The last Gate stripped me naked.
Save for two things.
As I passed through, the castle-forged steel of Aerion's armor bled into mist. Not all at once. First the pauldrons loosened from my shoulders, becoming pale vapor at the edges. Then the breastplate lost weight, lost definition, lost the stubborn reality of metal beneath my fingers. The mail followed in a soft silver shiver.
My body shifted with it.
The process was less violent than some of the previous Gates, but more intimate. Bone, muscle, and skin reconfigured with a deliberate care that was almost insulting. Prince Aerion Targaryen, barely old enough to be called a man by the standards of his world and still too young by several of mine, stretched and filled out into someone else. Not older by decades. Not even by one full decade. But the difference between almost grown and grown can be remarkably large when one is forced to experience it in seconds.
My shoulders widened. My hands lengthened. The slight, noble sharpness of Aerion's face softened in some places and sharpened in others, settling into Merrick's finer bones and dark-lashed eyes. My hair darkened, Valyrian silver-white bleeding down into raven black. A young wizard's body. Slim, attractive, practical enough to survive a dungeon, and unfortunately familiar enough from the recording that I knew precisely how much of it had been on display.
Then the clothing under the armor joined the metal, bleeding into mist as well.
Tunic. Belt. Hose. The last clinging layers of noble propriety.
Until my bare skin was kissed by the cool air of the cavern, and a quick white wisp darted past me toward Merrick's discarded clothes.
I followed quickly.
My light shoes clicked against the stone. They were one of the two things that had survived the transition, making a soft, neat sound in the sudden silence.
The shoes were no surprise. Whenever I entered a new World, I usually arrived dressed as my local self had been when they entered the Gate. Armor, robes, uniforms, embarrassing costumes, whatever the local body had carried across the threshold became the starting point.
Merrick had entered naked.
Save for the shoes.
The second thing was unexpected.
The wedding ring.
Not Aerion's betrothal token. Not Merrick's ring, for Merrick had no husband and, from the sudden bloom of his memories, no wife either. The ring was mine. Archer's and mine. Simple, elegant, Elven work, sitting on my hand as if no Gate in any world had the authority to remove it.
Good.
But unusual. Worth noting.
Merrick's black robe lay on the floor where he had shed it. Or rather, where the Gate had discarded the remains of the ritual. There was only a little dust on the cloth, which suggested roughly a day had passed. Perhaps less. Perhaps more, if the dungeon's airflow was odd.
More importantly, the robe still existed.
That implied Merrick's wards had not entirely failed after the Gate opened. If the local slimes had reached it unimpeded, the cloth would have been eaten, dissolved, or at minimum rendered unpleasantly damp. The cave floor around it bore the faint shining tracks of slimes that had approached and then veered away. A simple repulsion charm, weakened but functional.
Competent. Not brilliant, but competent.
Merrick had been a trained wizard, after all. A small-town one, perhaps. Skilled enough to recognize opportunity, and arrogant enough to spend his savings buying a cursed farm cheaply so he could cleanse it and sell it dear.
So, when he needed spending cash while trying, and failing, to break the curse, he made adult films with his adventurer friend.
There was an interesting lesson there about the commodification of magic, but I suspected Archer would not appreciate it if I used this exact moment to lecture.
Especially because the wisp had not settled into the robe.
It had burrowed under the black cloth and into the jockstrap beneath it.
Perhaps it would have been more erotic had Merrick, in the role of Zerdox, worn the robe with nothing beneath. A villainous sorcerer, naked under black cloth, his entire costume one dramatic gesture away from scandal. It had a certain obvious appeal.
But they had been filming.
And filming meant performance. Acrobatics. Angles. Doing that without the proper support for the important parts would be uncomfortable at best, and quite painful at worst. Or, perhaps more accurately, not wearing anything would have been daring fate to arrange a very painful and embarrassing accident.
Merrick had thought the jockstrap a necessary concession to professionalism.
The fact that this thought came to me with complete sincerity from his memories made it much funnier.
For a moment I simply looked at it.
It had been transformed: black and white stripes now ran across it, quite familiar, and a small crest had appeared at the front: the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen. The material had changed as well, slick and faintly waxy to the touch, with the thin crinkle of polyethylene-coated barrier fabric. If I were sprayed with corrosive slime while wearing it, the most important bits would likely remain safe.
"Do you plan to put it on, or just sniff it?"
The voice came from the direction of the Gate.
Merrick's memories supplied recognition immediately. Dwight. But the word choice, and that dry, sarcastic drawl, were Archer's.
I did not turn. Instead, I simply began putting the jockstrap on.
