Magic Murder Cube Marine

“Wow, that is quite well stated. Eloquent, even.” Jack said sarcastically. Then he saw the sour expression on Francis' face and quickly made a course correction. “Sorry, that was unkind of me. I realized after I said it that I sounded like a total wanker.”

“It's all good.” Francis said with a nod. The Marine was warming up to Jack now that they had gotten over the initial weirdness. “I know I'm not exactly great with words. But I am trying to do better.”

“That's all we can do, eh? Try and fuck up a bit less each time, hope we get better.” Jack shrugged, tossing a grape in the air and catching it in his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully. “It's alright. You're a smart boy, you'll figure it out eventually.”

The dust hound was feeling much better now that his health wasn't in the single digits. He had gratefully accepted Francis’ old purple robes and staff. Jack didn't seem surprised when the robes adjusted to fit him an hour later.

Francis envied the way Jack effortlessly adapted to his surroundings. The dust hound seemed completely at home and relaxed, except for one small detail. Jack kept looking at his hands and frowning.

“Something wrong?” Francis asked.

“No, I suppose not. But also, yes. I'm not used to being flesh and blood. It feels… weird.” Jack sighed. “I haven't run a full organic chassis since…” His voice trailed off as he got lost in a distant memory. “Well, certainly not for a good long while.”

The dust hound shook his head. “I'm used to being functionally immortal. Being this fragile is… disconcerting.”

“So how did you die?” Willow asked, “Champions come here after they die in their world.”

“Old age.” Jack explained, “We have a hard limit of two hundred years. I was doing my victory lap, as we call it, when time ran out. Apparently this is where I go next.” He chuckled sadly, letting his mask fall for a moment. “It's a shame, I had hoped I'd see my friends again. But I guess they made other arrangements.”

“I miss my friends too.” Francis said, understanding the pain of separation. “But if there is a way back I'll help you find it.”

Jack looked at Francis for a moment. He seemed to be trying to reach a decision. “I don't think that’s possible.” He said, struggling over the unpleasant news he was about to deliver.

The dust hound made a guilty face like he had just been caught going through the trash. “Maybe we come from different dimensions or something weird like that. But in my timeline, Earth was destroyed shortly after they discovered faster than light travel. So you might not have a home to go back to.”

Francis felt his mouth go dry. “Uh, say that again.”

“Earth was destroyed long before I was born.” Jack explained. “So either you’re from a parallel dimension, or more than likely, we're from the same place but different times.”

“Oh.” Francis looked at Willow for clarification. Because he hoped that didn't mean what he thought it did. The idea that his whole world had been destroyed was too much for his brain to handle. He had to be misinterpreting it.

The death cleric put her hand on his arm. “We don't know how it all works. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to why champions come here. So Jack could be right, or maybe he's wrong. There's no way of knowing for sure.”

“Sorry, mate.” Jack winced. “But I'm pretty sure there's no going back. Causality won't let you.”

“What?” Francis asked. “Why not?”

“Time travel is impossible. I'm not going to go into the science of stew theory, but you can't even send a message into the past.” He shook his head.

Stew theory was string theory’s much tastier cousin. It stated that everything that had or would ever happen already had. We merely interpreted events as happening in sequence due to our limitations as mortal creatures. In essence, reality was a stew, and the only way to change the past was to make another stew entirely from scratch.

“Wherever or whenever we are, I don't think there is a way back. But, there may be a silver lining.” Jack’s ears perked up as he made the realization. He was the kind of person who figured things out as he talked through them.

The dust hound smiled and wagged his tail. “Because if this place is the last stop, maybe that means our friends will show up here eventually. Maybe we're just the first ones to the party, or showed up at the wrong address.”

“So you're saying we probably can't go home, but we might not be alone?” Francis chewed on this new information. “Ok, so that means we should find a way to send up a flare or something. Let them know where we are and how to find us.”

“Yeah!” Jack agreed. “Let's fucking do it!”

Willow watched the two champions bond over a shared desire to be reunited with their friends. It was cute, in a way. They were like two boys at boarding school sharing stories about their friends back home.

“Man, I hope I see Ammo Dump and Babyface again.” Francis said with a smile. “They would love it here.”

“Why do they call him Ammo Dump?” Jack asked.

A glint appeared in Francis' eye. “Well, we were waiting for them to clear these mines, and we couldn't get out of the vehicle…”

***

Once Jack was getting settled in and Willow was off with Julia and Shiv planning the wedding, Francis grabbed two bottles of beer and went for a walk.

It was that bullshit time between afternoon and evening when it was too late to get started on anything and too early to call it a day. Francis walked down the main street, looking for a good spot to sit down and think.

The ruined city reminded him of his time in the desert. The shops and dwellings had that same rectangular construction and hard edges. Which he realized was at odds with the way the rest of the city was built.

Francis wandered inside one of the dwellings to get a better look. The windows facing the street were covered with clay privacy screens, the wooden shutters that covered them having long since rotted away.

He could feel the vaguest hints of an idea forming as he looked at the black stone that formed the walls. The blocks were slightly irregular, the gaps between them filled in with black mortar to hide the seams.

There were also shelves and benches built into the structure itself. In the kitchen a stone wash tub stood, permanently fixed into the counter. It was as much a part of the structure as the stone roof. Though, that had begun to crumble as the wooden supports rotted away.

“Huh, weird.” Francis said as he realized something else that didn't quite fit. “Where does all the rainwater go?”

He looked up at the roof and saw it was tilted towards the street, instead of away from it like he would have expected. And the angle was surprisingly shallow for a place where they probably got a decent amount of snow.

It wasn't built like Riverlark, with its steeply peaked roofs and Renaissance architecture. That was when Francis realized part of what was bugging him so much. The city didn't feel like a medieval mountain town.

He traced the path water would take down from the roof and found a storm drain. The smell of rot and decay wafted out of it. He followed the street, looking for an access point.

The houses were separated by stairs going down the mountain every few hundred meters or so. He found an access door near one of those sets of stairs on the inner curve of the spiraling road. It was sealed shut, but looked breakable.

Francis picked a building at random and went looking for a bathroom. Sure enough, he found one, complete with basic indoor plumbing. That meant they had storm drains, sewers, city planning, and he had even spotted some fountains on the side of the road.

The fountains were dry now, but they would have provided water for anyone who didn't want to haul it up the mountain. They were made of the same black stone as everything else, decorated with intricate carvings of skeletons pouring water from clay jugs. Francis made a mental note to check the fountains for lead. He remembered something about that fucking up ancient cities.

Francis couldn't imagine how else a city so advanced could fall into ruin like this. There had to be some fatal flaw he was missing. Brexis had been a paradise, centuries ahead of everyone else. So why had it died?

He took a deep breath and gripped his staff. What was coming wouldn't be pleasant. But Francis needed to know if he was going to do better this time.

“Relativity," he said. “Tell me how Brexis fell.”