Chapter 176: Chapter 162: Reunion

The name Dafydd meant nothing. It was completely unfamiliar and didn't at all feel like it belonged to me. But all my thoughts and questions about the loss of my name suddenly took a back seat to something far more important.

"Mum... Dad..." I muttered, crying and shaking. "How?"

Why was I even surprised? Owen had reincarnated as Daniel, and if my brother had reincarnated, why not my parents? Why hadn't I considered the possibility before? They'd told me they were an elderly married couple with a tragic backstory. Their backstory was me. I was what was taken from them.

"It's okay. I'm here. Even after Owen... I came here. I'm alive."

The twins stared at me in silence, their inability to speak not conductive to shocked muttering, but I could see the stupefaction on their faces. I heard the click of the door shutting and finally noticed that Cluma and Dennacta were no longer in the room. Cluma had probably dragged him out.

"Where do I even start?"

Dirrana tried to write something, but his trembling hand reduced his scribbles to illegibility. Tennacti was no better, struggling to even pick up her board from where she'd dropped it on the floor.

I gave a strange little laugh. Our complete family had turned up here. Me, Daniel, and our parents. Why us? What was special about our family? Were my grandparents around here somewhere, too? Thelma's parents were still alive when I'd died, but were old enough that they'd likely passed away before she did. Paul's had died in a traffic accident years earlier. One of Paul's older brothers died a year before I did, too. Did he come here?

Erryn didn't admit Daniel to me until her death, but she hadn't mentioned anyone else. Did that mean they weren't here, or did she simply not feel the need to mention them if they hadn't needed a mind-wipe? The balance of probability weighed in favour of them not being here; much of what Erryn had said to me heavily implied I was the first reincarnate she had seen. So, again, why us?

It took some time for the twins to calm themselves sufficiently to write again. "Are you really our Dafydd?" wrote Tennacti.

"I don't recognise the name at all, but I had a younger brother called Owen, and my parents were Paul and Thelma. Owen... tried to kill me. I fled into a street and was hit by a truck. Then I woke up here."

"It really is you," wrote Dirrana. "It's a miracle. God gave us our child back."

Tennacti put an arm on Dirrana's shoulder, giving her head a brief shake and then writing something that she kept hidden from me. Dirrana looked like he wanted to respond, before slumping and nodding.

Tennacti erased her board, then scribbled something else, turning it around to reveal, "Please don't call us mum and dad."

"But... but..." I stammered. Why not? It's not as if my parents of this world would take offence. Yes, referring to a pair of baby harpies as if they were parents would be weird to anyone who didn't know the circumstances, especially given they were twins and not partners, but adding one more point of weirdness to my record wasn't going to matter by this point.

"That was another life and another world," she continued, in a slow and untidy scrawl, her hand still trembling. "Your parents are back in Dawnhold, not here."

I took a deep breath, resisting the urge to snap back. I could see where she was coming from, but why did it matter what I called them? I was lucky enough to have either one of my sets of parents, so wasn't I even more fortunate to have both?

"If you insist," I answered. "Tennacti and Dirrana you remain."

She smiled back, although it was hard to tell with her rigid beak. It was the way the eyes crinkled.

"Owen is here too," I said, deciding to get all the bombshells over and done with. Indeed, the reaction of the twins—my parents—was very much as if I'd dropped a bomb on them. "He's called Daniel now. Erryn, the earth mother, wiped his memory after some... unpleasantness. He's bound by the Law already. I've never been to visit."

Once again, it took some time before the pair brought themselves back under sufficient control to write legibly. "If he no longer has his memory," wrote Dirrana, leaving the rest of the sentence unarticulated.

"I agree," I said. "I just thought you should know. But... why us? Our entire family. Do you have any idea?"

They looked at each other, communicating silently in the way that only people who had known each other inside out for half a century could, before Tennacti wrote, "No. Maybe everyone reincarnates somewhere?"

"We're the only ones here, though, at least to the best of my knowledge. I'm almost certain I'm the first, and that there hasn't been any others in the past couple of years. The bit in between is more woolly, but if there were others, Erryn hasn't mentioned them. If each family reincarnated somewhere different, then we'd have intractable problems delineating where the 'family' ends. Why my parents, but not your parents, for example."

ding

The System notification barely even registered, as focused as I was on my former parents. We continued our conversation for some time, the twins filling me in on the circumstances around my death and what happened afterwards, albeit reluctantly. My presence here had been a shock to them, as had theirs to me, but Tennacti didn't want that knowledge to change anything, and had talked Dirrana around to her point of view. Knowing I had survived my own murder brought them both a clearly visible amount of comfort, though. Which just led to another uncomfortable question...

"Does knowing that I'm safe and alive change your opinion on the Law?" I asked.

"No," wrote Tennacti, looking almost offended that I'd even asked.

Dirrana, however, was writing something longer. "The last time we discussed it, you implied some downside to freeing us. What was it?"

Tennacti looked at him in surprise, before giving a small nod.

"You'd be cut off from the System," I answered. "No classes, skills or stats. You'd be completely ordinary in a world of superpowers."

"Those who built the System didn't have the aid of the System," he pointed out.

