The Rabbit Sergeant and the Dragon Cult

[JennyDracos]

A few minutes later, she hurried into the conference room she had been presenting in for a week and a half. She saw two figures standing to the right, but she didn't have the ability to look at them. Instead she quick-walked in, straight to the table, set her binder and purse on it, and stood for a moment, holding her hands over the binder. Her heart was still pumping, and her skin prickled.

"Hey, Jessica, are you alright?" Rogers asked.

She spun to face him, her back still ram-rod straight. Rogers stood next to a chair, his service coat hung carefully on the back of the seat. Next to him stood Master Sergeant Langford, almost as tall as he was, her dark skin contrasting with the light blue of her blues shirt. Both of them were looking at her with worried expressions.

"I'm very sorry, sir," she said quickly.

Rogers looked a little taken aback. "You're not late, I just wanted to check on something and then you weren't answering your phone. You look like you just ran a race. Did something happen?"

Jess pasted a good-faith effort at a smile on her face. "I got a call from my friend. Apparently things in Ecuador are going bad, and she's coming back early. And then I think I accidentally gave a briefing to the Deputy Secretary of Defense."

Rogers blinked, then just stood there. After a moment, he opened his mouth, and said, "I think I would have liked to know in advance."

"So would I, sir." Jess's smell fell right back off her face. "I stepped into an empty room to take a call, I had a spell on the board, he asked what it was, and I told him, and he asked a few more questions and then a few generals asked more questions and I gave them honest answers and, well, definitely didn't follow the script I was supposed to be using, but.."

Langford was looking at Jess with a flat, unsmiling face. Rogers, on the other hand, was giving her a mock scowl - his face was still a little pale, but the humor was back in his eyes. "This habit of answering questions is part of the reason we can't let you back in the SCIF, Jess." He sighed. "But it's for the best. The script didn't really give the right sense of urgency, but we had our orders."

Langford's frown deepened, but in thought, not anger. "Actually, Sergeant, did you go against the orders? You said 'briefing,' but from what I gathered, you only answered questions?"

"Yes, ma'am," Jess said. "Just questions."

"Then you didn't technically deviate from the script." The taller woman gave the two of them a humorless smile. "And you're here because you're not actually allowed to work on the classified projects, so you didn't give anything away there. Scientific theory isn't classified, after all."

Jess looked at her a bit guiltily. "Well, ma'am, sir, one of the generals asked if I could make a nuclear bomb with magic. And I, well, answered. Honestly. And nuclear weapons development..."

Langford's jaw dropped.

Rogers nodded shakily. "I...see. Well, that would definitely give the right sense of urgency. And it might explain why Lieutenant General Morris had to cancel on us at the last minute."

Jess frowned. "Maybe, but if Babs was right about what's going on in Ecuador, I think she might have been pulled out for a briefing on Colombia."

The colonel gave her a quelling look. "Colombia is definitely not something we should be discussing in here."

A few more pieces fell into place. She turned around and shut the door to the conference room. Then she drew a deep breath and looked at Rogers. "Colonel, I think I need to know a little more about the Congo."

"The Congo?" Rogers frown at her, looking for the connection. After a moment, he spoke. "Why is that, Sergeant?"

She drew in a deep breath and moved away from the door. "Sir, one of the people in that room asked if a person could use magic to make it easier to use magic. It's not something I would do, because it's a downward spiral. But it could be done. And it would let you use more effective magic, at the price of your sanity. And it would let you attract followers, who would believe similar things because you've given them tangible evidence."

The master sergeant looked doubtful, but not angry. Rogers' face was an unreadable mask.

Jess pushed on. "Sir, Babs - Barbara, my friend - told me that she thinks a fringe death cult is making major inroads in the demobilized FARC, striking not only against the Colombian government but Ecuador, as well. If there's one thing that could cause a cult to gain power rapidly, it's magic. Cult members tend to follow the leader, and real, tangible evidence of the leader's power - given by magic - would make them expand very quickly."

Rogers sighed and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Jessica, I really am, but I don't think that's enough to make me violate a Congressional order about you and classified intelligence materials. Technically, I can't even tell you that there were rumors of a new religious movement in the DRC, or that we can't pick up any radio signals from anywhere within the blackout zone, or that any attempted overflight is either forced to abort or shot down by consistent 'freak' lightning and hail." He shook his head. "At best, Sergeant Dunbar, it would only add a little weight to your hypothesis. No proof, nothing actionable."

Jess felt her tear ducts tighten. She tried to take a breath, but it didn't help. She tried again. "Sir," she started, but couldn't even finish.

He sighed, looking away. "Even if I could tell you all that, it wouldn't change anything."

She shook her head rapidly, and raised her hand. Breathe in, long, slow. Breathe out, long, slow. "Yes, sir, it would. Hypothetically. Sir, I need to talk to that detective from yesterday."

Rogers went absolutely still. "You think that the killing yesterday was a cult getting started." He looked at her, his own eyes wide. "You think that whatever he summoned will give him the credence he needs to group his followers into a magically potent army. In DC."

"Yes, sir. And if he's using magic to make himself a more potent spellcaster, then I really need to talk to the police so that they know what they might be going up against. Before the cult gets too big to stop."

