Soulforged Dungeoneer

If birthing a fairy into your own mind was an incredibly painful thing, the last three ticks were the most terrifying part of it, in the sense that I was sure I was going to break something for real and it might never heal. Because while I was astonished that there was room inside of my mind for a teensy-tiny humanoid figure, there simply wasn't room for all her stuff.

And yet she wouldn't leave without it. Kids, right?

While we waited for each of the ticks, she paced around and appraised the empty space in my soul, going around to places I wasn't really conscious of and shuffling around things that I didn't even know were mobile in order to make room. I didn't understand that at the time, but she did, and that was somehow enough to calm me down, in a way it definitely should not have been.

And with each tick, she would return to the crack in my soul and fetch things out of it. They started small, or at least, in small pieces. She seemed to make a nest in my will that was suitable for her and compatible with me, staking out a place and pushing "me" back from it. After a couple easy ones, though, suddenly her luggage started to be oversize and rigid. When she pulled something out that was too long, it literally poked me hard in the mind's eye, which was a mental organ I didn't know could be poked, just as I didn't think that the edge of my mind could be broken and exposed to some kind of space outside.

Anyway, being hit like that hurt like fucking balls, but more than that, I could tell it did damage to me, in a very real way--it was the most fleshy, mortal thing I'd felt since I'd become a dungeoneer. Unlike the cracked shell of my mind, when "I" was hit, things stopped working right. I was dizzy, confused, sick to my stomach, and sure as balls that I'd lost some part of myself for good. When my new fairy friend didn't quite get her luggage through by gently tugging, she tried again, giving me another mental bruise that I could have sworn could never heal.

There had never been such a thing. There was no concept in my head for damage to "me" in that way. There was no way to touch it, to heal it. Except... except that to my vague ghost-sight senses, my much-maligned ESP, somehow I was certain that there was a me here, a me only surrounded by a shell that was my whole life. I suppose if ghosts were a thing I shouldn't be surprised that a living soul was somehow separate from the biology, but it was just so weird that even as I experienced it, it just didn't make a lick of sense.

I tried to vaguely feel where I had been hit, with mental "hands" that were barely defined. It felt... it felt like something boneless that had been bashed and bruised, like a very sensitive tomato had been poked too hard and was now too squishy in one spot. I couldn't help but fear that some real damage had been done.

What a baby. The words from my fairy companion were harsh, yes, but as I tried to focus on her, the sense I got was that she was trying to be friendly-grouchy in a helpful way; a crude attempt at "tough love". You'll heal. I'll help. But what's next is worse.

It was.

If the first big package was too long, the next was both long and wide, and forcing it through meant deliberately breaking the edges of my mind, and when she did, eggshell-like pieces that might have held on by a thread instead snapped off and scattered around my mind, while also banging against my "me" in a painful way. She was focused, though, on getting the piece through, and then set up, before finally returning to collect scattered pieces of my shattered mind, picking them up and placing them by the wall without trying to reconnect them.

Then she turned to look straight at me. It was odd; she hadn't done that before, but out of everything else going on, on a soul level I felt nothing but calm acceptance of her, and from her. She was, really, on my side, and I could just tell that in a way I couldn't put into words. One more, she insisted.

Was it really just one more? It was hard to believe, but I put all my efforts into keeping my mind intact and just waited, minutes passing in agony.

The last piece was just too big in every possible way. The wall split like a cruise ship was trying to force its way into my mind, and I felt like a balloon was being inflated inside of my eyes, crushing nerves that had never felt pain and trampling over delicate things that had never before been in danger.

And I was incapable of even looking around, much less handling it, as the fairy calmly pulled it the rest of the way through, did something off to my "left," and then with a gruff attitude, suddenly strode back into my sight, pushing a bunch of debris forward with a mental broom.

With a kind of magical dexterity I didn't think possible, she willed the broken pieces of my mind off of the "floor" of my soul and had them hovering in midair. She studied them like a jigsaw puzzle, rearranging them until the edges and picture matched, and then magic-glued them together, first to each other, and then to the wall.

As she did, I became aware of a system notification that was supposed to be visible to me. But with my focus now so thoroughly inside, I could swear that it was a hand-lettered sign being held up into my normal conscious space by a little stick from somewhere just below my sight. As I strained to look "down", halfway delirious and mostly certain that whatever was happening it wasn't really real, I saw it for the first time.

It was an engine. The thing that powered my Dungeoneer body was a big cylindrical engine, with teeth that spun in an "intake" and big coils of energy flowing out from the sides and back end. It barely even registered to me as I reached towards that engine and just kind of goosed the throttle a little bit. Somehow, once I saw that engine-y thing, I knew that the controls were just... there. The throttle, and other things.

