Carrot and Stick: A Fieldwork Guide for Magical Escalation - Chapter XV

Chapter XV

Hmm, how that title?

***

He wished that he had some more equipment with him. There were more expensive but more accurate sensing devices that would let him pinpoint the nature of the magical residues they were dealing with. As it was, he had one device, his own healing sense of magic, and Carrot.

Not exactly the ideal toolkit, but it was what he had.

Silas knelt next to a swing set with a slide mounted to the side of it. It was all old tin and iron, rusting through several coats of paint and covered in a thin layer of ice. Not much snow, however. 

He brought his detection device closer and scanned with it, trying to get a sense for the magic that remained even as it was quickly dissipating. “I can’t tell too much about the magic used her, but it seems... weak? Very wide-spread, however. I’m picking some off the ground and these playground... things and even a little in the air.”

Carrot nodded in the corner of his vision, but she wasn’t looking at him. 

Silas glanced up. “Did you sense something else?”

“No. But look, the snow.” She pointed at the ground, and it took him a while to see what she meant.

The snow was covered in a thin layer of ice all over, that was pretty normal, though he couldn’t remember if it had rained for that to happen recently. Still, it wasn’t too uncommon. More interesting was the clear signs that someone had moved around atop the snow. 

Silas pointed his device that way, and strangely, the amount of magic dropped.

“Look at that, the snow there looks like it was pushed back, and the ice is cracked weird there,” Carrot said. She moved closer, careful not to step on the evidence, such as it was. She gestured to a spot there the idea was broken in a sort of almost wavey pattern starting at one point then moving out.

“You’re right,” he said. “That’s not natural.”

Someone could have done that with some time and a shovel, and a normal person looking at it wouldn’t think twice about what caused it, but when combined with Carrot’s senses and his own telling him that a fair bit of magic had been used here, that was enough evidence to claim that something strange had gone down.

“And there’s wing patterns in the snow. See, over there? I think that’s a wing pattern?”

He nodded. He’d seen a hawk dive into snow once, and the pattern the bird had left behind was somewhat similar, though perhaps smaller? “That would be one large bird.”

“Yeah. Daemons tend to be big, right?”

“Sometimes. Often, even. Sometimes they’ll remain as large as the animal they originate from. But I see what you mean, that’s a large spread of feathers. It would have to come from a large bird, possibly a daemon of some sort. But if that’s the case, then... what happened here? What is it?”

Carrot looked up, then shrugged. “I can’t sense anything above,” she said. “Maybe it grabbed someone and flew off? Though... no, look, someone was standing here, near this wavey thing, and then there’s steps going that way.”

Silas nodded and followed Carrot as she started to retrace the steps of whomever had been here before. Unfortunately, the steps didn’t quite make sense. It seemed as if they’d stop and start again, often in different spots.

“Look, the way the snow moved. It’s like they jumped up, and twisted, and slid backwards.” Carrot tried to immediate the motion and almost landed on her face, one leg extended way too far behind her. “It must have been a ninja!”

“No,” Silas said. 

“Aww, it could be!” 

“It’s more likely that they were being lifted and dropped by the daemon. Maybe it was playing with its food?”

“Oh,” Carrot said. “No blood, though? And can you feel the magic here? It’s like... there’s two kinds, I think? One is a lot more spread out, but there’s something else. It tastes weird?”

A second wizard? That was possible, but implausible. The report he had been given--thin as it was--didn’t paint this as a place with many wizards. Carrot was a strange find already. “Do you know of any other magicals in the city?” he asked.

“Nope!” Carrot said.

“Alright, so let’s put a pin in that for now. Where do the steps lead?”

It wasn’t hard to find that. The steps stopped bouncing around so much, then simply... walked out of the park. Silas did stop next to one print pressed into softer snow. It had been worn out a little, but the treads of the shoe were still visible. 

“Small feet,” Carrot said. She placed her own well-worn boots next to the footprint and it was an inch or so longer than the print’s. He wasn’t any sort of expert, but he guessed that it was a woman’s sized shoe. He’d never seen men’s boots with hearts in the threads. 

Unfortunately, the steps simply lead out of the park, walking off and onto a sidewalk before disappearing in the mess of steps left by passing traffic and slush that had spilled off the road. They went the opposite way, following the steps back from where they had come instead, but that didn’t help any, the person had come in from the far end of the park and didn’t leave any obvious clues behind.

“Nothing but a dead end,” Carrot said. She looked around again. “I don’t see loose feathers, and the magic in the air is almost all done now. I think that we only just missed whatever happened, but that the daemon is probably still alive. And the lady that fought it too.”

“It could be someone normal who held it off,” he said. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Or,” Carrot offered calmly and sensibly, it could be that there’s a secret magical girl hiding in the city that no one’s ever heard of.”

