Occams Razor

Gary ran down Main Street, shouting. Some of it incoherent, oftentimes names like 'Sally! Professor! Leslie!' People stared at the half-naked, sopping wet man as he ran through traffic and between people.

Finally making it to #3 he banged loudly on the door. "Sally! Sally open up, blast you!" He cursed loudly in some guttural, forgotten language and ran to the park across the street.

Several kids were standing there laughing at the crazy wet man with blood running down his face.

"Bugger off!" He yelled, then began searching the ground frantically, muttering to himself.

One of the kids laughed and chucked a rock at him. Gary swore loudly again in that same guttural language as it pinged off of his swirling shield of air, then flicked his wrist at them. The ground in front of them exploded upwards with a loud bang of displaced air and showered them with dirt. The kids fell over them in their attempt to run.

Finally he found a long rock and began hacking away at the dirt, hoping someone he knew would've heard him and be here eventually.

Sally Lautner burst out the door of #3 with a gun in hand and the sound of ruckus.

At the sight of the fleeing kids, the rubble and dirt hanging about the air as it fell, and a bloody Madrigus-that-Was, he did the most reasonable thing possible for the moment.

"I DONE TOLT YOU TO KEEP THAT SHIT ON LOCKDOWN TILL HALLERWEEN, YOU GIVIN' AWAY MY BOOBY TRAPS FOR THEM THERE KIDS!"

He said this loudly, eyes scanning about for anyone that might have seen whatever the hell Gary had just done.

"'the fuck 's goin on, man?" Sally said, his voice dropping. "You got somethin' after ya?"

Just inside the door sat a very large rifle and a certain oversized piece of cutlery- both within arm's reach.

"An' why ain't you decent fer public?"

Gary spun around and leveled a manic stare at Sally. 'What? Decent? This is no time for decency, man!" He raked a dirty hand through his wet hair. "I might've figured it out! Come!"

Quickly he hastened to finish what he was carving, which was obviously the diagram of the planes. This time, however, he had added small notches to each of the circles.

"See, I was taking a shower this morning and considering the information we talked about on Saturday," he rambled. "Something's always bothered me about the thing; I always felt that there should be something in the middle, but no idea what it could be. My first idea, well, I chucked it because I didn't know anything about it, but the more I thought about it, and after Saturday, hum! Quick! Find a stick!" He gesticulated wildly and rummaged through his bag to pull out his grimoire, flipped some pages, and began scrawling again with the rock.

"Furthermore, if I'm right, I've also managed to make almost completely certain how it is these grimoires work! Or rather, what it is exactly they are in relation to the worlds! And souls! By the Styx, this is maddening!"

Sally, brow furrowed, stepped out from the landing with a droll, "Raight." He un-cocked and holstered his revolver, and glanced around Main Street again, looking for any of Whisper Hill's more mundane residents.

He pulled out the buck knife from his leg holster and dropped it, point down, next to Gary, should he need a more precise writing tool, then reached up the tangled limbs of the trees that liked to scratch along the windows of #3 and broke one off.

"An' yer stick."

"So yer books, an' this here bit in the middle an' all of it? Ya got it sorted, then?" Sally said, leaning over the mad wizard.

Kelsey Graham grabbed her hat off the shelf of Main Street #3 as she ran out the door after Sally, delayed by the necessity of making sure her medical bag still had all the things she might need at hand. She looked around wildly, expecting to see someone maimed or dying. Instead she saw a shirtless Gary and a bemused Sally.

She approached the pair of them cautiously, eyeing the nearby trees like she expected something to jump out at them. The medic looked a question at Sally, as he was clearly the saner of the two men present. "What's going on?" she asked. "Who's dying?" Then she crouched down to peer at Gary's carving, brow furrowing as she tried to make sense of it.

"Sorted? Maybe yes, maybe no." He grabbed the knife and used that to finish writing. "A lot of it is conjecture and assumptions, but right now it's the most solid theory I've seen yet." Placing the book in his bag he dropped the knife, then rammed the stick into the middle of the diagram.

