The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 8, 2398

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Medavorken and Cricket are not the only people here with them. They’re accompanied by a soldier they don’t recognize, and Meliora Rutherford. She regards them like she didn’t know they would be coming, and doesn’t know how she feels about it. Leona maintains her composure as captain of this crew. “Report.”

“None of your business,” Meliora replies. “Report.”

“We were trapped on a world that serves as a junkyard for random lost objects throughout the bulk,” Mateo answers.

Meliora nods. “Flipverse, yeah. Not a very pleasant brane, if I should dare to share my opinion.”

“Did you see my boyfriend there?” Cricket asks. “He’s lost.”

“Quiet, Cricket.” Meliora glares at her, then faces Mateo and Leona. “Sorry, he’s...excitable.”

Cricket glares back. “But I’m not dumb. You obviously don’t want them to know that my boyfriend is The Superintendent.”

Mateo, Leona, and Erlendr are shocked by this. Alyssa doesn’t recognize the term yet, so she doesn’t react.

“Don’t look so impressed,” Meliora warns. “He’s just a man with the ability to dream and make up stories. You can do it too.”

“Well, as far as we know,” Leona says to Cricket, “he wasn’t there.”

“Where are we?” Alyssa asks. “More importantly, can wherever we are get me back to my sister?”

“I’m afraid that’s not what I’ve been tasked to do,” Meliora replies. “I’m far too busy to take on new jobs while I’m in the middle of one.”

Leona widens her eyes, and shakes her head suggestively at her.

“We’re in my universe,” Cricket answers for her. “If we were ever separated, Tavis and I agreed to meet back here, right after the moment we first left together.” He looks around for him, but sees nothing but rocks, trees, and rushing water.

“I was to understand the Superintendent did not travel,” Mateo remembers.

“He doesn’t,” Meliora explains reluctantly, wishing this would just all be over. “This is a duplicate. He’s not even the Superintendent anymore.”

“Oh.”

“Bottom line,” Leona says, “is that we need to get to the Fourth Quadrant in September of 2398. The exact date isn’t super important.”

“That’s the rough date here,” Cricket points out.

“That’s where I was trying to go,” Mateo tells them. “I guess I just didn’t get the right universe. I don’t know what I did wrong, though, so I’m not sure I can fix it. Plus, I’m not the one who created the portal, I just found and used it. Is there a reason that it brought us here specifically, or is it random?”

“You were probably drawn to this one.” The soldier indicates Meliora. “She brought us here.”

Alyssa takes a half step forward. “If that’s true, then you can do it, you can reunite me with my sister.”

“Okay.” Meliora throws up her hands. “That’s enough about me, and the Superintendent. I’m sorry, but I cannot help you. In order for me to travel the bulk, I have to meditate for years. I literally sit in one place for several years to build up bulk energy in my body.”

“That’s not how long it took when you brought us here,” Medavorken contends.

“That was from The Stage; the same physical rules don’t apply. I can absorb it much faster while I’m there. It’s the difference between holding out your hand, and accumulating water from the air, and sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool.” There’s something she’s not telling the team. She would be able to find a way if she were clever about it. She could place herself into a time bubble, and make the meditation process faster. Even if that didn’t work as a loophole, she could place the team inside a bubble, so they didn’t have to stand around and wait for her that long. How she’s acting with them is no great surprise, though. She’s a powerful being. She calls herself a Rutherford, which is a fair claim, but a part of her will always be a Delaney, and a part of her will always be a Reaver. She plays it close to the vest, because otherwise, she could probably single-handedly solve every problem ever. She likely gets real sick of people asking her for favors.

“If you don’t help us,” Leona warns, “we’re never going to leave you alone. I mean, what else are we gonna do, hang out on this planet? It could be dangerous.”

“It’s really not,” Cricket breathes in the fresh air, and smiles proudly.

“My point is that if we’re not going anywhere...then we’re not going anywhere. I’ve always wanted to get to know my daughter better anyway.”

“I am not your daughter,” Meliora says. She’s touchy about her family tree.

