The room had grown lighter. Soren gazed up at the skylight and realized morning was almost upon them. “Alright, round one’s behind us,” Soren said. “Round two is the one that promises to be real fun.” He was thinking about helping them manage their new abilities. Some micro-managing was going to be in order whether he liked it or not, before kicking the new hatchlings out of the nest to fly on their own, trusting in nature over nurture.
Once again, he prayed he could carve out enough of a safe sanctuary space for everyone to get the hang of their new abilities before drafting them into war.
Knowing Victor, that was likely to be little more than wishful thinking.
FOURTEEN
Snake was gathering momentum now, moving from one dew drop to the next, his body taking on the look of his namesake. By the time he reached the old woman with more moles and cancerous protuberances than a warthog, sitting on the park bench in the midmorning sun, it was easy enough to disguise himself as a trail of urine cascading down her leg. That only took morphing the clear water snake into a yellowish-tinged, upward moving band. The old lady herself mistook his presence for the latest bit of urinary incontinence, and was secretly glad she didn’t have anyone sitting beside her to take note of the smell. She was so easily embarrassed by such things.
Once Snake was inside her, of course, she ceased to be embarrassed by anything; it was fair to say “embarrassed” was no longer part of her vocabulary.
Snake surveyed the park setting. An ad hoc family of wizards had chosen it for a picnic and some quality time together. The one called Naomi had thrown an energy shield about the several-acre setting that few could penetrate. It hadn’t stopped him of course. So long as they didn’t harbor ill-intent, civilians could come and go as they pleased with no inkling the shield was in place.
He couldn’t hope for a riper opportunity. There were no wizards within the dome that were in his weight-class, so no one posed any threat whatsoever. In fact, unless Naomi’s shield was dampening his scanners, there was no one on this planet who was about to check his power. He was the fox in the proverbial hen house—one planet-sized hen-house. Yes, they had foxes and hens where he came from—once upon a time, before being banished to oblivion for being such a bad boy.
The elemental wizard—God, they came young these days—was just getting the hand of tossing more than air, wind, fire, and water about. He’d progressed to the table of elements. Not bad, for a kid his age. He was entertaining the kids by growing a roller coaster track, replete with cars out of the ground, by simply pulling metals out of the soil and recombining them. The “electricity” for now would be provided by his command of the winds, propelling the cars about, and, of course, by gravity assisting him on the tracks many torturous drops and twists. He was drawing kids screaming with excitement of all ages and parents alike from all around. More so, as he kept adding to the track’s many loop-the-loops and twists. They must have been well-used to wizards in these parts, as no one seemed particularly put off by the ride taking shape before their very eyes. Even before the roller coaster finished taking form, the customers were lining up. Talk about someone priming Snake’s audience for him. It was almost anticlimactic, their being used to wizards on this world; he was looking forward to the years terrorizing people until they accepted his omnipotence in all things. But that phase might well be reduced now to mere days.
So long as the kid was limited to working with atoms as building blocks, he really hadn’t graduated to any realm that would cause Snake to break a sweat putting him down. He chuckled at the teen’s sense of his own omnipotence. He was feeling quite full of himself right now. His father figure, Soren, was permitting these sentiments because it appeared, that for Player, they were a distinct improvement over his earlier behavior. Apparently “Dad” was focusing on building him a healthy ego before graduating him to trans-ego states of consciousness. Not a bad plan, all in all. “Little do you know, Buddy,” Snake thought with a chuckle, eying Player, “you fit right in with the rest of these innocents.”
Snake panned the old lady’s head over to Natura. What a delicious morsel, this one. She was just perfect for him with her childlike innocence, which put all the other kids in Soren’s provisional family to shame for unadulterated age-regression. But she was too old for him. He needed a real six year old to get his pedophilia-perv thing going, not one who acted as if she were six when the child component of her psyche was in charge. Fortunately, there were plenty to choose from. But there was no need to rush things. There was a planet full of kids to feed his gluttony for child porn. If it could be sated at all, he might not have ended up in oblivion. Perhaps when he was done with his safety check… . It never hurt to be too careful. These days, all sorts of master wizards were passing themselves off as minor ensemble players, if only to avoid getting sucked into the “Who’s got the biggest, baddest magic wand in all the land” nonsense. He couldn’t blame them; after all, he was currently playing a similar role.
