by Kit Falbo
Close-cropped brown hair that would be curly if it grew out, but it didn’t grow because it might interfere with how the costume fit me. A lack of sunlight requires me to take supplements. My plain brown eyes a stark contrast to Joontal's piercing blue ones. Even at twenty-three, I still feel like I look sixteen. Not that I don’t have muscle, supporting the suit takes work. It’s just that after looking so old for so long, now I look so young. My skin tight undersuit makes me look younger the way it holds my body. Wearing two faces is starting to take its toll, my own young face looks too weird.
I can hear the side door open as I take myself in. “You know the other girls feel sorry for me, that I’m working on a crotchety old man. You should see the pitying looks they give me.” Says the sweet, yet husky feminine voice off to my side. In the mirror I see she slithers up to me, putting her arms around me, allowing me to feel what is for me a rare case of skin to skin contact.
I shiver, feeling her touch. “Lady Mallory.” A professional title, not a royal one. “The House is known for its discretion. You probably could let a few know of the secret. Contracts bind the whole business.”
She lets her arms slide down me slowly. “I enjoy the deception, just like I know you enjoy yours. Anyway, even with contracts, sometimes things have been known to slip. Even if you're not very famous, I doubt you would enjoy your time in the papers. The company abhors the cost of breaking contract if it’s found out.” She kisses the back of my shoulder. “If I did tell them the secret, they might try to get time in themselves. Taking time away from me.”
“I’m glad to know you appreciate my company. I had a hard time staying a grumpy old man today.”
Lady Mallory detaches herself from me. “Are you sure you want to be an old man all the time? Most young men your age are out and about having fun, going to school or military service.“
Back to the counselor role now I see, this topic has started to come up more frequently in my weekly visits. “Doing this type of Magic is all I’ve ever wanted since I was little.” I say with more conviction than I feel. I watch her face. Either Mallory senses a little doubt, or her UI picked up on it and informed on me. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun as Talos. You don’t always have to be the great Wizard Joontal. Use that vacation you’ve accrued and disappear here and reappear as yourself. Get out from behind that wall of a persona that you are hiding behind and learn how to be the real you.”
The real me had been a shy magic and tech geek who’d left home as soon as he could get out of that stifling environment. I lucked into this job. I did a lot of research, planning and underhanded trickery to get it. But still, there was a lot of luck. Mallory has managed to pull that shy young man out of his shell so much, but the real me of today is a mystery. I just don’t know if I can do that. “Two more Magic Battles, even if they are the dregs of challengers, and I’ll move from my C-ranking to the B-ranks. I’m doing well enough that someone at least semi-famous will try to challenge me to put me in my place. Build up enough of a base with that, and then I can do a fountain of youth style transformation into a young man again and go from there. I’m not sure how Lowman would react to such a change though.”
Lady Mallory stares at me with her piercing blue eyes, “Is that really what you want?”
Was it? “Maybe, but it will be different, and the benefits available when you are in the B-ranks of the Association will give me some protection.”
She walks closer to me until I can feel her warm breath on my chest. “Speaking of protection?” She takes the conversation a different direction from what I’m expecting. ”Have you forwarded those threatening messages to the police or even Franklin?”
The messages are disturbing images, sound clips, nonsense words, my UIs couldn’t trace them, so I doubt the police will be much help. “That isn’t something Wizard Joontal would do. My suit..” I point to the pile on the floor. “Is much more protective than most people would think. I also have all my other systems set up, just in case.” Mallory may feel better if she knew the secret of some of my tech, but there are just some things I feel unsafe revealing even here.
“Franklin knows you’re not really Joontal.”
I shake my head, “Franklin would feel obligated to let the police know, and that is just not something I want to deal with. He runs a tight ship and knows I can handle myself.”
Mallory sighs in defeat, then wraps her arms around me in a hug. “If it’s any more than creepy letters, I want you to take this seriously. You’re a good one, and I don’t want to lose you, as a client or a friend. You take the powers that are available in this world and use them to make magic and bring happiness. Others are not so nice.”
