Mantra: Black September free porn video

Author's Note: My previous Mantra stories, both available on fictionmania, are: 1) MANTRA: DAY OF THE STORM GOD 2) MANTRA: THE RUNE AGENDA This story takes place after THE RUNE AGENDA, which in turn takes place after DAY OF THE STORM GOD. All are stand alone stories, but each contains spoilers for its predecessors so, ideally, you should read those before reading this one. (NB: While FM author Aladdin has also been posting stories featuring Mantra and her cast here, our stories are not related to each other and do not occur in the same continuity. We've both taking the comics stories as our original inspiration then gone off in different directions. Things that have happened to the Mantra in his tales cannot be assumed to have happened to the Mantra in mine, and vice versa.) MANTRA: BLACK SEPTEMBER By BobH (c) 2005 Part 1. He was tall, easily seven feet, rippling with muscles, and had long red hair and beard. He wore a tunic of some sort of dark leather and gauntlets of the same material, but his arms and legs were bare, while his feet were clad with boots of the same white fur as the cape around his shoulders. His helmet was made of gold, as were the bracelets on his arms and the decorative inlay on his tunic. In his right fist he held a hammer, one whose head and shaft were a seamless whole, formed from some strange substance that was neither stone nor metal but a weird hybrid of the two, blue fire dancing across its surface. I knew who he was. "Donar, Lord of the Thunder, God of Storms," I said. He lifted my hand and kissed it, an oddly courtly gesture for a supposedly barbarian god. "Eden," he replied, in a voice that was the most manly I had ever heard, a smile on that handsome, chiselled face. I took his hand and he pulled me to him. I gulped, as giddy in his presence as a teenage girl. He was like some Platonic, idealized version of what a man should be, some perfect representation of distilled maleness. I felt strange stirrings in my chest and groin, and found my heart was racing and my breathing getting shallower. Dear gods, my body was reacting to him, the first time I'd reacted that way to a man since becoming a woman! Flustered, I made a half-hearted effort to pull away, even as he pulled me closer to him, lowering his head to kiss me. As his lips brushed mine, so my own lips parted and I... "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy," came the small, insistent voice as I was yanked from my dream and shaken awake, "it's time to get up!" It was my daughter, Evie, as excited as any eight year- old would be on the day she would be going Christmas shopping with her mother and meeting Santa Claus. "'Morning, button," I said, yawning and stretching as I sat up in bed, "I'll be down to make you breakfast after I've taken a shower." "OK, Mommy," she said, dashing from the bedroom. In the shower, I reflected on my situation. I was Eden Blake, a divorced mother of two young children and also the sorceress and ultra the world knew as Mantra. Yet this had not always been the case. Until two years ago I was the male warrior Lukasz, and I had been a warrior in countless male bodies for fifteen hundred years. All that changed when the war between my master Archimage and his brother Boneyard had heated up. (These were not their real names, of course. Like all true sorcerers, they concealed these lest that knowledge give their enemies power over them). Of Archimage's twelve knights only two now survived: me, and the one who had betrayed us to Boneyard, my sword-brother Thanasi, a man who for centuries had been my closest friend. Once, dying had meant nothing more to me than being the starting point for the soulwalk, the process that let we knights displace the soul of some unfortunate and claim his body as our own, but no more. The last time I took the soulwalk, after Thanasi's betrayal, the unheard of occurred and I found myself in a female body for the first time ever. And also, as it turned out, the last. The death I die in this body will be my final death. The soulwalk is no longer open to me. Soaping my breasts, running my hands over the female flesh that no longer felt strange to me, that I had long since accepted as my own, I replayed the dream again in my head. I had encountered Donar five weeks ago in Germany, during a trip back through time to the final hours of the Third Reich. Our meeting unfolded much as it had in my dream, except for that kiss Evie had interrupted. That had never happened, nor had I consciously wanted it to. Subconsciously? Well, I guess the dream answered that one. It was a disturbing thought, and not one I cared to dwell on. Instead, my mind drifted to the runestone that was the gateway between our world and that of the Norse gods, a stone currently residing in the tiny pocket dimension that could only be accessed via the folds of my cape. It would stay there until I could decide what to do with it. I flexed my arms, nodding approvingly at the muscle definition this revealed beneath my smooth skin. I had managed to fit two hours of work-out into most days over the past few months and all that exercise was beginning to pay off. In battle, a warrior needs every advantage he can give himself and, man or woman, I was still a warrior. The battles I fought as an ultra were different from those I had fought in the past with sword or gun, but they could be just as lethal. In my last two fights, against Rune and against Donar, I had been knocked from the sky and had fallen hard, sustaining deep bruising that only now had finally faded away. I had been lucky. Either of those falls could have been fatal. Over the past week I had been training with a couple of spells I'd managed to develop that I hoped would help alleviate this particular weakness, both of which should activate automatically. They were variations of the same spell, a cushioning spell. One would automatically cushion me in the event of my falling from the sky again, while the other should dampen the force of any physical blow used against me. It could not eliminate it entirely, but it should be enough to give me the extra edge I needed. I was inordinately pleased with myself for figuring out how to construct such spells. This was not something that came easily to me yet. After towelling off and donning a bathrobe, I headed out to the kitchen to make breakfast for Gus and Evie. Taking the cereal down from the cupboard, I paused momentarily as I caught sight of the deceptively nondescript goblet up there on the top shelf, where it was out of reach of the kids. That the Holy Grail, a hugely powerful mystical artefact, should currently reside in a kitchen cabinet in Canoga Park, California, was just another indication of how strange my life had become. Gus was his usual surly self, wolfing down his juice and cereal then dashing out to meet his friends with hardly a word to Evie or me. By contrast, his sister chatted away happily through the entire meal. Gus had begged off driving to school with us anymore, preferring to travel on the school bus where he could get up to mischief in the back with his buddies. I guess he figured he was now too grown up to have his Mom drive him to school. He was certainly too old in his own eyes to come shopping with us after school and to meet Santa Claus, but this was all Evie could talk about. I smiled as I listened to my darling daughter, marvelling that she could still be excited by such a simple thing as a department store Santa when she had seen so many wondrous things in the past two years. Unlike her brother, Evie knew I was Mantra, knew even that I hadn't always been her mother, but while this had caused problems between us at first, these were mostly behind us now. The resilience of children never ceases to amaze me. "Can I have the new Hardcase Ken to go with my Mantra Barbie, Mommy, can I?" pleaded Evie a little later as we walked out to the car. "We'll see," I