CHUCK VS. THE MAGNARUNE
By Stephen Tannhauser
Description: In another world where magic has become a science and technology of its own, a flunked-out journeyman sorcerer in a dead-end job with no prospects and no hope accidentally winds up the inheritor of a power that could change the fate of humanity . . . .
Notes: The primary influence on the world being built here was Harry Turtledove's obscure but absolutely brilliant fantasy novel The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump (1993). Jim Butcher's Cinder Spires and Codex Alera series are also worth acknowledging.
Disclaimer: CHUCK and all associated characters and images are owned by NBC, Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak. The dialogue and plot of this story is largely adapted from the pilot episode "Chuck vs. the Intersect" by Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak. No ownership of these elements is claimed by the author.
- 1 -
"Morgan, this is a bad idea," Chuck muttered, tapping his light on and off in nervous reflex.
"Well, we can't stay here, Chuck," Morgan growled, yanking on his gloves. In the sporadically-lit darkness, he was a dim shape near the window as he fiddled with his crafter's belt. "Don't wisp out on me now, pal. Stick to the plan." He twisted the locks open and shoved the windowpanes back.
"I'm uncomfortable with the plan!"
Morgan took the bedsheet he'd knotted into a rope and threw one end out the window. "Are you comfortable with survival?!"
"Ignis," said a clear female voice. The lamps around the room flared to life—there was still enough oil in them for hours—and illuminated the chamber: a small, white-plastered room dominated by a bed in the centre, walls covered with prints for obscure Hollygrove glams, a crafter's table cluttered with thaumaturgical tools, reagents and leftover crystals, and at the door, a tall brunette whose slim fingers rested against the silver-inked trigger rune on the wall. Caught, frozen, the dark-haired gawky man hunched down by the bed stared at her, while the shorter bearded man balancing on the windowsill windmilled his arms desperately and fell out of sight into the darkness.
"Morgan?" said the woman disbelievingly.
"We've been compromised!" came a yell from outside. "I'm a ghost!"
Chuck closed his eyes. "Morgan, don't leave me like this . . . you can't do this to me, man!"
The woman folded her arms, drawing her blue gown and white Healer's sash snugly against her body and revealing that for all her slender height she didn't lack for curves. Her glare, however, would have shut down most men daring to appreciate it. "Chuck," she said, in a tone that indicated she was already quite sure of the answer, "what are you doing?"
"Um, escaping?" Chuck admitted.
"From your own name-day party?"
Outside the windowsill, Morgan's head popped up again; he waved at the woman with a sheepish grin, clinging to the knotted sheet with his other hand. "Hey, Ellie. Wow, you look fantastic."
Ellie ignored Morgan, only gazing steadily at Chuck, who sank back onto the floor. "Well, you see, sis, the thing is, Morgan and I don't really feel like we're, well, fitting in at . . . my name-day party. You see, we don't know any of these people, because they're all your friends and almost all of them are either Healers, or nurses, or lay Order members."
"And none of 'em really get our jokes," Morgan chimed in.
"Well, your jokes," said Chuck.
"Okay, my jokes."
"Chuck." Ellie's glare at her brother didn't relent a smidgen. "I have invited real girls to our home for you to meet. Not glamours, not aetherling constructs, but actual, live, red-blooded human women. I have even managed to talk you up to the point where some of them think you might be a viable courting interest. If you disappoint me in this it'll make me look unreliable to my hospital's Preceptor. And I have put up with you moping around this house long enough. So come on." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to the door. "Let's go. Morgan, you stay here."
Chuck sighed and got to his feet, brushing down his blue MyLore tunic and breeches. He glanced back at his friend, still hanging off the windowsill. "Need a hand, buddy?"
Morgan let go of the knotted sheet and stood up, glancing down at the ground to make sure his boots hadn't landed in a flowerbed. "No, no, I'm okay, I'm all right."
ECHO PARK ESTATE, CASTILLO DES ANGELES, PROVINCE OF CALIFORNIA
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2007 A.D., 8:42 P.M. PST
The Echo Park estate was a fairly typical example of Iberian-colonial architecture: a nineteenth-century hidalgo's manse built around an open courtyard dominated by a large white marble fountain, which made a great venue for carouses while still allowing chaperones to watch from second-floor windows. The chaperones had fallen out of fashion (a state of affairs the Church still bemoaned), and the manse had been broken up into individual apartments, but the courtyard's role remained. Ellie steered her brother through their apartment and out into the crowd of young, good-looking, and by now most likely more than a little intoxicated people, muttering constant encouragement. "Hokeh, nameday boy, come with me, we're going to be social, you are funny, you're smart, you're handsome . . . ."
