I woke up to a sea of flesh.

“What the fuck did I do last night? Who the fuck did I do last night?”

As I took in the room around me, memories both sexual and strange fit back into my mind. To me, threesomes were something firmly attributed to the world of pornography, and orgies were little more than urban legends. The realization that I had participated in both within the timeframe of a single night was astounding.

Maybe it was something leftover from my old life, but the idea of being penetrated by a man had scared me a little. I attributed my sudden willingness to the presence of other women, but I had actually enjoyed it! Me of all people.

So far, I had only been saying that I wasn’t completely homosexual because I hadn’t tried dick before. Now that I had… Damn! It was like I was at fancy restaurant, and the entire menu had doubled before my very eyes! If women were the main course, men were the side dishes that added a little extra flavor.

I was leaning against a mattress that somehow hadn’t come from the two beds in the room. Around me were people both naked and half naked. More than a dozen in total, and we filled the room well beyond capacity. Most were asleep, but some hadn’t relented to the hour, and were still going at it.

“Isn’t that the receptionist? I really hope that’s her husband… or husbands that are fucking her.”

I looked down at myself, filled and covered with dried bodily fluids, and blanketed in the bodies of the people that had likely left them there. The desire to join back in existed, but really, I just wanted a bath. Last night had been fun, marvelous even, but I had had my fill, literally and metaphorically. My sexual frustration was now a thing of the past, and my libido was satisfied.

Also, it was only a matter of time before someone from the adventurers guild decided that we needed to stop, and I didn’t want to stick around for that.

“Socks and boots?”

Under the bed. Check.

“Hatmask?”

Still on my head. Somehow. Double check.

“Dress and underwear?”

Probably lost forever, but a small price to pay.

“Guitar-thing?”

I pulled it out of my storage, and immediately put it back.

“Is that everything?”

I looked around the room, but didn’t see anything. One of the sleeping women was wearing a strap-on, but it didn’t look like one of mine, and so I ignored it. I tried not to think of where it had been, lest I become tempted to return it there.

My movement was noticed by the others that were still awake. The two men just smiled, nodded, and gave me a friendly wave. It was weird. Their morning greeting wouldn’t have seemed out of place if I were just walking down the street, but it was strangely casual given that they were currently mid-coitus. The receptionist tried to do the same, but made the mistake of using the hand that had been covering her mouth, and so I was instead met with a loud moan.

“You guys have fun,” I whispered, trying to play it cool. “But I need to get going.”

The two men again gave another polite nod, and went back to their thrusting. If the woman had been planning on saying anything, it was immediately forgotten.

Weird. Orgies were fun, but they were still weird.

I crawled over to the window, and was blinded by the midmorning sun. Surprisingly, I wasn’t hungover, but I still suppressed a hiss at the light that met my eyes. I just wasn’t a morning person.

After checking to make sure the coast was clear, I leveraged myself out, and managed a not completely horrible landing from the two story drop. I could have just walked out the front door, but no. No way. I smelled like sweat and sex, and wanted to clean up before I put any clothes on. I wasn’t against exposing myself, but I liked to at least have a reason before I chose to run around in the buff. Despite my likely reputation, exhibitionism wasn’t one of my kinks.

In the narrow alley behind the adventurers guild, I summoned some water and gave myself a quick scrub down. Only one person walked by. I locked my eyes on them, and they averted theirs, pretending as hard as they could that they hadn’t noticed me.

“Thank you, social contract.”

Awkwardness is a wonderful emotion, in that if you can force the other person to feel enough of it, you didn’t need to keep any for yourself.

“I’m not weird for magically bathing in public! You’re weird for seeing me!”

I was definitely the strange one. I didn’t need Kearse around to tell me that.

Once clean and relieved, I tossed the waste water into a corner so it could soak into the dusty street.

When I was confident that I was genuinely alone, I made a quick trip inside my storage space to find some decent clothing. Being seen naked is one thing, but nobody looks inside a lady’s purse without permission.

It turned out that my underwear had been placed back in storage, and I found them in the pile underneath my charged mana batteries. I designated the bra and panties as being my lucky pair. They had earned it. I still needed a change though, and dressed myself more simplistically. Basic boy-shorts, an unremarkable bra, and a generic tracksuit. I’d still stand out in Orlis, but I would stand out no matter what I wore, and so comfort was the deciding factor.

