They finally found the 'news bulletin' on a board about a block from the train station, a place Myra walked by all the time without ever realizing what it was for. Unfortunately, it didn't say jack shit that she didn't already know. "The emperor is dead." No cause of death, no nothing.

After that, Iz peeled off because she really wanted to go find the group that had set off the fireworks earlier. Off she went with a pronounced spring in her step, and that left the four of them. Shortly after, Shera and Lukai walked off together ("to take the pulse of the city" or some such) so Myra walked with Nathan back to campus, where they ran into Cynthia near the food stalls.

"The emperor was old as dirt," Cynthia said. She slinked her arm around Nathan as she turned to face Myra. "He was, like, 95."

"You think he just died of old age?" Myra asked. "Heart failure or whatever old people die of?" That didn't make any sense, did it? Wouldn't that happen every loop? He had to have been murdered, right? Unless it always happens and it just gets covered up for some reason?

Or were heart failure timings susceptible to the butterfly effect?

"My dad says the old man's been on his deathbed for months," Cynthia said.

"Really? Why didn't you ever say you knew something like that?"

"Eh?" She dug a finger in her ear. "It never came up… I mean, I knew Iz would care a lot, I didn't want to get her hopes up over hearsay. Where is she, anyway?"

"Making friends, I hope," Myra said. "But I wanna hear all the hearsay."

"Fine, I'll say the hearsay." She giggled. "I mean, Dad can probably say a lot more, now. He was brought in to consult a few times, together with just about every other doctor in the empire, the way he tells it. All I know is old Kurt's been sick with the everything, and for the last few months, the prince has been leading the empire for all intents and purposes. It was just a matter of when Kurtwell would drop dead and make it all official. The high officials have all been getting everything ready for the transition."

"I see…" Myra said. No, I don't see! If they were so prepared, why was the news bulletin so incomplete? "I actually would appreciate it if you could ask your dad."

She puffed out a cheek. "Yeah, but you have to tell me what you all are up to. You're all sneaking around and whatnot. It's weird. And Nathan here says his brother's been acting weird, but he refuses to elaborate!"

Even though it was far too late for this and Myra was ready to collapse from exhaustion, she took the chance to finally try to explain the time loop to Cynthia again. And while Cynthia didn't laugh or take it unseriously, she still seemed only halfway convinced. Hopefully, she could talk to Iz later and become convinced, and then Myra could finally have her best friend on board.

At least it was a semi-positive note to end the day on as she returned to the hotel. She wasn't interested in staying up all night in futile hope for a trickle of additional news on the town bulletin or picking up unfounded rumors. No, she would just wait until morning for a proper article with more information. That would clear things up.

◆

Morning came, and with it a longer article in the morning paper to reveal the second piece of news:

Prince Humperton Raine had died as well.

There was still no information about how either of them died. The one thing she knew for sure was that Humperton Raine hadn't died of old age, and chances were, Kurtwell Raine hadn't either unless the two had dropped dead at the same time for completely unrelated reasons.

Can you imagine being on your deathbed and dying by being murdered? That'd be awful. I'd probably die of embarrassment.

On, and apparently, Malazhonerra Raine would be crowned empress in four days' time. Why four days? Who the hell knew.

And was she even still in town? Was Violet? Tracking them down could very well be the best way to get answers, even if talking to them would necessarily involve talking to them. (Shouldn't we be dealing with the revelations from yesterday? But they had to move onward.) So she got the others and dragged them all down to the Hotel Caldera. She teleported right to the top floor and knocked on the penthouse door. (She had finally learned the answer—thanks to Carmack's creepy note stalking—to the age-old question of which penthouse the princess was staying in. She was staying in the 'vent suite,' which incidentally made Loop 4 Shera correct.)

"Good job, Shera."

"What?"

The penthouse door was opened by an aggrieved-looking Violet Penrilla, wearing a tight tank top and shorts and with enormous dark bags under her eyes. She cussed them out when she realized they weren't there to deliver her room service, told them that "Mala" was out, and threatened to call hotel security. They hastily left.

"Well, she's fucking pleasant," Iz said.

"Yeah, she's a right bitch," Myra said, "but let's focus on what we don't know." (Literally anything else.)

"Fine," Iz said. "Was the princess actually not there? I think I got a good glimpse of most of the place, but she could have been in the bathroom or something."

