(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 20

It was a sparring room. Nothing in it even tried to hide that fact, or be subtle about it. The walls were plastered with weapons that looked highly illegal, sharp, curvy blades with pointy teeth and elaborate handles. In rigidly defined patterns, marked only by the tiniest of chalk symbols on the polished stone floor, an assortment of training dummies were placed in a way that seemed to optimize the space available for every person that might use them. But upon stepping into the room, Copper Claw, also known as Mortimer Davis, looked at the few people in there to train. They said nothing, bowing in silence and leaving the room at his mere glance.
"How old are you, flower?" he asked in a way that would sound threatening under nearly any other circumstance.
"Well, it's getting harder and harder to say, really."
That answer made him turn in a slow, intimidating fashion, his huge body moving like a boulder caught in a strong, turning current.
"How is an age hard to say?" he asked, trying to hide his confusion under a skeptical voice.
"I guess the best answer is seventeen. But as I said, it's a bit hard to say precisely."
The man moved between the training dummies with a grace that seemed misplaced in someone of his size. Once he had put the odd answer to his simple question behind him, he moved with dedication and firm direction, clearly knowing where he wanted to go in the room. And the farther into the room he walked, the more the room seemed to become an extension of him, the same colors, patterns and symbols adorning the walls as on his Asian inspired clothes. Either the place had a dresscode to match the decor, or it was designed around the same mindset as his wardrobe. In all likelihood, he owned the place.
"I can only assume that this has something to do with your secrets, with how you don't seem to age." He had done away with the overly correct pronunciations of every word, now satisfied to simply speak in a calm and fairly commanding voice. It was hard to tell if he was dropping an act, or putting one on, however.
"Why would you s..."
"Because I saw you in 1956, remember? You would have been only one year old then. You didn't look one year old."
There were a myriad reasons not to talk about age amongst time travelers. Apart from the trouble in adding up what it meant to spend days and weeks in other times and returning to the moment you left, there were times when time just became impractical to talk about, the math giving away that there was more beneath the surface. Times like this one.
"Are you immortal?" he asked in a surprisingly unimpressed voice.
"No, I'm not an immortal."
"A traveler in time, then?"
"No, not that, either."
He seemed to accept that lie at face value.
"Then I assume some kind of rejuvenation?"
"Not really."
He stopped at a small shrine, the only part of the room that had white on it in any meaningful amount. Like his odd scarfs, lengths of white fabric, looking like silk, were placed very delicately on the table-sized block of grey marble. Each piece of cloth had symbols on it, again like his scarfs, and upon closer examination, the symbols were not identical. They seemed written in lines, however, as if they told a story of some sort.
The large man knelt down on one knee, picking up a small candle on the side of the shrine and lighting two even smaller candles in the middle of it. The tiny flames did very little to the light in the room, barely even visible beyond the faint flicker right above their respective candles. After mumbling a few words, too low to hear, he stood up again. When he turned around, there was an annoyed, almost angry look in his eyes.
"You're keeping something from me, flower," he said as he trodded across the floor. In a spot just slightly more open than the rest of the room, he stopped. With what looked like honest respect, he carefully removed the two scarfs on his shoulders, then proceeded to take off the robe. Underneath, he wore a sleeveless black gi, a traditional fighting outfit. It was a tougher fabric than silk, none of the elegant shine of the robe. It still had a slender band of red symbold embroided along its edges, though.
"Quid pro quo, Mortimer. Something for something."
His eyes flared at the mention of his born name. It was hard to tell if he disliked the name, or disliked having someone, especially some random girl, use it.
"And that something is spirits, I gather," he grunted. Then, giving no real reason, he closed his eyes and stretched out his arms in front of him. It looked like the practice routine of a ballet dancer, but he didn't quite seem the type. When he opened his palms, long fingers pointing up into the air with not a hair's space in between them, the ballet resemblence started to fade. It evaporated entirely when the fingers curled into fists. Eyes still closed, he took a step to the left, his left fist swooping to the side and giving a training dummy a backhanded punch. Within a fraction of a second, he was not only back in his original stance, but had done the same to a training dummy on his right.
"Nice... punch."
He opened his eyes, hands still stretched out in front of him, fingers up.
"It's not about the punches," he said, his voice now suddenly velvet soft, like he was readying himself to sing a love song. "It's about what guides them."
"Spirits? Spirits guide your punches?"
With a roaring laugh, he let his arms drop to his sides, curling and uncurling the fingers into fists.
"No, silly flower, I just know where the training dummies are."
As his feet slowly moved out of their position between the dummies, he rubbed his hands with a repeating rhythm, a pattern that he used again and again, almost as if it was part of meditation.
