Josh drew shapeshifter porn for a living.
He hadn't planned it. He drew it because he liked it and nobody else was making the kind he wanted, and for a while the entire business model was that he'd finish a page and then jerk off to it. Lonely virgin, drawing tablet, no witnesses.
Then he posted a page. Then somebody sent him four dollars.
Six years later it was paying down his college debt. So the arrangement now was that he drew the thing, jerked off to the thing, and the thing paid his loans. He was aware this was an insane way to live. He was also aware that it was working.
He had a cast. A whole fantasy world for them to be in, the kind with a map, and a plot that people argued about in the comments like it wasn't porn.
And he had Sable.
Sable was the favorite. Always had been. Every artist has the one character that comes out right the first time and never needs fixing, and Sable was his. He'd never once had to redesign her, never once looked at an old page and winced.
She also lived in a fantasy world. There was no way she'd ever exist in real life.
It was evening. He was three panels into a page and losing, sitting in the dent he'd worn into his chair, screen brightness cranked because he hadn't turned a light on since it got dark. He'd been at it so long his shoulder hurt.
Then the doorbell rang.
Josh looked at the door.
Nobody rang his doorbell. Food got left on the mat. Work came through the internet. He sat there a second with the stylus in his hand, decided it was probably a mistake, and got up to answer it anyway, because he was the kind of person who answered doors.
He opened it and Sable was standing in the hallway.
Not someone like Sable. Sable. He had drawn that face thousands of times and he knew the spacing, the angles, the specific thing it did around the mouth. Six-three of it, standing in his hallway under the dead bulb.
She looked down at him and waited.
Josh's stomach dropped. God help him, he thought he knew exactly why she was there.
Because somewhere out there was a real person. A real person with a job and a face, and he'd drawn that face having sex, in detail, and put it online for anyone to see. It was the nightmare. It had always been the nightmare. He'd just never worked out what he'd say.
He went with all of it at once.
"Ma'am, I'm extremely sorry. I didn't know you before. The face just matched, coincidentally, I swear. Please forgive me if you faced any problems."
She blinked.
"That's the question," she said.
Her voice was low and suspicious.
"You draw like you've been spying on me," she said. "I thought magecraft ended a long time ago. Or do you have special ancestry?"
Josh's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
"U— um, what? I'm confused." He gripped the door a little. "Are you joking? Are you okay with what I do?"
She thought about it. She actually thought about it, weight shifting onto one hip, eyes going somewhere over his shoulder while she worked out her honest answer.
"I can't tell exactly," she said. "I don't like that you share these publicly."
"Right, no, that's completely—"
"But it's better than nothing, I guess."
She looked away when she said it.
Josh had no idea what to say to that.
"Okay," he said, both hands up. "This is awkward. Ma'am, I'm genuinely confused about what you're mad about. I'll discontinue drawing Sable. I promise. Done."
"Even the name. Sable." Her eyes came back to him and narrowed. "That was what I was called at a certain time. Are you a reincarnation?"
"I don't have any memories of my past life. If that's what you are asking, ma'am."
He said it perfectly straight, because it was true, and it was in the second after he said it that the whole thing turned over in his head and landed the other way up.
Roleplay.
Of course it was roleplay. A fan. Somebody had found his address, bad, that was bad, he'd deal with that later, and put on a costume, and was doing a bit, and had committed so hard to the bit that she was staying in character on his doormat.
And the makeup was good. Whoever did this was better at his own character than he was. She had the face. She had the height. She had the exact way Sable stood, which he was fairly sure he'd never even drawn from that angle.
Josh was twenty-four and had been a virgin his whole life. Roleplay was better than nothing.
He leaned in.
"So," she said. "Final question. Speak with honesty. Are you involved with anything the humans call the supernatural?"
"Yes, Sable," Josh said, playing along. "So..... which chapter do you want to reenact?"
(The woman:If he had screamed at any point, that would have settled it. Humans scream. That was the whole test.
He hadn't screamed. He'd answered the question like it was on a form.
So he wasn't human. Except magecraft died a long time ago, and there was no such thing anymore as someone like him. So what, exactly, was standing in this doorway.)
She took his arm.
For about a second it was an ordinary thing. A warm hand closing on his forearm, four fingers and a thumb, the first deliberate human contact he'd had in years, and his brain lit up like a switchboard about it.
