//------------------------------// // Chapter 10: Replication // Story: The Exchange Program // by Sozmioi //------------------------------// Demon? That put us on our heels for a moment. "What sort?", asked Lyra "We don't use the category 'demon' much, but it covers everything from scary but harmless shadows to… things that Celestia would prefer to avoid." Gwyneth kept her head buried in Shankar's chest. He said, "She just shrugged." After another moment she gathered herself together and pulled her head away from him. Softly at first, then gathering strength back towards a normal level, "I don't know what else it could have been. I didn't summon it. I had doubted that they even existed - everything else I'd seen of magic was… passive. Not alive in itself, even if it was made of life. But then that dreadful feeling showed up, and I abruptly decided that this was all very silly and I was wasting my time trying to do something when this was just a religion and you shouldn't expect it to work. I put all the books I'd collected, notes I'd made, and the materials in a box, and didn't take them out until Rhiannon expressed an intellectual curiosity in them, and then only because I thought of them as… historical artifacts, I guess. A few times in between, I've seen things that fit in so strongly with magic that I was convinced it was real, and bump, suddenly decided it wasn't. I think it happened twice this morning. Maybe three times. Enough times in a row that I noticed something was up and set about testing it, just so I could prove to myself it wasn't and could just stop thinking about it. Only, you know, it worked, instead of not working." I guessed, "So you sent me a dream?" She nodded. "I drew a major arcanum from the tarot without looking at it, took one of your hairs that I'd gathered…" Urgently - "You have some of Celestia's hair?" Slightly embarrassed, she replied, "Well, yes." "Where? Is it safe?" "It is in a safe, so yes." "I don't mean 'safe from being stolen' - it's literally made of magic and isn't stable. Celestia said that what I had on my head could have wrecked NYC." Gwyneth blinked. "The safe is still inscribed with pentagrams on the inside and hexes on the outside - I didn't get rid of them when I stopped believing it would do anything - so it should be reasonably well contained, on the one hand, and insulated from things that could set it off, on the other. Far safer than it was on your head. What happened to all of it, by the way?" I turned to the others and added, "Yeah, what DID happen there?" (she also gestured for me to turn off the space heater, and I gratefully complied) Jack said, "Sunset pulled the magic out of it. Toward the end she thought she'd gotten almost all of it and it was really slowing down, so she tried to get the rest in one go, but the new way made it get hot, so she got out and used a little magic to make herself fireproof, including the hair and your clothes… but she only covered fire. She didn't expect your shirt to melt. When that happened she lost concentration and the parts of the hair she'd drained went up in flames. Once we'd put her out, she repaired the shirt by magic. Had to put a lot more effort into it than she expected, but it worked." Huh. "How melted was the shirt?" I felt the back of my neck. Oh man, my hair was short. "Your modesty was preserved." Shankar added, "Anyway, she decided to soak the rest of the energy up more gradually with a sort of sponge she'll periodically empty." Lyra hummed. "Maybe it slowed down because she didn't have all of it right there." Silence fell for a moment. I grimaced. "Well, I guess we'll have to make like Inu Yasha and gather…" my comment was interrupted by Shankar laughing like crazy at the deadpan delivery. Gwyneth exclaimed in pain from that erupting next to her ear, and stood up from his lap – carefully staying in the circle. Shankar took the opportunity to get up and step gingerly out of the circle, then hesitated. "Sorry. Ah… was it safe for me to leave?" Gwyneth nodded. "Actually, I have no idea why this would keep the trap from going off. If anything, it ought to be making it go off harder. And it's not even a perfect pentagram." I crouched down and ran my hand past the section I repaired, checking. She clarified, "Even if you patched it perfectly, the mere fact that it was repaired is a kind of damage. Anyway, I performed a ritual that was supposed to - and, it appears, actually did - impose a vision of that card into all of your dreams, until you acknowledged it. And that card was The Devil. And when I checked back, the hair I used had burned up, as it ought to when you had acknowledged. So I figured I could easily disprove magic and get this stupid thing over with just by checking that you hadn't actually been asleep during that four hour interval in the middle of the day. So I visited you. I was about to leave, figuring that if you weren't home you hadn't slept. But instead, you arrived and confirmed the prediction in detail." I had finished my examination of the repair, so I pulled my hand back and put it on the floor further away from the diagram so I could push up to standing again… and in doing so, noticed that the part of the floor I