Ideworld Chronicles: The Art Mage

With Gertrude's unmoving body in my arms, I appeared in the Art Palace's workstation area.

I sat her down on the table meant for working on the models, the very same one where I'd lain not so long ago while my tattoos had been applied through paint.

She remained in the same cross-legged sitting position she'd been in when she died, her face tilted toward the ceiling, bearing the mark where something sharp had pierced her left eye socket. A blade must have struck her there and gone clean through, destroying her brain, killing her, and with it removing all Authority.

“Is she dead?” Nickolas asked as Maya guided him inside in her shining form. He paused half a step behind the threshold before continuing forward.

She flew over to Gertrude and circled around her, stopping just short of her face for a closer look.

Spiderbunny Anansi hopped onto the table as well, her curious black eyes scanning the model for any other damage. “Remove the clothes,” she said. “We need to check her.” Her front legs adjusted position on the table surface, distributing weight before she leaned closer.

“Besides the blob hair, she looks almost exactly like Alexandra,” Maya said, throwing a quick glance toward Nickolas. “Very, very, very much.” She paused. “Breasts are bigger, though. Maybe not everyone likes it, right?” she continued in her usual childish manner. Her head turned slightly between Nickolas and the body while she spoke.

“Nick.” I turned toward him while unbuttoning Gertrude's shirt. “Maya's remarks are directed at you.”

“But she's—”

“A model? Yes, she is. But a very lifelike one, painted with attention to every detail.”

“Are you guys embarrassed to get her naked in front of me?” Nick was amused, his voice an octave higher than usual and half a smile formed by a corner of his lips moving upward.

“Yes!” Maya chirped. “If you could be a gentleman and turn around, that would be splendid!” She remained hovering in place, eyes fixed forward on him.

“Sure.” He nodded, turned, and walked over to the painting station. Sitting down on a chair, he rested his elbows on the desk and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders dropped and he stayed still after that. “I could actually use some sleep, though.”

“Then...”

“But I won't until my body gives up on me, or Sophie's back.” He was adamant, his response quick, but his body worked against his convictions. “Maybe just a nap… little nap, would be enough.” He added, realizing that he’d not be able to follow what he’d like to set his mind to.

“Okay,” I replied, pulling Gertrude's shirt off.

There were quite a few cuts, bruises, and burns across her skin. They looked like nothing more than paint now, but they must have been very real to her while her spirit had still inhabited the body. My hands paused briefly over the shoulder before continuing downward. I removed the hand after this careful survey and found fragments of dried coloring on my own fingers, removed from her frame.

“Nothing life-ending on its own,” Anansi noted, hopping closer to her knees and inspecting the damage with her front legs. They worked quickly, each of them pressing delicately, trying to determine, if anything displayed on the skin suggested damage to the internal organs.

“No. The thrust through the eye is what killed her.” I said.

“Let me make sure.” She moved over the body, weaving around it with careful taps of her spider limbs. Her rabbit ears twitched, as if trying to catch even the quietest sound Gertrude might produce. She stopped at her shoulders, then climbed onto the head from the temple side, carefully inspecting the wound that ended that Persona. “Whatever damaged her, went cleanly through and left a crevice in the model.”

“But the rest of the wounds look like they were painted onto her,” I said, tapping my chin.

“So that means your animation soulmark adjusted the artwork that made her, and remembered the changes when she’s called back again to inhabit the model, right?” Nickolas asked, pushing himself away from the desk and balancing on the chair’s back legs. It shifted slightly under him before he corrected balance again.

“That means she didn’t… die?” Maya asked.

“The main wound went through the model itself,” Nickolas said, “but if the model was alive at the time, it should have gone into flesh and left a painted wound when the Authority left her. That’s my assumption, at least. That’s what we see in case of bruises, cuts and burns. Why would just one cut be different if not for that reason?”

“Could it be that she was sure she was going to die, and before it happened, released the Authority that held her and became just a model?”

“Are there any wounds, blood, or bruises painted around the wound?” Nickolas asked after a yawn.

“No.” Anansi jumped off the face and onto the desk, skittering away, just to stop at the edge and stop moving entirely in this eerily spider-like manner.

“Then it means whatever struck the model did it after she was already just that, so it had no reason to paint the wounds made to flesh.” Nickolas stood up and turned toward the doors. “I will be napping near the soul core if you need me. It seems that me ignoring my body’s needs is not going to work out in the end.”

“You sure? We’ll wake you if anything happens anyway.”

“Yes. It seems like you’ll be having another awakening soon anyway.”

“We need to fix the model first. Can’t have Gertrude waking up with a hole in her face.”