 

[Strypgia]

Rogers sighed and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Jessica, I really am, but I don't think that's enough to make me violate a Congressional order about you and classified intelligence materials. Technically, I can't even tell you that there were rumors of a new religious movement in the DRC, or that we can't pick up any radio signals from anywhere within the blackout zone, or that any attempted overflight is either forced to abort or shot down by consistent 'freak' lightning and hail." He shook his head. "At best, Sergeant Dunbar, it would only add a little weight to your hypothesis. No proof, nothing actionable."

Click to shrink...

Well, that's not good...

Rogers went absolutely still. "You think that the killing yesterday was a cult getting started." He looked at her, his own eyes wide. "You think that whatever he summoned will give him the credence he needs to group his followers into a magically potent army. In DC."

Click to shrink...

And that's worse. That's a kind of spiral that you need to stop early, or it will get bad very quickly.

 

[JennyDracos]

Jess looked up at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Colombia and bit her lip.

Like so many of the buildings in Washington, it was made of pale stone, grayer in places where it hadn't been powerwashed recently, with plenty of narrow windows. There was a wide flight of stone steps leading up to the main building, a few people going in and out.

She bit her lip. She hated this. It was another briefing - but she'd only met the detective once, and unlike a formal military brief there was no protocol. She didn't know the material that well, and she had absolutely no ideas what questions he was going to ask - or what questions she needed him to ask. If there was one thing she needed, it was preparation. And she didn't have that, either.

But there was no help for it.

The lobby on the other side of the door was a wide, open space, with a heavy counter opposite the entrance. A man with a blue shirt and gold badge was sitting behind the counter, watching her as she came in. Someone moved to her right; a woman, sitting in a chair, not paying attention. Just someone waiting for something. There were a lot of chairs, hard, plastic, bolted to the floor. The rest of them were empty.

She tried to key on the smell of disinfectant. Whoever cleaned the place clearly believed in quantity over quality; the disinfectant was particularly acrid, but it didn't do nearly enough to cover up the urine, the sweat, or the fear.

"How can I help you, ma'am?" asked the man at the desk. He was heavyset, with the look of a man who used to spend five days at the gym and now figured three games of basketball a week was all the exercise he needed. Three chevrons graced his right sleeve.

Jess shoved her other self aside for the moment. "I'm Jessica Dunbar. I have an appointment with Detective Conlon?"

He tapped some keys on his keyboard. "Can I see some ID?"

She pulled out her military ID and set it on the counter.

He scanned it, looked at the monitor. "Well, Miss Dunbar, you're about twenty minutes early."

He said that like it was a bad thing. Rogers had told her to wear civilian clothing, so she'd had to go to Babs' place on the way. It wasn't a big detour, and basically all of her clothes were in Babs' closet, which meant she'd been able to get one of her pantsuits on, but it had still been a detour. And she'd still managed to get here with plenty of time to spare. "Better early than late," she said finally. "If you need me to take a seat, I can."

"Not out here." He pushed a button on his phone. "Frost, need an escort."

A moment later, a younger officer came out of a side door. "Yes, sergeant?"

"She goes to the CID break room. On your way back, let one of the Homicide guys know she's there. Got it?"

"Yes, sergeant."

Jess was led up two flights of stairs and into a small room. The chairs were old, cheap, with bent metal frames and cracking plastic upholstery, but they were almost relaxing. Through the open doorway she could hear a busy kind of bustle that made her feel more at home than she had since the accident. The clicking of keys, the shuffle of paper, the exchange of insults with no weight behind them - it was like seeing an old friend that she hadn't known she'd missed.

It was different, of course. The uniforms were dark blue instead of green camo, and the room was better lit than what she'd worked in before. The scents of anger and fear, of gunpowder and blood, those were different. Also the lights were much brighter.

But it still felt a little like home, and so when she pulled her language workbook to work on a few exercises, she blew right through it. She tucked it away, trying to convince herself that reading through her dictionary was almost as good as the second workbook, sitting on the bookshelf in the apartment, when a door just around the corner opened and Conlon stepped out. He turned to look at her and frowned.

She slid the dictionary back into her binder and waited.

Conlon's frown deepened. After a long moment, he jerked his head over his shoulder and started walking back into the nest of cubicles.

She was on her feet catching up to him in seconds.

As soon as she was only a step behind him, he glanced back at her. "So what is it you want?" His voice was gravelly, level, controlled. "Why are you here, exactly?"

Jess started to answer, then stopped to order her thoughts. It took her a moment to figure out what was safe to say for public consumption. "Yesterday, someone killed a woman in order to bring a maneating creature into the world," she said. "That's scary, but it's something that I figured the police could deal with. You know more about killers than I do, and a creature that spits poison is worse than a scrapyard dog but not much."

"Spits poison? What makes you think that?"

She shrugged. "Jurassic Park. Yesterday I gave you everything I know, so what you're getting today is speculation."

He turned to his right, then gestured at a doorway. "After you."

She stepped through and froze.

The room was small - tiny, really. It had white walls, a small table with four chairs, and a laptop. The walls were covered with photographs of the crime scene, and the victim.

Especially the victim.

An instant later, she kept moved over to take one of the seats.

He sat at the laptop. "So what changed between yesterday and today?"

She sighed. "Yesterday I figured this was new territory for you, but not that new. It was a killer, probably crazy, and yeah, he'd probably kill again if he wasn't stopped. But I am not a police officer. I'm an intelligence analyst. What do I know about killers? Yesterday I figured the best thing I could do would be to get out of your way. Tell you everything I could, and if you had any questions, you knew where to find me. Today..."

