29 Taking Credit

I worried as I flew on my Flying Nimbus, Xiao Li seated next to me.

I now felt pretty guilty about not contacting Merildwen sooner. I was guiltier than I had already felt, which made it even worse. Did she transfer to a different universe, too? I didn't think so, which meant that there was crazy shit that went bump in the night in my world, too.

When I contacted her again, she was in Sydney, of all places. She told me a little bit about what she experienced, but she was suffering from a little bit of amnesia and didn't remember everything about it. Some parts are cloudy, although she made sure to use her Mental Palace technique to ensure she would remember certain things. 

She told me that it was awful, it lasted many years and that she would be utterly fucked if the Woman, or the thing that looked like a woman, that kidnapped her found her again. I asked her if it was worse than the Woods that Wend, and she paused so long that she missed her chance to reply in that Sending. 

In the next one, she said that it was worse, in a way, because of the malevolence. Our pet goat didn't understand anything but strongly desired to assist anyone who asked it. Being taken apart systemically to see how we worked in an instant and then rebuilt was just Her way of finding out how best to help us. That she still didn't really understand was just how it was. She tried, at least! 

I could see how purposeful malevolence would be a worse time even if some of the experiences weren't as, strictly speaking, bad.

I was feeling guilty because I had been able to cast Sending for a little over a year. I immediately contacted Merildwen's parents but had dragged my feet trying to contact her.

She said from what she could tell, only six months had passed on Earth while she was held prisoner, which made me worried about my cat. Merildwen didn't know Miss Militia's fate presently but seemed to understand that I wanted her to find out. Hopefully, our... my ex just kept her after I disappeared. Merildwen and I were both not feeling too optimistic about Merildwen's chances of recovering any of my funds or property after such a long disappearance, though.

Everywhere seemed to run on a different time rate. I supposed it was normal for time to be even weirder when she was held prisoner too; she had been in some strange fairy dimension, like the Nevernever from the Dresden Files novels. Differing time, usually to the human's dismay, was a trope of fairy stories.

According to her most recent messages that I had received right before Xiao Li and I left, she had also been changed, body and soul. There was significant damage to her soul, tears that she claimed were caused by thorns she had to push through to escape that dimension, with some strange type of magical energy filling the gaps in her soul and spirit. 

She suspected her changes and new unique abilities, including shapeshifting, would persist even if she used the body-stealing or Clone spell I discovered in the ruins. She thought any human body she stole or clone she grew would slowly shift to somewhat match her own soul now. She said this confidently, saying it was a strong intuition after performing the same soul-introspection spell that I often used and comparing it to her new protean nature.

This made me very much interested in whatever plant could cause such an effect and how precisely changed her soul was. I hadn't encountered anyone with a different type of soul in this world. Even diremonsters were basically humans, just on the Beast path of the Six Paths of Reincarnation here. Ghosts, too. How could a thorn damage or alter the soul? They were practically indestructible, to the point where you needed really strong magic to manage it. 

I wanted some of these thorns to test the effect. How many of her changes occurred before versus after this soul trauma? It sounded like it depended on this strange qi she talked about. I didn't know anything, except she said she could shapeshift for the past several years.

She did say she had a little difficulty casting the same level Wizard spells as she had in the past. She had beaten me to the ability to cast fifth-level spells, at least in the Illusion school, while she was in captivity but had lost a lot of memories. I didn't think her amnesia would last, though. At least, I hoped for her sake that it didn't. There was no way I would trade my arcane knowledge for weird fairy powers and the ability to shapeshift.

It was kind of difficult to convey in only twenty-five-word increments, but I tried to offer her moral support, even if it was a universe away. It sounded like she had the worst experience of anyone, and I could easily simulate her thought patterns, at least before her kidnapping. And she would be having a difficult time blaming herself. She would feel it was her own fault for failing in the summoning. Or succeeding in the summoning, depending on how you looked at it. 

Fortunately, souls were very resilient, not only to damage but in recovering from damage, although who knew what would happen with this exotic energy being incorporated into her? Generally speaking, a soul incorporating something into it was often a benefit, though. A lot of my changes were my own soul incorporating Qi, which was a foreign energy, too. Other people's talents were also something that were incorporated into my soul. 

The people who used this demonic art often were said to have a "patchwork" soul which would make them vulnerable to certain soul attacks, but I felt that was due to poor mastery or greed. I religiously self-examined my soul every day and would never attempt to steal another talent until I could no longer detect any difference between the parts I stole and my original soul and spirit. I had even thrown a couple of stolen talents out when I realised they weren't meshing well with myself.

All in all, Merildwen hadn't been able to help me immediately. She found herself bereft of everything that I had and homeless in a foreign country, even if it was Australia. Her initial plan was to acquire resources using illusions, theft and potential violence.

I suppose that her position could have been a lot worse. Australia had a culture and language similar to what I knew, even if you could barely understand what some of them were saying. She had said she would attempt to go to the public library tomorrow and spend hours researching Nirn, but for now, I should just tell them everything that I remembered, which I had done, spending almost an entire afternoon sending message after message.

