#Guys I really love Magi Briana.

[beelieveinfandom]

Haunted and Hunted Chapter Four

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5               AO3 Link

AO3 is highly advised due to Tumblr having formatting issues.

“And you’re sure this won't kill me somehow?” Charlie asked.

  “Yes. Absolutely. If anything goes wrong we’ll stop at once, and even if we don’t, anything going unusually will activate this spell, instantly ending the ritual.” Renee was pointing at a ring of runes inside the arcane circle.

  The circle was, outside of the killswitch addition, a very simple one. A pentacle drawn in chalk on the hard cement floor with the five symbols of banishment at each of the star’s corners. It was the simplest reliable banishment spell possible, pretty much only able to work on consenting entities or those who lacked any sort of intent of their own.

  I worked pretty hard on that cancel button and I’m like, 80% sure it’ll be fine.

  You’re telling me this has a 20% chance of killing me‽

  I mean, maybe?

  I’m pretty much pulling numbers out of my ass here, to be quite honest.

  everything you say is so reassuring.

  Hey, I’m the one that advocated against this from the start.

  You wanted us to do nothing!

  I wanted us to wait for more data. My friend will get us the original summoning circle, and reverse engineering it will be way easier and safer than just guessing at what might work.

  But how long will that take? And how will your ‘friend’ even contact us, assuming they get the plans? We’re gonna be in the middle of the woods away from all electronics for a while.

  That’s hardly a concern. He’ll find a way; he’s quite crafty.

  Anyway.

  You’re the one at risk so it’s your decision. You don’t trust my friend? Fine. Try banishing me. Just know that there is danger involved.

  “Charlie?” Renee said, “are you ready for us to begin?”

  “Um,” Charlie said. “Sure. Let’s… Let’s get this over with.”

“Make sure to let us know if anything feels off.”

  “How am I supposed to know if something feels of if I don’t know what getting exorcised is suppose to feel like?”

  “Um…” Renee said, “we’ll go slowly. Try and imagine what a normal exorcism might feel like and let us know if this feels different.”

  “I’m having second thoughts. Actually, I think I’m probably on fifth or sixth thoughts by now.”

  “It’s okay to back out. We don’t have to do this.”

  “I’ll be the first to admit I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Vin said. “On the other hand, how much worse can shit actually get?”

  “That’s actually a good point,” Charlie said. “I already could easily die via possession, or get captured by creepy scientists, or like, trip on a rock and die. Why not add ‘death from good intentions’ to the list? Yeah, let’s do this!”

  Charlie walked into the center of the circle and sat down. Renee started chanting a simple chant in modern English. Older dialects and languages tended to be more powerful, but they were easier to fuck up and there was little need for making the ritual as powerful as possible.

  “Um,” Charlie said after a minute, “is it supposed to hurt? Like a lot? Like my skin’s on fire?”

  Renee stopped chanting at once. “No, it’s not supposed to hurt at all! Are you okay?”

  “Define ‘okay’,” Charlie said. “If your definition includes ‘feels like I just got a really bad sunburn but it’s kinda fading’ then yeah, I’m okay. Or at least as okay as I was before, which was already pushing the definition of ‘okay’.”

  “I’m sorry. It would seem that they did tie your skin into the ritual they used.” Renee sighed. “I have no idea where to go from here.”

  “Well, maybe mysterious computer friend will come through,” Charlie said. “If not, well, guess I’ll die.”

  “Charlie.” Renee met Charlie’s gaze. “You’re not going to die. There are still other things we can try.”

  “Really?” Charlie broke away from Renee’s eye contact, shifting zir gaze to the floor. “Like what?”

  “Ah...” Renee’s face passed through several expressions before settling on ‘student woken up when called upon to demonstrate a problem for the class’. “Well, we still have time to think of things we can try.”

  “Or maybe the situation is just boned and there is nothing we can do,” Vin said. “Like I hate to be that guy but sometimes shit’s just irrevocably fucked.”

  “Vin!”

  “What? We were all thinkin’ it. Someone had to unpack that shit from the back of their mind and put it on the table to be beheld in all its awful smelly glory.” Vin shrugged. “I still got a bad feeling; I don’t think we’re going to find something that will work.”

  “You still have a bad feeling even after we stopped the ritual?” Renee asked. “Are you sure it’s about Charlie at all?”

  He shrugged. “What part of ‘I don’t know a thing, my guy’ do you have trouble understanding?”

  “That’s not good.” Renee slithered around the chalk circle on the ground. “Maybe we should start moving.”

  “Yeah,” Vin said. “Maybe.”

  Cleaning the circle off the rough cement floor was easy, which was good because they were in a hurry and it was generally considered rude to leave ritual materials strewn about someone else’s place.

  Getting their things together was also pretty quick as they hadn’t had any reason to unpack much the night before. It took only a few minutes to add the few items that Marcus had given them to their things.

  Their footsteps echoed faintly through the otherwise silent early morning hallways as they went back through the same path that Marcus had led them through the day before. Walking through the dim corridors they saw no sign of their host, but they figured that she wouldn’t mind them disappearing without saying goodbye.

  The crisp outdoor air chilled their lungs as they left the building. They headed East - Marcus had said that it was the shortest way out of the forest and Renee wanted to scout out the area outside. She wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the woods yet - they didn’t have anywhere to go and the woods were large and secluded enough to be a decent place to hide - but she at least wanted a solid idea of what was beyond.

  Cliffs rose to either side of them as they walked. It made Renee nervous, but suggesting alternate paths didn’t alleviate the dark feeling that hung over Vin like a bad toupée, and this path seemed to be the easiest way East. The relative flatness and rocky nature of the ground suggested that they were in a dried out riverbed, and none of them were going to complain about having slightly less underbrush to navigate through.

  Renee was being careful. Vin’s intuition was telling them something was wrong and she was not going to let whatever fate had in store catch them unawares. She was almost entirely focused on her farsight, trusting in her companions to keep an eye on the immediate surroundings.