Almost out of habit, I nearly let out a Joontal like snorting protest at the idea of bringing happiness, but I remember the birthday boy Jacen and the smile I wanted to give him. I hug her back, ”I promise, cross my heart, that if it gets much worse, I’ll deal with it appropriately.”
The rest of my two hours session is spent less mentally therapeutic and more physically, along with a dash of adult education. After pulling the suit up, as it crawled into place, I make sure to leave her a suitable tip. It’s one thing to be a cantankerous, mean, cranky, arrogant old man, and it is another to be a bad tipper.
Chapter Three
Next is home. I play with balls of colored light while I fly so those who may have stayed on my feed, even while it was cut during my private session, will have something to see before I end it for the night. There are always complaints by a few about not getting to see the ‘action’ from me being at The House of Mind and Body. And there are a few performers that cater to the adult mindset and show those type of encounters to the adult fans. I just don’t know what some of my fans expect or want out of wrinkly old Wizard Joontal in that respect. Maybe they don’t as well, and that is what interests them.
I reach my tower balcony, housed on the Lowman estate. Tomorrow is my day off, which means prepping for my Magic Battle in a few days. The room I enter is filled with books, floating and not, bubbling cauldrons and flasks, skulls of mythical beasts, and everything else that looks like it could have been bought at clearance from a prop department. Which, to be fair most of them had been, though I did modify them just enough not to be recognizable as the mass-produced originals. I quickly make my way to the mysterious peeling black door across the room. I open it to a swirling void and step inside. The effect ends when the door closes behind me, and my cameras automatically shut down.
For the second time today, I shed the form of Wizard Joontal into a predesignated pile by the door, onto the handy shoe rack. Muninn glides to a perch on the far side of the room. My room is ninety percent workshop, and ten percent bedroom with a cot and entertainment center tucked away in the far corner. Several matter printers are hard at work outputting designs I have been working on. One area has blueprints, designs and even some off the wall ideas. A computer is working away under the control of Booker, my second official UI, who handles research and paperwork mostly. He’s wearing my spare Joontal suit, without an actual body to fill it out, it looks very deflated and skinny at the same time. Tess, my tactics and design UI in the form of a spider with mini hands, sits at one desk putting together projects from printed parts that will need to be tested.
A makeshift security and safety testing chamber takes up the center of the room, half the time Tess constructs new equipment in there if any risk of spontaneous combustion or explosion. “I’m back!” I call to the UI crew.
Tess lets out a whistle of acknowledgment. Booker speaks with a gravelly male voice of a John Wayne fan. “Welcome back from your appointments Talos, information on your next opponent is rather sparse.” I nod towards Tess, you guys can tell me tomorrow.
The Association of Magic Users gives its members one of two options with User Intelligences. You could have one hyper-advanced multi-tasking partner. Which is what most go for, by having Muninn be my public one, I pretend I go that route as well. Or
you can have up to three so-called lesser ones that have more restrictions. The association is always kind enough to boost what the lesser ones can be maxed too whenever they produce a regulations update, which is frequent. I for my part always make sure they are top of the line and work fudging that line, if any leeway can be had. Each one of them is smarter than me. I would be dumb to not take full advantage of them.
There is already so much work going on, that it would be impossible to handle without them. Many more famous or popular wizards have their own trained support teams. The UI also has the advantage of not needing sleep. I assign Muninn the task of looking at historic successes and failures related to the format of the next Magic Battle before I crawl into bed and let the whirring of machines lull me into sleep.
Tiny hands crawling all over me wakes me up. “Oh god, Tess!” I grab the cat-sized, spider-like robot and throw it off my face. Like a cat, it rights itself before landing on the floor.
