Magic Under Construction: TOMU #479
Jan. 6th, 2011 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinStarted: 1/6/2011, 6:06 PM
Status: In progress (10:30 PM)
Word Count: ~2250
Hours Writing: 1.5
One and a half hour of writing
The good thing about taking the potion was that it was really easy for me to believe that it was in fact doing nothing. There was no immediately noticeable effect when I swallowed it. Then it was sitting there for ten minutes while Roger sat nearby, flipping through a textbook and occasionally glancing at the timepiece.
Yes, there was nothing like ten solid minutes of nothing happening to convince oneself that the potion one had taken might as well have been interesting colored water for all of the pregnancies it would actually terminate.
"And that's it," Roger said finally. "Remember, don't take anything else and try to stay away from any buffs or debuffs for the next two weeks. There wouldn't be any interactions with most of them, but we don't want any nasty surprises."
"Okay," I said.
The whole thing had taken maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, including the wait before I'd seen Roger. I figured the others had probably headed for lunch already, but they wouldn't be anywhere near finished, and I still had to eat... okay, technically I didn't have to eat. But I still enjoyed and was in the habit of eating, and was expected to by my owner, so I went straight to the dining hall.
After I got inside, I decided to check in at the table where the others were before getting my food. My jitters from earlier weren't ready to leave just yet, so they were finding new things to pester me about, like what would happen if everybody else finished eating just as I was sitting down and so they had to sit there awkwardly while I ate or else they'd all just get up and go, leaving me sitting there alone...
Nothing, I told them. Nothing is what would happen. Certainly nothing worth dwelling on or complaining about.
The jitters were unimpressed with my reasoning, but I held firm.
Ian was there, as I'd expected, along with Amaranth and Steff and Two. Amaranth looked up as I approached, but her smile froze on her face and her perpetually sun-kissed skin paled just a little.
"What's... what's wrong?" I asked as the once-downcast jitters rejoiced.
"Do you feel okay, baby?" she asked me.
"Uh, yeah," I said. I now wondered if I was showing unexpected side-effects from the potion. Maybe a ten minute waiting period hadn't been quite enough. Maybe the anti-fertility potion had never been tested on those with infernal or extraplanar blood. "Why? Do I look... is something..."
"There's something... off... about you," she said. "It's hard to explain."
"You look okay to me," Ian said. "Did you go to the healing center?"
"Oh, yeah," I said.
"Why were you in the healing center?" Amaranth asked. "Mackenzie, baby, is something wrong?"
"No, really," I said, trying to put as much assurance into my voice as I could. Whatever had Amaranth spooked, the news that I'd gone for healing certainly wasn't helping put her mind at ease. "During the night of the fish-beast, Ian and I had sex without a ring... so they gave me a potion to cure disease and another one to inhibit fertility, you know, just so I don't end up pregnant... well, it'll wear off in two weeks... could you be seeing that somehow?" I asked Amaranth.
"Oh yes,," she said. "I guess that does explain it."
"You don't think there's something else, do you?" I asked. "Because I also took a cure disease potion right before it, so... I should be pretty healthy. But I don't want to take any chances"
"Yes, I'm sure you're," Amaranth said. "I've never seen anything like it... it just looks funny, is all. I suppose I'll get used to it."
"What exactly are you seeing?" I asked. I didn't want her to be worried, but I also wanted to be sure there wasn't anything for her to be worried about.
"Well, 'seeing' isn't really the best word... okay, maybe it is the best word but it's a case where the best word isn't actually very good," she said. "I guess I could just say 'sensing', since I am processing the information coming to me through a sense, but that always makes me picture something like Dee getting all psionic, where this is more like a physical sense, like sight or smell, but..."
"What are you sensing?" I asked.
"Just... well, it would be like seeing a shadow," she said. "A dark spot. Or a blank one. Like something that should be there is being blocked out, or erased. Like I said, I've never experienced something like it before, but I suppose it is how I would 'sense' things if your natural fertility was being suppressed."
"Wouldn't someone who happens to be infertile hit you the same way?" Steff asked.
"No," Amaranth said. "I mean, I can tell when people are more or less fertile in the course of things, but this stands out... it's like the difference between knowing all your life that people have different faces, and then seeing someone wearing a mask for the first time. It was a little startling."
"Well, I'm going to go get a tray," I said. "I'll be right back."
I headed for the desserts first. I felt like I deserved a bit of a treat for what I'd done... well, it was more like I felt like I should feel that way, that Amaranth or others might think I deserved something. I didn't feel like I wasn''t entitled to something, and I supposed that was a start.
What I really would have liked was something with a good deal of meat to it, but lunch time was the worst meal for that. Breakfast always had some combination of bacon, sausage, or ham available by itself.
Dinner sometimes had a meaty entree, mixed in with the rice and noodle dishes that had shreds of chicken or tuna or beef hidden like tiny prizes among the larger bits of starch that weren't so much seasoned as stained interesting shades of brown and yellow.
For noontime meat entrees, we were pretty much stuck with the alleged chicken-and-rice dishes, and occasionally things like cold cut sandwiches. Most students seemed to just fill up a plate at the salad bar or grab some of the snackier items.
