Chapter 27: The Magic Shop, 351 Days from Now

Ai waved her late night Uber driver away. Normally she would have called Pat to pick her up, but that would have been an awful way to break the news to him. Doing it in person wasn’t going to be much better. She looked at her phone again. There was the message from Ethel: “Leaving now, bring key, 342473” There wasn’t anything more to it than that. She used the duplicate store key, then punched the code in to deactivate the security system. The idea of needing a security system when Ethel and Hell Bitch both occupied the store was beyond absurd. Ai wondered if Pethelator had known leaving soon was a possibility. They had it installed so that it would be already in place when ownership of the store passed to her. At the time she had insisted that it was just common sense because she might need to leave tomorrow or years from now. Either way, Ai was glad that it was already installed She frowned and switched over to the other message instead. It didn’t even look like something that any phone ever produced would consider a valid phone number. Then the message itself was just a garbled mess of unknown symbols. Ai braced herself, and her head hurt and her eyes watered as something shifted inside her brain. Now she could read what could only be a message from Hell Bitch.

TORTURER, YOU WILL PROBABLY PASS MY TEST. MY DEAREST SISTER SENDS HER WARMEST REGARDS. SHE REGRETS THAT SHE LACKED TIME TO SEND A MORE INFORMATIVE MESSAGE REGARDING OUR IMMANENT/HAPPENING NOW/PRIOR DEPARTURE. SHE ALSO REGRETS THAT SHE WILL NOT GET TO MEET THE SLUT’S OFFSPRING. SHE GREATLY ENJOYED MEETING THE SPAWN OF THE HERMAPHRODITE AND THE NO LONGER IMMORTAL. LEGAL PAPERWORK TRANSFERRING THE SHOP TO YOU, ALONG WITH A CROWBAR, AND TWO TUNING FORKS ARE ON THE COUNTER. THE TUNING FORK NEAREST THE CROWBAR OPENS THE DOOR TO THE DEMIPLANE CONTAINING HER PET MORTAL. THE OTHER OPENS THE DOOR TO THE DEMIPLANE CONTAINING NON MAGICAL REPLICAS OF MERCHANDISE SHE CONSIDERS UNWISE TO SELL. THE CRATE WHOSE NUMBER MATCHES THE NUMBER OF MOONS OF DORTAILGEN CONTAINS A LETTER FOR MY SISTER’S PET. MY DEAREST SISTER CONSIDERS YOU MORONS, FOR SHE INSISTS THAT I CONVEY YOU MUST NEVER TAKE EITHER TUNING FORK INTO A DEMIPLANE. DON’T WORRY, I WILL PROBABLY SEND A MORE INFORMATIVE MESSAGE IF YOU FAIL MY TEST. I CAN’T HAVE MY DEAREST SISTER UPSET WITH ME, AFTER ALL.

For the third time Ai yelled the word “Fuck!” She didn’t like being called Torturer, still had no idea how many moons a place called Dortailgen had, although she was sure it wasn’t anything she could google, and was horrified at the idea of Hell Bitch testing her. Unless that was what happened inside her brain that let her read the strange text message. That just gave her a bit of a headache. It also gave her a headache to consider that Hell Bitch would do something differently in the past, if she didn’t do the right things in the near future. How was that even possible? Then, what was up with the mysterious warning about the tuning forks. Would they explode if you took them into a demiplane? She hadn’t realized that the extra rooms Ethel had squeezed into her shop were even called demiplanes. If they were such a key part of her plan, it probably would have been helpful for Ethel to give her a crash course on how they worked. Was that part of Hell Bitch’s test?

Ai decided she might as well get to work looking for Pat’s letter despite her lack of knowledge of demiplanes. Picking up the tuning fork for the storage area, Ai rapped it against the counter where she had picked up the fateful gum nearly a year ago. A red door with a brass knob appeared where there had only been featureless wall before. “Fuck, there must be forty crates in here!” Ai swore when she looked in the small, featureless area. She couldn’t even rightly say what the walls were made of. Was it stone, metal, plastic? Ai decided that the most appropriate description was that it was made of stuff.

When she came out of the demiplane with the first crate, Ai used the crowbar to pry it open. Well, it seemed there were either more or fewer than thirty-two moons of Dortailgen, because this crate didn’t have a letter for Pat inside it. When she came out with the next crate, she realized that she either had two messages from Hell Bitch, or her phone was getting really stupid computer generated spam. She didn’t really have any hope for her spam theory; she wasn’t going to be that lucky today. Her brain adjusted to read the crazy symbols, and she saw it was just two sets of numbers. 56:48 and 49:24. What did that even mean? How could those be worth the headache it caused to read them?

