Origin of Revolution
The door opened before Touko on its own accord. She walked in, only to immediately stop and close her eyes, assaulted by a plethora of sensations. The strongest of them was the smell, as was always the case in the presence of death. Smell of blood, inescapable, smell of slowly settling rot, barely perceivable, smell of molten metal, surprising. Smells of unwashed bodies, of lingering cigarette smoke, of her own perfume and of thousand other things, each sharp, each distinct, none obscured by others, none mixed together.
There was magic in the air, an unmistakable suffocating presence that skewed her senses, setting her apart from the common sense of the world.
Touko slowly opened her eyes and, as expected, saw a stark pattern of red spread around two corpses on a bed in the center of the room, one of them lying on his back, another sitting unnaturally straight on top of him. From her position, Touko could see a gaping wound in the chest of the prone corpse, his heart missing.
She frowned. The skin of the prone corpse appeared to her eyes as golden, almost luminescent, mage sight enhancing colors close to red spectrum, while the sitting corpse appeared washed-out, gray, almost blending in with similarly muted colors of the room.
She walked closer. There were people around her, the police crew was busy processing the scene of crime, but there was a lock of hair tied around her finger, and so their gazes slid away from her and they instinctively stepped aside to let her path.
What appeared to be a sitting corpse from a distance revealed itself to be a porcelain doll, its genderless beauty broken by a ragged whole in its chest, a reflection of one on the corpse below it. And same as the corpse, it bled stark-red blood.
The doll's face was a smooth mirror with a number of arcane symbols carefully etched onto it, and Touko carefully sketched them in a notebook she fetched from her pocket.
Then she held a pencil against the doll's back and frowned again. Carefully, she pocked the doll in the shoulder with a pencil held between her fingertips. Immediately, the doll and and corpse screamed, the sound deafening to Touko's altered senses, and started thrashing around. The smell of feces was added to the palette, and new sounds assaulted her ears as people around recoiled in horror with screams of their own.
Touko felt the lock of hair on her finger burn and bit her lip, stiffing a curse. Quickly, she's made her way out of the room before her magic could fail her. The hair continued to unravel all the way out of the building and into a back alley. She still made it in time to startle Murphy with her sudden appearance.
"Jesus Christ, Aozaki!" Murphy hissed. "You'd give me a heart attack one of those days."
Touko just smirked. Murphy glared at her before shrugging.
"So, did you find anything useful?" Murphy asked.
"As much as I could." Touko winced. "It appears the victims were in stasis of some sort. Touching them broke the working, resulting in a... commotion as they finally were allowed to die."
Murphy cursed under her breath.
"Like it wasn't bad enough already," she said.
"You may take comfort in the knowledge that it wouldn't be your concern for long," Touko said, fetching a cigarette out of her pocket.
"What do you mean?"
"The doll was undoubtedly Bianca's construction," Touko said before lighting the cigarette.
"Bianca," Murphy said slowly. "You talked about her before. Another renegade magus, one with influence in high places. I don't think you've mentioned any dolls, though."
Touko nodded, a rueful smile appearing briefly on her face.
"Bianca's tale is a sad one. More than anything else, she wants to be perfect. To that end, she creates her dolls and imbues them with the power to reflect human desires in appearance and behavior. Lover, parent, child, lackey, rival - everything you can want out of other people, she can provide. Once a doll absorbs a desire of a given person fully, she ritually destroys it, eliminating similar desires in her own heart. She believes that the path to Akasha lies in perfect detachment, and the first step to it is to eliminate the need for other people in you. I wonder sometimes, would she even know what to do were she to succeed?" Touko shrugged and took a long drag. "In any case, while they last, her dolls are excellent tools to ensnare people. She enjoys the favor of the mayor and the chief of police, among others. I'd expect this case to quietly disappear before you could file the paperwork."
Murphy scowled.
