Thresholder

Nima had her hands folded behind her back and six different masks lined up on the table. The workshop was empty, as it had been before, but it had also been cleaned up, with all of the miscellaneous tools and materials put back into their cubbies. It looked like Nima had also swept up and wiped things down, making the place as professional and presentable as possible.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” said Nima. She was dressed more conservatively than the day before, with a skirt that went down past her knees and a short-sleeved crop top that showed off her toned stomach. She wasn’t wearing the glasses that she’d been wearing the day before, but Perry had been pretty sure that those were an affectation given that they hadn’t had much distortion. The unruly curls of her hair had been pulled back into twin buns that didn’t really help her to look more serious, which he thought was her intent, unless she was trying to emphasize the pointed ears which were now on full display. The necklaces were mostly gone, though she still wore one, which draped across her chest, a turquoise stone in the center weighing it down. Overall, he thought she was trying to look like a professional, or maybe like what she thought a human might find more comfortable.

“You’re prepared to study me?” asked Perry.

Nima frowned and looked at the masks. “I did talk to someone, my roommate. I didn’t say anything about you, but I did ask whether or not I might get in trouble if I didn’t report something that was, ah, maybe pertinent information for someone to know.”

“And?” asked Perry, though he knew the answer.

“She laughed and said that wasn’t the culture,” said Nima. “Which, when I thought about it, was true. If I thought that you were going to try something, to hurt someone, if I thought that you were trying to get something from me that I wasn’t supposed to say, secrets that I might know, that might be different.”

“I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” said Perry. He gave her what he hoped was a disarming smile. “I’m just looking for someone who can help me.”

“Are you going to tell me what you are?” asked Nima.

“No,” said Perry. “Also, I should warn you, I’m on a bit of a deadline. I was hoping to catch a ship — or a blimp — to Berus within the next week or two.”

Nima’s mouth hung open for a moment. “But you’re not from Berus.”

“No,” said Perry. “But I have business there, and after that, I’ll probably be moving on.”

“How am I supposed to learn anything in a week?” asked Nima. “Especially if you won’t tell me anything?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Perry. “I’ll show you things, and I want your expertise on what you see, with the diagnostic masks or without.”

“Show me … things,” said Nima. “Not just the power I saw flowing out of you.”

“Not just that, no,” said Perry. He smiled at her. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

Nima went to the bench and looked down at the masks. “This is everything that I have. Masks are individual, which is annoying because I can’t borrow from people, but I’ve made a lot for diagnostics. Unfortunately, not many of them are set up for tegman lithography, which means that I’ll be using my own eyes rather than projecting onto paper.”

She was describing some convoluted method of making photographs using magical masks that were only technically masks, he was pretty sure. He was glad that didn’t work. He would rather there not be any pictures of him anyway.

She put on the masks one by one, making quick notes with a pencil in a leather-bound book she had by her side. She did all of this silently, without talking. Her hands trembled slightly after setting down one of the masks, and she held her hand out for a bit, letting it steady before she resumed her writing.

“How was that?” asked Perry once the final mask was set down and the final notes were made.

“Um,” said Nima. She swallowed. “It’s a lot of energy to be in a person’s body. It’s broad, and shows up on four of these, including one that’s supposed to only show anything for the Implements, which is very confusing.”

The Implements were magic items, legendary weapons that Perry had only found out about the night before. They were part of the so-called ‘deep magic’ which dated to before the Effluence, things that either didn’t exist anymore, couldn’t be confirmed, or had simply been overshadowed for one reason or another. Perry had perked up on reading about the Implements, but he wasn’t entirely sure that it was a coherent class of things. There were swords and bows, but also axes, awls, and a few bits of armor. All told, there were supposed to be around thirty of them, but they were all a part of various commons now, and not all that impressive against the might of the huge lanterns of the Effluence or the more modern solar domes. If Perry could get his hands on an Implement, he would be quite pleased.

“I’m not a magical item,” said Perry.

“You’re sure?” asked Nima. “Because you’re glowing like one. I think, at least. I haven’t actually tested that one, I only followed directions to make it.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. “Can you try it all again?”