“At least she’s not dead, right?”

“True.”

**********

An hour later, I watched Alexandra direct the minions to push yet another batch of silk into the cavity, followed by the clay that had been mixed into it. Apparently, those two materials worked remarkably well together for filling it. Some of the spiders crawled over the body, their tiny painting legs pressed against the skin as they removed every blackened or bruised patch before covering the wound with a fresh, undisturbed image of the tissue. The surface of the model shifted under repeated contact, pigment layers smoothing out where the spiders passed.

She was moving well and had rested enough to do it all by hand, but she insisted on using mental manipulation instead, saying that every tool required practice and that, because of her current state, she still didn't have enough of it. Fortunately for her, we all shared the same soul, shaped by each of our actions into a spiritual lattice of shared experience that she could now rely on.

She stood valiantly before her three-dimensional canvas, and those fantastic creatures responded to her thoughts the moment they became intentions, or even unconscious impulses, as she guided them through pure instinct and ingrained memory. It could no longer be called muscle memory in our case. Not in the truest sense, for the actions performed by the spiders belonged to no single body.

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Yet to me, being privy to the inner workings of someone who could create or restore art this way, it was fascinating.

It would be easy to assume it all relied on sight, but that was only a tertiary sense in the endeavor.

Feeling came first. Each of those minions, in their conceptual idealization, was both its own creature and, at the same time, an extension of our senses. Their careful steps as they moved across Gertrude's body sent tiny pulses, little vibrations their painted hairs were supposedly picking up. In truth, the hairs weren't really there, but the paintings over their origami frames suggested otherwise, and that was enough confirmation for the Universe to behave as though they existed. The spiders spread out across the body surface, maintaining spacing as they worked.

Hearing and touch were almost the same thing for those arachnid bodies, and that opened an entirely new world to someone who could paint. Listening to the colors being applied while simultaneously feeling those tiny legs press against the surface sent shivers up both mine and Alexa's spines.

It was pleasurable in that autonomous sensory meridian response. Only after those two senses did she rely on sight. Both her own eyes, mine, and the spiders'. It was difficult to imagine being reduced to seeing only what lay directly before you now.

At the same time, it gave birth to questions about the nature of our ability to comprehend so many sensory inputs with such ease. Of course, much of that was what the additional brains were for. They managed the incoming streams and helped Anansi oversee what actually mattered. But even without them, we were exceptionally good at experiencing the world from more than one point of view.

“It's because of you,” Alexa replied to my thoughts. “Because of Personas, and the way I created you and assumed you, as though you were really me, throughout my life. I deliberately chose which traits to amplify and which to diminish, and in doing so I trained my brain early enough that perception itself could be changed depending on my own choice. My view of myself, and my view of the world through the eyes of the person I'd become.” She continued explaining without the spiders pausing for even a fraction of a second. They didn't even slow down. “Adding literal senses to that mix might have been easy enough for my grey matter to handle by that point. Expanding it to where I am now was simply a matter of computational and spiritual power, one of which relies on the other anyway.”

“Maybe that's the answer,” I said, pulling on the strings of my guitar as I quietly played in the corner, “or maybe it's something else entirely.”

“Either way, she is ready to be reinfused with her Identity.”

“You're hesitating,” I noticed, taking a quick peek at her and pausing my training. Ever since copying the proficiency of the instrument's master, chaining different melodies together had become incredibly easy and, at the same time, deeply relaxing.

“We have a lot of assumptions here. She might have really died, and forcing her back might force us to relive, if that's even the right word for it, the whole ordeal. Maybe it would even kill us outright.”

“I've been reduced to nothing more than the concept of a person and then turned back into an actual being a few times already. I say we should just do it.”

“You were never dead, though. What if the Universe, or whoever oversees all of this, made a note somewhere that Gertrude Monkey, as I imagined her to be, had died and no longer has the right to exist in any form?” A contortion along her left side forced her to sit down on the chair she'd placed behind herself.

“But she does exist. I know who she is. You know who she is. Penrose and Thomas understand the difference between her and you. The concept is still very much alive.”

“On that note, before I finally gather the courage to just suck it up and do it, do you think that's true for everything and everyone?”

“Could we force a painting of Peter to become Peter, for example?”

“Exactly.” She exhaled.

“It warrants some testing, but on a subject that's less important to us. I believe it should work.”

“Me too.” She looked at Gertrude's pristinely repainted and restored body. There was peace in the way she sat, as though she'd cast away every doubt, every fear, and every possibility of change, remaining still no matter what.

“Care to place a heart inside her?”

