287 Mirror World.

"Such a waste of delicious blood..." Yue stared wistfully as I emptied a blood bag of my blood into a paint can.

I raised an eyebrow.

"Didn't you have breakfast?"

"Jay's blood is so delicious. It's addictive~" Yue licked her lips.

"Don't lick your lips, please." I said but as if to spite me she did it again, sporting a mischievous grin on her face.

I sighed and got back to the task at hand, pouring out another blood bag into the can.

We were in one of the empty classrooms this sunday morning, building a mirror bridge to where the Binder was in the mirror world.

It had been a week since Cancer puppy, now just Puppy, was cured.

Once it was back to full HP, Quentin was basically putty in my hands.

Another contract, a small surgery and viola. His dad was cured and I had earned the eternal gratitude of the main charcter of the series.

That should help later on in the series when I will need him to give me something he'd much rather keep otherwise.

"Yue, show me the glyphs again?" I asked, and Yue pulled up a Fuzzbeat page with some stupid article about kids eating Lego pieces.

However, that was just a cover for the real article below, something even my technokinesis couldn't get to.

A magic imbued into the website that encrypted all traffic in an out of the site, prividing complete anonymity to all who used it.

An ingenious piece of spellwork that one. And so was the site.

Fuzzbeat was a BuzzFeed knockoff website built by a magician, Harriet Schiff, the daughter of the Head of Collections at the Order Of The Library Of The Neitherlands, Zelda Schiff, to provide free access to forbidden, banned, hard to access and even mundane magics to the everyday magician.

It was part of the greater, Serpent's Hand-ish Anarchist supercell she ran. Their motto was simple.

All knowledge for everyone, anytime.

It was beautiful as an ideal, flawed as it may be, and I supported that, if only because it gave me access to forbidden magics too, case in point, The Mirror Bridge, the only way to get in and out of the Mirror World.

The Mirror World was a pocket dimension formed from the leakage of the Antiverse, the flipside of the Multiverse, where nothing lived and everything was sort of non-existent.

Not to be mistaken for the Void Of Existence where I fought the Worms.

No. There was matter here. And Reality. Or rather, Unreality. It was weird and hard to put into words.

Like the opposite of Reality and yet not. Like love and apathy or slippers and crocs.

The point is, that when the universe was made, there were two parts of it. The part that held reality, The Multiverse, and the part that held the Unreality, The Antiverse. And never the twain shall meet. Or so it should have been. But the Old Gods left a tear in between the two Verses. An unsewn seam.

A door with one way in and no way out.

And because of this, a little unreality leaked into the Multiverse, mixing with reality to form a pocket dimension where everything was dead and life was fake. A mirror images of what was and should have been.

It had it's own unique vibe and fauna. Specifically one creature. Shards. Not like the ones in Worm, these entities were reflections of people who pass through the mirror world, like bad xerox copies that can only mirror the actions they observe.

Their only goal, the point of their existence was to propagate themselves, to make more and more shards ad infinitum.

So they were highly aggressive and cunning, and would do anything to keep their visitors in the mirror world for as long as possible.

And smack dab in the middle of it, somewhere, was a thick tome with the spell to make and unmake gods, in a place where no one would ever bother to look.

Or at least that's what the people who threw it in there would like to think.

But of course it was found, eventually, by Alice and later Julia, when she needed it the most.

With a twist of her hand and a curling of her fingers, Yue cast a spell on the laptop and the screen flickered before the page glitched out of reality and into the etheric realm, as new contents began to appear on it.

Yup. The encryption magic on this BuzzFeed knockoff was actually a pathway to their actual servers hidden in the etheric realm.

As I said. Fucking ingenious.

Magic in this world relied on circumstances and if you didn't know the circumstances of the target or object you were casting on, the spell wouldn't work.

So what better way to protect your servers than to hide them in the dimensional equivalent of a highway tourist trap.

To hide the needle in a haystack, a tree in the forest and their servers where no one in their right mind could access them.

And those who could wouldn't be in a situation to do it either way.

Why?

Let me explain!

The etheric realm was a dimension that overlapped with our own, where forgotten things and broken dreams went to die. It had a beach of lost socks, and boulevard for imaginary friends that had been forgotten.

