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From: hutch@intel.com (Steve Hutchison)
Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn
Subject: [KAN] Prelude
Date: 1 Oct 94 04:07:01 GMT
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This post is copyrighted 1994 by Stephen Hutchison and Spider Boardman.
Distribution and archive through normal Usenet/Altnet procedures is
authorized, all other rights including repost are reserved.

Jac Benson is the property of Spider Boardman.  'Raelf is the
property of Steve Hutchison.

>====<

[This takes place the night of the day following Luthor's party.]


Jac walked out along the long spit of beach that was the only
remnant of the long sand bar north of Generica -- at least, while
the tide was high.  The surf had died down a while ago.  He stood
with his eyes closed for a while, relaxing in the feel of the
wind, the sounds of air and water on sand, and the smells of old
life feeding new life along the shore.  Finally, he opened his
eyes and resumed his walk.  The sun had gone down more than two
hours ago, and the smallest moon was faint on the eastern
horizon.  He looked farther north.

A very small fire was burning at the far end of the spit.  A
blond man in a black wetsuit sat nursing the fire, feeding it
tiny bits of grass and dried seaweed.  Jac drew closer, checking
the scent brought by the wind.  Yeah, it was the one he was
looking for.  He came closer, eyes slitted against the brightness
of the fire.  As he came within shouting distance the blond man
gestured at the fire and it went away.  Jac concentrated for a
moment, forcing his eyes to adapt, and went forward, watching the
line of phosphorescence along the wake of the waves as they
sloshed up and back.

Well, no time like the present.  He stepped forward.

"'Raelf, me bucko!" Jac exclaimed.  "You've been hiding.  Oh, not
from me, exactly, at least not yet," he grinned.  "Still, as one
cat to another, I can tell.  You're acting like one sick or
seriously wounded feline.  That got my curiosity going, of
course.  I think I have a pretty good idea what the problem is,
now.  Not the *why*, you understand, but a fair measure of the
*what*.  Even more, I think there's a good chance I can help."

'Raelf gazed steadily up at Jac for much longer than the socially
accepted comfortable silence.  Finally he leaned back against his
surfboard where he had planted it in the sand.

"Dude, you got nerve.  Still.  Thing is, you're right.  Seriously
wounded.  Yeah.  That describes it."  He stared off to the
horizon.

"You got any idea about the Five Wars?"

Jac shrugged.  "Not by that name."

"They're, like, archetype reflections.  All of 'em turn on the
idea of two great universal forces in opposition, with big kahuna
anthropomorphic incarnations at the center.  Law vs. Chaos,
Justice vs. Wrongfulness, that kind of thing.  Seems I got caught
up in one."

"Ouch!"  Jac considered other responses, but decided to let
'Raelf tell his tale in his own time.

He laughed, hollowly.  "After going to the trouble to die and get
put back to life, and Raye getting murdered and having to get all
her pieces in one place and reattached and unkilled and we're
finally clear and free to be together again, and we get caught in
a damned war."

Jac frowned and slowly shook his head in silent sympathy.

'Raelf stared at the water, watching the phosphorescence fading
and brightening along the crest of the shallow waves.  The rush
of the waves was quiet and the distant bell of the buoy at the
harbor entrance was faintly audible.

"Seems there was this scum dude in the war between Hope and
Despair.  One of the Big Three bad guys, and he got chewed up and
all that was left was this skanky little shred about the size and
shape of an arrowhead."

He stared harder at the water, watching it wet the sand near,
then far.  He half-smiled.  "So, it turns out that one drag side to
the Great Wars, is you can't see 'em coming.  They're pretty much
divination-proof.  Well, not really.  You can see 'em coming in
the stars because they tend to be things like, the end of the
whole bloody world.  Oh yeah, and if you personally are going to
be one of the casualties.  Otherwise they're hard to foretell."

He looked directly at Jac, eyes flickering colors with a faint
light like a firefly, green, blue, amber.

"And the big reason is, the agents in the wars, like the Servants
of Hope and the Children of the Reaver, can't be scried.  It's
not possible -- they don't register, even to each other, without
special work, because the wars happen on the archetypal level and
we only get the echoes here."

'Raelf shook his head.  "Echoes.  Except when they cheat and they
get directly involved.  Like, this badguy thing was named Mar and
all there was of him was the littlest shard of his being.  These
things are holographic beings.  They can grow back into their
full selves from the smallest discernable fragments."