Before the two of them lay the planar map. Each circle bore small notches, the largest pointing inward and the four others pointing out. Inside each circle and next to the stick were runes.

"Now, see this here," Gary pointed to the top and limped around the diagram. "We know this is Ig, the Divine Realm. We know what each circle means. What we lack is the compositional whole, the why. What is the 'facility' and what does it do?

"Now, this might be confusing, so try to bear with me. I can't answer everything, however, but, please." He limped around the circle again and pointed at things or gesticulated wildly while he spoke. "I was just in the shower, trying to figure things out. I was thinking about some of the guesswork we made Saturday, like 'what are souls?' Well, currency sounds rather silly. But power? That makes sense. If the facility is a machine, then souls must be what drives humans to do what they do to keep the facility running. So what is hell? Well it can't be the engine. But a recycling facility? Maybe.

"If souls are energy, then you want clean energy to fuel your machine, right? So the demons take corrupted souls, cleanse them, then dump them back in. Makes sense though I could be wrong, but however, that gives us two new questions: why do the fey take humans and leave their children, and does the Emperium also take souls for some reason? These I cannot answer, but!

"I remembered that people said that the gate to the darkness was very technological, but also very magical. A while ago I had been attempting to understand modern technology, had a devil of a time of it, and gave up. But I remember seeing something. Look," he pointed to the notches on the outer circle. "In my stumbling I came across an interesting bit of tinkering called a 'planetary gear system.' No clue what the point was, but it consisted of five gears, one large outer, one medium inner, and three small ones connecting the two. The whole contraption was held together by a triangular framework." He pointed at the stick. "In the center of the thing was a shaft that applied mechanical force and caused everything to rotate. Well!

"After that I decided to look at it like a ritual circle. See? Everything has a place. A three-point circle is basic stuff but it's powerful. Each point allows energy to flow balanced through the ritual, creating a nexus of power at the center. Therefore I concluded that the planes are indeed also constructs of both magic and technology, and therefore there must be something at the center, but what?

"Well, if souls are power, then some infinitely large containment must be needed in order to use that power, yes? Where do souls go when they die? THE WELL OF SOULS!" He shouted, pointing fervently at the stick again. "Power flows through the well and into the planes, cycles through, the machine runs, and the power cycles back into the well for use again. But more on that in a moment.

"So where do grimoires fit? Easy! Each rune has meaning to it. When we cast a spell we make a formula, gather some relevant materials, chant a bit and then things happen. Well, if the world is also a machine, then doesn't that sound quite a bit like a computer program? A programmer writes a code, which makes a program, which tells the computer what to do. See? These books," he waved the grimoire under Sally's nose, "these are like a keyboard with which a magician can write a ritual program to order the world into doing something.

"But the Well! By the Styx, the Well of Souls! It hasn't been fixed! We broke it last year for the Morrigan! I broke two strict codes of mine: no doing things without research, and no trusting the fey. I broke these codes because of my own hubris and ego. I BROKE THE WELL, SALLY!" He flicked his wrist again, and the stick shattered in half with a bang. "WE NEED TO FIX THAT. NO WONDER THE EMPYRIUM WANTS TO RESET THE FACILITY!"

He stopped suddenly, panting hard and looking absolutely crazy.

Sally looked over the diagram. Looked to Kelsey, his brow furrowing further still. Looked to Gary.

"Ain't nobody dying," was the first thing he managed to say, glancing at Kelsey. "But I gotta imagine that ain't gon' hold fer very long..."

He looked over the diagram- something he'd made with markers on poster board a few times. Something he'd done his own wild gesticulating about more times, after Ashkairi explained it to them. Tell something enough- and he'd told it at least a dozen times- and even Sally Lautner can start to understand it.

"If yer raight," he clicked his teeth, "then... shit. Ok, I ain't gon' say you're wrong. Cuz I ain't Leslie r' Larissa or anybody else in the real know on this stuff. So, les' just say you raight."

He gestured to the diagram, "Where'd you see this Planet-ary Gear business? In one 'a yer books?"

