A Technomancer's Cases 1 (Original Urban Fantasy) (Patreon)

In the northern part of California, near the Feather and Sacramento River, about two blocks from the historic Bidwell Mansion, is an office. Nothing fancy, just one business out of several renting space in a building. But on the door to the office is a sign. It reads 'Ashton Erikson, Technomancer and Arcane Consultant'.

That's my office, where I take bit jobs involving computers, broken appliances, and answer questions people have about magic. The first two are what pays my bills, most months anyway, while the third is what I really enjoy working on. Even if my answers boil down to "it depends" most of the time.

Today, on the fifteenth anniversary of magic becoming a reality (around here, anyway), I was minding my own business, fixing up a toaster that some old biddy insisted was haunted. In my experience, any ghost, poltergeist, or other spirit that decided to haunt a simple kitchen appliance was too weak for those not sensitive to magic to even notice. But there you go.

A tall man wearing jeans and a white t-shirt with a stylized guitar and ‘Neck-Romancer’ written across it in black letters walked into my shop. He had longish blond hair falling over his face and shoulders, making me think he might be one of those dreadlocks people who like to dress down. Not sure why they would do that, but whatever rocks your boat.

The guy looked around as if searching for something. Then he stepped forward, looking at me, “Excuse me?”

“How can I help you?” I asked, setting aside the toaster. There was something magic adjacent to it, but I wasn’t quite sure what yet. Regardless, it could hold until I finished with him. His eyes didn’t meet mine, but considering the curling pair of horns growing out of my skull, hoofed feet, five foot long tail, and topaz colored skin I had, it was something I’d long since gotten used to.

He swallowed, before pulling out a laptop and putting it on the counter between us, “I’ve already taken it to the computer repair store and the original store, neither could tell me why it’s acting up. It’s almost like there’s something else controlling it, and it’s not responding to the mousepad and keyboard.”

I opened up the laptop, spinning it around to face me, then turned it on. While it booted up, I asked, “Did you try plugging it into another power source?”

“Yes,” he said. “It worked fine when plugged in at both places.”

“Are you sure it's not the battery dying? Or maybe the charger isn't working right either? You might want to check those things first,” I shrugged, opening the lid and tapping the keys to make sure the hard drive was turning on, “Do you know what kind of machine this is?”

“Yeah," he replied, “it's an Intel core i7. I got it for gaming.”

I made a quiet hum, tapping keys as it reached the login screen. Sure enough, like he said, the keyboard and mousepad stopped responding. After a few moments, the mouse icon began drifting across the screen, not drifting towards anything specific that I could tell, but not responding to my finger on the mousepad.

Turning an eye back to the man shuffling from foot to foot, I asked, “What made you decide to bring it here?”

“I can’t afford to get a new laptop,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “Figured it would be worth a shot.”

I nodded, closing the lid and setting it under the counter, “Let me write you a ticket, and I'll get back to you with it in two days.”

He smiled, making him look more like he should have dreads.

“Thank you, sir, thank you very much,” he said, grabbing the ticket and heading for the door.

I chuckled, turning my attention to the toaster I'd been working on when he came in. Time to see just what was wrong with it. There was a chance that there was something magical going on with the laptop, but that was why I kept wards under the counter.

They were simple ones, nothing fancy. They were designed to keep things in more than they were to keep things out. Which was a much bigger difference than most people assumed. The sort of entities that liked to mess with technology, gremlins being the most infamous, were also typically the kind that couldn't pass through a closed thaumaturgical circuit. Translation: the magical pests that fucked with tech couldn't leave a magic circle.

I pulled the toaster out from under the counter, setting it on the floor and crouching down to open up the back panel. My eyes went wide as I saw the trace lines of dark purple energy inside, pulsating slowly. That was a lot worse than I’d been expecting.

“Hookay, raw chaos magic inside of a toaster, that’s a new one,” I muttered to myself as I looked around before jogging over to a wall where I kept a shitload of odds and ends. Pulling out containers, I checked the contents “No,” I muttered before moving onto the next.

“No, nope, nu-uh, no,” I mumbled under my breath before finally finding what I was looking for. “Sorry Father Mitchell, but desperate times and all that.”

What I pulled out of the plastic container could charitably be called a cross. Only it was made out of old motherboards I’d soldered together. The first priest I’d had that hadn’t called me evil for the fact that I was a cambion would have a heart attack upon seeing it, but it was the best tool I had available to me to draw out and contain chaos magic.

I put the container back, tapping my fingers against my leg as I ran the situation through my head. Dealing with chaos magic of any kind was about as risky as hand grenade hot potato, but you didn't know what kind of grenade you were playing with. The only way to safely manage it was with an infusion of order aligned magic. Despite what some people assumed, order and chaos magic did not react like matter and antimatter, instead they reacted like acids and bases: they neutralized each other.