They were incredibly curious about how I got this information, but it seemed to mesh with what they had discovered from the interrogation of the false lich's soul. Their tentative plans were to lay low, learn the language until they reached fluency, and then find this "Winterhold" and join the college. Both of them were pretty confident about sensing and manipulating this new magical energy, Magicka, although the lich's memories were less helpful. His mind had deteriorated a lot, and he didn't remember how he originally learned magic. But, if it were like the game, then they should be able to find tutelage in any town or village.

Merildwen and I discussed things, and we agreed that for now, we wouldn't disclose that they were in a possibly fictional, possibly dreamed-up universe.

We also didn't know how CHIM would work in Nirn. From what I remember, it took more than just thinking about or even seriously considering you were a part of a dream to trigger it. But the idea was that you recognised that you were in a dream and either became something like a god or vanished, never to be heard from again.

We were sceptical that our parents could do it accidentally as both Merildwen and I had been considering that question seriously for years. Could the dreamer of Nirn be the same Blind Idiot God as well? In different names and guises? If so, perhaps we all were a dream. Or maybe the publicly available information about what I thought was our pet goat was bullshit. In either case, neither of us had gained vast cosmic powers nor had we disappeared.

Still, we didn't want them to attempt it and disappear if it was at all possible, so we just wouldn't tell them of the possibility. Actually, I found that Merildwen and I agreed on basically everything we discussed. 

I quietly wondered if that was a function of "you are nothing but your memories." If so, then we were kind of an amalgamation of each other rather than the same people we were when we both started out.

There might be a little truth to that. My behaviours were different. Before I found myself in this body, I would never refer to a lady as the B-word, even in my inner monologue. I had been a gentleman, after all. 

But Merildwen would and did, so I also started to do so. I even thought of myself that way now, occasionally. I didn't start until I had finally accepted my status as a female, though, and by then, it felt like it was a privilege I had to mentally refer to troublesome bitches as bitches.

I didn't think Merildwen and I were the same, but we were probably more alike than we were different now if that made any sense. Whether that was good or bad, well, I didn't have an answer to that. Merildwen's morals were a lot worse than mine, which might explain why I'm a bit accepting of things I would never consider before. However, the flipside was true, too—she was refusing to do things she would have defaulted to before.

I had the private fear that I hid from her that I was chosen as what amounted to a changeling daughter, shoved into place to mask Merildwen's departure. Was I picked up and altered so that I would be a filial and loving daughter to mask the disappearance of our pet goat's true, real summoner? Or was I just chosen out of untold trillions of possibilities because my existing personality would serve that purpose? That latter sounded a bit more likely if my fears were true at all.

We agreed that I would send her a message once a day. Once every one of her days, that was, and if she had a lot to tell me, I would arrange a time where I could chain cast Sending a lot. That was pretty much all we could do for now.

It wasn't like I could travel back there. Not anytime soon, anyway. Fundamentally, I believed that it was possible. I didn't consider information that much different than matter. So, since I could cast Sending there, I would be able to eventually send matter as well. It might not be easy, but it would be possible eventually. 

But would I even want to? While the internet was nice, I liked my new life where I was in the top 0.001% of the population, or more, in terms of power and status. Who wouldn't? The absolutely ridiculously huge world I found myself in was appealing, too, and this was only one of several thousand major realms and trillions of minor ones.

While it might be interesting to visit, especially to investigate how a fairy's magic worked and to raid a few bookstores, I had a nigh-infinity of exploration and discovery awaiting me right where I was, assuming I wasn't viciously murdered.

Also, the idea that there were such dangerous things back home startled me. I grew up there, and I had never given much credence to my Grandpa's stories about how things really did go bump in the night. I had been so sure that I lived in the age of science and reason. How could such things as Merildwen have turned into escape scrutiny? Illusion and glamour, besides, it would take a vast conspiracy!

What else were there besides these torture fairies? Perhaps they were situationally stronger than cultivators here and just lurked in the background, awaiting my stupid ass to go visit before pouncing. While I was really interested in this Hedge and Arcadia, the unknown scared me the most.

As such, I thought it would be better to focus on perhaps retrieving Mom and Dad from Nirn. While chances are things would be fine there, if they had arrived in a particularly unlucky time and place, then they might be caught up in things that might erase them from existence. 

They were outsiders in a universe that had legitimate time travel, which was dangerous. Who knew how that worked? There was no telling if they would be preserved if a timeline shifted since their very presence arose from an out-of-context issue. In a hypothetical Dragon Break, they might just vanish.

"It's your turn to fly," I told Xiao Li. My flying treasure didn't require me to bind it or Attune it as I would think of, so anyone could use it. Xiao Li's flying sword was different in that only he could use it. It was also much less comfortable but, on the other hand, useful in combat. It was the type of flying sword that you could both fly on and telekinetically control in battle using your Qi tentacles, although I had yet to see Xiao Li use his that way.

Speaking of, I kept one of my Qi tentacles in the control node of the nebulous cloud until I felt Xiao Li take over, and then I retracted it back into my body.

