This long-awaited seventh chapter in the sequel to No Obligation pulls our heroine and her Champion to Las Vegas, to try her luck and skill against a familiar foe with a new love of body snatching.

 

by Randalynn

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“How I wish that there were more
Than the twenty-four hours in the day
'cause even if there were forty more
I wouldn't sleep a minute away
Oh, there's black jack and poker and the roulette wheel
A fortune won and lost on ev'ry deal
All you need's a strong heart and a nerve of steel
Viva Las Vegas, Viva Las Vegas”
— Elvis Presley, Viva Las Vegas

“I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart”
— Sting, The Shape of My Heart

 

We arrived in Las Vegas just a few minutes from dusk, only a few feet from where the chaos magic had been invoked. I had cloaked us both with a variant of the "don’t notice me" spell the Arbiters used so long ago, when my journey to becoming the Advocate had begun. It had only been a few months, but it seemed like forever.

We were in a medium-sized Starbucks, half full of customers. Thanks to corporate standards, it looked about as normal as anything could look this close to the Vegas strip. Immediately in front of us, a woman sat alone in a booth by the windows, tears pouring silently down her cheeks. I could clearly see the glow of residual chaos magic shimmering around her, and I knew Leander could see it, too.

"I’m dropping the appearance spell," I said, as unheard as I was unseen by anyone in the coffee shop. "Two showgirls in glitzy gowns aren’t going to make her feel safe."

Leander nodded. "Agreed. But we cannot just be ourselves. We need a simpler illusion. It should be something closer to how we truly appear, but not close enough to provide clues to our adversaries. This could very easily be a trap, and we cannot allow Byers or Chaos to track us back to friends and family."

I closed my eyes and created a new spell that made me look like a college-aged Latina woman, and Leander as a pretty African-American woman, tall and model thin. Then I let the "don’t notice me" spell fade slowly, so as not to startle her. Her subconscious mind would register that we had been there the whole time.

"What’s wrong?" I asked, as I slid into the seat opposite hers. Leander stood behind me, scanning the space outside of the shop and waiting for Byers to attack.

The woman turned and looked at me, still not quite there.

"She is in shock." I reached out and took her hand. It was ice cold and trembling, and I could feel the magic clinging to her skin. "Whatever happened to you, we’re here to help."

She shook her head. "You can’t help me. Nobody can. It’s … impossible."

"It can’t hurt to let us try, can it?" I gave her a small smile. "I know someone did something to you, something so unbelievable that you’re running away from it inside your mind. But I need you to tell me, okay? The walls you put up in your head are too strong. You’re closed up tight inside, trying to hide, and I can’t even try to fix it until I know what ‘it’ is.”

After a minute, she looked down and shuddered, all over.

"Rachel … this woman," she whispered, one hand motioning towards her chest. "She stole my body, and left me trapped in hers."

I felt her defenses lowering slowly, as she began come to grips with the reality of what had happened. I replayed the whole situation from her point of view, sharing it with Leander through our connection.

"You’re Paul, right?" She nodded, a little confused, and I gave her hand a squeeze. "I’m the Advocate, and this is Leander. It’s our job to help people like you, harmed by magic users like … like Rachel."

"How?" Another tear rolled down her cheek. "How can you help me?"

"Do you think she’s the only one in the world with magic?" I released her hand and brought my two hands together, palms up. With a small application of will, a tiny fiery unicorn appeared, staring at her with sullen eyes, as if it being on fire was an affront to its very nature.

I sustained the illusion for a few seconds, then let it fade. "We’re here to stop her. To get your body back, and your life along with it. It’s what we do, okay?"

She looked in my eyes, took in a deep breath, and nodded. "What can I do to help?"

When she said that, the part of my soul that channelled strategy and tactics from ten thousand years of human conflict started spinning, working out possible permutations of the conflict to come, and I smiled.

"Right now, I need you here with us and as calm as you can be," I replied, giving her a smile. "We’ve got this."

I stood up and walked over to Leander.

"It is Byers," my champion said aloud, her disgust evident. "He is out there now, in this man’s body. Merde."

