My mind loosened some more as I juggled tasks in yet another new kitchen. I had a pot of ingredients for health potions simmering nicely over some cooling coals. It wasn’t much different than cooking stew. Terra ducked under my arms, rubbing her mana-charging fur against my forearms as we worked, her weaving path making me smile. All we needed was rock music playing in the background and it would have been perfect.

“It’s nice having Kat here,” Terra told me. It made me think of home. Our real home back in the real world. My heart tugged, but I told it to shut up.

“You two fought all the time,” I teased Terra, my attention more on making sure the cauldron didn’t get too hot than our conversation. The tree bark I was soaking needed a “warm, but not hot” bath. The recipes were a little convoluted, but I didn’t feel like I had the time or enough ingredients to mess around with them like I would have with food.

“We did not,” she sat, careful to keep her tail out of any spillage on the counter. I cast a quick clean around her. “She was the one who played with me. I loved her as much as you.”

“Sometimes that play looked more like torture to the rest of us,” I capped another bottle with a plug of wax that needed another light application of heat. I’d found that I could cast the lower-level versions of my spells. Flare would have melted the wax all the way into the potion, but Spark gave it just enough heat to seal the edges of the plug without breaking anything. The potion making was a learning curve, but I was getting the hang of it.

“Nah,” Terra gave a paw a lick. “That big black cat that followed Cliff around? He was torture!”

“Damon?” I asked. “I was constantly having to tell him to leave you alone. I’m sorry I didn’t…”

“You what?” she put her paw down and glared at me. “It took me forever to get him to play with me and you were telling him to stop?”

“Yeah, he was twice your size and a bully,” I reached over to give her a pet, but she pulled away.

“We were just playing,” she batted at my hand, but her claws weren’t out. “I loved it when I could get him into the zoomies with me.”

“Kitty-trains!” I smiled at the memory, checking my pot and putting another log beneath it.

“Do you think he’ll come?” Terra asked, nearly tipping over an empty bottle in the line I’d set up for this batch.

“Damon, here?” I questioned, catching the bottle before it could topple over. I had a sneaking suspicion that Terra had knocked the last one over on purpose. It didn’t matter much so I didn’t scold her for it. I could just cast the repair to fix it, and she’d rub against me to restore my mana. “Are you sure you want that?”

“Probably not,” Terra turned away, pretending to be uninterested in any outcome.

“Cliff is rather fond of the big beast,” I teased her again.

“He was old anyway,” she padded down the line of bottles, each one wobbling a bit as her tail seemed to casually hit them. “He couldn’t keep up with me.”

“He wouldn’t be old if he came here the same way you did,” I rolled my eyes and straightened the line of bottles again.

“Maybe,” she sat primly, as if she hadn’t just almost tipped over a dozen bottles.

“He’d be a magical creature just like you,” I scooped potion out of the cauldron and tried to carefully pour it into the funnel. It took concentration to pour and hold the funnel tightly to the potion bottle, so I didn’t see her response.

“Perhaps,” Terra said in my head, and I could only hope she was choosing to be good. I’d spent twenty minutes keeping this batch of health potions at just the right temperature. I didn’t want it to be ruined now. “But not as good as me.”

“Of course not,” I gave the only answer I could if I wanted to be able to finish the bottling process of this batch. Then again, she could hear my thoughts, so she could probably hear my eye roll. Cats and their games. I loved her even more for it.

I finished the line of potions and gave a relieved sigh. I looked up to find Terra cleaning herself unnecessarily. I cast a clean on her, playfully, and she swept her tail out toward a nearby bottle. Luckily, the bottle was full and didn’t move at the casual touch.

Luck +1

“Maybe I should go play with Kat,” Terra gave a snarky snicker into my mind, hopping down from the counter and sauntering to the door.

“Knife dodging as a new cat game?” I asked, casting clean on my cauldron and workspace.

I had the satisfaction of seeing Terra pause with a nervous tail flick at the open cottage doorway, but she continued outside. “As if she could hit me at her current level.”

“Do familiars level?” I asked, my curiosity suddenly poking me in the ribs.

“We level with you,” Terra turned in the doorway.

“Do you have skills and stuff?” I pondered. “I mean, do you… are you trying to get stats and skills up too?”

“Yes,” she purred like she’d caught one of her cat toys. “And I’ve just gotten two points in mental conversation. Now I plan to get a few more bumps in my agility.”

