Kristen thought she heard the chuffing of a horse near the base of the treehouse. When she heard the clop of a hoof, she was certain. The horse was blowing its muzzle. It sounded exhausted.
Death moved toward his recliner, sliding back his hood so that she could see his full skull for the first time. "That's Buxly," he said in passing.
The skeleton had hair that reminded her of Bill Murray's in Kingpin. Or a poorly groomed Donald Trump. It was so thin you could see right through it. He placed his scythe in the corner and worked his finger bones to push the few surviving strands evenly over the top of his head.
"Amateurs," Death grumbled. "Every time there's a substitute, I have to ride double time to enjoy my own vacation. No one has work ethic anymore."
Kristen thought she saw sweat on Death's cheekbones.
The magiscope had been filled with cosmic background radiation for more than a minute now, as the album had finished and the needle now glided along the inner circle of the record. The newt still rolled about in the popcorn as Death leaned over and placed the needle in its cradle. He then removed the record.
"What's the copyright date on that?" Kristen asked, pointing to the disc jacket in Death's bony hand.
Death turned the sleeve over. "2036," he said. "A few years after the Continental Convergence."
"That was when the Globe finally came to grips with the fact that magic and science went hand in hand. Here in Rootworld, however, people are still having a hard time believing in me."
"Oh, that's not entirely true," said Death sympathetically. He remembered what Kronos had said about Science's other hourglass in the history section and made a mental note to check it out later. "Rootworlders are just having a harder time letting go of Magic, as they've never had a solid definition of who or what it is." He thought then of that strange new hourglass marked Magic.
"Oh, come on. The wizzards awarded alchemy a solid ten on the Pita scale," said Science defensively. "And the only thing they think is worse than an alchemist is a plain chemist, with all their elements and such." Science made air quotes with his fingers. "And the only thing that can be any worse than a plain chemist is a plain chemist's son, who happens to be named Ian. If you ask me, I think he's the only student with any sense! Granted, it's a kid's right to be inquisitive, but when a chemist's kid is trying to find out things like what the elements are made of, everyone starts screaming, 'What rubbish!'"
"Well," said Death. "I mean, we're talking about Rootworld! It all was supposed to have come from the minds of Gods. Fresh off the press. If everything needed to be explained before it came to be, then who exactly would do the explaining, and who would it be that they did the explaining to?"
"Me," said Science—Kristen, feeling much like she was judging a tennis match, looked back and forth between the two in turns.
Death said, "A young twit would never dive from the nest if it had to reason out all possible negative outcomes before acting." The grim reaper placed the record in the sleeve and shelved it.
Science had taken his feet and now looked very thoughtful. He glanced at the newt, rolling over in Kristen's facemask, its belly pulsing with light. "I suppose God doesn't start a world by saying, 'Let there be tiny wave packets that run across an unreliable thread of conductive material, and in that material there will be gravity wells, and the strongest well will be utilized to energize the inflation of a potentiality, and that potentiality will have the ability to exist as either particle or wave and be the standard for speed in its world.'"
Death put a bony phalange to his chin. Kristen watched Death tap a couple other record sleeves on the shelf. Then he said, "No. A God starts a universe by saying—" Death pulled out another disc then raised his hand like a conductor and said, "—Let there be light." He brought his hand down, shrugged, and paced up to Science, handing him the record. "Then, quite literally for God's sake, he lets the peons sort out the rest of the rubbish."
Science took the disc and said, "Hey. I take offense at that."
"No offense," said Death.
Just then a high-pitched trill came from the magiscope. Death and Science turned toward it in unison.
Again, the trilling ring came, and Death dropped into his recliner, the springs and wood making an awful racket.
"What's that noise?" Kristen asked.
"We have a call coming in," Death said. Then he pointed the remote at the device.
The trill stopped mid-ring and the sphere winked on. An elderly but handsome man appeared. He had silvering hair and looked to be sitting in a booth at a fast-food restaurant. In fact, he had an apron on and was dipping French fries into sweet and sour sauce.
The newt emerged from the facemask and ran onto the table. It leapt from the table and onto the floor, scuttling across to stand directly in front of the scope.
"I'm sorry," said the man. "I've caught you on my lunch break."
The newt put a sticky hand on the glass.
"Tsk," hissed Death. "Mind the screen, please."
The newt removed its fingers and skulked down shamedly.
