"Is everything okay?" Katrin''s voice asked, crackling through a cheap speaker set into the wall.


    "Yeah," I replied, "I''m just getting my bearings."


    The generic hallway could have been from any cheap hotel in America. Bland wallpaper, mass-produced artwork, and patterned orange carpet that had been ugly to start with but now had a noticeably darker stripe down the center from too many years of foot traffic and not enough cleaning. The doors were all numbered, most with something in the 1800s to indicate we were on the eighteenth floor. The outlier was the door behind me, which said 217 and would lead into the replica of my old room at uncle Roy''s hotel.


    The original made-up room of my mind palace was still there, and it still connected into room 217 - but now it was coming in through the closet. The bathroom door still led to my childhood bedroom, which left the main entrance that I''d used to connect to this long hallway of doors. The actual Long Haul Hotel was only three floors, so I was taking the eighteen to be a reference to my age - and since this was all in my mind, I presumed my hunches about what things meant should be pretty reliable. I could see an elevator at the far end of the hall, right next to an ice machine, so I could test that theory easily enough by heading down.


    I began to walk along the hallway, noticing flickering light coming from under some of the doors. The numbers didn''t go in order and didn''t stay the same if I looked away and then back, so I figured it couldn''t matter too much which door I opened. "Okay Katrin, I''m going to try going into my memories."


    "I''m here if you need me," the speaker squawked, and I felt a distant phantom sensation of pressure on my hand.


    I picked a door at random and opened it, and could see the little apartment we''d so briefly lived in when we were in Theramas. I was in the memory as well, which was a bit trippy, so in a way there were three of me as I watched Connie and I attempt to re-create Solitaire with a very unfamiliar deck of cards.


    "No," she said, "that doesn''t work because there are five suits."


    "Well one of them could be wild, I guess? Or would that make it too easy?"


    "Wild just for the color you mean? Hmm. Or you could have to do all three?"


    "That would be too hard. What about just not having two of the same color in a row?"


    They didn''t seem to notice me. I peeked into the bedroom and Katrin was making her bed - but of course I couldn''t know that, right? I''d been on the other side of the room playing cards, so the real me wouldn''t have been able to see into the bedroom. That meant that these memories were... approximated. I was filling in the blanks. "Okay, good news is it''s working. Bad news is it''s not totally right - I guess memories probably never are. Someone told me once that you can''t remember something without also changing the memory, but that''s what I need here. So... what do you think, maybe use Temporal magic to reach back and recover the original form of my memories?"


    "I''m not sure." Katrin''s voice said - this time seeming to come from the open window as if she were out on the street. "The idea is sound, but the cost might be prohibitive if you''re trying to restore all fifteen years of memories at once and doing them one at a time instead might not be sufficient if you can''t figure out why some are wrong. Also they may still be flawed, tinged by your perspective. Ideally to fix that you''d need... Spatial magic? I suppose? Combine that with Temporal and Perception and I could picture you perfectly recreating a scene."


    I ignored my normal annoyance at being reminded that I was still thinking in terms of Earth years. I really needed to get used to the idea that years were four hundred and thirty-two days long here, making me fifteen. I was getting better at using "round" numbers like sixty-six or a hundred and seventy-four when estimating though. "Yeah, it''s hard to see my Dumine while I''m doing this but I''ll check it when I come back. That must sound strange when I''m sitting right next to you, huh?"


    We were at our camp that Katrin had located for us, a small abandoned town that had been absorbed by the wilderness. Despite still being on the Southern side of the mountain range from Erathik, we''d traveled to the Northeast along the very impressive Nubasarri river after leaving Sentortzi and it was once again a bit jungle-y and quite warm. I didn''t even recognize it as a town when we arrived, it was so covered in vegetation - but Katrin said there was still a slight dip in mana levels even after however-many years, and by the end of the first week we''d uncovered the walls and a few buildings that were still usable.


