Objects in Motion: A Progression Fantasy Adventure, page 21
Greg would show him who he was messing with. Greg would show them all.
THIRTEEN
MIXED RESULTS
Mocker frowned at the divination results, stroking his pointed beard as he contemplated his scrying pool. He’d performed a superb bit of spellwork, if he did say so himself, and that was after the effort he’d put into tracking down enough of Dimetria to do a divination in the first place. Locating the truck she’d robbed, and from there, following the trail to the crowbar she’d used just so he could have an anchor. Then setting up arcane resonators around the area to filter out the faintest traces of her presence from weeks ago. All that for a disappointing result.
She just wasn’t around anymore. Worse, she hadn’t been around before. By his divinations, the person known as Dimetria had existed for about a month in total—and worse still, the endpoint wasn’t something so clean and simple as death. It was more like her existence was being held in abeyance, like when people were subject to time travel or vanished into alternate dimensions.
He sighed, rising and straightening his cape by reflex, muttering a few words unpronounceable by most mortals to activate his private sanctum’s portal. Mocker stepped through to his quarters in Star Central, kept mainly to have a place where he could safely leave and arrive. The powerful protections woven throughout Star Central shielded it from casual meddling, otherwise. Crossing to the intercom by the door of the mostly bare room, he pressed it and waited for the switchboard operator to reply.
“I have a report for the Administrator,” Mocker told her and waited for a moment as he listened to her tapping away at her console.
“He can see you right away,” she said, and he grunted thanks. Striding out into the halls of Star Central, he waited at the elevator, musing on the mundanity of a master of the arcane being subject to the vagaries of technology until the bell dinged and the doors opened. The lift brought him up three floors to the Administrator’s level, where the entire space was given over to organization and recordkeeping.
He turned in the other direction from the clerks and tabulators, stepping up to the Administrator’s office and waiting. He glanced up into the lens of the large camera blister placed over the door, standing with his hands clasped behind his back until a click and a whirr announced the opening of the thick blast doors that shielded the office. As he stepped through the connection to his patron shifted uncomfortably.
Even diminished as the Administrator was, suppressed as his powers were, gods and devils alike remembered the forces Ichabod had wielded almost a century ago. Even if he had emerged from the Nullium Crisis a damaged man, there were still things about him that terrified those that lived on the edges of reality. A good way to remind his patron that Mocker was no tamed dog, despite the agreements that bound them together.
“Mocker,” Ichabod said, eyes still sharp despite the deeply scarred face, voice still strong even if half of him was enclosed by a life support mechanism to keep his body functional and his powers contained. “What do you have for me?”
“Dimetria wasn’t real,” he said bluntly. “I can give you a more elaborate analysis, but all my investigations have shown the same thing. The only tracks I can find, metaphysically speaking, show she only existed for about a month.”
“Real enough to rob a truck,” Ike noted, not arguing. “Something more than an illusion or a costume if you don’t have more.”
“Yes, it is quite odd,” Mocker said, stroking his beard again. “The furrow she leaves on the fabric of reality is sufficient to set her apart from a mere mask, but it is so constrained that she is obviously a creation of some sort. A secondary personality, a homunculus, an artifice of a power awakening—the traces are too faint for me to say for certain.”
Ike heaved a sigh, a sound that was uncomfortable solely for the faint mechanical whine that accompanied it. His long fingers played along the controls of his chair like a pianist, bringing up a projection of the files. They had no actual photographs of Dimetria, merely eyewitness statements—though Mocker could rectify that in part from his scrying. Viewing the past was far easier than viewing the present or the future, and conjuring an apparition to be photographed was a simple matter.
That would be for later, should it ever matter, as the connections were more important. The possible links with the slowly growing and snowballing threat of Mechaniacal’s technology, the clairvoyant or telepath manipulating things from behind the scenes. Even the sudden attacks on Glorybeam, information being dumped onto the press, and souring public opinion.
“I feel like we’re missing something vital,” Ike said, looking at the web of possible and known connections. “Someone is bringing these things together. These odd supers, the Mechaniacal drones, the information. I don’t know if it’s specifically aimed at destabilizing Star City, but I am worried we may be seeing a new supervillain on the scene.”
“Not Blacktime?” Mocker asked, though the uneasy balance between the Five City Alliance and its resident sovereign supervillain hadn’t been pushed in some time.
“Not with the information targeting his own enterprises. I suppose it would be possible he was playing at something obtuse even then, but the Glorybeam angle completely rules out even something that twisty.” Ike sighed. “He’d never.”
“Even if he’s got us by the short and curlies there?” Mocker asked dryly. The one and only clash between Glorybeam and Blacktime, years ago, had leveled several city blocks—to the surprise of both. Even now the place was a magical dead zone, the calamity of the two powers interacting having exhausted something vital from the world. To this day, the pair had refused to fight each other directly—and it was not so secret that they’d bonded over the experience, as people rather than supers.
Personally, Mocker thought it was just Blacktime manipulating Glorybeam. Forcing her hand by threatening devastation should she oppose him—though Mocker had to admit the villain rarely showed up himself. Instead it had become a strange sort of proxy war, with lower-ranking supers on both sides competing against each other. Though one side was trying to maintain civilization, and the other side merely parasitized it.
