Transcendence - Part 1

"Transcend" is an awfully strong word. I didn't really transcend anything, to be clear. Not intentionally. Dying just seemed like an awful way to have life turn out.
In fact, I'd spent much of my life working with magic to ensure that I would never part ways with this world. What can I say? I was a coward. I didn't want to face the fact that sooner or later I'd have to face the music.
I had been fairly sure, at the time, that I wanted to live forever. But I'd never realized what that entailed. Living forever on magic is like remaining awake forever on caffeine - it's possible, sure, but it's not quite sustainable, and it's certainly not healthy.
That had been my conclusion when I'd managed to make sure it was possible. It would be hard, but it was certainly worth trying.
So, ten years ago, I had begun figuring out how to be immortal. There were some nitty-gritty details about it, but really, it all boiled down to using magic to create a container for my mind as a container for my magic. This was certainly easy enough, but there was one little issue. Magic is generated by a soul. And, when my body got splattered on the windshield of an SUV on my way to the grocery store, my soul went with it.
My mind was suddenly cast into an orb of condensed thought on my workbench.
There was no noise. No light.
Actually, that's not true. There was no sound, and no sight. I had no idea whether there was noise or light. Probably a little bit of both.
I had plenty of energy to sustain the magic that my plan entailed for perhaps a month before things would go a tad awry. And by that, I mean I would cease to be.
Lucky, then, that I had a plan to remain “alive” for a while longer, if not perpetually. But that wasn’t the task for the moment. Right now, I needed to become something more than a pea-sized sphere.
Recalling the spells that I had committed to my memory so long ago, I created a map of all the objects within a couple of metres in my mind. There were the contents of my garage workshop, as I remembered them. A soul crystal sitting on the desk was blasting all of the power needed to keep me this semblance of living.
The series of spells that I had to pull from the bowels of my mind was complex, to say the least. However, the sheet of paper detailing every glyph that I needed to know did massively simplify the task, but only after I remembered how to see things. Other than the presence of colour, texture, translucency, and lighting, vision was markedly inferior to the power-sucking hog that was topical omniscience.  That and I couldn’t read with the easier, more powerful spell.
It took a while, but I eventually got myself seeing out the eyes of a visual representation of myself as I had looked prior to getting nailed by a car. So long as I kept my wits, and magic, about me, no one would ever notice that I didn’t exist. That was exactly as I wanted it – subtlety would always be an option, if needed.
Unfortunately, speech and hearing were beyond me. The lack of sound escaped my notice for a while, since the lack of vision was far more disorienting. When I experimentally pitched an empty coffee mug across the room, everything worked as per the plan, but I realized that I hadn’t heard what should have been a loud clattering as the mug smashed into a couple thousand shards of ceramic.
I also tried speaking. It was hard, at first because my lungs neither existed, nor functioned, and secondly, because I was a wizard, not a physicist – the intricate details of faking speech were completely beyond me.
So, I was deaf and mute. But, for all other intents and purposes, I was alive. Scratch that. For most intents and purposes, I was a tangible human. Just never let anyone close enough to hear me not breathing, and they’d be none the wiser. Unless they could sense auras, in which case I’d have some explaining to do. Quite of a bit of explaining it would be.
On a whim, I created some clothes on my body. I didn't know exactly how to do it, but I was pretty sure I’d done it properly. The thing with actually putting on clothes is that it would require a ton of energy to keep the fabric bouncing against me. So, I just created the illusion of clothes, on my illusion of a body.
Good enough! I congratulated myself in my head.
The final step written down on the paper was the simplest spell.
In the blink of an eye, it was done, and the dead body, looking quite similar to mine, suddenly disappeared, leaving some very confused bystanders. 
And I was alive. Again. Partly.
Hell of a start.

