Chapter 150: Paradox’s Pernicious Prison

Chapter 150: Paradox’s Pernicious Prison

***Heather***

Under the dim glow of the LED lights in Natalie’s walls, Heather’s eyes twitched back and forth rapidly, her body still, breath deep and slow.

Inside her mind was a little different.

Heather sat at a crude wooden table that looked like it would give her splinters just from looking at it, nursing a bowl of soup made from a goose named Becky.

She hadn’t had a normal dream since the ritual, instead consulting with her wraith ‘vassals’ every night while she slept. It wasn’t so bad, there was just the one, and they got along pretty good. This particular night, Anya was a bit agitated.

“He kind of reminds me of my husband,” Anya said, bouncing her son on her knee and keeping the wriggling menace from shoving tableware into his air-holes. The baby wasn’t real, though, just a manifestation of the ancient girl’s memories.

He’d died shortly after his mother.

“Who?” Heather asked.

“Paradox.”

“Really?” Heather frowned.

“Oh yes, my husband was about that age when I married him, fresh off his apprenticeship and ready to start a family. All Paradox is missing is a beard. He’d look good with a beard.”

She looked at the dead mother’s young face that couldn’t be older than hers, and the near-toddler squirming in her lap, at least a year old....which put her marriage...

“How old were you when you – you know what? Don’t answer that.” Different eras and all that. Didn’t make it less gross, but Heather tried to be sympathetic.

“Do you know why we’ve got such high compatibility?” Anya asked, setting her son aside to perch on Heather’s side of the table, leaning over and lowering her voice conspiratorially.

“I feel like I’m about to find out.” Heather said.

“Because we’re so similar. Terrible fathers, so much outrage at injustice, a willingness to fight to defend our love... So many tastes in common...perhaps an appreciation of young, handsome, bearded men?”

“Nope.” Heather denied, accidentally imagining an older, bearded Perry and...kinda liking it.

“Ask him to stop shaving.”

“What? NO!”

“Need I remind you of the terms of our arrangement?” Anya asked. “What do you stand to lose?”

“My dignity?” Heather responded, massaging her throbbing forehead. She was honor-bound to make a few minor concessions to the spirit each month, so there was no reasonable way to refuse.

God help me, my passenger has a crush on my girlfriend’s boyfriend.

Perry was...nice and all, but every time she found herself thinking about him like that, all the asshole things he’d done freshman year reared their ugly head in her mind, and she retreated into her shell, all thoughts of romance choked off.

She just couldn’t separate the Perry now, and the jerkface then, despite one being powerful superhero and the other being a cruel child who thought repeatedly humiliating her in front of her friends was a great way to make himself feel better about his own inadequacy.

She’d put some of it together, from snippets of comments he’d made in unguarded moments. She understood why he felt like he’d never measure up to his family.N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l--B1n.

She understood why he’d behaved like that, sure, but forgiving it was hard, and forgetting it was impossible. That’s why she was more comfortable trading childish insults.

The sting had already bled out of insults and jibes. It was safe and comfortable, being ‘mean’ to each other. If she started to care, that meant she was open to be hurt again.

“I’m not flirting with Perry on your behalf.”

“You know what? That’s an excellent idea!” Anya squealed and clapped her hands together with excitement, her dead son mimicking her movements with a manic giggle. “We’ll have so much fun!”

Heather buried her face in her hands.

“Can we just talk about crimefighting techniques long enough to pass the Bechdel Test? Please?”

“Young lady, I’ve been dry as a bone for six hundred years, so we’re talking about thi- Oops, he’s about to leave, wake up!”

***Paradox***

Let’s see here... Perry put his feet up and shuffled through his spell acquisitions, committing them to memory.

Resolution & Inheritance, Threads of Gintax, Bloodskip, and Totem Steed

Resolution and Inheritance (Difficulty: Master)

Ingredients: thumb-span sized Death Crystal, Haunted Iron. Norgoth’s Spirit Dive, Norgoth’s Recall, Kollox’s Threads of Fate, Norgoth’s summoning, Hubert’s Manifestation.

Use Norgoth’s Spirit Dive to enter the haunted iron. You will manifest into the spirit’s last moments of life. Proceed with caution as this may trap the user in an endless cycle of torment, or kill them outright. Having an assistant nearby to perform Norgoth’s Recall after a specific amount of time is advised.

Once their consciousness is inside the haunted iron, the caster must then draw the spirit’s rationality out of their endless torment, break the cycle and establish a rapport. This is a task of sheer willpower.

Summon the spirit with Norgoth’s summoning, and negotiate a resolution to their purgatory in exchange for willing you their Impact as they move on to the next plane.

Usually this takes the form of vengeance upon their killers or a favor delivered to their loved ones. Use Hubert’s Manifestation to make the spirit temporarily tangible. Both parties agree to the terms and bleed on the Death Crystal.

After this point, failing to commit the act in good faith will surrender your body and soul to the spirit. If this happens, they will consume your soul and possess your body. Only agree to a course of action that you know you can accomplish.

Cast Kollox’s threads of fate before doing the spirit’s task, visually manifesting the infinite branching strands of fate.

Once the deed is done, Use the death crystal to tune to the base of the new knot caused by enacting the spirit’s will. Once tuned, you may swap responsibility for the act in the thread of Fate. (Note, this spell does not actually change the past, only the universe’s perceived culpability for a specific event in present time. This may act as a loophole to commit murder and pawn the divine responsibility off on a spirit who hates the target.) This act will break the hold of guilt or anger on the spirit for their death and allow them to pass on.