Jess reached over and tapped one of the pictures of the victim. "This morning someone said something that made me realize that if he can do this, he can show others how to do it. If he has some kind of bizarre belief system, the fact that he has some kind of creature with claws will convince people he's onto something." She turned to Conlon and let the fear show in her eyes. "If he's not stopped, he'll have an army."

"He?" Conlon asked.

She shrugged. "Fifty-fifty. But there's another reason I needed to come here today. This script here." She tapped one of the kludged prayers - the singed one - written in a language she'd help invent. "On the one hand, this is a spell to keep people from seeing the alterations the 'Lord of the Land' didn't make. It's what kept that writing in blood - and the scratches and gouges - from being in plain sight. The reason it looks burned is because it's what I blew out with my own spell." She sucked some air through her teeth and looked at Conlon. "If 'lord of the land' wasn't a mistranslation of 'landlord,' then your killer is capable of hiding the evidence you might need to find him. If it was, he can still figure it out."

His eyes narrowed. "There's something you're not telling me."

"Not a big thing. I think. Yesterday when I woke up, I would have sworn to you that only three people in the world know that script, and your victim was not one of them." She pulled out the arcane dictionary. "I made this, and I want to know how she learned to use it."

He frowned. "Looks professionally printed to me. Why's the Eiffel Tower on the cover?"

"Because when it was professionally printed, it was an English to French dictionary." Jess relaxed into the chair. "Basically we took a whole bunch of French language study materials, and we built a really obnoxiously complicated spell to take all the French - and I'm going to be honest and admit that trying to translate the name of languages that grew out of Latin into Latin was-"

He waved both hands, frantically. "Whoa, whoa, too much, too fast." He slid the dictionary back over to her and squeezed his eyes shut. After a moment, he opened them and looked at her. "You can create a spell to do something like that?"

She shrugged. "Yeah. It's even easier with the arcane script, partly because it's what we spent all that time stipulating the arcane script to do, and partly because you would think it would be easier."

"Why does that matter?"

Jess blinked at him. "Well, that's one of the basic principles of spellcasting! Intent, belief, symbolism. The arcane script was designed to be good at symbolism. Nice, clear, easy to work with. But it's also a magical language made to do magic with, and that means it's much easier to believe that if you write it, or speak with it, it will do what you want it to do. Like I said, one of the basic principles of spellcasting is that if you don't believe it will work, it won't."

Conlon closed the lid of his laptop. He sat back in his own chair and stared at the wall. After several long moments, he turned to look at her. "Can you teach me how to see things that have been hidden by magic?"

"Do you think I can?" she answered. "That's the best way I can put it. Or, I can definitely teach you how, but learning is harder than just going through a lecture or a course. Belief is critical."

He sighed. "I was afraid of that. Because no, I don't think you can teach me. At least in time to be useful."

Jess grimaced.

"Plan B," he said and picked up the laptop. "I need to talk with the vic's professor. Can you ride with me? I need to pick your brain some more."

 

[Blaflaix]

"Because when it was professionally printed, it was an English to French dictionary." Jess relaxed into the chair. "Basically we took a whole bunch of French language study materials, and we built a really obnoxiously complicated spell to take all the French -

Click to shrink...

"So you translated all French materials in the world into a magic language, and you wonder how someone got access to it?"

"Well... nobody pays attention to French, right?"

 

[Strypgia]

"Not a big thing. I think. Yesterday when I woke up, I would have sworn to you that only three people in the world know that script, and your victim was not one of them." She pulled out the arcane dictionary. "I made this, and I want to know how she learned to use it."

Click to shrink...

Yeah, that should be the thread to pull on. There should be a very small number of people with the contact, time, and interest to have started using this script, and that should be your starting list for 'people to question and check alibis'.

 

[JennyDracos]

Yeah, that should be the thread to pull on. There should be a very small number of people with the contact, time, and interest to have started using this script, and that should be your starting list for 'people to question and check alibis'.

Click to shrink...

The trouble is, those three people are her, Babs, and Becky - and Babs is in Ecuador.

 

[JennyDracos]

Conlon was enough taller than Jess that she had to work to keep up with him as he strode down the university hallway. The sounds of their respective shoes clicked against the tile flooring, continually refusing to come to a rhythm, but aside from the plaintive whine of a printer that had gone too long between servicing, they were the only sound on the office level of the building. Too many books and papers lined the walls, mostly sitting on top of overstuffed file cabinets.

"Her name was Victoria Trepes," Conlon explained as they walked. "She was a Ph.D student here, studying Biology. Professor Simon Oblange was her advisor. I made the notification yesterday and he didn't take it well. In my opinion, and this is just opinion, I don't think he knew she was dead until I told him. He's on the list, but low."

Jess frowned. "Is there anything to make you think he knew enough about magic to be our guy?"

Conlon snorted. "I don't even know what to look for?"

"Is there anything I should or shouldn't do?"

He looked at her over his shoulder, his expression purely unamused. "Try not to spill confidential information in front of him."

"Intel," Jess reminded him.

He snorted, then knocked on the door labeled "Simon Oblange, Herpetology."

A moment later, the door swung open to reveal a stooped-over older man. He was less than six feet tall, but not by much, with the darkest skin Jess had ever seen in person, and close-cropped hair that looked like someone had wrapped steel wool around the sides and back of his head. His eyes were deeply creased with laugh lines, but there was no laughter in his expression right now.

His arms held a large lizard, at least a foot and a half from nose to tail. Its scales were a deep green, and its head rested against his neck.

