Scene 6 - December 19th

Interior Higgins Museum, Early Morning

Maxwell Copperfield

It was easy enough to slip into the Higgins Museum - while its main doors were opaque and it had no windows on the ground floor, the second level of the old building had windows. I simply stepped into a dimensional pocket and out of it within the museum.

There was no need for stage haze today - my careful expeditions into the museum over the last week to determine its security system told me that there were no laser wires - at least, not in the areas I was going to. Instead, I had to take slow, careful steps - the museum was protected mainly by sound detectors. They were mostly meant to pick up the shattering of glass cases, but if they were sensitive enough... I wasn’t sure how sensitive they were. Probably not very, since there would be a night guard around somewhere and another in the security office, and whoever was on duty tonight was unlikely to have a light step. Just in case, however, I had vanished my shoes for the moment, and replaced the thin socks which usually went with my suit with thick woolen ones to further muffle the soft sound of my footsteps.

I had remembered about the security cameras, this time, and had bought a device from Motael which the gadgeteer had assured me would leave me invisible to the cameras and prevent any outgoing alarms, but I hadn’t been able to afford the extra for it to work on the noise sensors. I had no idea how it worked, but I trusted him not to backstab me - he was smart enough not to ruin his reputation as the city’s best provider of tech to villains. Not over something so apparently small, anyway.

It was ridiculous how long it had taken me to find this damn book, I mused as I began moving towards the Camelot exhibit, which was the current centerpiece of the museum. After the discovery that Merlin’s book had fallen into a dimensional pocket bound to one of 14 foundational stones of Camelot, I had spent three months steadily tracking where each of the stones had ended up. I had only found 11 of them when I had figured out the key, just a week or two ago - the storage enchantment that Merlin had laid down, and that his book had fallen afoul of, was on all of Camelot’s stones - as a collection, not each stone individually. As such, any of the stones should be able to act as my key into the dimension that contained the manual.

The manual and a number of other magical relics, which I would also be taking. But those were just bonuses.

I had to pause on my way through the dinosaur exhibit, hearing the night guard approach. As I had guessed, he was a heavyset man, although he was younger than I would have thought. He wouldn’t be any trouble to slip into a pocket until the end of the night, if I had to, but instead I hid - I wanted this theft to go unnoticed. No one should have any reason to know or care that the stone doubled as magical storage, so I was confident it was possible - all I had to do was continue dodge the security as I had been.

Despite my attempts at stealth, however, the guard seemed to have picked up on something. Even though his rounds shouldn’t take him actually through the dinosaur exhibit until closer to sunrise, he had paused to shine his flashlight into the darkness. I huddled behind the podium that held the T. Rex and hoped he would move on his own.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

No such luck. “Who’s there?” the guard called. How to make him think that he had imagined whatever had drawn his attention...

Well, it had begun storming an hour or two ago. Perhaps I could...

I released a large sheet of aluminum into my arms - not big enough to be seen around the edge of the podium, but still sizable. I shook it once or twice, and the wobbling metal made a sound like thunder - a classic foley trick that I had used in a show a few years ago.

The sound of the thunder, as I had hoped, triggered the alarm system. The guard cursed and spoke. “Hey, shut off that alarm,” he said, and I heard him turn and begin to walk away. “No, it was the thunder. Loud as shit, you hear that?”

I leaned around the edge of the podium and saw that the guard was speaking into a walkie talkie, presumably to his partner in the security office. His voice began to fade as he continued his rounds, saying, “You really didn’t hear that? I thought I was gonna go deaf for a moment, damn thing nearly...”

The alarms faded and shut off, and I breathed out. I was glad I hadn’t had to resort to my next idea - starting a fire behind him. I had finally cracked adding kinetic energy to what I released from my dimensional pockets a month or so ago - at a very basic level, at least. I still couldn’t add in much more than the equivalent of a gentle shove. I remembered the lesson I had learned along the way, though - the twisting of my mind that would ignite whatever I pulled out. My extradimensional storage now held a box of matches to be dropped anywhere that might need to catch fire, as well as a few bags of flour in case I needed explosions and a huge stack of flash paper, for more harmless flames. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, after all.

But I digress.

I didn’t run into any other trouble as I headed towards the Camelot exhibit, thankfully, so the museum remained unburnt. Its centerpiece was the stone itself, which was the only genuine artifact in the exhibit - everything else was a reproduction of something that actually lived in a different museum, or at least in storage.

The stone was pretty large as such things went, according to the placard left by the museum. It had been set up as something like a table - only six inches or so thick, but five feet long and three feet wide. It was sitting atop four supports, just like table legs. Apparently, it and other stones like it had been used to make a flat, sturdy foundation for the castle to be built on.

But its exact history didn’t matter to me - what mattered was what lay inside it.

Looking at the slab of rock, I could easily see the magical energies that oozed out of it like sap from a tree. It was a slow but steady emission of a power that was invisible to the naked eye, but stood out to a magician looking for it like a sore thumb. I used that leaking energy as a guide, reaching out a hand and my mind to follow the flow of the power back to the dimension it was leaking from.

It wasn’t meant to leak, I could tell, but the extradimensional space was damaged - if it ought to have had a massive vault door, impossible to breach but opening easily to those with the proper key, that door had been bent and broken by the magical battle that had resulted in the book falling into it. The metaphorical vault door was wedged firmly into its frame and wouldn’t come out even to someone with a key - it was sealed shut to the point that I couldn’t really blame the hero who had accidentally done it for failing to retrieve the lost artifacts.

But I wasn’t Murphy Fox, and the seal of the vault was less perfect than it ought to have been, even if it could no longer open properly - the leaking energy was proof of that. I could get in, I was certain of it.

It was something like picking a lock and something like crawling through a tunnel and something like navigating a rope maze, but mostly it wasn’t like any of those. Working magic on the world could be understood with a metaphor, perhaps, but there was no metaphor up to the task of explaining what it was like to work magic on another piece of magic. Trying wasn’t like trying to explain sight to a blind man - it was like a blind man trying to explain sight.

Despite the incomprehensibility of the task, however, I was making progress.