A/N: Time to try this yet another time. This is meant to be kind of the spiritual reboot of Miracle, a story of mine that never really got anywhere despite getting started fairly decently, even if I do say so myself. You can check it out I guess, should be an okay read for what little there is of it.

But this story is, well a lot different. Technically a Jumpchain running certain variant rules of my own, inspired in part from the Celestial Forge/Grimoire/Menagerie model. There's basically a baseline build that the MC starts with, and then I can add on stuff from jumps… not for free, or with wordcount or any of those mechanisms, but rather by getting drawbacks from the same jump, adapted for the story as necessary.

The mechanisms will never be a significant part of the story beyond some minor notes here and there, the actual things he gets obviously will be. This is meant to be a fairly simple, OP romp of a story so keep that in mind going in, thanks.

Rise
Worm/Jumpchain Xovers
Prologue

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I wish I could say that waking up with my head pounding, every limb stretched taut and bound in steel was a shock and surprise. With the life I'd lived, it was pretty much par for the course.

It took me a second to wrench myself out of the weirdly fetishistic bindings, throwing up a spell to clean up the small, jagged pieces of metal digging into my flesh. They hurt like hell, but to quote a movie, pain was an old friend. It would take a lot more than simple pain to throw me off my game.

… such as a basic, rudimentary cleanup and healing spell failing.

I looked at my fingers, from where I'd waved my hand in front of me to cast the magic. Nothing. No gently glowing sparks of light, no gentle overall warmth followed by the metallic chunks and the blackish filth my clothes were drenched in vanishing.

By now my generation was already pushing the chunks of metal out of me, sealing up wounds as they dropped to the floor one after the other. But… my magic hadn't worked. A spell I'd cast literally countless times, and it'd failed.

I tried it again. Same result. What the fuck?

Pausing for a second, I cast my entire 'basic wellness' suite of spells. Heals, revivifications, mental freshness, curse dispelling… and not one spell manifested. Nothing happened.

Well, other than a weird, trudging sound making itself known. I paused at this. A weird sound that seemed to be getting closer, when until now there hadn't been a single sound in the entire… wherever I was. Granted it had only been a few seconds so I could be jumping at ghosts, but honestly I've met plenty of ghosts where jumping on and stabbing them might have gone better for everyone involved.

I looked around then, finally taking a look at the place. It was a narrow corridor that stretched as far as I could see in both directions, barely lit. I could see just fine thanks to my powers, but this place seemed designed to put people off their game. Glowing, blood red-black walls, a strange haze in the air, seemingly endless corridors… what the hell was going on? I would have suspected an Isekai scenario except for the sheer impossibility of it happening to Me of all people, after I'd woken up that day in…

A shiver erupted up my spine at the memory.

Why do you keep making me do these things to you? Such a cruel child, to know how much Granny loves you and keep making me punish you like this…

I shook off the distant memory, focusing on the present. One breath, two, three… the shivers subsided after ten, as the memory of the unique combination of self-loathing, confusion, agony and a weird, fucked-up form of love Granny had fostered faded. The Queen had spent virtual years in my mindscape with me, to try and heal me of the damage that had been done, but formative years are formative years and the Enemy whose work she was undoing was the foremost expert of her particular field in all the cosmos.

Granny hated my mother, and D- another shiver – you will not take the name of your Lord in vain, child! - He hated my father just as much if not more, so I'd always gotten a double dose of the sick, demented thing she called love.

And then –

I paused, before digging one finger into my left ear, muscling through the start of the ear canal even as it ruptured, barely noticing the pain, until… there.

I ripped the bug, a slimy, vile thing about an inch long, out of my ear and tossed it to the ground, before stamping on it so hard the rock cracked.

I had trained for worse situations than this. I'd been dropped in a weird-as-fuck maze with my magic malfunctioning, so what? I knew what to do here, had known it since my first month of training. And always the key was to maintain focus. Take stock. Identify the problem, note your resources, make a plan and act. I'd executed the whole thing over and over till it became instinct.

And yet, right now it'd been over a minute since I got out of those weird as fuck restraints and I'd been scatterbrained, wild, reminiscing and panicky the whole time. This fucking thing, an Illithid Tadpole that had been experimented with and mutated until it could consume all forms of focus and shit out nothing but confusion, this was what had been making my brain go haywire.

I knew this creature. I'd designed this creature back when… I snapped straight as the last of the confusion from the thing dissipated.

