The adventures of grave, p.32
The Adventures of Grave, page 32
“These talents; am I limited to them?” I didn’t want to be limited. That really rained on my parade.
“Mastering eldritch forces is part natural skill, and part rigorous study,” she shook her head. “Like with most things in life, we are naturally good at some, and not as good at others; our power is no different. Yume explained runemarks, and I am interested to see where your power naturally resides.
“Sounds good to me,” I braced myself.
“Ha. It makes it sound like their breaking your magic hymen,” Ramona chuckled; which got her a glare from me.
“She’s not wrong,” Yume added, in a rare moment of support for the enhanced blonde. A look from her aunt got her to zip it, and all eyes focused on me.
“We’re ready when you are,” I couldn’t ignore the glint in the older woman’s eyes.
Even weirder, I saw one of her runemarks. A symbol, that looked a little like an eye, appeared on her forehead as I started to raise the tea to my lips. She definitely wanted to see what happened as much as I did.
“Bottoms up,” I toasted the women around me, and slammed back the tea. If it was even possible, it tasted worse than it smelled.
I gagged and nearly puked, but swallowed it like a man. I shook my head back and forth to try and clear the aftertaste, but that didn’t work. Nothing happened. We all sat there as the minutes ticked by, and still nothing. Honoka’s third eyes seemed to grow brighter at certain times, but still nadda.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Ramona sighed. “At least they didn’t charge you for it.”
“We’ll add it to your tab,” Yume went back to glaring at the blonde. “Marcus, do you feel anything, anything at all?” she leaned forward.
“I . . . I,” I felt something come over me. Something so strong I couldn’t hold it back. “I . . .” I let out the biggest belch I’d ever summoned, and inflicted distress on the whole room.
All of the women’s eyes watered as they plugged their noses, and I waved my hand in front of my face.
“Jesus, Marcus,” Ramona gagged. My whole dick down her throat hadn’t come close to getting that reaction out of her.
“Sorry,” I apologized. “I just couldn’t . . .”
I had a nanosecond of warning before I was torn in half . . . metaphysically speaking. I didn’t actually tear in half and have my intestines fall out of my bellybutton to stain the floor of the shop red. If it was even possible, what happened felt even worse. The cup of tea Honoka had given me was filled with magic roofies, and the universe decided to sixty-nine me; and not in a good way.
Something fish hooked me in the cheek and tied the string to the bottom of a rocket. Something else took an industrial strength plunger, suction it to my asshole, and then had Ranger himself try to plunger my soul out of my butthole. At least, that’s what it felt like as I sat completely unharmed in the chair and screamed my lungs out. I kept screaming even as my voice went horse, and I couldn’t scream anymore. I was sure I was going to start coughing up blood, and end up staining the floor after all.
Piercing the veil my ass. This was like a whole battalion of tanks lined up and shot high-explosive rounds at my mystical barrier.
I had a passing moment of lucidity among the madness to wonder why no one was reacting to my clear signs of distress, only to see that everyone seemed to be frozen around me.
“Tough luck,” was my final thought as my mind was ripped from my body.
I rocketed out of the Hole, up over Arch City, and into space. Below me, a world of blue, green, and white spread out like a tiny marble in the black. Then, the marble started to spin. Day . . . night . . . day . . . night; it spun until I was sure I was going to astral puke all over South America. Still, it was a view to die for; which might just be my case.
It gave me a much better view of the world than what I’d seen so far. I’d seen pictures of the planet at night from the nineties. Light dominated Europe, the eastern US, the west coast, and all across Asia. Seeing them mostly replaced by darkness during the night cycle was a real slap in the dick, and told me that the virus had really fucked humanity up.
There were maybe two dozen clusters of light in North America, but nothing like the pictures I remembered. There were maybe half that in Europe. Asia was virtually dark with a scattering of lights, but nothing concentrated. Africa and South America didn’t look like they were even trying. Going from almost six billion to only several hundred million would do that to a world’s infrastructure.
