Talia sighs, resting her hands on the table for a moment, and then she begins the task of picking up and organizing all the papers sent flying during her outburst. "I'm sorry to burden you with this, Morgan," she says as she works, eyes glued firmly to the ground. "It's not your job to help me with my problems. I should just be thankful you didn't turn me in when you found me in the equipment room."
You bend down and pick up a piece of paper, handing it over to Talia for sorting. She takes it hesitantly, keeping a respectful distance between the two of you. "Talia…" you say, your voice surprisingly quiet, "I get it."
Talia doesn't acknowledge she's heard you, but you plow on anyway. "Everything about your life, it…it changed, all at once. And you're wondering if you have to change with it."
Talia's eyes, red and unreadable, meet yours. "Do I?"
"I…" you pause, grasping for words that don't quite come. "I don't know. Maybe. But maybe you don't. You can't be the same person anymore, but you don't have to change. You just have to figure out a new way to be you."
"A new way to be me?" You half expect sarcasm, but Talia's words are sincere. Almost hopeful.
"The Earth is no multiverse, but it's got plenty of things to see," you say. "You could explore your whole life and not experience everything there is to experience."
Talia chews the insides of her cheek, her expression lost in thought. "Do you really think so?" She asks. "Do you think I can live here? Instead of just being?"
"I think that's up to you."
**
Your heart hammers in your chest, and you can practically see you running that lookout down, stretching your legs and blazing across the open street like it was nothing.
"Morgan?" Aubrey asks, apparently sensing your indecision.
No. There's a dying woman on the floor next to you, and you can't turn away from that. "I can try to help her," you say, bending down to examine the spread of the black gunk across Grace's body. "I'll need your help. And there's a good chance she still won't make it."
"She will," Aubrey says, eyes blazing. "She has to."
You instruct Aubrey to lay Grace down in the middle of the floor and clear space around her, something she can do quickly and with little explanation. You stride into nearby rooms and search for anything you can use to make this process simpler.
You find nothing but a large array of knives, ranging in size from a scalpel to a machete. They're mostly blunted and covered in dried black-green gunk, but they'll suit your purposes. You select five of the sharper looking knives and head back into the main room, where Aubrey has finished arranging Grace per your specifications.
Time is running short, so you grab the sharpest knife and use its tip to draw a circle in the old wood surrounding Grace. Once the circle is complete, you slam each of the knives into the floor in a vaguely star pattern. The geometry isn't perfect, but it will work for a rush job. You don't have the time to get any more precise.
"Sit there, with her head in your lap," you instruct Aubrey. "Legs crossed. I need you to mirror my movements and direct the flow of magic in a circle as best you can."
"I can do that," Aubrey says, taking her position and flexing her fingers.
"Once that's done I need you to hold her arms down. She'll start thrashing and screaming, but if she interrupts my casting she'll die." Aubrey pales but nods, and you take a deep breath as you begin the ritual.
"Oh Lord," you murmur under your breath, drawing patterns in the air which Aubrey mimics. "I kneel before you in my hour of need, for this soul before you has taken steps on a path which will take her from the comfort of your light."
Truth be told, you're not sure if the prayer is entirely necessary. Merlin had taught you that magic is, at its core, the movement and conversion of energy, and so theoretically with enough practice you could perform this ritual without the need to ask for help from a higher power. But the ritual itself is hellishly complex, destroying a parasite while keeping its host unharmed, and you welcome anything that makes the whole ordeal a little easier.
You can feel the power building, a steady low throb in your bones, like you're standing too close to an oversized speaker. Aubrey stops mimicking you and turns her attention to restraining Grace, who has begun to spasm uncontrollably as the power begins flowing through her body.
The gunk that encases her arms and legs glows white hot and begins to sizzle, unable to bear contact with the power you've summoned forth. You can see Grace's eyes begin to glow as well, and the air around her body ripples with restrained heat.
