We made it back to Phoenix without incident, thanks to a little luck and Katrin scouting a good location for our exit from Nusos - lots of doors, some distinct walls, and no cameras. This seemed to confirm that I could just come and go from Earth now, but I still had that nagging feeling like once I returned to the prime plane it would all be over.

We returned to the motel and soon everyone was crammed into a room together, talking over each other to add details - real or embellished - to the story of what we'd been through. As soon as that was over I finally replaced the link between the other Zoey and her spirit thing, and the two Zoeys excused themselves to go and talk in another room while the rest of us tried to decide if there was anything else we could do to prepare for raiding Greg's vault.

That was the plan, anyway, but really it turned into Katrin and I chatting while Emma and Tony cornered Matlyn and Errod so they could pepper them with all sorts of questions.

"No," Errod was saying, "we don't have guns. Well... we do, in a way, but not with chemical explosives. I'm sure someone has done it, but in general people prefer to not work with volatile chemicals. They're dangerous to make even with magic, so for hunting monsters it's simpler to use spears and bows. In times of war, projectiles are typically diverted or blocked with magic anyway, so they're also not used much in that case."

"We fought a lady with a war hammer that was also a rifle," I said, "but I'm guessing that it was more expensive than normal people would want to bother with. It was almost certainly made out of magical materials so the hollow handle wouldn't bend and so the runes inside would work better, but like Errod said there are lots of ways to deflect or stop things. I have throwing knives that get around that, but they weren't cheap and I have to collect them all after a fight; there's no way you could do that with bullets."

That all being said, this had resulted in fantasyland not bothering to perfect the art. I was, absolutely, going to take the guns I'd stolen back with me and I fully expected them to fuck people up. Shields could only handle so many projectiles, and if I just kept pulling the trigger they'd be quickly overwhelmed unless it was someone like Aestrid who was a specialist in shields. I'd already looked up how to maintain them and where to buy bullets. Since we were in Arizona, the answer was "pretty much anywhere". I could probably get them at the donut shop down the street.

Errod watched as I un-did my braid so I could loosen things up now that I wasn't wearing a wig. "How do you think the disguise performed?" He asked. "Are you wishing you'd tried peeling your face off again?"

Katrin leaned way over so she could slap his arm. "Ugh! Don't remind me, the idea of that still horrifies me."

"What can I say," I replied, "Errod and I get shit done by chopping pieces off ourselves. But... no, I don't ever want to do that again. I only did it the first time because I had a super nice healing pod. Anyway, the disguise was... probably fine. Either way, Greg is still going to be looking for Emma and Zoey."

Tony looked concerned. He'd been paranoid, probably because he'd watched me get my memories wiped, but I wasn't worried about Greg finding them - Katrin had the room covered in wards, and they were going to stay put until the last second. Even assuming Greg had reviewed the security footage by mind-controlling the hospital staff, I didn't see any way he could guess at where we were now.

"You're so worried about us being watched," I said, "is that something you've seen Coelestis guys doing?"

Tony shrugged. "I don't know, I don't follow them around or anything. I kept an eye on Young, so I knew when it was safe to go charge the pin - the planar lodestone, I guess - but I almost never followed him. I know he checked on you, sometimes, at that hardware store you were working at."

Huh. I would have remembered that, right? Unless he spied on me from a distance, or unless he... oh. Fuck. I forced my way into my memory palace and pulled up a memory of Mr. Bagmaw. There the old fart was, standing in the middle of the aisle telling a ridiculous joke about catching blue elephants with ice cream sundaes.

"Yet again the hunter considers going after a red elephant instead, but no - that would be quitting; red elephants are extremely easy to catch, and anyone can catch one." As he said it I rolled my eyes and mouthed the words; clearly this part had been repeated quite a bit. "So for the fifth time he sets up a sundae," Mr. Bagmaw continued, "but in addition to all the other things he's tried before he dumps the whole jar of maraschino cherries on there, since he knows that's a blue elephant's favorite part."

I vaguely remembered the format of the joke. He'd started with a rope trap, but the elephant managed to eat the sundae without setting it off. Then it was the rope trap and a pit trap in sequence but it waltzed through both. Then something else, and something else... each time adding on to whatever was there before. It was a terrible joke, and he was clearly enjoying my misery.

"Mister Bags," I said, "I'm not allowed to have unapproved overtime, and at this rate we're going to be here well after closing."

