1.2 Taylor
Taylor takes a step forward to begin breaking the barrier formation of the summoning circle she had painstakingly laid out over the past few hours. Her power had supplied the designs necessary, but so much of what she was doing came with little to no explanation, only an instinct provided by a power she doesn't understand. Taylor is vaguely embarrassed to agree with her summons' assessment that the ritual was amateurish in execution, but her power had assured her that it would work perfectly.
The familiar she has summoned is, well, completely unexpected. All she had known was that her power was going to provide her with some means of protection. But as she had drawn out those sprawling, obviously arcane markings, she couldn't help but envision some kind of grotesque demon, or perhaps a monstruous beast, crawling from the spaces between worlds to land, writhing, in the summoning circle.
A bit dramatic, she knows, but she feels she can be excused by the circumstances.
Instead, she has pulled something with physical features entirely indistinguishable from a humans'. The creature has pale skin and a white cloth wrapped around her eyes, which seemingly does nothing to prevent her from observing her surroundings. She wears a clean white shirt with matching pants that reaches her ankles and has no shoes or other accessories. White hair is bundled up on top of her head in a messy bun. She looks like a ghost.
Val, as she had introduced herself, has androgynous features overall. She is tall, even taller than herself, with a lithe build that reminds her of an athlete. It wasn't until she had spoken in a clearly feminine voice that Taylor was comfortable categorizing her gender at all. The normalcy of her human features and speech patterns only serve to highlight her clearly supernatural origins. At least an intelligent familiar was going to be much more useful than some hulking brute. Probably. Taylor has seen enough movies to know how many ways things could go wrong.
Taylor doubts that whatever she has pulled between worlds will be a pushover. She had asked for something to serve as protection, and while she has little understanding on the nature, capabilities, or even limits of her power, she has no reason to think it would fail her entirely.
As she begins to scrub away the outside markings to break the binding array, something she again only knows to do because of her power whispering in the back of her head, Taylor glances at Val through the corner of her eyes. Despite the eye coverings, Taylor finds herself being patiently watched by her new summons.
Unnerved, she continues to scrub away. It doesn't take long to finish, with the barrier array making up only a small portion of the ritual. Finished, Taylor stands up and indicates with her hand for Val to step through.
She takes one smooth step to cross the boundary, and casually asks, "All right then, what's the plan?"
Taylor doesn't think a demonic summons has any right to being so nonchalant but thinks it wise not to say. Organizing her thoughts, Taylor gives her response.
"For now, we just need to get this place cleaned up. My foster parents are going to be home in a few hours, and I'd like to have all traces of what I've been doing cleared out. After that, we need to figure out what to do with you. We can work while we talk."
Taylor holds out the brush she had used to scrub the barrier array away.
"Just finish scrubbing off the chalk on the floor for now, please. I'll start moving the boxes and stuff around since I'm the one who remembers roughly what the room should look like. Shouldn't take too long, but it needs to be done."
She looks amused, for some reason, but takes the brush from Taylor's hands without complaint and leans down to begin scrubbing at the floor.
Walking towards the nearest wall to start pulling boxes and tables away from where they've been crammed against each other, Taylor continues speaking.
"So, the cleaning part is going to be pretty easy, but I'm not sure what to do with you. Also, I'm not really sure what your capabilities in general are. And why do you wear that cloth around your eyes? You're obviously not impacted by it, but I don't understand how."
After a few seconds, Val responds. "The eye coverings are something all of my people do. I mostly rely on magical means for sensing things around me. The active portion of my magic is locked away in between summons, but I don't lose the ability to sense or use magic ambiently. It takes some time getting use to but has clear advantages over traditional senses and I've long since grown accustomed to it."
"As far as capabilities go, I suppose I'm a fighter first and foremost. Much more of a do-er than a thinker." She shrugs, "I don't exactly revel in violence, but it's what I've done most of my life and I'm good at it." She says this with a casual confidence that has Taylor thinking it an understatement. "I also have varying levels of competence in different utility spells, but little experience in anything too complicated. It's something I use to supplement my combat abilities, mostly. My summoner has almost always been the more capable mage."
Taylor starts to feel a bit overwhelmed as the explanation goes on because, wow, there's a lot to unpack there. That Val is capable in combat isn't surprising. Her power had delivered. The bits on magic are more surprising, but after a month with her power, she can't say she's too surprised at that either. Her power certainly has a certain arcane bent to it, and she wonders idly if she's doomed to become Brockton Bay's Myriddin.
The reference to Val's culture especially catches her off guard. It makes sense, she thinks, that Val comes from somewhere and has a people to call a community, whatever form it may take. She just hadn't thought about it. The implications are kind of, well, staggering, but she needs to shelve that and focus on other things.
She asks the most practical question first.
"Can you give a little more detail on your capabilities as a fighter?"
Taylor needs to at least have a vague idea so that she can keep making her plans.
"Strong. Fast. Good reflexes. I won't have problems with whatever you throw at me."
Taylor wishes she would be more descriptive, but the sheer disregard in the statement has her hesitating. She doesn't think such confidence can be entirely unfounded. She'll press this a bit more later.
"You said that you know some magic?"
