The dead man - a burly dark-haired fellow clad in a cheap suit - was face-down in the urinal with his dick out and a small round hole punched in the back of his head, and Fat Bloke broke the silence by saying, "Can't have been a heavy calibre and I think it must've been a low-velocity bullet, looks like it went in and bounced around inside his skull instead of coming back out."

"Has tae be pretty fresh, he's still warm," Fiona said. "Very dead, but he must've been shot in the last twenty minutes from how warm he is," and she turned the body over.

"His name's Gillen Innes," said Mary, who was rather pale. "He's in here a couple of times a week, he's always been polite enough but I'd nae buy a second-hand car from him if you get my drift, and bloody right it's recent, he walked in here under his own steam not ten minutes ago."

"Who else was in the loo?" Annie asked her.

"Murdo was taking a shite when it happened, he's half deaf and he says he didnae hear anything, he found Gillen when he came out of the cubicle, I think it must have been that blonde man in the greatcoat who left just ahead of your Nihonjin friend, I've never seen that one before," said Mary, abruptly realising it as she spoke.

"I think this must've been a hit, this Gillen lad must've got mixed up in something he shouldnae have, it's nae like guns quiet enough we'd nae have heard it from the yard are exactly thick on the ground," and she caught Alice's expression. "Dinna tell me you believe that shite you'll see in films with someone screwing a wee bittie of pipe onto a gun and it making this silly wee zap noise, a gun with a suppressor on it is nae quiet, it's just less loud than a gun normally is."

"Is there anything real that could've done this then, I mean I guess apart from enchanted stuff?" Alice asked.

"Aye, that there is," said Mackie with a frown. "But they're nae exactly thick on the ground - the only one myself's knowing of is SOE stuff, this weird-looking bolt-action pistol with most of the pistol built-in suppressor, and it's about as easy to be getting your hands on as hen's teeth."

"Enchanting a gun to be quiet enough Mary wouldn't have heard it from the bar isn't easy either," Fat Bloke said. "I mean it's possible, basically by diverting the sound to somewhere else, but you're only likely to see it done as an active spell effect - it'd take a shit of a lot of work and expertise to do it as an enchantment, Sane Dave could probably do it and Dr Mayhem could definitely do it, but yeah, it's not exactly kiddie stuff and in all honesty it's not really worth the bother when you could just pop a hole in someone's head with direct magic."

"Let's get a look at that security camera," said Nick; Mary nodded and they all went trooping through to the bar to do exactly that.

The dead man had been drinking at the bar when the group of them had gone through to the back room; the blond man Mary had mentioned - tall and lanky with several days worth of stubble and scruffy-but-short hair, and clad in beat-up camouflage trousers held up by a belt with a death's head buckle, combat boots, and a check shirt along with the grey greatcoat Mary had said about - had entered the pub, glanced around, and on seeing Gillen Innes headed directly to the bar and ordered a small whisky, and Mary said that he'd had a clipped Received Pronunciation English accent entirely at odds with his appearance; when Gillen had gone to the toilet he quickly finished his drink and went straight in there.

The blond man spent less than a minute in the toilet, and on coming back out had immediately left the pub; a check of the exterior camera showed he'd turned left out the door and headed round the corner in the direction of the town centre.

"What do you want to do?" Annie asked Mary.

Mary took a deep breath, then sighed.

"You lot get all the illegal bits out of here, then I'll phone the cops," she said. "Gillen was a crook but he didnae deserve being shot in the back of the head like this."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Gillen Innes, huh?" said Vrotch, who was sitting on the steps to his caravan passing a joint with Vicky.

"Aye, that's who Mary was saying it was,"

"Well she was wrong about him not deserving it, he started pimping hookers out about three months back," said Vrotch with a sigh. "And honestly he was the sort of bloke who actually deserved a bullet in the brain, he, uh, basically his whores are mostly well, a bit young if you get my drift. In all honesty I think that's probably what got him bumped off, the big dog in that line of work up here really doesn't like pimps who use girls who're still kids, basically the biggest crime-lord in the north is an ordinary decent criminal. Dude's mostly in gun-running, it's where he got big start in crime and basically it's his main front business, but he does drugs and whorehouses and dud money too."

"Oh aye, anyone I'd ken?" asked Nick.

"Yeah man, everyone in the north knows Scotty Johnson," said Vrotch with a shrug.

"Wait," said Annie, "What. Scotty Johnson? As in the Scotty Johnson, Johnson and Co Gunsmiths Scotty Johnson? He's a crime-lord? I... didn't expect to hear that."

"Yeah, he keeps it pretty quiet because of course he keeps it pretty quiet but why do you think everything west of the Longman Road is so safe and everything the other side of the Longman Road nearly as safe? The entire no-go is basically his, every underground workshop and drug factory in Inverness pays him protection money and it's his dudes who enforce the rules north of the line of the railway. That's why there's not all that much vampire activity north of the railway too, basically anyone who tries to mug someone over that way tends to end up in the bottom of a peat bog and any vampire that tries to bite someone on Scotty's ground ends up chained to a roof to greet the rising dawn and, um, basically nonces who try it up there tend to wind up the same way as the Brahan Seer, you know, shoved in a barrel of tar and set on fire. He, uh, doesn't have any sense of humour about people starting stuff on his lawn. The cops know it too, basically they just leave him to it because his dudes can walk down a street in the worst part of town without getting a Strathcarron toothpick in the ear," Vrotch paused, frowned, took a huge drag of his joint, and added in a huge cloud of cannabis smoke, "Don't tell anyone about that though, the Innes gang down in Fort William wouldn't see eye to eye with it."

"We are, um, safe to splatter vampires in the no-go?" Alice asked.

"Yeah," and as usual Vrotch visibly had to stop himself calling her 'man', "I checked after you dudes bailed Jenny Devil out and Scotty called it pest control."

