Aaron found himself in a park. It was not unlike the one he’d played softball in just a few days earlier or when he’d met Alice and Barrett in their car parked across the pitcher’s mound.
As it had been in that dream, the park was surrounded by stone walls, like those of a castle, but with several notable differences. Aaron could actually see the tops of the walls this time, a hundred feet high or more, and they were topped with crenellations that faced away from the park, towards whatever was outside. There were no towers or guards, but it was an improvement to know those walls were keeping things out rather than keeping him in.
After scanning the walls thoroughly, Aaron saw there were still a few passages in the walls, but each was barred by sturdy oak doors banded in iron and held fast by heavy beams for crossbars.
If anything was moving outside those walls, Aaron couldn’t hear it.
From his previous experiences, Aaron fully expected something strange to happen in the dream. It didn’t take long for him to find out what it was as he felt an impact against one of his legs. It wasn’t a strong impact and whatever hit him wasn’t hard. When he looked down, he saw Baby Bear — his childhood teddy bear! — bouncing from side to side on his nubby legs.
“Let’s play,” the bear exclaimed, speaking in the voice Aaron had given him but with no input from Aaron.
It was like the imaginings of his childhood had come to life and his one reliable friend from a lonely youth had become something more than just a stuffed animal. What child didn’t wish their favorite toy would come to life?
The stuffed animal bounded away, moving awkwardly on tiny legs, then stopped and turned back to Aaron. Baby Bear beckoned him with one of his paws, calling him to play. Then the bear gamboled across the park, making his way to the playground.
The stuffed animal bounded away, awkwardly moving on tiny legs, then stopped and turned back to Aaron. Baby Bear beckoned him with one of his flipper-like paws, calling him to join in and play. Then the bear continued to gambole about the park, quickly making his way to the playground.
Although he knew this was a dream, Aaron decided to take advantage of it. When would he have a chance to play with his bear like this again? He ran over to the playground and the two old friends began to play. They ran around the park, wrestled playfully with each other, and laughed so much Aaron felt a little punch-drunk. He didn’t have to worry about what anyone would think, didn’t have to be ashamed of his bear, and didn’t have to force himself to pretend he didn’t care about either of those things.
At one point, while being chased by Aaron threatening to tickle him, Baby Bear ran face into one of the massive walls. He bounced off and flopped onto his furry butt. Before Aaron could even start to worry — or take another two steps — the bear bounced up onto his little legs, gave an indignant harrumph, and flicked his chin at the masonry. Well, the stuffed animal didn’t really have a chin — or fingers — to do the rude gesture justice, but the rounded end of a paw placed just under his muzzle worked well enough.
Then the bear ran back to Aaron, giggling like mad once more.
----------------------------------------
When Aaron woke in the morning, he was a bit surprised at how quiet it was in his bedroom. While he usually had no problem sleeping with city noise, Manhattan was supposed to be a whole different beast. Yet his room was almost eerily quiet.
It could be the neighborhood, since we’re up at the very northern edge of the Upper West Side, he mused. Or it could be really good sound-proofing, of the mundane or magic variety.
The morning hadn’t been completely silent, however. At some point, a chime had started ringing and lightly penetrated Aaron’s sleep. It had been faint and not especially unpleasant, but it had come from outside his dreams and had plucked at his attention. Although his half-conscious mind had ignored it for a while, eventually the chimes started coming faster and it grew more difficult to stay fully asleep. Finally, he’d decided he might as well just wake up.
Upon opening his eyes, Aaron found the room wasn’t just quiet, it was surprisingly dark. And much warmer than expected. It only took him a second to realize both problems had the same source — his teddy bear was still draped across his face, covering his eyes and practically clinging to his head.
I was definitely exhausted, he realized. It’s been years since I could sleep on my back with Baby Bear like that for so long.
He pulled the bear off his face and set him down next to the pillow — earning a soft, indignant smack from a fuzzy paw — then swung his legs out of bed. It took a moment to get oriented in his new room, but Aaron got his bearings quick enough and found his phone. Even with his brain slowly waking up, he knew there was zero chance that annoying chime hadn’t been notifications from the damned phone, which he hadn’t thought to put on silent.
Sure enough, as he was reaching for it on the nightstand, the phone chimed again. Aaron managed to pick it up without too much fumbling and, when he held up the small plastic rectangle the panel facing him, the screen lit up, showing he had a couple text messages.
No wait, that’s not a two, Aaron realized. That’s… I have twenty messages?