Xiao Li livened up as he took control of the cloud and looked to the left and right. We were flying at an altitude of about two hundred kilometres, which seemed insane, but it was considered pretty low for the altitude used by the personal flying treasures of cultivators. Even with our enhanced vision, the ground looked weird. It looked like what you would expect from space, except that there was no curvature at all, as if all the flat Earthers were right after all, and that it went as far as the eye could see, for tens of thousands of kilometres.

Once we had gotten far enough from the school, Xiao Li wasn't too proud to request we both use my flying treasure. You couldn't even really sit down on his, no matter how big he made the sword. I agreed, as that meant I would only have to fly for half as long per day. Our speed was pretty fast, over the speed of sound, but supersonic shockwaves were dissipated before they could travel further than a few metres. 

This was a universal feature on any flying treasure that could go this fast—otherwise, people would get annoyed and shoot you down as often as not if you exceeded the sound barrier too close to the ground. Pass over some meditating senior and irritate him? It'd suddenly be like flying down SAM Alley in Hanoi.

I squinted and thought I could see our destination coming up, although it would still take many hours to get there. We were headed for the regional headquarters of the Sky Guards Army, which was atop a mountain that was flipped around and floated in mid-air, just like what I would expect from a Netherese mythal.

"Do you know what the trial mission usually is?" I asked Xiao Li. He had more contact with the battle maniacs in the sect, of which his Peak was the worst. Most of the disciples in the Swordlight Peak had joined the Sky Guards or some similar group or just roamed the lands as a lone murderhobo.

He hummed and said, "It's usually a direct battle assessment combined with an actual mission that needs to be done—nothing subtle at all. According to Senior Sister, nine out of ten times, it is something like being transported into the wilderness in an area where the monsters have attacked humanity too much, and you have to return back with a diremonster head at least one small stage higher than your cultivation."

That was a pretty good test, as diremonsters were generally stronger in a straight fight than cultivators of their own level. There were many reasons for that, but it mainly broke down to them just being stronger, more experienced in fighting all of their life, and usually having a handful of queer but highly useful special abilities rather than a great comprehension of the Dao or fighting arts.

He paused and asked, a little unsure, "You won't have a problem with that, will you?"

I snorted but then considered it. I considered diremonsters equal in value, morally speaking, to human lives, and that wasn't because I was pretending to be one. Sapience was the only thing that ultimately mattered. 

Finally, I held my hand up and made a waffling gesture, "I'm not going to kill a random diremonster just because they are there, but I think you underestimate how brutal the wilderness is. There shouldn't be any difficulty to find some asshole that I wouldn't feel upset about killing." 

One didn't often become a small kingpin monster in the wilderness without doing terrible things. It was possible, but chances are if I observed a target even briefly, they would reveal how cruel and despotic they were. Even if one didn't ever hunt and eat humans, I would still feel justified to offer vengeance if they did hunt and kill sapient monsters, even if that was considered normal by everybody.

If I really was a diremonster, my proclivity for not eating any animal that had awakened his or her spirituality made me almost a vegan.

I was just fortunate that sapient, spiritual plants were almost a myth. Some were written about in tomes I had perused, but they were all highly mythical existences, like the Peach Tree Spirit, whose fruits were said to vastly extend the lifespan of anyone who ate one, said to only grow in the divine realm where Devas were born.

Xiao Li nodded after a moment and said thoughtfully, "That would be true with a lot of humans, too."

He shifted the Nimbus into a slow ascent. Like most things, the headquarters of the Sky Guards was in a ridiculous place. A mountain even larger than the one for our school, with a max height of over a thousand kilometres. The Sky Guards weren't at the peak since this was an especially pointy mountain, but they were still about midway up.

Living here for years, I still didn't understand how this all worked. It was totally unscientific. There was still air up there, but how was that possible? Suppose there was enough air to still exist at such high altitudes in the proper partial pressures to breathe. 

In that case, I should have immediately been crushed like a tin can by the atmospheric pressure close to sea level the instant I teleported into this world, but not only did I survive, but I hadn't noticed any difficulty in moving around.

Oh, well. I would stop thinking about it for now. 

---xxxxxx---

Merildwen had to touch something to send it to her dimensional storage, but she didn't have to hold it. This distinction allowed her to change her status in this new world. 

While she was still homeless, she was no longer penniless, starving or dressed as she fell off the wagon on the way to the Society of Creative Anachronism.

Disguise Self helped with the latter until she could steal a couple of sets of clothes that looked a little bit normal. From that point, she became something of a master shoplifter. She would either reach behind a display and disappear things out of sight of any video surveillance, or even, in one case, shift her disguised self to resemble a worker at the store and then steal things from the stockroom itself. 

She used to not be able to change such illusions after they were already cast; that was the realm of a specialist Illusionist, but that was what she had become in the hazy years in the mansion.

From what she could tell from his memories, John would have rationalised this behaviour somehow, but she didn't bother. She needed these things to live and thrive, so she took what she had to. It was only prudence that she hit mostly big box stores and the like rather than targets that John would have considered less appropriate. He was a bit of a silly duck at times, she thought.

That was where she was right now—in a large local electronics store, with the intent to liberate it of small but valuable items that she could sell for ready coin. Or rather, paper currency, actually, as this world did not use specie anymore. It was a wonder how they kept the value of currency from depreciating if it wasn't tied into something with inherent scarcity. 

