Celestial Garden

“The third moon, known by those who are ignorant of its true nature as the unassuming Dunadin,” Sterling quoted, tapping his fingers against the cover of the book he had gone through some lengths to achieve as previously noted and which nobody else in the room apparently had the capacity to read except Miles, “holds the mortal-immortal avatar which the Grand Lady has used in the past and, we trust, will use again. The edges of time and space themselves expand, an expansion which will throw the balance of the world to ruin unless the Grand Lady Akthech herself regains her former power, in doing so culling this unchecked expansion for the sake of preserving the rest of the world.”
Julien had somehow managed to requisition a very plush-looking swivel chair from some non-Tobias’s Office room in the MRA building and was presently entertaining herself by making experiments into maintaining the most consistent angular momentum with the least effort. “Sounds like a lot of unnecessarily ominous superstition if you ask me. For that matter, why would some random cult of random people decide they needed to pay respect to anyone calling herself the ‘Goddess of Eternal Destruction’? Sounds like they deserve whatever they got if you ask me which you didn’t.”
Sterling pulled his glasses down a bit, sending a brief stab of light into the ceiling above, and stared hard at her from above them. “No, I didn’t. In fact your interruption was decidedly unnecessary. So, if you don’t mind.”
He coughed slightly and continued to quote in the same somewhat theatrical voice, at which Mona (leaning against an opposite wall) sighed and rolled her eyes. “Thus follows the record of the origin of the Great Lady’s avatar in our physical reality, her greatness notwithstanding–”
“To narrate the origins of the avatar thus discussed it is necessary to recreate the origin of the world previous to this one, brought into balance by the Great Lady and her wisdom. That world was opened by the one responsible for this. The origin of the Great Lady lies in the past of the prior universe known as Guardian Island; a goddess designed to begin the government of reincarnation throughout by some enigmatic over-figure who crafted and discarded divinities such as hers on pointless whims. Under such a rule, the Great Lady’s abilities were stifled.
“In the end, it proved too much. The overdeity’s plan, while vague, always shackled her full limits of ability and left her with no freedom to excersize it beyond the limits given to the Great Lady. Her wrath was great, disrupting the physical shells of the Guardian Island for the purposes of reincarnating them into her own plans. And so that world transformed into this over the vast lengths of time common to gods of the strength held by the Great Lady Akthech.”
Tobias briefly interrupted by means of entering through the doorway. “Still around the  boring nonsense level if you ask me. Nicely baroque illustrations, though. Actual gold, isn’t it—General, why are you still in my chair, I was under the impression you had relinquished your temporary position here some time ago, unless I’m completely mistaken.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Wilhelmina said, leaning back in the aforementioned conflict-generating chair. “I just wanted to stay here to hear the neat little exposition wrap-up our temporary former villain seems to be readily able to give us. Compared to what you kept doing to me back then he gets props for at least preparing one before hand.”
Once again, Tobias decided to give up on his own chair and take his secondary one to the opposite side of the desk. “Go on, Mr. Donovan.”
At this point Sterling repeated much the same stare in Tobias’s direction that he had previously executed towards Julien. “Emphasis on my last name, I couldn’t help but notice. Regardless. In the end, there really isn’t much point to continuing; everything beyond that is a basic creation mythos with the primary variation of rambling every so often about this previous world. Nothing’s solid enough to draw factual conclusions from.”
“Apart,” Michael noted, “from the conclusion you managed which came into play. The question then becomes how you knew this particular book would give you an approximate location for the location of Iris Akthech’s physical avatar. That incident was too targeted to be someone rifling through the shelves looking for some nebulous piece of information.”
Sterling smiled, placing the book on Tobias’s desk and perching on the edge of another chair. “I have knowledge of previous incidents involving the Iris personality. At least one of them involved this book specifically, and one other involved an attempted assault on the same subregion of the Galzburg Special Collections. Beyond that, a number of the other incidents involving Iris Akthech from the reports had similar characteristics to the shady data present on record for the problems in the Saxon Research Facility.”
Julien crossed her arms, nodding. “Based on that theory the influence of the avatar while it was under seal probably didn’t stretch further than beyond the surface of Dunadin. It was only once the research began going subterranean that the auto-sentries began being affected by that influence, and at that point it was probably easy for them to begin disposing of anyone who had a reasonable level of resistance to it.”
“At the time that we managed to get there, the sentries had managed to dig most of the chamber out,” Mona said, calmly flicking a lighter she had apparently filched from Michael’s sub-office on the way up. “Past that, something in the rest of the way down towards the core didn’t seem to support further sentry digging, although I’m dead certain there were more ruins beneath it.”
“Probably, the single seal we saw was just the very edge; there was obviously some containment device in the core which got ruptured and caused the primary surface fracturing.” Julien put one hand to her head and dragged her heels on the ground, slowing her relentless spin. “Anyway, based on the way practically every fragment left seems to have dispersed back in to the main rings it looks as though it will be, to say the least, a bit tough to determine which exact theory we should start following from this standstill.”

