Avatar of Light

by Dmitry Bilik

  I spruced myself up and even had a shave. When I then took a look in the mirror, I didn’t recognize the person looking back at me. Don’t get me wrong: I was already getting used to seeing myself as a Korl. But even he had begun to change. Since the day of my first introduction to my real self, my blond hair had grown and my face looked drawn (because the deliciousness of Bumpkin’s dinners was balanced out by the fact that they were few and far between). My eyes had acquired a severe glint I didn’t recognize. The Sergei of old had changed a lot — and not just externally, either.

  I stopped indulging in a one-man narcissism competition, toweled myself dry and left the bathroom. To my dismay, my Purgator journeys had had a devastating effect on my already few socks and underpants. If it carried on like this, I’d be flashing my bare backside all over Cesspit.

  I got dressed, brushed my hair and slumped onto the couch, trying to suppress the rumbling in my stomach. I was quite morally prepared to withstand any news Bumpkin might throw at me, be it a broken computer, flooding out the downstairs neighbors or even launching a nuclear strike on a neighboring country (I wouldn’t put it past him). At least the supporting walls of the apartment were still in one piece which I suppose was good news.

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “They managed to figure me out, Master.”

  “Ah, so it was you who killed John F. Kennedy? I guessed that the Kremlin’s furry paw might have been behind it.”

  “No, no, that’s not what I mean,” he said, oblivious to the joke. “The neighbor from upstairs popped by and saw me.”

  “You mean Hunter?”

  “Yeah…”

  “So what?”

  “I shapeshifted into you and answered the door. And he says, why, isn’t your master back yet?”

  “You looked just like me but he knew it was you anyway? Is that it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You shouldn’t have answered the door, then.”

  “I didn’t. He started fiddling with the lock. He’s probably a burglar, the bastard.”

  I glanced at my watch. Normally, at this time of day I was still training with Hunter. He might still be in. I put my shoes and trench coat back on and trotted off to face the music, feeling like a student who rucks up to an exam completely unprepared. I hung around his front door for a while, not knowing how to strike up a conversation. Still, I couldn’t think of anything appropriate so in the end I just rang the doorbell.

  He didn’t open up straight away. He gave me the once-over, stepped aside and nodded, inviting me in. I entered, curiously looking around his inner sanctum. I’d never been in his other apartment before. There was nothing special about it; it was no Aladdin’s cave or whatever. Cheapish light-colored wallpaper, wooden plinths, a stained-dark wall unit in the lounge and a woolen rug on the floor.

  Hunter took me to the kitchen which was admittedly a bit modest too. A relatively new but equally low-budget set of cabinets, a whistling kettle, a sugar bowl on the table and some artificial flowers in a vase sitting atop a lacy doily. The air smelled of some herbs which reminded me of my childhood in some kind of “back in the USSR” déjà vu.

  “Tea?” Hunter asked.

  I nodded. Although I didn’t want either tea or coffee, I knew that a conversation always goes better over a hot drink.

  My mentor lifted the kettle and pressed his hand to its bottom. After a few seconds, the water began to boil.

  “Tell me,” he said as he poured out the tea into royal-blue Soviet-era china cups inscribed in gold, “1975: Thirty Years’ Anniversary of Victory over Nazism”.

  I had to chronologically recount all the events since our last meeting. Hunter didn’t interrupt me once while sipping his tea. Only when I’d finished did he pause and say,

  “That’s the end of your fun and games. You killed a god and took possession of his powerful Dark Avatar. Quite a few people will now want to see if you can walk the walk. This blond guy won’t be the first or the last.”

  “Any idea who he might be?”

  “No,” he said frankly. “Did you say that you passed each other while flying?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then he must have seen something in you. Something which made him go back to Lutum. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him turn up here soon.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Stop playing around and get on with the more serious side of training. Tomorrow at ten in the foundation pit. But we’ll have to buy a Fog Scroll first so that commoners can’t see what we’re up to. All right, that’s it. Get going. I have to be on my way too.”

  I went straight downstairs without calling in at home. The cat lady’s padded door on the third floor didn’t contain her angry voice informing me that Marquis “had a cheek and if he didn’t stop misbehaving, he wouldn’t get any tasty wet food”. How crazy was that? I was the one who could speak to cats but this woman was doing so without the need for any extravagant spells.

  Outside, things were only getting weirder. To begin with, Lydia’s husband Victor was standing by the front door calling his son’s name. Which was normal for a mischievous kid who used every opportunity to slink off. With one difference: little Boris was sitting by the garages less than twenty paces from his father, exactly where Victor was looking.

  “Hi,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “Are you looking for someone?”

