"Okay," said Orton, closing the door of the sleeper pod, "our tickets are all sorted." He took off his trenchcoat and folded himself casually into the seat, pulling down the window shade and poking through his bag in search of some alchemical substance or another. Enna wrinkled her nose.

"Seriously?" She flipped her coppery hair in annoyance. "We could have had an entire car to ourselves. Why'd you pick this tiny-ass roomlet?"

"A couple of reasons," Orton mumbled, shifting aside a packet of powdered gypsum and rooting around amongst a selection of plastic vials. "First, I could buy this ticket with cash and no questions asked, which meant less entropy shifted to secure it and thus less chance of quantum complications." He pulled out a dead frog, scowled at it, and put it back before resuming his search. "Second, because we have a lot of work to do, and some of it requires very specific conditions."

Enna rolled her eyes. "Gee, I wonder what sort of work we'll have to do that requires us to sleep in the same bed? You really need to work on your pick-up lines, Orton."

"Um." Orton blinked. "No matter what I say, it's going to be the wrong thing, isn't it?"

Enna considered this briefly, then nodded. "Probably." She sat down in the compartment's other seat, facing Orton, with her eyes less than a foot from his, and smiled. "The only question is exactly how badly you'll fuck it up."

"Oh, I'll fuck it up spectacularly, I assure you. I'm very practiced at that." He grinned back, then sombered a little as he went back to digging through his bag. "But first we have to talk about something else, which I really should have told you a long time ago." With a grunt of satisfaction, he finally found what he was looking for: a small vial of ginseng and a tiny bag containing a few petals from an Egyptian lotus. He expertly ground the bright blue petals and roots between his fingertips into a tiny ball, then handed it to Enna along with a bottle of water. "Here, swallow this."

"Wow." Enna smirked. "That's definitely exactly the wrong thing to say to someone who just accused you of having sinister sexual motives. Nice job." Taking the pill, she tossed it back with some water and a gulp. "So, how long before I get super horny?"

"Depends on how sexy you find extreme sleepiness," replied Orton serenely, folding his legs up into a lotus position. "Blue Lotus and Ashwagandha are a lucid dreaming mixture; you're going to get very drowsy, then fall asleep. But inside your dream, you'll be completely alert and in control of your own mind, which you probably could have done anyway if you knew the techniques." He closed his own eyes and began slowly adjusting his own rhythms to induce sleep in himself as well. "But this will be faster and let you be angry at me a little more."

Enna was already slumping, her eyes fluttering closed as she buckled her seatbelt with languid limbs. "You really... take all the fun out of it," she yawned. "How am I... ugh... supposed to learn if I'm asleep...?" Her head nodded forward as Orton slowed his breathing.

"I'll knock five times," his voice droned as she nodded off.

----------------------------------------

"Okay, that's really weird," said Enna aloud. She was still on a train, but this time she was on some kind of crayon-colored plastic monstrosity that looked like it had been made from styrofoam. She waved her hands back and forth in front of her face, marveling at how real everything felt. She was just about to start poking her surroundings when five sharp raps on a nearby door startled her; remembering Orton's instructions, she dutifully slid the bright yellow panel aside to reveal Orton, standing in a dark room with no visible walls. "Oh jeez. You can't be serious."

"I feel like I have firmly established that I'm a pretty serious guy," said Orton, gesturing for her to enter the pitch-black non-room. Enna gulped, then did so, closing the door behind her; the two of them were now in complete darkness. "What now? Are you gonna --"

"Before you snarkily suggest something horrible," interrupted Orton hurriedly, "let me remind you that we're inhabiting our own imaginations, and if you give yourself a scary idea you will be very much at risk of having it get away from you." He spun Enna around roughly, disorienting her, then pointed towards a dim light a few meters away. "Go that way."

She squinted at the shadowy gleam, which seemed to be an odd sort of creamy lavender color that she found vaguely familiar. "Wait, that's your color. I mean, the color I had to turn my --"

"Yes, we're going into my mind, hurry up," said Orton, sweating despite his current status as an oneiric eidolon. "The longer we goof around in this liminal space, the more vulnerable we are, either to you accidentally thinking something horrific or something horrific external to us finding us, or one caused by the other or both and shut up." He accelerated both of them into the light before Enna could argue, wincing as its radiance swelled to encompass them before darkening into a dull gray.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me." Enna put her fists on her hips, glaring around at the filthy concrete walls and peeling plastic furniture of Orton's root thoughtscape. "This is the same apartment building. The one with your gross trash den."

"It's a useful construct -- I can make the doors go anywhere, there's an arbitrary number of them, and I can go up or down an infinite number of floors. Plus, I've spent something like ten years in it across the various loop iterations, so I'm pretty good at reproducing it." He warped the space slightly so he could slip past her without awkwardness despite the cramped dimensions of the hall, stepped around her, and opened a featureless door. "Is this better?"