But the lights weren’t what really caught my attention . . . it was the veins of power stretched across the face of the planet. Night or day, they were visible; and they pulsed steadily as raw power coursed through them. I didn’t need to be a genius to figure out those were ley lines of eldritch power.
I’m not sure how many times I watched the earth spin, before gravity reversed itself and plunged me back down. I shot back down through the atmosphere, through the skies of Arch City, down into the Hole; but it didn’t stop there. I kept on going. I screamed and threw my arms out in front of me, but fuck all that did. I hit the crust of the earth, and plowed right through. Seven miles of crust passed before I could draw a breath, and then I was into the Mantle.
I’d paid some attention in science class, but seeing was believing. I was propelled through magma, or was it lava; whatever it was called when it was in the earth, I got a full facial of it. I passed giant diamonds bigger than Arch City that pushed back against the pressure and magma in an eternal struggle. I smashed through tunnels of stone, through caverns that directed the magma where to flow, and kept on going. Despite being thousands of miles, I was through in minutes. Into the core.
I expected more of a swirling inferno vibe, and yet again, I was wrong. The core was power, pure and simple. Eldritch power, magic, mana, chaos; whatever people wanted to call it, it all swirled around the living core at the heart of our world and branched out from there. As I continued my fall, like Lucifer getting the boot out of Heaven; the core turned its attention to me.
Maybe it spoke. Maybe it didn’t. I wasn’t sure my feeble human mind was capable of contemplating the four-billion-year-old deity that was the heart of our world. All I knew was that it reached out the equivalent of a magic finger, and flicked me away like a pestering fly. Then, I did the whole trip in reverse at twice the speed; with a god-induced acid trip to help speed things along.
Lights flickered like a kaleidoscope of what-the-fuck, and impossible things flashed in front of my face. It was like earth after earth was blurring by. All were similar yet different; until I came to the one where a T-Rex was taking a shit on a toilet the size of the Hoover Damn while wearing a monocle and a top hat. That had to be the acid-trip talking. I understood jack shit of what was happening, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.
I felt my physical body getting closer, and I braced for impact. I would have stuck my head between my legs and kissed my ass goodbye, but I didn’t have time before I erupted up from the world, and careened back into Yume and Honoka’s shop. With a final ta-da, I cannonballed back into me.
“Motherfucker!” I hit soprano on the last syllable, and toppled over backward. Ramona reached out to catch me and winced; which resulted in me slamming the back of my head against the wooden floor. It didn’t hurt, but a sudden cranial impact was still jarring.
“Shit, Marcus. You’re hotter than the inside of my thighs after a run,” the big blonde shook out her hands, which was about the time I notice there was steam pouring off me.
I didn’t feel hot, but the women gave me a wide berth as I crawled to my feet and stood up on unsteady legs.
“What the fuck was in that tea?” I leveled a finger at Honoka, and from her reaction, you would have thought it was a rocket launcher.
“Marcus,” Yume’s face was mixed with shock, awe, and a healthy dose of fear. “You’re runemark.”
“What?” I turned my hands over, but didn’t see anything.
I pulled up my shirt, which got an appreciative sigh from Ramona, but there was nothing there. I even looked down my pants. The memories of what the hell had just happened were slipping through my mental fingers like I was trying to hold water in my hands, but I still remembered all the power in the center of our world, and the ley lines coming off of it that fueled the magic in our planet. Since I was sure deities had a sense of humor, I wouldn’t put it past one to give me a runemark on the tip of my cock. Sadly, one look told me I didn’t have a magic penis, at least in that sense. I was busy feeling my face for the third-eye-type mark Honoka had, when Yume appeared with a mirror. She held it up in front of my face and I saw it.
“Please tell me this will go away, or I’m seriously fucked,” I looked myself in the eyes. Eyes that weren’t my usual baby blues that all the women seemed to fawn over.
