99 Gods: Odysseia

by Randall Farmer

  “I’m amazed my daughter would let you take the twins out of her sight,” Christine said.

  “That’s a long story involving a deal she, Ken and Orlando made with Betrayer,” Dave said. “She made a properly cold hearted decision, one you would likely understand and appreciate.” He glared at Christine. Christine, who he suspected of a colder heart than her daughter Nessa, glared back.

  “Abe, your mother and Knot had the twins under her care until just a little while ago,” Elorie said, at Abe. “They’re off as projections, and we’re in charge of making sure their real bodies stay safe.”

  Abe shrugged. “Whatever. Those two are just looking for a good place to die in a heroic fashion. I’m not about to interfere.” Exasperation colored his words, and disgust showed on his face.

  One of the unknowns in Abe’s group walked up and whispered into his ear. Abe’s eyebrows narrowed. “You joined up with Betrayer too, haven’t you?” Abe said.

  They had talked about how they should answer this obvious question while Elorie breast-fed the twins. “She made us an offer we couldn’t refuse,” Elorie said, twinkling. “She’s of the opinion that a huge war’s about to start, and that for reasons she wouldn’t explain that war’s going to come here. We’re going to play a part in this expected war, but we don’t have any idea what.”

  “No!” Christine said. “We can’t stay here and leave my grandchildren in danger!”

  “You know what’s going on, don’t you?” Dave asked.

  The man who had whispered in Abe’s ear nodded. Abe frowned. “It’s become clear to us that we’re caught in a nasty story and have a role to play in the coming war, but we don’t know what our role is, either. We’ve just been following the obvious twists to our story. Our as yet unknown role appears to be important and dangerous and the reason why so many of us have been hunted down, captured or slain. To prevent whatever we’re supposed to do.”

  Dave turned at Elorie and nodded. She blanched and repressed a tremble. “I think we’re in your story as well. Betrayer’s been training us in our various immunities. For instance, we’ve both learned to area-project.”

  “That does sound interesting and useful, but pardon my forwardness, Elorie: Betrayer’s only a Practical God,” Abe said. “The Territorial Gods are the ones who’ve been hunting us down, trying to erase our story before it’s written. Anything Betrayer can do a Territorial can do better.”

  “I’m not saying I’m ready to face down Territorials,” Elorie said. “I would like to get a Territorial in here to help train us. In any event, we should use whatever time we have to improve our odds of success with whatever we’re supposed to be doing. All of us. Betrayer’s been training Maria as well.”

  “Think of me as an Apprentice War God,” Maria said. She still kept herself hidden. “I may not be all that useful in a real fight, but I should be able to at least scare the crap out of you when we’re training.”

  Abe laughed, his charisma steadying his group and lowering their battle twitchiness. “Okay, okay. Your story makes sense and it does dovetail with what we’ve been thinking. We’re here to stay, then. Do you have any better places to gather than this crazy throne room?”

  “If we did, we’d be there,” Elorie said. “We’ve just started exploring this place, and I think we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  “Of course.”

  “Despite the appearances, don’t sneer at these uniforms,” Dave said. “They’re bulletproof. In fact, I’m willing to bet there’s a lot of usable crap in this place designed as insane props. Wait until you see Betrayer’s willpower swords. They’re amazing. Too bad neither of us is a swordmaster.”

  “Speak for yourself, Psychic,” Christine said, lust in her eyes. Of course, despite her age she had been the one teaching Tracy the advanced body-control techniques. He suspected she could still fight like a demon. “And January’s even better than I am, though she hides her talent well.”

  “Okay, okay,” Abe said, nodding. “One more thing. You need to know that before Diana left us to go with you, she said that eventually you and Elorie would join up with us, but that I wouldn’t be happy when it happened. Well, here we are.”

  This sounded like a Diana prediction. “Ah yup,” Dave said. “Want to introduce us to your people and help us explore a lair?”

  49. (Dana)

  “Fifteen minutes, four groups,” Richard said.