-/-/-/-/-/-

Half an hour later and they were on their way to clean out the next vampire lair on Vrotch's list, this one at a house in a suburb on the edge of Inverness called Dores right on the north end of Loch Ness, during the approach to which Alice saw, sitting at a mooring on the loch, something she'd never seen before, and she pointed.

"Is that a flying boat?"

"Aye, looks like one - pretty big one too," said Annie, who was sitting left-seat up the front tonight.

"Huh," Alice said. "Never seen one of those before." It had a barge alongside it with a pair of full-sized tanker trucks onboard, and there were people up on the top of the wings.

"You havenae?" asked Andy, surprised. "They're nae exactly unusual or anything though that's bigger and has more guns on it than most of the ones you see about - Grandpa's house is just across the other side of the loch there," and he pointed, "And I'm always seeing the flying boats coming and going from the anchorage here whenever I'm across to visit Granny. Most of them only have the two engines, there's only a couple of the four-engined ones I've ever seen on the loch and that one's new, dinnae think I've seen it before. Looks almost like a Sandringham, both the big ones I've seen on the loch were Sandringhams, but the engines are different and so's the nose and a Sandringham doesnae have all those guns."

"They're pretty common, least the two-engined type is, flying between the Outer Isles, lot of drug-sellers and gun-runners use them, and they're really really common places like lake country in southeast Africa or the Caribbean or whatnot," said Nick.

"That anchorage," said Fiona, "Is where Scotty Johnson's overseas gun sales leave Scotland, I'm pretty sure it's where most of his drugs leave Scotland, and I know for absolute certain several planeloads of Eastern European prostitutes have landed there."

Andy said, "Oh."

By the time they'd cleaned out the latest vampire lair, the big flying boat was away from its mooring and starting its takeoff run along the loch; Alice took the time to watch it go, and then turned the Bigger Van to drive back towards Vrotch's caravan park since the Harbourmaster's was still a crime scene.

Fiona got a phone call shortly after they got back to the digs, was on the phone for less than a minute, and then hurried out of the digs looking worried; she told Alice not to wait up for her on her way out but did not elaborate on where she was going.

It would not be the last time she did that, nor would it be the last time she came back the next morning looking wiped out and generally stressed and refused to explain where she'd been.

-/-/-/-/-/-

On Monday 30th of September 1996, a date that henceforth would live in infamy in the mind of a certain Miss Liddell, Alice set to the mad scramble of catching up on the week she'd missed due to her inadvertent unspace time-out - not the greatest challenge given how early in the course she was, but a lot of sweet-talking tutors was involved and she ran into a brick wall when it came to one specific module; data analysis.

MISTER Murchison spent the span of Alice's excuse (in a word, illness) steadily getting smugger and smugger, before finally replying with what had to be the smarmiest smile she'd ever seen in her entire life.

"Yes well," he said, and there was something decidedly oily about his voice, "As it happens I've heard all the excuses you've been peddalling for spending the last week lazing around and I don't believe any of them - as such, I won't be accepting any of your late work, it would not do to encourage bad little girls to slack off. However, I could be persuaded to accept work, but there'd be a price for it."

Utterly unable to believe what she was hearing Alice said, "What."

Murchison apparently took that as a request for clarification. He undid his fly and exposed himself.

Alice would, years later, describe what went through her mind in that moment as like something had exploded inside her head, leaving behind the purest rage she'd ever felt.

"Do you seriously think you can get away with that, you sick bastard?" she asked, collecting the papers she'd been attempting to turn in.

"Of course I do, you stupid little girl, and for your insolence you can be sure I won't be accepting any more of your work without you getting down on your knees and doing me a little service," and he indicated his crotch.

"I'll have the bloody cops on you," Alice told him, and spun on her heel.

"And who do you suppose will be believed, a known amnesiac teenage girl with a questionable attendance record or a respected educator? Go right ahead, little girl, run to the police and find yourself arrested for bearing false witness. Or alternatively you could be a good girl and do what your betters tell you."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Well was yourself seeing that then Nick?" said an impressed-sounding Mackie as the dust from the door-slam settled. The two of them had just been walking down towards the front of the building in preparation to go up to the chip shop for their lunch when Alice exploded out of a lecture hall they were passing.

(Another passing student, a boy from Benbecula who was studying electronics, crossed himself and did everything in his power not to attract the attention of the furious teenage spey-wife. Wise lad.)

"If you're meaning the Alice-sized ball of uncontrollable rage that was just storming past ourselves having tried to take that door off of its hinges on the way out, aye," said Nick with a nod. "Bloody hell! I'd swear she was about ready to back her bloody witch look up by blowing the roof off of the college, I've seen a body angrier but no by much."

Another door thundered shut just round the corner from them in the rough area of the office of the man who acted as head of school for, amongst others, the antiquities department.

"What just happened? I saw Alice heading out of the data analysis lecture hall like she was about to go and unleash the apocalypse," said Fiona as she walked up the hall to join the boys.

"Well I don't know now, do I," Nick told her. "She's gone into whatsisface, oh, shit, Jack something? Yourselves head of school, that lad, his office."

"Well whatever's going on that was the coursework for the Data Analysis lectures she missed that she had in her hand," said Andy. "I don't think Miiiiiister Murchison let her turn it in."

-/-/-/-/-/-

Dr Jack Kensington took one look at Alice's expression when she stormed into his office, and rather mildly asked, "Is there some sort of problem, Miss Liddell?"

"I want Kevin Bloody Murchison fucking fired," said Alice, and a small frown appeared on Kensington's face.

"I see, and why would you wish to see the newest member of this faculty become a former member of this faculty?" he asked, tone still neutral.

"The son-of-a-bitch just told me he won't be accepting any of my work unless it comes with a fucking blowjob," Alice told him, and he abruptly lost the air of mildness.

