Chapter 10

Valorie checked the connections again while her twin sister, Maggie, watched the monitor. "There it is!" Maggie exclaimed. Valorie looked up from the loose capacitor she was holding down with one finger. Sure enough, where Maggie's image had been on the screen was now covered with a light-pink shape that extended just a little beyond her skin. Their "control" subject, a sorority girl whose boobs cost more than the twins' car, looked up from doing her nails. "I think we need to adjust the transparency, though."

"I think we need to get it to work when I'm NOT holding the capacitor down." Valorie replied.

"Oh, did the solder come loose again?" Maggie asked.

"What is that, anyway? A nerd detector?" the sorority girl asked.

"Maggie, did you remember to include that clause in her contract that lets us deduct from her fee when she makes snarky comments?"

"Sorry, sis." Maggie replied, handing her sister the soldering iron. "I accidentally gave her one of the old ones."

"Better luck next time, kiddies." their subject chimed.

"We're not kids!" Valorie exclaimed.

"Yeah, we'll be eighteen in less than a week." Maggie added.

"Happy birthday!" the sorority girl responded sarcastically. Valorie held down the capacitor until the solder hardened again before closing the special camera's case. She and her sister were both taking a dual major in physics and mythology. They were convinced that there was more to stories about magic and gods than merely primitive humans trying to explain what they couldn't comprehend. Their childhoods had convinced them, and they aimed to convince others. Maggie adjusted the transparency on the computer until her features could be discerned behind her pink aura. "Look! You've detected two nerds! Congratulations!" the sorority girl said when Valorie moved into the camera's view, her robin's-egg blue aura now clearly visible.

"Maggie, give the Muggle her money so she can leave." Valorie said.

"Kupo?" Maggie chimed.

"That's Muggle, not Moogle." Valorie giggled. The joke had soothed her frazzled nerves, however--as her twin had known it would. Maggie handed their subject a hundred-dollar bill and waved her away.

"Easiest money I ever made." the girl said as she left. "Outta my way, lesbo-litter!" she snarled as her path was briefly obstructed by Chelsea Smith and Chelsea Smithe, each of whom was pushing a twin stroller with two babies in it.

The camera confirmed what the girls had only sensed on an intuitive level before. Around the women's heads were strange clouds. Superimposed over Chelsea Smithe's human appearance was a catlike humanoid shape, as if she was really some anime catgirl brought to life. The four children in the strollers and the baby in Smith's womb glowed brightly.

"Stop recording, I want to crop that clip." Valorie said. Identical locks of mousy, brown hair fell into identical bifocal-shrouded eyes. Maggie nodded once, rescuing her glasses from falling to the floor, and began entering commands into the keyboard.

Scheris was a long time waking up. Her body and mind were still worn out from their joyous work-out of the night before. Her spirit still sang with lingering traces of the supernova of ecstasy that had put her out. The scratching of a pencil on an art pad impinged on her consciousness, and she opened one eye. Master was sketching the bed and its occupants from a corner. She closed her eye again and reposed her face to avoid messing it up. Ina made soft snoring sounds up near the headboard, where she had wound up curled around a body pillow. Lita was in a loose fetal position at the foot. Shiko and Hato were sixty-nined to Scheris' left, and Kamilah was about to fall off the right side.

"It's okay to move, Scheris." Master whispered. Scheris stretched and gently moved Kamilah to a safer position. She crawled out of bed and knelt at her owner's feet, nuzzling his upper thigh. Her body was already readying itself to respond to any command he could give. He ran his fingers through her hair. "You girls sure know how to console a guy." he said, caressing her. "Whose turn is it to make breakfast this morning?"

"Mine." she said, kissing his palm as she rose. He nodded his head for her to proceed, and she padded naked down the stairs, putting on an apron and opening the refrigerator. Camber cried out from the nursery. Scheris had assembled the ingredients by the time someone quieted him. She nodded to herself. Instant gratification wasn't good for a child, or so her mother had always told her.

Scheris scrambled eggs, fried two packages of fajita chicken and combined them on tortillas with cheese and picante sauce, arranging the portions around the table next to the milk and orange juice, then wrote down a list of the things they were out of or nearly so. The ninjas came in from their work-out while Scheris was cleaning the cooking dishes. A few moments after she finished, the smell of food succeeded in drawing the rest of the harem downstairs. Master came down with two cuddled in each arm. Steve and his wife arrived and took their customary place.