Not. The. Time.

Okay, I was in a maze, dimensionally shifted by the look and feel of the air, and my magic was disabled. Step one was the same as whenever you found yourself in a maze. Get out.

I turned around and checked the spot I'd been restrained at. Stone slab with adamantine moulds into which my limbs had been trapped, now ruptured in one direction since I'd moved through the moulds. No trace of anti-magic on them, which meant it had to be in my body. Great.

I started to move, scanning the walls on both side. No inscriptions, no designs, just random movements of red through the black walls. And that smell… fuck, Anti-matter.

I was starting to put together an idea of where I might be. And it wouldn't be a problem, normally, but without magic… well I'd cross that bridge when I came to it.

I finally came to a branching point in the labyrinth I was in, and that was when the sound I'd been hearing all this time grew loudest. Quite naturally. If I'm in a labyrinth, I suppose it has a monster. I turn the corner, ready to face the… child?

It was a small child, about ten, eleven years old by the looks of him. Malnourished, dirty, wearing rags, ill-fitting chainmail and a crusader's tunic in front… and the bottom half missing, as a giant naked wound dripped blood and tentacles emerged from his waist and wrists, disgusting, squelching sounds and all.

Ah, shit. I'd seen these before. Basically vermin-level mobs to anyone serious, but they were some of the most hungry and vicious little things of their level, and, since it very much was am innocent child who'd been butchered and then his soul tortured and tormented until they went quite viciously insane, half the time people tended to get a fucking breakdown when they had to butcher the poor tykes the second time.

I didn't. The benefits of my utterly stellar upbringing, I supposed. In one movement I crossed the distance between us and hit the thing right in the chest, watching as it disappeared up the corridor until a very distant 'whuff' sounded through the place. I could still hit spirits, though. I'd been a bit worried since that particular ability had always straddled the line between being a normal combat ability and just plain fucking magic.

Back to figuring a way out. I kept moving through the corridor, always taking left turns even as a map started to materialize in my head thanks to my eidetic memory.

Only, now was the time for some tricky work. I allowed my mind to keep mapping the way and my legs to keep moving, even as I started doing… more. I'd always been great at multitasking, but outright splitting thought-streams had never stopped being weird.

As soon as I felt the second line of thoughts being stabilized I focused it into turning inwards, towards my own mind. A moment later I was inside my own mindscape, the memory palace I'd built as soon as I'd started understanding the mind magic I was being taught.

As I expected, it was a mess. I could see the damage the Worm had done, bridging my active thinking to the memory archives, cracking the rainbow that formed a passage between logic and action and looping action to repression instead… among other changes. Even as I watched the mindscape shifted, the damage reversing itself as my mental state was unfucked.

Or that's what I was supposed to think. Because while yes, this wasn't the time to reminisce about it, I'd designed the thing. It'd been just one more move to one-up the hack who called himself the Master of the Mind, the greatest of the Lie-Smiths. But that was it. It'd been a last minute addon when I figured out what his submission was going to be. It had never been meant to be more than a cherry on top of the actual attack, the…

The thing I could sense at work in my mind, now that I was standing in it. Fuck. Someone had managed to use Algernon's Bouquet on me.

I took a deep breath again, more for effect than anything.

Offhand, in the real world, I jumped over a cluster of the Crusading children before rushing back in from the other side and dispersing them with a clothesline. Back to finding a way out.

Algernon's Bouquet was one of the vilest spells I'd ever made. It'd started as a joint project with… the Bastard before things had gone to shit so bad I refused to even think his name anymore. It was…

Not. The. Time.

Time passed slower in my mind but it still passed. I couldn't focus on the details of discarded old projects, just that they had been repurposed and applied on me. And, considering that the original had been more or less a prank if a horrifically vicious one, whoever did it had probably made it much worse.

I could feel the spell spreading through my mind, claiming my mindscape at a rate of what was inch by inch right now but would soon rise the more of it spread. It may take a minute or two from the initial casting to taking over half my mind but it would only take a couple of seconds to take the other half. And then it would simply… blend my mind, for lack of a better word.

Self-memories, skills, knowledge and instincts, crucial segments of all would be deleted and the rest mixed and reconnected haphazardly until… well I didn't actually know until what since I'd never really cast it. The Queen had actually raised her voice at me for developing it, for the first time in my life, and the displeasure of the good mother figure in my life had been enough to make me discard it.

