It would be nice if I had perfect recall of every moment of my life so I could review my memories with clarity at a convenient time. But I didn’t, so I couldn’t think of the past and determine if there was something that I simply didn’t notice, or if it just didn’t happen. Though perhaps some forms of ‘perfect’ recall would only allow me to witness things I noticed in the moment.
I wondered if there was a good spell for recalling memories. From what I knew, they were far better at removing them. Those were the sorts of spells that got people in big trouble if anyone knew about them. Not that I was interested anyway.
When had my Nondetection spell become half depleted? That was the important question. If it was before we came to Earth #2 then I didn’t have much to worry about… here. Maybe somewhere else though. If it was here, I really wanted to find out how and why.
“Excuse me.” I turned my head to see Momo- in normal human form. “I understand you are in contemplation, but you should eat something.”
She held a tray of rice balls, which were still mostly not balls but triangles. I could probably survive indefinitely on Power Brigade energy bars, but that didn’t mean I wanted to. Nor did I actually carry enough for that. “Thank you,” I said. Food was good.
Why didn’t food give me mana? Or maybe it did. I’d never been hungry for long enough to test either way. But if that was the case, then did typical mana regeneration indicate an area with practically no ambient mana?
That shouldn’t be quite right. There was certainly some anywhere, and though I’d felt mana increase severalfold, regeneration increased similarly. Unless the amount of mana I felt wasn’t actually directly proportional. Sounded like the sort of thing that would need weird super tech to test.
I think one of the rice balls had tuna. Better than the canned stuff Midnight carried, but that was to be expected. That was just emergency rations.
“Does anyone here study magic?” I asked Momo.
“In what way? Magical girls had a fairly instinctive understanding of their abilities. Practice still helps, of course, but there isn’t much to study.”
I frowned. “I’d think Humuruns would, at least. Do you know of any magical girls with divination abilities? Scrying, far-seeing, or something similar?” I couldn’t know if magical terms would directly translate if I hadn’t used them before. We were working off shared understandings, but that was imperfect even as Translation continued to improve.
“Generally, we all have powers for directly fighting against The Scouring, or for dealing with the consequences of their arrival.” I remembered that all of them seemed to be able to repair the surroundings- which was why they didn’t have to shut down whole streets or malls literally every day. It might be good for the construction economy, but it would be a bit tough on the local budgets. “I don’t know of anything like Scrying, but the country is broad. Though I suppose support types that specialize in tracking The Scouring might count.”
“Can they track anything else?” I asked. “Like… those ninjas?”
“I don’t believe so,” Momo shook her head. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had such trouble with them.”
“Speaking of trouble,” I commented. “Have you had any more issues with them?” There could still be portals around Earth #2’s Japan, theoretically. We hadn’t even necessarily gotten rid of the last portal to Earth #1. Though that was something for my old world to deal with.
“I can’t think of any incidents,” Momo admitted. “I could ask Lady Eglantine. Our companions are the ones who know most about nonlocal affairs.”
“Speaking of which… is The Scouring only an issue in Japan here?”
“There are a few other locations with incidents,” Momo said. “Do not worry, the Humuruns who came through were able to distribute themselves to select a companion.”
“How did they get there?” I asked. “Can they teleport? Fly?”
“Of course,” said Lady Eglantine, as the multicolored porcupine entered the room. “If by ‘fly’ you mean ‘stow away on airplanes’.”
“That sounds… a lot less mystical than I expected,” I admitted.
She shook her head, which sort of continued down the rest of her body through her tail. “Even if all of us had the ability, it wouldn’t be magically efficient. Unlike your powers which seem practically boundless.”
I made a face. “Are you kidding? I can only teleport four times.”
“How many times in a day?” Lady Eglantine asked.
“That would depend on mana regeneration rate, and if I woke up in the middle of the night.”
“Approximate. Something achievable under normal circumstances.”
“Like ten?” If I assumed the base of six mana per hour, and a reasonable period of sleep but also beginning in the morning with full mana.
“A limited pool and a high rate of recovery, then.”
“It’s not that fast.”
“How much energy do you think it takes to go around the planet?”
“I don’t really do that though. Teleportation takes some shortcuts.”
“It’s still not trivial.”
I shrugged. “Probably not. How do people not notice you sneaking about?”
“You forget that we appear only to those we choose… or with magical affinity. Here, those are effectively the same thing.” She turned to Momo. “You had a question?”
“Well, Turlough did,” Momo explained. “About farsight and tracking abilities.”
How did she know to show up for that question? Momo hadn’t texted or anything. Not that Humuruns appeared to have phones. If I’d know, that would have been my first question. Clearly there was a different degree of empathy or mental communication than what I had with Midnight. We never got anything so clear as ‘come answer a question’.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
“What I needed to know,” I explained. “Was if there are any abilities people here might have that would interact with… people like me. Because one of my anti-detection abilities was tested.”
Lady Eglantine thought for some time, after moving to sit on one of the pillows arrayed on the couch. “It is possible. Would it trigger against friendly uses?”
“How would you define friendly?” I asked.
“Well, normally others with powers from Humuruns,” Lady Eglantine admitted. “Do you see us as allies?”
“Of course. But that doesn’t mean my spell wouldn’t stop people from looking. After all, by the time I know you’re an ally, you have to have made contact and exchanged information which could in turn detect me somehow, right?” I shrugged. “Anyway, it works against everyone that doesn’t have an intrinsic connection to me. By which I mean specifically Midnight.”