I expected a pang of pain. A touch of grief, perhaps. Another local life absorbed into Archer, as Mars and Shirou and Aethon had been. Another life folded into him, another layer in the blade.
But it did not come.
Had I been less attached to Dwight? Or was I getting numb?
"Who would sniff his own underwear?" I asked, allowing my amusement into my voice.
"A narcissist," came the prompt, teasing reply.
I turned to return the zinger.
And stopped.
Dwight's naked body was intimately familiar to me now, familiar enough that I could not miss the physical change. My eyes were drawn down, below where his belt should have been. Well, he wore no belt. His sword belt lay somewhere on the cave floor, discarded with the rest of his equipment.
But beneath where the belt would have rested was another sword.
His other, fleshier sword.
From Merrick's memories, it had been a perfectly respectable longsword. Now it was a zweihander.
No. More than that.
It was one of those impossible anime weapons, the kind that looked less forged than declared. Too large for practical use. Too large for ordinary physics. Too large, frankly, for good manners.
So big.
More fitting for a horse than a man.
And yet not grotesque. Not freakish. That was the strange part. It fit him. It had the same improbable rightness as Archer's traced blades, excessive but balanced, absurd but not clumsy.
Even if it was several sizes larger than it had any right to be.
My fingers twitched.
I wanted to put my hands all over it. To check if it was real.
That alarmed me.
Not the thought itself. Polishing Archer's sword was no great chore, and I was almost always willing to provide such service.
Intensity?
No. Not quite.
It was the way the thought slipped past my excellent self-control and manifested as a physical reaction.
"Mental interference?" I said out loud.
"Where?" Archer asked.
All levity vanished from his voice. He moved with precise grace, readying himself for attack.
"It seems the last transition did not merely enlarge your genitals," I replied, frowning slightly. "It also gave them hypnotic properties. Visual-based."
"I do not detect anything," a new voice added.
GLaDOS had finally arrived, rolling on the Roomba.
"It seems it does not affect you," I mused. "I wonder whether that is because you are not male, not human, not attracted to men, or something else."
"Before you start planning to parade me naked in front of test subjects to measure the response," Archer interrupted, "you should look down. I am not the only one who changed."
I looked down.
It was not only my fingers that had reached. My jockstrap was straining from the pressure.
But that was not what Archer meant.
What pushed against the transformed fabric had changed. It had been sharpened. Made harder in outline, more angular.
More like a railroad spike.
"If you are going to waste time on mating, I am going to leave," GLaDOS interjected. "I have better things to do than watch."
I was about to correct her.
Because she was wrong. This was not about sex. This was about anomalies, which, if left unexamined, were at best opportunities lost, and at worst dangers unavoided.
But I stopped because she was also right.
This was not only one anomaly. They had piled up like unwashed clothes in a student dorm. The ring. The jockstrap. Archer's "sword". My own altered anatomy. A visual compulsion that had slipped past my self-control. GLaDOS' apparent immunity. And those were just the newest.
This was not the time to rush from one to another without a plan, like a squirrel on meth.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and visualized clothing.
Simple slacks. A polo shirt. Dignified. Comfortable. Practical enough for a cave, respectable enough for a meeting, and bland enough not to invite commentary from Archer.
I pushed the image into the jockstrap.
It resisted.
Something was missing.
Yes. That.
I added the Targaryen heraldry. A small three-headed dragon over the breast pocket, restrained enough to look almost like a workwear brand logo.
The resistance eased.
Cloth slid over me as the jockstrap lengthened and transformed.
I opened my eyes to see Archer putting on his sword belt, with sword and sling attached to it.
Manly, a word supplied in my mind.
Well, it was not as if he was a poor picture of masculinity. But that was another suspicious mental intrusion.
The half-baked ritual really did its work.
A moment later, his own equipment shifted into jeans and a T-shirt, with the Velaryon seahorse heraldry printed large across the front, looking a little like band merch by placement alone.
"No leisure activities," I said out loud. "Those must wait. Now that all six Gates have opened, we need to make some plans."
I was tired.
It had been a very, very long day. Too much had happened in it. Six Gates. Six new worlds. Six new sets of problems, opportunities, memories, and metaphysical indigestion.
But there was still more to do before I could rest.
At least for a bit.
I straightened, adjusted my body, and prepared to speak.
"Lecture pose number five," Archer said to GLaDOS. "He is going to start with enumeration."
Soft enough to consider private, but loud enough for me to hear. Deliberate. Precise. Like a cut from the finest sword.
But I was not merely being predictable. I was properly communicating my intent through body language.
And properly communicating that I had heard him.