“Again?” asked Nima, looking at the row of masks. “All of them?”

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Give me a moment though.” He changed the flow of energy, what he preferred to think of as off-gassing, and directed the energy into his vessels, preventing any of it from so much as touching his skin. He stopped himself from breathing, which would draw in new energy, and closed himself off to the outside world, at least from an energy perspective.

“Ready?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

Perry nodded.

She ran through all of them again, this time writing her findings down on a new page.

“You know, I’m not a scientist, not really,” she said. “I’m much more of an engineer, and because we’re all expected to have specialties these days, I’m much more of a combined-discipline engineer. And I haven’t been at the Institute long really. I don’t want you thinking that I’m some kind of expert.”

“That’s fine,” said Perry. “You’re itching to bring in more people, aren’t you?”

“I am,” said Nima. She twirled her pencil around her finger, moving deftly. “I’m in over my head.”

“You were working on that other project alone,” said Perry. “Right?”

“That was different,” said Nima. “That wasn’t … this.”

“Can I ask about the results of that test?” asked Perry, pointing at her book.

“The results are that you can shut it off somehow, tamp down, block out,” said Nima. “It’s something that you can do with a lantern in a few ways, but you’re not a lantern. I mean … you’re not, right?”

“No,” said Perry. He tried to find some humor in that, but she was being fidgety, and it was setting him on edge. She hadn’t told anyone about him, aside from the conversation with her roommate, but that didn’t guarantee that she was going to stay quiet. “Do I show up as special on any of those others?”

“When you’re trying to cloak yourself?” asked Nima. Perry nodded. “Yes, this one.” She picked up the fourth mask. “It’s designed for finding effluence, actually, specifically what’s in a person’s body. You have enough that you should be dead several times over.”

“Fit as a fiddle,” said Perry, looking himself over. He was hoping that the second sphere powers he’d gotten from the Great Arc had allowed him to dodge radiation poisoning, but so far he was feeling good, which was a sign that however the accelerated healing that came with pumping energy through his vessels didn’t have a single thing to do with DNA.

“Can you do the reverse?” asked Nima. “Make yourself … bright?”

“I don’t really know what you’re seeing,” said Perry. “But I can try, sure.”

He began venting energy, bleeding the vessels with directionless off-gassing, letting as much power slip into the aether as possible. It was the same technique he’d first used to coerce repairs of his armor, though what he used now was refined, more focused on creating a second skin of flowing energy.

Nima put one of the masks to her face, then immediately put it back down. It clattered on the table and she clutched her face, blinking rapidly and then moving her hand in front of her eyes, which he thought was probably her checking whether her vision still worked. She looked at him, blinking quickly, eyes watering.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Alright,” said Nima. “Looks like I’ll have to modify that mask if we want to do that again.”

“But are you okay?” asked Perry.

“Yeah,” said Nima, though she hadn’t stopped blinking. She held her eyes open comically wide for a moment, then went back to blinking. “I’m going to take a break from the masks for a bit while I wait for my vision to come back.”

“You’re not blind, are you?” asked Perry.

She shook her head. “Calibration issue.” She wiped the tears from her face, and found a chair nearby. She was spooked, he could tell that, and that was a shame, because he was pretty sure that all she was seeing was second sphere energy, or maybe the effects of lycanthropy that remained when he was in human form. It was barely anything to write home about. “I’ll be fine. But I want to know what I’m seeing. What you … are. Or what’s been done to you.”

“You think something has been done to me,” said Perry. “Is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” said Nima. “You’re packed with effluence, and if I had to guess, you’re converting it into debased lantern light, which is obviously impossible.”

“If I learned how to make my own mask, could I use that energy?” asked Perry. “Could I harness the lantern light for projection?”

“It’s possible,” said Nima. “They’re different things, wildly different things, but they work together.” She was blinking more slowly now, but her eyes were still watering. “Where are you from, really?”

“Not Berus,” said Perry. “Not here.”

“The thing is,” said Nima, when it became clear that was all he was going to say. “You should know the answers to the questions that you’re asking. You should understand your own powers, how they work, if you’re from some major power of the world, or if you’re the project of some symboulion or council or whatever else. I shouldn’t be able to take my masks, give you a look, and tell you anything.”

