(Various Locations, January 20thth, 2047)

“Jessica”

I allocated a small part of myself to monitor Jessica, who was still sitting where I’d left her enjoying a sunset on a beach in that planet’s version of California. Still frozen as she was, at least she had the ocean breeze and nice weather. I was still standing in the maternity ward in Clovis New Mexico. I looked around some more, then pulled up the data my nanites had been able to gather from the portal she’d stepped out of before it closed.

Interestingly enough it appeared to be a normal magical portal though there were some oddities to its makeup. It seemed that it was composed of chaos, which would normally have destroyed anything touching it but my nanites had been able to touch and then follow the energy out of this cosmos. In fact, I’d received some very interesting readings before they’d been cut off. I thought for a moment then opened up the Cosmic Interface and started digging for the information I needed. Also, I had my Thor Aspect in the Singularity open a portal into The Unicorn and try to re-establish communication with the nanites that were now following something I could not describe. I tried using The Unicorn’s Singularity because it actually exited this cosmos, where the Artificial Singularity my Thor Aspect was in was just a gravity well that had not punched through the fabric of space-time yet. The last readings had been so alien to either the type of science I’d learned on Earth or the Magical theory I’d learned on Primore. It was, dare I say, more elegant.

My hunch paid off and I was able to re-establish my connection to the nanites going to wherever they were going. I then devoted the entirety of my Thor Aspect to analyzing and figuring out what was going on. While that part of me was working that issue, I established a connection with my nanites in Jessica and started downloading her memories.

“Get out of my mind!” Jessica’s voice bellowed through our contact

“No,” I said as I had the nanites put her into a coma-like state. Then I started reviewing her history like it was a movie at a couple hundred times normal playback speed. Jessica’s life started off normally then the Cultivation happened. Jessica was overseas and was lucky enough to have secret service personnel with her when the shit hit the fan. Her mother, The President, had requested that she fly back then which had been canceled when they realized that she’d have been over water. They diverted into Mildenhall in the UK and the base personnel had moved her to the bunker upon landing. Base personnel had been able to evacuate the locals onto the base and defenses had been put up to help defend against monsters that had started spawning. Mostly monsters falling in the fairy and woodland type classes. Once it was established that the humans had tons of firepower and weren’t afraid to use It the monsters moved away from the base.

When the Sanctuaries were set up She’d been in one of the groups that have moved into the London area and lived out her year there. While she’d been scared she’d been able to cope. Once communication was re-established though she’d been shown the security footage of her mother being decapitated and how they’d found her head in Las Vegas. If I felt any remorse on the subject it was that I’d exposed Jessica to such a vicious display of brutality by my hand. Of course, her mother had been a…. back on topic.

Like everyone else, she’d accepted joining the Syndicate and had also been given her share of the winnings. I’d set aside for everyone from the bet I’d made with the Gambler’s Network. She’d been moved to another planet where she’d been one of the survivors lost in this new reality. The Secret Service stuck with her for a while, but everyone was now rich in this new Galactic Society. She’d gone off on her own to pursue magic and training to find a way to make the person who’d killed her mother pay. Ah revenge, so predictable. What was not predictable was her memory of a blue-skinned platinum-haired woman stepping out of a portal, “Jessica Billingsgate?” she’d been asked in standard English.

“That’s me,” she said hesitantly. “What can I do for you?”

“It’s what I can do for you that has brought me to you.”

“And what is that exactly?”

“Well,” she said with the hint of a smile on her face, “I can allow you to take revenge on the man that killed your mother”

I read the confusion in Jessica’s mind as she thought about her options and then came to a decision as she looked at the blue-skinned woman, “Okay.”

I watched through Jessica’s memories as a new portal opened and she stepped through into… Darkness came down on our connection. I checked the nanites. An entire area of Jessica’s memory center has been locked out by something my nanites, my nanites? Couldn’t access it?. I shunted the issue over to my Thor Aspect and compared the notes he was getting on the area he was exploring. There were only three things that came to mind.