said, chuckling. I found the idea of Hardcase as Ken to my Barbie deeply amusing. I'd recently taken up their invitation of a few months earlier and joined Ultraforce, the world's premier group of ultraheroes, but I'd only met Hardcase on a couple of occasions and there had never been any romantic involvement between us. I guess it was easier to make Ken look like him than like any of the other male heroes in the ultra community. Now that I was part of an officially sanctioned group of ultras I had a say in the use of my likeness in merchandising. Like the rest of Ultraforce except for Prototype, whose likeness was the property of the company that designed his armour, I had signed my rights over to the charitable foundation that handled those of the other members and which ensured all profits went to various good causes. We got sent samples of all merchandise, of course, so scoring a Hardcase Ken for Evie wouldn't be too difficult. I was a figure of hero worship and a role model to girls across the country, but I sometimes wondered if toy manufacturers would be so keen to license my likeness if they knew of my, ah, interesting gender status. Then again, they had no problem licensing the Dax character from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for an action figure, so perhaps not. "If you're Mantra, Mommy," said Evie, brow furrowed, "and Hardcase Ken is Mantra Barbie's boyfriend, does that mean Hardcase is your boyfriend, too?" "No, that's just Ken and Barbie," I said, amused Evie had been thinking along the same lines as me. "Mommy and Hardcase are just friends." "Then is Prime your boyfriend?" she said, persisting with this line. Prime, the over-muscled flying powerhouse who was another member of Ultraforce, was probably the closest I had to a true friend in the ultrahero community. "No, not him, either," I said. "Prime's a little young for me." This was an understatement. I was 1500 years old, while inside the artificial form of Prime was 15 year-old Kevin Green. "If you had an ultra boyfriend," said Evie, clearly determined to get an answer, "who would he be?" My mind flashed back to the dream, to how I felt as Donar was about to kiss me and, unable to stop myself, I blushed. Even at her tender age, Evie knew what this might mean. "Mommy really likes someone," she chanted, laughing, "Mommy really likes someone." "Yes, OK Evie," I said, "but could you keep it down?" The car was a loaner courtesy of my insurance company, my own car still being in the shop after having its roof torn off during my encounter with the vampire Rune three weeks ago. It was OK, and it got Evie and me to our destination well enough, but I'll be happier when I'm driving my own car once more. With the constant change in my life down the centuries, I've grown very fond of the novelty of having familiar things around me that being Eden Blake allows. "Bye, Mommy!" said Evie, when we stopped at the school gates. She kissed me on the cheek and then she was gone, leaping out of the car and excitedly dashing over to join her friends. She was a total delight, I thought, smiling as I pulled away from the school and out into the early morning traffic. The simple, childish pleasure she took in everything was a breath of fresh air, a total tonic for the jaded cynic I had long ago allowed myself to become. In a very real way, being a mother to her and to Gus had brought me back to life, had reawakened the finer feelings I had let wither away. That was not something I would ever allow to happen again. I was an emotionally awake human being again for the first time in too many centuries, and I intended to stay that way. As I drove, heading for my job at the Aladdin facility where I worked, I reflected on how odd my position was in respect to my employers. Aladdin was a government organisation tasked with monitoring and, where necessary, neutralizing ultras. As Mantra, I'd had several run-ins with them, and I know they would love to take me down. However, now that I'd been inducted into Ultraforce, a group officially sanctioned by the President himself, they couldn't make any open move against me. Which didn't mean they might not try a covert move, of course. Being on the inside as Eden Blake at least gave me a fighting chance of staying ahead of them, but this was still all one more complication in my life I could do without. It had been made even more complicated a few months ago when I went on my first field mission for Aladdin. They sent me to Europe and I found myself pitted against a group of strange half-human creatures calling themselves the Herrenvolk who were seeking the Holy Grail. The Grail ended up in my hands and Aladdin ended up convinced that Blythe Ashwin, one of their agents who unbeknown to them was also working for the Herrenvolk, was actually Mantra. She knew otherwise, of course, knew that I was Mantra. Fortunately for me if not for her, she escaped before my next appearance as Mantra so they still think it's her. Escaping from Aladdin's Groom Lake facility was no mean feat. I wonder how she managed it and where she is now? Turning onto one of Canoga Park's main shopping streets, I was annoyed to discover the road blocked by stopped traffic. With the unplanned absences my role as Mantra often forced on me the last thing I needed was to get a reputation for lateness, too. Leaning forward in an attempt to discover what the hold up was, I was surprised to see bursts of light and the crackle of energy discharges up ahead. I instantly knew what this must mean: a battle between ultras. Somehow managing to pull over to the curb and park, I got out of the car and headed towards the action, fighting against the flood of people running in the opposite direction. When I was close enough to get a good look at one of the protagonists, I was surprised by who it was. I recognised the guy in the sleeveless red leather jumpsuit. instantly. The blond hair, the square jaw, the overly-muscled form that looked like an ad for steroid abuse, and a gun huge enough for any psychologist to conclude he was over- compensating for physical inadequacies elsewhere. "Warstrike!" I gasped. He was a friend and a fellow ultra. Like Prime, he knew that Eden Blake was Mantra. Unlike Prime, he also knew I used to be a man. But then he would. He was the one who'd slain me in my last true male body. He was also supposed to have retired. But who was he battling? Then his foe came into view, throwing bolts of sorcerous energy, and I knew. That long red hair, flowing blue cape, semi-naked body with the snake tattoo winding around her left leg - I recognized all of this instantly. It was my nemesis, flesh of my flesh, and the person I hated most in all the world. "Necromantra," I said, voice cold. Necromantra, my evil doppelganger. Necromantra, who had killed the original Eden Blake. Necromantra, the woman who had once been my sword- brother Thanasi, my closest friend for a millennium-and-a-half. Tucking myself into a shop doorway, and quickly checking to make sure I was unobserved, I recited my mantra of transformation: "Change, growth, power!" As I finished speaking the words so a wave of mystic energy swept over my body, changing my garments as it went. In place of my skirt-suit, I now wore a silver mask, hooded black cape, long black boots and gloves, and what looked like a swimsuit made of golden armour. Removing the ring that usually rested around my belt buckle caused it to grow and transform into the legendary Sword of Fangs. Sword in hand, I leapt into the fray, deflecting one of Necromantra's sorcerous bolts with my blade before it could hit Warstrike. "Mantra!" he grinned. "Boy, am I glad to see you!" "Hello, Mother," said Necromantra, using the momentary distraction my arrival had caused to blast the gun from Warstrike's hands. It fell to the sidewalk, sparking and spitting, now so much useless junk. "I'd love to stay and catch up on girl-talk with you," grinned Necromantra, "but