After AnimeCon 2: Emily's Conclusions

    Her phone began to ring again, and with a glance of irritation Emily overlaid the device with an illusory version, which she then picked up and wrung in her hands like she was squeezing all the water out of a wet dishcloth. It was a mental and magical strain, but she watched in fascination as a trickle of digital numbers and letters pattered across the comforter of her bed in eerie little black droplets. Sitting up from where she had been lounging, she peered in close over the inky spill to try to make sense of what it read… and failed miserably.

    It was gibberish, but that wasn’t too unexpected. She was blissed out on the constant supplements of magic goo, exhausted by playing with magic illusion stuff nonstop, and overall feeling kind of out of it.

    “Nani the fuck?” Emily grumbled, dispelling the illusion so that she could check the actual display on her real phone.

    It was the same unknown number attempting to call her that had rung twice in the last hour, with the only thing she could discern from the digits was that it was one local to the Seneca area code. She wasn’t exactly in the mood for distractions though, she didn’t want to talk to anyone, and it felt like she was right on the cusp of more breakthroughs with her ability. Cradling the real phone in her left hand this time, she conjured an exact duplicate of it in her right and compared the two. This time, the two displays matched.

    Probably a telemarketer, or some automated bullshit call service thing.

    The girl with the tousled bright blue pixie cut narrowed her eyes as she examined one and then the other, put a bit more oomph into the right one with her magic so that it had weight and felt more real in her hand, and finally raised a thumb to both phones so she could accept the call on both at once. She had wild theories about the possibility of making an illusion phone so real that it could connect to actual calls, because earlier that day she thought she’d managed to make an illusory cup hold real water.

    For a very short while.

    And, admittedly I had to put A LOT of juice into that one to even make it real enough…

    “Moshi moshi,” Emily said into her phone. It took her a moment to realize she’d spoken into the wrong one, so she switched and tried again. “Moshi moshi?”

    “Emily?” A girl asked in an annoyed voice.

    “Yeah?” Emily stared at the unfamiliar number on the display with suspicion. “Who dis?”

    “It’s Mary,” The girl said. “What’s going on with you guys?”

    “Oh, it’s you,” Emily deadpanned. “Whaddya mean going on with us?”

    “I got Brian’s number from my brother,” Mary said. “Except, I couldn’t connect at all. So, I thought Mark just fucked up reading it to me, and tried from his phone directly—number is out of service. Brian’s number. Or the call can’t connect, or whatever. Can’t even leave a message. Did he get a new number all of the sudden, or what?”

    “Ohhh, nah,” Emily said, placing the left hand phone—the real one—down on the bed spread and then sliding it away from her with her naked foot so that she could speak into the fake phone. “That psycho Chloe smashed up his phone. Like back at AnimeCon.”

    “What?” Mary’s voice was very hard to make out, and had almost no volume from the illusory phone’s speaker. But, it DOES output her real sound?! “Hello? I can barely hear you. What’s up with Brian’s phone?”

    Using her toes, Emily nudged the real phone a bit closer to her so that it would be in better range of the fake phone which was apparently copying from it somehow.

    “Hello? Hello?” Emily called. “Hear me now?”

    “Yeah,” Mary said. “So—what are you guys doing, what’s going on?”

    “Oh, uhh, well Chloe smashed Brian’s phone, he doesn’t have one,” Emily repeated, holding both phones up to her mouth and examining them for differences again. “Didn’t we tell everyone that last night? I don’t remember. So—yeah, he can’t call you, ‘til he gets a new one. We yoinked out his old battery and his SIM card, just we need to get a new thang to put it in. Might try to get a used one online? He was using like, a super old one. Ceres series Seven? Six? Was super overdue for an upgrade, his shit was already old and busted even before Chlo-a-bitch bricked it. What’s the current-gen Ceres even at right now? Twelve?”

    “Ceres series Ten, still,” Mary said. “Well. Alright. We could maybe go shopping for new phones together? Brian and me. At the Ceres store, downtown. I wanted to look at phone cases and stuff, too. Can I talk to him?”

    “I’m over at my mom’s right now, I had to do laundry,” Emily lied. “I think he was running around doing errands today? Now that he’s back. Checking at his old job to see if he can get his hours back, grabbing a new phone, probably. I can let him know, if I see him tonight? That you called.”