Looking to the sky for a moment, he tried to remember. "An' the Well a Bones? We did that, fer why, cuz the White Lady asked it, raight?"

Gary noticed Kelsey, but before he could speak his eyes glazed over. "Wait," he said, "Fey and Demons were made by the Angels, but after the facility had been created. That's obvious, as the facility had to have been made in order for the Angels to leave the Empyrium and then create said life from spirits and... Whatever. Residents of already created world's nonetheless. As such, both fey and demons are unnatural, and there's a power imbalance as souls keep crossing over into both worlds. Therefore the Pit is unlikely to be a recycling facility, but then what?" He stroked the edge of his flesh tome, oblivious to any pain from the gash on his forehead or his messed-up leg. "Why are the castaways collecting souls?"

His eyes snapped to Sally. "Bones, souls, whatever. But humans die every day all over the globe. As for the gears, I saw it on the Internet. Google can find it easy. The three-point ritual circle is a basic pattern in most magical texts." He nodded at Kelsey. "Hello.

"Ah! Yes! The White Lady asked us to break open the well. Which I knew was a terrible idea, but, again, hubris. We, I, someone needs to fix that, and soon."

Kelsey gave Sally a worried glance, then frowned for a long while in thought.

"I can answer some of that," she said. Turning to Gary, she asked, "You heard about the tithe the fae pay to hell?"

She stared down at the diagram while she sorted the words out in her head. "The fae pay a tithe of human souls to hell each year. That's why they steal children, I believe. Hell uses those souls as part of their army against the Imperium. My understanding is, that's what the fae and the Pit want human souls for - warm bodies they can use in their war against those of the Imperium."

Kelsey paused for a moment, looking between her two friends. "Isaira told me that the Well of Souls is supposed to move. The rituals people did for the White Lady, the fighting the Reapers...it kept the Well of Souls in one place. It''s not meant to be kept in one place. It's a heavy thing - it places a lot of weight on reality. And if it stays in one place too long, then that stretches out the fabric of reality...and stretches it...and if it stays put for much much too long, then the fabric of reality could break under its weight. We had to break it - the White Lady needed the army she got from it to fight Baelor, and the box we imprisoned in him was fashioned from shards of the broken well. Without it, though, we've had wraiths and all sorts of ooky spooky spirits floating around, cause the dead can't really go to rest without the Well fixed. People are working on fixing it, though - I know we've made some progress, but I think we're still looking for some runestones? Big, heavy things."

She shook her head. "I don't know too much about that side of it. Anyway...I don't think the breaking of the Well of Souls is why they want to reset the facility. I mean, it certainly isn't helping, but I thought we were pretty sure it was the Darkness leaking in that they objected to?" She looked back to Sally. "Do you remember if we know that for a fact, or if that was just someone's speculation? It was after that jerk took the box with Baelor in it away that the angels first mentioned resetting the facility, so I thought it had to do with all the ancient evils we were being bad at handling that was the problem."

"No, they want to reset the facility because people keep sticking their nose into things and mucking them up." A pained expression went across his face and he slowly sat on the ground, placing one shaking hand on his left knee.

"Honestly I'm disappointed by the fact that neither of you are as flabbergasted as I am about this," he waved at the diagram. "Magic and technology working together? As far as I understand it that's preposterous. But what if the technology is built out of magic, hmm? Or perhaps the computers we use are just too weak to handle magic. Either way..." His eyes glazed over. "War is nasty business. I'd rather see us settle things with the Angels diplomatically. Make them see we're just trying to fix things rather than bung bigger holes in the design. Maybe they'd help." He chuckled. "As if."

Gary sighed heavily and looked up at the two of them. "I apologize for being away too long. It seems I've missed quite a bit more information than I thought I had. Saturday everyone was focused on the church coming to attack the town, and nobody could think to tell me of anything else. Now I suppose I'm overreacting to old news.

"Who's in charge of fixing the Well? I should probably speak to them. No doubt a spell will be needed to cement those runestones in place.