Chapter 7: The Lingering Lingerie
The next half-hour was a blur of mortified practicality. Chloe rummaged through John’s closet with the focus of a combat medic, finally extracting a worn, grey university hoodie big enough to fit two of him. He shrugged it on over his t-shirt, the soft fabric swallowing his frame. The zipper went up to his chin, a feeble fortress against the world. The lingering pressure of the lace against his skin had vanished completely, leaving only a phantom memory, a tactile ghost.
He sank onto the edge of his bed, head in his hands. “Okay. Manual. Start talking.”
Amy’s sigh echoed from the nightstand. “It’s not a manual. It’s a precedent. A history of poorly chosen idiots who couldn’t keep their… energetic signatures… in check.”
Chloe pulled the desk chair over and sat backwards on it, arms resting on the back. “We’ll take what we can get. Who were they? What happened?”
“Farmers mostly. A few monks. One particularly memorable Venetian glassblower.” Amy’s voice took on a distant, storytelling tone. “The phenomenon isn’t new. Just rare. When a person’s innate… let’s call it ‘current’… runs unusually high, and they encounter a focus object like myself during a moment of profound personal cataclysm or, in this case, a profoundly stupid wish, a conduit is forged. The power needs an outlet. It finds one.”
“A stupid wish?” John mumbled into his palms.
“You said, and I quote, ‘I wish I understood what it was like to be someone else for once.’ While holding a mystical artifact you found in a parking lot. Congratulations. You won the metaphysical lottery.”
Chloe interjected. “But why her? Why… SexiWoman?” She said the name without irony, which somehow made it worse.
“Because his subconscious is a troglodyte,” Amy snapped. “The power accesses the deepest, most unprocessed parts of you. For him, that’s a fumbling, hormonally-charged knot of desire and alienation. It translates that into a form it thinks is powerful. Aesthetics as a weapon. It’s crass, but effective.”
John finally looked up. His eyes were tired. “So I’m not chosen for a grand purpose. I’m just… faulty wiring.”
“Bingo. You’re a live wire in a rainstorm. And right now, you’re going to electrocute anyone standing in a puddle nearby.” The pendant glinted, the hummingbird hum growing slightly louder. “The janitor was the first puddle. The security alert is the second. The pattern expands until you either learn to ground yourself, or you start a fire so big even a memory-veil won’t cover it.”
Silence settled, thick and cold. The LED lamp flickered once, casting a jagged shadow.
“Ground myself how?” John asked, his voice barely audible.
“By understanding the current. By feeling it before it surges. Right now, you’re a passive receptacle. A bucket in a thunderstorm. You need to become a… lightning rod. Something with intention.”
“And the lingerie?” Chloe asked, glancing at John’ chest where the lace had been.
“A focusing tool. It materializes the channel. Right now, it’s external. Eventually, if you gain any semblance of control, it won’t need to be. You’ll be able to shape the energy directly. Though given your progress, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
John stood up abruptly, the sudden movement making Chloe jump. He paced the tiny space, two steps to the wall, turn, two steps back. “I don’t want to shape it. I want it gone. Can’t you just… take it back? Break the conduit?”
Amy’s laugh was short and bitter. “It doesn’t work like that. The wish is the seed. The transformation is the root. You can’t un-wish something. You can only learn to prune the tree.” She paused. “Or let it grow wild until it collapses under its own weight, usually taking the unfortunate gardener with it. Your predecessor, the glassblower, ended up as a very attractive, very confused statue in a canal. The damp, you see. Played havoc with the energetic crystallization.”
John stopped pacing. He stared at the necklace. “You’re saying I could turn into a statue.”
“If you’re spectacularly incompetent, yes. More likely, you’ll just have a very public, very televised episode in the middle of the quad during the Spring Fling. Your choice.”
Chloe pulled out her phone, tapped the screen, and read aloud. “Campus security update: no suspect located. Investigation ongoing. Remind students to report any unusual activity.” She looked up. “They didn’t find anything. But they’re looking.”
“The ripple is still spreading,” Amy said. “It might calm. It might not. Every time you lose control, you create another loose thread. Reality tries to pull it tight. Sometimes it pulls the whole sweater apart.”
John’s gaze drifted to his dresser. The top drawer, where his socks and underwear lived. A strange, low thrum seemed to be coming from it, a vibration felt in the teeth more than heard. He took a step towards it.
“John?” Chloe asked.
He didn’t answer. He hooked a finger under the drawer handle and pulled.
Inside, folded with impossible precision atop his pile of mismatched socks, was the lingerie set. The black lace bodice. The garter belt. The stockings. All pristine, clean, smelling faintly of ozone and something floral. They hummed with a soft, magenta light that pulsed in time with his own quickening heartbeat.
“Oh good,” Amy chirped, her voice dripping with false cheer. “Magic laundry service. They’ll do that now. Always reappear clean and folded.”
John slammed the drawer shut. The vibration stopped. He leaned his forehead against the cool wood, breathing hard.
“It’s in my drawer,” he said, his voice choked. “With my socks.”
Chloe came over, placed a hesitant hand on his shoulder. He flinched but didn’t pull away. The hoodie fabric was soft under her palm. “Okay. That’s… a new variable.” She took a deep breath. “But it’s a contained variable. It’s here. Not on you.”
“It might as well be.” He straightened up, his face pale but set with a grim determination that Chloe hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t courage. It was the absence of any other option. “Fine. Lightning rod. How do I start?”
Amy was quiet for a long moment. The hum from the pendant settled into a steady, watchful frequency. “You start by not starting. You start by stopping. You need to find the calm in the storm. Which, for you, is like finding a sober thought at a frat party.”
“Meditation?” Chloe guessed.
“A crude approximation, but yes. He needs to feel the current as a constant, quiet stream, not a series of disastrous flash floods.” A note of reluctance entered Amy’s voice. “It will require focus. And a trigger.”
John’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of trigger?”
“A safe one. A controlled spark. Something small that elicits a flicker of the feeling, without the full… cascade.” She sounded almost embarrassed. “You’ll need to think of something that, in a small way, stirs that same part of you. But calmly. Gently. Like testing the temperature of a bath with your toe, not jumping into a volcano.”
John and Chloe exchanged a look. His cheeks flushed. This was worse than the transformations. This was dissecting them.
“I… I don’t know,” he stammered.
“Think of a memory,” Amy pressed, her tone clinical now. “A person. A moment. Something that made you feel that specific kind of… awareness. Without the panic.”
The room was silent except for the distant, low groan of the dorm’s plumbing. John closed his eyes. His mind, traitorous and eager, didn’t go to images of people on his phone or in his classes. It went to the smell of printer paper and ozone in the computer lab last semester. To the girl from his Algorithms class, the one with the intricate tattoos on her fingers, leaning over his shoulder to point out a bug in his code. Her focused frown. The way her hair fell forward, brushing his arm. The quiet, intense warmth of that shared concentration. It hadn’t been sexual, not really. It had been a connection. A focus. A current.
He felt it. A faint, warm tremor in his gut, different from the usual frantic spike. It was a low, steady pulse.
The drawer behind him rattled gently.
“Interesting,” Amy murmured. “You found a quieter frequency.”
John opened his eyes. He felt strangely calm. The panic was still there, but distant, like thunder on the horizon. The humming in the drawer subsided.