“No, you’re not,” Leona agrees. “Leona Reaver is. I don’t know if you know this, but we saved her life. We never found out who extracted her from her timeline, but after they did, we got her out of her body, and into a new one. We’re not just trying to get to Trina. We’re trying to get to her. Will you help us?”

Meliora sighs. “Are you skipping time?”

“Not presently.”

“My abilities are limited here,” Meliora begins to explain. I was born with a bag of tricks. When I go to another universe, some of those tricks come with me, and some of them don’t. I was trapped in one brane for centuries once because one of the tricks that I lost was my connection to the bulk. I only got out of there when the Prototype coincidentally showed up on a mission. I’m just lucky that I didn’t lose my immortality. My point is that I’m not lying, I can’t help you, unless you have five or so years to wait.”

“Would you please reach out to someone who can help?”

“Yes,” Meliora replies. “Future!Me will help you. But I have a recommendation.”

“What would that be?”

“Get out while you can. The Fourth Quadrant...does not last forever.”

Before anyone can ask her to elaborate, Mateo’s hands begin to drift to the right on their own, forcing him to turn his body. He feels a pull towards the empty space behind them. Droplets of bulk energy roll up his fingers like beads of sweat. They cling as long as they can, but eventually let go, and become drawn into a new portal. They don’t have to walk through it, or teleport. It sucks them in like a vacuum cleaner.

Bonk! They strike an invisible wall, and fall to the ground. They’re hurt, but only superficially. They get themselves back up, and look around. In one direction is the infinite ocean, and in the other is that translucent wall. This is the edge of the Kansas City Metropolitan Island of the Fourth Quadrant, but they’re on the wrong side of it.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Year 121 RSS

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Leona turned out to have packed a lot more in her emergency bag than a teleporter gun. It’s all tricked out with a vacuum tent, an oxygen tank, a carbon scrubber, food, hydroponic tubes, basic survival supplies, and even a miniature meat bioreactor, along with a fusion reactor to power everything. She designed it to promote the survival of one to three people in an environment with no atmosphere, and no organic resources. It can recycle water for a time, but this is not a permanent solution. For that, she wants to include starter nanites, as well as a few other amenities, but the tools that she had at her disposal in the Third Rail were limited. It’s impressive what she came up with already, and it’s more than they need in this place. All combined, it’s far lighter than it sounds, and could be carried by an average-sized adult with little issue.

When the team first landed in the Third Rail, their bags of holding stopped working, leaving only a few random items available to them, possibly forever. They do not have the Compass of Disturbance, or the HG Goggles, but Leona had built something pretty similar. It was mostly designed to test for the temporal origin of a given object or individual, but she thinks she can rework it to find out how long the lost objects in this forest have been sitting there. Erlendr was already trying to do that himself, but he could only estimate it, and he was way off on a lot of things, because it’s not like he has any experience dating aged and weathered objects.

Mateo didn’t help with the mapping project that Leona performed to find the location of the next roving bulk portal. It was his sole job to keep an eye on Erlendr, and since he would be an incredible annoyance on the road, the two of them just stayed at camp. Leona taught Alyssa how to work her gizmo, while she kept a lookout for threats. There are other people on this planet. They can hear them in the distance, in their little village by the river. They never come this deep into the woods, though.

The planet is not naturally habitable in salmonverse, so calling it a duplicate of Proxima Doma isn’t really all that fair. Leona’s current hypothesis is that this universe developed about the same way as it did for their brane, but experienced an impact—or series of impacts—which resulted in this huge mountain range in the Terminator Zone. This region receives warmth from the host star, Proxima Centauri, while being protected from its wrathful magnetic flare-ups. It probably gets warmer at those times, but not detrimentally so. Free from these solar storms, which would otherwise blow the atmosphere away, a pocket of civilization has been able to develop here without artificial superstructures. They couldn’t have evolved here, though. They came from Earth. They’re human.

“I believe we have enough data,” Alyssa declares, having just finished analyzing a heavily bedraggled forest couch.

Leona thinks she heard something, so she scans the trees a little more while Alyssa is waiting. Once she feels comfortable, she takes the tablet, and looks at the readings. “It probably is, but I think I saw some right angles between those trees. If there’s one more lost object deposit, then I would like to check it, and then we’ll see if our map does us any good.”

