Chương 423: Limitless Path Chapter Four Hundred Forty-Seven

It was, for the most part, a waiting game right now, though Beth had given Mortaine the details on their current location, so she had some expectation that he would just pop up at some point. Otherwise, Alex was still working and Selene was still on her trip, with no word sent, and they didn't have any other leads on the rest of Beth's materials. They could maybe, maybe, get a lead on the hearts she needed, but they were rather rare and hard to find.

There was no way they could get the cores she needed themselves, not without relying on someone like Megoria and her starship at a minimum, and there wasn't anybody like that handily available. The people they could have looking into it already were, and now they just had to hurry up and wait. Waiting was not really a chore, however, as they had each others company. Well, Sera and Beth were indolent in each others arms while Blood simply slept, or pretended to sleep, one could never be entirely sure with her.

Passing another day and another night with nothing more pressing than relaxing about their rented suite and waiting for people to get word back to them was fine, but by the third day, Beth was starting to get a bit of that itch. She wanted to be out doing, or even just working on something, rather than laying on the couch, even in her lover's arms, and she was getting a little antsy.

Fortunately, for all their sanity, there was a change on the third day, that change being a firm knock at their door in the middle of the morning. Beth answered to find Mortaine standing there, nice of him to not have just popped into the middle of their living room without any notice, though Beth was also pretty sure that he could see into the middle of their living room even from another dimension. She gestured him in to sit on the couch, which he accepted with a graceful nod.

"Mortaine," Sera said, giving him a nod as he sat.

"Well, hello," he said, glancing over at the sleeping Blood and shaking his head.

"Good to see you three."

"It's been a little bit," Beth said with a nod, sitting on Sera's lap.

"I have good news for you," he said.

"No bad news?" Beth interrupted with a slight smirk.

"Well, no, not as such," Mortaine said with a bit of a frown.

"Sorry, old joke," Beth said with a shrug.

"Anyway, I have good news," he repeated.

"I have found a source for all five of your singularity cores. I have called in a favor from an old friend, old in more than one way, ahem, and I have secured all the materials you need."

"Well, I still need two hearts," Beth began.

"That's taken care of," Mortaine interrupted with a wave of his hand.

"You will have the other two hearts, and you will have the five singularity cores."

"Do you have them right now?" Beth asked, leaning forward a bit.

"No," he replied shortly, getting a tsk from Beth at the response.

"I'm afraid we're going to have to take a little trip to pick them up."

"We have to go meet up with your contact?" Beth asked, guessing the situation.

"Exactly so," he said with a nod.

"When?" Beth asked.

"Well, now would be good," he replied with a laugh.

"Blood?" Beth asked the wolf, who just responded with a lazy, half-hearted wave.

"We're ready, we have time on the room and, I assume, are going to be coming back here?"

"Yes, I'll make sure you get back here, don't worry," Mortaine said. With a wave of the Exalted's hand, they all disappeared from the living room of the suite with a fizzy popping sound a flash of yellow light, though the last part Beth didn't see, as they were already gone. After a handful of moments in transit, Beth became aware she was sitting beside Sera instead of in her lap, all of them appearing in the same position they had been in other than that.

They were in a large, mostly empty room, only having a group of low chairs set around a low-slung table. The walls were wood, with a wood and stucco ceiling, and the floor was a tile of reddish-brown. The place was rather unremarkable, all things considered, and Beth gave Mortaine a slightly quirked eyebrow and small frown. The Exalted smiled before standing, gesturing for them to follow him.

"This is just a reception room, don't worry. We should, however, vacate," he said, adding rather quietly, "Not that I expect there to be any others any time soon." Beth and the other two followed Mortaine out of the room, which still brought up the thought of a sparse dining room in Beth's mind, and into a series of corridors, all wood paneled and with tile or wooden floors.

The first hint Beth had that something wasn't quite right was walking by a set of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out upon the infinite blackness of space, stars and nebula glowing in the background. The second hint she had that something was a bit odd was when, upon looking out the second set of windows they passed, she viewed what had to be a singularity, a black hole, positioned in such a way that it was close enough she could observe light twisting at the edge of the event horizon.

