Clementine liked to think that she was just a normal girl. She’d done well enough in middle-school that by the time she reached high-school she was driving an hour every day to the prestigious Weston French-American School a couple towns over. Learning came easily to her. Retaining information was not a chore but a skill that made her happy every time she could recall some obscure fact, because she knew she was good at it. Sometimes, she even thought she was the best.
Then one day, her parents gave her ‘the talk’ on magic, and it felt like that little world she was the master of turned out to have been as deep as a puddle.
Clementine was more than a master of puddles. But magic was hard in a different way from learning the organelles of a cell, or the carbon cycle. Her mother always said ‘for magic, you have to make your mind malleable, engrave the process and the feeling into body and brain. Loosen your logic a little. Let the sky be purple for a while’.
But the sky was blue, and nothing she tried, no spell worked, not even a simple transmutation. You couldn’t turn grass into gold without a supernova. It simply was not physically possible, which was why it was magic, which was why magic was impossible for her.
First, Clementine blamed herself. Then she blamed her parents for starting so late with her magical education. Then she went back to blaming herself, because no matter how bad of a witch she made, there had to be at least one thing she was a master of.
So Clementine got good at potions. Very good. Her parents were taking their first vacation in decades after she promised to keep the workshop running, and proved she could too. Potions took weeks, sometimes months of constant simmering, distillation, titration, and so on to guarantee the effect customers paid good money for. Measurements had to be exact, and she could do exact.
Her latest concoctions were anything but exact. And she wasn’t sure they were supposed to be mixed like this either.
Clementine felt someone grab the back of her nightgown and pull her back, mere inches away from one of the smallest of the pink alien mimics trying to jump at her face.
She let out a choked ‘erk’ as Akira — sweet Akira — pulled her into a protective embrace with one arm, then punched the critter mid air into the wall so hard that it left a black stain.
She blinked, staring in shock at the twitching mass that still had his fist imprinted in it. Through their mental connection, Clementine felt that Akira was as surprised as she was.
… note to self: experimental re-solidification potion might have long-term beneficial effects for bodily rigidity. Further testing required.
‘Testing’, eh?
Shaddup!
They’d barely stepped out of the other cellar and already everything was going exactly not to plan. They were supposed to have split up into two groups by now. But of course, Sam could never do that. More than usual, something was making her quite vocal about not splitting up.
The laser cracks approached rapidly as one Samantha-shaped blur retreated backwards through the hallway leading to the main entrance.
“Is her body supposed to be going through every color in the rainbow like that?” Akira asked.
“No.” Potions turned a bit weird the more you imbibed at once, and she had imbibed a lot. “I hope she’s ok.”
The window on their left exploded and Clem screamed. Sam shot something that tried to jump in after her before standing up, pulverized glass falling off her hair.
“Shit, Sam, are you—” Akira said before Sam slammed into him, rebounded, then shot a mimic before instantly zeroing in on them both with wide, manic eyes.
“Are you both alright? You hurt? Was that too much? There’s some mimic blood on your neck. Not good. Here, have some magical cleaning juice.”
Clem blinked as Sam sprayed her with some sort of cleaning agent while rattling off questions in double-time, four arms each doing something different. Her new weapon looked sinister, as if it used to be a part of some alien’s digestive tract or something.
God, aliens were real, and they were just as angry as the movies made them out to be.
This is ridiculous. Get a grip, Clementine.
“I’m fine, yes,” she said as her friend spritzed her with a bottle of liquid that smelled sharply of mandragora juice, extract of pearlroot, and a hint of lime. “Why are you back here? Are there too many mimics?”
“I killed them,” she said with a cackle. “These potions are insane, Clem. Ooh, there’s another one. Pew!”
Extremely focused eyes, hyperactivity, mania… I didn’t give her the wrong potion, did I?
You didn’t, came Akira’s thoughts, like a reassuring blanket. You’re diligent. Sam trusts you for a reason.
That was the problem. No one deserved to be on the receiving end of this much trust. It wasn't logical.
As she ran through the possibilities, Akira ushered her through her home that now smelled of acrid mimic remains and smoking wood towards the garage. There, the smell was replaced by the scent of gasoline. Chaos seemed muted in this place, as if none of the mimics had even bothered entering this place.
