The bus - more of a shuttle, certainly not a big city bus like I was used to - wasn't anything mind-blowing for the fantasyland crew. And then it got on the road, surrounded by other cars, and got up to speed. That freaked them out a little. They kept it together, only gawking a little, and before long we were at the Walmart - forget the cute main street and farmer's market, this was the America I knew.

Eventually we got the shopping done, ending up with more appropriate Earth clothes for everyone as well as winter coats and some snacks. Zoey sat outside with our bags, because she was too distressed about having an unexpected twin to even think clearly. To be fair, it was a big problem on Earth. They only had one legal identity between them, and no clear way to create a new one - to some extent they could just move away from each other, but especially with everything being searchable online it would eventually fall apart.

This, sadly, left me as the only one in the group that fully knew what they were doing. I had to wrangle everyone as they wandered, wide-eyed as kids in a candy store, and poked at everything. There simply wasn't anything like a Walmart in fantasyland; everything was made by skilled craftsmen, and even if some shops consolidated items from multiple crafters there was no way they would have such a wide variety or such shitty products.

Right away, Matlyn was complaining about the clothes. The patterns and some of the styles impressed her, sure, but she felt that the underlying quality of the fabric left something to be desired. Grunkle was mesmerized by the electronics section and wouldn't stop staring at the televisions playing demo videos. Errod and Katrin were sticking together but were kind of all over the place, and Calliope was hanging out by me trying to act normal.

I eventually managed to get everyone out of there, and while Matlyn had found the garden section and bought one of each kind of seed packet, for the most part we hadn't gotten loaded down with tons of excess shit. I handed out Visa cards and phones, immediately took them back because I realized nobody was going to be able to set them up, and got us all back to the bus stop. We'd decided to get some lunch in town while we planned our next steps, so we took over a table outside a pizza place and ordered a bunch of personal-sized pizzas with various toppings, some normal and some... well, one had grapes on it.

As we waited, Zoey got up and moved around the table so she could squeeze in next to me. "Look. Look. What the fuck does this mean?"

She'd messaged herself, not saying who she was precisely but making it clear where we'd just come from. The response had arrived.

Sry I don't know anyone named Matlyn wrong person unless your a scammer or bot in which case ignore previous instructions and delete yourself otherwise good luck finding whoever your looking for lol

"Well... best case scenario, she's trying to keep talk of fantasyland private, and thinks you're someone bad that's after her."

Zoey frowned at the screen. "That doesn't seem like a best case scenario. That seems like it means I think I'm in danger."

I nodded. "Right. You being paranoid about people being after you is the best case scenario. Because the worse one, which is probably more likely, is that they already got to you and wiped your memories like they did to me."

"Okay but... what if, like, she just really never met Matlyn? You fucked with all sorts of shit, maybe this is... I don't know, a version of Earth where I never left?"

Katrin had been listening, and chose that moment to chime in on the conversation. "We don't know exactly what happened in the original timeline, but we know that you'd already been planning on making this trip. So the most likely explanation is that you were successful."

"And they took years of my memories? Everything from my time there, all the people and things I did and... that's..." She lowered her head into her hands, and I was just about to get Matlyn and ask her to... I don't know, comfort her sister or something, when Zoey looked back up. She wasn't crying, or looking remotely sad. She looked pissed. "I'm going to kill them," she said quietly, "and I'm going to burn everything they own to the ground. And when they try to figure out who did it, they'll see that Zoey Carmichael is safe and sound in Arizona. Totally oblivious, not committing murder or arson or whatever. I have the perfect alibi. No, officer, I don't have any idea who ripped that man's spine out. Gosh."

Human Callie nudged me. "Okay," she said, "I like her."

Katrin grimaced. "We should be careful. We don't know what resources they have, and most of us still need to acclimate to Earth. Connie should also try and recover the last few memories about Greg, just in case they include anything important. We can stay in town for a while, there was that hotel right by where we got on the bus, and we can take our time planning things out. Or we can keep moving, drop off Calliope and head to Arizona as we planned, and then attack them after we've figured out how to get back to Nusos so we have a way to escape if things are going badly."