He spent a moment visibly locked in deep thought, then straightened his tie and said, in a soft and very calm voice, "I see."

"So what are you going to do about it?" Alice growled.

"Frankly? I don't know. While I believe you - over the term thus far I have increasingly found myself feeling that there is something I do not like about the man though I had not previously put my finger on quite what - at the end of the day Kevin Murchison is... connected. A matter of this nature will require, when dealing with persons with backers of the sort he has, that we handle it with a great deal of, shall we say, care."

"So you're just letting him get away with this shit," and Alice whirled so fast the heel of her boot tore a hole in Dr Kensington's office carpet; the door thundered shut behind her again.

Jack Kensington drew a deep breath, adjusted his tie again, and murmured, "... That was not even remotely close to what I was about to propose,"

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Fiona, I need your help," said Alice Liddell, diverting from going to sit on her bed and instead seating herself at Fiona's tea-table, which had gained a second chair in the time since just that morning. Fiona raised an elegant eyebrow and started serving Alice a cup of tea and Alice noted her room-mate had already got exactly how she liked the stuff perfectly memorised.

"Oh aye, and with what?"

"You know that bastard Murchison?" Alice said, and Fiona paused and carefully set her teakettle down - she popped a single lump of sugar into the cup she'd just poured and carefully passed cup and saucer to Alice.

"So he decided he'd be trying his luck with yourself as well," she said, and Alice stilled.

"As well?"

Fiona nodded.

"I... may have become so caught up in searching for you last week that I didn't turn up for any lectures either," she said. "There's a bottle of the strongest mouthwash I could find anywhere in Inverness on the top of my wardrobe if you're wanting rid of the taste."

"What do you mean if... Fiona, you're not telling me you,"

"We won't be having data analysis next year," Fiona said with a shake of her head. "About all we can be doing from our position is grit our teeth and get on with it. I know it's shit, but until there's a land war..."

"You're just going to give the son-of-a-bitch what he wants."

"The fact of the matter," said Fiona Macleod, and Alice would later note that her left eye had twitched as she spoke, "Is that we are women living in a men's world; at the end of the day the only thing we're worth a damn to anyone for is our looks, and that's why it's a good thing we look so damn good," and she tried to encircle Alice's waist with her hands, but Alice Liddell had hit her limit and she threw Fiona off, leaving the slightly taller girl flat on the floor with a look of utter shock on her face.

"Fuck," she very clearly and calmly enunciated, "That."

Fiona just lay there, shock fading into a look Alice was too furious to even try to read, and then asked, her voice breathless and sounding as if she might faint, "What are you going to do?"

"I am going," said Alice, "To change this fucking zoo."

She spun on her heel, the heel in question putting a divot in the lino, and stormed out.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Alice's next port of call was Annie's room; this was locked and banging on the door got no answer, so she went heading down the common room, still in a rage and looking for Annie.

The Kelly heiress was however not present; the usual cast of students were loitering around, a mixture of pimply young men mostly either horsing around or trying to chat up a mixture of pimply young women, one of whom, a particularly wasp-waisted blonde with a laugh like a donkey on crack and the most irritatingly snobby upper-crust accent on Earth, whom Alice fortunately didn't know any closer than to clearly understand she was A, utterly up herself, B, claimed to be named 'Lucinda', and C, overpronounced absolutely everything, she was capable of pronouncing 'oh' with four syllables, was loudly and snootily talking smack about about the exact person Alice was looking for; she was just haughtily declaring her heartfelt belief that Annie Kelly of all people would fold like a gambler with a hand full of crud the moment her 'betters' were so much as to look sternly at her because obviously someone with a daddy that rich on new money hadn't ever had any problems.

Fucking Murchison, fucking Fiona, and now this toff bitch talking crap about the only young woman Alice knew for dead certain would never need to worry about this shit?

Her head snapped round and she fixed the snotty little cow with a flat stare that, from the outside, could probably have stopped a charging bull haggis dead in its tracks due mostly to an as-yet unnoticed developing fault with her cybernetic eyes causing the micromovement controllers to cut out until voluntary movement right as Alice Liddell went prompt critical.

"If you'd seen what I've seen," she bit out, quite unaware that the only person in the audience who knew what she meant was a struggling-not-to-smirk Nick Macbane who had just realised what was about to happen, "Did you know she was born blind? Birth defect, her retinas failed to form in the womb. Then when she was only eight years old her parents moved to the absolute back of fucking nowhere, then one day some clever buggers decided they were going to get rich by beating up and kidnapping this little eight-year-old blind girl, well they didn't factor for Mackie Romanov, did they - the only person who got out of that car alive was the little girl in the boot. Two years later the doctors gave her a general anaesthetic, cut her face open, and when she woke up she was seeing for the very first time through eyes with these little visible mechanical camera irises in the middle, I've seen it, and that's why Annabella Kelly is made of steel, you absolute blithering idiot."

Lucinda, who had spent this rant steadily deflating, didn't even remember to overpronounce the very small, "... oh," that escaped from her.

"I trust," Alice said, having won the struggle to calm down and failing to notice the now seemingly-in-great-pain Nick up the back, "We've heard the last of that bollocks?" and Lucinda's gormless expression lasted just exactly long enough that Alice was spinning on her heel, leaving the latest divot in the floor, by the time Lucinda's head started frantically nodding.

Alice caught the tail end of the motion and had just enough presence of mind to say, "Good," and got out of there before she went and decked the stupid bitch, her heel-cracking stride brisk enough and utterly bloody furious enough she was out of earshot by the time that Nick turned round and found Dr Jack Kensington standing right behind him looking where Alice had gone with a faint but detectable calculating look on his slender face, and the thought of what was going to happen the very moment Kensington learned about the way that arsehole with the wee twat moustache hadn't been accepting Alice's coursework made him have to flee to the toilets to give it up and laugh his fool head off.

