"Holy shit," Lisa whispered.
The nature of the Spirit World was something I fundamentally just did not fully understand, and likely never would. Being as I wasn't a werewolf or even a spirit-focused wizard, and very probably could never become one (there were a few rare anecdotes about demiurges becoming other sorts of supernatural person that had enough evidence behind them to be considered reliable, but one, they all involved literal death and rebirth, and two, they were all through different methods that nobody had successfully replicated since), I simply didn't have any way of interacting with spirits, and I would probably just have to live with that.
However, I did have a few separate intuitions that were, for different cases, close enough to being correct that I could, when the need arose, pretend to be far more learned than I actually was. Provided that I wasn't talking to Jason Thronebreaker, the guy who'd actually taught me all this shit.
One of those intuitions was that every thing in the world, defined by what humans considered a discrete thing, had either a full-blown Spirit already, or the nascent makings of a Spirit within it, contingent on a sufficiently strong melange of thoughts and feelings on the nature of that spirit. And hey, wouldn't you know it, I happened to have with me something I've had for a long time, and had a lot of complicated and strong emotions and thoughts about. What is that something, I hear you ask?
"I can't believe I have a Spirit in my gun," I said.
When I was nineteen, still living with my parents, and had just flipped to absolutely hating Doctor Skinner, I'd decided I'd make a clean break from my old life, and go to make a new one. A new name, a new gender- honestly, I'd been kinda suspecting I had something weird and transfeminine going on before I met Skinner or the girlfriend before her, but it hadn't truly clicked until I became a demiurge.
The only thing I'd keep from my old life was something I hadn't really owned in my old life. Because, you see, as part of my unreasonably circuitous assassination attempt on Doctor Skinner, I had stolen my father's revolver. A six-inch Colt Python with a Royal Blue finish, it was one of the finest factory-made revolvers in the world; there were many like it, but this one was mine. Mechanically very reliable, with the only real downsides being its weight, both in terms of a heavy trigger pull- easy enough to compensate for with pre-cocking the hammer or simply building up good grip strength, the latter of which I'd done for Judo anyways- and also simply being a big ol' chunk of metal without any corners cut.
Most importantly for this revolver and this moment, though, was that I have, in fact, used it in anger, and on more than one occasion, against one Doctor Beatrice Skinner.
It knew her. And as it was an extension of my will, it hated her to the bone.
"Obviously," I continued, "having a spirit of murderous hatred in my revolver isn't great for my mental health, so..."
"Yeah, I'll get rid of it soon," Lisa said, nodding. "I'll do an exorcism on your haunted gun as soon as we get what we need from it. But first..."
"First," I prompted.
"...I was trying to figure out how I'd get a location out of this thing, and I've come to an inconvenient conclusion," Lisa said.
"Ah," I said. "Not as simple as just talking to it?"
"I could try," Lisa allowed, "but that'd be unreliable and wouldn't give us very good information. The thing about working with spirits is, druidic power can bend their nature to gain the desired results through a different method, but that same power could also be used to work with their nature to get better results through the original method. I have to bend the nature of this thing at least a little, because it's based on your idea of what a gun is, and so it does not care where it's pointed, whereas I need it to point at Doctor Skinner. But if I bend it too far, I won't have enough power leftover to get it to point accurately."
"Okay," I said, nodding. "So, what do you need in order to do that?"
"Some small specialty items," Lisa said. "Due to the nature of spirit association, it's going to sound like conglomeration of stupid puns."
"Alright, well," I said, shrugging and clambering to my feet. "I sure as hell don't have anything better to do."
----------------------------------------
"You were right," I said, as Lisa infused the essence of a gun dog spirit into a tracer bullet. "This does seem like a pile of stupid puns. I understand intimately how the associations of a gun dog, which tracks down and fetches prey after it's been shot by the hunter, and a tracer bullet, which lets you see precisely where your shots traveled, would be useful for this purpose. Nonetheless..."
"I love my job," Lisa said, loading the first tracer bullet into the gun's cylinder. "Well, parts of it, anyway. Now!"
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"Before you launch into a gun safety rant, I would like to inform you that I have woven the idea of indestructibility so deeply into my body that I was bulletproof back when you were still a miserable ginger-boy in high school," I said. "We're in an underground chamber made of reinforced rock, with nothing we care about inside it. Just shoot."
"...Fine," Lisa said. "But, as I was going to say, you need to be the one to pull the trigger."
"Ah, right," I said. "Because it's my hunt, and my gun."
"Exactly," Lisa said, nodding as she flipped the gun in her hand and held it out to me grip-first. "Here. Give me a minute to leave and close the door before you shoot that thing."
"Got it," I said, taking my gun from her and closing my eyes.
