The next morning, we’re prepared for Murat to be there. When we come out of the hotel door at dawn, he’s waiting for us, across the road, about ten yards away.

“Oh. Hi. Umm … is it dawn already?” He tries to downplay his eagerness

“Hello Murat,” says Danae, “How long have you been waiting?”

“Only a few minutes.”

She gives him her very best skeptical look.

“Maybe an hour,” His voice rapidly disappears into the mumble-zone again, but I catch the rest, “...or two.”

“Dude! Nice to see you,” I say. Making sure he’s not wiping his snot on me, I walk over quickly, and shake his hand.

Sometimes you run into a dude that can shred, but their mojo just isn’t there. Murat seems like he might be that kind of guy. It’s okay though; if you can get good at one thing, you can get good at something else. Mojo is just another thing to get good at with practice.

“Let’s head out of the city. Destructive powers don’t make the landlords happy. So can we ask you questions while we walk.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Snake, sir. It’s gonna be pretty hard for me to keep up with you, sir.”

“I’m not a sir, dude. It’s just Snake. She goes by ‘Her majesty’ though.”

Danae punches at me, but because there’s no hair involved, she misses; I can move my body faster than she can move her arm.

“I go by Danae or, if it makes you more comfortable, Miss Jefferson.”

“Most of my friends call me Mu,” says Murat.

“I’ll walk slow, Mu,” I say. “Can we talk as we go?”

“Sure,” he responds, and we head out of town.

I never really had a job with responsibility, but I know how to interview musicians for the band. I wonder if I’m supposed to do something different interviewing a guy for other kinds of work.

“Hey, Mu,” I say, “Tell us about yourself.”

“Umm. I’m 28. I was an actuary. I worked for my dad’s Insurance company. I’m pretty good at math. I like baseball. I’m from New York. Umm. What do you want to know?”

“Tell us about your childhood.” That was Danae.

“My mom was a history professor, specializing in the Ottoman Empire. My dad ran an insurance company. That’s how I got my name. Umm. What else. I studied physics in school. Then I had to decide between engineering and actuarial work and programming, but I failed all my interviews. I took the actuarial exam, the first one, and got a job at my dad’s company. I took four of the exams before the world ended.”

“What’d you do for fun, man?” He seems able to answer questions.

“I watched baseball. I made it to every Mets game last year. And, um, I played puzzle games. Portal 5 was my favorite. I played Chess online. I had a 2380 Elo rating.”

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“Dude, I don’t even know what that means.”

“I was one of the best 5,000 chess players in the world.”

“Isn’t chess dead? I mean, weren’t computers winning all the contests?” asks Danae.

“Umm. It’s like running. Even Junior Bolt can’t keep up with a Tesla Supercar. So do we stop having races? No. We keep the Teslas out of the human races, though.” Mu has a pretty good explanation. His voice is way more nasally than I would’ve thought though.

We reach a good spot outside of town and start testing what he can do in combat.

It turns out that his portals take about an eighth of a second to open or close. For almost anyone, that’s impossibly fast. But I’m not almost anyone. We test it, and so long as I have my sonar going, he can’t hit me with a rock. I always have my sonar going at this point. Every portal that opens, I sear it and dodge before he can do anything about it. He can only open one portal pair at a time, and if there’s anything but air in the portal, it won’t close, so he can’t open a new one.

Also, the portals are size-sensitive. He can open a larger portal--one that will let a person go through--but it only goes about 200 yards, and takes a second to open or close.

The portals themselves are pretty cool. They’re basically space shortcuts. Mu says it works a lot like he would expect a stable macroscopic quantum tunnel to work. I nod, and act like I know those words. Danae looks like she’s doing the same thing.

They’re two-sided, which is weird. Mu says that it’s actually a two-dimensional spatial rip, so it has to work that way. I nod sagaciously.

His aim with his targets is excellent. At nearly a mile, he can hit quarter sized objects, spinning in the air.

There’s bad news, too. His strength is kinda pathetic. He looks like Hercules, but he’s only about as strong as I am. Looking strong and being strong seem to be pretty divergent in this world.

He and I have a mile race, where he uses portals, and I run. I clear the mile in twenty-one seconds. He has to make eight hops through his portals, open and close them all. He takes twenty-five. That makes him the second fastest magic racer I’ve seen, except maybe the bird-people. I wouldn’t want to race Carter or Angela if they had time to build up speed. Danae, on the other hand, takes two minutes and a few seconds to cover the mile. We can quadruple our travel speed if he comes with us. He and D. can keep up with me.

In combat, he sucks. I mean, he’s not very coordinated, not very strong, and not very fast. Against me he can’t do much. He can’t even watch me fast enough to keep up. Against Danae, he does better for about ten seconds. She ropes at him, and he portals her rope to hit her in the back. That annoys her, so she leaves the rope in the portal, stopping it from closing, grabs a second rope, and gets a couple licks in. She relents quickly, though. He reacts like a dog that’s used to getting kicked.

Having gotten a good handle on what he can and can’t do, we head back to town talking.

He apparently was a skinny, weak, foreign kid with asthma, allergies and acne growing up. Not popular with anyone but his mother, but his parents sent him to school anyways. I'm not impressed with the character it built. Chess club and math contests was his life at school. He didn’t start being good at chess until he was in college, where all he did was play chess, study chess, and do physics homework. Then at work it was math and chess. It wasn’t a surprise to find out he was bullied quite a bit. He’s just not into bullies. His whole motivation is that now he can do something about it.

I think of him as a good kid. Honestly, I think of him as being more of a kid than Danae, and she’s ten years younger.

We ask him to meet us the next morning, and then the two of us confer after he leaves.

Danae calls him a goober. That’s completely accurate, but his power is pretty cool. She’s not excited about letting him sniffle along with us for months or years, even if he looks like a Thor reboot.

I tell her I bet we can fix his social issues by being friends and mentors.

She’s unconvinced.

His power will let us travel four times as far in the same amount of time.

She’s still unconvinced.

Has she thought about what her ropes can do if she practices with his portals?

She agrees that he can come.

The next morning, we tell him we’re heading out at noon, and that he should get his stuff ready. Six hours later, we go hunting slavers.