I nodded.

"We don't know if Byers realizes what he's done," I answered telepathically. "He might have just wanted to be male again. But we're in an unexpected hostage situation. We can’t hurt Byers directly without hurting Paul’s body."

"And we cannot reverse the spell he used to take it unless we know it is safe to do so," Leander replied, mind to mind. "Byers could be a thousand feet above the city right now. Putting Paul back where he belongs could lead to a dead innocent, since the magic Byers is using is most definitely not connected to his physical form."

"I don’t see how it could be. Back when we first stopped him, I took his ability to cast spells and use magic away."

"But he is using magic now." Leander walked to the window and looked out into the coming night. The neon on the strip was beginning to light up, one sign at a time, by photoelectric cells tripped by the oncoming darkness. "That much is clear. It is chaos magic, but still magic. How?"

"I don’t know. If it’s chaos magic, he shouldn’t be able to bend it to his will at all."

"Agreed," my champion said, her lips tightening. "Humans are living examples of order triumphing over chaos. Trying to channel and command chaos magic? The conflicting forces would rip him apart in an instant."

"We’ll figure out the how later." I walked over and stood next to my champion again. "Right now, we need to find him and hold onto him long enough to get Paul’s body back."

"We need to find him, to be sure, Rebecca," Leander said aloud, "but could we not just change the body Paul is in to reflect his true nature? Much simpler than trying to catch Byers without hurting him, yes?"

"Maybe, yes," I replied, "but we just went over why it’s a better idea to get Paul his original body back."

Leander's eyes narrowed, and I continued. "Who knows how much of a magical construct that female body is? We know it's not the same body Byers wore before I crafted his punishment. It might belong to some innocent woman he trapped in that dog’s body he was in. It might even be a gift from Chaos, and just as much a chaotic construct as the cow he created from that milk truck in Evans Falls. What if I try to pick the locks on the magic holding that body together, only to have it dissolve into the aether and take Paul's soul along with it?"

I looked out into the city. Las Vegas was like a temple to the very concept of chaos. People’s lives were changed by a roll of the dice or the spin of a wheel. Fortunes were gained or lost, not by skill or intellect or sheer force of will, but by the sheer perversity of the universe. It wasn’t completely chaotic — people could choose to come here, and the laws of nature still dictated how dice would roll or what number the roulette ball would land on — but it was close enough.

No wonder the place made my skin crawl.

"That is not the only reason you hate this city." Leander spoke softly behind me.

"Was I thinking out loud?"

"No, no, Becca. More like thinking too loud."

I smiled. "Apologies. A very bad habit."

"You do not like Vegas because you believe it brings out the worst in people. And you like people."

I stopped to consider my next words. "Las Vegas is like a giant predator, hunting the people I'm supposed to protect. It's an enemy I can't fight, because it offers them an easy way to get what they need to survive. People need safety, security, and protection. Here and now, security means having money, and Vegas gives them the fastest way to get it — if they’re willing to take a chance and roll the dice."

"And this is wrong?"

"Taking the easy way in life has its own risks. If you rely entirely on luck, you never learn to rely on yourself when it comes to overcoming challenges or getting what you want. You come to depend on the universe cutting you some slack, and that’s not the rule, it’s the exception. The best of humanity makes its own luck, and that’s a skill people need to learn."

My champion tilted her head. "So, my lady, let us make our own luck. How to we find our prey in a sea of chaos?"

I considered the problem, watching the pedestrian traffic grow as the light faded.

"Let’s think about this from his point of view. He went back to Evans Falls to punish the city he left a hundred years ago because it wasn’t big enough for his ambition. I’m thinking he came back to Las Vegas to take back the city he thinks I took from him. Sounds about right?"

Leander nodded. "But he must know that you could easily take it away from him again."

"Maybe. Or maybe he thinks he can defeat me with chaos magic and wants the chance to try."

"Considering the kind of man he was, that makes sense. It could even be why Chaos chose him as his champion. The two of them share a common enemy. You."