I considered strapping the pistol to my waist, but this outfit didn’t need a belt, and lethal force was beginning to seem less than tasteful. Last night had probably only turned out so well because I hadn’t tried to blast my way out of it. Use of my more destructive toolset was probably the fastest way to get people to agree that Verids was right to try and own me.

Let him be the one to cause trouble. Let him be the one to make an ass of himself. Walking around like I was looking a fight would do the exact opposite of convincing people that I wasn’t some thing that needed to be controlled.

When I left the alley, I felt a lot better than anticipated. I wasn’t full of energy, but I didn’t have the hangover that I had expected. Maybe it was my public victory over Verdis, or maybe it was just the good hard fucking that I had received, but I was doing surprising well.

“Checklist. Checklist… What have I got to do today? Hmmm…”

I needed to stop by the smithy and see how Weland was doing with my sword.

And Haylen. I had to meet up with her. Aside from telling her about the more important of last night’s encounters, I still wanted to explain to her the concept of “not bailing on the people that you invite to a party.”

“I should brag about the orgy thing. And the mage threesome. Maybe I can get her jealous enough that she’ll finally let me into her pants. No… no. I don’t wanna push it. There’ll be plenty of chances later.”

Anything else?

“I guess I’ll need to talk to Mayra about how I should handle the Verdis problem. Maybe get Father Gregor involved too. Even if it’s made of paper laws, I want as many walls between me and him as possible. Needing a document to prove I’m a person would feel kind of degrading, though.”

No rush. Whether it was today or tomorrow probably didn’t make much of a difference. I doubted that Verdis would give up before I left the city, but I also doubted that he’d be able to come up with a new plan very quickly. Even if he insisted on being a pain in the ass, I could just lay low until it was time for Haylen to start her pilgrimage.

Two weeks? Three? A month at most? I could manage.

The zombies of the Peninsula may have been trying to kill me, but they were impersonal. Being angry at them was the same as being angry at a lightning storm. Archmage Verdis though… He knew what he was doing. He either refused to accept that I was a person, or he did and wanted to enslave me anyway. I would have preferred that he just leave me alone, but part of me hoped that I’d not only have an excuse to kick him in the dick, but to be able to do so repeatedly.

I wandered the streets of Orlis for a time. I didn’t know where I was, but I could see the skyline with the temples in the distance, and so I wasn’t really lost. I wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere anyway.

After an hour~ish of random walking, I found myself in a shoreside park. It was little more than a copse of trees that met the sandy dunes of the beach, but compared to the urban sprawl around me, it was a slice of nature that had been beautifully preserved.

“Heh. Urban sprawl. As if this is urban.”

I decided to take a break from my wandering, and squatted down in a patch of shade.

I was at an, “I could eat” level of hunger, but I didn’t see any street stalls around, and so I pulled out a packet of sunflower seeds to munch on instead. Breakfast was never one of my larger meals. I ate when I was hungry, and not before.

Orlis was quiet, I supposed. It wasn’t exactly early, but I got the impression that everyone, unlike myself, was busy sleeping off a cumulative hangover.

It was quiet without being quiet. The silence of Peninsula had been a haunting thing that seeped into the very nature of the city. Around me was instead the hushed sounds of people that simply didn’t have the energy to make any extra noise.

From my perspective, this entire place was strange. Before I had died, a city was a place that was almost defined by its volume. Car horns, road construction, and the constant clamor of the people were all things someone thought of when they heard the word “city.”

Sound aside, Peninsula had been stone, concrete, stone, glass, concrete, metal, stone, glass, and concrete. There had been a few extra zombies, but overall, it wasn’t much different from what I was used to.

Orlis though? Orlis was brick and dirt and wood with a little bit of cloth here and there. By almost any definition of the word, it was primitive. Sure, sure. They lived in actual houses. Some of the roads were paved in cobblestone. I had even seen a few sewer grates. But they were still more antiquated than anything that I would describe as a modern society.

Was this really the world that I was part of? The world that I had to live in? Most of these people probably thought that indoor plumbing was fancy shit.

I sighed, and shoved another handful of seeds into my mouth.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The discrepancy between the Ancestor’s and the Imperials had been ignorable during my trip between the two cities. We had been traveling. Living in the rough. But this? This just seemed like camping indoors.

