The Rabbit Sergeant and the Dragon Cult

[JennyDracos]

Jessica Dunbar stood at the front of the wood-panelled room, her hands folded neatly behind her back so that no one else could see her fist clenching and unclenching almost spasmodically. She glanced down at her notes one last time, not that she needed to. She'd given this exact briefing a dozen times. But what was coming next was always the hardest part of it.

Her eyes swept the room, with its mixture of middle-aged men in Air Force camouflage and middle-aged men in Air Force blue, and then she locked them onto the two-star general at the head of the conference table. "That combination of a vulnerability that we are not prepared for and opportunity that we can take advantage of is why the US military and the Air Force in particular needs to do everything in its power to achieve and ensure magical dominance. Are there any questions?"

The general - the commander of the Twentieth Air Force and thus in her direct chain of command for once - nodded slowly. "Are there any limitations to what can be done with magic?"

Jess let out the breath she hadn't realize she'd held. She'd been expecting a much more painful question. This was a good one. Far from the first time she'd been asked it, but that was frustrating, not agonizing. "Honestly, sir, we have no really concrete answer to that. Going back to what I said at the beginning of the briefing, magic requires intent, belief, and symbolism. None of the experiments I know of have shown any sort of power requirements, or quantitative difference in effect. It works or it doesn't. The typical limfac - that is, limiting factor - is belief." She grinned ruefully. "Which is one of the problems with charting out limitations. Describing something symbolically can be very difficult. Placing those symbols without error can be very difficult, especially for something complex. But if you're not sure that it will work, it simply will not, and there is no way to know if it failed because you messed up a line in your formula or if you just didn't believe strongly enough."

"How important are the symbols used, then?"

Jess looked at the man who'd just spoken. He was a lieutenant colonel, and halfway down the conference table. She didn't recognize him, but he was probably a staff member. "Think of them as the waveguide or the reflector. The intent and the belief are the impetus. No intent, no belief, no signal. But the waveguide is what gives the signal its shape. Now, intent does reflect somewhat in what the symbols mean, but only somewhat. The color white to me means purity. Red means anger, or fire, or change. In China red is lucky, and white means death."

A major near the foot of the table leaned forward. "Is that what happened to you?" he asked.

Jess's heart stopped. Her hand clenched, her nails digging into her palm. She opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. After she had control of herself, she dragged her gaze back to the man who'd spoken. "You would get much better answers from Colonel Edward Nowroski. As a doctor working for the Human Performance Wing at AFRL, he was in charge of the experiment. He had contact with the company that produced the treatments. He conducted the investigation afterwards. He was who I went to when things...started...happening, and his memory of those events is much more clear than mine is." Her mouth had gone absolutely dry, and it seemed like there was a rock in her throat. But this was a technical question, and if she could just push past those memories, the shakes, the nausea, the blood-

Technical question. Technical answer. "To the best of my knowledge, what happened is a freak alignment of intent and belief, and symbols. One of the technicians involved in the process was intending to make a compound that would boost athletic performance. That's intent. They thought it would work. That's belief. But since they were intending to make a gene therapy treatment and not a magic potion, the end results were unpredictable."

The major crossed his arms and glared. "But you-"

"No more questions," said the general, ice in his voice. "Thank you for the briefing, Sergeant Dunbar."

Everyone leapt to their feet and stood at attention while the General walked towards the door. "Carry on," he said, and left.

The command chief who had been seated at his left looked at the major. "If you'd come with me, sir," he said in that tone of voice that says he knows he can't give you orders but he just gave you an order and you'd better do it, son."

Most of those present busied themselves getting their note-taking material together or moving towards the door. The one exception was a colonel making his way towards Jess. He'd been on the general's right, so probably senior staff. Almost hesitantly, he asked, "Is the colonel you mentioned the one currently heading Air Force magical research?"

"Yes, sir, at least at AFRL." Jess hesitated. "Although he's not at Wright Patt right now. He's currently working out of Andrews."

The colonel nodded. "Alright. Thank you for the briefing, Sergeant. Sorry about what happened at the end." He shook her hand and left.

Jess flipped her binder open, then shuffled through her briefing notes to make sure they were all there and in proper order. She set the stack face down and heard the last person in the room approach her with his familiar tread.

"That guy was an asshole," Lieutenant Colonel John Rogers said, glancing towards the door. "How are you doing, Jessica?"

She sighed, pulling out a pen, and adding a thirteenth tally marker to the left side of the page. The right side had two. "I'm fine, sir," she lied.

"Huh," he said doubtfully. He looked down at her binder. "Oh, hey. Is this your famous notebook?" He reached down and tapped the black spiral-bound notebook, tucked against the spine of the binder."

"I'd hardly call it 'famous,' Colonel."

"Do you mind if I take a look?"

Jess lifted the book and handed it to him. "Here you go, sir. There's not really that much in it yet."

He flipped the cover open, paging through it slowly. "What are these symbols?"

Jess looked up, then at the book. "It's a sort of artificial language. The idea is that everything in the language is fairly concrete and thus easier to work with. Plus everything has a relatively uniform size, which means it much easier to write around the edge of a circle. No need for word-smithing."

He grinned at her. "Don't you call the group of friends you were working with a 'circle?' You must really like those."\

She flushed and slapped the binder closed. She muttered, "It works, sir. Complete circle, complete spell. We started with Wicca, but wandered off that pretty quick, and really, 'so mote it be' is kind of like 'amen' as a signifier. It carries too many of the wrong implications." She closed the binder and tucked it under her arm, then raised a finger. "But a circle ends where it begins. Shall we go, sir?"

He nodded and started walking towards the door. "Invisibility, interesting. Does it work?"

"You'll see on the next page, sir."

"Ah, a spell to reverse invisibility."

"Becky's cat jumped into the circle while we were casting it." She pulled the door open. "After you, sir."

"That does sound like a conundrum." He stepped through the door, then flipped through another few pages.

She flipped the lights off, then closed the door behind her as she stepped out. When she looked up, he was studying her face.

"Much better," he mused. More loudly, he said, "Come on. I have a meeting halfway around the building, so we need to walk and talk. That was well-delivered, by the way." He held out the notebook for her.

Jess slid the notebook into her binder, then zipped it closed and hurried after, her heels tapping softly on the tile floor. "I should be good at it by now, colonel. That's the tenth time I've given the exact same briefing just this week. It feels like I'm having to brief every single officer in this building personally. Any idea when I'll be finished with the Air Force and have a chance to move on to the Army?"

He sighed. "At least it's not the Senate."

She looked at the portraits on the wall as they passed them. Anything to avoid letting him see her face right now. "It's not like it matters," she said. "The Intelligence Committee never lifted that order, which means I don't have access to classified intelligence materials. Which means I can't work in my career field, which means the only thing I can do is serve as a case study of what magic can do to a person and make it marginally easier to convince them we need to learn how to make magic do what we want." She clamped her jaw shut.

After a few moments, she forced her mouth back open. "I'm sorry, sir. That was..."

"Perhaps overly blunt, but also entirely too accurate." He glanced at her. "Especially with that tally."

That lump was back in her throat. "I wish they'd forget about it, sir. And as long as I'm here, they won't."

Rogers stopped at the top of a stairwell. "I don't think it'll be as bad as you fear, Sergeant. But I do have the power to cut you loose for the rest of the day. That said, I'm meeting with an old friend for dinner, so I will need the car - will you be alright?"

"I'll be fine, sir. Have fun at your meeting."

 

[JennyDracos]

"The doors are now closing. Please stand clear of the doors."

Jess winced and rubbed her ear. The presence of so many other people in a confined space made her other self nervous, which pushed her hearing into overdrive. Most of what she heard was easy to dismiss as background noise; the rust of the air as the train left Pentagon Station and moved into the north-bound tunnel, the grinding of the wheels on the track, the scrape of the runners on the third rail - all that had a pattern that made it simple to brush aside. The air pockets of maintenance accesses through the tunnel were no real distraction, either.

She was almost used to the smells, too. The reek of urine and vomit, overlaid with a haze of alcohol and the acrid reek of the disinfectant that someone in the car had used recently, all that came in a nausea-inducing wave, but it lingered, and it only took her a few minutes to get used to it. Human sweat, along with the subtler smells of fear, anger, lust, it was all just a part of life now.

The noise of the other people in the car was another matter entirely. The cough, the sneeze, the resettling of luggage - her other self treated all of those as reminders that she was surrounded by predators larger than she was. Sure, it wasn't much - her other self was almost five feet tall, not all that much smaller than the average woman. She'd tried to point that out to her other self, but had been countered with the fact that cows were much larger than humans and the big scary predators ate those all the time. Jess hadn't really given up the battle, but she more or less accepted the truce they'd come to. Her other self would be extra cautious around big groups of people, but Jess wouldn't run away from them.

None of that made it any easier to live with the sound of humanity, though. And when you combine her other self's hearing with her own inquisitive nature, it was almost impossible for her to stop from hearing every single word spoken in that car. The best she could do there was to be listening to so many conversations that none of them meant anything, just slipped through her head without stopping.

"Gonna be a good show tonight." That was an older woman, talking to the younger man next to her. "We got us a real magician, and he's gonna do some stuff, know what I mean?"

The man shrugged. "Sure, sure. Smoke and mirrors, but he'll put on a good show."

