5

Summoner - Chapter 5 - SomeoneYouWontRemember - Parahumans Series

Chapter 5

Notes:

She stared at the cash in her hand, unsure if she should have taken that deal or not as she walked away from the pawn shop.

It was on the complete opposite end of Brockton of course, so she doubted she'd get tracked down, but she still took precautions.

Precautions like appearing as an elderly old man with a old-timey floppy hat, whatever that thing was callet. A beret? A fisherman hat?

She walked into an alley after about ten minutes, glanced around very carefully, then pulled Evelynn's legend off of herself, and shoved the cash into her pockets, facemask snug against her face.

Now back to being herself, she felt a little more comfortable. 

Evelynn was seriously going to become her most used legend, she could feel it. She was just too perfect for her current purposes, and though the concept of 'self-love' was not supposed to be nearly as literal as Evelynn made it to be, it was nice to look at herself and not just not care, but appreciate what she saw.

Of course, it wasn't actually herself, just varying different people who were from average-pretty to drop-dead-gorgeous, depending on which part of town she was in and what she was doing.

Her mind wandered back to the cash in her pocket.

For one gold watch, two genuine pearl necklaces, and a beautiful flower-fractal set of earrings she almost took for herself, it felt like five hundred dollars was a bit much.

And the Rune of Inspiration had an effect called 'Cosmic Insight' which…

God, was that thing fucking ridiculous.

What would that effect be classified as? Thinker six? Seven? Whatever the number would be, anything lower than five would be downright impossible in her mind. It wasn't anything like mindreading, no, it was simpler, but also less and more impactful than that, and the name absolutely fit with what it did. 

Whatever she looked at and whoever she interacted with, she'd gain a somewhat significant piece of insight about. It wasn't spoken, nor shown, she just suddenly knew something about whatever she was looking at.

The clerk for example, had an intense case of self-hatred and maladaptive daydreaming, which would explain how he could sit there on the desk without music or anything and just stare at the door all day. He spent his time crafting worlds in his head to fulfill fantasies and dreams he'd given up on, slowly inching away from reality one year at a time.

It had also made her realize that same guy did not care nearly enough to negotiate too much, so she went sky-high on her demands and the man did the bare minimum to drive it to a less ridiculous number.

Five hundred in a day was not bad at all.

Now, to go buy some playing cards.

After finding another small corner where none could see her, she turned back into Evelynn and flew into the sky.

A brief stop at a general store later, cards in pocket, she touched down outside the back of the library for the third time in one day, and quickly discovered that spending multiple hours as a legend was genuinely tiring.

Well, she already knew that. The summon core could only do its work so much before the person using it began to get affected, but this was the first time experiencing it for herself. The robed old man had disregarded the effects because he had no choice, but she was not in the mood to experience the advanced stages of summon exhaustion, a term she made up less than a second ago but oddly fit.

Thankfully, Evelynn was pretty low on the… power consumption scale, If that term could apply here. If she spent five hours while being active and doing stuff while using a legend like Galio for example, she was pretty sure she would be vomiting rainbow bile as she convulsed on the floor, bleeding her brains out of her ears, at least as she was right now. It would get better with time.

She didn't know how, but the old summoner knew so.

The gaps in his memory were far too large for her to have all her answers, it seemed. A consequence she could guess was due to the summon core itself.

With money and cards in her pockets, she sat back down on an empty computer.

The responses to her threads were a lot more numerous than she'd thought.

In fact, Brockton Bay's board was a lot more active than the size of its population would suggest, even compared to many other cities in the US she could see in the menus.

She wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth however, because in the span of a couple hours, people with way too much time and knowledge both had given her more than enough information on which territory was where, where the schools were aligned with who, and even the gray areas of Brockton that were technically around gang territory but were so immensely useless that nobody cared or bothered with them.

The trainyard was the first, and a good chunk of the docks was the second. Not valuable enough to bother, or too much trouble to be worth it. There were also a few pockets of the trainyard that were being used as dumps by the city that were under surveillance by the gangs.

Apparently it was a good place for tinkers to get stuff, which was why it was monitored.

She did not understand that part at all.

