Crawling Chaos 47

Two days later in the recreational room of the facility Orison and Rio were being kept at, the two were having their first meeting after being separated when they arrived.

"Nice cast. I think its kind of funny they wouldn't let you keep your wooden ring after you got here," Rio said as he looked at the fat plaster boot the young mage was wearing.

Orison sighed. "The most secure fact I've discovered about this place is that the more you insist you want something, the more adamant they become on denying that thing to you. I had to practically pretend that I hated the idea of coming here before they finally decided to 'make' me. Contrary d*cks... More importantly, do you have the same problem I'm having in retaining information?"

The teenager said, "It's the weirdest thing. I can read whatever I want like it's no problem but seconds later, I can't remember a word I read and as far as I can tell, we're not the only ones. There's a couple of other people like that too.

"We all got one thing in common. Everyone that's like that, drowned on the lake but was revived. Cool thing is, there's another person who seems to have amnesia too. That means they haven't been giving me a lot of problems about it. They just think I was under a little too long and have some minor brain damage or something... Did you know it considered bad to try to make someone remember things when they've suffered brain damage?"

Orison said, "Let's bring the derailed topic back on track... According to my 'actually' kind of crazy roommate, the reason why so many people played lemur is because of a rare event that last happened over 200 years ago and once before, nearly 600 years ago. Story goes that before it was made illegal, there was a test of courage young men and a couple of women over the centuries would take. When the sun sets on summer solstice, a beam of sunlight will illuminate the diving rock on the cliff side. When that happens, diving successfully is supposed to bring you a lifetime of good fortune.

"Now, over the years, the sun doesn't line up quite as neatly but due to an earthquake, the diving rock shifted over a touch and now it gets lit up perfect again... That's just the setup of this story though. The really crazy part is that in the two legends from so many years ago, another thing happened. The full moon sat between a pair of opposing peaks on the other side, throwing a beam of light over the same diving rock.

"The story from way back wasn't as clear about things and sounds more like a children's story but the one from a couple hundred years ago was quite a bit more clear. That year, there was a squabble between a couple of people up there and several fell at once. All of them drowned but three of them were saved.

"Maybe because it was spread out over a few weeks instead of a few days, the symptoms came on slower but one of the survivors complained that they couldn't remember what they read. Later another confirmed the same problem but it didn't stop there... A few days later they began spacing out, talking about another place, another life.

"One spoke of a place where the air was heavy and dark things stalked in the shadows... sound familiar?... Another spoke of a place where the sun was a little brighter and the children of gods and monsters who had mixed their blood with mortals lived beside their human kin in a 'most common' fashion. The third hung himself with a note begging to be forgiven by god and spared the visions of the place he'd seen... Frankly, that could have been the world we came from too, depending on where he saw but that would be pure speculation. I-"

Rio threw up his hands and said, "Whoa, Whoa. You mean, we'll start hallucinating? They'll never let us out of here!"

Orison said, "Let me finish... Eventually they were semi catatonic, occasionally muttering about a whole other life they were living. Following that, they went full 'nobody's home'. Right as it looked like they were about to die, synchronized at that, the moon sets. The moonlight hits the diving rock and they just disappear in motes of moonlight."

Using snark to hide his fear, Rio said, "So we're going to hallucinate, turn into vegetables and get vaporized?"

Orison looked at Rio with dull eyes and said, "You're talking to a person who's technically in a rock that possessed a dead person... Think a little more positive and creative... Okay, since your brain just went on strike. We are going to phase into another reality or at least another world.

"I know that's outlandish but we're in the low dimensions. I feel thankful to be able to tell which part of something is its head and which part is its a**. There are times such a basic privilege HAS been denied to me... Lucky kid. It looks like you're going to accidentally become a climber."

Half disbelieving and half hopeful, Rio said, "From the stuff I read and Mr. Rothschild told us, you have to be gifted before you have the chance to become a climber."

Orison shook his head. "That's not true but even if it was, you're gifted."

Seeing the teen's dubious look, he added, "You couldn't have spoke with me when I was a rock unless you were spiritually sensitive and I'm pretty sure that makes you gifted. Santos, a person I assume you don't know, was gifted and still couldn't hear me... There's another thing. There's a good chance your mom wasn't lying to you. I'm fairly certain that your biological father is from the Abe clan... There was an Abe clan in New Yorkshire, right?"

Stunned but still following, Rio nodded.

Orison said, "If they're what I think they are, it's an ancient clan of onmyoji... exorcists and ward specialists mainly but also capable of some pretty kick a** familiar assisted sorcery."

