The Outer Sphere - Chapter 198

“Get back here, you sonofabitch,” Stick-Together Garth growled, tackling the sprinting Finish-the-Dungeon Garth to the ground and pinning him there with thick bands of wood.

“No, you don’t understand, I’ve got to get to the end!”

“And you will, but we need all of us to get there, damnit!” Stick-together said, glancing at the other Garths aimlessly wandering around the room, one laughing manically while one wept into his palms. The rest just seemed kind of dazed.

Thank god I absorbed Magic Garth first, Stick-together thought, as he began to subdue the rest of the errant facets of his personality. He felt like a cartoon character that’d run through some kind of grate and each resulting piece hand run off on its own, but he was finally starting to make headway.

Thankfully Garth’s desire to kill himself was weak, manifesting as a Goth-Garth, lightly tapping his forehead against the wall. It would’ve been bad if that part was particularly strong. It might have started stalking and killing the Garths that were unable to move on their own like  a seriel killer, essentially destroying large portions of his personality.

Self-Preservation Garth was going to be the tough one. Stick-Together wasn’t quite sure where he’d gotten it, but the manifestation of Garth’s will to survive was brandishing a shiv, holding it between himself and everyone else, taking rapid, panicked breaths. Despite the way he looked, he’d gotten a rather large slice of the pie.

I can save him until I get stronger, Stick-together thought.

“How are you doing, As-One?” Stick together asked his female counterpart. As-one was basically Alicia’s Stick-together, and so the two of them had decided to cooperate at wrangling and reuniting with the other facets of their personalities.

“My magic isn’t very good at subduing without harm. I think we should take my Fight next.” She pointed at a round-bottomed girl making whooshing noises as she kicked and punched at open air, shadowboxing some unseen opponent.

“Give you a heads-up over the others, sure.” Stick-together nodded with his hands on his hips, ignoring the slapping sounds coming from behind him.

As-One’s eyes slid past him, toward where Horny-Garth and Horny-Alicia were violently humping, groaning and staring mindlessly at the wall like animals, ignoring the damp, rocky terrain and the pebbles under them.

“You sure we need all of them?” she asked with a wrinkled nose.

“That’s Hang-Ups talking. I’m absolutely sure we need all of them to be the same person we were when we went in. Remember not to pick up any more negative pieces of your personality until the end, it could slow you down.”

“Ooor, you could, I don’t know, go back in the room, separate again and leave Hang-ups here to die?” another Garth said, sidling up next to them. “I mean, does she really help?”

“Shut up, Manipulative Pervert.” Stick Together said.

“Pff, fine, I’ll go over here with the cool kids.” Manipulative Pervert walked over to Masochist Alicia, clubbing herself on the shins with a stone with an unsatisfied expression. He leaned close and whispered something, causing her to brighten up and follow him over to another Garth, who had a mean grin.

“That can’t be good. It’s a goddamn madhouse,” Stick together said, shaking his head. “Let’s get your Fight back, and hope they can’t cause too much damage while we’re gone.” Together they began stalking toward Fight.

When she noticed them coming, she adopted a defensive stance, raising her hands up and lowering her center of gravity.

Well, the element of surprise isn’t really an option at this point, he thought, breaking into a sprint with As-One.

Fight lunged forward, surprising both of them by reducing the distance faster than they were expecting. She kneed As-one in the groin, causing the girl to stumble and tilt to the side, and at the same time, caught Stick-Together in the head with an elbow, causing searing pain along his eyebrow, forcing him to stagger back and clutch his bleeding brow.

Only a few remnants of Garth’s sports knowledge remained, but he was pretty sure elbow strikes were a foul.

Fight used his distraction to aim another kick at As-one’s face, where she barely blocked with her hands, getting flung back.

Stick-together didn’t know what to do exactly, since his Fight was off on the other side of the room, watching the chaos with amusement. He did know that he couldn’t let her beat As-One to death. The girl was the lynch-pin of their personality, and her loss would make it very hard for him to recombine with the rest of himself.