It had been a few hours of working out little issues with the magic. My single large energy store was far more depleted than it should have been. After a couple of hours, the energy store's aura had faded about 10%. At this rate, I would be out of energy after a couple of days. Which was a couple of weeks short of my schedule.
My plan was to have a week to figure out all the problems and measure precisely my energy usage. At that point, all I knew was that I was drawing about four times what I had intended to. Which was, in essence, a problem. A big problem. My previous calculations showed that a single mystical familiar - a polite word for enthralled creature, itself a polite word for bestial slave - could supply all of the energy I would need, including the energy needed to prevent it from killing me, mind control being an energy intensive task. The former plan required getting a familiar of a bit of power. My one large energy store was being held near the orb that my mind was in, roughly at sternum height in my “chest”, and was supplying every last bit of the energy I was using, which included the energy to keep it from falling to the ground and exploding into a million tiny shards.
That aside, my new plan was simply to get a number of, specifically four, familiars. And to do it fast. Money was not an object. Morality and economy could, and would, take a backseat to efficacy.

So, with that in mind, I sent a text message to a friend of mine, Kevin.
“Hey, it’s Richard. I need some SCs.” We had agreed to be vague in all of our contact out of person.
As always, he was efficient in trying to run his business. Thirty seconds later, I had my response.
“Yeah, I just got a few. What kind do you want?”
“Any of them.” I replied.
“The cheapest one is a Gryphon. Will that work?”
“Yes. But I need four.”
“…”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell do you need that for?”
“Uh, I died.”
"Pardon?"
“I need four familiars. Fast.”
“What?”
“Do you have four?”
“Yeah, but just SCs. Familiar’s are completely different.”
“I’ll handle it. Don’t worry.”
“That makes me worried, Richard.”
“You’re good with cash, right?”
“Yes. You’re good for cash, right?”
“Haha. Yes.”
“I’ve only got the 4. $130,000 total.”
“I’ll bring it.”
“You’d better. See you later.”
“Bye.”
So, carrying a briefcase of cash, I walked out of my house, and into my car. I wasn’t taking the chances of getting hit this time. That, and walking multiple kilometres would be a real pain in the ass, and would spend more energy than it was worth.
The briefcase of hundreds was part of the plan, kind of. On the off chance that I couldn’t hide the evidence of my death, I’d need a crapload of cash on hand to avoid awkward questions, like “who are you, and why aren’t you six feet underground?” Blowing all of it in one transaction wasn’t the plan at all, but it needed to be done.
I arrived at the "antiques" store of Kevin’s. The inside was a scattered mess of curiosities and old stuff. But I knew just what sort of things Kevin dabbled in, and those included selling magical items, and buying them. I had purchased many things from the gray haired man in the past. He looked very much the part of a wizard, being little over 5’8” with an affinity for top hats.
I entered the store. He looked over to me, and gestured to the window, mouth indicating some sort of speech. I stood there, somewhat dumbfounded, and his facial expression slowly turned more irritated.
Remembering the exact nature of the problem, I pointed to my ears and throat and made a sort of “not working” gesticulation. Immediately, he became more curious than angry. Indicating that I should wait a second, he walked over to the door and flipped over the “open” sign, before lowering the blinds on the window.
He looked at me, saying something, but stopped, and began pacing about. I walked over to the counter, and leaned against it. After a few seconds, he held up his cellphone, and typed a few words on it.
"What happened?" He then passed it to me.
"I died. I need some power." I passed it back to him.
His face went through confusion, denial, and acceptance, all in the course of roughly ten seconds, accompanied by what I'm sure would have been shouts. "Seriously?"
"Yeah. I need those soul crystals."
"What are you going to do?"
"Just sell them to me."
What he would be less than elated to learn was that I was planning to create these four creatures. Soul crystals can, and will, readily foist their contents upon any nearby being when broken. There is a bit more to it than that, I'm sure, but that's the important detail.
"Which do you want?" He asked
"What do you have?"
"Gryphon $20,000, kitsune $30,000, wyvern $40,000, cockatrice $40,000" He paused between each, trying to remember.
"I'll take them. $130,000."
"Deal."
He took the phone back, nodded, and walked back towards the counter to get the goods. Meanwhile, I grabbed the briefcase from the floor and started counting the stacks out. I was perhaps three-quarters through the case before I hit $130,000.
He came back holding a zip-lock bag with four film canisters inside. Each had a different colour of crystal inside of it packed in foam, which truly showcased the utilitarian elegance of Kevin.
We exchanged our respective items. I opened up the one canister, its side labelled "G" in black marker. Its pale orange hue indicated that it was likely the Gryphon soul.
There was some spell.... I recalled, thinking back. Right, that! After recalling the spell, the aura of everything within sight flashed before me. Where Kevin was like a glow in the dark bracelet, the gems were like rescue flares.
I flashed Kevin a thumbs up, and he smiled and waved, walking over to the door to unlock it and resume regular business.
I walked out, and started towards my next stop. There was something entirely eerie about walking in absolute silence, although I was getting used to it pretty quickly.
The plan was proceeding as I had hoped. I had the soul crystals. Sadly, though, that was not the most significant task.

