Chapter Seventeen: Teak's Freaks

+++++Ezra+++++

He awoke, having got a bit less sleep than he'd have liked, waking to the creaking of floorboards in the hallway outside. He tamped down his senses, already blaring to life as he ascended through strata of awareness, and glanced to the clock: six fifty-eight. When he nudged Rill, she groaned and pulled the covers over her head.

"We're awake!" he called out, and the servants shuffled in.

Despite having a whole hour, the morning routine was rushed: a hot bath, nail trim, hair trim, shave, and fitting for clothing. Between himself and Rill, they had seven servants to attend them - she got the extra, on account of her preparations being even more involved. They were bathed side-by-side in separate baths…

"In my experience, couple's baths always take too long," his bath attendant said, a rare infernic urmal with jinnic powers - he was responsible for bringing the baths to temperature: hot for Ezra and scalding for Rill.

"Hotter," she insisted, and started to do it herself.

"Any hotter and the steam might burn the other servants, miss," the attendant said.

"Fine… I suppose this is good enough." She frowned, but her glance in Ezra's direction was playful. She was thoroughly enjoying being waited on. Once a goddess…

"Is everybody in Mr. Teak's employ free?" Ezra asked the man.

"As free as an infernal can be, yes… or an urmal, for that matter, in my case." He ran a hand down the short, bristly fur of his arm.

"You seem… overqualified… for this job…"

The man shrugged. "Perhaps. But there's a reason we serve as we serve. Mr. Teak purchases unwanted infernics from those disappointed in the demon they've summoned, usually because our abilities are underwhelming compared to those of our brethren, or are at least perceived to be. I was purchased for one and a half stacks, relieved of my thrall-plug, and given the option of safe employment or a life in hiding… those who choose the latter don't last long, but few ever choose that."

Ezra wondered whether that was why they'd been brought here - to receive an ultimatum to serve Mr. Teak or go back to their life on the lam. He had to admit that, as awful as Teak's business model was, it was also quite clever: procure bodies for clients. Let some other criminal go through the trouble of procuring soul crystals. If, through no fault of his own, the client wasn't happy with his thrall, Teak would buy them for perhaps a quarter of the combined cost of its body and soul crystal. And, in so doing, he'd just found himself a loyal servant with magical powers equivalent to a 2nd or 3rd elevation mage but with greater elemental attunement. Deeply unethical, but quite ingenious.

They arrived at the solarium just as the grandfather clock struck eight and just as Mr. Teak and Lusha Dryad were sitting for breakfast. They'd picked a gray suit with a white shirt for Ezra - it couldn't have fit better if he'd had it personally tailored - and a white and cornflower blue dress for Rill. Back on Earth, they'd have called it a tasteful summer dress, showing off tanned, lithe arms and most of her legs below the knee. On the streets of St. Arbalest, it would have been borderline scandalous, especially if Rill was passing as a woman of means. And, in Mr. Teak's retreat, it was the dress she'd been most drawn to out of the three presented to her… Ezra wondered why they haven't given him a choice in suits.

Mr. Teak gestured toward the unoccupied chairs. "Rill, Ezra, please join us for breakfast. I hope first names aren't untoward…"

"And your first name is…" Ezra asked.

"Just Teak."

The provenance of Teak's name was immediately obvious, as his body was mostly made of teak wood - highly-polished, long-grained teak inscribed with the strange, ancient language that animated the scriben comprised limbs fit together like those of a fully-articulated mannequin. Unlike most scriben, who added whatever sturdy and useful materials to their suited their fancy as needed, Teak had clearly gone out of his way to fit his body together in a natural way, right down to the lifelike mask that served as his face. A burnished ruff, not too unlike that of a kao-alta, draped over his shoulders, hiding the neck joints.

As they watched, Teak lifted a small spoonful of egg fritter to his mouth… which slowly opened to accept the food, and then closed as soon as the spoon was withdrawn. Scriben with a magical talent were known to cultivate wood-shaping spells to animate the otherwise-impassive masks that served as their faces, but he'd never seen one actually eat. Somehow, it came across as deeply, strangely artificial.