Chaos, fuel, muting senses…
Clem flailed as she stepped on her aching foot, Sam turning to catch her. She fired two more lasers over her shoulder. As she reloaded, Clem pulled on the well of determination in her chest and turned her best friend’s face until she was looking her in the eyes.
“Listen to me — no, look me in the face, listen. I screwed up. Your body is metabolizing the onesies potions a lot faster than I thought. This is a good thing. But magic is a rubber band; the harder you pull, the harder it snaps back. And when the effects wear off, you’re going to crash hard.”
“Hard how?”
“Like a whale dropped from the ISS. A whale made of tungsten.”
“Oh.” She paused, if only to hand a spent battery pack back to her gnome friend. God, that was so her, making friends with the weirdest creatures. Not that gnomes were weird in a bad way. But if the average person knew about them, they’d label them as annoying little critters, as pets, as things best ignored or avoided. “Well, at least I don’t feel any pain.”
I didn’t give her any painkillers though?
Internally, Clem was screaming. Externally, she was making a noise like a hot kettle as Akira put her on the back of his bike and fastened his helmet onto her head.
“That is not a good thing, Samantha!”
“It is from my perspective,” she said. “I’m feeling great, fantastic, unbeatable, muahaha! Pew-Pew!”
Sam shot a pair of mimics down the hallway, then turned to Clementine with a look of pure and utter trust. She wasn’t worried about the potions because her bestie made them. Of course she would only have the best intentions, of course she was competent enough despite being a witch that couldn’t even cast a single curse.
Akira started the bike. Clementine instinctively wrapped her hands around his waist in the precise way that would make sure she didn’t fall off, which she now knew despite having never ridden a bike.
… lover’s potion may have an application in sharing knowledge and expertise.
“Where do we go from here?” he asked as the electric garage door rose with an agonizing lethargy.
“Follow your heart. Also, follow the route on your GPS. There’s a designated evacuation zone.” Sam shot her a couple fingerguns. “Hit ‘em with it, system!”
The GPS beeped. Akira revved the engine.
“Stay safe, Sam,” Clementine said because nothing else came to mind.
Sam just grinned and waved goodbye. “Don’t get stopped by an evil SOP sign, get eviscerated and-slash-or strangled, then get replaced by a doppelganger! I’ll be really mad if you do.”
Clementine let out a snort.
They gunned it down the driveway, gravel shooting past the back wheels as they burst through a smoldering hole in the ring of mimic signs. There were an awful lot less than before.
And when Clementine turned to watch as the distant figure of Samantha sprinted out, trailing gunshots and mad cackles, she thought that there was just the hint of something heroic in her.
She turned to hug Akira tighter.
Never change, Samantha. No matter what the universe throws at you, never change.
+++
I’ve got star power, do-do, doo~.
[Detecting multiple magical effects in bloodstream, including a potion of jumping, haste, ‘bravery’…]
[Temporary effects: Body +65, Sense +22, Mind +13, Soul -4, various (Expand list)]
[Caution: Mixing and excessive use of potions may lead to discoloration of the skin and eyes, mild emotional turmoil, fatigue, sudden loss of senses, great anger, confusion, contusion, addiction, haematoma, heart failure, multiple organ failure, unquenchable rage and a desire for tea, spontaneous combustion, metaphysical disentanglement…]
Yeesh, that was a lot of warnings. Time to ignore them!
Clem was a saint. She hadn’t batted an eye when I told her that the mimics were here for me. She just said ‘ok’ and then moved on with the kind of upbeat nonchalance that implied ten metric tons of faith in my ability to handle the situation.
I didn’t deserve her.
I lied to her about how many lives I had. Honestly, I didn't deserve a friend like her. It was time to come clean… ooor bribe her with a bunch of magical reagents bought with all the points I’d get from completing the mission.
Hell yeah, that sounded like a great idea.
The Ur-mimic was going down, right here, right now. Because I was feeling better than great, I was feeling fantastic, like a well of unending energy was pumping through my veins.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
A shotgun blast of leaper spines clipped me in the side. My chest armor caught them all. I blasted back, catching even more shots from a second and third leaper on my arms, where they pierced gloves and skin. They made ready to leap away, because as I found out leapers were skirmishing cowards that let their poison and their allies do the heavy lifting.
