Chapter 9: Eight

Dusting is easy. So easy.

It’s a wonder mortals have a difficult time with it. You swish-swish the broom across the wooden planks of the floor, sending bits of dust scurrying across the floor in little waves. There’s hair too, probably from one of the shelves where bundles of wolf’s fur are stacked together. They don’t taste very good, but they do have a nice texture to them.

You start humming, an old song that you had once heard while travelling in the Paths that Lead to Somewhere, just a little ditty that wormed its way into your vast memory.

You stop humming when you notice reality start to turn green. Annoying, that. With a huff, you tell the world to stop playing silly buggers and go back to being normal... or as normal as it was before. You’re here to work as a dutiful shop clerk, not turn the world different colours.

It takes a few minutes to dust the whole store, minutes that Abigail spends flitting all over the place, righting displays, wiping counters and replacing jars onto some shelves that have been emptied a little through no fault of your own.

You pause to chew on some marbles that were neatly stacked on one shelf. Nice and crunchy.

But you’re not here to nibble! Your summoner has given you a great quest and it is your duty to carry it out to the best of your ability!

You wield your broom like a lance ready to charge at dust foes and your dustpan is your stalwart shield against their choking assaults on your nose.

The dust bunnies stand no chance against your valiant charge and are soon dispersing like chaff in the wind to escape your might grasp.

But they did not expect the assault from the tentacle nation!

You split your tentacles into hundreds of teeny tiny tendrils that spear out and catch the defeated dust bunnies unaware. Soon they are dangling at the tips of your tenticular grasp, morale broken and dusty blood leaking out.

So you toss them all onto the dustpan like the corpses of enemies being tossed into a ditch.

Leaning forwards a little, you inspect the circle carved into the metal of the pan. It looks like it was stamped on by a big press. There’s the name of a company there, and a copyright number again, just like the lights. Strange.

You press your thumb to the place Abigail showed you and wait... and wait some more.

It’s not working.

“Abigail!” you yell. “Your pan’s broken.”

She looks up from where she is behind the counter and moves a lock of frizzy hair behind her ear. “Oh? Did the circle get scratched?” she asks as she tosses a pen she was using into a little cup and moves around the counter. Soon she’s kneeling by your side and inspecting the dust-filled pan. “You did good,” she says before rewarding you with a smile.

You look away. You are an elder, a Great One of unfathomable power. You don’t need the praise of some mere mortal to make you blush. It’s the stupid heat in this stupid shop. That’s why you’re so flustered.

“Let’s see,” Abigail says as she grabs the pan’s handle and presses her thumb over the mark on its side.

You stretch your senses, curious as to how this magic stuff works.

There’s a spark of something in Abigail, something wet and warm and soothing, like the very essence of life itself that goes from sitting within her like a still pond to rushing to her thumb. The circle on the pan drinks up the essence and then, with a woosh, the dust turns to smoke.

Cute!

The mortals figured out how to disintegrate things.

“Did you see how that worked?” Abigail asks.

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“I did,” you say. “I can do it now.”

She smiles at you again, then like the stupid summoner she is, she pats you on the head before standing up. “Call me if you need help.”

You take a moment to recentre yourself.

The door jingles while you’re busy touching your head where Abigail just patted you and that, finally, gets you out of your daydream of a many-armed Abigail pat-patting you all day long.

There’s a short, scruffy looking human in the doorway. He’s wearing a hood that doesn’t do a good job of hiding his pock-marked and scabbed face. “Abigail!” he says as he spots your summoner behind the counter. “The most beautiful Abigail, it’s a pleasure to see you again.” He makes big motions with his arms that send his hood reeling off his head and reveals a big, goofy smile. “You’re just the girl I need.”

“Hello, Moriarty,” Abigail says and you can feel her discomfort from here.

But that isn’t any of your business. Your battle against the dust bunnies might have ended in victory, but the war rages on!

You collect another pile of dust while the man moves around the store. He spots you at some point, but doesn’t actually comment except to snort at the way you’re holding the broom tucked under your arm like a lance. It’s not your fault the thing is so damned long.

Now to use the magic circle to disintegrate the pile of dust. The tricksy bit is using the same life essence that Abigail did. You, of course, aren’t mortal, and are therefore not alive enough to have any sort of life juice in you. But there’s plenty of life juice in the world at large.

You press a hand to the ground next to the dustpan and grip the handle with your other. You focus, feeling for the same life juice that Abigail used, but instead of looking for the stuff in her mortal body, you stretch out your senses into the ground and to the core of this living planet.

Plenty of life juice there!

You pull, and after just a tiny bit of resistance, a fraction of a fraction of the world’s essence it torn out of the ground, through your hand, arm, shoulders and finally into the magical circle.

There’s a woosh.

You notice the perfectly circular hole in the ground first, mostly where the dustpan used to be. Then, when you look up, you see the hole in the ceiling that keeps going all the way through Abigail’s apartment, the roof, and into the cloudy sky above.

Neat!

And you still have tons of life juice left in you, so much that you’re practically glowing with the stuff.

The dustpan’s a little broken, but that’s a problem for later.

Standing up, you cross the store, stalling Abigail’s conversation with the customer as you walk past her glowing as if you’d just nibbled on a billion firefly butts.

“What?” she asked.

“Getting a jar,” you tell her as you walk into the backroom.

It’s not hard to find an empty jar. There are plenty of them laying around, waiting to be filled with all sorts of yummy things.

You take a few out of their boxes and push your life juices in them. It feels a little bit like when two tentacles rub together, but in the place your soul would be if you had one.

Grinning, you raise up a jar filled with glowing juices. Perfect! Abigail will be able to use this to fill up her soul’s life juice swamp.

Now you just need to give it to her and reap the headpats.

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