Scene 11 - December 19th

Exterior City, Continuous

Abraham Armstrong

“Abe...” Emilia croaked from my shoulder.

“Yes, dear?”

“I’m worried about Max,” she told me. “If Excalibur is affecting his mind... what will happen if we take it away? Might it have some kind of addictive affect?”

“That would make sense, I suppose,” I said. “If you’re already going to affect a victim’s mind, making it addictive prevents them from even wanting to break it. But from what Peregrine said, the parts of it that affect the mind weren’t intentional - they’re a side effect of its enhancement.”

“Well, I’m also thinking about those narcissistic tendencies Arthur mentioned,” she admitted. “I didn’t notice anything at the time, but in retrospect... Max always had a way of making everything not his fault, didn’t he?”

I nodded. “He did, yeah. I didn’t notice any major red flags either, but Peregrine probably isn’t wrong that he has tendencies.”

“And I’m afraid... well, if he’s teetering on the edge of narcissism at the best of times, this might tip him the wrong way. The power boost...” She let out a concerned-sounding croak and buried her beak into the crook of my neck.

I gently stroked her feathers. “I see the worry. I hope we can talk him down, but... in the end, I think he’s probably going to need some therapy.”

“I don’t know whether to hope his trial has him declared non compos mentis or not,” she admitted. “I don’t want Max to go to jail.”

“I know. I still care for him too.”

Emilia strove to add a touch of amusement to her voice despite the limitations of a raven’s voice as she said, “Just ‘care for’, huh?”

“Okay, okay, I still love him a little. Can you blame me?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I still love him a little too. He was a good boyfriend, when he was actually paying attention.”

“When he was paying attention,” I agreed, a little sourly. Max’s tendency to get so wrapped up in magical research had been the single biggest reason we had broken up with him, much more so than the relatively-harmless crimes he committed. Had committed, until now. “He’s great at everything, when he’s paying attention.”

Emilia rubbed her beak on my cheek in a little bird kiss, and said, “You’re pretty great too, Abe.”

I couldn’t help but smile at that, and turned my head to press a kiss of my own to her beak. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Done being sappy?” Anima teased from her seat ahead of us. “We should talk about our approach to Max, you know.”

“Right, sorry.” I straightened up, Emilia shifting her grip on my shoulder slightly as I did. “I want to try talking him down first. If we can just get him to give up the sword, I’m certain that he’ll stop on his own.”

“A pretty big if,” Anima noted.

“It is,” I admitted, “but Emilia and I know him pretty well. I think there’s a chance.”

“And if not? What can we expect from him, combat-wise?”

I rubbed my chin thoughtfully. “Hard to say. Last I heard, he had picked up a kind of line-of-sight teleportation, but otherwise was still just bringing things in and out of pocket dimensions at a limited range. I know he was trying to figure out kinetic manipulation, at least enough to launch stuff as he released it, but I don’t think he had figured it out yet.

“On the other hand... his abilities will have been boosted by Excalibur, and it’s not clear exactly what form that will take. It might just let him use the abilities he already has at a higher level - pocket more mass and from a longer ranger - or it might leapfrog him to a higher understanding of magic and give him access to new abilities that he’s been working on.”

“It let him reshape the musuem,” Emilia pointed out. “How do we think he’s doing that?”

“Could be a power of Excalibur itself,” I suggested. “After all, as Peregrine described it, it makes the holder into a king, according to its own requirements. A castle could easily be one of those - maybe it reshapes the world around you into one, and just used the museum as material?”

“Or it could be an expanded magic thing,” she said. “If he can pocket parts of objects now, and his storage is large enough, he could just pocket the building piece by piece and put it together differently. That’s what it looked like on the news broadcast I saw, anyway.”

“So, worst-case scenario,” Anima began, “he’ll have all his usual powers, at a higher level than usual, and has kinetic manipulation enough to launch objects, and is working with objects much larger than ever before.”

“Best to assume that,” I said grimly. “The sword is going to be trouble, I can just tell.”

“I wish Referee was back,” Emilia said wistfully. “She’d completely cancel its effects out. Would get us boosted to match, at the very least.”

“Yeah, well... her flight doesn’t land until this afternoon, and we can’t wait that long,” I said. “If we have to, we can retreat and come back later with her.”

“If he lets us,” Anima said darkly.

“He’s never killed before - he’s always avoided even seriously injuring people,” I protested.

“That’s not what I meant. He can pocket living beings, right?”

“Sure, he’s done it to doves before,” Emilia confirmed. “Apparently time doesn’t pass in his pocket dimension, so it doesn’t even feel like anything.”

“So he could just drop us into his dimension, then,” said Anima, “and there’s not really anything we could do about it.”

I considered this. “That... is possible. Again, it’s something he’s never done before - he always tries to keep his threat level low, like I said before, and that would certainly raise it. But...”

“...but he doesn’t seem to care about that anymore,” Emilia finished.

“...we should have waited for Referee and Vulcan,” Anima said.

“...maybe.”

We fell silent for the next few minutes, until the roc approached the great marble castle that had once been the Higgins Museum.