SCHEME UPDATE:

Type: Impersonate

Difficulty Level: Blue

Participants: Cara Geraldo, Tina Dominic, Self

Status: Success!

Details: Participants obtained illegal permission to reside in a housing unit.

Reward: Level up!

~~~

Hell yeah.

~~~

GOD OF SCHEMES

Tier: 3

Powers Unlocked: Verity Tongue

Familiars: Joni Beck, Christopher Ricci, Blair Yan

Familiar Powers Unlocked:

Blair Yan, Banshee, Illusion

(+1)

Attributes: Delayed Sensitivity, Reduced Sensitivity, Heightened Constitution, Regeneration Tier 2, Unaging, (+1)

~~~

Huh. Apparently I got to pick an attribute this time instead of having it automatically select one. That should have been a good thing, but I always got decision paralysis and I had a whole list of things I could pick.

Regeneration Tier 3

Durability Tier 1

Evoke Spirit (Alive)

Heightened Speed Tier 1

Heightened Strength Tier 1

Low Light Vision Tier 1

And so on.

The thing is with all the tier stuff, I actually didn’t know what it meant. I mean, okay, I’m not so stupid I don’t know what ‘low light vision’ meant. But who knows exactly how much I’d get from a single tier? How many tiers until I could just see in the dark? Would this just make me able to read a book in a movie theater? What level were we talking?

There was a lot of risk. The whole level up might end up being useless if it wasn’t strong enough.

Besides, I had my eye on another spell. Evoke Spirit (Alive). Because that sounded an awful lot like make spirits alive, right? I mean, spirit and alive in the same description sounded pretty promising.

So I selected that one. Did it cross my mind that resurrection might not be ‘tier 4 God’ material? No. Did I really think that Delayed Sensitivity and a familiar that could make police sirens put me on the same level Jesus Christ? Yes.

Did I hestiate at all to contemplate whether taking this vaguely worded ability might not, in fact, give me the power to raise the dead and might, in fact, just be a waste of a level up?

Again, no.

Anyway.

I did have the brains to not immediately tell the ghosts my plan. Just in case it didn’t bring them all back to life miraculously. Also, because I promised (at least to myself), I tapped my familiar upgrade and selected Joni Beck from my options. Maybe they’d retain the powers once alive again? Wouldn’t that be cool.

~~~

Familiar level increased!