Jokes on them, I’m immune.
The first one was barely done dying when I lobbed a glob of green goo at numbers three and four. The acid slime splashed legs and abdomen respectively, enveloping it, turning their hard shells into soft sizzling goo within seconds. The one I hit center mass was twitching madly as the slime cracked its abdomen and then dug down to hollow out the inside. Finishing them off with the Toothpick was trivial.
That was the last of the leapers I could see.
This gun is amazing. I bet I could kill a giant teleporting huntsman with it. Y’know, assuming I can survive for long enough to hit a couple times.
I whooped a whoop of victory. The ring of signs was coming alive, a hundred different shapes of blades and toothy maws discarding their disguise, but what did I care?
Life. Was. Awesome.
Every step took me as far as three normal steps. Colors were bright, shapes popped out the moment I focused on them, and through it all my mind could barely keep up, but it did. It didn’t matter that my ECC efficiency was in the drain; just running was so fun it alone was fueling [Arms & Arms Proficiency], which made me feel even more awesome with every step and shot. I felt light, my airtime doubling, nay, tripling. I stopped on the lawn, shot a small mimic running at me from the right, then jumped with both legs, launching into the air.
Wohooo, jumping potions are the best!
A horde of misspelled Dagner and Sop signs greeted my fall, their tops sharpened into points like a forest of pikes. I took my Toothpick magazine, shot the twelfth consecutive shot, then tossed its humming form down where it detonated the moment it impacted the ground, tearing a hole into their formation.
Formation. Patterns. Intelligence. It was still around. A sign of an elite. A sign of something to hunt.
I landed, blasting two mimics straight through their widest part before going to town with the complementary silvered knife, slashing their thin stems apart before they could even begin to morph into an aggressive form. All the while my eyes roamed, looking for a sign, something, anything—
There. Something just climbed over the neighbor’s house, running away instead of towards me.
Coward.
I shot my last Goop Gun shot, handing the empty triple-chambered acid chamber to Moe as shrubbery and then the fence raced by my face, and I was out on the street. Racing around the nearest bend I caught a glimpse of something large, fast, and rather pink trying to escape the scene by loping from rooftop to rooftop.
As it should. Its assault had failed, and the local mimic population was duly culled by yours truly. It was right to feel fear. Fear me more, ye shapeshifting bastards!
Four arms and a jumping potion made climbing from veranda to balcony, up the drain pipe and onto the roof almost trivial. One, two, three hops and I had the thing in my sights, my prey skittering over the local hardware store.
I eyed the ground. It was rather far down and to be honest, my joy-production sank just a little as I imagined tripping and falling off the side. But there was a convenient oak nearby. When I jumped I knew I’d make it.
One, two, three more jumps and I was on the flat roof of the hardware store, and the thing appeared barely fifty feet in front of me. Seven compound eyes shifted from its head to its body, keeping me in its sights. I juked a scattershot of uncannily accurate return fire. Definitely a higher ranked mimic.
I was on my last battery pack.
I shot at it with the Goop Gun, but it jinked to the right at just the wrong moment. The goopy projectiles dropped in speed as fast as they dropped in height. Again and again I pulled the trigger, but between radiators and those spinning metal vent thingies that were shaped like a dollop of cream all I accomplished was property damage. And dammit, now I was fresh out of acid vials too.
Wait, when the hell did that happen?
It took a moment to realize that I was panting hard, arms shivering from the consistent bursts of heavy exertion. I’d been basically sprinting at top speed for the past few minutes, then climbed three stories, just to get right where I was, exhausted, out of breath, and out of ammo.
I punched a nearby radiator. The radiator didn’t turn into a mimic. Nothing did.
But it’s out of friends.
A grin split my face. It didn’t seem like the type of mimic that was made to brawl Custodians one-on-one. More a spotter than a fighter. The silvered knife felt comfortable in my hand. Time to close in and finish.
The skittering thing was fast — not faster than a doped-up me, but fast. It finally found a boxy vent to jam its body into, taking only seconds to adjust its body to squeeze down into it. My last Toothpick shot finally landed, searing off a leg, and then it was gone.
“Mother…fucker,” I gasped. Okay, maybe getting it with my knife was not going to happen. “System, buy three more acid slime vials and five more battery packs.”
