“What is this [Soul Bonded] skill?”
The words ran through my head a second time as my brain locked up for a moment. I gave my head a quick shake to clear it.
Regaining my senses, I let my mind and perceptions speed back up to their full system enhanced levels from where I’d slowed myself in order to interact at a more normal non-immortal stat level.
This couldn’t be her. Alex isn’t supposed to be here for another 78 years. Neither was I, for that matter, so clearly someone fucked up the timeline, and for once, it wasn’t me. At least, I was pretty sure I didn’t do this. Really seems like the sort of thing I’d remember.
But no, I felt my own [Soul Bonded] skill grab hold of its link as it gave me a mental tug in the direction of this woman. I could see her start to subtly flinch as the flood of notifications undoubtedly started flooding in, forcing her skills and classes to level up from the excess of experience flowing through our link. Definitely my Alex, then. I was going to have a lot of explaining to do, but first, I needed to make sure I got her somewhere safe before the [Champions] received some divine inspiration to come find us.
I gave the room a quick scan, but thankfully no one was looking in our direction.
“I can explain, but not here. When is your shift over? No, forget that, too long. Where’s your supervisor?”
Alex pointed to a bored looking elven man in a purple robe seated behind a desk, leaning back in his chair, feet kicked up on top of said desk, book in hand. From the cover and title, it appeared to be a rather steamy romance involving a werewolf and a rabbitkin. Well, to each their own, I guess; I'd read my share of questionable literature in my lives that I sure wasn't one to judge anyone's choice in recreation.
Elves. They could be miserable to deal with if you weren’t also an elf, but some of them were completely reasonable people. I looked back to Alex, asking, “Do you think he’ll make a fuss if I ask you to show me where to collect my packages and how to get to my newly assigned housing?”
“I don’t.. Maybe? I don’t think I care.” I watched as the customer service mask melted off Alex’s face and transitioned to a much more genuine expression displaying concern and a little bit of fear. “You need to explain this shit, and if it’s as important as you’re alluding to, then let’s just go.”
“Fair enough. Let’s get my crates first because there are some things in there that I need for part of the explanation,” I told her.
Alex nodded and gestured toward the door at the back of the room, “Over this way, then. Since you’re faculty, no one is really going to make a fuss about us leaving.”
“Lead the way.”
I rounded the table, avoiding stepping on the catatonic cultivator at my feet, and together we turned to leave. Alex’s supervisor looked up from his desk and raised an eyebrow at us. I waggled my eyebrows in a suggestive manner back at him. He rolled his eyes and gave us a dismissive wave as he looked back down at his book.
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Behind the door was, predictably, a corridor. One of my iterations had been here during the most recent reconstruction of the school, but I didn’t have those memories pulled up from deep storage at the moment. I had expected that I’d have at least 75 years to explore before Alex showed up as a student, so maybe I’d have to rethink the usefulness of those memories. She pointed down one direction, “The large deliveries are stored down this way.”
The hallway was uninteresting as one might expect from a hallway, and we soon stopped at another door. Behind the door was a predictably normal storage room, and I spotted a line of several similar looking crates on the floor beneath some shelving. I didn’t really feel like walking over and checking each one to figure out which of the two were mine, so I closed my eyes and focused on [Reflow], which my metal manipulation had merged into several lifespans ago. After only a moment, I felt a space filled with different metals that my skill slid right off of. “There you are,” I muttered as I walked over to the two crates sitting side by side. Once I was close enough that the labels were in line of sight, I could see my name on them, confirming that I had found the correct ones.
[Deliver to: Ada, School of Spellcraft and Sorcery]
As the merchant had promised, it had only taken a day to collect everything I had requested, or at least I assumed it was everything. I’d need to check the crates later, once we got to somewhere a bit more secure. I reached out and compressed the space around each crate. Now that they were each no larger than a puzzle cube, I crouched down to pick each one up and dropped them into my bag of holding. I stood and turned back to Alex. “Alright, that’s done. Are you ready to go find out how deep this rabbit hole goes?”
She gave me a familiar look of exasperation, further cementing in my mind the fact that this was definitely my Alex. System skill fuckery aside, even if she couldn’t remember anything about our life back on Earth right now, that look she was giving me now could not be faked. The way she scrunched her eyebrows, the thin line of her mouth, and the squint of those eyes had never been duplicated by anyone else in all of the lives on all of the many worlds I’d had to endure just to get myself back to this moment. From the very first time I’d failed to protect her until now had been abject misery, and I never wanted this to end. I could very nearly make that happen, but we still had to get to somewhere I could make safe, and I had a very long story to tell.
“Alright then,” I said. I turned and had very nearly started to open a [Gate] directly from here to the front door of the house she’d picked out for me when she reached out and grabbed my arm, interrupting the calculations I was working on to account for the current velocity of the flying island, which was at the moment accelerating.
“Wait a minute, can you give me anything before we go any further? I really don’t understand anything about what’s going on,” Alex said.
“Right, OK. That is a very long story, and incredibly brief overview.. Have you ever heard of a twin flame soul? No, of course not. Well, we’re very rare, and I only know of one, maybe two other pairs like us. We share two halves of what was once a single soul. Essentially, I am you, and you are me. Or at least the best I’ve been able to piece together is during our very first life we were, anyway. That life ended abruptly when we were murdered, and then the same asshole who murdered us ascended and tore our soul apart out of rage and spite. Fortunately, the fucker was then immediately shredded in his entirety by every single other ascended god from our race for doing so. Unfortunately, they couldn’t stick our soul back together, and so we’ve been cursed to have to go through our lives as separate people, trapped in the same cycle until we’re able to ascend together and restore ourselves. There is one god in particular who isn't exactly happy about all that I've been doing in an attempt to reunite with you, and right at the moment, I'm worried that she's going to send her minions after us and kill you again.”
Alex just stared at me, eyes wide, until finally she blinked and shook her head. “Wait. What?”