The Naomi chick was obviously just such a wizard, but she hadn’t fully owned her abilities yet, so, again—for now, not much of a threat. He returned his eyes to Natura—sweet little thing, with her pixie hairstyle and her surgically-altered elfin ears and petite body. I mean she could pass for twelve, though his fine nose told him that was definitely sixteen-year-old pussy.
She was delighting herself and others making Mother Nature play second fiddle to her park makeover. The trees, the shrubs, the plants, the flowers, the landscaping, they were morphing as only they could in a virtual reality world, ordinarily, growing more splendiferous from one morphing park-to-end-all-parks rendition to another. Parents and children alike were swooning and clapping, dazzled by the nature magic. She definitely had a knack for the stuff, all right.
And she was taking the pets brought to her by the kids and the parents on their leashes, squatting down to stare them in the faces and cupping their heads in her hands and breathing fairy dust on them. And when she was done, the animals were talking back to her. “Hey, thanks, Lady,” the Chihuahua said. “Tired of bitching with nothing but barking to give people a piece of my mind. Wait till they get a load of the ass chewing coming their way now.”
“Don’t even think of it, Thor,” the mother with her hand on the seven-year-old’s shoulder said. They looked like a pair of prize poodles themselves, with matching curler-crimped wavy blond hair, and fur coats. All the glamour of the professionally applied makeup and jewelry couldn’t elevate those plain jane faces enough for Snake’s tastes. “Any foul language out of you and you’ll be joining the pictures of those other Chihuahuas on the dogfood labels—as dogfood.”
“Take it on the chin, Thor, take it on the chin. You’re the comeback kid after today, I’m tellin’ ya,” Thor mumbled to himself, self-consolingly.
“Thank you, Natura!” the seven-year-old said, hugging her. When she let go of the hug she had to tease her long blond hair out of her mouth, manhandled by the wind, to say, “Now Thor and I can keep each other far better company when mom’s away.”
“You have no idea, sweetheart.” Thor mumbled the last part, “Okay, rein in your dirty mind, Thor. You keep forgetting you age faster than she does.”
Mother and daughter, with Chihuahua in tow, ambled off, the little fella getting dragged faster than he could go on his small legs. “Guess some things never change,” he bitched, in between gagging on the choke collar.
Natura didn’t even get a chance to stand up and straighten out her legs before the next one in line was putting forth her request. “Ah, could you make Herbert into a giraffe?” the nine-year-old with the shaped-for-curtness-lips asked, trying to get her bangs out of eyes. “I’m not feeling the whole Pug thing anymore.”
Natura did her thing with the Pug. Then asked him directly, “How do you feel about being turned into a giraffe, Herbert?”
“Ah, I’m down with it. It’s a bitch sticking my head out the window in the car on these pathetic legs. I tell ya, you haven’t suffered like a
lapdog suffers. Don’t even get me going about the shin splints every time I jump off someone’s lap.”
“Okay, giraffe it is, then.”
“Um, toy giraffe, please,” the mother interjected, her neck just long enough to have inspired the whole giraffe idea, as some kind of mock homage. “I suppose that goes without saying.” This woman, from the way she was put together—another one from the Fine-Living district—was clearly used to not letting anything get past her, including some sloppy wish-fulfillment thinking on her kid’s part. To dress that well, usually required a retinue of staff to dress you. If, unlike Swank Town, most of the citizens of the Fine Living sector were posers, living well beyond their means, these two certainly were not.
