Chapter 6
Chapter 6
“I think…” he started, but felt bile rising in his throat. He fought it down quickly, the said, a little hoarse, "I think I need to sit down." Looking around, but seeing no alternative, he ended up sinking to the floor sitting Indian style with his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands in the charred blackened remains of the explosion that he had just witnessed.
That thought made his stomach churn, and the bile rise again, and he was thankful that he hadn’t had dinner yet.
He fell back on his meditation, an old wizarding standby. If you find you can’t concentrate on a spell, fall back on your breathing, and order your thoughts.
He heard them talking around him as, in his head he sorted through his thoughts.
"Poor sod, can’t handle the pressures..."
"You’re not gonna puke are you sweetie...?"
"Hang on, maybe there’s something on WebMD about how to treat shock..."
"Great, our Wizard turns out to have a weak stomach..."
"No. Wait." This last was Robert. Davin was a little surprised to hear this, he’d been unable to get any kind of read on Robert. "I recognize this, Raul had to fall back to it on occasion. He’s processing. Meditating. Filtering the information."
And this was true, though Davin didn’t know how it was that Robert knew it. He was picking away at the events he’d just witnessed in his mind, going back over details and looking for information from his mental archives, trying to make sense of what he had just seen.
It wasn’t a bomb, this hadn’t been a terrorist attack, it had been an assault. or theft, gone wrong. But that didn’t feel right either. The people in that video weren’t thugs, they looked almost military, only without the uniforms. Like maybe... Mercenaries?
But the thing he had the hardest time wrapping his mind around was... Newton’s Battery was real. The Holy Grail of magic had been found, and it was right here in Terre Haute. This opened the door to so many possibilities...
But there had been two of them. Was this... Raul? Was he trying to replicate the original battery? It seemed he had succeeded, until...
But now it all made sense. The formulas started forming in his mind, and he instinctively reached for this smartphone and opened MForm, his formula creation app, and started typing in variables, but they wouldn’t resolve. Maybe that meant it really was impossible.
But he had to stop and think for a moment. He had only a small piece of the puzzle. It allowed him to see where some of the other pieces would go, but he was missing some vital pieces.
He stood up, and found that the rest of them were still talking. Except for Robert none of them seemed to have noticed that he’d gotten up. Robert made the slightest nod, then turned back to the conversation, his expression remaining unreadable.
"...but we still don’t know where to start," Rachele was saying.
"I still think it was that creepoid at the club. The way was harassing that poor girl Pearl..." Miranda held out her left hand and smacked it with her right, as if smacking someone in the face.
"But that makes no sense," said Bernard. "I’ve tangled with quite a few thugs, even driven a few of them around. These wankers were NOT street thugs like the guys at the club. I’m thinking military training"
"And then there’s Celia Fry," said Gary.
Rachele nodded. "The art house dealer. But I’m not sure how she fits into this."
"Well," said Gary showing them his screen. "I just found out she just posted on her Twitter feed about a famous art piece called the Jewel of the Winter Queen, which floats in the air, almost like magic."
"Oh, that’s GOT to be it!" said Miranda bouncing enthusiastically.
"That’s what I said!" Gary was quivering.
Rachele nodded. "That’s a start. We know WHERE it is, now we just have to figure out WHAT it is. And why someone would kill for it. "
"I think I can help with that now," said Davin and they all turned, noticing him for the first time. Miranda and Gary smiled, and Bernard looked at him with an eyebrow raised and a look of grudging respect.
"Are you feeling better?" asked Miranda as if trying to be careful of his delicate sensibilities. Davin sighed and smirked wryly at her.
"Okay." Rachele frowned at him as if eager to get back to work, and get the job done. "So? Tell us."
"So first of all, Newton’s Battery is a Legend-"
"We know that part," said Rachele slightly impatiently. "W-"
"Meaning," Davin interrupted back, "...that most of the information we know about it comes only from those legends. But I’ve been able to extrapolate a bit more since seeing the video you showed me."
He held up his smartphone and looked at it, trying to wrap his head around the idea, even now. Then he closed his eyes as he spoke again, trying to visualize what he was describing.
"According to legend," he went on, "the Battery was a tool for storing vast amounts of energy, but could only be accessed by magic. So the energy could only be used for magical manipulations. But nobody seemed to know how it worked, or how it floated, or why it was so cold. Everyone assumed that the cold and floating were a feature... But I think now in fact they were a side effect."
He struggled for a moment to find his words. "Okay: So imagine a spring. when you push it in you get potential energy. You let it go you release the energy. Well I think this is similar. There’s I’d have to do some research into the exact chemistry, but I think there’s a chemical inside that when the energy is absorbed - which happens constantly - turns solid, basically freezing it to nearly absolute zero. Not only that, I think it bleeds away it’s surplus energy as heat and kinetic energy." He took a deep breath, eyes still closed, and went on. "The kinetic energy of the cube has just enough force to overcome gravity. It’s like when you throw a ball straight up in the air there is the briefest moment when it has just enough energy to stop at its zenith before succumbing to gravity. The Battery is just constantly at that zenith.
He paused to catch his breath before moving on. "Keeping material like that in a state of potential requires keeping at a very low temperature, nearly absolute zero. Under normal circumstances that would cause a layer of ice much thicker than this, and anyone who touched it would probably end up losing fingers, however since it’s constantly drawing heat energy, even when the battery is full, the energy that doesn’t get turned into kinetic energy bleeds off as normal heat, which seems to be just enough to offset the extreme cold." Now he was coming to the point he wasn’t going to like. "But I think your friend’s design was a somewhat less efficient, because if the stories are true, the real one.... if it had gone off instead... Terre Haute would be a hole in the face of Indiana."
He opened his eyes. They were all looking at him again. He wished they wouldn’t. He looked down at his feet uncomfortably.
"Right," said Rachele sarcastically. "Crazy super bomb potential, in the hands of someone with his very own mercenary group. Great. Now we just need to figure out who has it, where they’ve got it, and how we can get it back."
Davin nodded slowly, as they all looked around at each other, unsure how to proceed. "Well as a native of Terre Haute," he said, "some of the things you’ve said so far kind of ring a few bells, but I might know more if I knew more about what was going on here. And while we’re on the subject, like... who ARE you people? If you’re not with the cops, how are you allowed to be here at the scene of a... a... whatever this is? Terrorist attack, or accident or crime? Murder? I mean I can help you, sure. But I think it would help if I had a little... er... Context?"
Rachele sighed deeply. "I’ve told you all you need to know. But if you can tell us-"
"No," said Robert. "I told you. We can trust him."
Rachele glared at him for a moment."Are you willing to bet your life on it?"
Robert regarded Davin for an unsettling moment, then said simply,"Yes."
She looked slightly surprised, but still skeptical. She sighed, shrugged, and said, "Well then, you get to go first."
Robert nodded at her in aknowledgement, then turned to look at Davin. Suddenly his whole demeanor changed, and it was he was looking at a whole different person. "Well start with, you might know me better as Richard G Dean." And suddenly one of the most famous Self-Help gurus the world had known since Tony Robbins, stood in front of him. It was so obvious that Davin had a hard time believing that he hadn’t seen it before.
Richard smiled, clearly pleased by the recognition, which was stark contrast to the nearly oblivious personality he’d had before. Richard was vibrant, and alive and charismatic. He grinned offhandedly as he spoke. "Well then. As Robert’s not exactly the best at telling stories, we’ll have to get along without him for the moment, and talk about how we got into this mess."