May 1998 — Miskatonic University
In a small lecture hall at an exclusive university on the eastern coast of the United States, a group of about fifty had gathered to hear a professor speak on her area of expertise. Eight months ago, that group would have consisted of bored undergraduates, annoyed to have their lecture scheduled so early in the morning, and the topic of the class would have been Historical Divination. Today, the group consisted of diplomats and military leaders from the nine magical states which constituted the International Dark Alliance, as well as from the muggle governments of North and Central America, and the topic of the lecture was the state of the ongoing campaign to manage and reverse the series of interdimensional rifts through which hostile demonic entities had begun invading their universe approximately seven and a half months ago.
A series of interdimensional rifts Miskatonic wasn't responsible for, for once. It might have been better if they had been — generally speaking, when a Researcher accidentally broke the universe they knew how they'd done it, and in the event they were lost in the accident their projects were generally well-documented. Every time they'd caused an interdimensional incident, they'd reversed it, and published several dozen articles related to it in the aftermath. Rest assured, General, if we had caused this travesty, we would accept responsibility.
Since they hadn't, it had taken several months to develop a ritual (based in goblin magical traditions, to the chagrin of most of the humans involved) to seal the breaches without further weakening the planar boundary by appealing to external magical consciousnesses. Gods exerting influence on the Mundane Realm(s) made it easier for the demonic aliens to tear another hole in the fabric of reality and advance what was clearly a deliberate campaign to conquer this newly-discovered dimension. (It wasn't going very well, at least in this timeline.) After the first rift was successfully closed, the ritual had had to be adjusted to account for local geomantic differences and, in the case of the Great Blue Hole, being cast underwater.
In the meanwhile, magical and muggle communities had been thrown together in an existential struggle against an enemy no one could possibly have anticipated. The Demonic Alien Presences (DAPs) were like something out of a nightmare, floating blobs of some infernal matter which behaved like a liquid only passingly familiar with the concept of tangibility (and gravity), except when they intentionally interacted with physical objects, whereupon they could be alarmingly solid. They had no clear heads or limbs but, like amoebae, extended tentacles (up to three metres long) to pull themselves about, crawling along the ground or hovering in mid-air. In ideal environments — forests, for example — they could move astonishingly quickly, flinging themselves from one hold to the next, though if they found themselves stranded out of reach of a convenient object — in the midst of a homogeneous medium, open air or water — they tended to simply float at whatever elevation they'd reached, sinking at a rate of approximately one foot per hour until they reached something they could use to propel themselves in any other direction in search of prey.
Prey, of course, meaning humans, goblins, any and all sentient life forms. Like dementors, they fed on the psychic energy of sentient minds, using some form of emotional manipulation to induce those minds to produce stronger and more visceral emotions. Also like dementors, mind mages — any well-trained occlumens, really — could resist their influence, keep their heads, but the vast majority of people quickly devolved into gibbering, fearful wrecks, unable to run, much less fight when faced with one.
Unlike dementors, they always reduced their prey to 'soulless' husks, which they could then turn into puppets, making them more mobile. They weren't particularly convincing as body-snatchers — they couldn't fit themselves inside the bodies of the husks — but they didn't really need to be. Controlling the bodies well enough to move them from place to place and clinging on to the outside was perfectly functional for their purpose — generally, using human tools to sabotage the electric grid, or put out defensive fires. Or just moving them to use as "stepping stones" to cross roads and other open, flat spaces — convenient objects to grab and pull themselves forward. They tended to die of dehydration within a few days, but that hardly mattered. They could still grab corpses to move themselves, and there were always more humans to make new puppets.
The first weeks were like something out of a zombie apocalypse film. It didn't take long for muggles and mages alike to discover that these things could be repelled by fire, and destroyed with high voltage electricity. Muggle contraptions called tasers were far more effective than any other weapon. (Any other conventional weapon, at least.) Unfortunately, they were hardly ubiquitous. Physical barriers couldn't stop the things, though electrified barriers could, as could sufficiently powerful wards (simply due to the volume of energy flowing through them — the same wards scaled down had no effect). Fire was the easiest and most common method of deterrence. They could pull themselves over it if there was anything within grabbing distance, so it was essential to place fire-lines well away from buildings and trees and so on, but they apparently couldn't pass through it, regardless of their tangibility.
