This choice: Concentrate on developing your skills • Go Back...Chapter #70Four for the Price of Two by: Seuzz   "I still can't believe how keen she was," Joe says.
You're too focused on the videogame to reply. But Joe is better, and a moment later your game avatar is blinking red and fading. "I told you she was going to like helping us," you snicker. "'Cos I told her she was going to like helping us."
Chelsea is gone by now, after spending two hours enthusiastically spilling everything she knows about Westside High School--and everything she'd like to do to her fellow students.
Joe seems particularly struck by the latter. "It was more than that," he says. "All that planning and plotting. She loves it." He pauses as your game avatar pulses back to life. "You'll love it too once you're inside her, operating her."
You smile, for you're deliberately holding back from that, savoring the anticipation. The sweet, juicy anticipation of getting inside Chelsea Cooper's body, and feeling it up and down with her own hands and probing it with her own fingers. She herself must have a lot of experience doing that. How could she not take advantage of the opportunities everyone else would like to have? "I'll make a mask of her for you," you say.
Joe's game avatar freezes at your words, and in that moment your own avatar blows a hole in the other's head.
"Are you serious?" he says. "Because that'd be way cool. Not as cool as navigating the real girl, but --"
"She's not the real girl anymore," you say. "She's just a golem. And you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between being inside the golem and being inside a mask."
"Maybe not. But knowing where you were--" He trails off. "Say, why didn't you?"
"Why didn't I what?" You keep your eyes on the screen, for his avatar has returned and is in motion.
"Sorry, just following a-- I was thinking it would be cool to operate Chelsea and have some ousiarchs to play with while inside her. So why'd you just turn her into a golem instead of making her a partner?"
It's a good question, and you hesitate before answering. "I wanted them for myself."
Abruptly, Joe pauses the game. "You mean take yourself apart and swap out your essentia?"
"Well, yeah," you say, even though you hadn't actually articulated just that thought until now. "Or, I dunno. Maybe just add Glundandra and Eldibria to my own, give me four for the price of two."
"Good thing you mentioned it to me first. It can't be done."
"Whaddaya mean? Who's to say?"
"The planets. You can only have two."
"We're already committing crimes against nature." You chortle, but it sounds uneasy even in your own ears, and Joe doesn't smile.
"It's been tried before," he says. "Not too long ago, in fact. One of the Stellae went retrograde, tried using a doohickey to give himself some more planets. It turned out bad for him."
"What happened?" A feeling like a thin sheet of ice spreads beneath your skin.
"Kali wrote the story up--that's one of her hobbies, you know--and she gave me a copy. I'll pass it along."
He returns to the game. But your concentration is fatally shot, and he easily beats you six times in a row.
* * * * *
You have to pester Joe before he'll remember, but the next day he gives you a bulky packet of papers: a thinly fictionally account of the retrograde Stellae. Your attention, naturally, is caught by the account of the Calice de Tenebres, the occult object at the heart of the adventure. For a little while your palms itch with the desire to lay hold of it and study it. But then you reflect that you've learned how to do the trick yourself, and without the need of anything but sigils. That leaves you feeling rather smug.
Then you feel even more smug when you see how to get what Joe said was impossible.
Your eyes are bloodshot but shining when Joe and Frank find you the next morning at Jonathan's breakfast table. You'd stayed up all night working. "Where'd you get the canary?" Joe asks warily. "The one that you seem to have swallowed," he adds.
"From you." You wave some of your scratch paper at him. "You gave me the idea, and the answer was in that story."
"I knew I shouldn't have spent yesterday playing Jonathan," Frank says. "What are you guys talking about?"
"You're better for the quality time you spent with Monique," Joe says. He keeps his eyes locked on your face. "Have you been working on that cock-eyed idea--?"
"Got it licked, too."
"I don't like the sounds of this," Frank says.
"You don't have to." To Joe: "In the story, where it says 'The shadows are now a net.' This Lucio guy got them all tangled up with each other, and that's why he failed."
