By the time Brue finally released Noelle from her duties the day had cooled considerably. It was early spring so it wasn’t as if Noelle thought the nights would be 70 degrees, but she certainly was not expecting for her light jacket to be ineffective against the elements that were showing their fangs after sundown. She wanted nothing more than to run back to her apartment and stay in for the night, but something inside of her compelled her to walk in a different direction.

Her destination: The Dusty Tome.

Brue’s chatterbox nature got on her nerves but it had played to her favor this time. The incident in the alley was fresh in her mind as well as the details Brue let drop about the man who had come to her aid.

Levi, the proprietor of the bookshop with the tacky display.

He wasn’t bad looking, but it wasn’t like there was anything special about him either. He seemed relatively fit, at most six feet tall, and had messy hair. He was altogether indistinct from any other twenty-something in town. He was the kind of man you’d expect to bump into at a coffee shop or the supermarket. A totally unassuming, dopey existence.

An incorrect interpretation for someone who had fought off whatever was in the alley.

Noelle could weave baseless conjecture from his appearance all she liked, it wouldn’t change what she saw that day. Levi had chopped that thing’s arm off with a wheel of fire and sent it flying with a single punch. Even when she struck that monster as hard as she could it wouldn’t even budge. How much power did magic bestow for Levi to be able to do that? For all his seeming normalcy he was still worlds away from anything Noelle knew.

Which was exactly why he was her link to something more than the life she knew.

Noelle pressed onward, determined to not let the cold or the uncertainty within her avert her gaze from the possibilities in store.

Noelle arrived, swiftly opening the door to The Dusty Tome and stepping inside. The shop that met her was primarily a dingy brown, from the shelves to the flooring. Stray dust hovered about the air. The scent of Pine-Sol utterly permeated the place, dizzying Noelle with a burst of lemon fragrance. As far as stores went it was barely above the level of a garage sale. The place was cramped and haphazardly organized to the bare minimum required to attract customers.

“Nice place,” commented Noelle coolly in greeting to the brown-haired man at the register. His green eyes looked to her side instead of making eye contact. He was either unaware of how to greet her or hopeful that she would leave him be. “How’s your day been?”

Levi blinked but gave no response, disarmed by Noelle’s casual greeting. “Good, thank you. What are you looking for today?”

“Nah. The act’s over. Time to explain what happened yesterday.”

Hope left Levi’s face as he slumped down. It reminded Noelle of a puppy denied its treat, and she so loved it when dogs begged.

In the twenty minutes since Noelle’s arrival she was frustrated to find that there were several “key” factors that Levi had to move past before he would entertain discussion. First there were the papers on his desk (“I need to sort these expenses”) followed by the smudges on the windows (“I need it to look good or nobody will shop here”). Chores were eclipsed by complaints of hunger and, in a huff, Noelle was forced to drag the man across the street to the café. Finally, with a chicken parm sandwich and a cup of coffee put away, Levi got around to the subject of Noelle’s interest.

“Yeah…so…you were right. That was magic back there. Good guess.” With that he picked up his mug for another pull of coffee, seemingly forgetting that he had drained it to the last drop a moment before.

Noelle’s barely pulled together poker face dissolved into a scowl. Pressure built at the inside of her skull, the beginnings of a headache catalyzed by the man before her. Levi played with his hair, twirling it around his finger impishly as his eyes cast glances towards his shop. Clearly he was hoping his affirmation would be enough to purchase Noelle’s dismissal. Noelle glared at Levi, giving him one final chance to speak lest she really put the screws to him.

“You have sunglasses? Not the cheap kind with the colored lenses. Real sunglasses, the type with polarized lenses.”

“Stay on topic and get to the point.”

“I am! I promise!” pleaded Levi, hands flapping about to calm Noelle. “You know how those sunglasses work? The polarized ones, I mean. They put strips of chemicals on the lens to filter light. In a sense, it’s a filter that changes how you see the world. Get it?”

“No.”

“What I’m saying is…the way we see the world is like we’re always wearing sunglasses. There are layers of elements: fire, water, earth…typical stuff like that; but there’s also higher filters like space, time, holiness. Pretty much whatever you can think of.”