The procedure was, when we got down to it, pretty straightforward, relying on both druidic spirit magic and demiurgic mad science. Lisa had fashioned a gun and some bullets that would guide themselves to Doctor Skinner, and I happened to already have a gadget that could trace those paths on a global map and do all the trigonometry for us. All we had to do was take two measurements from different spots, and we'd have Skinner's location.
Naturally, we needed her to hold still while we were doing this, and so we had to do this in the middle of the night, when she would likely be asleep- she had an insistent habit of going to bed at 8 PM and waking up at 4 AM, not because she was a morning person, but because she thought everyone else in the world except her was stupid for not understanding how solar time worked. This was, inconveniently, around when I tended to be asleep, too, because sharing a bed with other people tends to compel you to go to bed at the same time as them, thus making all of us align our sleep schedules to optimize bedtime cuddling as well as optimizing 'not climbing all over each other while someone is trying to sleep.' At least our sleep schedule was more 10 PM to 6 AM, giving us around two hours of window to give it a shot without staying up past our own bedtimes.
"Alright," I said, mostly to myself. Lisa had left the room and sealed the door behind her. "Let's do this."
I turned on one foot, in the sloppiest pirouette one could perform without tipping over, letting the pull of the gun and its bullet guide my hand. Once I was sure it was in the right place, I pulled the trigger.
My globe-scanner was watching, and had recorded the trajectory. I opened my eyes, lowering the gun, and walked back to the door. Akane had, as preparation for this, created a long, temporary tunnel deep in the earth, a quarter circle seven miles in radius, with two chambers on each end and a tracked vehicle for traveling between the chambers- because neither of us wanted to walk the eleven mile distance between the chambers. At ordinary walking speed, that'd be four hours, and even at a four-minute-mile sprint, that'd still be like forty five minutes, whereas this vehicle could get us there in two minutes without turning our lungs into firewood and our legs into jelly.
"So," I said, climbing into the little mad-science railway car with Lisa. It was a deeply uncomfortable contraption, because Akane either chose to make 'really uncomfortable to ride in' her signature flaw for vehicles, or it simply kept happening anyways because she was really bad at ergonomics. "...Come here often?"
"To this place which didn't exist this morning and won't exist tomorrow?" Lisa asked as the cart started moving, the half a G of acceleration slamming us against the back, then her into me as centrifugal force refused to let her stay on the inside of the radius.
"Yeah," I said, while she muttered something into my chest about airbags.
"Yes, I do," she said, strenuously prying her face out of my tits. "Rrrgh. Y'know, for all that you're not that busty compared to the rest of us, I gotta admit, your boobs are still pretty nice."
"I'll have you know I'm actually above the statistical average in America," I said. "I just look reasonably-proportioned and Not That Feminine because I'm tall and broad-shouldered and dress like this. Also, y'all have tits the size of your heads, which kinda skews your idea of what a properly feminine amount of titty looks like."
"Hey, mine are smaller than my head," Lisa protested. "Which, incidentally, is transphobic. I deserve bigger."
"Lisa, I gave you a telepathic transformation collar," I said. "You can make them bigger whenever you want."
"Well, yeah," Lisa said. "But also, I'm your pet foxgirl. I need you to want them to be bigger before I can do that."
"Is that actually true, or is it more that, being my pet foxgirl, you 'need' to give me a hard time about something petplay-related every now and then?" I asked.
"...No more questions, your honor," Lisa said.
I patted her head, riiiiight before we hit turnaround and ended up sliding across the bench to the other side of the car.
"Hey, if you had a secondary form with at least one inhuman feature, but as many human features as you wanted, what would it be?" Lisa asked.
"Honestly, I'd probably pick something like the demongirl Nicky made for my Vtuber avatar," I said. "I'm not a kinnie, but-"
"Promising start."
"-I do feel a, well, kinship with demons. Or, at least, I think they're hot, and demongirls occupy an interesting space where they're undeniably feminine, but also not merely allowed but often expected to be domineering lesbians. There's a bit of a problematic edge in that, being a Jew and also a trans lesbian, I'm well aware that what I'm doing is garbing myself in hateful queer-coding, but all the same, reclamation is a thing that happens, and also, I wouldn't exactly be leaving the house with red skin and horns."
"What about a tail?"
"Well, duh, obviously," I said, almost affronted. "Wings, too."
"Feather or leather?"
"Leather," I said, nodding. "I'm not really into the fallen angel look." The railcart finally came to a stop, and I climbed out. "Alright. Let's finish up this fucking trigonometry word problem so we can go to bed and be done with this bullshit mañana."
"You really think we can be done with this tomorrow?" Lisa asked.
"Finding someone is the hardest part of this job," I said, drawing my gun. "After that, it's just wetwork and matches."