Chapter #28Your Princess Is In Another Castille by: imaj   “Leave the cart,” you order the other member of the housekeeping staff.
She stares vacantly straight through you as your shadow writhes about her. “Yes Edie,” she mumbles. The other housekeeper dumps the set of towels she had been carrying on the floor before walking off without another word.
You regard the abandoned towels for a moment before deciding they aren’t important. Instead you roll the cart forward to the next room, where your first target awaits. Using the keycard you took from the real Edie in the laundry room, you let yourself into.
“Housekeeping,” you call out as you walk into the suite.
A petite woman, made seemingly even smaller by the size of the huge leather sofa she is perched upon, looks up from her tablet. “No, no no,” she begins in English, putting the device to one side and standing up. “You can’t be in here.”
You feign confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“You can’t be in here,” she repeats, this time in Spanish
“Oh, of course madam,” you say. But you don’t leave. You send your shadow out to forestall any further complaints on the woman’s part. Moments later the woman falls back to the sofa, left unconscious by the effects of your knockout sigil. The imago of Fiona Glover settles into your collection .
You lift her legs and swing them onto the sofa. Fiona lies there completely unresponsive as you remove her clothes and pile them atop a coffee table. You’re not sure if that’s entirely necessary, but you haven’t tried the sigil you are about to use before and you don’t want to damage her expensive looking skirt suit.
Sparks crackle along the the length of Fiona’s body as you touch the new sigil to her. You snap your hand back anxiously, though there is no warmth to the red and blue flickers of light. Then she just blurs, making it hard for you to focus on her momentarily. When you look again, Fiona is gone, replaced by a misshapen lump of granite coloured matter. No, that’s not the right way to describe it, you think. It’s hard to attribute any kind of shape to it at all.
You hunt round the suite for something to carve the rock-like remains with, eventually settling on a corkscrew you find in the mini bar. The pseudo-stone material proves surprisingly easy to work at with the tip of the corkscrew. You carefully carve the design onto what remains of Fiona. It too is experimental, though less so than the sigil you used to strip Fiona of her anima and imago.
The new sigil bears a resemblance to the remote sigil - the one you used a few months earlier on that Australian pop starlet. You’ve made some changes though. Your new design is, well wider isn’t quite the right word here either. It’s not wider in any physically measurable way, but rather in the connection between you.
Now you just need to put Fiona back together again. A Fiona at least.
First you pull out an anima strip from within the folds of your uniform. The glowing red writing on it read Breeanna Lynn Summers. Using the same sigil you used to create the band originally, you transfer a copy of the anima into Fiona’s remains. Then you use another one of the deeper spells from the copy of the Libra within you. This one to push the copy of Fiona’s imago that you absorbed minutes earlier back onto what was her body.
A Fiona sits back up on the sofa, almost indistinguishable from the one that was there earlier. Only the look in her eyes betrays the substitution, for Fiona looks at you longingly. “Marji.” she asks, Breeanna’s thick accent now evident in her speech.
You nod in reply
“What’s going on,” asks the Fiona / Breeanna chimera. “Why do you look different? Why do I look different?”
“Yah trust me, dontcha,” you ask, calling upon enough of Marjory Wilson’s mental imago to mimic her way of speaking. She nods fervently. “We’re going to be these other people. Yahr going to be this Fiona.”
“Fi,” she interrupts, the Australian accent vanishing. “She calls herself Fi. I call myself Fi. How do I know this? How am I speaking like this?”
“Part of the magic,” you explain. “Yah know everything about being Fi, right?” She nods again, surprised to find that she does. “So yahr going to be Fi, perfect as yah can except when it’s just us girls. And I’ll be someone else. Can yah tell who it is yet?”
The new Fi takes a moment to think about it. “Portia? You’re going to be Portia.”
*****
Portia Lovelace - Edward Lovelace’s daughter - is in the hotel’s penthouse suite, directly above the rooms hosting Fi Glover. The stolen keycard works here too, but this time you don’t announce your presence when you walk into the suite.
The first room, the lounge, is empty of people. It is, however, full of detritus from the previous night’s party. You pick your way through the maze of abandoned glasses and bottles, looking round for any sign of your second target.
Crumbs of abandoned food crunch underfoot as you make your way into the bedroom. There you find a half dozen naked bodies tangled together on the bed. The tableaux prompts a flash of deja vu. It takes a few seconds to realise where you recognise it from - Macau. Except in Macau you woke up inside the pile of bodies.
The people on the bed are too hungover, or too deep in sleep to notice your arrival in the gloomy room. You still cast your cloak over all of them just in case. It forces you to move a little bit more slowly in order to keep that many people blinded to your presence, but you only need to move a short distance to touch them and use your knockout sigil.
Once all six are securely unconscious you drop your cloak and start looking for Portia. After digging past a slightly plump redhead and pair of muscular twins you find her buried at the bottom of the pile, snoring gently. Though you’ve already seen pictures of Portia online through gossip streams and via InstaFeed, it’s the first time you have seen her in the flesh. She’s beautiful in a pneumatically blonde sort of way that reminds you of some of the cheerleaders from your high school days, even if her face is squashed by the tangle of bodies on the bed.
A simple tap on the sole of her foot is enough to replace her. You absorb her imago and fold it around yourself, shifting into her much slimmer body. As you do so, the colour bleaches from her flesh and she begins shrinking. While Portia dwindles away to doll size, you quickly strip away the housekeeping uniform. Admiring Portia’s body again, this time from the inside, you can spot all the little tell tale signs of the extensive plastic surgery her memory tell you about.
Still, you’ll be happy enough as Portia for a while, you think, cupping your unnaturally perky breasts with both hands. Like Jennifer Tseung before her, Portia is her father’s spoilt little princess. But unlike Jennifer, Portia is also your princess. Even though you will use her to cast your influence over Fane, she is still only stepping stone on the road to your ultimate prize.
You pick up the little doll that the original Portia has become. It crumbles into dust as you invert the spell that made it. With the last obstacle to your usurpation removed, you crawl into the pile of bodies and your new life.
To stop reminiscing, attend to Fi's reports in "A Short Hop" 
 You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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