He grinned wryly.  "Useful talent, huh?  So this splinter got into
the hands of a good friend of my friend Jameson Walker and it
crawled into his body.  Back home we've got some parasites
that act like this thing, sneaking into the spirit and feeding on
the life, but they're amateurs next to the Reaverchildren.  So
then this thing started eating the old worn-out gods.  Not much
reality left of them but they had power, or the shreds of it."

The bell rang distantly and an incoherent cursing carried from the
docks, far across the bay.  "Thing would have been ground to
nothing by a real god, even the wimpiest local deities could have
driven it off.  But it went after the defenseless old guys and
ate them and then used their bones to make new baby gods to send
it more power."

Blond hair fell down around his face as he slouched forward.
"We had help.  A Servant of Hope named Dariel came into Nexus and
showed up here in town just as Mar was getting himself set up to
grab enough power to take on all comers.  None of us knew who Mar
was hiding in.  He was good at hiding.  When Dariel showed up he
spotted me and Raye and we recruited him into helping us.  See,
we'd just got the lighthouse, and a month later, this way extreme
storm hit, which we were just able to stop.  The storm wasn't
just the standard issue big wind and killer waves.  The eye was a
solid tornado half a mile across."

Jac blinked, and whistled quietly.  A breeze rose from off the
ocean and began looking for whatever was whistling.  'Raelf's
eyes flashed a very pale blue and it spun around them, stirring
the air just enough to tease at their hair.

'Raelf opened a pocket on his belt and pulled out a long stick of
incense.  It lit when he touched the tip, and smoke tinged with
clove and catnip wafted around, caught by the vagrant breeze,
making faint images to match his words.  Jac shifted to see
better.  'Raelf half-smiled.  "It was a Marid, stolen from the
nursery in the Halls of Air and Water as a seed and force-grown
into something really ugly.  About then was when I ate Kev.  Poor
kid.  His folks got all twisted up by this Mar-god of apathetic
violence.  Nasty bugger.  They killed Kev, just dropped rocks on
him one an hour for a couple days.  Found him in the streets, his
mom brought him to be sacrificed to their god."

"And you stopped that."

"What?  Oh, I killed it.  Sort of.  Filled it full of beacons and
sent the stupid thing off to the far Astral where the nasties ate
it before it could figure out how to get back.  Didn't make up
for Kev's folks."  There was a rough edge to his voice.

Jac squirmed a bit.  "If the memories hurt too much, I'm quite
willing to deal with an executive-level summary."

"No, it helps to talk about it.  Well, I noticed about then that
I was starting to propagate.  See, I don't usually have more than
one timeline.  It's not the way Travellers operate.  We don't
let the forks go past the minimum required for local causality."

He half-snickered and picked up a bit of old clamshell, then
snapped it towards the water.  "So I noticed that I was anchoring
into the reality here by linking into all the available branches.
That's an old family reflex, it's the beginning of a temporal
fugue.  If someone is bound into a whole subtree instead of just
one branch, you can't unroot 'em.  To completely kill them, you
have to destroy all the branches.  My family uses paradox and
timefolds starting when we're kittens, temporal fugue is the way we
fight.  So I knew that somewhere uptime I was going to be in a
major ugly fight."

"Our friend."

"Yeah, it was Mar."  'Raelf pulled three faintly glowing spheres
out of midair and started juggling them.  "What I did, once I
talked to Dariel and figured out what was going on... Raye drew
the short straw and had to build the Warrior mode.  I got to be
the poison bait, which is just as well.  She would have anchored
differently than I did, and Mar could have severed her connections
more easily than when he went after mine.  Anyway, the trick I
used was this."

He flipped the three spheres to Jac.  "Mar was a champion in his
particular war.  He tried to build the arena where he could take
me apart.  I changed the rules a lot while the arena was going up,
and we ended up with the battle between Creation and Unmaking.
Thing is, the rules in that war are a lot more dangerous if you
take the losing side.  Mar split off a third of his being to deal
with me.  I'd made myself _seem_ quite visibly dangerous, took out
three of the fresh-baked gods and made the Guild aware of the
situation."

'Raelf paused while Jack rolled the spheres around on his hand,
across the back and between the fingers.  He smiled as Jac copied
his own contact-juggling moves but in reverse.

"So we had this arena and we were trapped in it.  Mar was too
smart to try right off for Unmaking, because that's the side that
consumes itself and he didn't want to win that kind of thing.  He
wanted to bring things back to his own war, which meant he had to
win on the Creation side.  So we started giving each other gifts.
His really sucked.  Mine were rude too.  I think what won it for
me was giving him free will.  It didn't hurt that Raye took on the
Warrior aspect about then and came after him."

