Void and I were leaving Dr. Payan’s office and rubbing our noses after going to get the pregnancy test again. Void attempted to get out of going because of the threat of schnoz trauma, but I managed to convince her it’s better to get the test for the surprise reveal. She admitted it was worth getting her snout smacked to hold the tube with the two swirling colors in it again.

  The reason my nose was bludgeoned by a tongue depressor? I didn’t show any visible reaction to the news since I already knew the answer. Dr. Payan got on me for failing to show sufficient excitement over the announcement.

  “We need to find out what’s causing your loop reset to change,” Void said while wiggling her nose to relieve the pain. “I don’t want to have to go through this every time.”

  “Honestly, I don’t want it to change again,” I replied. “It’s terrifying to think of it. Every change will give us less time to solve the problem when we do figure it out.”

  Void’s head hung when I said those words. It was a heavy thought to consider what it meant.

  “Hey,” I added. “Maybe whatever gave me this is telling me something. The first reset change came after we won the cistern battle.”

  Void placed a hand on her stomach. “Is it possible they’re important or the Grand Creator didn’t want you to lose them?”

  “If the Grand Creator is real—” I started.

  “He is,” Void forcefully interrupted.

  I smiled. “I’m not sure what to believe. How many children were erased during those three months? Did I have enough impact on the world to interrupt some of them being conceived? I don’t like thinking about it, really.”

  “You got Jummi and Amis back together. Jummi is still young enough, maybe all the ones supposed to be born over the last three months happened and we added three more,” Void mused. “The Grand Creator wouldn’t let souls be erased.”

  That wasn’t entirely implausible. I’d seen a lot of strange things, the most bizarre being the bra in the treasure chest at Mermaid Falls. It was supposed to be a set of fine miner’s gloves yet, for some reason, that was the very first instance of something changing in a loop where I didn’t have an identifiable impact on causality. Was that the first sign things had changed?

  I was snapped out of my head by a tug to my arm. I looked over at Void and she had a huge look of glee on her face. She raised and arm and pointed. “Can we go?”

  I looked to where Void was pointing. I saw a cake shop, a clothing store and an apartment building. “Do you want to look at wedding stuff now?”

  Void squinted in thought. “I…well…I’d like to after we talk to mom and dad, but that’s not what I’m pointing at. Her!”

  I looked around again and I saw a cougar-clan woman washing the window of the cake shop. “The window washer?”

  Void groaned with frustration. “No, there in the alley.”

  In the alley between the cake shop and the apartment was an old jaguar-clan woman in a shawl and gaudy polished glass jewelry all over her fingers. She had a table set up with a crystal ball sitting atop it and was staring at us, beckoning us to approach. She looked a little pathetic hiding under a tarp to protect her from the rain which was starting to come down.

  “Seriously? You want to talk to an alleyway scammer?” I asked.

  “She’s a fortune teller,” Void retorted.

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s nonsense.”

  “The Crown Prince said theirs predicted the cistern battle,” Void argued.

  “You’re reading too much into it. Those charlatans were vague and are letting you fill in the blanks,” I replied. “They probably felt the ritual magic forming and tried to pass it off as a prophecy. Then they changed their minds after we interrupted it.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Void responded with tears forming in her eyes. “I want to know about our future and the babies.”

  I was about to shoot back when I paused. Wow, why am I being aggressive about this? What’s the harm? We’ll pay a couple of copper Sovereigns and get a generic feel-good story out of it? Then I began to laugh when a ridiculous thought came to mind.

  “What’s so funny?” Void looked hurt.

  “I’m sorry, Void,” I replied. “I was being mean for no good reason. The reason I thought it was funny is this is our first lovers spat.”

  Void wiped away a tear. “You mean we never argued before?”

  “I don’t count those anymore,” I replied. We had a few arguments about books in the past, but I remembered what Void said to me at Mermaid Falls about living with them. “You and I haven’t argued before. We should stop by the cake shop to commemorate it.”

