People had a strange habit of forgetting about my medical doctorate. Sometimes it was after they found out I was a Psychiatrist, other times it was after they found out about my powers, but either way they still forget that to get my certifications to practice psychiatry I had to pass Med School.
The ABCs of first aid came to mind immediately when I saw Shepard, Kaidan, and Miranda lying unconscious on the ground.
A stands for airway. I rushed over to the nearest of my companions, Miranda, and carefully opened her mouth. It was far too dark for me to see the inside of her Trachea clearly.
"Lux."
As I spoke a Latin word for light, and the woman's airway lit up clearly. I couldn't see any obstruction so I moved on to to B, breathing.
It was clear to see that Miranda was breathing fine so I pressed two fingers to her carotid artery and felt her pulse beating strong and steady.
I continued to check her vitals, but I couldn't find anything wrong with her. As a last ditch effort I extended my magical senses towards her aura, and I felt a strange flux in the energy field that surrounded her.
I immersed myself in the beautiful woman's aura. I hadn't done a check up of this depth on another person's aura since I'd stopped practicing, but the sensation of someone else's power in my mind was still very familiar.
I laughed aloud when I found the issue and check the other two for the same problem. After I confirmed that the cause of their conditions was the same I gathered my aura and focused my will on the three.
"Evigilo."
At once all of my allies' eyes snapped open and each one of them flew to their feet at full alert.
"What happened?" Asked Shepard to no one in particular.
I cleared my throat and the trio's attention snapped to me with all the focus of a targeting laser.
"That would be my fault actually," I replied. "My aura is stronger than most so when I use sound to carry a spell there's a bit of an echo. I wasn't paying enough attention to where all the magic was going so when I used a stunning spell on the Justicar the rest of you got caught with some of the backlash."
"That can happen?" Miranda asked. She didn't sound angry just curious.
"Not unless you have an aura as powerful as mine, and even then if you focus your will well enough it isn't a problem. I forgot to account for that." I turned to address Shepard. "It won't happen again."
The intimidating redhead held my gaze for a good ten seconds before she let out a breath and shook her head.
"Fucking magic, see that it doesn't. How long will she be out?" She said pointing at the Asari.
I ran some numbers in my head, but in the end I figured I'd play it safe.
"There's no way to know for sure," I told the Commander. "Really it depends on her psychic defenses and sensitivity to magic. I'd say another half hour would be a safe bet."
"Alright then. Everyone grab a limb, let's take her back to the station."
(LINE BREAK)
We were back to the station before 15 minutes had passed. Which was good, because 20 minutes later the Justicar woke up.
I had expected to have to put her out again, but as her eyes flickered open and she saw me I detected a glimmer of respect in her eyes.
"Well fought, Sorcerer," She said. Her voice sounded like most other Asari's voices did at about her age, but the slightly slow and very careful intonation of her words made me feel like I was talking to a woman who was much older than most. Not in physical years, but in wisdom.
She got up from her place on the bench we had set her down on, and began stretching. "It has been a very long time since a human has bested a Justicar in magical combat." She bowed her head lightly. "I am the Justicar Samara, and I apologize for my actions earlier. I was…" She paused like she was having trouble picking out the right word. "Overcome. Yes, that is the word. I was overcome by emotions that had no place in such an encounter. I deeply apologize."
On a hunch I copied the incline of Samara's head.
"I accept your apology Justicar Samara," I said with just as much respect as she had. "I have heard rumors about the magical prowess of your order. I freely admit that I did not think to take them to be true, but nevertheless your personal skill is undeniable. I am honored to have done battle with one such as yourself." Judging by the pleased look on the Justicar's face I'd done good job of balancing the tasks of accepting her apology, protecting her honor, and respecting her order. "But for future reference I go by Magician, not Sorcerer."
That won me a smile from the Asari.
"I will remember that Magician." Samara retorted.
Shepard, on the other hand, looked slightly confused by the exchange, but she hid it well. I only noticed because I'd seen her confused quite a bit in my short time in her company.
She pulled Samara aside and explained our mission. (A process that took about 20 minutes longer than it probably needed to.)
