17

Chapter 17: Pendulum 0-2

Pendulum 0.2

+1320:15:33

One of the things about my powers I'd been a bit hesitant to touch was magic. It wasn't just a matter of believing in it or not or anything like that, although those trains of thought had their own thorns, but more a problem of the…stigma attached to capes who thought their powers were magic.

It wasn't that there were that many that did. A few, to be sure, but most, even if they thought that way, never admitted it out loud. That was because they worried about the stigma, too.

The reason why was Myrddin.

There was no question that Myrddin was definitely a powerful cape. He wasn't someone you could laugh off and call silly; if you were a bad guy and you were fighting him, you didn't take him any less seriously than any other hero.

The problem wasn't raw ability, though. Sure, Myrddin was a really powerful cape and a prominent figure in the Chicago Protectorate, and I didn't think anyone doubted that for an instant, but that didn't mean that people didn't laugh at him.

Because when it came to capes who claimed their powers were magic, Myrddin was the loudest and proudest of them, and that was why people thought he was a little…touched in the head was a good phrase for it. Delusional, if I had to put it in one word.

Now, of course, I wasn't an expert on powers and where they came from, so maybe Myrddin was right and powers did come to us via magic of some kind. Functionally, since no one else understood where they came from, the difference was negligible; powers might as well have been magic, for all that people could explain them.

Maybe it was just a product of our time, then. People didn't actually believe in magic, anymore, so anyone claiming their powers were magic or a byproduct of it tended to be laughed at by nearly everyone on PHO.

That was why I'd been a bit leery about touching some of my magic-based heroes, figures like Medea or Circe or Merlin. If I went around using them and claiming everything they did was magic, I'd just be laughed at, too.

As for my thoughts on the whole thing? Honestly, I had no idea what to think. I had mages in my list of heroes, wizards and witches and whatever you wanted to call them. My power called their abilities "magic." Not Shaker or Blaster or whatever. Magic. Maybe I could have just written that off, but…

Yesterday, I'd Installed King Arthur, and everything my power had told me beforehand had been true, even the parts that had gone against my research into Arthurian legends. King Arthur was a sixteen year old girl. Excalibur shot beams of light. King Arthur literally had the powers of the Red Dragon from Merlin's prophecy, instead of just being a metaphor for Britain.

And maybe I could just write that off as being my powers' weird interpretation of the mythology, but…was it? Why would my powers invent a whole story, a whole personality, a whole person, with her own thoughts, feelings, and experiences, who felt so real? Why would it follow so many of the beats of the original mythos, then throw crazy or ridiculous things into the mix, like Merlin doing… well, that to her, and Morgan le Fey taking advantage of it to make Mordred?

In the end, was I just borrowing from mythological figures, or were these real people I was reaching across space and time to mimic and channel? Artoria Pendragon, Mordred, the Lady of the Lake… were these people who had once existed, preserved now in my powers, or was this just some crazy reinterpretation of their legends that my powers were making up on the fly?

And if they were real, did that mean that the other figures, like Medea and Circe, Roland and Charlemagne, or Cúchulainn and Aífe were real, too? Did that mean that their powers were actually magic, and that it wasn't just some… vague approximation my own powers were creating?

It all seemed too fantastical. I wasn't sure I was ready to start believing that magic had once been as real as my right hand, because it just seemed too impossible, too unbelievable. Occam's Razor — what was more likely? That my powers really did borrow from real people who once existed, magic was real but nowhere to be seen in the modern world, and I could do all of it, or that this was just my powers, which were strange and incomprehensible on the best of days, being weird?

So, I wasn't ready to start believing in magic, yet. Maybe one of the reasons I hadn't wanted to touch my more magical heroes was that it would be harder to write it off as just my powers if I actually used them, and that was opening a whole kettle of fish that might mean redefining my understanding of the world and how it worked.

However, I'd already come to the decision that I couldn't afford to ignore parts of my powers just because I was afraid of them or their implications. That didn't just mean Installs, that meant the wizards and mages and spellcasters I'd been ignoring up until now, too.

Following that reasoning, I spent the rest of yesterday afternoon just looking up wizards and witches and other magical heroes, starting with the Greeks, as I had when I first began researching my heroes at all. I found, to my surprise, that there weren't actually that many. Circe and Medea were the first names to pop up, and when it came down to it, mostly the only ones that weren't directly gods or goddesses, like Hecate. There were a few soothsayers, a couple of oracles, a prophet or two, and magical weapons and artifacts all over the place, but when it came down to it, very few mages or magicians or wizards.

