Save State Hero 3 -ch 9-

Chapter 9

Edmund frowned, looked at his phone, then looked back to the portal Dot held open.

“Dot… would you close it briefly for me? Just something like… ten seconds. Please time it?” Edmund asked, still watching the clock on his phone.

“Alright, Teddy,” Dot murmured, watching him with a warm smile. A spell quickly formed in her hands and began spiraling about, snapped together, then vanished.

At the same time that the portal closed.

Edmund clicked the stopwatch function on his phone and watched it. Readying himself to stop it the moment the portal re-opened.

Seconds ticked by.

Ten seconds.

Then thirty.

An entire minute passed.

Raising his eyebrows, Edmund only now understood what’d been said previously was true. This place was indeed suffering from a magical calamity, but it might be one that intersected with issues in time.

Blowing out a breath, Edmund stuck his phone in his pocket and looked to Iren, Alina, and Ellie. The latter two were still standing under Iren’s wings as the three of them talked to themselves.

Hesitating at interrupting them, Edmund instead looked back to the point the portal should be opening.

Rather than just standing there doing nothing, he instead opened up his Save-States, but did it in a way that would allow time to continue. It was something he had learned to do with the constant times and points in his life as of late where he just stood around waiting.

Looking at his Save-States was better entertainment a lot of the time than just standing around waiting. Because even if he looked to his phone, or something else, more often than not he’d already drained all the entertainment out of it.

It wasn’t as if the world changed despite Edmund making changes to his own life.

This time though, he decided he wanted to poke at something he had been somewhat avoiding.

Or rather than something, someone.

Leveraging his own timeline, his own life, Edmund went right back to the starting point of his own existence. All the way to the point that existed before this world existed.

Taking Adeena’s lessons had gifted him with a great deal more control over his power now. He had been experimenting with it quite a bit and found that things were far more malleable than he’d ever thought they were.

Using that Save-State as the starting point, Edmund began moving the world forward. He watched was Runner and Ryker finished crafting him, set him to the side, and then began putting together the base elements of the universe.

This was the point that he had wanted to see in fact.

Leaning into his power, Edmund kept the world moving along as he waited for what would inevitably be Time. Time was going to need to be spoken to about the situation in regards to Skipper as well as Australia it seemed.

He watched as Runner and Ryker seemed to summon people into being into the room they sat. As if it were perfectly natural. That it wasn’t two gods building out the universe itself.

Edmund spotted Adeena when she was fashioned into the world.

“Oh,” Edmund murmured to himself and grinned, peering at the young woman. She looked just as she always did to him, but it also wasn’t his personal Adeena. This was the sad young woman hiding away in a world that didn’t need or seem to want her.

This was quite similar to how Edmund saw Dot and Dot-E. Same woman, technically, but a different person entirely. Adeena was not the same woman that he now saw in his Save-state.

Edmund kept things moving until it seemed no one else was being brought forth. There were no more universal entities to shape the fabric of reality with.

Grasping the Save-state firmly, Edmund looked into each person there. Looked into them and their Save-states.

He most certainly didn’t look into Runner or Ryker, however. The less he knew about those two gods the better off he was. Edmund genuinely felt that even his current awareness of them risked him in ways he couldn’t explain or understand fully.

One by one, Edmund flicked through them, until he found who he was looking for.

Time.

She was a young woman with bright-blonde hair, pale blue eyes that almost looked gray, and a face and figure that would be mundane and forgettable. Edmund could have run into her repeatedly and never remembered her without something calling her to his attention.

Holding onto her Save-states, Edmund then drew them out into a time-line. It ran paralell to his own in many ways. There were a number of times that Time had multiple splits of reality, though they all ended quite quickly. As if any choice other than the she made ended in some true tragedy.

When he reached the start of his own life he saw that Time and he intersected often.

Repeatedly.

Multiple points where he had apparently come across her in one way or another. Starting with his point of birth and where his parents found him. As if Time had been present for it but hadn’t intervened directly.

Following it from there, he could pick out each and every point Time was present in his life, but hadn’t interacted with him. Leading upward, outward, he traced it all the way down to this moment.

Time was actually with him, right now.

Watching him, watching her life, and the exact moment they intersected once again.

“You’re here, Time?” Edmund asked, taking hold of her Save-state and giving it a light squeeze. “Rowan. Rowan Elise. Your name isn’t as ostentatious as Adeena’s.”

There was a light shimmer that went through the world, followed by the young blonde woman simply appearing before him.

Iren, Ellie, and Alina were all now looking at him and the new arrival.

“Yes, my name is quite simple and direct,” Rowan stated in a crisp, proper tone. Almost without any inflection at all. “Why’re you running down my timeline?”

“Trying to figure out what’s going on here in this place,” Edmund answered directly. “I figured I could sit here and wait for the Save-state to shift or change, record it, and make a note of it. Or just ask you directly. Save some time.

“That and maybe chat with you about Skipper but… looking at your Save-states, I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t you that caused the Skipper issue. But a different Save-state version of you.

“Are you unlike my Adeena who seems to be everywhere all at once, but locked to one timeline and one reality?”