  Void snorted back a laugh. “That’s a silly celebration.”

  “It is,” I said.

  Void’s face changed and looked mildly embarrassed. She then whispered, “Can we do like Irene and Stephon after they argue?”

  I gasped. “Here in the road!? Scandalous! We should wait until tonight at home.”

  She hooked an arm around mine and pulled in tight. “Thanks for that.”

  “It’s no trouble,” I replied. “Besides, we have to prime ourselves for it. We’ll get into more arguments over the years. It’s good to remind each other we still love one another despite having disagreements now and then.”

  Void remained silent and nodded at my statement.

  I pointed to the old woman, who was still trying to get our attention. “Come on, let’s see what she wants to reveal about our futures.”

  We approached and the woman beckoned to a pair of wooden crates set up for customers to sit on. The entire operation was slapdash to say the least. The old jaguar-clan woman’s clothing looked like it was a donated Advancement 0 dungeon drop and the jewelry was mismatched.

  The table was a broken mess and she didn’t even have a tablecloth on it. The crystal ball was malformed glass with a few bubbles in it. It must have been an apprentice’s first effort sold cheap based on the fact it looked more like a football than a sphere.

  Parts of her were unusual. She was unusually short for a jaguar-clan woman and had fluffier cheeks than normal. She also had incredibly intense, yellow eyes. Her eyes shone like she was barely out of her teens yet had a deep stare of someone who’d seen things. If she wasn’t clearly elderly, I’d have sworn this was the same person who I saw with the musket. She even had a leather-wrapped walking stick propped up against the cake shop wall.

  “Greetings, Baron,” the woman said. People in this world didn’t have natural accents because of how the magic system worked. The only ones who did were myself and my fellow summoned from Earth where our speech took on elements of their home language. I have a mild Southern flair to my perceived speech.

  Here, there were accents, but they were forced by actors trying to amplify character traits. The fake fortune teller in front of us was doing that. Hers, however, was bizarre. Her pronunciation had heavy tonal emphasis to it and her speech pacing was similar to Damu’s. It was like if Mandarin and Tswana were mashed together to form its own language.

  Once more, I was impressed with my brain to recall random trivia like what a language sounded like despite completely forgetting the country it originated from. I remembered Tswana and forgot my old employer’s name. Human brains aren’t meant to store centuries of information.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “I have grave tidings for you,” the fiction teller said…gravely. Yes, I know I called her a fiction teller. It’s not a verbal typo.

  “Sure, and what will these grave tidings set me back?” I replied

  “Oliver!” Void snapped. “Don’t be rude.”

  The old woman only let out a raspy chuckle. “For you? The information is vital and will be free.”

  “Free with mandatory donation I reckon,” I muttered.

  Void jabbed me in the ribs before she spoke. “Don’t mind him. Magic doesn’t exist where he’s from.”

  A brief smile crossed the fiction teller’s face and her hand reached out. I pulled away when her hand moved toward my face. Another jab from Void forced me to play along.

  Her hand paused before reaching my cheek and, after a second of staring at me, she ran her fingers across my skin. I could see a strange sense of nostalgic grief cross her face as she stared at me, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  She then pulled away and cast Torchlight on her hand, sending the light into the glass football. The light split into rainbow rings as the glass separated out the wavelengths and cast them on the table. With a twist of her hand, the fiction teller spun the rainbow image.

  Void was mesmerized by the movements of the different colors on the table. I was bored with the display of a cheap prism experiment. Whoopdie do, you figured out light has different speeds depending on its medium and curved glass separates wavelengths. What’s next? She’ll rub her feet on a carpet and cast lightning?

  After casting her spell, she looked at Void. “Congratulations on the new additions to your family.”

  Void instantly gripped onto my arm and excitedly tugged. “See? She’s real!”

  “We came out of a doctor’s office. She probably saw you putting the test away,” I said with a bored voice. This woman was cold reading Void like a book.

