Tommy's story: Seeking the secrets of magic

Sunday, January 13th, 2058

1030 (Seattle)/Tacoma : St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church

I was praying.

Don't gape, it's unbecoming.  I was, honestly, at prayer. Services were going well, and I was enjoying it.

Many of you who read this won't understand, but a church service among faithful, well-meaning people is a wonderful event for awakened people to experience.  Under all that emotional current, you want to reach out and feel the presence of God (big 'G'), but it doesn't seem to work that way.  You have to have real faith it seems, and I have struggled with that. I pray sincerely, but I don't think I yet have what folks would call a strong faith. But I could definitely enjoy the message, and the astral space in the church was a wonderful thing to behold.  I'm pretty certain some people thought I was high, and they may have been right.

Anyway... I was praying.  I was praying for the well being of the people around me.  I was praying for a peaceful day in the metroplex, and I was praying for a call.

I was going through a recitation of prayer when I felt my pocket secretary vibrate very softly.

I finished the prayer and casually strode to the back of the church and out through the doors.

It was cold outside, snowing with stinging little ice pellets falling among the soft flakes.I check around me, saw now one in the flesh or on in the astral, and hit the 'call' button.

"Angel, tell me you found something"

"Tommy, I got the data you were wanting.  You owe me for this one."  Angel sounded tense, which is NEVER good.  "I'm printing this for you and it'll be at your doss in two hours"

"Sub-zero, Angel.  I'll send you the creds in a minute.  Thanks for help chummer." I was hoping to sound upbeat and friendly.  Some part of me was desperate that whatever seemed to be worrying Angel wasn't going to find its way to me.

"Okay Tommy.  Enjoy your Shakespeare." then she hung up on me.

"Shakespeare?"

*******************

I transferred the money to an account Angel had set up.  My money was now lost in a sea of money laundering electrons until it came out clean on Angel's end.  She was careful, precise and {DELETED:  honestly Tommy?!?!?!}.

My car service dropped me a couple of blocks from my doss.  I walked the rest of the way wrapped in an invisibility spell.  I was shivering as I walked to the back, and keyed my way in through my back door.  I was home for maybe ten minutes when I received a text, "Shakespeare". I looked out and saw a small, white, quad-rotor drone lifting off from a package laying in my grass.

Angel had printed the data, sealed it in a plastic bag, and wrapped it in white shipping tape.  It was a pain in the ass to open.  Inside were nearly one hundred pages of text and hermetic diagrams, the work of several forensic magicians and of a recently deceased corp mage who once banished my childhood friend.  I spent the rest of the afternoon reading through the pages and pouring over the diagrams.  The last page in the packet was a sketch, done in pencils with various color patterns layered over it.  I had been almost a decade, but I recognized the crude image as a poor effort to sketch Isabellix.

Seems the corp mages conducted an investigation of the spirit "incident" in the school.  Astral investigation had gleamed much of what had happened and they had formulated a theory as to what Isabellix was.  Now I had their notes, I had the diagrams of the late Dr. Natasha Romain (dead corp mage), and I had an idea.

********************

When a spirit is disrupted you can often retrieve, or rescue, that spirit from the astral plane.  You have to be able to reach the plane in question though.  So hermetic magicians, like me, normally access elemental planes.  So, in theory, it would be possible to attempt to retrieve Isabellix.  It wasn't very likely that I would be able to succeed, but it was at least possible.

The problem I had immediately lay with the type of spirit the corpers had indicated Isabellix was.  They weren't certain, in that each magician seemed to disagree, what type of entity Isabellix had been.  One believed she was a spirit of man, one was very vocal about her being an air spirit, while the the other two were not certain but both agreed the first two were mistaken.   I didn't much care for what Isabellix may have been, I just wanted to find her.  I wanted to save my friend.

My hope lay in the advance metamagical practices utilized to access what are called "the metaplanes".  The metaplanes were 'other' places in the astral.  Places where great mysteries were said to be answered, where power waited to be tapped, and where horrific entities with no name waited to devour the souls of mankind.  Initiate magicians were said to be able to access these metaplanes.  I would need to enhance my knowledge, strengthen my ties to magic, and become an initiate if there was any hope of me every seeing Isabellix again.

I had done as much discreet research on the subject as I could.  There were various publicly recognized magical brotherhoods who purported to help advance understanding of magic through initiation into "higher mysteries".  I needed something more low profile.  There were certain magical writings, (call them tomes, manuals, treatise, or what have you) that were said to provide instruction for those who wished to initiate on their own.  They were also terribly expensive, and some were recognized as class III magical paraphernalia, meaning I would need a license to own them.  That certainly wasn't something I could do.  So I needed a few books on magic, and I needed them without a paper trail.

Buying contraband isn't hard.  You just have to know the right people.  Buying magical contraband is damn hard, because there aren't that many "right people".  Trading in magical goods and tools is very lucrative, even without the mark up for illicit services.  So you don't find too many people who are willing to break the law, and risk their permits, to sell things under the table.  When you find someone who can get those materials, you have to wonder whether its a sting operation, or something else is going on.  I didn't want to take the time, and possibly make a mistake, to run down the materials I needed on the black market.  So I sent a text to SheilaX.

Sheila told me she would look into finding the books I wanted.  She gave me a price.  I nearly choked on my own tongue.  I would be hurting for money after paying that, but I agreed, and she said she would let me know once she had them, then she hung up.

"Tommy, you okay?" Sue asked.  She was coming out from the bathroom, a fluffy white towel wrapped around her.  Steam was coming out the door behind her, and wafting from her bare shoulders.  She looked fresh and clean and I really wanted to see what that towel looked like on the floor.

***************

I think we're done for tonight.  I know this place with the best gyros down in Tacoma, next to the church.  We'll talk about those books and the trouble they caused another day



(Edit:  Re-titled this entry following feedback from readers)