Rowan opened her mouth, stared at Edmund, blinked, then closed her mouth with a shake of her head.

“I am most certainly not like Adeena. Or… the Adeena you know, now that I look. Her time is fractured. As fractured as your own,” Rowan mumbled then looked to the other three women. “Or as fractured as any of you are.

“You’re right to guess how you did. I exist in one instance, in one timeline, and nowhere else. I am time and all things have a start and an end.

“Even you do, you just… happen to have a number of ending points. Some are… quite strange. Looking at you has always been disorienting.”

“Got it. So there is multiples of you, one for each timeline,” Edmund simplified. “And the Rowan from the timeline that I walked Skipper to the end of time in, let that Skipper loose. Now Skipper is using her power as if she were that Skipper.

“This is all so… very confusing. There are times I barely can keep it all in my head.”

“I think you’re correct. Skipper also has many strange ends. I see a number end with you killing her. As well as Felix, surprisingly,” Rowan stated, staring at him. “As to this location, yes, time has been savaged here.

“A number of magical spells and artifacts went off here. A large number of them. As well as a few portals that opened up and spewed out their contents here that really didn’t help at all.

“This continent exists in a version of time that can be in the past for elsewhere on the planet, as well as be in the future,” Rowan clarified, without making it any easier. “You’re in a portion of the continent where time is moving backward, rather than forward, for another six or seven months. Then it’ll move forward again at a much faster rate to catch up at a point about three months from now.

“It’s quite the mess here. This isn’t my plane of existence, so it isn’t my chore to tend, tidy, or work with it. This particular world didn’t have universal agents such as myself.”

Edmund blinked at the information.

A sudden and blunt thought slapped him directly and left him standing somewhat stunned.

There were multiple planes of existences, rather than just multiple planes. That there were universal agents, Fate, Time, Luck, Justice, in some of them, but not all of them.

It also explained why death in the battle with Zeus was such an issue.

There’s no universal agent of Death there, is there?

That’s what the whole issue is.

Blinking several more times, Edmund nodded his head at that information.

“Wanna tell me how long I’d end up waiting for Leila, Red, and Sam here?” Edmund asked instead of what his thoughts were. His thoughts felt like fragile things at the moment that would destroy him in a way if he put too much effort into them.

“About two months. Give or take a handful of days. Time can shift randomly here based on who’s here,” Rowan answered with a nod of her head. “Dot won’t be opening the protal for another six months though. For you, time will pass a great deal, to her, only ten seconds will move by.”

Shaking his head, Edmund contemplated how to really handle this continent. It didn’t seem like something that one could plan really well for if you weren’t careful about it.

Though you could also use it as a strange sort of time machine.

“Don’t,” the incarnation of Time interjected quickly. “Don’t… try to go back in time from here. This world won’t support a paradox and you’ll just end up inhabiting your body from six months ago, rather than meeting yourself. You’ll also just forgot you’ve even done it.

“Time is only problematic here, not anywhere else. Anywhere and everywhere else just rejects anything that isn’t at the right time here.”

“Then how did Dot’s portal work to begin with?” Edmund asked, confused.

“Think of it as an electron microscope. When outside time peers into this time, it behaves normally. When it doesn’t, it goes off course,” Rowan said with a shrug of her shoulders.

For all of Adeena’s angst about Time, she seemed perfectly normal to Edmund.

If anything, she seemed so normal that he wanted to try to friend her.

He didn’t have any normal people in his life.

“Uhm… phone number?” he asked bluntly and pulled up his phone. He flicked it to the contacts list and clicked ‘new entry’ then looked at her.

Rowan blinked several times before her eyebrows went upward as she watched him. As if that were the very last thing she had expected him to say.

Nodding her head she leaned over his phone and slowly tapped in a number.

He of course dialed it immediately and looked to her.

Only to hear her phone ringing in her pocket.

“I didn’t expect you to be this way,” Rowan muttered as Edmund hung up the call.

“Agreed. Adeena made you seem problematic. You don’t seem that bad to me,” confirmed Edmund. “Though it’s still annoying you set Skipper loose on me, but I wonder again if that was just you being angry that I walked her to the end of time. Then her power doing the rest.”

“Probably,” Rowan admitted a bit sheepishly with a small shrug of her shoulders. “You’re… you don’t know what you are, but I know what you are. I know what you can do. What you’re cappable of. That you can pierce through everything if you wished.

“I think I resent you a bit. Because you’re almost as much of a universal agent as I am, but with a great deal more agency that I could have ever hoped for. That I could ever dream of.

“So… if you took someone to the end of time, then-then I probably got… pissy… and did something like what you described.

“I swear that even if I did do something like that, I wouldn’t expect her to be able to impact other timelines. I know of other timelines, and not to interfere with them.”

Edmund only smiled, waved her off, then sighed.

“Alright… months… well,” he said, looking to Iren and the others. “We’re here for something akin to six months while we wait for Dot’s portal to re-open. This’ll be a good chance for us to figure out what’s going on with Leila, plan, plot, and figure out the right course of action.”

