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3.8 For Yuri, I Go Clubbing in Another Dimension
🕑 Added 2025-07-16 18:02:41 +0000 UTCAm I back in Forks?
My first thought coming out of the portal is that it dumped me in the woods outside the city instead of taking me to the World of Glass. I’m no tree expert, so I can’t say for sure if I’m looking at hemlocks or firs or cedar, but they’re all definitely evergreens and they all look familiar. The space between trees is a bit much, but only a bit; I found a clearing a lot like this one on my first outing as a witch, when I explored the forest around the mountains and had to punch a bear to scare it off.
Everything looks real, too. The leaves, the soil, the bark, all of it looks and feels like I remember. So I could be back on Earth, or this could be a perfect recreation. Either way, the fact that I’m alone means something went wrong with the portal.
I need more data, and a bird’s-eye view will let me orient myself, so I lift off and fly through the foliage. Or, at least, that’s what I try to do.
Takeoff goes fine, but as I ascend I can feel myself almost immediately slowing down. My flight meets resistance that gets stronger the higher I manage to climb until I’m only gaining inches, then centimeters, then even less. When I drift back toward the forest floor, there’s no resistance whatsoever and I move at normal speed.
Point for the World of Glass column. I frown. This is weird, and that almost makes it more interesting than annoying. I fly back up until I’m progressing in inches again, then raise my hand and watch as it slows down, encountering more and more resistance until I can’t see any movement. But I can still feel infinitesimal advancement, and I don’t have the sense that I’m pressing my hand against a barrier.
Science experiment aside, the reality of the situation is that I can’t get over the canopy. That could be the effect of an enemy magic user, or it could mean I’m in another dimension that just happens to look exactly like Earth. I set back down on the forest floor and consider my options. My surroundings are lovely, but I’m totally lost and I have no idea where anyone else is.
“Archon,” crackles the voice of Ferromancer in my ear, now clear of her mask’s distortion and coming out of my earpiece. “Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” I respond, “and it’s a real relief. Shit’s fucked, Ferro. What happened? Where am I? Is this actually the World of Glass? I’m in a forest that looks pretty ordinary.”
“Something interfered. We were separated as we passed through the portal and scattered across the nearby area, but everyone made it into the World of Glass. I’m in an office building inside a replica of Forks.”
“Lucky. Hey, is flight weird for you, too? It’s like there’s an invisible ceiling, but it feels wrong. A slowing effect.”
“I’ve experienced it before,” Ferromancer says. “It’s not always active, but it’s a property of many parts of the World of Glass. I’ve got a friend big into philosophy, so I showed him the data and he compared it to Zeno’s paradoxes of motion; your movement is being divided into an infinite number of sub-tasks, so no matter how much progress you make you never actually get any closer to passing the barrier. In practice, it means there’s a ceiling inhibiting flight that you can never slam into, only approach, so it’s not like hitting a solid surface.”
I frown. “That sounds… unnatural. Like, obviously, it’s magic, but that feels like something someone put there with intention.”
“Quite possibly,” she agrees. “Feel free to poke around, but try to stay where you are; I’m trying to guide everyone to pair up, and you’re fairly close to Agatha. I’ll get in touch with her next and send her your way. Ferromancer out.”
“Roger.”
I hum to myself as the line clicks dead. What other experiments can I run while I’m waiting for Agatha? There’s a ceiling, is there bedrock? I should specialize an imp for digging.
Thoughts of idle experimentation are interrupted by the emergence of an unexpected shape from between the trees: a very ordinary-looking Washington black bear. Dark fur, brighter nose, adorable and deadly. What the hell is this guy doing here?
“You’re probably not a bear, yeah?” I ask the thing that looks exactly like a bear. I raise my voice a little. “Hey, buddy, if you are just an animal, I don’t have any food for you. Don’t pick a fight you can’t win.”
The bear steps further into the clearing, beady eyes locked on me.
I spread my wings, put fire in both hands, and shout at it, “Hey! Piss off!” If it’s a real bear, it should be thinking twice about attacking me; there’s no food around and black bears aren’t usually eager to engage with loud weirdos they don’t understand. But it probably isn’t a real bear, and unfortunately for it, I’m not afraid to use lethal force either way.
I draw on Prometheus and burn a gun into my hand: the SIG Sauer P320 semi-automatic pistol that one of my familiars grabbed off the floor as I was leaving the bank. Mike calls the P320 a “trash piece of shit whose only redeeming quality is how many cops shoot each other with it due to misfires.” Perfect for the kind of guy who thinks shooting at an immortal witch is a good idea.
I don’t have any experience with guns outside of video games, and the skills aren’t really transferable, so I poured transformation magic into the base copy just like I did with Thunderclap’s axe and the bow that Ferromancer bought for me—with corresponding change in appearance, picking up green accents and spiked edges. It increases the flame cost, but now I can actually expect to hit what I’m aiming at. I wouldn’t bring it out in any situation where civilians could get hurt, but in another world? Perfect time to practice.