“I donut that,” he replied. 

She pouted, but didn’t argue. They looked around one more time, but it was getting cold and finding nothing for so long was kind of dragging the mood down. 

He decided to call it a day after another ten or so minutes. They stopped by a hot dog place and he let Carrot order whatever she wanted, which turned out to be some corndogs which she ate with an unhealthy amount of mustard and vinegar and some fries with gravy. It wasn’t the best meal he’d ever had, and he was pretty sure it was, if anything, making it harder for him to heal, but it tasted good and he did need some food to get back into shape. 

“I don’t like it,” Carrot said as she daintily dabbed her lips clean after not-so-daintily destroying her meal. “Daemons are going around the city and now there’s one that we didn’t catch. It could be out there right now, causing all sorts of problems for people.”

“That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing,” he said. “There’s a reason that the Ordos are so important. We protect humanity.”

“While keeping magic secret?” she asked.

“Yes. There are good reasons for that too,” he said, though he didn’t elaborate. 

Once they were a little more full, they headed out again, though it was hard to walk briskly when stuffed, so they took it easy. He did have them stop in a little electronics shop along the way. They sold pre-paid phones, and he picked one up and had Carrot set it up for him because she was younger and newfangled technology wasn’t his strong suit. Still, if she needed to call him for an emergency, he’d have a number.

They continued to walk, and he mostly watched as Carrot ran through some of the more discrete magic training tricks. She was a natural, but it wasn’t like she didn’t struggle.

There had once been a young man a grade above his that was a bit of a darling at the academy. He picked things up quickly, and more importantly came from a family that had several generations of wizards in at least two Ordos. He’d been exceptionally envious of the young man until he saw all the work he put in. There was talent there, certainly, but also...

Well, Carrot wasn’t just learning quickly, she was learning quickly and non-stop. She was practicing now, and he was pretty sure she’d continue to practice later. 

Later came around sooner than he would have liked. The sun was starting to dip by three, and even after almost wandering through the entire city, they hadn’t found anything that stood out enough to be worth investigating. 

“We’ll try again tomorrow!” Carrot said.

“Sure,” he said. “I suppose one more day of rest won’t hurt either. Keep practicing, though, I don’t want to see your skills deteriorating after one night, alright?”

“Yup!” Carrot said with a salute. “I promise, I’ll practice lots!” 

***

She did just as she had promised. After leaving Mister Silas off at his house, she skipped her way on back home, hands stuffed in her pockets to practice with some of the tricks he’d shown her.

In her left hand, she was creating a small mobius strip with her magic, a flat shape that spun around into itself, then she made the ‘twist’ section of it move along the entire circumference of the strip's circle. 

In her right hand, she continued to perfect her Chains of Darkness. She was making tiny little three-link chains, trying to create them as quickly as possible while making sure that each link was shaped correctly.

There were a lot of little things that were super hard to keep track of that could change the shape in small ways and lead to a less-good result. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get it all right, not without studying for years like Mister Silas had done, but she could chase better pretty easily. 

She was going to get so good at magic!

Then she felt it again. A blip. It really was like a fire alarm battery warning going off a couple of rooms over. She could remember one of her neighbours who had let theirs beep for weeks on end. It was one of the few times she could remember her mom ever complaining about something.

Anyway, she’d felt it, she was sure. She paused. Should she call Mister Silas? He did seem a little tired, and it was possible that it was nothing...

She was still hesitating when she felt it again. Giving up on her magic practice for the moment, carrot took off running ahead, and almost as soon as she hit the corner, she felt the same ping again. Closer, this time. 

So close that she could actually feel out the magic a little.

It wasn’t a ping to attract attention, she realized. It was... different? There was some intent in the magic, but it wasn’t ‘look at me’ kind of intent. 

She started to run properly. There was a park not too far from where she was, larger than the one she and Mister Silas had gone to, and nicer as well, with newer swings and toys and probably fewer people visiting it. 

She paused on the edge, her senses opening up as she tried to feel out the presence of any deamons only... there wasn’t anything of the sort.

Weird!

So, she started to walk through the park. There weren’t many people here. Some folks were at the far end, walking by, and there was a lady pushing a baby carriage, and a young woman about her own age standing by the jungle gyms with her hands in her pockets.

Carrot spun around, then made sure to look up as well, in case a demon was about to swoop down on her.

Still nothing.

“Darn,” she muttered.

Then she felt it again, louder than ever before. The spell swished past her like a jet doing a flyby at an airshow, so close that she could feel the entire mechanism of the spell all at once.

It wasn’t a ping at all. It was more like a really complicated sonar!

And it bounced right off of her.

She spun around, and her eyes locked with the glaring eyes of the girl by the jungle gym. “Got you,” the girl said.

***