But as I passed the salad bar on the way to the cake and stuff, I noticed something: there were great big strips of chopped up ham and pieces of grilled chicken sitting on it. So I ended up with two pieces of strawberry cake and something that stretched the definition of "salad" to the breaking point and beyond for lunch, but even if I couldn't convince myself that I deserved anything special, I also couldn't convince myself that I didn't want a pyramid of chicken and ham stacked over a thin layer of lettuce.
I expected a bit of reproach for my meal choice from Amaranth, but she just raised an eyebrow at it.
"There's an interesting question that just popped into my head," Amaranth said. "If you did get pregnant by a human father, would you need to eat human sustenance while you were carrying the child?"
"I don't know," I said. "My understanding is that human appetite plus demon appetite divided by two equals a slightly moderated demon appetite, because demonic hunger is stronger or bigger or more dominant than human... at least, that's how I made sense of it when my grandmother explained it, to the extent that she epxlained. I suppose at some point it's got to average out to the point that a human with infernal blood would have to eat human food. I just don't know what that point is... and I'm not too interested in finding out."
"Well, you never know how you'll feel in the future," Amaranth said. "You might change your mind. And after all, if you were to find out that three-quarters human or non-demon would be enough to allow a more conventional diet, wouldn't that do away with one of your main objections to being pregnant?"
"Psst... I think Amy wants you to have her babies," Steff said.
"Well, obviously not," Amaranth said, rolling her eyes, "I just want Mack to be aware of what her options really are."
"I've had enough of options for now, I think," I said. "I don't want to think about choices, or possibilities, or potential. I just want to coast for a while."
"Then I've got good news for you," Steff said. "It's all downhill from here!"
Amaranth wasn't the only one who noticed something different about me... I saw Celia in the stairwell and she flicked out her tongue and told me that I "tasted funny".
This wasn't the first time she'd said something like that to me, so rather than assuming she was talking about my potion use I just said, "I thought you'd be used to my scent by now."
"Different than what passes for normal, for you," she said. "Like when you're having a weird mammal thing, only... different."
"Oh, well, I'm sort of on something at the moment," I said. "For health reasons," I added, since Celia was the biggest user of recreational alchemy in the dorm.
"No shit?" she said, her big, lidless eyes brightening. "You got anything you want to trade?"
"No, it was just a single dose thing," I said. "And I wouldn't want to trade... this is a legitimate health need."
"Hey, I've got not needs, too," Celia said. "Emotional needs, spiritual needs... there's more to health than blood and guts."
"Yeah, well, I'm not judging... I'm just saying I'm not holding or carrying or whatever you'd call it, and I'm not looking for anything," I said.
"Alright. Cool," Celia said. "Baby steps. Got to learn to slither before you learn to walk, I get that. Oh, Feejee asked me if I'd seen you."
"Why?" I asked.
"Don't know. Why don't you ask her yourself? I don't even know why she asked me in the first place," Celia said. "She's a lot 'closer' to you than I am. If I had eyebrows I'd be raising them when I said 'closer'."
"Was she in your room?" I asked.
"Yeah," Celia said. "Where do you think I just came from?"
"Okay... thanks," I said.
"Don't overwhelm me with gratitude or anything," Celia said, and she went on her way.
Feejee and Celia's room was at the near end of the hall, the closest one to the bathroom not counting Kiersta's. I'd have to walk right past it to get to my own room. I decided that was okay, though... if Feejee were looking for me, it would be better for her to find me in the hallway of our shared dorm than out and out about somewhere. There were bound to be at least a few other people on the floor, and I had my own room to retreat to.
It wasn't like she could corner me, I realized... if I had to, I could always break down the nearest door and jump through a window. I didn't tend to think of things like that because I'd been brought up to think of using my strength like that as something like a horrible sin. My brain really didn't even pick it out as an option in most cases.
But I wasn't too worried. It wasn't like I didn't believe Feejee was capable of harming me, but she was also at the same time determined to be friendly, and she also held to her own people's values when it came to things like hunting on the land. That was more than could be said for Iona. I also knew that I could cow Feejee with a show of my own predatory mojo, if I could muster it.
The man in my dreams had called mermaids "sea devils"... that raised some interesting questions. Was that just an old name for them in their monstrous forms, or was there something more significant to the name? In another one of my dreams, he'd suggested that the current state of the demon race was as a result of meddling by Khersis... if demons had once been another race of human predators inhabiting the natural world, might they not have been similar to land-dwelling mermaids?
Of course, demons couldn't shift their shapes... at least, no more than humans or most other races could. An immortal life span and a hefty power reserve meant that a given demon was likely to be better at altering its shape than a given human.
All of this was an interesting mental digression, but if I was going to go upstairs and face Feejee I would need to do that. Well... I wasn't so much specifically planning on facing her as I was planning on walking past her room and letting her say whatever she wanted to say to me outside in the hallway. I wasn't going to go out of my way to confront her and I wasn't going to go off alone with her.
One hour of writing:
The good thing about taking the potion was that it was really easy for me to believe that it was in fact doing nothing. There was no immediately noticeable effect when I swallowed it. Then it was sitting there for ten minutes while Roger sat nearby, flipping through a textbook and occasionally glancing at the timepiece.