It was whimsical as fuck and a huge party 100 percent of the time.

And it could only be accessed when you were tripping balls. Hard.

Mostly used by magicians as an intermediary to move shit, it was used by Julia and Kady's mom in the show to cast an interdimensional fish hook to steal Marina's spell cabinet and later by some thief to steal an entire branch of the library.

Smart choice.

Maybe I'll pay Harriet Schiff a visit soon. An enemy of the library was a pawn I could use. Especially the beloved, rebellious daughter of one their heads.

After all, the library had travelers aplenty and if one dimension hopping Daniel Kikuno was a pain, you can imagine what an army of those can do.

They were a threat even to gods, much less an ordinary immortal like me.

I went over the sigils and glyphs again and began to paint them onto the mirror beside me with my own blood.

Traveler's blood. It was conduit to turnt he mirror into a portal to the Mirror World.

As soon as I finished writing the glyphs, the mirror rippled like the surface of water and our reflections in the mirror disappeared.

In their place, another copy of the room appeared on the other side, except it was permanently lit in a dystopic tone. Muted greys and dull off whites. Ash and dust floated in the air, twinkling under a mysterious light.

Like a world abandoned.

"Alright." I grunted, getting up, back to my feet and picked up the paint can of my blood.

"I'm going in. You remember the protocol right?" I asked Yue.

"Yes." She nodded, "If the portal closes, reopen it immediately, and lead in a rescue effort.

Examine anyone in there if they try to get out. Only let them out after complete inspection and Word As Bond." She patted her pocket with a stack of envelopes containing a Word As Bonds.

"Good. And remember, if you have to come in to save me, don't use magic. Magic can ricochet off and go haywire in there.

Instead arm yourself with one of my spare power armors. Do the same for anyone else coming in with you." I said, walking up to her, and caressed her face, "And remember, I have more than one body, but you only have one of your own, so your safety matters more than mine okay. If the rescue seems fruitless, save yourself before you save me. Even if it means using magic, okay?"

Yue nodded tensely and I smiled, patting her head.

"Of course none of it will be necessary, I'll come back in a couple of minutes as is. But y'know, better to be prepared, just in case." I assured her.

I had already warded up the room, brought in a dimension anchor and set up a forcefield too, so there wasn't any real danger here, anyways.

"Un~" Yue nodded and I walked into the mirror.

The mirror rippled as I stepped through and it felt like a veil of hydrophobic goo as I passed through it, like oobleck and vegetable oil.

Stepping into the mirror image of the room, I noticed that it gave off a weird sensation.

Like it was pulling at something, from my being itself.

It was very slight, nigh imperceptible, but my code was flaring to alert at it's influence.

I shook my head and ignored it. It was probably trying to make a shade of me already.

Thankfully, it seemed like a time intensive process, so I better get out sooner than later.

I walked put of the room and looked around the fallen shelves and empty halls, a sense of loneliness creeping into me, sending ashievr down my spine. It felt like something was about to jump me, just around the corner, like I was living the first scenes of a horror movie, but IRL.

I scanned the room and found nothing.

Probably just the feel of the place.

I moved on, going through the labs and library, looking around the classrooms for any sign of it.

It couldn't have been far. In the show alice found it within walking distance.

Very short walking distance, given she was on a time crunch.

All the while, my glasses ran calculations on this world, figuring out it's coordinates, it's location and geometry and examining the fundamental physics of this place, bit by bit.

I snooped around, gathering samples into little baggies for later analysis too.

I was going to figure the shit out of this place. Learn the exactness of it's circumstances.

Turn it into my trump card.

After all, if I can cast in a place no one else can, I can easily win any fight, even against a god.

Just drag them in like SCP-106 and kill them here, a place where death is a welcome repsite and constant neighbour. A dead world to kill a god dead, using it's laws against them.

Of course, it would only be a last resort. Don't want to lose their god seeds to the dead concepts of this realm now do we?

.

After over an hour, and that included trips to and from the mirror to maintain the glyphs to keep the portal open, I had gathered all but the most important samples.

A sample of a Shard creature.

I hadn't found a single one of those.

