I checked around, not only with my eyes and my item sense, but also by sending a few ghosts out to do a quick search. But there was no one else around us. This forest we were in, wherever it was, seemed to stretch out forever in all directions. The ghosts went as high as they could but nothing else came into sight besides the tree canopy. Of course, those trees were so thick there could have been an entire town under the foliage just a mile away and they’d never see it.

  Also, obviously, one of the first things I thought of trying while we were searching and coming up with nothing was a quick teleport. I just wasn’t sure how to pull that off exactly given I still had no idea exactly where in the hell that pyramid had been. Sure, I knew it was in Egypt, but that didn’t help all that much. I should’ve used my distance-checking power while we were there to get an exact location. I’d been distracted by the Olympus showing up, damn it. Mom had been the one who narrowed it down to Egypt, but again, not helpful when it came to finding the exact spot.

  I did, however, think to use the distance power to check where we were now. Which… well, according to it, I was currently about six thousand eight hundred and fifty miles east and very slightly south of Laramie Falls. I wasn’t exactly sure, but that seemed relatively close to still being in Egypt. But I really didn’t remember there being this sort of huge area of trees in Egypt. Did they have forested areas? Maybe, I thought I remembered something about that, but could they really be this big? This one stretched on for what really seemed like hundreds of miles.

  I think they did have forests, especially a long time ago--from our time I mean, Story noted. But I don’t think they were this big. Of course, that’s Bystander history which probably doesn’t mean much. Especially when it comes to a place like Egypt, which was a big Alter hotspot for awhile.

  Behind me, Cassiel cleared her throat, drawing my attention. She gave me a curious look before asking, “Your ghosts find anything, oh child-of-Manakel?” There was something in her voice. It wasn’t exactly direct suspicion or whatever, but it did sound a good bit like she knew there was more to that situation than I was actually saying. Which, to be fair, there was. I just couldn’t get into it. Even if the idea of explaining my whole story to this complete stranger (who might not even make it into my present given I’d never heard of her before) did seem oddly appealing.

  Actually, given we’d already considered the idea that this Cassiel might have a power that allowed her to talk in a way that made her sound familiar to people, thus allowing her to make them accept her more easily, maybe this feeling was more evidence of that. I really did feel like talking to the girl about what was going on. She just… there was something about her that made me instinctively want to bring her in on all of that. It had to be some sort of power like that, right?

  Pushing that out of my mind for the time being, I focused on replying. “No, just more and more forest. We do seem to be in Egypt still, but an Egypt with more trees than I’ve ever heard of being in this area. I could try to transport us back to where we were before, but I’m not sure how successful that would be. Or if we’d even be able to get back to this spot if it doesn’t work right.”

  Cassiel considered me for a moment, her expression making it clear that she wanted to ask a lot more about everything I was saying. Instead, she simply replied, “Maybe we should look around down here a bit first, see if we can find anything or anyone. Then try that teleport spell of yours.”

  Right, of course, spell. Naturally she would think it was a spell. I couldn’t really claim otherwise without needing to get into entirely too much. As far as she knew, I was just the son of Manakel who had inherited his Necromancy. I had Seosten gifts and those Tartarus ones. I might be able to get away with pretending some of my powers were offshoots of that, or even inherited from whoever my mother might be. Hell, maybe she could think that some of the things I did were thanks to my ghosts retaining powers they had. That was a thought. But I definitely couldn’t let her know anything close to the truth. I was tap dancing across a very fine line in this situation, and any wrong move might completely change everything about the future. God, this was so dangerous, why was I even here? Why was I interacting with these people? I didn’t even know who this Cassiel was. I’d never heard of her before today. It was possible that she had simply gone on to other things and happened to not come up in the present, but I just… damn it, I didn’t know. I could be changing so many things dramatically just by interacting with her right now. What was I even supposed to do, or say?