I had long since gotten over any ingrained habit of reaching for a light switch or expecting water to come out of a faucet. Through magic and the resources provided to me by the necropolis, I had managed to maintain a semblance of what I would consider to be a normal quality of life.

But this?

Orlis looked like a hodgepodge of everything between the Bronze Age and the Renaissance. What was I supposed to do with this?! My original intentions for my role in this society had been to act as a muse. To help guide technology, without letting it outpace the culture. But now, I didn’t even know where to start.

The things that I thought of as basic science were already above what most of these people could understand. Hell, the stuff I thought of as basic was rooted in concepts more complicated than I could understand. Just because I had the books, didn’t mean that I knew it all well enough to explain it.

If I had all the right pieces in front of me, I could probably build a nuclear bomb as easily as I could assemble a computer. It really wasn’t that hard. Making those parts in the first place though… That was a bit more difficult.

A motor? A steam engine? A goddamn cotton gin? Fuck! I dunno!

I knew that pi was 3.14 something something, but I had no idea how anyone had calculated it in the first place.

I was both too advanced to safely give them what they wanted, and too advanced to know what they needed. Their daily lives were so far removed from what I understood that even basic empathy was going to be hard. How could I relate to things that I had never experienced?

Another handful of sunflower seeds were shoved into my mouth. Any that fell to the ground were free to try and germinate. Best of luck to them.

Cobblestone streets? Fine. I had seen that before in touristy areas. Brick buildings? No problem. Brick is a perfectly fine construction material. But underneath the roads was a septic system that could, at best, be called “advanced for its time” by later historians. Inside the buildings was little that I could feel familiar with. They still heated their ovens with wood!

The complicated nature of my predicament was enough to make me reach for my flask, but I held off. I’d had enough to drink last night. I’d had enough to drink for the past week. I liked to think that I was self aware enough to know that I’d been hitting the bottle way too much lately.

Fuck it.

It was their world after all. I was just a tourist.

For now.

Someday, I would be part of this world. Not right away, but eventually. I would be theirs, and they would be mine. I could adjust.

Until then, I just had to deal with it.

This was my problem. Not theirs.

I sighed again, spat out the last of the shells from my mouth, shoved the empty wrapper back into my storage, and pulled out my journal. A lot had happened yesterday, and I wanted to write it all down while it was still fresh in my mind.

Today’s entry, day six hundred fifty seven of my life, was more of a rambling monologue as I wrote out thoughts on the future. Two pages were filled in before I got fed up and tossed it all back into storage. I had a lot of things I needed to do. They didn’t need doing right away, but the mountain of minor tasks, topics to learn, and skills to acquire was intimidating.

I rubbed at my temples like I was trying to squeeze the stress out of me. The anxiety I had felt on the way to Orlis had mostly left, luckily. This was the common bother of seeing a pile of paperwork on your desk, and knowing that you wouldn’t be able to get it all done before another pile was inevitably added on.

I stood up, ready to start getting shit done, but stopped before I had even taken a step.

“The fuck?”

Something felt… off.

It felt like…

It felt like someone was reading over my shoulder.

It felt like I had reached into my pocket, realized my wallet was missing, and instantly known that I had dropped it somewhere.

It felt like a pack of zombies, that I thought I had thrown off my trail, had just turned up an hour later with all of their friends in tow.

It felt like I had placed the milk in the cupboard, and the cereal in the refrigerator.

It felt like I was being watched.

I looked around in front of me. I looked around behind me.

Most of the nearby people were, or had been, glancing in my direction. I kinda stood out. But nobody was staring at me. I was unusual enough to take notice of, but hadn’t been doing anything unusual enough for them to keep an eye on.

So what, or who, was sending that chill down my spine?

Two years in a necropolis had taught me that any such feeling must be acknowledged until proven false. It had saved my life enough times that I wasn’t about to disregard it now. Even in a world with magic, I generally attributed such sensations to my subconscious mind noticing patterns before the rest of me did, but this one felt freaky in par-fucking-ticular.

I started walking down the road, away from the beach. If this was an earthquake, tsunami, volcano, or random act of some god, I probably couldn’t escape it. If it was a person, which was much more likely, I had at least a little hope of losing them.

After a block, the feeling of being watched hadn’t dissipated, so I took a random side street, followed by a random alleyway. A few turns later, and I still felt like someone was breathing down my neck.

