[Here I’ll try to condense about seven hours of game time from literally six months ago into a recap. I’m working on other things at the moment too, so it will not be to the standard of the recaps. One day I hope to return and punch it up a bit.]
The barbecue fizzled out after Sarolt left, and everyone retired to where they were staying after making their goodbyes. Imrus reassured his daughter that her Mother’s departure wasn’t a big deal, and that he didn’t have any problems with her working for the Caliber Institute, it was just that her Mother worried for her safety.
‘Well, everyone, thanks for coming,’ said Ursa, a little shakily. ‘Thanks for the pie, Merlin.’
‘Don’t mention it. My Mother will be very pleased that her suggestion went down well.’
Ursa gave a hollow laugh. ‘We’ll need to meet Merlin’s parents next!’ she said to the group in general.
‘…No,’ said Merlin.
‘Oh. Uh, Nora’s parents?’
Nora shook her head. ‘Not gonna happen.’
There was a pause.
‘I don’t have parents!’ said Alkahest, brightly. He was still holding a burger.
‘We can make you some,’ said Merlin, darkly.
Everyone looked at him. ‘What?’ said Nora.
‘Yeah, Merlin, I…’ said Alkahest. ‘Was that a threat? I—I don’t really know how to respond to that?’
[Even Adam, Melrin’s player, did not know what that was supposed to mean. We all laughed for a long time.]
The next day, Merlin took the fingerbone to the Institute’s containment facility, an imposing Brutalist block a mile or so just outside of anywhere reasonable. To the casual observer, it might have been a factory, or a multi-story-car-park with no on ramp. There was a fence ensconcing it within a tarmac wasteland of about four acres.
Merlin approached with the casual confidence of one on orders from their boss, and thus immune to criticism. He’d agreed he’d get his colleagues in, at Nora’s insistence. She framed it as “covering him, just in case”. Merlin assumed she just wanted to have a nosey around, which was technically true. It was just that she’d be noseying with intent.
Ursa had arrived at the same time as Nora, with Alkahest dropping her off. He was planning to track down a few things to eat while Ursa was busy; special mention going to a place that just sold gingerbread. He’d been talking about it for roughly half an hour before they arrived.
Inside the facility – after going through multiple ID checks on the other side of an intercom – Merlin, Ursa, and Nora were introduced to Anasios Kojak, a semi-retired former field agent who now worked as the site’s manager. He was a tall man, in a long-limbed sort of way that would’ve seemed gangly if each arm and leg hadn’t the coiled tension of a fresh-strung longbow. On his nose was a small pair of dark glasses, the adaptive lenses slowly drifting back towards clear as he approached them.
He wasn’t supposed to be their point of contact, but the facility had apparently grown increasingly shortstaffed over the past few months. True enough, they stood in the lobby by an unmanned reception desk, and neither the stairs up to the offices above nor the path to the side that led towards the stacks of containment units had anyone traversing them at all.
‘So. Merlin, I will escort you to the unit we’ve prepared for the relic you’ve brought. Along that way you can brief me on any special features that we may have forgotten to account for. Nora and S–‘ He paused abruptly. ‘Sorry. I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Ursa,’ provided Ursa.
‘Nora and Ursa, you’ll wait here. We shan’t be very long, I expect.’
With that, he and Merlin went off into the facility proper. They came to a lift, and Kojak punched the down button.
As the lift doors closed, Nora promptly swivelled on the spot and began walking. The silver wire in her chest stretched off down the corridor, past the lift, deeper into the compound. She wasn’t going to stand around, was she, not when she was this close.
Ursa went with her, because standing around in a corridor was not her idea of a fun day, and she had to ensure that her day was as pleasant as possible after the one before it. By all rights she should have been off eating gingerbread, really.
As it was, she followed after an increasingly tense Nora, who was moving as if she were in an egg-and-spoon race while surrounded by those dinosaurs from Land Before Time II.
