Adventure in Action 2024

Prologue

I still hadn't gotten the hang of fingers yet. Bigger, simpler limbs had been easy to remember; arms and legs had only one hinged part, only bent a single way. But the dexterity needed to manipulate those little, wriggling digits was still beyond me. I was clumsy, like a newborn.

It was lucky, then, that the body I'd slipped into was such a lazy piece of shit. I could see it in the way the pawn shop's owner looked at me, this body's callous-free hands and scarless skin. I could see it in the fragments of memory this sack of flesh had burdened me with. Despite being from the perspective of its previous occupant, veiled by arrogance and puffery, I could tell.

There was a reason for it. This man, whose life I had switched out for my own - Leon Geheim - had also been filthy rich. And yet, he had been employed - apprenticed - at some backwater pawn shop, reduced to nothing more than a menial laborer. In this day and age, I quickly learned, there was a more polite term - retail worker.

"Leon!" Bellowed a voice hoarse with age. "Come here! Now!"

I dragged myself away from my thoughts, collecting myself.

"Yeah, Doctor?" I called back. There was an art to this laziness, to mimicking what Leon would have done.

"I said come!"

"Alright," I shot back, "just give me a second." I was careful to infuse my voice with disinterest, with the correct slang and cadence. It was hard, though. Servitude had been beaten into me throughout the centuries. I'd hailed from a time when your master's word was absolute, not this strange, modern landscape of disobedience and... individuality.

I lifted myself from the rickety table in which I sat, and began the job of navigating the shop's cluttered back room. It was filled with all the product that the Doctor deemed broken, or visually boring, or didn't understand the purpose of.

There was no coherent theme to the mess; bookshelves sprouted like stunted trees from random points in the room. These were supplemented by odd bits of larger furniture. I skirted a grandfather clock, its paneling stained with age, then stepped around one of the shorter shelving units, in which a collection of rough wooden carvings had been displayed. There was so much junk, in fact, that the room's red-bricked walls were all but hidden, and I had to rely on a snippet of Leon's memory to locate the door. And yet, as I passed, I could feel the resonance from each and every object; like a voiceless whisper, or a bone-deep vibration. They were all Imbued, all vessels for power, just as the unfortunate Leon had become for me. Terrible for him, of course, but for me, it was pure, unadulterated joy to experience the world again.

I shoved open the heavy oak door that separated the space in back to the shop itself, stepping into a much larger room that glinted with coppery afternoon light. Even in the midst of a smoking, stinking city - this Manhattan - the shop's high windows managed to capture an adequate amount of illumination.

I scanned the room for a potential customer, but the only figure present was the Doctor, his warped frame hunched over one of the shelving displays. He turned at my approach, glaring at me with an expression gone tight with exertion.

"Give me a hand!" he bellowed, his voice no quieter despite our proximity. I wandered over, noting which section of the shop he was in. Open to customers, the front section was much better organized, and it was trinkets devoted to movement and travel that I found myself surrounded by as I reluctantly helped the Doctor pull a wooden case off an upper shelf. Despite his muttered curses, I made sure to take my time lifting it from its perch. I was being insolent of course, but also practical. My hands, leaden as they were, would not appreciate any sudden movement.

Most of the objects on the display murmured quietly, little pools of power. They were simple things; amulets that let you jump higher than normal, sheafs of paper that, when written upon, reflected the very same words upon a sister set. But the box, which the Doctor promptly waddled towards the shop's worktable with, had a high, keening voice that cut through the others. It had pitch, rhythm, a cadence of noise that was almost on the verge of intelligible. Of course, the older man couldn't hear it, even as he opened the box, selected a thin, wooden rod from a set within arranged on a velvet padding. Only those like I, dragged from the same world, same source of power, could feel its essence. In a way, I was no better than these mindless tools. I was nothing but the result of a summons, albeit more powerful than the one that gathered this mindless magic.