    The walls were repaired - badly - as we uncovered them, mainly just hacking away crawling vines and filling in holes as best we could. It was good enough to keep most of the larger monsters from attacking us when we were trying to relax, and it meant we could let the moskar loose to graze which formed another layer of security; if anything climbed over the walls to eat us, Shitheel would hammer them into paste. Sneezy, Dopey, and Sleepy could join in if there was anything left by the time they got there. Despite how much work it was to get the walls shored up, clear a space for the garden, dig out a latrine, and a hundred other little things I had enjoyed it. Having the ruined town lurking there under the foliage was a godsend for all the little ways it saved us effort, but most importantly when we were done it looked far more impressive than anything we could have done from scratch.


    "I need to do the divination... scrying... remote viewing thingy just right, I don''t know how it''ll even work if I need to wipe out my Dumine and start over since I have three of them. I think Temporal and Thought should be enough? It''ll probably throw some Perception or Comprehension in there, it seems to prefer doing that - I think it makes it easier to process information. But Temporal and Thought should be the main ones. And if I''m targeting myself as opposed to being able to do it to other people that should be easier, you can''t have a much stronger connection to something than it being you. But you''re right about the Spatial thing, I would love for it to actually let me see shit I missed the first time around. Could also be nice if I could have it active when we get into fights, maybe get a spider-sense and know if people were going to attack me."


    "Spider sense? Is that a thing spiders can do?"


    "Earth thing. I mean... no, not even on Earth, but... never mind."


    She laughed. "Okay. So are you seeing anything... tampered with?"


    "No, but I''m in a pretty recent one. I think I need to go back to Earth. Hang on."


    I walked back out into the Long Haul Hotel and got into the elevator. The buttons inside were labeled from one to eighteen, along with a basement button and the usual "close doors" kind of things. I pushed the button for fourteen, and the elevator hummed for a moment before the doors slid open to reveal what looked like the exact same hallway. I walked up to a random door and opened it and there I was, back in Universal Servicing Systems.


    "That''s not good enough," fourteen-year-old me said into a phone that was - like all of them - totally disconnected, "Carl, if you want to get the trip to Cabo this year you''re going to need to get those sales numbers up." I lifted a mug that said ''World''s Greatest Aunt'' but stopped right before it reached my lips. "WHAT? What do you mean, nobody is buying? It''s a zombie apocalypse and we''re a gun company! Who isn''t buying? Carl, you just... no, no I hadn''t seen the news today. A cure? Oh that''s terrible, Carl. Shit. I need to talk to the boss. Oh, and I need to make sure nobody cures my ex-wife, I like her better as a shambling undead."


    I was a little embarrassed to be seeing myself do one of my stupid imaginary conversations, but it was neat to be back in that place. The odd smell, the rows of abandoned cubicles, the flickering fluorescent lights. For just a split-second something changed, and the whole place looked like a war zone with desks having been thrown through the air and a massive hole in one wall - but then it all snapped back to normal. Probably just triggered by the zombie apocalypse talk.


    I took a little stress toy thing off one of the desks, and headed back to the hallway to try another memory. The stress toy came with me without any incident, which meant I''d be able to drag all sorts of things back into my rooms - creating items out of thin air had been giving me some trouble, so that was good news. I wandered some Earth streets, popped into a Circle K and got a soda. It was... strange. This whole world, that I''d lived in for eighteen years, and now I was never going back.


    The music faded from the little ceiling speakers of the Circle K as Katrin butted back in. "Find anything strange?"


    "No. Haven''t looked much yet though, just poking around. Be less eager."


    "Sorry. I''m worried for some reason."


    "That''s sweet, but it''s fine. Look, I''ll try to find one of those memories for you just... hang on."


    I headed back to the elevator with my Big Gulp, and punched the button for sixteen. That was - to the best of my ability to guess - where the anomalous soup kitchen memories should be. When the doors opened, the hallway was empty. No doors. Well, shit... what did that even mean? I did my best to explain to Katrin as I walked down the hall, trailing my fingers along the wallpaper. After a moment I headed back to the elevator and ducked down to fifteen, where the doors looked okay as the elevator opened but... they stopped before the hallway did.


