Work Text:
- Enter your chosen building and get into the elevator on the first floor alone.
- Press the button for the fourth floor.
“This is a really nice lab, Mama,” he says, although he is too short to see up on the counters. “How come it floats?”
“Magic,” she says, and he frowns.
“Labs are science,” he corrects her. She should know this. “How come? Whose is it?”
“Because,” she tells him. “it’s ours, that’s how come. I wanted a place for me and my brilliant boy to do our work, and I wanted it to be the best lab in the world.”
“You made it float?” He bounces on his feet, catches a glimpse of his own tool set on a shelf in the back. “Show me how, show me how!”
She uses his bouncing as momentum to swing him up onto her hip. “Just like that,” she teases. He’s getting a little too old for that, but he’s still small. “I’ll teach you everything you want.”
He learns how to make things float eventually, but first he learns about his lab. He has his own room, and before long the walls are covered in scribbles and blueprints. He learns how to wire circuit boards sitting on his mother’s knee, leaning in so close his big glasses slide off his little face. When he’s lonely he talks to Upsy and examines the rooms full of Miller history, wandering back and forth in front of his legacy of inventions. When he’s tired of that, he reads. When his mother looks into the smooth face of an emerald, he looks in too, and while she works on her important projects he teaches himself how to build robots.
Lucas Miller grows up beside his mother in a home of their own making.
- When the elevator reaches the fourth floor, do not get out. Press the button for the second floor.
- When you reach the second floor, remain in the elevator and press the button for the sixth floor.
There is a world where people can fly in metal and there is a world he cannot look into for long until his eyes feel like they’re melting from the sights of gods, and there is a world that is dark. All of these worlds are open to him. To them. The first time his mother shows him Lucas left breathless at all there is.
He’s grounded by his mother’s hand on his shoulder. “Well?” she says. “What do you think?”
“It’s incredible,” he says quietly. “It’s- Mama, this is amazing, there’s so much we could do with it! Look, here-”
He cannot chose a single image to point at and marvel over, there’s so many. It’s all so beautiful and overwhelming. Everything moves so quickly, it’s all he can do to pull out his notebook from his shirt pocket and scribble down everything he sees.
Lucas does not realize he’s been there for hours until his mother returns (when did she leave?) to kiss the crown of his head and bring him to dinner.
“It will all be there later,” she tells him, smoothing out those curls. “It’s always going to be there. It’s ours.”
- When you reach the sixth floor, remain in the elevator and press the button for the second floor.
- When you reach the second floor, remain in the elevator and press the button for the tenth floor.
When Lucas is a little older, and his room is full of complicated diagrams and toy robots he’s made, taken apart, and made better again, and his head is full of even more complicated diagrams and ideas for even more robots, his mother takes him with her for their biggest project yet. It’s nothing like when they went to Goldcliff, although that was pretty, or Neverwinter or Phandolin or any of the other places they’ve visited to install elevators and other things. This time, Lucretia comes too, and they go to the moon.
Lucas knows that it cannot be the moon. Of course not. But they go to the moon.
The two facts fight in his head the whole time they float up in a sphere, worrying him so much he can’t even examine the mechanics and ask all the questions he’d normally have. The sphere he can figure out later.
It exists that they are traveling to one of the moons, and the ground is getting very very far away. They’re higher than the lab, a dozen times over, and there’s still a ways to go; Lucas knows that it cannot be the moon. You cannot travel to the moon in this way, and Lucretia cannot be taking them there, because Lucretia cannot control the moon, but they’re very clearly getting higher and higher. He looks to his mother, who just smiles and says, “Luc, did you notice the decent gear?”
He didn’t, actually, so he looks at that until they get there. Lucretia tries to engage, the way that she does, awkward aborted sentences and silences that he just ignores. While he does that, she and his mother have a conversation over his head. It’s over his head only in that he’s still fairly short. He’s always listening, and his mother knows this.
“It’s ambitious, I’ll give you that,” his mother says to this woman they know nothing about. “You’ll have to let us take over from here. I have no idea what you’ve managed to do so far, but we’ll take care of it.”
“Absolutely,” Lucretia says. “I have complete faith in you. There’s just something we have to do first, so that we’re on. The same page, about this.”
They dock in some half finished ghost bay, Lucretia tying the sphere in with a length of rope, and she leads them past other skeletal buildings, roughly laid walkways, and takes them on a tour of the moon. It’s not made of rock, and the fact that he’s breathing normally is a pretty dead giveaway that Lucretia was underselling what she’s already built.
All of the new information and stimulation is just starting to be too much when Lucretia opens a door and shows them jellyfish, swimming in a dark tank, a million colors swimming in the darkness of its body, and Lucretia hands him a glass full of that inky dark. He looks to his mother for something- his head is swimming too, that’s funny,- but she looks back and downs her dose in one go.
