Becoming Monsters: I'm Blue 09

Becoming monsters is the creation of AiLovesToGrow, setting used with permission

This idea comes from Amethyst Dragonfly. Nisha, the Maned Wolf, is the creation of XelArtz, used with permission. Quiverbow is the creation of Domochevsky, used with permission.

If you don't catch the Spaceballs reference, though, I'm shocked you're still reading.

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Chapter 9: Incoming

Sterile white walls surrounded them on Thursday morning, as another irritated look crossed Abbey's face. "Justin, why is it that every time something alarming comes down, you start ignoring what I have to say? I mean, there's today, the Wish resistance, the math exam..."

"Hey, that last one didn't actually happen!"

"Maybe, but it's exactly what you would have done." Abbey was sitting in an examination chair, just a hair under an hour until she needed to be at the bank to get to work. Justin was cutting class, a fact which factored fairly heavily into Abbey's irritation. Another factor was that she had just had to give several medical samples, along with being still hooked up to a couple of monitors, just in case she was actually pregnant.

"Abbey, if the house is really trying to tell us something by making that room, I want to make sure that we have as much notice as possible."

"We haven't even..." her voice drifted off a bit, the sterile surroundings making her unconsciously self-censor.

"I know, I know. Then again, we haven't taken the time to build an enchanted mansion, either, so please excuse me if I'm a bit more open-minded about these things." Behind the Nursery door had been another open and mostly-empty room, containing two adorable cribs. One decorated in pink, one in blue. Next to each was a changing table and a comfortable rocking chair. The tables had storage, though that was empty for the moment.

"You know what caused that one, though. Your Wish didn't say anything about this!"

"I also didn't specify a mansion, either, so..." it was Justin's turn to be interrupted as the doctor came back.

Or, say rather, A Doctor. Not the same one as before. This one was a man, significantly scruffier and leaning on a cane. His name tag read Dr. Abode, and he spoke with a gruff voice. "Well, it looks like you're negative. At least as far as we can tell. No teenie weenie genies coming. "

Relief flooded both of them. No matter what they might have said, Abbey and Justin both knew that neither of them was ready for that kind of responsibility. But, at the same time... Abbey had questions. "What do you mean by 'as far as we can tell?'"

The doctor looked a bit irritated. "How many pregnant Marids do you happen to know? The problem is that your Subrace is obnoxiously rare, and we have no existing literature I can find for information. For all I know, you could be ready to give birth to twins tomorrow. Nothing we have on other kinds of Genies or Humans indicates that, though I can only be... call it 99% sure."

That feeling of relief? Gone. The good doctor's bedside manner could use some work.

"Thank you, Doctor." Justin's own human interaction routine was drilled into him by countless hours slinging coffee and a lack of a doctorate. "I guess you want us to be looking out for anything that might make us think otherwise?"

"Oh, if I had my way I'd strap sensors onto your girlfriend's body for the next month to be sure, but I don't have enough of an excuse to do that right now. There is a critical patient I also have almost no Racial knowledge of upstairs, so if you will excuse me I need to move. Have a good day." He left abruptly.

"..., " Abbey and Justin said in unison. The nurse came back in to clear them shortly, but within fifteen minutes they were back at the front door. Abbey had to get to her shift, and did so after a kiss on the cheek, but that left the boyfriend at loose ends. He'd already cut class, no sense admitting he was wrong and going back just in time for it to let out. It wasn't nearly time for lunch, either.

Before long, he found himself back at his dorm room. Back at the beach house, looking out over the waves under the steel-gray clouds. More developments had come, though they were overshadowed. The Kitchen had grown a bit, sprouting what was obviously supposed to be a dining room space. A door labeled Lounge now opened into a living room kind of place on the first floor. What was in them was, for now at least, exceedingly rudimentary and bare bones, but it was THERE.

He could barely keep up with it. Seemingly every day or two, something new showed up or opened up. Problem was, only a small fraction of the house was even available yet... and he had no idea how to hurry the process along, if he even should. The Wishes had been shown to take a short-line path to fulfill their purpose, but even with a constant drain on his own mana and Abbey's there was a lot going on. Thing is? Now that he knew what he was feeling, he knew that something had changed that morning.