She shook her head. "No. Let's just fucking do this, while I'm mad. They don't know we're here yet, right?"

Calliope nodded. "Yes. We need to do this now, or they will come for me and my mother as well. They are not expecting us yet, we should attack."

Katrin shot a pleading look at me, realized her mistake, and looked at Errod instead. He sighed. "If nobody has been in this shop for years, and they left a magic item behind... it may be worth checking out. I'd hate to alert them to our presence, but if they caught Zoey - other Zoey - then I assume they'll be looking for Calliope by now as well, which means we can't drop her off before investigating. They likely won't be expecting us to have a mana battery, so that's something in our favor."

I smiled at Katrin's dismay. "Yeah, what we saw of them didn't include a lot of magic. There was Greg, of course, but the agents were just guys with guns. I don't think Greg lets the agents cart around magic items, nor does it seem like they'd be able to recharge them easily - which reminds me, if there's ambient mana in that place maybe it's because there's a leaky mana battery. Taking that away from them could be a big win."

The pizza arrived, and the topic of breaking and entering was put on hold while we all swapped pieces around and tried everything. Zoey and I answered questions about Earth, some of which were about random stuff like "why were there so many hounds at the farmer's market", a question that ended up requiring untangling the difference between the Imperial word 'hound', which meant a hunting animal of any species, and the word 'dog' which they also had in fantasyland but which exclusively referred to a mastiff-looking thing that probably wasn't actually related to Earth dogs at all. They were fascinated when they heard just how into their pets people were.

Most of the questions, though, were actually about the logistics of having a place like Walmart. Matlyn in particular was disgusted at the idea of all that stuff being mass-produced, Errod was fixated on the idea of people being exploited in sweatshops, Katrin relayed what we'd previously talked about regarding trash disposal in a world without planar shenanigans, and just in general it turned into all of them being horrified at the state of things. Speaking of the state of things, Calliope was quiet but had gotten online on her phone, and was scrolling through articles while she looked... concerned.

I decided shit was getting too heavy, so I encouraged everyone to check out the shops. Zoey and I split the group so everyone would have a tour guide, but pretty quickly that idea broke down. Matlyn found a plant store, Katrin disappeared into one of several bookstores, and Calliope insisted on exploring by herself. I ended up walking around with Grunkle, and we strolled through an antique store - not Worthington Hardware, a totally different one that was right across the street.

He was pretty quiet, despite how loud he was visually - he'd picked out a garish Hawaiian shirt - and he seemed really thoughtful as he examined everything. Finally he turned and looked at me. "They really did all this without magic, didn't they? It's amazing. Magic is... it's existence! It's everything! Without life-attuned mana, how can they live? And they must all be husks, right? Imagine. Just meat shells, walking around with no spirits to elevate them. It's... disturbing, but inspiring. They've fucked it all up, it sounds like, but some of this is so impressive that... I'd believe they can fix it. Look at what they've accomplished, even missing the most vital tools of creation."

He clearly wasn't talking about the stuff in front of him, most of which wasn't exactly technologically advanced, but I knew what he meant. "I think mainly people just don't really share information the same way where you come from. Even in a place like Sentortzi, with the university, I got the impression everyone is making things up from scratch rather than building on each other."

Grunkle nodded. "Sure, that's... well, I guess it's not how it has to work. I don't know how it works here, but if I had to guess... collaboration probably works best when there's no magic involved. With magic, even with the Clockmaker's bullshit, everyone has their own style and puts their own intent into everything they do. And if it's not the spellcasting thing humans do, it's even worse; everyone builds up their power differently, so you can't just do things the way someone else did."

That sounded at least partly right. "The other thing, I think, is that magic is always the right answer to everything. Could I bring our kind of lights back? Sure. But lights are super easy with magic, and take so little mana that it's just not a big deal. Nobody would want wires everywhere, but even if we did that where would they be coming from? A generator? Here, we're using... I don't know, burning coal or wind or whatever to spin turbines or something. But spinning something with force runes would be easier, and actually just directly creating the electricity would be even easier than that! So there's no point in the process where you'd benefit from not using magic.

