Part Thirteen

While Jareth and It were making a devil's bargain, Sarah was sitting on a mall bench and trying to catch her breath. She occasionally poked distrustfully at the wood underneath her, waiting for it to dissolve or grow legs or worse. It remained stubbornly solid.

Not that that meant anything, Sarah thought. She remembered how real the room in the junkyard had seemed before she opened the door. This could all be an illusion. She didn't care it was, really, just so long as it stayed normal for long enough for her to figure out what was going on.

Sarah's mental processes, not all that stable at the best of times, had taken a severe beating. She was still trying to come to terms with being rescued from Jareth by a... by a... what was That!

Sarah frowned. And why was she thinking about It in capital letters? Stop that!

Her subconscious, which was considerably more afraid of It than of Sarah, ignored her. The worst that Sarah could do was clamp down on its heavy use of Freudian imagery, while the worst that It could do- well, her subconscious wasn't totally clear on what It could do, but somewhere in the depths of it a tiny voice was saying: Tread cautiously! In fact, don't tread at all! Stand perfectly still!

At least, that's what the subconscious thought the voice was saying. It was a little garbled, what with the screaming and all. There also seemed to be a noise like a thousand chipmunks trying to climb a blackboard.

Sarah shuddered without knowing why.

"Sarah!" The voice that called her name was both feminine and familiar, which was the only reason why Sarah wasn't already 50 feet away and accelerating. Still, the muscles in Sarah's legs didn't completely relax until she lifted her head and saw Lisa bearing down on her like a freight train with ringlets.

"Hi, Lisa." Sarah said, attempting to project a degree of nonchalance that would have been more convincing if she hadn't last been seen running in terror from images of Robin Williams.

"What in God's name is going on with you, Sarah?" Lisa asked with frustration, but her expression softened as she noted Sarah's soaked clothes and haunted eyes. "Are you all right?"

Sarah thought about telling Lisa exactly how far from 'all right' she really was. She thought about telling her all about how a magical entity was determined to drag her back to a place she never wanted to see again. She thought about telling her how he'd nearly drowned her in a mall bathroom until Something broke down the door.

Then she thought about having to spend the rest of her life in a room with padded walls.

The part of Sarah's brain that still hadn't quite caught up with recent events thought this was a very good idea. No public washrooms, it thought. I'd be safe! However, its optimism was firmly squelched by the rest of Sarah's mind, which was unwilling to wager the rest of their life on Jareth's possible preoccupation with hygiene.

"I'm fine." Sarah said at last, avoiding Lisa's eyes. She plucked nervously at the hem of her shirt.

Lisa's shirt, never one to pass up an advantage, was busy poking merciless fun at the soaked condition of the velvet.

"Why are you wet?" Lisa said.

Something about the set of the velvet's collar suggested that the blouse was treading on thin ice. It managed to make it clear that if the blouse ever got wet, the pieces would have to be re-assembled by tweezers. Shoddy workmanship like that can't hold together under any kind of pressure.

"I fell in the fountain?" Sarah said hopefully.

Lisa's blouse chortled merrily. Ha, it said, rasping its fibres together in a distinctly insulting way. Wouldn't have thought you could have looked worse, but I can admit when I'm wrong.

"Are you kidding me?" Lisa said.

Sarah's shirt, like Sarah itself, had been spending a lot of time around Jareth recently. It wasn't healthy for either of them. The shirt hadn't absorbed much magic during her last confrontation with Jareth, but it had gotten enough.

"There was this guy with a hose," Sarah tried again. "And he-"

Sarah's shirt reached out to the universe with what, for lack of a better word, we will call its mind. With a kind of malicious glee it tugged on the incorporeal strings here, and shot a bolt of energy there and...

The strange thrumming noise made Sarah break off in mid-lie. She looked up. So did Lisa.

Something odd was happening just below the mall ceiling. It looked as though a spherical patch of air roughly a foot across had suddenly decided that it needed a change, and was now attempting to squeeze itself into an area about two inches. The shimmering marble hung above them, emitting a slow pulsing hum.

Lisa and Sarah stared at it, their faces a study in contrasts as they were at totally different stages in the process of: "It's true, Little Girl! There *Is* Magic in the World!"

(The title is from a popular children's book in the Underground. It helps parents teach their children about the birds and the bees: namely, that the birds are occasionally royalty in disguise and that the bees are six feet tall and nasty when they're drunk.)

Lisa was at Stage One: Magic is Real! (Comes with dawning joy and excitement)

Sarah was at Stage Eight: Magic is Still Real, and Even More Irritating Than I Remembered It. (Comes with the strong desire to trap Reality in a dark alleyway and express your opinion of Magic being in the World in a very personal and physical way.)

Above their heads, something was changing. The colours dancing across the surface of the sphere were beginning to move faster. The humming noise was getting louder, and climbing to an impossibly high pitch.

The sphere was stretching and bulging and... there was a noise like someone sitting on a pound cake, and the sphere began to expand. As it stretched outwards it became transparent and pale tendrils stretched out from it like grasping fingers. It darkened to a sombre grey as it reached its final shape.

The miniature storm cloud hovered overhead, casting a menacing shadow over Lisa and Sarah.

