Most of my time in Literature class was spent composing new story ideas. I curved ink and brought paper out of my pocket dimension, and ignored the lecture entirely while I went through the books and stories of this area and era. I made notations of which stories could be interpreted very differently, using a flick of my finger to write multiple lines of text and dry it immediately. Here's one that would be more interesting told from the sidekick's perspective. Here's one that could be a coma theory, if the audience is not burned out on coma theories already. For this one, an unreliable narrator. Next, an antihero.

  And occasionally I would take a break from that stuff to just tell a story I already know. Maybe a fairytale, maybe a Stallone movie, maybe an episode of the Simpsons. Anything that I could remember well enough, and that could be formatted in a way that this medieval setting will understand easily enough. The hardest stuff to adapt is anything with major fantasy elements- it's hard to write a story that has magic working one way when your audience already 'knows' that magic works differently. The easiest stuff to transfer over, oddly, is westerns. I'm batting 1000 with westerns, and I already wish I'd watched more of them when I had the chance, that would be useful under the circumstances.

  The teacher stopped lecturing to put us to reading some other assignment or another, I could tell from the silencing of that droning background sound.

  And then a voice reached my ears, intimately close. "I suppose it's good news for anyone who's worried about class rankings, that you pay so little attention in class," Tiviti Wirrel said. She was murmuring very very softly while she idly toyed with a small gem on her bracelet. Mana-empowered magic items, the hallmark of the warrior class. Tiviti was at least a gladiator, maybe a knight. She glanced up, made eye contact with me, then darted her eyes down to her bracelet and back to me and nodded.

  I answered with a bare tiny whisper of breath. "I'm glad you think so, but the scores will tell the story when the time comes."

  She smirked and her voice came back to me, quietly in my ears. "You think you can score high without even hearing the lectures?"

  This time I did not say anything, but the jibe on my lips made it clearly how smugly confident I was in my results. She shook her head, either amused at my arrogance or impressed by my intellect. Probably the first. I get the impression she respects a good hubris.

  But she doesn't need to know that this self-assurance doesn't come from arrogance. The scores tell the story: at an Intellect of 11 the game will not even offer me the option to place lower than first in my class.

  Instead she sent one more message to me through her bracelet. "If you're ready for another outing, I could purge some more of those monsters. Tomorrow night?"

  I nodded back. Sounds like a good opportunity. Tonight, I would do some scouting.

  And until then, I'm rewriting the classics, releasing wave after wave of reimagined touchstones, evolutions of cultural monuments. This society has a dire dearth of "what-if" thinking, and I need to jumpstart it. It's not even linear, it's not like the people here have never considered what would happen if a good guy didn't win or if a beautiful woman did not end up married. It's not a specific set of tropes and structures they're tied to- it's those stories themselves. Before I came along, there was literally a finite number of stories that people would tell, all as nearly verbatim as possible.

  From my reading I know that this complete stagnation of heritage began with the Fissuring. When the ground split in half people wanted something stable, and they created that stability in their customs and chronicles. For all that they cycle fashion trends twice a year, it's always within a tightly-proscribed paradigm, they are no closer to miniskirts now than they were five hundred years ago. Hearstwhile is moribund and stale.

  The last ten years I've been shaking up music and technology. The last three years I've been shaking up stories and storytelling. I need to reach some critical mass and get people breaking out of their tale-telling torpor and innovating on their own without my prompting. And I've only got a few more years to do it.

  No I don't pay attention in literature class. But for once I've got the best excuse ever.

  Safe to say, I've never been so happy to step onto a sporting field without seeing a blue window open up in front of me. No challenge, no strength rating, no damage ratio. I grabbed a hurley of the correct size and ran out to practice on my own.

  Backing up a bit: I void-walked from the music hall to the locker room, got dressed, and then took my portals to the edge of the field. I was in uniform, equipped and in place before anyone else was even inside the locker room. I did not want to sit around wondering, that's all. I like knowing in advance. Also, and not trivially: I did not want to be standing inside a crowd of noncombatants when I found out whether today would be safe or not.

  So when the coach ambled out, the first thing she saw was me, geared up to go, with hurley in hand, soloing back and forth at a good run. Balancing the sliotar on the bas of the hurley is a difficult skill but definitely worthwhile if you're going to be advancing. I'm not skilled enough to try to get under-bar goals from a distance, so I need to focus on advancing for the close-up game. Or I can just practice long-field points above the bar, but that's just not as much fun.

  "When I didn't see you in the locker room I thought you'd have transferred out," the coach said, barely yelling at all. "Instead I find you out here earlier than anyone at all. You're awfully eager."

  "Yes coach," I called out, without stopping. My breath huffed and panted. "Should be perfectly safe today."

  "Oh is that so?" she retorted.