She lets out a long series of chirps and whistles while vigorously waving her hands at me. Booker speaks up, “She says that you’ve been slacking on your calorie intake. She suspects you skipped dinner last night. She doesn’t care if the audience doesn’t like watching someone eat. You need to take care of yourself better.” There was a time when I let all three of my UI speak to me. It didn’t last long.
“Yes, mommy.” I reply snarkily. “Feel free to adjust the morning meal as you see appropriate. I’ll be eating in while we discuss the coming action.” Most wizards don’t let their UI baby them. Most wizards are also fucking stupid for taking away UI independence and having them be just an advanced tool that only responds to direct requests. If the most I have to deal with is one poking me and telling me I’m not eating enough, I’m definitely getting the better end of the bargain.
I pull up the specifics for the upcoming Magic Battle, while Tess is synthesizing breakfast. Magic Battles are games designed to pit one user against another, testing the wielders skill, technology, deception, and will power. With dozens of different games, each with many variations on the rules, they are meant to be spectacular and entertaining. They also have a good chance of being bloody and dangerous. Before the Association was founded, deaths were common, and real fights over the rules and who won were frequent. I’ve had to deal with several broken bones, a concussion and regrowing my left pinky. Considering the extra destructive nature of the technology used, I’m proud to be able to say I have not seriously harmed any of my opponents. I did the most harm outside of the battles when I first did my job interview, three concussions and a handful of broken bones handed out that day.
There was so little info about this new opponent, with their initial challenge we’d ruled out several of the pattern oriented and random draw games as an option. Random is rarely genuinely random, and we didn’t have enough to go on. A popular one has both players given twenty targets they then take turns striking. Only three targets have value and whoever gets all three of their opponents’ targets first wins. The game had ancient roots in a game called battleship, which surprised me, as it had nothing to do with space battleships upon looking up its history.
For this match, we wanted to take advantage of my experience, power, and skill. I wanted to limit bodily harm, but since I had no information on the man’s defenses, it is tricky to know what might cause bodily harm. The Association has standards and precautions recommended by them. I grimace thinking back. Not everyone chooses to meet those precautionary standards. Tess and I decided ritual totem defense as the game. Rules are simple. Each player takes turns attacking their opponent's ritual totem with attacks that can be deflected by a B-class 10 cm defensive disk. Three clean strikes or up to six partial strikes will destroy your opponents ritual, allowing you to finish out yours in whatever spectacular finish you want.
Tess floats three plates of food over to me. Six sausages, three eggs, two fist-sized rolls dripping with butter shoved inside them, and a plate of fruit. “You can’t expect me to eat all that!”
Tess whistles a shrill reply. Booker starts to translate, “She says…”
I wave him off. “I know, I promised.” I open up a roll and shove egg and sausage inside to make a makeshift sandwich before taking a bite. ”So, what have you dug up on this Mr. Magi-tinnus? “ I ask, food still in my mouth. Tess has a small beep at my lack of table manners but wisely doesn’t do more knowing I would take any complaints as a challenge.
“Mr. Magitines.” A poor quality image projection pops up above my food. It has that gritty quality you never see anymore. “He uses dispersion techniques to obscure outside recordings. Association approved, for those who like to control their content, but he has yet to release or sell footage of himself. We used an intermediary to try and obtain, with a generous offer, a performance recording, the offer was ignored.”
I shove more food in my mouth, Tess won’t be happy unless I keep my word and eat the recommended meal she provided. “Mysterious. Could be a good selling point if played right.”
“That does not add up. The Magic Battle against Joontal will be his big reveal, as he can’t obscure during a Magic Battle. To be honest, there are names with bigger audiences and would be easier to win against, that would have accepted his first challenge.”
I take a few more bites. “So, his UI is giving him bad matchup advice."
Booker shakes the deflated head of the spare suite. “When simulated, we have not found any situation where any UI would logically select you as an opponent. This was an illogical selection.”