08 – [Three Months Later]

Cold air swept through the interior of the room, revealing another silouhette standing in the midst of the minor blizzard heading through Galene. Michael’s black coat swirled about him as his feet hit the parquet wood floor, tracking the resulting snow over its red surface towards the table at the very opposite edge.
Julien slammed the edge of the silver watch in her left hand. “Late.”
“Actually,” he corrected, “that’s already two minutes behind anyhow. So. What did you want to speak about this time, then?”
She nodded, tilting the watch back towards herself and scrutinizing it closely. “How did you know that?”
“It’s been two minutes behind since I first got here something like ten months ago. Does the mad scientist aspect completely override you noticing things like that, or is it just me?” The way he clipped off the edge of the question made it quite rhetorical, and he had already somehow materialized a lit cigarette in the distance between blizzard/door and table.
“I wanted to speak to you about one question which has been bothering me. Do you think Dunadin ever existed in this world?”
The skeptical look he proceeded to give her made his answer fairly clear.
In response, she reached under the table and, with only a minor amount of visible strain, managed to retrieve a rather large tome with several different pages marked. Julien flipped it open to one of these, causing the table to reply with a fairly hollow ‘thud’. Rows of dates, times, and measurements filled each page from top to bottom.
“And,” Michael said, drawing out the single syllable for a bizarrely long time, “what does this have to do with anything, much less that?”
“Tidal tables,” she replied. “The date for the destruction of Dunadin was 10 – 17 – 1892, that or the very early morning of 10 – 18 – 1892. Hard to tell in space. But the main issue is here; the tidal patterns don’t change much, but if they changed at all to compensate for the new satellite configuration it would be gradual, not all in one jump. But here, the tide records changed almost overnight to compensate for the loss of Dunadin. It’s as though the entire mass suddenly not only stopped existing in the present, but stopped having ever existed in the past. I strongly suspect it’s based on the reincarnation system and other, related abilities of Iris Akthech, although with no more access for research beyond the hazy mostly mythical resources Miles has at his disposal we probably won’t ever be able to pin it down as a certainty.”
He shrugged. “Good. Now we don’t have to go through a lot of existential problems with agonizing over whether or not we are presently living in the ‘original’ universe, and if so whether or not we’re just copies of the originals. Less angst for me. We all win.”
“… Fine. I did realize you probably had less of an innate need to figure this sort of thing out, but I also didn’t anticipate it would be this low.” Julien closed the cover of the heavy volume with an audible, if papery-muffled, thud.

—

The sun gradually rose over the edge of the sand dunes, the dust-thickened air kicked up from below refracting the light into an extremely red sunrise sky. Sterling watched it, the more intense areas of light reflecting off his glasses and book lying open flat across his crossed legs. Around him a number of other earlier risers, although a crowd almost entirely made of the staff on the liner, still watched the sunrise along with him in equal silence.
He abruptly twitched by reflex as Mona placed a hand on his shoulder, although considering the chair was positioned facing towards the window and away from the blue-carpeted room behind him his surprise didn’t particularly make a lot of sense. After briefly jerking his head around to assure himself of her identity his gritted teeth softened into a slight smile. “Have you gotten any results, then?”
“A few. The central pylons have had to be repaired about twice, though, and the strain of keeping the water out of our dig sites has begun weighing in on much of the shielding equipment. Doesn’t look as though there will be too many heavy issues in the remaining segments of the dig but we should obtain new pylon centers, if only to add some more to reinforce the few which have begin showing cracks.” She examined the pages that were presently displayed for a moment before continuing. “But it’s not as though most of the techniques used to do things like that five hundred-some years ago are going to help us now, so why are you bothering?”
Sterling gave up on humming some odd tuneless series of notes. “You can get ideas from anywhere. Besides, historical interest is worth a lot for m—I thought you would be used to this sort of thing, considering you’ve worked for magometrists before.”
“Most of the others I work for,” she said, sitting in the opposite chair and resting her head on one hand, “don’t divide their thoughts quite this much, you know.”
He shrugged, attention still not straying from the horizon. “Personality isn’t as standard as most people seem to be convinced that it is. Not even within some of the most notable magometrist lines specifically; the Trevelyans of recorded history most definitely don’t match in the slightest for instance.”
Mona swiped a tall, thin glass of some form of whiskey from the table in front of her, and began sipping at it placidly. “If you say so. It’s not just that, though, seems like I have to make exceptions for a lot of my general patterns of magometrist behavior… all because of you. It’s almost beginning to annoy me the amount of disarray you’ve thrown in there.”
The last page in the antiquated book turned, as Sterling finally looked back to other things in the lounge area. “Just don’t do the same thing a number of those I know would do and try to kill me for the sake of reordering your survey data. That wouldn’t actually get you anywhere.”
She paused to blink with a vaguely confused expression. “Well. I’m not entirely sure who on the Sphere you consider people you know, but if I had to comment I would suggest you change who said people are.”
“You didn’t have to comment,” he murmured quietly as he retrieved another, slimmer book—apparently on the same subject, although mildly less antiquated—from the pile strewn about the surface of the table.
A rather lengthy period of silence followed, with Sterling continuing to page through the book and pausing every few moments to note things in the margin and Mona continuing to sip from the glass in her left hand.
By this point the sun had certainly made it to an early mid-morning position, heralding the entry of a considerably larger crowd to the central lounge and as such a considerable amount of people (most of them talking amongst themselves, which although individually quiet added up to a considerable amount of background noise). Most of the crowd filtering in, however, remained self-evidently content to ignore the two sitting far to the opposite side of the door.
“When’s landing?” Sterling asked at last.
“Thirty minutes.”
“Ah.”