Chapter 26: 3-6 Charmed

Charmed 3.6

2000, July 9: Phoenix, AZ, USA

Judging by the digital clock in one end of the room, it was one in the morning. I spent all of today, yesterday technically, creating Control Wards. They were confiscated from me and placed in a storage room on the first floor of the warehouse. I could still see them with the Oracle's Elixir, though hiding them from me wasn't the point. The point was to keep them out of my reach just in case it was possible to tinker them into something more problematic.

Lawless and Camille had checked in on me regularly. The latter had even asked me what I wanted for dinner and spent time hanging out with me. Honestly, she reminded me of an older girl I used to have a crush on in my past life. It would have been endearing if her plan to consistently expose me to her power wasn't so transparent.

And now I was free. Sort of.

I shared the barracks with Lawless and two other mooks. Camille had another room, with Freeform as a cat curled up at her feet. She'd had sex with him and did a remarkable job of feigning affection, before rushing to the bathroom to vomit into the toilet after the fact. Every. Night. It was… not my favorite thing to watch.

I now knew just how far she was willing to go for La Torcha's ambitions.

Lawless heard every bit of the cocktail of conflicting desires whirling within me and laughed. I swore every night to kill him, just one more desire I couldn't act on. It only made him laugh harder.

I didn't sleep. I couldn't. Instead, I'd forced my young body awake for the past several nights to memorize their sleep schedules. I wanted to know just how light a sleeper Lawless was. After all, whispers were only damning if he was awake to hear them.

I'd been meditating for hours while lying on my back, the stillness, even breathing, and emptiness of thought good enough to fool my captors. All my gathered mana went into my Tear, removing any distinctive light shows.

Hearing their soft snores, I finally allowed myself to emerge from within my soul and plan my escape.

To start, no matter my violent intentions, I had to admit that the likelihood of fighting my way out of here on my own was slim at best. Three insta-kill bullets. I could probably steal my gun back, but… then what? I was good enough to not shoot myself, but I was no marksman. The relic pistol wasn't something that'd let me win against multiple gunmen. The only chance of escape I had would be to use the resources they'd need to provide me to make my own solution. That'd be hard enough to do from under Lawless' nose without having to also hide the specifics of how I'd love to murder him with whatever my current project happened to be.

No. No matter what, busting my way out like an action movie star was out of the question.

'Let's see… What do I have available to me? I had a quart of holy water, which they didn't know was special in any way. I knew where my relic pistol was being kept, on Camille's nightstand as a memento. I could reasonably make requests for more potions ingredients.' Seeing how pitched combat was out of the question, my thoughts immediately strayed to the most basic of all underhanded weapons: poison.

'Can I make a poison?' I wondered as I allowed the tidal wave that was the World Rune's memories wash over me. 'I can't hope to shoot everyone with a dart or stab them with a dagger, so it'd also have to be aerosolized. I'd need to be immune to it obviously. It'd have to be fast-acting to give them no time to raise the alarm. Odorless. Colorless too… Do I have anything like that?'

I dismissed Cassiopeia's noxious fumes. Though highly lethal, they were also an eye-catching purple.

There were subtler poisons used by both the Du Couteau family and the mythical Black Rose, but none would suffice. 'The poison won't spread fast enough,' I realized. 'The warehouse is too big.'

Nor, for that matter, could I think of a ready justification for why I needed twelve quarts of rattlesnake venom, the minimum I estimated I'd need if I wanted to cover the warehouse and the surrounding lot.

Poisons used by Singed, Twitch, and Teemo faced similar problems.

On top of that, I was almost certain that La Torcha was immune to poisons. Her breaker state effectively made her Portgas D. Ace, all but invulnerable to physical dangers. I could conceivably catch her by surprise, but that surprise wouldn't be long enough to kill her with poison and it'd certainly end with my own death. There was also a good chance that she would burn away the poison, if it could reach her at all. And Freeform… He'd simply change himself into a new body, washing away all poisons before they could incapacitate him.

Worst of all? I had no time to devise a safe delivery mechanism and I wasn't immune.

No, poisons weren't the way to go here…

My thoughts then turned to the simplest method of escape: teleportation.

It was only simple on paper though. While the World Rune gave me recipes and ideas, it would require a fully functional Hex Core and an intricate enchantment, at minimum. And to build that, I'd need a Namestone of the Brackern, something that obviously didn't exist on Earth-Bet. It was theoretically possible to fashion one, albeit greatly diminished, but not in any reasonable length of time. This was one of those "build tools to build better tools" scenarios tinkers often found themselves in and I couldn't afford to sink into this spiral.

'it'd be nice if they could just sleep forever…' My thoughts trailed off as a lightningbolt shot through my mind. It'd been a while since I had such a blatant eureka moment. I could put them to sleep for an extended period of time. It wasn't reliant on the airflow and wouldn't weaken over a large area. It couldn't be avoided nor resisted, not by a human who was completely unaware of the spiritual anyway. They could be in the middle of a fight to the death and it'd still take effect. Best of all, I had holy water already.

I was talking about the God-Willow.

Well… kind of.