Eventually, though, the wire led her to a door.
⁂
Elsewhere in the facility, Kojak and Merlin emerged from a lift, and made their way to a door of their own.
Kojak adjusted his glasses, the lenses shifting from clear to a sort of bluish hue. ‘You’re contaminated,’ he told the Gnome. ‘Or, rather, something is trying to influence you.’
Merlin didn’t particularly want to talk about anything other than the containment of the fingerbone, but there was no way he could ignore a comment like that. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It just looks as though something has been trying to affect your emotions. Perhaps the bone you’re carrying. Have you found yourself more… volatile than usual, recently? Emotional? Prone to violence?’
Merlin wanted to punch him in the testicles. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Kojak. ‘You’re resisting it, then. But keep an eye out. It could be that whatever is causing it might resort to more… obvious techniques.’
Merlin thought back to his encounter on the train and said nothing.
They threw the fingerbone into a room containing a blank, white expanse sort of like in The Matrix. Very, very slowly, it began to unfurl. Kojak closed the door.
‘If it does grow into a full labyrinth, that room will still keep it enclosed. We’ll keep the main branch informed. Now, I’d like to get back to your colleagues before they find any trouble.’
⁂
Nora didn’t enter the door. It would have been locked, anyway. There was a little window, and she could just about see some blinking lights in the dark beyond it.
Instead of stopping, she kept walking past with Ursa trying to make conversation at her heels, then used her new Jacket of the Mountebank to teleport inside.
Ursa of course, seeing her friend just disappear, panicked a little bit.
The Morris Server was a huge behemoth of a supercomputer, the kind you’d use to plan out a war in the late ’50s. There were racks and racks of wires and blinking lights; in a more logical installation there’d be space to walk between them, but here it was simply a tangle of shelves and massive thick cables with no regard for anything that existed in the physical world.
Except for Nora, of course.
The whole thing began to writhe and shift, eventually opening out to something much more understandable. A large user interface section slammed into place on one side, with a dizzying array of slots and punch cards.
The Morris Worm spoke with glee in its voice.
‘Nora! I can’t believe you’re really here!!’
‘Hi, Morris, it’s—what is all this?’
A flicker. The voice suddenly had a point of origin. ‘It’s me, Nora!’ A silhouette had appeared, grey and nondescript. It smiled despite its lack of a face.
‘It’s your… body, you mean?’ said Nora, carefully.
‘Not exactly. It’s more like… the shell of a snail, I suppose. But I’m so happy to see you! You—you even brought your friends!’
Nora didn’t like that tone. The Morris Worm had a bit of a jealous streak, which only seemed to be growing. She supposed it was only natural; it had been just it and her for quite a time until now. ‘”Friends” is a strong word,’ she began.
‘Anyway!’ the Morris Worm was saying. ‘Look, I’ve added functionality for you to physically run programs!’ It indicated the punch cards. ‘And that’s what the wire is for! If you concentrate, you should be able to travel down it. Your soul should, I mean. And then you’ll be able to use whatever cards you need!’
‘That’s—thank you, Morris,’ said Nora. ‘You know, I realise I’ve been really busy recently; it’s been a while since you and I have time to just hang out together, you know?’
The Morris Worm didn’t seem to hear her attempt at placating. Whatever manic energy was carrying it just continued to rush forward.
‘I’ll show you what I can do! What you can do, I mean!’ The Worm began to scoop up great heaving armfuls of punch cards. ‘I can summon things for you – like with the frog earlier, sorry – and if you travel down here on the wire you’ll even be able to cast Wish. Though it uses up about a month’s worth of power, haha.’
It slotted a random selection of cards into slots, and then pulled a lever in full-on-Frankensteinian rapture.
⁂
Outside, in the corridor, Ursa had figured out which room had claimed Nora, and been knocking at the door for a time. Nora couldn’t hear; apparently the thing was soundproofed. But Ursa saw – quite of its own accord – the lever on the punch card machine drop. Static energy buoyed her hair.