The touch of Louisiana in her voice thickened sharply. "You just let yourself think that, you do. There's more to the world an' all that. There's magicians that can do some really big things."

"Yeah, make freaks."

Jess felt her jaw tighten. She was grateful when someone down the car started talking about the Middle East - a hippy-looking chick, her hair wrapped in a green scarf. "Is it going to get as bad as Africa?" she was asking a young man in Army camo.

"Who knows?" he asked. He leaned forward, conspiratorially lowering his voice. "We still don't know everything that's going on there. Total communications blackout."

"Really?" said the woman. Jess heard a slight touch of satisfaction under the mask of curiosity. "Hey, do you want to grab a coffee?"

The satisfaction told Jess exactly what was going on: someone had found a dumb young fella willing to spill military secrets to impress a pretty lady.

Trying to focus on something else, Jess scanned through the advertisements near the ceiling of the car. The first was a purple pill add with a happy older man and a happy older woman in front of glassy hills. Someone had spraypainted a wavy red line over it. It wasn't enough to block the ad, but it kept going - over the next ad, then the next, all the way to the front of the car, where it terminated in a big triangle. She stared at it, trying to figure out what it was, why it was there, trying not to listen to the businessmen in the back of the car talking about acronyms she'd never heard of.

After a minute or two, she gave up on the graffiti. She opened the bag in her lap and pulled out what had once been a beginner's French language workbook, flipping past the pages she'd already covered in notes to the first exercise she hadn't done yet.

She managed a page and a half.

She knew what the problem was. It wasn't the major who'd jabbed at still-healing psychological wounds. It was the fact that she was *constantly* exposed to it. Her current assignment had the wonderful combination of being practically pointless and yet being extremely high-visibility. Her nerves were getting worn to the ragged edges, and she didn't even have the satisfaction of doing something meaningful.

Fuck, she needed to be around people she knew right now.

She looked up the at the route map, trying to see past the spraypaint. Barbara's apartment was another three stops down the line; Becky's house four stops past that. Joint Base Andrews was, she knew, a transfer, six stops, and either a bus or a taxi the rest of the way.

But Babs was still in Ecuador. Her apartment would be cold and empty, and Jess needed company too much to subject herself to that as long as she had an option.

Becky was out, too. If Jess had a really interesting idea for a spell to work on, she'd have been willing to risk it, but she didn't and Becky was in full Crazy Writer Mode. If she didn't give Jess a clear invitation to visit, she was as likely to throw things at a visitor as welcome them in. In addition to the normal stresses of contract deadlines, Becky was also seven months pregnant and her temper had been getting very short.

That left Nowroski. At least she could catch up on his latest set of experiments, and anything that let her understand magic a little better was worth doing.

As the subway lurched to a halt, Jess grabbed her purse and binder and pushed out of her seat for the door.

 

[michaell8000]

it's a nice start and it feels like the timeline is set just after the first mass panic intrested to see where this goes

 

[JennyDracos]

it's a nice start and it feels like the timeline is set just after the first mass panic intrested to see where this goes

Click to shrink...

Honestly this is kind of before the first mass panic. There was no big sudden 'Change' where technology stopped working, so mostly thus far it's what happened to Jess and other people like her: no one intended to 'cast a spell,' but they wound up doing so anyway. Enough of that has happened - and enough of it made the news cycles - that most people know what magic is, but they still don't really think of it as something 'real.'

Which keeps the number of people who can do magic down. For now.

 

[michaell8000]

Honestly this is kind of before the first mass panic. There was no big sudden 'Change' where technology stopped working, so mostly thus far it's what happened to Jess and other people like her: no one intended to 'cast a spell,' but they wound up doing so anyway. Enough of that has happened - and enough of it made the news cycles - that most people know what magic is, but they still don't really think of it as something 'real.'

Which keeps the number of people who can do magic down. For now.

Click to shrink...

Really? Holy fuck that is legitimately terrifying magic latching on to day to activities and interpreting them to whatever the result is i wonder how long until society goes round the bend.

 

[JennyDracos]

For the most part, that's not a big problem; since it requires all three things in place. You have to want something to happen, you have to believe your efforts will cause something, and you have to have the proper symbolism in place. Even then, most of the times some spontaneous magic happens, no one notices. Jess was one participant in a clinical trial; she's the only one who got any non-placebo effect.

If this were the sequel to another story, that would have been a big part of Jess and the two friends she studies magic would figuring out the 'belief' factor. They were trying and trying to get a candle-lighting spell to work, and finally one of the friends pulled out a lighter, and poof! the candle lit. But they can't duplicate it, because they're trying to see if it will work, until they figure out that believing a spell will work is an absolute requirement to the spell working.

But it's not the sequel to another story, that story does not exist, it would have about two hundred words I could be proud of and fifty thousand trash.

 

[JennyDracos]

Colonel Edward Nowroski was a rarity among military leadership, a man who'd accepted that he was going bald. What was left of his hair was wispy and gray, and the grin he gave Jess filled his face with well-worn laugh lines. "And here you said you didn't think you'd be able to make it by before I left!"

Jess grinned back at him, but it flickered. She plopped into one of his visitor chairs and dropped purse and binder in the other. "I'm sorry, Doc. It's...been a day."

He gave her an assessing look. "I quite understand. And I think I know exactly what would cheer you up." He opened a cabinet, pulled out a pair of mugs, and set them on the desk. Then he reached under the desk and pulled out an electric carafe. Tilting it over one of the mugs, he poured out a pungent stream of coffee.

That thought punched right through the dark clouds surrounding Jess. She straightened hurriedly and raised a hand. "Uh, no thank you, sir-" she started.

He looked up at her and grinned roguishly. His thumb spun the lid of the carafe around, and when he poured into the other mug, it was marked with the grassy smell of green tea.

She blinked and tilted her head, her lips forming a few possibilities before she settled on one that seemed likely. "Oh! Transmutation circles in the lid? One for tea, one for coffee?"

He winked at her as he set the carafe down. "Bingo! I imagine if I had a smaller hand I could scribe a warming circle on the inside of the pot, but I suppose I'll just have to make do with the power of electricity to turn cold water into hot."

Jess grinned, pulled the mug of tea over, and took a sip. "It tastes like tea, at least," she said.

He snorted and raised his coffee to his lips. "So hot water, basically. But then, you know how it is. It's easier to turn something into tea than it is to something that's almost tea. If I were to try and make that fake sugar stuff you usually drink I'd have a much more difficult time."

"Honestly, Doc, I seem to have lost the taste for it." She took another sip of tea, pulled the mug away and looked at it. "I kinda feel like I'm losing more and more of him every day."

Nowroski sighed and slumped back. "It's not impossible. Are you sure you don't want to find a way to reverse the change? Now that we have an idea of what happened and how, we can probably try to reverse it."

Jess clutched her mug to her chest for a moment, then shook her her head. "No, it's not worth the risk. We both know how lucky I was to stay as human as I am, even most of the time. I don't think we know enough to be certain of just undoing the accident and not making things worse." Then she giggled. "Besides, Babs would kill me."

"In that case, why not step into my lab? I've got a few things running that I'd like to show you." The colonel stood from his chair.

Jess stood almost without thinking - and almost with spilling her tea. "Should I leave this here?"

He snorted. "I'm certainly not. Come on - it's not as nice a lab as the big one back in Dayton but it's not as if we need all that much in the way of expensive equipment right now."

"Personally, I continue to be surprised by the fact that I haven't bought a 3D printer," Jess said as she followed him through the door. "I can't help but think that we could manage some amazing things by layering symbology over itself."

He looked back over his shoulder at her, with one eyebrow raised. "Are you telling me that you haven't tried making a spell formula on a regular printer yet?"

"Heck, we even tried using autohypnosis to convince ourselves it would work and it didn't." She shook her head. "But we could make form fit pieces, then manually add the runes and assemble."

He gave that one a thought as he walked into the room. It looked like a fairly standard, but unused, low-risk biology lab; wide benches with smooth, black surfaces, shelving for equipment high enough over the benches that you had plenty of room to work with. There were three of the long benches in the room, two of them bare.

The bench he stopped at was the exception; a computer and several pads of paper were at the far end, but down here were three separate circles, inked in silver paint and scribed with neat letters. At the center of each circle, a steel ball floated about six inches off the bench.

Jess scowled at the text. "Latin? I suppose I should be glad you didn't use Greek."

He quirked his lips. "Occupational hazard. I imagine any lawyer who starts working with magic will use Latin as well. It's got that feel of..."

"Pretentiousness?" Jess suggested.

He snapped his fingers. "Exactly! You know how it works. It's easier to believe a spell will work in the right kind of language, and if you don't believe it, no spell. Write the exact same thing in Latin, or Greek, and it will be more likely to work with English. Sanskrit or Hebrew would be better because of their ties to mysticism, but I find both of those have a fundamental problem."

"You don't speak them."

"Right again, my dear, right again."

She rolled her eyes at him, then looked at the circles, trying to puzzle out their meaning. "Unfortunately, I don't speak Latin, either."

He wrinkled his nose and tapped the rightmost circle. "This circle turns the sphere into a floating sphere. If I slide it off the bench, it stays more or less level." He reached around and tapped it towards himself and, as he had said, it floated out.

Jess tapped it back towards the circle. "Levitation, always a classic."