And now it was in my head. Fuck.

I scanned through my mind. Whoever had cast it had known what they were doing, the original focal point had been the main palace, the spires of gold rising in the middle of a raised hill in the middle of the city. My Self-memories and my Arcane knowledge, as the most prized and intimately linked of my knowledge and memories, were all in the palace, and I could feel the infection spreading with every moment that passed.

Okay then, no time to waste. I'd never really expected this but I'd expected someone to try some manner of mental fuckery at me, and I'd made preparations ever since I'd been able to make preparations, always refining and improving them as my skills improved. I started checking my mental segments to ensure there wasn't some sneaky, second point of origin in play.

Once the whole mind was checked I allowed myself a tiny scrap of relief. Just one origin point. Okay, first things first. I checked the innermost, deepest section of my mental casting library. The most powerful, terrible spells I could cast… and the counter to Algernon's Bouquet. They weren't infected yet… but damn, the counterspell was the beacon drawing the curse in. They had done this right.

Well, I couldn't save these then. They'd draw the curse wherever they went. But there was one other thing I could do with it. How ironic, after all that work to break free of the limits of Vancian casting.

Once the spell was Prepared, I took the time to prepare one other thing. You never knew how this kind of thing might work, after all. But then it was time to move on. All that knowledge, improved and refined spells I hadn't even written down… I'd make whoever this was pay, some day.

I moved to the third most important section of my memories. My skills, everything related to crafting, healing, cooking (personal favorite) and all the other skills that weren't active, direct battle magic. It was a trove that for all its size was still dwarfed by the depth of magical knowledge that would be going down… but surprisingly, it was clean. Instincts, learned tricks, tricks with powers, my control, my legal talents, tricks of the body, ways of flying… even magic, copies of what was in my main memory archive but embedded in these specific skills, all that was clean.

An instant later they were copied, moved into what I had only ever named the Contingency.

The most important part of this exercise completed, I started working on the additional targets. Wading back into the magical segments of my memories, I found there actually was an entire sub-archive that was impossibly, miraculously still clean. Probably because it had been stored unfairly.

The magic was much too dear to me heart for its value. The curse was designed to optimize between the value of the memories and how hard they were defended. These were simply defended far beyond their value. But it allowed me to copy and move them now, so well worth it in the end. I allowed myself a smile. This was a relic related to my real childhood, one of the pieces of the Before even Granny hadn't managed to corrupt and destroy.

What else was safe? I scanned my mind again. The curse was spreading almost blindingly fast now, spreading almost visibly before me. I ripped away mental representation of spells from it, saving whatever pieces I could and dumping it all into Contingency.

That lasted until I went through a door, and… holy shit.

I was in my theoretical section, the part of my mind that stored my knowledge of the actual nuts and bolts of various magical systems I knew. Not a single ready-to-go spells to be found, but all the first principles of how the spells were constructed and why they all worked in the first place.

And I couldn't feel a smidgen of infection. Was it possible whoever had pulled this could miss this? Was it a trap? I checked again, and then again. Nothing, except for the rapidly encroaching power of the curse from the outside.

And then I moved it with the rest of my stored knowledge. If the curse could hide deeply enough that I couldn't sense it in three scans then this was all for nought anyway, so I had to assume this was an oversight from whoever did this… and this was the oversight that would kill them one day, I'd make sure of it.

Stepping away, I checked the storage of my skills again. Huh. The curse was covering everything related to magic, and the Divine-tier science I knew, all the crafting and healing... but it was leaving my mundane skills alone. Cooking, general knowledge, all the 'human' skills seemed to be beneath notice. Well, that was something at least. They were already backed up anyway. It was time to focus on something more important.

I was at the final and innermost section of my mind, the I. My core memories, my identity. The focus of this attack, and suffused almost completely with the infection. I could see the effects becoming visible here, as vicious, cancerous tumors grew across the bookshelves that represented my deepest, most intimate memories, ready to grow into blades and shred them all before burning the shredded pieces into a fire that would unmake me entirely.

There was no saving this, I realized.

After everything I'd done and endured, it remained a strange feeling to look at your own death. I knew I wouldn't really die, no. My soul, my underlying self I suppose would remain and even get to have the same body, probably. But the me of now, this identity comprised of these memories and experiences would at worst be annihilated and at best be twisted into a mess, while a stranger got to walk away in my body with my life's work.

