Richard woke up feeling surprisingly great. He was sitting on a silken divan, his bundle still on his lap. The coats wear embroidered with surreal designs that he didn't recognize. Also he didn't recognize Meridan, who seemed an entirely different person. For one, he was a foot taller, and had horns like a prize buck. His face was also half-eagle with a menacing beak. He also wore fabulous clothing, it drifted around him seemingly made of cloud. It clouded thick and dark around his groin, feet and neck, otherwise it was, fluffy sheep, clouds. Dozens of armored guards, the faces of their helmets black pits, hurried about working various tasks.

  The room was now an expansive laboratory, with a semi-circular work table that Meridan stood behind. Already he was getting to work. Tiny, nude, green-skinned woman flitted about him with butterfly wings, faires, or something of the like. They measured out chemicals, and brought glassware to him.

  Richard himself seemed changed. He had been admiring his newly discovered muscles before. Now he seemed like a Greek god. Literally he was carved from marble, his skin was rock hard, but beneath supple muscles shifted. There was no mirror, but feeling at his face, he was pretty sure he could cut glass with his jaw.

  He was still shirtless, but his pants now seemed to contain the night sky, and all its stars. “Can I order around your servants?” Richard asked.

  “Sure, ask for anything you want,” Meridan answered. Meridan was getting into his work, now surrounded by equipment, with dozens of the fairies assisting in his alchemy.

  Richard wanted some sort of shirt, but was hesitant to cover his immaculate features. “Bring me a coat, something I can wear open chested. Preferably made of rainbows, but whatever you have on hand.” An armored guard bowed, and left into another room. While he waited, he chatted with Meridan. “So should we be worried about the many-faced?”

  “If they haven't made themselves a nuisance yet, I think your appearance scared them off.”

  Richard was offended that his appearance might scare anyone. “I think that is a little rude,” he complained.

  “The many-faced are more than a little rude, so you should be happy.” The guard returned with a coat indeed made of rainbows. Richard draped it over his shoulders, and decided to do up a single button near the waist.

  He struck a few poses, Atlas, Hercules, Zeus, testing for the one that felt right, and Meridan watched him with derision. “You're ego tripping,” the alchemist informed. “It's common when someone is first introduced to an upper phase. Yours is a worse case than most, some amount of psychological snapback.”

  The servants had laid out a meal of wine and grapes, and Richard delighted on them. “What do you mean?” He asked, not really interested.

  “You had a low opinion of yourself. From that you never learned how to reign in your ego. Now that you are in a place with no constraints to your ego it's growing exponentially.”

  Richard scoffed. “My ego is just fine, nothing needs reigning in.”

  “You've grown a foot in the last five minutes.”

  “Your taller in here, you don't see me complaining. And you have a beak, what's the point in that? Why don't you just keep working, and I'll worry about my ego.” Richard cracked open another bottle of wine, pulling the cork out with his fingers. He could get used to living like this. It felt good to have real power, and not be constantly worried about the cult. Maybe he could kill the cult's god like this. Screw the whole, blowing up a bomb, that was bitch talk. Right now he was pretty sure he could fistfight whatever stupid god was in that Idol.

  “It is a problem for two reasons. The first is the upper limit of form you can sustain. Your shape is supported by your real bodies humours. Frankly I am surprised you are holding up. My rough estimate put you nearing your limit. This is a realm that stars take form in. Beings that could tear the world in are the most powerful existence in this phase. As a simple human you can't just ascend to the maximum tune.” Richard rolled his eyes. Stars were just big balls of gas, what right did they have to be any kind of force. Clearly in this place will was the key, and what will could a star have.

  “The second is when you go back to the regular phase. The cognitive dissonance could break your mind. I'm cooking up some downers now, to try and smooth you out. It will take some time, and until then I need to keep you from losing control. I had hoped explaining the situation might work, but you are mostly ignoring me.” Meridan finished lamely.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Yeah, sounds good,” Richard replied. He was more curious how there was a live hummingbird in the winebottle. There was sometimes a worm in a bottle of tequila, but those were at least dead. He roared with laughter at the spinning, swooping, antics of the drunken bird, as it escaped the bottle and flew around the room.

  Meridan searched around on his worktable, scattering bottles into the air, where they floated with no regard to gravity. Grabbing up a glowing golden spray, Meridan doused his face with it. “Richard, I compel you to recount, in detail, a time you felt foolish.” His voice was laced with magic, and it cut through Richards mind.

  Not really understanding why, Richard began to tell a story. It wasn't a story he was fond of, but Meridan had asked. “I had only been a bandit for the cult for a few months. Everything was up in the air those days, no one knew have to do anything, myself included. Still working out all the kinks you see. So anyways this is how I got to be known as Dick Bandit.”

  “There was this group of five walking down the road, three woman, and two guys, none of them armed, least I could see. Nice juicy looking backpacks too, back then I had make quotas. It was a competition with the other Bandits, and only the loser mattered. I came up to them on my bike, fired off a round into the air, as ammo wasn't scarce back then. Then gave them the spiel. “I'm Richard Bandit, give me all your stuff or get shot.” You know how it goes.”

