Chapter Five: The Mall and the Past

After Nekra had earned a good bit of money between her part-time job at the library, her second Job and her work costarring in Cory’s streams. The two had enough money to waste and they decided to do so while shopping. They also invited a couple of friends Cory made while Martha was temporarily the school’s punch line. Martha came too, she seemed to have almost convinced herself that what she had seen wasn’t real and that these two are just foreigners that enjoy messing with people who try to help them… like they had some kind of sick sense of humour… and were really good at sleight of hand. She still held doubts about whether or not these girls were normal but she was determined to be near them like it was her responsibility to stop them if they did anything dangerous.

The story the two gave for why they were wearing the same clothes all month was that they did not have enough time to pack when they came over to the states and pretty much abandoned their old lives to come to look for Cory’s “Father” together. The group of friends accompanying Cory are of course her loyal court magician, Martha, Sara (an underclassman who is obsessed with magic), Timmy (A boy who is currently a follower of Cory’s videos and wants to know more about her), and Bob (the boy who passed her the note earlier. He acts a lot creepier than he looks/is) the group spread out and thus began the search for clothes fitting of these girls in the mall.

Also, since Nekra is short with white hair but has mature enough features, Cory’s friends have for the most part mistaken her for an older sister or mother to Cory but every time they ask Cory just refers to her as a friend. The age gap is a bit much so the friends reasoned to themselves that they may be related in a way their culture would rather not say. ‘Perhaps’ they thought ‘one or both of them is an illegitimate child… and that’s why they’re both looking for their father’. Most of the clothes they picked out for Cory were the cutesy, colourful scene type of clothes, whereas most of the clothes picked for Nekra were more the Mature older sister, librarian style of clothes. Except for Sara who always tried to get the girls to wear black and gothic style clothes.

Cory ended up taking a couple of the cutesy outfits one of which was an oversized hoodie with cat ears and short shorts with thigh high socks and sneakers. Another such colourful outfit was a colourful oversized graphic T-shirt with some pop culture reference on the front a skirt and pants with a novelty cap and boots. Sara’s contribution was a big black dress with frills and lace in far too many places, those gloves that only cover your arms and not your hands, and high heels with toe socks.

The outfits Nekra ended up taking a liking to were a dress shirt and short skirt and stockings combination that was complete with high heels. The second one she chose for herself was a simple tracksuit and cap combination, (Timmy’s idea). And Sara gave her a power metal T-shirt, a short black skirt, with fishnets and studded boots. She also provided an umbrella with a certain band’s logo on it.

Needless to say, Sara’s were the most expensive and though she didn’t expect them to actually buy her contributions she still had fun seeing them in those clothes and taking pictures of them. To no one’s surprise, the two wouldn’t be able to afford to buy all the clothes. Martha was a bit troubled because she knew part of the reason they couldn’t buy all the clothes they wanted was because she had suggested her mother charge them rent as she had been charging Jeffy when she found out he got a job to buy something their mother had said no to on the pretence of cost, but they would soon realize she just didn’t want what he wanted to be in the same building as her.

“Maybe if we show mom how you look in your clothes, she’d offer to pay for some of them?”

‘Doesn’t she hate us?’

“That sounds like a great idea”

“I’ll text her these pictures and ask permission to use her card then” Martha began typing on her phone at Cory’s request. And after waiting a few minutes Cory got a call where she was fuming because they went shopping without her. A short wait at the mall’s food court later she arrived and paid for their clothes on the condition that Cory beat her at an eating contest. And she did. After which she also began offering suggestions and different things she thought would look good on them. They mostly ended up picking up similar things to what they already had and by the end of their trip to the mall, Cory and Nekra had enough clothes to have a change of clothes every day for a month and not wear the same thing twice, though they only got a few pairs of shoes each.

In addition to their everyday normal clothes, Martha’s mother bought them both a few sets of pyjamas she thought would look good on them. A couple of onesies for Cory. A unicorn one and a bear one. And for Nekra flannel shirts and pants. The two looked at each other and smiled though on the inside ‘I suppose my gathering money was just an exercise in futility’

‘Not entirely we can just save it until we need it’

‘shall I then open a bank account?’

‘from what you’ve learned of this world so far can you trust any given bank not to lose our money’

‘not entirely’

“Thanks for buying us clothes”

“Thank you”

“You’re very welcome” Martha, Cory, and Nekra ended up going home in Martha’s mother’s car. They said goodbye at the entrance of the mall and the other friends went home walking the way they came. The traffic was painfully slow.

