Published at 8th of March 2024 7:43 am

Chapter Four

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Alice can hold her fucking liquor.

I was nursing one, one singular Mai Tai, and feeling a bit tipsy. Before you judge, know that I haven't had alcohol since college and the thing was like, half Captain Morgan because the bartender mixed drinks like he thought we ran on jet fuel. Alice was on her third margarita and the only indication that she had imbibed any alcohol was that she was laughing at everything I said.

Which wasn't the best acid test of sobriety—because as it turns out, I'm fucking funny. But maybe that is the admittedly small amount of alcohol I've imbibed talking.

“Did you see the luggage stand on the dock?” I asked.

Her eyes got wide. “Right? RIGHT?” She laughed. “Who the fuck buys luggage when they're about to embark!?”

“I spent a good 20 minutes going through every possible reason one would need to buy luggage, and each one was more frustratingly confusing than the last,” I gestured with my fork, which currently had a shrimp speared on it.

“Quick!” She said with a giggle. “Name a reason for new luggage! Wrong answers only!”

I said the first thing that popped into my head, as she took a sip of her drink. “My luggage got lonely!”

Pink liquid sprayed to my left as she did an honest to god spit-take. She looked around in embarrassment and grabbed her napkin, wiping her face. “I didn't think you'd answer so fast,” she said with an embarrassed laugh, shoulders hunched in that “oops I don't want to be seen now” way.

We were on the dining area, which is on the back of Deck 2. A buffet abutted a wall—bulkhead?—that separated the outside dining area from the rest of the ship. To the right (starboard?) a well stocked bar kept the drinks coming. The deck was designed so the rest of the ship acted as wind break so you could eat outside without having to guard your food from sudden gusts of wind.

We were early for dinner, but apparently the buffet had long hours and getting here early meant we got food that hadn't been sitting under heat lamps and metal lids for indeterminate amounts of time. I was having a great time. I was having such a great time that I blinked and suddenly noticed I had an empty Mai Tai in my hand, and a vague recollection of someone replacing one before this one. Hmm.

I decided to order a water the next time the server came by, and one for Alice as well. God I was having fun—

I suddenly had the realization and more time had passed and there was no evidence of water on the table, just yet more alcohol. At some point I had switched to hard lemonade, which I guess was slightly better.

“No, you see, you see,” Alice was saying. “You—you see, you gotta fuckin' go direct. Amazon takes a cut of everything they resell, right? But often they sell for the same price that is—that is, that is offered by the manufacturer. And if we wanna avoid the-the-the whole Wall-e thing where there's just one big ass Costco that owns everything, we gotta, gotta... We gotta--”

“Support the little guy?” I suggested with a slur.

She pointed a finger at me, that if I were sober I would think was a little too close to my face. “Exactly!”

Suddenly my vision doubled and I knew I had drank too much. It must have read on my face because Alice frowned.

“Are you okay?” She asked.

“Are you okay?” She asked.

I was definitely not. Not only was my blood-brain barrier absolutely drowning in shitty middle shelf hooch and too much sugar, I had more mental capacity used up than the average cruise-goer.

“Colm?” She asked when I didn't respond.

“Colm?” She asked when I didn't respond.

Confession time. I've mentioned bargains I've made with Trix but I've been light in the details because it's just habit at this point. But my third bargain was the one that gave me the most trouble and was perhaps the most useful in a crisis situation.

You might have heard of warlocks in fiction asking for knowledge of the future as part of their pact. This appealed to me but was too, I guess I would say, narrow of focus for me. There seemed to be a lot of wiggle room for the other party of the bargain to fuck you over. She could make it so you had knowledge of the future 1000 years from now, or the future of one small fishing village in Okinawa, etc. There are ways to word the bargain so that you can get close to what you want, but that was a pain in the ass and it was the nature of the entities we warlocks contact to be way, way smarter than us.

And the thing is, I'm a huge fucking nerd. I'm a bit behind on my popular culture with all the work I've been doing, but inside my gray matter is a catalog of useless science fiction, fantasy and superhero bullshit that is of no use to anyone. Except sometimes it gives me ideas.

In the Star Wars prequels, the first one in particular, there's a line by Liam Neeson's character that the reason the little kid Vader is able to compete in the pod races is that he can see the future, which gives him incredible reflexes beyond that of a normal human. I always got from that scene that it was like a constant feed of shifting variables that allows a Jedi to predict where lasers would be and intercept them with the light saber. And then I thought, “Could I do that?”

It took a lot of negotiating with Trix. Most of the times I summon her are to negotiate, and not for payment. The negotiations revolve around what she'd be willing to do for souls that weren't mine, mostly. The value of my soul, given freely, is much higher than the soul of someone coerced into the bargain. (Which is why for my current bargain I had to pay with four souls instead of just one.) It took a long time, maybe three weeks of daily summoning (with occasional days off when I noticed she was getting irritated with me) to negotiate the bargain: I would be able to see 3 seconds into the future, constantly. It was the first time Trix had demanded more than one soul.

It had been incredibly debilitating once I obtained the bargain. Imagine everything you experienced happening twice, just as clear both times, with the only knowledge of what was real was that the one instance that was delayed by 3 seconds was the actual reality. I kept grabbing for things that weren't actually close enough to grab, turning into doorways that weren't actually close enough to turn into—you get the idea. It's a miracle I made it home. I think I very nearly went insane. Or maybe I did go crazy and I'm just handling it well. There was a strong argument to be made that no sane person would make a deal with a literal devil.

After a month I had actually debated summoning Trix again and offering my soul to fix the situation, it was so bad. It was at that point I got irritated with myself and buckled down to solve the problem. To gloss over a lot of mental exercises, meditation and playing handball with myself against the side of my house, I eventually developed a mental system that basically ran the future-sight as a subroutine that I was aware of subconsciously. (Like I said: Big ol' nerd.)

Unless I, say, inhibited my mind with a half gallon of alcohol.

“I think I need to go lie down,” I said.

She nodded. “Let me help you,” she said as she stood and reached for me, at the exact moment I said, for real this time, “I think I nee--” but it didn't get out as I recoiled from her touch that she hadn't actually initiated yet. My chair scraped back a couple feet and my hands came up in a defensive position, as if warding off an attack. A couple tables nearby noticed the sudden motion and glanced my way. I lowered my hands to my lap.

Suddenly the future I was seeing shifted, like a YouTube video you were scrubbing through. Her eyes were wide, as I had just flinched away from nothing. I couldn't even explain why. I mean I could but it would sound crazy. Hey, I can see the future, and I saw you were going to touch me, and I have this weird thing about being touched suddenly without permission, so I recoiled like you were trying to bite me, but you were trying to help me based on a thing that I actually haven't said yet. Weird, right? Yeah.

I spoke slowly, so that the futures would have more time to line up. This was the first trick I learned that helped with the double-vision. “Sorry,” I said with a sigh. “I have, I have some mental hang-ups that, uh, developed since the last time I did any heavy drinking, and, uh, it isn't going well.”

“Do you need help?” She asked, slowly, and thank God for that.

I shook my head. “No, no. I, uh, just need to lie down. I—sorry about this. I was having a great time until my brain decided to vomit inside itself. I'm—I'm going to lie down. Don't let me ruin your night.”

“Okay,” she said quietly, her worried eyes on me as I very slowly got up from my chair and began to walk to my cabin. I walked like someone who was very, very drunk, which I guess I was.

“I'll see you tomorrow?” She called to my slowly retreating back.

“You bet,” I said back, careful not to move my head for fear of ruining my tenuous balance. Oh god, I think I'm going to throw up.

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