"Next on the list is Harlan''s Hardware," Katrin''s voice said over the hotel speakers. We''d been at this for two days and I was thrilled to be so close to finishing; the job at Harlan''s had been pretty recent. I went to the door that felt right, and opened it - and there it was, the familiar smell of the hardware store. It wasn''t a particularly big one, just a little spot in a strip mall between a carniceria and a nail shop. In this memory I was chatting with Mr. Bagmaw, who was one of the only regulars I could remember. He was retired, I think, and always trying to keep himself busy with various projects.


    "What do you think for the frame, Calliope? Wood or PVC?"


    I sighed, but couldn''t keep from smiling at him. Old Mr. Bagmaw always put me in a good mood. "Mr. Bags," I said, "I will tell you for the fortieth time. I know how to use the register, and I know basically what sh- stuff... is in which aisle. But I don''t actually know how to build or repair anything."


    He looked at me very seriously. "You almost said shit. To a customer."


    I felt this reflex start to kick in; apologize before the customer gets angry and you snap at them. You can''t get fired again, not so close to getting booted out of the group home, you have to - for once - keep a job. But then I caught the twinkle in Mr. Bagmaw''s eyes. "You must be mistaken, Mr. Bags. I would never swear in front of a customer. That would be super fucking unprofessional."


    He laughed, and patted me on the shoulder. "You''re a good kid, and don''t let any of the bastards out there tell you otherwise. You remind me of my daughter. She was a good kid, too." And just like that, the twinkle was gone. He sighed, with a bit of a shudder to it, and then plastered a now-fake smile on and shuffled off to get some PVC pipe.


    I watched him go, as well as watching the memory of myself shake it off and go back to cleaning up the impulse-buy gauntlet that led up to the registers. That was one memory down, but Katrin had insisted on checking two from each place. I ducked back into the hotel hallway and back in through another door. This time I was in the back room eating a sandwich and trying to play on my phone with my other hand. Rob, one of my coworkers, popped his head in and told me I had five minutes left.


    "I know what time it is, Rob. You don''t need to ruin my break by doing a countdown."


    He frowned like I was being totally unreasonable and left. I played for a moment more before cursing and throwing my phone down - it had done the left-hand squiggle block glitch again, where it got fixated on that one piece and wouldn''t send anything else. I kept telling myself I''d take a look at the code and try to fix it, but I never got around to it. I''d downloaded it from my old cloud student account at one point, but when I tried to compile it the whole screen filled with errors and I didn''t even have the energy to dig through them since it implied I hadn''t kept the right version anyway; the left-squiggle-happy version had compiled just fine, and had even worked without issue for a while.


    Memory-me finished her sandwich and stood up, but then hesitated. Ah, right. I had decided not to come back out one second before my break was over. Fuck Rob. Satisfied, I stepped out of the memory and let Katrin know. "Okay, two clear memories of Harlan''s. I saw Mr. Bagmaw and Rob."


    "Got it, both those names were on the list." She was speaking English, which meant she''d put the bracelet back on. We''d been trading it around, and both Errod and Katrin had been making great progress. Errod was actually outpacing Katrin on it, leading to Katrin deciding that she could spare some potential to unlock some extra ability with languages in general, rather than just with High Imperial to cast spells. Even then, it only let her catch up - not exceed him. I would have thought Errod would be excited to have something he was finally best at, but I guess learning languages wasn''t exciting to him - he had been kinda moody the last few weeks.


    "We have to be basically done, right?"


    "Only one left, actually. I maybe should have warned you that I added it to the list, but... I think we need to check the Desert Oasis apartments."


    "Oh right! No, that''s fine. It''s a good call, I should have thought of it myself."


    One scene change later I watched myself stumble in to the apartment office, exhausted and already cranky. I''d had to walk from work since Adrian hadn''t showed up like he promised, and it was a hundred and twelve degrees outside. "Can you tell me what apartment Adrian Klein is in? He just moved in today."


    Nobody had moved in that day, they told me. I insisted that of course he had, and maybe it was under his girlfriend''s name - Tiffany... something. They assured me that even if I could remember her last name it wouldn''t change the fact that nobody had moved in that day, and while they couldn''t give out people''s apartment numbers they could tell me there was no Adrian Klein in their system.


