by Daniel Ruth
“Probably because she’s asleep in the back,” I volunteered, as he was about to head out the door.
“What?” he replied in bewilderment.
“Seems that someone made me the emergency contact,” I said with a smug smile. “She took an aircab over and has been here since. Except for the ride in the rickshaw.”
“Rickshaw?”
“Stella gets nervous about air vehicles since we crashed into my front lawn. We had to get a tourist rickshaw to get around.”
“Crashed?”
“We took a cab but Stella didn’t know to control her aura so we crashed into the house. It was just as well, the demons looked like they wanted a tasty little treat out Beth.”
“Demons!”
“Don’t worry we killed them all and I now have some very nice alchemy supplies. You just can’t find demon parts on this plane. Don’t worry, I took good care of her. I brought her with me to talk to Vincent and Sabastian.”
“Vincent? As in the master of all the vampires in the city Vincent?”
“Yep, safe as houses,” I paused to think about how safe houses really were. Not very, with Faramond around. “We chatted and I got the services of a vampire assassin out of it.”
“Vampire assassin?”
“Yes, you know Sabastian?” I asked worriedly. Jeremy didn’t seem himself, he kept repeating everything I said. It was very unlike him. “Are you okay? You seem confused. You should take a break. It should be all right to take a few days off, assuming the end of the world doesn’t interfere,” I qualified. “Beth has been very helpful. In your absence, she has been acting as my agent and has done very well.”
“Your agent? She’s only eight years old.”
“True, but she says she’s almost an adult and who am I to argue?”
“Derek, she is only. Eight. Years. Old,” he said, clearly enunciating each word. “Did you even look up what the life cycle of the normal human is?”
“I. Know,” I replied. “I did read it. My terminal is useful like that, since it stopped blowing up. However, obviously the writer didn’t know a thing. The description of maturity levels and capabilities was so far from being accurate that he should be up on academic probation at the very least.”
“You can’t treat her like an adult, she’s only a little girl,” Jeremy protested looking like he was being driven into apoplexy.
“You can’t modify your world around an obviously inaccurate study,” I waved my finger at him. “If objective evidence shows that a hypothesis is incorrect, you have to discard it and try one that does fit the facts. I am surprised at you. I found out about the scientific method from you, the rest of your stuff may be nonsense, however I like that one.”
“But...”
“Despite the fact that your viewpoint on childhood is clearly out of touch with reality, I have to concede that you and your parents are her legal guardians. If you wish to treat her like a dumb pet, it is completely within your rights. Under the law,” I reluctantly admitted.
Jeremy stared flatly at me for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “Thanks. Is there anything else you want to tell me about?”
“Well, I activated Beth’s psionic potential, that’s why she’s sleeping,” I said nonchalantly as I headed to the kitchen for a snack. With all the people living here, I needed to increase the deliveries.
“Damn it Derek! You can’t just rewire a minor’s brain on a whim,” Jeremy shouted at my back.
“Give me a break! You had just been kidnaped, your sister almost devoured by demons like poor Mat was,” I snapped impatiently. He obsessed over the tiniest details. “When we finally found you, you were beaten so bad your still growing you’re teeth back. Surely you want your sister to be able to defend herself?”
“But rewiring her brain...” Jeremy lamely trailed off.
“I keep telling you, this is the standard procedure to unlock psionic ability. The areas involved have nothing to do with personality,” I paused for a moment. “Unless you’re an ogre. Ogres actually get an intellect boost and a healthy obsession with hygiene. Both are generally considered positives by almost anyone you ask. Except other ogres...”
“Mat’s dead?”
“Yeah, the horde of demons that almost got your sister stopped to snack on him first. He was just around the block. Conrad thinks he was stopping to see me when the demons’ aura shorted out the car and he got swarmed. There isn’t even a body to bury.” I sighed sadly at the sheer waste. “If there was I might have attempted a resurrection, using one of the new circles I have been working on.”
“That stinks, he was a nice guy. Always seemed a bit nervous though,” Jeremy observed.
“It seems to be a pretty common attribute with his department. Hopefully, they’ll man up in time for the end of the world.”
“Okay, I guess if she’s the same little girl, then the ability to protect herself would be good. Thanks for saving her from the demons. That means a lot to me.”
I nodded magnanimously. “It’s all right. I always try to look out for my friends.”
“So end of the world, eh?” he said, switching tracks.
“That’s a melodramatic way to put it, nevertheless it will be nasty.”
“Is that what happened to your world?”
“Eh?” I looked at him nonplussed.
“You’re not really good at keeping secrets. You like showing off too much,” he said wryly.
“Fine,” I acknowledged. My kind have huge egos. It’s really hard to suppress, it’s a racial thing. “Yeah, our world was just like the Baron’s except for a bit more science. Not as advanced as your world, but only maybe fifty years behind.”
“So what happened?”
“Lots of deaths, swelled ley lines and self-sustaining flow of supercharged energies. Just like that stupid attempt to divert their world’s energies are going to cause here.”
“Will it be permanent?”
“I’m not sure. I think if we close the portals soon enough the change won’t be permanent.”