More specifically, I was interested in the dream blossoms nurtured by Lillia in the Garden of Forgetting.

I was extremely fortunate in that the dream blossom was in the same boat as the relic stones that made up the weapons of the Sentinels. Once, the God-Willow represented the very heart of the world, the focal point of all life magic in the First Lands. It arguably predated even the likes of Ornn.

Once.

I burned at the hands of Ivern the Cruel, the very same who would one day come to be known as Ivern the Green Father. And when it fell, the very land wept.

Just as the Water of Life I used was a pale imitation of the Well of Life originally discovered by Maokai, the dream blossoms were several times removed from the God-Willow, and very much its lesser for it. The God-Willow made a seedling. That seedling made the Dreaming Tree. The Dreaming Tree lost a branch and that branch flowered into the Bashful Bloom.

In a way, Lillia was Ivern's granddaughter.

I couldn't make the God-Willow, but I could make dream blossoms.

'Yes… A cup of holy water… Some flowers conceptually tied to dreams…' A broad grin split my face. Yes, this was possible.

I allowed myself to drift off to sleep, the skeleton of my plan starting to take shape.

X

"Oi, wake up, kid." I was shaken awake by Lawless. "Take a shower and come out in six minutes," he ordered, shoving a cup of elixir into my hand.

I dragged my groggy ass into the water and emerged mostly awake.

"You know what would help? Setting an alarm," I grumbled as I walked into the office that doubled as our living room. A squishy lump impacted my face, my body too lethargic to catch it.

"Ha, not a morning person, cutie?" came Camille's cheery greeting.

"Huh?"

"Pick it up 'cause that's your breakfast."

"Right…" I picked it up. It was a breakfast sandwich from McDonald's. For all that Lawless and Camille loved to hear themselves talk, they were careful, leaving me as few clues as possible to discern my location. For instance, by buying food from places so ubiquitous I could be anywhere, or by intentionally removing packaging labels from local stores before feeding me.

I scarfed down the Egg McMuffin and brushed my teeth before returning to stretch in the office. Yes, I was kidnapped. Yes, I wanted to escape. No, that wasn't a good reason to stop my morning practice. If anything, the more I worked out, the less time I'd spend helping my captors.

"Heh, doing some karate kid shit again?" Lawless laughed. "You imagining beating my ass like a drum, little tinker?"

I flowed from the kneeling dragon to the swirling cloud, a series of movements meant to harmonize the spirit with the body and center the practitioner. It was a part of the foundational motions taught to every Shojin acolyte. I stepped lightly and brought my hands forward into a grasping claw before my claws turned into two middle fingers.

"Heehee, leave him alone, Kev. Let the little guy do his thing. Besides, I'm pretty sure that's not karate."

"What the hell do you know? You ain't Asian."

"Filipinas are Asians too, you piece of shit."

"Sure as hell don't act Asian."

"And what does an Asian act like?"

Lawless shrugged and gestured towards me. "That."

"Fuck you, Kevin."

"That in invitation, sweetheart?"

Camille made a disgusted face. "Ugh, I'd rather replace my tampon with a lit cigar."

"Bitch PMSing all the time, I thought you already did," he snarked back.

I did my best to tune them out. I couldn't spot Freeform, which admittedly didn't mean much. He could have been sent away on some mission to win Camille's favor or he could be that spider in the corner of the room, waiting for me to make my escape attempt. When I made my break for it, I'd have to make sure to kill him first.

The bickering between Lawless and Camille was practically a ritual. As much as La Torcha tried to portray the Crips as one big dysfunctional family, they weren't. They worked together well enough, or they'd never be trusted to watch me, but they definitely didn't like each other. The impression I got was that Lawless thought of Camille as little better than a cheap whore while Camille considered herself La Torcha's real right hand gal.

Eventually, I could put off my tinkering no longer.

X

On the bright side, my skill at engraving runes was progressing rapidly. Having the memories of rune masters certainly helped, and like my martial arts, I was slowly turning distant, hypothetical memory into something more actionable.

By the time lunch rolled around, I'd made four more Control Wards, all stored in the same room on the first floor.

The three of us sat together, eating some bulgogi that Camille had Freeform pick up for her. It was manipulative, a blatant attempt to get an eight year old boy to associate her with something familiar, something reminiscent of home. It stung that it was working. The bulgogi was subpar, made for the overly sweet American palette. A part of me still loved that she'd thought of me as she ordered lunch.

"You're not making any more of those wards," Lawless spoke as he polished off the last of his meat.

"They work."

"They do. And we got enough. Ain't so many invisible capes that we need a giant stockpile. Next time Dos Caras squares up with us, someone's gonna set a ward and we'll have a sniper on watch. Fucker's gonna pop like a balloon."

"They only last five minutes apiece."

"See? That's how I know you never traded hands with anyone before. Five minutes is fucking forever in a fight, midget."

"Fine. What else am I making?"

"Powers in a bottle." He must have seen something in the way my face paled. "Fuck's wrong with that? You got more than that steelskin shit."