  I paused, slowed, and came to stand still not far from her. I hopped the sliotar off the hurley and into my hand. "Well, my visions today only guarantee that I won't get hurt. Don't take this the wrong way, but I cannot offer guarantees for anyone else. Still, I believe that if I'm safe today, everyone should be safe today."

  The coach put her hands on her hips, clipboard clacking. "If you say so princess. Visions?"

  "Yes coach."

  "Where were these visions yesterday when you got attacked?"

  "Right where they were needed, coach," I said ruefully.

  She gave me a strange, appraising, 'what-do-you-mean-by-that' kind of look. "And so- yesterday you knew?"

  "Not how it would happen," I said, starting to catch my breath. "Just the relative severity. I thought it would be a sport injury or some sort of bullying, the sorcerous attack was a surprise."

  "You knew you'd get hurt?"

  "A little bit. That whole event was very frightening, but not very painful."

  "You showed up anyway?"

  "No guts no glory, coach. Just because I can see these things coming does not mean I need to run from them."

  The woman stopped, and took her hands from her hips to cross her arms and glare down at the grass for a long minute. "All right Harigold. Taking this from the top. You're a aristocratic princess. And a sorceress. And a convicted multiple-murderer. Who sometimes gets visions of danger in the future. And yet still runs straight towards that danger, instead of avoiding it. And you choose to play dangerous contact sports. For my team."

  "You know, when you lay it all out like that in a list with no context it sounds pretty stupid," I admitted. "But broadly, yes, every point of that is true."

  "Fuck it," the coach said. "But from now on you tell me when and if you or someone else is going to get injured. Even if you're not going to avoid it, I want that heads-up too."

  "Yes coach."

  "And if you're going to stay on the team you need to keep your grades up like everyone else."

  "Yes coach. I am probably going to be ranked first in our class, so that's a given."

  "Oh shut up," she groaned. "And keep running solo drills. You've got better hurley control than most. If we can get the other team scared to get near you, you might run that sliotar from midfield to scoring position."

  Our version of camogie is a lot more violent and roughneck than in the real-world, but otherwise plays exactly the same. Soloing is just about balancing the sliotar on the flat side of the hurley. It's basically how you dribble in camogie; we're only allowed to take four steps holding the sliotar in hand, or hold it for the same length of time as four steps. Cannot throw to anyone but yourself, cannot pick the sliotar up off the ground with a hand. So if you're going to get a lot of yardage you either need to kick or swat it a good distance, or you can pass it from player to player, or you can balance on the hurley to solo it.

  And if I can practice to the point that I can solo at a dead sprint, or while dodging tackles, I'm gonna be a star player.

  More likely I'll get moderately good and make some surprising gains for the team. I'm probably not going to be a major scorer. Still, I expect I'll earn my keep. And definitely hold my own in the scrum. I'm here to train up stats, and to have fun.

  Maybe this time, just for once, I'll be able to restrain my competitive nature and not make a big deal out of this.

  During dinner, and study hall, I produced and discarded a dozen possible ways to find out who had tried to kill me. It was easy to spitball and brainstorm, but an actionable plan? Not nearly as easy. My connections in high society are wonderful tools for putting influence and pressure on anyone who does not already want to kill me. My station and authority are great at influencing people if I know what I want from them. My sorcerous powers are powerful and versatile tools that can affect just about anything except for making people give me information they don't want to. My money can't buy answers until I know where to go shopping, and my out-of-game knowledge only applies to things that happened in the game, which this is not.

  I have a metric ton of resources, tools, options, powers, and advantages. And almost all of them are completely useless against secrets! So what is it I run up against over and over!? Secrets!

  Bah. And the main resource I do have for unearthing secrets is my twin brother Nathan. He's brilliant, charismatic, and he's as good at finding other people's lies as I am not good at doing that. He's got skills, plans, and plenty of luck. He would dismantle this thing fast. But to get him involved means that I'd have him nosing around in my other secrets. Rabert Frantlin, Quarl Billiams, Yheta, the Byeview Boys, Thumper Kuritan, my investments with Kurumi, my excursions with Tiviti, Elica's role in Lachel's difficulties... by bringing Nathan closer to my affairs, I increase the odds he stumbles across some small clue to any of these. And he's a good enough detective that he could take a small clue and unravel everything before I even realize he's got the scent in his nose.

  I need another detective, another spy. Someone I could trust with my business, who was not going to try to hold power over me, who I could ask to stay out of my private affairs.

  I also need a working smartphone, a couple hours' access to my old walkthrough files, and a double cheeseburger. I need about two hundred easy experience points, a firm answer to why my affinities were locked the way they were, and about thirty minutes with my hands around that goddess's neck. I'm probably not going to get any of those things though. Especially not a spy I can trust with my secrets. Everything else is slightly more feasible than that.

