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Introductions 1.2
"Familiar," you say through lips that have gone a bit numb.
"Yeah," the guy—Blake—says, shifting a bit uncomfortably from his spot in the mirror you just made. "You know, like the witch has her—"
"—has a black cat, yeah, I know," you say, letting your rear hit the cold floor. Did this have to—no, better to check, it might not be as bad as it sounds. "Just to be clear," you ask the man in your mirror, now completely out of sight from your angle on the cold floor, "you are talking fantasy stuff, right? Magic?"
"…yes?" the other says, a note of confusion clear in his voice. "So you already know about it?"
Nope, it's exactly as bad as it sounded. You bury your head in your hands for a moment. Of all the powers going to all the capes in all the world, you had to get the power that was actively as deluded as Myrddin. Fantastic. Par for the course, really.
"Fuck," you mutter venomously. Your next words come out louder. "So you actually believe in magic." It wasn't a question.
"Well, yes," Blake says. "I'm currently squatting in a different world from you, talking through a mirror. How else could this be happening?"
"Oh, I don't know," you say sarcastically. You're very strongly tempted to just lay down and stare up at the ceiling in disgust, but that would mean taking your eye off of the mirror for longer than a second or two. "How about with parahuman powers? It's not really weirder than a lot of other capes' powers."
Actually, you couldn't see Blake at all right now. Who knows what he's doing? Time to fix that oversight. You start to get back to your feet.
"What's a cape?"
Oh, there's the floor again. It hasn't warmed up much at all.
"Is that some specific kind of practitioner or something, like a valkyrie or shaman?"
"…what."
How could…how could
anyone not know what a cape is? Parahuman, maybe, there are clearly plenty of people at school who never bothered to learn more than the colloquialisms, but cape? The term was everywhere. Time to get to the bottom of this.
"Look, I have no idea what's up with you. I'm going to need you to give me as good as an explanation as you can." You pause for a moment. "I'll answer any of your questions in turn."
"Alright," Blake says amiably enough. "Let me start with the fact that I cannot lie. Or, to be more technically correct, it's against the rules to lie, so I don't, because lying costs me power, and if there's anything that my time with magic has taught me, it's that power is life. That's even more literally true now than it was before, I suspect."
How convenient, you think to yourself, but say nothing. Before Blake has a chance to talk, you realize that you still can't quite see him or what he is doing. You have a brief mental war between politeness and caution, and you end up compromising. You warily move the mirror against a support beam and then go lean against another one. You place it so that you can look at each other without straining or staying too close, but you have an unobstructed path to the basement stairs, and the mirror is tilted so that the stairs aren't quite in Blake's area of sight.
Once you are both situated, it all comes out. How Blake came from another world entirely, one that appeared to be perfectly normal, without any parahuman activity at all, like Earth Aleph on the other side of the government's interdimensional portal. Except that that was just the façade that overlaid the world, with an entire magical world teeming just below the surface. One full of supernatural beings known as Others, such as ghosts, goblins, and—
"Fairies?" you break in incredulously. "You have fairies?"
"I think you're thinking 'fairy,' 'f-a-i-r-y,'" Blake says firmly. "Those, from what I understand, are basically animals shaped like foot-tall butterfly-winged people. What I'm talking about are Faerie, 'f-a-e-r-i-e,' which are...markedly different. Think of the stories that you hear in the older folklore, about the Fair Folk, or the fae. Changelings, taking a human child and leaving something else in their place. Tricksters, who might con the clothes off your back for the pleasure of watching you freeze."
With that sobering correction (and a mental note to look those kinds of stories back up, since you have quite forgotten a lot of the details) you let Blake resume his explanation. Details aside, it seemed to boil down to: everything from myths and folklore really existed, but generally you had to go to the older myths to get more accuracy, though the distinctions could be fuzzy and labels are dangerous. Above all, everything is nastier than you might expect.
It's nice to have part of your worldview validated, you suppose, if a bit depressing.