“Is there a chance that there is no pattern at all?”

“There’s more than a chance. If this phenomenon has anything to do with the flares from Proxima Centauri, it may be hopeless. We may be stuck here forever.”

Alyssa frowns.

“Trina is safe,” Leona goes on. “So are Carlin and Moray. I know what it’s like to leave people behind, unsure of their fate. All you can do is be strong, and keep trying.”

“Okay.” Alyssa sets her anxiety aside for now. “Let’s go investigate these right angles.”

Whatever Leona saw, it must have been an optical illusion. This area seems to be beyond the range of the portal. Or maybe it sometimes shows up, but doesn’t deposit anything. It may go all over the planet, and this only looks like a place of higher concentration. They have caught glimpses of the village, which doesn’t look technologically advanced at all. Whether that was originally done on purpose or not, it suggests that the people have yet to discover the lost objects. There are a lot of cell phones here, like a shocking number of them. One might think that they would eventually reverse-engineer them, or at least become inspired to aspire to it. Who knows? They don’t even know if the bulk portal is two-way. This could all be a massive waste of time. “Okay, I guess that’s it. Let me see if the map has good news.”

They turn to head back for camp when they see a young boy staring at them a few meters away. He looks scared. “Well, hello there,” Alyssa says to him kindly.

“Are you a wraith?”

“A what?” Alyssa asks.

The boy looks down at Leona’s device when it beeps to indicate that the map is finished rendering. “Forbidden. Forbidden object!” He runs back towards his village screaming, “forest wraiths! Forest wraiths! Alert the king!”

“We should go,” Alyssa decides.

“Yeah,” Leona agrees. She starts heading towards camp, but stops when her tablet beeps again.

“What is it?”

“It’s already detected a pattern.” Leona’s eyes widen.

“What is it?” Alyssa repeats.

“We need to run.”

They bolt, and make it back to camp out of breath.

“What is it?” Mateo asks. “Is everything okay?” He looks at Erlendr, in case he had something to do with this.

“Se...” Leona continues to try to breathe. “Seven.”

“Seven what?” Mateo urges.

“Seven years.” Another breath. “Eighty-three days.”

“Seven years, and eighty-three days. That’s how long we’ll have to wait?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“It’s okay, be patient with yourself.”

“I can’t. Erlendr was right, but he didn’t have the whole story. This planet makes one orbit every eleven days, and Proxima Centauri rotates on its own axis on an eighty-three day cycle. That means that the portal opens up every eleven days, but it only does it seven times before the poles reverse.”

“The poles?”

“The poles,” Leona confirms. “The AI from The Constant, it detected a pattern. Every seven Earthan years, the sun’s magnetic poles reverse, and begin dumping random objects from the bulk roughly every eleven days for eighty-three days.”

“How many times has it done it during this cycle?” Erlendr asks. “At least three.”

“There’s no way to know. If we miss the next one, we may only have to wait for eleven more days, or seven more years. My system detected some objects that were recent, some that were seven years old, others that were fourteen years old, and so on. Nothing shows up during the interim periods. That’s how I realized that they matched this solar system’s behavior.”

“So where’s the next portal going to open up?” Alyssa asks.

Leona frowns, and delays her response. “There is no pattern to that, at least not one that the AI can detect. I know that it’s going to happen today, but I don’t know where. It may have popped up already. That’s why I ran. That’s why I’m so earnest. Mateo, are you...sensing anything?”

Confused, Mateo switches his gaze among everyone, as if he’s not the only one who could answer that question. “No, not really. Little hungry.”

“Are your hands, uhh...being blocked right now?”

He pulls at his shirt, which would have disappeared if he wasn’t letting the layer of telekinesis magic protect it from the timonite layer on his skin. “Yes, you want me to unblock them?”

“You could try,” Leona suggests. Just try not to touch anything.”

Mateo clears his throat, and turns around. They see him start to undo his pants as he heads for the trees alone. He doesn’t go very far, so they can hear what he’s doing, as if they needed any more proof. “Okay,” he says once he returns. He takes his shirt off completely. He’s not had anything else to wear for eleven days, so it’s pretty dirty and uncomfortable—they couldn’t bathe or wash in the river without being seen—and he doesn’t want to waste the timonite on needless banishments. It may be a finite resource.