  “Twins are an auspicious blessing,” the fiction teller continued. Now, I had to admit, that was a good guess, one which Void immediately gave away as being true by her reaction. I decided to stop being rude and allow Void to have her fun, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Will they turn out to be good people?” Void asked with a twinkle of excitement in her eyes.

  The fiction teller spun the lights in the football a few more times. “The signs say yes. Their parents have good souls and strong bodies. Such factors lead to blessed children. The father’s soul is particularly powerful.”

  I rolled my eyes at her attempts to butter me up. Plus, her vision must be poor to think my flabby behind is strong. Sure, I have good muscle power, but my beer gut hasn’t completely vanished.

  The fiction teller’s eyes bored into mine. “Your soul is stronger than any have ever known. Yet I sense it is frayed and fractured. It cannot hold power or grow and must be repaired.”

  Alright, she is starting to hit a little close to home on that one. I made sure to keep a neutral mask on my face to avoid playing into her cold reading techniques.

  Then the fiction teller did something that completely changed my perception on what was going on. She cast Gust to dramatically ruffle her fur.

  I’m betting you, dear audience, are wondering what’s so impressive about a simple spell like Gust that even a child can cast. Well, you see, she had just cast Torchlight a second ago.

  Still not making sense? Here’s the thing. In this world, people are born with attunements to elements. They can only cast spells they’re attuned to. Lia, being fire attuned, can cast Pilot Light, a simple cantrip which creates a simple lighter-sized fire at the tip of your finger. No matter how much training she received, Lia could never cast Purify Water no matter how simple the cantrip was.

  Yet I just watched this old woman cast two spells from different attunements. The only one who should be capable of doing something like that is me. The last time anyone could do that was Dane over a thousand years ago.

  Void was too engrossed by the performance to realize what this old fiction teller just did. She was attuned to more than one element and it triggered my warning bells, which only rang louder with the next words.

  “You, one who is trapped in the cycle of time, must be wary. Fate has chosen you to defeat a great evil. Your soul is bound with the remnants of the Twin Goddesses and their power begins to wane. Find the answer and repel the evil forever more,” the woman boomed with a strong, more youthful voice.

  Holy shit on a shingle, Batman. I was starting to believe Void. How in the Hell did this woman know I was looping in time? And she even brought up the old story I found in the Exterminator’s Guild library about the ancient, forgotten past about two Goddesses dying.

  “There is another who is aware,” the fiction teller continued, her voice low. “She is a passenger upon your journey, bound to your cycle. She is the last of an ancient, forgotten order. One with youthful body and eyes of the ages will seek you out.”

  I stared dumbfounded at the woman. She had known about the strange jaguar-clan girl with the musket who I’d seen twice now and wasn’t in the expected place.

  Void poked me and I turned to her. She had a smug look on her face. “See? I told you fortune tellers are real.”

  “Alright, I have to admit this one was a lot more accurate than I expected,” I replied.

  “So, how much to I owe—" I turned back to the fiction teller and my voice vanished from my throat. The woman was gone. In the brief moment I turned away to talk to Void, the fiction teller took her walking stick and disappeared. All that remained was the junk table, the glass football and the pair of us sitting under a tarp in the rain.

  Void gasped. “How mysterious! I wonder who the ancient person is.”

  I looked at the table a few more minutes in thought. As I stared, I noticed some orange powder on the edges of the table where the woman leaned and on the crate she used as a seat. I brushed my finger against it and looked at it closely.

  “What is that?” Void asked. She leaned in. “It’s cosmetic powder.”

  I looked at the powder closer and noticed it was the same tint as the woman’s fur. I snorted and slapped my hands together to remove the powder. “Turns out she was just some actress after all.”

  “She didn’t ask for payment,” Void retorted. She did reflexively check her coin pouch and ensure it was still there.

  “Maybe it was a prank or some kind of strange practice,” I replied. “Come on, let’s get out of here. What a waste of time.”

