Duty Page 31

  There was no speaking, until they were all the way through the blue door of the magic shop, which seemed to be stone that was colored that way naturally, and into the back room of the place, past the young woman who was watching the front desk. Albert waved at her, not knowing if that was a good idea or not.

  Tim closed the door behind them, which it hadn’t been a moment before. One of them. It was clear that there were more of the portals heading toward the back of the place. How far it went in that direction, Al didn’t know. He didn’t ask what that was, taking a seat in the middle of the room, when a chair was called into being.

  Where it came from, he couldn’t tell. They were in the Moon, not a magical house. That meant summoning something like that was kind of special. Timon nodded, his eyes still and not moving as much as people normally did most of the time.

  “The field is built into the wall. If you focus, you can call up almost any kind of furnishing you might want. The design is for real homes. Places of stone or wood. Alyssa Baker did the work. It’s well done. She isn’t the top builder, but she’s easily in the top twenty or so. For all the worlds, so that isn’t a small thing. Even the Ysidril have to work to make this level of things.”

  The man moved behind him, and touched him on the shoulders, the back of the chair between them.

  “So, Albert. If you could be anything, or anyone, what would you be? Dream big. I can’t do everything, but I have some nifty tricks ready to go. Who are you, in your dreams? The good ones, I mean. The bad ones can fend for themselves.”

  “Who am I?” The thing there was that he didn't know. He was, like most men, defined by what he did for a living. He didn't need magical powers to sweep the floor though. Just a broom. A thing that the club had several of. The idea of having magical brooms that extended from his arms seemed a little over the top, given that. Being a bit more energetic could help with that, he supposed.

  Even helping people didn’t really take superior powers. There were some things that would be nice, once he thought of it. It didn’t apply to his new job directly or anything, but Timon hadn’t asked for that, just what he might want to be.

  “I’d love to be happy. It doesn’t have to be perfection, or anything, I don’t need that, just not… Sad, all the time. So that I don’t feel like I want to kill myself, most days?” He waited for pity or disgust.

  Instead the good-looking man just nodded.

  “I can almost certainly help with that. What else?”

  “Um… Not needing to sleep? Or at least being able to stay up and not get tired. I’m not in great shape, and it gets hard, being awake for days at a time. I get sore, too. Just from standing and stuff. I’d hate to think what would happen if I accidently ended up having to do physical labor for that kind of time span. Those people fighting the fires with shovels are all incredible, aren’t they?”

  The man behind him simply stood for a moment, touching him gently on the shoulders.

  “I can put in some other things as well? There’s kind of a standard package that people seem to like well enough, if that isn’t too boring? Plus, what you spoke of? I mean, you might as well get the whole package, since you already have the job. There was a vote, so getting out of it will be hard now. You’re kind of responsible for… Pretty much everything, now.”

  “Sure? I’m not really certain what’s going on here, to be honest.”

  “I know. I’m being clever, so I won’t scare you off. It’s hard to get people to be willing to make massive changes to themselves. They like the idea at first, but when it comes down to it, they get scared and back out, as often as not. Afraid that they’re going to die. Only, you aren’t afraid of that. So, I’ll do what you asked for and a few other things. Nothing too externally overt. We can talk about that later? I won’t change your face, this time. Alice is right as far as that goes. All of us are way too good looking. Not just for her, either. We stand out as a group. There are times when that isn’t the best plan.”

  Al could understand that.

  The other man squeezed his shoulders a bit. Which felt nice. A thing that was more to do with the free message than attraction, thankfully.

  “This will be pretty boring for you. I’ll stand here for about four or five hours, then hand you a healing amulet. It will itch then, as you change into your new form. Not that much, since the alterations won’t be that great.”

  Albert snorted a bit.

  “That’s the part where you’re lying to me, then? You’re going to turn me into a frog, aren’t you? That or a pig. It’s retaliation for giving that one woman a shield from you, isn’t it? Here I’ve been doing so well with the ladies lately, not being sneered at at all this evening. Alice was even kind of nice to me, unless I didn’t get she was making fun of me. In that case, clearly, don’t tell me!” Which was, honestly, true. None of the attractive women had treated him any differently than the other men there. That wasn’t faint praise, either. They’d all been very polite to him. Even the people that hadn’t voted for him to have the new position.

  There was a sense of movement from behind him.

  “That’s the plan. The very one, in fact. Ready? You might want to close your eyes and not think about anything, for a while. Daydream or something like that?”

  The activity really was pretty boring. The man was behind him, with hands on his shoulders, but there was no movement or even the idea of anything going on. The whole thing lacked chanting and magical symbols of note as well. Instead of playing the whole time, thinking about finding a girl to date or possibly marry, he went over his schedule for the next few days. There was a lot of work for him to do, even if he was going to get the nights off, in order to sleep.

  At least twice in the next three days. Once, really, if he was holding that impromptu party. He needed to call everyone and invite them, as well as make certain that he was allowed to hold it at the club. Serro had already agreed, but that didn't mean it wasn’t going to be used for something else at that particular time. Double checking that was an excellent idea, in case he needed to find some other venue.