That trend continued when I expanded my research to other cultures. Cúchulainn, Aífe, Scáthach, a fairy or two in the Fenian Cycle, Merlin, Nimue, Morgan le Fey, and a few more obscure guys in the Arthurian sagas, Brynhildr in Volsung… A lot of them just went unnamed. There were a bunch of fairy tales that had a wizard or a witch as a bad guy and never bothered to name them beyond "the evil witch" or "the evil wizard."

Eventually, I'd gotten linked to alchemists, which I'd heard once were the predecessors to modern chemists, and from there, I'd found a bunch of guys like Nicolas Flamel and Paracelsus and John Dee. I hadn't yet seen if any of them counted among my "heroes," but I was sure I'd get there once I'd experimented with a few of my "pure magic" guys.

That was how I found myself back in that rundown warehouse the next day. The camera and backpack I'd brought with me the first time more than a month ago had been left behind, because I wasn't planning on recording anything this time. Instead, I'd come exactly as I was.

It still amazed me that no one had picked up on my habit of coming here on the weekends, but maybe that was because this was completely uncontested territory and no one felt like fighting for this scrap heap.

"Alright," I told myself as I stepped back into that clear space I'd been using since the first day. I took a bracing breath and squared my shoulders. "Okay. Here we go."

I would have freely admitted to being nervous. I'd used an Install a grand total of two times, now, and one of those was the Locker. Sure, nothing had gone wrong with King Arthur, but King Arthur was an upright and moral person who lived in the bounds of a moral code of knighthood. Her personality had been…mild, for lack of a better term. Calm. Direct and strong, but not consumed with purpose, grudges, or regrets, the way that hero in the Locker had been, the way some other heroes might be.

Even so, it was a decision I'd already made. This procrastination was just me being scared, being nervous about what might happen. I couldn't, wouldn't, let it stop me from moving forward.

"For real, now."

I stilled. I let out a breath. I reached inside of myself and grasped at my power.

"Set."

The warmth spread through me, and wherever it passed, change was left behind. My primary form, costume included. A stepping stone, it was hard not to realize, to the next stage of my power.

I reached through myself and out into the vastness. Another time, I might have been overwhelmed with a plethora of choices, all of them valid and all of them suited in some way to what I was looking for. However, I already had my choice in mind, and I'd known from the beginning who I would be Installing first, today.

I grasped her and pulled her towards myself, preparing my mind for the invasion to come and my body for the sudden change.

"Install."

We merged.

There were other ways to describe it. I might have said that it was like I was incomplete and she was filling up all of the empty spaces inside of me with something more. I might have said that I was accepting all of her into myself, the good, the bad, and all the little things that were neither one nor the other. Her hates, her fears, her loves, her joys.

When I opened my eyes again, it was already over. There'd been no muss, no fuss, no sudden desire to kill everything in sight. I was still myself, and I could feel her presence in the back of my head. For someone so famous for her wrath, she was actually surprisingly calm and even-tempered.

Perhaps the most jarring thing was suddenly finding myself almost six inches shorter. It was strange to feel like, "This is how tall I'm supposed to be," at the same time as, "I'm way shorter than I'm supposed to be." The difference had been even bigger yesterday with King Arthur, but I hadn't been paying it any mind, so it was more noticeable to me, now.

I looked down and immediately felt jealous. She wasn't exactly a buxom blonde who could make a tidy living at Hooters, but she was noticeably bigger than I was in my normal body.

"Of course she is," I murmured. "The only one smaller than me is a girl who was pretending to be a boy."

I stopped paying attention to that and moved on to other things, like the clothes. They were actually fairly intricate — befitting of a princess, I supposed — and came in varying shades of purple. A lighter robe formed the underlayer, hugging snugly in all of the right places (holy shit, I had hips, now), and overtop of that was a sort of mantle-sleeve-combination thing in a darker purple that covered my arms and shoulders, and the uppermost layer was what I could only describe as a black cloak, trimmed in gold and complete with a hood that was flopping against my back.

I wanted a mirror to check everything in more detail, but there wasn't one available and I wasn't about to go running around to find one. Instead, I had to settle for pulling at a few strands of hair to find they'd turned a pale blue (blue, of all colors) and straightened out, and it was in the middle of that where I discovered the ears: pointed and elfin.

