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Chapter 184: Fizz - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2023-12-09 06:26:29 +0000 UTC“Miria!” called out my mother again.
I felt a glimmer of excitement as I thought about the first real conversation I would have with my mother in this life. Thus far, she had been in a drug trip almost every time I interacted with her, and seeing her lucid for the first time in months brought hope for a real change. I wanted my mother to get better in this life. And having a real conversation with her was the foundation for improving everything.
I left my room and half-ran into the living room, and looked at my mother.
She was… normal looking. Or at least, much more normal looking than usual. None of the usual haze stuck to her eyes, and when she looked at me, she looked as though she was really looking at me, instead of a distant apparition that existed only in her imagination.
“Mom,” I said, cautiously.
My mother hesitated, and looked at me more carefully, and I could see a bit of a grim smile appear near her lips.
“You’ve grown,” she said. “In my memories, you’re much smaller…” she sighed, and shuddered. “Miria,” she said. Even though she still seemed a bit out of it, her words were the clearest they had ever been in this life. “I… I haven’t been well, have I?”
“You… you haven’t been, mama,” I said. I felt my eyes start to grow hot as I thought of all the times I had tried to talk to my mother, and she had just given me a blank, empty smile as I watched her slowly kill herself. “You haven’t… been here.”
“Miria… you’ve grown older,” said my mother. “So much older while I wasn’t here. I’m sorry. It hurt so much, and I didn’t want to look at anything, so I just… dreamed. I don’t…I’m not sure how you even survived.” She said, as she inspected my arms and legs, and then looked at my face. “You look healthy. Much healthier than I thought you would.”
I nodded. “I found someone who was willing to let me help out for food, so I’m not hungry these days. I was really hungry before. But it can be better now. You’re… you’re planning on continuing… right?” I asked, looking into my mother’s eyes and making the best pleading expression I could.
Please be done with drugs. Even if you just want to get better, I can help. I have magic and as long as you want to get better I can find a way to make it happen. As long as you’re willing to accept help, I’ll help.
My mother sighed. “So you needed to find someone to take care of you when I couldn’t. That… makes sense. Who is it?”
I felt a stab of concern. I couldn’t tell whether she was ignoring my unspoken question, or whether she hadn’t understood it. Should I push harder? Should I back off?
I had never dealt with someone in such a delicate mental state before this. Sallia and Felix had never once lost control of their mental faculties. Not like this.
I felt like I was in a field of landmines. A single mistake could cause the situation to collapse and send my mother back into a drug induced haze for months. For now I decided to back off and go with my mother’s topic change.
“Old Mo helped me. He runs a bakery. Nothing fancy, but he needed some help kneading dough in the mornings, so I help him out in exchange for meals.”
My mother sighed. “A bakery, huh. You’re… four? Five?” My mother looked at me, and then shuddered. “Gods, I don’t even know what year it is anymore. Is working at a bakery where you learned to talk so… maturely?”
I froze. Was I doing a bad job of pretending to be a four year old? I had thought I was doing all right, but it had also been a long time since I had the mindset of a real child. Ever since I had joined the Market, I was basically playing pretend anytime I tried to act like a kid…
My mother looked at my confused expression, and then sighed. “I guess with a mother like me, you had no choice but to grow up fast…” she shook her head again. “Damn. I really need…” She reached for a small pouch that I hadn’t noticed before. It hung off of her shoulder, almost like a fanny pack. I saw my mother pull out a pinch of blue powder and start raising it towards her mouth-
“Mama? Can you not take Fizz anymore?” I asked, urgently. My mother’s first response to stress or disappointment had been to immediately start reaching for her drugs again. I nearly teleported the drugs away from her, before I managed to stop myself in time. My mother wasn’t in her right mind most of the time - I didn’t think she would really be all that great at keeping secrets. If my mother started blabbing about my weird teleportation abilities to her customers, it wouldn’t be long before someone put two and two together and figured out where Felix had gone.
But the temptation was still there. I wanted to knock the drugs out of my mother’s hand and throw them in the trash.
My mother froze for a moment, looking at me and the pinch of blue powder in her hand.
“Please? Don’t take any more. If you just wean yourself off of it, maybe you can get better. And then…” And then I would have you in my life, instead of a hollow shell of a person that occasionally wanders into the house before passing out. I didn’t say that out loud, because it didn’t match the four year old persona I was trying to display.
