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I’ve got a whole little collection of snippets and short stories from the world of Urban Dragon. One of the things that I’ve always wanted to explore but never got a chance to were the Doors to Nowhere in the Forest of the Damned– those prototypes that don’t lead to anywhere in Arkay’s world. Some of them, as it turns out, don’t cross space so much as they cross time.

That’s where this story comes in.

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Meeting your past self, Arkay decides, is weird.

Like, really weird.

Zero out of ten, would not recommend– like those fucking awful mixed drinks that some people recommend on a dare, the ones that are endured and survived and then passed along like a sixty-proof curse. 

In fact, she might just prefer the Red-Bull-and-Sour-String right now, because that hangover was starting to sound like a cakewalk compared to the headache she’s getting just looking at ThreeClaw.

For one thing: the whole age thing. Because technically speaking, ThreeClaw is a whole lot younger than her right now– maybe fifteen, twenty years, it’s hard to pin down exactly when this is happening and she’s already promised to leave years out of it– but she looks older. Not older as in the eighty-or-whatever years that she actually is, of course. There’s something weirdly ageless and statuesque about her, no wrinkles, no loss of elasticity, no slow shift in muscle or fat distribution, no scars apart from the missing arm, but there’s a rigidity to her posture that flat out declares she’s never seen the broad side of a stripper pole, a hardness to her eyes, a stiffness to her face like it might break in half if it ever cracked a smile. 

But under those flinty eyes are her cheekbones, and between them is her nose, and that’s her jawline alright. And okay, the scalp is weird– leave it to the buzzkill to wear a buzzcut– but Arkay gets a good look at it, because the two of them are the exact same height. 

ThreeClaw is fixing her with the same cold appraisal, and she doesn’t seem to like what she sees any more than Arkay does. Which is fine, Arkay’s fielded enough judgy looks that it doesn’t bother her– it’s just that most of them don’t come from the other side of a funhouse mirror. 

It’s weird, is what she’s saying.

“You aren’t a doppelganger,” ThreeClaw says at last. Her voice is low and level, and there’s the faintest hint of an accent woven into it– Northwest, maybe?– but otherwise it reveals nothing. 

“If I was, I’d be the best fucking doppelganger you’ve ever met.” 

“Or the worst.”

“They never get the smell right.”

“You smell nothing like me.” 

“That’s because I actually use shampoo. And bodywash. The nice stuff, not– what even is that, gas station soap? You’re rich as a gilded age porn star, and that’s what you’re using? Seriously?” She takes a breath to calm down and get back on track. Meanwhile ThreeClaw’s expression hasn’t changed in the slightest. Nothing about her has changed. She hasn’t moved a muscle, except to breathe: again, statuesque. “Besides, you know as well as I do that that shit is superficial at best.”

“I’m sure you’re the expert in that field.”

Arkay chooses to let that go. “The important stuff, though? The baseline stuff? You can’t copy that just by raiding the bathrooms of the nearest Love’s. You smell like dragon. We both do. The right kind of dragon. And that’s not something you can fake.” She rolls her eyes. “Also there are a few key details that I’m pretty sure most doppelgangers would be paying more attention to.” She waves her conspicuously present right hand.

That hand is what sells it, really, because it tells the story all by itself: that someday ThreeClaw gets so fucked up and takes so much Styx that she regrows the missing limb from scratch, which suggests that there’s not much of her original brain left inside her skull. Ipso facto: an identical dragon with an identical face who doesn’t look like she got an assault rifle shoved up her ass. And then apparently got her left arm blown off sometime later, but these things happen.

“Look,” Arkay says. “I’m sure it comes as a great disappointment to you that this right here–” she gestures between the two of them, “is actually not some weird sex thing. Which, your loss, but that’s beside the point.”

“So you do have a point, then.” ThreeClaw raises one eyebrow so masterfully that she must have practiced that look in front a mirror for hours. 

“Yes.” Arkay says. “My point is– Styx. You have it. I need it.”

ThreeClaw’s eyes move deliberately to the scars exposed by Arkay’s neckline. They look older than they should be, but if she was regularly dosing, they’d be as flawless as ThreeClaw’s skin. 