Most text messages Aaron had received over the last year were either bank alerts or spam, so he struggled to think of a good reason he’d get almost two dozen the first morning he had a new phone. In fact, he struggled to think of any reason for so many messages. He wasn’t going to find out without reading them, so he flicked the phone twice, unfolding it to its normal width and half its full height.
All of the messages were from Tia.
Tia: < wyd? >
Tia: < u up? >
Tia: < what’s going on? >
Tia: < u ok? >
Tia: < Text me back, please. >
Tia: < Aaron? >
Tia: < u there? >
Tia: < {confused Travolta.gif} >
Tia: < hey >
Tia: < Aaron >
Tia: < hey >
Tia:
Tia:
Tia:
Tia:
Tia:
Tia:
Tia:
Tia:
Tia:
The messages had started about two hours earlier and there wasn’t more than ten minutes between any of them. The messages picked up speed the longer Tia kept sending them, then slowed down again about half an hour ago for the last three.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
That was… a lot of messages.
The first couple had Aaron thinking Tia might have been coming on to him — which would have been surprising but awesome — but the tone quickly turned serious. He didn’t know what had gotten Tia worried enough to blow up his phone like this and it set his nerves on edge.
Did they find me? Am I in danger? he wondered. If there was a problem, surely the security people would be coming through the walls shouting about Kool-Aid. Right?
Aaron made his way around the bed to peek out through the drapes on the back window. He didn’t really expect to see ninjas and necromancers swarming over the alley, but it didn’t hurt to take a look. Everything was quiet back there, as far as he could tell. Yet Tia had been adamant that Aaron call her as soon as he could, so he hit the call button. It didn’t even ring once before she was on the line.
“I’m coming up,” Tia said.
“Did you miss me that much?” Aaron asked, trying to seem suave and immediately regretting it. Tia had, mercifully, already hung up.
He barely had time to throw on a t-shirt before there was chime from the front door. He pulled the bedroom door most of the way closed on his way out, and half-jogged across the apartment.
As soon as he opened the door, Tia pushed past him into the apartment. She didn’t say anything, but went to the three windows overlooking the street, opening and closing the blinds on each in turn.
Aaron followed behind her. He was still too groggy to be completely infected with her frantic energy but he was definitely feeling on edge. She turned back to Aaron, her mouth open to speak, but she said nothing. Her mouth closed and she looked him over, slowly.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Aaron asked.
She didn’t answer for a second, then shook her head slightly, like she was clearing away a daze. “What the hell happened last night?”
Aaron scratched behind his ear. “I ate an implausibly huge dinner with this hot Asian girl I met recently, then I went to bed. Don’t you remember?”
“You’re sure that’s all? Nothing strange happened?”
Aaron’s brain was finally waking up for real and he was starting to pick up Tia’s nervous energy. “Yes. Why? What the hell is going on?”
“This building is warded to shit to prevent emanations from being detected, but there was a ton of magic in this apartment last night. A big spike is expected whenever someone goes through the Emergence, but I’m pretty sure this was on a whole other level.”
“What ‘emergence’?”
Tia went to the dinette table and sat down, gesturing for Aaron to join her. He took a seat next to her. It didn’t seem like the world was in imminent danger of ending, so he was curious to learn what surprising, wondrous, horrifying new thing was in store for him today.
“The Emergence is a kind of physical transformation drakus go through when the amalgamation of their current and legacy essences is completed,” Tia said. “It can cause some pretty dramatic changes.”
Aaron’s mouth compressed into a thin line. “I don’t have any dramatic physical changes. I mean, I’m a bit more alert than I usually am so soon after waking up, but that’s not that weird considering how long I slept last night.”
“You sure about that?” Tia asked, tilting her head forward so she was looking slightly up at him. She leaned over and patted Aaron firmly on the chest.
It had been a long while since he’d had any real physical contact with an attractive woman and he fought against the shiver that ran down his spine. He didn’t want to look like some kind of colossal fucking weirdo — Nevermind that I am some kind of colossal fucking weirdo, he thought — but he wasn’t so distracted he didn’t notice how odd it felt where she’d patted him.
Odd like… he wasn’t really sure what it was like, exactly.
“I think you turned out okay,” she said with a shrug. “I thought the frumpy, nerdy look suited you well, but at least Alice’ll be into it.”
Aaron rubbed his hand over his mouth, feeling particularly lost. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Go look in the mirror, dude,” Tia snorted. “I’ll wait.”
She got up and went to the fridge in the kitchen, where she began rummaging through the leftovers. Aaron — left with little choice but to take her advice or argue with her over… something — got up and turned to go back to his bedroom. He hadn’t gotten more than two steps down the hall when Tia called out to him.
