Chapter 125: 125
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Since he was instructed to take a shower before he started modeling, Orison simply rinsed off and lay in the bungalow's unnecessarily large bed. The maid, coincidentally the girl he had modeled with, was somewhat hesitant to leave after dropping off snacks and pajamas but the young mage had more important things to do. Looking a little hesitant himself, Orison 'reluctantly' exclaimed how tired he was and wished her pleasant dreams.
Since he had been baring it all for hours, putting on bedclothes seemed pointless and it would only make it easier to quickly activate the TSSRR suit if he didn't. Instead, he pushed himself into trance and came to a little before four in the morning. A little discovery from the night before, he had a bit more control over his trance state as long as he wasn't overly tired.
Still reclining restfully, Orison mulled over what the glimpse into the anomaly had showed him. Muriel had almost fooled him, at least partially, with her act. There were men, women and even animals locked in various poses, slowly fossilizing. Most were still alive, in a sense, but beyond saving. He understood what Zora's intuitive reading meant. By whatever means, they were slowly turning into stone from the outside in. After it reached a certain point, they'd die from various complications if the process was stopped. Not that there would be much left to save of the person they'd once been anyway.
The only spot of good news is that the process took a long time to reach that point. There were several people potentially capable of being saved but Orison had no idea how he could do it yet. The entrance to the anomaly was in a sub basement area surrounded by wards and curse traps. The people would be in no condition to help themselves even if he could reach them and there were too many variable he didn't understand.
Zora was only interested in getting Neil out as far as he knew. The Collective might be sympathetic but Orison was far from positive on whether they'd be willing to get into affairs dealing with the Mason's or the 'new blood'. Supposing that the people could be saved, they'd be a PR nightmare for the secret societies which would probably lean even the nicer ones towards silencing rather than saving.
All thoughts on subtle plans went out the window when he felt a cold sensation of negative essence try to work its way into his head. Collecting the clothes he'd been wearing the day before, he found that the stag pin in his pants pocket was missing. The sudden shot of adrenaline was so intense, his world was stained in red before it went white. The whisper of cautiousness and worry over future consequences was drown out in a roar that wasn't fueled by the hormone drenched centers of the primal brain but his very soul.
He didn't so much walk into her town house as walk through it. Doors, drywall and plaster flew in pieces as he made his way towards Muriel's sanctuary like a slow motion wrecking ball. Bullets bounced of the TSSRR suit helmet or stuck in the back portion before Orison slammed a security guard's head into a particularly solid wall and sent a spike of will to knock out another, causing a small amount of damage to the poor man's spiritual seat. Even in the midst of nearly mindless rage, a portion still knew who was responsible and who had just been dragged into it, giving the young mage just enough impetus to not murder his way to Muriel but pull his lashing out below lethal range.
Sigil after sigil lit up the entire place like a thick blanket of Christmas decorations but the multiple layers of wards and curse traps only made him more bold as Orison brought his space to the surface. The rest of his vengeful trek was done looking like a two dimensional, pure black cut-out of a person dashing through Muriel's place. Flickering between ghost-like and a living black hole, he threw himself at her like a feral animal.
In the cavernous sub basement of Muriel's house, the woman drew up her most powerful wards to keep Orison away as she screamed entreaties and threats at him. Seeing that her best efforts were only buying her a few seconds, she gave up all pretense and drew out the entity dwelling within her shadow. An inky representation of femininity in titan form coalesced around her.
The entity made of shadow and negative spiritual essence hunched over to fit in the confined space, dwarfing the young mage. Where the head should be, a writhing mass of inky snakes coiled and lashed about. Set deep within the mass, two gloomy orbs glowed with dull gray light. Around Orison, wood and upholstered fabric petrified along with any other organic material but none of it did more than pass through or into the chaotically churning edges of his space.
When the dark palm of the shadowy giantess slapped down on him, Orison buckled momentarily. Shattering an ankle and suffering fractures in his shoulder, his space began defensively churning and chewing into the palm momentarily. Suddenly slipping through what was left of the large hand in ethereal ease, the coiled strength within his still good leg released, catapulting him towards the gray orbs.
With an effort of will, his ghostly form forcefully shifted back to devouring mode. Reaching through the mass of serpentine menace that struck and bit at him, the young mage snatched one and then the other 'eye' in lightning speed. The core and source of it form devoured into Orison's space, the shadowy titan collapsed into negative essence mist.
Slightly fueled by the subtly poisonous substance, the enraged young mage physically twisted Muriel's head off before turning to the spacial anomaly. Cutting through dense wards and curse work with a lightless black hand, he reached through and devoured the core artifact that had maintained it. A modicum of intellect asserted itself as Orison realized the idiocy of what he had done at the last moment.
With vengeance dealt, the young mage's returning rational went into overdrive. To keep the living contents of the anomalous space from being crushed by its collapse back into reality or harmed from the indiscriminate nature of his own space, Orison danced between ghost and devouring forms. Taking in displaced air and all non-living material, he let the victims pass through as the anomaly collapsed.
