The Magician 4

The borderline elderly gentleman sneered at Orison and said, "By the four cardinal directions and the names of the archangels which preside over them, I command you return from whence you reside."

Another whip crack of force smacked against the tender welt on Orison's chest, drawing a wince and a dribble of blood. The ghost form canceled and another rush of the mysterious essence of existence merged with the magician.

Under everyone's gawking eyes, Orison ran out of the circle and stared daggers at it before turning back to the old gentleman. "It's not my fault that I was mistaken by this damn thing as whatever it was meant for!"

The old gentleman was enraged, switching his dead, shark eyed gaze between the tattooed man and Orison. "Years worth of preparation and work ruined by a greedy subordinate and whatever you are. How will the two of you compensate me?"

Eyes narrowing to menacing slits, the magician said, "I won't hold a grudge... and that's highly conditional on your ability to not act like you're entitled to something from me when you're clearly not."

"All of you, subdue this trespasser," the old gentleman snapped crisply.

"Sleep until your debt to me is exhausted," Orison snapped back.

Every last one of the original group collapsed on the spot. Even the old man staggered for a couple of seconds while the magician summoned a phantom steed under Them. While the old man pulled a pistol from his coat, Orison flung two burning needles at his thickly veined hand. The old man dropped the gun and looked at Orison with a grimace while desperately resisting the urge to scream with pain from the cauterized punctures on his cradled appendage.

"For a past life of regrettable actions against me that ended very poorly for you, I'll give you one chance to back down. If you still show a pitiful lack of wisdom, I'll kill you without mercy or regret," the magician said with an emotionless face.

The old man said, "Tea time is at twelve sharp daily. When you doubtlessly find ill welcome everywhere you go, I'll be waiting to negotiate terms for your residence."

As They began riding away at an unhurried pace, Orison replied blandly, "Imagine the depths of my anticipation... Put up 'No Trespassing' signs OUTSIDE the boundary. I lost a follower to the lower dimensions today because of that electrical contraption... and a nice car filled with commodities that this place could have benefited from."

The old gentleman raised his voice slightly so that it carried clearly, "There's no point to that. They'd be missing within days. You would think over three kilometers worth of emptiness would have been warning enough."

Orison shouted back, "Touche."

The old man chuckled through a hiss of pain.

There was an immediate pang of guilt for mentioning Cat in such a flippant way but it was repressed. They had never intended to interfere much with that soul's path but Cat had grabbed the opportunity available. In truth, slipping into the lower dimensions might present a whole new chance for the woman to seize or it could end up amounting to nothing. She wasn't any better or worse off either way.

As soon as They were out of sight, the horse ramped up to top speed. Orison didn't understand how a soul that was as inherently scheming and seemingly self serving as 'Granny Xia' was, could still maintain a fairly neutral existence. However, They wanted as little to do with the old gentleman as possible. The decision to not kill the psychopathic person was less sentimentality and more the sense that there would have been severe and life threatening consequences for doing so.

Upon seeing the first sign of people and communities, Orison canceled the horse. A couple of people rubbed their eyes, looking in the magician's direction, but quickly shrugged off what they thought they saw. Much as it had been in the other dying world; supernatural powers, magic and ritual work were reserved for secret societies. The mundane populace was only dimly aware but clueless to its depths.

The old gentleman's evaluation of Orison's welcome wasn't exactly right but it wasn't completely wrong either. People that They met along the way were polite but distant. A few that gave off weak signals of a supernatural nature watched the magician like a hawk but seemed content to let Them wander around as long as They didn't get too close to residential areas.

Eventually, that became a problem. Night would fall soon and the calling that Orison was sensing was IN an extensive residential area that was ran around with razor wire topped chain link for miles. They also had the manpower to guard it.

Without knowing the nature of what was calling to Them, the magician wouldn't recklessly charge in or risk being caught sneaking in. After milling through a bazaar type trading area for the different communities, They prepared a duffel bag full of random goodies and made Their way to an entrance gate. A woman behind a bulletproof ticket booth watched Orison's approach as three armed men leveled weapons from hunter's tree stands rigged to telephone poles.

"State your business, young man," the woman said with a hint of kindness behind the frost.

The magician gave a sad smile and said, "Looking for safe temporary residence while I figure out what to do next."

She said, "Every single last soul in this place has developed an immunity to what's going on out there. If you're not sure you are, I'd suggest looking for shelter elsewhere."

Unfocusing Their eyes, the magician responded, "Why do you think I'm looking for a safe place to stay... alone?"

She gave a knee jerk sympathetic look before saying neutrally, "You're young and healthy. That gives you some personal value but you're not so young that you count in the leader's 'Women and Children First' initiative. We're not as well off facility wise but we have plenty of room to move around and clean water that's not reliant on plumbing and electricity."

