What convinced Lucian wasn't, ultimately, that Lianelle couldn't remember her past. Sure, it was suspicious how all of her connections to anyone besides May had been cut or weakened, but that was only enough to push Lianelle so far. What convinced him that May was mind controlling his friend was Lianelle's lack of interest in being anywhere but by May's side. Lianelle didn't do that for anyone. She loved Katia with an intensity Lucian had hardly seen in any marriage, but she'd only visit Quiteria for a week at a time - never staying unless it was urgently required. When armies had been raised to fight the Magyar Lianelle had been there, but even then she'd ride off alone often, returning with news about how one village or another was now free. Seeing her relegated to a bodyguard and lover of someone she'd just met, with no apparent intention to ever leave, was... wrong. It wasn't Lianelle.
And so, this is how Lucian finds himself digging a hole in an unremarkable forest in west Austria. Well, digging several holes - the landscape's changed enough in the last 1200 years that it's difficult to locate the exact spot where he and his men, victorious but weary, buried the Magyar's artifacts that they could not understand the purpose of.
It's an hour before dark by the time he uncovers the chest, wood rotted through but items inside intact. He's not really sure this next step is going to work, but he's desperate and needs magic of his own, with only slight hints of how to gain it. Taking his phone, he creates images of the items inside, submitting them for display to the Pinterest repository of images. Some aspect of the physics beyond his ken slows the process beyond the tests he performed previously, but eventually he can cause his phone to recreate what he should be able to see himself, allowing him to read the magic words inscribed on each artifact. One in particular, a stone with just barely readable inscriptions and three rubies, seems promising.
He re-buries the other objects in a new location before reading aloud the words on the round white stone, the rubies sparkling as he does.
And then -
Lucien throws his arms behind his back in what feels in that instant like a futile attempt to prevent an attack. For some reason.
"I guess I don't really know what I was expecting. Not this anyways. Why are you both me?"
"... We're the same person from multiple worlds, and I am hazarding a guess that so are you? We're both named Lucien."
What if he were next to Isabella on the floor and also holding onto her tightly? That would be good.
"I cast a spell that was supposed to bring me to a place where I might find allies, if I understood the description correctly." He can show them the magic rock, which has only two gems remaining in addition to the inscription in ninth-century Aramaic.
"Stopping a powerful mage who is assembling a mind-controlled army of people with magic powers."
"How big an army are we talking, do I need to be calling every esper I know -"
"Currently it's only the mage May and her... ally Lianelle - a close friend of mine who I believe to be mind controlled and an extremely capable fighter - but the mage plans on resurrecting powerful espers at a rate of one a week or so. I'm not sure whether she's got around to any yet. She claims she's resurrecting espers for dungeoneering but I don't trust this given the mind control and suspicious circumstances in which she acquired her magic in the first place."
"This May character is amassing the army in a different universe with espers in it? Because this one has espers in it. Do the individuals match such that we can find the me there?"
"Different one, I'm guessing? I suppose I could be wrong and this could be the same one, actually. Also she resurrected me in the esper universe but hangs out in the one where mind control prevents people from noticing magic. She's planning on resurrecting someone named Tomorrowgirl, I don't know who else."
"We had a Tomorrowgirl. Unless offical reports are lacking she wasn't actually that impactful in spite of the name - Isabella here is a better precog than Tomorrowgirl was - but her partner was a big deal combat esper."
Nod.
"I don't really have much of a plan to take the mage on. I had a trove of magical artifacts confiscated from the evil mages I fought, most of them were horrible or confusing, but one of them promised to send me to another world with allies, and that's how I ended up here."
"There was a largely decayed book on magic for blinding people, and a powder that had something to do with reverse clouds."
"...reverse... clouds... Anyway, I'm Haru, that's Isabella, Isabella and her Lucien are from, you were calling it Eclipse -?"
"Yes, we've got non-esper magic there, it hits harder at the high end and it's more flexible in the long term but the odds that any particular weird thing people don't already do all the time can get done in the near term is nil. Also we can't get there at the moment, we got here in two consecutive freak accidents via a different planet."
"I'm from Aragon in the 9th century after christ. Specifically the Aragon in the non-esper world with the magic veil I mentioned."