Present-me looked closely at him while he continued the joke, trying to decide if there was anything off. It was hard to say, since these memories weren't divination-perfect and were already filling in some gaps the way brains always do, but I thought there was a certain... fuzziness... to him. Tiny inconsistencies in his appearance any time I looked away and back again. I was almost certain he was an illusion, or - more likely - a mental effect making me perceive him differently than he actually was.

"But while the hunter had a sixth sundae," he said, "now of course he was out of cherries. He set it up anyway, just in case the elephant was still interested. The elusive blue elephant jumped out as soon as he'd set up the sundae, dodging the net, blocking the cage from closing, kicking dirt over the glue trap, jumping the pit, and yanking the sundae away before the rope snare could grab him."

"I get it, Mister Bags. Can we cut to attempt number seventeen or wherever this ends?"

It had to be Bill. That would mean he was the one who had come in every week with some ridiculous project and "accidentally" bought a candy bar from the impulse-buy gauntlet leading to the registers before remembering he couldn't eat them and handing it to me. He was the one that had paid me to learn the words to Weird Al's song 'Hardware Store'. He was the one that gave me that key chain, which apparently was a minor magic item.

"And when the elephant saw there were no cherries," Mr. Bags said, "he was furious! Steam shot out his giant ears, and he turned red with anger. And then the hunter just grabbed him. The end."

Rather than being happy the tedious joke was over, I looked mad. "What? After all that, he just grabs the elephant?"

"Well," Mr. Bagmaw said, "red elephants are extremely easy to catch, and anyone can catch one."

Fuck, it was such a bad joke. I checked a few more memories, and while I couldn't be sure, it seemed like he wasn't doing anything to me. The birthday check-ins with Greg were where I got the false memories reinforced, so these visits were just... what, for him to say hi to me without me knowing who he was? That was a little creepy, and a little sad. And maybe a little sweet.

This, of course, brought me back to what I'd seen the previous afternoon at Tony's house. Bill made it sound like I full-on couldn't kill Greg, but that didn't make any sense if I took it literally. Fate could encourage events to happen or not happen, but it was limited in power; if I put a bullet through Greg's brain, he'd die. The end. It could maybe make the gun jam, or help him to get away, or... well, all sorts of little things, but those couldn't hold up to dedicated and persistent attempts.

It was like if someone foretold that you'd wear a red shirt the next day; If you were determined to make them wrong, they were fucked. A whole box of red shirts arrive on your doorstep, red dye falls into the washing machine, you get a job at Target. But if you insist on just not wearing a shirt at all, there's not a lot fate has to work with. Making someone die from a specific cause would be trivial; that's one discrete thing that needs to happen. It's a goal you can work towards. The alternative means preventing stuff indefinitely, with no actual end date. I kept trying to think of how that would work, and it didn't mesh with my understanding of fate at all.

It could also be that he just thought Greg was invincible, but I doubted that was the case. I'd seen his hands chopped off, and I'd gotten the better of him a few times. Clearly he was very tough, but fundamentally killable. The last alternative, which seemed more possible but didn't feel like what Bill had meant, was that he felt Greg was serving some important purpose. Like I couldn't kill him, because that would be worse for me somehow. There was also a warning about not opening a door - I did remember a heavy vault-like door at the back of that room, and I was willing to believe that it could have something I didn't want to fuck with trapped back there, but what if it was important? Hell, what if Greg had used magic to convince Bill that he couldn't be killed or that the door in the back had to stay shut? It could all be bullshit.

One thing I did trust was what Bill had said about Thanksgiving. The self storage place would be empty, and Greg would be at least a little distracted. It was the perfect time to clean everything out of there, take away all his toys. "Hey, before I go to the psych ward, anyone have any thoughts about what Greg is doing tomorrow? Like, should we try to fuck up his plans?"

Katrin glanced at her new laptop, consulting her notes. "'Catastrophe', as Zoey is calling her, said that tomorrow will have ten planes aligned - well, nine plus the prime plane - which she said is the most since the day she pulled you from Earth. Only two other days before the Grand Alignment have the same or more planes aligned. But I don't see how that would be relevant, since the planes don't align with Earth - or not in a way that seems to cause any mana to come through."

"There's also planar effects," I said, "so it could be he wants to do something with one or more of the planes. Let's see, it would be the first twelve planes other than the Bazaar and Brinkmar. Prime is nothing, that's always aligned anyway. Itzele, Nusos, Ematse, Uihene, Hudai, Heregie... let me see if I can say this right... Inuizor... no, Inuizlorrareto, nailed it. And then Lenderatze and Zirkolo."

