Nightlord: Orb (14 page)

Saturday, September 19
th

I got to meet three more neighbors, today.  About noon, a large, indignant man pounded on my front door and jabbed the doorbell repeatedly.  Since I was in the basement poring over spell diagrams, the interruption was not welcome.  I came upstairs, locked the basement door behind me, and answered the front door.

“Who do you think you are?” he demanded.  No introduction.  No greeting.  Simply a loud voice and the smell of beer.  No cigarette smell, though.  Maybe the Surgeon General finally made some headway on that.

“I think I’m the guy who owns the property,” I replied, levelly.  “The property you’re standing on.  Who are
you
?” I demanded.  This seemed to faze him slightly.  He was a big guy.  Maybe we wasn’t used to that sort of response.

“My kid says you’ve got his toy!  Give it back!”

“What toy?” I asked.

“His flying drone!  Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!” he half-shouted, and took a step forward.

“Put a foot across that threshold and I will defend my home from an intruder,” I told him, calmly.  While he blinked at me, trying to process that, I added, “I probably do have your kid’s toy drone.  I’ve got a dozen.  They keep flying into my barn and crashing.  If you can tell me what it looks like or give me some way to identify it, I’ll go get it for you.”

“He crashed it?”

“I don’t know; I found it in the barn.  It’s hard to maneuver through a barn.  That’s why I’ve picked up several of them.  I’m waiting for the pilots to come claim them, that’s all.”

“He didn’t say he crashed it.”

“He can have it back,” I assured him.  “He needs to identify it, that’s all.  I don’t want to give him the wrong one.”

“Keep it,” he advised, and stomped off my porch.  I watched him slam the gate as he left.

“Well, someone’s in trouble,” I muttered, and closed the door.  I went back down to the basement.  About two hours later, my doorbells went off again.  Grumbling, I went back upstairs.

Two boys, in the eight-to-ten age range, stood on the porch.  I opened the door.

“Yes?  How can I help you young men?”

There was some nudging between them before the taller one spoke.

“We want our fliers back,” he said.  He had an odd accent.  I couldn’t place it.  A speech impediment, maybe?

“That’s nice,” I told him.

We stood there and regarded each other for several seconds.

“Well?” he asked.

“You haven’t asked for anything,” I pointed out, speaking slowly and clearly in case his speech impediment indicated other linguistic problems.  “You’ve told me you want something.  I acknowledged.  I want a ham sandwich and a glass of milk; I don’t expect you to do anything about it.”

“Can I have my flier back?” he asked.

“Probably.  But I’m an old-fashioned sort.  The correct way to ask is, ‘May I please have my flier back, sir?’  That works better.”

“May I please have my flier back, sir?” he repeated.

“Sure.  What does it look like?”

He described it.  It was the circular mono with the counter-rotating props.  I told them to wait, shut the door, and fetched it.

Back on the porch, I handed it to him.  He snatched at it, but I didn’t let go.

“You’re supposed to say something when someone does something nice for you,” I prompted.

“Thanks.”

“Close.”

“Thank you?”

“Almost there.”

“Thank you, sir?”

I let go of the drone and he pelted off with it.  He friend stood there silently.

“Did you have a flier, too?” I asked, trying to be pleasant.  He nodded.  “Okay.  Do you know what to do?”

“May I have my flier please sir?”

“Very good.  What’s it look like?”  We repeated the process and I handed him his drone.  He held out both hands and I gave it to him.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Good job.  What’s your name?”

“Edgar.”

“Nice to meet you, Edgar.  I’m Vladimir Smith.  You can call me ‘Mister Smith,’ for now.”

“Okay.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

He shook his head.

“All right,” I said.  “Thank you for being polite.  If you need anything, feel free to stop by.”

He nodded and remained standing there.  I wondered how to tell him to buzz off without sounding unpleasant.  I can be unpleasant; that doesn’t mean I always want to be.

“Have a nice day, Edgar.”  I stepped back and slowly closed the door.  That did it; he took off down the walk and remembered to shut the gate behind him.

Kids today.

I was halfway to the kitchen before it hit me.

Oh, my god.  I’ve become that cranky old man down the street.

There were some good points to the day.  I figured out one part of my magical problems.