"I hate it, you know," she said. "That... farce we have going. I shouldn't rely on you, I shouldn't just ignore it when murder cases get ignored for being too weird. I should be out there, arresting people like whoever our culprit is, bringing them to justice, not... vigilante action or nothing at all!"
Murphy let out a frustrated sigh and held a hand to her temple. Touko watched her curiously, rolling the cigarette between her fingers.
"Would it truly be better, though?" Touko asked. "Consider: currently, most magi are bound by their own obsessions. They spend their days in their workshops, paving the ways out of this world. They take what they need from society, but otherwise let it be. What you propose would require the dissolution of the boundary between the sunlit and moonlit worlds, the elimination of secrecy. The end result would likely see magi in prominent positions, wielding political power in addition to personal one, for, if nothing else, hypnosis is a simple technique. Would you truly entrust your world to people like me?"
Murphy glared at her.
"You speak of 'most' magi being content to live and let live, but not everyone is like that. Bianca apparently plays with people's minds, our culprit is killing people, and you've talked before about more murderers and other kinds of monsters. They should not be allowed to do as they please."
"All magi are monsters, given the right motivation," Touko said. "But the current status quo makes it inconvenient to them to truly show it." She took another drag. "But I think we went off-topic here. We aren't going to bring down the masquerade right now, but we do have a situation to deal with."
Murphy looked like she wanted to say something, but then just sighed and nodded.
"Alright then," she said. "What can you tell me about it?"
Touko took her time smoking the cigarette and watching the smoke swirling in the evening air, slightly out of synth with the wind, affected by the magic still saturating the crime scene.
"Hmmm," she said eventually. "What I can tell is that the working is really strange. Both intricate and amateurish at the same time."
Murphy raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to continue.
"It affected a human and a doll that ran on something very similar to real blood directly, freezing them in place while causing their hearts to explode. That's not an easy thing to do. There is a reason why most magi, when they fight, resort to manipulation of physical forces and matter. Weaving such a curse is technically easy on conceptual level, but in practice, it would be immediately rejected by the intended victim unless additional measures are taken. That it affected two victims at once is also peculiar. Normally, when magi do resort to direct alterations like that, they employ simulacra of their victims, weaving the desired effects into a model of their true target and making it so they're accepted as natural part of the human pattern. But that does limit the utility of a curse to just one person. It is possible, of course, that two simulacra were employed at once, but in this case..."
Murphy raised a hand.
"I'm sure your commentary is very insightful, but I understood none of it," she said. "Is there anything I can actually use?"
Touko sighed.
"Look out for foreign organic bits. Hair, nails, drops of blood - well, that one would be tricky to find and is unlikely to be used anyway... The working was most likely done at a distance, judging by the patterns of mana in the air. Leaving a bit of yourself near the intended victim is the easiest way to accomplish that. Also look out for arcane symbols in the room. Runes, circles, strange patterns. Anything out of place, really. If you find them, make a copy and bring it to me, that would help. I would also like samples of the victims' blood and whatever you can get from the doll."
Murphy nodded.
"I can do that," she said before wincing. "Unless the case disappears under me, anyway, but I'll do what I can. I was more hoping for theories about the culprit's identity, though."
Touko shrugged.
"No clue. It's not a style of any magus in this city. We can exclude the Association Enforcers, at least, they wouldn't do something so blatant. Beyond that... Well, I'll contact Bianca, see if she knows anything. Certainly, she did make enemies over her life, one of them catching up to her is plausible enough..."
"What about Marcone?" Murphy asked.
Touko glared at her.
"What about him?" she said sharply.
"The dead guy was one of his men."
"Ah." Touko's expression turned thoughtful. "That would fit, yes. He has that skull, whispering secrets to him he has no business knowing, allowing him to create boundary fields and who knows what else... Now Bianca targets one of his men, and he strikes back, makes an example out of him. A combination of amateur approach and enough knowledge to make it work..." She smiled mirthlessly. "Well, it's the right time I've dealt with him."