With Muriel's death and the collapse of the anomaly, inert spirit essence began flooding back into her property through the disintegrating wards. Orison's attention was pulled back to that fact when a distressed cry of alarm issued from all of his summons in concert, managing to barely reach his spiritual perception. He quickly shut and pulled in his space but a great deal of damage was already done. Before he could investigate just how bad it was, essence fatigue and the damage that the inert essence had done to his life force darkened his vision. With a last weak exclamation of 'zero f***s given' to retract his suit so he'd look like the rest of the victims in the basement, Orison lost consciousness... again.
Weeks were spent drifting in and out of trance. The young mage knew things were bad and the only thing that kept doctors at the hospital he was in from making it worse was the influx of nearly 300 other patients that had came in with him. On the surface, he was better off but in truth, he was hanging on by a thread. The inert essence within his body was so dense that liquefied portions were swimming around his bloodstream carrying microscopic crystallized death to every inch of his body.
He would have been long dead from life force drain if the water elemental that inhabited his vital water pool hadn't devised some way to share it with him in barely safe amounts. It wasn't the only one. All of his summons had found a way to reach out to him even though he hadn't been able to reach them. And every one of them besides the horse had found some way to aid in his survival. Whether it was the earth elemental helping draw crystalline obstructions from his body into his space or the sprites sending tiny, pencil dot heals throughout him, his continued existence might have been questionable.
Once the fires of his life force had been banked back up from where it had fallen to a few minutes, at its lowest, to a few years and the major obstacles to continued life had been removed from his body, the mysterious additional connection severed. For a brief moment, he thought he felt the Danann Key but it was so radically different in feeling, he tacked it up to some benevolent force that was similar. Lacking any better option, he simply thanked it silently and was rewarded with what felt like a ghostly peck on the cheek.
Once it was noticed by staff that he had come around, a man in a lab coat came to speak with Orison. He knew right away that the man was a society member of one kind or another. There was a quality to the gentleman in question that one glimpse away and it was possible to forget he was there. Trying to recall what he looked like was impossible.
The man asked the young mage questions about his ordeal which Orison obviously lied about. Keeping the story simple, he just feigned ignorance entirely, only admitting to remembering going to visit Ms. Gorogos about some modeling work but not even clear on who he was. The man finished his questioning with an exercise in hypnosis that Orison allowed to affect his mind, removing it the moment the man left.
The cover story was well done. A gas leak at Muriel's house led to the discovery of a nearby holding facility for a human trafficking ring owned by the mob. The poor widow was an unfortunate victim of an attack against her home by said mob and her security staff was set up to look like heroes. The combination of generous payout and medical bill coverage coupled with the ever looming mob retaliation threat to keep all the victims silent and hidden, it was polished to perfection. Orison had no doubts that those who didn't stay quiet and behind the curtain would indeed face retaliation to keep the cover up pristine.
The best part for Orison was that those like himself, and there were a few, who couldn't remember their past lives were given new identities. They were only asked to come forward and reclaim their old identities should the day come that they remembered. The elation over easily acquired legitimacy died as Orison looked over his new identification. It was him. The paper trail that he had made in Port Haven was the same aside from being moved up a handful of years.
A note clipped on the back of his new driver's license read, "Good to see you alive and relatively well. Neil is one of ours and you can be too, if you wish. I'll keep my word as long as you keep your fangs put away... Sincerely, Mr. C."
During the earlier days of his recovery, Orison hadn't received any visitors. In a futile attempt to protect whatever part of his identity they thought he'd managed to hide, Zora and Ignatius had stayed away. Closer to the end, Nicolas had stopped by once and they had made plans to hang out once he was released. The young mage could tell under the happy-go-lucky demeanor, the sculptor was deeply worried about his own future. Without Muriel, he had no patron and no studio.
The day before his scheduled release, Orison received two more surprise visitors. Mrs. Derby and Ms. Messier, now Mrs. Carter, practically fell over themselves with tearful joy at his reappearance. Though there was genuine happiness at meeting him again, 'Mrs. Carter's histrionics were somewhat fake. Being the wife of Jonathan, there was no way she wouldn't be in the know and under some obligation to help keep things subdued and private. Despite that, her warm hug and misty eyed 'welcome back' were real enough.
After she had gotten herself under control again, Mrs Derby said, "I never gave up hope you'd be found one day. What dreadful circumstances!... When you first disappeared, I put up a reward for information but the feds made me take it back down. Instead, I threw some weight around and had your likeness posted at ever Darby's location. Can you believe they replaced the 'e' in my name with an 'a'? Outrageous!
"Imagine my surprise when I got a call three weeks ago saying that someone who matched your description was seen coming in. Well, I was on my way here the next day! I nearly had a heart attack when I had people ask around and finally managed to track you down here with Rachel's help. Why you just stumble around from one bad situation to the next! Makes an old woman worried to death!"
Internally, Orison half sobbed, "So you're the reason Mr. Carter knew who I was. The results of the meddling of overly kind people are scary."