  They had moved out of the Blue Ridge mountains area west, not far, to the Nantahala National Forest, still in western North Carolina. The command group gathered in a clearing on a low hill, with the defenders under cover around the road into the forest. They dug into in ravines, hid among dense brush, and sheltered by rocky slopes. All four Gods had prepared the area with defenses, traps and illusions to the best of their ability. The forest showed no sign of battle yet, and birds chirped and animals rustled among the pines. The sun warmed the fall day and in other circumstances Dana would consider her surroundings beautiful.

  “Three groups of Paladins and what?” Maria said. Maria, better thought of as Persona today, had changed into a thirteen feet tall giant, part of her ongoing experimentation with battle forms. Dana thought Maria had overdone things with the tusks and the faux animal skin clothing.

  “Can’t tell,” Richard said. “Some new form of neo-Supported mixed with the usual Natural Supported. My guess is that these new neo-Supported are going to be the personal guards of the projections, since Dubuque, Santa Fe and Worcester’s projections are on that bus as well.”

  “They’re coming in on busses today,” Bob said. “I guess they didn’t like how I knocked the whole lot of them out of the sky last time.”

  In the last battle, while Dana had been dead, Bob had set up a trap zone to nullify the standard willpower-based flying methods, creating a chaotic mess. Dana was sorry she had missed the fight. The battle sounded both spectacular and hilarious.

  Dubuque, though, still wussied out and didn’t attack them with his full resources. Bob thought Dubuque was trying to take them out on the cheap. Arrogant prick.

  “Attack the busses,” Kay – Progress – said. Lydia seconded the motion, but Dana held up her hand.

  “I’d like to try something different,” Dana said.

  “I didn’t think you could attack anymore?” Richard said.

  “I’m not going to be doing a battle style attack, but something trickier. I’d like to make a visit to one of the busses of Paladins,” she said. “I can’t do this as a distraction. Morally incorrect for me. However, if I make my visit before they arrive at the battle site, it’s okay. I’d also like to take along PheareChylde.” Bob’s second neo-Supported. PheareChylde, pronounced either as ‘fear-child’ or ‘fair-child’, depending on her mood, was sincerely screwier than S’up, nearly as invulnerable as Dana and almost as useless in a set battle.

  “What’s your goal?” Richard said.

  “Terrifying Dubuque and company and reducing the number of Paladins who’ll be able to attack. Angelic tricks.”

  “They’ll kill you and PheareChylde,” Richard said.

  “Not this time. They’re going to have to solve me before they can even come close to killing me, and I’ll keep our PheareChylde sort-of alive.” Dana smiled. Her experimentation had shown that her magical focus had changed tremendously by being reborn; in addition to the Angelic magic, her normal Natural Supported tricks had become far stronger in the area of protection, likely to make up for her moral turning away from violent attack capabilities.

  “You sure?”

  “Have I been wrong about anything since you resurrected me, Richard?” she said, with a pretty smile.

  Richard blushed, to her surprise. She had said the sex would be better with a reborn non-patched-together body and the new additions, and she had surprised him with how right she had been. Her body’s hard-wired physical inhibitions hadn’t been resurrected with her either. “Okay. I’m going to trust you on this,” Richard said. “A
nyone else you need besides PheareChylde?”

  “Nope. I’m going to want both of us in costumes, though, and PheareChylde’s going to need a new shape. What I want is…”

  She described both, shocking all except PheareChylde.

  “I’ll do this. I’ll do this totally seven times!” PheareChylde said, as excited as Dana had ever seen her. “With your permission, boss lady Lydia.” So far, only Lydia could keep PheareChylde in line.

  “Go ahead, Jabba the Butt,” Lydia said. “But I want my Dana back in one piece this time!”

  “I humbly apologize,” PheareChylde said, once they flew out of the camp on their way to intercept the bus filled with Dubuque’s crew of Paladins. “I totally misjudged you, Dana.”

  “Because I came up with this?”

  PheareChylde looked at her flayed skinless hands as they zipped mere feet above the top of the forest canopy. “It’s a hella dark vision you’ve made me into, ma’am, darker than any I’ve constructed for myself, for sure.”

