The Magician 34

The young mage looked around in confusion. He and Mimi were standing in a run down apartment that smelled faintly of cat urine. "Why are we here? I came for Mark and Amber, Zeke sort of... While you're at it, mind explaining what the hell you meant by your comment a second ago?"

Mimi looked into the bedroom area as she said, "Think about where we are and rub a couple of brain cells together. I'm sure you can figure it out."

Annoyed at first and then with dawning understanding, Orison said, "We're in Dream Jimmy's room. Since Ignatius, Zora and the three J's are most definitely some of the people brought through by Noxflora, we're here for Jammers, I'm assuming. What has me confused is why it's necessary. I'm completely certain that my spiritual daughter has this handled and it still doesn't answer why you said what you did."

Mimi gave him a pitying look that made his ears burn. Even he could feel like he was missing something important but didn't know what it was. He could understand if there had been some kind of 'accident' while Mimi took advantage of him in the recovery coffin but that obviously wasn't what she was referring to.

She said, "Jammers is OUR spiritual son, yours and mine. I can't believe you just swallowed Herne's explanations of things and never dug a little deeper. Do you honestly believe some special dirt can act as a 'mother'?

"While we were locked in a life or death struggle to eat each other, I used a lot of nasty little tricks to try to get you and Piran to exhaust your resources and damage your souls. You were his pillar of support. I thought that if I could weaken you, he'd crumble under the assault.

"What I didn't, couldn't, factor was that damn draconic bloodline. I don't expect you to feel sorry for me but I want you to understand that you were a victim of it as much or maybe more than me. Once it awakened in Piran, you were chipped away to feed his growth, sacrificed to save him.

"When I tried to chip a piece of you away when Jammers was made, a piece of me was chipped away too. That's why our little boy was able to be pulled out from sheer illusion to the real world. Wendy's little maneuver to pull Piran into her bridge, set it in stone.

"Under a creation like that, do you believe Noxflora could save him? She barely survived saving herself, her realm and her core support. You think too highly of her abilities. The same for Sammy. They might be special but they aren't THAT special."

Trying to keep his brain from locking up or melting down again, Orison said, "You talk like Noxflora isn't a part of this. If what you say is true, wouldn't she be your spiritual daughter too? And what about the rest of the garden fairies?"

Mimi got her flaring emotions back in hand. "Sure, there might be the slightest touch of you and me in her but hear me on this. Noxflora IS the spiritual daughter of Piran. She and the 'garden fairies' are the result of that terrifying dragon bloodline's attempts to rope the Weird Sisters into Piran's plight. Your feelings on the issue are yours but don't confuse them for reality's truth.

"You do remember the three strange women at Rose Cliff, right? They aren't innocent in this either. Them and their coven's ritual magic ripped right into my illusion and made use of it much the same way that spiritual bloodline did. And in much the same way as Reese studied me to plug holes in your weaknesses, I studied their knowledge in the game console to plug mine."

Orison stared into the bedroom where a time stilled Dream Jimmy was fast asleep. He far from just took her word for it but everything she said checked out and made more sense than the 'truth' he thought he knew. As quickly as he could, Orison recalculated his plans within Mimi's illusion world to accommodate new priorities.

Mistaking his unmoving form as reluctance, she tried to peer into his mind only to find it closed off in ways it wasn't the first time with Suniir. "Please Orison. I know I haven't given you much reason to trust or want to help me. But what little goodness I had in me then was used to make him. He's your son too!"

He looked at her with angry eyes. "Stop. Of course I'm going to help you save Jimson... Respect that in doing so, my chances of drawing Zeke out completely went from slim to none. I'm just trying to re-figure things to ensure that as much of his spiritual legacy lives on as possible without ruining my chances of using illusion Mark and Amber to save two other friends."

After he was finished thinking things over, he said, "Show me the ritual you were planning on using to pull this off. My way isn't ideal. But depending on what you've got, we might have to use mine anyway."

She pulled up two spectral pages for Orison to read through.

Once he was done, he said with a pained expression, "I have no procreative power. On a purely physical level, I'm fertile if I want to be but the echoes of... ruin are still within me."

She nodded and said, "I have a similar spiritual curse type problem I'm dealing with because of the things I've done. It doesn't matter. We're not making a new life, we're bringing an old one back... As for our curse or curse-like issues, leave that to me. Whatever way we tried to do it, that was always going to be an issue."

Under double vision of the maze room and the illusionary world, the two prepared and began the ritual. Wide eyed, Klein unintentionally became a witness to pagan magic of the oldest and most carnal variety. Preoccupied under the importance of what they were doing, the poor punk rocker had been temporarily forgotten about. But even if they had remembered, they might not have cared.