You press him for more information on himself, specifically, rather than this bizarro-world he describes, but he refuses. "I've been forthcoming so far, when I was the one snatched from…elsewhere…and put here in your mirror. I'm going to need you to do a turn of explaining now." You scowl but reluctantly acknowledge that he has a point.
Then you try to return the favor, explaining about the world that you live in, that he apparently lives in now too. How it sounded like it was the same as his, at least up until 1982, when a mysterious man appeared over the oceans, nude and glowing. Scion, the first parahuman, though he is gone now, and has been for a few years. Other people with amazing powers began appearing after he did, though they stayed out of sight until around 1987. By now, parahumans, often called capes, are a part of society, especially here in Brockton Bay, which has become a cape hotspot of sorts. They are generally split into law-enforcing Heroes and criminal Villains, with the occasional Rogue who stay out of the crime-oriented dichotomy in favor of industry, all hiding behind costumes and fake names.
There is a brief silence as you marvel anew at the thought of a world without something as commonplace as capes, let alone one with so much madness seething just out of sight, while Blake is visibly coming to terms with so much strangeness just being out in the open, where everyone's reaction is just to go about their day.
"Okay," you say. "Your turn again. Tell me about you. You're
in a mirror. How does that happen? What
are you?"
Another expression you can't quite interpret crosses Blake's face. "That's…a complicated question. I'm not entirely certain of the answer."
You start to bristle angrily at this non-answer, but Blake raises a hand soothingly.
"Please, Taylor. I understand that you're upset and confused; I feel much the same way. I'm still going to answer you, it's just complex, and a fair bit of it is speculation."
Reluctantly, slightly mollified, you slowly settle back against the support beam as he continues.
"Most of my memories right now are somewhat fuzzy. From what I do remember, I was a relatively normal boy for most of my life. My grandmother ended up deciding to pass on everything to just one grandchild. After the first heir died," you feel a flash of sympathy at the pain that crosses his face, "I was appointed the next custodian of the property. With the property came magic. And enemies, enemies who stood to profit from the destruction of my family. We…I…was under constant siege or outright attack practically from the moment the property passed on to me, more or less. There…there was a lot going on, but it's honestly kind of jumbled, and
quite fuzzy. I think that I had a companion, or a false companion, who was stuck in a mirror like this, but I don't remember it working for…her?...the way that it's working for me. And I think, at some point, we found out that I was an Other, not her. And now I'm the one in the mirrors."
You try to wrap your head around that rambling explanation. "You still didn't answer the question of what you
are."
"Well, that's what's complicated. I remember years of being human. I also remember much foggier memories of being some kind of Other. But if what you're saying about your world is true, then right now I'm probably neither of those things, being a part of your 'superpower,'" he says, putting his fingers up in air quotes. "Are there powers out there that can make people or Others like this?"
You scowl at him for a moment. "I don't know the name of the classification," you say, only now realizing just how superficial a lot of your cape geek knowledge really was, "and that's something that I plan to correct, soon. But yeah, there are some who can make minions—" You cut yourself off at the sight of his face. You flounder about for a moment or two.
"Minions?"
"Well," you say, shifting awkwardly, "yes, minions—"
"I am minion to
no one," Blake says firmly. More than firmly. Almost angrily.
You close your eyes, stamping down some obscure stab of pain in your chest. This is something that has been worrying you since your power first started talking back, and it is time to settle it. You picture Blake firmly in your mind, then picture him leaping to his feet then standing in place. For good measure, you add words to your mental command:
stand up.
You open your eyes to find that nothing has changed, Blake still staring at you with an expectant expression on his face. You deflate, a little. His expression might have wavered a bit, but only for a moment.
"You're not a minion," you say dully, dejected. It's not like you
want to have control over someone who seemed just as much a person as you were, exactly, but it would be nice to have control over
your own power. Fuck.
"Good," Blake says, "I'm glad that's settled. So there's something like this going on with other capes?"
"Something like this, yes," you say, trying to push past your feelings to deal with the situation at hand. "I'll look up more details soon. You, um, you said something about it's working differently for you than for your companion?"
