The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Three

I commented this a while ago in an update, but as a reminder: I am in the process of moving. Please bear with me and be patient, especially from the 21st to the 2nd!

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My entire vision became a dichromatic blue and gray, and the sounds of the world went tinny and very far away, as if I were trying to make out a conversation that someone was having on the other side of a busy underpass. 

I took a haltering step, moving with no balance to speak of. I shuddered and nearly crashed into the ground. This body had no vestibular, proprioceptive, gravitational, or tactile sense to speak of. 

As a pseudo mass mage, I had a better understanding than the average person of how much my lesser-used senses impacted my ability to move or function, but this was ridiculous. I’d grown used to having my gravitational sense cut off, but this was incredibly disorienting. 

I continued to take stumbling steps forwards until I had pushed through the disorientation, attempting to move as quickly as I possibly could, then focused on attempting to cast spells through my simulacrum. 

That was where things went from disorienting to downright… strange. I could feel my aura powering the simulacrum, and I could feel the ambient aura flowing into the spell I’d laid, in a half-conscious sort of way. I could also feel the power coming from Jessica’s home aura generator, and the power of my own trickle arch-star. 

All of that was expected, but there were also two other sources of power that I didn’t expect.

The first came from my own recharge, which drew in more aura the more metal I was in contact with. I had expected the slight trickle I always had from my rings and bracers, of course, but my entire simulacrum was buzzing with magic it was pulling in of its own accord, almost working to keep itself powered. It wasn’t like I hadn’t needed the ritual – I still would have for no other reason than to get it up and moving initially – but it was shouldering a portion of the burden with what little it could pull in from the pitifully thin aura of the city.

The second one I found to be completely inexplicable. There was another source of power feeding aura into me, but also draining aura out of me. It wasn’t especially large, but I felt like it was draining away a few auric units shy of twenty every second, but it was returning just a tiny smidge more. If it was draining eighteen, then it was restoring eighteen and a half. Stranger still, the entire place where the aura was draining out and feeding back in felt like a hole or a tear where my aura should have been before. The closest thing I could describe it to was the sensation of a familiar bond, but even then, that wasn’t quite right. That was more like weaving two blankets together, while this was like the hole punched through paper to create a staple. 

I poked and prodded at it, trying to figure out what exactly was going on. Had the dreamscape elixir that the Contractor given me done this? Had the jaunt through the Wandering Path somehow wound up with me accidentally claiming a portion of it? Was this some sort of hole being poked into my aura by Odril? 

For all I thought about it and flexed my aura to try and figure it out, it wasn’t forthcoming at all with its secrets, and in the end, I decided to keep a mental eye on it, but otherwise leave it be. It wasn’t hurting me right now. If anything, it was actually helping me, providing more aura than it drained away. If the drain started to escalate, then that would be something of a problem, but otherwise, I had more important things to do. 

I focused on manipulating my aura through the projection, which felt like shaping clay with thick woolen mittens on, opposed to normally being able to move with the dexterity of an expert potter. While it was far from impossible to shape my aura into spells, it took a great deal more concentration, and for what was perhaps the first time in years, I failed to cast a simple metal levitation spell. 

If I hadn’t been so worried about everything that was going on, I might have actually found it to be an interesting challenge, and a good way to train the dexterity of my shaping skill. I could see why archmages were usually the only ones who pulled such tricks. 

It took me a few attempts, but I eventually managed to lift my simulacrum into the air with a metal spell, and immediately let out a sigh of relief. I was well used to manipulating metal without vestibular, gravitational, or proprioceptive feedback, so even with the issues caused by shaping the spell, flying my simulacrum around was a hundred times easier than trying to get it to walk. 

I floated my construct out of one of the windows, using a metal shaping spell to open it wide enough to fly through, then joined one of the flight lanes in the city. Though it pained me to waste the time in the skylanes, I didn’t have another invisibility potion, and even if I did, I didn’t think that it would have extended to the simulacrum. More importantly, this would ensure that whatever watchers that the Arenamaster had stationed saw me flying off to where I was told, like an obedient little pawn. 

Slipping my simulacrum through the constable’s cordon around the hotel was a little bit harder, but I infused the spell array with my aura hiding arch-star to bypass the alarm wards, and then crept in slowly, doing my best to not alert anyone. I started from the base of the building and flew up the stairs, until I arrived in the ruined wreckage, where I spotted it. 

The orb in the air was gray-blue, rather than red, given that my vision was only capable of picking things up in those colors right now, but it had to be the thing the arenamaster was talking about. I didn’t know how she had made it visible to me and only me, but I didn’t know a lot of what she was doing now. 

