2014

Jiann stepped into the featureless non-space of the liminal dreamscape, marveling at how easily it came to him now. The first time he'd done it, he'd actually needed help from Enna to cross it, and they'd nearly been eaten by something with a truly staggering preponderance of legs, eyes, and teeth before managing to retreat into the safety of a more defined oneiric realm. But now, after nearly two years, he was an old hand at it; he could always tell her mindscape apart from the other innumerable distant, dreaming spheres of color, and crossed into it with barely a thought. He opened the door, strode inside, and closed it firmly behind him.

Her mindscape was always a train -- a winding, infinitely long train which rocked gently as various terrains passed by outside its windows. Often, they showed a snowy mountainscape or an idyllic countryside; less often, one could glimpse stranger views such as underwater vistas or star-filled expanses of space. But today, they displayed merely blackness, shot through with the occasional lantern and interspersed with city lights off in the distance: a night voyage through countryside. He smiled a little, remembering family vacations from years long, long gone, when train travel had been something a bit more magical than a slower, less prestigious fallback option for the aerophobic.

Crossing the first car to the next, he opened the door and was treated to an immediate change of scenery; this car was traveling slowly through a valley of green fields and fetching copses of trees, and as he entered, it slowed accommodatingly to a smooth stop; a quiet bell sounded, and an unobtrusive door for disembarkation opened to his right. Stepping obligingly down the stairs (he knew, from past experience, that the train would remain stopped as long as he was off and would resume motion when he boarded once more), he went out into the bright sunlight. Here in the dream world, his sight didn't depend on his eyes, so he was free to luxuriate in the various visual delights made doubly delicious by being set in the too-rarely-visited realm of the daylight hours -- a pleasant and welcome respite from the ghostly blur of his astrally-augmented vision in the waking world.

Taking in a deep breath (one could breathe in a dream, if so inclined, even when one were dead), he soaked in the butter-yellow sunshine, the emerald green of the trees and grasses, and the painfully bright blue of the sky. To his left, high above, a hawk wheeled and let out a piercing cry.

"I cain't hear you," he called up to it mockingly. "I've turned off my hearin' aid." The hawk let out another cry in response.

As he watched, it spiraled down, growing closer; the sun dappled shadows on its wings as it flew under the canopies of trees between them. Alighting on the top of the train, it fluffed its wings a few times, then began to preen its feathers; then, abruptly, it was gone, and Enna sat on top of the train in its stead.

Gone were the mall-stolen clothes, threadbare and many-colored, that her eidolon had worn at first; now she favored a black leather jacket over a matching tank top and jeans, just as she did in the waking world. Her brilliant red hair blazed like a cupreous mirror, almost blinding with reflected sunlight.

"Poop on anythin' interestin'?" growled Jiann as she hopped down to greet him; despite the distance from the top of the train car to the ground being nearly thirty feet, she landed lightly in a crouch and rose to her full height easily.

"Eagles don't have to poop in dreams any more than people do." She stretched, then sighed dreamily. "Flying's great, though. I don't think I'll ever stop wishing I could fly in the real world."

Jiann grunted. "Imagine it'd be just as much of a pain in th' ass as everything else. Bugs in yer teeth, an' whatnot."

Enna laughed. "Probably. So, what are we studying today?"

Jiann pondered, then nodded. "More physical simulation, I reckon. Won't do near as much good here as in th' wakin' world, but likely to keep your attention a bit better than meditatin' or readin'."

Enna sighed. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be difficult, it's just..."

"...not in yer nature," nodded Jiann again. "Can be a bit of a problem fer sorcerers. Don' let it get ya down. Plenty o' time before we arrive at our next point o' investigation." He stepped back onto the train (a bit wistfully, it must be said) and Enna followed him; as the doors closed behind them, the train started moving once more, and they crossed to the next car.

Much larger than the previous two, the third car was nearly fifty feet on a side (an obvious impossibility for a real train car on most railroads, but which never seemed to cause any problems in the dream world) and decorated in a much more rustic fashion than the previous two. Paneled with bare wood, its floor was covered with thick mats of straw, and thick poles jutted upwards at a variety of heights. Leaping upwards, Jiann alighted on one somewhat daintily and waited for Enna to join him.

After a moment, she did so, soaring smoothly; all the time in hawk form had aided her aerial comfort level, he guessed. "Aight then." He raised his hands and one foot, taking a crouching wushu pose.

As she turned to face him, her eyes widened slightly; she tried and failed to stifle a giggle as she brought her own limbs into a much less practiced combat pose. "Sorry. It's just that... you've gotten whiter again."

