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PotV Volume 1 Epilogue
🕑 Added 2025-06-26 23:56:23 +0000 UTCHey folks.
This is a weird update--it's going to come after the conclusion of Volume 1 on Royal Road, and it'll be put up on Scribblehub after the fact.
I'm adding this epilogue after various pieces of feedback and such on Royalroad made me decide it ultimately needs to come earlier in the story. Originally this was going to be a volume 4 tidbit (or maybe even in volume 5!), but I've decided the story might be stronger if it moves up into the end of Volume 1, where--for the new RR reader--it'll be fresher and address some comments I've been getting. What can ya do? Some audiences are less patient than others.
This goes between the end of Volume 1 and the beginning of Volume 2.
OK here we go:
EPILOGUE - Archer
She wakes up and begins the gradual indignity of getting out of bed. The thing about getting older isn’t so much the aches. They’re manageable—it’s fine. She knew those sorts of pangs would come, with age. She prepared for them.
It’s more the absence of the why that galls her. She does not like mysteries. Why is her neck so stiff? Where did that come from? Was it from some way she moved? Or just how she slept? Her posture?
Maybe it’s just the headache her life has become, physicalizing itself. Stress response.
Nothing to worry about for too much longer. Things are being rearranged. She’ll be dealt with, she imagines.
With the humiliations of age properly pondered, she’s up, and Lordling is underfoot as he loves to be, grumbling about food.
He catches a claw on her pants as she pulls them on. “One thing at a time, hellion,” she says, chidingly.
She really ought to put some thought into where he’ll go. Check around with the neighbors, perhaps. Tell them—what? She’s taking a little vacation. It might be fun to blow the top off everything. An interesting way to go, perhaps. But she’d end up a tabloid curiosity, and she’d probably get the neighbors liquidated. So perhaps not.
She’s ninety seconds into steeping her breakfast tea when her phone goes off. Not her normal phone. The phone she keeps in her blazer. The one she assumed would never go off again.
Her ridiculous, irrational stomach ties itself off into a neat little bow.
“Today it is, then,” she says to Lordling, and stands.
She digs the phone from her pocket and hits the green button.
“How did you get this number?”
“We were pinged.” The voice on the other side. Not a familiar one, but they never are. “Just now. The T-5. Fifteen seconds within range.”
“Fifteen—”
Helen sprints to her living room and opens her laptop. God dammit, where’s her glasses. God dammit, where’s the charger thing.
“Fifteen seconds,” she says. “What was it doing?”
“What were they doing. B-31 and B-32. You’ll see the signal path. Either the device has a malfunction or our guests are faster-than-light.”
“I’d call that a coin toss. We still barely understand what the hell we’re tinkering with.” She finds the cord under a stack of Vogues and plugs her computer in. “He’s still with her, then.”
“Possibly,” the phone says. “Or his body, or they extracted the chip.”
“Now why would they do that?” She hits the power button. “Why would they go through the trouble of sparing him, taking him, and then killing him?”
“Dissection, maybe. Why did we go through the trouble of leaving him walking?” The voice’s flat grind speaks to a computer-generated source. Perhaps Helen’s reading the emphasis. “Considering you couldn’t keep him from slipping the net.”
“You, he says.” She smirks. “No. If it was me, I’d be gone. Let’s not pretend. I’d been wondering why I wasn’t, in fact. Everyone else is. Everyone our little unaccounted variable didn’t massacre. I’ve kept tabs.”
No reply.
“It was a mistake to pull the plug,” she says. “We should have let him carry her off. More uptime, less blood, same result.”
“He was about to be an infohazard.”
“He was a paladin. You saw the eval.”
“You saw the phone.”
“Your people went knuckle-dragger. Right at the moment we could have broken through.”
“We’re not relitigating Archer West.”
“No,” she says. “No, I understand. You’ve stumbled into an opportunity. Something that dwarfs whatever we might have expected from our little xenopsychology trial. And whatever cat’s-paws we’ve had to cut off.” She casts a look at Lordling, who greets her metaphor with feline indifference. She plucks her teabag from its mug. “And you still need me.”