Familiar: Joni Beck

Type: Wisp

Abilities: Atmosphere – Minor Temperature Alteration

~~~

I frowned. Alteration, huh? So like making it hot and cold. I gave Joni a sideways squint, where she was scratching at her ear. Would she like this more or less than Blair’s ability? Wisp sounded kinda lame, as ghost types go. Banshee was kinda cooler.

I decided against telling Joni about the power up thing for the moment. Instead, I called up all the magic in my brain and pointed my finger at her, closed my eyes hard and focused on the words “Spirit Alive.”

“Uh.”

Joni’s flat deadpan did not sound like a dead woman who found herself alive again. I cracked an eye open to find that she was, in fact, still very dead.

“Damn.” I snapped my fingers in disappointment. Not only had I failed to level them up, but I no longer had any idea what this new ability did.

“Did you shit yourself?” Joni asked, raising an eyebrow sky high.

“Dude, you looked in pain there,” Christopher said, laughing. “I thought you were having an aneurysm or something.”

“I was trying to resurrect you.” My cheeks burned. “You know, bring you back to life? I got this new ability, uh, Evoke Spirits Alive? Was hoping it might, you know, bring you all back.”

Christopher frowned. “Seems like kind of a strong ability to get at–what are you now, tier 3?”

My cheeks burned hotter. Of course it was. “Well what do you think it does?”

Everyone was quiet. Even Cara for probably the first time in her life. Even Blair had puckered her brow in deep thought.

“Evoke means, like, bring forth, right?” Christopher said, finally breaking the silence. “So you can bring forth spirits.”

“And we’re spirits,” Blair clarified. “So you can make ghosts.”

“Make alive ghosts,” Joni said. “So maybe you can bring ghosts out of dead people, like the initial God did.”

“Maybe,” Cara said, the start of her sentence overlapping the end of Joni’s, “you can evoke spirits out of living people?”

All of my ghosts fixed her with looks of outrage at the sheer stupidity of this question. Even Blair seemed to find this stupid. She had her head cocked sassily to the side, lips pursed. Blair’s “I’m smarter than you” look was a thing of legends, in that only a few people had ever claimed to have seen it because Blair wasn’t typically known for being smarter than people. Though there was a time where an old friend, Fritz, had ODed at a party and Blair had been the first person to recognize his symptoms. She flashed this same look at that event, before saying ‘We really should call 911.’

Luckily for Fritz, there had been service, so instead of being hurled into a car to die a horribly violent and premature death like Blair had, he’d been carted off to the ER and then to rehab. I haven’t seen him since, cause we really only ever saw each other at parties and he went full sobriety guy after that.

Good for Fritz, though.

But my old druggie friends aside, this was the second time I’d ever seen Blair be this convinced that someone else had just said something very stupid. It was miraculous to behold, but I wasn’t going to acknowledge it. It’d just egg the ghosts on to make fun of poor Cara.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Instead, I just shook my head wisely.

“Could be, Cara. Could be.”

–

Tina the Taxi returned later that night with my car. I hoodwinked some guards into helping me bring my stolen gear to the apartment so it could start feeling like home. They left the boxes in the corner and left, muttering about how this was not the overnight shift’s typical job.

We had a lot of decorating to do.

“Well,” Christopher said, appraising the stack, hands on his hips. “This is… well, like, it’s something I guess.”

“Um, did you get all that from TechShack?” Cara asked, eying my ‘bounty.’

“Yeah.”

We may not have had as much decorating to do as I’d thought.

I was more than a little let down by how it all looked in the middle of the floor. When I’d first pictured New Olympia, I think I’d expected something smaller than this place. Something more like the 10x10 bedroom where I used to live. I had severely misunderstood how much stuff was needed to outfit a place this big.

Because boy let me tell you, a single shopping cart worth of video game consoles, a monitor, a few keyboards, and a medium sized speaker didn’t make a dent in a five bedroom apartment. It looked pathetic just sitting on the living room floor.

“Okay.” I sighed. “This might actually take some time to fill out.” After a moment of my face getting redder and redder, I took a deep breath and forced a smile. “We can get started on that tomorrow though. First thing in the morning!”

“Shouldn’t we deal with the whole, ya know, fugitives from the law thing?” Cara asked, voice spiking in a familiar note of oncoming panic. “I mean, what if the police find our spot while we’re out and set up a barricade around it? What if they shoot you before you speak? What if they shoot me? And speaking of shooting, aren’t we supposed to be tracking down that Henry Miller guy? We need to–”

“Cara!” My face was back to red. “Okay fine, so a shopping spree isn’t top on the plate. I’ll just…” An idea popped into my head. “Okay. Tina, would you like to do a shopping trip tomorrow?”

Tina pursed her lips. “I mean, yeah. You got a card though I can use? Cause I can’t afford much right now and maybe you feel comfortable hustling but I can’t cut and run like that.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I’ll get you a card. Easy peasy. I’ll just make a call in the morning. You just hit up whatever furniture stores you think look cool, buy whatever you can until the card hits its limit, and we’ll go from there.”

Tina’s lips pressed together, stretched out in something that might be a smile but was contradicted by the crease between her eyebrows. “You sure?” she asked.

“Positive. Just… you know. Tomorrow.” I let out a sigh that turned into a very long yawn as I took a hard look at the gleaming, shiny, very hard hardwood floor. Man I was tired. I was dog tired. The more I thought about how tired I was, the more tired I got. We’d visited Noah today, broke Cara out of jail, hired Tina, and gotten a house all in one.

I was almost tired enough to sleep on the wooden floors.

“Cara, call the front desk and ask for some blankets. Tina—” I jabbed a finger at her “—your first priority tomorrow is beds. Mine will be getting some breathing space from the cops. Might take a buncha of the day, but we gotta do what we gotta do.” I’d hoodwinked cops before. I could play them like a flute.

—

DAY 3: FRIDAY

–

