I was not handling this well.

I couldn’t get my mind to settle on one thought. At first I was mad at myself for yelling at Alice, then I was mad at Alice, then I was frustrated for never learning teleportation magic because it was dangerous but hoo boy is hindsight twenty-twenty, ain’t it?

I found myself in the empty hallway that housed the door to my cabin. The side effect of the attention wards I’d put up was that no one hung around my cabin so I pretty much had this place to myself. I began to pace. My cabin wasn’t big enough to pace in and I really needed an outlet for my nervous energy. I wish I had my punching bag.

The biggest kicker was I never did finish my meditation, and I doubt I would have the opportunity until I got back home. I was way too wound up. Meditation was supposed to help with that but you don’t fucking sit down and be introspective when you’re being fucking hunted.

I paced for a who knows how long. Long enough for the sun to go down. Long enough for me to settle my emotions into a somewhat cohesive whole. I took my fear, anger and frustration—my anxiety and hopelessness and mashed them all into a seething ball of hate. I ended up looking at the door to my room.

“You want me, you three-piece Chuck E. Cheese nightmare? Come and get me.”

I opened the door to my cabin, half expecting something to be standing behind it and more than a little disappointed when I found my normal room waiting for me. I started to prepare a spell similar to the spell I cast to summon my spell book. This was a different dimensional space and it housed the second gift I ever got.

Trix isn’t the only other demon/elder being I’ve summoned, she just happens to be the one most willing to accept my unorthodox payment methods. The first being I summoned happens to be a joy to work with compared to most multidimensional beings, he/she/it just happens to accept very hard to come by payments.

He/she/it only accepts things that are truly unique. Souls aren’t unique, sadly. Most thinking things have a soul.

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He/she/it is called the Orphan. Why they go by that I don’t know. I assume it means that, like the things they accept as payment, they are unique and singular. I had the opportunity to offer the Orphan not one, but two truly unique items and was compensated very well, in my opinion.

What I am doing now is opening the space where I kept one of those items.

Like with my spell book, the impression of a thin line appeared in the air as I finished the incantation. With a grimace I reached inside, feeling the extreme cold leech the moisture from my hand. An instant later the cold was replaced with another, gentler chill, that felt like a hot bath in comparison. I removed my hand from the interdimensional space to reveal a hand covered in roiling, oily shadow.

The shadow split into four pieces, one sticking to my hand while the other three slid across my body to attach to my other hand and feet. I have never been covered in slugs before, but I imagine the sensation was similar to a slug traveling very quickly and dryly across your skin, leaving behind not slime but a trail of utter darkness that went away after a few seconds.

These four pieces of shadow stuff were called the Limbs of the Other Side by the Orphan and they were perhaps the greatest item in my not inconsiderable collection. Limbs of the Other Side is a bit of a mouthful though, so I thought of them as my mitts and socks. They were so valuable that I had gone through the great effort and expense to create a second interdimensional space for them so that I could be assured of their safety and also have relatively easy access to them.

As they settled around my limbs I molded them into normal looking clothing items. For my feet they became very black calf high socks and for my arms I arranged them to look like a long sleeved undershirt, also black. I’d catch some looks as the storm had pushed us closer to the equator and the temperature had risen as a result, but I have a strong suspicion the disposition of the passengers and crew were going to be the least of my worries very soon.

Next I retrieved my spell book (I’m going to have to figure out a way to make these spells more efficient) and brushed up on my defensive and offensive magic. Unfortunately the materials I’d been able to get my hands on were mostly written by vengeful pricks so I had a lot of fairly terrible curses, hexes and what one Frenchmen had called “Spells to render the fat from my enemies while they still drew breath.” (I had tested these out on a coyote corpse I came across and, ah, yeah, it did what it said on the tin.)

I was debating the efficacious-ness of the fat rendering spell on something that likely has no fat when a wave of despair and pain rolled over the ship. All of my worst thoughts and feeling rose in my mind like a tidal wave of mental anguish that snuffed out any other thought like a sharp gust of wind on a candle. Simultaneously, my body lit up as if every nerve in my body had been exposed to a steel wool version of a band saw. I was quite grateful when I passed out.

I awoke a short time later according to my phone. A little over fifteen minutes had passed. All that remained of the strange sensations (aside from a vivid memory I shudder to confront) was a vague lethargy and a tingling sensation similar to when a limb falls asleep across my whole body. A small examination with my Gift of Body (what I called the gift I received from Trix that allowed me to manipulate the various systems and structures of my body) allowed me to determine I was largely unharmed except for a couple of small bruises forming on my knee, wrists, elbow and head from when I fell unconscious.