  I was still bothered by what I saw. Not so much the nonsense the woman said, but her ability to cast both Gust and Torchlight. Was she hiding a magic stone fueled fan under her sleeves? Yea, that must have been it. If she was all-attuned like me, she wouldn’t be giving away free performances in an alley. Someone like that who wasn’t a summoned dud would be a major power player in Vialina.

  “What about the cake?” Void asked.

  I snorted. “Alright, let’s get some for everyone.”

  After getting a cake from a very confused baker wondering why we wanted to commemorate a fight, we returned to The Gnashing Teeth.

  Once more, there was a crowd of onlookers. This time, the Royal Guards were all standing outside looking at the door. I had hung my new Stewart House Crest on the door the day before.

  I felt a sense of relief wash over me when I saw the Royal Guards milling around in the street instead of raiding our home. This time, Void and I casually strolled through the crowd and up to the door.

  “Excuse me?” I said when I walked up to Captain Dalvin. “We’re closed on Danesdays. You can come back tomorrow on Endweek. I believe we have herb crusted boar loin as our lunch special.”

  Captain Dalvin and the other Royal Guards bowed before the Captain addressed me. “Baron. Apologies for the intrusion. We request permission to search the property. We’ve received an anonymous tip of criminal activity within.”

  I put on my best confused face. “That’s odd. I live here and I haven’t noticed anything unusual. This is a busy pub, so I’m sure some of the patrons would have noticed something. Can you tell me what this is all about?”

  Captain Dalvin looked at the crowd and noticed I had shifted the mood against them with my words. Most of the people here have eaten at The Gnashing Teeth and knew its reputation. He shifted his gaze back to me. “I cannot, it’s a Royal investigation.”

  “Then I fear I can’t allow you to enter,” I replied. “Especially on some vague claim something bad is happening.”

  “Baron, I must insist,” Captain Dalvin pressed. “Pursuant to Royal Code—”

  “Yes, yes,” Void cut in. “Pursuant to Royal Code Section 8, Part 15, Subsection 1, enforcement actions directly ordered by the king cannot be interfered with by the nobility.”

  “Who are you?” Captain Dalvin glared at Void’s interruption.

  “She’s my fiancé,” I replied.

  Dalvin’s expression instantly changed to worry.

  Void rolled her eyes. “This is why I can’t stand the Royal Guards. They have such poor comprehension of Royal Code. Tell me, Captain, what does Section 8, Part 1, Subsection 3 say?”

  I held back my laugh when Void spoke. She was having fun for how dismissively Captain Dalvin treated her in the prior loop and had reversed the entire situation.

  “A…apologies, Baroninne,” Dalvin stuttered. “It states Noble households and primary businesses cannot be searched without approval of two-thirds of both the Low and High Councils along with the King.”

  “And do you have a Noble’s Warrant perchance?” Void asked.

  “No, B…baroninne,” Dalvin stammered. “We’ll take our leave.”

  Dalvin’s presence changed when he started barking orders to the other Royal Guards. As he was arranging them to leave, I scanned the guards and found the marmot-clan man and wolverine-clan woman who groped Mira and mocked Doun.

  I made my way to the front door of the Teeth and “accidentally” bumped into the two of them on the way. I turned and, with my most incredulous voice, shouted. “You dare!? Captain! Your two underlings assaulted me!”

  “It’s battery,” Void corrected me.

  “Yes, they battered me!” I roared.

  Both of their eyes popped out of their heads at my accusation. The crowd began to murmur and point. A few even spoke of the audacity of attacking a Noble in public.

  “On your knees!” Captain Dalvin shouted and the two Guards immediately fell down. He pulled a sword and held it pointing in their direction. “Baron? What punishment do you decree?”

  “Void,” I asked, “What’s the typical punishment for such an offense?”

  Void whispered to me. “Don’t be too cruel.” Then her voice rose to project to the crowd. “Depending on the severity, either immediate execution or a Max Punishment in the penal brothel.”