It would be so much easier to just take a car, drive up and down Brockton, and buy electronics from everywhere, only a couple from each to not draw attention.

Her eyes lingered on the trainyard as her mind wandered to a certain legend.

Then another, and another.

A haphazard plan began to form in her mind.

She wasn't planning to be a villain… But who the hell didn't want an underground lair? With one last glance to the bottom right corner of the screen, which showed that it was still about two in the afternoon, she logged out once more, and idly considered how young one had to be to get a driving license for a car.

Because it wasn't like she could just grab a bunch of giant random stuff and…

Wait, could she?

…

She could grab a desk as herself and turn into a legend, only to find herself still awkwardly holding it in her arms when she turned back.

She wracked her brain for a moment as she gingerly put the table back on her kitchen floor.

How much did this 'transference' carry?

The answer was more than she thought, less than she hoped for.

Trying to transform into a legend while miserably failing to lift her couch off the floor did not make the couch disappear, and when she turned back to herself, she wasn't holding anything, obviously. Anything else she could physically carry, like two chairs or a car tire from the basement, she had more success with. Her only guess was that if it was too big or she wasn't carrying it, it wouldn't stay with her.

Still, it expanded her options for how the hell she was going to get anything heavier than a backpack to her evil underground dungeon of doom without a helicopter, because there wasn't much drivable area inside the trainyards themselves.

Even the tracks were covered with rotting train compartments as far as she knew.

Her curiosity sated for all of ten seconds, she dropped onto the kitchen chair, exhausted. Her legs both still felt like jelly from her run and now she was considering that maybe today has been good enough to call it quits. But having a mere seven days to prepare made it very difficult to just melt into the couch. A sense of urgency was ever-present. She blew a stray strand of shoulder-length, curly hair out of her face as she thought about how to even begin with all of this. It felt rather daunting. Simple experimentation first then.

She took out the packs of cards she'd bought, dug them out, and went to the living room, dropping them on the coffee table.

Then she grasped for a legend, a man who, in her opinion and his own both, barely deserved the title.

Twisted Fate, The Cardmaster.

A suave man wearing slacks and a vest shirt with a black coat and a fedora, accompanied by sideburns and a gravelly voice. A gambler, a liar, an opportunist, and a smug prick, but the first and only person who had managed through blind belief and talent, to make a new branch of magic specifically to do with an entity he called Lady Luck, who in truth was just the personification of chance in his mind, turned into a seductive woman because the guy was a gambler womanizer with no self-awareness and a fondness for old sayings.

Despite her personal dislike of him, he had style in every way that mattered, and he was one of the few who could so easily and effortlessly enchant stuff her regular self could use with minimal practice.

Like the cards he liked to use as weapons during his time alive.

As she took a hold of him however, she tried to do something a little more complicated.

She tried to mold her own form to his.

She'd tried once before when travelling back home with her dad, just out of curiosity, and found that the oddity of seeing someone as plain and mediocre as herself mixed with the perfection of Evelynn was oddly nice.

That, and Evelynn's soul, or rather, the fragment of her existence in the summon core, was quite proud. It wasn't alive, more of the shadow of an echo of a fragment, really, but it had a certain nature. And that nature was like a really vicious cat that only told you to stop petting when it was time to gut you alive and feast on your pain.

It took a lot of mental… pushing, sort of, just to make Evelynn's hair and skin tone match her own, and that was mostly where the similarities ended. Anything further like facial structure and curves just refused to change, including the gleaming eyes of gold.

It might be a bit stupid, but she didn't want to suffer through any more dysphoria than she'd already suffered through, so if she could change any legend's appearance by trying to mold their projection to some extent, she'd take it. Especially if she was going to spend a lot of time as other people.

Additionally, if she became a hero of some kind, she knew exactly how important image was, and unless people knew each of her legends, it would just make everyone very confused, both in the public eye, and in the immediate chaos of a battle, considering she could swap legends near-instantly.

It would be much less confusing if she could shift into varying human forms with at least a couple constant characteristics between them. Like gender, height, skin tone and hair. Of course, this only applied to legends who would probably allow her to do something like this were they alive and with an opinion, and they also had to be somewhat close to human to attempt it, but she could work with those restrictions.