“Toy giraffe, it is,” Natura said, and touched Herbert again as she did before. The giraffe he morphed into had a head that reached about four feet off the ground. Definitely he’d need to stick his head out the car window now just to avoid getting neck strain, but all-in-all, a pretty good size for a bantam giraffe.
Mom gave Natura the thumbs-up and she, the kid, and Herbert, the now-giraffe, lumbered on.
“God, this is like a seriously weird form of kiddie porn, Snake. The kind for people who fancy psychedelic drugs. Hell of a setup for the sex scenes with the star-featured children to come, though.”
Snake panned his head over to Stealy. Now, there was a serious adrenaline junkie. He could relate. She had her own section of the carnival set up for the older teens. There, she showed them how to do tricks on the motorcycles that Player was whipping up for her to hand out to the eighteen and nineteen-year-olds. The mounds of dirt for vaulting over, and the dirt-bike track, threaded through the other rides and the park—which had grown to twenty-acres or so, by the way—thanks to Natura’s magic.
Stealy demonstrated how to use magical words of power to allow the riders to do the most elaborate tricks on the dirt bikes.
For the coup de grâce, she’d stand to the side of the track and conjure wizards out of thin air; they were little more than holographic projections, of course, but they were damn convincing. The teens could then use a different magical word of power to shoot down the phantasms—no matter what wizard was blasting what kind of magic at them. Stealy had needed to combine her powers with Naomi’s to pull off the magic, but she could lend three of her four powers to the teens with Naomi’s help.
Like with a video game, the contestants had to figure out that they had these extra abilities on their own. But Stealy would help them by thought projecting into their heads once they’d gained enough confidence on the track—this time, with Naomi’s help.
The teens were having the time of their lives playing wizards. The poor, talentless saps, which never even got to enjoy being part of the minor ensemble players out there, got to play at being wizards for a day, or at least for the length of the ride. They were so elated, they were happy to get back in line for a chance to do it all over again.
Naomi, ever-concerned about remaining cloaked, was able to disguise much of her interventions as belonging to her more talented kids, and not her. She divvied up her abilities among them, thus not making any one look powerful enough to attract the attention of a heavy hitter. She had mixed her conjuring magic with Player’s to help him manifest the motorcycles; for right now, Player hadn’t mastered enough elements yet, or how to combine them, to do all that on his own. She had mixed her magic with Natura’s to help it go beyond the animals, to the park setting, when she sensed Natura getting frustrated by not having enough space for the animals to play, too. Considering Natura’s name, she might well be able to take her own nature magic to that level, unassisted, someday.
Personally, Snake preferred The Family Grimm to The Family Feel-Goods, who were starting to get on his nerves. This many kids juiced up on ecstasy, feeling like gods themselves, it was going to make his job a lot harder come time to prey on their insecurities. Maybe he should make his move now before things got any worse for him. Careful, Snake, what has experience taught you? Always know your enemy before making your move.
Lar, a.k.a. Cypher, had his face so buried in one of Soren’s books that he couldn’t be bothered to notice all the pandemonium of the carnival going on around him. The guy must have the concentration of a master wizard to not feel the least bit distracted by the explosions of laughter, screams, oohs and ahs, all coming at him, rising above the din of chaos in no predictable way. If it was more like white noise, Snake might understand, but no, the kid had an enviable degree of concentration that rivaled even his own. That kind of focus was seldom found too far away from a much higher level of wizardry than the young man had at his command. But his klutzy nature… his nervous system was such a mess, not even their cyber-enhanced chi master, Soren, could do much with it.
Unless… of course, Soren was sheltering the dweeb. His parental involvement in their lives was causing him to be overprotective of the lot. Good luck taking that approach, pal, with ghouls like Snake on the loose. He knew the full roster of players that had escaped oblivion along with him. There was no getting past any of them with such a deliberately shallowed growth curve that Soren was maintaining over The Family Feel Good.