"Cool!" Steve said, and nodded acknowledgement to Scheris. Claudia wolfed down her food and went to the fridge for more.

"I'm afraid we're out of ice cream and pickles." Scheris said.

"I know, I ate the last of it last night."

"Where are the Chelseas?" Hato asked.

"Early test." Charlie responded. "One of their professors is a sadist."

"Both of them? I didn't think they had any classes in common."

"Japanese Composition and Rhetoric, I believe." Charlie said. "The difference is, it's an elective for Smithe." Claudia assembled ingredients from the fridge, ranging from frozen fish fillets, leftover pork chops and potato salad to taco shells and gummi bears.

"I'd better go with whoever's doing the shopping. Might need more than one car." Steve said.

"Good thinking." Charlie acknowledged. His watch beeped, and he got up, kissing Scheris before he went to the other side for his classes.

"Kicking Ass for Fun and Profit," her book cover proclaimed. It was a novelty fake book cover, but considering the real contents, apropos. Sheena had many spellbooks, including several she'd drawn up herself, copying spells from more generalized books into specialized collections. One was completely dedicated to death-spells, another specialized in enslaving her victims' minds, hearts, bodies and/or souls, another was for trap-spells, yet another was for summonings.

"I could have beaten him a dozen times by now." boasted Jean-Paul d'Arc, a journeyman with a nose like a turd someone had slapped onto his face and painted flesh-tone.

"Talk is cheap, d'Arc." Sheena responded. "Better mages than you have failed. Do you want to end up like Kreig?"

"Not a chance." d'Arc boasted, and vanished.

"Weevil." Sheena huffed, returning to her book. "There's nothing wrong with taking the time to plan your operation properly."

The rig wasn't quite as portable as the twins would have hoped. Dependent as it was on software and data storage space only the laptop could provide, recording became a two-person operation requiring almost as much setup as recording time. They were already brainstorming ideas for boosting battery life, but for now they were limited to less than half an hour of recording at a time.

Maggie panned the camera around the cafeteria. At first, nothing showed up except for the Chelseas and their offspring. A guy walked in surrounded by a boiling aura that looked like grape Kool-Aid vomit, and just before the battery alarm went off, they spotted a girl with a cloud around her head attached to that aura. She took a seat next to him, staring blankly at nothing as she allowed him to fondle her body.

"Hey, the Chelseas are leaving!" Valorie whispered.

"Do you have the spare battery?" Maggie asked. "Maybe we can follow them and find out who's holding their leashes!" Valorie changed batteries quickly, and the twins got up and followed at a discrete distance. The Chelseas returned to their dorm room. Maggie opened the door quietly--the rooms in the dorms lacked locks, a relic from the "good old days" when people could be trusted. Along the floor was the students' stop-gap solution: A floor covered with Red Bull cans that served as an alarm when they went to bed. The cans were still swept out of the way from the residents' passage. The closet door closed. Even before Maggie opened it, the girls both knew that it would be empty. Eerily empty, in fact. No personal effects were revealed on the floor of the closet when the door was opened. The rest of the room reflected disuse as well. The beds were dusty, as if they hadn't been slept in since the semester started. The computers still wore their dust covers. "Weird. It's like they just use this place to get to and from class."

"Hold this." Valorie said, and handed her sister the laptop. She reached into her pocket for their mother's brooch, which held the largest chunk of amber either of them had seen without flaws or inclusions in the center, about two inches long and one wide, rounded and polished in an oval shape. She held this up to the closet door and mumbled a few words of Latin--one of the few benign spells the twins had run across in their independent research. This one replicated the last magic used in the area. With the amber amplifying Valorie's talent, magic was easier. The door flared, and the girls opened it. Instead of a closet, they found a huge mansion on the other side. The twins crept in together and were instantly immobilized. It was a frightening experience, being held prisoner like that. They couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't use even the little magic they knew--they couldn't even breathe, although they felt no physical symptoms of lack of air. A young girl about their age dressed in a maid's uniform found them. The girls could see that there was a cloud around her mind, different from the ones around the Chelseas. She also had a pinkish aura around herself, and a golden glow in her middle. The girl left, and several minutes later, returned with the Chelseas and more women. The camera and laptop were removed from Maggie's grip, and the brooch was removed from Valorie's, before they were carried into a strange room with arcane patterns on the floor and ceiling--mostly protective circles. They were arranged so they were staring into each other's frozen eyes before the Arab woman put up strange, magical force fields around them and left them alone.