"So if that’s true, if he wants to take me down, he won’t want to hide. He’ll want me to find him. Problem solved."

"Byers will light up the night like a signal fire," Leander said as she smiled, "hoping you will fly into it eagerly, like a besotted moth, and burn."

"To paraphrase Harry Callahan," I replied, smiling in return, "a girl has to know her limitations. I may be good, but I’m still a rookie when it comes to fighting chaos. When he sets his ‘fire,’ we’ll go in slow and as ready as we can be."

"And the … hostage situation?"

I thought for a few seconds, then smiled slowly. "Let’s take a closer look at what put Paul in that body … and what it’s going to take to get him out. Then we'll see just how good an escape artist Reynard Byers really is."

Byers hovered over Las Vegas, held aloft by the winds of Chaos, and gloried in his newly recovered maleness. He loved the feel of his new body, the hardness that surrounded him instead of that accursed softness. And knowing that he'd stolen it from a weak man with too much compassion and too little common sense made him almost giddy.

"Predator and prey!" He shouted down at the city he had called home for decades. "Survival of the fittest, nature's golden rule. He didn't deserve to be a man. Now she's prey. Maybe after a while, I'll look her up and show her exactly what it means to be a woman."

"You'd have to know what it means to be a woman before you could show Paul anything, Reynard," a voice said behind him. "And I’m afraid that level of empathy is way outside your comfort zone."

He spun in mid-air and saw a small Latina woman floating a short distance from him.

"Impressive glamour, Advocate," he said, smiling. "But not good enough to fool me."

"It's not meant to. It's an effective mask, that's all."

"A meaningless mask now. I saw you as you truly are in Evans Falls. Barely more than a child. Very lazy of you to expose yourself that way."

"About as lazy as you were to launch a magical assault on a place I knew from your past." The Advocate shook her head. "After living so long, to be so careless? Or do you consider yourself so powerful now that none can challenge you and win?"

Byers threw back his head and laughed. “You took away my magic, supposedly forever, turned me into a bitch in heat, and set me loose to suffer for who knows how long. Yet here I am, free and alive, human and male, and with magic again. If someone here is winning, it certainly isn’t you."

"If this was a game, which it is not, we would still be playing," she replied, her voice carrying easily across the sky between them. ”And even though I hate Las Vegas with a passion, I know it’s bad luck to count your chips at the table before the last card is dealt.”

“You have spirit, I’ll give you that. I look forward to taking it away from you before I make you my slave.”

The Advocate smiled softly. “Big talk, Reynard. Aren’t you supposed to be a man of action? A predator? Why don’t you show me your teeth and claws? Or do you plan to monologue me into submission?”

“Her hubris knows no bounds,” Byers thought, his anger rising. The rogue mage reached out to his chaos demon with a mental command. “Bind her!”

He felt the bolts of chaos energy reach out to her small form, only to stop a few feet from her and swirl impotently around her. A second set of bolts joined the first, forming a hazy sphere of pure chaos around her.

“The problem with chaos energy is that it resists being told what to do.” The girl looked at him through the aurora borealis effect, her eyes smiling. “It doesn’t like to be commanded to do anything, so it’s already only half-committed to your plan no matter what it is. However, like a raging river, its power doesn’t mind being channeled — especially if the path you send it down feels random enough to be natural.”

“You may have captured it, Advocate,” Byers replied evenly. “But it has also captured you. You cannot command or control it either, so you are trapped in your pretty bubble.”

“I don’t need to command it. I just need to set it free and give it a path of least resistance to follow. Just like a river.”

The sphere reshaped itself, extending a funnel above her and allowing the glowing mass to escape into the sky.

“In about five seconds, give or take, a Russian spy satellite is going to get the worst set of systems failures in their space program’s history.”

“Hit her again!”

The energy shot towards her, and the same thing happened.

"Again!" He screamed into the night. Another deflection.

"You do realize that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a textbook definition of insanity," the Advocate said, her voice irritatingly calm. "Ever tried therapy, Reynard?"

"I may not be able to touch you, Advocate," he replied, gritting his teeth, "but the people you protect? That's something else."