I’d taken flute in the seventh grade. It was the only instrument I’d ever played beyond banging on a grandparent’s piano once as a kid, or screeching on recorders in first grade. Like an idiot, I’d assumed you played flute and recorder the same way. Didn’t realize it was supposed to be sideways. So first day of flute class, I stuck it in my mouth and blew. Got a very judgy look from my teacher, whose impression of me didn’t change throughout the entire miserable year. Finally she left a kindly worded letter suggesting that my passions may lay outside music.

Which is to say, ‘playing something like a flute’ was a bad metaphor for ‘something easy.’ It was, however, a good metaphor for something difficult. Something like buying time from the police.

I’d had a good, if short lived, feeling about the whole thing as I cruised into the police station. Things had been going pretty well, the last few lies I’d told. Got the guards to give us free blankets, got Jordan the landlord to lend us his credit card, got a spanking good free breakfast.

I was feeling good until maybe thirty seconds after entering the police station.

“Hands up where we can see them! Keep your hands over your head and don’t move.”

I’d kept Cara at the apartment because I knew I was more likely to be able to survive a gunshot than her. I hadn’t expected to be shot, it had just been a precaution. So this was definitely taking me by surprise.

“What I do?” I shrieked, hands jumping over head. “I just came in here to–”

“We got two men missing, last seen escorting you and murder suspect Cara Geraldo from the premises.” The cop pointing his gun at me didn’t even lower his voice. Everyone else in the office looked very tense, and I could see a half dozen hands itching towards holsters.

“Uh.” I swallowed. “Don’t shoot please?”

“I’m getting cuffs on her,” the officer with the gun said. “Now. Someone hold my gun and check her for weapons.”

“Wait wait wait wait, I do not consent to being frisked.” I wanted to run or duck or something, but my hands were still over my head, and I knew if I took a step, they’d shoot. So instead I started kinda wiggling like my feet were glued to the ground. “No handcuffs either. Stop. Don’t. Please. Come on, guys, give me a break.”

They weren’t listening because I wasn’t telling lies, but my brain was drawing a bit of a blank. The ghosts, meanwhile, were full of ideas, which was part of the problem.

All anyone in the office saw was me wiggling and begging not to be handcuffed while a cop handcuffed me.

But what I was hearing was:

“Not commands, not commands, not commands are you fucking stupid?”

“Bro, Sammi, deep breaths, you’re gonna get yourself shot. I like, don’t think that would kill you depending on where you get shot but maybe we, you know, shouldn’t test it?”

“Sammi, oh my gosh, you’re being so silly! You’re gonna end up next to poor Noah if you’re not careful. You gotta–”

“Shut up, Blair, you’re distracting her.”

“Maybe you need to stop stressing her out. Chill, Joni chill. You need to–”

“Don’t be mean, Joni. Sammi needs–”

“She needs to not get shot, she needs to–”

“Deep breaths, girls. Deeeeeep breaths. It’ll be–”

“If you tell me to calm down, I’ll kill you. Sammi is literally going to die–”

“She’s just gotta stay positive! Okay Sammi, repeat after me. I am the God of Schemes and you’re all gonna be in a lot of–”

“Just say you’re not a criminal.”

“Say you did nothing wrong.”

“Tell them you work there.”

“Keep it simple.”

“Say something!”

“You’re running out of time.”

“Just tell them you’re supposed to be here.”

So I was hearing a lot. And I was fucking sweating my ass off. This had to have been the most stressful moment of my life, cause my face was beet red and I could feel steam coming out of my ears and I felt like my head was about to explode, and finally what came out of my mouth was.

“I’m not supposed to be in trouble or do anything wrong please.”

Which made no sense.

It did, however, get everyone in the room to pause, parsing my garbled sentence.

“You’re… what?” Officer Handcuffs asked.

“I’m…” My voice trailed off in a whimper. “I’m not in trouble.” I looked around the room at the frozen police officers. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

They were quiet for another long few seconds. Officer Handcuffs looked around the room, eyes slowly starting to bug more as he took in the accusatory glares of everyone in the room and then looked back to my handcuffed wrist.

“Jim.” An older woman with a bigger badge than many of the others, stepped forward. “This is enough.”

I froze, holding my breath.

“Amanda–”

“No.” Amanda shook her head. “You narrowly avoided probation for the vending machine incident. Now you’re handcuffing this poor girl who hasn’t done anything wrong?”

Jim was starting to sweat. Actually, everyone was starting to sweat. It was absolutely sweltering in here.

“I’m sorry. I… I didn’t–she looked like–”

Amanda was still shaking her head. “Uncuff the girl, Jim. Then you and I are gonna have a little chat. And I’m looping Charlotte in.”

Jim’s face probably would have gone white at this if it wasn't, like, eighty degrees in the room. Instead, it went a dark red. I was starting to worry for his health.

“Y-yes Sarge.” His shaky, sweaty, slippery hands fumbled with the lock on my cuff before unclasping it from my wrist. “Sorry miss. I…”

I waved him off. I had no idea what to say, but this was working kinda sorta, and I was scared to ruin it.

After Amanda escorted Jim away, the rest of the office sorta returned to normal. My mouth felt super chalky as I willed my heart to slow down, but I swayed where I stood, dizzy. Spots flashed in my eyes. Was I having a stroke?

“Jesus, someone wanna turn the AC on?” the woman at the desk asked, her voice a gravelly growl.

“Don’t normally need to in September like this,” Officer Handcuffs said. Then he pulled at his collar and took a few panting breaths. “But yeah. Yeah, let me go check on getting that cranked up.”

“Bro, you all look like you just ran a marathon.” Christopher pulled his legs up into a criss-cross applesauce pose. “Is it actually that hot?”

“Yeah, what gives?” Joni asked, blithely unaware–as I had been, until she’d asked–that she was ‘what gives.’

“I uh…” My eyes slunk around the room at the various police officers. How was I supposed to have a conversation with Joni here? Too many people who were gonna find it weird. “I’ll tell you outside,” I said, teeth grit. I just needed to have a conversation about posting bail and we could bail.

Joni wasn’t impressed by my blow off, but I didn’t really care. I needed to get us out of this office before people started passing out.