She turned to see a black, glutinous lahar bleed out of a hole in reality, before congealing into a decaying monster covered in eyestalks, with one yellowed, sightless cataract in its very center, focused intently on her.
It was an undead Beholder, not that Ursa was concerned with taxonomy for now.
Another had appeared before Merlin as he’d emerged from the lift on the way back. His first reaction was to lob a Firebolt at it, as if testing the waters.
The flame ignited one of the eyestalks, and the thing shrieked before turning to float at speed down the side corridor.
‘–I repeat, we have a breach,’ Kojak was saying into an intercom panel on the nearby wall. Then he sprinted after the Beholder, without even a word to Merlin. Merlin took off after him.
⁂
‘Oh dear,’ said the Morris Worm, perhaps a bit theatrically. Nora couldn’t quite tell if it was genuine.
‘What did you just do?’ she asked.
‘I might have… summoned things. Hostile things. Where your other two friends are.’
‘What! Morris, why?’
The Morris Worm pulled a card. ‘I put this in the wrong slot. I was trying to show you how you can Wish for anything. You can change reality itself!’
‘I don’t want to change reality! Not like that, anyway!’
‘—I thought you’d like it. I was only trying to–‘
‘No, I know, Morris. I’ll… we’ll talk again just as soon as I sort this out.’
Nora bolted from the room, pistol drawn. She saw Ursa blasting some sort of auditory-whisper-magic at a decrepit eyeball monster on the one side, with another of them screaming down the corridor towards them with Kojak and Merlin in hot pursuit.
In the ensuing fight, the four of them pursued the beholders through the facility’s corridors, with Merlin summoning up a terrible-shadow-beast, Nora firing Eldritch Blasts left and right, and Ursa actually resorting to combat magic since her usual incapacitation spells seemed inadequate.
Kojak produced a plain combat knife – the kind with serration on one side of the base of the blade – and hurled himself at the monsters with the speed and power of a man in his absolute prime. Whatever beams of force the beholders were firing frequently knocked him away.
Nora, Merlin, and Ursa were all hit with paralysis beams, and left behind as Kojak sprinted off ahead. They followed as soon as they recovered, though the beholders had apparently made quite a bit of distance. They would have lost them entirely, but luckily for them there was a trail of blood droplets that must have been from Kojak. It was less lucky for him.
Kojak’s trail came to a larger room with what appeared to be a steel bunker squatting in the middle. The door was conspicuously open.
‘What is that?’ panted Ursa.
‘A cell,’ said Merlin, tersely. ‘From the looks of things.’
The cell within was sterile steel. It was more than bright enough to see – maybe a bit too bright – but had no visible light source. Actually, there were no features at all save four heavy black chains attached to the walls. These trailed down towards an Angel, knelt in the center of the floor.
Two chains were attached to manacles on her wrists. Two were attached to loops pierced in the tips of her wings, which were spread wide like an anatomical diagram. There were more wings, too, sprouting from the back of her head. These were folded over her eyes like a blindfold.
Kojak was in here too, holding on with his knife buried in the side of one of the beholders. It bounced around the room trying to buck him off.
The others quickly moved to support him, and in the melee the beholder was destroyed with the distinct pop of a dismissed summoning.
The Angel began to stir.
Kojak, bloodied and panting, backed away. ‘Move,’ he commanded.
Ursa approached him. ‘You can barely stand; let me heal your–‘
‘We have to get out of here right now.’
One of the chains had been sheared through by the beholder’s disintegration beam. The Angel’s wing folded in, flexed, and then sheared through the chain connected to her hand on the same side. This hand clamped onto the opposite manacle, which deliquesced into slag beneath her grip.
The door slammed shut behind them, and Merlin cast an Arcane Lock on it just as the second beholder crested the top of the cell and began firing death rays at them. There was a distinct boom from the other side of the cell door. Something – the Angel, obviously – was hammering on it.
