I have never been in the practice of considering what my epitaph might be, but I think I would accept, “Too stubborn to quit.”  It is a thousand times more flattering than the truth.  “Spiked like a sad football through the gates of Purgatory,” is evocative but not quite right.  “Pulled by the ear by women into the depths,” isn’t an epitaph, it’s my life’s story.

(And yet, if they hadn’t pulled my ear, I’d probably follow of my own accord.  It’s not sad.  I love women.  I just have bad judgment when it comes to choosing the right ones to follow.  I like them self-assured and talented, with great legs.  I can’t see what’s inherently wrong with that.  Those three qualities are all fine in and of themselves.  It’s got to be what I’m not specifying.  How do you add, “and not insane?” to the list without somehow making the whole gender angry?)

I decided to ignore Doloise’s comment.  This whole venture was madness, so what’s one more invocation of doom offhandedly mentioned by a practitioner who lives in this psychedelic mist?  Despite being a fervent believer that words can mean things, I chose to switch my faith to “and some are just social noise” for the moment.

Some snarky part of me, however, hadn’t gotten the systems change memo and was already talking back to her.  “So, having failed your inspection, can you put me back safe, sound, and pretty much the original way you found me?”

“I did not say you failed.”  Something about the way she spoke always made me feel like she was translating from some dictionary and then putting the words back together in some way she thought fit.  What do they normally speak?  I tried to think of a name without making any offensive sign-language jokes.  Her pause gave me not quite enough time before she spoke again.  “You make noises like you are not committed to your contract.  Did I not provide you with the simulacrum you requested?”

I tried to take that to mean that I had put her out a little in creating it, so as to make myself feel better.  “I am concerned for my life, comfort, and well-being, like any sentient.”  That’s it.  Treat it like a science fiction story.  The word “sentient” always conjured up scenes from Star Trek in my head.  This could be a set on some planet in Next Generation.  Totally.

“I am not concerned with your comfort. You are not some suckling attached to its host, ignorant of the dangers of the independent breath.  You are a specialist of skills necessary for this one task.”

Way to tell me off, baby.  Yeah, yeah, I’m your McMuffin.  Um.  Sorry.  My snarky brain had quit for the moment leaving only the one capable of handing the surreality of the scene.   One of the wan stepped near me and sniffed as it went by, all in the world like some butler from a British television show.  Over the top, I thought.  I’d had a shower.  Oh, and several moments of being drenched in cold fear to improve my natural aroma.  I resolved to buy one of those little cologne sprays they advertise on television as being fairly irresistable to girls.  Maybe they work on the fey, too.

I bit my mental tongue, and went back to the conversation at hand.  “I would like it if you took into consideration what I consider a natural aversion to pain.”

She seemed to do just that: consider.  Maybe it was the word “natural” that threw her.  I didn’t know how fey were wired, except that, well, as noted above, some of them did interbreed with humans, so hopefully it wasn’t from eating our livers or something.

“I could make you numb to the consequences, but I am concerned as to how that would affect the working.  Similarly, I believe it would be more interference than I am allowed in your life.  It is bad manners to break a guest.”

I was hoping to ask, “But what about leaving them bleeding?” but that also seemed like bad manners.   “What kind of portal is it, anyway?” I asked, on a sudden hunch.

I had discomfited her.  That was not good.  This was not good.  Oh, did I have a bad feeling about this… and no R2-D2 to save me.

If there had been any justice in the world…but that golden child is long gone.  Wait, wrong story.  If things had gone according to what I had expected, she would have drawn a portal anchored at the edge of, say, the cubicle doorway, and it would have had subtle transitions between where this world and where she was taking me overlapped, and I would be going into a place of order.

Instead, my head reeled with the sensory overload of a messy transition, and for a moment I lost all sense of location, disjointed from my reality entirely, only to end up tumbling through more than one place at a time.  I saw a room of nymphs petrified in fright over a pool of mercury through some romanesque columns, rolled through a crowd of screaming crows at what I could only put in my frame of reference as a rock concert, and then somehow danced through a field of migrating dandelion blooms in sixteen-bit colour.  When I finished falling, I managed to gather my guts rather than lose them on the faintly golden shag carpet.  I sat on my knees for a few minutes, willing the world to stop spinning.  It ignored me, of course. I’m not in that league.

