The Accidental Necromancer
For the Sake of Both Worlds

I rode my bike back to camp. Everyone was there except Xyla, who preferred the depths of her forest to hanging around a tomb. De gustibus non disputandum est. Kathy was cooking with Inka.

“How’d it go, my wife?” Valeria asked. She was still radiant and clearly enjoyed calling me that.

Gren just walked over and gave me a squeeze.

Gruush and Kendala hung back, not really part of the group, but clearly interested in my answer.

“So far, so good,” I told her.

“Did the Orc leader try to seduce my wife?” Valeria asked.

“Jealous?”

“Oh, sure. But I get it. So did she?”

“Yes.”

“Did she succeed?”

“No.”

Valeria smirked.

Gren reported that Gruush had enough bricks made that I could start using them for building. Of course, I could buy bricks, too, if I wanted to.

I liked the idea of the trolls learning that wood was not the only thing one could make buildings out of, because it would reduce their desire to exploit the forest. So I downloaded some plans off the internet, and made some modifications, for a brick building with three rooms. Most of it would serve as a warehouse for lumber and the like, so I could get a little ahead and have the stuff stored closer to its destination, but there would also be sleeping quarters, and a small anteroom.

Oh to be able to put in a bathroom with a shower and a flush toilet! But failing that, it was better for people to do their business well away from the building.

Except for one, I’d make the interior walls out of studs and drywall. Or perhaps, show the orcs how to make them, and supervise.  If drywall caught on, it would be a new thing I could sell the trolls.

Meanwhile, there was also the extension on the crypt I wanted to build.

So many things to do.

Dinner was excellent. Very spicy, which was no doubt Inka’s doing, but really good. Maybe the boutique leather store could sell food, too, but we’d have to make sure no one got a good view of the chef.

After dinner I taught Val and Gren how to ride a bike. Gren got the hang of it before Val did. I had expected it to be the other way around, although I couldn’t put my finger on why. When I did, I wasn’t happy with myself. Val looked like the sort of person who could ride a bike – which really, in the end, was just because her skin wasn’t blue. Ugh.

And why wasn’t I teaching the orcs? Was that, too, prejudice? Or was I reasonable to withhold some trust from them? It might, I decided, be a little of each.

Once Gren and Val had it down, I gave each of the orcs a turn. Lesseth couldn’t ride a bike, but she enjoyed watching the others do it. I’d have to get some more bikes, but for now, it was getting dark.

I had some new ideas for how to test the magic field. I wanted to take Val with me, so that one of us could be on each side, and I wanted to borrow Kathy’s gun. I ended up borrowing Kathy and Talos, too.

I also got out some traffic cones. I’d used them before, with tape between them, when I’d redone sidewalks or porches, to help people see they were off limits. They’d serve a similar purpose this time.

Basically, I had Val try to take the bag across. Whenever it fell out of her hand, I put a traffic cone there. It was at least a little bit more precise than going by my body shifts, since my form didn’t change unless I was all the way across – it remained whatever it was, otherwise. Pretty soon, we had a rough circle marked out around the gate. It wasn’t a circle really, though, it was a demisphere, and it was bigger than I thought, because previously I didn’t change into Abby until my head was below the top of the sphere. All in all, it was over five meters in diameter, or about two and a half meters tall at the center.

Then Kathy tried to bring the gun the other way. I thought it was possible that there would be two different lines, but no, she couldn’t bring the gun even close to the gate anymore. Bit by bit, Amaranth was expanding.

I had moved in nearly two months ago. So it was advancing a bit over a meter a month. That certainly wasn’t an urgent problem, but there were issues. In a few months, it might make the gas boiler for my radiator not work, for instance. Or worse, it might push the radiator away. I needed to know which, so I asked Kathy to leave her gun, unloaded of course, on the floor in the basement. If it started to move, I’d know.

If it somehow got past the barrier that way, that would be interesting, too.

In a year or so, it might include some of the outside, and eventually even extend past the property line. That was all assuming the expansion was a steady increase. It could be accelerating. It could decelerate, or be more about volume than the radius, which would at least mean the radius wouldn’t be getting bigger as fast as I feared.

We’d need to keep doing measurements.

In the meantime, one of the positive side effects was that I could now bring a bag that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, and which never got heavier no matter how much stuff I put in it, into my home and set it on the basement floor. I could even fit the planks in, since they were so relatively narrow, and not have to manage them down the stairs. It would also make it easier to bring heavy things up, not that I had a lot of applications for that at the moment.

I’d done what I’d come to do, so I promised myself I’d make another measurement in a week. The expansion might be accelerating. Or, if it was by volume, it would appear to decelerate some even if it was expanding at a steady speed, at least measured by the diameter. I knew of no way to affect it.

Nice place you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.

Oh, shoot. He was awake. Did he sleep? He was certainly quiescent a lot lately. But of course if the magic field was expanding, it meant Enash had a somewhat greater range, too, which made me wonder if he’d planned it that way.