I adjusted my position to make it a touch more menacing, just enough to show him that punishment would come.
When time allowed it.
His lips twisted into a smirk. A pleased one. Not that anyone else would have known.
"The first Gate has closed," I said, enumerating. "The world behind it is no longer our concern."
I raised a second finger.
"The second has no urgent global matters." Though it did have private ones. I was still a bit worried about Victor. "But it does require further exploration and observation."
I paused there for a second. Both to let them process it, and to take a breath.
The air tasted of slime and musk. Even a day later, the smell still lingered. The chamber must have had poor ventilation.
"Beyond the third Gate, the situation in Tesla City is stable for now," I continued.
And in the care of my greater self.
"But we need to plan expeditions into the frozen lands for other survivors. The time they have left is likely limited."
"I will take the lead on that," Archer said. "You prepare the infrastructure. Supplies, housing, and receiving new people."
I nodded. It was not unexpected. Besides, everything worked better when everyone took the job they enjoyed doing.
And for him, that was saving people.
Directly. Personally.
"And I will organize education and retraining for both the current and new inhabitants of Tesla City," GLaDOS chimed in, "to transform them from a drain on our limited resources into productive members of our corporate family."
My greater self briefly touched my mind, transferring information.
"You will find the new addition to ASEND quite useful for that," I said, but did not elaborate.
It was not the time.
And she would see for herself soon enough.
"For the fourth Gate," I moved on, "fortunately, Mayan calendars are precise enough that we know the exact date. Unfortunately, we have less than two years until Cortes lands."
"Cortes does not need to land successfully," Archer said.
"I love when you are being charmingly murderous," I replied. "But before you send our enterprising conquistador to sleep with the fishes, consider who and what we actually want to save. Montezuma? The Triple Alliance? Blood-soaked Aztec culture? Instead of wading straight into that mess, we focus on the real enemy."
I tapped my fourth finger against my thumb.
"Smallpox."
"Not to disparage your humanitarian efforts, but what about prophecy?" GLaDOS interjected. "Prophecy. What an unscientific word. Conclusions should follow the causes, not jump around."
"Causality requires linear time. We break that with every portal we make," I replied. "We should leave it as it is."
A pause.
"Train for the ballgame, but not try to avoid it. From precedent, avoidance does poorly with prophecies."
For a moment, I let silence linger, to see if there would be any other interruptions.
When none came, I raised my left hand too. I needed a fifth finger, and just using a thumb would be silly.
"Beyond the fifth Gate, we also have a prophecy," I continued. "And also potential opportunities in the Stepstones. Both as preparation for the prophetic journey, and as an opportunity to deal with those slaver cities."
I let that sit for only a moment before moving on.
"But before all that, we have to return to Runestone and explain how we lost Emily."
"I also require my new platform," GLaDOS said. "I miss the efficiency of my Human Intimidation and Eradication Avatar."
"Well, this new one would not be so intimidating, since it needs to look exactly like Vaella," I replied. "But I could make it deadly enough for your tastes. That reminds me, I will need a lock of Vaella's hair, so you will have to assume human form. Just briefly. I apologize for the indignity."
"Yes, but that still leaves the problem of Emily," Archer added. "We have, after all, lost a noblewoman."
"Perhaps we could say she fell overboard," I mused. "It happens."
"And what happens when she comes back?" Archer asked. "You were nearly certain she would."
"She is a good swimmer," I replied blithely.
"Being a good swimmer does not explain a two-year absence," he pushed further.
He was not wrong. I was almost certain Emily would return. But that was exactly why the lie needed room to breathe. Archer wanted a story that would survive facts. I wanted one that would survive people.
"Well, then she was picked up by a ship that went..." I thought for a moment, then continued, "bound for Asshai, perhaps. It took her a long time to return. Or she was abducted by pirates. Or had some adventure. It does not matter. I am Daemon's son. No matter what explanation I give, many will assume something worse."
"I know you have a perverse joy in people thinking you a villain," Archer said, his voice a touch softer than usual. "But I admit I mislike it."
"Admiration is the furthest thing from understanding. People observe what they fear. What they worship, they put on pedestals," I said, though that was more of an excuse.
He was, after all, right.
I did find people making terrible assumptions terribly funny.
I extended another finger on my left hand.
"Enough about philosophy. Luckily, there is no prophecy behind the sixth Gate."
"About that," Archer said.
"You are not going to tell me there was a carved stone prophecy right behind my back," I said with a sigh.
"Well, if you insist, I could avoid telling you about the carved stone prophecy right behind your back," he replied with a smirk. "Would it help if I kept silent about it?"