“I forgot to get my figurine back from you yesterday; bring that back out with you, please.”
Back in his room, he went to the bathroom and rummaged in the small pile of laundry by the door. He fished the small figure of an eastern dragon out of one of the pockets. It was a finely crafted thing, all graceful lines and the lovely sheen of polished jade. When he stood up and saw his reflection in the mirror, he nearly dropped the stone ornament.
A stranger was staring back at him from the mirror. For a fraction of a second, Aaron thought it must be another assassin and his eyes darted around the room, searching for the dagger the stranger would surely have and a weapon of his own.
Except… the stranger looked familiar. Very familiar. As familiar as his own face, in fact, because it was. Or very close to it. Aaron stepped closer to the counter, lifting a hand to his face and seeing the act reflected in the mirror. It was him, only… only he looked amazing.
It was like he’d lost more than a hundred pounds, then put most of that weight back on as muscle. The sinuous curves of his chest, arms, and shoulders were visible beneath his t-shirt, but sleek and wiry instead of the ungainly bulk he tended to gain when he dedicated himself to lifting. If he hadn’t been able to feel the changes to his body with his own hands, he might not have believed what he saw in the mirror.
Aaron walked back to the living room in a daze. Before he could think to say anything, he felt a sudden, powerful urge that he simply couldn’t ignore. He hurriedly set the jade figurine on the table, muttered “back in a minute” to Tia, then rushed back to the bedroom, closing the door behind him — he’d only been awake a few minutes and hadn’t had a chance to empty his bladder.
Good thing I wasn’t sporting a Sunrise Surprise or seeing Tia first thing in the morning would have been even more awkward, he thought.
When he’d finished, Aaron stood at the toilet, forgetting to shake for more than a minute. He was holding up the front of his t-shirt with his free hand and just… staring at his abdomen in the mirror.
He didn’t have the absurd, ultra-chiseled abs of a movie star on a dehydration diet, but there was noticeable definition there. It wasn’t something he’d thought his body capable of — even at the most driven and healthiest times in his life — because he had a large frame and could never seem to entirely get rid of his gut.
Finally, he snapped out of it and finished up, washing his hands and concentrating on schooling his face into some kind of passive state. Far better to lose blasé than revealing the absurd giddiness of going to sleep a chubby slob and waking up with a fucking Adonis belt.
“Am I taller?” he asked Tia, when he was back in the living area.
Tia eyes him up and down again, even standing up so she could gauge their relative heights.
“Looks like you gained an inch or two. Did you gain inches anywhere else?” she asked, waggling her eyebrows.
Processing that question took Aaron a moment, during which he just blinked stupidly at the young woman. Was there an answer here that didn’t make him seem like either an idiot or creep? Bonus points if he could be funny, for crying out loud.
“Umm, no?” was the best he could come up with.
“Before and after pics or it didn’t happen,” Tia said, digging back into the carton of leftovers on the table.
“That’s an old meme, but it checks out,” Aaron said, his mouth doing its own thing before his brain could weigh in. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to wonder; the only people who get to see my junk are doctors and people I’m about to use it with.”
He paused for a second, then added, “Medical doctors.”
“No one has any respect for the Humanities anymore,” Tia said with a laugh.
“What was your Emergence like? Surely you didn’t get any taller.”
He winced at himself. You couldn’t have stopped after the question, Aaron?
Tia shrugged. “I don’t know if I’ve had one, yet. I was really young when I became a drakus, so if I did it was kind of a rip-off. I’m still miserably fucking short and I sure as hell don’t have tits like Alice.”
“You were like six or seven, right?”
Tia tapped her nose with a finger and they both chuckled at what had quickly become an in-joke between them.
“Back on topic — did anything weird happen last night?” Tia asked, the levity mostly gone from her voice.
Aaron shook his head. “Not as far as I know. I put away the leftovers, walked around the apartment a bit, chatted with the security guys, then went to bed.”
“Don’t forget about the snuggles,” a small voice said from nearby.
Aaron and Tia both jumped out of their seats, scanning the room for the source of the third voice. Aaron’s hands were up in a guard position and Tia had conjured a small orb or roiling red energy in one of hers. Neither of them saw anyone else in the room as they whirled around searching for the intruder.
When they turned back to the table, however, they found the intruder standing on it, sticking a fuzzy snout into Tia’s carton of leftover Chinese food.
“What the hell?” Tia said, jumping back from the table.
Aaron’s reaction was quite different — his knees practically gave out and he sat down on his chair, hard.
“This smells yummy, but it’s cold,” the teddy bear said, then he waved one of his paws at them. “Hello! I’m the Baby Bear!”