Yesterday’s piece is here.
Copyright J.B. Norman
“Heeeeeeeeelp!” Dunstella calls, her voice fading in the distance.
“You’d better have a cooling coil waiting for me when I get back,” Kathryn tells the scrap-monger before bolting out of his store.
A few stalls away, she can see a pair of strange, armoured figures hauling away Amarantha as Dunstella clings desperately to one of them, biting and kicking and scratching to try to help Amarantha.
Sort of…
“Go!” one of the figures says from behind a mirrored faceplate. “Faster!”
Kathryn unslings her Quantum MagBow from over her shoulder. The energised bowstring hums to life as the current runs between the two opposite-polarity power converters at the ends of the bow’s limbs.
The one not being bitten by Dunstella draws his gun and fires off a shot at Kathryn. At the stun of the telltale high frequency, quasi-metallic sound of a stun bolt being fired, Kathryn ducks and the bolt sails highs.
The air a few inches from her head is filled with a familiar burnt, ionised smell. She’s distantly aware that the fact she knows what a stun bolt smells like probably says something about the life she lives…
Kathryn pulls back the string of her MagBow, but decides against it when she realises she’d need to shot and somehow not hit either Amarantha or Dunstella.
She sighs and just starts running faster to catch up with the kidnappers.
Amarantha manages to wriggle away from the hand clamped over her mouth and begins to speak in a language that Kathryn doesn’t understand but that makes the hair on her arms and the back of her neck stand up.
Amarantha’s voice rises higher and higher and starts to echo and reverberate.
Then, there’s a flash like a supernova and a shockwave that rattles the rows of stalls and sends the two armoured kidnappers, along with Dunstella and Kathryn sprawling. Amarantha is left standing in the middle of a circle of broken glass and groaning bodies strewn along the floor.
The air smells burnt and energised in a way that isn’t strangely familiar. Though was is strange that Kathryn feels like her teeth taste Purple and visions of C-Sharp are swimming before her eyes.
Kathryn blinks and slowly gets back to her feet, she sees Amarantha flickering with ghostly, flame-like lights.
As Kathryn and Dunstella limb towards Amarantha, a group of the Ring’s security officers pull up on their hover-scooters.
“Well,” the leader of the security officers says. “What’s all this, then?”
After a brief discussion with the officers, and a quick review of the station’s security recordings, Amarantha is deemed to have been acting in proportional self-defence to an attempted kidnapping and sent off along her way, while the two kidnappers are hauled off straight to the Ring’s detention centre.
“So,” Kathryn muses. “That was impressive.”
“Yes, well,” Amarantha mutters, doing that thing where she wiggles her nose whenever she’s particularly angry. “Now, I may not know how to work a microwave oven—”
Dunstella rolls her eyes. “I keep telling you: you. just. press. the button. It’s literally the easiest thing in the galaxy.”
Amarantha glances down at Dunstella with narrowed eyes before turning back to Kathryn and continuing, “— but I’m not entirely helpless. The Alvaraeans have been studying sorcery for, oh, only the past forty thousand years.”
I’m basically borrowing “sorcery” from Warhammer 40,000 to describe Space Magic — hence why the Alvareans have been doing it for forty thousand years — but it’s not exactly a direct influence.
As I understand it, most of 40k‘s Space Magic is basically psychic powers, and “sorcery” is what it’s called when Chaos is doing it — to the point that in the actual game, Chaos’ Space Magic-capable characters are called “Sorcerers.”
And, as I recall, some Sith in Star Wars are classified as sorcerers. In fact, it’s a character class in The Old Republic.
That basically means sorcery in 40k is inherently evil, whereas I’m really just using it to say “Space Magic” without having to call it “Space Magic” and treating it a lot more like typical Fantasy Magic that happens to be, um, happening in space.
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