"They did have hundreds or thousands of years of built-up research, knowledge and resources, though. If you took the people who built it and dumped them back into this world's equivalent of a stone age, I doubt they'd have succeeded."

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"True. If you find a way with no side effects, then maybe, but our previous logic still stands. I don't believe we'll be changed. Don't go out of your way on our account."

I nodded. So, their opinions weren't quite so ironclad as the impression they'd given last time. Or, at least, Dirrana's wasn't. Still not enough that they'd cut themself off from the System for it, but enough that he'd stopped to consider it. Should I put some effort towards finding a side-effect free method? They didn't want me to, but it would be a comforting ability to have, just in case. I just couldn't imagine what such a thing would involve. How was I—someone who relied entirely on the System for my abilities—supposed to overcome global scale magic left behind by a six-hundred-year-old almost-goddess?

I stepped outside the room and found Cluma and Dennacta engaged in some sort of board game. That seemed rather low-key for Cluma, but Dennacta probably wasn't going to leave the twins alone to take her flying or whatever insane thing she'd no doubt tried to get him to do.

"Sorry about that," I said to the pair of them.

"So you're family?" he asked.

"Yes. Well, were. They don't want me to act any differently towards them than I have been. It might be weird for a while, but I don't think anything's going to change."

"So these reincarnations aren't random, but your family did something?" asked Cluma, causing me to frown again.

"I don't know. None of us can think of any reason for it, but it's certainly true that every reincarnation I'm aware of is part of my direct family."

"Wait, there's more?" asked Dennacta.

"One other, but he... didn't adjust well. The earth mother was forced to erase his memories of our old world."

"Oh, that's sad," said Cluma, looking downcast. "When did that happen? You never said!"

"I found out about it after the Emerald Caverns, but I'm not sure when exactly it happened. We... didn't get on, back on Earth."

"So if you hadn't shown up here, the earth mother might have wiped the memories of our twins?" asked Dennacta, looking horrified. "No, wait... She's..."

"Not at all," I answered, interrupting him. "They've adjusted very well, and would have done so even if I hadn't butted in, even if it had taken a little longer."

He relaxed again. They'd been born after Erryn's death, so there was no danger of her doing anything to them, as he seemed to work out halfway through his sentence, but I couldn't blame a father for panicking about his children. Although, leaving contingencies behind to bind them with the Law still counted as something.

We ended up spending the full day at the sapphire peaks. It was, as expected, awkward and weird, but I couldn't bring myself to leave. Eventually, the twins did open up a little, and listening to my former parents talking to me about my own funeral was utterly surreal. Hearing about Owen was disturbing. He'd spent the remainder of his life on Earth in prison, and died in a fight with another inmate. It was hard not to feel sorry for him. How did he turn out like that? It wasn't lack of love. Did he have an undiagnosed mental condition? Were some people just born evil?

"You went there to solve a mystery, but came back with two," commented Cluma, once we'd teleported back to Dawnhold.

"Yeah. Not only did I fail to resolve my name mystery, despite confirming that the twins were affected in the same way, but it turns out that all the reincarnates are my immediate family."

"Mmm. Do you think you should ask for help? The institute, or... Lily?"

"The slime couldn't help. I've already asked her. I doubt the institute could add anything." Perhaps another reason to want to find ways to manipulate the Law; no-one under it would be able to indulge in reincarnation research. They couldn't help me however much they tried.

No god had greeted me as I'd reincarnated. I'd been given no mission here. I wasn't deliberately summoned. No-one from Earth had sent me here. I wasn't anyone special, involved in government conspiracies or alien technology research. If anyone else in my family was, they hid it damn well.

Why had I forgotten my name? Not just forgotten, but buried. And why had I noticed the hole now? The twins had been the same. They had noticed when I'd just pointed it out to them, but they hadn't when I'd asked them their Earth names before. It couldn't be anything to do with living here some amount of time. Had something changed?

"The mana did that weird drifting thing again while you were talking with the twins, too. East, that time, and it was stronger than before. I didn't say anything at the time, because your time with the twins was more important."

And there's a third mystery to add to the set. I hadn't noticed anything, but I was highly distracted. Had something consumed a vast amount of mana somewhere, resulting in a gradient? What could eat ambient mana like that?

"Night," called Cluma as she gave me a goodbye hug. They were always a little slower than her hello hugs, and she wrapped her arms lower down my back. Goodbyes were always sadder than hellos, after all.

"Good night," I replied, hugging back. "I'll just have to put it out of mind for now. Let's head back to the dungeon tomorrow. We should be able to reach the next boss."

"Yay. At last, something that will be a challenge."

Cluma departed, and I made attempt number three of sleeping in the lonely house. It wasn't until I was lying in bed that I recalled the earlier ding. Given the situation, wasn't that more likely to be a trait than a skill?

Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates <Error>
Administrative notification: Connection lost to foreign soul.

What the heck? Someone new had reincarnated? But why wasn't there a location listed? And how were they lost? Had someone almost reincarnated, but it had gone wrong somehow? A miscarriage? Regardless, with no coordinates and the connection lost at some point afterwards, there wasn't anything I could do about it now.

Despite the questions floating around my head and the buzz of my reunion with my former parents, this time I managed to sleep.

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