Yes, there was nothing like ten solid minutes of nothing happening to convince oneself that the potion one had taken might as well have been interesting colored water for all of the pregnancies it would actually terminate.
"And that's it," Roger said finally. "Remember, don't take anything else and try to stay away from any buffs or debuffs for the next two weeks. There wouldn't be any interactions with most of them, but we don't want any nasty surprises."
"Okay," I said.
The whole thing had taken maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, including the wait before I'd seen Roger. I figured the others had probably headed for lunch already, but they wouldn't be anywhere near finished, and I still had to eat... okay, technically I didn't have to eat. But I still enjoyed and was in the habit of eating, and was expected to by my owner, so I went straight to the dining hall.
After I got inside, I decided to check in at the table where the others were before getting my food. My jitters from earlier weren't ready to leave just yet, so they were finding new things to pester me about, like what would happen if everybody else finished eating just as I was sitting down and so they had to sit there awkwardly while I ate or else they'd all just get up and go, leaving me sitting there alone...
Nothing, I told them. Nothing is what would happen. Certainly nothing worth dwelling on or complaining about.
The jitters were unimpressed with my reasoning, but I held firm.
Ian was there, as I'd expected, along with Amaranth and Steff and Two. Amaranth looked up as I approached, but her smile froze on her face and her perpetually sun-kissed skin paled just a little.
"What's... what's wrong?" I asked as the once-downcast jitters rejoiced.
"Do you feel okay, baby?" she asked me.
"Uh, yeah," I said. I now wondered if I was showing unexpected side-effects from the potion. Maybe a ten minute waiting period hadn't been quite enough. Maybe the anti-fertility potion had never been tested on those with infernal or extraplanar blood. "Why? Do I look... is something..."
"There's something... off... about you," she said. "It's hard to explain."
"You look okay to me," Ian said. "Did you go to the healing center?"
"Oh, yeah," I said.
"Why were you in the healing center?" Amaranth asked. "Mackenzie, baby, is something wrong?"
"No, really," I said, trying to put as much assurance into my voice as I could. Whatever had Amaranth spooked, the news that I'd gone for healing certainly wasn't helping put her mind at ease. "During the night of the fish-beast, Ian and I had sex without a ring... so they gave me a potion to cure disease and another one to inhibit fertility, you know, just so I don't end up pregnant... well, it'll wear off in two weeks... could you be seeing that somehow?" I asked Amaranth.
"Oh yes,," she said. "I guess that does explain it."
"You don't think there's something else, do you?" I asked. "Because I also took a cure disease potion right before it, so... I should be pretty healthy. But I don't want to take any chances"
"Yes, I'm sure you're," Amaranth said. "I've never seen anything like it... it just looks funny, is all. I suppose I'll get used to it."
"What exactly are you seeing?" I asked. I didn't want her to be worried, but I also wanted to be sure there wasn't anything for her to be worried about.
"Well, 'seeing' isn't really the best word... okay, maybe it is the best word but it's a case where the best word isn't actually very good," she said. "I guess I could just say 'sensing', since I am processing the information coming to me through a sense, but that always makes me picture something like Dee getting all psionic, where this is more like a physical sense, like sight or smell, but..."
"What are you sensing?" I asked.
"Just... well, it would be like seeing a shadow," she said. "A dark spot. Or a blank one. Like something that should be there is being blocked out, or erased. Like I said, I've never experienced something like it before, but I suppose it is how I would 'sense' things if your natural fertility was being suppressed."
"Wouldn't someone who happens to be infertile hit you the same way?" Steff asked.
"No," Amaranth said. "I mean, I can tell when people are more or less fertile in the course of things, but this stands out... it's like the difference between knowing all your life that people have different faces, and then seeing someone wearing a mask for the first time. It was a little startling."
"Well, I'm going to go get a tray," I said. "I'll be right back."
I headed for the desserts first. I felt like I deserved a bit of a treat for what I'd done... well, it was more like I felt like I should feel that way, that Amaranth or others might think I deserved something. I didn't feel like I wasn''t entitled to something, and I supposed that was a start.
What I really would have liked was something with a good deal of meat to it, but lunch time was the worst meal for that. Breakfast always had some combination of bacon, sausage, or ham available by itself.
Dinner sometimes had a meaty entree, mixed in with the rice and noodle dishes that had shreds of chicken or tuna or beef hidden like tiny prizes among the larger bits of starch that weren't so much seasoned as stained interesting shades of brown and yellow.
For noontime meat entrees, we were pretty much stuck with the alleged chicken-and-rice dishes, and occasionally things like cold cut sandwiches. Most students seemed to just fill up a plate at the salad bar or grab some of the snackier items.
But as I passed the salad bar on the way to the cake and stuff, I noticed something: there were great big strips of chopped up ham and pieces of grilled chicken sitting on it. So I ended up with two pieces of strawberry cake and something that stretched the definition of "salad" to the breaking point and beyond for lunch, but even if I couldn't convince myself that I deserved anything special, I also couldn't convince myself that I didn't want a pyramid of chicken and ham stacked over a thin layer of lettuce.
