“Well,” the two women looked at each other.
“We don’t really know,” the man said. “Marcus-that’s one of the owners of the bagel shop-said it was giants. He gets here earlier than anybody else to start baking—you know, like before the sun comes up kind of early. Freaked him out a bunch. It’s one of the reasons why he cleaned out the shop and closed it down.”
“Giants?” Zanie repeated, tone flat. “Are you serious? Like one of them stepped on the building?”
“Not exactly,” The man tilted his head from side to side and winced. “More like they smashed the end of the building up with these huge clubs they were carrying.”
Jeremy frowned, even more curious now about why they had only smashed one end of the building and moved right along. Before he could voice that, a question from behind the group of nurses or whatever the three of them were in their scrubs and whatnot, making them jump and scatter away from the door to see who was behind them. It was just Hazel and Caleb, who had come over to join the conversation.
Hazel was the one who had asked the question, a contemplative frown on his face. “How tall exactly were these creatures?”
“Um…I, um…” The man seemed to lose his nerve as he finally noticed the thin, tapered ends of Hazel’s ears. He also had a rather severe look on his face as he waited for the answer to his question, one which Jeremy had grown used to as simply reflecting that he was trying to puzzle something out but could probably appear quite intimidating to someone unfamiliar.
One of the women piped up. “Marcus said they were taller than the building, but not as tall as the light posts.” She pointed to one of the parking lot lights towering above the cars. “And about as wide as they were tall.”
“And they carried clubs?”
She nodded.
Hazel narrowed his eyes and all three of the nurses seemed to hold their breath.
“That sounds more like ogres than giants to me,” he mused, pulling out his little notebook of observations to note this down. “What else did Marcus say?”
“Well, that’s about it,” the woman’s eyebrows had lifted at the emergence of the notebook. “He kind of got into his car and drove away because he thought they might smash up the whole building.”
“I wonder why they didn’t,” Jeremy said, looking mostly to Hazel for an answer.
But it was the man who spoke first. “We’ve been talking about it a lot. And the only thing we can think is that the store at the end was vacant-up for rent- and so they didn’t find anything interesting inside and just moved on?”
Hazel, who was slipping his notebook in his pocket once again, shrugged like that sounded reasonable enough to him. If he knew enough about ogres to identify them from a description of simply about that tall and just as wide and swinging clubs around maybe he knew how to fight them.
“How long ago was this?” Jeremy asked.
“About a week,” the man answered.
The second woman, who’d said hardly a thing so far, snapped her fingers and pointed at Hazel. “Marcus also said they were doing some kind of magic, like levitating stuff around or something.”
“That’s right!” The man said excitedly. “They were moving the wreckage around without actually touching it after they smashed the roof in.”
Caleb made a strange sound. Thus far, they had not run into anyone else who could do spatial magic except for him, and now the first ones turned out to be ogres. He crossed his arms and Jeremy had to fight back a smile because of how put-out he looked. But then Hazel stepped in to adjust all their misconceptions once again.
“It’s possible that an ogre might be able to use magic to levitate,” he said slowly, “But unlikely. Very few ogres use much magic at all. I would bet, just based on how the wreckage looks, that it was wind magic, if anything. And there was probably only one using magic, a shaman or leader of their band.”
Jeremy had several thoughts which bloomed to life in response to Hazel’s musings. For one, he agreed with Hazel matching up wind magic with the wreckage, because it did look like a tornado had hit it, things flung off onto the parking lot, pieces of wood buried into the collapsed drywall as if jammed there with great force, and everything else twisted around inside of the hull of the building. That did not necessarily mean that someone using spatial magic could not create the same damage.
Caleb, had at one point been amusing himself by flinging soft pine needles at trees as though they were darts, similar to how the wood was sunk into the drywall. But, there was no way Caleb could levitate and manipulate that many objects all at once to cause such destruction. It seemed more likely that a small tornado or dust devil of some kind had been whipped up and churned the wreckage into its current state.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
This brought him to his second thought, a query about the nature of ogres. “Hazel, does that mean that fewer ogres have an affinity for magic than other creatures like, say…humans?”
Hazel frowned. “No, that’s not necessarily true.”
“But they can have affinities?” Caleb clarified.
“Are you asking if they have gifts?” Hazel asked, then corrected himself to use Jeremy’s term. “Unique Personality Traits? Yes, everything can have one.”
“But it’s not common for ogre’s to actually use theirs?” Jeremy asked, still more concerned about Hazel saying that only some ogres used magic.
“Yes, ogres are not the most intelligent beings. So, they don’t often become mages. In fact, it’s even more rare, than say…goblins. It’s unlikely to meet a goblin that uses magic, as well, but it does happen.”