"I saw most of the left half of the room," Myra said.

"I w-was watching Violet," Shera said.

"I saw most of the room, too," Lukai said. "And the bathroom door was open. Their window was open, too. I could levitate up and look from the outside."

"You can do that without getting caught?"

"Yeah, pretty sure."

"All right, be careful."

In five minutes, they had another intelligence report. Violet was alone in the room, pacing back and forth, until her food arrived, at which point she started eating. Lukai also said it was a large meal for one person, so he had initially thought the princess would be joining her, but that never happened.

Fortunately, the whole trip wasn't a complete waste of time—because, of course, they weren't the only ones looking for the princess. Only a few minutes later, they ran into Sky Mishram, and according to him, nobody knew where she was.

"In this instance, the Times published just about all it knows," he explained.

"That's nothing!"

"I know." He tapped his foot, looking up at the hotel. "I hoped to find the new empress and get a statement from her. Even confirming her location would be more than we have—we thought she would head straight for the capital, but none of my colleagues have been able to find her. I thought maybe she was still here."

"Oh!" Myra realized something. "You're here because of my info?"

"Just so. No one else had any idea she was here—otherwise, I imagine the place would be swarming with people like me. I thought maybe she was lying low here to avoid attention, so I went up and spoke to the Penrilla heiress, who politely told me to fuck myself in a pretty creative way."

"So you don't know anything about the emperor's death?"

"Well, it came out that he's been on his deathbed for a while, though that was somewhat of an open secret already. Our editors were all ready to publish about it, but then it came out the prince died as well, and now it's just mass confusion." Well, at least I'm not alone.

They made plans for Nathan to stake out the hotel in case the princess returned, but in the meantime, there wouldn't be any rest.

◆

Vikram and Kiera were drowning their sorrows away at the Mixopolium bar, commiserating over the infinite money flushed away by the police raid, all for nothing when you consider their lab didn't even have what the empire was really looking for to begin with. The unfairness of it all, only days off from the emperor kicking it, which almost certainly (they were certain of it) would have distracted the powers-that-be from their assault on science. If only it had happened earlier. Just a few days! These things, they let the bartender know.

"You two look like you could use a pick-me-up," Myra said as she sat down on Vikram's side, placing her trunk on the counter with a thunk.

Vikram barely looked at it. He barely looked at her (though he did look at her). "It'll take quite a bit of picking up for the week we've had."

"Maybe I have some good news for you all," she said. She rapped on the trunk to remind Vikram it was there.

"Unless your good news involves a certain, rare botanical specimen, I don't have a whole lot of optimism. Of course—" He looked Myra over again. "—you're welcome to join us for our drink…" He took a deep, thirsty drink.

Myra couldn't have asked for a better cue, so she opened the trunk.

Vikram sprayed most of his drink on the bartender before getting ahold of himself, at which point he quickly slammed the lid shut again.

"You can't let anyone see that," he hissed. Somehow, he was more sober than he was just twenty seconds ago.

"I didn't see anything," the bartender said.

"I appreciate you, sir," Vikram said. "Listen—miss—what's your name?"

"My name isn't important," Myra said.

"Where did you get that?" Kiera asked.

"Is that important? What's important is that I have it, and as I understand it, you need this to do your big thing. Am I wrong?"

He looked at the trunk and back to Myra.

"Are you offering a contract?"

"I'm offering the vine. You need it to complete your existing contract, don't you?"

"There is no 'existing contract,'" Vikram said. He kept looking around like anyone could catch him at any moment. "The client cut their losses and ran. Even with the vine in your case to replace the one that the imperial police confiscated, it's physically impossible at this point to finish by their preferred deadline. This was unacceptable to them, so they walked away."

"Surely your organization can find something else to do with it, right?"

"How much are you looking for?"

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"I want to know what drug your organization was making. I want to know about your client—" And I want to know about your 'tangential' neurology work. But from Vikram's face, she already saw she was hitting a wall.

"Miss, we can't give out—we can't give out confidential information like that."

Myra picked up the trunk and made for the exit.

"Wait, wait!" Kiera called out from behind Vikram. Oh my god, I've always wanted to do that, Papa always said the best part of negotiating was physically walking out to close a deal.

"Huh?" Myra said.

"I said, I think we might be able to answer some of your questions," Kiera said. "Strictly as—as alchemical experts, you understand. But in exchange, we want you to meet our director to discuss a deal for the vine."