One, a power or force I had no hope of understanding had locked me out of Jessica’s mind and created the portal she’d stepped through. Two, there was an unknown force, be it technological or magical, at play that I had yet to understand, or three it was a technological or magical force that I could understand, I just hadn’t figured it out yet.

I accessed the readings from Jessica’s mind and it seemed that my nanites weren’t having any effect because there was nothing for them to effect, though I knew there was something there because a scan of the area showed that the neurons were intact. What to do? When in doubt cheat. I wished for an answer with my magic. Immediately a purple pop-up appeared in my vision.

Think smaller

Think smaller? That is incredibly helpful, NOT! Or was it helpful? I set the Thor aspect to taking my chaotic nanites down to an even smaller scale. While my Thor aspect tried that route I also tried to do so with magic. First, I teleported to the beach Jessica was on. Then I focused on the nanites in her mind and willed a portion of them to 1/1000 their current size. They reported no change. 1/10,000 their original size, still no change. 1/1,000,000 their original size and the world exploded with information.

I diverted my entire mentality to interpreting what I was looking at. Current scientific dogma cited the quark as being the smallest particle in the universe. My chaotic nanites were at least 100 times smaller than that and the ones I just willed to be even smaller were 1,000,000 times smaller than that. The scale was incredibly small. Also, the objects I was seeing were weird. There is no other way to describe it. I surmised that my chaotic nanites were a manifestation of magic that had taken solid form in the shape of my nanites which was allowing them to reform into a semi-solid state that could still perform as I wished them to even at the scale they were operating at. Before my nanites were chunks of something that was acting both like a solid, liquid, and gas in an energy state which was preventing any electrical input into or out of the area except through one area. I went over to the area and it appeared that some of the objects were acting like gate guards letting packets of energy move into and out of the cut-off area. As I watched the whole scene shifted to my nanites and everything morphed into a dome with one entryway allowing traffic to come and go with guards garbed in Nazi-style gear checking cargo and passes that each “person” showed before they entered or exited. My nanites examined each other and noticed that they’d taken on the form of flies which were much smaller than the people doing the checks. Once this was apparent my “flies” passed through the gate and I was in. My mind must be using images that were understandable to me to help me interpret what I was perceiving.

Once my nanites were inside, my perspective changed once again and I was able to follow Jessica’s travels after she left the portal. The first thing she did was open her personal interface and check to see if anything had changed. Stat wise she was an average human,

Name: Jessica Billingsgate

Age: 24

Weight: 119

Birthday, January 20th, 2012

Abilities:

“Magical Savant” – Learning Magic is like breathing for you. Also, you are unlimited in the number of spells you may learn, though the maximum number of spells per day that can be memorized is still limited. You also level all magical skills twice as fast.

“Magical Battery” – You may memorize one extra spell of any level per level in your highest magic using class.

Level 1

Attributes

Strength 6

Agility 7

Dexterity 6

Endurance 5

Constitution 6

Intelligence 9

Wisdom 8

Willpower 8

Perception 7

Charisma 10

Luck 5

Primary Stats

Carrying Capacity 36 lbs.

Hit Points: 5

Base Health Regeneration

1 HP per day

Stamina 57

Base Stamina Regeneration

7 Stamina per minute

Mana: 80

Base Mana Regeneration

16 Mana per minute per second

Movement

Normal Running Speed: 6 mph

Standing high Jump: 12 inches

Note. Falling Damage is not mitigated by maximum jumping Distance.

Base Attack

Unarmed Attack: 2

Critical Damage Maximum Damage x2

Skills,

I stopped looking over her sheet. There was nothing I didn’t expect to see. I was more interested in where she was, which appeared to be a small white room with a desk, two chairs opposite each other, and two doors. The one she’d stepped through and the one opposite her on the other side of the desk.

“First things first,” The blue-skinned woman said as she ushered Jessica towards the chair closet to her while walking around the desk and taking a seat. Jessica sat and she continued, “My name is Za. It’s not my original name nor is it the name I’m known by in most places but it’s the name I use performing this function.”

“What function is that exactly?” Jessica asked.

“Why rapid growth and development of course”

“Why me?” Jessica asked.