[Soulcoins: 85->46]
[Delivery time: 1min 24s]
I peered down the black edge of the shaft.
“How the hell did you even get down here,” I muttered. It was barely tall enough to fit a fist, and about a foot wide. Damn slippery mimics.
Well, since there was no way I was following it down that way I’d have to find another path. We’d made it quite far north to what I’d call the downtown of Creektin, which was in effect just all the commercial buildings plastered along the main road, including but not limited to a Wendy’s, the local apothecary (run out of business and foreclosed since the great health insurance crash), five gas stations, and old Ben’s butcher shop — owned by a jovial old polish guy who used to give me free slices of salami as a kid. I’d never seen his shop from this angle before, so it took me a moment to realize what I was standing on.
It was the old tank museum.
I swung over the edge of the roof. The fire escape below rattled under my feet as I pushed and pulled against the door.
“Dammit!” It didn’t open from this side. Every second I wasted was a second the mimic could either run away or morph into something and hide until reinforcements arrived and I eventually had to give up the pursuit.
I ran around to the front, where the old sherman they used in historical demonstrations once a year was shown off on a pedestal behind a glass front. The front door was locked too; it was a Sunday.
“Hey system, can you open electronic doors?” I asked.
[Custodians have a right of entry into all public and private buildings which aren’t part of military or Custodian-owned complexes. Upon request, the system may facilitate entry given that the doorways are electronic and connected to an active network.]
I stared at the door, waiting for it to open, which it didn’t. This was still fine. I coughed, wiping a bit of regurgitated potion off my lips. It tasted coppery. That… was less fine.
Right, I was on a time limit.
After too many seconds spent hemming and hawing I decided that something had to give, and that something wasn’t going to be me.
Two tossed bricks and a strong kick shattered the bottom half of the window. Gingerly, I stepped inside, shards cracking under my boots. The museum was entirely dark, galleries and galleries stuffed with silent watchers from the second World War through Vietnam, from US tanks to European and Chinese variants. From the entrance it was easy to make out a splotch of black blood, and a trail that disappeared into the darkness.
For a moment, my stomach clenched, and I didn’t feel that invulnerable anymore.
“System, where’s the master light-switch?”
[Marking likely location]
A dot appeared on my minimap. Slowly, I crept along the wall, making sure not to make a single peep.
A sudden flash of something appeared to my right and I swiveled on the spot, trigger finger twitching. There were two boxes that hadn’t been there before.
“Oh. Just my ammo delivery.” I kicked them a bit just to be sure, but nope, they were normal.
I took my ammo, flipped the light-switch, then legged it back to the entrance to follow the bloody trail. It was quite easy, the mimic having dribbled all along the Yom Kippur War aisle as it dragged itself over tracks and ERA, under barrels and tank bellies. It wasn’t under any one of them though, I made doubly sure to check. It was not escaping me.
The trail only lessened to a trickle after a while, implying that this mimic had limits to its shapeshifting ability.
The trail ended in a dead-end, an ‘immersive’ life-sized display of a couple WWI tanks — those weird rhombuses with tracks — driving over a reimagining of a trench, complete with life-sized mannequins dressed as soldiers.
“Shit!” I swore as suddenly the whistle of artillery shells and screams of men blared from hidden speakers all around. The display came alive. Some of the mannequins in the trenches were waving, turning, or moving in one of many distracting ways.
Damn motion sensors.
What was worse, there were piles and piles of perfectly 30kg mimic-sized objects, from mountains of sandbags to disarrayed steel girders of broken tank traps and even the mannequins themselves. But the mimic had to be in here; the swinging doors were practically torn apart when I’d arrived, and the trail ended just a few steps ahead.
I breathed in and out. Shape or color. Was there anything that was off in either shape or color?
The first few steps into no-mans-land were heart-throbbing. My laser pistol was aimed straight ahead, my goop gun held to the side as I didn’t want to splash myself. If I was going to be jumped, there was no way in hell that my Toothpick would burn a hole through a leaper in time.
The potion swirling through my veins was allowing me to ignore its poison. I had two knives in my remaining two hands. As long as I didn’t step on the mimic, I could take it.
I could practically smell its fear — maybe that was just my imagination. Maybe I was just smelling myself. The roar of bombs and men screaming as they died horribly was working on my nerves.
