3.1 Events Go Askew

"You have to let me retrieve him. He's an essential string. The simulation will reset without him." 

The elf-creature knows more than it should.

"The simulation always resets," Lethe replies crispy.

"It's been resetting early. Haven't you noticed?"

Lethe is an important program. He holds in place several aspects of reality. He has done this for so long, and in such an isolated location, that he has long since stopped noticing how the denizens of that reality are getting on. "If he was marked as essential, I wouldn't have been able to kill him."

 

"You didn't kill him, Lethe, you deleted him. What if the system didn't account for that?"

"That would be a serious glitch," Lethe admits, though from his tone it's clear he doesn't care.

"So... let me fix it."

"My waters are oblivion. You cannot fix it."

"I may be the only one who can."

"I know exactly who and what you are, Loki Archer." To hear an elderfae speak one's name is viscerally painful. The man standing before him squirms, though his determination remains unshaken. "Don't mistake my apathy for ignorance."

"Let me try," Archer pleads.

"It's not my problem. If it were... the administrator would be here. Not you."

"It's been at least a thousand iterations since your screw-up," Loki protests. "If your administrator hasn't interfered by now, perhaps he's been affected by the data loss as well?"

"Not. My. Problem."

"Then I've brought you something in exchange."

"What could you possibly bring me that could—"

"The Setran artifacts."

 

 

He summons them from thin air and lays them out at the water's edges. Sparkling, ginormous gems.

But they aren't really that. They house intense power, crafted by magic that predates every iteration of the current reality. Their form shifts in the presence of entities like the Archers, but they've been forced into an inert, controlled state. It took many lifetimes to find them all.

The fae, even the elderfae, truly love a good trade.

"This isn't all of them," Lethe states, after pause that is just long enough to convey that he's interested.

"Yes well, my dear Chet already gave you one, in the very same cycle where you let your houseplants murder Reve Archer."

 

 

This, Lethe does remember. "She cast it into my waters with no words spoken to me and no request for an exchange. Why?"

"Because she wanted to keep them from me."

"This Chet sounds wise."

"I'm giving you the chance to complete your collection. And all I want—"

"There are others missing."

"Only three! The witches of Styx have them in this timeline. Do you want me to interfere with your sister's servants?"

Silence. The fae will rarely tell you what they want.

"Be reasonable, would you? We're running out of time. Reve should be almost an adult, and he doesn't even exist. The simulation's going to crash. I simply don't have time to fight witches for you, Lethe. So it could be another thousand iterations before I end up here at your waters again."

"I accept your offering. But I won't help you with your sorcery. Your spell may fail."

"It won't."

It didn't.

Reve regained consciousness some days after that, unaware that he started life in this iteration as a soulless construct, crafted from fragments of a distant past universe that existed before this one.

 

 

"How's our patient?" Footsteps coming closer. Weirdly, Reve would later dream about this—these moments before his mind was his own.

"Corporeally stable," a woman responds. "In and of itself, that's a miracle. Unfortunately there's a problem integrating his memories. Boundary failure errors across the board. We knew he was never going to be perfect, but.. uh... the system is consistently recognizing him as part of iteration 379,002,274,621."

"Incredible. The system thinks he's perfect."

"That's a particularly conceited way of spinning it, sure... but... without knowing our own iteration number, every time I try to activate him it sets off a code 16."

"We can't be more than a few thousand off, Alex."

"Do we know that for sure? And there's no guarantee that even if we guess the correct number to plug in there that the system is going to allow us to overwrite the old one. So far it keeps reverting back to ol' 274,621."

"How fast is it coming?"

"I wouldn't describe it as fast. I've been able to semi-automate the process, but tripping a 16 / 16 every time and having to cancel that is slowing everything down. It'll be months before we can get through a thousand."

"This is taking too long then. We need a different approach."

"You already tried psychic linking, that should have forced brand new data and triggered an update to the iteration number, but for some reason it didn't. We have to face facts; it was just never going to work like we thought it would. I don't know what else to even... suggest...." Alex sighs, trailing off. "So what happens if there's a full crash before we figure this out?"

"He won't go back to Lethe. We could lose him entirely."

 

"Well that's... that's a problem."

"I should have waited another few cycles. Gathered more information."