She stepped across, her shiny heels all that crossed my path of vision except for this entirely too ugly carpet for the eternity or thirty seconds I actually needed to make sense of my environment. I admired her legs briefly before the panic overwhelmed my baser desires.   “Self,” I told myself, “You do not need this kind of crazy in your life.”

“What kind of crazy do you require?” she asked, simply.

Oh, bleep.

I diverted the question.  “It seems to me,” I said, standing up and taking the rest of my environs into consideration, “that I never inquired of your identity.”

“You can call me Doloise.  These are some of my kin.”

Which you can take to mean I was not only looking at my surroundings, but that I was surrounded.  Not in any kind of linear fashion, of course.  Let me start with the describable, and work my way up to the things Lovecraft attempted to clutch.  Not that anything was particularly squamous, unless you minded the  1970s-style carpet.

The floor was indeed what I would consider shag carpet in that colour Maggie would have called goldenrod or maybe daisy.  She was always correcting my “pale yellow” into something more dramatic.  Amongst these creatures, I was hard pressed not to elaborate.  It was too silky to be shag, too metallic to be yellow, with the scent of something both sour and sweet at once.  There were columns that curved in like a giant’s ribcage, the colour of bleached bone.  Fires of every colour in the spectrum danced underneath them. The sky was a pale blue bowl of sizzling silver stars despite the apparent sunlight above us.   Distance showed the spectre of hills in shadowy indigo, with reddish clouds at their tips.  Save for the strange misty mountains (no doubt populated with goblins) the place was an island bounded with these columns and the edge of visible light.  I’d guess things turned kind of purple after about 10 feet from a lamp.

Meanwhile, there were the creatures.  Tall, many of them wan, as if the unnatural sunlight was all they could stand.  Thin enough that a good wind ought to clean the place out.  All of them staring at me like I was some kind of unnatural insect that had wandered uninvited into the barbecue.

Maybe not.  Maybe I was just feeling how unlike I was to them.  I felt short and clumsy and ugly and just…different, and like I was, of course, the focus of attention because everything around me wasn’t meant for me.  It was compatible, maybe.  It was like they spoke a different language, even if it was my own, and their speaking it was, of course, the way it should sound whereas my words were cheap, simple, maybe just plain ignorant.

After a moment I realized I wasn’t the pork chop in the caviar.  They were saving their disdain for Doloise.  It was something in the way they looked directly at her, as if polite snubbing was only for those they actually respected.  I almost felt better, until she looked at me again.  Her glasses shimmered in the faint burgundy haze.  “They wished to see the servant of closure their mage found.  They are disappointed that you have none of the old blood, for this will make it more difficult, but I am still certain you will survive.”

Let me back up for a second, especially since I am presuming you’ve never been pushed through a portal before…oh and yeah, the word, “Pushed.”  Oh, and the bit about my hair.  You see, you probably believe in the myth of consent, and that’s the ribbon that runs around this.

Modern urban fantasy suggests that while you can trick someone into giving up some of their hair, spit, blood, or other bodily fluid of choice (actually heard about a urinomancer up in Alaska.  Dude needs a better hobby.), while the foolishness would let it work, generally all us practitioners spend a few minutes every day cutting off the cords of similarity so the dust mites and DNA we leave behind (kind of a mystical Gattaca scenario) no longer focus on us.

This is baloney.  Pure, 100% Oscar Meyer variety.  Sing it with me.  “M-E-Y-E-R.”

See, I know people who are paranoid, almost to that extent.  But take it from me – that three year old T-shirt you stuffed back in the closet with the sweat from that concert you attended has lost a lot of its potency merely for the same reason finding your true name is kind of a moot point: we grow, we adapt, we can become different people (even if none of our friends will ever believe it.)