"Ah, a Salamandra Solaris," said the man, wiping his fingers on a napkin. Kristen recognized the voice as the chivalrous narrator from the last magic video disc. "Living dangerously, I see. Back in the day, a few ounces of mistletoe tea would have done the trick. Nowadays kids are licking the asses of toads."
"Oh please," Science objected. He laid the vinyl on the counter and began pumping the handle on the well above the sink. "Must we be so vulgar?"
Death gave a breathy chuckle, resigned to watch as Science rinsed out the teapot.
Kristen stood and walked over to pat Science on the shoulder sympathetically. As she did, she noticed the record jacket lying on the counter. It was upside down, but the copyright date at the bottom was clearly visible: 2075. She tilted her head, puzzled by the date.
"Wait," said Kristen. "I'm confused."
Death lifted a hand. "You are seeing Lancelot in the present. Globeside. I am certain he is only trying to defend his honor."
Kristen's face bunched up like Maurice's Dad's had done when she'd mentioned evolution. Then she returned to the table, letting it go.
"Arthur was no peon," Lancelot said. "And neither was I."
"You, see?" Death commented.
Science lifted a finger as if to interject but the magiscope came even more alive with the sound of a man in the background. "Your lunch break was over ten minutes ago, Lance! Get back in here or so help me..."
The image went off-kilter and there was a muffled sound like a microphone being occluded. Then Lance was back in the booth. "Sorry. I told him I'd walk out again." He was re-organizing his lunch on the table.
"Nothing worse than a has been," Death said.
Lance dabbed his mouth with a napkin and tried to look proud. "We're all has-beens," he said. "Not everyone remembers the time when they were the hero in their own story."
"Aren't we always the hero in our own story?" Kristen asked. Science moved quietly about the treehouse, tidying the remaining evidence of their meal.
"Of course not!" Lance said, pushing his fries aside. "The story always seems to require a hero. If we're lucky, sometimes we may be it." He gave a self-deprecating smile. "This round, however, I was not that hero. But luckily, after two millennia, magic was finally returning to the Globe, and the great engine of belief began turning again."
A spatula flew past in the background of the fast-food kitchen. A customer ducked without breaking stride. "That engine would turn out looking like a giant pyramid twisting and rising from the desert of Egypt, pulling the continents back into one huge supercontinent. Naturally, with new beliefs would come room for new gods. But the driving force was in the minds of those of us who were predicting it."
"Those of us?" Kristen leaned forward.
Lance grinned. "Getting ahead of myself. There was, however, one thing that no one could have predicted. That the hero might not be a god at all, but instead, a little girl."
The magiscope's surface rippled and shifted as Lance continued, "What can I say, sometimes it takes a goddess. And it was some goddess that Lilith would have to be in order to re-bind the chains of the veil and bridge the rift, not only between continents but between worlds."
The image blurred and refocused, now showing a tall figure hunched over a desk.
"During this time, there was another non-hero—a simple wizzard who didn't want anyone, anywhere to know that he existed. Because that always led to trouble."
The magiscope's view solidified as a picture-in-picture on the scene as Lance's voice took on a narrating quality:
"His name was Merle, son of Tael."
Lance wiped his hands on his apron, his fast-food surroundings momentarily forgotten. "You see, Merle had been teaching at an American Institute when he noticed something peculiar about one of his students. Something only he would have recognized, because Merle was one of the rare few on the Globe, besides myself, who remembered life before the casting down of the tower of Babel."
Lance's expression grew distant. "And if you pushed him really hard, he might just tell you something about the time before the rending of the universes, during the times of Avalon and Anglesey." He paused, raising a warning finger. "Just don't ask about Atlantis; that only makes him cranky."
In the magiscope, Lance was superimposed over a video of the old wizened man checking his email. Lance continued, "About the time my email landed in Merle's inbox, he was noticing that one of his students at the institute had a memory like a machine. The young man could solve any complex equation in a matter of seconds. And in all of his lives, Merle had only known one person with that particularly extraordinary skill—Abacas. But that was back during the coming of the Welsh in 300 B.C."
"The wizzard had been receiving a lot of emails lately," Lance's voice took on a wry tone, "on account that there were twenty knights of Arthur's round table just now coming into their memories of lives long lost. Not that Merle wasn't accustomed to fan mail; he just wasn't accustomed to fan mail that held any real merit."