"In truth, there are no spirits," he said, sounding like he was holding back even more laughter. "The invisible is nothing but energies, flowing through everything we call real." He made a complicated move with one hand in the air, looking intently at every finger as they moved around. "Move the real, the invisible follows. Move it right, and the invisible will work for you."
"That sounds pretty simple."
Although he didn't laugh at the response, his grin told the same story as his laughter had.
"Everything sounds simple when you don't go into details. I could tell you that building a house was nothing but placing stone and mortar in the right places, and you could be forgiven for thinking you could make a home."
With a gentle shrug, he seemed to symbolically shake off the pocket philosophy speeches he seemed to have gotten himself into. Instead, he walked to the wall of weapons, his eyes visibly running over each item on it, looking for something or trying simply to decide.
"So what's the less simple version?"
"You ask a lot of questions," he muttered in a low, deep tone, his fingers gliding from weapon to weapon on the wall. He wasn't looking for one, he was deciding between the ones he saw. "But you answer very few."
"I sleep in a special chamber."
His attention broke completely from the weapons, his huge head spinning around in a nearly cartoonish fashion as he looked away from them.
"A chamber?" he asked, his voice suddenly not quite as steady as before.
"Yes. It keeps me from aging. But I'm asleep, so for me it barely matters."
It was impossible from his expression to see if he had taken the bait, believing the lie. He did, however, seem awfully disappointed, and he reluctantly turned his attention back to the weapons on the wall. Suddenly less critical about his choices, he carefully pulled a staff off the wall, one end of it ending in a small, curved blade.
"So," he grunted, "immortal to others, but not to yourself. That is disappointing."
With a mere flick of his wrist, he swung the slender staf in an arch into the room, spiking the tip of the blade in the head of the nearest dummy. The other end of the staff ended up between his fingers, as if he was holding the entire thing like a giant writing pen. It was hard to remain even slightly calm, looking at the massive man almost lovingly hold the deadly weapon between his agile fingers.
"I'm sorry to disappoint. Very sorry, very sorry to... disappoint."
He sighed. "No worries, flower. The world has a tendency to do that."
With a single move, he gently grabbed the staff with his full hand and slid its deadly tip out of the thoroughly murdered training dummy.
"As for your spirits, well..."
Even as he spoke, the weapon seemed to take on a bit of life of its own. It moved funny in his grip, like it was writhing, the length of it becoming a very stiff snake.
"It's not simple," he said, slowly, looking at the staff, "but with training, it can be done."
In a few steps, he crossed the bulk of the floor, again positioning himself between the dummies he had been between before.
"With training, you can learn to feel where the energy flows through you. Control your body, with proper diet, proper discipline, and you can become a vessel for energies."
"But how does that energy become a spirit?"
"It never does," he answered. "When energies are used on other energies, they simply seem to take on a life of their own. Like having one machine push buttons on another. Use it right, and you can make it seems as if they are your living servants."
As he spoke, he gave his free hand a strange look. Slowly, he moved his fingers, like he was moving them for the very first time, testing them. Then he turned the hand, pointing the fingers downward. Slowly but surely, they started to look like they were dripping. But what ran from them never hit the floor, instead gathering, like icicles, along the fingers and finally in long, thin strands from them. It had a metallic shine, an orange-red color. Like copper.
"But I felt... fear. Anger and fear when they..."
His eyes suddenly blazed with something, some inner mania.
"You felt them?" he asked, sounding almost afraid.
"I had some rush through me. They had seen something, and they were afraid and angry."
"No," he mumbled, some of the previous intensity slipping away as quickly as it appeared. "The fear and anger were yours. The spirits just triggered it."
As he raised the crude copper claws on his fingers, hi eye began to show something else. An emotion that was hard to place. There was sorrow in there, but alo an anger. The looks of someone who felt betrayed.
"You need to keep your dominion over the energies, or they will betray you. Trained well, they become an extension of your body. Limbs and digits, as much a part of you as fingers and arms," he said in a hushed voice, sounding far more sentimental than he had before. "But like the body, they wither over time." He flicked his wrist, and the copper claws on his fingers snapped like thin sheets of ice, falling to the ground and shattering.
"For years I tempered my body, teaching it to hold the metals that my spirits needed to form those things." He stared at the shattered, flimsy pieces of copper on the training room floor. "But we all age," he suddenly said in his previous, booming voice, finally looking up from the copper pieces. "Except you, flower."
"Yeah, the chamber is..."
"I won't hear more about your chamber," he snapped, in a soft but stern remark. "There is no chamber. You have your secrets, and in time, you will tell them to me."
In long strides, long even for him, he marched to the heavy door that served as the entrance, and the only entrance, to the training room. At the door, he turned.
"Food will be brought to you. Everything else that you need is in here," he said, pointing around the room. "When you feel like letting me in on your secrets, you can knock."
