Alfie didn’t even try to process the words from the earmuffs. The fact that a pair of high-tech earmuffs was supplying a running commentary on a hold-up taking place half a dozen paces from where he hid had been eclipsed by the thing in the would-be robber’s hands.

Squinting at it, Alfie could see the little creature had its pudgy arms and legs tucked in around it. As he peered through the curtain gap, he saw it stir again and let out a pitiful little croaking mewl that tugged at his heartstrings. It was wrapped in a dirty swaddle and had a…

“It’s got a mask over its head,” he whispered to himself. He could feel his eyes popping in disbelief. A drop of sweat made a break from his hairline and ran down his back, heading south for warmer, moister climes.

“Yeah,” the earmuffs said conversationally, “that’s to stop it turning people into stone willy-nilly, mate, you know?”

Alfie didn’t know.

“See the string fastened to the trigger finger of the plonker holdin’ it?” the earmuffs continued. “That whips the hood off when he flexes his finger. Gives whoever is in front of the gorgon a blast of petrification.”

The earmuffs’ explanations were just so many words sizzling through Alfie’s currently stunned mind as he continued to watch the unbelievable performance taking place on the other side of the velvet curtain.

“Got to hand it to the pillocks, they did remember to bring along some anti-petrification goggles,” the earmuffs noted grudgingly.

“That’s good, is it?” Alfie whispered weakly.

“Depends what end of the gorgon you’re on.”

“This is a bloody stick-up, old man!” barked the goon, currently not holding a weapon shaped like a miniature human.

“Aye, I ascertained as much,” Furbelow said testily.

“Give us anything you have that’s valuable, yeah?” the man holding the baby gorgon snarled. “Then, we’ll be on our way. No harm done.”

“Hex me sideways,” Furbelow cursed, “but everything in here has an intrinsic value o’ some kind, you moron. Dinnae tell me you just came in here without so much as a rough idea o’ what you wanted?”

The two men shifted uncomfortably and looked at one another.

“We want, uh… We want your most… We want your most magicalest item!” the man with the gorgon said.

Magical item… Alfie’s brain translated and repeated to him in case he’d missed that particular piece of the conversation.

“Yeah, your most powerful, uh, treasure—made of gold!” the other said, taking his friend’s lead.

“Or a jewel,” the first man amended magnanimously. “We ain’t fussy. Something like a– a– a dispelling stone, a– a summoning horn, or something like that.”

“Right, right, right, yeah,” the second man said, scrubbing at his shaved head and sending a cloud of dandruff swirling into the still air. “We want your most powerful piece of gold or jeweled magical, uh, thing. Yeah.”

The man held the gorgon higher. With one hand, he pinched the little creature’s foot, causing it to writhe and fret.

Alfie got the impression that action was this acid dream’s equivalent of cocking the hammer on a revolver.

“Otherwise, I’m going to pop you right in the kisser with a blast of this here gorgon, then spend some time carving you into the birdbath of my bloody dreams with that axe over there.” He nodded at an ornate axe that had been stuck casually into an umbrella stand.

“And we want that shit five minutes ago, Grandpa!” the gorgon-wielder bellowed.

Alfie saw Furbelow flinch.

The man with the gorgon gave the little creature in his grip another cruel squeeze. Another mewl of pain and fear came from under the tiny hood.

Heightened stress, fear, and unbelievable circumstances can work strange things on a human being. Even so, it was the casual cruelty rendered on the helpless whatever-it-was that goaded Alfie into action. He’d been on the receiving end of his fair share of bullying in senior school—the burning desire to beat seven shades of crap out of the class nutjob, Paul Slater, had made him start kickboxing lessons after school halfway through year eleven. He had no truck with that sort of thing.

He was moving and acting before he had allowed himself to consider the possible ramifications.

He burst out of the changing room with the only weapon he could lay his hands on: the changing room mirror.

The two stocky, rough-looking stick-up artists both turned their goggle-covered eyes in his direction. The mouth of the man holding the impossible weapon dropped open to reveal teeth the color of an unwashed coffee cup. He stepped back, jostling his mate and knocking his anti-petrification goggles from his brutish face. His arm swung about.

Alfie walloped the gorgon-wielding man with the mirror. The edge hit him squarely in the mouth. It knocked out a couple of his hideous teeth, unintentionally saving him from a hefty dentist’s bill down the line at the same time as it sent blood misting into the air.

The guy with the gorgon screamed. His finger tightened on the makeshift trigger as he instinctively tried to shoot Alfie. Luckily, at the exact moment as he did that, Alfie brought the mirror back around in a backhand sweep. Unbeknownst to Alfie, the baby gorgon’s briefly uncovered stare was unintentionally deflected by the mirror onto the second bandit, who was standing like a lemon nearby.