My mother looked at me, and then looked at the blue powder in her hand, before she laughed bitterly.
“Miria.” Her eyes locked onto mine, and her expression became unreadable. Some of the sorrow and warmth that had been in her gaze seemed to fade away, replaced with a look of alienation and disgust as she stared at me. There was something else in her eyes for just a moment - something that made me a bit nervous. It was a spark of rage.
Then, a few seconds later, my mother smothered it before turning to me again. She stuffed the pinch of blue powder into her mouth, chewed once, and then swallowed.
“When you’re older, you’ll understand, Miria. Verne isn’t… a good place to live for someone like me. People don’t… think highly of my work, and they also don’t really approve of single mothers,” said my mother, snorting. “No matter what I do, nothing will change anyway. Ever since I kicked your bastard of a father out, getting by has been hard, but at least everything we have is safe with him gone.” My mother snarled as she said that.
“But mama… when you’re at home, it doesn’t feel like you’re really here,” I said. “I don’t care what you do for work. If you don’t want to anymore, we can change it. If you really don’t want to change… it’s not what matters right now. What I want is for you to be here with me when you talk.”
My mother snorted again, although I couldn’t tell if that was some sort of reaction to the drugs she had just inhaled or not.
“Miria… I love you, but the real problems are you damn father and my… job,” she said. “When you get older, and you understand what I do for a living… you’ll see why my actions don’t matter anymore. Don’t ask me to stop. This is the only way I have left to cope with our situation.”
I started to feel a gut-wrenching pain in my gut.
“So you won’t stop? You won’t even consider it?” I asked, hoping that maybe I had just misunderstood my mother. If my mother was willing to work with me to improve, there was so much I could do to help. I could use alteration to turn all of the drugs she took into some sort of vile-tasting sludge, or just ‘hide’ it from my mother… or a number of other things.
But if my mother actively fought my treatment, I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like I could stalk her 24/7 and teleport things out of her hand anytime she was about to take a drug.
“No. Stop asking,” said my mother. Once again, for a brief moment, my mother had an expression of alienation and coldness on her face as she looked at me.
I hesitated for a moment. I had never seen that kind of expression on any of my previous parents. I knew that I hadn’t. It almost made me want to run away, instead of continuing to talk with my mother.
But if nothing changed, she wouldn’t get better.
I hesitated. Was pulling back the right thing to do? Should I wait for another day?
I thought about how long I had waited for a single lucid day from my mother. If I pulled back now, I might need to wait months, or years, for another lucid conversation with my mother. I didn’t think that was a good idea. Even if my mother’s body and brain were in decent condition due to my constant healing, the longer my mother was trapped in a haze of drugs and despair, the harder it would be to build a life afterwards. I wasn’t sure if it was possible for my mother to get back everything she had lost during this period of time… but I wanted to try. I wanted her to get back on her feet, so that she could build a life again.
“Mama, if you don’t stop taking Fizz, you’ll still keep hurting. If you stop, then we can find ways for everything to improve. Please, just-”
“Don’t ASK ME TO STOP,” snapped my mother, nearly snarling at me, before she shivered, and her tone became a bit softer. “Sweetie, don’t mention Fizz again. I hate the way I get when you mention it. I don’t want to hurt you by accident. See? I don’t… I can’t…” my mother’s eyes were starting to become a bit more vacant as the drugs she had swallowed started to take over again. “I can’t handle the withdrawal symptoms, sweetie. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” She leaned a little closer to me, and then gently wrapped me in her arms.
This was the first hug I’d had that didn’t feel nice. I just felt cold and sad.
A few moments later, my mother released me and then wandered into her room. I was left with an empty feeling in my heart. As I heard my mother start to drift further into a set of dreams, Felix quietly crawled out of my closet and started gently rubbing my back as I sat on my bed and tried not to cry.
Author’s Note: I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this chapter, honestly. I don’t write extremely emotional chapters very often, and this one is definitely focused solely on emotions. On one hand, it’s impossible to improve without trying things out, practicing, and improving. On the other hand, doing things that I don’t do often is extremely nerve-wracking, because it’s harder to assess which parts of the chapter I write well and which ones I write poorly. I did my best, and I’m sure based on my internet history the FBI now thinks I have a family member who’s addicted to meth or something. If someone from the FBI ever bothers checking my search history, which, admittedly, is unlikely. I feel like they have better things to do with their time than investigate me. But still.