  Fuck it, I just had to take it all one step at a time and hope I wouldn’t fuck the whole timeline up. So, I nodded as casually as possible. “Yeah, let’s see if we can find anything here. No need to rush and end up making everything worse. Unless not rushing is what makes everything worse.” I tried to smile a bit as though I was kidding, though I couldn't shake the feeling that something was going to go horribly wrong no matter what we did. I really needed to find my parents. Where were they? Had they been put down somewhere else in this giant forest? I still had ghosts searching through the trees, but they hadn't found anything besides a few normal animals.

  It was obvious that this other girl was anxious about the whole situation as well, even if she didn't say it out loud. The two of us exchanged knowing looks, making it clear that we weren't at all confident about what we were doing. Then we started to walk. I tried to use my direction power to tell us how far we were from the pyramid that we had been looking at so we could go that way, but of course it couldn't be that easy. Whether it was just because that spatial distortion effect was screwing me up, or some other reason, I was getting no response from that power when it came to finding the pyramid itself.

  So, the two of us just started walking and hoped for the best. My ghosts were searching the place much more efficiently than we could, but there was always a slight chance that they might miss something. Plus, this way I could send most of them into areas we weren't already walking toward. I simply had a couple go ahead of us to make sure we weren't walking into any traps. Though honestly, I almost would have preferred to find traps. At least that would mean we were heading in the right direction, toward where people were. As it was, there weren’t any signs of any civilization at all. There were no signs of anything aside from those few scattered animals. Various birds and mammals scattered away from us, or watched from the trees as we walked.

  “Right, so I know you can’t really talk about the future you’re from,” Cassiel put in a minute or so after we started going, “but I need to ask you something important. If you decide you can’t answer, that’s fair. I’ll even look away so I can’t see your expression when I ask. Um, the thing is, I know… I’ve gotten some… let’s just call it peeks at potential futures I guess. Let’s just call it that. And in those futures, I um--in some of them, magic and the Seosten are well-known to humanity, and in others they’re hidden. Like, really hidden. Is there any way you could, um, at least say which one of those potential futures you come from without giving too much away?”

  Well, there was obviously a lot behind that question. I felt the gears in my brain turning slowly, trying to pick out exactly what there was in that whole bit that was pinging so loudly. At the same time, I was also trying to decide just how much I could say. Cassiel did as she’d promised, looking away to make sure she wouldn’t see my expression, and she stayed pretty quiet, not rushing me to an answer. Which gave me time to consider all of that, debating it in my head with Story’s help. We were trying to figure out just how much we could screw up the timeline if we confirmed that the future we came from was one where magic was hidden from humanity. Right now, I was pretty sure we were in a time period when that wasn’t even close to being a thing. The Bystander Effect wouldn’t be created for… awhile. Maybe they were considering it even now and by confirming it was a thing, I would be making sure they went that route? Which would mean that confirming it would be a good thing, because it would keep things on track to be our future. But why would she even need to ask that anyway? What did it have to do with her? Was she part of the team that was pushing for that measure, or was she pushing against it? Was I just looking too deeply into the whole thing and she really did simply want to know which of several possible futures she’d seen would actually come true? Would I be changing things dramatically by giving her that much information, or would it really change nothing at all? And how did she see glimpses of the future? There were people who could do that with magic, Apollo had used them. Wait, what if she was one of those people who helped him with that?

  Then it happened. In the midst of going over all of that for what had to be the fifteenth time, Story and I both came to the same conclusion simultaneously. Each of us blurted it to each other silently, before I said the same thing outloud in a rush. “Wait a minute, you’re from the future!”

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  Well that got a bit of a reaction. The other girl audibly choked, stumbling over her own feet as her head whipped around, eyes wide. “Huh? How do you--I mean what are you talking about?” Even as she got that much out, Cassiel was already wincing. Her shoulders slumped. “I guess I didn’t do that good of a job at hiding it, huh? Which is pretty bad considering how much practice I’ve had. But in my defense, I’ve never had to hide it while trying to get information out of someone else who was from the future. I guess I shouldn’t have tried to poke at it. But I just--this was the first chance I’ve had to really figure out anything concrete about--you know, all that.”