“I don't mind,” I replied sending the guitar away, standing up and walking toward the desk where a freshly chipped fragment of the soul core lay. I picked it up and held it firmly in my hand, its warm power radiating from the point where my skin met its jagged surface.

A few steps later I stood beside the hole painted onto Gertrude's chest and reached toward it. My soul understood my intention perfectly, and the blackness washed away before my eyes. What had been a Looney Tunes-style circular hole only a moment earlier became a glimpse into the cavity inside the model's chest, revealing the metallic skeletal frame that held everything together in the proper position.

I placed the gem inside and withdrew my hand. A sudden burst of shadowlight stripped the painted opening of its Identity, leaving me staring once more at nothing but black paint. The art crafters rushed in on their beautifully folded, long, thin legs and immediately began covering the dark spot with skin-toned paint.

“Do you think restarting her will tax your soul the way it did the first time you willed all of us into existence? Or will it be easier, like it is each time I'm reawakened now?”

“No idea. But even if it's easier, every time you were brought back it happened under Anansi's guidance—”

“You dropped unconscious from the strain. I know.”

“I made it in time. Fuck, I am good,” I said, watching the monstrous eldritch being above me disappear, replaced by the Art Palace's open ceiling. Beyond it stretched a star-filled night.

I sat cross-legged on the table and jerked my head, sending a satisfying crack through the air.

“We thought you died,” Alex's voice reached me.

At first I thought of him as just a man, but then his memories, Alexa's memories, flooded into me and back out again, giving me knowledge of everything they'd done while sharing my own story with them as I knew it.

“I kept fighting for as long as I could before I just made myself vanish. I'm glad to hear Sophie is okay. Even more glad to know Rei Yamashiro got impaled and properly unarmed.” I chuckled. “He deserved his fucking fate.”

“You need to go back, though.” His pupils dilated, and he clutched his head. The cascade of memories rushing into him was every bit as overwhelming as the one that had battered the shores of my own psyche.

He wielded music with remarkable proficiency, turning it into a weapon. Maya could perceive the very nature of magic itself, watching as it wove the fabric of metaphysics. And I—I gave us something just as profound: the understanding that through our actions, through performance, composition, and even the right gesture at the right moment, enough artistic flair could transform that something into a weapon or a tool.

He smiled as the realization settled over him, and I found the same understanding reflected in his eyes. There were countless artistic paths we had yet to explore, constrained only by our own assumptions. Music and performance had opened our eyes—every one of them—to new possibilities waiting to be discovered.

“I do,” I replied, glancing at my main body slumped unconscious in the chair before me. She had begun to fall sideways, but the Domain, acting under Anansi's orders, had removed gravity around her, leaving her suspended in place.

“Yes. I need to finalize my deal with Penrose and talk to that alco-mage who saved the shit out of all of us in there. Without his deus ex machina intervention, I'd be nothing more than a cautionary tale for anyone who thought they stood a chance against cosmic bloody beings on their own turf.”

“You think there's something to be gained from this meeting?” Alex's arms folded across his chest and his leg started tapping against the floor.

“Of course. I bloody saved him as much as he saved me. Without my artistic stance, he'd never have been able to attack that creature,” I replied, summoning the spellbook away from him and onto my waist. I grabbed the grimoire and tossed it onto the table in front of me, flipping through the pages until I found an empty one.

“He owes you.” Art crafters crawled in, directed by him, and began painting an image of the hall exactly as we had left it not so long ago. Statues gathered in the middle over my unmoving body, and Penrose stood protecting me. A puddle of water sat on the floor. All sorts of crap like that—enough to point the world at the right address.

“Yes. And I need to make him see it that way. He’s a mage and an alcoholic. If I can’t exploit that combination for my own benefit somehow, I shouldn’t call myself Alexandra May.” I reached for Equinox, as it was painted into the tattoo on my back, and summoned him into my hand.

“You aren’t—”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“What about the rest of your weapons?” His chin lifted toward the reclaimed pistol I held.

“They proved less useful than I hoped for. I’ll grab them when I’m on site.” I shrugged.

“I kind of hoped that you died.” He came over to the desk after a brief pause to watch the spider helpers. They weaved their differently colored legs to apply the paint in the correct combination needed to produce the right hue. “That way, if we managed to bring you back, I’d be sure that I’d exist even in the face of great peril.”

“Fuck off, Alex. Just do your best not to die, so we can live eternally in glorious unknown.”

“We always have Elle. Maybe she’ll die in that rathole and we can check whether a concept can truly be erased from being summoned.”

*That’s not the nicest thing to think,* Elle’s thoughts came into the conversation. It was nice of her to give us input while blowing up a Nazi camp.