Snake didn’t waste time pondering what was the real deal with Soren. Chi Masters like that wore their hearts on their sleeve. They couldn’t be bothered with guile and cunning. In their minds, the powers of the universe were always at their highest when used in the service of good. Typical chi master thinking. They were right, of course, as far as it went. But, man, that was some damn serious naïveté when it came to the darkness out there. He should have paid better attention with movies like Star Wars to the Darth Vader types and the Sith Lords. Even they didn’t do much but graze the surface at the kind of ugliness lurking about the cosmos, or the sense of empowerment they’d stored up over lifetimes as predators, preying on other predators, just to climb up the rankings.
It was time to strike.
Snake locked his sights on the seven-year-old of earlier with the talking Chihuahua. They both looked like they could stand taking down a peg. And as for Mommy Dearest—getting her to blow her top watching Snake bust his moves on the seven-year-old, thinking her safe out in public like this, amid wizards this powerful—hell, that was worth the price of admission. God, Snake loved parallel universes and parallel worlds—otherwise, he wouldn’t even have the terminology and the idioms in place to truly communicate how filthy his mind was; and if there was one thing he hated, it was going underappreciated. No one climbed the axis of evil as he did without favoring a bit of grandstanding.
Snake teleported to where the little one was taking a rest on the bench, holding her pet Chihuahua in hand, scolding him for humping another old lady’s leg. “Shame on you, Thor!” Snake had developed quite the knack for rematerializing just at the edges of his victims’ peripheral vision to hide the teleportation, thus avoiding startling the girl.
“Ah, the crone hasn’t seen that much action in years,” Thor said. “Trust me, she got a charge out of it.”
The mother was shaking her head at the dog. “Enjoy it while it lasts, the two of you, because before we get out of this park, I’m marching you both back to Natura, and putting an end to the lip.”
“I’ll behave!” Thor said, and he meant it. No one was messing with his upgrades. He could play it smarter than that. He just had to learn to control those urges. Impulse control had never been a forte. But screw it, with stakes this high.
Snake slipped out of the dog’s head, his tunnel vision kicking in naturally as he focused on the child; the fugue taking hold. He had just planted his hand on her leg without mom noticing when… .
What. The. Fuck?
He was being sucked right out of the old lady’s body. By the time he figured out what was going on, he was in ethereal form again—inside one hell of a prison. The genie had been put back in the lamp. No lamp had ever held him before. Only oblivion had ever been up to the task of containing him. What kind of fucked up magic was this?
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***
“Thanks, Victor,” Soren said, running over. “Naomi alerted me, but I couldn’t get here in time, not even with boosting my chi, not without risking doing more damage than good.” Soren was visualizing not being able to brake in time, capsizing the bench, and sending the girl flying.
“Don’t mention it.”
Soren stared at the genie bottle serving as the trap, attached to the nozzle and the line, like a sprinkler unit used to mix fertilizer with water for spraying the roses. Only this one worked in reverse, sucking things into the bottle, not spitting stuff out. The bottle itself was coupled to what looked like one screwy steampunk-inspired assault rifle. Copper tubing threaded in and through the gold rifle stock. And parts of the weapon glowed or were illuminated with some kind of green energy. It was a safe guess that none of the metals featured were in their pure, unadulterated form.
“All too easy, in any case,” Victor said.
“Yes,” Soren admitted, suspiciously. All too easy indeed. Victor had gotten over on them again. Not even Naomi’s earlier prophecy blunted the force of what Soren was seeing; perhaps because she lacked the scientific acumen to do much but render the picture in charcoal drawing, as opposed to Technicolor. There was only one explanation that played at all to Soren’s scientific nature. Somehow, the son of a bitch had trapped The Masked Man in a bottle just like this one, using magic forged from all four wizards in the moment the portal to oblivion had been opened, rather than blasting him back to oblivion where he belonged. And now, his prisoner in hand, he was planning on milking him for advice on how to handle the latest interlopers. Soren was briefly furious at him, but it didn’t last long.
“Go on, Victor, enjoy your Ghost Busters moment.”
Reborn (Frankenstein Book 1) Page 13
