It took me a while to find the clay among the piles and boxes of this and that on the floor of my garage. Taking the parts to my workbench, I rolled the clay out into a thin sheet. Then, cutting a piece of nylon cord, I laid it on the clay and wrapped the edge around the cord. A quick knife cut, and I had a clay-wrapped cord.

  Finally, I cut the clay into ten pieces and pushed them apart. It sort of looked like what I’d imagined. For my first test, I balled up another pinch of clay by rolling it into a ball.

  This ball was my test enchant. I cast a IMBUE MANA spell and it glowed the shimmering blue of my MANA spells for a moment. My MANA was down by 15 points. So far, so good. Picking it up, it felt like was still just a ball of clay, except there was a tiny tingle. Almost like static electricity, but different. Or a vibration. You’d have to feel it to understand.

  First, I tried squishing it and it squished…but nothing happened. Then I pictured the MANA coming out when I squished it again. This time I felt 10 points of MANA come back to me. The clay turned to dust, adding to the dust on the workbench and floor. My Mana was almost full again. It didn’t take long after that until the rest of my MANA was recharged naturally.

  “It worked!” I shouted.

  Hearing a faint, “Great!” from the kitchen, I made another test ball, and IMBUEd it. Then I enchanted the ten on the string I made. The ten spells took me 20 seconds each, so three and a half minutes plus prep time…something on the order of five minutes to make and IMBUE ten of these. It would take another 20 minutes to regain my MANA to make another ten. Call it ten every half hour.

  This took a lot of MANA to do, so I couldn’t mass-produce them, but I could keep our MANA users from running out of power so fast. If I needed to overpower a shield to protect us, I could do it easier. I’d already thought of situations where I’d have to keep one going long past emptying my MANA Pool.

  Getting up, I returned to the kitchen and set the extra clay ball and the string of MANA beads, as I called them, on the table next to Blaze’s computer.

  “MANA batteries. Each one restores ten points of MANA. Hit me with a couple of REVEAL STATS, then squeeze the single ball and imagine MANA flowing out of it into you.”

  Blaze finished the sentence she was typing, then looked up at me. “OK. You’re sure this works?”

  “Yep. Already tried one, and it worked.”

  Waving her hand twice, I assumed she cast it twice. I watched her pick up the clay ball and look at it. When she squeezed it, she jerked up. “It worked! My MANA’s back.”

  “Told ya,” I said with a big grin. “Just squishing it won’t do anything. It’s crude, but it works. I can make one of those strings about every half hour.”

  “Nice. How many are you going to make?”

  “Don’t know yet. Most of that is the wait time. I can prep the clay for a lot more while waiting for my MANA to recover.”

  “How long do you think we have to rest?”

  “No clue…but let’s grab it while we can. Remind me to put some enchants on the rest of the party’s gear when we see them. I can add a plus one stat to them. It isn’t much, but the +1 CONSTITUTION I already added to your vest gives you ten extra hit points. That might keep you alive if something gets through.”

  Blaze nodded. “I know. Give us some time and we can do a lot. But when things go to hell, we won’t have time. ‘Do what you can and write it up’ is how the Bureau operates…well, sometimes.”

  Halting in the doorway, looking back, I asked her, “Do you think we’ll get through this? Live until we can treat it as normal…the new normal?”

  “I sure as hell hope so,” Blaze replied, looking up at me. “The Bureau was my dream job. My uncle was an agent and he told us stories about what he did. I grew up with that. He helped me with what I needed to get in.”

  She paused a moment, staring at the empty, off-white kitchen wall, probably thinking about her uncle.

  “He’d been retired a couple of years by the time I graduated, but he showed up and was as proud as my parents were. I’ll send him an email to let him know I’m fine.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll prep the batteries and maybe take a nap after that. Us old men get tired easy,” I said, laughing.

  “You ain’t that old,” she said, giving me a once-over. “Not that out of shape, either.”

  “Thank you, I think. Maybe in one of these fights I’ll get to use my sword and you can see if I can use it?”

  “If you’ve got the extra gear, I’ll find out for myself. I took fencing in college and was pretty good. Epee and saber were my best styles. Most women stick with foil.”

  “I’ve got the blades, but not an extra mask. We’ll see what we can do.” I looked her up and down as well. She looked fit. She was wearing a green t-shirt with a Celtic design, tan cargo shorts, leather sandals. With her red hair, it somehow worked. She had the arm muscles for it, from what I could see.

  “If I get the time, I have some gear in my apartment. If I remember it, I’ll get it next time I’m up there,” Blaze told me.

  Nodding, I grinned. “You’re on. But if I want a nap, I gotta get these things prepped. See you in a while,” I finished, heading back to the garage.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  When I returned about an hour and thirty beads later, Blaze’s laptop was closed and sitting on the kitchen table. I found her in the living room, stretched out on my couch, sandals on the floor and earbuds in her ears, reading and listening to something on her phone. She looked typical of her generation. Then I noticed her FBI coat on the rack and…yeah, not so typical.

  “You look comfy,” I said loud enough for her to hear me. She looked up and smiled.

  “Checking the net and the news. They’re calling it worse than any pandemics or natural disasters. Estimated at least one and a quarter million dead worldwide so far…and they say five times that injured.” She wasn’t smiling as she told me those numbers.

  “The hospitals are emptying. Seems a lot of medical people took Healer classes. If they live long enough for someone to get to them, they’ll live. The hospitals and doctors are trying to figure out how much to bill someone per healing spell.”

  She grinned, and I laughed and sat down in my dark green recliner next to the coat rack. It matched the couch. Years of use had shaped it perfectly to my body.