"Of course. Now the second circle - the sphere in it isn't floating, per se. It's sitting six inches above the surface."

She frowned. "I don't follow."

"Watch." He slid his hand between the sphere and the bench. The instant his hand passed under the sphere, it jumped up. As soon as his hand was out from underneath, it fell back down. It actually bounced off an invisible surface twice before it settled. "Like the first circle, though, it's now a property of the sphere. It doesn't depend on the circle. I can wipe it away and those spheres will keep floating and sitting until I run them through the float-be-gone over there." He gestured down towards the stack of notepads.

"Then this last one isn't the same way," Jess said softly. "It's applied by the circle."

He nodded. "Take the ball out and it drops," he said. He nudged the ball and it floated out. The instant it crossed the wring of Latin, it dropped to the bench. "You see? The effect is on the area, not the ball."

She leaned in close, slid the ball around to the side of the circle, and set it to roll back across the line. As soon as the center of the ball was past the letter it was rolling over, the sphere 'fell' up into the air. "I wonder if that's because the contact point is inside the circle, or because the sphere is more inside the circle than not?"

He sighed. "It's going to take high-speed of cameras to know that, I'm afraid. The curvature of the circle will make a difference between one and the other, but not to the naked eye."

Jess looked at the other two floating spheres. "I assume you weighed them after?"

He looked affronted. "Of course! Before, after, after float-be-gone, and once I put them back in the circles. At least as best I could. Again, all my most sensitive instruments are back in Dayton, and the sphere that floats by itself is, well, obviously not 'weightless' per se because it would be flying towards the horizon by now. The mass seems to be about right, but I had to use a spring scale and an accelerometer and I don't have a lot of resolution." The affront had changed to disgust, but then he grinned and nodded at Jess. "But the hovering sphere was another matter entirely. Run your hand under it."

Jess narrowed her eyes suspiciously. She hesitated, but then she moved her hand cautiously into the second circle. As soon as her hand passed under the sphere, it rose six inches above her hand. She gasped. "It feels like it's sitting on my hand!"

"It feels like it's sitting on the balance, too." He winked at her. "Made it much easier to weigh. Absolutely consistent with the other weighings, by the way."

She cupped her hand around where the sphere felt like it was, then rolled it around in her palm. The sphere stayed six inches above where she felt it. After a moment, she let it roll back down to above the bench.

Nowroski plucked the floating sphere and carried it down the bench towards the tangle of power cords. "I'll show you my measurements. Before, and after. And this circle is, naturally, the float-be-gone."

She frowned. "What does it do? Specifically."

He smiled. "Removes all magical floating effects, naturally."

Jess hesitated, then slid her hand over the circle.

His grin widened. "Don't worry. The other circles are all cued specifically to 'steel ball.' This one isn't, but it also only removes magical effects."

She grinned back at him. "Can't be too cautious."

"Now if we pass the floating sphere through the float-be-gone-" and he did - "we can set the sphere on the scale, like so." Automatically, he pulled a pen out of his pocked, slid a lab notebook over, and moved to the bottom of a column of numbers. "And sixty-six point nine oh six grams..."

Across the room, a loud thump made them both jump.

Jess looked. Where they had been, there were still three circles on the bench, but only one floating ball, within the last circle. Almost instantly, she realized what must have happened. "I'm sorry. I must not have stopped the hovering sphere from rolling." She crouched down to scan the floor. "But I don't see it anywhere."

From Nowroski came a startled grunt. "There are two spheres in the area effect circle."

Jess leapt upright. "There are?" She hurried down the bench and saw that he was correct: one ball was floating in the circle, while the other was sitting in it. A whiff of burned plastic hung in the air.

Hesitantly, Nowroski passed his hand underneath the sphere. It rose up, and he set it rolling back towards the center circle. "Did its weight break the circle, then?"

"Not from this smell," Jess said. She waved her hand in front of her nose. "Something smells fried. And the color doesn't match."

Nowroski blinked. "That, my dear, is rather fascinating." He leaned in close to look at the painted Latin. "I think you're right. The paint is burned, and I think the countertop underneath it as well."

Jess frowned. "From a conflict between the hovering spell and the zone spell?"

"Or perhaps even from trying to float two balls at once." He checked first one cabinet, then another, then pulled out a bottle of alcohol and a wipe. He sprayed the circle, wiped. Some of the paint vanished. Then he frowned at the pieces of writing still left. "Do you know, I believe that's the very first time I've ever seen a working spell fail."

"That's-" Jenn froze. She thought about it. All those practice sessions with Babs and Becky - had they ever broken a spell in progress by accident? "Same here," she said finally. "I've definitely never seen anything flow from the spell to the spell formula, either."

Nowroski had already grabbed his notebook and was writing furiously. "This is going to take a completely new set of tests. It could open up whole avenues of explanation." He turned and raised a finger. "This is a spell that we know works - from experience - being pushed to failure. This is the bathwater going up!"

Jess looked down at the countertop, its finish still slightly pitted, imagining all the new possibilities forming. "All the things we can test," she said, looking up to him.

Behind him, she saw a window full of rapidly darkening sky. She blanched. "I really need to get going, though. I need to get home before it gets too dark."

He blinked, then looked at the clock. "Oh dear! I believe you are quite correct. Well, you have my number. Remember, my dear, any time."

Buoyed by their recent discovery, she threw him a grin and headed for the door.

 

[Strypgia]

As much as I hate to say it, the USAF might have more $ to throw at something like this. She should still go brief the Army anyway.

 

[JennyDracos]

As much as I hate to say it, the USAF might have more $ to throw at something like this. She should still go brief the Army anyway.

Click to shrink...

The way I see it, the Air Force would absolutely try to take control of magic (at least within DoD) the way they did with nuclear weapons, drones, fixed-wing aircraft, cyberwarfare, and satellites. That means there will be some push within the upper ranks to try to keep their people from briefing joint groups.

I also figure that they'll have as much success as they did with cyber and drones; one of the things I wanted to do with this setting was specifically not do 'only certain people can use magic,' which means that restricting it is gonna be impossible.

Anyway, one more scene and then we get to the killings!

 

[JennyDracos]

Her good mood lasted until the door of Babs' apartment thumped closed behind her.

It was cold, dark, and empty, and Jess had known it would be, had felt it for almost a week now. It would be another week before Brilliant Investigative Journalist Barbara Thompson was back from Ecuador. Her bosses thought there was some shady political stuff afoot; Babs had told Jess she was almost certain that someone in the local underground was a serious crafter.

In the meantime, however, that left Jess here, alone, staying in someone else's apartment.

Ignoring the light switch, she walked through the living room, shucking her uniform jacket. Like it or not, tomorrow would be coming, and that meant her service coat had to spend the night hanging on a hangar in her corner of Babs' closet. Once that was taken care of, it was back to the living room, and flop onto the couch where she and Babs had spent never enough time cuddling. The controls for Babs' sound system were right next to it; she turned it on, switched over to a talk radio station, and turned the volume as low as it would go. It wasn't the family she craved, but it was almost like having another person in the room.

That took some of the edge off.

Though come to think of it, she really was alone, so she might as well take advantage of it. Carefully pressing around the edges of the plastic speaker case, she found the tabs that held it on and undid them. The metal grid that covered the speaker itself was mounted to a thin disk, which was basically perfect. That went on the island in Babs' excellent kitchen. Her notebook went next to it, her teakettle went on the stove.

Cold, lonely, and worn-out meant it was a very good time for comfort food. Macaroni would be perfect, and she knew exactly where it was kept - on the opposite side of the cabinet from the big bowls, one of which she set down on the island. Then she opened the refrigerator and pulled out the good lettuce, the okay lettuce, the sliced onions and, yeah, the shredded carrots, too. It wasn't until she'd set everything on the counter that she realized what she'd done.

"No," she told her other self. "We are not doing this. Not for the fourth night in a row."

Her other self didn't answer.

"Fine," she said after a minute. She could just add some protein to it. Nice, warm chicken went *great* with a salad, and the very thought of it caused her stomach to wrench.

She gave up.

If there'd been someone else - anyone else, other than the man rambling about Wall Street on the radio - it would have been easier. She'd eaten steaks, chicken, seafood. Mike had even cooked rabbit burgers once, and her other self hadn't given her any problems. But that was different. That was with Babs, and Becky, and Mike, and the kits. That was safe with family, when her other self was at its most relaxed. This was not.

So she ate the damn salad. Between bites, she carefully measured the diameter of the speaker cover, crunched numbers for the length of the spell formula she was using, and started scribing runes.

It only took her a few minutes. The original version of the translation spell was six rings of script around the edges of Becky's four-foot coffee table, with four separate inset circles for clarification of specific points. It had taken a full day to come up with the spell, another to painstakingly translate it into Latin, and a three-day weekend to ink onto the tablecloth they'd sacrificed to the cause. Once they'd done it, though, they had a name for the language they'd created, and a much more convenient language for writing spells. Now all she had to do was scratch a single stanza into the soft enamel and the speaker would translate anything spoken in to the arcane language, more or less.

And if she put it in backwards, it would reverse the effect, and she could actually get a bit of language immersion going.

"Thanks for listening to Wesley Talks Finance," the voice on the radio was saying as she carefully fitted the speaker cover backwards into the case. "Coming up next, an hour by Reverend Justin McCarthy."