Jiann grunted; his eidolon form had been in flux since he'd begun life as a revenant, and he was more or less used to it by now. At first, it had matched his self-image in Orton's mind -- a dead, rotting version of his living self -- but the time he'd spent in Surrey had turned him into some sort of garden-skeleton hybrid, with shoots and leaves and streams of bright water rippling intertwined with transparent, glowing bones. This had in turn gone through a bit of a further metamorphosis since he'd taken over Cameron's body; as he became more accustomed to his new form's height, his mental representation of himself shrank correspondingly, and he now sported hair and a beard of his own in the dream realm. But the rest of him had continued to be a hodgepodge of all his previous self-concepts, and it was only during the last few months that he'd begun to unify himself again enough to form a hard, marble-like skin that brought to mind the glossy-fleshed figures of Vedic mythology. He hoped he wouldn't be sprouting any extra arms; the shifting, mottled colors had been enough of an adjustment. Not bothering to verbalize a rejoinder, he instead began his first attack; a sweeping, easily dodged punch that he hoped she'd try to capitalize on.

Enna instead dodged backwards, hopping with easy grace onto another pole behind her; she'd learned painfully that Jiann had few compunctions about hitting women, especially in martial arts training. She shifted her hands and feet, preparing herself for another leap, and when Jiann moved to close the distance between them, she jumped, aiming for the same pole he was. He got there first, just in time for her to slam both booted feet into his chest.

Jiann snaked sinuously around to the left; one foot remained firmly rooted on top of the pillar, denying her a landing zone, while the other wrapped around the wooden surface just below it in a twisting, vaguely tentacular fashion. Off-balance, she flailed, and Jiann immediately grabbed her ankles and dumped her unceremoniously into the straw. Wincing, she sighed in defeat -- being bodyslammed in a dream might not hurt physically, but it could still be quite bruising to one's ego.

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"I'm tired of this already," she complained, smiling a little ruefully at herself as she did so. "Are you sure we can't find some other way for me to study, like competitive meta-cake eating? Can't get fat in a dream, after all."

Jiann scowled down at her from atop his perch on the pillar. "Little lady, I know you ain't particularly keen on th' topic o' hard work, but even you gotta recognize that you can only put it off so long." He hopped down into the straw to stand over her, shaking his head. "Kids today, with their iPhones and their tee-vees. Ain't never done a real day's labor."

"Yeah, yeah, uphill in the snow both ways, I know." She sat up, placing her elbows on her knees, and pondered. "I can't understand it, Jiann. I've tried, and I've trained, and I've studied, and I still feel like a bull in a china shop at everything I do."

"Y'ain't got no shortage o' natural talent, at any rate," Jiann pointed out. "We all seen that. But if'n ya wanna get any better, y'ain't gonna do it half-assin' yer lessons."

"Half-ass is the best I can do!" Enna wailed. "If I wasn't trying, it would be quarter-ass, or something!" She lowered her head onto her forearms. "Are you sure you don't have a magic spell to cure ADHD?"

Jiann shrugged and sat down next to her. "Wouldn' cast it if I did. Orton saw somethin' in you, an' even though I might not always like his annoyin' cracker ass, I cain't deny that he knows what he's doin'. If anybody's failin' here, it's me; I ain't got no appropriate ways to teach you, an' I ain't sure I could learn any new ones at this here juncture." He scratched his nose contemplatively.

Enna sighed, then clambered to her feet resolutely. "All right. If I can't be good at any of this, I'll at least do my best to fail diligently. Hope you're ready to kick my ass again."

Jiann grinned, standing up as well and taking another combat stance. "A chance to beat some sense into th' youth? Christmas done come early this year."

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Orton wiped more sweat off his forehead, wishing the room had a window he could open; the heat in Puerto Escondido was stifling even in the dead of night, especially indoors. The table in front of him was covered with bills, coins, and old bloodstains, but its most concerning contents were the snub-nosed .357 revolver in front of him. He did his best to tune out the taunting and profanity from all the spectators, sighed, and picked up the gun; doing his best not to let his hand shake, he put it to his head, held his breath, and pulled the trigger.

The hammer clicked on an empty chamber, of course; he'd quadruple-checked all the probability vectors first, and his sight beyond sight would have warned him long before he'd ever been in any real danger. Still, it was one thing to be pretty sure that you weren't about to shoot yourself in the head, and quite another to actually put that certainty to the test; trembling very slightly, he dropped the gun with a thunk back onto the table as cheers erupted around him. "I regret the life choices that brought me to this juncture," he muttered sourly in Spanish, eliciting a fresh round of laughter from the other people in the room. His opponent, looking significantly less confident than he had a moment ago, swallowed heavily.

"We have, optimistically, about one or two more attempts before the statistics catch up with both of us," Orton pointed out, somewhat unsteadily; in addition to having enough adrenaline pumping through his system to explode the heart of most humans, he had also consumed a truly staggering amount of tequila since the night had begun (he'd transmuted almost all of it into water before it could enter his bloodstream, but still). "I'd really rather we put a stop to this before things get out of hand."