I know what that means, despite being the dumbest one in the room, I’m not stupid. “He chose us. Then he’s either a fan or our mysterious antagonist.” I let out a sigh and tell myself that crazies happen to every celebrity. “Any new threats on that side?” A small clip projects in front of me. It’s Joontal tied to a stake wiggling. Well, that’s not so bad. The stake bursts into flames and the clothes and flesh begin to melt off the figure. “Ewww… Any change up to his method?.”
“Still bounced through the interstellar communications array. As much as I would like to think that the sender is not in our neighborhood, with your audience, it is unlikely.” Tess whistles in agreement.
“I’m almost B-rank; my audience isn’t that small. So is this Mr. Magintines our guy?”
There is a pause that is indicative of my three UI talking to each other silently and faster than I could manage. “Inconclusive, while the challenge is suspect. Mr. Magintines has not shown the technical skills to produce or distribute the offending materials. Based on second-hand accounts and review of the obscured images, he is a Kit Magician. Primarily using kits that were released four to five decades ago.”
That’s a lot to process. A Kit Magician, I wince inwardly and outwardly thinking about it. These are performers and players who buy and use mass or limited production magic kits. The book I gave Jacen if I produce enough to need to register it, could technically be considered a kit, that is if you discount the easter egg of technical information that could be unlocked. You could buy any magic kit from a big buy store, and it would count, they come in ranges from harmless to ridiculously destructive and requiring weapons and pyrotechnic licenses to purchase.
There are three basic flavors of Magicians in the Association. Classical, where they’ve gone to the arts school and have a degree, by far the most common of all professionals. Kit Magicians, where the performer buys magic kits and uses those for shows while building their ranking, usually reserved for birthday and weekend Magicians. Then there are the homegrown magicians who manage to enter the business with no formal training and hack together dangerous technologies that often have tragic results. I am one of the few who has succeeded in being homegrown, managed not to blow myself or others up, and have had a respectable job for several years. There are literally a handful of us in the millions of Magicians in the Association, well technically one hundred and twenty-six as recorded in the last Association census. Still, a handful in the grand scheme of the organizati
on.
That is not to say it’s a strict classification. Both classical and homegrown magicians do buy magic kits in order to take them apart. Kit Magicians sometimes do try to modify and change kits, but if they lack the technical skills or a competent UI, it usually ends up being the number one cause of death for that type of registered magic user. I’m just lucky Lowman didn’t ask for a degree as part of his hiring process. I suppose that made it easier because the competition was filled with Kit Magicians.
The fact that Mr. Magintines is using forty and fifty-year-old kits is a problem. They come from the dangerous pre-Association time, the wild west of the magic competitions when the deaths were high. Any competent practitioner will also tell you old does not mean bad or not very powerful, the sheer volume and variety of high tech tricks often mean that things even from a hundred years ago often will seem just as advanced and amazing as things developed last week.
Being that old also makes those kits collectors’ items. The training and licensing that might be required to buy them if they were released recently are not there. I’d taken advantage of such loopholes when buying stuff for my gear, but it doesn’t mean I approve of them. I even lobbied for closing such loopholes after I got my training certifications and paperwork done.
My UI let me think and eat. Mowing down two-thirds of what Tess had provided, I start to feel like I’m going to burst. “So, how dangerous are we talking?” I ask Booker who is standing next to me in the deflated Joontal suit. A UI operating a humanoid body is technically illegal, but Booker is most comfortable in the suit.
“The kits we’ve been able to recognize from the limited information we have are all prior to the official rating system.” The association had chosen a starting at the lowest and going to the highest, F, D, C, B, A, X, S, SS, SSS ranking system for kits, ripped partially from history. They have a similar system for ranking members, though F and D ranked players can’t join the association. “Using unofficial collectors grading, we spotted tricks and tools from at least four different kits two Ds and a C mostly. The obscure comes from an A-ranked kit, though we don’t know which one, as the obscure is the only thing used from such a box that we've observed and three known A-ranked kits use similar technologies.”