"Pardon my ignorance, sir, but I thought scriben didn't have to eat…"

Teak wiped the carved lips of his mask - a pleasant but androgynous face, placid and beatific. The mouth drew back into a slightly-uncanny smile. "We don't… and humans don't have to smell flowers or have non-procreative sex, and yet they do." He tapped his chest with a hollow plunk. "It all goes down to this little reservoir, which I'll clean at my convenience. And I find that, even if I cannot derive chemical stimulation from my morning café, the smell and warmth have a stimulating effect."

That made a sort of sense - it hadn't even occurred to him that a scriben could taste or smell anything, but it made just as much sense as them being able to see, speak, or feel touch despite having no eyes, no mouth, or no skin - at least not in the sense that humans did. For that matter, Ezra could think perfectly well… better than well, actually… despite having a deeply dysfunctional brain rattling around his head. The servants pulled out chairs for them, with Ezra found a bit off-putting, but Rill accepted with aplomb. The dye had washed right out of her hair in the scalding bath and her hair looked fiery and burnished in the warm glow of the solarium. She scooted close to the table, greedily eyeing the steaming plate of Arbalestic breakfast foods in front of her.

"Thank you for the invitation," she said, her mouth already half-full. Rill was not yet a 'proper' lady, and didn't show any particular interest in becoming one. But she did understand gratitude.

"It was our pleasure. Isn't that right, Lusha?"

The dryad nodded and dabbed at his lips. "It is, sir. The fire goddess and the zero demon running around the city… the old sorcerer had no idea what he'd stumbled across until it was far too late, and now they're sitting right at our table…"

There that was again… they'd called Ezra the 'zero demon', whatever that meant. What did it mean? That he couldn't do magic? Because, thus far, he'd displayed absolutely zero aptitude for it, despite a host of other interesting abilities. Maybe these two had some idea…

"What did Fenrik stumble across?"

Teak shrugged - he wore a well-tailored gray suit much like Ezra's, albeit carefully redesigned for limbs that had far more articulation than any human. His forearm, for instance, looked like it could rotate endlessly in either direction, and his cotton-white shirt sleeve separated subtly right along the joint to allow this. "He summoned two unique infernics…" and, when Lusha cleared his throat, the scriben clarified: "… all infernics are unique, of course. But from a power standpoint, as the saying goes, the eyes spy the prize. Or, in this case, an infernic's eyes show their affinity and, as a rule, the brighter the better. No offence to Oliki here…" he gestured toward a kao-alta maid with mossy-green eyes… "but her lovely green eyes betray a far lower affinity than Lusha's glinty-green monsters."

"No offense, sir!" the maid beamed at them and refilled Lusha's coffee.

Perhaps he'd had them tamped down the night before, because Lusha Dryad's eyes had an unmistakable green glow about them today, like a bright and humid jungle morning was projecting through his eyes from afar. With a flicker of effort, he brought them back to a merely-intense emerald. "The color in the eyes tells us an infernic's natural affinity, and the intensity of its coloration suggests the power… glowing is quite rare and, well…" he gestured toward Rill… "I've never seen that before. And Teak has been around for a lot longer than me…"

"Though I only remember the past two and a half centuries of it," Teak said.

"Still a lot longer than me… and if you've never seen anything like it, and you've been in the infernic business for a century. Bright enough to distract in the daytime sun. Bright enough to shine through sunglasses."

"And what does that mean for me?" Ezra asked… and then he went in for more egg fritters. They were quite good.

"Won't it be informative to find out?" Teak said. "It occurs to me that we can help one another." He gestured between his side of the table and theirs. "But first, we'd better have an idea of what you can do. And wouldn't it be helpful for you to know what you can do? You've had quite a few run-ins with undesirable company of late and, if you're going to make it a habit, I'd suggest cultivating a response to lumbering borrenkin snatching at that soft human body of yours - something better than scampering up a fire escape, for instance."

"I realize that I'm in the lion's den here, but I'm not sure I want a man who murders people for business knowing my strengths and weaknesses…"

Teak sighed - though, when he did it, it came across more like the groaning of old wood. "You're new to St. Arbalest, Mr. Wormwood… new to all of Medias, in fact. So take it from an old hand: there are no pure heroes or pure-ichor villains here. Yes, the methods of some of my colleagues are suspect but… well, you're not one of mine. But take Rill's aesthetically pure body here… it was not a morally pure body."