The man opened his mouth, but nothing came out. After a moment, words came to him. "Detective," he said in a thick, West African accent, "have you found the killer?"

Conlon shook his head. "I'm sorry, Professor, not yet. I just had some follow-up questions. Standard procedure, you know how it goes." He gestured to Jess. "This is Sergeant Dunbar, from the Air Force. She's consulting with us on the case."

Oblange glanced over at Jess. "You seem familiar for some reason," he said. "But where are my manners? I'd say it's a pleasure to meet you, but I'm afraid the circumstances."

Jess smiled at him. "I quite understand. And who's this?"

The man's face practically lit up. "This is Charlie," he said, and rocked his shoulder forward. "Come on, Charlie."

The lizard lifted its head from his shoulder, then turned to look at Jess. Then it looked at Conlon, and its mouth opened to reveal rows of tiny teeth. It hissed spitefully at the detective.

"Charlie!" Oblange said, chidingly. "He was the bearer of bad news. That doesn't mean he's a bad person."

The lizard simply tucked its head back under Oblange's.

Oblange sighed. "I'm terribly sorry. He's really quite smart for a reptile, but I have to admit that there is only so much I can work with there. He knows I hurt, and he knows you were there when I started to hurt, which for a lizard is frankly amazing."

Jess ran her finger lightly down the ridge of scales on the lizard's back. His scales were a bit spiky, but somehow they still felt soft to her touch. "What kind of lizard is he?"

"Well, he was a Central Bearded Dragon. They're an Australian lizard, fairly common pets. For reptiles, anyway. They are cold-blooded, which means they're a lot more delicate than those of us who can put on a sweater to get warm." He winked at Jess, then blinked in recognition. "My goodness! Sergeant Dunbar - the Sergeant Dunbar?"

Jess forced a smile, but glanced sidelong at Conlon, who was looking at her suspiciously. She looked back at Oblange. "Yeah, that was me."

Oblange's smile widened. "I watched the Senate hearings, you see. And read your report. Fascinating reading, and the implications! Although I suppose the one who really owes you is Charlie here." He hefted the lizard. "Would you like to hold him?"

Jess relaxed into a real smile. "Sure. Come here, cutie!"

The lizard was heavier than she had expected, and cooler. He tilted his head back to look at Oblange and chirped, then looked up at Jess.

She ran a finger lightly up the underside of his jaw, feeling the roughness of his scales. "You said 'was.' Is he not one any more?"

Oblange smiled. "As a matter of fact I have modified him, perhaps as far as I can go. There was one more thing I wanted to try, but then I heard about Victoria." He shook his head abruptly, as if trying to wake himself up. "And my manners are still not present. Come in, come in."

His office was definitely larger than a closet, but not by all that much. The wall to the left was lined with bookcases filled with books on frogs, lizards, snakes, crocodiles. More books were piled in front of them in haphazard stacks. The far wall had a desk, piled high with papers and more books, and a big glass tank partly filled with sand, some thick branches, and a big leaf clipped to one side. On the right -

Jess stepped in past Conlon, turning to the right to look at the wall. The whole wall was one big whiteboard. A few notes were on the sides, but the center of it was dominated by a large set of red boxes that showed the clear signs of having been traced by a ruler. More ruler-straight red lines connected them and led down to the floor, where one more rectangle on the floor was marked out in red masking tape. Each of the red boxes on the wall was filled with neat black runes written with a careful hand.

In her arcane script.

She focused on the top center block. It looked like an unaddressed prayer to grant wisdom, but something about the phrasing felt off. It looked like a literal word-for-word translation, which from her reading and practice didn't flow particularly well. Left of that was a prayer for tolerance, but the word was one that meant tolerance for temperature.

"What is this?" she asked, turning to look at the professor.

Oblange looked at the wall. "I wanted to see if Charlie could be a little more...well, it wasn't my idea, actually, but even if it didn't do everything we had hoped, Charlie is very much changed, I believe for the better." He held out his arms and the lizard happily clambered back over. "He knows that I'm sad, and that's not something that reptiles are truly capable of. He spends less time basking than he used to, because he's a little warmer." He reached out with his free hand and patted a blank space on the wall. "It's still a work in progress. It doesn't do everything we wanted, but I'm still tweaking it."

She looked over the wall. Carefully, trying to sound like she slightly curious, she asked, "What language did you write it in?"

Oblange smiled. "There's a - well, I call it a working group, but it's really more of a student club for which I am the advisor. We are just beginning to explore the potential of what can be done with nondirect methodology. It's open to anyone, but so far we only have a handful of people. I'm the only member of the faculty, though I do have hopes..."

Conlon took a half-step forward. "I'm sorry, 'nondirect methodology?'"

Jess looked at him and coughed, a little embarrassed. "Ah, in the initial report I wrote, 'nondirect methods' was what I called magic. We didn't know all that much about it at the time, just that there was a gap between cause and effect, so 'nondirect.' It wasn't until Dr. Nowroski figured out how much symbolism played into things that we started calling it magic."

"I still do not like that term," Oblange said. "It implies that you cannot approach it with a scientific mindset."

Conlon raised his eyebrows. "I see. And this language - your 'working group' found it?"

Oblange smiled and brushed a hand over the whiteboard. "I don't think 'found' is the right word. We devised it, brought it forth. We wanted - needed - something like it, and there it was."

Conlon nodded slowly. "Was Victoria Trepes part of your working group?"