Rio said, "But they tested me. Dad even sat through months of ward making with me and nothing happened."

Orison nodded. "Neil's a decent detective and probably found out who your biological father was but he's a terrible teacher... I'm assuming you were probably fairly young when they did all that and didn't give you a lot of training before hand. They probably didn't even account for how important a honed will is to utilizing talent if it exists..."

Rio neither agreed nor disagreed but silently listened as Orison continued, "This isn't a dig at you personally but it's a nearly universal truth that kids have horrible concentration at the best of times, much less when they have to do something boring and repetitive with nothing to show for their effort. As time went by, you were probably discouraged. They were discouraged and even if you would have become capable of doing something, you would have convinced each other that you couldn't."

The young mage took his glass of water and spilled a little on the table before setting the cup on it. After moving the cup around a little, he raised it. Into the ring of water, he moved a little magic and the lightest touch of spirit essence.

Finished with preparation, he muttered, "Water pool, raise and cool... Alright. It's charged and prepared. All you need to do is lean over and let out a slow breath over it while imagining the little molecules of water evaporating from the ring and taking the heat with it... Give it a shot."

Rio tried and nothing happened but before the teen could get crestfallen about it, Orison walked him through the imagery in detail and set it up a second time. It went without a hitch and where a ring of water had been, a small circle of frost spread out that quickly evaporated away leaving the table notably cooler in that spot.

"Yup, you got the talent. You just need to log the practice. If you did it for months with Neil, I'm sure you remember how it's done." Orison assured with a smile.

Just to be sure nothing Neil taught had degraded into uselessness with time, the young mage rehashed the basics while reminding Rio to stay calm before an orderly broke them up. He also warned to stick with visuals and meditation for the time being. If Rio was caught drawing sacred geometry all over the place, Orison imagined that things could get a little complicated.

Right before time was up, Orison dipped his finger in the water glass, swiped a wet circle and whispered, "Whap Rack."

In a split second, he reproduced a stronger version of what he demonstrated earlier, producing a chilly table top. It was to show what practice was for but it was also to demonstrate the principle of condensing visualization and focus into something practical and not as easy to predict. Once he explained how 'whap rack' was a phonetic shortening of the embarrassing little rhyme he said earlier, he let Rio's imagination fill in the rest. What he wouldn't share was how the sloppy display was ten times more expensive and a third the power of a standard casting of 'degree shift'.

Only one more day of recreation time discussion was the end of their time as teacher and student because the hallucinations started for Rio. The young mage didn't have the hallucinations but he did feel his ability to control his borrowed body weaken. While the teen saw visions of a bright world, Orison only felt that his conduit's connection with this body was diminishing. While Rio had lucid periods, he would only have points where he had the strength to move around normally.

During a period that felt like it was getting close to the last time Orison would have the ability to move around, he tried to have a last minute discussion with Rio but the boy wasn't in the recreational room. By the time the teen made an appearance after a long 'bathroom break', both he and Orison had to be taken back to their rooms. They had fallen and couldn't get up. After that, it was all down hill. His senses faded drastically by the hour and he felt reeled back in.

The last coherent memory he had from the borrowed body was being moved to a hospital after a doctor gave a grim observation. "I don't believe in fairy tales, director. What I do believe is that when nine people who all drowned in the same lake show similar aggressively progressing neurological conditions, a rational person starts looking for potential pathogens or toxins IN that lake! We should feel fortunate that whatever it is, isn't contagious."

There was lethargy mixed with the feeling of being stretched and connected to something. There was a sense of a piece of him being sent through that connection but there wasn't much else thought or felt for a small time.

Before light and sensation returned to Orison, there was a moment where he heard an older and more tired sounding Zeke say, "How did this run go? Excellent. This is the one we keep. Juice me up one last time and we'll close the loop. Here, I'll take those items stuck to you so you can take the letters... Thanks for showing me how to keep being me...

"And if you can hear me in there, short stack, Gan's conduit is to me what your conduit is to Keita or whoever she is now. We'll always be a little connected but they're not us. If we're both lucky, I'll meet you in the mid dimensions some time."

As the connection to something else grew stronger, he felt an odd sensation of moving backwards but not at the same time. All the while, his conduit was pulling in some strange and unknown essence. It took him a moment to place it but he realized it was the astral realm stuff that he had interacted with before. The part of himself that was the miasma he'd originally used to start his insane journey, recognized the astral stuff as 'home'.