  “How much you wanna bet the big hospital chains will declare bankruptcy by the time the first Healers reach level ten?” I asked.

  “I might take that bet. It might be sooner. Level two has CURE DISEASE. Some doctors may already be there.”

  “Some EMTs too,” I added. “Anything new about the game?”

  “The wacko conspiracy types are all over the news. Some game companies and book publishers are talking about copyright infringement but don’t know who to sue. Some gangs in LA and New York, plus the Outfit in Chicago, formed parties demanding protection money. It’s a crazy, mixed-up world out there.”

  “I’m happy to be in a small town. The big cities must be going through hell right now.”

  She nodded. “People testing out their powers have caused millions in damage and hundreds of deaths. The police can’t hold people with powers. They’re talking about turning hospitals into prisons and inducing comas in all the people with powers that ordinary jails can’t hold.”

  “Good idea. If they don’t need the beds for sick people anymore, it’s one way of holding them until we get anti-magic wards. Any good ideas out there about how to do that?”

  “Lots of them. Too many. No matter what people say, not everyone in government is out only for themselves or just plain stupid. The Bureau only hires smart, educated people. We still do dumb things, but most of us try our best.”

  “Do you keep in touch with your uncle?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “I do. He’s my father’s oldest brother. Had 45…46 years in when he retired. He was a policeman for a few years before that. He told me stories about cases he had when I was a kid. I said I wanted to grow up to be just like Uncle Dave. He was so happy when I graduated from Quantico.”

  “Was your father there too?”

  “He couldn’t come. He was in the hospital. He wanted to, but Uncle Dave came instead. He’d told friends in the Bureau about me, and I fit what they were looking for. More women agents. It’s still an old boys’ club, but it’s changing…slowly.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that about your father. I know what it’s like to be stuck in a hospital. What happened to him? Is he OK now?”

  She smiled. “He’s fine now. Fell off a roof…broke a leg in two places, an arm in three, cracked some ribs. He works construction. That was years ago. Still claims to be almost indestructible.”

  “I’ve known a few people like that,” I said, laughing. “I thought I was one of them too. Found out I’m not. We don’t dare think we can survive anything…that’ll get us killed real fast.”

  Blaze nodded. “They kept stressing that in training. It isn’t the movies. We aren’t there to have gunfights. We always have to be ready, but the goal is to avoid violence if we can.”

  “I wish more law enforcement felt that way. You did a great job with PokerRun.”

  “When my supervisor read my report, I got chewed out for being stupid enough to risk myself while he was shooting at me. He wrote that if it hadn’t worked, and no one got hurt, he would’ve written me up. But it did work, so it gets filed as a job well done.”

  “Do they do a lot of that?”

  “Some. I haven’t been around long enough to say. At least if it works, they recognize it. I emailed Uncle Dave, and he said, ‘Congrats on being successfully stupid. Don’t get yourself killed out there.’ He’s the family you want around when things go south.”

  “I know the type.”

  “What did you do, or used to do? You said you went to college here and stayed,” Blaze asked.

  “I was an English major. History minor. MFA in writing. Wanted to be a writer…ended up a pretty good editor. Landed a job with the university press editing scholarly books. Many of them were history. I liked doing it and I stayed.”

  “Then met a girl. A couple girls, back then. Finally stayed with one. Got married, we had a kid. He grew up, joined the Air Force, and moved out. Then the accident. I lived…she didn’t.” My eyes watered a bit at the memory.

  Blaze nodded. “You said that. I’m sorry. Haven’t you found anyone since?”

  “I haven’t tried. Things we used to do together haven’t been as fun or interesting. So, I stayed home.”

  “How’d you know Madame Bedroom, as you called her?”

  “My wife and I were part of the local kink community. She introduced me to it thanks to a friend of hers. We weren’t all that kinky, but we played some and made friends.” My eyes misted a bit remembering her. But I continued.

  “Boudoir is a Pro-Domme who, as I understand it, got kicked out of some other towns and ended up here. She does a lot of domination for money. Mostly it’s online and sometimes in person. I don’t know if the ultra-feminist persona is real or just an act, but she’s always that way when people meet her.”

  “She tried to dominate you?”

  “Me and every other man around. I laughed at her, which made her mad. The local public dungeon is small. It’s mostly university students and locals with more experience. A friend told me they banned her from there last year. She still makes enough money to get by.”

  “You’re kinky and dominant? Sadistic too?”

  “Not so much sadistic as generically dominant. I was a good service top. I can teach a few things, but I enjoy sensation play more than pain play.”

  “What’s a service top?” Blaze asked.

  “Basically, someone who does kinky stuff like bondage or flogging for the other person’s enjoyment. They do it more for the bottom than for themselves.”

  “OK. Interesting. BDSM came up in some of my criminal justice classes. They didn’t talk much about why people did it. Nobody in class admitted to trying it, but I think a few did.”

  “Maybe. It’s more common now because of the Fifty Shades books and movies. I know police get more calls about it, but most of what people are doing is harmless.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  We let that conversation drop.

  A few minutes later, I got up and told her I was going to take a nap, but first, I was going to enchant her jacket. My MANA had recovered, and her jacket was hanging right there on the coat rack. I put a +1 CONSTITUTION on it. Ten more hit points never hurt. I did the same for her pistol, but with +1 DAMAGE.

  “Thank you. Everything helps.” She said.

  “It does. I’m setting my alarm for four hours. If you’re awake and we get a call, wake me. Get some sleep yourself. It can’t hurt.”

  She laughed. “I will. Right after I finish this,” she said, looking at her phone.

  “Yeah. Right.” I went to bed.