Chapter Five: Short Trips

+++++Ezra+++++

When Ezra awoke, it was in his town house back in Fort Wright, Oregon. He was sprawled out on the rug while somebody groaned on the couch behind him. He blinked, realizing that the darkened visor was gone from his eyes, that he was seeing the world as it was. He rolled up to a sit, scratching his head. It had all been a DMT trip - less than an hour had passed in the real world, even though his bizarre trip had felt like weeks and weeks spent in some twisted fantasy realm.

He pulled himself to his feet, noting that his freedom of movement was more restricted than the limber young body he'd imagined he was inhabiting. His back was sore from lying on the floor and some of his joints cracked when he moved them. At least he didn't have a metal plug over his chest or mufflers bolted over his eyes and ears. He chuckled and glanced toward Anna, who was curled up from the couch and coming down from her own trip. He nudged her shoulder and then rolled her over to make sure she was okay.

"Ah!" He helped in surprise.

That wasn't Anna's face at all. It was a broader face with paler skin, though she had the same dark hair. It was… Anise. That was the girl's name. Where did he know her from again?

She smiled and pulled at his chest. "You'd best get going," she said.

"What?"

The pull became an aching throb and it startled him awake. Ezra was in his little chamber and he was being summoned by Fenrik.

+++++Ezra+++++

Ezra was going to escape. He'd escape as soon as he could though, for the life of him, he couldn't imagine how he might pull it off. The moment that Fenrik realized he was gone, he'd shoot as much pain as he could through Ezra's thrall-plug. As far as he knew there was no upper limit on how much pain could be dispensed or in how far away the sorcerer could be and still juke the thing. It might well kill Ezra, but he would rather die than spend his entire life like that.

His entire life might be many decades, for his body was only sixteen. He regarded himself in the dingy little mirror he'd procured. He sometimes picked up discarded things while running errands for Fenrik, and the sorcerer didn't mind Ezra hoarding them in his little room, so long as he didn't catch him carrying them through the house. If he did, there would be punishment. But if he didn't catch Ezra, he'd let him slide - it was a sort of benign neglect, which was about the kindest thing you could say of Anise's uncle.

He regarded the boy in the mirror. Wuhel… that had been the boy's name. A name that was neither Unilog nor Westricht in origin, though he assumed it was from one of the other several human languages. The boy was sixteen, of average height and slender build, though he might yet grow and fill out. There was barely any meat on his bones, though the manual labor that Fenrik put him to was gradually instilling a wiry strength over that slim frame. It wasn't the sort of body that bore fat well, but it was also the sort of body that tended to tear through calories. From what he could see of his face, it was a handsome face, with expressive lips, a medium complexion, and thick ash-blond hair… the curve of his jaw and the point of his chin gave him slightly effeminate appearance, but he didn't particularly mind it. Better that than the square-jawed stubbly face of a traditionally-masculine brute. He was the kind of boy that Anna Glass had pined over back in college.

Tap-tap-tap… tap-tap-tap…

"Come in," he said.

The door was already ajar, so Anise just shuffled in. She didn't bother to check for his chamber pot, on account of it always being clean (if he told her where he usually did his business, she might be surprised) and on account of her wearing trousers. In St. Arbalest - and, from what Ezra gathered, the rest of Medias - women rarely wore trousers. Though these appeared to be riding pants.

"My mother wants to go riding with me before I go. I was making sure they still fit."

"They look a bit loose," Ezra said.

Anise blushed. "I've lost a little weight."

Ezra didn't think she needed to lose weight. She wasn't slim, but slenderness wouldn't befit her. Not in his opinion - it worked well on some women and less well on others. But that was Anise's business and not his, even if he wasn't a slave and she a magistress-in-training.

"You're leaving soon?" He hoped his timbre conveyed his disappointment - without his niece around to keep his crueler instincts in check, Fenrik was likely to make life in the house a living hell.