    "But I... I gave him the money this morning. First and last month''s rent, and the security deposit, and..."


    I didn''t really want to listen to this disaster unfold again. Man, I had been so excited to have my own apartment, even if it did mean sharing a space with Adrian and his shitty girlfriend. I''d had that stupid keychain all ready to receive its key, and then I was going to go get my free birthday milkshake at that weird little diner with the pissy waiter, like I had the year before. Yeah, I wasn''t going to stick around in this memory any longer. I grabbed my backpack away from memory-me - hah, finally got it back - and took a quick look around before shifting my focus so I could talk with my actual mouth. "Katrin? Preliminary glance looks fine, it feels like a real memory. I''m going to try to skip ahead and see what happened when I disappeared."


    I wasn''t sure if I could fast-forward within a memory; I''d been leaving and then opening a new door from the hotel hallway each time, but that seemed like a crutch. There was no real reason I had to do that, right? I concentrated, I squeezed my eyes shut, I walked in circles - nothing. That didn''t mean I couldn''t do it, just that I couldn''t do it yet - while you needed to spend potential to gain new abilities, good old practice could still make them improve in little ways. It was already easier to pop in and out of my memory palace than it had been initially, and while my most recent attempt to walk around in the real world had resulted in me falling down, that still meant I''d been moving my body. In another few weeks I''d probably be skipping through memories while running laps.


    I was about to leave when I was startled by memory-me jerking back from the desk and standing up rather abruptly. I couldn''t remember why I''d done that, it was like I''d been bitten or something. Huh. I reported it to Katrin, because I''d promised I would tell her if I saw anything remotely strange, and then it was back to the Long Haul Hotel only to spin around and pop back to the Desert Oasis apartments just in time to see me start running from the cops.


    Honestly, I was impressed with myself. I followed easily, at first crediting the fact that I was in the best shape I''d ever been in before remembering that this wasn''t even my real body. There I went, up the back of a car and onto the covered parking before taking a wild leap... and then something flickered... and then I was in the air, a few feet over a snowy landscape. I slammed down, blood already pouring out of my ears and nose, and collapsed backwards into the snow - I was still watching my unmoving body, but I knew that nothing else was going to happen.


    "Uh. Okay. That was strange."


    "What happened?" Katrin''s voice was distant, almost lost in the icy wind.


    "There was a part that I''d... I guess I''d mostly forgotten about it. I mean everything was so strange, and... I don''t know. It went by really fast, it was something between here and Earth."


    "Can you slow it down somehow?"


    I''d just failed to fast-forward, but somehow the idea of pausing seemed easier to visualize. I stepped out and then back in without switching doors, watched the chase unfold again, and then as the moment approached I focused on slowing things down. Much to my relief, it seemed to be working. As I launched into the air it was like I was drifting through syrup, and then right as the flicker hit I clamped down on it and the memory froze. "Oh motherfucker. This is going to give me a headache."


    "What is it?"


    "It''s... it''s like four different things, all overlapping. Jesus this is strange. It''s the parking lot, and the mountainside I ended up on, and then... what are the others?" It was hard to pick the images apart - it felt like one of those magic eye pictures where you have to look just right to get a 3D image to pop out, except it was four different competing ones. "The woods, in a clearing with some huge boulders covered in runes. Uh. And somewhere with... this awful green glow, and a lot of gears and stuff. Like a factory or something, very steampunk. Sorry, bad reference for you. I don''t know how to describe it."


    "Somewhere on Earth, or somewhere here?"


    "Here, I think. Just something about it. No wires, just tubes and stuff. And that glow looks familiar. Why does it look so familiar? Oh, shit. Shit. I know what I''m seeing."


    It was Ulren''s laboratory. That was the green glow, it was the crystalized time mana that he had huge containers of. I was seeing it because... because that''s where Connie had been? It must be. Something about the fact that we were the same person gave me this one tiny moment of seeing through her eyes. But then what was the Stonehenge-style place? "Okay the gears and stuff I think are Ulren''s sorta-kinda time machine, so best guess for the other is... it''s got to be whatever brought me here, right? I mean, something did. And this place looks pretty fucking magic."


    "Could be. It''s as good a guess as any. Do you see anyone there?"


