Looks like it’ll be 3 sections!

Shit. Something went wrong. I hate dealing with the mental stuff. Give me cancer or the clap any day. The mental stuff is way worse.

Okay, what’s the situation? Darkness. Voices. Some kind of vibration, and a tingle across my skin.

“Hello? You out there? Eternus? Donald?”

“Yeah, we’re here Kerry. Hold on.”

Shit. We. Some kind of dissociative disorder? Or is it magic shit? Fuck. Only thing worse than mental shit is magic shit. At least things are getting brighter.

“Hey Kerry.”

Fucker! Behind me. Holy shit, he looks bad. That’s where the vibration came from. He’s flickering.

“Hey. Uh, you know my name?”

“Yeah, we’ve had this conversation before. Or one like it. You’re less predictable than most. It’s why we’re friends.”

“Man, this is the first I’ve ever met you. Is this some kind of time warp thing?” Gods, I hate time shit even worse than magic shit.

“More or less, we think. We as in all of me and we as in you and us. If it isn’t a time thing, it’s dimension shit. And yes, I know that’s about the only thing you hate worse than the time shit. But we’re confident it’s time shit.”

“That’s why I hate the time shit man. Are we in your head, or some kind of power space?”

“My head. Well, our heads. As in yours and mine. You copy the disturbed brain waves into yourself. It syncs us up, almost like psychic shit.”

“I hate psychic shit.”

“I know. You know that you hate pretty much all the shit.”

“Well, yeah, all this shit fucked up my life.”

"So you say. Often. And loudly.

“Look, are you going to explain this or keep fucking with me?”

"You figured it out fast the first time we did this, but yeah. My brain got messed up when I ran into Finale. That time freeze bubble fractured my personal timeline. It made me loop back into it multiple times, including a couple of deaths. But when it popped, all of me were folded into one.

Which wouldn’t have been great, but it wasn’t that many of me. I was coping okay until I died again and looped back. All of me got doubled. And the next time, all of those got doubled.

From what you will have figured out, it was going to start being a problem anyway. All the looping and rewriting of memories on my brain was doing damage. But in the primary timeline, the origin line, I would have made it into my sixties before it showed up.

With the extras in here, it amplifies the effect every loop. I’ve been lucky so far, we’re only a dozen or so deep. So only a few hundred copies of myself so far, each a little out of sync, with fractionally different patterns trying to write onto the same brain. Next one, it’ll get close to a thousand of me in here. Then thousands. You’ve pulled me from the field while you try to really fix the problem, but then something very bad happens, and I make the jump on my own.

You’ve spent a lot of time in my head. You’ve even tried riding along, being in this kind of sync when I blow my brains out, but you can’t come with me. It’s a one man show. This time, when I had to come back, you told me to tell you to go deep and try to get a grasp on each of the mes that were formed in the bubble. You said that you might be able to pull all of those minds together. If not, then it would be psychic or magic shit, because you’re at the limit of your power. If that doesn’t work, the only other option would fry your brain.

Problem is, you told me that while some really nasty bastards were attacking headquarters, and we got hit by a bomb. That’s where I was before I slammed back into myself on the stairs again."

“Fuck me. Fuck me raw and running.”

“Yup, that about sums it up. The good news is that every time we’ve met for the first time for you, we’ve been stuck in here longer. The first first time was maybe five minutes. Last time was most of a day. So we’ve got a bit of freedom to work.”

“If that’s the good news, keep the bad to yourself.”

“Yeah, that’s what you always say.”

“There is bad news?” Oh great, he’s fucking laughing.

“Yeah, and this is the point in things where you usually tell me to keep it to myself anyway. But then a few weeks later, you tell me I should have told you now. Which do you prefer?”

“How the fuck should I know!?”

“You’re the nurse and healer, I’m just an asshole with some guns and a dubious relationship with time.”

“Give me the bad news then.”

“Huh. Only the second time you made that choice. That’s what I like about you, Kerry, you surprise me. Well, that and your sunny disposition.”

“Shut the fuck up and tell me. Asshole.”

“At some point, our first meeting will fry your brain completely. We’ve only got maybe two or three tries left. Worse, chances are high that it’ll take you dumping all of it onto someone at once for you to get rid of it if you do manage to fix it before then. So you’ll have to fry someone that may or may not deserve it because you get less and less able to function every time it happens. Last time, you could barely walk once we woke up. And I haven’t looped back before this meeting since the first one, and I should have. So it looks like I can’t prevent this event at all.”

“Any suggestions as to who?”

“Yeah. After the prime timeline became screwed, I encouraged a little proactive pruning of the worst enemies. We’ve got Nuke locked down and drugged to the gills down in the security unit. He kept causing a major waste of resources right before the Kitain show up.”

“I have no clue what the Kitain are, and I don’t care. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! Fine. Let’s do this. Did I give you any idea about how I’m supposed to go about it?”

“Yeah. It’s like waking up a catatonic patient, only there’s six patients to do at once.”

“Great. I fucking hate —”

“Yeah, I know, you hate the mental shit. For what it’s worth, John, the doctor that Max has help us, has some really good drugs available. Plus the DoD has some crazy strong opiate analogs with vastly lowered overdose risk. So you’ll be able to take a nice vacation if we both survive.”

“Okay. I need you to stay quiet, stay still, and don’t fight what I’m doing. Not that you could stop it, but any time I’ve done this mental shit and the patient fought, it hurt me and them a lot. So, lay down.”

Good. He follows orders. “I’m going to be touching you a lot. I don’t really have to touch to use the power, but it makes it easier on both of us.”

Let’s see what I can do. Six of him. He’s not vibrating, it’s the other minds switching in and out of control. Hell, this entire conversation was with all of them. Go deep? Not the most useful advice there, future Kerry. Snag this version. Hold it. Fuck! It’s slippery! Damn it, lost it. Okay, next one, try again. Shit! Shit* I got it! Fuck yes! Damn thing is like finger fucking a bag of razors. Okay, okay, pull it in, get it settled.

Next one. I think I can do this. Shit, it’s bloody! Real blood or symbolic? Both? Both. Fine, pull the injury out first. Patch up the throat. Yes! Fucking A right! That got it smoothed out, bundle it right next to the first, tuck them both in, align them with me. Next one looks in better shape. I think I got this! I think I can fix it!

“Max! Max, The Doctor’s waking up!”

Thanks be! I needed some good news! “On my way Mandy.”