Isabella did the introducing for him, which is good because talking still seems kind of hard.
"Spain. You're maybe remembering Catherine of Aragon who was queen of England."
"I spent a lot of time in what I believe is now France, and in lands further east, helping to coordinate armies."
Nod. Lifeline's read about the Second World War - sometimes fighting is really the best option you have.
"I think her magic is limited, and she didn't think I'd be a threat? I don't have my own magic, I'm unfamiliar with the modern world, and my closest friend Lianelle no longer trusts me nearly as much as she once did - though she did still remember me enough to mention me to May."
"Okay, so, how does her magic work - is there a way to take it, I'd certainly like to have Tomorrowgirl and Chaos back in action the next time there's a confluence. Or to undo the mind control surreptitiously, since she's apparently got decent taste in who to resurrect."
"The magic allows her to do a variety of things, with limitations on how long it takes May to acquire enough magical energy to do so, as well as backlash she claims to need Lianelle to remove. My understanding is that she acquired the magic by winning a fight to the death with six other mages, though I'm not certain of some of the details, including how she entered the tournament in the first place. The tournament was supposed to recur every quarter century, but the mage found a way to prevent that and keep the power for herself."
"I suppose killing her and waiting for the tournament to happen again might work for taking the magic, if you were willing to wait that long. I don't know how to undo the mind control surreptitiously."
"Oh, and all of this is based on what the mage and Lianelle told me, so it may not be entirely reliable."
"May is an esper? Or this is backlash from your world's magic system and they just use the same term?"
"She claims to be an esper and from a world containing those rather than the world with the magic tournament I and Lianelle are from."
"And she's using her power to interface with your system somehow? Do you know what her power is?"
"Unfortunately I don't, assuming she in fact has one and isn't using it as an excuse to keep Lianelle nearby."
"I can at least tell you that it's a real esper thing to need other people to get rid of backlash from power use. If that's what's going on she wouldn't need any specific person, but it often works out almost that way for various reasons." He pats the back of Lifeline's hand.
"Getting rid of backlash feels nice and people have predictable reactions to a recurring need to touch a specific other person as much as possible in a way that feels nice. But there's no strong underlying tendency for someone who's backlash-compatible to also be personality-compatible or sexual-orientation-compatible or lifestyle-compatible in any other way. My last partner and I did not speak to each other at all because her backlash made her averse to social interaction, all I tended to see of her was her feet."
"You're going to need a codename, pet, you can't just coast on Lifeline having one any more. - my Lucien and I are also dating and also have magic powers but we aren't espers and we are from a universe where romance tends to work differently."
She pulls out her phone to start checking ideas for collisions on Racehorse.
"We care way less about what gender people are and we have a different thing instead which is only moderately correlated with gender. I'm his dom and he's my sub. It's my job to take care of him and his job to do whatever I say. Plenty of subs talk more than this but he's feeling shy, it would seem." Pet pet.
"I'm pretty sure it's fine and he's just different from us - or at least me - along some relevant axis."
The Lucien question leans into his doms pets and gives a thumb up to his alts.
"Also sometimes he's talking to me telepathically and you just don't hear it."
Lucien nods in agreement.
... Possibly he should say words, but his brain is still returning that only telepathy works right now, so he's not going to try.
"Do you have the range on divination to get stuff about other worlds, pet?"
"He says not yet. - espers have fixed power sets, eclipsed don't, we can teach ourselves to do anything from the appropriate half of possible magics, my Lucien and I are both psions which means we do things without physical effects. Information, illusion, etcetera."
"Yes, but it would take plausibly years to get usable and it would really help to know more about it."
Nod.
"I can tell you more about what tipped me off to the mind control if that would help, though if it takes years, a different plan might be preferable."
"I think more information is worth having whether or not the psions are going to psion at it."
"That seems reasonable. The most immediately obvious piece of evidence that Lianelle's mind had been tampered with was that she didn't remember her wife at all. Later, I realized that she's also missing quite a lot of her memories of me, which paints a picture of her being cut off from emotional connections other than the one she's formed with May. Lianelle was also far more deferential to May than I'd seen her be with anyone - she agreed to stay with her rather than go and run dungeons extremely easily, which is wildly out of character for her. She also seemed uninterested in having her memories restored."