    "Shit, there''s a bunch missing from the previous year too. I guess... I guess I''ll just try the last door?" It opened to a police station.


    I was handcuffed to a chair. The cops were, presumably, trying to contact Child Protective Services to find out where the hell I was supposed to be - but my case manager was on vacation and I''d run away from the group home so long ago that I had long since been removed from their list. There was nobody else to call. I knew Bill''s number, but he had quit CPS the year before and the only other phone numbers I knew were mom''s and uncle Roy''s. They weren''t even in the same state, and it''s not like mom would help me out even if she was.


    There was nothing to do but sit back and wait for them to send me to another group home. Let''s see, after this it was... just some group home. But which one? Or ones. I''d moved a few times, right? I must have. I never stay in the same place for long. The police station had grown... fuzzy, somehow. Indistinct. Someone came to get me, someone whose face was just a blur, and we left together. I followed along and we drove somewhere, ending up at a group home that kept changing whenever I looked too closely at any of the details. The faces were all still indistinct, and I tasted chocolate for some reason. Something cold, like ice cream or a shake.This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    I walked back into the hallway. "Man, I wish you knew what an AI-generated video was. Because the memory I was just in looked a lot like that. I''m pretty sure that was my brain actively filling in holes in my memory as I tried to look at them."


    I headed back to the sixteenth floor with its total lack of doors, and felt along the walls. "Okay, Katrin? I''m going to try something strange, so be on standby. It should be fine. Probably." I''d been bad at creating things, but as I stared at the wallpaper I told myself I knew exactly what was behind me on the opposite wall. I turned and found - as I had known I would - a fire axe in a case. I took it and took a deep breath. "Okay, crazy thing begins now."


    I started chopping, hacking a hole in the drywall and then widening it by kicking chunks away. There was another hallway on the other side of the hole. I ducked through, and found myself in a different place entirely. Dimly flickering fluorescent lights, concrete floors, peeling paint on brick walls - except the one spot where I''d broken through, which was just drywall. There were doors, kind of, but they weren''t from a hotel room - they were roll-up metal doors like you might see on a garage or...


    "I''m in a self-storage place?"


    "I don''t know what that is." Katrin''s voice was echoing from somewhere, but I couldn''t put a finger on it.


    "Uh. It''s a big building with individual rooms people can rent out to keep their extra shit in. I don''t remember being at one in person before, but I''ve seen them in movies and stuff."


    Most of the units had padlocks on them, and even with the fire axe I couldn''t get them off. A few had been left unlocked though, so I located one and rolled the door up. It was my high school - the first one, not the one I graduated from. I''d gone there until I moved to Sunshine House - the group home I''d aged out of - which had been on the other side of the city and therefore required me to switch schools for my senior year. There was a law, McSomething Veto? Something that could have somehow let me stay at the same school. But the commute would have sucked, and I didn''t really have friends anyway.


    The memory was crisp, no blurred out faces or shifting scenery. Same for the handful of other doors I found without padlocks, all of which led to high school. I tried to force it, concentrated on seeing the group home before rolling up the door, but all that got me was a blurry room of blurry faces. The voices were messed up too, like they were speaking from under a pile of blankets. One of the people was me, clearly, but I had no guesses for the others. Huh. No unscrambled scenes of the group home.


    I tried for another half an hour before my mana was too low to continue, and I only found two other memories that weren''t blurred. One was of me working in a McDonald''s, which I vaguely remembered - it was my first job when I was sixteen, but I didn''t think I''d worked there long and for some reason I didn''t remember a lot about it - and one where I was just hanging out in a park, eating a burrito. None of the memories had anything notable in them, just regular everyday stuff - in fact, I wasn''t certain they were distinct memories. It was possible they were just conglomerated fragments, the way so many day to day things meld together over time.


    I opened my eyes back in the real world. "Okay, so there''s a whole year of my life where I can''t remember anything about the group home I lived at. I don''t know how I didn''t notice before, but it''s everything; I don''t know the name, the address, any of the staff or other kids, nothing. I''ve got some shit from work and school, bland memories of just... existing... but if I force it to show me the group home it''s all blurry. Remember when we talked about going down a list and checking my memories more methodically? I think it''s time. Soon, I mean. Right now, I want to go kill something."