"I would be more than willing to aid you in your mission," Samara said. "But I first must complete my own mission."
"Would it be rude of us to ask what your mission is?" Shepard asked
"I am tracking a dangerous fugitive. She was recently smuggled off planet on a cargo ship by the Eclipse sisters. I was searching for the name of that ship."
"Can you help us if you find the name?" I inquired. "Or perhaps the fugitive?"
The Justicar raised a single eyebrow.
"She is a skilled Sorceress in her own right. Tracking spells aren't likely to succeed."
"Maybe not, but a Sorceress, Magician, Mystic, and a Healer working together should be more than capable of getting through a few wards. Especially with a ritual working."
The Asari visibly considered the idea. I could almost see the wheels turning in her head.
"I would be willing to attempt such a ritual. I believe blood of the mother should be a potent enough focus for the spell?"
"If it isn't than it won't matter if we have a thousand practitioners working the spell, she's not going to be found. Shepard we'll need to be on the Normandy to pull this off do you mind if I take us there?"
"No you're fine," Shepard said with her head once again in her hand. "I'm never going to get rid of this migraine am I?"
For a split second I considered making a smart ass remark, but I decided against it.
"You can borrow some of my meds if you'd like Commander, but I don't think I have enough."
Kaidan was, apparently, a braver man than I.
"Alenko you can just-."
"Domum."
Space churned and contorted unnaturally as the world around us shifted to the point of being unrecognizable until reality clicked back into place leaving us on the Normandy.
Whatever Shepard had been about to say must have gotten scrambled by the spell because the last few words of the sentence came out as an incomprehensible mess of sounds.
"I need to see if Karin has any of the supplies I need for the ritual." I quipped as a took off for the Med Bay.
"I'll go help him!" Kaidan added and if the sounds of his heart beating and footsteps were any indicator, he was running to catch up with me.
I took a mental double take at that thought and nearly fell on my face. I was a good twenty feet away from Kaidan when I noticed the change in his heartbeat. It was no surprise that my hearing was getting better, using magic had always enhanced my senses, what concerned me was that my hearing had gotten as good as it was in so little time.
When I'd first started practicing it had taken several weeks of wielding magic for my senses to get good enough to hear the ticking of a clock through a wall, and it had taken months to pick out a person's heartbeat. If the changes kept occurring at this rate I was going to have a problem on my hands way sooner than I was expecting.
"Hey are you alright?" Kaidan asked. I was starting to get sick of that question. I appreciated the concern, but it was starting to get old.
"For now I'll be fine," I answered with a brief smile. "Those changes I told you about this morning are just happening faster than I thought. It just caught me off guard."
"Oh okay then," The soldier was quiet for an awkward twenty seconds. "Sooo." He drug out the word in a way that was hard to ignore. " What exactly is a ritual?"
I chuckled under my breath. "What?" Kaidan said with a hint of exacerbation.
"Nothing, it's nothing. I just find it endearing." I said though my amusement.
Kaidan's face turned in confusion.
"What's endearing?"
"The curiosity." Kaidan stared blankly at me his confusion still evident. "You do realize that you haven't stopped asking questions about magic since you learned that it exists?"
The biotic's face turned slightly red with embarrassment.
"Well um… I mean… well yeah," He stumbled over the words. "It's interesting."
I set a hand in the shoulder of his blue combat armor.
"Really it's okay. I have absolutely no problem answering any questions that you have. Like I said, it's endearing." I paused for a beat. "But anyway. A ritual is kind of like a spell, only it's a lot more formal. Most of the time all a practitioner needs to work magic is a source of power to fuel the effect, and the will to make it do what they want. Some practitioners like to use an item, called a focus, or a small animal, called a familiar, to make the process a bit easier, but typical nothing more than that. In a ritual you prepare an elaborate ceremony in order to cast a particularly complex, or powerful, spell." I hung a left and headed down the stairs to the crew deck. "Another time you would use a ritual is of you wanted to work a particularly difficult spell. You see some magic requires more work than other magic, A summoning for example. Often spells like that are just to complicated for a single practitioner to cast, and the way rituals direct and focus magical energy in such a predictable fashion makes them ideal for group magic, which is incredible difficult without help. As a result rituals are a great way to work magic that would normally be beyond the abilities of a practitioner."