It had taken considerably longer for communities to organise for their common defence, especially those who were taken by surprise and overwhelmed by fear, and in heavily populated areas where simply setting a strip of land around their camp on fire wasn't feasible. Tens of millions around the world had been taken within a fortnight, entire towns in the areas nearest the rifts wiped out, not a single person with any higher brain functions to speak of surviving, with further casualties accumulating over the next six months, and untold numbers suffering and dying from shortages of food, medicines, and other essentials as the systems which supported city life collapsed and were resuscitated with varying degrees of success.
Also unlike dementors, they clearly didn't comprehend human thoughts. It was questionable whether they even had any idea how humans experienced the emotions their manipulations produced. The legilimens who'd tangled with them directly hadn't felt anything remotely comparable in their minds. But they definitely couldn't comprehend human memories or specific knowledge. It had taken nearly as long for them to discover the origin of the strange power which so easily overwhelmed and destroyed them as it had for the native sentients to develop a ritual to close the rifts. They had clearly learned to use human tools through observation and trial and error, rather than assimilating any knowledge from the puppets they used to manipulate them, and they couldn't make other objects intangible with them, so walls could stop them bringing hammers into power plants to wreck whatever they could. And they didn't seem to understand the concept of a supply train. Coal mines, for example, had gone largely unmolested, despite a great number of electric companies depending on them for fuel.
No one knew for certain how they communicated between each other, but they clearly did, revelations about, for example, how locks work spreading from one city to the next with no direct contact between the individual creatures. Walls and locked doors might stop them bringing in tools, but they didn't stop them from entering a locked building (by flinging themselves at a wall and becoming intangible in flight) and turning any sentient inside into a puppet to simply unlock them. They also had some way to monitor activity between the Mundane Realm and the Beyond. They hadn't managed to break into Apparation Space yet, or the plane used by portkeys and portal spells, but gods exerting influence (except through avatars, whose once-human souls created a conduit which apparently somehow bypassed the barrier the DAPs were attacking) invariably drew their attention, and seers reaching into the Beyond even within the universe were quickly detected. The presenter at the front of the room had narrowly escaped being eaten while spirit-walking several times now.
Still, in Mimi's opinion, they were doing pretty damn well.
"To recap: We have been doing well." Good to know Druella agreed. "The Niagara, Death Valley, Prince Albert, Blue Hole, Mexico City, and Kobuk rifts have been sealed, stemming the influx of large numbers of invaders. There are certain indications that there may be another underwater interdimensional portal somewhere off the coast of Baja California, but that is yet to be confirmed, and I think we can all agree that it is unlikely the odd breakthrough cases we're seeing in the southern United States and around Quebec are coming from California.
"The Infernal Analysis teams from Cuba and Carthage have reached independent conclusions which agree with those of our own team here at Miskatonic. The DAPs appearing in the absence of obvious cross-dimensional interaction are reaching our thread from an adjacent timeline, likely one that—"
"There's other damn timelines, now?!" the representative of the American president interrupted.
"Yes, Mister Wells. You may recall this visualisation—" She cast an illusion depicting the development of a multiverse system within a single plane, zooming in to a single branch to examine the fourth-dimensional footprint — little deviations of various threads from the main thrust of the universal division. Most of them came together with various others some way down the line, as the consequences of (relatively) small differences which resulted in their branch developing in the first place played out, leaving the timelines in similar enough circumstances that they merged back together. She'd used colour to denote the degree of difference between different branches, a green branch slowly separating into distinct blue and yellow threads, which twined around each other, growing closer and more similar in colour until they once again formed a single green timestream. "—which I discussed approximately twelve minutes ago."
She zoomed in further yet, bringing the swirling double-helix of blue and yellow into greater visibility, and cut across them with a black plane, intersecting both blue and yellow at an oblique angle. "The black plane here represents the interdimensional contact. As you can see, it touches both our timeline and an adjacent one, which likely began branching away from our own only about twenty years ago. Now, shifting to look at a more immediate span of time, our present." The lines were replaced with blue and yellow-tinted maps of North America, the blue one about a foot above the yellow and slightly to its right, surrounded by a thick ring of darkness, though the immediate space was clear. A thin band of gold separated the two. "Here, the black represents the DAPs' plane of existence, gold the Beyond, and the untinted area our own universe. We are not truly surrounded by their plane, of course, but unfortunately there is no way to simply represent the actuality of the situation in a two-dimensional image. We shall have to make do."
Narrow black lines extended from the black ring, piercing the gold and extending to intersect the blue map from above, and the yellow one from below. On the blue map, these stopped firmly at the point where they met. (Each one was located precisely where the real-world rifts had been sealed, of course.) On the yellow map, however, pools of darkness spread slowly from the points of contact, with even thinner lines extending from these to invade the blue map from below.