Jac smiled grimly at the last comment.  The wind rose, coming in
off the sea to seek out the vagrant breeze that had come by before.

"One thing about those holographic beings.  They can split off a
chunk of themself and send it off to do dirt and then go off and
do other stuff.  The bigger part of Mar was hiding.  It built this
little pocket of space, too small for Dariel to really work in."

'Raelf stretched, and the breeze, bored, moved off up the beach
towards the city.  "So, in the fighting, we all ended up there,
except the me that you're talking to right now was in the real
world watching the event horizon and anchoring my forks in the
fight.  Dariel won.  He used his own Light to burn away Mar's
darkness completely, and there wasn't much left of him after that."

The blond man paused and looked at Jac.  "Still not too confused?
Good.  The bit of Mar that I had given free will -- see, back
before the trap closed, while we were killing off the pantheon of
dismal, Dariel had gone out and put some things right.  He found
one of the gods that Mar made, a goddess of suicidal misery.  He
healed her.  Her name and her task is Joy, now.  Thing is, the
piece of Mar I was fighting, I'd given it free will, and compassion,
and he saw her and fell in love with her.  So he defended her
from the other part, and then when it was distracted Dariel, uh,"
'Raelf coughed.  "He cancelled Mar out, but meanwhile Joy was all
ripped up."

Jac winced.  The rising wind left it ambiguous whether he'd also
groaned.

"My opponent renamed himself.  Raphael.  Angel of healing.  The
original -- Mar had killed him, I think, before he was defeated.
He put her back together.  My last focus was in Void.  Fifth
ring.  The Raphael dude had no body, he had been hiding out in
another one of the Guild folks, and once he renamed, he had to
give the guy back his own bod.  So I built him one.  But then I
didn't have enough left to remake my own, and besides I was pretty
mauled.  So he's still got me there, in his innards.  I figure
I'll get that part back soon enough.  Thing is, by all the regular
rules I should be able to rejoin all the other tracks, but it
isn't working."

Jac coughed.  "That explains why your Void phase is hidden from
me. That's *not* something I'm used to.  Finding things which
were supposed to be hidden is one of my more obnoxious habits,
especially since it keeps happening by accident."  His face
acquired a distracted look.  "Sometime, if you get the chance,
you should ask my fiancee about her recovery from amnesia."  He
shook as head and returned his attention to his surroundings.
"But--I digress.  As it happens, the twists of attachment to
those 'frozen' selves I can read from you, give me reason to think
that all six of you are required before you can fit back
together.  It'll take ritualistic methods even then."

'Raelf sighed.  "That's what I'm afraid of.  Kev wants to try the
by-parts reassembly first.  'Raf doesn't have the depth left though.
Too much erosion from the curse."  He stared off into the sky, at
the place where the wormhole, the natives called it the Blossom,
opened twice a year.  There was the usual cloudy blue and orange
trace there.  He looked down again.

"Kev's been working out a ritual for fusion.  Trouble is, every
'kan does this just a little bit different, and it's different
each time.  So it's hard to define all the ways it can go wrong
and forestall them."

Jac nodded.  "Yeah.  Lex's Gift is probably handicapped there,
too, since there's almost always a problem with 'seeing' where
one's own self is involved.  Besides, I bet Mar would've been
amused to ensure that handicap.  Well, my own prognostications
come from being a double-talent diviner with additional training
in mystic methods of seeking information.  That might be enough.
I can also act as a sounding-board with a different viewpoint and
an alternate way of looking at things.  Sometimes, that's the
biggest contribution of all."

Taking a breath, he added, "Finally, I have some ability to
'push' on probabilities in a situation where things could go
wrong, especially where the timing of things is a key to
success."

'Raelf grinned.  "I've been wondering if I should have Erik help
out that way.  He's got considerable power on those lines.  Trouble
is, he drags in the raw chaos, and he can't handle Earth, and the
Shades don't work in close tandem very often."

He picked up the glowing spheres from where Jac had laid them
down in the sand.  "They use raw chaos all the time at ShadeHaven,
I'd be surprised if you haven't seen it."

"I've seen traces of it.  My quirky wild-talent luck operates a
bit differently.  In some sense, I surf whatever chaos is already
present, and twist that to my ends.  Net result tends to be a
reduction in entropy."  Jac chuckled.

"Now, you should be wondering why I'm so annoyingly eager to
help."

