25. Erosion (Patreon)

It takes a minute for me to register that the smashing noise and clatter of ceramic is because I just punched a hole in the bathroom wall.

I barely even felt it. My chitinous knuckles and feet can feel things, certainly, but the sharp shards of hard-fired clay would hurt a human hand, and the lack of pain—even the dull kind of pain I'd expect from punching a wall without breaking it—causes a few seconds of confused disconnect as my rage-fueled brain catches up with reality. I broke a wall. I didn't even cast any magic! Which I suppose is fortunate, because a pipe ultimately stopped my fist and I do not want to bust a water main before school. The metal pipe seems… fine, I think? I gave it a pretty solid hit, but I'm either not strong enough to mess up metal or the wall itself took enough impact to save it.

Still, though. This is, uh, pretty bad. I hear footsteps approaching from down the hall before someone knocks on the bathroom door.

"Hannah!" my mother calls out. "Are you okay? What was that noise?"

"I-I'm fine!" I answer, jolting a little at the sound. I direct the water away from the hole in the wall, do a quick rinse and shut the shower off. "I, uh, tripped? And accidentally broke the wall?"

"You what!?"

"I'm sorry! I fell!" I lie, the fear of having to lie hopefully making it sound more real.

"Let me see."

"Let me get dressed first!"

I quickly extract myself, drying off and bundling up in my clothes before unlocking the door and letting my increasingly-impatient mother in.

"Oh, God," my mother swears, pulling back the shower curtain to survey the damage. "You sure you're not cut anywhere?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, I got lucky," I lie. "I'm sorry."

"Take your gloves off, let me see," she orders. "Why are you wearing gloves indoors anyway?"

I swallow, instinctively taking a step back.

"I… I just want to," I answer my heart beating like crazy.

She frowns at that.

"Let me see," she insists.

"No mom, don't be weird," I press. "I'm fine."

"Hannah…"

"I said I'm fine!" I snap, regretting the shout the moment it leaves my mouth. My mother's eyes narrow.

"Do not raise your voice with me, young lady," she intones. "That's not going to get you out of this. Do you think I'm stupid? Do you think I can't see that something is going on?"

She steps towards me and I take another step back, my body reflexively scrunching down, my hands grabbing onto my sleeves to hold them in place. Just in case. She's not going to touch me, right? She knows better than to touch me. I just… I can't take this. Not now. Not with everything going on. I glance away, unable to meet my mother's blistering gaze.

"Hannah," she says, a little calmer this time. "Look at me."

I hesitantly glance back up again. My mother doesn't look mad anymore. She looks… worried.

"Hannah, have you been hurting yourself?"

I blink, caught off guard by the unexpected question.

"I… what?"

"How did you get these scars on your face?" my mother asks. Oh, shoot. I forgot. They're light enough to be hard to see, but there are definitely still scars from my wounds all over my body, even the parts without skin. Chitin heals weirdly.

"I… I don't know," I lie lamely.

"Hannah," my mother frowns, clearly not buying it. "If… if you're not going to talk to your father and I, you should at least talk to a therapist."

I go stiff. She… what!? This is her way to get me to open up, isn't it? Because she knows, she knows I'm not going to… how dare she. How dare she!? What kind of bullshit false dichotomy is she supplying here!? I just found out my f—my travel companion is a Goddess-damn mind rapist, I am not dealing with my mom pressuring me on this bullshit by threatening to make me go back to therapy.

"No," I hiss.

"Hannah, please, your father and I have been talking. You've been avoiding us more and more, and now you won't even show us your face! I—"

"I'm going to school," I growl, stepping away from her.

"Oh, no you don't," my mother fires back. "Stop right there, young lady."

I pause, a decade and a half of well-trained fear of her tone ringing through what's left of my bones. I don't turn around to face her, but I stop.

"I don't know why you're getting angry at me but I'm not having it," my mother snaps. "You do not get to raise your voice. You do not get to be rude. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, mother," I seethe.

"All I want, all I am asking, is to see if my daughter is okay. Is that unreasonable? Is that something that warrants me being yelled at?"

"No, mother."

"Then show me."