"Thank you," Chuck muttered. "Oh, look, there's Captain Awesome . . . ."
"Please don't call him that."
Ellie's bonamour Devon, whom Chuck could have forgiven his tall blond gorgeousness and physical prowess if he hadn't also been infuriatingly goodhearted, smart and friendly and a world-class Healer, clapped Chuck on the shoulders and took over steering him. "Hokeh, I've identified some courting candidates for Chuck and they—are—awesome," he declared. With a brisk shove he pushed Chuck up to a small group of girls, standing by the fountain with drinks in hand. "Girls, let me introduce you to Chuck, Lady Eleanor's brother!"
Chuck smiled feebly around at the girls as they enthusiastically greeted him, all in the latest sequined carouse-fashions. "Are you in a costume?" one asked him curiously, looking at his work tunic.
"No, no, I'm, uh, I'm an associate journeyman at the MyLore in Burbank." That was a polite way of saying you hadn't qualified for a Guild chapter membership, but a lot of the big charter outlets would cheerfully overlook that flaw for people with enough magecraft, especially out here on the West Coast. "I'm with the Rune Goons."
"'Rune Goons'? That is so cute. What do you really want to do?"
"Working on a five-year plan, just trying to pick the right calligraphy . . . ." Chuck fumbled his way through various sprite-chatter questions, feeling sweat break under his arms. He had never liked this part of courting. He and Jill had never needed it. "No, uh, I'm not injured, it's from the glame High King's Duty—the rune panel chafes after a while . . . ."
"So Ellie said you went to Stanford?" said a blue-eyed redhead whose name he hadn't caught.
Oh, Christ. Of course Ellie would have mentioned that. "Yes, that's . . . technically correct. I majored in arcanology."
"Oh, my God, I graduated in '02! I knew this great guy who went to Stanford; he majored in arcanology too, and he ran track and I think he did gymnastics as well, what was his name?—"
Hell. I'm in Hell. "Bryce Larkin," Chuck muttered. "He was my dormmate. I think he went on to become a ledger-scribe."
Thankfully, the redhead's scatterwit attention didn't seem inclined to stay with the topic of Bryce. "Do you have a bonamour?"
Not that that topic was much better. "Not now; I did, back at Stanford. Her name was Jill; we met in freshman year . . . ." He found himself staring at the air, lost in memory. "I remember when we met, it was in economics class . . . I was walking across the quad, and she'd dropped her bag, and I was like, you know, rushing to go pick it up for her, and we did that whole like, you know, in the funnyglams, bumping heads at once, and there was a whole gang of us . . . Jill, and me, and Bryce . . . ." He sighed. "We all had so much in common then . . . ."
The rest of the story poured out of him, now entirely possessed of its own momentum, as if an aetherling had taken him over: the accusation of cheating, the hearing, the discovery of the examination questions in his room, Bryce's betrayal, discovering Jill in Bryce's room, the leaden words forever terminating his hope of becoming a Fellowship Scholar . . . . "So there I was," he finished, staring numbly at the pavement. "Jill with Bryce, me on a train home—I guess she thought he was more exciting; hard to blame her . . . ."
Chuck trailed off, looked around, and blinked. He was alone. With a sigh, Devon walked up to him and put a reproving hand on his shoulder. "Not awesome, bro," he said mournfully. "Not awesome."
"Yeah," Chuck muttered. "Yeah, I kinda got that."
WASHINGTON, ENCLAVE OF ST. COLUMBA, DIRECTORATE OF VICEREGAL INTELLIGENCE
LABORATORY ALPHA CHI 22
11:57 P.M. EST (8:57 P.M. PST)
The alchemist's fire blew the lab's warded steel doors off their hinges with a roar, sending the blue-uniformed guards outside flying; Bryce's imbued aetherling pushed a surge of blazing strength through his limbs as he rolled to his feet, leaving the burning wreckage of the lab behind him. He vaulted off the wall, kicked a guard in the face, then threw himself into a slide down the hallway's polished floor, cannoning under a table and taking out another guard with a kick that sent a chair flying into his face. He leapt up the stairs and knocked out a third guard with a side kick en route. The door he'd come in by was locked, but he simply jumped up to grab a pipe and swung through the glass pane above it, not even needing the aetherling to boost his strength and speed for that one—CIA agents got all the best aether-tools to help, but they were trained not to rely on them as much as possible.