Something new had opened.

A quick check of the first floor showed nothing new, same with the second. That in itself was concerning. Nothing on the third floor had decided to reveal itself before today, so he had no clues whatsoever as to what it might be. The layout of the floor was the same as the ones below, the view perhaps a bit better. It took Justin two laps to figure out that it wasn't a normal door. Instead, on the back wall, exactly one floor above the one that led to his dorm room, another glowing rectangle formed. Another doorframe, which meant it linked up to who knows where.

Justin walked up to it, and it resolved itself into another door. Just like below. In Abbey's elegant calligraphy, the sign on this one simply said "Hall."

He faced a choice, then. He had no way of knowing where this door led. The word could mean simply too many wildly different things, ranging from the first floor of this home to the Governor's Mansion main reception area, or anything in between. He figured it had to be within the state to save energy, and that it wouldn't be actively hazardous to his health due to the Wish, but beyond that there was just no telling. He could either wait for Abbey to get off of work tonight, after his own shift, or he could step through to see what was going on while he had some time.

You know, while procrastinating on his homework.

The choice was clear. He had to find out as much as he could about this house, about what it could mean for their future. His hand grasped the new doorknob firmly and gave a twist, the door swinging open. Beyond it was cool darkness. No help for it, he stepped through and closed the door behind him.

In exactly a step and a half, he bashed his head on a wall. Apparently, he was in a hallway going sideways. There was light coming from the right, and noise. Voices, quite a few of them. Made the next course of action obvious, once the headache passed. Justin walked a bit more cautiously down the hallway towards what he could hear, and moments later he emerged, blinking despite the relatively dim light of the cloudy late morning.

Where this place might be eluded him, with its wooden and cloth structures, open circles on the ground, numerous stalls for food and merchandise. There were people everywhere, people of every size and shape, people in white and brown and black and red and orange and green. People carrying clipboards and backpacks, in tee shirts and body armor, with swords and guns at their sides.

It was one of those dueling circles that gave him the clue he needed, as what appeared to be a Maned Wolf Beastfolk wielding a two-handed sword faced down a winged and haloed man in full plate armor, also with a giant blade. To one side, a small, purple Imp called out the beginning of a duel, and the two clashed in a storm of fire and light.

There's only one place that wouldn't have people running screaming. I'm at the Guild Hall. Why the heck did the Wish House make a door that comes here of all places? And also... I really need to figure out what we're going to call the place. Feels like it needs a name.

Justin wandered. He had no Coinage at all and precious little cash or credit, but what he possessed was a large amount of curiosity and open time. He watched as people dueled and drilled. He saw a group come back from the Gate Shuttle and be swarmed by Guild members and congratulations. Finally, he ended up at what amounted to a food court, a few seats down from an Armadillo Beastfolk sporting a white star badge with a gold pomegranate on it. A basket of fries with salt and vinegar didn't dent his wallet all that much, and it gave him a chance to continue people watching.

At least, it did for a moment. Approximately four (delicious) fries later, an argument broke out one table over. Two Humans in light armor, wearing badges depicting a sunrise over a city, had a knife between them. The blade broken halfway through. "Come on, man, you get one chance to go Below and snap your freaking dagger an hour before you get on the bus? How dense do you have to be!" The speaker was a sandy-haired and athletic guy with a truly irked look on his face and a rapier on his belt.

"I know, I know!" The other, apparently the owner of the dagger in question, was dark of hair and eye and whip-thin. "I need you to help me find someone to repair it on Crafter's Row, like right now. I can make due on some protein bars, but I need it fixed."

The first man barked a short, unpleasant laugh. "That's even stupider than when you broke it! You think any of the Smiths or Shapers in camp have any time or Mana left over to rush a repair on your basic freaking knife? Nah, I am not wasting time looking for what isn't there."

Justin was not a Beastfolk to have ears which physically pricked up at the mention of his Class, but his entire head snapped towards them in its best attempt anyway. "You need a Shaper? I'm new here, but that's me. What's up?"

The shock on both of their faces indicated that there would be lottery tickets purchased in their near future. The dark-haired owner of the blade spoke. "Yo, I got a snapped dagger and a Delve in an hour. If you got the mana, can you fix it? Needs to hold up, but this one's just steel."

