Patricia Wilson
Stories
10
Chapters
3,347
Words
163.4 K
Comments
0
Reading
13 h, 37 m
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An inexplicable outbreak of altruism broke out across suburban Gamphe. It spread, seemingly without reason, along stale residential streets and through mall parking lots. It climbed over overflowing sinks and under subfloor heating. It even, unprovoked, helped a little old lady cross a street, got a cat down from a tree and returned a toy thrown out of a pram. When the sweating, swearing, miserable band of intelligence analysts eventually isolated the source of the chain reaction, they dubbed it “SFO…-
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Truth was elbow deep in the guts of the commercial cold box. A device that looked nearly as old as its owner, and that little senior looked as old as the hills. Or at least a hundred. It was a combination of factors that led to the cold box blowing out. The most obvious was the air circulation tubes. The air circulation tubes, enchanted with a wind spell that pushed cold air out and sucked up the hot air, were badly damaged by intermittent cosmic energy spikes shorting out the finer spell lines. Lines…
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3 •
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Truth looked around the big box store with the apathy of the truly exhausted. His magical reserves were on the low side, but not panic-worthy. His physical condition was, essentially, fine. One day, with the support of friends and faith in the Almighty, he would find the strength to get up off the sofa and do something useful. Not now, obviously. Possibly not even today. But someday. Faith is wonderful that way. His brain ached. Trying to figure out how to use Earth Folding Step in practice was insanely…
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Shape their perception and you shape their reality. Truth listened to the furious racket of private guards sweeping through the neighborhood- demons summoned, angels summoned, police summoned, all trying to track him down. A lot of the neighbors were having their doors unexpectedly kicked in, as all the summoned beasts searched the surrounding properties. At this point, the process felt quite comfortably familiar. He kept jogging, letting the expanding search radius become his friend. Giant, golden…
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Radz Sung’s poker face was justly legendary. Even so, he couldn’t quite restrain a certain crinkling at the corners of his eyes and a subconscious throbbing of the veins on his temple. “I do always like more power. It’s never free, though.” The old man’s voice remained mild as milk. Things hadn’t quite risen to the level of actual strong emotion. “Oh yeah, you could potentially be out… I want to say as much as twenty, or even thirty thousand wen.” Truth nodded. “Well, I guess there…
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Truth let himself vanish from the guard’s perception, then found himself a nice spot on a wall across the street to sit on. The wall was four meters tall and covered with broken glass jutting from the cement, but at this point that wasn’t any sort of issue. A quick pass with his hand smoothed everything flat, and he had a nice spot to watch the show. The key lesson of terrorism, he had learned, was that it wasn’t about the atrocity itself. It was about the reaction. That’s where the real damage…
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Truth waited and watched. The site supervisor frantically hit a gem. Then again, changing a little light on the glass “stone” from blue to orange. Then he clumsily dumped far too much expensive oil into the communication altar and gripped the sides of it hard enough to turn his knuckles white. Truth was trying to just exist. Coasting along the waves of chance and connection and seeing where his path was leading him. Embracing his inner fool, perhaps. The supervisor was sweating, rolling, fat droplets…
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Truth kept an eye on Thrush. There didn’t seem to be any particularly dramatic changes going on, but he could feel a sort of whispering, a sense of pieces shifting slightly. The little black bird was drawing the mass of gore and corruption into itself, seemingly shivering in pleasure. Truth tried to puzzle it out. The kids run out into the street, and go… where, exactly? They don’t have homes, they are refugees. Go to the cops? Ahahahaha. No. But say they did- what would they tell the cops,…
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Truth found the building quite easily, but rather than storm through the back door, he went around the front. He wanted to see just what the place was. It was… nothing. A six story concrete box that took up a third of the block by itself. It had a front door with no markings, a small wagon loading dock which only had the usual safety markings, and that was it. There were a few indiscreet recording talismans arranged around the building, but that was standard everywhere in Jeon. It had windows, mirrored…
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Truth strode out into the regrettably necessary city of Gamphe. The immense concentration of raw concrete everywhere failed to inspire feelings of warm affection in him. The news was interesting but lacking. His interests were domestic at the moment, not international. He needed to get a sense of where Jeon was and where it was headed. If he was going to poison Starbrite’s food, he had to get a sense of how it tasted, as it were. Besides, he hadn’t lied to Merkovah. He really did want to see if he…
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