"Here, you see the initial interdimensional portals in our universe have been sealed. In our sister timeline, however, they have not. As the sister timeline is overrun, the DAPs have been initiating intraplanar contact, attempting to flank us from another timeline within our own universe. As such short-term portals can be created from any point in space and time to the corresponding point in the sister-timeline and the intraplanar magic which separates the timelines—" She tinted the space between the maps pink, casting the lower one in orange, from Mimi's perspective. "—has been infiltrated by the DAPs and is being monitored, locations of new portals cannot be predicted by arithmancy or scrying.
"We do know that the majority, if not all, of these flanking attacks are originating in a specific timeline which diverged from ours approximately twenty years ago. The relatively recent point of divergence means that there are most likely significant political differences in comparison to our timeline. To put this in perspective, all of the people who were born before Nineteen Eighty should also have been born in this sister-timeline. Nearly every one of us in this theatre has a counterpart in that timeline, unless they died at some point in the past twenty years. Most of the children born in the Eighties ought to have counterparts as well, where the effects of the changes which have affected the trajectory of the timeline had not yet rippled out to affect personal decisions when those children were conceived."
A witch from Belize, who was here as a representative of the unified muggle-magical government which had formed in the wake of the catastrophic consequences of a mass of DAPs making landfall on their shores, raised a hand politely. "Shouldn't the little decisions be the catalyst, building into larger changes?"
"Yes. Every divergence can theoretically be tracked back to specific individual decisions having an unanticipated degree of impact on a number of other actors, who in turn make different decisions, which affect the potential futures not only of individuals, but of larger communities. However, whether one woman's decision to enter politics in Nineteen Seventy-Nine eventually leads to a war between her country and the neighbouring nation or not, it almost certainly won't affect whether a given couple on the other side of her country engages in marital congress several months later. It will affect them eventually, and they will begin to make choices other than those they would have in the absence of that catalyst, but it will take time."
The Belizean witch nodded.
"This is speculation, of course, but I believe that in this sister-timeline, geopolitical circumstances likely compromised the ability of one or more major organisations or nations to contribute to our collective defence to the extent they have in our own timeline. Regardless of the proximal and ultimate causes, the effect is that the DAPs have managed to establish footholds in the sister-timeline, from which to launch attacks on our own timeline. And the frequency and severity of these secondary incursions will likely increase as they strengthen their position in that world. My team, and those of the Cuban and Carthaginian delegations, are in agreement on this."
She gave an exasperated little sigh before admitting, "They hesitate, however, to support my recommendation on actions to be taken to rectify the situation. They have no alternatives to offer, but I have still been asked to be very clear that I speak only for myself in this:
"It is my recommendation that rather than continue to meet the attacks as they come, we organise an international force to send to the sister timeline, in order to bolster their efforts to repel the invaders, providing aid in the form of seasoned troops and intelligence on the enemy. This must be done with all possible haste. The longer we delay, the more time the DAPs will have to solidify their hold on the sister timeline, and the more difficult it will be to close the rifts in that timeline." She paused, then, cancelling the illusion with a negligent wave of her hand. "I will take questions while we consider the matter, in order to clarify any details you may find relevant."
"You honestly want me to go tell the President that some crazy witch wants us to put together a military force to launch a counter-invasion against another timeline to stop more of these fucking demon things showing up out of nowhere?" the American envoy drawled. He clearly thought he was making it sound mocking, but Druella, being Druella, refused to accept mockery.
"If, Mister Wells, you doubt your ability to communicate the threat these fucking demon things showing up out of nowhere pose to your nation and the urgency of breaking up a flanking manouever before one's position is encircled to your President, I will gladly do so for you."
"Why don't the other analysts support your recommendation?" the Canadian representative asked, suspicion heavy in his voice.
"Would one of you prefer to answer?" Dru asked a handful of mages in the front row. "I shouldn't wish to be accused of downplaying your concerns."
After a quick exchange of glances, a tired-looking Cuban wizard rose and turned to face the auditorium. "Our primary concerns are twofold. One, none of us are scholars of military history. As such, we have no grounds to dispute Magistra Rosier's claim that the most ideal course of action would be to take the fight to the enemy as soon as possible. Her reasoning does seem sound. We do doubt, however, that our counterparts in that timeline — and yours, and those of your governments — would welcome what would seem from their perspective to be a second invasion, by what would by necessity be a very large armed force. We have no way to communicate ahead of time that we are sending aid, or to confirm that our aid would be welcome. They may, for one reason or another, wish to refuse. It is possible, for example, that China refused to allow Western mages to assist with the Tibetan incursion, and our forces were over-extended trying to shore up Indian and Nepalese efforts to keep the DAPs from spreading there, inadvertently allowing them to gain ground closer to home. Are we to attack other nations in order to force our help upon them?