They fought the second beholder, and through some impressive work from Merlin’s Shadowspawn, they brought it down. All the while, the cell door began to buckle.
Nora just barely got out of the way when it exploded outwards. The Angel emerged, wings still over her eyes. She gave them a slight bow, then, with a beat of the wings on her back, launched into the air.
Ursa was fast enough to catch her with a Hold Person, but after a few tense seconds of her fighting the spell, she crashed up and out of the facility, destroying a wall and most of the ceiling in the process.
‘Outside, now!!’ commanded Kojak. ‘We have to get after her!’
‘You can barely walk!’ said Ursa, rushing over with healing magic.
‘That wasn’t a request, Solya,’ said Kojak. Then, seeing Ursa’s expression, he said, ‘Shit.’
‘—Mama?’
‘We’ll—talk about this later. Please, this is more important than you could know.’
The four of them made their way outside. Occasional other employees, wearing cleanroom coats, were making sure all the containment rooms remained shut; all the while alarms blared overhead.
Outside, the Angel floated above the empty car park. She appeared to be enjoying the taste of the fresh air.
‘Who is that?’ asked Merlin.
Kojak had his knife out. ‘Mysterioso Pizzicato. Myst. The Institute’s policy of staying out of things, of empowering other factions to keep one another in check as opposed to acting themselves? Well, that wasn’t always the case. It used to be that we’d… well, “remove threats to the balance”. And six months ago we went back to the old approach again, just to bring her in, because nobody else could. She’s—she’s a big deal.’
‘Are we talking Laniakea big deal?’
‘Bigger.’
Merlin paled a bit, which due to his already pallid complexion rendered him near-transparent. ‘Like… Laniakea and Mr. Pyrite? Together?’
‘Yeah, if the two of those were to work together they might be able to stop her.’
‘How did you get her the first time?’ asked Nora.
‘With help. With a lot of help. The Director himself had to take to the field, and even then it was a close call.’
They all took this in silence, apart from Merlin. ‘Hold on, Brynner is on the same level as two ancient Dragons?!’
‘After a fashion,’ said Kojak. ‘When necessary. And it was absolutely necessary. She was responsible for the… major disruption of certain hierarchies. Namely, the assassination of both Infernal Kings. But that,’ he added, seeing Ursa’s eyes go wide, ‘is a strict secret. It cannot go beyond us.’
‘Are you certain it was her?’ asked Ursa.
‘She admitted to it herself.’
‘Okay, but… if that’s true, then I have to warn Alkahest. I know you said it was a secret but–‘
‘You are not to tell your boyfriend, Orsolya. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances.’
‘But if she’s going to go after whoever’s in charge…! That’s what he’s working towards, well, not being the king but making things more equal…’
‘Either way. You are not to speak of it.’ He pulled a little toffee out of his pocket. ‘Eat this.’
‘That’s obviously suspicious,’ said Ursa. ‘It’s going to erase it from my brain or something.’
‘It will not erase it from your brain. That would invalidate me even telling you, and I told you in an attempt to keep you safe. Eat it.’
Ursa took it reluctantly. ‘This is taking a lot of trust from me!’ she said. ‘I hope you realise that. And it goes a bit of the way to mending our relationship.’
‘Solya… Ursa. I am your mother. All I want is to keep you safe.’
Ursa unwrapped it and put it in her mouth.
‘And I’m very sorry, especially considering what you just said,’ continued Kojak. ‘But I keep my work life and my home life meticulously distinct.’
With the sugar and magic of the toffee dissolving on Ursa’s tongue, Kojak cast Geas. He commanded: ‘You are not to speak a word of what you know about the Angel Myst to Azoth Alkahest.’
If the spell took hold, it would last for a year and a day. But something in Ursa’s shame and rage at the betrayal meant the spell did not take hold. Though Kojak didn’t know that, because he didn’t technically cast it himself.