"Yeah, from what I can make of my memories," Blake says, letting the subject change with nothing more than another firm look.
"How—how so?" You shake your head briefly.
Put it aside, deal with it later.
"From what I remember, she was limited to the area around mirrors that were next to me, or…somewhere else. The property, I think. Everywhere not reflected in those mirrors just didn't exist, for her. But for me, looking around…it's the same, but different."
You have a lot of practice not venting your frustration.
"I'm still limited to pools of light around mirrors, it looks like, but they're everywhere. I mean
everywhere," Blake says, looking around. "Any reality not created by the light through mirrors is still only darkness, but I can see pools of light a lot further away than I should be able to. At least, a lot further than if I was restricted to ones just around you, or just you and one other place. And there's one that's not lit up at all, but is standing out like a beacon compared to the others."
You have a sudden horrible suspicion of what that might be, chasing away your other thoughts on what he is saying, but he continues without pause.
"And while the mirror was facedown, I shouldn't have been able to use it, since there's no light leaking through. But I was fine; I didn't feel like I could move around a lot, but I was still here, instead of being shunted over to another mirror."
"So you don't know what you are, because you're at least somewhat different from your companion, right?" you say in the lull that follows. You wait for Blake's nod to continue. "But you seem to be pretty similar. So what was she?"
"Well, remember that labels are dangerous. But if I'm the same kind of Other that we thought she was, then I'm a vestige."
"A vestige," you muse. Not that the name told you anything, but still, having a name made you feel a little better, somehow. "I'm sorry," you say after a moment, breaking eye contact for a moment. "You were still listing differences between you and your companion?"
"Yeah, and this one's kinda big."
You straighten up against the support beam in interest but don't say anything.
Blake almost seems to be mirroring you for a moment, but his straightening keeps on going, standing up from his place against the support beam, and starts walking towards the mirror on his side. You scramble to your feet, uncertain if now is when you should flee, but you hesitate. He's not really acting hostile, he's just…walking towards you. Maybe baby steps would work best.
"It's something I noticed earlier, when you were holding the mirror. See, one power that all practitioners have is the Sight, which shows us the things that are hidden from the uninitiated. And I'm pretty sure that my companion didn't have it, couldn't use it. But the thing is," he says, crouching by the mirror so he can see through it, "I can."
You stop taking little half-shuffles towards the stairs at this pronouncement. "You can?"
"I think I can, at least," he said, squinting as he looks through the mirror. "Could you get a little closer?"
Your heart resumes its jackhammering in your chest. Still, there's no good way to refuse. Slowly, so slowly, you inch your way towards Blake.
"Aha!" he exclaims suddenly, causing you to jerk backwards in surprise. "Nope, lost it again. The slow moving was really helping, though, helps narrow the range down. Could you inch forward again, please?"
Flushing slightly at the out he gave you, you inch forward again until he tells you to stop.
"Yup, there it is. I have something like the Sight, at least. It wasn't working like I'm used to, but I can still see connections radiating out from you."
"…connections?" You are intrigued, of course, but having almost every answer lead to new questions is pretty frustrating. Though maybe that is natural for capes who are just starting out?
"Yeah, in my world, there are tiny little spirits in everything—feel free to look up animism some time—that are revealed when a practitioner uses their Sight. They tend to follow power, which allows them to empower runes…but I'll explain about those later," he says, catching the look on your face. "Anyway, one really useful aspect of the Sight is that there are little lines, pathways that the spirits follow, like cords or ribbons. The connections between people, things, ideas, concepts…they're visible to the Sight, due to so many more spirits running along those lines."
That…sounds strange, but on the surface, it isn't really weirder than some other powers out there. So your power has a power? A sudden thought strikes you.
I wonder if he has any other powers?
"But it wasn't working until you got close enough, which is definitely not how it worked before." Blake eyes the ground between the two of you for a moment. "I'm pretty good at judging distances by eye, and I'd say that the range is a little more than six feet."
