Note: all characters are over 18, as established in previous chapters.
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Master of Elements: Chapter 10 - In search of weakness
"We have to endure what the gods send." Euripides
Jenny got up from the chair where she had been sitting for the previous six hours with only a few short breaks and stretched her stiffened limbs. In truth here in the Aether world her body was a mental construct rather than strictly speaking real, but the mind tended to fill in the details it expected, so you could still feel both pleasure and pain.
The Mistress of Earth gave me a tired smile. "Jen has been dismissed by the Creature back to her rooms, so I have put her to sleep, which in turns means I can have a break. Its hard work controlling her, it needs a lot of concentration, so I'll welcome the rest."
"Did you find out any more about the 'Theia' question? It seems our best lead to date."
"No, not this time. I'm afraid to push it too hard in case the Creature becomes suspicious."
"Never mind. You are doing brilliantly," I said and gave her a hug. I meant it too. I was astounded by the fortitude this young lady, still a month short of 19, was showing. It had to be mentally gruelling to have to carefully watch everything you said while at the same time probing for information.
Jen was the name we had given to our creation. It wasn't exactly a clone, having none of Jenny's DNA in this unreal world, although it had plenty of her personality. Athena had suggested that it was technically a 'simulacrum', that is a representation of someone, in this case Jenny. But however accurate a description that was, it was scarcely catchy. So we did what people do and gave it a name, initially 'spare Jenny' or 'Jenny Two' but finally just 'Jen' and that was what had stuck.
It had been my idea, inspired by Jenny's story of the soulless human appearing servants the Creature had made to see to her needs and, no doubt, keep watch on her. Given Jenny had said they were made from the elements, I figured that whatever our enemy could do the Mistresses of Elements could do as well. And, after a lot of trial and error, I was proved right.
Jenny, Mistress of Earth, created the body. Being far more complex than, for example, a simple item of furniture, this took several days but proved well within her ability to do. In fact her main complaint was that it would have been far easier for her to construct a likeness of any one of the rest of us, who she could see and copy, than it was of herself, who she couldn't. We eventually solved that problem using mirrors plus a lot of well-meaning but probably confusing commentary, which Jenny accepted with good grace.
Once she finished we had a body that exactly resembled Jenny on the outside although it neither had nor needed all the internal organs a human requires. Matsu seeped the power of Water through Jenny's creation, giving it flexibility and suppleness and Freya supplied the element of Air to give it the appearance of breath, the ability to speak and a certain graceful lightness of movement.
Brigit it was who supplied the spark of seeming life, imbuing the creation with energy through the power of Fire. It was a weird and eerie sight to see the copycat Jenny move its limbs and seem to breathe. However, it was as yet mindless and it was Athena who applied the finishing touch, using the power of Aether to psychically link the real Jenny to this copy of her.
Once ready, Jenny had spent several days in practicing controlling her curious new sibling and learning to see and hear as if through her eyes and ears. She quickly improved her ability to act realistically through Jen until even I and the girls couldn't tell them apart. Then we returned the Creature its bride, only it got Jen rather than Jenny and we got the perfect spy and inside agent.
I think we all expected our enemy to detect the ruse at once but we had not reckoned that, for all its power and intelligence, it had little understanding or recognition of humans as individuals. It was soon obvious that Jen passed muster as being human in the eyes of the Creature, therefore Jenny got to work. My instructions to her were not just to pick up any clues she could but to actively talk to the Creature and probe for information. It proved surprisingly willing to join in with this; we realised it was doing the same to Jen, trying to understand more about humanity.
And it was in this way we found our clue, something from the Creature's origins and its first confrontation with humanity, something called Theia. Jenny through Jen had drawn it into a discussion on this topic without much success but the Creature did reveal in passing that both it and its enemies drew on the power of Theia. The problem was we didn't know what that meant and our enemy would not be drawn further on the matter. So I set the cleverest among us, Athena, to work on the issue while Jenny continued to dig for more information.
The major downside of this spying operation was that although Jenny could control Jen from thousands of miles away in this world she could not do so from a totally different plane of existence, that is to say our own Earth. Therefore there was no choice but for her to remain in the Aether world for the duration of Jen's existence and in turn that meant Jenny's real body would stay in a coma back home.
I was unwilling to let Jenny remain here alone, without comradeship and some degree of protection, so we organised a rota. Brigit, Freya and Matsu took it in turns to be in the Aether world and keep Jenny company. Athena was excused as she was needed to send the others back and forth and so had to stay in our home world. Her spare time was spent in trying to understand more about our enemy, reading and rereading the notes Gwydion Jones had left with her.
I no longer needed Athena's services to travel between the two worlds. She had explained to me how it was done and, having some modest control of the power of Aether myself, after some practice I found I could freely move myself back and forth, although I lacked the strength to do the same with others. I confess that I was rather proud of that and used this new ability to split my time between the Aether world and Greece, keeping a concerned eye on all our affairs and my girls and helping Jenny and Athena as best I could.
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