I take a deep breath, forcing myself with every ounce of my strength to stay calm, to not hiss or bite or brandish my extra bladed limbs at her. The claws on my toes puncture clean through the foam protecting my socks, digging gouges into the carpet below me. Hopefully they won't be large enough to notice.

"...I'd rather go to therapy," I say, barely getting the words out.

I'm not looking at her but I can feel my mother's surprise, the shape of her shocked expression, alongside the positions of the rest of my family. The way my brother waits behind the door to his room for this awkward conversation to end. The way my father pretends to be asleep on the couch downstairs. My house is quiet. Honestly, it feels like a silly, stupid thing to shock people with. I'm mutating into a monster, I have real actual magic, I've killed four different people and eaten their corpses, I got mugged yesterday and nearly killed myself, and yet out of all the absurdities in my life, this manages to shake my family. This is still the baseline for 'surprising' that they live on. I probably wouldn't have had the courage to say those words if my life hadn't tossed me around so hard that my standards for stress shot through the roof and out of the atmosphere, but I did. Just to buy myself another week, maybe another couple days, before I actually have to face the real problems. If this gets my mom off my back right now, then I'll do it. And it will get her off my back, I know that. I can talk to her and dad, or I can talk to a therapist. That's what she offered. She just can't believe I chose a therapist, and I can hardly blame her.

She's the attorney that put my last one in prison, after all.

"I… okay," my mother nods. "If you're sure you can't talk to us, we'll respect that. And we will make sure you get the best, most trusted therapist we can possibly find, Hannah. There will be no chance of any problems. I promise. We'll help, okay? We love you."

I nod, and respond with the most commonly-spoken lie in my life.

"Love you too."

I don't hate my family. At worst I mildly dislike them, and even that feels ungrateful considering how much they've done for me. My biggest problem with them is just that they feel entitled to my time and attention, and arguably they are. It's certainly the argument they would make, anyway, and from a utilitarian standpoint I have to admit that the amount of suffering I go through by being around them is usually nil, and the amount of suffering my mom seems to go through when she doesn't get time with my brother and I is pretty substantial. She cares, she loves us, she goes out of our way to help us, and I should honestly be putting up with her more.

But I don't like her. I don't like my brother, either. My father can be okay just because he doesn't usually push me on things, but I still don't love him. I don't know why, but I've never had the sort of instinctive care that people are supposed to have for their family. If not for the fact that I live with them all, they are all the sort of people that I wouldn't even bother to remember the names of. None of them are interested in any of the things I am interested in, none of them even understand any of the things I like or want or feel, and my mother in particular has spent a large amount of her life subtly insisting that the things I like and want and feel are maybe not the best for me. Have I ever thought about going outside and engaging more in real life, she asks. It's not healthy to look at a screen all day, she insists. Take up a sport, make new friends, go camping with us, go to the beach, go and do all these normal things that normal people like, you'll surely like them too if you just give them a chance. It will make you so much happier and healthier to pretend to be someone you're not. Mother knows best.

So I fake it. I'm good at faking it. But that's all I am around my family: a fake. If not for Brendan I'm not even sure if I'd know what the real me is like. I sometimes wonder if I'm somewhere on the autistic spectrum like he is. Maybe that's why we get along so well, understand each other when no one else seems to. Thing is, I'm way better at faking it than he is. Am I neurodivergent enough to claim the title if I'm spending all day very successfully acting normal? If I have that capability, isn't that what being normal is?

I don't know. I feel like I'm a pretty empathetic person, but if other people aren't faking the way they seem to like the world as-is, I certainly don't have any intellectual or emotional understanding why. I'm not sure I want to have any.

"...Get me some plastic wrap and tape so your brother can shower?" my mother asks.

"Okay," I nod, and head downstairs to do exactly that. Wordlessly, I return with the materials she needs to patch things up, then head back downstairs and storm out of the house. With my dad resting in the living room, I don't want to go through the stress of hiding the fact that I've been eating raw eggs every morning. Better to go hungry. I trudge out to the bus stop with fury and resentment bubbling in my veins. I have real problems to worry about. Namely, 'how do I stop somebody with mind magic from continuing to mess with my head?'

I suppose the first option would be to kill him.

