Technically Magic

Chapter Two: Cabbages

One heartbeat; politically important family. Two beats; a missing child. Three beats;
“I’m pretty sure runaways and kidnappings are a job for the regular constabulary.” I had a long day ahead of hiding in my cupboard pretending to do paperwork I didn’t understand. Why come looking for a wizard?
“He didn’t run away... he vanished. I saw it, he was swallowed by shadows.” Mrs Tajir shuddered at the thought, not just the kind of shudder which comes with a bad memory, but like she was just touched by something cold. Bleak.

I sneezed. I always sneeze when I’m nervous. My candle went out. I needed to relight it, the process was almost automatic at this point. I pricked my right index finger on the needle I keep under my desk. Component. I reached out towards Rage, I needed to make myself angry to reach it, a memory. The time I stubbed my toe in the market? Not enough. The time Cob drank my beer. Yes. That was my beer, I had blackberries added to it, they were hard to ripen. It was the wrong season, he drank my beer! I pulled from Rage. Energy. I flicked the blood onto the wick and focused my will on fire. Goal.  The candle re-lit. Easy magic, but not without risk. I clenched my fist and let the sweetness of pain ebb away. Rage is one of the basic realms of Magic The flickering light returned and her face briefly still held the shocked expression that people often made when confronted with magic for the first time. Their eyes widen and lips pull tight. Colour often drains from their face and returns when they realise they're staring.  The expression quickly fell back to concern; the sincere concern of a mother worried about her child.
“Sorry.”  An awkward silence fell between us, nothing but the rustling feathers above to keep our ears company. I waited. Should I break the silence? What should I say? Will she at least say ‘bless you’? Is it rude to sneeze in front of a Vaciri? Why aren’t I saying anything helpful? Should she be explaining more? How long will she stay silent for? Maybe it’s rude to use Rage Magic in front of her for some reason-
"Will you help me or not Mr Blaise?" Mrs Dima Tajir broke the silence, at last, knocking my line of thought out my left ear and into my water, spilling it over, or perhaps it was the sudden movement.
"Of course I'll help you." I surprised myself, standing up to my full but not quite impressive height of just over 170cm. "It's what I'm here for, as acting head of the M.I.D. I am obligated to help all citizens of the allied lands residing in Lysa with any crimes of a magical persuasion that the regular city guard is ill-equipped to deal with," I repeated verbatim from the job description I was recently coerced into memorising. A small pit of dread formed in my stomach as I applied a mask of confidence over a mask of cheeriness.
“I know, that’s why I’m here. You didn’t need to explain that to me.”
“Right, well. Let us begin.” With a flourish I produced some paper and a quill, and sat back down, my dramatic rising ignored. I wrote a heading: Alwynn Blaise and the Mysterious Missing Magnate’s Minor. I've always had a thing for alliteration, and pointless dramatic additions, both always created a minor boost for me.

The Ambassador's wife told me a lot about her son: Durai, his favourite foods: boiled cabbage, what colours he disliked: orange, and a lot of other unhelpful information, mixed in with small things I actually wanted to know. I made notes of things that I felt were important. The boy was 13 – likely just starting puberty, which is when magical leanings would begin to present itself. And a magiphysical realm would begin to show favour. He'd been a lot angrier as of late, yelling at the servants over minor inconveniences; like over-boiled cabbage. This could be the effects of Rage Magic influencing his mind, or it was puberty. When an acolyte first begins to manifest their connection to the peripheral planes of magic  they are at their most vulnerable to the adverse effects that comes with their potent and volatile abilities. That's one argument, the other is that people who have strong emotions, or whose brains are imbalanced one way or another forge the connections with the realms.

She also gave me a far too detailed description of Durai: I knew he had his mother's hair and his father's blue eyes, I knew he had a pockmark under his left eye from picking at his first load of spots, I learned that he favoured his right leg and right hand and she even gave me a demonstration of his laugh. I decided to press her for the details of the ‘vanishing incident'. The day previously, she,her son, and miscellaneous guards had gone for lunch at a popular restaurant in the Hill District and had then intended to go to the city’s library for private tutelage. It was en-route to his lessons that Durai had chased after what appeared to be a butterfly listlessly travelling in the breeze. His mother struggled to keep up and when she turned a corner, she felt a damp chill in the air and saw her son in the shade of a nearby building, be taken by shadowy hands and dragged into darkness.

I doodled shadow hands grasping at cabbages absentmindedly on the paper to try and bring some levity to the quite awful situation, and because I found it hard to focus on much. A boy had been kidnapped, by a magical being of some kind. Worse,  there were rumours of other children going missing throughout the city. The regular guard had been going spare looking for the kidnappers. If Magic was involved, that explained why they weren't getting much headway. Mrs. Tajir showed me on the city map where they had eaten, where they were headed, and crucially the spot where Durai had disappeared. I marked each location with a circle. Not far from The Dancing Kraken - my third favourite pub.
“I’ll do some digging, compare with other cases. I’ll check back in at your estate tomorrow, late afternoon. Please tell your guards I’m coming. I don’t want to vault a gate, get lost in your hallways, and wind up in the bath house only to be thrown out of a first-floor window as a peeping tom.”

She raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow quizzically. "That's an oddly specific example, Mr Blaise"
“It was completely hypothetical.” I lied. “You came to the right place. You’re in excellent hands.” I was getting rather good at appearing confident. As she left I contemplated what I’d agreed to. Philippa landed on my desk and I examined her stitches. She was perfectly healthy for an illegally revitalised bird brought to un-life by bleak magic. She opened her beak as if to coo softly
“Good hands? You’re wetting bleaked Alwynn”
"Thanks, grandma."

I made a plan to make a plan - at the pub.

From J. Monroe’s ‘A Beginner’s Guide to the Unknown’:
A magician must concern themselves not only with the physical reality that presents itself to all living things, but also the ‘magiphsysical’ (term coined by myself) realities that exist just beyond the cognitive realm. These alternative planes of existence are intrinsically linked with the state of mind of sentient beings. Our emotions and imaginations fuel them, and in turn, they subtly influence the ‘real' world. Magic is the layman's term for the manipulation of forces and energy from the emotional realms in the physical realm and bringing them into our world through invoking the state of mind for each realm, and providing a pathway for the energy through a component, and a shape, form, or action for the magic to take.
The three most invoked realms are Bleak, Euphoria, and Rage. There are more of course.
Invoking a realm without its due respect, or abusing its power can have a permanent effect on the magician's mind and personality. Those particularly linked with a realm will often find their hair grows to match the associated colours of the realm
_
3.5th Edition note from the editor: Monroe’s ideas on Magic have been widely discredited in recent years: they were deemed overly complicated, he was dismissed later on partly because of his pompous nature, and wild speculation of a plane of existence called Orgasma that can only be reached through heightened sexual prowess. Monroe died 15 years after the publication of his most famous book from an untreated Sexually Transmitted Infection.