    “Okay,” Mary grumbled. “Thanks. If he doesn’t have a phone by then—tell him he can go with me. We can like, walk around the shopping center there, and stuff. Do lunch, maybe.”

    “I mean, I’ll let him know but don’t get your hopes up?” Emily was torn between playing nice and simply antagonizing the girl. “He really seemed like he was vibing with Candace, last night. And, even if that doesn’t go anywhere, Becky—”

    “Candace is super old and she already has a kid,” Mary scoffed. “Isn’t she like, almost thirty? Brian’s way smarter than that. And, Becky’s a fucking slut.”

    “Yeah, and?” Emily laughed. “You think Brian would prefer some uptight prude girl who’s never ever gonna put out, or one who’s gonna take care of his… needs?”

    “He doesn’t need the town fucking bicycle,” Mary hissed out.

    “He might if he wants to get anywhere?” Emily taunted. “If she’s a bicycle, what does that make you? A fence post?”

    “Yeah yeah, very funny,” Mary scoffed. “If you think that—”

    “Mary, real talk—Brian just broke up with Chloe,” Emily said. “He’s gonna like, gravitate towards whoever feels most like the opposite of all that mess. Chloe was super uptight, Chloe didn’t put out. Because apparently to the raddest of super radical feminazis, all penoor-in-vagina sex is evil, consensual or not. Which makes it—”

    “Don’t you mean consentual?” Mary growled. “Consensual is not a word. And. I’m not like Chloe. At all.  Puh-lease. I think what Brian needs, is—”

    “Listen, I’ll tell him you rang,” Emily cut her off. “S’not on you or me to decide what Brian wants or needs. Alright? That’s on Brian.”

    “Fine,” Mary grouched. “Okay. Thank you.”

    “But, like… I  mean you really were all trying to call him like right away?” Emily teased. “Kinda desperate? Because wasn’t it just last night that—”

    The ticking runtime numbers of the call froze on the digital display as Mary abruptly hung up on her, and Emily quickly brought the two phones in her hands back together to compare them. To her dismay, the fake phone’s call runtime was still going and wasn’t even accurate—as if sheepishly correcting itself, the numbers glitched out for a moment before eventually mirroring those of the real phone.

    “Yeah, I saw that!” Emily cried out in exasperation, tossing the phone against the far wall.

    It didn’t make it the whole way, because the moment her illusion left the connecting spruedopod supplying it with magic, it smeared into a dark blur and disappeared like it was a trick of the light. Which… it technically was.

    The phone call with Mary itself remained immaterial to her, but as part of her ongoing tests it seemed to reveal a number of weird implications.

    It’s not JUST memory and imagination feeding into these things with the magic, Emily couldn’t help but observe. Part of it definitely is those impressions, but when I like, MENTALLY ASSIGN it to copy something, some part of it’s also directly copying from the real thing itself. Just… imperfectly. Or, maybe I’m not putting enough OOMPH into them to update in real time, or—or maybe I need to have sprues connecting not just from me physically, but also between the illusion and the target object itself?

    Emily couldn’t help but imagine holding a real gun in one hand, and a copy of that gun in the other—would they both shoot real bullets? Or, real enough bullets? Because that would potentially double her damage output. Except, this made her remember that her creations were still tied down with the limitation of her sprues, so an illusory bullet would only travel from the barrel of her metaphysical gun at the speed with which she could cast out spruedopods.

    Which is… Emily flicked her hands into a spider hero gesture and flung a string of magic against the wall. Fast? But nowhere near THAT fast…

    The magic output for those was less like launching an arrow and more like throwing a dart. Emily hurried to double-check the clasp lid on her cum jar, and then carry it over with her towards her desktop computer. She’d been running these esoteric searches all day, and as her fingers met the keys and typed and then moved the mouse and clicked and she took time to read, Emily discovered that something super lethal like a bullet from a handgun would be going at least 700 miles per hour! While an arrow might be around 150 miles per hour, and finally a thrown dart would be in the area of 40 miles per hour.

    “I could still hit them with a magic dart?” Emily pouted. “Maybe. Maybe? Dunno if I can like, penetrate with my illusions…”

    Using the last of her current breadth of internal magic, Emily created a long metallic blade out of nothing like she was a liquid metal exterminator from the future. With a deep breath she reared back her whole arm, and then stabbed it into the wall beside her desk. For a brief moment of surprise she gasped as the magic form bit deep into the drywall and visibly gouged her bedroom wall. The gash was there, paint had chipped and crumbly bits of plaster and powder fell from the penetration point down to scatter across her desk and the floor.

