World A Week: Starving

The Sword of Night had turned me into a mile-tall, phase-shifted humanoid fog bank. And then it messed up turning me back to human. I lay a half-mile long after the partial retransformation, and my skull buzzed in the wake of potentially world-cracking magic, and I had starved to death in the last world, the world of the Sword where I fulfilled a Quest.

Here, I lay amidst triple canopy jungle with my left eye in the top canopy, and my right eye in low-hanging clouds. Sitting up brought me above the cloud layer, and all I could see was white fluffy stuff.

The mere thought of doing magic made my head spin, not that I had a spell directly suited for this. There was the Ghostwalk ritual I'd made on some Gothic space station, and a request for aid from nature spirits to grow plants to gigantic size I'd learned from a verser priestess of an animistic religion. Maybe, I could work the concepts together, but "aargh", the mere thought of doing anything more than simple conversation left my head splitting and my soul as dry as dessert scoured bones.

I ducked under the clouds, and saw a man, a pygmy, I think, sitting in a clearing near me. He was tending a campfire, and something about the smoke beckoned me.

So I approached by scooting on my bottom.

He began speaking in Mandarin Chinese, and shortly I knew a few facts. He was a shaman, and he thought me a wandering spirit in need of help. That was true enough. And this was an alternate timeline where Dynastic China had not turned against technology and inward, and where
everyone spoke a corrupt form of Mandarin as the lingua franca.

The shaman tried to help me, but he was not that good at it. He was more of a happy-go-lucky sort who had not mastered the discipline to really rescue me. That was the bad news. The good news was that he was a happy-go-lucky sort who knew a ton of jokes.

He managed to strengthen me, but still within a week I was gone. The problem was simple. No water, and no food could nourish me unless it was transformed to my state.

I woke in the next world thinner than ever, any maybe a bit shorter. It was a place of pitiless sun. Heat mirages all about, and white rock, and no water even if I could have drank it. I would not last long here, I thought.

Then I saw the woman. Clothed in rags, but quite healthy with a nice tan. She was being pursued by a gang of brutes. Frustrated, I reached for psi powers, but no joy. And my head still ached after that close shave with the lesser powers of the gods.

So I swooped down on the ostrich-riding thugs with their rifles and crude swords and ragged clothing. Startled they drew up short, but they were brave sorts, and not inclined to give up. They shot at me, and tested me in various ways while I contrived to scare them as best as I knew how.

Finally, I went after their mounts, and was rewarded by seeing the ostriches tear off in various directions.

I cast about for the girl, and found her climbing a shale slope.

"Thank you, Great Cloud Being. Know that you have a friend in Cheyenne Mountain."

We talked, quickly, and it developed that she was an American born after the Firefall when the Cuban Missile Crisis got out of hand. The thugs were descendants of Russian invaders.

And she desperately wanted to get over the hill to get to her "Mount". I took that to mean her horse or ostrich, and allowed that I could try to fetch it for her if she gave me a name.

I stepped in five steps over the mountain and into the next valley to try to herd "Duke". Duke stood much shorter than me being only seventy-five feet tall of simian muscle. His eyes glowed, from the atomic radiation, I assumed. I'd entered a world where atomic radiation had created gigantism among the animals.

It seemed fairly smart for an animal, and so it came quickly, and we were in time to rescue Grace.

I journed with them back to their camp outside Cheyenne Mountain, and saw about a dozen of these great beasts being ridden by the tribesmen.

The more numerous invaders of a crude and barbaric but militaristic and brave culture had developed techniques which enabled them to have a chance against these beasts. And the spawning ground was captured by the invaders, and so the next generation of giants would go to the invaders.

I was able to help by scouting. My incorporeal status made me the perfect scout, and so my fellow countrymen were able to reclaim this field of glowing lights where the eggs of the great monkeys had been laid.

The chief scientist, Grace's father, offered to test a theoretical shrink ray on me. It did not work, and I was blown into the next world which was just as well.

I spent the next day looking down on a field of worms of varying sizes. The smaller worms seemed to be on top, and occasionally a much larger worm would rise out of the mass of worms and chomp on some of the surface worms.

Their was no dirt, just squirming worms. I think the ones on top were the bottom of the food chain, and highly photosynthetic. They were solid black so that meant they used all available light, and it seemed as if that light included gamma rays because I felt like I was getting a sunburn as I stayed there.

I was shorter, and it may have been the shrink ray, or it may have been because I was losing mass. The last joing of my fingers was gone.

After one day, I was out of there. My resistance was lower, and it was a harsh place which I think the space commando girl verser had told me of before. H'mm.

The next world was pitch dark. No sun, moon, or stars. Then I started to see bio-luminescense. For a long while, I thought I was in the water, then I thought on land, and then I realized halfway up my trunk was under water, and the rest was leaning onto dry land.

I'd grown so tenous, that I could hardly feel gravity.

There seemed nothing intelligent to talk to although I tried.