Two minutes pass. Three. More. You've never heard of the ritual taking this long before – then again, you've never heard of the ritual being performed by one person before. Well, one and a quarter. One and a half really – though Aubrey isn't doing any of the heavy lifting, she's proven surprisingly adept at keeping the magic moving in a circle. You channel more and more energy, so much that your bones begin to ache from the effort, until finally you can't do it anymore and the spell collapses. Light and heat spill out from the circle, the temperature in the room shooting up a good ten degrees before returning to normal. You fight the urge to fall asleep then and there and keep your eyes trained on Grace, looking for any signs of life.
You find none.
"She's not breathing," Aubrey says. You expect her to sound sad, or scared, but instead there's a cold fire to her tone. "It didn't work."
You can barely think, let alone speak, but somehow you manage words. "I'm…sorry."
Aubrey shakes her head and blinks back tears with practiced efficiency. "You told me this might happen," she says. "I just thought…I thought maybe I could do it, you know?"
You know you should probably be reassuring her – this is probably traumatizing as all hell, for a girl who only discovered magic a few months ago. But you're exhausted, and this isn't over yet. There's still work to do.
"We need to burn everything," you say, practically dragging yourself to your feet. "The gunk. The bodies. The house. Everything."
"I have lighter fluid in my trunk," Aubrey says, gently closing Grace's eyes before standing up. "It's for bonfires…a lot of spells require bonfires."
"Fire's a good power source," you say, only half paying attention. "Lots of energy being released. Lots of emotion and meaning tied up in fire too." You bend down and pull one of the knives from the floor. "Go get it. Hurry."
Aubrey nods and jogs out the door, careful to avoid any of the gunk. You test the sharpness of the knife against your finger - it'll do.
The gunk is surprisingly difficult to cut through, even with your Heraldry enhance strength. It's been a long time since you've seen one of the Ladies do this, but you don't remember them having this much trouble. Maybe it's just because you're so tired, or maybe the worms aren't quite ripe yet – either way, you soldier on. This is too good an opportunity to pass up.
Eventually you cut deep enough to find what you're looking for – a hunk of bone and rock hard gunk about the size of a baseball, fused together as if by incredible heat. Even through your exhaustion you can feel the pulse of shadowy power within, a dark heart that beats almost (but not quite) in tune with your own.
A worm. The link between the Gods of the Lake and their worshippers. And now it's all yours.
After that, it's a relatively easy task to douse everything you can in lighter fluid and set the whole place ablaze. You stay long enough to make sure that the whole place is going to burn, but before the fire gets too high.
On the whole, you suppose, today was a victory. You discovered what the Church was up to, and you have a chance to study their magics without interference – from the Church or from Camelot. You should probably feel proud. Instead you just feel tired.
"I'll pay you next week," Aubrey says as the two of you drive away, leaving the nursery behind. "Everything I was going to pay the Bloc. And I want you to know there's more where it comes from."
"More? How much more?"
"I don't know," Aubrey says, her knuckles white against the steering wheel. "How much would it cost to kill all of them?"
**
"Mordred," Merlin says, not looking up from his notes, "could you please pass me the potatoes?"
You glance over at a wooden platter piled high with potatoes and focus your will around it, reaching deep within yourself and projecting your desire out onto reality around you. The platter quivers once, twice, and suddenly jerks into the air, threatening to throw potatoes all across the table but never quite doing so.
You snicker to yourself and use your fingers to guide the energy keeping the platter aloft, floating it gently over to Merlin. The mage is so immersed in his texts he doesn't even notice the fact that the platter is suspended in midair – he plucks a potato off the top of the pile and continues is work.
"No magic at the table, Mordred," Lady Percila says, though her tone is closer to bemusement than chagrin. "Although it's good to see you're taking your Sorcery studies more seriously than your squiring."
Across the table, your cousin Gawain mouths "ignore her," then motions to a pitcher of wine. A smile stretches across your face, and you carefully set the potatoes down before turning your attention to the wine.
