BECMI Chapter 16 – A Study in Time

The main room itself was a study in contrasts. The tables and chairs and all the furnishings were all in perfect repair and intact, and I could see the gleam of the bar’s railings and the polish of the mirror behind it clearly.

However, the floor of the place was filthy, with literally six inches of muck and crap spread all over it and solidified, showing tracks and traces of things moving over and through it, never truly cleaned out.

It seemed the temporal reset didn’t affect something as standard as cleaning the floor off.

Flying about the place and looking in the windows earned the same results. The beds and all the furnishings were fine, but the floors were filthy in most cases… most, but not all.

It appeared someones had been living in several of the rooms, and there had been fights and battles in others, because there were a few places with dead goblins on the floor, weapons strewn about, packs fallen here and there, and even the floors swept and cleaned in places.

All the beds neatly cleaned, folded, and ready for new visitors, of course.

I set down again before the main door, which was standing open so I could look inside. It had been noted to automatically close at dawn, if anything happened to leave it open after going inside, and dust and things could easily blow in.

Oddly enough, I was pretty sure I had a workaround for the situation here.

If not, then I was going to have to find out where everything inside here went, and given the temporal flux, I was pretty sure it had something to do with time travel. If that was so, then I was sure it meant engaging in enough time travel to get back to close to when the Inn was made and occupied, as they certainly had a means of getting people out of here.

I Summmoned up another silvery Celestial Hound, and bade it enter the Inn and then return to me. Happy to do so, the Summoned creature trotted through the doorway, and I watched temporal energies easily stretch and let him in. He turned around, tried to come back out, and was immediately reset back to where he had come from, startling him.

I held up my hand to stop the Hound from continued fruitless attempts to return, instead stretching out and sending magic through the Energized Star Sapphire on its tip.

The BLACK Star Sapphire, which possessed the unique ability of shutting down chronomancy within thirty feet of itself once it was ‘active’.

The magicks binding Time to this Inn were strong, but this was a fundamental conflict with an object that was intensifying natural laws to a massive extent. I reached out slowly, and the influence of Orb pushed on the temporal field steadily, forcing it back, back…

With a swirl of normalization, the barrier of Time parted before the Orb just before it could touch, removing it from the doorway.

“Come out,” I bade the Hound, who happily bounded out and sat down next to me with a gesture.

I pulled back, and the Orb was only a foot away when the Doorward snapped back to full coverage.

Post-Thirty work. Who was so insane as to pour this kind of time and effort into making a building like this? Specifically an Inn?

Did they do it to set up a possible temporal stepping stone across the later centuries? To travel into the future and return? Or just to be able to travel to the past?

Worse, was it just an unintended side effect of using time as a convenient way to replace all the cleaning and resupply situations for the Inn?

Looking at the way the magic was woven, my guess was for the latter. The magic was mono-purpose as far as time went, reading what ‘belonged’ and what did not, and restoring those areas to previous optimal points, literally fresh and brand new, absent all wear and tear, polished, clean, and ready to work. There was nothing involved in the woven spells about something as complex and esoteric as time-travel… but they were fucking with time’s flow so much that naturally something had coalesced here.

I stood there and considered my options, glancing at the Orb on tip thoughtfully.

The Orb that was rippling under its temporal lock in the gammathauma spectrum, around the soul crystal at its heart, which seemed to have tapped into the temporal signature here and was radiating into the higher gammas uncontrollably, as if in reaction to…

I looked up at the stars, and de-powered the Orb. The temporal tides normalized, and the gammathauma fell to normal.

It was plenty obvious once I thought about it, and a good thing I’d come out when it was not daylight.

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Everyone knew the shadenelven king was sending operatives to the surface world. None of those operatives were priests of Gaebrel.

Not a one.

Likewise, in none of my Scrying of the surface world had I heard anything of soul crystals, despite their power being obvious and significant.

The surface would be a far, far better place for the elves to return to, but Gaebrel obviously did not want my people to return to it, while the secular authority obviously did.

It followed that if the soul crystals were the object of major significance for Gaebrel, and those crystals did not exist, could not exist, on the surface, then no, he didn’t want the elves leaving the depths at all. Indeed, all he wanted them to do was go down deep to where the soul crystals existed and mine for them in pursuit of whatever his ambition was.

If this was what patron Immortals were like, I really hated them now.

My Summoned Hound popped back out of existence as I contemplated the Inn in front of me, and the opportunities it represented.

