Chapter 302: Gone and Forgotten
Alexandra Erin on July 24, 2015 in Volume 2 Book 9: Who Is Mackenzie Blaise?, Volume 2: Sophomore EffortIn Which Mackenzie Got It From Everybody
I couldn’t hold it against Rowan that he didn’t immediately launch into answering my question, much less answering every mystery of my childhood and life to date. After all, from his point of view, the past day or so had to have been just as mystifying and frightening as it had been for me.
Watching me collapse to the floor and then come back up just as insistent as before but in a completely different direction couldn’t have helped make things any clearer.
That’s the benefit of hindsight, though. At the time, I just wanted to know what the hell was going on… what I was missing, what had been done to me.
“What just happened?” he said.
“I don’t know!” I said. “I think I questioned something I wasn’t supposed to question, and it… broke. Inside me, I mean.”
“Something is broken inside you?”
“Okay, that sounds really dire when you put it like that,” I said. “What I mean is, someone suggested to me earlier today… hold on, bad choice of words. Someone put forth the idea to me earlier today that I might have been acting under a telepathic suggestion that was stopping me from thinking about certain subjects. I didn’t believe this, but… it’s possible I was being prevented from believing it. A minute ago, right before I fell over on the floor, I noticed a discrepancy and thought about it, and… snap.”
“Snap?”
“That’s what it was like,” I said. “Like a dam breaking… only there evidently wasn’t anything in the reservoir behind it. I’ve been told my memory might have been tampered with, but I don’t know anything that I didn’t know when I woke up this morning.”
“Well, that’s a shocking indictment of the academic program here,” he said, putting the end of his sleeve in front of his mouth as he sort of giggled.
“Rowan,” I said. “I’m going to ask you this once. Are you fucking with me? Is this all a joke, this stuff about us knowing each other?”
“No,” he said. “Khersis! No, Mackenzie! It’s not a joke. I make smartass comments when I’m nervous, and as I recall, you do, too, sometimes, but I’m serious.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then so am I. Tell me everything.”
“Where do I even start?”
“How about the beginning?” I said. “No, wait… how about the end? We were friends, I went away. What happened?”
“I told you, nobody knew,” he said. “I thought it had something to do with the… you know…”
“Rowan, I don’t know,” I said.
“The psychic stuff,” he said. “The games we used to play. Your mom had told us it wasn’t a good idea to mess around like that, and you stopped, but stuff kept happening, and then when you both disappeared, I thought… I thought maybe we’d caused it somehow, you know? I know, I know, you don’t know. But I spent years reading up on the subtle arts, ‘psionics’… I Was A Teenage Mindreader and stuff like that, all the coming-of-age stories. There was this one about a pyrokinetic… it made me think of you.”
“Was there a fire?” I asked.
“Some kids said, but I don’t think they knew better than anyone else,” he said. “It was more just the whole… well, the story didn’t have a happy ending, okay? I was looking around for the answer to a mystery, and the only thing I knew about you that was different from anyone else was that you maybe might have been a bit psychic…”
“Tell me about that,” I said. “You seemed pretty sure I should have been able to read your mind, when we bumped into each other in Gilcrease. We did bump into each other, right?”
“Are your recent memories of me shaky, too?”
“No, nothing’s shaky… whatever you think I should remember isn’t there,” I said. “What I meant was, that was a coincidence, right? You weren’t looking for me, or lurking around there specifically so I’d run into you?”
“I came to Magisterius University because I knew you were here,” he said. “But I had no idea we were in the same dorm. They keep that kind of thing on a need-to-know basis, and… well, I don’t exactly have a lot of basis for comparison, but the towers don’t seem like the kind of dorm where everyone knows each other.”
“No, they’re really not,” I said. “Within a floor you get little communities and stuff, but… there’s just too many people to have something like a social night for the whole hall or anything like that. Not that that kind of thing is exactly my scene. Anyway, you were going to tell me about me reading your mind.”
“It was like a game we played,” he said. “You know? Trying to guess what the other one is thinking… I don’t even remember what we were talking about when it started, just that I was going to tell you something and then it popped out of your mouth. When I look back at it from the cold light of almost basically adulthood, it wasn’t anything I’d actually call definitive, but it put the idea in our heads, so we started trying to see if we could make it happen again.”
“What, like, ‘I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 10’ type stuff?” I said.