  My head shook slowly, taking that in. “I mean, you kind of talk like someone from the future. Just your word choice, the cadence you use, all of it. I couldn’t figure out why you sounded familiar and casual at first. I actually thought it was some sort of power you had, something that let you automatically say things in a way that would seem familiar to whoever you were talking to so they’d trust you more. A diplomacy power, I guess. But it’s not that. You’re not from this time at all. You might even be from somewhat further ahead than I am. That would explain why I don’t--”

  I stopped myself then, as Story pointedly coughed in our head. But it was too late to hold back. Cassiel gave me a look, chin lifting with realization. “You don’t know me at all in the future, do you? You’ve never seen me before, where you come from. Or, I mean, when you come from.”

  What was I supposed to say to that now? Could I even try to backtrack or simply say that I couldn't give her any other information? Suddenly, this entire situation had basically flipped on its head. If Cassiel was from further in the future than I was, then confirming that I didn’t know her would basically only tell her that that much. She would know I was from a time earlier than she was, and that would mean she knew more than me. So talking about the future wouldn’t change anything at all. Except she clearly didn’t know enough because she didn’t know that Manakel didn’t actually have a son. Unless she was assuming it was secret in that time. Or maybe in the future I posed as Manakel’s son again for some reason? Or maybe--god damn it, there were so many maybes right now. I was going cross-eyed trying to sort my way through it.

  Maybe we should just run with it, Story put in tentatively. I mean, it really seems like we've got a fairly equal chance of screwing things up either way. It could be bad if we don't say anything, or if we do. But I think she has a pretty decent motivation to want to keep things the same if she’s from the future too. So if we do tell her too much, she'd probably be okay with getting her memory erased just so she doesn't accidentally change things and send us all into a timeline where she wasn’t born, or--you know, anything like that. That’s my vote, we take the plunge.

  And exactly how much of a ‘plunge’ should we take? I sent back with what amounted to a mental shrug. Should we tell her everything about ourself and what’s really going on?

  Maybe not everything, she advised. At least at first. Let’s just start with confirming that we’ve never seen her before in the time we come from and go from there. Take it all step by step.

  We had continued to walk forward that whole time, picking our way through this dense forest without actually finding anything. But hey, on the plus side, at least not finding anything also meant we weren’t getting into any fights. It gave me a chance to talk through all this with Story.

  Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe I would end up regretting it. But I had to make a choice at some point. I couldn't just stay silent the whole time, tempting as it might have been to avoid making any decisions at all. So, after taking a deep breath, I made myself nod. “Yeah, you're right, I've never heard of you. I don't know why. I mean, it's possible that you come back from some time past when I'm from. Or maybe you spend your time on a different planet and I just haven't met you yet. I guess if we want to narrow that down, you'd have to see how far in the future you're actually from. And if you’ve ever heard of me. Though--” Yeah, that had its own issues. She might know Flick from the future but not realize that Flick was me. Or maybe she did. Maybe she knew everything about what was going on now and was deliberately keeping quiet about it for the same reason I had been keeping quiet about being from the future, to avoid changing things. She could be going through all these same arguments in her own head, though probably without the added benefit of having another person to talk through them with. Thanks, Story.

  Cassiel obviously picked up on my hesitation, offering me a faint smile. “Believe me, I'm pretty sure I have a good idea about what's going on in your head. I mean, the basics anyway. I've been running things like that through my own mind ever since I showed up here. I mean, not here, but over in Seosten--” Then it was her turn to stop talking for a moment, as though realizing she had probably said too much. A visible flinch crossed her face before she gave a low sigh. “Wow, that kind of slipped right out, didn’t it? Okay, fine, I’m gonna lay it all out on the table. Maybe this is stupid, but here we go. I’m not really Seosten--I mean, I am now, but I wasn’t to begin with. I was a human when I was first born. Except--okay I’ll get into that in a minute, maybe. The point is, I was a human from Earth. I lived around the year 2020, and then something happened and I ended up in this place called Tartarus. You’ve probably heard of it, if you inherited your father’s power and all that. Anyway, I ended up there and was physically transformed into a Seosten. I mean, my body was human, then it was Seosten. I’m still not sure exactly how all that works or how it happened, to be totally honest. I was in Tartarus, my body got transformed into a Seosten, and that’s when Lucifer and Sariel found me. They were in there rescuing Chayyiel, but they pulled me out at the same time. I’ve been pretending to be a normal Seosten with magical amnesia since then.”

