“Ok, you have to get out of this room Brainy. You’re withering away.” Frank nudges me off of my back, laying up staring at my phone, browsing the trending topics. Other-me was convinced to lend me the little device since I’d basically be locked up for the week. Said he’d come collect it with the rest of his stuff. It wasn’t exactly the most stimulating thing, but it at least kept me occupied. Right now there’s buzz about some anti-magic rally that got announced for a few months away. Thinking back, a few years ago I would probably be forced to attend. Not sure why I’m bothered to get worked up about something that I won’t live to see, but it’s there.

I just push back against him. “I’m withering away no matter what. The only thing going out will do is complicate a lot of things. Too far away from the professor and he can’t figure out what to do next, too close and Brian will have to clean up the mess.” True to their words, I haven’t spoken to the professor once since that first time I woke up. Sabrina brings him fresh blood samples and biometric scans basically every morning though, so it’s clear he’s actually working on me in some capacity. 

Other-me, Brian. Still weird to think of someone else as ‘Brian’. He hasn’t bothered to see me once. He dropped off his clothes, his phone, some cigs, and another warning to keep my head down, and then he’s pittered out back to my actual life. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already filed me away as another horrible event to pretend never happened. Morty has apparently been glued to his hip since they left too. He texted me once or twice that first day, but then said that Brian told him to leave me alone and hasn’t responded to any of my messages since. 

No, it’s been Bianca and Sabrina keeping me company, basically 24/7 on call. I mean, they’re essentially my hospice nurses now, but it’s been nice to have the company. You can definitely tell Bianca and Frank are related. Well, not so much by looks, but by the way they act; both sweet, willing to drop anything for people they care about, and a little too cocksure (after she got over her nerves meeting me that first night). Speaking of Frank, he’s come by at least once a day too. He offered to stay longer, like his sister, but I told him that if he loses his job over this he’d be dead to me. Brian would probably mean it too. 

He reaches over and dings me on the nose. “Is this really how you want to spend what could be your last few days? In a sterile room browsing twitter?” 

“Why not? It’s how I spent the rest of my life.” He gives me a sour look and I stick my tongue out at him. “I mean, of course not. No offense to you or your sister, but I’m bored out of my goddamn mind. No one told me dying would be so excruciatingly boring. But, I mean, what exactly am I supposed to do?”

“Look, man, I don’t know. Go out! Do something! Go see a movie. Fuckin’, minigolf or whatever. Just something.”

I scoff. “That’s the best you could come up with for a bucket list? Minigolf? It’s October, Frank.”

He scratches his head softly. “I don’t know, man. I just want you to get out of here.” He sits for a second before snapping his fingers at me. “Wait, no no, you have that party tonight right? That one at the frat? You and Morty have been talking about it for a while now!”

“Yeah, that’s not happening.” 

The door unseals, lifting up. “What’s not happening?” Bianca and Sabrina come on in from their drink run. Sabrina throws a couple of ciders out towards me and Frank; Frank catches, I don’t. 

“Brainy here,” Frank starts, “is going to a party tonight. College kids throwing a halloween thing. He needs something to get his mind off all this, right?”

I shake my head no. “Frank, I’m already going to that party. Don’t you think it’s going to be a little strange when a second Brian shows up at the door? Questions are going to get asked that can’t get answered.”

He scoffs. “Then don’t go as Brian. It’s Halloween, get a costume. Go as a bedsheet ghost for all I care. You know how college parties go. If you wait a half hour, they’re all going to be so buzzed they won’t even notice anything off.” 

Bianca leans over, laughing. “Costume! Oh that’s going to be fun, turning Brainy here into a little dollie! Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you!” I blush kind of hard at the idea. She must have seen, because she just squints her eyes a little at me and keeps laughing.

Frank tosses something over at her. I’m not sure what’s even in the room to toss. “Glad that you think it’s so funny, big sis, because you’re going too.” 

She flips almost instantly out of laughter. “Wait, what? Me too? Around all those people I don’t know? I… Uhh… I don’t know…”  She’s back to acting all shy, like she was on the first night I met her. She must not do well meeting strangers. Is that why she never came out to meet us whenever Frank invited her?