  Her first thought had been that something was happening at the facility, but when she checked she found the place utterly immersed in chaos. People were rushing out of the place, alarm lights were flashing, a small fire (normal and red/orange in appearance for once) was raging in one of the computer rooms. It seemed unlikely that they were going to be able try anything. She supposed it could be an elaborate ruse but it seemed unlikely that they would actually set their building on fire just in case she happened to check on them.

  So whatever was going to happen was already in the works. And was quite possibly unavoidable, judging from Vin’s current state.

  She supposed it was possible that whatever was going to happen had nothing to do with the facility at all, and that they were about to die to a supervolcano explosion or a meteor strike or something. There wasn’t really anything that they would be able to do about a natural disaster, and it would explain why no suggestions altered Vin’s intuition.

  She decided to stop thinking about that. There was no point wasting her time worrying about things she couldn’t do anything about.

  It was possible the small fire at the facility could rage out of control and burn the whole forest down. It was kinda dry. How dry did it even need to be to burn green wood anyway? She really should have studied more wilderness survival. Now they were all going to burn to death and she wouldn’t even know how impressed to be that the fire managed to spread.

  She decided to Stop Thinking About That. She wasn’t wasting her time worrying about things she couldn’t do anything about.

  She managed to go about a minute before checking back on the fire at the facility. It seemed to be smaller than it had been when she first noticed it. There were sprinklers on. They were probably going to wreck all the computer hardware in that room.

  She took a few breaths and shifted her focus away from the facility. The fire wasn’t going be a problem. There was no point watching the facility anymore. Whatever threat menaced them now was already on its way.

  The other day the doctor - Dana, their name had been Dana - had been adamant on getting someone involved who was qualified to deal with Tyrone. That was probably what was happening. Not a massive fire, not a supervolcano, just someone who had some way of tracking them and good enough mobility that they couldn’t be evaded with good intuition alone. Someone who would have a computer on them and wouldn’t be fooled by simple illusions.

  Renee still had no idea how, exactly, she was supposed to deal with this, but combed through the woods with her farsight anyway, figuring that if she could at least see the threat she might be able to better assess the situation.

  The group continued in silence for a ways. No one really felt like talking.

  The silence that hung over them wasn’t a comfortable one. The sense of dread that weighed down Vin had spread to everyone, and they were all just waiting to hear the grenade’s pin drop.

  And drop it most certainly did.

  There was nothing unusual about the patch of thin forest they were traversing through until the trees wavered and disappeared, revealing a clearing with a single short person grinning ahead of them.

  The group stopped suddenly, with Renee putting herself in front of the other two.

  Looking around, she noticed people with guns pointed towards them on the cliffs to either side.

  “You didn’t think you were the only one that could make illusions, did you?” the person said. Their skin was dark and their white hair reached just past the small of their back. They were dressed very formally, in well-fitting clothing that was far too clean for someone trekking through the forest to be wearing.

  “Oh, you really shouldn’t look so shocked, dear.” Their voice was high pitched and sounded sort of like someone attempting to talk with a German accent after having one described secondhand to them, which happened to be exactly what a modern Australian accent sounded like.

  “You didn’t actually think that a few simple illusions and a bit of luck could keep you from me, did you? Now, that’s just darling? ” they said, clapping their hands together. “Anyways, let’s get on with things, shall we?”

  A magicore floated to their hands from behind them. It was a smooth orb, covered with yellow lines of light that danced around at the magi’s touch. The magi made a few sweeping gestures, strumming the magicore as their hands moved around it, and then flicked both their wrists, causing a bright yellow light to shoot away from them at Charlie.

  Charlie barely had time to register the light before it hit zir, lifting zir off the ground and illuminating zir body in a blinding flash. This only lasted a moment before ze fell out of the air and consciousness.

  Alcor managed to land in a manner that didn’t even vaguely resemble elegant, but at least didn’t hurt the body at all.

  “So you cannot be sedated, such a shame,” they said. “I take it that now I’m dealing you and not some little child?”

  “I’m amazed you still have the resources left to bother with us.”

  “Oh, they paid me in advance darling; I couldn’t care less about what happens to them.”

  “You might want to double check that that transfer actually went through.”

  “Who cares . What matters is that this is you! Oh, how exciting this all is. I’ve been waiting for years for this moment, you know. Admittedly, this is not quite how I saw this encounter going, but you can’t let a few details get you down, am I right?”

  Alcor stared at the magi.

  “Let’s do introductions, shall we? Not that you need any introductions, your reputation precedes you, but I’m afraid mine does not. At least, not in your current state. Normally I imagine you have no need for introductions at all. Must make social encounters very convenient. Anyway, I’m Magi Briana Hurtzog, she/her, at your service. Well, not at your service per say, but you know what I mean.”

  “Am I supposed to be pleased to meet you or something?” Alcor all but snarled. “Because I really cannot fully encapsulate how much that is not the case.”

  “How could you say such a thing? This scar goes deep into my heart.” She dramatically covered her heart with a hand. “Anyways you should come with me and we can go get you out of that ridiculous body.”

  “And then what?” Alcor crossed Charlie’s arms.

  “I’m not going to lie,” she said. “What happens next is not exactly in your favor. But it will be a great learning opportunity for everybody involved and I think we can all agree that that is what really matters.”

  “And what about the kids?” Alcor asked. “What happens to them?”

  “What? Them? I don’t care about them . They can go back to prancing through the woods or whatever it is that they were doing. I’m not their babysitter.” She waved her hand absently. “That said, if you don’t come along nicely, well, I don’t care about them. Or specifically what will happen to them. What all of these armed guards will do to them. I’m going to have them killed is what I’m saying here.”

  “No, I got that.”

  “Oh good. One can never be sure.”

  “I’m many things, but a moron isn’t one of them,” he said dryly.

  “Some people have trouble with the subtext, darling.” She spread her fingers wide. “There is no shame in that.”

  “Do you people have any tricks up your sleeve besides threatening children?”

  “Oh!” Her face lit up. “I could also threaten you directly if you’d prefer.”

  Briana’s hands spun around her magicore, tiny bolts of electricity reaching between it and her fingers.

  She snapped, pointing at Alcor.

  It was like being slammed into a wall. Pain - and not the interesting kind - blossomed through his very being. The world spun. He stumbled backwards, or maybe just thought he did because the body didn’t seem to actually change position.