He nodded to Lusha, who reached into a case and presented a folder, spreading it out on the little lazy Susan at the center of their table. The dryad pointed to a sepia photograph, a bit blurry, but unmistakably a constable's profile of Rill. "Vakla Tisch, drove her younger sister to suicide, stole one hundred sixty brownbacks from her sick aunt, and found herself in jail after badly beating her friend in an argument over a boy. That same boy, the son of one of our city's fine magnates, bailed her out, and she proceeded to have relations with the boy's brother and then walk out with a stack of brownbacks that the brother owed to Mr. Blose… not a good man to owe money to. Mr. Blose agreed with me that young Vakla's crime could be paid with her life and the young man's debt erased. More than fair, I think. And we procured her body for our own use. If you ask me, we did the city a favor - and, since the girl was likely to get herself killed before too long, regardless, all the better reason to make the body available for somebody else's use."

"I like it well enough," Rill said, preening for herself in her reflection in the little cream jar. "Though I wish I hadn't known about the details of its procurement."

Lusha shrugged. "This is how the sausage gets made. I don't wish to dwell on this any longer - let's finish breakfast."

"A splendid idea," Teak agreed. "We've got two brilliant young demons to test."

+++++Ezra+++++

Once Rill convinced Ezra that they ought to get tested - he was still very much skeptical of Teak's intentions - the four of them walked across the grounds through a great garden still in full bloom despite the late autumn. As they walked, Ezra observed a kao-etema woman wandering through the little garden paths, waving her hands over the plants and bringing them back into greener health or better bloom. Another dryad, he assumed.

His understanding was that spirits (or demons, if that was your preferred terminology) had an affinity for one of the seven colors of magic, with the eighth 'pure' color being nonexistent… though some people seemed to think that was his color, whatever that meant. Some were more useful than others on an estate - green energies were those of growth and usually possessed by nature spirits. And, on rare occasions, you'd get a spirit like Rill who possessed an affinity for red energies (consumption) but would have secondary affinities nearly as strong for orange (friction) and yellow (radiant) energies, enough so that her eyes were a pulsing orange-red streaked through with little motes of brilliant yellow. And, for that matter, Lusha's eyes were brilliant green flecked with yellow - he had two colors to his name.

The end of their walk took them to a mid-sized stone cottage that had been converted to a workshop - the roof had been completely replaced with a cap of concrete and aluminum culminating in a huge, humming ventilation and power system the size of a truck. Once they got inside, it was clear why: the room was packed full of medical equipment and a dizzying array of more obscure technologies. Two women - a borrenkin and a human - sat around a table quietly discussing a series of documents scattered across the surface.

"High Sorceress Jue and Doctor Pithvil, are you ready for your subjects?"

"We are, Master Teak," the human said.

Ezra knew Jue as the sole sorceress on the staff at the St. Arbalest's Etudium… though it was also common knowledge that she was a 7th elevation sorceress, whereas 'high sorceress' was reserved for 8th elevation practitioners. That meant she'd either elevated very recently or, more likely, had been keeping it a secret. Ezra had never met a mage of the 8th elevation in person, and it was a bit intimidating - he could feel the arcane warp shift in the room as her attention drew to him and Rill, seeming to pass through and beyond them.

"They feel no more powerful than the other infernics I've seen," she stated.

"They're new to Medias… this one still has remnants of her soul crystal incorporating into her human body and I suspect the boy's base meridian was blocked until he removed the custom-designed thrall-plug the sorcerer created," Lusha said. "But it is well-known that resistances incorporate into the new body more quickly than output abilities."

"I'll spin the scanner up," the borrenkin doctor said. "Meanwhile, Jue can run her tests."

The high sorceress's tests started out simply enough - confirming that Ezra and Rill could do the basic magic of draining and energizing magic crystals, such as the sort that powered Pithvil's medical scanner. Ezra was competent enough at charging the things which, as far as he was concerned, took no special skill beyond having a reservoir of energy to work with. Ironically, draining them was the more difficult task for him - unlike Rill, who could drain the energies right out and use them for impressive little bits of flame and light control, all Ezra could do was make them wink out and then… nothing, apparently.