"All right," Myra said. "Strictly alchemically speaking, then, what exactly is the vine?"

Vikram scratched his chin. "As best as we can tell, it's some crossbreed or evolutionary offshoot related to the Miirunian camera-leaf, imbued with an incredibly powerful SAP. It can take a… photograph, of sorts, of the area around it. A three-dimensional photograph, down to the finest detail. The chips on the wood of this counter. The cells in your skin, the molecules bouncing around in this drink, the aura concentrations in the air, the electromagnetic 4-potential at any point—" He put his finger up, indicating a random point in space.

"The cells on my skin? Are you being literal? That shouldn't be possible."

"Yes!" Vikram says. "It ignores your domain defense like it's nothing."

"We don't know quite how it works," Kiera said. "But we think it sort of… infers based on all the particles going through you. All the little neutrinos…"

"A few people had even started pushing a dark matter theory," Vikram added. "We had a betting pool going."

"Regardless, it's not blocked by domains," Kiera reiterated. Okay, right, I already knew this.

"What can it actually do with this photograph? Like, how do you, uh, view it?"

"Well, it's very difficult," Vikram said. "Like with a normal camera-leaf, you can impress a slice out onto a sheet of paper. But you can only see a 2D slice that way. If you want to actually bring out the deep well of information in the vine, you need more complex alchemical processes."

"And is the empire so interested in it as to confiscate it?"

"I don't know—I really don't!" He held his hands defensively, even though Myra hadn't challenged him on the point. "We didn't even know they would care until they showed up to take it. It's not like it's on a list of banned substances. We don't even know how they found it."

"So where did you get the vine?"

"Where did you?"

Myra leaned forward, not answering.

"Our client obtained it for us," Vikram relented. "It wasn't easy to do. They took a team out to some remote part of Miirun and collected the thing. It was larger than what you had here, but not by much."

"Did they walk all the way out there?"

"No, they teleported—I understand it was very difficult because the location was so remote—and you can't teleport with the vine at all. We used an automated levitation engine to carry it back. This is standard procedure for us, since we deal with exotic anomalous plants all the time, but it was difficult because the client insisted we keep to this ridiculous timeline."

"And when did the client first approach you?"

"Around two weeks ago."

"What day, specifically?"

"It was … the Wednesday. November…" He did the date math. "6." (The first day.)

"And the client, I don't suppose they have a name?"

Vikram took off his glasses to wipe the sweat from his brow. "They never gave us a name. I need to stress, they were very concerned with their privacy. I don't believe they ever showed anyone their face, in fact, and they only ever met with a few alchemists in person. For your own safety, really, you don't want to go poking this dragon."

"I'll take your opinion into account," Myra said dryly. "Now, tell me about the drugs you were making."

Vikram hesitated.

"This is strictly an alchemy question, no? What can you make out of this vine?"

He shook his head.

"I'll get you started. There's a red drug, a blue drug, and a green drug. What do they do?"

Vikram looked alarmed. "How do you know that? You know way too much to be uninvolved—"

"I know about them, but I don't get what they have to do with this ability of the red vine you're describing. The drugs are memory-wipe drugs, right?"

"Sort of," Vikram said. "It can revert a person's brain cleanly, in its entirety, without any kind of bleedover in implicit memories or anything like that."

"It's not permanent," Kiera said quickly. "It's not as dangerous as it sounds."

Not permanent!

"Explain."

"The—the three-drug system."

"Red, blue, green, yes."

"The red drug is the one with the… vine."

"That's why it's red."

"It's an artificial coloring," Vikram said. "That's just a coincidence. The red drug is the important one. The other two are… they just help control it."

"So what's in the other two?"

"They aren't even—they're just proteins. You can buy them in any bio-bodega on the corner. Fill a cauldron with amino soup, cook it over the right runic recipe plate, have it ready in half an hour."

"You said before—" Crap, wait. "I mean, I heard that red and green were the important ones."

Vikram looked momentarily confused, but he let it slide by. "Just let me explain it," he said slowly. "With the red drug, you can like… select a point that you want to go back to. The blue drug cleans the red drug out of your system once that's done. But that alone doesn't do anything. The problem is… very technical, it has to do with your domain defenses, but the point is, that doesn't work on its own. The green drug fixes that."