'Raelf grinned and nodded, "Now that you mention it, why _are_
you so annoyingly eager to help?  What's in it for you?  Other
than the challenge."

"Yeah, that too.  There are a couple of reasons.  One is just
that I can see the strain on you from this continued separation
of you selves, and I get frustrated when I see something like
that and I can't fix it.  That's a general aspect of me, related
to being a healer of sorts, among other things.  The more
specific reason, though, is that I expect to be able to learn
something about how I could safely pull off temporal fugues
myself if I can watch you go back together.  That's the
self-interest motivation, the one you can sink your teeth into,
and maybe even trust."

"Yeahright.  Well, ok.  You haven't been lying.  You haven't been
using undue influence.  And you haven't been hiding anything from
me that you know about."  'Raelf rolled the three spheres around
on his hand and they vanished.  "So I guess I can trust you.  Thing
is, you may not be able to handle the environment where I need
to work on this."

"In those true-forms of mine that you've seen used here, I'd
guess that's true.  However, assuming you're talking about your
actual home environment or something a lot like it, you might be
surprised.  Use your elemental vision to see how I'm looking at
you.  Follow the source of my own elemental perceptions.  I'm
drawing on another true-form for that.  If that form of mine
can't survive where it needs to, it's at least close enough that
I can derive a new one from it pretty easily which will do the
job."

'Raelf stared at him, eyes flickering -- blue of deep sky, hot
yellow flame, deep ocean green, granite grey, and very briefly
the non-color of the Void.  He startled, and looked closer.
"Where did you get the ang... uh, yeah.  That one's pretty good.
You could live in my place for quite a while in that one.  Not
too well in other parts of s'Chsh'k'kan, but it might do for a
visit.  Just a little too flashy, isn't it?"

"A wee tad.  For more reasons than I hope show.  Anyway, how and
where would you like to proceed?"

'Raelf closed his eyes and lay back on the sand.  "For now, I
think I'll put you on hold for this.  I appreciate the offer of
help, and Kev has been looking for someone else to check his rites,
but I'm not convinced yet that all five offspring have to be
present.  And we do need to try our own recom ritual first.
And all the rituals would have to be rewritten to account for
your presence, since you carry a lot of temporal twisting.  I
can't hurry the healing either.  But if our next recom fails,
I'll give you a call."

Jac nodded.  "When should I call on Kev?"

"Oh, any time after dark.  He's got to be a kid during the day
so the Little Rat can have someone else to care about.  She's
quite the caretaker type.  She even tries to mother Iradeth,
y'know, and Iradeth is ... five years older, I think."

"Heh," Jac chortled.  "How'd y'all end up with her, anyway?
She's pretty much straight human."

"My not-a-ranger-but-I-play-one-on-tv friend Lancos decided to
bring her by our place almost a year ago.  Her mother died when
she was four or five, and an older street rat adopted her for a
while, but he got killed in the gang wars and she's been on her
own since then.  Lancos was afraid the Gutt Man would get her.
Gutt's a local psycho, usually doesn't get the chance to hurt anyone,
but he stole one of Lancos' better swords.  Anyway, he's been
after the Rat for a while.  So Lancos dropped her by our place.
Don't think he understood how seriously we take it when someone
asks us to raise a child."

"Which is?"

"We don't let go our kids until they can handle themselves in
the world, against the nastiest things they're likely to come
up against.  Yeah, I know," 'Raelf said, "you can't prepare 'em
for everything.  But you can come close enough for jazz."

"Yeah.  You train 'em and launch 'em, and hope they fly."  Jac
shook his head.  "Back to the subject -- If you let me know when
your next attempt is, I'll pray for your success."

'Raelf sat up, and stared in Jac's direction.  "I... Yeah, sure.
Go ahead.  It might help.  You're not calling on the locals, so
it won't hurt.  I expect it'll happen tomorrow sometime."

"OK.  Hey, how cold is the water?"

"Not bad.  Warm current from the south.  About 22 C.  You might
want to ward against sharks if you're going in swimming."

"That's all right," he grinned ferally.  "I bite 'em back."  Jac
stood, abruptly, and trotted to the beach.  There was a splash
and a flash of moonlight and a dark shape arrowed off just under
the waves.

"OK," 'Raelf said to himself.  "Fine."

He waited a moment for the sound of shark-attack and shrugged.
A black fin moved across the water.  'Raelf grinned.  "Play nice
with the fishies."  He touched the keel of his surfboard and the
runes along the side and bottom began to glow.  It floated up into
the air.  He jumped on, and headed for the Lighthouse.