I don't know what happened when I did jiggle it, exactly, but something definitely happened. Power surged around, and I could swear that the thick threads of energy swelled--sometimes too much--in response to being fed a little extra juice. There was more here, more that I could do if I could just...

In a way far more delicate than I expected after how she treated her luggage, a fairy hand landed on my mind. I half expected her to be violent or callous, but she was... sentimental, and kind of gentle. It's complicated, she insisted. Don't do that yet.

Yet?

It builds out. You have to build to use more.

As she 'spoke' to me, I could tell that her thoughts were hanging there, neither beyond my reach nor a part of my own thoughts. Like the loops of power coming out of the engine, they had connections and directions, and while I might look at them, they weren't mine. Her understanding of the engine, similarly, seemed to borrow heavily from the engine itself, small threads that hadn't been there when I looked a second ago, but as soon as I'd touched the throttle, she'd chased after me to figure the thing out on my--our--behalf. And behind that summary was a simple truth--classes, levels, stats, skills, abilities, and whatever the hell else was a part of the system, they were just channeling a small part of something greater.

And if you fuck it up you'll die, she replied, otherwise flatly agreeing with my summary. From what I could tell, my little bound fairy was constantly serious about everything, far from the image of frivolity and hippy-ness that I associated with the term.

Anyway, yup, can die from it. I acknowledged that thought with a mental nod, and she studied me--studied, I realized, the bruises on my soul, my "me". Tiny fingers traced the bruises, and while the wounds were tender, her gentle nudges seemed like they were popping dents out of me, moving things that had been pushed out of place back into position. It was... it was healing, just not... not from a spell or anything. She was healing me "by hand," as it were.

Your friend wants to know you're alright, she said at last, moving out of the way. And in truth, after hours of having nothing more important than this to focus on with, I'd started to forget I even had normal sight, and hearing, and other senses. I had a long moment where I wasn't entirely sure how to put my focus back on... you know, everything.

And then I was there, and Louise was crying loudly, shaking and sobbing as she clutched me to her chest, and I was sure that I heard my phoenix crying nearby as well.

It was surprisingly awkward and felt incorrect, but I was able to unsteadily move my hand up to her shoulder and grab Louise in return. She seemed to miss the action right up until I actually touched her, because she let out a surprised yell when I made contact.

"AAAAH!" She squeezed me tighter to her in shock, and then immediately forced me away with enough force to fling me a couple feet. "Are--GODDAMNIT JEREMY IF YOU'RE ALRIGHT SAY SOMETHING YOU ASSHOLE!"

Unfortunately, I was still pretty limp at that point, with my muscles not really wanting to work correctly, and I just kind of flopped over. The two of us sat there for a moment, her I guess scared or wondering if she just imagined the touch, but I was able to force the arm under me to prop me up a little bit.

"Hey... Louise." I was mostly just kind of confused, really really dizzy but without any nausea. "I'm okay. I'm... my head hurts, a lot. And... my name isn't Jeremy."

"W-what?"

"You called me Jeremy. Again." Honestly, that little detail was... it was... sweet, somehow. I don't know why I thought that--

Because you're in love you asshole. Just say it already; it's obvious and she clearly likes you enough. Every now and then, my internal fairy kind of blocked or bumped into something or other as she moved around trying to fix things in my head, or else the damage that had been done was making it hard to... you know, be correctly. Whatever she was doing was working though, I thought, but it was obviously the kind of thing that would need to heal over time in addition to whatever she was doing.

"No, I... uh." Louise stopped. She tried, among her sniffles, to sound like she was insulted, but it didn't work. "I didn't. I wouldn't do that."

I looked at her, and in spite of my headache, a smile came out that I just didn't have any mental strength to try to hide. Because yeah, okay, whether you called it love or a huge crush, I was definitely into her, wasn't I? As shaky as my mental state was, it all seemed to simple as to be funny, and I laughed.

And... somewhere in the resulting spasms I lost consciousness.

There was supposed to be a dream there. I knew that there was supposed to be, but all I had was a black room with a fairy in it instead. She was just kind of staring there and looking down at me. Not... not looking down in a judgmental sense, but in a watching me while I'm sleeping sense. Which, I guess, is also kind of creepy? But in a way we were family now, and that was one of the things you had to trust family with, because they would be there when you were sleeping, whether they were watching you or not.

