1:04pm The Current Time
7:00pm Soundcheck
9:00pm Showtime
Alright so things really started going off the rails when Handsome Alex screwed up and lured a jazz musician to our cabin instead of the hard-driving headbanger type we needed. I couldn’t just teach this dude how to play guitar like a badass from scratch; that’s not how it worked. Artifact essence compounds could only be removed when the subject’s soul had already integrated the related concepts and techniques.
Take Mina for example; she was a virtuoso guitarist even before I ever pumped her full of soul-steroids. The basic techniques underpinning her more advanced skills were already automatic. She could afford to lose those artifacts leftover from her soul’s infancy, which allowed me to then stuff her full of hot-shit guitar-magic extra-dimensional alchemical-worms.
But this big dumb clown had never even been in a rock band. He didn’t own a bass guitar, only the coffin-sized upright bass that I made him leave out in the aisle between cabins because we didn’t have room for it in ours. Not with his big dumb clown ass standing there.
This was going to throw a serious wrench up the butt of our plans. Handsome Alex had this power to lure people to us by seeding their dreams with deja vu. What felt to them like a series of mystical events confirming their special destinies was actually just Alex bringing me souls to diddle. But apparently he’d mistaken this highly accomplished jazz dork for someone useful to us, and the process of remotely luring in a replacement would take weeks, at best.
It wasn’t like him to screw up like this; he was the pro’s pro, but I didn’t have any standing to call him on it; not given my own recent missteps.
So with Handsome Alex requiring most of the day to reconstitute his final form, it was going to fall to me to find us an actual bass player before showtime. Hopefully before soundcheck.
The first thing I did was kill Handsome Alex’s big dumb mistake with some nasty death magic:
[Putrefaction]
Necromancy. Corruption.
Low Mana Cost
Rank: 2
Description:
[Rank 1]Inflicts the target with a decaying damage-over-time effect.
[Rank 2]Consume the effect to inflict 75% of Putrefaction’s damage instantly.
I never got the big clown’s name but his eyes went wide with terror as I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him further into the cabin. Didn’t matter that he was a foot taller than me and built like the proverbial brick shithouse; chain-casting Putrefaction ate his big dumb muscles first. He started to cry for his mommy and I told him to shut up.
Then it was like all the water got sucked out of his body. His cheeks puckered and his lips peeled back. Teeth started tic-tacking onto the floor as his gums turned black, his arms curled up into his chest as his heart failed, and next I knew he was on his back, kicking his quickly-withering legs like a dying cockroach. I hit him with the spell again and again until he was nothing but a man-shaped pile of ash, and then before his soul could escape I reaped a completely useless upright bass essence from it. Everything else had already been corrupted beyond use.
After that I headed out to find a real bass player. The emotional backbone of any band. The empathetic one. And someone with at least one tattoo for fuck’s sake.
This was all like three hours ago.
“This should have been easy,” I complained while hiding under billionaire partygal Lady Gates’s vibrating bed. She was standing over at the door to her luxury cabin, peering out the peephole. “Are they gone yet? I really gotta get out of here. If Handsome Alex is done with his chrysalis before I get back he’s going to kill me.”
“They’re still out there.” She knelt down and put her cheek on the floor so she could look me in the eyes from across the cabin. Today she was wearing a bright blue wig with an inexplicable Karen cut. “Maybe you should just stay, Kirby. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
I sighed and shimmied and twisted out from under the bed. It was tough because my gut was almost too big to fit in the first place.
“Look, Cherry-lynne, I know you’re feeling a lot of powerful horniness in your soul for me right now. Just like all those people waiting for me out in the hall.” I grunted as I struggled up to a kneeling position. “I know to you I’m probably like some combo of Elvis and Jesus all smashed together, but it’s not real. You only feel this way because an old god forced me to absorb the soul essences of an alien from another dimension who happened to be spiritually engineered to be ultra-humpable.”
“Are you talking about Rajah Superbus? Of the Drix Consortium? You have his essence?”
I brushed myself off as I climbed to my feet. Then I crossed the room and offered her a hand up, as well. “How does a sweet little old billionaire broad like you know any of those weird-ass words?”
Out of nowhere she pulled some fucking alien stun gun thing and zapped me high up on my thigh. Way too close for comfort.
When I woke up, they had me in some kind of anti-magic attribute-suppressing full-body condom thing. I felt like one of those red-hot pickled hotdogs you’d buy at a gas station. I don’t even know if that makes sense in 2025. Anyway, they had me all wrapped up in this indestructible, see-through cellophane crap and it was blocking me from using any of my magic stuff.
The cabin I was in now must have belonged to the Drix Consortium. It looked like they were in the process of converting it to their tech. They’d installed some sort of futuristic-looking terminal on one wall, and now wires and cables and shit were spreading out from it, creepy-crawling up the walls like tentacles.
As alien as their tech looked, the Drix themselves appeared completely human. I didn’t know what their true forms even were, but everyone was well aware that they owned soul engineering techniques that didn’t even exist in our reality; techniques that weren’t compatible with our system of physics and could only be used back in their own dimension.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
For the purpose of the competition they were calling themselves Superbus—pronounced Soo-pur-boos—and they all appeared to be ethnically Indian. No clue why they had made that decision; I assumed the sitar just sounded really cool no matter what dimension you hailed from.
