Chapter 4
Chapter 4
The smoke smell continued to get stronger as Davin and Rachele continued through the storage park. It was mostly woody smoke, but underneath there was something else, familiar, but Davin couldn’t quite identify it. It was... bitter... tangy? He didn’t have the words to describe it, just that it was a very chemical smell reminiscent of ammonia.
They turned the corner into a row of storage units and Davin saw it. One of the units, and large portions of the ones surrounding it, were blackened and hollowed. Scorched. The pavement and the walls of the surrounding area had been blackened as well, in a pattern that looked like a perfect circle.
Like a blast radius.
Then he noticed the yellow police tape. "Are y... you aren’t... uh..."
"You have a hard time using your words sometimes don’t you?" She smirked at him over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised. "No we’re not cops."
"We?"
Rachele shook her head and rolled her eyes. "Apparently," she said with mock enthusiasm, "I get to babysit a whole posse of amateurs. And they just won’t shut up."
Davin could hear them now, the voices coming from inside, a cacophony of cross purposes. The sun had gone down behind the storage units, so they stood in shadow and look into the burned out unit. The unit was lit with large portable flood lamps, and inside was a very strange assortment of people.
The first one to stand out was the orc with olive green skin, and an East London accent the Davin recognized as being similar to the character Mickey from Doctor Who. He was wearing a white button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, as he fixed an old English looking car, which also looked like it had been damaged by whatever blast had blackened the rest of the area. It seemed like a lost cause to Davin, but the orc seemed determined.
He was arguing with a gnome in a polo shirt and jeans, of vaguely Middle Eastern descent who was sitting behind ... Some kind of portable computer networking station the likes of which Davin had never seen.
They were both being shouted down buy a cute looking half elf with pink pigtails, wearing a tank top the bore the legend "Ryne City Rollers" and cut off jean shorts. She was covered in equal measure by bruises and tattoos and wore a pair of guns in shoulders holsters under each arm.
He almost missed the tall thin man standing silently in the corner wearing an impeccably fitted black suit. He found it was hard to judge exactly what the man looked like. His face was completely common, placid, and forgettable. It was a little unnerving.
Davin couldn’t tell what it was they were arguing about, but it seemed as though the argument had been happening for a while, and it was getting heated.
"No dude! Even his contemporaries said it wasn’t real, just a fantasy, like the Easter Bunny, or Santa, or a secret ending to Lost where all the crazy island shit is explained," said the gnome, typing away at his keyboard. "Just something to tell the grandkids when you start getting older, like ’Hey kids guess what I saw!?’"
The pink haired girl retorted, "Well of course they did, because it was HID-DEN, just like your tiny little-"
"It’s hard to keep something like that that hidden for quite that long love. People tend to get in everywhere and root things out." The voice came from under the hood of the car. "Someone would have heard of it by now."
"Sure!" she flounced in a satirical bimbo pose. "Even though the Dead Sea Scrolls were found thousands of years after the bible was written, you can’t hide something for THAT long."
"Not out in the open like that, you’d-" the orc was cut off abruptly.
"It’s just a piece of ART-WORK handed down through the generations, and sold to a collector about five years ago or so to pay for some greedy little trust fund brats new camero." The gnome was pointing to his screen, turning it to the others. "Here it is on his Facebook page. ’Bought by Art’ it says."
"Exactly," agreed the Orc who was walking around the car. "It’s just a gimmick. Conspiracy nut-jobs and crackpots from all over the world have examined the damned thing."
"Well then they didn’t know what they were doing!" the girl was smiling, obviously enjoying the debate. "Obviously Raul though it meant something."
"Maybe," said the gnome. "But I have no way of figuring that out. How do you even going about the process of making something like that?"
Rachele stepped into the floodlights at that moment, and Davin followed her closely. "Now that is a good question," she said. "So lets see if our new friend can’t give us the answer."
The all stopped talking and looked at Rachele, then at Davin.
The pink haired girl bounced over and said, "Ooo, Rachele! You’ve brought me a new toy!"
Davin felt his face go very red, and she giggled.
"Who’s this then?" The orc looked him up and down.
Rachele nodded, and said, "Everybody, this is Davin Quickly, TA to professor Merriwether, who just went in vacation to Tahiti." She indicated the pink haired half-elf, "That’s Miranda... " to the Orc,"... Bernard... " then the gnome, "... and Gary. It’s probably best for you if you don’t know their last names right now." She paused and added. "Oh yeah, and Bobby." She gestured vaguely in the direction of the thin man, and Davin realized he was an elf, because his ears had slipped out slightly from his hair.
"It’s Robert actually," he said placidly, "but your attempt to goad me has not gone un-noticed." He gave Davin a small polite smile and nod, then his face melted back into a passive mask, and it was like he was gone again.
’That is so creepy,’ thought Davin.
Gary the Gnome whined, "A Teachers Aid? That won’t be nearly good enough, the complexity of something like this is astounding! Not to mention it was thought up by a crazy person." The others all stopped and glared at him, but he just waved them off. "Oh, you know what I mean. He believed this ...THING... was real! That’s like believing in little green men, or the stupid WOW Bengal Tiger Cave."
Davin looked at Gary. "Oh dude, A or H?"
Gary looked mildly offended. "For the Horde!"
Davin grinned. "Lok’tar Ogar bro. Zul’jin?"
"Illidan. PVP." Gary was grinning back now.
"Sweet, I’ve got a seventy-fi-"
"Well this is all very touching," said Rachele, "But we’ve got to move on now. You two can speak your secret little love language later. Right now we’ve got some work to do."
"Hang on," said Gary. "He might know his WOW lingo, but that doesn’t mean he knows about magic, or at least not on the level we need. Raul was..." he stopped for a moment, and looked away, blinking. He opened his mouth, as if to continue, but stopped, as if he was trying not to cry.
Miranda, who looked close to tears just watching him, recovered first, and said, "So? Why not just test him or something?"
They looked around at each other except Robert who did not look at anyone. Rachele just sighed and rolled her eyes.
Davin nodded too. "That should be fine, I should be able to tell you just about anything you’d like to know."
Miranda gave him a sultry smile, and Davin felt himself blush again.
"Okay," she said. "How about if we start off with an easy one and see how it goes from there. Besides I’ve always wanted to know the answer to this question."
Davin nodded.
She grinned at his acceptance, and sat on a plastic crate near the car. "Okay then. So, what is Magic exactly?"
Davin paused a moment taking that in. Then he chuckled a little and started grinning. "Oh my. Miranda is it? That’s... one hell of a question. I thought you said you wanted to start simple?"