Mizrah's Ladder Ch. 06

That week...had been the most amazing week of your life. In the space of a couple days the nature of your very existence had changed, and everything seemed to move in a sort of ultra-fast, experience-dense lucid dream. Before this, bereft of choice, lacking a voice to affect change and constantly thrown adrift by circumstance, all you could do to survive was quietly smile and pretend that everything was okay. Never good, never acknowledging how truly bad it was - for down that path lay the spider-clawed grip of despair - so existence had always had the quality of gas station food. Bland...broken up by occasional flashes of flavor that ultimately left you nauseated.

Now...everyday had a...theme. A rich, defined taste, as if life was some obscene buffet of vice and transgressions against scientific surety. Your whole life, you'd been sitting on the sidelines sipping water and eating bread crust, always told "you can't". "Not enough money". "Not the right person"...and suddenly Yusuf was there, kicking the door open, taking you by the hand, and guiding you to gorge.

...after that first wild night left you with more cash than you could remember holding, a new dress, and a surprising lack of hangover, you wake up slowly to find your arm and leg draped over his naked body. He's still asleep, deeply, and when you glance at your clock, you find it's already half past eleven; you never sleep this late, but somehow it's hard to care. After spending some time admiring his form you: listen to the sound of conversations two, three stories above; smell your landlady's deodorant as she stumps past all the way out in the hall. You must have really gone hard last night, your memories are difficult to claw back through the slowly receding curtain of sleep.

Your senses return inward, and you think about the fact that there's this...man in your bed, and analyze his face as he sleeps. His pretty face is relaxed, although you can see the subvocalizations in his throat - if you lean in you can hear them... and it sounds like he's having an argument in his dreams. You can't help but smile and push his hair back from his forehead to kiss it, which causes him to lightly stir beneath you.

He quickly awakens and sits up, greeting you with an electrifying kiss that clicks his tongue-stud against your teeth; he doesn't care that you haven't brushed your teeth, that your hair is tangled around your head...doesn't care that you're not showered, hell he likes the way you smell.

Picture this...he's sitting on your bed, shirtless, wearing a pair of maroon-colored pants that fit his defined legs nicely, strumming the mandolin your uncle gifted you on his trip to Corinth a couple years ago. He's watching you as you piece through your closet, sighing and agonizing over your options. Analysis, observation, hypothesis...that's your pita and hummus. Decision making? Always an agonizing process and responsible for making you late to work more than once.

You have a fine collection of blouses and dresses, suit pants and blazers...some have nice patterns, some are solid and bright but much of it is the sober, relatively unexciting style expected for someone who works in a financial institution. A sky blue, lacy thong clings to your hips, matching bra holding the firmness of your bust against your svelte chest, and you're incredibly aware of the fact that he's watching every move you make with open fascination. You pretend not to notice, not to be aware of the way you're tantalizing him with the movement of your hips as you pull a bright, cerulean sundress off its hanger and hold it against yourself.

"Nothing looks good anymore, I don't like any of this stuff. I feel like I'm wearing..." you let it sag in your hands. "A bag."

Inadequate.

Yusuf gives you that trademark, infectious grin of his, and takes a long look at the blue garment in your hands. "I think you look sexy...but you should dress however you like." He strums a discordant note.

You answer sounds so lame you can but laugh at its lameness, tossing the dress on the bed next to him, hands on your hips.

"It's because of my job, I have to maintain an image even outside of it. It's in my contract."

"Well my God the contract!" He breathes in mock awe, setting the mandolin aside and reaching forward to take your hips, pulling you to straddle him - musical laughter flows from your throat. "We can't break the contract...why..." He looks up at you, smiling as you net your fingers lightly through his black hair, "we might piss off The Man."

"The Man? Who is this Man?" you ask him playfully, luxuriating in the sharpness of his stubble against your fingernails.

It sounds like some American cultural thing you may have missed...wouldn't be the first one. You prepare for that look, the one that precedes 'you don't know / haven't heard of xyz?!' but it doesn't come.

