Leopold von Steinhof listened, seemingly transfixed, the glass whiskey in front of him untouched.

Moses continued to translate for Little Crow in a low voice, his soft timbre underlining every sentence Jackie Wells said.

"Now, it's not like we knew it was, well, the end." Jackie said. "Sure, there were only a handful o' us in a bunker designed to house five hundred people for a year. Sure, we couldn't get radio contact with anyone on the outside. Sure, we was all worried that we were all gonna die of radiation poisonin' because the outer door weren't closed and couldn't shield us. Sure, some of us were already mutatin' for some reason. But we thought -- well, it's just us. Austin was the next Phoenix, the next bloody battleground. But it wasn't." She pulls her legs up into the chair, and wraps her arms around her legs. "It was everywhere. The Union launched their entire arsenal at us. And the Confederacy, well, as soon as the folks in Richmond detected the launch o' so many warheads, they pushed their own button. And then the rest of the Northern Alliance launched, then the rest of the Southern Alliance, and...more people died on that day than have ever lived on Earth up 'til now. Six billion people, just...gone." She wipes a tear from her face. "A-and...and you'd t-think that was the worst of it. But...sometimes...sometimes, I think they were the lucky ones. They didn't have to live in the world that came after. They didn't see The Reckoners arrive."

She gulps. "War arrived first, somewhere out in Kansas. I heard that wherever he walked, the dead rose to follow him. Legions of them. he stomped north into Dakota, through Deadwood, and laid the remaining Sioux low before crossing the Mississippi. Famine, she rose out of the Great Maze. A lot o' the remaining Ghost Rock strikes in The Maze had been set on fire by the bombs. Wherever she walked, folks starved to death -- but didn't die. They just followed her, and their bites made everyone who survived them go hungry, just like them, and their numbers grew and grew. Death, they say he came out of Death Valley. This is what I heard, anyhow...I didn't see any o' them myself."

She swallows. "Those of us in Texas...we got Pestilence. When he rose, well, it fucked with our little hidey-hole. Our supplies, which had been fine, suddenly turned toxic. Sargent Hardegast got hit first. He was awful fond o' this drink called Bubbly-Fizz. I don't know if any o' y'all ever tried Coca-Cola? Bubbly-Fizz was kinda like that, and some moron had stocked the base with a dozen cases o' the stuff. Anyhow, right around the time we began to figger no-one was comin' for us, Sargent Hardegast came down with somethin' nasty. Bubbling boils, his teeth rotted away..." She shivers. "It took place mighty quick. He also started drinkin' more an' more Fizz. And then he went crazy. He started forcin' others in the bunker to drink Fizz, and they started gettin' sick like him. Cassie and I wouldn't touch the stuff, so the brainer torched all the goddamn food! Said it was to force us to see the 'glory o' the bubbly.' Then the Fizzers started gettin' violent, so Cassie and I bugged out. We figgered we'd rather face the outside world and maybe die of radiation poisoning than stay in there and degenerate into one o' those critters."

"We wandered for weeks, livin' off the land as best we could. The Suburbs outside Austin fared better than the city proper, but not by much. There was some sort o' riot, so most o' the places near the city had been looted and abandoned by the time Cassie and I left the bunker. I decided that I wanted to strike up north, towards Dallas/Fort Worth, 'cause if any o' my family was alive they'd be in Arlington. Cassie was worried that folks wouldn't take kindly to her extra face." Jackie winces. "She didn't get the chance to worry about that. We were set on by a band o' raiders outside Waco lookin' to get at our bugout kits. We fought them off, but one o' them gut-shot Cassie before he went down." She sighs. "After she died, I was all alone. All I had was Cassie's kit, and a beat up '67 Ford van I found and hotwired. I managed to keep it runnin' until I made it to Arlington, and got lucky enough to find a settlement o' sorts there. A bunch o' survivors banded together to make a new life for themselves, and..." She smiles for the first time. "...and Dad was with them. I tell you, I cried like a little baby when I found him." The smile fades. "He was the only one who'd made it. Ma and my little sister had been doin' some shoppin' in Dallas when the bombs fell." She hsakes her head. "But Pa made it. And he knew more about what was goin' on. You see, he was a First Lieutenant in the Rangers. And that meant he had a copy o' Chapter 13 of Fugitives From Justice In The Confederacy."