“You had it,” ThreeClaw muses. “Whatever happened to your supply?”

By which she means: what happened to her supplier. But Quinn is long gone, and with him any chance of making more. 

“It’s gone. Or so close to gone that it’s not going to last us to the next emergency, and we need more. Which is why I’m coming to you, on this the day of your daughter’s wedding–”

Clearly ThreeClaw has no patience for movie quotes. “You want to know how to make it.”

“Fuck no,” Arkay says. “Are you kidding? Have you looked in the mirror lately? Have you seen what that shit’s done to your soldiers? People aren’t meant to squeegee their insides off the floor and then turn around and go back to the front lines the next day. And an endless supply is going to just open that back up.”

ThreeClaw tilts her head, which is about as good as a paragraph coming from her. “So you want a limited supply.”

“Yes. What you can spare.”

“My stockpile.”

“It’s not like you can’t make more.” 

“We need it. There’s a war on.”

“So I’ve heard.” 

Another head tilt. “But there isn’t. Not for you.”

Okay, so that probably violated some rules of time travel or whatever. Assuming this even is time travel and not some weird parallel dimension shit, which is a whole other pile of headaches that Arkay does not need right now. At least she didn’t say anything outright: just implied that the mental wellbeing of her soldiers is a priority rather than the whole not-going-extinct thing, which in turn implied some kind of big things about the way the world works in the future.

“You know I can’t tell you about that,” Arkay says.

“Can’t you?”

“No. Because wibbly wobbly– never mind, I don’t even know if that’s come out yet. But you know how this works. I can’t just give you the cheat codes to fix the future. It doesn’t work like that.”

“But you expect me to give you the cheat codes to life itself, entirely gratis.” 

“I mean, technically you’d be giving it to yourself. Because, you know.” She waves her hand between the two of them. “And we’re helping your people here. That’s got to mean something, right?”

“It really doesn’t.” ThreeClaw levels her stare. “You want this. Then give me something in exchange. Something worth having.”

Arkay just stares. What’s she supposed to say? Without a relevant year, it’s not like she can give any kind of investing advice. Pass along the names of some politicians to keep an eye on, maybe? Tell her about this Order kid named Adam– make sure he stays alive, but apparently your people kill his parents anyway so they’re free game? Tell her what year she stops being ThreeClaw so she can quit sneaking off looking for creative ways to die? 

And she raises her eyes to meet ThreeClaw’s unyielding stare.

“Nadia still misses you.”

If she wasn’t already looking for it, she never would have noticed the way ThreeClaw goes absolutely still. For several long seconds she doesn’t even breathe. The only hint that thoughts are racing behind those eyes is how absolutely they’re shuttered, perfectly trained to be perfectly blank.

You don’t work that hard to hide something unless it matters.

Which means it’s a choice when ThreeClaw slowly shuts her eyes. It’s a concession– I know that you know that I know that you know– but she’s still too heavily guarded to put it into words. 

Not that, at least.

“On the southernmost wall of my living room, I am going to install a false wall. Behind the wall will be a door. On the other side of that door will be a stockpile. That door will be the only entrance or exit. No one else will know it exists. No one will be able to add to or draw from it once the wall is installed.” 

Arkay frowns. Really, she’d been expecting to get handed a bunch of crates or something– but then, that would risk somebody seeing and asking awkward questions about the world’s worst ThreeClaw cosplayer, which might invite other questions that might lead to some uncomfortable paradoxy shit. So she asks, “Do those things expire?” 

“I suppose you’re going to have to find out.” The transaction finished, ThreeClaw turns and begins to walk away. She only falters briefly, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hitch in her step, but Arkay is still watching.

“Yeah,” she says to the unspoken question. “I’ll make sure she’s okay.”

ThreeClaw’s jaw jerks in a hint of a nod and she keeps walking, never breaking her stride.

Arkay watches her go. It isn’t until ThreeClaw is completely gone that she lets out the thought she’d been holding in.

“Was nobody going to tell me my ass was flat?”