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This was bad. This was bad and there wasn’t much that Doctor Allilondra Yenith could really do about it, much to her distaste. But she was a professional, and as she floated across the communal work space she remained perfectly calm about the fact that she was going to die.
She was having a slightly harder time remaining perfectly calm about the fact that her team was going to die.
But she was a doctor in magical affairs, and as the magitech core couldn’t power itself this far from any ley lines, the lack of electricity also meant that there wasn’t anything that she could do. But Trey and Joyce hadn’t even known what caused the outage, and hadn’t been making making any real progress before Allie had decided that she should probably get out from under foot.
She pushed off of the wall with her feet and drifted into her living unit. Grabbing onto a bar on the wall to turn herself, she looked through her things for anything useful. Her tablet would still have some charge, and it had all her old books on it. Maybe there was something in there about functional spells in no mana zones? Pulling it off the spot that it was velcroed to, she flipped through some files. Some rituals could take energy from mundane sources, maybe she could use that somehow? All she would need is to do the work of about four competent mages working for a week within the ten hours that it’ll take them to run out of air. And since she didn’t have a working magicore, special reagents as well. Special reagents that were located oh so conveniently about 75 million kilometers away. No problem. At that point you might as well…
Oh. That… could work. Theoretically. Maybe. Probably not, but. But.
But, it isn’t just her. She has a team. Tracy, whose partner was so excited about the mission they gave them boxes of baked goods before launch. Trey, who was so kind and whose laughter was so loud and frequent. Joyce, who designed robots after the bees she kept and would explain circuits and code so coherently and excitedly. Yes it was a stupid idea and she would never do it. Should never. Even if it worked, the consequences would be beyond serious. But, they would be her consequences, and they would be alive. But if things went wrong they could also get hurt… But.
But they at least deserve a chance. A choice.
She launched herself from the far side of her room into the hallway, hastily floating through the dim emergency lights (only two hours charge, so only half an hour of light left). Across the workspace she saw two of her team looking through the opened panels on the walls at the exposed wires and hardware. She didn’t see Tracy, but they wouldn’t be far. Not that there was anywhere far to be, all things considered.
“Guys, I have an idea.” Allie announced. “I might know some magic crap that could potentially still work without the core.”
Trey looked away from his work and gave her a tired smile. “I thought you said that any magic that could be done in mana free areas needed energy from magical items, which you didn’t have.”
“It does need some… things, but it’s pretty flexible.” She averted her gaze. “Of course it’s obviously never been tested not on Earth, and data from Earth is still relatively minimal if we’re going to be honest.”
Tracy floated in from a side chamber. “What sort of ‘magic crap’ are we talking about here, Dr. Yenith? You’re being worryingly vague.”
She sighed. “You guys know how before I moved on to space stuff I was doing something unspecified for the government, right? This… this has a lot to do with that. It’s dangerous. And there is a very high chance it won't even work. And if it does work, there is a chance that it will go horribly wrong and we will all die.”
Trey snorted. “I don’t think that's really as big of a deal as it normally would be, Doctor. But I take it from the fact you even brought it up that you think there is a chance it might work?”
“Yes. It’s a small chance, but it’s there.”
“You still haven’t actually told us what you are planning on doing.” Joyce softly pointed out.
“I’m going to be frank with you. What I am am planning is very illegal. As in even having knowledge about it is illegal. And if it doesn’t work, and you guys somehow perform a miracle of engineering and get us home alive, I don’t want you to get into trouble as co-conspirators. If it does work there will still be consequences and I’ll tell you everything but… it’s better that I minimize risks while everything is still unknown. But I want your consent, as unfortunately uninformed as you all are. I am not going to do this if anyone is uncomfortable with me performing highly illegal unspecified rituals in this this tiny, fragile tin can that is all that protects us from the void.“
Trey was the first to speak up. “You know, we still don’t know what went wrong exactly, but… there are some fried circuit boards that are pretty vital, and we don’t have the parts to replace. Best case scenario is we could get life support up, but we’re still not going to be able to steer. We’re not going to be able to go home. I don’t exactly like what I think might be going on here, but I don’t see any other way for us to get back. And when push comes to shove, I trust you, doctor. You’re damn good at what you do. Can’t hurt to try, or at least not that much more than it will hurt to suffocate in the void.”
