Epithet Erased, page 21
“Rick? Rick, are you okay?”
“Nnngh . . . Molly?” He blinked the fog out of his eyes and took in the toys around him. “Hahh . . . I suppose I messed up then, huh? We’re back in the store . . .”
“It’s okay. Let me see your injury. Where is it?” She was pretty sure the spell had hit him on the belly in lizard form, but she didn’t know where that translated to on his actual body. Rick pointed to a spot on his side. She pulled up his jacket at the hip and her eyes widened. His riverbed clay skin was covered in dozens and dozens of silvery scars like quartz veins in a cliffside. They wrapped across his stomach, up and down his body in crescent moons in long, ugly lines.
“Oh good! It appears I am unharmed!” He smiled. Molly gave him a worried look. “Hm? Oh, I see you’re concerned on account of my countless wounds! Do not worry! Most of them don’t even hurt! Much! . . . Are you alright? Things got pretty heated back there!”
Molly felt a shiver of embarrassment creep up her back. Oh right. He was there that entire time. He heard her explode at her sister. That was the second time today. She must seem like a nutjob.
“. . . I’m okay.”
“Excellent! In that case my heroic self-sacrifice has borne fruit! Perhaps the fruit of friendship?” He extended the usual hand. Same old Rick. Good. That meant he was fine. Molly let out an exhausted little sigh.
“You come on a little strong,” Molly told him.
“Yes, I am very strong! THE STRONGEST!” Message not received. She pushed him up from behind to avoid the handshake. “So!” he dusted himself off, “Shall we go back in?” Molly froze.
“Umm . . . Actually? I was thinking I might go in by myself this time.” Rick’s constant smile dropped for a second. Then it flipped back on like a broken light switch.
“Oh!” he said. “Cool! Cool, cool, very cool. Yes.”
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate you trying to save me, it’s just—!”
“No, yeah, I get it. No.”
“—it’s just that I can’t be hurt by her spells and everyone else can, so . . .”
“No, no, yeah. No, yeah, I get it. I get it.”
A silence fell over the room. The uncomfy kind. Like a blanket scrunched behind your neck at a weird angle. She didn’t want to make him feel too bad. There had to be something he could do . . . She tapped her chin.
“I . . . think I’m gonna find a different entry point this time. You could . . . help me find another spot?”
“Yeah! Sounds good, I’ll help! Yes.” It wasn’t much of a bone she threw him, but Rick jumped at it like a puppy. He followed her along as they squeezed their way past the huge, silvery bubble that still occupied more than half of the building.
At the back of the storefront was an unfinished hallway that turned a corner and disappeared off into darkness. Molly flipped on a fluorescent light and took a left. There was a thin staircase going up and a thin staircase going down, each about half the width of a normal staircase. The architect must’ve really been trying to cram as much into the limited floorspace as he could. Molly mentally mapped out the bubble’s location and decided to head down the lower staircase. Rick followed behind single-file, ducking his head beneath the low plaster ceiling.
Halfway down the staircase the bubble re-emerged through the wall like a ghost, blocking their path. Molly tapped the bubble and watched the surface wiggle a bit, studying it the way an old woman studies the ocean before a storm.
“It’s taking up too much of the wall,” Molly decided. “We’ll have to go through it.” She opened a portal against the bubble’s side and blue light poured into the hallway. Heavy seawater pressed against the rim like it was aquarium glass and faded off into a deep, distant cobalt. This must be in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Molly looked at Rick. He was Ocean Race. She tilted her head.
“You can’t breathe underwater, can you?”
“Nnnno. No, not anymore.” Rick looked especially disappointed by the question. Right. He almost drowned earlier. Maybe he had gills once but they got hurt or scarred like the rest of him at some point. Molly felt bad again.
“T-that’s okay! Uh, I can just do this!” Molly extended her arms like a scarecrow and a wobbly green-and-pink bubble emanated from her on all sides, like she was in the center of a hamster ball. She gestured for Rick to step inside. “You’re gonna have to walk at my pace, okay?” He nodded, and with a one . . . two . . . three! Molly rolled them both into the ocean depths.
