Disclaimer: I don't own the characters from 'Roswell' or the rules of the Wizard's universe.
Couples: All three traditional CC couples, though Michael/Maria might be late to the party.
Category: Adventure/Drama
Rating: TEEN for now.
Summary: As a teenage wizard in Roswell, Max Evans has seen some incredible stuff. But he wasn't ready for what would happen next when his lab partner got shot, and only a healing spell could save her life.
Author's Note: Okay... this is not really a typical crossover. The main character names and personality traits are taken from Roswell, and the canon rules are taken from Diane Duane's 'young wizard' series of novels, starting with "So you want to be a wizard." I don't expect that any named characters from the Diane Duane books will show up, this this is sort of like an AU exercise.
Max, Isabel, and Michael are all human (and wizards,) but since aliens do exist in the DD canon, they could show up just when you least expect them! And I hope that people who aren't familiar with the Diane Duane books won't be shy about trying this fic - I'm trying to make it as accessible as I can for Roswell fans of all stripes. Max will be doing his best to tell you what you need to know about the rules of wizardry, so that you can follow the action!
"So, Maxwell, what do you think of Liz Parker, really??" Michael needled me as we sat in the Crashdown cafe booth.
"Umm... she's cute," I managed to say, about as nonchalantly as I could manage.
Michael raised his eyebrows. "*Just* cute?"
"No, not JUST cute -- she's really smart too," I shot back with a smile, and Michael shook his head. I met his gaze head-on, thinking about all that we'd been through. Michael had been my best friend for eight years, pretty much ever since my sister and I met him - she offered to share her lunch with him, because he didn't have any cafeteria money, just... well, that's a long story and I'm not going to get into it now.
We probably seem like an odd pairing. I'm the son of a relatively rich lawyer, and Michael's an orphan - his father was a construction worker who got knocked off an office tower when he was five, and then his mom was killed in a traffic accident five months later. No next of kin could be located, so Michael ended up in the foster care system, and right now he's living with a guy named Hank Whitmore down at the town trailer park... in fact, I guess you could say that Hank was trailer trash. (Some people have tried to apply the same term to Michael himself... but most of them regret it sooner or later.) Hank himself treats Michael kinda like a sack of trash, and that disappoints me, esepcially since Michael won't take abuse from anyone else in his life. He could use his art to protect himself from Hank so easily too, except that he doesn't want to do anything that could attract attention to us and spoil the secret.
"Okay, your turn," I said, trying to deflect the fifth degree back on its source. "What about Maria DeLuca? I've seen you looking at her. Got a little sweet spot for your own waitress, maybe??"
Michael sighed. "Well, she's definitely hot - especially with the short hair, though she was really pretty even before she chopped it all off." He sighed slightly. "There's something about her beyond her looks too... a kind of energy, a hint of attitude." He sighed meaningfully, even if I couldn't put my finger on just what the meaning was.
"A hint?" I laughed. "They call her hurricane DeLuca. I think that's more than just a hint," I commented.
"Oh, come on Maxwell. You should know better than to put much stock in gossip," Michael said. "But here's the thing. Maria has never - not once - looked in my direction without rolling her eyes. After a little while I start to notice things like that." He sighed and went back to his plate of Saturn rings.
I sighed a little bit myself, feeling for Michael's angst. Just then it started to penetrate my awareness that an argument was starting up a few tables away. Two big, kinda mean-looking guys, talking about money in heated tones. The sound of a chair falling away as one of them suddenly jumped to his feet, and then the other. A voice that I didn't recognize called out 'He's got a gun!' Somebody at the next table to the fighters hurried away.
I was looking right at Liz when it happened - not quite sure, unless it was just some kind of impulse to make sure that she was all right. But she definitely wasn't. Just as I spotted her, a huge thundercrack of noise rang out through the entire room, nearly knocking me aside, and a very ugly spurt of dark red suddenly imploded in Liz's uniform, right around her upper stomach, on one side. Her body swayed slightly, and she got a confused look on her face that still makes my heart break when I think about it. Because she hadn't yet figured out what had happened. She couldn't grasp the idea that she had been shot, and was probably only a few seconds away from death.