Tracy stared at her a moment before speaking. “I’m with Trey on this. If my life is going to be tangled up in any dark majyicks, I’m just glad that it’s your dark majyicks.”
“Joyce” Allie looked over at the mechanic, still fiddling with wires. “You’ve been pretty quiet.”
Joyce smiled at her. “Of course I trust you, you big dolt. What sort of crap do you need for this anyway?”
Allie stretched out her body, shaking her head a bit to clear it out. “Alright. Tracey, do you still have those glowsticks? And I’ll need something to… I think one of the spare air recycling units would do.”
Tracey dashed off to their living unit. Joyce gripped the footholds tightly as she slid open a large cabinet, pulling out an large and awkwardly shaped piece of machinery.
“What else do you need?” Trey asked.
“Actually I think that’s it. I have everything else in my unit. It’s actually a very simple ritual, although I’ll admit the materials I’m using are… unconventional.”
After Tracy meet up with everyone at Allie’s unit, holding a brightly colored bag, Allie turned to her team.
“This should be everything. I’m going to want to do this alone, if you don’t mind. If it does work and you actually saw the ritual there will be even more problems once we get home.” She said. ‘If this does work and goes south, I don’t want you to see me get eaten.’ She did not say.
Joyce drifted over and embraced Allie. “Good luck.”
And with that, everyone went back to trying to coax some life back to the ship.
Allie was alone.
Allie released the breath she had been holding, manually relaxing her muscles. Alright. She knew how to do this.
Funny how years of working at censoring and repressing all information on how to do this made it so she could perform the ritual from her head. Funny how literally the only symbol she knew by heart corresponded to the most dangerous and powerful result. Funny, how much what she was about to do went against everything she had worked for and believed.
It’s all so very funny she could cry.
She slid a dead monitor along the wall, revealing a large white board tucked behind it. She then grabbed the free floating marker tied to it and she drew a large circle with the help of a piece of string. A slightly smaller circle was added inside, and six symbols were drawn in the few inches of space between them.
She pulled up her tablet. There may not be any information on most of what she was doing, but protective and sealing wards were quite common information, and she needed any help she could get.
After a few minutes, she had finished drawing. She slowly snapped each glow stick, attaching them with gecko grippers to the whiteboard around the circle.
She breathed.
Allie took the bulky purifier from behind her, guiding it to the center of the circle. Now was the hard part. How exactly do you sacrifice something that isn’t alive?
Grabbing her athame she unscrewed the casing, revealing the filters to the world. Or the tin can. Void. Whatever. Doesn’t matter.
She breathed deeply. This was the worst idea she had ever had. She was going to kill everyone on board. She breathed. Try not to think about what would --no, what could go wrong. Try not to think about California, or -. She breathed.
Doing her best to keep her voice level, she spoke into the circle.
“Stella splendida, vos invoco. Vos invoco ut faciatis voluntatem meam. Dico nomen vestrum: Alcor!”
And with that she plunged her athame into the fragile filters, destroying the purifier.
******
The goat would not look away. No matter how hard he glared at it, it wasn’t going to give. He bobbed in the air, flaring his wings a little. The goat was not impressed. He didn’t even know how it had gotten here. Goats shouldn’t have the cognitive function to project themselves this clearly into the mindscape. And no goat should be able to project itself into his mindscape. A handful of his sheep were watching the proceedings intensely. Most of them had probably never even seen a goat. Well, maybe a couple in dreams they wandered through. Never a real goat. Real dream goat projection. The goat seemed surprisingly unfazed by the unnatural limbs, sharp teeth, ghostly wool and extra horns and eyes of the flock around it. The goat seemed pretty unfazed about everything.
Well he sure as hell wasn’t going to lose a contest of wills with a mere goat.
Something at the back of his mind pulled at his attention. Which was a bit odd, as it was kinda late for a Dippingsauce call, but maybe one of the kids couldn’t sleep and want to go over some math. With a flick of his hand he pushed the goat back into the material plane and focused on the summon.