Then the fingers went long.
Josh had drawn this plenty of times, and he'd drawn it wrong. He drew fingers stretching, like taffy. These didn't stretch. They got longer and thinner as they went, and they moved like water: around his wrist, up the inside of his arm, into his sleeve. Past his elbow.
Josh didn't move. He didn't breathe. He stood in his own doorway with her fingers crawling around inside his shirt and didn't make a sound.
"What chapter was this....." She was smiling. "Oh. Twelve eighty-seven, was it? Did I get it right?"
She had.
Josh did not pass out. He wanted it noted that he did not pass out. The reason he didn't was that all the blood went to his dick, and somehow that cleared his head.
"Wait," he said. "Is this real?"
Her fingers stayed in his sleeve.
"Why are you acting surprised?" She rolled her eyes. "You drew that stuff like you were secretly spying on me?" She stepped back and tipped her head toward the stairs. "Your cover is blown. Come on. I'm taking you to the Inhuman Embassy."
"What? Inhuman Embassy?!" He looked down at his own sleeve, which had something in it. "Is this real? Your hand is real. Wait. This is real. Hold up, I need to think clearly—"
"No. You're coming with me."
She got a better hold of his arm and just walked, and Josh found out that a person can be taken down two flights of stairs while still, actively, out loud, working on an explanation.
✦ ✦ ✦
The car was on the curb with two wheels up on it.
It was a Lincoln. A 1927 Model L, which had been, when it was new, about the most expensive thing a person could park in front of a building. Coachbuilt, huge, all of it built to be looked at. It wasn't new now. The paint had gone chalky, one running board was on with wire, and the seats had been repaired by someone who owned a stapler.
She put him in the passenger side, went around, and got in.
Her hand came off his arm and went back to normal, no ceremony, no transition he could catch, and she started the engine. It turned over like it had an opinion about that.
"Your hand can do that?" Josh leaned over to get a better look. "How does this work?"
"Why are you asking? You know everything. You've been spying on me."
"Okay. Okay." He put both hands flat on his knees. "The roleplay is over. Now — are the accusations real?"
"Yes, the accusations are real." She frowned through the windshield. "What's with the roleplay?"
"N— nothing. Just a thought." Josh went red.
He made himself watch the road. This was an abduction. He was reasonably sure you were supposed to track an abduction, note the turns, count the blocks, so he counted the blocks. Down past the lights, left, a few more, and then she turned and he read the sign and sat up.
51½ AVE"Fifty-one and a half Avenue?"
Since when did avenues have fractions?
"Oh." She perked up. "You don't know about this, huh? Your family line must have abandoned this. You are a real catch."
"Me, a catch?" He gestured at the dash, at the cracked dial glass, at the enormous chalky hood. "Says the girl with a hundred-year-old run-down car."
"Hey." She patted the dashboard. "This was the best Ford could build. I was one of the early adopters."
"Is this even road legal?"
"Don't ignore me, damn it." She smacked the wheel and looked over at him properly for the first time since the door. "Are you really that dense? I'm taking you somewhere without saying anything. And you're okay with that?"
Josh thought about it. He gave it a real, honest few seconds.
"I guess," he said. "I could work remotely from anywhere. I'd just have to buy a new iPad."
The car was quiet for a moment.
"And here I thought I was the weird one," she said.
"Cheer up. I'm not complaining."
"We've arrived."
✦ ✦ ✦
The building was Victorian, narrow, wedged in between two buildings that didn't seem to be aware of it. She got out, came around, and pulled him in, with normal hands this time.
Inside, it was a waiting room.
Josh had braced for something. He wasn't sure what. Candles, maybe. Instead the whole ground floor had been done out like a place you go to argue about a parking ticket. Beige walls over the old wainscoting. Fluorescent tubes screwed into fittings that used to be gas. A water cooler. A rack of forms. A plastic rubber plant, dusty.
Rows of chairs. A take-a-number machine. A noticeboard with flyers pinned three deep.
Then his eye caught on the chairs, because his eye did that now. Six years of drawing bodies meant he couldn't look at a chair without reading it backward into whoever sat in it: seat height, back angle, where the weight goes.
