SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART THIRTEEN

She hesitated then, wondering if she’d interrupted Alijda unnecessarily during her meal. Except her human friend hadn’t even taken a bite in the couple minutes since Para had come in the cafeteria, and she seemed to be staring off into the distance.

Indeed, it took a moment, but Alijda put her fork down next to her noodles and gestured to the seat in the cafeteria across from her.

“It’s not just you,” she answered, meeting Para’s gaze.

[caption id=“attachment_848” align=“alignright” width=“219”] PARA
Commission by Michelle Simpson[/caption]

Relived that she had ‘read the room’ correctly, Para went to sit across from Alijda. “I mean, it’s not like I had anywhere else to be,” Para added. “But it’s not like we’re doing useful pandemic vector research or sensor upgrades or anything now.”

It had been two weeks since Trixie’s interview with the scientist from Bunny World. Beam had vaguely looked into the idea of giving him asylum on Tech World, but not seriously. There didn’t seem to be a good way to deal with his ethics.

Then Fate and Jake had switched their minds back, and they’d been able to teleport him back down… along with Officer Mikoto.

They’d left Mikoto with the distinct impression that Jake had something to do with the missing persons cases around the park. It was about as far as they’d dared to go in terms of interference with another World’s issues.

It seemed like something Mikoto would follow up on, given her personality.

This meant that, with the pandemic being natural (more or less) up to and including the dimension jumping, it wasn’t their situation to help with… though Alice had continued her viral research nonetheless, while remaining in quarantine. Beam had offered her assistance; she was still afflicted.

And as of yesterday, Alice was out.

So the only thing that was really tying them to the situation any more - aside from Beam’s condition - was the mystery message they’d received about it in the first place. Plus the presence of Clover Enterprises, but that was more an incidental event.

They were making headway on neither item. Yet they were still there.

“We’re not being productive,” Alijda agreed. “But we still might be needed to distribute a cure to the worlds not directly linked to TechWorld any more.”

Para nodded. “Oh, agreed. But you and me aren’t personally needed for that.”

“No,” Alijda yielded. “Though in the mean time, I am enjoying my talks with Trixie.”

Oh, that’s right - Para had sen the two of them together numerous times since Alijda’s own release from quarantine. They were bonding over the curious programming involved in Beam, as well as Trixie’s own magical device Rixi.

“Are you two becoming friends?” Para wondered, tilting her head. Part of her wondered if that meant she was supposed to act jealous.

Alijda let out a snort. “Friends would be pushing it. I feel like my depressive nature bothers her, while it kind of annoys me that she’s doing you-know-what with the very tech we’re investigating.”

Para stared. “Doing I know what… what?”

Alijda blinked. “Trixie and Beam. Uh, you hadn’t noticed?”

Para slowly shook her head. She knew the two women had been spending some time together without Alijda, but figured it was for some magic-tech analysis. “I don’t really pay attention to whatever doesn’t concern me.”

“Huh. Well, for the last week they’ve been… uh…”

Alijda raised one hand with the thumb and index finger connected, and moved as if she’d put her other index finger inside the space created. Then she paused and made the hole image out of both her hands, looked at them, tried to interlock them, and finally shrugged.

“Whatever. They’re sexing it up, Para. I thought everyone knew.”

Para now felt embarrassed for having brought the conversation there. Human relationships were still something of an enigma to her. “Oh.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Alijda hasted to add. “I know Trixie’s been on edge, Beam’s got bunny sexy issues, and they’re both consenting adults so, y’know, whatever helps them get through station life. But they’re passing it off as research. I figure, at least be honest about your libidos, ladies? I mean, really.”

It occurred to Para then that Alijda hadn’t exactly been honest about her feelings for Kat in their prior missions. But she got the impression that was a slightly different relationship issue… probably best not to bring it up? Yeah.

Instead, Para remarked, “Any headway on getting the virus out of Beam then?”

Alijda shook her head. “Latest attempt was her shifting incorporeal. No dice. So we’re back to monitoring the planets to see what they come up with regarding the pandemic in general.”

Para nodded. “And any idea yet why you were in the past of Fantasy World? That one with the magic uprising?”

“Oh.” Alijda frowned. “I’d kind of pushed that out of my mind. No, nothing there. Though now that you mention it… huh. What if we travelled back in time to have me close that circuit? Maybe it would reveal how we’ll send that message. Maybe that’s all we need to finally close the books there.”

Para nibbled her lower lip. “Meaning the Epsilon crew don’t find more on Clover.”

Alijda shrugged. “That’s hardly my issue. Aside from, yes, Alice obsessing over it, and how she’ll presumably return to being my roommate.” She shook her head. “Thing is, we’re not superheroes, Para. Our powers notwithstanding. We can’t do it all.”

Para considered that. “True. And it would be nice to get home. I think that’s how I’m feeling about things now.”

Alijda smiled. “Me too.” She picked her fork back up. “Okay, going to actually finish my lunch, and then talk about the Fantasy World angle with Trixie. If I’m going back there, I could use her magic expertise.”

Para stood back up. “I’ll leave you to it then. Thanks for the chat.”

“Thank you,” Alijda noted. “We might actually have a plan for once.”

Para decided to head to the control room next, to see if Fate was there. Beam was there instead.

“Hello fellow bunny,” Beam said, grinning and motioning for Para to come in, before the mathematical woman could retreat.

Para entered timidly. “Hi, Beam. I was just wondering if you administrative types had made progress on… well, anything.”

Beam bounced on her heels, her ears twitching. “Well, you might notice I’m not dressed in a swimsuit any more. And I no longer have the pyon pyon vocal urges to the same extent. It’s either due to time, or to Trixie. Either way, calling that a win.”

Para blinked. “Trixie programmed it out of you?” She recalled what Alijda had said. “Or are you talking about how you two are… uhmm…”

“Doing the horizontal hula?” Beam quipped. “Yeah, the latter. Seems to keep my viral hormones at bay. Though Trixie’s still treating it as research, of course, so probably not a good idea to raise it with her. Okay?”

Para frowned. Then their coupling WAS research? It made Para wonder to what extent she might take things with someone on the station in the name of her own investigations of humanity.

As if sensing the uncertainty, Beam added, “Like, Trixie’s research is both into my code, and also the way I ‘charge up her hormones’. She doesn’t want this to be a weakness with her clients for in any cases she has in the future. Or something like that, I was a little preoccupied as she tried to explain.” Her tongue ran over her upper lip.

“I feel like this is more than I need to know,” Para said. “I was mostly asking about progress in case there was something I could do to help.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry,” Beam apologized, looking sheepish. “Can I blame part of the overshare issue on the virus too? You look like me, but without the horny bunny stories we can swap.”

Para pursed her lips. “Yeeeah. I have my ears for a VERY different reason.” She smiled weakly.

At that, Beam looked thoughtful. “And you know what? That’s an angle we haven’t tried. You and me, neither of us are human, both of us are part bunny… yet you’re normal. Maybe whatever passes for your DNA could be used to tweak my coding. You think?”

“I… maybe?”

Beam nodded. “I gotta raise that with Trixie and Alijda. Thanks, Para.”

“Okay.” Was she being helpful then? Para couldn’t tell any more. She edged back. “I guess there’s nothing you need me for?”

“Nope. Unless you want to check on Fate in the artifacts room. She was looking to see if something else might be helpful to get at the Clover angle. Alice is still freaking over it, to the point of investigating bringing Science Guy back to make a deal. Bad plan, right?”

“Ooh, right,” Para agreed. “And you can’t talk Alice out of it?”

“No luck yet, pyon pyon.” Beam made a face. “Damn it, that slipped out…”

“I’ll go check with Fate then,” Para agreed.

“Thanks,” Beam said, smiling and wiggling her fingers.

Para offered back a partial smile, then headed out of the control room.

She found Fate in the hallway next to the artifacts room door, leaning against the wall. The blonde woman looked up as Para approached and offered a halfhearted smile. “Beam send you?”

“Kinda sorta,” Para admitted. “I was looking for you anyway though. Are you okay?”

Fate sighed and shook her head. “Honestly? Not so much.”

Para nodded. “Anything I can do to help? Because I’ve been wanting to do something for a while now, but I haven’t been sure what.”

Fate crossed her arms. “Right. We’re sort of stringing you along at this point, aren’t we. Sorry. Did you want to leave?”

Para shook her head. “Not necessarily. I know things are unresolved, and I’m happy to help. Just feel like we’re not making much progress lately.”

Fate sighed. “Yeah. I keep looking - hoping - for a breakthrough, and… it’s not happening. But I don’t want to jump us out of time, or call the mission off either, not while there’s loose ends.” She brought her hands to her hips. “Para, am I being stubborn now? Not wanting to end my Epsilon association on this note?”

Para blinked. “You’re retiring?”

Fate gestured. “This was never meant to be a permanent position. I needed some time and something to do, and Rose Thorne thought I’d be a good fit, so… yeah. But much more and I’ll overstay my welcome.” She turned to look at the artifacts room.

Para followed her gaze. “Nothing in there that would be useful here, I take it?”

“Hm? Oh. Not without consequences, no,” Fate said. “Except, I was thinking about the phone in there. And God. And how She’s not talking to me, when she’s communicated with both Alice and Beam in the past.”

Para tried to put two and two together. “Then you want to go out having at least heard from the maker of this station?”

Fate flinched, then rubbed the back of her neck. “Huh. I guess so? Assuming the message that got us into this pandemic situation wasn’t from Her. Thing is, I don’t have Alice’s memory or Beam’s holographic abilities. I’m normal. Why would She talk directly to me?”

“Why wouldn’t she?” Para insisted. “Fate, everyone has their own skills, supernatural or otherwise. Maybe you’re doing such a good job, She hasn’t felt the need.”

Fate chuckled. “It’s nice of you to say that. Though it has crossed my mind to look more into the virus on Fantasy World, where people can have latent magical powers activated… who knows what I might get? Maybe something to see a path through this.”

Para stared. “Um. I don’t think infecting yourself is a good plan. Alijda’s report said their magic came with a dark side.”

“Oh, no worries, I wasn’t giving that SERIOUS thought,” Fate said quickly. “It’s only…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked thoughtful.

After a minute, Para decided to risk interrupting. “Only what?”

Fate refocussed on her. “Clover went after Bunny World because of the scattering field technology. Yes? So what if they could be enticed to go after Fantasy World because of the magic power activation.”

Para stared. “You want to lure them there?”

“Maybe. Yet maybe they already ARE there. We’ve been neglecting that world ever since Alijda left, that’s been a heck of an oversight.”

“In fact Alijda was talking about going back into that world’s past,” Para admitted. “To close out that doppelgänger loop.”

Fate pushed herself away from the wall. “Riiight. We need to do more investigation in the present first though, I’d say. Send Alijda to reconnect with that mystery man from her cell. See what other dimensions might know about the place, if anything.”

Para nodded. “I guess that makes sense.”

“So who should we send down with Alijda?” Fate wondered. “Trixie? They’ve been working together - or does that make it seem like I’m trying to get Beam away from the pretty redhead. Hmm. Alice then? She’s all over the Clover angle. Though we might want her help on the station instead.”

“A-Are you asking me?” Para said, surprised.

“I’ll be asking everybody,” Fate corrected, heading for the control room.

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10693225]

VOTING CLOSES WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 30th (probably).

EXTRA ASIDE: I had a couple votes in November. Decided to keep things open, send out another tweet, went in Tuesday Serial. And nothing, through to when I closed the poll on December 19th. So I feel like only going a week isn’t going to change much; it’ll let me put out another part to start January, which is sure to be insane for teaching remotely, and we’ll go from there. As always, thanks for reading through to this point.

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART TWELVE

Granted, in that elevator she’d been pressed up closer to Alice than she had been to her occasional boyfriend the last time they’d been together. And Alice was staying in quarantine.

[caption id=“attachment_2345” align=“alignright” width=“186”] TRIXIE VIRGA
Commission from Sen Yomi[/caption]

But Alice had been wearing a mask, and according to Ziggy’s preliminary analysis, Trixie had a negative test.

Besides, they now had to deal with the situation involving the Vortex scientist… in Fate’s body, sealed off in an isolated area of the station. Trixie had volunteered to do the interrogating, off Beam’s suggestion of getting more information from him somehow.

And Trixie stepping up wasn’t merely because of the looks he’d been giving her, after they’d been caught at his lab, down on the planet. She also wanted to know more about how he’d been allowed to work alone in secret in the first place.

She considered what they knew already.

Alice’s plan of pretending to be members of Vortex Limited, ‘checking up on their scientist’, had worked. To a point. That point being the man in question asking them what his name was.

“This whole assignment has been pretty hush hush,” Alice remarked. “We only get codenames. Yours is Nye.”

He stared at her.

Alice waved her hands back and forth. “You’re the science guy! No? Maybe? Not a thing on this Earth? C’mon, work with me here.”

“Who are you really?” he demanded.

Alice lowered her hands as Trixie clasped hers behind her back. “How about this,” she proposed, leaning forwards. “We’ll tell, if you do. Along with why you let us come through your decontamination area, despite suspecting us of something nefarious.”

He seemed to consider her. “My name is Jake Hyde. As for letting you back in, it should be obvious that, now that you’re in my underground residence, it will be harder for you to leave.”

“Was already hard, what with you controlling the elevator,” Alice pointed out.

Jake nodded. “True, but now it’s also easier to judge what you know, as you’re here in front of me. For instance, based on where you two specifically aren’t looking, I divine that you also know of my hidden passage to the lab area.”

Trixie made a face. He was smarter than she’d hoped. “And here I thought you let us in because you wanted to see me all wet,” she remarked, referencing how the decontamination chamber worked.

He chuckled. “Fine. Not going to lie, that’s nice bonus. Particularly given your pants.”

Trixie smiled, shifting her hip out to the side. Smarter, but not gay or celibate, so she had something working for her after all. Maybe the leather pants hadn’t been a poor choice.

“You still haven’t reciprocated,” he pointed out then, frowning.

Trixie nodded, standing straight. “I’m Trixie,” she admitted. “This is Alice. We detected a weird reading outside the park, and then when we arrived, thought you might have useful information about the pandemic.”

He eyed them. “You’re from that Tech World then,” he decided. “There’s no other way you could have figured out access to this place, short of truly working for Vortex.”

“Maybe we’re Tech who also work for Vortex,” Alice suggested, wiggling her eyebrows. “Also, have I mentioned that I’m single?”

‘Alice, don’t help,’ Trixie thought mentally. Aloud, she simply stated, “We’re not about to confirm or deny anything. We did see some suspicious stuff in our brief time here though, so maybe you should take us back to your lab and explain how you have different strains of the virus?”

He again took a moment to think about it, before gesturing to Trixie to lead the way. She went over to trigger the knothole, and soon enough all of them were back in the larger computerized area.

Jake went over to log into the computer system. “If I do this,” he remarked, “perhaps you’ll tell me how you didn’t turn up on sensors coming in. The first time. Invisibility fields?”

“Classified, sorry,” Alice said, clasping her hands behind her back.

Classified information was an idea Trixie could get behind. The fact that Jake asked the question also implied he hadn’t noticed (couldn’t notice?) her wiping of the security footage.

“You’ll have to ask for something else,” Trixie stated. Then with a wink, she remarked, “Like our phone numbers.”

Jake snickered. “Nice try, you two. As if I have time for personal relationships when I’m this close to a breakthrough.”

He called up something on the screen and pointed to it. “Here. I manipulate and look at different strains because some of them are less resistant to attack. The data could lead to a treatment, or a vaccine.”

Alice peered at him. “Why do this in secret though?”

He shrugged. “Vortex isn’t fond of my methods. Actually, the main problem I’m running into is a lack of subjects. Mice only get me so far.” He eyed them again. His gaze seeming to linger on Trixie. “You two might want to be more forthcoming. Since right now, you’re new possibilities.”

Trixie felt her heart rate increase. He didn’t seem like he was joking. “It’s true we have advanced technology,” she admitted. “But it’s coded to us, thus of no use to you.” Which was true enough; Rixi wasn’t about to respond to anyone else.

“Who even knows you’re here?” Jake continued. “If I were to detain you for a few hours, or days, would anyone even come looking?” He smirked.

“Oh, we have people who’d be looking for us,” Alice assured him. “Also, given your attitude, I withdraw the Nye codename. Bad Jake. Learn ethics.”

“Anyway, do you really think we’d tell you if we wouldn’t be missed?” Trixie challenged.

He laughed. Then seemed to hesitate. Then his eyes went wide.

“Oh no, Alice, if you’re over there, then who am I?” Jake gasped.

Meaning prior to the mind swap, Jake had confirmed that Vortex had been turning something of a blind eye to him. No doubt if his work had proved successful, the company would have taken some credit, while if his work had failed - medically or ethically - they could have claimed to have no part in it.

But had he really had ‘carte blanche’ to do whatever he wanted?

At the least, Trixie now knew he wasn’t responsible for Smoke itself. Beam had found in the files that the pandemic’s origin had been due to the tech-magic-dimensional soup, which came about thanks to the interference of Clover Enterprises.

Resulting in computer simulations, to the point of being able to run one on Beam’s holographic matrix, hence why she’d ended up in quarantine. The worlds being affected by this virus definitely had some technological advantages.

Yet there were still unanswered questions.

Trixie unlocked the door to the storage area. “I’m coming in, I wouldn’t try anything,” she said, before entering.

Fate’s body was sitting over near the corner of the room, examining Alice’s jeans and looking decidedly unimpressed. “Oh, it’s you,” Jake said. With Fate’s voice. That was going to get weird. “I should have guessed.”

Trixie leaned back against the wall, crossing her arms. “We need some answers.”

The clothing was tossed aside as Jake/Fate stood up. “Perhaps it’s my turn to say I’ll tell if you do. What the hell’s happened to me?”

Trixie considered him. She pointed and unpointed her toe. “Let’s just say the people Alice and I work for were concerned for our safety,” she said at last. “Resulting in your abduction. One of them, incidentally, is Beam.”

Jake/Fate looked surprised, then nodded. “Again, I should have guessed. But know what? If you Tech World types are trying to intimidate me with that knowledge, it’s backfiring. I was able to infect that computerized woman without much difficulty. Meaning I might get out of here without much trouble too.”

Trixie stared. “In the body of a woman.”

Jake/Fate looked down at himself. He cupped his chest. “I won’t deny it’s a mite distracting. But I could do illegal things out there now and not have it traced back to me. Plus I feel like there’s worse places you could have put me, if you’d wanted.” He looked back up and smiled. “So why didn’t you?”

Trixie glowered. She was simultaneously glad that he wasn’t in her body, and confused as to whether she should attempt any of her distraction techniques now. I mean, did she really want Jake admiring her legs while he was effectively possessing Fate? Particularly if it wasn’t giving her the upper hand?

Trixie settled for, “I suppose this is where I point out YOU haven’t reciprocated any information yet.”

Jake/Fate snorted. “You haven’t told me what you wanted to know.”

“Fine. Then first, how was Vortex able to send out a dimensional message?”

His eyebrow went up. “Best guess? By uncoupling the heisenberg compensator.”

Trixie sighed. “Be serious.”

“Hey, if you’re going to ask me nonsense questions I can’t answer, I’m going to fish to see if your background is truly scientific in any way.”

Okay then. Beam HAD said it was possible that Jake didn’t know anything about the message. Trixie shifted gears.

“Hmph. Second then, has there been any indication in your - admittedly thorough - viral analysis to suggest that Smoke was deliberately engineered?”

He seemed about to laugh, then thought better of it. “What, like this was intentional? No, this is very much Vortex Limited not understanding how magic and technology can play nicely together. Fusion go boom.” He tilted his head. “Why, were you hoping we could sell you a patent?”

Trixie felt a little ill. “No. What’s wrong in your mind that you would think that? I wonder how many have suffered already, thanks to your experiments down in your bunker.”

The main reason for the question had been to confirm what was in the Vortex files, and judge his own scientific understanding. And ethics, apparently.

His eyes rolled. “Suffered? Really, Trixie?”

“For all I know, you’ve been killing people,” Trixie pointed out.

Jake/Fate looked genuinely offended at that. “Hey now. I may have experimented on a few homeless individuals, but not with anything lethal. Unless your warped mind sees bunny girls as being some lethal condition.”

This was unbelievable. “So you don’t even deny experiments. First, do no harm? That ring any bell?”

Jake/Fate gestured. “That’s medicine, not science. We’re in a pandemic, we need answers.”

Apparently Vortex Limited didn’t have an ethics board. Maybe that was answer enough as to why he had never been cut off.

With that, she wanted to say ‘we’re done here’, but there was one other thing they needed to figure out on that front. She bit down on her tongue. “Okay, last thing. Do you have a way to contact Clover Enterprises?”

Jake/Fate nodded slowly. “Oho. Now we’re getting to the heart of things. You want them, do you? You know, maybe I should get your phone number first. You did offer it earlier?”

“I regret that,” Trixie said. “And this isn’t critical information. So maybe I leave instead.”

It really wasn’t critical. According to Beam, if the pandemic was natural, along with the link between Tech World and the other planets, their work was effectively done. Once they’d made sure that the outbreak wouldn’t spread further, and tracked down the source of the original dimensional message, at least.

Of course, nailing Clover Enterprises might prevent this sort of thing in the future. So it would be a nice bonus.

Jake/Fate considered. “Know what?” he said at last. “If I tell you, I want asylum on your world.”

“You what?” Trixie sputtered. The audacity of this guy.

“I want asylum on your world, the one with all the technology,” he insisted. “It’s obviously better than ours, with the possible exception of our scattering field. The fact that you cut ties with us implies you’re handling your pandemic better, and there’s really nothing left for me on my planet anyway.”

“I doubt asylum’s in the cards,” Trixie assured.

“Then I doubt Clovers are in your cards,” Jake/Fate concluded. Fate’s body sat back down and smirked at her.

Trixie sighed. She supposed that the option could be floated to actual representatives from the technological world, the one whose pandemic had affected people’s ability to use teleports. Both worlds had already been in contact already.

Would that violate Epsilon’s interference directives? She didn’t know enough about them. It might be a breach of ethics though. Given this guy’s attitude. But then, maybe Tech World had a way of rehabilitating him.

Of course, if all they wanted was the Clover information, there might be another way to get it, deceptively or otherwise. He was smart, but Trixie judged she was smarter.

Either way, she’d have to consult with Beam. She left the room before he could start eyeing her any further.

OPTIONS: [crowdsignal poll=10656324]

VOTING CLOSES SUNDAY NOVEMBER 29th (probably).

EXTRA ASIDE: I had vague plans of writing on Thanksgiving Monday (Oct 12) to get the part out on Oct 18. Still only had one vote then. Decided to leave the poll open, got distracted by a week of teaching. Closed it on Friday the 16th with 2 votes… and that weekend decided to continue “Time Untied” edits instead. (There is now a character page for that serial.) The minute engagement here was getting me down. Then I got a viewer spike in late October, and I decided I didn’t want to leave things much longer than a month. So, we’re back. Next part in December, school and NaNo’s taking time. As always, thanks for reading through to this point. Hope you’re enjoying?

Hello all! Apologies for the silence. I didn’t think I’d really be missed.

I’ve been devoting more time in the past month to “Time Untied” (given the waning views on the latest ‘Epsilon’ – don’t worry, I will finish it – and the yearly NaNoWriMo efforts). Currently “Untied” is at 150,000 words and we’re at one of the two major events I was aiming for.

Yeah, the serial is going to be two Books again (like “Time & Tied” Books 1/2 and 3/4 were full arcs with a breakpoint). I’ll figure out how to break things up whenever I get through it. I can’t post here as I write owing to the time travel messing with earlier scenes.

Still, I figure you should see more of what’s going on there. Hence this character page with information.

I’ve been trying to cut my “point of view” characters back (from almost the full cast), meaning I shift only between three, hence the first category. Any commentary welcome. Enjoy!

POINT OF VIEW CHARACTERS

MAJOR CHARACTERS

MINOR CHARACTERS

Let me know if any of them leave you wanting more information, or if you think it would be worth it to post some excerpts of what is likely to come.

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART ELEVEN

Beam froze in place. The police officer had reached for the stick she had on her belt. “I’m stopped,” Beam said, adding, “I wasn’t about to jump on you and smother you with kisses, pyon pyon.”

The police officer walked closer, her hand still on the end of the baton. “That’s good,” she said, voice slightly muffled by her mask. “Why were you approaching my position in the first place?”

Beam took in a deep breath. “Here’s the thing. There’s been suspicious activity in the park. I was hoping you could help me look into it, pyon pyon.”

When a transparent lie was likely of no use, best to tell the truth. To a degree. After all, they merely needed the police officer to go elsewhere, so that Para could set up the final pylon undisturbed.

The officer stopped about four metres away, sizing Beam up. Beam could now read the label on her uniform, identifying her as Officer Mikoto.

“The park is closed,” Mikoto reminded. “What activity do you mean?”

“Drones,” Beam answered. “Possibly magic as well, pyon pyon. I was just walking through, and well, it’s something that I definitely shouldn’t handle by myself.”

Mikoto frowned. “Wait. I think I’ve seen you around here before, haven’t I? A couple weeks back, before you, uh, caught the virus?”

[caption id=“attachment_1997” align=“alignright” width=“202”] CHIBI BEAM (pre-bunny)
Commission from Gen Ishihara[/caption]

Beam bobbed her head eagerly, clasping her hands. “Yes! My name’s Beam. I was away doing self-quarantine. Now that I’m not contagious, I’m back investigating, pyon pyon. It’s partly why I think there’s something going on here. Can you help me out? Mikoto, I’m so, euh, so worried.”

Beam cleared her throat, glad she had managed to catch herself before saying she was so aroused. Mikoto really was very pretty - even given that Beam’s definition of such had loosened considerably since the virus. The officer had short, dark hair, intense brown eyes, moderate curves and looked good in her uniform.

“Officer Mikoto,” the woman corrected, even as her stance relaxed, her hand moving away from her baton. Apparently recognizing Beam from earlier had added further credibility to the story. And although Beam had protested it less than an hour ago, perhaps wearing the large overcoat while on this mission, to cover her swimsuit, had been a good plan too.

“Okay,” Mikoto granted. “Okay, Beam. Can you show me what you saw safely, without us being detected? Or for that matter, without us being closer than two metres apart? No offence.”

Beam smiled. “None taken. And I think so. Follow after me? We’ll go in the same way I did.”

She walked off, looking back over her shoulder to verify that the officer was following. Behind Mikoto, she then saw Para poking her head out from around the corner and applauding.

Feeling her cheeks going pink, Beam quickly brought her gaze forwards again.

She quickly led Officer Mikoto around and into the park, trying to keep an eye out for drones or other activity… surely there would be something here, right? As whomever it was who had Alice and Trixie, they’d probably want to be doing surveillance for others… particularly if the Epsilon Team had tried some sort of bluff, about calling police. It was why Beam and Para hadn’t planned on going into the area at all.

Beam stopped a short distance away from the bench she’d formerly used as a place to sit and think. She again looked back at Mikoto, and gestured towards it. “It was over there, pyon pyon,” she said, mildly annoyed at not having seen anything specific yet.

Mikoto peered towards the trees and bushes where Beam had gestured. Beam wondered how long it would take Para to set up the last point of their triangle, working all by herself. Likely not that long? She might be done already.

“I’m not seeing anything now,” Officer Mikoto said, starting to peer around suspiciously in all directions. Her hand was back at her baton. “Are you certain it was a drone, Beam? Not some sort of animal?”

Beam nodded her head. “Oh, yes. At least, I’m sure it wasn’t an animal.”

“Hmmm,” came the uncertain reply. “And you said something about magic too? What exactly gave you the idea that it was operating?”

As if in answer, a purple beam of light shot through the area some distance behind them in the park. It was followed by another, and another, on the exact same bearing.

Mikoto’s baton was immediately in her hand, as she crouched. “Holy…”

‘That’s our triangulation!’ Beam realized. Para must have set up the last pylon… but was there a reason they were activating the field now? Was Para in some sort of trouble? She had to get back to the mathematical blonde.

“Yes, so, I think we should leave now,” Beam said, all in a rush. “Get going before something bad happens here that puts us both in–”

Everything went white. And then Beam found herself standing in the small set of rooms that Epsilon had sealed off as quarantine. She knew them all too well after her recent time spent there.

“–danger,” she finished.

Beam barely had enough time to register that standing around her there was Para, Alice, Trixie, some guy in a lab coat, and Officer Mikoto. Then the lights went out, dropping them all into pitch blackness.

She heard a door open, but no light accompanied it.

“Ziggy,” came the voice of Alijda van Vliet. “Lights on? Please?”

“It’s as I told you when you insisted on the activation,” came the calm female voice of the station computer. “Some systems are going to blow out.”

“The LIGHTS? Really?”

“There is a reason we do not do wide area teleportations as a matter of routine,” Ziggy said, with a hint of petulance. “Particularly when a scattering field is involved. Be glad that the lighting circuit is separate from the door locks.”

“Great. Fate’s body is still contained?” Alijda pressed.

“Naturally, as is the seal on your quarantine,” Ziggy answered.

“Lovely,” said an unknown male voice, which could only be the individual Beam had seen in the lab coat. “Though I had better be locked up too, since as I recall this mental effect has a randomized time-out.”

“Okay,” Officer Mikoto put in. “Well, before you time out or whatever, someone had better explain what in the hell is going on.”

Beam’s eyes had already adjusted to the darkness by now; she suspected that the only reason there had been a delay was the elements of her programming that made her seem more human. As such, she could see that Mikoto had taken up a defensive pose, and was edging backwards.

“Careful Mikoto, you’re going to trip over an ottoman, pyon pyon,” she warned. The police officer was heading for the comfy part of the room.

“Officer Mikoto,” the policewoman corrected, though she also froze in place. “And again, barring an explanation, everyone here is under arrest. For, at minimum, abduction.”

“I feel like this would be a good time for me to apologize again,” Alice remarked. “Fate, if I’d known it was you trying to get into my head, I wouldn’t have rejected it. I thought it was him doing something.”

“Yes, well, if I’d known the attempt would jump me to the nearest person on a rejection, I never would have enacted this plan myself,” the strange man said, crossing his arms.

Para cleared her throat. “Maybe I’m partly to blame for this new situation? Alijda just told me to get in the field, that we needed to break through with a teleport before the scattering elements took hold again.”

“Ugh, all I know is that none of this is MY fault,” Trixie asserted. “Though I am in awe of how randomly you people operate. I’ve half a mind to simply transfer the rest of the files Rixi has over to your Ziggy, and then leave your group before something more terrible happens.”

“I hope the other half of your mind wants to talk to me before that,” Alijda remarked. “Very curious about that whole tech-magic blend thing, and we have yet to properly chat.”

“There is that,” Trixie yielded.

“We would also appreciate your input in putting the pieces together, Trixie,” the man in the lab coat added. “You are good at your job.”

Trixie sighed. “And I’m not immune to flattery. But unless I miss my guess, all of us are both in quarantine and under arrest anyway? Soooo…”

“Yes. Arrest. This hasn’t been much by way of an explanation,” Mikoto said, sternly.

“If I might?” Beam said. People turned to look in her direction. Beam hoped that everyone else was starting to see in the darkness, and weren’t merely homing in on her voice.

“Go ahead,” Alice chirped in encouragement.

“On account of my situation, I can leave quarantine, pyon pyon,” Beam said. “Which means I can fix things like putting on the lights. I can even interrogate whomever’s in Fate’s body. Moreover, if I’m forced to stay in here instead, I may find myself hitting on Trixie soon, in part due to her tight leather pants. Pyon pyon.”