The young mage beamed brightly and was about to speak when Mrs. Carter said, "Just remember what I told you, Alice. He had been working for years on bringing down the human trafficking ring with the feds. That's the kind of thing that could put him in a whole lot of danger if it was leaked."
Mrs. Darby looked at her and said, "Thank goodness your husband has friends in government or who knows what kind of harm I could have caused."
"Who knows, indeed," Orison thought blandly.
After some time of fawning over him, Mrs. Darby informed him that the fast food restaurant patent was unsuccessfully challenged once. The only thing that saved it was how inclusive and advanced it was. Having it brought to her attention, however, she turned it back on the ones that had went after her and saw where they and a few other chains had emulated it without permission. After a heated round through courts, she found herself possessing varying degrees of profit shares with several other franchises.
She was stupid rich. She also wasn't that naive and even if a heart of gold beat in her chest, dollar signs danced in her eyes as well. She knew who was responsible for it all and genuinely wanted to share some of her gains with Orison but she wanted something in return. It was fairly simple. She wanted a more thorough patent model along with what amounted to a Standard of Operation Procedure.
Orison was more than happy to agree. By the time that Mrs. Derby's limo escorted him to her hotel the next morning, the young mage had given her a breakdown of a year by year additive model for the next decade and gave her enough of an SOP outline to keep her vested interests squirting cash into her accounts for the rest of her foreseeable life.
Orison was about to protest right along with her two sons when she announced to her family her intent to split her liquid savings down the middle with the young mage. She shut them up by showing them the new patent model and how it would insure their futures long past her, throwing a simple but binding legal contract at Orison along with a water tight NDA. Afterwards, she celebrated by ordering up a banquet to their suite.
Mrs. Derby may have been a gem of a human being but years of soft living had turned her two oldest children into different creatures altogether. To save himself from subtle harassment and nauseating boot licking, he stuck to her side. During the following hours of comfortable rides from place to place, getting all the little details squared away, Orison noted that the youngest son was a quiet, observant and respectful teen.
When the teenager Henry approached him while the older brothers were off doing who knows what, a situation Mrs. Derby likely devised on purpose, the young mage wasn't quite as ready to retreat back to Alice's side. After fishing for common interests and exercising some clumsily executed psychology tricks to ingratiate himself, Henry started leading the conversation towards the future.
Smiling, Orison said, "Are you a person who knows how to care for the little people who serve you loyally like your mom? Can you boldly cut off a pound of flesh to return a life changing favor like she's doing?"
Giving Orison a saccharine smile in return, Henry readily agreed with cold eyes.
The young mage sighed. "You're smarter than your brothers but you're not better. The reason why I helped your mom and I choose to do so again was and is because she's a good woman, not because I care about money. If you're interested in becoming wealthy, throw your money into oil after a bad drop in the early seventies and pull it before 1980. Take the money you made and invest in the development of technology, especially as soon as there is an emergent home computer company sometime around the mid nineties or hell, do it yourself if you can find the brains necessary.
"If you want to make a difference, take time and resources to invest in clean energy and medicine that actually cures disease instead of just treating them. There's little money in that but a whole lot of good. If you do that, you can take comfort knowing that you may lose a fortune but you'll help humanity survive a little longer."
Looking thoughtful, Henry said, "What do you mean by clean energy?"
Giving Henry a genuine smile, Orison sat down and explained.
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Since he was instructed to take a shower before he started modeling, Orison simply rinsed off and lay in the bungalow's unnecessarily large bed. The maid, coincidentally the girl he had modeled with, was somewhat hesitant to leave after dropping off snacks and pajamas but the young mage had more important things to do. Looking a little hesitant himself, Orison 'reluctantly' exclaimed how tired he was and wished her pleasant dreams.
Since he had been baring it all for hours, putting on bedclothes seemed pointless and it would only make it easier to quickly activate the TSSRR suit if he didn't. Instead, he pushed himself into trance and came to a little before four in the morning. A little discovery from the night before, he had a bit more control over his trance state as long as he wasn't overly tired.
Still reclining restfully, Orison mulled over what the glimpse into the anomaly had showed him. Muriel had almost fooled him, at least partially, with her act. There were men, women and even animals locked in various poses, slowly fossilizing. Most were still alive, in a sense, but beyond saving. He understood what Zora's intuitive reading meant. By whatever means, they were slowly turning into stone from the outside in. After it reached a certain point, they'd die from various complications if the process was stopped. Not that there would be much left to save of the person they'd once been anyway.
The only spot of good news is that the process took a long time to reach that point. There were several people potentially capable of being saved but Orison had no idea how he could do it yet. The entrance to the anomaly was in a sub basement area surrounded by wards and curse traps. The people would be in no condition to help themselves even if he could reach them and there were too many variable he didn't understand.
Zora was only interested in getting Neil out as far as he knew. The Collective might be sympathetic but Orison was far from positive on whether they'd be willing to get into affairs dealing with the Mason's or the 'new blood'. Supposing that the people could be saved, they'd be a PR nightmare for the secret societies which would probably lean even the nicer ones towards silencing rather than saving.
