Arcana 99: Stage One

Charles Tepper was a small man. Thin, flimsy, frail, minuscule, "gnomish, but without the fashion sense," these words were the most often descriptors applied to Charles by those close enough to know him. Everyone except for Sheri Hoy Parfit. She would describe him in equal parts "genius," "useful," and "quick learner." He lacked the creative mind to turn his intelligence toward breaking the world as Sheri did, but he was able to quickly twist his intellect toward whatever goal someone set him toward. To Charles, this meant he was lesser than Sheri. She could discover how to teleport while he could only be taught how to do it. To Sheri, this meant he was greater. It took her years to find and understand calculations Charles mastered in weeks. Despite this, he couldn't comprehend a word of Sheri's ramblings for the past hour.

The clean room he had seen the night before was gone. The bed's mattress had been moved to the bathroom and the bedframe acted as a table for countless notes, sketches, and instruments. Cups and bowls—no doubt from some nearby restaurant—were strewn about the floor with markings of their volume crudely drawn on their sides. In the far corner was a hotplate with the charred remains of Sheri's pillowcase laid atop it.

When asked, Sheri had said something about a ring, calling it "potentially magic, maybe." Charles asked her how much sleep she had gotten, and Sheri held up three fingers. Charles did not believe they represented hours.

For her part, Sheri did not appear to have missed any sleep. Whenever she was on the cusp of discovery she forbade food and rest. The week she finalized her teleportation device she had eaten four sandwiches and slept fourteen hours. Yet, she still worked and spoke with more fervor and life than Charles. That was until she had completed her teleporter and spent the next thirty-six hours unconscious. Charles was less afraid of the damage her enthusiasm did to her body than he was of her inevitable crash when she solved the puzzle.

"A ring?" Charles stepped over a pile of stained dishes and sat next to Sheri.

"This one," She pointed to a small ring sitting upon the bedframe without looking up from her notes, "There's something about it. I think it can do something, but I don't know what. Nothing's worked so far." Realizing she was talking about magic rings as if they were real, she relayed the previous night's events to Charles.

"What!? Sheri, why didn't you tell us this last night? He killed a man! We need to go!"

A finger silenced him, "Don't you remember the day we got here? Maxwell stepped out of his office, and he looked right at where we teleported. No clues, no evidence, nothing, yet he knew. It'd take us a week to run the calculations for a new destination; we'd leave clues."

"You want us to stay here because you're afraid he can track a teleporter?"

Sheri set down her notes and stood, "No, I am not working because I am afraid. I am working because I need to know how," She threw open the window. The midday Sun shone through, giving Charles a pristine view of Lake Petén Itzá. He saw the smooth water, the paved causeway leading to the shore, and a fresh urban sprawl bordered by the lake and the endless jungle that formed the horizon. Houses, shops, streets, lights, all the hallmarks of a decades-old city were there. One building—almost a palace—stood three stories tall with manicured gardens hanging over the tiered roofs and balconies. Its architecture was not in the style of Central America, or anywhere in the New World. It was unmistakably a villa you would find on the Italian coast, and it stood in the same spot they teleported to two days ago, "I need to know how this could be possible in the world I was taught to know."

Charles was pulled to the window by some desperate part of him hoping the few feet would reveal some trick of the eye or a painting on the shore. Sheri, long past the shock, swiftly returned to her work.

By the time Sheri finished her notes on the impact experiment, Charles had recovered enough to speak, "Have you. . . Have you learned anything?"

"I've learned it doesn't work by wearing it, thinking about it, or ignoring it. Though, I haven't actually ruled out thinking being the trigger. Its just that I don't have the time to think every possible thought. I think it's brass, but it doesn't react to any chemical baths I give it, and I couldn't get any shavings to come off. I did get some sketch work done," she pointed to a pile of drawings depicting the ring. It looked as if the ring had been formed of metal ropes coiled around each other. At the ends was a small, ornate cap with a circular extrusion. The center of each circle was open but much too small for anything larger than a needle to fit. Their ends left a gap, opening the ring just enough to be mistaken for a break. The caps had an intricate hatch pattern, much too small to have been made by any hand.

Charles had never seen anything like it. The details were too minute to be made by anything but a machine, yet the material looked ancient. He pondered a moment on his Summer apprenticing for an archaeologist, but he'd never seen patterns like that. He told Sheri as much, and she nodded before continuing to recollect her experiments, "I don't recognize it either, but I've never bothered much with history. I tried the libraries, but they didn't have anything helpful, in French anyway. Before you arrived, I hired a construction worker to strike it with his sledgehammer. Forty minutes and all he managed was a patch of dead grass and compact dirt. The ring wasn't damaged, it hadn't even sunk into the earth. It was like the hammer passed through it."

"So, it's indestructible, but otherwise just some ancient circle." Charles summarized.