He had no idea whatsoever that particular ship was already well underway, or what exactly Murchison's refusal to accept Alice's coursework had entailed - or for that matter that Jack had been looking for Alice with a proposed course of action.

Jack Kensington, for his part, knew (or perhaps that should be thought he knew) exactly what he'd just heard.

He proceeded at once to somewhere private, removed his mobile from his pocket, dialled, waited as it rang through and was answered by a chirpy young female voice telling him that he was through to the British Museum Department of Special Circumstances and how could she help him, and said, "Hello, Amelia - it's Jack Kensington up in Inverness. Is Doctor Portendorfer in the office? I've just discovered that I have a student he will want to know about immediately," and one she had said that Dr Portendorfer was indeed in and that she would transfer Jack's call to him momentarily, and he had thanked her, the very next words out of his mouth were, "Wilf, one of my students appears to have the Sight in its postcognitive form."

Alice Liddell had just become a strong candidate for the status of most valuable antiquities student in Scotland.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Alice was still fizzing that evening when she decided, since the sun was still up (if just creeping past the horizon) to walk back down to the Harbourmaster's to see whether the cops had finished as she hoped she'd get the chance to take it out on some vampires, she had a large heavy armoured van suitable for running the undead down and that and a bit of making the undead go splat with her finger felt like just the ticket to her educated opinion, she wasn't sure where they were going to be meeting up, and it was a shorter walk than heading over to Vrotch's place.

She had just crossed Portland Place and was waiting for the traffic to clear enough for her to cross Shore Street to the pub when she happened to notice, and spend a moment watching, a freight train crossing the bridge above the Harbourmaster's, and that was when she saw something she had not been expecting; the train had a pair of white-clad passengers.

As Alice watched, the pair jumped off the wagon they'd been standing on, down onto the lineside embankment just behind and to the east of the pub, and Alice glanced left and right, saw a break in the traffic, and darted across Shore Street; she quickly found the two, who obviously weren't aware they were being watched, emerging from between number 58 and number 56 on Inness Street; they started walking normally the very moment their feet were on pavement and Alice quickened up her place to go and get a better look.

She got close enough for that at the corner where Innes Street met the Railway Terraces while the two were waiting to cross the Longman Road; the two were so close in looks they just had to be twins - with the main visible difference the length of their hair, one had hair just below her shoulders and the other had hair so long she probably often sat on it. They were clad in matching white dresses, their waists were dramatically corsetted (Mackie would have been able to make a circle with his hands round either girl's middle) both were wearing brown leather dog collars, and the short one was wearing a lead of all things, the handle of which the long-haired one was holding.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Keeping far enough back to follow them without it looking like she was following them, Alice kept on them as they turned from the Railway Terraces into the back entrance of the station, where they went straight into the ticket office; Alice pretended to look at timetables while keeping an eye on them and wondering about how little notice anyone was taking of that lead, mostly it seemed to provoke slight eye-rolling, and got a closer look as they came out of the office.

Up close, they looked like they were probably Middle Eastern, with dusky skin, jet-black hair, and finely-formed features - but the part that really gave Alice pause was their eyes.

The shorter-haired girl was arresting enough; she had almost honey-coloured, verging on yellow, eyes - a shade that didn't seem quite right in a human face and was startlingly reminiscent of Grace Mitchell - but it was the long-haired girl whose gaze really gave pause; she had total heterochromia. Her left eye was the same yellow as the short-haired girl's eyes, her right was a really striking bright blue and to top all that both of them had a haunted, hunted, edge to their gaze almost but not quite like a thousand-yard stare.

Alice followed them towards the platform end of the station, where they turned onto platform four where, according to the departures board, the evening train for Glasgow was standing to wait for the train from Aberdeen so people getting off of one could get onto the other.

The two girls in white quickly boarded the Glasgow train, and Alice went and sat herself down on a bench where she could see whether the pair left, and acted as if she were waiting for someone to get off of the Aberdeen train; a few minutes passed and the Aberdeen train arrived, a flood of people got off of that and got onto the Glasgow train, and as (a couple of minutes later) the guard blew his whistle and the Glasgow train pulled out, Alice got a good look at the pair of girls she'd been following, confirming that they were indeed on the train - and then she started wondering why she'd been buggering about like that.

She shook her head and headed back out of the front of the station to walk back down to the Harbourmaster's before anyone started wondering where she was if they were open, and that was when Alice saw that a pair of twin girls identical to the pair she'd just finished following were queuing at the tram stop in front of the railway station. The only visible difference between this two and the two who were now on the train to Glasgow was that the one wearing a lead was the long-haired one this time.

Alice positioned herself so she could hear them as they waited; a few minutes of peace and quiet and the two not saying anything later a tram arrived, and the pair boarded, requesting tickets to the spaceport.

-/-/-/-/-/-

When Alice did get to the Harbourmaster's she found herself annoyed again; it was in fact still closed with POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape across the doors and a couple of police vehicles parked across the road from the pub, so first she went all the way back up to the digs to see if the others were about, only it turned out that Nick had pulled an all-nighter working on his new bike, Fiona was not currently on Alice's list of people she had any inclination to engage with, and for whatever varied reasons nobody else felt like going out to splatter some walking corpses, so instead of stewing, she sneaked through the back gate into the Harbourmaster's yard and headed through her portal for a bit of a dick about.

This she commenced by constructing herself what amounted to a firing range a hundred yards off through the trees in her little patch of land floating in the void, in which to practise her 'magic bullets' - it took a bit of experimentation to figure out what would and would not have holes blown through it, with the eventual solution being to use a big mound of earth (which she had to carefully concentrate on being earth instead of a solid lump of something that looked like a mound of earth) for a backstop, and she'd just finished it and started investigating the insides of her not-a-kitten, trying to work out how to give it a digestive tract, when she was surprised by Fat Bloke saying, "Knock knock," from her portal.