"That's what I told you," Joe says. "Get me some OJ while you're up, Frank."
"So all I have to do is keep them separate. I'll take some OJ too, Frank."
"I might as well play butler to you two," he grouses. "I've got nothing to contribute."
"The week is young," you laugh. "We'll see how little you have to contribute."
He freezes and turns. "What does that mean?"
You ignore him. "We already got the concept for the solution," you tell Joe, "in that spell that lets you put different imago into a mask. It keeps them in separate layers, remember? Just do the same thing with essentia. Then you can flip between layers."
Joe tugs at his lower lip. "But can you make it work in execution?" He closes one eye skeptically as you flourish your worksheets at him. "Could you do the same thing with anima? Put different anima in yourself and switch between them?" He nods at Frank as the latter sets some orange juice onto the table and sits heavily with a cereal bowl.
"I'm not switching my psychology around," you retort. "Look what happened to you and Frank when I switched your psychologies around with anima."
Joe's grin is sharp. "You mean that anima is essential to who you are, that's why you don't want to fiddle with it?" You nod, and his grin widens. "What makes you think it's any safer fiddling with essentia? Why do you think they call it essentia, which is the root form for the word--?"
You wave your hand dismissively. "Yeah, alright, so in a sense I'd be changing who I am. So I'd no longer be 'Will Prescott, Sulva and Kenandandra.' I'd be, uh--"
"Shmill Shmescott, Glundandra and Eldibria," Joe finishes for you.
"But my anima would be unchanged. My imago, too. So as far as what I felt like, I'd be the same."
"You don't know that."
Frank drops his spoon with a clatter. "Are you talking about--? Shit! Are you talking about giving yourself two essentias? Four ousiarchs?"
"Yeah!"
Frank stares at you; Joe laughs softly to himself. You grin at both of them. Frank looks over at Joe for a long minute, then returns to you. "And where were you gonna get the donors?"
"We already have donors. Glundandra and Eldibria. Perelandra and Catilindria. An extra Sulva, an extra Mala--"
"Just as long as you're not casting covetous eyes at me and Joe," Frank says.
"Dude!"
"Well, he wouldn't do that to you, Frank," Joe says. "He's already got an extra connection to Malacandra, thanks to Rick. And who'd want your connection to Lurga? Me, on the other hand--"
"Joe!" Your tone is wounded, and sincerely so.
He just grunts, and takes your worksheets from you to study. Frank gets to spend another day as Jonathan Straussler.
* * * * *
Notwithstanding all your brag about the ease of the concept, the execution proves tricky. The two essentia cannot "touch," and yet each must be accessible to you. So you craft a "skein of control" that will tie separately into each, and yet will be rooted in your own anima. If it works--
"Did it work?" you mumble as you sit up in the ballroom. Late afternoon light streams into the ballroom.
"Beats me," says Joe, who looks as exhausted as you feel. "I passed out as soon as you relinquished control of me. We shoulda waited for Frank to get back. He's got more stamina." He blinks stupidly at the massive sigil you are laying inside. "The bottles are empty, so I assume--"
You close your eyes and concentrate. Sulva and Kenandandra swim into view. So far so good, though it's not an advance on where you started.
You look deeper inside your self. There should be a switch. Or something that feels like it.
Things like spider webs brush past your consciousness.
And then you find it. A web that floats into and settles over your face. You smile into it, and it unlocks.
Something inside you lurches, and your stomach plunges. You open your eyes with a hard gasp. "What's wrong?" Joe asks, and crawls over with an anxious look on his face.
But you're already laughing. He frowns, then gasps in his turn as you open your palm to him. The sigils for Glundandra and Eldibria float there.
* * * * *
Despite what you'd told Joe and Frank earlier, you now find yourself entertaining more grandiose thoughts. You've got four ousiarchs now; you can have six; why not get yourself ten? Take their essentia from them, for yourself? Sure, you can borrow it now by borrowing their bodies, but this way you could have it without having to negotiate with them.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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