Something was wrong. The sacrifice was far too powerful to be the insects or plants that the ‘cult’ would generally use. And the call felt really strange. It felt echoey almost. More distant than it should. Then again, no one who wasn’t connected to Cassie had actually been stupid enough to try to summon him since -
He decided to think about the actual summon instead. Maybe he had forgotten what a “normal” one felt like, it had been quite a while. He was having trouble getting to much info on it, small space, poor lighting, seemed pretty typical. What the hell, he would be lying if he didn’t admit that he missed terrorizing cultists.
*******
In the dim living space the lights around the circle flared bright blue. A plume of dark smoke spiraled around, growing larger and slowly taking the form of an impossibly dark figure. Large bat-like wings towered out of its lower back, and a single golden eye shone brightly from the center of the head.
“Ẃ̀H͝҉O̧͢҉ ̨D́͡͡À͠RE͠S͏ S͢͠um - wait are those GLOWSTICKS? Seriously?” The demon stared down at the circle surrounding him. “I mean at least they aren’t scented but still. That's just… ugh.”
He let his disdainful glare travel away from the offending tubes. The sacrifice seemed to be some mechanical thing. He supposed someone had used their inhaler once so it wasn’t totally unheard of. There was something really off about all this, but he couldn’t for the life (hah) of him figure out what. Must be something about the area. He was on a white board? That’s a new one. Black ink at least, none of that pretending that red pigment was as classy as blood. The marker drifted through his vision, floating slowly around the corner of the board pivoted by its string.
“So, foolish summoner” Wait. The marker was floating. That isn’t normal, is it? For human things?
“What is it that you desire?” He finished slightly distractedly.
No it definitely wasn’t normal. Humans did have the magical capabilities to enchant something like that but why would you? What's the point? Anyway, enchantment would have a small dent in the local mana field and there was… there was no mana around? At all? He could barely sense the nearest ley lines. Oh. That's what felt weird, it was quiet. There wasn’t the omnipresent buzz of magic crowding his head. There were hardly any auras even. Anywhere. How could there only be four people in his visual range?
It was pretty nice actually, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had this little demanding his attention. (Didn’t want to think about the last time) The only distraction around was the yammering of the summoner.
Oh, right. The summoner. He supposed that he could bother actually paying attention to what they were saying. It was pretty impressive how well they were containing the turning cloud of deep cerulean fear that swelled inside them. He glanced up in the direction of their voice.
They were floating on the ceiling. Humans didn’t float on the ceiling, that was his thing damn it. How could they even begin to do that without magic anyway?
He guessed it was time to admit that this wasn’t exactly a cult in some abandoned warehouse. Instead of old rotting shelves and boxes full of questionable items the walls were lined with the clearest starscape he had seen in years.
Oh. Holy shit.
Dr. Yenith abruptly stopped her somewhat insincere apology for the lack of candles as Alcor the Dreambender, Eater of Souls, Destroyer of California, Lord of Nightmares, most dangerous of all known demons causally floated out of the heavily warded circle, causing the whiteboard to smoke slightly as he passed over the edge of the circle. (He is known to be impossible to hold. Highly unpredictable. This is why you spent 20 years making sure no one would be stupid enough to pull him into our world.) He drifted to the window. She felt her carefully contained fear start to boil over into full blown panic.
“Are we in SPACE?” Alcor turned to her, grinning impossibly widely. He had two sets of teeth, Allie noticed. Like a shark. The black void that was his body seemed to be evaporating, leaving behind a more human-looking man, in a suit so outdated it would be absolutely hilarious if the wearer wasn’t the single most deadly entity known to man. The golden eye seemed to fade, and with the blackness gone two wide, almost human eyes could be seen instead, although the golden pupils set on black were still were vivid reminders of how inhuman he was.
“Oh man that must be why I can’t sense any ley lines or anything, there’s no life or souls to generate the energy for them. And of course there are no auras, there aren’t people! Oh man the glowsticks are actually pretty genius, what a great way to get around not having access to fire. This is The Sedna, isn’t it?” Honestly if she didn’t know much, much better Allie would say that the demon looked an awful lot like one of the excited children she would encounter at various publicity stunts. “Then you must be Dr. Yenith! Gotta admit, I did not expect that I would meet you, of all people, in this manner.”
“Yes. um.” Allie pushed down the surge of panic at the demon knowing her name. She was practically a celebrity. And he was close to omniscient. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Focus. “Alcor. I would like to discus the possibility of a deal. With… you”
He remained quiet, grinning at her like this was the coolest thing that he had ever seen.
