Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap!
The stranger out there rapped on the door with desperate urgency, but neither Seymour nor Penny moved to let them in.
Because instead, both were mesmerized by the motes of pure white light which had begun to dance upon Seymour’s chest, radiating warmly through the work shirt he’d forgotten to take off. This light was no joke; the brand of divine illumination that people claimed to see in the tunnel during a near-death experience; the kind of light where Grandma and your first dog wait for you on your way to Heaven. It flashed out from his collar with such painful brilliance that for a moment his eyes were forced shut. He would have held up a hand against the glare, but his body still wasn’t quite up to the task of obeying his commands.
And though supremely pleasurable, the moment also came loaded with uncertainty because he hadn’t been conscious during the manifestations of his three existing sigils. He might not even have been corporeal. He sort of assumed that Greed, Envy, and Pride had been imprinted on his body while he was still en route to this universe, traveling between realities as some kind of interdimensional space ghost. But for all Seymour knew, his vampire kidnapper had tatted him up. He really had no clue, and the sudden appearance of this latest sigil forced that fact to the forefront of his mind.
Had he gone through this before? Was it all going down the way that it was supposed to? It felt like something would soon burst out of his chest. Something alive. Not in a particularly painful way, though. More wholesome than that; less Alien and more Spaceballs.
The second he could wrangle some semblance of control over his body, Seymour reached up and attempted to undo his suddenly too-tight collar but he was still too wracked with pleasure for his fingers to do anything but fumble lamely. Noticing that he couldn't help himself, Penny took the opportunity to seize both his lapels in her fists and then she tore his shirt wide open, sending buttons zipping to every corner of the room. She looked down at his bare chest like he was a feast and she had been castaway for years on a deserted island.
Seymour’s face suddenly felt hot, along with other areas of his anatomy. Was she about to take advantage of him? Had she been waiting for this to happen – waiting for when the time came that he’d be incapable of refusing her? He stared up at her in shock.
And then he looked down at his own chest with the exact same expression, and he realized that at the current moment she was hornier for his emerging sigil than she could ever be for the rest of him.
There on his right pectoral muscle, opposite his pentagram-shaped Sigil of Pride, an invisible artist was tattooing his new Virtue Sigil in divine, silver-white ink. The sight of it struck him as equal parts impossible and mesmerizing. With his shirt torn open, the light emanating from his breast now white-washed the rainbow glow of Penny’s kaleidoscopic party decorations, drowning them out completely.
“It’s going to be Diligence.” Penny’s voice had become reverent, barely above a whisper, as if she was speaking a prayer only to herself. Her fingers lightly traced the design even as it was still being drawn, setting off ripples of pleasure which blanketed Seymour in more goosebumps. “Diligence; you lucky fucker! As if you’ve worked diligently at anything, ever in your life!” She playfully bonked him on the head.
Seymour could make out the emergent design now, too – the outline of a hand that looked like it was trying to steal a treat from an invisible cookie jar. In an instant, what little he knew about Diligence cut through the haze of his euphoria like a switchblade flicking out:
It might have been the most desirable of all sigils for someone who wanted to evolve a class and become an adventurer, so much so that Heschian parents often sent their kids off at an early age to perform hard labor in hopes of forcing it to manifest. And he knew that adding a catalyst to it would likely confer instant expertise in trades or even combat styles. With the right catalyst, he could become a legit swordmaster or the like.
Penny asked, “may I have a closer look?”
But she didn’t wait for him to answer. The jeweler's loupe still hung from around her neck. She took it in hand and held it to her eye, and then she leaned in until its lens nearly pressed against Seymour’s skin, and used loupe to carefully examine his new sigil.
“Strange.” She sounded mystified but excited. “It feels like Diligence, but never have I seen anything like—”
Seymour sat up halfway and swiftly stopped her with a closed-mouth kiss. Just straight up mashing his lips against hers. He didn’t exactly know where it came from and he was already planning his wine-based defense as he pulled away. When he settled back, propping himself on his elbows, Penny appeared stunned. Her fingers lingered lightly on her own bottom lip.
“I’m sorry,” he began, but before he could try to explain himself the intruder at the door interrupted:
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap!