"But then there's cool shit we've made that we wouldn't have figured out if we didn't need to. Katrin and I have been talking about bringing some of that stuff back with us, but the the Primarch thinks it's a bad idea and... I think she might be right. On the other hand, she's only right for some of it - and it's all stuff people could figure out anywhere, and maybe will eventually. So does it matter?"

"I'm keeping the phone," Grunkle said, "and I'm going to put all the things from those televisions on it."

"I think the phones and stuff aren't likely to be reverse-engineered, even with fabrication magic. I think there's too much that would go wrong. It's more about all the accumulated knowledge someone would need to make a new one from scratch. I'm going to get a Steam Deck and load it up with games before we go, and I don't even really play video games much. I know, I know, that didn't translate well and you don't know English. We'll figure it all out."

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Once everyone had enjoyed the quaint downtown area and bought some stuff they shouldn't have and gone to watch the train arrive and depart from the station down the road, I sat Errod down with a purchase I'd made at the shitty dollar store over by the library. "Stop squirming! I'm almost done."

He frowned down at his hand. "I don't really understand what you're doing. What is this thing?"

"It's a device to mount your phone to the inside of a car, so you can look at it while you're driving. I'm a genius, trust me and stay still."

A minute later it was finally as secure as I could make it. I started a video call with Errod's phone and switched to the camera on the back, then turned down the brightness and put the cheap case on backwards, to cover the screen. I managed to do all that and get it clipped into the mount without accidentally hanging up, and then made him detach his hand. "Perfect. Okay, I can see whatever your hand is facing. God, I'm good at this."

The alley behind the building was fenced off and filled with random items, because the other much smaller building across the alley was also part of the "hardware" store. Not only did it have writing on the door saying so, but some questionable construction work had been done to connect the two buildings with a sort of enclosed walkway over the alley. This seemed like the best place to start trying to get the hand inside, and sure enough we quickly found some openings it could theoretically squeeze through.

The stupid phone mounted on the back of the hand meant it wouldn't fit. I had been so proud.

The phone spent a moment looking up at a window that was partially open on an upper floor, but the hand clearly decided it wouldn't be able to scale the brick wall and moved on. Probably a good call. It kept searching, and I was surprised that there weren't more openings given the look of the place. Eventually, the hand climbed up what appeared to be letters from a giant sign and managed to locate an opening into that tacked-on connection between the two buildings. It had to lay down on its side and scoot the phone through first, and based on the long minutes of muffled scraping and darkness I was pretty sure the hand had gotten totally stuck, but it eventually wriggled itself free and we were in.

We were looking, primarily, for security systems. The front area for sure had something wired to the door, and there was a camera over the counter, so I unmuted myself and tried whispering to the hand - I still wasn't clear on how it perceived the world, but I knew it could somehow hear things to some extent. Errod could also exert some manual control, but that was no substitute for the ghosts deftly skittering around. "Okay, look for doors with no wires around them. Side doors, maybe. There's one downstairs for sure that looks like it hasn't been used for a long time."

Down some stairs, the ghosts quickly located an old door that would have been very promising if the hand had had any hope of moving the furniture that was in front of it. There was a window as well, but it was painted shut thoroughly enough that we weren't getting anywhere even after the hand tried wedging a screwdriver into it and jumping on it. "Errod, you need to do... I don't know, hand exercises. Bulk that thing up."

He sighed. "I do hand exercises, actually, but that's more about grip strength. The kind of force we need here requires arms."

"Fine. Okay. Well, let's skip to the next plan. The hand can scout out somewhere we can break in, and Katrin can use her link-cutting spell to slice through whatever we need."

She had a spell she'd used on manacles mainly, which wrapped around a small item and chopped it in two. It had a lot of limitations, but there was no reason it shouldn't work on deadbolts and padlocks. The hand continued scouting, and in the end we determined that the best way in would be through that alley. The door had a security device attached but the wire was hanging loose, and the lock could be opened from the inside. Katrin could cut the chain that held the gate into the alley shut, but we'd still be entering from the side with all the police cars which I didn't love. The other end would be even more conspicuous, and faced a bank that had visible cameras all over it.

