old cartoon, as every decision made by the little magical constructs was optimized to be as inoptimal as possible.
“So you can’t just, uh, unsummon them?” Michael asked.
“I’d rather not,” the lack of playful cynicism in Lex’ voice gave Michael pause. “It has implications I am not fond of.”
“How so?”
“Well, you remember I told you yesterday that magic works a bit like thoughts?”
Michael grimaced slightly as he tried to talk his throbbing brain into maybe doing some remembering. “I do recall hearing something like that yeah,”
“Right. You’re having a bit of a day so I won’t bore you with details, but these,” They motioned for the Empedoclings, currently attempting to stack up in such a way that they could wield a mop in any meaningful way, “are not like computers, they process data and learn like humans do, and the more complex a construct is, the faster it learns. More surface area for the learning to stick, you could say, and past a point it risks becoming an intelligence of sorts. It’s why I don’t like making anything more complicated than a magical fragmentation grenade. Once they get learning and experiencing it’s basically a small living thing right there. These jokers are about at the level of fancy rats at this point, what comprehension and personality is considered.”
“And so unmaking them would be akin to killing, then?”
“I suppose,” Lex said. “And although the lesser sciences don’t balk at such practices, I find it barbaric. So the funny little element men stay.”
“Fine by me,” Michael nodded at them, “But you might want to intervene unless you want mutual destruction to be a thing.” He had spotted the ill-fated attempt at going Voltron leading to some unexpected consequences, as the earth and water elements had started absorbing each other into some hideous mud amalgamation, and the intervention by the fire dancers and funnel clouds only further exacerbating the situation into a small, but perfect, storm of superheated mud.
Much to Michael’s surprise, unmaking the chaotic situation included no actual magic, or at least it didn’t much look like it did. Lex went to work seizing the attention of the empedoclings, eight in all, and talking them through the procedure of separating in such a way that they wouldn’t create further unintended chaos. It was a considerable contrast from the crazed sex goblin they’d been so far. Perhaps the inveterate perversion was a defense mechanism, if it wasn’t the professional sternness that was one. It was hard to tell some times what was mask and what was face, Michael thought.
Michael suddenly became aware that Lex was looking back at him, and it was clear that something was said, at some point, to him.
“Uh, what? Sorry, I was miles away.”
“I asked whether you needed a painkiller or something.”
“Oh, if you have one…”
“I’m always prepared for such matters, Lex said as they produced a crinkly blister pack 3/4ths full with white round pills from one of the many many pockets on their pants.
“Wouldn’t want to deplete your storage…”
“Literally don’t worry about it. Medicine is for taking, and I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with a spell or something for it soon.”
“Well in that case you’re a fucking lifesaver.”
With the empedoclings once again calmed down and the small but chaotic fruits of their labor was cleaned up, Michael found himself making breakfast with Lex. The kitchen and its adjacent pantry wasn’t stocked particularly well, but the things it did have, mainly dried meats of various origins and some sort of meal, Michael guessed oat but it was hard to tell with these things, it had in abundance.
“Producing food out of thin air isn’t very efficient,” Lex explained as they stirred the pot of porridge. “But duplicating food that already exists is comparatively simple.”
“So, whatever happens they won’t starve, I guess,” Michael peeked up from his job of making some sort of jerky charcuterie board.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Lex said with a sigh. “Duplicating already duplicated food leads to exponential risk of unwanted effects, so while we can double barrels of oats all day, that’s only good as long as that “original” barrel’s good. If it spoils, we’re shit out of luck.”
"So when you say… unwanted effects, how unwanted are we talking here?”
Lex shrugged.
“It won’t be anything big at first, but copies of copies will eventually lead to side effects. Some batches come out tasting a bit wrong maybe, some strains may be functionally inedible as all the carbs have been turned to cellulose, and it might be getting exponentially wilder until we’re sitting here eating disembodied eyeballs or whatever.”
“That’s Unwanted, yeah… that sounds about right,” Michael grimaced.
“I mean yeah, but it’s hard to say anything for sure because magic don’t work right these days. Well, it’s maybe more apt to say that it doesn’t work consistently.”
“How so?”
“Well, I don’t exactly have access to fantasy libgen, because that doesn’t exist. Getting data and prior research has been a nightmare,” Lex said, “but what seems to be happening is that various sources of magic from the destroyed worlds are kind of melding together, or reverting to some original form perhaps? I’m working on a model, but it’s a bit like trying to figure out Special Relativity in a world where nobody bothered to write down General Relativity.”