“Who could that be?” he wondered, hoping to distract Penny from the kiss he still didn’t fully understand himself. “Eusebio, maybe? But why is he knocking like that? All tap-tap-tappy.”
But Penny didn’t take his bait. Her fingertips remained on her lips.
“You kissed me,” she said. “Why would you do that?”
“I, uh, I don’t really know. Blame it on the wine, I guess? I’m sorry, it won’t happen again—”
She made him a liar in the next moment by pouncing on him and pinning him to the floor with a kiss of her own. But unlike a moment ago when he’d mashed his lips against hers, Penny’s intent couldn’t have been more clear. She moved around to straddle his hips and Seymour reached up to caress her cheek – and that’s when it happened:
The romantic mood was instantly strangled in its crib. Suddenly Seymour had to question if the girl he had known as Penny Amberwine was even human, or if she was merely another magical construct made of sacred geometry. It struck him that he hadn’t shaken hands with anyone since acquiring Infringement, because he’d been bowing to everyone he met, instead.
He pushed Penny off harder than he meant to and sat up, quickly scooting to the far end of their picnic spread. He schooled his expression into a tight-lipped smile but didn’t know how to explain what had just happened.
“What is the matter with you?” Her face had screwed up into a look of confusion and betrayal.
How to tell her that they couldn’t get it on right then because she might not even be a real person?
“This isn’t right,” he said. It was a true reason, at least, even if incomplete. Penny crossed her arms, unsatisfied. So Seymour blurted, “you’re drunk.”
“I am not.” She stood up and stomped her foot. “And even if I were, I am a twenty-three year-old woman. I can imbibe my fair share and still choose who I want to be with, and when.” She cringed at what she’d just said and shook her head and sighed. “What am I doing? I will not beg you, Seymour Little. I simply…. What happened just now? It felt like…. I felt you…. change.”
Seymour’s mind raced for a soft lie to tell her, something to let her down easy.
“I’m drunk.” That much was actually true, too. “Your first time shouldn’t be—”
“Did you not hear me?” She shot back. “I am a twenty-three year-old woman; this is not my first time.”
Seymour froze, caught off guard by her sudden worldliness; by the fact she wasn’t actually a virgin princess from a cartoon.
“Our first time,” he deftly corrected, “should be better than this though, right? More pure and whatnot. And without Dathon’s drunk ass snoring five feet away.”
He could feel her gaze. He met it head on; she doubted him, but Seymour could see that he’d managed to infuse just enough plausibility into his claim. And he’d been practicing his poker face for years.
“Damn the Fates,” she swore and fell to once again sit on her knees opposite him on their mussed and wine-stained picnic blankets. “You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry, Seymour. I don’t know what has gotten into me. Seven or eight goblets of velvetberry wine, I suppose. I just—”
He slid across the floor then and caught her in a tight squeeze.
“Don’t,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
But that schematic was still in his mind.
Penelope Amberwine. Virtuous. Human.
In that moment, the only thing that could rescue him from more awkwardness was the door-knocker he’d briefly forgotten. And as if on cue, whoever was out there returned then to save him:
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap!
He nearly leapt to his feet. “I’d really better get that. It sounds important.”
She didn't look up as he made his way over to the door. Not until he pulled it open, and something black came flapping chaotically into the workshop, barely missing Seymour’s face. He scrambled back a few steps before tripping over the disheveled picnic blankets and thudding hard onto his butt. The flapping thing—at first sight all Seymour could conceive of it as was a bat, likely of the vampire variety—flew a circuit around the room and then landed on the bunched up blanket, right beside Seymour.
“A raven!” Penny exclaimed, the prayerfulness from earlier returning to her voice all at once. “Whatever he has for you, it must be of the utmost importance.”
Only after blinking a few times could Seymour see that this thing actually was a legit raven. And a big one. It looked up at him with its black beak and eyes. On its back, some sort of weird little backpack thing had been strapped to it, stuffed with a bundle of rolled-up letters, all tied together with string. The raven reached back with its beak and gingerly plucked one of the letters out. With a little twitch of its feathered tail, the bird then ejected the letter into Seymour’s lap, after which it cawed twice in quick succession before flapping back out into the showroom.
Seymour, meanwhile, picked up the letter from his lap and began to read the words that had been written there by a familiar stranger.
Words that would eventually change the lives of everyone on Earth.
