Infernal Absorption - UL

    There is something to be said for the atmosphere of a serious bar. Whether just for the alcohol or not, a good bar is a hell of a place to forget about your troubles. The look on the bartender’s face had been priceless when I had asked for a full glass of gin. Luckily, his qualms disappeared when I had slammed a one-hundred dollar bill on the table in front of him.

    That had been an hour ago, buying my last and only drink of the night. My phone buzzed and beeped in my pocket, and I pulled it out, only missing my pocket twice with my right hand. I pulled the phone from my pocket, slipping a bit before putting it on the bar in front of me. I blinked a few times, trying to pull the screen into focus. Eventually, I managed to make out the nine dots on the screen. Clumsily, I slid my finger over the five dots that should unlock the device, one-four-five-six-nine. It flashed a red line, tracing one-two-five-nine. I tried again, this time watching it fade over to the home screen. The two pictures of the screen flickered around in my vision, but I could almost read the text when I slid the notification bar down.

    It simply read “Calendar Event: My De…”. I did not need to click it to know what it said. It read “Calendar Event: My death, in 15 minutes.” I had put in the event five years ago. I just looked at it, a drunken smile stuck on my face. I started laughing, a sad sound in the empty bar. I sat there, looking at the phone in my hand. I pulled my wallet out of my pocket, and yanked out every bill in the central fold, before slamming them down on the bar. I waved the bartender over, and gestured loosely at the money. “Sir, I want you to use this money to make someone happy. Not me. Someone else.” He looked at me forlornly, before nodding and grabbing the cash up.

    “Want to talk about it?” He asked after counting the money.

    “No.” I stated as firmly as I could. “I’ve already thought it through.” I chuckled, and tossed him my phone. He caught it skillfully, and looked at it.

    “So what’s your story?” He asked after taking a few seconds to absorb the message.

    “I… I really pissed someone off.” I replied shakily. “Like, really badly.”

    He looked at me, now seeming concerned. “Sir, should I call the police? This seems serious.”

    “There is not a chance in hell of the police being able to do anything for me.” I replied. My watch beeped, signalling three and a half hours had passed since my last dose of veil. I silenced it after a few tenuous pushes with my right hand. “Man, what d’ya think of the whole Mystics thing?” I asked, putting down the liquor. As he contemplated an answer, I grabbed a flask from my pocket, and poured the whiskey into it, swishing it slowly.

    “I think they have as much of a right to be here as we do.” He replied, watching what I was doing carefully. “You must have an opinion, if you’re asking.”

    “You’re damn right I do.” I said, slurping back the foul liquid. I shook my head to clear the taste from my mouth. “I think that for the most part, they’re great persons. But some of them,” I said, waving a finger in the air, “Some of them are just assholes. Serious assholes.” I grabbed for my glass, which I now realized was empty. “Can you fill this up for me?”

    “What’re you planning? To drink yourself to death?” He asked as he took the glass from me. “I’m not sure I condone that.”

    “Nah.” I chuckled a little. “But the end result is the same.” The look on his face became somber as he handed the glass back to me.

    “You think you’re dying tonight?” He asked, looking both alarmed and saddened. I just laughed, and put my phone on the table, facing him, and tapped the event. He looked down on it, and looked me in the eyes. “You have a story to tell.” He said, staring at me expectantly.

    “Sure I do. But I don’t have time.” I stated, trying to get up and walk away. I stumbled a little. Well, actually, a lot. I was a few steps away from the stool, when he said something to me.

    “I can only wonder what else you might have planned for the night of your death, which, might I remind you, is in ten-some minutes.”

    I stopped, turning to look at him. “Alright. I suppose I can spare a minute to explain my life’s story to a man.” I sighed. “I don’t have anything else to do, slight exception of lay down and die.” I turned around and walked back towards the bar. “I’m gonna take a wild ass guess that you want to know why I’m about to die, and why I know to the minute when it’s going to happen.” I sat down.

    “You’re correct in your guess.”

    “Just give me another drink, and I’ll see what I can do.”

    “Fine.”

    “So, six years ago, I was just another guy in the south. Nothing much unique about my life. But… Well, I pissed off the wrong guy. A wizard, I learned a year later. It started small, I owed him some money. I paid him back eventually, but, like, damn, there were other things. But what really screwed things up was when I hooked up with his daughter.” He eyed me, giving me the ‘Why the hell would you do that’ look. “I didn’t know, alright!? But it happened, and he finds me there the next day. I never saw her again, never even saw him again. But I got a letter from him a year later, with a date and a few words. It was tomorrow’s date, midnight, and the words ‘You die’.” I took the beer and drank some of it.

    “And how the hell could he know that?”

    “I was no longer the man I once was.” I replied, “Five years ago, I never would have imagined the hellish-craziness that was the Mystic universe. And then, well, that sack of crap screwed it all up. My beautiful ignorance of the universe was shattered. Suddenly, all of my life was fire. Fire, fire, and fire. He really screwed me over. And then on top of all of that, he gives me a solid deadline on living.” I drew a breath between sections of rant, when he interceded.

    “What the hell did he do to you, man?”

    “He turned me into a god-dammed phoenix, okay? You see why I might have a problem?” I snapped, ”That’s a species with a definite shelf life, and my human life had already taken up most of it. But, really, that wasn’t the worst part. It wasn’t that I was turned into a phoenix, it was that some other poor guy was dragged into all of this crap. His name was Jahomir. I’ll be honest, I deserved the hand I was dealt. But that sorry dude, this young phoenix, he was teleported into the room we were in, and that bastard forced my soul into his body. It was hellishly painful, exactly as bad as it sounds. But the other guy, damn, he suffered far more than I did, and I felt his last thoughts echo through my mind as he disappeared. My soul was cast out of my body, his out of existence. His silent screams told me what I needed to know.