“How hard is it close them?”
“Once they are self-sustaining almost impossible. They won’t be dependent on any spells and they have no physical structure to target. Before that point there some possibilities. I would guess Jin or his demon has etched the spell as a circle on a stone or permacrete surface near the node. The spell will make it very, very durable. Once the ley lines flood it will further enhance the durability of them and anything magical. It will be almost indestructible.”
“So why did you jump down Conrad’s throat when he suggested blowing it up?”
“Small explosives won’t do much. Anything big enough to destroy it would take out the city too. The death energy of an entire city has a really good chance to open up the portal by itself and also cause a chain reaction in all the nodes along the network. The only difference between this and the magician’s council’s plan is that their portals only go to their world. At least as far as we know. A natural chain reaction could go anywhere and hell dimensions are like magnets for random portals.”
“So damned if you, damned if you don’t,” he sighed.
“We’ll know more if... when Mei’s contacts can send us information.”
“Okay, let’s make some plans. Maybe Conrad can minimize this disaster from the world ending to simply disastrous.”
“We can do that,” I nodded in agreement. “If the military had a presence in each city and barricades and their force fields it may help. Their tech is hardened,” I tapped the wrist terminal as an example. “It’s likely a side effect of their EMI hardening and redundancy but they don’t blow up unless you really try. The big worry is that someone panics and sets off enough ordnance that causes the aforementioned cascade effect.”
“What about this interference effect magic causes, can we minimize it?”
“Without military tech, they need to retire the newer quantum chips. They go like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Even without that, most technol
ogy built in the last seventy five years is going to be scattershot. I did find out that the safety restraint systems actually go off in such a crash of a floater.”
“That bowl of ‘magic be gone’ worked for the minions. Could it do something else?”
“Absolutely!” I exclaimed, while slapping him lightly on the back. “I actually already protected our terminal. And if I did nothing to but inscribe those runes on all the task force’s equipment from this moment on, you would have a single division with magically hardened gear ready for when the gates to hell open and the terrors of the universe pour through.”
“Enough with the sarcasm,” Jeremy replied with a grin. “So it would be too little too late.”
“If we could actually find any significant numbers of the mages that did the Moscow thing we could put them to work. As it is, I haven’t seen anyone. Even Mei, who has seen them, says they are hard to find.”
“Fine. What about nanites?”
“Shouldn’t be any effect. As far as technology is concerned nanites are just complex chemical reactions. No electricity and although I hear quantum calculations are involved... hmm,” I paused in thought, while opened the fridge and pulled out some more leftovers. “Now that I think about it the energy overflow may cause more runaway behavior. I don’t really know. They never had nanites at home. My guess is that it would be fine unless magic was actively doing something to them.”
We went back and forth like this for several hours, developing contingency plans and ideas to minimize loss of life. He had me record the ideas on my terminal. His new one would be delivered by the morning. I would send him the file when it arrived. By some miracle, Conrad didn’t call us about his holy reports. Jeremy promised he would submit a report along with our suggestions to the officer in the morning. Eventually, he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer and he headed back to the room his sister was in on unsteady legs.
A minute later I heard a yelp and rapid footsteps heading back to me. “There’s a freaking cougar lying on the bed next to Beth,” Jeremy yelped.
I thought for a moment and then nodded, “Must be the babysitter.”
“Why is there a huge cougar babysitting my sister?” my friend exclaimed, with suppressed tension.
“I know, it’s absurd,” I agreed with him. “Mei went all Conrad on us when we thought about leaving Beth alone. Started spouting laws and talking about responsibility. She made us wait for a friend she had in a local pack to come babysit. Your laws are completely out of control. Its amazing everyone isn’t in prison.”
“Oh,” Jeremy said as the anger left him. “That’s okay then. She’s a good friend.”
“I think she just didn’t want to be arrested,” I cautioned him. He ignored me. Why the heck did he get mad at me for allowing his sister to defend herself and it is okay to call in a random stranger to stay with her?
“Since there is a big cat in the bed, is there another place to sleep?”
“Sure, take my room. You can grab some of the clothes in the closet. I think you ordered some extra last week.”
He headed to the back of the house again while I examined the house. The couch was in disarray, with all the pillows crooked and an extra blanket crumpled half on it and half on the floor. Coffee stains littered the counter and dirty cups and dishes littered the kitchen and tables. Dust was tracked into the hallway. It was all completely unacceptable. I got to work putting the house in order. The bedrooms were mostly soundproof so I also vacuumed the floor.
I also spent a few minutes in the bathroom determining the new limits of my body. As I had thought, the rebalanced energies, and excruciating pain, had indicated a fundamental change in the limits the rune imposed on me. The room was too small to fully check, by fifteen feet tall I was kneeling with my head bent. With the extra size came the ability to have some nicely sized teeth. The jaws were limited to roughly humanoid shape, therefore, they still weren’t my forearm sized weapons. Nevertheless, it was better and I didn’t feel so defenseless. There is nothing like being able to bite someone’s face off to say ‘this is my space’.