“Whatever I can think of, huh?”

“What I meant was that the world, the world we see, is polarized. The layers all fly off, out of our view. We’re left with our world that we perceive right now. All that stuff’s there, but we can’t see it, like radio waves or ultraviolet light. Even with the potential for more right in front of our faces, the world we can see is pretty mundane,” Levi chuckled.

“Yet I saw something that defies that mundanity,” said Noelle, shrugging. “I couldn’t care less if there’s magic dancing all over the place. I want to know what makes it happen.”

“You just need faith.”

“Yeah? Maybe if I toss you in jail you’ll give me the real answer.”

“No, no! I really mean it,” said Levi. “This is all perception based. If you can believe it, if you have faith, you can make power manifest.”

“Is this a sermon? I thought you were a magician,” smirked Noelle.

“I’m not anything, first of all. It is a bit of a sermon. That kind of faith is what you need. Magic doesn’t just happen because you want it to show up. It needs the structure of faith to manifest. If I wanted to cast a spell I would need genuine belief in the process, like that a fireball would show up if I flip a coin and get two heads in a row. The structure is reliant on the process; a consistent effect from a consistent cause. The rules can be something dumb, like flipping a coin, but they are rules. People aren’t powerful enough to cause phenomena for no reason.”

Noelle whistled derisively. “You believe that? The coin flip thing?”

“Ah,” Levi started, “I don’t. What I did was a bit of a cheat.” He held out his arm to Noelle, a bracelet on his wrist glistened from the lights of the café.

“Jewelry? I knew I had you pegged.”

“Wow! Thanks! I think it looks nice myself.”

“I apologize for the ambiguity. I was making fun of you.”

“This bracelet,” Levi gave a nod towards his wrist, “is called a stratus. It’s simpler than what I described. These things already have a spell encoded into them. I just have to send a bit of my power into them and I get fire.”

“Power?”

“My internal magical energy. Like chi. That’s why I was able to knock that thing so far away earlier. Any magic user worth his salt can do it. Your body is your domain so it’s simple to change some of its properties without the setup a spell would need.”

“What’s the point of all that faith stuff then? It sounds like even I could use magic if I had a stratus.”

“Not everyone can manipulate their internal energy. I mean, you can’t, can you? It’s a bit of a prerequisite to becoming a magic user. It’s unfair, but in a way magic is an everything or nothing type deal.”

“Why did you lead off with all of that ‘faith’ stuff? It sounds like all you need is your bracelet.”

“They’re not all that,” sighed Levi. “These are nothing more than somebody else’s spell crammed into an item. It’s like the difference between being able to sing a song yourself and listening to the CD. The inventor of the spell was probably able to burn an entire city down, but all I or anyone else will manage with the stratus is what you saw in the alley.”

“Speaking of that, what was that thing?”

Levi kept eye contact for a few seconds, caught in the moment before speech with nothing to say. A period of silence sent the conversation into a lull as he shifted his attention from Noelle to the fingers he absentmindedly tapped on the table. “I don’t know.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” said Noelle.

“Don’t give me that,” objected Levi. “Just because something is weird means I should know? It’s not like you know everything about every mammal. Don’t take me for some kind of expert. I’m no scholar.”

“Clearly. You don’t recognize that thing, you borrow someone else’s magic…you’re kind of shabby, huh? I was thinking of pressing you into teaching me some tricks, but now I’m second guessing myself.”

“That’s good, because I can’t.”

“I know you can’t.”

Levi sighed before bringing his cup up once again, only to stare at the empty, coffee-stained bottom. “Almost all mages these days inherited their magic. The gift was passed down their bloodline. Anyone can learn through old fashioned means but it’s an all-around pain. We’re still following the ‘shortcut’ left by Abramelin centuries ago. You need to prepare for 18 months in the middle of nowhere to contact your Holy Guardian Angel and-“

“Ok, I get it,” cut in Noelle, “I didn’t actually think I could gain powers.”

