Chapter 14: What Next?

ALICIA

So let's see. I talked about my past, I talked about various jobs, and even about religious stuff sorta. This day, my mother was making rollover pastries using brie and homemade fig jam, and my father needed random things for making sandwiches at the Lions club. It was a slow rainy day punctuated by activity around me, and not much activity from me. I was expecting a package from Amazon but otherwise nothing was going on. I had told a friend named Sinan online who had read my other writings about all of this. He/she was interested in cryptography and was interested in the language I made, comparing it to an obscure language called Toki Pona. He/she shared their thoughts about the spy, and hI told how I know Fox was a spy because she was too available. I tried to get in touch with Momo after that to ask her thoughts on the book, but she said right now she was dealing with stuff and was just too busy. Exactly as planned.

Currently, I was mostly unemployed, writing my various thoughts as a memoir, trying to make sense of things. I had supposed it would be okay to just live the rest of my life out peacefully, not worrying too much about anything. In the background, and just Netflix and chill for the rest of my days.

RENA

That wouldn't do at all! I had no objection to her not working, as frankly money was only useful if used towards a purpose. My own agency fluctuated from rich and poor, depending on how many agents we had active at any one point, and how many of them were earning money at it. Currently, we were hemorrhaging alot of money watching after Alicia, and many of them wanted to quit. I told them honestly that it was up to them, as I understood that I had sunk alot of personal cost in this goal, and it wasn't necessarily everyone's goal. Pretty soon, roughly 9/10 of my staff went on to greener pastures, leaving just my four friends, and those truly devoted to our cause. Some of them joined other spy groups, other rejoined civilian life. I sent Christmas cards to them, but respected that they now had their own lives. And mine was Alicia now.

So no, I didn't care whether Alicia had a full-time job, a part-time job, or even no job at all. But I did care that she seemed lonely, or that she might be all too willing to just back to sleep and leave things as they are. Wake up! I said. And so, I gave her work to get her to face the world. The symbols she used to interpret the world flooded his every waking moment, until she was forced to face the illusion of his past. I am sorry I was so hard on her, but it needed to be done.

As for his obvious suspicion that Momo was obviously me, I let her think what she wanted. But Momo was actually one of my agents instead. Probably. Or maybe a random stranger that I allowed her to meet because she was lonely and needed a friend to talk to who wasn't part of all of this. Maybe? Or maybe Alicia was right about Momo. I deliberately left it open-ended so no matter what the conclusion, Momo could bring him some friendship and happiness. So too with several of her other friends, because I didn't want Alicia thinking everyone was me. That wasn't a healthy fixation, I figured. And yet despite giving her friends to meet with and talk to, I kept up the pressure until that illusion that she had from her childhood cracked. "What the hell..." she said, just before a violent seizure flooded her brain (unlike the past "seizures" this one was real) as she finally remembered the years of memories buried under false experiences.

ALICIA

I thought I had a mostly normal childhood. But it turned out that I was wrong. My mind suddenly and with great finality broke all of the illusions I'd ever seen. I remember Fox was Rena. I remembered when I was very young, how Rena rescued me from a violent nurse nun, and suddenly my perpetual fear of hospitals made sense. I had always thought it had to do with being overmedicated and having probes stuck in my head when I supposedly had seizures. I remember the way her touch felt as she carried me to the people who were supposed to be my parents. I remember that I had no real parents because these were from a previous life, and I remember the "dream" I had now in full detail and clarity. I was Alethea, a woman, trapped inside the body of a man named Emett. I now wore women's clothing occasionally, as I had taken a genderfluid lifestyle, so my name was now Alicia.

I remembered that I was not born in Sharon, Connecticut (Sharon, CT) but Sharon Court (Sharon Ct) in Richmond, along the roadside. I was moved to an undisclosed new location for the first few years of my life, while I was systematically worked on by professionals to bury my memories in such a way that my photographic recall didn't work properly. But now it did. I looked at a picture once, and started to draw every detail. I wasn't the best artist, but my picture did contain every house, fence, tree, and pet that could be seen.

I knew everything done to me. One of the agents was a creeper and molested me, as I expected, but Rena confronted him upon discovering it, and unceremoniously ate his liver. Had she only cut part of it away, it would have regrown eventually, but she went all Temple of Doom on him. The liver, it turns out, is actually more important to the body than even the heart, as within minutes he bled out. It turns out that blood passing through the liver every minute is a pretty big deal. Also without a liver to clean the poisons in his body, all the food and water he had recently consumed became impure. It was disturbing to watch and I was glad to have forgotten it. But in some ways, I was relieved that I had a fox girl looking out for my well-being. She kinda spat it out right after, because the idea of a ninetail eating humans livers was an old wives' tale. Foxes are omnivorous, and while they like animal liver, human liver isn't really their thing. Foxes tend not to harm humans or many pets (besides maybe rabbits or birds). It was just to punish him for mistreating me.

I knew that lightning runes were used on me to induce a seizure. I knew that Autumntwig dressed me up to make me feel less insecure about being reborn as a male. I knew that the people in my classes at school were actually tanukis, elves, and other beings mixed in among real humans.

In fact, I was not only able to break the illusion of my past, but also other illusions. Angels, fey, demons, and other beings lived among us, usually enacting a glamour of some sort. Swamp creatures ran the government (literally, they were called saurians, and they loved being in power because it meant they could inflict pain). On a bus ride I took, a lady across from me was a vampire, and a man two seats back was a kappa. They often had medical conditions matching what they were. For example, she had no ability to process iron, and a vitamin D deficiency because she couldn't synthesize sunlight. He had male pattern balding and a sweaty scalp. Magic, sorcery, and the divine art had been hidden in plain sight all of this time, and fantasy stories about it had all been true. And yet, aside from very simple effects, I did not how to use any magic. I walked out into a forest, ignoring the «Private Property: No Trespassing» signs, continuing further until I was past posted zones and into a part of the forest that nobody owned. I moved my hands as I remembered how I saw the divine art used. In retrospect, moving to a forest to use a fire was not the best move. But it made no difference. "Fire!" I called out, attempting to draw all of the runes from inside my body, mixing them with the outside world. This was the theory behind how both magic and divine art worked, the dantian system drew energy from the spiritual circulation starting from the stomach and flowing through the heart and mind. Sorcery was a little different, you could do weird things like pulling from ley lines or from other people's energy. But in any case, unless I had some sort of blockage or deviation, I should have been able to do this. I focused harder, probably looking constipated to anyone who might have walked up to me then, trying to focus everything I had into making even a small spark. "Fire!!!" I said, followed by, "Dammit to hell!" A voice behind me giggled, "That's not how it works for you." A moment later, Arboria stepped out of an oak tree. No, not stepped out from behind an oak tree. Actually, I saw her body move out from within it.

She made a beckoning motion as one might signal for a cat to come closer, only to have the cat scoff and move in some other direction. But I was not a cat. "Yeah, you," she said, "Come with me, I'll take you to Rena. She'll straighten you out." And so, I walked with her, past the forest, crossing a small river, heading up a hill near an old grain silo, until we came to a desolate-looking house. But now I could see through illusions. Built in the middle of the forest was pretty sweet pad.

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