After I finished with the sizes, teeth and talons I quickly changed from ogre, dwarf, elf and back to human. Attempting to change outside a roughly humanoid form only brought a dull ache to my chest. An effort to change to a gaseous form set it on fire. When I was done I had mixed feelings, but in general I was pleased.
To celebrate I popped open my wrist terminal and ordered several new sets of really stretchy pants, shirt, and underclothes. It wouldn’t do to ruin things with any embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions. After that it was time to get to work.
Several hours brought order to my tiny kingdom and it was with a sigh of contentment I headed down to my lab. I wanted see if I could etch the magic negation symbols tiny enough to be placed on the inside my wrist terminal casing. I had gotten really fond of the thing and I wanted to be sure it wouldn’t go up in a billow of blue smoke. Once I was done with that, I would work on the healing circle. If I could get skilled enough to work the sigils on the advanced version, I might be able to do something besides mourn if one of my friends accidentally had their heads blown off.
The next several days were a similar pattern. There were no kidnappings or rescues; however, I spent most of the days working on perfecting my skills with circles. There’s a surprising amount of dead time during these kind of long term endeavors where you are simply working on the right arc or curve of a sigil. So I thought about our predicament.
When I went upstairs Jeremy, Mei and I discussed various plans and possibilities. Beth meanwhile spent a lot of time exercising her mental muscles by the simple expedient of floating a spinning coin over her hand. The disk was a collectible from ages back when they actually used physical money. No doubt the economy would soon go up in a puff of electronic logic when the end came. Jeremy was the one that brought up that delightful possibility. I personally put forward the theory that the next line of currency would be bottle caps. Except for moving the information onto military computers, we didn’t have a solution to that particular disaster.
Conrad ate up our ideas with the enthusiasm of the truly desperate. Considering how hard he was pushing the military and upper government to prepare, if nothing happened his career would be infamous for its shortness. Still, I had to give the man props for sticking his neck out for what he believed. He was rarely on hand, conversely I would frequently see his hologram in the living room talking with the others.
Stella hadn’t shown up yet. She had obviously gotten detoured, however we were at a loss about what to do about it, except alert the police to watch for an elf in a fancy gown wandering lost around town on foot. She had after all taken off with my magical tooth of tracking.
I was also haunted by an overpowering feeling we were missing something. Admittedly I had actually missed a lot so far, the most significant evidently was the decade of planning that Jin’s recent actions had been hiding. Nevertheless, we kept coming back to the map we had made of the ley lines and nodes. There was an obvious choice for a portal to be opened as the trigger for the massive spell Jin had set up. In the middle of Minerva Park was the largest node in the city. It was even within a stone’s throw of where we had rescued Jeremy. Of course, it was surrounded by a half-dozen shifter packs and Conrad had installed enough hardened surveillance to start his own spy agency.
The other nodes all had their own watchers. We had tried following the mages summoning minor demons back to their home. The problem was that their spies were better than ours. All the watched nodes never had any attempts. Since we were watching all the identified nodes this meant the next few days had been remarkably quiet. As the days passed that was actually a bad sign. We had no clues and watching the nodes had actually made fewer leads. I personally suspected scrying, yet even when I figured out how to use the anti scrying ward I didn’t see how it would change. Since they now knew all the nodes were watched I didn’t think suddenly not being able to scry a location would make t
hem dumb enough to think it was no longer being observed.
On day three, I went outside to stretch my legs and try something different to distract myself. With a small case of my supplies and an extra set of clothes in tow I headed towards where Mat’s body had been found. Or rather the remains had been found. It took me a while but after an hour I had finally found what I thought might be a small chip of bone. I located a flat surface nearby and placing the fragment on it, started to engrave a circle with a hastily formed talon. I was about half way done and the energy within the lines were peaking when I heard something.
“What are you doing, Professor?” as a familiar voice asked.
Looking around I was taken aback when I saw a glowing blue transparent figure. “Magic, who are you?” The outline was unclear, like viewing something through pebbled glass. My first conclusion was it was an astral projection.
“It’s me, Mat,” said the figure in a perfectly reasonable voice. “Who else would be in this godforsaken place?”
“Hey, I live here,” I replied offended. Except for the occasional roaming demons and naked vampires, it was a fine neighborhood. When the buildings weren’t collapsing. “You seem not all there. You wouldn’t happen to be an astral projection?” I asked hopefully. That would be the easiest option.
“No, I am pretty sure I’m dead,” he said solemnly. “Never seen anything as creepy as a bunch of monster bugs devouring my body before. I think it unlikely I lived through it.”
“I can see how that would be upsetting,” I commiserated. I didn’t know much about ghosts. Some people think they are echoes in the firmament of a person or even a person’s actual soul. “Are you bound to this location?”
“Not really, I just feel more real here while you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing. Before that, I was somewhere else that made me feel... something.”
“Interesting, I didn’t know ghosts were sustained by magic,” I nodded to myself. “So when I charged my circle, you manifested. Before that, you were likely basking is the energies of a node. Say, you don’t feel the urge to eat human flesh or swallow souls, do you?”