"You're from the ninth century and you're cool with a woman having a wife?"
"I take it that such behavior is still considered rather out of the ordinary now?"
"Depends where you are in the world. But it's a historically recent development even here and this country was an early adopter of same sex marriage."
"Oh, is there a reason I missed for why woman getting married isn't basically harmless that explains why it took so long to be allowed?"
"We don't have an exact analogue to this. I guess it's sort of comparably controversial for subs to marry subs and doms to marry doms but it's never been impossible to just have one of them lie. Obligatory at times, even, back when people didn't think women could be doms or men could be subs."
"Well, it seemed to help some with Lianelle's insistence on seducing men to her bed and I've never found religion a particularly good guide to make decisions by anyways."
"I'm gonna start putting away the board games, I don't think they're getting played today."
Isabella just fell on the floor and it's not even a multiperson job to begin with so she just taps her cane on the ground thoughtfully. "Can you explain more about the spell that got you here?" she asks Lucian of Aragon.
"It's supposed to take you to a world with allies, and it's capable of returning you to the world you last were in. There are two uses left and it's only one person each time, so we'll have to be really careful who we send."
"Two uses left? It's - consumable charges or something? I mean, if Lifeline works across worlds - I can check that, if the spell doesn't itself take too long to cast or take effect - we can get more use out of it that way, but it's - weird that it's so limited use."
"There are rubies on it that get consumed - I'm not sure if it's just those rubies or some other magic they are involved in. It can be cast in a couple of seconds and takes effect instantly."
"Then I'll be able to check if Lifeline'll be able to pull people across if we send him first, that's within my precog range."
"Should I be buying some labgrown rubies to see if they work as charges?"
"It seems worth trying, a labgrown ruby is pretty cheap. How big, can I see?"
Lucian hands over the stone - the two remaining rubies are both quite small, and there's an obvious indent where a third could go.
"You can buy most things that are for sale on the internet, and we can make rubies artificially these days so they aren't that expensive."
"They've actually been around since my time - though I guess that's still the future for you. The main way people can tell that something is a synthetic ruby is that it's too flawless. I actually have one somewhere, give me a minute."
Lifeline returns from his room a minute later with a ruby the size of a toddler's fist.
"I had one back in the past and bought a new one once I started making esper money. It's a bit silly, I know, but I thought it was just such a neat technology and missed my old one."
"Well, fortunate you went for ruby instead of moissanite or opal or something."
"We can see if this one gets along with the magical thingamabob. It's probably too big, so I shouldn't cancel my order if it's not, but -" Will the thing react interestingly to the giant ruby at all?
"You'll have to explain later, when we aren't figuring out how to stop an evil mage."
"The correctly sized ruby won't appear till Monday, and our most promising avenues for accomplishing anything once we've traveled to your world that we've thought of so far probably route through the psions picking up new powers over the next several months to years. I think you should probably not spend the entire intervening time in emergency mode, though of course if there is more you want to tell us about the evil mage or more questions you have about the resources at our disposal go right ahead."
There appears a person.
"Lucian?" she asks, and then she double- and triple-takes at the surplus bearers of that name.
Oh, he's not asking permission, he's reaching through her hand, grabbing the sword, and pulling that too through her hand as it disappears, all in one motion.
She can react pretty quickly, but in this particular case that doesn't actually help. She tries to kick the invisible attacker, hopefully hard enough to send them at the couch a few feet away without injuring them even if they are otherwise a baseline human.
Nope. He doesn't want her to touch him. He scoots back a few inches in the air, evading the kick.
Lucian doesn't really want to get into an argument with the person who is probably doing mind control... on the other hand, if he has a shot at persuading Lianelle to back down then that's probably the best way out of this.
"You act significantly differently in a few key ways that seem designed to make you more willing to obey May than you otherwise would be."
"-it's not just that! It's that your okay letting May make decisions for you and you're perfectly content to stick around as her bodyguard rather than going off fixing things on your own - that's... that's not being you."
