Chronal Disassociation Ch. 54 (Patreon)

Two months passed in a blink of an eye. Too fast for Lena’s liking. Throughout that time, neither she nor Archer had brought up the argument that they had. Sure, they continued to talk. They continued to train and work at the Overwatch base, and outwardly, there were no issues.

Especially since, even though Lena knew she was well within her rights to be angry at him, she also had to concede that Archer was right.

Emily will always be a target, now more than ever. Already, Overwatch’s enemies had shown that they were more than willing to employ assassination tactics if they so wished. 

If Emily was going to be in danger, Lena would rather be the shield standing right in front of her than a worried voice on a comms channel halfway across the world.

So, she had done exactly what Archer suggested. She swallowed her pride, marched straight into Strike Commander Morrison’s office and demanded the security compensation. Morrison, looking more tired than she had ever seen him, hadn't even argued. Now, their flat had reinforced doors, silent alarms connected directly to the nearest Overwatch station, and a rotation of private security detail funded by the UN budget. Thankfully, since she was technically still owed some compensation from the whole Slipstream incident, the budget for that came without too much trouble.

Other than paperwork, of course. That was just damn painful at the best of times.

All in all, it made leaving London slightly easier, though the knot in her stomach hadn’t fully unraveled.

"You’re doing it again." Emily’s voice cut through the dry heat, pulling Lena out of her thoughts.

Lena blinked behind her sunglasses, shifting the duffel bag on her shoulder, "Doing what, love?"

"That thing where you scan the perimeter like you’re on patrol." Emily teased, squeezing Lena’s free hand, "We’re on holiday, Lena. Try to turn off the tactical visor for a few days? Overwatch isn't going to collapse just because you took a couple weeks off."

They were standing outside the Albuquerque International Sunport, waiting for their rental. The New Mexico sun was a different beast compared to the dreary grey of London. It was a sharp, dry heat that seemed to bake the pavement beneath their feet. Lena absolutely loathed it.

"Old habits, Em. You know how it is." Lena offered a sheepish grin, though her eyes still darted toward a passing shuttle bus.

"She’s right, you know."

Archer was leaning against a pillar a few feet away, looking entirely too comfortable in a simple dark t-shirt and jeans. It was jarring to see him out of his usual combat attire or the distinct red coat. He looked...human. A civilian. If one ignored the fact that he was carrying three heavy suitcases as if they were filled with feathers.

"If there were threats here," Archer continued, adjusting his own sunglasses, "I would have sensed them before we even touched the tarmac. If I were you, I’d take the win."

A sleek, hover-capable SUV pulled up to the curb. The doors opened automatically, and a chipper voice told them that their ride was here. Archer tossed the luggage into the back with a flick of his wrist, "Shotgun."

"Hey! I’m the wife, I get shotgun!" Emily protested, laughing as she raced him to the passenger door.

Lena watched them for a second, the tension in her shoulders easing just a fraction. This was the scene she wanted to protect. Emily laughing, light and carefree, far away from the prying lenses of the paparazzi and the looming shadow of the internal investigations back at HQ.

If Archer was right about de Kuiper - if this "vector" was really here - then this trip was going to be anything but a holiday for two-thirds of their party.

They piled into the car, the air conditioning blasting a welcome relief against the desert heat. This time, it was Lena driving, surprisingly because Archer didn't actually know how to drive a hover car. She supposed that his experience only really carried with the older style of vehicles and not the visual overload that was the modern car.

As the vehicle hummed to life and merged onto the highway, the landscape began to unfold.

It really was like a movie set. The description of "Space Western" hadn’t done it justice. To their left, vast mesas of red rock stretched out toward the horizon. To their right, a mag-lev train zipped by on a suspended rail that ran across the horizon.

"It’s beautiful." Emily breathed, pressing her hand against the window.

"It better be with this bloody heat." Lena smiled at her wife, before she looked at the rearview mirror, catching Archer’s eyes. The playfulness had vanished from his face, replaced by that steel-grey focus she had seen in the flat two months ago.

He gave a nearly imperceptible nod, then looked away, staring out at the desert.

"So." Emily turned in her seat to face Archer in the back, "What’s the itinerary? You booked everything, so I assume you have a plan that doesn't involve us sitting in a hotel room."

"Santa Fe first." Archer said, his voice shifting back to a casual drawl. "I got us rooms at a place near the Plaza. Historic, good food, plenty of art galleries for you to drag Oxton to."

"And you?" Lena asked, the subtext heavy in her tone.

"Cassidy asked me to get a few replacement parts for his revolver." Archer said smoothly, "Boring stuff that I'd rather get done now than later. I figured I’d leave you two to have a romantic dinner tonight while I handle that."

Lena gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. Handle that. That meant assessing de Kuiper. That meant determining if a scientist needed to be neutralized because he was a walking door for an Outer God. And doing it all under the nose of whatever government oversight was running the facility.

It was telling that Archer didn't even mention where said facility was. He wanted her in the dark as much as possible, plausible deniability and all that.

"Don't have too much fun without us." Lena said, forcing a lightness she didn't feel.

"I doubt fun will be part of the equation." He said it jokingly enough that Emily snorted. Lena could only give a forced chuckle.

As the miles ate away beneath them, driving deeper into the heart of the American Southwest, Lena couldn't shake the feeling that they were driving straight into the eye of a storm. Archer had promised to keep Emily safe. Lena had promised herself the same thing.

She just hoped that whatever Archer found in that facility didn’t bite them in the arse.