"Come in - oh, Fat Bloke, hadn't expected to see you, what's up?" Alice asked, gesturing him in the direction of a sofa. The not-a-kitten mewed a greeting.

"I thought I'd check out how you were getting on," he said, sitting down on the indicated sofa.

"Not sure what I should say to that," Alice told him. "I've been practising that 'magic bullet' trick constantly, basically every time I can get somewhere private where I won't leave random holes in things - talking of which how far does it go before it dissipates? I haven't quite dared to just let it off into the air, I don't want to risk poking holes in any satellites."

"Don't worry too much about that," Fat Bloke said with a laugh. "It starts to attenuate immediately, by the time it's a couple of miles away from you if it hit someone it'd feel like being poked with a stick, and it attenuates out enough to be lost in the thaumatic background by about ten, fifteen, miles. So just don't shoot it off if you can see or hear any aeroplanes. There's spells you could use to hit things in low orbit, but a mage bolt isn't one of them."

"Good, that's a weight off my mind," Alice declared; she drew a bit of magic, pointed up, and added, "Bang," getting another chuckle out of him.

"Clown," he said with a smile to show he was ribbing her.

"My finger the deadly weapon, what a weird idea that is," Alice said with a nod. "It's going to take a while to get used to it."

"Yeah, it really messes with your head at first doesn't it," he agreed. "I used to get these bad dreams about just cooking off like, oh, like bullets in a fire, back when I was about at your level of learning, took a while for the woman who taught me to get me over that hump. How's the getting used to keeping track of how full your reserves are going?"

"Eh, I can't say I've got very far with that," Alice admitted. "I can tell when I've drawn just enough for one magic bullet, more or less - I mess that up about one time in five - but knowing when I've got enough for two, that's another question."

"Yeah, there really is only one way to learn it - practise, practise, practise," Fat Bloke agreed. "Talking of which, the others are planning to come over in a bit with another friend of ours, I know him as Kitty Katty, he's a Yank but a good bloke anyway, we figured we should have a look for any marked 'elemental' tendencies you might have at the soonest opportunity if that's okay with you? Anyway while we're waiting for that lot to make an appearance I have some sensor equipment with me, stuff for recording dimensional resonance and ambient thaumatic flow, I wanted to ask if it was okay to set it up in here, it's why I decided to come over early."

"Certainly, and I wouldn't mind a talk over how it works," Alice said, putting her not-a-kitten aside for now.

"Oh, that's nothing complicated," Fat Bloke said, rising to his feet; she followed him back to the portal. "Basically it's possible to enchant metal to expand and contract in reaction to how much magic is flowing over the surface of it instead of heat, what we call thaumaturgist's steel, right, or to do the same in reaction to dimensional resonance. Then you just use that to make a bimetal component - one piece of thaumaurgist's steel bolted rigidly to a matching piece of normal steel in an environment with a known level of background magic," and as he was speaking they arrived at a tatty old Bedford saloon car that was parked just inside the Harbourmaster's yard gates, "So the whole assembly flexes in reaction to magic. Then you attach one end of that rigidly to a support frame, and attach a pen rigidly to the other end, with an assembly to make a long roll of paper pass underneath it, turning at a fixed rate - so the pen draws a line on the paper in reaction to how much magic the entire device is exposed to. We call that a thaumometer, our friend Doctor Mayhem - you haven't met him, bit of an oldschool mad scientist - he invented it, it's based on how old barometers work."

With that, he opened the car's boot and lifted a rather nice-looking brass-and-polished-wood piece of antique-looking machinery out.

"I made this out of an old barometer in fact, because look at it, ain't it snazzy," he said. "The dimensional resonator works just the same with a different bimetal component and I mounted both of them in the same casing - they're the blue and red lines on the paper here," and he pointed. "Blue for the thaumometer, red for the dimensional resonator. The paper moves at a rate of an inch an hour under the two needles. Now let's see what it does when we take it into unspace... ooh, look at that, the dimensional resonance is going up as I carry it towards your portal, that's really cool!"

"The thaumometer part looks pretty stable," Alice said as he paused just outside her portal.

"It crept up a little as I approached the yard here - see how it'd pushed up from where the line was a few minutes ago? That all happened in the last couple of minutes of my drive. Nothing unexpected, you're spending a lot of time here and an active spellcaster like you just being in a place tends to push the background up a little, as does the presence of a portal."

"Let me guess, that's a part of how you find young mages before they have a head explosion," Alice guessed.

"That and word of mouth are about the only approaches we've got so far," Fat Bloke confirmed with a nod. "The Flimflam Man - another of our friends, Vietnamese bloke, bit of a smart alec but his heart's in the right place - is working on something a bit more applicable but there's any number of government-related problems... Now let's advance the roll a little - like this," and he turned an adjustment knob on the side of the machine, pulling a little paper past under the pens, "Then see what happens when we take this thing into unspace."

He stepped through the portal, Alice hard beside him.

"Check it out, they both shot way up!" he declared, delighted.

"Neat," Alice said with a nod. She made a table appear for him to put the machine on, and the dimensional resonator pen jumped again then dropped back to where it had been after they stepped through the portal.

"Huh, that's cool - does it do that any time you do stuff in here?" Fat Bloke asked.

"We can find out," Alice said with a shrug - after a moment of thought she made a brick appear in her hand, causing the pen to jump again, made the brick as hard and heavy as foam rubber, causing a second jump, then buzzed her foam brick at Fat Bloke's head, getting a startled yelp out of him followed by laughter when he realised what she'd done.