Magic works.  Given.  But it doesn’t work in exactly the same ways between Rethven and here.  While the larger systems work—the pentacle or the triangle-in-circle, for example, to define the locus of a spell—the smaller, more detailed bits are slightly different.  When I draw
zel
,
azi
, or
kas
symbols around the perimeter of a containment diagram, they don’t seem to resonate perfectly with the magical environment.  It’s like playing a tune in the wrong key, I suppose.  You get the song, but it’s weird.  Or, maybe it’s more like using tiny, off-color lightbulbs in a chandelier.  The thing lights up, but it doesn’t look right and doesn’t shine the way it should.

So how do I figure out the correct… well, for lack of a better term, the letters in this universe’s fundamental alphabet?  On second thought, “alphabet” might not be the right word.  They are symbols of… hmm.  Magical constants?  The symbols are like… runes?  Ideograms?  Each one is a concept, not a sound… although some of them have sounds associated with them, which is generally what gets recited or chanted during a full ritual spell.  Still, how do I determine the right shape for the symbols I need
here
?

I’m clever.  I got a piece of window glass and a dry-erase board.  I took them down to my basement Ascension Sphere and sat down to work.

After drawing a symbol I knew from Rethven on a small dry-erase marker-board, I put the glass over it and bled a little.  With a few drops on the glass, I concentrated on the function of the symbol in question.  For the
ara
symbol, I lit a candle and concentrated on the fire.  The blood formed up to almost match the symbol beneath.  Then I re-drew the marker version to resemble the changed version I saw on the glass and repeated the process.  Again, the blood moved to almost the same shape, with minor variations.  After two or three iterations, the blood on the glass matched the symbol below. I had the correct ideogram for fire in this universe!

Now I need to figure out how to pronounce it here.  I doubt it’s called
ara
.  It might sound similar; the final version of the symbol was similar.  But how do I tell?  Letters may look similar in different alphabets, but that’s no guarantee they sound at all alike.  My spell-writing should be much better, but I’m probably going to sound like a German speaker reciting English poetry translated into Japanese.

I suspect my alphabet-revealing technique only works because of my magic circle.  I tried it outside the circle and the blood didn’t alter shape.  It didn’t flow off the glass, either, so I presume it was still trying to do what I wanted.  If I try this in a world with a high magical potential, I probably won’t need the circle.  Which raises the question of how do people figure this stuff out without a head start?  Do they try to draw pictograms of the idea and see what works?  Do shamans and other less-technical spellcasters see shapes in the clouds, dust, and fire, then paint them on the cave walls?  Or do the gods give them the runes, like in the myth about Odin?

I have a head start with a magical alphabet that only needs some touching up and polishing.  Of course, there are thousands of letters in that alphabet.  Each one is a symbol for a concept, not actually a letter.

To make things worse, each one is a process, not a simple one-shot spell.  It takes a while to identify the sometimes-subtle alterations and repeat the process.  It takes at least three or four iterations, sometimes as many as a dozen.

It’s also a daytime-only project.  I can’t do this after dark.  It’s hard to get blood out of me at night—my mystical bloodsucking attraction seems dead-set against it.  Even if I draw some out with a hypodermic or a spell, the instant it leaves the hypo, it crawls right back into me.  This is not helpful.

In a larger sense, though, I also wonder about the thing Jon called Language, with a capital “L.”  From his description, he believed it to be the fundamental language of the universe.  That is, if the universe was created by some entity, this was the language that it used to describe it.  In computer terms, the code for the universal operating system.

Does that mean I’m deciphering the written form of it here?  I never thought of magical ideograms as being actual words in
the
Language, but… back to that pronunciation thing.  Are the wizards and magicians of Rethven mispronouncing their spoken spells?  Close enough to influence the world, perhaps, but not quite right for altering the fundamental fabric of reality?  Or is it just a subset of shorthand commands, with spells being programs written in a more user-friendly form, rather than in raw code?

Of course, it’s more than just the sounds.  To properly use a word in
the
Language, one has to not only pronounce it correctly, but understand it.  It’s like invoking the name of a specific entity to be summoned.  You can’t merely read it aloud and expect it to work.  You have to understand the nature of the Thing.  So even if you find a book like a dictionary, with symbols and their definitions, you need a frame of reference to put it all into.