The ball suspended in the water like a jellyfish, slowly moving forward against the current. It was a little tricky to maneuver. She’d only done this once before when Lori had made an Atlantis-style undersea kingdom with the store’s pool toys. By erasing the water in front of the ball Molly was able to create a small vacuum which sucked them forwards. Rick looked up and down, marveling at the shadows of sea creatures swimming all around them.
“. . . You are really amazing, Molly.”
A shiver of confused embarrassment crept up her back. She hurried to deflect it.
“My powers only work like this in places my sister makes,” she clarified. “That’s why it’s my job to fix Lori’s messes.”
Rick nodded. He stepped alongside her until the ocean in front of them seemed to stop expanding. The watery reflections danced flat against an invisible wall like they had hit the edge of a pool. Molly rolled up the sleeve of her hoodie to her shoulder, stuck her arm into the water, and tapped the wall, exploding it outwards to the other side.
The ball rolled through and popped against an unfinished cement basement floor. The closing portal swallowed up the blue light behind them, leaving only a handful of yellow bulbs hanging from the ceiling to illuminate the room.
Toys and tools sat on shelves in disarray. A large workbench criss-crossed with paint splotches occupied the majority of a wall just underneath a sprawling bulletin board with dozens of sketches push-pinned to the cork. Dolls and action figures were left in pieces on wooden counters like an unfinished autopsy. Stacks of organized mess piled high. A toy junkyard, just left of whimsical. This place would have looked downright creepy in the wrong lighting.
“Daaad?” Molly called. “DaaAAaaaad?”
No answer.
Lorelai’s bubble extended all the way out into the middle of the room. That meant that her father had probably been sucked into Lorelai’s world by accident at the moment she created it. That wasn’t terribly uncommon. Both Molly and her father had been unintentionally sucked in too many times to count, sometimes even in the middle of the night. Lori would start sleep-inscribing and her worlds would leak into real life.
She sighed. Her dad would probably be alright. Lori didn’t let their father into her worlds too often, but once he was in it was tough to get him out. He would navigate her fantasy lands like a prairie dog, constantly popping up in spots that made no sense for him to be in. Once something caught his interest he would study it the way a tinkerer looks at a clock, fixated and utterly impossible to remove.
“Is this your family?”
Molly turned.
Rick was pointing to an old photograph in a circular frame. That one was taken a few years ago. Right near the marsh they’d visited on vacation, actually. Molly and Lori were in front and their parents were in the back. Their dad had an arm around Lorelai with a big, stupid grin on his face. Their mother had a hand on Molly’s shoulder.
Calliope Blyndeff.
Her colorful name was almost a complete mismatch for her
appearance.
Unlike her husband, Calliope almost always had a serious expression on her face. Her tall figure and the way she held Molly’s shoulders in the photo gave off the unmistakable energy of an evil stepmother or schoolmarm who hated the children at her orphanage and would sell them for a nickel.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Calliope was the sort of person who’s face barely had one degree of separation between a smile and a frown and only the people who were close to her could really tell the difference. Molly knew that in that photo she was smiling as widely as she ever did.
Her mother was a fastidious woman and a meticulous taskmaster who ran the business end of the family’s toy store. The polar opposite of her husband in basically every way. Where he was wild and impulsive, she lived her whole life according to a day planner.
She looked after the children. She did all the chores. She ran the finances . . . and she loved them all to the tick of a clock. Her life was an endless schedule and she loved every minute of it. Callie once told Molly how amazing it felt to plan and then execute an ideal day of work. Molly did not understand this feeling then and she especially did not understand it now.
Looking back, Molly now realized her mother had been a ball of high-functioning anxiety. In business meetings she wore a false pair of glasses because she worried people wouldn’t take her seriously without them. A full-on addict of hustle culture. She had her daughters’ whole lives planned out and was devastated whenever an obstacle to that plan presented itself. The only thing that could calm her down was her unendingly lax husband.