I wasn’t going to do any real soul-searching and life-changing in the instants between when she plucked a hair off my head and did her little reality-mash.  Well, besides having tasted some Real Fear in a far too immature vintage.   From what I know, she had to have something real “of me” to do the trick.  That’s at least some comfort, if I was concerned about her making an army of E clones from here to the horizon.  Of course, I’d probably be bald by then, but it doesn’t have to be hair.

And one other reassurance, if you can call it that… she couldn’t make them practitioners.

Probably.

So no, she didn’t have to have any mythical (or mystical) consent to do her thing.  And she can quite easily push me into a portal for much the same reason.  I might have been able to prevent it if I’d been closing it at the time…but that could have easily gone very awry.

One of the first rules I ever learned about magic, and no, I didn’t number them or make some kind of list of laws or anything – this is purely “rules of thumb”- is to not mess with anyone else’s spells.  Of course, in one sense I do that for a living, but an active spell is usually different than an active portal.  It’s when they coincide that I get into Trouble-with-the-capital-T.

Always.

But I digress.  A lot.  You may have noticed.

Um, focus.  Where were we?  Yes, I was going to actually tell you about the portal, because, if you’re very lucky (or terribly common) you won’t have the special opportunity to enter into a portal drawn by a fey practitioner.

Most portals worth the name have a boundary area.  Sometimes it’s a natural feature, or an artifical one like a doorway, or the edges of a pictureframe, or somewhat inbetween the guggle and the zatch.  That boundary area (I call it a frame, but again, nomenclature is not solid between practitioners) exists in the mind of the Opener, so sometimes it’s the dark space behind the closet door in your room, or drafted distinctly under the bed (but not existing under the covers where you’ve run and into which you’ve drawn your toes and all but the tip of your nose.)  I can feel these boundaries.  They sing.  There’s no other word that’s quite right to me, although my first teacher said she saw them like lines of colour (but never colours she could describe.)  It’s part of the idiosyncracy of the practice, I suppose.

The second piece of creating a portal is that the places where worlds meet have some level of similarity.  (With or without the capital S.)  A dark place leads into a dark place, a forest leads into a forest, a beach could focus on sand or sea…

Or so I thought.

The third is that your frame is anchored to something so you know how to remove it.  This is more optional than I’d like.

Having had a madwoman break all my rules of thumb about portals at a go, we’ll continue.

I figured I had three options.  I could play stupid and probably get kicked for it later.  I could play knowledgable and probably get kicked for it later.  I could play it straight, and, well, there would be a whole lot of fonging going on pretty much no matter which choice I used.  The differences were subtle.  One of my fellows had done a lot of study on the fey, so I had a good idea of how to negotiate.  Alas, a lot of it seemed to boil down to, “But, they’re capricious, so no promises.”  I don’t like “no promises” as an answer, so it might be good to just blindly follow the, “I’m just a dumb mortal,” route (“Me E. You sparkly.”), and hope I was actually clever enough to not end up in some bad place.

I could just brazen it out and face what was coming to me.  I never claimed to be smart, right?

“Oh.  Well.  You’ve found him, then,” I said.  I like to think my inherent lack of suaveness…suavity? Um.  That it was in deliberate reaction to the kind of soft glow filter the fey put on things, anyway.  I’m crude edges.  One thing this fellow of mine had said (his name was “Thomas,” and I may speak of him more in the future) was that only practitioners come across at all three-dimensional to their kind.

Crude edges.  Like an axe.

She smiled.  I had half-expected her to titter, which proves that my prejudices are quite close at hand.   I tried not judging the smile because it was another pathway of opportunities I couldn’t navigate without a trustworthy guide.  Either it was deliberate, and it was meant to look like a mortal smile, or it was a natural reaction (but I wasn’t sure of it) and was it too wide, or too short in duration or…  A man could go mad trying to wend his way through the labyrinth.  But I will guess that I amused her because I wasn’t blasted to bits on the spot.  See?  Easy as cake.  Pie.  Bacon.  Whatever.

