Workforce - 1 of ?

Part one of an as-yet interminably lengthed story about a crackhead wizard and his long-delayed journey into the world of post-adolescence. Drug use and implicit sex, but they're magic drugs and it's magic sex, so whatever.





So much of wizardry is crossing lines, you would think I'd have seen trouble coming. Since there was no doubt in my mind that I'd crossed one. A Big One.

But no. I was politely obvious, lying facedown in a shallow puddle of my own spit on the hypercolored jute floor of my mother's solar. The unholy turquoise and searing magenta tiles seemed to be screaming directly through my optic nerve and into my brain. Screaming something about overindulgence, punctuated with brief, almost ladylike bursts of agony.

My silk cravat was rumpled and stained; possibly beyond repair. My frock coat had begun the previous evening (what I prayed, ferverently, to every imaginary being the morati worshipped was the previous evening) a deep and lustrous purple, but was now a bonanza of colors most commonly found on the floor of an indifferently kept men's room. I'd cast a Coloressence charm on my fashionably long hair but the charm seeemed to have worn thin; it was stuck mostly in the crap colors. Puke green, feces brown; baby-shit tan.

The way I looked was a dream compared to the way I felt.

I managed to roll over onto my back. Mistake, good god, was that a mistake. The floor tiles were nothing compared to the light.

My mother's solar demonstrated her inimitable decorating style; "More is More" could not possibly begin to describe it. My brain was hurting too much to take it all in; the icing-pink ceiling, the chandeliers studded with rainbow-dripping diamonds, the lace. The doilies. The lace on the doilies.

In fact, the only other thing in the room more embroidered that the decor was my mother herself. And she was hovering over me, and clearly had been for quite some time.

"O," she said, her crystal-blue eyes filling with luminous tears as she fanned herself with a pheonix-plume fan and brought a hand to her forehead "O, O, O," she cried, every exclamation punctuated by a kind of piercing short-shocked yelp that went through my ailing head like meteor collision.

"O," she shrieked, her voice reaching crescendo as she fell to her knees and began solicitiously fluttering around me, touching my hair, my bruised eyes, my bruised lips "O, that mine only son could be taken in by such as they!"

Taken in. Had I been taken in? I suppose I had. When three beautiful houris appear in your crystal, dressed to the nines and practically begging for you to take them out and show them a good time, you don't say "no". I certainly hadn't.

In fact, some rather ominous pains around my lower regions made me nervous about how many "Yeses" I might have said. And to whom. Oh, good god. No wonder Mother was in such a tizzy.

"Those terrible triplets," she cried, dragging my prone and thus-far motionless upper boddy to her chest and pressing my face into her bosom in a manner that might have been maternal were I not 24 and smelling strongly of drink.

"There there, mother," I murmured into her lace-bedecked, bejeweled, rhinestoned, powdered and corseted breast "there there."

Memory was returning; there was a moment, I was sure, where I was reclining supine in a bed of soft living limbs, drinking down glass after glass of potent sapphire wine laced with angel wings and powdered toadstone, making pretty lights with my mind while my lower body commited what was, strictly speaking, a crime with one dewy-voiced and luxurient young...

Wow. Just...wow.

"O, but I tried!" she cried, her hot tears carving tracks through the filth on my face. Her phoenix-plume fan was growing uncomfortably hot pressed up against my cheek.

"If only your father were here," she cried "had been here! I told him you needed a strong male influence!"

Oh, I was strongly influenced alright. Strongly under the influence. Possibly, I considered as I looked back on my fuzzy recollections, with males.

A sprite, green-skinned and miniscule, fluttered through the almond-shaped door from the Men's Quarters and hovered over me, ignoring me utterly. The household sprites had all declared war against me over that silly little fire-spell incident they were quite unwilling to forgive.

"Milady," she squeaked "the master wishes to speak with his son."

There was a moment of silence. Pristine. Beautiful.

My mother wailed a wail that would leave many a bain-sidhe green-eyed with envy and burst into immediate tears. She'd been weeping all along, but now it was more like an exploding faucet spraying water in all directions.

Could I stand? I think I could stand. I stood.

Well I tried, anyway, and once again, and finally I was verticle. Canting decidedly to the left, but verticle.

"Come, young master," the sprite said.

"In a bloody minute," I said, wandering through the door, towards my chamber "the old man can bloody well wait for me."

I stumbled into my room. I think, looking back, that I lost at least an hour because there's this unsettling blank between my falling facedown on my bed and my hearing the sprites rather pointed and significant cough. At any rate, it helped. A bit more Manticore toxin cleared out of my brain (fatal, of course, but in lower doses it makes your...you know what, nevermind) and I felt a bit more alive. I conjured a buttered scone and a cup of tea with a lazy wave of my hand; what showed up was a hunk of stale bread and a pickle jar filled with brine, but I was prepared to call that a victory at this stage. I managed a few bites; then I stripped off my much-abused ensemble, which faded away from existence as soon as I threw them on the floor.