A half-smile crossed Lance's face as the annoyed wizzard deleted item after item with his mouse. "The autobiographical account he'd published back in the late twentieth century was a calling card to the knights, but he'd nearly given up when the second decade passed without a single legitimate response. How could he have known that his book would go on to be a New York Times best-seller and send him running off to other countries in order to avoid the press?" Lance chuckled. "Well, also to avoid that one eccentric young man who claimed to be his destined apprentice. He was finding that wizzarding in the twenty-first century, opposite Rootworld, came with some unique challenges."
The wizzard appeared clearly now—as tall as a young maple, with the head and face of a troll, though it was just the nose that made him trolly. And the baldness. He sat beneath the orange glow of a paper mâché pumpkin, unfurling documents on a coffee table beside his recliner.
He consulted the account of the Coming of the Welsh, checked his map, put his chin into the web of his thumb for a moment, then snapped his fingers decisively.
"Javier is definitely Abacas," he declared, bringing voice to the scene as he drew a line through Abacas's name on the document. That left only one unaccounted for.
A teapot's sudden whistle pierced the quiet, its lid rattling with threatening indifference to the sumac boiling over. Kristen thought it might be theirs again, but it was the man in the magiscope's. The scene had gotten fully involved.
"Oh, confound it!" Merle barked, wrestling with the footrest of his recliner. When he finally escaped its overbearing embrace, he tugged the lapels of his bathrobe together and sprang to the kitchen, removing his old nemesis from the heating element just before eruption.
"That's better, I say." He waved for his teacup to come over, but it refused.
"Old habits do die hard," he said to a poster of a white raven that seemed to be ridiculing him. Then he reached into the cabinet himself and poured a steamy cup.
The scene shifted to show him later that night, plugging in his hotspot. His inbox appeared full of rubbish again. He would have expected a delayed response from Boris, but not the rest of the gang.
Kristen was almost disappointed when the scene was lost, and Lance looked directly into the magiscope again. He popped a half-eaten French fry in his mouth. "Yet there my email finally was—the last member had been found. Yes, I am the Lancelot of that fabled time of Albion." He bowed but then gave a self-deprecating smile. "You may think all of this sounds rather ridiculous, but if you could remember your own past lives, this would just be routine."
His manager's voice carried from somewhere behind him, but Lance waved it off impatiently. "I must start by saying that the account of Guinevere going into a nunnery is total misinformation. In fact, Guinevere and I lived quite happily, raising Mordred and our own two boys after Arthur's departure for Rootworld. With the veil rent asunder and magic evaporating from the Globe, returning to Rootworld was simply a waiting game."
He ran a hand through his hair, his expression growing distant, and Kristen tried to think of him in armor and on horseback. "Sure, I could have tried to contact Tael on the Samhain of 1202 during the full moon, but I didn't make it quite that long. The drink drove me to an early grave." A wry smile crossed his face. "What with no adventuring left, a wife that thanked Hazeus for all the good I provided in life and blamed me for all the problems, it was a lengthy and mentally traumatic existence for both of us. Though, as I said before, we did make it quite happily for a time. At least until the kids were out."
His gaze hardened. "The Globe was a vicious place back then. It is only now, during my third incarnation, that I am finding any hope that God's genuine faith in humanity might be returning."
He leaned forward, voice dropping slightly. "Now that the tower of Babel has risen, things are coming together again. Things and people, that is. But before that, there were exactly twenty-one of us, though Borus was running a little late."
Lance glanced at his watch, then back to the magiscope. "It was 2030 and the Day of the Dead was upon us."
The magiscope's surface began to ripple, preparing to show the gathering in the desert, and Kristen hoped that Lance would not interrupt again!
Twenty figures gathered in the desert heat around a square bluestone altar. The sun blazed overhead as Merle addressed them:
"Well, gather around, gather around," he called.
"It's a bit difficult when the table is a square," Tony complained, ever the one to state the obvious.
"This was the only piece of stonework that could be brought down by the loading crew," Tael said in defense of the volunteers. "They're terribly busy patching the keel right now."
"At least it's blue," said Richard, looking like he could go for one of those turkey legs from a fair. He'd more than likely sweat to death under his beard before this was done.
"I assure you," said Merle, "it is not only blue but actually holy bluestone. There's much more, but it would have taken time to quarry it. This bit will have to do."