“She makes a strong case,” Trixie said dryly. “Anyone against?”

“Possibly,” Mikoto insisted. “I still don’t–”

“Look, we’re sorry you’re here, but you don’t want lights? Really?” Alijda interrupted.

Mikoto sighed. “Fine. But no one here try anything funny.”

Beam hurried for the exit before anyone could change their mind. Ziggy unlocked the acrylic barrier at her touch.

It had been an hour. Beam had decided to stall the others in quarantine, leaving them in the dark, once she’d learned that Trixie had resumed transferring the files from her device.

After all, it had not escaped Beam that she was technically in command for however long Fate was out of commission. Not to mention how Fate had been looking into relinquishing control of the station in any event. Bunny infection or not, Beam knew she had to step up here.

Particularly in light of what was turning up in the files.

“Ziggy?” Beam said, leaning in against the console. “Is there any other explanation here aside from them making a dimensional doorway, pyon pyon?”

“None. Vortex Limited made a dimensional doorway,” Ziggy agreed. “With the common sense to restrict it using decontamination chambers. Trixie must have been correct in her assumption, this is how the pandemic spread between Earths.”

Beam drummed her fingers. “Okay. So. Vortex gets a bunch of magic from the mysterious Clover Enterprises after trading their tech. In particular giving them things like the scattering field, which even we cannot punch through, pyon pyon. They use the new magic to, among other things, set up this underground bunker. From there, they punch a hole through to Tech World.”

“All before the pandemic,” Ziggy remarked. “And technically outside our policing, as Earths in the multiverse can do their own dimensional investigating.”

“Except for how Clover Enterprises was involved,” Beam pointed out.

“That’s why I said ‘technically’.” Ziggy’s petulant tone was back.

Beam rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Smoke soon becomes a thing due to the tech-magic-dimensional soup, and very soon after, Tech World catches a novel version. The virus must have made it through more conventional quarantine procedures, which have since been upgraded, pyon pyon.”

“Logical. This also explains how you were able to be infected,” Ziggy remarked. “Both sides were working on a computer simulation of the effects in the aftermath.”

“But that stopped a few weeks ago,” Beam continued, pointing at a date. “When Tech World cut off the link, leaving Bunny World to it’s own viral analyses. We know from our scans that Tech could then use the pandemic as cover to purge information, pyon pyon. Likely details about any dealings with other worlds, including Bunny World, the one Alijda went to, and more.”

“Another logical assumption. A world with teleporters would have had the capability to extend on the dimensional technology too, after all.”

“Loverly.” Beam hooked some hair behind her ear. “Still, two things these files don’t answer.”

“Only two?” Ziggy mused.

Beam ignored the remark. “First, why one Vortex scientist was left working on all this down there in his secret lab, alone, pyon pyon. I mean, why not a whole team?”

“I would hypothesize that Vortex Limited does not want their dimensional dealings or their part in the pandemic to go public,” Ziggy remarked. “Don’t forget, over time Smoke clears and people return to normal.”

“Except there might be side effects. And don’t enough people know about this, such that it would get out in the end?” Beam wondered. “It’s better press to say you’re working on a fix, pyon pyon. And second, while it makes sense that one of these planets would seek help by sending a dimensional message, I don’t see how we managed to be the ones to receive an encrypted communication from them. If they were the origin. A fluke?”

“I have no answer for you,” Ziggy stated, not pleased by the admission. “Though we could now apply some of the techniques in these files to attempt a better trace.”

Beam pushed away from the console to pace. Given this new intel, what was her next step? Well, probably to restore the lighting to the quarantine room, and get some help from her friends. But even then, what should she be proposing to them?

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10619965]

VOTING CLOSES SUNDAY OCTOBER 11th (probably).

EXTRA ASIDE: Closed the vote on Oct 1st as promised, most writing done on Oct 3rd. At what point do I give up on more readers? At least we avoided another tie. Whoever you are, thanks for reading through to this point. Hope you’re enjoying.

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART TEN

Despite that, Beam was trying to remain impartial. And not stare too much at Para’s curves, even as her libido kept telling her to.

“These pylons should work much like the amplifier Alijda and I installed in the station, right?” Para remarked, breaking Beam out of her thoughts.

Beam looked down at the one she was carrying, as the two of them walked along the sidewalk. “Close enough,” she agreed. “We simply anchor them in a triangle and use the field they generate to punch down through the interference, pyon pyon. Should let us get a lock on our team.”

They had already set one pylon up at a telephone pole, their arrival site, and roughly the location of Trixie’s mayday call. Their scanners implied something existed inside the pole itself - an elevator? - but they had no idea how to gain access. It likely required magic.

Para nodded, her bunny ears bouncing. Beam found herself wondering if her extra ears did the same.

“We could split up and each do one then, right?” Para continued. “That would be faster.”

“But not as safe,” Beam insisted.

Para nodded again. She seemed to want to say something else, but wasn’t sure how to phrase it. Or perhaps wasn’t sure if she even should say something.

Beam sighed. “Speak up, pyon pyon,” she prompted. “If nothing else it keeps my mind occupied more on the mission, and less on how sexy you are.”

Para’s cheeks bloomed a bit pinker. “It’s not exactly about the mission though,” she admitted. “It’s more, when you say safe… I was wondering if you meant, without me, you’d be inclined to wander off and find someone to… um… you know. Get satisfaction.”

“What, on account of every lady on the station turning me down?” Beam quipped.

Para seemed unable to meet her gaze.

Beam sighed. “Don’t worry about me, Para. While I grant that sex is one of my primary tools for solving problems, I am a professional. And as much as I might want to get it on, pyon pyon, for now I care more about rescuing Alice and Trixie. Okay?”

Para nodded. “I didn’t mean to imply–”

“No offence taken,” Beam assured quickly. “I’m not exactly myself.”

“Right. Okay.” Para nibbled her lower lip. “Meaning it’s more me that you’re worried about, should we split up.”

Again Beam shook her head. “I trust you to get the job done too. But one, I know the area already, and two, I worry that there’s a drone out there with a knockout dart. Or worse, pyon pyon. I’m not merely scanning our surroundings here for pretty girls, you know.”

“OH,” Para realized. Beam could only assume Para had thought that their plan to move around the perimeter of the park, rather than through it, was enough to keep them safe. “Sorry. I… I didn’t…”

“Para, stop apologizing,” Beam insisted. “We’re stronger together is all.” She realized her eyes had wandered south again. “All I ask is that you don’t suddenly decide to take me up on any prior offers. I don’t want to have to run a willpower check, pyon pyon.” She smiled.

Alas, Para’s face became even more red. “That’s SO unlikely,” she blurted. Then she flinched. “I mean… it’s like I’ve said before, you’re not undesirable, it’s… uh… I… um…”

Beam could tell Para was trying not to say ‘sorry’. “Ugh, again, no offence taken,” Beam broke in. “Calm down, Para. I get it. You’re not human. Possibly not bi either. My remark was more an attempt to defuse tension, pyon pyon. Along with being a commentary on… how do I put this.”

Beam paused to find the right phrasing. “Listen. I think certain people infected with the Bunny Virus are more prone to want to engage with other infected, rather than the general population.”

Para considered that. “Then you want to, er, be with other bunnies,” she clarified.

Beam nodded. “The pull is stronger. Now, maybe that’s because I, as an individual, would rather not spread the virus, pyon pyon. Even though I’m not contagious. Might be different for others, particularly if they had strong emotional ties, and wanted someone in particular to be converted with them. But if not, well… we stay together.”

Para fell silent, seemingly thinking about that as they continued their walk. “Does that mean if we run into other infected, they might try to jump me?” she said at last.

“Didn’t want to come out with it, but yes, maybe, pyon pyon,” Beam concluded.

“Ah. Thanks for being here then,” Para decided.

They reached the second point of the triangle then and set up Para’s pylon in silence, before continuing to walk around the park to get to the optimal site on the other side. They were walking, rather than running, to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

Beam checked her scanner. Ideally, they’d wanted their points to form the largest possible equilateral triangle. They didn’t know how big the underground complex was.

It was as they turned the final corner, that Beam was forced to shoot out her hand to keep Para back.

“Heck,” Beam muttered. There was a police officer down there. A female one. And while anchoring down their pylon wouldn’t take long, there was no way it wouldn’t be seen as suspicious, particularly since it would seem like infected people were doing it.

“What do we do about her?” Para murmured, peering past to see the issue.

Beam handed her devices over to Para. “I’ll try to lure her away, pyon pyon. When I do, you set up the pyon. Er, pylon.”

Para looked unconvinced. “You think you can?”

Honestly, Beam wasn’t sure. She couldn’t rely on her sexual wiles to manage it, that was the one thing everyone would be guarding against with an infected person. But a transparent lie such as ‘come here, someone’s been mugged’ might not hold up.

Para didn’t have to know any of that though. “I think so,” Beam answered. “Unless you know of some alternative?”

Para winced. “We could hope that Fate and Alijda are having better luck on the Station?”

Beam shook her head. “We’re not going to wait around on their plan, pyon pyon. Er, my plan. My plan that they’re enacting. Whatever.” She took in a deep breath. “Here goes.”

Beam headed towards the officer.

“This was a good idea,” Alijda remarked. “Working two angles simultaneously, in case one fails.”

“Except this splits our focus at a critical time,” Fate lamented. “Plus Beam knows the Station’s history a heck of a lot better than me. But she needs to be down there, as she presumably cannot get infected.”

[caption id=“attachment_976” align=“alignright” width=“168”] Alijda van Vliet (chibi).
Commission from: Shirochya[/caption]

Alijda noticed Fate continuing to work through the security locks for the Station’s artifacts as she spoke. She could watch the other women via the Pad being carried, but was, of course, still stuck in the quarantine room.

“Don’t beat yourself up over it,” Alijda said. “Besides, this beats sitting up here spinning our thumbs.” She looked back down at the artifact listing on her terminal.

There was a click, and Fate headed into the next room. “I will admit,” Fate said after a moment, “every time I walk in here I half expect that phone to ring, and discover that God is on the other line.”

“Phone?” Alijda asked, without looking up.

“The one on the wall here. I don’t think it’s real,” Fate added. “But it wasn’t listed in artifacts either, so it must be part of the station. Unless the other administrators weren’t that great at records.”

“Ooh, don’t let Alice hear you say something like that,” Alijda remarked. “She can be a real stickler for the rules at times.”

There was a pause, as Fate presumably looked at the physical items while Alijda continued her scrolling through the catalogue. There were only around a dozen artifacts whose home dimension had not been located yet, but there was a fair amount of detail to go with them.

“Alijda?” Fate asked after a moment.

“Mmmm hmmmm,” Alijda answered.

“Did Alice ever talk much about that God? The one who, I guess, set all this up?”

Alijda shook her head, finally taking a moment to look back at the monitor. “Just, female, rescued Alice from a Hell Dimension, never met in person, seemed to give good advice. Depending on your definition of good. Granted, I never pried. It didn’t seem right, given how Alice revered her, yet got fired.”

Fate nodded, looking troubled. “Okay then.”

“Why, do you know something about this God that we don’t?” Alijda asked.

Fate sighed. “No. If anything, I know less. I’ve never received orders, the few items retrieved in my time have been due to scans we made. I’ve been wondering though, whether She is the reason we picked up on this dimensional pandemic in the first place?”

“Huh. You think our mystery message was sent by God?” Alijda tried not to sound incredulous. It seemed even less plausible than their current ‘message from the future’ theory.

“I don’t know,” Fate said, visibly frustrated. “But if it was Her, well…” Her voice trailed off.

“Well?” Alijda prompted, her attention having gone back to her item list.

Another sigh. “Well, if there is a God, doesn’t that imply the existence of a Devil?”

Alijda frowned. “Huh. I’m… not the best person to be talking to about religion. Are you implying the Devil started the pandemic though?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe about all this,” Fate said. She pressed her palm to her forehead. “I need more sleep.”

“We all do,” Alijda agreed. Her finger hovered over the current item. “Hold on. Something here, maybe. Found on an Earth denoted… PX-75309?”

“I’m listening,” Fate said, sounding more business-like.

Alijda cleared her throat. “It’s a helmet that lets you swap minds. You merely need an item belonging to the other person to make it work. And Alice has stuff up here, yeah?”

“Hmmm. You’re thinking I could briefly take over Alice’s body to learn the layout down there,” Fate deduced. “While she could be up here debriefing you.”

“It’s a thought,” Alijda agreed. “It’s unclear whether the range works when we’re not on the planet, but nothing can block mental brainwaves, right?”

“It’s worth an attempt,” Fate decided. “Reminds me of a gun enchantment in Chartreuse’s last mission, actually.” A pause. “Nothing in the room looks like a helmet though.”

“This says helmet, but the image is more like a metal fruit bowl,” Alijda clarified. “Also, uh oh, Beam’s notes say that the transfer time is random. Moreover, the person you swap with now has the helmet. If they swap with someone else, you could be stuck in the body you transferred to.”

“Unless I got the helmet back,” Fate reasoned. “Though I guess a lot of damage could be done in the interim.”

“Yeah. I think that’s what happened on PX-75309. Anyway. To activate you simply concentrate on the item you have, and on what the other person looks like.”

“Okay. I’ve got it now,” Fate said, holding up the mind helmet.

“You do,” Alijda confirmed.

Fate turned to exit the room. “I’ll get some clothing of Alice’s and bring it to an isolated area of the Station to activate. Just in case.”

“That’s prudent,” Alijda agreed. “Keep me on video to monitor the situation.”

Fate had everything set up less than ten minutes later. Alijda tried not to laugh as the woman lowered the bowl onto her head; it covered most of her face.

“Okay then. Does this look as silly as it feels?” Fate asked, as she sat down and clutched a pair of Alice’s jeans to her chest.

“Would you believe me if I said no?”

“Not really. And no word from Para or Beam yet?”

Alijda shook her head. “No, though they’re still on sensors. Should we wait?”

“No point. This might not even work.” Fate drew in a deep breath. “So here’s wishing that I could swap minds with Alice.”

“Mmmm. At times, we all wonder what goes on in her head,” Alijda joked.

At first, nothing seemed to happen. But then, Fate sat up straighter. “What is this?” Fate’s voice demanded. She pulled the helmet off of her head and looked around. “Where am I? Where the hell did my underground lab go?!”

“Oh. Oh, that’s great,” Alijda muttered.

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10613718]

VOTING CLOSES AFTER SEPTEMBER (Thurs Oct 1st).

THE ORACLE PROPHESIED: I’m not sure about prophesied, but early drafts had Fate and Alice already having swapped minds (likely if we’d gone the romance angle). It seemed like a useful device to have during a pandemic, when the limitation is your body cannot leave the house. Nixed when we started with Trixie.

EXTRA ASIDE: I kept the last vote open to see if the tie would be broken, and because it was my first full week of classes under our new pandemic teaching model. So I was busy. Closed it Friday, but before I could start writing in earnest, my daughter got sick, and gave us her cold, and we all needed Covid-19 tests to avoid being at home for 14 days which was not a feasible situation. Hence the part is late. Thanks for waiting, and reading through to this point.

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART NINE

Could Para catch the virus? If she caught it, would she grow a second set of bunny ears? If so, would they be partially tied to her mood, as her parabolic ears currently were? Or given that she wasn’t human, would there be no physical effect, only mental problems?

Ever since Beam had been out of quarantine, Para had endeavoured to engage the other woman in conversation about the non-physical aspects of the disease. Just in case.

But that only tended to result in Beam getting seductive. Of course, it now felt questionable in terms of usefulness, as for all they knew, Beam might have been infected with some holographic variation in the first place.

Para was now spending her time trying not to think about it, instead working to improve the Station’s sensors.

[caption id=“attachment_848” align=“alignright” width=“219”] PARA
Commission by Michelle Simpson[/caption]

Granted, she didn’t know that much about the technology, but she’d asked Alijda for some help. And while her first human friend was more of a hacker than a sensor specialist, it gave the both of them something to puzzle though while Alijda was quarantined, after her return from the magical world.

The initial reason for Para’s work had been better communications in advance of future teleport retrievals. A larger part of the logic now was the encrypted message the Station had received, the one pointing it towards this pandemic problem in the first place. Perhaps they could locate the source? Or find more such messages out there?

Either way, it was fortunate that she’d put her efforts there. Because this meant that it registered right away when Trixie and Alice disappeared from routine scans for their communicators.

Para double checked. She attempted a triangulation from their last known position, and it looked like they’d been headed towards some sort of park. Somewhere Beam had frequented. An attempt to scan more directly revealed a blind spot in the sensors.

“That can’t be good,” Para muttered aloud.

Para wondered about calling Fate, but the poor woman was finally getting some rest after having sent Trixie down to the planet in the first place. So she opened an internal communication to Alijda instead.

“Hey, do you think we could finish our upgrades fast?” she asked.

Alijda’s head bobbed. It looked like she was sitting up. “Maybe,” she yawned. “Why?”

“I’ve lost track of the team on the planet,” Para explained.

Alijda flinched. “Go to Auxiliary Control and illuminate a panel there. So that I can see what you’re doing.”

“I’m already here,” Para remarked. “I’ll set it up straight away.”

They were collaborating in less than five minutes, Alijda visible on the panel from the waist up as she peered at what Para was doing.

“Okay,” Alijda said. “I think as soon as the amplifier is hooked in, we’ll get a signal boost.”

Para peered at the wires, making sure not to hook a positive to a negative. “You’d think the station could access the best equipment,” she mused aloud. “Or at least be able to replicate it or something.” This amplifier had been assembled from parts in a storage bin.

“There’s probably some law preventing them from grabbing the best dimensional technology,” Alijda remarked. She grinned. “They have to make due with temporarily grabbing the best people. Or, er, beings. Meaning us.”

Para half smiled herself as she completed the hookup. “Even though we’re in the dark. It makes me wonder about the God that Alice referred to in our first mission. Like, why can’t they help out more?”

“Or as Alice would say ‘what does God need with a Dimensional Space Station’,” Alijda remarked. “All I can say is her take was that we still needed to have free will to fix things. Or screw up. Or both, considering how she was fired. They’re good questions though, I’m glad you’re asking them.”

“I’ve been questioning more than usual lately,” Para sighed.

“Okay, that should do it,” Alijda said, as Para moved back. “Flip the switch.”

Para stood back up, dusting off her skirt. “Great. Let’s see if we can learn more about the blind spot.” She reached out to activate the enhancements.

“This area didn’t show up unless you were looking right at it, yeah?” Alijda observed. “Implies there could be more down there.”

“That’s unsettling,” Para said, frowning. “Also, it’s still there… albeit smaller. Oh wait, I’m picking up…” Para twisted a knob.

“Hello? Hello?” came Trixie’s breathless voice.

“Hello, Trixie?” Para asked.

“Oh, thank goodness,” Trixie sighed. “Hurry. We’re trapped in the elevator with valuable information. Can you beam us up? Like, we don’t need Beam but… you know what I mean, yes?”

“Um, let me check,” said Para. She looked towards Alijda, hoping her friend had some way to know.

Alijda looked at the ceiling. “Hey Ziggy, you clued in?” she asked the main computer.

“More or less,” the computer responded after a moment. “Parts of me go inactive during your work, given that I don’t entirely want to know what surgery it is you’re trying to perform on me.”

“Can we do what Trixie asked?” Para wondered.

A pause. “No, there is a scattering field in place. You will want Trixie to move further away from that location.”

Para cleared her throat. “Trixie, there’s–”

“I heard. What part of us being trapped in an elevator did you not get?” Trixie complained. “And yes, there’s an emergency hatch, but it’s stuck. In much the same way that my elbow is stuck in Alice’s side.”

“At least it’s not poking me in the breast any more,” came Alice’s deadpan voice for the first time. “This is not a large space.”

“Hey, waving my wrist communicator around WORKED, didn’t it?” Trixie shot back.

Para decided not to mention the sensor enhancements. “Ladies, you’re on the edge of a strange blind spot,” she explained. “Maybe instead you can provide us with information to shut it down, or get around it?”

“Information? Well, there’s a whole secret base down here under the park,” Trixie said. “Funded by Clover Enterprises.”

“Indirectly funded,” Alice elaborated. “It’s local, run by Vortex Limited, who have been making their money through magical upgrades to the world’s technological systems. Upgrades obtained through Clover.”

“Right, right,” Trixie agreed. “Though you’re the one who thinks this is all some global Clover Enterprises experiment.”

“Taking advantage of the locals, why wouldn’t it be?” Alice argued. “Besides, we DO know that some aspects of the magic have been less than compatible with indigenous biology. Which led to the current planetwide situation.”

“Oh, damn. The pandemic,” Alijda gasped.

“Right,” Alice confirmed. “The Bunny disease is natural, except not, because it came from components that never should have interacted. Clover is at fault.”

“Kind of makes your Epsilon Project sensible,” Trixie admitted. “Keeping items out of dimensions where they shouldn’t be. You never know what might happen when they mix.”

“But then how is the disease jumping dimensions?” Para asked. “And mutating?”

“That? Not sure,” Trixie said. “This Vortex scientist has been playing with different strains here, in an attempt to find a cure. Could be his corporation also has the ability to jump dimensions? We didn’t find evidence of that - yet - but it would account for the spreading.”

“I wonder if these guys offered a biological sample to Clover Enterprises,” Alice said. “Clover themselves could be the ones spreading it. After all, the first file we saw was for a trade, not a cash payment. Might have been for items to be provided later.”

“I feel like Clover wanted some of this blended magical technology up front though,” Trixie noted. “I mean, from what little I’ve learned through working with your Epsilon group, tech and magic fusions are not that common in the greater multiverse. Even on my Earth, it’s not as simple as it might appear.”

“Maybe,” Alice said, sounding unconvinced.

“The blend was certainly messed up on the tiny world I went to with Para,” Alijda recalled.

“These Vortex people have certainly mastered their fusion to the point of infecting Beam,” Para reminded. “I’m starting to think we DON’T want them getting their hands on Trixie, and all the extra information she has.”

“I’d settle for getting my hands off Trixie right now,” Alice remarked. “No offence.”

“None taken,” Trixie mumbled.

“So far I haven’t heard anything that would get us past the scattering field,” Para pointed out.

“Can I transmit Rixi’s files to you somehow?” Trixie suggested. “You might find something there.”

“That’s an idea,” Para agreed. “Can we link her device with Ziggy, or have it send the information as an attachment?”

“I will attempt to set up a link through this channel,” came Ziggy’s voice.

“Rixi, try to coordinate. Para, there’s a bunch of files, and we haven’t had time to read each… wait, the elevator’s moving again,” Trixie realized.

“Going down,” Alice sighed.

“Oh no, he’s calling us back,” Trixie yelped. “Beam us up, beam us up!”

“We’ll start working on an extraction plan,” Alijda noted. “No worries. Stall if you can.”

Alice sighed. “It’s my fault we’ve been caught,” she admitted. “I insisted we stay long enough to get the files. So, know what? Even though I’m not the one in those pants with that perfume, I’ll try to seduce him to get us free. Okay?”

“Ha ha, good joke,” Trixie grumbled.

“I’m totally serious,” Alice insisted. “He’ll be so confused by my doing it that you might have a chance to escape out the front. With all your tech-magic intelligence. No elevator there to slow you down. Right?”

Trixie sighed audibly. “As amusing as … fine with taking point on … clarify our cover story?”

Para frowned. The communication link was breaking up.

“We could … members of the Vortex Limited team following up …” Alice stated, just before the channel went completely dead.

“That’s not good,” Alijda said, redundantly.

“I was able to obtain a few files before we lost the link,” Ziggy commented. “Shall I pull those up for you?”

Para nodded. “Yes please, and I guess we’d better wake up Fate.”

Only fifteen minutes had passed since they’d lost the communication link. It didn’t feel like that much time to Para, but she suspected that it felt longer to Trixie and Alice, down on the planet.

Fate had tentatively labelled them as hostages, though for all they knew, the two Epsilon employees were running a convincing con job.

“I see three options,” Fate said, pacing back and forth. “First option is sending Beam and Para planet-side, to evaluate the situation. Possibly set up a signal booster on site to cut through the interference, and we get everyone back that way.”

“Don’t you need Beam to help with the Station?” Para wondered.

The blonde hologram shook her head. “Stuff I’m dealing with is routine enough that Alijda could handle it from her room for now, pyon pyon. Plus I know the planet and would blend right in.”

“Also, Para, I don’t want to send you alone,” Fate noted. “I won’t lie though, it might be dangerous.”

Para felt her bunny ears quivering. “Second option?”

“We contact the Vortex group,” Fate stated. “There’s enough information in the few files Trixie transmitted for us to do that. We could even pretend to be with Clover Enterprises. There’s less risk to us this way, and if we do it right, we can get our people released as well as obtain more information about both groups.”

“But if we mess up, we could end up putting Alice and Trixie in even more danger,” Alijda chimed in from the monitor where she was observing the meeting.

“Possible,” Fate yielded.

“And the third option is my idea,” Beam remarked. Fate gestured at her to continue, and Beam smiled. “Thing is, we do have some artifacts on this station that have not yet been returned, pyon pyon. Between those and the sensor upgrades, we might find a way to punch through all the interference and get our ladies out without interfering with anything else happening down there at all.”

“Might?” Para wondered.

“Yes, well, it’s still half a plan,” Beam admitted. “But it emphasizes our non-interference policy and could mean we get a useful tool for later use.”

“We’ve already interfered,” Alijda pointed out. “And what if your plan turns into a wasted hour?”

“Look, sorry, we don’t really have time for a debate here,” Fate cut back in. “I’m going to choose. This meeting was mostly to see if there was an obvious flaw in any of the plans, and I’m not hearing anything I didn’t already consider. So unless someone had any other ideas or input…?”

Everyone exchanged uncertain glances. It didn’t look like there was anything else to say.

Para turned her attention back to hear Fate’s decision.

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10605190]

VOTING CLOSES AFTER SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13th.

EXTRA ASIDE: Already over 50 spam messages for September. Really? Contrast just over 10 actual page views. As for voting, three way tie until late Sunday. I guess it’s nice that there’s no one clear path I should be following? (Which would make things too predictable, right?) Though I sometimes wonder if people who don’t get their choice are annoyed. (Is it even the same people week to week? Who knows?) Either way, thank you all for sticking with it.

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART EIGHT

Alice rolled her eyes. “Fine. We stay together then. You want to decontaminate at the same time, or would that be as awkward as the elevator ride?”

Trixie flinched, and immediately cursed herself for that reaction. For whatever reason, it was taking some effort to keep her hormones in check, after all that time stuck on the Epsilon station. It didn’t help that Alice was attractive, in her own way.

Fortunately, it did help that Alice was pretty practical in terms of staying on task.

[caption id=“attachment_2345” align=“alignright” width=“186”] TRIXIE VIRGA
Commission from Sen Yomi[/caption]

“It’s fine,” Trixie said, clenching her jaw. “I’m having a little trouble adjusting to everything, that’s all. But I can take it.”

Alice tilted her head to one side. “Am I everything? People do sometimes have trouble adjusting to me. Can I do something to help you with that?”

Trixie sighed. “Alice. It’s not you. Not directly. Let’s just say I was dealing with Beam on the station, plus I haven’t seen my open relationship boyfriend in a while, so I’m… adjusting. Can we leave it at that?”

“You’re adjusting…” Alice blinked, then her eyes widened. “Oh. Ohhh. Would it help if I slapped you? Or if you slapped me?”

“It’s FINE,” Trixie repeated, pressing the heel of her hand to her head. A thought occurred. “Just tell me that we can decontaminate while still wearing our clothes.”

Alice walked over to read the signage more closely, as Trixie belatedly used her Rixi to take some photographs of the file folders about the virus. In case it was useful or even necessary for later.

“We’re good,” Alice called out after a moment. Trixie turned, to see the other woman giving her a thumbs up. “Shirts, socks, panties, they can all stay on. Hella suspicious, bad for any fanfic writers we have, good for you.”

Trixie came over to give the chamber a look herself. The system seemed automated, and she saw no reason that the same spell that got them down here wouldn’t work again. More to the point, unlike the elevator, which had been smaller than a phone booth, the small window in the door showed the chamber to be the size of a small bathroom at the least.

“Suspicious in what sense?” Trixie asked, deciding not to delve into the other comments.

“I’ve read up on decontamination,” Alice remarked. “Being on a pandemic planet and all. Removal of clothing is pretty standard, implying a level of technology down here that exceeds the technology up there.”

“So the government has been hiding advances from the people,” Trixie hypothesized. “Or there’s some element of magic on the planet that isn’t well known.”

“Mmmm, or something,” Alice mused. She shrugged. “Anyway, we might want to leave anything behind that we don’t want getting wet or damaged. I bring it up, as your pants might qualify. But again, that’s fanfic bait.”

Trixie looked down at her leather pants and sighed. Maybe they had been a bad choice after all. “I’ll live. And Rixi can handle water.”

Alice nodded. “Speaking of, we’ll need your magical device to get us access to the room. I’m no hacker.”

Trixie nodded. “That shouldn’t be a problem.” The techno witch pressed Rixi up to the keypad with one hand, while waving her other hand out in front of her. “Ubi fumus, ibi ignis,” she restated.

There were some clicks, and after a moment, the decontamination door swung open. A combination of magic, and Rixi doing a fast interface.

“Piece of cake,” Trixie remarked. “After you?”

“Thanks?” Alice said, peering inside. “It occurs to me that these things are gas-tight, and it’d be real easy to see us on a monitor and suffocate us. I hope our emergency beacons still work.”

“My Rixi is always available,” Trixie said, waving it in the air. “It can get us out. Besides, a smart director would want to question us before a death sentence, to know how we got past this security in the first place.” She wondered whether to ask why Alice was fixating on horror movies.

Alice nodded. “Okay then.” She walked into the room, with Trixie following. As soon as Trixie closed the door behind them, the lighting - which to this point had seemed automatic, Trixie presuming it had been triggered by their use of the elevator - tinged red.

A spray of what Trixie hoped was water came from the ceiling. She wondered about closing her eyes, to protect them, but she was equally nervous that she would miss something important that might result in them getting trapped. She squinted.

The spray went on for what Trixie judged to be about a minute, and when the water was finished - she now saw a small drain in the floor - there was a heating effect. This helped to dry them, as well as presumably frying anything that might have been airborne. There also came a humming noise, possibly a sonic effect, as Trixie couldn’t think of a reason for the noise to be sustained in that way.

Alice was right, it definitely felt more high tech than anything else on this world, or on her own for that matter.

The whole process took almost five minutes, and left Trixie sweating in her outfit, but in the end, the lighting went back to normal. There was a click at the door on the far side. Trixie quickly stepped forwards, pushing it open. Once she was out, she quickly raked her fingers through her still slightly damp twintails and wiped her fingers down on her pants to try and remove any excess moisture.

They were now in a small one room apartment. There was a cot, a table and chair, and a small kitchen area with a fridge and a lot of cardboard boxes.

“Guess we came in through the back door?” Alice mused, taking off her mask. “The good stuff must be through there.” She pointed to the door directly opposite to them. “Now that we’re in, can your device scan for life signs?”

“Not like the movies,” Trixie said, belatedly pulling her own mask down. It made sense that they wouldn’t need those after having gone through that chamber. “Rixi needs a link to internal sensors.”

“Worth a shot,” the other woman sighed. She crept over to the other door, listening at it for a moment. Then she carefully cracked it open wide enough to peer through. Then she fully opened it. “Never mind.”