I shudder, my extra limbs flexing inside my shirt and scraping up against my skin. No. I won't do that. I know I won't do that, not just for moral reasons but because I don't think I have it in me. When the chips aren't down, when lives aren't in danger, when raw mortal terror isn't fueling my every movement, could I kill a person? I know that I'm the kind of coward to kill when my life is in danger, but I'm also the kind of coward to hesitate in every situation outside of that. Sindri probably knew that. That's why he was training me, encouraging me to hunt and to fight. He needs me to be a killer if he wants me to kill the Chaos mage for him.

I wonder: how much was planned? How much was staged? How much of my adrenaline-fueled murders was me firing the gun, and how much was him curling my fingers around the trigger? Was that cast of Friends the first time he directly controlled my mind? Or has every interaction with him been tainted, been him digging his claws deeper into my brain? Goddess, when You spoke that word with his lips I fell apart like a flower in a storm, trusting beyond trust that he'd never do wrong by me. I felt so weak and stupid and foolish for even thinking a bad thought about him that I threw all those thoughts away. In that moment, with that magic, he was more important to me than Brendan.

I flex my claws, terror and fury swirling together in a dangerous torrent. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I can kill him after all.

"Hannah," someone says, and I turn on them, hissing in warning. I can feel the air pass up my throat, warping and twisting into impossible noises before passing between my teeth. My extra limbs twitch, my talons gouge. But of course, it's just Brendan. He holds up his hands in surrender, keeping a respectful distance, and I calm down as best I can.

"Brendan," I sag slightly. "Hey. Sorry."

"Maybe you should just like… face this direction while you wait?" he suggests. "I promise I'm not trying to sneak up on you."

"Honestly, I'm not sure why you startled me," I admit. "My spatial sense is starting to kick in over on this side of things. I guess I'm just really distracted."

"Oh yeah?" Brendan asks. "Whatcha been up to?"

"Contemplating murder," I growl.

His face goes blank, defaulting to his usual unreadable expression. From anyone else, I'd be worried about being judged.

"Are you okay?" Brendan asks before anything else.

"Physically? Yes. By basically any other metric? No."

"But in a different way from usual," Brendan clarifies.

"Yes, in a different way from usual," I confirm, rolling my eyes. "Remember the Pneuma mage I travel with on the other side? Sindri?"

"Please tell me it's not mind control," Brendan sighs.

"It's definitely mind control."

"Fuck."

"Yeah," I confirm. "That's about where I'm at. He seemed all nice and normal for most of the trip, but then he goes and does something sus and the moment I call him out on it, he hits me with a spell called 'Friends.'"

"What, like the D&D spell?" Brendan asks.

"Uh… I don't know," I admit. "Maybe? When he invoked the Goddess to cast it, I just… stopped thinking he was capable of doing wrong, basically. And it lasted the rest of the day! I only figured things out when I woke up this morning. It either wore off or it doesn't affect both of my bodies."

"So you're worried you'll be mind controlled again when you go to sleep tonight. Okay. Yeah, that's pretty scary."

"I genuinely, actually thought he was my friend," I seethe. "Like, I thought he was my friend before the mind r… mind control. Or at least before the obvious mind control, who knows what sort of messed-up stuff he was doing to my head without me ever noticing. And I just… I don't know what to do about it! He just has to say one word, Brendan. One word and I'm a f-freaking slave!"

The bus arrives then, and it's only at that point that I realize I'm shaking. I'm not sure if it's anger or terror. Both, I guess. I'd been betrayed, I'd been violated, free will and independent thought stripped out of my brain like wrapping paper from a shiny new present. Everything I thought I knew about someone I thought I trusted has been thrown into doubt. As Brendan and I get onto the bus, a thousand paranoid fears flit through my mind. Are Teboho and Kagiso okay? Have they been slaves this whole time? Is their village even destroyed? What if those 'bandits' weren't bandits?

"Shadowruns, huh?" Brendan mutters.

"Huh?" I blink.

"Oh, uh. There's a tabletop game called Shadowrun, and the setting is pretty dystopian. The party are generally supposed to be a group of mercenaries who usually do jobs for like… evil megacorporations? And about ninety percent of the time whatever job you're on is a trick, a setup, something designed to cover up a far worse situation than you could have ever anticipated. And once that happens enough times, the players start to get paranoid. They see problems and threats everywhere. But it doesn't actually get any easier to figure out the truth just because you're freaking out about knowing that you've been lied to."

