Chapter Forty-Six

The next day, after ‘despooning’ myself and waking up far too early, we began our routine again. However, we added something new to it. I would hold the mobile device so we could both see it and watch stuff while our mana was depleted. And Celia would feed snacks to us both, back and forth out of whatever bags she’d brought into the room. It was a very strange thing still, to be fed by hand by someone else, but by now that we were on the third day of this, we now had a solid routine, including short breaks to check the ‘wellbeing’ of our patients, like turning them, moving their limbs a bit, giving them water and giving them a quick cleanup.

The painful mana drain became much less uncomfortable with exposure, though it didn’t become less tiring, and… strange as it was, it was nice to not even have to reach for the snacks I was going to eat.

Could that be just my laziness talking?

Yeah, probably.

Celia seemed to find it amusing to no end, and as the hours passed by, we noticed them less and less.

And it was a truly beautiful thing, watching the way the sparkling colored lights shimmered and twisted and flowed from one place to another, most magic spells, they’re not even noticeable when they’re cast. Only the strongest ones are visible, so I almost never actually saw mana manifest itself into this or any other world.

Nobody did.

So this was something very new and unique to me. “How often have you done this?” I asked.

“A few times. Broken limbs, diseased innards, and a few poisonings that caused a lot of damage, oh and some radiation poisoning once. But that was back when I was first getting started. Like most of the beginners who weren’t top of their class prodigies, I helped keep people alive more than kill them.” She popped a few pieces of corn chips into her mouth, crunched, chewed, and swallowed them before saying…

“I pretended to be a doctor on maybe thirty different worlds to keep dissidents against dictators alive after some amateur assassination attempt. I even killed an assassin once that was coming after my ‘patient’. So I have some experience with this stuff.”

“You’d think they’d have people like me doing some of that.” I said, admittedly, saving lives was new to me, at least I had some experience with that now.

“I’m sure you could do it, but let’s be honest. It’s hard to get to some of those guys, and when you have to get them, you have to get them fast, a lot of the time, right?” She asked.

“I suppose.” I answered, though I was a bit sullen about admitting it. “Like this one time, I had to take out a fleet that was already launched. I did a lot of teleporting to paint various offices, and it took weeks of it before the fleet finally gave in and turned around, and I took out their dictator too.” I couldn’t help but laugh, “They were so confused, they just couldn’t figure out what kept happening to everybody who was put in charge… until nobody wanted to be put in charge, and the flagship’s crew decided to just ‘go home’. They ended up launching a coup, and I got rid of their dictator and painted his office before they got there. It’s a pretty peaceful world now.”

I was quite proud of that one. “It turned out their military budget took up so much that they couldn’t afford much else, with that reduced, there was enough for far more to go around. It was a good week.”

Maybe I’m a little unusual in that I’m more social than the average swapper, but the more time we spent with our manaweaving into the thingy, the more it seemed like Celia became comfortable talking in general.

Maybe it’s true that my pleasures are petty and small, they’re not big grandiose adventures… alright maybe my regular job is, but even that’s just routine now.

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But given a choice, this right here was plenty.

The number on the thingy reached one hundred, and our hands lowered in sync. I went to where his head lay propped up on the pillow and after removing the thingy from Shugo, I placed it on Rin’s forehead, and took a weighty breath.

“A few more days. I really did think it would take a lot longer. But it looks like I won’t have to do a third round of sleep spells.” I was more than a little relieved about that. One less thing to worry about, it’s not that the spells were a bother, they did slow down the body’s functions a lot, so we didn’t have to do cleanup ‘much’ but… humans are awkward that way. They make… various smells.

I gained a new respect for the nurses at the local hospital, that was for sure. And that’s the last I’ll say about that.

So our routine went on, one day bled into the next, the numbers went up, I got used to Celia snoring by the seventh day… yes, the damage to Rin must have been worse… his numbers went up much slower.

…And of course Celia would repeatedly insist, “I… do not… snore.” Which was positively precious, especially when yes, she absolutely does.

It’s funny, the things we appreciate.

We would then eat big meals and snack and chat and watch various shows. On what we knew was going to be the last such day we chose a long one and she asked, “So… these wish granting balls are nice and all, but is it really necessary to spend whole episodes just powering up over and over again? It just seems pointless. That ghost crime solver didn’t take anywhere near this long and had a very complete story.”

I had an enormous smile on my face when she said that. “What?” She asked when she saw my expression.

“You’re starting to understand story structure and what separates a good show from a bad one.” I answered, and this prompted a raised eyebrow to go with the cockeyed look.

“So?” She asked.

“I’m just proud of how far you’ve come. Speaking of, did you find a job yet?” I asked.

“No.” She pouted a little, “A lot of the skills here are really specialized. Maybe I could fake credentials and lie, but I still wouldn’t know how to actually do the thing, so why bother?”

“Too ba-” I cut myself off. The ninety-nine had become a one hundred.

“Did we do it?” Celia whispered with a kind of hushed reverence. I stopped the episode, and our arms lowered as one, then I approached the bed and removed the thingy, handing it over to Celia as soon as I’d done so.

Once she threw it into her magic storage, I said… “I don’t know. But I’m going to cancel the sleep spell, and wake them up. Once I do, remember the story, we took them to a specialist named Dr. Stone who I called in as a favor and he did surgery on their brains for a bunch of hours and then let them heal, and they’ve been unconscious all the way back here before being allowed to sleep. Oh! One more thing, the devil is always in the details.” I said, and after ‘swapping’ my hand so that it was a very sharp claw, I sliced it over their scalps and around to the forehead.

“Why did you do that?” Celia asked, clearly baffled as my hand went back to normal and I proceeded to wipe away the blood.

“So that they have scars later. We want this to be complete, it’ll be suspicious eventually if there’s no scars ever. As far as they’ll know, their heads were opened up.” I wiped my hands clean and tossed the paper over to the garbage bin in the corner, “Questions?” I asked as I made ready to cancel the spell.

“No, go ahead.” Celia said, then shrank herself back down to child sized. She let out a tiny, nervous breath, we’d never used this on a human before, but we had reason to think it might work. Probably. I mean my magic worked on Suki, and so did our potion. So I think it should.

I was suddenly a little nervous, ‘It would be a lot less nerve wracking if I were just killing these two, at least then I could just try it again, but if this doesn’t work, nothing will, they’re stuck like this for life.’ I swallowed the lump in my throat, thinking about their sad, dull, lost eyes…

I bit the bullet, held out my hands over them both and said, [lepsid].

I then stepped back and dropped my hands to my sides.

“So, you’re awake again, you two were asleep for a really long time… can you tell us your names? Do you remember? What do you remember? Anything at all? How do you feel? Would you like some water? A snack? Are you hungry?” Celia was jabbering, and I stretched out my hand to touch her arm.

“Celia… give them a moment.” I said it softly, as nonthreatening as I could, and asked…

“Do you know who I am?”

And the two boys had no answer to that.