Jackie looks over at Katy. "So I got to find out what y'all had been hidin' from us. All this time. All the things your superiors knew but never saw fit to tell the rest o' the world. Well, at that point, there was no need to hide it from anyone. 'Cause all the monsters, they had free reign o' the world. They didn't need to hide no more." She slams a fist on the table. "All o' the things us normal folks could have used to fight these damn things!" She sits back and sighs. "Sorry. That's still a sore spot with me."

Leopold leaned forward and licked his lips, unusual nervous.
"You say, the allies of North and South dropped these... bombs, too? What... who..."
He stopped, then started over. "Was Austria-Hungary allied to either of your nations?"

Jackie shrugs. "Austria, Hungary, and Germany were all part o' the Southern Alliance. Hell, most o' the European Union was, 'cept France." She shrugs. "They'd long split by my time. The Empire fell apart in the First World War. That's, oh, roughly thirty-five years from now. Your Archduke gets assassinated, war gets declared, and it drags all the nations what got allied with each other into one giant quagmire."

"Rudolf? Assassinated?" Leopold blinked his eyes, disbelieving.

Katy listened to Jackie's tale with a growing sense of dread gnawing at her stomach. She seemed startled a little when Jackie slammed a fist on the table. The Ranger swallowed and tipped her head a little to the side. "Folks in Austin think they're doin' right by it, ya know. If ya wanna change that attitude, we gotta get ya ta Austin. Ain't zactly somethin' I can just telegraph."

After taking a breath, Katy placed her right hand on her hip. "As fer what's bein' hidden, even I don't gotta copy o' that. I'm only a Sergent, so I don't rate all the secrets we got. Only those Uncle Jack or one o' the other officers shared with me, or that I seen myself."

Logan heads over to the bar and orders himself a whiskey, putting it down fast, and then looks over the assembled group while he considered the situation.

"Fella named Franz, actually." Jackie shrugs. "Franz Ferdinand, I think. And before you ask, I don't know much more than the name...it wasn't like I was the greatest student o' history. You'd want Morgan fer that, and I ain't seen him in nigh on to four years."

She nods at Katy. "I know. And I don't blame you, specifically." She says. "And eventually, I reckon I will. But it looks like I got some things to take care of here first."

Matt stood up like he'd been stung. His lips were trembling, his hands shaking, and his eyes wide as church-doors. He staggered to the bar, clearly overwhelmed. He patted down his pockets, realized the bartender had left, and reached tipsily for a bottle.

He muttered quietly to Logan, and passed him the bottle after he poured.

"Franz Ferdinand?" Leopold asked, incredulously. "The Emperor's nephew?"

He stood up and pinched the bridge of his nose. He staggered, slightly, shaking his head. It looked as if he was fighting back tears. "So much tragedy..." he whispered.
Then he turned and went to the bar, grabbing Matt's bottle and pouring generously into three glasses.
"Logan, Matt", he started, but couldn't think of anything to say. So he just downed the liquor and slammed the glass down.

"Is there more for you to tell, Jackie?"

Belle tried a different tack.

"I mix, set, and detonate explosives for a living.  The current yield of a stick of so called ghost rock dynamite is five megajoules, while some proprietary military rockets can yield an impressive yield as high as fifty or even sixty.  In order to even begin approaching that level of destruction, the weapons would have to jump several orders of magnitude into at lease petajoules, though more likely in zettajoules.  That is a staggering amount of energy, on the same magnitude of a castrophic earthquake.  No chemical reaction is capable of that, no matter how many future advances are made.  You'd be talking about some kind of completely new kind of discovery, which while plausible, couldn't be mastered in a mere century or even five.  The mathematics alone, and bear in mind I mean only the countless arithmetic would would have to be slogged through, would take generations, if every man woman and child were set down with an abacus and a slide rule to work it out. But we shall come back to arithmetic presently.

"A society which had the ability to produce weapons that strong would easily be able to launch ships into the heavens, and would be able to operate on paradigms currently inconceivable.  They would have access to so much energy, their engineers would toil away at problems no one in this room would be able to imagine.  Such a technology which could produce such a weapon would also produce infinitely many other more desired things; though a defense arsenal of great power is desirable at some point economics mandates the public would be satisfied, even if the amount was enough to combat several countries it would stop well short of global destructive potential.   In short, one cannot simply develop such an unfathomable weapon without inventing a great deal else which would be far more practical and desirable.  These economic details are crucial absent from the story.