“He’s got enough to deal with given the press releases,” Ike pointed out. Some of the businesses that had been revealed so far were things that were suspected but not known; others were entirely new. Regardless, the slow proxy war had flared into something hot, as Ike had been given a reason to go after these pieces of Blacktime’s empire.
“You don’t become a supervillain on power alone, Ichabod,” Mocker pointed out.
“I know, Sam.” Ike sighed. “But it just doesn’t seem to fit. The scavenging of lingering tech, the hits on small things rather than any major operation—it feels like someone just starting up, not what an established criminal could leverage.”
Mocker grunted, unable to argue that particular point. Blacktime’s operations generally had more of a point and existed to further his criminal empire. Some of the sub-gangs were less careful, but they were also generally obvious. Crash was hardly a master of subtlety, for example.
“Actually, since you’re here, I have something new I’d like you to look at,” Ike said, tapping at his chair controls. The intercom chimed, and Ike spoke at the air. “Hands, could you send up a sample of Anomalous Material LB-7?”
“Yeah, okay.” The voice at the other end replied, sounding distracted and harried. Mocker was only somewhat familiar with the super in question—tinkering and magic didn’t overlap as much as some people thought.
“I think this might be related,” Ike said as they waited, fingers dancing over the controls to pull up another file. Once again there were no photographs, just text and sketches from Freehand. Mocker glanced it over, but it wasn’t the person that was interesting so much as the conclusion.
“Permanent alteration? Not common.” It wasn’t unheard of, but powers rarely strayed into transmutation—that was more the realm of magic, and even conjuration-type powers generally only summoned temporary material. Assuming it was a power to begin with; the categories tended to blur at the edges.
“And we have no records of this power before it showed up on one of Crash’s henchmen,” Ike said. “Only weeks after the Dimetria incident.”
“Hm,” Mocker said, twirling the point of his beard with a finger as he eyed the projected file. A few moments later, one of Star Central’s many couriers appeared at Ike’s office with a box and handed it to Mocker when Ike tilted his head in the warlock’s direction. Inside was a square of cloth, precisely cut, and Mocker whisked it out with a light application of magic to keep from touching it and possibly influencing it with his aura.
The stuff felt very odd to his esoteric senses, entirely mundane in almost every sense except that it was also not quite subject to the laws enforced by the Cosmic Orrery. Any practitioner would know it had been altered, but there was a lack of the energy that usually accompanied such alterations. As he had thought, it was the closest to what he saw from tinker creations, but it was far deeper. Something had altered the fundaments of its nature, adjusted a small portion of its intrinsic self.
“See if you can find the person who changed it,” Ike said, and Mocker frowned. If it had been a sustained effect, that would have been easy enough, but as it was—well, it was good that he was an expert at all things arcane. Psychometry metas could have gotten an answer right away, but he would have needed to consult some tomes if he hadn’t just been doing the same kind of work for Dimetria.
He flicked his fingers, drawing a rune circle around himself simply to isolate his target from the building’s ambient magical defenses, then chanting under his breath as he gathered power for a deep dive into the cloth scrap’s past. At least such an alteration would be so dramatic that finding the point that it happened would be quite easy. Then it was a not-so-simple matter of extracting the resonance at the very moment the cloth was affected, running the sympathetic connection backward, and finally arranging the magic into the scrying orb he produced from his robes.
Dark runes and fires swirled in the depths of the orb, smoke billowing through it and then finally clearing to reveal a young man with tousled black hair and a scar across his jaw. A gesture pulled the image of the man out of the orb and into the room, and a camera flashed as Ike took a picture for the archives. Mocker studied the subject in question but found nothing particularly noteworthy.
Another set of incantations drew a set of small crystals from beneath his robe, arranging them around his scrying orb as he plumbed the question of the man’s identity. His location. His origin.
“You’re right,” he said, as the results of his divination were half familiar, the floating arcane glyphs and shapes easy enough to parse considering he had just finished analyzing something similar. “Whoever this is has existed for even less time than Dimetria, but the signature is more robust. Unfortunately, he currently is in the same kind of abeyance. Not dead, but quiescent.”
“Well,” Ike said, nodding slowly. “It’s a start. More than we had before.”
Professor Mechaniacal, last survivor of Earth—from his timeline, at least—listened idly to the conversation in Ichabod’s room as he pruned the lunar equivalent of grapes. It had taken quite a few visits for him to have a chance, but he had long ago planted a bug on Ichabod’s chair, and from there, Star Central itself. A tiny device the size of a postage stamp, with gears the size of a mustard seed etched from crumbs of regolith—by itself a mere microphone, but he had never relied solely on his own expertise.
He was no lunarian and couldn’t use lunar magic directly, but repurposing some of the long-distance alarm runes embedded in his theoretical prison had not been too difficult. They thought that depriving him of tools and metal and glass would be enough to keep him contained, and he was content to let them believe it. He had little desire to interfere too much, so long as the world ran properly and didn’t slide toward a doomed timeline.