I expected a bit of reproach for my meal choice from Amaranth, but she just raised an eyebrow at it.
"There's an interesting question that just popped into my head," Amaranth said. "If you did get pregnant by a human father, would you need to eat human sustenance while you were carrying the child?"
"I don't know," I said. "My understanding is that human appetite plus demon appetite divided by two equals a slightly moderated demon appetite, because demonic hunger is stronger or bigger or more dominant than human... at least, that's how I made sense of it when my grandmother explained it, to the extent that she epxlained. I suppose at some point it's got to average out to the point that a human with infernal blood would have to eat human food. I just don't know what that point is... and I'm not too interested in finding out."
"Well, you never know how you'll feel in the future," Amaranth said. "You might change your mind. And after all, if you were to find out that three-quarters human or non-demon would be enough to allow a more conventional diet, wouldn't that do away with one of your main objections to being pregnant?"
"Psst... I think Amy wants you to have her babies," Steff said.
"Well, obviously not," Amaranth said, rolling her eyes, "I just want Mack to be aware of what her options really are."
"I've had enough of options for now, I think," I said. "I don't want to think about choices, or possibilities, or potential. I just want to coast for a while."
"Then I've got good news for you," Steff said. "It's all downhill from here!"
Amaranth wasn't the only one who noticed something different about me... I passed Celia in the stairwell and she flicked out her tongue and told me that I "tasted funny"
Status at half hour mark:
The good thing about taking the potion was that it was really easy for me to believe that it was in fact doing nothing. There was no immediately noticeable effect when I swallowed it. Then it was sitting there for ten minutes while Roger sat nearby, flipping through a textbook and occasionally glancing at the timepiece.
"And that's it," he said. "Remember, don't take anything else and try to stay away from any buffs or debuffs for the next two weeks. There wouldn't be any interactions with most of them, but we don't want any nasty surprises."
"Okay," I said.
The whole thing had taken maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, including the wait before I'd seen Roger. I figured the others had probably headed for lunch already, but they wouldn't be anywhere near finished, and I still had to eat... okay, technically I didn't have to eat. But I still enjoyed and was in the habit of eating, and was expected to by my owner, so I went straight to the dining hall.
Ian was there, as I'd expected, along with Amaranth and Steff and Two. Amaranth looked up as I approached, but her smile froze on her face and her perpetually sun-kissed skin paled just a little.
"What's... what's wrong?" I asked.
"Do you feel okay, baby?" she asked me.
"Uh, yeah," I said. I wondered if I was showing unexpected side-effects from the potion. Maybe a ten minute waiting period hadn't been quite enough. Maybe the anti-fertility potion had never been tested on those with infernal or extraplanar blood. "Why? Do I look... is something..."
"There's something... off... about you," she said. "It's hard to explain."
"You look okay to me," Ian said. "Did you go to the healing center?"
"Oh, yeah," I said. "I took a potion to inhibit fertility. It'll wear off in two weeks... could you be seeing that somehow?" I asked Amaranth.
"Oh yes,," she said. "I guess that does explain it."
"You don't think there's something else, do you?" I asked. "Because I also took a cure disease potion right before it, so... I should be pretty healthy. But I don't want to take any chances"
"Yes, I'm sure you're," Amaranth said. "I've never seen anything like it... it just looks funny, is all."
"What are you seeing?" I asked.
"Well, 'seeing' isn't really the best word... okay, maybe it is the best word but it's a case where the best word isn't actually very good," she said. "I guess I could just say 'sensing', since I am processing the information coming to me through a sense, but that always makes me picture something like Dee getting all psionic, where this is more like a physical sense, like sight or smell, but..."
"What are you sensing?" I asked.
"Just... well, it would be like seeing a shadow," she said. "A dark spot. Or a blank one. Like something that should be there is being blocked out, or erased. Like I said, I've never experienced something like it before, but I suppose it is how I would 'sense' things if your natural fertility was being suppressed."
"Wouldn't someone who is infertile hit you the same way?" Steff asked.
"No," Amaranth said. "I mean, I notice when people are more or less fertile in the course of things, but this stands out... it's like the difference between knowing all your life that people have different faces, and then seeing someone wearing a mask for the first time. It was a little startling."
"Well, I'm going to go get a tray," I said. "I'll be right back."
I headed for the desserts first. I felt like I deserved a bit of a treat for what I'd done... well, it was more like I felt like I should feel that way, that Amaranth or others might think I deserved something. I didn't feel like I wasn''t entitled to something, and I supposed that was a start.
What I really would have liked was something with a good deal of meat to it, but lunch time was the worst meal for meat. Breakfast always had some combination of bacon, sausage, or ham available by itself.
Dinner sometimes had a meaty entree, mixed in with the rice and noodle dishes that had shreds of chicken or tuna or beef hidden like tiny prizes among the larger bits of starch that weren't so much seasoned as stained interesting shades of brown and yellow.
For noontime meat entrees, we were pretty much stuck with the alleged chicken-and-rice dishes, and occasionally things like cold cut sandwiches. Most students seemed to just fill up a plate at the salad bar or grab some of the snackier items.