"But back to the underlying math.  Surely there will be progress such that in fifty years I will laugh at our current efforts, but to accomplish this much in two centuries would be objectively impossible.  Humans simply cannot do the calculations in this amount of time.  In a few thousand years, perhaps.  But the rate of progress is limited to the ability to perform calculations, which hasn't increased too significantly since we first learned of Arabic numerals.  And truthfully it can't, our greatest calculation tool is the human mind and it only proceeds so quickly, even with mechanical aids and every tree felled for the paper.  No new theorem or lemma is going to improve our throughput so meaningfully as to overcome this.

"This is important, because the delivery of the payload alone would require far more calculations in too short a time than humanity is capable of.  You would have to, effectively, automate trigonometry and physics.  Some day such a thing might be possible, however the devices to do so would be huge for the number of memory devices would be absolutely massive, larger than this saloon, hardly something practical to place everywhere.  And there would only be a few such devices."

Jackie shrugs. "I hove no idea how he gets there, just that he does." She nods. "I reckon y'all need to know how I got here from there. But at least you know now what it is I'm tryin' to change."

Jackie raises an eyebrow at Belle's prattling on about arithmetic. "You seem so sure about all that. Maybe you oughta ask Nicola Tesla about the Difference Engine he's cobblin' together in his spare time. He's gonna unveil it to the public in about fifteen years, along with wireless power generators, electric lights, and a whole host o' other things...they're gonna call it Tesla Science instead o' New Science because o' him. And you know what they'll use that Difference Engine to do? Make better computers. Smarter computers. Smaller computers. Which will figure out how to do the same. Iteration after iteration, until you got devices small enough to fit in your pocket." She shrugs. "But mebbe you can explain this."

She pulls out a small, hemispherical device with a button on top, then flips it casually over to Belle. "See if you can explain how that works."

She looks back at von Steinhof. "Bu yeah, there's more. My dad and I and the Arlington Survivors made it through a couple of years. Then Jane Swindall entered our lives. She was lookin' to bring Law back to the Wasted West, and was recruitin' anyone who had some sort o' law enforcement experience. My Daddy joined up, and since I had been a Ranger Cadet, I joined up, too. And for the next few years after that, we traveled." Jackie sighs. "I'm gonna give you the highlights of the next eleven years after that. We went all over the west, got into adventures, stomped on monsters, muties, and misfits of all kinds, and then my daddy got shot by a fella called Stone, who left me alive because he didn't think I was worth a bullet. I roamed around on my lonesome, joined up with some other wasters, got married, and eventually we wound up at Devil's Tower."

She looks over at Coot. "This is the part where you come in."

"Me?" Coot says.

Jackie nods. "Devil's Tower is hollow, you see. It was hollowed out by these critters from another world. They was long gone by the time we got there...only the remains o' their experiments were left, and those critters got mighty nasty. But they also left their tech behind. Including the portal, which at the time we thought was just a fancy generator. But the eggheads weren't expecting you to walk right out o' the thing, looking confused as all get out..."

Belle was about to point out a computer's height and weight had nothing to do with his throughput, but then caught the device, looking at it curiously.

Wait... was this... could it be...

She looked for a light source to hold it up to.

*Computer in its obsolete sense of someone who used to perform tedious manual calculations like finding new prime numbers or digits of pi by hand.

Art perked up at the mention of Devil's Tower, his ears swiveling toward Jackie ever-so-slightly beneath the hood he wore. "Dis portal ya mention? It be a link ta the Huntin' Gounds?" Art shifted a little more of his weight to his staff, waiting to hear more about how this woman would be able to help him find his way.

The device is even stranger up close. It's got a ton of tiny gizmos inside -- injectors of some sort, small suture needles, and some sort of thin metallic tentacles.

((OOC: Make me a Mad Science or Knowledge (Engineering) roll, please. Either will work for figuring out what it does.))

Jackie nods. "See, it was like this..."

---

June 21st, 2094. Inside Devil's Tower, Wyoming

"Well, that should do it!" The Professor beamed. He stood in front of the Portal, and looked out at the others.

The Portal. That's what they all called it, because it looked exactly like one thought something like that might. It was a glowing rip in the fabric of reality itself, like a tear in a strip of film. The rip was too dark to look at -- it hurt the eyes. The Portal was surrounded by a glass cylinder. A metal cap over the top of the glass held an astounding array of etched crossbreed circuitry, wires, and cables drawing power from the Portal into the gently chugging generator the crew had set up.

