A Fortress of Pebbles

There were a dozen gray robed scribes in the room. She knew some of them from her time working on her thesis under the Master of Mind. If she recalled correctly, the one lounging on a gray matter blob chair typing on a laptop was also the one who’d organized a betting pool about Aissaba’s inevitable failure. When he saw her, he scrambled to his feet as if he’d been looking at porn.

“Master,” he said, head bowed, “we’re still compiling the data on gun violence and frontal lobe degeneration.” Several other scribes murmured their agreement, taking pebbles off their foreheads and rising to their feet in respect.

Aissaba waved them back to their work. “Carry on, my children,” she said, in her best approximation of the Master of Mind’s priest-like demeanor. Then, robes swishing, she walked to a small orifice in the wall, tickled it open, and extracted a pouch of high-quality mind pebbles.

No one dared to watch her – eyes on their work or closed in concentration.

Aissaba took a stroll around the room in her borrowed body, pretending to be silently judging the graphs on computer screens and the ongoing conversations. Pulses quickened. Lots of nervous swallowing.

She did it not just because she liked the power (though that was nice too). It was because the next thing on the agenda was to walk into the bathroom orifice. Calls of nature weren’t normal for the Master of Mind.

She finished her stroll by inspecting the gray matter around the bathroom orifice, finding a small defect in the wrinkles. At this, she frowned and repaired it by flashing a mind pebble with a standard tissue repair protocol and rubbing the pebble on the spot.

Shaking her head in disappointment, she entered the orifice and continued the fake inspection until it closed behind her. Then, she darted into a stall and dropped the pouch of pebbles into the ground sphincter. It accepted the offering.

She reentered the office, sat back on the avatar’s blob chair, and ended the protocol. A moment later, Aissaba was withdrawing her single mind pebble from the slimy hole she had dug. It was wet but undamaged – good!

Now, of course, there was only one thing left.

The trick with the ground sphincters was that they were photosensitive – ready to detect anyone squatting over them. Aissaba covered the photosensitive spot with her backpack to keep it open. Then, she hopped down into the sewer tunnel – which was cleaner than one might expect, either because no one ever used the nightmarish bathrooms in the Hall of Mind, or because the Master of Mind had devised some way for the gray matter to flush itself periodically. Aissaba had never inquired.

In the darkness, it wasn’t hard to locate the pouch of glowing pebbles she had deposited from the nearby bathroom. After retrieving it, she tossed it up through the open sphincter above her. To get out, she took three map pebbles, converted them into blocks of granite, and stood atop them.

Once she was out, she destroyed the granite with a few more map pebbles and repaired the hole in the wall with a handful of life pebbles. She retrieved her backpack and dodged the spray of water from the bidet glands in the sphincter’s perimeter.

She walked back into the hallway – heist complete.

“How was the dump?” said Orion, petting the purple vine that lounged on the shoulders of Cassandra’s flannel.

“Did you wash your hands?” said Cassandra.

Aissaba didn’t have to fake her smile anymore. “It was a great dump,” she said. “I’m suddenly finding myself excited to get to know you two better. Are you ready for some mind magic?”

Tassadu’s loose jaw told her he knew exactly what she’d done. Nice that she could still surprise him every now and then.

“Seems like mind magic just grows brains everywhere,” said Orion. “Isn’t that just life magic?”

“Good observation, Orion! Mind magic is, indeed, an extension of life magic, just as minds are an extension of life,” said Aissaba, giving the usual monologue as she took a pair of mind pebbles from the new pouch on her belt. “But mind magic is optimized for making changes to a very specific kind of organic material – the stuff that makes up your brain and nervous system. Wanna see?”

Both kids nodded excitedly. Aissaba tapped one pebble to each of their foreheads, causing them to freeze where they stood, a blank look upon their faces. The vine pets on their shoulders blinked – more sentient than the kids, for the time being.

Tassadu hadn’t yet managed to form words, so Aissaba handed him the pebbles and said, “Don’t worry. It’ll only wipe their memories starting from when I finished the, uh, dump. When I go back inside, tap them with the pebbles.”

Feeling better than she’d felt all day, Aissaba went into the bathroom again and counted to ten.