"Whenever my parents' carriage stops by. Probably an hour or so… I thought I'd give you a present before I go. I put a lot of work into this…"

Without asking, she shuffled around behind him and rummaged around through a little pouch of tools. She eventually found what amounted to a screwdriver - it was different from any Earth screwdriver he'd seen. Essentially, it had two very sturdy prongs that went into two holes in the screw and made it possible to loosen or tighten without ever stripping the screw. The only drawback was that it was relatively easy to bend the prongs, in which case you might need a new screwdriver. Anise's tool was a magical variant that would unscrew in a hurry and with a lot of force. It whirred to life.

"Ah!" Ezra resisted the urge to pull away. She'd just unscrewed one of the bolts holding his ear mufflers into place, unthreading the little screw right out of the bone of his skull.

"Sorry… I should have mentioned that this might hurt. Five screws to go."

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Ezra had no idea what the girl was up to, but he trusted her not to do anything too cruel or foolish. She'd felt bad about getting them both punished and then about getting angry during their punishment in the storage room. He could only guess that whatever she was doing would help with his ear mufflers.

Blood dribbled down the sides of his face. It wasn't too much, just a drip-drip-drip on either side that he had to keep wiping away with a damp rag, lest it stain his shirt and get him in trouble with Fenrik again. When Anise was done unscrewing the mufflers, she gently removed them. The air was cool on his ears and Ezra marveled at the sensation for all of two seconds before the hissing, cracking overstimulation of the ambient noise had him wincing. Somewhere, in some distant corner of the house, Yacha was pecking away at bugs, and each crack was like a jolt to Ezra's brain.

"I… I can't…"

As quickly as she could, Anise inserted something into his ears - smallish ear plugs with a small, bendable wire to hold them in. Immediately, the sound lowered to a tolerable hum, louder and far clearer than what he'd tolerated with Fenrik's inelegant but very permanent mufflers. Then Anise shoved something into his hand.

"What's…"

"It's a healing decoction. Not as good as what Uncle Fenrik can make, but it should heal over the screw wounds and the abrasions within a few minutes."

Ezra gulped down the sour-tasting stuff and made his way to the little mirror. There was a shallow cut all along either side of his head, where the metal of the mufflers had dug into the skin, and deeper circular wounds dribbling blood out from where the screws had been driven into his skull. Almost immediately, Ezra felt a warm buzzing in his ears, like when he'd tried DMT. But this was Anise's decoction doing its work. It wasn't enough to fully heal the wounds, but it was enough to scab them over so they were no longer open and bleeding.

"Did it work?" she asked.

By way of response, Ezra pulled her into a hug and wept. Tears streamed out from the little perforations underneath his welding goggles - those were still very much attached to his face. But it felt like some small part of his humanity had been restored.

"I worked really hard on the sigils for those," Anise said. "They should last for a few days, at which point they'll gradually lose effectiveness and you'll have to either 'borrow' one of Uncle Fenrik's small crystals or try to charge them yourself. They should take even less than your little lighting crystal, so you should be able to manage with them indefinitely."

There was a knock at the front door. Urgency pulsed in Ezra's chest, so he rushed out to see the visitor in. The man at the door was a coachman in impeccable attire, a kao-etema with leathery skin, a bald, bulbous head, and little red eyes.

"The coach for Miss Anise Derrigin has arrived," the man said. He stood at parade rest, his little beady eyes lingering on Ezra with an expression that might have been disdain, the narrow, drawn-on arches of his eyebrows rising up in surprise as he spotted Anise in her riding pants stumbling down the hallway toward her room.

"Shoot… shoot… tell him I'll be a minute!"

"Miss Anise will be out at her earliest convenience," Ezra said.

