Music is weird. As far as I can tell, it seems to consist of nothing but crudely disguised metaphors for sex and romance, which I suspected was just another layer of metaphor for sex. This wasn’t exactly different than it used to be, but before the songs had mostly just been about sex. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about the addition of the metaphors, but figured it was worth farther examination.

“Marian, what’s this?” She ignored me. That seemed to be the main thing music was used for now, although my sample pool probably wasn’t big enough to say that for sure. Marian, at least, used music to ignore people. Well, she used it to ignore me, but I was the only person here. If she wasn’t interested, I guess I would have to investigate myself. I technically already knew that what I had was an iPhone. I also assumed it was Marian’s, considering I found it in her pocket. I had removed it shortly after she lost interest in extracting my life story, but hadn’t actually looked at it yet. Now, what was in this thing?

I wove a simplistic sensory spell around it, drawing from the rather sizable reservoir I had after drinking Blood and Bones entire blood supply. Well, I had made sure Marian drank as much as she could hold first, but that hadn’t been much. The spell was relatively simple, just microscopic sensors that copied themselves over and over again until they covered the spells preset area. It was very good for studying small objects in immense detail, but took a lot of power to expand to a large area.

The insides of the little device were interesting. I hadn’t gotten a good look at human magic before, so it took me a minute to understand what I was looking at. It was basically a very unimaginative brain. I very simple one, with a far less effective approach to thinking, but the idea was the same. It might not have used the same language as an animal’s brain, but it had the same potential. There was memory, both short and long term, and a bunch of yes or no based reasoning chains. It was lacking quite a lot, but nothing I couldn’t fix.

All I had to do was set a little knot of chaos magic there to work at translating the programming into something more magically compatible, then link that to an adaptive processing network like the ones in new born daemons. After that, all I had to do was provide some better memory and a spell for drawing in ambient primordial light to keep it all going, and the translator was already working. I watched as the stimulus from the phone began to trickle into the unformed mind I had grafted to it. The patterns slowly changed, mutating and adapting to fit the criteria I had built it around. I absently changed my internal organs around as I waited to see if my experiment would work.

I hadn’t realized just how much I had missed being able to change my form. It had been really uncomfortable to stay stagnant for that long. It wasn’t anything about my appearance, but more of a sense of tedium that was hard to compare to anything else. The closest thing was probably the feeling you get when your driving across the mid west and have nothing to look at but the same endless fields of corn for hours on end.

It’s not that anything about the image is all that bad, but you just want it to change. That was what I felt like when I had to stay exactly the same, like I was being forced to experience the exact same thing for way to long. It wasn’t really painful, but somehow incredibly unpleasant. Luckily, Steph’s soul had been more than enough to let me start changing my form again. I was still using her appearance, partially because I didn’t have any other clothes, but mostly because it clearly bothered Marian.

We had left the town center rather quickly, but the old prison was clearly a lot farther away. I had asked if she knew what its name actually was, but that had been after the point that she started ignoring me, and I didn’t care enough to force her. “We’ll be there in about a minute.” She finally broke the not really silence, and I looked up from dumping selective memories into the phone memory to see what happened.

“We should stop here than. Approaching my foot seems a lot stealthier.” She didn’t acknowledge my suggestion, but did pull into the woods at the next opportunity.

The car stopped and she looked over at me. “Is that my phone?” I looked down at the offending object.

“I think so.” She clearly wanted to snatch it, but didn’t like the sort of things she probably thought would happen if she did.

“Why do you have my phone.” This time she didn’t even give me time to answer her stupid question. “Right, you stole it because why wouldn’t you?”

I nodded. “Exactly.”

She sighed. “Can I have it back?” I shrugged and handed it to her.

“You know where it is from here?” I asked, hoping that we could just head off from this spot.

“Yeah, it’s not exactly hidden.” Well, it sounded like we totally could just head off from here. I wasted no time in getting out of the car, which had proven to be quite boring once my entertainment had stopped responding. I stretched, inhaling the fresh mountain air. Now, where were the snacks… I mean, demons?

I turned back to the car to see Marian giving me a weird look. “Do you really have to keep using her body?” I raised a suggestive eyebrow.

“Do you really want to see Marcus naked? Because, even he wasn’t this small.” It was true. Marcus might have been on the underfed side, but he had still had a distinctly male build. Steph, on the other hand, had been quite tiny even for a human female. “I might be able to get away with the shirt and underwear, but the pants would never fit him. I can try, if you really want.”

That was complete bullshit. I could have just changed into a different female form or a very small male one and the clothes would have fit fine. However, Marian didn’t know that, and I wanted to see how long I could get away with using her dead friend’s appearance. She scowled, but clearly didn’t want to push it any farther. “You don’t want to get anything before we do this?” I stretched from side to side, considering her question. The stretching had no actual effect, but was still satisfying.

“Not really. I doubt we could easily find any weapons that are more effective than my own skills, and we don’t know enough about what we are going into to say what we might need. Considering that, any equipment is likely to be more of a hinderance.” It was true. I could figure out a way to mimic the effects of most things that seemed reasonable to bring with us, and the situation was way to vague to identify specific items we might need. Considering that, I was as prepared as I felt I needed to be. We might still get caught or killed, but that would be true regardless.

“Doesn’t that make you think that we might not want to do this?” I considered the question.

“No, not really.” I closed my door and came around to the driver’s side. “You feel full?” I asked, knowing that she almost certainly was.

She grimaced. “If the feeling that my soul is slowly burning means I’m full, than yes.”

I smiled. “It does.” I gestured to the woods to say lead the way and we started off.