I passed the first tank, checking it for any unwelcome add-ons or passengers. The hatches were welded and glued shut. Unlike the other tanks it was not an original, just a hunk of metal made to appear like one.
The mannequins caught my attention next. They were human-shaped and sized, white-on-white like the ones used for display in a clothing boutique. None of them were carrying any pink backpacks. A couple that had been knocked over caught my attention.
I sighted an ammo box and fired. The crackle of my Toothpick trumped the ambient sound for a moment before its echo was lost in the ever-present rolling thunder barrage. But all that remained was an ammo box with a smoldering hole in it, no dead mimic in sight.
After a few more minutes poking dozens of sandbags with lasers, I sighed, backing away from the set with a frown. Could I have been wrong? Did the mimic double back and turn into something indistinct on the way here? This was a mimic smart enough to coordinate dozens of its brethren just to kill or delay one high-value target, aka me. But was it really that smart?
I gathered a handful of battery packs and tossed them into the trenches. Immediately, one of the sandbags wiggled in panic.
I smiled, aimed, and shot twice. Both lasers hit center mass. The critter wailed in an eldritch way that made all the loudspeakers crackle for a moment, before finally curling up into a ball and laying still, motionless.
The battery packs did not explode.
“They weren’t even charged, dumbass.”
With a smile, I uncovered my ears, jumped over the trenchline, and went to gather both of them up when two hats with sharp blade-like legs jumped at me.
I yelped, pistol-whipped the first one before the second grabbed onto my arm. I had no ammo and it was stuck like a limpet. But I had a knife and after a brief if painful tussle, it ended up impaled on one end. Its friend disappeared in a glob of antimonic acid.
I gasped.
The fingers on one of my left hands were cut down to the bone, and bleeding enough that I needed to bandage them. Not time-bandaid them, just a mundane, one soulcoins bandage that wrapped the fingers tight together. Even then, I couldn’t fully close that hand anymore.
Nerve damage. Or cut tendons. Fuck.
Fixing that was a problem for future-Sam. What mattered was that I won. I outsmarted the mimic.
“Close one… but not close enough. Hahahah.”
I still should’ve expected a second damn ambush from the damn mimics. It was kind of their thing. My heart was absolutely pounding, but I’d won. Ten points to me.
I had to be forgetting something, which was when I noticed that I hadn’t gotten a kill notification yet.
“Sneaky bugger.” I trained my laser on the big mimic, which had tried to sneak away by taking on the color and texture of dirt and dragging itself across no man’s land. By the time I had burnt a fist-sized hole in its chest, I finally got the notification that it was dead.
[You have killed: Elite Coral Leaper]
[Quest progress!]
[Silver Soulcoins: 50->150]
[Ivory Soulcoins: 0->1]
[Congratulations! You have reached level 9]
Big money, big levels, whoop whoop!
“System, where is my essence?”
[Deploying Essence_Finder_v1.014]
A part of the leaper mimic was highlighted in red in my interface.
Time to crack this lobster open.
I dug around its chest cavity for a moment, spraying globs of gooey organs with my TidyBlank spray until there it was: a small round gemstone, shimmering in see-through green. An essence. It had to be.
[Coral Leaper Essence]
Tier 1
Rarity: Uncommon
Growth: +2 Sense
Ability: [1] choice of [3] abilities
Yesss, loot! It looked a bit spidery, like a little spider brooch, but that was a plus in my book.
[Changes to Body, Sense, Mind, and Soul may cause a temporary state of vulnerability. It is recommended to find a safe place guarded by associates before ingesting an essence.]
Find a place to hide and pupate, noted. The thought of shedding my history of failures like an old, useless skin was making me feel giddy. It was probably because I was by this point covered in a thick layer of dried sweat and I couldn’t wait to get it off. It was hot outside. Man, I really needed a shower. Maybe I could buy a few hundred gallons of water and let the system rain it down on me?
I was halfway through reading what the difference between normal silver soulcoins and the ivory variants was when a tank-tread slapped me square in the chest.
spider loot.
rating or review. Those help the most. Seriously. In the eyes of the algorithm gods, an advanced review is worth many reviews which in turn is worth many ratings, which itself is worth many follows.