"A couple of certifiable geniuses, if I do say so myself." Charlie said, panning the camera around. The laptop was plugged into a wall outlet to avoid draining the battery. The camera took its power from the laptop, reducing the number of plugs needed. He deleted the recording file he'd just made and set the camera down. He found the raw and cropped records of the Chelseas' trip past the multimedia lab door, glimmers and glints around people with vague hints of magical abilities which were and would remain untapped, and the guy with the purple aura and his thrall. "Recognize those two?" he asked the Chelseas.

"Mudd Tucker." Smith said. "The girl's Leia something-stein. We've been avoiding him, for the most part. I had a close encounter once, but luckily I was already showing at the time. He doesn't like pregnant girls. He's got a couple of other zombies following him, too."

"Any idea how long he's been active?" Charlie asked.

"As long as we've noticed him." Smithe responded. "It was his zombie-slaves that caught our attention in the first place." He scratched between her feline ears absently, drawing a low purr from her throat.

"Nothing too remarkable about the brooch." Sanna said. "It's been used to focus the girls' natural abilities. The girls are lucky to have an affinity for a relatively common stone like amber as their mage-focus."

"What about the girls themselves?"

"Twins, precisely six days shy of their eighteenth birthday." Annemarie said. "They've been sensitive to magic all their lives, but they have very few sources of information on it. Despite all that, they're determined to prove the ancient stories of wizards aren't just make-believe."

"That could be trouble." Charlie said. "Especially if the government decides it has the right to force mages to use their abilities for its purposes."

"I could break the camera and put a lock in their minds so they can't make another." Sanna suggested. "It wouldn't be the first time the Myrdhynns have prevented non-mages from learning of supernatural things."

"No, Sanna." Charlie said. "That doesn't set right with me. No, we have to get them to understand the shit-storm public knowledge of mage abilities would cause, and agree to keep the secret of their own free will."

"Alternatively, you could offer to teach them to control their powers in return for their silence." Hannity suggested, joining the meeting. The Crystal of Atlantis hung around the ancient magician's neck in a bag so that it wouldn't snap its thong at an inconvenient moment. Millimeter by millimeter, the Crystal was still growing, and would continue to do so until it had regained its former dimensions.

"I still think it's best if they understand our reasons." Charlie said, rising. He prepared a late lunch for the twins, though they wouldn't have gotten any hungrier while frozen than they had been when they'd trespassed.

"You're sure the fact that they're pretty has nothing to do with it?" Hannity asked.

"Pretty sure." Charlie responded, smirking. "It's not like there's a shortage around here. Barring intervention from..." He paused as something occurred to him. "Sanna, be a dear and seal up Tashi Myrdhynn's grimoire, would you please? We don't want his ghost pulling the same trick he did with Annemarie."

"Yes, Master." Sanna said. Charlie assigned the girls to set up a salad bar in the work room, and went to the computer, using the copy of Download Helper he'd recently registered to nab videos from YouTube--specifically, videos showing how cruelly non-powered people used powered people when they found a way to control them. He cropped Terra's flashbacks from Final Fantasy 6 in Windows Movie Maker and added them in with bits from the Genosha story-arc in the 90s' X-Men cartoon, choice PsiCorps moments from Babylon 5 and clips of the misuse of Alter Users in s-CRY-ed.

Valorie and Maggie sank to the floor as soon as they could move, glad to be able to change position at last. Maggie scratched furiously at an itch she'd been about to scratch before the spell froze them.

Their "hosts" had set up tables with the makings of a salad around the room--activity the twins had been able to hear but not see, stuck looking in each other's eyes for who-knew-how-long. Maggie got a little bit of everything that was offered, but Valorie eschewed plant matter except for the lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, sunflower kernels and whatever plant-based ingredients were in the thousand island dressing. She did her best to ensure that every kind of animal protein on offer was represented in her bowl.

