Chương 75: 74-The House

Patient Pam sat on a stone bench in one of the parks inside Julta, the city that contained the Black Tower in this Aeon. She was not a particularly promising housemate, but her stat combination made her immune to the passage of time and, consequently, to boredom. It was shocking how much spotlight time she got.

"She is just going to wait there?" asked Decisive Daniela.

"She is in the spotlight, and she chooses not to act?"

"When have you ever seen her do anything? They do not call her Patient Pam for nothing," answered Logical Lucy.

"You are right, though; let's ask for a vote." The House was filled to the brim, as always, with identical young women shouting at the same time, trying to make themselves heard above the others. The Judge presided over the House, its veiled face impassively regarding the chaotic scene from its dais. In its right hand, it held the gavel of judgment. Tactical Tammy waited for her moment.

She was one of the Extremes, a housemate with a build focused on a tertiary attribute, which granted her two votes instead of only one. Her focused attribute was, unsurprisingly, Tactics. She had long ago mastered the best techniques for getting the other housemates' attention. Unfortunately, the other Mind-based housemates had become suspicious of her and of how easily she seemed to grab the spotlight. That meant her proposals were carefully reviewed before approval.

Tammy waited until Strong Susan and Fierce Felicia stopped their shouting match. When that happened, there was always a three-second pause before someone started shouting again.

"I have a plan! I have a plan for getting the Icosahedron," she screamed at the top of her lungs. All 714 other housemates looked at her at once.

"Of course, you have a plan; you always do," scoffed Stoic Sarah.

"Let me guess, you need the spotlight to formulate it, don't you?"

"You know I do. I only have a fraction of my powers during House Time, but it's enough for me to know that the full plan could work." The other housemates regarded her with suspicion.

"She is going to get the spotlight…again?" someone asked incredulously.

"Only for five minutes, so I can get full access to the brain," Tammy promised.

"I will give back the spotlight after those five minutes are over. I will design a decision tree on the blackboard." A giant blackboard materialized behind the Judge as she said this.

"We will follow the instructions in the tree, and they will lead us to the Icosahedron." Tammy's plans almost always worked, not surprisingly, as her tactical acumen was thousands of times that of an average person. The problem was not the plan itself, but what traps Tammy could hide inside it to further her own agenda. Cunning Catherine was talking with other mind-based housemates. Bad. That bitch meant trouble.

"Mind-based housemates will approve your plan, with one caveat—your decision tree will not include the possibility of you grabbing the spotlight again." Damn, she saw through that one, Tammy thought. No matter, the plan would work. They would give the Icosahedron back to Necessity, and she would get her own House. She could not wait for the moment she left all these clowns behind. She had already won half the battle. Mind-based housemates were the only ones who considered what they were being asked before voting.

Most of the other housemates voted solely to increase their chances of getting the spotlight. It was surprising how many housemates always voted no, no matter what they were asked. She was five votes short of the necessary number to implement her plan, but she had enough to grant her the option to modify it and ask for a new vote.

"If the plan gets passed, I promise Adaptive Alice, Rampaging Rebecca, and Immovable Irene will have a place in the decision tree." That did it. Both Rebecca and Irene were Extremes, each receiving two votes. Alice was only a Moderate and had only one, but she was already part of the plan. She could actually use Rebecca; as for Irene, well, she had just promised a part in the plan—she had not specified how important that part would be.

The new proposal passed with flying colors; the Judge hit the desk with its gavel, and Tammy was whisked out of the House and into reality. She was still seated in the same spot where Patient Pam, that lazy cow, had spent all morning. Damn. She would love to go out, breathe the cool morning air, and bask in the sun, but she had only five minutes left. Her brain went into overdrive—Jenna would have needed a potion to reach Tammy's level of tactical prowess.

She created a mental map of Julta and peopled it with a simulation of its inhabitants, the Losers, and as many temporal variations of them as she could think of—and she could think of an awful lot. She split the map into an infinite number of copies and created an infinite number of simulations of herself to study them. She mentally gave the go-ahead and sped up her subjective time until one second equaled five years. All the battles were over in an instant.