Oblange's smile fell, as did his free hand. Charlie immediately put his head up against Oblange's jaw. After a moment, Oblange spoke up. "For about two weeks, yes. She was one of my grad students, very bright, very smart. Still early days as far as her research, but she had potential. I told her she should come, but she was always too busy. Finally I cajoled her into coming to the last two sessions. I had high hopes for her. I think she might have made some major breathroughs." He sighed. "But now that's not going to happen."

After a moment, he looked at Conlon. "Did she suffer, do you think?"

"The coroner said it was over in seconds," Conlon said. "She barely had time to realize it was happening."

Jess had seen the expression frozen on her face and wasn't so sure about that, but she held her tongue.

"That's something, then." Oblange sighed. "Bad enough when the young die. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I hope that when you find who did it, they suffer." His lip quivered.

Jess had to blink back her own set of tears. In self-defense, she looked back at the whiteboard. "Professor, you mentioned that this didn't do what you had hoped. What was that?"

He sighed, then shook himself and looked at her. "We wanted to test a point, you see. Turn one kind of creature into another kind, a kind that didn't exist. The idea was to turn Charlie into a-"

The door slammed open and a tall man, taller even than Conlon, stepped in. He was lean, with a slightly ruddy complexion, jet black hair, and a neatly trimmed beard. For some reason he smelled strongly of woodsmoke. "Simon, have you had a chance to-" Then he saw Jess and Conlon and jerked to a halt. "Sorry, sorry, I didn't realize you had visitors. Well, introduce me!"

 

[Strypgia]

And if you can enhance animals like a lizard, how long until someone decides to start enhancing humans? Or already has?

 

[Hell on Strikers]

And if you can enhance animals like a lizard, how long until someone decides to start enhancing humans? Or already has?

Click to shrink...

Isn't that what happened to the Sargent?

 

[JennyDracos]

Jess's other self focused on the new man with an intensity Jess hadn't seen since Babs had taken her to the zoo. Jess couldn't afford that - she needed a little more context. She glanced over at Oblange.

Apparently Charlie agreed with Jess's other self. He was looking at the newcomer with something resembling absolute loathing, the spiny scales around his head flared out, his teeth bared. The man holding him, on the other hand, was smiling with welcome relief. Oblange himself was very happy to see the newcomer.

"Of course, David, of course. This is Detective Conlon of the Metropolitan Police Department, and Sergeant-"

"Jessica Dunbar, of course!" interrupted the newcomer. "I should have recognized you at first glance. The Rabbit Sergeant, here in person!"

Jess wished she could sink through the floor.

"David," Oblange said reprovingly.

The newcomer smiled. His teeth were very white. "Quite, quite, I do apologize, Sergeant. I'm just excited, that's all."

"Fine," Jess said. Anything to change the topic. "It's totally fine, mister...?"

"Professor," he said. "Professor David Murray, of the Walsh School of Foreign Service." He smiled again. It was a very sharp smile, reaching but somehow not quite touching his eyes.

"My partner," Oblange said. "In rather a few things."

Murray's glance flicked to him, and momentarily down at the large lizard. "Simon, I was wondering if you'd managed to put my suggestion into practice?"

Oblange sagged slightly. "I'm afraid not. I just have not been able to gather the concentration today."

Jess glanced from Oblange to Murray. "If you don't mind my asking, what was your suggestion?"

Murray smiled his artifical smile at her. "I assume you've noticed the rather complicated spell formula on his wall? Simon has been trying to turn his little creature there into a more...evolved being."

"David!" Simon objected over Charlie's outraged hiss. "One can hardly call it 'more evolved.' For one thing, evolution-"

Murray waved him off. "Yes, yes, so you've said. In any case, the answer to your question, Miss Dunbar, is that I suggested he rewrite his spell in another language. Surely, I said, it would work better in the language of dragons?"

Jess stopped breathing as she put the pieces together.

Conlon frowned. "But dragons don't exist," he said. "How can they have a language?"

Murray turned towards the detective. "Whether or not they are here, on this small world, has remarkably little relevance to whether or not we can determine what their language is. If we know for what we reach, surely we can pull it from the aether." He turned to Simon. "You should do it. I think you owe it to the little fingerbiter."

Oblange sighed. "I'll try, David, I'll try."

"In the meantime, Professor," Conlon said, "do you think you could give us a list of the people who've been attending your working group?"

"Certainly, certainly. Let me get Charlie settled first." Oblange hurried over to the glass tank and set the lizard inside. He lowered the lid of the tank while Charlie darted under a mass of branches.

Jess tilted her head at Murray. "Are you a part of his working group?"

"I'm not, no." His lips twisted into something that could be called a grin, if one were charitable. But at least they weren't flashing his teeth at her again. "I think that the discovery of magic will rock the world, but somehow a student group seems so..."

"Who better, David," Oblange said absently as he used his index fingers to punch something into the keyboard on his desk. "Who better?"

Conlon turned to Murray. "Professor Murray, I do need to ask you some questions. Procedure, you understand."

Murray laughed. "Trust me, I teach International Finance. Procedure, I understand."

"Did you know Victoria Trepes?"

Murray shook his head blankly. "The name sounds familiar, but-" He shrugged.

Conlon pulled out a phone in a thick, rugged case. He flipped through some pictures, then raised it. From her angle, Jess could see it was a picture of the dead woman when she had been alive and well.

Murray narrowed his eyes. "I've seen her before. Oh! She's one of Simon's assistants. Oh." He looked down and away from the picture. "She's the one who died."