“Do you feel anything now?” Erlendr asks him.

“Shut up,” Leona orders.

Mateo holds his arms out, not only hoping to catch a scent of some kind, but also to keep from touching anything he doesn’t want to get rid of. He starts to wander around the area. Meanwhile, Alyssa and Leona begin to break camp, and Erlendr stews. His hands are still cuffed, though now in front of his body. He’s getting off easy. “I feel something!” Mateo announces.

“Where?” Leona lets go of the vacuum tent, which expands automatically from the outside of the bag, and has to be collapsed back in manually. Alyssa takes the job over, since it still has to be done.

“It’s close. It’s very close. I think it already dumped something, and it’s just hanging around. I think we could have gone back in where we came last year, had we been able to see it.”

“Can you see it now?” Leona presses.

“No, but I can tell where it is. Come on.” While Alyssa throws the pack over her shoulders, Leona and Erlendr begin to follow Mateo through the trees. He’s moving slow enough, so she’s able to catch up. “It’s here,” he finally says. “Are we ready?”

“How do we get through?” Alyssa asks.

“Everyone take a hand,” Mateo figures. Once they do, technicolor bulk energy begins to cover their bodies. They slip through the portal, and land on some rocks by the river. They’re not alone. “Medavorken?”

“Mateo?” Medavorken asks right back.

“Hi, I’m Cricket!” a young woman says excitedly.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Year 120 RSS

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Mateo zips Erlendr’s wrists together behind his back. He’s not real aggressive with it, because the man is currently using his best friend’s body, and Ramses is going to need it back one day. Still, it should hold, especially since he also pats him down for blades, and other weapons, even though Leona didn’t specifically order him to.

“Where are we going?” Alyssa asks as soon as they start on their walk.

“I need to get out of this forest. I have an idea of where we are, but I have to confirm it with a better view of the sky.”

“I know where we are,” Erlendr claims.

“You’ll forgive me for not trusting you,” Leona spits.

“How about I tell you where we are, and if it’s what you suspect, you can be pretty sure I’m not lying?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s Proxima Doma, except the people here call it Spectrevale. Well, that’s what they call the terminator zone, but since it’s the only habitable region of the planet, they’ve become the same thing.”

Mateo looks over at Leona, who sighs. “That’s what I thought. How long have you been here?”

“Three years,” he answers.

“Three years, as in three Earthan years, or as in thirty-three days?”

“Thirty-three days,” Erlendr clarifies. Proxima Doma—or Spectrevale, as it were—orbits its sun about every eleven days. Back when they were on their brane’s version of the planet, though, this was mostly useless fun fact that the residents mostly ignored. They lived inside of domes to protect themselves from the solar flares, and paid very little attention to the orbital period.

“How did you get here?” Mateo asks.

“I don’t know that I should tell you,” Erlendr responds. He’s probably right about that. They’re in dangerous territory now. That was the silver lining to being in a reality where temporal manipulation didn’t generally work. They were no longer worried about encountering—or worse, creating—a paradox. Time travel made it a constant threat, and bulk travel compounds the risk. Anything he says about what he did since he stole Ramses’ body, and fled the lab, could cause real problems for a lot of people.

“You don’t have to tell us anything,” Leona says. “You’re from our future. We have you now, and when we get you back to the Third Rail salmonverse, we’ll Livewire you out of that body, and move on from this. That was the plan, and it will remain the plan, except for one minor change.”

“What might that be?” he questions.

“You won’t be placed in my alternate self’s body. You’ll just be put into the Insulator of Life, where you can’t move, or do anything to harm anyone. It was going to happen anyway. It’s fate, if you will. But I don’t know if I should tell you.”

“That’s okay. I’ll get out of it. I always find a way. There’s something that even you don’t know about what death really means.”

Oh, you mean Pryce’s afterlife simulation? That doesn’t work out for you either, Mateo wishes he could say out loud, but he knows that he can’t give that much away.

“We’re going the wrong way,” Pryce says after a bit of silence.

“I still need to see for myself,” Leona explains. “We’re going to climb a little bit.”