I blink, taking a moment to parse the analogy.

"...What are you saying I should do, exactly?" I ask.

"Focus on taking care of yourself. You can't stop the bad guy if you're not safe. So let's make a plan around that, and figure everything else out later."

"There's not much to plan," I grumble. "I figure the moment I wake up I'm either already caught or I have a few moments to act before Sindri notices I'm not under his control. I am very tempted to just slit his throat, but I'll probably try to run."

"Can you cast his spell first?"

"What? No."

"Why not?" Brendan presses. "It's Pneuma-aligned, you can learn Pneuma spells, and you heard the incantation."

"It's not that easy, Brendan," I insist. "Like, firstly, even if I could do that it'd be astronomically weaker than Sindri's version and might not even do much. But secondly and most importantly, I am not at all confident I understand the spell well enough to mess with it, and I am not risking a miscast. Miscasts are horrifying."

"Uh. Hmm. Last time we talked you seemed kind of laissez-faire about them? But you also said Sindri was scared of miscasts, so uh. This entirely reasonable caution you have strikes me as a red flag. You sure you don't need to be stuck into master-stranger containment?"

"Into what? Wait, you think I'm compromised? No, I just… oh. Oh, beans. I forgot to tell you about Saturday."

"I'm not going to like this, am I?" he sighs.

"Well I almost killed someone, then I almost died, and also Autumn knows about me. Kind of."

He rests his face in his hands as I spend the rest of the bus ride explaining the mugging and subsequent aftermath, though I leave out the bits about Autumn having DID since I think she wants that private. I'm up to the part where she's kind and thoughtful enough to come back with a bunch of extra chicken when we arrive at school and have to part ways for first period. Gosh, what the heck even is my first period? It feels like it's been forever since I last went to school. Uhh… it's an A-week, I think? And Monday? So I guess I'm going to… English? Sure, that sounds right. I head for my first class of the day, my mood rapidly dropping as my proximity to Brendan decreases.

For once, I not only fail to pay attention in class but I fail to do anything productive in it either. English comes and goes with my brain doing nothing but being a jittery, paranoid wreck. What do I do when I close my eyes tonight? Fight or run? Fucking Sindri's been putting so much effort into teaching me that it's okay to kill, so maybe I should take him up on that lesson! …No. No, the fact that he's trying to turn me into a killer is just all the more reason to spite him. I don't want to give him a victory like that, no matter how pyrrhic. I should just run away. But… wait. If I run, what happens to Kagiso and Teboho? Crap, crap, crap!

I'm panicking so hard that I barely even register Autumn's presence when I sit down next to her in biology class. I'm vaguely aware that she jumps a little at my arrival, tensing up, but I only really consciously acknowledge these facts when she clears her throat and I jolt, my chair making a sharp screeching noise across the floor as I nearly fall out of my seat. She returns the wide-eyed look I give her with one of her own.

"A-autumn!" I stutter. "Oh, gosh, I'm sorry, you nearly gave me a heart attack. I'm just… jumpy, sorry. Um, are you…?"

She fishmouths a little, opening and closing her jaw without saying anything. Class will start in a minute or two, so now is a pretty bad time to have an in-depth discussion about anything, but if this is Alma (and it kind of seems like she's Alma) then she probably has no idea what happened Saturday other than the fact that I know about Jet. She just continues staring at me, though, so I guess I have to start the conversation on my own.

"Um… sorry," I chuckle awkwardly, scratching my cheek. "It's… Alma, right?"

Her breath catches. Her expression quickly shifts from confusion and surprise to utter dread. She turns away from me, and I know I somehow fucked up really, really hard.

"Don't call me that," she mutters. "Not here."

"Oh," I answer softly. "Okay, I won't. I'm sorry."

She doesn't respond. Class begins, and the number of things to distract me and freak me out have doubled so I'm not exactly any better at paying attention. My time is split between freaking out about maybe losing Autumn as a friend (or friends) forever, and freaking out about upping my murder status from 'under duress' to 'first degree.' Suffice to say I am not having a great day. Once my second class ends, it takes everything I have to work up the courage for a single question.