I had so many questions, so many things that seemed so important, but as they swirled around my head, she just kind of shrugged. Most of those things she simply didn't know anything about. She knew what I knew, because I knew it--that someone had said she could "steal" knowledge from the Dungeons, and that she would become a part of my magic. And my magic, mostly, came from the Dungeons and my... my Dungeoneer's Key. The thing that I might lose if I failed this quest.

It wasn't until the Fairy started to smile at this thought that I really started to look at her. Even in a dream, she was strangely well-defined. She had eyes that were consistently level, almost exactly half-open. That gave her an expression that seemed, well, not emotionless, but subdued, and she used her facial expressions more as a tool to communicate than as a genuine expression of what was beneath. In spite of that, she did convey her thoughts well; she seemed natural, not like the Administrators and their puppet-like avatars.

Meanwhile, she was naked, but as sexless as a Barbie doll. Other than that, she seemed perfectly human, except in miniature; her fingers and toes even had nails, although they seemed superfluous. I thought when she had more time to think about her appearance she'd probably end up looking goth, with heavy eye shadow and black nails, but for now she didn't even react to the thought. Her expression and attitude both spoke of a restless, spunky, come-at-me-bro attitude, and nothing I saw or sensed suggested otherwise.

After I brought up the Key, she took her hands off her hips, where they had been parked in traditional "Yeah, so what?" fashion, and I could tell she concentrated just a bit on it, clenching her arms and hands as she focused, as that view of the "engine" I'd seen before floated up behind her, taking up a stage I was not able to really consciously look away from--not in a dream, at least. The engine itself was so strange--a little leech-like thing that generated power. But what did it feed on?

There is a Master Key, the Fairy told me, her voice almost startling in a dream where I was otherwise used to indirect, it's-just-true transfer of knowledge. It's huge, it's far away, and it's coming closer. It's not slowing down, so maybe it will pass by? If it gets out of range, that will be bad. Like everyone dies bad.

That sounded bad, yeah. How long did we have?

I dunno. Your units of time are weird. Uh... centuries? A long time.

So... not an immediate problem. Still, what Herman said about how we could still lose echoed in my head. How did we learn to control it?

She just shrugged. There was some kind of lock on it, and that was its own thing. She could steal answers--if they were close, and if she knew what answers to steal. Close to what, I wondered? But her instinctual response, not vocalized, told me that was the wrong question--not close to what, close to whom. A creature tied to the magic of the Dungeons, both the magic that I could reach and the deeper magic that ran it.

An agent of the system. An Administrator.

I woke up back at the inn, Louise cuddled up to me and probably asleep. I hadn't had this kind of headache since I'd been a normal guy--not that, even this close, I could tell the difference between Louise's body and that of a "normal woman." Somehow, whatever made us damn-near immortal was either buried within or somewhere else.

That's complicated. I got the sense that my fairy friend was off doing something else, deliberately not focusing on the two mammals in a bed. It's a big machine. I can't even begin to mess with it; I'd just break it.

I shifted positions in the bed just slightly to change how the weight was on my arm, and focused on thinking quietly to my new guest. We need to get you a name. ...unless you have one?

Nah. If you get that pet item back I could take over its identity--

I took immediate offense to that, and she stopped. I liked Cassie as she was. Unless there was some reason why we had to, I didn't want to break a living thing and replace it like it was... like she was nothing.

The fairy popped back up into an area where I could clearly sense her, and it was odd just how clearly I could perceive her when she did. It was like I was really seeing her with my eyes--just that consistent, that colorful, with all the minute details--except that the stage she was in had rules that I couldn't begin to understand. She was sticking her head up out of nothing, only up to her nose, but there was no obvious thing that she was hiding behind. You're a nice guy, but I don't think she's alive. I took a look while you were out and... well, she's a little simple. Nice, I guess, but simple.

I followed that logic, but something about the fact that I'd already started interacting with Cassandra made me immediately very stubborn about treating her like anything but a living creature. Besides, I reasoned, she's shown loyalty to me. I don't want to reward that with betrayal.

That's fair. The fairy's eyes measured me silently for a moment. What kind of name are you thinking? Don't make a joke out of it. Just a nice normal name is fine.

Somehow, I felt a strong urge to make her name a lot like mine. If the names were different, we might seem like different people, assuming others would actually be able to interact with her. In a way, she was a new sister or daughter or something, anyway. What about... Merry?

That's good with me. And, uh, I can't... "out" right now, but I'm pretty sure eventually, yeah. Merry's hand poked into my vision just long enough to give a kind of vague "out"-like motion and then retreated.