I concluded my lecture as we came to the door of the Med Bay and we entered the pristine room.
"Hey Karin do you have any ritual supplies lying around?"
The aged woman arched a brow, but she pointed at a cabinet beside her desk anyway.
"Might I ask what kind of ritual you want me to help you with?"
"I haven't asked for your help yet."
Karin shot me a look that made me feel like I was 13 years old again, and wearing a dunce cap in the corner.
"Honestly William, do you think I'm an idiot?"
I rolled my eyes at her, and failed to suppress a grin.
"A tracking spell. One potent enough to pierce the counterspells of a skilled Sorceress."
She tapped a finger on her chin thoughtfully.
"In that case use powdered silver instead of magnetized flakes of pure iron. It will give us an edge against warding magics. You might also consider substituting the usual copper bowl for a pure iron one engraved with empowered runes of divination, precision, and order. Oh yes and fill it with a solution of equal parts pure liquid silver and mercury, instead of filtered spring water." I scanned my memory for the magical properties of those last components.
"To throw off counterspells and prevent the Sorceress from using our spell to track us right?"
"Yes, though I don't expect a Sorceress to pull off a ritual esoteric such as a tracking spell on her own. Especially not through our wards, but I'll take some time to augment them just in case." She turned the swiveling chair away from me and whispered something under her breath far to quietly to be heard by normal ears.
Just not quietly enough to evade my senses. "I'll need to ask Nathan to help me set a spell to collect the residual power from all of this magic…"
"Or I could help you with that," I commented. "It wouldn't be so difficult, I could give you a lot more to work with than Nate can."
I saw Kaidan's head tilt curiously to the side, and Karin spun in her chair in a moment of surprise.
"How did you-" She began, but then her head caught up with her mouth and her eyes flew wide open in sudden alarm. "Oh no. It's that far along already?" I nodded silently in reply. "That is very concerning. The next stage is enhanced reflexes right? That hasn't started too has it?"
"No Karin it hasn't, but I don't think it's going to take long. Either way there's no point in worrying about it. Let's just take this one step at a time." I rested a hand on her shoulder to assuage her concern. I felt the tense muscle of the joint relax under my touch as she let out a deep breath.
"You're right," She admitted. "I'll prepare myself for the ritual. The best place on the ship for something like this will be the conference room." With that the woman turned around in her chair and rested her head in her hand.
I gestured for Kaidan to follow me out as I exited the room. I knew that the doctor prefered to be left alone at times like this.
Kaidan followed behind me silently with his arms full of ritual components. His expression wasn't uniquely noteworthy, but his dark eyes swam with thoughts and questions that were so plain to see that I wondered how hard it was for him to keep a secret.
The conference room was just as we left it. The large table in the middle was the perfect size for a ritual circle, and the nature of the room was excellent for this kind of magic.
"So would you mind walking me through all of this?" Kaidan asked while he set up the engraved iron bowl in the center of the circle 9f powdered silver.
"Sure what do you want to know?" I replied as I used a quick incantation to melt down the silver we would need to fill the bowl with.
"Why a circle?"
"Well…" I began after taking a second to get my lore straight. It'd been a long time since I discussed the fundamentals of ritual magic with someone. "Magic is full of symbolism. That's why spells work best when they are poetically appropriate for the situation that they're used in. Circles are symbols of balance, containment, protection, and isolation. In a nutshell that means that when you empower a circle with magic you separate the inside of it from outside influence, contain magical energies inside of the circle, and balance whatever energies are already present in the circle." Kaidan nodded along while I mixed the liquid silver with the mercury. "Since rituals are basically just extremely complicated spells the circle creates an environment where the practitioners casting the ritual can work in peace."
"Interesting," Kaidan said somewhat absent mindedly. "So I assume the rest of this stuff is symbolic too? And that symbolism makes the spell either easier or more effective?" I found myself smiling in something resembling pride at Kaidan's conclusions.