    "Uh... no? No, but it happened too fast to turn my head or anything so they could just be out of view. Plus, y''know, it''s possible these memories are totally inaccurate. Well, put it on the list I guess. It''s not a priority, but at some point once Hammersmith is off our backs about getting her into Brinkmar and we''ve dealt with the guys that attacked us in Sentortzi, and... whatever else... we can try to figure out where that place was. I don''t need to go back to Earth, but I should probably find out if it was just random bullshit or if I was... I don''t know, if I was targeted specifically for some reason."


    I headed back to my mind palace and dumped all the little trinkets and things I''d snagged from the memories I''d been poking through. "Okay, waking up." I opened my eyes and flinched at the sunlight, then realized my legs had fallen asleep and carefully stretched them out and tried to wiggle my toes.


    Katrin stood up, and began pacing. "Well that seems to confirm it," she said, "the blurry area only covers a little over a year. It starts when you''re heading to a new group home, and ends when you arrive at a different one. While it''s possible that time period covers multiple group homes it would make the most sense if it was just the one. So I think the best theory we have for now is that there''s something that happened at that group home you want to forget."


    I was a little caught off-guard by that. "Wait, you''re saying you think this was me?"


    "Well... I assume so, yes. There''s no magic on Earth, and even if there were why would someone edit out your memories from a group home? Probably something traumatic happened, and the blurry memories are all you''ll let yourself see."This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    "Okay. I''m not saying I agree, but let''s go with it. That doesn''t really explain the extra stuff, right? The extra memories of... I don''t know, working at soup kitchens and trying to be a better person. Or... or of living in the woods. Or stabbing some people to death in their sleep."


    "That last one, hopefully, was just a nightmare. You haven''t seen any gaps where those things would have fit, unless they were during that year. But you don''t think they were from then, do you?"


    "No. Well, some of them maybe. Not the stranger ones, I think those are older."


    Katrin nodded. "So probably the ones about living in the woods are from when you used to go camping - I still can''t believe that''s just a thing people do on Earth, sleeping on the ground for fun - and the ones about stabbing people to death must have been from when you were in foster care. You did say the memory felt like they were abusive foster parents, right?"


    "Yeah. That was the vibe. But I can''t picture the house or anything."


    "It doesn''t matter. If you had really stabbed your foster parents to death there would have been fallout from that, there''s no way you could just forget it. It was a nightmare."


    She had a point there. "And the soup kitchen thing?"


    "That part might have been real," she conceded, "but even so it was probably heavily edited. You remember living in a house, maybe with Bill, but he was gone from your life by then. So it''s possible you replaced whatever traumatic situation you were in at the group home with someone that felt... parental. And you don''t have a lot of good examples of that."


    "I guess Bill did fit, he had big dad energy and he abandoned me. So." That wasn''t fair. It was a job, and he quit. He was allowed to quit. And he tried to set me up with a place to live before he left, it wasn''t his fault that I had an episode and wouldn''t even go inside. Either way, it didn''t matter anymore. That stuff was my old life. And whatever had made that year all blurred out - well, the parts at the group home - was ancient history. "Well, I guess I can''t argue."


    "You could," Katrin said, "if you could make the memories more accurate. But in the meantime, while you try to decide the best way to do that, you could... let me into your head."


    Ah. This again. She''d tried to lay out the reasons it was a good idea several times, but in the end I just didn''t want her to accidentally see some fucked up memory of me biting the other kids or lighting anyone''s braid on fire or whatever. I told her I''d think about it, and then went off to mess with Errod instead. He''d bought a game along with our supplies, it was a little like chess but with hexagons rather than squares and only one of each type of piece aside from the pawns. They were clearly meant to represent people with different magic powers, although I wasn''t really certain what some would be in the real world. The teleporting guy, sure. The one that could capture two pieces at a time if they were in a straight line could be lightning or something. But what was the one that had a second indestructible piece it could move around the board?


    "Are you playing Tactics against yourself? I guess I''ll play the winner."


    He sighed, and scooped the pieces off the board. "I feel like I''m losing even against myself. Let''s play tag instead."