“Then it is certainly possible someone looking for civilians in danger might have passed over you. Or that an ability meant to find The Scouring would wrestle with your abilities to some extent, finding foreign magic.”
“Hmm. But they’re not magical, right? Not really.”
“True. Bue we didn’t design our abilities to exclude most supernatural interference. Just what we expected to exist. In short, other Humuruns… and not exclusively.”
I nodded. “Because of the bad ones.”
“... It’s really very rare,” Lady Eglantine said.
“Literally everyone in my first world has access to powers and thus has the potential to abuse them. Making mistakes with selection occasionally is fine compared to that.”
“I see. Hopefully that information assuages your concerns, at least.”
It didn’t, really. There was some chance that someone accidentally brushed past me, but it seemed a bit more drained than that. Unless their divination abilities were particularly strong.
-----
Midnight and I were going to stay awhile, so I had him send a message back to the Brigade. We needed to take some more time to gather lashes from different magical girls for testing purposes anyway, and for some reason not everyone was willing to give them up for the cause. Even though eyelashes totally grew back. I wasn’t asking for all of them. Just four or five… per lid. What if upper or lower were better? I doubted left or right eye would matter, but I had a bunch of different baggies getting labeled. We didn’t want to have to come back here every day or something just to try to use Contingency.
Of course, rather than sending the message we could have just gone back if I didn’t have other things to do. One of those things was finding a time when the safehouse restroom was available. That was where the biggest mirror would be.
“What are you looking for?” Burning Shrimp asked. “You think there are more monsters out there?”
I was quite certain that those would have been noticed, with the screams of people being attacked and all that. “Someone might have been looking for me,” I explained. “Why are you here anyway?”
“I need to make sure you don’t do anything weird.”
What weird thing would I even do? Whatever, it wasn’t like my magic was secret.
This wasn’t the best Scrying mirror I’d ever had, but the best one wasn’t a mirror and was in another dimension, so this was the option.
Truthfully, I’d never had much luck with finding random magical things. I tended to focus on the strongest stuff. But in this case, that might be what I wanted. Especially if I looked for something that shared my sort of magic. I didn’t have any reason to expect that except instinct. Maybe some extraplanar intruders came here.
I gathered mana. Mists swirled on the mirror. Then… nothing. Midnight’s tail flicked. “What does that mean, you think?”
I had a pretty good idea, having felt the results firsthand. “Earlier, I sensed something. Someone shoved me away. Now… there’s nothing.”
“So they left?” Burning Shrimp asked.
“Hardly. They just properly warded themselves. Getting a null result kind of means I actually found them. Or I would have probably locked onto something around here. Most likely, someone with a powerful Nondetection spell.”
“Weird,” Midnight said. “I would have expected something like those Scrying anchors.”
“I think those are better for people who can’t use magic,” I explained. “A workaround that Doctor Doomsday came up with.”
“Uh…” Burning Cupid frowned- I could see her in the reflection. “Is this Doctor Doomsday guy… a villain?”
“Obviously. He even chose his own name.”
She shivered slightly. “I don’t like the sound of that at all.”
“Yeah, neither does anyone else. But he’s very hard to take down. He creates the best super tech New Bay has ever seen. Apparently.”
Midnight had more to add. “Most of it outdoes the actual advanced technology that the Martians and Celmothians have.”
Burning Cupid looked up at the sky. “Do you think… there are Martians here?”
“Here on Earth #2 or on here on Mars?”
“This is totally Earth #1. Yours is the weird one,” Burning Cupid said. “Anyway, in this dimension.”
“Humuruns are from much further, right?” I confirmed. “Not this system. So… hard to say. Gimme an hour and we’ll figure it out.”
-----
There weren’t any Martians. Either that, or they were really good at cloaking technology. However, Midnight didn’t think so.
“My suit’s sensors don’t detect any graphical artifacts,” he explained.
The bathroom was fairly roomy to begin with, but upon learning that we were going to look at Mars, we kind of got all the people- and Humuruns- staying at the safehouse. Or those who were nearby, since most of them had better things to do than hang around all day. Usually, they just had one or two keeping the place safe- and potentially keeping eyes on the weird extradimensional orc. I didn’t think that was unreasonable, since even if we were friends I did tend to find trouble. Though I didn’t think it was my fault here, since they had so much on their own.
“Wobble, stop getting in the way,” Shield complained as her morphic metal companion pressed up against the mirror.
“I wish to see that mountain over there. Surely there will be aliens.”
I shifted the view. Moving Scrying about was something I was used to by now. Without a proper target except ‘Mars’ I’d ended up with a nonspecific location, but it was clearly Mars. It looked just like the old pictures from Earth #1. Not that I recognized anything specific, which might have been more suspicious.
Lots of people were recording. Even magical girls were interested in Mars, I guess. I kind of wanted to keep looking for whoever had Nondetection, but bugging them more seemed unsafe.
“Alright, you should probably stop recording soon,” I commented. “This is going to become a normal mirror again in a few seconds.”
There were a number of disappointed looks. Why were people so excited about Mars, anyway? It was just another planet. It didn’t even have people.
Though if I thought about it… most of them had only seen Earth. Were there any rules about taking people from one foreign dimension to another? Would Extra even have to know?
I wouldn’t be good at lying, though. And it was probably better to not draw attention to them by going to the one world that had already crossed over with them.
As for whoever was hiding here… I might stand a better chance finding them from Earth. At the very least, I’d be better shielded from potential retaliation.