And bitching about it wouldn't change the situation any. Coldly, almost mechanically I went through every inch of the self section, stealing away every quirk, every tiny preference I could see wasn't yet infected. It was barely a fraction of a fraction of what I was, but it was all there was. It'd have to do.

I came out of my mind standing in a junction of eight corridors in the Labyrinth. The floor around me was covered in an inch-thick layer of corrupted ectoplasm, still writhing with tentacles here and there.

Time for the hard bit. I aligned both my chains of thought, focusing simultaneously.

Contingency Activation. Category: Schwarzenegger-Farrell. Level: All is Lost

I'd never believed in lying to myself, after all. This was a long shot even now. I felt myself black out, as the contingency took hold. It'd been tricky work learning this, training my body to act on its own for the moments it would take to activate the contingency. The entire point of a contingency where my mind was compromised, after all, was to make it so I didn't quite know enough of what I was doing to derail or undo it.

…

…

I felt my eyes snap open. If things had gone right it should be exactly twenty-four seconds later, and checking how much the disgustingly vile ectoplasm on the floor had dissipated… yeah. Well, at least something had gone to plan.

Time to get the fuck out of here.

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"Test #13. We have identified an anomalous field suffusing the artifact. Checking for potential radiation-related issues." Armsmaster dictated his notes, as his machine moved over the heart again.

This was insane. He was busy, he had better things to do. Designs to finalize, prototypes to test. But here he was, testing to ensure that a piece of bomb wreckage was safe for storage. A heart, a human heart of all things that had been found at the center of some explosion. Apparently a tech or two being unable to get any samples from the object simply because it didn't yield to any scalpels was enough to get it referred to him these days. Such was the value of his time nowadays.

Dragon, apparently able to sense his mood even across the distance, spoke up "Well, we're almost done, Colin. You can relax and we can get back to more productive things!"

"Yes, yes I know. It's just… I had ideas to work on today. Anyway, there's no point to griping about it.

He looked at the heart from where it sat in the containment unit. A strange energy field saturated it, evidently the source of its unnatural toughness. And it was unnatural. Colin himself had tried to extract samples of his own, using devices rated for low-tier Brutes who were normally too tough for any mundane measures much like this heart. Only for those devices to be unable to penetrate its surface, too.

The scanned beeped once, twice… and then simply stopped.

Colin frowned. That wasn't right. The Anomalous Energy Imager had worked on everything from Clockblocked items to scanning Vista's distortion fields in the past. Now… he looked at the output. Surface level scan was green, there was no energy leaking out of the heart. Depth 1 scan was also fine, the energy under the surface was stable.

The Depth 2 scan, which would check the status of the energy field deep within the organ… was inconclusive. Data unavailable. Evidently the object would not disgorge its secrets that easily.

For posterity's sake Colin ran the scanner a second time, to identical results.

Well, this became just a touch more complicated. He pulled his gloves back on, before gingerly opening the casing of his scanner and picking the slightly desiccated, dried organ up from where it rested.

He was moving it to the cooler again when it did what on second thought was its second weirdest thing for the day.

He did not cry out when the heart suddenly heated up to what felt like a thousand degrees all of a sudden, but he did end up dropping the damn thing. It bounced off the floor, arcing like a baseball before crashing into one of his other devices positioned all the way at the corner of the lab.

Colin watched, almost transfixed, as the object bounced right into the target area of the device he'd made to try and disrupt temporal fields. It had been an idea several months ago when he'd finally made some progress with understanding Clockblocker's temporal effects, to try and get a device ready that could perhaps disrupt Grey Boy fields.

But it'd never worked. The furthest he'd gotten was disrupting a few objects Dennis had used his power on, and there was no real way of knowing if that was even his machine or just the effect running out on its own. It'd certainly not done anything when he'd had the machine carted to the nearest Grey field to test it.

And now the object was lying right on the target, directly under the disruptor.

"Special note. The object exhibited additional anomalous behavior upon being removed from the AEI. Extreme heat noted, in addition to non-standard motion." Colin narrated for the record. Oh the things he was reduced to these days.

"Colin, that wasn't normal." Dragon's voice broke him out of his thoughts.

"Yes, but I can hardly say I dropped it because it was hot, can I?"

"… not what I was talking about, but glad to know your limits on this. No, I'm looking at the infra-red cameras and the object rose to almost a thousand degrees for a single moment with no trace of any cause. And it's inert once again. It was as if it heated up just so you would drop it."