"Lettuce con carne, ha-ha, nice!" remarked one of the young males in the room. He seemed to have no magical ability, although the other two young men had a great deal of it. One glowed with a golden light in the girls' vision, with something else glowing on his back and a link to every other female in the room. The other young man had a comparatively calm aura of a rich, deep purple and features she kept catching herself staring at. The looks Maggie was giving her indicated she was also liking what she saw in that direction.

"Do you know who I am?" asked the golden-glowing young man. The twins shook their heads. "I'm Charlie Lobo. I believe it's safe to presume you followed the Chelseas through their dorm closet to our home somehow, though they assure me they closed it behind them."

"Repeat magic." Maggie said.

"I thought as much." said an old man who had seated himself in a chair. In addition to his magical aura, somewhere between the hunk and the host, he looked the part of a wizard, with a floor-length beard, long hair and flowing robes, and a use-smoothed wooden staff which he kept nearby. The Arabic woman gave the brooch to Maggie, who gave it back to Valorie.

"You don't look Mexican." Valorie said to Charlie, who laughed.

"I'm descended from Spaniards, not Mexicans." he said. "Anyway, the other males in the room are Hannity," he indicated the old man, "my roommate, Steve," here he indicated the Muggle, "and Crown Prince Clement of Atlantis and one of the few survivors we know of."

"Wow." the twins said dreamily, completely star-struck. The Prince was not completely immune to flattery, and used activating the DVD player as an excuse to look away. The lights dimmed, and a series of clips began to play--apparently every scene in fiction Charlie could find of people with powers being abused by people without. Without the distraction presented by Clement, Valorie could see the theme. She was prepared to ignore it until it finished with the fictional stuff and moved on to nonfiction--the Holocaust, the Salem witch trials, the Spanish Inquisition, as well as more recent actions to drive home the point that there were still people in the world who saw "different" and "evil" as synonyms.

"Okay, okay, we get it." Valorie said. Charlie turned off the player.

"But what are we going to do now?" Maggie asked. "We spent years working on this for our Ph.D. thesis!"

"I'm sure two brilliant young ladies like yourselves will think of something." Clement said. The twins giggled, then covered their mouths in embarrassment.

"Yes," added Hannity, "though not very well-versed in mage-craft yourselves, you're both as sensitive as people who have been using it for centuries. It makes me wonder, hmmm..." He seemed to lose himself in thought. Charlie spoke before they could press him.

"In the short term, you can be of help in liberating certain young women--the ones bound to the guy with the nasty aura you caught on tape."

"But first," Clement said, indicating the bowls in their hands, "finish your salads."

The twins' solution, two days later, was a trap consisting of remote-controlled cars carrying emitters set to project energy at a wavelength just lightly off from his. In theory, it should have prevented him using his mage-gifts. In practice, it caused him excruciating pain and left him twitching in the center. The twins had turned off the emitters and coaxed him to his feet. The mere threat of turning them back on again got him to promise to behave, and he walked sedately between the cars and kept his mouth shut.

Sanna used a spell she knew to summon those who were bound to Mudd. Fully a dozen girls answered the summons, faces as blank as new whiteboards.

"This is tricky, Master." Sanna said. "The spell isn't mind-control, exactly. Their minds--and their souls--are tethered to their bodies but trapped outside." Charlie tapped energy from the Crystal's reserve and fed it to Sanna to keep her strength up during the working. Each liberation involved taking a good deal of blood from Mudd, so it was a good thing he didn't have more than a dozen. By the time they finished the last one, he wasn't in much of a condition to resist. The emitters were put in the ceiling of Amelie's basement with foils to narrow the projection area, thus creating a specially-tuned force field just for him. Charlie left apple juice and a sandwich within reach and sealed the basement door.

"Chahyie!" an excited voice called as the group exited the basement.

"Akiko!" Charlie said, scooping the child up into his arms. The three-year-old was wearing a Goku costume, complete with a little pin-on stuffed tail. "I see you found the way here through your parents' closet."

"I hiding." Akiko declared, finger-brushing her long, black hair out of her face.

"From whom?"

"Mama." Akiko said. "Pyay hidey seek?"