“Are you logged in yet?”
Helen watches the wheel spin. “I would be, if you’d budgeted for a computer from the 21st century. What’s waiting for me? Did we pull anything in from those fifteen seconds?”
“Fragments. Audio is doing what they can.”
“And you want my take?”
“File’s on the desktop.”
Helen sees it. Her hand shakes as she double-clicks.
Muffled voices. Nonsense words. But close enough, she thinks, to the voices on the recordings. The language B-31 spoke to B-32.
She furrows her brow and replays the file. “That is Thirty-Two,” she says. “Pull the voice from the Archer West tapes and compare it, but I swear to God it’s Thirty-Two. Thirty-Two speaking their language. And Thirty-One talking back.”
She settles back onto the couch. Her heart is galloping.
“I told you," she says. “I knew it. She took him. Grant Hyde is alive.”
Comments
Alex
Not closed off, no, but we’re going to get more maekyon development in volume 4 that’ll link into this (as well as some other loose threads)
Alex
The big shock was that Sykora managed to kill everyone and summon the ship. They intended for Grant to be comfortable enough to talk to her—the lax security was intentional in that way. But they were confident that they could stop her from getting out with a whole garrison upstairs, and they didn’t imagine she could radio for help with a jury rigged phone. They knew she was intelligent, but not a one-Taiik wrecking crew. The baby thing—I’ve been tweaking this in the drafts for RR to make it more of a Sykora-sourced thing that Grant picks up on and gets determined about. Agreed that right now he’s a bit baby crazy a bit early.
Narf
Huh... if anything, I'm more confused now. My assumption until here had been that the escape at the start of the story had been known to and permitted by the powers that be. That only a token effort was made to sell it rather than expose that it is all a setup, just some nobody guards sacrificed, no damage worth mentioning. The security was so laughably weak that it did not make sense for it to be anything else for me. I was certain that this was a thread that the story would pick up again later, because no way Grant and Sykora wouldn't realise at some point just how stupidly easy it was for them to meet, communicate, and escape. Like, come on, they literally put some random civilian in charge of observing an alien on his first day in employment, left him alone for his entire shift, and left a manual how to loop the camera feed. It doesn't get more obvious and if anything it's odd that Grant and Sykora haven't figured that out yet. While this chapter does confirm that Grant was just another part of the experiments, intentionally allowed in and the interactions with Batty allowed to happen while being kept under observation, it appears that the escape part was unplanned? That they genuinely tried to kill Grant and keep Sykora contained? That those ridiculously weak attempts at containment were actually serious attempts rather than a smokeshow intended to veil that they actually let them go? This is very unexpected to me. I'll have to reconsider a lot of my assumptions now. i had actually not considered that part in the start of story a problem until now. Just a temporarily suspended mystery as to who was behind Sykora's disappearence to Earth, who was behind her imprisonment on Earth itself, and why she was permitted to leave again. A thread to be repursued at a later time. Now it has actually become a bit of an issue, as I struggle to suspend my disbelief at how their escape could have ever worked in the face of genuine resistance. The only actual weakspot of the story so far for me had been the switch to the whole "we want children" plot. That they developed that wish was fine, but it just felt very rushed and escalated too rapidly, like a quick replacement for the removed struggle for Grant's freedom was needed so this needed to be forced in place quickly. Grant went from self-admittedly not caring about or wishing for children at all to a compulsory-feeling necessity to have kids with Sykora in what felt like a couple of days, developing this extreme fixation on that idea before even talking to his wife about it.
RepossessedSoul
I really don't understand the purpose of this epilogue as it introduces characters and ideas that aren't really looked at again for over 60 chapters after, and I'd be willing to bet aren't going to be closed off until book 6 at earliest. It's cool to see that there are additional machinations behind the scenes but what's the point?
Zach
I wonder what the point of this is? There is nothing they can do against the empire to our knowledge, but Chekhov’s gun and all that. I wonder if they get in contact with an anti-black pike cell of the empire or smth.
