zzambrosius_02

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.”—CGJung

 
When he woke the next morning, it was to a Herald’s cry: “Pick up your trash, pack up your stuff! Site closes at 4 PM! Leave the place cleaner than you found it! You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here! Thank you!”

Marie appeared in the door of the tent: “Tea is ready, and the sun is out. The canvas may well be dry before we take it down.”

He stretched and groaned as joints popped and muscles complained: “That will save a lot of time and effort. My holiday is over...just about. I’d just as soon not have to set everything up in the parking lot to dry later this week.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’d be a pain.”

He rolled out of the bed and began to dress.

He contemplated returning to the Real World: ‘Or to the real worlds, all of them.’ He sighed: ‘Stuff to do.’

It was two days later; it took that long to sort out the trailer and do the laundry: ‘I’d forgotten how much work I used to do before and after those SCA campouts...”

He sat at the south side of a large round table in a room in a stoa at Red Warrior Guild Skolo.

He’d been awakened that morning by multiple calls on his MPS, the request for this meeting among them.

Other calls included a ping from his desktop, alerting him to news stories about the Homeless population of Eugene: ‘Seems that a bunch of the rowdier Borderers moved across the river into Springfield,’ he thought. He pondered that story: ‘When asked why, they said they felt harrassed in Eugene, so they fled across to Springfield.’

Now Eugene’s nearby neighbor was suffering from the BLM’s eviction of the Swampers, and they didn’t like it—not one bit: ‘The funniest part is The Mayor of Springfield accusing Eugene’s cops and Councillors of deliberately driving the Borderers over the Willamette. Not that that’s unlikely, but it’s funny.’

His shoulders ached: ‘Not from swordplay—I’m accustomed to that, again—but from setting up and tearing down that camp. I’m really glad I got out of there with dry canvas.’

He dragged his attention back to the present; he stared with some dismay at the trio of Red Warrior Guild Magistrae who had asked him for the meeting.

“Something wrong?” asked the Eldest of them (in appearance at least).

Ambros looked around the hallway outside the restaurant at the top of Seattle’s Space Needle, in the Alcatraz Quiet Timeline.

“Masters must have found a way to break out those windows,” he said aloud, not too quietly. “Those are supposed to be completely unbreakable, except with artillery.”

The carpets were savagely shredded; enormous rents disfigured the wallpaper.

“That’s a lot of destruction for one bureaucrat to accomplish,” he said, shaking his head: “Masters! You around?”

No answer. He drew and deployed his APS, and cautiously moved along the hall. The remains of the double doors into the restaurant lay on the floor, where he’d left them on his previous visit. The marks of his cuts with the APS showed plainly.

He crept silently through, looking behind both sides of the door as he entered. He surveyed the wreckage of the foyer and bar. 

He drew out his Shifter and activated the MPS on his wrist: “Not a live thing for a hundred miles around, except bacteria and fungi...”

Empty cans and jerky wrappers littered the floor, mixed with vomit and liquor bottles. Ambros estimated the amount of food eaten, and checked the whole area, including the entire restaurant, for other signs.

In the end he said: “Masters fled the joint with about enough food for a week, on very short rations. If he’s really more than a hundred miles away now, he must be getting pretty hungry.”