  “Not very pleasant, I hope? Just a little something I’ve been working on in my spare time. That was roughly one percent of what it’s capable of. If my calculations are correct I imagine that at full power it would be capable of rendering you incapacitated for a number of hours.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you start with that?” he growled.

  “Language, darling. There are children about. As for your question, I was hoping we could keep this civil and not have to resort to threats of torture.”

  “So instead you open with threats of child murder.”

  “Exactly, darling. Now I think we’ve wasted enough time with all of this chitter chatter. Shall we be going, or are you going to make things unnecessarily difficult?”

 Renee looked around. She was not going to panic this time. There was a way out, she knew that. She just had to find it. She was smart. Clever. She could do this. Would do this.

  Breathe in

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Breathe out

  Alcor was still talking, having taken a few steps towards the magi. It was hard to say if he had a plan or was just testing the waters. She had to assume that he didn’t have a plan. Worst case scenario, there would be redundancy. Who was she kidding, worst case scenario they were all going to BE FINE. This was Fine. She just needed a plan.

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Breathe in

  She was fine.

  Vin was casually looking at the gunpeople periodically spaced around the cliff’s edge.

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Breathe out.

  Good. Now go talk to Vin.

  “How are you so calm about all this?” Renee whispered, more harshly than she intended. It wasn’t what she intended to say, but upon reflection she couldn’t figure out what she meant to say outside of ‘something else’.

  “What?” he replied. “It’s not like we were going to remain valuable assets forever. This was pretty inevitable.”

  “Not it isn’t! We’ve gotten so far. Their building is on fire, for Pete’s sake. We just need to find a way out, it’s going to be okay. We are going to be okay.”

Breathe.

“Hey Renee?” Vin said.

  “What?”

  “I just wanted to say, thanks for everything. These last few days,” he laughed, “okay, these last few days have been a fucking shitshow, but it’s a shitshow that I’m really glad I got the opportunity to experience. I never would have gotten out of there on my own. If it wasn’t for you...  I didn’t really have any memories from before, you know, so just having this time out here, having gotten to see and do all this shit before I die… It means a lot to me.”

  “Vin, stop talking like that, we’re going to be fine -”

  “This is fine,” he shrugged. “Well, it’s kinda bullshit that they are going to kill you too. I’m sorry I can’t help you there; someone as great as you really does deserve better.”

  “Vin please, no one is going to die. We just need a plan.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be the realistic one? We’ve seen way too much. The only reason we aren’t dead yet is they want to make sure that Tyrone’s pacified first so he doesn’t get mad enough to explode Charlie and burninate everyone.”

  “But hey!” He beamed. “Look on the bright side. This is by far the coolest thing to ever happen to us, and I don’t know about you but I’ve been dying to participate in something this dramatic.”

  “How can you -” She shook her head. “No. We are going to get out of this alive. We just… can’t you feel anything about the future? There has to be something.”

  “Nah. I ain’t got shit right now.”

  “Please! You have to have something. Anything! It just... even some little random impulse.”

  “Hey, you know that I can’t control this shit.” He laughed completely mirthlessly. “And I really don’t think you want me to follow my impulses right now. Not really any need to rush it at this point, anyway.”

  “Vin come on, there’s something. There has to be something. What about what they were having you do back at the lab? You had some amount of control over that, didn’t you?”

  “Renee! I can’t just…”

  “You haven’t even tried! You’ve said yourself that you don’t know how this works, the extents of your capabilities!”

  “Fine.” He rolled his eyes and then closed them. “Look, I’m making my best constipated face while wishing really hard on -”

  His eyes went wide, pupils constricted to nothing.

  “Oh fuck.”

  The scar along his forehead shot open, his third eye dilated to blackness.

  Vin crumpled.

  Collapsed.

  Renee froze. Balled her hands, nails drawing blood. Reached out, grabbing, pulling him to her chest.

  “I’m so sorry. Fuck I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you. I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry. Please say something. Please be okay. You have to be okay.”

  She was shaking. Holding him. Tighter, probably, than was wise. Lower torso curling in on itself, pushing and flipping. Slamming against the ground. Her eyes raced around, looking for answers, a way out, something, anything . For.

  The gunpeople were alarmed by something, shuffling around, taking aim. Had she made too large of a scene? She wrapped herself around Vin as much as she could. She had a lot of body mass; she could probably take a shot or two, right?

  She again looked for any sort of out. For a sign. For a plan.

  She could… she could probably project pain with her illusions. Pain was a sensory thing.

  That would have to make aiming harder, right?

  The gunpeople weren’t aiming at her and Vin. They were focused farther away.

  At Charlie.

  No.

  At Tyrone.

  He was next to the magi.

  When did that happen?

  He didn’t seem to notice the guns. He didn’t seem to notice the danger he was in.

  That he was putting Charlie in.

  The magi was weaving her arm through the air, casting some spell.

  Tyrone was so close. He took the arm.

  The gun people were going to-

  Renee closed her eyes, keeping the location of the gunpeople in her mind.

  She thought about needles. Of scalpels. Of being huddled on a bed too small for her as something ripped through her brain, through her insides.

  Screams broke her concentration. The people with guns were screaming.

  She was doing that. Oh god that was her she -

  No.

  She was doing this. This was the plan now. They were screaming and she had to do this.

  The magi pulled her arm back.

  “Really?” she said. “I think I can manage to handle all the might and physical prowess of an overweight child, darling.”

  He was smiling. Baring teeth. Lips stretched farther than they should.

  He pushed his claws into her arm. Through the thick fingers and useless nails of the body that contained him. He pushed , sinking into her arm, sinking past her skin, past her flesh, past her bones, into Her.

  She realized what he was doing. All her cockiness evaporated in an instant, confidence replaced by desperate anger.

  She yanked her arm back, shouting with no words but purely emotion.

  Her skin, her flesh, her bones: they easily pulled out of the weak and bloody grip of the child.

  His claws were still gripping her Arm, though.

  And without her Arm, her skin, flesh, and bones fell limp at her shoulder.

  Alcor.