During one of Cory’s live streams where she honestly and completely divulges any truth she thinks would be interesting to her steadily growing group of followers. Suddenly a comment worded exactly as she remembered seeing it in class floated across the screen as the boy had paid ten dollars to ask her his question. “really if you had just asked, I’m sure I would have found it and answered it, but since you so generously asked me I’ll have to tell you all” [switching to a first-person narrative so I don’t have to write in “thanks for the___” every five lines]

Cory’s Pov

I, when I came to power in the old world, looked like a regular human child with blue hair. It took me a good bit of time to learn the world’s language but as it was my first language it should be expected to be difficult. I was raised by a friendly young couple who I later learned only raised me because they were curious if they would be good parents and didn’t want to mess up raising their own biological child. They found me to be quite strange in that when I was injured, I’d just eat the injured part and regrow it, as is my nature as an immortal jellyfish. They thought it was strange but as it was a magical world there were people who had strange magical abilities that they knew intrinsically how to do but couldn’t explain. But in most human societies these skills are usually limited to calculating math really fast or healing minor wounds a week or two faster than normal.

It was rare for a human to be able to regenerate but as there was the contingency of me having to eat the injured part they thought it was still a grotesque ability that I should hide from people. They also soon found out that my growth was based less on my age and more on how much mana I had or could hold onto at the time. As I grew smarter my ability to use magic increased. As I began to use magic my capacity for using more began to increase. I used to be eight feet tall you know. Though I’m only five feet tall now.

An old saying in the world where I learned magic was ‘It is only through suffering that we gain Wisdom and through wisdom increase our capacity for magic’ It seems I became very wise when I entered into this room because I could cast intermediate level spells by the time I learned how to speak. The old world’s language was the same as the current world but they used the Greek alphabet instead of the Latin one.

The reason they used the Greek alphabet was because most spells needed to be chanted in Greek though if you were skilled enough you didn’t have to chant at all, just channel the mana into the spell you want. My special ability when I arrived in my second world was not my regeneration abilities, I was born with those. Rather my special ability granted me by my former world was a body that could cast the mana that was unnaturally and painfully forced into me when I entered the world’s atmosphere. As I was born with no capacity for magic the world itself granted me a body with the ability to use the mana around me.

My foster parents were elves and as they saw I was gifted with magic they decided to teach me through their method of using magic was different from everyone else’s. the elves use magic by changing the mana around them to suit their needs whereas most other magics involved using mana from within one’s own body. I ended up learning both as where mana is thin spells are weak. So I spent the next hundred years learning magic from them. My foster parents didn’t really notice my slow-changing and unageing body but the other people around us did notice. They thought my ability to regenerate whole limbs without magic terrifying, they saw my lack of ageing without being a member of a known long-lived race... unsettling. They thought I was some kind of monster and to some extent, I think they were right to think so. This all contributes to your question just let me get to it.

One evening my foster parents had decided to evict me because my presence was giving the two unwanted stares and since they thought taking me somewhere else would just be an unnecessary hassle, they didn’t want to repeat every century or so. Also, they conceived a child and no longer needed me.

More than a little upset I moved on to the next town on my own. It was a bit near where all the sentient monsters lived and more half monsters lived there as a result so I assumed it would be a safer place for me to live and grow… unfortunately the current king of the monsters, which at the time was a position only claimed when the previous king is murdered, was a terrible womanizer and I had just changed my appearance from one that looked like the man who brought me here… except for the blue hair part. And made myself the body you see on screen today.

My timing couldn’t have been worse though. Yes, it made people significantly more trusting of me and half breeds tend to have more powerful abilities mine was still seen as a… well people didn’t really want to see my ability. Or what they perceived to be my ability. Anyway, things were fine for my first few days until I met the current monster king.

He was a literal pig-headed fool. He killed the previous king through assassination like a coward and was constantly hiding behind a well-paid guard. Well… one day as I was coming home from winning a local drinking contest to get a wand I liked the look of I was stopped on my slightly stumbling way home where I was told by the 7ft tall pig monster that I could either follow him willingly or he could take me by force. I was going to tell him that I chose neither. Instead, I threw up all over him saturating his clothes and hair with alcohol and vomit. A couple of chunks of sandwich were in his hair.

“I don’t think anyone’s coming home with you tonight” I ended up saying while laughing at him. In Rage, he grabbed his sword and tried to stab right through me. My body then changed into a mass of tentacles that he just shoved his whole arm right into.

“Oh, I seem to be too drunk to maintain my human form, you don’t mind, do you?” I asked as the now terrified pig man screamed in pain and fear demanding his guard come save him. But as he struggles and flailed about, he tangled himself up further, pushed the barbs deeper and poisoned himself to death on my drunken half away body. The guard was too scared to touch me as he saw how fast the pigman fell and instead opted to bow, “long live the new king of monsters”

“man, I am hungry” much to everyone’s surprise and the horror of a few I ate him along with some of my tentacles he’d managed to tear off in his futile struggle for survival. ‘It seems the mana in my body made my poison much, much stronger’ I thought ‘or this man was incredibly weak’.

3rd person again

“And that is how I became the king of the monsters” she then proceeded to thank a few new followers and subscribers and generally people who donated money to her. The rest of the stream was dedicated to answering minor questions that get repeated often like her favourite food and how she gets her hair to look how it does.