“Sure,” said Perry. He was watching her closely. She was working through it, and he was curious what kind of conclusion she was going to come to.

“You’re from another world,” she said.

Perry’s mouth opened slightly, then closed. “What do you mean?” he eventually asked.

“I mean … there are limited options, right? That you were made this way by someone, except then there are things that you should know, so it would have to be people who did this to you and didn’t tell you anything. Or maybe it was the result of some accident, but then why would you be secretive about it? Or you could be from the future, but then I don’t know why you’d be talking to me, it’s the same problem again.” She took a breath. “So I think you’re from another world.”

“Huh,” said Perry. “I’m still not sure that follows.”

She began tapping her foot on the ground pretty rapidly, like a rabbit. “You’re not asking me things that you already know,” said Nima. “You’re asking things that you want to know. And the things I’m telling you are about how the masks work, how the lanterns work, things that you couldn’t learn from just checking a book out from the library. You want me to tell you whether someone with a mask can see you. You want to know where you’re vulnerable. That was the first thing you had me check. And blinding me, that was the second thing you checked.”

“Now hold on,” said Perry. “I wasn’t trying to blind you.”

“Fine,” said Nima, holding up a hand. “But I’m right, aren’t I? About where you come from?”

Perry watched her for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I want to know how you knew that though. I don’t think it was obvious, and I don’t think that it logically follows from what you know. Is there a history of people coming to this world from other worlds? I haven’t been able to find anything.” He didn’t like the direction that this was going. He wanted a helpful confederate who could serve as a point of contact and investigation, and it felt like it was going sour. She was too scared of him, which was a sign that he’d played it wrong. He should have been more of a dope, and maybe that was what he would do next time.

Nima sat down in her chair for a minute. She was breathing hard and there was sweat on her brow. It seemed like an overreaction.

“Nima,” said Perry. “Tell me the history. Tell me what I need to know about this world.”

She looked up at him with wide eyes. “There’s a story,” she said. “No one takes it all that seriously, but there is a story, a human story. The humans used to say that they came from somewhere else, that their god-king brought them to this world a thousand years ago. Or … they said that humans were technically half elves, sired by their god-king, the king from which all other human kings were descended.” She stared at Perry and placed her hand on the knee of the overactive leg, stilling it. “You’re from another world?”

“Yup,” said Perry.

Nima swallowed. “That’s not good.”

“No?” asked Perry.

“You shouldn’t be telling me, you should be telling someone in charge,” said Nima. “Why me? I’ve just been at the Institute, minding my own business.” She had started tapping her foot again, even faster than before.

“You’re a single person,” said Perry. “If you have a negative reaction, I can leave and never come back. You’re a scientist, which means that you can make deductions, and maybe have some curiosity. Plus you seem nice enough.”

She swallowed. “I just wanted to know whether you needed help,” she said. “Have I already said that I’m in over my head? It’s been running through my mind for the last day, how beyond me this is.”

“Sorry,” said Perry with a gentle smile. “I’d give you some time to process, but I’m in a time crunch, and I was hoping that you would tell me some things that I need to know.”

Nima let out a breath. “Can you tell me about the world you come from?” she asked.

“I could,” said Perry. “But before I do … there’s just that one legend? A human god-king from a millenia ago?”

Nima nodded slowly. “That’s all I’ve read about. There might be more. I’m not a student of history. All my time has been put toward the masks and lanterns, their intersection. And he wasn’t a human god-king, the humans are all his descendants, half elves. Supposedly, anyway. I don’t know if it’s true.”

“You weren’t around for it?” asked Perry.

She gave a little choking laugh and shook her head. “No. Even if I were that old, no.”

“I don’t know how old you are,” said Perry. “It’s surprisingly hard to get a definitive answer on how long elves can live, and it’s hard to know how old an elf is just from looking at them.”

“I wasn’t around for it,” said Nima. She took a deep breath. “Perry … I think I need to tell you this now, and I don’t want you to be angry with me, and you have to promise, to really promise, not to hurt me.”

Perry stared at her. “Okay.”

“No,” said Nima. “Promise.”

