LTSV - Harbingers of Change - 5 (Patreon)

“It’s not as though I didn’t try to replace him,” Adra defended himself.

They reached the car and he opened Mira’s door for her before taking his place at the driver’s seat. The harsh lights of the parking garage cut a harsh line across his face as he started the ignition and made his improved features appear a bit older and more tired.

“You’re correct, supplanting Dietrich as Samira’s fiance was the obvious solution,” he continued, once they were underway. “I put together the best face, body, and background that I could. I presented myself to them as a cardiovascular surgeon who’d been featured on the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly. I took them to see my exquisite mansion and grounds in the Estrella Foothills and for a tour aboard my mega yacht. I even included Virgil on a lucrative venture capital investment that he almost wrecked for everyone else, just in case he still thought I lived off my salary.” He heaved a deep, annoyed sign and clenched his hands on the steering wheel. “The problem is that I utterly failed to understand my quarry. They didn’t want an ideal son-in-law for Samira, they wanted someone like this fool.” He gestured to his own chest. “Ugly, vicious, and stupid.”

“It’s not your fault,” Mira consoled him and reached over to squeeze his knee. He covered her hand with one of his own. “We still don’t know what’s the matter with Samira’s money. They may have needed someone who wouldn’t question them. A millionaire, heart surgeon, male model, venture capitalist son-in-law might have come across as someone who wouldn’t let them mismanage his wife’s assets, if that’s what is happening.”

“I should have taken this body over years ago, but his family is unbearable and I’d had an opportunity to take another, better body who was already in brain death,” Adra continued. He glanced her way and admitted, quietly, “I thought you would prefer it if I didn’t kill anyone.”

“That is true,” Mira sighed. “I’m not angry that you took that body, mind you. I would have hurt him worse if you hadn’t been there and it would have been harder to cover up. I overreact, sometimes, if I’m attacked right as I’m transitioning.”

“Does that happen often?” Adra asked her. “I’d been lurking around the hospital in case the head injury was what woke you, but I didn’t expect him to go into your room. He avoided Samira whenever possible—especially if she needed something. The times he caused problems were all in moments where he was forced to be around her by their families.”

“It happens often enough,” Mira admitted and turned her head to watch the city lights pass. “Our previous life was as close to ideal conditions as I’ve ever gotten,” then she changed the subject. “That Helena woman will need to be trapped in a bathroom stall during the wedding and reception or else she’ll find some way to ruin the ceremony or make an embarrassing speech.”

Adra squeezed her hand. “If they must attend, then I’ll make sure they sit politely in their seat and nod when spoken to—and nothing else.” He paused and added. “We’ll have to keep them around prior to that. I stole Virgil away during the party to make him answer a few questions I have about the conservatorship. He won’t remember our conversation.”

“How bad is it?” Mira asked.

“Bad,” Adra grumbled. “Samira’s order of protection revokes her ability to consent to marriage. That Julian Cross started sniffing around you and Cece before I could get much more out of him so I still have no answer regarding the money, but I have two fortunes that are at your disposal so it’s hardly a concern.”

“Two?” Mira asked. “Didn’t you have to abandon that body when you took a new one?”

“I still have it and am using it, although I admit that this is not an ideal state of affairs. I will have to do something with one of my forms, eventually,” he sighed. “So long as I redistribute my matter periodically and synchronize my memories between them, both of my bodies will function as intended. Ideally, I’d like to dispose of the Mason body and have you marry the other one, but the conservatorship will be a difficult barrier to circumnavigate. For the moment, my other body is managing an investigation into the exact terms of the order of protection. I am looking for any material I can use to force the courts to either assign you a new conservator, amend the order, or do away with the conservatorship entirely.”

“It would be ideal if the order could be revoked,” Mira agreed. She trusted Adra with all her affairs, but also hated having to ask for everything she needed. “I’ll need to research conservator laws in this state. I’m given to understand they vary wildly from place to place, so perhaps there’s something we can use to have the order removed all together. I can’t imagine the Bellamys have been adhering to every requirement. Maybe we can use that.”

‘One step at a time,’ she told herself. ‘One step at a time.’

Mira decided against trying to go ‘home’ (or to even pretend that she had) the next morning. Helena’s parties went on late into the night and Mira's pre-awakened self would take any opportunity to not sleep under her mother’s roof, up to and including sleeping in the cramped backseat of the Volante.