He raised his voice and threw his arms wide. "Go wild! Make this city yours!"

A few feet away, a flare of chaos energy coalesced into a sphere similar to the one surrounding his adversary. Darting back and forth inside, a single stream of power bounced fitfully against the walls, the light inside become brighter and brighter.

Byers turned to the Advocate, confused. She smiled at him and drifted closer to the sphere.

“I knew you could not wield magic, especially chaos magic. So Chaos must have given you access to someone who could. So every time your ... friend struck at me, I used the trajectory of its attack to note its position. And of course, it's just as easy to throw a shield around your ally as it is to throw one around me. Only now it's become a trap — powered by the demon itself."

The sphere began to shrink until it was the size of a basketball. The Advocate balanced it on her fingertips for a moment, and tossed it upwards with a casual wave of her hand. It rose quickly, gathering speed until it disappeared from view.

"It might escape eventually, if it stops to think things through and realizes it's using its own power to imprison itself. Although that kind of thinking involves … well, order. Reasoning in a straight line is not going to be its strong point. So it could take a while. Maybe by the time she reaches Jupiter.”

"You're lying," Byers said, suspicion coloring his tone. "If you captured her, why am I still aloft?"

"Because I'm using my magic to stop you from falling." The infuriating woman smiled wider. "Otherwise, you'd be heading for what used to be the Sands Hotel at thirty-two feet per second squared."

"You are a fool," the ex-mage said, his tone sharp. "Keeping an enemy of my strength and experience alive? Smarter to let me fall."

"Not while you're wearing Paul's body," she replied evenly. "Although even if you weren’t, I’d still be reluctant to just kill you. I tend to think of redemption first. Anything else is a waste of resources.”

Byers laughed before he could stop himself. ‘How could she be so stupid?’

"You're human," the Advocate said simply. “Every human has the potential to change. You may never live up to it, but it’s there nonetheless. I need to be true to who I am, so you don’t get to die today, despite all of the pain you’ve caused.”

Byers sneered, his disgust rising up. “Rules. Your kind are always tying yourself up, limiting your own power when you could be a god.”

“Godhood is overrated. Too much responsibility, no downtime. I prefer being me.” The irritating woman shook her head. “Just as Paul prefers being himself. Leander?”

Suddenly, the world around Byers blinked, and he found himself sitting in a familiar booth, looking at the world through a pair of familiar eyes.

He was a she again.

There was a blurring of the space across from her, and the Advocate appeared with the body Byers had stolen beside her.

"And yes, rules limit us," the bitch said, continuing as if nothing had changed. "That's what they're for. Laws keep us all safe. Rules keep us civilized. Even good manners make life a little sweeter. Say what you want about political correctness, but simply being polite goes a long way to avoid everyone wanting to feast on the blood of their enemies. You really should try it."

Byers opened her mouth, but found she had nothing to say. She was once again trapped in this accursed body, imprisoned and powerless. There was no threat she could utter that she could possibly make manifest, so her words meant nothing. The Advocate smiled.

"Now there's the first bit of wisdom you've shown today. If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.”

The ex-mage was silent for a moment, waiting for Chaos to step in and support His champion. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, he sighed.

"So, back to the streets again?"

"I'm not sure what that would accomplish," the Advocate said. "Did you learn anything from the experience?"

"Nothing I didn't already know," Byers replied, eyeing the woman in front of her with a tentative curiosity. "Suffering is to be endured until it can be overcome. Anything else is weakness."

"Your mentor taught you that?"

"Among other things." She gave the Advocate a humorless smile.

"So suffering teaches you nothing, except how to endure?”

“What else is there?”

“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘to understand someone you must walk a mile in their shoes?’”

Byers snorted. “I don’t need to understand someone to control them. For all their posturing, humans are still animals, manipulated by the same tools used to control a dog or a cow. Carrot and stick, pleasure and pain. The proper use of power.”

The Advocate turned to the man beside her. “Is there somewhere you need to be, or should I just send you home?”

The man smiled. “Home is fine. Thank you for your help today.”