I'm lucky that I figured out so fast. Not panicking isn't exactly in the 'luck' category - the past few eyars have gone a long way towards training me to keep my head in a crisis, to do what needs getting done. I hurried forward, only one thought uppermost in my head. I had to throw caution to the winds, and act fast, or Entropy would claim a human life today. A pretty girl who's in my biology class.
Liz had crumpled into a nasty-looking sprawl by the time I was approaching her. Michael was moving too, and that was good. Maybe he'd try to cloak Liz and I with a small wizardry to keep anybody from noticing anything. I know that he still keeps enough supplies around for a quick perception alteration, wherever he goes. But that was only a fleeting flash of thought through my mind at that time. The rest of my attention was focused on the requirements for my own wizardry.
Healing is my specialty as a wizard. At sixteen, I'm a little bit on the young side for specializing, but I'm not getting any younger, and the Advisories have suggested that if I'm comfortable sticking to my specialty as much as possible, the more good I'll be able to do as I get older. Healing wonds of any kind - broken bones, cuts, scrapes, and yes, gunshots - doesn't require any physical supplies in the usual sense, and I'm familiar with the spells that I wouldn't need to stop and prepare anything to help Liz. That just left the two big requirements.
First requirement - the wizard performing a healing must willingly take the pain of the injured party onto him or herself. That might be a tough one, or not - it was hard to tell if Liz was really suffering or not. Second requirement. The wizard must shed his or her own blood. A kind of symbolic sacrifice.
Another stroke of luck, if you want to look at it like that - Liz had knocked aside a board with plenty of kitchen implements from the diner counter when she fell, and now they were scattered across the floor near her. I found the sharpest knife that I could in one second, hoped that it was mostly sanitary, and drew the blade into the palm of my hand. A wave of pain rushed up my arm, and more blood started to drip down onto Liz's uniform, to join her own blood that had welled up from beneath. Racing against time, I said the words of the wizardly Speech that made up the spell that I needed - mostly silently, but a few of them came out as mumbles. That didn't matter. And at the same time. I opened myself up to the pain - not just the pain in my own hand, but every bit of pain that Liz herself was feeling.
As I worked through the words of the spell, (nineteen words, fifty-five or so syllables,) the pain grew inside me, making it harder and harder to concentrate. Any muffed syllable would ruin everything now - there was absolutely no time to start over. I could tell that much - The damage to her internal organs, the blood loss, was already nearly too much for my spell to repair, and if wizardry failed for an instant everything would get much worse. As the spell drew to a close I looked through her to find out what had happened to the bullet. There was an exit wound - it wouldn't be inside her anymore. That meant I could worry about it later.
With the last word of the spell, pain burst me so hard that I probably blacked out for a few seconds. Guess that's something to remember - though not too hard, or maybe next time I wouldn't have the nerve to try. Liz had looked peaceful enough as she lay there that it had been hard for me to believe that there was much pain. But Michael was shaking my shoulder. "Time to make ourselves scarce."
Yeah. But first... I shook my head to clear her vision and look down at Liz, who was just opening her eyes. Reached up, took a bottle of ketchup that was still on the counter above. Meant to crack it against a chair, but it burst in two just from the grip I had on it. Wild. I dumped the sweet red sauce all over Liz's uniform, covering her blood, my blood, and obscuring the bullet hole. "You spilled the ketchup when you fell," I muttered, not sure if I was expecting Liz to believe that, or if I was just giving her a cover story to tell anybody else. She stared right at me for a second, an expressive stare that made me feel funny inside. Then Michael was pulling me away, and I went willingly, knowing that it'd be best if we weren't around there any longer. I snuck one look behind as Michael hurried me out the front doors of the dining room, and saw that Liz was standing up now, hands linked over the worst ruined part of her uniform, and still gazing wonderingly in my direction.
Once we were in my Jeep and heading east, I turned a bit of attention to Michael. "What kind of sense alteration did you use?"
Michael stared at me with about the same look he'd use on a Denesev who'd invited him to jam his bare feet into the ground and enjoy a nice 'root.' "Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Maxwell? I didn't cast any kind of Wizardry back there." Oh. Guess that'll teach me to make assumptions. "Come on - it would have been a waste of a perfectly good converter."