Not one to miss out on an opportunity to 'learn', Klein paid attention to every detail with a concentration that would have put top university students to shame. It was obvious that he was very passionate about the subject. If the furious motion of his hand was anything to go off of, he was taking very detailed notes as well.

At the moment of ritual zenith, Orison and Mimi released the pent up energy with a unified concentration of will. It was suddenly bolstered by another source. But other than drawing a knowing smile from them, nothing of importance had changed. They made their sacrifices of spirit and the deed was done.

As a symbol of light and essence etched itself onto her belly, she said, "I've returned the illusion to accelerated time. Do what you need to do before it runs out. I'll have little to spare for Klein as it is. But after lending us a... hand, he deserves a little consideration."

With an amused sigh over his familiar's antics, Orison got to work. For Mark and Amber, it was a mere effort of observing the memorized pattern of their existences. After that, he pulled the two vague shadows into his void while drawing some of the meager allotment of maze provided resources into the mix of life crystal and positive energy rift vital water that hid somewhere within.

When it was time to handle his business with Zeke, Orison ran a hand over his face in melancholy. "Sorry, buddy. Without the combo of me and Gan, you just don't seem to happen. Piran raises one way or another and his father just...ends.

"I'm already chocked full of taboo laws, so a little time manipulation added to the mix of my void's a drop in the bucket. I'm giving your practical life experiences to my son in a condensed form so he can have a leg up and your personal experiences of transformation from conduit to person, I'm giving those to my knight buddy.

"They aren't getting it for free, though. I don't know how many motes of your core I can save but they'll be temporarily connected to the knight's. Once they succeed in becoming a person, I'm hoping they will one day have a child that will possess those bits of you I save... I really wish I could have done more."

Informal eulogy completed, Orison finished off the maze's allotment of resources to perform the actions he spoke of. Despite his well meant effort, the four motes of soul core he managed to collect didn't stick to the knight's protean soul but they did stick together and drift out into the mysteries of the afterlife. He tried to take some comfort that if there was enough spiritual cohesion left for the motes to do that, there should be enough for a birth into a low dimension somewhere.

With a final look at the illusionary image of Zeke, he sent a mental signal to Mimi. Upon returning from the illusion, what greeted him was a sad and extremely confused Jimson. He was wearing a spare set of Klein's garish clothing, holding onto a silver and brimstone tipped cane.

Not too far away was the broken body of Mimi with a pained smile frozen on her face. In the distant corner, Klein sat, rocking and muttering about never having children. After what the poor guy had just witnessed, Orison could hardly blame him.

The young mage sighed. "You didn't kill her coming out, son. She did some kind of ritual to sever you from being contaminated by our karma. Don't worry. She's not going to run away from us that easy...

"Set that cane down too. There's a strong sympathetic magic on it that will pull you from the grasp of the maze and I'm not ready for you to get whisked away to Noxflora's realm yet. I want to have a chat with you, at the very least."

Jimson dropped the cane like he was afraid it would scald him. "I don't want to go back there... She said she got bored of me. My chest hurt so bad, I thought I was going to die. Thinking about it still makes my chest hurt."

The confused young man turned his head to look back at Mimi. "She really is my mom? And you... I always thought good Jimmy was my dad. Can you-"

Giving Jimson a ghost of a smile, Orison interrupted to say, "Slow it down, Jammers. I know you have a lot of questions and now I have a few of my own but let's get your mom sorted out first. If I wait much longer, it's going to make things a lot more complicated."

He walked over to her and whipped a complex circle into existence around her using the bone dust sediment laying in every crevice of the slow room. As he worked a life-to-death-to-life ritual with a generous handful of life crystal in the sacrifice portion of the circle, her body raised to undead status but blew to dust on the second part.

Choking down agitation, Orison said, "Sorry Jammers. Your mom short cut reincarnated. I think she was preparing for this for quite some time. Out of all the unpleasant things that might be said about Mimi, you can take pride in the fact that your mom is smart. Some might also say devious and cunning but definitely smart."

"Klein, the only person who could release her from her third favor is you. What in the world happened while I was in the illusion? Inquiring minds want to know."

The punk rocker stood up, still looking a little queasy. "She's still alive out there somewhere?"

"Yeeees. Please answer my question. I'd really appreciate it," the young mage said.

Klein chuckled nervously. "She said she'd show me something interesting if I would let go of my brain vacation. I-I sort of thought that a little 'real' was worth a lot more than a whole lot of not real. I was just way wrong on what I thought she was going to show me... Way wrong."