  So without that, I was left on my own. Out of my depth. I am so damn hypercompetent at so many things! I am exceeding the standards in so many ways! And yet I keep getting hit right from my weaknesses.

  Sucks.

  I jot down dozens of plans that seem all right until I really examine them. Over and over, the plans come to "and then what?" and I don't have an answer.

  And what's just as annoying is this sneaky conviction that I've already got all the clues I need. I'm annoyed by this suspicious thought in my brain that this is not, in fact, an investigation for me to pursue, but is actually a puzzle for me to solve by looking at it from the correct angle.

  I was distracted through dinner, and barely participated in conversation. The others joked about how a single assassination is enough to distract me, and I laughed a little but I kept trying to figure out how to find this mystery enemy. How do I track them, trap them, reveal them, deceive them? I can't make a plan until I know more! And all I have is an infuriating collection of questions that don't even make sense!

  In the end it was a relief to be released to our free time. I wanted to work on something different, a goal and a quest that is not nearly as baffling as this. The bells were not done chiming before I dropped into a doorway and shuttled myself hundreds of miles to the east.

  Out of Hearster entirely, I hovered in the air over the fishing villages of Jangale. This is the land ruled directly by the Freckentop house, but the main body of the Freckentops are associated in Hearstcliff and the royal family, preferring to be as near as possible to as much power as possible. The homeland of Jangale is mostly left in the care of their cadets and lesser houses, especially the Tsilven house. Despite the name, Jangale is not a jungle and never was, it took me ages to lose that assumption in my mind. It is a hilly, rocky, scrubby sort of land, with vineyards and olive groves and limestone monuments and fishing villages.

  When the Fissuring hit here, one side of the land was broken upwards, revealing the stone strata beneath. The other side was shoved downwards, and Jangale was never very high above sea level. The south side of the fissure was turned into an ocean inlet that stretched for two hundred miles inland, and a few miles wide. Under that water, entire villages were drowned and submerged, their communities and churches ruled by coral and cod now.

  I was looking for a particular landmark, at the narrow end where the water finally ended. I flew at speed, sometimes using a portal to skip a mile or two. I changed clothes again as I went, very modestly thank you, adding layers from the inside before dispelling my outer gown. I was low on mana, having done rather a lot of work today. I mostly relied on essence of air to fly me along, until I found the ghost town.

  Nothing ominous here, despite the obvious inference that there is a ghost town here. It was a fishing village that popped up centuries ago, but died out because the fishing wasn't consistent enough. Bad seasons can stack up until even the stubbornest trawler will move to get a better catch, or a better job.

  I skimmed over the low water, and I used my affinity to water to feel the currents pull. Here, there was a place where the water drained downwards. A sinkhole that was expanded and exacerbated by the water that flowed over it and down through it, eroded over centuries until the water drained faster, the sinkhole expanded wider. And after years, the currents here got strong enough to affect the fish populations and drag them under, starving out the village at the shoreline.

  Here.

  I surrounded myself in a bubble, and I sank that bubble straight down. The water bulged away in a bowl shape, displaced by my sphere of air, and the bowl deepened as I sank. The water came up to meet overhead, enclosing me beneath, the bubble was now under the surface. I sank further, hovering in the middle of a breathable sphere, surrounded on all sides by water that pressed darkly. And then below me: the bottom of the bay. And right beneath me: the yawning black sinkhole that drained water down into the deeps of the earth. I sank myself within, following the dark tunnel through the dripping, aching stones.

  I closed my eyes as the light failed. I wanted to channel the bat or the owl, but I had been injudicious during the day. I navigated instead using my affinity for stone and air and water, maneuvering through the borders between them.

  Side tunnels of standing water showed me where the water had nowhere to drain, so I ignored them. What I wanted was where the water retreated. As I shut off the flow from above, the water beneath me drained into lower and lower tunnels, and that is where I followed.

  Back into darkness neverending. Back to hidden homes of the starving swarms, stygian seas and an endless craving need that scours away any but the most evil of thoughts.

  I emerged. The way opened around me, exchange claustrophobic tunnels for agoraphobic galleries. This place was vast and dark, and full of rushing echoes. As I sank away with my bubble, I left the tunnel, and the water pressing from above began to flow. The waterfall I had interrupted began to stream down, and the noise rang out from all sides.

  A hidden ocean. Water that fell from the surface full of fish and life, gnawed to nothing until even the water is exhausted by the hungering of the blind monsters in this water. Their lanky malformed limbs parted the water beneath me, gasping for anything they can fit into their mouths, anything that can fall into the bottomless hunger they each carried.

  I opened a portal, and blazing burning light seared the cavern, and the eyeless things within would never know. They sloshed beneath, unknowing, while I returned myself to Hearstcliff. I had the place, I had visited and I could return. The hunts would continue.