Rue
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Andrew Quilty was a sickly child. Thin and pale, he looked underfed for a majority of his early years. He was also quiet, and distant, and once he could read he devoured books, quickly reading far above his age bracket. His parents took him to a behavioural psychologist, who told them their son was gifted and that he just needed to interact with other kids more to learn social skills. 

When he was five, he was explained for the first time what bullying was, and that the other children were simply jealous, and didn't understand him. Andrew didn't really care why they did it, only that they did, and wanted them to stop. After a little time, he started to prefer playing with the girls, who still said mean things sometimes, but they didn't hit him. 

He also spent a lot of time reading at school, devouring books about nature, science and mythology. The latter especially sparked his imagination, conjuring worlds with gods and monsters for them to defeat. 

At eight, he still had few friends, and his birthday parties were heartbreaking affairs for his parents, who saw their child slide into a depression without understanding why. There were more psychologists, who told them that Andrew had a unique way of looking at the world and that this, indeed, made him different. He didn't connect with a lot of his peers and it isolated him. The disconnect, the doctors told them, was what was causing Andrew distress. They recommended math camps and similar gifted programs in the hopes that he'd find someone like himself there. 

At the age of ten, Andrew attempted suicide for the first time. He had learned about carbon dioxide poisoning and knew where the car keys were when his mom took her afternoon nap. She had woken up in time and dragged him out of the garage. He spent time in institutions. Ironically, he made a few friends here, people whose skin didn't fit right and that society didn't understand. 

At fourteen, Andrew exclusively wore long sleeved shirts and hoodies. What facial hair he could grow, he did. In high school, he met a friend, someone who didn't quite get him, but was also an outcast to a degree. They weren't close, but they were nice to each other, and occasionally they would hang out at Andrew’s house to try out a new game or watch Star Trek. His parents were happy he had a friend, who his mother especially took a shine to. 

At sixteen, a binge drinking experience ended with Andrew in the canal. He survived because a morning jogger had seen him and fished him out. He spent some more time in the institution, and came out with a love for the goth aesthetic, which a girl in his group rocked like nobody’s business. He dove into the subculture and came out a changed man, eyeliner and all. Being able to transform so drastically actually improved his mood significantly, and he spent the last two years of high school fairly happy. He even ended up getting his ear pierced so he could wear an upside down earring. If he wasn't going to fit in with normal people, there were others. 

At nineteen, being Goth didn't do it for him anymore. The rush of changing his lanky appearance wore off, and he traded in his skinny pants and mesh shirts for baggy jeans and more hoodies. He grew a beard and applied at colleges, eventually finding an okay community college nearby where he would pursue a business degree. He didn't flunk out, but he had many retakes as he slid back into a depression, having lost contact with his old and few friends. 

He bingewatched TV shows, and went back to his childhood hobby of reading up on the myths of the world, finding the different deities and their powers as fascinating as he had as a child, and imagined the changes he could make to the world if he'd had them. 

At twenty-one, his mother got sick and he dropped out of college. She could no longer work, and they barely scraped by with his father's income. So he started working part time jobs to earn enough for them to pay the medical bills, and spent the rest of his time at home taking care of his mother. 

At twenty-four, his mother went into remission, and Andrew decided to put some time towards learning a craft, and landed on a tailoring apprenticeship. After two years, he earned his certificate, and became a paid intern at the same company. He was quite happy. 

At twenty-seven, his mother fell ill again. He kept his job, hoping that the added income would help. But their insurance had shifted, and they found it harder and harder to make ends meet. 

Remembering the many prayers he had read about as a child, he recanted an old Norse prayer and suddenly, in his bedroom, stood Thor, exactly as he'd imagined him, big beard and bigger hammer. But he was quiet, didn't speak or move, until he vanished. He experimented with different summoning rituals after that, realising he could summon the gods themselves if he had a clear image of them and what was required to get them there. And they'd do his bidding, though they didn't seem very smart. He figured that so many people used to pray to the gods, these might be a kind of facsimile, a reflection sent by the real deal. 

Once, while she was asleep, he summoned Apollo and attempted to heal his mother. It didn't work, the God simply stood there, and he realised that something as complex as healing might be outside the realm of their abilities. Later, he summoned Athena and Aphrodite commanded them to give him the power to change his shape into whatever he desired. He saw his body glow, so bright he couldn't look down, and felt a warmth rush over him. When the feeling dissipated, he got up to look at the mirror and saw… A human-like blue shell overlaid onto his clothes. It seemed this, too, had been too complex, and he sat down in resignation as the shell of Aphrodite cracked and evaporated. He cried himself to sleep. 

The next day, walking down the street, he saw in an antiques window an old ring he recognised as belonging to cult of Thelema. He rounded a corner and summoned a small imp, blue and glowing, and told it to go into the shop and take the ring, unseen, and come back outside. It did as requested, and as he slid the ring onto his finger, he began to formulate a plan. 

Over the next few months, he slowly gathered more and more sacred texts, lost rituals and ancient artifacts (most of which, he would never realise, were competent forgeries), until he could summon more and more different creatures and deities, and he had an impressive menagerie at his beck and call. He had no idea why, but every God, every magical creature was at his disposal. He felt powerful. His plan was ready. 

A plan that was utterly ruined when a dark creature, seemingly made of living oil, crashed into the building and attacked him. Except that the creature turned out to be a girl. And the girl turned out to have been his high school friend. And then his high school friend punched him in the throat and demanded he take her home. 

Considering the mess it already was, he dreaded the knowledge that it was only going to get stranger from here. He wasn't wrong. 

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