  That was a lot to digest. Seriously a lot. I had been expecting her story to be pretty wild and out there if she was actually from the future. After all, look at my own story before I ended up here. But when she actually said it, all I could do was stand there and stare at her for a minute. I had stopped walking entirely by then. There was just no way I could possibly focus on moving my feet and watching where I was going while trying to cope with everything this girl had just said.

  Even Story was taken aback. For a moment I thought there was a buzzing in my head, or even outside it, like a bug nearby or something. But it was actually her, making a long, sustained, uhhhhhh noise. Yeah, it was gonna take her a second to sort her way through that. Lucky her, not having to be on the outside while this Cassiel girl stood there anxiously waiting for a response. As if I could even form actual coherent words right then, let alone put them in order.

  “Okay, yeah,” I finally managed, voice sounding strained even to my own ears, “I have to admit, I didn’t see that coming. And believe me, I’ve seen a lot. But that sounds like--I mean it really is just a-- you’re a--oh. Wow.” I opened my mouth, shut it, then opened it again a couple more times like that. And in the end, the only other thing I could manage was another weak, “Wow.”

  She waited patiently while I shook that off. “I’m not exactly sure what I expected you to say, but ‘I’m a human girl from the future who was magically transformed into a Seosten and ended up in Tartarus until Lucifer and Sariel saved me’ definitely wasn’t anywhere on the list of possibilities. You’re sure making a solid play for having the most ridiculous life story, but I think I can barely squeak out ahead.”

  With a weak, self-conscious smile, Cassiel corrected, “I know this is a tiny, insignificant point against the other things, but… not really a girl. I mean, just--I am, but not just that. I’m kinda… fluid that way?” She smirked before coughing with a dismissive wave. “Never mind, that’ll be funnier when you know more about me. Point is, I’m not she or her. I’m they. Which is just--probably not at all important given everything else going on, so I’m sorry.”

  I gave a little shrug, smiling faintly despite myself at the absurdity of the whole situation. “No, it’s okay, I get it.” Giving her--them another look, I added, “Were you a Heretic in the future? A Boscher I mean. Crossroads or Eden’s Garden? Wait, am I saying too much right now?”

  Their giggle was clearly born from very high nerves. “I--uh, I’m probably giving away a lot if I admit I have no idea what you’re talking about, huh? I’ve never heard of any of that stuff. Probably because I--uh, that is, I’m pretty sure I’m not actually from this Earth. I mean, I think the Earth I’m from is a different reality, a different universe entirely. I don’t know if I can really get into it, but yeah. You know, while I’m piling on the absurdity of this whole situation for you.”

  “Sure, why not?” I blurted that out loud, almost hysterically. What else was I supposed to say? “You’re from another reality entirely. This is all totally normal and fine, nothing ridiculous here. Nothing--right, okay, um…” I took a breath, then another one and tried to calm down. Getting hysterical about all this wasn’t going to help anything.

  “I guess I kind of win on the ‘having a ridiculous life story’ front after all, huh?” Cassiel murmured.

  Meeting her curious gaze, I offered a tiny smile. “I dunno, if that’s all true, it’s definitely up there. But maybe I should tell you my story before we make any firm decisions on who has the weirdest life right now.

  “You should brace yourself though, it’s a doozy.”

  Joke Tags: Honestly You Guys Have No Idea How Weird It Is To Have These Two Characters Talking To Each Other In A Completely Canon Chapter