How would I go about determining the proper way to pronounce things I already understand?  Fire?  Water?  Space?  Time?  Getting a symbol was easy, almost intuitive.  It’s a visual thing.  But a sound?  A pronunciation?  What do I do for that?  Enchant a harp?  Or a stereo speaker system?  That’s going to be a trifle more complicated than a glass plate and some blood.

I have so
much
to do.  Homeowner, magical researcher, high-energy physics student, and keeping up appearances… not to mention I’m starting to get hungry at night.

I used to think holding down a day job and getting laundry done was difficult.

Tuesday, October 13
th

Sorry for the long delay; I’ve been busy.

For the first week or two, I was studying.  Modern relativity, the Casimir effect, frame reference theories, conjectures on FTL travel, wormhole equations, spin foam, vortex foam, loop quantum cosmology...

I used to be a physics teacher.  Things have changed.

I think I’m following most of it.  My only advantage is I have a much better empirical understanding of the subject matter.  I ate the souls of people who developed the spells for folding space in weird ways.  I built an interdimensional-capable gateway. I understand it, sort of, from a magical perspective.  The science-based perspective involves way more math, most of which has expanded beyond anything
I
ever studied in school.

Arcane writing and mathematics are starting to look suspiciously similar to me.  Is that weird?  Or is that inevitable?  Am I starting to get a grip on the math because of my magical background—like studying Latin and Spanish together—or am I closing in on the point where science makes sense of magic, and magic is another science?

I hope I get the hang of this without making my head explode.  I haven’t studied this hard since the final exam in Doctor Kramer’s class on quantum thermodynamics.  My head hurt then, too.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided the headache was from studying too hard.  I was beating my head against the math and the math was winning.  I needed to take a break.  Living at home and doing nothing but talking to my computer and reading isn’t the right way to go about this.  But I can’t sign up for a postgraduate course; my personal history doesn’t have the academic credentials for it.  I have to hammer this out on my own… but keeping my nose to the grindstone is only going to flatten my face.

I went into OKC for a weekend.

That was interesting.  I called a cab and Google Cabs sent me a car.

When I left my own world, years ago, Google was developing a self-driving car.  Now, in
this
world, Google Cabs is a major transportation industry.  Anywhere within fifty miles of an electric road—a road with a power strip—they’ll send an all-electric, self-driving vehicle to pick you up and take you where you want to go.  It’ll even remember your destinations and your schedule, like, “Mom’s house,” or “Take me home,” or “Time to go to school,” or “Date night with my girlfriend.” They’ll keep track of your friends, remind you of appointments, show up early when you’re likely to have luggage, and, for all I know, take your pet to the vet.  While you’re on your way, they’ll suggest places to stop for food, shopping, or entertainment.  Or you can sit back and watch a movie while the car drives you across the country.  You can also have it talk to you in different celebrity voices.

And every single cab, everywhere, will remember your preferences.  They have a master file somewhere in the cybernet and the traffic control system gives it to any individual cab that you may be using, so you only have to set up any particular preference once.

When I call a Google Cab, the welcome sound when the door pops open is a series of wheezing, grinding sounds—kind of like house keys run along piano wire—followed by a thump.  If you know the sound, you know what I’m talking about.

I love it.  And it’s terrifyingly invasive of privacy.  It’s convenient beyond belief, but I may have to get my own car so Google doesn’t know
everything
about me.

Assuming it doesn’t already.

Anyway, weekends in OKC.  Could I find something to do on the weekends?  Yes.  I could join the fencing club at the university; it wasn’t limited to current students.  I also thought to look for a karate school open on Saturdays.  Maybe I could even find a chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism!  I’m pretty sure OKC is in Calontir, but maybe it’s Ansteorra.  Way back when, I was in Æthelmearc, up in the northeast, so I was never too clear on the other kingdoms’ borders.

I haven’t found any SCA people yet, but I’m hopeful.  I did join the fencing club, and I did find a Krav Maga school open on weekends.  Now I have something vaguely recreational to do that relates not at all to driving myself up a wall with eye-crossing, brain-baking study.