It looked to be a small bathroom.

Trixie crossed her arms. “No way out. So this is a bunker of some sort.”

Alice shook her head. “All that high tech setup for this small area? And an entrance that felt more like an emergency exit? I don’t buy it.” She looked around the room again.

Trixie wandered over to check in the boxes. It looked like an excessive amount of canned goods. The fridge seemed to be more of a freezer unit, which held more perishable items. Someone could definitely hide out down there for a while. Say, if someone was on the lookout for them.

Alice had started knocking all along on the wall to the right. By Trixie’s reckoning, that direction led back towards the entranceway of the park.

The redhead cleared her throat. “What, you think there’s a–” Alice pushed on a knothole, and an entire piece of panelling popped out. “–secret passage?” Trixie finished, eyebrows going up.

“There are secret passages all around you, if you know where to look,” Alice intoned. She gestured. “You first this time? Distract anyone inside, okay?”

Trixie sighed. She supposed turnabout was fair play… besides, she probably wouldn’t have even found the secret area without Alice’s help.

“I’m trying stealth before I shake my ass,” Trixie noted. As such, she quietly edged in through the opening. The room on the other side was dark, but Trixie got the impression that it was larger. In part because there seemed to be a panel blinking off to one side, some distance away.

She edged along the wall, then over towards the panel. Up close, she realized it was a monitor, and the system seemed to be in standby mode. Trixie held Rixi up.

“Can we interface with this?” she murmured.

“Clarify,” Rixi stated.

“Use the same spell to get access.”

A pause. “Unlikely. There is higher security. I do believe we could circumvent it manually.”

Trixie knew that Rixi’s use of ‘manually’ meant inserting some code into the system, rather than looking for a physical switch. But that would take time.

She looked back towards Alice, who was now silhouetted in the doorway. “Have a look around,” she suggested. “I’ll see if I can break into their computers.”

Alice nodded. “If you can’t get all the way in, see if you can tweak communications to get to the station. Alijda can hack almost anything.”

“So I’ve heard,” Trixie said dryly. Alijda had come aboard Epsilon while she’d been asleep, and had been very quickly whisked off on her own mission. So the two of them had yet to meet. She was curious about the other woman, as a preliminary file she’d been granted access to indicated that Alijda had a teleportation power, mental issues, and a not unattractive presence.

Still, that was a consideration for the future. Trixie was sure she could handle this.

Only when the lights came on, did Trixie bother to look around the area. The room WAS larger, along the lines of a lecture hall, with the computer banks over on her side, and a number of specimens or samples lining shelves on the opposite wall. In between were lab benches. There also seemed to be two visible doorways… not counting the way they got in, which seemed to be a hidden panel door both ways.

One of the new doors had the look of another decontamination chamber. Trixie didn’t know where the other one led, but Alice seemed to be on her way to check it out.

Trixie returned to her coding. Based on Rixi’s initial scans, the program she was writing into her device would grant them access, at least temporarily.

“Any luck?” Alice asked, startling the techno-witch on account of standing almost right behind her. How much time had passed?

“Probably. Give me another five minutes,” Trixie muttered.

“No problem for me, but someone else could come by in that time,” Alice pointed out.

“Uh huh,” was all Trixie bothered to say in response. No one had come yet, and talk was a distraction that delayed her coding.

Another five minutes passed, or she hoped it was only five minutes. Either way, she was done. She gestured vaguely to Alice before tapping at Rixi’s red crystal. “Execute.”

“Interfacing and executing,” Rixi responded.

Trixie wiped her arm across her brow as she waited.

The standby screen flickered. A login screen briefly appeared… and then a logo appeared in its place, spinning around on its access. It looked to be a four leaf clover.

“You’re in?” Alice breathed.

“For now,” Trixie agreed. “Rixi, record all screens as we browse.”

“Acknowledged.”

The screen now resolved into a graphical interface with two words on the background screen.

“Clover Enterprises,” Alice continued. She started to hop from one foot to the other. “Yes! I KNEW it, I knew Clover would be behind something inter-dimensional like this. Now we are so happy, we do the dance of joy… that is, assuming you can copy over their corporate manifesto??”

“I don’t know where I’d even find that,” Trixie complained. “And for all we know, this Clover refers to a company that makes computers.” She opened up what looked like a file directory. She immediately went into the first subdirectory. “Also feeling like the Security folder should be a priority.”

Alice let out a long sigh. “Yes, okay, fine.”

Trixie quickly realized that there had recently been a file backup to archives… but not recently enough. “Rixi, I’m going to erase all signs that me and Alice got in here. Let me know if I miss anything.”

“Acknowledged.”

Trixie tapped at the keys, finishing by tuning into a live video feed. It looked to be a view of the park above them. “I think this confirms that someone was monitoring Beam wandering about. Hence the hijacking of her code.”

“Yes, well, some of the jars down here are for knockout drugs,” Alice affirmed. “And there’s items to disrupt systems like hers. And there’s something that might have been able to inject her. We need to know the WHY though… manifesto?”

“Yes, okay, hold on Miss One-Track-Mind,” Trixie grumbled. “It’s not like that’s labelled.”

She was hesitant to delve into the archived files, as it would give current date stamps to their most recent access. She wanted to reprogram as little as possible. But maybe whoever this was had been looking at something more recently?

“Okay, how about this,” Trixie mused. “Opened yesterday, but the file name is dated from even before the pandemic began.”

The document appeared on the screen. She scanned it, even as Alice enthused, “This is an agreement with Clover Enterprises to trade technologies for magical items.”

“Yuh huh,” Trixie agreed. “Now I pull up recent files related to those items.” She began to type in the search command.

Rixi’s crystal pulsed. “You are about to have company.”

A video feed popped up again, this time showing a figure in a hood and cloak who was entering what looked like some sort of storm drain near the park fountain. It didn’t look like a drone camera. Trixie concluded that it was pointed at the other entrance to this place.

“We gotta go,” Trixie sighed.

“No, the files,” Alice protested. “He’ll be five minutes getting through decontamination. We need this information.”

“He’ll SEE us from that room,” Trixie said, pointing at the small window in the door and shaking her head. “I mean, I can get copies into Rixi to look at later, but only at a cost of having to hide down here, hoping we’re not found.”

“Pfft. Once we have the files, we confront this guy,” Alice objected. “Since even if we leave now, we won’t make it to the surface before he’s onto us. That elevator was hella slow.”

Trixie frowned. Alice was right, their chances of getting away weren’t great. But perhaps they could contact Epsilon from the elevator. Wasn’t that better than provoking this guy, either by hiding in his lair, or by throwing their investigation into his face?

What was the least terrible option?

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10597815]

VOTING CLOSES ON SUNDAY AUGUST 30th.

EXTRA ASIDE: Only one vote for a week, then abruptly three more when I mused on Facebook… I guess that’s where I need to be hyping? The fifth vote was when I left it open for an additional day anyway (possibly the original voter returned). The posting delay today was owing to a busy week, and me wanting to get through ‘Steins;Gate 0’ prior to the week before school. Wheee. I do appreciate that you’re still reading!

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART SEVEN

A redhead with twintails slid out of the portal, landing on her behind. She was wearing the same kind of protective face mask as Alice herself, though her glistening white blouse and dark leather pants were a departure from the pink T-shirt and blue jeans that Alice had selected that morning. As were the woman’s ankle boots.

Alice approached as the wormhole closed back in on itself. She extended her hand.

[caption id=“attachment_929” align=“alignright” width=“185”] ALICE VUNDERLANDE
Commission by Cherry Zong[/caption]

“Hello! Trixie, I presume?”

The woman eyed Alice for a moment before reaching her arm out to accept the help rising to her feet. “Correct. And you’re Alice, I recognize you from the videos.”

“Only the public ones, I trust,” Alice chirped. “I’m more interesting in person.” She gestured at her new companion. “Did you dress up special for me? I thought you preferred skirts.”

Trixie dusted off her pants. “No. This simply seemed more practical for the mission, while still being prone to distract anyone that I’d want to keep off balance.” She looked back up at Alice, her eyes worried and searching. “Please tell me you’re not aroused.”

“Oh no. I’m not Beam,” Alice said, laughing. “Just, those wouldn’t be my first go-to after ditching a skirt.” She hooked her thumbs into the belt loops of her jeans. “Gotta stay comfortable.”

Trixie dragged her fingers back through her twintails. “Oh, tight leather’s comfortable, if you wear it enough. And it’s not like you’d see my ass less if I wore jeans.”

“I suppose,” Alice granted. She gestured down the alley. “So, shall we regroup back at the apartment?”

To Alice’s surprise, Trixie shook her head. “I’d rather start by taking readings from the nearby park,” she said. “The one Beam used to frequent.”

“You think that’s the place we want?” Alice asked. They had no conclusive proof yet about where Beam might have been infected, only that it had likely been a deliberate act.

“I don’t know,” Trixie said. “Hence the taking of readings.” She pulled some sort of small device out of her blouse pocket and waved it in the air.

“I did take a few preliminary scans of all locations where Beam hung out,” Alice remarked. “Including there. Though I guess if that’s some magic detector, you’ll register things I didn’t.”

“It’s Rixi,” Trixie stated. “I downloaded some of the data on this Earth into her, but for the most part, I’m starting from scratch. At worst, this gives me a baseline. At best, we find something’s up.”

Alice nodded. “This way then,” she concluded, turning the opposite way out of the alley from her original plan.

Honestly, Alice was just as happy to start their association by doing some investigating. She had been getting tired of all the dead ends, and after the recent Station news, had been tempted to start looking into infection sites on her own. However, once she’d learned of Fate’s decision to send Trixie down, she’d decided to wait the additional day.

For her part, Trixie seemed to be warily looking at everything and everyone as they walked down the street. It was a bit hard to tell how she felt given the mask over the lower part of her face, but she seemed troubled.

“You won’t see many late-stage infected,” Alice remarked. “The bunny ears are a dead giveaway, so they tend to stay at home. And while there could be people in the early stages of Smoke, as there’s been no way to identify such cases - I mean, beyond a test that takes a couple days to produce results - we just have to keep our distance.”

“It’s not only the virus that has me on edge,” Trixie admitted. “This is a whole new world. Yet it doesn’t look that different from being in some foreign city on my world. It’s weird. Will we turn a corner and see dogs walking upright? I keep expecting some other shoe to drop.”

“We can only hope that this will be the last footwear to fall,” Alice quoted.

Trixie focussed in on Alice. “What?”

Alice smiled back, despite knowing that Trixie wouldn’t be able to see her expression. “What?”

Trixie continued to stare for a moment, then looked back down at her Rixi device. “Okay then. So, is this park we’re going to still closed?”

“All of them in the city are,” Alice confirmed. “Except to walk through. Beam kind of ignored that, it gave her a quiet place to think.”

“Right. I’d ask why she didn’t think the apartment was a quiet enough place for that,” Trixie remarked. “Except I read your report about the lady across the hall.”

“And her boyfriend, and the fact that they’ve both turned bunny?” Alice considered. “Yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re nice enough. But they need me to do grocery runs, and the other day, one wanted me to fluff their tail.” She lifted up her palms. “I wash my hands a lot.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Yup. If I’m gonna be a bunny, it’s gonna be on my terms,” Alice stated, clenching the hands into fists. “Or possibly because I’ve become so popular that my merchandise warrants the Playboy Bunny variation. Ehhh?” She winked.

Trixie blinked back. “Sorry, are you… famous on some world out there…?”

“Nope. Not yet,” Alice sighed, clasping her hands behind her back. “Infamous, maybe. Unless being part of Epsilon itself counts.”

“Um. Well, you are unique,” Trixie said after a moment.

Alice again gave a hidden smile. “Thanks! So I’ve been told.”

Trixie cleared her throat. “So, Beam did her thinking in a park?”

“Yes. She also investigated at city hall, the airport, and on a carrot farm outside town,” Alice reminded. “But it’s true the park is the most suspicious case, since others have done reporting in the other places without any consequence that I’m aware of.”

“Are there more bunny cases among those living closer to the park?” Trixie asked.

Alice shrugged. “I’m good at tech tinkering but I’m no hacker. So I don’t have that data. However, the property for the park changed hands a bunch of times before it became what it is - that’s in the public record - and this whole neighbourhood is a pretty large subdivision. So maybe someone’s been hiding out or running experiments? I dunno.”

“Hmmm,” was all Trixie said. She looked back down at her device.

They didn’t speak again until reaching the park, though Alice did notice how more heads turned to look at Trixie and her outfit than had ever looked her way. Meaning it would probably be up to Alice to do any covert work while the eyes were on her companion. She was okay with this.

It was as Alice started to walk through the park gate that Trixie reached out to grasp her arm. “Hold up,” Trixie murmured. “I think there’s a drone in there.”

Alice reached down to pretend to tie up her running shoe. “You sure? My earlier scans were inconclusive for electronics.”

“I don’t think that was a bird I saw,” Trixie said, dubiously. She tapped at a few buttons on her device. “Maybe it was some kid who… hold on. This world has no magic? Aside from me?”

“None that I know of,” Alice said. It occurred to her belatedly that they should have tested out some of Trixie’s magic. Different Earth dimensions could react differently to individual abilities. Hopefully it wouldn’t be an issue.

Trixie remained silent for a moment, then started to walk down the sidewalk, parallel to the park. Alice finished with her shoe and hurried after. “What’ve you got?”

“I’m reading something. Something like when I access my Hammerspace,” Trixie muttered. “That is, I don’t think someone’s accessing a pocket dimension, but the more often you cast a spell, the more I can register it’s existence, given how it becomes less effective.”

“On your Earth, at least,” Alice pointed out.

“True,” Trixie granted. She came to a stop at a thick telephone pole on their side of the park fence. “But something’s been cast here. A lot. Rixi, can we duplicate?”

“Working,” came a sound from Trixie’s device, as the redhead touched a small red crystal. To Alice, it sounded like an electronic version of Trixie’s own voice.

Alice took the opportunity to look around for signs of another drone, or anything that might indicate that they were being watched. They were in the shadow of a large tree, which helped to conceal their presence, and she didn’t see anything in the branches that might indicate spying.

Too bad she hadn’t thought to bring any of her own scanners to the meet-up with Trixie.

“Analysis complete. Greatest chance of success, fumus ignis,” Rixi intoned.

“Huh,” Trixie mused. “That’s alarmingly relevant.”

“Was fumus a reference to Smoke?” Alice asked. “Something about the virus?”

“Not directly,” Trixie answered. “There’s a few catch-all spells that can be used to, well, in a sense, hack someone else’s system. In this case, we try… ubi fumus, ibi ignis.”

As Trixie spoke, she waved her hand out in front of her body. There was a click, and the telephone pole swung open, revealing a hollow with what looked like an elevator panel inside. “Translated as, where there’s Smoke, there’s fire,” Trixie finished.

“Got it,” Alice remarked, leaning in to look at the panel. “Only one other floor. Going down?”

“If you think we’ll fit,” Trixie said, dubiously. “It’s obviously made for one.”

“I’d rather not split up,” Alice insisted, moving to press herself up against the back wall. Though it was true that the cylindrical space would not fit the both of them very comfortably.

Trixie seemed to agree with the sentiment, moving in to press her body up against that of Alice. Alice suspected that the only thing that kept the shorter woman’s breath from being hot against her neck was the mask. “Pull me as close as you need,” Trixie murmured. “But try not to grope my ass too much.”

“Only a little bit then?” Alice quipped, as she fumbled for the elevator button.

“I’d hate to think I was completely unappealing,” Trixie giggled.

The door slid closed, leaving them in almost total darkness as Alice felt the platform they were standing on descend. Trixie squirmed against her body, seemingly looking for more space that didn’t exist. Eventually, she gave up.

“Alice, do you wear perfume?” Trixie murmured after a moment.

“Not usually,” Alice answered. “Though I notice you do.”

“Um. Yeah,” Trixie admitted. A pause. “Sorry if that bugs you.”

“No, no,” Alice assured. “It’s a way to distract people if they’re not keen on leather pants. I get it.”

Trixie took in a deep breath, which Alice felt more than heard. “Right.” The elevator continued to move very slowly. “Mmmph. So what are you thinking about?”

“Right now I’m thinking about horror movies that take place in elevators. Devil, Elevator, The Lift…”

“Yikes. Okay then,” Trixie said, as Alice let her voice trail off. Then, after another pause, came a mutter that sounded like, “Why am I thinking about my last Tinder hookup.”

Alice wasn’t sure how to respond, but before she even could, the door slid back open. And after Trixie had pulled away from her with a faint sigh, Alice stepped out to see what they were dealing with.

Problematically, it seemed to be a dead end. For all intents and purposes.

“Decontamination chamber,” Alice remarked, taking a couple strides to look at the exit on the other side of the small room. It was sealed shut with a sign and a keypad.

“But also some files,” Trixie remarked.

Alice turned. Sure enough, the room they were didn’t didn’t have much aside from what looked like an emergency generator, a coat rack, and a table… but on the table were a few file folders. Alice glanced over Trixie’s shoulder as the other woman flipped through them.

“I think these are all viral analyses,” Trixie said after a moment. “Of Smoke in different settings. But it’s not clear whether it’s related to causing the pandemic, curing it, or something else.”

“The dates seem to be from after the first case,” Alice noted. “If that’s relevant.”

“It probably is,” Trixie said. She put the files back down. “So, we keep going?”

Alice sighed. “Do we? Someone will surely notice when their decontamination chamber is in use. If not now, then when someone checks the inevitable video footage.”

“They might have already noticed their elevator was active,” Trixie pointed out. “We should get as far as we can before they’re really on to us.”

“Let’s at least call for backup,” Alice decided. She pulled out her Epsilon communicator… only to find that no signal was available when she attempted to use it.

“That’s that then. We could leave the area to call, but I think by the time Beam or Para got down here, we’d have lost the element of surprise,” Trixie insisted.

Alice crossed and uncrossed her arms. “Maybe we should split up then,” she yielded. “You can go up top to check in, as well as be distracting to anyone monitoring the park. I’ll keep trying to sneak in the back way here.”

“What? Why should I be the one to go topside?” Trixie argued.

“Because you have the spell ability to get back down, if necessary,” Alice pointed out. “Along with your claims of being a better visual distraction.”

Trixie’s nose crinkled. “Ah. You’re not wrong.”

Alice nodded. “So, what do you think?”

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10590282]

VOTING CLOSES ON SUNDAY AUGUST 16th?

EXTRA ASIDE: I actually had all four votes within 6 days. Maybe I was talking about it more? Maybe you’re more eager? Either way, thanks for reading.

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART SIX

Trixie looked up from her cafeteria tray. She immediately regretted doing so. “Beam,” she groaned. “Now that you’re out of quarantine, could you, like, wear actual clothes? Unless you’re headed to a pool.”

The blonde holographic woman tilted her head to the side, while still leaning in across the table. Giving Trixie a very good view right down into the cleavage of her swimsuit. “No. I feel all tingly when I cover up more than this,” Beam answered. “Which then seems to make the effects of the virus worse later on.”

“Then at least make the effort to not charge up my hormones this way,” Trixie griped, now finding it impossible to look away from Beam’s heaving chest. “I need to focus, so that I can solve this mystery and get the heck out of here.”

Beam glanced down towards her own torso, then stood up straight again along with taking a step back. “Oh yeah. Sorry. Was just with Para, who’s less susceptible to my wiles than you or Fate. It DOES take a conscious effort for me to not be sexy in this state y’know, pyon pyon.”

[caption id=“attachment_2345” align=“alignright” width=“186”] TRIXIE VIRGA
Commission from Sen Yomi[/caption]

Trixie sighed, finding it easier to stare at her bowl of melon balls now that Beam was a couple metres away. She brought her spoon to her mouth, munching in order to have a moment to consider a response.

Honestly, even if Beam wasn’t contagious - as far as they could tell - having the bunny girl hopping around the Station felt more distracting than it was helpful.

Sure, Fate needed someone to handle station work. And Alice had recently reported that, over time, Smoke could completely clear from an infected person, and revert people to normal. But the number of cases there were still in the minority, while Beam was still very much infected.

But then, Trixie reflected, maybe she was simply biased. Because she had become enraptured by the holographic girl’s coding, which was written in some programming language that she didn’t have a hope of understanding. It was mysterious, magical code, from which a lovely female personality could emerge, and blossom. Blossom, and thrive.

Blossom, and thrive, and perform skilled sexual acts on the fairer sex.

“Why do you consistently send my mind into the gutter?” Trixie finally asked.

Beam smiled and shrugged. “It’s a gift? Though when you first saw me I was giving off more lusty vibes than usual. Doubt that helped for impressions, pyon pyon.”

Trixie shook her head. “Guess I’m not blameless. After almost a week here on this Station, I’m craving more human contact. So, why are you interrupting my lunch? It better not be to hit on me.”

“It’s because Fate’s going to make contact with someone else shortly,” Beam answered. “And she thinks it might be best for all of us to be there.”

Trixie pushed the cafeteria tray away, focus restored. “Let’s hope it provides a breakthrough. Lead the way, and don’t shake your cotton tail at me.”

“No promises, but I’ll try, pyon pyon,” Beam stated, spinning on her heel as Trixie stood up.

Trixie climbing off the ladder in the main control room seemed to prompt Fate to start in on an explanation.

“Okay,” Fate said. “I ran a new character analysis. There was our initial information, which suggested to us that Trixie might have some solutions, plus the data from Alijda and Alice. All conditional on us only consulting someone with whom Epsilon’s previously interacted.”

“Isn’t that kind of a short list?” Para mused. “There haven’t been that many big missions.”

“Small missions count. Like Beam’s first archaeologist assignment,” Fate clarified. “People who have never met us, but they are aware of artifacts and the like.”

“What turned up then?” Trixie asked, coming closer.

Fate turned to the computer. “One name. Time to give this a try.”

The blonde woman reached out and tapped a few keys, then stood back as a phone began to ring.

“We’re not bringing them here, pyon pyon?” Beam murmured, leaning closer to Fate.

“According to his file, he’s got the means to get here if he wants,” Fate answered. “In a British taxicab.”

Trixie turned. “He?” she said, surprised. She’d started to take their all female cast for granted.

The sound of the phone ringing cut out, and an image appeared on the computer monitor. Trixie took in darker skin and what looked like a tan suit, before there was a flash of blinding light. Light that must have come from a swiss army like device that the man was holding. His face came into view as he looked at it, then back at the monitor.

“Oh,” he said. “This is actually a call. I thought for sure there was a malfunction.”

Fate stepped forwards and waved. “Hello! I represent a group of people who are looking for some assistance in terms of a dimensional pandemic. Possibly with a temporal angle.”

“Oh, that’s MASON,” Para said, smiling. She stepped forwards next to Fate, waving. “Hi! How have you been, friendly alien guy?”

Mason’s look of confusion was replaced with a half smile. “Oh, there’s someone I recognize. Para, yes? You still with… the Epsilon Project, was it? Guessing it hasn’t been easy to track me. I’ve been off the grid.”

“I don’t think we were trying to,” Para answered. She looked at Fate. “Were we?”

“No. Alice even put a flag on his file, but we’re in a bit of a bind here. Mason, can I send you all the data we have? For your opinion? You can decide if you want to join us in person after reading it.”

“Oh, HE gets all the data first,” Trixie muttered.

Beam took a step closer to her. “Mason has already been on this Station, and signed a non-disclosure form. Or some equivalent,” she informed her, quietly.

“I’ll take a look,” Mason was answering, as Trixie processed Beam’s words. “Kind of in the middle of something though. Include the best coordinates to phone, in case I can’t visit?”

“Will do,” Fate stated. She stepped forward to tap again at the keyboard.

“Thanks,” Mason said. “I’ll be in touch as soon as – wait, stop, good kitty. No, kitty. No, don’t jump on the–”

The connection cut out.

“Huh.” Trixie ran her fingers back through her twintails. “Well, that was informative. When can we expect him to–”

She was interrupted by a ring, and Fate reached out to tap a button on the console. The image of Mason reappeared, although this time he was wearing a fez and sunglasses.

Trixie stared, her fingers still stuck in her hair. Apparently more time had passed on his end of the phone line than on theirs.

“Hello again. Good news and bad news,” Mason remarked. He peered at his swiss army knife, then pushed the sunglasses up to the top of his head, knocking off his fez.

“Bad news first, pyon pyon,” Beam chirped.

“Hm? Ah, yes. Can’t triangulate to your location, but it’s not because of chronon particles on your end,” Mason said, ducking out of view. “As there are none. I think the trouble’s my stabilizer.” He reappeared and pulled off the sunglasses. “And the affectations aren’t helping. Oh well.”

“Did you want us to try and lock on from here?” Fate asked.

“Don’t bother,” Mason said, waving her off. He peered again at his swiss army knife, then shook it and looked back at them again. “I can deliver the good news this way. I think I know why your pandemics are happening, if not how.”

Trixie slowly lowered her hands. “Just from reading Fate’s files?”

Mason smiled. “Well, and from looking at your group. A bunch of white females. Who are, aside from the lady rabbits, human too.”

As Fate looked back around at their group, Trixie had to concede the point. Even Alice and Alijda fit the bill in terms of his description. Perhaps that’s why the algorithm had pinpointed a brown skinned male alien for them? Assuming biological sex even worked the same way with his race.

“Uh, we’re sorry for that?” Fate said, looking back at him.

Mason shook his head. “Never apologize for being yourself. Unless you’re supporting institutional racism, then do better than simply apologize. No, it just got me thinking, to a virus you’d all be the same too. Except while Beam looks the same, she is different inside. So why go to the trouble of attacking that code, and not the nearest router?”

“Um, I’m more complicated than a router,” Beam protested.

“Right,” Mason said. “You can move about. Go places you shouldn’t. Whereas a router is stuck in one place. You see it yet?”

“Hey! When I go places it’s CONSENSUAL,” Beam insisted. “I mean, I might come on a little strong with the prettiest women, but before I put my tongue–”

“Beam, stop. He means you were deliberately infected,” Trixie broke in. “That’s it, right? This wasn’t natural. Someone adapted the virus to her.” It was starting to click, and not in a good way.

Mason nodded. “The thought had occurred,” he remarked.

“Except the virus was affecting immobile technology on the adjacent world too,” Para reminded them. “Wasn’t that in the data we provided?”

“Well, looked like something was affecting those devices,” Mason granted. “Possibly a program for purging information that people didn’t want getting out. To stay hidden. Another a good way to stay hidden is to be somewhere that nobody wants to go. Like a world in the midst of a massive pandemic. Which is where I was leading.”

“Oh no,” Trixie said, a chill running down her spine. “You don’t think multiple worlds were infected merely to try and divert attention away from the one place where someone was doing experiments, do you?” Misdirection was a classic way of concealing a truth.

Mason shrugged. “Hey, I have no certainties here, only more hypotheses.”

“Okay. So we’re talking about someone trying to stay concealed,” Fate reasoned. “Someone on Bunny World, since that’s where Beam was.” She paused. “We need a better name for that place.”

“Smoke Machine?” Beam mused.

Fate rolled her eyes. “Anyway, this is progress. We can now plan to track down whomever could reprogram a holographic woman to be infected, or otherwise think she was, to keep her and other people away. Not a common thing on that world.”

“They also gave Beam the capability to spread the regular virus in the process, for plausibility,” Para added. “Since Beam gave us an initially positive test, right?”

“I feel like Alijda could do those things,” Beam mused, crossing her arms. She looked over at Trixie. “You probably could as well, pyon pyon. So you’d both be helpful for finding the real crook.”

“I could too,” Mason remarked, reminding them he was still watching. “Not that I - or any of us - would. That is, any of us in this present moment. I’m not sure how your temporal issue factors into the–” Something sparked behind him, and he looked over his shoulder. “Oh, shoot.”

“More trouble with your cat?” Fate wondered.

“You mean the Flerken?” Mason said. “No, I think this is… uh oh, I gotta go. Thanks for the chat, all the best with your problems.”

He waved his hand, seemed to fall down, and the communication line cut out again.

“I’m sure he’s fine, pyon pyon,” Beam said after a moment.

“So that happened,” Trixie said, rubbing her forehead. “Moving on, remind me whether it was confirmed that Bunny World had the first outbreak?”

“Yes, as best as we could tell,” Fate answered. “With the latency period ranging from one day to fourteen days, it’s hard to be 100% sure.”

“All right. So either it started there, and someone’s taken advantage of it to spread it further and give themselves a hiding place… or it was brought there by this individual deliberately.”

“A-Am I the only one thinking Alice could be in danger?” Para spoke up. “Like, maybe anyone who gets too close to the truth gets infected the way Beam did.”

“Alice was steering clear of where Beam had been,” Fate assured. “Precisely because we didn’t want Alice being infected, and didn’t think Beam had found anything. Though I suppose Alice IS staying in the same apartment.”

“I should go back down,” Beam decided. “Not only to help Alice, but maybe seeing me still poking around despite my infection will throw our enemy off their game, pyon pyon.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I should go,” Trixie said, crossing her arms. “Aside from how I don’t think I can stand being on this Station much longer, you said it yourself. My ability to give you this virus makes me well suited for pinpointing a like-minded individual.”

“Or maybe Alijda should go,” Para offered. “She also has programming power, we know she works well with Alice, and right now she’s on a decoy world.”

“We’d need to route her through quarantine, which would delay things,” Fate said. “Also, Alijda was seen in the past of the planet she’s on… wait, you don’t think she’d go rogue in the future, and be the person we’re after, do you?”

“If so, all the more reason to have Alice watching her,” Para suggested.

“Hello? Was I not brought on board to investigate?” Trixie insisted. “And I have magic, which Alijda doesn’t have.”

“Your field work is hit and miss,” Beam noted. “And if I was on the planet, I wouldn’t be distracting your research up here.”

Fate crossed her arms, brow furrowing. “Great. Another decision to make.”

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10584203]

VOTING CLOSES ON SUNDAY AUGUST 2nd?

EXTRA ASIDE: After a week online, there was only one view and one vote. Again I sighed on Facebook, which brought me to three votes, all tied. I had vague plans for working with all three, but did retweet Tuesday Serial and put out a call on Twitter (twice) for anyone wanting to tiebreak. Happened late on Thursday, so went with the Mason plan. (I’d have thought it was the first person re-voting, possible after 7 days, except it wasn’t for their initial choice.) Thanks for reading, spread the word!

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART FIVE

There was a pause before Alijda got her answer, which gave her time to move the watch communicator from her mouth to her ear. “Better than yours, apparently,” Fate’s voice came at last. “Am I your one phone call?”

“This is our scheduled check-in,” Alijda reminded. “The police confiscated magical items. This communicator is not that.”

Even so, she had turned down the volume, given how there might be some sort of monitoring system in her cell… and she wasn’t alone in here either. Hence why she had to raise the device back up to her ear again to hear Fate.

“Give your report then.”

Alijda pushed herself back to her feet. She had claimed the far corner of the cell for herself, leaving the two cots for the three other individuals. Two of them - who gave the impression that they were sister and brother - had laid down and leaned against one, respectively. They seemed to have fallen asleep over the past two hours.

The final person, an older man, had lain down on the last cot. But while he gave the appearance of being asleep like the others, Alijda was pretty sure it was an act.

“Haven’t found anything about the virus jumping beyond humans,” Alijda reported. “Tried to follow a lead about a forest becoming enchanted, but that seems to have been caused by a human, in the end.”

“Is that what got you arrested after only four days?” Fate wondered.