"Um… wanna talk at lunch?" I ask Autumn.

"No," she answers, and my heart breaks in two.

"O-okay," I manage to stutter. "I'm not… I mean, I'd still like to be friends. Is that okay?"

She doesn't answer, just scrunching in on herself like it's raining on her and swiftly walking away, leaving me in a mire of self-hate. Good job, Hannah. You made more of a mess than a milk truck hitting a sewage line. Not only are you rapidly running out of friends, but you don't get to be Autumn's friend, and she really looks like the kind of person that needs one. But again, not you, because you're an idiot.

I struggle through my third class and actually head to the lunchroom for lunch, against my better judgment. I just kind of don't have anywhere else to go. I didn't eat breakfast and I didn't pack a lunch, and while school naturally means I'm constantly surrounded by meat the fact that I am legitimately tempted to take a bite out of someone means that I definitely should be putting something in my stomach right now. I'm too wired up on adrenaline to compound the problem with hunger. Let's just ignore the fact that it's entirely my fault that I'm this hungry in the first place and get some grub.

The lunchroom is crowded, noisy, and full of bad food, but at least they have meatloaf today. Which is, uh, a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life, because meatloaf is usually quite disgusting before it's put through whatever degenerative process seems to be required of all school food. But now it means I'm lucky enough to get a school lunch that I can actually digest, and that's a rather important attribute to food in my personal experience.

Brendan is sitting in the lunchroom with his school RPG group, as usual. I don't usually join him here because his friends are all boys and all really awkward around me in ways that I find kind of uncomfortable. They're not rude or misogynistic or anything, they're just… I dunno. They certainly don't pass the leering test, I'll say that much. It's the sort of mild background discomfort that I deal with pretty constantly as a person with boobs (and pretty nice ones, not to honk my own horns) but I'm the type of person that tries to avoid those sorts of situations rather than confront or just put up with them.

It's whatever, though. I'll deal. I wander up to Brendan's table and sit down next to him, wordlessly cutting into the deeply cursed lunchmeat and slipping a bite of it underneath my mask. Hrm. Definitely better than I remember, but not even my recent taste bud transfiguration can make it taste actually good. Why do they bother drizzling it in gravy if the gravy literally has no flavor whatsoever? It's just uncomfortably thick water.

"Oh, hey Hannah!" one of Brendan's friends greets me. I don't remember his name and don't really care to. He is staring at my chest.

I hiss at him. Loudly.

I don't think about it at all. I haven't even been caught off guard, I'm just annoyed and I need to make it known. The whole table, as well as most of the people sitting at nearby tables, goes quiet. I'd be lying to myself if I said that didn't feel strangely satisfying, and not just in the sense that not a lot can get a high schooler to actually shut up. It was accidental. Literally effortless, yet it got me what I wanted. I got to see him flinch. I like that he's afraid of me. It makes me feel a little less powerless.

"Uh, sorry," Brendan apologizes awkwardly. "She's had a bad weekend."

…Aaaand there's the embarrassment. Holy guacamole I just hissed at a ton of people I barely know I must look like a gosh dang crazy person! Aaaaagh, what am I doing!?

"That sounded kinda awesome, actually?" one of the other guys at the table chuckles nervously. "Like damn, I felt that in my bones. I kinda wish I could hiss like that."

What. He's… jealous? Of my weird eldritch hiss? Goddess darn it why am I feeling flattered about that?

"Brendan, is your whole friend group as obsessed with monsters as you are?" I grumble, sneaking in another bite of chaos loaf.

"Nah, Brendan and Jacob are the only furries in the group," a guy behind a Dungeon Master screen pipes up. "Speaking of, Brendan, it's your turn. What's your tabaxi doing?"

"I'm gonna punch him," Brendan answers, already rolling a handful of dice. "Twenty-three hit?"

"Yep."

"Fourteen damage."

"Oh, nice. He is bloodied!"

"Can I taunt him, too?" Brendan asks.

"What, like, goading him to focus on you?" the DM asks. "That'd be another action."

"...Can I taunt him ineffectually?"

"Ha. Sure."

