Chapter 3: Port Prep

 

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Angela

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[ - the present; simultaneous with Chapter 2 - ]

 

CW:

 

I leaned against the trunk of a tall fir tree, watching the other three people in the wooded glade with caution.

 

It had been about ten minutes of subjective time since we’d all appeared in this clearing. There were four of us now: a facet of the Goddess, myself, and two distinct alters from the plural system that had helped me in the alleyway. So far I had only occasionally needed to take part in the conversation going on between the others, which was a blessing. I felt on edge, being in this unfamiliar place with these unfamiliar people.

 

The plural system that had stepped up to help in the alley had been understandably panicked when they first appeared here. They’d appeared as an incoherent huddle of hazy figures in the middle of the clearing with us: some no more than ghostly silhouettes, others looking various degrees more fleshed out and defined. Almost all of them had been scared and confused, apparently thrown way out of their comfort zone with little notice. It was very unusual for Diana to have let such a complete stranger into one of her sanctuaries like this, let alone without properly preparing them. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and She seemed convinced we weren’t out of danger yet.

 

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in calming down this entire group of people. Artemis Kóri, the face of the Goddess that was here with us, had taken to that task with sincere empathy. Kóri was a younger and more carefree aspect of the Goddess, whose epithet simply meant ‘girl’ in ancient Greek. She had dazzling emerald green eyes, and was currently in the form of a heavyset dark skinned girl with a golden wreath of vines woven through her brown hair. I’d met her a handful of times in the past, during dreams and visions. She had helped me come to terms with my gender, way back when I was still locked in a dungeon room and treated little better than a lab rat. I owed her for that bit of free therapy, but we weren’t very close friends yet. Even though she was mostly focused on the others, it was really good to see her again. We hadn’t had much time to chat since I escaped.

 

The teenaged goddess girl was currently happily engaged in explaining the basics of reality to the humans who were here with us in this astral space, and to their credit the group had been listening with rapt, if skeptic, attention. Apparently, Kóri and Diana both believed that this plural group could learn how to teleport in less time than it took for any other enemies in the area to catch up to us.

 

Before now, I’d had no idea how astral travel worked when there were multiple people sharing one body and mind - I hadn’t come into contact with many systems in my time on the run. Clearly though, the various identities within this body could dreamwalk independent of one another. I had been watching intently as the system figured out how to handle itself. Many of the hazy figures in the initial group had seemed to very much not want to be here, and they’d instinctively clustered close to a stocky nonbinary person who had eventually identified themselves as Max. Max had listened intently as Kóri guided the group through reconnecting and blending with each other, then gone around and, one by one, gently knelt down and hugged the others, reassuring them that everything was going to be okay with quiet words until the tension finally drained from their shoulders. Their astral forms had then melded almost eagerly into Max’s, usually shifting the enby’s appearance slightly as a result. Longer hair, shorter hair, different colored eyes, that kind of thing. It seemed like these parts of the system generally let Max speak and act for them.

 

Meanwhile, a smaller huddle of colorful figures had gathered a few yards away from Max, and they had taken a different approach to re-forming themselves. They all seemed a bit older than the others, and they’d shared almost knowing smiles and glances between each other as Kóri explained what was going on. Slowly, almost ritualistically, they had stepped closer together and begun dancing a slow, steady set of steps to a beat only they could hear. At regular intervals two or more of the dancers had whirled together and merged into a single new alter, who quickly fell back into the rhythm of the group. It was only a few minutes before they had melded into a single lithe woman who had introduced herself as Maxine.

 

Once they’d become more collected, Max and Maxine seemed a lot more comfortable and confident than any of the individuals had been before the transformation sequences. They were now watching intently as Kóri demonstrated how to manipulate the astral realm around us, which was ostensibly what she and I were here to teach them.

 

I’d gotten a very brief and jumbled thought stream from Diana after the fight in the alley. She’d explained that she needed me to talk to my saviors, and that it needed to happen now. I had protested of course, but she hadn’t budged. She assured me that my attacker would be taken care of without need for my input, thankfully, but apparently my mortal ass was required for communicating ‘efficiently’ with these everyday heroes. I wasn’t sure if ‘efficiently’ meant that Kóri had asked for back up just in case she couldn’t get through to them herself, or if there was some more tangible reason another mortal needed to be here. Whatever the case, I was required, and so here I was.

