Completing Ivy's transfer properly required more preparation than any of us had anticipated, and Vethrion, after consulting with the Historical Review Circle directly, secured permission for us to return briefly to the Archive of Incomplete Records — this time with a specific, focused purpose rather than the broader, exploratory investigation of our first visit.
"If other interrupted transfers exist with similar Realmgate anchor compatibility," Vethrion explained, guiding us back through the Rift's chaotic threshold, "understanding the precise mechanism of their interruption may prove essential to safely completing Miss Chen's own transfer without triggering whatever safeguard originally prevented its natural conclusion."
We found, cross-referencing dozens of similarly marked records with increasingly practiced efficiency, a pattern that proved both illuminating and deeply unsettling — trainees and transfer subjects spanning centuries, each interrupted at a similar stage of completion, each left in a state of suspended, exploitable potential rather than either finishing their process naturally or being permitted to simply fade away.
"Some of these are considerably older than I expected," Kai said, examining a record whose dating markers suggested an age measured in millennia rather than mere centuries. "Whoever's behind this interference has been patiently accumulating potential anchors for an extraordinarily long time."
I found myself drawn to one particular record, something about its details catching my attention in a way I couldn't immediately articulate — a trainee named, according to the fragmented status window, simply "Aldric," whose training process bore unsettling similarities to my own trillion-year ordeal, interrupted, according to the record, at nearly the exact same completion percentage as Ivy's own transfer.
"This one trained through something very similar to what I went through," I said, examining the record more closely. "A trillion-year process, nearly identical structure. But it says here the training itself was interrupted, not just the transfer afterward."
"Interrupted mid-training," Aria said, alarm evident in her voice. "That means whoever did this could reach directly into the training process itself, not just the transfer stage afterward."
"That's..." I trailed off, feeling a fresh, personal chill settle over me at the implication. "That's considerably closer to my own experience than anything else we've found so far. If someone could interrupt Aldric's training process at nearly the same point mine reached completion, that means whoever's responsible for this has access to, or at least deep familiarity with, the exact same training grounds I went through myself."
Vethrion studied the record with visible, growing concern. "This is deeply troubling, Master Gigonos. If the interference extends into the training process itself, rather than merely the transfer stage that follows completion, this Circle's earlier assessment of the scope of this problem requires substantial revision."
We continued cataloging records for several more hours, building an increasingly comprehensive picture of a scheme that had, apparently, been operating patiently and largely undetected across a span of time that made even my own trillion-year training feel, by comparison, relatively brief.
It was Ivy, examining records alongside us despite her own understandable unease at the archive's implications for her personal situation, who finally voiced the question that had been building, unspoken, throughout our entire investigation.
"If this has been happening for so long," she said quietly, "to so many people, across so many worlds — why hasn't anyone stopped it before now? Why did it take my own accidental, incomplete arrival, and Lukas's petition, to finally bring this to the Court's attention at all?"
Vethrion was quiet for a long moment before offering an answer that carried the weight of genuine, uncomfortable institutional honesty. "Because this Circle, and the broader Court it represents, has grown complacent across countless millennia of relative stability," it admitted. "We assumed the underlying systems governing training and transfer processes were fundamentally sound, requiring only occasional oversight rather than active, ongoing scrutiny. Your arrival, and the pattern your investigation has now revealed, suggests that assumption was a costly, dangerous mistake."