The Magician 35

After moving them to the cradle, the young mage sent Klein through the maze to conduct a kind of survey. It annoyed him but he had to let the punk rocker sleep off gamer fatigue first. He had to admit, the cradle was fluffy and pretty much perfect for the deed.

Giving into the desire to have a trance nap himself, Orison took four and compiled a critical thinking style grimoire for Jimson. From there, he split his time into guiding his son on concepts that interested the young man and manipulating the populace of visitors in the maze. For the ones he approved of, he directed them towards areas that would further their achievements. For the ones he didn't or had fallen too far into the rabbit hole of First Family brainwashing, he directed them to their deaths.

It was harsh and heavy handed but he needed more resources so he didn't have to sacrifice the last precious connections he had with those who were somewhat resistant to causality. The one with Keita was priceless on a logical and emotional level. The one with Duran was much the same. His connection with Zoe had been lost but Their own equally superior form of 'endlessness' preserved the memory of it anyway.

His feelings towards Lily had become mixed and filled with different, sometimes even conflicting, desires. The woman who had started out as something of a school boy style crush in Orison's heart had turned into a mystery. She had undeniably helped him and had obviously developed some feelings in return but his own romantic notions towards her had faded over time.

He decided to hold onto those feelings but not be limited by them. If they were meant to be, then fine. But if not, he'd do what he could to pay her considerations back and strive for friendship, assuming she even remembered him.

He packed those thoughts away as Klein came back looking worn out and complaining. "There were at least three-no, five- girls that I would have been more than happy to throw my life away for. Wouldn't I be more useful to you as a pact shadow?"

The young mage looked at him dully. "Klein, don't get too cavalier about your life. Yes, I have you earmarked for retrieval but the key has become a part of me now. I can't use the abilities it possessed as freely as I could before. Until I get on with my new path, you've got a 'one and done' limit.

"That issue aside, I get red checks against me for arresting the path of a soul, every time I do it. Too many, too quickly and Greater Reality will swat me. Besides that, you need to have a care for yourself.

"Jumping in and out of pact shadow status will take its toll on you too. If you burn out your potential, you could turn into a 'null shade' or some other being formed from inert essence. That's a bad end kind of game over."

Eyes turning crafty, he added, "Besides, shouldn't you have loftier goals now that you're a supernatural being? Instead of getting stepped on by a girl you treat like a goddess, how about getting stepped on by a real goddess? I mean, the higher you rise, the loftier the *ss you can kiss."

Jimson looked up from the current set of flawed models he was trying to 'fix' and said, "There's a whole class of demons born with the instinct for pleasure and pain. Devils have one that focuses on the punishment side of it. Angels actually have one too, love in all forms."

Klein put up a hand. "No, no, no! An innocent yet naturally sadistic girl slowly falling into the corruption of wealth, power and fame IS the goddess my heart's desires. Why do you think I like being a pact shadow so much? With smoky blood, sooty sweat and dark tears, I had a small army of mean girls as coworkers. It was heaven."

Narrowing his eyes, Orison said, "If you tell that story to someone else, you better clarify that you found them like that and didn't lure them into it. I can and have destroyed pact shadows that tried to LEAD people into corruption."

Klein smiled, lost in pleasant memories. "And when you did it as a woman... it was so hot!"

"I'd like to lock you and Mellow into a room together for about a decade while I made the two of you take turns being girls to teach the both of you some damn sympathy for what it's like to be the target of your attention. But, it would be exhausting trying to keep either of you from derailing the exercise and missing the point entirely." the young mage said.

"That hurts, Boss. Mellow is a filthy parasite that tries to live off of women. I live FOR women." the punk rocker said mournfully.

Orison sighed and threw his hands up. "At the earliest maze time point possible, go find one of these potential goddesses and throw your life away then. Once you're a pact shadow again, go fetch Cole from the earliest space-time point you can... The cradle is officially a no-when on a one hour forward until you return.

"I've constructed a maze assisted model that tracks different space-times in different places. Try your absolute best to keep any of the dials' arrows from passing a red mark... Do NOT go to or allow anything to push you into mid-dimension space-time. Abort your mission if you have to, if that's the only way to avoid it."

Flipping to serious mode, Klein said, "What's on the chopping block if I fail?"

"Besides losing the only opportunity I'll have to do the one and only thing asked of me by a good friend? Me and my son will be stuck here in frozen personal time until a new potential void walker comes along. At which point, we'll be automatically booted out, completely derailing all my plans here," the young mage said.

Klein looked nervous. "That's a lot of heavy, boss."