“Just doing my job, Paul. But you’re welcome.” The Advocate smiled back. “Just focus on home and I’ll do the rest. But when you get there, take a little time to get back to yourself. What happened today was traumatic. Just focus on getting comfortable in your own skin again, okay?”

Paul nodded and closed his eyes. Reality shifted and he was gone.

“You’re all about power and control.” Once again she continued the conversation as if there had been no interruption, and Byers watched as a frozen drink appeared in front of her adversary. "That is a philosophy based on fear. What are you afraid of, Reynard?"

"I fear nothing."

"If that is true, you are ignoring a valuable survival tool.” The Advocate took a sip of her drink. “But I know you’re wrong. The answer to my question is obvious. You are afraid of being overpowered and of losing control, to anyone. Which means that at one point or another, you were in that very position, and it was so painful that you want to make sure you never wind up in someone else’s power again.”

“What makes you think you know me at all?”

“I walked through your head, remember?”

"If that's true, you made a terrible mistake, Advocate." Reynard smiled slowly. "You took exactly the wrong approach towards my ... rehabilitation. You put me in a position where I was powerless and had no control."

"To show you what it was like," she replied, nodding. "But of course you already knew, and the memory was buried so deep, I didn't see it the first time. I made assumptions about why you did what you did, and I should have known better. I’m sorry.”

“Your apology changes nothing, woman. I don’t believe people are any better now than the ones who abused me as a child. I can’t. I have experienced that truth first hand, and there is no way you could possibly convince me.”

I looked at Byers, smug and undefeated, and shook my head.

“You’re right,” I said softly. “I don’t see a way to convince you. But at the same time, you’re completely wrong. And the way you’re wrong is so much a part of who you are, I’m not sure how to make you see it. You’re broken, but strangely whole, like a fine china cup that someone decided to glue back together as a porcelain softball made of nothing but sharp edges. I can't dissolve the glue, but even if I could, how can I even start to put the cup back together the way it should be?”

I sighed. “Hell, it’s not even my job to fix you, it’s yours. But you don't even remember what you were like before you were broken. Hell, you think everyone else is just as broken as you are. You’re absolutely sure everyone in the world is a dangerous sharp-edged softball pretending to be a cup, just waiting to cut you when you touch it.”

“I know it’s the truth because I’ve lived it.”

“And I know it’s not true,” I replied, “because the truth I’ve lived is nothing like the one you’ve lived.”

Byers snorted. “For all your power, you are young. You know nothing about how the world truly is.”

I caught her eyes and held them with mine. “I’m a lot older than I look, and I’m pretty sure I know more about real life than you ever will. When I took this job, they put entire libraries of information about how the multiverse works inside my head. But that’s not why I know more. Truth is, I lived for more than four decades as a man before I became the Advocate.”

“A man? You were a man?”

I nodded. “Husband and father. That’s how I know the world isn’t as corrupt as you believe it to be. But convincing you it isn’t … I’m not sure I know how.” I stood up. “I need more time to work this out. And I need you somewhere you can’t cause any harm until I do.”

“You should kill me.” Byers rose from her seat and moved to stand across from me.

“You may be right. Occam’s Razor says the simplest solution is most often the right one. But I know enough to know that not every problem is solved by violence. Many can be, but more often than not, it just makes things worse.”
“That’s why I’m going to take you off the board for a while, Reynard. I’m going to put you somewhere Chaos can’t find you, where time moves very slowly. You’ll still be conscious and awake, which is why I’m giving you something to think about while you’re gone.”

“You think your knowledge of magic makes you stronger, because you deny all the things you see as weaknesses. You see love, compassion, and empathy as flaws, because they punch holes in the walls you have created to keep you safe. You think your walls are solid, and unbreakable.”

I gestured at her, and Byers rose into the air, floating a foot above the floor. I walked over to her, raised a finger, and gently pushed her shoulder. She began spinning slowly, and her arms flailed as she tried to make herself stop.

“But your walls have no anchors. As strong as you can make them, they can be pushed aside easily, because they are connected to nothing. The things you think make us weak actually provide us with the connections we need to be strong.”

