TWLA 14

"So, what's your inner nature actually look like. I feel cheated that you know what all of ours do but we don't know yours," Caesar said.

King chuckled. "It's a pretty ghost girl."

"It's a young... male.... rusalka. I know they're supposed to be girls but- How did you see a girl, King!?" Rainmaker had began talking at the same time as the tyrant but finished after.

As they looked at each other oddly, Caesar added, "I'm surprised you saw anything at all. It was all hidden inside that super small on the outside but big on the inside, black dot... What's a ru-sock puppet whatever?"

Rainmaker said, "Rusalka... It's something between a water nature spirit and a ghost... What's this about a black dot?"

Blushing, Jeremy interjected. "It did start out the way King said but it was only that way for a little while. That was the weak nature I possessed. It would have never-never formed on its own. It just couldn't. Maybe part of that's because I'm a guy? I don't know...

"When the grafts and junk were force stripped from me by the high pressure magic in the geode, the bit of Theo's inner nature I inherited filled in the gaps and strengthened it enough for me to survive and adapt again. He was like a weird half elemental or something."

In thought, Rainmaker said, "Okay. As a theory, it tracks. In mythology, there's not a lot of difference between elementals and nature spirits. Rusalka are pretty gray area to begin with... Is it a shadow elemental?"

Jeremy shook his head. "No, more than that...Less but in a stronger way? I don't understand it AT ALL. Luckily, I don't have to. You each saw what you saw. None of you saw wrong. You just saw what was happening at different parts but it hasn't stopped yet."

Grumbling, King muttered, "A twisted inner nature that turned people into pretty girls instead of ugly freaks and alien monsters would have been a nice change of pace..."

Jeremy muttered back, "Even if it made you beat me to death, I'm happy to disappoint you on that one."

Looking quickly to Rainmaker, he added in a near panic, "Not that I look down on girls or anything. I'm just happy being the boy I was born as, you know?"

With a raised eyebrow, she said, "Uh-huh... You do realize you look almost nothing like you did when I first saw you... Nothing to complain about, mind. You're just different."

Caesar looked a little sad. "I miss my jelly belly pillow."

"It ain't right and it ain't fair. Not a lick of effort and you look like you've been hard at it for a drop or two. Except, you know, for the callouses, blisters and scars an honest person should have," King grumbled.

"Says Captain Average Superhero. Do you hear Caesar complaining?" Jeremy shot back, masking his irritation with a friendly smile to keep from setting off King.

The tyrant said, "No one's complaining about Caesar. He can make wine now."

Pinching his nose, Blue Jay said, "I meant that he didn't get any cheat improvements...you know, physically. He was pretty much perfect to begin wi-... alright, I mean."

Caesar's blush made him stop and realize that his words were a little misleading in intent. Seeing King's leer, he knew it was the kind of thing that would be used to harass him for awhile unless he owned it.

"Screw it...Yeah. He's a beautiful guy. What of it? Rainmaker's pretty and you're handsome in a way that p*sses me off," he added defiantly.

Smiling widely, King said, "That's because you recognize me as a 'man' and a rival for attention. That means I'm doing it right."

Their conversation was ended by a distant rumbling. Back the way they had came, a monstrous army of twisted creatures were barreling towards them at full throttle. Whatever had caused the disturbance to begin with triggered another unfortunate phenomenon in its wake as well. Time seemed to stretch out.

Under whatever insane mechanics the slow and fast were chosen with, it favored the stampede of monsters. As his mind synchronized with body to make the 'slow' seem normal to him, the monsters were nearly a blur of fast-forward catch up to their position. There was no escape.

No sooner did he register a flash of gold brilliance, Jeremy was slammed to the ground and covered by a whole body's worth of it. Things sped up quickly after that but adrenaline slowed it to perception. Every heavy stomp of a passing creature was crushing the air and life out of both of them but Jeremy was certain it was multiple times worse for king.

