Makers

Eviction

"I wish she would leave" the voice coming from the badge hanging from her neck startled Espeth as it always did. There was no preamble to one of Rabin's visits. She sat up in her bed and cast her hand over a Wick, lighting the cubby she shared as sleeping quarters with her charge. Rabin's normally inert form sat up in his own bed looking at her. She could almost feel him actually looking at her. He must be much more present here, much closer than when he usually contacted her.

"Who do you wish would leave, Rabin?" she asked, as she crossed the small space to his bed and sat down next to him.

"Tam al Tan. Nothing is starting!" he complained. "We can't find the next scene of the Reality. She's supposed to do something and we can't see anything with The Seed here. It makes everything too possible."

"Tam is The Seed?" Espeth asked cautiously. She never knew when she would run across a land-mine of forbidden knowledge that Coriff had planted, via the Forum that Rabin followed with slavish devotion. When those mis-steps occurred Rabin became secretive and intransigent, and generally departed without giving any additional knowledge.

"Tam? The Seed?" the boy asked, confusion in his voice. "Why would you ever think that? She'd be useless backstream."

He went on as if his statement had resolved Espeth's question, though for her it had only created more of them.

"She has to leave here, and get away from The Seed. So I can find the next part of the Reality. I'm positive it's going to be around her in an otherwhen but all of her otherwhens are chaotic. They're like that for the whole Forum, for every person who is around The Seed."

Espeth thought furiously, but not fast enough for an impatient Rabin.

"So can you tell her to go? Please?" Rabin asked. His form collapsed to the bed. Having made his plea, Rabin had vacated before hearing her response. She laid the boy back comfortably, straightened his covers and donned a dressing gown. A quick glimpse at the muted display from the Wick showed the time to be close to half-even. Tyche would still be awake, then. The man barely slept, and certainly wouldn't be retired until half-morn at the earliest.

She gathered her penciled notes, startled for a moment that she didn't recall making them. The conversation had been short and she must have scribbled them down like an automaton. She was becoming a creature of habits, she thought, as she departed for Tyche's study.

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"Brilliant" Tyche said minutes later. "The boy is brilliant." He returned to looking at his own notes, which he had created during Espeth's recitation of her conversation with Rabin. They were considerably more extensive than her own.

"I agree he is quite bright" said Espeth, "but why are you exclaiming his brilliance?"

"Well look" Tyche gestured to his notes. "The lad has given us critical information. And done so around the limitations placed upon him by his Forum. He's given us the information we need for our next offensive, and confirmed information critical to our current plans."

Espeth looked over Tyche's notes in confusion. Much of her related conversation was there, parsed out in dribs and drabs across the page. The bulk of the notes were symbols and mathematical equations, however. Lines and arrows connected various circled figures and formula and all were equally meaningless to her. She could make nothing of it and said so. "This makes no sense to me in the slightest" she said, while herself gesturing to his notes.

Tyche cleared his throat and spoke. "He's told us that our agent of chaos is The Seed, and that this person can indeed mask our activities from his cohorts. He's also told us that the next Reality we need to interrupt is not here in Rosoph, though I will need to do some deeper analysis to determine where he said it is."

"He said all that?" Espeth asked with incredulity.

"That and more" responded Tyche. "He's also informed us that he doesn't suffer from the same limitations that inflict his brethren in regards to seeing probability around The Seed, and that he is hiding this fact from them. I believe his exception is simply due to the physical proximity of his body but will look into it."

"That is amazing from such a little boy" Espeth agreed.

"Pfffft" Tyche scoffed in dismissal. "It is foolish to think of him as such. He is not restricted to your pace of experience, Espeth. While his body is that of a little boy, his consciousness has experienced possible lifetimes worth of stimuli. He is one of the wisest creatures you know."

Tyche began shuffling about making tea. He poured water into a glass decanter and stroked its rim. It began glowing a deep red and bubbles quickly appeared in the water along the base of the vessel. He stroked the rim again and the decanter's glow faded. Tyche added the boiling water to a pot, already prepared with leaves, and left it to sit.

That task attended to, he returned his attention to Espeth. "I know what you are thinking right now and it is incorrect. The fact that I am also a timecaster does not mean I share that trait with him. We are very different casters, he and I. On my limited forays I travel backstream, and as I am rather poor at it I do so seldomly. Back there everything is dead. There is no chance of anything happening, no possibility. No Darkness to make weaves reality."

He readied two cups and saucers as he continued. "Things there can be seen, but never felt. Never experienced. They simply were, and carry no more attraction than any other thing that was and now isn't. The strings are there but they are dead things, without potential. They can do nothing that they did not already do, and they are locked that way forever."

"Rabin doesn't play in that depressing playground. He adventures upstream. Darkness resides there in abundance and the realm is populated by everything that is possible! Everything alive or that will be alive or could be alive! Anything can happen there and he sees these things, experiences them, lives them."

"Consumes him?" Espeth interrupted.

"To a large extent, yes" Tyche replied. "It is how his madness manifested. He is locked into addiction of his Reality."

Tyche strained the tea into the cups, then added a sugar cube for Espeth (no accounting for taste) and a dollop of cream to his own. As he handed her cup to Espeth he completed his thought. "If the boy believes his Reality is threatened it could be devastating for him."

"Then why is he helping us? Our goal is to disrupt the Reality" Espeth commented over the rim of her cup.

"He isn't. Or doesn't believe he is helping to do that, rather. He is guiding us towards it, after all. But he's wise enough to note something is wrong and precocious enough to want to do something about it. His love for you is likely what brought him down on our side instead of Coriff's, and as long as we are facilitating his view of the show I believe he will continue to help us."

"And to facilitate his Reality, we now need to get Tam out of Rosoph" Espeth noted.

"That was his message" finalized Tyche. "Tam will be thrilled, of course. She's had far too much down time with only two critical tasks to pursue. Now that we can add a deadline to her burdens she won't have so much time to mope about."

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-Jim