Judging from the memories in her head, John's opinion would be that they didn't. That opinion of his was tied up together with a host of complicated and negative opinions on what he would call capitalism and politicians, which amused her greatly.

As she was about to cause several solid-state drives to vanish, she noticed that she was being observed. When one was a mirror for years and years, one became very sensitive to being observed, and she could instantly detect that she was being shadowed by what she'd identify as loss prevention employees.

How odd. There should be no way to discover her method of theft. She stopped to consider things for a moment before quickly making a complicated gesture and casting Detect Magic. She gasped. It wasn't strong, but there was a thin film of magic pervading the entire store. It had the colour of a ward of some kind, and she immediately realised her mistake.

Her plans to take over the world ended as soon as she was kidnapped by The Woman. She had only made them because she thought that humans were alone in this world in the first place. That was what John had thought, despite some, in retrospect, obvious hints to the contrary given by his grandfather. Now that she knew that there were at least others like her, and possibly other things as well, she had little desire to follow through. She didn't need to.

Because there would already be people or creatures seeing to her goal of preventing some unexpected apocalypse—the fact that they were secret, not known to humanity, meant that ipso facto they were a conspiracy of supernatural entities. So long as any secret conspiracy of supernaturals was on the ball, they would ensure she wasn't likely to be incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. Probably.

But if there were an unknown number of supernatural entities hiding behind the scenes, that meant that they were perhaps more common than she thought. Common enough to even protect an electronics store from other supernatural entities, like her, robbing it blind.

She made an instant decision, decisively turning around and walking out of the store. As she stepped out of the store, someone grabbed her arm. Turning her head, it was a rather large man of European descent, bald and at least one hundred and fifty kilos. He was seemingly normal from her magical sense, aside from a set of odd glasses which had a hint of magic to them. The gorilla said, "Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to come with me."

"No," she said, simply, and cast Sleep. He slumped over on the ground, and she stepped over his body, ignoring the stares and cries of shoppers who noticed the unusual sight of a man losing consciousness right in front of them. She darted around, seeking to lose line of sight. She had already mapped out most of the video surveillance devices around the store, so she headed straight to a blind spot before casting Invisibility and running away. 

If that Sleep spell hadn't worked, she would have probably proceeded to lethal force immediately. Not so much trying to kill him, but she would have defaulted to using force so strong that it wouldn't surprise anyone if serious injuries, or even death, resulted. 

She hadn't done anything wrong in that store yet, after all, so the man had no right to stop her. Where she came from, killing a kidnapper in the attempt was just the thing you did. Certainly, no adventurer would allow themselves to be put under arrest if they hadn't actually done anything wrong (yet) unless they were threatened with absolutely overwhelming force.

The wards in that store felt different from what she was used to. It wasn't strong, but it didn't have the scent of faeries on it either. The magic of The Woman was very distinct. Hard to miss. She would have noticed if it was similar to that, even if she hadn't cast Detect Magic. 

It wasn't even really magic in the way she might think about it. It was as though the entities managed to forge contracts or agreements with fundamental parts of reality. She had learned a few clauses herself over the years. In some ways, they were much weaker than magic, but in others, they were incredibly strong and versatile. 

It was the magic of contracts and oaths, and she could even bind people to their words if she but exercised an amount of power as they promised her. What would happen to them if they broke their pledges to her would depend very much on how they phrased the oath, but if they swore on their life, she thought they would die.

It was all very subjective, though. Using John's memories to make a comparison that was apt in this world, Wizardry was very regimented, like electrical diagrams. There was some use of the wizard's understanding and of concepts, but not to the extent that this new magic she could do was.

The wards in the store felt a little similar to Wizardry; at least, it was structured a lot more than the magic of contracts. After she broke free, she closed her eyes and considered not just the colours of the magic but thought about the taste of it on her tongue.

It was a divination ward. That was obvious. Yes, it wasn't set to detect the supernatural like she was worried about, but a bit more conceptual. She thought it would alert someone in the event someone walked into the store with the strong intent to steal from it. She might even have been highlighted with a halo, as she speculated that was the purpose of the glasses the security gorilla had been wearing.

Darting into a public restroom while still invisible, she dropped the spell after confirming she was alone. Glancing at her reflection in the mirror, she winced. She didn't particularly like mirrors. The Woman With Too Many Teeth had rubbed off on her that way, although she didn't know why.

She froze. That was a lie. She had made a promise not to lie to herself, and she needed to keep it. The reason why was because she was similar to her now.

Mirrors didn't hurt her like she suspected they might hurt The Woman, but she had a marked distaste for seeing her own reflection. Despite the fact that she could mould it however, she wanted, with some limitations. To do so cost her energy, and it was an odd type of energy she couldn't easily replace here in the real world, so she intended to mainly focus on using her illusory spells to hide her identity for these brief thievery jaunts and only use her "shapeshifting" abilities to create more permanent identities.