All thoughts on subtle plans went out the window when he felt a cold sensation of negative essence try to work its way into his head. Collecting the clothes he'd been wearing the day before, he found that the stag pin in his pants pocket was missing. The sudden shot of adrenaline was so intense, his world was stained in red before it went white. The whisper of cautiousness and worry over future consequences was drown out in a roar that wasn't fueled by the hormone drenched centers of the primal brain but his very soul.
He didn't so much walk into her town house as walk through it. Doors, drywall and plaster flew in pieces as he made his way towards Muriel's sanctuary like a slow motion wrecking ball. Bullets bounced of the TSSRR suit helmet or stuck in the back portion before Orison slammed a security guard's head into a particularly solid wall and sent a spike of will to knock out another, causing a small amount of damage to the poor man's spiritual seat. Even in the midst of nearly mindless rage, a portion still knew who was responsible and who had just been dragged into it, giving the young mage just enough impetus to not murder his way to Muriel but pull his lashing out below lethal range.
Sigil after sigil lit up the entire place like a thick blanket of Christmas decorations but the multiple layers of wards and curse traps only made him more bold as Orison brought his space to the surface. The rest of his vengeful trek was done looking like a two dimensional, pure black cut-out of a person dashing through Muriel's place. Flickering between ghost-like and a living black hole, he threw himself at her like a feral animal.
In the cavernous sub basement of Muriel's house, the woman drew up her most powerful wards to keep Orison away as she screamed entreaties and threats at him. Seeing that her best efforts were only buying her a few seconds, she gave up all pretense and drew out the entity dwelling within her shadow. An inky representation of femininity in titan form coalesced around her.
The entity made of shadow and negative spiritual essence hunched over to fit in the confined space, dwarfing the young mage. Where the head should be, a writhing mass of inky snakes coiled and lashed about. Set deep within the mass, two gloomy orbs glowed with dull gray light. Around Orison, wood and upholstered fabric petrified along with any other organic material but none of it did more than pass through or into the chaotically churning edges of his space.
When the dark palm of the shadowy giantess slapped down on him, Orison buckled momentarily. Shattering an ankle and suffering fractures in his shoulder, his space began defensively churning and chewing into the palm momentarily. Suddenly slipping through what was left of the large hand in ethereal ease, the coiled strength within his still good leg released, catapulting him towards the gray orbs.
With an effort of will, his ghostly form forcefully shifted back to devouring mode. Reaching through the mass of serpentine menace that struck and bit at him, the young mage snatched one and then the other 'eye' in lightning speed. The core and source of it form devoured into Orison's space, the shadowy titan collapsed into negative essence mist.
Slightly fueled by the subtly poisonous substance, the enraged young mage physically twisted Muriel's head off before turning to the spacial anomaly. Cutting through dense wards and curse work with a lightless black hand, he reached through and devoured the core artifact that had maintained it. A modicum of intellect asserted itself as Orison realized the idiocy of what he had done at the last moment.
With vengeance dealt, the young mage's returning rational went into overdrive. To keep the living contents of the anomalous space from being crushed by its collapse back into reality or harmed from the indiscriminate nature of his own space, Orison danced between ghost and devouring forms. Taking in displaced air and all non-living material, he let the victims pass through as the anomaly collapsed.
With Muriel's death and the collapse of the anomaly, inert spirit essence began flooding back into her property through the disintegrating wards. Orison's attention was pulled back to that fact when a distressed cry of alarm issued from all of his summons in concert, managing to barely reach his spiritual perception. He quickly shut and pulled in his space but a great deal of damage was already done. Before he could investigate just how bad it was, essence fatigue and the damage that the inert essence had done to his life force darkened his vision. With a last weak exclamation of 'zero f***s given' to retract his suit so he'd look like the rest of the victims in the basement, Orison lost consciousness... again.
Weeks were spent drifting in and out of trance. The young mage knew things were bad and the only thing that kept doctors at the hospital he was in from making it worse was the influx of nearly 300 other patients that had came in with him. On the surface, he was better off but in truth, he was hanging on by a thread. The inert essence within his body was so dense that liquefied portions were swimming around his bloodstream carrying microscopic crystallized death to every inch of his body.
He would have been long dead from life force drain if the water elemental that inhabited his vital water pool hadn't devised some way to share it with him in barely safe amounts. It wasn't the only one. All of his summons had found a way to reach out to him even though he hadn't been able to reach them. And every one of them besides the horse had found some way to aid in his survival. Whether it was the earth elemental helping draw crystalline obstructions from his body into his space or the sprites sending tiny, pencil dot heals throughout him, his continued existence might have been questionable.
Once the fires of his life force had been banked back up from where it had fallen to a few minutes, at its lowest, to a few years and the major obstacles to continued life had been removed from his body, the mysterious additional connection severed. For a brief moment, he thought he felt the Danann Key but it was so radically different in feeling, he tacked it up to some benevolent force that was similar. Lacking any better option, he simply thanked it silently and was rewarded with what felt like a ghostly peck on the cheek.