It would be easy to levitate the pitcher itself, but you have something a little more exciting in mind. Liquids are notoriously difficult to manipulate with telekinesis, but with a few whispered charms you're able to lift a large glob of dark red wine into the air unsupported. You're about halfway to Gawain's goblet when you hear your mother's voice.
"Mordred, what did Percila
just say?"
Your mother's words hit you like a train, and your concentrations shatters. Wine spills all across the tablecloth, soaking several plates full of food, but to your surprise nobody at the table reacts in the slightest.
You look up at your mother, who is of course seated at the head of the table (Camelot's dinner table is square shaped, unlike a certain other table your mother often sits at). For a moment you think there's something in your eye, because something about your mother doesn't look quite right – she's shorter, for one, and her hair is longer, falling past her shoulders. Your eyes meet for a brief second before you realize that you're not looking at your mother at all.
"What the fuck?" Annabelle asks, shooting to her feet and sweeping her gaze across the dinner table. Before you can properly react, Annabelle blurs across the table and right hooks you halfway across the dining room.
Your jaw explodes in pain and you instinctively call upon Caledfwlch. Your only response is an aching emptiness, like a tiny piece of your heart has been excised from your body.
Annabelle's hands are on your throat now, her grip stronger than iron. Her snarling face fills your vision, and it's all you can manage to choke out "this is a dream, you can't hurt me."
There's a few seconds of taut silence as Annabelle does her best to choke the life out of your anyway, and although the rational part of your brain knows that you're in no real danger, it's hard to ignore the instinctual panic firing at all stations. Finally her grip looses and air rushes back into your lungs, a relief despite its entirely imaginary status.
Annabelle takes off while you're gulping down air, leaping over the still unaware dinner guests and vanishing down a side hallway. You don't bother to pursue – you've studied enough dream magic to know what happens next. Not a full minute later Annabelle bursts back into the room from the same doorway, skidding to a stop and looking around wildly, as if unsure of where she is. She blinks once, twice, then leans up against the wall and slides slowly into a seated position.
"You're going to have to let me go eventually," she says after a few long, silent minutes. "Even if I can't break out, my friends will find you."
Of course she thinks this is your doing. Now that your near-death panic has abated, you can feel an almost familiar humming in your head – the spell that maintains the barrier between your two identities has shifted in this dream space. Annabelle sees Mordred, not Morgan, in front of her, though she still isn't able to put two and two together.
"I knew from the minute you showed up that this was going to be a thing," Annabelle continues. "Seeing you on the ground in that cave…I just had this feeling in my gut that you were bad news. And now here we are, in your creepy mind prison-"
"This isn't my mind prison," you interrupt, cutting Annabelle off before she really gets going. "I don't know how we got here."
"I guess you really are from a billion years ago," Annabelle says, rolling her eyes. "That one might actually be the oldest trick in the book."
You know there's no point in trying to get her to change her mind, but a small, childish part of you wants to argue anyway. Instead, you shrug your shoulders. "Okay."
The two of you sit in uneasy silence for a long, long time (or maybe only a few minutes – dreams are tricky like that). Either way, the silence has a clear effect on Annabelle. She stands, sits again, stands back up, paces, plays with the silverware on the table. You watch her without quite meaning to, eyes following her as she drifts from one time-waster to another. "Can you at least stop staring at me?" She asks finally.
"I'm…" you trail off. Of course you want to deny that you've been staring, but you have been, and lying in a dream is a complicated, dangerous endeavor. Pretending to be someone else in the deepest recesses of your own mind could be damaging in ways even magic can't fix. "Okay. Sorry."
Annabelle looks you over out of the corner of her eye, confusion spread openly across her face. "Okay," she says after a moment, "credit where it's due. None of you have ever apologized to me before."
You frown. "None of you?"
"You know, you," Annabelle says, waving her hand at nothing in particular. "Bad guys. The Forces of Darkness."
"I'm not a ba…I'm not one of them."
"Yeah, okay big dog," Annabelle says, returning her attention to the silverware. "Whatever you say."