“Our ship, the Sedna, is having serious malfunctions. As things currently stand, we will not be able to make it back to Earth alive. Obviously we find this to be a less than ideal situation and I was hoping that you would be able to help get my team and I back to earth, alive, without any additional illnesses or injuries in exchange for some amount of payment in return to be decided upon here.” She took a deep breath “I would just like to state that I am not willing to give away my soul, nor the souls of any human as payment. I am willing to consider many other forms of payment.”
“Hmm, safe return of everyone over what, 47 million miles? That dooooooes sound pretty expensive.” He exaggeratedly stroked his chin. “But you know what might be easier? I could just repair the damage. Couple computer parts are a bit of a smaller order all things considered. You guys go on your way, finish what you were doing, and I probably wouldn’t even need to c͢on͝s͜u̷͏̢me̸͡ y͢ou̧r̴̢͠ ̸̕v̴ęr͞y̸ ̀҉͏èss͠҉en͏c̵̢̀e͏.”
“If you just reset the system to how it was before, wouldn’t the problem just happen again?”
“Nope! At least, probably not. You got really unlucky with a bit of space debris to trigger this in the first place. And sure, there potentially could be another large particle that would collide with your ship, but that would be pretty unlikely and the chance of it actually hitting a critical spot is astronomically small.”
“What would this cost, exactly?”
“Well lets see…” He looked around the unit, looking over her personal affairs. “Lets say that old diary in your case over there and…”
He stared her directly in the eyes, grinning widely. “A Martian rock.”
“What? Why?”
“Well you see the diary has a lot of emotional attachment from being important to so many people and I can take that energy for my own purposes.”
“No, I get that, I was more wondering why you would want a rock.”
“Maybe I just like rocks. Why am I getting my motives questioned by a species that has made things like gender segregated pens and banana specific storage containers?”
“But I don’t have a martian rock yet.”
“Think of it like insurance. Part of the deal will be unfulfilled until you get to Mars, so I have a vested interest in not doing anything that will cause you to die horribly in the next two weeks. Then once you get there you find some time to make another summoning circle and finish giving me my payment. And before you ask: no, I will not use this opportunity to do anything that will have a noticeable effect on you or your team for the foreseeable future, outside of what is necessary to complete the deal. That sound good to you?”
“Alright.” She looked him in his eyes and held her voice steady. “I will give you my grandmother’s journal now and a martian rock during the duration of my stay on Mars, in exchange for you returning the ship to the condition it was before it was hit by space debris. You also agree that for the payment you will not do anything that would sabotage our mission, or have a noticeable effect on myself or anyone involved with the Sedna mission.”
“Change that to intentionally do anything with a notable effect and that sounds perfect to me” He smiled. “I’m not going to let you having some nightmares or whatever break my end of the bargain.”
“That would make sense I guess.” She knew that she should probably be trying to figure out any possible loopholes in all of this but her mind was too preoccupied with reminding her to breathe.
Alcor reach out his arm to Allie.
“Do we have a deal?” He asked, as a smooth layer of glowing blue warmth spread evenly along his hand.
He retracted his arm, staring at the even distribution of flame. “Oh, that's really cool! Shame you didn’t have any actual candles to use. Fire looks awesome in space.”
“Well even ignoring the hazard of lighting fires around concentrated oxygen, small flame orbs tend to burn out pretty quickly. They don’t pull oxygen into themselves like they would under normal conditions." Allie paused as she realized that maybe this wasn't the best time to habitually explain everything, "er, anyway, do we have a deal?”
“Oh, right.” He looked away from the odd fire surrounding his hand and reached out, taking hers. As they shook, a bright blue light flashed from where her grandmother’s journal had been stored, and the quiet room was filled with the gentle hums and buzzes of many electronic devices powering themselves on.
“Well Dr. Yenith, it has been a pleasure.” His silly floating hat dramatically tipped itself. “I look forward to seeing you again.”
And with that the glowstick briefly flared brightly before going out completely, leaving Allie alone in her living unit once again.