The knights arranged themselves awkwardly around the stone altar, sweltering in the desert heat.
"Well, we could at least stand in a circle," suggested John. "You know, just for the principle of it."
Merle sighed and leaned against the stone with both hands. "Just forget about magic, you idiots! None of you possess a bit of it!"
"Hey!" protested Corey. "You said I was your most apt pupil!"
"Yes, yes," said Merle, "well, I meant most daft."
Laughter erupted from one of the knights.
"What are you laughing at?" Tony demanded.
"What?" Lance raised his hands defensively. "You couldn't even pass the tree test!"
The magiscope showed the heat waves rising from the cracked earth as Merle's voice cut through the bickering. "This is not the time to be daft! You are all here because you know and have experienced a link between the past and present."
Each knight nodded, their expressions carrying the weight of remembered lives.
Merle looked up, shielding his eyes to judge the sun's position near its zenith. Heavy shuffling feet approached from the direction of the wooden structure.
"Travis," Merle said without looking back, "must you always miss the beginning?"
Travis, towering over John and Tony, pushed between them. His hair and beard formed a brown tangled mask over his face. He threw back a lock of hair, glancing uncertainly between his companions. "What? There was an interesting puppet show. The guy was really bringing it with his little wooden dudes." He pantomimed the puppeteer's movements, stopping mid-act when he caught Merle's glare. "It was about the Day of the Dead!" He waved his hands dismissively. "It's not important. Now, where were we?"
John elbowed Travis, causing the whole circle to shuffle.
"Now," Merle's voice carried across the gathering, "that we're all here. Donnie? Do you have the relic?"
The magiscope focused on Donnie, a retired Marine who straightened under Merle's attention. "I have it."
"Then put it on the altar."
"Okay, but is it really necessary?"
"Put it!" Merle commanded, rubbing his pate with a towel.
Donnie took a plastic apple with a bite taken out of it from his pack, tossed it in the air, and caught it in the same hand. He held it up to block the whole sun, closing one eye. "You sure this is gonna work?"
"Not if we don't do it right as the sun is straight up!" the old man said, exhausted.
"I have to state the obvious here," Lance interjected.
"The white hole!" Merle pointed to the great white plate of fire in the sky, impossible to hold in one's view.
"But you said none of us have any magic! So, what in the hell is this about then? What can we possibly expect to happen by putting a damn apple on a stone under the sun at the light of noon in the middle of the desert?" Lance couldn't take it anymore. He knew for a fact nothing would happen—he had written it all down and stuck it in a chest. He had manipulated people and places to be there at that certain moment. He had pulled all the strings like in Travis's stupid puppet show. He was the one who had gathered them here for this hogwash! "Let's just do it and then go home and have a drink!"
"HA!!!" roared the old wizzard. "Now, I see you!"
Lance stepped back, genuinely frightened he might be offered up as the druidic human sacrifice for this cult he had somehow drawn together...
But his friends did not seize him. The old man simply pointed his finger across the stone altar and declared, "You made it all a joke! At the last supper. That's who you are! You are the Joker, Lance." Then he shook his finger at the others. "Mathis is the one who can't take things seriously."
To Lance's surprise, his comrades nodded in agreement.
"He's right, Mathis. You really haven't ever taken anything seriously since, well, since your sister."
"My sister?" Lance stared, flabbergasted.
"Yeah," said Percival, "Morgainne. You love her so much, you went and found someone just like her."
"Wait, I thought Morgan was Arthur's sister."
"Yes," said Merle, "it is complicated, could we please get on with it? Donnie, the apple."
"Okay," said Donnie, looking utterly bewildered by the family drama unfolding. He leaned in and placed the apple on the center bluestone altar.
"We can discuss the implications after, Mathis."
"I still don't get it. Why in the fuck are we in the middle of the damn Mexican desert? Shouldn't we be at Stonehenge or something?"
John pulled out an actual sword—an exact replica, if not the original Excalibur—and held it up to the sun. He looked like a man who had just found God. "Because," he said, "the body of the dragon. It's moved."
"Correct!" cheered the old wizzard, becoming himself again. "The magnetic north pole has moved so far since our last time here," Merle explained, reaching into his dusty jerkin. What he pulled out surprised them all—not his old blue pointed cap, but a set of glasses that looked like something from Back to the Future. They had triple lenses that could be selected by a switch and a headband of elastic which snugged them to his forehead and eyes. Sadghuru would be jealous.