Huh.

… a thought took shape in Colin's head at the idea. It couldn't possibly mean…

"Dragon, you don't think there's any chance, any chance at all that there could be remaining… intelligence acting on it, right?"

"Colin are you asking me if a ghost did that."

"What, no!" Colin almost groaned. He regretted ever having tried to come up with a scientific name for Crusader's Ghosts. Dragon never missed a chance to bring it up to poke at him.

"I mean that the heart… there couldn't possibly be any life remaining in it?"

"I don't see how, Colin. It's completely inert. It reads as a perfectly ordinary dead heart."

"Except for the part where it's invulnerable and choking with unidentifiable energies?"

"Except for that part, yeah."

Colin looked back at the object of their discussion. Well, technically his remit in this examination ran all the way to destructive testing, if that was what it took. And trying to disrupt the field may very well yield more usable data.

He flicked the switch before he could talk himself out of the idea.

Looking at the readout, the emitter prepared a lance of a completely random combination of exotic energies, built it up, and then it was stabbed much like a knife might have been, into the matrix of interlocked flows that comprised the heart's energy field. Colin watched as the matrix held for one moment. Two, three… this had been the part where things had gone wrong with the Grey Boy field as instead of collapsing it'd sent back a feedback that had knocked his device's own emitters out of array.

But this time… Colin couldn't suppress his delight when the energy field got a hole punched through it. Whatever the exotic energy that had resisted his imager was, it was pouring out of the ruined matrix now, until… the moment arrived when the remaining energy was too little to sustain itself and Colin watched as, for the second time in its operating history, his disruptor caused an energy field to simply give up and dissipate.

Well then. It did work. Colin considered the merits of asking for another chance with the Grey Boy fields. Clearly the principle of the device were fine, there had obviously just been some unknown factors in play at the time. If he could get another chance he could fine tune the device, correct for any factors

"Colin!" the urgency in Dragon's voice broke Colin out of his gathering fugue state.

He looked at the screen, ready to ask what the problem was when he spotted it just in time to hear her say it. "The Heart, Colin."

Colin stared at the object they'd been experimenting on till a few seconds ago. The heart, when it had been collected from the explosion site, had already been dried, not quite a husk but significantly desiccated. It had been dead, without any question.

Only now it was awash in red, looking larger than it'd been even a second ago, without a hint of desiccation. It looked like someone had just taken it out of a human body right now. Even as Colin watched, blood appeared on its surface, sliding down to his device below.

Okay, what the actual fuck was this?

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They met at the top of the hill outside the city, because it was their nature. You couldn't put five of them together near a hill and expect it to go unused.

The Warlord found himself a position to stand as the rest of the group that had gathered for the Rite returned and positioned themselves according to the numerous subtle socio-political and personal power dynamics between each other. Hierarchies, too, were one of the things that just happened when their kind gathered, however temporarily.

At the peak of this particular hierarchy were their uncle and aunt, as the seniormost of the collective and by far the mightiest among the eclectic group. They were the purest expression of themselves right now, the truth or as close to it as their kind ever came.

"Well then? We have things in motion?" The woman he was used to seeing with a garland of shrunken skulls toyed with the ankh she was wearing around her neck instead, as she asked.

"I am the Facilitator! Indeed they are! I have fulfilled my role! I was asked to help little brother, and I have!" his brother confirmed. The Warlord was glad his brother had modulated his particular habit this time around. It was fine most of the time, but here and now, well… the consequences of one of them doing even once what his brother usually did five times in every conversation didn't bear thinking about.

Their aunt nodded at the confirmation. "Yes, I can feel it too. His presence is manifesting. It won't be long before he's realized into this world. I don't imagine I need to spell out what comes next from here."

Indeed she didn't. All of them had had their own Rites in the past, though only two had endured the kind of mess this was already shaping up to be.

"I will be his Guide."

Speaking of the two, the Warlord was surprised when he heard the Third speak. He'd honestly thought the guy was here just to fuck around. Though considering the kind of guidance their uncle was famous for, maybe that was still the case.

What surprised the Warlord was that their aunt seemed surprised too.

"You sure, brother? What happened to 'he's probably just as boring as his father'?"

"Well, so far he doesn't seem to be. Or would you prefer I not serve, sister?" good to see the Third was tetchy as always. For how much the guy played around with people, he never seemed to be able to take a joke in his turn.

