Chapter #27Lessons Given and Lessons Learned by: Nostrum   (Co-authored by Seuzz)
At a secluded spot under a tree in Potsdam Park, you wolf down your steak and cheese sandwich, choking a little on a bite that was just a little too big.
Robert slams you in the back, and you almost spew out a mouthful. “What’s the big idea?”, you bark.
“That sandwich’s too big for you", he laughs. "You should have got the kids’s one!”
You glower at him. It's going to be a pain, isn't it, working with him, particularly if he keeps acting like an idiot.
“So, tell me about the stuff you’ve been working on,” he says.
"It's serious stuff, Robert", you warn him. "It's not something to be joking around with."
"Sure."
"I'm serious! You're not taking a shop class at school are you?"
"No."
"Well, maybe you should—"
"They don't offer one, Will, they—"
"— because this stuff is dangerous, a lot more dangerous even than a shop class. It could do worse stuff than chop your fingers off. If you're gonna be serious in a shop class, you gotta be serious about this stuff.
Robert gives you a look. You give him the same look back.
He sighs. "Fine. I get you. It's dangerous and—"
"And you need to take it seriously. This isn't stuff to goof off with."
"You made your point, bro!"
"So you need to do what I say. Don't backtalk, and don't just grab things and try playing with them."
His expression curdles with contemptuous skepticism. "Do you even know what you're doing?"
"More than what you know", you retort. "Okay? Okay?" you repeat when he only nods.
"Okay", he sighs. And he takes your hand when you put it out for a serious, promise-making handshake. "So can we get on with it already?"
You snort to yourself. This is going to be a disaster, you think. But if he isn't going to listen to the warning you just gave him, he won't listen to any other warnings you try to impart.
So you wipe off the mustard from your fingers and pull out the three books you've been working from: the primer on sigils that you stole out of the professor's office; the notebook he had been using to summarize his experiments with the Libra; and the notes you've been making.
"Okay, that book I was working with?", you start with Robert. "The one I got at Arnholm's, and Dad and I did that experiment out in the garage?" Robert nods, and you're gratified at least a little to see his expression tighten to one of rapt interest. "Well, it's a collection of spells for making things—"
"Like that mask I put on back in the basement."
"Right."
"That was cool."
"Uh huh." Focus, Robert, you want to tell him. "Now, the way it works, the way you make it, you have to put together a bunch of ingredients and mix and burn them. But the real magic is in the sigil that the book gives you to use."
"The what?"
"Sigil. It's like a magical symbol. A circle with all kinds of, um, arcane symbols and runes written around the rim. Here, like this." You open up the primer and point to one of the sigils that it contains. (It was the primer, in fact, which explained to you that it is a sigil which does the magic, not the stuff you use in the spell.) "When you burn the ingredients together, you have to do it in a bowl that's set onto a sigil that's written in the book, and the magic goes from the sigil into the bowl and into the stuff."
Robert frowns. "You mean the magic isn't in the ingredients?", he asks. "It's not in my stuff?"
You roll your eyes. "No, like I told you, it's in the sigil. You need the right ingredients for the spell to work, but it's the sigil that does the real work."
"So do you have a copy of the sigil that makes masks?" Anxiety etches his face.
You shake your head. "That's why I'm doing this research. I'm trying to figure out how to make it. And some others."
His face lights up. "So you can do the spell!"
"Right. Dad made me sell the book to that university professor. But when me and Taylor broke into his house to get Lucy out, we didn't find it, but we did manage to steal a bunch of his notes. And I got this book here off him too"—you indicate the primer—"that explains how to make sigils. I just got started working on it, but I managed to make a simple one that— Well, here, let me show you."
You open up your notebook to a blank page, and using the primer for guidance you copy the first sigil in the primer. Robert sucks in a sharp breath a couple of times as the symbols you draw change and metamorphose into new shapes under your pen, and you feel yourself plumping up with pride. "Now watch," you tell him when you're done. You set a coin in the sigil and run your finger around the rim of the sigil three times. The coin flips.