Flashes of an intelligent but alien being getting a part of itself sliced off, crying out in shock and the newfound sensation of existential pain it had fled to the beyond to escape flickered through Orison's consciousness. He understood that the 'astral realm' that he had seen twice before was nothing more than the remains of that entity's egg/larval sack/cocoon. All of the portals within it were the places that it had personally made contact with and the weird saw tooth tornado ball was a 'pet' it had found wandering close to it's 'home' in the maelstrom.

Whatever his conduit had done, the result was an unraveling of that 'astral space'. The tornado ball was free to roam the near infinite for the no time it would take to rejoin the maelstrom and cease to be. Once too much had unraveled and staying became too dangerous, the keystone let the connection finish pulling them elsewhere as something within his conduit cracked and broke.

Whatever that broken part was, it hadn't belonged to the keystone to begin with but it had allowed for things that shouldn't have been possible. Whatever that thing was, it just fell away like the rocket on a spaceship once it was used up. Left with no other choice, Orison chalked it up to the infinite possibilities of lower dimensional nonsense and left it at that. He didn't have time to give it more thought anyway as images and memories of another began to invade his consciousness.

It was a light assault. The memories were from a hollow and contrived existence designed to worm its way into the reality he was going. It was a reflection of the life of the suicide guy from the freaky lake. Orison's merge with the hollow existence started when it was young, fished from a destroyed building with no one knowing where 'the boy' had come from.

His slow becoming of 'the boy' had fulfilled whatever mysterious prerequisites Orison's third step baptism required as well. Baptism, boundary crossing and becoming were all happening in a stretched fast-forward of the 'the boy's life. Such a thing was overwhelming and only his connection that kept reeling him in, held the young mage together. Clinging to that lifeline, Orison's core self tore across the boundary divide like a slow motion dirty comet, leaving deep streaks of impurities and structure poison in its wake.

They weren't the only things shed. The relevant and meaningful surviving parts of Al and Orison's life before and after joining became bright, polished gems within his spiritual consciousness as repetitive or meaningless periods faded to obscurity. False memories from trainers and the memories of others slowly crumbled and fell away, leaving only useful kernels of knowledge and wisdom. Even the useless weight of years spent trapped or as a spiritual hitchhiker became little more than abridged footnotes.

Caught up in all that was happening, Orison suddenly felt like he was losing things that weren't relevant in the broad scheme but were important to him on a personal level. The pure and euphoric feeling of 'returning to innocence' became a battle to remain himself. Deep grudges and emotional pain that was being washed away became precious dark treasures he desperately clung to after having found that many were gone or severely faded. Such things may not be pleasant but they helped to shape the toughness and resilience he possessed.

On a deeper level, he knew that with time he could let them go but the pain and personal tragedies of the hollow life he was about to claim were far too superficial to replace the hard lessons won. Substantial wisdom didn't require it, intellect only suffered from the burden of too much emotion but Orison wanted the hardened and sharper edge that a touch of wretchedness gave. He didn't desire to be a demon but neither was angelic virtue something he sought.

Clutching onto the rest of what his spiritual 'rebirth' was attempting to 'clean' him of, the young mage tuned in to the life of the person he was to become and how that would affect him. The story was bland but that wasn't a bad thing. A relatively nondescript personality would make transformation into a whole new person seem like a natural turn of events.

The kid in question, was rescued from a collapsed building during a fight between a 'superhero' and a trumped up 'villain', lost in the stack of much more prevalent events taking place around the same time. With no family, he became a ward of the state but he had lived in a couple of nice foster homes over the years. Due to a slight lisp, when the child gave the only thing he could remember, his name, to rescuers, they had misinterpreted it as Austin Ketchup. It was the most upsetting thing about his new life and proof that his rescue workers had been too tired to really care much about accuracy or the future feelings of a survivor when more probably needed saving.

The way the kid stayed just a hair below average in every way should have been suspicious to someone but the very nature of the kid made him easy to overlook. It wasn't til Austin's early teens that things took a turn for the worse. He stood out in bad ways and became a bully magnate when he started having nightmares about a thing he called Gnarly or the 'blue eyed boogeyman'. Orison shuddered on that reveal and hoped that it wasn't some kind of omen and just a bleed over from the situation he barely escaped.

The situation stabilized into a running commentary on the failures of support systems for foster children and public education that weren't really possible to fix. Eventually, Austin ran away after the third and final test administered to screen for 'specials' showed that he was just a normal human. He struggled unsuccessfully to support himself for a few weeks and then gave in to anxiety, depression and a total collapse of self worth. At a nearby lake, he jumped off of a particularly high point of a cliff and drowned.