She grinned at him; he picked her 'brick' up and went to chuck it back at her, only for her to make it stop existing before it could leave his hand, getting another startled noise out of him and another jump out of the needle.

"So it reacts to me creating things, such as a brick, altering them, such as turning a freshly-created brick into a joke not-a-brick, and uncreating things, not-a-bricks included," she said. "I say we perform a series of experiments at five-minute intervals, to give the drum time to turn new paper under the pen nibs, repeating what I just did in steps. Then see if the readings change when I create, alter, and uncreate smaller and larger things, and the same goes for pseudo-living things."

"That sounds like a good preliminary plan," said Fat Bloke with a nod. "Oh, and add to our planned series of experiments tying it to a long rope and throwing it off of the edge of your patch of ground into the far blue - well, actually nebula-colour - distant yonder."

"I can create an animate barometer-carrying thing, like a clockwork robot bird thing with a space and straps for the barometer housing in its back, have it fly a few miles away at say about four miles per hour then turn round and fly back," Alice suggested. "Use that to test how it reacts to creating, altering, and uncreating pseudo-living things."

"Hello, anyone home?" came the voice of the Munching Hamster.

"Over here," Alice called over to her, and she came sauntering through the trees, accompanied by Annie Kelly and a slightly scrawny-looking fortysomething man with buzzcut hair and a prominent lantern jaw, who was clad in a shirt and slacks.

"Evening," said the Hamster with a smile. "Alice, this is a mutual friend; Kitty Katty, and as I trust Fat Bloke already told you it's time that we taught you a little more advanced spellcasting than a simple mage bolt."

"First up we're going to check if you have any particular affinities," said Kitty Katty. "That'll tell us where to go from here - it wouldn't do to have you attempting to learn to throw a fireball if you have an affinity to hydromancy now, would it."

"Then once we've checked that and you've practised with a handful of simple spells - tricks like this," and Fat Bloke snapped his fingers in a way that ended with his thumb pointing skywards and a tiny flame like a cigarette lighter sprouted from the tip of it, "We can move on to working out what sort of spell foci is going to work best for you."

"Okay," said Alice, "So how do we go about checking if I have any particular affinities?"

"That's easy, we teach - or attempt to teach - you a series of simple spells for the different affinities - actually that's another part of why I'm here, between the three of us we represent the full set," said Kitty Katty, "Oh yeah, it's entirely normal to have multiple affinities and you can even develop more down the line so long as you don't specialise too tightly on one method of working - any way that's how we find out if there's any that you find particularly easy, or of course particularly hard."

"As far as what the possible affinities are, if you're thinking 'classical elements' that's a start but you're not thinking widely enough," the Hamster took over. "Earth, air, fire, water, void, light, metal, wood, spirit, mind - that all stems from primitive understandings of magic, fed through several iterations of deliberate obfuscation and fairy-stories of course. The reality is more along the lines of 'thermal energy' or 'pressure', a so-called pyromancer can most likely freeze something solid just as easily as they can throw a fireball."

"The typical nine aren't the total extent of it either," Fat Bloke added. "You've got kineticists, think impossible martial artist or say Fiona. There's what we call biomancers, and they're pretty illustrative of how thoroughly off the penny dreadfuls' portrayals reality is - magic of life may good on paper but realistically speaking you're just as likely to find a life mage sewing man-eating monstrosities together out of orphans as you are to find some sweetness-and-light healer type, and a death mage is as likely to spend all their time arguing with the departed shades of varied relatives and dead celebrities as they are to be setting walking corpses on people. Bear in mind that Baba Yaga of all people had a life-magic affinity so marked she was all but incapable of using anything but biomancy, yet her name still makes most of the population of Eastern Europe cringe to this day despite the fact she got her head blown off by a Bolshevik marksman nearly seventy years back."

"And beyond that we have the issue with 'affinities' being nothing more than a way of pigeonholing something that is in reality a whole lot more complex than any extant description we've ever been able to find - even our own model is strictly limited by the fact that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the magic and everything to do with the person handling it," said the Hamster. "They're a shorthand description at the end of the day, and like all such shorthands and simplified versions they are only useful up until a certain point and you should never be afraid to attempt something outside the box because some idiot told you that your affinities mean that you can't do it. Anyway, we may as well start at the beginning - fire."

"This is as simple a piece of fire magic as you could want," Fat Bloke took up, and again snapped his fingers. "Just concentrate the tiniest smidge of magic into your fingertip, about half as much as you'd use for the finger-gun trick, and use some sort of mnemonic like snapping or flicking your fingers to turn it into a flame,"

Alice started trying exactly that - to begin with she snapped her fingers, then tried flicking them in varied other ways.

"It helps if you picture you're lighting a cigarette lighter," said Kitty Katty, and Alice did so without result.

"Okay so I think we can conclusively state that you're not a pyromancer - let's try hydromancy next," said the Hamster, and she unearthed several sheets of photocopier paper from her handbag; she laid one down on the table, held her hand up with her fingers spread and continued, "Note that my hand is dry - presto!" and pressed her hand down on the sheet of paper; when she lifted her hand there was a wet handprint there.

Alice tried it, and got as much of a result as she had with the attempt to summon a flame. The pattern continued with attempts to get a small gust of wind, to produce an electrical spark, to make a blade of grass curl round her fingers, and so on and so forth - the three magi suggested one little spell after another, and time and time again Alice got nothing.

Finally, with the attempt to give herself a spot having failed (ruling out life magic) Fat Bloke gave Alice a long measured look, and said, "Alice... just out of interest, what's the closest you've ever come to dying?"

"Jesus Christ, Fat Bloke!" Kitty Katty complained. "That's not the sort of question you should be asking just out of nowhere like that!"

"No, I think he's onto something," said Annie, speaking up for the first time since she'd entered the portal with the Hamster and Kitty Katty. "Isn't he, Alice."