Meh, I'll find one eventually. Or make one myself. Quentin owes me two favors now.

Maybe I'll have him jump in and split into shards.

For now, I focused on finding the Binder.

I turned to the many shelves and stacks of books in the library and began going through them.

Anither curious thing about the mirror world, the letters in the books were mirrored too, but the contents were still legible and if you mirrored the texts again, it would be easy as pie to get what you wanted.

I mean given the stacks of books dumped arpund haphazardly, soneone must have thought of it or else the books would have still been properly shelved.

I just didn't know who, and judging by the dust they had gathered, I don't know from where, whoever it was, must have come here a long while ago.

Nothing recent.

I wonder why more people, especially hedges, didn't just use it for this?

Were they afraid of the shards?

Or maybe they just didn't know this was a workaround to their problems.

Or was it the nature of this place?

It certainly was giving me the creeps.

And I could feel the pull on my existence increase ever so slightly each moment I was here. Another twenty minutes and I'd split a shade off of me like a budding flower. And I'm not ready to be a mommy to an abomination.

I'm a much better daddy.

I chuckled as I out down another book and scanned the room.

No sign of the Binder. Not to plain sight at least.

Had it been charmed to be unnoticeable? I'd certainly do that if was hiding something. Maybe even make it blend into the surroundings.

"And the Dragon said he was going to put out a word.... " I huffed, "Word my ass, there's no sign of the damn Binde-"

Thud!

A book fell down from a random stack behind me.

I turned around in confusion and saw a thick tome of weathered pages fallen onto the floor, just begging to be picked up and read.

That's not a metaphor, it was literally giving off that signature to my psychic scans. I looked back at the stack it had apparently fallen off of.

Hold on.

Was that book always there?

I just went through this one and there was no such book.

I mean obviously it had to be the Binder, that's no mystery.

What's a mystery is how I didn't notice it right under my nose?

God magic?

Hmmm..... Maybe this requires further research. The book and it's spell yes, but also the method by which it was hodden.

I stuffed the blood red tome into my bag and looked around once more to see of there were any other coincidences waiting to happen before letting out a sigh of relief.

Best get going now.

No point in waiting and sprouting a shard.

I zipped the bag close and turned around to leave when out of the corner of my eye I spotted a silhouette.

A woman. Coated in red, wearing a black see-through pantyhose under a frilly miniskirt, a hint of flaming crimson in her hair.

No. That can't be.....right?

I chased after her as she rounded a corner and slid into the hallway only to find nothing.

What?

Then, again, I spotted her, out a window, across the courtyard in another building.

This time it was clearer, her visage.

That red coat and black tank top. Wisps of crimson energy like a phantasmal crown upon her head.

I ran over, flying across the courtyard, running up the walls with enough force to dent concrete with each footstep from my power armour.

I ripped out the window, sill and all, throwing it overhead behind me, dashing into the classroom I saw her in.

It was empty. Again.

I frowned.

I could feel the pull reaching a climax now.

Shit. No time to waste here.

But if it was her... I'd find her. Just not today.

Today, I need to get out of here before the shard pops out.

But once my unstable state has settled, or I find a way to remove the realm's influence on me, I'll be back here. To find out the truth. And maybe, just maybe.... Even her.

I activated my thtusters and flew back to the mirror, escaping the mirror world and closing the portal behind me.

"Yue I'm back." I said, as I spotted Yue half clad in a power armour herself, pacing around worried, a can of blood in her hand.

As soon as she saw me, she dropped the can and rushed into my arms, latching onto me like a koala bear.

"Why do you make me worry so much?" She whispered, softly as I patted her head.

"Sorry." I apologized as I comforted her, "It took a bit longer than expected. But hey, I found the Binder!" I pulled the tome from my bag and showed it to her.

Yue gave it one look and turned up her nose.

"It smells like an old man."

I chuckled.

So she can smell that much huh?

Then again, that's to be expected of a vampire, I suppose.

"That's because it is an old man." I told her, placing the book down onto the pre-placed plastic wrapping on the floor.

"Lets wake him up, shall we?"

_____________________

MC gets the Binder and maybe a hint?

Find out next time!

Thanks for reading.

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