Oh, right. Michael's favorite broad-sensory illusion spell requires a kind of tiny vibratory ocilloscope converter, and each one is only good for one casting - something in the mechansim gets cracked at the end of the Wizardy's duration. "And what are you so worried about? Nobody in there would notice or believe a Wizardry no matter what they saw - except for Liz, and me doing an illusion wouldn't do much good on her."
Hrmm. Michael might have a point - that I was feeling nervous about Liz's reaction to what had happened, and getting grumpy with Michael even though he couldn't have shielded me from that part of the situation if he tried. "Maria might have noticed," I said lamely.
"Not after I told her to call the ambulance," Michael said. "Sorry, but it was the only diversionary trick I could think of on short notice."
A thick silence settled on the Jeep as I drove home.
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I parked in the driveway, and Michael and I went inside still without any words being spoken. I was feeling drained from the energy outlay of the healing spell - fixing all of the havoc that the bullet played with Liz's system and making sure that she wouldn't die from the blood she lost had a price, and then there was the lingering effects of the pain on top of that. Michael seemed to be lost in his own thoughts, and I didn't feel like following him in there. We came into the front hall and got a good look at my sister and her boyfriend making out on the couch.
"Hey! Come on, Izzie, I thought that we had a deal," I complained out loud, ducking back towards the front door so that I didn't need to see any more of Alex's tongue. "You guys wouldn't do that out in the shared rooms of the house while I was around."
"Well, how exactly was I expected to know that you were around?" Isabel asked out loud. I still wasn't looking, but presumably her lips were not still locked to another pair of lips, so maybe in a few seconds it would be safe to come out.
"I get the impression that hearing a car pull into the driveway and immediately rushing for cover is customary," Michael pointed out dryly. "Not that I've ever had the opportunity to try it myself, but the idea seems quite sound. If the two of you were so singlemindedly absorbed that you didn't even hear us... then you have nobody to blame but yourselves.
"We thought that you two would be downtown for, ooh, for about an hour longer at least," Isabel argued, not really adressing Michael's point. "You must've hardly even had time to order your food. What... did something go wrong?"
"I don't want to talk about it," I muttered sourly.
"I... maybe I should really be going," Alex said, his voice betraying some nervousness. I felt some sympathy for *him*, actually. Alex seems like a good guy, and I know that it freaks him out when Isabel and I spat like this, superficially over her relationship with him. It's nothing personal about him... I guess I'm just a little freaked out by the idea of my little sister, (younger than me by a whole six minutes,) usually so calm and in charge of her life, going totally gaga over *any* guy. (Not that she's even been paying attention to guys as a species for that long, but you know what I mean, I think.) She's so deeply in love or something like it, and I guess I do worry that she's going to get her heart broken. She'd say that I don't have a right to get overprotective about her... maybe I don't...
I headed up to my room, started on some English homework, and then picked up my Wizards manual and tooled around in it a little while - logging a journal entry about what had happened, and then reviewing the specifics about healing gunshot wounds to make sure that I didn't miss anything in the heat of the moment. I was deeply into the detailed effects of temporary cavitation on the inelastic tissues of the liver, when there was a soft knock on the door. I looked up and saw that Isabel was there in the doorway. "Umm... I, uh, I thought I felt a familiar twinge of power. It was, um, was kinduv hard to be sure under the circumstances."
I smiled at the opening line and spent a moment just looking at Isabel. Not like staring at her or anything, though... well, I do have to admit that she's a beautiful girl. Nearly as tall as me, eye-catching golden blonde hair... (actually she dies it, when she was younger she was almost as dark as me, but it LOOKS perfectly natural on her.) Isabel has the kind of face that Leonardo da Vinci would have loved to paint, and the kind of figure that Hugh Hefner would probably like to immortalize in something more glossy. Right now, she was wearing typically stylish casuals - a black blouse with white detailing, designer blue jeans, and brown leather boots. "Yeah, umm... there was a fight in the cafe," I said as casually as I could. "One of them had a gun, and the other tried to take it away, I think. In the struggle - one of the waitresses was shot."
"Oh, my god." Isabel rushed into the room and sat down on the side of my bed. "Is... was it Liz? Is she okay??"
"Pretty much, yeah," I said. "Err, that is, it was definitely Liz, and I think she was in pretty good condition when we left." I hefted the book. "May need to try to find some excuse to check out her liver, just to be sure that she doesn't get complications in a few months... or a few decades. But I saved her life." And I sighed heavily.