“I promise that whatever you say, I won’t hurt you,” said Perry, though he was certainly priming himself for immediate action. He had the ring now, and if need be, he could slip into it, though that would pin him in place. It might be better to do his best high-powered sprint out the door.

“What do you promise on?” asked Nima. “The world you’re from, what is your promise against?”

Perry looked at her. She seemed very serious that she expected his promise to be backed by something. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have nothing to promise on. My honor, I guess.”

Nima let out a breath. “Alright,” she said. “The reason that I made that leap isn’t anything that I read in the history books. I’ve barely read through the history. It’s something that I knew because … well.” She reached up and touched the turquoise centerpiece of her necklace.

The necklace bloomed with petals of shimmering metal, slowly covering her body and her clothes. When it reached the bottom of her crop top, it changed to woven chain links, and when it came to her skirt, it switched back to petals again, mail that was covering her. The armor was tight against her body, and in places there were larger pieces of hard metal, especially around her feet and wrists. It was slow to make the helmet, and the metal wove itself more elaborately there, making a screen around her face and larger pieces everywhere else. It gave her ears their own individual armor, and even as Perry was trying to understand it, he thought it was pretty impractical.

“I don’t understand,” said Perry. “You have one of the Implements?”

Nima shook her head, which caused a clink of metal. “This isn’t one of the Implements. It’s not from this world. I’m not from this world.”

Perry stared at her. She was breathing hard. The armor clung tightly to her, the links tiny, allowing it to drape across her skin. She was scared of him, that was obvious, but she was more scared now, having revealed this to him. She was the one ready to bolt.

“You promised not to hurt me,” said Nima. “I really don’t want any trouble. I am an engineer, a scientist, a researcher, I’m just not … not originally from this world.”

“How?” asked Perry. The word came out harder than he’d meant it to.

“There was a — I don’t know how to describe it.” She swallowed. “There was an aperture, a portal, and I went through it because I didn’t really have much of a choice, and then I was somewhere else. I thought that I had gone somewhere else on the same planet, but they didn’t even know what a planet was, and the stars were all unfamiliar, and — I’ll tell you everything, but you promised, remember?”

It didn’t make him feel all that good to realize how little his promise would have stayed his hand. He had no incentive to kill her though, not even if he thought that she was the enemy. She seemed too weak to him, though he’d been tricked in the past by someone feigning weakness.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” said Perry. “Drop the armor though.”

Nima’s hand quickly went up to her chest, where the bit of turquoise had become a centerpiece of her armor. With a stroke of her fingers, the whole thing began to undo itself, the petals of metal and tiny chain links being absorbed in almost exactly the opposite order that they had made themselves. The process took almost twenty seconds, which felt like an eternity.

“So,” said Perry once that was done. “How did you find me?”

“I didn’t!” said Nima. She was up and pacing back and forth, only occasionally looking at him. For his part, Perry was as still as a statue. “I really was just trying to help you, that’s the culture, it was —”

“Chance? Luck?” asked Perry. “Two people out of millions bumping into each other?” He knew that it had to have been the portals, must have been, their meeting setup by the same process that matched people to adversaries. It was still a startling level of prescience though, something that Perry hadn’t seen before.

“I don’t know,” said Nima, echoing Perry’s own thoughts. She was still looking frightened, as though he might attack her at any time. He was certain that she’d seen combat, or possibly just escaped from it. “I think that’s all it was, just fate.”

“How long have you been here?” asked Perry. “In this world?”

“Three months,” said Nima. She swallowed. “I just … slipped in, I guess, found a place, found somewhere to be.”

Perry looked down at the masks and furrowed his brow. “All these, you made them in three months? All your work here, it’s been in that short a time frame?”

Nima nodded.

“How?” asked Perry. “These people aren’t stupid. You tested out of apprenticeship and now you’re blowing past them?”

“I cheated the test,” said Nima. Her slender fingers went up to the small turquoise necklace. Perry waited for her to activate it again, but she only held onto it. “This isn’t the second world I’ve been to, it’s the third. I got this in the second. It’s alive, in its own way, a companion, of sorts. It — she — has her own senses, her own ways of thinking. We’re linked together, even when I’m not wearing her.”

