As I blinked the sleep out of my eyes, I started to notice a few odd things. For one, the woman in my arms ended at the waist. For another, her hair was long and blond, with a thick braid down her back. It had been medium length and brown the night before.
It took me another minute or so to remember. We had been doing some more testing of Diana’s magical abilities last night, and she had been trying out several new looks. She had managed to make five duplicates of herself at once to compare a bunch of new hairstyles, which was two more than she had been able to do before. She had also been practicing some more with using the various parts of her body without keeping them attached to her all the time.
I turned in the bed to face the other way, where I saw two of her lower halves, as well as another upper half. This one had short red hair. There was another of her, in one piece this time, lying on a futon on the other side of the room, with bright pink hair done up in a ponytail.
I staggered down the hall to Diana’s old room, where I found the other three duplicates from last night sprawled on top of the covers. One had a think mass of black curls, one had bright white hair in a short bob, and the other had bright green hair and was colored blue from head to toe. Evidently, we had been getting a little creative with Diana’s transformations.
The inventory completed, I wandered down to the kitchen to make breakfast so Diana could work on getting herself together. I had bacon on plated when she came down the stairs in her undershirt and shorts. She seemed to be sticking with the short red hair. It suited her.
“Good morning, Derek,” she said, yawning.
“Morning,” I said. “Love the new do.”
“Thanks.”
“You sure you don’t want to stay with the blue-skinned one?”
“Maybe on Sundays,” she said. “Bacon me.”
I served plates and sat down at the table. “So, it looks like we’re running a little low on groceries. We’re going to need to go shopping by the end of the week.”
“How is our money situation doing these days, by the way?” she said, taking a bite of toast.
“Well, we can definitely keep going on our savings for the rest of the month,” I said, “but after that, we’re going to have to start thinking about job hunting again.”
“That’s going to suck,” she said. “I haven’t even thought about work since all this started. It’s going to be hard to explain the huge gap in my work history.”
“Yeah. After all the stuff we’ve been through, I can’t imagine going back to a regular job.”
Over the past several weeks, since Diana and I became a serious item, we’d spent most of our time conducting experiments to try and figure out just how Diana’s magical abilities worked and what she could do with them. She had duplicated herself as many times as she could and tried to as many different things at once as possible. I had taken her separated head to the next town and back trying to find out how far apart her parts could be and still work, but I hadn’t found a limit yet. I had made her a miniature teleporting obstacle course to see how well she could travel without line of sight.
We had tried going to actual scientists long ago to see what they could tell us, but they were always reluctant after a few attempts, so we figured that the only way to really learn anything about magic was to do the experiments ourselves. We had spent so much time concentrating on her magic, and obviously amusing ourselves with it, that we had completely neglected anything resembling a source of income, ever since she first approached me with her head in her hands and we both decided to put our jobs on the back burner. Now, it was coming back to bite us.
We finished our breakfast, and she made a duplicate to make the cleanup go faster. Then, she separated one of her into pieces, and I hid them around the apartment so we could work on her ability to feel the location of her parts. She was starting to develop a sense for the state of her body when it was divided, and it was getting stronger.
I always enjoyed experimenting with Diana’s magic, especially with the playtime afterwards, but my heart wasn’t really in it this time. I was too worried about our finances. I didn’t really want to go back to software design, not with something literally world-changing right in front of me. It was bad enough that I lay in bed that night for at least fifteen minutes before I fell asleep.
In my dream, I was flying. It felt amazing. I was free of all my cares. I could do whatever I wanted.
I soared through the city, swooping between buildings and through archways. I flew down to street level, waved my hand, and the traffic parted before me. It was majestic.
As the haze of sleep cleared, I felt Diana shaking my shoulder and calling my name.
“Derek? Derek, wake up.”
“Wstfgl?”
“Derek, you need to wake up.”
I forced my eyes open. I found myself hovering about three feet above the bed. That was a new one.
I waved my arms feverishly, trying to reach something I could use to pull myself down.
“Diana? A little help?”
She stepped up onto the bed and climbed onto me, and I slowly drifted down onto the mattress. We lay there for a little while as I got my bearings back. “So, I had this weird dream last night.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you did,” said Diana. “So you can fly now.”
“Yep.”
She turned her head. “Still worried about money?”
“Yeah, a little. But that can wait.”
“Attaboy.” She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Let’s get back to work.”
We went back downstairs to the kitchen. She had already made a duplicate to get breakfast started.
After we were done eating, we started a new round of experiments, but this time the roles were reversed. We started with an epic game of The Floor Is Lava, where Diana got me to chase her through the apartment without touching anything solid. I got a little practice tumbling around and losing my attachment to up and down, since it didn’t seem to matter which way I faced. I could stay upside down for as long as I wanted without feeling like the blood was rushing to my head. My shirt didn’t even fall around my head. It was like I was floating.
After spending so much time tumbling around, I realized that I could basically choose my own gravity. I could fly by ignoring it altogether, or I could pick a different direction and walk on the walls and ceiling. I had to be careful not to jump around on the walls too much and put my foot through the drywall, and it was a pain to walk on the crappy popcorn ceiling, but I had a good time. It was like I was five again. One time, Diana took my hand and hung from me while I was on the ceiling, and when she held the right amount of weight, we just hung in midair.
After lunch, I moved on from anti-gravity to levitation. I told Diana about the part of the dream where I parted the traffic, but before I tried throwing cars around, we started with playing cards. With a little practice, I could deal a hand of poker with my mind. From there, I moved on to tying my shoes hands free. I couldn’t manage to turn on the TV on my first try, but I was able to press the buttons on the remote from across the room.