"And... and that isn't good news?" Isabel probed.
"Well... it's better than the alternative, of course," I disclaimed. "I... I guess I'm just wondering if she realized any of what actually happened to her. If she'll get up the nerve to ask me about it at school." Something else suddenly occured to me. "If somebody's going to find the bloodstained bullet. Dammit, I knew I forgot something when Michael dragged me outta there."
Isabel smiled. "It's going to be okay somehow. Count on that." She stretched slightly. "I've got a slightly different kind of work that you can help with if you're up for it."
"I dunno, I feel like shit," I mumbled. "What is it this time??"
"A tree... I think it's the big pine five blocks left," Isabel replied. "It's been having nightmares for weeks now... and apparently, when a tall tree gets recurring nightmares, that's bad news." She sighed. "I'm going to go in and see if I can help, but plants are weird. Thought it would help if somebody gave me a lifeline to pull on if things got too messy."
I smiled at the thought. Isabel's own particular talent seemed to have to do with dreams... lucid dreaming, travelling mentally into the dreams of others... that'll probably be her specialty, though she hasn't focused on it so deeply as I have with healing. In case you're wondering, Michael hasn't really specialized much yet, though he seems to spend a lot of time on offensive and defensive spells. Isabel sometimes teases him that he's going to end up tapped as an Advisory if he doesn't pick a major - which Michael doesn't like the idea of because he doesn't see himself as an authority figure or having much patience with other people asking him very basic questions. He's got a point... but then, maybe Isabel will be right in the end. Much stranger things have happened before.
"Pine tree dreams?" I repeated. "Umm... not sure. Were you going to go in soon??"
"Pretty much as soon as I knew that it was asleep... I guess." Isabel shrugged. "But it probably doesn't matter so much. A normal healthy tree can apparently dream for over fifty-eight hours at a stretch - did you know that??"
"Umm, I have to admit that I did not," I said, sighing. "Okay, which lifeline did you want, or did you have any idea yet?"
"Oh, index under 'Retrievals and connectors,' secondary mindscape variant," Isabel said casually. I flipped to the comprehensive index, (which usually took up about a fourth of the fairly substantial book,) and noticed the subtle sighing sounds of the Wizard's manual's contents shifting after I touched the entry Isabel had names, and a page number appeared.
Wizard's manuals do this a lot, by the way, in case you didn't know much about our Art. They're pretty magical for their own part, and switching their contents to better serve the needs of their owner is one of the most common ways that this shows up. Rewriting pages with new content, or even adding new pages and removing them again when they're no longer needed. That's why my index is so back - it's actually referencing a base of text that would fill up the biggest library in town. Oh, and there are also functions where you can change the pages themselves... like the journal entries I mentioned a little while back.
So I flipped quickly over to the page number indicated. "Pretty simp..." Isabel started, but I cut her off with a wave and read up on the entire entry before turning to her. "Why is there an extradimensional component in here? We surely don't need th..."
"Oh yeah?" Isabel interrupted me in turn, and arched a well-groomed eyebrow. "Are you absolutely, one hundred percent convinced that tree dreamscapes don't have an extradimensional component?"
That shut me up for a moment. I knew, vaguely, that some people's mindscapes had aspects that extended them into other worlds, (and the question of where in our world the dream worlds of everybody fit is apparently a very complicated and much-debated question,) but I wasn't sure about trees. "Okay, well, give me a little while. Just want to listen to some tunes and maybe fool around on the computer."
"Kay," Isabel agreed. "Just don't waste too much energy on that thing. Entropy's running!" And with that parting shot, she took off again.
----------
I did help Isabel with her dream lifeline later that night, though she wasn't sure how much it had helped. Struggling under the drain of helping Liz and Isabel both, I didn't sleep well until about two AM, and then managed to turn off my alarm clock without waiting up, so I had to rush through showering and changing, and skip breakfast just to make it to first period on time. (Hardly seems like it's worth the effort, but that's high school for you.)
