Old magic

Peter sat down at the table in his small apartment after placing a cup of coffee in front of his friend Victoria.

"How're you feeling?" he asked.

"The same way I have been feeling for the past few days," Tori said. "Empty."

Peter nodded sympathetically.

"I want to help people, Peter," Tori went on. "I was helping. People, animals, anyone in pain. Even after... that. I never stopped wanting to help everyone."

"I know. But what Drea did, Tori, she ruined your life."

"And got away with it. After all," Tori said, "it was just me doing it to myself. And without you, I probably wouldn't have gotten through it. I would've just, I guess, found a way to be lost."

"So there's a silver lining to it."

"I suppose, but that doesn't stop me from feeling empty." Tori took a sip of coffee. "Purposeless."

"How much do you remember?"

"Most of it."

"Then you could probably make a pretty good veterinarian, regardless," Peter pointed out.

"That's true, but I'd have to adjust to, y'know, not just being able to let my patients treat themselves." Tori sounded a bit lost and hopeless.

"I'm sure we'll find something," Peter said reassuringly.

--

You looked in on the conversation. Another consequence of your ascension. When you'd absorbed all the magic in the universe, that had taken with it any number of enchantments, curses, hexes, and the like.

Among those had been a curse placed on a family line long ago, that **** them to be possessed by others in need. Some had turned this to useful purposes, but many had had their lives ruined by it, so unlike other forms of magic, this one you hadn't restored.

That didn't mean the progeny of that curse couldn't be useful, of course.

You'd gotten the revised proposal for the future of Project Inside Out and Project Quicksilver submitted. Just a minor fixing of the future had ensured that they would be approved, and Kelly Lancer would be assigned as the liaison officer, but it would take a little while to go through the relevant people, both from Hideki and from the military. That left you with a little time to gather other pieces for the revitalized projects.

You were growing less uncomfortable with using your abilities to ensure the outcomes you wanted. It still wasn't something you were prepared to do on a regular basis, but you told yourself that as long as you were doing generally good things, it was something you were okay with doing.

Of course, that was by your own standard of "good", which didn't necessarily comport with what others considered good. On the other hand, given what you'd become, your own conceptions of everything were objective truth. Other people might disagree, but at some level they'd know they were wrong, and most would revise their views to avoid the resulting cognitive dissonance.

So it was with that thought in mind that you stood at the door to the apartment building where Peter lived, and punched in the code for his apartment.

"Hello?" he asked.

"Hello," you replied. "I'm Juno Ternion, director of Hideki Labs. I have something I'd like to discuss with someone whom I have good reason to believe is staying with you, a woman named Victoria."

"How did you know that?" he replied suspiciously, but as you'd ensured, didn't just hang up.

"As I said, I'm the director of Hideki Labs. We have very reliable sources of information." You didn't get into just how reliable your personal sources were. "We'd been keeping an eye on Victoria and others like her for a while, and are aware of certain recent events. I have a proposal that I think she'd be very interested in hearing."

"Hold on a sec."

You heard muffled voices in the background as Peter clearly had covered his phone's audio pickup. One voice was his, the other Tori's. You already had decided what their answer would be.

"All right, I'll buzz you in," Peter said after the discussion, "but if there's anything funny about any of this, I'm kicking you right back out."

"I understand," you said. A buzz sounded, the door lock clicked, and Peter hung up.

You jogged up the stairs easily and knocked on their door a few minutes later. You knew they'd looked you up, so you made sure to look like the profile picture on Hideki's website that you hadn't yet updated.

"You'd better have something good," Peter said without preamble after unlocking the door and letting you in. It was clear he wasn't really sure why he was doing all of this.

"Just let me talk to Victoria," you said. "If she doesn't like what I have to say, I'll leave and never bug you again."

Peter nodded, found a third chair, and you sat down in it.

"You must be Juno Ternion," Tori said. "And you say you can do something for me."

"I can, if you'll let me."

"You say you know what happened." Tori's look was questioning. "How?"

You thought for a moment. You weren't going to lie to the woman. The only question in your mind was how to tell her.

Nodding, you decided. Time came to a screeching halt.

Time was as much a part of you as everything else. Its progression was under your direct control, control which you'd shared with others, to an extent, but ultimately, as with everything else, at your absolute discretion. It flowed as and only as you willed it. Its direction and speed, locally or universally, were things you could decide as you saw fit.

You'd chosen, in this case, to freeze it in its tracks. It did not move anywhere in all of existence, except for yourself, for Tori, and for only those few fundamental forces that relied on its passage, such as gravity and electromagnetism. Even light and sound propagation were technically halted, but you demanded that the two of you still be able to see, speak, smell, think, and it was so. The universe had become a fundamental contradiction at your command, but at your command logic itself yielded to your inexorable will.