The man across the table from him shook his head stubbornly. "I'll eat this gun before I give the artifacts to you, gringo," he growled.

"Hey, I wanted to buy them from you, with a big bag full of cash," protested Orton, feeling a bit put-upon. "That's still an option. You could totally just be rich and not blow your brains out trying to be macho in front of people who will loot your corpse before it's cold."

The other man, his ego now fully tumescent, snorted and picked up the gun; steeling his own nerves, he spun the cylinder, snapped it back into place, and held to his head. They were playing the 'no sequential pulls' version of Russian Roulette, which could in theory go on forever with no deaths; but unlike Orton, the smuggler had not had any education in statistics and was ignorant of the consequences of iterative probability. The report of the revolver was deafeningly loud to everyone in the room except Orton, who had had his fingers in his ears and a sad expression on his face. "I told him," he protested to anyone who would listen, but the ensuing scramble for the weapon and the cash still on the table drowned out his protestations. With a sigh, he retrieved the briefcase containing a pair of clay tablets from under the table where his opponent had been possessively guarding it only a few seconds before; found in a ruined city in Peru roughly ten years ago, they were widely considered to be archeologically unimportant but were in fact based on quipu specifications which could trace their provenance back to beneath the Huaca de los Sacrificios in the Caral-Supe ruins of Aspero and were thus a recent expression of five-thousand-year-old lore. They were stupefyingly dangerous, evil in the extreme, and they had been a gigantic pain in the ass to obtain; he'd been on the trail for the last two years, and was pretty thoroughly exhausted of the whole endeavor by now. If he hadn't needed them for his next set of divinations, he'd have thrown them into the bay out of pure frustration (which was saying a lot, since it took a very great deal to frustrate Orton).

Slipping out the back door while the frenzy was still getting into full swing, he crossed a few dimly lit streets and ducked through a pair of alleys, nodding perfunctorily to a few toughs as they looked him over; to a man, they shrank back from his ice-cold aura of danger. He was definitely not in a playful or merciful mood at the moment.

Leaving the city proper, he began striding across a lush expanse of grass towards the beach; with any luck, he could find a seaplane for hire to take him across the border back to America; for this next set of rituals, he'd need a very particular set of --

"Denny? Oh my God, Denny, is that you?"

He froze. What in the gibbering fuck?! The voice seemed familiar, but... no, it couldn't be. Slowly, he turned around, shocked, to see a slightly flushed but still very much alive face that he had not expected to see again in this loop. He blinked, just to be sure. "I... Mrs. Little?" The shopkeeper's hair was slightly streaked with gray, but otherwise exactly as he remembered it; with a shock, he realized he'd never gone back to check on her after Cameron had nearly killed them both.

"Land sakes alive, it is you!" She walked closer to him, giving him a better view of her; despite being in her mid-fifties, her bikini-clad body was toned and slim, and her creamy brown skin was still supple and taut in most places. He grinned, despite himself. "Wow. Where's the party?"

Natalie laughed, rushing forward to hug him and nearly spilling the drink in her hand as she did so. "Just me and some friends; you know, on a trip. My God, let me look at you!" She held him at arm's length, looking him over. "You got even taller! And dang, that beard!" She laughed again. "You look like a native!"

"Well, you look like a model," demurred Orton, trying to maintain his exterior calm while internally shrieking in panicked disbelief. This should be twelve kinds of impossible. I've Faded so far into other universes that most people think the president before Reagan was a guy named Jimmy Carter who got attacked by a rabbit; she should have forgotten me a dozen times over by now. He forced his face into a semblance of a grin. "Did you make a deal with the devil for eternal youth? I don't see one wrinkle!"

"Oh honey, you know black don't crack," Natalie purred. "Besides, look at you! It's been almost twenty years, but you still look like you're in your twenties!"

Orton grimaced. Being frozen in time under a lake in Finland will do that for you. "Just lucky, I guess." He fidgeted, shifting the case to his other hand. "Listen, I'd love to catch up, but, you know, business..."

Natalie smiled. "Of course, Denny. Dennis, I mean." Abruptly, she looked slightly embarrassed. "I guess I still think of you as that kid who hung around my store all the time. Sometimes it's hard to imagine people as grown-ups, you know?"

Orton laughed, unexpectedly. "I do. I do know." Surprising himself, he stepped forward and hugged Natalie again. "I've missed you. And the shop."

She hugged him back, giggling. "Well, I still have it -- and five other locations, but I still run the register a couple times a month to remind me what my employees are going through. You should drop in sometime!"

"The next time I'm back in town, I'll do that," Orton promised. Hefting the case, he turned back towards the water; but after a moment he stopped, and turned around to wave at Natalie again. "I'll see you soon!" he called out, smiling; it would have taken a sharp ear indeed to notice the way his voice cracked at the end. Natalie cheered and waved back, but he was already gone; only a set of footprints in the sand remained, trailing off into the darkness.