Status: In progress (10:30 PM)
Word Count: ~2250
Hours Writing: 1.5
One and a half hour of writing
The good thing about taking the potion was that it was really easy for me to believe that it was in fact doing nothing. There was no immediately noticeable effect when I swallowed it. Then it was sitting there for ten minutes while Roger sat nearby, flipping through a textbook and occasionally glancing at the timepiece.
Yes, there was nothing like ten solid minutes of nothing happening to convince oneself that the potion one had taken might as well have been interesting colored water for all of the pregnancies it would actually terminate.
"And that's it," Roger said finally. "Remember, don't take anything else and try to stay away from any buffs or debuffs for the next two weeks. There wouldn't be any interactions with most of them, but we don't want any nasty surprises."
"Okay," I said.
The whole thing had taken maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, including the wait before I'd seen Roger. I figured the others had probably headed for lunch already, but they wouldn't be anywhere near finished, and I still had to eat... okay, technically I didn't have to eat. But I still enjoyed and was in the habit of eating, and was expected to by my owner, so I went straight to the dining hall.
After I got inside, I decided to check in at the table where the others were before getting my food. My jitters from earlier weren't ready to leave just yet, so they were finding new things to pester me about, like what would happen if everybody else finished eating just as I was sitting down and so they had to sit there awkwardly while I ate or else they'd all just get up and go, leaving me sitting there alone...
Nothing, I told them. Nothing is what would happen. Certainly nothing worth dwelling on or complaining about.
The jitters were unimpressed with my reasoning, but I held firm.
Ian was there, as I'd expected, along with Amaranth and Steff and Two. Amaranth looked up as I approached, but her smile froze on her face and her perpetually sun-kissed skin paled just a little.
"What's... what's wrong?" I asked as the once-downcast jitters rejoiced.
"Do you feel okay, baby?" she asked me.
"Uh, yeah," I said. I now wondered if I was showing unexpected side-effects from the potion. Maybe a ten minute waiting period hadn't been quite enough. Maybe the anti-fertility potion had never been tested on those with infernal or extraplanar blood. "Why? Do I look... is something..."
"There's something... off... about you," she said. "It's hard to explain."
"You look okay to me," Ian said. "Did you go to the healing center?"
"Oh, yeah," I said.
"Why were you in the healing center?" Amaranth asked. "Mackenzie, baby, is something wrong?"
"No, really," I said, trying to put as much assurance into my voice as I could. Whatever had Amaranth spooked, the news that I'd gone for healing certainly wasn't helping put her mind at ease. "During the night of the fish-beast, Ian and I had sex without a ring... so they gave me a potion to cure disease and another one to inhibit fertility, you know, just so I don't end up pregnant... well, it'll wear off in two weeks... could you be seeing that somehow?" I asked Amaranth.
"Oh yes,," she said. "I guess that does explain it."
"You don't think there's something else, do you?" I asked. "Because I also took a cure disease potion right before it, so... I should be pretty healthy. But I don't want to take any chances"
"Yes, I'm sure you're," Amaranth said. "I've never seen anything like it... it just looks funny, is all. I suppose I'll get used to it."
"What exactly are you seeing?" I asked. I didn't want her to be worried, but I also wanted to be sure there wasn't anything for her to be worried about.
"Well, 'seeing' isn't really the best word... okay, maybe it is the best word but it's a case where the best word isn't actually very good," she said. "I guess I could just say 'sensing', since I am processing the information coming to me through a sense, but that always makes me picture something like Dee getting all psionic, where this is more like a physical sense, like sight or smell, but..."
"What are you sensing?" I asked.
"Just... well, it would be like seeing a shadow," she said. "A dark spot. Or a blank one. Like something that should be there is being blocked out, or erased. Like I said, I've never experienced something like it before, but I suppose it is how I would 'sense' things if your natural fertility was being suppressed."
"Wouldn't someone who happens to be infertile hit you the same way?" Steff asked.
"No," Amaranth said. "I mean, I can tell when people are more or less fertile in the course of things, but this stands out... it's like the difference between knowing all your life that people have different faces, and then seeing someone wearing a mask for the first time. It was a little startling."
"Well, I'm going to go get a tray," I said. "I'll be right back."
I headed for the desserts first. I felt like I deserved a bit of a treat for what I'd done... well, it was more like I felt like I should feel that way, that Amaranth or others might think I deserved something. I didn't feel like I wasn''t entitled to something, and I supposed that was a start.
What I really would have liked was something with a good deal of meat to it, but lunch time was the worst meal for that. Breakfast always had some combination of bacon, sausage, or ham available by itself.
Dinner sometimes had a meaty entree, mixed in with the rice and noodle dishes that had shreds of chicken or tuna or beef hidden like tiny prizes among the larger bits of starch that weren't so much seasoned as stained interesting shades of brown and yellow.
For noontime meat entrees, we were pretty much stuck with the alleged chicken-and-rice dishes, and occasionally things like cold cut sandwiches. Most students seemed to just fill up a plate at the salad bar or grab some of the snackier items.