  “Don’t lose yourself in the Angelic magic I’ve put on you. You’re still yourself, not the role.” Dana didn’t surround the two of them with a shield, the way Ken would have done. She simply enabled the two of them to hear each other.

  “This is so fucking strong I’m half terrified of myself.”

  PheareChylde, a long-time member of Bob’s informal gaming and hacker network, had contacted Bob the day after the Paladin attack where Dana died. “I’m dying, Kid, they couldn’t cure the sepsis. I know you can’t do miracle healing for political reasons” as anyone he healed got hunted down by Dubuque’s thugs, part of Dubuque’s non-public terror tactics “but if you have any use for me, I’m willing to donate myself to you, so you can do whatever with me, or with what’s left of me as spare parts.”

  Bob emailed back some conditions, headed off by requiring PheareChylde to drop the drug use. She asked for help kicking a few of the nastier ones; Bob had agreed. They had never met in person before Bob grabbed her out of the hospital and made her into his second neo-Supported. They and S’up had practiced until they had figured out PheareChylde’s strengths and weaknesses; and one of the weaknesses proved to be an inability to channel any sort of offensive battle willpower.

  Her psych quirks had been enough to give poor S’up nightmares, despite the obvious compatibility between them. Her quirks didn’t bother Dana, at least not the current Dana. She suspected PheareChylde’s quirks would have bothered her a great deal before she learned to understand herself while in limbo. Now she knew better.

  “This isn’t as disruptive as the snakes, I hope.”

  PheareChylde shivered. “The problem with the snakes was the multiple bodies. Too paradoxical for me.” Where did one’s brain go when using a willpower trick to divide one’s body up into multiple parts, anyway? The question amused all four of the Gods and bothered the heck out of everyone else. For the highly-into-the-physical-reality-of-herself PheareChylde the question had been much more than academic. When Bob turned her into a pack of snakes, none with anything close to a human sized brain, she had freaked. “This is just delicious and evil.”

  “No, not evil. Dark, yes, and eating at the foibles haunting our subconscious minds, but not evil.” Dana smiled and took PheareChylde’s skinless hand. It was slimy and oozy with the lymphatic goo or whatever got produced when the skin was removed from someone’s body.

  This didn’t feel the least bit wrong to Dana.

  PheareChylde had many kinks, and one was pain. Dana had always thought the term ‘masochist’ allegorical. Shows what she knew. Dana actually found PheareChylde’s other kinks more disturbing and her background even worse. PheareChylde had been sexually abused by two different stepfathers; when she had hit puberty she had screwed every boy and girl she could find, specializing in deflowering virgins and spreading STDs. After stepfather two had departed, she talked her equally messed up mother into allowing her to get some experimental surgery done to her on her sixteenth birthday. Said surgery had closed up PheareChylde’s vagina in a surgically reversible but otherwise permanent fashion. Mom, just as talented with the keyboard as her daughter and drowning in too much Silicon Valley money, relented, seeing this as a way to keep her daughter out of everyone’s bed. By then PheareChylde had followed in Mom’s footsteps, becoming severely overweight and deeply into drugs.

  What her mother didn’t understand was PheareChylde hadn’t gone anti-sex; she had just wanted control of her body for the first time in her life. Next came the bouts of bulimia to fix the weight problem, yet more serious drug use, then the breast removal thing. On PheareChylde’s eighteenth birthday, by which time PheareChylde had her own money supply due to her computer skills, she became a V.

  “This situation’s a wondrous kaleidoscopic mélange of LARPing and cosplay, but since it’s for realsies I’m biggo nervous,” PheareChylde said, casting a wandering eye on what remained of her oozing legs.

  Dana sighed, annoyed that she had been around Bob, Lydia and S’up long enough to understand PheareChylde. “In some sense, all of life is live action role playing in costumes. Understand this and you can succeed in any situation, even the obscure ones.”

  “Well boo for me,” PheareChylde said. “You don’t have to go all pompous Angel on my skinless but curvaceous derriere, yah know.”