Currently, she was just trying to get Twisted Fate's legend to mold itself to her as much as she could push it to. At least enough to be a woman who had replaced Twisted Fate's own straight, long black hair with her own curly mop.

To her surprise, it wasn't terribly difficult for this legend. He wasn't nearly as prideful or haughty as the succubus demon, and his form was already fairly close to her own compared to Evelynn's. He didn't have curves, he was about the right height, his hair was long, et cetera.

Unfortunately, it wasn't like she could physically see how she molded to a completely different person, nor have much, if any, control over it, so she applied his legend.

Then she spent a moment mentally judging how the merge felt.

Well, she was certainly a woman, she knew that because she didn't have a dick.

Then she opened the vest shirt just to confirm, and found herself sighing in disappointment when she realized that changing the gender of a legend did not change their garb.

AKA, no bra.

So basically any topless male legend immediately went out of the window for merging with in active combat. Maybe she'd do it if she had time to prep before a battle.

She buttoned the vest shirt closed again, got off the couch, brushed down her black coat, finding it to be very fitting to her new absurd sense of style, and strode up to the bathroom.

Then she stared into the mirror, blinking rapidly.

She took the vaguely triangular fedora off just to have a better look, and felt her brows raise.

The person staring back at her… was literally just herself. Almost nothing of Twisted Fate remained but a slightly more angular browline that she actually quite liked, a bit of the cheekbones shape that felt off, and she had a lot more muscle than her own body ever had.

She mentally noted down Twisted Fate, or rather, Tobias, as a nine out of ten on the compatibility scale. Evelynn sat at about three.

Feeling oddly pleased and a little less apprehensive towards the man's legend, she strode back down to her living room, the curtains already drawn, and sat back on the couch, grabbing the cards, and beginning to work her mana, or maybe more accurately, Twisted Fate's mana, into them.

The enchantments he used were more of a vague feeling than an actual science, more like art.

Very repetitive, static art from a man who was not an artist.

That, combined with his odd connection to the mystic existence of Lady Luck, was what allowed him to do these simple enchantments to his cards. Even if she tried to recreate this as herself, she would never be able to get it.

While wearing his legend as if a cloak however, it was not much more effort than breathing. Hold the card, think of what she wanted it to do, and pour mana into it.

First, she made a test card, one of the basic cards, their enchantment unnoticeable to the extreme, merely some endurance and sharper edges.

Scraping its edge against the coffee table proved that the enchantment worked flawlessly, leaving a deep but extremely thin furrow in the wood, so she put it down, and put the legend away, her hoodie snapping back into existence on her frame as various things instantaneously shifted.

Then she grabbed the card and scraped against the wood again, feeling her lips stretch into a feral grin.

She could use them without a legend equipped.

She turned back into Twisted Fate and made more cutting cards, using one of the two decks entirely for this purpose. These were also the cards whose enchantments would last the longest by far, so she felt pretty safe in her choice of having fifty two small, conspicuous, razor-sharp throwing knives in her pocket. Which of course refused to cut her. Tobias learned that lesson quickly after his first time making some of these. His palm still had an imperceptibly thin scar on the right hand.

The whole thing took about ten minutes, only having to spend a couple seconds on each card. Fairly quick.

She used the second deck for the magical ones. Thirty two of them gleamed bright, searing yellow-gold on the table, reflecting off the TV screen. Stun cards. If they pierced skin, the hypothetical thug would react like he'd just been hit with a high-powered taser for all of three to four seconds, his limbs locking up stone cold and refusing to obey him, his mana locking up, should he have any. She was hoping they would also stun powers if that made sense, but that felt like it would be too much to ask for.

And there was no electricity involved, just static magic bullshit that even Tobias- or Twisted Fate, rather, barely understood himself.

The next twenty cards were all lethal ones.