  Pulled.

  She was screaming. She was panic. She was terror. The emotions filled Alcor, rushing through him like fire. It had been far too long since he had done anything like this. It had been far too long since he let himself do anything fun .

  She was writhing in agony, her scream becoming the air he breathed. She genuinely seemed to think that somehow, with the right combination of movements and actions, she could possibly get out of this.

  Watching her final sliver of hope die was hilarious.

  Her soul was everything. Even the small amount he consumed through his grip was freedom from the tight compressed confinement that he hadn’t realized he’d been feeling. Energy rushed through him as a wave, giddy lightning that tingled and vibrated and pushed out all the stress and frustration and utter bullshit of the past. It was taking a beautiful, intricate mechanism and slamming it on the ground, watching it shatter into something new and even more beautiful. It was jumping on a table in a crowd and screaming . It was overturning a picnic table into a river. It was standing up and decking someone after years of silent discomfort. It was freedom, true freedom. It was the promise that this moment could be truly wonderful if you would just let it.

  Who cared what these stupid mortals had been trying to do? He was Alcor! He was the single strongest entity in the whole dimension! They only existed because he permitted it, because they were entertaining. Why should he give a fuck about what ridiculous things they did to each other? About what they did on their comically absurd destiny to ensure their own destruction. Why the fuck had he let any of their petty bullshit tie him down?

  He was laughing. He was hysterical. Why wouldn’t he be? What did he care if his body ran out of air? It wasn’t like he needed it.

WRONG.

  He stopped, smile fading from his face. The magi reduced to a twitching pile of limbs, her soul frozen in his firm grasp.

  Oh. that was right. He cared. Him with his stupid boring killjoy self.

  He was Alcor. He was the twin star, the brother, the gruncle, and he was strong enough to ignore the temptation of one measly soul.

  One really, really tasty soul. That was right there. Bright. Beautiful. Perfect in every way, really. Tingly and light and -

  There would be other souls. Better ones.

  But there was also this soul right here, and really the future wasn’t real anyway, so…

  That would hurt Charlie. The body was absolutely not going to survive having that much energy going through it.

  Ze was already dying, though. Would it really be worth it to waste such a wonderful opportunity if ze was just going to die anyway ? Really, who cared about this one person?

  Him. He cared. He absolutely cared. He pushed the soul away from his - from Charlie’s body, a tiny spark flickering from where he rejected the energy he already absorbed from it.

  He stared at the cyan flame.

  Well now.

  It wasn’t much of a consolation prize, but if it worked it would be absolutely hilarious.

  Charlie’s face resumed its unnatural grin.

  He pushed, ever so gently, on the soul. Its energy was already connected to him so it really should take no effort at all to…

  The soul exploded in brilliant fire, racing through the valley with the slightest command. Up the cliffs it raced, searing through the rocks, silicon rich sediments melting into hard and rough glass. It was at the top in an instant. At the gunpeople, who were for some reason a disorganized mess, in an instant. It burned -

  That would be crossing a line, wouldn’t it.

  It melted their guns. And burned their clothes off. People didn’t need clothes to survive. Or hair.

  The remaining energy of the soul roared around him like a maelstorm. It was screaming. The tiny bond that connected it to him was a dagger lancing through him - the real him - not the body he wore. It was wonderfully satisfying and delightfully real in a way most magic just wasn’t and -

  TYRONE!

  Alcor froze, confused, at the sound that echoed around his mind. Tyrone. That meant something to him, right? He looked away from the beautiful storm of fire that danced around him for a source of the interruption.

  There was a person close by. The cloud of fear around them was so thick it was almost impossible to see them through it.

  “That’s enough,” they (Renee Iris Etheridge, ~16.853 years old, dead in - ) said.

  This mortal was trying to tell him what to do.

  This mortal was trying to tell him what to do.

  Something was wrong. Obviously. He was going to have to teach her a lesson.

  No.

  Something else was wrong.

  He knew the exact time and place of Renee’s death.

  His omniscience was trickling in.

  His omniscience was trickling through.

  Charlie's dreamscape wasn’t strong enough anymore.

  He had forgotten about Charlie.

  A quick internal check revealed that Charlie was still around, but ze felt faint. Which was entirely his fault. He had forgotten about Charlie. He -

  “That’s enough, ” Renee said, surprisingly firmly for how much fear swirled around her. “They aren’t a threat anymore. You can let that go.”

  For a moment Alcor had no idea what she was talking about. Then he followed her gaze upward, at the soul that he had entrapped.

  He stared at the spinning vortex of soul above him. It was screaming just like Henry had screamed. He couldn’t - wouldn’t - do that. Even if the person did deserve it. Wasn’t going to make it beg for the mercy of centuries of digestion.

  He.

  He let go of the soul. Watched it practically explode in order to dissipate away. Felt its screams fade.

  He was going to fucking slaughter some cults when this was all over.

  He let Charlie’s body relax.

  Renee was curled up around Vin staring wide eyed at Alcor. She was trembling slightly, clutching Vin like a lifesaver.

  Vin didn’t look well.

  “What was that?” Renee asked, leaning away from Alcor, putting the bulk of herself between them. “I could feel that with senses I can’t even… What was that?”

  He paused. There was definitely a wrong answer here.

  “As you know, living organisms, especially those with higher levels of cognizance, produce significant amounts of magical energy from their emotions and intent. I just realized that this was an external source of power I could use without channeling it through Charlie’s body.”

  “Was that her soul ?” Renee pushed herself a titch farther away from the demon.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s going to happen to it now?”

  “It’s going to need a little time to regenerate the energy I burned,” Alcor said. “But it should reincarnate just like any other soul removed from its body.”

  “You’re not a ghost, are you,” she said quietly.

  “I never claimed to be one.”

  “What are you?

  He smiled. “I think that you are a very smart girl with a lot of evidence at her disposal and probably shouldn’t ask questions when you don’t want to know the answer.”

  She kept looking at him.