Penny sat at the workbench. Her eyes danced across the page, and Seymour breathed a little easier. Their near-sex experience had been averted.
But that schematic was still stuck at the front of his object memory.
Penelope Amberwine. Virtuous. Human.
“I’m gonna have another goblet of the hooch. You want some?”
She didn’t answer, still completely engrossed by the letter.
“For Seymour Little,” she read aloud for at least the fifth time. “I pray this letter finds you well. Please allow me to introduce myself, my name is Oscar Rusk, and if you will extend me a bit of trust, I will help you return to your home.” She paused and looked up at Seymour while he poured himself more wine. “If a raven had not been the one to deliver it, I would not believe this letter to be authentic. But ravens are the most reliable and trustworthy of all couriers. Whoever this Rusk person is, I am confident his words are true.”
“Yeah, about that: I actually do know a little bit about who Oscar Rusk is. He used to manage this shop.”
“You might have said so sooner.”
“Well, you seemed pretty into that letter. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“In the future, please do not be so cautious. The open exchange of information between us is vital now if we are to solve the puzzle presented by Rusk.”
“Is that what we’re doing now?” He laughed. “Solving riddles posed by strangers and delivered by ravens?”
Penny ignored his glib question. “Is there anything else I should know about him?”
“Not really.” He thought for a moment. “Oh wait, one time I did fight a topiary tiger who was apparently one of his minions.”
“In the hedge maze, correct?”
“Yep.”
“The same hedge maze which Rusk mentions at length in this letter.” Penny turned the yellowed parchment over in her hands, examining its many creases like they might be concealing a trap. Then she set it aside and picked up a thin-bristled brush which she dipped into an inkwell she had told Seymour was filled with mana lacquer.
He was still seated on the edge of his cot, while she had been periodically swiveling in her chair to alternate between talking to him and reading the letter and even taking time to work to repair the magical teacup that his pet cactus had broken a week earlier, when it had suddenly doubled in size after harvesting a unit of his blood. Seymour had hidden the shards under his mattress, unsure of what to do with them, but had brought them out once the topic of Rusk came up, so that Penny could take a look with a pair of catalogoggles. And being the obsessed artificer she was, she’d immediately gone to work repairing it.
Fixing the teacup seemed to be sobering her up some, too, and she kept returning to the task whenever she needed a moment to process the details revealed by the letter. This weird little routine had been going on for close to an hour already, and each time she went completely quiet while glueing the cup back together.
Seymour finally broke the silence. “So you seriously think he’s telling the truth? About the maze having some kind of connection to Earth, I mean.”
“Is that not what I just said?” She drew in a deep breath and set the brush aside. “I’m sorry, I do not wish to snap at you. But yes, I do believe the intermittent hedge maze must contain that which Rusk claims it does.”
“The Midnight Express.”
“An ominous name for what he describes as ‘a means of bridging the gap between Heschia and Earth’, to be certain.” She swiveled back around to fit another shard of the teacup into place and brushed it with mana-infused lacquer to cement it there permanently. “Does none of this cause you to feel the least bit suspicious?”
“Suspicious of Rusk?” Seymour shrugged and finished his latest goblet of wine. “I mean, sure. Of course.”
“What does he stand to gain if you find your way back to Earth?”
“Who’s to say? Maybe he gets a gold star for being a good samaritan? Could even earn his whole class a pizza party.”
“Please abstain from silliness,” Penny chided, no longer showing even a hint of the buzz she’d had earlier. “What if Rusk’s goal has simply been to have you insinuate yourself into the hedge maze the way you already have?”
“What if it is?” Seymour asked. “Why would he want that?”
“I’d rather not speculate.”
“Well then I guess we’ll never know.”
“Interesting.” She used her jeweler’s loupe and held it close to flush against the letter.
When she didn’t elaborate, Seymour asked, “what’s ‘interesting’, exactly?”
“This parchment, the way it has been folded. Look closely at these creases.” She passed the letter back to him.
He squinted at it but didn’t see anything unusual. “What exactly am I looking for?”
“It has been folded multiple times over, as you can see. Many more times than would be necessary for it to be sent by raven.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” He squinted at the folds, criss-crossing the parchment all over. “Actually, come to think of it, when the bird brought it to me it was all rolled up like a doobie, even.”