Ten red cards, which would explode outwards on impact with some kind of red, flaring energy designed to twist in a rough spiral in a several foot wide radius. If she hit someone head-on with this, say, on the chest, she could imagine it wouldn't have a massively different result from detonating a small grenade against their ribcage. She could probably bust through a concrete wall if she threw two or three at the same time in a relatively tight grouping

Ten blue cards, glittering star-blue on both the places where there was ink and on the outside rim, just like the other cards. Should she throw these at someone, she could comfortably say it would just phase through the target and tear out a huge chunk of their mana while doing so. He made these for fighting mages and ethereal creatures mostly, and the occasional necessity to bring a casino down on everyone's heads after he got caught being a swindling cheater, but she was not going to be facing those here, so she would content herself with knowing she could probably throw these straight through armor if she had to to kill someone.

She set the cards in two neat piles on the coffee table, then swapped back to herself.

Of course, they all stayed there, one stack looking normal and the other looking like someone had shoved a bunch of conflicting LEDs in between the cards, the whole stack looking like something out of a strange art project.

The cutting cards would last her a solid six months. The magical ones would last her a month, maybe two, and would not die out gradually, just staying on maximum power until it suddenly fizzled out. Perfect for "just in case" scenarios. Next, another test. She picked Evelynn again, picked the Rune of Precision, and picked a normal card up, flicking her hand to launch it at a kitchen chair, where it remained, embedded an inch into the wood.

Then she glanced down, staring at her tiny waist, her wide hips, and felt like she should be blushing. But this form was half herself and half Evelynn.

Why did Evelynn have to wear basically nothing damn it, it felt so weird to mix their appearances like this. Like really, what kinda person got aroused by themselves?

Nobody sane, that's who.

She shook her head with a slight shudder, and stared at the card embedded into the chair, tilting her head.

A sword would have difficulty cutting that deep.

So she could make things with one legend and use them with another…

Interesting.

She glanced at the clock hanging on the wall, and sighed.

She still had a little more than two hours before her dad got home.

Deciding to pace herself, she turned back into herself, naked porcelain skin snapping out of existence to turn into her casual clothes, and she got up with a groan as she grabbed a kitchen knife, a broom, a cleaver, and a giant bottle of water.

Then she went out into their backyard, and with a brief but careful look around to ensure there wasn't anyone peeking through the ruined dry bushes or anything, kicked the broom head off, leaving her with a long, sturdy stick.

Time to train muscle memory.

She kicked shoes and socks off to feel the ground on her feet, tossed her stuff down on the drying grass and dirt, and took the broomstick, taking up a stance.

She knew how much the body relied on memory, but she still couldn't help but end up glaring at her hands in frustration just five minutes into her session.

Really, it was bizarre how she knew exactly how to twirl a staff into a whining blur around her, how to perfectly twist every muscle, ligament and bone, how to twist her whole body from her toes, up to her ankles, adding momentum and torque and force with every tiny twist and contraction until she could hit someone like a literal bullet and snap bones like tiny dried twigs, yet the moment she tried to do even a basic spin, it felt like her body and mind were two complete strangers stuck doing a group project together.

Her body was the lazy, bumbling idiot, and the brain was the competent, diligent, talented one, growing increasingly fed up with the former's bullshit.

Brain would say 'okay now we do the spin' and Body would say 'best I can do is smack our nose with the broomstick'.

Then it would smack her on the forehead instead because it couldn't even guess its own capabilities right.

It was fucking infuriating.

By the twenty minute mark, only just now starting to feel proper progress, right when she started feeling exhausted, she idly wondered if she even had to do this.

She could always just take up Evelynn and shapeshift into herself. It would be good, nice, incredibly convenient, even. She could change things on a whim, including her clothes, she would be tough enough to only hiss in pain and bruise from getting shot, she would be able to feel and taste the emotions of people all around her, she would never get physically tired… The only drawbacks were that her main self, her actual self, would forever be incompetent as shit if she did that, and as fun as being Evelynn was, it was also a bit of a mental risk.

Changing into a legend did impact her mentality. She knew that. It wasn't a lingering thing, nor a parasitic thing of any kind, it was more of the case that… she was usually wearing either someone's soul, or someone essence, or just a personified myth brought to life by faith. She was wearing someone's skin, and while under it, it would change how she thought. For example, when she was flying over the city as Evelynn, her eyes would instinctively dart to lone targets, predicting paths and how hopeless they'd be if she pounced on them for a quick meal of agony. There was no desire whatsoever to do so, but the background process of a predator was still there, even if massively muted.