Making sure Tori wouldn't completely shut down at the alien conditions, you said, "I happened, Victoria."

She was still scared and confused, of course. "What do you mean, you happened?"

You told Tori an abbreviated version of events, not the full story as you had with Kazumi, but enough so that she knew that you were why she was no longer cursed, no longer able to channel others' consciousnesses into her body. No longer able to help as she once had. No longer a potential victim for anyone with a personal grudge.

"So you did this," she said as the information sank in.

"I did this," you agreed.

"And so, what? Are you here to restore it?"

"No. Nobody should have to go through what you did. You especially didn't deserve it. Nobody does."

"So then what? Are you just here to tell me why I'm useless now? How does that help?"

"The curse that was placed on your ancestor wasn't purely magical, Victoria. It altered all of you at a genetic level, too, making your brains more conducive to understanding different thought patterns."

"I also changed in other ways when I'd channel," Tori said. "I know that."

"That was another part of it," you agreed. "But it's your brain that makes you the perfect person to help with Hideki's new projects."

Instead of asking about the project, though, Tori said, "Why are you doing all of this, anyway? If what you said is true, couldn't you just, you know, do it? Why go through this whole process?"

"I could," you admitted, "but, put simply, you aren't ready for that. People--not just humans, everyone in the universe--aren't ready to know that there's another being out there who controls everything, whose will overrides their own, overrides reality itself, no matter what they might want. I could make you accept it, **** the issue, but that's not something I want to do. I'll tell the people I need to tell, and ensure that nobody else finds out, but that's as far as it goes. Acting openly would just invite instability that ultimately could only be ended by irresistible ****. Much better to let things proceed as usual, with the occasional nudge."

Tori nodded. "So if I decided to help your project, what would I be doing?"

"I'm planning to redevelop the technology that resulted in me toward purely medical applications. However, as we're dealing with sentient beings, I won't have them put in situations they don't want to be in. For full bodysuits and human-size slimes, who can communicate normally, this isn't an issue. But even the smallest bandages and gels we'll develop have to possess some intelligence, and they're every bit as deserving of a say in what they do."

"So you need to be able to communicate with them," Tori concluded.

"Exactly. The alterations that the enchantment effected in your brain mean that given a way of establishing a mental connection between you and any other being, you can communicate directly with them."

"So you'd want to use me to get consent from your... products."

"That would certainly be part of it," you admitted, "but by studying your brain patterns during communication, the neuroscientists and software engineers who will be on the project should be able to develop other means of replicating what your brain has already built in."

"And then what? Once you don't need me and my brain, wouldn't I just be surplus to requirements?"

"Of course not. They'll never be sure that their program is flawless, but I know that curse was. You'll still be needed, if for no other reason than to randomly double-check the results of the tech."

"I guess it's nice to be needed," Tori said, though she clearly wasn't all that enthused at ultimately just being a backup.

"It's not just for the medical projects," you went on. "This will allow us to replicate what you were doing before this, at least insofar as communicating with animal brains is concerned." You outlined the ideas you'd suggested to Kazumi. "Every single one is going to require its own program, and you'll at least get some of the experience you used to have, and will be contributing toward doing what you did before."

"I wasn't just communicating," Tori pointed out. "And, well, I liked the other parts of it, too. When it went well."

"You liked how your body changed."

"Yeah. I wish I could've stayed in some of those bodies, at least for a little while afterward."

You knew that was something Tori hadn't admitted to anyone else, even Peter. But people knew implicitly that you knew everything about them, right down to the deepest, darkest secrets that they might not even have fully admitted to themselves. So they were much more willing to talk about them with you, even if they'd only just met you, and the more so as time went on and everything adjusted further toward being nothing more than an extension of your consciousness.

"Body alterations are a potential application of the technology that we'll be exploring down the road. It was theoretically possible with the original project, but required the introduction of significant replacement mass to have the alterations persist. But it's possible to build a bodysuit with built-in fusion microreactors, and a slime that can convert the energy perfectly into matter."

"Another place where you're just gonna nudge, I take it."

You shrugged. "It's much more satisfying to think you've done something on your own than to know it was done for you."

"How long until the project moves to that stage?"

"Not for quite a while, at least not so far as widespread deployment is concerned. But..." You draw the word out. "There's no reason you can't be involved with testing prototypes." You smile. "Or at least that's all anyone else will ever need to know."

"Are you saying..." Tori didn't want to finish the sentence.