Stick Together blinked through the pain and charged forward to receive a jab to the nose, causing his vision to shatter into stars. Ignoring the pain, he spread his arms out wide and managed to catch Alicia’s fight on the shoulder, using his superior weight to drag her to the ground.

Unfortunately she had a much lower center of gravity than him, simply leaning low in the direction of his fall, allowing him to slide off her before she continued, kicking both of them, silently snarling as she did.

“Use magic!” As-One shouted, guarding her face with her forearms.

Oh right. Having just gotten it back today, and without his Fight, he hadn’t even thought of using it offensively.

Stick-together put his palm on the ground, channeling nature mana from the air into the spores under his hands, directing the resulting roots to tunnel over and wind around Fight’s ankles.

The girl almost toppled before looking over at Garth and down at her feet. She immediately squatted down to strike him, aiming to make him lose his concentration.

As-one let out a feral shout, and tackled Fight to the ground, where Garth made more roots to pin her arms to the ground.

Fight was struggling violently against the hold of the roots as As-One closed her eyes and pressed her hands against her forehead. As one glittered for a moment before fading from existence, her essence merging with Fight.

“Let me up,” As-one said from the ground.

“Sure.”

She stood up and flexed her hands.

“I’m a lot stronger now.”

“Fight seemed to be a lot of you.” he agreed.

As-One glanced up at Garth’s Fight, who began taking off his shirt, anticipating their next move.

“Let’s get your Fight back” she said with a feral grin. “Then beat the shit out of the rest of these bitches until they fall in line.”

“Your Fight is showing.” Stick together said, chuckling as he stood, the pain slowly fading.

***later***

“Wait, you don’t have to do this, I could be like a side-kick,” Manipulative Pervert said, his hands up as Garth approached. “I mean, we’re all still together, right? I could give my input, same as I always do, but we would have two cocks. Two cocks. And you know, Alicia told me- MMMPH!”

Garth wrapped his last fragment up with a single thought, gagging him with a root.

“I can’t believe how much of a pain in the ass it was to get you.” he muttered, putting his hand on the man’s forehead and willing them to rejoin.

A moment later, Garth opened his eyes, a root in his mouth, arms and legs bound with wood.

With a thought, the wood crumbled to ash, and Garth stepped away from the damp stone wall with a sigh. Finally, he felt entirely himself again. Even the tiny voice in his head suggesting he use the Facet Room to reconstruct Alicia’s personality however he wanted was back where it should be. Garth squished it.

He glanced back down the hall to the room they’d just left, recently dubbed the Facet Room. In the center of the room, a fist-sized sphere of what looked like moonstone was jutting out of the ground.

Garth walked toward it slowly, sliding his feet out in front of him carefully, until he felt the hairs on his skin raising from the strange sensation of being split. He saw several feet, nearly placed identically to his own, step into the range of the room.

He pulled his foot back, and the split feet pulled back too.

Garth sat down and studied the moonstone growing from the upper corner of the room. It was in the form of a sphere made of tiny hexagons, a bit like a bug’s eye. Its facets each reflected a different color, shifting as Garth moved his point of view, a property of the moonstone, he was sure.

The question was, did the crystal do the effect, or was it the room? Or both? Garth had seen adamantium growing from the walls of mutated dungeons that spawned ultra-tough creatures.

What kind of things grew from the walls of a reality-warping dungeon like this? Garth’s Greedy self had been sitting here, contemplating that very same thing an hour ago, and now he was focusing all his mind on it. garth intended to profit from this death-trap.

He needed two things. A guinea pig to test it, and a way to contain the effect if the stone really did what the room did.

Garth glanced over his shoulder, and spotted Alicia sitting crosslegged, brows furrowed, jaw clenched, eyes closed. Living lightning flickered from beneath the various scrapes and bruises, making her flicker with internal electricity. The bruises were slowly fading, but not as quickly as if he’d cast a Heal on her.

There’s my guinea pig.

“Oh, apprentice,” Garth called, and Alicia opened her glowing eyes, gazing at him as the lightning faded away. “I need your assistance with something.”

“Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like it?” she asked as she came to sit beside him.