You decide to take his word for it.
He then peers more closely, not
at you, but
around you, searching what appeared to be nothing but empty air. "Plus, you have some strange connections."
Figures. Aloud, you ask, "What's so strange about them?"
"Well…" Blake trails off, staring off into space for a minute while you fidget in place. "Sorry. You don't seem to have a practitioner connection, but there is this other bond that…almost seems to be taking its place? It looks kind of similar to what practitioners have, but it's still distinct. I also can't see any active friendship connections—"
You flinch, your shoulders hunching at this, as the vestige continues to look around you.
"—and only one family connection of note, which might indicate another limitation to this Sight. Oh, and that connection seems to be moving. It looks like it's moving a lot, actually."
That nervous feeling you had before came back again. "Moving?" You lick your lips apprehensively as Blake nods his head with a mildly confused expression. "And it's supposed to show the locations of the people on either end?"
"Well, the lines are more fluid than rigid, but the ends are rooted in people on both ends, yes. Why?"
"So where would you say—?" The sound of a door closing from above you cuts off your words, and it feels like a leaden weight just fell into your stomach. "
Shit," you whisper harshly, panic gripping your throat. "Dad's home!"
Blake's face transforms in an instant, becoming utterly business-like. "What do we do?" he whispers, keeping his volume just as low as yours.
"Just—" your words are cut off abruptly by a voice from above.
"Taylor? Are you here?"
You don't dither, walking swiftly over to the mirror and picking it up. "Sorry about this, but I have to hide you for now. I'll come and get you when I can. Just
stay here." Ignoring Blake's quiet protests as you stash the mirror behind some boxes, you wish you could run the stairs to leave the basement, but the house is old, and not well-built—actually running up the stairs would announce exactly where you are.
You pause at the head of the stairs, trying as hard as you can to listen for where your dad might be. It's several tense moments later that you hear his footsteps move away and up to the second floor. You slip out of the basement, into the kitchen, and start puttering around, taking out food as if to start making supper. You pretend not to notice when you hear his footsteps returning.
"Oh, there you are, kiddo," your dad says from behind you. There's a long pause that is suspended but not interrupted by the greeting you give him. "What are you up to?" he asks, several beats too late.
"Just getting some food ready for supper," you say, getting out some relatively fresh vegetables.
There is another pause that lasts too long. "Okay," he says at last. He is silent for a bit longer, then leaves the kitchen without saying more. When you hear the TV turn on in the next room, you let out a brief sigh of relief.
The next hour passes far too slowly. You put together a relatively quick supper. You're distracted, thinking about everything that you've been learning about your powers, but you manage to avoid ruining the meal, much. Your dad is a better cook than you are, but it's not right to expect him to cook all of the time, not on top of all of the extra hours that he has to put into work to help make ends meet.
Though…you shook your head. That's a question for later, if at all.
Your dad and you eat together in silence. Neither of you are exactly social butterflies, but it has been getting worse lately, for the past three weeks or so. Ever since
that happened, making everything so much worse than it had been—not being able to talk about it, to even hint that it had happened…you wouldn't want your dad to know anyway, you are glad that you could hide it, but it still hurt, and it put up a distance between you.
That makes you think of Blake's diagnosis of your "connections" to people. You knew when he said it that it wasn't a mistake, that you don't have any friends, not any more. Not since you were betrayed by the one you were closest to. Only one familial connection, to your dad. There is your Gram, your mom's mom, but she has never really approved of Dad, and that would have made relations difficult even in the best of times, which this wasn't. If you have to guess, you'd say her connection is too paltry to matter, or maybe even to see. As for your mom herself…well. No point in going down that path, not right now.
Think about something else, anything, anything.
Remembering your thought from earlier, you shove down the burning in your eyes and clear your throat. Your dad looks up from his food, looking startled from whatever thoughts were occupying him. That's just the way he always looks, though, like everything in the world surprises him.