  “Now, do you have the first aid kit that Marcus gave us? I fucked up Charlie’s hand pretty bad back there.” Which was really putting it mildly. Charlie's right palm, where Alcor had pushed through, resembled a failed attempt to cook hamburger more than it did a hand. The skin was badly and unevenly torn, there was uneven charring all over, and it was so bloody that assessing the extent of the damage was impossible.

  “Right,” she said, uncurling to get access to her bag. “Right.”

  Renee shifted through the contents of her pack. She had thought that she had put things away neatly, but the inside was a mess.

  “Why are you helping us?” she asked, looking up.

  “Because I want to. Which is pretty much the reason I do anything, really.”

  She pulled the first aid pack out of the mess. “That is not... reassuring.”

  Alcor sat down and put the first aid kit in Charlie’s lap, picking though it. “It isn’t exactly new information. I’ve been pretty open about the fact that I could leave at any time so long as I didn’t mind killing Charlie.”

  “I know that, but I guess I hadn’t really internalized it.” She watched as Alcor cleaned the wound. “Despite what you said, it has felt like you were stuck in the same boat as the rest of us. But you’re only here as long as you want to be. I’ll admit, it makes me nervous. That you might stop wanting to help us. That you could just get tired of all this and leave, taking Charlie’s life with you.”

  “I’m not willing to kill Charlie. That isn’t likely to change.” He covered Charlie’s hand with a skin growth spray. “And I’m confident that the friend I contacted will be able to help. Not just with Charlie and my thing, but with getting all of us past this. I may not be stuck here, but I am still in the same boat as you - and we’re going to hit shore soon. Speaking of which -”

  Alcor walked over to Magi Briana’s body. Body being the key word - it was not a corpse. One might assume that a body, upon having its soul violently ripped out, might die. One would be wrong. A body doesn’t need a soul to survive. A body needs a soul to be a person. From the body formerly belonging to Magi Briana’s perspective, all that had happened over the past few minutes was that a child gripped its arm with all the strength that a child doesn’t have and it suddenly found itself in the market for a new a tenant. The biohazardous blood from Charlie’s wound was closer to being a threat to the body than anything Alcor had intentionally done.

  The body didn’t react to Alcor’s approach. Giving a shit about a literal demon coming towards you while looking like it wants something was the business of a person, which was no longer the body’s problem as of a minute ago.

  Alcor took the headset from the body. It, unsurprisingly, did not resist. It didn’t do anything. Soulless bodies were boring .

  “Are you seriously leaving Charlie’s hand like that?” Renee asked before Alcor could say anything into the microphone. “You can’t just spray skin growth formula on tissue that’s that badly damaged. You need to treat the injury first.”

  “Do you know how to treat something this bad?” Alcor asked.

  “When it’s this bad is when you seek medical attention.” She shook her head. “Actually, you should go to a doctor even if it’s a lot better than this. But I can at least make a dressing for it, make sure it stays moist. Let me see it.”

  She carefully set Vin down next to her.

  Alcor offered her the hand, which she took and started cleaning more thoroughly.

  “Hey kid,” Alcor said into the microphone.

  The headset was an old fashioned two way radio. It was specifically designed to only use one frequency. The computer on it was so simple that calling it a computer was like calling chihuahua an apex predator. From a logical standpoint, there should be no way it could be infected by a computer virus, as there was really nothing to infect. The Alcor Virus realized this, decided that he didn’t much care for that line of logic, and infected it anyway.

  “Hey Dad,” the virus said. “Guess who has no thumbs and fucked up?”

  “What happened?”

  “They figured out it was me almost as soon as I started doing anything,” the virus said. “Which isn’t surprising; I think they were expecting me. Anyway the long and short of it is they destroyed the servers that had the information you need before I could get it.”

  Alcor pinched the bridge of Charlie's nose with zir good hand. “I’m starting to think that they want me to kill them in the most gruesome way possible.”

  “It’s not entirely lost, though: I have located a backup. Unfortunately, my ability to access it depends on the cooperation of a human person. I think I should be able to make it work, though.”

  “We should plan for what happens if you can’t.”

  “For sure. What chance of success do you think you’d have of fixing this on your own?”

  “Fairly low.” Alcor sighed. “We’ve determined they’ve incorporated zir skin into the binding ritual but we don't know any details about what they did besides that. If we actually had the skin things might be easier, but we don’t.”

  “Why don’t you go get it?”

  Alcor raised Charlie’s eyebrows. “You’re suggesting we go back?”

  “Why not? Thanks to me and the literal fire the place is pretty well cleared out.”

  “Right. Renee mentioned that earlier. Why exactly was the place on fire?”

  “They started it,” the Alcor Virus said. “Some moron wanted to be very sure I couldn’t get at those files, I guess. And they weren’t very careful about the surroundings. It’s died down by now, but the combination of that and what I was doing mean that the place is pretty empty now.”

  “And you can make sure it stays that way?”

  “I pretty much tripped every alarm they had. And since they have no way of knowing if I just tripped an alarm or actually broke something, releasing dangerous quantities of ionizing radiation or carbon monoxide or one of the other half dozen things they were monitoring, it’s going to take more than a day or two for them to determine if it’s safe to actually enter the place. Assuming that they can even get there, which I plan on making hard for them. Did you know that it takes about forty miles for the single road leading to the facility to connect with anything?”

  Alcor smiled. “What are you planning on doing with it?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I was thinking of taking control of a forklift and stacking some cars on top of each other to make a pileup. There’s also a logging company nearby so it might be easier to just pile some trees on the road, but that’s less fun.”

  “Those both sound like they’d work just fine.”

  “There’s also a satellite launch happening two states over in a few hours. I’m pretty sure I could hijack the rocket and crash it into the street. They specifically design them to not turn around mid air and crash into the ground, so getting it to do that with any precision would be a challenge, but where’s the fun in life without a little challenge?”

  Alcor shook Charlie’s head slightly. “That sounds like it would likely generate more attention then we would want.”

  “You’re probably right - but consider - I would get to hack and crash a rocket for the greater good.”

  “Do whatever you think is best, and have your fun, just make sure it works. I don’t want another molasses incident here.”

  “In my defense,” the Alcor Virus said, “the molasses incident was hilarious.”

