Charlotte Ritter and Watson Doyle in the style of Abstract Expressionism, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Chapter 16: Adventures close to home
Twin Peaks Township, Confluence dimension
Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)
After the meeting with the three heroes of the Revolution, Charlotte went back to her ordinary investigator duties. There was a disgruntled husband threatening violence against his wife, who was probably being unfaithful to him. At a local manufacturing plant, three people got hurt in an accident that was probably caused by their own negligence. Two neighbors got in a fight over renovation plans.
Charlotte tried to imagine why Olz Hap might want her to keep working the Soth case, finding no good reasons. She still wanted to, though, even if she had no idea how she might contribute.
In her free time, Charlotte played with altering magic. A few years ago, she had joined a study group, and they still hooked up on a regular basis to discuss their recent experiments. Although considered a form of metamagic, altering was closely related to cancellation and had been developed on that basis. The straightforward application of cancellation was to negate (or kill) other magics, but one could also do soft versions where the negation was temporary, and which might be described as a form of stunning. This had led some people to think that maybe other soft versions of cancellation could also be possible, and one thing they attempted was to cancel specific strands of an overall magic flow. Having succeeded with this project, further experiments tried to replace the negated strands with other strands. Thus altering magic was born.
While great fun to play around with, altering was not particularly useful for Charlotte’s work as an investigator. She had tried to imagine possible applications in the field, but her scenarios seemed far-fetched. Perhaps an illegal surveillance attempt of someone’s house could be altered so that it targeted a different location, which might be useful if investigators needed more time to trace the illegal surveillance while the perpetrators suspected no one was onto them. Then again, you could probably achieve something of similar utility by just employing illusions.
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On a more mundane level, altering one’s own magics was slightly less energy-consuming than tearing them down and setting them up again with the desired changes, but that was not much of a pay-off for having invested so much time and energy in it. It was fun to play with something nerdy that not many other people got involved with, though.
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Watson spent much of his free time learning to communicate better with Sherlock. Sherlock understood at least a hundred words, although most of those were related to physical objects and actions. His limited understanding of more abstract concepts complicated the communication process, although Sherlock gradually picked up new word-concepts. Earlier, if Watson wanted to communicate the concept of anger, he needed to become a little angry himself so he could share the emotion with Sherlock via their Transmission field, achieving the best results if he also visualized an angry face at the same time. Then, after some time, the angry face itself seemed to get the point across, and when Watson added the name of the emotion to the mix, Sherlock started to associate the word with the face, which was in turn associated with the emotion itself. In this way, Sherlock had learned many word-concepts that would have been too abstract for a dog to learn without Transmission magic.
One of the benefits of having Sherlock learn how to communicate emotions was that he could often pick up on people’s emotional states just by smelling their scent. Sherlock was thus becoming a very handy interrogation assistant, as he could pick up on emotions that people might be able to hide from their faces.
Practicing loop magic was a bit trickier because of the regulations and the energy required. Obviously, Watson could not access the energy hoard of the investigator office for his private experiments, so the only way to get anywhere was to save up some energy over a week or so and then play with looping for an evening. He practiced it regularly, but progress was slow.
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The invitation back to the Tower of the High Magus arrived just as the investigators were having lunch. Charlotte saw Watson zone out for a moment, then he looked straight at her with a grin as he shared the news with her over a Transmission field, exuding enthusiasm the way a child might do, or indeed like Sherlock often did.
Charlotte Ritter and Watson Doyle in the style of Gustav Klimt, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