I have places to be. If this macho idiot hadn't waylaid me, I'd already be gone. Ciao." With that, she threw a bolt at the sidewalk, causing a blinding flash of light. When it faded, she had gone. "Well, that didn't do a lot for my ego," said Warstrike, gazing ruefully at the remains of his gun. "You've still got plenty of ego left, Brandon," I said, snidely. Warstrike was actually multi-millionaire Brandon Tark. I've always assumed he did the whole Warstrike thing for kicks, 'did' being the operative word. "Didn't you retire?" I asked. "Yeah," he said. "When I had that precognitive flash showing Warstrike, showing me, as a tyrant, my rule built on a pile of skulls, what other choice did I have? I couldn't let that future come to pass, so Warstrike had to die." "Yet here he is," I said. "What changed your mind?" "That future..." he said, "it's already come and gone." "It has?" I said, puzzled. "How did I miss the pile of skulls? I think I'd have noticed something like that." "It puzzled me, too," he said. "Even weirder, I then started having flashes of me calling myself 'the Strike' and leading a motley group of ultras called the Exiles, one widely regarded as a bunch of terrorists. I spent the last three months trying to figure it out. My investigations eventually led me here." He gestured towards the building we were standing outside. It was the local hospital. "The hospital? I don't understand." "This mystic I consulted was able to figure out where my vision had come from," said Warstrike. "It came from here. Or, more precisely, from one of the patients. When I visited her I found Necromantra standing over the bed. Mayhem ensued." "Who is this patient," I asked, intrigued. "A 14 year-old girl," he said. "Her name is Lauren Sherwood." "Lauren?" I said, shocked. "You know her?" said Warstrike, surprise in his voice. "She used to baby-sit for me," I said, "and on one occasion she was transformed into a doppelganger of me." "Really? What happened?" "A Mantra Fan Club made up of her classmates somehow got hold of a book of sorcery," I said. "Not realizing it was the real deal, they chanted one of the spells, summoning up a demon I'd fought before." "Hmmm, powerful build, horns, cloven hooves, I suppose," said Warstrike. "Actually, he looked like the cartoon character Wiley Wolf," I smiled. "He'd been trapped in that form as punishment by his master, Boneyard, after failing to kill me. Needless to say, he didn't reveal himself. Anyway, he gave Lauren, who was resentful at being excluded from the club, my powers and appearance and goaded her to violence. She put Heather, one of the club members, in the hospital. I heard about my supposed attack on Heather when the police tried to arrest me for it. Naturally, I went to see her at the hospital. Lauren showed up, and we fought. She fled, I pursued her and, eventually, sensed the demon's presence and revealed him. Seeing his ridiculous Wiley Wolf form for the first time caused Lauren to lose faith in him, which broke the spell and left him powerless. He then disappeared, Heather recovered, and Lauren returned to normal. I didn't blame her for what happened, and she continued to baby-sit for me, none the wiser about me being Mantra." "What did the demon hope to gain from this gambit?" asked Warstrike. "He claimed his new form couldn't stand the stress of the mystic energies the book could endow, but that combining my powers with those he'd granted Lauren would free him from that cartoon body." "I can't claim to know a lot about magic," said Warstrike, frowning, "but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense." "No," I agreed, "it doesn't. Oh, I have no doubt that freeing himself from that hated form was part of the demon's plan, but that can only have been a side-effect of a larger plan. It was Boneyard himself who decreed he should stay that way and he wouldn't have dared go against his master's edict unless he had something big to offer him, namely me. I've always assumed it was partly about discrediting me, but by itself that wouldn't have been enough. No, I'm sure there was something else going on but I have no idea what it can have been. So about Lauren - why is she in the hospital and how long has she been here?" "Three months," he said. "She's been in a coma since the end of September." "Let's go in and see her," I said, "try to figure out why Necromantra is interested in her and just what she has to do with your precognitive flashes." Part 2. One of the advantages of being a member of Ultraforce was that it got you into places you might otherwise find it difficult to gain access to. If you're not a family member, a hospital room is often one of those places, but here we now were, staring down at the comatose form of Lauren Sherwood. She looked so small and pale lying there, the drip going into her arm, machines behind the bed monitoring her condition. Her mother, Angela Sherwood, was at the bedside, gently stroking her daughter's bleached blonde hair. She too looked pale and drawn, her concern for Lauren etched on her face. We would need her permission if I was to do what needed to be done. "I was horrified when she dyed her hair," she said, "but she had started to test her limits and I suppose that was part of it. She was also stealing my cigarettes, and had started stuffing her bra." Lauren had turned up that way to baby-sit a while back. Afterwards, Evie had laughed about her 'big boobies'. Poor kid was small for her age, almost flat-chested, and desperate to start developing. "How did this happen?" I asked. "We were talking in my mother's kitchen in Manhattan, back in September - I'd taken Lauren there to see her grandmother," she said. "One moment Lauren was fine, and the next she collapsed. She's been in a coma ever since and no one knows why. According to the doctors, there's nothing physically wrong with her. She should be awake and up and about, but she isn't. Can you help her? Is that why you're here?" "We have reason to believe Lauren's coma has more to do with magic than with biology," I said. "I can't promise anything, but if you give permission, I'd like to examine her to see if we're right." "Of course," said Angela. "If there's any chance you can bring my baby back to me, any chance at all, then you have to try." Assuming a lotus position next to the bed, I recited my mantra of power: "Change, growth, power!" As I did so, I levitated upwards until I was floating about four feet above the floor. I heard Angela Sherwood gasp. "I'm going to enter Lauren's mind," I said, "to try and discover what the problem is. While I'm in her mind, I will appear to be in a trance out here in the conscious world. It's very important no one tries to wake me, however long the trance. This leaves my body vulnerable, however, so Warstrike will stand guard to protect me from any assault an enemy might try to launch." "Is...is it dangerous?" asked Angela. "Can it hurt Lauren or you?" "There are no guarantees," I said, "but no, it shouldn't be dangerous. Now I need you both to remain quiet. I'm about to go in." Having my consciousness, my spirit, slip from my own body and enter Lauren's mind felt much like slipping into a warm bath. I was swimming through her mind, surrounded by thoughts and dreams and impressions I had to tune into, had to bring into focus if I was to have any hope of accomplishing the task I'd set myself. With an effort of will, I gathered all that mental activity to me, trying to force it into coherent form... ...when, without warning or sensation, I was suddenly and abruptly somewhere else. I stared around me in some confusion. patting my body down to assure myself I wasn't dreaming. I was standing in the middle of the baseball diamond at the local high school, dressed as Mantra and, apparently, quite solid. Had my spirit somehow been ejected from Lauren's mind back into my own body and that body then instantaneously been transported several miles away? It