Book Eight, Chapter 19: Interlude

Mortimer the 304th walked the cracked pavement toward the high school as if he had all the time in the world—which, technically, was an understatement. He had far more time than this world.

It had been a thousand years since he had missed the Barker. While others relied on corporate news and old-fashioned gossip for information on the Barker’s whereabouts, Mortimer had devised his own alert system. To those who had studied the Magic Between Worlds, it was quite simple.

Mortimer had more than studied MBW. He had mastered it.

He stopped in his tracks as a gust of cool night air lifted up his cloak and breathed life into his lungs. He was very proud of those lungs. Making them functional was hard enough, but making them capable of producing joy at the act of breathing was a whole other matter.

For these lungs, a breath of fresh air was pleasurable. It was everything he remembered from three hundred and three body iterations ago, back when he was only known as Mortimer, back when he was mortal.

There was a chill in the air, but it didn’t cut through Mortimer’s wool cloak or suit.

The air in 1980s suburbia smelled like gasoline and lawn clippings. Somehow, it still felt purer than all that. It was an age of innocence, but for this world, it would soon not be.

The Sweepstakes had come to this place. Soon, would come the superstition, soon, would come the riots, soon, would come a new world order where luck was the only currency that remained.

But that night, the mortals slept in their houses, not knowing that their lives were about to change forever.

The Barker was near, Mortimer knew. He could feel it in his bones like old agers could feel a thunderstorm. His bones, after all, danced with MBW. Perhaps he would always have a connection to the sweepstakes.

He pushed his body forward step by step, willing it to his beck and call. An engineered body was unnatural, but the magic of humans is that they can change their nature. Mortimer certainly had, not that any could tell it to look at him.

He had a pianist’s fingers. His father’s fingers. With bony cheeks and sharp features to match. There wasn’t an ounce of his mother in him that he knew. Time had taken his memories of his parents for the better part.

The high school loomed ahead, newly built. Mortimer had seen many films set in such places, though, when he was mortal, he had attended a much smaller school in the 1940s. His world was likely on a path to be like this one, but it never got the chance.

He felt a pang in his heart. What might have been, had the Sweepstakes not visited his home world?

Well, he would be long dead for one. He would have lived to see the 1980s, though, and not only through the pop culture of low worlds.

What a curse it was to feel nostalgic for places and times you never experienced, but it was a shared curse among the members of the Consortium.

As he approached a door leading into the high school, he produced a small ticket and hole puncher from his pockets, but it turned out he had no need. Others had gotten here before him, and one of them had wedged a rock in place so the door would not close.

How kind.

The ticket and puncher went back in his pockets as he entered the building. He found himself in a long hallway lit only by a trail of glowing ticket stubs. Mortimer read what remained of the ticket:

RIPPER’S AMBIENT LIGHT
“When the dark gets rude, light it up!”

Ripper’s brand was a common one for small, convenient quality-of-life fixes. They must have been making a fortune on those tickets. They were dead simple. Mortimer could think of two or three easy ways to implement such a spell. He could make a few hundred of those tickets himself, but he suspected the Barker wouldn’t take them in trade.

The Barker expected more from Mortimer the 304th because Mortimer was an expert MBWer. A simple trick of light would not be a suitable trade.

He walked down the hallway until he found the queue. A dozen or so men and women had beaten him to the punch. Ahead of them was the grinning man in the red and white striped shirt—the man with a thin mustache and a gaze that pierced the Many Worlds.

To the side of the queue, a mortal man, a custodian, watched in utter confusion. He likely worked at the high school and had stumbled upon the Barker by accident.

He was drawn to the Barker and the Sweepstakes. All were. It wasn’t too long before the man had leaned his mop up against the wall and stood in line behind Mortimer.

Mortals were rarely attuned to magic or the supernatural, but even then, the call of infinite possibilities was so strong that none could witness the Barker hawking his wares and not intuitively understand what lay before them.

The custodian was an older man with a toothpick affixed between two of his teeth, right through a gnarly gap. He kept preparing to ask Mortimer a question, but never found the words. He simply waited his turn in line.

That man wouldn’t be winning immortality like all others in line had once. The odds were infinitesimally low. Mortimer had never even seen someone win such a prize.

Technically speaking, even Mortimer himself never won immortality. Instead, he won “the complete comprehension required for a singular task.”

The task he had chosen so quickly and thoughtlessly many years ago was “becoming immortal.”

And so Mortimer had been given great knowledge of MBW and body engineering. Thusly, while those standing in line ahead of him sported young, pristine bodies, Mortimer’s was bespoke, so to speak, or at least much of it was, replaced by flesh and bones born of magic and patience.

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It was no bother. None in the Consortium judged a man for the origin of his beating heart.

“Mortimer,” a voice beckoned from behind. “I should have known you would beat me here.”

He turned to see the young Dr. Aldric Rose.

“If it isn’t our newest Narrator,” Mortimer said cheerfully.

They were separated by the mortal custodian, who still waited his turn in line with all the gusto of a field mouse.

“Good sir,” Mortimer said to the custodian, “Would you be so kind as to let my colleague step forward in line? We would hate to talk over you.”

The custodian looked at Mortimer with fearful suspicion.

“No,” the man said weakly. He cleared his throat and, in doing so, found some courage. “This is my spot. You can move back if you like, but there ain’t no cutting forward.”

Mortimer laughed.

“Good lad,” he said. “Then we shall trade places.”

The custodian was quick to acquiesce. Mortimer logically knew that the trade in position would not affect him materially, but there was still a small, animalistic fear in his mind that the mortal man might take magic meant for Mortimer’s more experienced hands.

He took a deep breath with his new, wonderful lungs and let that fear go.

Mortimer turned to Dr. Rose and shook his hand.

The good doctor was young, no older than five hundred years, and did not share the fashion sensibilities of most in the Consortium. He dressed like a college teaching assistant. No matter. It was his mind and ambition that had made him famous in the Consortium.

“I imagine that the ever-boastful Lucien Graves has been in a bad way in recent days,” Mortimer said. Mr. Graves had recently opened the kimono to the only living players in Carousel, only to be turned down. “I hope he doesn’t feel too embarrassed over his predicament. The Beguiled are never good recruits.”

“Nothing like that,” Dr. Rose answered. “He says he doesn’t blame them. If anything, he’s ashamed that his other team had been dipping their toes in the river. That undermined his authority a bit.”