Her mental clones made notes about the most noteworthy aspects of each and passed the information to her central self. Then she repeated the process once again, changing the opponents and the situations. And again. It became so automated that she could process the whole wargame in one picosecond. Five minutes later, she had mentally kicked randomness and fog of war out of her tactics. Her plan was infallible.

She needed two picoseconds more to distill all those gigantic libraries of tactical knowledge into a simple decision tree with twenty-seven possible paths, all converging on a single outcome: victory. She spent one more picosecond simplifying the plan, so that even the most mentally challenged housemates could understand it. Done. Still six seconds left. She ran into the street and felt the sun on her face. Perceptive Penelope took the spotlight just two seconds later.

She slowly opened her eyes and drank the city with them. She calmly absorbed the resulting torrent of visual information. Penny briefly admired the patterns the wind had scoured into a brick in a tower two miles away before closing them again. Smell, now. She perceived the distinctive smell of every inhabitant and animal in the vast megalopolis, and realized some of them were duplicated.

There were exactly twenty-three people who smelled exactly like her, twenty-one who smelled like the Everlasting, and eight who smelled like the Skillmaster. Only eight like the Skillmaster. She briefly wondered about the disparity. She then concentrated on sound, trying to match the hundreds of thousands of heartbeats in the city to her own. She quickly found the twenty-three that matched the pattern. One of them was not alone. It was in the company of two other heartbeats.

Heartbeats that also had almost perfect echoes all over the city. Bingo. She had found them. She pointed in the right direction.

"There. Eight hundred feet away." Tactical Tammy looked at Rampaging Rebecca.

"Your turn, Becky." Becky did not bask in the sun. She was not beautiful; she was not bright, but she was determined, and she allowed nothing to stand between her and her goal. She gave her body a few seconds to adapt to the new personality. It grew larger, hunched forward, and gained around 200 pounds of muscle. Body +6 Strength +6 Momentum +6 She started charging in the direction Penny had instructed her to. She moved, slowly at first, but with increasing momentum.

When she hit the first wall, she was going at the speed of a freight train. Why take detours when a straight line works? ◇ Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Can you hear that?" asked Bob, as the detonations sounded in the distance.

"Yes. Aren't they getting louder?" asked Jenna. Billy looked at the southernmost wall of the storage depot. Suddenly, there were two Billys. One of them jumped on Jenna and Bob, pushing them aside and tackling them to the ground. A screaming brunette juggernaut crashed through the wall. Billy vanished just one instant before she went through the space he was occupying—he had jumped one second into the past and had saved his friends.

"Who the hell was that?" asked a bewildered Bob, as he watched the effect of the brunette's charge. She had taken half the depot down on her way out.

"I think it was me, Bob," Jenna answered.

"A more powerful version of me. She was hitting at least +6 in a tertiary Body stat. I can't do that without help." The Losers stood in formation, their armor and weapons shimmering into existence around them. Nothing could be heard. Suddenly, Jenna's twin entered, walking slowly among the clouds of dust. Her hairstyle and facial expression were different; she was no longer a 600-pound brute but a lithe and athletic warrior, and she was still Jenna.

She pulled something that was tied behind her back and switched it on. It was a telescopic baton, now the size of a bo staff.

"My name is Adaptive Alice. Let's fight," she said. Then she charged at them. ◇ House Time was a strange concept, Tactical Tammy mused as she watched the fight begin from within the House. It was no faster or slower than real time. It was relative to it. It was measured in decisions, not in instants.

That meant that in the few milliseconds before Adaptive Alice announced her attack and her charge, the House had time for three proposals, one agenda addition, and two impassioned speeches from some boring Extremes who wanted to reschedule things. God, I can't wait to have my own House and be rid of these idiots, Tammy thought.