I would need to give orders to my Simulacra in case I was absent longer than expected, and I would need to make some preparations.

I would also need to explore the Inn. I eyed my Sorcery Slots, considered the building in front of me, evaluated my options, and nodded.

I could do this unless there was something immensely powerful inside… and something immensely powerful wouldn’t have left random dead goblins laying around.

I extended , pulsed power, and the veil over the door peeled back. I stepped forward, and entered the Thisbean Inn completely.

The temporal veil snapped closed behind me, and I could feel the lock that took place. It would not want to let me out without some specific permission to do so, just shunting me back a second in time if I tried to leave without some authority.

I tapped back to the Doorward, watched it peel aside petulantly, and stepped back outside, the timelock vanishing as I did so.

Confidence, and having a key to the lock that no one could imagine, a Black Star Sapphire to Time at VIII+1.

I stepped back inside the place, absolutely sure that I could now get out of here, already planning on taking this place as a base of operations for my own. One of the things that would involve is severely curtailing who and what could enter the place, so I was going to have to put some lethal Wards about the place.

And probably inside the place, too. Having one of my Sims remain here to oversee defenses would probably be a good idea, and I could start accumulating resources and storing them here as needed, too.

I looked down at the bones and dirt and hard-packed, almost rock-like mud beneath me. I was walking above them with , but the whole thing was a huge detractor.

This place was going to need a lot of cleaning, I was sure of that.

I looked up and around, searching.

I hadn’t expected my spells to pierce the walls on the inside, but I was mistaken. While the structure was probably impervious to conventional harm, timelocked and restored as it was, my Divs were capable of reaching through the walls and floor and looking for anything else in here.

at VI+1 rippled out. I didn’t need great range, so the Upcasting was designed to penetrate wood and any stone in the way instead.

There was a single hobgoblin on the second floor, hiding in one of the rooms there.

Down in the basement, an Air Elemental was raging around, and I could even hear the distant roar of its flight as it flew about, confined by the closed door and unable to get out of the space.

I could also sense the temporal rift down below, currently shut, that it had most likely come through.

The fear and plans to murder anything that entered rippled off the hobgoblin’s thoughts, while blind fury at being confined dominated the Elemental. I briefly considered my options, then simply glided away, intent on filling in the few blind spots on my Visual File map of this place first, especially the stairways down, before I headed up to remove the hobgoblin as a threat to anything, and then down to the Elemental afterwards.

All supplies of the place were completely in place. It was almost surreal.

Hanging cuts of fine meats gleamed ready to be used, a single large ham partially hacked off, probably by the hobgoblin, while what were probably slashes of frustration with a crude axe had chopped and cut into beef, mutton, goat, chicken, duck, horse, venison, and several other types of meat, including a spread of large fillets of various fish that looked like they’d been caught this morning.

The various barrels of alcohol were all brimming full and ready to be served, an array of wines, meads, brandies, ales, and beers enough to satisfy any palette, even a small cask of fine elven mead available, and I was sure at least one elven wine. I was pretty sure at least one sizable barrel was some very hard dwarven mushroom whiskey, given the kick of it, although I had only a few drops of it. Definitely not something made for an elven tongue…

The thing which brought me up short was the fact that the till was completely stacked with gold, silver, and copper coins, ready to go, and there were even random coins from the day before in the tip bin.

It set off all kinds of alarms in my head.

It was precious metal. It was . There was NO WAY most of the sapients that came through here would not take this, be it from greed or just as collector’s items. Likewise, I did not believe that the totals of the coinage would be replaced by the Inn’s magic, or this place simply would have minted coins every day, hand over fist, and that would certainly have been abused.

None of the creatures involved had left this place through the door. Some of them had died, like the goblins on the floor above. It meant there was another egress, and it was probably the Rift in the basement below.

If they left through the Rift, it stood to reason the coins here did NOT leave with them, and were instead shuffled back into place. Likewise, if they died here, the coins were included in the reset, and set back into place.

That would mean that nobody had exited the place successfully for all these years… and everyone had died. All of the coins were here, none had exited the building…

And none of them had been moved into the future.

There had to be a prohibition on moving the same object into the past. The coins couldn’t accompany any carriers into the past, and if they were going into the future, they’d be missing… they’d all be missing at this point, because the law of averages said that looters took them and some of them should have gone into the future.

Nobody was going into the future.

Hah…