"You've got to direct the energy before it dissipates," Jue said. "You'll have no more than eight or ten seconds before it bleeds off…"

He had no idea what she meant. As far as he was concerned, the moment the crystal winked out, the energy was gone. He could feel the energy when Jue or Rill drained a crystal, could sense it flowing into whatever other crystal or effect they were driving, but as soon as he drew the power, it was like flicking out a light switch.

Jue sighed dramatically, tapping her dark purple fingernails against her little workbench. "I haven't got time to teach you the bare basics of magic… so, fine. Let's continue. We'll test the fire demon's affinity first…"

"Goddess," Rill stated.

"…Excuse me?" Jue said.

"If you're going to call me ifrit, demon, or any other description that isn't my name… or perhaps 'young woman'… then I'll insist that the thing I'll be called is 'goddess', because I will not be talked down to by a woman who thinks I'm special enough to be worthy of study but unimportant enough to be an 'it'. Do you wish to test me or not, High Sorceress Jue?"

"Yes, fine… please step this way, Rill…"

Testing Rill's affinity was easy enough - along with any infernic's elemental abilities came certain immunities and resistances. For instance, Lusha could probably resist any natural venom or toxin on account of his potent green affinity. And Rill, being a red/orange/yellow affinity uber-ifrit could presumably resist anything pertaining to fire, heat, or light, whether that was looking into Ezra's luminous eyes or… doing what Jue had in mind. The sorceress had a series of ten flames lined up, from an orange-flickering candle flame up to something that burned a brilliant blue and chewed through 6-CCd orange-yellow crystals in about five seconds flat.

The sorceress had Rill place her hand over each of the flames in succession for five seconds apiece, taking careful note of Rill's reactions and keeping a healing decoction at the wayside, should Rill get injured by any of the flames. The healing potion went unused, as Rill went from flame to flame over the course of a minute, eventually taking the blinding blue of the last flame and balancing it on a slim fingertip for a few seconds until she could no longer maintain the intensity and it dropped to a more prosaic orange-yellow.

"Very droll," Jue said, any trace of surprise or being impressed as unreadable as anything on Mr. Teak's wooden face. "Finally… I've got some white-hot slag that I'd like you to dip your hand into, Rill… I've just heated it up with a pure orange 8-CCC, which I paid a pretty par for… it'll reach its maximum temperature in about five seconds, so please don't dilly-dally."

Without further ado, Rill plunged her hand in, shooting the sorceress look of as much boredom as she could muster. "I don't… ow!" Rill said.

Ezra reached for the healing decoction but, when Rill's hand emerged, dripping with molten metal and stone that sizzled the very air, her small hand looked utterly unharmed, save for a sliver of sharp metal the size of a thumbtack embedded half-way into her thumb. She pulled it out and sucked at her thumb for the three seconds it took the wound to stop bleeding. She placed the silvery bit of metal in her palm, frowning at the offending bit of jagged scrap.

"I was wondering if I'd get any arcanite in that batch," Jue said. "Notoriously difficult to melt, which is why melting everything else is how you find the tiny bits it comes in. If you wouldn't mind, Rill, could you please melt that into a little bleb I can store?"

Without much thought or effort, Rill lit a tiny patch of her palm right below the scrap, glowing it so white it was probably inadvisable to look at (though Ezra somehow doubted it would hurt his own eyes), and when her palm stopped glowing the arcanite was a tiny round blob. She plopped the still-glowing metal into the little container the sorceress proffered.

"As for you, Ezra, I have no idea how to test your upper limit… I suspect you'll have to work on magical cultivation until you can direct your energy into something that isn't an inscrutable black hole of magical power. Which, I must admit, is impressive in its own uniquely useless way."

"Um… thanks? Maybe?"

+++++Ezra+++++

The equipment that Dr. Pithvil had set up included a host of medical instruments for things like heart rate, blood pressure, and so on - these weren't too different from what Ezra was familiar with from Earth. They also included a suite of instruments for things like strength (where Ezra was pretty average) to reaction time and reflexes, where Ezra was so far above average that the doctor accused him of cheating.