Sarah shouted a warning at almost exactly the same time as the cloud let loose. However, in the horse race of causality only one event can come in first and in this case, it was the rain that would be taking home the gold trophy and the flowered headdress.

It wasn't normal rain. How could it be?

Instead, Lisa was suddenly standing in a vertical bath. The water didn't so much fall as much as it appeared out of nowhere, drenching Lisa to the skin without bothering to go to all the trouble of physically travelling the distance between her and the storm cloud.

The really interesting part was that, although the water was pouring from the storm cloud that was above both Lisa and Sarah, Lisa was the only one getting wet. The droplets *swerved* to find her, in some cases stopping only an inch above Sarah's head before suddenly making a sharp left turn and zooming sideways to hit Lisa in the eye.

Even after hitting Lisa, no drop of water escaped to so much as splash Sarah's shoes. Or, more to the point, Sarah's shirt.

Which was laughing hysterically.

*******

Elsewhere, two entities were engaged in communication. It is perhaps misleading to say 'elsewhere', since the plane on which they exist has virtually nothing to do with physical reality and can most accurately be described as a theoretical construct with an attitude problem.

The two entities communicated without words or gestures. You couldn't even pin it down by calling it telepathy, as these beings don't have thoughts in the same way that humans do, being entities that combine almost limitless power with an almost perfect understanding of the Universe. Note the almosts.

The visitor entity spoke in a voice like a hundred stars dying, and he spoke thusly:

"I am Techniqoutaxil! Second Companion to the Great Iafandirzis!"

Brief flurries of power spun briefly into existence, called by the strength of the Names, but finding no spell to bind them they dissipated back into space. Some of their residue found its way to a bucolic farming planet and settled on a simple peasant boy, giving him the power to turn any piece of gold into a large yam. It didn't really affect his lifestyle.

The other entity looked supremely unimpressed. If it had had anything as physical as nails, it would have looked at them. "Ethel. What'dya want?"

Techniqoutaxil looked vaguely nonplussed, but forged on.

"I have come to lay a demand at your feet!" He thundered. "My Masters are displeased! They would have a Destiny laid upon the worthless creature that has defied them! They are too merciful! The wretch deserves-!"

"Got the form?" Ethel's bored voice cut off the speech, preventing Techniqoutaxil from really getting into the dramatic possibilities of lava, acid, and wrenching molecular dissipation.

"My Masters are above forms!" Techniqoutaxil proclaimed. "We are the - "

"Look, Techie, you've gotta have the form."

Power started to stir again, but collapsed into confusion when confronted by the use of the nickname.

Many historians place the blame for the sinking of Atlantis squarely on the head of a young novice whose last words were reportedly along the lines of, "Oh, the protection spells do so know who I mean by 'Archie'!" He was assisting in a routine summoning of the minor demon Archentiala at the time. Names are Power, but nickNames are dangerous.

Techniqoutaxil looked down at what, if you used a lot of imagination, could have been his feet.

"I, Techniqoutaxil, second Companion to the Great Iafandirzis!... do not have the form." Techniqoutaxil admitted, then said: "Nobody told me!" Whole galaxies of petulance elbowed their way into the sentence.

"Uh huh." Ethel said with resignation. Like everyone that had to deal with the public on a regular basis, Eth was well aware that nothing was ever the fault of the people who came to see her.

Destroyed an entire civilization? "That planet jumped in front of me, I swear!"

Accidentally summoned Pryxti, the energy leech? (Also 'letch', but let's not go there.) "I thought I was just reading my grocery list out loud..."

Like her terrestrial counterparts, years of dealing with hordes of self-proclaimed saints had left her with a rather cynical view of the universe. Unlike her terrestrial counterparts, Ethel's relative omnipotence let her know without a shadow of a doubt that no matter how bitter, jaded or downright paranoid she got... she didn't know the half of it.

"Down the hall," Ethel said calmly. "First star on the right, straight on until morning. Brenda will get you the right form."

Techniqoutaxil was gone and back within seconds, folding several realities into halves and destroying one completely in order to make it back before closing time. He held the document out to Ethel with an expression of almost pathetic eagerness.

Ethel took it and settled down to ignoring him, focusing her attention fixedly on everywhere in the universes that didn't contain a second Companion to the Great Iafandirzis.

"When can we expect it to be done?" Techniqoutaxil seemed to notice his pleading tone for the first time and drew himself back up to his full height, pulling a cloak of crackling energy around him like a shield. "I mean, we demand that this be done at once!"

"Sure." Ethel said, and yawned. "We'll let you know."

Techniqoutaxil departed in a huff as Ethel glanced over the document.

A few seconds later, the distillation of everything Sarah Williams had been, was now, or ever would be landed on top of a large pile of documents. In defiance of all natural laws, there was a coffee stain on it.

______

Tell me what you think?

Note: Sorry for the delay in getting this part out. A lovely lady named Jinni put up a Willow/? challenge on one of my lists. Needless to say, that was something I couldn't pass up. But, after writing Willow/Jareth, Willow/Lacroix and Willow/Draco, I think I've finally got that challenge out of my system for the moment. Although who knows... I may wake up tonight consumed with the idea of writing a Willow/Hoggle fic. *g*

God, I hope not.

Next part is new, you know. Ack!