~1~

  As I scratched beneath the chin of a creature with soft flowers in its ears and multiple tails, I got it. Why spoil this kind of amazing surprise? Of course you would never.

  Regina indulged me for a little while longer, allowing Tweedle Dee to roll around on his back and make the most adorable noises of appreciation.“Shall we?”

  Tweedle Dee hopped obediently up as though he fully understood. I wondered how much he did or didn’t understand, and added it to the list of a million bajillion questions that I couldn’t ask and Regina would be terrible at answering.

  Who discovered the portal? Did the Chinese, the Russians, or the French have portals of their own? What was the purpose of us coming here? How often did creatures like Tweedle Dee manifest out of magic? Could I eventually get a companion creature like it?

  I dearly hoped the answer was yes. My mother was allergic to dogs and so was I, and they’d always considered that the st nail in the coffin for pet ownership. It wasn’t a discussion that I could have with them. The only times I ever brought it up, it was swiftly shot down. No dog.

  But could I have a foxicorn? Or a fox Pegasus, like a fox with wings? Or a fox made of ice?

  My mind spun off and away from the other questions that I’d considered, and settled on this one.

  Maybe I could have something even bigger than a fox. Maybe there were giraffes and hippos and elephants with batches of crystals growing out of them, or psychic ostriches.

  I’d gotten to my feet, slowly of course, and hobbled after her when she set out with her purposeful strides, carrying half the contents of my pack like they were nothing. For a time the minutes passed in companionable silence. I marveled at all the things; she gnced back at me periodically and grinned at the expression on my face. I must have looked like a stoned dope.

  I didn’t care. Over there was a mushroom the size of a skyscraper with what looked like tiny dragons flying around the cap. As I watched, one of the caps of the distant mountain lifted off and, over the course of the next ten minutes, floated over to a different mountain before settling down again.

  “Regina?”

  “Hm?”

  “Could I get one? One of the… like Tweedle Dee? Is he yours? It seems like he’s yours.”

  She ughed. “Slow down there, cowboy. I know what you’re getting at, and the short answer is yes.”

  I jumped up and then thrust my elbows back. “Yessssss!”

  She ughed again. “It’s a little more complicated than that, but yeah. You get one. Let’s get you to the city…”

  “Lead the way,” I told her.

  Colossal mushrooms are weird, but not as rge as upside down floating cities, buildings made of trees, or pces where gravity works both ways at once.

  You have to imagine a staircase that both ascends and descends at the same time to get what I was seeing. People walking upstairs from below on one side and walking downstairs, also from below on the other side. Straight out of an M.C. Escher.

  Castle towers that had creneltions on four different sides, like a cross, with people manning those towers on all four sides. And nobody was falling off. The whole guard tower cross situation slowly rotated clockwise, while the banners rippled in a wind that made no sense, and guards stood rigid at attention.

  Regina had been in the middle of sketching out a bare skeleton of what the heck was going on here. The trouble was, she wasn’t very good at it. Her good-natured manner, cheerful ughter at herself, and frequent petting of Tweedle Dee made it seem like it didn’t matter.

  “So, the gist of the world is that magic is everywhere. It’s suffused into all the objects and organisms all the time. It’s, sort of, possibility. Until you add intent, it just sort of sits around and collects. The teachers at the academy will be able to expin a lot better than I can, but the basics go like this: if enough magic collects in one pce, it spontaneously generates objects, or lifeforms…” She ughed, half embarrassed. “Or elements or emotions or acts of nature. Sorry, I’m not expining this very well.”

  She gestured to a rge column of purple red vines waving in the middle of the meadow, looking more like tentacles than vines. But the vines sported leaves, and thorns.

  “That, over there, is a manifestation.”

  “Is that a pnt or a creature?”

  “You have to understand that the lines get blurry. Tweedle Dee here is mostly an animal but some bit of pnt. Like an eighty twenty split. And the lines get blurry in some weird ways, like… there’ll be creatures that are also elements. Creatures that are also feelings. Pnts that are also elements. Elements that are also feelings.”

  “What?”

  She blew out an exasperated sigh. “There are mixes of all kinds of stuff. I can’t expin it all that well… save it for the academy. Just trust me, that vine thing right there is maybe half creature, maybe a little less, and around half pnt, probably a little more. And there’s a mine where miners found a vein of crystallized excitement. And also a river that was fire. And a creature that was also your pleasant dreams.”