had just moved my hand to was much warmer than it had been right next to the circle. "The diagram seems cool. Maybe it's sucking the cold out?" Gwyneth frowned, knelt, and felt around near the edges. "Seems normal here." Shankar also checked around the perimeter, touching just outside the circle. "Normal here too." Gwyneth continued, "As your dream suggested, this diagram is used to contain, not draw out or repel something. So it can't really be sucking out the cold." I found the cool spot again, and found that it was still there. Wasn't my imagination. Shankar made it around to just outside the other spot I'd patched, and reported, "Cold here. A little." We looked to Lyra. She shrugged. "My class on diagrams was based around a different sort of design, and was more practical than theoretical, so I don't know. I do understand the basic idea behind this simple one, but the rules are tricky and have lots of exceptions, even in simple cases like this, so… I don't know." Gwyneth's jaw slacked, then she recovered. "So wait. You understand this one at least a little, so magic is the same for you as for us, and you have taken classes on diagrams more complicated than pentagrams and hexes?" Lyra nodded. "How we do magic is different, but it seems like mostly it's just a matter of different tools. Having a horn is so much faster and easier than using anything else, for instance. But some magic isn't from unicorns, or not entirely, so it's useful for that. And sometimes it helps keep a spell stable for a long time. But once you get past that, it's the same basic system." "Teach me!" Shankar pointed out, "Electricity isn't magic to us, but it is to you. We have mathematical laws for it and everything. So it can't be exactly the same." Lyra shrugged. "We have mathematical laws for magic. Usually impractical to work out, so you normally do it by feel. But getting the real solution is important for diagram stuff, and spell design. And if you're going to improvise with entirely new kinds of magic like Sunset Shimmer did, you can't get a full solution, but knowing how the math works really helps. So it's not like understanding what's going on doesn't help with horn work at all." He sat down on Rhiannon's bed, hard. "Wow. All right, sign me up too." I coughed. "So, project 'hair retrieval'. Can I get to it?" Gwyneth stood up again. "Let me see if I can get out and not freeze. Could have broken it." Before waiting for objections, she stepped out of the circle. We froze, not sure quite what to do - that had been precipitous. Over the next ten seconds, she said, "Normal… a little cooler… getting cold." She stepped back in. "Still cold but not colder… warmer… normal. Well, that was informative. All right. I…" "That was risky!" Shankar countered. Gwyneth frowned. "A bit, I guess. Anyway, now we know that I'm pretty well stuck here." She frowned. "Actually, you're right. That was really risky. It didn't occur to me at the time. I'm usually much more careful about these things. Anyway! If magic is real, and also if I'm stuck here, then we need to get some things from my place." She gave me her keychain, her address, the combination to her safe, and the locations and descriptions of certain notebooks. "My neighbors recognize Rhiannon, so it won't seem odd for her to visit and grab some things. Hurry back so we can talk about how this all works." Lyra looked to Shankar. "Or we could swap again so he can get your stuff, and I can tell you what I know in the mean time." Gwyneth took a few deep breaths. "What?" So they explained the deal with the new amulet to her, with re-emphasis that Lyra and Shankar's swapping regenerated it when she objected they shouldn't waste it. Once they were swapped again, Shankar rummaged through Rhiannon's drawers for a pair of jeans and T-shirt, saying, "I think I've had enough of dresses for a while. [This'll] help me feel a little more familiar and manly." - Lyra offered, "If it bothers you we can switch back." - He refused, "This is important and may be time-sensitive. I'll be fine." He pulled the jeans up, then pulled the dress off and shirt on, then reclaimed his car keys and cell phone. As we headed downstairs, I asked, "How are you holding up?" "It was one thing when everyone was nice like Lyra, but now we've got something that could have killed someone, and was trying to do mind control. And if they can just make people not believe, then we could lose all of this whenever. Before I was amused-excited-scared. Now, it's not so amusing, and the excitement is wearing off." Once we were in his car, he added, "What about you?" "Same. I was hoping to just get home and collapse a little after all that walking, and metaphorically collapse after the excitement, but it looks like we're in for much worse if we're going to save Gwyneth." Even so, we took a minute to collapse a little - rather than start the car, he put his hand across to mine, and I took it. I closed my eyes. "Is there a particular reason you haven't kissed me yet?" "At the end of the first date you shrank back. I was giving you some time." Did I? "I'm not sure that was intentional. Could have been a bug in my face or something. But yeah, first date… I wasn't feeling it so