The first cup of coffee that day really hit the spot. I had breakfast in the kitchen, got dressed, then peeled off the rest of the wallpaper while I thought about what to do next. It was good to have that finally out of the way. The living room walls were ready to paint now.

I didn’t know when I was going to get to redo the kitchen cabinets, at this rate, but it would happen eventually. It wasn’t in my nature to slack, but I wasn’t slacking. I was exploring a new world.

The crypt was musty, and had horrible air handling. I wondered if I could run a power cord down there and install an air purifier. I didn’t see why I couldn’t run a cord, since I could dangle rope in, but it was something to test.

I wanted to test whether Life Drain would work on Earth, so I walked outside. I didn’t see Kathy, but Roxy and Rover were happily chasing each other in my backyard. They stopped chasing to bark at me.

I had a feeling that the fence wasn’t going to get done as soon as I’d anticipated, so I paused to make friends. I squatted down and offered my hand, and they took some curious sniffs. Soon I was giving the neck scritches and we were pals. It was good to take a few minutes out of my agenda to just appreciate life. Dogs didn’t have an agenda. They just were.

Eventually, though, they decided to go back home. It wasn’t hard to find some weeds. I had some runaway ivy – not poisonous, but it would take over the lawn if I let it. I touched it, and said, “Drain Life.”

Nada.

Magic did not work on Earth.

I wondered if that was why I got the headaches when I teleported up. I could cross the barrier using magic – the barrier itself had to be magical – but I paid a cost on arrival. Using the same ability entirely on Amaranth wasn’t a problem. It also explained the puzzle; Enash couldn’t just open a gate from his world to mine, but he could, with his much greater command of magic, push through the parts of a gate one piece at a time.

I drove to my storage unit and got the last of my stuff. The sooner I quit paying for storage, the better, even though it wasn’t a major expense in the big picture of things.

I couldn’t keep my mind off of Xyla. Those lovely green curves. But there was also the question of what to tell her. Actually, that was true of any relationship I’d have on Earth, too. What did being honest in a relationship mean when I had two bodies, could travel between two worlds, and sometimes had a megalomaniacal necromancer in my head? Being honest would just make women think I was crazy.

Kathy was out on her porch when I got back, sitting on a wooden chair with a laptop, typing away. She looked up as I pulled my van into the driveway, and I waved. She seemed to take that for an invitation, because she put her laptop down and walked over to me as I was unloading the van.

“Still moving in, huh?” she asked. “I hired movers, when I got here.”

I nodded. “I had to hire movers to take stuff down from Boston into storage. But I can mostly do everything myself. I don’t have any really big pieces of furniture that don’t break down.”

“Ah. No couch?”

“No. Hey, you’ve been here a while?”

“A couple of years.”

“Anything I should know about the neighbors.?”

“Maybe? They don’t talk to me much. Nothing bad about it, it’s just not a very social group unless you have kids. The parents bond at the bus stop, but if you’re single — like I take it you are, and I am — then you’re kind of out of the loop here. Either that or they just don’t like me, but I don’t have any reason to think that. Let me know if you have any better luck.”

I chuckled. “I keep myself pretty busy, I don’t know that I’ll have a lot of time to socialize.” Normally I’d make the time, whenever I needed a rest from physical work.

“What do you do for a living?”

I told her about the house flipping.

“Oh, so you won’t be here long.”

I shrugged. “Haven’t decided. Maybe this is the place I settle down.”

“Ready to retire rich, eh?”

“I wish! How about you?”

“Software sales. I travel, sometimes, but most of my work is remote. Say, it’d be nice if I had a buddy who I could tell when I was going to be away, so they could keep an eye out, you know? I had a deal with the Graysons like that, although honestly I don’t know that either of them would have even heard if anything happened. They were both pretty deaf.”

I nodded. The Graysons had sold me the house. They seemed like nice folks. “Sure. I can do that, if I’m home. Pick up your mail, and hold it for when you get back?”

“Yes. And you know, well, if you don’t see me around for a while, and I’m not on a trip, come check on me? My sister and my parents are out west, and I don’t have any family here. I always think if something happened to me, no one would ever know.”

I smiled. “Sure,” I said. “Any reason something’s going to happen to you?”

She shook her head. “Not that I know of! And I can do the same for you.”

“That’d be great,” I said, because it was the thing to say, not because I wanted her to check on me. I supposed if I was to die on Amaranth, someone would find the gate eventually, and it might as well be Kathy. I’d just have to not die, that’s all.

“Nice. Let me know if you ever want to, you know, hang out. Watch Netflix and — Netflix or something.”

I smiled. “Sure. I’d like that.” And I would, too, I just didn’t know how I was going to fit it in. “I’ll let you know.”

“Great. Well, back to the grindstone,” she said, and with a little wave, she headed back to her porch, and her laptop. I finished unloading.

Once that was done, I started putting aside things to bring down to the crypt. A notebook, so that she could draw me a rough map, and so that I could draw maps over the course of my travels. A pen. Chocolate bars, obviously. The way that had appealed to Xyla led me to wonder if she’d like some other things. Tea? Coffee? Beer? Cola? Some little electronic thing? Of course, the batteries would run out, but electronic gadgets might still be useful, like an item with a limited number of charges in a role-playing game. I didn’t know what existed in her world. For all I knew, while he’d been asleep in his tomb Amaranth had gone through the industrial revolution. But at least Xyla’s corner of the world had clean, fresh air.

What I could use now was an old-fashioned mechanical compass, since GPS wouldn’t work and it would be easy to get lost. I ordered one online and splurged for overnight delivery. Of course if Amaranth didn’t have magnetic poles, that wouldn’t work either.