  “Don’t mind me,” Dana said. “I go Angel these days when stressed.” Despite PheareChylde’s bulimic tendencies, she hadn’t lost her ample rear end, a source of much amusement to Lydia and annoyance to PheareChylde.

  Dana had never heard of the Vs before PheareChylde. Vs, a post-99 God social phenomena, were surgically neutered in such a way that they could still give themselves pleasure with vibrators. Both men and women could become Vs. Dana didn’t know the anatomical details for men, but for women, becoming a V involved implanting a plastic plate over the clitoris and pulling lots of flesh over the top, hiding the details below.

  The fact the 99 Gods had somehow prompted the Vs bothered Dana. The appearance of the Vs whispered to her, in the back of her mind, that the Angelic Host still had a few hard questions to answer about themselves and what they had done with the 99 Gods, or to the 99 Gods.

  PheareChylde had another bothersome kink: she got her pain by wounding herself. A cutter. Thus the sepsis. Bob hadn’t stopped the cutting and had gone PheareChylde one farther – he had teased out of her neo-Supported powers the ability to sculpt herself with a razor. This trick made PheareChylde excessively happy, as he hadn’t mucked with her nervous system to damp the pain.

  “I’m going to teleport us into the bus,” Dana said. “The teleport’s going to be disconcerting because of the velocity frame-shift.” The loss of her battle magic abilities opened her up to many new avenues of tricks, such as this absurd teleport. She had once found the idea of teleporting into a moving vehicle impossible to contemplate. She had once found teleporting impossible. Now teleporting was second nature.

  PheareChylde wasn’t the only member of their current group Dana had plumbed in full human depth, just the one Dana found most heart-wrenching and loveable. In the days since her resurrection, she had slowly wound her way through their entire group, talking to them and encouraging them to share their life stories with her. The plumbing of souls had become a compulsion, part of her new makeup as Dana reborn. As people talked to her, Dana lived their history with them, as she had relived her own life in limbo. The more she did this, the more she understood about humanity, and the more she understood God and all those nasty ‘why’ questions. She knew her effect on people helped Richard and the other two and a half Gods, as those she interviewed became more comfortable with life and its vicissitudes and less suitable for war and battles. None had become unable to participate in battles, but she also knew none of them would ever be able to take part in such foolishness as the earlier attacks on Phoenix’s and Dubuque’s headquarters. All of these changes mirrored Dana’s own prejudices; she knew this and continued interviewing anyway. Those two at
tacks still pissed her off, and she couldn’t wait to get a chance to do this to Portland.

  Dana adjusted her bridal veil with her other hand and they teleported.

  Only three of the Paladins shot before Dana’s peace and harmony overwhelmed them and they stopped; the three shots trivially dissipated on Dana’s shields. Dana and PheareChylde stepped through the roof and into the bus.

  “I killed you,” one of the Paladins said, speaking of the past and his fingers up to their elbows in Dana’s first mortal body.

  Good. Eyewitnesses made this much easier. “Yes, but Orlando and Columbia resurrected me. Did you think only Dubuque could resurrect?” She felt the City of God Mission deflate several steps just by this revelation. “I am the Virgin Bride Reborn; Living Death has joined me. We are here to save you from oblivion.”

  Think of this as a stage name, she had told Richard, like your original God names. She remained Dana in private, but for this and likely for her remaining public actions she had become the Virgin Bride Reborn. In her soul, she thanked Jan, Betrayer and the Godslayer again for pointing out the power of names to her. She was now a myth, a living story, and as a mortal, she wielded more story power here than anyone else in the contest.

  “Everyone gets a dance with the Virgin Bride Reborn,” she said, and loosed the Natural Supported magic holding one of Richard’s willpower tricks. The inside of the bus became a dance hall. Soft dance music started to play around them. “After your last dance you’ll receive the kiss of Living Death and go to God. Where you belong.”

  “We belong here,” one of the Paladins said. “Dubuque resurrected us.”

  “He did not,” Dana said, raising her voice. She walked forward and took the face of the Paladin who had slain her into her hands. She lifted the metal that formed the man’s face. Behind it were just machine parts and emptiness.