Once it was noticed by staff that he had come around, a man in a lab coat came to speak with Orison. He knew right away that the man was a society member of one kind or another. There was a quality to the gentleman in question that one glimpse away and it was possible to forget he was there. Trying to recall what he looked like was impossible.
The man asked the young mage questions about his ordeal which Orison obviously lied about. Keeping the story simple, he just feigned ignorance entirely, only admitting to remembering going to visit Ms. Gorogos about some modeling work but not even clear on who he was. The man finished his questioning with an exercise in hypnosis that Orison allowed to affect his mind, removing it the moment the man left.
The cover story was well done. A gas leak at Muriel's house led to the discovery of a nearby holding facility for a human trafficking ring owned by the mob. The poor widow was an unfortunate victim of an attack against her home by said mob and her security staff was set up to look like heroes. The combination of generous payout and medical bill coverage coupled with the ever looming mob retaliation threat to keep all the victims silent and hidden, it was polished to perfection. Orison had no doubts that those who didn't stay quiet and behind the curtain would indeed face retaliation to keep the cover up pristine.
The best part for Orison was that those like himself, and there were a few, who couldn't remember their past lives were given new identities. They were only asked to come forward and reclaim their old identities should the day come that they remembered. The elation over easily acquired legitimacy died as Orison looked over his new identification. It was him. The paper trail that he had made in Port Haven was the same aside from being moved up a handful of years.
A note clipped on the back of his new driver's license read, "Good to see you alive and relatively well. Neil is one of ours and you can be too, if you wish. I'll keep my word as long as you keep your fangs put away... Sincerely, Mr. C."
During the earlier days of his recovery, Orison hadn't received any visitors. In a futile attempt to protect whatever part of his identity they thought he'd managed to hide, Zora and Ignatius had stayed away. Closer to the end, Nicolas had stopped by once and they had made plans to hang out once he was released. The young mage could tell under the happy-go-lucky demeanor, the sculptor was deeply worried about his own future. Without Muriel, he had no patron and no studio.
The day before his scheduled release, Orison received two more surprise visitors. Mrs. Derby and Ms. Messier, now Mrs. Carter, practically fell over themselves with tearful joy at his reappearance. Though there was genuine happiness at meeting him again, 'Mrs. Carter's histrionics were somewhat fake. Being the wife of Jonathan, there was no way she wouldn't be in the know and under some obligation to help keep things subdued and private. Despite that, her warm hug and misty eyed 'welcome back' were real enough.
After she had gotten herself under control again, Mrs Derby said, "I never gave up hope you'd be found one day. What dreadful circumstances!... When you first disappeared, I put up a reward for information but the feds made me take it back down. Instead, I threw some weight around and had your likeness posted at ever Darby's location. Can you believe they replaced the 'e' in my name with an 'a'? Outrageous!
"Imagine my surprise when I got a call three weeks ago saying that someone who matched your description was seen coming in. Well, I was on my way here the next day! I nearly had a heart attack when I had people ask around and finally managed to track you down here with Rachel's help. Why you just stumble around from one bad situation to the next! Makes an old woman worried to death!"
Internally, Orison half sobbed, "So you're the reason Mr. Carter knew who I was. The results of the meddling of overly kind people are scary."
The young mage beamed brightly and was about to speak when Mrs. Carter said, "Just remember what I told you, Alice. He had been working for years on bringing down the human trafficking ring with the feds. That's the kind of thing that could put him in a whole lot of danger if it was leaked."
Mrs. Darby looked at her and said, "Thank goodness your husband has friends in government or who knows what kind of harm I could have caused."
"Who knows, indeed," Orison thought blandly.
After some time of fawning over him, Mrs. Darby informed him that the fast food restaurant patent was unsuccessfully challenged once. The only thing that saved it was how inclusive and advanced it was. Having it brought to her attention, however, she turned it back on the ones that had went after her and saw where they and a few other chains had emulated it without permission. After a heated round through courts, she found herself possessing varying degrees of profit shares with several other franchises.
She was stupid rich. She also wasn't that naive and even if a heart of gold beat in her chest, dollar signs danced in her eyes as well. She knew who was responsible for it all and genuinely wanted to share some of her gains with Orison but she wanted something in return. It was fairly simple. She wanted a more thorough patent model along with what amounted to a Standard of Operation Procedure.
Orison was more than happy to agree. By the time that Mrs. Derby's limo escorted him to her hotel the next morning, the young mage had given her a breakdown of a year by year additive model for the next decade and gave her enough of an SOP outline to keep her vested interests squirting cash into her accounts for the rest of her foreseeable life.
Orison was about to protest right along with her two sons when she announced to her family her intent to split her liquid savings down the middle with the young mage. She shut them up by showing them the new patent model and how it would insure their futures long past her, throwing a simple but binding legal contract at Orison along with a water tight NDA. Afterwards, she celebrated by ordering up a banquet to their suite.
