(Strive 10:2)

As I stared at the nightmarish jar of compressed organs, the grass below me began to smolder from my burning aura.

“Guess the cat’s out of the body bag,” Mia mused. “Pickpocket, huh? A spell that allows you to steal from people's inventories… that could be a useful addition to my collection.”

“I knew something was fishy as soon as you started flirting with Xavier,” El said, crouching into a low stance before adding for my benefit, “No offense.”

Mia began to laugh, a light and carefree sound. “I like you, funny raccoon. Maybe I’ll keep you around. I’ve always wanted a pet—a non-human one, I mean.” Before I had time to parse this, she continued. “Maybe I did come on a biiit too strong. But in my experience, guys like you can be pretty dense, so I’d rather lay it on thick.”

“Guys like me?” I said. “Actually, forget it. I don’t want to know. What’s more important is this… corpse jar.” I glanced at it and retched. “You’re a monster. What did you do?”

“Rude,” she said. “Didn’t anyone teach you about not yucking other people’s yums?” Casually, she undid a knot in her left sleeve, and a second bracelet, this one dark green, fell down to her wrist. When she looked back up at me, her eyes had turned heterochromatic; each iris matched its kada’s color, so that the left one was forest green and the right burned a deep indigo.

I hadn’t imagined it after all.

“Whoever’s body’s stuffed in this jar… you killed them and stole their bracelet,” I said. “Using your teleportation ability, the same one you used to snatch us from the elevator.”

“Not bad,” Mia smiled prettily. “But it was his kada that had the teleportation ability. Yao was his name. Honestly, he brought his fate on himself, the poor guy. All I had to do was encourage him. A sultry look here, a warm touch there. Wasn’t long before he’d follow me anywhere, do anything for me. Even take off his bracelet in a moment of passion…”

The woman was enjoying herself, I realized. She didn’t have to tell us any of this, but she was luxuriating in it. Smoke curled from the bark of the tree behind me, and I shifted to avoid setting it alight.

“It’s not quite teleportation, by the way. His ability only exchanges the positions of two living things. Not as convenient, and requires a bit more preparation, but it's still pretty potent. Now, here’s a pop quiz for you.” With a flourish, she pulled another jar from her inventory, with a small frog in it.

“What do you think would happen if I swapped someone with this frog?”

El let out a frightened whimper and hid behind my leg. Rank-smelling steam rose up from the bottom of my aura.

“The Egyptians used to preserve their pharaohs in canopic jars,” Mia continued in a conversational tone. “They considered it a high honor; the more lavish the receptacle, the better. My seller assured me these are made of the finest adamant-glass. Put against a normal human body, they’ll win ten times out of ten. Oops—” she paused, “I guess I spoiled the answer.”

“Didn’t work on me, though,” I said.

Her left hand’s fingers danced. “That’s what the second bracelet’s for, silly,” she replied as her other wrist-ring glowed.

An aura the color of jade blossomed from her body, and she disappeared. I looked up and she was dropping onto me with her leg outstretched in an axe kick. I met it with a reinforced forearm, and the clash of our auras rang like steel meeting steel, before she flipped backwards and landed with a gymnast’s poise.

“Don’t suppose you’ll tell us what this one does.” I eyed the glowing ring. “Since you were so good as to monologue about the other.”

Mia tapped her cheek with a finger as if considering it. “Hmm… I think it’s more fun if you figure it out yourself. But nice try—”

A crackle of explosions appeared where she was standing, filling the air with a smell of sulfur.

“Good one, El,” I said. Glancing down, I saw that El’s teeth were bared, her udjat sparking with blue light while her hands held the last position of the Firecracker spell. But as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the woman.

“—as I was saying, nice try.” Mia dangled upside down from a tree branch above, shirt dropping to expose her bare midriff. “Gotta be faster than that.”

With a twist of her right hand, she vanished again. Then, I was the one in the tree, and not being as agile as she was, I fell out and landed roughly on the ground. I spun to see that she’d clutched El in her grip, holding the snarling raccoon at a distance from her face.

“You swapped us,” I groaned.

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“Sharp as a ta—ow!” El had managed to sink her teeth into Mia’s hand. “Bad raccoon,” she said, before flinging El’s body against a tree with a sickening crunch. El fell senseless to the ground, and Mia raised her hand and grimaced at the bite marks. “Did you ever get it checked for diseases? Rabies is no joke.”

The smoldering grass around me burst into flames. I ran at her, but she conjured a short blade and stabbed through my aura multiple times, her hand a blur of motion, before spinning away.

I looked down and saw dots of blood. The shield had blocked the worst of it, thankfully. I turned to strike her—

—and felt my vision go double and my joints stiffen. My knees buckled and I sagged to the ground, suddenly weak.

“Feeling a bit woozy?” Mia asked, sheathing her knife carefully. “They call it belladonna. A good dose of it’ll make you hallucinate, paralyzed and delirious. Fun fact—” and here she gave me a playful grin “—they used to use it as an aphrodisiac.”