Additionally, the summon core had a limit, she knew that from the old summoner's scattered memories. It wasn't like she could be wearing a legend all day every day without consequence. Just five hours of only occasionally flying around as Evelynn, and she had started to get a bit tired, mentally. The old man had disregarded the consequences of overusing the core. She was not in the mood to start doing the same. The only reason she only had a few of the summoner mage's memories was that he'd lost most of them during the final battle, overusing and breaking himself by summoning legend after legend until death or complete exhaustion, and then going even further.

So yeah, splitting headaches followed by memory loss, and eventual, slow evisceration of the soul? Not something she was particularly fond of inviting, and she didn't know how much using her legends would strain her.

Despite that, she was very tempted to risk it. Because this felt like a waste of time, and she did not have much of it. Was the potential for bleedthrough from Evelynn becoming permanent worth it? Was she willing to crawl back into the locker, behind the lens of a legend, and go back to living through their eyes, just with a dash of more sensation in it, because it might be difficult and more time consuming to do the alternative? It wasn't quite the same, and she was sure someone like Yamada would say she was traumatized, and she probably was, but just the thought of living day to life as herself while wearing Evelynn, it scraped at a place she didn't quite know how to deal with, a place of rambling madness in as many tongues as a mouth had teeth.

She took a deep breath, exhaled it.

Then she bent down for the cleaver, clearing her mind as she constructed an opponent in her head.

'Shadowboxing' sounded way too stupid and edgy, but yes, that was what she was doing. Lee Sin did not have a name for the technique.

It was simple. She could almost quote him from when he spoke to one of his students.

'Create an opponent as good as you could imagine him, as realistic and true as you could make him, but do not choreograph him. Do not think of his moves. Do not think of how to move him. Then you would quickly realize your imagination and movements match his own as you fight, because he is your construct, and because he can only be as good as you can be in the same mental place, because he will react exactly as you would subconsciously, without your control. What you will have made will be nothing but a mental clone of yourself, one only you could see, and he will do as you do to an infuriating degree. From there, from the separation of mind and body, unity will also be achieved, and with every version of yourself you kill, a new stronger self will arise within you, waiting for your challenge to reach ever higher.'

The man certainly knew how to capture one's mind and ears.

This technique would be especially good for herself, she felt.

In her head, she'd fought anything from thousands and thousands of people to hundreds of things with hundreds of different limbs. Tails, four-headed monsters, things the size of buses, et cetera. No matter what kind of attack, when, from what direction and more, she'd been on both ends of it, receiving and giving.

So despite considering herself to have a bone-dry imagination sometimes, shadowboxing was... not easy, but not hard after she got the hang of making a separate entity in her mind based entirely off animal reflex. It took an hour or so, but she did it until it was easy. The 'Absolute Focus' effect from the Sorcery Rune helped immensely, too.

Winning the fights was not easy though.

She didn't win a single one, even when she kept downgrading the mental enemies she'd have to face. She'd stumble, break her footwork because no damn muscle memory, or simply could not do the moves that legends had done to dodge such attacks because she couldn't twist herself into a pretzel like they could or flip backwards eight feet into the air.

So she downgraded repeatedly, until she could dodge at least one out of three or four attacks of a regular human with a sword, and actively felt herself sort of... come into contact with herself like this. Like she knew her actual capabilities, putting an easy to see line between herself and the legends, a line that sometimes faded but this odd training helped reinforce. 

She couldn't fight as a legend, not even close.

But she could do it in the future, maybe, so she kept refining that separation, that compartmentalization that detached her from the imaginary man currently beating the fuck out of her.

Until she almost dodge a third of his hits with some amount of consistency.

With sweat in her eyes, tremors in her knees, and a burning pipe where her throat was supposed to be, she staggered to the side to go back inside and hopefully collapse on her bed, only to turn and see her dad leaning on the back porch's door, arms crossed and something both concerned and awed in his expression.