The other two had noticed they were in outer space, so to speak, but hadn't noticed the singularity until Beth pointed it out. Mortaine continued to lead them through what was either a space station or starship, Beth having a little trouble from the windows figuring just what exactly it was, until they arrived at a large room with wooden walls, dark wood floors, large crystal chandeliers, and a series of four different seating arrangements within.

Sat at one of them were two men, animatedly discussing some topic, having not seemed to take any notice of Mortaine and the groups' entry to the room. One of the men was familiar to Beth, though she had trouble placing him at first, while the other man was unfamiliar to her entirely. She decided, because why not, to scan the both of them to see what she got back. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Zane Farstrider, Level 2000 Human Void Emperor Fallon Whiteheart, Level 1800 Griffon Chronomancer Conquerer Well, that was certainly something.

"Mortaine!" Zane, who Beth recognized as the man in her contacts list, exclaimed as they approached.

"I didn't expect you so soon."

"He is precisely on time," said the other man, Fallon, right after Zane finished speaking.

"In that, he arrived just when he wanted to."

"Time is a construct," Zane replied to the man, Mortaine not having gotten in a word edgewise.

"Oh, here we go," Mortaine muttered, seeing Fallon sputtering at the statement.

"All of reality is a construct! A unity altered only by our perception of it!" Fallon cried indignantly.

"Gentlemen," Mortaine interrupted the brewing argument, calmly but forcefully.

"I have brought the ladies with me to retrieve what you offered, as requested. Could we, perhaps, stay on track?"

"We've already tried that, and it's not very entertaining," Fallon said with a dismissive wave.

"He controls time," Zane said in a lowered voice, hiding his mouth from his companion and leaning towards Beth and Sera in a conspiratorial manner.

"He's looked through different timelines where we act like serious, self-righteous assholes and they're not very fun."

"Ladies," Mortaine said, beginning to ignore the two.

"Let me introduce to you the only two Manumitted the Milky Way has had the pleasure, or distinct displeasure, of hosting in the last hundred millennia. On the left, the man with far less wit than he thinks of himself is Zane Farstrider, a master of gravity and gravitational magics. On the right is his old traveling companion, Fallon Whiteheart, a griffon that has studied and partially mastered the esoteric magics of time."

"Rich to call my magic esoteric when you explore the dimensional boundaries," Fallon replied, somewhat grumpily.

"Being a native of the galaxy, I take a distinct displeasure at you calling me a distinct displeasure," Zane said, though Mortaine didn't seem bothered by the disproval of such a powerful being.

"You have the materials?" Mortaine asked, dragging them back on track.

"I have them," Zane said, throwing a container at Mortaine that appeared from nowhere. Looking in the container, Beth observed five black spheres that pulsed with a strange rhythm, mana being drawn into them with each pulse. Her eye power told her that these were, indeed, the five singularity cores that she had been missing.

"And the price?" Mortaine asked.

"Consider it repayment of a favor," Zane said then.

"I don't feel right just taking it for free," Beth said.

"You helped me before, and so did Mortaine," Zane said with a shrug.

"That was hardly help," Beth replied with a shake of her head.

"What happened?" asked Sera.

"I just guided him to a building he was looking for a couple years ago. And, apart from that, Blood and I got our Roses there, so it's kinda like helping him led to us meeting you," Beth explained.

"You worked at one of the Rose Bars?" asked Zane.

"I worked at the Royal Rose. Long story," Sera replied.

"Interesting," said Zane, leaning back in his chair and eyeing the group.

"You're rather strong, given your ages, especially with one of you having worked at the Royal Rose. Those contracts are always five years."

"They are rather talented," Mortaine commented.

"Their time is different," Fallon added, stroking his chin as he looked at them.

"They've spent quite a lot of time in altered space. In fact, this one has it." He had pointed at Beth at the end, who just nodded in response.

"I inherited a power through a memory crystal somebody left. Gives me a gate that I can set to a few different things."

"Ha! The properties of transference always hold!" Fallon crowed, looking at Zane like he had just won a point.