"The Man, he's your boss. He's the cops. He's Mayor Clark, even though she's a chick. He's that suit who tells you what to do cuz he's got you by your wallet, or he's got a gun, or he's got a court order." His hands slide up your mostly bared body, arms crossing in an X over the middle of your back as he pulls you close to him.

"You don't gotta take it from him anymore, cuz you don't need what he's slingin'...mmm you smell amazing."

It...the two things together - these revelations that you have a certain kind of freedom now that you once didn't, and his love of your scent - work in tandem to leave you momentarily speechless...a moan leaves your throat involuntarily when he kisses your neck. "Unnfffh god...okay, so...it's really just fine for us to live this way? Do you have a job, like...a nine to five - "

"A job? Like a human?! Hah hell no...naaah see, stuff like money, I got ways of getting that if we need it and I'll show you how. It's fun! Besides," the playful croon of his voice grows only slightly more serious, "we got other concerns that take up our time. Least we can do is live large where we can."

Interesting. As with all the questions he leaves you with, you wish to press but before you can he stands, holding you around his hips with his hands supporting you by your posterior; you flush and feel a sudden crescendo of arousal.

"We're flush with cash, and I can easily get us more. Let's go downtown...change up your wardrobe to something you like. I can tell you had more metal - you had a septum and snake bites once, I can see the holes almost healed up, right? I know someone who does piercings for people like us."

"People like us? We need special...ohhh, the healing." Your long legs eventually find the ground as he snags a pair of Hopitoula IPAs from your fridge, cracking them open against your countertop.

The thought of reclaiming yourself from the sober, bland demands of your job is extremely appealing. Your photo albums are filled with shots of in your early 20s when you first graduated with a finance degree and a creative plan for it...back when you wore leather and steel, fishnets and silk. Your sense of style was almost as important as the shows and performances that, by your hand, had brought exultation and euphoria to so many concertgoers.

Was it... really this easy to make rent? It wasn't like you needed to pay for health insurance or anything like that. Maybe...

No. He's right.

You clink your bottle against his, and link arms.

"Fuck the Man, Yusuf."

"Hell yeah Isabel!" He laughs as you both drink.

The two of you take the Metro downtown and even in the subway he can't keep his hands off you...you don't want him to. You know the both of you are getting stared at, and they have no idea the utter carnage the both of you could wreak. Have you ever smiled this much before?

You make your usual route to the thrift store and, on instinctively checking your wallet, you remember it's fat with unmarked bills; you put together a new outfit, throwing money as some sort of quantity to the wind for now. Vajra's Boutique it is then.

The humidity and the heat mean little to you, given your Aegean origins, which is why you can make leather work in a Gulf city like this. Mizrah is a great audience, lapping up every moment as you dress up and show off before him...and you know, in the murky, intuitive parts of your mind, that this is all part of the Hunt.

"Really sleek...you'll have everyone's gaze when you want it, but you can blend in when you don't," he remarks, and it's hard for you not to check him out reclining in that little folding chair outside the dressing room.

He's referring to the bright red leather jacket sitting open over a tight gray midriff shirt that hides little of your elfin body; a fleur de lis with steel wings stretches across your chest...it will attract attention, certainly has his crawling over your chest and belly.

"What do you think of these? I dunno, they really put a lot on display," you fret as you stride before him in a pair of high-cut green cargo shorts that showcase the pale, shapely length of your legs; from curved calf to firm, slender thigh, all the way up to the near perfect sphere of your posterior. Fishnet tights cling to them...you can feel the pinprick heat of his eyes following their path up to the line of your back.

"I think..." You feel him tug lightly on your belt loop, pulling you back toward him so he can run his hands up the sides of your thighs, brazenly cupping your ass and kissing your exposed lower belly. "They look great, and show the world you know it, and that I get to touch you," he purrs against your chest. Your arms come around his head, embracing him lovingly against your bosom...and even as you remember where you are, you just don't give a fuck.