"Sure, no problem." It wasn't just that it was steel, this was a mono steel knife. No fancy layering, no enchantments. It might be hardened, which made it more difficult, but with a few moments of concentration the stressed and sheared surfaces melded back together. The weapon was whole once more, not a sign of the fact it had been in two pieces a moment before remained. "Okay, nice and easy. Went ahead and honed the edges while I was there."

"Sweet! Thank you!" As the man reached over to pick it back up, though, a brown gloved hand came out of seemingly nowhere to hold the dagger to the table.

The arm it was attached to was pale, but dotted with pinprick remnants of old burns. It was clad in a white shirt, long sleeved but rolled up over the elbows, which in turn belonged to a woman with fiery red hair and a sharp vest. "Forgetting something, Erik?" Her voice had a fairly strong German accent, and her glare seemed significantly more threatening than the faintly glowing revolver openly holstered at her right hip.

The dark haired man stammered for a moment, then fumbled for his Coins and dropped a Silver one on the table. At the woman's continued glare, a second joined it. With a humph, she lifted her hand. The man grabbed his weapon and disappeared with his friend. Not quite literally, a distinction which must be made at the Hall, but rapidly.

"And you." She turned to level that Look at Justin. His hand paused its mission of putting the Coins in his pocket. "Get your food and come with me. A Shaper I've never met in camp means you're new, and doing that service for free means you're foolish. I need to fix both before you hurt someone. Yourself included."

She stood sharply and started walking towards the Crafters, Justin had to scramble to get his stuff and keep up. This included chomping on a couple more fries, they were good and he was hungry. Before long, she abruptly opened a wooden door on the side of a sales stall, leading him back into a surprisingly roomy work area. "Alright, mister messer. I am Quiverbow, and you are new. Show me what you've got, and I'll tell you how things work around here. What do you work with?"

"Uh..." his brain was catching up slowly to the sudden change of events. "Um. My name is Justin, and I usually work with plain metal... I guess I can do sand and glass, too, that's new."

With a sudden thump, a large bucket full of sand landed at his feet. Standing straight, it should be said. "Mit Gefühl, then."

"What?"

"It means 'with feeling.' Get to it, neither of us has all day."

The prospect of pulling another sword out of the sand was daunting now that he wasn't staring down a literal dragon as encouragement to get it right the first time. She said to do it with feeling, though. Looks like this is the fastest way out of the weirdness I've managed to get myself into. It took focus, but he leaned into it. "Once more with feeling!" It was a phrase he'd heard his theater friends say often, so he didn't hold back.

With a flash and a glow, he laid his hand upon the sand and grabbed a handful. It coalesced under his grip, the power extending down almost a foot until it hit the bottom of the bucket. The sudden change of material stopped the Ability cold, and when he drew it upward the straight blade ended in a clean break. "Sorry, ma'am, it stopped at the bottom of the bucket." Justin had a headache again, this time from a source he knew. Mana drain.

Quiverbow held out her hand, and wordlessly he handed over what he had done. Also wordlessly, she inspected it closely. "Kann man sich ansehen. Not Enchantable, obviously, but impressive. If this is you being cautious, I look forward to seeing what you do when you go for broke."

"Um, that kind of was going for broke. Isn't that what you told me?"

She shook her head. "With feeling. Taking care to do things properly. There is a pad and pencil to your left. Take notes."

So much for having cut class. Quiverbow was just as demanding and twice as precise as any of his instructors at college. By the time he'd been kicked out of the workroom with a buzzing head and a stack of notes, Justin had nearly forgotten that he wasn't, in fact, taking an engineering and design course again. Time was getting on in the afternoon, though. He felt that he'd better get back.

Another thought struck him, though. If a Silver is about ten dollars, that meant I spent two minutes to make more than an hour at work... and according to Quiverbow, that was criminally cheap for a rushed job of decent quality. As soon as the House isn't draining my mana, I could set up shop here and actually make money.

The train of thought was interrupted by a loud ping from his phone. A message from the hospital. "We need both of you to come back for more tests, immediately if able."