A fresh whiff of grief drifted over from Oblange's desk.

"Can you tell me where you were Tuesday night between six PM and midnight?"

Murray's gaze slammed back to Conlon. His brow thundered. Rage filled the room. "Surely you don't think I-"

"It's just procedure," Conlon said soothingly. "Just so I have it in the record."

Murray closed his eyes. Jess could almost see a wave of control wash over him. When he opened them, the anger was gone from his voice. "Of course. Procedure. Tuesday - that would have been the dinner for the Foundation, at the George Town Club. That was from just before five until about nine." He looked at Oblange. "You spent most of that pinned to Doctor Herrara."

Oblange chuckled. "I can't help it! She has the best stories. And you were with that idiot." His voice had turned cutting.

Murray's grin was cold. "But he's a useful idiot." He winked at Jess. "Michael Penlon. Senator Keller's chief of staff."

Jess felt her throat go dry.

"After that, we went home," Murray said with a shrug. "I'm afraid nobody saw us except for each other."

"And where is home?"

Oblange raised his head. "North of campus. It's very convenient." He smiled. Then a printer hummed behind a stack of books. "And I have your list here."

Conlon nodded and started walking towards the desk. "Thank you, Professor. If you wouldn't mind putting down your home address...?"

"Professor Oblange," Jess asked, "Would you mind if I looked at the spell you used to make your symbol set?"

He frowned as he scribbled something on the sheet of paper in front of him. "I'm afraid I'm not entirely comfortable with that," he said. "If you attended the working group, we might exact certain promises, but magic misused can have disastrous consequences."

Jess snorted. "I'm well aware. That said, it wasn't your language I wanted, or to duplicate your spell. You see, I already have that." She pulled the English-to-Arcane dictionary out of her purse.

Oblange blinked.

Jess gestured at the whiteboard. "I can read about nine out of ten words there, and recognize the rest, which is very strange. I want to compare your spell with mine, and see why whe got the same language."

Murray's grin widened. "It's like I said, Simon. The language was somewhere out in the Aether and you pulled it out. It's the only logical explanation."

Jess pasted a smile on her own face. "Perhaps."

 

[bookwyrm]

God, and the best part is that this is the dude after a bunch of self-administered arcano-neurosurgery so the fact that he's so obviously looking like a creepy serial killer winking at the audience is actually the point, his idealized new sorcerous him is a fuckin' Hollywood psychopath. What's going to happen when dark lord dave is thrust into circumstances that his new knockoff patrick bateman personality has absolutely no script for?

 

[JennyDracos]

Jess sat down in the passenger side of Conlon's car and shuddered. "That was him, wasn't it? He killed her."

Conlon lowered his hand from the ignition. He frowned slightly, then raised his eyebrows gently. "We don't know that. It's a possibility, and we'll be looking into him, but until we find solid evidence, we need to continue to check out other leads. Remember, it's not the only possibility. He could be a creep because he's a serial killer. He could be a creep because he's something else that we need to look into, but someone else is the one who killed Trepes. He could be a creep because he's a smug rich bastard who'd never raise a hand to murder someone because it's too much effort."

The printout crumpled in Jess's hand. She straightened it. "Right."

"If his alibi checks out, that puts him on entirely the wrong side of downtown during rush hour, but we will check it out, and I'm going to put some guys on him. In the meantime, I have some questions for you. Pardon me." He reached over the center console and into the laptop bag next to Jess's feet. He came back with a laptop, flipped it open, and started tapping notes in.

"Such as?"

"When Murray walked in, he called you 'the Rabbit Sergeant.' What does that mean?"

The printout tore. Jess set it down in her lap and closed her eyes. "That's...what the media started calling me during the Senate hearings. Well, Senator Keller came up with it, but they ran with it."

"Which Senate hearings?"

Jess looked at him, to see him looking at her with genuine confusion. "The...hearings about magic. Everything that happened to me happened in a military hospital, under the eyes of military doctors, and that meant plenty of witnesses to say that what had happened was one hundred percent physically impossible, but that it had very definitely happened. Afterwards, I did a compilation of a whole bunch of OSINT of similar cases, and the report went up the chain of command until the Senate called us in. Uh, not the whole Senate, just the Intelligence Committee."

Conlon narrowed his eyes. "How likely is it that other people will recognize you?"

She shrugged. "It depends on how much they watch the news. Or where they watch it. Or when. The Senate hearings were big news when they were on, but now they're not. Of course anyone who watches the Good Reverend's video podcast will see my face regularly, sometimes with demonic features edited in." She stared blankly out the windshield.

Conlon grunted and settled back into his seat. "So, most of the people on this list."

She blinked. "Um. Possibly, yes."

"And they're more likely to talk freely to you than to me."

"That would depend on how they feel about the military."

He snorted. "Your uniform isn't likely to close all that many doors that stay open for my badge. I think it'd help if you came with me."

She blinked. "I can do that."

"Right. First stop is Tom Hill. He's one of Oblange's other teaching assistants, he's been in his 'working group' since the beginning, and he has a sealed juvie record. Can't be that bad, because it's sealed, but." Conlon closed the laptop and slid it back into its bag.

Hill's apartment was across the Anacostia, in River Terrance. It was less than a mile from the apartment Trepes had died in; like hers, it was part of a row of brick duplexes. Unlike hers, it was at the end of the row, with the only thing between it and the side street a low single-car garage with blue siding. The apartment looked dingy; the windows had white curtains on the inside that weren't completely closed but weren't open, and what looked like a thin film of grime around their edges. The white door had plenty of dark smudges on it, and mud spatter around the base, and the brass mailbox was dull.