I forced myself to at least put on the first coat of Comfortable Gray. Realtors loved off-white walls, and the plan had always been to flip the house in a year or so, so I had the paint.

But that wasn’t still the plan. The house had the entrance to the other world, and that meant that I couldn’t, wouldn’t, sell it. Maybe I could pick up the puzzle and reassemble it somewhere else, but that seemed like an awfully big risk. I’d be risking giving up a whole world.

I’d be giving up being Abby, too. I’d been avoiding thinking about that. I wouldn’t have chosen a body like that, but there was certainly something nice about having curves.  Obviously, automatic consent for groping boobs. I thought there was more to it than that, though, and a part of me wondered what that said about me, which is probably why I was finding reasons to put off going through the gate.

I put it off some more by making the rope ladder, which took me an hour or so. I added a measuring tape to the things I was bringing down, stripped, and went down into the crypt. The rope ladder was a big improvement over hauling myself up and down hand over hand. I stopped for a moment after my body transformed, not to grope myself, because I wanted my hands on the ladder, but just to take stock of how I felt.

I felt pretty damn good, and a little excited.

I looked at the pile of clothes I’d left behind the night before, but ignored them for now, and started measuring.

38DD. Yeah, I started with that. 26 inch waist, and 36 inch hips. I was about five feet, nine inches tall. Size eight shoes, based on which of the thrift store shoes had fit me. I wrote it all down in my notebook. By that time I was half hard from running my hands and the tape over my body. I was tempted to go right up and do some shopping.

Nice body I built you, huh?

I refrained from pointing out that he’d hardly done it for me. He’d intended it for himself. I put my foot on the rope ladder and started climbing, intending to order myself some new clothes.

Maybe that wasn’t the most important thing, but with a new world to explore and a new body, it was very hard to prioritize. My carefully made schedule was obsolete.

Wait.

I kept climbing.

I have something to tell you.

Against my better judgment, I stopped, partly because I didn’t want to change into Abel again right then. Being a naked man on the way to order clothes for my mostly female self was not a great visual, and I couldn’t use the internet as Abby.

Huh, maybe I could run some CAT-5 or something downstairs, too. I wasn’t a heavy gamer so I’d been strictly wi-fi for a while, but the old-fashioned way might work.

Too many projects!

Look, I said I was going to cooperate. When they were hunting me down, toward the end, I hid some of my stuff. A wand, and other things. Things that will be useful to you. Magic things.

“Yeah?” I was intrigued now. Getting a wand was a priority, although there were so many priorities.

I think I can find the way, although it’s probably overgrown now, and it might be dangerous. It wouldn’t be for me, of course, but for you? I left behind some zombies to guard it, with a particularly long lasting enchantment. But you should be okay if you have a gun.

I sighed. I knew, deep down, that Enash would love for me to go on a murder spree. But he probably didn’t want me killed, and yeah, having a gun was probably smart.

So I called Sandra. Sandra’s dad had been a hunter, and Sandra liked to go down to a range and shoot now and then. Her dad’s old guns were still in a gun cabinet in her basement.

“Hi Abel,” she said. “I didn’t figure I’d hear from you for a while. You’re always so focused when you get into a new place.”

Focus was something that had been lacking for a while. “I’ve got a problem,” I said.

“Something your own right hand can’t take care of?”

Punching zombies seemed like a bad idea. Better than not punching them, if it came to it, I suppose. “Yeah, something – ah, I got you. Um, no, that wasn’t what I meant.”

Sandra laughed. “So if it’s not a booty call, what is it?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain.” And saying that didn’t sound suspicious at all. I should have planned this out better. I couldn’t tell her that I needed a gun to hunt zombies, because she’d think I was crazy. I couldn’t have no reason at all, because that would make it sound like I intended to kill someone. So I had to take a different kind of risk. Sandra and I knew each other, and we both knew we saw other people, so she wouldn’t be jealous, right?  It wasn’t always that simple. “I met a girl.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re going mono.”

“No, no. Not that. Anyway, she lives out in the woods, in bear country. And I was thinking that if we were going to walk around there, I’d like to be armed.”

“Don’t want to be relying on a girl to protect you, Abel?”

“Sure, we’ll go with that.”

“I can give you some advice, I guess. When are you going to visit her?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Wow, she must be some girl! In the middle of a house project, too!”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t.

After a pause, Sandra said, “I’m happy for you, Abel. I’d like to meet her sometime.”

“She’s shy right now,” I said. “But yeah, that’d be great.”

“So, let me get this straight. You want me to loan or sell you a gun, so you can look all macho in front of your new girl?”

I shrugged. Punching zombies would be macho. I wanted to avoid the machismo and just blow their heads off. “Yes, I’d like you to loan or sell me a gun,” I said. “So that I can protect myself.”

Sandra laughed. “This is one of those moments I find so hard to explain to Bill.”

Bill was Sandra’s latest boyfriend, the most recent candidate for “the one.” It was Sandra who might go monogamous someday, not me, and we both knew it. Bill accepted that she was polyamorous for now, sort of kind of. “Yeah, I bet it’s an eye-opener for him.”

“Anyway, I’ll do it. Some of my dad’s old pieces should be perfect for a bear; too much kick but plenty of impact. Meet me at my house at five-thirty? And maybe we can snuggle some, too?” By snuggle she meant make out, at the minimum, and probably sex.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Not an overnight, though.”

“Gotcha,” she said.

I had a little time to kill before leaving to go to Sandra’s, even given rush hour, so I ordered some bras, some tops, some skirts, some jeans, some panties, and a little black dress.