“By dodging Kat’s knives?” I asked, pausing to lean against my counter.

“What can I say?” Terra gave a kitty-smile and turned her tail toward me, heading for the front garden. “I’ll need to get ahead of the beast, because Cliff will certainly bring his familiar with him.”

I tried to hide my snicker, but there was no hiding from a familiar. She gave me a playfully mental bat and I felt like I could feel her padding across the stones of the path. My connection seemed to snap off as she was distracted by something that looked like a butterfly but moved much more like a cricket. I could only think Kat would love/hate them.

I had gotten the hang of the process in the first hour. I got into a rhythm. Not only was I getting experience for my class, but I was gaining experience as an Alchemist. The experience I got for practicing my spells wasn’t enough to let me level in my class, but I got two levels in my Alchemist profession. It was welcome growth, especially with how it bolstered my mana and health pools. I loved how my profession levels added to my class level to calculate my health and mana. It was something I fully planned to exploit.

I’d gotten to level three as an Alchemist, having started at level one. My mind got lost in the process of churning out experience and skill boosts. I loved it. The perfecting of just how much experience I could eek out of the least amount of effort was something I’d had to practice all my old life. I’d been sick a lot of my life and maximizing what I could do with very little energy was my specialty. It was so familiar that it relaxed my mind. The routine gave my mind a chance to think as well. I was enjoying the quiet.

“Mom!” Kat burst in, Terra a limp form in her arms.

My heart skipped, but Terra gave me a mental wink and then jumped out of Kat’s arms. With a scampering laugh, Terra darted up one of the ladders. Kat stood staring.

“She was faking?” Kat bunched her fists and lunged for the ladder. “I’m going to catch you for real.”

“Terra the Terrible strikes again.” I grabbed Kat’s arm with a chuckle.

“Terra, the Terror!” Kat shook a fist at the ladder, but I could feel Terra was already sliding out an opened window in one of the lofts.

“Check her hands,” Terra sent to my mind, and I jerked my attention to the hand at the end of the arm I held.

“What did you do?” I gasped at the cuts on Kat’s fingers. None of them were very deep, but there were quite a few of them. I used my Identify skill and cast a heal to replace the health she’d lost.

“It’s nothing,” Kat pulled her hand back and went to hide it behind her back until she noticed it was whole. “Besides, all it took was one little heal and it’s all fixed.”

I gave her a stern look.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Kat gave me a playful smile that had just enough chagrin to have me sighing in return.

“And when were you going to come back to get that heal?” I accused her, turning back toward my workbench to hide the slight shake of my hands.

“I was on my way,” she tried to explain. “I was only going to let my health go down a few more points before I came back here for a heal. I know you’re busy.”

“I’m never too busy for you,” I grit out, angrily stuffing a few herbs into a large pestle. The mana mixture required a set of dried herbs that had to be ground together. I stopped myself long enough to doublecheck the proportions. I made mistakes when I was angry or flustered. “I don’t know where you got that idea, but I wish you would realize that I’ve always got time for you.”

“I know,” Kat’s low voice came from behind me. “I didn’t mean to say it. I’m sorry.”

“What were you doing,” I turned around to face her, the herbs on my counter meaning nothing. “Did you go into the forest?”

“No!” Kat assured me. “It’s just… I was playing that game we saw in that old movie. You know, where the guy put his palm on the table and ran the knife between his fingers.” She took out her dagger and put her hand on the table as if to show me.

“Don’t you dare,” I grabbed for her knife hand, but she flicked it away. Her stats were definitely improving if she could pull away so easily. I turned my grabbing hand into a pointing finger.

“It took my dexterity and luck up like crazy,” she held her healed hand up in front of me. “And all it cost was a few health and a heal spell to fix it.”

I could see her point, but I didn’t like it. Was my head still half-stuck in the old world where it was stupid to play games like that? Or was I overreacting like a Mom? It was one thing to bargain with my own pain and health, but it was something else to see her doing it.

“Try it?” she held out the dagger to me, and I was ready to lose my mind.

I think I took the dagger because I wanted her to see what it felt like to see a loved one in pain, but my dexterity was good enough that it wasn’t the idiotic gambit I’d assumed. She was my kid. I put my hand on the table with my fingers spread, knife in my right hand. This was stupid. I was the grown up. I was supposed to disapprove. My mind snapped back into focus as I imagined the worst that could happen.