Frank takes a long swig out of his can. “Yes, you too. You need to keep an eye on him anyways, right? And god forbid something bad does happen, what better back up to have than a witch and an android? Hell, Sabrina would be able to stop even a fist fight in a few seconds.”

She whirs up in pride. “Yes, I could. If anyone attempts to accost you I would simply snap them in half. I am rated for at least a half ton of lifting torque after all.” 

I shake my head. “Damn. Remind me not to get into a fight with you.”

She gives a little digitized musical chuckle. “Okay, reminder set.” I hear a little beep coming from my cell phone. Did she actually send that to my notes? She turns towards Bianca and pokes her upper arm. “We’re going. This will be good for you too. You need some more practice meeting new people.”

Bianca scrunches her face up, frowning. “I meet new people all the time. I met Brainy.” She raises a hand up at me, and then lets it fall back by her side quickly. 

Frank laughs. “Yeah, after years of begging you to. And only because you decided to take your apprenticeship early instead of going to college, again.”

She blanches. “It’s just for one semester! The professor basically begged to be able to study Sabrina anyways, and said it would help with the actual education to do it first.”

“Yeah, and it had nothing to do with you being able to hide from people for another entire year.” 

She gives him an absolute death glare. “You know why it’s taking me so long to be ready to do this, little bro. Don’t be a jerk.”

Sabrina hums softly. “Franklin is only trying to help. You really could learn to be around people again. Plus… while we’re there, we can get some real world testing done on that new device?” I feel like if she had eyebrows she would be raising them right now.

I bite my lip, crush my by now empty can and toss it into a little garbage pail near me. “What device? No offense, but I would like heads up about any devices for the next, say, half a week.” 

Bianca snapped right back to her giddy usual self, shaking her hands in front of herself a bit. “Oh! You don’t know, that’s right! Me and Sabrina have been tinkering with all different kinds of ideas lately! I’ll be right back, it’s just upstairs in the lab!” She practically skips out of the room, running up.

I shake my head softly. “Well, that was a fast turn around. She certainly can be energetic when she wants to, can’t she?”

Sabrina nods, soft whirring sounds accompanying the motions. “Tell me about it. Try being her girlfriend and her special interest at the same time. Sometimes I have to remind her that at least one of us needs to breathe.”

Not even a minute later she comes bursting through the door again, a fairly big pin with a screen and a button on it in her hands, huffing and puffing. “Alright! So you know how the whole stigma around familiars is ‘oh no they’re all animals what are those witches doing white woman dog moment’ right? Like, we don’t exactly want to play into that whole thing, especially because we’re going to have enough scrutiny at us when more people start finding out about all the other ideas we’re already breaking. Plus the whole sentient AI idea is new territory for people and we have no idea what the social taboos of this are going to be on it’s own, which is fascinating by the way if we can figure out how to reverse engineer Sabrina’s processes into a working reploid, bec–”

“Darling,” Sabrina interrupts, spinning her fingers in a little circle. “Short version.”

Bianca blushes, slapping the pin onto Sabrina’s button up shirt under her lab coat. “Right, sorry. Uh, I wanted to kiss my girlfriend in public. So we built this.” She taps the screen a few times, and it starts making a little beeping noise. “It takes the high reservoirs of mana naturally building up inside her body to create a visual distortion layer around her. We’ve gotten it to basically be fully believable to our eyes. Now we just need to put it into practice.”

Sabrina presses the button on her pin softly, and waggles her fingers at me and Frank. The blue lines crossing around her face start glowing incredibly brightly, enough that I can’t look at her anymore without hurting my eyes. I shield them until the glowing from behind my hand subsides. “So boys, how do I look?” It no longer had that artificial, sing-song tone to it. Instead it was as if her voice were natural, low and throaty. I lower my hand and; whoa, she looks like a person. Skin, body, moving face, everything. Full, nearly white hair falls around her shoulders. Blue lipstick is a pretty nice touch.

“That’s amazing,” I say in a little disbelief. “I wish I could have one of those.” I can’t help but notice Bianca squinting her eyes at me again.

