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Chapter 259: Amelia - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2024-06-15 07:46:02 +0000 UTCAfter graduating, we decided to spend two weeks celebrating. We had spent eight years wrestling with tests, projects, and homework. We could spend a few weeks celebrating before we started preparing for university.
The first thing we did was organize an outings with Vance and Iselde. After all, we would be seeing a lot less of each other once we entered university. We decided to organize a picnic. Old Mo packed us some sandwiches, and the five of us walked up a little trail near town that had a nice view of the ocean. We had a tasty lunch, played some board games, and admired the view of the ocean. It was nice.
Near the end of the outing, Felix and Vance ended up making a few wooden swords and fencing. When I saw Vance and Felix battle, Vance's skill surprised me. The three of us who were part of the Market had spent decades working on our swordsmanship. We'd had Sallia teach us and spar with us during that time, and her skills were no joke. Vance couldn't trade blows evenly with Felix... but he was still able to sneak in one hit against Felix out of twelve matches. Granted, Felix was toning down the overwhelming difference in stats... but it was still impressive. I couldn’t help but wonder how good he might have gotten at actual fighting, if this world treated fencing as a combat technique and not a sport.
Anise and I also ended up dueling Vance a few times, although he didn't manage to hit either of us. The four of us still had a lot of fun, and Iselde cheered everyone on during the duels. We had a great time.
We spent the next few weeks arranging similar outings, before going to the university to fill out our paperwork. We spent over a day filling out forms before we left.
After that, Anise and I started prepping for her future.
After all, Anise wasn’t going to be attending university with us. She had decided to prepare for a possible confrontation with the worldstriders. She felt that if she found a weakness of the creatures, she would try to exploit it to drive them back. It would be a great way to earn a keyword ability, and it would also remove the greatest threat to her life. But she needed a way to practice spellcasting, farm achievement, and grow until she found a weakness. After all, she was fifteen now. In this world's standards, she was bordering on being a real adult. It would be odd if she didn't go to university or find a job.
Anise had already floated the idea of opening a repair shop to me. Her mend spell could heal prosthetic limbs, and there was plenty of demand for prosthetic repairs.
Of course, there was a problem with that - Anise was known to have a force manipulation ability. She had used force manipulation several times in public. If she started using her mend spell, people would realize something was wrong. While we might reveal the existence of Zelyrian magic, we didn't intend to do so now, at least. So Anise needed a way to openly use her mend spell.
We decided to create a new identity for her. If Anise couldn't use the mend spell openly, we would create a new personal for her that could use a mending 'ability.'
For that, I intended to lean heavily into my illusion magic. Anise, unlike Felix and I, preferred to have very pale skin. I suspected this was because the first world she remembered was the world of the black sun. There, everyone lived underground, so nobody really had a tan. Either way, Anise's skin was very pale, unlike Sallia, Felix, and I.
So I gave her alternate identity a tan as the first big change. Then, I helped her change her hair color to silver. Her pink hair was one of Anise's most distinctive traits, while silver hair was a relatively common color on this continent.
Then, I helped her increased her height a little bit (this time using stilted shoes and illusions). I used even more illusions to change her facial structure, giving her a slightly larger forehead and bigger eyes. Then, I made some of her limbs look a little longer and more slender.
Finally, we went to Old Mo for help. After all, Old Mo was a former assassin. He should obviously know how to disguise his identity. And that was where we found a veritable gold mine.
Old Mo had forgotten a lot of the finer aspects of being a spy, since he had retired decades ago. Despite that fact, he was a former spy and assassin. A lot of the information he gave us proved critical to help Anise differentiate her identities. He taught her how to walk differently. He taught her how to vary the way she spoke, from her voice to her word choice. He taught her how to alter her posture seamlessly.
After a few weeks of training, even I could have been fooled by Anise's disguise.
Of course, that moment was broken when 'Amelia,' Anise's alternate identity, gave me a big hug and burst into excitement.
"Miria! I did it! Even you felt like I was unrecognizable for a moment, right? Right?" she said.
I laughed and ruffled Anise's hair. "You did amazing, Anise."
"I'm going to go fool Felix!" she said, before she left for Felix's room.
The next day, I found a grumpy Anise glaring at Felix. Felix had mistaken 'Amelia' for an intruder and had tried to whack her with a floating blob of metal. Anise had revealed her disguise before Felix managed to hit her... but it was a close call. Felix was embarrassed by the whole thing, and I couldn't stop laughing when the two recounted what happened.