 

My physical body with its human glamour was still back on Earth, but for some bizarre reason I couldn’t easily change my form here in this astral glade. I’d tried in vain to shapeshift in a million different ways, but in this place I seemed firmly tied to the demonic succubus form my soul naturally took. This wasn’t helping my anxiety in the slightest, seeing as I’d spent the past three years on the run, never staying in one place for fear of accidentally growing vulnerable roots. Friends, or hell any strangers who saw me like this, were a liability I couldn’t afford with my parents hunting me. It would only get people hurt.

 

I tried to distract my anxiety by examining our surroundings. This forest felt connected to the Goddess, somehow. It was similar to how astral representations of temples to Artemis and Diana had felt more solid to me. Normally, traveling through astral space felt like lucidly moving through ever-changing dream-like scenery guided by your will alone. But places like this – astral ideas that were somehow strongly anchored to physical locations – were more stable, sort of like self-sufficient ecosystems that were able to weather the storms of change that constantly swept through the astral realms. It allowed the locations themselves to retain their identity and purpose without the need for external observers.

 

In this particular forested glade’s case, I had no idea what significance it had that made it so constant. Pine trees surrounded us on all sides, and a midday sun shone brightly overhead, frozen in the sky. There were a few mountains off to the west, and the smell of sea salt wafted in from the east. We were likely in some representation of Italy, but there were no defining features around that I could make out. Just a few boulders scattered around a circular grassy clearing.

 

Unfortunately, thinking about the scenery just made me think about the Goddess it was tied to. Diana had not appeared here with me, which was frustrating, to say the least. Kóri was wonderful, but she wasn’t part of me the way that Diana was. I could feel my connection to the moon goddess was still active, which meant she was probably doing something with my Earth body while my mind was here. Maybe surveying the area? I didn’t really care. No matter how necessary it was, I did not like to be apart from her for long. Especially not with strangers around. And especially not while said strangers could clearly see that I was far from human.

 

My spade-tipped tail twitched irately as I tried to get my mind back on track. She knew what she was doing. I might not be alive without this system’s help. That was a very simple truth, and it was very possible that my situation had reached a point where I could no longer rely solely on myself to escape the chains of my family. Which meant bringing people like these into my confidence might be the only path forward.

 

Besides, the concept of having friends had always held a certain appeal to me, since I hadn’t exactly had many peers growing up as a test subject under my parents’ complete control, or while living life on the run afterwards. I felt myself scowling as memories I didn’t want to deal with surfaced, and I tried to shrug the whole debate off with a flare of my bat-like wings.

 

It wasn’t like I could go back in time and stop these people from getting involved either way. This was happening now, and I needed to be present for it.

 

“So let me get this straight,” Max was saying with a frown.

 

“Or gay, we’re not picky,” Maxine interjected, with a playful smile.

 

Kóri laughed while Max grimaced, though the enby didn’t miss a beat.

 

“Demons are real, magic is some flavor of real, we’re in the astral plane, which is also real, and you are a small part of a much larger and very real Goddess. Did I get all that right?” they asked Kóri with a bit of exasperation, their voice low and melodious.

 

Max had ended up about my height, just shy of six feet tall, with their hair in a pixie-style cut. They were broad-shouldered and well-muscled, wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, and a heavy black jacket with tons of pockets. Maxine had ended up a bit curvier and a few inches shorter than her counterpart. She had her hair in a simple ponytail, and was wearing a light blue hoodie, a pink t-shirt underneath with “Fight like a Girl” emblazoned on it, and white skinny jeans. Both of them were about ten feet away and to the left of me and my tree.

 

The Goddess was standing a few feet closer to me, on their right, and she seemed to be genuinely enjoying the current conversation. “That’s right!” she replied with a grin. “The world’s a lot more complicated than your society currently wants to account for. Parts of me have been on Earth for centuries, and some have lived openly alongside humans for decades.” A shadow passed over her face, probably due to the events that had brought those public stints to a close. “That never really worked out well in the long term, though,” was all she said about it, a note of sorrow in her voice.

 

She shrugged her shoulders a bit, as if to dispel the memories, and bounced on the balls of her feet as if to jazz herself back up. “Anyway! I don’t really have time to give you the whole family story right now, Angie and I just need to bring you two up to speed on the basics of magic and divinity. Do you have any more questions that need to be answered right now?”