“Where you were, where you came through. There’s a portal there. It’s roving, but it doesn’t move too much. The only way out is to jump through it the next time it comes around.”

“And when will that be?” Alyssa asks him.

“In eleven days.”

“There is nothing particularly special about the orbital period of a celestial body,” Leona begins. “There is no starting point, nor ending point. These moments are arbitrary human constructs, designed to help people manage the events of their lives.”

“Okay, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I understand that that’s how it seems to work where you’re from, but there’s a sunspot on Proxima Centauri that triggers a bulk dumping event once a year, right here in Sargan Forest. I’ve seen it happen twice now, plus the time I came here. That’s a pattern. The locals call it The New Year Nose, because it somewhat resembles a nose.”

“Sunspots move more than portals do,” Leona argues.

“I’m just telling you how it is. This is a different universe, with a different set of proper physics. You can’t necessarily rely on the old rules.”

Leona knows that this is true, she just hates when someone like Erlendr Preston knows something that she doesn’t. She doesn’t want anyone to be a rapist, but if he’s already a rapist, at least make him wrong about literally everything. “I’m going to check the sky, and that’s final! If what you say is true, we have eleven days anyway, so what’s it to ya?”

“I just want to make sure we get a good spot to sleep. I found a lost mattress a couple of kilometers away that we can share. It hasn’t been here long. That’s what I’ve been doing, examining the lost objects, and estimating their arrival times, so I can figure out a pattern to the roving portal.”

Leona stops walking, and pushes Erlendr in the shoulders. She immediately regrets it, since she too doesn’t want to harm the body, but she’s just so angry. “If you think we’re going to sleep anywhere near you, then you seriously missed my point of view on rape.”

“For the last goddamn time, I did not rape anybody!” Erlendr screams, still on his back. “She was my wife!”

“She still has to consent!”

“She did!”

“Bullshit!”

Erlendr shouts unintelligibly. He swings his legs to trip Mateo onto his own back. Then he rolls over enough to make it to the hill, and keeps on rolling, hoping to escape. “Screw you!” he yells, dropping the volume of his voice deliberately, because he’s not slipping away fast enough for the sound to grow all that fainter naturally.

Leona drops her emergency pack as Alyssa is helping Mateo off the ground. She casually removes a teleporter gun from the bag, quickly calibrates it, and shoots Erlendr before he can impale Ramses’ head on a tree branch. He appears a few meters away, and maintains his momentum, ending up right at Leona’s feet. “Are you done yet?”

“Yes,” Erlendr replies, face in the dirt.

“Then come on. That was a good idea, tracking the movement of the portal. But you lack the tools necessary to come to a valid conclusion. I don’t.”

Microstory 1534: Found and Lost

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I can never find anything in this ________ house. I swear, I’m not a ________, I just cannot get organized. I can spend ________ on the hunt for one ________ thing, and there have been some things that I still haven’t ________, even after years. I’m not talking about common ________, like my chapstick or wallet. I use those every day, and I always ________ them in the same ________. I’m talking about that little metal key thing you use to access the ________ card or external ________ on your phone. I only need it every two ________, and that’s plenty of time to forget where I placed it. And when I finally do ________ what I’m looking for, I always recall that I put it there for some ________ reason. Yeah, I thought I was pretty clever, ________ all the thumbtacks with the nails. But ________ go out in the garage, and ________ are an indoor ________ . The fact that they’re both ________ isn’t all that relevant. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been through this ________, flipping through my stack of tax forms and middle school report cards, or opening every ________ in my desk twice. You would think I would have the layout memorized by now, but I’m only ever looking for one thing, and even if I saw it the last time, when I was looking for something else, it’s not like I’ll remember. But I should, because I have to do it so ________. And what’s happened today doesn’t make any ________. This is what you might call a junk ________, but it’s actually pretty clean and ________. It’s the most organized area I have. There’s a divider for rubber ________, and one for ________, and another for ________. If I’m ever looking for ________, that’s one of the few things I actually can always find. It’s the first ________ I open when I’m looking for something that’s not normally in it, though.