    “Holy shit…!”

    Then, she dispelled the blade illusion… and realized that her wall was actually still completely unblemished. In reality, there wasn’t even a single scratch to be found there at that spot at all—all of the damage had been part of the illusion.

    “Motherfucker,” Emily cursed, slapping her desk. “Fucking bullshit illusions! Fuck.”

    Her test earlier with the fake cup that held real water was starting to feel like a random fluke, and now Emily couldn’t help but doubt the direction of her efforts for the past few hours. Maybe she only tricked herself into believing the cup held real water? With the real stuff vanishing down the drain unseen, while fake water filled had the false vessel in her hand. It was getting hard to be sure of anything, because the process of generating illusions in the first place was a lot like mentally gaslighting herself into thinking something was real to such an absurd extent that reality started to bend to that as well.

    Illusion depth was a huge obstacle as well—most of what Emily was experimenting with was what she was beginning to think of as ‘dreamlight.’ Which was a lot like when you’re about to cast a spell or place an object in a video game and the game shows you a placeholder representation of the spell form or placed object, as a guide. Emily could see all of the dreamlight illusions just fine and she suspected other magic users could see them too, if the Kelly speck of light experiment was in any way connected to all of this. But, pushing dreamlight through with enough oomph to become actual light was a huge drain.

    As was physical distance. Emily could fling dreamlight illusions around her room okay, but the strain became apparent the farther out things were, as if she was holding weight at arms length away from her body. This effect worsened when upgrading the dreamlight illusions up to real light, and she didn’t think it would be plausible for her to cast ‘visible’ illusions out away from her body in a real world scenario.

    “Which means I’m not the cool magic illusion dreamworld trap girl, I’m more like the magic disguise sorta shapeshiftery girl,” Emily deduced, toying with the clasp of the jar. “For now. Which is, yeah, it’s still totally badass!”

    It seemed like a silly thing to be disappointed over, because there were so many cool things she could do with an ability that morphed her appearance to anything in her imagination. There was so much untapped potential there. At the same time, if she was able to assign real tangible kinetic force to her illusions, she would be able to do… almost anything. She could be a blade dancer, or turn into a rotating storm of knives and swords and just run at bad guys like she was a living blender, she could make force fields for defense or that kind of thing.

    Just… I’m not sure I can do all that, exactly, Emily tried hard not to be frustrated. I can maybe only make it LOOK like I can do that. Make it SEEM like I can do that. Which, yeah. Still awesome! Just. Ugggh it all feels so close! Am I just fooling myself? Are my illusions just so good at appearing real that I’ll always feel like I’m right on the edge of PULLING THEM INTO BEING REAL?!

    “Bollocks,” Emily muttered. “Bloody bollocks, is what it is!”

    She felt sorely tempted to take another teaspoon of Brian’s cum and try again, but honestly she’d been magicking all day and felt pretty frazzled all over. Her pussy was rubbed sore from a-little-bit-too-frequent masturbation sessions, and her head was getting a sort of foggy that even slurps of baby batter weren’t doing much for, anymore. Emily decided she needed a break.

    Instead she moved the cursor back to the search bar and typed in how make baby wrap from sheet for carry baby.

    Kelly had warned her that the magic cum would start to evaporate or vanish or something if it was physically too far away from them for too long, and thus Emily had been so paranoid about the stuff disappearing on her that she’d been practically pressing the glass jar against her body ever since she collected it. Taking it around with her everywhere was going to be awkward—for now while she was still just in the privacy of her house she was just going to find a way to tie it to her body so that at least both hands were free.

    Will the magic cum still disappear if I connect it to myself from a bit of distance with a sprue of magic? Emily wondered, pursing her lips as she clicked through videos of DIY baby wraps. Could I like, have a container of magic semen hidden off somewhere, but still connected to me like a battery pack? Can I literally just keep a big jar behind me in an actual backpack, and just draw magic from it through a spruedopod straw?! Nonstop source on tap would be way better than my meager internal reserves. Or, do I need to actually physically ingest the stuff… since it looks more and more like the illusions AREN’T actually real. Damnit!

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