Ursa spat the toffee out.
‘It still takes effect, Ursa.’ Kojak’s voice was not unkind. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me at some point. But this is too important.’
‘Let’s just do what we can to stop her.’
Myst was scanning the horizon, and appeared to be coming to a decision.
As this was going on, Nora had shot her mind down the silver wire to meet with the Morris Worm again.
‘Yeah, did you mean for this to happen?’ she asked it.
‘Oh, hello! Mean for what?’
‘There’s an Angel.’
‘Did something escape?’
Nora couldn’t tell if the Worm’s reaction was genuine. The surprise in its tone seemed real, but she didn’t know if it was surprise at its own success or surprise that anything had happened at all.
‘If there’s trouble… you could use the machine!’ said Morris, eagerly. ‘You could summon something to help stop it! Or you could even use Wish!’
Nora said nothing, instead travelling mentally back through the wire and into her body again.
Kojak was staring at her down his coloured glasses, like he’d just seen her come back into herself. But rather than asking her about it, he called up to the Angel.
‘Myst! I’m giving you one chance to come back down here! Surely Life would prefer you to stay contained if you’re still here after this long!’
Myst said nothing.
‘Alright,’ said Kojak. ‘Let’s hope she’s out of practice.’
He flashed upwards, knife in hand. Suddenly he had a fistful of her hair, and plunged the blade into her neck like Merlin stabbing an old woman.
Myst flexed her wing. Kojak crashed down like a meteor to the concrete.
The Angel spun in the air, and began to sink, alighting before Ursa, Merlin, and Nora. There was no sound at all as she moved.
‘Hi!’ said Ursa. ‘I just wanted to ask, did you really murder the Infernal Kings?’
‘Ursa!’ hissed Merlin. ‘This isn’t the time for that!’
‘I just thought now was the only opportunity we’d get,’ said Ursa, a little bruised. ‘I mean it is important. Not just to me, I don’t have a personal stake or anything…’
Myst, though, actually turned to face Nora. ‘You are tied to something here,’ she said, in a voice like a candle going out.
‘What’s it to you?’ asked Nora.
The Angel looked down the silver line in Nora’s chest. ‘You are a part of the Institute as well.’
‘Again, what’s it to you?’
The Angel’s wing arced down like a guillotine. Nora was ready to throw herself back, and realised – just in time, too – that Myst wasn’t aiming for her, she was aiming to cut the silver wire. The wire that, should it be damaged, would cause enough magical feedback to burn out her soul.
Instead Nora leapt forward, the bladed feathers making a gash in the concrete where the wire had been. Myst followed her with wing-covered eyes, and smiled. ‘You may become a problem down the line,’ she said.
A pink blur interposed itself between them. Ursa stood, blocking Nora from the Angel’s view. There was a sound like an oven being opened, as Merlin conjured up a shadowblade.
Nora, though, still wanted answers. ‘Speak to me. And maybe we can help each other. Why is me being connected to the server and working for the Institute an issue?’
‘I have been contained here for longer than Life would prefer,’ said the Angel, still smiling. ‘And I suspect the Institute would use you to pursue me, if you are tied to such a power. So I doubt you would help me, even if our goals are aligned.’
‘If our goals are aligned then why would I–‘
‘You are an employee of theirs. You wouldn’t have a choice.’
‘I’m not doing that now, though, am I? We’re just talking here.’
‘Then move,’ she said.
Nora leapt back down the wire. ‘Morris!’ she called. ‘Do you swear you didn’t do this on purpose? It’s not one of those messy things you do for fun?!’
‘I swear! I swear on—on our friendship! If I’m lying then you never have to speak with me again! I was excited to see you, and I was trying to impress you, and I fucked up, okay?’
Nora tried to think. ‘Do you have a way of confirming if the Angel Myst really did kill the Infernal Kings? If she’s as dangerous as they say she is?’