Sabrina, for her part laughs, sitting down on the desk surface across from us. “Sorry! Only works for me, needs a lilium level power source and an inanimate frame to build the illusion in. Shame it’s wasted then, as soon as we go public I’m tossing the thing. You know, if it were up to me I’d never wear this. It’s just an image projection, so if anyone touches me they can tell immediately. Besides, I like how I look.” She poses with her hand on her chin like a model. I swear, for just a second, I could see the blue lines shimmer from under her illusion. “But as a stop gap, to get around in public without drawing too much suspicion, it works.” A large, toothy grin spreads on her illusory face like a faceful of fangs; her demeanor can sometimes make her seem shy, but she seems almost predatory when you can physically see her emote to match that voice. “Besides, isn’t that the point of halloween? It’s fun to get to wear a disguise.”

I scoff. “Yeah, when you get to take it off.” I realize from hearing the tail end of Bianca speaking that she and I had said nearly the same thing at the same time. She and Frank share a glance that is a little too long for my comfort.

“Okay,” Frank starts, getting up. “You three figure out how you’re making up Brainy, I’m going to go get in contact with Brian and Morty so they’re not blindsided tonight.” That’s weird, he’s not going to be staying with us? I thought they weren’t going to meet up for another few hours? 

We all sit quietly for a few minutes after he gets up. “So,” Bianca breaks the silence, “what do you want to dress up as? We have a few hours to get some basic costume stuff.”

I shug. “Don’t know. Something that’ll disguise me, I guess.”

Sabrina leans over, hand on her cheek. “What she meant was, is there anything you ever wanted to go as that you never got to?” What a weirdly specific thing to want to know.

“I never got to go as anything as a kid. We didn’t celebrate Halloween in my town. It was ‘godless’ and ‘part of the magical agenda’. Ma did a few years at home for me as a really little kid, but with no one around that would be involved it eventually just fell by the wayside.” 

Bianca just nodded. “So it’s a cult thing, and not a,” she makes the air quote motion with her fingers again, “thing.”

“I’m confused? How could it even be the other thing?”

She waves her hand above her head. “Oh, you know. Not living up to the masculine perfection that people demand you be. If you fail in one aspect, maybe you’ll fail in others, maybe you aren’t the kind of man they want at all.” Ah, that’s what she’s getting at.

I shrug. “I don’t know if it was ever like that. I just didn’t want to be me much as a kid. I don’t exactly like who that me was very much at all.”

She nods softly. “And who did you want to be?” 

“Not me. Someone else.” She titters her fingers on her thighs for a second, looking a bit frustrated. I don’t know what she wants, I’m answering the questions as best as I can. This convo’s gotten pretty personal for such a simple task.

She bites her lip softly, and then looks up at me more determined. “Ok look, I’m going to be blunt. I’ve only known you a few days and you’ve set off a bunch of flags in my head, so I’m asking it straight. You said you wanted to use Sabrina’s cloak. Was that because you wanted to look like her too? Like her.” What. “Say no, I’ll drop it. Be honest.” 

I shake my head enthusiastically. “Of course…” I trail off. I mean, of course I don’t want that right? That’s absurd! That’s a stupid thing to want. I just wanted to not have to be me for a few hours, right? The awful toadie cum awful meathead loser. Not have to have people look at me and assume everything about me. I just don’t want to be that kid who hurt all those people only to get out and do nothing with his life. Right? “I… I don’t…”

So why can’t I say it?

I press my fingers into my temples, rubbing softly, really digging in. Maybe it’s because I had already shared (some) of my actual secrets with these two, maybe it’s because I only had a few days left and the energy to lie to myself just isn’t there anymore. “A little.” I bury my face into my arms, trying to hide the blush creeping up onto me. 

I feel a soft rubbing on my upper arm. Uncurling from myself to see Bianca standing in front of me with a gigantic smile on her face. “I have an idea in that case, ok Brainy? Give me a little bit to put a costume together for you, and I’ll grab a backup if it’s too much or if you hate it. Sabrina, you come too, I need your help.” She pats me on the head, and walks over towards the door. Before opening it, she looks back at me with a wink. “Girls like us have to look out for each other.” Wait, what? What does that mean? Before I could ask, she’s out the door. 

CassieSandwich

Like an excommunicated priest casting demons. Ask one what it's name was.

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