I stared daggers at her through the red haze of my shield as she shed hers.

She sighed and put out an inviting hand. “Come on,” she coaxed. “Don’t be so stiff with me. Take off that shield.”

“If…” I fought against the poison to speak. The world felt wavy and indistinct.

She leaned toward me to hear, her chimeric eyes alight with interest. “If? If what?”

I moved my lips and fingers with an effort. “If you insist.”

My aura detonated right in her face, and at once the forest became a searing firestorm. I fell to the ground, crawling under the smoke to find El. I picked her up, scooping the corpse jar into my inventory. My limbs didn’t want to obey, but I forced them to move. Without Harden activated, I sweated and choked in the heat as I escaped from the clearing in a lurching run, without looking back.

I don’t remember how long I ran in that dim half-light, while laughing eyes seemed to lurk in the shadows, taunting me at every turn. My mind swam in the confusion of the belladonna poison.

I tried to shield myself again, but my fingers spasmed uselessly from the poison. Unable to cast Harden, I took more cuts—leaves and branches slicing like blades, snicker-snack—and began to bleed freely. Every so often, I had to stop to let out a hacking, smoke-filled cough. When at last I stumbled ungracefully from the darkness out into rolling hills and sunlight, I almost cried in relief.

The sun crested the horizon like a great breaching whale. A cylindrical city sat like a giant can of Chef Boyardee amid a grassland that gyred and gimbled. A squirrel periscoped its head up, then rippled nervously across the prairie. Trees dreamed their furious green dreams. All was vivid and bright.

“Beautiful,” I tried to say, but coughed out silvery dust instead. I frowned. That seemed rather bourgeois of me.

Important-looking words swam up to my face, but they were all funny, like they had been written in that old font Wingdings. I waved them away impatiently. I didn’t feel like reading right now. I wanted to rest by the trees and dream together, but as I stepped toward them, I almost dropped what I was carrying.

It was some kind of rodent, taking shallow breaths in its sleep. “It’s okay, weird big mouse,” I said, stroking its fur. “We’re okay now. Everything’s gonna be copacetic.”

I collapsed with my back against an old oak tree, closing my eyes as it spoke to me.

“Yes,” I said to the tree, “that’s very wise.”

Check your status, said the oak, rustling its leaves.

“I don’t want to. I want to sleep.”

An acorn fell on my head. I sighed and brought up my hand, then stared at it, stupefied. It was covered in red X’s like a flunked school exam.

Another acorn fell on my head. Check status. Examine.

“Okay, okay,” I wiggled my fingers, and words bloomed across my vision like red roses.

HP LOW BLD HALLU

The characters didn’t make any sense. “Well, HALLU to you as well, I suppose.” I waved up at the oak, then squinted. Was it just me, or was the sky darkening? Hadn’t it just been sunrise? But now it seemed like late afternoon, and that meant Mom was going to be home soon…

“Good afternoon, good evening, and good night,” I murmured, as darkness overtook me.

----------------------------------------

“Xavier!”

My first kindergarten roll call with the warm and kindly Mrs. Grier, she’d called my name out half a dozen times before I recognized it. She’d looked at me with some concern before moving onto the next name, and I remembered wondering why she said it so strangely, so differently than I’d heard it from Mami and Dedi.

Years later, in a college linguistics course, I learned that the phonotactics of my parents’ native tongue—the sounds their mouths were trained to produce—precluded them from properly speaking my name. As a kid, I’d just been confused that they’d chosen a name for me that they couldn’t pronounce.

In those good old days, I’d rush home after school and throw Skies of Arcadia up on the big CRT in the living room. I was too young to understand the gameplay, but I loved piloting Vyse’s airship across the vast biomes of the world, feeling like a fantasy hero. The loyal crew, the feeling of freedom, the quest to save the world: all of that was an appealing escape from suburban mediocrity.

One afternoon, I heard the great droning sound from the garage door that announced my mom’s arrival—much earlier than normal. Six p.m. was her usual time, but the microwave clock showed barely half past three. I scrambled to shut off the Dreamcast, flipped to a random page of the math textbook, and made myself look busy.

Maybe it was the somewhat frantic look in my eyes, or the fact I’d flipped to a chapter we hadn’t gotten near to covering yet. Whatever the case, she knew, as attentive parents always do. She reached under the Dreamcast console, and I cringed as her expression told me she felt the residual heat from my hours-long session.

“Xavier,” she said. “You know our rule.”

A mother’s love made her hold back, but it still hurt as the belt landed on my rear with a thwacking sound. HP LOW. Meaningless words came to me from another reality, bizarre and disorienting.

I tried to harden myself to the pain as the blows rained down. HP LOW. HP LOW. HP CRITICAL.

She was yelling at me, calling me a sneak and a liar. But every time she cursed my name, Xavier, it sounded like the word Savior instead.