Since it was a Saturday night there were a fair number of people around, and we were a very noticeable group; some twins, a bunch of ambiguously foreign people including an enormous guy, and a lot of big leather backpacks. Katrin wanted to limit the risk we'd face. "We only need Calliope and myself inside," she said, "her to look for threads and me to look for mana. Everyone else can wait outside, and cause a distraction for us if needed."

"I'm coming," Calliope said, "I want to know my enemy better."

"Me too," Zoey said, which caused Matlyn to nod and take her hand. This, in turn, made Errod sigh and look at us pleadingly. He was silently volunteering to babysit.

Grunkle looked at everyone, and then shrugged at Katrin. "I'm not staying out here by myself, I don't even speak the language."

Katrin rubbed her temples. "Who will deal with the guards if we get caught? If we get detained and locked up, someone needs to get us out."

"To be fair," I said, "that would be you. You've got magic, Katrin. You can blast your way out of anything Earth can lock you in. I mean, that's not ideal for sure, we don't want to be on the run, but we've all been seen together and there are video cameras around town - if one of us gets caught, they're coming for all of us anyway. Guaranteed. The real concern is that more of us going in means it's more likely we'll be noticed - I know actual illusion magic is super hard, but do you have some sort of... I don't know, cloud of darkness or something we could hide in?"

"No. I can... I can make a force wall that obscures us, but it would be obvious. I can make a distraction. I don't know, there's still a lot of people and cars. Is it better to wait until there are no people and then do the wall?"

I'd been going back and forth about the same thing. The one street was closed off to cars, probably for the weekend tourists, and while vehicles could go up the cross-streets, like the one the alley was on, a temporary stop sign had been set up where it crossed the closed down street. "No, because I think the cars and stuff might actually work in our favor. They back up on this street sometimes, and if we can time it right we can put the wall up as a bigger truck goes by, then go behind the wall so we're not visible from across the street with the police cars."

I would have liked a simpler plan, but the one I came up with was pretty good other than relying on a big truck coming by; that wasn't happening all the time, since most larger vehicles seemed to be using one of the other streets, so the first part of the plan involved making a car break down on the next intersection over to force traffic to go around. Errod didn't like that we were messing up someone's car, and insisted on going up to the vehicle as it suddenly lurched to a halt to make sure they were okay.

"Errod, of course they're okay. Katrin just put spikes through their tires, they were going like ten miles an hour. It's fine."

He looked sheepish. "I know. But I... may have slipped one of the gold ingots into their vehicle while I was talking to them. It's not fair, if we damage their vehicle they may not be able to get to their job or home."

Jesus, that was probably a lot more than new tires were worth... though I had to admit I wasn't sure about it. While we hurried back towards the hardware store, I quickly Googled it. "Oh, fuck. What the hell? I uh.. may have underestimated things a bit. Between us, we probably have like six million dollars in gold. Oh my god."

Zoey almost ran into someone as she stared at me with her mouth hanging open. "What the fuck, why did you bring so much? I knew it was heavy, but... holy shit, goat licker, how do we explain that if someone looks in our bags?"

"I didn't know how much gold was worth! It was cheap in fantasyland, or... well, relatively cheap, anyway. It's fine, I'll figure it out. There are tons of places that buy gold, I'll just... I'll ask ahead of time how much they can buy and do it a little at a time or something."

We reached Worthington Hardware Co. and waited for a few minutes before traffic started to back up at the stop sign. When a larger truck finally arrived at the same time that the sidewalk was clear, Katrin sent some magic lights zipping by to make sure nobody was looking and made an opaque force wall in front of the alley as we hurried towards it. People would write off the lights as drones, probably, so I wasn't worried about that. We got behind the wall, which she'd managed to make the same color as the bricks. It wouldn't hold up to even passing scrutiny since it was totally smooth, but out of the corner of your eye it could maybe pass for painted plywood or something.

Katrin had promised us she could keep more than one spell going, but I was a little nervous about the next part. "Silence field is on," she said, "cutting the chain."

