Gregory Grey and the Fugitive in Helika
Page 33
CHAPTER 13.4
Lesley's Diary - Logistic Pitfalls - August 10, 1909
In stories, when the protagonist gets super powered magical abilities, practically every obstacle and impossibility wets its pants and turns into bowl of lukewarm porridge…
Real life, as it turns out, does not work this way.
Now that I think back on all those stories, it’s a little funny how all the obstacles and impossibilities happen to obligingly line up together just as the superhero gets his power, when, up to that point, they’d been kind enough to present themselves one at a time.
In other words, for most superheroes, their greatest power is an author’s plotting convenience.
For if my obstacles were halfway so considerate, I could have been across the border by now. No, when I gain superpowers, the chances of my overcoming obstacles go from being totally impossible to just highly improbable.
My current superpowers line up thusly:
•I can turn invisible
•I no longer need instruments to access my thauma’s kinetic potential
•My thaumic radius is about fifty feet – twice that of an adult mage
However, I can’t cast spells. I can only move things around.
For example, this means that when I have the bright idea of single handedly raiding the warehouse and extracting the antidote, I have the magical wherewithal to actually drag out every box of vials I find in there.
My limitation becomes painfully apparent when I have to spend the next 8 hours hunting down all the idiots in hiding who’ve managed to form sickly looking armed groups hiding where they can.
I don’t really blame them for their fear (especially considering what’s going on right now, but we’ll get to that in a bit), but it’s hard to feel charitable when you’ve got to pretend to be a kindly but stern ghost who’ll bully you if you don’t form orderly lines to take your medicines.
Still, juggling a chain of wicked looking knives never felt so satisfying.
And I can pull off a mean and wraithlike voice like nobody’s business.
There are about 42 bands of people spread around the camp. Once I’d persuaded people to follow my appointed leaders to the various locations where I’d stored the antidotes, things actually proceeded quite smoothly on the medical end of things. Whatever the poison or the malaise is, people seemed to recover almost immediately after a dose of antidote. I even remembered to have the elders and anyone else who could do magic set up a magical perimeter, in case the Spooks tried to assault us.
Three problems quickly became evident:
1. If everyone truly needs eight vials each to cure themselves, then we only have enough antidote for three vials each – after two weeks, we'll run out, and the week after that, the illness would return to afflict us.
2. I can scare sick people… but I can’t pull the same tactics on the Spooks that I did on the refugees – the Spooks would just start killing the refugees again till they thought they got the one juggling knives at them.
3. I can’t be everywhere at once.
That’s why when bands of about 20 Spooks turned up this morning ready to fry us if anyone dared to so much as sneeze, and they called out the names of various refugees, and took these aside…
… and charged them with treason…
… and read out their death sentences…
… and took them away to be executed…
I couldn’t do anything but stay invisible… and watch. The Spooks keep doing rounds of the camp, take away a bunch of us to be executed, and we just watch.
I can’t fight an army.
They’ve set up a gallows in the main square. We will be able to watch the condemned swing from beyond the wards… and we will, thousands of us.
They’ll start with the executions tomorrow. And they’ll be back for more of us tomorrow.
Superheroes shouldn’t have to deal with logistics
And they shouldn’t have to feel impotent.