"Two, we do not even know if it is feasible to create a stable portal of a magnitude necessary to transfer an entire army between timelines. Nor can we guarantee that the troops in question will be able to return home, even if we could somehow transport them there. And a large percentage of this force would necessarily be mundane soldiers, who may not be psychologically prepared to be moved between timelines."
"Forget the muggles not being up for it," Helsinki's representative scoffed. "Do we have more than a handful of mages who would be prepared to skip blindly off into an alternate timeline? The vast majority of us were, before this past year, largely unfamiliar with the concept of extradimensional incursions, much less the mechanics of any of this!"
Canada raised an eyebrow. "Magistra?"
Druella huffed. "I have already outlined the arithmancy describing such a portal for my fellow analysts. A coven of thirteen sorcerers could cast the necessary spell—" ("Because we definitely have thirteen sorcerers who have any experience whatsoever with coven magic," one of the Carthaginian mages muttered to a colleague. She didn't quite manage to cover a snort of amused agreement, earning the both of them a glare from Druella.) "—or forty-nine mages of more average ability. Obviously they would practise casting less volatile magics cooperatively before attempting the portal spell. I cannot believe that any nation, when faced with an existential threat on par with what we have seen with the DAPs, would refuse aid from any quarter — China did accept our assistance in Tibet in this timeline, and we're hardly on the best of terms — and it's only been twenty years. It's barely a different timeline. I sincerely doubt combat troops fighting DAPs will have the opportunity to sit around discussing recent history with the locals, anyway.
"Furthermore, I was under the impression that when a soldier is shipped off to combat he understands that there is no guarantee he'll return home, but I'll go over and orchestrate a return portal myself for the survivors, if it will make you happy."
"Happy is not the word I suspect I would use, Magistra," Cuba said coldly. Apparently he didn't appreciate the sarcasm.
I thought it was funny, Mimi assured her, slipping the thought into the forefront of her mind.
It wasn't meant to be funny. If it gets them to agree, I absolutely will go over myself, though I likely still have a counterpart in that timeline, anyway.
Oh, good, then you'll have someone to talk to when everyone else is being tedious.
Don't be absurd, Mira. What on Earth would be the point of talking with myself? I'd already know exactly what I'd say...
The conference dragged on for another two and a half hours, though like Dru talking to herself, Mimi could easily have told them then that they were going to agree to talk to their respective governments and reconvene in a few days. That was how these conferences always went, even when someone hadn't just suggested invading another timeline for its own good.
New Avalon's in, she informed the older witch. Technically, she was here as their ambassador to the University, though she'd been enlisted into Security when the first rifts opened. I don't even have to ask. Bella and Thom will help cast the portal, and Bella will be extremely annoyed that being Lady Black precludes running off to go kill more DAPs in an alternate timeline where they actually gained some traction. I can go, though.
Dru caught her eye over the slowly dispersing crowd to put on a sarcastically-overdone expression of surprise. And neglect your ever-so-essential diplomatic assignment? You? Never...
Oh, shut up.
"I meant it, you know," Mimi said, tapping lightly on the frame of the door of Druella's office as she entered and took an uninvited seat, flopping across an armchair in a way she was aware her (former) great-aunt found incredibly annoying. She knew that Mimi knew that and was doing it anyway just to tease her, which lent the feeling a bit of frustrated resignation and a note of fondness, like you're such a little shite, you know that?
She didn't acknowledge it, though, simply raising an eyebrow at the complete non-sequitur. It wasn't as though they'd ended the conversation they'd had over lunch on the same note as the one this morning, when Mimi had volunteered to go over to the sister timeline and kick alien arse. Still, Dru didn't miss a beat. "I didn't think you didn't."
"And, I've been thinking—" ("Oh, no...") Mimi projected a mental image of herself sticking her tongue out at the older witch, and continued speaking as though she hadn't. "—even if they do agree to try it, it's going to take ages for them to get their shite together, recruit troops and sorcerers and train them."
"Such are the realities of cooperative projects."
"Yeah, yeah. But Cuba had a point about sending someone ahead to lay the groundwork for your reinforcements."
"They haven't agreed, yet, Mira," Dru reminded her.
"You never make proposals you don't think will pass. What's the arithmancy on them saying no?"
