The music that only I can hear is a mess of sounds. Not only is the music of the MOGO that we're approaching a cacophonous mess, but the sounds emitting from Andrew, revealing his fear without me touching his mind are just as audible. I frown, saddened by what is going to happen here, but I am also aware that if I can course correct and stop certain things from happening Andrew will end this story much happier than he can probably even imagine. And today is a big first step.
We're minutes from setting foot down a path that we can't walk away from. I have a chance, due to the unique and prodigious powers I possess, to gain an enormously powerful servant in the minutes that follow, and this is an opportunity I can't pass up on. Assuming I play this right I'll be taking my first significant step towards saving… if not the world then at least myself in a few years.
The world I'm in is on the cusp of being touched by tragedy. I have a responsibility, and the ability, to subtly shift the next set of major events. I gaze up at the sky and look at the tops of the trees that surround us. We continue to move deeper into the woods, and the vibrations grow louder. Ahead of me Matt and Steve, two young men who radiate protagonist energy, laugh and guide us deeper into the woods.
"Do either of you know how to get back?" Andrew asks, next to me. He is dutifully recording them.
"I know how to get back." I tell Andrew, causing him to turn and smile sadly at me. I can sense his appreciation just like I can sense the belief he has in me.
"Yeah Andrew! Lalo has our backs." Steve tells the teen. We make our way deeper into the woods and Matt suddenly runs forward laughing in excitement before sliding down a small hill. After he reaches the bottom of the hill he keeps going for another few dozen feet. He abruptly stops and points to the earth in front of him right before I see it.
I feel my heart begin to race as Matt points to a hole in the earth, a surprisingly narrow thing that as I get closer I realize is faintly glowing. Small traces of blue… radiation, probably, escape the hole and tint the air around it a shade lighter than it should be in the gloom of the night.
We all stop around it and peer down into the hole. It only goes a few feet down, perhaps 9 or so at a glance, easy enough for us to jump down into and after the wall we'd need to climb down we see a tunnel stretching forward. Andrew looks at the others and I can see the fear on his face. I can also see the looks of unearned teenage confidence that Matt and Steve are making.
Steve is the first to leap down into the mouth of the hole, landing in a small puddle, and I realize that if this were a horror movie he'd either outlive everyone or be the first one to die. I move and climb down after Steve, doing so carefully but still only taking a few seconds to do so. I step beside Steve and into the dark tunnel, noting that the blue glow that colors the air outside of the cave is brighter and more consistent here. It colors everything with a fascinating hue.
Andrew and Matt join Steve and I before I've been down here longer than three minutes. Andrew is not happy about this, which is honestly understandable, but Steve is quick to insist that we explore whatever geographical discovery we're making and that Andrew capture all of it. He talks a big game about how we're making history and does so so skillfully that for a second Andrew almost buys it. Almost.
The tunnel extends as far as we can see. I'm not using my actively supernatural sensory range, so right now I'm essentially just a human, exempting stuff like the Song of Spheres perk. As we move deeper into the tunnel the freakish nature of the sounds only I can hear gets more disturbing but the volume starts to decrease. I instinctively realize that this is because the monster is dying even as I remember that it's not dead yet.
It takes us about four full minutes of non-stop walking to reach far enough into the tunnel that we can lay our eyes on the source of… so many things that should happen in the future. The tunnel just ends, and ahead of us is a solid mass of stone with crystalline protrusions coming out of it. Steve is the one of us who moves the closest to the strange sight: a wall of crystals that are so filled with strange energy that they radiate blue light.
"Guys I'm really scared. What if this is radiation?" Andrew asks, behind the three of us. Steve is so close one of the protrusions coming out of the wall at the far end of the tunnel is inches from his face. The music I can hear is almost deafening, and I watch as the blue light coming out of the crystal begins to blink rapidly.
"Matt! I'm freaking out right now. Guys can we please just leave?" Andrew asks, shortly before we all begin to hear a piercing, almost supernaturally loud sound, and we all fall to our knees. I recover in seconds, thanks in no small part to my decision to shut off my ability to feel pain and begin to stand up even as the others cuss and hiss in pain. A few seconds later the others more fully recover, getting up as Matt asks a question.
"Is it showing up on the camera like that?" Matt asks Andrew, referring to the blinking, causing the young man to complain some more.
"I don't know, it's freaky and messing with us. I don't really want to record it like this!" He says, before Steve moves even closer to one of the crystal growths. He gazes at it awestruck and reaches out to touch it. When his finger touches it he smiles right before the crystal turns red.