  Part of him wanted to toss in the towel. To give up on the idea and to simply go off to his room and curl up with a nice bottle of port. Or three. That or a Sweet Southern Gold wine, from Noram. That was probably his favorite, if the goal was to enjoy what he was having, instead of just getting drunk.

  Eventually, nearly falling asleep for over an hour, Tim Baker stood back, his eyes looking calm as he pulled a healing amulet from under his shirt. Even if Albert had his own.

  “It will itch. That will fade after a while, so try not to drop the thing.”

  Then, instead of being pressed to his arm, the activated amulet was tucked into Al’s left hand. Which didn’t really itch at all, to begin with. It burned instead. It was a breath stealing thing, that got him to stiffen up, trying to fight a scream. He didn’t do that, but it was close. The other man stood back and simply watched him, closely.

  After four or five minutes, the burning did turn to itching, which spread from deep inside his torso, to his outer limbs. Then everything started to tingle. There was difficulty holding the amulet in his hand. Mainly because his hand became lost, in a sea of sparkling electricity. Which, when he glanced at his own paw, wasn’t there at all. It was just a hand, holding a piece of stone with a green shadow of a man on it.

  Except that now he could see it wasn’t a shadow or silhouette at all. It was a tiny fellow, complete with full features, glowing all in green. A hundred shades of it. A thing he hadn’t been able to notice before. It was impressive, if not that important.

  Timon smiled at him, the muscles in his face shifting. Hiding something. There was doubt in the expression, as well as a sense of triumph.

  “You won’t need to sleep now. You can, though. If you try to close your eyes and think of sleeping, what that’s like, you’ll do it. For mental health reasons, you should try to do that once a week or so. Otherwise you won’t feel tired at all. You still look like
you. Instead of making you better looking, I loaded you down with pheromones. Things that will help others like you. With practice you should be able to control them without a lot of work. In the meantime, they should basically try to follow what you intend to have happen, on a subconscious level.”

  There was a grin from the man.

  “Greater speed and strength as well, of course. Enough to be worth having. You pretty much can’t get tired from physical effort, which is the special part of things that way. I mean, you can just run, flat out, and not stop for hours on end, without training at all. It will hurt, a bit, but you can do it, where others couldn’t. Better senses, a faster healing rate… Standard things.”

  The man meant what he was saying, though he was, clearly, also hiding something from him.

  “What’s the other part? The one that you aren’t mentioning?”

  Timon smiled.

  “That bit. I won’t go over all of it right now. Later, after you realize it’s all real. Right now though… You can tell when someone is lying to you. Perfectly. That won’t tell you what they’re hiding or anything. They won’t be able to trick you. It’s not a vast power, but I didn’t want to over do it. You should also be able to learn magic, if you go to school for it. You have the concentration for it, or will if you learn how. That was there already, so I didn't have to do a lot that way.”

  Standing was easy, considering he’d been in a chair for five hours. He felt… good.

  That was when he noticed it.

  “I don’t feel miserable! I mean, emotionally. I just feel… I don’t know how to describe this. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Even on drugs.”

  Placing his hand out, touching Al on the shoulder, Tim Baker nodded.

  “Ah… I can see how that might be confusing to you. What you’re feeling, Albert, is what most people like to call normal. This is just what you would have been all along, if you hadn’t been battered with depression constantly for most of your life.”

  Shutting his eyes, he reveled in it for a moment.

  “Most people feel like this, all the time? Without even having to earn it? It just… Happens?”

  “Yep. They get up in the morning and just feel like this. Go through their days like this and all of that.”

  Albert shook his head, feeling… Regular, for the first time in his life.

  “This is… So easy though. I thought almost everyone felt like I did. This is… incredible.”

  It truly was. Stretching a bit, Albert smiled, meaning it. His lips simply moved on their own, distracting him with the ease of the movement. Nothing inside of him was really making it take place. Not that he could notice on a conscious level. No, it was just taking place. It nearly got him to jump, it was so unexpected.

  “I feel like I can do anything. I don’t even want a drink, if you can believe that. I mean, the healing amulet made it so I wasn’t addicted to anything any longer, but… Now it’s like I don’t need to lean on anything like that.”

  The other man made a weird sideways move then, almost a flinch.

  “Good? One of the side effects of being made immortal this way, is that you can’t get drunk. Your body will process the alcohol too fast. Almost everything else you could take, as well.”

  He had to process that news for a second. Then he doubled back and closed his eyes in shock. Not about the immortality part, though that was interesting to find out about. The inability to get drunk though… That didn’t sound fun at all.

  Possibly survivable, if he got to feel like he did at the moment, most of the time.

  Even part of the time might be enough. Being normal was amazing.

  Chapter eleven

  The amazing thing about the alterations that the Ancient Timon had decided he should have, was just how much easier everything felt after that. Nothing around him actually changed, but Albert was able to move from one task to the next, almost without resistance or feeling like he had to run and hide away from the world, constantly.