The third row was wrong, and it wasn't damage. It had been made that way, and made well. Seat too deep, back canted at an angle no spine he knew about would put up with, a long slot cut through the base for something to hang down through. Two rows over, a bench barely off the floor and twice the normal width. By the door, a chair with no seat at all, just a padded ring on a frame, worn shiny.
The coat hooks by the entrance were at nine feet.
Above the counter, a little red display read:
NOW SERVING: 47There was one person in the room and he was behind the counter.
"Hey, Luna." He didn't look up from his stamping. "Long time since you last visited." Then he did look up. "Oh. It seems you brought a little man alongside."
"Hey," Josh said. "I'm five-six. Don't call me short."
"And she is six-three. That makes you short."
"I can change my height, you know," she said.
"And I also know that you prefer to be tall." He put the stamp down. "So. What brings you here today, along with our lovely little guest today?"
"I am not littl—"
"I think this guy's ancestry has something to do with magecraft," she said over him. "He was performing it on his own. Somehow."
"Intriguing." The clerk's face gave nothing away. "Come on, little man. You can call me Solaris. We will get you tested right away."
She laughed and covered her mouth with the back of her hand.
"You still using that corny name in this age?"
"Girl, you just used the moon's name." He spread both hands. "And now, if I used the sun, you have a problem? Double standard."
"Sure, sure. Just so you know, Solaris is cringe nowadays."
"Cringe?" He repeated it like a word in a foreign language. "Oh, you are using internet too? The world is progressing so fast. It feels like yesterday that I witnessed the atom bomb."
"You guys talk weird," Josh said.
"Oh, yeah. Let's get you processed." Solaris was already reaching under the counter. "Hey, Luna. This feels like a real one. The reward is gonna be amazing."
"Yeah, yeah. Sure. Hurry up already."
✦ ✦ ✦
Solaris came around the counter with a clipboard and took him through a door Josh had assumed was a cupboard.
The room behind it was the same beige, with a drain set into the middle of the floor and a table that had been wiped a great many times.
"Sit. Hand on that."
That was a glass orb about the size of a grapefruit, clouded through the middle like something had gone off inside it. Josh sat down and put his hand on it.
"What's it do?"
Solaris wrote something down.
Nothing happened to the orb. Nothing happened to Josh either. After a while the orb went back into a padded box, and Josh said, "Did that work?" and got the lid closing as an answer.
The helmet came next, and it was a real helmet, steel, with a chin strap, drilled through all over so that crystals could be set into the holes with the points facing in. Solaris lowered it onto him without mentioning the weight. Josh's neck did most of a push-up.
"Is it meant to be this—"
"It's meant to be on."
So he sat in it. The points were cold against his scalp, and then they weren't. Nothing else happened.
For the third one Solaris stood him a foot from the wall, facing it, and told him to put his hands up with the fingers apart.
Josh put his hands up.
His fingertips started to bleed.
There was no cut anywhere. The blood just came out of his fingertips. It didn't drip down. It went sideways, in thin lines, across the gap to the wall, and the wall soaked it up and stayed beige.
"Okay," Josh said.
"Does that hurt?"
"No."
Solaris stopped writing.
"No?"
"No. It's like—" Josh turned his hand over and watched the underside of his knuckle run. "You know when your leg's been asleep and it's coming back? Less than that."
Solaris looked at him for a second longer than the answer needed. Then he wrote it down, and it took him a while to write it.
The last one was smoke.
He set a shallow dish on the table and lit what was in it, and what came off it was heavier than smoke had any business being. It rose to about chest height and stopped there and held its shape, a soft gray column standing on the table, not spreading.
"Breathe it in. Through the nose, all the way down."
Josh breathed in.
The smoke didn't move.
He looked at it. He tried again, harder, leaning in over the dish, and got a lungful of ordinary room air while the column stood right in front of his face and stayed exactly where it was.
"Am I doing it wrong?"
"No."
"Can I go again?"
"You can go as many times as you like."
He kept at it until Solaris picked the dish up and put it out. It was the only one of them he had actually wanted to pass.
It took two hours.
✦ ✦ ✦
Solaris came back to the counter with a printout, trying not to laugh.
"Human," he said. "Every test."
Luna's head came up. "What?"
"Human. All the way down." He turned the page over. "Except one. He got flagged as a dwarf."