A Technomancer's Cases 2 (Patreon)

I walked up the steps to the front door of the place I went halfsies for rent, performing some stretches for my tail to deal with the cramping I got at least once a week. Much as I normally enjoyed having a tail a foot shy of my height, sans horns, the modern world wasn’t exactly quick to adapt to people with tails. Let alone tails that were as thick as my bicep at the base. Cars were almost entirely a no go for me, which is why I rode a motorcycle, even if finding someone to make a custom helmet for my horns cost two month’s rent.

“I’m home,” I called out as I entered, letting my roommate know, even as I deposited my keys into the metal chalice that was our keyholder. I set down a bag of groceries on the counter, before squatting down to give Nibbles, one of my roommate’s many, many cats, a pet as she rubbed herself against my leg.

There was a series of click-clacking sounds, mere moments before my roommate entered the kitchen. I am not exactly a short guy, ignoring my horns, I’m an even six foot, with the up and back swooping horns adding another three inches if I tilted my head the right way. My roommate, Andrew Mitchels, was even taller than me. Side effect of his own magical mutation, though I’d never gotten the story out of him.

Andrew’s torso up was mostly human, if an unsettling chalk white and his hands having three extra fingers each, until you got to his head. He wasn’t bald, but his hair did little to hide the six compound eyes along the sides of his head. The two eyes on the middle of his face were mostly human, their coloration resembling a certain card throwing comic book character, but what drew most people’s attention was his mouth. Like certain hunting focused movie monsters, it consisted of four mandibles around a smaller mouth, but there were two large fangs in the middle of his upper jaw.

It was his lower body that made people freak out. Think centaurs, from Greek mythology, but instead of a horse's lower body, Andrew had the bottom half of a massive, oversized spider. Eight legs, massive abdomen, the works. With the exception of the fact that he couldn’t produce silk. If there was any sort of intelligence behind the magic that mutated him, it apparently didn’t feel that giving him the ability to easily make mint by selling silk was necessary.

Andrew greeted me with a wave of his long-fingered hand, a hint of a smile curling the edges of his mandibles, “Welcome back, buddy. How was work today?”

I shrugged off my leather jacket and hung it up on the coat rack by the door. “Eh, it was fine. Had a few close calls with my tail, but nothing I couldn't handle.”

Andrew chuckled, a sound that reverberated oddly in his spider body, “I know the feeling. Sometimes I forget how big I am and bump into things. Ask out any cute girls?”

“Seeing as I needed to pass along a heads up about potential trouble to the MTF, I wasn’t exactly in the mood to be asking anyone out,” I shot back, stepping around the three cats (Squeaky, Gasbag, and Butterball) that had followed him as I put away the groceries.

The overwhelming majority of our groceries came from a local butcher shop, since both of our mutations increased our appetite for meat but Andrew’s also killed most of his ability to digest plants. End result: steaks, burgers, bacon, sausages, eggs, chicken wings, so on and so forth.

“How was your work today?” I asked, putting the last of the groceries into the freezer.

He chuckled, but the sound was a bit brittle, “I’m sure you already know, but there are some fucking weirdos on the internet.”

I pat him on the elbow on my way to my home lab/the garage. He was a streamer, but while he also had arachnophobia, bad. It was bad enough that the only room in the entire house that had a mirror was the garage, and he avoided it like the plague. Which made the fact that he was being paid five figures monthly by people more interested in having the spider boy play dress up than the games he enjoyed playing rather painful. I’d talked to him, even gotten him to talk to a therapist for it, but he continued to chase the likes, kudos, thumbs ups, subs, etc.

In the end, despite how much it freaked him out to see himself, he continued to do it because it was his only source of income. I couldn't help but feel sorry for him, but I also knew it wasn't my place to tell him how to live his life.

I entered my lab and quickly got to work on one of my latest projects. It was a device that could detect samples of magical energy and track down its source, like a magical bloodhound. I had been working on it for months, and I was finally getting close to finishing it. As I tinkered with the circuits and wires, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. This device could make my work with the MTF so much simpler. Plus, if I could get it to work and patent it, then I'd have another stream of income, this one passive.

Tracking magic wasn’t necessarily hard, per se. But the fact that magic was so new, that the limits of it and the forms it could take were still being discovered made any sort of widespread use of it still something of a frontier. There were no universal rules or underlying principles that could be exploited, or at least, no widely recognized ones.

