#88

The journey will have to continue, in the face of everything. Though You now likes Jacob, and Susie does as well, they can't just sit around friend-blathering forever. Mark is the first to express this concept, when he says, “You wankers can't just all sit around friend-blathering forever!”

“Hey. Mark, right? Who asked you?” Jacob replies.

“I asked myself! And I asked all of the dead people in this city, who were killed by Your father!”

“Wait.” You has told Jacob much of what he told Mark, but he once again left out that detail. “The Emperor is Your father?”

“Yes.” You is beginning to feel irk over this idea, and how often it's being asked about.

“...what. You didn't see this coming?”

“How should I have? He was my father's clone, and the two were telepathically linked via a brain implant this whole time.”

“...You has a point. That does seem rather contrived. Still satisfies some sort of trope, I suppose, down the line. 'I Am Your Father', or something. That's why I say it's predictable.”

“I guess. There are a lot of contrived things along this line.”

Jacob nods. Now, on this other world, his old life seems to be fading into the past already—he's a fast adapter to these sorts of things. But in this new lens, he feels a strange tugging on his mind; like someone, somewhere, set up the deaths of Lex and Amos to be some sort of angst motivator. He feels inclined to give in to raw passion and start crying or swearing against the moon or something like that. It's only the fact that he's so self-consciously trope savvy that he doesn't give into it. Maybe this is a side effect of that virus he picked up, the one that made him start screaming during the D&D session. Cliché corruption. It's not that he wants to avoid feeling miserable about the death of his friend, and his bro—he does feel that already. It's just that he knows they wouldn't want him to be bogged down, y'know?

“Well, look,” Mark says. “We really need to get going. You, Doctor.” He snaps and points to Kay. “You can fly us around in this House, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Takes us the Tower. The Emperor's Tower.”

Jacob suddenly frowns. “Wait. Did we say we were going to a Tower?”

You senses that “Tower” keeps being capitalized, for some reason. That's when You senses some sort of grammatical distortion around Mark. But You can't trace its origin. Still, You can tell it's linked to the strange tension in the air; which is to say, the altered tense. It's like there's a grammar-based time field situated around Mark. You realizes gently that You sensed the same thing around the Emperor.

You isn't the only one who tenses up. “I thought we mentioned that,” Mark says. “The word keeps popping up in my head...” He pauses for a second. “I can't be the only one who's this confused.”

“No, I'm...not feeling the best either,” Susie interjects. Then she whispers quietly. “Something in the air? I feel like I'm not the only Lady here all of a sudden.”

There is another one of those pauses for a split second. 

During this pause, You senses something about Mark, something s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶. And You makes it physically clear that you is instantly distrustful of such a thing. It's in Your face, in Your fists as You clenches them. And the raw emotion in You, which You knows is based on something broken and no-longer-there, is visible to Susie.

She doesn't know what to think, but she's seen all that stuff in You in other times. Like every time Mark has opened his mouth, for instance, when he's been around her.

Susie now approaches Doctor Kai, or Kay. “Doctor, we have to take off at once. This House will give us a huge advantage, presumably, during any sort of siege we'll have to make against the Emperor. How resistance is it to attack?”

“Speaking frankly, Miss Sanford,” he begins. “Only the most powerful magic can damage The House. They could be armed with magic, but it's not the nature of our enemy to use it. At least, in a way they comfortably identify.”

Jacob is surprised; Kai seems to manifest a different personality for each person he talks to, and even then those personalities aren't consistent. It's like he's some sort of identity libertine, as stupid as that phrase sounds. Or, perhaps, a multi-faced bastard. He did mention being insane once. He knows that the phrase “multiple personalities” is no longer accurate, but maybe it's just simply that Doctor Kai is a madman. (Could that explain the multiple names, too?) But then, he still hasn't ruled out that he, Jacob, is the madman. Which is something he just sort of accepts. No need to sweat it, really. Reality is subjective, and so if his reality is this messed up, it's true to at least him, and not much matters past that, right?

While Jacob muses, Susie talks. “Then we'll use it. Rig it with weapons if we can get them. I doubt there are any here in Imperial Central worth using, but if there are defenses near where we're headed, we could crush or ram them with The House.”

“Sounds like an excellent plan,” the Doctor says, grinning. He doesn't reveal that The House is also vulnerable to the technology of the Ultra—but he doesn't suspect that that will come up in the battle ahead.

Aside from everything, Klaus wanders off, and this doesn't go unnoticed by You.

You glances back at the others, before looking over at Klaus. You does wonder where that guy goes when he gets around—maybe now You can find out. You starts following him as he ducks into the rubble, with the intent of making sure he isn't escaping or anything.

He seems to be entering a building. One of those red, white, and blue flags is waving overhead, indicating it was once an Imperial office of some kind; now, it looks abandoned, and mostly shattered. As You enters, Klaus begins to descending down the steps. This doesn't look good, so instead of shouting after him (and perhaps thus alerting anyone waiting down there), You heads back to the group.

“Klaus just went inside an Imperial building,” You says. “He's climbing down into a basement of some kind. Can you guys give me a hand with him?”

No one says anything, but they too become wary of some sort of ploy. Nobody (with the possible exception of Mark) thinks that Klaus is betraying anyone but he might be triggering some sort of trap. They all begin to follow You, with Doctor Kai glancing back briefly to The House.

When they enter the building, the coast seems clear; there is an upstairs, but the staircase for that has collapsed. So the whole place does give off a solid air of abandonment. There's still the basement. Susie leads everyone down there, followed closely by Jacob and Doctor Kay. When they get there, there's only a single room, but at the far edge of the room is a working computer terminal—hooked up to a rectangular frame.

Doctor Kai is the first to recognize it. “A portal gate. Likely captured and repurposed by the Empire.”

“Is this like one of the ones that transported us here? Roughly?” Jacob asks.

“It's the same sort of thing, yes. There are any number of ways the Imperials could have gotten such a thing as this...”

“Could we maybe use that control panel to get back to my Earth, then? We have to still stop them from finding that snake thing you mentioned. Serpentis bomb or whatever.”

“We could, theoretically. But it looks like it has some sort of glitch.” He looks it over. “It does...the key to access Universe-Beta-4 isn't lit up. It could be linked to a power failure...or...”

Suddenly, the gate begins to glow, and a surge of rushing fuel can be heard. “Sounds like the portal's powering up,” Susie says, with a degree of apprehension. “Did you touch anything?”

“No! It's something from the other side.”

Jacob then feels something happening to him, personally. His hair, which we must say now is rather long, is starting to stand on end. It could just be the electricity pumping through the portal frame, or some sort of reaction based on the trips he's made through the—what did Kay call it? The Unseen? The trips he's made through The Unscene or whatever recently. But it seems to be something else...

The image solidifies, and Jacob allows himself a gasp.

“Mina?”

“...Jacob?”