Spider’s Design: Tuesday
For once, the sun is up. It shines through the factory window, illuminating the motes of dust that dance in the air like fireflies. That same dust, by consequence of its ubiquitousness, illuminates Assasssin’s threads, stretched across the room. And so, rows of tiny crawling legs move more like ant than spider, spanning the length and picking it clean of the revealing debris. More of them leap through the air, snatching specks like flies.
William measures the gunpowder contents of a cartridge carefully with implements meant for cooking. In the corner of his eye he detects movement, and glances to it. A tiny shape with glistening eyes looking up at him, like a giant pair of binoculars. As if scanning the area, the spider turns and examines the cartridge. Then, back to him. Eye contact with a spider.
Something plucks at strings inside of William head, and he closes his eyes, setting down the measuring tool. The fingers of his hands clutch the uneven, rust-stippled surface of his workbench and his unkempt nails bend from the force of his grip. Phantom images play in his head of every direction the tiny creature could go- and there are many indeed. They stop, flicker, restart, double back, play over themselves like an overplayed record. Through the half-formed iterations one emerges, stretching across his consciousness. Better to lull it into a false sense of security. In this fantasy his finger reaches out and settles against the top of its body, as if in affection. Then, without a moment’s notice, crushes its liquid innards out onto the table.
Opening his eyes, William stares at the wall. The world hasn’t changed to resemble the pointlessly cruel fantasy, not this time, but the guilty finger digs itself into the table aggressively. Riding out the wave of his compulsive calculations, William takes several deep breaths. There’s no demon in your head. Only what they put there. Live wires in a soulless machine, seeking a target.
Resisting leaves beads off sweat on William’s brow, and he wipes them off with the back of his head. Forcing a smile, he looks down at the arachnid still staring at him. “Guess you’re kinda cute.” There’s one part of the passing fantasy that lingers, and William reaches out uncertainly, resting the tip of his index finger against the spider’s back. With tiny, tiny motions he pets it.
“Exuberant!” the loud, but no less monotone cheer comes from somewhere behind him, and the surprise yanks a cough out of William’s lungs, too quickly for him to cover it up with the spider-petting hand and feign ignorance. The other runs over his scalp as if to smooth back hair that is no longer there, instead tracing the ridges of scar tissue not currently hidden under rubber and powder. “You are coming to realize the joy of spiders, Master?”
“Wouldn’t go that far,” William mumbles. His temples pulse with the heat of a ghost’s impatience. Pathways inside of his head vibrate, their friction the cause. He’ll need to burn some of it off soon. As good a time as any for some experimentation. “The ones with the little binocular eyes are kind of cute. The rest can stay the hell away from me… please.”
“Impish! Eheheh,” her laugh is like a poorly read script by a flailing theatre kid. “Master likes jumping spiders. I will accept this small victory for now. But I will make you love all spiders by the end.” Whose or what’s end, he doesn’t feel like asking. Rather not hear the answer.
Delicately finishing the job of his latest cartridge, William does his best to ignore the girl watching over his shoulder. She’s perched on strands of webbing that shouldn’t be able to hold her, as if she could choose to be selectively light as a feather. Turning the finished bullet over on the table, he uses a pin to begin scratching a line into the surface. “You name your spiders, right?”
“Intrigued. Yes, Master. What is your reason?”
“What’s one’s name?”
There’s a long pause. “Cautious… Saghir.” Stepping off her webbing, Assassin slides to his other side. “Inquisitive. For what reason?”
Shifting his pin as he continues to scratch, William inscribes the name onto the bullet. It’s not an accurate representation of the Arabic, or whatever it is the word is from. But he translates it as best as he can, and the intent gives it meaning. Connection. It’s not something he knows, not in the rational parts of his mind. It’s more like a hunch, guiding his experimentation. “Want to try something,” the non-answer given, William opens his weapon and loads the bullet. “Bring Saghir.”
Beyond the streets of London, out into the wild. Not the real wild. The neat, trimmed wilderness that borders the city. Somewhere a weapon can be fired without too many nosy bobbies coming to ask too many questions. Leaping right from stand to sprint isn’t very smart, though. So William tosses a ball into the air, catching it when it falls back into his palm. Another toss, and then it vanishes from the air in front of him.
Hassan had moved faster than he could see, snatching the baseball out of the air. Grasping it between two fingers, she examines it curiously. Assassin is written across the dirtied off-white surface in pen.
“It’s a baseball,” William explains before she can ask, holding out a hand for the ball. Only after feeling the stitching along the ridges does she return it to him. “They’re used in a sport called… baseball.”
Letting out a puff of air from her mouth, Assassin drones, “Impatient. This time could be spent scouting or making preparations. Why are we here?”
“This is preparations. It’s practice,” reaching into his sleeve- the sleeve of the new suit Assassin had made, threading it together in barely a day. Its material is extremely durable, like a set of cloth armor. William withdraws his wand. It’s a lame-looking thing, black with a white tip, the essence of an amateur stage magician doing his first performance. So, fitting in a way. Touching the tip of the wand to the baseball, William focuses his intent. A small trickle of power is drawn from him into the wand, enough to trigger its own internal circuitry. On the surface of the ball, a pinprick of light appears and then vanishes. The first half of the activation is done.