Today, I can’t remember where I ________ my social security ________. I need it to apply to this airport thing, and apparently memorizing the number itself isn’t ________ enough. Which is dumb. What’s the difference between ________ the number, and showing a piece of ________ with the number on it? That’s all that’s on there. I could probably forge one myself, even though I’m no ________, nor exceptionally good at computers. Anyway, that’s not the point. There’s something in my organized ________ drawer that doesn’t belong. I have never seen it ________. It’s a golden flash drive that claims to have five petabytes stored on it. Like I said, I’m no computer ________, but even I know how insane that is. I look it up online; that’s five thousand times larger than the ____est flash drive the public has access to. Obviously I have to figure out what’s on it. Someone ________ into my house, didn’t take anything I can see, but left something that shouldn’t even ________. I’m not certain it ever could exist, even in the ________, not in something so small. I’m worried it’s a ________ that will destroy the ________, though, so I spend the next ________ looking for my old ________. I mean, this ________ is ancient. It still boots up, but the ________ I’m not using my ________ computer is because I don’t want there to be any ________ of connecting to the ________. This thing was manufactured before wireless ________ was even a thing, I think, probably. I stick the mysterious ________ ________ into the USB ________, and wait for it to ________. It begins to glow, and quickly becomes too hot to touch, so I can’t take it out, and shutting the ________ doesn’t matter, because it’s so old that it can’t detect whether it’s open or ________. The screen will stay on unless you turn it off ________, which isn’t working either. After a ________, I’m getting really worried, but before I can make another ________, two beams of light shoot out of the flash ________, and hit me right in the eyes. Now I’m ________ in a trance, unable to move a muscle. I can feel myself being ________ into the device, little by little. Then the darkness. I don’t know how long it takes me to ________ up again, but it takes me awhile to get my bearings. I realize that I’m in the computer, and I’m able to access everything still ________ on it, like the letter I wrote to the boy I had a crush on in ________ grade that I was always too scared to print off and ________ to him. I can’t actually do anything here, though, because like I said, this ________ is too old. Now I’m regretting it, because if I had an internet connection, I could have at least called for ________.

Microstory 912: Fandom

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I have mixed feelings about this topic. On the one hand, I love that people love to love things, but I think they can take it a bit too far. Back in the day, men were allowed to like sports, boobs, explosions, and more sports. Women were allowed to like horses, and making sure my dinner was ready by 5:15. These days, it’s cool to like comic books and video games, and it’s not really cool to like those traditional things. I take issue with this too, because while the jocks ruled the school of yesterday, the nerds run the show now. There’s just as much judgment and animosity as there was before, but now with different divisions of people. I admit that this is getting better already, with the mini-generation after millennials basically not caring what anyone does, as long is it doesn’t negatively impact the world. I also think there is quite a bit of materialism going on, even more than there used to be. Man, my goal of being more positive for this series isn’t going all that, is it? I’ll do better next time. For now, I want to talk about all the stuff. Major content creators make more money off of merchandise than they could ever hope to make from the source material. Why is that? Why do full-grown adults find satisfaction from owning an action figure, while doing nothing with it but set it on a shelf. Or they own so much of this crap, they can’t even display it all. Do you not find that absurd? Exactly how many plush porgs do you need? If you’re about to look around the room and count your porgs, don’t bother. The answer is a hard zero. I’m all for expressing your love for whatever, but there’s a way to do it without losing half your income. You need a cup to put your drinks in, so buy a cup with some insider quote from your favorite show, like “I’m the one who knocks” or “time out on this game of thrones; I need to pee!”. You need a bag to carry your essentials, so that one works out as well. But all these little stickers, trinkets, figurines, and costumes you never wear; it’s all just useless junk to which one of two things will happen. Either you’ll die, and burden your family with all that stuff you overestimated how much they would want, or you’ll become immortal, your priorities will shift, and you’ll wish you didn’t have it anymore. And you won’t be able to sell it, because guess what, everyone around you feels the same way. So now the world is down in resources, but up in full-sized pokeballs. Like I said, it’s all about priorities. If you have some disposable income to burn on a real 1940s police box, why not instead give that money to charity? You’re not gonna make me feel bad about trying to make you feel bad for wasting your money on a sonic screwdriver that stopped making noise after a week.