Adra’s other body had ordered a replacement mattress delivered to the penthouse and had it installed in the bedroom with new bedsheets while they were out at the party.

“Will I get to meet this other body?” Mira asked. It was late and she was pleased to find that Adra had also swiped all of her skincare and lounge clothes when he was raiding her parent’s house. She’d thought he might leave those and replace them in order to maintain the illusion that she was still staying there, since pajamas and face cream are the first thing anyone takes when they pack.

She was seated on another new acquisition for the penthouse; a fluffy ottoman in front of a lighted makeup table that looked similar to the one Samira had shown off in her infrequent ‘Get Ready With Me’ videos. She’d changed from her sweater and jeans into a satin shorts and camisole set. The vanity even had a glass-front jewelry cabinet.

“Yes, of course,” Adra had changed into a set of bamboo lounge pants and a pullover before he pulled up a chair to watch her figure out Samira’s routine. Most of it was muscle memory, so she had to stop and think about whether she did toner first or serums. He looked down at his hands. “In truth, I don’t like this body touching yours even if the criminal is no longer present within it, but I’m sure that it would cause us even more problems if you were to be seen with my other, better body—especially after all the effort I put into winning over your parents in that form.”

Well, that explained why Adra hadn’t been trying to charm the crowd. He wasn’t planning on keeping this identity, long term.

“What is your other name?” she asked.

“Ilya Volkov,” he told her with an amused squint. “Not one of the Magnates, but I thought the name could stand up to theirs.”

Oh, right. Them.

The Magnates: Julian Cross, Blade Calloway, Dominic Caine, Jacob Sterling, and Rafael Corvino.

“Adra,” she chose her words very carefully. “I saw one of the Magnates at the party. Have you encountered any of them yet?”

His smile faded. “Ah,” he said and leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees. “I have. They’re all from the same set Ilya ran with in life and that Mason existed on the fringes of, although none of them were friends. I haven’t been able to guess who is who, aside from Cece.”

“What if…” Mira pulled off the padded hairband she’d been using to keep the hair out of her face while she applied her ointments. “...what if they aren’t the other boys? Julian Cross felt like a complete stranger to me when we spoke. I’ve always known the others as soon as I see them, even just a picture of them in another world. I’ve realized now that there were only illustrations of Cece on the cover and in the color plates in the book. None of the men were shown except their hands or the backs of their shoulders.”

Adra stood up and brought his phone over. He pulled up LinkedIn on his phone and started showing her profiles. Mason was connected with all the Magnates, which made it easy to find them. Adra flicked through each one, giving Mira time to search their faces for any spark of recognition and find none.

Not one of them was a cast member and she was sure Peleon would be a Magnate, at minimum. In retrospect, possibly not. The one thing you could not accuse him of was having no personality.

“This doesn’t make sense!” Mira took Adra’s phone and backspaced to look at them all over again. She had no better luck the second time around.

“Maybe it does,” Adra mused. “The Magnates were more placeholder than man in the book. They had little personality except what served to drive the current scene. In fact…!”

“Yes, yes, my love. I know,” Mira spoke fast before Adra could start in on the original book. He’d hated the entire thing, cover to cover. It wasn’t that she disagreed with him. That book was sensationalized drek, but she didn’t have an hour to listen to another systematic takedown of a novel they could never read again, except by living it out. “Adra, if the Magnates aren’t Cece’s boys then where are they?”

Adra was less worried than she was and came over to kiss her forehead. “They’ll turn up,” he said, sounding a little resigned about it. “They always do, whether you want them to or not.”

Mira slept like crap that night. She was still mad about the cocktail party; madder after the fact, even, than she had been in the moment because she hadn’t realized what a bog-standard move from Helena’s playbook the whole debacle had been until she was stuck there and reliving Samira’s sad Hall of Shame moments.

The good news was that she would have plenty of opportunities to make that woman squirm in the future. It would even be in keeping with their setting for Samira to have a bitch awakening after her hospital stay and turn the tables on her narcissist mother. Mira’s usual modus operandi was to not lean into the genre and mind her business, but for this she was willing to make an exception. Samira had been near skin and bones by the time Mira woke up and it wasn’t because she, personally, wanted to be that way.