    “The pain of the shift wasn’t the worst, though. I knew that my stupidity had caused that much pain to an innocent bystander, and I was determined to try to resolve the problem I had created. I wanted to help the family I knew he had left behind. The problem was, I didn’t have his memories, just the vague things his mind had forced into me. A family of three. A wife. A nest of stones somewhere on a mountain. The physical pain that I felt that night never compared to the mental pain of the years.” I sighed again, knowing that all I was doing was confusing the barkeep. He looked at me, nodding slowly.

    “That’s some heavy stuff right there.” Was all he said, before pointing out the obvious, “But you’re human now.”

    “Veil is some effective stuff. But it was hard to get my talons on it. It took me almost a year to learn about it, and then two cold months to actually buy it. It was worse, though, when I finally did. I no longer was myself. I used to be brown haired, green eyed. Had myopia. But now, I’m black haired, blue eyed, and don’t wear glasses. There was only one good piece of news, though. The Reveal had happened weeks beforehand, so the government had a system in place for my situation.” I finished the remainder of my drink, and with it my discussion “But I’ve wasted enough of your time already. I’ve got a death to be getting to.” I put the phone back in my pocket, and walked away from the bar. He did not try to stop me this time. I checked my watch, and saw that the end was nigh. Five minutes, to be exact.

    I walked out the door, into the snowy streets. It was well below freezing, but I did not care. Hypothermia would probably hurt far less than whatever that wizard had in mind. I staggered around the corner of the bar, heading into an alleyway. I reached the dumpster at the end, and sat myself down against it, legs in the snow. Another glance at my watch showed that the time was drawing ever nearer. I just stayed put, thinking about my life. My regrets, my moments of pride, the latter being few and far between.

    “Dude, you alright?” I heard someone ask. I looked up, and saw a man standing on the sidewalk, looking my way.

    I considered my answers carefully. “Good as I need to be. You want anything?”

    “I want you to get out of the snow and come to the hospital! You’re freezing to death out here, and you know it!” The man came towards me, wearing a ski jacket and gloves. “Com’on, just walk with me, alright?” He pulled off his glove and reached out to me. I waved him off, shaking my head. Not taking no for an answer, he grabbed my arm. I glanced at my watch on my other arm, and realized that I had only a minute left.

    “Fine. Where to the hospital?” He helped me to my feet, and I started walking with him.

    “It’s just a few hundred metres from here, com’on!” I nodded, and we continued walking into the night. We were just past the next store down, when I collapsed. The man jumped a few feet backwards, before approaching me again. “Are you okay?” He asked, a rhetorical question at this point.

    I was moaning in pain, down on the ground. But I noticed the first signs of the veil wearing off. Namely, heat. My body temperature shot up from roughly a slightly hypothermic 35 degrees to easily 50 over the course of about a quarter second. The snow went from stinging to soothing my skin. It was always like this for me. Human skin and phoenix body temperature make for a poor combination. I had to hold my tongue down to keep me from screaming. That being said, it was either a saving grace or a cruel irony that the next stage of the regression was my mouth changing back into a beak, not a painless process itself. As though my lips were caught in some piece of industrial machinery, they were extruded forward, hardening into the spikey shape I had known for five years. Soon, the rest of my face followed, the changes moving in a downward wave. My eyes forced through my deforming skull while shrinking, and the colours of the world all rotated quickly, revealing to me the spectrum of infra-red through ultra-violet. The colours cannot be described, but I was hardly paying attention.

    As the man looked over the freak-show before him the hairs on my head re-arranged into reddish-orange plumage as they had countless times before. I did not know this, but I could take very good guesses, having recorded my transformation a few years ago. The wave continued down my body, arms crackling as my wings reformed and stretched, feeling exactly as they had when I had first woken up in a smouldering heap in the wizard’s apartment: Stiff and rigid, like a wet rag left to dry without wringing. The most subtle, which is to say painless, part of the whole change was growing a tail. There was no deformation there, just sprouting of perfectly formed feathers.

    After what seemed like an hour of changes, I pulled my head out of the puddle that my body heat had formed, taking in a squeaky gasp of air. Everything was moving slowly, including me. I managed to turn around, and look at the man behind me, twisting myself back and forth to get the water out of my feathers. He came towards me, silently, in awe of what he just witnessed.

    "You're a mystic." He said, whispering. I looked at him and nodded.

    Had the pain of the change not been bad enough, things suddenly got far worse. Oh yeah. I'm dying. The heat that I felt, while normally something I appreciated, escalated immensely, to the point of being uncomfortable for a phoenix. That is a challenge in and of itself. I heard a plunk as the man fell into the snow, probably trying to shield himself from the heat. I opened my eyes, which I had not realized I had closed, and saw only bright-white, bordering on blue, incandescence illuminating the street. Light that was coming off of me.

    I shortly realized that my body was feeling dry. And suddenly, everything stopped. By my count, I was dead for six and a half eternities. But then, after waiting far too long, the world snapped back into existence. And blinked. Once. Twice. Again after a pause. My head moved around, looking for something in the snow and ice. Why can't I move? I pondered as the world kept moving about.

    Who said that? A panicked voice whispered. What's going on? I stood up abruptly, landing awkwardly on my talons.
    I'm... I'm me. This is my body! Who the hell are you!? I complained, suddenly jumping with a seemingly experimental squawk.
    Get out of my head! We shouted at the same time. The area around me burst into flames instantly, and whoever was controlling my body jumped.
    How... How did that just catch fire? Oh god... I'm... He stopped moving us around. I'm one of them.