Right now, her "permanent" identity was that of a tall, shapely, fair, red-haired woman with freckles, as opposed to the tall, almost fat man she had Disguised herself as. She had just modified the looks of a dwarf she had seen in the past for her illusory disguise, stretching him out and fattening him up. She would have preferred her illusory disguise to be shorter than her real body, but Disguise Self was just a simple illusion. Being much taller than the illusion over your body led to a lot of problems.

She smiled at herself and then winced again when she saw her teeth. As much as she tried, she always seemed to have a sort of inhuman part to her, no matter what form she took. There would always be at least one feature that was at least in the uncanny valley, with the most common being her mouth full of at least two times as many teeth as she should have. That was less than the Woman used to have, and hers weren't shark teeth, but she didn't particularly like being compared to that psychopath.

That said, there appeared to always be an illusion over her so that regular people couldn't see her "true form." This wasn't an illusion she cast, either, but it seemed to be intrinsic to what she now was. She had the feeling that people like her, and possibly other supernatural entities, would see through this illusion, though.

After washing her face, she departed the bathroom and walked straight to the location she found herself when she arrived in Sydney. It was a good thirty-minute walk, but eventually, she arrived at a graveyard in the middle of the metro area. It was an old and small graveyard, but it was right in the middle of the city—almost downtown. While most of the deceased were from decades ago, the ground was still well cared for.

Glancing around after arriving, she knocked on a door in one of the crypts, saying, "Lemme in."

Opening the door, rather than stepping into a mausoleum, she stepped into the middle of a forest. It was different than the forest of leafless trees that surrounded the Woman's manse. This was an elven glade that wouldn't be out of place from her mom's childhood memories. 

The first thing she did was immediately collect an amount of that strange energy. She hadn't used her fey abilities much aside from shapeshifting and opening the door, but it cost a little each time she entered or left, and this area that was on the veil of two worlds seemed to naturally generate some, which was another reason she was making her camp here.

This wasn't the fairyland that she had escaped from, but some sort of intermediate area. She liked to think of it as the land of thorns. The source of the thorns changed based on what sort of biome she stepped into, but they were mostly always present. Here, they would usually be in the form of rose bushes and hedge rows that you had to carefully navigate around.

She was better capable of handling them now, though.

It was kind of like one of those once-burned, twice-shy sort of things. Those things had hurt her. Not just her body but the very core of her soul. As such, she had an intuitive grasp of where they were now. Even if she had to bypass in between two huge hedges of rose bushes, she would duck and dodge with preternatural grace, not being scored by any of the thorns.

She'd know when they were all but impassable, too, and in those cases, she would burn them to the ground with controlled Fire Bolts. It took a lot of effort, but she had created a small area of clean, safe ground, and this was where she set up a small tent and a few tables. 

She wished she could still cast fourth-level transmutation spells like she remembered being able to do. If so, she could use Fabricate to create planks out of these trees and build herself a nice cabin here.

The first night on Earth, she slept in a run-down motel, but she preferred this eerie otherworld to a dirty motel. The Woman clearly didn't mind coming to the real world, but she had avoided happy forests like this while dragging Merildwen home, which was why she had stuck to these glades when she first found one. Finding the exit back into the real world had been a fluke. Honestly, she had thought she would be trapped in either the fairyland or the land of thorns forever.

Now, though, she had almost everything she needed to survive here and generally only returned to the real world for eight or so hours a day. She would have liked to be able to use Glyph of Warding even more than Fabricate, but regaining her memories of her arcane expertise in their entirety was going to be a long-term project. 

She had memories of casting the fifth-level Illusion spell Creation for the inspection of The Woman, who always wanted to see examples of her magic. It was the only spell that didn't get an immediate punishment for how terrible it was; instead, The Woman just nodded and left. Unfortunately, her memories of her time spent in the mansion were hazy. She had memories of casting the spell, but not how.

She would have to spend a lot of effort to remember them, and they weren't pleasant memories she was recovering from. Still, they were vital memories to her survival. Her Memory Palace resembled a broken down keep now and would take a long time to fix.

Time seemed to run a little faster here in the world of thorns than it did on Earth, but nothing close to how it was in the mansion. 

She actually thought it might be slightly variable here, so she wasn't surprised to receive a Sending a little later. It was the daily check-in by John, or rather Mei Wen as he… she was now calling herself. Merildwen had already given her all she could easily find out from an afternoon of browsing the Elder Scrolls wiki a couple of days ago, so she didn't have anything to tell him today. While she was worried about her parents, she was also confident that they would succeed wherever they found themselves.

Nirn was a dangerous place, conceptually, but she didn't think anywhere was really safe anymore.

After finishing absorbing the energy near the gateway, she carefully examined the magic she had left here. She had already verified that the Magic Aura spell she had left on the Earth-side door was functioning. She didn't know how many people in the world were like her, but she didn't want to attract anyone by accident. Here in the land of thorns, all of the Alarm spells had not been tripped, so nobody had come here. 

That was good, even if it was out of her experience. She had cast those spells the first day, and they still seemed to be fine. It seemed like some spells lasted a considerably longer duration here in the land of thorns than they did on Earth. Illusions and wards, especially.

Walking over to the table, which was just one of those fold-out tables used for picnics, she sat down on a metal chair and grabbed a few tools that she had left on the table.