The others clapped. It had taken a hell of a lot of work. First they'd had to get in here, through the ancient rusty door at the base of the tower. Then they'd had to fight their way through the caverns winding their way through the entirety of Devil's Tower, until they reached this. The former owners of the place had long gone, and only some degenerate monsters had remained. But those former owners had carved themselves a wondrous home in the heart of this monument.

There were a dozen in Jackie's group -- the Junkers and Librarians who'd discovered the pulsing emanations of Devil's Tower and decided to mount an expedition into it, and the Law Dogs who'd been working in the Sioux Nations to reduce the fear and help the Ravenites rebuild after the destruction of Deadwood. Jackie smiled at the Professor.

"So it's done? We can power the generators forever?" She asked.

"Theoretically." The Professor said absently, but Sam and Morgan both nodded vigorously.

"We done got power enough to rival Denver." Sam McGraw grinned. Jackie liked him best among the band -- he was a Junker who'd been working at Roswell before Judgement Day, and it was nice to be working with a fellow Texan after all this time. "And maybe if'n we get some of the Lizzie's tech workin', we can make the Combine fuck off."

Jeremy, decked out in his white tabard, glared at the portal and leaned on the wall. "This thing is unholy." he muttered. "It's a wound between the worlds. We should be sealing it, not forcing it wider." Jackie sighed. She wasn't the Templar's greatest fan. All his talk of "protecting the worthy" seemed damn arbitrary to her at times, and she hadn't helped clear this damn place just to shut it all down again.

"What happened to 'The Greater Good?'" Heather, the girl they'd pulled out of that tank in Boise, shared Jackie's distaste for the Templar, though Jackie suspected it was mostly because Heather played with the sorts of dark forces Jeremy condemned. "Won't helping the folk around here be worth more in the long run?"

Jeremy scowled, but didn't reply.

Rick Littlecrow, on the other hand, stepped up and slapped the Professor on the back. "Excellent!" The Sioux said. "Really! My people have been afraid of this place since forever, and now it's going to save us all! I found some whiskey a while back...was saving it for a special occasion." He pulled a bottle that was, at best, half full out of his pack.

"Seems to have been a lot of 'special occasions' there, Ricky." Lana, one of the Librarians, chuckled.

"Oh, you know how it is." Rick grinned back. "Just being alive in this dead world is a special occasion. Cups, everyone!"

Everyone began digging though their gear, bringing up whatever cups they'd each salvaged along the way. Even Jeremy grudgingly pulled a cup. Rick poured for everyone, though he kept a decent amount back in the bottle for himself. He raised the bottle. "To the future!"

"The future!" Everyone said. Jackie tipped her cup back to drink...

>knock, knock, knock, knock<

Jackie nearly choked as she spun towards the Portal, her hand immediately going to her HI Blazer. There, standing inside the glass, just outside the portal, was an old man. He had a wild beard, archaic clothes, and an even more archaic Gatling rifle on his back. He was banged up, dirty, and bloody, but he grinned at the group all the same.

"Uh, howdy, folks." He said with a chuckle. "Didn't mean ta startle ya. Would y'all mind terribly tellin' me where I am?"

He nodded in thanks to Matt, and poured himself another one, and then drank it quickly afterwards. 
He muttered something, shaking his head in disbelief, but when the story went on, he turned and paid attention like any other. 

Whatever response Matt might've had was silenced by Leopold's arrival.

"Major," he greeted, raising his glass in thanks at the Austro-Hungarian, "Can you believe this? Doesn't make much sense if you ask me, but there might be something to it."

"Marshal Broaddale, Leo here is a...friend of the family, you could say. He helped me out in my investigation here," he said.

"I'll tell you all about it later."
This message was lightly edited by the player at 18:34, Tue 14 Mar 2017.

Matt nodded warily and reached over to grab his wallet off the counter. He smiled gently at Steinhof.

"If you say so, Marshal."

"So..." Zek said, trying to understand all the possible ramifications of Jackie's story-and failing. "...Coot goes to the future at some point? Is not you telling him that gonna change the future?"

Leopold throws a quick glance around, making sure everybody else's attention is fixed on Jackie and her tale, then leans a bit in.
"You can drop the pretending, Matt. Logan and I have a long history together. I had to trust him with my life before and have not come to regret it."
For Logan, he adds: "I have rarely seen such a convincing act, I have to say. Matt and I had a little... adventure, just a few weeks before I attached myself to Colonel Manning."

