The second interlude continues! The usual warnings for this rough draft apply. Poor grammar, bad language, and adult topics. Thanks for reading!
Winnie sighed and sat back in her comfy leather chair. She massaged her temples briefly before looking back at the spreadsheet on her computer screen. It was blurry and it hurt her eyes. At long last, the Christmas shoppers were gone, the door was locked, and she had some peace. She’d tally the day’s books and be on her way. Her eight-hour shift felt like eighty and she’d been out of sorts for the last half of it. Migraines had been a problem for her since she was a teen and she wondered if one might not be on its way now.
Around her on the walls and display shelves sat the accumulated treasure of decades and centuries past from all across the Aether. Items ranged from collectibles, to great masterpieces of art, to historical and religious artifacts. Some of the items were obviously magical, while others held no more magic than a root canal. What they all had in common was that they were all very rare and all very expensive. Winnie had more accumulated wealth in her little back room than some of the lords of the Free Cities. Well, maybe not quite that much, she conceded, but she’d certainly done well for herself.
Across from her in a crystal case, the talwar, Veritas, that cut the sting from the hand of Lord Dal rested next to a rune-etched jar of Panacea containing the brain of the not-quite assassinated John Fitzgerald Kennedy. On another shelf, a Detective Comic number 27 was enshrined next to the original composition sticks of the Trentii Aetherphone Symphony transcribed by Xis The Younger herself.
In the business of antiques and collectibles, there was a fine line between what would become valuable and what would end up dropped off in a cardboard box at the back door of a second-hand store. Winnie’s biggest talent was being able to tell which was which.
Her skill came with a serious flaw though, and that was time. It took decades for an item to mature from a mass-produced nothing to an expensive collectible. While the item was ageing, she was too. What was the point of being rich if you only got that way in time to spend money on new dentures and prune juice?
Her ability wasn’t anything arcane or mystical, it was just something she’d become good at with time and experience. Winnie was a sorcerer in name only. She’d barely been able to master the simplest of tricks and lately she’d even let that slip. She’d come to understand it was the results that mattered and not necessarily how you got there.
Being able to use magic was like being Vegan, it was a lot more exciting when you had other Vegans around you to talk about how great it was. The rest of the time was spent researching bean recipes and trying not to become anaemic. That was magic in a nutshell for her. It was fun being part of the herd, but the number of times one would be called on to do some really serious magic in a given lifetime was almost nil.
What then, went her logic, was the point of studying for years to learn if all you did with magic on a day-to-day basis was warm up your water for a cup of tea?
Magic was a novelty skill, like being double-jointed, or the women she’d heard of who could launch pingpong balls across the room without using their hands. Just because she had the capacity didn’t mean that she had the desire. Magic was like that for her. Knowing how to make money out of everyday objects was her power, and it did for her what she couldn’t be bothered to do with magic. If she wanted fire, lightning, or pingpong balls, for that matter, she’d hire someone. Her time was better spent becoming more wealthy.
She’d made a name and a very comfortable home for herself in Senak without ever relying on her magic, and it had all been because of what she called, “The Plan.”
At the tender age of seventeen, Winnie decided on a direction for her life. It would require her to begin purchasing potential antiques and raise enough money for a fifty-year dose of Panacea.
She began working as a dispatcher at Transaether Direct, a shipping company specializing in the moving large goods throughout destinations across the Aether. There, she used her employee access to all of the known worlds to hunt down the things that she thought would become most valuable with time. Every other penny she made was tucked away for a dose of Panacea.
Years slipped past as her savings slowly trickled in. She was good at her job and she moved deftly up the company ranks, but always just a bit too slowly. Crows feet began to gently press in at the corners of her eyes. Even worse, her sharp eyes began to notice that her breasts began to register the effects of gravity. As though supported by the sand in an emptying hourglass, they began their long journey south. Two pink glaciers following gravity down across her abdomen. It was a slow race that she, and by extension her breasts, were losing.