"Exactly," I confirmed. "The components of the ritual take some of the hardest of the work off of the casters, and help to augment the spell in ways that would normally requires hours of preparation to accomplish. It's basically a very popular mystical shortcut."
By this point the silver and mercury solution had been poured into the iron bowl and the circle hand been laid out as perfectly as I could manage. The most geometrically perfect the circle was the more effective it would be.
I stepped back to observe our handiwork and nodded to myself pleased. "This looks pretty good. Now all we need is Karin, Nate, and Samara and we'll have this fugitive sorceress tracked down in no time."
"Should I go get them?" Kaidan asked pointing his thumb back into the hall behind us.
I considered the idea for a moment before responding.
"No. The spell will be just as effective tomorrow as it would be today. It'll be better if Samara and I take some time to rest and recuperate from our duel."
"Alright then. So… what now?" He said scratching the back of his head nervously.
"I guess I have the day to myself."
It felt weird to say that. I hadn't had this much time to myself since I stopped practicing, and I wasn't really sure what to do with myself. Back then I would've spent the time in training, but that wasn't an option nowadays unless I wanted to risk progressing the change any further along than it already was.
I supposed I could make sure I'm up to date on recent advances in medicine, but if I was being honest spending three day cooped up in my room reading didn't sound all that enticing either.
"Do you have any plans?" Kaidan asked. His question pulled me out of the stupor I was in.
"No not really," I admitted. I detected an unexpected hint of shame in my voice that raised a few mental questions that I felt needed to be looked into, but the patient, yet inquisitive, gaze of the lieutenant convinced me to file those concerns away for later. "I don't have many hobbies that aren't either work related, or magic related." The only skills I'd enter picked up purely for the sake of leisure required tools that, as far as I knew, simply weren't available to me at the moment.
"Well I was just going to get some practice with my sidearm in and chat with some old friends for the rest of the day, but you're more than welcome to tag along if you'd like." The soldier spoke in a ever so slightly awkward tone that I probably wouldn't have even noticed if it hadn't been for my enhanced senses. Still I really didn't have anything else to do ,and although the shooting practice was a disaster waiting to happen if he tried to put a gun in my hand, Kaidan's offer sound appealing nonetheless.
"If you don't mind having the galaxy's most incompetent shot watch you practice than I'll be more than happy to take you up on that offer."
(CHAPTER END)
I hope you all enjoyed this one. I'm so sorry that it took so long to get this out, but I spent a ton of time writing and rewriting this chapter because it's a much more narrative chapter that spends a lot more time in Will's head than most of the others. That's mostly because I'm still trying to flesh out his personality, and establish how he views the world.
It has been brought to my attention by a reviewer (I would give them a shoutout but I would rather not give names without getting permission first.) that this story could very easily become vulnerable to a number of common, mostly negative, tropes and I wanted to address those concerns. The first, and most dangerous, of those tropes is the Mary Sue trope. This is actually one that I've been thinking about on my own time regarding Will's character. The largest risk of centering the plot of this story around an Original Character is that he doesn't come with any requirement for any kind of weaknesses to limit his character, and the presence of magic could lead to William becoming what could amount to a Deus Ex Machina in character form. I am working tirelessly to avoid falling into this trap, but at this point in the story I've been trying to give you readers a solid idea of how magic works and what William is ultimately capable of. I promise that William is flawed, significantly even, but I also recognize that those flaws could be hard to spot if you don't know what to look for so I'm hoping to clear that up right now. Firstly Will's largest character flaw is what I like to call D&D Wizard Syndrome, or an utter reliance on magic. When given the choice he will nearly always use magic to solve a problem (Or by extension biotics) just because he feels it is the best possible way to resolve any problem. Second Will constantly overestimates what he can handle and has a habit of charging in headfirst without much of a plan to fall back on. And lastly his changing biology as a result of using magic a lot is arguably his most dangerous trait. While it does offer a large number of physical enhancements, his change also comes with a slew of far more subtle alterations to his character that prove much more crippling than any of these fatal flaws. As always have a great day and I will see you all later.