"No, no, no! We are not changing the decision tree. I already explained why," she told Stolid Silvia. She was not very sure what stolid meant, but she was betting it had nothing to do with the brain department.

"Why do you give Alice so much power? Why can she decide who grabs the spotlight next, and for how long? And why does it always return to her? She is not even an Extreme. She is a Moderate," Stolid Silvia said calmly, without expressing emotion or reacting excitedly to the situation, and managing to look boring and dull.

"Alice has a very powerful Mind/Body build that allows her to study her enemies as she fights them. That is why she always makes the right call on who gets the spotlight, and for how long," she explained patiently, as if to a child. A stolid child. ◇"Wind Kisses the Ball!" shouted Bob, but he did not throw a Palooga ball—he threw the gambling die. Jenna recognized the maneuver as the Unexpected Flash. Bob was going to make the die emit blinding light as his opponent dodged.

Adaptive Alice did not even try; she just swatted the die away with her staff as if she were playing baseball. Damn, those were not just reflexes. She guessed what Bob was trying to do—it is a hybrid Mind/Body build. Jenna made quick calculations and found out that their foe's stat build must be worth around +8 freebie points, instead of the +5 she used. Less flexibility, more power. Jenna suddenly realized why Alice was at the vanguard.

"Guys, watch out; she is probing our weaknesses," she shouted. Damn. They did not have a hand sign for that. Enough. Jenna put all her points into Body and charged at Alice, much as Becky had done at the beginning of the fight. Alice saw her coming out of the corner of her eye.

"Immovable Irene, two seconds," she screamed as she dropped the spotlight." Only two bloody seconds?" protested Irene as she grabbed it. Oomph. Jenna fell to the ground, feeling as if she had charged straight into a cliff. What had happened? Her foe's face flickered, as if going through conflicting emotions, and then settled back into Alice's calculating gaze. She has multiple personalities! Jenna suddenly realized. Each personality is a build. ◇"And now, we are in step four of the Tree," Tammy explained.

"Jenna realizes we are a collective entity and tries to use it against us," she read aloud.

"Get ready, Sarah. You go next." Bob used Death Thrust to create an impassable barrier of spear strikes—Alice dodged them so beautifully that for an instant, Jenna wanted to cheer her. Billy's form flickered as he entered and exited the continuum, trying to find a moment in which Alice would drop her guard. The housemate's defenses did not falter—she did not react to Billy; she predicted where and when he would strike. Something was wrong, Jenna noticed.

Alice was not the main fighting form; she was just an opener for the finishers. Why had she not shifted her personality to counterattack Billy or Bob? What was she waiting for? Suddenly, Jenna saw an opening as Alice overextended her weapon. She needed an entry into her spirit—with someone as powerful as Alice, that meant physical contact. Jenna grabbed her wrist and tried to push her spirit into her mind. Alice turned round, but she was no longer Alice; she was Stoic Sarah. She had been waiting for her.

For the second time in less than a minute, Jenna was thrown away like a rag doll when her mind crashed against Sarah's powerful psychic defenses. Jenna groaned, trying to stand up. The whole room swirled around her. This was not going well. She saw another personality take over their foe and deliver a powerful Spirit attack against Billy, who fell senseless to the floor. Jenna realized that if she fought as she always did, they would lose. She had to change her game, but how? What made this Jenna so different?

How had she wound up so ill? Suddenly, she knew. There was only one person who could have done this to her. If her suspicions were right, this Jenna had never met Billy or Bob before, and she had never returned to Babylon. She had never met her mother or sister. Alice caught Bob with a blow to the jaw with the shaft of her staff. He fell unconscious to the floor.

"I do not want to kill you; I only want the Icosahedron. You have already lost; give it to me," Alice said as she approached Jenna.

"I am so sorry for you," Jenna answered.

"You got the worst parts of my life and missed all the rest. Let me in—I want to help you."

"Let you in? So you can wreak havoc inside the House? What kind of fool do you take me for? Should I call Sarah again?"