She was building herself a new spell focus so that she wouldn't have to have a pocket or hammerspace full of spell components. She had decided on a wand this time. It would be easier to conceal than a staff. A stout staff was basically a deadly weapon on its own, so the ability to have something that she could store in her storage and wouldn't scream "weapon" to the rubes was ideal. She might even take to wearing green and silver so she could pretend to be a Slytherin cosplayer if she needed to pull it out in public.

While she was horrible in alchemy, creating magical devices was something she had adequate competence in, and the creation of a simple spell focus was something every Wizard should be able to do. No one would promote someone from Apprentice without the capability to at least make a staff, after all.

The wood taken from these trees would be the ideal construction material, too. Wood from a tree trapped between worlds for the wand of a wizard trapped between worlds, in more ways than one. The symbolism would absolutely help to make the wand better than usual.

She slipped a pair of stolen AirPods into her ears and turned on the music player on a cheap smartphone that she bought with cash. She could buy minutes on a card, but she had nobody she wanted to talk to. She supposed she could call the thing that had assumed John's identity after she was kidnapped, but she didn't really want to talk to him... to it. 

She hadn't decided whether or not she had to kill it yet. She didn't have any deep ties to John's life, but she did have a strong desire to be the only wizard on this planet. She didn't know what memories she shared with the thing that she discovered went to work every day at John's job at the nuclear power plant. Perhaps none. Perhaps all?

She had no way to get back to North America right now, anyway. She would have to find out eventually, and then if she felt she had to eliminate it, it would be better if it were a... surprise. 

She kept this a secret from John... well, now Mei Wen, too. She knew how she thought unless the three years in a new place had changed her radically. Perhaps it had, but if it hadn't, she would be struggling with a case of the guilties about enjoying the relationship with Merildwen's parents.

She might feel an unnecessary similarity, possible kinship, between her and the imposter. This would distress her, so it was better that she didn't worry about it. Merildwen didn't even know that she needed to kill it yet, anyway.

So, instead of calling anyone, she pressed play on the app and hummed.

"Sixteen in the clip and one in the hole, Nate Dogg is about to make some bodies turn cold..."

Bobbing her head, she pulled out some fine grit sandpaper and a tiny little knife and got to work.

---xxxxxx---

Merildwen woke up to her Alarm alerting her mentally of intruders, and stilled instantly. She slept with most of her high-value items and physical currency already stored in her hammerspace, so she just got out of her sleeping bag, cast Invisibility, and darted out of the tent and into the nearby forest, dodging an unusual branch that had a grown a rose tendril.

She quieted and stilled, wrapping herself in shadows using her fae abilities at the same time. It wouldn't serve. to make her anymore invisibile, but it would muffle the sound she would invariably make, the scents she would have, and even her magical presence. A little.

She watched a group of three... people rush into the clearing she had carefully burned out of the forest. One of them looked sort of like a dryad, another was some kind of beast-man while the last was almost a dwarf. The dryad yelled at the other two, "Where is the gateway?! They're almost on us!"

An Australian dryad? That was a bit odd. Usually they spoke Sylvan or Elven, not usually Common. And definitely not with an Australian accent.

"I don't know! This area has been changed! Fuck, someone's been camping here!" the dog-like man yelled, sounding terrified. I could feel the fear on them all, actually, as I lurked out of sight.

The cause for such fear arrived about the time that Merildwen realised that the woman wasn't a dryad. She remembered one of the workers back in the mansion, who was forced to live and sleep in The Woman's garden. Eventually, he started looking as much plant as man, like of like an ent, with branch-like arms. This woman was a lot more beautiful, but it seemed like the same thing. She realised she was looking at three people like her.

About a half dozen angry looking hyena-looking-things chased them into the small clearing, starting to surround the trio. Merildwen had seen a number of monster-things on her flight, but only had to kill a couple of them. Usually, they responded as expected when she used Fear or Cause Fear and just ran away. They were deceptively strong, and usually had a queer ability to boot.

The dwarf-man had been calm the entire time, and casually produced a fucking sword of all things. This suddenly felt incredibly nostalgic. They were adventurers, just like she and her parents had been. Sort of. They had been more like a wandering family of necromancers, but that was the same thing in her opinion.

Even so, she remained still. Of all people, she knew best that adventurers weren't necessarily to be trusted. It wasn't uncommon for adventurers to operate on the "Three All System." Kill All. Loot All. Take All.

It would be best if they dispatched these weird monsters and left without discovering her. Merildwen would have to relocate her camp site. She thought she was the only one to know about this entrance to the real world, but clearly that was wrong. Or maybe, she'd just deal with the unsanitary conditions in motels.

The dryad-lady did something and vines started to entwine one of the hyena-dogs, while the rest leapt to attack. The Fighter-looking guy got a good hit on one with his sword, and the dog-man growled and bit another who attempted to get him. The dryad-lady was bound over by a snapping monster, but the Fighter-guy kicked it off of her.

I frowned. They weren't doing as well as I thought. One of them was going to die at this rate. Why didn't they bring automatic rifles in here if they were adventuring? I mean, I guess Australia confiscated most such rifles, but it should still be possible to russle up a double barrel or something, right?