"You were home earlier than usual today," you say, careful not to show the hoarseness you knew was in your throat. "Any particular reason?" Might as well get two birds with one stone, right? You could try to build your relationship up with your dad while also getting information that you need to learn about your power without fear of exposure.
Some emotions flitted across his face, too fast for you to read, before it settled on rueful amusement. "Oh, just Kurt meddling again," he says lightly, referring to his longtime friend and coworker. "Came over and told me that I needed to get my rear back home instead of staying late again." Dad's expression starts to droop as he talks, until he regains his other typical expression, one of defeat. "It's just with the jobs the way they are lately…"
You just nod. It's a common refrain, and not just in this household, though since your dad is the head of hiring and Union spokesperson in the Dockworkers Association, you probably hear it more than most. You haven't been alive long enough to remember anything differently, but apparently the economy has been in a pretty bad place for a long time, since the Endbringers first appeared. The giant monsters don't bother anything most of the time, but their attacks on major cities every three months do a number on globalization and trade. Given that Brockton Bay had primarily been a shipping port, it had been particularly affected, and there were other local factors that just made everything worse.
Your dad rallies, pulling a smile back onto his face with visible effort. "Anyway, he convinced me to come home on time, for today at least."
You nod back at him, then turn your face down to resume eating. That's good to know, that tomorrow he will be staying out late again. That will give your more time to experiment. And then there's the weekend the day after that. It wouldn't be unusual for him to leave you alone for much of the weekend, often because he goes in to work to try to rustle up some jobs for the dockworkers, but also because he seems to realize how much you cherish your weekends away from school. Too much experimentation will probably get you caught, if you did it at home, but you could also head out somewhere more abandoned to practice. He knows how much you like going to the library, it'd be fine.
Your dad offers to clean up the table for you once you both finish dinner, since you are the one who cooked, and you accept hesitantly, shooting a covert glance at the basement door. You don't want to leave Blake alone in the basement for too long, but without your dad both sleepy from eating and distracted by the television, you don't trust your ability to move around the creaky house enough to try to retrieve the mirror without him catching you. You shoot the door another worried glance before going to the living room, turning on the TV. You browse around for a bit before settling on one of your dad's favorite programs, to keep him more engaged and thus distracted.
Even after your dad comes and joins you in the living room, you can't concentrate. Rather than remaining on the couch with him, shifting and twitching and generally presenting what must be a suspicious picture, you get up abruptly, not even waiting for a commercial break.
"I…" you start, mentally fumbling for something to say in response to his inquisitive look. You don't want to
lie, not to your dad, but that hardly means that you want to tell him everything. Lies of omission were fine, surely. It comes to you after a second. "I still have homework that I need to finish," you tell him. All true, even if you're not sure that you'll be able to focus until after 10:00, when your dad's early slumber patterns mean it should be safe to retrieve the mirror.
"Okay, Taylor," he says. "I don't want to get between you and your work. I should get some paperwork done too, since you mention it."
"Alright," you say. You stand there awkwardly for a moment, then start to flee upstairs. You glance sidelong at the basement door once more, but don't pause as you go up the stairs.
When you're almost at the top of the stairs, however, you hear a strange thump and a muffled oath coming from…the wall? Looking over, you see your reflection in the cheap transparent covering for the photos along the side of the stairs, until Blake stands up and your image disappears.
"
Blake?" you hiss. You shoot a hasty glance downstairs, but you don't think your dad heard. "What are you doing—no, nevermind now, you need to get back to your mirror!"
"I didn't come up here on purpose," he breathes, his voice angry but quiet. "I was just minding my business—after being left in the dark, by the way—when I was yanked up onto these stairs. I thought you summoned me or something."
This derails your line of thought entirely. You get it back on track when you see the look on Blake's face, however. You aren't quite tactless enough to say what you were thinking out loud.
"I take it that you didn't?" he asks, his expression still warning you off.
"No!" you retort, maintaining your quiet despite your faint flush. "Try to go back downstairs."
"Okay, okay," he says, walking down the stairs. His movement was strange—the moment he reaches the edge of one picture, his image leaps to the next, without any time in between. He reaches the last picture in the line and disappears.