The little hood was whisked off the creature’s tangerine-sized head, revealing unexpectedly pretty, feline, amber eyes divided by a vertical silver pupil. There were also numerous delicate, fettuccine-thin snakes covering the little head like hair. Without so much as a change in his gormless expression, the second robber froze and toppled over sideways like a statue knocked from its plinth.

There was no time for Alfie to ponder on the obvious fact that what had just happened could not have possibly happened. The question of his own sanity was going to have to wait until he had dealt with the other angry, desperate, and, now that he was up close and personal with him, noticeably malodorous man.

As they turned to face one another, time took on a syrupy quality. The grains of sand falling through the pinch in the universal hourglass changed from a rushing hiss to a slow tumble.

Alfie threw up his free hand as if he could tear the baby gorgon from the robber’s hand with the Force or something. A futile gesture, but…

The giddy realization of impending doom was followed by a sudden surge of… of…

The influx of raw, unexpected energy that coursed into Alfie’s body was far more powerful than any adrenaline spike caused by blind panic or imminent fear of petrification. The sensation that washed through every sinew, nerve, and particle of his being was like nothing he had ever experienced before.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

If he’d had the time, or the desire, to describe it, he might’ve compared it to the rush that immediately precedes the long drop of a roller coaster; the punch of chemicals that assaulted your brain right at the moment you went over the precipice, when your body was convinced it was about to die. Intermingled with that rush would be the sensation of falling into an ice-cold bath, mixed with the unsettling gut-wrench of missing a step in the dark, combined with the throbbing flutter of exchanging smiles with a girl on the street or across a crowded bar.

It was all of that, and none of it.

That, of course, would have been enough to put him off his stroke in the best of circumstances. The follow-up crystal clear hallucination that came next though, that was what really floored him and left him open to the mercy of the man holding the gorgon.

Magical Aptitude Detected! Initiating class identification sequence...

Error... Class Unknown

Reinitiating class identification sequence...

Class found!

Class: Fortifier

Elemental Affinity: Earth

Level 1

Spells available:

Stone Fist Level 1

The words etched themselves across his still-functioning vision in letters of bright gold as if they were being cast onto his retinas by a projector unreeling in the back of his skull.

I’ve gone mad, was Alfie’s initial thought. I’ve gone totally, one hundred percent, stark-raving bonkers. An asylum would at least take care of what to do with my life.

As he blinked, trying to dispel the message even as he sought to understand what the dickens it meant, the robber with the bloody mouth had turned the gorgon on him.

“Your goose is cooked, chum,” he spat.

He pulled the trigger.

The hood came up.

The gorgon was staring straight at Alfie. Instead of turning him into something that could have been placed in a rockery, though, it turned a languid and sleepy gaze on him, sighed, and then appeared to go to sleep.

“What the bloody hell!” the crook yelled. He pressed the trigger a couple of times, but the gorgon was out like a light and did not respond, not even when the man gave it a furious poke with a sausage-like finger. The man chucked the swaddled baby gorgon away.

With exemplary agility for a man of his age, Claude Furbelow hurled himself over his desk and caught the little creature before it hit the deck.

The ugly crook ripped off his anti-petrification goggles and stared wildly about. Then his gaze flicked down and alighted on Alfie’s hands.

“What the hell?” he repeated, with even more feeling this time.

He ran, bolting toward the shelves and the front of the shop beyond.

The words across Alfie’s vision had just faded enough for him to give chase without banging into too much stuff. He ran after the fleeing man, intent on, if not bringing him to justice, at least making sure he wouldn’t try his luck on any more frail, old shopkeepers. He pursued the man through the twisting maze of disordered shelves and accumulated random items.

As the pair emerged from one of the final, skinny passages of junk and miscellaneous curios, the robber looked over his shoulder. Once more, his eyes seemed to snap onto Alfie’s hand—his right hand. He gave a little breathy shriek as Alfie wound his fist back to try a shot at the back of his fat, shaved head.

And that’s when Alfie finally saw that his right hand, almost up to the elbow, was encased in a cracked, crusty, stony clay-colored covering that looked like he’d just been using The Thing as a hand puppet.

Alfie let out a garbled cry of horror and surprise, even as his fist crashed between the almost-thief’s shoulder blades.

His stone fist impacted the fleeing crook with such power that the stumpy man was sent flying bodily out of the end of the final row of shelves, crashed head-first through the closed door, and disappeared in a shower of splinters into the little square beyond.

Alfie only dimly registered this result. He was too busy dancing around and shaking his hand in an effort to rid it of the weird stony skin that had covered it like a glove. The spell, if that’s really what it was, faded away to leave nothing but his usual skin and the material of his jacket.

“Okay,” Alfie said. “Okay. That’s… okay.”

+50XP

Progress to Earth Fortifier Level 2: 50/200

The sound of a pair of lungs working overtime behind him alerted Alfie to the presence of Furbelow. He looked rattled, but not as rattled as Alfie felt.

“Clive—” Alfie said, turning from the partially destroyed door to face the frail, old man.