The blood-like color of the crystal is something that amazes Steve but blood suddenly pours out of his noise. The others panic, a heartbeat before they also begin to bleed, and I smile as I realize that this should be enough for them to have attained their powers. I lower my detectability as much as I can lower it and sense my presence fade.
I point fingers at each of my companions and fire sleep rays. The nearly invisible beams slice through the air and connect with all three young men and I listen as all three slump to the floor and as the camera Andrew is holding slides out of his grip as he passes out, falling to the floor and breaking. I wince at the dull thuds their bodies make before I use rays to telekinetically push the three men away. I'll heal them in a second.
I turn to look at the MOGO and smile. The creature is starving and is on death's door. It is still emitting a red light and I reach into my soul and pull out a familiar though only rarely used object: My orcish weapon. I coat the end of the blade in my entropic miasma and point it at the monster. Debris in the tunnel begins to float and I can sense the creature reacting to me, but I open my eyes wide and reach into myself before activating my anti-magic cone. This allows me to see something that makes me smile: the power of the crystalline menace shutting off, causing the debris it was planning to attack me with to fall to the floor.
During one of my last fights against the wicked consortium in Generic Bard World my anti-magic ability underwent an evolution. The ability is now strong enough to fully suppress things that aren't magic, an evolution it was always promised to undergo eventually, though for a while now it's been strong enough to weaken such things.
"Sorry, friend. That's some bad luck." I tell it as I move closer. I feel a little bad for what I'm about to do, but it planned to turn a gaggle of teenagers into its superpowered slaves so I don't feel that bad.
I study it and lift my blade to the thickest part of its crystal body and move forward, causing the blade's tip to stab into it. I don't feel any resistance, though that's almost certainly because of my miasma. This creature is fully supernatural relative to my reality-of-origin but in this world this creature is a natural being; part of an ancient species that are, for all of their goofy biology, in this world completely non-supernatural.
Another piercing sonic scream emits from the strange creature but it can't actually stop me. I take a second step forward and feel the blade, aided by my entropic miasma, slide deeper into the creature. The glow it emits begins to dim and I pull my blade out of it. When the crystal goes dark I reach forward, shutting off my anti-magic cone, and cast my true undeath spell on the monster.
To do so I place a hand on one of the crystal protrusions, and wince as memories belonging to the corpse fill my mind. This is another bit of an evolved ability: "Theater of the Mind"; my perk responsible for granting me psychometry has evolved such that I can touch corpses and they count as objects.
The small hole created by my blade repairs itself and the crystal begins to glow again. The glow increases in intensity before I command it to stop glowing. It obeys, though I realize that it's still not sapient, only able to understand me as a result of my power coursing through it. I grit my teeth and almost begin to smile before I activate one of my newest perks: Ascension.
A surge of energy collects in my fingertips and then races into the monster. The crystal begins to glow in a way that could induce seizures in some folks for almost a full minute. The boys around me remain passed out. After a few moments the crystal stops glowing and I begin to grin confidently when I hear a voice.
"Hello, master." The voice tells me. I feel faint vibrations emanate from the protrusion I'm touching, which I suppose is part of the physicality of the act of the creature speaking. I have just gained a wonderfully powerful minion.
"Good evening little one. I'm sorry you were in pain earlier, but now you'll never have to be in pain again." I tell the creature gently. The crystals glow in response to my words. I close my eyes and try to link our minds. The initial sensation I feel is unpleasant and foreign, no doubt due to the creature's largely alien intellect, but in a matter of seconds I can hear human-like thoughts. I open my eyes and try to project my own thoughts into the creature's mind.
"Can you control your abilities?" I ask it, causing it to send me back non-verbal question marks. I groan, disappointed that I can't easily and simply figure out the truth behind this thing's abilities but I am also cognizant of the fact that I have all the time in the world to do so. Five years is a long time. Still, if it can control to the necessary extent its powers I won't even need to use something like anti-magic on those it affects to be able to give out telekinesis. And if it can't control its powers to the necessary extent then I should still be able to free people from its control using my generic totally not mind control powers. I just need a second to experiment with it. Still I'm not excited to learn that I'm gonna need to do some experiments to discern what exactly the MOGO can and can't do.
I order the undead being to head back down the tunnel its motions and activities created. It does as I command, moving itself backwards with telekinesis which comes as a surprise to me. I watch it seem to simply… streak backwards, it's like watching the top half of a car drive in reverse. It moves surprisingly fast as well, which is scary. I send it messages with telepathy, testing the upper limits on the range of this ability curiously, and find that I can't quite make out an exact distance limit.