“The necklace helped you cheat?” asked Perry.

“The pendant,” said Nima. Her pacing reached the end of the workshop, and she turned on her heel to go back the other way. “It’s like having someone working alongside me. I understand most of it now, but at the time, we had just looked through a handful of books together.”

Perry almost laughed. It was exactly what he was doing. But she was clearly a thresholder too, and that meant that it wasn’t the time for laughing or jokes. It was very possible she was hiding her power level, putting herself in a position of apparent disadvantage in order to pump him for information and test the boundaries of his power. He was planning on revealing nothing to her.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” said Perry. He tried not to say it as though he had just decided on it. “But you can’t tell anyone of my existence. And we’re working together from here on out.”

“Together on what?” asked Nima. She was practically holding her breath.

“When you left your home world, there was a portal,” said Perry. “The second world, there was someone who tried to kill you, and when you defeated them, or when you were defeated, another portal opened up.”

Nima swallowed. “Yes.”

“It was just those two? And this one?” asked Perry.

“It was,” she replied. He listened closely, and decided that if it was a lie, it was one he could discover just from hearing it said.

“There’s a word for what we are,” said Perry. “Some use thresholder, others use world hopper. We travel between worlds and we fight each other. But sometimes there’s an ally, and until you show otherwise, I’m going to assume that’s what you are. That means that there’s a third out there somewhere. A thresholder, someone who’s looking to kill us, or if not kill, then do something terrible to this world.”

“How do you know?” asked Nima.

“I’m not a novice at this,” said Perry.

She had questions, but she must have known that she wasn’t in a position to ask them — that he didn’t want to tell her his life story at just that moment. She kept her mouth shut for a while, and he could see the gears turning in her mind. Even if she’d cheated her way into the Institute and had help from her own magical Marchand, she had some obvious intelligence.

“Tell me what you need from me,” said Nima. She sat in a chair and folded her hands in her lap.

“Tell me about where you’ve been first,” said Perry. “Your home world, and the world after it.”

Nima cleared her throat, which had to have been a stalling tactic, at least a little bit.

Her home world had been a place where the intelligent species had been divided into castes. They had five of them, elves, humans, dwarves, angels, and devils — all her words for them. The term ‘caste’ hadn’t been her word for it, but Perry could read between the lines well enough, and all the talk of meritocracy seemed hollow to him, especially given what she said about ‘an elf’s place.’ The dwarves were the common laborers, used for anything that needed brute strength, while the demons were essentially enslaved, large scaly things that had a lust for violence and leering eyes.

A man had come and torn through the capital city, and a woman had come after him, trying to stop him. They were using strange magic, the power of gods but in contravention to everything the gods stood for, nothing circumspect or devout in their battle with one another. Nima sheltered in her tower, but was forced to flee when an impact at the base made it unsteady. Either the woman or the man had begun unleashing the demons from their chains, and the monsters were tearing through the city as the two clashed.

The fight raged for a long time, but it ended within a hundred feet of Nima. The woman won and slipped through a portal, bloodied but victorious. Nima followed after, because the other option was to stay and risk death from the demons that had run rampant.

She had come out into a world that was nothing like her own. They didn’t even have elves there, and her ears attracted no small amount of attention until she got very used to wearing large hats to conceal them. It was a world of diverse biomes that were driven by magical towers rather than anything innate to the climates or species, a patchwork world that was tiny compared to the one she’d come from. It was inverted, a sphere that surrounded a ‘sun’ and thick clouds that provided the only thing that resembled night.

She’d wandered the place, trying to find a way back home, or at least to find ‘her people,’ but there was nothing and no one until she came across a man with a gift like nothing ever seen in that world. He had delved into the guts of one of the great towers and changed its very nature, thrusting the whole slice of that world into perpetual cold, killing everything in order to funnel power into a creation of his own design. That was where the necklace had come from, though she hadn’t gotten it until later. The man had his sycophants and hangers-on, and she slipped in with them. She’d hoped that the wizard had answers for her, but when she revealed that she was from another world, he immediately tried to kill her.