Fast forward a little bit. Lunch time. As horrible as the cafeteria food at West Roswell generally is, I ate more than usual of it, because of having missed breakfast. Busy wizards need plenty of energy, and diet is a part of that. Wasn't going to find anything especially healthy around here, but even hydrogenated oil is good energy as long as it gets used. Well, anyway, after eating, and trading some unimportant small talk with Michael, I headed out to the edge of the school field to get a little bit of fresh air before biology class... and seeing Liz again.
Liz is my class lab partner - we ended up sitting next to each other the first day, when the official seating chart was drawn up, more or less, but it's been fun working with her the past two weeks and change. Both of us pretty much know the simple experiments that we've been doing backward and forward already from after school junior scientist sessions, so we've had a chance to talk about stuff while going through the motions... never anything really personal, but you can never tell when a discussion of music or popular tv shows will happen to hit on a reference that betrays a little more depth.
So anyway, I was wandering around the edge of the schoolyard, when behind me I heard a cat meowing. *Greetings, honored Healer, and well met on the path of the Powers. I come to you in need of aid.*
I turned around as the meaning of the Speech came to me, delivered in the feline recension. The cat was small and a little on the skinny side, but not a ktten anymore - maybe fifteen or sixteen months old, his coat a pretty golden-bronze with white patches. As I looked at the kitty, a few unusual things about what he had said penetrated. He had spoken directly in the Feline version of the Speech, not in cat-speak, Ailurin, which I could have also understood through Wizardry, ('via the Speech,' as some wizards say.) That was kinduv unusual, though not as rare as a non-wizard human knowing the Speech. And the formal phrasing was one laden with tradition: *not* a wording that a cat wizard would have used, (that would have probably used 'I am on errantry...' to start off,) but evidently someone had trained this cat well in old-fashioned courtesies due to a Wizard.
He wasn't lying about being in need, either - one of the hind feet dragged behind him, totally useless, and the other one seemed to be half lame as well... when he moved, he was pulling himself forward only by his front paws, which had to be incredibly difficult. There were a few nasty scrapes around his hind flanks and rump too. "Oh, Poweres among us!" I wasn't looking forward to having to do another tricky healing, but there was no way I'd have the heart to turn this customer down - even if he hadn't said hello so politely. In fact, refusing a plea for help is always tricky as a wizard, and can come very close to breaking the Wizard's oath... we sign up for this gig to serve all life, to defend and heal, whenever it's the right thing to do - not when it's convenient or easy. The power of a wizard doesn't come for free, and this obligation is part of it.
I stepped closer to the cat and sat down, near enough that he could come closer without too much trouble. *Hello, there, guy,* I said, in as close an approximation as I could come to the same dialect of the speech that the cat had used, though he probably understood english fairly well. *What went wrong??*
*One of those big SUVs drove right over my butt while I was sleeping,* he replied. *And if you're asking why I was sleeping anywhere that's drivable... well, that's kinduv a long story, and some carelessness on my part. So, how about it, Doc?? Can you do anything to help??"
*No rest for the good of heart,* I said. *By the way, I'm Max.*
*Yeah, I've heard of you, though haven't made the acquaintance before.* Hmm... that was interesting. I haven't spent that much time with any cats before - so who told this one my name? *I'm Moawah.*
*Alright then, let's have a look at you.* Moawah had crawled close, and after extending his hands close for a moment and waiting for a reaction, Max picked him up carefully around the mid-body and examined the wounds around his hind legs and 'butt.' It was pretty bad - broken bones, a little bleeding, and... *Come on, you're holding out on me man. Cars are nasty, but there's no way that a rubber tire would give you scrapes like that. And... and what happened to the tip of your tail??* It definitely looked like some of it was missing there.
