Luca DR
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05 – Beyond superstition
🕑 Added 2023-05-10 16:34:01 +0000 UTCThe BSA-operated satellite hovering in a geostationary orbit above Temalas City was like an all-seeing panopticon, its lenses particularly crafted in a way that allowed them to spot Events before they could fully form. The technology was classified, but it came as no surprise to anyone who knew what the satellite did that there was magic involved. Its tireless glass eye spied and observed the surface of the earth every hour of every day, ready and watchful. Always. When the surge of energy, highly indicative of an incursion event forming, happened the satellite immediately picked up on it, zeroing on its position with its full suite of sensor arrays.
There was a man in a room, hidden somewhere underground. It could have been close to the city, or on the other side on the planet. Not even he knew. He was always attentive, staring at a number of screens that parsed the data coming from the satellite and from a number of other sources. They showed the geography of the whole state, with a particular focus on Temalas City. The four-million people urban center had been the epicenter of the astral activity in the last two months, and warranted special attention.
The screen beeped red. The man stared at the dot in the map for but a moment before he quickly scrambled in search of the little red analogic phone at the center of his desk, and picked it up. There was only one number that could be dialed.
“Sir, we have an event forming in the bay area.”
On the other end of the phone was none other than Samantha Cromwell.
“How long has it been going on?” She asked. The soldier at the phone with her could hear some kind of music playing on her end, and a beating noise. Then a hiss. It was around dinner time, he realized, so she must be at a restaurant. No doubt with other military heads.
“3 minutes, 44 seconds so far. We are monitoring it.” He said.
“They are spreading. But the satellite caught this one early. Call SpaceOps, have him teleport the astral team immediately. Cordon off the area. I want nobody getting in, or even close to the event. Get PsyOps on the site too with the second trip, have him do a scan of whoever saw the event and wipe them.”
Samantha Cromwell must have walked away from the dinner, because her side of the line had gotten pretty silent as she barked the orders.
“Understood. Shall I send SpaceOps to pick you up as well?”
“No. Only send him if the event reaches 40 minutes without losing strength or threatens to become Tier 2. I will be at the Shed.”
Barely 15 minutes and 3 seconds later, SpaceOps appeared in the shed. He looked around for a brief second, taking a glimpse of the strange space filled with tools and—
“Report.”
“Yes, sir. The space is behaving abnormally. The gathering of energy has accelerated and is out of known bounds. If this keeps up, it will break through to Tier 2 in 10 minutes.”
Samantha shook her head. “Take me there.”
***
There was a test that begged for execution, if anything to prove whether a theory that Albert had was right or not. It was a simple thing of manifesting some magic in the real world and seeing whether people reacted to it or not. To him, even without activating [Perception], magic was always visible. But he didn’t know if it was his magic that was visible, or magic in general, because if the latter was true then the world was a bit too mundane and lacking in interesting features for his tastes. It would mean that he was the only magic user in the whole town, a thought that both disturbed him and kind of reassured him.
Squiggly lines and sources of light populated his vision when he used perception to scout for mana, but Albert quickly realized that what was he was seeing was the ambient latent magic. It was only present in a radius of only a few meters around him and, when he used his will on it, it moved and responded to his commands. Which meant that he had both internal reserved and the environment to draw upon whenever he wanted to cast spells. But it also meant that his question was still unanswered. Was there other magic in the world, and could other people see it?
He decided to try but his mother had left early, and he was finishing his lunch alone. He had classes in the afternoon too, and while he could have performed the experiment during class he felt particularly self-conscious about it when he thought about performing in the middle of a crowd of a hundred undergraduate engineers.
He painstakingly waited until the end of the last class.
“Hey Al!” Marc waved at him from the other side of the crosswalk. He was alone.
“Hey!” Albert replied and joined him as soon as the traffic light became green.
It was a perfect opportunity to attempt to perform his experiment. While he crossed the street he began to concentrate and saw a small pinprick of magic materialize in the palm of his hand. It looked like a luminous drop of water, suspended in the air, emitting a faint glow. Looking up, he studied his friend’s face, seeing no reaction to the feat that had taken him two full days to do for the first time.
“What are you doing?” Marc asked candidly. “What’s with your hand?”
The thing was like a prince Rupert’s drop, enticing and entrancing in its beauty. But Albert still didn’t know whether Marc could see it or not.
“Can’t you see it? It’s right here.”
“See what? Your hand is empty. Are you pulling a prank on me?”
This confirmed it. You need [Perception] to perceive magic.
“Nothing, nothing.” Albert said.
Marc was not convinced, but luckily he did not press the issue. The two began to walk together, with Marc having unilaterally decided that they were going to study together at a coffee shop he liked to hang out at. Albert wanted to complain, and for a moment entertained the idea of finding a way to extricate himself from the task so that he could go home and do magic. But Marc wasn’t having it.