 

Both of them seemed to think about that for a bit, letting quiet descend in the clearing.

 

After a few moments, Maxine spoke up with a furrowed brow. “Clearly we can’t argue with you after all that’s happened in the past half an hour or so,” she said. She looked both excited and scared, hugging herself lightly. “But how… how is this much magic kept secret from the world?” she asked, “We’ve been around for twenty five years and done a fair bit of research into the occult. No one’s ever come forward with the ability to communicate telepathically at will or teleport people across a city! At least no one that seemed genuine.”

 

Seeing an opening, I decided I may as well involve myself with the conversation and help Kóri as Diana had asked. I pushed off the tree and stepped towards the little group, keeping my wings folded tightly against my back. So far they’d seemed okay with my appearance, but I wasn’t eager to test the bounds of their comfort. It does things to a person, being raised under the premise that her self worth was measured in her differences from other people.

 

“I can answer that,” I said with what confidence I could muster, my tail tracing a lazy ‘s’ in the air behind me as I came closer.

 

The Maxes – their features were similar enough they could be taken for twins with their sapphire blue eyes and oak brown hair – looked back at me expectantly. No flinching, no uneasiness in their postures. It was honestly uncanny to just be chatting like this with normal people while presenting as my true self, after so long spent hiding my purple skin and blood red irises from mortal eyes. Thankfully this was a topic I’d had rather a lot of time to think about and observe, so it was surprisingly easy to dive in and forget where and who I was.

 

“The gist of it is that people figure out magic’s real all the time,” I said, crossing my arms and standing a few feet away from Max. “Pretty much all living things are capable of using what we’re calling ‘magic’, which I’ll loosely define as ‘altering the world around oneself in ways not understood by the almighty priesthood of science’,” I explained, making air quotes around both magic and my definition for it. 

 

I caught Kóri smiling at me out of the corner of my eye, and had to studiously ignore the twinge of happiness I felt for causing said smile. I did not want to deal with blushing in front of the newbies.

 

“The world itself is filled with energies that science hasn’t figured out how to detect yet.” I said, refocusing away from my emotions. “Society tries with all its might to explain the whole of reality using an extremely limited set of lenses, and those lenses have changed countless times throughout history. Nowadays everyone more or less believes in the sciences, even though stuff like quantum physics just barely scratches the tip of a very large and complex iceberg.”

 

Max and Maxine had frowned and looked down at the ground in almost perfect sync as I spoke, and I gave them a moment to process the information. This was important for them to understand if they were to be at all helpful to Diana in a magical sense.

 

The fact that they were taking time to think about my words, without immediately blurting out their opinions or calling into question my sources, was extremely heartening. Genuinely listening to other people and holding your own biases in check was a rare skill for mortals to have. Satan knew no one in my family had ever heard of it, at least.

 

“Okay, I mean,” Max ventured, looking quizzically at me, “if everyone can do it, why has no one followed the scientific method or whatever, made a fool-proof case for these magic energies and got their findings peer reviewed? Other people should be able to replicate a simple experiment, right?”

 

I let out a snort.

 

“If only it were that easy,” I replied. “Sorry, I’m not being derisive towards you. Just towards science in general. The thing about ‘magic’ is that the scientific community’s current worldview studiously ignores it. It doesn’t work according to the accepted laws of nature. And while the scientific method might be feasible for like, a Goddess to use on magic, humans are so enmeshed in their culture and beliefs that you’d be fighting an uphill battle every step of the way trying to exactly replicate an experiment someone else did. There’s about a bajillion variables that need to be accounted for to have a true ‘control’ in a magical experiment, and at least seventy percent of those are imperceptible to human technology. I’m talking the experimenter’s beliefs, the beliefs and emotions of every single other being aware of their experiments, the general background radiation of the accepted consensus reality that has molded the world around them in ways too subtle to name. That kinda shit.”

 

I was still at a stage of healing where I relished being able to speak without being constantly interrupted and dismissed. Kóri gave no sign that we needed to hurry, and the Maxes were both looking thoughtful but focused. Since no one seemed like they wanted to stop me, I kept on rolling.

 

I closed my eyes for a moment, concentrating on the world around us and willing it firmly to change. When I opened them again, there was a wheeled chalkboard on the grass beside me.