*Umm... I ran into a few human kits on the way to find help,* Moawah admitted, sounding very nervous about saying that. *They, umm... they weren't terribly helpful. Let's not talk about that part.*
For a second, I was furious at the idea that american kids would torture an already wounded cat like that... but somehow I couldn't muster up much surprise. *Alright, let's get started. I, umm, I don't think I'll be able to restore what you lost from the tail tho.*
*Ahh, that's okay. Easier to keep it up perpendicular this way. Just make sure that it won't start bleeding on me or anything.*
*Alright.* I tried to focus on the healing spell, but something about that comment was nagging at me. A cat keeping his tail up perpendicular... *You're a TS Eliot fan?*
*Well, I haven't really read him, but I saw some of 'Cats' and quite liked it. Again, it's a long...* subdued yowl of pain, *...story.*
*Right, sorry.* But 'the naming of cats' was running through my mind as I prepared. 'But I tell you, a cat must have a name that's particular / A name that's peculiar, and more dignified / Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular / Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride??' Eventually I had everything sorted out again, except for a way to shed a little blood again. Looked over at Moawah. *Can you help me out here? I need to shed my own blood to complete the healing, and I don't have anything sharp on me.*
*You probably don't want me to scratch you with these guys,* he said, waving a claw regretfully. *Cat scratches infect people easily, don't they??*
I laughed. *Not THAT easily. I'll go and get my hand washed as soon as you're better." Maowah still hesitated. *What, come on, are you a sissy-puss?*
*Okay, okay.* He reached out with one claw and delivcately tore a bit of the skin of my forearm open, just enough to let a few drops of blood well up, bright and red. I repeated the spell, not quite the same variant that I'd used on Liz but remarkably close, and the world seemed to crouch close, listening, curious as to what I was asking of it. (Most times the world is more of a leaner than a croucher - maybe this time it was just because I was working a spell while sitting down.)
And the sensation of pain came through again, not a fiierce burning agone like Liz had felt, but more of an awkward dull numbing ache in my legs and lower abdomen... the sensations still strong and compelling enough that it was hard to remember that it wasn't really my legs that were ruined, that I'd be able to stand up just fine once the wizardry was done. Finally magic let us both go, and Moawah jumped to all fours, testing his hnd legs, waving his tail back and forth in nervous expectation, and then raising it in an arc of pleased approval. I wasn't sure if I was interpreting his tail gestures through wizardry or just ordinary human common sense.
Moawah turned to face me, and then did a startled take. *Uh-oh. Sorry doc, but I think you had an audience.* Uh-oh indeed. I turned around, toward the chain link fence, and just beyond, stood Liz Parker, her eyes wide. "You... you saved that cat," Liz breathed, in a breath of a whisper. "His... Its legs were lamed, I'm *sure* they were. And you fixed them!!" She took a deep breath. "Did you fix me too, Max??"
I tried to say something, but my own voice might as well have gone to stay inside Liz. "And... and you were TALKING to him, in little mews and humms of cat talk. He spoke, and you understood him, and talked back. I... it sounds crazy, but I can't think of any other explanation."
"That's not really cat talk in the usual sense," I said awkwardly. "But yeah, we could communicate with each other - probably best to leave it there for now. Moawah, Liz Parker, Liz this is Moawah. He, umm... he came and asked me for my help." I sighed, as Liz seemed to be turned completely speechless by this turn of events. "Umm... I actually need to go and wash this arm now," and I showed Liz the scratch, "and make sure that it doesn't get infected." That wasn't just a good idea - I needed to follow through on the promise that I'd made to Maowah, even in such a relatively trivial way.
"We'll talk more, umm..." I suddenly realized that by the time I'd finished with cleaning the small wound, it would be time for class. And there was no way that we could talk about wizardry surrounded by a roomfull of biology juniors and a teacher who'd rather have classes in theater or spanish lit than anything in the sciences. "Umm... after eighth period this afternoon??" I waved by to Maowah, who waved his tail happily and took off in the opposite direction from the school., which I started heading towards. Liz paced me on the other side of the fence.
Liz looked very doubtful about that. "You aren't going to try to avoid me or sneak away without telling me what's GOING on?" She looks really cute when she's pissed... long straight dark hair, five feet and two inches of slender but feminine figure, big emotive dark eyes... she was wearing a dark pink t-shirt and blue jeans today, very simple clothes, but they set off her mesmerizing beauty perfectly...
I took a breath and tried something. *I promise to tell you what happened yesterday, and what you need to know about me, once we're finished with our classes today,* I told Liz in the most common human recension of the Speech. Or at least, that's the gist of it, because I had to be a lot more precise than that, or I'd have to tell Liz about what everybody in the galaxy was doing for all of the time period from midnight to midnight yesterday, and so on. Fortunately, the speech lends itself to such precisions, and the vow that I intended to uphold wasn't much longer in the speech than the simplification I gave is in English. I watched Liz carefully for her reaction - it's always a little interesting to watch the effect of the speech on people who didn't know that it existed.