“Good,” she said.  “I was looking for you.  You are the doctor?  Of places in-between?”  She made a hand motion kind of like opening something.  I was uncomfortable with the phrase.  I had a feeling that her words were being chosen deliberately and had additional meanings I was going to be kicked for in the future.  In fact, I felt a headache coming on already.

“I close simple portals to this world, if that is what you mean,” I corrected slightly.  Correcting meant I felt like I was a little more in control of the game.  Linguistics aren’t my forte, but I could habla some kind of rudimentary patois, I hoped.

“Indeed,” she said, and the look she gave me I recognized from other women.  It was some sort of reminder against either bragging or modesty, but I’m not always sure what side of the coin it represented.

Women aren’t my forte, either.

“I have a ‘simple portal’ that needs closing by one anchored to mortal blood.  You will be compensated.”  She paused just long enough.  “It should not hurt you.  We leave now.”

Thomas suggested they couldn’t actually read minds as their own were too alien.  Still, she had hit some of my concerns.  Of course, “should not,” was a “no promise,” of a similar colour each uisge.

“I am contracted to this mortal labor,” I tried speaking the speech trippingly on the tongue.  “I may not cross that boundary as a matter of honour.”  I hesitated before offering a stronger principle, like, “Ability to feed myself,” but it seemed to fit.

“This is work a simulacrum could do,” she said.  She reached out faster than I could stop her and pulled a hair from the top of my head.  With a quick knotting, she unfolded -something- and scared me half to death.

I was sitting at the desk.  A call came in and my double picked it up, convincingly.  In fact, I think it might have done it better.  I’ve been at jobs where I thought a trained monkey could do the work, but never had I thought, “So easy my simulacrum could do it.”  I mean, I could see the differences between this creation and myself, but no one looks at temps that hard.

And she did it without words, time, or any of the principles of illusion or mindbending magic I had learned.

“Scared” covered it, but that’s because I’m not good at the talky thing.

“Is your honour satisfied?” she asked, impatiently.

I nodded.

“Then let us depart.”  And with that, she opened a portal right in front of me, pushing me towards the abyss.

At first I didn’t recognize her.  Well, I didn’t recognize her specifically, anyway, but I’m not talking about the individual here. I can give a lot of reasons why I hadn’t noticed it immediately: she was standing in the doorway framed by the sun, and she had legs that distracted me poking out from under a tight dress of charcoal grey. She had ringlets of pure saffron masquerading as hair, held back with a black clip. Her eyes were covered by expensive amber sunglasses.

Have I asked permission enough for my digressions?  Because I’m about to take you on another short trip.  See, I knew she was fey.  Not, like, bubbly and a trifle on the wild side, but one of, well, them.

And you’ve read too much urban fantasy.  See, they’re just another demon to me.  Another thing that slips past the boundaries and makes trouble.  Just because they’re ridiculously attractive doesn’t mean they’re all that different from the -cubi.

Well, except they’re practitioners.  I’ve never met one who has stayed on this side of the wall who couldn’t wipe out one of the Tough Guys without breaking a sweat.  What we know as Reality scrapes and bends for them.  Oh, and they open and close portals as easy as breathing.

I kind of think of them as my nemesis.  Nemeses.  You know what I mean.

So modern fiction would have you believe they live in two, maybe three groupings, often called “Courts.”  Let me abuse you of this notion immediately; the only thing the fey bow down to is power.  So, sure, there might be a named Oberon or Mab out there, but if they’re titled, it’s delusions of grandeur… or, at least, glamour.

They have that much right, at any rate.  You can’t do glamour without the aether-dominated blood and something of similarity to back it up.  Feasts from a single kernel of corn? No problem.  You could even survive on it for a while if you had to…but interaction with their shadow of reality leaves one pale and wan… just like most of the drawings of the fey, right?  It changes you, no doubt, to the point that you are no longer able to synchronize with the real world.

Well, this one at any rate.

Alright, so that was just a side trip.  Back to the moment.

She was lost and confused and I wasn’t buying it for an instant.

