“Did they come back?” Ef Utan asked as he hurried to Vedis’ side to look out the window.

“I don’t think so,” Vedis replied as she pointed. “There was a spike of dream energy that caused the flash, and suddenly that figure fell out of the portal. Do you think they might have fell through time like we did?”

“Only one way to find out. Let us go say hello,” Ef Utan replied.

“Hey Ef,” Kenari said as she moved to catch up with the others as they went downstairs. “I found some stuff in a secret compartment while we were looking.” She pulls the leather-bound notebook out of her pack and hands it to him. “Can you make heads or tails of this? I looked and it seems to be a mash up of mathematics, spell formulae, and wild ramblings. I found some odd potions and metal bars too, but this seems like it could be what they were looking for.”

Ef Utan took the book and scanned through the pages. “Good find, Kenari. Parts of this are definitely talking about a spell…but when it gets into the math, I’m afraid it loses me too. We’ll have to see if we can find someone who can interpret it.”

They make it to the bottom of the stairs and walk back out of the tower to find a person with a purple mohawk and strange markings on their skin slowly stirring from the ground. “Damn…what happened? Where am I?” they groaned as they stood up and brushed dirt from their tight-fitting silver garb.

“You fell through a portal and ended up at the tower of the Sapphire Mage at the end of time,” Kenari answered plainly. “Hi, I’m Kenari, and these are my friends.”

“Sapphire…what? I was on Absalom Station…” they mutter as they look around and back to Kenari. “I’m Falak 13, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Falak 13,” Ef Utan replies as he looks at the portal with distrust. “Why don’t we head back into the castle so we can discuss what happened over a drink?”

“Now THAT sounds like a good idea,” Falak 13 agreed as Ef Utan guided the way.

~~

“So wait… you’re from the future?” Kenari asked in amazement as she puffed on her pipe and passed it to Falak 13, who waived it off.

“I guess just because we went forward in time doesn’t mean someone else can’t fall back through it from the other end,” Vedis replied as Vy chose that moment to scramble out of her jacket onto the table they were all sitting around.

“Looks like I’m not the only one if you’ve got a Skittermander,” Falak 13 replied as they looked closer at Vy. “You don’t look like Morg though thank goodness,” they muttered to themselves.

“Is that what they are?” Vedis asked in wonder as she corralled Vy from jumping off the table.

“Yes, looks like this one is still a child though,” Falak 13 replied. “They tend to be non-sentient until adulthood.”

“Do they get any bigger?” Kenari asked, remembering her experience with Elliwinkle the Space Hamster.

“They average about 3ft, 35 pounds,” Falak replied as Kenari sighed in relief.

“So anyway…” Ef Utan interjected, “You were telling us what happened when you fell through the portal?”

“Right. I was on Absalom Station where we were trying to find the location of Historia Seven when there was an accident in the lab that seemed to cause a planar bleed. I must’ve been affected by it when I woke up here.”

“Must’ve been a powerful spell to backfire like that,” Ef Utan replied with a low whistle.

“Spell?” Falak 13 looked at him quizzically. “We were conducting an experiment when there was an overload in the computer banks.”

“Com-pew-ter?” Kenari asked with a raised brow. “What’re those?”

Falak 13 seemed to sigh as they realized their situation, and with a gesture of their hand a dark rectangle covered in moving and flashing symbols appeared in their hand and they handed it to Kenari. “Like this… but bigger. Here, you can play Candy Crush.”

“This is amazing!” Kenari said in wonder as she touched the device and the small colored spheres moved at her touch. “It’s like… an interactive illusion spell was cast into it!”

“No… no spells… it’s just a machine that is programmed to do different things,” Falak 13 corrected.

“A machine?” Kenari’s eyes widened even more as she flipped the device over at looked at it closer. “How do you power it? Did you have to shrink the hamsters so they could turn the tiny gears?”

“The… what?” Falak 13 replied in shock. “I don’t…. what?”

“The Tinker Gnomes make all sorts of amazing machines, but they’re always on a large scale because they use the hamsters to power their gears,” Kenari explained. “So they must’ve used some sort of shrinking spell to get them into something like this, right?”

Falak 13’s brow furrowed even deeper as they looked at Kenari and then turned back to Ef Utan. “Anyway….where I come from we use science and engineering to power machines and beings like myself.”

“Like yourself?” Melchior asked curiously. “I noticed the strange patterns in your skin… does that denote the fact that you’re not human?”

“This vessel isn’t, if that’s what you mean,” Falak 13 replied. “In essence my ‘self’ was uploaded into this android body.

Melchior looked at Falak 13 agape. “Your soul was put into a machine? But… doesn’t that go against the will of the gods?”

Falak 13 shrugged. “Wouldn’t know… I tend not to believe in them.”

“That’s allright,” Kenari said. “Neither do I.”

Vedis gasped. “Kenari, we MET some!”

Kenari shrugged. “They exist, sure…. doesn’t mean I believe in them though.”

Melchior rubbed his face in stunned silence as Ef Utan rolled his eyes. “So…when you made that machine appear our of nothing it wasn’t magic?”

“Right… I use nano robots to create what I need,” Falak 13 replied with a nod, grateful for the change in topic.

“Imagine what the gnomes could make if they could get that tiny!” Kenari declared as she picked at the edge of the device with her claw. “Does it open up?”

“Kenari, stop trying to break things,” Vedis admonished as Kenari stuck her tongue out. “So if you use your abilities to make things…. I guess that makes you more like one of those Artificers? They’re always making mechanical creatures and things, but nothing this advanced.”

“That sounds a little more like it,” Falak 13 agreed with a nod. “When you’re from my time, however, the skills and resources are a bit more advanced.”

“Speaking of things from your time,” Kenari said as she tore her attention from the device, “maybe you could help us identify the other things we found? They might’ve come through the portal too.”

“That’s right,” said Ef Utan as he pulled items from his pouch. “We found this metal cylinder, as well as a book that looks like it contains some complex numerical formulas as well as incantations. We could only make out part of it successfully.”

Falak 13 almost grinned as they took the metal cylinder from Ef Utan and inserted it into a strange pistol that was at her hip. “I’ve been needing one of those! Thanks!”

Kenari’s eyes light up as she catches a glimpse of Falak 13’s gun, but Ef Utan glares at her before she can say something. “We also found these odd vials of a fluid we couldn’t identify.”

He hands one of the vials over to Falak 13 and they gaze at it curiously before weary recognition crosses their face. “Where did you say you got this?”

“Why… what is it?” Ef Utan asks with concern.

“What it is I’m not exactly sure…. but I do know that it’s a bi-product created by the Illithids.” Falak 13 replies.

Vedis shudders. “Illithids… we encountered one of their ships once, but thankfully they were already dead.”

“Yeah and the only bi-product of them I found was their version of sweet treats,” Kenari continued in disappointment.

“Sweet…treats? Illithid sweet treats?” Falak 13 asked in disgust.

Kenari brought out a small jar of pink pellets and shook it. “You know… brain candy!”