The group of hyena-dogs regrouped, one of them injured severely. It wouldn't last though, because the hyena-dogs realised the same thing too. They had the advantage and knew it, so before they could attack again and ruin her opportunity, Merildwen cast Hypnotic Pattern at the group of monsters. She carefully placed the glyph in such a way that it wouldn't hit the three adventurers.

It worked. Although her invisibility dropped, she noticed the on-the-ball soldier guy immediately glance at her, crouched and hidden in the forest, while all six hyena-dogs were staring off into space drooling. It was like the other two adventurers could feel the magic, too, as they turned in her direction.

"That spell only lasts a minute. You should kill them all before it wears off. One at a time," Merildwen said with a sigh, stepping out of the forest. She felt safer hiding amongst the trees, and didn't like strangers Observing her, but she pushed through that feeling.

They weren't stupid, they realised what she had done and the soldier said, "One at a time. Wounded one first!"

She watched the guy with the sword rapidly and systematically decapitate the monsters, and felt uneasy as the group turned to regard her. She put up the hood in her simple hoody jacket as the sword-wielding guy stood in between her and the others.

The dog-guy also seemed on the verge of growling, but the dryad-lady patted him on the shoulder which stilled him. The woman said, "Stranger, we don't mean you any harm. I'm Kate, this is John and Peter. Thank you so much for the help. We got turned around looking for a few Goblin Fruits to sell at the freehold, and were attacked. We were trying to escape and..." She shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, 'you saw the rest.'

Merildwen considered giving a false name. True names were supposed to have significance in fairy stories, and certainly The Woman certainly never shared hers. Should she ask a question and reveal her ignorance? Finally, she settled on a middle course and said, "You can call me Merit. What is a Goblin Fruit? And what is a freehold?"

They each glanced at each other, almost communicating without speaking in the way that a good adventuring party usually could. Then they glanced at her makeshift camp. Finally, the dryad asked, "...how long has it been since you escaped?"

Ugh, that was like a punch to the gut. Were they all escapees too? Certainly, the only reason The Woman might have for a dryad was to wither her, but she already thought that there was likely others like The Woman. 

Merildwen had no idea how rare her situation was, and it was disconcerting to think that it wasn't, apparently, that rare at all. She said, "...A few days. I found this gateway to Sydney, Australia and have been living here for now."

The look of incredible pity and empathy from the dryad woman, almost like she wanted to hug her made Merildwen take a half-step back. The woman caught herself and said with a sigh, "...you poor thing. Are you willing to come with us? I think The Rusty Rabbit is pretty close to where this gateway leads, and we'll buy you some pancakes and explain some things."

Merildwen frowned and said, "I'll have to go through the gateway first, and then afterwards you walk in front of me, OK?" She wasn't about to turn her back to some adventurers in the wild.

Her distrust seemed to hit the flower-woman hard, who just shook her head and said, "You poor thing... of course, that will be fine." The Fighter-guy seemed upset with that idea, and even opened his mouth to say something, but closed it again at a glare from the dryad.

She moved sideways until she arrived next to the gateway, and activated it. She said before she entered it, "I'll be at the entrance to the graveyard."

Then, she darted through. She wasn't hungry so much for pancakes, but for answers, so she was willing to risk going along with this.

---xxxxxx---

Glancing briefly at the giant serpent that was chasing me, I continued running for my life! Xiao Li had been absolutely correct about the trial we should expect, and I had been absolutely right about it being easy to find evil diremonsters. This giant serpent, for example, who was a terrifying warlord of a small hill in these forests.

The law of jus primae noctis, where a feudal lord could demand the virginity of its vassals, might be apocryphal. But in this case of this serpent, it actually did demand to eat the first born of any monsters nearby, so I felt perfectly alright in murdering him. It was in the middle of the Foundation Establishment, over four small stages above us, but it was the kind of monsters that specialised in growing bigger, which usually meant that it wouldn't have much in the way of special abilities or know many techniques. 

It didn't seem to need them, unfortunately.

We had been ready to attack it together when by a fluke we had both been attacked by a group of three other diremonsters, who now I think were intending to eat snake meat tonight. By their attack, they clearly would settle for the long pig, unfortunately. We had quickly killed one of the attackers, but this fight aroused the serpent who for some reason hated me right off the bat, and had chased me away from Xiao Li and the two remaining monsters, and through the forest.

I didn't have time to jump on my flying cloud because it, unfortunately, started pretty slow. Its speed was good, but it was like a constant acceleration drive like in sci-fi spacecraft; it took a little while to get up to its maximum speed.

It was made for comfort, not combat! The first couple of seconds were quite slow, and that would be enough to get me swallowed by the giant serpent that was chasing me.

The serpent was acting like a forest demolition team, crushing trees and turning them into splinters as it snapped at my heels.

Dodging the next snap of the serpent's mouth, I turned around in mid-air. My Qi tentacles were still propelling me forward, grabbing branches and throwing myself along my path like a half dozen prenhensile tails from a demented spider monkey. Facing the serpent while being propelled backwards, I cast Polymorph at it.