seemed more than unlikely; it seemed impossible. And yet, this was all too real to merely be something Lauren was dreaming. The quality of the light, the distant sound of traffic, the slight breeze lifting my hair, all of these spoke more of the real world than the world of dreams. Grabbing the ends of my cape, I let my elemental power over the wind lift me into the air and headed for a nearby library. All my main senses were telling me this was real but there was a small voice in the back of my mind, a voice that had saved my life countless times down the centuries, urging caution. Dropping out of the sky and landing softly in front of the library, I saw a scruffy adolescent hawking newspapers. He had seen me land and his mouth hung open, his eyes wide. "Can I have one of those?" I asked, smiling sweetly. "S...sure thing, Mantra," he said, handing me a newspaper. "We all thought you'd retired now there's that new, blonde Mantra. No one's seen you in months." "Blonde...Mantra?" I said, slowly. "Yeah, she's got your old sword and everything," grinned the kid, "but I always preferred you. You're much hotter than she is!" "Thanks...I think," I said, glancing at the newspaper headline. What I saw there shocked me: KEVIN GREEN aka PRIME STILL MISSING Mother Urges Son to Contact Her. Kevin's identity is public knowledge here? I was stunned, but I also now knew that wherever 'here' was it wasn't the world I knew. Handing the newspaper back to the kid, I headed up the library steps. Once inside, I ducked into a side room and, after checking that no one has seen me, changed back to Eden Blake. I would attract less attention that way and I had some serious research to do. At the main desk, I checked out microfiches of the 'L.A. Times' for recent weeks, and also one of 'Ultra Magazine', the scandal rag devoted to the doings of the ultra community. I wasn't a fan of the magazine or of its sleazeball publisher, Al Baker, but for all its sensationalism and distortions, it was going to be the quickest way to bring myself up to date on the local ultra situation. This world was remarkably like my own yet also very different and I needed to get up to speed on those differences as fast as possible. After a couple of hours spent hunched over the microfiche reader, I sat back in my chair and let out a long sigh. It was all there, everything that made this world a warped version of the one I knew. On the screen before me was a photo of this world's new Mantra. She looked like a Barbie doll. She'd started out wearing a silver costume that, while plain, did the job, but recently she had taken to wearing what could only be described as lingerie. According to 'Ultra Magazine' - not the world's most reliable journal of record, I know - she had also been seen naked on a few occasions. I was not impressed. She seemed more like some puerile, adolescent male fantasy figure than a respected ultra hero. Then there were the Exiles. As soon as I read about them I knew this world was the one Warstrike had somehow been seeing with his precognitive flashes. What was known about the group made for grim reading. Led by a figure calling himself 'the Strike' who some had suggested - correctly, as I knew - to be Warstrike, their ranks also included Amber Hunt, the woman who had awoken the ancient entity on the moon last year and led to the first large scale meeting of ultra heroes on my world; a clown-faced guy with a scythe; an enormous, armoured bulldozer of a man; and a woman who apparently had the power to cause large scale energy discharges and disruption on a global scale. No one had been able to put names to the last three, but the group as a whole were responsible for an explosion in downtown Manhattan that had killed thousands of New Yorkers. Not surprisingly, they were wanted fugitives. However, in many ways the biggest surprise lay with Ultraforce, who in this world were still led by the Black Knight. The Black Knight had travelled to this universe from another one several months ago, and joined Ultraforce. Between the time Topaz offered me membership at the end of the Hybrid affair and the time I actually accepted, Ultraforce teamed up with the Knight's original team, a group of other-dimensional ultras who called themselves the Avengers, to battle Nemesis, a being with the ability to rewrite reality itself. Nemesis was defeated when the Knight shattered the gem that was, for want of a better term, the being's central processing unit. In the release of energy that followed - the Nemesis Wave - the Black Knight, the Avengers, and every other being from that other reality that had found their way to ours were swept back to their own universe. But that's not how things appear to have unfolded here. Not only is the Black Knight still around, but from reported sightings in 'Ultra Magazine', I'd guess that several more ultras have found their way over from that other universe to this one. Leaving the library, I was so lost in thought as I walked down the steps outside that I didn't even see her until she was right in front of me. "OK, impostor," she said, "don't take another step!" Surprised, I looked up to find myself facing the young woman who had taken my place in this world, the one everyone now knew as Mantra. Blonde, blue-eyed, and with an impressive bust, her black and burgundy costume looked like some sort of skin-tight teddy, with opera gloves and thigh-length boots completing the outfit. She was holding what looked like the Sword of Fangs out in front of her, pointed at me. "'Impostor'?" I said. "You're a fine one talk." "Someone phoned local news radio to say they'd seen the original Mantra entering the library," she said, never taking her eyes off me, "I rang Eden Blake and she told me it wasn't her. So who are you?" "You know I'm Mantra?" I said, surprised. "Yes, I suppose you'd have to to have inherited those powers and my sword." "I found out Eden was Mantra the time Boneyard's demon turned me into a copy of her and I took off the mask," she said, "though that memory was blocked for a while." "Lauren?" I said, surprise turning to astonishment, "Lauren Sherwood? Is that really you?" "Who *are* you?" she said angrily, now gripping the sword two-handedly. The situation looked like it could be about to turn ugly, and I was at a disadvantage as Eden Blake. Almost by reflex, I found myself chanting my mantra: "Change, growth, power!" As I completed the mantra, so a wave of energy swept over my body leaving my armour in its wake. Without pausing, I pulled the ring from my belt buckle, grabbing the pommel as it instantly transformed into the Sword of Fangs. "We can fight," I said, touching my blade to hers and seeing the uncertainty in her eyes, "or we can talk. I'd prefer to talk, but the choice is yours." She held my gaze for a moment then, sighing, let both her eyes and the point of her sword drop. "We talk," she said. "If I don't like what you've got to say I can always kick your ass later." "In your dreams," I laughed. If nothing else, she was feisty. We were beginning to attract a crowd, not surprisingly, so I made a suggestion. "How about we continue this conversation somewhere a bit more private?" "Suits me," said Lauren, and with that we both took to the skies. I flew to the high school baseball diamond and she followed, her landing on the neatly trimmed grass almost as soft and accomplished as my own. "Why here?" she said, looking around her distastefully. "School's out for Christmas," I said. "The high school closed a few days early this year for remodelling, so we've got it to ourselves. Plus, this is the spot where I entered this strange world." "Entered from where?" said Lauren. "And what's so strange about this world?" "Well, there's you for a start," I said. "In my world, you're in a coma and have been since September. You're also nowhere near as, ah, physically well-developed there. You barely even have breasts yet." "So how did you get here," said