"There was no way we could have predicted this would happen. Cass Thompson doesn't encounter this problem."

"That's a predestined event. It has to happen."

"But it doesn't trigger these errors, and I don't know why."

"I was late in getting to Lethe. We should have been at this step years ago."

"It's not your fault."

"It is my fault! Acheron could have foreseen this issue for us, but I didn't even try to get his help... I was too angry...!"

"Stop it. The problem is in the here and now. Not in the past." 

"Fine. New plan. Speaking of my nephew, could you bring up file Mnemosyne-A?"

"I don't remember that one. Let's see..." clicking sounds, but not much pause, "you want to affix Reve with a curse?"

"Call it a 'patch'. I ran comparisons between your, uh, arm there, and Acheron's scans from before and after his latest encounter with Kerykeion. It's untested, but this may be the key to stabilization across iterations."

"Won't this risk messing Reve up in future loops?"

"If all goes well there won't BE any, will there?"

"Things have yet to go well."

"In theory, he should be alright. Your own glitching doesn't include a full memory carryover. However, you're still experiencing other significant carryover without triggering a boundary failure. I isolated a script line unique to both of you that may be what allow you to get past it."

"There must be risks or you would have brought this up sooner."

"Of course there are risks. Do you have a better idea, Alexandria?"

"...I don't."

Reve's first sensation is that his skin is cold and damp. As far as he knows, a moment ago he was being forcibly held underwater. Now there are lights, and he's back in his favorite jacket but not the jacket he was wearing before, and this place smells strange and there are hieroglyphics on the walls and he can't sense anything psychically; that weird thing arcing energy into his skull is preventing it.

"WHAT THE ****ING *** **** ****!!!" Reve screams and cusses as he struggles to push the machinery away. There's a figure looming over him, staring with big curious eyes... 

EYES. Not human eyes! Reve is desperate to get away.

"Hey," the stranger greets him calmly. "Name, please?"

"WHERE THE **** AM I?!" Reve responds.

The stranger assumes an inappropriately sassy pose. "First rule of time travel: don't scream. I have sensitive ears."

"Holy ***ing ***... I know you!" Reve sputters. He's seen this person in his mother and uncle's memories. His expression of fear and indignation turns to anger, and for a moment he looks so much like Finley. "LOKI." He spits the name like an accusation.

Loki smiles. "Yep, all day long. All the time. And you?"

"I'm... I'm Reve..." the teenager deflates a little, thoroughly confused.

"Oh thank goodness," Alex breathes a sigh of relief.

Loki is thrilled. "Correct! Excellent! Names have power you know, you should never stray too far from your name. Risk of fragmentation."

"What the F**K," Reve says again.

"Chill out little guy," Alex tries to intervene. "Loki just saved your life."

"Alexandria!" Reve snarls. "You two working together again?"

"Oh... have we met?"

"No! I saw you in my Mom's memories."

"Neat. You know, I hadn't given much thought into how we would explain this to you," she muses.

"What the **** happened to me? Where's Jasmine...!"

"The Jasmine you knew died so long ago that if I could give you a number you couldn't even wrap your head around it," Loki says.

"Time travel?!" Reve shrieks. "You saved me with time travel?!"

"Sort of," Alex says. 

"What did you do to me?!" Reve demands. "I feel weird... and don't lie to me! You're too ****ing powerful for me to read your mind but I'll still know if you LIE."

"The dryads sacrificed you to the river Lethe," Loki explains. "At first I thought you got what I always wanted. To disappear into oblivion. To be forgotten, forever, erased."

"W-why did she..." Reve is fighting tears suddenly. This whole thing has been unfair and scary, and it's finally catching up to him. 

"Life for life. In terms you'd understand, there was enough magic in you to fuel the healing of Mehrend, and more."

"What's Mehrend?"

 

"The dryad colony leader, at that time. Not to worry though, the colony isn't in Lethe's forest anymore, in this particular iteration. They were chased out of there many generations ago." 

"We should be careful how we explain things to him," Alex cautions. "If you break his mind, he might not be able... to..." She chews on her lower lip, trying to choose her own words carefully, "...do whatever it is he needs to do."

"If he's successfully reintegrated, he won't have a choice. Destiny will do its thing. Always does."

