Settling 1.01
It had been all of seventeen hours since I had landed in Earth Bet, and already I was at the PRT headquarters. 'Adam why?' You may ask, head hung low with my lack of moral flexibility, uncomprehending as to why I would decide not to use my Mc Awesome powers I got I that CYOA I did last night, to defeat the merchants, use their assets and manpower to take over the city and then live like an emperor until I inevitably one-shot Leviathan, kill Zion and then travel the multiverse with at least two women who would die for me. Well for one my powers were not from a CYOA and are actually a pain in the ass to use [because it's really difficult to cast a spell on the fly], two I'm not particularly keen on the idea of mass murder, and three I'm gay, so the enticements of women aren't really for me.
The most important reason of course was my lack of intent-based magic, not to say it doesn't have an intent based component, just that it's not enough to control a spell, it's only real use is to stop my magic doing anything bad to me or anything that would seriously mutilate someone who I don't want seriously mutilated. For example if I tried to make a criminal stop in his tracks and I used the incantation 'pauson', it would mostly just backfire on me. Stop what, the criminal, his heat, time, death, atoms? There are so many ways for that spell to go backwards that if I did that spell it would most likely go towards the smallest effect it could, like stopping a singular atom from vibrating, which would do very little.
Now if I actually wanted to magically stop a criminal from moving I would have to make a wand from the antlers of a stag, use it to draw the character of Saturn, then intone the incantation 'pauson to therama mou' and even then that has just as mush a chance of physically slowing him down as making him very, very sad or just draining him to the point at which he could no longer muster up the energy to move, neither of which are particularly PR friendly.
Which is why I am currently just outside an elevator staring at a myriad of teens dressed like - well - superheroes, in attendance was Aegis, Gallant, Clockblocker, Shadow Stalker, and Vista, all in full regalia and stood in a line in front of me, well except for Sophia, who was making herself a sandwich in the snack area. Aegis walked up to me and put out his hand to shake,
"Hi, my name is Aegis, head of the Brockton Bay Wards, it's always nice to have a new member on the team. I believe introductions are in order. This is Clockblocker, Gallant, Vista, and Shadow Stalker." He gestured at each when saying their names, all making a small greeting or a wave, except for Sophia who grunted before going back to her sandwich.
"It's a pleasure to meet all of you, I've heard wonderful things about you since I arrived." I stifled the twinge of sadness that was brought up when mentioning my home, which I'll probably never be able to ever go to again. My sisters, my brother, my parents, my friends, my country are all gone. Damn Gallant flinched, I must not be as good at emotional quashing as I thought. And this was when our dear Shadow Stalker decided to grace our ears with her dulcet tone.
"Oh yeah, you're from another dimension, Earth Gamma, right? Must have been a shock to find your entire country crazy for coco-puffs, huh?"
That.
Bitch.
Miss Militia began "Shadow Stalker, that was absolutely..." She continued with tearing Sophia a new one in a way that did exceedingly little to faze the teen, mainly because it sounded more like a mother chewing out her daughter than an authority to a teen who had just brought up one of the worst disasters to have struck the world in the past forty years in Europe. Whilst she was doing that I had pulled out an Aspen wand, which I had stored in my pocket just in case, and whispered "deixon moi tas skoteinotatas praxeis Sophias Hess' and was suddenly shown an image of a man in a bright yellow coloured costume, stained with a rusted red, and a young girl in a mask, turn to look at him, then shadowing off into the distance, leading the poor man in yellow to fester and die.
I...
Fuck that was dark.
"Those are strong words from someone like you Sophia," maybe I should have respected Miss Militia's attempt at de-escalation, but I am pissed and when in Worm... "given that whole predator and prey thing you have going on. But then again we can't blame someone as tired as you, after all tiredness can excuse a great many things. At least that's what you thought when you left that man to die..." if me saying her name had got here to look up now she was paying attention.
"Do you think I should care about a criminal, he was pathetic and if he died then good, we could use a bit less of those bottom-feeders." By the end of her little tirade she had just spouted her face had settled into a disturbingly sadistic smirk.
"Oh no not him, the man in yellow," ah there was that shock again, "supernovae he was called, Jeremy to his friends of course but how were you to know. Oh surely you remember him? Brown hair, twenty something - about your brother's age now that I think about it - and terribly dead of course, but you already knew that."
"Magician enough!" And there was Miss Militia again, but the altercation was already done and Shadow Stalker was gone, probably going out to beat up some poor druggies. Poor, poor druggies. 'Magician' was the prototype name given to me by the PR team, I didn't like it.
"I'm sorry Miss Militia, my words got away from me." At my hapless shrug Miss M went off, either to find Sophia or to find an official to tell a superior, Piggot or maybe Renick.
"Yeah you can say that again. Man how the hell did you know that, and why the fuck did you say that?" Clockblocker said looking halfway between stupefaction and schadenfreude.