But as I passed the salad bar on the way to the cake and stuff, I noticed something: there were great big strips of chopped up ham and pieces of grilled chicken sitting on it. So I ended up with two pieces of strawberry cake and something that stretched the definition of "salad" to the breaking point and beyond for lunch, but even if I couldn't convince myself that I deserved anything special, I also couldn't convince myself that I didn't want a pyramid of chicken and ham stacked over a thin layer of lettuce.
I expected a bit of reproach for my meal choice from Amaranth, but she just raised an eyebrow at it.
"There's an interesting question that just popped into my head," Amaranth said. "If you did get pregnant by a human father, would you need to eat human sustenance while you were carrying the child?"
"I don't know," I said. "My understanding is that human appetite plus demon appetite divided by two equals a slightly moderated demon appetite, because demonic hunger is stronger or bigger or more dominant than human... at least, that's how I made sense of it when my grandmother explained it, to the extent that she epxlained. I suppose at some point it's got to average out to the point that a human with infernal blood would have to eat human food. I just don't know what that point is... and I'm not too interested in finding out."
"Well, you never know how you'll feel in the future," Amaranth said. "You might change your mind. And after all, if you were to find out that three-quarters human or non-demon would be enough to allow a more conventional diet, wouldn't that do away with one of your main objections to being pregnant?"
"Psst... I think Amy wants you to have her babies," Steff said.
"Well, obviously not," Amaranth said, rolling her eyes, "I just want Mack to be aware of what her options really are."
"I've had enough of options for now, I think," I said. "I don't want to think about choices, or possibilities, or potential. I just want to coast for a while."
"Then I've got good news for you," Steff said. "It's all downhill from here!"
Amaranth wasn't the only one who noticed something different about me... I saw Celia in the stairwell and she flicked out her tongue and told me that I "tasted funny".
This wasn't the first time she'd said something like that to me, so rather than assuming she was talking about my potion use I just said, "I thought you'd be used to my scent by now."
"Different than what passes for normal, for you," she said. "Like when you're having a weird mammal thing, only... different."
"Oh, well, I'm sort of on something at the moment," I said. "For health reasons," I added, since Celia was the biggest user of recreational alchemy in the dorm.
"No shit?" she said, her big, lidless eyes brightening. "You got anything you want to trade?"
"No, it was just a single dose thing," I said. "And I wouldn't want to trade... this is a legitimate health need."
"Hey, I've got not needs, too," Celia said. "Emotional needs, spiritual needs... there's more to health than blood and guts."
"Yeah, well, I'm not judging... I'm just saying I'm not holding or carrying or whatever you'd call it, and I'm not looking for anything," I said.
"Alright. Cool," Celia said. "Baby steps. Got to learn to slither before you learn to walk, I get that. Oh, Feejee asked me if I'd seen you."
"Why?" I asked.
"Don't know. Why don't you ask her yourself? I don't even know why she asked me in the first place," Celia said. "She's a lot 'closer' to you than I am. If I had eyebrows I'd be raising them when I said 'closer'."
"Was she in your room?" I asked.
"Yeah," Celia said. "Where do you think I just came from?"
"Okay... thanks," I said.
"Don't overwhelm me with gratitude or anything," Celia said, and she went on her way.
Feejee and Celia's room was at the near end of the hall, the closest one to the bathroom not counting Kiersta's. I'd have to walk right past it to get to my own room. I decided that was okay, though... if Feejee were looking for me, it would be better for her to find me in the hallway of our shared dorm than out and out about somewhere. There were bound to be at least a few other people on the floor, and I had my own room to retreat to.
It wasn't like she could corner me, I realized... if I had to, I could always break down the nearest door and jump through a window. I didn't tend to think of things like that because I'd been brought up to think of using my strength like that as something like a horrible sin. My brain really didn't even pick it out as an option in most cases.
But I wasn't too worried. It wasn't like I didn't believe Feejee was capable of harming me, but she was also at the same time determined to be friendly, and she also held to her own people's values when it came to things like hunting on the land. That was more than could be said for Iona. I also knew that I could cow Feejee with a show of my own predatory mojo, if I could muster it.
The man in my dreams had called mermaids "sea devils"... that raised some interesting questions. Was that just an old name for them in their monstrous forms, or was there something more significant to the name? In another one of my dreams, he'd suggested that the current state of the demon race was as a result of meddling by Khersis... if demons had once been another race of human predators inhabiting the natural world, might they not have been similar to land-dwelling mermaids?
Of course, demons couldn't shift their shapes... at least, no more than humans or most other races could. An immortal life span and a hefty power reserve meant that a given demon was likely to be better at altering its shape than a given human.
All of this was an interesting mental digression, but if I was going to go upstairs and face Feejee I would need to do that. Well... I wasn't so much specifically planning on facing her as I was planning on walking past her room and letting her say whatever she wanted to say to me outside in the hallway. I wasn't going to go out of my way to confront her and I wasn't going to go off alone with her.
One hour of writing:
The good thing about taking the potion was that it was really easy for me to believe that it was in fact doing nothing. There was no immediately noticeable effect when I swallowed it. Then it was sitting there for ten minutes while Roger sat nearby, flipping through a textbook and occasionally glancing at the timepiece.