  Meridan just shrugged, so Richard elaborated. “Shouting at them. “Don't try anything funny, think I give a shit about killing any of you.” Told them all to toss their stuff on the ground, and walk away. “Give me plenty of space, and I might leave you with some stuff” Always important to let them know cooperation will get you a longer stick.”

  “So at this point, I had already gotten in my head the idea of having a pair of sawed-offs backwards on my hips. So I could shoot people behind me, real slick like. Only I was still working out the kinks, as I said before. I didn't have any real harness, just kind of tied the guns onto my belt. Figured that would be good enough.”

  “I start collecting their stuff. Mostly food, some clothes, and other junk. I hear someone coming up behind me. Now I've got the stupidest grin on my face. Because I think my idea is hotshit, which it is now, mind you, but back then there were critical flaws. Dumb luck I didn't blow my feet off, to tell the truth. So I pull the cord, and BANG!, the guns go off.”

  “I'm sure I don't need to tell you that shotgun are loud, and the kickback meant my knees were weak. So I didn't really know what happened. But I assumed it all went off without a hitch. Spun around expecting to find some fool, surprised to be on the ground with a chestful of birdshot. He was definitely surprised, that's the truth.”

  “So my shotguns had shifted, no harness or anything to anchor them properly. They had shifted up, and shot right over the dudes head. More importantly that changed where the recoil went, it went down. Remember the guns were just tied onto my belt, so when they went off, it blew my pants down to my ankles. A real shock and awe mooning, I think I'm probably the only one to have done it. Took my underwear down to.”

  “I hadn't realized any of this at the time. Adrenaline was pumping hard, I couldn't feel the wind on my bare ass. Still with a dumbass grin on my face, thinking it had worked. I screamed, “That's what you get when you fuck with me!” Gave it my best post-apocalyptic raider voice, like I had been eating gravel since it all went down.” Richard flushed with embarrassment at the recollection, and physically felt himself shrinking.

  “So one of the woman starts laughing. “Watch out it's Dick Bandit,” she calls out. Then the lot of them start laughing, like god-damned maniacs. I don't know why, maybe they were so scared, getting robbed, not knowing if they would live. Then the dude blows off his own pants. Frankly looking back at it, I don't blame them.”

  “So it turns out my trick works, it does put all of them down, as they roll on the ground laughing their asses off. Finally it clicks, I've got my pants around my ankles. I pull them up, and scream at them to stop laughing. They pause, scared again as I point my shotgun at them. I'm half mad with embarrassment, liable to do anything. Now two sawed-offs is a lot of weight, and my belt is shredded from the kickback.”

  Meridan, whose work had slowed as he listened intently, couldn't help but interrupt. With horror, he whispered, “No.”

  “Yes. My pants fell back down, as I brandished my shotgun. That was the last straw, I saw no chance at salvaging the situation. I couldn't steal a single thing, my hands were full holding up my pants. I rode off on my bike, and it was a long time before I stopped hearing the laughter. I had dreams where it happened, you forget your pants dreams.”

  “The story got around, luckily most people think it's all a lie. Just a derogatory tale to make fun of a criminal, after all who could be that stupid. And what sort of bandit would let all those witnesses live. Even if I was the sort who could kill without any conscious, I still couldn't have done it.”

  “Why?” Meridan asked with bated breath.

  “I don't think I could have looked at any of them long enough to hit them. I would rather look my shotgun in the eye, then any of them.”

  Meridan was doing his best to suppress laughing. Richard signaled for him to get it over with, and Meridan spent a good minute chuckling. Richard was feeling noticeably less god-like. His body still was more like a Greek statue than not, but he was no longer emitting an aura of power. His height was a reasonable eight feet, and was absolutely shredded. However, there was no longer an overwhelming need to be more, pushing him to become something else.

His ego seemed cut down to size by the reality check. He owed a lot to Meridan for helping him out of that self-destructive loop. Now he could properly understand what the man had been talking about. His soul felt deflated, and stretched out. In his head he had been able to fight a god, but it had been a cheque his form couldn't cash.

  With a clatter of banging a glass stirring rod against a beaker, Meridan declared a brew finished. He handed it to a pixie, who strained to carry the beaker. It was full of dozens of bubbling blue solids, that shifted how many corners they had. “You're back under control now, but take two, just to be safe. We don't know when something might trigger an escalation.”

  Richard obeyed, and choked down two of the objects. Regular pills were easy enough to swallow, but these seemed to deliberately get stuck going down, shifting to shapes with greater volume. He washed them down with some more wine, and relaxed. It was a good thing those many-faced weren't attacking. The most basic warnings on drug use had taught him that you weren't supposed to mix uppers with downers, and the alcohol of several bottles of wine weren't helping. Richard passed out, as his body, granted superhuman power by being tuned up to this phase, worked out the problem, and evened him out.