  “No one is questioning the hilarity of the incident,” Alcor clarified. “I’m just pointing out that it didn’t accomplish what we wanted in the slightest.”

  “Which did sort of make the whole thing even more funny.”

  “That may be true,” Alcor said with a smile. “But we really can’t afford that sort of mishap right now. Charlie’s life is very much on the line, and if people get through on that road, Vin and Renee are in danger as well.”

  “I suppose I could find a different reason to crash a rocket…”

  “Do you really need a reason?”

  “It’s more funny that way.”

  “Well let me know when you’ve blocked that road off, alright?” Alcor said. “I should bring Renee back into the loop.”

  “Will do,” the virus said. “It will probably be a little, there’s nothing very close that I can infect.”

  “I take it your friend didn’t get the ritual diagram,” Renee said, gently wrapping a bandage around Charlie’s hand.

  “No,” Alcor sighed. “They destroyed the digital data before he could. He’s located a backup but will need to get someone to cooperate with him in order to get it.”

  “And I’m sure he’s just great at getting people to cooperate with him.”

  “It really will depend on what sort of person has backup. If it’s the same person that decided that the correct solution for a data breach was to set a server on fire, he’s going to have to be careful. If it’s a more reasonable person… well, he has a lot he can offer a reasonable person.”

  “And in the meantime you’re suggesting we go back,” Renee stated.

  “We need Charlie’s skin,” Alcor said. “The facility is going to be a better place to do a ritual than anywhere else in this woods. There also might be physical documentation on the ritual they used that my friend couldn’t access. The place is empty right now, and my friend is going to block the road ensuring it stays that way, so it should be safe.”

  “I’m not going to say you’re wrong, but I don’t like it.” Renee hugged her arms tightly to her chest. “I never want to go back to that awful place.”

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Alcor pointed out. “I can probably manage on my own at this point.”

  “I don’t want to abandon Charlie,” Renee said resolutely. “And if there are people still there, you’ll need my illusions.”

  “I still have my fire.”

  “How much more fire can you produce without further aggravating Charlie's condition?” Renee asked. “Especially after that stunt you just pulled?”

  Alcor didn’t respond, thinking about how loose the bond between him and Charlie felt. Any fire at all was probably a bad idea.

  “If there is anyone left, you’ll need my illusions,” she said firmly.

  “I’m certainly not going to argue against help,” Alcor said. “I just don’t want you to feel pressured into doing something you don’t want to do.”

  She picked up Vin again. “My anxiety will eat me alive if I stay back while you two go ahead. I’ll feel better doing something, even if it’s largely unnecessary, than I will if I do nothing. Even if that means going back.”

  “Alright then,” Alcor said. “Let’s get on with it. We should see if there’s a way up the cliffs. They probably have some kind of vehicle that we could use, or at least tracks we could follow.”

  They walked along the cliff face, looking for a path.

  “In case I missed saying it before, thank you for earlier,” Alcor said.

  “For what?”

  “For stopping me.” Alcor paused before continuing. “If I had been left to my own devices… I’m not sure Charlie would have survived.”

  “It was nothing,” Renee said, avoiding Alcor’s gaze.

  “It was extraordinary. You were terrified, I was putting on what was likely the single greatest demonstration of destructive power you had ever seen, you had no idea how I would react, and you drew attention to yourself to call me out anyway.”

  “Someone had to do something, and I didn’t think the either the dead woman or the two unconscious people were like going to seize the initiative.”

  “Speaking of which, what happened to Vin anyway?”

  Renee’s gaze dropped. “He’ll be fine in an hour or two. He tried to find a way out and ended up looking too far forward. It’s my fault; I shouldn’t have pushed him after he said that he didn’t have any intuition on what to do next. I knew that this is what happens when he tries to control his abilities and I told him to do it anyway. I guess I thought that if the situation was dire enough adrenaline might get him through it? Or more likely I wasn’t thinking about what the consequences would be for him at all, only about what I wanted.”

  “What you wanted was for all of us to get out alive,” Alcor said gently. “You didn’t know I was capable of doing what I did. There was a chance that Vin could have been the straw to tip the scales in our favor, and you acted on that chance. If the only options you know about are to risk putting Vin through this or to die, risking this is the right choice.”

  “But was it really my choice to make?” Renee asked. “I’m not the one who got hurt.”

  “He was presumably also aware of what happens when he pushes himself and tried it anyway. He made just as much of a choice as you did.”

  “I don’t think he was actually trying to look into the future, though.” Renee was slithering slowly. “He was being really flippant about it, and he seemed genuinely surprised when his third eye opened.”

  “It is possible that he only did it because of you. That doesn’t mean you made a bad choice.”

  “He seemed so content,” Renee said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so relaxed and peaceful as he was when he was sure that he was going to die.”

  “Renee,” Alcor said. “Vin’s severely depressed. His relationship with death is badly skewed.”

  “Is it really our place to say that it’s a bad end for him, though?” Renee said quietly. “It’s what he wants. It feel selfish to say that he has to live because I want him to.”

  Alcor took a deep breath before speaking. “Look, I know you feel like a shitty person who selfishly hurt her friend, but a) you’re not and b) even if you were that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong about everything. Yes, Vin wants to die. Vin also wants to be eating chocolate at all times. If you feel comfortable denying his desire to constantly consume confectionaries you should feel fine denying his desire to die. He’s sick, and unless things worked very differently at the facility than I’m assuming they did, he’s completely untreated and spent most of his life in a triggering situation. I’m not going to say that death is never a solution - there is a reason assisted suicide is a thing - but death is a very final solution. It’s what you do when nothing else works, when you’ve expended all your options, the pain is unbearable and can’t be stopped. It’s not what you do when you haven’t even tried a single method of treatment.”

  “But he’s not going to be able to get treated!” Renee cried. “We can’t even go to a farm in the middle of the night without disguising our faces; we’re not going to be able to walk into a psychiatrist’s office, assuming we could even find someone who does in-person visitations.”

  “Sure you will. Remember we aren’t alone anymore; I brought someone else into it. This could go very public if we want it to. Or we could shut it down quietly and blackmail them into leaving you alone. Either way, you’re not going to spend the rest of your life hiding in the woods. Unless you want to, of course, in which case I’m not going to stop you. Live the dream.”