Through a wheeze, the tyrant used what little air he had left in his lungs to say, "This is why I get first pick."

Jeremy was somewhat stunned. They were both on the verge of dying at any moment and King had decided to turn their situation into a defense of privilege. Blue Jay had to admit, it was a hard point to ignore. Assuming the man truly did put his life on the line at every crisis, it was a given he'd get the best there was. Aside from food and other consumables, most of everything else was more like borrowing than taking. Self sacrifice was almost a given eventually.

A few breaths rolled by. And as King's golden armor dissipated, Jeremy realized that they had survived. "Not to sound ungrateful but I can't move. I doubt they were running from nothing. Now, we're behind them and whatever that was."

King tried to moved a bellowed in agony.

Through a sudden profuse cold sweat, the tyrant said, "I can't. My arms and legs are broken. They're stuck in the ground too."

Jeremy used his senses to see how bad it was. It was horrific. The golden armor had kept everything where it should be but from the knees and elbows down, they were beyond mundane repair. Forcefully shoving the man off would likely cost King his hands. The legs below the knee were pretty much hamburger as it was.

Wiggling enough to look past the man's shoulder, Jeremy scanned into the distance. The horizon looked fuzzy, almost like something was simmering. Putting two and two together, Jeremy nearly sobbed in despair.

"I don't know if it'll do any good but I'm going to try to set up a ritual circle. Our life is worth more than some rewards, right?"

King nodded slowly, looking more pale and woozy by the moment.

Wiggling a hand free, Blue Jay cast out a cantrip, a low power spell that didn't do much more than leave some graffiti. Due to whatever was coming, the bulk of the corruption was temporarily pushed away and diffused with cleaner essence. The lack of interference allowed his mind picture of 'sacred geometry' to be laid down with little warping.

Waving a numb, pancake flattened finger, he consecrated the circle with some essence infused blood. Reaching his undamaged hand into King's tattered frog suit, he worked the storage bag out and grabbed a handful of the blue chalcedony from the top. With a fumbling toss towards the 'sacrifice' portion of the circle, he incanted some strange words that had been recorded in the journal phonetically. He had no idea what they meant.

Whatever that meaning was, the blue chalcedony that was disintegrating under the influence of their environment, broke apart even faster. With an ear plugging sudden increase in air pressure, he could feel the unraveling power of the stones infused into a bubble around them. A feeling of calm, slightly suffocating stability rose within the circle.

Although it was slightly muffled by the dome of magic around them, Jeremy could hear a building rumble in the distance as the air danced with greater and greater quantities of white dots only visible to him. The bubble gave him a little hope but the steady building of noise and essence galvanized him to further action.

Thinking to substitute everything the ritual called for with chalcedony, Jeremy threw out another handful towards the northern guardian direction and diagram. "*&^%$ of protection stand %&^*." he chanted in the partially known language.

The stones he threw were moved by an invisible force out of the diagram, rejected. But, before he even had a chance to react, a stinging sensation came from the back of his neck. A small, dark, mole-like speck that had been embedded there, pulled free.

A small ball of something that looked like a black glass marble, rolled out of the storage bag. The speck from Jeremy's neck, fused with it as they were drawn towards the protection relic diagram. A few pieces of chalcedony exploded into powder as a dull gold marble flew from King's forehead to join the artifact party.

As the two marbles rolled around, producing black and gold ripples across the previously invisible surface of the circle's bubble, he used a casting of some weak telekinetic type spell called Magic Hand. With a few scooting gestures, Jeremy pushed the chalcedony into the southern diagram and uttered more phrases. He was only vaguely aware that they had something to do with well being.

This time, the chalcedony was accepted but it was being joined by a bottle of tequila with a 'Nurse Blue' label that had wobbled out of the storage bag. Before the bottle could get there, a roaring tidal wave of mud and debris swept over the shuddering bubble around them, plunging them into darkness. A faint glow from the circle barely allowed mundane sight to work at all but Jeremy's black and white vision was clearer than it had ever been.