The old man put the glasses on, which magnified his eyes tremendously, and said in a voice reminiscent of a time long gone, "If Abacas and my calculations are correct, where we are standing right now is the tail end of the largest ley line this baby's ever seen. Which means," he said as the dust started really kicking up in the wind, his beard twirling like in the old days, "We are on the negative end of a very large battery here on this side of the veil."
Everyone started taking things more seriously. John split the plastic apple cleanly down the center with Excalibur. The sharp sound echoed through the air like a railroad spike being driven, adding dramatic punctuation to Merle's speech. Now, Excalibur lay on the stone like a cross, next to the apple, which was halved and displaying two cores with five seeds each, resembling stars as they rocked gently on the table.
Travis grabbed John's hand and held out his other hand to Tony. They all followed suit, joining hands around the altar.
"Up there is the negative end of Rootworld's very large magnet. Can anyone tell me what happens when two poles of a magnet get near each other?" Merle asked, his voice carrying across the table.
"I've got this one," shouted Borus, known as Travis in this age. "They repel."
Suddenly, the ground shook violently, and the desert sands rose into the air like a colossal, dusty drum had been struck by a divine force. The group jumped, then landed amid the swirling sand and scorching heat.
"Wrong!" Merle, son of Tael, declared. He raised the Tome of Ages for all to see, then threw it onto the altar alongside the other relics. "The three have become one!" Lance shouted, despite his lack of understanding.
"Yes," Merle affirmed, pride lighting his eyes as he glanced from Lance to Arthur, now named John. "The books of Arthur, Lyonesse, and Hazeus."
"Now's the time, Percival!" Lance called to Corey, standing beside him. "You're the one. You're the purest of spirit. Speak the words!"
Percival gazed across the block at Merddin, striving to believe in his role beyond being simply Corey. Merle gave an encouraging nod. "Remember," he urged.
"You said you wanted to fly!" Lance reminded Percival.
Taking a deep breath, Percival spoke the incantation: "Ah Elfyntodd dwir Sindin do carrig oore farlurig noon ooseereth eck safyr too fair ecklynmoore knee krom boor loon!"
The words ascended toward the blazing zenith. Merddin joined the circle, pulling his neighbors' hands together and thrusting his wand into the clear, white pillar of light connecting the bluestone to the sun like a silver string.
"Magic is more than the ingredients gathered here!" he proclaimed, then added with pride, "ZAMA, ZAMA, ZAMA!"
The whole world quaked. Donnie cursed while pulling himself back to his feet in his neighbors' combined strength. Then they saw the impossible: A tsunami, rising like a mist on the horizon.
"I think we've calculated this all wrong!" wailed Abacas on the wind. "We've cast no protective circle!"
"If we'd used a protective circle, we could have never affected the entire world!" Merle sang in a strange voice above the fray. Then, back in his normal voice, he pointed toward the wooden structure on the hill. "Now, run!"
Kristen sighed and rolled her eyes when Lance straightened in his booth to continue his tale through the magiscope: "And that's pretty much how the Tower was raised, and the Continental Convergence went down. Of course, it could have all been coincidence, as twelve other entities thought that it was their fault the convergence occurred. Yet, when it comes to magic, I've found that while thirteen is a remarkably lucky number, things normally occur in threes."
The scene changed, much to Kristen's delight, to portray Lance's narrative: "As fate had it, two other parties may actually have been correct in their assumptions. One of those was Adam and Eve, who had just returned missing artifacts to their placeholders deep under the Pyramid of Giza. The other was Father Time and Mother Earth, who had just given birth to their only daughter."
She recognized the image of Lilith in both portrayals.
Lance's narrative continued, "Along with these two legitimately intertwined happenings, there were lesser coincidences, such as a Rabbi who had just finished singing Ramadan Moon and was prophesizing the coming of the Davidic Messiah from a parapet in Jerusalem. He had just thrust his arms skyward in a declaration when the tremors began."
The magiscope split to show multiple scenes simultaneously: "The same day, a world council was being held on the detrimental effects of global warming. Unnerving and undeniable data was being presented that the Globe had finally reached a point of no return, and that no amount of medicine could ever reverse the increasing heat and weather anomalies of the future. That discussion was taking place as the first tsunamis were being reported on a giant 8K screen in the war room."