The fun part started when Diana took off her head and told me to try levitating that. I sent her head zipping around the room, and then to her surprise, I levitated the rest of her body and gave her a few somersaults. When she said she was starting to get a little queasy, I brought her to a stop and joined her back together. Then I floated up alongside her.
That was a good day. We’d never done that in quite that way before.
I spent dinner trying to eat with my hands behind my back, not even letting myself guide the movements with hand motions like I’d been doing. Trying to manipulate the cutlery that way was tricky, but it didn’t take me long to realize that with telekinesis, I didn’t need cutlery at all. I started floating bites of food into my mouth and forming globs of water to drink. Near the end, though, I just ate and drank the regular way. Using magic to eat was amusing, but a little complicated.
We spent the rest of the evening finding my speed and weight limits. I got to be able to fling playing cards pretty fast, but the faster I got, the worse my aim was. The same seemed to apply to weight. There didn’t seem to be a limit to how heavy of a thing I could move, but moving heavy things precisely was hard. We kept that in mind for if we ever wanted to rearrange the furniture. I didn’t wanted to knock holes in any walls with a runaway couch.
As I drifted off to sleep that night, exhausted, I was still a little worried about our income in the back of my mind, but I was starting to think that our magical abilities could be monetized somehow. I couldn’t think of a way that Diana could make money at a regular job by dividing herself in half, but being in half a dozen places at once had to be worth something, and there were all sorts of jobs that involved moving things around a lot. After we really refined our abilities, we were going to sit down and start getting some money coming in.
In my dream, I was a powerful wizard. I could sculpt the world with a wave of my hand. The apartment became a palace. My car became a limousine. My clothes became a tuxedo. I wanted for nothing.
I laughed at all the people I saw going to work, doing ordinary jobs. I didn’t need to submit myself to any of the drudgery. I was free.
When I woke up, Diana was curled up alongside me, her hand on my chest. She hadn’t separated or duplicated herself before bed last night, or done anything else with her magic. I guess she was more focused on me yesterday, or else the same old thing was getting old. When I looked down, though, I saw that my usual sleeping clothes had been swapped for a tuxedo.
That woke me up in a hurry. I quickly got up and made a scan of the apartment, just to make sure that I hadn’t changed anything else into fancy things in my sleep, but everything else was as before. The apartment was still average, and my car was still crappy. By the time I got back, Diana was awake.
“Oh, wow,” she said. “Another dream, huh?”
“Yeah, a big one this time.” I gave her the executive summary.
“Whoa,” she said. “You weren’t kidding. Well, I guess that solves our money problems.”
“What do you mean? Clothes are nice, but we still have bills to pay.”
“And? Just make some money.”
“What? Just like that?”
“Why not?”
Well, why not? I sat down on the bed and tried to make some money happen. I laid my hand on the bedspread and concentrated, and when I lifted it, there was a twenty-dollar bill. I picked it up and rubbed it between my fingers.
“Awesome!” she said. “There we go!”
“No, it doesn’t quite feel right,” I said. “I think I did the serial number wrong, and this seal is totally sloppy. There’s way too much detail in a bill for me to duplicate one. Besides, forgery is still a crime. I don’t want to go to federal prison for magic.”
“Well, come on,” said Diana. “There’s got to be something valuable you can make.”
I thought back to my physics classes in college for a moment. “You know what, I bet there is something I can do about that. First, though, there are a few things I have to take care of.” I took Diana’s hand and raised her to her feet, and I twirled her around. As she spun, her undershirt and shorts changed into a long red gown with matching arm-length gloves. She seemed to approve, judging from the way she wrapped her arms around my neck and buried her face in mine. We drifted down the stairs to the kitchen, where I set her down on the kitchen counter and laid my hand next to her. I focused for a few seconds, and then I wiped my hand across a patch of the Formica. A bar of yellow metal appeared, in a swirl of light.
Diana’s eyes grew wide. “Is that…is that a gold bar?”
“I hope so,” I said. “I learned the periodic table in school, and I’m pretty sure I can remember the electron configuration of gold. If that’s not enough to make it real, I don’t know what is.”
“And it’s a lot safer to make than currency,” said Diana. “There’s no watermarks or anything, just chemical composition.” She picked it up. “Wow, it’s heavy.”
“Yeah, the standard for a gold bar like that is almost 30 pounds.”
“So how much is this worth?” she said.
“Um, I’m not sure. Let me check.” I got my phone and did a quick search. “Whoa.”
“What?”
“At current prices, a bar of pure gold that size is worth almost half a million dollars.”
“Hah!” She almost dropped it, she was so excited. “What was that about a job? We’re set now!”
“Well, it’s a good start,” I said, “but we can’t do this forever. If we start selling gold left and right, we’ll lower the price. We might even crash the economy a little.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said, “but this should at least give us a good boost, enough to square our debts and give us a seed to start something really lucrative. Besides, neither of us is a glutton. We can make this last for a really long time. Especially if I do this.”
She walked around the kitchen table, creating duplicates as she went. Each one was wearing a different color gown and gloves, in all the colors of the rainbow, and each one held an identical gold bar. When she was done, there were six of her standing all around me, and she had about three million dollars in gold in her arms.
We went out for a very nice meal to celebrate, without the duplicates since we were out in public. I had tried to conjure some good food at home, but I turned out to be even worse at cooking than at forgery. It turned out that making complex organic compounds required more effort and concentration than I was willing to put into dinner.
We spent the rest of the day experimenting with the things I could conjure and finding a buyer for the gold. The guy was really curious about where we’d found so much gold, but Diana had a decent story prepared about an inheritance. He made an appointment for the following week. We both slept very well that night, between silk sheets.