See, the crystals didn't contain much power. The creatures from which they came, however, could produce absurd amounts of energy. Would it be enough? Absolutely. How, though, did I plan on creating these creatures?
Well, that's where the morality in the backseat came in. Or, more accurately, was left out.
In a perfect world, nobody would be harmed by my action or inaction. But damned if I would let myself die for my own inaction.
And, really, becoming magical creatures of immense power and respect was a pretty sweet deal in the long run.
Now I just had to find four people, release on them the magic of soul exchange, and.... There was something else.... Oh, right!
Make sure I remembered how to do mind control. That bit was going to be important.


After deciding that my best bet for finding some fodder for my magic was at the local mall, I had begun driving that way. It was a Saturday evening, thankfully, so there was likely to be more than a couple people there. 
I was a tad out of practice with the magic I had in mind. Specifically, that which would let me get into their minds. I wouldn't need much, although there was the chance it would get hard. What I needed was for the four people to conveniently show up at my house, without wondering why. After that, luckily, I was rather near the middle of nowhere - this was Canada, after all - and my house was on the edge of town. As in, nothing but trees for about a hundred kilometres north.
How do I get someone to come to my house readily? I pondered. Indeed, why would anyone ever go to a stranger's house of their free will? Not to come in for any length of time. Well, that part I could handle. If they were delivering something? Perhaps returning something?
Yeah. That would work.
Now I just needed somethings. Luckily, malls were great places to buy some things.

Eventually, I wound up in the hardware store, purchasing four identical key chains, with engraved tags on them, and a couple of duplicated padlock keys. On the way out the door, I ditched the padlocks in a garbage can. I only needed the key chains.
Each one was engraved with instructions to return it to my address if found.
This has got to work. Which is to say, if it did not, I would be dead before anything else could happen.
Then, I wandered about the mall, letting the keys slip out of my pockets here and there. One wound up on a bench, another on the floor in the middle of an aisle, another on a shelf, and a final one on a cafeteria tray in the food court. Hopefully, that would lead to four or five people coming to my house, completely unaware of how they would leave. Or that "they" wouldn't.
Feeling rather pleased with my plan, I headed back home.

As soon as I walked back in the door, I dropped my appearance. The amount of mental stress incurred from performing magic was as bad as I had expected. However, having to maintain an appearance perfectly for half a day was downright painful. By my best guess, I had exactly no time at all to prepare for those who might come around.
I needed a few more things for my plan to work. First of all, a garlic crusher. Perhaps not the best tool for the job, but certainly a tool for the job - I just needed to shatter the crystals, and they were hardly diamonds. That, and a hammer would raise some suspicion. As it reasonably should.
Next step was to open the basement door so that I could pitch the immobilized creatures down that way, before creating the blood crystals that would make this whole plan work.
Finally, under the cover of darkness, vacate the premises with my new found allies in tow.

Everything was ready, finally, so I waited. Waiting, it turned out, gained a whole new meaning when you have no senses but the presence of things around you. I explored every nook and cranny of my house from the comfort of my own mind. I managed to find a record that I lost.
My exploration came to an end when I noticed someone at the door. Reinstantiating my body, I walked over to the door. The four crystals were within a few metres of me as I got to the door, and I reached out a branch of telekinesis to grab the garlic crusher.
I opened the door to find a man standing there, probably in his late 40s. I started applying some force to the crusher, getting ready to make my move, when some movement behind him caught my eye.
His son was standing behind him. I paused.
Do I load a second gem, or let them go?
The kid looked to be roughly 10. He had barely had enough time to live.
That said, I really didn't want to die.
Internally sighing, I gestured that I couldn't speak.
"Oh, okay! We found your keys at the mall." He said, holding them out. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what he said. Lip reading is hard.
I mouthed "thank you!" And clasped my hands together in praise. I took them from his hand carefully, not fully aware of how my skin would feel.
"Your welcome! Have a nice day." Or maybe that's what he said. With that, my first two opportunities slipped away.
I was four short, and had three more opportunities.
Friggin' ethics.