Yes, there was nothing like ten solid minutes of nothing happening to convince oneself that the potion one had taken might as well have been interesting colored water for all of the pregnancies it would actually terminate.
"And that's it," Roger said finally. "Remember, don't take anything else and try to stay away from any buffs or debuffs for the next two weeks. There wouldn't be any interactions with most of them, but we don't want any nasty surprises."
"Okay," I said.
The whole thing had taken maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, including the wait before I'd seen Roger. I figured the others had probably headed for lunch already, but they wouldn't be anywhere near finished, and I still had to eat... okay, technically I didn't have to eat. But I still enjoyed and was in the habit of eating, and was expected to by my owner, so I went straight to the dining hall.
After I got inside, I decided to check in at the table where the others were before getting my food. My jitters from earlier weren't ready to leave just yet, so they were finding new things to pester me about, like what would happen if everybody else finished eating just as I was sitting down and so they had to sit there awkwardly while I ate or else they'd all just get up and go, leaving me sitting there alone...
Nothing, I told them. Nothing is what would happen. Certainly nothing worth dwelling on or complaining about.
The jitters were unimpressed with my reasoning, but I held firm.
Ian was there, as I'd expected, along with Amaranth and Steff and Two. Amaranth looked up as I approached, but her smile froze on her face and her perpetually sun-kissed skin paled just a little.
"What's... what's wrong?" I asked as the once-downcast jitters rejoiced.
"Do you feel okay, baby?" she asked me.
"Uh, yeah," I said. I now wondered if I was showing unexpected side-effects from the potion. Maybe a ten minute waiting period hadn't been quite enough. Maybe the anti-fertility potion had never been tested on those with infernal or extraplanar blood. "Why? Do I look... is something..."
"There's something... off... about you," she said. "It's hard to explain."
"You look okay to me," Ian said. "Did you go to the healing center?"
"Oh, yeah," I said.
"Why were you in the healing center?" Amaranth asked. "Mackenzie, baby, is something wrong?"
"No, really," I said, trying to put as much assurance into my voice as I could. Whatever had Amaranth spooked, the news that I'd gone for healing certainly wasn't helping put her mind at ease. "During the night of the fish-beast, Ian and I had sex without a ring... so they gave me a potion to cure disease and another one to inhibit fertility, you know, just so I don't end up pregnant... well, it'll wear off in two weeks... could you be seeing that somehow?" I asked Amaranth.
"Oh yes,," she said. "I guess that does explain it."
"You don't think there's something else, do you?" I asked. "Because I also took a cure disease potion right before it, so... I should be pretty healthy. But I don't want to take any chances"
"Yes, I'm sure you're," Amaranth said. "I've never seen anything like it... it just looks funny, is all. I suppose I'll get used to it."
"What exactly are you seeing?" I asked. I didn't want her to be worried, but I also wanted to be sure there wasn't anything for her to be worried about.
"Well, 'seeing' isn't really the best word... okay, maybe it is the best word but it's a case where the best word isn't actually very good," she said. "I guess I could just say 'sensing', since I am processing the information coming to me through a sense, but that always makes me picture something like Dee getting all psionic, where this is more like a physical sense, like sight or smell, but..."
"What are you sensing?" I asked.
"Just... well, it would be like seeing a shadow," she said. "A dark spot. Or a blank one. Like something that should be there is being blocked out, or erased. Like I said, I've never experienced something like it before, but I suppose it is how I would 'sense' things if your natural fertility was being suppressed."
"Wouldn't someone who happens to be infertile hit you the same way?" Steff asked.
"No," Amaranth said. "I mean, I can tell when people are more or less fertile in the course of things, but this stands out... it's like the difference between knowing all your life that people have different faces, and then seeing someone wearing a mask for the first time. It was a little startling."
"Well, I'm going to go get a tray," I said. "I'll be right back."
I headed for the desserts first. I felt like I deserved a bit of a treat for what I'd done... well, it was more like I felt like I should feel that way, that Amaranth or others might think I deserved something. I didn't feel like I wasn''t entitled to something, and I supposed that was a start.
What I really would have liked was something with a good deal of meat to it, but lunch time was the worst meal for that. Breakfast always had some combination of bacon, sausage, or ham available by itself.
Dinner sometimes had a meaty entree, mixed in with the rice and noodle dishes that had shreds of chicken or tuna or beef hidden like tiny prizes among the larger bits of starch that weren't so much seasoned as stained interesting shades of brown and yellow.
For noontime meat entrees, we were pretty much stuck with the alleged chicken-and-rice dishes, and occasionally things like cold cut sandwiches. Most students seemed to just fill up a plate at the salad bar or grab some of the snackier items.
But as I passed the salad bar on the way to the cake and stuff, I noticed something: there were great big strips of chopped up ham and pieces of grilled chicken sitting on it. So I ended up with two pieces of strawberry cake and something that stretched the definition of "salad" to the breaking point and beyond for lunch, but even if I couldn't convince myself that I deserved anything special, I also couldn't convince myself that I didn't want a pyramid of chicken and ham stacked over a thin layer of lettuce.