But the smile falls off your face when Robert only snorts. "That's no biggie", he says. "Criss Angel does more awesome tricks than that.”
"No, but it's like in math", you retort. "They show you the easy stuff first and build up to the complicated stuff."
Robert shrugs. "Okay, so what comes next?"
Well, that's the problem isn't it? You rake your hand through your hair.
"I've been trying to figure out how the sigils work", you tell him. "What I mean is, you saw how each time I drew a new symbol inside that box, over the old symbol, how it, like, folded and twisted up into a new shape? I think it's like when you do math—"
"You already said that."
"Shut up and listen. I mean, it's like when you start with a '9' and then you add a '7' and then you get something new, you get, uh, sixteen." It is 16, isn't it? A little sweat pops out on your brow. It would be embarrassing to be caught out in an elementary arithmetic error. "But the sixteen contains both the nine and the seven, and you can work backwards with, uh, subtraction to get the nine and seven back out again. Well, I'm trying to figure out how to take a finished sigil and get the original symbols back out again."
"Why don't you just try making the sigil that makes that masks? Isn't that what you want to do?"
"Sure. But I also want to be clear on how this stuff works. Because like I said, it's dangerous!"
Robert sighs again. So you add, "Besides, I don't know what the starting symbols are. The primer here gave me the symbols I had to use to make the sigil. See—" You flip open the primer again. "They're not just shapes. They have meanings, like words. Like this one—" You point to one of the symbols, beside which is written "=coin". "That one means 'coin,' so the finished sigil knows to flip a coin. And this one means 'flip'."
"Yeah, I can read", Robert says. "So what you're saying is, we can't make masks without the sigil, and we can't make the sigil without the right thingies like these." He points to the symbols in the primer.
"Exactly!"
"Tch! It's too bad your professor didn't write them down someplace."
You feel as though someone has hit you between the eyes with a rock, and your scalp feels like it has caught fire. "What did you say?"
"I said, it's too bad your professor—"
But you're not listening anymore. You snatch up Blackwell's notebook and with shaking hands flip to the page with PERSONA written at the bottom. There's a line of symbols scratched deeply into the page. One of them instantly leaps out at you—two barbed hooks connected by a bar. It comes back to you that you saw that same figure in one of your very vivid dreams.
"Robert", you say, your voice filled with suppressed hysteria. "Look at this symbol." You point to the hooks. "Go through the primer and see if you can find it anywhere." Robert stares at you, then takes the primer. You concentrate on the professor's notes, flipping between the pages. They are each set out in the same methodical order: cryptic lists of ingredients and cryptic instructions, and sets of symbols, some of them extremely long, taking up most of the page. You stifle a cry when you recognize another one of them from the spell that makes the coin-flipping sigil.
"Here it is," Robert says, and shows you a page near the back of the book. Two barbed hooks, connected by a bar. There's no translation for it, though, and you have flip backward in the book before you find it again, this time with a meaning. Grasp is what the book says it means.
You feel yourself trembling all over as you turn back to the professor's notebook. It looks like he did write the sigil down for you, by breaking it up into its basic parts.
--
You and Robert move from the park to the municipal library before continuing, and together you pore over the primer and Blackwell's notebook, and making notes of your own. Not all of the symbols that the professor wrote down are given a meaning in the primer, and you can't shake the dreadful feeling that Blackwell's own list might be incomplete. But it does look like you might be able to use the professor's notes to duplicate the sigils.
Robert has the same thought: "Bro, you think we can make that sigil thingie, to make some more of those masks?"
You don't know how to answer. Beyond your own nagging doubts, there's the warning you'd tried impressing on him. This stuff is dangerous. What could happen if you tried making the sigil, and you messed up? What could happen if the professor himself has made a mistake?   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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