“Alright guys, listen up!” Rodrick paced back and forth in the laboratory once again. The initiates often felt a little weary now about being summoned here. as most times it ended in pain. “Today we will be teaching you the most important technique that has ever come out of etheric manipulation. We don’t actually have a name for this because it is mostly theoretical and the success rate is, well, a little lower than we’d like. I think, for convenience, I’ll just call it Cosmic Jumping and see if the name sticks.”
“Cosmic Jumping?” said Sam. “You mean like travelling between worlds? The way Mr. Silver did it eight hundred years ago?”
Rodrick smiled and pointed at her, he was feeling particularly joyful today. “You are correct, dear Sam! You are all probably thinking: how can Old Mr. Rodrick teach this to us if he’s never done it before? Well, I’m a student here just as you are. Perhaps a demonstration will suffice?”
Rodrick closed his eyes and stood as still as a stone. He took a deep breath and clapped suddenly, and in a flash of light he disappeared! Victor ran forward and waved his hand where Rodrick was standing to check if he had merely disguised his presence, but his physical and etheric bodies were gone!
“I’m not invisible,” said Rodrick from the doorway. “I’m just somewhere else! Just as a Vampyre can inadvertently congeal physical matter around its etheric body to create a new form, I was able to cast my etheric body to another location and then – using alchemy – deconstruct my body and reconstruct it somewhere else!”
“But a Vampyre can only perform a morbid reconstruction at best. You did it flawlessly!”
“But I am no Vampyre, now, am I?” Rodrick returned to his place in the lab. He rolled his shoulders and stretched, as if he had been cramped up in a tight spot for too long. “Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that. While you don’t think you know exactly how your body is made the fact is that you actually do, but we suspect that you can only transform physically back into your own body and not somebody else’s. What I recreated was my residual image; me based on how I see myself in the mirror. As such, Ling reported to me that after my first ‘jump’ that the scars on my back changed shape, ever so slightly.” He clapped his hands – but didn’t disappear this time – and said: “So, who would like to try it?”
They were hesitant at first, and for good reason. At last Sam asked: “If we get it wrong, will we die?”
“Yes,” Rodrick answered. “Or you will be horribly disfigured.” Despite the seriousness of the situation he found the pale shock in their eyes to be a little humorous.
“Well,” said Gretel, “That’s comforting.”
Putting all jests aside, it was easy enough to practice this technique by moving small inanimate objects like rocks or pencils, but because of the rule that one could not fully transmute another living thing, the only way to practice that part was on themselves. It was terrifying beyond all imagining. When Victor at last tried it he felt himself floating through the air, as light as a feather, and focused his attention on where he wanted to go. He assumed having his entire body be ripped apart into tiny molecules would be painful, but when it finally happened he felt nothing at all. He felt like air. Consciously he wasn’t sure how he managed to put himself back together again – looking back it all happened rather quickly – but he guessed that some instinct deep inside knew exactly what to do. There was an awful strain on the muscles, however, after each ‘jump’, and like Rodrick he doubted if he’d ever really get used to it.
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