‘I… I don’t know,’ said the Morris Worm. It stared at a rack of lights, which were all rapidly blinking as if accessing a hard drive. ‘That’s what the Institute records say? That’s heavily encrypted. I can’t find any other mention of her online?’
‘…Okay. I may be back again in a minute.’
Back in her body, Nora saw Myst step forward. Her wings were raised, and glowing, and very, very sharp.
Ursa pulled on all the magic left in her, and cast Suggestion.
‘Stop!!’ she screamed.
The spell just glanced off, doing nothing. The wings came down.
And Kojak skidded up to Ursa’s side, and his hand crashed down onto her shoulder as he invoked the alignment of Neutrality.
There have been several points where the alignment of our protagonists – their cosmic ones, Life, Death, Order, or Chaos – have shifted. These alignments are powers more vast and nebulous than anything else in our story. They’re what lies waiting at the end of the infinite line of worlds around the Fulcrum. The termination point, if you will.
Neutrality, then, is something else. It’s the alignment lurking at the exact center of the other four. It’s balance. And if all other factors are totally, perfectly balanced, what does any conflict come down to?
It comes down to will.
Ursa was clenching her jaw so hard she feared her teeth would crack. If Myst’s wings came down, that was it; her friends, her Mama, gone. And after that, maybe not today but down the line, Myst would come for Alkahest too.
Myst stopped.
Kojak’s grip was shaking. ‘Do whatever you’re going to do now, I can’t keep this up for–‘
‘I was just trying to stop her, I didn’t have a plan for after–‘
Nora took in a breath. ‘Kojak. Does she really need to be re-imprisoned?’
‘There’s no way for us to do that, our only goal now is survival.’
‘Then I’m going to cast Wish.’
Her mind went down the wire again, and Morris already knew. ‘What do you wish for?’ it asked.
‘I don’t know if she really did what they think she did. So I don’t want to just wish her out of existence. That’s not a power I want to wield. Even this isn’t a—okay, I want Myst—the Angel, Mysterioso Pizzicato, to be re-imprisoned securely in the same location, circumstances, and exact manner she was twenty-four hours prior, and for all restraints and imprisonment techniques to be similarly reinstated.’
‘Done,’ said the Morris Worm. A tidal wave of punch cards swept up and began slotting themselves into the machine. The whirring of the machine grew faster, and faster, and faster.
Back outside, Myst was no longer free. There wasn’t a flash, a sound, nothing.
‘What did you just do?!’ asked Ursa.
⁂
Myst’s cell was intact once more. They were able to check on her, see the chains back in place, see the walls that now had never been broken.
Kojak took them up to the office, and locked the door.
‘Nora… can you tell us all what happened there? Where your consciousness went, and how you did that?’
‘You noticed that, then,’ said Nora.
Kojak adjusted his glasses.
And Nora told them. She told them about her first encounter with the Morris Worm. She told them about the wire, and the server it was connected to. She told them about her Wish.
‘I’m not going to be reporting this,’ Kojak announced. ‘Not just to cover up the escape, though. There wouldn’t be a way for me to explain the day’s events without implicating Nora. And I believe that, like the knowledge of Myst’s reason for being here, if that information were to spread it would put you in danger.
‘…Don’t think of the Caliber Institute as “the good guys”. They’d probably throw you in a cell like Myst’s if they ever found out.’
‘How do you know the other staff here won’t tell anyone?’ asked Merlin.
‘They won’t.’
Ursa wondered just how many Geas toffees he had in his pockets.
Kojak got to his feet. ‘I don’t want this to get out and make life more dangerous for any of you. I’m not having that. The Institute already got years of my life, I won’t—I never wanted that for you.’ This last part was to Ursa. ‘Sarolt never wanted that for you.’
He escorted them to the door. ‘I have paperwork to do,’ he told them. ‘We almost had a breach, after all. That part does need to be reported.’