“If I’m threatened, Leander will be there to help me. Any of my friends will be. Because we are connected by our commitment to each other, and to our mission. But I captured you easily because you are a wall that stands alone. Chaos will not save you because He has no real connection to you. You are nothing but a convenient tool to Him, and you have already failed him. And since He doesn’t believe in anything but destruction, how could He possible build anything that could stop me — especially with a tool as damaged as you?”

I reached up and stopped her rotation.

“You’re smart, Reynard. Think about how easy it was for me to defeat you, and how easy it would have been for me to kill you. Then think about why I didn’t. Here’s a hint. It has nothing to do with weakness.”

I held my hand up and watched her disappear.

I appeared inside my room, alone. For some reason, I felt very, very tired. Even though catching Byers and fixing his predations wasn’t exactly a challenge, I felt burned out on an emotional level. And I thought I knew why.

Some people are easy to help. They want to do better, to be better. But Byers had spent his entire life believing the universe is a battlefield where only the strong survive. His idea of being better was winning at a zero sum game, subjugating everyone else to his will, and he would do whatever it took to rise to the top and protect his own power.

His relentless pursuit of absolute control to keep him safe from any who might threaten him was a direct challenge to my own belief in optimism as a survival trait, and to my commitment to the idea that if given a chance, people would choose a positive path. Byers had been pushed to embrace this world view by those who had chosen it before him — first his parents, then his mentor. They had convinced him by hurting him over and over again until he channeled his own anger and hate into confronting and overcoming them.

They had created a living weapon, driven only by a lust for power and disgust for every emotion that made humans better than savages. He’d been this way for a hundred years. How could I possibly undo a century of experience learning that might makes right and emotion was a weakness? Was redemption even possible for Reynard Byers, or was any effort doomed to failure before it even began?

I honestly didn’t know. That’s why I put him in that pocket universe, to buy myself some time to think. Plus, leaving him free would give his Chaotic servant the chance to reunite with him and start wreaking havoc again, putting innocents at risk.

‘Speaking of Chaotic servants,I really should release the one I sent away,’ I thought, laying down on the floor and staring at the ceiling. ‘It may never figure out how to get free of that trap on its own, and I don’t want to think about dooming any entity to spending forever shooting through the cold darkness of space.’

I reached out with my mind and released it from its cage. It had barely reached the asteroid belt, and it launched itself back towards Earth the instant it realized it was free. It wouldn’t find Byers, not where I had hidden him, and I wondered how Chaos would deal with his champion disappearing from the field of battle. ‘How well does He understand cause and effect,’ I wondered, ‘and what will happen when His demon tells Him about what it witnessed in the sky above the city?’

I sat up and looked over at my bed, thinking that curling up and taking a nap would work well for me. Alas, even though it was already night in Las Vegas, it was almost dinnertime here. Sitting around the table with family sounded like a terrific way to pull myself back from my musing about Byers and rejoin the normal human world for a while.

Or so I thought. A part of me wasn’t sure I wanted any level of human contact, which really wasn’t like me. I think of myself as a people person most of the time, meaning that being with others energized me. But being with someone as dysfunctional as Byers had tired me out in such a fundamental way that I wasn’t sure I could interact with another individual.

“You are thinking too hard, Becca.”

I turned at the sound of the voice and found a small Japanese girl standing naked by the window. Even though I’d never seen her in this form before, I recognized her.

“Hello, Akiko. Welcome to my home.”

She smiled slowly, and did a slow, tentative turn. “Do you like? It is my first serious attempt at a human guise.”

“Very attractive,” I replied, giving her a smile in return. “How does it feel?”

“Slightly awkward, to be honest. Two legs instead of four? It is amazing that they remain standing at all!”

“Sometimes they don’t.” My smile became a grin. “I’ve seen my share of falls over the years, and even had a few myself. Most of the time, though, they do pretty well. They’ve never known any other form, so they … adapt.”

Akiko’s hands came up and cupped her smallish breasts. “And these? I could understand their size if I were feeding young, but this body is barely old enough to breed.”