Jeremy had a sudden flashback to the newscasts during the first couple of days when Chicago was faced with a goblin army marching through the closest gate, which appeared to be far more organized than the military had initially given them credit for and included certain individuals who could do things like create massive shields out of mana.
With that in mind, Jeremy asked Hazel, “So, this group is probably not something you could handle without the backup of a properly leveled mage, then?”
“No, definitely not.” Hazel agreed.
Jeremy sat back in his seat and rubbed a hand over his mouth, mulling that over. If even an elf, who was practically level six, thought he could not deal with this band of ogres, Jeremy highly doubted anything else that met them on their path would be able to handle them. The room lapsed into silence, aside from the low murmur of the news video still playing out of Zanie’s laptop. Then one of the nurses cleared her throat.
“Well, we have to get back.” She nodded in the direction of the medical practice. “We just wanted to see what was going on over here.”
The three of them began shuffling toward the door, which prompted Hazel and Caleb to step out of their way. Caleb held the door for them as they filed through, and asked, “Are you guys incorporating healing magic into your practice, yet?”
The three of them exchanged glances. “Well, there’s been some information about it coming down from the hospitals, but they are mostly encouraging us to simply be aware of it and continue in our regular practice.”
Caleb looked over at Jeremy with raised eyebrows, then scoffed. “What happens when the medical supplies run out?”
The nurses exchanged another meaningful glance. Jeremy wondered when exactly the hospitals had gone from the rapid and desperate scramble to learn and develop new healing spells, which he had seen several weeks ago, to warning their nurses and doctors—out in clinics and whatever this practice was, at least—not to use it for practical purposes.
“We know a little bit about magic in general and how to do the healing spells as safely as possible,” Caleb told them, then offered, “We could help you get started.”
“Actually,” the man rubbed the back of his neck, “we’ve already gotten started on that. You’re right about the supplies not getting delivered and its hard to listen to the general hospital system when they are not holding up their end by supporting us out in the clinic any. So, yeah, we actually have been practicing healing spells.”
“Oh, cool!” Caleb’s face brightened, “Maybe we can exchange notes?”
They still seemed hesitant, though, so Caleb held up a hand. “No, I get that you’re busy. You said you had to get back to work.”
“No, it is a good idea for us to exchange information,” one of the women stepped in, then waved her hand to invite Caleb along. “We actually aren’t all that busy since most people are staying at home. Some have even been cancelling appointments.”
She continued talking as she led the other nurses and Caleb, and Hazel, who hesitated but decided to follow them, over to the clinic a few doors down. Jeremy and Zanie exchanged a look, then she dropped her eyes back down to the news and Jeremy went back to his rock. He still needed something to hammer the dragon scale with.
He poked around in the back of the shop in hopes of finding something and came up with probably the most useful thing he could imagine—a hammer. It was tucked away with some other tools into what appeared to be a cleaning slash utility closet. Pleased with himself, he settled back down at the rock and held the dragon scale poised over the surface. After enchanting for a couple of days now, he’d begun to develop a pretty good eye for planning out the runes to make sure they all fit. After one last look, he committed.
Carving with the dragon scale was not all that difficult. He chipped off just a small amount of rock, leaving behind a thin white line while concentrating his mana on the tip of the dragon scale. At first, he went pretty easy, scared that if he struck the scale too hard it would shatter the rock or something, but after a little bit, it became clear that would not happen and he began to fall into a rhythm.
When he was about half-way through, a small black figure leapt up onto the table and broke his concentration.
“Oh, there you are,” Jeremy said to Atticus as she walked across the table and looked down at his efforts to carve into the stone. Then she put two little dainty paws onto the stone to step up onto it and sat right on top of the half-finished enchantment, tail curling around herself and eyes piercing his own.
She had been wandering off as they traveled the past couple of days, giving Jeremy hear attacks the first couple of times. But she always seemed to wander back in a reasonable amount of time, so he’d begun to worry less and less.
“Not that I’m not glad to see you,” he scooped her off the stone and deposited her into his lap, “But I’m trying to get this carving done.”
She did not seem to be perturbed by the change in location, circling and pawing around on his thighs a handful of times before settling down into a little black circle of fluff.
He kept chipping away at the stone, keeping a steady stream of mana concentrated on the tip of the dragon scale. After a while, he finally had a finished product. He ran his fingers over the runes, leaning down to look closely and make sure they were as precise and complete as he could make them. Then he turned to Zanie, who was circling the room and unplugging the phones and whatnot which were fully charged, and asked, “Will you go outside with me so I can test this?”