"Five more incidents included individuals who were experimenting with hallucinogenic substances. Only one was a scientist. The other four were teenagers." Lance's mouth twitched with amusement. "Then there was a youth who had just learned to blow a bubble with her chewing gum. It was a new record. Yet, when it popped, there happened to come with it the explosion of an electrical transformer as the ground beneath her feet wrenched. Her mother scooped her up in a move for higher ground and would be plucking the pink from her hair later."
The magiscope focused on a particularly doleful-looking camel. "And finally, somewhere in Egypt, a camel startled itself with a rather loud and unexpected fart which coincided with the great pyramid beginning to grow from the sands before its doleful eyes."
Lance spread his hands. "Who am I to say that all of them weren't correct?"
His expression grew more thoughtful. "Naturally, Merle and I, along with our 19 other cohorts, thought the magic was of our own doing. Though at least two of us weren't so naïve or egocentric to be blind to other facts presenting themselves shortly after. When the flooding receded and our ark was run aground atop Mount Ararat, it was quickly determined by Merle and me that the branch that the raven had brought back was in fact of a hallucinogenic type of sage called oxychana, not an olive branch."
He sighed. "In fact, without pointing any elbows at anyone, a certain someone nearly caught the ship on fire trying to smoke the thing for uncertain insight on our dilemma. A needless act since the water only held out for thirteen hours. Borus is an idiot. Yet, the smell of the burning leaves is what helped us determine its origin."
The magiscope showed scenes of the world's transformation as Lance continued: "The debate about global warming held out as the front-running explanation until the landmass was finally recharted. This took some years, since the shifting waters, which subjected sixty percent of the land, seemed to prove the hypothesis. Electrical grids and internet servers were flooded and destroyed beyond repair, obviating all digital data. The few technological survivors, such as those situated near Greenwich, Egypt, and Mount Snowdonia, were the starting points of new technological recovery. They were considered stone-aged to begin with, aka Analog.
"About thirty years after the convergence," he concluded, "rearing domes would be established to ease newborns and unruly citizens into the absolute acceptance that magic and science lived side-by-side. At that time, visas, like yours, would be awarded to those who could mentally wrangle with the new reality. In short, if you had a visa, you could travel the wide world outside the domes."
"LANCE!" His manager's voice reached new decibels. "Those fries aren't going to cook themselves!"
"Actually," Lance mused, standing and straightening his apron, "given recent developments, they just might. I mean, it is 2075, after all."
Science leaned forward eagerly. "Absolutely fascinating! The simultaneous convergence of multiple causality streams, each theoretically capable of initiating a dimensional merger—the mathematical probabilities alone are staggering! And the quantum entanglement patterns—"
"Yes, yes," Death interrupted dryly. "Though I must say, among all thirteen causes, the camel's contribution was particularly inspired. Never underestimate the butterfly effect of a startled dromedary." His skeleton stare was utterly unreadable. "Or should I say, the butterfly effect of a—"
"Please," Science interjected hastily, "no flatulence puns."
"LANCE!" The manager's voice had reached a pitch that suggested imminent cosmic consequences of its own.
"Right then," Lance sighed. "The multiverse won't save itself. Or maybe it will. Bit unclear on causality these days..." He gave a small wave and vanished from the magiscope. There was a boop, boop sound as it winked out.
Kristen sat silently for a moment. She glanced at the notes she'd been taking, suddenly realizing something important.
"Hold on," she said, flipping back through her pages. "The Continental Convergence was in 2030." She looked toward the counter where the new disc lay. "And that video disc is copyrighted 2075." She looked up at Death. "That's the current year, isn't it?"
Death's skull tilted slightly in what might have been approval. "Connecting the timelines, I see."
"So Lilith's story was back in 2036—and this new video is supposed to connect what's happening now?"
The newt hopped back onto the table, its belly pulsing with orange light as if responding to Kristen's questions.
"That," Death said, "is what we're about to see. The threads are coming together quite nicely."
Science nodded eagerly. "The chronological revelation creates an elegant structural framework. We start with you in the treehouse, view historical events through the magiscope, then reveal that we're witnessing events happening concurrently with your present time. There's a plan."
"And what," Kristen asked, "are we supposed to do while we watch another entire movie?"
