FINAL WEEK

[strangerpeople]

FINAL WEEK

[Well. What else can be said? The Little Courtesy is over. You have all survived. You are now going to your final destination-with invitations to boot. And Charlotte will be getting that private audience, as promised.

But it's not over. Everyone knows it. Confrontation is inevitable. The question is what, exactly, will happen when that confrontation happens-or if anyone will in fact be able to go with Charlotte when it happens. But you've gone this far. There's no turning back. There has to be a way.

Nothing has been certain, or simple. Whatever happens will be no different from the horrors of the Little Courtesy. Perhaps the saying might still hold. Will all be well? Will it?

It must. God help everyone if it isn't.

Seven is the Number, but there are nine strangers left in this place.]

Comments

[disregartist]

Well, they are your memories. You were never supposed to lose them to begin with. But the Liberation harvested them for whatever they intended to do. Sell them? Possibly. Weftlander memories are prized by some artist schools desperate for inspiration.

Losing them is painful, and regaining them, just as much. That's why one must take it slowly.

[She goes back to making...a syringe of red honey. It's only one, though, out of all the teas.]

...As I have said. The Little Courtesy isn't meant to be a game. Even if some in London view it as such.

CW public execution talk, oblique reference to lynching

[charmingheroine]

We aren't in London.

[Somehow, she manages to suppress the urge to tack on "or Kansas, anymore". It's not like someone from this joyless place would know Oz, after all.]

And neither were those - that prison wasn't, either, but they sure did treat our part of it there like a game. They had popcorn, for God's sake, brought their children along -

[But it's not like her own world is devoid of that kind of awfulness. People have turned up for public executions all across history. It's only in recent years that the legal ones have stopped being treated as a spectacle. Using that as a benchmark, her own ancestors were monsters, and not that far distant.]

I still don't understand. If it isn't a game for whatever runs this world, Empress or Sun or... something... even the other you wouldn't say. What is it, really? I know what the other one is, so don't dodge to that.

[disregartist]

...

[She makes herself a tea with some whiskey in it. Does she even get drunk? It doesn't matter.]

For the most simplest reason, as Darwin put it: survival.

[She takes a breath, lets the heat and scent permeate her nostrils.]

Tell me. Did that figment of mine tell you about the Replacement?

[charmingheroine]

No. Maybe to the others, but not to me.

[She stares at the tea, trying to sort her thoughts. Out here the suns can hear. She's been too incautious already. But she has to know....]

Before explaining that, please tell me just what you mean by bringing up Darwinism. Is this meant to find those most suited for life in this world?

[disregartist]

No...not quite. I suppose adaptation is important, but there have been people who have died who might have been far suited to life in Albion then ten Londoners.

[A quiet sip.]

No, it's a question of time. It always has been. Even before the Empress came to the skies. The Replacement merely...complicated the issue to no end.

[charmingheroine]

And I still don't know what that is!

[She's being shrill, but she can't care. This is so close to the answers she wants, but Her Aubergine Highness is still so OPAQUE - she doesn't know how else to respond.]

[disregartist]

[A sigh. The kind a schoolteacher gives.]

An obvious euphemism for what happened to our Earth. The destruction of that world...the people still on it. Everything in the Neath.

By an Earth from another universe.

[charmingheroine]

[Were she from ten years or so later she'd probably be thinking what she just heard sounded like a bad movie, the kind of thing that only exists because the Russians have the Bomb - but she isn't, of course, and so it just sounds like something fished out of the slush pile at Weird Tales. The sincerity of the answer, though - she isn't being sniped at or mocked, this is possibly the most straightforward the Conductor has been.]

Not torn or woven like our worlds, just... suddenly occupying the same space, like it was... as if filling a vacuum?

[She is floored. It's the simplest answer, and the most horrifying.]

[disregartist]

It was the first tear.

[She pauses, cup halfway to her lips.]

Unlike all the others, a deliberate one. But what was that nonsense the Seekers enjoyed saying? 'Every invitation is a betrayal?' One would think they would have known better.

[A quiet drink of her tea.]

[charmingheroine]

They called it in, didn't they.

[She's not sure if that's the worst conclusion she's drawn in all her time here or not. The question that follows is giving it a run for its money, definitely. She had to be careful with phrasing, where the stars might hear, but....]

If there's something out there that controls space and time, something that may be mortal in its own way... do you think it's possible to prevent all this?

[disregartist]

You mean to go back in time. Even with the power of time on her side, the Empress is unable to accomplish this. Much has been done in what can be done with Hours and time-but it only slows time down, or hastens it.

[Sip.]

he only way to go back in time seems to be through a Weft of Unraveled Time. But that is...quite random, as you might have noticed. And dangerous. And really makes the problem worse.

There is no guarantee you will even go back in time and not go forward, in any case.

[charmingheroine]

There's no guarantees of... anything at all, if we just do nothing. That's all you need for evil to take root, isn't it, to give up and stand aside instead of at least trying - ?

[At this rate her tea will have gone as cold as it feels like her blood is - but it isn't as though she'll taste it anyway.]

How many people have told you what I just did, one way or another?

[disregartist]

So many I've lost count.

[A quiet sip.]

But they run under the assumption that nothing whatsoever is being done to address the problem. They-and you-are mistaken.

As I've said. The Little Courtesy is not a game. There is a reason it is played, and why it is time we seek. It is, as I have said, for survival. And-not just ours. Not just London's.

[She places her saucer down.]

Ours is like a sieve. It goes one way, for now. Towards us. But it will not always be that way.

[charmingheroine]

Why do you talk in spirals like this? No, don't answer that.

[She still loathes this woman, still doesn't believe for a hot minute that she isn't deliberately cruel. Still. But there are cracks in that belief too - places rats could get in, were her mind a house.]

Our... what flows one way, our time? The force pulling other worlds into this? If you can't answer that, don't, fine, but... what's the reason?

[disregartist]

...I thought I made myself quite clear.

[???? do people in Charlotte's world not speak vaguely and cryptic but at the same time in such a way as to be understood ever or]

The latter. So far.

[charmingheroine]

[Somewhere, if he still exists, a dead Spaniard was just seized by the memory of a sneeze. And of course people besides him do that, politicians still exist. Or, perhaps, did.

Charlotte grits her teeth, holding back a string of curses that would have made her partner blush before speaking again.]

You've answered what I didn't want to know. The reason, "survival" as you put it... how in any world does this procedure -

[Suddenly, with a recent memory jarred loose by her choice of words, everything clicks into place... or seems to.]

Oh my god. You send the shattered bodies to the Throne -

You're - you're harvesting time?!

[disregartist]

...Yes.

[She sips again.]

I suspect some of your comrades have been cornering that fact, as well. But. Yes. That is the Little Courtesy's aim.

Time was wasted and abused for many years by the powers. Then, London came to the sky and began to waste them. Before the Replacement, conserving the time we still had in reserves was not as pressing an issue.

That, unfortunately, is no longer the case.

[charmingheroine]

So this is all just to - no. You know what?

You're insane - this whole world is insane - and I don't care.

[Charlotte does, of course. That's been the problem this whole time. This is how her best friend might have been made to stop fighting, if he's really still alive; his heart couldn't cope with a world like this, not if he was being kept alone.

She'll regret it, she knows this, but there's a couch a few steps away to collapse onto. She drinks the now merely warm tea quickly, and sets the cup and saucer down roughly as the headache begins to drill itself into her skull. She's done here.]

[disregartist]

...So you say.

[She just goes back to drinking the rest of her cup.




Charlotte, later, whenever she comes to, might notice a blanket on her that was not on her before. There's no sign of who might have out it over her.]