“Little bit of that, little bit of what was basically ‘I Spy…’ without the clues,” he said.
“And that was enough to convince the two of us that I could read your mind?”
“No, actually, you were pretty terrible at it,” he said. “But… stuff kept happening. You kept hearing things, knowing things… odd things at odd moments. Sometimes I’d know what you were thinking, too.”
“So maybe you were the telepath,” I said.
“No, because I only ever picked things up from you,” he said. “You got it from everybody.”
“…that seems like a pretty big deal for someone to have expunged from my memory, if it was happening all the time,” I said. “Though, I have it on good authority that memories are associative rather than linear.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means if someone wanted to root out most of the memories that deal with the same thing, they wouldn’t have to… or be able to… look up and down the timeline of my life to find all the instances of it,” I said. “They’d just have to look for clusters. And even if they didn’t get all of it… memories without context aren’t really… well, I don’t know what they are. The fragmented memory of a person I don’t remember playing a game I don’t remember to verify a suspected power that I don’t remember probably isn’t much more than a weird feeling, if I even managed to trigger it somehow.”
“Do you have a lot of weird feelings, Mackenzie?”
“My life is a weird feeling,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” he said. “Nothing’s been quite right for me since you left.”
“We… you weren’t in love with me, were you?”
“Mackenzie, I was eight,” he said. “I was in love with grape juice.”
“You were in love with gr…”
“I was trying to make a point about how young I was and I said the most inane thing ever,” he said. “Can we get past it?”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s just, the way you said that…”
“You were my best friend,” he said. “And probably my only real friend. The world felt wrong without you in it.”
“When I think about my childhood, before… what I remember is that my mother was my world,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Rowan, but… I’m not sure I can believe that I felt the same way about you.”
“Well, to be honest, you were a bit older and a full grade ahead of me, so I kind of have to doubt it myself?” he said. “But… I mean, you loved your mom, Mackenzie. Like, people made fun of you for that.”
“That I remember,” I said.
“But we were friends, good friends,” he said. “I can’t imagine I wasn’t important to you.”
“This is the thing that makes no sense,” I said. “I was… someone told me that they thought maybe my mind had been tampered with so I wouldn’t grow up blaming myself for something that wasn’t my fault. But I don’t understand how or why that leads to erasing all memory of you, and apparently significant parts of my childhood with it. I mean, did I have other friends?”
“Yeah… I mean, the way elementary schoolers do,” he said. “We were the ones who hung out almost every day outside of school, but then there were the people you sat with at lunch, and things like birthday parties. Normal stuff.”
“Normal stuff,” I echoed. It sounded normal. It was the kind of thing I remembered going on around me. “I don’t remember that at all.”
“If the block in your head got broken, why don’t you?” he said. “Not that I’m doubting you or anything, I’m just trying to get a handle on the rules.”
“Okay, well, I am not an expert, but I have sat through a couple impromptu lectures about the way the mind works, and I’m friends with someone who is probably one of the most powerful and skilled telepaths on this patch of the surface of the world, statistically,” I said. “And as far as I can tell, there are two things that might have happened here: one, I might have had a bunch of memories erased and/or altered beyond recognition, and two, I might have had some suggestions laid on me that would keep me from thinking about topics relating to them.”
“Might have?”
“I think once you start talking about mental tampering, you have to firmly embrace the whole ‘true knowledge is knowing you know nothing’ thing,” I said. “I mean, I don’t want to take it this far, but if I can accept that my childhood memories were altered, how can I know that my recent memories weren’t? If it’s possible that someone laid a suggestion on me ten years ago that was stopping me from thinking certain things were possible, it’s just as possible that someone laid a whammy on me tonight in order to make me strongly consider it.”
“That’s… that’s a scary way to live.”
“I don’t plan on living like that,” I said. “I mean, if you think about it, the idea that anything you think you know might be a lie and any idea you think was yours might have been put there by someone else is technically true of everyone at every moment… I’m just kind of acutely aware of it right now? My point is, there are these two things that I will say have probably been done to me. The two things aren’t actually connected… I mean, yeah, probably the same person or entity did them, and for the same reason, but one’s not propping up the other.”
