Chương 179: Act 3, Chapter 33: Just peachy

Day in the story: 14th January (Wednesday), early morning Elle Erikson I was finishing applying makeup to make myself look as close to my original body as possible. It wasn't something Alexa had expected to be doing as me—or as any other body, for that matter—but since she had played us before to great success, it felt in good taste to return the favor while our source lay unconscious, recuperating from the abuse our soul had endured.

In the meantime, Gertrude organized clothes that would fit me best, pulling some from the Art Palace's wardrobe and a few items from the Earth-side apartment. She also conveniently dropped Anansi's cat body there, leaving her to browse the net on the laptop and learn the basics now, before promptly leaving to buy herself some handguns at Big Mike's or some other shop. I dressed in proper trousers, a blouse, and a cardigan.

In my humble opinion—along with the paint on my face and neck—I looked presentable enough to pass for a slightly more all-over-the-place version of myself. I touched the painting on the wall showing my original bedroom and wished to go there, forcing the world to move for me.

"Ready to go?" Anansi asked, pushing the mouse to the right with her feline paw. She had been reading the news on some site I didn't recognize.

"I need to grab my bag and materials, but yes. I'm taking the phones with me," I replied, collecting both and stashing them into the bag I had grabbed moments earlier.

"Soph's still home?"

"I heard her a moment ago."

"I might still catch her," I said, leaving the room and walking in on my dear friend kneeling in front of her green wall, removing spiderwebs from the hanging plants. She exhaled as soon as she noticed me, half-closing her eyes in a piercing stare.

"Your little minions webbed the whole thing overnight. Can you ask them to behave properly?" she said, her voice bordering on complete surrender.

"What you see now is nothing compared to what I walked into. The whole wall was grey and white with it."

"I was sure that would not happen," I replied, following a thought pattern Alexandra had begun earlier.

"I assumed they couldn't produce the silk required."

"Oh." Soph caught up as she remembered the rules governing my power.

"Art can't leave the medium, right?"

"Yes. Exactly. I made a mistake, though. It's still within the medium. For art that exists as objects, the three—rather four, if we include time—dimensional world is the medium. And with animation at play…" I trailed off, already considering further applications. If I made a life-sized replica of a drake, it could torch everything with its breath. I was restricted only by materials and the time required to create such a thing.

"So they're basically real spiders, just looking a bit too rigid and folded in their paper form, right?" she finished for me.

"Yes. I apologize for drifting off. This discovery opened new doors for me to explore—and I'm already exploring quite a lot lately." I stepped closer to help her, removing webs and altering the Authority within my minions. They would still behave like spiders, but they would not produce silk for now.

"I saw Gertrude earlier," she said.

"She left for what she called 'fixing the obvious hole in the equipment department.' Do I need to know?"

"She went to buy some guns and other things. Nothing to worry about," I told her, removing a few strands of silk caught in her hair.

"Thanks," she replied, standing up with one of my paper spiders on her palm. She placed it on the couch, and it gracefully scuttled down.

"You're all over the place right now—with your other self and all those small creatures. How are you feeling? You look well, but you talk with less—how to call it—your usual bravado?"

"It's probably because I look like Alexa, but I am Elle Erikson looking like her. With you, I didn't bother trying to behave like her."

"Oh fuck." She blinked, and I couldn't help but smile and giggle.

"So you made other versions of yourself to be their own thing, and they ended up playing you anyway. I… I… you…" She gestured helplessly.

"It's way too much Lexing for me. As far as I understand, I'm still talking to the real you in there, right? Or not? It's easy to get lost."

"I am still Alexa, but I am also not her in this body."

"And yet you'll pretend to be yourself, even though you still are you. What the actual hell is going on?" She scratched her head and ran her hands through her fabulous hair.

"You'd have to be more than one person to fully understand. But know this: anything you say to any of us will be known by all. And all of us are different—but also one. Is that clearer?" She laughed hysterically.

"I bet it'll only get less clear over time, so yeah, consider it understood."

"So what did you want to ask me?"

"Eh… I kind of forgot. But most likely it was whether you feel fine, and if you'd like to eat anything before heading out."

"Eating sounds interesting. Yes, I should try doing that in this body to avoid more public humiliation later. And I feel great as Elle and Gertrude. Alexa's original body is sleeping now after giving me autonomy. It's a very taxing thing for our soul."