Once the Dungeons and Dragons gets going in earnest I stop having to worry about awkward boys leering at me, since they're all way too invested in the grid on the table. I finish my lunch in silence, listening in on the game just to have something to occupy my attention other than dread and shame. At least I get to walk part of the way to class with Brendan. It helps calm my nerves a little bit, but a little bit goes a long way when I'm this much of a mess. On a whim, I tilt my body slightly to bump my shoulder into his arm. I should have asked before touching, but he doesn't react poorly to it. He just looks down at me with a concerned expression. We part ways soon afterwards and I head to my fourth class of the day. I sit down and pull my books out of my backpack in a futile attempt to convince myself I have the slightest chance of being able to focus when one of the so-called 'popular girls' walks up to me with a rather unfriendly look on her face.

"What's with those gloves?" she sneers.

I sigh. Why is it shit on Hannah day?

"My hands are injured," I respond lamely.

"And you thought those would look better?"

Wow. Wow wow wow. I'm actually getting fashion bullied. This honestly doesn't happen to me all that often. Who is this loser, anyway? I take the effort to actually look at her face and vaguely recognize her as one of the girls that hangs out with Ida sometimes. Doesn't Ida take this class with us? Yeah, there she is at the far end of the room, pretending she doesn't see me. I've been trying to respect the fact that she told me to leave her alone, but I don't really have the patience for this today. I lean past whoever-this-is and call out to my (former?) friend.

"Hey, Ida!" I bark. "Can you get your remora off of me?"

She flinches the slightest bit, probably not enough for anyone else to notice. Then she stands up with an affected sigh, pretending to fix her hair with one hand as she walks over.

"Are you saying I'm a shark?" she drawls.

"You're certainly as smooth as one," I say automatically. Goddess, what does that even mean? Ida laughs anyway, probably at least getting the reference but definitely playing up her reaction.

"What's even going on over here?" she asks. "I've never seen you two speak more than a sentence to each other."

"Not surprising, since Hannah never talks to anyone," girl-I-don't-care-about mutters. "I thought you'd given up on her too, Ida."

"And so you also thought to yourself 'oh hey, I should insult her gloves for no reason,'" I say, rolling my eyes.

"The reason is that they're ugly fucking gloves and it's the middle of April."

"Is your, uh, 'condition' getting that bad?" Ida asks me, ignoring the other girl. Which is a good tactic, honestly. It's one of the better snubs we can give her in this situation. I play along, keeping my attention entirely on Ida.

"Yeah, it's on my fingers and all the way up one leg now," I tell her. "The gloves are a bit heavy but I needed something capacitive."

One of the weird things about Ida that I've never understood is the fact that she spends a lot of time hanging out with people that she doesn't actually seem to like. When we first met in middle school she was already firmly integrated in the popular crowd, which by the natural law of middle school was also the bullies. And don't get me wrong, Ida was a bully, probably sometimes still is. She likes proving she's more clever than other people, and ultimately I think that's why we first started hitting off so well. I'm not as mean as she is, but I like that too.

When bullies came after me, I always tried to outmaneuver them. The plan was to make them feel stupid for talking to me enough times that they eventually decide I'm not worth the effort. Of course, being a middle schooler, I didn't really anticipate the fact that I'd be awkward and genuinely hurt at least as often as I was eloquent, and even if that wasn't the case the bullies would be too dumb to stop badgering the quiet kid anyway. At least that would have been the case, if not for Ida.

Ida likes hanging out with bullies. Heck, the little chaos gremlin is nominally friends with those bullies. But half the time I started biting back against their abuse, Ida would immediately turn on those very same friends and help me make fun of them. We'd banter back and forth, deny them what they want, and make them feel left out all while Ida remained firmly within their group and I remained firmly within mine. She was my little traitor on the inside, and I don't think it was because she wanted to be nice to me. I think she just wanted some intelligent conversation for once. She stifles herself, hanging out with them and obsessing over fashion and boys and gossip and whatever other inane things normal girls do. I've never gotten a straight answer when I've asked her why.

"What condition?" glove-insult-girl asks.

"Oh my god Gloria, you can't just ask her about a serious condition like that," Ida wheels on her immediately. "Do you not know how rude that is?"

"If you're scared of having to wear gloves, don't be," I chime in. "It's not contagious. Probably."