The bear takes another step closer to me, slow and methodical. It’s not a real bear, I know it’s not a real bear, but a little part of me still doesn’t want to risk killing an innocent animal. I don’t want to be the one to escalate. I aim to the right of it and fire a warning shot.
The bullet, enhanced by magic, blows a hole in a tree and sends bark flying. Blood oozes from the wound, pulsating flesh exposed where there should be heartwood. Why is it always meat plants in alien dimensions!? The tree and the bear scream in shrill harmony, their voices unsettlingly human.
“Fuck it, we ball!” I yell before unloading another six shots directly into the bear.
Each impact tears fur and flesh, blasting holes in the creature’s body that run straight to the bone. Except, “flesh” isn’t exactly the right word; where the bear should bleed red, instead it drips black ichor, and more ichor clings to the bear-thing’s bones. Ooze melts over the monster’s skull where I shattered it.
The abomination screams again, and then it comes for me.
I fly away from the monster as fast as I can, forced to stay low to the ground by the invisible ceiling and forced to slow down by the risk of slamming into a tree and getting its blood all over me. The beast chasing me has stopped pretending to be a bear; it skitters toward me on chitinous legs that burst out of the holes I put in it, spindly and segmented and dripping oily ichor. The sound of its mutation is wet and sharp, a song of severing meat and sprouting bone. I keep firing as I fly, but physical trauma just seems to incite more growth from the monster—more limbs, more mass, and more speed. The stench of bile fills the air.
The chamber in my gun clicks empty and I resummon the whole thing to reload. Another five shots tear through the spider-bear, the rest going wide as I frantically swerve to avoid another tree. I completely obliterate the creature’s head this time, which does absolutely nothing to slow it down.
“Useless garbage,” I chastise the pistol as I unsummon it again. I make a bow instead and nock a foam arrow. Let’s hope this works!
The first arrow strikes center mass, the yellow foam expanding and hardening. That doesn’t do much, but the second and third arrows get tangled in the monster’s legs and bind them together on one side. The horrid beast keeps coming, but it has to drag the weight of its own paralyzed limbs with all the working limbs and I can see it slowing—at least until it grows even more legs to keep up. I can barely see anything left of its original shape.
I whirl around and try to lead the creature back toward the initial clearing, where Ferromancer told me to wait before I was attacked by this extremely gross shapechanging horror. Actually, wait—
“Hey, Ferro?” I call as I fly. “Can you hear me?”
“I read,” she answers quickly. “You’re moving. Something about a bear?”
“Horrible oil monster! Shifter! Too many legs!”
A pause. The spider monster pursues with feral speed, its segmented limbs splintering and reforming with each impact as it pushes itself to gain on me. I keep shooting, launching arrow after arrow, until a lucky hit sends it stumbling and momentum does the rest. The beast trips over itself into a heap of tangled limbs, and that’s all the window I need to rapid-fire arrows and cover it in foam. I keep firing until I can feel the cold air on my once-hot skin, the heat of Prometheus dimming as I spend my flame. The abomination is completely encased in hardened foam, but it’s not still; the foam mound shudders as the shapeshifter strains within.
Wary of the monster escaping its prison, I start summoning imps: a line of flamers and a line of melee, standard formation. I shiver in the sudden chill.
My earpiece crackles again, but this time it’s Howl whose voice comes through: “Still alive, kid?”
“Yes! Give me something useful!” A spot on the foam mound blackens like rot, and then it spreads. Ichor oozes through the membrane and begins to dissolve it. “And hurry!”
“Yeah, yeah. I call ‘em deimovores. Sounds like you already know about the shapeshifting. They feed on fear, so don’t let it bite you or you’ll be tangling with your worst nightmare. Crazy territorial, so there’s probably just the one. Oh, and watch every angle!”
I fire off a few more foam arrows to keep the monster pinned, but the foam added dissolves almost as quickly as it forms, and I’m running out of flame to spare before I hit the critical zone. “How do I kill it!?”
Howl laughs, low and throaty, and I can just imagine the smug look on her face. “Dunno. I’ve never fought one that stayed dead.” The line clicks.
“Fuck!” I swear out loud.
“That name is infuriating,” Ferromancer comments in my ear. “It has a Greek root and a Latin suffix. It should be ‘deimophage’ or ‘timovore,’ not ‘deimovore.’ Completely uncultured.”
The deimovore screams in its prison and two spidery legs pierce through the dissolving foam. Then it stops, falling silent and still. It’s planning something.
I reclaim the flame from my bow and add another fire-thrower imp to my cohort. “When I banish the foam,” I command my minions, “burn it to death. Spears, you’re on guard duty.”
I take a deep breath, roll my shoulders, and claim back all the flame I invested in the quick-hardening foam that was encasing the deimovore. The foam vanishes.
There’s nothing there but oil, severed limbs, and a hole in the dirt.