“Nope,” Alijda said. She dusted off her bottom, more a habit from rising than the floor itself being dirty, then swept her cloak aside to press a foot back against the wall as she continued to speak. “Caught in the crossfire of class warfare. Virus activates latent magical abilities, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Fate repeated back, warily.

“Well, society can’t have the common folk developing magic powers. That’s bad for the ruling class, who more or less had the magic monopoly until this became widespread. So the cops are rounding up people who exhibit powers but seem low class, ‘for our own safety’.” Alijda realized she was raising her fingers to make air quotes, and made herself stop.

“Oh. We made you look too low class?”

Alijda glanced down at the T-shirt and jeans she was sporting underneath the cloak that Epsilon had provided. Then her fingers idly brushed over the face mask she wore, to prevent her from actually being infected. It was top of the line, but had been crafted to resemble a cheap, cloth version. “Apparently.”

“And you haven’t teleported out of your situation because…?”

Alijda hesitated at that. Her teleportation ability had been one of the key reasons for her selection on this mission, after all. The power to get away from people though seemingly magical means, which was really useful for avoiding crowds. And by extension, hopefully the virus itself.

“At first, it was research,” Alijda admitted after a moment. “And now that I’m on the inside, their police stations are set up to suppress magical powers.”

“But your ability came from a biochemical accident,” Fate protested. “It’s not magical.”

“I know,” Alijda said, rolling her eyes. “I was there. Still, I haven’t seen a reason to test these suppression limits yet. More to the point, my peacing out might cause trouble for the others in here with me.”

“Hm. Okay, well, we’ll monitor your emergency band. We can pull you up here into quarantine at any time, though we’d prefer it not leave lots of questions for the locals down there.”

“Understood,” Alijda sighed. “I’ll be in touch.”

She shut off the communicator and strapped it back onto her wrist. Then she looked over at the cot with the old man on it.

[caption id=“attachment_976” align=“alignright” width=“168”] Alijda van Vliet (chibi).
Commission from: Shirochya[/caption]

“Do you want to talk to me yet?” Alijda asked. “Because I doubt I’ll be talking to anyone else this evening, and at this point, you likely believe I’m with the CIA or something. Figure I should debunk that.”

At that the man opened his eyes and sat up; he was also wearing a mask, but Alijda fancied that he was smiling. “I wouldn’t have said CIA. I originally thought you were a plant to learn more about those of us protesting the class system, but not any more. Since I gather you’re not from around here.”

Alijda shrugged. “I’ve been out of touch with city people for a long time.”

“Oh, sure. To the point where you either talk to your wrist device with no one on the other end, or to where you were asked to pass back information about the viral outbreak.”

“I certainly could be insane to the point of talking to myself,” Alijda offered, wiggling her eyebrows to try and compensate for her hidden facial expression.

The man shook his head. “Let me revise. I suspect you were not asked to pass information… you were recruited? Bribed?”

Alijda pursed her lips. The man was apparently a good judge of character. She had been recruited by Epsilon months ago, and she had in a sense been bribed to go on this mission.

By agreeing to go, Alijda had been able to see some of the algorithms for Beam, that autonomous hologram lady. She would later have the opportunity to network with someone named Trixie, a techno-witch, and fusing magic with programs seemed like a fascinating discipline.

Couple all of that with her investigation being of help to Alice, her occasional roommate who was also in the midst of a pandemic, and Alijda had felt like ‘no’ wasn’t an option.

Of course, insanity was still on the table - even with all that, what sane person would agree to investigate a world experiencing a viral pandemic?

“I’m indirectly helping out a friend,” Alijda admitted aloud, choosing to reference the situation with Alice.

“Ah! Someone you met before you started talking with members of our group last week? Or afterwards, as you gained more of a conscience?”

Alijda shook her head. “Nice try. I wasn’t in town last week.”

The man crossed his arms, scrutinizing her. Her casual dismissal there seemed to have caught him off guard. “Then you are a twin.”

“I’m not,” Alijda assured.

“Then you are a liar, or I am mistaken, neither of which bode well for our continuing to converse,” the man decided. He lay back down.

Alijda frowned, pushing away from the wall. This seemed like more than a simple misunderstanding. “Okay, hold up. Someone of my description was asking questions a week ago?”

The man did not answer, choosing instead to continue staring at the ceiling.

Alijda resisted the urge to sigh in exasperation. The trouble was, “Epsilon” had a limited time travel capability. She had seen it in action on the “Full Scale Invasion” mission, where a message had been sent back in time. Then she had been personally impacted by the problem of having experienced months, against Kat’s few hours, at her second encounter with the man.

Was something going to happen that necessitated continuing her investigation in the past? Or was time going to somehow fracture in the future?

“How about this third option then,” Alijda stated. “That wasn’t me, but may have been my spiritual form. It escapes me when I sleep. So I’d kind of like to know what went on.”

The man did turn back to her at that. He sized her up again. “There is more to you than meets the eye,” he said after a moment. “But this was not second hand information. I saw you personally, speaking with a friend of mine. Granted, with a different shirt and mask, but you were not spectral.”

“Impersonator then. I’m just that important.”

He slowly nodded. “That might also explain my young friend’s new ability.”

A lengthy pause followed, where he seemed to be hoping that Alijda would let something slip about the conversation she hadn’t yet had. “I hope my double was able to help him with it?” she said at last.

“Mmm. Like so many of the new abilities, the magic came with a dark side,” the man elaborated. “He can now see flashes of another person’s future. And yet, he was not able to perceive anything with you in the same way.”

Alijda tried not to let her frustration show. “Well, that wasn’t even me, so all this means is that my doppelgänger was not in control of her future, or something.”

Inwardly, she now wondered whether an upcoming temporal glitch was even “Epsilon” related. And she rather hoped that she had enough anti-depressant medications secreted away in the sole of her shoe to handle a few extra days, were things about to go sideways, throwing her into the past.

“Or perhaps your future is so bizarre that it could not be perceived,” the man said. “At any rate, perhaps it is to our benefit that I explain. You were asking him about–”

Without warning, the wall behind Alijda vaporized into nothing, and they could hear many people outside screaming.

“Free the people!”

“Defund the police!”

“Work your magic!”

The older man was immediately on his feet. “Jailbreak time. Another day, perhaps,” he stated to Alijda, before running out of the opening and towards the nearby crowd.

“Wait, what the… damn it,” she cursed, unable to take it all in at once. The brother and sister couple had been roused and were also rising to their feet. Moreover, it sounded like the police were running down the hall, but the chanting was very disruptive.

Alijda quickly jogged after the mystery man, but spotting him became impossible as a cloudy gas covered the area, making her eyes water.

“Well, if this virus was brought in from an exterior dimension, it’s sure as heck causing colossal issues for this planet,” she muttered.

With one hand rubbing her eyes and the other thrust out in front of her to push people aside, Alijda was able to get through the crowd, to a point where she felt like she could do a couple of quick teleports to escape.

“Everything okay?”

Para had decided to speak up after seeing Fate stare at the computer monitor for at least two minutes without moving. Even after Para’s interruption, the ponytailed woman still didn’t move right away.

At last, a palm was slammed down on a console in frustration, before Fate turned away from the auxiliary control computers to face her. “No. Can I help you?”

Para felt her bunny ears twitch. “That was going to be my question to you.”

“Right.” Fate pressed a hand to her forehead, leaning back against the computer banks. “Right,” she repeated. “Thing is, I don’t know. Nothing makes sense, and I hate that.”

Para clasped her hands behind her back. “I’m a good listener?”

“You are,” Fate agreed. She ran her hand down her face. “Fine. Let’s recap. We’ve got Smoke, a virus that crosses dimensions and seems to affect both humans and technology, but not nature.”

“Have you confirmed technology, outside of Beam herself?”

“Mostly,” Fate answered. “From our recent readings off tech world, they’re having computer glitches. It’s partly why we wanted additional data from fantasy world, to cover the nature angle. But with that, Alijda’s giving us some new temporal connection.”

“The report about someone seeing her before she arrived, I read that.”

“Did you?” Fate frowned. “Remind me to double check your clearance. Though, this kind of clears up one mystery. Trixie was right to have us investigate our own investigation. Alice never tripped a scan. The scan was triggered through an encrypted communication we received. Possibly one we’ll send to ourselves, in the past.”

“Meaning we’re trying to help ourselves out somehow.”

“Except NO,” Fate said, the exasperation returning to her voice, “as we’re now synched alongside three worlds, which makes implementing actual time travel near impossible. So when are we going to send it? Meanwhile, we have no active artifact mission, and yet I’ve brought three of you civilians on board to assist in research. Feels like a flagrant violation of the rules.”

Para considered that. “This ‘Smoke’ may not be a physical artifact, but it IS something out of place dimensionally,” she pointed out. “Doesn’t that justify my being here, to help with vector analysis?”

“Yeah, loophole,” Fate grumbled. “Along with Trixie to tackle the mystery, and Alijda as her tech backup.” She shook her head. “At this point, maybe I should bring in even more people, to get their opinions… but if they don’t see whatever we’re missing, I’ll have had no justification for it.”

“Isn’t providing backup to Alijda and Alice on their pandemic worlds justification enough?”

At that, Fate hesitated. “Maybe?” she yielded. “Except we may want to recall Alijda anyway, since her investigation is dead-ending and everything we have is pointing back at Bunny World instead.”

Para shrugged. “If you think having Alijda here would help, I see no reason to–”

“But then, Beam’s coming out of quarantine. Maybe we should give her a new mission, to try and keep handling this ‘in house’ as much as possible,” Fate concluded. She put her hands on her hips. “If it was your call, what would you do?”

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10579608]

VOTING CLOSES ON MONDAY JULY 20th THURS JULY 23rd?

EXTRA ASIDE: Left the vote open for over twelve days; could have closed it after three. Thanks to the one person who was able to vote! With the late close, I thought I’d write through the weekend, but found it’s easier during the week (with Daycare open). Hence this part being late. Hopefully someone notices and has time to keep reading. Have a good one!

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART FOUR

Beam looked back over her shoulder, ceasing wiggling her hips. Or rather, ceasing shaking her bunny tail at the acrylic doorway separating the two women.

“Is it distracting you?” Beam asked, with a cute little smile.

The blonde holographic woman had changed since Trixie had last seen her in the video. Most visibly, she was now wearing the blue one-piece swimsuit she’d alluded to then, to match the bow around her neck and the bunny ears spouting from her hairband. She still wore dark stockings, but now they disappeared into a pair of blue heels.

“Vaguely,” Trixie admitted. There was no point in lying. “But it’s like I told that Para lady. Don’t use my own distraction techniques against me. It annoys me more than it turns me on.”

[caption id=“attachment_1997” align=“alignright” width=“202”] CHIBI BEAM (pre-bunny)
Commission from Gen Ishihara[/caption]

“Oh.” Beam stood up fully and turned back around. “Fine. But I doubt I’m contagious, pyon pyon. And my fourteen days are almost up. We could have a LOT of fun together afterwards, before I get back to normal. Hmm?”

“You don’t even know me,” Trixie pointed out. “This is our first meeting. Why allude to wanting to sleep with me?”

Beam winked. “I’ve read your Epsilon file. I know you’re here to help us, meaning you should be rewarded. And I don’t think not knowing someone has necessarily prevented YOU from a night of passion before.” She wiggled her eyebrows, which made her bunny ears twitch too.

Trixie tightened her jaw. Beam wasn’t wrong, and yet. “So you got to read some file on ME, whereas we have to talk in person before I get access to any files about YOU? Oh, that seems fair,” she concluded, allowing her tone to imply that it definitely did not seem fair at all.

At that, Beam sighed. She turned away again, but instead of shaking her tail, went retrieve a nearby chair, which she pulled closer to the doorway before sitting down in it. She crossed both her legs and her arms, regarding Trixie.

Trixie wondered whether Beam was trying to get her to look away first, or perhaps was waiting for Trixie to offer up an apology for the outburst. She did not rise to the bait, waiting for the blonde to take the first action.

“You want me to spell out why we’re meeting here?” Beam said at last. “Or would you prefer to deduce it, what with investigations being something you’re supposedly good at, pyon pyon.”

Trixie swallowed her first response - namely ‘your bunny virus wanted a woman to hit on’ - in favour of giving the question a fair chance.

Whatever file ‘Epsilon’ had, it likely contained some information about Trixie’s habits, her investigative procedures… and Rixi, her magical technological device. Indeed, Trixie suspected that part of why they had showed Beam to her at all - a curious case of a piece of technology who could get sick from a human condition - was in the hopes that it would rope her in.

A plan which had worked.

In the end, off Fate’s final offer, Trixie had found herself incapable of turning down the chance to study Beam, even over the alternatives of looking into this Station’s advanced technology, or chatting with another female programmer who might have similar interests.

Which had to be the answer.

“You want me to see you as more than a program,” Trixie decided. “More than a piece of near incomprehensible software that might be malfunctioning. Which can only be done by talking to you in person, before looking at your ones and zeroes.”

Beam made a little finger gun, which she used to take aim at Trixie. Her smile was back. “Eighty percent of the way there. And?”

“And you wanted to make sure that I don’t have an interest in stealing your software. Given that time in my past when I was interested in a constructing a virtual person for dating purposes.”

Beam pointed her finger gun at the ceiling. “Whoa! That info is not in your file, but I am hella intrigued now, pyon pyon.”

Trixie grimaced. The overshare had been a gamble, to see just what data they DID have on her. But given Beam’s reaction, perhaps she should have thought of something a bit less personal.

“Fine. Then more generally, you also wanted to see me, to judge my capabilities. Possibly my personality.”

Beam lowered her index finger again to make a shooting motion. “Bang on. Wouldn’t you want to meet the ladies who intend to sift through your unmentionables? Alijda, I know, pyon pyon. You, I did not.”

Trixie posed with a hand on her hip. “And what’s your opinion of me now?”

Beam bounced up out of the chair and clasped her own hands behind her back, leaning closer. “I know you are good at what you do. And I now believe you see me not as just a program or a person, but a balance of both, pyon pyon. Granted, the virus may be throwing off my balances… still, I think we could be friends.”

Trixie eyed Beam. “I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

“Mmmm. But I am reserving final judgement until I see whether you’ll keep talking to me, or run off to look at my less human pieces now. Since I am giving you the go-ahead for that.”

Trixie considered the proposal. And as tempting as it was to simply look at the data, Beam was as much a client as she was a curiosity.

“I’ll bite,” Trixie yielded. “We’ll keep talking. Do you know much about your own software then? About what it is I’m going to see?”

Beam shrugged. “Only about as much as you might know about your own body, pyon pyon? Fun fact, you’ve got more bacterial cells in you than you do human cells.”

“Okay. And would you normally be able to reprogram yourself?”

At that, Beam finally frowned. “Hmph. Would you be able to reprogram your gut bacteria?”

Trixie shook her head, twintails flipping back and forth. “False equivalence. That’s hardly the same thing.”

“I suppose not.” Beam started to pace back and forth. “But based on similar logic, no. I’m pretty sure I’d mess something up if I tried. I wasn’t given high tech programming knowledge, Trixie. If anything, I know more about humans. And women, pyon pyon. And how to please them.” Her smile returned, and again she winked.

“Uh huh.” Trixie refused to be baited, no matter how cute Beam appeared. “Don’t make yourself out to be some kind of programmable call girl, Beam. It’s undignified.”

At that, Beam paused in her pacing. “I’m hardly programmable,” she said, indignantly. “I have my own kinks. And I come from a world of free love, Trixie, so one of my fundamental understandings is that there’s nothing wrong with ladies enjoying sex. I got the impression from your file that you of all women would understand that?” She fluffed her chest.

Again, not wrong. Trixie worried she was starting to blush. She forced her gaze back to Beam’s smile. “Yes, well, time and a place, Beam. How about this virus situation, do you at least know how to triage yourself?”

Beam accepted the deflection and resumed pacing. “Sure. I mean, I know how to keep my hairband charged, pyon pyon. I have self-repair diagnostics, which are vaguely analogous to your leukocytes, or white blood cells. And if I’m really in trouble, I know to seek help, meaning I can identify such cases.”

“But aren’t you in trouble right now?”

“Am I? I’ve got weird cosmetic changes, a desire to wear odd clothes and say ‘pyon pyon’, a hankering for carrots, and a majorly charged libido, but my life isn’t in danger.”

Trixie considered that. “So you think that’s why no self-repair is cutting in.”

Beam shrugged. “Or maybe it needs the virus to wane more before being fully effective? Again, I’m not some interface for Goodle, or whatever your world’s popular search engine is. I can’t simply ‘look up’ a correct answer.”

“Right, right.” Trixie tugged on her own earlobe as she thought. “Well, what DO you know about viruses?”

Beam chuckled. “Human or technological?”

“Both.”

“More than I did a week ago,” Beam said. She stopped pacing in favour of sitting back in her chair. “It gets boring in here.”

“So what have you been learning?” Trixie pressed. She sat down herself on the floor of the hallway, cross-legged, hoping it would encourage Beam to stay seated and stop wiggling her bunny tail. “Or is it more, you’re becoming aware of subconscious things you knew on some level already?”

“Been talking to the other ladies, pyon pyon?” Beam started swinging her legs back and forth. “I mean, I’m sure my programming knows more than I consciously do, but I’m not convinced it can interpret a virus the way they think.”

“So you don’t think my examining your bits would help.”

“Oh, you can examine my bits,” Beam giggled. She leaned back and swung both legs wide open. And Trixie now regretted sitting on the floor, given what it put at eye level.

“Bits and bytes, for any viral code,” Trixie snapped, louder than she’d intended.

To her credit, Beam shut her legs shut again almost immediately. “Sorry, new libido took over. Trixie, my bits and bytes and petabytes might help. That’s why I’m letting them be examined, pyon pyon. But as I said, not convinced.”

“Why?” Trixie pressed, tugging at the collar of her blouse.

Honestly, she didn’t know whether it was the virus, Beam’s mannerisms, or something about the hologram’s very nature, but the blonde bunny really was seeming more and more attractive, the longer that they spoke.

Trixie decided to focus on a random point on the wall behind Beam.

“Because,” Beam answered. “A virus is designed to alter the way a human - or computer - operates, by attaching itself to a legitimate cell - or program - and using that other identity to spread it’s nefarious code. Via vectors or macros or whatever.”

“That I know,” Trixie said. “So you think the very act of your program attempting to analyze a virus would cause said program to become infected? Except that doesn’t make sense, because a normal computer wouldn’t be infected by a flu.”

Beam clucked her tongue. “A witch, forgetting that magic exists, pyon pyon? Not to mention how we know this thing jumps dimensions. Think again.”

Trixie’s brow furrowed. She still didn’t have a good baseline for what dimensions were. “Then, an adaptive virus? One that has some magical power to mutate depending on its environment?”

“Mutation was my first thought after being planet-side,” Beam agreed. “But in the reading I’ve done since, I think it’s more a matter of recombination.”

Trixie shook her head. “We’re beyond my expertise.”

“Recombination occurs when co-infecting viruses exchange genetic information, pyon pyon. That’s how we get a novel virus. A bit like having a viral baby, except there’s no sexual reproduction involved, alas.”

Trixie grimaced, looking sidelong at Beam. “So, what, you think this virus - does it have a name I can use?”

“The locals on the world where I went called it Smoke.”

“You think this Smoke was able to combine with some virus that already existed in your programming?”

“Not quite,” Beam clarified. “I now think Smoke was able to exchange information with something that wasn’t a virus - though magical means, possibly - allowing the creation of a new novel virus version of itself inside me, pyon pyon.”

Trixie considered that. “I don’t see how that’s more likely than a mutation.”

“Well, every virus mutates, with RNA viruses like the flu being more prone to it over DNA viruses like smallpox. But they usually mutate into a weaker version, whereas getting at me, or behaving in a non-bunny-girl way on a different world, implies a power-up.”

Trixie shook her head. “But if this virus can recombine at will, then why wouldn’t it spread itself into plants too? Or animals? Or other living things?”

“Good question. I assume it’s been given magical limits,” Beam asserted. “Thankfully.” She slumped. “Or, y’know, I’m totally wrong and looking like a bunny was truly my programming doing an over-analysis, pyon pyon. I dunno. Gawd, I need a carrot.” Her legs fell open again.

Trixie only noticed that last in her peripheral vision, and she scrambled to stand up after doing so. Could pheromones be transmitted through plexiglass? Either way, she was definitely getting too distracted. “Okay, Beam. I’m going to go have a look at your code now. Just one more question?”

“Yup?” Beam said, not bothering to correct her posture this time.

“Do we know if this virus has jumped outside humans on any other world from your briefing? On the tech world with teleporter technology, for instance?”

“No idea, pyon pyon. But Alice is still investigating in my place on Bunny World, she might have turned up something.”

“Right. Okay, thanks,” Trixie said, giving a little wave to Beam as she turned to walk down the hall.

“Byeeeeee, enjoy staring at all my naughty bits,” Beam called out.

Once Trixie had turned the nearest corner, she paused, and took a couple of deep breaths.

“Get a grip, Trix,” she muttered to herself. “It’s opposites that attract, not whatever the hell that was.”

She raked her fingers back through her twintails and considered what additional information she had.

First, while the Epsilon people were very shady, they did seem to be playing it straight as far as their situation went. Or they were incredibly good actresses.

Second, there was no way they were going to get all of their answers to the virus mystery by staying on the Station. Even if Beam’s programming turned up something, they would still need more data regarding the potential for those viral recombinations. As well as possible natural immunities.

Perhaps, Trixie mused, she should even suggest that they gather data from the other viral worlds? They didn’t have a defined point of origin yet. And sending Para might prompt an illuminating response, if they recognized her state as one possible mutation.

Finally, irritatingly, Trixie knew that was going to have to be careful not to get swept up in the novelty of everything going on around her. After all, these people knew her better than she knew them.

Even with everything being on the level, she would still need to be cautious.

HOW SHOULD EPSILON INVESTIGATE?

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10573167]

VOTING CLOSES ON SUNDAY JULY 5th?

EXTRA ASIDE: There were no views on the previous part in the 10 days after it was posted. Possibly a new record of some sort? There was one vote though, which I suppose answers the question of whether subscribers voting counts for views. Once report cards were in last week, I posted to my personal facebook looking for more votes, which is how we got to where we are now (and why this post is a few hours late). Thanks for sticking with it out there. Let me know if you have a particular viral preference.

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART THREE

Alice clasped her hands behind her back, leaning closer to the large, clear wall that had been erected in place of a doorway. She scrutinized their colleague and friend. “I did say I wanted to teleport someone here, remember? Before you went down? So I created this area. You’ll have everything you need.”

“Sure, but when you said you’d bring me back in quarantine, I didn’t expect THIS, pyon pyon,” Beam protested. Her gaze shifted to Fate, who was staring, wide-eyed. Despite her own obvious irritation, Beam smiled. “And what are you looking at?”

Fate took a half step back, a blush starting to colour her cheeks. “Nothing? Just, maybe the bunny ears suit you?”

Beam’s omnipresent hairband now had two bright blue bunny ears sprouting from it, one of them partially flopped down. And her normal outfit of a dark blouse, blue skirt and dark stockings had been accessorized with a neck choker containing a bright blue bow.

The blonde holographic girl did a quick spin then, lifting her skirt to reveal a blue bunny tail poking out through a hole she had cut in her panties. “Do you like my tail too?” She wiggled.

Fate cleared her throat and turned her attention to the clipboard in her hand, idly spinning a pencil in her fingers as she stared intensely at the paper before her. “Irrelevant. You’re in quarantine.”

Beam spun back. “But I won’t be contagious forever, even assuming I am now.” Then her eyes opened wide. “Oh NO… this is two weeks without any hugs, isn’t it. I don’t know if I can handle that.”

“You have before,” Alice pointed out dryly. “Running this place all alone.”

“Yeah, but I think maybe now I have a stereotypical bunny libido?” Beam said, chewing her lower lip. “I’m thinking about sex more than usual. Come to think, thank goodness the virus didn’t switch my sexual preferences, pyon pyon. Makes me wonder about the guys it infects.”

Fate rubbed her forehead. “Back on topic, please. Beam, do you know how you, a hologram, caught a virus that, as far as we know, only targets humans?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Beam admitted. “Remember my programming is meant to emulate human physiology as much as possible? I sweat when I work out, I bleed when I’m cut, and so on. It’s likely that an accidental exposure to the virus triggered these bunny changes, to help me blend in with the locals.”

“But you’re not sure,” Alice pressed. “It could be some new mutation.”

Beam shrugged. “It’s possible. But I even caught a cold once. This isn’t too different. And as I said when I contacted you, I’m willing to ride this infection out so that you get some data, rather than trying to reprogram myself, pyon pyon.”

Fate nibbled on the end of her pencil, then finally brought her gaze back up to scrutinize Beam. “So, the tail. The ears, the bow. It’s become part of your program? You woke up one morning and had them?”

“The same way it happens to someone on that Earth, yeah,” Beam affirmed. “Though for humans, the bunny ears come from the scalp. Also, this bow collar?” She tapped it. “It didn’t appear, it’s an accessory. I just had this… compulsion. To buy it.”

“You felt compelled to accessorize?” Alice said, lifting an eyebrow. “How?”

“It’s like how I’m compelled to say ‘pyon pyon’ sometimes,” Beam explained. “My tongue starts to feel funny, until I do it. Likewise, my neck felt funny until I put the bow on. Even now, part of me feels like I should wear a one piece swimsuit too.”

Alice crossed her arms, looking thoughtful. “I wonder. Could the initial virus have been created by some clothing corporation?”

Fate rolled her eyes. “Any other physical changes for you, Beam? I mean, given that the males who catch this apparently change sex?”

“Like what, a bigger bust?” Beam mused, smirking. She shook her head. “Not that I’ve noticed. Did you want me to strip down and let you take my measurements, pyon pyon? Hmm?”

Fate pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. “Oy, I should never have let our relationship get unprofessional.”

“For now, let’s just have you type up a more detailed report for us,” Alice interjected. “Okay Beam? It will be important if I’m going down there to replace you.”

Beam’s smile vanished. “What? Alice, no. It’s not safe for you there.”

Alice brought her hands to her hips. “Why? Were there riots in the streets or something?”

“Well, no. At least, not that I saw,” Beam admitted. “It’s just, the virus. Right? It apparently takes at least a day to incubate, so you can have it, and transmit it, and not know it. And I’ve seen what happens to people who catch it, pyon pyon. They’re socially shunned.”

“I’ll wear a mask,” Alice soothed. “Besides, it won’t be for long, just to get any additional data we need.”

Fate looked to Alice and shook her head. “What? No way. Once you’re down there, the only way you’re coming back is through quarantine. We’ve got to have a closed border policy in place.”

Alice opened her mouth as if to protest, then seemed to think better of it. “Valid. I guess I should be glad we’re not talking Andromeda Strain deadly here.”

Beam looked hopeful. “Then Alice would join me in here after? Ooh, so maybe Fate should go down instead?”

“Fate is still in charge,” Alice objected. “As to the rest, we’ll figure it out before I leave. Your job for now is that detailed report. Understood?”

Beam’s expression became a pout. “Pyon pyon,” she mumbled, her bunny ears visibly drooping.

The second video finished playing, and Para closed the file. She then turned back to Trixie, to see the redheaded witch had taken two steps back, and was now glaring at her.

Para glanced down at herself, smoothed out a wrinkle in her purple dress, and looked back up. Trixie was still glaring. “What?” Para asked.

Trixie pocketed the device she had called ‘Rixi’ and then crossed her arms over her chest. Her posture seemed to convey that the problem was obvious. Except it really wasn’t.

“Trixie, what?” Para reiterated.

Trixie sighed, shook her head, then raised her hand to point. “You’re infected.”

[caption id=“attachment_848” align=“alignright” width=“219”] PARA
Commission by Michelle Simpson[/caption]

Para blinked. Then reached up to the bunny ears on her hairband. “Oh! No, I said these were because I’m a quadratic function.” She smiled in what she hoped was a conciliatory way.

“Uh huh. The last guy I chatted up in a bar said he was allergic to latex,” Trixie shot back, while lowering her arm. “Could be true, sure, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a red flag to continuing a conversation.”

Para nibbled her lower lip. She’d never been stereotyped on account of that part of her appearance before. “Okay, well… what can I do to convince you? Should I calculate the arc of a thrown object real fast or something?”

“I don’t have anything to throw at you,” Trixie pointed out. Para still couldn’t figure out if the woman was bluffing. “Is this some sort of a test?” Trixie pressed on. “Is that Fate woman watching us now, to see how I react?” She glanced furtively around the room, possibly looking for cameras.

Para slowly shook her head. “Fate went to take a call from Alice. Whereas she brought me to the Station in part for my expertise - more on vectors than on bunny girls, by the way - and in part because I’ve worked on the station before. In case an emergency situation comes up with Beam in quarantine.”

Trixie continued to stare for a long moment before relaxing her stance. “Fine, whatever. I’m staying over here. Further if you cough. Since studies vary in terms of how far away I need to be.”

Para nodded. “Are you at least taking the case? You seem to know a bit about disease transmission.”

Trixie’s expression became hard to read once again. “I know a little about a lot of things,” she said eventually. “And I still have questions.”

“I’ll answer as best as I can?” Para offered. She wondered if she should keep smiling or not.

Trixie mumbled something under her breath. It sounded like ‘bet she won’t answer questions about this place until we talk virus’. Before Para could speak up, Trixie was speaking aloud once again.

“Three obvious problems, Para. First, everyone’s been talking about this thing as a virus. What about this realm-hopping thing being a bacteria? Was that ruled out because bacteria are larger, or what?”

“I don’t know,” Para admitted. “Though I guess something smaller might more easily slip through a dimensional crack.”

“Except a virus can’t exist without a host,” Trixie continued, taking a couple steps sideways to slap at the wall. She then pointed at Para again. “Which is probably a lot LARGER than a bacteria. Can you explain that?”

Para winced. “No? Again, not a biology expert, more in this for the math.”

“Uh huh. Second problem, that holographic lady.” Trixie gestured towards the computers. “I’m thinking she could catch a cold because her programming recognized the virus type, and as such she runs some program to act accordingly. Yet in this case, the virus would be unknown… so how would her software know what program to run? Or did it only change her appearance?”

Para shook her head. Here, at least, she and Fate had discussed the situation a bit. “It’s more than cosmetic. One possibility is that Beam’s program was able to do an analysis of the viral effects at a very high level. Meaning she’s got valuable data we can use somewhere in her subconscious.”

At that, Trixie leaned against the wall with her elbow, resting her hand back against her head. She looked thoughtful. “Really? The technology buff in me kind of wants to talk to this Beam now. Is her fourteen days of quarantine up yet?”

“Not yet, but the talking is easy enough. Oh, there’s also been talk of bringing Alijda back on board to look at Beam’s programming,” Para added. “She’s a woman who was even able to hack into alien technology on my first mission here.”

Trixie stared. “You’re making this sound more and more interesting, and part of me hates you for that. But before I commit, third problem. Did anyone run a check on how you first noticed this virus thing? Alice said something about tripping a scan, but that detail was swept aside.”

Para winced. “We’re back to me not having an answer. Um, good job picking up on that?”

“Thanks, I know,” Trixie said. She glanced around the room. “So when DO we get someone in here who can answer my questions?”

“Now,” came a voice from above.

Trixie’s head tilted up. Para followed Trixie’s gaze, to see Fate was looking down at them from the hatch in the ceiling. The central control room was a couple stories tall, so the only way she could join them would be to shut off the artificial gravity, or–

Fate flipped a switch, and a short ladder swung into view. She hopped onto it as it started to telescope down. Bringing the ponytailed blonde close to the floor, as she was standing on the bottom rung.