She sat in the bright light of her room for a moment breathing. That was not what she had expected. She had encountered a demon before when she was younger. They had showed up just too late to stop the summoning. It had only been a mid-power demon, but it had been everything that you’d expect. Big. Shouting. Demanding the absolute most it could. Making threats and attacking with its words. Even the cult who had summoned it, who had summoned it before, where clearly scared of it. And yet Alcor, who had turned the side of a continent into an island chain, just accepted her stated limits without any fuss. He didn’t even try to convince her that it was selfish of her to keep her soul at the expense of everyone on the ship. He just offered her a solution that was honestly preferable to just instantly going home for practically nothing. He didn’t even need to give her anything, he wasn’t contained by the circle, he easily could have just killed her if he wanted.
She suddenly understood jack shit.
But understanding didn't matter right now. She still had a responsibility. She had to explain what she had done.
She slid her door open and headed to where Trey and Joyce had been working. As soon as she floated above the hallway to the living units, she was greeted by three pairs of eyes. Before she could say anything she found herself flying back against the wall as Trey hit her like a missile.
“You’re okay!” He said, hugging her close. “We were so worried!”
“Yeah, I am okay, aren’t I?” Allie started laughing. It started as a quiet chuckle and quickly turning into deep hysterical sobs. “Jesus fuck I’m actually okay. And so are you guys. We are all actually going to survive, probably.”
After a few minutes of catching her breath she looked at the others. “So. I guess it’s time to spill, then. The promised explanation. That ritual I performed... I summoned a demon.”
She gave them a moment to process what she had said. Waited for them to tell her how stupid it had been. How she had endangered everything. How she had violated their trust.
They nodded a little a waited for her to continue.
“You guys seem pretty calm about that.” She said, slightly confused.
“I mean, we kinda figured,” said Tracy. “There isn’t exactly that much illegal magic in the first place. Necromancy’s out, as you would need something dead, and we couldn’t figure out any way for it to be useful in this situation anyway.”
“Actually,” Allie interjected “Necromancy isn’t technically illegal, it’s just extremely highly regulated… but that, that doesn't really matter does it...”
Tracy laughed lightly. “Well, the more you know. Anyway, that leaves what? Mind control? None of us could figure any way for that to help, and even if it could you probably wouldn’t have bothered asking for consent to take away consent. So that left two major possibilities: teleportation or summoning a demon.”
“Teleportation isn’t illegal, it just isn’t possible.”
“Well” Joyce perked up, “I figured that teleportation might be possible, but the knowledge of it might be controlled because it could be actually dangerous, raise troubling morality questions about what counts as ‘you’, or be a threat to government control. It didn’t seem like the most likely thing in the world, but hey, we had ten minutes and little to do besides talk about what you might be doing.”
“You guys really aren’t bothered by this?” Allie asked, slightly disbelievingly.
“Allilondra” Tracy met her gaze. “We were going to die. Now we aren’t. You clearly didn’t do this because you wanted to and you saved our lives. Why would we be upset?”
She had about six different thoughts try and reach her mouth at once and managed only a few incoherent sounds. Why wouldn’t they be upset? How could they not understand how much she shouldn't have done that?
“Anyway” they continued, “you said there would be consequences. Why don’t you tells us about what exactly you agreed to?”
“Well basically we agreed that he would fix what had gone wrong with the ship, which was apparently caused by a collision with some freak space debris, and in exchange I would give him an emotionally charged possession of mine and,” she broke eye contact with Tracy “and that I would summon him again on Mars and give him a rock. But! The wording was very clear that he wouldn’t do anything that could cause us harm or alter the mission when I finish the deal.”
“At least that probably means we’ll make it to Mars. Kinda a weird request though.” Tracy smiled. “All in all that sounds like a hell of a bargain. I was expecting something more drastic than that.”
“Yeah.” Allie said, “honestly I didn’t even bother hoping that I could get off with so little. Still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some loophole to be exploited.”
*******
Alcor sat cross legged above a vast brown expanse, holding a small rock. He was on top of the largest mountain in the solar system! He was on Mars! And now that he had established a connection between here and the mindscape, he could just go to Mars whenever he wanted! And he had gotten to talk to (well, scare the shit out of but you take what you can get) Dr. Yenith herself! The astromagi!
This was, by far, the coolest thing to happen to him in the past 150 years.