The message was made clearer with the unsubtle glances she was making at the duffel bag. They weren't thieves but they expected someone who was interested in staying to give up some goods.

Seeing Orison open up the duffel bag, she said, "Now, before you go whipping things out here in plain view, understand. What you're offering doesn't guarantee anything. It's a gesture of goodwill. I'd say you have a good chance as long as your offering is sincere enough but I can't make promises. Don't give up anything you can't live without if you're not accepted."

Orison made a show of removing a small photo album, an equally small lock box and some survival essential gear. Packing those away into a backpack, along with a few days' food, They pushed the rest of the duffel bag to the booth door. Following directions, They stepped back to a yellow line drawn on the road and waited. One of the armed men came down to inspect the offering while the booth woman took inventory.

As the man pulled out the offerings to be inventoried, his face grew ugly. Many of the items were things a single person would enjoy very much but not so much useful to an entire community. Or, at least, not things a person was likely to share with a whole community. That was, until he reached the bottom and found a tool box with lots of useful and uncommon tools.

The ugliness vanished and the man looked at Orison. "Do you know how to use these?"

The magician scratched Their head and said, "Yes, in theory. Underneath the toolbox are some schematics for switching mundane appliances into battery compatible. I could obviously only fit a couple small and one large folding solar panel into the duffel after the batteries but I'm sure more are available elsewhere."

"Not every community has access to electricity and I miss..." The smiling man started a conversation that lasted until Orison was called in.

After a boring and interrogative conversation with a rather unremarkable man that possessed a 'truth telling' ability, the magician was provisionally accepted under the condition that Orison spend two days in the inoculation house. Confused, They were escorted to a dreary looking old manor house that looked like something from a horror movie. Under normal circumstances, They wouldn't have gone so meekly and peacefully but it turned out that the house was where the calling was coming from.

One of the guards said with a somewhat guilty face, "We know that you said you were immune but sometimes a person can still get sick a second time. Every time there's a round, the plague seems to adapt and change but being inoculated against the original strain will immunize you to the rest.

"Our group makes our way by doing resource runs once a month into infected areas on the other side of this town, closer to the big city. We can't risk someone coming back with an adapted version. I-I know what that sounds like. There's people that survived one version but not the original. I'm sorry but... you're young and beat a strain, I'm sure you'll be just fine."

The man didn't look overly convinced. And despite the survival rates shown, Orison was under the suspicion that less than half that number survived exposure to the 'parent' version. It didn't matter to the magician. More than anything, They were curious as to how the community was so sure that the inoculation house held the original strain.

Unable to resist, They asked, "So, this place has the ground zero strain? How do you know that?"

The man shrugged. "The leader brought it back on his last friends and family search trip about a year ago. Oh, don't open the source box. If you do, someone will be scraping you up for sure. Even people who survived the house will get sick and have to be isolated for awhile after doing that. You get exposed to too much and it will overcome immunity."

In front of the spooky house was a large clear plastic and tarp pavilion.

The guard said, "After you spend two days inside, you need to spend another couple in there. Someone will come to spray you off. Since it's nice out, I'd suggest leaving whatever belongings won't survive getting washed, in that bin over there.

"I know it's hard to trust a stranger's word but we're big on cracking theft around here... This is an awkward question but... Do you have any particular person or groups of people you want your possessions to pass onto if..."

Orison chuckled as They placed the backpack into the bin. "Give it to hardship or whatever you have that passes for it."

The guard clarified, "You want us to pass your belongings on to the worst off? Alright... Just sign this here after I write that out... After you're inside, you only need to spend two hours of the first day in the basement. There's motion sensor lights that'll go off as you walk around. Since you're going in at night, you can leave to the tent house after noon the day after tomorrow. If we don't see you come out by sundown..."

The magician walked in without a moment's hesitation. To keep from seeming too eager, They walked around the house for awhile.

Laughing, Orison muttered, "I keep expecting to see famous sixties monster family sitcom actors to pop out and surprise me."

Once night fell in earnest, They turned on a battery powered lantern and headed down into the basement. Fully furnished, They absentmindedly noted how nice the house would have been in its prime as They went to a large, rectangular box in the back corner. It was no real surprise to Them that the 'source box' for plague was what drew the magician there.

With a few preparations and an exercise of weak telekinetic power, Orison opened the box. The alarm inside didn't even have a chance to chirp before it was broken by a burning needle. After making sure there weren't anymore security surprises, They inspected the contents.