My temporary position was with a waste processing facility.  Everyone occasionally needs someone who can answer phones and dance their way around an alphabet, even if I was sometimes a little confused if it went, “JIH” rather than “HIJ” when put to the test.  I put on my best professional face.

“Can I help you, miss?”

Oh, if I hadn’t been a simple mortal I might bow and scrape a little too.  They like games, after all.  But to a simple mortal, she was just a pretty girl, and I was just the dumb bloke behind the desk.

She came up in a flounce.  “Oh!” she said, a perfect moue belying her casual manner.

Bleepin’ fairies.  They can turn even your internal prose pretty darn purple.

“I seem to have been misdirected.”  Most people would have said “lost,” but really, Lewis Carroll does write their dialogue.  “I am looking for a doctor’s office.”  She handed me a piece of paper.

I considered not taking it from her, but once her hands moved away from it, it could not be considered a gift.  It was an offering, instead.  Big difference when dealing with the peskie ones.  Gifts put you in their debt, if you are on the wrong end of Hospitality.  (Hospitality is a whole ‘nother story.  I am learning it since it does have to do with boundaries, and some things like traditional vampires can be dispelled through the right manipulation of it, but it’s like a whole rulebook of its own.)  In this case, as an offering, there were no ties to bind.

I wasn’t sure what I was really going to be seeing, but there was something that looked like it could have come from Google.  I tried disbelieving it just to see if that worked, but nothing seemed to change.  She smelled like flowers after the rain.

The directions were right in that they led here.  The problem was bigger than that.  See, it took me a second to look – I had missed the destination.

She was looking for me.

I’ve read that Heinlein said, “Specialization is for insects.”  While I could probably Google the exact quote, I know the implications have influenced me to learn a variety of talents.  I want to be somehow better than the bugs.  (It might be a hard contest. For one thing, they have four more legs than I do, which suggests right there that they might be sturdier if I were to try to find one an easy pushover.)  I want to do what humanity does best, and if all the old science fiction I’ve read is correct about that, that’s adapt.

The funny part is that if that’s our strength, we still don’t seem to like (or, in some cases, even accept) change.  It’s an inconvenience at  best when we amend our habits.  It’s worse when we’re trying to overcome our reflexes and instincts.

I’ve heard opposing arguments on those.  Some people think we should focus and train our natural tendencies to be the best they can be, and some think that we’re rational, thinking creatures that should be able to rule over our inner beasts, if you can excuse the comicbook theme of the scenario.  I think there’s definitely a middle ground, because some of our instincts are ground in by millions of years of very  handy evolution that can still serve us in a modern world, and some of them may be becoming more and more obsolete.

If you couple this with the theory that we learn based on repetition which leads us to make judgments based on acknowledgment of very few facts, you might see that we don’t have to change so much.  Because if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, most of the time it is a duck.

Sometimes, of course, we’re wrong and it’s actually a martian.  But that’s another story.

I was reflecting on the way to my temp job about why I broke up with the Magster.   I think it’s because she had become so familiar with me that she hadn’t seen where I had changed.

It happens a lot with relationships.  Two people who just do it with shorthand, ignoring the little subtleties of growth.  The cues that they don’t catch.  Maybe I want cherry ice cream tonight, not chocolate.  Yeah, I like chocolate, and I’m happy you got the ice cream, but… it’s not what I’m really in the mood for, and no, I don’t want an argument, so I’ll just eat the chocolate.  I can’t say anything without it becoming a big deal. And so on, and so forth.

It’s like answering the phone.  I announce the name of the company and my name.  And you don’t hear it.  You’re thinking of what you need to accomplish.  You might be a bit impatient, thinking that I need to hurry up so you can get to the person who can really help you.  I’m a stepping stone, a place in the path, the fool in the beginning of the journey.  If I’m the receptionist, you barely see me.  Maybe I’m part of the decor; unless there’s something extreme, like I shout at you that I want cherry, not chocolate, I am just scenery.

Maybe that’s where we were.  I mean, she asked for my help.  She recognizes my use as a tool.  She’s versatile in ways I’m not.  I’m an insect in a macrocosm I don’t entirely understand, and she’s not a duck, she’s a raptor.