Lauren, frowning at my description, "and what do you want?" "I went into a trance and projected my astral form into Lauren Sherwood's comatose brain," I said. "I expected to enter any dreams she was having, to interpret the symbolism of what I found there and maybe find some clue as to how to unlock her coma. What I didn't expect was to find myself here, back in the flesh. And I certainly never expected to encounter you." "So you're saying this is some sort of dream?" said Lauren, incredulously. "You're nuts, lady!" "Well, that body of yours is certainly your fantasy come to life," I said, "but, no. This place has none of the quality of a dream. This place, whatever it is, is somehow real. All the evidence suggests this is a parallel world, that I've somehow slipped dimensions and ended up on an alternate Earth, only I haven't. I may not be the most powerful of sorceresses, but my mystic senses would've detected that. No, I don't understand what this place is, and that's worrying." "So I'm in a coma where you come from?" said Lauren. I could tell she still didn't buy my story. "And I'm underdeveloped physically?" "Yes," I said. "Before the coma you were desperate to look older. You'd dyed your hair, taken to stuffing your bra, and you were stealing your mother's cigarettes." "Cigarettes...," said Lauren, frowning. "Until you mentioned that, I'd totally forgotten, but that means..." She looked at me then with a frightened expression. "What's going on?" she asked, a mixture of anger and fear in her voice. "That would be the $64,000 question," said an amused male voice. I spun round to face the newcomer, hand instinctively pulling the ring around my belt buckle as I did so, my hand grabbing the pommmel as the ring expanded to become the Sword of Fangs. "That was impressively swift," said the man, smiling as I held the sword point to his throat. He was a slightly-built fortysomething with thinning brown hair and round glasses, but who was he and how had he managed to creep up on us in the middle of an empty field without either of us noticing? "D...Dad?" said Lauren. "I don't think this is your father, Lauren," I said, eyes narrowing. "Where I come from, Charles Sherwood died three years ago. Lauren gasped, and clutched her head. "Nooooo!" she said. "I want you to be wrong, but it's all coming back to me, all of it!" "Only because I'm letting it," said Charles Sherwood, looking amused by Lauren's discomfit. "I enjoyed playing with you, giving you everything you wanted - the body of a centrefold because that's what boys liked and you wanted boys to like you, the power of Mantra, the father you'd lost - then spoiling it all. You had the body, but everyone still thought you were a dweeb, and ensuring you kept losing your clothes in front of them produced the most delicious embarrassment. You had your father back - even if it was really just me keeping watch over you - but not the happy family you remembered and craved because now your parents were divorced. You had the power of Mantra, but no one really took you seriously. You were always being compared to the original Mantra, and always found wanting." "Enough!" I said, pushing the swordpoint forward slightly, producing a trickle of blood. I could see the stinging effect his words were having on Lauren. "Who are you really?" said Lauren angrily, trying to hold back the tears. "And why - how - did you do this?" Charles Sherwood grinned. And his grin grew wider and wider, his face simultaneously oozing forward and forming a snout as brown fur sprouted all over his body. Cartoon fur. "Wiley Wolf!" I said, momentarily taken aback by the sight of the person before me morphing into a cartoon character, something I'd never before seen in fifteen hundred years of life. As the transformation finished so the Sword of Fangs turned to flowers, the flowers falling about our feet. "Oh don't worry," said Wiley Wolf, laughing at my shocked expression, "the actual Sword of Fangs is still safe and sound back in the real world. That was just a demonstration of the power I wield here. This is my world. I made it and everything in it answers to my will." "You don't have that sort of power," I sneered. "You're just some two-bit demon lackey of Boneyard's." "I was," he admitted, "but as this world shows, I'm a lot more than that now." I couldn't deny this. Much as I wanted to tackle the demon, centuries of experience in battle counselled otherwise. His new powers were unknown but clearly far beyond anything I could muster. No, far better to keep him talking while I - while we - tried to figure out a strategy for defeating him. "So you were responsible for me becoming Mantra both times?" said Lauren. "Yes, and if you'd done as I wanted and killed that first time you would've already been the one and only Mantra," he said. "So there *was* more to that affair than you admitted to at the time," I said. "Of course there was," he laughed. "If all had gone to plan, Lauren would have become Mantra, a dark Mantra who killed, and you would have been trapped inside her mind, forced to watch everything she did but unable to do anything about it. I have the power to create, but no creative imagination, a little joke of my master, Boneyard. I could take on other forms, but they were always copies, never original creations, hence this shape and the one I first fought Prime in. The same is true when I transform others. I can, however, link the copy to the original. When I turned Lauren into a copy of you I linked the two of you. The spell book provided the raw power necessary for her to be able to mimic your powers, but the pattern, the template, for those powers and her altered body was you. Had I succeeded in getting her to kill, the mystic link I'd forged between you would've destroyed your body, drawing all your power to Lauren in the process, making her transformation permanent and leaving you trapped as an unsuspected passenger in her body, able to see, hear, and feel everything she did but unable to affect it in the slightest. You would have been destroyed, and in your place would've been a Mantra who would ultimately have served my master. And since I was part of the link between you, I would've ended up with Lauren's old form, of course. I'd have been a child, but that's OK. Children grow and become adults in what seems a blink of an eye to a demon." "A shame things didn't work out for you," I said. "More than you imagine," said the demon. "When she wouldn't kill, when she saw my true form and laughed at me, so breaking the spell, the mystic backlash resulted in me ending up trapped in her mind, an unsuspected passenger unable to influence her in any way. I languished there for months until, when your other babysitter was unavailable, you started using Lauren again. I have no idea what it was, but there was an active source of great mystical power in your home, and it raised the level of ambient background magical energy to the point where I could use it." The 'active source' he referred to could only be Kismet, the artificial magical being who was masquerading as Eden at the time of Lauren's 'big boobies' visit to my home. Fortunately, I didn't obtain the Holy Grail until after this, an artefact immensely more powerful than Kismet. "So you used the energy to escape your prison?" I said. "Not exactly. I tried, but the constraints of the original spell that had trapped me just increased with, and drew from, the power available to me. So I tried something else. I used the magic to split myself in two. As long as I stayed behind it satisfied the imprisoning spell and my doppelganger could then find a way to free me, too. This was a one-time deal and not something the magicks would allow again, but once was all I needed." "I'm guessing it didn't work out," I said. "No," he admitted, "it didn't. My other self had a mind of his own and was perfectly happy to leave me to rot. Since he was part of me I could see through his eyes, as