I was in the middle of Random Alley A, in between Generic Buildings B and C. If something was going to happen, now was as good a time as ever.

Nothing happened.

No thugs trying to rob me. No adventurers trying to snatch me. There wasn’t even a stray dog begging for scraps.

Annoyed, I opened my third eye, and looked around to sense what was nearby.

Not much. I was alone. Anyone close was inside, and I would have been able to physically see anyone near any windows that had a vantage point on me.

But something…

I scrutinized my surroundings both physically and mentally.

I made sure not to run as I left the alley, the small road it led to, and the bigger road beyond.

Something was there.

With my mind open, I could see it. It was like I was surrounded by a heat haze.

I closed my senses, and the ripples in the air disappeared. It was warm for the spring, but even this far south it wouldn’t be hot enough for that to have been natural. I reached out again, and the distortion returned.

“What is that?”

I took a step to the left, and it moved with me. I dashed across the street, almost getting run over by a wagon in the process, and still the rippling haze followed, perfectly in sync.

Because I was in the center of it, I couldn’t get a grasp on how large of an area it affected. It didn’t seem to be dangerous, but it was obviously magical, or else I would have been able to see it normally.

“Think Indigo, think! What could be causing this? Fantasy, scifi, videogames, anything.”

Magic? Obviously. I knew that already. Offensive spell? Probably not, or it would have done something by now. Defensive spell? But why? I wasn’t doing anything that needed to be defended against. No, it wasn’t defensive. Illusion? I turned my extra sense on and off to check, but nothing changed aside from the mild blur. So… Probably not illusion.

”Alright. It’s not offensive or defensive, and it’s not actively fucking with you, but something is happening, so ignore the immediate effects. What’s left?”

I appraised the people around me, but aside from the occasional glance or whisper, nothing really stood out. But it still felt like someone was…

“Oh… Oh! Verdis, you sorry sack of crap! Why can’t you just leave me alone?!”

He was scrying me. He was fucking scrying me! I felt like I was being watched because I was being watched. Somewhere, wherever the mages guild was, Verdis was probably in his rooms with a crystal ball, and a close-up of my face in the middle of it.

And there was nothing I could do about it!

The bastard had gone passive-aggressive, and I couldn’t do shit to stop him! I didn’t know any warding spells!

I could dig through a couple of my books and find one, but…

“I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Like hell I was going to give him so much as a glimpse inside my storage!

Like fucking hell I was going to open a guidebook on magic where he could see me!

“God-fucking-dammit!”

He had won! In the contest of “who can give the other person the biggest middle finger,” he had me beaten. Given my recent actions, he must have realized that I had figured out what was going on. I knew what he was doing, and he knew that I knew what he was doing, and I knew that he knew that I knew that I couldn’t stop him!

“Well shit… What now?”

I could toss a boulder through the walls of the mages guild, but I highly doubted that that would be considered socially acceptable. Or legal. Verdis may be a total fuckwad, but that’s not an excuse for me to cause trouble for all the other mages. Mayra was cool. And Anja and Bianca had been pretty damn accommodating in the bedroom department. My argument was with Verdis, not the guild, and I had to keep it that way.

I could try ignoring him, but that would put a halt to all my studies. Knowing that he was looking over my shoulder would mean that I couldn’t do anything that he wasn’t aware of.

Unlike last night, this wasn’t something that I could so easily bullshit my way out of. If I did something about it, I’d be the bad guy, but if I let it continue…

As little as I was beginning to think that my musings could help the empire, Verdis was the last person I wanted to be on their receiving end.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. You still don’t know for sure.”

I knew it was him. Of course it was him. Now that I was under Orlisian law instead of Father Gregor’s, Archmage Verdis was going to use every twist and loophole he had available to get to me.

I didn’t know why he wanted me so badly. I was high quality goods, sure, but this was just taking things further than necessary. He had made his determination clear when he placed the bounty on me though. That thing had been enough for someone to live off of for…

“One, two…”

Ten whole years!

Why me? Why couldn’t he just leave me alone? I was a short-term gain! I didn’t know anything the Ancestor’s didn’t! I knew less!

“You’ve got an entire city worth of stuff to work with! So why are you giving me such a hard time! I helped Mayra bring back enough random shit to keep you guys occupied for years! So why can’t you just leave me the fuck alone?!”