Enna gaped. Beyond the ill-fitting, much-abused doorway was a paradise -- a boundless Shangri-La with watermelon-colored clouds soaring majestically above distant peaks, surrounding a misty terrace adorned with plush cushions. She gingerly stepped through, glancing around in disbelief, as Orton followed her through and shut the door (which, on this side, was a wicker barrier set into a wall of sandstone). "Holy crap. Okay, this is a cool trick. I'm ready to stop snarking and pay attention if it'll teach me how to do this."

"You may continue to snark," said Orton magnanimously as he took a seat on one of the cushions and gestured for her to do the same. "A lot of this will suck to learn, and bitching about it is a normal and natural part of the process." He centered himself, then took a deep breath (not that he needed to breathe in a dream, but it helped) as Enna dutifully sat on the cushion in front of him.

"We're here in my mind," he began, "because it's a very safe place to spend time, practice, and otherwise take the time to deal with what you're about to learn. Additionally, the fact that your mind is here instead of in your own body allows me to pull some magical shenanigans that would otherwise be impossible, such as speeding up your thoughts to give you extra time in the dream realm and thamuaturgically shifting us from our first train line to our last without us having to actually wake up and switch trains."

Enna blinked, then whistled. "Wow. Add that one to my cart too, please."

Orton winced and shook his head. "It's not something I'm doing lightly. It's mentally and magically draining for the host -- which, in this case, is me, not you -- and, like most powers that alter your cognition, can be very prone to abuse. But the main thing is that, like all powerful magic, it has long-term consequences that make your life difficult afterwards." He leaned forward, making sure that he was meeting Enna's gaze. "And the reason for that is Fade. Which is what I've been trying to warn you about."

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Enna shrugged. "You mentioned it before -- it's what makes our pasts get erased, right? But my past is already erased."

"It's more than that," Orton replied with a sigh. "Fade is the natural consequence of using your powers -- as you shift yourself through universes, you move further and further away from your base reality. And that has a bunch of side effects of its own -- stuff you put down might not be there when you come back to it, people you've met or made friends with will forget you, and so on. But that's only part of it." He brought his hands up before him, then began slowly moving them apart. "The stronger your powers are, the more you also move away from your base probability -- in other words, deeper and deeper into the realm of Weird Shit, where the world is not only less recognizable but also less normal. In other words, using magic moves you further and further away from the mortal realm; use enough strong magic, and you'll start getting attacked by hungry things with tentacles on a regular basis."

"Um." Enna thinned her lips and narrowed her eyes. "This really seems like it should have been part of the initial brochure, Orton."

"Yes, I'm a shitty teacher, shut up, I'm not done," Orton shot back. "As bad as that is, there are worse things that can happen if you Fade too far. Your emotional connections -- the things that bind you to people and places that have meaning to you -- get left behind as you move further and further away from your base universe. And if you go too far, you turn into what's called a Shade -- a shell, a shadow, full of power but no humanity."

"That's dumb." Enna tossed her hair, not believing a word. "Being powerful doesn't turn you evil. What, just because I use magic, I'm going to turn into some kind of psychopath?"

Orton winced, then bit the bullet. "No. You'll turn into a psychopath because there won't be any more consequences to your actions. With enough power, you can kill people, then push yourself into a different universe where they never died. You can play God to any degree, and you won't care, because you'll always be able to reverse or remove the repercussions of what you do." He leaned forward, trying desperately to get his point across. "And you'll do it soon. You're on the edge of becoming a Shade yourself."

Enna jumped to her feet, furious. "Bullshit! You're just trying to control me again!"

"Don't be a child." Orton's icy retort shocked her -- she was so used to his relaxed, permissive demeanor that his scorn seared her with unexpected force. "You've been on your own for six years. In all that time, did you ever use your power to help anyone but yourself? Did you think for one second about where all the money you stole was coming from? About whose food you were eating, about who got left behind when you strolled off with their car or their credit card or their reserved train car?" He pointed an accusatory finger at her, and she found herself stumbling back a step, blinking. "You've been leaving a trail of wreck and woe through a thousand universes, lady, and I can see every ounce of the damage in your wake. And if you need me to, I'll make you remember it." Slowly, his glare softened, and he leaned back and took a deep breath. "But I think you don't. I think if you take five minutes to think about it, you'll see for yourself."

Enna scowled, whirling around, but realized belatedly she had nowhere to go. She tried heading for the wicker door, but found that it never got nearer, no matter how many furious stomps she took in its direction; she turned back to yell at Orton, but he was impossibly far away. "The distance between us is an artifact of your spiritual disharmony," he commented, his voice reaching her clearly despite his apparent remoteness. "As you calm down, I'll grow nearer. It'll probably take a while."