And the speaker cover went flying into the couch as she threw it down as hard as she could. That sanctimonious, hypocritical, scaremongering-

But the day had been bad enough without having to listen to him. All she had to do to hear the actual good news was scan to the next station, so she did. Then she checked the speaker cover for damage, fitted it into the case, slapped it into place, and went to the bedroom to grab the blanket.

She needed Babs' scent, bad.

She needed a friendly voice, too. And if she needed a reason to risk interrupting Becky's writing, well, she had one. She'd blown up Colonel Nowroski's spell, hadn't she? That was worth investigating.

The phone picked up on the second ring. "Jess!"

Jess closed her eyes in pleasure and snuggled into the couch. Rebecca Damarrias had been one of her classmates in high school. They hadn't seen each other until Rebecca heard about her report on the accident and reached out to her; in the process, she'd become the first friend that 'Jessica Dunbar' had ever had. "Hey, Becky!"

"Anything fun happen today?"

Jess's smile widened against the arm of the couch. "I broke a spell."

"Ouch! That sucks." The sound of a creaking chair came over the phone. So Becky was in her office after all. Not writing, though, or she'd have been angrier. "Was it something you can patch, or are you going to doubt everything about it now?"

"Not like that," Jess said smugly. "The spell was live until we fried it."

The phone was silent. "Wait. You 'broke' a live spell - not countered or dispelled?"

"Broke." Jess pulled the blankets higher up. "The paint the circlework was done in burned, even. An effect circle tried to change an enchanted object. The spell broke, the enchantment stuck."

"Now that is something I want to play around with," Becky breathed. "Was this after you got home, or are they letting you do research at work now?"

"Oh, I went by the Doc's after Rogers cut me loose," Jess said. Then she blanched. Becky was very perceptive. She'd know exactly what that meant.

"I take it that today was an especially shitty day at the Pentagon?" Becky asked archly.

Yeah, right on the nail. Jess grimaced and threw the blanket over her head. Then she pulled it back off. "It was fine," she said.

"Don't lie to me, you suck at it."

Jess sighed. "It really wasn't. It was the same as always. Just...a whole week of it."

"How long till Babs comes back?"

Jess flipped onto her back and squeezed the blanket tight. "Six days, ten hours, fifteen minutes, but who's counting."

"And you're sitting alone in her apartment?" Becky's voice was stern. "Did you eat anything other than a salad?"

Jess shrank back. Shit, this was angry-mode. "It's just easier that way."

"That's it. You're coming over here, right now, where I can make you eat some real food."

As much as that would help, it wasn't really an option. "Becky, it's eight at night and you need to get the kits in bed."

Over the phone came the sound of grinding teeth.

"Okay, fine. Tomorrow, though. You are coming tomorrow as soon as you get released, and you are eating dinner with us."

"I can't make you-"

"Jessica Dunbar." This was her Mom voice now. "You cannot live on salad alone. She cannot live on salad alone. We both know that for all the things the experiment did that weren't intended, it did work. Her being there boosts your metabolism, and you cannot let her cut your calorie intake, too." She sighed. "She can't settle alone? Fine, we can deal with that. You can come here and she can settle."

Jess closed her eyes. "Alright," she said. "Tomorrow."

"No excuses!"

"No excuses."

"Alright. That's that, then." A grin entered her voice. "But you are right, and I do gotta wrangle the munchkins. Tomorrow!"

Jess listened to the disconnect sound, then turned the radio volume up a notch with her toe. Closing her eyes, she went to sleep to the sound of an angry man ranting in the fluid tones of a language she did not yet understand.

 

[Strypgia]

How annoying, involuntary vegetarianism.

 

[JennyDracos]

Victoria Trepes sighed and turned the stove off. The whistle of the kettle died down, and she picked it up and poured it into the cup. Then she dropped a bag of tea leaves into the hot water. After a moment's hesitation, she added another.

Really, there were just too many things to do. She had homework for her classes, she had to grade homework for Professor Oblange, she had to start some more simulations for her thesis, and she had to spend some time with those books he'd loaned her. She'd only been to two sessions of his little 'working group,' but she'd already come up with a few neat little tricks. Like the one to keep the cops from pounding on her door when she used volume to keep herself awake. Or the one that would keep the landlord from bitching about how she'd done the first one.

Unfortunately, no matter how handy his artificial language was, it's not like it could give her more time to sleep, or let her get more done in a given amount of time while she was awake. That meant caffeine would have to suffice. And since the first thing she absolutely needed to have done was her homework for her class the next morning, that took precedence.

She lifted her mug to her lips. The instant the scalding liquid touched her tongue, she jerked back, sloshing the liquid in the cup onto her hand. She swore, set the cup down, turned on the tap. The cold water felt just as painful as the hot water hand, and she swore again, but she kept her hand under the pouring water.

After a minute, the cold was actually starting to feel warm, so she turned off the faucet, grabbed the towel from where it was hanging on the ancient refrigerator, and patted her hand dry. Already the side of her finger was starting to redden. She swore again.

"God damnit, Vicky, you know better than that!" She looked at the freezer where her tub of Emergency Ice Cream lurked, but she had entirely too much work to do to waste any time moping. Hoping that cellular biology would distract her from the throbbing in her hand, she stepped out of the kitchen and into the tiny central hallway.

It took her about four steps to get to the space the landlord called a 'dining room.' To her, the huge wooden table was a perfect workspace. Its four solid legs didn't shake when she bumped into it, and its copious surface had more than enough room for her to spread what she was working on as much as she needed. The only problem right now was that it was strewn with her laborious translation of the soundproofing spell. Well, that was easy to deal with; she just swept the papers into a pile on top of the heavy dictionary and set the whole thing on the hutch. She could sort them out later if she needed to. Her cell bio textbook was still in her backpack, but her bedroom wasn't any further from the dining room than the kitchen had been.

The firm knock on the door startled her. At nine PM? On a Wednesday?

She checked the chain on the door, then undid the deadbolt and pulled the door open, looking at the figure on the other side of the crack.

"Professor!" she gasped.

The tall man smiled at her. "Victoria. Would you mind opening the door for me?"

Victoria gave him a second, more hesitant look. His smile was polite and fairly urbane, but something about his eyes bothered her. There was a tiny glint in them, like a fire burning deep within. He was dressed oddly, too. Yes, he was wearing a gray three-piece suit, like normal, but he was wearing a black robe over it. This was entirely too weird - no, not weird, unsettling - and she was absolutely not going to open that door.

"It's really just too much hassle when we can talk through this just fine," she said, then she closed the door, undid the chain, and pulled it all the way open. She stepped aside so he could enter. "I wasn't expecting you here today - or any day - and I'm really not comfortable letting people into my apartment, even if they are a professor."

He closed the door behind himself, then fastened the chain, and then the deadbolt. "Not 'Professor.' That's an old title and an old name, for an old world. We are in a new world. You shall call me Deresfedt, the wizard."

"Yes, Wizard Deresfedt." She almost bit her tongue as she said the name. It felt so odd. "But why are you-"

He frowned at her, and she was silent. "Don't be scared, and don't interrupt. Speaking of which, will we be interrupted?"

"No, Wizard Deresfedt." It came a little easier this time. "I told everyone I had too much work to do anything tonight. And it's a school night."

He smiled, then glanced at the ceiling. "But you are not the only person in this building?"

"No, Wizard Deresfedt, but they can't hear." She smiled at him. "I like to play my music loud, so I-"

He gave her another sharp look.

"The apartment is soundproofed, Wizard Deresfedt." She blinked. She really did not like telling him so much. She wished he would leave. She had so much coursework to do, after all.

He looked into the dining room and smiled at the table. "That will do perfectly. Take your clothes off and lie on the table. Tell me what's on your mind."

That was a suggestion that Victoria absolutely would not stand for. Even if he was one of her professors, the idea that she would strip naked in front of him was so far over the line that you couldn't even see the line anymore. "That's disgusting. I'm not going to do that," she said as she kicked her panties to join her long shirt. "You should leave."

It wasn't until her burned finger started throbbing that she realized what she was doing. "What's going on?" she asked, confused, annoyed, but not the slightest bit afraid. Her naked thighs were pressed against the hard wooden table, and when her shoulder-blades touched the cold wood, she felt an involuntary shiver. "Why am I doing what you tell me to? Are you using magic to force me to-"

"Yes," Deresfedt said, then ducked below the edge of the table. The sound of a chain rattling was followed by a cold, hard ring dragging hard on her right ankles. A moment later, he rose back up, frowning. "Do you by chance have a bucket in this place?"

"There's one in the bathroom," she said. "I'm not scared of you. I'm naked, chained, and I'm doing whatever you tell me to. Why am I not scared?" Her voice dropped, thoughtfully. "I should even be scared by the fact that I'm not scared of you. This is a really frightening situation and all I feel is confused."

The only answer she got was the bath faucet filling her plastic bucket rapidly.

"Maybe I can cast a spell to break it?" she said thoughtfully. "I'd need to think of a good set of words. Powerful words." The faucet shut off and Deresfedt walked back in. She could see it in his hands. The metal handle was flexing, and the bucket itself looked almost distended. The wizard carried it as easily as if it were an empty basket.

"I rather doubt it," he said, and smiled down at her. "After all, you have to mean to work magic, and right now you can't mean to do anything. Can you?"

"No, I can't." She blinked. "You kept me from doing that, didn't you?"