    Hunting monsters was supposedly good for developing our Dumines, and anyway it was nice to have fresh meat. Technically any animal that had natural magic was a ''monster'', and any that didn''t were ''beasts'' - but it turned out there were things in-between. The moskar, for example, had a crop where they''d store any mana crystals they found - it was the only way they could get mana for some reason, but they could naturally convert the energy into energy. Katrin had bought some little mana capacitors that could serve the same purpose, and whenever she heard them horking one up she''d recharge it and feed it to them again. It was... interesting.


    There were also plants that used mana, and bugs, and mold - it was a whole food chain that was mostly parallel with the one I was used to. Big monsters ate smaller monsters, the smaller monsters ate each other or monster bugs, and the monster bugs ate monster plants. Humans got mana via their link to spirits on other planes - our ''minds'' and ''souls'' - but despite the method being different, it still made us look very tasty to the larger monstrous predators. Unlike normal animals they were way less likely to give up if you hurt them, and some had nasty tricks up their sleeves.


    There were two really dangerous types near our camp. Tixmin were like gorillas crossed with lions - semi-bipedal with somewhat feline features and vicious retractable claws. They seemed to manipulate velocity in short bursts, launching themselves or projectiles at ridiculous speeds. That would be bad enough if they were small, but they were six and a half to seven feet tall and built like linebackers. They''d hoot if you got too close to their territory, and if you ignored it and kept going the next warning would be a medium-sized tree flying towards your head at a hundred miles an hour. I''d learned that the hard way - if it had hit me directly or if we hadn''t had the healing platform installed in the wagon I would have been fucked. Since then, we''d just been avoiding them and they were so far returning the favor - we passed close to a hunting party at one point, and rather than attacking they hooted again so we would know to turn around. For wild monsters, that seemed pretty chill of them.


    The other type of monster in the area was... not so chill. Razil were these things that... well, they were giant reptilian rat creatures. They hunted in packs, and they didn''t give a shit if you killed half of them - the other half would just keep coming. They could make more, in their horrible nests. That was the other time one of us almost died since we arrived at the camp - Katrin slipped on some rotting leaves and slid right down an entrance to a razil nest we hadn''t seen. She''d managed to slam a shield into place, but with twenty of them hammering on it she couldn''t hold it for long. We''d just barely dragged her out before it failed, and then had to run like hell as the whole nest tried to chase us.


    But now the tables were turned. The razil I was spying on somehow hadn''t noticed us - they were fixated on something up ahead. Errod looked concerned, and began trying to sneak around to get a look which I was just certain would result in him making enough noise that we''d have the razil all over us in a heartbeat. I braced for combat as he mis-stepped and a large stick snapped under his foot, but still the razil just sat there. What the fuck? Were they hypnotized or something?


    "Hah!" Katrin said, way too loud, "it worked!"


    I glared at her, ready to strangle her for being so loud, when I realized she had to be talking about the razil. "Did you do something to them?" I whispered.


    "No. I made a barrier between us and them that works a lot like your silent shoes. They can''t hear us, and we can''t hear them - which is an added perk, because I hate that clicking noise they make."


    Errod returned. "They''re about to ambush a tixmin. Juvenile, I don''t know why it''s out here on its own."


    I shrugged. "Well, even a young tixmin should be able to wreck a few of those things, so we can just let them fight it out and then pick off the ones that are left."


    Errod frowned.


    "Oh come on. They''re monsters! The whole appeal of monsters is people don''t give me that look when I talk about killing them! Don''t ruin this for me."


    He gestured, and we crept closer until we could see the tixmin walking closer, oblivious to the danger. "Katrin," he said, "drop the sound barrier."