Para turned back to Trixie. The techno-witch’s expression had resumed being inscrutable. “How long were you listening in?” Trixie asked, as Fate jumped off the ladder.

“Long enough,” Fate said, brushing off the lapels of her suit jacket, before offering up a smile of her own. “And Para’s right, good job. I can give you access to Ziggy and even Mr Smith, to track down the origin of the initial scan. Or I can look into it, while you talk to Beam about technology and the virus.”

“Sensing a big ‘if’ coming,” Trixie remarked, as Fate paused.

Fate shrugged. “It’s contingent on you agreeing to join our cause and take the case, of course.”

“Which is now a double barrelled statement,” Trixie pointed out.

Fate’s smile faded. “Yup,” was all she said.

Trixie grimaced. She looked back at Para, then the computer banks, then up to the hatch in the ceiling, then Fate again. “Will you guarantee my safety?”

“Wish we could,” Fate answered. “Know that we’ll do our best, and aren’t trying to lie to you. For that matter, maybe you’d prefer to chat to Alijda about not simply programming, but also about how much we suck? That can be arranged too.”

Trixie stared. Finally, she nodded and made her decision.

WITH WHOM WILL TRIXIE TALK NEXT?

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10566901]

VOTING CLOSES ON SUNDAY JUNE 21th

EXTRA ASIDE: Only 1 vote by the end of last Sunday, so I kept the voting open an extra couple days (busy time of year at school anyway). Thanks to those who boosted the count. I’ve also started posting to Tuesday Serial, we’ll see if that does anything for us.

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART TWO

Para smiled tentatively at the redheaded woman who had been teleported aboard the Epsilon Station. She had just dropped into a wary crouch. In her defence though, the Station really didn’t have a good way to warn their targets before retrieval.

“I - we - brought you in,” Para explained. “Because you accepted the virus case.”

“The hell I did,” came the woman’s sharp response. She now seemed torn between shouting at Para and looking around the circular control room. “I phoned your number to get more information, only to get a recording saying ‘Thanks for your interest’ or some such. Decided to go to the kitchen to make myself a snack - and now I’m here?”

Para pursed her lips. “Oh.” Apparently there had been a miscommunication. “Well, Trixie - er, should I call you Trixie? Professionally? Or would you prefer–”

“Trixie will do,” the redhead interrupted. She finally settled her gaze fully onto Para as she drew herself up and folded her arms over her chest. “And you would be?”

“Para. I’m a personified parabola.”

An eyebrow went up. “Quadratic equations are blondes with bunny ears?”

Para instinctively reached up to touch the parabolic rabbit ears of her hairband. She had normal ears too, to be sure, but the hairband was almost an extension of herself, the long ears reacting to whether her depression was at a minimum or a maximum. “Yes? Or we can be? I do have a twin-tailed variation.”

That seemed to cause Trixie to reach up and run her fingers quickly back through her own twin-tailed hairstyle. Para idly took note of how Trixie’s red hair was much shorter in comparison to her own, yet it did manage to reach her shoulders, even tied as it was.

“Hmph. Okay, so math can be seductive,” Trixie decided. “Doesn’t explain this abduction.”

Para felt caught off guard. “Seductive?”

A partial smile graced Trixie’s features. She posed with a hand on her hip. “I know math can reel a person in, Para. Practically taught it to myself because high school classes went so slowly. And I know seduction too. Because why have people like you only for your brains? So don’t you try to use my own distraction techniques against me.”

Indeed, with the light dusting of freckles on Trixie’s face, the schoolgirl-style blouse and skirt outfit, and the stance, Para could see how the redhead might be called… well, funny enough the first phrase to come to mind was ‘Sexy Cute’. The same moniker that her first human friend, Alijda, had once used to describe Para herself.

Of course, Trixie was human, whereas Para was a amalgamation of various theoretical concepts, given human form. Still, Para had always suspected that her curves were to make her more appealing to those who didn’t like math… were there humans like Trixie who saw quadratics as appealing already? Is it that she didn’t pick up vibes from them as often?

Still. “Trixie, wouldn’t I look more, um, male? If I was trying to seduce you?”

“Tch. Again, you can’t spirit me away and claim to know my actual name, and then pretend not to know about certain other aspects of my personal life. Honestly, it’s not like you’d be my first choice, Para. But if it’s for a case - or a dreary Friday evening - I’d be game to see what’s under that dress you’re wearing. The math aspect makes me curious.”

Para felt her cheeks getting red. “Oh.”

It occurred to her then that she had never considered any relationship entanglements with humans. But was it possible that others she had encountered might have seen her in a romantic way? Could that be partly why Chartreuse had saved her on their last mission together?

“See? I play the game better. So.” Trixie snapped her fingers in the air. “Abduction, Para. Why?”

Wait, had Trixie been bluffing? Para couldn’t tell. She shook her head. “Sorry. Um, you gave me something to think about there.”

Trixie’s smile became a smirk. “Fantasize about me later.”

“That’s…” Para shook her head, and decided not to bother correcting the woman. “Look, the Epsilon Project didn’t mean to abduct you. Per se. Phoning that number was enough to indicate agreement that you’d take the case. Or that’s what I was told, at any rate. Hence the summons.”

“Told? You’re not in charge?”

“Oh no,” Para said, raising both hands up. “I’m more of a… consultant? Though I suppose I go on missions too. Either way, Fate had something to take care of, so she asked me to fill you in on all the details.”

“Uh huh.” Trixie’s gaze had resumed wandering around the room. “I’d prefer to speak to Fate. Or whomever’s in charge.”

Para nibbled her lower lip. “Could I at least show you the video first? You’ll see her - everyone - on that. It might also answer the questions you had about the mission. And it will mean that I’ve done my job properly.”

“One moment.” Trixie walked over towards the one visible door in the room. She paused, then wrenched it open and looked into the storage closet. Seeing no-one there, she glanced around once more and sighed. “Fine, video. But I reserve the right to be returned home after.”

Para smiled. “Thank you.” She then gestured towards the computer banks on the wall. When Trixie approached, she cued up the file that Fate had left for them.

“For reference, the woman in the T-shirt and jeans you’ll see is Alice,” Para supplied. “The one dressed a bit like you, but with a darker blouse, is Beam. And the one in the business attire - when she arrives - is Fate.”

“Thanks.” Trixie pulled a device out of her blouse pocket. “Rixi, active recording. I assume you have no objection, Para?”

Para shrugged. “No. The others might ask you to erase it later, is all?”

“Well, they can ask,” was Trixie’s final word on the matter as the video started to play.

“I did hear you the first time,” Alice admitted, following the third time Beam cleared her throat. The brunette woman finally turned away from all of the sheets of paper she had stuck up on the wall of the auxiliary control room. “Something wrong?”

“Well, you?” the holographic woman said tentatively. “Between the recent alcohol intake and, er, this…” Beam said, gesturing at the wall Alice had been scrutinizing, “…Fate and I are worried you’re getting too emotionally invested.”

Alice’s lips tightened. She looked back at her wall of sheets, then Beam, then the wall again. “But they’re OUT there,” she declared, pointing. “We know they are.”

[caption id=“attachment_929” align=“alignright” width=“185”] ALICE VUNDERLANDE
Commission by Cherry Zong[/caption]

Off Beam’s silence, she turned back to the blonde. “The organization that provided one world with the means to abduct people like Fate. Who were getting funds from another world, to the point of that Earth thinking they had to shut down dimensional travel to get away. What else is this ‘Clover Enterprises’ involved in? We have to know.”

Beam clasped her hands behind her back. “With all due respect, we don’t. That’s not Epsilon’s job. We’re meant to clean up dimensional irregularities, artifacts that have become accidentally displaced. That’s all.”

“That’s FATE’S job,” Alice argued. “She’s the one in charge of the Station. We were both fired, remember? And later recruited by Fate to look into this very thing?”

Beam winced. “Technically, I resigned. But listen, after a month of us turning up no new leads? Fate’s been looking into returning control of the station to one of us. Remember, this was never meant to be a permanent position for her,” she added, as Alice seemed about to protest. “She has a world she might want to return to, unlike us.”

Alice frowned. “Are you saying I wouldn’t like to return to living with Alijda?” she accused, crossing her arms.

“You know I’m not,” Beam sighed. “Just, your original world became a hell dimension, while mine was all about free love, making my lesbian self an outcast. So neither are an option. You’re welcome to go back living with your friend, while I take over again here. Kinda the very thing I was trying to bring up.”

Alice again turned from Beam to the wall, and then back to Beam. “But we’re close to something! Right? I mean, look here.” She began to gesture and point at the sheets.

“This world has no clovers. While on this world, four leaf clovers are the norm instead of three leaf ones. The dimensions between them when we do a four dimensional projection contain THIS cluster of worlds where magical leprechauns are either a rumour, or fact, even if they don’t call themselves that. Now, if you draw a rainbow from that set over to these dimensions where the ‘Star Trek’ franchise didn’t have its first prequel known as ‘Enterprise’, you can see that a shadowy influence might have caused–”

“Mr Smith?” Beam interrupted.

“Hello, Beam,” came the male voice of the Station’s auxiliary control computer. Its control panels had been previously opened, the artificial intelligence offering assistance to Alice wherever possible during her analyses. Alice paused in her gesturing and turned at the remark.

“Hi,” Beam chirped back, wiggling her fingers in a wave. “Could you show Alice what she looks like lately? That picture I suggested from before?”

“Indeed,” Mr Smith said. An image came up on his main screen.

Alice made a face. “My face on Charlie Kelly, ha ha. Never watched that show, weirdly enough, so I’m not certain what you’re trying to say about me.”

“Oh.” Beam rubbed the back of her neck. “I thought you’d know it. He’s a guy who loses himself in fantasies, as you seem to be doing. Now, don’t get me wrong, your ability to free associate has its merits, just… maybe not here.”

“Then again, maybe Alice IS on to something,” came a new voice. Fate walked into the room then, looking down at a clipboard.

“Ungh. Way to spoil my vibe, girlfriend,” Beam said, hands moving to her hips.

Fate looked up then, seeming momentarily flustered. “Please don’t call me that when we’re on duty, Beam. It’s unprofessional.”

Alice’s eyebrows shot up. “Whoa! I was gonna simply dismiss the remark, given how Beam’s programming still has trouble differentiating girlfriends and girl friends. But now? What DO the two of you get up to when I’m not around?”

Fate’s cheeks got pinker. “Alice, it’s not what you think. I’d had a few drinks and… um, look, let’s just say this job can get stressful, and it’s important to relax.”

Beam smiled, running her tongue over her upper lip. “And women have needs. And I have–”

“OH-kay,” Fate said pointedly, waving her clipboard. “Listen. I came here to say that the scan you recommended? It’s turned up key information. About an airborne virus. Jumping dimensions.”

Alice and Beam immediately stopped looking sidelong at each other, coming to attention.

“A virus can’t do that,” Beam stated. “Not based on everything we know.”

“Not without outside help,” Alice agreed, pounding one fist into her other palm. “Excellent, a clue. Now, what was this scan you ran, Beam?”

Beam blinked. “I didn’t run one. Isn’t Fate referring to something you ran?”

Alice frowned. “I don’t think so? I’ve been running a few things though, so maybe I tripped a scan in the process.”

“Well, someone put it in the system,” Fate stated. “As we wouldn’t normally have picked this up. In particular, the virus causes different reactions on different Earths. But now that we have the data, well, it’s highly suspicious.”

She turned the clipboard around, allowing both Beam and Alice to glance over the printout and her written notes.

“Arranged by most infected,” Alice remarked after a moment. “Could mean one of the three at the top is the virus' origin… do we have ANY vector data?”

Fate shook her head. “Not yet. Ziggy’s still running an analysis. Could take days.”

“Scope as origin is kind of a dangerous assumption,” Beam cautioned. “Still, I can go down to that world at the top of the list, to learn more. With my holographic matrix engaged, I should be protected.”

“Should be?” Alice objected. “Also, your hairband is still a tether, we know you can get hurt that way even while insubstantial. It’s like the a mobile emitter on Star Trek: Voyager.”

Beam shrugged. “I’ll be careful. Besides, this says all the virus does is turn people into bunny girls. That’s not so bad, it’s even kinda sexy.”

“On the more standard Earth it’s doing that,” Fate pointed out. “Which, I add, is preliminary data, and it has the potential to become bad. Once all the males have become female bunnies.”

“Meanwhile, on that fantasy world, it seems to be activating more latent magical abilities,” Alice mused, peering closer at Fate’s clipboard. “And on the tech world it’s causing teleporter malfunctions. This is WEIRD. Are we even sure it’s the same thing?”

“According to our data, yes,” Fate confirmed. “Only slightly mutated. Giving us insight that those worlds don’t have.”

Alice frowned. “I’d say we should just teleport someone here, but I’m not sure how far I trust the bio filters on this station.”

“Who? No one on those worlds popped up in the recruitment folders, that I know of,” Beam pointed out. “We can’t risk revealing ourselves. It’s fine. I’ll go. What’s the worst that could happen?”

WHAT HAPPENS TO BEAM?

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10559999]

VOTING CLOSES ON SUNDAY JUNE 7th

SMOKE WITH MIRRORS: PART ONE

Trixie Virga - it was not her real name, but rather a name the young witch had decided to adopt professionally, to the point where she now answered to it - turned and shot the man a look.

“Look, BIFF,” she began, trying to keep a level tone. “First, this is your sister pumped full of mystical energy. Not a superhero. Second, she’s committed crimes, so even if she were ‘super’, she’d be more super villain than a super hero, yeah? And third?” Trixie paused. “Well, third, that plan should have worked.”

“Right. I’m starting to regret paying you in advance.”

Trixie let out a sigh of exasperation. “Let me think.”

She crouched closer to the door of the trash room, listening for noises. She couldn’t hear Biff’s sister Eleanor on the other side, meaning their mad dash out of the woman’s hotel room had apparently bought them a bit of time.

Or Eleanor had more than a few points in Stealth and Dexterity.

Setting that thought aside, Trixie figured the first major question was why pinching the mystical artifact from Eleanor hadn’t de-powered the woman. Trixie held the necklace up to her face, squinting at it in the dim light. Was this not the source of the mystic energy after all?

[caption id=“attachment_2345” align=“alignright” width=“186”] TRIXIE VIRGA
Commission from Sen Yomi[/caption]

She fished her personal device out of her blouse pocket. She kept it there partly because of her preference for skirts which had no decent pockets, but mostly because when she went for it, people tended to be distracted by her ample chest. Thus less likely to speak, or notice whatever it was that she was actually intent on doing.

“Are you phoning for backup on that?” Biff asked.

Unfortunately, Biff was either oblivious, or gay.

Trixie made a noise that she hoped conveyed her irritation at the remark, and otherwise ignored him. The glowing red crystal in the too-small-to-be-a-smartphone device came to life at her touch. “Rixi, fast scan, okay?”

“All right,” her device intoned back, a parroting of her own voice.

Trixie placed the necklace onto Rixi’s tiny screen. “Mystical?”

“Affirmative,” Rixi acknowledged.

“Granting ice powers?”

“90% chance.”

“Accessible at a distance?”

“0.2% chance.”

Trixie grimaced. “What the hell am I missing?”

“Unknown,” her device supplied.

“How much field work have you actually done solo?” Biff broke in again.

“I’ve done enough,” Trixie muttered. True, she hadn’t been the founder of the private magick agency Biff had approached, and she was better at research and development. But she had been running the place without much outside help for over two years now. She’d seen enough field work in that time.

“It’s just, I mean, wasn’t there that other guy back at the office? Maybe you should call him?”

“Oh, do NOT start with me,” Trixie snapped, turning her best glare back at Biff. Client or not, he was becoming a pain. “First, he’s not a coworker, he’s my boyfriend. Kinda. Not exclusive. Not relevant, never mind. Second, even given that he does help me on cases, he had to go out of town on business yesterday. And third?” Trixie paused. “Well, third, damn it, that plan should have worked.”

“Yet it didn’t,” Biff remarked, though off Trixie’s look, he had backed off a step to press himself against the back wall.

Trixie pocketed both Rixi and the necklace before raking her fingers back through her twin-tails, wracking her brain for the answer.

This was like the classic Star Trek episode “Squire of Gothos”. Captain Kirk had destroyed the mirror that was supposedly the source of Trelane’s power… only to discover it was some kind of amplifier, and the guy still had powers. Was that actually useful information? Was it merely random trivia?

Well, Kirk had needed to be bailed out of his death sentence by superior beings, so that didn’t bode well for her situation.

“You know, my sister could be taking hostages out there,” Biff remarked, seemingly determined to break her concentration.

“That’s more on you than me,” Trixie growled.

“Look, I hired you to handle the situation,” Biff said, raising his hands with his palms out towards her.

“So let. Me. Handle. It,” Trixie spat. She smacked her forehead twice, as if that would help to knock the proper thoughts together.

It worked. Or at least, it made her realize she’d overlooked something.

In the Star Trek episode, Gothos had been artificially constructed. Right? How had this hotel been constructed? Was there anything about this location that might be interfering?

Trixie fumbled for her device again. “Rixi, cross reference GPS of our current location with known magick events, starting with the present and working backwards.”

“Working,” came Trixie’s own voice again, followed seconds later with, “an explosion two months ago in room 1408 created a temporary fissure to another realm. No damage otherwise. Documented by–”

Promising. “Abort explanation, correlate aftereffects with previous artifact and accessibility question,” Trixie said, trying to speak as fast as she could without sounding garbled.

“Working. Revised probability of distanced access, 97%.”

There it was. She simply had to get the necklace off this property to sever the connection. Hopefully. Pity she hadn’t thought to cross-reference earlier, as getting Eleanor out of the area would likely have shut her down as soon as the artifact had been removed from her person.

Though that might have made the necklace harder to grab.

Anyway.

“Okay then,” Trixie concluded, shoving Rixi back into her breast pocket. She yanked the door to the trash room open.

Eleanor stood on the other side, staring back. She was a head taller than Trixie, her hair a snow white thanks to the effects of the necklace, her outfit an ice blue dress. Trixie couldn’t shake the image of a very ticked off Elsa, from the “Frozen” trilogy of movies.

“I was wondering if you’d try to jump down the chute,” Eleanor remarked. “Glad you’re giving up instead.” She held out her hand. “Last chance. Return my necklace.”

Trixie knew she had no chance of being imposing here. Heck, she tended to dress more for seduction… albeit she knew now to give a pass on tight skirts when out in the field. So more running wouldn’t be a problem. If only there was a way past.

“Hard no,” Trixie said, wondering idly if reason could win through the day. “You’ve broken into how many places now by freezing the locks?”

“Lost count,” Eleanor said. “You’ll be the first witch I freeze though.”

Eleanor extended her arm, and Trixie knew the touch was liable to be deadly. Of course, in theory no magick user could ever affect someone who was unwilling, but there were rather a lot of loopholes. Including Trixie’s prior use of a spell in Eleanor’s presence, opening her up to passive acceptance of retaliation.

And as that prior spell had been a low-grade teleport, to get the necklace away, Trixie couldn’t use that spell now. Casting any spell multiple times in a row would always result in diminishing returns.

She had one option in reserve though.

“Velocitas,” Trixie breathed.

The spell to speed up her own frame of reference proved to be enough for the redhead to not only dodge Eleanor’s outstretched hand, but drop to the ground and jump through her adversary’s legs before the other woman could react.

Trixie began to run as fast as she could down the hotel corridor. Only to have her feet slide out from under her, as her boots failed to find traction on the newly icy floor.

“Nice try,” Eleanor remarked, as Trixie slid into a wall, ass first.

This was bad. Now that she was in the corridor though, and right by the elevators, Trixie realized there was a new option in reserve. She righted herself without bothering to completely get up, and fumbled again in her pocket.

“Rixi, materialize delivery gun.”

“All right,” her device intoned. “Accessing.” It took a few seconds… during which Trixie worried that she’d removed the item from her personal magick hammerspace at some point in the last two months. But eventually the familiar small globe of light appeared, hovering over the screen.

Trixie grabbed within the light. With that, the light was dispelled, leaving her holding what had - once upon a time - been a nerf gun.

She dropped Rixi back into her pocket while pulling out the necklace again.

“A gun?” Eleanor said, pausing in her advance. She was only five, maybe six metres away, but seemed to be in no hurry. It was almost like she knew she had the upper hand. “You realize I can freeze the bullets in the air before they reach me.”

“Suspected,” Trixie admitted. She held up the necklace. “Gun’s for this though.”

Eleanor frowned. “What do you hope to accomplish by shooting it? You cannot destroy my necklace, you should have realized that by now.”

“Yeah,” Trixie agreed, cranking the gun power to full. “But I think my gun can pierce that window there, the one looking out on the parking lot?”

Eleanor turned to look where Trixie was gesturing. Even then she didn’t seem to quite catch on what was about to happen. It was only as Trixie dropped the necklace into the chamber where one would normally put bullets that Eleanor’s eyes widened. And as Trixie exhaled, she could see her breath in the now bitterly cold air.

“Protrudo,” Trixie gasped, as she pulled the trigger.

It hadn’t been a sure thing. Hell, Trixie doubted she’d have wanted to know the odds, even had there been time to ask Rixi about them. But with the additional propulsion of the spell, the necklace did indeed pierce the nearby window with a ‘crack’, the arc such that the artifact ended up flying out and well beyond the hotel parking lot.

The newly formed icicle, with its point less than a metre away from Trixie’s chest, remained frozen in place for a few seconds. Then it fell off Eleanor’s index finger. Then Eleanor crumpled to the ground.

Trixie decided it was safe to draw another breath.

Once Eleanor had been unconscious for ten seconds, Trixie let her head fall back against the wall and closed her eyes.

“Um, so, is my sister going to be okay?” came Biff’s voice, after a short time.

Trixie reopened her eyes. Her client seemed to be checking for Eleanor’s pulse.

“Oh, I’m FINE, thank you,” she growled, pushing herself back to her feet. The ice on the floor had melted, and her skirt was wet. But she was still alive. In fact, she suspected the anger she felt was more trying to dispel the sense of fear.

Trixie fumbled back in her pocket for Rixi, and stowed the delivery gun back into her hammerspace.

Biff watched her, looking unimpressed. “Isn’t this all in a day’s work for you, or something?”

“Because as you pointed out, I fight super villains ALL the TIME,” Trixie snarked. She walked closer. “But yes, we’re BOTH fine, and outside of the withdrawal symptoms your sister will experience, she should be herself by morning. And one more thing, if I may?”

Biff seemed to consider whether he wanted to hear it. “Yes?”

“Next time you want to give your sister a gift, don’t buy it from a demon. Capiche?”

Biff flinched. “You think that I’M the one who gave–”

“Stop,” Trixie interrupted. “Don’t even. I’ll assume it was unintentional. But I saw the little inscription on that necklace. Hence me saying hostages would be more on you than me. Suspected it initially too, hence the paying me in advance.”

Biff simply stared now, a frown tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Oooh, yes, I’m more than just a pretty face. I’m a techno-witch. So, do you have anything else to say? Or can I close this case?”

“I… would prefer not to see you again,” Biff concluded.

“Fine. Eyes on you though,” Trixie said, making the universal motion as she pointed two fingers as her own eyes before turning them to jab at Biff. “Keep your nose clean.”

With that, Trixie marched out of the hotel to go and find the necklace. She made a mental note to ask Rixi to do the occasional web search on Biff’s name for the immediate future too, just in case the guy was truly up to something.

That evening found Trixie staring at the note. She’d put off dealing with it in favour of handling the case with Biff and Eleanor, but had no such excuse any more.

Her querying messages had come back by now too, and none of the other techno-witches she had made contact with had any awareness of what it meant.

Trixie gave the words a scan again.

‘We need help with an airborne virus. It’s jumping dimensions. Not deadly yet, but is a mystery. As you can handle both magic and technology, call this number if you accept the case.’

“Surely they mean realms, not dimensions?” Trixie muttered aloud. “And I’m better with computer viruses, not airborne ones, so whaaaaat?”

She shook her head. The note had been shoved underneath her office door last weekend. Scans by Rixi told her nothing. Which in and of itself was kind of fascinating.

Trixie stood up from her desk. “Well, fine. I can at least call to get more information,” she decided.

WHAT’S NEXT?

OPTIONS:

[crowdsignal poll=10553607]

VOTING CLOSES ON SUNDAY MAY 24th

EXTRA ASIDE: Yes, this was supposed to go up last weekend. But full time math teaching from home, while simultaneously parenting my almost 2-year-old daughter? Means I get VERY little free time. Add to that the fact that “midterm” grades had to be sent out May 8th, and May 10th was Mother’s Day, and WOW it’s amazing when I even get sleep any more. So many emails. So we’re a week late. Thanks for your patience.

ɛ PROJECT

WB (Writing Bufferless) presents…

STORY 6: SMOKE WITH MIRRORS

Every Epsilon story can stand alone. That said, in Story 5, the crew were trying to locate a company that was having seemingly illicit dealings across the dimensions. Now, according to prior voting, we proceed...

STORY #6:

A mystery illness is jumping dimensions. Who are you going to call? Possibly a techno-witch. Find out more by reading below.

CAST:

TRIXIE VIRGA ... A twenty-something techno-witch (from Virga Mysteries)

PARA BOLA ... A personified quadratic function (from Personified Math)

ALIJDA VAN VLIET ... A melancholy teleporter (from an RP campaign)

ALICE, FATE & BEAM ... The team running the Station

EPISODE INDEX:

1. Have an Ice Day (May 17)

2. Viral Video (May 31)

3. Bunny Can't Buy Happiness (June 14)

4. Balance Beams (June 28)

5. An Arrested Development (July 13)

6. Perspective Shift (July 26)

7. Double Park (Aug 9)

8. Enter and Break (Aug 23)

9. Elevator Pitch (Sept 6)

10. Mind Games (Sept 23)

11. Before the Dawn (Oct 4)

12. Who Runs the Asylum (Oct 18 Nov 15)

13. Ad Hoc Talk (Dec 21)

14. What the H? (Jan 10)

15. Self Doubts (Feb 14)

16. Door Stop (Feb 28)

17. Field Work (Mar 14)

18. BONUS Space Battle (Apr 1)

18. Over Clover (Mar 28 Apr 12)

Story #6 is Concluded

There’s actually a lot that went on behind the scenes of “Virga Mysteries”, featuring university witch Melissa Virga. Not so much in breadth, but in depth, as far as the writing goes.

So to fully wrap up the Virga Mysteries saga, I thought I’d do one more post about how it all came together. Note: There are spoilers for some plot points. Enjoy!

EARLY CASES

[caption id=“attachment_2011” align=“alignright” width=“202”] MELISSA VIRGA
Commission from Shirley[/caption]

I had the first story done by May, so after graduation. I’d basically had the idea of an imaginary friend come to life, and wanted an eccentric female detective to deal with it. Sherlock Holmes was likely an influence.

The characters were revisited a year later, in June 2004, when I was in the midst of some confusion surrounding my relationships. That’s why the second story has a romantic undercurrent in it, along with the technological aspect. (The initial note for the story simply states “computer site, evil script”.)

I feel like the writing helped me work through some things. I subsequently changed elements after the first draft, and then modified things even more before putting that second case online here.

I must have been treating the story more seriously then too - I actually had some text files of latin phrases for use in 2004. And a vague third story idea, “Love of a Star”… that never materialized. Instead, the third (and last) case came about in 2008, after a four year gap.

It was my grandmother’s death that prompted me to mess around with what actually became that third story, “Borderline”. I don’t remember if it was a conscious or unconscious decision to bring back Melissa, so that I could work through some personal issues.

I was quite close to my grandmother, and incidentally was pleased she was able to meet my soon-to-be wife before she passed on.

Since this time the afterlife issues were of impact only to me (unlike the second case with relationships) there was less overall editing. In fact, the story was unfinished (lacking concluding paragraphs) until 2010 (when I did the extra edits to that second story). That’s when I decided it would be a trilogy and called it there.

I hadn’t really had any plans to put it online, but I hadn’t had any plans to not do it either. Which could be said of much of my writing.

BALANCING ACT

July, by comparison? Relatively quiet. So when I saw the JulNo tag somewhere in June, I decided to try for 50k. But what to write? Well, why not a new Melissa story, incorporating as many weird supernatural things as I could? Including callbacks to the original cases.

Since this was going to be novel-length, I decided it had to be at a pivotal time for the characters, hence James' graduation years later. I did my own personal tracking (they have websites for this now), reaching 10k on July 6th, 20k on July 17th, 30k on July 21st, and 40k on July 25th.

There were a couple of 0 word days in there (when I NaNo now, I try to avoid this, always having at least something new in the document) including on July 29th. But on the 30th I powered through with almost 4k words to get 50,085. (It wasn’t even the highest day, I had two previously where I exceeded 4k.)

I then wrote the conclusion on July 31st (including Trixie’s “Post Epilogue Thing”) to get 51,382 words in total. This was spread over two files: Events up to the end of Amy’s part, and from Melissa’s parents onwards.

For the record, my writing style tends to be having a particular goal in mind (in this case, Melissa’s ascension) with smaller arcs created along the way. I find I can’t write the goal first, because I’m not sure what the mood or reactions of the characters will be at that time… it will depend on whatever comes before.

So that’s why there was that big time skip after the bit with Melissa’s parents. I realized I was approaching 50k, and so decided I’d fast forwards and wrap up the faction stuff rather than draw things out even longer with cases (which I probably could have done).

I feel like it still made narrative sense, but maybe that’s me?

Once done, I figured the story would need edits… but maybe not too many, since James wouldn’t get to edit this story to match with the plot, right? And Trixie self-described herself as no good at it. ;)

VIRGA ONLINE

The initial cases were easy enough to separate into four parts/acts each, as I’d written all cases to be roughly the same length. I mostly did final edits as I went along, usually in the days right before posting.

“Balancing Act”, which began its run on this blog in late January of 2019, required rather more effort.

[caption id=“attachment_2345” align=“alignright” width=“186”] TRIXIE
Commission from Sen Yomi[/caption]

I initially split the story into Four Acts (as I had the previous cases). I did edits on Act 1 as posting began. By March 2019, I realized that the second act was going to be 8 parts, more than the initial 6 parts of Act 1.

It had made sense to put the split in when Amy fell asleep, separating by event, rather than by length. But I wasn’t sure I liked that, and suspected similar issues would come up with the remaining two acts.

It was after March Break (with my wife and daughter still in France) that I revised “Balancing Act” to Six Acts. But they still weren’t equal size, the third act was only two parts (splintered off of Act Two) and the fourth was four parts.

Tweaking occurred, putting the last (now sixth) part of Act Two into Act Three as well, giving part lengths of 6-5-3-4-??. By the end of March, I’d even decided to go with 6-5-5-???, splitting Act 3 in the middle of the dinner with Melissa’s parents. Perhaps a bit awkward, but I think it worked?

By early April I had edited things as far as June. I don’t upload right away in such cases, to give me time for a final pass, but that seemed to create a lot of inertia. Act Five took a lot longer to mess around with, editing-wise. I blame parenting, and so forth.

It wasn’t until near the end of JULY that I got Act Five done. Seriously, I look at my edited files and there’s a jump from “Mar 21” (Act 4c) to “Jul 22” (Act 4d, possibly just a renumbering).

In the interim, I got an art of Trixie in May at Anime North 2019, just so that it wouldn’t be Melissa all the time as the image for the posts.