I expected a bit of reproach for my meal choice from Amaranth, but she just raised an eyebrow at it.
"There's an interesting question that just popped into my head," Amaranth said. "If you did get pregnant by a human father, would you need to eat human sustenance while you were carrying the child?"
"I don't know," I said. "My understanding is that human appetite plus demon appetite divided by two equals a slightly moderated demon appetite, because demonic hunger is stronger or bigger or more dominant than human... at least, that's how I made sense of it when my grandmother explained it, to the extent that she epxlained. I suppose at some point it's got to average out to the point that a human with infernal blood would have to eat human food. I just don't know what that point is... and I'm not too interested in finding out."
"Well, you never know how you'll feel in the future," Amaranth said. "You might change your mind. And after all, if you were to find out that three-quarters human or non-demon would be enough to allow a more conventional diet, wouldn't that do away with one of your main objections to being pregnant?"
"Psst... I think Amy wants you to have her babies," Steff said.
"Well, obviously not," Amaranth said, rolling her eyes, "I just want Mack to be aware of what her options really are."
"I've had enough of options for now, I think," I said. "I don't want to think about choices, or possibilities, or potential. I just want to coast for a while."
"Then I've got good news for you," Steff said. "It's all downhill from here!"
Amaranth wasn't the only one who noticed something different about me... I passed Celia in the stairwell and she flicked out her tongue and told me that I "tasted funny"
Status at half hour mark:
The good thing about taking the potion was that it was really easy for me to believe that it was in fact doing nothing. There was no immediately noticeable effect when I swallowed it. Then it was sitting there for ten minutes while Roger sat nearby, flipping through a textbook and occasionally glancing at the timepiece.
"And that's it," he said. "Remember, don't take anything else and try to stay away from any buffs or debuffs for the next two weeks. There wouldn't be any interactions with most of them, but we don't want any nasty surprises."
"Okay," I said.
The whole thing had taken maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, including the wait before I'd seen Roger. I figured the others had probably headed for lunch already, but they wouldn't be anywhere near finished, and I still had to eat... okay, technically I didn't have to eat. But I still enjoyed and was in the habit of eating, and was expected to by my owner, so I went straight to the dining hall.
Ian was there, as I'd expected, along with Amaranth and Steff and Two. Amaranth looked up as I approached, but her smile froze on her face and her perpetually sun-kissed skin paled just a little.
"What's... what's wrong?" I asked.
"Do you feel okay, baby?" she asked me.
"Uh, yeah," I said. I wondered if I was showing unexpected side-effects from the potion. Maybe a ten minute waiting period hadn't been quite enough. Maybe the anti-fertility potion had never been tested on those with infernal or extraplanar blood. "Why? Do I look... is something..."
"There's something... off... about you," she said. "It's hard to explain."
"You look okay to me," Ian said. "Did you go to the healing center?"
"Oh, yeah," I said. "I took a potion to inhibit fertility. It'll wear off in two weeks... could you be seeing that somehow?" I asked Amaranth.
"Oh yes,," she said. "I guess that does explain it."
"You don't think there's something else, do you?" I asked. "Because I also took a cure disease potion right before it, so... I should be pretty healthy. But I don't want to take any chances"
"Yes, I'm sure you're," Amaranth said. "I've never seen anything like it... it just looks funny, is all."
"What are you seeing?" I asked.
"Well, 'seeing' isn't really the best word... okay, maybe it is the best word but it's a case where the best word isn't actually very good," she said. "I guess I could just say 'sensing', since I am processing the information coming to me through a sense, but that always makes me picture something like Dee getting all psionic, where this is more like a physical sense, like sight or smell, but..."
"What are you sensing?" I asked.
"Just... well, it would be like seeing a shadow," she said. "A dark spot. Or a blank one. Like something that should be there is being blocked out, or erased. Like I said, I've never experienced something like it before, but I suppose it is how I would 'sense' things if your natural fertility was being suppressed."
"Wouldn't someone who is infertile hit you the same way?" Steff asked.
"No," Amaranth said. "I mean, I notice when people are more or less fertile in the course of things, but this stands out... it's like the difference between knowing all your life that people have different faces, and then seeing someone wearing a mask for the first time. It was a little startling."
"Well, I'm going to go get a tray," I said. "I'll be right back."
I headed for the desserts first. I felt like I deserved a bit of a treat for what I'd done... well, it was more like I felt like I should feel that way, that Amaranth or others might think I deserved something. I didn't feel like I wasn''t entitled to something, and I supposed that was a start.
What I really would have liked was something with a good deal of meat to it, but lunch time was the worst meal for meat. Breakfast always had some combination of bacon, sausage, or ham available by itself.
Dinner sometimes had a meaty entree, mixed in with the rice and noodle dishes that had shreds of chicken or tuna or beef hidden like tiny prizes among the larger bits of starch that weren't so much seasoned as stained interesting shades of brown and yellow.
For noontime meat entrees, we were pretty much stuck with the alleged chicken-and-rice dishes, and occasionally things like cold cut sandwiches. Most students seemed to just fill up a plate at the salad bar or grab some of the snackier items.