Personal Log.
That’s it. Just Personal Log.
After some more deliberation, we decided that Cyra and I should head back to the Earth the academy is located on. From there we should be able to determine our own status, and maybe that of Baudemagus. We stepped through to the Grand Stair and I sealed the Door behind us once again.
Since walking there directly would take roughly two weeks Cyra preferred to teleport from a nearby Gossamer world. My first thought was to walk to my own world, where I had thought to look for Ilsa whom I might employ as a courier, or perhaps the world I had led Soto-sama’s people to, which was slightly closer, but Cyra didn’t seem to have the patience for a half-hour walk along the stair, so we checked out some nearby doors.
It is a fact that it is impossible to know the destination of each and every Door along the Grand Stair. Even near Doors used I’ve used frequently there are those which I have never touched. For the Door now leading to Morholt’s Domain in Fierce this was certainly true. I have been in the habit, when not in a rush to brush my fingers along the Doors on one side of the Grand Stair as I make my way along, looking not at where each particular Door might lead me but simply seeing if it would take me anywhere. Twice this has paid off, revealing to presence to me of an unlinked Door. The first had been shrouded and sealed the next time I passed it. The second now leads to Fierce and is shrouded and sealed in turn. I find the parallel amusing .
Thinking back, there may have been a third Door as well, although I didn’t realize it at the time. In my early days of exploring the Grand Stair there was a man, an albino giant of a man, leaning against a Door, his face rapt with concentration. He didn’t look at us as we approached, hoping he might be able to tell us something of this strange new place I had found myself in, but emitted a primal growl from deep within his throat. Ilsa had growled back at him. I had thought discretion the better part of valor and simply turned and left, Ilsa following me reluctantly.
Now, however, I was interested in linked Doors, particularly one linked to a world supportive enough of sorcery for Cyra to teleport us from it, and a place isolated enough that teleporting away (and presumably back later) would not draw attention. The first three Doors I touched led to Nexopolis (locked, of course), a small office in a world which felt like it matched the description I had heard of Planet Fiction and a world I felt leery of visiting, and Finisterrae, site of the last battle of the Dwimmerlaik War, now a broken world open to shadow and with unpredictable patterns of energy coursing through it at random. While I have long wanted to visit Finisterrae, now was not time time for a pilgrimage, nor was it a safe world for sorcery. Before I could go on Cyra grew impatient and asked why we didn’t use the Planet Fiction Door, claiming minimal risk since we would be departing immediately. Despite my foreboding I agreed.
We stepped though into a small office, a doctor’s office I thought, judging from the medical degrees framed and hanging on the wall. University of Edinburgh. I’d heard of it. A decent enough school on my world and probably here as well. Doctor Joseph Bell. The name didn’t register. Than we were gone.
The Stratosphere, one of many prominent buildings in Las Vegas, although rarely seen from on top. It afforded me an impressive view of the city to occupy my thoughts while Cyra worked her magic, an effort which yielded some interesting results. Baudemagus was now assigned to the world of Indus, an ancient Earth world inimical to wrighting and sorcery. The lot of us had been given citations, promotions, early graduation (she didn’t say what our final class rankings were), and assignment to Indus as Baudemagus’ aides. Low key explainable disappearances. At least we weren’t to be shot on sight.
On a whim I sought for Baudemagus with wayfinding. Indus was not, to the best of my knowledge, sealed, so if he was in fact exiled there then he should be findable. No such luck. I didn’t think it would be that easy.
Having discerned our status, we moved on to part two of our plan. I had readied a package with copies of all the documents retrieved from the Cyber-Lady, along with copies of the Icons found. My original thought had been to find Ilsa and have her hand deliver them to my Uncle Cedric. Cyra suggested she simply teleport them onto his desk, needing only to pluck from my mind a strong impression of his office and the desk onto which they were to be delivered. I succumbed to the simplicity of the plan, eliminating the time needed to find Ilsa and then have her travel the Grand Stair to reach my uncle. Sometimes I feel the lure to learn how to do this myself, but ultimately I prefer the joy of discovery as by walking I find portions of the Grand Stair new to me. When events are not so pressing as they are right now, that is.
I had debated with myself for a while over the wisdom of sending the documents to Uncle Cedric. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that he was the better judge of the danger inherent in the situation and how best it might be presented and to whom. He can honestly deny any knowledge of how they got to him, and although I expect him to make a reasonable guess at their source he can also in all honesty deny knowledge of that as well. It would have to do.
Cyra had brought along a similar packet of documents which quickly followed mine into the aether, and we teleported back to Planet Fiction intending to depart that world as quickly as we could.