"I think there is Pi," said Science, erasing notes on a dry-erase board on the fridge and writing π=3.14159265358979323846...
He lost her at one of the twos. Even if he were making a pun, she didn't think she could handle a slice of real pie, at least without making some room first. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
"We're using you to sweeten our compost, Kristen," said Death. Science turned, looking disgusted.
"Wha... What?" she asked.
"There is a restroom." Death's hand indicated the direction of a cloth curtain covering a small room in the middle of the space.
She was almost afraid to look. The newt seemed skeptical as well. After giving her a questioning glance, it traversed the gap between the table and chair where her bow and quiver hung. It nuzzled itself between the fletchings of the arrows.
"It's equipped with a modern toilet seat," said Science. Then, as an afterthought, and as Kristen pulled aside the curtain, he added, "We lift it, like gentlemen."
She peered in. There was a single shower stall, a sink with no notable handle for water, and a wooden box that stood above waist level. Indeed, on top of this was a porcelain toilet seat on a hinge above a hole cut into the box.
She glanced back out to the living space.
"Light switch is on the wall," said Science. "If you want me to show you how the shower works..." he began.
Kristen held up a hand. Then she entered the bathroom and pulled the curtain closed. She could hear Science from the kitchen beyond the thin fabric doorway.
"It's really quite interesting, you just tote the water over to the basin and turn on the heating blanket…" She ignored him, feeling uncomfortable that sound traveled so well from there to here.
Only one pace took her to where she could peer down into the hole of the plywood. Far below the toilet seat, she could see a light brown sprinkling of sawdust. There wasn't any noticeable smell. Oddly printed toilet paper sat on a shelf nearby.
She looked around, wondering where to put her paintball mask, which would undoubtedly fall to the ground once her belt was untied. There wasn't much room. She poked her head back out from the curtain and saw Death sitting comfortably, now holding his scythe and using it to rock himself gently in the recliner. His head turned toward her, offering no comfort.
Ugh! She gasped and slid the curtain closed again.
"You could've said something," said Science, as Kristen began wrestling with her belt.
"I really don't see what the problem is," said Death.
The problem, thought Kristen, finally getting the knot free, is that I won't even be able to pass gas in this closet without everyone knowing! She finally got her clothes loose and pushed them down just far enough to keep them off the floor. OMG! she thought, realizing that to get onto the seat, she would have to jump. She closed her eyes, breathed out, and hoisted herself onto the toilet.
Before she could even get comfortable, she farted.
"Just use the bucket when you've finished," came Death's voice as her cheeks turned from pink to crimson. She wondered what he was talking about and leaned over to look. Sure enough, there was a small silver bucket of sawdust by her feet, which now dangled from where she sat.
"It helps cover the smell—" he said.
She took the opportunity to handle her business.
"—and heats up the compost for a more thorough—"
She'd done it again and cursed silently to herself.
"—and nutrient-rich mixture," Science finished.
She tried to ignore the pause. Luckily the rest of her evacuation was quite noiseless. But so was the living area.
When she'd finished her necessaries and re-robed, she scattered a mound of wood dust into the hole, adding an extra measure to ensure it covered everything. Then she went to pull the curtain back but looked at her hands. Then at the sink. "Ugh!" she said, no longer able to contain herself.
"It's really just enough for us," Death said as she stormed out from the bathroom, her hands held palms up.
Science had already started pumping the well handle and waved her over. She went. "Don't we wash the dishes in here?"
Science gave Death a look that Kristen couldn't see, as she reluctantly rinsed her hands in the diminishing flow. He handed her a dish towel.
"And isn't this what you dried the tea cups with?" she said, using it anyway and then, ignoring Science's outstretched hand, throwing it down by the sink.
Science just looked at her, appalled.
"You better really have pie," she said, winking at the newt that was watching her from the quiver.
Kristen grabbed the MVD from the kitchen counter, looking at the artwork on the front while she brought it over to Death. The sleeve depicted a strange man riding a llama down a hill, holding a satchel overflowing with leaves. Behind him, on the hilltop, was a skeletal-looking tree. The title read:
Yestrasmartis
And the subtitle oddly read:
But you already knew that.
Death took the Magic Video Disc and said, "It's elderberry."
She looked at him quizzically as he removed the disc from its sleeve. "The pie."
She smiled.