"Would that even work for you? Eating, I mean. Wouldn't it be like something entering a painting?"

"No. It's not the same. The restriction doesn't apply to physical changes within the frame. Fire still burns, even if it's confined to a single sheet of paper. If I were to paint it unevenly, it would spill into the empty space, become real flame, and burn the whole thing down. It's happened before—trust me."

"How does that relate to eating?"

"It's exactly the same. My body, the food, even the smells—they all exist within the same restricted frame: the physical world. Nothing new is entering it. This body"—I pointed to myself—"isn't the frame. The world is. I exist inside it, like a sculpture. That's why a nose painted on a card wouldn't work, but the one printed onto my body does."

"Good God. I'm starting to see that I might be way over my head with running a company for you," she said, while a few spiders ran to the kitchen to open the fridge and prepare some sandwiches for us.

"Are they… making breakfast too?"

"Of course. Sit, please." I pointed at the chair.

"It's a pretty easy thing to do."

"Can they also do the painting for you?" This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"Can they…" I trailed off, thinking about it and watching the small things grab slices of ham and place them onto bread they had already smeared with mayo.

"Honestly, they're pretty agile, but creating something from scratch would require more finesse in the movement. Maybe if I made them bigger?"

"How do they know how to make food for us in the first place? It's not something spiders normally know," she asked, laughing.

"Probably from me. Or from some universal blueprint of conceptual behavior. It's not like I know how holes, fire, or electricity really work, but when I ask something to become that, they obey. There's some deeper understanding there that I don't really grasp."

"I wonder, then, if they would paint something in the likeness of your style or something more generic."

"You know what? I love that question," I replied, standing up and walking to the counter to pick up the freshly prepared sandwiches. I patted my arachnid friends on their abdomens and sent each of the eight that were there into the Domain, asking them to unroll the paper roll and paint solitude. I deliberately chose an abstract subject to see how they would handle it.

"Here you go," I told Sophie, handing her the food on a platter.

"You sent them away to paint?" she asked, taking a first bite. I sat opposite her and took mine. I felt my body swallow, the food moving down into the stomach—or whatever was there to handle it.

"Yes. We'll see how my creations handle creating for me," I said, taking another bite. It seemed that eating was not an issue at all.

Gertrude Monkey While Elle was already tackling symbolism in art, I took all of the arms I had bought into the Domain. It was interesting to see the stupid clerk's face when I packed all the ammo boxes into a backpack and sent them on their way there while he wondered how all of that could possibly fit into such a small container. He had an even bigger head-scratcher when I did the same with an assault rifle and the handguns. But since our main identity was protected and Reality was a thing, we just didn't care.

I remade the rules within the warehouse building to be permanently cold inside, like one big freezer, with walls shifting to grow small shelves along them. This allowed me to place the resin and the Octowl's corpse in storage without worrying about anything rotting. With that done, I moved to a workstation Alexandra had set up for more physical work—artificing, creating jewelry, and working on things like bullets. As I unpacked the first box, I started thinking about how to keep our identities hidden and separate.

In the magical world, having a different face and body would not be enough if all of us shared the same Domain. Of course, we could play it off as us joining Alexandra's—or Jessica's, for that matter—but in the long run that wouldn't work too well. Luckily for us, the amount of freedom we had with artistic creation allowed us to pose as having different Domains as well. Jess would generally present herself as the sourceress of artistic creation.

I'd create a different set of firearms and bullets that would allow me to claim my Domain was that of Firearms. Elle would be a dollmaker or puppet master and play with animation as her main power. That would still leave music and spatial abilities for someone else, if we ever needed them. Overall, a sound plan. [I agree. Splitting the power like that would make you look like someone else—and someone weaker, for that matter. You can't underestimate the advantage of others doing the same when they are judging you.] Yeah. Now I just need to come up with a few interesting designs for bullets and weapons—and learn how to coat them with Shadowlight while I'm fighting. [I believe in you!]"Peachy." I whispered under my breath inspired by Elle's chat partner. Elle Erikson I found Peaches in the dining hall during a break. She was sitting with Zoe, both of them doom-scrolling on their phones while eating, so neither noticed me when I approached and sat down beside them.

"Hello," I said simply. Zoe jumped slightly in her chair. Peaches remained glued to her phone. Since I had sat closer to her, I let one of the sp-eye-ders crawl subtly up my collar and peek at her screen while I maintained direct eye contact with Zee across the table.