Up the stairs he hurtled and staggered to a stop several landings up, falling against the wall. His shirt made a sodden sound against the pourstone; he realized the white cambric had turned red with blood. From his belt-pouch, he pulled out the rune-tablet. It seemed to burn with a tangible heat from the sheer power trapped in it, almost vibrating, feeling heavier by far than the alchemical corundum of its cognomatrix should have made it. Frantically, he scrolled through the list of contact runes in the tablet's memory. Even at the speed of aethyric transmission, even in its compact form, this rune would take time to send; he needed to find someplace it would be safe, at least for the moment. No, no, not him, not him—definitely not her—shit, when did someone give me a rune for the Unholy One?!—no, no, no . . . .
A door burst open below, and a blue-uniformed guard thundered upstairs towards him, bringing up a military-grade boltcaster staff. Blasts of searing blue-white light shrieked over Bryce's head, so close he smelled the stink of scorched hair. The CIA agent threw himself up one more flight, paused one critical second, then swung back and kicked with all his aetherling's strength. The guard pitched over the railing and went plunging to the ground a dozen storeys below. Bryce winced as he heard the impact. He hadn't wanted to kill anybody, these guys were only doing their jobs and any decent Healer could patch up anything he'd done so far, but that kind of injury needed a full-blown theurgist to come back from—and he was far from sure the Church would be willing to provide that. Church theurgists, even the more flexible ones willing to help out the Council, tended to be very picky about demanding patients with clear consciences, or at least repentant ones.
Shouts of warning and anger broke him out of his daze of regret. Bryce continued his flight up the stairs and within seconds was out on the roof of the building, under the night sky, leaping a gap and levering himself up as the guards swarmed after him. A couple of braver guards followed him. Bryce ran for another gap, a much larger one, and called on his aetherling again to boost him across the chasm to a safe landing. Only one guard attempted the same jump, and without an aetherling of his own his landing turned into a roll and a scream of pain as he writhed around his clearly-broken ankle.
Bryce ran for the building's far edge, leapt off, landed seven yards down, ran to the next edge and leapt down again, then one last jump to the ground outside; it took almost all the power his aetherling had left, but he pulled off a shoulder roll and came to his feet without another scratch. Hurrying across the empty parking lot, he pulled out the tablet again and hastily flipped through his contact list. Hairy Chicken, Victor Nine, Cracker Bits, Chu—
CRACK! The bolt burst through the shroud of his exhausted aetherling, blowing it away in a cloud of white mist, smashing into his chest and knocking him flat on his back. The impact stunned him beyond pain; he blinked up at the black sky, his vision already blurring. Aw, crap, he thought dimly. Who could have done this? He knew the tactics Imperial guardsmen used, and this kind of lone-wolf ambush wasn't in their repertoire—it was more like . . . .
Aw, crap.
"Don't move," said a flat, familiar voice. Major John Casey strolled over, covering Bryce with his personal bolt wand, and scowled down at him as if he'd squashed some particularly nasty variety of cockroach. Then his eyes moved to the tablet in Bryce's left hand, and narrowed.
Oh no you don't. All the strength was gone from Bryce's body. The black closed in. But he didn't need to see for this. He had just enough awareness left to move his thumb to the last contact rune, the oldest one in the list. "Too late, Casey," he husked, and pressed it.
The predefined command sequence kicked in. As the contents of the tablet's cognomatrix began to unspool across the miles, the aethyric currents powering it were shunted into a positive feedback loop through the corundum, building up and up until the crystal turned white-hot and shattered in a smoking mass. Bryce sighed out his last breath, and before Casey's squinting eyes, the tablet died, the last thing to flicker out the name beside the flashing contact rune:
Chuck.
ECHO PARK ESTATES, CALIFORNIA
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2007, 12:17 A.M. PST
"Cheer up, Chuck, you talked to some women," said Morgan, fingers blurring on the controller tablet. On the C-Cube's glame-stage, his illusory avatar blew the head off half a dozen illusory enemy soldiers in quick succession. "You know, it's a start. And Ellie's right, you know; Jill was five years ago. It's time to move on."
"Yeah, well, I'll move on from Jill when you move on from Ellie." Chuck gave Morgan a pointed look. "And at least Jill and I actually courted."