"I'll transform you to your heart's content and pay you for the privilege."

Tori sat back, was silent for a moment. "I'm in... if you give me a taste of that first."

"Any particular body you'd like to try again?"

"Take your pick. You should know what I like best."

You nodded. Tori's body shifted under your command. Tufted ears sprouted from the top of her head, even as she grew a little taller and her muscles became a bit more defined. Her butt plumped up substantially, while her breasts simply grew, and grew, and grew, until they overflowed her lap substantially. Finally, from her tailbone, five extraordinarily fluffy tails sprouted, spreading out behind her.

"This is the body I had when I helped that vixen rescue her cubs, though my breasts weren't nearly this big," she said. "She was so concerned for them. And it felt so right to be her, be like this."

"Because you're like her. You're strong, you're confident, you know what's right. You set yourself on a goal and you attain it. You use all the tools you have to do it. This body reflects who she was on the inside," you said, "but it also reflects who you are. That's why it felt so right."

Tori considered your words, then said, "I think that's a load of shit."

You raised your eyebrows.

"Not the part about this reflecting me or her. That's true enough, probably. But it's full of shit when it comes to why you chose this body for me."

"Then why did I choose it, Victoria?"

"You chose this body, Dr. Ternion, because you want to get me in bed looking like this."

You had to order reality itself to ensure that Tori wouldn't notice your flush as her words hit the mark. "I'll admit I wouldn't rule it out, if you wanted that."

"I prefer my partners to have something a little... harder," Tori said.

You shrugged. "There's plenty of ways I could arrange that, too."

"Then maybe I'll ask you one day."

"If you want to explore for a little while, I don't mind," you said. "After all, I've got all the time I could possibly need."

"I think I can wait until later," Tori said. "Like I said, I'm in. I'll sign the papers right here, right now, if you have them."

"You should probably explain things briefly to Peter. After all, you're going to have to move to Spiral City for this, though Hideki will arrange suitable accommodations."

"I take it I won't be able to tell him about you."

"Only what little you already knew from Hideki's website."

Tori nodded, and you reverted your changes to her body. Very briefly freezing her in place while ensuring that both of you were in the exact same pose you were when you'd stopped time, you unfroze it.

"Hideki has quite a lot more information than most know," you said, in answer to the question Tori had asked just before you froze time. "We're aware of what you were able to do, and that you can no longer do it."

Peter asked, "So what are you suggesting?"

"To give Victoria a job at Hideki where she can help with projects on which her previous experiences will prove invaluable."

You gave a much briefer outline of the possibilities of communicating with sentient bandages and gels.

"It sounds interesting to me, Dr. Ternion," Tori said, having to play ignorant. "I'm certainly interested, and, well, it's not like I've got much more than just me to move."

"You sure about this?" Peter asked.

"What have I got to lose, Peter? If Dr. Ternion's on to something, I'll get to feel useful again. I'll get to do something like what I used to."

"It's your call," Peter agreed. "I just don't want you getting hurt again."

"I take personal responsibility for the safety and well-being of everyone on my teams. I wouldn't put someone in a dangerous situation unless I was sure they were as well-informed of the risks as they could reasonably be and had fully agreed to assume them."

"I want to do this, Peter," Tori said. "I think... I need to do this."

Peter acquiesced, and you pulled out a laptop from your briefcase and modified a standard Hideki employment contract to include what you'd discussed with Tori. He gave you the guest password for his apartment's wireless network and a few minutes later Tori had signed on the line.

"Send me an email with the details of when you want to leave and I'll get the flight chartered. Hideki will spare no expense for such a unique employee, after all."

All three of you stood. "It's been a pleasure to meet you and I look forward to working with you, Doctor," Tori said, extending a hand, which you shook.

Peter extended his hand. "I'm glad you came, Dr. Ternion," he said. "I didn't think Tori would ever find something to replace what she'd lost."

"I'm glad I came. It's not every day I get to meet someone with such an interesting life experience, even if discussing it fully will have to wait until later."

Peter walked you to the door.

"Oh, before I forget," you said, stepping around him to give an envelope to Tori. "As promised in the contract. Do something nice for yourself, OK?"

Tori slid the cheque out, nodded at the amount. "I will, Doctor."

"Call me Juno. I don't want to stand on formality with my specialists, Victoria."

"Then please, Juno, call me Tori."

With that you nodded and left, Tori already excitedly talking in general terms about what she'd be doing--the details were covered by an NDA you were personally enforcing--and once in the stairwell you teleported back to Zoe and Chloe's old lab at Hideki. You'd been putting it off, but with the rest of the pieces in place you were going to have to figure this out at last.