“It’s fine, Cal, it’s fine! Look at me! I got no idea what I’m doin’ and even a loser like me ended up with a perfect wife and kids! I’m a total failure, but here I am, happy as a clam! See? Bap bap bap. These clam lips want a clam kiss! C’mere! Mwah! Hey, there yah go.”
She would laugh and calm herself at his endless stupidity. She found it charming. An oasis of fun for her tight ship to sail in.
As a lone parent either one of them might’ve been too much, but somehow her wild workaholism and Marty’s reckless abandon balanced each other out, yin and yang. A happy home balanced on two broken support beams. Together they were almost parents.
Calliope died in a fire when Molly was ten.
No one was quite sure what had happened. The fire had started in the middle of the night, and by morning their old life was gone. Their toy store, which had grown so well under Calliope’s management, vanished alongside her in a cloud of smoke. An old friend of hers from business school managed to set them up with a new live-in store as a favor, but the location wasn’t as nearly good and the spark was gone. Without Callie running the ship it was destined to sink slowly into the swamp.
Molly nodded.
Yes.
That was her family, once.
Rick stared at the picture and appraised the smiling girl who had almost killed him. Younger then. Smaller, in normal clothes.
“When did your sister become a witch?”
Molly had to think about that. She looked into her own warped reflection on the bubble wall like it might know the answer. She almost said “Just today,” but that wasn't really right, was it?
“. . . I don’t know. She used to be nice, I think. We used to play together. She used her powers outside of her bubbles more and we would play.” They’d had tea parties in real castles. They’d traveled through enchanted forests together. She had worn a real princess dress and her sister had been her knight. Her protector.
She knew that those things had happened. They were facts. But those facts felt far away now, almost like she was remembering a photograph of those moments rather than living through them herself. Lorelai had grown distant after their mom died. She had always been outgoing and energetic with lots of friends, but nowadays she rarely left the house. She was definitely extroverted, but who needs to go out when you can go wherever you want? So instead of going out she would stay in. In her own worlds. Far deeper in than anyone should ever go.
Molly walked over to Lorelai’s bubble and picked a new spot along the far wall, away from where they came out of the underwater ocean.
“I think this is basically the opposite side from before. I should be able to get in faster this way if she doesn’t know I’m coming.” She searched around the room for some excuse to say goodbye to Rick. Some way to leave him there.
“. . . I’m a little jealous of you,” he said.
Molly stopped.
“. . . For what?”
She couldn’t help but be a little mad at him. What did she have that anyone else could possibly want?
“Your friendship seems so easy,” he said. “The way you talk with Phoenica and Trixie, it’s so, it’s just so . . . easy. I can’t think of another word.” He looked at her. “But that’s not fair, is it? You were willing to give up everything to take the hit for them! And your Boss guy. And me! You’re cool. You’re really, really cool, Molly.”
His compliment was so unexpected that it nearly knocked her over. “Cool?” Her? No one had ever called her cool before. Well, Boss did once, but he used the word “Cool” like a comma. Rick sighed.
“I wish I remembered how to make friends like you,” he said.
Molly turned to him, embarrassed, desperate to downplay the compliment.
“I only have two real friends.”
“Hey, that’s not too bad. I don’t have any,” Rick smiled. He’d been smiling all day, but this one wasn’t like the others. It was soft and worn and real, like the pattern on an antique doll. Molly couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
“But . . . you must’ve had lots of friends underwater, right? Didn’t you say you used to be super powerful?”
“Yes, well . . .” Rick walked over to one of the work tables and began absentmindedly fiddling with dolls. “That was a long time ago. Friendships are very different, where I come from.” The image of Rick’s tattered skin with all of its scars flashed in her head for a moment. It felt like a dangerous question, but she couldn’t help but ask:
“. . . What happened to them?”