well as through Lauren's. I watched in frustration as my 'brother' ended up battling the ultra known as Elven and getting himself destroyed. I had blown my one chance of getting free. That fiasco had shown me that while I could not get out I could draw magic in, but I was never going to find myself in the presence of such powerful mystical energy again. Or so I thought." "The Nemesis Wave," I said, realisation finally dawning. "The Nemesis Wave," he agreed. "Lauren and her mother were in Manhattan when Nemesis was there creating and recreating multiple versions of it with dizzying speed. Reality was putty in her hands, and her power was off the scale. Though she was many orders of magnitude stronger than I, the energies she wielded were the same ones my own powers let me manipulate, and she was throwing off so much stray energy that I was able to draw in prodigious amounts of it, more mystic energy in fact than I had ever had access to in my entire existence. I still couldn't use it to escape my prison, of course, because that just got stronger the more energy I acquired, but there was a loophole I now had the raw power to exploit. While I couldn't get back to the real world, I could pump that energy into an adjacent dimension of non-space to create a bubble of space, a tiny pocket universe whose only way in and out was via Lauren's mind. And because that was still the only way out, it did not violate the imprisoning spell. At first, it wasn't a very large bubble but within it I could use the energies at my command to take on physical form again. And so I watched as Ultraforce and the Avengers battled Nemesis, as Lauren and her mother and all those in Manhattan were caught up in the madness of creation run wild. I watched through Lauren's eyes, and I pondered the possibilities. When the Black Knight destroyed Nemesis with his enchanted blade and so released all the vast energies she had been wielding, I was ready. As the Nemesis Wave swept over me, sending all those from the Avengers' universe back to their own reality, I drew as much of that energy as I could into my little bubble, vastly expanding it. I tried to draw in as many of the ultras as I could, too - let them know what it was like to be trapped - but that's when a curious thing happened. Rather than draw the originals in, my attempt to do so created what I can only describe as mystical clones. I watched in amazement as a copy of each of the ultras seemed to peel off the original unnoticed by them and be sucked into my pocket universe. As the Nemesis Wave spread out across the country so I was able to pull in more and more of these clones, though I didn't succeed in getting everyone, hence some quite high-profile ultras missing from my little world. These were remembered by everyone there at first, which called for some creative editing on my part. I also pulled images of other superbeings from the minds of the departing Avengers for future use. The final thing I pulled in as the wave crested and broke was the mind of Lauren herself. The passing of the wave wiped the memories of everyone caught up in it except the ultras of our universe - those from that other reality no longer even remember our universe exists at all. Because of this, what Lauren's mother remembers is she and her daughter talking and Lauren suddenly collapsing, rather than the chaos of a reality healing itself, which is what was actually going on around her as I pulled Lauren into my new little universe." He paused in his tale for a moment, looking very pleased with himself. "So, this...really isn't the real world?" said Lauren, looking crestfallen. "And this isn't my body?" "Hardly," grinned the wolf. "You're actually an underdeveloped girl of fourteen, not the overdeveloped young woman of seventeen you think you are here." "So what happens now?" I asked, still looking for an angle to exploit. "That's the beauty of having finally drawn you here," he said. "You were linked to the original spell that trapped me here so you're now my way out. Your connection to the real world is the path I follow, only this time I'll be vastly more powerful there than I was in the past. Before I leave, however, I need a more impressive form. And I can see just what I need in your mind." With those words, he began to change. He grew taller and broader, his form morphing from that of a ridiculous cartoon wolf into one far more impressive and powerful, a form I was all too familiar with. He was tall, easily seven feet, rippling with muscles, and had long red hair and beard. He wore a dark tunic of some sort of leather and gauntlets of the same material, but his arms and legs were bare, while his feet were clad with boots of the same white fur as the cape around his shoulders. His helmet was made of gold, as were the bracelets on his arms and the decorative inlay on his tunic. In his right fist he held a hammer, one whose head and shaft were a seamless whole, formed from some strange substance that was neither stone nor metal but a weird hybrid of the two, blue fire dancing across its surface. "Who...who is that?" asked Lauren, awed. "Donar, Lord of the Thunder, God of Storms," I said. "A god," grinned the demon. "Yes, this is what I should always have been! This is my destiny!" Laughing, he gestured with his free hand and three familiar figures appeared on the grass several yards from him: Prime, Prototype, and Topaz. "How the heck did we get here?" said Prototype, looking around him, and quickly sizing up the situation. His gleaming armour was significantly different to the blue and gold version worn by the man I knew. "Mantra..." he said, looking at me then quickly nodding at Lauren. "Did you guys bring us here? And who's the dude with the hammer?" "The name's Donar, whelp," he said, raising his hammer to the sky and causing the heavens to rumble and darken, "and before re-entering the real world and bending it to my will, I thought I'd have some fun with this one." "Look out!" I screamed, knowing what came next, but I was too late. The three of them had only just started to move, Prime peeling off to the left, Topaz to the left, and Prototype powering up the jets in his shining black and gold armour, the whine of the turbines clearly audible, when Donar struck. Had Prototype managed to get airborne he might have stood a chance, but in contact with the ground as he was he had none. The lightning bolt the faux Donar called down struck him directly in the chest, millions of volts surging through his armour and into the Earth in a fraction of a second. Batteries and capacitors burst under loads they were never designed to handle, components exploding off the armour off as parts of it melted under the load. Prototype toppled forward, black smoke and the smell of baked flesh billowing from the ruptured seals of his helmet. He crashed to the ground and didn't move. He never would again. "Lauren!" I whispered, surreptitiously casting a spell on the ground of the baseball diamond while everyone's attention was elsewhere. "It's time for you to go!" "What?" she said, looking first at me and then at the whirling mystic portal that appeared on the grass. "But, I have to help the others!" "They're not real!" I said, and pushed her to the edge of the portal. Caught off guard and off balance, she toppled into it and vanished. "I never gave anyone permission to leave!" snarled the demon angrily, swinging his hammer around in my direction. Before he could draw a bead on me, a red, yellow and blue streak slammed into him, an enormous fist landing a haymaker that sent him flying backwards. "Way to go, Prime!" I yelled. Before the demon could recover, Topaz was on him. She was no match for Donar physically, but what she lacked in strength she more than made up for in speed and agility. The blows from her staff could not be hurting the demon while he had Donar's form, but it was obvious they were annoying him. The warrior queen of Gwendor was all