Conlon led the way up the concrete stepping stones to the front door, and Jess followed. From up close, she could smell dirt, and oregano, and pizza. Not a lot of soap. More than a little marijuana. She frowned. "Do you smell that?" she asked Conlon.

He knocked on the door and threw her a look. "Obviously."

The door was opened by a tall, skinny young man. He wore a loose t-shirt over sweatpants. The t-shirt read "Ask me about EBIDTA." His blond hair was long enough to be messy. There was a slight red tinge to his eyes. He blinked at the two of them. "Can I help you?"

"I'm Detective Conlon, MPD. This is Air Force Sergeant-" and the door slammed in his face.

Conlon swore and pushed the door open. Jess caught a glimpse of the man at the back of the apartment, fumbling with the rear door, before Conlon's back blocked her view.

The garage was barely eight feet tall. Jess leapt up and slapped the edge hard, using it to make sure her feet could clear it. As she kicked off towards the rear of the house, she thanked Rogers for telling her to change into civilian clothes. Running in her uniform skirt and heels would have been much more difficult, even with the help she got from her other self. Instead she cleared the roof with two strides and kicked off over the small grassy yard, turning to face the rear door of the apartment, bracing her hands to throw the runner back.

He was in the process of slamming the rear door shut, came face to face with her, and jerked to a halt. He turned to run the other way.

Conlon came out the back door and grabbed him by the arm and shoulder, guiding him carefully but firmly into the back wall of the house. "Tom Hill? We need to have a little chat."

"Um. I'm Tom Hill," said a young man in a red t-shirt and jeans. He had brown hair, blue eyes, and looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here.

"I don't want to go to Guantanamo Bay!" the runner said into the bricks.

 

[bookwyrm]

Honestly a completely logical reaction to seeing both military and police at your door, let alone magical investigators.

 

[Hell on Strikers]

Honestly a completely logical reaction to seeing both military and police at your door, let alone magical investigators.

Click to shrink...

Only if you have been doing something very sketchy.

 

[bookwyrm]

Only if you have been doing something very sketchy.

Click to shrink...

I mean no one in gitmo ever actually had a trial and their day in court, from the bombmakers and cell leaders down to the people who were (then) teenagers in the complex where targets of interest were located and were like proximate to american soldiers dying in the firefight. Sure you might say living in the same building as a terrorist leader is probably sketchy, but then again we label those targets terrorists because they bomb and assassinate and terrorize the shit out of people who happen to be loosely associated with or just randomly nearby local american liasons, american-supported precincts and barracks, and random american embassies and governmental offices. Not trying to do a bigbrained "the American government and terror cells are exactly the same" thing, but like it has to be said the logic of the detention and drone striking of even a bunch of american citizens is on pretty thin ground and objectively not something that one should be super comfortable with taking for granted and assume won't ever harm you personly if it just locks onto you for whatever reason.

 

[JennyDracos]

I think it's pretty fair to say that nobody wants to go to Guantanamo Bay. And it's certainly a terrifying thought that might occur to someone who is in fact doing something very sketchy when they see a police detective and a member of the military on their doorstep.

 

[Justbrowsing]

Looks like pothead panic to me.

Also, enjoying the story, but I'm getting the feeling I just stumbled in on book 2. Are there some other stories in this setting?

 

[JennyDracos]

Looks like pothead panic to me.

Also, enjoying the story, but I'm getting the feeling I just stumbled in on book 2. Are there some other stories in this setting?

Click to shrink...

Yes, but actually no. I actually did manage to finish a volume that precedes this, but it's garbage and never gonna get posted online. I'm trying to make sure it's not a problem to not have read it, because no one ever will, but unfortunately I have, so it might be an uphill battle. The only plot-relevance it has is preconditions; she's an intel analyst associated with magic, she's not allowed to do intel work.

I did almost put a plot summary of it in the last scene I posted (the main plot centers around the Senate hearings), but the timing wasn't right.

 

[Strypgia]

Murray's grin widened. "It's like I said, Simon. The language was somewhere out in the Aether and you pulled it out. It's the only logical explanation."

Click to shrink...

Logic has not as much sway when we're talking about magic, sir.

I trust Mr. Murray not at all. Watch him like a hawk, Detective.

 

[JennyDracos]

The two young men had three chairs at the table in their kitchen, so Jess took the one closest to the front door, while Conlon leaned against the back door. The two young men took the remaining chairs around the small round table, pinning them between the detective and the sergeant.

It was a decent enough kitchen, fairly well maintained unlike the apartment's exterior. A clean towel hung from the handle of the refrigerator decorated liberally with fast food delivery magnets. The sink smelled of dish soap. There was a somewhat dented-looking knife rack close enough to the runner to put Conlon on edge. The room smelled of spices, flour, tomato sauce, olive oil. She could pick up traces of wood smoke and marijuana, but that was almost buried under the food smells.

The runner turned out to be Nathan Washington, Hill's roommate and an undergrad finance student. Even after Conlon had failed to immediately cuff him and throw him in the back of a police car, he kept glancing from the detective to Jess and back. "You're not here to arrest us?"

Conlon raised his eyebrows. "Should I be?"

Jess shook her head. "Magic isn't illegal," she said. "What you do with it might be, but just doing it? No."