Almost the very same second that he left, Blake crashes back into the stairs at your feet, or at least where your feet would be in the mirror world.
"What's going on?" you ask insistently, the stress of the moment leaking into your voice.
"
I don't know!" Blake retorts harshly. "I don't like it
either!"
"Fine!" you start, before you're cut off.
"Taylor, are you okay up there?" you hear your dad call up from living room where you left him.
"Uh, yeah Dad!" you yell back. That last bit had been rather loud, you guess. You turn to face Blake again, who didn't look as mad. "Let's take this to my room," you suggest in a whisper, gesturing towards your door.
A few minutes later, you and Blake are in your room, staring at each other through a dusty hand mirror you found buried in the upstairs bathroom; it's not like you have any other mirrors in your room. You both take the opportunity to take stock and calm down.
"Okay," you say with a voice of forced calm. "Now what's going on?'
"I've been thinking about it some." Blake responds in a similar tone. "When we first met, I said that something was telling me that I was here to be your familiar, and that's true. Something I hadn't mentioned about familiars yet is that they have a range limit from their practitioners. There's a certain point that they just can't get further than. It's possible that we ran into ours, here."
You press your lips together, thinning them further than usual, but didn't say the first things that sprang to mind.
"I think," you say after several deep breaths, "that I need to know everything."
Blake raises an eyebrow. "It took me and my companion weeks of dedicated study to know what I know now, not counting what we learned in fights or other more…exotic…sources. How long do you have?"
You get up and retrieve a spare notebook from your school supplies, one of the many that you've scrimped enough to buy in bulk. You plop it on the desk between you and the mirror and open it up, a pencil in hand.
"I might not have all night," you say, looking him dead in the eye. "But we have until 10 before Dad goes to sleep and I was going to get your mirror, and we can still talk after that if we're quiet."
"Fair enough," Blake says after a moment. "Where would you like to start?"
"Let's start with familiars," you say, opening up to the first page and writing that along the top. It took you only seconds to fill in what little information you had on the subject. "What else do I need to know? Start with the information that isn't found in fantasy books, please."
"Alright," your familiar says. "Let's see. All familiars have two forms, set at the time of the binding…"
Basic Info
· Status
o Normal
· Big Three
o Person
o place
o THING
· Auxiliary elements
o Unknown
Vote for one option per underlined section. Feel free to customize your votes with up to 60 words of additional description; if you are using someone else's plan and wish to add something to it, please
bold the new portions.
What do you want to do tomorrow?
[] Skip school. Think of how much experimentation you and Blake can do when you have the whole day to do it! Surely this decision has nothing to do with any ulterior motives …
- Customization
[] Go to school. You could hardly call yourself any kind of real cape if you couldn't even face a day at school, regardless of what's waiting for you there. There's plenty of time for experimentation afterwards.
- Customization
[] Split the difference. You owe it to your dad, and your mom, to try to continue your education. Go to school, but should any…difficulties…arise, if it feels like too much, just take off. You can make them proud by being an awesome cape, too.
- Customization
What do you want to focus your experimentation on tomorrow? (Note: others aspects will at least be touched on, regardless of choice, though your above vote will influence how much you're able to discover.)
[] Blake, or rather your (powered) interactions with him. You created him, he's a part of your power. You already found that you couldn't give him mental commands, but there's got to be more to it.
- Customization
[] Inside your head. Between the three bundles and the other stuff you haven't really looked into yet, you feel like a stranger inside your own brain. Time to fix that, even if it's not yet time to use any of the bundles again.
- Customization
[] Pact Magic. Blake mentioned a lot of different kinds of magic just in what you've talked about so far. There's got to be a reason for your power to have all of these memories of stuff that doesn't exist…right? Maybe you could use them yourself!
- Customization
At the moment, I'm thinking that I'll close the voting at 11:59 pm PST on Monday, but we'll see. Be sure to let me know if you see any errors, please
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