I saw Lady Grace on the far side of the cabin talking to one of the Drix. She noticed that I was awake and sent me a friendly little wave before casually gliding over to stand beside my condom-cage.
“Terribly sorry, Mr. Dufresne.”
“So you’re an alien?”
She laughed and then coughed and then after a moment she could speak. “Oh heavens, no. I’m just old, is all, and the Drix have ways of making me young again. Ways we can’t even fathom.”
“Get the fuck out of here, seriously? You’re just trying to reverse your aging?” I laughed and shook my head. “Lady, Handsome Alex could have put you in the body of a twenty year-old. Any twenty year-old.”
She shot a quick, nervous glance back over toward the Drix aliens. There were two of them. One had been working at their tentacle-monster console ever since I woke up, and the second joined him once Lady Gates had come to chat me up.
“It seems I may have acted rashly.” Her voice was low, aiming to avoid the De\rix overhearing. “Our friend here have promised to reduce the age of my body at a cellular level, rewinding me to approximately forty-three years of age – you’re saying this Handsome Alex could do better?”
“Way better. And he would have been happy to do it.” Now my voice was low, too. “If you hadn’t gone and gotten his buddy kidnapped by fucking aliens from the murderbot dimension.”
She stole another look at the Drix. Something seemed to be wrong with their machine and their body-language suggested they were arguing about it. But they must have been telepathic communicators because I didn’t overhear shit.
“What if I help you get out of here?” she asked.
I just scoffed. “You are wild, Cherry-lynne.”
“I’m serious. I saw them put you in here. I think I could turn this…. thing off.” She nodded at the magic-blocking condom-cage. “If I did, would your friend help me?” I didn’t answer. “Mr. Dufresne—Kirby—I hope you know it was nothing personal. And if it hadn’t been me, someone else would have taken the Drix’s offer once they found out you were the one who had stolen the essences, and that would have happened fast once people started noticing the changes to your aura.”
“My aura? Are you some kind of witch?”
“Yes.” She suddenly looked at me with fresh orneriness. “How old do you think I am, anyway?”
“Ninety-five,” came out of my mouth before I could stop it.
She just smiled like a lizard. “Kirby, I’m over three-hundred years old. You musicians always think you own a monopoly on magic.”
“Well I’ll be damned.”
“So what do you say? Can we let bygones be bygones?”
“Look, Lady, I can appreciate a good doublecross. You help me get of here, and we’ll forget that you put me here in the first place.”
“And your friend – he’ll help me?”
“I can’t talk for Handsome Alex. But if you don’t help me out of here, I can tell you that he will find you, and ain’t nothing gonna help you then.”
She stole one last look over at the two Drix aliens. “Can you handle them?”
“Probably.”
“And are you ready now?”
“Yup.”
She knelt down and fiddled with the strap on one of her heels. Then, without another glance at the two aliens who still seemed to be in some sort of argument, she quickly reached over and pulled a lever down on the base of this thing I was inside. It came to rest with a click, and I immediately felt access to all my supernatural shit return. Lady Gates looked up at me and her eyes asked if it had worked.
I nodded just as a warning beep began to boop from the anti-magic body-condom that wasn’t working on me anymore.
The Drix both turned to see what was up with their shit. Why was it beeping and booping and whatnot.
I waved at them through the wall of my full-body condom and I hit them each with Putrefaction. There was a moment where I worried that these weird-assed interdimensional soul architects might have some sort of decay immunity or at the very least resistance engineered into their vessels but that was not the case. The two fuckers actually withered way faster than I’d expected, and fell right where they stood as soon as I consumed the decay effect.
I mean it, they were super fragile and started to turning to dust right away.
“Oh fuck.” It had flashed in front of my eyes for only an instant:
Regular Nerd Appraisal:
Joffrey Superbus. Drax Clone. Male. 4 days old.
Attributes:
4 Strength
8 Stamina
8 Agility
4 Intellect
19 Spirit
4 Presence
Spell and Powers:
NONE
Talents and Traits:
LEGENDARY[Syncopated Slapping]
The soul was evaporating fast; essences below Legendary on the ol’ superpower scale had already fucked right off.
I bolted forward and activated Reap, thinking I’d just burst out of my wrapper or something, but the material was way more durable than I expected and I fell hard. For a minute I was just flopping on the floor like a fish out of water in a condom.
Lucky for me, Reap had no trouble pulling the legendary essence right into my pocket abyss, along with a fat stack of spirit essences. And after a brief struggle I finally tore my way out, too.
Everything was going to be alright. No, I hadn’t found a bass player yet, and yes, soundcheck was now only like four hours out, but at least I had this legendary essence to show for my time. Handsome Alex would have to like that.
I took a peek inside my pocket abyss to see what exactly the thing even did:
[Syncopated Slapping]
LEGENDARY TRAIT
Syncopated Slapping gives every note you play a chance to disrupt your opponent’s rhythm section. This trait is always active. The Legendary Version also has a chance to break your opponent’s fingers.
[WARNING] Membrane integrity has been compromised. Compounds contained within will be lost unless transferred to a suitable host. Time Remaining: 39 seconds.
“Oh no oh no oh no.”
“What is it?” Old Lady Gates was suddenly hanging on my elbow, trembling in fear at my response. “Kirby, what’s wrong?”
I looked her in the eye and I sincerely meant this next part:
“I’m really sorry for what I’m about to do.”