“Are you crazy?” I snapped my hand back off the table. “You could have cut off a finger! Would a heal put that back?”

I could see her chewing that one a bit. No one could beat my mind for imagining the worst.

“Oh,” she mumbled, and took her dagger back when I spun it to offer it back to her. “You’ve got a point.”

I ground my herbs to keep my hands from shaking. What had I done by bringing her here? She’d had a future as a doctor in our old world. Had I been kidding myself about doing her a favor by bringing her here. For the first time, I wondered if I’d made a very big mistake. I should have brought my husband first. Kat could have rebounded and gone on to med school. Kids left home and were just fine.

“She needed you,” Terra poked her head over the ledge behind Kat, probably having crawled back in through that window when the coast was clear. Kat was staring at her hand in her own thoughts.

I cast a glance up to Terra but shook my head instead of responding. I wasn’t done with my self-castigation. This was a dangerous world full of twisted morals and immoral dilemmas and the first thing I’d done was doom my kid to it, and why? Because I was a lonely, pathetic idiot.

“I’m sorry,” Kat echoed the words that were swimming around in my own mind. I’d almost thought I’d said it, but she had.

“No, I’m sorry,” I choked out, my herbs tilting over in a mess that I knew I couldn’t use. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. You had such a bright future! Better than anything I could have done. I wasn’t going to make it through med school, but you? Oh, my God, you! You were going to be something!”

“I hated college,” Kat dumped on me, her voice flat, her head shaking. “I hated the thought of medical school, and most of all, I hated, with everything in me, the very idea of being a doctor.”

“What?” My eyes misted. Her eyes misted. Terra was probably sniffling as Kat and I stood staring at each other.

“You didn’t see her crying in her room,” Terra whispered in a hushed tone. “She did hate it.”

“I felt like a fraud!” Kat sputtered over the top of Terra’s voice in my head.

“No,” I whispered, not because I was denying what she felt, but because I couldn’t believe I hadn’t known. We’d been so close. I thought I knew her.

“I couldn’t have gotten through pre-med without you,” she choked out. She didn’t seem angry, but it felt like some dam was breaking in her.

“I couldn’t have gotten through without you!” I insisted, sliding down to sit on a stool beside the table we’d eaten breakfast at an hour before.

“You say that,” Kat threw up her hands and paced. “It isn’t true. You could have done anything! You’re amazing!”

“I wish I could have told you,” Terra gave me big eyes. “I heard each of you crying the same tears at night when things got tough.”

“But I gave you so many chances to quit,” I tried to find my voice in a throat tight with tears I’d been afraid to shed for a long time.

“Quit?!?” Kat scoffed, and I could tell she wasn’t angry with me. She was angry with herself. “I couldn’t quit! We weren’t quitters! Not our family! As long as you could stay in school, I was going to be right there beside you.”

“I’d have quit if you did,” I reasoned with emotions that didn’t want to hear reason in either of us.

“That’s exactly why I wasn’t going to quit!” she raged. “I was not going to be the reason you didn’t get to be a doctor or whatever else you wanted to be.”

“But we talked about other options,” I tried some more.

“Yes,” Kat deflated a little. “But you didn’t see your face when we explored any other direction. I knew you would have done anything for me, but you… you wanted to be a doctor. You think I didn’t hear you crying with Dad at night that you’d have made a great doctor?”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I gulped, searching my mind for the memories. “I was tired from all the school garbage. All the ways they tried to stop us. I meant that if I’d been young when I started school, then I’d have made a great doctor. I was going for you! You would make a great doctor!”

“I never thought that,” Kat admitted, finally sitting across from me, rows of potions between us. I let her talk, knowing I had to listen. “I never thought I’d make a good psychologist much less psychiatrist. I hated it. I hated how weak other people were compared to you. I hated how they whined and moaned about petty complaints when you were fighting real mental illness. The way you saw things and how people shoved you in a closet and patted you on the head like you were brainless after you’d helped them! I wanted you to be a doctor. I had to finish so you could get the recognition you deserved.”

I carelessly pushed potions out of the way and grabbed Kat’s hands in mine. I didn’t care if I broke them all. I didn’t have words yet. We sat.