“So the memories you lost…”
“I have a sinking feeling they’re not just buried but gone,” I said. “The suggestion was just to keep me from noticing any holes they left, though I’ve been assured the mind does a pretty good job of papering over the cracks all on its own, which probably helped things. In fact, that might be why the suggestion was broken so soon after something came along to challenge it… it might not have had or needed much force to begin with.”
“But why… why would someone do that to you?”
“Like I said, the theory on the table right now is so I wouldn’t feel bad. I’m not saying I buy it, but… well, it’s my favorite theory.”
“I mean, if this was done to help you, why would they take your memories away forever?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It makes a sick kind of sense, if we work on the assumption that I was never supposed to find out that I was ever tampered with, you know? If the memories were there, buried… they could be uncovered. Like I said, I don’t know the rules for this stuff any more than you do, but I have to imagine there’s a lot more that could go wrong in the long term with hidden memories than destroyed ones.”
“Shit, you are so calm about this.”
“It’s… it’s all abstract to me, Rowan,” I said. “You tell me that I know you, I knew you… and nothing in it resonates with anything inside of me. I can’t imagine why you would be lying, or why you would have all these details, so… I guess I accept you’re telling the truth? And I guess that means my memories are wrong? But I know what I know. I remember what I remember.”
“And you don’t remember what you don’t remember,” he said. “You know… I thought I was prepared for anything. When I found out you were alive, I thought… I hoped… that I’d catch up to you and you’d explain that you had to move away for, safety, I guess, because of the demon thing, but you’d thought about me and wished you could get in touch. But I made myself think about all the years that had passed, and how much I’d changed, and how much you must have changed, even without all the… stuff… just, the passage of time, you know? And I thought that maybe we were different people, maybe you’d grown out of missing me… or maybe you never had. I told myself it would be enough to know that you were alive and okay, enough to know the mystery was solved. I even thought that maybe you wouldn’t remember me, the way, you know, you don’t remember people sometimes. I just never thought…”
“You never thought that every trace of your existence would have been wiped from my head,” I said.
“Can you blame me?”
“No,” I said. “Rowan, I don’t… I don’t want to make any promises about the future, about you and me and… whatever. I don’t think that’s fair or realistic. But I want to get back what was taken away from me, and that means getting to know you all over again. I don’t know if that’s going to be enough to get our friendship going again, and I kind of doubt… I mean, realistically, it’s not ever going to be just like it was, whatever it was like. But there’s at least one thing we have in common.”
“What?”
“We’ve both had something taken away from us,” I said. “This was done to us, to both of us. And I know I said the theory on the table is that it was supposed to help me, but… frankly, I had a lot of things done to me after I turned that were supposed to help me.”
“So what do we do?”
“I kind of want to just sit here and have you tell me the story of my life as you remember, but it is approximately ass in the morning,” I said. “And I think we’re likely to just keep going around in circles of clarifications and questions and treading back over the same stuff, and I don’t think it’s going to get better if turn this into an all-nighter.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Like I said before, I don’t really know where to begin.”
“Okay, well… you think about that, get your thoughts in order, and I’ll… I was going to say ‘check in’ with my friends, but I feel like what I should be doing is apologizing. If I wanted to catch up with you tomorrow…?”
“I’m in room 515,” he said. “I’ll probably be there all afternoon.”
“Okay,” I said. “I might bring someone with me… I mean, I haven’t talked to her about it, but if she’s as interested in unraveling this thing as I think she is, then I imagine she’ll be up for it. The question is, how do you feel about having your mind read?”
So Dee is going to be looking into Rowans mind.
Another layer of a very complex weave. (ok, more like 10 layers)
Thank you!
So her memories are GONE. It does make a kind of sense. Though if I remember from way back when erasing memories is a lot like healing wounds as far as these things go.
To get that specific with so many fundamental bits without leaving ANY recognizable mental scars requires both skill and power I can’t even comprehend.
Though maybe if Dee or ROTT knew what to look for they could try finding and re-opening old “wounds’. I doubt a full restoration is possible but getting a couple of bits back would still be nice.
Seems like it would be simpler to kill off some of the more prominent bits, and let the association links break. One could have all kinds of memories, with no real way of remembering them.
Of course, we still only have Mackenzie’s personal theory. On one hand, I think it would be cool if she get the memories back… on the other, it certainly makes sense to have them gone for good.
The obvious flaw being that you have a LOT of links to break. Memories aren’t just linked one way and you can’t just scrub out one detail without making logical holes. In this case working off Rowan himself as a kind of association would probably be most convenient. He’d be associated with school and home and neighbors and pretty much any memory that doesn’t involve Laurel directly.