“Enash,” I said, mostly so that everyone would know I wasn’t talking to them, “Do you know any way to slow the expansion of the magic area into Earth?”

Nope. Wouldn’t tell you if there was one, anyway. Not sure why it’s happening, actually. The strong conquer the weak, so maybe it’s just that my world can beat up your world. Nyah.

“Like you thought you were stronger than me?”

Grrrr.

Enash’s explanation might be the right one, but another popped into my head. Maybe it was, really and truly, all about me. “What if the more time I spend on Amaranth, the more the sphere grows, and the more time I spend on Earth – or outside the sphere, on that side of the gate, the more it will shrink.”

“That would be bad,” Valeria said.

“I agree.” I didn’t want to spend more time on Earth, away from my sweeties. Or, if I was honest with myself, in my male body. I liked having curves and soft smooth skin, and I liked wearing girls’ clothes.

“Maybe I count, too,” Kathy said. “If that’s true, maybe having Valeria and Gren and Xyla spend more time on Earth would help stabilize it.”

“Or maybe it’s not about the time you spend,” Valeria said, “But where your heart is.”

I shrugged. “I can’t do anything about that. But – I don’t think I’m the center of the universe, like that.”

Valeria just smiled at me, and I wasn’t sure what she meant by it. But she had a nice smile.

I think she’s probably right, actually. If you were to become cold-hearted, and turn all your girlfriends into zombies, that would probably bring it right back into alignment.

Enash was just a nasty son of a bitch, and probably couldn’t help himself at this point. “Maybe if I was to destroy the necromancer inside me, the gate would fix itself,” I said.

Now you’re just being petty. There’s no possible connection. Wait, though! I know. The fact that you’re dominating the body I made represents an encroachment of your world onto mine. To preserve the balance, my world asserts itself geographically by expanding. If you would let me drive now and then, the problem would be solved.

“Nice try,” I said. “But if that’s the case, then I’ll just have to let it keep expanding.”

“Talking to Enash?” Valeria asked.

I nodded. “We just don’t know what’s happening,” I said. “And Enash either doesn’t know, or won’t tell. Is there anyone who would know?”

“About gates to other worlds? I will pray for guidance, my god might know. But I have never heard of such a thing.”

“Some physicist?” Kathy suggested. “But if we’ve done such a thing, it’s been hushed up.”

I nodded. “And we don’t dare go asking around.”

“I would not like it,” Valeria said. “But you could try an experiment, and sleep up here, at least.”

“I wouldn’t like it either,” I said. “And there’s no point in even trying until we’ve taken a few measurements and see how fast it’s growing without that. Otherwise we wouldn’t know if it worked.”

“Unless it stopped completely.”

“Unless it stopped completely,” I agreed. I still was going to wait. It wasn’t, yet, an emergency.

“I’ll go back to working on my porch,” Kathy said. “Just in case. And I’ve been sleeping on Earth, anyway. I wonder, though, if it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Earth got a little more magic in it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Except for the part where the government finds out and takes over.”

“What if,” Kathy said. “It’s related to all the stuff you’ve been bringing over. That it’s not about how much time we spend, but every plank of wood you cart from Earth into Amaranth grows it by just a bit.”

I hadn’t considered that, but I nodded. “That makes as much sense as anything else we’ve come up with. Once we have a baseline, we could check, just by bringing a whole bunch of stuff up, whatever junk we can find, and filling my house with it.”

Kathy  nodded. “Unless the farther away from the gate the stuff is, the more it affects it. Like an old-timey balance scale.”

“In which case, we’d have to take the stuff farther away, I guess. In a truck.” I threw up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “The fact is, we don’t know, and we can’t know, yet. We need to table this until we can actually perform experiments.”

“And meantime, we might be making the problem worse.”

I shrugged. “We might.”

“Maybe it’s about marriage,” Valeria said.

“Huh?”

“If Talos and Kathy were to have an Earth wedding, that would restore the balance.” Her lips looked absolutely serious, but there was a twinkle in her eyes.

“That makes no sense,” Kathy said.

“Marriages are sacred. Magic.”

“I just met the guy! I mean, sure he’s hot and good in bed, but …”

“For the sake of both our worlds, Kathy,” Valeria said gravely.

“Like Abby said, we don’t know and we should table it for now,” Kathy said.

“Or maybe,” Valeria said. “It’s about babies! Because Gren is pregnant, you and Talos –”

“No!” Kathy said quickly. “Not a chance!”

“You’ve been taking precautions,” I said, not making it quite a question.

“None of your business. And yes, I’m on the pill. I am not getting –”

I chuckled. “Valeria’s playing with you,” I said. “The fact is, this started before Gren got pregnant.”

“Are you sure?” Valeria said. “I mean, you don’t know exactly when that happened, do you?”

I tried to remember the first time I had sex with Gren, and the first time I’d noticed the magic area expanding, and I couldn’t remember which came first. But either way, we were grasping at straws.