“God,” I sent up a prayer for words. “It wasn’t like that for me. I…”

Kat held my hands but laid her forehead on the table. I searched for words that didn’t come easily to me.

“I really didn’t think…” I tried again; my words jumbled. “I was convinced they wouldn’t let me finish. Then I was convinced they wouldn’t let me into medical school. Then I was just so tired that I didn’t dare hope I could get through the next class. I was fifty-four years old and feeling every year in every bone of my body.”

Kat looked up at me. I could see in her eyes that she knew how much of a toll the whole thing had taken on me. I kept hold of her hands, even as I couldn’t meet her eyes all the time I was talking.

“It took me fifty years to be mature enough to deal with the stupidity of college,” I offered up next. “Professors convinced they were right about everything but ignoring patterns that I’ve seen for decades of watching the world slowly fall apart. Officials who wanted to convince me that they were going to help me and then stabbed me in the back. It wasn’t that I didn’t know they’d do it, but you didn’t know it. I figured if you were going to survive in a world with the same level of neurodiversity I’ve got, you’d need someone to stand in front of you and get hit by all the assholes that want to stand in your way.”

“I can take my own hits,” she protested weakly. “I’d have gladly taken half the heat they heaped on you.”

“I know, but you didn’t have to,” I told her. “It was the least I could do for you. They were always going to see us as too stupid to be smarter than them. And I’m dumb. I’m really dumb in some really whacked out ways.”

“No, you’re not,” she shook her head at me and put her forehead back on the table a little harder than I wanted her to.

“I am,” I insisted, wincing at the knot she’d have on her head if she kept that up. “I’m also really smart in a way they can’t understand. I’m both. And so are you. But they were going to come for you. That first class where the teacher took one look at your age and thought your paper had to have been written by me instead of you? They were going to do to you what they’d done to me.”

“I just wanted them to stop coming after you!” She looked up at me.

“It was too late for me,” I admitted what I maybe should have admitted long before. “They were convinced I was one thing and they needed to nail me into that box so they could justify treating me so badly.”

“People suck,” Kat took her hand away to grab her hair. I cast an extra heal for the headache that had to be looming for her.

“Mostly,” I admitted. “But I was hoping you wouldn’t know that for sure until after you’d made enough money to be able to make your own rules.”

“That was never going to happen,” she protested weakly.

“I was only recently starting to figure that out too,” I pet her hair, trying to calm us both.

“I’ve known that for the last year,” she grumped at me.

“That’s how I know you’re smarter than me,” I shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want to be a doctor,” Kat told me more calmly now.

“I don’t think that’s an option anymore,” I nodded with a playful frown, waving my hand around the room. “It’d be hard for an assassin to pass the medical exams in a whole different world.”

“Thank God,” she muttered with a watery smile. “Though, maybe assassinating some of those assholes in college would be cathartic for both of us.”

“Maybe,” I shook my head at her.

Terra butted her head at Kat’s elbow. Kat reached out to pet Terra.

“You don’t hate me?” Kat asked me, focused on Terra to avoid my eyes.

“For what?” I teased her, my smile turning real. “Do you hate me?”

“Never,” she asserted firmly.

I waited until she met my eyes and said, “Ditto, kiddo.”

“I can’t believe we went through anatomy for nothing,” she teased, using a stray feather from her hat to get Terra playful again. Terra’s eyes got big and claws came a little too close to my bunched but unharmed batch of sealed potions.

“I don’t know,” I reasoned, grabbing bottles and packing them into boxes. “You’ll know exactly which arteries to hit so they bleed out quickly.”

“Mom!” she pretended badly to feel shock and dismay, but I rolled my eyes. “So bloodthirsty! The PTA women would be shocked!”

“And that’s why I didn’t take over the PTA in the only school I ever sent you to,” I asserted, as if we didn’t both know I was pretty much a pacifist. I hadn’t even killed Beau and that was as close as I got to hating a person. I’d never hated him as much as anyone thought. I couldn’t imagine who the Nemesis Engine had chosen for me.

Did I really even hate anyone? If I didn’t hate the college people, I didn’t hate anyone, really. Did I? My mind conjured the head of the Code of Conduct department. It was true. I disliked that guy a whole lot. Then I imagined him trying to cope in this world and gave a snort of derision. I couldn’t imagine a single one of our college tormentors surviving a day in this world.