Besides, it was always a bad idea to meet yourself.
The alternate version of himself was still alive down on the surface and, from the sound of things, was giving Star City—and the Five City Alliance—a bit of a time. Nothing major, but everyone had to start somewhere, and it would be the peak of discourtesy to interfere with this version of himself. He’d tried that once before, and it had not gone well.
A gesture with the small runed disc afforded him by his warden—a magical tool proffered to help him with his hobbies—shifted the vine to a better position so it could catch the starlight. The sun was only just on the horizon, the Earth riding exactly where it always did in the sky. From his vantage he could almost see the great mechanical linkages of the Cosmic Orrery, fixing the spheres of empyrean crystal that surrounded each heavenly body to the sun itself. Only almost, however; they existed on a plane of reality that was hard to truly access. After all, it wouldn’t do to let just anyone touch the fundamental gearing of the world.
Once he was satisfied with the arbor, he left it to grow in peace and returned to the mansion at the center of his jail, strolling casually along paths of packed regolith, flanked by pale purple and blue flowers. Most lunar plants bloomed only for a few days each Earth month, the constant shift of the foliage helping to offset the sameness of the long days and nights, entire weeks of sun and darkness. Overall, he rated the lunar prison to be one of the better ones he’d been in, though he was starting to get a little restless.
“How are the za-berries?” Mikender, one of the guards at the mansion, asked easily as Mechaniacal approached. After a few decades, the lunarian wardens had lost their fear, as Mechaniacal had made no obvious attempts to escape. Of course, some of them had been outright disrespectful, and those hadn’t returned. Mechaniacal had made sure of that.
“Should be ready in another lys or so.” Day and month weren’t things that existed in the lunar lexicon, and he’d been there long enough to be able to use the native terms. He still thought in terrestrial terms, however, since despite the prison’s safeguards he had popped down to Earth on rare occasion when he felt a particularly strong desire for a certain pastry or sandwich that was unavailable on the moon. Such excursions were safe only when the civil war flared up, when nearby fighting drew the guards away long enough that they wouldn’t miss his presence.
“Looking forward to it,” Mikender said, leaning on his runic lance as he peered down at Mechaniacal. “Your last vintage was quite good!”
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Mechaniacal demurred. A few years of tinkering with lunarian plants was just the first pass at true mastery, and it wasn’t like he didn’t have time. The clockwork ticking away inside his body had long ago arrested his age, winding his own personal mainspring to the tension he preferred. Youth, he’d found, was overrated once a few deficiencies of flesh had been accounted for.
“I suppose you have!” Mikender chuckled, though a trifle uncomfortably since Mechaniacal had been there before Mikender had even become a guard. “I, ah, have the coin from selling some of the batch still.”
“Keep it,” Mechaniacal said, waving it off. It had been incredibly easy to create a surreptitious trade between himself and the local town—nothing mechanical, of course—and so get a few sundries here and there. The guards were careful to prevent it from being anything they thought he could use, but of course they didn’t truly understand his capability. They believed he needed processed metal and tempered glass to work his craft, rather than seeing and taking inspiration from the works of the Great Clockmaker all about.
“If you’re sure,” Mikender said, a little doubtfully.
“Get your wife a little something,” Mechaniacal told him. “Your anniversary is coming up, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Mikender admitted, blinking his oversized eyes. “Thank you.”
Mechaniacal chuckled and slapped him on the arm—even as tall as he was, reaching the shoulder of a moonie required some stretching—before heading inside. His footfalls were light on the polished regolith of the floor, luminous runes burning white in the air to augment the fading sunlight. Most of what was illuminated was just rune-etched stone, replacing things like countertops or chairs or sinks with magical conjurations and fields of force.
Earth itself hung framed in the front window, a blue marble swirled in white. From a distance, it was easy to forget how full of conflict the world was and how fragile it all could be. And how one person’s poor choices could utterly ruin it.
Something he wasn’t going to let happen again.
The mercenary house reminded Isaac, strangely, of foster care.
He was allotted a tiny room, but he wasn’t hired as such. Justice for Hire was one of the few mercenary companies that allowed unknowns and walk-in applications but provided far less support for them. No salary or stipend; he had to do work first.
“Nobody will ask about your civilian identity,” Lia said in her strange, breathy voice. The moonie seemed to be the dedicated greeter and one of the few people around in the middle of the day. Everyone else was busy with mercenary work. “But trust can, of course, be more difficult if you have no interactions outside the professional one.”
“Ravdia understands,” Isaac said, from underneath the inertially invested veil. He wasn’t actually looking for advancement, so that was perfectly fine. Not that he wanted to freeload, either; aside from not wanting to be a leech, he needed to make some money with his savings unavailable.
“To get you started, we have standing contracts for sight-patrols in various areas,” Lia continued. It was almost certainly not her real name, but if she wasn’t going to ask about his, he wasn’t going to ask about hers. “They don’t pay very well, but you’re not supposed to fight. Until you’re cleared through our courses, we’re not going to purposely send you into any enforcement situation.”