  “You’re saying we can put this whole ordeal behind us, just like that?” Renee said.

  “You don’t sound especially excited about the prospect.”

  She shifted her grip on Vin. “On top of the fact that I don’t think I can say with any degree of sincerity that I believe you, it feels wrong. It’s too easy; there’s too many places for it to go astray.”

  “There are probably considerably fewer moving parts than you’re assuming.” He smiled. “I can pretty much guarantee that if we get through this alive I’ll be able to clean your records.”

  “At what cost?” Renee asked. “What organization would be pulling these strings and what guarantee do we have that they aren’t going to want to hold this favor over us?”

  Alcor laughed. “There isn’t a nefarious organization. There’s really just the two of us, and you’re already up to your ears in my crap already.”

  Renee cocked an eyebrow. “There’s just two of you and you’re confident that you can both make this go public and give us our lives back?”

  “Well,” Alcor said, “it’s mostly just him, if I’m being entirely honest. But he’s pulled much bigger stunts than this before.”

  Renee frowned. “Unless your friend is like the Alcor Virus or -”

  “Wow,” Alcor interrupted. “That was a really good guess.”

  “What?”

  Alcor was grinning widely. “I didn’t think you’d figure that out until you two were talking.”

  “What‽” Renee was looking around, as if she could find a more sensical universe hiding behind a tree.

  “But you got it nigh instantaneously.”

  She focused on him with a disbelieving stare. “Are you trying to tell me you are friends with the Alcor Virus?”

  “You were the one who suggested it in the first place.”

  “I was being facetious!” she cried. “Wait a minute, yesterday you said - did you program the Alcor Virus ???”

  Alcor just grinned.

  “Just to be clear,” she said, “we are referring to the program that took over the entire world's nuclear arsenal and threatened to use them if a series of increasingly asinine demands weren’t met?”

  “Yeah,” Alcor said dreamily. “That was a good time. We managed to get global nuclear disarmament in under a day.”

  “You’re telling me the goal of the Tretalelin Incident was disarmament?”

  Alcor waggled Charlie’s good hand. “About eighty percent of it was about disarmament, twenty percent was just about fucking with the global powers.”

  “Well, that worked out great in the long run.”

  “We had a good two centuries of zero active nuclear arsenals. I would say that’s pretty decent for a day’s work.”

  Renee shook her head. “So our lives are now in the metaphorical hands of one of the most infamously unpredictable and trollish entities ever. How far we’ve come.”

  “Oh he won’t do anything to seriously fuck with you if I ask him not to.”

  She glared. “Are you actually planning on asking him not to, though?”

  Alcor put up a finger. “That’s a very good question.”

  “That is not an answer.”

  Alcor put Charlie’s palms up. “Where’s the fun in life if you don’t have a surprise every once in awhile?”

  “I’m starting to get the feeling that we have very different ideas about what fun is.”

  “I bet Vin would agree with me,” Alcor said. “He has a sense of humor.”

  “Vin doesn’t take the future seriously because he doesn’t believe he’ll live to see it. Having him on your side here isn’t doing you any favors.”

  “You’re just jealous that it’s two to one.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I bet Charlie would be on my side.”

  “Well, that’s just because Charlie’s a square.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “That’s because you’re also a square.” Alcor stopped and pointed at a bit of the cliff. “Oh, hey, this looks pretty trampled. Wanna try ascending here?”

  The trampled path was at a gentler incline than the cliff around it. It was still pretty steep, certainly steeper than Renee would like to scale while carrying Vin, but it looked manageable enough.

  Renee nodded.

  As they climbed Renee turned to Alcor. “I can’t think of anything that can rip out the soul of a living, non-consenting person.”

  “I normally wouldn’t be able to. But I’ve done practically nothing these past few days but gather my energy up. I could do a lot right now, or at least I could before I went and did the thing.”

  “Just how much energy are you absorbing?” Renee asked, looking at Alcor like he was some kind of large wild carnivore. “The amount of energy it would take to do that is absurd.”

  “Do you know how much energy it takes to burn through the dreamscape of something with the cognitive strength of a selkie? It’s not a small number.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “It’s actually sort of lucky that I ended up wrecking zir hand,” Alcor said. “It takes a lot more energy to achieve a physical effect than it does to do things in the mindscape. If I hadn’t had so much of the energy I was channeling through zir push through zir physical body...  Things could have been very bad.”

  “Well, that sure is something.”

  They picked their way up the cliff side.

  “So,” Renee said. “If I’m to believe the words of our former captors, you’ve killed enough to gain a reputation for it.”

  “I’m not sure why you would trust anything those people have said, but yes, I have,” Alcor said. “What about it?”

  “Do you,” she paused. “Do you feel guilty about that?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Alcor reached the cliff’s top and extended Charlie’s uninjured hand down to Renee.

  “Sometimes?” she said, taking it.

  “Sometimes,” he repeated, helping her up. “Sometimes I’m not really in a place where I can feel guilt. Sometimes I feel fully justified in my actions. Sometimes the weight of everything I’ve done is completely immobilizing.”

“Do you feel guilty about it currently?”

  “Some of it,” he said. “Most of it. Some of it feels pretty justified, though.”

  “Like the magi just now?”

  “Yes. That was definitely an unusual occurrence, but I’m not going to lose any metaphorical sleep over killing someone who was prepared to murder kids to use me as a science project,” Alcor said. “And although the circumstance surrounding the encounter was obviously unique, and the ending was rather extraordinary, there wasn’t anything too special about her, really.

  “The way my existence works…” Alcor continued. “I see the worst side of people. I see a lot of the worst side of people. And even though I also deal with perfectly decent people, when you constantly see the extent of what horrors people are capable of… It’s a fight to keep believing that people are worth grieving over. That I should feel guilty at all. And sometimes, it’s a losing battle. And sometimes, it’s too hard and I just isolate myself.”

  “So why do you care, then? Why bother fighting just so you can feel bad about what you’ve done?”