I walked the simulacrum over to the orb, then stood in the center, letting it sink into my metallic chest. I kept watch for a few minutes, then let go of my connection to the simulacrum’s scrying, allowing the built in spellcraft to take over. The connection continued to float in my aura, as it likely would until the ritual either burnt itself out, the simulacrum was destroyed, or I passed through an active ward potent enough to cut the connection. 

I rose from the circle where I had been sitting and stretched, popping my neck and back. Sitting lotus style for that long wasn’t something my body was used to, then started taking stock of what tools I had. 

My guns were still with my real body, so I had some firepower. I’d left my knife in the pockets of the simulacrum, though, just in case I had to try and fight through it, and to leave the visible bulge of weaponry in my coat. Speaking of which… 

Without my coat I would need to be more careful. I had my old undershirt of spun metal and fabric, which was slightly too small, but at least would provide a bit of defense against cutting, and would give me a bit of metal to manipulate and let myself fly. I also had some enchanted items from Jessica’s stock that I thought were probably defenses against mundane attacks, and the buttons would ward against most curses.. Still, it was probably best to act as if my defenses were only down to the shirt, rather than relying on enchantments that I didn’t know or understand. 

Other than that, I didn’t have anything, and my storage vault was in Rhys’ apartment. There would be no easy way to kit myself out with the kind of weapons used in airship combat or backup armor. 

Was there anything I could do to disguise myself? I was already wearing the clothes of Jessica’s husband, a pair of pants stitched with a bright pink floral pattern and an eye-searing green shirt. 

Though it might seem foolish to pick such a visible outfit, it was actually a calculated choice on my part. When someone saw such bright colors, it tended to be the thing that stuck out most in their mind. 

Given that apart from my two meters and change of height, I didn’t stand out that much, I was banking on that to act as a way to pull people’s attention away from my face. 

I headed into Jessica’s kitchen, where I used a knife to cut my hair short. It had never been long, but I’d let it grow out a bit since leaving the military. Now, though, I was back to the almost bald state that the military needed. 

I headed to their bathroom and took down some of her cosmetics, focusing on the foundation. Jessica’s skin was several shades lighter than mine, but not so much that it would look absurd, and if altering my visible skin tone slightly could help me not be perceived by any other watchers the Arenamaster had left, then all the better. 

It might have been paranoia, but seeing how wild things had gotten, I wasn’t sure that paranoia was the worst thing in the world right now. 

With my disguise complete to the best of my abilities, I made my way down the hall and to the lift, glad that Jessica’s apartment wasn’t fancy enough that it had a floor guard on duty at all times. I took the lift down to the ground floor, then joined in the middle of the mob of people headed in and out. I took an ordinary stairwell, heading into the undercity, and continued to stick with the crowd. 

It was only when I was fairly sure that I’d either lost a potential trail, or wouldn’t be able to lose the tail no matter how hard I tried, that I broke away. I shoved the brightly colored shirt into one of my pockets, to let the faint gray of the undershirt blend with the dirt and dust of the undercity, then started sprinting down back alleys. I cast a quick spell to reduce my mass to let my legs carry me further with each step. Once I was in a space large enough for me to be able to fly, I used the threads of metal in my undershirt to lift myself into the air and headed for the remnants of Cipher Nightclub. 

It was the first place on my list for two – admittedly quite basic – reasons. The first was  that it was slightly closer to Jessica’s apartment than the White Rooms. The second was that I still couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I was a better fit for the White Rooms than Jessica was. If she didn’t fit, then why would she be there? 

I began shooting through space, and when I encountered the faintly glistening wall of magic that indicated a constable’s alarm ward cordon, I pulled the exact same trick as I’d used with my simulacra, slipping inside and floating through a small side tunnel to avoid being seen. 

As I came into view of the open space that had once been the nightclub, I felt a surge of complicated emotions rise up in me. The field was still covered in charred, twisted corpses, the burnt remnants of tents where cheap solder had melted and caused the metal to cave in, and the crumbled stone and earth where Jin and I had broken people out. A few constables were stationed in the field, probably just there to act as guards until the investigation was over.

I slipped further back into the shadows and considered what I could do. Jessica wasn’t just sitting out in the open. I began to spin up a metal sensory spell, adding as much extra power in as I could, infused my hiding arch-star into it, and cast. I swept my metal senses out over the vast expanse. I filtered out the structural supports, the basic copper I beams, the chips and debris.

Nothing. 

I swept my senses several more times, and then I caught it. I’d missed it initially, filtering it out on instinct, but there was a spot above me where the structural supports and air vents branched off, shifting to take a slightly different path. 

It wasn’t much. For all I knew, it was just a supply room for the workers who had to sometimes go into the ventwork, or some enchantment node to keep the air and heat moving. But it was the best lead I had.

I glanced down at the constables in the center of the massive atrium, and then up at the ceiling. 

Now… how to get up there without them noticing and setting off an alarm?