I wait for it to streak out of view before I turn and heal, taking their pain into me and allowing my personal healing factor to sort it all out, and then awaken the three teens. They are groggy and grouchy and when they ask where the crystals went I explain that I also passed out and that it was gone when I woke up. I pull out my phone and show them the time: it's only 10. They realize they've only been out for a few minutes.
We make our way out of the cave and slip back into the woods, having safely survived something very dangerous. When we're outside of the cave we exchange phone numbers, while agreeing that we need a beat to process what just happened. It doesn't take us a long time to head home, though I'm the last of us to do so, only leaving after everyone else leaves and thus gives me a chance to use my telekinetic ray to seal off the tunnel. I do so inside of the actual space, creating a second wall of stone and dirt so even if someone gets inside they can't just head down the tunnel until they find the MOGO and then I close off the entrance, also using telekinetic rays so it looks like whatever was here was sealed off.
I continue to experiment with the range of my telepathy. It doesn't take me forever to notice that as I get further from the monster it takes longer for me to get messages from it but I'm never fully out of range and I anticipate that my power will only continue to increase in range as I grow more versed in its usage which should gradually reduce wait times. This is as good a place as any to practice and hone this ability, as in this world I seem to be the only person with true verbal telepathy: the kind that allows you to hear thoughts and project your own into other people's minds as words. I can't, at least not yet, read the minds of someone out of my line of sight but it seems like I can receive messages from a mind I've touched that are intentionally sent to me even from vast distances, which is a good discovery to make early.
Shortly after 11:30 I make my way to a pleasant-looking mansion in a gated community. I ride back in a taxi, and get dropped off at the entrance to the place before walking back using the memories "I" naturally have. In minutes I sneak into the mansion, cognizant of the fact that it is a manifestation of my "Housing Fit For A Chad" item though only really appreciating that when I move through the foyer and make my way upstairs. I silently move through the palatial building and I am delighted to find an exact replica of the house I lived in during my last jump. As I explore the place I silently use my advanced senses, mixing in my orcish abilities, and finding that I can smell familiar scents. Tears almost well up in my eyes when I discover the fates of my friends; Amber, Rowena, Lilly, and the other maids: Courtney and Jasmine, are all here. I… don't know how much they'll remember so I instinctively decide to experiment by first approaching someone who should remember me: Amber. She's part of the item but was also a lover of mine and should be able to remember that.
I sneak across the mansion and make my way to the part of the building where the help lives in this reality. There are some changes to how this item works, narratively, in this jump compared to my last one. The interior is different and the fact that I have a family means it naturally operates differently with more rooms being filled out and inhabited. I don't actually mind this, and when I reach Amber's room I knock on the door. It takes almost a minute before a sleepy Amber comes to the door and opens it. As she looks at me I get to see her womb-tattoo-like marking beneath her clothes begin to glow. I watch her eyes fill with memories and sense her recognizing who I really am.
"Lalo? Lalo! What is going on!?" She asks, whispering urgently to me. I am a bit surprised at this, and she pulls me into her room before closing the door.
"Do you know what's happening? Where we are?! I think we're in a different country. And you! You're a different person." She says, speaking a little more loudly now. I smile and realize I owe it to her to explain what's happening. I move to her bed and I sit on it before inviting her to come sit next to me. When she's next to me, seated and a bit calmer I begin to speak.
"So we're not in a different country, we're in a different world. There's a lot to tell you, and I wasn't even sure if you'd remember everything if I'm being honest," I admit, causing her to look at me with confusion plainly visible on her face. "I'm a world traveler. Every couple of years I warp from one world to another. I don't have control over it, and I don't pick where I go. I'm originally a human from a world like this one, not an orc like you know me." I admit, causing her to look at me in annoyance.
"You knew!? You knew this was gonna happen and you didn't tell me?? Did you tell anyone?" She asks, valid anger filling her voice. I realize I fucked up as she chastizes me, and I beat myself up as I take in the fact that I messed up by not properly preparing her. I summon Sapphire who flits out of my chest and flies around Amber and I. She smiles at Amber who smiles back at her before turning back to face me angrily.
"Do the others remember our time in the… other world?" Amber asks, and I note that despite her anger she seems to trust that I'm telling the truth. A small victory but a victory nonetheless.
"Did you remember our time in the other world before you saw me today, just now?" I ask, causing her to calm down a touch as she thinks hard about the day she's had.
"No. I didn't." She admits, before she tries to figure out what makes her different. I pause for a moment before pointing to her stomach.
"You have my mark. Because we've slept together." I explain, causing her to blush. I let out a small laugh and note that that eases her panic.