"I do," I admitted hesitantly. He'd obviously heard my internal bitching at some point. "There's a reason I don't make it, a reason I didn't make it for the PRT. And it's not because Director Lyons didn't know about it. Did you know I admitted I could give people permanent enhancements?"

"For real?"

"Yeah. We decided we shouldn't touch it. If she sees a bunch of guys running around with identical brute and mover packages and shiny purple veins, she'll know who took me. I told her about Shimmer, that's the formula by the way, but we agreed to scrap the idea because it drives people insane. And I don't mean a little eccentric; I mean full-on catch and eat roaches, peel off your own face with your fingernails kind of insane.

"Look, Lawless. I know you probably heard me thinking something like, 'I wish I could give myself powers.' And you heard right. I wish I could. And I can. It wasn't because the PRT didn't like the idea. It was because I didn't, and still don't, know how to make the Shimmer formula safe. Trust me. Don't touch Shimmer. It's really not worth it."

I could have simply not said anything and gone ahead with making Shimmer. It would have given the PRT a heads up as to who had taken me, if Watchdog hadn't figured it out already. But it would also cause wonton destruction across the city while costing La Torcha many of her soldiers. I couldn't afford to alienate the Crips yet.

"Well fuck."

"Make me a knife, Andy," Camille interjected. "You know, one of them super tinker weapons."

I wanted to immediately agree but caught myself. "A knife is a knife is a knife. It won't be much more deadly than any other blade just because a tinker made it."

"I know."

She then did something unexpected and placed a pound of fossilized wood on the table. "Had a mook order another mook who got some homeless guy to buy it for me yesterday," she said in explanation. "I want one of them fancy Petricite knives. It'll block powers, right?"

I looked at the multicolored block of calcium, its red and blue crystalline hues carved into something resembling a howling wolf. My pistol was made with only three pounds of Petricite alloy. With a pound of pure Petricite… Yes… I nodded slowly. "This is enough for a blade."

She pumped her fist and pulled me into a hug, one I'd no doubt have enjoyed more had I been older. Flushing red, I reluctantly pulled away and did my best to banish the warm and fuzzies.

"I-I want a reward," I said, stuttering.

"Hahahahaha, hear that, Teq? Kid wants a reward," Lawless cackled, waggling his eyebrows suggestively at the two of us.

Camille's face went through a myriad of emotions in rapid succession. Surprise. Bemusement. Revulsion. Hate. Her expressions shot conflicting feelings through me.

"N-Not like that! I want a tea set!"

"Oh, thank fucking God," she sighed with relief. "A tea set..."

"Kind of. More than that. The whole thing, really. One of those traditional Korean tea sets. Teapot. Cups. Jasmine and chamomile. Incense burner, press, and mold. White ash bedding. Powdered sandalwood incense. The whole shebang."

"What the hell? Most kids ask for a video game."

"Trust me, the tea set is more expensive," I said simply. "Besides, we all have our hobbies. Mine is martial arts, listening to jazz music, and tea. If you're so hell-bent on making me a gangster, I'm going to be one with style."

"I'm not buying you a full tea set, Andy. Where would I even find one of those?"

"Probably in Chinatown. It doesn't need to be authentically Korean, just made in that style. I wouldn't know the difference, but I do know my teas though. I want jasmine, chamomile, and sandalwood incense."

She looked at Lawless with an arched brow. The thinker shrugged with an amused smirk on his face. "Ehh, he really does want them. Tea bags ain't good enough apparently. Wants the pressed flower kind. Gook's got class."

I flipped him off. "Fuck you too. Oh, and a pound of good knife steel. The better the steel you get me, the better your knife will be. In fact, if you get me the wood as well, I can make a proper handle too. If you have a picture of your ideal style and length, it'd help to have that too."

"Fuck. You know what? Fine. You have a deal, Andy. I'll get you your tea set. Just write it all down."

"Good, now what else can you build?" Lawless said, leaning forward. "Shit don't need to be a weapon, just has to be useful."

I shrugged, not wanting to volunteer anything too powerful. "More health potions?"

"Nah, the two dozen you made are enough for now. Try again."

I looked to through the wall and over my temporary lab. I couldn't deny that a part of me was drawn to all the tools and materials I hadn't used yet. The problem was, anything I built would be taken from me immediately to ensure that I couldn't use it against them. I didn't want to empower the Crips. The least I could do was make something that wouldn't hurt anyone directly.

"An EMP, an electromagnetic pulse that shorts out electronics in an area," I said. I wanted to use it to make my great escape.

Lawless smirked. "He's fucking adorable. He wants to use the EMP on us. Knock out the electronics and sneak away in the chaos."

"Andy, can't you see we want to be your friends?" she cooed. "You may as well stop trying to find a way out. Everyone becomes my friend eventually."

"Pretty sure Lawless isn't," I snarked back.

"Yes, because I don't want him to be," she scrunched her nose cutely. "He's an asshole."

"Ehh, she starts with her power on me, I put two between her eyes. She's smarter than that," the thinker said. After a moment, he added. "You know what? Sure, kid. Build your EMP machine, but know I'll be listening even more closely. I can just take it away the moment it's done. And if you do activate it, well… Let's hope you're faster than you look."