You know, I learn a little bit from every soul I swallow.  Maybe if I
eat
a couple of physicists…

No.  Bad vampire.  Bad,
bad
, vampire!  Go to your coffin and don’t come out until you can behave!

Anyway, I have excuses to go into the city, now.  I can’t exactly admit I go to town for dinner.  Well, not for the dinner
I
eat.

Most of the time, I pick a hospital and walk through it.  There’s always someone ready—no, ready isn’t sufficient.  There’s always someone desperate to die.  Usually, there’s a cancer patient in the oncology wing or someone in ICU.  Once I walked in about the same time an ambulance pulled up.  I sat down in the ER waiting room and had a quiet conversation with the ghost of the guy they brought in.  But I never lay a finger—or a fang—on any of them.  I help their spirits get loose from their failing flesh and move them along.

They’re going anyway.  At least they don’t go alone.

That’s not entirely altruistic of me, but it’s what I do.  Birds eat worms, wolves eat deer, and I eat people.  I deliberately pick people who want to die, too.  I doubt anyone is likely to be understanding and thankful for that, though.

Does this make me a tragic figure?  I don’t feel tragic.  Much of my life seems more like comedy, albeit at my expense.  Maybe that
is
tragedy.  Maybe I should have spent more time studying theater instead of theories.

Still, I don’t get nearly enough credit for not being a bloodthirsty monster.  C’est la vie.  Or should that be “C’est la mort”?

For my more physical dinner, I go looking for trouble.  I have to suppress the effect of the amulet while I “take a shortcut” walking through an alley, but it’s built to do that when the wearer wants.  So far, I’ve been shot twice and knifed once by people volunteering to be food.

Much to my chagrin, I’ve also had it proved to me that I need more hand-to-hand lessons.  One guy did something fast and effective involving his feet, my legs, and both arms.  I wound up face-down on damp pavement with a distinct pain in my shoulders and elbows.

At
night
.

I was too surprised at the suddenness of it all to do anything about it.  Of course, once I realized the unarmed guy was actually a threat, I unbent my arms.  He applied more pressure, but they unbent anyway.  The joints may be shaped like a human’s, but they’re not made of human flesh and bone.  They don’t tear like human ligaments and cartilage.  The bones don’t break under any force a human can exert.  My arms moved as inexorably as hydraulic pistons and, since he was sitting on my back, I grabbed at what I could reach.  I wrapped my hand around his femur.

If I’d meant “thigh,” I would have said “thigh.”  Sharp fingernails and inhuman strength, remember?  Besides, the femoral artery carries an astonishing amount of blood.  He lost consciousness quickly and soon became a whiter shade of pale in the scattered streetlight.

I seriously considered going to my Krav Maga class every day, rather than on weekends.

On another occasion, there was also an electric zapper thing I did not like at all.  I discovered my muscles will contract and vibrate under high voltage.  On the other hand, when the current quits, I’m fine.  Poke me with the high-voltage baton and I go rigid and vibrate.  Turn it off and I look at you with an unkindly expression.

It doesn’t hurt, exactly, although it burns a little on contact.  The big thing is how it keeps me from making voluntary movements while the current is on. This is one disadvantage to a superconductive nervous system.

To be fair, I didn’t do more than injure the guy with the electric doodad.  He brought a non-lethal weapon to a robbery, which meant he had no intention of killing me.  He even put some thought and effort into that, deliberately choosing something non-lethal.  I returned the favor because it’s the sort of behavior—for a mugger—I think should be encouraged.  His bones will knit.  I was careful.

No fang marks on any of the rest, either, but plenty of mundane wounds.  Blood still crawls over to me and soaks into my skin, so once they’re suitably perforated, dinner comes to me.  I’ve been trying to leave wounds that are obvious bleeders—wrists, femoral artery, throats, that sort of thing.  Simplicity itself for me.  If I’m not concentrating on seeing the skin, the surging network of the blood is one of the layers of things I see inside the vague, fleshy outline.  So, when someone finds the bodies, the severe blood loss isn’t too surprising.  Sometimes this takes fancy footwork, though.  There needs to be
some
blood left at the scene!  That means I have to hurry away down whatever direction it drains so the blood trying to follow me seems to lie naturally.  That’s not always convenient.