"The probability is low, but it's not impossible. There's a very good chance they won't agree until the situation in the sister timeline is unsalvageable."
"Well, that's all the more reason for you to send me as an advance party, isn't it? Improve the chances that they can get a running start when they finally get there. I mean, I could at least go give Thom and Bella a heads up that there may or may not be company showing up, and they should vouch for them when they do."
Druella raised an eyebrow at her. "What makes you think I can just decide to send you ahead?"
Mimi pouted at her. "Um, I'm not an idiot? I know that travel spell you used to use all the time is stepping through the Void. There's no reason you can't just open the second gate to, say, the kitchen at Grimmauld in the sister timeline, on the first of September of last year, is there?"
"Aside from the fact that I no longer use that spell all the time because it tends to attract the attention of DAPs to a greater extent than most high magic? No. I presume you think you'll just give them a heads up on the entire invasion, then."
"Well, I might as well. I figure the beginning of September would be good. I wouldn't want to be sitting around too long waiting for shite to happen, and it probably won't make much difference to get there earlier. Most people would think I was crazy if I just turned up insisting that I was from another timeline, in the future, and there was going to be an alien invasion on Mabon in two years, or whatever. And Bella keeps the Guard in ready condition anyway. I don't even think they let any DAPs get off Mann without a heads up."
New Avalon had been lucky enough to be at the epicentre of one of the rifts. By which Mimi meant, the rest of Europe had been lucky that New Avalon had been at the epicentre of the event, because they hadn't done well with the Iberian portal. A second one only twelve-hundred miles away would have been a disaster. DAPs couldn't swim, but they could crawl, and they didn't need to breathe. If the portal had opened underwater instead of on Mann, they probably would've poured through unhindered and dragged themselves across the sea floor to both Great Britain and the mainland in a matter of weeks, forcing Western Europe to fight on two fronts.
"And I'm sure this has nothing to do with you wanting to go fight more of those horrid things in a timeline where they will still inevitably gain more traction than they did here. If I send you in early, things will still get bad enough that we're getting intraplanar incursions. Causality still applies in time-loop scenarios involving multiple timelines."
"Well, maybe a little." She tried for a self-effacing grin, but from Druella's exasperation, didn't quite manage to pull it off convincingly. They both knew she'd had way too much fun helping oust the infestation which had quickly spread from Niagara down into the forested hills of the Appalachians. She was only here because the portal had been closed for months now, and as far as Security could tell, they'd cleared out the last of the major hives. There might be a few individual hold-outs hiding in caves, but they didn't have the resources to comb the whole mountain range. They'd kill them when they dared stick a tentacle out of hiding. "It's still not a bad idea."
"I still haven't heard a solution to the problem of me being eaten by a DAP as soon as I reach out to open the second portal."
Mimi shrugged. "I'll get Angie to make a distraction. Open a portal in the middle of a fire-trap and pick off the DAPs that take the bait like fish in a barrel. If we use that goblin attention deflecting ritual to secure the area we're working in, that should work, right?"
Dru considered for a moment, then sighed. "Yes. You're going to be the one to tell your parents what you're doing, though. I'm not getting stuck holding the bag on sending Lily's daughter to an alternate universe only a few short years after Lily returned from her own odyssey, to say nothing of potentially allowing Bellatrix's heir to go get herself killed in another world."
Sort of a silly concern — Lily wouldn't blame Dru, she had met Mimi, she'd know it was her idea as soon as she heard about it, and Bella could always use one of the littles as an heir. Granted, they were only two years old, so wouldn't be able to take over the House right away if she died, but the Family Magic would forgive Sirius enough to use him as its focus in the interim, if it literally had no other choice — but whatever. That she was willing to do it under any circumstances was sort of unexpected. Circumstances that were so easy to arrange was even better. (She must be really worried about the consequences of the DAPs gaining a permanent foothold over there.)
"Yes! Fuck yeah! This is going to be great! Okay. I'll write to them tonight. And we'll do it tomorrow?"
"Not until I see responses from both your parents and Bellatrix," Dru said firmly. "If I'm sending you back to September, a few more days will make no difference at all. And you still need to arrange that distraction."
Mimi sighed, mostly for dramatic effect. Fine. She could wait a couple more days. It was still a win — she could have to wait until the entire aid party got their shite together. Still, she had to say, "I know that. I don't know how you think it could possibly take more than ten minutes to convince Angie to lure a bunch of DAPs into a trap, but..."
She grinned at the older witch's exasperated eye-roll. You know you love me.
Yes, I do. Please don't get yourself killed, Mira...