Ai pulled another half dozen crates out of the demiplane. She finally found Pat’s letter in crate thirty-one. Had Ethel, or even Hell Bitch for that matter expected her to pull this crate out first? Had she already failed the test by pulling crate 32 first? This crate didn’t seem to have any replica items in it. Just the letter for Pat and an unmarked bottle of brown liquid. Ai guessed it was more of the Bourbon Ethel had saved from destruction. Ai picked up an envelope sealed with wax and addressed to Pat in exquisitely fine calligraphy. As she held the envelope in one hand, she weighed what to do next. Now that she had found it, should she wake Pat up? Ai decided to let the poor man sleep. The sooner he woke up, the sooner he was going to be miserable. There was no way to change the fact that Ethel and Hell Bitch were both gone, literally never to be seen again, at least by anyone on this world.

When she turned to go fetch another crate out of the demiplane, her phone beeped. She had heard it beep several times when she was coming out of the demiplane with a crate, but she hadn’t looked at her phone assuming it was just another one of Hell Bitch’s cryptic and headache inducing mystery numbers. Since this didn’t fit the pattern, she picked up her phone and was disappointed when she saw more of the strange symbols. Ai felt a stabbing pain in her head, and the most recent set of numbers became obvious to her, 3:38. Fuck, all the numbers from Hell Bitch kept getting smaller and smaller. What happened when they reached zero. On a hunch, she set a three minute timer on her phone. She would sit here doing nothing except watching and waiting until the timer went off.

Nothing had changed in the room when the three minutes had expired, but while she was clearing the timer, the door to the demiplane containing the crates vanished. Ai’s blood ran cold. What if she had been inside the demiplane when that happened? Would she have been trapped for all time, dying horribly of hunger and thirst trapped in a place that only Ethel could access? Would her last thoughts been of ones of hope that someone would find and hit the tuning fork to set her free before it were too late? Had this been Hell Bitch’s test? Fuck, one or both of them should have warned her about these damn demiplanes. Then Ai realized Pat was in one of these things. Presumably, Ethel could open a doorway from the inside of one. Since her driver presumably could not, Ai hurried to the counter and activated the tuning fork to Pat’s room. When a blue door appeared, she rushed to it and opened it. She could see from the light from the shop that Pat was still inside and sleeping. Ai didn’t want to do any more work on the crates for fear of waking her driver. He would be destrought when he awoke to find Ethel had left him without saying a word; no need to wake him up early. Truth be told, she was kind of horrified that she had risked trapping herself with no hope of escape inside one of the demiplanes. Ai decided that from here on out, any entry into a demiplane would be on the buddy system. One person in the store, one person in the demiplane. In the event of a mishap, the person still in normal space could use a tuning fork to reopen a doorway back to reality.

The door to Pat’s sleeping quarters vanished after about an hour. Wanting to be more scientific about these mysterious doorways, Ai hit the stopwatch on her phone right as she tapped that tuning fork on the counter. As best she could tell, the doors lasted exactly one hour after the tuning for was struck. Did they have a limited number of uses? In the end, Ai decided not to worry about that. The one thing that Hell Bitch had warned her about was taking a fork into a demiplane. Ai reasoned that if it were at all probable that she might use up a tuning fork, or somehow break it, Hell Bitch would have warned her about that instead. Twice more Ai tapped that tuning fork. She passed the time by looking over the contract leaving the store to her and making notes about things she wanted to talk over with a lawyer. Top of her list was getting a “Closed: Under New Ownership” sign made.

Shortly before Ai’s phone was set to go off to let her know the door to Pat’s room would be closing, her driver emerged and entered the magic shop. “Hi boss, I didn’t expect to see you ... No. Oh no!” Her driver dropped to his knees and wailed, “No, no, no, no...” over and over.

“Pat, Pat, I know. I’ve got something for you.”

“Is that our crowbar?”

“What, how would I know? It was here when I got here. I’ve been using it to open up crates and replace real magic items with non-magical replicas before I re-open the store.”

Pat picked up the crowbar and cradled it in his arms like Amy and Emily did while holding their new born daughters. “Oh Pethelator, I was so happy when you tossed me this crowbar knowing that you and I would date someday. Who could be cruel enough to straighten this reminder of our love.”