Chapter Seven: Not Really All That Lucky of a Number After All
So then they took off in the Darkstar heading toward Timeline Linear-Beta-7, which Kalli rather hoped would be their lucky number and let them be done with all this randomly hopping around to places that looked an awful lot like places that they weren't actually an awful lot like, which was extremely confusing and gave her a headache. Linear-Beta-7 looked, at first glance, to be quite a lot like the place they had just left, aside from the fact that there wasn't a random proliferation of Chaos in the immediate vicinity, not that that really changed the Elkandu anyway, since they were always doing stupid things and having random orgies in the middle of the street even before and after Chaos showed up.
"Okay, here we are," Kalli said, glancing over at Suzy who was in the co-pilot's seat.
"Now we are," Suzy corrected.
"What?"
"We haven't actually changed where we are, just when we are."
"I don't care," Kalli said. "Now, where did you say this Mika chappie was again?"
"In Timeline Linear-Beta-7, which is when we are."
"No, where he is."
"I don't know," Suzy said with a shrug. "Scan around for him or something. Knowing him, he's probably in the nearest bar anyway."
"Whatever," Kalli said with a bit of a sigh, tapping the commands into the computer and wondering just when Suzcecoz installed the ability to search for a particular person by their name. The computer came up with, "Search requested: Mika. Record found for Mika. Primary aura: Time Magic." It showed a pattern of deep blue speckled with a couple other colors on the screen. "Aura search commencing." It then began to list a rundown of which worlds it was scanning.
Suzy said, "That should find him wherever he's at, unless he's masking his aura, and I haven't really known him to do that too awful much, except possibly when he was off playing pirate, and it's not like there were a lot of Seekers capable of aura reading in the backwaters of the Seventy Islands anyway."
"If you say so," Kalli said, leaning back and watching the stream of names she did not recognize flow across the screen one by one.
Finally, the screen flashed with the words, "Match found. Examining temporal signature. Temporal signature matches Linear-Alpha-0."
"That's the one," Suzy said. "Where does it say he is?" she asked, leaning over to look at her screen.
"Wilderplane," Kalli said. "Town called Surgalon."
"Surgalon?" Suzy said, raising an eyebrow. "What's he doing there? That's in the middle of nowhere."
"Apparently, eating pancakes."
"Sounds good," Suzy replied with a faint grin. "Put her down over there, then."
"Aye, aye, cap'n," Kalli said, piloting the ship down to the little town called Surgalon somewhere in the southern part of Wilderplane, near the Sea of Doom. There really wasn't any good reason why it would be called the Sea of Doom, as while it certainly qualified as a sea, it was hardly particularly dooming, and looked rather like any other ocean she had ever seen.
Surgalon was a quaint little town nestled in the middle of nowhere, which appeared to subsist off raising goats and various crops. The buildings were rustic and built primarily of wood, which was quite abundant on Wilderplane given the vast unbroken forests of trees stretching from one end of the planet to the other, many of which were tall and wide and must be thousands of years old, large enough to be towns in their own right. The villagers had, obviously, never seen a spaceship before, and stared at the vessel rather incredulously as Kalli brought it down, careful not to land on anything humanoid or caprine, although she might have ended up squashing somebody's squash farm, but there wasn't overmuch she could do about that.
The five of them then disembarked thet ship and searched about for the restaurant in which Mika was currently eating in, Theodore making snarky comments along the way and primarily being ignored by the others. They entered the building, which wasn't particularly large as they didn't really get a lot of visitors this far out, and looked over toward the Chronomancer in question, who was presently indulging himself in a plate full of pancakes smothered with strawberries and whipped cream and drinking goat's milk.
Mika glanced over at them and commented, "Well, that only had a nine percent chance of happening."
"That much?" Suzcecoz said. They headed over toward his table at his cordial invitation and proceeded to order breakfast themselves. The waiter just stared at them strangely when Kanraku ordered a stack of forty pancakes as a small appetizer. "... at least we actually have local currency this time," Suzy said with exasperation. "Four pancakes," she said. "He meant four. He has trouble with numbers sometimes. Kid's not right in the head, I tell you."