This first prototype would probably only work for extremely high concentrations of a specific “flavor” of magic, the kind of concentrations that turned ordinary people into cambions, changelings, nephilim, weres, or one of the countless other mutated individuals. They didn’t happen nearly as frequently now as they did in the first few years of magic’s return, but there was still the occasional surge of raw magic. Still, even if that was all this first prototype did, it would be something.

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“Here’s your toaster, ma’am,” I told the old woman early the next morning at my repair shop. “If you don’t mind my asking, where did you get it from? There were some odd problems with it that I’m not used to seeing.”

“Oh thank you, young man,” she said, putting the toaster into the bag set in front of her walker. “I purchased it at my neighbor’s estate sale, his son was so helpful.”

The woman left, and I looked up the address that was on her file. She lived on the corner of East Washington and Oleander, a relatively short walk from where my store was, in downtown. Pulling out my tablet, I jotted down a quick email to Kayla, telling her about the source of the toaster. The rest of my day went relatively normally, I did some research into the estate sale in between my regular repair work, and when it was closing time I locked the store and set the wards.

There were two basic categories of wards, depending upon how they were anchored. You can either anchor them to a physical place or to a home. The way that each of the two types of wards were structured meant that wards were an either or deal, you could try to use both, but they’d interfere with each other and fizzle out after a week or two.

The wards that were tied to a physical place could be placed anywhere, but by contrast they were limited in strength by what it was that they were tied to. I’d heard along the magical grapevine that some crazy hippies from the bay area had gone up to the redwoods and tied their wards to some of the oldest trees there, but by and large these types of wards were tied to buildings. The older the better, the age gave an extra metaphysical weight to them. Brick, stone, and wood also held wards better than glass, iron, and steel.

Home wards were focused around the concept of the hearth: the metaphysical ‘heart’ of the home. In modern times and the western design philosophy, it was a bit of a coin toss if it was the living room or the kitchen. The more that the people living there saw the home as theirs, the more powerful the wards would be.

The long and short of it was that, thanks to the building my shop was in, my wards for it were pretty close to the most potent you could get in Northern California. Forcing that bit of mental recollection aside, I made my way to the place that had held the estate sale.

It was a bit of an older house, probably built during the forties or earlier. It had clearly seen at least two generations growing up in it, even if it wasn’t the oldest home in town (that honor almost certainly went to the mansion a few blocks away that had served as a college dorm before it had been turned into a State Park).

Walking up the steps, I knocked on the front door, even as I pulled out my tablet and a few odds and ends. My shop didn’t pronounce me as a technomancer just because I was handy with fixing appliances, a lot of my personal magical skills were tied up in technology. Some people with magical talent favored staves with runes etched into them, some rods designed to focus blasts of fire. Me, on the other hand? I wrote my spells into apps I kept on my tablet.

I started up one such app, feeling the invisible barrier settle mere millimeters over my skin, and barely had my tablet down by my side before the door opened. The woman who opened the door was short, by nearly any standard. If she was four and a half feet tall, I'd eat my horns. Her hair was a deep, dark brown, just shy of being called nearly black, and kept in a series of braids held tight against her head. Her eyes were hard, cold, and deep blue like sapphires. At a guess, I’d say she was in her late teens or early twenties. Whatever her age, she clearly didn’t want me there.

“What do you want, freak?” she asked, glaring at me with distaste in her eyes.

“Good afternoon,” I greeted her with a nod of my head. “I have a repair shop and magical consultation service on Broadway, and had something unusual come up recently that was procured at an estate sale held here. I was hoping that-”

The door slammed in my face, and I sighed. I was used to it, even if it didn’t make my job any easier. Honestly at this point, I didn’t have enough to go off of so that I’d be able to bring it to Kayla and she could get a warrant. Ideally, I’d have been able to get a list of people who purchased appliances or other such things at the estate sale that I could then go track down and check.

“I’m so sorry,” a voice behind me said as I was about to leave. “I had no idea that she was going to be like that.”

I turned around, and the man who’d opened the door was standing there. He was taller than me, by a good six inches, leanly built, and his light brown hair was curled and tousled in a way that gave him a look of having just gotten out of bed. He wore a white dress shirt, under an unbuttoned hawaiian shirt, denim cargo shorts, and orthopedic shoes.

“Is there anything I can help you with?” the man asked.

Setting aside the man’s apparently nonexistent sense of fashion, I told him, “I’m an independent investigator and consultant for the MTF, and I am here to follow up on a potential lead regarding a cursed item that was procured at the estate sale held here.”

The feel of the defensive spell over my skin was the only thing keeping me from falling into a defensive posture. I couldn’t tell why exactly, but my instincts were screaming at me that the man in front of me, bad dress sense and all, was dangerous.