  “Boris, who do you think? Lydia told me to get myself down to his school to find out how he’s getting on. And it turns out he’s already been playing truant for two days in a row! I haven’t told her yet. When she finds out, she’s gonna kill him.”

  He must have read something in my stare because he added, “Metaphorically, of course.”

  “Okay. I’ve got fifteen minutes to spare. Let’s split up. You go to the shops and I’ll check out the road to the school. He must be hanging around here somewhere.”

  “Okay,” he agreed with surprising ease.

  We split up. I made a show of leaving, then returned straight to the garage. I walked over to Boris and crouched down next to him.

  He looked both surprised and scared. “How did you… sort of.. see me, like?”

  So it hadn’t been my imagination, then. “I’m an ESP specialist. You’d better tell me how you do it.”

  “I don’t,” he said, hiding his hand behind his back.

  I chuckled and held a hand out palm up. After a moment’s hesitation, the boy laid a shapeless rock in it. It looked like any other chunk of stone except it was veined with green.

  Repelling Stone

  No of Charges: 91/110

  Range: 60 ft.

  Duration of one charge: 1 hr.

  Renders everyone within the item’s range invisible to commoners

  Note: when activated, the item creates an urge in all commoners not to approach within its range.

  “Where did you get it from?”

  “The guy that you beat up gave it to me. Back in the foundation pit. He must have put it in my pocket.”

  “What do you mean, ‘must have’?”

  “We just stood there talking. And when I got back home, I put my hand in the pocket and found it there. The stone, I mean. He was the only person who could have done it.”

  “So it was the Choru- er, I mean, that guy you were with? Do you know how to disable it?”

  “You just move your hand above it.”

  I did. The green veins disappeared, turning the artifact back into an unsightly little rock.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to take it from you,” I said. “This isn’t a kid’s toy.”

  He visibly drooped but didn’t protest.

  “You’d better tell me why you started skipping school.”

  “Eh, it’s nothing,” he shrugged my question off, biting his lip.

  “Come on, tell me. I’m not your mother. I’m not going to judge you.”

  “We have this guy, Pavel Kabanov. We call him Boar because that’s exactly what
he is. He’s the worst bully. He said some really nasty things to Marina, she’s a girl in our class. So I told him to piss off.”

  “Very good. A very chivalrous thing to do.”

  “Chivalrous my ass,” Boris sniffled. “He and his buddies waited for me outside and they beat the hell out of me. And again. He said he’d now be beating me up every day until I pay him five hundred rubles[2]. And I don’t have it. So I thought I’d skip school for a while.”

  “Why didn’t you tell your parents?”

  “I’m not a grass.”

  “I see,” I said, wondering if Russians would ever grow out of their inbred prison-hierarchy mentality. “In any case, that’s pretty stupid. Never mind. Let’s do it this way. Today it’s already too late but tomorrow we’ll go to school together, you and I.”

  “Are you gonna beat him up?” Boris asked, getting all excited.

  “Yeah right. The only thing I haven’t yet done is beat up children before breakfast.”

  “He’s not a child! He’s thirteen already!”

  “Okay, it’s settled, anyway. Let’s go.”

  We headed for the supermarket where we bumped right into his father. When Victor saw his son, he took in a big lungful of air, readying himself to give him a lesson in tough love. I had to interfere.

  “Boris, here’s ten rubles. Go to the vending machine and buy yourself some gum. Victor, there’s something you need to know…”

  I shared the intel with him — omitting the artifact bit, of course, because it was a different secret entirely. Honestly, I could hardly have imagined Victor’s reaction. I knew very well what Lydia would have done: she’d have rushed off straight to school to blame and accuse everyone involved, thus completely ruining her son’s reputation in everybody’s eyes.

  But her husband, whom I’d always believed to be a complete doormat, suddenly showed an unheard-of zeal.

  “I’ll go there now and sort them out myself.”

  “Okay. And how do you see it? A grownup man punching the living lights out of a minor? I have a better idea. I can go there myself. I might pass for his big brother. Also, there’re some things than speak louder than punches.”

  Your Persuasion skill has increased to level 10.

  You’ve achieved Mastery in the following skill: Persuasion

  Mastery level: 1

  Now every time you speak to a commoner, you can use one argument that might convince them.

  “Thanks, Sergei. But if you don’t mind me asking, why is it you’re constantly helping us?”

  “Well, we’re not complete strangers, are we?”

  Your Lying skill has increased to level 8.

  In all honesty, I wouldn’t know how to answer this question. I did like Boris, and his father wasn’t a bad guy, either. Still, I admittedly surprised myself with this show of altruism. Could it have been the influence of the Light Karma which I apparently had to spare? Also, my new moniker as Avatar of Light might have had something to do with it too.