…

Klironomia.

The Clock Tower.

Outer Gods.

Having one of those exist in the modern day wasn’t too much of a head scratcher. Certainly, they would be troublesome, but nothing about them existing would have worried him. No, that was a lie. He certainly would have been worried had the Clock Tower still existed, as they would have stopped at nothing to get their hands on the other two, or maybe would have been the cause of those in the first place.

Yet it didn’t. The Clock Tower was empty. There were no more magecraft users that he could find in the one city that should have been one of the pillars of the Mage’s Association.

All signs pointed to a catastrophe that befell the magi of the Clock Tower. Yet, if it had, the actual buildings would - should - have taken the brunt of whatever attack it was. The non-magically inclined should have felt the repercussions of whatever it was.

But, nothing.

No police reports, no social media posts. Other than the Church’s Papal Records, there was nothing. And even then, it was only a suspicion on his part. Nothing had been confirmed, until that encounter with O’Deorain.

The pieces were all right in front of him.

December 31, 2018. New Year’s Eve. The one record he couldn’t understand.

The day that the Alien God and the Crypters declared war on humanity and Chaldea.

Somehow, some way, even though Chaldea had clearly won as evidenced by their current world, vestiges of the Alien God and the Lostbelts must’ve clawed out and ended up in Proper Human History. It wasn’t too much of a stretch - Qin Shi Huang, Ivan the Terrible, and Skadi had all somehow retained their changed existences after summoning them, not even mentioning how Arjuna shouldn’t have the power of all the Hindu gods contained without going insane.

Perhaps the Texture of the World had been scrubbed clean, rewritten to exclude the supernatural to prevent the Alien God from anchoring itself again. A hard reset. A firewall installed by the Counter Force or some other desperate contingency to deny the enemy a foothold.

But nothing is ever perfect. Cracks remain. Debris drifts from the void between dimensions.

And Siebren de Kuiper, a brilliant astrophysicist obsessed with the harness of gravity, had stared into one of those cracks.

The problem wasn't just that he had stared. It was that something had stared back.

That crack would have allowed Mystery to flood and revert the Texture to what it once was. But, like retrieving deleted files from a computer, some errors remained. While the idea of magecraft was back, the small details - say the magi themselves - were lost.

Yet that still wouldn’t explain everything.

For one, the amount of technological advancement was just too fast. There was fundamentally something different that happened between the start of Chaldea’s operations to the present that increased humanity’s progress by decades, if not centuries. Many would think that this was just the natural inclination of humans to go forward, but that was not the case.

To put it bluntly, the world as it stood was too clean, literally. Humanity had somehow achieved total clean energy output with cold fusion, and had made them small enough that every single Omnic was powered by miniature fusion cores.

And that was over thirty years ago.

That meant that humanity had progressed from fossil fuel based power in the 2010’s, to discovering, implementing, and converting all major power grids to fusion technology by late 2020’s, because the omniums were all built after that technology was already widespread. 

That was a ludicrous amount of progress.

Unless there was an accelerant. Something that pushed the pieces into place before they were naturally ready to fall.

A civilization that advances too quickly usually hits a wall. It burns out. Or, in the eyes of the Quantum Time-Locks, it deviates too far from the Human Order and gets pruned. 

The fact that it survived, that it thrived and integrated the very machines that tried to kill it, suggested a stabilizing factor. Or a manipulation so subtle it had bypassed the World’s immune system entirely.

Emiya's eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses as the sprawling adobe architecture of Santa Fe came into view.

Mina Liao.

The name kept circling back to the front of his mind. One of the founders of Overwatch. The creator of the Omnics. A woman who, by all accounts, was a genius of unprecedented scale. But was it just genius? Or was it inspiration from a source that shouldn't exist?

"We're here." Lena’s voice broke his concentration.

The SUV slowed to a halt in front of a hotel that looked more like a historic mission than a place of lodging. Adobe walls, exposed wooden beams, and the smell of roasting chiles in the air.

"Oh, it's lovely," Emily said, opening her door and stepping out into the late afternoon sun, "Look at the turquoise on the door handles! Archer, you actually have taste."

"I try." Emiya remarked dryly as he stepped out, instantly dismissing the heavy philosophical dread in favor of the persona of a helpful travel companion. He pulled their bags from the trunk, "Check-in is under Oxton-O'Hara. I’ve already forwarded the credentials."

"You're not coming in?" Lena asked, taking the handle of her suitcase, her eyes scanning the lobby entrance.

"I have an appointment, remember? Gunsmithing waits for no man." He lied with the ease of a man who had spent lifetimes lying, whether to himself or others, "I'll be back late. Don't wait up."

He watched them go inside. He watched Lena subtly position herself between Emily and the automatic doors, checking the corners of the lobby before allowing her wife to proceed to the desk. She was learning. Good.

Once the glass doors slid shut behind them, Emiya's demeanor shifted. The casual slouch evaporated. In his hand, a dagger of a king. The presence of the man standing on the sidewalk vanished, replaced by a void in perception. To the passersby, he was suddenly uninteresting, a shadow in the corner of their eye that warranted no attention.

The facility wasn't in Santa Fe proper. It was thirty miles out, buried beneath a nondescript government relay station. A black site designed to hold things that defied physics, preventing any unauthorized personnel from getting in or out.

Emiya would only need five minutes.

…

A/N: I think by now, it’s obvious that when I have an Emiya perspective, I always start with Lena. Next chapter, from the rough draft I have now, will almost certainly be from Emiya’s perspective completely.