Throwing a boulder, or better yet a lead cannonball, through their walls at mach six was starting to seem less like escalation, and more like proportional response. Verdis just kinda had that effect on me.

“I swear, if I could just put the fear of Indigo into him, he’d never want to look at me again. I just can’t think of a way to do it without ending up in a prison cell.”

Mayra. I had to find Mayra.

She was either at the guild, or she was at home with her uncle. Probably.

“Fucking world without phones. I can’t just… call someone and ask where they are.”

There were spells for that, but until recently, I hadn’t known anyone to try contacting.

I had tried it once back in Peninsula, looking for anyone that may answer, but it hadn’t worked. Why? Because magic is fucking bullshit!

“Goddamn, I swear this world is out to get me. One of these days, I’m gonna go full “dark lord” and when they ask me why, they’ll be all, “Oh. That makes sense.” Goddamn fucking wizards and their goddamn bullshit magic. It’s a good thing Mayra has nice tits, or I’d be pissed at her out of sheer principle.”

I wandered the streets until I found what I was looking for, a smudge of haze that was thicker than the rest. I went another block, just to make sure, and when it pointed in the same direction I walked towards it.

I didn’t know where Mayra lived, but it wasn’t hard to find where she worked. The double layer of distortion from the scrying combined with its source led me straight to the mages guild.

If I didn’t resent Verdis’ very existence, I would have thanked him for making his location so obvious. Instead, I mocked him for making his location so obvious, and pointed a pair of middle fingers to the sky.

The guild itself was exactly as I had expected, while also being what I should have expected

There was a tower, because of course there would be a tower. But there was also a wall, and it was big. Normally, “fence” would have been a better word. It wasn’t really that tall, but its solidness and general aura of “you’re not getting over me” made it into a wall.

It looked like it was made from a single stone, though the thick coat of paint made it hard to tell. It enclosed a compound of an entire block or more, and was curved outward to prevent anyone from climbing it. It must have been enchanted, and for a moment, I was distracted by wondering how often the spell needed to be reinforced just to keep the thing standing.

It was a university. A college. An academy. Naturally, that couldn’t fit into a single building. There was an entire campus in front of me, and in one of its buildings, Verdis was busy pissing me off. Hopefully, Mayra would be here too.

That added a new layer of perspective to it all. If the mages guild was anything like an educational institution, then Archamge Verdis was that annoying professor that all of the students hated because he stopped caring about lessons the moment he got tenure.

Now I just needed to find a way in.

When I had located the front gate, I strode in as confidently as possible. I had heard that people wouldn’t bother you if you looked like you knew what you were doing, but apparently that didn’t apply here.

“Excuse me, Miss.”

I was called out to by a man in a small gatehouse.

“Fucking security guards. Yah, yah. I’ve got horns and pointy ears and big eyes and I’m the finest piece of ass you’ve ever seen. Get on with it.”

“I’m here to see Mage Mayra Damfeld. If you could point me in her direction, it would be much appreciated. If you can’t, point me to someone who can.”

I managed to force out a complete sentence, and it looked like the guard was distracted by my appearance enough that he didn’t notice my struggle.

“Just a moment. Please allow me to check,” he told me before darting inside.

When he returned a few minutes later, he seemed apologetic.

“I’m sorry Miss, but Mage Damfeld is not here today.”

I sighed, and rubbed at my temples.

“Do you know when she will return?” I asked, managing to hide my vocabular difficulties behind my frustration.

“I couldn’t say. Maybe tomorrow?”

“Well, shit.”

It wasn’t like I could lay siege to the place. Storming my way in wouldn’t be acceptable unless I knew for a fact that Mayra was here, and I didn’t.

I thanked the man and left. There wasn’t really anything else I could do at the moment. My choices were just too limited. Maybe it was for the best. The people inside the guild might not have all been my enemies, but this was still enemy territory.

I could either obey societal norms, leave, put up with the invasion my privacy for a while, and try again when I had a plan, or I could start throwing rotten eggs over the walls and hope that one of them just happened to hit Verdis in the face.

“Deal with it it is then.”

I was confident that if push came to shove, I could win. But unless he pushed, I couldn’t shove back.

For now, I could play by his rules, but there was only so long before I stopped playing nice.