"Oh no, you don't get to take it back now. Okay, if bro will be the Guide, who will be the Guardians?"

"I will be a Guardian! He's my Blood, and I will stand for father!" his brother spoke up. Good, they'd discussed that much. What the Warlord wanted to do was to put the fear of himself in whoever stood from side of the boy's useless, worthless whore of a mother who'd denied him to his father and then fucking let him be taken by-

"I will be a Guardian. He is blood of my blood, and I will stand for his mother." … ah. Of course they would send the one person who was also his sister, so he couldn't even threaten her properly. And considering what he'd heard of his brother preferring magic over all, he couldn't even say that his sister was even a bad choice. Especially considering her nature and power over crossroads and liminal things, she would be an extremely good choice to fulfill a guardian's role. Just as good as his brother and his natural ability to prevent Obstructions inserting themselves in their brother's path.

"It's decided then. Remember everyone, only the Guide gets to initiate contact. The both of you only need to place your power along the right routes to deter any claim-jumpers. It's okay to step in if he approaches you, but we don't want any of the mess that comes with Usurpation claims." Okay now that was just patronizing. But that was the nature of things too. Old women always did love the sound of their own voice.

The Warlord blinked as a stone hit him in the back of the head.

"Do take care who you think of as Old, dear. Just because it's true doesn't mean I'll let you get away with bringing it up."

"Yeah, yeah. Old women don't like to be reminded. What else is new?" he answered back immediately. She was his aunt, one of the most powerful beings he'd ever met and the Annihilation of All Things, but he was the Warlord if she thought he was going to let her boss him around he wouldn't waste any time before he taught her differently.

He was surprised for a second time when she just smirked at him and walked away instead. Shit, this whole mess was serious they weren't even being petty to each other.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Consciousness came in bursts and flashes.

"- a fucking dead heart, Armsy! Don't tell me that's not freaky…"

"… less than an hour, and already he's almost…"

" -have some idea? How is it possible you don't know anything at all…"

"Observation #12. As the regeneration completes, the skin on his forehead has developed markings forming what is recognizable as an Omega symbol associated with Case-53 Parahumans, albeit with additional flourishes and decorations. Coupled with the coloring and the size, tentative classification is Case-53, subject to change upon interaction with subject."

A brief flash of strobe lights, scalpels and pain flashed in my head at the word.

"Don't call me subject" I muttered out reflexively.

The man jumped almost a foot into the air. Terrible habit, to get engrossed that deeply while making observations. Why, when I'd been…

When I'd…

I blinked, unable to understand what was going on. As my mind finished booting up, I could feel a number of thoughts trying to surface before floundering as there didn't seem to be any reason or background for them in my head.

"Ah, you're awake." The man, finally having composed himself again, spoke up, striding to be closer to me.

"Yes, but… I don't, my head, I can't…"

"Yes, I understand… please don't try to think about anything too hard. Please, just try to relax and focus on nothing but this exact moment.

I… that seemed like decent advice, but 'stop thinking' was kind of fundamentally a self-defeating proposition unless one had some very particular training and experience. Focusing just on the present was a much more productive approach. I very carefully focused on the now, to the exclusion of everything else.

I was lying in a bed, wearing nothing but a hospital gown. In front of me was a balding, 5'10" researcher with a nervous habit of chewing his pen, a taste for cigars and an unhealthy addiction to screens. Everything else led to confusion and chaos in my head, so it didn't matter.

"Do I have your attention?" The man said, thankfully just in time.

"Yes."

"Good. You are currently in the hospital wing of Protectorate headquarters, in the city of Brockton Bay, United States of America, on Earth Bet. Do any of these names make sense to you?"

I frowned. What kind of question was that. Of course I'd heard of America. I'd even had a…

Even had a…

I snapped my attention back to the man. "Yes."

He seemed surprised. "You know of Earth Bet?"

I hesitated. "I know of Earth. Nothing about any other words for it."

He made a note on his pad. "I see. And the United States?"

"Yes, located in North America. I learned that in… where had I learned that?

I shook my head slightly, trying almost to physically shake off the confusion.

"I understand. Please remain calm, we have seen this before. It's normal for people in your condition to be missing memories. Please don't be concerned and focus on my questions."

I suppressed a groan. I had no long-term memories in my head and even then I could tell this was going to be a chore.

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A/N: Well, that's the prologue. Let me know what you think, please. Feedback is the currency of the realm.