‘…Can I talk to Mama?’ asked Ursa, on the threshold.
Kojak paused. ‘Do you two mind?’ he asked of Merlin and Nora.
When they didn’t he went with Ursa over to her mother’s car. She hadn’t seen it on the way in, but had just been sat there all along. ‘Huh,’ said Ursa.
When she got in the passenger side, it was Sarolt in the driver’s seat.
‘What is it, Solya?’
‘I—I’m sorry about what happened yesterday. Calling you, uh, a hypocrite. I didn’t realise you had such a terrifying job.’
‘Solya, I get it. I… used to be the same with my own mother.’
Ursa seemed to make up her mind about something. ‘I’m really mad at you, but I’m also glad you’re not dead,’ she said. ‘I really thought that was what you were doing when you put your hand on my shoulder back there.’
‘To tell you the truth,’ said her mother, ‘I thought the same thing. You know our family is more important to me than anything. You are more important to me than anything. I have to keep you safe, no matter the cost.’
Before Ursa could reply, though, she continued. ‘But I’ve learned today that you’re a lot more capable than I’d assumed. I hadn’t realised until now how grown-up you are.’
‘Thanks, Mama.’
‘I do think you should quit your job at the Institute, though.’
‘I already did, Mama.’
‘Oh!’
‘I’ve been thinking of applying to work there as a consultant instead, though.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’ll call you at the weekend,’ said Ursa. ‘Don’t die before then. But I am still mad at you.’
After that, Nora wanted a word with Kojak and Merlin left for the B&B he was staying at. Before he got away though, he got his own comment from Kojak:
‘Remember what we talked about before all this went down,’ he said. ‘Try to keep your head.’
Merlin left with his head full of thoughts about how everything around him seemed much bigger and more powerful than he’d realised. They weren’t pleasant thoughts.
When Nora sat down alone with Kojak in Sarolt’s car, she told him everything – actually everything, about the Morris Worm’s jealousy, and about sending off Merlin’s information to whatever made the bones, and about its predilection for messing with the Institute’s computers. She left her watch on the floor outside the car, and willed the silvery connection in her chest to close.
‘…And I just wanted to tell you the whole story because, uh…’ she finished without finishing.
‘Well,’ said Kojak, weighing up what he’d been told. ‘I don’t think you should tell the Institute, obviously. I don’t think you should tell Merlin, either because if what I suspect is happening to him is happening, he may try to kill you.’
‘That’s fair.’
‘As for the Morris Worm… I can’t help but see it as a child. It just knows that it wants something, or it thinks that you want something, and it doesn’t think about the consequences. And that could end up really bad for you.’
‘Yeah,’ said Nora. She swallowed. ‘Look, uh. I wanted to thank you; nobody’s ever really stuck their neck out for me like you have today.’
‘That’s just because I feel I have a responsibility to help you. And not just because you’re friends with my daughter. So no thanks are necessary.’
As she climbed out of the car, she thought about how Kojak hadn’t said anything one way or another about telling Ursa. Sarolt probably would want her to? Probably. Kojak, though, was decidedly neutral, despite knowing Sarolt’s feelings.
‘…You okay, Nora?’ asked Ursa, tentatively, when she rejoined her.
‘Yeah.’
‘I know you don’t like to talk about stuff, but if you want to talk about stuff… I’m literally always here for you.’
‘…Thanks.’
It was awkward.
Nora cleared her throat. ‘Maybe… when are you headed back to Middlemarch?’
‘We’re headed back Monday?’
Now Nora stared furiously at the ground. ‘Maybe we could go get a drink at some point, just the two of us?’
‘Yeah, I’d love to! That’d be amazing!’
‘Cool.’
Despite the awkwardness, Nora stuck around for long enough to make sure Ursa was picked up safely. When she drove home, she actually stuck to the speed limit.
Roll History 