"I prefer to think of it as preserving possibilities," said Morgan airily. "I mean, sure, Awesome is an amazing guy and he shares all her interests, but you gotta get bored of perfection, right?" Then he glanced over as Chuck's desktop cogitator gave out the little chirruping trill of an incoming ae-missive. "Oh, man, blast from the past!"
"What, what is it?"
"Bryce remembered your name-day, dude."
A chill went through Chuck; he tapped the rune to freeze the glame and put his controller down. "What?" he said levelly.
"Check it out, right there." Morgan pointed at the cogitator's glamour-display; an alert bubble glowed amid the pastoral meadow Chuck used as his caesura. Then, perhaps reading Chuck's lack of expression, he added hesitantly, "Want me to dispel it?"
Chuck almost said Yes, then caught himself. If he was going to move on, he had to confront the things he'd never addressed. Bryce might as well be the first one. "No," he said. "No, whatever he's got to say, I want my chance to answer it." He got up and went to his desk, Morgan following, and "tapped" the bubble, poking his finger into the glamour field. The missive unfurled into a blank white page. For a moment nothing happened. Then another line of calligraphy skritched across the page: The terrible troll raises his sword.
"What's that?"
Chuck shook his head, not sure if he wanted to laugh or go pull his bedclothes over his head. "It's Zork," he said. "Well, our version of it—you remember the old scribing adventure glame, back before they figured out how to construct imaging glamours using cognomatrix crystals? We wrote our own version of the glame back at Stanford on a TAS-80."
Morgan's eyes glowed. "Wow, you guys were so cool. So what are you supposed to enter in response here?"
Chuck sighed. "I don't remember. It was something in the hero's satchel you used to kill the troll, obviously, I just can't remember what it was."
"Right. Well, you know what, you're still really cool."
Chuck glanced at the time showing in the corner of the cogitator's display. "And, uh, you're going home."
"Is it that time?" Morgan looked at the glamour-image of the horologe. "Ouch, wow, yeah, it's that time. Sorry, buddy, my ambulator awaits." He went to the window, pushed it open and slipped out through it.
"Pedal safe," Chuck called after him. He glanced back at the missive. Terrible troll, terrible troll, what did we . . . ? Then he frowned. He hadn't noticed it before, but there was a compacted ae-dossier bound to the missive, and a sizeable one by the numbers—enough to practically be a whole new major glame or saga. Maybe Bryce was sending him a sneak preview of High King's Duty III. Chuck smiled. It was still a pretty sucky form of apology, but he had to admit that it wasn't the worst possible gesture, either. And it would probably be nasty of him just to dispel it without even looking—
Ah, that's it! Chuck grinned with sudden recollection. On the runeboard, he typed: Attack troll with nasty knife. The words appeared on the page underneath the original line. For a moment nothing happened.
Then the page vanished. In its place there appeared a rune like nothing Chuck had ever seen before: so large it filled the stage's display field, so insanely, finely complex he couldn't imagine how long it would have taken to write manually. He had a second to marvel at it before it started moving, looping and twirling in and out back on itself in a rainbow mist of endlessly cycling images—images? Yes: so fast he could only barely consciously make them out, but he thought he could see the Pontifex, the Vatican, Viceroy Bush, the Capitol in Washington, a ballroom dance, armies marching, cavalry charging, a bulging bloodshot eye, the Pyramids, Stonehenge, dancers, a steaming apple pie, wardragons in flight, carousels, London, crashing airships, Moscow, high priests of a dozen faiths in regalia, tattoos, Paris, dead bodies, buildings destroyed by fireshells, Vienna, swords wands lightning Berlin fireblasts Dukes Ministers kings princes Uluru Rock swimmers ships knights girls women Mecca dead men hats trains crowns Beijingeruptingvolcanoesmurdersformulaesigilsmapsdemonsaetherlingsimpsdaggersshieldsruneguardshousesfacesnamesblooddrugshorrorgoldgryphonscrowdsplansscrollsconstructscrystalspoisonssecretsstoriesvictorieslossesmoresecretsmorestoriesmoremoremoremoremore . . . .
Chuck had the vague impression of his skull ballooning up, and up, and up, and wanted to scream in terror and agony, except he couldn't seem to remember how. Every nerve in his body came alive in shrieking, blazing fire. He thought he saw smoke coming from his cogitator, could smell the harsh stink of cracked crystal. And then the world tilted lazily around him and the floor came gently up to meet the back of his head.