He follows suit, throws up most of it, and has to sit down for half an hour. In this way, Lucas and Maureen Miller become the newest open minds in the world, and the only ones who do not end up with bracers on their arms.
As people arrive, people who always have bracers, Lucas ignores them and dives further into the little work that remains. He likes being an important scientist, for the first time in his life, and he likes knowing all of the secrets about this fake space rock.
Then, Lucas and his mother finish their work, and go home. The descent gear on the sphere, explained to him by a wildly gesturing man who definitely does not know more about mechanics than him, is as impressive as he thought, but he can still think of a few tweaks. When they get home he considers calling Lucretia about it, but just shoves the sketches into a pile of rejected ideas instead.
- When you reach the tenth floor, remain in the elevator and press the button for the fifth floor.
- When you reach the fifth floor, a young woman may enter the elevator. Do not look at her; do not speak to her. She is not what she seems.
His mother actually cooks dinner one night, not the easy things they normally make to eat one handed while doing something else, but an actual dinner he has to hunt down napkins for.
“There’s a new project for us,” she tells him. “We’re having a guest to discuss it.”
He knows this already. The letter was addressed to Maureen and Lucas Miller, because he’s already made a name for himself, or, he’s making good use of the name that he has, and they looked at it together. It was as vague as it was flattering, almost every detail that they would require being absolutely not present. He also knows that his mother has had follow up conversations with the writer that he was not privy to, so this will be interesting. They’ve had guests before, but never anyone they were working to impress; there have been people they’ve shown off for, and occasionally they need extra hands, but this is a first. As he finishes folding the napkins, his mother sends him off to put on a better shirt.
“One that’s not covered in grease stains,” she suggests.
“I think evidence of my work would send a better message than cleaning up would,” he tries to argue, and she just pushes him out of the kitchen.
When he returns, cuffs uncomfortably stiff and starched, his mother is already speaking to someone. He stands, equally uncomfortably, in the doorway for a moment, before remembering that this is his home.
“Hi,” he says. “Lucretia?”
As they eat they discuss the details of this job, and Lucas does not trust her. There is something she isn’t telling them, something she is carefully hiding from them. What she does tell them, hesitantly, is fascinating. He would be taking notes, if he could. As the leftovers on the stove go cold, they make plans with what little information they have now. Lucretia shakes both their hands goodbye, and she tells him she's pleased to be working with a fine young man like him. To his mother, she just says thank you.
- Press the button for the first floor.
9a. If the elevator begins ascending to the tenth floor instead of descending to the first, you may proceed.
As a cornerstone of their own brand of science, Lucas and his mother have always believed in each other. Maybe it makes them a little more reckless, and a little too emotionally invested, but it is a fact as much as gravity and conservation of mass and light refraction. Lucas and his mother are brilliant, and there is something very special in knowing this about your mother. About your son.
There is a difference between believing in your mother, believing in her science, believing in her mind and everything that she does, and understanding. But another cornerstone of belief is trust. A cornerstone of understanding is belief and learning and knowledge, so he believes in her, and he believes her when she tells him that everything is fine.
“Everything is fine,” she says. “I’m just working a few things out right now,” and he believes her, even though he wants to ask, “So why don’t you let me help?”
Because he is afraid of what she might be doing. And because he is afraid of what he might do. But he is not afraid of her.
9b. If the elevator descends to the first floor, exit as soon as the doors open. Do not speak.
Maureen Miller dies.
Lucas’s mother dies.
- If you reach the tenth floor, you may either choose to get off the elevator or to stay on it. If you choose to get off, and if the woman entered the elevator on the fifth floor, she will ask you, “Where are you going?” Do NOT answer her. Do NOT look at her.
Between the memories he's had for years now, and what Lucretia told him and his mother over the number of conversations they'd had, Lucas is aware of what the Philosopher's Stone is. He knows what it can do, he knows how to use it, and because of this, he knows what he has to do. If nothing else, Lucas is good at rationalization, and by the end of the two days he spends trying to ignore the thrall he knows that this is right. Just holding the stone settles him further into his decision, the weight of it in his palm somehow enough to ground him.
He's going to do something brilliant, and he's going to bring his mother back. Everything he knows about the stone suggests that this alone will be enough. After that, he can stop using it, or even hand it over to Lucretia, although he hates the idea of these amazing possibilities being destroyed along with it. But he just has to make it until his mother is back, and everything is back the way it should be. The Cosmoscope looms over him, and he is caught between love and hate for it, and he's still young and he wants his mother back and he just has to be strong enough to make it until then. He can do this. He's strong enough to do this. So the call to Lucretia is the worst part of it, worse than watching his home turn slowly into crystals, all because he couldn't do this right. It's the worst part, right up until the next worse part, and the next one, and the next one.