Mrs. Derby may have been a gem of a human being but years of soft living had turned her two oldest children into different creatures altogether. To save himself from subtle harassment and nauseating boot licking, he stuck to her side. During the following hours of comfortable rides from place to place, getting all the little details squared away, Orison noted that the youngest son was a quiet, observant and respectful teen.
When the teenager Henry approached him while the older brothers were off doing who knows what, a situation Mrs. Derby likely devised on purpose, the young mage wasn't quite as ready to retreat back to Alice's side. After fishing for common interests and exercising some clumsily executed psychology tricks to ingratiate himself, Henry started leading the conversation towards the future.
Smiling, Orison said, "Are you a person who knows how to care for the little people who serve you loyally like your mom? Can you boldly cut off a pound of flesh to return a life changing favor like she's doing?"
Giving Orison a saccharine smile in return, Henry readily agreed with cold eyes.
The young mage sighed. "You're smarter than your brothers but you're not better. The reason why I helped your mom and I choose to do so again was and is because she's a good woman, not because I care about money. If you're interested in becoming wealthy, throw your money into oil after a bad drop in the early seventies and pull it before 1980. Take the money you made and invest in the development of technology, especially as soon as there is an emergent home computer company sometime around the mid nineties or hell, do it yourself if you can find the brains necessary.
"If you want to make a difference, take time and resources to invest in clean energy and medicine that actually cures disease instead of just treating them. There's little money in that but a whole lot of good. If you do that, you can take comfort knowing that you may lose a fortune but you'll help humanity survive a little longer."
Looking thoughtful, Henry said, "What do you mean by clean energy?"
Giving Henry a genuine smile, Orison sat down and explained.
Since he was instructed to take a shower before he started modeling, Orison simply rinsed off and lay in the bungalow's unnecessarily large bed. The maid, coincidentally the girl he had modeled with, was somewhat hesitant to leave after dropping off snacks and pajamas but the young mage had more important things to do. Looking a little hesitant himself, Orison 'reluctantly' exclaimed how tired he was and wished her pleasant dreams. Since he had been baring it all for hours, putting on bedclothes seemed pointless and it would only make it easier to quickly activate the TSSRR suit if he didn't. Instead, he pushed himself into trance and came to a little before four in the morning. A little discovery from the night before, he had a bit more control over his trance state as long as he wasn't overly tired. Still reclining restfully, Orison mulled over what the glimpse into the anomaly had showed him. Muriel had almost fooled him, at least partially, with her act. There were men, women and even animals locked in various poses, slowly fossilizing. Most were still alive, in a sense, but beyond saving. He understood what Zora's intuitive reading meant. By whatever means, they were slowly turning into stone from the outside in. After it reached a certain point, they'd die from various complications if the process was stopped. Not that there would be much left to save of the person they'd once been anyway. The only spot of good news is that the process took a long time to reach that point. There were several people potentially capable of being saved but Orison had no idea how he could do it yet. The entrance to the anomaly was in a sub basement area surrounded by wards and curse traps. The people would be in no condition to help themselves even if he could reach them and there were too many variable he didn't understand. Zora was only interested in getting Neil out as far as he knew. The Collective might be sympathetic but Orison was far from positive on whether they'd be willing to get into affairs dealing with the Mason's or the 'new blood'. Supposing that the people could be saved, they'd be a PR nightmare for the secret societies which would probably lean even the nicer ones towards silencing rather than saving. All thoughts on subtle plans went out the window when he felt a cold sensation of negative essence try to work its way into his head. Collecting the clothes he'd been wearing the day before, he found that the stag pin in his pants pocket was missing. The sudden shot of adrenaline was so intense, his world was stained in red before it went white. The whisper of cautiousness and worry over future consequences was drown out in a roar that wasn't fueled by the hormone drenched centers of the primal brain but his very soul. He didn't so much walk into her town house as walk through it. Doors, drywall and plaster flew in pieces as he made his way towards Muriel's sanctuary like a slow motion wrecking ball. Bullets bounced of the TSSRR suit helmet or stuck in the back portion before Orison slammed a security guard's head into a particularly solid wall and sent a spike of will to knock out another, causing a small amount of damage to the poor man's spiritual seat. Even in the midst of nearly mindless rage, a portion still knew who was responsible and who had just been dragged into it, giving the young mage just enough impetus to not murder his way to Muriel but pull his lashing out below lethal range. Sigil after sigil lit up the entire place like a thick blanket of Christmas decorations but the multiple layers of wards and curse traps only made him more bold as Orison brought his space to the surface. The rest of his vengeful trek was done looking like a two dimensional, pure black cut-out of a person dashing through Muriel's place. Flickering between ghost-like and a living black hole, he threw himself at her like a feral animal. In the cavernous sub basement of Muriel's house, the woman drew up her most powerful wards to keep Orison away as she screamed entreaties and threats at him. Seeing that her best efforts were only buying her a few seconds, she gave up all pretense and drew out the entity dwelling within her shadow. An inky representation of