In return, the ritual user will inherit a large portion of the spirit’s intelligence, skills, and talent, adding it to their own. The amount is based on compatibility.

Interesting. Perry thought, reading and re-reading the spell. He definitely needed to get his hands on Kollox’s Threads of Fate. It sounded like a spell that would allow him to visualize branching fate, something that his System processed on an industrial scale. Another piece of the puzzle to get him closer to mastering The System.

Well, not something I can do in the next three hours, Perry thought, moving on to the next one.

Bloodskip (Difficulty: Advanced)

Something worthy of the name...Paradox.

Perry laid out Kolath’s Floating Armaments, Sacrifice to Gintax, Threads of Gintax, and Astra’s Mending.

Perry pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and started outlining the spell infrastructure in a manic blaze of speed.

Once it was all done, he took a deep breath, staring at the monstrosity he’d created.

I did need an attack spell.

Paradox’s Pernicious Prison (difficulty: Paradox)

Ingredients: Forming slime, Areonite, Hair of Saint Natanya, vivant root, A Malturian web-spitter, tar from the Tolusian pits, Death Crystal, mindtaker Ichor, Silvered Cloud Giant’s eye, The legendary Mimic, Abun’zaul, Darryl Zauberer’s ‘System’.

Insert Darryl’s System and the Mimic Abun’zaul into the caster’s soul. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Use Paradox’s Soul Surgery to implant Paradox’s Essence Filters into the soul, as well as the following Essence Storage and soul circuitry.

A hastily drawn diagram described how the spell would work.

Effect: Quite a bit of ass-kicking.

Perry took a picture of the spell, then fiddled around in his desk and pulled out the E̸̗̝͂̈́̏́p̶͇͚͝i̶̟̩͆̇̕h̵̨̖̞͙͆a̷̳̻̞͠͝n̶̖̮͐͋͠ỵ̸̴̣̰͗̇ egg he’d received from the tentacle monster rogue at the end of Gerome’s idiotic D&D campaign. Perry cracked the egg and spilled the slurry of mind-melting thought over his rough sketch before comparing the two.

Perry’s soul circuitry was shown at an axis, revealing a three-dimensional shape that Perry hadn’t thought of.

Perry took a picture, then paused, his new senses as a Dimensional cross-class Tinker tugging at him.

A 2-D schematic could give a rough approximation of a 3-D construction.

What if Perry made a 3-D schematic and doped it with the egg? What if he made a 4-D schematic?

Perry glanced at the clock.

I got time. Not a lot, but I got time.

Perry yanked his phone out of his pants and called dad.

“Hey dad, you still got that holographic projector in your lair? You know, behind the lawnmower?”

Dad showed up with the projector in a matter of minutes, and Perry uploaded the file he’d been designing to represent the 3-D schematic for his new spell, plugging a honking thumbrive into the machine.

Once Perry confirmed it was working, he poured E̸̗̝͂̈́̏́p̶͇͚͝i̶̟̩͆̇̕h̵̨̖̞͙͆a̷̳̻̞͠͝n̶̖̮͐͋͠ỵ̸̣͗ over it.

“You know,” Dad said conversationally as they stared into the endlessly writhing mass of circuitry projected into the air that seemed to stare back at them... “If I was still in a meat-suit, this would drive me thoroughly insane.”

“Don’t be a wuss, dad, Insanity builds character.” Perry said, to which dad chuckled. Perry tried to take a video, but a 2-d representation of what he was looking at missed...SO much nuance.

It also made his phone bleed a little.

Written notes didn’t really do it justice either. They also changed a little every time he looked at them. Probably a side effect of dimensional turbulence around the schematic.

Perry needed to retain all that it was in his mind, then transfer that over to his soul-surgery equipment.

Let’s make some magic happen.

Stability 40 -> 34

Nerve 26 -> 32

Perry could help but let out a manic cackle as his mind expanded enough to swallow the living schematic whole, as the world around him faded away.

“I’m...regretting certain choices,” dad said, but Perry didn’t have enough spare thought in his mind to process it.

It was so FULL!

An hour later, Perry staggered back to Natalie’s hotel room, rubbing his chest, wishing he could massage his soul. The sun was creeping above the horizon, the Mk. 7 was done, he’d outfitted it with the spells he needed for the mission, and he’d outfitted himself with the spells he needed for the mission.

His soul was stuffed like a Thanksgiving Tofurkey, and it sucked. It made him cranky and irritable, and wanting more than anything else to not visit Nat on the way out.

But some things must be done.

Paradox’s Pernicious Prison (1/6)

Six uses, though, that’s not bad at all.

Perry crept into the room where his girlfriend was quietly sleeping in his girl friend’s arms, bent over and kissed the tiny Tinker’s forehead.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he promised, straightening and about to head out when he heard a sharp intake of breath, the sound of someone waking up.

“Perry?” Heather’s sleep addled voice called, and Perry turned to see her looking up at him, her eyes unfocused and blinking slowly.

“Yeah?”

“You should grow a beard, it would look good on you.” Heather said.

“I, umm...thanks,” Perry muttered, completely defenseless against Heather saying something nice. It was deeply disturbing.

She noticed. Crap.

Heather’s sleep-addled face gave him a smile that was half beatific, half impish delight, before she passed out again, snuggling back into the pillow.

The dead peasant girl from the 1500's swimming around in Heather's soul gave him a wink.

That was weird.