+++++Ezra+++++

Ezra expected Anise's departure to herald a new and horrible era in his life in the house of Fenrik of Westval. To be sure, it was a new era, but it wasn't really any worse than before. This was mostly because Fenrik had embroiled himself in some new and all-encompassing project and, without his niece there to coax him into eating or bathing, he spent nearly all of his time at it. Ezra's door was hardly ever locked, because Fenrik might summon him in the middle of the night to bring more paper, more ink, more reagents. There were occasional pops or small explosions and the whole upper floor of the house would vibrate, usually followed by cursing. Sometimes, Fenrik would course pain through Ezra simply to channel his anger, but usually he wouldn't.

There was a lot to do outside of the house. For those craftsmen who wouldn't or shouldn’t deliver goods, Fenrik had no issue with sending Ezra out to pick them up, often in dangerous parts of town.

Many of Fenrik's errands sent Ezra up into the Old City. Streetcars didn't run to the Old City, so when his errands required a lot of material transfer, such as when Fenrik ordered five crystal slabs, each of which weighed close to what Ezra did, Ezra could take the coach. He got pretty good at driving the thing around using the six little levers that served as its controls. Most of the time, though, he had to walk.

Walking to the Old City took about half an hour if Ezra walked quickly and was always an interesting experience. There were stinking canals there coming off the river and lots of little bridges crisscrossing over them. Some parts of the district hosted the grand stone buildings of old money, looming estates with gray slate and white marble and great glass windows gone smoky with age. Most of the district had been in decline for decades, and its grand old houses were deteriorating and inhabited by squatters or had been subdivided many times over to where the average tenant had little more space than what Ezra had in his little chamber under the stairs.

The cramped and cobblestone-studded streets were always busy, but there was lots of good stuff to be found in the alleyways. Ezra found a rusted old bicycle of the strange local fashion (with one wheel bigger than the other), and he made a project of gearing and refurbishing the bike for quicker trips across town. One of several of his 'alleyway treasures'.

And outside of those cramped, often dangerous alleyways the makeup of the district was different - there were fewer humans, borrenkin, or kao-alta, three of the 'big four' dominant races that sat atop the city's hierarchy. There were plenty of dorthek, the little gliding dinosaur people, and kao-etema, who were distantly related to the kao-alta but had the look of hairless, half-human mole people and were treated with utter disdain by their more genteel brethren. There were byoun, which appeared to be sentient, humanoid masses of damp swamp grasses. In short, most of the old city was inhabited by the city's undesirables.

"Hey, kid, you looking for crystals?" a woman whispered from a nearby alleyway.

"My master has plenty of crystals," Ezra said.

The woman was an urmal, a member of the fuzzy, wide-eyed lemur race who were native to Yuya-Sasetù, the continent that St. Arbalest was located on. For the most part, they'd been driven from their homelands and were every bit the underclass that the dorthek and byoun were.

"Your master?" Her wide, amber-brown eyes looked Ezra up and down. It was common enough for humans to be servants, but it was rare for them to be shabbily-dressed or to refer to their employers as masters. "You an infernic?"

Ezra nodded and tapped at the thrall-plug beneath his shirt. The woman approached him - she was a full head shorter than him, though her fuzzy limbs were broader. It was said that the urmal were twice the strength of humans but half the speed. In the invasion of their homeland, where the 'civilized' races of the world had wielded advanced magics and firearms, being twice as strong didn't do a whole lot of good, and the urmal had been utterly defeated. She reached into her blouse and handed him a rumpled-up pamphlet.

"You know how to read?"

"I can read," Ezra said.

Plenakton Promises Liberation to Infernics the pamphlet read. Below that was… a recipe? The recipe read 3Z, and Ezra quickly realized that this stood for ziya ziti ziq̂o. A 'demon liberation potion', however such a thing might work. The urman woman pressed the pamphlet into his hand.

"Keep it. Make the potion, or else give the directions to a friend who can. And don't ever let a fucking kao-alta or human…" she spat. "Don't let them see this, or you're cooked. Got it?"

"Got it," Ezra said.

"So… you need crystals?"

Ezra shrugged. "Let's see what you've got."