For a moment, I was stunned. Medea had elf ears. Actual, honest-to-God, straight-out-of-Lord-of-the-Rings elf ears. Then, I felt stupid, because duh, Medea of Colchis wasn't human. Not fully, at least. The stuff I'd read online had debated exactly how divine her blood was, but when your grandfather was the Sun God, there was no arguing that your blood was at least somewhat divine. The ears were…strange and unexpected, but not the weirdest thing she could have had.

Like a tail. Or horns. Or wings. Altered appendages were one thing, but extra appendages probably would have been too much to deal with on just my third ever Install.

That was one of the reasons why I was hesitant to touch Medusa, after all. If I used her, would I get the lower body of a snake and vipers for hair? The possibility was kind of creepy, to be honest.

Once I was done with my self-inspection, I turned instead inwards and looked at Medea's knowledge: what could she do?

It turned out, quite a lot. Offense, defense, healing, espionage — Medea had a spell for each of those roles. She could curse you, shield you, obliterate you, reattach your arm, bewitch you and make you her spy, trap you in a pit of darkness, lay down spells like landmines to protect a base; if you named it, she had something she could use to accomplish it.

Which meant that now I did, too.

I looked around at the disheveled warehouse and decided on a target, then took aim at a big chunk of what looked like roofing. I lifted my arm and pointed one finger at it as though it was a pistol or a cannon.

Start off small, I decided. No need to blast the entire warehouse down to the bedrock. Just…something that could give me an idea of how powerful Medea's "magic" really was.

"Ερε Εκάτη."

Something hot and powerful surged and gathered at my fingertip, then a bloom of bright, pink light appeared and shot forth as a ray. Through the glow, I could just barely make out the patterns of circles and lines that traced themselves around, in front, and behind the bloom as though they were the lenses through which the beam was being focused and condensed.

The aftermath was more than I expected. What I thought would happen was more like a small explosion, like the rubble would just be blown apart. What actually happened was something more like how sci-fi movies and popular Aleph games like Halo (for what little I knew of those things; I read more fantasy, myself) tended to treat laser weapons — the beam had bored straight through, carving out a perfectly circular cone that was charred and smoking, and it had continued going, searing its way through everything else, until it hit the far wall. Even from where I was standing, I could see the tiny, blackened hole that had not quite punched all the way through the brick and plaster.

I looked down at my hand; the black glove covering it was untouched. It wasn't even singed.

"Holy shit," I breathed.

That was one of Medea's weaker spells. Still meant for offense, still meant to do serious damage, but the upscaled version of that was firing beams like they were raindrops and reducing everything in the way to rubble. That was the nuclear option, as I'd seen it being called on PHO, or according to the much more crass version, "Fuck everything in that general direction." This version was supposed to be more precise, more contained, and just less devastating, and it had still gone through both my target and almost everything behind it.

I glanced around.

If this was the kind of damage it could do, though, then maybe I shouldn't be practicing with it in what was my "official" training grounds? Practicing my Celtic martial arts here would be a lot harder to pull off if I accidentally drew the attention of everyone in ten square miles by blowing the roof off of this building or turning the wall into melted slag.

I pursed my lips and took mental stock of Medea's other spells. Most of them had plenty of other uses, and not nearly all of them had destructive purposes, but everything that didn't run the risk of bringing this decrepit old heap down on my head had at least one of three problems: it needed a livelier target to test on than rubble (and I wasn't about to start testing those on animals or people), it took a lot of time and preparation that I wasn't ready to invest just yet, or it required an injured person to test it on.

Long term spells took too much time to do in an afternoon, so I'd have to come back to those later, when I could dedicate an entire weekend to them. Spells designed for immobilizing or ambushing the enemy were useless without a moving target, so those were just right out. I…could, maybe, have gone down to the hospital and volunteered, but I was fairly sure if I did that in dark colors and a cowl, the best I could have hoped for was to be summarily be turned away.

No, it didn't look like I really had anything else I could do with Medea, right now.

Nothing else for it, then.

"Release."

I let go of Medea and dropped back into my primary, costumed form. I felt her vanish, her presence and her knowledge, and like with King Arthur the day before, only the faintest of her memories still remained. I could, if I tried, envision the beach where she'd remained in exile, imagine the face of her father, see glimpses and snippets of her learning magic from Hecate, but it was all without meaning or personal stake. It was like…copying the answers to my math homework out of the textbook; the answers were right, the work was done correctly, and everything was flawless, but I didn't understand how the conclusion was reached or how the equation supplied the answer.