The white of my eyes – whatever the fuck they’re called – were gone. Poof. Adios. They’d been replaced with twin black orbs. I could already imagine people running for the hills, calling me a monster, and busting out the torches and pitchforks; but that wasn’t the end of it. The runemarks had replaced my eyes themselves. The iris and pupil, both were gone, and replaced by a glowing, circular runic symbol of green. I looked at the runes, they looked right back at me; and I couldn’t help but shiver. There was something almost-evil about the look, and then they flickered. When I blinked, I was back to normal.
“Thank god I bought those helmets,” I breathed a sigh of relief. It was hard to stay anonymous when you were that dude with the malevolent black and green eyes.
“Eyes. Your first runemark is your eyes,” Honoka had finally recovered enough to speak.
“I’ll give you another fifty bucks to tell us what the hell that means,” Ramona tried to be nonchalant about it, but I could feel that she was shaken.
I reached out to grab her hand, but she flinched. I didn’t blame her. When a kid touched a hot stove, they didn’t go back for seconds unless they were certifiably special. She slowly extended her hand, tapped it against mine, and when I didn’t burn her, she let out a sigh of relief.
“That would have seriously complicated our sex life,” she winked at me.
“The eyes are the windows to the soul,” Honoka threw out some fortune-cookie bullshit, but didn’t elaborate.
“We’re not exactly sure what it means,” Yume took over. “I’ve never seen those rune’s before, and only know a handful of people with eye runes” she nibbled on a cuticle as she thought. “It could be some form of mental magic: empathy, telepathy . . .”
“There are no such things as telepaths,” Ramona put her foot down on that one.
“Really?” I thought it would be a common power among the enhanced. After all . . . X-Men.
“Yep. Never heard of any, and even if there was one,” she mimed putting a gun to her head and pulling the trigger. “Can you imagine if you heard people bitch and moan twenty-four-seven about their first-world problems.”
“That makes sense,” I nodded, and looked back at Yume.
“So, you two don’t know what I’m going to be good at, but it might have something to do with my mind.”
“Or not at all,” Honoka wasn’t making things any easier.
“Thanks for being so specific,” I frowned at her. “Now, what’s next?”
“We figure it out,” Yume’s face took on a determined expression. “I can help tutor you, if you’ll . . .”
“Wait a second,” Ramona put her foot down. “You just want a slice of this vanilla pie,” she put her arm on my shoulder. “You’re going to need to get in line.”
“I’m trying to begin his eldritch education,” Yume fired back, but the pink in her cheeks said that was only half the reason she was doing this.
“I’ll educate you with a foot up the ass if you think you’re cutting in front of Gabi,” Ramona’s attacks were slightly more chivalrous now that I knew she was protecting her friend.
“Who is Gabi?” Yume looked appropriately confused.
“Ladies,” the crack from when I slapped my knee was enough to stop the bickering. “There is,” I couldn’t believe I was about to say this, “enough of me to go around.”
I turned to Ramona. “I need to learn about my power. My real power.” The blonde didn’t look stoked, but she nodded in understanding.
“Yume, I need to learn about my power,” I put the emphasis where it was needed. “After we tackle that, we can talk.”
The smaller Asian woman smiled and nodded. That was clearly good enough for her.
“Then we start now,” she jumped out of her chair and disappeared into the back. Her aunt didn’t even watch her go; she was still deep in thought. I waved my hand in front of her face, and still got no reaction. Weird.
When Yume returned, she had a portfolio of what looked like dried, old pages. They looked like they were in desperate need of the climate control tech in Angel’s shop. Being housed between two pieces of plastic clearly wasn’t cutting it.
“They’re spells,” she informed, as she took her seat.
“Spell slingers,” I nodded, remembering what she said some practitioners called themselves.
“These pages hold the process of pulling magic out of yourself and expressing it into the external world. Spells aren’t just words, phrases, actions, or hand gestures; although they can be,” she immediately contradicted herself.