If your coworkers, incredibly conservative, stuffy people like J-guy, saw you so...well dressed, they'd immediately gossip and bitch to your boss, since everyone in that miserable little bank was trying to snipe the other for advancement...but it's like Mizrah said: fuck the man.

Besides...you remember how he used his charm, the heat of his magnetism to draw you near, and you know...you can do it too.

The clothes make the Huntress.

You set out with him in your new outfit; you see the person who does his piercings, and she does an amazing job; you party, you bar-hop, you meet his numerous friends and fans and you return, exhausted, to collapse together on the bed and sleep.

Before you close your eyes, you look into his, and you both smile, and you whisper against each other's lips: Fuck the man.

---

"...so you're saying...it is like gravity, or electromagnetism."

"It's not quite that fundamental, I misspoke. It's like the idea of entropy run amok...so a closed system will move toward disorder over time, that's just how it goes right? The Curse is that; everything falling toward chaos; we just see it in ways our brains can comprehend."

Sure, of course, you remembered some high school physics, and because that old friend of yours in college got high with you and watched Farniverse on the SciFi Channel.

You're behind the wheel, rolling along with late night traffic on the Paul Creed Expressway, out to Ashland which Mizrah insisted was a perfect place to learn just *what* your new body was capable of. Why Ashland though? On the other side of the Riviera, it was a liminal space between the red lights of vice-ridden home, and the industrial decay left by the departure of big steel and copper.

"So you know how in physics and the proton field, or the electron field, their lowest energy state is zero - nothing going on, right?"

...sure. You nod along and make a note to Google search what he's talking about.

"You can think of the Curse like that, it's a field but its lowest energy state is actually at a number higher than zero...like the Higgs field. Just bear with me...mortals, whatever, the Curse is at its highest energy state with them - value zero - but Prospects are in a state of zero excitation which means the Curse is at a high value and unstable, which is why you experience misfortune."

"That doesn't make any sense," you state flatly as you take the offramp onto Cranston Avenue, down into the industrial rot. "So normal people are...they're like excited particles, but with a low value? And if they weren't excited, they'd be Prospects?"

"Or Accursed, it can happen spontaneously. I know, but...okay so think of us now, at the top of this ramp - even if we're not moving, there's still potential for us to descend and gather energy."

"Right...but if we go down like now," you point out, "it dissipates." You make the point by letting your car roll along toward the stop sign before tapping the brakes as the idiot in the left lane cuts you off.

"Yep...but that isn't what happens with us. Cursed humans and Prospects, they're at the bottom of the ramp...they are heavy with the value and energy of the Curse, and their low excitation means they absorb ambient entropy, which to us appears as misfortune."

This is strange and confusing, but you...think you understand. It might go some distance in explaining why your luck always seemed so abysmal; like how you got fired from your last job for being in the wrong place, wrong time and subsequently were accused (with no evidence, none needed) of theft...then there's the fact that you never seem to win at cards, or backgammon, or really anything involved chance or a throw of the dice. Then of course, there's the simple fact that everyone you have ever loved is...

No. No don't go there, Isabel.

"It sounds like you've got a scientific way of trying to look at something that is totally unscientific." Your dry tone hides your unease at the strange intersection of these two things...what appears to be utter impossibility, magic even, explained using analogies to field theory. "My guess is you didn't come up with it."

"Ohh ho, why's that? Not smart enough?" You glance his way and see him grinning at you and you smirk back, rolling to a stop at a light.

"You already have the brawn and beauty, if you have brains then there will have to be some catch."

"Like...he's a ten, but he's a monster wearing human skin?"

The two of you chuckle, gaze into the void of each other's eyes, and you lean in to kiss him...and you two hold it. It's a long one, and he sighs against your lips. That's not a sound you often hear this soon into a...whatever this is. He breaks it with a flushed smile. "I mean, I didn't come up with - "

You interrupt him by pulling him into another fierce kiss - you can tell he's thinking 'hey that's my line!' but he doesn't protest. Even when the Impala behind you starts to honk impatiently, and you both give the driver the finger until he drives around you.