"Uh, probably?" Ida emphasizes.

"Probably!" I confirm innocently.

The bully whose name I swear I just heard looks a little uncomfortable at that, though Ida looks especially worried. Whoops, I forgot she was actually scared of my monster bits.

"Okay, whatever," G-something dismisses turning to walk off. "Have fun being diseased."

"Catch up with you in a sec, Gloria!" Ida calls after her happily, as if the two of us didn't spend the last thirty seconds explicitly trying to make her feel bad. She turns back to me, lowering her voice to a whisper. "You never mentioned it was fucking contagious!"

"That was just a bit!" I insist. "I mean, I guess I don't really know if it's contagious or not because I don't know what causes it, but no one else has started mutating yet."

She gives me a level stare.

"Um, that I know of?"

"Do you have a way to check?" she groans.

"I don't think s… hmm," I pause, remembering that I haven't tried the Soul Sight spell on Earth yet. "Uh, I guess maybe, actually? I don't know if it's a good idea, though. I am really flying by the seat of my pants on this stuff, Ida."

"Don't care," she grunts. "Do it."

"It's… not something I should do in public. It's, um, obvious. Like last time."

She shudders.

"...Okay," Ida nods. "How private do we need to be? Bathroom after class?"

"Back of the building, after school?" I hedge. "Just to be safe. But you'll have to be my ride home."

"Okay," Ida agrees, tapping her foot nervously. "...That really was all real, right?"

"Yeah," I confirm.

"Fuck," she swears emphatically, turning around and heading back to her seat. I can't say I disagree with her, though I'm a bit concerned about what's got her so worked up.

The teacher starts class soon after, though, and my mind is pulled back through spiraling about all my problems. Sindri most of all. The more I think about it, the more I need to not just decide how to try and prevent being hit with his magic again, but contingencies for if I am hit with his magic again. Ways to try and prod at the edges of his spell and look for weak points. Things to try that I won't stop having the incentive to try if I start unconditionally trusting Sindri with my life again. As Brendan would put it, I need to seek out excuses to give myself more will saves. The problem is that the dungeon master I'm trying to convince is my own future self, and that dumb jerk will have already thought of all this!

Stop, back up, don't panic about the shadowruns. All I need to worry about is giving myself the highest possible number of opportunities to stay alive. I pull out my notebook and start scribbling out ideas on the page after the actual class notes I'm supposed to be taking. I'm going to have an excessive amount of homework with all the in-school time I'm missing, but school is pretty rapidly plummeting down my priority list. I honestly don't care all that much anymore.

My fourth class ends, my fifth and final class begins, and I spend it doing much the same sort of planning. Can I use Refresh to 'clean' my mind of foreign influence? Probably not, since the spell works by physically moving things. Maybe investigate and/or try to manifest a more conceptual version? One of the big problems with being adjacent to Pneuma on the element wheel is that it means I don't have the slightest bit of resistance to Pneuma. I can't really leverage my supposedly-huge aura to do much about it, so I'm stuck with more mundane methods. Mental tricks, promises to myself that I'm not sure if I'll keep, bargains and strategies and all sorts of little things that probably would never have a chance of working on their own… and if I'm being honest, probably don't have a chance of working in tandem. Because ultimately, the problem with fighting off mental influence is that it takes self-control. And I do not have that. Like, at all. So… that's a problem.

The school day ends and I barely remember to send Brendan a text to not expect me on the bus, as engrossed as I am in my plans. I wander to the back of the school, wishing I could chew on something or claw something to shreds to get rid of this ever-growing stress. I've already snapped two pencils today, though it's not a huge deal since I carry around about twenty. They just kind of seem to collect themselves in my backpack somehow. I spot the little chaos gremlin known as Ida and do my best to blink away my thoughts of tonight, but unfortunately she seems to catch on.

"Y'know, I uh… should have asked, before," Ida says awkwardly. "Are you doing okay?"

I shrug.

"No," I admit. "Not at all."

"Fuck," Ida swears. "I'm sorry, Hannah. I just… I've been freaking out about this, okay? Ever since you summoned that invisible scary lady into my car and used fucking actual magic I just… the world just feels fake. Does that make any sense?"