“I need you to stand here, in case that,” Garth said, pointing at the fist-sized bug-eye moonstone jutting out of the wall, “is what is causing the Facet room.”

“Why can’t you do it?” she asked.

“Because I’m more powerful and therefore better at helping you put your pieces back together, and you are less so. Also because you’re my apprentice. Wizard apprentices are often test-subjeccts. It’s a rite of passage.”

“Fine,” she said, glancing up at the stone. “We both got pretty close to that stone when we were wandering around the Facet Room, so it’s probably safe.”

“That’s the spirit,” Garth said, backing away before reaching thirty feet out with a vine hand and tugging the stone out its seat in the wall.

He pulled it four feet closer to them. If it had been generating the entire field, at that point it would have covered Alicia and split her into her Facets. It didn’t do that.

Garth buried a hint of disappointment as he pulled it closer. Perhaps it mimicked the room’s effect, but its area was smaller.

He kept pulling it closer until it was about a foot in front of Alicia.

“I don’t feel anything,” Alicia said, reaching out and taking the moonstone from Garth’s vine hand. She turned it this way and that, inspecting it in the bright light of Garth’s illumination plants.

“It is pretty though,” she murmured, studying its glittering facets as she turned it over in her hand.

“You don’t feel any urge to keep it all to yourself or call it ‘your precious’, do you?” Garth asked.

“What? No. Where did that come from?”

“Nowhere in particular.” Garth shrugged. “Well, you can bring it along and figure out what it does later. After all, it technically belongs to you.”

Alicia turned and looked at him with a budding smile. “Tha-“

“Thank you!” A phantom of Alicia leaped out of her body, becoming solid as she jumped on Garth, locking his lips in a tight kiss as Original Alicia watched, her jaw hanging loose.

Well, I think we know it works now, Garth thought.

“I love you so much! I’m addicted to you!” Love-Dovey Alicia said, vacuum-sealing onto him while plastering him with kisses.

Garth peered past the black hair and reached out with his vine hand, snatching the moonstone out of Original Alicia’s hands and moved it back into its home before things could get any more complicated.

“The first thing we need to do” Garth said, trying to speak past the smattering of kisses. “Is figure out if this a Copy or a Facet. Do you feel any urge to do this?” Garth asked Original, pointing at the Alicia hugging him and sighing contentedly.

Original shook her head slowly.

“Hmm…Facet then.”

So the crystal had a much weaker effect that only made one facet at a time, most likely on contact, or close proximity, precipitated by strong emotions. It was possible it could do more given enough time, but Garth had wanted to keep things simple.

Garth could think of a few things he could do with something like that off the top of his head. With the right research, he might be able to create a mechanism to control which facets are made and possibly blend people’s facets together to create an entirely new person.

Interesting stuff, but first I gotta get rid of the girl snuggling on me.

“Alicia, you need to go back to your original, okay?” Garth said, trying to peel her off of him.

Lovey-dovey shook her head.

“Don’t wanna. I wanna do this forever.”

“This is embarrassing.” Original said, crossing her arms. “I’m not even sure I want her back.”

“You think Manipulative Pervert wasn’t embarrassing for me? You’re taking her back.” Garth said with Clarion Call for emphasis.

“If you say so.”

“Alicia, if you hug me forever, I wouldn’t like it. As a matter of fact, I might start to dislike you.”

Lovey-Dovey gasped, looking up at him, her blue eyes wide.

“But if you join up with Original again, You’ll have plenty of chances to hug me.”

“Nuh uh, she always stops me from doing what I want!” Lovey-Dovey said, shaking her head vigorously like a child.

“I’ll work with her on that, I promise. Matter of fact, I’ll give you a hug.”

“Promise?” She asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Okaay.” The Facet of Alicia’s personality reluctantly disentangled herself, unwrapping her legs and putting her feet on the ground before going over to Original, putting her hand on the other’s forehead and re-merging.

“Well, that was weird-oof.” Alicia was cut off as Garth swept her up in his arms, pressing her to his chest.

“Get off me,” she said, pushing on him with an unconvincing lack of strength.

“We both know that’s not what you want,” Garth said.

Alicia sighed and hugged him back.

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