  The crowd silenced and the wolverine-clan woman began to sob.

  Shit, that was way too much for getting revenge for something they didn’t do yet. I knew the pair were lecherous, they wouldn’t have acted that way if it wasn’t a pattern, but I wanted to be better than the local customs.

  I decided to play it up like I was thinking over my options. I stared down at the marmot-clan man who had a completely dead look in his eyes and the wolverine-clan woman was borderline hysterical imagining spending the next few decades pleasuring strangers.

  “I don’t believe I’d want my sidewalk stained,” I said. “It would be too much trouble cleaning off the blood.”

  That sent the woman over the edge and she fell over on her side and began pleading for mercy. The man continued to stare dead-eyed at the ground.

  “Then the punishment is—” Dalvin began to speak.

  “Hold,” I stated. “Captain, tell me, what is the typical cost of a session in your castle brothels?”

  Dalvin stated at me perplexed. “50 copper Sovereigns. Pardon, Baron, but I don’t think you’d want to be seen going—”

  I held up my hand. “Each will be fined 4 silver Sovereigns per month in perpetuity to be delivered to my coffers.”

  Dalvin looked at me, puzzled. “That is quite lenient.”

  “No!” the wolverine-clan woman shouted. “I can’t! That’s too much!”

  “Silence!” Dalvin shouted at the woman. “Be glad you got off light!”

  Damn, I wasn’t expecting that reaction. She really liked her brothel sessions and I likely just took away her funds set aside for entertainment.

  “My lord!” the woman pleaded. “What else am I going to do?”

  I stared down at the pervert on the ground. “You can go to a tavern and leverage your winning personality. I’m sure you’ll have men lining up.”

  “Enough of this,” Dalvin ordered. “Move out!”

  The marmot-clan man rose and gave me a half-hearted bow. He had a mixture of relief and fear plastered on his face. The woman was still railing on about the unfair treatment for a simple accident when she stepped into one of the bison-drawn wagons.

  “That was cathartic,” I mumbled. I had to admit, it was a bit mean. Still, I saved two unfortunates working in the castle brothel from them. Besides, if there were long-term negative repercussions from this decision, I won’t do it on the next loop.

  Void nudged me. “Pay attention to the crowd.”

  I shifted my focus to the gathered crowd. I didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t this.

  The conversation on the street was oddly positive. Many of the people were admiring how lenient I was. Most of them were terrified I’d be like the other nobles and had those two guards beheaded on the spot. Letting them go with a light fine went over well with everyone present. Their reaction really hammered home how bad the nobility of this nation was.

  “I’m not doing that sort of thing again,” I whispered back. “It feels like abuse of power.”

  “Good,” Void responded. “I’m not sure I’d want to marry you if you let your title go to your head.”

  A few of the locals came up to me afterward and asked me about The Gnashing Teeth. I assured them that, yes, I was the owner, but nothing about its operations would change. That made them happy to know Mira and Doun were still running the place with the added layer of noble protection to keep the business operational. I found it impressive they wanted to stay out here and chat in the light downpour.

  After a few minutes talking with the people on the street, which really helped them become more comfortable with my presence as a noble, I saw Zelda making her way toward the Teeth.

  Zelda saw the crest on the door and gave me a bow. She was wearing a dark blue blouse with a white apron over it and a black skirt while hiding under a wax-lined umbrella. It was the server uniform of The Gnashing Teeth. “Baron, it seems I am in your employ now.”

  “Will that be an issue?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No, it will only add to my prestige. Is Doun still here? He asked me to come by for training.”

  “Don’t worry, he and Mira are still running the show,” I replied. “Come on, let’s get you inside and started.”

  Zelda looked at me askance when I opened the door to let her in. She pushed me aside and held the door, instead. “It’s my job to hold the door for you, Baron.”

  I sighed at the latest reminder of my change of status and decided not to fight it. I entered, followed by Void and Zelda. I had to put aside my concerns. We had an announcement to make.