I had at least a basic concept of what all those planes were like, though I was a bit sketchy on some of them. I was trying to think back to Betokat's lecture on the intent of the planes, but none of them seemed like they'd have an obvious application on Earth. Lenderatze could fix a lot of environmental problems, sure, but I didn't really think Greg was the type to give a shit about that. The various planes had different levels of entropy, different rates for the passage of time, different gravity, different spirits... none of it was giving me ideas.

The one that aligned the least often out of this batch was Zirkolo, which I didn't know a lot about. It had something to do with the empire that existed thousands of years ago, way before the Clockmaker. The one run by the twelve families of spirits. They'd had cities there, and they were still standing even after that empire had fallen and dozens of new ones had taken its place, and then those had been conquered by the Clockmaker, and then his had fallen and turned to dozens more. But the cities were hard to get to, and there was some sort of permanent dust storm that made it an unpleasant place to live.

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Most importantly, I wasn't aware of any special properties of the place. It was associated with 'substance' in the magical sense, that ability to lend matter extra real-ness or fuck with its effective density. Errod's sword was the main example that came to mind, with its lethality to otherwise ephemeral spirits like the Granch he'd skewered, or the fact that he'd managed to float in the air with it when he was thrown from the airship.

Sadly, as was generally the case with planar shit, this didn't mean that tapping into that plane would let you control it. Instead, it would just mean that everything in the area you forced to overlap would have a little more substance to it than normal. You couldn't easily target things, or distinguish between friends and foes. You couldn't reverse it and make everything float. It was a potentially cool trick, but not anything I could picture Greg caring about.

My attention was pulled back to the room by Emma asking another question. "How do you all speak English so well?"

It was a fair question. I sort of subconsciously ignored their slip-ups and translated the bits where they dropped back into Imperial for words they didn't know, but even taking those things into account they'd picked up the language incredibly well.

"Matlyn had a lot of time to practice," Katrin said, "and I have an ability that makes me better at learning languages because it helps with my spellcasting. Errod and I also learned faster thanks to using a magic item that translates for you, plus Errod..." She trailed off, clearly uncertain about whether or not he wanted to revisit that.

He sighed, but didn't sound like he was upset. "It's a long story, but I learned some English from Calliope's ghost."

Rather than actually explaining that convoluted situation, I just popped my ghost out of my body and waved before pulling it back in. Tony and Emma both looked downright terrified, and they stopped asking questions for a while. Instead, since it was already sort of the activity while we waited for the Uber, Errod asked one.

"What happened to the moon here?"

Tony and Emma had no idea what he meant, of course, so I had to jump in. "Nothing happened, that's how it's always looked. It's too small to have water and air and stuff on it."

Katrin frowned. "Too small? What does size have to do with it? Do all planets over a certain size have air?"

"No, it's the lack of gravity. More stuff means more gravity, and you need a certain amount to... basically hold the air down so it doesn't drift off into space." I knew that was probably a terrible oversimplification, but it was good enough for a quick answer. I was going to go on to explain that the moon was the result of some other small planet hitting Earth and ripping a chunk off, but instead I found myself remembering something.

I was at the table in Bill's kitchen, and he was talking about gravity. Was he helping with homework? Or... no, this was something else. This was something I'd had nightmares about, even if I could only barely remember them. I forced myself into my memory palace and started searching - it didn't take long. It was, clearly, the scene that Tony had described to me. I was sitting there, stonefaced, angry, hurt. Bill looked miserable.

"I'm so sorry," he said, "I should have done a better job keeping you safe, keeping you out of all this."

I practically growled at him. "I don't want to be out of this! It's magic! Real magic! Why wouldn't I want that? Why are you working with the human embodiment of a diseased sphincter to hoard it all?"

Greg snorted, more amused than insulted at my comment, and continued to just lean against a counter. Bill, meanwhile, seemed to be struggling with finding his words. In retrospect, I had to wonder if there were things an oath might be preventing him from plainly saying. "This isn't just some story," he said, "this is real life. When people find these things, most of the time they just get themselves killed. Many of those items... want things... and they'll use kids like you to get what they want, because kids are easier to manipulate."

That got my attention. "What do you mean they want things? Are they alive, or... I mean, not alive, but intelligent?"