“You haven’t been studying as of late, have you?” he asked.
“I… uh… I did study.”
Marc gave him a perplexed look.
“Fine. Let’s go.” Albert eventually withered under the inquisitive gaze.
“Good.” Marc said as they started walking together.
Traffic was as bad as usual in this part of town. The military still had not opened the bridge back up to traffic, and the whole explanation that the cables had snapped and they were simply doing some tests to make sure there was no danger of collapse was sounding more and more suspicious by the day.
“Why would the military ever be involved in stuff like that?” Albert wondered out loud. “They should call in some civic engineers, not the damn military!”
“Perhaps there’s something else going on. I heard that they don’t let anybody even near that bridge, and that nobody has been seen entering or leaving the area ever since the perimeter was sealed three days ago.” Marc said.
“Ah, see… if I was one of those conspiracy theorists, I would say that there’s something weird going on there.” Albert said. “But I don’t know. I don’t think that humans are competent enough to actually be able to keep things secret like that.”
“Then what? You said it yourself. Why would they ever call the army to deal with an old bridge showing signs of age?”
Albert sighed. “So you believe there’s something else going on?”
Marc puffed out his chest. “I didn’t say that. I only know what I read. And the news isn’t all that good.”
“Read where?” Albert scoffed. “On 4chan?”
“…I have also read that they closed off a whole section of the bay as well. This morning, in fact.”
Albert pushed the glass door of the café, letting the smell of coffee and artificially humidified hot air hit his face. It was a stark contrast to the cold wind of the capricious September climate outside, and from the unpleasant stench of cars and asphalt.
“This morning you say?”
Marc nodded.
“Well,” Albert said. “I guess we’ll see what happens.”
***
He didn’t show it while he was with his friend, but the news Marc told him shook Albert more than a fair bit. The timing was surely interesting, with these events gaining traction right about the time when he suddenly woke up with a system and with access to magic. In fact, even though he never gave the thought much conscious processing power, the whole revelation that magic was a thing had been destabilizing much of what Albert thought true about the world. Much of it happened at an unconscious level, and whenever the thought emerged he tried to suppress it, but it was getting more and more difficult to deny the truth. The implications were not without weight.
Things were not as they seemed. Which also put a notable dent in Albert’s previously unshaking belief in hard science and objective truth. Because it was clear that while there was more to the world, these extra bits of information were not only completely alien and rested outside of anything even remotely true about physics, but they also managed to hide themselves so well as to not ever come up anywhere he could look prior to his awakening into magic.
Now, both claims were bold claims. And Albert knew it. Perhaps there was mention of magic and supernatural events out there in the world, but he always dismissed it as bogus and fake and new age bullshittery. And perhaps this magic of his was not at all in conflict with the laws of physics, it was just that he didn’t have the whole picture. Quantum mechanics could offer a way out, if he only had time to study it. It was in the third-year curriculum, so he could always procrastinate until then.
Back to the issue. The military: they were onto something. But did he want to investigate, to get involved? His mind immediately replied with a firm no.
It made no sense, it was risky and he was definitely ill-equipped for it. He remembered how he was utterly powerless even against three street thugs. For now, life could go on as usual. Classes, going out with friends, and secretly cultivating magic without anyone noticing. At least until he was sure he could deal with the consequences of using it in the open.
Yes, he was a coward. No, he didn’t feel bad about it. What was he supposed to do, walk up to the military men at the bridge and demand to be let in?
Mother was not home, as usual. But she texted, saying she was going to come home for dinner and to wait for her. This left Albert with a couple of hours of free time, which he could spend experimenting with magic. With the studies done for the day, courtesy of Marc, he didn’t even feel guilty about it.
There was a quest waiting. Enticing him with a very promising reward.
- Quest: You know how to project mana into the world. Create a Skill without a video.
- Reward: Defensive Treasure.
“Okay… saying it helps with visualization. Coalesce! Coalesce into fire, the burning, the chemicals! Oxidation of combustibles…”
It was not the first time he tried to complete the quest, of course, which meant that resorting to ever stranger methods of going about it was feeling increasingly less embarrassing.
Nothing.
“Hmm. Perhaps I am going at it the wrong way. This is magic after all. Let’s strip away the non-essentials, leave just the burning.” Albert muttered to himself, all sense of shame lost. In moments like these, what would later come to be called by his doppelganger as the illusion of his ego was already absent, and all the self-awareness that came with it, in the form of shame, was also nonexistent. “Rearrange, magic. Burning, the transformation of matter, the heat!”
Nothing.
“Damn. What gives? What’s a fireball if not all this? Let’s try… heat, power, momentum, mass, energy!”
The room suddenly lit up to day, and the superheated air blasted the door open and almost shattered the windows. There was barely a moment of grateful contemplation before the smell of burning reached Albert’s nostrils, and panic set in.