That last one is probably most promising. I mean a link defined by the absence of the one thing that’s actually THERE. I mean if Laurel is out and his family is babysitting she just has to remember the times her mother wasn’t around but she wasn’t in school. Which would basically be a bunch of memories effectively identical to the ones involving Rowan and his mother as a babysitter and maybe a few parties. Deleting an absence of information is probably way harder than deleting regular information, and basically works the same as a minus key in a search engine.
Well, my thought is that memories would come in a few varieties including events and concepts. People are concepts, and things you did with them are events, and details about them are other concepts linked with them.
So, unless a given memory is linked heavily with multiple others, most memories would end up filed as “thing that happened with [person]” or “detail about [person]” and the primary link to that memory is that person. So, if you were to delete the core concept of that person from the mind, you would be left with a bundle of events and details about and involving them… but with no way to look them up.
So there may be a memory “favorite color is red” and “the time we ate lunch together” linked to a friend named Alice. But if your core memory of Alice (an abstract concept) is removed, those details become meaningless, and can’t really be accessed in any useful way. You may recall that you knew someone who likes the color red, or that you once had lunch with a friend, but you wouldn’t link either of those things to the other… or to anything else about that person.
This would mean that by removing the core memory of each classmate and/or close friend, you eliminate her ability to recall any events or details associated strongly with them.
Remove Rowan, and you lose all the games they played together. Eliminate her classmates, and she loses all the social skills she learned through interacting with them. Remove the idea from her mind that she may have psychic powers, and she forgets all the times where they seemed to be in play.
Layer on top of that a strong compulsion to ignore the gaps, and it’s like none of it ever happened.
That would mean only 20-30 specific concepts needed to be erased to suppress the rest. And remember how the ROTT said that anyone accessing your mind would need to follow the same connections you do to access memories in a meaningful way? That means that in the process of deleting them, they would need to perform a fully recursive search down each branch and then destroy memories on the way back up. This would be a long and involved process, if you wanted to avoid causing severe damage. On the other hand, you could just delete the root nodes, and the rest is left dangling in oblivion.
It’s, oddly enough, like “deleting” a file on a computer. You remove the record of the file from the filesystem, but the data is still there.
So the question is, did someone thoroughly scrub the memories? Or just snip off the chains. And if the second, is it possible to recover them?
I think we’re moving a bit too far into theoretical concepts in this case.
MU memory eraser have been mentioned as probably working along a specific concept. It’s not just breaking connections, but more or less tearing the entire experience off at once. Hissy remembered nothing of her experiences and this seems to be the norm.
In that case the (very specific) memories were literally dangerous. Anything short of complete removal could be damaging. Furthermore, those memories were probably much easier to find, both because of their limited scope, and being infernally tainted.
Well the games aren’t gone, it’s just that without Rowan in her memories she was playing them with herself. Kind of how Amy Pond’s parents were removed from all of time but she never questioned it because they were removed.
I think in Hissy’s case they just erased everything back to a point before she got in the fight. A bit brute force but considering memory consolidation and short and long-term memory function sounds reasonable. No XP for Hissy.
Speaking of coincidence, I had commented about a story about repairing memories with a coup;e who are amateur authors.
Their premise is that there are secondary, backup memories that might be retrievable from undamaged portions of the brain.
My disagreement with this idea that what I know about human memory, it does not work that electro-mechanical way. I understand that our memories are chemical chains. Once the chains are broken, there is no way to retrieve that specific memory with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
Now there is a hypothesis, that the complexity of our personality exist not just 3 dimensions but in 4 and that there is an unproven, maybe unprovable quantum entanglement effect. Maybe but then what?
If through nano technology, comes the opportunity of repairing actual physical damage to brain cells. That still cannot the memories that were physically destroyed by Alzheimers or physical injuries.
The media as usual in journalistic hyperbolic ignorance will proclaim a cure for senility. To be followed by a flood of lawsuits when people realize that the person inhabiting what used to be their mother? Maybe a very nice person but the new personality will still not have any memory of their past life, families, friends, etc.
The suggestion that prerecorded memoirs, photo’s, video, etc can be used to give the new person a datadump to replace those lost memories. However that won’t be more than an actor memorizing a role.