I could feel the magic wash over the diremonster, and it didn't take hold. I made a "Tsk" noise, flipping myself in mid-air, and returned to running flat out away from it, still using my tentacles to grab and propel myself and, more importantly, to redirect myself after I was already airborne. The snake seemed to like waiting until I made a large jump and then using my inability to redirect my parabola to strike, which was actually a pretty good tactic.

That Polymorph failure annoyed me. I would have won the fight if it had worked. I was hoping to turn the giant serpent into a chicken. That would immediately make it harmless, and I would have time enough to capture it and then arrange for it to die due to shapeshifting-related expansion trauma later after I ran back to help Xiao Li.

You couldn't just wring the chicken's neck. Otherwise, it would regain its true form and, in this case, swallow me. However, you could put it in a location that fit a chicken but didn't fit a giant serpent, and that would cause damage when the spell terminated.

Dad had a special magical device that he called the Hencapitator. It had two main enchantments on it. One for durability and one that made it a guided missile for chickens. 

If you threw it at a chicken, it would absolutely end up around that chicken's neck. The idea was that you'd Polymorph a dangerous enemy, like, say, a giant serpent, into a chicken and then throw the Hencapitator at it. Then you'd let go of the concentration of Polymorph, and the chicken would expand as it regained its old shape, but the Hencapitator ring around its neck would not, and Bob's your uncle.

It was as effective as it was gruesome, and I had been planning a similar fate for this snake. Sadly, that plan was now as doomed as the Hencapitator's original name—the Cockchoker. Mom just refused to let him call it that.

I realised I wouldn't be able to dodge the next snap of the snake's mouth about midway through. I had propelled myself a little sideways and had unfortunately entered the area where the creature had already felled the trees so there was nothing to grab onto.

I pushed my multitasking ability to the max, waving my hand to summon my corpse puppet from my spatial ring and commanding it, while simutaneously doing two other things. First, I cast Dragon's Breath in mid-air and opened my mouth to expell a huge cone of ice and cold. 

The corpse puppet started moving instantly, jumping inside the serpent's mouth and holding its mouth open. I heard a creak and a couple of cracks, but the snake wasn't quite able to destroy the puppet, so the overly large conjuration of ice flew directly into the creature's mouth.

Lastly, for good measure while I making the breath attack, I briefly materialised my athame behind my back and freed all twenty-five wrathful spirits I had refined in the past year and directed all of them to fly into the creatures wide open mouth, arriving about the same time the ice storm did. 

The ice breath exploded inside the creatures mouth caused the snake to thrash its head around in agony, throwing my damaged corpse puppet out the side after it couldn't quite snap it in two, and the two squads of spirits jumping into its gullet probably didn't do anything good for it, either.

Landing on my feet, I instantly leaped again towards the in-tact trees, trying to put some distance so I didn't get crushed accidentally while it was thrashing out.

I had limited success changing my illusory spells to include blocking spiritual sense, but I had success in a conjuration. I cast Arctic Haze on the move, and darted into the billowing and concealing mist. I had been able to add the smallest bits of the concept of reflectivity, from the Dao of Mystic Ice to the conjured ice crystals. 

While I only studied ice in passing, ice spells had always had an outsize impact when I cast them so I spent a little time studying the concept of ice, gaining a few insights into the much smaller Dao of Mystic Ice. Adding this to my conjuration made spiritual sense almost useless inside the AoE of the spell. It still worked, technically, but it was like trying to use radar amongst a cloud of chaff, as every small ice crystal was a little big magical now.

I followed things up with my ace in the hole, casting it over the same area that the mist and haze obscured. I had been just in time, too, leaping out of the haze as the giant serpent crashed into it, snapping trees in a cacophony of destruction.

Instead of continuing after me, though, it started screaming. I could just barely see, through the haze, the mass of Black Tentacles that had instantly wrapped around the serpent. 

This spell had become my new ace in the hole, when other control spells failed, as they had in this vaguely magic resistant serpent. It was at least twice, maybe three times as effective as it should be, despite still remaining a fourth level spell. From the way the serpent, barely visible, was struggling and how big the tentacles were, I wasn't even sure I needed to do anything else, especially since all of my spirits were still attacking it.

Still, I peppered it with repeated Toll The Dead castings before it died and the tentacles released it. I let go of the concentration of the spell, and one of the Black Tentacles seemed to offer me a jaunty wave before vanishing into thin air.

I ignored that for now, and instead gathered up all of my spirits. A few didn't make it, but the majority did. I left the damaged corpse puppet where it landed, as I couldn't control it right now anyway. It would need repairs, shortly.

I pulled out my Flying Nimbus and got on and started flying back to Xiao Li. It was impossible to get lost. I just had to follow the trail of destruction that the snake bastard made.

After a few seconds of acceleration, I was moving faster than I could on my own, and a few seconds more I was really cooking. While that snake had chased me for ten minutes, I got back in just half a minute, leaping off the cloud a couple hundred metres up.

The one monster left, ironically a panther of some sort, made the mistake of glancing up at my approach and Xiao Li took advantage of that and quickly decapitated it.

I landed firmly on the ground and said, taking credit for his victory, "I distracted it for you."