“Hm? Oh! Well. Hmmm . . .” The question was weighty enough that he had to search for a good spot to lift it from. “Well . . . When I was a young guppy, I had many friends. Generally epithet-users get stronger the more they use their powers, right? But mine is different. ☆Soulmates☆ only gets stronger when I gain a new friend. Each friend is worth one point of Proficiency, you see. Right now I’m sitting at a whopping two!”
Oh, they must use Proficiency to measure epithet strength in Ocean Country too, Molly thought. She’d had her own Proficiency measured once. 18. Quite high for a child her age. Most kids didn’t have to use their powers as much as she did. Most kids didn’t have a sibling somewhere in the high sixties.
Rick gathered the toppled dolls into a cluster on the desk.
“I obtained as many friends as I could and I became VERY powerful. So powerful in fact that I caught the eye of our Supreme Leader!” Rick looked up from the dolls. “Does the surface have a Supreme Leader?”
Molly shook her head no.
“Well, we do! Our Supreme Leader is an ancient warlock known as He Who Hungers Endlessly. Big squid man, ten feet tall. Sits on an electric throne. Terrifying, honestly!” Rick picked up a broken puppet and sat him against the wall. “Well anyways, I caught his glowy, glowy eye because I was basically the strongest kid my age by a country fathom. So, one day I got Harvested!”
“. . . ‘Harvested’?”
Rick looked at her. “Oh man, do you guys not have the Harvesting? Lucky! Whenever someone’s powers grow enough to be worthy of the Supreme Leader’s attention, they are taken away to a cell in the Colosseum. The strongest of us would duke it out against other wizards and witches, and when we were finally powerful enough we would get to fight against His Translucence himself! And boy, oh boy, he will just turn you into paste. I thought I was strong, but MAN. He just destroyed me. Multiple times!”
“Why?” Molly blinked.
“So he could get stronger! He Who Hungers Endlessly lives up to his name! He Hungers! Endlessly!” Molly shrunk back like she was listening to a ghost story.
“Does he . . . eat kids?”
“No!” Rick said automatically. He thought about it again. “Maybe? I hope not! But no! See, his Proficiency was already so high that the only way it could actually get any higher was to fight strong opponents. Like, REALLY strong ones. Ordinary people didn’t level up his powers at all.” Rick swung the puppet’s arm to knock away all the little wooden figurines in front of him. “Long story short, we were farmed for
experience points!”
“That’s . . . that’s awful!”
“Yes!”
“That’s like . . . really really awful!”
“Yes!” Rick smiled. “The worst part is that all of those fights didn’t even make me any stronger. Which was a bummer! My power only grows when I get more friends, and when you spend a bunch of years inside a cage, well... some of your friends from the outside start to forget you.” He shrugged. “I don’t blame them. I hadn’t seen most of them since I was twelve.”
“You got taken away when you were twelve?” Molly asked. “. . . I’m twelve.”
“Haha, hey! Watch out!” Rick said, shooting her a quick double-guns gesture. He sounded playful, but she couldn’t help but feel some part of it was meant as a genuine warning. She imagined what it would be like to live that way for years, enough years to become a grown-up like Rick. She felt a lump in her throat.
“Anyways,” Rick continued, “Long story short, I was the only one in the Colosseum fights who kept getting weaker. You know. Not counting the ones who died. I tried to make friends with my fellow captives, but . . .”
His eyes disappeared behind his sunglasses.
“Well . . . It feels . . . wrong. You can’t hurt the people who are supposed to be your friends. Right? Even facing them in battle felt wrong. So instead I faced them under the ‘Rick Shades’ persona! After all, our value as Proficiency cattle was entirely based on winning and strength. My friends all needed to win the battles, but I didn’t need to win any! I just needed them to like me. So . . . I would lose! I would lose every fight.” He pulled up the edge of his patchwork jacket. The silver scars sparkled across his skin. “For them, winning was the only thing that mattered. So I would lose. And that way, we all won! Letting myself get hurt was best for everyone!”
