"You know..." Celistar said, the rest trailing off we looked back towards the town. The man with the shifting face lay at my feet, very very dead.

"Yeah, I get it," I sighed, "He was better off alive."

"No," she said, "I was just wanting to complement you for the fact the town is still standing."

"Oh," I said, my mouth making the same shape the noise implied.

I looked down at the body, then I looked at her. "When did you know?"

"In town," she replied, tilting her head towards it slightly. "The second I touched him."

"I realized even earlier," Viktor said gruffly. "He was speaking oddly while I was chatting with Ágnes."

"Who the say what now?" I asked, briefly baffled before it hit me. "Oh, right, the cow." The way he'd said it was like 'AH-gnesh', so my brain hadn't even registered the word as a name the first time. Or as word, for that matter.

He nodded in affirmation.

"Well, anyways," I said, "I'm not about to kill a bunch of people who probably had nothing to do with all of this. They all seemed pretty normal, honestly."

"That," Celistar commented, "Is weird in and of itself. Whatever strangeness was there only seems to affect cultivators."

"And somehow," I added, "István was switched out with… not-an-István here." I nudged the corpse with my pretty little blue shoe, which was now looking much less pretty with all the grunge from the jungle and the road raptors and such on it.

I will admit I was trying to suppress a panic attack. My current operating procedure was not to worry about him until I knew exactly what to worry about. It was kind of working. Somewhat.

Later on I could do my worrying in bulk. It was more efficient that way.

"I don't have the slightest clue where to start looking," I said. "I'm not even sure when we lost track of him. This faceless thing," I kicked the corpse again, mostly out of spite, "did a pretty good job of mimicking the way he looked, and I was too busy having my head messed with by the town to catch it."

"Eh," said Viktor, laying a hand on my shoulder. "He will live." He said it so matter-of-factly it was difficult for me to really even think about disagreeing with him.

"That's great," I said, since it was pretty much the only thought I was capable of thinking on the subject. I was genuinely relieved to hear him say that. It still didn't solve the main problem, though...

"I've still got no idea how we go looking for him. Going back into town doesn't exactly seem like a stellar idea."

"Well, if push comes to shove," Celistar said, looking in the direction of the hamlet, "Could just do what you usually do."

"Yeah, no. Not keen on senseless slaughter, I keep my slaughter sensible, thank you very much, I was well taught." I patted Viktor's hand, which was still in possession of a decent chunk of my upper torso.

"Exactly!" Elder Mountain roared. "It is only fun if they can hit back."

I started walking back to the city, but this time I did so slowly, carefully feeling out anything and everything I could. My thoughts were that whatever they'd done to the town definitely didn't have infinite range. There must be an edge to it somewhere.

Steeve sat off to the side, watching with her paws propping up her chin, but with the pads up, apparently having grown some elbows to bend them that way. I mean, maybe a fox could do that normally, but it sure looked odd. Made me do a double-take the first time I saw her.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

She was staring at the town as though she was daring it to out-weird her. Which, considering how she seemed to run entirely off pure distilled absurdity, probably was the case.

Moving past the strange fox towards the strange town, I kept going closer one step at a time.

I didn't notice I'd crossed the line until I started thinking about how my toes looked amusing. Fortunately, I glommed onto the change pretty fast.

"I was about to go get you," Viktor said.

"Oh?" I wondered what I was doing that he'd noticed.

"You were walking only L-shaped paths, as though you were on a chessboard," the big man explained. "Not normal behavior, for you."

Honestly, Viktor did not strike me as the type to play chess. Not because I thought he wasn't tactical enough for it, as I knew he was. No, for logistical reasons. His hands were most of the size of the board! How do you even move a little piece like that? He'd be all like: 'What is this, a board game for ants?!' And then go stomping around knocking everything around like a giant in a little village.

Shit, I'd crossed the line again. I backed up once more, and the feeling went away.

Whatever they had done, I couldn't see it. No Nebula, none of their corrupted energy. Nothing to delineate between 'normally silly' Char and 'silly is the new normal' Char. Which was problematic, because the more I went over the line, the more subtle the feeling became.

Like it was trying to lure me in. Hmm.

I held out my hand; a blob of Nebula stretched out away from me. It wasn't doing anything specific, just hanging there. I began to sculpt it, refining the shape. Not one inclined to art, I really had to think about this.

I was trying to do something similar to the fountain back in the city, but more difficult. I was trying to make me.

It was the kind of thing you'd think were be easier than it is. I am me; I am full of Nebula. Just take that shape and plop it down outside, right?

Well, to some extent I could get that part down, making myself wasn't hard. Make a board shape, put a head on it. Done. I kid, but quite honestly it made me happy I wasn't sculpting Alessa. She'd probably wind up lopsided or something.

Concentrating hard, I realized that the whole thing felt off. It wasn't just the color, although there was that too. I didn't think that mattered as much though, because I assumed whoever was running this thing - if it wasn't somehow sapient itself - probably didn't have eyes on everything inside it.

That seemed like it would be a great way to make your head explode. Or have way too many eyes all over your town.

Wait, I hadn't crossed the line again. Had they expanded it? Was I too close?

I felt inside myself carefully and realized that somehow the silliest feeling parts of me were the ones supplying Nebula to the artwork.

Talk about life imitating art: my sculpture was amusing me… literally.

I walked back a bit, and the urge to pun faded. Whew. For a second there, I thought they could control the thing.

"That looks like you," Viktor observed, staring at my creation.

"That's good," I said, "Since that's the goal."

"It does not feel as though it is you, however," he continued, squeezing what felt like half of me with the hand he still had on my shoulder, for emphasis. I had a fleeting thought that he'd probably make a killer masseur. "It is not Charlotte-Aligned."

Holy crap, the man was right. That's why it felt wrong.

While it was my Nebula, it wasn't me. I'd noticed this before about Alignments in general, but never put it into words. Viktor didn't have the vibes of his fire; he had the vibes of Viktor. Likewise, with Celistar and our misplaced Elder Scholar.

They felt like themselves, with the power just being one component of that. There was a 'wholeness' to the rest of them.

I peered intently at the other me I'd grown in front. How to make it more Char? Wasn't like I could just pump sass into it like some sort of witty balloon.

I felt something off to my right and watched as Steeve pursed her little lips and blew. A ball of color expanded. At first I thought it was just a ball, but before long a perfect copy of her was in its place in front of her, facing the other way.

"Yeah, I get it. You can do it, you little fancy pants," I groused under my breath, getting a kekeke from the fox.

Joke was on her though, as New-Steeve immediately started doing even stranger things than normal, before growing little flowers that then sprayed water all over old Steeve, each jet giving off perfect little rainbows in the surrounding mist.

Apparently, she had used too much wit.

Old Steeve was not amused. Or maybe she was, since she was probably also New Steeve. Something for the philosophers, I guess. What Steeve was, however, was roughly the same distance from the town as not-a-Char now was.

The little minx had been sitting at the boundary the whole time. Of course a fox powered by hijinks could sense the odd silliness presence around the town; they were cut out of the same cloth!

Either confident she'd got her point across, or tired of being sprayed in the face, she left her post just about as I thought that.

I turned back to my mixed 'me'-dia sculpture, realizing that I needed to do something to the fundamental nature of my power in order to make it work right. It kind of reminded me of the work I'd done in crafting my memory for the shadow creature in the city.

Hopefully, this time I wouldn't have to give up an actual memory in the process.

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