Children deserved education, the freedom to play, and (most importantly) to eat well. Samira had had none of those things and Mira was about to make it everybody’s problem.

Mira sat up far too late thinking of terrible things to do to that woman before Adra squashed her under a blanket of shadow matter and said, “You can scheme in the morning, darling. Now you should sleep.”

In the morning, they were both forced to confront the fact that they’d forgotten an important thing, the day before.

Mira had noted, when she was touring the place, that Mason Dietrich had lived off (in order) whey protein, sparkling water, beer, and not much else if the state of his kitchen was any indicator. His microwave showed some signs of having been used once, but that was it. He must have eaten out for most meals. There was a little dust on the top plates in his cupboard, so he wasn’t even using those. Only his glasses and the silverware showed signs of recent use.

“I’ll order something for delivery,” Mira decided aloud as Adra started poking around in the cabinets to see what other evidence of neglect he could find. He immediately found a box of pots and pans. To be clear; it was the actual box, still sealed and full of pans, that had been wedged into the lower cabinet.

Breakfast arrived from a nice coffee shop and they ate at the kitchen counter, perched atop some bar stools, as Mira made a grocery list on her phone with one hand and she idly ran her toes along Adra’s ankle. He did not like his present body, but it seemed important to Mira that he understood that his presence trumped any past actions of its former occupant, insofar as she was concerned.

Eventually, Adra was forced to leave for a meeting. Mason might not have done much at his job, but he sure was in demand for meetings. There were five scheduled today, alone, and Mira wished him joy of it. She didn’t miss that part of having a corporate career.

Instead, she dug into her closet for the comfiest ‘running errands’ outfit that Samira had. She needed a moment to feel normal after the previous night. Soap Opera worlds activated her worst impulses like nothing else and she was going to carve out time to decompress and reset on a regular schedule or else she would spiral off into the melodrama and not come back down again until she died of it.

There wasn’t much in there or that didn’t need heels to keep her from dragging her cuffs on the ground. Mira was on the short side in this life, which explained why her host wore platform heels almost exclusively, with the singular exception of a pair of Mabrouka slides.

Casual fashion at the moment seemed to run towards loose on the bottom, light on the top. Mira stepped out of the penthouse in a set of breezy wide-legged lounge pants with a high waist, the slides, a sleeveless crop top that could have done decent work as a sports bra except the material was a little too thin, and an oversized fleece hoodie that was worn hanging off-shoulder around your elbows, according to the current mode. She'd had two bags to choose from; a Rada Saffiano clutch and a Turms Lindy 26 bag.

Mira took the Lindy and promised herself that she’d get something more practical to use for a casual outing later.

The sole grocery option within walking distance of the penthouse was a Harvest + Co a few blocks away. Mira decided to walk, since it was a nice day and she now lived by the beach. She might as well get to enjoy the fresh air.

Once in the grocery, she grabbed a couple of colorful net bags from the ‘local products’ end cap for future shopping endeavors. Mira did not cook and Adra only ate food recreationally, so she saw a lot of small trips like this one in her future and started loading her hand basket with ready-to-eat and somewhat healthy convenience foods.

She was in the produce section, picking out fruit infused waters when an uncomfortable jolt zinged through her entire body; literally an electric jolt, or very near to one. It took her a crucial half second to realize she was sensing a violent shift in ambient mana saturation; from almost nothing to nearly more than she could comfortably withstand.

Adra had left some shadow matter on her as a matter of course when he departed that morning and he had been doing the equivalent of cat napping in the folds of her jacket while she shopped, but he tried to leap onto her body when the mana spiked. The spike caught him mid leap and his shadow matter dropped to the floor, draining off her body; temporarily stunned by the overabundance.

Light bloomed all around her, but it was hard and unnatural; a bit like being surprised by an arc welder. Mira felt the bottom of her stomach drop out and then she was abruptly somewhere else.

Notes: It's the System!FYI, in regards to having two Adras running around, he is refusing to watch ‘Severance’ on principle. Assume the half not in the Mason body is, at any given moment, alternating between scaring the hoes and staring out the window with sad BG music playing.Fake brand names:

Harvest + Co - WholefoodsTurms - Alternate name for the god Hermes, so I used it as an alternative for the brand.

Rada - Alternate name for Prada