She had eventually won the fight, and when she did, a portal like the first one had opened up for her. She had thought that it would send her back, and instead, she’d ended up in this new world.

“There’s no way back, is there?” asked Nima.

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “I assume there must be, somewhere among the worlds. I haven’t found a path yet.”

“I don’t know about this world,” said Nima. She took a shaky breath. She was mostly past the case of nerves that he’d induced in her, but “Sometimes they seem to have everything figured out, but they’re so alien, so difficult.”

“How so?” asked Perry.

“I’m an elf,” she said, placing a hand on her chest. “There’s supposed to be a place in society for me, not a supreme place, but a place with resources, with purpose, vital work. It’s not the same here. Even amassing scrip couldn’t get me to the place I want to be. And their elves aren’t like my kind, we don’t cocoon up and transform ourselves into something new. They’re alike only in form, it’s uncanny.”

“You are anticultural,” said Perry.

Nima blinked at him. “It’s not my culture, not my people, not my world. Everything that I’ve done here, it’s been to help them, to give them some of what my people had before the calamity. Is that wrong? How can it be?”

“I don’t think it’s wrong,” said Perry. “Though as you’ve said, they do seem to have their culture figured out. Maybe trying to insert your own ideas about how a society should function isn’t something you should be doing.”

“What I tried to give them was only a pale shade of what they should have,” said Nima. Her fingers touched her necklace again, a nervous habit, making sure that it was still there. “How long have you been here?”

“Two days,” said Perry. “I’m not saying that whatever you’re attempting to do is wrong, because I don’t know what you’re attempting to do, and you’re right that I don’t understand the culture that they seem to invest so much of themselves in. I’m not here to chide you or argue. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with you.”

“And … have you decided?” asked Nima.

“No,” said Perry. “Personally, I’m looking to go across the ocean, to Berus, to see what I can find on the king killer there.”

“Why?” asked Nima.

“Because I think he might be a thresholder,” said Perry. “If there’s a signature, high power levels and mysterious powers are definitely part of it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, holding up a hand. “I don’t understand. You’re going to fight?”

“I’m going prepared to fight,” said Perry. “And I think you should come with me.”

Nima took a step back. “I’m not doing that.”

“I don’t think you understand what it’s like, doing this long term,” said Perry. “There’s always another thresholder, at least so far as I can tell. I’ve fought them, talked to them, heard their stories, and if there’s a constant, it’s conflict. If you stay here, he’ll eventually come for you. Your inventions, your anticultural tendencies, that might be what attracts him.”

“Then I’ll just stop doing that,” said Nima. “I won’t go to the councils, I’ll just … become something else, a leech if I have to, someone that sits by and does nothing for anyone. How would he find me?”

“How did you find me?” asked Perry.

Nima froze. “We just bumped into each other.”

Perry pointed at her necklace. “Can you see the glow of that with a diagnostic mask?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Or … not the ones that I’ve built. I don’t know what exists at the upper end, what things they might have held back as part of their ‘contradictions.’ When I asked whether you were secret police, it’s because I’ve been worried that they’re out there, that there’s someone watching for — well, for people like me. Like us. And yes, you’re right, he might have a way to find me. But to just leave? To go off to Berus in the hopes of finding him?”

“It’s that, or sit here trying to gain power,” said Perry. “That guy, if it’s him? He took out a king, one of the most highly defended people in this entire world, and to all appearances, he did it on his own. There might not be anyone else who can take him. So either we go after him now and try to get him while he’s in the middle of other affairs, while there’s still a single kingdom left to stand against him, or we wait until it gets bad.”

“Bad,” said Nima. “Bad, as in … demons roaming the streets, killing thousands?”

“Yes,” nodded Perry.

She let out a long, slow breath and released the bit of turquoise that had been clutched in her fingers. “You want to be allies. Allies against some powerful but unknown enemy.”

“Depending on what we find, yes,” said Perry.

“Alright,” she nodded. “I’m not leaving my workshop without knowing more about you, who you are and why you’re here, how this is all supposed to work. But if you say that there’s someone out there who will want to kill me, then I think I don’t have a choice but to believe you. And if you need me, then so be it.”