I have to take more care to pick the ground where I get mugged.  It’s tricky.  If there wasn’t a depression going on, it would be harder.  Lucky for me the crime rate is at an all-time high.

The blood reminded me, though, of the spells I’ve been working on.  I’ve made good progress on my fundamental alphabet, so there’s that.  I also recalled I can kill things to use their living force in magical workings.  By releasing their life energies inside the revised magical circle in the basement, the magical environment inside it gets observably more powerful.

Yes, I sacrifice squirrels, raccoons, possums, and other small animals in my basement.  I’m that guy.  No cats, though.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a cat, actually.  No, wait, I can; there was the kid and his cat, when I tied its spirit into a more stable matrix so it could stick with him after it died.  It was ungrateful.  Before that, though… I haven’t seen any cats, aside from big ones that don’t seem to like me. Are they avoiding me?  Or have I failed to notice them?

I’ve also seen how my energy-conversion spell is a complete mess.  I’ll have to redesign it completely.  It’s not utterly useless, but it’s such a poor converter of electromagnetic energy into magical potential I don’t see any reason to bother with casting another one in the form it’s in now.  It’s too much work to build for too small a return.  I think I’ve worked out enough of the local magical alphabet, though, so creating a spell tuned for this world should go much better.

Let me see… in other news, I’ve had more visitors on my porch.  I’ve given back all the drones, or fliers.  Most of them are from streets to either side of Valley View.  The owners of those drones seem to be less interested in me.  I think it’s because how far they have to walk to recover their toys; the neighborhoods are fairly spread out.  The kids who live on my street don’t have to walk so far, so they keep flying the things over me.

At least I’m getting practice in using my funky mind powers during the day.  I’ve never used my mental movement much, especially after Sasha started me down the magical studies road.  Most of my work has been developing magical skills, not my built-in abilities.

Things are different, here.  It’s easier to be a supernatural creature than a wizard.

Edgar is one of the repeat offenders.  I’m not really offended; I think it’s just something for him to do.  The other three repeat offenders are friends of his:  Patricia, Luke, and Gary.  Edgar is Susan’s son and, I think, the reason Susan married Larry.  Luke is the one who needed the lessons in etiquette; I haven’t met his parents.  Patricia is the brightest of the bunch, and the best pilot.  She’s also suspicious.  She suspects something is knocking down the fliers.  Gary is the one with the large, loud father—Mark Spotznitz (Another name I’m probably misspelling).

I’ve noticed Gary tends to wear long pants and sweatshirts even when the others are not.  He also has an occasional bruise on his face.  Apparently, he’s clumsy and runs into doors on a regular basis.  Or so he says.

Yes, my first impulse is to go have a midnight discussion with his father, preferably while holding him off the edge of some high place.  I haven’t.  It’s tempting, but I haven’t.

I kind of like Gary.  He’s a bright kid and, like Patty, Luke, and Edgar, doesn’t seem to be too addicted to staring at a screen.  I’m worried about interfering in his personal and/or family life.  A scared bully sometimes takes out his fear on his victims.  Moreover, Gary might not appreciate someone kicking around his dad; he’s a young boy and it’s his
dad
.  You don’t do that.

I’m not sure exactly how to help, or even if I can.  I’d have a quiet, tell-me-to-buzz-off-if-you-want talk with his mother, if his mother was around.  She’s either dead or missing; I haven’t found out which.  So far, the best I can do is make sure Gary has someplace where he can go if he needs to hide.

I’m not using the barn for anything illegal or suspicious—yet—so I put a mini-fridge out there.  I keep it stocked with things appropriate to a hungry, growing boy.  I haven’t told Gary anything, but I also didn’t knock down his flier while hovered over me during the setup.  We’ll see how that goes.  I feel confident he’ll figure it out.

For my own benefit, I’ve posted signs—Keep Out, No Trespassing, and so on.  That’s so my butt is covered, legally speaking.  But I notice things, like the way barn doors mysterious open or close themselves.  Work stools have walked around.  Strange, corrugated footprints on the wooden floor.  Fudge-pops have mysteriously disappeared from the freezer.  I’ve even detected wet streaks on the barn walls, inside and out—possibly from those pump-up, air-pressure water guns.