Chapter 2 - Back Again

It was widely accepted that magic was complicated. I died nine months from today, on the seventh of June at approximately eleven-thirty in the morning. I spun my chair around and leaned in over my shitty old laptop. It was the one that had carried me through college, and it had been dated even before I bought it. I had... replaced it, a few months ago. Or a few months from now? It had started freezing up more and more often. The operating system had gone out of date, and a new one only came with a monthly subscription plan and couldn't even run on this old machine's specs. Oh, and hadn't there been a big data leak two weeks from now? I blinked, trying to refocus. So much of what I knew was now foreknowledge. Maybe. If I wasn't just losing my mind. I was in my apartment. In the past. That... wasn't possible. But magic was complicated. It was one of those 'no duh' kind of facts that people just took for granted because it was so obvious. Rain is wet, fire is hot, magic is complicated. It was so strange to just sit here though, the normalcy of it all was jarring. A few minutes ago, I'd been talking to Misses Tone, my landlady, out in the corridor. We were standing by a set of windows that looked outside. It was nice and sunny out. The clouds were high. The sky wasn't filled with smoke. The city wasn't on fire. I shivered, blinked a few times, then pushed through. I didn't have time to freak out. I had other things to do. I wouldn't say that I was ordinarily a very analytical woman. The truth was that I was a chronic underachiever. I had the grades to do well, but never the drive. I liked some things, but rarely enough to give myself a boot in the rear to try and achieve anything. The only times I truly pushed myself was when I was stressed, when I had a lot of things weighing on my mind and I could bury those in work, in action. I had so much on my mind right now. The laptop finally booted up, and I stared at the date and time in the corner of the screen. It was the same as my cyberware, same as my old phone, same as what Misses Tone had said. The seventh of September. That was impossible. Being here was impossible. A few minutes ago, I was being crushed under a collapsing building beside a howling A-class portal to some unknown hell. I never made it. Just bled out beneath the rubble, full of regret and agony I couldn't even scream through. Then I blinked, and I was in the lobby of my apartment building. Upright. Whole. Nine months earlier. That was today. A few minutes ago, in fact. Not just alive. Back. Back in a building that had burned down just the day before. The day before, for me. Clearly, my apartment was fine. Mister Couchtop, my grumpy British Shorthair, was fine. I was fine. I shouldn't be here. Not in this chair, not in this building, not alive. But here I was, returned to the moment just before everything had started. Rewound, reset, whatever you wanted to call it. The first time around, this day had been boring. Grocery shopping. Job interview jitters. Small talk with Misses Tone in the lobby. I let out a breath and stared at the login screen until my thoughts stopped spiraling. Something was different this time. Not just the timeline. Not just the miracle of not being paste under rubble. Something in me had changed. There was a weight beneath my sternum now. A pull. A pressure. A pulse of something alive and molten and wrong. A magical core. I touched a hand to my chest. No scar. No mil-spec augment where my eye used to be. Just skin and that low, humming pressure in my gut. "Okay," I whispered, half to myself, half to the gods I didn't believe in. "Let's figure this out." As I said, I wasn't entirely stupid. This situation was impossible. So, what could, in the absence of a logical answer, explain this? A hallucination? Maybe I was still bleeding out and this was the last grasp of my mind? But that didn't feel real. Someone with mind magic? There were people capable of crafting illusions. Even very convincing ones. I'd seen some working at Luna Corp, and during that final big battle. But illusions were usually small and static. This was... a whole building, my apartment, Misses Tone. My grocery bags with a stain on the bottom where I'd spilled soda one time a year ago, the missing floor tile by the doorway, the smell of this place. No, not an illusion. Or if it was one, it was so well-crafted that no matter what happened, I was screwed because I was dealing with at least a B-ranker. What remained? Memory manipulation? Maybe someone had fed me that dark future? September seventh... I'd been fighting on the front on the seventh of June. I counted months backwards on my fingers. Nine months. Nine months of random, specific memories. My memory wasn't perfect by any means, but I could recall a lot of meals and changes over that time. New gear, new friends, new work. It was a lot. A simulation? But why me? I wasn't anyone interesting. A psychological break? I wouldn't say that I was the sanest person around, but I didn't feel that bad. A little anxious for a job interview coming up on... Monday? Christ. I'd passed that one, no? So, what did that leave? Mister Couchtop jumped up into my lap and pressed his little paws into my chest. I gasped, a memory of rebar and concrete shoving down on me... only it was just my dumb cat, wanting attention. I petted him, the action calming while I tried to resettle my thoughts. Magic and counter-intuitive logic. There was something about it that tickled my brain, something I'd learned more recently while talking to Louise. I paused. Louise would still be alive, wouldn't she? I felt my insides twist and turn, something churning within me. A feeling of deep, unfulfilled regret, almost palpable it was so strong. I pushed it down and opened Magi-pedia, the world's foremost source of almost-correct information about magic. It was one of those sites that were operated by volunteers and the information was often sourced dubiously. