Chapter 46: Withdrawal

Rick woke up staring at the ceiling, briefly disoriented. A convulsion clenched through his entire body, forcing him to roll onto his side. By the time it passed, he had started to remember.

Though his sense of time was utterly distorted, he thought that it had been a day or two since Melissa had moved him to a hotel. That was part of what had disoriented him at first, since he'd been expecting her room. Here they had privacy as well as hopefully a hidden location, if H did attempt to track him down.

Suddenly paranoid, Rick groped on the nightstand for his phone to check his messages. More from H disapproving of the family emergency and insisting that he continue his training to prepare for the upcoming fight. Also offers to send him more Formula T if he ran out, which now seemed doubly suspicious.

Setting down the phone, Rick lay back and tried to get the shivering out of his system. He wasn't sure if the paranoia was part of his withdrawal symptoms, but he definitely felt mentally unstable. But as Lisa had pointed out, feeling this miserable overall was likely to have mental consequences entirely separate from the withdrawal. Not that it mattered, since he needed to suffer through it all regardless.

The one constant was the shaking, ranging from trembling in his fingers to painful convulsions. For most of one day he'd lived bent over the toilet, emptying his guts, but thankfully that seemed to have passed. He'd been running a fever for a while, though that symptom was allegedly a necessary part of healing. His body would wildly range from aching and just wanting sleep to suddenly overflowing with energy and needing to train.

Worst of all was the immense sense of weakness, even during his manic periods. When he tried to summon aura, it felt as if he didn't have enough lucrim, even though it was obviously there. Testing his Bunyan's Step, he'd frequently faltered out mid-way through the technique. Even his defensive core felt like it was constantly running on fumes.

He tried to tell himself that it was just a lie, his body demanding more Formula T and insisting that it couldn't cope without it. Sometimes it felt like he'd fall apart without the drug, but he forced himself to repeat his exercises no matter how wrong it felt.

Strangely, the cravings weren't as bad as he expected. Every eight hours he had an intense urge to take more Formula T, but if he could suffer through those times, it didn't consume his mind too much. He was still glad that Melissa had locked away all of it so that he couldn't be tempted. Being across the world from his source certainly made it easier to quit cold turkey.

"You doing okay?" Melissa came in, speaking gently as she always did. She'd brought food and water, so he made himself sit up.

"It could be worse, but I don't feel like the symptoms are getting any weaker. I was hoping they'd wear off after a day or two." As he spoke, Rick mechanically chewed and swallowed the bread, though it didn't taste like anything.

"Lisa said that it could be longer than that. She let me know she departed, by the way, so she should be here soon."

"That's good."

"Also, the library called back. Are you feeling good enough to talk? I'm not sure what you have in mind with them, but I assume you want to be at your best."

"Oh. I forgot... yeah, I'll try." Rick rubbed his eyes, which constantly felt filled with sand. "How bad do I look?"

"Well... you're not going to be winning any seals in the beauty contest part of the Showdown."

"Let me clean up and get myself awake. Then I should talk to them."

Shaving and washing his face helped a little, though his body insisted that it wanted to curl up and die. Rick forced himself to exercise and forced lucrim through all his old channels. It got adrenaline moving and made him feel briefly better, though his body would keep demanding more lucrim and eventually he'd slump back into withdrawal symptoms. Still, he should be alert enough for a phone call.

To his surprise, Melissa instead brought a small blue pyramid into the room. "Uh, they said we're supposed to use this thing for private communication? Not sure exactly how it works, but I'll let you figure that out. Let me know if you need anything else."

The pyramid was a strange communication device, but it was modern tech: it had idiot-friendly labels saying which side should be set down and a normal switch. Rick set it up at the side of the room and flipped the switch. After a bit of static, he saw Heather on the other side, sitting in the scroll room of the library.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "Given what you said about wanting to quit the whole fucking Showdown, I wasn't sure what to make of it..."