“Claude,” Furbelow corrected him.

“Claude, what, uh… What was that?” Alfie asked, his voice coming out slightly strained. “What was that that just happened then—with the two guys, and the little gray thing, and the stuff that went all over my hand and made my arm think it belonged to Chuck-bloody-Norris? What was that?”

Furbelow looked pensive for a moment, like a man who was looking for the correct words that might talk another man down from a very high precipice. In his arms, the baby gorgon settled itself more comfortably and carried on snoring gently.

“I suppose, laddie, that the easiest way to describe it would be to say you were caught up in a botched crime of the magical variety.”

“Magic.” Alfie looked hard at the hooded creature in the old man’s arms, willing it to run out of batteries or do something that would enable him to disbelieve that it was, in actual fact, a real baby gorgon.

After a few seconds, Alfie gave up. Until he ascertained whether he had suffered some kind of psychotic breakdown brought on by lack of life direction, he decided that it would be easier for all concerned if he just went along with all of this. It would save him an immediate headache at the very least.

“Okay,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Magic. Jolly good.”

Oddly, despite his ebbing adrenaline and the ludicrous, unbelievable turn his life had just taken, he found that he could feel his body welling up with some kind of strange vitality. It was a dynamism that made him feel somewhat elated.

What the hell is that? he wondered.

He was visited abruptly by the mental image of every game he had ever played. It was of the moment when, as a character, he might defeat an enemy and take in its mana, lifeforce, or whatever that particular game had labeled the imbibing of manifest experience. And whatever those golden letters had been, they had also said he’d “gained experience”.

No… Surely not. This afternoon has been barmy enough already.

“You’re not just a shopkeeper, are you, Furbelow?” Alfie asked, pushing his sweaty hair out of his face and puffing out his cheeks.

“Nay, that I am not,” Furbelow answered in his soothing Scottish brogue.

Alfie raised an eyebrow at him.

Furbelow leaned forward like a man about to divulge a whopper of a secret. At such close range, Alfie could see just how magnificently sweeping the man’s eyebrows were. They must have been three inches long.

“I’m a bookkeeper, too, laddie.”

“You mean a bookmaker?” Alfie asked.

“Nay, lad, I’m not a blasted bookie. I’m a bookkeeper. You know what one of those is I trust?”

“You’re telling me that not only do you own and run this shop, which is stuffed to bursting with all sorts of mental stuff, but you also”—and Alfie dropped his voice to a theatrical whisper—“moonlight with a cheeky bit of administrative work and minor accountancy?”

“Let me tell you something interesting about bookkeeping, young man,” the old man said.

“Please do.”

“It’s the only word with three consecutive double letters—”

“That’s it?” Alfie asked incredulously.

“What do you mean ‘that’s it’? What more could you want from a word? As for all the talk about administrative tasks, you’ve lost me there.”

“That’s what bookkeeping means, doesn’t it?”

Claude Furbelow snapped the fingers of the hand not cradling the sleeping juvenile gorgon.

“Ah, we’ve had ourselves a wee miscommunication, laddie,” he said. “The term bookkeeper is different in the thaumaturgical world—the world of the magic user,” he added, seeing Alfie’s uncomprehending look. “It refers to one who looks after books—grimoires specifically—in the same way a beekeeper looks after bees, you see?”

“Nope,” Alfie said. He suddenly wanted that glass of beer very much indeed. Followed by about seven more.

Before Alfie could launch into a plethora of questions, there was a tinkle from the doorbell.

A newcomer entered the shop, stepping carefully over numerous jagged pieces of wood and the forlorn brass doorknob. He pushed open the door, which was really just a frame with a man-shaped breach in it now, and shut it fastidiously behind him.

He was a dapper, older man, dressed as a stereotypical English country gent: a beautifully cut tweed morning coat, tweed trousers tucked into almost cavalry-style brogue boots, and even a deer-stalking hat. His hair was thick and pure silver shot with a few streaks of deeper gray. His features were so sharp they were verging on hawkish and gave the loose-limbed man a speedy air. He had a willowy build, and there was something of the rogue about him; hands fluttering about, the hint of a knowing smile, head tilted at a rascally angle, and an unpredictable energy that suffused him.

“Afternoon, Claude,” the newcomer said cheerfully. “I say, did you know there’s a hole in your door?”

Furbelow didn’t answer but stared at the man in surprise.

“Who in the heck is this Johnny-come-lately?”

It took Alfie’s discomposed mind a second to realize that he had spoken this thought out loud.

The man’s eyes, when he turned them on Alfie, were so tawny they were verging on golden. They were crinkled good-naturedly in the corners, but there was something about them that told Alfie to trifle with this man would be about as good an idea as using glass in the construction of an anvil.

“Well met, that man,” the suave gent said, smiling a crooked smile and extending a hand. “The name’s Cornelius Sharpe. A pleasure to make your slightly contumelious acquaintance.”