"I did, yes. I also ensured that you would tell me what you were planning."

"You're going to rape me, aren't you? You know no matter how much water is in that bucket, it won't destroy the evidence."

"No." His smile widened. "I'm not going to rape you. And I don't particularly care about evidence. As to what I am doing - well, you should consider it an honor. But you don't have to. Further back on the table, please."

The heavy weight of the steel cuff around her ankle made it very hard for her to bring her feet on the table, but at the price of a lot of pain in her thigh muscles, her ankle, and her right foot, she managed. Once her foot was on the table it was much easier for her to scoot back. She began to shiver, almost violently.

From behind her, Deresfedt gathered up her hair, pulling it taut. He moved his other hand into her view, now holding the heavy kitchen knife that had been in her knife block just minutes before. "You don't have to feel honored. You don't have to feel afraid. But you may." Then an almost religious exultation entered his voice, and the next words thundered out. "Behold, my offering!"

Her scream lasted the rest of her life.

 

[Strypgia]

This was entirely too weird - no, not weird, unsettling - and she was absolutely not going to open that door.

"It's really just too much hassle when we can talk through this just fine," she said, then she closed the door, undid the chain, and pulled it all the way open. She stepped aside so he could enter.

Click to shrink...

... Uh oh.

Her scream lasted the rest of her life.

Click to shrink...

That's a nicely chilling line.

Hmm... but if he had control over her will good enough to force her to let him in, strip naked, and get chained to the table to be sacrificed, why did he need to chain her?

 

[JennyDracos]

Jess stood in line and grimaced at the line ahead of her. She'd had been fifteen minutes later than usual, and not only was there now a considerable amount of people in front of her, but the line had slowed to a crawl.

Still, she had more than enough time to be in place for her first briefing of the day. Being alone in someone else's apartment had its advantages; she had nothing to do in the mornings but get to work. This wait would cut into her time for jotting down spell ideas or checking her email - but not into getting her notes in order.

A quiet chirp came from her purse. She frowned, then pulled out her phone. It chirped again, and Colonel Rogers' name flashed on the screen. Her frown deepened as she flipped it open.

"Colonel?"

"Jessica. Are you at the Pentagon yet?"

"I'm waiting at Security, sir."

"How fast can you get to the North lot?"

Jess blinked. Their - well, her - first briefing was in C-ring, not somewhere they'd need to drive to. "Uh, ten minutes? Faster if I run."

He sucked in a breath and held it for a few seconds, then released it. "I'll meet you at the exit. You know where it is?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'll see you there. In five."

She spotted their rental car as he pulled up to the lot exit. Speeding over, she slipped in though the passenger-side door, then dropped her things in her lap while she sorted out the buckle.

"I'm sorry," he said. "If I'd realized you were in heels I wouldn't have asked you to run."

"It's easier than it should be, for me at least," she said as she slid the buckle in. "Honestly the hardest part is not losing the shoe. What's so urgent? We aren't briefing somewhere else, are we?"

He pulled out. "You remember I was having dinner with some an old friend last night?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, we were meeting with a few of the people he works with from time to time, and we were discussing magic and its applications. One of them called me this morning. The DC police have a case they think might involve magic, and, well, nobody knows magic better than you do."

Jess folded her arms. "Anybody can learn magic. It's right there."

Rogers gave her an impatient look. "Anybody can, Sergeant. You have."

She scowled while he navigated the bridges, then shook her head and opened her book, scanning through the spell formulas she had in it. Surely she had something that might be useful in a crime scene. It wasn't something she had considered.

She had a few variations of alarm spell, but those would be too late for whatever had happened. The same went for the wards and the shields. She'd come up with a half-dozen finding spells, but most of those had been ripped out of the book after testing. Only one of them had survived, because only one of them had successfully worked when the subject - having been marked with the finding spell - worked when the subject went through a doorway. Still, it was something.

The flickering of red and blue lights made her look up from her book. Rogers was slowing, and she could see why - there was a police car double-parked on the side of the road. It was blocking in another police car. There was a third, and a fourth- "Seven?" Jess said. "That's...a lot of police. No wonder you were in a rush."

"Yeah," Rogers said grimly, scanning the area. "Crap, if they can't find a place to park I don't think we can, either."

A cop wearing the patrol uniform of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Colombia jogged up, holding his hand out for them to step. Jess lowered her window as he got close.

The cop ducked down, looking past Jess at Rogers. "I'm sorry, sir, you can't be here. This is a crime scene, I need you to move along."

"Lieutenant Colonel John Rogers, USAF. This is Sergeant Jessica Dunbar, you should have been told we were coming."

The man frowned, then moved his mouth to the radio at his shoulder and talked very quietly. "Detective, you expecting the military?"

A moment later, his radio beeped and, just as low, the response came. Even Jess's hearing wasn't able to pick up much about the speaker other than that he was male, probably middle aged. "They must be the occult experts the Captain sent."

The cop blinked at that, then keyed his mike. "Understood, bringing them in." He lowered his hand and looked at Rogers. "Just shut the engine off, sir, we'll have the whole street blocked off in a minute anyhow. You'll need to come this way to sign the logbook."

Seven police cars made it fairly obvious what had happened in the house, so Jess was almost ready when the scent of blood rolled across her nose like a red tide coming in. Jess could feel her other self freeze and focus entirely on the smells in the air, but she just kept walking. Her nose could pick up blood, not fresh, but plentiful. Water, tea, a trace of smoke.

The officer told them to wait at the front door, then headed back to the street. After a moment, a jacketed crime scene tech hurried over with a paper log on a clipboard and a box of blue latex gloves. "Sign in here. Put the gloves on, but touch nothing, you understand? The gloves are there to keep you from contaminating the scene, but they won't stop you from destroying evidence."

Jess nodded and pulled the gloves on, hoping that their smell would distract her nose from all the blood.

"Be very careful where you step. We've mostly swept the floor, but sometimes we do miss something, even on the second pass."

Jess followed the tech through the front door and looked around the short hallway. It was much louder on the inside than it had seemed from the outside; a half dozen people were clomping around in a blend of sneakers, hard shoes, and boots, and someone in the kitchen was actually running a vacuum. It sounded like a hand vacuum, not a full-sized one, but she should not have missed that sound from where they had been waiting for the tech.

The smell was coming from the room to her right, and it was through that doorway that the tech walked. He stepped aside, and immediately she saw the victim.

The woman was very, very dead; even without stepping into the room, Jess could see that her ribcage was open, flecks of bone visible through gristle. Her skin was pale and waxy, and she was stripped naked. A heavy metal cuff was set around her ankle, attached by a thick chain looped around one of the legs of the table.

Jess focused on the chain. It was odd, very odd, and that helped keep her focus away from the messy death.

"If you're gonna ralph, do it outside," the tech said.

Rogers gulped. "I'll stay out here. Go on, Jessica."

Jess ignored them both and took another few steps into the room. She ducked down to get a good luck under the table. There was the chain, of course, and a padlock around the chain. There was a bucket by the other end, a yellow plastic mop bucket, and around the bucket was a wide puddle of water. She glanced down at the puddle and saw a red stain around the edges. Blood, settled out as the water evaporated.

She stood up, then took another few steps into the room. From that position she could see the wide gash in the woman's neck. That was covered with dried blood.

Across the room from Jess was a man in a beat-up black suit. He was middle-aged, with coarse brown hair, and smelled of gunpowder. A tiny crucifix dangled from a thin chain around his neck. He, too, was looking at the woman. "So you're the Captain's occult expert?" he asked, glancing up at Jess.

"I've learned a bit about it here and there, doing research," Jess said. "I'm much more familiar with magic, though."

"Same diff. Michael Conlon, Detective, MPDC." He stepped around the table and held his hand out.

She shook it. "Technical Sergeant Jessica Dunbar, US Air Force."

He looked back down at the body. "I'm thinking Aztec. Her heart is gone."

Jess frowned, looking at the woman's neck. "They slit her throat before she died. The Aztecs didn't do that, they wanted a still-beating heart. And that chest doesn't look like it was cut open, more like..." She paused, trying to find the words. "Something very strong tore her ribcage open."

Conlon shrugged. "People do all kinds of stuff hopped up on the right drugs."

She closed her eyes and took a long breath through her nose. "Shoot. I can't smell anything but blood. Let me try again." She took a step away from the puddle, towards the wall, and then another long breath. She froze, turning towards the blank face of the wall. "There's blood here."

The crime scene tech looked up from where he was crouched. "Nope. We checked it. Splatter pattern says there should be, but he musta blocked it with a tarp or something. No blood."

"I know you checked it," she said. She took another long breath. "I can smell the chemicals. I just also smel blood. Do you mind if I check something?" She pulled her book out and flipped thorugh to find the page she was looking for.

The detective actually snarled at her. "If that paper touches the wall, I'll have cuffs on you before you can say 'Obstruction of Justice.'"

"It won't," Jess said. She took a careful step away from the wall, and tore the last page out of the back of the book. She slid it on top of the page that held her calculations and translations for the invisibility counterspell. Quickly she roughed in the circle, then traced the runes inside it. But then, they'd had to put the Sabrina inside the circle, hadn't they? No way she could do that with a wall. But maybe she could spread the spell over the room instead? There was that spell that made a gust of wind, maybe reverse the whole thing?