"If I were mind controlling Lianelle to make her more convenient why would I have resurrected you? - also who are these other people! Two more yous and also a random other person, where are we?"
"They can't see me," Haru clarifies, now standing behind them to make that cheaper, still holding the sword.
"I thought you resurrected me as a test before resurrecting powerful espers."
"Billions of people have lived and died! I could have resurrected someone who knew more useful things about magic! I could have resurrected Kareem Husain Fathi! Or Edward Jenner! I could have brought back Norman Borlaug! Twice! I picked you because you were Lianelle's friend. It was also useful to have a test run but it's not like resurrecting you tells me anything about whether an esper will keep their powers."
"Non-esper who was big in coordinating the espers that kept Egypt from going the way of Indonesia. Who are you?"
"I remember you! Quite a lot! Even if I don't remember as much of you as you remember of me. You're the only person from my past I talked about with May."
[I'm not sure if it's a good time to ask her but Lianelle sure does look like the person who came over and petted our chillo, right?]
[Isabella, the one with the chillo. You know how my Lucien's like a copy of the one going by Lifeline? There's a copy of you here and Traceless just had to steal her sword because she and her - I'm not sure how I should parse the relationship, her associate - are acting pretty hostile, and if you'd be willing to hop on a video call this could conceivably help anything.]
[Lemme check with my agent ... okay, no hostages left in here, I can call, though I'll have to end it if that changes.]
[Thanks. Can you call me so it looks a little less sketch?] She provides her number.
Here is a video call of Lia, just emerging from a dungeon.
"Hiyah-oh other me!"
"In addition to Luciens, we've got one of her too! Does that help anything?"
"This new Lucien dropped in on our game night from yet another universe," she says, pointing the phone at New Lucian. "Complaining that his friend Lianelle," point, "was acting suspicious and he thought this was because she was mind controlled by this person, May." Point. "May and Lianelle deny this and I wondered if you'd have any light to shed on what somebody who's your alternate universe duplicate should be acting like."
Lucian can summarize the reasons he thought she was mind controlled - the memories, the accepting sticking around May, deferring to May, not being desperate about wanting to go on independent adventures, etc.
"... well, it certainly sounds like you have correctly identified things that it would be very weird for me to do."
"Sounds sort of like you're in some respects a different person than me, even if you have some things in common? Is that how having an alternate self normally works?"
"The Luciens don't match in every respect, mine keeps weirding out Lifeline." (Pet pet.) "But that seems arguably different from Lianelle having changed over time."
"I'm not denying she's changed over time! Probably she has, it's been centuries! I'm saying I didn't do it!"
"I'm pretty sure that even if I lived centuries I wouldn't be happy about staying with one person all the time and not being able to go on adventures on my own."
"I tried to figure out how to put her missing memories back but the magic user interface wouldn't play ball. I don't know why, I was introduced to this magic system only recently and all the magic people I've met besides Lianelle suck and she's not really a nerd about it."
"Um. Is it possible that the memories won't go because she's not the same person who lived in the past and knew Lucian?"
Apparently his early work in identifying individuals extends well to this.
"Yeah, Lucian knew a different person."
"Can whoever stole Lianelle's sword give it back now? I think she's rather attached to it."
"...I don't find that a satisfying answer. You can have your sword back when you're departing my house."
"... I don't actually expect it to make a difference in any fight, but okay."
She leans on May and tears up a bit.
"Um, can you resurrect the original Lianelle?"
"I probably can but she's presumably going to want - her - wife, who also might want people, and - I'm leaning on knowably limited chains when I'm triaging espers -"
Yeah it can totally bring Lianelle the human back to life for the standard one-week cost.
"Probably sometimes? I have to mostly hang out in the world where the Spring is from or it won't refill properly and I'll fall behind my planned resurrection timeline."
"We should test my power to see if it works across worlds - if so, it'd make transporting more people much easier, unless your transportation method scales well on its own."
"It takes passengers but I have to go along every time. What's your power?"
(Whatever it is, it's compatible with Haru, who is cozying up to him with all of his non-sword-holding extremities.)
Mm, he has a great boyfriend.
"I can tag people and then later cause them to zoom to my location through obstacles, even if they're in a dungeon, to my location. My tags are also contagious, so I can have someone else go do the tagging while I stand somewhere safe."