When I awoke I was being carried through the Door back to Fierce, being subsequently informed that we had been subjected to a magic based attack as we teleported into Planet Fiction, most likely by the world itself trying to remove all our copyright and trademark information. A pair of locals had discovered us and managed to suppress the spell holding us long enough for Cyra to wake and get the two of us out the Door. I refrained from saying “I told you so.” After all, I had agreed to it in the end.
In our absence something had happened to Sturm. He had changed in a way that made him unrecognizable to us. He would not elaborate, and I didn’t press him on the issue. It’s still a curiosity.
After informing the others of what we had discovered Soto-sama surmised he was being imprisoned somewhere. Had Drake felt the need to have him killed it would most likely have been a very public execution and an implied warning to others who might defy him. It would also have been admitting that one of his legion commanders had, in fact, defied him; a fact which was so far known to very few and all of them abandoned on Fierce. I lack Soto-sama’s confidence in Baudemagus’ current status, but I hope she’s right.
Having put our message in a bottle and cast it out on the seas of fate we now had to choose our next course of action.
We could hunker down and hope our message reached other than deaf ears and the reaction to it would be to our benefit. This seemed a losing proposition to me, as we were quite unsure there would be a helpful reaction and it would hand the initiative to our opponent.
We could launch a direct attack upon the Cyber-Lady. This hadn’t worked out so well the last time, with our salvation resting upon the fact that her attention was focussed on the Door.
We could leave Fierce and search for Baudemagus, essentially handing the responsibility off to someone else. This assumed he wasn’t already dead, that we would be able to actually find him if he wasn’t, and we could extract him from whatever prison Drake had placed him in. Add it all up, and the odds started looking pretty long.
We could leave Fierce, severing the door and abandoning Baudemagus, our mission, Soto-sama, and the eight billion souls trapped there, and risking the eventual flooding of the Grand Stair by the Cyber-naki should the Cyber-Lady and her allies ever regain contact. I, for one, wasn’t yet ready for this one.
None of these options appeared particularly appetizing, but Soto-sama reminded us of one fact. Morholt had dominated the Cyber-Lady, not defeating her totally but dominating her with the Eidolon from the Annunaki. We had defeated Morholt. The thing which gave Morholt the edge over the Cyber-Lady was the artifact. If we could recover the artifact, if Baudemagus had in fact hidden it somewhere and not turned it over to Drake, then we had a good shot at defeating the Cyber-Lady ourselves. If he were unsure of being able to convince Drake of the wisdom of intervening in Fierce rather than abandoning it, then Soto-sama and ourselves were the only likely hope for salvation of this world and the artifact would likely be a valuable tool in that effort. Therefore, it didn’t seem unreasonable to hope the artifact had been concealed from others but not us.
It seemed a long-shot to me, but Soto-sama had served under Baudemagus far longer than us and understood his thinking far better than we did. Besides, as a long-shot it still offered us a better hope of success than the alternatives, and it beat simply waiting for the anvil to drop. Wayfinding told us the artifact was reachable, so we set out at once, leaving Fierce once again behind a sealed Door.
Rather than risk repeating our experiences on Planet Fiction we started by walking to the world Soto-sama’s people had been relocated to. They were settling in well enough, but found themselves completely isolated from their neighbors. Their language and life skills were so completely at odds from one another that communication with the locals was nigh-on impossible. I did what I could in the short time available before Cyra teleported us all out, creating a set of translation tablets from which they could work out the local language. I apologized for making them in English rather than Japanese, since the Grand Stair granted me knowledge of only the local languages and we were no longer on a Japanese speaking world. They were grateful for my efforts and assured me their own command of English would be quite up to the task.
Baudemagus’ legion was headquartered on a world called Verse Archanum, which Mena had previously visited. We had decided on this world as a starting point for our search on the assumption that Baudemagus would have hidden it someplace relatively close. Mena then took point, as she was the one with who had the most contact with (and blood on) the artifact. In short order we were again traveling the Grand Stair.
It felt good to walk the Grand Stair once more, brushing my fingers on the Doors we passed, getting a fleeting sense of the myriad worlds they touched, the nigh limitless possibilities offered there. I recognized, more through the descriptions of others than firsthand knowledge, the Jaeger Expanse, the Grey Tower, the Rickety Stair, the Grand Expanse. Again I saw, and again wondered at, the Crawler Upon the Stairs, and was glad our path took us in the opposite direction. The Stair sang to me, it was in my blood, and I wondered if Uncle Cedric could still hear it or if his time with the Legion had deafened him to it.
Our Way finally led us to a Door, our journey taking us beyond the Grand Stair. The door was of sandalwood and bore a sign saying “Open for Business”. I had to suppress a laugh. I recognized the Door. It was the only public, aka unlocked, Door to the world Nexopolis, a locked Door to which lay practically across from the Door to Fierce. It again makes me wonder if the Grand Stair has a sense of humor.
Written by Dave Nebiker