He shook his head. "No, that would actually be better. The fact is, most of the items locked in the vault have some sort of destiny tied to them. It could be something very simple; a sword that's destined to kill a particular person, or a ring that's destined to be worn by the next king of some country. The items themselves are just objects, but destiny is a force... and it applies pressure to the world to get things to happen. It makes sure people find these items, people that will use them, and then puts those people in situations where they'll be more likely to accomplish whatever task it is."

"And something found me," I yelled, "and I wanted it! It was mine! I had a purpose, I was special, and you think that's a bad thing? Fuck you, Bill! Fuck you for taking that away from me! You're a boring piece of shit who hates fantasy and magic and anything interesting, and somehow you get to decide whether or not people can use magic?"

He nodded. "I know, it seems unfair. But there are things you don't understand. First of all, the mana levels on Earth are... nonexistent. Most of those items wouldn't even function, there are only a few places where magic is leaking through."

"Leaking through? Leaking through from where? What do you mean the mana levels on Earth? As opposed to where, Bill? The place with the endless rooms, or is there somewhere else?"

He looked at Greg, who shrugged, and then Bill very slowly started speaking, like he was choosing each word carefully. "Places like that, yes. Each is different. And something, sometimes, reaches through to Earth and leaves a... wound. Magic seeps through, a little at a time, but not enough to matter for most purposes. That's what I did for Coelestis Acquisitions; I checked on the places where magic was coming through in case there were magic items. They... they'd find their way to those spots, thanks to fate. No better way to make sure the items saw use than to have them all charged up, right?"

I nodded. "How did the one I had work, then? Is your house one of those spots? Or, no. The soup kitchen? Is that why we always went there?"

He chuckled, but stopped when he saw how mad I still was. "No, kiddo. No. I went to the soup kitchen to feed people, to help people who needed it."

"You could help people with magic!" I yelled, banging the table.

Bill looked deadly serious suddenly. "You're right. I could. Even if I wanted to keep the details secret, there's so much I could do. But I had to make a deal, an agreement to not use magic for... almost anything, in order to keep other people from doing bad things with it. In the end, I'm helping more people by standing in the way of evil. Still, I hate that I can't do both."

Greg rolled his eyes so hard I thought they'd pop out or something, and walked over towards the table. "Can we please move this along? She has no choice in the matter."

"Greg, she deserves to understand what's happening - to the extent I can tell her."

"Apologies if I don't have your patience, William. You can tell her all you want about the horrible evil monster that manipulated you into an unfair deal - meanwhile, earlier tonight one of my employees tried to renegotiate a contract by cutting my fucking hands off. But I'm sure you'd consider that a completely fair dealing, hmm?"

They just stared at each other for a moment, and then apparently past me decided it would be better to keep getting some answers. "So if the soup kitchen wasn't one of those places, one of those spots where there's magic, then it must have been trying to find us specifically. And it chose me! It attached to me, it worked for me, it... it was mine."

Bill shook his head. "Sorry, kiddo. This happens a lot, and I try to keep other people out of it. These things, they just find their way to me. Almost everything in that vault was something that I found. Back when I did data entry for a while, nice boring spreadsheets, they asked me to inventory the copy room and I found - tucked in with various old toner cartridges for printers - a canister of magical poison."

I glared at him. "What a fucking waste! Why would magic shit go to you? You hate magic!"

He shrugged. "It's... it's like gravity, sort of. Imagine the way gravity bends space, picture a gas giant surrounded by moons. All these little fated objects, or even regular magic items without any particular fate, they get caught in the orbit of the biggest thing around. I've already got a destiny, kiddo. A big one. The biggest there can be. And all these others things, they end up finding me just so fate can convince me to go do something interesting, anything that might lead to completing that big fate. Except instead, I try to be as boring as possible."

My jaw dropped. "What the fuck, Bill? Why? What does fate want that you're being so stubborn about?"

Bill sighed, and stood up. "My destiny... the big one, anyway... is to destroy the entire world. Fate wants me to be the bad guy. And a lot of the other ones, they... they're meant to kill people, sow chaos, bring about the end of empires. You'd be amazed at how many are focused on death and destruction. This isn't a game. I would never let Greg hurt you, but as awful as he can be we agree on one thing; nobody can be allowed to tamper with these objects."