The arcane runes for the invisibility counterspell on the outside, the gust of metaphorical wind in the middle, and then she carefully scribed the circle on the inside. The bloody water in the middle of the puddle rippled away from her, and then there they were. Clawmarks and gouges in the table where they hadn't been before. Blood on the wall, but not just the spray from the cut on the woman's throat.

"Saints above," the detective whispered. His hand went to the crucifix as his eyes ran over what was unmistakably writing, in the woman's blood. "What in God's name is that?"

Jess was staring, too. There were four stanzas, roughly the same length. Every character, or rune, whichever they were, was made of short, straight, mostly vertical lines, and even if the prints were blurred and drippy, it was clear that they had been drawn with fingers dipped in blood. It wasn't an alphabet she had ever seen, even in her pre-Circle research binges into the mystic systems of history. That didn't make it any less horrific.

"Sergeant," Rogers said, choked.

Jess turned.

He was pointing at the opposite wall. "Isn't that the alphabet you use?"

She spun to look where he was pointing. Running in a long row at about knee height, in careful brush strokes of black ink about five inches high, were the runes of the arcane language she had just crafted her spell in. "That definitely is," she said. "I even know some of the words, and if I'm right-" She pulled out her dictionary, scanned through it. "Bingo. 'So mote it be.' That's a Wiccan spell, written on the wall."

The detective looked up from one of the grooves in the table. "Vic wasn't Wiccan, though."

Jess shrugged. "No, but if you're wandering into magic on your own, then Wicca is one of the three most popular entry points. Wicca, Vodun, Occultism - if you want to find a spell to try it out, most Americans will look there, first. Then change things from there. We certainly did."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Know anything about these marks?"

Jess leaned in and took a long, deep sniff. "All I can smell is blood. The gouges aren't universally even, though. Not paws, fingers. But an alligator would be sitting on her body, and I don't see any signs of that."

"Christ," Conlon said. "So in your expert opinion?"

Jess thought about it for a moment. She looked at the bucket of water, and the chain. "Well, I'd hardly call myself an expert, and I don't have the slightest clue what they wrote on the wall. But she's chained by the leg, like a sacrificial goat. Her blood went into a bucket - into water, that's associated with sharks. My opinion is she was killed to bring some kind of dangerous creature here, and it worked."

 

[bookwyrm]

Oh boy, looks like our wannabe dark lord already has some bespelled creatures at his command. Hopefully he can be stopped before people start pulling out the big boys like various attempts at Leibniz's Charateristica Universalis or the whistled/musical language of the birds. But to be honest I'm mostly nerding out over this world and how Sindarin and Quenya might actually cast magic with the proper intent.

 

[JennyDracos]

...Dang, I didn't even think about that. It makes sense, though. They would be at least as good as Latin, Greek, Hebrew or Sanskrit, and for the same reason. Frustratingly, for thematic reasons everyone except Nowroski is going to be using one of two artificial languages.

Welp. Now I have to figure out a sequel.

 

[Strypgia]

The Air Force project has to be pretty well known in Magic circles if they got a call this fast.

 

[JennyDracos]

The first time Jess had visited Becky's house, it had been a little uncomfortable. At the time, Becky had just been someone she'd known in high school, an old connection barely renewed. She was a lifeline, yes, but it had still felt like she was intruding on someone else's inner sanctum. The standalone house in the outer neighborhoods of DC had seemed almost intimidating in its normality, representing a kind of stability that her injured self found alien and incomprehensible.

She'd gone anyway, of course. Becky had offered her a chance to figure out what had happened to her, what was still happening to her, and what she could do about it. Heck, Becky had offered her something to do while she was in Washington DC. Time spent here with Babs and Becky was time not thinking about her own personal misfortune being dragged onto the national stage.

Now, however, just swinging open the gate at the front of the yard and stepping onto the concrete path felt like coming home. Personally it was a little too much for her; the house was very well lived-in, full of chaos and life. But her other self loved it. She took a deep breath and she smelled the cat, and John, and the kits. She smelled a few lingering traces of Babs. And most strongly of all, she could smell Becky, who was probably the closest thing to a sister that Jess would ever have.

And right now Jess needed family. With every step, she could feel the detective's business card against the inside of her jeans pocket. And every time she felt it, she smelled the blood that had covered the scene.

She slipped her key into the door, turned it, and stepped through.

The instant she did, a little blond rocket squealed, ran up, and grabbed her leg, squeezing tight. His chin dug into her thigh as he looked up at her, life shining in his eyes. "Auntie Jess!" he said.

"Oof!" she said, and ponderously moved her leg forward so she could close the door behind her. "Mason, you're getting so big! I can barely move!"

The little boy giggled. Then he looked serious, as serious as a five-year old can look. "You're in trouble," he said.

"Oh?"

He hugged her leg again, his cheek against her jeans. "Mommy said if you weren't in uniform it means you didn't come straight here."

Jess had known she was courting Becky's wrath by dropping by Babs' apartment after Rogers had released her, but the scent of blood had seemed like a compelling argument. This, however, was an added twist. She didn't want to encourage disobedience. How could she swing this? ...Actually, that might work. She bent over and stage-whispered, "I was hoping she wouldn't notice."

Mason shook his head. "Mommy notices everything."

Excellent. She frowned. "Are you sure?"

"Jessica Dunbar. Did I not tell you to come straight here?" Becky stomped into the room. Almost half a foot taller than Jess, she had long, straight brown hair, and a dark scowl. Her belly offered proof that the giggling girl in her right arm wouldn't be the youngest child for long.

Jess froze for a moment, not entirely sure the scowl was feigned. Still, she lowered her head towards Mason. "Darn, busted."

"I told you she always knows!"

"Come here," said Becky, walking to meet her. She swung her free arm around Jess's shoulders and gave her a welcoming squeeze. "You know we could have scared up some clothes that fit you."

Jess shrugged. With Becky holding her on the right, little Angie grabbing her arm on the left, and Mason still clinging to her leg, Jess was feeling a little squeezed. Her other self, however, was relaxed enough to make up for it, and that made it more than worth it. Still, she did have to give Becky her reasons. "It was on the way, and I needed a shower. And I didn't want to impose."

Becky pulled back, glaring at her. "You are never an imposition. You also didn't miss dinner, so I'll consider forgiving you. Hold the munchkin while I get the table set."

Jess took Angie from Becky and followed her towards the kitchen, giggling weight dragging from her leg. She took a deep breath. Charcoal, corn, butter, beef. "Hamburgers? Awesome!"

Becky scowled. "John couldn't find rabbit meat, so it's beef. It's too bad. I could use some revenge."

"I am one hundred percent fine with that," Jess told her. "It freaks me out to eat rabbit."

Her friend tilted her head and looked at her. "I thought you said she didn't care about that?"

"She doesn't. I do." Jess stuck her tongue out at Becky, and then followed her into the kitchen.

 

[JennyDracos]

John Demarrias was, as always, an excellent griller, and once they'd finished their food, Becky dragged Jess to the corner of the house they used for magical experimentation. She carefully sat down on the couch in front of the low circular table. Jess sat a third of the way around on the carpeted floor, in her usual spot.

Becky narrowed her eyes at Jess. "Tell me about this spell you blew up," she ordered.

Jess nodded. "The doc had a spell that lifted any steel ball in it into the air. He had another that made a steel ball float six inches up. I accidentally knocked the enchanted ball into the area effect, and pop! The ball that was already in there falls to the ground, and the paint he used for the spell cooks."

Becky frowned. "Okay, that's definitely something we can test. Do you think it's the enchantment conflicting with the area effect, or was it a second ball in the field, or...is there anything else that might have killed it?"

For a moment, Jess wasn't crouched at Becky's low table, she was looking under someone else's tall one at a pool of blood.

She blinked and she was back. "Hey, Becky."

"What's up? You seem out of it."

"I just...did you say you had some ideas about fast-casting?"

Becky raised an eyebrow. "Is there a reason you don't want to talk about breaking spells? Did you find out what happened and it was embarrassing?"

Jess gave a half-chuckle. "No. No, I just have self-defense on the brain."

Becky nodded. "Grab a marker, you're taking notes. First off, have we ever done anything with command words?"

Jess closed her eyes and thought back. "Huh. No, not since we were still doing all-verbal casting. So, you're saying cast the spell, but make it hold off on the effect until told to do so?" She shifted forward and swept her arm around the circumference of the table. "So the, ah, 'trigger template' here, and then on the inside, the original spell?"

"That's the idea," Becky said. "Directing it would be tricky, especially since you might not know what you needed when you set it up."

Jess rubbed her chin, then uncapped the marker. She sketched out a rough arc around most of the circumference, then finished it with a smaller loop. She repeated it with another arc-and-circle. "Okay, here's the thought. Command word goes here, on the outside. That, ah, 'collapses' down and completes the circle, triggering the effect. For targeting, we have another sub-spell here. That collapses within the effect circle to provide the target variable." She grinned at Becky.

Becky glowered back. "You're turning it into programming again."

"I will stop turning it into programming when it stops making sense to turn it into programming." Jess nodded down at the table. "So here's the idea - I point at you, so the targeting circle will be satisfied, and say 'Arglefraster,' and boom! A stream of soapy lemon water squirts out." She leaned back. "But that still leaves two problems. First, how do we know it'll survive the threshold? I walk out of the room and it's gone. Second, it's one and done. The command word finishes it."