Resting inside of a two person makeshift coffin was two corpses that had been partially exposed to the elements for awhile. It smelled atrocious and was a grim sight even for the magician's slightly jaded eyes. Fishing out the items with supernatural qualities from the box coffin, They quickly closed it back up and used a couple Presto casts to clean themselves and the immediate air.

Done with that, the magician took Their findings to the other side of the basement and spent a moment to mourn the fate of the two dead people. A man with strange ear cartilage rested beside a pregnant female within. With contextual clues from the items inside and Spirit Sight, a fog lifted off a portion of lost memory to reveal some limited interactions with a little girl called Harley Monroe and a rabbit eared man called Theo.

Neither of them seemed to be special people to the magician but they were people Orison knew and thought positively of. Considering how little remained of the past within Their mind, such a revelation was a bittersweet kind of blessing. To know that Theo and Harley's fate had been so bleak, that was nothing but bitterness.

As to what caused it, the magician looked at the partially cracked open capsule sticking itself to Theo's Osomo spark. They felt like They should know something about it beyond what the items were and did but it was shrouded deep within the swirl of shadowed memory. The same applied to an orb the size of a tennis ball that looked like it was made out of lead.

More so for the orb, in fact. The magician felt that the orb was something intimately familiar. It would be the next item focused on after the wooden stationary box with sketches in them.

As Orison looked over the drawings, They felt like They were watching the evolution of Harley in reverse. Beautiful oil and pastel pictures regressed to stark, realistic coal and graphite. Surreal and warped color pencil drawing finally retraced the steps of her artistic journey to two highly detailed but unrefined crayon works. It was the last two that Spirit Sight latched onto.

The first of the two was a disturbing scene of a cartoonish person in blue scrubs being shot multiple times and in the process of falling backwards. No sooner did Orison latch onto the spiritual trace left inside than a speck of soul stuff transferred from the page and into the Entanglement Key. Once there, it settled into one of the center cluster shadows, the most important feeling ones.

Confused, They muttered, "Jay Cotton. He was Harley's uncle, an orderly or maybe a nurse at a nursing home. I- I don't remember anything else about him. Why would... He was someone's fragment, a spiritual splinter living a different life."

They felt distraught. "No, no, no. Without strength, the shadow will get overwritten by you. Please, whoever they were, it was one of my most important people. Please don't make them disappear!"

The key fed Orison's distress through to the shadow. A confused but sympathetic emotion rolled back through. The spiritual remnant allowed itself to flow through the preexisting pattern rather than reshaping it. Some things had already changed and a few more would have to finish the process but the soul, far from recovered, had made a big compromise to suit the magician's wishes. It was a soul easily moved to compassion.

It took awhile for Them to get emotions back under control. The shadow in question had deep ties to all three of the personalities that had merged to create the current Orison. In spite of or maybe because of that, the shadow's identity remained a mystery.

The momentary scare made the magician hesitate on inspecting the second crayon picture and to pass the lead looking orb for the capsule attached to Theo's spark. There didn't seem to be a way to interact with the capsule directly. So They moved Their will into the spark. Predictably, the patterns and energy of the spark moved to 'fix' the 'broken' spark within Orison.

A display popped up. "Inbound rewards packages are waiting to be added to your inventory. Please read invoice and accept."

Orison mentally selected the big button macro because the invoice was blurred. The capsule on the table disappeared and there was a subtle disturbance of space around Them that the Entanglement Key stirred to nibble at. A lack of proper spark forced incoming capsules to open directly into the first layer of Orison's space. They weren't sure where all of it had come from but it became obvious really quick, that not all of it was good.

It ended up not mattering. With massive quantities of stuff piling up in the chaotic space Orison couldn't view directly, only feel, the desolate depths of Their soul pulled everything inside. Moving desperately to try to save some of the best things, They managed to push a few to the safer second layer but was dragged back into the 'Realm of Ruin' once again.

When the inevitable regurgitation came, Orison was spit back into material existence with a companion. Unfortunately, at that moment, They were too busy puking up gray sludge and expelling toxins from every conceivable opening in Their body while additional messages poured into Their mind from the spark. It would take a little time to process it all. But what little that registered as important first, prompted Orison to make some split second decisions.

With mind still reeling from information overload, They softened the edges of Their pattern as a set of strong hands reached for them. Retreating into the depths of trance, they weathered the storm of a demented apple tree dryad's spite additions to Their split of Osomo rewards and inheritance. Several hours later, They resurfaced.

While a Draconos man held Their limp and decidedly feminine form, apologizing mournfully, Orison ran a round of healing and Prestos. "There's nothing to apologize for. A mentally ill dryad used her citizen credits to give me some payback through you. We should both be thankful that we were reset, in a manner of speaking. First Family brainwashing should have been completely broken into uselessness by the recovering spiritual realm inside me."