 

“Consider this your first official lesson in magic,” I said, smiling just a tiny bit at the awed expressions on their faces at the chalkboard’s sudden appearance. “Humans and other beings can use magic as easily and subconsciously as breathing, it happens with almost every thought we have.”

 

I turned to the board and willed a piece of chalk to appear in my hand. Projecting into the astral realm basically felt like lucid dreaming, if I believed there was a piece of chalk in my hand and left absolutely no room for doubt, it would be there. I hummed to myself as I drew ‘BELIEF’ at the top of the board. Then I faced my audience and whapped the word with the chalk.

 

“At its most basic level, magic is the act of believing. Of knowing in your heart that something about the world around you is true. When a consciousness actively concentrates on a belief, their mind interacts with the world around them in subtle, tiny little ways, tweaking things just a little closer towards matching what they’re thinking about. A lot of people have figured that out and written about it, from the chaos magicians to the self help enthusiasts.”

 

Maxine was nodding slowly.

 

“That actually makes a lot of sense to me,” she said. “I’ve read some of those sorts of books, Chaos Protocols, The Secret, and such. I’ve noticed some of the effects that belief has on the world outside the system.”

 

“Oh damn, really?” I asked, pleasantly surprised that we might not have to go through a whole proof of concept to get the point across.

 

“Yeah,” she replied seriously, turning to Max, “It’s like, when we came out as trans, none of it felt real at first, remember?”

They nodded readily. “Yeah,” they replied, “it was really touch and go for a while. You’re talking about how we flip flopped between being certain that we were on the right path and convinced we were making a horrible mistake every couple minutes for a few weeks, right?”

 

“Exactly, even though we knew in our hearts that the system was not a boy,” Maxine said. “When we first started to tell people, it felt like we could never actually be taken seriously as a woman. But that changed as friends started accepting and supporting us. Their support gave us the strength to believe in ourselves more, fight off the doubts. And that gave us the strength to start changing our outward appearance, which led to it being easier to convince other people of our truth, which gave more support to the reality that we were a girl, and so on. It took a few years before it became real to us.”

 

I smiled and nodded along with her story. I’d gone through something similar with my own transition, albeit without any support at all from other humans.

 

“Back to the matter at hand,” I said, “performing magic on the scale that the Goddess is asking of us normally takes years of practice. But from what I understand, she wants us to teleport ourselves to a safe place yesterday so we’ve got a bit of a time limit.”

 

“How long has it been since we left the alley?” Maxine asked curiously.

 

“You’re still in the alley!” Kóri replied with perhaps a bit too much excitement. “Time here is moving really slow compared to time in the physical world, I figured we needed all the time we could get to bring you all up to speed on things!”

 

“What exactly is the long term goal here?” Max asked. “Is there still someone dangerous hunting you?” They nodded in my direction.

 

I shrugged.  “That’s usually the case.”

 

“What Angie here means to say is there are lots of nasty folks on her tail most of the time. She’s been lying low in Chicago for a couple months now, but since one person found her it’s highly likely others have too. She needs a new place to run and hide,” Kóri explained, much to my chagrin.

 

“I can take care of myself, thank you very much!” I tried not to pout.

 

“Of course you can! But why would you want to when you’ve got two or more friends right here?” Kóri exclaimed with a knowing glint in her deep green eyes.

 

“How are they tracking you?” Maxine inquired, cutting through the protests that rose to my lips with ease. “Like, is there a way you can disappear again but stay with us in our apartment for a bit?”

 

I blinked at her, confused. “I mean yeah I can lay a false trail somewhere else and loop back here no problem, but why would you want that?”

 

Max put a hand on her shoulder. “We want to help you the best we can,” they said. Then they turned to Maxine. “But, we don’t know that staying with us is really the best move for you. We’ve got an extra bedroom slash office, but we’re not exactly equipped to house someone new.”

 

“Diana can get you access to some extra money to cover Angie’s costs,” Kóri chimed in, “but you’ll actually need to plan for holding two extra people!” 

 

I cursed aloud. “What do you mean?” I sputtered, almost certain I knew exactly what she meant.

 

Kóri’s brilliant, knowing smiling confirmed my worst fears. “Diana’s planning to teleport the person who attacked you as well. She thinks they might be able to help you avoid detection for good this time!”

 

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End of Chapter 3: Port Prep

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