“Huh,” Michael said. “I’ll be honest I understood very little of that.”
“There are few who do,” Lex said, a thoughtful note in their otherwise irreverent tone.
“I guess that duplication problem is the reason it’s almost only food that preserves well in the pantry, huh?” Michael said.
“Uh-huh. They’re mostly scavenging from the detritus clouds outside of Thereafter still. There’s a plan to rely more on home-grown foods, but as you can imagine there are several problems with that,” Lex tasted the porridge and made a face that made it pretty clear that while it didn’t taste bad, there was an absence of good there that was offensive to them. “Good thing we won’t run out of sugar spice and everything nice anytime soon, though,” Lex said, reaching for one of the many, many jars that lined the kitchen wall.
“I’ll say. The spice trade economy must be in shambles,”
“Who’s in shambles?” A by now semifamiliar voice from the doorway spoke.
“Oh good morning beautiful goddess,” Lex trilled as they saw Alicia enter the doorway, looking only a little bedraggled. In fact, Michael thought, the slight disorder to her magnificent curls was even a kind of fetching look when combined with her sweats.
“We are, mostly,” Michael said. “There’s some water in the pitcher over there, Lex has painkillers if you need any.”
“Oh thank god,” Alicia said. “You two are angels sent from a loving god.”
“Be ye not afraid,” Michael said gravely, “For We bring good tidings.”
“And ibuprofen!” Lex chimed in, sounding decidedly like they were batting for the other team, theologically speaking.
The three were partway through Lex’ porridge and Michael’s finely curated cured meats when Felipe joined them. There was a swagger to his walk and manner that Michael assumed was put on. It had to be. Nobody could walk into a room looking like that much of a cocksure fuckboy and not intend it on some level. The sunglasses didn’t help, but Michael assumed those were there for a reason.
“Oh it smells like white people cooking in here,” Felipe said. “Your oat slop any better today?”
“It is a sublime pleasure like it always is to people who doesn’t still clutch at their mamas apron,” Lex answered. There was humor in it, but also an edge. This was a joke that was working its way towards mean and not funny, the only question remaining was who’d take the final step over into rancor. Michael filed it away under Potential Problems, a sizable filing cabinet of his mind.
“Now that we’re all here,” Michael said, twirling a stick of dried meat like a drumstick between his fingers. “I think we need to have a little talk,”
“Ooooh, someone’s in trouble…” Felipe mocked.
“Actually, Felipe, we’re all in trouble. I don’t know if you noticed it, but this place is a fucking powder-keg. People are desperate and scared. The world ended hundreds if not thousands of times over not a month ago, and now everyone is trying to get along while the question of where next week’s meals will be coming from are very much up in the air,” Michael didn’t intend to chide Felipe, but once the rebuke started he found it very hard to stop. Hell, part of him didn’t even want to stop it. “It’s… a tense and difficult situation, you know?”
“Yeah…” Felipe said, he looked away, or at least Michael assumed that’s what the slight head turn was meant to convey. “I get it.”
“So, you’re thinking about how we’re going to jump ship? Get home?” Lex asked.
Alicia shook her head, she had picked up on what Michael wanted to say already.
“No, you’re thinking how we’re supposed to help, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Michael conceded. “Maybe it’s stupid, but I kind of miss being a hero. Having a goal, having people rely on me, knowing, actually KNOWING, what was the right thing to do. Even if it was hard. Even if it was scary… you know?”
Silence fell over the rough wood breakfast table.
Alicia shrugged. “I’ve fought a real-life dragon,” she said. “How hard can this be.”
“I always did want the murder case I investigated to be a bit more complex and challenging…” Lex mused.
Felipe waited the longest before actually piping up. “I mean I guess I don’t have anything better to do…”
With this assent, the first breakfast of the Exalted Heroes ended amicably. As they started cleaning up after breakfast, the discussion turned to what their next steps would be. What opportunities and challenges they were facing, and how they were planning to keep the number of terrible mistakes they made to an absolute minimum. The conversation stayed as light as one can expect such talk to be, but engaged enough to last as they retreated to the Exalted main room. The conversation lasted up to the time where a knock on the door heralded the coming of an important guest, bearing succulent gifts, and an apology.
Author’s Note: Found a good spot to talk about magic at last. The exact mechanics of magic isn’t super important in book 1, but I figured it’d be good for the stakes to know a bit about what magic can and can’t do. Also I like Lex nerding out a bit. It’s challenging to write, but also fun.