Work Text:
The blood mage stood by the rut in the side of the road, glowering as if the his gaze alone could wilt the puckered snapdragons. They were wet and red and glistening in the dew underneath the baleful grey-brown sky. He had a rucksack balanced over one shoulder like a lady’s handbag.
‘Archie.’ The seaman said. He was a well built man of about thirty and with his height he easily towered over the other man, scary mage or not.
‘Hm.’ He goes. ‘They never mentioned that you were so tall.’
‘I’m surprised you’re such a shorty, shorty.’ The mage doesn’t seem to do anything but before Archie knows what’s happening he is dangling around in the air, suspended by his shoes pirouetting slowly and his blood is going to his head. It’s in that configuration that he sort of floats around. He struggles a bit.
‘So, how many people died to fuel that spell?’
The mage mutters something that sounds a bit like ‘unscientific bullshit’ but Archie’s hearing is a little impaired by the fact that he’s hanging upside down in the air so he has to ask a second time and the blood mage, Maxie, switches from forgetting that haemodynamics exists to forgetting that gravity exists so Archie ends up falling to the floor. There’s a little upward tick in his movement when the landing is cushioned.
‘What kind of name is Maxie anyway?’ Archie frowns. ‘I have a Blackie, Spottie onboard and you’d fit-‘
‘Yes, yes.’ Maxie said absently but he shoots a look that said if-you-persist-in-aggravating-me-your-entrails-will-end-up-being-fed-to-your-family. ‘You really don’t want to continue that line of thought.’
‘Maybe I do.’
‘The last person who continued it ended up visiting the Ethics Committee.’
‘So who are we visiting now?’
‘The Ethics Committee.’ Maxie stared ahead, but Archie could tell he was scared of whatever being headed it. He didn’t want to imagine what kind of multidimensional beast of worship frightened a blood mage so he zipped his lips tight.
Nervously, they slipped in through the dark as night gates surrounding the Ethics Committee’s walled off habitations. Barbed wire that occasionally emitted lightning ran horizontally across the small gap between the walls and the roofed ceiling. From the slit, light blue light shone feebly in an attempt to bat out of the all consuming darkness. Archie occasionally jumped at sounds.
A grating boom emanated from the deepest section of the crypt after Maxie and Archie had twisted through dried up skeletons. Archie stopped behind one of the spider webs.
‘I’m stuck.’ He said painfully. ‘You go on without me.’
Maxie turned around and saw that Archie was indeed wedged between many thick filaments. Some were as thick as a person’s forearm.
‘Oh don’t be ridiculous.’ The blood mage snarls, crossing his arms. ‘For heaven’s sake, just wriggle out of those.’
‘I’m stuck. There are many frightening spiders. Oh Arceus, I think you’re going to have to spell me out. Oh Arceus, they’re coming for me.’
Maxie gritted his teeth against the urge to explain the difference between blood magic and pseudoscience and was successful. He held his ground, firmly, trying not to feel very scared as several not insignificant large rocks as he crossed back on his way to free Archie. Closer, he crept, almost close enough to rescue –
‘Boo!’ Archie shouted causing Maxie to go completely pale and almost lost his balance but Archie catches one upper arm before the mage can topple into the abyss into a deserving death. He laughed heartily the entire time at Maxie’s terrified reaction, although that quickly crumpled down to mortification and then into one thin clenched line of fury.
The blood mage furiously wrenched his arm out beneath Archie’s, shaking in anger.
‘Never do that again!’ Maxie shouted.
Archie wiped away tears with the back of his hand. ‘Maxie the Dark Lord. That’s about as fitting a name as Fluffy the Terrible. But actually, I was going to say that you were really brave for someone so scrawny.’
‘Thanks.’ Was the recalcitrant reply, the speaker struggling to hold down the urge to issue blatantly pseudoscientific threats that only worked on the uneducated like offering to transmogrify him into a potato, but he was a little touched.
A deep resonating sound from the earth heralds all the fury of a beast uncaged. From the ceiling falls great cylinders of material, shiny and glittering. The two travellers huddle in a rock formation with a flickering flame an ancient artefact that Maxie has probably procured from some distant land. The device contains a corkscrew that issues a small amount of controlled hydrogen periodically that uses a body heat mechanism to set it alight, although it could also be fuelled by bloodmagic in a pinch.
Words wrote themselves into the walls of the ancient, deepest chamber.
Maxie frowned. ‘It’s probably spelling some ancient death threat. After all, the Ethics Committee has never demanded anything except human lives and countless sacrifices.’
‘Who was your translator?’
The mage gives it a thought for a while. ‘Colress. He was a linguistic specialist. We highly valued his archaeological experience and his contextual definitions.’
‘Do you know any death threat that begins with P?’
‘Countless.’ The blood mage said.
‘What about P E?’
‘Well that rougly halves the sample size.’
‘Actually,’ Archie said, ‘Any that begin with P E W?’
This time, it finally catches Maxie’s attention as he beholds his multidimensional overlord. First, a bright blue and violet entanglement frees itself like a demon’s fire and then another limb, floating on a stalk and for the audience of the cowering Maxie and Archie expecting an karmatic and undefeatable demon coming to punish them from fire and brimstone a small head pops out.
‘Pew pew!’ Nebby said and does a little dance of victory, finally freed from the first and deepest confines of the bag, where it would eventually escape by whatever force necessary.
‘Well, it could be worse.’ Archie said. He’d leaned on the doorframe with his muscly forearms crossed and had developed a habit of doing that often. ‘The Ethics Committee could have actually existed.’
‘True,’ Maxie acknowledges with a reluctant drawl. The rest of his red hair peeped upward from the back of his robes. ‘Instead, I have to babysit a child for the rest of eternity.’ He was trying, unsuccessfully, to encourage Nebby to remain within his warded workroom but the instant he got close, Nebby vanished through a hole through which the fabric of space time could be viewed and reappeared outside a second hole conveniently positioned outside the workroom.
‘Well it isn’t too bad. I could help you out.’
‘I meant that I have to babysit you,’ Maxie said annoyed and then straightened. ‘First things first, have you ever heard of a wonderful thing called stem cells?’
The idea that he could finally indulge in an indefinitely long expository romp explaining the difference between pseudoscience and haemodynamic potentials excited him but nobody else in that room.