Olly Briggs
Olly considered his uncle as they hiked. Eli seemed determined to save face and not show signs of discomfort, but as Olly watched Eli's footing slip on some loose ground, and saw the wince spread across his face, he knew that he was struggling. He felt a bit bad, but he did hold onto some resentment. It was frustrating that Olly had to go to detention for a fight he hadn’t even started, and consequently was told to keep his nose clean by his uncle, who immediately turned around and got similarly messed up.
He wondered how these “business” trips went down. He always assumed his uncle had someone with him for a level of protection, but Olly had minimal exposure to anything that happened outside of the games room. Hopefully, it was a one-off, just a deal gone slightly awry. The general borough tended to show deference to his uncle. He knew that Eli could exact his own payback if he wanted to, and he would have support behind him, so he wasn't overly worried, unless the tide had begun to turn.
"Leroy hasn't said anything to me since the incident," Olly said, half to himself.
"Good, he shouldn't be a problem any longer," Eli said casually.
"What did his father say?"
"Not much, he certainly didn't push his son towards it. I reminded him that I'd been tolerant of him but that further slights could be seen as bordering on aggression. Threats against you are threats against me, and he'd do well to remember that," Eli said, smirking.
This was a reassuring answer, but it did conflict with something else that had been weighing on his mind. He had been wondering about how the mayor’s squeaky-clean image aligned with his uncle's less legitimate forms of business. Olly could remember seeing the mayor, typically in disguise, as he was growing up. These types of visits had become less frequent as the mayor’s political star rose, so he assumed there was a risk in getting the mayor involved with Olly's aptitude test. He had become increasingly curious about why the mayor was willing to take the chance.
And since his uncle was answering his questions...
“Is the mayor your friend?” Olly asked innocently.
Eli stopped in his tracks and grimaced. “No,” he said in derisive disbelief, “What brought this on?” They were well and truly alone, no one had been seen on the trail for quite some time, and yet Eli's eyes still darted around for eavesdroppers.
“He just seems like someone you’d want to be friends with, given what you said to me about making new friends at the academy,” he explained with a shrug, “If I get in.”
Eli’s mouth twisted distastefully, as if caught. “We’re not friends,” he sputtered out, “We’re business associates, at times, and I have on occasion provided an advisory role if needed. But we are not friends,” he said in a way that suggested finality.
Olly threw up his hands. “Okay, fine, sorry I asked.”
Eli shook his head. “Forget about the friendship side. Do you think the mayor could be friends with me? Just hanging out in the open like a couple of chums?”
Olly felt a twinge of guilt. His uncle looked at him expectantly.
“I guess not,” Olly acquiesced.
“Right, so why would I willingly choose to be friends with someone like that? A friendship conditional and inorganic like that? No, it’s not worth my energy,” Eli explained. Olly realized that he was keeping his voice even and neutral, but it seemed like it was far from effortless.
“I get it now, thanks,” he murmured, “Sorry.” He felt a bit guilty.
Eli ran his hand through his hair roughly. “No, it’s fine, I get it. It’s confusing. But rest assured, it will be different for you.”
Olly was debating asking further questions but something caught his eye. He stared at a point just over his uncle’s shoulder, a few hundred meters in the distance.
Eli cocked his head, “What’s wrong?”
Olly pointed. “Do you see that?” The air seemed to shimmer at the point that had caught his eye. Eli turned to look. He squinted and turned back to Olly with a look of confusion on his face.
“No?” he responded, not understanding.
“I’m going in for a closer look!” Olly exclaimed and ran in its direction.
“Olly wait!” Eli shouted at his retreating back. Olly stopped, remembering his uncle wasn’t quite in one piece. He turned back to see his uncle walking briskly towards him, trying to keep up as best he could.
The guilt pricked at Olly, and he waited on the spot for his uncle to catch up. He turned around to look for the spot again only to realize it had vanished. Panicking, he swept the landscape with his gaze, unable to find it again.
Eli was upon him. “What? What is it?”
“I… I don’t know. It’s gone now though. The air sort of shimmered, like it wasn’t really there. But I felt pulled towards it, as if I should go look at it”
Eli looked quizzically at the area and resumed the trek over to the spot, Olly kept stride with him.
“It was more over here,” Olly described, motioning to one side of the small clearing where he had seen it appear. It did seem to be truly gone now. His shoulder slumped, feeling slightly stupid for his reaction.
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“How’s your tutoring going?” Eli asked out of the blue.
Olly looked at him, confused.
“What I mean is, do you think your tutoring might have triggered some kind of inherent cartography skills? This, plus the magic, leads me to believe that my instincts about putting you in this stream were correct,” he explained, a small smile forming on his face.
“Just instinct huh?” Olly asked suspiciously, “You still expect me to believe that?”
“What can I say? I have a good gut feeling for success,” Eli said with a shrug. “Shall we?” He gestured back at the main trail.
Olly pursed his lips, looking around at the air. Nothing here caught his attention any further.
“Yeah, let’s go,” he agreed, feeling uncertain once again.
----------------------------------------
“It’s an interesting theory, I’ll give it that,” his tutor, Delilah, said as she chewed thoughtfully on the back of her pencil.
“So you think I could have seen something that a Cartographer might be looking for?” Olly pressed. It was the day after their hike and Eli’s words continued to ring through his head.
“It doesn’t quite work like that, usually we don’t do fieldwork to have to ‘look’ for a potential tunnel locus. And stumbling onto a locus at random would be statistically unlikely. But the shimmer is interesting. Usually, a shimmer doesn’t happen until the fabric of the locus is manipulated by a force, such as by a Conductor. But we also haven’t fully unraveled the mysteries of the universe yet, so I wouldn’t rule out you having seen something by random chance,” she explained, looking intrigued by the idea.
