MarkT had expected that recreating the car the slow way would take some energy—but as much as all that? Nearly five orgs! Still a drop in the bucket measured against his full reserves, but it was a large drop. If this was what it took to get things done in this hostile environment, saving enough mana to fulfill his mission would be chancy at best.
But then again....
MarkT smiled. Then again, he didn’t have to. Nor had he ever expected to have to. He just had not anticipated needing to restock so early. But since he did—“Perhaps it’s time to top off,” he muttered.
Concentrating again, T attempted to draw to him more mana from the Outside, the very thing his colleagues among the Four had sought to guard against by freezing the energy assets of all Avatars. He almost smiled at their naïveté; while it was quite true that the Vortices at the Four’s command could not channel to him his own mana ration, an immense store of ambient mana suffused the Outside quarters, and since the Vortices were his to command, he could command them to channel that to him. He reached out with his mind to his legion of whirling servants, and felt—
Nothing. There were no Vortices to contact! It was as if they had vanished from the Antipodes!
“Well I’ll be,” MarkT breathed. “Damn you, Deja Voodoo! You knew this, didn’t you? That’s why you were so smug! Somehow, you knew!”
Which left the Great and Powerful MarkT a fish out of water. Up shit creek without a paddle. Or whatever other metaphor you care to enlist. We might as well indulge in coming up with some for a while, because for the next several minutes his language is going to be even more colorful than it was when he checked his reserves.
He came to his senses eventually. After all, it takes more than getting snookered to make people like MarkT throw in the towel. They don’t get to where they are by giving up.
Besides, expensive or not, he had his car, and a destination that continued to beckon—more urgently, in fact, now that he realized the fix he was in. It was plain now that saving the Antipodes, and hence the world, was not going to be the walk in the park he had anticipated. But it wasn’t going to be a walk through hell, either. A drive through hell, maybe. But that was still an improvement.
He got in the car and drove south until nightfall, turning now and again to avoid the bigger obstacles as the Corolla’s tank-like treads easily maneuvered him over the treacherous, shifting surface. He had to make one wide detour around a region of cratered terrain characterized by sinkholes half-full of poisonous-looking fluids reeking of chemicals and corruption. For a while he wasn’t certain there was any way around it, but ultimately it gave way again to the more familiar slag desert, and he was able to press forward once more. By the time he halted he had made good progress, even if his destination remained maddeningly far away. Reasonably satisfied, he slow-converted some of the ubiquitous flotsam into camping gear and built himself a fire.
After the fire had attracted three vampires, a flock of blue-footed Boobies and a crawling Bulbous he was somewhat less sanguine. The vampires were the worst; a group of two males and a female, by name St. Stent, Lefax, and Bubbles. St. Stent and Lefax sent Bubbles on ahead to distract the victim while they attacked from the rear, and this being the BE Addventure, it worked like a charm. After all, Bubbles was sultry; she was seductive; her breasts had undergone enhancement. Hey, a bloodsucker has to have some place to put all that extra blood. (Just don’t ask where the males put it. Trust me. You don’t want to know.)
But MarkT was hardly a defenseless victim. Once he realized what his visitors were, he made Bubbles flare with solar energy, reducing her and her two accomplices to ash. Afterwards he was more wary. The Boobies seemed harmless, if more than a little ridiculous, but he took no chances, slaughtering them as soon as they entered his campfire’s circle of light. Then the horrible Bulbous oozed in to scavenge the carcasses....
By that time, he had had enough. Camping out in the open appeared to have made him a magnet for monsters. His nerves were frazzled, he was losing sleep, and he was wasting power. Retreating into his newly-armored Corolla, he finished the night ensconced inside the vehicle, leaving his erstwhile antagonists to other scavengers of the waste.
MarkT awoke with the vague impression that something was wrong; not with the country outside the vehicle—that was a given—but personally. The Author simply didn’t feel right. Shifting position in the uncomfortable front seat of the Corolla, T groaned slightly, and immediately realized—
“Hey, my voice is different!” And what a difference....
T flipped down the rear view mirror, confirming by eye the aural evidence. The face in the mirror was female. And an oddly familiar female at that. She frowned. “I look like that actress from the 70s—what was her name? Maureen McCormick, that was it. But why—?” Then it clicked. McCormick’s most famous role; Marcia, on “The Brady Bunch.” Marcia—MarkT. Coincidence? She smiled grimly. In a world built on story, there was no such thing. More evidence of the instability of the Antipodes; even one’s form, it seemed, was subject to change. And apparently transformation here followed certain patterns....
“Well, I don’t have time for this shit,” T muttered, and changed herself back. Male again, he got out of the car to answer the call of nature—much easier when you could do it standing up. He saw scant evidence of his attackers of the night before. The scavengers had done a good job; even the bones were gone.
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