femininity in titan form coalesced around her. The entity made of shadow and negative spiritual essence hunched over to fit in the confined space, dwarfing the young mage. Where the head should be, a writhing mass of inky snakes coiled and lashed about. Set deep within the mass, two gloomy orbs glowed with dull gray light. Around Orison, wood and upholstered fabric petrified along with any other organic material but none of it did more than pass through or into the chaotically churning edges of his space. When the dark palm of the shadowy giantess slapped down on him, Orison buckled momentarily. Shattering an ankle and suffering fractures in his shoulder, his space began defensively churning and chewing into the palm momentarily. Suddenly slipping through what was left of the large hand in ethereal ease, the coiled strength within his still good leg released, catapulting him towards the gray orbs. With an effort of will, his ghostly form forcefully shifted back to devouring mode. Reaching through the mass of serpentine menace that struck and bit at him, the young mage snatched one and then the other 'eye' in lightning speed. The core and source of it form devoured into Orison's space, the shadowy titan collapsed into negative essence mist. Slightly fueled by the subtly poisonous substance, the enraged young mage physically twisted Muriel's head off before turning to the spacial anomaly. Cutting through dense wards and curse work with a lightless black hand, he reached through and devoured the core artifact that had maintained it. A modicum of intellect asserted itself as Orison realized the idiocy of what he had done at the last moment. With vengeance dealt, the young mage's returning rational went into overdrive. To keep the living contents of the anomalous space from being crushed by its collapse back into reality or harmed from the indiscriminate nature of his own space, Orison danced between ghost and devouring forms. Taking in displaced air and all non-living material, he let the victims pass through as the anomaly collapsed. With Muriel's death and the collapse of the anomaly, inert spirit essence began flooding back into her property through the disintegrating wards. Orison's attention was pulled back to that fact when a distressed cry of alarm issued from all of his summons in concert, managing to barely reach his spiritual perception. He quickly shut and pulled in his space but a great deal of damage was already done. Before he could investigate just how bad it was, essence fatigue and the damage that the inert essence had done to his life force darkened his vision. With a last weak exclamation of 'zero f***s given' to retract his suit so he'd look like the rest of the victims in the basement, Orison lost consciousness... again. Weeks were spent drifting in and out of trance. The young mage knew things were bad and the only thing that kept doctors at the hospital he was in from making it worse was the influx of nearly 300 other patients that had came in with him. On the surface, he was better off but in truth, he was hanging on by a thread. The inert essence within his body was so dense that liquefied portions were swimming around his bloodstream carrying microscopic crystallized death to every inch of his body. He would have been long dead from life force drain if the water elemental that inhabited his vital water pool hadn't devised some way to share it with him in barely safe amounts. It wasn't the only one. All of his summons had found a way to reach out to him even though he hadn't been able to reach them. And every one of them besides the horse had found some way to aid in his survival. Whether it was the earth elemental helping draw crystalline obstructions from his body into his space or the sprites sending tiny, pencil dot heals throughout him, his continued existence might have been questionable. Once the fires of his life force had been banked back up from where it had fallen to a few minutes, at its lowest, to a few years and the major obstacles to continued life had been removed from his body, the mysterious additional connection severed. For a brief moment, he thought he felt the Danann Key but it was so radically different in feeling, he tacked it up to some benevolent force that was similar. Lacking any better option, he simply thanked it silently and was rewarded with what felt like a ghostly peck on the cheek. Once it was noticed by staff that he had come around, a man in a lab coat came to speak with Orison. He knew right away that the man was a society member of one kind or another. There was a quality to the gentleman in question that one glimpse away and it was possible to forget he was there. Trying to recall what he looked like was impossible. The man asked the young mage questions about his ordeal which Orison obviously lied about. Keeping the story simple, he just feigned ignorance entirely, only admitting to remembering going to visit Ms. Gorogos about some modeling work but not even clear on who he was. The man finished his questioning with an exercise in hypnosis that Orison allowed to affect his mind, removing it the moment the man left. The cover story was well done. A gas leak at Muriel's house led to the discovery of a nearby holding facility for a human trafficking ring owned by the mob. The poor widow was an unfortunate victim of an attack against her home by said mob and her security staff was set up to look like heroes. The combination of generous payout and medical bill coverage coupled with the ever looming mob retaliation threat to keep all the victims silent and hidden, it was polished to perfection. Orison had no doubts that those who didn't stay quiet and behind the curtain would indeed face retaliation to keep the cover up pristine. The best part for Orison was that those like himself, and there were a few, who couldn't remember their past lives were given new identities. They were only asked to come forward and reclaim their old identities should the day come that they remembered. The elation over easily acquired legitimacy died as Orison looked over his new identification. It was him. The paper trail that he had made in Port Haven was the same aside from being moved up a handful of years. A note clipped on the back of his new driver's license read, "Good to see you alive and relatively well. Neil is