By the time that my next parole hearing came around, I had learned to love how the Garbage Eating enchantment made prison food taste better, and I think it might have actually made the food more nutritious at the same time. At least, I felt in better shape afterwards than I did before. An odd thing for an enchantment to do, but I certainly couldn't complain. I wasn't doing anything else with my MP, so using it just made sense.

Of course, it also made things I didn't plan on eating look tasty, so I, uh, didn't use it all the time. It was bad for my psyche to consider gnawing on plastic or metal, even if it might have made me stronger. And then there was the bird poop, which was everywhere. Garbage eating wanted to tell me that it was going to be delicious. I decided never to try.

And then I sat in front of Mustache, Flat-face, and Princess again.

Time had indeed moved on. Mustache was a little rounder, Princess a little thinner. He was a little balding; her hair was in a big long ponytail instead of a complicated foof on top of her head. Princess was also wearing a more eye-catching outfit, her heels easily twice what they were, and her dress cut a bit more scandalously. Meanwhile, poor flat-face had a liver spot on his cheek that had grown since last year, and his voice was a little more hoarse, a little more raspy. I felt oddly like far more time had passed for them than was passing for me.

Otherwise, things were more or less the same. I rejected the opportunity for parole; Mustache advocated for me anyway, and Princess objected. Mustache drank when Flat-face wasn't looking, and this time, so did Princess, from a teardrop flask concealed in her cleavage, which she was somehow enhancing. Flat-face broke his pencil four times, and when he was done, the two others bolted for the door, although this time, then didn't quite close the door all the way and I caught sight of them suddenly and violently making out for a moment in the hall before they ran away, Princess giggling madly.

Flat-face neither heard anything nor cared.

Things changed in the next six months. A bunch of old faces left, two in a hearse; their spots were filled quickly by people that didn't understand yet that I wasn't to be messed with. Max tried to warn them; he wanted to be a good dog, wanted people to fear his boss, wanted people to know how things worked, but some people need to be taught the hard way.

I didn't kill them, but the guards weren't happy anyway. They just generally didn't like me. Things were tense for a little while, and but only a couple weeks, maybe two months on the outside. Hardly even worth thinking about.

Max campaigned for more forced labor and less standing around being useless lumps in the yard, but it took months of campaigning before the Warden stopped ignoring him long enough to tell him no. Max suggested and planned out several pranks with some of the more restless inmates, mostly I think to convince the warden that we needed fresh air, but I didn't help with any of that. I did give tacit blessing to the others, though, by just standing and walking away whenever Max was in the mood to plot, and so eventually he roped a bunch of people into some shenanigans.

Shenanigans that got one more inmate killed, which made Max pretty sad. Still, seeing the Warden's tighty whities hanging on the flag pole was certainly a memorable moment. It brought the mood in the place up, more than the death brought it down. The death wasn't a kill--just an accident, someone falling from a high place, and it was pretty obvious when all was said and done that he just should have been more careful.

Eventually we did get stuck on a bus and set to work digging ditches. They did their best to watch us, but Max was gone at the end of the day, and I could only roll my eyes. They tried to suggest I had something to do with it, and it was hard not to laugh at them for it. The captain of the guard in charge of the investigation was recently promoted, from a different part of the prison. He'd heard of me, but didn't know me. The fact that I could leave at any time was nothing but a myth to him, one he thought the guards had made up.

There was a rock in the corner of the yard that we would sometimes sit on; it was a big fuck-off rock that probably weighed a thousand pounds. It wasn't easy to convince the new guard captain to move our interrogation over there, and once there, I only gave the guards a brief warning of what I was about to do.

That warning was basically "Hey, tower guards, don't shoot me, just showing this guy something." And then I cut the rock about in half.

It wasn't a perfect chop--it didn't cleave all the way through, and it wasn't dead center or anything, but it sufficed to prove that I had something in my pocket that would have gotten me out any time of day or night. There were guns drawn on me immediately, but all I did was turn to the guard, cross my arms over my chest, and say, "If I wanted to leave, I would leave." After that, he had to do a bunch of posturing, the way they always had to do. He asked me to show my inventory, which I did--empty. He asked me to remove my abilities, which I said I couldn't (in truth, I never tried, but I wasn't going to). He tried a lot of shouting and speeches and threats to make it look like he was in control, and I just stood there, nervous that he was going to do something stupid and I'd have to block gunfire again, but otherwise unaffected.