There is also a theory though, that we remember remembering things, so we have memories of memories – less accurate, but more recent. And that we often don’t remember full details, because we aren’t really remembering the original, just the last version. It’s like repeatedly photocopying copies of a document using a cheap copier – it loses a lot of quality, and gains a lot of garbage. The most important parts stick out more, and the less important parts become lost.
If this holds true, then there may be various links on the chain of copies that would have been missed by the erasure – leaving potential (poorly formed) copies that could be recovered.
No, memories aren’t simple static chemical chains. They’re encoded in the shape of the neurons as well. Things you regularly think become easier to think. Some neurons literally are louder than others. However, this takes place in a world where magic is real and the universe literally screws with you if you try to use the scientific method. Memories likely aren’t stored or accessed in the same way in that world as in our world.
Finally the proof that Mackenzie has psychic abilities/potential. I’ve suspected that pretty strongly ever since the fight with Hissy, when Demon!Mack went “OK, if she’s gonna try and get inside my head, let’s show her the real horrors that are in here” and actively did something to psychically violate Hissy’s mind.
Then we find out that Mackenzie’s mom was/is a powerful subtle artist, and the SSOROTT tells her that she’s kinda-sorta-but-not-quite got psychic powers… the pieces kept sort of adding up, but it’s nice to finally have it confirmed.
Now the question is, what will she do with it? 😀
This is so sad, really. And I’m weirdly proud of Mackenzie for her take on this that “this is something that was done to US.” True, but it is remarkable that she has found out that her memories were tampered with; but she’s worried about the heartbreak of a best friend she doesn’t remember. That’s growth.
I want to take it that way, but isn’t there also the possibility that (the demon side of) Mackenzie is being manipulative, framing it that way to make sure of Rowan’s cooperation?
There are no two mental entities inside Mackenzie’s skull. There is only Mackenzie who is affected by her demonic heritage as much as she is by her human one. And whose personality is informed by what (apparently) her mother left her of her youth and the way her grandmother forced her to grow up in an abusive situation.
Part of Mackenzie’s nature is to hunt, but it is buried pretty deeply under layers and layers of mental and social conditioning. She is no Dr.Jeckyll / Mr.Hyde. Rather both are always present in her, with the equivalent of the doctor forming the majority of her personality and only in times of great stress the more murderous Hyde part of her personality controlling her actions (much like how in times of mortal danger our primitive brains takes control because it is much better at keeping us alive).
I’m curious what remnants the Owl Turtle Thing could find in there.
I’m interested in Dee’s interaction with Rowan, but I’m -really- interested in the OTT’s interaction with Mackenzie’s frayed brain now that she suspects things.
Well, this sure makes me more certain of my theory that this whole thing was done to cut off Mack’s telepathic abilities. Hard to do that without removing any evidence she had them, and that evidence would have been inextricably linked with her friends.
It seems like Laurel Anne was willing to go damn far to thwart the Man’s plans for Mack, and I imagine that her telepathy was a large part of it (remember that he started showing up again when Pitchy tore a hole in her mind, and he sure tried to get Mack to let him teach her psychic defense stuff.) Makes me wonder what it is he’s up to.
Another excellent chapter, AE. Thanks so much!
The theory that his interest in Anne was more to do with her mental ability than anything else may have merit.
Well, Mackenzie is half demon, she is fertile and a psionic. If her daddy can figure out that whole ‘female demons get eaten by any predator’ thing which currently prevents halfbreeds from doing any propagating with other demons, he could go a long way to bring at least one particular bloodline of demons (his) back into the world permanently.
And having psionic abilities and a mind that is literally deadly to any human would be a useful survival trait. Or perhaps he expects it to be able to allow her to defend herself against other predators. Not sure how effective it would be against a greater dragon (probably not so because the one she met could easily bind her will with his), but we know what happened to all the female part demons that Mercy could get her hand on in her quest to breed an army of half demons, and my guess is a psionic ability would allow Mackenzie to protect herself against that particular fate.
I wonder if there is something like artificial insemination in the MUniverse? That would solve some problems for both Mercy and Mackenzie’s father.
If I had to guess, sex probably involves more magic than our world. It seems like the right spell ought to do it… but messing with life magic like that might not be very safe.