As the punk rocker lamented his misfortunes, Orison turned back to Jimson. "She'll track you back down eventually. I can promise you that she wanted you returned to existence more than anybody until she helped me understand what you were to me. I'd say it was a close tie after that."

With concern fading, Jimson was about to launch into questions again.

Before he could, Orison said, "Before I start clearing up your confusion, would you help me with some of mine? I know it hurts to think about it but WHEN did Noxflora say that she was bored of you? Was there anything important going on at the time?"

The poor guy wasn't overly clear about the when or what was going on but he could share enough peripheral details for Orison to get the general idea. It was a combination of things. She was getting a lot stronger while he hadn't grown much. Their union wasn't 'fruitful' either. There had also been a lot of outside pressure that was putting Jimson under terrible strain and duress.

The painful truth was, he wasn't fit to be a consort to an underworld ruler. There was little doubt that Noxflora had cared for him. It was likely that she had cut things off so firmly so that he could move on and grow.

What would have made him a pretty amazing lover or companion for most, had also made him a poor consort to a leader of dangerous and powerful entities. At least, that's how Orison chose to see it. If he found out that Noxflora really had just gotten bored and tossed Jimson in the dumpster, he'd have to face the first time he'd ever been disappointed in her. Either way, what was done was done.

With little to rush them, he spent some time actually getting to know Jimson as a person rather than just the funny caricature of one the young mage once thought of him as. He was pleasantly surprised to find that Jimson wasn't nearly as naive as he seemed, merely eternally optimistic and hopeful. After a couple of days worth of catching his son up to speed on the myriad hows and whys of things, it was time to move on to discussions about the future.

"You're welcome to travel along with me on my journey, son. I wish I could say that it's safe by my side but it's not. Despite that, I'm not going to cut you loose to wander on your own. That's even worse... What's your current strongest desire?"

Jimson thought about it and said, "To be more like you."

Orison tried to push down the sharp spike of happiness the simple statement caused with the rationality that his boy's mental state was catching up to the balance between physical and the much older spiritual one. At the moment, impulse was somewhere just past seven. In another day or so, it would be in the teens and Jimson's answer might be quite the opposite.

The young mage mentally mapped out the routes to power that he knew. Being a new soul, his son didn't have much spiritual potential but, as trade off, had a great deal more hidden potential in his body. Despite limitations and advantages, Orison marked off aspect paths to archetypes and cultivation immediately. As he thought of the inappropriateness of his own path for Jimson, a radical thought occurred to him.

He thought, "It will cost me a great deal many of my plans to meddle in the lives of my previous friends and my own uses for this maze but... it's for my son. He's the one and only child of mine in both body and spirit."

Looking at the storage jewel on the magic cane, he mentally added, "And doesn't it make more sense to help a small few of those close to me rather that just a little help to a whole bunch of people who don't even remember me anymore?"

Making up his mind, further thoughts were interrupted by a tremor running through the maze.

Klein looked at his empty hands which held the game console a moment before and said, "Boss, what happened? If you were going to take it back, you could have let me save first. I lost a day and a half of progress!"

Orison looked at him oddly and said, "The whole maze readjusted and you're only thinking about the game progress you lost? I think you might be my favorite companion of all time or just the strangest. I haven't made up my mind yet..."

"There's no rule that I can't be both," the punk rocker said while stroking an imaginary beard. "But really, what happened?"

Orison said, "I made an important decision and the maze accepted it. I had to pay a pretty big price, though. A lot of resources I had wrapped up in preserving some connections were reclaimed."

Jimson looked sadly at the cane that transformed back to it's original simplistic design. "They don't remember us anymore, do they?"

The young mage squeezed his son's shoulder and said, "No. I don't think they do. I know that somewhere deep in your heart, there was this small hope that things could change, maybe go back to what they were. But even if she cut things off for your sake, even if you could become what she needed and she could accept you again, it wouldn't be the same anyway. You'd both be different people."

While they looked at the cane in very different contemplations, the magic Mimi had laid on it to draw her son away, shifted focus. A smaller magic underneath was revealed in the process. It was a private message from her to Jimson. Orison would have honored the privacy of that but it was etched into his brain.

There was little in it that Orison particularly cared about but it did change how he personally saw her. Mimi's reasons for wanting immediate distance between Jimson and both his parents was compelling but flawed. From the young mage's view point, both her guilt for wanting to reabsorb Jimson while still a purse and her superstitious investment into curse contagion from over studying the witches' knowledge were absurd.

"Alright. The vacation's over Klein. While my boy's putting his head and heart back in order, I need you to do something for me," Orison said, putting his game face on.