"I want to see it. This "conditional magic" of yours." Jess finally said.
"Fine. But not today." I said with a sigh.
"Why not?" she demanded.
"First you can drop the tone. I've already agreed to show you. Second i'm basically out of mana at the moment and I'm not burning any of my emergency stockpile just to watch you choke on your own words. I'll be back to full come tomorrow." I said pointedly.
"Mana?" Boone asked.
"It's the nature of my magic. In order to cast anything I require mana of the correct amount and color. Right now my refreshable mana producing artifacts have already been mostly tapped and thus unable to give me more. It takes until the day rolls over for them to untap. I also have sources of mana that are one time use but I'm not burning those emergency rations just so she can turn blue as she accepts that I have actually been telling the truth this whole time." I say frankly.
"Ignoring that, you still have to answer for not telling me about Benny. You knew didn't you?" She asked with a sharp glare.
"The process was important. You had to reach him step by step. If I just flat out told you who he was and where it ruins the point." I say honestly.
"That wasn't your call! It was MY revenge!" she hissed.
"And you got it. So whether or not I told you made no difference." I point out.
"We could skipped all of the stuff between Goodsprings and the Strip." she said firmly.
"Only a small part of it. Don't believe me? I'll walk you through it. First lets skip Goodsprings entirely as that whole fiasco had almost nothing to do with me. We would have skipped Primm too but we barely even stopped there to begin with. Then you'd still have had to go through Nipton which would have again led up to the checkpoint and back. After that we came to Novac which we technically would have been able to skip entirely. That means Boone never gets his closure, Jeanie May stays alive and in charge and the ghouls bothering the town keep doing so. Then we would pass by the standoff in Boulder city and Veronica shortly after that." I pause to take a breath.
"Then we'd get to Freeside with basically no money and you having nothing worth anything to protect yourself beyond a vault suit that might as well have been made of tissues in the face of bullets and other shit. We would STILL have needed to figure out how to get past the securitron checkpoint and then you would have gone and confronted Benny before no doubt once again killing him in probably the exact same way or dying yourself because you were not as well equipped to handle him. And that catches us up again. The fucking process mattered." I finish firmly.
She got quiet and the anger bled out of her after hearing it broken down like that. No matter how she wanted to argue those were all facts laid out without any embellishment. A step by step run through of the entire process of getting to Benny. As I had said if we just rushed all the way to the strip all that would have really changed was how prepared we were for it.
"So you knew about me before we even met." Boone said with a far away expression.
I sigh "Yeah I knew." I said honestly.
"So what don't you know?" Jess asked eventually.
"Tons of things. My knowledge is, well, less like actual independent pieces of knowledge and more entire regionally isolated timelines. I know various pieces of information on a lot of things in this region and a few others where it's all technically the same but different choices were made. It's why I know exactly how us skipping everything to track down Benny goes. It's why I DIDN'T make it an option. Because the process was important. The end was always going to be similar. If you didn't die Benny would, one way or another. The stuff between Goodsprings and that moment was the only difference." I said honestly.
"Timelines? Like parallel histories?" Boone asked.
"Yes precisely. The start is always the same. Goodsprings, the courier waking up after getting shot. Sometimes a male, others a female. Sometimes good, others evil to the bone. After that it's just a matter of what the courier does. Skipping everything to go straight to the Strip, ignoring Benny entirely to explore literally everything, even them going on a rampage to kill everyone and everything they meet along the way. I've seen it all. Your kill from the dinosaurs mouth going to various possible people. Manny, Cliff, Jeanie may, all are options you accept in hopes of getting some closure." I let that sink in.
"I know a lot about a lot of things but my sight is not infinite. It's region locked and subject to change so saying definitively that I know something will happen only applies to a VERY small number of things. For example the second battle of the dam is an absolute fixed point. So too is the death of Benny." I said without lying at all.
"So you just know what we will do before we do it?" Jess asked with a look that was like she ate something sour.
"No. It's more a general vibe type deal. Exacting details are lost in the noise more often than not. Additionally in no timeline do not I exist. So that adds a layer of unpredictability that has to be accounted for." I said seriously.
"What do you mean you don't exist?" she asked confused.
"I mean every single timeline I know is entirely from your perspective, well versions of you at least. I simply don't exist in any of those timelines." I say with a shrug "It is what it is" I add.