“Now, now don’t worry. I can tell you all about the theoretical pathway to the Abyss postulated by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. That one only takes six months! That’s way less work to contact your Holy Guardian Angel, your very own HGA!” Levi said all of this with his chest puffed out and pride in his voice, clearly beginning to enjoy his stint as Noelle’s lecturer.

“Like I believe you. Throw out terms and long names to make yourself seem smart all you want, I know it’s all hollow.”

All Levi did in response was smile.

Noelle had evidently grown tired of questioning Levi by the time the café was near closing time. A good thing as far as he was concerned, she had long since lost interest in rules and trivia, opting instead to question the validity of his filter even after he explained it wasn’t on him in the alley.

“This covers it all up? I could see it just fine. Guess you broke it,” she had said while fiddling with the filter. “You’re not planning to wipe my mind or something else like that, right?”

Even if he still had the chance to, he wouldn’t have bothered at this point. Not after all that explaining. Magic was an open secret anyways, controlling that information too closely with a mind wiping spell was immoral in his eyes. Well, The Congregation may have a different opinion on that front.

She was quick to abscond once her inquiries had run dry. Pocketing the café pamphlet which doubled as a menu, she left him with a threatening “See you later.” Levi decided not to head straight back after exiting the café, leery of whatever his golem would have to say about the dinner meeting he had just had.

His feet took him to a convenience store a few blocks down the road. A few children were running through the aisles, ignoring the periodicals section overflowing with unwanted newspapers and magazines covering interests they were too young to have. He noticed a photo of his storefront on the town newsletter sitting on a rack and picked up the thin booklet. It looks like somebody had covered The Dusty Tome without his knowing. Whatever. He flipped through the article absentmindedly, assuming whatever had occurred relating to this piece had been handled by Hugo.

The article characterized his store as a gloomy hole in the wall that, despite its charm, just didn’t offer the depth of options a big store may have. Not that he would know, he wasn’t terribly fond of reading. Levi just liked the idea of a little college town bookshop. Why shouldn’t he try running one?

Levi continued reading through the circular. As time passed he felt more and more aware of his presence in the store. He considered buying something so that the cashier wouldn’t feel any ill-will towards the space he was occupying, but there was nothing he wanted. He supposed the cashier would just have to deal with it, Levi couldn’t afford to think about peoples’ reaction to him every time he went out.

Done with the convenience store, Levi put the newsletter down and turned to leave. Through the window he saw a man on the street. The man was similar to many his age: some wrinkles, heavyset, balding.

He was also a dead ringer for the creature Levi encountered in the alley, minus the black substance.

The man was lumbering down the street with an easy gait and a woman of similar age to his right. They seemed to be engaging in an actual conversation, a far cry from the oscillating pleadings Levi had experienced the day before. Levi pushed the convenience store door open with more effort than was probably required, the sharp ringing of the bell and the “Hey!” from the cashier warning him over his poor conduct. The man and woman paid no mind to the noise as they continued down the street.

Levi raised his internal magical power sharply and maintained the heightened state. It was a bit uncomfortable, much like holding a plank, but he hoped he would only have to keep it up for a minute or two. The stimulus from the power increase triggered his filter, and Levi felt a subtle shiver as the cloaking device was duped into concealing his body. The filter wouldn’t be able to completely erase him, but he would be able to get closer to the man than societal standards typically allow.

As Levi crept ever closer the shrill voice of the woman changed from an unclear tumble of noises to a cavalcade of complaints and observations. “Honestly Jeffrey,” she said to the man, nose held high, “how can you bring yourself to sleep that long. Even at my laziest I’ve only turned in for six hours. Tops! Three days in bed is excessive!”

“I said I was sorry, didn’t I? I was just so tired. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Why is everyone so damned lazy these days? I walked all the way to Dryden Road to visit Joyce this morning, and Ernie tells me she’s been asleep for 16 hours now!”

“Maybe she’s just tired?” offered the man, trying his best to stand up for Joyce and, vicariously, himself.

The woman shushed her companion before turning on her heel to face the door of a cozy Indian restaurant. Pushing it open, she disappeared inside with the man, leaving Levi on the street with a questionable lead he felt reluctant to pursue.

The fact that Noelle hadn’t been around for this was a small blessing Levi was determined to hold onto.