    She looked at me apologetically but I thought she was probably on his side. With a gesture it was done, and I could hear a subtle shift in the sounds of the jungle. And then... Errod started hooting. It wasn''t hard to do the tixmin hooting sound, and it had seemed clear from the little bit we''d observed that the seriousness of the threat was communicated through the frequency of the hoots - one was a warning, a slow hoot-hoot-hoot was saying something was wrong but not a problem yet, and so on. Errod did the tixmin equivalent of panicked screaming, hoothoothoothoothoothoothoot!


    The young tixmin instinctively dove for cover behind a tree while simultaneously grabbing a large rock - it clocked Errod first, and then a split second later saw the pack of razil. They, in turn, were spinning around to look at us expecting to see another tixmin - they hesitated a moment when they realized we weren''t giant gorilla-cats, and during that moment of hesitation a rock blasted one of them into the afterlife.


    And then it was chaos.


    Errod was hacking away, his form noticeably improved from a few months before but still a bit clumsy. Thankfully, the razil weren''t really used to dealing with swords and would try to bite his blade if he missed. Katrin was mainly on shield duty, but blasted the creatures with lightning when she saw a good opening. I threw a couple knives, but they closed fast enough that I had to switch to the shitty spear I''d been practicing with. I''d rather use the cool lightning sword we took off that Elrebar guy, but it was a bit big for me and I couldn''t get it to do anything. No lightning, no flying to my hand, nothing. There was a thread attached to it, that was dangling loose - finding a way to attach that to myself was somewhere on my to-do list.


    Our biggest advantage was that razil were dogshit at pack tactics. They could plan some, clearly, but as soon as the fight started they would just swarm with no thought to flanking or tag-teaming or whatever. That meant that they split themselves four ways, leaving a manageable number for most of us. The tixmin was in the worst position, but as far as I was concerned that was just another perk. I skewered one, kicked another since I didn''t have time to wiggle my spear free, and then fell back and stabbed another as it tried to bite me. They couldn''t get through my jacket, but the bites could still crack bones and leave me looking like I was made entirely out of bruises.


    I saw another blast of lightning, far too close to Katrin - she was supposed to hang back and let Errod and I aggro as many as possible but there were more than we''d seen at first and it had been inevitable that some would get up to her. Katrin''s own jacket would stop most of the bites, but it didn''t cover all of her and it wouldn''t take a lot to kill her. I made the decision to turn my back on the ones I was engaged with, and just ran for Katrin.


    I''d started heading to her before I could see her clearly - we''d been separated by twenty feet or so almost immediately and she''d ended up on the other side of some trees from me - but it was only a few steps to get to a good vantage point. She wasn''t in as much trouble as I''d worried she was - there were only three still mobile in close range to her, and as I watched she slammed her spellbook down on one of them with a horrible cracking sound. The book was made out of some sort of alchemical metal, and the corner did at least as much damage to the little monster''s skull as my spear would have. I booted another one away from her before diving onto the third and driving my knife into its eye.


    After that the ones that I''d left behind me caught up, but Errod was behind them and after another few frantic moments we had it under control. The only thing we still had to do was finish them - the little fuckers could heal from anything short of full decapitation, which to be fair probably explained the chaotic swarming tactics. When we reached the tixmin it was down and bleeding badly, but surrounded by twitching bodies. It had held its own surprisingly well for its size, only five feet tall.


    Katrin approached cautiously, and it gave a single feeble warning hoot.


    "Oh, this is a bad idea," I said as I realized what was about to happen, "This isn''t going to feel good, and it''s going to kick our asses. I can''t believe you ever gave me shit about being impulsive, you hypocritical bitch."


    She did it anyway.


    As the healing magic swept through the tixmin it howled - Katrin''s battlefield medic spell was not particularly subtle and it let you feel every little fiber of muscle and skin trying to re-stitch itself. We backed off, preparing to fight - which would just mean causing more injuries than she''d healed - but the tixmin barely staggered to its feet before the snarl fell from its face and it poked curiously at the new scars. Then it gave another little hoot - this one quiet, as if to say ''okay fine but watch yourself'' - and then yawned and stumbled into the trees towards its territory.


    I didn''t let out my held breath until it was a good fifty feet away.