Idk. I hope the chapter works. I feel like there are some parts of the chapter I could have done better, but at the same time, I probably could have spent weeks writing and rewriting this chapter to chase some illusory form of ‘perfection’ that may only exist in my mind.
Reminder that on December 22nd I will post the last chapter of the year for each of my stories. Then I will take a two week vacation.
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Comments
Irakli Jishkariani
Hmmm, maybe she was too careful? I don't know. She only got 15 minutes or less semi-lucid state talk from her mother. She should have grabbed those drugs to get the f*cking explanation for a single day, single proper conversation. Instead all she got was this: "you'll understand when you grow up". How ironic.
Irakli Jishkariani
Seems like you wrote answer and then question. I got impression from your saying that dhe should treat this like game and refusing to connect to anyone in world is growth. You answered and then asked the question if she should treat world as achievement farm. And I completely disagree with your general idea. But I don't have concrete opinion on her mother's situation yet.
Rain
TFC
Clean Gopher
She is def. floundering more than she needs to and is perhaps too keen on the new found family. If anything I would have thought she’d be at the point where she would find herself feeling numb to the cycles of loss from each world when they died. She lost 2 families already and they died along with her both times. I would think she’d be more on a journey of wondering if she should connect with anyone in the worlds they visit and if her market friends are more real than the temporary worlds she is in. I think that’d be a good direction for her struggles than trying to be a good girl for her family, again again. That was fine once or twice…but she seems stuck and isn’t growing as a person in this third world so far. She has been a respected healer and community leader, she has grown up twice she can remember, run a business, and helped to lead the islands in their war strategy. She has killed men and monsters and died in horrific ways, twice. But she still comes off like a lost puppy 19 year old college girl from earth who wants to codependently perform some type of narrow minded kindness in a moment to moment way, such as spending 2 or 3 chapters on the potion theft or again in the moral dilemma of the gang members they killed. She ought to be past such things or be very clear on what her limits are, not pondering like she’s never ever thought about morality before. She’s like 45 to 70 years old mentally, but acts like she’s 20 and from a suburban western earth family. At this point I’d expect to see her developing a way to have a big impact on a culture or empire to earn achievement. Coming up with plans to topple governments or to win wars through infiltration tactics and then wondering if she’s going tooooo far. This small scale day to day stuff is silly for such an experienced killer. She went into the ocean abyss of madness and swam with giant monsters just because she was curious! Those gangs murder, steal, and extort and should be an easy way to aim for wealth, food, and achievement no different from the imperial invaders who attacked her islands. Hints of her finding mass achievement +2,400 through impacts on the research program have been laid as a narrative thread to later do things like have a grand plan for a big impact. The world should be slowly becoming more like a game or puzzle to her and they are lucky and powerful for the very first time, able to kill dozens of men as toddlers, so they can have an outsized impact. But do they or should they view worlds as nothing more than achievement farms where destabilising things is just part of the plan? Now that’s a moral quandary! Not grabbing a few potions.
Mark Corwin
It's a good chapter. It conveys well the addiction and its impact on family. Tftc
IronJim
I think she is a bit to obsessed with mothers and fathers, I mean she’s is like 60 or 70 year’s old and has lived multiple lives and fought numerous enemies. I can understand if she wants to help a stranger (because that is technically what this woman is to her) out of kindness and compassion but not out of a desire for a new mother or familial piety. Maybe I missed something and she has a psychological trauma or something and the author will expand on later.
Bliss
Just joined the Patreon. Found you on Royal Road with the Budding Scientist, which I enjoyed. Then I checked out the Markets and Multiverses, and I enjoyed that one even more :) Enough to get the Patreon. Have to grab some sleep because got medical appointments today and need to be there early :( But this was a great read. I hope things start looking up for Miria in this new life.
Luboš Hemala
Or she might be considered out of it on drugs...
Arkeus
If my mother started blabbing about my weird teleportation abilities to her customers, it wouldn’t be long before someone put two and two together and figured out where Felix had gone. <== Miria, you greatly underestimate how limited the grapevine is lol
Fucking Shracc
She got some bad luck with the magic system, in a different world she might have been able to just conquer to country and enact change.
MinE
She should just start a gang and take over/destroy the drug and red light businesses. She really needs to learn/make a new spell for healing mental wounds. P.S I wonder if she could try making her mom afraid of Fizz using her alteration essence plus rune abiliities.