"Don't get carried away," Murphy said. "It's just one possibility. For all we know, he's a victim as well."
Touko waved her hand dismissively.
"Yes, obviously I'm still going to investigate this properly." She looked at Murphy thoughtfully. "Though... you always told me that he's a scum. Would you truly care if he were to meet his end now, even for a crime he didn't commit for once?"
"I would," Murphy said, her voice level. "He's a scum, but he's a human scum, and his crimes are still human, even if his methods sometimes aren't. We're close to pinning him, and I'll see him in jail one day."
Touko watched her for a few moments.
"Alright," she said. "I can respect that. If he is involved, however..."
Murphy sighed.
"I guess I'll have to be content with that," she said and looked at her watch. "I think we're done here, unless there is something else?"
Touko shook her head.
"I'll be in contact," she said.
Murphy nodded and walked towards the front of the building, leaving Touko in the shadows of the alley.
"Yes, yes, of course... If I could just redirect the mana flow... The ley lines interference should be... But what of the storm? Does it matter?.." Victor Sells mumbled to himself as he drew more arcane formulas on the floor of his study.
At the beginning, right after that man spoke to him and ignited the fire inside his brain, Victor tried to keep his research tidy. He bought a whiteboard and stacks of journals, markers and pencils, he tried to keep his note organized by subject and dates. In the end, it was futile. New magecraft concepts kep exploding inside his skull, demanding to be let out, to be written and given a semblance of physical reality. Now he wrote on the nearest surface with whatever was at hand, be it markers or his own blood.
He didn't need order, anyway. Even though the room around him was covered floor to ceiling with haphazard, overlapping drawings, he knew where everything was, he could find anything he needed at any time.
"Honey, are you still there?" a voice said behind a door.
Victor barked a word in a language of his own invention and cast his gaze beyond the door without moving. A woman with a dried scorpion on her chest stood there.
He recognized the scorpion. It was one of his more elegant creations. Projection was useless, useless, useless, as a rule. You needed to know a thing inside out to replicate it, and even then the flaws were insurmountable. But there was a trick to it: each thing except humans knew itself. Scorpions knew themselves in a way he never could. It was a simple matter to imbue one with a working that would gather ambient mana and replicate the scorpion on a larger scale. Scorpions within scorpions within scorpions, until they became unstable and exploded, which was its own benefit.
Now, why did the woman had one of his creations? Did she steal it? No, that didn't sound right. Who was she?
He looked at the arcane formula he was scribing a moment ago. It offered no answer. He looked at the woman again, tracing the worry lines on her face, gazing into the dark shadows under her eyes. He knew her.
She was... She... was his wife. Yes, that was right. She was his wife, and he loved her, and he gave her one of his scorpions as a gift of protection. That's why she had it.
He sighed with relief. She wasn't here to steal his work, after all.
He frowned. But why was she here, then?
He realized that she was still behind the door, saying something he didn't catch.
"W-what is it?" he croaked, struggling for a moment to control his voice. It was so strong and clear when he was weaving a magecraft working, why was it so thin and broken now?
"Vic..." she said, something in her voice he couldn't recognize. "I'm worried about you. You spend so much time in there... When was the last time you ate or slept? Or did anything but write?"
"I-It's fine," he said. "I have work to do. So much work, so little time..."
He looked at the arcane formulas surrounding him. They were chaos. Each describing an unrelated concept, each written wherever he would reach the writing surface at the moment of inspiration, but he understood their meaning, he could see the full picture.
Within the ink and the blood lines he could see what he had to create, a reversed spire made out of mirrors digging into the heart of the city like a tooth of an impossibly large beast, becoming thicker and wider the higher it rose, culminating in a complex polyhedron structure on top that would become the egg of God.
It was fine, the formulas told him. He was not a failure, no matter what his boss said, no matter what the man said before leaving him alone with the newfound knowledge.
Humans didn't know themselves, but he knew his purpose.
His Origin was Revolution, and he would bring it to the world.