"But I meant forty..." Kanraku protested.
"Four," Suzy said. "And if you're hungry later you can head for the replicator." She smirked slightly.
"So," Mika said, taking a sip of his goat's milk. "What brings you out to a place like this?"
"You're a Chronomancer. Do you really have to ask?" Suzy said.
"It's generally polite to do so, even if there were not several different possible things it could be. You might, after all, just enjoy my company or have merely wanted to meet up with somebody else who survived the end of the world, although that only has a twelve percent possibility."
"Well, we went to Torn Elkandu and talked to Aviel, and she seemed to imply that it was actually possible to change the past in some manner," Suzy said. "I don't begin to understand it as it goes against everything I've ever been told about Time Magic and the nature of the universe, but she seemed pretty convinced that it was true. About every action being capable of setting into motion vast changes in the universe. And about how the fate of every timeline is intertwined."
"Ah," Mika said as he ate another bit of pancake. "So that's why you're here. You want to try to change the past, then?"
"She said that she wasn't nearly experienced enough to do it herself, but implied that we should find you instead."
Kalli poked at her meal and said, "Is this goat cheese?"
"Is there any other kind around here?" Mika replied. "Changing the past is not easy, as I'm sure she told you. Entropy will resist all attempts at paradox, however, it is possible, and paradoxes have occurred in Elkandu history even when not really intended."
"Paradoxes?" Kalli said again. "Paradoxen, paradoxii, paradoces?"
Mika smirked at her. "However, in this case, it may be necessary. The Nameless Ones are not themselves incapable of influencing and even travelling to other timelines, especially with their dramatic increase in power. They will need to be stopped at the source somehow, before they ever grew to such power. Given the choice between the Nameless Ones and Chaos, I would have chosen Chaos. It's much easier to deal with and much less likely to actually manage to destroy the universe in any reasonable time frame short of many millennia. They don't exactly tend to do things very quickly, and were very likely the force of change which the Elkandu needed to break them of their stagnation. The destruction of the Interdimensional Bridge cutting them off made possible the rise of the Nameless Ones, but the subsequent events making that possible were so unlikely that even the most skilled Chronomancers could not have anticipated them. Million in one chances may happen constantly, but there are so many different possible million in one chances that any one of them could have happened."
"So you'll help us?" Suzy said, surprised that he was being so verbose and uncryptic for a change. That in itself conveyed to her much of the seriousness of the situation.
Mika gave a nod. "It may well prove nigh-impossible and take us subjectively hundreds if not thousands of years to manage it, but we have no choice. If they manage to affect key moments of the past, they may well cause paradoces that could rip apart the universe and bring about destruction of the entire spacetime continuum. The universe in our timeline may have been destroyed, but the possibility we face is total cessation of all existence. Suddenly, all the universe will have never existed. And given sufficient time and motivation for doing so, the Nameless Ones will figure out how to do it."
"So, wait," Kalli said. "If the universe is to cease to exist, in the past, because of something they might discover in the future, in another timeline entirely, shouldn't the universe have already ceased to exist because it would have already happened?"
Everyone stared at her. "Beer!" Suzcecoz said. "We need beer at this table!"
The waiter was quick to bring them a jug full of beer and several mugs for them. Kalli didn't reach for it, although the others did, continuing her tirade. "Although perhaps since it hasn't happened yet, it will never happen, meaning that we'll succeed in whatever we're trying to do, but then if so, Linear-Alpha would not have been destroyed and we would not be here to try to do it."
"Kalli, dear," Mika said. "Just stop. Paradox is hard enough to understand when you're a Time Mage, and just about impossible when you aren't."
"I'll take your word on that," Kalli said, shrugging and pouring herself some beer finally. "So what are we going to do?"
"At the moment, we are going to drink beer and eat our breakfast," Mika said, proceeding to do so. "After that, we'll see about saving the universe."