He stared.

She stared back, finding it oddly nostalgic how she suddenly felt like fidgeting.

Not that she had the energy to do more than sway on her feet and wheeze.

"... What time is it? Uh, how long have you been there?" She rasped out, and grimaced as she felt air move through her abused throat.

"It's uh… six twenty-something. About twenty minutes." Danny said, then he cleared his throat and jutted his face towards the cleaver in her hands, his face twisting in confusion. "How did… where did you learn to do that? And could you please be more careful with heavy, sharp objects? If you didn't look like you knew what you were doing I would have grounded you for… whatever that was." He said, glancing back down the flattened oval of grass where she'd been moving up and down and rolling on the past couple of hours.

She paused, thinking.

Then she shook her head with a shrug.

"Yeah, I'll be careful, but, I don't know how I can do this. Powers are strange things. I'm starving. And dying of exhaustion. Do you mind making dinner while I go shower, dad?" She asked, and limped towards him.

"Oh, yeah, uh, of course. I'll also have a plumber to help you with the Tinkering thing. There's a car mechanic I know too, but it's best to start from something simpler when starting out with technical professions and- yeah." He finished, realizing he was basically nervously rambling. "I'll go make some pasta. See you in a bit?"

She nodded with a smile that was not fake, but not exactly felt either, and followed him inside.

"... By the way, Taylor, what's with all the... cards?"

She paused.

"Uh. Power stuff?"

A long-suffering sigh was her reply, then a grunt with a rub of paper on wood as he assumedly removed the card from the chair that she'd forgotten to remove.

Gleaming red-yellow-blue on the coffee table, she grimaced, and shuffled over to shove them all in her pockets. 

She didn't look back to confirm what her dad was doing, instead resuming her ongoing battle to climb Mount Staircase with legs that felt like someone took a pool noodle and put it through a shredder or three.

She had to get a dart board so she could practise with the throwing cards too.

The list of tasks just kept growing.

Downstairs, Danny sprinkled salt into the boiling water as he thought back to the sight of his child with a cleaver in her hand, holding it as if it was more natural to her than a pen or a fork or even her own fingers.

He thought back to her glare, so intense it felt like gluing a flashlight to his retina, yet somehow lightless, uncomfortable to the extreme in a way he wasn't sure he could really describe.

He thought of how the weight of her gaze felt too oppressive to challenge.

He thought of how that same weight was one borne of suffering he hadn't been able, or perhaps mentally present enough, to do anything about. To prevent. He was a coward through and through, and he sighed at the thought that came up at least once a week, used to its sting by now.

His little girl was tougher now, in the same way one's skin turned leather-hard from years of abuse beside brine and salt, scraped against wood and concrete and rope. 

But she was also more alive than he'd seen her be in years. Or she was, when he wasn't around.

How she moved back there, that triumphant, spiteful grin she made to herself as she bested whatever challenge she'd put on herself, whatever on earth she'd been doing back there.

He stared into the boiling water, and the realization that soon she'd be even further away from him than before took hold. The following realization, that that would not even be a big difference compared to before the incident, left him even more hollow than the first.

The fact he could think of nothing to bridge that gap, nothing that wouldn't be all-too transparent and awkward and too little too late, that was the part that watched the boiling froth of the pot and thought of simpler times, when he would stare into the frothing waves with Annette beside him, talking about nothing in particular.

He just had a faint feeling of sadness, worry, and emptiness right now.

He stared at the card in his hand, something that refused to bend and had been stuck in his kitchen chair not three minutes ago. Sharp, but somehow refusing to cut him.

He put it in his pocket, and hoped that the Wards would give Taylor something fulfilling and meaningful.

Notes:

danny will be fine, chill

also i know it might be a bit controversial and odd how i decided to try to go for a 'merging' thing, but it's not really that crazy. I think of the legends as like, projections of a sentient memory. You could push the memory to change a bit while you fiddle with it, but it will self-correct immediately, or just refuse you if its too far from itself.

simple as, really

glad you guys enjoy, loving all the comments, keep them up and keep motivating me

next chap: The Evil Lair(TM)