"I'm fine." A blatant lie, but she didn't need to know about his withdrawal symptoms. "But I'm going to leave and you said to remember the public libraries. I'm willing to cooperate with you in any way, I just don't know how valuable what I know is."

Heather winced. "I hope I didn't set your expectations too high, but... probably not very. There are a shit ton of people who fail or quit the junior leagues, so we have some information that way. It's the top levels of the Showdown where we really need both information and sponsors."

"Yeah, I was afraid of that."

"But, listen, that doesn't mean I'm not glad you called. You've probably ran into some interesting things while you were traveling, right?"

"I hope so." Rick had thought through what he wanted to say, but wasn't sure where to start. Maybe with the most striking one. "I have direct evidence that some people are creating lucrim elixirs that are intended to addict the people taking them. Not just power addiction, but creating dependents. I don't think that's publicly known, is it?"

"No, but unfortunately that's 'dog bites man' type news. Don't get me wrong, if you really have evidence, I'm real fucking interested. But most people already assume that elite athletes are doping in unhealthy ways, just like corporations don't have our best interests at heart. It's normal."

He'd been afraid of that, but the rest might be grasping at straws. Since straws were all he had, Rick pushed on. "I may not have been at the top of the Showdown, but I've interacted with more immortals than you'd expect. There's some sort of competition between several major groups of them..." He went on to tell Heather about Josiah Craw, Qing Shan, and the others. Mostly he left out anything that sounded conspiratorial about H and Alger because he wasn't sure it would be believable.

Surprisingly, the thing that interested her most was the Triune Golden Spheres. Apparently they were a relatively rare technique and librarians would jump at the chance to publicly log it. Though Rick knew that would instantly tie the information to him, he was also likely to make a lot of enemies anyway, so he wasn't sure it made a difference.

When he was finished, Heather spent a while muttering curses under her breath, then finally nodded. "Okay. Let's just fucking do this. I should say, I didn't expect this to be so dramatic when I mentioned it to you, but I guess you don't do anything half way."

"Uh, what do you mean by doing this?"

"The public library system is a neutral party, so we can't get directly involved or help you materially. At least not right now - if you want to let us study the lucrim techniques you know, you'd be compensated for that. But I can pledge to help out with anything knowledge-related."

Rick could only nod. He knew that the library system sticking out its neck to help him had been a long shot and hadn't been counting on it. "Do you know any secrets about overcoming addiction or rebuilding lucrim portfolios?"

"I could send you some books, but..." Heather shrugged. "You probably know the basics already. No easy solutions there. Anything else?"

"What about ways of forging demonic bonds? I've been putting together an idea that would pair weak demons with poor humans."

Heather's eyebrows, which he only that moment realized were dyed the same green as her hair, shot up. "That is not what I fucking expected when I started this call. Hell, not what I expected from you at all. Hmm... though the library is not in the bond business, we do have a great deal of information about demonic contracts. If you can deliver everything you've said, I'd be happy to connect you to the right people."

"Great. Thanks, Heather."

"It was the least I can do. Really, I'm sorry I can't do more."

After the call ended, the blue pyramid went dead. It was probably far too much security for a simple conversation, but the public library system didn't mess around. Soon after Rick began shivering again, his adrenaline running out and his symptoms returning in force.

When he sat down on the side of the bed, clutching his stomach, he just tried not to black out for a while. But when he recovered enough to straighten, he saw Katenka floating beside the pyramid, regarding it curiously.

"I think this was the last step we needed, Rick. We don't have any real public libraries in Siberia, not in the sense you do here. But with their help combined with everything else, I think we can create the demonic bonds."

"Great." Rick turned over onto his side and tried to squirm under the covers. "Now we just have to survive the rest."

"I think you're doing better, and you'll have more help soon. Stay strong."

He nodded in response, but that wasn't what he'd meant. Rick knew that he'd get through the withdrawal - he was worried about what came after.