FINAL EDITS

Around this same time, I was completing the equivalent of an entirely new part (to fill in the time skip gap a little better). That’s when I realized the parts could be 6-5-5-5-?? and most of the acts would become five parts.

This new work in late July, by the way, also let me flesh out Trixie’s backstory a little more. A process I’d started earlier, as in the initial writing, she had been interested in bothering Melissa by trying to hook up with James.

I nixed that early on. (Hello past me, we really don’t need two women with a thing for the narrator.) It morphed into more of her annoying Melissa in other ways, and not taking relationships seriously.

So the discussion between Trixie and James (in 4D) after their dinner (and just before the time skip) was all new - originally just a two paragraph summary.

I frankly like Trixie much better this way. The original writing had her drop her interest in James after the illusion spell making her look like Melissa went nowhere (the bit with Zamboni). This now morphed into her questioning her desire for a perfect relationship (as a counterpoint to Zamboni).

I’m still not sure if it works, but it definitely works better than what was there before.

At any rate, to keep the 5-part structure, I decided to put the Wrap-Up of the Zombies in the start of Act Six (as 6a)… and it just so worked out that Trixie’s addendum in Act Six worked well as it’s own part, extending what would otherwise have been another five part pattern.

Meaning an overall structure of six acts, the parts being 6-5-5,5-5-6. Almost like I planned it from the start, or something.

I do like how it kind of foreshadows Trixie’s extra “Post Epilogue”, if you remember that Act One seemed to have that extra part to it.

The entire editing process was done on Tuesday, July 30th. There were some minor updates in October 2019 as I uploaded to the blog, and again in mid to late February 2020. I had toyed with the idea of splitting “Balancing Act” into two (a bit like I did with Time & Tied’s four books), but September 2019 promised to be busy, so I nixed that.

This post was written the week of April 20th, after spending the previous week on the Epsilon Summaries, and there you have it.

Did the process go at all like you thought it did? Do you have any thoughts about the characters, either the three mains (including Trixie) or the individuals? What about bringing back information from the other case files, bad plan? I’d be interested in your thoughts, as always.

If you liked the story, perhaps vote for it at TopWebFiction, so more people see it? (By clicking on that link?) It took a while to clear their queue, and then I never remembered to suggest that link until now. My marketing fu is weak.

Next week, we’ll see how Story 6 of “Epsilon” goes. You still have about a day to vote, if you want input on the genre and characters. Thanks for reading!

[caption id=“attachment_342” align=“alignleft” width=“150”] Author (mathtans), as depicted by Errol Elumir[/caption]

Welcome! I write serials, some of them based on a plot that YOU vote for. Yes, you! And the voting is usually really close, meaning odds are high that you will definitely affect the outcome at some point.

We’re gearing up for our sixth “Epsilon” story here. Each story is stand-alone, but if you want information on the various characters that reappear, see this post from last week. (There are also votes in THAT post, which I’m taking into account going forwards. Already seen that post? You can add to your prior votes since I have a one-week timeout! You’re welcome.)

The first thing we need to decide is what genre I should aim for. I cannot guarantee that we’ll stick there as voting continues, but many prior stories have mixed it up… where should my initial focus be?

[crowdsignal poll=10543281]

The other thing to decide is how key certain characters should be, relative to each other. For instance, Alice Vunderlande is running away with the vote on that prior post I mentioned… in the Epsilon administrators category. If the choice was between her and, say, Para, would she still win?

To clarify how your vote below connects to that prior post, if you vote for the regulars, the winner of the prior vote will be in the story (along with others, most likely). If you vote for the station character below, that prior winner will become part of the mission. And if you vote for the minor character below, it means whomever won that prior category will appear.

In the case of a tie (either place), I’ll likely pick my own preference (same if you vote for a mix). But I will offer at least a cameo to the other choice. Make sense? Vote away!

[crowdsignal poll=10543286]

The plan is to close the polls on May 3rd, in one week. I’ll then need a week to write the first part, and so we go forwards from there with a new part (and vote) every two weeks, the vote closing after the first 7 days.

How long will the story go? I have no idea, tends to be between 12 and 18 parts… did I mention I have no real plan, just a vague idea, and from there it’s all your votes?

One last, thing - a final “Virga Mysteries” post will tide you through the start of May, namely the “Behind the Scenes” explanation of how that story evolved over more than a decade. (For those just joining us, I’ve been running that serial for the past year.) So look forward to that update.

Thanks for reading, thanks for voting… and thanks for spreading the word? (I mean, my birthday is this week too, so it’d be cool to get a few extra votes… just saying.)

Until next week!

This is a summary for the Epsilon Project serial… complete through to the end of STORY FIVE. For while every story can stand alone, there is a thread running through the parts. I’m hoping this post will help jog everyone’s memory (including mine) and get people more enthused for some upcoming voting. Which is also happening in this post.

First, a reminder about the Epsilon Project itself, paraphrasing from Alice: The station was designed to react to dimensional anomalies. The crew could then make almost zero alterations fixing them (hence Epsilon, a tiny value… it’s not the fifth station). Clarified later by Beam to be handling of rogue anomalies, not individual human error.

Most of their missions were reasonably successful.

MAIN CHARACTERS

Feel free to vote at the bottom based on the backstory, you don’t have to have seen them in action.

1. Alijda Van Vliet

Originally a role-play character in a play-by-mail RPG, “Powers” (2011-2012). Played by Katja Herbers. Female, in her mid-thirties.

[caption id=“attachment_976” align=“alignright” width=“168”] Alijda van Vliet (chibi).
Commissioned from: Shirochya[/caption]

First met while using the pseudonym Alison van der Land. Has the ability to teleport in a cloud of purple and black smoke, thanks to an incident involving Marshall Biochemical Engineering some time after she turned 24. Needs a visual reference to teleport (which can be a photo). Teleport preserves relative velocity, and she can carry up to 300 pounds.

Grew up in British Columbia; parents moved away after she went to University. She dropped out and checked herself into a psychiatric unit due to issues with depression; that’s where she met Mason and got prescription medication. Has a way with computer software, to the point of hacking alien technology. Is mildly paranoid.

Fled to Seattle after embezzling money from a corrupt company and bought a house. Worked as a secretary for a college professor named Singh. Had romantic feelings for a police officer named David Rose who had also been in the MBE incident, having gained super speed. She tends to nickname people (like “bunny girl” for Para) so she doesn’t get attached. (1)

After the first mission, started writing fiction and putting it online, but after a year she was still getting low readership. Born in the Netherlands, knows some Dutch. Can be impatient and is annoyed by references she doesn’t get. Shrank (temporarily) due to her teleporting in a density suit, until she was doll size. Sees Para as being child-like. (3)

Returned to the station after six months. Wanted to know Kat better. Will challenge Alice’s opinions (to a point). Does trend to black/dark humour, wants to stop hurting more than she wants to die. Had dinner with Kat after the couple days of testing, which followed the Fate mission. (4)

2. Para Bola

[caption id=“attachment_848” align=“alignright” width=“219”] PARA
(Commission from Michelle Simpson)[/caption]

Originally one of my personified math characters (2011-present). Female personified quadratic graph who has bunny ears on a hairband, attuned to her moods. Blonde hair, pink dress with a bow.

Self-conscious about human interaction and once cut herself on the arms. Can fly by spinning her ears. Was a late addition to the first mission (but arrived first). Trusting to the point of blurting out information she possibly shouldn’t. (1)

Returned to the station to set up a square-cube program, and vouched for Alijda to get her programming help. Immune to fairy knockout dust, and doesn’t ‘sleep’ the same way as a human. (3)

Brought to her third mission by Chartreuse, adopting the guise of an educational assistant. Was willing to believe rumours, given how Fractal City had proved to exist in her mathematical network. Used a metronome to calculate when a room would fill with plush animals. (5)

3. Katherine “Kat” Conway

Originally a character in the online RPG “Doorways” via IRC (2011-2013). Male, played by Colin Ferguson. Thirty-something Sergeant in the Canadian military, assigned to the “Doorways” project out of Nevada (that allows travel to alternate worlds, out of Epsilon’s reach).

[caption id=“attachment_2005” align=“alignright” width=“181”] KAT CONWAY
(Commission from Jakface)[/caption]

Personal interest in the occult owing to his pyrokinesis. Carries a matchbook. Seeking a girl he knew in high school named Fate, but never goes in depth about why.

Name is because his mom died giving birth to him (not in a hospital), and they thought he’d be a girl. Has an eye for the ladies but doesn’t take relationships seriously. Tends to make jokes when under stress. Tried to better understand Alijda, hoping she wouldn’t give up on herself. Is good with configuring computer hardware (not so much with hacking). Fire control is limited to what might be in a fireplace. (3)

Returned to the station after only a few hours, which helped him recall Chris' communications spell. In the military because his father was lax and felt like Kat needed more discipline. Recognizes a few occult symbols. Fate was his first serious relationship in high school (after her rejection of him); they went to prom and corresponded while he was at military college (until it suddenly stopped). Was willing to bend rules to get Fate back. Opened up to Alijda. (4)

4. Chartreuse Vermilion

Originally a character in my “Time & Tied” serial (2000-present). Female teenager who says ‘like’ and ‘you know’ after having succumbed to mystic forces. Dyes her hair pink. Bisexual.

[caption id=“attachment_1093” align=“alignright” width=“222”] CHARTREUSE VERMILION
(Commission by Ruuari)[/caption]

Required a day to align herself to the cosmic forces of a new world. (Azure showed what happened without that day.) Uses crystals to see into the future (if she has a focus), and can get flashes from people or their auras. Technology can interfere with that.

Dating a girl named Carrie, who can stop time/has time travel abilities. Has a thing for blondes. Her younger sister named Azure (who is more verbally direct) can see into the past, using cards. Their family has worked with the Canadian government in the past. She’s not a great cook. (2)

Returned to the station after two weeks (still her summer). A jade ring artifact (obtained by Beam) was meant to reduce ill effects of dimensional alignment; Chartreuse still got queasy. Later took it off to help receive impressions. Insisted on neon red stockings to go with the drab school uniform disguise.

Used a piece of quartz to divine a hidden panel. Doesn’t think ‘brainwashing crystals’ are a real thing. Got sensory stunned saving Para from a ray gun. (5)

[crowdsignal poll=10539447]

STATION CHARACTERS

[caption id=“attachment_929” align=“alignright” width=“185”] ALICE VUNDERLANDE
(Commission from Cherry Z)[/caption]

Originally a role-play character on the BuffyMUX (2004-2005), full name Alison, female. Prone to making pop culture references (and saying ‘awesome sauce’). Former secretary to Angel Investigations, rescued from a Hell Dimension by the Epsilon Project’s “God” (a female). (1) Possibly that involved an actual Angel. (4)

Claimed she couldn’t leave the station (2); it was later revealed that she used to do solo missions until the station required maintenance (such as for power problems). (4) Had worked with the project less than a year before seeking recruits. Enjoys morning exercise. Has an eidetic memory and analytic mind. Was fired for creating a dimensional rift to help her team, and ended up moving in with Alijda, on her world. (3)

Returned to the station after six months. During that time, made a pin based on Steins;Gate to commemorate her Epsilon time. Can get manic when given alcohol, and overshares bedroom stories with her friends. Not great with social cues. Enjoys music while working, and is good at creating devices. Mentally junked a lot of her hell dimension memories. (4)

Her ability to free associate terms allowed her to defeat a truth serum. Used to do karaoke when first recruited to the station, though is not the best vocalist. Good at recognizing pieces of devices, and dimensionally related items too. (5)

6. Beam

[caption id=“attachment_1997” align=“alignright” width=“202”] CHIBI BEAM
(Commission from Gen Ishihara)[/caption]

Originally a character in an online MUX (2009-2011). Female, long blonde hair, early twenties. An autonomous hologram with internal batteries and a charging port in her hairband (her control mechanism, and a weak point, along with her earrings). Mostly light, so has no bones to break when falling and her blood is a simulation. Can run faster than a normal human. Lesbian.

Beam’s first memory is of waking up in an alleyway, knowing only her name and basic programming. Taken in by a non-redheaded woman. Part of her programming is to repay debts to girls who save her life. Has trouble differentiating between girlfriends and girl friends, partly because her world advocates free love regardless of gender. Marriage is for procreation.

Saw her recruitment to Epsilon as being escape (from a place where her rejection of males was peculiar), versus abduction. Her first mission was a tech world with a magic amulet, accomplished by seducing a female archaeologist. Upgraded the station sensors; never knew about Mr Smith.

Can transition to an insubstantial state (and back) using her earrings, though it’s a power drain. Takes items on her person with her automatically, but they cannot be used. Tends to overshare, much like Alice (perhaps due to them mostly working alone).

Classified Rose as her first girl friend, thanks to Kat. Knows kung fu and acrobatic self-defence techniques. Rules oriented, has trouble deviating from protocol. Now works with Alice, under Fate’s command. (4) Injured on a mission with Alice, but got information to hack a high-tech school. Likes all-girl group hugs. (5)

7. Fate Wallace-Wray

Originally a character in Kat’s backstory (same online RPG; no photo). Blonde hair, now long and in a side ponytail. Tends to wear black (like Alijda). Was dimensionally abducted by Compton Sr, but her occult symbols made her immune to his mind scrambler. Decided she was resigned to living out her days on a world where magic was regulated and where her occult symbols worked more tangibly. Adopted the name Destiny and specialized in potions.

Tried to find people with not-quite-right powers, and dimensional weak points. A cyber arm found at one such point she imbued with a desire, lest it phase back to her own world; it was retrieved by Beam. Tortured briefly by Compton Jr, who was trying to resume his father’s illegal dimensional activities. Weird sense of humour.

Defeated Compton Jr (with Rose’s help) and learned Compton Sr had been fed the knowledge of dimensional travel. Accepted command of Epsilon as a transition before a possible return home. (4) Recruited Chartreuse by having the station do some temporal shifting. Seems to be “all business” with reports (possibly Beam’s influence). (5)

[crowdsignal poll=10539451]

MINOR CHARACTERS

Originally a character in my “The Girl Who Speaks With Algebra” serial (2016-2017). Red hair with freckles, teenager in university.

[caption id=“attachment_1919” align=“alignright” width=“196”] ROSEMARY THORNE
(Commission from Lia)[/caption]

Mistaken as being a math genius by Beam; Rose claims her blonde girlfriend Paige is the math and techno-girl. (Also mentioned Paige had father issues.) Babbles when nervous and resorts to humour to stay calm, like when she was given control of the Station. Avoids social media for those reasons.

Musically inclined, sings alto, can play piano and cook. Wears pun shirts. Tends to say flûte, as a way of feeling closer to her french girlfriend. Used to lie to herself about her sexual preferences. Knows basic self defence. Will second guess herself, doesn’t like being in charge. Learned about both Kat’s and Beam’s first missions', and tried to teach Beam about boundaries. Had stronger magic potential than Kat.

Gaining tracking magic in her nose briefly made her drunk, and she talked about Angie, a girl she liked in high school - with the opposite problem to Beam, in that Angie pulled away. She envies how open Beam is about being a lesbian. Later considered them being pen pals.

A mystic shockwave gave Rose the power of doubling, which she linked back to multiplying emotions once, under the guise of ‘Algebra’. She used the power to double Compton, who was set to reflect, and hence became copies of herself. She also used it to amplify Fate’s mind scrambling spell. It wouldn’t carry over to her normal reality. (4)

9. Simon Black

[caption id=“attachment_164” align=“alignright” width=“113”] Jensen Ackles[/caption]

Originally a character in my “Last Magical Girl” unfinished serial (2003/2010). Played by Jensen Ackles. In his mid to late twenties. Knows someone named Becky from his reality, had to leave her behind once. Also someone named Keith who does technology; Simon isn’t a fan.

Works as a magician, knows misdirection/slight of hand and basic hypnosis. Is a pretty good cook, partly because his mother died when he was young. Was briefly turned into Simone on the mission. Mild obsession with magical girls, and watches anime. (2) Was sent to the small scale world a year before that third mission. (3)

10. Mason

[caption id=“attachment_13” align=“alignright” width=“125”] Morgan Freeman[/caption]

Originally a character in an online RPG via IRC (2006-2008). Played by Morgan Freeman. Is a time lord who likes to keep his TARDIS in the form of a 1950s London taxicab (the “for hire” sign strobing upon materialization).

Arrived by tracing an inter-spatial call for assistance. Used to go by the name “Chief”, but now considers himself more of an observer.

Uses a device he calls Bardiche which has multiple functions (like a swiss army knife). Was taken aback that pieces of his history existed in a science fiction show for a particular reality/dimension. (1) The fact that his race was copyright of the BBC there meant Alice got a ‘cease and desist’ letter. (4)

[crowdsignal poll=10539453]

SETTING

The station’s computer intelligence is female, Alice calls her Ziggy. There is also an independent system in the auxiliary control room named Mr Smith (who is male). While usually somehow out of phase with the worlds of each mission (including the ability to temporally jump), the station can be parked in orbit around a planet.

[caption id=“attachment_2012” align=“alignright” width=“148”] From Story4, see the station at the bottom.[/caption]

The station’s in the shape of a wheel. The name for the central control room is the Hub. It’s large enough allow a person to park a car in front of the main view screen, and the room is shaped like a cylinder. Across from the main screen is a large wall of computer banks, while the other compass directions include a meeting place, and a storage area.

A large ring device with lit chevrons (think Stargate), located in the middle of the Hub’s floor, can send people to different dimensional realities. It’s kept irised shut until the ring activates; blackness can be seen before the whirlpool appears. Access to the Hub is from the ceiling, with another irised door; there is a ladder, or more usually gravity can be turned off.

Other rooms include: a fitness room, holography deck, small cafeteria, auxiliary control, artifact containment, override room, and a personal room for the commander (where they can sleep and such). A few places can be shielded from detection by sensors.

Communicators in the form of digital watches can communicate back to Epsilon (not between each other, except via the station with an open channel). They can teleport people onto the station, but prefer to whirlpool them off. They have the technology to synthesize component elements, but limited power. They are able to shore up a planet’s dimensional weak points.

The project only pays people “in adventure, a better life, favours to be named later kind of deal”. The female God Alice has referred to would seemingly veto a male administrator, as their egos are deemed “too fragile”.

PLOTS

Plot for Story One: Numbers Game (2014): People with powers learn that someone is messing with clocks. This turns out to be Phillip Denomolos, aka “the Denominator”, a 20-something tech genius. He was being influenced by Lissa Jous, in his dreams. This allowed her to rewrite his reality and dimensionally jump from her own.

Plot for Story Two: Wish Fulfilment (2015): An artifact is granting wishes on a fantasy world. Wanda, apprentice to the wizard Qifarihm, was tired of male beliefs affecting their magic reality. (Females need a focus object to control spells.) With the artifact, she took over his job. Snowball, the white cat, became a pink unicorn, while a (formerly) imaginary elf named Pelinelneth became Wanda’s companion.

Plot for Story Three: Full Scale Invasion (2016): A small scale world is being invaded by large scale objects. The Department of Extradimensional Objects (with Larry Appleson and Bonnie DuChessy) knew of previous smaller anomalous objects, and worked with tech. Meanwhile the Magic Users Club (with Michaela and friends) used fantasy items. Queeny (and City Hall) tried to clamp down on everything, and it took Cure Axiom to learn their answers were with Clyde, former DEO head.

Plot for Story Four: Epsilon Delta (2017): The Epsilon station in the multiverse is in trouble. A cyber arm Beam brought back went rogue, trying to crash the station. A parallel planetary investigation with Firestorm led to tracking a woman named Destiny - even though that became outside the scope of their mission. Dealing with her abduction by Compton (Jr) revealed multiverse issues with his father.

Plot for Story Five: Chanced Erasures (2018): Infiltrating a school that knows about the multiple dimensions. Chartreuse (there to rescue Alice) was mistaken by Sam Depas for being in the ‘work elsewhere in multiverse’ club, aka ‘Clover Club’. Sue Morts (limited invisibility power) and Sir Thred helped investigate. Mind manipulation and ending dimensional travel (to halt immigration) turned out to be involved.

Do you have a favourite story so far? A reminder you can answer simply based on the summaries, you don’t have to have read them all to vote.

[crowdsignal poll=10539455]

The only real thread through stories 1-3 was Alice, who was subsequently fired. In story 4 we see someone still wanted the missions to continue solo, recruiting Beam. The crew then determined that a shadow group was spreading dimensional knowledge to various Earths, their only clue being a clover shape. This led to discovering the existence of “Clover Enterprises” in story 5, a seemingly nomadic organization taking money in exchange for information or favours. Possibly manipulating the progress of worlds.

Where do you think this might be going? Did you want a revisit of any prior worlds?

IN CONCLUSION

The votes above (in this entry) will give me an idea of whom you might like to see more of. And the usual way I write is to shift point-of-view every chapter, so this way the preferred characters might get more POVs. But of course, I make these stories up on the fly, so we’ll see what works with the narrative as well.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, for plot or otherwise feel free to comment. For instance, I’ve been debating bringing Trixie on board, now that anyone who read my last serial is aware of her. But do I have too many female characters already…?

Until next time, I hope you were able to do some voting here, and please do spread the word… I’ve had 10 days with zero pageviews on this 300+ story entry site so far in April, maybe we can do something about that. Thanks!

A Virga Mystery: BALANCING ACT

ACT 6f: OF MELISSA AND JAMES

Hi! Trixie here. I’ve now read the whole “Balancing Act” novella that James wrote, as I assume you have too. Thanks for getting this far! This is why I feel you should know the real ending. You can thank me later.

For the record, I do maintain that James was an idiot. Yet to a certain extent, Missy was also an idiot, so in the end, they truly were made for each other. Right?

It’s sorta like that anime about “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”. Except Missy only got to be a God towards the end. Well, and James truly loved her, and Missy knew things were supernatural, and okay, bad comparison. Bah, look, I’m no writer. Anyway, here’s the deal.

[caption id=“attachment_2345” align=“alignright” width=“186”] TRIXIE
Commission from Sen Yomi[/caption]

I found this manuscript on the computer in James’ room (formerly Missy’s room), finally exploring there after the third day that he didn’t return home. Yes, his computer was password protected, and yes, I’m that good at what I do. Hence how this whole story has been added to the other three cases he published online. You’re welcome.

Now, while I’m not 100% certain, and James could be dead in a ditch somewhere, I’m pretty sure I know what happened to him. It’s why I got him to sign the Agency over, and more to the point, why I said he’d better hold on to that ring.

Because the idiot didn’t seem to clue in to the fact that it would take Missy time to recharge herself from doing an ‘Ultima Ratio’, to the point where she could actually bring him along to join her. Like, a lot of time.

I didn’t tell him, because I didn’t want to raise false hopes. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure she’d be able to get enough power within the three-month window for those space-time fractures on either side of her decision. It sure came down to the wire.

Anyway, he’s gone, and so yeah, good for her. For both of them, that is. I like to think that being able to home in on the ring helped Missy out, along with my having written James' engrams to Mixi as a test run.

Meaning I did a good thing. I really am that smart, yeah? More mature than I was at the start of all this too. Just saying.

And that’s the real end. You’re welcome.

Oh, unless you care about little me? The buxom witch Trixie, who seemed to be such a puzzle for James to figure out? It’s so tempting to give my real name, instead of this one that James created.

Seriously, had I been a MALE character picking up every Friday night in a bar, I doubt any of you would have given it a second thought. As a lady, am I not allowed to seduce people or something? Damn stereotypes. Or maybe it’s because I was a techie? And they’re not supposed to behave the way I do? Because that’s also bad stereotyping, and shame on you all.

At any rate, I’m doing reasonably well for having lost the only group of people where I felt I was finally fitting in. (Did you even think of that? Did you? Yeah, thanks for asking.) Thing is, I’ve got their Agency here, and I’ve been recreating my Rixi, and okay, I might have met someone at Missy’s ‘farewell celebration’ too, which is leading to a stable relationship.

Could be a guy, could be a girl, could be an elf, you don’t know. It’s not an AI though, is my point. Maturing, as I said. Also, it’s not a relative. Seriously, ew, who went there? Oh, and if I find anyone shipping the three of us main characters at once on any fanfic boards, you’re getting a piece of my mind.

Okay, so that’s the end.

Except now I’ve gone and ruined the poetry of it, huh? And I dunno how to rewrite all this to end it more like how James did last part.

Know what? For all his faults, the guy did craft a pretty good story.

Hmm, fine, let’s consider this. If something magically wonderful happens, you probably have Melissa to thank. If something completely contrary to the supernatural balance happens, you probably have James to thank for distracting her and Mixi at an inopportune time. Heh.

Yeah, I have no idea if ascended beings can make out, but if a mysterious baby appears on my doorstep sometime in the next few years, maybe I’ll have my answer.

Hell, they’d better not do that while I’m single, I don’t think I could handle being a single mother. Shoot, making this about me again.

So really, really, that’s the whole story. Of Melissa and James.

You can stop reading now.

For serious.

Are you still there?

Okay, yes, dammit, it’s true that I’m going to miss those idiots. You happy now? Go leave a comment on this blog now or whatever, I’m gone.

TRUE END

A Virga Mystery: BALANCING ACT

ACT 6e: OF MELISSA AND JAMES

I felt my heart beating faster in my chest. “Do I want to know what you saw?”

“I saw more than one thing,” Melissa admitted. “Which isn’t something that’s supposed to happen. Even yesterday, I’d held out some hope for the variation. That there would be a way to mentally train myself, so that Mixi would be sufficient.”

Trixie pursed her lips. “And what more did I need to do? Should I just take my wondrous creation back?”

Melissa shook her head. “Don’t misunderstand, I needed all that you’ve done, Trixie. But it has to be more. And when I finally realized what my role was in all of this, I… I wanted to put off saying my goodbyes for as long as possible.”

I felt a knot forming in my stomach. “Mel?” I said, not liking where she was going with that.

“The orb also let me see the key reason for why I was chosen,” she continued in a rush. “Setting aside my fanaticism with supernatural balance, it goes back to my lineage. There is more power in me than I realized, more power than my parents themselves are aware of. Enough for me to do more than observe the Earth. I have the power to see other realms, James. Other possibilities. Things that I’m not sure Mixi can handle yet.”

“I want to be offended by that, but you’re freaking me out,” Trixie remarked.

Melissa sighed, and held Mixi up. “This device is perfect for maintaining the supernatural balance, which is what we designed it to do. But it can’t recognize when exceptions are needed, or adjust for the rules that exist outside of our realm. A human element is required. One that knows how things have changed over the centuries.”

Trixie flinched. “You really ARE going all ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ on us here, huh?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Melissa admitted. “I will say that the burden will be considerably lessened with this device operating. It’s only, necessary adjustments cannot be made by someone bound in this space-time, and the transition out will only happen when the fractures align. Which will be soon.”

I found my voice again. “So you’re leaving,” I said. “And you knew this yesterday.”

[caption id=“attachment_2011” align=“alignright” width=“202”] MELISSA VIRGA
Commission from Shirley[/caption]

Melissa took a step forwards. I took a step back, suddenly not sure I knew her anymore. After all, if it had been me, I would have spent more time with her. I would have celebrated the rest of the time we had together, not retreated, not kept silent and worked on things by myself!

Her expression did something of a sad crash. “It’s not that I didn’t think you’d understand,” she murmured. “It’s that I didn’t want to make things different between us.”

“Except you did,” I insisted. “You retreated from me!”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. “I… damn, you’re not wrong. Oh James, I messed up, and now everything is aligning, so I can’t make it right. God, I wish I’d given us more time!”

When I remained silent, Trixie spoke up again. “Okay, so bye, take care of yourself then,” the redhead chirped. “Maybe tweak the stars in my favour a bit? Seeing as you’re running off with not only my prototype Mixi but the original device I had to base it on?”

Melissa looked over. “I can’t play favourites, you know that,” she said. “Otherwise I’d do something to fix this now.”

Trixie smirked. “Just testing you. You pass. You’re normal, and probably not possessed. Albeit you’re more flawed in terms of relationships than I realized, because James has a point. So how are you going to use the next sixty seconds?”

Melissa winced. “I… don’t know.” The part of the roof where she was standing started to puddle a bit, like it was turning into pudding. She returned to looking at me. “I hope you can forgive me in time,” she whispered.

It was that comment which shocked me back to my senses.

Maybe I would have spent time with her, but Melissa, she wasn’t me. That was the whole point; it was why I enjoyed her company. More to the point, Melissa was normally so blunt and straightforward, and here, she’d been evasive. Because of how much she’d cared.

Perhaps, in the end, I’d sort of sabotaged myself? Encouraging Mel to listen to her emotions over the last several years? Meaning she’d said nothing until she’d been sure, and then even beyond that, had found herself unable to open up. Unable to be blunt with me any more. But all of that, it didn’t matter. Damn it all, I still loved her.

“Just tell me one thing,” I said, thinking back to the conversation we’d had in her parents' pantry. “Do you really want this? Do you really want to be the one forced to monitor magick in and around the entire world?”

Melissa’s lips quavered. “I do now,” she admitted. “I thought I wasn’t ready, and maybe I’m not. But to see it all laid out – this is what I’ve been trying to do with the Agency, James. But now I can do it on a cosmic scale! Outside of this framework of reality, I could even affect events before they happen. And I want to make that difference.”

“Then you should do it,” I concluded. “And I’ll support you in that. Because I love you. And in the end, that means there’s nothing that needs forgiving.”

Melissa seemed to blur a bit, and it took a second for me to realize it was because I’d started crying. She smiled at me. “If it helps, James, in a sense, I won’t be gone. I’ll be everywhere.”

I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. “It helps.”

A tear ran down her cheek. “I should have been with you last night. But I was worried that, if I was, I’d have second thoughts. I’m sorry.”

“No regrets,” I insisted. “Though, can we at least hug before you fade out, or whatever?”

I opened my arms tentatively, and Melissa threw herself into the embrace. She buried her face into my shoulder for a moment. “There’s a letter,” she murmured. “For you. In the filing cabinet. Trixie has others for my parents. Whether you read your note or not, know that I do love you. Please know that.”

“I love you too,” I assured her. “Now go and show the whole world why.”

I stepped back. Then I noticed what seemed to be a slight inconsistency in the air behind her. Like a bit of a tear in space. This might be the last time I saw her.

And yet, I was briefly distracted by Trixie moving into my peripheral vision. Staring at me suspiciously. I tried to ignore her.

“Okay,” Melissa said, letting out a long breath. “Here it goes.”

She threw her hands out to the sides and looked up into the sky. “Let the balance be restored, and then become attuned to those on Earth… let my power synchronize with the wills and desires of everyone out there… though let me retain my sense of self as take on the mantle of - Libra Magica. ULTIMA RATIO!”

I knew then what it must have been like for Melissa to observe Melody. I dare say that must have been her basis for this spell. Sparks shot out from her, thousands of them, millions, most firing off into the distance, but some seemingly dropping down through the top of the roof.

Attuning themselves to everyone, and feeding the information back to the Chosen One, even as I saw the rip opening larger behind her. She was going to transition.

That’s when Trixie kicked me REALLY hard in the shins.

“OW!” I said, looking over at her in befuddlement.

“You COLOSSAL IDIOT,” she bellowed back at me, hands closed in a pair of fists. “If that’s a ring in your back pocket, you better damn well GIVE IT TO HER BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!”

Oh yeah. I’d almost proposed again that morning, but I hadn’t gotten up the nerve before Melissa had left the kitchen. I’d figured it would keep until after this was all over.