"Language Clockblocker." Vista pulled the coke can on the table in front of her from several metres away. "But that is a good question, we don't typically see such a strong thinker, especially one that can gather such precise information."
I pulled out the wand of aspen from the cuff of my shirt where I had hidden it whilst casting the small divination charm. "Aspen is such a versatile wood, capable of a great many things, when smoked it can improve a person's eloquence, when placed around the boundaries of a home it can help with staving off theft. But its most important aspect is its connection to the element of Air and Wind, which in turn is connected to conjurations of such, as well as divination. This contributed to the small charm placed upon Shadow Stalker as well as the fact that this Aspen was plucked from its tree on a Wednesday, which is known for its help with divination and spiritual insight. If you are asking about the divination itself I simply asked to see Sophia's darkest deeds. And I most certainly wasn't disappointed." I - of course - was met with blank stares.
"I'm a tinker but with magic instead of science."
Their confusion slowly shifted to an odd sort of acceptance and Gallant said, "So you are like Dauntless but you need materials instead of time?"
I smiled, "If you would like to think that way then yes, but it is a tad more complex than materials, the timing, the star signs present, the incantations muttered if one should need to use them and the type of medium used all needed to be taken into account. For example the reason I managed to pull so much information from my divination is because it is currently the eighteenth of march, making the constellation along the elliptical Pisces, which is associated with Water and thus dream magic, and Sophia had been dreaming about it quite often as of late." And wasn't that disquieting, dreams of death in the mind of a woman who doesn't care means that she was dreaming it for someone else, I wonder who?
"Do you always speak like that? All academic and like?" The voice of Clockblocker ripped me from my reverie, and now that I think about it. I did go a bit dramatic didn't I.
Aegis responded on my behalf, given that I had forgotten to respond. "I quite like it actually, it goes well with your English accent, making it sound wizardly." God that smile and that costume should be illegal, damn.
I smiled back, "I suppose it did come out a bit... theatrical..."
"Hey, what's going on?" It was at this point that Kid Win came in from wherever he had been, most likely tinkering, or at least attempting to. It was clear that he didn't understand what was going on, why Vista, Clockblocker and Gallant were sporting amused half-smiles, Aegis fully grinning both at me and now at him, Miss M and Stalker gone their various ways.
"The new guy ripped Soph- Stalker a new one."
"You don't need to cover up her name Dennis, names are one of the things I'm good at."
Now I was the one who was sporting the amused half-smile, though at this almost all smiles on the others were killed dead on their faces. Vista especially looked stricken, "So you can know a person's secret identity with just a glance, Magician that... that... that's big."
"To learn your names I needed to drink a tonic of Passion Flower at exactly seven o'clock on a Wednesday, whereupon I entered a sleep-like trance and see your names, and it would have only worked if I would have eventually known your names anyway." At this they calmed down and the tension in the air broke, I had lied of course, but that doesn't mean that the spell itself wouldn't have worked, but it would've been successful even if it would only have worked on people I consider or will consider a friend.
"Well," Began Aegis, back to what I am now assuming to be his trademark grin, "If you already know who we are then we don't have to keep our masks on." Dear lord, why is he that hot, small addendum, it should be illegal to have that smile, that costume and that face. After this they all did their reveals and at least those were standard and conversation was flowing nicely until a PRT officer (apparently Miss M had been called away due to emergency whilst away) escorted me out to the entrance and let me on my merry way. He seemed to buy that I was going to get the bus 'home' (luckily he didn't ask me where my home was) and so I was allowed to meander into downtown Brockton, to a very specific alley.
This time I began a very different spell, one that wasn't affected by the stars or dates, dreams tended not to be after all, and it was my body that was the conduit, the only conduit that could've possibly worked on this side of the boundary, I began speaking the incantation, the words not mattering only that I was the one to say them, but hey I'm a stickler for continuity so I began in my favoured magically potent language, Ancient Greek, "Diaspao boulesis tou kosmou kai horao ide eis tous oneiros eason me pesein eis autoumerkurios ankalas kai elkyson me peran ton phragmon." The world twisted open and I fell in.
AN: Hello! This is my first attempt at a fanfic and it scares me. If you have any notes please feel free to comment as such. A little warning is that my fanfic will have quite a bit of crossover between quite a few different medias and Worm is only really used as a base world for all the other plots to be based on and this shall be very, very AU. BUT YOU SHALL HAVE YOUR FAVOURITE CHARACTERS. I know that there isn't much plot in this first chapter, but it's really so everyone can get used to the main character as well as other aspects of the story without being chucked right into the first arc. Please keep in mind that the MC is around seventeen years old and has quite a few flaws which have been put there on purpose so he can have some semblance of character growth. The genre is undefined but there will be some aspects of horror and general unpleasantness but it will by no means comprise a majority of the plot.