"That's a pretty good power. Are you an esper or some otherworldly thing?"
"Tags only last a few hours, but I can safely manage a couple hundred people or so during that time with some guiding."
"Oh, and this will be even more efficient if the other esper world has another alternate of me."
"In that case, you'd find me in Toronto under the name Lifeline - assuming everything went exactly the same. If there isn't an alternate Haru, or I didn't get attacked by a mysterious creature a century ago, it would be different. Though in either case googling my name, Lucien Sulzberger, would work to check if I was even born there."
"The codename was my idea, probably he wouldn't be called Lifeline."
"I think I might have heard about it if there was somebody who'd time-traveled back home."
"It was pretty recent here, if it's not the same time of year that would do it."
"But if the first name's all I can expect will surely match it's kinda needle in a haystack and anyway if he's an esper his name might well not be public."
"Possibly the useful thing would be to search for is my power, since that's what we want regardless."
"But of course then we'd miss any of you who haven't awakened yet. Or who have different but also useful powers, the way he does," gesturing at Isabella's Lucien. "- hey, May, just out of curiosity -" He holds out a fist.
She reaches in his direction. "Well, with at least one of you I'm -" She makes contact with Haru.
"I'm fine, he's just the least compatible person I've ever felt, worse than Dovetail -"
"Oh, I think you're compatible with me, enough to notice at a distance, did you not feel it when I was going for the fistbump with him?"
"Kay, if other not-quite-me is still planning on being there in like, six hours, I will come and give her a hug."
"These people kind of showed up uninvited in my silo and I don't super want them to still be here in six hours, that's past my bedtime."
"I don't want to linger here, it's costing me magic. How about we have some nice civil meeting where nobody's response to being resurrected from the dead is to go plot my downfall, some time in the future, at my and Lianelle's place in her world."
"I confess there was too much uncertainty for me to have a schedule of my own, but I don't actually have future plans anyway."
"I think this one for the time being, if one of my alternate selves will host me."
"Okay. Did you settle up with your landlord before you went to Europe or do I need to do that for you?"
"I wasn't sure whether I would return - can you? I'm uh. Sorry for the misunderstanding."
"Yeah, I can do that. Also if you wanted to pay me back for your ridiculous roaming in Europe phone bill sometime that would be cool, I was not really expecting that when I got you a phone and it's mildly annoying to move my money from home to your world. - which now that there are this many worlds I'm going to go ahead and name Artesian."
"Oh I didn't know they did that - I'll pay you back as soon as I am able."
Her schedule is pretty open what with how she lives in a world where she has no ongoing projects so she can do a cool thing about once a week, so sure!
"That's not really the level on which I have a problem with you waving a sword at me and my boyfriend and my houseguests during our board game night but we don't have to get into it. Buh-bye."
"About, what, being a legend-based amended copy of the historical Lianelle? Yeah! I don't know what I'd be feeling in your position either."
"I think it's not just legend and that my - her - personality and memories were changed to make me a better champion for my summoner."
"...I might want some time to go adventuring on my own. Maybe. If the spring lets you allow that."
Spring, can Lianelle get more distance from her - potentially even interworld -
One year if she wants Lianelle to never have any leash, a day to allow Lianelle to range wherever she wants for a month, and three times that for interworld.
Not if she's in the world they connect to and they are normal three-dimensional dungeons.
She'd start feeling a strain and then eventually discorporate if she didn't leave quickly.
Does the cost scale proportionally, like, can she buy Lianelle six hours for twelve minutes?
"Getting you time to go do stuff by yourself isn't that expensive per hour. I can buy you time to go do a dungeon as long as it's not four-dimensional - that's harder because it's farther away - without me along, while I'm visiting my parents and Cricket so we're in the right world to go into a dungeon from in the first place, and it'll cost less than the time I spend visiting them does in lost magic absorption. Easily worth it. If you have something else in mind the cost goes up proportionally and getting you free of the range limit forever would cost a whole year of absorption. Fifty-two resurrections."
Spring, can she time-delay this so there can be guiding right away when she copes with having done magic and not be burning Lianelle's off-leash time...