"I only ever expect you to do what you can. If it ends up becoming something beyond your ability, that's on me, not you," Orison offered with a reassuring smile.

As soon as Klein left, showering a little too much praise, he brought out the shadowy doppelgangers of Mark and Amber. Tolerating the spill over seeping into him of memories that wouldn't fit in their minds, Orison tried to stuff as many lifetimes worth of useful experiences as he could into Hefty and Mellow's heads. They didn't need any kind of reincarnation redo, so the young mage was about to redirect the excess of resources back to the maze when he was distracted by one of the memories that he had absorbed from them.

It was from where they had swam in a 'pool' of gold coins with Keita. With the expanded abilities of the maze assisted memory sorting, he caught on that her drunken rambling to them was actually a coded message. It revealed a specific location and space-time that there should have been no way for her to know. Not for the first time, Orison was terrified over the sheer power of the kaleidoscope ability.

Distracted under the importance of digesting the information hidden within the memory before it faded away, he hadn't noticed that another force had taken the momentary link to the outside and directed it towards another event. The Daily family plus Roy Collier and Myra landed at his feet for all of a brief moment before they were shunted into a core portion of the maze Orison had no ability to interact with. It was a sad necessity to keep them from being erased.

Through the rapidly closing connection, Zoe shouted a greeting and an intent to wash her hands of him. Before the connection finished closing, it whip-lashed to the undead kingdom. A few more bodies, souls and items came through as it closed. The same event as what happened to the Daily family, happened again. But this time, one person and two souls remained along with a couple of items.

As the souls drifted lazily over to the shadowy bodies, Stephen Rosu transformed into Drake with the help of the remaining entanglement power in Orison's Mark and Amber replicas. While Drake looked at Orison in wary confusion, waiting for his mind to reorganize, the two possessed shadow people were shunted out by the maze. Leaving the dhampir to his own devices for the moment, the young mage rushed over to the black orb of force sitting before him and pulled it within.

"Too much, too fast! I mean, thank you Zoe but my gawd, I don't even know where to begin processing that!" the young mage muttered.

Picking up the small smattering of items remaining, aside from one, he sent them into a slowly expanding safe zone space nestled within his spiritual seat. Inside, a dilapidated cabin was slowly reforming back to its original quaint and humble glory. Once done inspecting the cabin, Orison resisted the urge to massage his head.

Tossing the saint stone necklace at Drake, he explained what it did which prompted the dhampir to ask, "Why would you give me such a precious thing?"

"Friendship of a past life... Unless there's some benefit for you being exposed to fast-forward reincarnation energy, roll through the fluffy stuff that way until you're near the wall. Don't touch the wall, by the way. That would be fatal," the young mage said.

Jimson got up to join Drake but Orison stopped him. "You, my dear boy, need to put some mileage on that shiny, new soul of yours. Don't worry... I'll be right behind you and pull you behind ME if it becomes too much in one or not enough for another maturity."

Thus prepared, he pulled out the cabin. Digging Dustin out of the mud choked tray, he endured the wild flailing and dashing around the two rusalka did until they calmed down some, huddling together and worriedly looking between him and Dustin. It helped that he could give the two of them a glass of vital water apiece to gulp down courtesy of his knight moving a shrunken disk and some resources to his safer spiritual seat space.

After some careful maneuvering, Orison managed to catch the two rusalka and a certain spiritual mote hiding in the greenhouse supplies in Dustin's reincarnation bomb radius. It was tricky but he yanked the cabin back in before it took more than the first hit. That meant everything went according to plan but one anomaly.

Drake, curious about the reincarnation magic, came into contact with it. A shadow of a certain antlered young man superimposed over the dhampir and fused with him. The result was bizarre and unformed.

"I should have known. Outside of crazy huge racial differences, the two of you were like the same person..." the young mage muttered.

Leaving the Stag/Drake combo to sort themselves out, Orison turned to address Dustin and the two Rogers ladies. He didn't get much of a chance because Dustin's cousin called on Sammy to 'preserve' them. The maze was forced to kick them out to keep them from affecting others' chance at survival. Reese, still reeling from her resurrection was snatched into Sammy's pull as well but a silver light in the form of a tree kidnapped her another direction.

The young mage sat down and rested his head on his knees. As soon as Klein returned, available time-space for Orison to interact with would become zero before the start of a new astral cycle. He had become contaminated with causality beyond the line of the mid-dimensions.

Seeing his distress, Jimson said, "What's wrong, dad?"

"Over 300 years of emotional distance from anyone I ever knew. It's not a huge deal. I just have to let go for a chance at new beginnings like I advised you not too long ago. Guess I have to practice what I preach," Orison said with a miserable smile.