“I’m not sure, but I think producing more milk was a survival trait when humans were evolving.” I slipped to the floor and sat, folding my legs under me. “Also, male humans find them attractive, so maybe natural selection made having larger ones an advantage when mates were being chosen.”

“Ah. So they fought for the most desirable?” She walked over to the mirror and looked at herself, then glanced at me. Her lips twitched first, and then she smiled. “How many human males have fought for your breasts, Becca?”

“Only one, thank the Goddess. My life is complicated enough without having to juggle multiple suitors, and Tommy was mine long before I even became this girl.”

“Which is very confusing, since you are that girl now,” Akiko said, “so she both existed and did not exist before you became her.”

“Welcome to my world.” I shook my head. “I still haven’t quite figured that one out. My father is also me, or rather the man I used to be, so that makes two Becca’s and two of me. We’re all tied up in a chronological knot that would have the Time Lords of Gallifrey spinning in their graves — well, if they were dead instead of fictional.”

“Involvement with the Creator of all things is often confusing. I prefer Inari, and the smaller universe in which I live.” Akiko walked over and gently stroked my sleeve. “These clothes … I assume they are appropriate for a human female of your age and social position?”

I shrugged. “I like them. They suit me. I think you should wear something as well, since casual nudity is not common in this culture.”

Akiko closed her eyes for a second, and an outfit identical to mine shimmered into existence on her smaller frame.

“Nice,” I said with a smile, “but you should choose something that reflects who you are. What I’m wearing ... this is my style. Think about how you would like to be seen.”

She closed her eyes again, and her clothing shifted to shades closer to her natural coloring.

“Very attractive.”

“Thank you.”

There was a silence, and then she spoke.

“You are ... wrong. Can you not feel it?”

“About what?”

“No, Becca. Who you are, inside, is wrong.”

After a few seconds of uncomfortable introspection, I nodded. “Yes, I guess I am.”

“Do you know why?”

“I think so, but I suspect you have an opinion you’d like to share?”

“The lines between who you are and what you do have become blurred, and your ability to just be Becca has become ... damaged.”

“It isn’t something I can fix easily.” I sighed. “There are too many roles fighting for my attention, and I feel guilty whenever one of them is neglected. So I try harder to give that role its due, only to neglect others. It’s the Red Queen’s Race.”

She tilted her head in the way I’ve seen confused dogs do, and I smiled. “It’s from a human book by Lewis Carroll. The Red Queen’s Race means running all day to stay in the same place.There are just not enough hours in a day.”

“Ah. I see. No wonder you are wrong. It is because you are wrong.”

“You have as many hours as you need, Becca-chan, for each of those pieces of you that require the time to live them as they should be lived.” Akiko’s eyes twinkled. “As long as you avoid meeting yourself, you may travel back and live each of your lives simultaneously.”

“Won’t that significantly shorten my actual lifespan?”

Akiko’s eyes narrowed, and her lips pursed. “Since you are both a kitsune and a physical manifestation of the needs of the Omnipresence, you are effectively immortal, Becca-chan. Surely you know that?”

I stopped to think about it. Could it really be that easy? Or would this kind of time shifting actually be easier at all? I’d been a science fiction fan for too many decades to think time travel solves much of anything, and usually ends up making things way more messed up than they were before you got the bright idea to play with causality.

“I’m not sure whether that approach would create more problems than it solves,” I said, giving her a smile. “Still, it’s a solution I hadn’t thought of, and that means it may not be the only one out there to find. Thank you,”

“Now, as much as I like that outfit on you, it’s really more my style than yours.” I turned to my laptop and woke it from sleep, then opened a browser. “Let’s go hunting for clothes that tell others who you are in human form ... or rather, show them the you that you want them to see.”

“Hmmmm ... hunting and illusion! Both well loved by kitsune.” She leaned over my shoulder. “Show me the prey we hunt!”

I grinned and hit the search engine.

© 2013-2018 as a work in progress, all rights reserved. Posted with permission of the author.

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