“A doobie? What a ridiculous word. Please, Seymour, I again ask you to be serious.”
“Sorry. But it’s kinda your fault. If you wanted Serious Seymour you probably shouldn’t have fed me all that wine.”
Without acknowledging her role in his silliness, she held out her hand. “May I have that back?”
“Sure.” He gave her the letter, and immediately after taking it she touched the parchment’s corner to the flame of his touch candle. It quickly began to burn. “Hey! What are you doing?”
“I am destroying this piece of surveillance artifice.” The letter was nearly enveloped in flames before she dropped it into Seymour’s wastebasket, which was fortunately empty.
“Surveillance artifice? Are you saying that letter was some kind of bug?”
She twisted up her face like what he’d just said was absurd. “It is obviously not an insect. I beg you now to at least attempt to treat this moment with the gravity it deserves.”
“Sorry, but it’s really not my fault this time. On Earth, I think we’d call this a bug. It means he wanted to use it to spy on me, right?”
“A fascinating colloquialism.” For the first time, she sounded genuinely intrigued rather than mildly repulsed by his use of Earth slang. “And an accurate one, as well. I believe Oscar Rusk—or whomever it was that truly sent this letter—first folded the parchment into a shape which caused its internal geometry to be altered in such a way that this seemingly innocuous object became a one-way scrying artifice.”
“So, sort of like an origami palantir.”
She cocked her head. “More Earth-speak, I assume?”
Seymour nodded. “Yep. Middle Earth, to be more specific.”
“Creating artificery on this level would require a nigh-unfathomable level of expertise. Whoever sent it to you—be it Rusk or someone else representing themselves as Rusk—they must have dedicated their entire lives to the craft.” She frowned. “I pray it was not Melvina, setting a trap which you have triggered with your obliviousness. But I can scarcely imagine who else might possess such expertise. Aside from myself, of course.”
“Of course,” he snidely replied.
She ignored his attempt to tease her. “Seymour, these facts combine to reveal a genuine mystery – one you and I are now tasked with solving.”
“Yeah, I guess we gotta go all Scooby-Doo on this thang, huh?”
Again she ignored what he’d just said.
“Do you have any idea how to bring forth the hedge maze? And idea what causes the transformation?”
“To be honest, at first I thought it might have just been me. It seemed like it showed up pretty much at the same time I did. But I’ve been here over a week now and it hasn’t happened again, so I don’t know.”
“You are not that special, Seymour, despite the events unfolding around you.”
“Be nice.”
“Eusebio surely must have a theory about the origins of maze,” she probed further, ignoring his mock-hurt. “Has he shared it with you?”
“Yeah, according to him, it just happens every so often as a result of the shop—like, the physical structure itself—having become infused over the years with so much stray mana. You know how that stuff just oozes out over time when an item gets out of whack.”
“When an object no longer conforms to its intended configuration,” she corrected, “and its essence is slowly released into the environment.”
“Yeah, like that. Anyway, Eusebio says that with the way the third floor is just a jumble of stuff, sometimes a busted magic item gets overlooked too long and then all the magic juice leaks out. The shop drinks up the juice and then the third floor turns into a some kind of haunted pocket dimension with a hedge maze in it. Simple as that. Eusebio has to shut down the entire floor until it switches back, which usually lasts about a week, according to him. It didn’t hang around that long this last time, though.”
“Could not a Purifier be hired to cleanse the stray mana?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Of course you don’t, my apologies.” She frowned, thinking. “I find Eusebio’s explanation rather implausible. It is possible that he is unaware of the true reason for the floor’s intermittent transformations – but it might also be that he is dissembling. I believe we are confronted with a second mystery.”
Seymour chuckled. She was so into this.
“Ruh roh,” he laughed Scoobily.
“We are going to need to thoroughly explore that hedge maze when it next appears,” she decided. “And to pursue that end, it would be best if I have first evolved an adventuring class.”
“Well you’re in luck. I’m something of a prodigy myself when it comes to giving people weird ass classes.” He playfully puffed out his chest. “So whenever you have the chits—”
But she wasn’t looking to wait a moment longer. Before Seymour could even finish his sentence, Penny jumped up from the workbench and hurried past him, making her way out into the dark showroom.