"Whoa," she breathed. "I... I *understood* that, even though it wasn't in a language that I've ever learned." She shook her head, looking a little overwhelmed. Maybe I should try not to make things any more confusing for her... but that would be kind of hard to do while keeping my promise, come to think of it. "And... and I believe you, in a way that's so complete that it seems strange."
That's an effect of the speech, usually. It's impossible, (or at least dreadfully stupid,) to make factually false statements in any variant of it, and if you make a vow in the true speech, you need to at least attempt to follow it through, even if you're not a wizard. Most people who hear the speech recognize the inherent truth of it that underlies those principles, though some hearts and minds are so clouded with deception that they don't know inherent truth even when it's biting them.
"I'm curious, what did it sound like to you?" I asked. "Aside from what you understood it in. How did the words and phrases sound?"
"Umm... hard to say," Liz admitted. "Very foreign-sounding and flowing, kinduv elegant. Maybe a bit like Greek or Turkish?"
"Hmm." I considered that, and didn't really have much of a reaction to it. "Okay, just wondered."
So I went and washed my arm. Thought about trying to find a bandaid, but there really wasn't time, and the air would probably do it good. I hurried to class and took the seat beside Liz, wondering if she would say anything out of the usual.
I was waiting a little while. The teacher gave a distinctly half-hearted spiel about primordial life and one-celled orgamisns, and then we each took a few little drops of water out of a big jar at the front, and tried to spot some protozoans inside the drops, under microscope slides. (I'm not quite sure where the original protozoans in the jar had come from, but they seemed to be doing very well - there was no trouble in finding them - we both made a lot of notes, and Liz pulled out some blank white typing paper and did a few really good freehand sketches of the tiny amoeba-like critters.
I stayed at the microscope longer than Liz did, wondering about these beings, so unimaginably tiny that they were totally out of my frame of reference, that I couldn't even SEE them without using a contraption capable of bending visible light rays to a precise pattern... or unless I employed a wizardry to do something similar. But they were part of the forces that I served, the power of Life itself, just as much as an elephant or a Rierhate Galomphornuss - or a person was. Maybe creatures like this were some of the first to ever be created on Earth, or to develop... wizardly sources seem to be uncertain whether life evolved and called forth the Powers to protect and nurture it, or if the Powers were begotten first and created temporal life. (I've even heard theories that it was Life that caused the big bang, which seems a bit circular, but oh well.)
As I stared at them, it seemed as if I could faintly hear them whispering one word in the speech, but couldn't identify the meaning in it, if there was one. All of a sudden Liz sighed softly and I looked up. "Do you ever wonder about... about life forms from other planets, Max? I mean, aliens are kinduv a joke here in Roswell, but I wonder about it occasionally. If their cells are at all like ours, I mean."
"Hmm." I had to think a bit on this one. Now, I've met people from very different planets... not too many, because my practice of the Art hasn't taken me that far from Roswell... in fact, most of the aliens I've met have been ones that have come here, actually. I go to the moon - just about every young wizard goes to the moon sometimes to hang out, it's kinduv a rite of passage thing. And I've been to Mars once on business - a few Denesiv on vacation got attacked by Granthar mercenaries... (don't ask me why wandering tries would want to vacation on a planet that's all dust and craters,) and I was tapped for a hastily assembled rescue mission, mostly in case they needed medical assistance.
"I, umm, I don't know, but somehow I doubt it," I admitted. "The universe is so amazingly complicated that most aliens would probably look different from us on the inside - and on the outside too," I said. "They'd have to, to live in other environments and other ecologies and survive. On the other hand... there are probably similarities just where you least expect them - the possibilities aren't infinite, and sometimes there's probably only one or two ways of getting the job done. If you look at the stars and galaxies - they're just about all we can see of the universe outside our own backyard, and there's incredible variety in some ways, and a lot of surprising repetition in others. Probably the same way with living beings."
"Yeah, that's a good point," Liz admitted. For a second I was wondering if she'd give me a followup that would be harder to handle... something more specifically about aliens in Roswell, maybe. Perhaps she was going to, but then the teacher came around, and said in a bored tone that if we'd already finished the regular assignment, perhaps we'd like to try an extra level for extra credit... adding other environmental factors to the protozoan medium and observing their reaction. I looked at the list of available 'factors' with a sinking feeling... acid, chlorine bleach, ammonia...