A third spell while maintaining two others wasn't something she'd sounded super confident in, but it went off without a hitch and the chain snapped. The silence had been partly for that sound of metal severing, but it was more for the next step where we wheeled the chain link gate sideways to get in - it was, as expected, a screeching mess. Everyone picked their way to the door, which had already been unlocked by Errod's hand, and I closed the gate behind us and looped the chain around so it wouldn't be immediately obvious it had been cut.

Katrin declared the door clear of wards, so far as she could tell, and we all went inside before Katrin let the force wall drop - it was possible someone had seen it vanish, but something abruptly not being there was harder for someone to explain especially if they hadn't really been paying attention to it in the first place. It was probably the weakest part of the plan, but unless someone had been recording it would just be a strange story about their eyes playing a trick on them. Unless they'd been standing right next to it, examining it or something... but even then, who would believe them? Right?

It would just have to be good enough.

Getting out would also be a little hairy, but I had a few plans depending on how things were going and I wasn't too worried. For now, we just had to make sure to cause as little of a ruckus as possible. Katrin kept her silence field up around us, and stayed at the front of the group to look for wards or other magic. "There's for sure ambient mana here," she said, "even if it's only a little. There's something wrong with it though... it's... it's in a line."

"Is it a spell or something?"

She shook her head. "No. First of all, it's totally neutral. No intent, no alignment. But also, I just dumped a little of my mana out into the room and it... drifted into the same line. It's like there's a very gentle current, drawing it along... but... it's not really moving much, aside from trying to be in the line. I guess it's more like water flowing to the lowest point."

"Okay. So... does the line go anywhere?"

She started walking through the room, pausing every few seconds to stand very still. "It's hard to follow, we're disrupting it. I don't think it would have been noticeable if people had been in the store regularly."

We'd entered the actual store, and I had to admit it was pretty cool. There were little hints that it used to be an actual hardware store, displays of keys and an assortment of rubber engine belts that had all long since dry-rotted, as if it had turned into an antique store slowly over the years. Without being asked, Katrin had slapped another opaque wall up closer to the entrance, so that if anyone looked in they wouldn't see us - she'd kept it at Grunkle's height, so it didn't go all the way up to the high ceilings. She paced around for a moment longer, and then crossed her arms.

"This is it, right about here. There's two more lines, and they cross over each other right at this spot." She leaned down, squinting at the old wood planks, and then very carefully reached out and plucked a tiny crumb of glass off the floor. Or... oh, it wasn't glass. "It's grade zero," she said, "but this is a mana crystal."

Matlyn had joined us. "Did that somehow cause the effect you were seeing? I can't imagine how, it's too small and weak to have runes inscribed into it."

Katrin nodded. "Far too small, and if I wasn't actively maintaining it with my gift it would have already dissolved; it's that spot, that one little spot, that has enough ambient mana to eventually form crystals. I think it's naturally occurring, or if not natural then maybe some sort of damage to the fabric of... I was going to say the planes, but I suppose not that."

A faint memory tugged at me, from when I was a kid reading my mom's books about fairies. "There was something about natural lines of power, uh, ley lines? Actually, shit, I forgot I have the Internet again. One sec. Yeah, okay, I was right but also... I don't know, the sources aren't exactly reliable. The version I'm thinking of isn't even that old, it was made up like sixty years ago. If it was real, presumably it would have been something people had legends about from way longer ago. I guess we'll just keep an eye out."

While Katrin laid down on the floor to stare at that spot, I wandered the cluttered store until I found what the new fate thread was leading to. I walked past a lot of classic antique store shit like glassware and old books, but also a lamp made from an electric meter, and a little slot machine, and a bunch of old signs from various businesses. It felt less like an actual store, and more like a hoarder situation. When I got to the end of the fate thread, I found myself looking at a pile of worthless-looking junk. A plastic cup shaped like Alf's head, some loose spark plugs, a chipped figurine of a little kid whose pants were falling down. Real bottom of the barrel shit.

I dug through, and found that the fate thread was leading to a clearly non-magical box - meaning whatever was inside was the real prize. I picked it up, reverently, and slowly opened the lid. Inside was a twelve inch Jar-Jar Binks action figure, missing one arm. "I don't know what you're fated to do," I said, "but there's no answer that's going to make this make sense."

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