One night, in a fit of drunken despair, she did some back of the napkin math. At the rate she was saving, her boobs would be around her ankles by the time she had enough for a ten year shot of Panacea.
Her breaking point came at the age of thirty-two when she found her very first grey hair. Enough was enough. She’d heard of Dr. Knox and the services he provided—almost everyone who chased the dream of extended life had. She wasn’t ill, but you didn’t need to be sick to become a gin, you just needed to be desperate.
Dr. Knox’s process wiped her carefully gathered savings clean, but in the end, it had worked. She’d carefully wrapped up and put her accumulated treasures into long-term storage. She’d bid adieu to her friends, family, the early 1960s, and awoken in a new world of the Social Media, Web Mages, and even better than she could have imagined, online auctions.
In a few short weeks, she’d recouped all of her savings and bought space in the upscale shopping district of Senak. Now, undiluted Panacea flowed through her veins and life for her would be very long, and better yet, still perky.
This wasn’t to say there hadn’t been a few bumps in the road. Things had been different after she’d been revived. Something had seeped away from her and been left behind in the barrel during the long darkness of the intervening decades. She felt incomplete, like a used teabag, the best parts of her already gone, unable to do more than make the water look dirty, and smell strange. Emotion felt muted, food tasted bland, and every song seemed to be played in a minor key.
In counselling, she’d been told that the lack she felt was probably melancholy or guilt from leaving behind her life in the 1960s. She wasn’t convinced. She hadn’t had many friends, just a lot of acquaintances. She’d been too focused on her goal of beating old age. And if those acquaintances had ever met her family, they surely would have helped chip in for her goal of spending five decades in a barrel.
After some soul-searching, she decided that the grey feeling was probably due to the massive disconnect between her time and the present day. She’d gone into the barrel in the early sixties. Back then, the Bay of Pigs Invasion was still news, the Space Race was just beginning, and the counterculture for which the decade was known hadn’t really taken off yet. She thought that was a shame because the idea of a bunch of drugs and anonymous sex didn’t sound all that horrible to her.
Despite being somewhat titillated at the thought of sex and drugs, she knew deep down that her cultural outlook was more Leave it to Beaver than Jefferson Airplane. How could it be surprising that she found herself feeling out of place in a time so different from the one she’d lived in? At least that was what she’d tell herself.
She sighed and reached for her teacup. Instead of gripping the bone china handle as she’d intended, her hand spasmed and knocked her teacup off its saucer and to the floor where milky tea splashed over her exotic hardwood floor. She swore softly and intended to get up to fetch a cloth and broom to clean up the mess, but found she couldn’t move a finger.
There was a sudden tearing pain throughout her entire body. It felt her bones were being pulled out through her skin. Her vision split, stretched apart like she was in two places at once. One set of images had her still sitting in her chair, while the other was rising to stand. Winnie thought her head would explode from the solar flare of agony before the two perspectives snapped like an elastic band and whiplashed back into her mind to become one again.
The back of a woman suddenly loomed huge in front of her as she moved away. Slowly, she began to recover and one fact cut through the haze with alarm. There was someone in the room with her!
A high ringing tone in her head made it hard to think, and she felt so weak. As she tried to stand, her legs wobbled like she’d spent a month sick in bed. She lurched forward and stumbled over her own numb feet to fall to the floor.
Looking down at herself, she could actually see the grain pattern of her floor through her arm. How could that be? That fact had barely time to register before she looked up and was able to make out the profile of the intruder’s face. It was her face, her body, right down to the raw silk robe and that mole on her neck that she’d been meaning to have a doctor check out.
She reached out desperately to grasp at her double’s ankle, but instead of gripping and holding tight, her hand skittered off, as though the skin was just below a frictionless layer she couldn’t touch. Her doppelganger continued up the stairs of her sunken living room, slipped on a pair of shoes, took a jacket from her closet, and left out the front door, not bothering to close it behind her. After a few stunned moments, Winnie felt a tug, a compulsion as though a web of strings had been attached to her insides. She had to follow. Somehow she found the will to stand and staggered toward the open door.
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