Looking insecure, Jimson said, "I'm here."

The young mage stood up and ruffled his son's hair. "That's true."

Staring into an imaginary distance, he added, "After I do my best to grant you a legacy, I need you to make an important choice... Your mom's probably going to get over her guilt after a few years and regret leaving you. If you stay with me, there's a chance you might not be able to see her again. At least, she might not be your mother in anything but spirit by the time you do."

Jimson frowned. "It's the same for you too, isn't it?"

Orison slowly nodded. "Whichever your heart tells you is the right decision, you do that. There's no wrong choice here."

Unable to bear the tortured look on his son's face, he walked over to the formless person who was once Stag and Drake. "Are you recovered enough to talk?"

There was a slight delay before the formless person took on the shape of a sandy blond man with a slight green touch to its loose curls.

Turquoise eyes stared out of a face that was both strong and delicate at the same time as he said, "I owe you a debt hard to know how to repay. Unfortunately, I will not be able to stay long enough to even try. If you are swift, I might restore one to you from this void ark.

"You need not worry about conflicts with possibility. What they lack in soul or substance, I can request an intercession from my ancestor to fill as well. I know that there is much we might have shared, old friend, but my time is nearly at hand for rejoining with all my other selves."

Orison wanted to rebut that there were several minutes at least but there was something about the way Stag/Drake had said it that convinced him. "Unless you know something I don't, everyone that I might not mind having by my side is connected to others. I don't want to rob someone of their friends, family or lover. But if you can see a decent person out there that I have some goodwill towards, I'm willing to take in a stray."

The man smiled and nodded. As he disappeared, drawn by a force the young mage couldn't grasp enough to identify, another person was revealed. It was Cole in a patrol uniform. As soon as he finished materializing, he started howling in pain. The cause, his tail was caught in his pants and crushed flat at its base by a thick belt.

With some instructions to his son, Jimson was using an innate mending ability to fix the problem while Orison rushed over to the prone figure that was behind the feline young man. Klein lay writhing as he was forcefully twisted back together. The punk rocker's shadow pattern was nearly rent in two but the potent reincarnation power that Stag/Drake had left behind was even fixing the spiritual damage.

Shadow Klein projected, "The space surrounding the maze is INSANE dangerous. If I didn't have its approval to move in and out, the butt ton of crazy things trying to get in would have murdered me in an instant! If I hadn't felt a line of energy leading here on the return trip I wouldn't have made it. Sorry but the ring that can become two rings I used to get Cole here... It's toast."

Orison said, "I'm just glad you're okay. Head to your new clubhouse in my spiritual seat for now and get some rest."

Too exhausted to snoop, Klein weaved around the knight, entered the cabin and collapsed into the lower bunk nearest the door.

"I know you have questions, Cole. But, you're only going to have more in a moment and some of the questions you have now will be answered in the process. Put a little faith in me for the time being?" the young mage added.

The feline young man nodded and said, "Seeing as I'm suddenly a cat person, I guess I can get my own tongue! Bad joke, I know. It's nerves. Trying to figure out me is about all I can handle at the moment anyway."

Orison called the cane to him. "Take a deep breath you two and I'm going to pull you into a storage space. I'll release you once we're in the cradle. Your law concepts will be invalidated down to whatever bits are universal. But until the allotted resources run out, or you've reached a comfortable limit, it'll fill in blanks or present you with compatible stuff."

Jimson said, "What about Alta?"

Seeing Orison's confusion, he added, "Don't try to look for her. If you look right at her, she might stop existing... I've been mind talking with her while you've been busy. She likes cars and stuff, about four foot tall? Oh, she says she's an artificer."

The young mage shrugged. "I might have known her at some point but I've lost a lot of memories along the way... Uh, if you can hear me, Alta, wait til you stabilize a little more and request to go to the Hall of Reflections in the maze. It'll help strengthen your power of existence."

He wanted to ask when she showed up but there wasn't much point or time. Soon, the cradle would start synchronizing it's personal time-space with the surrounding heart of the maze to collect resources again. That would spell the end of the current run. The remaining people in the maze would get a certain amount of time to clear each section until there were no more people left.

The people in the outer layers who met the First Family's prerequisites could transport out and the rest would perish. For those who made it to the inner layers, it ceased to be a fight for survival and transformed into a race for opportunities. Those who failed to advance would be given a new start on some world or other and there were choices so that friends and family wouldn't be separated.

With Klein's help, he had did what he could for the challengers he liked and the families he was connected to. The rest would be up to them. Once the young mage had finished his current action of taking his son and Cole into the center of the cradle, his business with the maze was finished anyway.