"Okay. I got two ideas for that." Becky pointed around the circumference. "We go back to the outer circle casts the inner circle, but just carry it with you. Like, in your little notebook. You write the spell in there and, what did you say? Spray soapy water? The spell is right next to you, waiting."

Jess frowned. "Tricky. You'd need a fairly complex activation key to make sure you activated the right spell, and only the right spell. I'm not sure if having a dozen spells separated by a half a sheet of paper - less, given ink bleed - and waiting for command words to go off is all that safe. And you know as well as I do that we still haven't cracked personal targeting, which means that anyone using the command word in the right place would trigger it, which means more complex commands and security through obscurity."

Becky grimaced. "Well, you're going to like the other idea even less."

Jess thought about it. Then she leapt to her feet and pointed at Becky. "No. No! Absolutely not. That is a terrible idea."

Becky threw up her hands in defense. "Hold on, Jess!"

"Enchanting yourself is a terrible idea." Jess folded her arms and scowled down at Becky. "Awful. Remember, no matter that our spells are clearly written, and no matter that we're using a concise symbol set, every personal enchantment has come with unforeseen consequences. Every personal enchantment has changed the person it was cast on. There's a reason our translation spell has a time limit. You're talking an indefinite enchantment that's going to be active when you're working on other things."

"An enchantment that deliberately and explicitly does nothing?"

Jess sagged. After a moment, she sat back down. She rested her elbows on the table and her face in her hands. Becky had a point. An enchantment that did nothing until it activated and then immediately deactivated should pose no long-term risks.

Of course the operative word there was 'should.'

"I still don't think it's worth the risks," she said into her hands.

"Well, we have time to think about it," Becky said. "We still haven't figured out how any of this would work. And then there's the overhead. We're talking about dozens of stanzas to incorporate..."

Jess groaned. The work was almost as bad as the risks. But then, in her mind's eye, she saw a gouged table, covered in blood.

There were risks to not acting, too.

 

[Strypgia]

A little surprised she didn't explain about the blood when the kids were out of earshot, in order for her friend to cut her a little more slack.

 

[JennyDracos]

Jess was thinking about the risks all the way through the visitor security checkpoint the next morning. The risks of enchanting yourself, versus the risks of someone using your corpse to summon a monster.

Maybe Becky had a point when she said that an enchantment to make no changes would cause no changes. It did fit the rules that way. An enchantment intended to do nothing and where the symbols controlled it to do nothing should, in fact, do nothing, until that intend and symbolism changed.

The trigger part was easy enough. She'd tested the command word as soon as she'd gotten home, modifying the candle lighting spell that been her first deliberate spell. It had been 'one at done' at first, until she replaced the runes for 'when' with an 'every time,' at which point it has worked until she deliberately broke the circle.

The more she thought about carrying a book full of armed spells in her pocket, though, the more concerned she got. To her, a circle on a page never represented a flat circle. It always meant a cylinder or a sphere. And that meant that any trigger in the book would trigger some or all of every other spell in the book, and that sounded like a recipe for disaster.

As she made her way down a nearly-empty hallway, her phone chirped. She checked it. Barbara Thompson.

Babs? But she was in Ecuador, and that was too expensive for a casual phone call. Especially since it was just as early there as it was in DC.

Jess glanced to her right; a small wood-paneled conference room was empty, its lights off. She stepped in and answered the call.

"Jess! Glad I caught you." Babs' voice was tense.

Jess's other self relaxed at the voice, but Jess herself tightened up. "What's wrong?"

"You remember why I came here?" Babs barely paused. "Well, it's getting worse, fast. It's already civil war in Colombia all over again. But these guys seem to be willing to get into it with Ecuador, too. I'm not sure who they are. At first they were just some kind of crazy death cult, but then they started making real inroads in the leftovers of the FARC, and then-"

Jess's heart jumped into her throat. "Are you okay? Are you safe?"

"I'm fine for now." Babs hesitated for a moment. "For now, anyway. They haven't gotten to this part of the country yet, and I'm not on the war beat, so we're flying back early."

Tension ratcheted back down to 'bad.' Jess let out a sigh of relief. "That's good. That's great, actually. I really missed you."

Babs gave a throaty chuckle. "I just bet you did." Then she sobered up. "But about the reason I called - do you remember that communications spell we whipped up?"

"I don't need to," Jess said. "I have my book right here."

"Perfect! I made a few contacts here, and I want to stay in touch with them without, you know, exposing them the way a cell phone would."

Jess slipped her book of spells out of the binder, then opened it to the page with the communications spell. She leaned it against the conference room's big whiteboard and uncapped a marker. "Three stanzas. Are you ready?"

There was a sound of paper rustling. "Okay, go."

Jess carefully pronounced the syllables of the arcane language, writing them as she did.

After a moment, the sound of a pen being retracted came over the phone. "Okay, that looks like how I remember it being." Babs thumped the pen against the pad she was writing on. "About interception. Is it possible?"

Jess took a few steps back to look at the completed spell. "I wouldn't think so. It doesn't transmit any waves or anything. Whatever is in the circle is bound to whatever else is in the circle. But I suppose a general interception spell might be able to catch it - I've never thought about that."

Babs' voice tightened. "I don't want to risk my friends. They both have kids."

Jess frowned. "Okay, okay. So tracing the spell should be impossible. No - I take that back, just impossible unless you have one of the endpoints. If you have more than one thing enchanted with the same spell, they're linked, and that means you can track one with the other. But it would have to be on the same casting, or they wouldn't be linked. So you'll want two or more castings, and as long as you have one endpoint, your friends can't be traced without the bad guys grabbing *you*. Which will be fine, since the bad guys will be in South America and you won't."

"I'm with you so far," Babs said.

"Now that only works for tracing. I don't know how to intercept a communication with this, but that doesn't mean it can't be done with the right spell. If they can be identified by voice or word, then we need to block that, too. But that's easy. Give me a second to find the cipher-lock." She flipped through the book. "Okay. Now, put this between the second and third stanzas, and then put a second circle around the third stanza." She pronounced the words of the cipher.

"Got it!" Babs' pen clicked closed again. "Hey, babe?"

"Yeah, babe?"

"Why am I spending international minutes when we have a communications spell?"

A little joy bubbled up from some part of Jess's chest. She grinned and shook her head as she said, "Because the spell can't ring. An endpoint is on or it's not, and there's no way to know if the other end is on without a response. Voice goes through one way, voice goes through the other way."

"Oh, right. Still, it's too bad. Especially with the cipher lock."

Jess frowned. "How so?"

Babs let out that throaty chuckle again. "Because we could have set up a time and talk dirty."

Heat flooded Jess's face. "Babe!"

"I'm just saying, missed opportunity." She sounded a little wistful. "Next time, maybe. Speaking of..."

Jess capped the marker and leaned on the table. "You already have another trip lined up?"

"Not yet, no. But how are you taking this one?"

Jess tried to get the right words lined up. Somehow, there was something she could say that would make Babs think-

"Based on what I'm not hearing, you're not fine."

Damnit. Jess sighed. "I really miss you. She misses you, too. Plus she hates crowds, strangers, and being alone, and so she's always kinda riled up, and that's draining. But I do have Becky and the kits, and there's John, and the Doc, and even when I'm at the Pentagon the commander's mostly here with me." She let out a wistful note. "But I'll be really glad when you're back."

"You know what would make you feel better?"

Jess could hear Babs' grin through the phone, and it was a very suspicious kind of grin. Jess narrowed her eyes. "What?"

"If we talk dirty right now."

Jess choked. "Babe! I am in the Pentagon right now, on a call to Latin America! If there is one cell phone in America being tapped, it's this one."

"But babe, we're both Americans," Babs said, a pleading note in her voice. "That's illegal."

"Yeah, well, you know that, I know that, and the NSA guy frantically mashing the delete button knows that, but the algorithm doesn't."

"Fine, fine." Babs' voice went serious. "You take care of yourself, okay? I'll be home in like a day or so."

"I can hold out, babe," Jess said. "I have to go. Love you, Babs."

"I love you too." Then the line disconnected.

A moment later, Jess's other self realized Babs' voice was gone and expressed her displeasure.

Jess sighed and rubbed her forehead. Then she straightened off the table. She did have a briefing to get to, after all.

Then someone stepped into the room.

Jess blanched and spun to face them, coming to attention almost automatically.

The newcomer was an older man, white, with gray hair and a slight paunch. He was wearing a black suit with an American flag pin at the lapel. He carried an attache case and looked at Jess with an expression of slight amusement. He also looked somewhat familiar.

"I'm sorry, sir," Jess said. "I needed to take a call and the room was empty."

The man smiled warmly. "Don't worry about it. I like being early, so you weren't interrupting anything."

"Yes, sir." Jess's answering smile was a lot more forced. "I'll just clean up and get out of your way."

"Of course." He set his case on the table at the far end, then looked at the whiteboard, his brow furrowed. "If you don't mind me asking, what is that?"

Jess gulped. "It's a communication spell," she said. "Well, sort of. Basically, the way it works is, you draw it on a flat surface. Then when you have two objects - I prefer paperclips - in the circle at the same time, they are connected and so whatever someone says when they're holding one can be heard by the person holding the other."

He blinked, taken aback. "Magic can do that?"

