Alex Norton, Paranormal Tech Support v1.0

Chapter 1

Wizards are generally long-lived. Not naturally; means to prolong life through alchemy and enchantments are learned in the first decade or two of magical study. I'm not talking about immortality, just stretching out your lifespan a few times over. It's necessary for really dedicated wizards, since going deep into any established magical subject takes half a century to even begin to break ground on new concepts. In groups like the New World Circle, septuagenarians are basically grad students.

So, naturally, well-established wizards with any significant rank in the Circle start at a century old. The means of prolonging their lives are well-tread and thoroughly understood by them.

After doing tech support for enough of the middle-aged-looking, middle-ages-acting geezers, I've come to the conclusion that they stay alive by sucking the life out of me. Personally.

I stared at the smoldering wreckage that was the back of Isaac Myerscough's computer. That's not a metaphor; it was literally smoldering.

"Please tell me exactly what happened, sir." I tried and mostly succeeded to not grit my teeth through the "sir."

Isaac was a bald, short man who looked to be in his mid-sixties but was at least two or three times that. In the libraries and laboratories of High Rock, he understood the physiology of every remotely supernatural creature that walked the planet on at least two and at most twelve legs. At his home in Red Hook, he struggled to grasp email.

If you've ever played cable jockey to a parent, grandparent, or grey-haired executive, you know exactly the type. Only worse, since at least the technophobes you counseled grew up understanding electricity and combustion engines.

"I'm not sure, Mr. Norton. I came home and pressed the button on the box. It lit up and made that humming noise it's supposed to, but nothing appeared on the window."

I spent a half-second resisting the troubleshooting instinct to ask which window. He was talking about the monitor, not a specific user interface element or any part of an operating system. Literally a box with a window in it.

"Did you hear a beep?"

He shook his head and frowned at the acrid-smelling tower. "No. It simply made the humming noise for a few seconds, then stopped."

"No POST. That narrows it down."

"Post?"

"Technical term, it's the process a computer goes through when it starts up. Like drawing a boundary or visualizing focii before casting a spell." No reason not to explain a term if I could give him some sense of what it meant.

"Ah, of course. Then the beeping means the computer has drawn its circle?" I could see the gears spinning in his head. Figuratively; even simple mechanisms like gears sometimes baffled ancient wizards.

"That's a good way of putting it. Did it catch on fire at that point?" I looked at the back of the box. It was mercifully unplugged, and still warm to the touch. A short? Maybe a power supply fault, sometimes freakishly not triggered by magic unpredictability or eldritch incompetence?

"No. I put on the gloves you gave me, then pulled the cord out of the wall and counted to thirty, like you instructed."

I was impressed. More impressed by his following directions than I was by the bunny-beagle snuffling around my feet. Bennett was a chimera fused, or bred, or spawned, or somethinged by Isaac. Adorable, if unsettling in its implication. Wizards could work some genuine wonders with study and preparation, but outside of their fields they tended to be mind-bogglingly useless. Nine out of ten times a Circle client could know the hundreds of sigils and focus words necessary to turn bricks into tapioca pudding or fill a room with darkness and wind, but would look upon my words with awe when I tell them to turn their device off, unplug it, then plug it back in and turn it on again. I couldn't cast spells, but there was a reason the Circle kept trying to recognize me as a Magus in good standing.