  “That is… so…”

  “Fudged in the A?”

  She was also growing less normal as the walk went on. Her freckles had definitely multiplied, and they definitely had started going different shimmery colors. Because they were also shimmering.

  “You’ve probably noticed, magic is collecting on me,” she said, gesturing to her shoulders, where the freckles gleamed iridescent colors, “and it’s collecting on you.”

  “What?”

  She produced a mirror and showed it to me. Sure enough, my eyes had already changed to a violent Monarch butterfly orange and bck patterning. My hair was wilder than it had been a half hour ago, the mousey brown frosted with orange tips. And I had an odd pattern of organic lines running over my face, faintly darker than my regur skin tone.

  “Holy…”

  “Shiznits. I know.”

  Both of us stopped.

  “Dee? What is it?”

  Tweedle Dee was whining, and his tails were tucked down beneath his legs. He clearly didn’t like whatever he smelled or heard.

  Veering off, I went in search of the sound I’d heard. “It sounds like… oh dagnabbit, what’s that smell?”

  I came upon a figure in the tall grass, lying there and making a pitiful sound. Worse, though, was the stench. It became thicker and stronger the closer he got to the creature.

  The thing he was looking at… was all different colors. All the soft pastels ran together in different ways, sometimes creating abstract flowery shapes, and other times running down its body like stems or leaves. It was humanoid, vaguely, with a number of spindly limbs all along a long trunk like body. I realized its head was a flower.

  It was also bleeding bck. Several wounds on its body ran with ichor directly down into the dirt, where it was pooling.

  “Hey,” I said gently, reaching out a hand. “Hey, what happened? Who did this?”

  “Who did… oh.”

  It became clear that several of the petals had fallen off when it raised its head to look at me. It appeared to have four eyes, or perhaps six, but they weren’t organs, just suggestions in the middle of the sunflower-like center of the flower, where all the pollen would sit. A rge mouth shape turned down as it locked those five or three or four eyes on me and made another keening cry.

  “You said oh,” I told Regina, not taking my eyes off the pitiful sight. “That means you know what this is and what’s happening.”

  “That,” she said, “is a god.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  It would still be another week before I got to choose Divinity’s Vet Corps, but the face of this thing.

  The flower god extended one pleading hand out toward me.

  “It’s a god. That’s part of the reason this program exists.”

  “A god.”

  “Probably the god of flowers. Maybe the god of the scent of flowers. Usually when they get corrupted like this their purview goes first.”

  “Uh… huh…” I said, and reached out to take its outstretched hand. Her words didn’t register much. The need on this creature’s face made perfect sense.

  “Christopher, don’t—“

  Too te. A cool hint of divinity touched me, and everything went both immediately bright tie-dyed colors, and also total white. The pastel colors soon fled and left me wondering where the world had gone.

  ~2~

  While I was… away, I had a fsh of memory. Sarah was just a tween at that point, maybe twelve years old or so, and she had gotten it into her head that she was going to start a garden.

  “And these are the tomato flowers,” she said. “Look. Little and yellow. Six pointed stars”

  “I know,” I told her, and rolled my eyes. There were little yellow stars all over the kitchen where the pnts were growing.

  “I’m learning all about flowers. There are pansies and peonies and poinsettias—”

  “And purple people eaters.”

  “Shut up. There’s Sweet William Catchfly and Adam’s Needle and Thread, and tons of lilies, of course roses, but did you know there are also primroses? There are hyacinths, hydrangeas, hollyhocks,…” She continued reciting flower names, up until she went and grabbed the book, some sort of flower encyclopedia she’d gotten from the library.

  “I don’t. Care.” I told her, and tried to turn back to the computer. I was watching someone speed run a video game where you py as a guy with a coffee mug for a head. It made no sense, but video games don’t really have to. Internal logic is only a thing if companies make it a thing. The cool thing about this game was that the animation was far more fluid and bubbly than anything I’d ever seen. The description cimed that the game animation was not only hand drawn, which was incredible in the age of computers, but that the style was almost a hundred years old.

  There were certain hit box tricks to the speed run that fascinated me. Flowers were decidedly not fascinating. They wouldn’t be until I was in my mid-twenties and wanted to cheer up my dying mother.

  ***

  I came to with several people and several creatures standing over me. I hadn’t met any of them, save Regina, who radiated worry, and Tweedle Dee, who was presently head butting my face softly. The smell of rosals, gaura, Chinese trumpet flowers and a few other flowers had roused me from unconsciousness.