Without another word, he left through the door, which shut tight behind him. And then, the room was quiet.
To look around at the place was like looking at a mueum. The weapons were either old, or they were made in the image of old weapons. There was nothing new, no fancy hunting knives, no factory made axe, no mass produced swords. In fact, more than a few of the weapons showed strong signs of age, decomposition having set in in their handles, edges worn down by repeated sharpening. Others seemed like collector's items, old but in pristine condition. Those typically had elaborate markings on them, flowing symbols like those on his and the shrine's lengths of silken cloth.
The copper claws, shattered though they were, till lay on the stone floor. There was no wind in the room, barely even a sign of ventilation, but the bits had been scattered around as if by a slight breeze. They were as flimsy as tin foil, perhaps even more, and it seemed likely that jut the air from the large man's footsteps could easily have blown them around that little bit.
"Trained machines..."
Nobody was there to hear anything, but saying the words out loud felt like it made thinking them easier. Even just kneeling down beside the copper bits made them move slightly, breaking several of them into even tinier bits, many bordering on little more than orange dust.
"Trained... machines..."

"He really just left you there? No guards, no cameras, no nothing?"
Daniel swiveled around in his chair, repeating the motion enough that it started to look like a child spinning playfully in it dad's office chair, only much slower.
"Yeah. I mean, there was only one door, I guess he placed someone outside. But nothing inside, no."
"Was there even a bathroom?" he asked, sounding more fascinated by the question than it seemed he should be.
"Uhm, no idea, actually. He said everything I needed was in there, so I assume..."
It was clear that his brain was working on a dozen or so individual quetions at the same time. He had a hard tome putting one thing down to work with the next, and that was as true for questions as for anything else.
"He seems sloppy," he said, in a fast way that made him seem like he was complaining more than observing. Again, much like a child.
"Could we move on to the mystery at hand, Daniel?"
Placing one foot demonstratively hard on the floor, he stopped the chair from its rotation. He still seemed lost in quetions, though, his eyes focused on nothing in this world. He was running a small, thin stylus across his teeth, not biting but still creating a clacking sound, rhythmically tarting and stopping as he changed it from moving from right to left, to moving from left to right.
"I don't get it," he finally admitted. "You've seen this guy use spirit stuff in those crazy tournaments of his, so he clearly knows a lot about them. But if he said what you say he said, it makes no sense. I mean," he said, leaning forward and pointing almost threateningly with the small stylus, "who would train these spirit energies to scare the shit out of you because they saw some TT tech inside some building in the future?" He sat back, trying to calm down from the slight frustration he was clearly starting to feel. "Unless someoen is pranking us, it just makes no #*@!ing sense."
Even when he stopped talking, the room was in no way quiet. As complicated infographics danced across the half dozen or so screens, little sounds kept trying to draw attention to every little result or oddity that popped up on them. Daniel ignored all of them, looking very much like this orchestra of blips and beeps was just his usual landscape of noise.
"I don't really care about that right now. What really pisses me off is that I honestly thought he would cooperate."
"Why?" asked Daniel, very casually.
"Yeah, why. Good question. Maybe I thought he'd just tell anyone who asked. I don't know."
"Like in the movies?"
"Yeah. Like in the movies."
Daniel sighed. Mostly for show, he turned his eyes to the many screens, grabbing a mouse on the table and using it to shut down a few of the constantly bleeping notifications. Once he had done that, he just sat there for a moment, doing nothing, just looking at the screens.
"You already know that I didn't watch a lot of movies growing up," he finally said. "I mean, after the Heavenfalls, we didn't really have a lot of Blockbusters around."
"We don't have Blockbusters around, either, Daniel. They dont..."
"I know, I know," he interrupted, in a friendly tone. "You know what I mean. Apart from the books we could scrounge and whatever stories we told amongst ourselves, there really wasn't a lot of, well, stories. So I'm not exactly as inspired by movies as you are." He used the mouse to poke at what seemed like completely random things on the screens. "I tried catching up when I got a little more naturalized around here, but that way of thinking is still a bit difficult for me."
He seemed honestly embarrassed about what he said, about the problem he described. His voice dropped, almost beginning to mumble, and his eyes seemed to glaze over, for as much as could be seen from the side. The screens only made the effect stronger, their lights reflecting in the eyes like still lakes.
"I'm not so sure that's a bad thing, Dan."
He released his gaze from the screens, looking looking halfway over his shoulder, but still not looking at anything in particular.
"How come?" he asked, actually sounding a bit vulnerable.
"Movies aren't real. What works in them doesn't typically work in real life."
He grunted, his eyes moving about a bit as he mulled that idea over in his head.
"In fact, maybe I should let you think out the next course of action, Daniel."