"Like I said, mostly just utility spells. Things to help me maneuver easier, go unseen, move objects at a range. I know how to enchant, as well, but I'm only proficient with two words. All of this will need to come through you, of course." She says this last part as an afterthought.
"What? Can you explain that?"
"Which part?"
"The 'will need to come through me' part."
Val is just giving her an odd look.
"Right. No guidebook, you said." She seems mildly exasperated as she says this. "Because I'm anchored to this plane through your Contract, any magic I call on will come from your reserves."
This is all coming as a first to Taylor. She didn't even know she had 'reserves'. She hasn't felt anything, at least.
"Will I feel that happening? Is there a way to tell how much reserves I have?"
Val hums. "Probably. And yes, but probably not here, unless your reserves are very small. We'd need to try burning through them to get an idea of their size, and you probably don't want to do that in this basement."
Makes sense. She still wants to see if she can feel anything, though.
"Can you try something small? I want to see if I feel it."
Leaning back off her hands and knees and settling into a sitting position, Val takes a look around the room. Taylor wonders why Val turns her head at all if she uses magic to sense her surroundings. She clearly doesn't use her eyes. Maybe out of habit to set other people at ease? She had seemed confident she would be able to blend in.
Val raises her hand and gestures towards a shelf in front of her, and something comes hurtling through the air towards her hand. It lands in her palm with a solid thunk. It's a snow globe.
Taylor is embarrassed to admit that in her surprise, she had forgotten to pay attention. She has no idea if she felt anything. "Ah, sorry, one more time please."
Val nods and tosses the snow globe underhand towards the far wall. After it has travelled some distance, she once again makes a gesture and the snow globe reverses directions and flies through the air, landing in her palm with another satisfying sound.
Even though she had been paying attention this time, she still hadn't felt anything.
Taylor shakes her head. "Nothing. I don't think I felt anything. Should I have?"
"I think so, but I'm not positive. This isn't something I've talked about with my previous Contractors, and my memories have grown hazy regardless."
This catches Taylor's attention.
"Hazy? Why?"
"It's been a long time since I've last been summoned." Val says simply. "Memories fade."
It's painfully obvious there's something heavy in that statement, but Taylor thinks it best not to press.
"So, that was one of the utility spells you mentioned? Telekinesis? Does it work on people?"
"It works on anything that isn't alive."
Taylor hums in consideration. "So, seems like the Manton Effect still applies."
"Manton Effect?"
Right. If Val hasn't been summoned in "a long time", and she wonders what a long time is for a creature dragged between worlds, then there's no way she knows anything about capes. She's likely to be as lost when it comes to the modern world as Taylor is with this whole "magic" business. Taylor hesitates for a moment.
Speaking of, how could Val predate the emergence of capes? Was Val even real or just something that her power has fabricated? If she can't tell the difference, does it matter? She's been of the opinion that if an artificial intelligence were to be indistinguishable from natural sentient life, then they would be a person in all meaningful applications of the word. She thinks similar logic would apply here.
Or maybe Val isn't fabricated at all and was instead actually honest-to-god dragged through worlds by her power. The existence of Aleph means the idea can't be entirely dismissed… but it was certainly far-fetched. Aleph isn't meaningfully different from Bet, not in the way a world that Val's casual explanations would indicate.
Too many questions, no way to find answers. No point in asking Val, since Taylor doubts questioning whether her existence is fabricated would go over well. Or even have a point. There was absolutely no reason to not treat Val like a person, and so Taylor settles her spinning thoughts and determines to worry about questions she can actually answer and actions she can actually take.
"Right. So. The Manton Effect is the inability for most capes to use their powers inside of or on organic material. The extent that it applies actually varies a decent amount from cape to cape, but, especially for powers where you generate some kind of matter or energy, you typically wont be able to do so inside of a person."
"Capes? That's what the people here call mages?"
Taylor shakes her head. "No, capes have superpowers, not magic."
The statement lingers in the air for a couple of seconds.
Taylor follows up with, "Magic isn't real but superpowers are."
Val stops scrubbing the floor and leans back slowly, looking vaguely embarrassed.
"Right." Val coughs, once, and continues, "We'll probably need a rag and bucket of water if we want to get the chalk residue all the way off the floor. The brush works on a smaller scale, but at this point I'm just smudging it around."
Taylor's face is heating up, but she pushes forward through the painfully obvious deflection. "Okay, so, maybe it's not a great distinction. I just meant that the idea of magic has been around for thousands of years prior to the emergence of capes, and there's no proof of its existence."
"Powers, on the other hand, are a measured and proven phenomenon, and behave in straightforward and quantifiable ways. Well, mostly. We might not know why they work the way they do, but they clearly follow some ruleset. Again, mostly…"
Val at least seems less embarrassed by Taylor after the explanation, but she still says, "Seems like semantics. Magic is pretty quantifiable, too, where I'm from."
Taylor thinks this over for a moment but refuses to classify 'magic' and 'powers' as the same thing. Her sensibilities just won't allow it.
She continues to talk with Val as they clean the basement in the chilly air and under a dim light bulb. There's an undercurrent of excitement in her veins. It's finally begun. She's going to make a difference.
She has to.