  Wait.

  I knew the names of all the flowers. And I could parse rosals from gaura by smell alone.

  “What’s… happening?”

  “Just lie back, son,” a man with a case of too-much-mustache said. That same bushy salt and pepper stretched around above and behind his ears, but left him with a shining bald head.

  “I’m okay,” I told them, not sure if that was true. I couldn’t sense anything wrong, though I was drained. “What happened?”

  “You touched a corrupted god, you nitwit,” Regina said.

  “Oh.” And apparently that was unwise.

  “Not to worry,” Mustache Head said. “Regina and her Nakamamon were able to reach the city swiftly and we were able to get help here in a jiffy. In the future, if you should happen upon a corrupted god, you should be extremely cautious. Only go to interact with it once you’ve learned the procedures and if you have the appropriate skills.”

  “Noted,” I said. “Where is the… the god?”

  Mustache Head beamed at me. “Why, she’s all around you, son. Just get a snout full of that aroma, you’ll see.” By way of example, he sniffed loudly, seeming to suck half his mustache up into his face.

  I closed my eyes and took a sniff as well, and instantly became aware of marigolds, daffodils, tulips, and cherry blossoms in the vicinity, among others that weren’t so prevalent. Mostly, Tweedle Dee was in my face and I was smelling all the flowers in his ears: the rosals, which were probably my favorites for right now, guara, trumpet flowers, balloon flowers and the others.

  A rge rectangur screen I recognized instantly expanded into being and took up my whole field of vision. The border was a royal blue, the background a grayish blue, and the text was eight bit. Those big chunky letters appeared rapid fire, all of this exactly like some of the video games I’d pyed.

  You have been touched by divinity!

  The little downward triangle fshed, so I… pressed on it. With my mind. There wasn’t a click audibly, but I could feel it in my brain.

  [Goddess of the Meadow] has judged you worthy, and bestowed the gift of [floral knowledge] onto you. [Goddess of the Meadow] felt your compassion and willingness to help, though you knew not the way. [Goddess of the Meadow] has bestowed upon you +1 Likability. You gain 1 Likability token.

  I sat up, feeling the warm sunshine, the cool breeze, and the attention upon me.

  “I don’t want to take any more of your time,” I told Mustache Head and the rest of the assembled people. Mostly Mustache Head. He was the only one apparently willing to talk to me.

  Mustache Head nodded curtly. “I’ll be meeting you soon, d. Stay safe.” With that, he climbed aboard his own weird animal companion, a thing that looked like a raccoon that rose swiftly into the air on fps of skin like a flying squirrel.

  Several younger people rose up into the sky as well, one of them on a rge crane with bright purple and red feathers. The other one stepped onto a smiling pink cloud and zoomed off after Mustache Head.

  Afterwards, Regina convinced the armed guards I hadn’t noticed to take their leave also. They climbed aboard their flying companion creatures and zoomed off.

  She watched them go for some time, hands on hips, smile slowly vanishing. She whirled on me when they were out of sight.

  “You could’ve been killed,” she hissed down.

  I blinked at her.

  “Idiot! When someone says ‘oh that’s a corrupted god’ you don’t just reach out and touch it. That thing could’ve drained out your life force to recim some of its… whatever. Essence. Or magic powers or whatever they have.”

  I smiled easily at her. “Divinity?”

  “You need to take this seriously, Christopher. Ohh, my assignment is a flipping ship for brains.”

  “Oh, I won’t touch another one of those things again… at least not without Mustache Head next to me.”

  She froze. “Mustache Head?” The name dawned on her then, and she threw her head back and ughed uproariously at the sky. “Oh, you’re not wrong. All of his hair looks the same. Even the eyebrows!” The clutched at her sides and ughed and ughed.

  Finally she stopped, and gred at me. “My job is to get you to the academy safe and sound, you hear? No more dumb swizz, okay?”

  “For shizzle, my nizzle,” I told her seriously.

  She threw her hands up in the air. “You’re going to get yourself killed before you even nd your first paycheck.”

  I blinked at her and slowly got to my feet. I was feeling more energized now, less like I was going to blow over in a stiff breeze. I did sway on my feet a bit, but I steadied without having to use Regina’s shoulder for bance.

  “Hey, what’s a Nakamamon?”

  This is Christopher beginning to feel like himself again.