Next to me, Louise stirred, and Merry retreated to give me room to be myself. In the few seconds it took Louise to blink sleep out of her eyes, I couldn't help considering just what that meant--in a very real way, instead of (or in spite of) this fairy being a reward, I really was being possessed by some kind of moderately friendly spirit, wasn't I? The grim specter of "possession," enhanced by Hollywood, had been a boogeyman that I'd known for many, many long years, as a person haunted by who-knew-what, and in my heart and soul I was sure it would mean the end of my life. But this...

Just a magic spirit and a dude working together, maybe a little too closely. Although Merry didn't pop into my head, I got the impression of a shrug, but only for a moment. But yeah, this could have gone way wrong. After I woke up there were kind of... instructions. Pretty sure we'd be screwed without them.

Instead of replying, I smiled at Louise, who was smiling at me. She--we--weren't naked or anything, just kind of cuddling in bed, and she pulled back and sat up, looking more than a little relieved. "How are you?"

Somehow, that was a complicated question to answer. "Well... it worked," I said. "I have a... kind of resident spiritual companion, I guess. She's real and alive and it's weird. It... it hurt like hell, Louise, and it still does, and it scared me shitless, and it still kind of scares me. If it turned out that she'd been evil, I would have been screwed. But... I think... I'll be okay."

"Can I see her?"

"She can't 'be out' right now," I answered immediately. "But she's cute. I think you'll like her."

I am not cute. Which was, of course, exactly what was exactly what I expected her to say. It's a cute response to being called cute. It is not.

"So are you more or less healed?" Louise's face lost some of its relief without really putting on a new expression at all. "Yesterday... you really looked like you might have been dying, or already dead. You wouldn't respond to anything, you weren't moving... and you... you felt wrong. Like you weren't in there."

I shivered. I'd seen my mother like that, when her dementia got worse, a little while before she died. It gave me the creeps. "I was there, I was just... inside. I..." Frankly, I didn't want to think about what I'd just gone through. The concept of something breaking in, both the breaking and the in was still creepy, even admitting that Merry seemed to be good. It was... not a thing that was supposed to happen.

True that. Merry's thoughts kind of echoed out of the back of my mind, somewhere. At the very least, whatever privacy curtain she was using to keep me from being distracted worked, as long as we weren't talking. Like, I feel like if I do something wrong I'll hurt things that aren't supposed to get hurt. Soft things that are meant to be covered up.

That sounded entirely too much like she was crawling around my junk, but she responded to that thought by poking her head up again. No, you dummy. More like your, uh, inside-insides. Guts. Imagine me crawling around your, uh, stomach? Chest? Chest. Man, you have a lot of words. I feel like I could... step? On things. I'm being careful, though, I promise.

That mental image was no good at all, and it also made entirely too much sense. I tried to keep my focus on Louise despite knowing she'd see my attention was split. "I... don't want to talk about it."

She responded by wrapping my head in a hug. "Does it still hurt?"

I shook my head. "That's not it. She--uh... it's hard to describe. She's there in a way that's hard to ignore.

Sorry. For some reason, she popped a little further up to show that she was grinning in a sympathetic fashion, and gave me a hand sign that I didn't really recognize, which morphed into just flicking me off. Whatever. I thought I understood something but I don't. I'll, uh, read some more.

And then it was just me and Louise again, and I just shook my head. "I'm... going to need some time to adapt."

Louise looked uncomfortable. "But if you wait too long, you won't be ready for your fight. Do you think she can help with that?"

Uh... lemmie think. Another two solid rests like that should have your head mostly healthy again, but we need to do some practice 'cos your magic ain't gonna work like it did. I frowned, wondering exactly which part was "my magic"--the engine, certain skills, or what? Dunno. But it's different. For now, rest. Then we play.

"We'll see," I answered Louise, as I leaned back in the bed again. "For now... I still feel like my brain is bruised, and I need to sleep. I should be okay if you want to go do something else--"

"I'm staying," she assured me quietly, and laid back down with her head on my chest. I'd never had someone be that forward with me, but I wasn't dumb enough to not see it. "Hey, Jerry?"

"Yeah." My hand raised by instinct, but I hesitated to put an arm around her. Why? I couldn't help questioning the weird instinct, but I was trying. My feelings had been right, right?

"Tell me I'm not crazy."

I looked down at her, but she kept her head against my chest, and instead of looking back, stubbornly reached out and wrapped an arm around my chest. I thought I understood... but...

After a moment, I did put my arm around her. "You're not." Somehow... it was different after I understood. Was that silly? I did want her there. Even if she thought she knew that... well, I'd thought I knew things before, too, and it was torture. "I like you too, Louise."

The arm that was wrapped around me clenched tight like I was the only safe thing she had to hold onto, and she sniffled like she was crying. I held on tight, too... just in case.