Suddenly perking up, he spun his chair in a single, jerky motion, to lock eyes. There were signs of a new energy in him, a new interest in participating.
"Me? I should... I mean, with all do respect, but are you telling me to tell you what to do?!"
A single nod made his eyes grow wide, so wide it looked a little painful.
"But isn't this, like, one of those council things? Like, shouldn't you bring in the key folk inThe Embassy and make your plan in that fancy meeting room inside the red zone?"
"That would usually be... Hey, wait, did you actually see the room? I thought you..."
"It makes my teeth buzz, like real bad, but you know me. Anything to satisfy curiousity," he grinned, showing his teeth in a way that almost seemed to underline his words, even if that wasn't his intention.
"Jeez, you're #*@!ed up, dude."
He chuckled at the comment, but quickly calmed down.
"Anyway, yeah, this might technically be a common planning thing, but I really don't have the time for that."
"Uhm, Marie, you've got a time machine. I don't think that excuse flies for you."
"Yeah, well, I just don't feel like making it an official oops-I-#*@!ed-up thing. I just... I need answers. I need to know what's going on."
"Alright, alright, I got your back, girl," he chuckled, raising his hands defensively. He quickly put them down again, though, putting on a more serious face at the same time. "Fine, you want my suggestion? You need to talk to a time traveler. Like, a really experienced one. All this," he waved his hand around, "it's really impressive how you got this all running from scratch, but you're still not a trained and hardened time traveler. You need someone with an actual background in time travel. Like one of..."
"We're not tracking down the originals, Danny."
His enthusiasm practically evaporated, his back slumping down in his seat.
"Then at least go find someone who has been doing this a long time. We do know a few, right?"
It was the great temptation, the great lure. A one-stop source of time travel information. The one thing that every new time traveler dreamed of.
"You know we can't."
Although still sitting in his chair, Daniel was becoming increasingly frustrated, his fingers flailing about randomly at the end of his hands, balling up into brief fists now and then.
"Dan, if I talk to a time traveler in their past and make them change their plans, it's not just a split in the timeline, it's a split in a time traveler's timeline. They could change their missions, they decisions, their everything, setting off more changes."
"I know," he said, sounding a bit disappointed. "But don't you run that risk every time you talk to someone? Like, your report says you talked to some guy named Gabe, doesn't that affect things?"
"Not in the same way. Gabe is gonna blend into history. A time traveler jumping around in history won't. We push too many things around, so pushing us around has a real risk of a domino effect."
His eye were supposed to drop. His face was supposed to change to an expression of disappointment, of giving up on an idea. But that never happened. Instead, his eyes squinted slightly, and there was a hint of a smile on his lips.
"What?"
He looked over at the door, as if to makje sure nobody was standing there, listening. Then he looked back.
"What, Daniel? What are you thinking?"
"I know that getting involved with a time traveler can cause a lot of chaos," he said, sounding very sly about it. "But what if that time traveler is never going to time travel again?"
His grin turned almost devious as he waited for an answer. He was always the straight forward type, not one to play office politics or anything like that. But he was hiding something.
"Daniel, what is it you know?"
It was an actual relief to see the devilish grin turn into childish enthusiasm again as he spun to hi screens. With lightning speed, his fingers ran over the slender keyboard in front of him, and new windows appeared on one of the screens. Most of it was text, but an image finally popped up, an image of a woman with haphazrd curls and bulbous eyes. It had been reconstructed from descriptions, that much was clear from the weird flatness of her face.
"Who is she?"
"I don't have a name, but I saw her myself."
It took a moment for him to understand the shocked look his words caused.
"Oh, no, not around The Embassy," he added. "I saw this one, wait for it... before I even came here!"
He was obviously proud of what he was telling, but several pieces of the puzzle were clearly still missing, and somehow, that didn't quite seem to dawn on him.
"Daniel, please explain."
"Oh, sorry, yeah," he said, fumbling about a bit as he got his words straight in his head. "I saw her before my parents got me to The Embassy. She was one of the rebel types that got hunted in my town, right before Heavenfall."
"So?"
"So..." He dragged the word out while he called up a text document, with a video accompanying it. The video was paused at the beginning, and he clearly had no intention of playing it. But he didn't have to, either. It was an interview at The Embassy, the kind that was done with every new arrival.
"We processed her and two others from the early 2100s. They described the exact same woman, helping them get smuggled out of a warzone.
"So, she returned to the same time for another mission. Right?"
Daniel's sly smile was back. "Nope. She had been there for a very long time, and the one I saw was a lot younger."
The image just hung there on the screen, but it almost seemed like the woman was looking at everyone in the room.
"She stayed behind?"
Daniel nodded. "This little piggy never went home. She stayed long enough to naturalize."
He beamed with pride. He had every right to.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have a time traveler who has stopped traveling through time."