  They hadn’t really made him into a super being, of course. Not on a level that most would care about. The biggest point of interest for him came after he’d gone to two of the towns that needed food still, to make up for what they’d lost in the inferno. Both were done in the middle of the night, with him working alone. That took some juggling to do quickly, since he had to fill the hopper almost constantly, while working the large device that he’d moved from place to place.

  A thing he managed by using the magical creation from a distance, once he figured out that would help at all. It wasn’t a vast effect like some of the wizards had managed in front of him a few times, but he could stand ten feet away and get the thing to make what was needed, by thinking at it.

  Which didn’t mean he didn't have to stop loading dirt to run to the large food gap on the other side to move the newly created sustenance out of the way. That all had to be loaded into bags, burlap sacks, since that was what he had for the task. It meant making edibles that were fairly durable, such as unground wheat. That wasn’t exactly easy to eat, but it would keep people alive.

  Those bags were stacked, over to the side of where he was working, in large piles. That or as a small mountain, which was a good portion of the way to the size of a one-story house. A thing that Albert wouldn’t have been able to put together normally. Not before, anyway. He worked, sweating and huffing normally enough. The thing was that his hands didn’t seize into fists after the first ten bags, each being near a hundred pounds in weight. His back didn’t hurt, forcing him to hobble or stop to stretch, either. Instead he was able to simply keep going.

  Each trip was no harder than the first one. Not in how it felt. Even climbing up the large stack of food barely slowed him down.

  It meant that he managed at least five times the work that night as he’d figured on doing. It wasn’t any more interesting than making that kind of thing normally was, of course. In a way it was only the newness of how he felt that allowed him to keep going, after a while. Albert was testing himself, to see what he could do. That, as he’d been told, was apparently anything that he could before. Only without having to stop or slow down. Also with lifting powers that were many times what he had before. It was hard to tell how much that actually was, given that he had nothing to measure against it. He simply hadn’t been all that physically oriented, before being changed.

  When morning came Albert had a new task to see to, since he had to run from town to town, making food for hundreds of military men. It took him about an hour and a half, with some literal jogging being done several times to get into place in a timely fashion. Then there was a gap, a time of rest, before he needed to make some sandwiches or wraps for people’s mid-day meals.

  It wasn’t exactly a break, but he did take some time to shower and work up a new outfit for himself. Something special, to show his new state. After all, he was one of the Ancients, now. That was special, even if it wasn’t a thing that he’d really done for himself.

  After playing with the clothing amulet for half an hour, Al started getting pretty wild with the designs. They ran from glowing gold and green, to a lustrous beige color that spoke of some kind of refined cloth making. That or magic. In the end, sighing, he shook his head.

  “Or, you could focus on doing your job? I think it’s a new position, anyway. Something almost official? I mean, they made you immortal, right? So, it has to mean something. More than that, there was that vote. If you have a rule saying that all the Ancients anywhere have to help if you ask them to, that’s probably pretty important.”

  To that end he finally dressed himself in the same plain brown that he’d been wearing for the last month and longer. If something more entertaining came up, he could change it to something more special seeming. Until then, looking like a simple workman oddly fit. After all, he was, really.

  This time, instead of running from place to place to set up the Tiera food unit, making four individual set of meals, Albert did the sane thing and made up three hu
ndred paper wrapped sandwiches, six hundred cans of drinks and went to Harmony, to borrow four floating boxes. Just before mid-day he simply delivered those to the men doing the harder work. It was faster by far and got everyone fed in a timelier fashion.

  He had other work to do that day, but part of that was going to have to wait, being that he needed Dare Canton for it. So, he ran, from place to place, using his handheld almost constantly, as soon as he was fairly certain that anyone was going to be awake for the day.

  Which meant that, after mid-day, the food delivered and everything packed up, as he sat in the shade of a tree that hadn’t been too badly burnt, the sky sunny above him and the day pleasantly warm, people started to get back in touch with him.

  Which made eating the sandwich he had pretty difficult.

  The whole thing should have left him feeling annoyed, but he took it in stride. A thing he had to figure was due to the changes made to him. He simply felt good. Less empty than the prior years, but that was, he had to consider, due to having something valuable to do with his time. It was hard, in a way, but actually being useful really was making his life better.

  Tapping the device into working, he smiled, seeing Alison Peterson’s face in his hand. She was lovely, of course, which he actually noticed for once. Not that he hadn’t known that fact before, since it was rather obvious. The girl kept her face right out there, for everyone to see, after all. He simply felt it now, instead of having to analyze her face to see if she was symmetrical enough to count that way.

  That idea, of course, was him overstating things. He just didn't care in the moment.

  He nodded at the woman. The head of the investigation for the entire kingdom. That was a pretty large deal.

  “Good afternoon. I have some information for you, about the kidnapped people.” There were men in the mix, of course. Not as many as there were women, but they’d been mentioned several times. It was important to keep in mind. Men counted too. A lot of people forgot that kind of thing, at times. It was easier to think of women or children needing help or aid. Men, in general, were supposed to fend for themselves and look out for everyone else, not the other way around. The only problem with that idea was that it didn’t always work.