"No, sweetie, Uncle Charlie's tired." Charlie said. So saying, he flopped into the new couch in the parlor, onto which the skylight shone, revealing the actual time of day, though the windows were still charmed to show Texas time. Akiko climbed all over him while chatting up a storm, replacing her L's with Y's without seeming to notice. He had Trouble bring some lemon drops.

"Yemon dwop!" Akiko chimed eagerly as the candies came into view. Charlie grabbed the one Trouble threw him and shook it in its plastic wrapper to get Akiko's attention.

"Akiko, say 'lemon.'" he said in his best child-encouraging voice.

"Yemon!"

"No, 'Kiko. 'Lemon.' La-la-la-lemon." With exaggerated movements of his tongue, he showed Akiko how to do an L-sound, though it took her a few tries to get it right. When she did finally get the word right, he unwrapped the candy and gave it to her. Her face scrunched briefly, but she was soon smiling and bouncing happily on his chest.

"I thought I'd find her in here." Kumoko said, scooping her daughter off Charlie's chest. "I hope she wasn't a bother."

"Not at all." Charlie said. Akiko took the lemon drop out of her mouth.

"Bye-bye, Chahlie." she said, then returned the candy to its place. Kumoko looked at her daughter a moment, then smiled at Charlie.

"Well, looks like Uncle Charlie hasn't been slacking off." Kumoko said.

"I taught her 'L.' 'R' is your job." Charlie joked. Akiko waved farewell to everyone as her mother took her back home.

"There's a charmer if I ever saw one." Valorie remarked. The phone rang. Amelie answered. She brought the phone to Charlie.

"Hello?" he asked.

"Charlie, it's your father." said the voice on the other end. "My stupid brother's put Dad in a home. We're going to go get him."

"Dad ... you know we're connected through the closet, right?" Charlie asked.

"Oh." his father responded.

"Hold your horses, I'm coming too." He clicked off and had Amelie grab Camber. This was as good an opportunity as any to introduce the baby to his great-grandfather.

Curtis Lobo was flattered. His second-born son had mustered his entire family to rescue him from this reeking hell-hole of antiseptic, body substances and nurses with too much perfume.

"Charlie, my bright boy!" he called as his middle grandson approached.

"Hiya, Grampa." Charlie said, hugging him. The hug jostled the bandages that covered the top half of Curtis' face. The Viet Cong had not been kind when they'd caught him spying on one of their camps. He had refused to tell them what he had seen, so they had decided to make sure he would never see anything again.

It hadn't quite worked. Though his eyes were completely destroyed and the upper half of his face scarred heavily enough to make the Phantom of the Opera wince, he occasionally perceived things. Things like where members of his family were, or certain objects he'd collected. Occasionally, he wondered if it was a family legacy.

"Who's that in the doorway there?" he asked.

"Oh, Grampa, this is my wife, Amelie, and our son, Camber." Charlie said.

"Camber? Good name. Good name." He felt Charlie positioning his hands, and so was not surprised when a warm bundle was gently lowered into them. With the ease of long habit, he moved the baby to the crook of his elbow, freeing his other hand to get a feel for the new baby. Soft skin, a firm grip, an energetic kick and what Curtis judged to be a cute face, with a light dusting of soft hairs. A spreading warmth told him that something else had bred true, as well.

"Whoops!" Amelie exclaimed.

"No worries, Amelie." Curtis said. "Charlie's father, aunts and uncles peed on me, he peed on me, his brothers and cousins peed on me. It's just a family tradition."

"Well, he had a little help." Amelie said, sounding guilty. "I rushed changing his diaper because we were in a hurry."

"I'm flattered. Really." Curtis said. Amelie took the baby into the bathroom and made a change. Charlie changed Curtis' shirt. "Ya know, Charlie, sometimes we don't use all the gifts we're given. Sometimes we don't have the opportunities we need. And sometimes, we're just too scared."

"Everybody gets scared sometimes, Grampa." Charlie said. "Remember when I used to be scared of needles?"