"So… the red and blue drugs are used to wipe someone's memory, but they'll regain their memories immediately if you don't apply the green drug?"

"Correct."

"And how do you get the green drug out of your system?"

"Oh, uh… you just wait it out. It should last eight, maybe twelve hours."

"Bullshit."

Vikram flinched. "No! Why would I lie about this?"

Myra looked him in the eye. This was annoying. This didn't make any sense! How could Ben intend to use the drugs to wipe her memories without applying the green drug? Was she off-base about everything AGAIN?

"Let me make sure I have this exactly," Myra said. "If someone wanted to, say, erase my memories of the last 28 days, they could use the red and blue drugs to do it. But ONLY if they keep applying the green drug every eight to twelve hours afterwards. As soon as they stopped, all the memories would come flooding back."

"You have it right."

It's all consistent with what he told me before.

But still—

"You're lying."

He shook his head violently.

"You know a way! A way to avoid the green drug."

Myra reached out to grab his wrist, but Kiera seemed to have had enough because she suddenly acted. In an instant, she slid around and pushed herself between them. "Our little chat's over," she said. "We told you what we know about the vine. We told you how the drugs were supposed to work. Now, you said you'd meet our director."

"Sure, let's arrange a time."

Kiera leaned forward. "Now's a time."

It was a belated realization, but she suddenly understood that Kiera had moved not just to get in front of Vikram, but to physically block Myra from taking the trunk.

"Help," Myra said.

Kiera opened her mouth, but not fast enough to get a word out. A tranquilizer stuck in her neck, and she toppled over, head on the counter.

Myra scribbled something on a napkin. "Leave a message at this address," she said, and handed it to a shell-shocked Vikram. "And I'll meet with the director. I expect he'll be able to answer my question, yeah?"

She took the trunk, left the bartender a large tip, and left to meet Lukai.

◆

She checked in on the news, but it was all olds. Nathan said the princess wasn't back yet, but that he had a robust informational network for learning if she did. Then she tried to decompress for the rest of the day, not that it did much good. It was genuinely annoying that she had learned so much concrete information about the vine and the drugs, but it didn't seem to fit. And nobody else seemed to have good ideas.

But one person seemed particularly quiet.

"… Lukai," Myra started as they turned in for the night. "What do you think of these Mirkas-Ballam drugs?" Myra asked.

Lukai thought for a moment. "Something's not adding up. The alchemist implied that the drug works by taking this '3-dimensional photograph' of your brain and then superimposing it on your brain."

"I… think so? I mean, he didn't really say that explicitly…"

"But that would require you to take the photograph in the first place. You couldn't just wipe arbitrary memories, you'd need the photograph first."

"Oh." Myra blinked. "Huh… That's interesting, but I really meant, like… what do you think of the, you know… the memory-wiping capability?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean…" God, you know what I mean! How was she supposed to ask it better? She needed to know his thoughts to know what thoughts she wanted to ask about. But he should have thoughts, damn it!

He removed his shirt and crawled into his bed, burying himself under the enormous, fluffy hotel blankets. "Let's get some sleep, Myra."

◆

When Myra awoke to a loud rumbling sound in the distance, the first thing she noticed was that Lukai was gone. His bed was empty and unmade, and his staff and most of his other stuff were gone. She tried several explanations. Oh, he went to get something to eat. He went for an early morning run.

But something was wrong. There wasn't any reason he should be missing. Maybe he was with Shera? Shera didn't sleep. He could be with Shera.

But there was that noise, too. Myra spent too long trying to connect his absence with the noise that had woken her up.

Wait, what the hell was that?!

Frantic, she got dressed and ran outside the hotel. She didn't see Lukai anywhere. The source of the noise, though, was obvious, as in the distance there were a significant number of lights bouncing off a thick smoke in the sky in the direction of the university.

She didn't waste any time. She teleported there in an instant, and she almost screamed at the sight.

Professor Bandine's laboratory was gone. The building, her personal kingdom, where her students worked, where she built mega-golems and showed off her hundreds of inventions, all of it was gone. It was just a pile of rubble. It wasn't even like the buildings that collapsed at the end of the loop. Somehow, it was more thorough than that. There was charring and smoke everywhere.

Most of her allies appeared in short order, not to mention probably half the school. A number of guards from the security office tried to shoo the students away to no avail. Huh? Wait, where's Iwasaki?