"Oh. I didn't know that that actually meant something. After I got it we never really talked about it." She admits, and I nod. There were too many variables and unknown factors.
"Look, I'm sorry. Genuinely. I've been going through this process for thirty years now. Before last time I didn't have ANY means of bringing people I met with me. I didn't know how it'd work. Even now things aren't exactly the same." I tell her, sincerely. She falls quiet for a moment before asking me to explain everything. I nod and oblige her, spending hours telling Sapphire and Amber of my journey so far, including my pre-chain life. Before long it's the wee hours of the morning and she is exhausted but also now fully cognizant of the reality of our weird lives. I nod and tell her to go to sleep.
I slip back into my room, surprised to note that it has all of my furniture and stuff from my last jump. A part of me hopes this is the only time I enter as a jump as a teenager, as being here right now feels weird as fuck. It is early in the morning, the kind of early where it's still dark out, so I sit down and try to communicate with my undead servant. I'm unsurprised when it takes a minute but the message goes through without a hitch. This pleasant news is an expected relief but a relief nonetheless.
The weekend passes in a blur. I get to meet my family: they look like me and I look like what I wanted to look like as a teenager: a somewhat stereotypically handsome Latino youth, though one with a well-defined and muscular form. Someone who is handsome in the male-gaze kind of way, but with believable and normal-looking, non-bodybuilder muscles. On Saturday I go to the library and do my homework, spending the day among the books, using my Story Collector ability to snag new stories to affix to myself. I equip two tales about having a big brain and popularity, leaning into my two biggest strengths and further doubling down. Along the way I text my new friends and am unsurprised to learn that Andrew is the first of us to broach the topic of feeling "Odd" after yesterday's encounter.
Over the next few weeks it will become apparent that the three are developing psychic powers. This is a consequence of their encounter down in the tunnel. My powers are a replica of theirs but not actually keyed to me having gone down there, and a jumper in this jump could easily prevent them from gaining powers in the first place by simply preventing them from encountering the creature. Of the three psychics Andrew is seemingly the most skilled: taking to both large and small scale things with a shocking level of talent, Steve is the most creative and inventive: as he was the one who discovered how to fly but struggles with finesse, and Matt is skilled but doesn't have any apparent special talent.
In fairness to Matt in exchange for his lack of special talents when it comes to telekinesis he has something that is arguably more important: an uncomplicated, loving, home life. For teenagers such a thing is invaluable. For superpowered teens an uncomplicated, loving home life can be the difference between someone becoming a superhero or a supervillain.
I practice my telekinesis more and find that lifting the ball is much easier now than it was yesterday. The difference isn't night and day but it's enough of a difference that both with and without using my reactor I can pick the ball up and lift it fully into the air. It's also shockingly easy to control it if I move it using my hands and steer it with my mind, nudging it in given directions at will. I seem to have a talent for a more manipulative kind of telekinesis, the sort that isn't about lifting something but about changing it in some way.
I spend Sunday with Amber and Sapphire, having done my homework already and opting to spend time with the people who were with me before. The day passes by peacefully, and in this reality she works as a full-time, live-in personal assistant to my parents so we do some different errands. I enjoy this brief bit of downtime and I experiment with my powers out in the open while this occurs, though never so dramatically that people notice what I'm doing. It is once again even easier for me to do stuff with my powers, and I find that I can actually lift, though with a bit of a struggle, multiple things at once, so long as they are incredibly light things like banana peels.
During this time I begin to formulate a plan. I need to get Andrew's address so I can most succinctly cut through the noise and prevent the pair of linked tragedies that cause the finale of the film this world is keyed to. When I get the address I can use my newfound shapeshifting to become someone new and go and outright fix stuff. It's a bit more heavy-handed than I'd ideally like to be but given the importance of keeping everyone alive I'll allow it. Having all three of the protagonists survive the school year is my number one priority right now because even though my being here is a distinction that is already changing the plot, barring an intervention on my part there's no firm guarantee my friends will make it to a year from today.
Monday's arrival is a welcome thing. I am eager, excited even, to go to school. The one saving grace about my schedule is that Matt, Andrew, Steve and I all have the same lunch break. As usual I breeze through my morning classes, and in no time at all I am seated with my friends, lunch in hand, in the school's gymnasium. No one is paying us any mind. My lunch consists of an apple, some fries, a school-sized milk, and one of those… weird cardboard pizzas they fit to the biggest part of the school lunch trays. My friends are quick to share their thoughts on the tunnel, and I get to amusingly listen to various sorts of conspiracy theories. When it's my turn to speak I decide to go ahead and pull the trigger by being the first of us to reveal their abilities.