"Stop anticipating the rod dropping and just stop it when you see it drop, Ezra," she said.

"I am."

And, honestly, he was. The goal of the test was that, when the doctor let go of a finely-delineated measuring stick dangling between his thumb and forefinger, Ezra should close his fingers over the stick to prevent it from falling. The less it managed to fall before he stopped it, the faster his reaction speed. Only, his reaction speed was so fast that it was within a margin of error overlapping with zero. Average time for young adults was, apparently, just under two tenths of a second. Rill ranked in at about a third of that and Ezra was so close to zero it was physically impossible for nerves to conduct and synapse that fast… though Ezra's apparently did.

"It's because you're not conducting or synapsing with your nerves," the doctor said.

The scan she showed him, taking from some clicking, crystal-powered imaging device that it felt vaguely unsettling to stand inside, was far blurrier and smudgier than any of the medical scans Ezra had seen back on Earth. Medias was fifty or sixty years behind Earth's medical technology in most areas. But it was still pretty clear what he was seeing in comparison with the image of a control brain: a head without a whole lot in it. Ezra's head was almost entirely filled with fluid, whereas a normal brain was merely surrounded by a thin layer of fluid with a few fluid-filled ventricles within the brain itself but was mostly filled with brain stuff. For her part, Rill had a lot more brain left, though it was pretty clearly damaged all around the top part.

"There's extensive damage to your cerebral cortex, but almost everything below that is in decent condition. No use beating around the bush - the toxin that Teak's people administered did a pretty good job of keeping autonomic functions intact while erasing anything that might be a mind. Conversely, Ezra's body was in an accident that caused massive damage, and it looks like the medication they initially gave him at the hospital had an adverse neurotoxic reaction that's still killing the few neurons that are left in there… it's almost entirely his spirit acting through his humors…"

"Oh…" Rill sounded a bit disappointed about that. "What would happen if I got my hands on some nerve toxin?"

Pithvil scratched at her leaves and flowers. "Purely hypothetically? You'd have to take quite a bit because of your healing speed. Then you'd get pretty sick… and then you'd get better and your soul would continue to co-opt what the nervous system should do. Since, unlike us, the anchor between your soul and your body is purely artificial. You still need the organs that provide a physically essential role… your heart, your liver, and so on. But the senses and behavior upstairs only use the brain and nerves as a control framework… no nerves means they go by pure spirit energy, which is basically instantaneous and free of cost if you're at the 1st elevation or higher, which you both are."

"In that case, I'd like some, please," Rill said. And, honestly, it made sense. If you could magically (literally) increase your reaction time and memory processes at zero cost beyond a few days' sickness, then it would be pretty foolish not to do so.

"I'll see that it happens," Lusha said.

Even if they gleaned nothing else out of the testing, Ezra and Rill had already provided an invaluable service to Teak and Lusha: they'd told them exactly how to get the most out of your infernic bodies. It was best to summon them in with a mostly-intact brain (otherwise, sensations would flood in catastrophically, as they had done to Ezra). Then poison the remaining nervous system a bit at a time until the new soul wasn't anchored down by it whatsoever. Nobody with the extent of damage seen in Ezra had ever survived long enough to be a host before because the life support technology to maintain breathing and heart rate was too new. But now there were all sorts of - frankly horrifying - new options to people doing body work.

"We've paid you well," Lusha said. "See to it that none of this information gets out."

"Oh, believe me," High Sorceress Jue said, her dark eyes glittering greedily, "I don't want this getting out, either."

"Thank you both - we'll be in contact… or vice-versa, I'm sure… if any of us needs anything further. Ezra and Rill, I believe Teak would like for you to partake in his afternoon meditation. I have other things to attend to in the meanwhile, but the staff back at the house can see to whatever you need."

From the glint in his ethereal green eyes, Lusha Dryad looked to have some very important, very specific task in mind for himself. Something, presumably, pertaining to them. Without waiting for their reactions, he spun on his heels and jogged back to Teak's mansion.