What did this have to do with me taking motherboards that were older than me and making a cross out of them? From a magical perspective, symbolism was king. To me, both the cross and technology were orderly things, and combining them made that association more potent. Which, in turn, made it the best tool I had to draw the raw chaos magic out of the toaster.

Taking a deep breath, I took a piece of chalk and drew a circle on the floor around the toaster, before carefully placing the cross on top of it. Taking a step back, I took a deep breath before reaching out with my tail and touching the circle. Charging the circle, I reached further in, touching the cross and imbuing it with energy.

A lot of mages needed some sort of focus to help them concentrate their magic, especially when they’re first starting out. A side benefit of being hit with enough raw demonic magic in my youth to turn me into a cambion: my inhuman body parts worked just fine for a focus, providing they’re touching whatever I’m trying to work a spell on.

The cross in the circle started glowing brightly as I poured my will into it. The glow spread out, covering the entire area of the circle until the light was so bright I could barely see anything else. There was a series of loud cracks and pops before the light began to fade, the sudden surge of order magic drawing the chaos magic like a pack of frat boys at a brewery with a sign out front saying Free Booze. In other words, as fast as possible.

When the last of the power drained away, I pulled my tail out of the circle. Still I had a frown on my face. Chaos magic doesn’t just form willy nilly, it has to be manifested. Not by some sort of magical creature or entity, like a fairie, either. Magic made up their flesh and blood, so playing with chaos magic was like trying to perform your own open heart surgery. Sure, in theory you might be able to pull it off, but in practice there’s easier ways to perform suicide.

What this meant was that there was someone out there, intentionally or not, who put chaos magic into an old woman’s toaster. There were several questions relevant to this, but honestly there was one forcing its way to the forefront of my mind.

“Why?” I asked as I broke the circle with a hoof. It made no sense that I could figure. This amount of chaos magic wouldn't even do anything other than screw around with the toaster and the other appliances in the kitchen it was in.

Not knowing why did nothing to make me less worried about the fact that there was someone in the area playing with chaos magic. I sighed, running a hand over my head, scratching at the base of my horns as I did so. This was bigger than me, I needed to make sure that the head of the local MTF knew. The Magical Task Force had been put together about ten years ago, and they were colloquially called the 'Weird Shit FBI' online. They were assigned to investigate crimes related to magic, even if the overwhelming majority of them weren't mages themselves.

Which was where a surprising number of my paychecks came from: I was the closest thing to a heavy hitter of a mage from Sacramento to the Oregon border. So when shit went down, I was always the one they called in.Which is how I was recognized and waved in as I made my way up the steps to the MTF office.

The head of the MTF for the Northstate was...a highschool classmate. Which was the kindest way of putting it. Captain Kayla Scott was not a woman you wanted to get on the bad side of, and not just because of how her body had been altered in the same event that made me the devilishly handsome fellow I was today.

While I’d gotten blasted with concentrated demonic magic, and thus was turned into a cambion, she had been hit by concentrated faerie magic. Despite what one would have assumed when it happened, that didn’t result in her turning into a sugar plum fairy. No, she was turned into a changeling. But more specifically, an ogre changeling.

That wasn’t what made interacting with her awkward. It was the fact that we’d dated in high school, not because we got along or anything like that, but because we were the only two freaks in our school. Our breakup wasn’t heated or anything like that, but even ten years hadn’t washed away the level of awkwardness that comes when working alongside your ex. Coming to a stop outside the door to her office, I took a deep breath and knocked on it.

“Come in,” she said, glancing up as I walked in. Giving me a nod, her greeting was a flat, “Ashton.”

“Captain,” I returned, sitting on the stool in front of her desk that had been brought in when it became obvious that I’d be a regular consultant. Backed chairs and tails don’t mix, after all.

“Why are you here?” she asked, pulling out a notepad and a pen, her voice and mannerisms that of pure professionalism.

I did my best not to let the amusement I always felt upon seeing her behave like that show. It wasn’t because she’d been different when we were younger, it was the dichotomy of her behavior and her appearance. Kayla was massive, even if she was a fraction the size of a true ogre. Think the Cave Troll from Lord of the Rings, and you’d have an idea of her limb proportions and width to height ratio.

Forcing my amusement down, I answered her question, “Was doing my day job when I found an appliance filled with chaos magic in it. A toaster, best guess it would have been made in 1997, I haven’t spoken to the owner to find out where she got it from yet, just wanted to give you a heads up.”

She looked up at me, “Is this as bad as the Yuba City case?”

“Hopefully not,” I reassured her. That was a mess and a half that had taken weeks to clear out. “But have your guys keep an ear open when they’re off shift. I’ll be asking around, but more ears never hurt.”

She snorted, sounding more like an angry bull than a woman, and said, “Make sure you report anything you find.”

“That’s the plan,” I told her as I stood up. “Give Odin a scratch behind the ear for me.”

She grunted an acknowledgement as I left. It was a safe bet that her rescue dog would be getting an ear scratch, though whether she’d give me the credit was up in the air.