Looking at Assassin, William gets a wry grin, one of the few times he’s managed a smile. “Think fast.” Behind the eye holes of her mask, he can see her brow shift. Winding up, he twists at the last moment and whips the ball out into the trees. Then, he points the wand at her.
There’s a line between them, the ball and the girl. It carries her name. Or more of a title, maybe. Loose, near-infinite spool there to stretch out between them as necessary, but now something catches the string between its fingers and holds it taut. Sucked down into the line, Assassin vanishes from the world.
It takes more power than William expected, and the rush of mana from his body into the wand mixes with the endorphins released by the act of smiling, leaving him elated. For such a tiny thing, there’s a lot of mass to her, a lot to fit into that imaginary line. But he has the power to spare, and she does.
A fraction of a second later, the baseball falls to the ground where she once stood. It takes Assassin what seems like two strides to smoothly land beside him from wherever he’d tossed her. “Glee! An enjoyable rush, this spell of yours’, Master. Can we do it again?” Apparently the feeling of slipping through space is more novel than running faster than the eye can track. William is still wearing his grin, and he likes to think she’s got one behind that mask too.
Sweeping low to pluck the ball from the grass, William gives it another toss up and down in the air. “Yeah. I was thinking this could be useful.” Useful on their mission, which he still doesn’t really get. Just that they’re at war, with other pairs like them. Except most of them are going to know more about cooking up wizardry than him, and by Hassan’s estimation most of them will be stronger than her. An underdog fight could be fun. Just say fuck it and live for today, maybe that’s best. “Let’s give it some more tries before we try something harder.”
Permutations and practice.
Throwing the ball, then shoving Assassin to its place and allowing it to keep its own momentum, launching through the air from the point she was standing.
Both of them moving in different directions, and swapping places.
Both of them remaining in their original place and swapping only the direction of movement- that one doesn’t work. The two targets need to switch places, William notes. The wand isn’t that flexible.
Having her run at full speed, then swapping them and launching the ball at speeds that lodge it into the trunk of a tree like a bullet loosed. That particular test leads to some time spent digging it out, and leave the horsehide quite damaged. It gives William plenty of confidence in the next test, however.
Popping open the cylinder of his revolver, William makes sure that it’s arranged correctly. He clicks it back into place and pulls back the hammer, priming it to fire the spiderly named bullet. Wand in the other hand, he establishes the connection with the bullet first. “I imagine by now you’re… figuring out what I have planned,” he comments conversationally. His voice is tired, panting, the rapidfire tests leaving him feeling winded. There’s plenty of mana still, no doubt. He feels it coursing just behind his skull, from a vast reservoir refilling faster than he can spend it. It’s the moving of it through him and into things that’s not so easy on the body. Like hard exercise. “You got that spider?”
“Hesitant,” in spite of the word she uses to describe her attitude, Hassan complies. She holds up her palm, where she’s wearing silk gloves, and spiders begin to bloom from the material as if from thin air. Her mouth continues moving, probably some concern about not splattering her precious spider into a tree, but William is staring at the glove instead. He can draw the connections where otherwise they might be unclear to the naked eye; they emerge from some other space to which they are briefly connected, ‘imaginary space’ just like the lines the wand pulls things through.
“I want that.”
Assassin takes sudden offense. “Bristling! You want to smush Saghir into a tree?”
“Huh?” staring uncomprehending into her face, William processes the side of their interaction he’d been neglecting and shakes his head. “No. I want that,” he points. “Those gloves. I want some of those.”
Brushing her hair aside, a completely superfluous action since she can actively control where it goes, Assassin dismissively states, “Unconcerned. These are nothing special. They do not produce my spiders, they only store.”
“No, I want that. The storage thing, I want that,” he insists. “Actually, does it work on my suit jacket and pants?” Assassin cocks her head. “Letting me store or unstore things from my back and shoulders, for example. Can the whole suit be connected?”
“Considerate. Perhaps, Master. We can look into it when we return. Though,” one hand behind her back, she lets the jumping spider out onto a tree, “Condescending…” blunt is a word he’d use. “You really should not be in the field, Master. You can supply more than enough mana for me to take extended operations afar. You are the weakness in this partnership. As such, I would suggest that Master remain in London.”
“I’ll look into it,” William responds sarcastically, then takes aim in a random direction, in the air so the bullet arcs instead of ramming into a tree, and fires. Seconds later, a bullet rips into the ground where the spider had been, throwing up dirt. Somewhere in the far distance, a little spider will be gently floating down like a leaf on the wind. Or something. Shouldn’t be smushed into a tree, William estimates. “Saghir fine?”