"All kids are scared of needles. Some don't grow out of it. But that's not what I'm talking about." Curtis responded. "Before I went off to war, I ran across an old family story. The pages were moldy and rotted, but I could make out what was written down most of the way through. My great-granpappy shoved it in a heavy metal chest before my granpappy was even born, and it stayed there until I found it. Seems an ancestor of ours took in a pregnant widow during the Inquisition and hid her from Torquemada's men and the Church's knights. Marilyn, I think it said her name was. They fell in love, and she stayed even after the baby was born. He took her to England and married her there, and adopted the boy. All the English officials knew was that she was a widow and the baby was of her first husband. When they got back to Spain, he knocked her up again, and she gave him a real son. They raised the boys together as brothers in full instead of half-brothers and the two got along great. Someone else showed up, a woman in black robes. She tried to take the boys, but Marilyn wouldn't let him. They fought, and the story says they cut up the countryside somethin' fierce. Neither one of them could beat the other. The woman in black tried to banish Marilyn to another dimension--I figured that was a euphemism for killing her underhandedly at the time--but Marilyn grabbed hold of her and they both vanished. The sons cried for a while, but then realized that they needed to learn what their mother knew if they were gonna defend themselves. They apparently found some skill, and their kids learned what their daddies knew, and they passed it on to their kids, and so on, for a while, but they started running into hunters with swords that blocked magic, so they stopped using it. But that wasn't enough. Spies kept finding out about the practice and learning, so they stopped teaching it too. I guess my great-granpappy decided enough was enough and tried to cut the whole thing off."

"Maybe he figured his kids wouldn't believe it." Charlie ventured softly.

"I wouldn't have, before I lost my eyes." Curtis said. "Thing is, I know now that it's true. I can see certain things. I can see family members, or at least tell where they are. There are certain objects I can see, and I've done my best to gather them up. I'm glad I never gave your uncle the key to where I had that stuff. There's still time to change my will, if they'll stop finding more paperwork for your father to fill out."

"Amen to that, Dad." Charlie's father said, coming in for the first time. "Camber pee on his shirt, Charlie?"

"Yep." Charlie responded.

"Finish changing him, and we'll get out of here."

"Just keep me from bouncing off the walls and I'll speed things along." Curtis said. "It's not like it matters if there's something covering my face, anyway." Before too long, they were at Harold's house. Charlie wanted to set him up in his old room, but Curtis insisted on the hide-a-bed in the living room. He knew how to find things from there. He leaned his cane against the side of the couch and heard a plastic package being opened. Charlie put Curtis' fingers through the holes in five chocolate-striped shortbread cookies. "Just like I like 'em." Curtis said happily, and began to eat the cookies off of his fingers.

"Cookie!" a little girl's voice chimed, and little feet toddled closer, bringing with it the smell of Vick's Vapo Rub.

"Whoa! Hold on, Akiko, you need to get the Vick's off your fingers first!" Charlie said. "No, don't lick it! Nasty! Uh, Grampa, you gonna be all right here for a few minutes?" The sound of Akiko struggling in her uncle's grip punctuated his words.

"I'm fine." Curtis said, eating another cookie off his finger. "You take care of the little one." The sounds of struggle receded. Another little one crawled across the floor, picked itself up, and toddled in his direction. This one smelled of Vick's as well. "Hello, there."

"Jounouchi!" Kumoko's voice called, and the baby fussed as he was picked up. "Hello, sir. Do you remember me?"

"Kumoko ... yes, I remember." Curtis said. "I remember how jealous the younger boys were of your husband, too."

"Yes. You missed last Thanksgiving, though, so you haven't met Jounouchi. He has a cold today."

"Right, don't need to be spreading that." Curtis said. The baby sneezed, then laughed. His mother made a disgusted noise, and took the baby away somewhere. Charlie and Akiko were laughing.

"Joey made a nose bubble!" Akiko giggled.

"Here's your cookie, Akiko."

"Cookie wring?" Akiko asked, her R-sound blending a little W in with it. He sent Akiko to find her mother.

"Charlie, I've been meaning to ask you ... what's that in your palm?"

"That's a long story." Charlie said.

"Speaking of long stories, I had a weird dream that you were fighting dinosaurs a few nights ago." Curtis said. Charlie laughed.

"My time-travel adventures haven't gone quite that far, Grampa." he said. Then he told him about his trip to Atlantis. After that, he explained how he had come to have a harem of women who would do whatever he wanted.