much then. Second would have been good. After yesterday and today, I've been too distracted to think about it. You've been awesome though, so as soon as you aren't wearing my roommate's body, I expect I'll be very interested. So, how about we get this fetch quest done with?" I opened my eyes and looked at him for that last sentence; he smirked and started the car. We reached her home without incident, entered easily, not even seeing any neighbors. The safe was in the second-floor office, where she'd said it would be. The combination worked. Aside from a number of documents like you'd expect to find in a safe, there was a sealed glass jar with hair in it. I grabbed it, made sure there weren't any others, and re-closed the safe. Then we went looking for the notebooks. A minute later, my cell phone went off. "Hi, Jack." "Rachel! She left!" "What?" "Well, she had me leave the room so she could make the circle work better by getting naked and lying down. She did, and Lyra talked a little, but then she got up and got dressed and said this was all utterly ridiculous, there was no way that she could be freezing cold, magic doesn't do that. She got out of the circle, and didn't freeze. Not even a little." I objected, "But we have her keys. She can't drive home. Where is she going?" "Walking home, or maybe even randomly. She seemed disgusted, distracted, confused. I'm keeping her in line of sight… looks like she's making a call." At that, Rhiannon's cell phone went off, and Shankar answered. "Hello. uh-huh. Of course you can. I see. How about we meet at your car? We'll be right over." He hung up. To Jack, I said, "She should be heading back to her car." "Got it. I'll go back in the apartment. She seems a bit more together, and I don't really feel like being around her spelled-up obnoxiousness any longer." "Stay on the line?" But it was too late - he'd closed the call. Shankar had found at least some of the notebooks, and we hurried back. We found her leaning against her car, tapping a foot. Even as we got out, she approached us. "Rhiannon, this has gone quite far enough. I don't know what you slipped me, but it's illegal to drug people. Get that stuff back to me, now. I ought to burn it, with all the trouble it's caused." Shankar sighed. "You can have everything." He went to the back of the car and grabbed the notebooks, and muttered, "Return to the status quo pro ante isn't so bad, I guess. At least she isn't dying of cold." I had to agree. No teacher, but no threat to life either. Without thinking, I moved to hand her the jar of hair… and it was quite visibly smaller than it had been, glowing red, and twisting. She stared. "That's funny. How did you set it on fire like that without breaking the seal? And it is twisting around quite a lot. What did you make that extension out of anyway?" Can we overpower the trap with evidence? This isn't exactly the strongest evidence ever, though. And then it burned out. She prompted me, "Well?" Recalling her question, I said, "So far as I know, it was not made of regular matter." Her frown deepened. "So far as you know…" Pause. "Maybe I should be…" she shivered, and began walking "… getting the fuck back in that pentagram! Crap! It got me again!" We realized she was heading to the apartment, and I rushed to unlock the door; Shankar brought up the books. Since she had started earlier, she made it into the pentagram considerably less cold than she had the first time, and with no further damage to the diagram. By the time I'd escorted her in, Shankar was back in his own body. We convened around the pentagram. Gwyneth took a deep breath. "Rachel? What time did you open the safe?" I shrugged. "About a minute before you called. Maybe two." "Then I think I know what's going on." Shankar nodded. "I have a guess too." I said, "Beyond the idea that my new magic-sucker sponge thing is sucking away the trap as long as it's on and I'm near you and it hasn't got something fatter to suck on like Celestia's hair?" They nodded. "And the pentagram is slowing the sucking down enough you don't get cold, but not so much that the trap can go off?" They nodded. Shankar said, "Hold a finger in front of your lips and close them nearly all the way and blow really hard. That air is actually colder on your finger than it was in your mouth. I think we're looking at the same thing with magic. Immediately downstream of where it gets past the bottleneck, it gets cold. Whether that's right outside the diagram, like now, or in Gwyneth's body, when she's not in the diagram. When you're not around sucking everything up, then there isn't a pressure drop so it doesn't make a temperature drop." Gwyneth had raised an eyebrow. "That… doesn't fit with what I know of magic, but it would explain certain things I still found mysterious. I wonder if it's also right in its way. Lyra?" Lyra was trying the experiment Shankar had proposed. "That's really weird. I never noticed! Anyway, I have no idea." Gwyneth took a deep breath. "I think I know how to get the trap off, permanently." Yay! But her tone… "But you're going to need help you're worried we might not want to give?" She shook her head. "I need to figure out why I put it on myself in the first place."