Scene 20 - October 21st

Interior Hideout, Early Evening

Maxwell Copperfield

I was grateful for Referee’s warning, but to be honest, I didn’t change my plans at all. It wasn’t as though Legion could do any harm to me, after all - few could, when I could dump anyone without magical resistance into a pocket dimension and dispose of them however I chose. Legion, to the best of my knowledge, had nothing to do with magic whatsoever, so there was no reason she would have any magical resilience.

I saw no reason to fear the woman - however many of her there were, I could dump up to three tons into my pocket dimensions. And yes, the various tools and tricks I currently kept in them took up probably half a ton - I kept a lot on hand, just in case - but that was still two and a half tons of space if I needed it. If she showed up, I’d simply drop her into a pocket dimension and deal with her later.

So after lunch, I returned to my hideout and continued my work. Not the drudgery of tracking stones through museums - that I left relegated to the morning. No, the afternoons were reserved for my real work, my passion, my one true love - magic.

It was a constant struggle to advance my magical knowledge and skill. Oh, it was a struggle I was up to, yes, but magic was so esoteric and complex that it was extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming to expand your knowledge at all. Every type of magic seemed to differ from every other kind - the one illusion spell I had managed to learn required a completely different mindset than my dimensional pockets did. Everyone who used magic, whether magician, wizard, or conjurer, had a particular type of magic that they excelled at, something which came naturally to them. When they sought to learn something new, it was far more difficult. But the closer it was to something they had already mastered - or better yet, to their particular specialty - the easier it was. That was why, as I sought to expand my magical repertoire, I was beginning with a modification of the dimensional pockets I had, at this point, mastered.

Typically, when I opened a pocket and dumped something in, it lost all kinetic energy - no matter how fast it had been going, the energy was lost when I reopened its pocket and deposited it back into the world. I had high hopes that I could do the opposite as well - release things from their extra-dimensional storage with more speed. That alone would vastly increase my prowess, but even more than that, it could be my gateway from dimensional manipulation into kinetic manipulation, and from kinetic energy it should be a short step into thermal energy, sound energy, and more...

But first, I had to crack the secret of adding kinetic energy back.

I had tried a number of modifications to my mental state as I cast, most of them simply causing the spell to fail. One, that I had filed under ‘never try this again,’ had apparently released the matter that I had dumped from its pocket as energy instead - a complete matter-to-energy conversion. It had been an enormous explosion, which I only barely managed to contain by pocketing all the air in my test chamber - the shockwave had been unable to travel, and while the incredible heat had scorched the walls, they were made from sturdy enough stuff that it had survived. It was a good thing that I was doing my experimentation on such small objects, too - individual granules of flour, typically.

My current line of experimentation was based on that failure, though - if I could release the things I pocketed as energy instead of matter, perhaps I could release only some of it. Certainly, I could release only a part of an object - that had been easy. But releasing most of it normally while selecting only a few atoms to convert to energy, and attempting to limit it to kinetic energy? That was more of a mental balancing act.

Part of the reason that magical experimentation is so slow is that when you’re creating a new spell, it takes a long time to fix it in your mind. The ways you have to bend your thinking to cast magic at all are as twisted as a hose after a winter in the garage, but it becomes easy with practice. Trying to tie your mind in an entirely new knot? You’re lucky if you can make more than one attempt an hour, between the lengthy meditation and the struggle to figure out what went wrong in the previous experiment.

All of that to say that I made only a few attempts that afternoon. My latest failure had nearly worked, but the energy had come out as thermal rather than kinetic, causing a brief spark as the single grain of flour burst into flame and then burned out. As it was nearly dinnertime, I was about ready to call it a day, when a voice came from behind me.

“Ah, Max,” it said, in a pleasant soprano. “So good to see you.”

I whirled on the intruder who had dared to enter into my hideout. “Who the hell are you?” I demanded, producing one of the guns that the woman from Ambrosia had lost to me last week. I usually didn’t keep guns, returning them to the NVPD for the bounty on criminals’ guns that they paid, but I hadn’t had a chance to bring the latest batch over yet.

The intruder, a woman in green who was built like an Amazon, ignored my question. “Silly of you not to move after last week, but I suppose you never were a smart one.” She smiled at me. “And don’t bother trying to drop me into your hammerspace,” she warned me as I tried to do just that without success. “I ate a tree before I came in - I’m a little beyond your weight limit right now.”

I blanched. “Legion.”

“The one and only,” she said with a smirk, giving a brief bow. “...well, I suppose that’s not quite accurate.” The villain laughed. “But you have no need to worry, Max. I’m not here to fight - in fact...” She grinned fiendishly at me again. “I’m here to help.”