He crouched down next to me, but I still avoided his eyes. "Sometimes, you don't have any good options. Usually that means something bad has already happened, or someone already made a mistake. And I can be mad that this is how the world turned out, mad that nobody stopped this all from happening in the first place, but that doesn't change what I have to do now. If things were set in motion thirty years ago, two hundred years ago, fifteen hundred years ago... it's in the past. I have to work with what's in front of me.

"I ended up making a bad deal, a long time ago. I thought I was doing the right thing, and for the most part I was. Over the years, I've found ways to improve my situation somewhat, but negotiations are all about leverage and... well, the fact is I had to agree to some things tonight just to keep you safe. It means you'll be alive, and it means the police won't be asking any questions about that Zoey girl that went missing - I know that wasn't your fault, but it still could have landed in your lap. The bad news is that I had to give up my chance to fix certain things, and I had to agree to let Greg remove your memories of magic and... of living with me."

I just kept staring straight ahead. "Good," I said, but I was already starting to cry.

"Right before you turn twenty," he said, "specifically on March thirty-first of 2025, I'll find you and restore your memories. If all goes right, we'll have saved the world by then. If we haven't... well, it'll be too late to do anything about it after that so it still won't matter. We'll talk about it all over dinner, I'll make macaroni and cheese - the way you like it. I'll even shoplift an extra packet of cheese if you want. And if you can't forgive me, then at least you'll have a chance to tell me that. Okay? It's the best I can do, with everything already as messed up as it is."

He kissed me on the forehead, and walked out of the kitchen. He paused before closing the side door. "I love you, Calliope. Whether or not you love me. I hope, someday..." he sighed, shook his head, and then closed the door behind him.

Greg came over in his place, rolling his eyes. "Well, finally that drama is over."

I sneered at him. "I'm going to cut your saggy old man balls off and choke you to death with them," I said.

"Oh, I'm sure you'd love to," he replied, "but I'm afraid that at this point I can only die from suicide or certain very unlikely accidents. Even then, to be sure it took you'd need to have a very special item that is... extremely far from here."

"Good," I said, smiling up at him, "that's the best news I've gotten today."

That made him pause. "Oh?"

"Sure. You look like shit, Greg. The teeth, the hunched back you're developing, the wrinkles, the coughs I've heard that sound like you're going to spit out a whole platter of raw oysters... and don't get me started on the smell. That tells me that whatever magic or fate is going to keep me from killing you doesn't actually care about you being healthy. So when I remember what's going on, and what you did to me? That suicide option is going to look really good. It'll be hard to pull off while paralyzed from the nose down, blind, and deaf... but you're a resourceful guy. You'll think of something."

He actually looked a little shaken. Good.

"Big talk from the little girl. You're just another anomaly, drawn to William. You're lucky you're not in my collection right now, with the other organic samples." I tried to say something, but he gestured and I found myself unable to speak. "Let's get started," he said, "we'll go backwards from here. Most of it will have to be a mass edit, but to begin I think we should tie this goodbye with William to another one, for stability. You're in a diner..."

A device he'd just pulled out from somewhere began to glow in his hands, and Bill's kitchen melted away into that same diner I'd seen before, all chrome and red vinyl. The memory destabilized, and a moment later I had to drop it and leave the memory palace. Katrin was looking at me, concerned, but I just shook my head. I'd fill her in later, but for now I needed to just sit and think about things. March thirty-first of 2025 would have been the day after the Grand Alignment. The first one, the one that had gone so badly.

What end of the world had Bill been trying to prevent? The one that had happened hadn't seemed to have anything to do with him one way or another, and I couldn't think of anything that he would have stopped from Earth - if he'd been in fantasyland he would have been obliterated along with everything else, and worse, he wouldn't have been re-made when I fixed things. So he was just sitting here, doing nothing, and thinking that would prevent catastrophe? For someone so focused on getting involved to make the world better that seemed strange.

Either way, I had to assume they knew something had rewound seven hundred and twenty days. I really needed to just talk to Bill about all this, but the way he'd acted with human Calliope made me think there were a lot of restrictions on him... plus, if I was honest, I was scared to see him again for reasons I couldn't really articulate. I was mad at him, and I missed him, and I felt betrayed by him, and he was family in a way my mom never had been. It was too much.

I was saved from stewing over all this shit by Zoey and Zoey, who walked back in and glared at me in stereo. "Well," they said in unison, "the good news is that there's only one of us now. The bad news is that we still have two bodies, and I don't know how the fuck to explain that."

Huh.

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