Matthew furrowed his brow at Leopold's assertion. He turned to the Major, and set down his drink.


"...What are you talking about?"

"If you hadn't noticed, I'm tryin' to change a whole lot about the future." Jackie says. She looks over at Coot. "Besides, you knowin' about this will probably help you out, when the time comes."

Coot nods slowly. "So...does this mean I fail? in what I'm plannin'?" he says very carefully.

Jackie sighs. "I think it does. You got mad as hell when we got you out and explained where you were." She watches Coot's face fall. "But!" She says. "That's why Heather was seekin' you out. To tell you what went wrong the first time. You knowin' what we know means you can be prepared for it. Figger out a way to counter it."

"So what did go wrong the first time?" Coot asks. "Did I tell you?"

Jackie nods. "Well..."

---

The Hunting Grounds, where space is warped and time is bendable

Coot Jenkins slapped in another load for his Gatling Rifle, and looked around at his boys.

They'd done remarkably well, all things considered. The ones who'd kept their heads had put up a hell of a fight,  shoving the Manitou back past the gates. Three of them had been resealed, with new, immortal guardians taking the place of the Old Ones.

But he'd miscalculated. The worms inside his boys had an easier time getting control. He hadn't counted on that, though he should've.

So it had been rough going. But still, Coot was certain they could win. Just four more gates to close. He wasn't looking forward to the final bit, where he'd be cutting out his own still-beating heart to seal the pact, but -- well, the world was countin' on him.

"Let's go, boys!" He shouted at his army of Harrowed, and got a ragged cheer. They charged the mass of manitou...and then the explosion came.

some mood music

There was a flash of light, and then a shriek of cracking stones as the land split in half. Coot was thrown to his knees as the sky split as well, bathing the Harrowed Army and the legions of manitou in a hellishly bright white glow.

And through the light strode a tall, thin figure, with a rotten face, a battered top hat, and a coat festooned with badges, all of them from lawmen, and all of them with a hole through the center. And Coot shivered. He'd know that figure anywhere.

Stone.

"Well, if it ain't Coot Jenkins, my old friend." The dead man grinned. "Ain't seen you in nigh on to forever. Always wondered why you and I never settled things."

Coot shivered. He'd tried to recruit Stone once, before he knew what Stone was. He'd nearly paid for that with his life, and he still had the scar.

Stone raised his twin Colt Dragoons. "Well. Guess I don't have to wonder no more."

He fired...but one of Coot's troops leaped in the way! The bullets shredded the Harrowed, carving a furrow in his head and chest but turning the bullets enough so that Coot only felt their wind.

Stone scowled, then spit into the dirt. "Fuck it. I ain't got time for this. I'll get around to you eventually." He tipped his hat. "Be seein' you." Then he strode off, following the tear in the sky.

But the manitou only seemed emboldened by Stone, and the Harrowed Army was pushed back. More and more of Coot's men fell, and finally Coot had to call a retreat. "Follow me, boys!" He shouted...and then ran into the glowing tear in the universe, heading the opposite direction Stone had come.

He and his men wandered, lost, until Coot spotted a hole. It looked like a way out of the Hunting Ground. He knew he could get back in...but he needed to regroup. And so he stepped through, and found himself inside a glass cage, surrounded by folks toasting the future.

Leopold raised a quizzical eyebrow. "I am talking about Kansas, of course. The shootout with those renegades? You and the Wichita Witches coming for my rescue? Not that I needed rescuing, I was doing fine on my own." He chuckles and adds, looking at Logan: "Sharing a "last cigarette" at the right moment can do wonders. If you have the right kind of tobacco. I almost didn't believe that the same trick that worked in Timisvar would work here as well. Well, peasants are the same everywhere."
He smiles at Matt. "I think it's good that you no longer flaunt your knowledge and talents as freely as you did when we met."

He downs another drink, then frowns at Coot's tale.
"I'm not sure what to make of all this."

Broaddale sputtered for a moment.

"Back at the Bella Union was the first time I recall meeting you, Major," he said quietly, earnestly, "And I never...flaunt."

Matthew ran a hand over his short-shorn hair, and took another sip. In reference to Coot, he said simply, "Sounds about right. You can't trust some people . Not with something like that."

He returned to the previous subject.

"When was this, Major? With Kansas, and Black River?"