"I'm not doing anything you say!" Reve yells. "Not after what you two did to my mom!"

"Ahhh, but the people you're thinking of were not us," Loki argues, a smile still on his face. "We're not your Loki and Alexandria Archer. Those two died. Not long after you, in fact. Jasmine murdered you for nothing. Everything either of you knew ceased to exist only a short time after you did, because your absence caused a massive cascade failure in the simulation we call our universe."

Alex facepalms.

"Yeahhhh okay, whatever you say," Reve scoffs.

"Am I lying? Don't you know if I lie?"

Reve's expression shifts from sneering to uncomfortable. "...You don't think you're lying. But you're crazy or something so that doesn't mean anything."

"See, Alex? It's not a danger to tell Reve anything. It's Reve. He never does anything important."

"Well he might, if you traumatize him enough that it follows him into subsequent iterations."

 "What the hell is an iteration?!" Reve yells.

Loki just keeps smiling. "Wellll. I tried to explain it to Acheron like this: time is a loop. We are stuck in a time loop. We're born. We die. Time loops around. We're born. We die. Time loops around. On repeat. Forever. Same soul, but no conscious knowledge of past actions."

"Unless you're cursed, or you're Loki," Alex tries to clarify. "He has psychometric powers. So he can look into the past and see that there was a past."

"That's not how time loops work!" Reve protests. 

"Do you know that for sure? Are you a time scientist, Doctor Reve Archer? Where can I read your published research on how time travel works?"

"Stop mocking the literal child," Alex grumbles.

"You're lying to me," Reve accuses. 

"Yes!" Loki sighs dramatically. "Yes, I am lying to you! There is no time travel. Just an endless, predetermined cycle of reincarnation as reality resets itself. It's not our patterns that are degrading, it's the system that's degrading, and I am tired of the torture. You might as well consider yourself to be in a parallel universe or alternate timeline, because trying to think of it as time travel will never make sense. How could it make sense that no matter how wildly events go askew, the same people always get together and have the same number of children, with the same mix of genetics and the same—"

 

"—although, the cascade failure brought on by your erasure has caused significant data loss and the system's attempt to compress and reconsolidate that data has chimerized some of us. Our files are getting more corrupted each loop, kid. Not just mine."

"We brought you back to end the cascade failure and save the world," Alex says.

"Exactly!" Lokie agrees. "I can't end the world if the world keeps resetting before I get to the point where I can end it." 

The frown on Reve's face deepens. "Huh?"

"Could have just left it at saving the world," Alex stage-whispers.

 

 

"I'm trying to help us escape saṃsāra. A perfectly normal goal."

Their chance to break the cycle comes up exactly once per iteration... at the very end of everything that is allowed to be... and for now, what they need is for Reve to resume his place in the universe so the universe doesn't crash early, depriving them of their chance to rewrite the end. 

Perhaps it's a small and insignificant role that Reve plays, but in the grander scheme of things, Reve is directly and strictly necessary.

So Loki and Alexandria abruptly release Reve into the wild, with hopes he will find his way and in doing so resolve the errors that frustrate them.

The poor teenager appears—in a column of light and electricity—on a lonely stretch of the river, far from where he was drowned but near enough that he can see the town he grew up in. 

For a moment he feels relief, as he can sense most of the people who have been so familiar to him for his whole life...

...and then...

...horror...

...because in subtle ways, these once-familiar people have changed...

...and he cannot find his mother or his uncle among them.

___________

Etc.: UH OH?

The events in Goldbeards RLC happen many more universe resets after this chapter. So Loki and Alex are doomed by canon to fail in their larger goal, even though they've succeeded in restoring Reve and fixing some system crash that was messing everything up.

Acheron's "encounter with Kerykeion" is an event that happens in Fleeting Inspiration. The Loki and Alexandria seen here are the ones from that iteration. Cass is a character that will appear in Lawful Chaotic but that chapter isn't published yet so forget I said anything. 

Some screenshots taken in The Sciramid. 

16 / 16 is silly a reference to one of my favorite games. Don't think too hard about it. 

Generally, the next generation doesn't take over until they reach adulthood... but in this very special case, I'm starting generation 3 while the heir is still a teenager. I'll add a page for roll reveals soon™.