"I got blown up a few months ago," Alice said, voice low.

"Define blown up," said Kitty Katty, a sudden note of understanding in his voice. "No, no need - you really aren't a fan of talking about it, are you? Who would be?"

"I'm pretty sure it was a terrorist bomb," Alice told him. "I... there is a lot more of me that's metal and plastic than I'm comfortable thinking about, and before I got blown up my face didn't even look like this and you're bloody right I'm not all that into talking about it, I can still see the bit of car flying towards my face every time I close my eyes."

"Massive reconstructive cybersurgery," Annie added. "She didn't have any arms or legs the first time I saw her, and thank God her face was covered in bandages, she can't have looked any too good if the components I saw our doctor getting together is anything to go by."

"I see," said the Hamster. "Insensitive as his phrasing of it may have been, that is indeed significant at this point, and I have to apologise for overlooking what you said when you told me about how heavily you'd been reconstructed - it is not at all unusual for someone who has come extremely close to dying to develop enough of an affinity for death magic that they'll struggle to even start learning anything else."

"How do we test that?" Alice asked with a suppressed sigh.

"How else? We have you attempt to reanimate an insect," the Hamster told her. "Now, where are we going to find a dead bug that's not too fried?"

"I'll see what I can find in the yard, the pub's still locked up tight but the cops buggered off as I was coming up the road," said Fat Bloke.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The first thing out of Kitty Katty's mouth the moment he and his fellow cybermanecers were solidly out of the girl in question's earshot was, "So why's that chick totally pissed about something?"

"You what mate," said Fat Bloke.

"That Alice chick, she's so angry she's just about frothing at the mouth over something - I don't think it's anything any of us have done but she's furious and distracted."

Fat Bloke and the Hamster exchanged looks, and Fat Bloke shrugged.

"Don't ask me, I'm bloody hopeless at reading people," he said.

"Can't say I'd clocked on either," said the Hamster. "Well. I think we'd better see if we can find out what's wrong."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Alice Liddell, Necromancer," said Alice for about the five thousandth time. She was laying on her bed in the dorm while Fiona, who did not appear to have moved more than a few feet since Alice lost her temper a few hours previously, sat at her tea-table and sipped at a cup of tea.

"So yourself's keeping saying, aye," said Fiona.

"Necromaner. Neck-roe-mancer. Necromancer, fuck me. Fucking necromancer. Fuck my hat, I'm a necrofuckingmancer. Am I supposed to get zombies or something? Alice Liddell, Necromancer. Fucking what? Were I Mengele in a past life or something? Fuck me, Alice Liddell, Necromancer."

"Alice," said Fiona, setting her cup down sharply enough to spill it and rising to her feet, "Yourself's stuck on repeat."

"Alice Liddell, Necro-OW!" and Alice changed track mid-word due to Fiona hitting her in the ear. "What the hell was that for?"

"Well sometimes when your stereo's stuck in a loop it starts working properly again if you're clouting it, so myself was thinking maybe it'd be working the same on numpties," Fiona told her, hands on hips and oddly reminiscent of a schoolmarm, "Now, are we done with the repeating ourselves ad nauseum then?"

"Oh fuck off Fiona, get back to me when you've had to find out your future involves a whole lot of zombies," Alice declared, sitting bolt upright and returning the glare with change. "Jesus, what the fuck, on top of everything else I did NOT need to be a natural bloody evil overlord!"

Fiona very slowly shook her head, went back to her tea table, discovered her spilt cup, and started preparing a replacement.

"Alice, dinnae be daft," she said. "The most famous death mage ever was a policeman, it turns out that some dead men are downright bloody eager to be telling tales... Now are we going to be stopping dwelling on the penny-dreadful shite version of what a necromancer's all about? Jesus, you're an archaeology student, I'd have thought the idea of being able to reliably get 'hunches' would have you excited, no panicking like an absolute daftie."

"You what?" said Alice.

"The word itself, 'necromancy', comes from an ancient Greek phrase meaning 'divination by the dead', " Fiona said with a shrug. "Aye, you're capable of creating walking corpses, but since when was being physically capable of something the same as actually doing it? Don't try that argument with someone who carries a brace of pistols wherever she goes, you great numpty, it's no going to work," and she punctuated that by removing the teabag from her cup of tea and taking a sip.

Alice gave her a slitty-eyed look, drew a deep breath, and declared, "Necromancer!"

Fiona threw the teabag at her.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The Harbourmaster's was closed for several days, as a result of which the group of them went to find somewhere else to hang out the following Saturday evening - October fifth - and this ended up being a bar called the Ironworks, on the north side of the road just to the east of where Chapel Street became Academy Street, apparently so named because that was what the building used to be or something, and it turned out to firstly be the primary venue for rock concerts in Inverness and secondly the favourite hangout of a wide variety of students including the crowd Lucinda, the snob Alice had given a thorough dressing-down in the common room, hung around with, and dear Lucinda, whom Alice had noticed giving her and Annie weird looks.

However it was also the favourite hangout of a lot of other students, including the rest of the archaeology students in Alice's year, who enthusiastically greeted them on sight.

"Alice! Fiona! Andy!" Keiko happily declared as she saw who was coming, then continued to say something, and after a bit of thought Alice figured out she'd probably been asking where they'd spent the last month vanishing off to.

"Mum's pub," Andy more or less confirmed the guess, giving Alice hope that it was actually possible for an Englishwoman to learn to understand Keiko's Buckie accent. "You ken my mum runs a pub, where'd you think I'd be hanging out?"

"Okay sure," said Mike Mackenzie, "If you're hell-bent on hanging around with crusty old sailors and all of the toy soldier anoraks what brings you dafties up to the real world the night then?"

