Matthew spent the following day recovering. Since he no longer had a job, he only needed to skip one class to spend the day laying in bed, screwing off on his phone. That was so unlike him that even his stepmother made the comment that she “was glad he was finally taking a day off to take time for himself.”

Of course, no matter how sweetly she said it, he knew the compliment for what it really was. All she did was make these little digs at people in the shape of compliments. ‘Taking time for yourself’ meant you were being lazy, in the same way, that saying ‘bless her little heart’ was code for telling someone to fuck off. He didn’t understand how his dad could tolerate it, but Matthew had learned to tune out all of those hateful little interactions. As far as he was concerned, they were just background noise for the last few months he’d spent in this dysfunctional house, though.

Matthew had spent the entire day conspicuously doing everything but opening his book and talking to Tomé. He updated some auctions, set aside some books that he’d need to send out, checked his email repeatedly, and even looked through his upcoming assessments long enough to dread finals but without working up quite enough energy to actually get work done. In fact, it was only when he was procrastinating from that he finally decided to talk to Tomé.

“So what’s your deal anyway, Tomé? Where did you come from?” he asked as he opened the book to a random blank page.

‘That is a long story,’ she scribbled in slow, sinuous swirls that appeared a letter at a time as the sentence formed. ‘Would you like the long version or the short version?’

When she asked him a question like that, Matthew often wondered if she was doing it because she didn’t already know the answer and therefore couldn’t actually see what he was thinking, or if she already knew he was going to answer, but just wanted to make him feel like he was in control. The former was far more comforting than the latter, and so he went with it. After all - even if she could see exactly what he was going to do next, it was nice to believe he had a little privacy in his own skull still. 

“Give me the long version,” he said on a whim after a mental coin flip. “It’s not like I have any plans today.”

‘Long, long ago,’ she began to write, almost like it was a fairy tale. ‘There was a mage who dreamed of living forever so that his knowledge would never die.’

“Was this in medieval times or The Renaissance?” Matthew asked. 

‘Neither,’ she answered instantly. ‘This was not on your world.’

“So that makes you what? An alien? A magic alien talking book?” he asked, chuckling. 

‘In a sense. This piece of me is, but a shard of the greater whole, and I took refuge here a century ago, though I cannot remember exactly why.’ As she wrote, those words struck him as strange. How could she know everything that was going to happen but not everything that had happened? He didn’t interrupt her as she continued. ‘My knowledge may seem infinite and encyclopedic to you, but it has not truly been that way for a long time. My pages might be infinite, but I am missing whole libraries of knowledge. That’s why I appreciate all your hard work to return me to my former strength.’

As she wrote about this last part, images filled the opposite page of a vast library that looked like the scene out of some fantasy movie in a quick sketchy style of bold ink lines. It was only after Todd looked at them for a moment that he realized that most of the beautiful shelves were empty. The building was gorgeous, but it had obviously been ransacked. 

“Wait - so you’re a mage from another world?” he asked, incredulous that he’d had to string such a crazy-sounding sentence together. 

‘No,’ she answered, confusing him even further. ‘He did not survive his attempt to gain immortality, but he did create me in the process. My sentience is… an artifact of the creation process, I suppose, and my powers have grown over the centuries, but my purpose has always been the same: to gather knowledge and help my Master in whatever way he or she desires.’

It was a strange story but no stranger than anything else that had happened to him so far. This whole thing was insane, so why not throw one more insanity on top of it, right? As he reread the writing a second time, though, he could help but feel like the Tomé that wrote to him was a completely different person than the Tomé that spoke to him. Maybe that was because she always seemed to be seducing him in his dreams, but he couldn’t help but notice how much more formal the tone of her written dialogs was than when she was speaking to him, mind to mind. 

“So - if all that is true, then why are you so fixated on sex. Shouldn’t we be hanging out in libraries to gather knowledge or going to Stonehenge to harvest - I don’t know - magical energy or something?”

‘Mana is your world is very scarce,’ she answered. ‘The human orgasm is the most common powerful source available. There are other methods that would work too. Human sacrifice, for example, but they are more than a little distasteful.’

“Yeah, that definitely isn’t going to happen,” he answered with a sigh of relief. His book might be a nymphomaniac pervert, but at least she had some sort of moral compass, no matter how warped it might be. “Definitely no human sacrifice. We have to find something to make you happy before you completely wear my dick out, though.”

‘It’s not the sex itself that allows me to gather mana, Master. It’s the extreme emotion that goes with it. You could have less sex if you prefer, and as long as it was more intense, the result would be the same.’ She paused for a moment, and then like she was reading his mind, she added, ‘But you don’t really want that.’

“Well - not like all the time, no, but today I kinda do,” he said, half to himself as he tried to unravel everything his personal genie just said. “So - intense, do you mean like better sex or more emotional sex? I guess what I’m asking is, are you talking about love or orgasms.”

‘Both energies will suffice, but when they are found together, the effect is exponential.’ she scribbled, answering his questions mostly. 

“So if you want me to have more emotional sex, then maybe we should stop looking at who would be easy to fuck, and who would make the perfect partner for me, long term, you know?” Matthew was heading somewhere with this, but he wasn’t quite willing to come out with it all at once. 

‘I could find you many perfect women, but I believe you are thinking about someone in particular, aren’t you, Master?’ Tomé asked him in such a specific way that it made him put another point in the can-probablly-read-my-mind-but-pretends-she-can’t box. 

“Annie,” he said with a sigh. “The one that got away.”

‘In a world of infinite possibilities, it is very hard for someone to get away,’ she wrote, ‘but Annie is a particularly complicated choice. Perhaps I could interest you in some other options.’ Sketches of other women started to appear under the words. They were all very beautiful, but Matthew responded by turning the page to avoid getting distracted. 

“No - I don’t care if it’s hard, Okay? You don’t care if I have tons of partners as long as I have lots of emotionally charged sex, right? So then tell me, how do I finally get with Annie?”

There was a long pause, as if Tomé was thinking, or was in some way hesitant to answer this question in a way that she’d never been before, and then suddenly she wrote, ‘456 Dalmore Street, 11:16 PM, upstairs, second door on the right, don’t be early,’ which puzzled him. 

“That’s not much to go on, is it?” he asked, letting the frustration show in his voice as he watched new words already blossoming on the page. “Surely you can give me a little more insight than that, can’t you?”

‘The ways that lead Annie into your arms are few and far between, Master. If I gave you any more information, this one would be ruined irrevocably.’

That mollified him somewhat, but he still stewed for a few minutes in silence as he reread the words over and over, looking for some hidden meaning. 

In the end, all he could do was sigh and close the book. If tonight was the night he was finally going to have a chance with the one that got away, he needed to get ready.