"Hi, Lex," Zoe said with a slight frown.

"You look a bit thinner than usual. You okay?"

"I'm fine," I replied, just as Peaches turned—at the sound of my name, or maybe my voice—and smiled at me. My little spy caught her browsing occult forums and urban legends. Interesting.

"Just haven't had much to eat yet." Which was entirely true. This body, in its short existence, had consumed exactly two sandwiches.

"You do look slightly off, but I can't quite put my finger on it," Peaches added.

"You're why I'm here, Pam. I wanted to talk to you about the magic some more," I said, watching Zoe for a reaction. She remained calm. That meant she already knew.

"I thought you told me everything in the hospital," Peaches replied, putting down both her fork and her phone. Then her eyes widened.

"Wait a second!" she blurted, before lowering her voice to a whisper and covering her mouth as she glanced at my legs.

"Is your leg fine? Did you heal it with magic?"

"Kind of. I made the prosthesis look like a real leg, and now, as long as my magic flows through it, it functions as one. How is it that you remember any of that?" I asked carefully.

"She's awake, but non-magical as far as I know," Zoe explained quietly on her behalf.

"Her mind must have accepted it as an axiomatic truth the first time she learned about it. It happens sometimes."

"You knew about this?" I asked Zoe.

"Yes. I asked whether Zoe remembered how we got to Paris in the first place, and we began talking," Peaches answered for herself. I looked at Zee with wide-open eyes.

"I trusted her enough to tell her about magic, Lex. I didn't know she knew about you," she explained with a simple shrug. She clearly had no patience for my games in her current state.

"Am I in danger here? I don't like being talked about like that while I'm sitting at the same table," Peaches said, then took a hefty bite of an apple. She looked nervous.

"And for that matter," she continued, spitting out fragments of half-munched fruit, "I don't like it when people talk about me behind my back either."

"You are in no danger from me, if that's what you're asking. I was just curious how you avoided being targeted by Reality. That's all. I made a decision to start trusting my friends with my secrets, and I'm trying my best to stick to it," I replied, taking a spoonful of risotto.

"Reality as in what makes people forget?"

"Yes, that's the one. I'm thinking of making a short video about it to show people, so I don't have to explain it every time it comes up."

"I understand the concept. If you need any help figuring something out, let me know," she said.

"I don't know any details, but I'm a quick learner and creative, so… maybe?" A hint of hesitation crept into her voice at the end.

"You know what? Let's try that," I said.

"In basic terms, my power allows me to create something—or paint over something—and whatever art I make that way, I can ask to become the thing it represents."

"Can you give an example?" she asked, munching on her apple with clear interest.

"Sure. I can paint a bunny on a piece of paper, and it will hop like a real one within the bounds of that paper. Or I can make an origami spider, and it will walk around the world, making webs like a real one."

"So not only paintings, but all creations. And they're restricted by the plane they're on."

"Yes and yes. Well done," I cheered her on.

"So knowing that, what could I paint on a bullet to make it better?"

"You could turn them into heat-seeking missiles, lightning rods, poison darts, or cocoons containing wasps or something like that. Couldn't you?" She answered after a minute of thinking through the question.

"Seeking has been done, but the other ideas are quite decent. I especially like the lightning rod idea. It could work well enough with other things I can make. You are indeed a capable thinker, Peaches."

"Thank you," she replied, slurping her orange juice. Her ideas, combined with the ones Gertrude had already come up with—like tiny flying drills and bullets painted to resemble glassy containers with a black widow spider inside—would make for a decent arsenal for our lady of the Domain of Firearms. Peachy indeed.

"You could be making the world a better, safer place with that kind of power, Lex. Imagination is your limit, and you went in the direction of more destruction," Zoe said suddenly, breaking me out of my brief dive into thought. Her face was devoid of any signs of emotion.

"You know the other side is not safe. Being prepared does not mean I intend to cause harm. Si vis pacem, para bellum."

"If you want peace, prepare for war," Peaches translated for Zee. Zoe exhaled and covered her face with her hands.

"I'm sorry. I'm unloading on you while my anger is directed at someone else."

"I know," I replied, just as my phone started buzzing. My work phone. I picked it up and saw my mentor's name on the screen.

"Speak of war and the devil starts calling," I muttered.

"What did you say?" Peaches asked.

"Excuse me, ladies. I should probably answer this call."