The worst part, she reflected furiously, was that it was obvious that he knew what he was doing. She shouted and swore and flailed ineffectively, but since she was in Orton's mind, her powers didn't work here. She screamed obscenities at him, swore vengeance, and detailed all manner of torments she would inflict upon him for this affront, but each one only served to underscore his point and she felt herself feeling increasingly foolish. Despite herself, she found memories of her most egregious instances of selfishness coming to mind (of which there were no shortage, since she'd spent a lot of her time gratifying herself in the preceding half-decade). Before long, her rage had turned to discomfort, then to sorrow, and then eventually to tears; she was dimly conscious of Orton's hand rubbing her back comfortingly, despite the rest of him being several dozen feet away. Fuck, this is nuts, she thought brokenly.

Orton forced himself to watch as she cascaded through the horror of the realization; his own epiphany had been much worse, since he'd had no one to help him and significantly grimmer extenuating circumstances. He had had a rather different and much less gentle path from and back to his dharma, and he'd bear the scars from it forever. A little emotional trauma beats a hole in Scotland, I promise, he thought to her silently, then winced as she glared at him. Whoops. I forgot you can hear my thoughts in here if I'm not careful.

ORTON, YOU FU-- he winced as a burst of vile invective seared across their shared mental link. And then, unexpectedly, she was there in his arms, warm and achingly tactile, as she sobbed into the phrenic representation of the soft cotton of his shirt. He patted her and made soothing noises, mentally erecting an impenetrable fortress of privacy around the thoughts that arose from her close proximity. After a sweet, brief eternity, she quieted, then sighed and pushed him away gently. "Fuck. I'm so sorry, Orton."

He shrugged. "It's my fault if it's anyone's. Shitty teacher, remember? I had weeks to teach you this crap, and I wasted it giving you drugs and watching you meditate."

She shook her head. "No. I wouldn't have understood then -- hell, I barely understood just now. And I'm guessing you couldn't pull off this kind of brain-holodeck action back then."

"No. And in fact, you shouldn't be able to either, but you seem to have a real talent for breaking the rules." He sighed. "My first time through the loop, I didn't have a tenth of your power at your age. I had to spend decades meditating and doing rituals before I even broke through to the second tier."

Enna lay back on her imaginary cushion and sighed. "I never felt like I broke through to anything. Maybe it's different for sorcerers? We just... I don't know, get stronger?"

Orton shook his head. "No, Nej was a sorcerer, and he still had to go through the same stages of enlightenment I did -- mastery of the body, mastery of the mind, mastery of the soul, mastery of the oversoul, and maybe someday Svādhyāya Samasta -- total cosmic oneness and all that. But it sounds like you didn't."

"Not to my knowledge, anyway. I just studied the book, thought about stuff, and did magic at whatever got in my way." She sighed. "Well, until it started going wonky, anyway."

Orton raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean? Your magic got weaker?"

"Not weaker. Just..." -- she flapped her hands noncommittally -- "...less reliable. Sometimes it would only sort of work, or I'd have to try a few different magic words. C'était très frustrant, let me tell you."

Orton blinked, then laughed. "Let me guess. You're still invoking in French, aren't you?" Enna sat up, wide-eyed, as he chuckled. "Remember how I said that a language has more power the older it is? Well, that's only part of the truth. It also has more power the more foreign it is to you -- there has to be an otherness to the magic words, or else you'd summon a big pile of manure every time you talked about how 'shitty' something was." He shook his head in disbelief. "The more you learned French, the more you were eroding that entropic differential. I thought for sure you'd be invoking in at least Latin or Hebrew by now."

"But that doesn't make any sense!" she fumed, causing him to go into a fresh spate of cackles. "Won't I just learn to think in those languages too?!"

Orton shook his head, smiling. "You're supposed to treat the language as rote, not as an actual means of communication. It's why dead languages are so great for spellcasting -- nobody's going to strike up a conversation with you in, say, Akkadian, and our knowledge of the grammar and syntax are probably woefully incomplete anyway. Yelling the proto-Aramaic equivalent of 'much fire hotmaking' is more than enough context to produce a damned strong effect -- spells don't take off points for bad conjugation. When you make the transition from basic powers and invocations to full-blown spells, you'll understand more."

Enna groaned and covered her face with her hands. "Great. Just fantastic. And let me guess, you'd have told me all of this if I hadn't run off?"

Orton nodded, patting her foot consolingly. "Sure. But you wouldn't have had the experiences you've had now -- which, I'm sure, will help you to actually understand what I'm teaching you rather than just being assaulted by it -- so it'll probably all work out in the end. And there's obviously a lot more to whatever power framework you've cobbled together than you think -- you contacted me in Tibet from Switzerland with telepathy, and that's a third-tier power. And you did it without even knowing what psychal proximity was, let alone having to manipulate it."

"I'm just gonna pretend all that stuff you just said meant something," mumbled Enna through her fingers. She sighed and sat up. "I don't suppose you can teach me a functional vocabulary in 'Potto-Arachnid', or whatever it was, while we're on this train?"

Orton smiled. "Proto-Aramaic might be a little bit of a big step for your first nekroglossa. For now, maybe we start with a little ancient Greek."