"She won't be able to stop me. Nothing can stop me from entering your mind."

"Is that so?" Alice asked, amused.

"Why?"

"Because I am already in. I am the Chant. I am life. I am art. I am passion incarnate…" Jenna began to recite the first coda of the Chant—a higher power, unbound by the Compendium, who had already accepted her and knew her like the back of his hand. Like cool water flowing into an empty vessel, the Chant entered the House. ◇"Order, order," Tammy shouted as the housemates tried once again to force another vote.

"We are sticking to the decision tree—that is final," she screamed.

"We demand another vote; we have a right to it. Who seconds my motion?" Wanda asked. Wise Wanda had switched sides.

"Okay, let's vote," said Tammy. It did not matter how impressed Wanda had been with Jenna's words. She just did not have the numbers.

"Wise Wanda wants us to lower our defenses and let Jenna in, so that she can heal us. Who seconds it?"

"I do," said a clear, confident voice. Tammy gaped at the newcomer.

"Who the hell are you, lady? How did you get here?"

"My name is Elariana, queen of the Elves, and I vote yes."

"As I do," said Vana the skymaiden.

"And I," said Oron the Spellsinger. The newcomers sat one by one and cast their votes. Who the hell were these people? Where had they come from? She had accounted for every possibility, every nuance, every permutation, no matter how strange or improbable—yet she had not accounted for these people. What the hell was the Chant? Who were these strangers? An even better question: how many of them were there? Suddenly, the House seemed much more crowded than before. Wanda had the numbers after all.

◇ Jenna saw Alice's face become blank for an instant—she had her chance. With a thought, she plunged into her foe's mind. She was no longer in the city. She was in some sort of council hall, filled with copies of herself having agitated discussions with the protagonists of the Chant. Presiding over the room was a masked figure with a gavel. Him. She charged towards him at the speed of lightning. Only Tammy guessed what she was about to do, but she was too removed to do anything about it.

She tackled the masked figure as he tried to run away. She removed his mask, knowing who she would find beneath it.

"You broke her, didn't you?" Jenna said, tears of rage filling her eyes.

"She was not strong enough to part with you, and you ended up destroying her mind. I saw what happened to her as I entered the House. You broke her and had to commit her to a psychiatric ward in Chicago. She was there on Activation Day. She never returned to Babylon."

"I was trying to help her," Brinkman said, from the floor.

"God, it is always you. It is always you. Andara used you against me, and that thing in Bjarfalla. You were there, in the inside-out palace, and you are here in this poor girl's mind."

"You are the deepest scar life has ever given me. My most painful wound. I am sorry I did not kill you when I had the chance."

"Jenna, wait, don't let your anger cloud your…uhhrk." Those were Dream Brinkman's last words as Jenna broke his neck. Everything stopped at once. The Jennas and the Elves stopped arguing and looked at Brinkman's corpse. Jenna was expelled from the House. Her last glimpse was of all the housemates fusing into a single entity. Jenna opened her eyes. She was no longer fighting; she was hugging a crying, scared, nineteen-year-old girl. A girl who looked just like her.

"What is your name, sweetie?" Jenna asked her gently.

"Jenna," the girl she was holding answered.

"Just Jenna. Oh, God, everything is so quiet now. I am so alone," the girl wept.

"No, you are not. Look inside yourself," Jenna told her healed sister.

"I will look with you." The old House was gone, but something remained in its place—and it was not empty. There were no other Jennas anymore, but Elariana the First and Last Amazon, Vana the Skymaiden, Belegrin the First Spear of the Elves, and the rest of that magnificent company were there, waiting for her.

"This is something my Elven family taught me: you will never be alone. Wait till this whole thing is over. When the way to the Black Tower is open, go back to it and return to the timeline you came from. Seek Babylon. Do this, and I promise you that you will have friends both inside and outside your mind." She gently kissed her sister's cheek and watched her rise, walking away into the morning sun. She stood for long moments, considering what had happened.

"God, I hate Brinkman," she said.