“Every spell slinger does it a little different. The same spell might be cast six different ways by six different practitioners. It all just depends. Summoning and casting eldritch power is as much an art as it is a science. So, I suggest you start small. Five spells should do it.”
“How much?” Ramona raised an eyebrow. I was glad she was taking on the role of moneybags, because I was eager and willing to learn. Five or five hundred, I wanted me some spells.
“A grand a spell,” Yume stared unflinchingly back at the blonde.
“That’s . . . better than I expected,” the blonde shrugged and pulled out some cash.
“A spell is a spell,” Yume continued, like the papers weren’t that important. Since she was charging a grand for them, I could tell she wasn’t the best saleswoman in the Hole.
“A simple shield spell can protect a person, or an entire city. It can shrug off a bullet, or a nuke. It depends on the power and will of the caster behind it,” I could tell from the way she was looking at me that I was the city-defender, nuke-fucking type.
“Do people still use nukes?” I asked Ramona.
She shook her head. That was interesting, but in a world of demigods and mad scientists, what good was splitting the atom.
I understood what Yume was saying; so, I took a few minutes to think of what spells I needed in my arsenal. Defense for sure, so the shield spell took care of that. Then, I needed something for offense. She handed over the papers and I flipped through them. Some of them looked simple, and others more complex; so, I selected a simple one. A beam of energy that I could fire off. If I was indeed the nuke-fucking type of spell slinger, a beam of pure eldritch power coming from me should do some damage. The page clearly said that with practice, I could dial up and down the intensity, so that made it an easier selection.
Two down, three to do. Melee and ranged attacks were two other avenues I wanted to cover. The beam spell covered range, but if I had to get in close with a powerful Neohuman, I wanted to be able to trade blows.
“This could be fun,” I picked out a spell that fortified my fists and added bursts of power to my hits. From what I was reading, those bursts could cover several different types of power; which told me that spells could be built upon, and adaptive to the situation. That tracked with what Gabi and Ramona had told me about spell slingers when they discussed the different types of Neohumans. People like Yume were weaker, but far more versatile than enhanced Neohumans. For this particular spell, I was more interested in raw, kinetic force than anything fancy right now.
With three down, I thought about a movement spell. If shit went sideways, I wanted to be able to get the hell out of dodge. There was a flight spell, but as cool as that seemed, someone had written in the margins of the spell that it wasn’t an easy one to master. Instead, I opted for the one behind it: teleportation. Even a limited application of the spell would be able to get me out of a jam; and some of the –I guess you could call them upgrades – were pretty freaking sweet.
That made four, and covered all of my big needs, so I searched for something a little more technical. I found it deep in the pile. Originally, Yume had given me the idea. It was important to have subtle, softer abilities as well. Not all problems were solved with punches that leveled buildings. Sometimes you needed to pick a lock instead of kicking down a door.
The spell I selected wasn’t telekinesis, the page made sure to relay that, because I wouldn’t be using the power of my mind to move objects around. Still, outside of an academic standpoint, it didn’t seem to operate any differently than the power many enhanced Neohumans had. It just lacked the oomph; which I was fine with. I wanted a lighter touch to start.
“Five spells I need to master,” I held the papers in my hands as Yume counted the cash Ramona handed over.
Things were coming together. The memories from my astral projection were gone, and something told me that was probably for the best. Sometimes, it was better to remain ignorant. I might not remember what happened, but I’d popped my eldritch cherry. I could feel the power in me. Now, I just needed to figure out how to use it.
“I’ll call you,” I told Yume, which elicited a brilliant smile.
“I have school from . . . you know, I’ll just send you my schedule. Want to give me your number?”
“Uh,” I did want to give her my number, I just didn’t have a number to give.
“I guess, I’m playing secretary now,” Ramona sighed as she took the pen and wrote a number on the back of Yume’s hand.
The smaller woman didn’t look as happy to be getting Ramona’s number, and I promised myself to get a phone on the way out of the Hole. “Or Gabi can get a deal on one from her job.”