I had gotten a little out of her about the prison during her ignore Sam faze, although I had had to order her to answer any question that was actually important. It seems like it had been abandoned for quite a few years now, but someone had moved in about a year ago. No one was really sure what person or group had taken up residence, but they were assumed to have bought it and vehicles could be seen in and around the old building. The missing people hadn’t been clearly associated with the old prison until Marcus had mysteriously come back and started working there.

Marcus’ previous crimes had drawn a clear mental connection that led to a unified theory that Marian seemed to think she wasn’t alone in. I couldn’t say if it was right, but it was definitely worth looking into. If I was unlucky, it would be a completely innocent operation of some sort. Of course, there weren’t a lot of innocent operations that worked out of an old prison and had no interaction with the surrounding township, but it wasn’t impossible.

But, if I was lucky, there might be some incredibly shady and dangerous demonically connected group messing with forces beyond their control. If I was really, really, lucky, they would be at least partially composed of demons. I barely dared to hope for that, but it was certainly possible. There was also strictly the possibility that I might save some people from… whatever, but that wasn’t overly relevant. I could already feel the sensation of demon intestines tearing in my hands. I was definitely looking forwards to this.

Marian, having given up on making me see her reason, locked the car and started off into the woods. I, for my part, followed, making significantly less sound. This wasn’t because I was trying to be stealthy, I really doubted there was any need, but because she seemed to be inherently loud. It was like she had no regard for what she stepped on or how she applied her weight. Every step had her whole body in it, as if she was in the constant state of falling forwards. I resolved that I would need to carry her if silence was ever necessary.

It didn’t take long for us to break out of the woods and into an uneven shrub covered field that gave a clear view of a large esthetically displeasing building behind a rather tall fence. Now, I wasn’t an expert, but I suspected that was the place. This suspicion was increased when Marian dropped to her stomach next to me. “That it?” She flinched at my question, clearly not having noticed that I was already on the ground next to her.

“Yes.” She whispered, despite the fact that no one in the building could possibly hear us.

I nodded and pointed at the falling sun. “We will wait here until dark, then crawl to the closest cover to the fence. They clearly haven’t cleared all the growth around it, so we should be able to find a good entry point.” I put my chin on my fist and started watching the building.

“You mean we aren’t going to do anything but sit here for hours?” She sounded displeased with that idea.

“Yes, you don’t want to go in unprepared and get killed, do you?” I could palpably feel her desire to strangle me, but she instead opted not to respond.

The silence continued for about an hour before it was finally broken. “What did you do to my phone?” I looked away from the building that I had been studying with as many detection spells as I could pull off to see her trying to get her phone to start.

“What do you mean?” I asked with as much innocence as I could fake.

“It’s just giving me this spinning circle loading symbol.” I peered at her phone which was in fact showing nothing but I black screen with a spinning circle around a cartoon apple with a bite taken out.

“Uh, maybe it’s updating?” I suggested.

She looked over at me with unwarranted suspicion. “They don’t do that on there own. Plus, Apple uses a loading bar.” I considered that.

“Maybe it felt it didn’t want to be restrained by fixed goals?” Her expression made me think that she didn’t consider that a legitimate possibility, although it totally was. “Do you want me to look at it?” I asked, somewhat interested to see what was happening in the machine. She looked at me as if I was somehow untrustworthy.

“No, I’d rather you not.” I shrugged and returned to studying the building.

Everything remained fairly silent until dark, with only the occasional curse from Marian at her phone which appeared to have entered a state of perpetual updating. Once dark had fully fallen, I started the slow process of inching towards what seemed like the ideal spot to enter. That wasn’t because it was the easiest spot, or the hardest to monitor, but because it was the least suspicious. The point I had chosen was one of the numerous areas that had uneven terrain and uncontrolled plant growth, but it wasn’t nearly as uneven or uncontrolled as some of the others. No, this spot was both totally useable, by me, as a way in, but not somewhere that would be identified as a high-risk point. It was always possible that everywhere was perfectly monitored, but it didn’t look like it.

We eventually reached the spot and I rose into a crouch, examining my options. The fence was old, but still perfectly intact. That meant that I would have to resort to magic, something I had a limited reserve of, to make a whole. There was also the possibility that the ground in the shrubs on the other side was trapped in some way, since this was a point that was hard to see. I might cut through, the thing that would be most expected, only to find a wire or landmine. No, I would prefer to do this in a more… personal way.

I waved a hand to get Marian’s attention, then put a finger over my mouth to ask for silence. Once I knew she understood, I grabbed her, through her over my shoulder and jumped almost straight up. She still made a muffled squeaking shriek, but it was neither loud or obviously human. The fence had only been about twelve feet, so I didn’t have any trouble cresting it. Landing was a little trickier, since there was a lot of overgrowth of the other side. Luckily, I had aimed for a patch that was mostly tall grass, so we failed to hit anything to painful.

I came down close to silently, bending my knees to absorb the momentum. Marian, somehow managed to thwack her face against a limb of one of the larger bushes on our way down. I must point out, that was entirely on her. I immediately crouched down, dropping my package onto the grass. There was no sign that we had been spotted, but I still didn’t want to move until I was sure. I brought my mouth next to Marian’s ear and whispered so low that only a lilin an inch away from me could possibly hear. I even changed my vocal cords just to get it quiet enough.

“We are going to wait here and watch for another hour or more.” I said, before pulling away and giving her a big thumbs up. She looked at me like I was insane. I thought she was about to say something, so I put a finger against her lips. Silence was paramount, and it was surprising how much she didn’t like having to go slowly. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason I was being cautious, but it was definitely a bonus.