I spent at least twenty minutes in the shower, under the buxom bronze naiads who poured hot water from...again, nevermind. I'm not doing my reputation any favors at all. Three saphire rings, a ruby pendant, thirteen earings and a brooch of meteoric iron; no need to overdo it. Today I needed color; maroon it was. Frock coat, breeches, I debated for a moment over a tricorn or cape and decided that it was best to be informal. Just meeting with Father, of course.

Just meeting with Father who was undoubtedly going to unweave the very fabric of my existence and start all over again.

Well, I guess, he couldn't. He didn't have a body, hadn't in years. If he wanted an heir, he was stuck with me.

...of course, he could always just erase my brain completely and keep me around as a drooling meatpuppet, listening to soft music. That had happened to one of his brothers, my Uncle Charlie. He lived in the basement, surrounded by stuffed animals.

But I hadn't done anything that bad. It was just a party. Juuuuuust a party.

My father's tower was all the way up at the top of the Celestial Palace, of course. Up seventy flights of stairs, past innumerable corridors, and through sixteen ornamental gardens that made it take nearly two minutes for about forty sprites to carry me there in my sedan chair. Workshy little dragonflies. You can't get good help these days.

As I rode up, cherishing the tiny grunts and grimaces of my fluttering little slaves, more moments from the previous evening rolled up. There had been an Incubus, if I recalled correctly, and a hirsute fanged Scandinavian with a name that was Vlad Glottal Stop or something. That might explain the pains in various parts of my anatomy. As a wizard, of course, I am used to pain. Just not pain of quite this level of...intimacy.

The huge bronze doors to my father's place of residence are strange things. For example, you might chide me about my tastes in statuary but I would never endorse half of the things depicted in polymorphous metal, going in slow motion at glacial pace so the figures were doing different things every year. I would never do any of them. Sober, anyway.

I had this uncanny feeling that I'd done at least a few of them the night before. There were those Houris, after all, and I recall them singing in voices of unearthly purity as ruby light fell in languorous waves from the ceiling onto a sea of limbs gently and orgiastically entwined-

Oh, good lord. I'd been staring at my father's front door for close to five minutes. Apparently the manticore venom ("Cosmic M" being the common street name used by the vulgar) hadn't worn off quite enough. I opened the door.

And stepped in maelstrom.

I remember the days when my dad was made of meat.

SO, said a booming voice expressed not in sound but in color, in poetry, in great flaring splashes of bloody light that assaulted the senses like an army of the damned IF IT ISN'T THE SHAME OF MY ENDLESS LIFE.

I winced "surely that's a little harsh."

HARSH? he boomed, the hurricane of light and love and searing hot celestial matter echoing with the unsettling riffs of his laughter HARSH? IF I HAD AN ASS YOU'D BE A PAIN IN IT. WERE I NOT BEYOND DEATH, I WOULD DIE IMMEDIATELY OF SHAME.

This was the infuriating thing: though beyond death and time and human intervention, traveled so far into the realms of Power that he and the Deeper Magic were all but indistinguishable, the nagging never stopped.

STILL, he mused STILL I SUPPOSE THIS IS PARTLY MY FAULT.

I nodded hopefully "That's what mother said."

DO NOT QUOTE THAT FLUTTERING SIMPLETON AT ME, my father snapped, and his irritation was like a red-hot hammer playing my ribs like a xylophone.

"You married her!" I said, jumping immediately to her defense. Amazing how one forgets the screamlets and the vapors and the occasional bad touches.

She I could touch. She hadn't transubstantiated herself into a cloud of ethereal energy two days before my ninth birthday and forget to tell anyone about it, dad.

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, YOU WORKSHY REPROBATE, my father said with a note of consideration in his unvoice I definately did not like SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

"Ground me?" I asked hopefully.

He had no eyes; he was still glaring. I could feel it. One feels the blast of a supernova before it overtakes one, too.

NO, he said musingly NO, THAT WILL NOT BE SUFFICIENT. SON, I AM GOING TO TELL YOU WHAT MY FATHER TOLD YOUR UNCLE CHARLIE, ONCE UPON A TIME.

Oh god, here it came. Goodbye life, goodbye memory; presumably scrumptious supernatural entities will no longer want to mount and master you in an evening of drug-fueld metabliss when you are a drooling nonentity in a floating wheelchair.

Of course with my friends one could never tell.

GET A JOB, YOU FUCKING HIPPIE.

This is the sound a soul makes as it dies.

I shrieked like a dying thing high into the registers of my voice, my mother's son after all. "Father, no-"

THIS IS YOUR FATE.

"Please, I'm begging you, don't make me work the mithral mines like some useless pleibian-"

THERE WILL BE NO NEGOTIATION.

"Please," I fell to my knees in front of the rotating stormcloud of nothingness and love that was my dear formless father "please, don't let my friends see me like this."

DON'T WORRY, he said grimly THEY WON'T.

"You're sending me into the past?" I asked hopefully.

NO, he said, and I felt the sledgehammer-to-the-stomach feeling that meant a gateway was being woven around me I'M SENDING YOU INTO THE MORATI.

I struggled; I screamed, I cried. I begged, I called the Ten Words of Power against him. Which did about as much as flicking matches at a tornado.

I was still screaming and cursing like a posessed thing when I landed, flat on my suddenly denim-clad ass, directly into the path of a moving car.