I’m trying not to think of her on her knees in front of a demon.  I can’t explain how it makes me feel.  Angry.  Horny.  Betrayed.  Sad.  Happy.  Vengeful.  I feel too much for her.

I need a new girlfriend.  I want to say someone who isn’t part of this world, this one where we’re left like angry insects, insects who have very little options but to sting.

A duck quacks.

A raptor screams.

There’s a difference.  A clear difference.

I wasn’t expecting her to call or anything.  I kept my cell phone in my pocket, half hoping she would. Noodling about, thinking of what I’d say.  Should we try again?  Should we maybe go on another date?  Is there anything to salvage?

I almost missed her.

No, not Maggie.  The woman walking in, looking lost and confused.  My kind of girl.

I woke up feeling like I had a hangover, with the taste of sweet dill pickles on the back of my tongue… and the terrifying thought that I had almost gone down on an incubus.

That’s not the kind of thing you really want to think in the morning. Not before breakfast.  I should in all honesty add, “Not after breakfast, either.”

Could have been worse.  I could have slept with my ex-.

E’s not bad as far as ex-boyfriends go.  I’ve had worse, much worse. We looked pretty good together, which isn’t all that’s important, but it made a difference.  He’s a bit of a pretty thing, with a shy smile, but he’s way too intense.

I like to relax, have a good time… leave the windows open.

You begin to see what I mean?  I see the little nod.

Most artists don’t mind knowing we are just one of infinite dimensions.  It means more possibilities, and much of the art is definitely the manipulation of coincidence, or the nudging of those possibilities.  I like to think of us as bubbles in the larger multiverse, floating gently around, sometimes touching each other, somewhat permeable, basically self-sufficient.

Of course, not everything out there is bubble.

I think that’s why we have the arts; to protect us from the things that might go bump in the night… `the night’ in this case being what’s out there between the bubbles.  Gods and shadows, lovers and listeners, parasites and pestilences, all spawn from some strange cosmic source, a sinkhole the bubbles rise and fall from.  A place of madness, an abyss from which we’ve all felt the thin, cold touch.  Arts to protect us with whimsy, with honest, loving laughter from the alternatives.

I do wax a little poetic when I talk about my real job.

During the day I push papers with pride in property portfolios. I schedule with panache.  I answer phones, should the caller weave his or her way through my carefully crafted web of alternative information.  I make my bosses look good.

I roll up my sleeves once I get home.  Take off the hose and heels and get my feet dirty, if needed.

I needed to get out into the garden.  Far from sowing my wild oats, I needed to recharge, root into some of the source of my power.

I hadn’t liked doing what I did last night.   Blatant manipulation of memory and motive is difficult, but at least groups reinforce each other.  It also could get me on the hit list of a lot of self-proscribed guardians of human virtue.  Do I sound sarcastic?  There are arcane wars between organized groups of artists every couple of years.  Independent operators like myself are usually the first to be picked off, which is why we have to be subtle and effective.

Organized groups all have names implying they’re the righteous folk keeping the rest of us in line.  White wardens.  Councils bound by codices of ancient laws that tell people what kind of magic is acceptable practices.   Stuff and nonsense.  The only kinds of magics that should be proscribed are the arts that are stupid and dangerous to your or others’ health and sanity.

There’s no Unseen University, or if there is, I haven’t found it.  (Heck, it might be invisible.)  You pick up what you can, where you can.  I have had a variety of teachers.  I don’t have the talent E does as a closer, but a lot of his is natural aptitude.  He just seems to pick up the edges of reality and hold them close.  I would have to name them and tie them, sealing them shut with careful stitching.  It’s the difference between ritual and a knack, like using a ruler to make your letter straight, and people whose quick printing is calligraphy.

But he means well, which is the important thing.

Me? I like to think I make things  better, a little bit at a time.  That’s really the secret to not opening those doors; smile a little, improve someone’s life a half step.  That’s all the magic you’ll ever need.

But really?  You want to know why I broke up with him?

I’m not like him.  I don’t want to save the world.