    Tag was our other game, which started as Errod just riding the moskar around one at a time to keep them used to following directions. Then I''d tried to do it at the same time and we''d gotten competitive and... now it was turning into a full sport, where we chased each other through the ruined town trying to slap each other. Katrin had even started joining us, which meant that Sneezy, Dopey, and Sleepy all got to participate. Shitheel got upset at being left out, but he also got upset if I tried to put the harness on him, or ride him, or basically anything else.


    Today, I''d had enough of his attitude. Yes, he was bigger than me. Yes, he could easily kill me. Yes, that would bring him nothing but joy and he''d never feel an ounce of regret. But he cared about the other three moskar, and he cared very much about his right to eat first. So I walked over with the harness, waited for him to hiss and spit at me, and then offered it to Sleepy instead and when she stepped forward I pulled out a whole razil leg and gave it to her. He jerked his head almost straight up and glared at me with one eye, furious. Wasn''t he the head moskar? Not that he wanted a treat from me, the stinky human. But he wanted to be offered the treat so he could snub it, and then Sleepy could eat if if she wanted.


    I walked away, then came back with the harness again. He hissed, I offered it to Sneezy. She came forward, she got a razil leg. When I went to do it for a third time, I guess the idea that even Dopey would get food before him was too much to bear and he stalked towards me, hatred burning in his eyes. I grabbed him by the edge of his head plate and whispered to him. "You''re going to learn who is in charge around here, you little shit. Or I''m going to eat you." and then when he pulled away I just shrugged and walked towards Dopey again. Shitheel let out a furious shriek, and grabbed the harness from me with his jaws.


    It went on like that for another ten minutes, but he finally let me saddle and ride him. He still was pretending he didn''t want to play tag with us, just sulking and snapping at me - right up until Errod ran past on Sneezy and smacked me on the back of the head. And then Shitheel was pissed. I don''t think he was being protective of me, I think he was just being competitive. Either way, we flew through the ruins faster than I''d ever gone before - leaping over rubble and bushes, ducking under old doorways and nearly knocking me off, then launching from the shadows so he could snap at the other moskar while I leaned out and slapped Katrin or Errod. When we were done he almost forgot to hiss at me.


    Errod, still panting, pulled me aside. "You know you have to let Katrin see Earth, right?"


    "I don''t have to do shit. It''s my brain and my memories." I saw a dark look pass over Errod''s face - I''d been seeing that more and more often from both of them. My gut instinct was to snap and hiss like Shitheel, but I managed to resist. "I don''t mean it like that, I actually do want to show you guys everything. But... I don''t know. I don''t know what the rush is, and right now I feel useless. We''re fighting monsters, and all I can do is throw knives. If they didn''t magically shove themselves deeper when they hit I don''t think I''d even be doing any real damage. I know I didn''t end up picking the most combat-oriented gifts, but I''ve been thinking of things I could use my potential on that would actually help."


    He waved at me dismissively. "You''re doing great, your reflexes are amazing and you''ve taken out at least as many monsters as I have, probably more. Sure, you have to rely on your armor a lot which isn''t ideal - but we know that works on these things. Meanwhile... well, I know it''s not your strong suit but do try to put yourself in Katrin''s shoes. If she had come to Earth, what would you have given to be able to see her memories of this world?"


    I hated how good a point that was.


    I made sure the moskar were fed and cleaned while Errod did the nightly check of the walls, and then I sat down and meditated on my Dumines. There was that strange gulf full of squiggles, still hard to look at and harder to understand despite me spending potential on it. I started giving it prompts - I wanted to let others into my mind. Specifically, I wanted to invite their mind - the actual tethered spirit thing - into my domain in Ematse, which was the plane where our minds naturally ended up. I was pretty sure that was how my current power was working; I was shifting my consciousness from my body into my mind. This also explained the odd moment when I''d failed to do it in the library at Sentortzi and had found myself looking around at the library instead of my mind palace; I knew some wards kept people from accessing other planes, to the extent that they would force your mind and soul back into your body. It had given me some ideas, that I wasn''t quite ready to implement.