I had to think that it followed for her skills and abilities, too.

I lifted my hand and pointed at another piece of rubble.

"Ere Hecate."

But nothing happened. The words were the same, the intent was the same, and I was fairly sure that I was pronouncing them exactly as I remembered pronouncing them just a few minutes ago, but something vital was still missing. Without Medea, I might as well have been speaking in gibberish.

I let out a slow sigh through my nose.

I wasn't disappointed, though. I'd been expecting that it would work that way, and it had been a pretty big longshot in the first place. In fact, I probably would have been more surprised if it had actually worked.

I let my hand drop. My fingertips weren't even warmed.

"Oh well," I murmured.

Nothing to it, though. If it didn't work, it didn't work.

"Okay. So, who was next?"

I'd compiled a list of spellcaster types from my research, and Medea had been first, because…well, maybe I just sympathized with her. She was a tragic character who had been mind-controlled into doing a bunch of terrible things, and at the core of her, even after all of that, she was actually a fairly good person — better, I think, than I would have been in her shoes. Circe, meanwhile, was a bit of a manipulative bitch, and what I knew of Merlin from King Arthur's memories was…strange. That was why second on my list was the magician said to be Merlin's equal, rather than Merlin himself.

I reached into myself and back out into that vastness. I already knew who I wanted again, so she came to me instantly.

"Set. Install."

We merged, just as I had with Medea. All of the empty places were filled.

In an instant, I was three inches shorter. My costume lengthened and flowed into an intricate gown and a long, priestess-like robe overtop of it, all done in varying hues of white and pale blue. Something heavy and metal rested against the skin of my chest, just beneath the collarbone, and something equally metal encircled each of my middle fingers. Beneath the skirt of my gown, I could feel my feet were bare.

I looked down at my arms through a curtain of golden hair to see the big, billowing sleeves of my robe, stitched with flowing, water-like gold designs near the hem. On my head, I felt a snug crown made of twining bits of metal, swirling and flowing together like the waves of a deep lake.

I reached up for my ears again, and found them just as pointed as Medea's had been. My hands trailed down over the gown — silk — over the swell of this hero's bust, over the hips that could have made Aphrodite jealous, and then came back up again so I could inspect the perfection of each nail and each finger.

She was beautiful. I didn't need a mirror to tell. She possessed an unnatural, unearthly radiance that went beyond human. Looking at her, no one could mistake her for a simple, mortal woman. Looking at me with her power, her essence, inside of me, no one could mistake me for one, either.

She was a fairy. Lady of the Lake, Nimue.

It was…incredible, how beautiful I felt like this. Medea had certainly been attractive herself, but with Nimue, it felt like I could melt men's hearts with a smile. Ordinary, bland Taylor Hebert could never have been this charming, this enchanting, this… this…

But I couldn't be Nimue forever. Even if I could have been, it was something I shouldn't do. No matter how much she put a girl like me to shame.

Besides, I'd Installed her for a reason. Gawking at her flawless skin and her perfect body wasn't what I'd called on her for.

I forced myself to focus and reached into her knowledge. What awaited me was a vast trove of spells and magical formula — different than Medea's. Vaster, and yet somehow more limited. Stronger, and yet somehow weaker. More versatile, and yet somehow less capable.

If I had to try and describe it, I would have said that Medea's magic was closer to the source and therefore had a potency that Nimue's lacked, but Nimue's was not necessarily lesser because she was an equal to the man said to be the greatest magician to ever live.

Even that didn't quite capture it, though.

I could see myself using Nimue in certain situations, but for general spellcasting and for most combat, Medea would just be faster and easier.

Now, when it came to Noble Phantasms — I turned my attention in that direction and began inspecting them — Medea was somewhat lackluster, in some areas, although her chariot…

I stopped. Took a moment to make sure I was understanding the information. Took another moment to check again, just to make sure. Then, once I was sure I wasn't "misreading" it, I blinked, nonplussed, and opened and closed my mouth a couple of times.

Finally, when my mouth and my brain had reset their connection, the only thing I could think to say was a very inelegant, "Oh."

That was… Okay.

Yeah. Maybe Nimue was better than I gave her credit for.