When you're done making out at the intersection and finally go through, you pass underneath the old, creaking eaves of the Fossman Foundry...the monolithic structure looms like a massive, squat titan's corpse over you both. A small section is still lit up, and your powerful senses pick up on the reek of ultra-heated metal, slag, and toxins filling the air...all that remains of an industrial powerhouse the size of three football fields.

There is something else...a sensation of passing through some sort of vein-shot haze that you can't see but feel behind your eyes.

"What is that? You sense it too, don't you."

"I do," he responds, watching as you pick up on...whatever that is. "It's metavolis - oh God...that's right. You're Greek..." Mizrah runs his finger along the bridge of his nose at what must be irony.

"I am, and proud of it," you respond easily, clearly awaiting more...you recognize the word from your mother tongue, even if he pronounces it badly.

"It's just funny. We mostly talk about this using bad Greek...something to do with King Lykaon, but yeah. That's metavolis; potential for change." You don't bother correcting him on the particulars, he's got it close enough and he's having a good time being the knowledgeable one...guys like doing that kind of thing and it's kinda cute. "Normally for Imprecations to work, we have to burn our own batteries, but in places like this we can draw on the local buzz."

"...you'll need to explain in more detail. I don't know this imprecation word."

He spends the rest of the drive through the foreboding, long dark of Ashland building the basics for you, from the ground up. He's a patient teacher at least.

Apparently there is considerably more to this new state of being than protean flesh, a chaotic nightmare-food chain, and unhinged sexuality. Again, assuming he's telling the truth about all this, it sounds as if your kind is capable of some sort of...magic? He avoids calling it by any similar terminology, but the impossibility is implied - sensing events before they occur...collapsing whole buildings in on themselves with a howl...or like he did earlier, shattering bonds and chains like they're paper.

It doesn't come for free; the same energies that power your ultra-charged metabolism are burned and depleted by these abilities, and when you first Changed you were entirely unsated, accounting for your strange behavior; your body is flush with them since you both feasted on that unfortunate Hisser at the pier, but in places like Ashland, where such power suffused the air, it was mostly unnecessary...as he would demonstrate.

You roll up outside of Branston Motorworks. You haven't exactly been here before, but you - any of The City's over twenty million people - would recognize the photos from the middle of the 1960s, back when proud, unionized workers filled the workshops and assembly lines and put Americans on the roads and in homes. Then, of course, came globalization and the steady impoverishment of the many for the enrichment of The City's gilded few. Branston was mostly an empty husk now, a squat-yet-looming mausoleum of old brickwork and girding. "Check it, pull up over there." Mizrah points toward a collection of garage doors, their shutter doors green and dirty, covered with incoherent graffiti.

You climb out with him into the warm, squalling night, your shoes splashing in a light layer of dirty water covering the concrete. "It's not exactly where I'd take a girl on a date night but..."

"No," you interrupt him with an ivory toothed little smile. "This is new and interesting...and I am in pretty good company." You run your fingers over his lower belly.

You give him a wry little smile, tugging a belt loop lightly to bring him closer, hands sliding up to his shoulders. "Alright. Show me what's so special about this place."

He does just that.

You don't care whatever pseudo-scientific explanation he tried to give for it, about excited particles and energy values...it's just fucking magic, and it actually works and it drives the rational part of your brain up a wall. As your lover explains it, your kind can 'manipulate probability' even though he can't describe the mechanism by which that happens...and since, technically, much more phenomena are highly improbable rather than purely impossible, what is actually *occurring* before your eyes isn't some usurpation of reality.

It's literally just...fucking with it, brutishly.

He shows you how you can claw harsh sigils and nonsensical, strange glyphs into the side of a building, how the metavolis in the air can be burned to manipulate doors, windows, creaking them open and shut...you do just that, after messily imitating the symbols he draws. Just like that, a major part of security systems...broken. Not that you were much of a skulking thief anymore, but that would have been a useful trick back home when things were bad. You can feel it, the lightless, veiny smoke in the air igniting and flashing beyond sight, a thrilling rush of power and widening, shifting perspective...is this how it feels to do magic?