The worst part is that he took the stone, and he did something with it that he can never undo, and never do right.
- You will know whether you have arrived at the Otherworld by one indication, and one indication only: The only person present in it is you.
They leave him behind in a prison of his own making, and he knows it. It is no less than he deserves. Lucretia is going to think he’s dead, and he feels a pang of self pity, or sorrow, and he can’t tell which. He does not want people to forget about him.
He looks around at all that’s his, surveys it as the king does his castle, and wonders how long he is going to last this time.
The Return Trip:
If you choose to stay on the elevator-
If you choose to exit the elevator at the tenth floor-
- You must use the same elevator to return as the one in which you arrived.
All in one moment, his world shatters, at the same time as his mother’s mind does. He will attempt to categorize it and make sense of it, lend labels and reasons to that moment where there is all of a sudden, there’s a noise, and she is not there anymore. She’s at the other end of the room, inspecting the components of the Cosmoscope, goggles on her forehead pushing her hair up, and Lucas is pouring over her notes and offering input.
She says, “Take one,”
and in that one moment,
that one act, it’s over.
This is a lie. It takes a lot longer than one singular moment for his mother’s body to be torn apart by the thing she created, and he watches her and screams as her mind breaks into so many pieces he couldn’t dream of putting her back together. But to quantify it, he will think of it as one moment. There is a before, and after, in that case. As science works, there are causes and effects, there are A - B relations, there are clean rules and words to deal with what he has in front of him. Terrifyingly, as he stands in the aftermath, he thinks, I could fix it and try again. He’s torn in two by the urge to But he can’t fix it.
So he fixes other things, and builds even more things from the ground up. He lets himself go, a little; his hair grows out so much that it catches fire occasionally, when he leans too close to what he’s messing with; more than once, he stumbles headfirst into the wall out of exhaustion. His failures start to pile on, and pile on, and then-
it starts to work. The hugbears make sure he eats. The first good thing he’s ever done, in a way, is make that shell that hosts a girl’s soul, and even as he does it he knows what he’s doing. Lucas knows that he is never going to care about Noelle’s life as much as he cares about being smart enough to give her that life back. About getting this right.
He has to get this right. Lucas is not used to not being right, he has to be right, and this is the only thing he can do right now. Lucas has to be right, and so he does that with a stone in his hand, and his gaze focused through shimmering, colorful crystal, and it starts to work. It’s going to work.
- When you enter the elevator, press the buttons in the same order you did in steps 2 through 8 of venturing out. You should finish at the fifth floor.
“Just because you’re smart enough to know you’re the bad guy doesn’t mean it’s okay,” Magnus says, inches away from his face. The heat fogs up his glasses. “You fucked up.”
Magnus is holding him by the neck and yelling, and there are ghosts everywhere, and he’s done everything wrong, and he’s sorry. He’s sorry he’s let everyone down. But he’s not sorry he tried.
Someone is missing an arm. Someone is dead because of him. There are now many, many children he’s taken a parent from, because of his mistakes. The bottom line is that Lucas is the smartest person he knows, but everything has still fallen to shit. He loves his mother, and she loves him, but this is the end.
He keeps fucking things up.
- When you reach the fifth floor, press the button for the first floor. The elevator will again begin to ascend to the tenth floor. Press any other floor’s button to cancel the ascension. You MUST press the button BEFORE you reach the tenth floor.
He’s standing in front of what might be his mother, and it worked for N03113, and he’s on the precipice and he’s happy and happy and happy, and it worked- and she hurts him.
- After you reach the first floor, check your surroundings carefully. If anything seems off, even the smallest detail, do NOT exit the elevator. If you detect something wrong, repeat step 2 until your surrounding look as they should. Once you are confident you have returned to your own world, you may safely exit the elevator.
He honestly thought that eventually, when someone said he'd died in his lab, that they'd be correct. Forever was a very long time, and even he couldn't stop that; his punishment could stretch on until the end of the world, and he'd still be there. And he thought this until that very familiar feeling, the one from years ago, pours memories into his head, and he understands what's happening outside. His first thought, seeing Lucretia's life play in his mind, is that she's been holding back. Then he throws up, and then he goes to find a mint and gather his things for the real end of the world. With this new information, he imagines that Lucretia will be too mad at him. The Reclaimers might have some thoughts about the new projects he's been working on, but this is just as much his fight as theirs, now.
Or not, because 100 years means they're more entitled to it, but he's mildly pissed at Taako now that he knows everything about the stone, and this is his planet, and it's time for him to do something right for once. He only learns them now, but Lucas Miller knows a few things: His mother's prophecy makes sense now, she's out there fighting the Hunger coming from the sky, and she deserves more than a coward for a son. He's going to make her proud.