My next world, I saw men and woman standing about up to their knees in a sea of blue goo. They wept, and cursed and blamed each other in hysterical tones and in somewhat American English.

I tried to get them to calm down, and find out what the problem was. They were freaked out by me, and later they used me as a symbol.

"See someone else is even more messed over than we are. We need to pull it together." This use of me as a bad example did cheer me in a gallows humor type of way.

I did find out their problem. They'd had a runaway assembler, nanotech make anything device, dissasemble everything not labelled "pet", "sentient", or "house plant" or "planetary crust". All of their buildings, spaceships, computers, etc. were now a chemically inert blue goo. And so was the assembler because it discontinued itself.

Still, I lasted less than a day. Starvation was versing me out quicker and quicker. And while I thought my ability to do magic was improved, my physical status was rapidly worsening. I might end up caught on some loop where I verse out every five minutes.

I really needed to do something, I told myself. Only I was so tired.

The next world was modern, and I appeared on stage in a magic act in a nightclub. The stage magician kept his cool, and incorporated me into his act.

Later, in the dressing room, he asked, no he compelled my by magic to explain what I was. I did in short bursts, and he listened in astonishment that changed to compassion.

He placed a phone call.

"Yes, I'm aware its the middle of the night. This is of potentially great importance. This individual has a great deal of knowledge about other realms, and seeing as we have daemonic assasins dropping in on a weekly basis, I thought you might could wake the Man up. Now!"

Within the hour, the President of the United States and his cabinet surrounded me in spells and pentagrams to try to give me health and transform me.

The made me feel better, and clear-headed, but they were not able to reverse the disintegration, or cause a transformation. The second was beyond the bias in that world, I thought.

Nevertheless, I repayed President David Copperfield for his kindness in telling them all I knew about daemonic realms. I'd definitely vote for him, even if he was so inherently tricky that he'd make Nixon look like an amateur. In his world, the U.S. did not send in the Marines or the Aircraft Carrier. They sent in the CIA which used Magi to cause "accidents" to foes of their country. And of course, they also had interdimensional invaders to deal with while keeping the whole thing secret from the public, for some reason I never found out.

My next world, I found myself in the midst of a transformation even as I awoke. I looked up at trees, and bushes. It was a great relief. So great that I jumped up and down and yelled.

Then I tried to cast magic, but it was hard focusing on all the different aspects that I needed to at the same time, and I felt uncommonly clumsy. The Reverse Ghostwalk spell I'd been considering trying for the first time did not do as advertised. It flung me into an orbit of a nearby flower bush which I later learned was labelled "Ghost's Tears."

A woman of assurance came walking across the fields to me, and I saw she was taller, much taller than I.

"Oh. You naughty, naughty little wizard. Look what you have done to yourself. If only you had just submitted to my spell, you'd be fine." She shook her head, and to my deep embarrassment, I began to cry and to weep.

"There, there, I've got just the thing for you." An air elemental, not at all like the malicious creatures I'd met in the world where this mess started, held me on her arm, and snapped her fingers. An illusionary lollipop appeared. And she stuck it in my mouth. It was the first thing in several weeks I'd tasted, and I was very happy. And I'd wished I'd thought of that earlier when the shaman had offered spells. He might have known an illusion or two that would have made my slow disintegration easier. But, I hardly cared at the moment. My time horizons had shrunk. I was happy now, and that was all that mattered.

On the way back to her gleaming marble castle, we came upon a toddler dressed in solid black with a skull topped wizard's rod.

"I am Virxly the Black, terror of thousands! You will fear me, Tonya of the White Order. You will beg me to kill you before I am finished with you." Of course, he had much poorer diction than that, but I got the gist, and I broke out in tears.

Tonya patted my armspace, and then Frowned.
"Anymore talk like that, and we'll be washing out your mouth with soap." He blanched, and I'm afraid I stuck my tongue out at him.

She carried us both to her tower, and we got acquainted with the others who had tried to teleport into Tonya's Valley to kill her and fallen prey to her spell of Instant Toddlerhood.

It seemed Tonya had a very strong maternal instinct, and a prophecy that said any natural children of hers would destroy the world. So she made her enemies into her children. And she set about raising them to be decent citizens.

It helped that she was very powerful, and clever, and that the local magic system seemed to require the kind of focus that an adult mind did with practise, and a child almost never did.

Being a kind-hearted person, and a powerful mage in one, I thought I had found my deliverance. But she would not listen to me. It had something to do with one of her problem children trying to flash-fry her, and quarter-succeeding:(usually such attempts did not work at all). She healed herself, and then she gave him a serious spanking, and took his magic rod away. And by then, she was not in the mood to hear my problem, and she did not realize I was close to starving. She thought I was elven or something which explained my skinniness. So she compelled a nap, and I versed out in the midst of it.

And in so doing, the spell unwound itself, but maybe it had something to do with what happened next. Indigenous scholar, you ask, what happened next? Well, the universe, sort-of lost track of my molecules, and I came back in another world solid but different. Very different.

Tadeusz