Justin went from a casual walk to a dead sprint in the space between heartbeats, previous chain of thought shoved on a high shelf. Through the hallway which turned out to be in the back of one of the larger wooden structures, feeling the wall until he found the door, through the halls of his home until he got to the Dormitory door, and out again towards the medical line bus. He made it just as it pulled up, too, on his way as fast as the streets of Seattle would let him.

Abbey, too, had gotten the text and closed her desk with unseemly haste, barely slow enough to let Brittany and her supervisor know it was a summons from the hospital and that she needed to move immediately. The nagging headache and fatigue that had dogged her all afternoon was forgotten as she morphed her own shoes from sensible flats directly to joggers. Her own bus trip was much, much shorter than Justin's, though she didn't realize this.

As a result, she beat him to the waiting room by almost fifteen minutes. If he hadn't still been sweating when he got in, she might have been more annoyed at him. Instead, they embraced tightly and waited to be called back. "You okay, Justin?"

"Yeah, just scared. Messages like that aren't good for my heart. You?"

"I'm fine. Joints are hurting, feeling sick to my stomach. Just a lot going on."

Justin's heart rate, which had finally been slowing down, decided to accelerate directly to ludicrous speed once more. He was glad he was sitting down, his own head starting to swim a bit as every ounce of anxiety he had started screaming at him what that could mean. Could he be sure that those "teenie weenie genies" were not, in fact, coming?

They got called back, both brought to the lab for yet another series of blood draws and questions. Crystal scans complimented this, as the doctors tried to map the remarkably complicated network of factors at play.

They were finally sitting in another of those sterile white rooms, leaning on each other after they dragged a couple of chairs together. "Abbey, do you even know what the heck they're looking for?"

The azure face shook a negative. "One of my lab techs mentioned that they just realized a Wish was involved, so they had to call us back."

"I guess that makes sense, especially for you. I definitely would have preferred it if they'd told us before we both panicked. Some of us do have lives."

"Speaking of, did you get any ideas for the Form and Function piece for your portfolio?"

He was about to say no, but two things struck him. First was that today had taught him that his Class Abilities had all kinds of practical applications. Maybe he could turn them to artistic pursuits?

The other was that the door opened up at that moment, and a doctor walked in. "Miss Williams? Hi, we think we know what is going on, but I need to confirm a few things first."

"Of course, Doctor."

"Following this Wish you told us about, have you been experiencing these symptoms? Headache, nausea, fatigue, joint discomfort, low Stamina and Mana on your Status?"

"Yes to all of those."

"Any cravings for foods, particularly fatty or high-calorie ones?

"Uh, not specifically? I'm just hungry all the time."

The doctor smiled. "Congratulations, then, I have good news!"

With excitement and dread both rising in his heart in equal measure, Justin asked "what is it, doc?"

"Oh, that's the good news. Your body is just a bit depleted and drained from the Wish work. A few days of resting and eating well should set you back to normal."

"...," they both said, for the second time that day.

"I will say that we saw a rather unique aspect to this one, though. Justin, are you aware that your own stores are being tapped to help her?"

"Yes, I am." The emotional whiplash still had him off balance. Relief that he was not going to have to support a family that quickly, concern about Abbey, and a confusing mess of other feelings too mixed up to identify.

"Good. You need to make sure to keep yourself healthy as well. Don't waste your mana and stamina if you don't have to." Oh, like pushing his Shaper powers then sprinting through two portals? "Also, being closer to each other physically is going to help this process be more efficient."

"That won't be a problem, Doctor," Abbey interjected. "Other than work and school we're practically never apart."

"Ah, young love. It will probably help keep the stress down, too. Remember that high stress does keep your Status regeneration down for everything we have managed to study."

Justin's tone was bone-dry. "We'll do our best, Doctor, just been a crazy couple of weeks and Finals are coming."

"Understandable. Just do your best, this isn't life threatening but it's best not to let it drag on. Now, you have two last labs that do still need to come back in, but staying cooped up here won't help. I recommend taking a walk around the area. Set yourself a timer for about an hour and a half then come straight back in to the nurse's station. We'll wrap up then, and you can go home to get some rest." He stressed the word as though he were used to it being ignored. To be entirely fair to him, this was often the case.