over him like a master tumbler, her red hair sweeping around as he lashed out, his flailing fists failing to find or connect with blue and gold clad form that weaved around him. And while he was thus distracted, Prime took the opportunity to whale in again, land blow after blow on his opponent, each of them powerful enough to have slain twenty ordinary men. So transfixed was I by the spectacle before me that I was slow to notice what was happening around me. When I did, I gasped. The world was unravelling. Whether it was because this world he had created required his attention to maintain, or because the demon had drawn too much energy to himself to create his godly form, or because of the amount of energy being expended in the fight, I did not know, but this world, this pocket dimension was coming apart. The sports field and the school buildings still looked as solid as ever, but beyond the perimeter fence the trees and the buildings were turning to mist and drifting away. Even the sky was fading to a dull, and featureless grey void. With a kind of shocked awe, I realized that this was all that remained of the pocket dimension. It had contracted to the line of the perimeter fence, but as I watched those fences too were slowly turning to mist and drifting away. "Enough!" shouted the faux Donar, managing to send both of his tormentors flying. "You will learn that you cannot treat a god this way!" With that, he picked up the semi-conscious form of Topaz from where it lay and, with one swift motion, twisted her head around. The sickening sound of her neck breaking was followed moments later by the thud of her lifeless body hitting the earth, sightless eyes staring but no longer capable of seeing. Prime had hit the ground near where I had been standing, causing me to leap and roll away from that spot. As the demon discarded Topaz, so I leapt to my feet and attempted to send a sorcerous bolt his way. Nothing happened. "My world, my rules, remember?" he grinned. "I've blocked your spellcasting abilities. Now you've opened the portal to the real world, I don't want you closing it again." "Murderer!" yelled Prime, getting unsteadily to his feet. "You'll pay for the deaths you've caused!" "Actually, I don't think I will," said the demon, raising his hammer. In response, a lightning bolt forked down from the sky and struck Prime, who exploded in a great shower of green 'goop'. I had seen that 'goop' before when the hugely overmuscled body of Prime broke down, as it periodically did, to reveal the far less impressive form of 15 year-old Kevin Green inside. This time was different. This time the goop was boiling and bubbling and the heat it was giving off was intense. Inside, slowly emerging as the goop sloughed away was Kevin Green, his flesh red and scalded. I knelt down beside him, wanting to take him in my arms and comfort him but knowing this would only cause him more pain. "Guess...guess this is it, Mantra," he said, smiling crookedly. "I s'pose I always knew we'd meet someone we couldn't beat one day." And then he died. I had told Lauren that he and the others weren't real, but I was wrong. Each of the fallen heroes around me shared the courage and nobility of the originals they were taken from. In this place, in this world, they were as real of those of my own world. They had died courageously, as warriors, and I would mourn them and honour them as warriors. "And that's that, sweetcheeks," grinned the demon, standing between me and the portal. "You lost, I win, and now I've got a world to conquer." "Y'know, you're not the only one who has access to pocket dimensions," I said as, still kneeling, I pulled the hood of my cloak up, drew it in tightly around me, and fell forward into the rapidly cooling goop before me. The cape collapsed. I had vanished. "I don't know what you hope to accomplish by this, Mantra," said the demon, picking up my discarded cloak and swiftly wadding it into a tight ball. "I learned about the pocket dimension within your cape when I scanned your mind earlier." "I was counting on it," I said as, ghost-like, I emerged from the ground behind him, "which is why I used my phasing power to go intangible and pass through the Earth instead." Before he could react, I'd leapt into the portal and was heading back to the real world and to my own flesh and blood body. I heard the demon scream in rage and frustration behind me, but it was too late for him to do anything about it. I *was* the link between his pocket dimension and the real world. Travelling through the portal automatically closed it behind me. Yes, the demon was extremely powerful, but he was also trapped in that now much-diminished pocket of creation, and I intended to see that he stayed there. There was light ahead of me; I was almost home. And then I was through, back in real flesh and once more fully awake. I lurched forward, gulping in great lungfuls of air, knowing instantly that something was wrong. "You're awake!" cried a woman's voice. And then she was hugging me, tears in her eyes, as I looked down at the tiny breasts barely disturbing the line of my hospital gown, glanced over at the saline drip feeding into my skinny arm and at the hospital monitors beside the bed. "Oh, my baby, you're finally back!" sobbed Angela Sherwood. "I was afraid you were never going to wake up again, Lauren." Part 3. Sighing, I examined my reflection in a mirror over one of the wash basins in the girls' restroom. That long plain face, the straight, brown hair with that unflattering fringe, and the unattractive glasses had become a familiar sight over the past few weeks and I was no longer surprised by what the mirror showed me. Of course, the band-aid holding the bridge of those glasses together was new, and I knew that Mom was not going to like it. As a single mother working a low paid job she didn't have the money to replace my glasses, ugly though they were or however battered they got. I wiped a small trickle of blood from the corner of my left nostril. I'd been careless in letting Janice Cantrell land a punch and break my glasses, but though I still wasn't entirely used to this body yet and what it could do, I certainly wasn't going to put up with bullying. Janice was the second bully to learn that small, nerdy Lauren Sherwood wasn't to be picked on any more. I hoped the beating I'd given her would ensure I didn't have to administer that same lesson to a third. I doubted the original Lauren would have put up with this after her sojourn in the pocket dimension, and I definitely wouldn't. Fortunately, the fight had been over and done with before the teachers could get involved and they didn't even know who had been fighting in that circle of girls. I ran a hand lightly over my unimpressive chest, surprised at how much I missed Eden Blake's breasts, how much I missed her body. And while the sneakers, jeans, and sweat shirt I was wearing on this skinny form were easy and practical, I also found myself missing adult female clothes. When I first found myself in Eden's body it would have been inconceivable to me I might actually miss wearing high heels and a skirt. Lost in thought, I jumped in surprise as the door flew open and a beautiful young blonde strode in. "Still fretting over those things not growing like they're supposed to, Sherwood?" she said, stopping in front of another mirror and taking out her lipstick. This was Heather, the girl the original Lauren had once hospitalised. Tall, confident, and already well-endowed, Heather was actually a few weeks younger than Lauren but she could easily pass for several years older. "So, you looking forward to Ultraforce visiting the school tomorrow?" she asked, carefully freshening her lipstick. "Isn't everyone?" I said. "Prime, Prototype, Hardcase...and Mantra," she said, glancing sideways at me. She hadn't forgotten that affair with the original Lauren and her and her clique's Mantra Fan Club. "So, why do you think they chose our