Oberan grinned widely. “You better believe it. The limit to my power reaches far beyond your imagination.”
“Only if you’re lucky.”
“Shut up.”
“So it’s random?” Zipper asked. “How many times per day?”
“You’re not telling her,” Oberan hissed. “You’ve blabbed too much already. You want no violence? Learn to negotiate. As soon as she knows what she wants to know, she’ll attack.”
“As much as I dislike to agree with him, he does have a point.” He sighed. “Let us make a deal.”
“I’m listening.” Zipper said.
“Firstly, could you stop that,” he pointed at the crackling ether around her hand and fingers. “In return I can promise you I will stop any trick he tries to pull.”
“Secondly, I want to put on my clothes.” Oberan didn’t even wait for her consent, just walking over to the windowsill, where the garments were haphazardly thrown around. Most disturbingly was the fact that the mortalborn did not appear in the reflection of the room, nor did his clone. he gave the doppelganger a strange look, then began pulling on his boots.
“Why are you following me around? Go stand over there.”
“I can’t. I need to remain by your side. Anyway, miss, what are your demands?” the clone spoke, drawing the girl’s attention to the two Oberan’s and the window behind them. “We wish only to leave with our life--”
“--and all our limbs.”
“And that, yes.”
“No extra holes in us either.”
“What he said.”
“And give the Innkeep a hard slap in the face.”
“You can’t do that!” He coughed in his hand. “Now, barring that last bit, is that agreeable?”
“It’s not,” Bran interjected. “Put freedom in there too.”
“Shhhhhh,” Zipper shushed. “I’m thinking.”
“If that’s your thinking face, you’d better stop. It’ll get stuck.”
And maybe that was the final straw that broke the camel’s back, but the ether missile flared to life again, hurled at Oberan’s head. It bore a hole in the wall where his head was but a trill ago, and she threw a 2nd one, this time shattering the window, scattering glass shards all over the room.
She readied a third ether missile, but someone grabbed her hand.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” a chipper voice said. When Zipper turned around, her anger turned to confusion, then fear, then straight back to sheer rage. She was face-to-face with her own clone: only one that positively exuded radiance. “No violence in the bedroom! Please? Pretty please? We’ve been horrible to the decor.”
“About time,” Oberan grumbled, “I’ve been on the back foot for far too long.” Hopefully this clone would be as detrimental to the woman’s efforts of vaporizing him as his own clone had been to his attempts at not spilling secrets.
“Finally someone reasonable!” Oberan’s clone exclaimed. “Welcome, miss..?”
“O’Connor. Please to meet you.”
“Let go of me!” But the clone would not budge for Zipper. It smiled its too-pleasant smile, the kind you see on the faces of recruitment posters prior to a war.
“Zipper, you can’t be rude. You gotta let them go out free into the world. Like baby foxes all grown up.”
“Baby foxes?” Oberan blurted out incredulously.
“An apt metaphor,” his clone nodded sagely.
“NO, IT’S NOT,” Zipper shouted. She charged an ether missle in her other hand and all but rammed it straight into the skull of her clone as she shot it forth, who smiled all the way to her messy death.
“Woah. Brutal.” Oberan’s clone wasn't as impressed, instead he looked disgusted, making a face of immense disappointment and disapproval.
“Yes, I agree.” said polite-Zipper, popping out of another shard of glass, her own ether missile prepped and ready. “Go free, young foxes! Go free! I’ll save nature with my life!” She placed herself in between Zipper and the Oberans. “Fiona Zippormaria O’Connor, I am a servant of the secret Ether, the flame of Emea. The dark ether will not avail you.”
“NO, DON’T YOU DARE. DON’T YOU FUCKIN’ DARE, YOU CUNT.”
“You,” Clone-Zipper smirked the smirkiest smirk that ever smirk. She somehow made it classy too. “Shall not pass.”
Oberan had seen enough, and knowing that this probably was his only chance, he strode to the broken window, looking straight down at the street below. It wasn’t too far down… there was a crowd gathering, attracted by the destruction. While not ideal for a quiet escape, he could use it to disappear. Preparing to jump, a hand on his shoulder pulled him back.
“You can’t just leave her!” the clone urged, pointing at the battling Zippers. “She’s sacrificing herself for us!”
“That’s the point!” he growled at his clone, then rethinking his strategy. “Look, if we don’t make use of it, her sacrifice will be in vain. And there will be violence. Lots and lots of violence! Also, she’ll just return anyway.”
That seemed to win the doppelganger over, though he still protested. “At least take the stairs. You can’t just go jumping out the window.”
“Yes I can,” Oberan spat, dropping from the windowsill to the street below, not giving his clone a chance to stop him. A frustrated noise escaped the doppelganger’s lips, but he had no choice but to follow. The both of them broke their fall with a tight roll, quickly got back to their feet, and rammed themselves through the wall of people, the clone apologizing all the while.
A shard of stone lanced out at them, aimed to kill, only to be turned aside at the last moment by a second surge of either: a sign that the little clone spat above had moved far beyond tossing energy back and forth.
In the coming trials, a boatload other people --most of them guests at the same Inn Oberan had stayed in-- were reported to walk around with a twin of their own. Some people witnessed them crawling out from mirrors and windows, sometimes from the water’s surface, or from the blade of a knife. Demons, they called them, though most clones turned out to be well-mannered and polite --a sure sign they had come to drag the soul of their target to hell. People tried killing them, though they just popped back out of another reflective surface, causing some to desperately avoid every reflective object they could, sometimes reclusing to a dark room for several trials. Oberan meanwhile spent three trials in extreme annoyance as his clone did his utmost best to have him living a proper and normal life, thwarting all attempts at larceny, drinking, and mischief. He was more than a little glad when the three trials were over and the clone vanished into thin air.
And Zipper…
Zipper took it worst of all.