It was a few idle hours of hindsight before someone else arrived.
I had made up my mind over those few hours. If a kid would be involved, I would not do it. I had to draw a moral line in the sand somewhere.
Luckily, when I opened the door this time, I didn't find a child and parent. Instead, a young-ish man. He had the keychain in hand, as little as it mattered, but more importantly, he had no ring on his finger.
Grinning inwardly, I crunched the soul crystal. A blinding flash of light filled the room.
His mouth cracked open in shock.
And then it kind of hung there as he convulsed, and collapsed to the floor. I started dragging him inside. I had never seen any transformations before, and I must say, if I still had a stomach, I would have puked.
I was in a bit of a hurry, mostly to avoid permanent mental scars, so I tossed him down the stairs to the basement, locking the door behind him.
It had been a tad horrifying, watching scales sprout from every surface of his body. It seemed that I had put the wyvern crystal in there, then.
As much as I wanted to distance myself from the changing abomination in my basement, I knew that my work was not yet over. Steeling myself, I opened the door and descended into the dark.
The guy was writhing on a step about halfway down. I almost didn't want to turn the lights on, just so that I wouldn't be treated to the horrifying view before me.
But, still, I did. It was not a pleasant sight.
His arms were kind of extruding themselves into the wings of the Wyvern. Really, that was the worst part, except, perhaps, his rapidly distending face. Or maybe his crackling legs, with clawed toes tearing through his shoes.
I stood there, horrified, for a few seconds, before realizing that I had to move.
The plan revolved around creating the blood crystals. And, in case the name didn't give it away, that required blood.
Carefully, I approached the rapidly growing Wyvern, contemplating my options.
I needed to retrieve a blood sample. And I had left my knife upstairs.

Hoping that he would still be asleep when I got back to him, I bolted back upstairs, and grabbed the nearest sharp object. In this case, it was a dirty fork from my breakfast. It would have to do.
Rushing back downstairs, I was greeted by a wing, perhaps two meters long, sticking up into the stairway.
Close enough! I decided, slamming the fork into the wing. Understandably, he jerked about his wing, trying to get the knife out of it. 
I could feel his scream shaking the air around me, although I was spared the true nature of the sound. My imagination filled me in on that, though, putting it somewhere between an air-raid siren and the squeal of a stuck pig.
As he continued to writhe under my grasp, I squeezed a few drops of blood from the punctures, and pulled them away from his flesh in a hurry.
With the door securely locked, and a chair wedged under the handle, I began to work my magic.
The blob of blood that I was forcing to remain in the air before me slowly condensed into a hard sphere. The spell took a few seconds, but soon enough the orb began glowing, while developing an iris-like iridescence.
Instantly, the power flowing from the ball simplified everything. It was like a weight off my shoulders. But I wasn't out of the woods yet. There was one more spell to cast, and it was a doozy. But, with as much power as I now had, it came easily, though it did take a few seconds.
In a flash, I was in the basement, feeling very hot, thrashing about, and fighting an overwhelming feeling of dread and anxiety.
It's gotta just be a dream, He moaned, there's no way this is real!
A piercing whine, seeming to originate from my own throat, was the verbal representation of his displeasure.
How the hell do I get out of his head, I wondered.
His thoughts were zipping about like a chipmunk on cocaine, trying to figure out what was happening. The pain I had inflicted on him was starting to get to me - I'd liken it to, well, a fork in my arm.
Not wanting to be here anymore, I loosened my grasp on his mind, and was suddenly blind and deaf again, upstairs. A quick scan of my surroundings revealed, well, nothing, except that I had fallen down. Understandably, I'd ceased to focus on keeping myself intact when my consciousness had been catapulted into a separate being. Luckily, nothing had been pulverized upon impact with the ground.