After that little event, we went back to Old Mo for help getting Anise a second background.
Having a person we knew and trusted who understood the full details about the Market made life much easier.
It took a week to get everything set up, and then Anise went to an ability registration center. 'Amelia' was now a seventeen year old girl who had fled from the worldstrider invasion of Verne. She possessed the mend ability, and was looking to open a prosthetics repair shop. The ability registration went well.
Then, ‘Amelia’ went to Dr. Trish’s clinic, to ask for a checkup. Of course, there was no real issues with her body - we just needed a pretext for ‘Amelia’ to become friends with us.
From there, we presented an illusion of becoming fast friends. Amelia got to know Felix, Old Mo, and my mother. For bonus points, I also created an illusory Anise to join in a few of our outings, to make sure that nobody thought Amelia and Anise were the same person. The illusory Anise wasn't a perfect imitation of the original. She didn't talk much, and some of her movements were a little awkward. We kept these outings to areas where people wouldn't have a reason to directly talk to Anise, such as restaurants with private rooms. It wasn't perfect, but it would hopefully keep Anise's two identities separate.
After a few weeks of this, 'Amelia' opened up a prosthetics repair shop (using some money that I gave her). 'Amelia' hired Anise and I as assistants to help keep the shop running.
It only took a few days for our first few customers to come in. Anise met the patients first, without any of her illusions or masks to disguise herself. She would then ‘adjust’ a few internal parts of people’s prosthetics, to 'set it up for Amelia'. Then, she guided the patient to another room, changed into her Amelia disguise, and used her mend spell to fix the deteriorating prosthetics. Afterwards, I gave them a final dose of healing magic, to make sure everything was still connected and working with their physical body.
It proved to be a massive success. Anise’s job, and future, was set up, as long as I was nearby to maintain her illusions and body transformations.
Of course, that wasn’t a permanent solution. Once we left for university, Anise wouldn't have me on hand to maintain her suite of illusions and body transformations all the time anymore. Luckily, Felix and I already had a plan to solve that problem.
We spent the next two weeks developing a special bracelet that would let Anise apply her ‘Amelia’ illusion as needed. It was surprisingly easy to set up, once Felix and I got the right idea. Felix was already used to ‘affixing’ ideas to shapes… so he had me create the image of ‘Amelia’ and then he affixed the idea of an ‘Amelia illusion’ to a simple bracelet. With a detailed illusion to work with, and Felix’s talent for binding essence manipulation, we finished the project in two weeks. It was the first research project we'd done in this world that hadn't run into a mountain of surprise issues, and I was very happy to have an easy success.
After that, I spent a week hovering near Anise, to make sure nothing went wrong. But nothing did. Our bracelet worked as intended, and Anise could swap to her Amelia disguise at will. Anise’s shop, as well as a way to farm Achievement and keyword abilities, was secured.
Author’s Note:
Join my Discord! (I’m much more active there than in the comments section).
Comments
Rain
Nice TFC
Pride mystic artificer
Ok, i have got to say this is the most convoluted and weird way you could have done this, their are a number of ways you could have made this so much easier and less plot hole riddled. first, you could have made anise simply be a prosthetic repair person who takes the prosthetic for a day or two and returns it good as new. second, you could have anise leave and have “gotten a job in [place]” so that she didn't need to set up a convoluted second identity that will fall apart the first time someone realizes that their prosthetic is repaired before they walk to the back, or anise breaks character and suddenly you have the problem of 5 abilities being shown not two. third, it takes months to train a person to stop using their natural mannerism, and a further weeks to train them to adopt new ones. Constantly switching back and forth between two would likely takes years, why do you think spy’s don't do that, not only is it hard and easy to accidentally break cover but it also doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It just is weird and convoluted for absolutely no reason, its not like anise is hard up for cash. The entirety of the crew is already quirky and eclectic as hell, i promise no one (in or out of the story) will blink twice at “i want to be a super witch” anise dropping out and living on her friends dime (which i'm certain she is already doing) and training to be some sort of guard for her. And if she really needed to get a job to maintain appearances she has two super genius friends both of whom ar prime to need “assistances” and she is trained enough to help them both in a way less disastrous way if the lie breaks down