  I returned home, grabbed my phone and called for a cab. I’d been planning to go to the function by bus, seeing as it wasn’t very far anyway, but what with Boris and all, I just didn’t have the time. Never mind. What’s two hundred rubles for a cab when I was looking at all that profit from the rachnaids’ eggs?

  I purposefully sat directly behind the cabbie and quietly pulled the stone out of my pocket. It looked just like any other piece of rock. I ran my hand above it just like Boris told me. Aha! I could now see the green veins glowing in the dark!

  Just as I was admiring them, the cab swerved to the right.

  “Where d’you think you’re going, mister?” the cabbie shouted out the window. “Are you blind?”

  My mouth went dry. This wasn’t the best place for these kinds of experiments, was it? I’d completely forgotten that we were now invisible to everyone. Repelled by the artifact’s effect, other drivers would have loved to get out of our way, but they just couldn’t get off the road, could they?

  I hurried to disable the magic gizmo and gave a nonchalant look to a saucer-eyed driver of a Lexus to our right. To him, we must have just materialized out of thin air.

  I still had those Divine Stones to sort out. Just not at the moment. God forbid that I burn or freeze someone to death. I should choose some nice secluded place in which to test the rocks which I’d apparently “already met”.

  All right then, enough gaming stuff. Time to get back to reality. I spent the rest of my trip quietly exchanging texts with Julia like any other commoner without any superpowers. We actually made up our minds to go skating.

  Despite all my efforts, I was late. Maybe no more than ten minutes — but judging by my mother’s face, that was almost enough reason to start a nuclear war. She nodded commandingly at a free place at the table. That was her domain: even Dad, the most authoritarian person in our family, kept a low profile.

  The café where the wake was held was rather average. Nothing to write home about. Its owners were clearly aiming at budget weddings and other functions like this one: old-fashioned burgundy tablecloths on tables set out to form a U, shabby chairs and slightly frayed lace curtains. The fact that there was sufficient daylight was already a plus.

  I curiously studied my numerous relatives all of whom exhibited various degrees of their Korl roots. Some of them were remarkably burly, with regular features and thick hair — but they were mainly older people whose Korl blood hadn’t been too diluted yet. The younger commoners among them only differed by their lighter skin tone and fairer hair, like you would imagine a Scandinavian surrounded by a bunch of Russians.

  But that was nothing compared to an old Korl at the far end of the room. Now he really caught my interest.

  “Why are you standing there like you’ve just seen a ghost?” Darya asked.

  “I wish it were a ghost,” I said without taking my eyes off the old Player.

  Chapter 13

  SOME PEOPLE tend to despise poker, regarding it as just a stupid card game you play in company after a few drinks. But it’s actually poker that teaches you to contain yourself so as not to betray your inner emotions. The word “poker face” says it all.

  It was also something I could have used right now.

  “You’ve always been a bit of a nutter,” Darya said under her breath, “but now you’re even frightening me.”

  “I was just thinking about something,” I said, trying to tear my gaze away from the old boy who’d definitely noticed me.

  “Had you been a computer, I would have given you away for spare parts. Even my laptop doesn’t freeze like you do.”

  “Don’t start niggling now,” Mum hushed. “Sergei, why aren’t you eating anything? Take some koliva and a pancake[3].”

  I had to comply. I served myself a spoonful of the traditional funeral rice pudding, folded a pancake and dunked it in honey, then started stuffing my face to the strains of the local church choir.

  The only difference between a peaceful agnostic and an aggressive atheist is that the former doesn’t try to prove a point. It was much easier for me to go along with certain traditions rather than to explain why I had no interest in them. Certain rites are much easier to perform when you don’t take them seriously. For my Mom, my turning up here was a really big deal. It put her mind at ease. Better this than stage sacrificial services to Cthulhu.

  I didn’t even notice them serving up the soup. I ate it absent-mindedly, as well as the mash and meatballs that followed, washing it all down with an ungodly fruit squash. Some old ladies next to me were talking in soft voices, doing exactly what I had no desire or intention of doing — namely, remembering the departed.

  “Poor Sveta. She didn’t quite make it to her eightieth.”

  “What are you saying? She was seventy-six!”

  “That’s exactly my point. She had only four years to go.”

  “…that wasn’t the only thing. I did tell her that one should never bring a fir tree in from the forest to plant in one’s ow
n garden. It was a bad sign. But she did plant a baby fir tree, anyway.”

  “That’s right. She planted it right next to her house.”

  “Not next to the strawberries?”

  “Yes, right next to them. It was me who gave her the four strawberry plants in the first place. The earth is so good at her place. In my garden, all my strawberries are always droopy, but did you see hers? They come into season before everybody else’s.”