    So: grab people''s minds, and shift them into my own domain rather than the one they were used to. Did I have enough potential to make it involuntary? That could be a very useful skill, although it would be a bad idea to do it before I had mental protections in place - I probably should have done those already, but I was too eager to get abilities that were fun. The best ones would be the Planar things, but I couldn''t pull physics over from planes I couldn''t feel. Right now that meant I was limited to Nusos and Xeyul, both of which I could remember the feel of even though I hadn''t been to Xeyul since getting my gifts. I couldn''t feel Itzele, probably because I hadn''t been there as long as the others. Anyway, none of those were the ones I wanted to pull physics from anyway.


    I was distracting myself.


    I could leave open the possibility of making the connection involuntary, maybe make it the difference between yanking someone into a room and gently tugging on their shirt but letting them walk for themselves. And what was the connection? The current ability worked largely by thinning the planar membrane where it overlapped with my lutore, my aura, my core, whatever I wanted to call it. But that didn''t seem like it would help much with external people. I thought of how some of the threads connected to Errod''s glove but then continued on and faded away, and imagined making my lutore do that - hooking onto someone else''s thread for their mind and looping it through me. Not stealing it, just making a slight connection.


    As I walked myself down this meandering path, the squiggles shifted and moved in response. They even seemed to be suggesting slight changes at times, like they were trying to find me the best possible way to design the ability and link it in with my others. Before long it felt about right, and I locked it in.


    "Okay you two, come over here. It''s time. Um. Hold my hands, I guess, in case that helps. Get comfortable, your legs are probably going to fall asleep."


    I dropped into my memory palace. I kicked a few things under the bed and straightened up, and then imagined reaching out for the threads of the people around me and pulling. I felt something, and then my mana dropped and the room exploded with bodies. Katrin and Errod were there, so that was good, but there were also two more of me - three if you counted the glowing big-eyed elfin version of me that looked like she was carved from amber - and a ton of people I didn''t know. Other than Katrin and one of the extra Calliopes they were all wearing football jerseys.


    "Ah! No! Out, out out! Shit!" As I panic-yelled, Errod and Katrin snapped out of existence. The random people all scrambled like cockroaches when the light comes on, and then one of them yanked a door open that hadn''t been there a moment ago and they all piled through into what appeared to an inky void. One of them started to drag the extra versions of me with them, but the me that was covered in scars and wearing an old My Little Pony shirt stabbed him and he abandoned the effort.


    The door slammed shut behind them and was gone, leaving just the extra Calliopes who also started to wander off - the relatively normal one in the football jersey walked into the Long Haul Hotel, and as I rushed to stop her - I didn''t want whatever it was poking through my memories - the amber anime-looking one tackled me in a hug. I stumbled back, and she stripped off her football jersey and dashed naked through the door to my childhood bedroom. I turned to the final one, who was at least not going anywhere yet. She looked a bit ragged; she was covered in scars, and her hair was a mess.


    "You, stay. I don''t know if you''re some reflection of myself born of indigestion or guilt or something, but the scars and shit are over the top."


    "You feel guilt?" the scruffy me asked, in an odd accent.


    "Uh. Occasionally? If you''re trying to give me shit for being a heartless monster, I think that would be more... remorse. Guilt I''ve mostly figured out."


    She picked idly at the My Little Pony shirt. "Why do you look like this here?"


    I sighed, trying to think of how to deal with what seemed like... personality fragments, or figments of my imagination running loose in my memory palace. "I don''t understand the question."


    "Why is that your face?"


    I felt suddenly uneasy. What if this wasn''t just a figment of my imagination? What if it was something external, reaching out to me? Some sort of monster, coming to eat my memories or mind control me? "What... what are you?"


    "I am Calliope Smith," she said in that accented English, "and I want to know thing."


    "What thing? What do you want from me?"


    She shuffled closer. "Want to know... if this make you die for real."


    She jammed the knife into my eye, and I recoiled with my whole self - briefly dropping into the real world before snapping out of my trance. Just like before at the library, I could see myself there with my eyes shut. As soon as I was back in my body - ignoring Katrin asking questions and Errod clutching his head and the phantom pain of my gouged-out mental eye - I flipped on my vision of the threads and there, standing in front of me, was my mind. As I''d thought, it was the version of me I inhabited while in my memory palace - same clothes and everything. There was no emotion on its face, and the eye had already healed other than a drop of blood like a tear running down its cheek. It drifted towards me and overlapped with me, and was gone. Huh.


    "Okay so... that could have gone better."