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on novelhall. Report any occurrences elsewhere. The site looked exactly how I remembered it: cluttered, poorly maintained, and suspiciously close to being a government honeypot. It was mostly written by D-rankers and wannabes, people who lived online and had something to prove. Which meant it was one of the few places with actual information buried under three layers of bullshit and personal theories. I searched 'upranking.' It was a hunch, but... The page loaded slowly, like it needed to stretch before working. The top was filled with ad banners trying to sell mana supplements and low-end insurance. The content was familiar. Almost word for word from what I remembered "In the progression of magical development, Rank D is widely regarded as the most challenging to attain. While higher ranks demand greater time and resources, their advancement generally follows a steady trajectory tied to natural maturation and continued practice. The transition from Rank E to Rank D, by contrast, is often abrupt and spontaneous. It typically occurs only after extended periods of magical cultivation or personal growth and is frequently triggered by moments of intense emotional upheaval." That part stuck with me. Emotional upheaval. Watching your coworkers get torn apart by portal monsters. Being handed a rifle with no scope and told to hold a street with three other E-ranks who couldn't even reload under pressure. Running messages past artillery fire. Dragging the wounded into cover that wasn't cover. Pulling the trigger. Pulling it again. I scrolled a little more, finding the section I was looking for. It had a subtle, bland subheading. 'Power expressions.' "Upon reaching Rank D, most individuals attuned to magic will acquire a new ability. While these abilities generally fall within broad thematic categories, their specific manifestations tend to be highly individual. Notably, this initial ability emerges alongside an innate, intuitive understanding of its function and application." I worked my jaw. Was that what it was? I touched my torso, just under my sternum and between my breasts. I didn't need the wiki to tell me what was happening. I could feel it. A core. A power. A trigger, just waiting to be pulled. I stood up and nearly knocked my chair over. Mister Couchtop leapt down, then hopped up onto his perch. Energy was bubbling under my skin, rising through my veins like pressure in a boiler. I wasn't one for impulsive action, at least, I hadn't been, but now I couldn't sit still. I needed out. I needed to move. To breathe air that wasn't thick with memory. I closed my eyes for a moment and calmed down. I had an extreme and well-honed talent for ignoring one problem by focusing on another. I'd come to Fortress ENE because I'd been pushed to it by well-meaning family. I had an aunt that lived in the city that I didn't much care for, and she didn't care much for me, but she had nagged and insisted that life here would be better. The sort of woman that had 'married well' and was proud of her new station in life. She'd helped a little, but for a long time I'd been stuck here, disconnected from the friends and family I'd left behind. Finding a job at Luna Corp had been a big deal. I wasn't one for the whole 'this company is your family' schtick they pushed so hard, but once I was in, I'd kind of fallen for it. It provided me with people and contact and a network, and near the end, when everything went to shit, that had been a lot. At that moment, I had a whole new problem to focus on and I was going to use it to the hilt. But... that didn't mean I had to be inefficient about it. I needed to take notes. Write down everything I knew and remembered now, before things started to slip away from me. I didn't exactly have too many free notebooks sitting around, and I didn't trust foreknowledge to my crappy old laptop. I shook my head. Power testing first... but not in my office, or my living room. The fridge was half-empty. Mister Couchtop meowed in complaint from his spot and gave me a half-lidded glare of mild betrayal. "Groceries first," I muttered. "Testing second." He flicked his tail like he didn't believe me. I grabbed my jacket from the back of the couch, scooped up the bags I'd dropped earlier, and stepped into the stairwell. Three floors down, my legs already burned. I hadn't realized how out of shape I'd been back then. Back... now? Civilian me. Soft me. Before nine months of employment as a guard and pack-mule and occasionally as a corpo soldier. The street outside was exactly as I remembered it. Narrow. Overbuilt. The air smelled of hydrocarbons and old plastic. Someone blasted ghetto-pop from a jacked-up car nearby. Ads flashed from projectors. Hyper!Mart — Stock up or Starve! I passed an ATM that hadn't worked since before I moved in and slipped into the parking garage next to the building. Three floors up, just like before. Top level. Cameras didn't work. Fewer people parked here because no one wanted to climb stairs. The old van on cinderblocks was still here. I set my grocery bags down beside it and exhaled. I focused. That thing in my core wasn't just magic. It was... shaped. I could feel two distinct pieces inside me. Two triggers. The first one was primed. The second one felt locked. Waiting. I pulled the first. Mana raced through me like a shot of espresso straight into my heart. My breath caught, but nothing changed. No glow. No burst of light. No aura. I walked around, tracing a big circle. I threw some punches at the air, jumped on the spot. Nothing felt different physically. The second trigger flipped from locked to 'ready.' I hesitated, then pulled it. And blinked. I was standing ten feet away, facing a different direction. No sound. No shift. No sense of motion. I was there, then I was here. My jaw worked silently. I checked the time on my old augs. Pulled the second trigger again. The clock ticked backward by one minute. I almost staggered. "Oh," I said, my voice tiny in the empty garage. I could rewind time.