"Shera, have you seen Lukai?"

"Huh? Wasn't he sleeping with you?"

"Where's Mr. Iwasaki?" Nathan asked.

"I was just asking that," Myra said, though she was actually thinking of when she was thinking it.

"Who's Myra sleeping with?" Cynthia asked.

"Wait, wh-where's Lukai?" Shera asked.

"Hey, what's going on?" Myra tried to ask one of the security team officers, who then aggressively ignored her and continued to cordon off the area.

"M-Myra, where's Lukai?!"

"I don't know, Shera." She buried her face in her hands.

◆

It came out in the morning that both Hachirou Iwasaki and Lana Bandine had died. There was an ongoing investigation into the cause of the disaster, and class was cancelled for the rest of the week. A memorial to honor Professor Bandine and all her accomplishments would be held. Lukai still hadn't shown himself.

Now, who can I go to for more information?

"Yeah, just make yourself at home, I guess." Aurora was at her desk, working on her composition homework. Sky was there, just as she'd been hoping.

"Sky, please tell me you're doing the reporting for the building that just blew up—oh, what are you dressed up for?" He was wearing an immaculate black suit.

"Ah, I'm meeting Aurora's parents tonight. Have to make a good impression, you know." He laughed.

"Oh, okay. But do you know anything about—wait. Your parents are in town?"

"Yeah," Aurora said. "Why?"

"Just—nothing." Okay, forget about that. It's fine, it's fine. "Umm… right. I was here to ask, do you know anything about the blown-up building?"

"Eh, I got the basic facts for an article," he said.

The 'basic facts' weren't much. Last night at around 4:30 A.M., an alarm sounded at the professor's laboratory, indicating an intruder. Hachirou Iwasaki went to check it out. While he was inside the building, the building exploded. Based on the kind of explosion and carefully controlled nature of it, everybody assumed foul play. The investigators had picked through the wreckage and found the professor and the security head to be the only victims.

Then there was a frantic knock on the door.

"Who—"

Nathan entered without waiting for anyone to answer.

"Excuse me," Aurora said.

"I just got word from my contact on the kayaking team," Nathan said. "They were down around the riverbend near the hotel, and they said the princess is back."

"Empress," Aurora said.

"They said she entered in a hurry with another woman with 'killer shades and a green pixie cut'—"

"Yeah, yeah, Violet Penrilla," Myra said quickly. "We should go before they get away."

"I agree," Sky said. "Aurora, I'll meet you tonight." He removed his glasses and put on an identical pair of glasses. "But right now, duty calls."

"Whatever," she said.

"I—okay, yeah, let's go." The more the merrier, Myra mused. "Wait, we should get Iz." Crap, this is annoying. Myra herself could teleport to the hotel almost instantly, but her chance of actually getting a conversation with the princess would increase by orders of magnitude if she had Iz with her. "Where the hell's Iz?"

"She said she was going to look for clues at your hotel."

Oh, that was actually convenient. Myra and Lukai's hotel was in roughly the same direction as the Hotel Caldera. She got ready to teleport. "Okay, sorry, I'm going to go ahead and meet you there—"

◆

Iz was in Myra's hotel room, digging through Lukai's suitcase.

"What are you doing?"

"Looking for clues," Iz said.

"About where Lukai disappeared to, or like… do you suspect him of something?"

Iz looked at her impatiently. "All clues go to the same brain, Myra." … What? "Did you notice all the yarn is gone?"

They had bought some yarn earlier with the intent to study the weird yarn-based locks, which they had never gotten around to. And no, Myra hadn't noticed the yarn was missing.

"Never mind that," Myra said quickly. "Look, Nathan got word that the princess is back in the hotel, and—" Myra took Iz by the wrist and dragged her outside. She explained on the way, not that there was much to explain. The princess was back, and they were going to try to catch her before she left again.

But as they turned the corner, and the Hotel Caldera shifted into view, Iz dug in her heels.

"Myra, STOP!"

"They might leave any minute—"

"No—" She yanked so hard, it might have dislocated Myra's shoulder. "LOOK!"

"Huh?"

Iz pointed to the sky. She wasn't the only one looking up. Passersby screamed.

Bright and plainly visible in the late-morning sky, it was a—what was it? Myra almost called it a shooting star. A meteorite. She only had a second to process it at all. It struck the Hotel Caldera, and the building went up like its namesake.

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