"Um, yeah, I guess," I nod. "It's a bit of an Earth-shattering revelation to have fantasy and reality swapping places like that."

"N-no," Ida shakes her head. "I mean yes, but also like… literally. If I stop focusing on it, then things literally, physically start to feel like they're fake. Like I'm just dreaming and if things were a little more lucid I could reach out and… I don't even know. Do something real? I'm sort of rapidly and very unwillingly turning into a solipsist."

Oh. Oh gosh. Okay.

"...Reach out how?" I ask hesitantly.

"I don't know," she admits, sounding uncharacteristically small.

"Okay," I nod. "There's… a way I can check to see if you have magic. I'm not sure what happens if I use it in this world, though. It'll probably be fine, but it might be really bad?"

"Did you say another world?" she asks.

"Yeah, I uh, I live in another universe when I sleep."

She opens her mouth to comment on that, but then she just shakes her head.

"You know what? Sure. Fine. I just… I accept whatever risk this is, Hannah. I feel like I'm going crazy. Just… do your thing."

"I'll have to summon the, uh, invisible scary lady again. The Goddess."

I add the last two words without even thinking much about it. It feels wrong not to clarify that I mean Her.

"Which is why you wanted us alone," Ida sighs. "Sure. Go for it."

I nod, inhale, and make my intent known.

"Aura Sight," the Goddess says, blooming into glorious existence around Ida and I, swirling and caressing us. She pats me on the head, pinches Ida's cheeks, and then disappears like she was never here. Ida and I both shudder, terror passing through us both in equal measure.

"So what did that do?" Ida asks nervously, looking distinctly like Order.

I blink. I look again. Yep, Order. Ida the chaos gremlin… is aligned to Order. And only Order.

"Well, congrats I guess," I tell her. "You have magic. I'm pretty sure if you pull on that feeling hard enough, you won't just be a lucid dreamer. You will metaphorically wake up."

"What, just like that!?" she asks, halfway between incredulous and hysterical. "Would… will she come back?"

"Uh, hopefully not," I say. "She only shows up if you speak the name of a spell out loud, and you should not be trying to speak any spell names out loud. It could seriously mess you up, maybe even kill you."

"Then why do you say spells out loud?" she snaps.

"Because I'm stupid," I tell her frankly. "And also a funky multidimensional monster. Don't do what I do. We should probably go to a better place than behind the school if you wanna test out your magic."

"What if I don't wanna test out my magic?" Ida hisses. "What if I just want things to make sense again?"

"Then maybe your magic does that! I don't have any clue, Ida. You're an Order mage like me, you could have all kinds of bullpoop. I have a cleaning spell."

"Wait, seriously?" she asks.

In response I just lick my wrist, bring it up to my face to smear my makeup, then snap my fingers for show, which makes a surprisingly satisfying popping sound even through my gloves. With a quick pulse of Refresh, my face is looking better than before the smudge.

"Okay, shit, I want magic now," Ida gapes. "That's way cooler than freaky toe claws."

"Uh, thanks, I think?" I smirk. "Come on, drive me home and I'll teach you what little I know about not causing yourself to explode."

"Is that a thing that can happen?"

"Yeah, I nearly bled out on Saturday," I nod.

"...Can I change my mind again?"

I chuckle humorlessly, heading out towards the school parking lot and motioning Ida to follow. Whether she chooses to cast or not, I still need to tell her as much as I can about what I know. It's only fair, not to mention much safer for her, to be informed. After some brief hesitation, she follows me and the two of us walk to her car, dozens of other students doing the same around us. Out of curiosity, I glance at one at random to try and see what magical alignment they have… and I don't feel anything.

Glancing back at Ida, I focus and confirm that yes, she still feels like Order, and yes the Aura Sight spell is still active. I glance at a different student. Nothing. Another new student. Nothing. A bird, a bug, a teacher, a tree… nothing. No auras on any of them. The bus passes by, and through the window I manage to catch Brendan's eye as he waves at me. I wave back, and of course give him a magical vibe check. Art. His aura very clearly tastes like Art. But that's it. Out of everyone I can see, the spell only reacts to Ida, Brendan, and of course me.

My friends and I are the only people in school that have souls.