Occasional strikes to the bubble made it ripple and buckle ominously but it held. And when the bottle finally joined the chalcedony at the southern diagram, it all vanished at once. Suddenly, there was no room for observation because white pain and King's screams drowned out everything else.

Holding to consciousness as best he could, Jeremy finished the shelter and security diagrams' activation while blindly tossing more stones around. It was a task made more difficult by the moment as rolling and spinning around were added in. The flood had unmoored their bubble from the ground. The last proved too much for poor Blue Jay to see the fruits of his labor. He fell into peaceful darkness.

***

Within the dream space, his symbolic self lay curled into a protective fetal position around a multicolored grain of brilliance. Though Theo hadn't cared for him personally, it didn't change what the man had done for him. It was only a murky, intuitive thing but he felt like if he kept the grain safe and nurtured it instead of following the darker instinct to devour, he might one day be able to return the favor somehow.

That dimly understood hope became the joke most supernaturals would understand it to be, as a power beyond his understanding yanked it from him. In yet another instance, reality pointed out how powerless he truly was. But, the deep sense of loss and mourning that erupted from him, stayed that power for a mere moment.

His thoughts and feelings were exposed like an open book to that power. His life was so small and insignificant, it was laid bare and understood in an inconceivable instant. Jeremy's gratitude and good intentions were acknowledged, approved. In a detached and alien way, it pitied him and was faintly moved by his nobility in the face of hardships.

As the presence disappeared from his dream space, Jeremy felt a welling warmth. In exchange for his safeguarding of Theo's spark, the entity had granted him a 'heart' of the brilliant soul stuff similar to what Theo's spark had been made from. As the mark of his own existence stained the pure opaline pellet in the flavors of his short life and young soul, a strange alteration in perception occurred. The pellet went from being a small pebble-like heart at the center of his gaseous self to an immense thing. And he, just a tiny speck within it.

All that he was, on a spiritual level, couldn't even encompass and fully claim an amount equal to the smallest grain of what had once been a part of Theo's soul. The immensity of that reverberated through Jeremy, as his intense emotional state disturbed the peace necessary to stay within the dream space. Despite that, he wasn't quite able to awaken either.

"Hello, I'm everyone's favorite void walker, Hiidan. Thanks for using the ritual circle that allowed me to pick up my grandson's soul core fragment. Don't try to use it again. It'll do diddly squat, just a means to an end.

"Then again, that chalcedony's some good stuff. It'll make some good holiday presents for the extended friends and family. You get something nifty-fifty like that, I might wink a little your way, sailor. Don't bet on it, though.

"With that out of the way, for the next two hours or so- years for you- I'm going to clear up the mess of basic magic and artifact making junk you inherited from my edgy and depressed descendant. But, kind of like the proverbial three wishes, we'll be square and done after that. Finding and saving you, is the self appointed quest of my younger and hungrier grandson... Real go getter, that one.

"Don't take my light hearted and witty banter personally. When you reach my level, reality don't like you getting too handsy with the mortals. There would be consequences for all involved.

"... Without further adieu, Lesson one-"

Jeremy said, "What's going on? What is this classroom? Where are we!?"

The Hiidan imprint of a stuffy looking but goofy acting English professor said, "You're experiencing the impression I left behind on the little gift I left for you. This classroom is an imagined environment and we are in you- No- I can't answer any questions related to things out of the information left in the imprint. But, enough of that.

"A couple of years might seem like a lot of time but every second wasted you'll regret later. How much you can gain from what's in here will greatly depend on you. Once you reach the limit of time I've placed on this, it will fade away. Can't have your soul coming in contact with my power directly. That would mess you up big time, buddy."

Seeing that he had Jeremy's undivided attention, the illusionary mental projection said, "Alright. Let's get to it. The first lesson and the last will be the same one but you'll see it much differently then, hopefully. The soul is a forge... Let me explain why and how to use it."