school out of all those in Southern California to deliver their anti-drug message?" she asked. I thought I knew why. It was because Prime used to be a resident of Canoga Park as Kevin Green. When Ultraforce had agreed to the President's request to get involved in the anti-drugs campaign and a photo-op at a California high school had been suggested, it had almost certainly been his choice. "No idea," I shrugged, "but we're late for Ms Jones' history class. "We'd better hurry it up." "Yeah, right, whatever," said Heather, pouting at her refection, fluffing her hair, then sweeping out past me. Sighing, I followed along in her wake. Like it or not, I was Lauren Sherwood now, and would be until the day I died. I had to live her life, to make this whole school thing work. Ruefully, I recalled my shock on waking up in this body... "What happened?" I croaked. "Oh, honey, you collapsed at Grandma's back in September," said Angela Sherwood, still sobbing. It's January now. You've been in a coma almost four months." January? But I came to this hospital as Mantra in early December. "Mantra..." I croaked again. What *was* wrong with my voice? "Easy, honey," said Angela, pouring me a glass of water. "You haven't spoken or moved in all that time, so you're going to be weak, and stiff." I took the water, and sipped it gratefully. "Mantra was here last month," she said as I drank. "She and that ultra Warstrike were involved in some sort of fight outside and she went into your mind to try to wake you up. She seemed to be in shock at first when she came back out, but she pulled herself together, apologised for not being able to wake you from your coma, and then they left." So Lauren had somehow ended up in my body. I wondered how that had happened. Was it an accident, or a parting gift from the demon? "I know you're a big fan of hers, so you'll want to know what's happened in the weeks since then," continued Angela, as I took another sip of water. "She's had several adventures with Ultraforce, of course, but the big news is that she's dating Hardcase." "What?!" I said, spraying water all over the bed. "B...but she *can't*! I mean that's just..." "I know honey, I know," said Angela in tones meant to soothe, as she patted the back of my hand, "I know you always thought she should get together with Prime, but it looks like it's Hardcase she's hit it off with." Prime? Lauren thought I should get it together with Prime? Oy. But then, she wasn't the same Lauren any more, was she? I looked down at my body again and shuddered. No, she was now Eden Blake, a grown women and mother of two children, and I was teenager Lauren Sherwood. Reversing something like this, putting us back in our own bodies, was way beyond the current level of my sorcerous skills, and those skills were dependent on the powers possessed by a body I no longer even possessed. There was a very good chance I would not be able to do anything about this. In which case, I'd be stuck as Lauren forever. It was not a happy prospect. "Why are things so blurry?" I asked, noticing for the first time how I couldn't see most of the room very sharply. I might have put this down to the coma, to those long unused muscles, but my vision wasn't clearing. "Oh, silly," smiled Angela, reaching into a bedside drawer, "you're not wearing your glasses." Sighing, I donned the spectacles she handed me. Never, in any of my countless previous lives had I ever needed to wear glasses before. It was just one of many indignities I knew I was going to have to endure from now on. "Have you heard anything from Mrs Blake?" I asked. "Mrs Blake?" she said, puzzled. "It's been months since you last babysat for her. What made you think of her now?" "I don't know," I said, unable to think of a single plausible reason why Lauren would ask after her, "but I'd really like to see her." She had looked at me strangely, shrugged, and agreed to ask her. Then the doctors had finally arrived and the testing had begun. They quickly concluded there was nothing wrong with me, that my recovery was as inexplicable as the coma had been. However, after four months in a coma there had been a lot of muscle wastage, which meant a special crash diet designed to quickly make up that lost mass and an intensive course of physiotherapy to get back to normal. Eden Blake came to visit me two days after my return to the real world. "Hello, Lauren," said a familiar voice from the doorway of my hospital room, and I looked up from the copy of 'Ultra Magazine' I was reading to see her standing there, smiling at me uncertainly. "Hello, Eden," I smiled back at her, "or should I call you 'Mrs Blake'?" "Eden's OK when it's just the two of us," she said, sitting down in the chair next to the bed, "but I suppose it should be Mrs Blake the rest of the time, to keep up appearances." "Makes sense," I said, studying her with great interest. She was wearing a dark skirt suit over a pale yellow silk blouse which revealed just enough cleavage, with matching shoes, her make up and jewellery both immaculate, and tastefully understated. "You're looking good," I said, "surprisingly so, in fact." "I always had good taste," she shrugged, "but I never had the money or opportunity to put it into practice." "So," I asked, "what the hell happened?" "God, I wish I knew! I couldn't have been more surprised when I travelled through the portal from that other world and ended up in your body. That was the last thing I expected to happen. I was confused at first, but I quickly pulled myself together and covered as best I could. I got out of there with Warstrike real fast. He kept asking me if I'd learned anything about some vision he'd been having, and I realised it was about the pocket reality I'd been living in for months. So I told him about the Exiles, and how that place had been created and sustained and he seemed pretty relieved. I guess having visions so out of whack with the real world the poor guy must've thought he was going nuts. He left then, and I haven't seen him since. I remembered how to switch from being Mantra from that time I was turned into a copy of you so, as soon as I was alone, I switched from Mantra to Eden Blake. I found a car key in the pocket of her skirt suit jacket, and walked up and down the car park and the road outside until it activated the lock on one of the parked cars. Found your purse tucked under the driver's seat and drove very, very carefully back to your house. I'd taken driver's ed at school in that other world, but it just wasn't quite the same as driving a car here, and on real roads. I've practiced a lot since, and now I doubt anyone would guess I'd only been driving four weeks." "Four weeks," I murmured. "Any idea what that was about? I left that pocket dimension maybe ten minutes after you did. How does that translate to four weeks here?" "I don't know," replied Eden, a frown creasing that beautiful brow. "I suppose it has to have been the demon. He likes tormenting us." "Yeah, I guess so," I said. "So...what did you do when you got back to the house?" "First thing I did was phone in sick to Eden Blake's employer. Then I collapsed on the sofa and just went into shock as the enormity of what had happened hit me. I knew you were still trapped in the pocket dimension, but since you hadn't followed me out I figured there was a good chance the demon had killed you. And if he had, then I had to carry on, both as Eden Blake and as Mantra. I didn't think the world could do without either." "Not a difficult decision for you to make though, was it?" I said wryly, holding up the copy of 'Ultra Magazine' I'd been reading. The front cover featured a picture, obviously taken with a telephoto lens, of Mantra and Hardcase in a passionate embrace. "No," she admitted, with a smile, "not difficult at all. Tom's a wonderful guy, and drop dead gorgeous. I wasn't expecting what happened between us, but I'm not at all sorry that it did." Hardcase - sometime actor Tom Hawke -