Now it really was all over. But Melissa herself had said that she didn’t want things to be different between us, not in these last few days, hours, minutes, seconds. Right?

Unless she’d been waiting for the ring.

Trixie kicked me again, and damn it, it hurt. I rounded on her, only for her to jab her finger almost right up my nose. “I SWEAR to GOD, if you don’t move your ass RIGHT NOW James, I am going to turn you into a CHICKEN.”

I’m not sure what it was. Perhaps Trixie had managed to use that tone that gets people to obey without thinking about it. Maybe there’s something about the Virga lineage. Or perhaps it was the chicken reference, which reminded me of the clause in my initial rental agreement with Melissa. But then, maybe I simply didn’t need as much of a nudge as I thought I did.

Before I realized it, I was stepping forward and saying, “Mel!” As her gaze refocused on me, sparks still flying from her body, I pulled the box out of my pocket, opened it, and unexpected words spilled from my lips. “Take me with you!”

Melissa’s hands moved to her mouth as she gasped. “You actually did it. You bought me a…” Her voice sounded like it had a bit of an echo to it. I’m not sure if it trailed off, or if I missed a word.

“Opal. Your birthstone,” I said. Perhaps redundantly, but her body seemed to be growing brighter, and I wasn’t sure she could see. “Mel, this ring means we do these things together.”

“It’s too late,” she protested. “I can’t.”

“Then take the ring at least.”

Her gaze shifted to be one of sheer determination. “No, keep it with you. Remember I love you, and please think of me when –-”

The brightness was so intense now that I found I was forced to blink.

Leaving Trixie and me standing alone on the roof, with Melissa’s unfinished sentence hanging in the air. Gradually, the chain link fence reconstructed itself into iron.

Epilogue:

So that’s everything. You’ve now read the story of how I chose Melissa over my childhood friend, only to lose Mel again before the end of the summer.

I think I’ve now been through the traditional five stages, from denial, when Trixie had to practically drag me off the roof three hours later, to acceptance, that being in the form of writing all of this down. Tomorrow will mark exactly three months since she transitioned. There are only a few little gaps that probably need filling in. Well, plus a massive edit job on this whole tale, but let’s deal with that later.

First, the letter Melissa left for me. It said a lot of what she had stated on the roof, maybe because she hadn’t been sure how long she would have to explain things. Several times, it also said ‘I’m sure I’m not explaining this well but I hope you can understand’. It concluded by saying that she will always love me, even always be a part of me – and added in a small postscript, that I should check in with Amy about her lamp.

I did. It had apparently reverted back to being a knife, some time during the three days following Melissa’s ascension. (I’ll use ascension for lack of a better term.) I’m not sure if that was supposed to mean something, but resuming contact with Amy was something of a comfort. Maybe that had been Mel’s intention?

After all, Amy had seen some of what was out there too, giving me someone to talk to aside from Trixie, and it was Amy’s suggestion that I write all this down. She’d apparently looked up those prior three cases online, and thought that I had a good thing going.

The second thing to mention is our parents. In the end, I think mine understood Melissa’s decision to leave, if not the specifics of the magick involved. My mother in particular I think wanted to deride Mel, but they never did so in my presence, and they haven’t tried to set me up with anyone new in the time since.

As to Melissa’s parents, I think her letters to them explained things much as mine did. They’ve even sort of accepted me into the family, despite Melissa’s ultimate rejection of the ring I’d offered to her. There wasn’t a memorial service per se, since Melissa wasn’t dead, but they invited me to a celebration of her life.

Then finally there’s the actual matter of supernatural balance, and the Agency. The latter remains in my name, but at Trixie’s insistence, she’s become a co-owner on paper, with access to the accounts and everything.

I didn’t see the harm. In theory, there will be fewer cases involving people, as things rebalance. But maybe other witches or beings will find it useful, as they adjust to the new (old?) reality out there.

I’m not sure how long I’ll stay. I haven’t quite worked out my future yet. Part of me thinks I should sell the ring I bought for Melissa and move out of the apartment. Part of me cannot bear to part with it yet, particularly not after Melissa’s last words, and Trixie has insisted I keep it as a reminder, at least for a while yet.

I do still have the option of journalism. Maybe there’s a witch faction that runs a newspaper? Or maybe I’ll turn this into a proper novel. Either way, in the end, I guess I’m just glad I got the chance to tell Melissa’s story.

And you know, maybe, just maybe, if you wish really hard for something, and it’s something that can be balanced out in the grand scheme of things… Melissa will hear you, and it will happen.

Just like magick.

END…?

A Virga Mystery: BALANCING ACT

ACT 6d: OF MELISSA AND JAMES

I hesitated, largely because I wasn’t sure about Trixie’s state of mind. “Uhm, you know my magick experience is really limited, right?”

Trixie’s smirk was back. “It’s fine. You don’t need any inherent magick for Mixi to see what’s going on in your head.”

“Ah. And you don’t want to eat first? Or shower?”

“Nope. But you can picture me in the shower, if you think that’ll help get your neurons firing, James.” She wiggled her eyebrows, and then her hips.

“Trixie…” Melissa said warningly, though it was almost resigned amusement at this point.

I somehow found my gaze back at Trixie’s chest again. I don’t know how she does it. “Trixie, look, you’re not going to be pulling fetishes out of my head, are you?”

Trixie giggled madly. “Not on a test run, but OOH you’re giving me so much ammunition to potentially tease you with. It’s almost criminal, to take advantage of your naivete this way.”

“Yeah, um, so maybe don’t do that?”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Yes, fine, look, listen. I’m doing an impossible thing that no one’s ever done before. Humour me NOW, before I crash and need to sleep for a day straight.”

I resigned myself to my fate. “Be gentle?”

Trixie laughed once more and dragged me into her room to affix medical patches to my temples. All I really have to say about the process is that it was somewhat long, though not the three hours she’d deemed for the final run. It was also completely painless, and seemed to satisfy Trixie that she’d done what she’d set out to do.

Almost immediately after, the redhead passed out, face down on the floor.

When I finally left Trixie’s room, Melissa was gone. She’d left a sheet of paper on the desk saying she needed some air, and some candles. I toyed with the ring in my pocket for a moment, then went to prepare dinner.

That night, I realized that Melissa seemed to be withdrawing from me. Whether it was a conscious decision on her part or not, I didn’t know, but we remained on opposite sides of the bed.

[caption id=“attachment_2011” align=“alignright” width=“202”] MELISSA VIRGA
Commission from Shirley[/caption]

The next day, early on, she set up what she needed for her spell in our room. Namely some orbs, candles, and I think the rib of a small animal. She then requested absolute silence for when the technology spell actually took place.

Trixie was still asleep (apparently she hadn’t been kidding about sleeping for a day), while I took the opportunity to go to the main room and look out the window. To see if I could catch the flash when Earth’s entire technology grid was flipped off, then almost immediately back on again.

I’m not going to tell you when this happened. There’s a slim chance that making it public would get Annie in trouble, as I could still say here that her information was a bit off, and Melissa calculated the difference.

I mean, okay, I’ve been changing everyone’s names, so I suppose I could change the time of the event and give you that in the narrative. But it seems rather pointless.

I will tell you that the magick involved ensured that nothing would need to power cycle back up, so maybe it was that moment when your radio cut out, or when your computer seemed to freeze up, or when that light in the hall seemed to flicker as you were preparing for bed.

Two seconds, maybe less. I fancy I saw it, but only because I knew exactly when to look for it.

There were no complications.

By that I mean there was nothing reported in the news related to this. There were complications as far as Melissa was concerned. The most immediate consequence being her emerging from the room looking rather pale.

I quickly got her a glass of water and asked if there was anything I could do to help her out. She shook her head. “It was an eye opening experience, that’s all.”

I paused, then led Melissa out into the hallway, away from any surveillance. I then crouched a bit to look her in the eyes, and made sure she was looking at me before speaking again.

“Mel, this is me you’re talking to. I can tell something has upset you. What’s wrong?”

Her lips grew tight. “It’s that there are cracks,” she said after a moment. “In the fabric of space-time. Which is why other realities knew about me, they caught a hint of the spell I just performed. I also got a sense of…” She shook her head. “I can’t describe it.”

“You mean Merlin?”

Melissa shook her head. “James, please don’t press me on this.”

I nodded. “Okay then. You’re sure there’s nothing more I can do?”

Melissa stared past me for a moment, then refocussed. “I need to see Alicia. I’m suddenly scared that there’s not enough time left to do what I need to do. I swear I’ll tell you if there’s anything you can do to help me with it though, okay?”

She smiled at me then, and leaned in to kiss me. For a moment she sank into it, and into my arms, and seemed to me like things were normal enough.

But when she drew back I saw there was still something lurking behind her gaze. With a quick apology, she was immediately running down the stairs, off to Alicia Wing’s store. I think she would have done so regardless of whether the store was actually open at the moment.

To this day, I’m still not sure what Melissa had really caught sight of during her spell.

There’s a well-known quote by Friedrich Nietzsche that comes to my mind: “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

I hoped Melissa would be all right. Again, I found myself fiddling with the ring inside my pocket.

Two days later, meaning one day short of the big day, I was sure that Trixie knew something too. I called her on it while Melissa was out.

“Don’t keep being an idiot, James,” she retorted. “Your girlfriend wouldn’t tell me anything that she wouldn’t also tell you.”

Something in her tone had me reading between the lines. “Might she have told you something BEFORE telling me though?”

The redhead flinched at that, even looking a bit guilty. “No?”

“Trixie, tell me what you know,” I said, becoming a bit scared. I’m not sure why that had been my first reflex. Can men have intuition too?

“Nothing!” Trixie insisted, only to amend, “I’m sure it’s nothing. Just, I have some messages to give to Melissa’s parents after tomorrow.”

“After her Decision Day.”

“Right.”

“Related to the fact that she’s refused to respond to their messages? The ones insisting that the spell worked, and that she can stop worrying about everything?”

I really hadn’t been sure what to make of those. Had Merlin been re-energized? Had he not been, but false flags had been thrown up to make the casters think the spell had worked? Did Melissa need to do something to help him out? Or were Melissa’s parents simply outright lying to her, so that she wouldn’t do anything rash?

Trixie had no answers. “I dunno,” she said, shrugging. “Melissa sealed the content into envelopes.”

I stared at Trixie. She wouldn’t meet my gaze. That was definitely new. “Then do you think the spell her parents were doing worked?”

Trixie sighed. “Damn it, James, I don’t–” She cut herself off. “Look. All I know is Melissa thinks her task is actually greater than ever. She even asked me to try and cut down on the three hour window for her virtual self. Don’t ask me to explain why. I’m tech-girl, she’s the supernatural balance expert.”

“And there’s no problem with Mixi and the neural net?”

Trixie’s expression morphed into something that said to me ‘There bloody well better not be after all the effort I put in’. Her lips merely said, “Nothing I’m aware of.”

I dropped the subject.

In retrospect, I must have been preoccupied. I didn’t pick up on the fact that not once did Trixie call her cousin ‘Missy’ on that day.

Melissa didn’t come to bed that night.

When I saw her the next morning in the kitchen, it didn’t seem like she’d actually slept. On the one hand, this wasn’t unusual, since she never did have a good sense for time of day. On the other hand, shortly after I entered, she headed out of the apartment again. So she had to be avoiding me.

I can’t be certain, but I think that was the night when Melissa wrote the message for me.

Melissa was back by noon, in order to undergo the process of putting her engrams onto Trixie’s neural net. It only occurred to me then that I wasn’t entirely sure how the decision-making process was going to occur.

Somehow I’d visualized Melissa casting a spell, with an image of Merlin appearing and asking for her final answer… and that wasn’t it. Of course, I’m not sure Melissa herself had known until three days prior, as I suspect she would have said something to me otherwise. As it was, she merely said we’d be headed to the roof of the building in a little while.

The roof door was normally kept locked. Obviously not a problem in our case.

Melissa walked out first, holding Mixi. I followed after her, and Trixie hung back behind us. My girlfriend walked all the way to the edge of the building and looked out, through the protective chain link fence that someone had erected. She then turned and let out a long breath.

“Okay James, you deserve this explanation from me in person,” she began. “The choice I’m faced with here is the chaos that would come from magick becoming common, and being wielded against those without consent, versus the strict regimen of magick casting backlash and a severing of ties with other realms.”

I nodded. “I sort of assume you’re looking at the strict regimen though,” I said. “Given how you’ve got Mixi there to implement it.”

She licked her lips. “Yes and no. Thing is, while the latter system might have worked 1500 years ago, I’ve been forced to conclude that it needs updating. All systems must change to adapt to the changing times, I know that now. And Merlin, if we still refer to the originator of the system that way, was aware of this possibility. In fact, the more recent shifting in the supernatural balance hasn’t been due to corruption, or lack of energy. It’s come from two other things.”

“Powerful things, I presume,” Trixie said from behind me. “Given how that chain link fence seems to be morphing into cheddar cheese or something before our eyes.”

Melissa glanced back over her shoulder only briefly. “That’s blowback from what’s about to happen. In retrospect, the proximity of me and other Chosen might have been a catalyst for a couple of the more curious incidents. Like Amy’s lamp. As to the two things being powerful, I suppose that depends on your point of view.”

“These are the things you saw during that fraction of a second when we didn’t have technology, isn’t it,” I divined.

Melissa nodded. “Correct. The first thing is the fact that there are now several billion more people on Earth than there once were. It makes tracking the flow of magick more difficult. The second thing, even more problematic, is how the original system doesn’t understand how to adjust for all our scientific advancements. It seemed immensely relieved for that one second when it didn’t have to.”

“So the Internet really is a problem.”

Melissa ran her fingers back through her hair. “Not a problem. An additional variable. That’s what I really didn’t understand until a couple of days ago. How much the system needs to be updated.”

I exchanged a glance with Trixie.

“Fine, I’ll ask her for you,” Trixie said, reading something in my expression. She stepped up next to me. “Melissa, if you’ve known for a couple days, why only tell us all the details now?”

A Virga Mystery: BALANCING ACT

ACT 6c: OF MELISSA AND JAMES

Gardening struck me as being a new hobby for her, and I said as much.

Annie grinned. “Yup!” she asserted. “That’s my new thing, been growing my own herbs, along with plants and flowers. Selling some of them too, as the couple years since graduating haven’t been good for finding stable work. Particularly since I prefer non-technological jobs. But I get the occasional contract here and there to make ends meet.”

“You’ve kept up with spells too,” Melissa said with a measure of surprise. “I wondered if you might have given that up, to try and keep from being discovered again.”

Annie put her hands on her hips. “Okay, spill. How did you know I was casting?”

Melissa shrugged. “No deduction, per se. Not even a scent. Just a vibe. From you, from Tabby, even from the plants.”

“Ah." Annie adopted a more neutral pose. “Well, and I did avoid it while I was still in school,” she replied, “But once I was done, and then unemployed for six months with no interest in pursing personal relationships, I needed some other ways to fill my time. Plus I was hopeful of there being a good job interview spell or something. Instead, I latched on to communications.”

“Communications?” I wondered. “Are there magick phones or something?”

Annie chuckled. “Not that I know of. But that brings me to why I wanted you to drop by. I need your opinion on something.”

After pulling down the shade on her window, she ushered us over to her kitchen table, where she had laid out what looked like some homemade variant on the ouija board.

Melissa was immediately walking around it, crouching down to see it at eye level, and standing on her tiptoes to get an overall sense of it.

“You’ve been trying to contact other realms,” she concluded at last. “Surprisingly professional setup. Did you search the web for this?”

“No, I still avoid the web for magick,” Annie admitted. “It’s my grandma who gave me some advice. We’ve connected more since my graduation, and my growing interest in spells. She told me that I had to be very careful not to create an open connection, and that I had to have a sense of where I was going to be transmitting. I’ve been pretty careful.”

Melissa tilted her head to the side, as if she was trying to divine exactly to whom Annie had been speaking. “So you’ve been talking to…?”

“An elf.”

Melissa nodded. “Right, makes sense. This flow is connected to that weak point at the North Pole.”

As to me, I was startled. “Hold on. There’s actual elves at the North Pole?”

“No, no,” Melissa said, gesturing vaguely as she continued to admire the setup. “Though that was a logical place for their realm to gain access, as a number of regular humans already have the belief of elves existing up there, even though the elves they picture are very different from the real thing.”

“So they don’t have pointed hats and help Santa,” I reasoned. “Are they more like Tolkein elves then? Because I only ever saw the movies.”

“They are long lived, and can be beautiful, but are mostly my height, with no dark vision,” Melissa said idly. She turned her attention back to Annie. “Who is it you’re talking to then? While most elves aren’t evil per se, a number can be particularly mischievous.”

Annie smirked. “Iantneth has a similar opinion of humans. I really only speak with her about fashion, relationships, daily life stuff – though she’s been instructing me a little on how to grow better herbs.”

“Aha, that explains the magic I sensed from the plants,” Melissa concluded.

“So, be straight with me. This seems safe and all?” Annie said, hesitantly. “I mean, I’ve spoken to my grandma about it, and sent pictures, but it never hurts to have a second opinion from someone in the know who’s actually here.”

Melissa looked once more under the table, then stood up and shrugged. “I don’t see any problems with this. Have you noticed anything strange?”

Annie breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, I noticed a pine tree had morphed into an oak tree last week, only a block away. I figured it was unrelated, but…” She gestured vaguely.

Melissa pursed her lips, then nodded. “I have been aware of a few incidents like that of late. Don’t worry, it’s not you. We’re approaching a sort of supernatural turning point.”

I was reminded then of Melissa’s knife turning into Amy’s lamp three months ago. “Could talking to other realms be upsetting supernatural balance even more though?” I wondered. “Not exclusive to Annie, I mean.”

Melissa shook her head. “No, the balancing issues are related to the weak points that these devices exploit. It’s those areas which can allow entities though, and these visitors cause much more of a problem than what’s more akin to a radio transmission.”

I nodded. “Meaning, going after communication tools is a bit like shaming someone for not using a reusable bag, when the plastics industry is really at the core of things.”

“I guess?” Melissa mused. “Except it’s more like you’re reusing a plastic bag in the first place. Things won’t get worse than they are already.”

“A-Am I doing a bad thing then?” Annie asked. “Because I’m getting confused.”

Melissa waved Annie off. “No, no, you’re fine. This setup isn’t even electronic at all, is it?”

Annie shook her head. “Nope.”

“Okay. So do you use electronics at all?” Melissa pressed. “To the point where your grandmother might have told you when NOT to use them next week?”

Annie now looked very confused, which led to me jumping in with an explanation of the problem we were facing. I left out the Chosen One aspect, playing up the secret spell part, and wrapped it up by remarking, “Ideally we’d want you to find out the time without making it clear that that’s what you’re asking.”

Annie pressed her index finger to the side of her mouth. “Funny you say that. Iantneth said there would be some sort of disturbance in our realm coming up, so I can use that as a basis. I was planning on driving around town next week on another job hunt too… so yeah, I can probably get Grandma Lindy to spill something.”

“I’d need the exact second,” Melissa reminded.

Annie nodded. “After your help back in University, I’ll see what I can do. And if it doesn’t pan out, I’ll try to let you know sooner rather than later.”

“We appreciate that,” I said, reaching out to shake her hand. “And hey, let us know what herbs it is you’re selling, in case we need a supply of anything.”

Annie grinned. After a few more quick pleasantries, and Melissa declining the offer of home brewed tea, we headed on our way. I sensed she was turning a new thought around in her mind, and called her on it shortly thereafter.

[caption id=“attachment_2011” align=“alignright” width=“202”] MELISSA VIRGA
Commission from Shirley[/caption]

“Well,” Melissa admitted. “It occurs to me that with the balance fully back in place, and the other realms cut off, potentially beneficial conversations like the one between Annie and Iantneth would be lost as well.”

“Ah. Throwing the baby out with the bath water?”

“Not quite so crude, and we do need a way of preventing the bad from getting worse. But it makes me wonder about loopholes… would Trixie’s AI be able to handle those, even with my engrams?”

“It might depend on whether it was something you’d thought of before they got mapped,” I reasoned. “Do you think many would come up?”

“I don’t know. I’m realizing more and more that there’s a lot I don’t know.”

“Maybe some of the literature from the rational faction could help,” I quipped.

Melissa made a face. “I tuned out a lot of the faction stuff. This sort of decision calls for an opinion that hasn’t been biased one way or the other, after all.” She paused. “I guess it’s harder to ignore the occasional benefit when you see it in person, that’s the only problem. Makes me wonder if there’s a lot of others like Annie out there, who need to see that there’s a good side to being a witch.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I simply let the matter drop.

We heard back from Annie within 48 hours; she was able to give Melissa the precise timing that she needed. It would be early in the morning, three days before Decision Day. That is, the day her final decision would need to be rendered… assuming the reinforcement spell failed, which Melissa was certain would happen.

Melissa started to prepare for her own spell. Me, I got a ring, and decided to propose to Melissa one day before all of that went down.

Unfortunately, while I had the ring, and some phrasing in my mind, what I didn’t have was control over the other circumstances surrounding me.

It happened about five minutes before I felt I’d have the nerve to drop down on one knee, as Melissa sat looking over some papers at the main desk. Guess I should have been braver. As it was, the delay meant Trixie’s door burst open first. She bounced out, and practically off the walls, she was bursting with such enthusiasm.

“It’s DONE,” Trixie shrieked. “I DID it. I am like a TECH GODDESS, ha ha ha!”

“The artificial Melissa?” I said, startled. “I didn’t think you’d be ready for another day or two.”

Trixie grinned at me. “I haven’t slept in a while. That helped.” She bounded back into her room, then emerged, holding up what might have once been an iPhone. “The new Rixi is ready! I shall call her Mixi. Missy, I’ll need you for a couple hours now, to deal with the memory engram side of things.”

I fidgeted with the ring still in my pocket. “Um, Trixie, you don’t want to sleep first?” I suggested.

Trixie’s hair was rumpled, to the point that she had a single twintail, versus a ponytail. One of her knee high stockings had fallen nearly to her ankle and she’d made no attempt to correct it, and as to the rest of her clothing, I could see stains from either sweat or drool, which was completely out of character for her. She had definitely been pushing herself.

“Nope!” Trixie chirped. “I am SO ready to put this to the test. To cement my brilliance in the history books. Today’s the day, James! So, Missy? Let’s get to it.”

Melissa hadn’t even looked up yet. “It will have to wait until after tomorrow’s spell.”

The redhead’s gaze took on a slightly murderous tinge off Melissa’s casual response. “Are. You. FUC–”

“It’s not that we don’t appreciate EVERYTHING you’ve done, Trixie,” I cut in swiftly. “And the fact that you have things ready in advance of your own timelines is amazing, particularly in light of some of the challenges that you’ve been telling us about along the way. It’s just, I think Melissa needs some time herself now in order to get more in tune with the spell she needs to cast herself.”

Of course, there was also the matter of my proposal, though given Melissa’s reaction to Trixie, I was fast thinking I might want to hold off on my revelation as well.

“It’s not a matter of tuning,” Melissa said idly. She looked up for the first time then, and sucked in her lower lip briefly as she diagnosed Trixie’s expression. “Of course, what you’ve done is AMAZINGLY AWESOME, and worthy of praise.” Her gaze shifted from Trixie to me. “People still say ‘awesome’, yes?”

“Ugh, forget it,” Trixie said in exasperation, flopping down onto the couch and throwing her shoulders back. “It’s enough that I’ve done it, that James appreciates it, and that you’re not lashing out at me for being smug. Adding extra flattery on top would be weird, particularly when it sounds like it might be sincere. That’s not the Missy I know and love.”

Melissa half smiled. “I may still get you a cake. Or some cheesecake. The thing is, the new memories I’ll be gaining in the next day or two may be critical for decision making on the part of your device. I don’t want there to be any chance of corruption between my mindset now, and what my mindset might be like on the day I have to decide.”

Trixie crinkled her nose cutely. “No biggie, I can wipe the engrams if necessary. It’s a feature, for testing purposes. Though I grant that would be easier to do with a completely different person.”

“Meaning you could test it on yourself for now?" Melissa checked.

The redhead crossed her arms. “Playing to my vanity? Mmm, I’ll allow it. But honestly, as a test run, it’d be better for me to have a measure of separation from the data." She turned to me, and grinned almost wickedly. “So I’ll co-opt James. Then purge and overwrite with yours later, Missy. Speaking of, what kind of waiting period are we talking about here?”

Melissa ran her fingers back through her hair. “How much time do you need, from starting to pull in my memories, to complete implementation? Bare minimum.”

Trixie looked back. “For serious? Bare minimum? Three hours. But that would cut it awful close, and it would be better to allow for the case of needing a reset.”

“I’ll try to give you more time,” Melissa concluded. “Though it seems like, the closer we get to the event, the more I’m starting to doubt myself, wondering if I’ve missed an alternative along the way. Please bear with me?”

She smiled, a bit sadly it seemed to me.

I decided that today was definitely not the day to propose.

Hello, my readers! Life has been busy, as you can tell by this site’s wrap-up post for last year (2019) happening in the middle of February 2020. Full time work, and family time including my one year old daughter, are keeping me very busy. (As was being very sick at the end of December.) But I have wanted to take a look back for a while now, as I have a few things to say.

First, Virga’s Mystery’s “Balancing Act” has now been running for over a year; it began at the end of January 2019. I had debated splitting it up partway with another “Epsilon” story, but found myself with very little free time in the summer, and opted to use that time to finalize edits instead.

Yes, there was a bunch of editing that took place for “Balancing Act” from its July 2012 origin. Notably separating it into parts, giving Trixie more personality to do her own thing (rather than tying her to James), and generally explaining more about the world I’d touched on in the early cases (in particular during the big time skip).

However, Melissa Virga’s story will be ending shortly. Meaning something new in April 2020. That will likely be a return to “Epsilon”, as my schedule is gradually easing, but it could still be more runs of old writing. Do you have a preference? If Epsilon, will people will be interested enough to vote?

That said, I am pleased that I’ve maintained the posting schedule of every two weeks, ever since I shifted to it in July 2017 (during “Epsilon 4”). So if you want reliability, I’m here for you. But see more on site statistics below.

TIME UNTIED

Secondly, work on my sequel to Time & Tied is still progressing… very slowly. Here’s a picture of Heather Bright, which I commissioned when I somehow made it to Anime North 2019. She’s the new time travel tech for Carrie, now that they’re at University. Many of the characters like her are in my head, even if their words are slow to hit the page.

As a quick reminder, my early writing for “Untied” dates from 2014, before I had even posted up Carrie Waterson’s first stories. I restarted from the top for NaNoWriMo 2017, managing 39,372 words by early December. I did edits for it the summer of 2018, splitting it into four files. November 2018 saw an additional 29,225 words, and by January 2019 we were at 6 files and over 65,000 words.

There wasn’t much writing time beyond that, as I went from part-time back to full time work. Still, November 2019 added another 33,373 words meaning we’re almost at 100k - and we’re almost at what I’d envisioned as the halfway point. So it seems we’re looking at a run of at least 4 “Books” again (as I did with the Time & Tied), assuming it all goes as planned.

A reminder that I can’t release the first part until the second is done, as the time travel aspect means some earlier scenes might need redoing. But that’s fine, as certain secondary characters are finally showing more of themselves, meaning I can give them more personality in those early scenes too.

To be clear, this is my priority as far as fiction writing goes (I’m not including non-fiction efforts for the Time Travel Nexus), which emphasizes how much little time I’ve had in the past year for writing at all. And reading, for that matter. I’m behind on other blogs, and I haven’t done much with Comic Tea Party in over half a year. Thank you for your patience.

As far as coins go for 2019 - read “Time & Tied” if you don’t understand why this is interesting - I got 3 toonies, 1 loonie, 9 quarters, and 4 dimes. That’s a total of 17. (I had 16 until Christmas, when I got an additional quarter driving home.) No nickels, which made me wonder if they minted any, but I got one as change just yesterday, so they’re out there. There were also special D-Day commemorative toonies, but I only got one as change in early January, so it’s not pictured.

I’ll probably keep an eye out for 2020 coins. Inflation is still a thing, meaning they’re still printing more money.

STATISTICS

My pageviews for 2018 totalled 2,429… and we’ve backslid to 1,492 for 2019. Granted, I have barely had time for any promotions. I auto-tweet out the current parts, and post them to my Facebook writing page whenever I remember. I did add “Balancing Act” to the Web Fiction Guide listing, and it came up in mid-May on their front page, but that’s about it.

Granted, that listing did help break up a rather impressive stretch of decimal views, which had been going on for over a month.

Decimal views means less than 10 views (in this case, under 5 views) per day, for 30 days. Because WordPress turns the scale into decimals. It actually happened twice in 2019, once for March through to May, and then again for October through to mid-December. Is that impressive? I mean, it’s likely something others cannot claim to have experienced in the fifth year of their blog being around.

My most popular day for 2019, as far as I can tell, was May 28th. That day saw about 52 page views. Most days had less than 15. Strangely, there’s been 9,249 spam messages blocked for the duration of the blog; I’m not sure why they’re so interested.

How many people have read through all of Virga’s story? Act 2A (from April) has only 16 views, while Act 5A (from November) has only 9. But that 9 is fairly consistent with the page views of posts afterwards. (Granted, last week’s posting has 3 views so far.) As to comments, I had 3 for the whole of 2019 (6 if you count my replies). Thanks to mathhombre (March/Sept) and chaosbeast (Nov).

The posts with the most hits (aside from the indexes) were Virga’s Act 1A (77 views), TT1 “Timely Discovery” (72 views), and Epsilon 3.1 “Data Integrity” (38 views). Those were followed by other Virga entries beyond 1A. Kind of nice that some of my older posts are getting looked at, even if people aren’t continuing to read. Top countries (over 100 views) were the US, Canada, and for some reason, Sweden. Thanks for coming out!

I believe that concludes everything I’d wanted to say. If you’re running your own website, hopefully it’s doing better. At any rate, I’m pleased about my consistency, and given the opportunity I wouldn’t have changed my priorities.

Final questions, would you like to see another “Epsilon”? Are you still interested in hearing about progress on “Time Untied”? And will you miss Melissa’s story at all? Feel free to drop a comment to let me know. Either way, hope you stick around, and thanks for reading.

A Virga Mystery: BALANCING ACT

ACT 6b: OF MELISSA AND JAMES

Melissa shook her head. “I have no doubt she could do it, but I don’t want to distract Trixie at this point. She’s got less than two weeks to finalize her work on the neural net. Besides, I need to know the spell’s exact time, down to the second. It won’t be easy for her to get that precise.”

I thought again. “Your parents might have it written down somewhere. If we were to visit them again, I could distract them, while you look.”

“They’d see through that,” Melissa sighed. “And I’d probably end up arguing with them even more, which I’d rather not do.”

“Since you might storm out in a huff?”

She attempted to elbow me in the ribs. “One time, ONE time I act immature in front of them, and you’re there, so you’ll never let me forget about it, huh? No, it’s that my Mom is pretty stubborn, so even presenting a proper case to her now will be pointless. Stooping to the level of subterfuge, that would not fly at all."

“Fair enough,” I said. “So maybe you can try your case on someone else? Trixie’s parents? Other witches?”

Melissa clasped her hands behind her back as she spoke. “Except then I might have to get into the whole Chosen One situation. I don’t think it’s wise to mention the spell to anyone who doesn’t already know about it. In part because other witches might not like that I… I’m starting to have second thoughts about my unilateral decision to restore supernatural balance.”

I stopped walking. “Really?”