“You have been selected because the individual that killed your mother is becoming troublesome to my employer. My Employer would like you to have the opportunity to do something about it.”

“Exactly how long will this take?”

“Subjective or Literally?

“Subjective or Literally, what does that even mean?” Jessica asked.

“Subjectively you’ll be gone for a very long time. Literally, not so much”

“And I’ll be able to take my revenge on the man that killed my mother?”

“Absolutely!” Za said with the hint of a smile.

“Then I’m in, what do I need to do?”

“The first thing you need to do is get up, and walk through the door behind me.”

I watched as Jessica stood up and walked through the door. Then her vision blurred and she was stepping back into the white room with Za. What the hell. I focused my mind, went into my memory of what I just witnessed, and thought it looked a lot like a sped-up tape. I slowed down the rewind by a million times. Still not slow enough. 3 million times, which was just about 100 years for one second. Still too fast. I incremented the speed slower and slower and at 15 million times I was able to see what had transpired.

Instead of watching 500 years’ worth of data at normal speed, I moved my consciousness to machine speed and reviewed Jessica’s experiences. 500 years’ worth of time in a second. I watched as she was introduced to Master Magician and schooled in the ways of magic. Then sent into local dungeons that had popped up. Additionally, I found out that the location she had ported to was a Universe with a temporal clock flowing much faster than that of the normal Universes. In fact, there were a plethora of Universes where this temporal speed was the normal speed as well as Universes that were moving much slower than any of the normal Universes. Jessica had been brought to this Universe to learn the skills and abilities necessary to be able to defeat the “monster”, their words” that would one day destroy the Universe. They then described who I was, where I was born, and how to make sure that I never became the problem I had. Also, it should save her mother. Besides the fact that her mother, and Jessica would probably have died during the Cultivation which made what she’d been told utter horse shit, I was beginning to think someone didn’t like me.

Throughout the experiences, I watched I saw no one else that knew exactly why Jessica was there save her master. Her master looked familiar but searching my memory I could swear I’d never met her before. A déjà vu moment perhaps? I watched with half interest as Jessica learned about all the schools of magic with a heavy focus on time and gravity.

When she was taught all she could be taught and leveled to a point where she should very easily be able to kill a baby in a crib she stepped through a portal to find Za, just as she’d left her, and realized that no time had passed for Za

“Done, I take it?” Za asked.

“Yes.”

“One last thing,” Za said as her eyes glazed and she looked at Jessica. Her eyes focused as she said, “That should do it. You now have access to his quantum location. Use your spells to get to the location of Adam right after he was born and end him. Nothing fancy, just get it done.

Which brought us almost to the present. Jessica had indeed cast a wish spell and opened a portal except that she hadn’t known that this Universe was time-locked and traveling into the past was forbidden by beings much more powerful than her or I. Also, I noted that during her conversion she’d lost some of her class ability traits which had made it almost impossible for her to stand toe to toe with me. Also, she was nowhere near level 100,000. The conversion had left her at level 1,113. In 500 years she’d done well for the magical Universe she’d been in but going toe to toe with me? Someone had used and set her up. I almost felt bad for her.

As I considered everything I’d learned I portaled her body into a holding cell in one of the asteroids on Nu Draconis. Had the nanites break down all non-magical items and had one of my duplicates remove all of her magical items. Nothing too fancy just a spatial bag of holding with almost nothing in it and a couple of rings. I also set up an anti-magic zone around her cell so she couldn’t use magic to escape before I left her naked on the bed with a grey jumpsuit and released her from her coma.

Jessica woke up, looked around, and tried to teleport out only to find out that no magic had worked at all. She was my prisoner and she was stuck. She looked around, looked down at her nude body, and said “Really?”. I didn’t dignify the question with a response. Moments later she noticed the jumpsuit and put it on. As with all my cells, this one had a monitor and very soon she had figured out how to access the web and television and was busy watching the news as I teleported back to my estate to think about what I was going to do with Mrs. Billingsgate. Honestly, I was much more interested in where the white room was and who Za really was. As my Thor aspect went back to work I laid down and allowed my mind to rest. I had just lived another 500 years of Jessica’s life as it was.