“Alright,” Iren said, then laughed. “We’ll probably need to rest already though. I’m just in my read-for-Eddy clothes and Alina nor Ellie are suited for this environment. Unless you want to watch them slowly die and wilt here.”

With a start Edmund realized she was right.

There was no reason to subject them to this.

He looked to Rowan and then laughed.

“I’ll call you when I land in the other Save-state to update you. Anything I need to prep you with so you don’t think I’m being weird?” he asked.

“Ah, just tell me it’s contingency three,” Rowan said and made a dismissive hand wave. “I’ll understand. I mean, I have all of time to plan for these things you realize.

“And no, don’t test me by telling me it’s a different number. I already planned for that as well as you trying other things.”

Edmund only grinned at her, raised his eyebrows, and suddenly found himself deeply curious about Rowan. An average looking woman, with an average bust, who was most certainly not average in her intelligence, or awareness of Edmund.

***

“Oh!” Iren whispered and grabbed Edmund by the chest and pulled him closer to herself. “There they are! A giant friggin’ fairy, a Beastkin like Andrea, and a Gnome.”

Edmund could only nod his head even as Iren just about shook him around.

In the end, they’d reset the Save-state and he and Iren had gone through the portal alone after cleaning up all the soldiers and the tanks with everyone. The simple reality was Iren would be able to carry him off, protect him, provide for him, and generally, be quite safe here.

No one else could really say the same given the harsh environ.

They’d been sat here for nearly half a year, just waiting.

As Rowan had warned, there was no real way of dealing with the issues in time here, other than moving through them. No matter which way Edmund had tried to tackle it with Save-states, it hadn’t really worked out.

All of it had boiled down to sitting here with Iren and letting time creep along.

Even going backward in actual real time and trying to get to this location had been incredibly difficult as Skipper had absolutely drowned the area in soldiers and tanks. To the point that it was worth it.

Yet the Save-state where they had just finished wiping everything out was always clear.

So, here he sat with Iren for six months doing little more than just being with her. Day after day, month after month, existing with the beautiful thirst-trap Dragon as she focused all of her attention on him.

“Honey, look!” whispered the Dragon, openly nuzzling him, and then nipping at his neck and ears with her lips. In a strange sort of ‘preening’ gesture that she’d started up after their second month here.

As well as the change in nicknames and behavior.

“Yes, Iren, I see them,” Edmund said with a snort, rolled to his side. They were a long ways away from the target destination and peering through some insanely powerful binoculars.

Or at least, Edmund was.

Iren was just using her incredibly abnormally great eyesight as a Dragon.

Edmund set the binoculars down in front of him as he shifted his body.

He wasn’t moving away from Iren, but getting at his pockets more directly. He reached in, pulled out his phone and marked down the time and date. This would be needed to get everything put together to handle Leila, Red, and Sam.

The biggest issue, was Edmund was pretty sure this whole thing would cause some issues with how he got them out of this little plane of time and magical distortion. He was counting on the fact that if he opened a portal from here, it could go elsewhere, without an issue so long as it went to a position where Red, Leila, and Sam didn’t currently exist.

Stepping out of this issue and arriving elsewhere regardless of the time involved. Then he’d have to find another location to travel backward to a degree, and step out to a point in time that he had been absent from.

Or so he assumed.

“Alright. Are we going to watch for a while, figure out what we need to do to keep them alive, then rewind again?” Iren inquired and moved closer to him. She leaned down and started kissing, nuzzling, and pulling him close once more. “I need to go turn our clutch soon then sit atop them for a time. They’re growing so well.”

Edmund really didn’t want to think about the clutch of eggs Iren had dropped in their third month here.

In the end, she hadn’t been able to resist her nature, their close proximity, frequent coupling, and without anyone else around, had led to the current situation.

“It’s fine, dear,” he responded unable to really respond other than positively or warmly. Iren had changed significantly from the Dragon he’d met to the Dragon she was now. She was still herself in many ways, but a lot of her eccentric behavior had mellowed out significantly. The drinking had ended, the somewhat lack of care for herself vanished, and she was far more aware of her surroundings. Her sexual appetite, response to Edmund, and general upbeat joy in life hadn’t changed at all though. If anything it’d all grown larger. “Now, let’s just… watch, wait, and see what we need to do.”

Lifting his binoculars up to his eyes, he began to watch as the trio looked to one another, then around themselves, and started dealing with their situation.

“It’ll be strange,” Iren said quietly. “I’ll have a clutch, watch them hatch, and then… it’ll be like it never happened. You’ll remember them though, I suppose.”

“I’ve already promised you a clutch in multiple Save-states, Iren,”  Edmund stated, reminding her again. Then, unable to help himself, he laughed, set the binoculars down, and kissed her several times. “Don’t worry about the clutch. You’ll get it again later. You’ve clutched multiple times throughout my Save-state hops. We’ve just never gone this far into it before. Now… help me, Iren, you beautiful Dragon.”

“Yes, honey,” Iren answered while staring at him in a way that reminded him of the other women in his life. “Did… I mention I’m Ready for my Eddy?”

No matter how much Iren changed, she’d always be Iren.