"But...why would the military be here?"

Hill was frowning at Jess. "Hey. Aren't you Jessica Dunbar?"

Jess sighed and nodded.

"Holy shit, dude!" Hill said, turning to Washington. "That's Sergeant Dunbar! The Sergeant Dunbar!"

Washington rocked back in his seat and stared at Jess. Then his mouth broke into a grin, though his eyes still looked sick. "I tried to run from the Rabbit Sergeant?"

Jess sighed and nodded. Again.

"Holy shit, dude!" Washington said. Then his eyes relaxed a bit. "Uh, no disrespect, or nothing."

Conlon snorted. "Speaking as an officer of the law, we do tend to find people running from us rather disrespectful."

Washington slumped. "I'm sorry, I just panicked. I've just been helping Hill with some of his ideas, and I did try one thing, and then we had the Air Force at the door, and I freaked out."

Jess looked at Hill. "What ideas are he talking about?"

Hill flushed. "Well, don't laugh, okay? So, I'm from NYC, and all the pizza places around here, none of them really know how to make a pie. But my oven won't get hot enough for long enough to get the stone warmed right, so I etched in some runes. You said you know Professor Oblange, right? Well, his symbol set works great if you want to surround an area, especially a circle."

"You don't say," Jess murmured.

He kept going. "So what I did was, I do two things to the stone. The first is, when there's no pizza on it, the stone has a really low specific heat. That means when I preheat the oven, by the time the oven is at temperature, so's the stone. Then, when I throw the pizza on it to cook, the stone has a really high specific heat. So it really soaks the heat into the pizza, gets the crust cooking fast. And when it's done, and I take the pizza off the stone - well, then it goes back to the low specific heat, and it cools down fast and I can put it away in no time."

Jess glanced at Conlon. He was giving Hill a look of horrified fascination.

Hill was looking at the table, still a little flushed. "There's one other project I'm working on, but it's not all there yet."

Conlon raised an eyebrow. "More pizza? Pizza duplication, maybe?"

Hill coughed. "Actually...ice cream. See, the creamiest ice cream is made with liquid nitrogen, but the landlady would never let a nitrogen truck pull up in front of the house to fill a dewar, you know? But I got this." He stood, turning around, opening a cabinet. Conlon straightened to clear his holster, but Hill just reached up to the top shelf and pulled out a pair of thick blue gloves and a big plastic bowl. Then he pulled the gloves on and carefully pulled out what looked like a beaker made out of frosted glass.

The instant he moved the beaker, Jess realized that the glass was literally frosted, as a clear liquid splashed up and out of the beaker and vanished into a cloud of thick fog that curled down towards the ground. Carefully, Hill lowered the beaker to chest height, then emptied it into the bowl. The bowl filled with fog and the sides of it iced over.

And then the beaker was empty, with only a bare trickle coming from within.

"And...that's why it doesn't work so good," Hill said. He sighed and set the beaker down on the table, then pulled the gloves off. "Basically, there's two little things etched on the inside of the beaker. The first one sets the temperature to about two hundred degrees below zero. That's cold enough for nitrogen to liquefy, and since air is mostly nitrogen, it puddles on the bottom. Problem is, air is only mostly nitrogen. If I leave it sitting upright, all the nitrogen in the beaker will condense, and more air will be pulled in. But after a while, it's mostly really cold oxygen inside, and only a little nitrogen, so it slows way down. If it's upside down, it works faster, but I can't store it."

Conlon's eyebrows were raised. "This for ice cream?"


Hill coughed. "Partly. Mostly to see if it could be done. And the answer is 'yes, technically.' But the other way is just way easier."

Jess frowned. "You said the beaker did two things?"

Hill coughed again. "Well, yeah. I had to, uh, change the boiling point of oxygen in the beaker, or I get a beaker full of liquid oxygen. Once was enough."

"Ice cream," Conlon said, shaking his head. Then he looked at Washington. "And you?"

Washington squirmed.

 

[bookwyrm]

Considering the unspeakable things college students already can get up to with a soldering iron, a half-baked idea to work around the fact they can't pay for any more appliances and/or consoles, and an encompassing tolerance for dangerously uninhabitable living conditions, so far these two are well within the mean of twenty-year-old tomfoolery.

 

[Strypgia]

Conlon's eyebrows were raised. "This for ice cream?"

Click to shrink...

We've got a team of prize idiots here...

 

[Blaflaix]

"Partly. Mostly to see if it could be done. And the answer is 'yes, technically.' But the other way is just way easier."

Click to shrink...

To be honest, this describes pretty much the entirety of college.

 

[ptbptb]

Jess glanced at Conlon. He was giving Hill a look of horrified fascination.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, both those little bits of magic have horrendously dangerous applications to warfare and terrorism (but also industry). This guy is like "pizza and icecream!" but your world setting is going to allow someone with "a little learning" to make the equivalent of thermite grenades in their kitchen.

 

[JennyDracos]

Regarding industry - honestly I don't see any way to keep from absolutely wrecking the economy. Not so much the liquid nitrogen thing, because apparently it's easy enough to build a mechanical air liquifier in your home, and it's cheaper to buy a gallon of liquid nitrogen than a gallon of milk. But playing with specific heat the way I had him do there - that's free energy. I remember reading a novel where they used something like Mass Effect to increase the mass of a pair of flywheels, and you could do that here, too. Two flywheels, two motor/generators, and you have a unit that can power your home indefinitely...