She also stopped and looked at me. “Really. Is that so strange?”

“Sort of,” I admitted. “I mean, you cut right to the heart of the matter in the beginning, and you don’t usually second guess yourself.”

“It’s not second guessing so much as realizing I might not have had all the data I needed to form my conclusion in the first place. In particular, Merlin’s take on everything. Hence, wanting the spell information.”

“Huh.”

I resumed walking, and she again fell into step beside me. “I guess this doesn’t make much sense to you,” she said after a moment.

“No, it kinda does," I reassured her. “I was just thinking of more alternatives. And while there’s only four witches aside from your mother involved in the re-energizing spell, there must be TONS dealing with the tech problem. Can’t we track down one of them specifically? See what their calendar looks like in the couple days before Decision Day?”

“Kind of? There are a few names I’m aware of. Thing is, I don’t personally know any of them. Aside from the one in France, whom I vaguely recall from a fancy dinner when I was young. And with him, I wouldn’t know how to get in touch without my parents finding out. While for anyone else, being contacted out of the blue would simply be suspicious.”

“Someone geographically closer would be best,” I granted. “We could maybe sneak into their place when they weren’t around.”

“Again with the subterfuge, I hate to resort to that. Of course, two weeks doesn’t even give me the time to figure out where they all are, and then do further research to narrow down which ones might be sympathetic to me if we’re caught.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. This was definitely as big of a problem as she’d thought. “Can we play the odds? I mean, the majority of witches casting this anti-tech spell, they’d be older, yeah? Against new inventions? Maybe we can use that to narrow things down.”

Melissa frowned. “James, that’s ageist. Who’s to say they’re not younger? In fact, the older witches and wizards might not properly recognize some of today’s tech.”

“Oh. I figured the spell would be doing the recognition.”

Melissa rubbed her nose. “Another good point, I don’t know the exact spell involved here. Agh, if only my parents would simply TELL me!”

“Okay, calm down,” I soothed. “Consider, we can at least eliminate the techno-witches as casters. I mean, can you honestly see someone like Trixie willingly participating in a spell to cut technology out of her life, even for a second? Imagine if something went wrong, and they couldn’t get it back! Chaos!”

The brunette witch smirked. “Possible point. But that really doesn’t narrow things down. There’s a lot of witch groups.”

“Okay, let’s turn it around then. How many of the other groups might be friends with techno-witches, and inclined to give them vague warnings. Like ‘Bad idea to use your technological devices at a particular time on this day’ sort of thing.”

Melissa stopped to lean back against the nearest building. “That’s a good line of reasoning. Slightly modified, since a witch would be more inclined to warn a family member, versus another member of another group.”

“Okay, great. So now we’ve got something.”

Melissa grimaced. “All we’ve done is trade the problem of tracking the spell casters for the problem of tracking their families. It’s no easier.”

“No, see, we don’t try to track the families down,” I countered. “We go the other way. We check for witches and other people we know in the area, possibly through our old case files, and then see which of them are most likely to be connected back up the line to the technological spell casters on your list.”

Melissa tilted her head. “Bit of a long shot.” She smiled. “But it’s a good line of reasoning, and one that I hadn’t considered. Thanks, James. Let’s try it.”

I waved my hand in the air and made a slight bowing motion. “Any time.”

We resumed our walk. Melissa seemed to be heading in a circle back towards our apartment, implying to me that she hadn’t really had a destination in mind, she’d only wanted to have the conversation. So I decided to bring up the other topic on my mind.

“So, uh, by the way, I looked more into the idea of a Chosen One getting married,” I admitted.

[caption id=“attachment_2011” align=“alignright” width=“202”] MELISSA VIRGA
Commission from Shirley[/caption]

Melissa nearly stumbled in her walk. “Yes. Right, sorry, I hadn’t forgotten about that issue either.”

“It’s merely been lower priority?”

Melissa winced. “Don’t put it like that. There’s been a lot on my mind. I actually need to prepare my own communication spell to run at the same time as the tech shuts down.”

“Right, I get it,” I yielded. “Thing is, Zamboni and his priest friend were gambling on their service being at a particular time, using I suspect a particular set of phrases. There really isn’t anything to prevent you being married, if that was something you were still interested in doing.”

Melissa said nothing at first. Then, “Okay, so honestly? The more I thought about it, the more I figured what would come after a promise of an engagement is an actual ring. So if you’ve done the research into it being okay, I mean, you already know I love you and all, so, ah… I guess the next move is yours? Unless I’ve missed a social cue.”

I’m sure I flinched. “That’s… a really good point. I’m sorry. I guess I just… I’m sorry.”

Melissa looked at me again. “You thought that now might not be the best time? Because engagements can last for years, you know. Unless you’d wanted to get married next week? Since that would be more of an issue.”

“No, no, I don’t mean to rush this,” I insisted. “It was more like, I guess I wondered if there were certain magick aspects that I had to make sure to follow through on, given our particular circumstances. Uh, seems not?”

Melissa looked away. “In the end, I really am still just a regular girl.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. I’m sorry.”

Melissa shook her head. “Stop apologizing. I mean, sure, there are little things to know. Like, I’m keeping my last name. That’s a simple witch truth, we do it even if legal documents pretend to say otherwise. But there’s nothing to stop… that is, don’t let my situation keep you from acting like you normally would. Okay?”

“Right.”

I felt like I’d really messed things up this time. Not sure what else to say, we finished the walk back to the apartment in silence. I resolved to find Melissa a ring.

That night, Melissa came up with a short list of possible casters for the tech spell, which we could cross-reference with our files and local supernatural individuals. The name Lindy Sermo struck a chord almost right away. It took another day before I was able to find the link.

It was an old case, very old. The second one I’d been involved with, in fact. And I hadn’t been there when the lineage spell in question had been performed, I’d only seen the paper after the fact. But the page was still there, in our files.

I showed it to Melissa the next morning, when we went for another walk.

“Lineage spell,” was her first remark, glancing at the page. “Given names, the proper ingredients, and the permission of the person involved, you can track the origin of certain genetic qualities. Such as witchcraft. How does this old sheet help us?”

I pointed at the name at the top, one Annie Potts. “We know her.” And then my finger traced two generations back, to Lindy Sermo.

Melissa stared. “I’ll be darned,” she realized. “You’re right. I would never have made that connection. Annie’s mother never wanted to practice, didn’t even keep her last name. So the magick information was never passed on to Annie, and she also took her father’s name. Good work, James.”

“Thank my memory,” I remarked. “Also, in a sense, Annie’s ex-boyfriend, who had created that online file, which acted as a beacon for the spirits to go after Annie herself, bringing her to us.”

“Let’s NOT thank him,” Melissa corrected. “Even if he was Odi et Amo.”

For your reference, Annie had been a victim of stalking by an Internet entity, who had sensed her spell casting potential. Annie - who must have sensed her own capabilities too, based on her cat and choice of reading material - had ultimately helped in casting the spell to vanquish the entity.

“The only question is whether Annie and her grandmother are close,” I concluded.

Melissa chewed on her lower lip. “They can’t have been that close back then,” she deduced. “Since Lindy never spoke to Annie about magick prior to her association with us. But perhaps, if Annie decided to continue doing witchcraft on the side afterwards…?”

“I figured there was no harm in looking her up and asking.”

Melissa nodded. “Agreed. As I recall, she was a year ahead of me… except she wasn’t keen on technology either, thus probably won’t be easy to track on the web. One might hope she’s still in this city, of course.”

I nodded. “I didn’t turn up anything on an initial search. I thought I’d talk to you before checking in with Trixie’s bag of, er, tricks.”

“Mmm. Unless finding the spell itself, this should be a simple enough job for Trixie, if she’s not at a critical point in her studies. Rather than disturb her unexpectedly, do you know if she still surfaces to eat?”

I considered the last few days. “Eat, yes. Though I’m less sure about her showering, and I think she even had some of your shrimp and asparagus soufflé the other night without complaint.”

“She must be getting close, it’s making her more manic,” Melissa mused. “I’ll see if I can turn up anything first.”

Melissa got a list of a few ‘A Potts’ from the online phone book, which she planned to call the next morning. I happened to see Trixie later that day, wearing the same cropped top, skirt and stockings that she’d been wearing for two days. I mentioned the situation, in passing.

Trixie apparently was pleased to have an easy diversion for a few hours, as the next day, one of the names was circled in red with a smiley face next to the phone number.

We were in luck. Annie didn’t mind the call “to check in”, even if it was years later.

Okay, so she was briefly concerned about there being some new entity in the area that might menace her, and I slipped up in terms of saying it was Melissa’s Agency, but once we got past all that, Annie was more than happy to invite us to drop by to talk.

And by that I mean she said she wanted Melissa to take a look at something. So we headed right over that afternoon.

A Virga Mystery: BALANCING ACT

ACT 6a: OF MELISSA AND JAMES

“Our time’s up,” Melody said, stepping away and cracking her knuckles. “Move fast, I’m not sure Mortum will survive this, and there is a non-zero chance that his death will cause the castle to crumble.”

“Oh, good,” Melissa sighed, as she adjusted the strap of her bag.

The door was thrown open, and Mortum himself stood there, flanked by a few zombies, and looking seriously pissed off. “You bitches,” he snarled. “Any last words before I blast you both into dust?!”

“Two,” Melody stated. She threw her arms out at a forty five degree angle. “Ultima ratio.”

Sparks seemed to fly from her body then, energy sparks, as if she were being electrocuted. Her body even twitched, as the light show passed out through the walls, not unlike Melissa’s tracking sphere had done before. This time with more sparks being generated by Melody’s body to replace them.

Mortum, seemingly unimpressed, lowered a staff he was carrying, pointing it at the witch like a weapon.

The zombi next to him reached out and pushed the staff back up.

Mortum turned in surprise to look the zombi in the eyes. Then he realized he actually WAS looking said zombi in the eyes, and not staring at the blank look he was used to. According to Melissa, Mortum first seemed confused, then scared. Then very scared.

“Braiiiins,” the zombi whispered, finally able to speak on its own.

Melissa judged that was the most opportune time to duck down and push past the group. She fled without looking back, encountering more than a few dead and undead bodies moving in the opposite direction, under their own power. Whether they were homing in on Mortum, or on Melody’s light show, she wasn’t sure, nor did she particularly care.

Her destination was the circle of salt on the turret, and safety. She destroyed the circle on our end as soon as she arrived.

I leaned back in the desk chair. “So you think Melody survived? And saw that Doctor?”

[caption id=“attachment_2011” align=“alignright” width=“202”] MELISSA VIRGA
Commission from Shirley[/caption]

Melissa sighed. “Probably? I hope so.” She circled her shoulder around and then put her ice pack back on it. “Remind me never to ram into doors again.”

“Never ram into doors again,” Trixie chirped. She was lying on the couch, chin resting in her hands as she kicked her legs back in the air. “I’d make another Doctor Who reference too, but neither of you would get it.”

Yes, in the end, Trixie hadn’t gone out to find herself a date for the night, electing to wait with me for Melissa’s return. Perhaps handling the factions and the explosion had given her enough of a rush, or perhaps she was turning over a new leaf after learning about Zamboni. I still can’t read her very well.

Melissa looked over at the redheaded witch. “I’ll save an exasperated remark at you for a later occasion, on a day when you didn’t recently comport yourself with aplomb.”

We had given Melissa the rundown on events here, before she told us her story. In case there was any sort of immediate fallout from the failed marriage to deal with, though it was seeming less and less likely.

“Do you think using big words means I won’t realize that’s a compliment?” Trixie asked, grinning. “Also, apology accepted for being a jerk to me earlier.”

Melissa simply half smiled back before looking back at me. “I wonder if the factions will resume devouring their own tails now. Or better yet, decide I’m untouchable."

I ran a hand back through my hair. “They’ll definitely think twice about messing with the Agency, at least. And by extension, you."

Melissa nodded. “That’s good.” She paused. “And in the end, they were right. The evening was a turning point for me. In that I figured out why my parents’ spell will fail.”

I blinked. “Right, so you said. What was that about, exactly?”

“What Melody said to me. About the will of the zombies.”

I searched my memory for when that might have occurred in the story she had told me. “You mean the bit about wanting a break after being forced to do something for a long, long time?”

“And lashing out at anyone who doesn’t give it to you, yeah. Because I’m thinking Merlin or whoever needs a break. Giving him more power to last longer won’t help in that case, particularly if someone’s already tried casting this spell at him in the past.”

“Guess we should start thinking of a plan B, huh?” I joked, looking to Trixie.

To be clear, the three of us had all been pretty careful not to link Trixie’s neural net project with Melissa’s prophecy decision, just in case word got out, and people tried to prevent Trixie’s efforts. So we were pretty confident in our backup plan.

“We might want a plan C,” Melissa murmured then, which surprised me.

“Hey! I’m going to manage this virtual Missy thing for you,” Trixie said, sitting up. “Granted, I’m a still wee bit hazy on doing it in the necessary time frame, but don’t write me off so quick, damn it.”

Melissa shook her head. “That’s not what I meant.”

“No?” Trixie looked back and forth between Melissa and me. “Oh, fine, fine, hint taken to leave the room and get back to work.”

“Melissa wouldn’t hint,” I pointed out. “You don’t need to leave.”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “I’m going off your expression more than anything, James.” She pushed herself up off the couch. “You two talk. Because you both have stuff to say that the other person needs to hear. And I do want to work more before I sleep.”

With a grin reminiscent of the time she’d left me alone with Amy, Trixie went back to her room and closed the door.

Melissa cleared her throat. “Well, and Trixie’s not wrong. Because here’s the problem, other realms have now come up a couple of times. Except when my virtual self picks supernatural balance, they’re supposed to be cut off. So how could that Culicinae vampyre have known about me and my family?”

I decided to go with Melissa’s topic, even as I parsed what Trixie had meant in my case. About our relationship. “He’d been in our world for a while,” I reminded. “Could have researched.”

“Virga is hardly the first thing he’d feel like looking up,” Melissa insisted. “No, the only possibility that occurs to me is that we’re coming up on an event that’s so cataclysmic, its effects reverberate back through time across neighbouring realities. Which may simply be the decision, but could also be our methodology for it.”

“That’s unsettling. Could things go that wrong?”

“I don’t know.” Melissa shifted her ice pack. “Maybe I’m overreacting. But it’s why I’m considering a plan C.”

I looked at her for a moment. “Well, we’ve still got some time to figure it out.”

“Some.” The brunette tugged lightly on an errant strand of her hair. “I need to revise my last resort spell too, I think. That will take a bit of time.”

“What? Why, what’s wrong with the one you have?” It occurred to me then that I didn’t even know what was involved in the spell she already had – there had never been an occasion for her to use it.

“Things change. Another feeling I have.”

“All right, well, let me know if I can help.”

“I will. Don’t worry, it won’t be like it was with the zombies.”

Melissa smiled, then lapsed back into silent thought. Since it was probably verging on 2am by this point, I almost left her that way, but given how Trixie had alluded to the other issue, I couldn’t get the marriage idea out of my head. Except, how to approach it?

She seemed to sense my hesitation after a few minutes, looking back at me. “Sorry, something else?”

“No,” I said automatically. Then, “Actually, yes.” I reached back to rub the back of my neck, suddenly wondering if I should have delayed this talk until I’d gone out to buy a ring or something.

“The marriage thing,” I finally blurted out. “Part of me wonders if I should propose to you right now, but another, larger part of me doesn’t want that sort of personal element to mess up your psyche at this rather critical time. In particular if it would make you lose your Chosen status somehow. So, I won’t. Unless, I should. Um, I love you.”

I think I botched that rather completely.

Her cheeks began to tinge red. “I… I love you too. You know that. But wow, marriage? We’re not even twenty-five yet.”

“Too soon, right. Sorry.”

She quickly shook her head. “Oh, I don’t mean… that is, I never really saw myself as the marrying type until I was at LEAST that old. But then, I never pictured that I’d be in line to choose the fate of the supernatural until I was over twice that age. So I’m not sure what to – wait, James, was that actually a proposal?”

Her expression implied worry over not reading me properly. Honestly though, I wasn’t sure what I meant either. “I think it was a promise of a proposal. I mean, as crazy as Zamboni’s scheme was, it did get me thinking. About us.”

“I see. And you’re thinking that you’d want to spend the rest of your life with me?”

I looked at her again, seeing how tired and exhausted she was after her overseas encounters, and yet how she was still beautiful despite that. How she was so much better looking than any other girl I’d ever met. And I thought about how I wished I could have been there for her, doing something when she was being attacked. I might well have sacrificed myself so that she could have escaped unharmed.

Of course, all that I actually managed to say in response was, “Yeah.”

It must have come across sincerely though, since Melissa’s face was definitely red now as she looked away. “Golly. That’s the nicest thing anyone… but it’s probably something we should revisit when this Prophecy stuff is over. Right? I mean, for all I know, the worship faction put a whammy on you out there.”

“It’s not that.”

She turned back to me, looking adorably flustered. “I know. Trying to make a joke. Came out lame. My sense of humour is still a work in progress.”

I smiled back at her. “It is late. Promise we’ll revisit this within the next three weeks, at least?”

Melissa nodded. “I’d like that.”

I nodded back and started to turn away, only to have her drop her ice pack, approach me, and pull me into a rather passionate kiss.

I was more than happy to oblige. In fact, by the time she pulled back, my hands had started to wander. “I’m too overwhelmed to enjoy this now,” she rasped near my ear.

I squeezed. “I reserve the right to pick up here later.”

She smiled. “Mmm hmm.”

We were late to breakfast the next morning.

The very next day, we returned Alicia’s orb. It occurred to me that she’d known about the turning point too, but I had no idea whether she’d manipulated the situation with Melissa to take advantage of the situation. She was even more cagey than usual, so I don’t think we’ll ever get an answer there.

Another week passed, uneventfully. I went by the park at one point, but aside from some efforts to repair the gazebo, presumably by the city, I didn’t see anything there of concern. Only the more devout faction members were lingering, and they didn’t seem to have a plan.

It was the following Monday that Melissa suggested to me that we go for a quick stroll. I accepted. She got to the point right away, and it wasn’t about the marriage situation. “I think my parents have been listening in on us again. Somehow.”

I frowned. “What makes you say that?”

“I contacted them,” Melissa admitted. “Because I wanted to know when they were planning to run their ‘suspend technology on Earth’ spell. And they wouldn’t tell me.”

“Oh. Well, is there a reason we need to know that?”

Melissa grimaced. “That’s the same question they asked. And yes, there is, because the loss of tech would give me the chance to be more in tune with the supernatural, possibly even Merlin himself.”

“Oh,” I repeated. “So, what, do they believe we’re going to use that time to implement the results of Trixie’s efforts?”

“That’s what I wonder,” Melissa said. “They certainly know we’re at cross purposes. Mom went so far as to imply that I wanted to sabotage their spell, and gave me a whole lecture about knowing what’s best for me.”

“That must have been fun.”

“Oh yeah.” She looked up at me. “So, I’m going to need your help, to figure out the details of their spell, without them knowing.”

A Virga Mystery: BALANCING ACT

ACT 5e: OF ZOMBIES AND ZEALOTS

The tracking spell, which had been laying dormant in the orb room behind them, was sparked into action one last time. It immediately ballooned out, the little glowing sphere’s radius increasing exponentially fast as it passed right through the walls, through the floor, ever expanding until it made contact with Melissa herself. Then, having located it’s mistress, it enveloped her and collapsed back down, taking her along with it.

Fortunately, only physical forms could be pulled right through the wall, not the Zombi spirit presence. The distance was also only good for a radius of about ten metres, which was why Melissa hadn’t tried that from the start.

Melissa could practically hear Mortum’s roar of rage through the stone. But she wasn’t done yet.

Reaching again into her bag, she pressed another scroll against where the door seemed to be on this side, the twin of the one she had put up earlier. Ensuring that the mechanism would not function either way. Which would give her, she judged, between three and five minutes.

She then extended her hand, palm up, and made a small spark arc between her pinkie and thumb, looking towards the other occupant of the room. “Do you need a zapping?”

“No,” Melody said slowly, rubbing her palm against her temples. “No, I think I’m finally clear of it. How did you know that ripping me away with that spell as the zombi spirit tried to jump, would clear it from both of us?”

“I didn’t,” Melissa said frankly. “I wasn’t even sure you’d be caught in the field. But I was on a tight timeline and had made the tracker spell generic to witchcraft, as opposed to my unique witch scent, so there was a chance. Figured I might as well try. Seeing as even you didn’t deserve that fate.”

“Lovely. Was it also a guess that you’d be able to talk and perhaps subdue me once you got out of that room?”

Melissa shook her head. “That, no. I knew your area spells were confined to the throne room. I tested it early on by clearing my throat just the other side of the entranceway.”

“Aha. Clever.”

“I know.” Melissa lowered her hand. “Though I’m glad I don’t have to zap you. Invoking that emergency measure has severely depleted my casting ability. I’m not ashamed to admit that you nearly had me… I don’t remember the last time I felt that vulnerable.” She moved to start poking around the chests in the room to find the orb.

Melody pursed her lips. “For spells, I can back you up temporarily.”

“I’d hoped. Going to escape with me too?”

Melody sighed. “No. Thing is, I’m here voluntarily.”

Melissa blanched, turning back. “Are you INSANE?”

“Possibly,” Melody said with a half smile. “But oddly enough, I did this because of you."

At first, the explosion only expanded out as far as the scrolls on the gazebo posts, scorching the interior. But then, with nowhere else to go, the force was directed upwards, to the roof. Where I had placed no scrolls. So kind of a big mistake.

“No, no, nooooooo,” Trixie/Melissa said. And while there was a tinge of panic to her voice, I interpreted the cry as more of a command than a scared shriek. She seemed to be spinning one hand in the air.

Moments after the top of the gazebo popped up, before any flames could burst out, it spun back down. Once again containing the burning fireball. The fire continued to blaze brightly for two or three more seconds, before fizzling out, I presume due to a lack of oxygen.

Trixie/Melissa lowered her hands. The pieces of paper ceased their glowing. The roof of the structure completely collapsed, leaving everything as a smoking ruin.

There was a moment of silence.

“I DID it,” Trixie/Melissa said, fist pumping into the air. “Variable sided containment. First try. Take THAT, Missy! Ha ha ha!” She began to dance around on one foot.

“Missy?” Zamboni questioned, looking towards the witch.

Trixie/Melissa froze, then looked at me, I shrugged, and she made a few canceling gestures to restore her actual appearance. Zamboni was caught off guard, and fell silent. Or possibly it was the look of Trixie’s original clothing as she jutted out her hip that silenced him, I don’t know.

“Fac ut gaudeam?” I asked of the redhead. It hadn’t been the phrase I’d used to cue her.

“Yeah, we can tag whatever we like onto that particular spell,” Trixie explained. “And roof aside, I’ll admit, that was a good plan. Lucky that I’d sometimes listen when Missy droned on about you, and so I realized what you were talking about, hm?”

“No,” the priest said, having fallen to his knees. “No, this is not possible. I checked all the variables. For whatever reason, the Chosen One was at her most vulnerable right now! I knew we could take her power through marriage, we had merely to…" He jabbed his finger out at Trixie. “How are you not Melissa?! I verified her presence, I went so far as to determine her unique magick scent, and I sense it here with us, even now!”

Trixie looked towards the priest. “You do, huh? Well, you know how anyone who gets real close to a witch, and doesn’t have a magick odor of their own, ends up giving off a stronger version of that same scent?”

“Yes, but it takes years for someone to…” His voice trailed off. And he looked at me.

Trixie also turned. “Actually, priest here raises a good point, James. If you’ve been having sex with Missy to the point where you can apparently fool the church with her odour, maybe you SHOULD propose already.”

I became flustered. I didn’t feel like raising my sex life was very fair in front of an audience.

“H-Hey!” I objected. “It’s spell proximity that does it, not sex. At least, Melissa said it can be transmitted without sex, and I can’t even pick up on this scent thing, and Melissa merely gets all enigmatic about it when I ask. Can we not do this here? I mean, this guy isn’t even a real priest.”

“Ahem, I really am,” the priest said in annoyance. “The marriage needed to be valid.”

“Yeah, he’s a wizard priest who guaranteed me either a magick wedding or a spectacular suicide that would put me in the history books,” Zamboni put in, finally finding his voice. He began undoing his bow tie. “You said there was no way they’d identify the bomb, dude. What happened to your mystic cloaking whatever?”

“Obviously it’s working, the factions were baffled,” the priest shot back.

“Oh, I never sensed anything mystically,” I felt compelled to add. “You told me where the explosives were yourself, Zamboni. When you gestured at your priest friend earlier, telling me to reveal my game? You almost made him drop the book. Once it registered with me why he’d looked so panicked, the rest fell into place.”

“Son of a–”

“Zam,” the priest cut in warningly. “Not now.”

“Fine, fine.” Zamboni put his hands on his hips, then leaned in towards Trixie. “Hey, nice work with the gazebo. You’re sexy too, would you be game for a marriage? We’ve got the priest right here. You could really put one over on ‘Missy’ that way.”

“Gah,” Trixie said, leaning back and crossing her palms over her chest. I realized then that her learning in towards him had not been intentional. “NO. I am not as desperate as you, and may I never reach that level. Just marry the priest yourself if you want into the covens so bad.”

Zamboni sputtered at that, but it seemed he didn’t have anything coherent to say.

“So,” I said to the priest. “Before we go, want to reveal how many others here were in on the scheme?”

He shot me a look. “Pardon?”

“The factions here,” I elaborated. “Some must have the same information as you. About the turning point. So they let you two try in order to see whether worship, arguments or crazy vendettas had the stronger case for getting her.” I gestured, only to notice that our audience had thinned considerably in the time since the gazebo had more or less imploded. “The answer being none of them.”

He grimaced. “As if I would tell you if I had anyone working on the inside.”

“We don’t need you to tell us anyway,” Trixie scoffed, before bellowing, “HEY!” That immediately got the attention of everyone still around. The redhead looked out at the scattered groups of people in the park, before pointing at me.

“Check it out,” she continued. “He’s not even Melissa and he took these marriage guys down. Look at him! No plan, no backup, no weapons worth a damn, oh, and something else, now he doesn’t have anything to lose. So, if you’ve got any silly little plans about going after Melissa again… do the smart thing.” She put her hands on her hips. “Let somebody else try first.”

She began to march out of the park. I decided that was a good enough exit, and hurried to catch up. “Nice little speech,” I muttered to her as we headed out. “Didn’t recognize the material, Douglas Adams or something?”

She whipped her head in my direction so fast a twintail nearly hit her in the face. “You didn’t recognize Doctor–” Off my expression, she smacked her palm hard against her face. “Oh GOD, it’s like I’m living with a couple of luddites.”

I didn’t follow up. Frankly, I was more worried about whether Melissa had truly reached some sort of vulnerable turning point, not here, but in Mortum’s castle.

“Hear me out,” Melody added, as Melissa’s jaw clenched. Obviously she did not like the implication that she had somehow driven another witch to become a zombi.

“Listening,” Melissa said, though she turned her attention back to finding the orb.

“Almost fifty years of witchcraft,” Melody said. “Fifty years. And you were the first to ever make me pull out my last resort ‘Ultima’ spell. The first witch to force my hand to the extent I felt I should vanish, giving up everything I’d made for myself to that point, and you were barely twenty years old.”

“I’m crying for you,” Melissa deadpanned back.

“That made me angry, but more than that, it made me curious. So I looked into you, Melissa Virga. Turns out you’re on the path to be one of the Chosen Ones.”

[caption id=“attachment_2011” align=“alignright” width=“202”] MELISSA VIRGA
Commission from Shirley[/caption]

“Been there, doing that,” Melissa said, spotting an orb. She reached for it, only to discover it was a decorative snow globe. Albeit one you could trap people inside. She tossed it aside, allowing it to smash on the ground. “Or have a plan for the decision, at least.”

“We’re within the window?” Melody said in surprise. “I suppose more time has passed than I realized. But no matter. Discovering that fact helped me to come to terms with the knowledge that, while my habit of bleeding essence away from the recently departed did not violate the letter of supernatural balance, it did violate the spirit, as it were. You, a Chosen One, had judged me, and found me wanting.”

Melissa paused in her searching. “Please don’t talk about me like I’m some sort of God. I never went around intentionally judging anyone.”

Melody shrugged. “Religious upbringing, it’s how I speak.”

“Get to the point,” Melissa suggested.

“Very well. I decided I should atone, and become more of a force for good. Meaning I tracked down the person on the planet who was the worst form of necromancer, namely Mortum, and signed up to be one of his underlings.”

Melissa rested back on her haunches, staring at the blonde witch. “Which brings us back to the INSANITY. How are you a force for good by willingly allowing an undead spirit to possess your body?”

Melody smiled again, this time darkly. “With my background, Mortum accepted me. And since it was a willing zombi partnership, the spirit would occasionally extend itself away, secure that it could return. Allowing me breathing room, with the chance to study it, to understand it. Not act, I grant. Not then. But I knew that the time had to come when someone would free me, giving me the chance to turn the tables. To do something about this, something that would put to practice all I had learned about the way an individual’s will is suppressed by a zombi spell.”

A shiver ran up Melissa’s spine. “Then you know how to free them,” she deduced. “You know how to free them all.”

Melody’s smile became a bit unhinged. “Mmm hmmm. I have a NEW Ultima spell.”

Melissa’s eyes again flickered around the room, the witch suddenly not sure whether to congratulate Melody, or run screaming from the room. “Do I want to know?”

“Let’s just say that if you were forced to do something for a long time – a very long, long time – you’d want a break. And if you didn’t get it, you might very well lash out at the one who’s been forcing your situation upon you. Assuming you have your will restored.”

“O-kay,” Melissa said slowly.

Melissa turned back to the latest chest, and after another moment of inspection, pressed a jewel in the front. A secret compartment opened, and Alicia’s orb popped out. The brunette witch grabbed it, and placed it into her bag, even as a thought struck her. “Alicia’s person on the inside… that’s you, isn’t it.”

Melody nodded. “As I say, I had occasional breathing room. I was never sure when or where it would happen, but sometimes, the spirit would extend itself away, and I could get out a brief message to the rightful owner of that orb.”

Melissa licked her lips, trying to figure out what she should say here. Being casually dismissive felt wrong. So she considered what I might say, in her place.

“Look, Melody, you’ve obviously sacrificed a lot here. Maybe more than you realize, more than you should have. Promise me you’ll get checked out by a doctor or something, after depleting yourself with your last resort spell?”

“Of course,” Melody said, her light tone not exactly a guarantee.

“Melody, look at me.” The older witch managed to focus back on Melissa. “Doctor.”

“Of course,” she repeated, though this time seeming surer of herself. “And thank you for shaking me out of my complacency years ago.”

Melissa frowned. “For the record, I was more in the wrong than you were, that day,” she admitted. “I let things get too personal, and allowed my emotions to run away with me. I am sorry. Especially if things came to this, because of that.”

Melody shook her head. “I was too clinical back then, too detached. We witches, we cannot allow ourselves to operate in either mode for too long. Can we?”

Melissa again thought of me. “Yeah. Learning that.”

“You will make the right decision, in the end. For all of us.”

Melissa almost answered ‘I hope so’, only to have it hit her why her parents' plans would ultimately fail. It was a turning point. She knew then that she would need to know more about her destined role, and she was running out of time to do some proper research.

And at this point, you’ve probably divined that it was Melissa who gave me this account after the fact, not someone else. But while she was about to escape, our problems were only going to get more difficult.

END ACT 5