The deimovore erupts from the earth below me and slams me to the ground with the full weight of its misshapen, mutating body. Half a dozen thin, spike-tipped chitin limbs pierce through my arms and legs to hold me in place while another half-dozen lance the closest imps and toss them away like unwanted refuse. Each laceration stings on entry and then goes numb.
The core beneath all those spindly limbs, coated in black bile, doesn’t look like a bear anymore; it’s beginning to look like the body of a woman with my build and my features. The shadowed impression of my own face stares at me with oil-slick eyes, and as I burn a gun into my hand to shoot the monstrous doppelganger it latches its mouth onto my neck like a lamprey and bites.
Where I was cold, I am frozen. Ice spreads through my veins, all heat stolen by the deimovore’s hunger. The cold is in my brain, slowing my thoughts. The cold is in my arms, paralyzing my fingers. I try to pull the trigger on my summoned weapon, but I can’t move.
I call to Prometheus, but I can’t reach it. I call to any flame that will listen, but it’s all so distant. I grasp. I fumble. The flame is so close, but I’m swimming through a frozen lake. Trying to cup it in frostbitten hands.
Then the world goes orange and yellow and a wave of heat rushes over me. The deimovore is torn from my neck by a ball of fire that sends it flying. Ice follows fire, then lightning, and then fire again. Life returns to me, paralysis banished as the deimovore screeches in agony. I grab at the wound in my throat, but there isn’t one; the skin is unbroken, as if it never bit me, but I still feel the lingering sensation of the deimovore’s icy teeth. I bolt to my feet and glance in the direction the attacks are coming from, knowing exactly who I’ll see:
Agatha has arrived. The magical girl chants arcane syllables to send spell after spell rocketing out of her floating grimoire, but she gives me a little nod and wave as I make eye contact with her.
“Thanks for the assist. Let’s finish this bastard.” I summon new imps to replace the ones I lost and direct them to throw fire, then take aim at the deimovore and start shooting.
For the first time since this encounter started, the monster is on the back foot; it flees from our attacks, losing more to our combined assault than it can quickly replace. Something is happening with it, its shape writhing and dissolving, but before it can complete its transformation it gets blasted with a full triplet of fire, ice, and lightning.
The deimovore staggers and I seize that opportunity to command all my imps to rush the monster and bury it in flame. It cuts through a few, but not all, and then each familiar explodes on top of it with as much magic as I could put in them. Fire erupts and spreads, though Agatha is quick to keep it contained with precise usage of ice magic.
When the dust settles, the deimovore is reduced to charred bone with not a hint of dripping ichor. I shoot it again anyway, just to check. Nothing happens.
“Do you think it’s dead?” Agatha asks, adjusting her glasses and looking between me and the bone pile nervously.
I dismiss my gun and summon another batch of bomb imps, directing them to circle the corpse of the deimovore closely. “If it so much as twitches,” I hiss at the latest batch, “detonate.” With a watch set, I let out a heavy breath and can finally force myself to lose a bit of tension. I smile at Agatha. “Thanks again, I was in a rough spot there.”
“Of course!” she says with a shy smile. “I’m happy I could help. It’s, um, nice to meet you! Archon, right?”
I grin. “That’s me. And the feeling is mutual, Agatha Cain. I’m glad I was dropped near you and not the Syndicate freak or Harlequin. I’ve heard good things about your streams.” Heard, yes, definitely. Not watched. Not a fan.
Agatha blushes. “Oh, thank you! Have you—I mean, not that it matters, but—sorry, no, that’s a silly question.” The urge to confess rises in me, but I ruthlessly crush my inner fangirl. “So, um, this monster thing!”
“The deimovore,” I supply, glancing back at the beast in question. It hasn’t moved. “Feeds on fear, horrible shapeshifter. Probably playing dead, according to Howl’s intel. No idea how it works.”
“Here’s hoping I can help,” Agatha says. “Watch my back while I take a look?”
“Of course.” I summon my gun again and sweep my gaze around the woods, keeping Agatha in the corner of my vision at all times. She’s going to do the glasses thing!
Agatha latches her grimoire back onto her belt, brushes back her bangs, and takes off her glasses. Her eyes flare bright, gleaming with power, as she beholds the deimovore with her signature magical ability.
And then she doubles over and vomits.
Comments
Lako
Deimovore, Deimovore, Does whatever a Deimovore can ...
Aden Howard
Hmmm maybe trying to magically comprehend some extra-dimensional nightmare creature was a bad idea?
VoraVora
There's a double meaning, but mostly it's to avoid spoiling the big twist early to public readers glancing at future titles.
Lucy Severine
I feel like, unless this expedition is going to be very short, this should be counted as a new arc?
Arueshalae Table Building Society
We love meat trees, tree but on the inside is flesh and blood! We love the Phyrex--- err, John Carpenter's The Thing.
Theodore Suzukawa
Learning is apparently not fun in this case. Well at least she can send Agatha a superchat later as thanks/apology. (With her stolen bank money)
Clara
New meaning to "I Go Clubbing in Another Dimension"