one of ours and you can be too, if you wish. I'll keep my word as long as you keep your fangs put away... Sincerely, Mr. C." During the earlier days of his recovery, Orison hadn't received any visitors. In a futile attempt to protect whatever part of his identity they thought he'd managed to hide, Zora and Ignatius had stayed away. Closer to the end, Nicolas had stopped by once and they had made plans to hang out once he was released. The young mage could tell under the happy-go-lucky demeanor, the sculptor was deeply worried about his own future. Without Muriel, he had no patron and no studio. The day before his scheduled release, Orison received two more surprise visitors. Mrs. Derby and Ms. Messier, now Mrs. Carter, practically fell over themselves with tearful joy at his reappearance. Though there was genuine happiness at meeting him again, 'Mrs. Carter's histrionics were somewhat fake. Being the wife of Jonathan, there was no way she wouldn't be in the know and under some obligation to help keep things subdued and private. Despite that, her warm hug and misty eyed 'welcome back' were real enough. After she had gotten herself under control again, Mrs Derby said, "I never gave up hope you'd be found one day. What dreadful circumstances!... When you first disappeared, I put up a reward for information but the feds made me take it back down. Instead, I threw some weight around and had your likeness posted at ever Darby's location. Can you believe they replaced the 'e' in my name with an 'a'? Outrageous! "Imagine my surprise when I got a call three weeks ago saying that someone who matched your description was seen coming in. Well, I was on my way here the next day! I nearly had a heart attack when I had people ask around and finally managed to track you down here with Rachel's help. Why you just stumble around from one bad situation to the next! Makes an old woman worried to death!" Internally, Orison half sobbed, "So you're the reason Mr. Carter knew who I was. The results of the meddling of overly kind people are scary." The young mage beamed brightly and was about to speak when Mrs. Carter said, "Just remember what I told you, Alice. He had been working for years on bringing down the human trafficking ring with the feds. That's the kind of thing that could put him in a whole lot of danger if it was leaked." Mrs. Darby looked at her and said, "Thank goodness your husband has friends in government or who knows what kind of harm I could have caused." "Who knows, indeed," Orison thought blandly. After some time of fawning over him, Mrs. Darby informed him that the fast food restaurant patent was unsuccessfully challenged once. The only thing that saved it was how inclusive and advanced it was. Having it brought to her attention, however, she turned it back on the ones that had went after her and saw where they and a few other chains had emulated it without permission. After a heated round through courts, she found herself possessing varying degrees of profit shares with several other franchises. She was stupid rich. She also wasn't that naive and even if a heart of gold beat in her chest, dollar signs danced in her eyes as well. She knew who was responsible for it all and genuinely wanted to share some of her gains with Orison but she wanted something in return. It was fairly simple. She wanted a more thorough patent model along with what amounted to a Standard of Operation Procedure. Orison was more than happy to agree. By the time that Mrs. Derby's limo escorted him to her hotel the next morning, the young mage had given her a breakdown of a year by year additive model for the next decade and gave her enough of an SOP outline to keep her vested interests squirting cash into her accounts for the rest of her foreseeable life. Orison was about to protest right along with her two sons when she announced to her family her intent to split her liquid savings down the middle with the young mage. She shut them up by showing them the new patent model and how it would insure their futures long past her, throwing a simple but binding legal contract at Orison along with a water tight NDA. Afterwards, she celebrated by ordering up a banquet to their suite. Mrs. Derby may have been a gem of a human being but years of soft living had turned her two oldest children into different creatures altogether. To save himself from subtle harassment and nauseating boot licking, he stuck to her side. During the following hours of comfortable rides from place to place, getting all the little details squared away, Orison noted that the youngest son was a quiet, observant and respectful teen. When the teenager Henry approached him while the older brothers were off doing who knows what, a situation Mrs. Derby likely devised on purpose, the young mage wasn't quite as ready to retreat back to Alice's side. After fishing for common interests and exercising some clumsily executed psychology tricks to ingratiate himself, Henry started leading the conversation towards the future. Smiling, Orison said, "Are you a person who knows how to care for the little people who serve you loyally like your mom? Can you boldly cut off a pound of flesh to return a life changing favor like she's doing?" Giving Orison a saccharine smile in return, Henry readily agreed with cold eyes. The young mage sighed. "You're smarter than your brothers but you're not better. The reason why I helped your mom and I choose to do so again was and is because she's a good woman, not because I care about money. If you're interested in becoming wealthy, throw your money into oil after a bad drop in the early seventies and pull it before 1980. Take the money you made and invest in the development of technology, especially as soon as there is an emergent home computer company sometime around the mid nineties or hell, do it yourself if you can find the brains necessary. "If you want to make a difference, take time and resources to invest in clean energy and medicine that actually cures disease instead of just treating them. There's little money in that but a whole lot of good. If you do that, you can take comfort knowing that you may lose a fortune but you'll help humanity survive a little longer." Looking thoughtful, Henry said, "What do you mean by clean energy?" Giving Henry a genuine smile, Orison sat down and explained.