"Most of these will kill them," I said flatly.
"Well, maybe. Don't you have to do the experiment to find out for sure?" Ms Willemin said, with that completely uncaring smile, and went over to try to keep Pam Troy from roasting her protozoans by lighting the gas supply - without hooking up a bunsen burner. I looked up at Liz and smiled a nervous smile, wondering if she'd think I was being silly or crazy. I knew that the protozoan's didn't matter much to my own life, but I'd got an odd sense of connection to them from my observations, and I was feeling extremely iffy about the ramifications of my oath and carrying out an experiment that would kill them. I know, technically the oath doesn't say anything about how you interact with other life forms when you're NOT using wizardry, but that was loophole-ey. It's still against the spirit of my art, as I see it, to kill even so simple and unintelligent creatures just for the sake of an extra credit grade, and making an observation that would just confirm what we already knew in theory.
"Hmm," Liz said, looking at the sheet more closely. "Well, we could try the drop of diluted fructose syrup. I have to say, I'm not sure if that would hurt them or help them, but it seems worth a shot." She looked up at me and smiled, and I felt relief that she seemed to be looking for a way out for me. I scanned over the list myself, (just to see if there weren't any safer alternatives,) and nodded.
"Let's go for it."
The smallest drop of diluted syrup that we could make wasn't much smaller than the protozoan water still on the slide, but when we capped the slide again and put it under the microscope, it was clear that the impact had been a bit of a disruption to their culture. Most of the protos had been splashed away from where the new drop had landed, but none of them seemed to be in extreme difficulty - in fact, some of them seemed happier and more content with their lot now, though it was hard to say if I had decided that from visual observations or my wizard's senses. I let Liz take a look through the scope.
"It's working," she said. "I think that they're eating the fructose sugar."
"Me too," I agreed. "They'd better not have too much sugar and get all hyper."
Liz laughed. "Yeah, it's not really a balanced diet for growing organisms. They need ionic minerals, and amino acids, and..." Liz was still peering into the microscope eyepiece, and she cut off suddenly. "Oops, my mistake, I guess they're not growing much bigger after all."
"What? What did you see, Liz?" She turned away, but not before I caught a hint of a pink flush on her cheeks. "Liz Parker, are you embarassed because you caught a protozoan reproducing itself? Dividing itself, I guess I should say."
She turned back. "It... it sounds silly when you say it that way, but yeah. I mean, if they have any equivalent to... to the sort of natural functions we feel private about, it's that. I realize that they don't really feel any particular way about it, but..."
"Oh, I'm not absolutely certain about that," I said softly. Liz looked up at me in surprise, and I continued very quietly, not wanting anyone else to overhear this. "They don't have feelings the way that we do, anything like, but I'm not sure that you can be alive at all without having some sort of... some sort of reactions to the fundamental processes of your life, and how are those different from our basic emotional drives? Ours involve complex neurons and brain chemicals, but that's just a detail." I shrugged. "I think he's - or they're - proud of what just happened, in an odd way."
Liz shook her head slightly. "Max Evans, you're kinda weird." Soon enough after that, it was time enough to clean up - we put our protozoans back into the jar, along with whatever fructose syrup was left, for all of their friends to munch on, and Liz slipped an eyedropper full of some fluid that I think had amino acids and mineral salts into the jar as well. Then, well, we had to go our seperate ways, as I headed off to spanish lit. (Ms Willemin, eat your heart out!)
But Liz was waiting for me at my locker at the end of the day. In a way, that felt kind of weird... I couldn't help but play another scenario through my head that would explain WHY she was there - something that involved... well, involved dinners and movies, and kissing her. Oh well. I put my books away, and then led the way off to my Jeep, neither of us really saying much. I was glad that Isabel hadn't ridden to school with me, and hadn't talked to me about getting a ride home with me. Once we had left the school building far behind, Liz groaned and said, "Okay, level with me, Max Evans. Are you some kind of weird alien in human form, whose extraterrestrial powers gives you the ability to either save people's lives or kill with a thought? Sorry, but I've just gotta know."
I nearly crashed into a parked car.
TO BE CONTINUED...