  “Because,” Alcor said slowly, “I like people. Admittedly, not always in a healthy way, or a way that’s good for the people involved, but I pretty much always like people. The world would be awfully boring without them. And I want to be liked back, to deserve to be liked.”

  “At least, sometimes you do?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I really don’t care what anyone else thinks of me. But I kind of hate that part of me.” He laughed without any humor whatsoever. “Of course, I also hate that I hate that, hate that I feel the need to get validation from others, hate how weak and pathetic that is. And then I hate that I feel that way and... I’m a bit of a mess, honestly.”

  “Have you ever considered therapy?” Renee asked. “You sound like you could really use it.”

  “Hah! Yeah that would go great. ‘Yes, hello, you can call me Tyrone, I’m a hundred times your age, good with kids, and I’ve almost certainly killed more people than you’ve ever met’.” He sighed. “Actually I have tried therapy before. It didn’t go great. There’s too much that I just can’t tell someone I don’t know that well, and at the end of the day, therapy is about changing what you can and accepting what’s left and I can’t do that. I can’t change what I am. I want to - god do I want to - but it’s too much a part of me.  And I don’t want to accept it - I don’t want to be okay with doing terrible things because that’s when I do even worse things.”

  “Just how many people have you killed here?”

  “I haven’t exactly been running a tally. It’s not a small number though, I can tell you that much.” He paused. “Most of it was an accident though, for what little that’s worth.”

  “How do you accidentally kill more people than you can count? Are you secretly a politician or something?”

  “No, I didn’t poison a water supply or whatever. I was a dumb angry kid and I threw a hissy fit with more collateral damage than I realized was possible. I didn’t know my own strength at that point, and a whole lot of innocent people paid the price.”

  “That sounds terrible. I’m sorry,” she said, unsure how else to respond.

  “It was,” Alcor said, pointedly ignoring the part of him that found it hilarious.

  The silence that settled over the two was like an especially itchy blanket on a hot summer night.

  Renee focused on picking her way through the underbrush.  The path was well trampled, making it much easier to traverse than the path leading to the encounter had been. She kind of wished it was harder, that it would demand more of her attention. As it was, it left her with little to do mentally other than contemplate everything she just learned, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to do that just yet. She just wished she had some sort of distraction.

  As if on a cue, Alcor stopped in front of her.

  “Well, this isn’t what I had in mind, but it will probably do,” he said.

  Renee lifted herself up a little to see over Charlie’s frame. Ahead of them, scattered around the area’s sparse trees, was a pack of parked motorcycles. They looked relatively new, despite the layer of dirt that coated them. That was about all Renee could assess from them, as she knew about as much about motorcycles as she did how to feel about Tyrone, which was an almost impressive amount of ignorance to have about a relatively common object.

  Renee slithered about the area, getting a more solid idea about what was there. The motorcycles were the only things she could see that were left behind. There was nothing she could see that could practically transport something her size.

  “They really weren’t planning on taking Vin and me back, were they?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it, no.”

  “He was right,” she said. “They were planning on killing us.”

  “Probably. I could have told you some very dangerous things by now.”

  Alcor walked up to one of the motorcycles. It was still on: apparently they didn’t expect the encounter to last very long. Which, Alcor supposed, wasn’t technically an inaccurate assumption.

  Experimentally, he got on one. It was a little large for Charlie’s body, but not unworkably so.

  "Think you can get on one of these?"

  "You want me to ride a motorcycle," Renee said. "What with my zero legs and four meters of torso."

  "I was more wondering if you would be physically capable of mounting one. I might be able to tow you," Alcor said. "I want to get back to the facility quickly; getting me out of Charlie as soon as possible is more important than ever."

  "Can you even tow a motorcycle with another motorcycle?"

  "I don't see why not," Alcor said.

  "You can, so long as you have a towline," the Alcor Virus said in Alcor’s ear. "There should be one in the repair kit in the storage area under the seat."

  Alcor shuffled through the storage area’s contents. It seemed to be mostly standardized stuff, but there was a small jar that contained a dead dragonfly and a centipede. The repair kit was easy to find; it was a neatly labeled box that took up a majority of the space.

  "Is this it?" Alcor asked, pulling a strap out of the kit.

  "You realize that you left the only camera for miles with the Magi, right? You could have just pulled out an irate alpaca and I wouldn't know so long as it was very quiet."

  "Right. It's a thick strap with a Y shaped fork at about one third of its length, around 5 meters long."

  "That's it. You're going to want to tie each end of the Y to your footpegs, and lead it around the handlebars and have Renee hold it with her left hand. She's going to be your breaks, which is fun because she’s only going to be able to use the handbrake."

  "I think I understand how this works." Alcor started to tie the towline to the footpegs."You willing to try getting on one?"

  "Sure. Why not. Have the naga ride a motorcycle," Renee said. "It’s hardly the most absurd thing to happen today."

  She slithered up to the nearest bike, pushed her upper torso over the seat, and wrapped her lower torso around it. Her torso drooped along the sides of the bike, with her weight resting on the fenders, pushing them close to the tires. Vin rested somewhat awkwardly between her and the handlebar. She had never been more grateful her friend was so small.

  “So how are we going to take this out of park without instantly tipping over?”

  “There are stabilizers for low speed maneuvering,” the Alcor Virus said. “I can easily activate them.”

  Alcor relayed the virus’ message as he hooked the strap around the front of the bike and looped it around the left handlebar a couple times.

  “The handle on the right is your brake,” Alcor said, handing her a helmet. “If we’re going faster than you would like, feel free to use it. You want to keep the towline taunt if possible.”

  “Shouldn’t there be two breaks?”

  “The other one’s a foot brake.” Alcor mounted his bike. “We’ll go slowly, though; I’m sure we’ll only need the one.”

  “This is absolutely going to end with us crashing into a tree, isn’t it?”

  “Eh, there’s like, ten bikes here.” Alcor put a helmet on Charlie’s head and prepared to go. “We’ll get it eventually.”

Happy TAUniversery everyone! 

The next (and final!) chapter only has ~3000 words written so far, and I’m thinking it’s going to be a longer chapter, so it’ll be awhile. Hopefully not too long though. 

Previous Chapter - Next Chapter