"The space is inconsistent," Zane dismissed with a casual wave.

"Timescale doesn't mean a consistency in the altered space."

"You just refuse to accept the mountain of evidence," Fallon snorted.

"Do you know what they're talking about?" Sera asked Mortaine quietly as the two spiraled off into some kind of argument.

"No, they always get like that," he sighed.

"They have arguments that are long running contentions of theirs stretching back tens of thousands of years."

"What do you mean?" Beth asked.

"Well…" answered the Lord of Traversal a little hesitantly, "Manumitted Farstrider mastered the singularity, and through mastering the use and knowledge of gravity to an unprecedented level, has mastered space.

"On the other hand, Manumitted Whiteheart has studied the movement of the stars for centuries and millennia, understanding the passage of celestial objects, which eventually led to his near-total mastery of the concept of time."

"So, they know a lot about space and time?" Beth asked with a raised eyebrow.

"I suppose one could put it like that," he responded as he clasped his hands behind his back.

"The two of them are basically the two greatest masters of space and time in the Milky Way, and likely a considerable portion of the local universe."

"And I am telling you," continued Farstrider as gravity suddenly seemed to turn off within the large room, "that the constraints of the standard field only apply under fully normative quantum effects where the mana is flowing in alignment with standard quark movement."

"And I am telling you," Whiteheart responded with a very aggressive finger wag, "that you could only view that as a single still moment taken from the infinite range that, when viewed as a flowing system, renders the isolation of the mana pattern moot." The Lord of Traversal shook his head off to the side as he wrapped Beth, Sera, and Blood in his power and moved them to a seating arrangement at the edge of the room that, strangely, didn't seem affected by the alteration of gravity in the room.

"Of course," he continued, "it generally means that nobody, not even my august self, can understand an absolute lick of what they're blathering about." A teapot and four teacups appeared on the small table in the middle of the seating arrangement as if they had always been there, though Beth was positive they had been teleported in.

It was all rather surreal, sitting in a chair that didn't move in a room that didn't have gravity while a beyond-grandmaster of teleportation offered them tea and, in the background, the two greatest masters of time and space in the galaxy had an argument only they could understand.

"Tea sounds nice," Beth replied, glancing at the others, finding them both in staunch agreement. The argument continued for some time, Beth and Sera discussing some elements of smithing while Blood slowly sipped the offered tea and meditated. Mortaine paid attention to the argument between the two luminaries, but he chipped in to Sera and Beth's discussion from time to time. After a little bit, the other two finished their discussion, the room returning to normal and the two joining the four at the table.

"Smith, are you?" Zane asked.

"Sera and I," Beth said.

"Blood is working Leatherworking."

"Any good with runes yet?" he asked them.

"Well, we're working on it," Beth replied a little lamely. He held up a hand and a hollow sphere appeared above it, entirely constructed of runes. There was nothing inside the sphere, it was literally just a sphere of runes about the size of a standard basketball. The runes were so tiny and so densely interwoven that there had to be something like ten thousand of them all joined together to create the sphere.

He held it up for them to observe for a moment, clearly ready to lecture on it, but Beth beat him to the punch.

"How the hell did you do that?" she asked.

"Is it a skill?" Blood growled.

"You're not even an Enchanter, are you?" Sera added.

"No, no skill, and I'm not, strictly speaking, an Enchanter. I simply imprinted the runes upon the air in front of us," he replied.

"Well, not the air, but the base fabric of this dimension."

"You…what?" Beth asked, eyes nearly crossing as she tried to follow.

"Look, forget that," Zane snapped, waving his free hand.

"That's for the doctorate thesis in runes, meanwhile I'm trying to guide you through Runes 51: Runes for Dummies." Beth frowned at him before holding her left hand up, palm up, and concentrating for a moment. A wavey, not quite opaque rune formed above her palm, shifting and flickering before settling down. The Lord of Traversal, who had been about to make a slightly sarcastic comment before moving them along, quite promptly snapped his mouth shut with an audible clicking noise.

"Well, that's new," he said, looking at Beth with some awe.