“Relieved… Yes,” there is a brief pause while Hassan disappears from sight. Moments later, she reappears, probably with an extra spider in her glove. The probably becomes a definitely when she holds it up to her face and coos at the reappearing thing, “Adoring~! My little Saghir. Jumping spiders make the best scouts you know, Master, such good eyesight. But they are not common here. Insistent: Most valuable! Not expendable!”
Turning his weapon to an empty chamber, William holsters it. “That’s why I did the small tests first. Didn’t want to blow the little guy to pieces. Now let’s head home. I got something else to show you.”
“Confessing. I have been nosy, Master,” Hassan announces, watching William stand smugly in front of a large rectangular shape covered in a blanket, which had been sitting in the corner of one of the factory rooms for the past couple of days. “I have taken a peek. Inquisitive; what is so special about a box?”
Grabbing a furl of fabric at the edge, William flips the cover away, revealing a wooden crate. Its intention would be plain to see to anyone familiar with modern stage magics: a trick casket, with holes in the sides for swords to be inserted, only for the occupant to ‘magically’ disappear into the other one. “This is the secret weapon we’ll use to travel to Oxford and back. See, I’ve already got one’a these bad boys over there. The matching set.” Slapping the side, William squats down to try and lift it into a standing position. After letting him struggle for a good few seconds, Hassan reaches down and rights it with ease. Sniffing to himself, William smooths his suit jacket. “Thanks.”
When he opens the door and motions Assassin into the crate, she looks askance at him. “Doubtful. Do you believe this will work?”
“One way to find out.” With the air of someone of little expectation, Hassan steps inside. William starts to follow, but he realizes how little space there actually is. Sunk cost fallacy, might as well give it a go anyways. It takes some awkward shuffling to fit both of them inside, and then he closes the door. “Prepare to be amazed,” he hypes himself up, tapping the inner wall. White glow briefly illuminates Hassan’s mask, fearsome in the dark, then fades. Closing his eyes to the faint lights the sword-slits let in, William focuses on that strange new sense.
Stretching between everything, a web of interconnected relations. Imagined fingers pluck and feel at them, tracing out the thick, aged strand between two boxes, stretched long and far. It feels like a dense rubber band, made solid by the years the two points spent upon the magician’s stage. Solid against William’s probing. Now comes the hard part.
Point and shoot is the easiest method of using the wand. But William suspects that it can shoot through more than just physical space. Trying to align his physical and spiritual bodies, he angles his hand in the air, pointing it down the length of the stretched rubber band. Hesitation leaves him clutching the wand tightly, biting his lip. Get a move on. No way to learn except to pull the trigger. Pushing himself ahead, he activates the wand. A tiny mote of light, imaginary light for an imaginary side of the world, sails out along a parallel path to the connection. Hanging behind it, a faint thread, like the safety line of a spider. William can feel it pulling at his mana supply more and more the further it gets, to sustain itself. Before it ever arrives at a destination, it fizzles out.
The principle is sound… William takes a deep breath and tries again, focusing more mana into the point of the wand before he fires. This time it launches faster, farther, until he detects an impact and the wand leeches power through his hand to execute its final function.
Cold air suddenly hits William, and he opens his eyes. The factory is all around them, and he can feel a strange air pressure beneath his feet, a place where something should be, a placeholder for something coming. He and Hassan have not moved at all, by the time the opposite box appears around them. “Well shit.”
“Snobbish,” Hassan mocks him quietly, “I told you this would not work. Your hubris,” she laughs, slowly and deliberately. “Amusement. Your hubris- to think that you could tread so near to Sorcery with a mere stage trick.”
One half of the experiment had failed, but William’s mind is already awash with ideas for how to use his new targeting method. “Mhm,” he pays little mind to Hassan’s jest at his expense, and pushes the door. It rattles, but remains shut. At first, he’s not sure why. Then after they stand there for half a minute he realizes, “I think this one is latched shut.”
A crowd of spiders handles a dustpan, carrying wooden splinters from a broken magician’s box. Willaim steps over them, carrying a rolled up paper in his hands, and spreads it out over a table next to the loom where Hassan is spinning more of her magical Rumplestiltskin thread. “Alright. Here’s my new plan to get to and from Oxford.”
Hassan’s only reply is a small noise to acknowledge she’s listening, with zero interest in whatever Mundie solution he’s come up with. “Hmph,” William grunts to himself, feeling spurned. With a finger, he traces a line on a map of London’s rail networks. “I’ve recorded thee schedules of these trains to and from Oxford. Some passenger, some cargo. Should be easy to slip onto either one.”
“Unenthused. Master, I can run faster than these ‘trains’. If you must travel, I could carry you.”
The very idea makes William flinch, his mouth curling into a scowl. “I don’t think my pride could take that. Besides, if I bump my head on a tree along the way I’ll just die.”
Hassan tips her head to the side. “Acknowledgement. You are correct.”
“Great,” rolling up the map, William tucks it into the inner pocket of his jacket, alongside his notes on the station schedule. “I should scope the place out before the freaky blokes start rolling in. I’ll hit it up tomorrow.”