From what she had told Olly, she wasn’t practicing as a Cartographer but instead was doing advanced research at the academy with the goal of eventually becoming a professor. Tutoring was a good way of gaining teaching experience, she had told him. He didn’t fully understand if it was just an act, or if she just had more to gain by showing a successful candidate from the sixteenth borough, but he did find he wanted to work harder for her than his old tutor. Having someone actually treated him like a person and didn’t shame him was a huge motivator. It made him believe his uncle’s ambitions for Olly could be a reality, and that he could maybe fit into this world.
Also, the more he learned about the Academy the more he realized that he had barely scratched the surface of what was out there. It was like a whole other world, and once you were allowed in, many doors seemed opened for you. The thought intrigued him, he had to admit. He hadn’t even been admitted yet and his worldview was slowly but surely becoming bigger.
“What do you think about the tunnel collapse?” he ventured. He was a bit bored with the logic puzzles, so he figured keeping her talking about other topics gave him a break from the constant studying. Laypeople didn’t usually bother themselves with the specifics of tunnels or how they were made, but lately, the rabble had been growing. He didn't want to feel ignorant to it, and he figured he might as well talk to the expert while she was still available to him.
“It’s perplexing. By all accounts, it really shouldn’t have happened. But the inquest is ongoing, and we’re researching it thoroughly. The prevailing theory is that something about the locus lent itself to being unstable, through a previously unknown factor to us, so we’re trying to identify the cause behind that factor,” she explained.
“Why shouldn’t it have happened? Are tunnels really that safe?” he questioned.
“Extremely so. Despite people suddenly claiming to be experts and inserting their opinions into this situation, there’s no evidence to suggest there are any safety concerns with tunnels. It’s mainly due to their structure. You see, you can’t create a tunnel without two loci. The first locus is visible, and the second locus is invisible, though both have known coordinates. The Cartographer determines the coordinates and the Conductor ‘punches’ the hole that connects them. What do you think happens during that ‘punch’ that makes it special?”
He shrugged. “Something to do with magic?”
“In a manner of speaking. The Conductor can apply a counter-force, this is the golden glow that appears at their hands. They're effectively 'conducting' negative energy. By applying this force they first puncture the fabric of space between the two points to connect them. Here, let me demonstrate.”
Naively he thought she was going to show him actual magic and he became excited, but instead, she grabbed a piece of paper and folded it in half. Writing “Point A - visible” and “Point B - invisible” on either side. She grabbed a pencil and a straw from her bag.
“Watch the pencil,” she said as she poked it through Point A to Point B, “This is the punch. The fabric is torn but because it doesn’t like to be unstable it quickly knits itself back together.” She withdrew the pencil and placed the torn edges of the paper back into alignment.
Then she poked the straw through the hole. “To make this tunnel traversable they must stretch and expand the tunnel by exerting a greater negative force until it reaches the appropriate length and diameter,” she continued explaining. To continue demonstrating, she pulled the paper apart again so that Point A and Point B were two opposite sides, connected by the straw. “Make more sense?”
“Uh, huh. But isn't there a chance that the Conductor could make a mistake?”
“I suppose it’s possible, it is an unstable tunnel until the Labourers are technically done. So if human error were the culprit it could belong to either of those groups. The Conductor’s job is difficult because the fabric wants to push back and stitch itself back together, therefore it requires a lot of negative energy to counteract this force. The Conductor can provide enough negative energy to counterforce this effect which would last up to a few hours, but the Labourers are the ones who have to make it permanent. They bind, or cure, the Conductors’ energy into a matrix which also binds to the stretched fabric. It almost acts like a plaster bandaid, very solid and sturdy once set. Though I still maintain it’s unlikely. In order for there to be a failure on the Conductor’s part, I’d expect the failure to be in the punch. A tunnel that would collapse would likely never be able to be opened in the first place.”
“You keep saying energy, how does magic work then?” he asked, side-eyeing the paper demonstration.
“It may seem like magic, but it’s very scientific and explainable, and you’ll learn about it in far more detail at the Academy. But basically, nobody is creating anything, as magic as a concept might suggest. They’re merely adapting what’s already there. It's even in our naming conventions. The Conductors 'conduct' the negative energy. It's disputed how we discovered the ability to do this, but it comes down to some people being more sensitive to these natural rules and energies. Personally, I don’t subscribe to magic. There are many schools of thought, however, and others within the Guilds will disagree. In my opinion, calling it magic is only hurting the current state of things, and it’s leading to fear of the unknown.”
He found it to be a very unsatisfying answer but did not push it because he appreciated her simplified explanation. The magic, or energy, she was describing sounded so cold and logical, and unlike what he had experienced. It only drove his curiosity.
He did see her point though with the concerns of calling in magic. Conspiracies were already forming, and he was already worried about how differently he had been treated for attempting to get into the Academy, now he was worried about growing hostility. After his fight, after his uncle’s mystery fight, it was all getting too close to home and the potential connections scared him.
“But how does the magical part of the aptitude test work then? If it’s something they test for they must believe in it,” he asked, frowning.
“It’s actually quite a simple sensitivity test, and ingenious really. Through research, a mimic tunnel locus was created. It's basically a panel within a wooden frame that is covered by a very unstable, but safe, space-time fabric. If you have a true sensitivity it should elicit a response in the matrix. Now, shall we get back to work or do you have further distractions to try and dissuade me from completing today’s lesson,” she asked him wryly.
He shook his head. “No, that’s it from me. Let’s get back to it.”