"Oh, definitely, sir." Jess nodded and picked up the eraser. "I don't know if anyone has cracked remote targeting yet, but binding objects, carrying them, all that works fine."

"So tell me, Sergeant, what kinds of spells have you made?"

Jess looked at her book. "Personally, sir? Well, the usual early spells, candle lighting, flame extinguishing, hovering an object. I've done a few basic transmutations and enchantments. I have a pen here that doesn't require ink and only writes on paper."

He nodded. "That's more in line with what I'd heard," he said, looking down at his paperwork.

Jess shrugged. "Well, that's what I'm comfortable working on in a civilian home, or putting in a book I carry on public transportation. Things I haven't really tried - dropping the mass of a bullet while it was in a firing chamber would increase the kinetic energy it had when it left the barrel. That would work for everything from pistols to railguns."

He dropped his pen and looked up at her, startled.

"Like I said, I haven't tested that exact scenario personally, but I have tested the theory with variations on hovering charms and it would definitely work." Jess pointed at the board. "A circle like this can change the fundamental properties of a space for a time. All kinds of physics can be manipulated. Unstable compounds can be rendered stable. For instance, there are chemicals they're working on in weapons labs that blow up before they can make a few molecules of them, which makes them useless. Do it in an enchanted beaker and they could be as safe to handle as water. Put them in an enchanted bomb and make the fuse break the enchantment. Boom."

He was frowning now. Someone else stepped into the room, but the man held up his hand to them.

Which was good, because Jess was on a roll. "I've made a cat invisible. The hardest part about doing that to a Predator - or a B-52 - would be drawing a circle large enough, and getting the symbols right at that scale. Reducing the weight of a plane would let it carry more armor, more weapons, more fuel, or all three. Going back to the physics of a volume, you can make a space incredibly hot, then push air into it, and you have a jet engine that never needs refueling."

A man in Army camouflage sat down to the right of the civilian. "Could you make a nuclear warhead?"

Jess glanced at his chest. Four stars. She gulped. But she gave the answer a few moments thought. "Honestly, sir, I don't think so."

He nodded and opened his mouth, but she continued.

"Nukes are fiendishly complex. I don't think I understand them well enough to duplicate one. Similarly, fissile materials are heavy. I could definitely make a spell that *should* make one, but I don't think I could get it to work. The belief hurdle is just too high. But..." She drew to a pause and gave the general a worried look. "Transmutation, though. I could make a spell that would turn depleted or unrefined uranium into weapons-grade uranium, possibly, or plutonium. Lead would be harder. I'm not sure I could manage to do it with a simple spell like this one, which of course means I couldn't. But if I took the time and energy and fast-talked myself in the right way, I would be able to come up with an alchemical process that turned lead into weapons-grade plutonium."

A faint, almost inaudible chirp sounded from Jess's purse, but another four-star was sitting down a few seats to the civilian's left. She was asking, "What infrastructure would you need? To do any of those."

Inside, Jess was screaming. Just what room had she walked into? Outside, however, she just gave the new general a sad smile. "Pen. Ink. A table. Unless I had existing infrastructure and wanted to improve it. Everything I've seen about how magic works says that it works fine with technology, but engineering is another matter. So is mass-production. Engineering involves double-checking, and triple-checking, and 'what if this doesn't work?' and that will make a spell fizzle every time."

The female general was nodding. "And mass production?"

Jess shrugged. "This spell behind me. Take a picture of it and you have a picture of a spell. No machine can duplicate it for anything but reference. Copy it by hand with the intent to cast, though, and it might work - especially if I told you what the words meant, and demonstrated it in front of you. No infrastructure required." Although...something about that was sending an alert in her brain.

Maybe it would gel if she gave it time.

But she didn't have time. She didn't even have time to look at her phone, which had chimed four more times.

"So demonstrations," said the civilian at the head of the table. "What else would reduce that...belief hurdle, Sergeant Dunbar?"

Well that made her feel guilty. He recognized her and she didn't recognize him. And he was senior to four-star generals.

But it was a good question. "Time, sir, and experience. There are some associations that help. Personally I've been actively practicing magic for over a month now. The spell behind me - I know it works, because I've tested it. I know how it works, I know why it works the way it does, and that means if I change something I can 'know' it will work. Language, scripting - if you think a spell should work, it's more likely to. Calligraphy etched in gold is more effective than something scrawled in pencil. I do have a certain advantage in that I'm reminded every second of every day of the powerful kinds of change that magic is capable of, but that's personal."

The male four-star frowned. "Could you use magic to make it easier to believe your spells would work?"

Jess shrugged. "In theory, sir, but it would have consequences. Trust me on that. The Air Force had a research project to improve athletic performance that wasn't intended to use magic. It did anyway." She waved at herself. "Nobody expected this. The human organism is a very complex piece of equipment, and the human brain is the part we understand the least. If you deliberately altered your ability to believe in magic, you'd probably also alter-"

The alarm bells were back in full force.

Her jaw fell, her eyes widened. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She forced herself to verbalize the thought as she worked her way through it. "You'd probably start to believe something else that's impossible, or close to it. Probably, though not necessarily, you'd go insane. But you'd be capable of powerful magic, and you could demonstrate it. So you'd gather followers who bought into the same belief..."

She turned and looked at the board, with the communications spell that she'd sent to Babs, who was probably in a lot more danger than they'd thought. "And now I'm wondering if that's what's happening in Colombia."

Or across the river.

She needed to talk to Rogers. For multiple reasons, since now third four-star was in the room, in Marine camo, and the Marines didn't have all that many four-stars.

She gulped again and looked at the civilian. She was pretty sure if he was the Secretary of Defense, she'd absolutely recognize him, and she didn't. "I'm sorry, sir, that was pure speculation on my part."

He smiled at her. "Perhaps, but germane to our discussion. You may go, Sergeant Dunbar. Chief Allen, I'm sorry I delayed the start of your briefing..."

Jess closed her binder around her book, pivoted and quick-marched out of the room, barely giving a glance to the woman in Navy khakis. As soon as she was into the corridor, she collapsed against the wall until she stopped hyperventilating.

Then she pulled her phone out to see four texts and one missed call from Colonel Rogers.

 

[bookwyrm]

Well... that's just cheating. Like "I wish for more wishes" cheating. And since this isn't Mage the Ascension and there's no force of collective human belief and disbelief holding together the truths of the modern world by their own inertia and putting a cost to the truly batshit stuff, we might just get right into the Cool Zone with people "knowing" that the world is a flat firmament with the Judeo-Illuminati dome of stars hiding the sight of god and casting spells with utter certainty as such. RIP reality, we hardly knew ye.

 

[JennyDracos]

Well... that's just cheating. Like "I wish for more wishes" cheating. And since this isn't Mage the Ascension and there's no force of collective human belief and disbelief holding together the truths of the modern world by their own inertia and putting a cost to the truly batshit stuff, we might just get right into the Cool Zone with people "knowing" that the world is a flat firmament with the Judeo-Illuminati dome of stars hiding the sight of god and casting spells with utter certainty as such. RIP reality, we hardly knew ye.

Click to shrink...

The good news is there's two things working against that: the first is 'context.' There's still more in the story about that, but it's come up a few times: doors, walls, thresholds, all those tend to block magic. So making a spell that can cut the world in half will work in the room you're in, or the boat you're in, maybe the street you're on. Maybe. But cutting the world in half...not so much.

The second is that using that cheat method does in fact drive you insane. There is a problem if you do it badly - you may be unable to do certain things because you are no longer able to perceive that the world doesn't work the way you think it does. You may also, by boosting your ability to 'believe,' lose your ability to 'intend.'

Or you may conquer the world.

A little more to come on that this weekend, hopefully.

 

[Strypgia]

Which was good, because Jess was on a roll. "I've made a cat invisible. The hardest part about doing that to a Predator - or a B-52 - would be drawing a circle large enough, and getting the symbols right at that scale. Reducing the weight of a plane would let it carry more armor, more weapons, more fuel, or all three. Going back to the physics of a volume, you can make a space incredibly hot, then push air into it, and you have a jet engine that never needs refueling."

Click to shrink...

Come on, Jess... this is the Pentagon. If there's one building in the world you should know better than to just run your mouth in, it should be this place! Classification alone should have her shutting up right off the bat.

She needs adult supervision.
And boy, wouldn't this have turned out differently if she'd taken Babs up on that offer of talking dirty right now!

Well that made her feel guilty. He recognized her and she didn't recognize him. And he was senior to four-star generals.

Click to shrink...

There's a very short list of people who'd be swanning about the Pentagon and senior to 4-stars, and most of them start with 'Secretary {X}'. Given he's meeting with multiple service officers, that probably eliminates the individual Service Secretaries. So this is possibly the SecDef, or one of this Deputies. Either way, bad Sergeant for not even guessing that much.

 

[JennyDracos]

There's a very short list of people who'd be swanning about the Pentagon and senior to 4-stars, and most of them start with 'Secretary {X}'. Given he's meeting with multiple service officers, that probably eliminates the individual Service Secretaries. So this is possibly the SecDef, or one of this Deputies. Either way, bad Sergeant for not even guessing that much.

Click to shrink...

When I was active duty, I'd have recognized the Secretary of Defense by sight, or the Secretary of the Air Force, but not necessarily the other branch secretaries, nor the deputies. (That said, she has figured that much out!)