The casualness of her dismissal cuts surprisingly deep, and you do your best to shake it off. "I don't have to justify anything to you," you say, hopping up to your feet and massaging your legs.
You don't miss the way Annabelle's grip tightens around the handle of one of the table's many knives. "I'm sorry," she says, "I just…I think I just heard you say that you don't have to justify anything to me."
"That's because I said it. Good to know you're not completely stupid."
Were the two of you in the physical world, you have no doubt Annabelle would've attacked you. Instead she crumples the goblet she's holding as if it were paper. "You're a psychopath," she says. "A traitorous, mass murdering psychopath."
You laugh despite yourself, a distorted echo of amusement. "Yea, okay big dog. Whatever you say."
"Is that why you trapped me here?" Annabelle asks. "To be a playground level dickbag?"
"I already told you, I didn't trap you here."
"Oh my God, give it up already!" Annabelle shouts. She slams both her fists into the table and it shatters into a thousand thousand pieces, tiny slivers of what used to be dinner flying in all directions and then coming abruptly to a stop mid-air. "I'm not new to this anymore! You're going to sit on the sidelines for a while and hatch your stupid fucking schemes and your shitty nefarious plots and I'm going to be too busy with other pointless bullshit to stop you until…until you hurt someone I care about."
Annabelle marches up to you, and though you actually have a few inches of height on her, you feel like she towers over you. "You know what? I'm not going to let you. I know how this works now, and the minute I get out of here I'm coming for you." She jabs a finger into your chest. "I'm sick of watching you people tear my fucking life apart. I'm sick of being relieved when I see my friends every morning because hey at least they weren't murdered in their sleep! I'm sick of watching that fucking number go up up up and knowing that it's only a matter of time before I fuck up so bad that it…"
And then she's running. She's so fast that you almost miss her, and before you can make a conscious decision you're following her, tracing her footsteps through impossible twisty hallways that are sometimes the old stone of Camelot and sometimes the faded paint of Roosevelt.
Light and heat and noise hits you like a physical force as you stumble into a new scene, the Roosevelt tile under your feet giving way to lush, thick grass. In front of you Annabelle stops running and sinks to her knees, staring at a massive wall of too-hot fire that threatens to consume the very horizon itself.
"I've never seen this before," she says, her voice a hushed whisper that you can hear even above the screams of the dying. Within the flames, a figure that might've once been human twitches feebly. "I see memories in my dreams, sometimes, but not this one."
You swallow hard and say nothing. You don't have to.
"This is so typical Annabelle," Annabelle murmurs, half to herself and half to you. "So many people whose heads I'd love to get into, and instead I'm stuck in yours."
You can hear something, on the edge of your awareness. A noise that doesn't quite belong. It takes you a moment to realize that that noise is your alarm clock, the shrill screech that heralds a new day in your new life.
As Annabelle grows continually more blurry, you realize that this might be the best chance you get to pass along what you learned about the brownie without revealing Morgan's…
your earlier snooping. Nothing too comprehensive, just a general heads up. Then again, telling her now means you lose any chance to reap the rewards later, as Morgan. Whatever your decision, you'll have to make it fast – the connection between your minds is just about to fade completely.
[] Tell Annabelle she's cursed
[] Don't tell Annabelle she's cursed
**
You awake from your sort-of-sleep sort-of-refreshed. A brand new week lies ahead of you full of infinite possibilities! (3 actions)
Bone, Gemma, Gavin, Terri, and a mysterious note (?) are available this week.
[] Bone
-[] Pick up merchandise
-[] Play poker
[] Gemma
-[] Learn guitar
-[] Go to a movie
[] Gavin
-[] Meet Bailey
-[] Talk about chicks
Terri
-[] Shop for new clothes
-[] Go to a rave
On Tuesday, a mysterious note sits in your locker, pressed cleanly between your math and history textbooks. It bears only a phone number and the words "If you'd like to start more fires"
[] Mysterious note
-[] Call the number