The Man’s interest in Laurel Anne, Aiden and Mack do smell to me of an attempted breeding programme, maybe he’s trying to establish a clan to rival the LaBelles – could they be a part-demon-bloodline clan from a rival to the Man?
I doubt that they are demon blooded. If they had enough demonblood for anyone to care, it would be enough to cause issues.
It’s been heavily implied the LaBelles are linked to the Fay that use to be local to the region (hence their gifts). Besides that it’s been mentioned they have some giant/dragon. But it came from Puddy, so shouldn’t really be taken at face value.
No demon blood though.
Nice Update. Lots of information again, I hope it continues.
I looks like my theory from last week is still possible and a couple of my assumptions have been confirmed. Mackenzie was reading everyone without much control and was also was capable of actively interacting with another persons mind which would have been quite bad if it had continued after she had turned.
I don’t really have any idea if she will be able to recover her memories and I don’t know which one would be better for the story.
Those who thought that Mac
Had a hole in her head are
Now vindicated
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee e e e e e e e e e e e
So about seventy five years ago (give or take an order of magnitude), I used to wake up most mornings in my little house, kiss my boyfriend as he left for work, make coffee, and curl up on the couch to read the new chapter of ToMU.
Literally everything about my life has changed since then, but when I saw that a new chapter was up last night, I made myself wait until this morning and recaptured the essence of that lovely routine.
AE – and I say this from long experience – you are without doubt the best way to start the day.
Also, I miss the forums.
It occurs to me that if Mack wants later to explore/practice/develop her psi side without endangering the subjects, she has limited choice – the Man, perhaps the ROTT, perhaps Embries – perhaps Puddy, if she claims any Demon heritage. Although, perhaps her mental shields to protect Emily could also protect more mundane subjects, maybe only knocking them out or giving them a real bad headache since, iirc, Emily still felt some discomfort from a shielded Mack.
I have just been thinking about this and as far as I can tell from the text problems only occur when active contact is make. Mack could practice any of the passive skill, listening and shielding etc. The big question mark that I can see is how much control over her abilities she will have if they become unblocked.
I would guess that Mackenzie could read surface thoughts without damaging the other mind, but any deeper access would probably hurt them, and projecting thoughts actively would be like psychic attack.
Though, it would probably be possible to learn ways of using telepathy safely. Though there is only one person who would likely be able to teach her that… her mother.
There’s Mercy’s pets. Which I’ve. Jest kind of been ASSUMING are the target’s here. You strip Mack naked and throw her in there like the others and she’s got no choices but to die like the rest or use the one power that could stop them.
As long as Mack is using her necromantic birth control potion, she isn’t giving off the pheromones that make predators want to kill and eat her. And why would Mercy or anyone else “strip Mack naked and throw her in there like the others”? Mercy wants to find a way to breed half demons, so she needs to find a way to both keep Mack alive and get her pregnant by a male half demon.
1. If Mercy gets her hands on Mack, I doubt she’d listen to what she had to say or provide her with birth control, given it’s counter intuitive to her designs.
2. It’s MERCY. She may be good, but she’s not competent. She may be an elf, but she doesn’t really care for fine details. Hence why she’s so quick to use napalm instead of arrows and why she keeps throwing females in with males and no supervision.
When Mercy grabs Mackenzie(WHEN, not if. An immortal assassin with a target doesn’t play games forever.), that’s basically it. She has no real respect from the law and in a practical sense the only thing stopping her from grabbing Mack out of her bed or in the dark of night is the inconvenience of an investigation or expense of the right bribes. She might put out even more enchantments, which demon fire will break anyway, or she might examine her for longer, which’ll give her last potion dose more time to wear off, but eventually she’s WILL try to put them together. Hell, even if by some miracle she survives that’ll only convince her that her doggies play well together and deserve more play dates.
This could happen a hundred years down the line, or it could happen right after Mackenzie leaves the library, there’s no real way to tell. But it’s one of those things that’s inevitable by virtue of two immortals in irreversible conflict coexisting long enough.
I think you’re giving Mercy too much credit. She’s hardly the only immortal horror in Mack’s life, after all. There are several others that would have grounds to be annoyed at Mercy snatching Mack for herself, and Mercy has expressed pragmatism in avoiding conflict with powerful beings. Besides, her demon breeding program might just be a passing fancy.
Been away for a while, but want to say welcome back to writing 🙂
Yay!!! MU returns!!!