Now, for the hard- actually, hmm, how would this compare to that? Never mind, yeah -the hard part: imposing my will upon a rather irate someone that I had recently turned into a Wyvern.
I'd have felt sorry for this guy if I had had time for that, but as it were, I carefully set down the tangible parts of my body, and carefully skimmed the surface of his mind.
<Stop moving,> I commanded. Immediately, he halted.
Around this point, my plan hit a brick wall. Where do we go now? As far as I could guess, given the timescale, I had three options: 1) Tell him the truth and hope for the best, which wouldn't work. 2) Tell him a massive lie to get him on my side, which has a hope. Perhaps worth a shot. And, seemingly the best long term plan, 3) force him to do my bidding for as long as necessary, which was a measure of last resort. But it was still an option.
Having accidentally began on the path to option 3, I decided to try my luck at number 4 - only force compliance when necessary. Not an original item on the list, sure, but totally an option.
Ooh! Actually, number 4.1 - Use force where necessary to reinforce positive behaviour. Or, no, better- wait he's started moving again.
Stairs! Oh god I need to get away from here! His thoughts slowly came back to pace.
Now, to be clear, pain is, technically, all mental, last I checked, so, technically, I wasn't harming him when the equivalent pain of being set alight made him howl in agony.
<Stop trying to escape> It was hard to differentiate between his thoughts and the ones that I had planted - or, rather, embedded - there, at least to me. But his change in thinking did reveal that he couldn't discern the cause of his problems.
What the am I? Somewhat curious, I reached into his mind and watched his journey of discovery. He rolled this way and that, trying to discern what he could of his body in the dim basement. A... lizard? With wings?
His attitude turned confused, and then took on a tinge of joy. Holy crap I'm a dragon....
Oh, so close yet so far. Wyvern.
His thoughts wandered again, and I ceased to pay attention. I went about preparing for the next guest, grabbing another crystal from the pile.
"K", it was labelled. How specific. I had to assume Kitsune. Those are the fox-like things? Fire elementals or something?

My train of thought was broken by an abrupt shift in the power. In a flash, it had all disappeared.
I looked over and checked the thermostat. It was still set to 20 degrees.
Wait a minute. The energy was gone, and suddenly so was the heat.
The pleasant thoughts of the wyvern drifted into my mind. I dug a little deeper, and could feel him lying on the carpet in his idea of perfect weather, while silently expending enough energy to freeze my entire house.
I was just about to put an end to it, but I thought about it. Really, was he doing any harm to me? I was pretty sure that Wyverns' affinity was to ice and cold, so he wasn't using any energy, just reducing what I could pull from him. Not a problem, unless he kept it up until I ran out of power.
Which was unlikely, as he had fallen asleep.
Note to self: Wyverns can be pacified with cold.
Realizing an opportunity, I reached into his mind carefully. A dream of his was playing, looking and sounding just like it should, or would, were it real life.
He was running as a human down some hall or something. I don't know where he was running, or why he was running. But I decided that, hey, why not spice it up a little?
The hallway suddenly ended at a sheer cliff, and he ran in stride from it, entering a dive as he went. The ground was nowhere to be seen.
Immediately, I could feel the changes beginning. And it seemed as though he could to. Oh no no no no no no NO!
His hands swung up, trying to scratch away the forming scales. But then the webbing of his wings started to form, and that was pretty much the end of that. It seems that there are some mechanical limits to movement when one has wings. The changes progressed steadily, and soon his feet and legs had left the comfort zone of pink flesh and endothermicity, newly grown claws clinging to the now oversized shoes.
The ground appeared immediately below me, I mean, him, and he flipped his wings apart to try and avoid becoming a splatter on the ground below.
A sharp noise penetrated the hazy dream. Is that a doorbell? Indeed, 'twas. The nightmare collapsed, and his vision was cast back into my frost-covered basement.
As I rushed back to the door with the garlic crusher in "hand", I noted that waking up still a wyvern was not exactly an exciting concept for him, whose mental sobs of anguish did not escape my notice. They only just dodged my giving a darn at that point in time.
The doorbell rang again.
They'd be in far less of a hurry if they knew what was about to happen.