"Yes. I have no clue how to find out what it does, but I already have a few plans for testing its invulnerability. I'll need a gun, some dynamite, and"

"Hey, let's focus on what it can do before we blow it up, yeah?" Sheri put her drawing of a blast chamber down and reluctantly nodded. Charles thought of any way to test the ring, but his mind kept returning to the part of Sheri's story where Maxwell gave her the ring. In the detective stories Charles frequented, the killer always left some kind of clue at the crime scene. Maxwell had to have a way to know the ring was magic, or he knew what it could do already. The only way to learn either was to confront him or perform an investigation, "What about going back to where he gave you the ring? If we could find some clue on how he used the crown or some intonation he made when he handed it to you, we could crack this case."

"Crack this case? This is serious scientific inquiry Charles, not some dime detective. But, with concepts so foreign we call them magic. . . a bit of fantasy couldn't hurt."

Sheri led Charles to the bench where Maxwell had given her the ring the night before. She explained the event in detail as Charles nodded along adding little more than the occasional "I see" and "Mmhm." He understood none of it. Wishes, magic rings, conjuring cities, they were all things he believed to be relegated to the realm of the mind. They simply shouldn't exist in the world of science.

Finding the act of remembering dull, Sheri took to examining the bench and the lamp as she spoke to Charles. Maxwell never stepped into the light, and he made her reach out of it to take the ring. The bulb was an ordinary filament bulb you'd see on any street made in the last half-century. The only way Sheri could think it would influence the ring was the heat it generated. She made a mental note to stick the ring in the freezer as her tale reached the creation of the city.

For his part, Charles took physical notes of Sheri's story. When she was done, he searched the ground for footprints. Finding the faint, dark red outline of a boot; Maxwell's he presumed. He measured it to be thirty centimeters long.

The two turned towards the alley. As they expected, the man's body was gone. Not even a trace of his blood stained the ground. Sheri nearly tripped on the subtle step up into the alley. Charles did. With his eye an inch from the concrete, he noticed it was clean. No stains, no cracks, no caked-on gum. Sheri saw the same when she rounded the corner the man was hiding behind. Where his legs would have been was a small lip down to the rest of the alley.

Sheri stepped off the fresh slab of concrete. At the edge between the two pieces, Sheri could see a thin line where the new one ended and the old, bloody, one began. Her gaze eventually fell upon a thin streak of red. A drop of blood forgotten in the cleanup. She ran her fingers across it, and the ring she wore gave off a feeling. It didn't move or glow or otherwise affect the senses, but as she touched the dry blood it filled her mind with the thought that something was happening and the ring was the cause. She checked the ring, her hands, the blood, and the concrete. None of them had changed.

"Sheri. . ." Charles' trembling voice rose her head. Between the two was a translucent blue figure with a faint glow about it. Charles thought it a ghost; Sheri thought it was the man she saw die.

"What. . . How. . ." The figure looked around, and when they recognized the alley they calmed, "He said it'd kill me."

"It, uhm, it did kill you." Sheri could only force the 'did' out with a cough.

The figure looked at her, "And how do you know? I'm standing before you, aren't I?!" To emphasize his point, the figure spread its arms and looked toward its feet. It had none, "Oh. Strange, I should feel fear or shock. Yet all I feel is curiosity. Tell me, did Maxwell uphold his end of the bargain? Did he make the city?"

Sheri nodded and pointed toward the city on the coast of the lake.

The figure looked through Charles, and when it saw the fulfilled promise it smiled and spoke again, "I was afraid he lied. He told such a grand tale of wishes and magic. How he-"

A window slammed open, followed by a harsh voice. Sheri reflexively looked up, it was Karin Bernays. The head of advertising for the Grenfell-Maxwell Marathon, "Hey!" She shouted down at them, "What are you two yelling about?"

Two? Sheri thought. She glanced to the figure and saw only Charles.

"Nothing!" Charles shouted back. She was only on the second floor and could easily hear a normal conversation, but that didn't stop either of them.

"Really? I thought you said something about Maxwell!"

"That was me, just talking about the race we won and wondering when we'd get our check!" Charles wasn't sure if magic rings were illegal, but he was certain he didn't want anyone else to know about them.

Karin paused and gave a skeptical look to Charles before continuing at a normal volume, "You're the inventor, right? Grenfell said he was interested in studying your teleporter."

Karin muttered something under her breath. Sheri ignored it, "Tell him we'd be glad to, once he meets our proposal."

"I'll be sure to remind him, but could you do me a favor first?" Karin put on a much kinder tone when it came to asking for something. Sheri wished she kept it for every conversation, "You're science people, right? Your job is solving problems?"

Sheri nodded, "In a sense."

"Good. Then I need your help, in a sense to discover why I can't leave this room."