After about an hour of that, though, I was back in my cell, and there were no more accusations that I helped Max escape. There was more harassment, though, and I just sort of blocked it out.

Harold became more bold with our conversations as year 3 went on. He snuck me in more enchanted things to absorb, always esoteric things to test the limits of my abilities. One was a whip that, for whatever reason, was enchanted to remove articles of clothing from the person you struck. I don't know exactly what dungeon that particular piece of gear came from, but he was curious what that would transform into when put on literally any other piece of equipment.

The answer to that, as with many other pieces of equipment, was that it simply turned into a skill booster for a psionic version of the same skill. If I grabbed a piece of equipment someone was holding, using that skill, I could forcefully try to rip it off, and the equipment would become ethereal and pass through them--if I got through its resistance, which enchanted items in particular would have, plus any magic resistance of the person wearing it. It was a particularly niche skill that I would never otherwise have gotten, but apparently, that's all it really was.

Similarly, a small object that turned water into wine became a more generic fluid-changing skill booster, which was interesting but not that interesting. It let me in particular purify water, but since it was psionic--a mental, skill-based ability and not a predefined arcane one--unless I had an example of a particular fluid, I couldn't just mentally command "let this piss turn into acid" or "let this water turn into wine" and have it be done. If I didn't know the target liquid, I couldn't do the transformation.

It did, of course, still improve my prison life substantially--Harold had one small snifter of brandy that he brought along, and it turns out I could memorize liquids the way I memorized items, but those memories only worked with that one skill. I couldn't just make fake liquids the way I made fake items.

The most useful to me were the five items that turned into telekinesis boosters, although they all had different source enchantments. Only one of those was deliberate--a circlet of telekinetic power, which was the only one that produced a major boost to my ability, the others being trivial to minor boosts. Once I had those five plus the one I originally got from my boots, the net result was huge, although it ate up a bunch of mana to keep it active. The circlet and the boots did the lion's share of the work, but once those two were on, even the minor boosts ended up doing significant improvements.

Of course, the mana drain was relative to absolute improvement in my skills, so if the trivial (less than 5%) booster made a measurable impact on my skill level, it cost more to maintain. I ended up splitting things between two items; the boots had the larger of the two boosts, and the trivial boosts, while the broach ended up with the rest. The boots were already a favorite piece of equipment, if one I couldn't practice with in prison.

The least interesting to me in the short term was an earring of "Speak with Animals," which worked exactly as it should have after conversion. Harry was a little curious if it would do something different in a weapon, but no; it was a skill booster, and those worked about the same no matter what.

Most of the rest were pieces of equipment with various auras, and those were always different on offense versus defense. The ones he gave me were all trivial auras; aura equipment was expensive, apparently, and there was no reason to spend a bunch of cash to prove that point. Still, by the time he handed me a poison-aura item, I got the impression he gave zero fucks about the optics of his shopping trip and was basically just playing around. Or... possibly hitting on me. I didn't have much of a gaydar, so that thought only occurred to me late, and I tried hard not to think much of it.

And then it was three years. The parole hearing started off no different, except Princess was visibly pregnant and visibly pissed, flat-face was losing his hair, and Mustache was graying around the edges and very obviously drunk, pulling gently at his whiskers with a depressed look on his face instead of twirling them. Mustache and Princess didn't speak to each other at all, either; when flat-face asked Mustache a question (really, the only question he had to ask), I had to be the one to get Mustache to wake up and pay attention, because she wouldn't, and flat face didn't seem to understand that he hadn't been heard.

Mustache blinked back at me when I snapped at him, shook his head to try to clear it, and mumbled, "Um... let him go," without further discussion.

Princess gave me a very appraising stare, one that might have been distilled vinegar for all the sweetness there was to her face, and finally agreed. "He's fine. Let him go."

Flat face broke his pencil ten times. I guess the form had more to fill out if they agreed I was to go free.