"Well there was a murder in the bloody toilets on Tuesday evening," Andy told him, and that got the attention of everyone around him. He continued, "And the fuzz still haven't let Mum re-open, probably because Dad was killed in a land war."

"It's no that, I heard one of the Fort William Innesse boys was shot dead in the Harbourmaster's toilets Tuesday," said Saul Chisholm. "The fuzz are going to need to go over that one with a fine-tooth comb if they're no wanting a gang war with the Harbourmaster's being right on the edge of Longman Org ground."

"I heard it was probably a hit," said Malcolm Chisholm. "Someone with an actual silenced gun too as in one of the ones that are actually quiet and we all know those are like rocking-horse shite, I heard someone was on the shitter when it happened and didn't hear a gunshot, the rumour is it was probably the SOE trying to start a gang war," and that got a round of nodding.

Alice soon lost interest as the conversation went into speculation about why a crook from Fort William had been bumped off 'right on the Longman Org's back door' and by whom, and Alice wasn't the only one to quickly lose interest; within about twenty minutes she found herself sitting with Fiona, Keiko, Annie, the one other girl (aside from Annie and Val) on the mechanical engineering course whose name turned out to be Trish Stoker and who did not make a good first impression of herself as she had on being introduced given Alice a really weird look and then studiously refused to look at her again, and a couple of other girls whose names Alice had not yet taped who'd also quite lost interest in wild conspiracy theories about what government branch might want to take advantage of which gangland rivalry, making small talk mostly on topics that were almost but not quite as annoying, such as clothes, and this led to one of the girls Alice hadn't quite got the name of yet asking Fiona where she'd got her blouse.

And that was when Fiona smiled and said, "I made it."

"You did?" the girl asked, clearly surprised. "Holy crap, I wouldn't have guessed - you're really good, I thought that had to be professional made!"

"It's hard to find clothes in a style I like that show off my waistline," Fiona told her with a pleased little smile. "There just aren't that many places you can get clothes in my style if you're down to sixteen inches, and the places you can cost a bloody fortune."

"Sixteen," said Annie with an annoyed sigh, hitting a topic that got even further up Alice's nose than the conspiracy stuff. "Bloody hell, Fiona, you lucky bitch, that slim build of yours - I inherited Dad's build, I had an absolute bitch of a time getting my waist down to eighteen."

"What the hell is with this insanely-tight-corsets thing anyway?" Alice asked.

"Come off it Alice, looking really damn good is always worth it," said Annie.

"Torturing yourself? Fuck that, tightening these blasted things past the point that actually fits you is just plain nuts," Alice declared,

Trish Stoker squinted at her, the first time she'd actually looked directly at her since being introduced, and then snorted.

"Alright for some, what the hell bloody size is your middle anyway?"

Keiko said something that sounded very annoyed indeed. Annie gave Alice a faintly irritated look, then shouted across to Nick, "Hey Nick, got a tape measure on you?"

"Sure," Nick shouted back, and a moment later a carpenter's tape measure came flying down the table; Annie caught it and turned back to Alice.

"That belt you're wearing oh-so-provocatively round the narrowest point on you, cough up, this thing isn't flexible enough to wrap round that tiny bloody waist of yours," she said.

"What?"

"Give. Me. Your. Belt."

"What, oh, bloody alright," Alice sighed, and pulled it off, admitting to herself that she did in fact rather like the dramatic look of the belt. Annie took the tape measure to where her wearing it had put a mark on it.

"Seventeen inches," she said. "Bloody hell, Alice, you don't tighten up your corset?"

Alice paused, looked from one annoyed girl to another, and then said, "Shutting up now," and took the belt back off Annie, who lobbed the tape measure back along the table to Nick.

Fiona let out a sigh and shook her head.

"For Christ sakes Alice, you've got a seventeen-inch waist and I know perfectly well you don't pull your bloody corset in at all, don't you have any idea how insufferable you starting on about the stupidity of lassies like me who have to lace ourselves up tighter than a drum skin to manage a figure like yours is anyway? No wonder Keiko's looking like she wants to clout you, you're coming across as a smug self-satisfied upper-class bitch telling us proles we shouldn't be putting on airs."

Alice didn't say anything for nearly a minute, and what eventually came out was, "... Oh."

"Just let it bloody rest," said Fiona. "Preferably before someone's trying to make you eat your own teeth, and I'm thinking yourself's owing some apologies."

"I'm guessing Doctor Clayton rebuilt you a good deal narrower than you were before the bombing," Annie said.

"Yeah, he must have, though I hadn't clocked how much," Alice said with a sigh. "God knows why."

"Are you absolutely mental?" Fiona asked, throwing her hands up. "Don't you know what every other lassie in this entire bloody town - apart from Val and she's, well, Val - would give for a waist that small? Ye Gods, Alice."

"There's that bloody rabbit hole again," Alice said with a groan, and tipped forwards until her forehead hit the table with a thump.

Annie sighed and stood up.

"Come on, Alice," she said. "I'll run you back to the digs."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The first thing Keiko said once Alice and Annie were gone was, "So what's her problem anyway, what the hell was that shite about rabbit holes?"

"Alice is an amnesiac," Fiona told her, and the rest of the group of girls too. "Some form of retrograde amnesia, probably something to do with whatever injured her so badly over half of her is cybernetic, she doesn't remember a damn thing right from before the last week of August - well, okay, she's got a full set of memories but the world she remembers is like some sort of really weird twisted carnival-mirror version and about the only real shared common point is Alice in Wonderland, I don't even know if her name's actually Alice Liddell or if she just latched onto the one thing she could actually clearly remember."

Keiko said, "Ah."

"You should've seen her face when Romanov casually mentioned atomic rocketry," Fiona continued. "You could've knocked her down with a feather, that night while she was basically in the middle of a breakdown about it she said something about how every time she thinks she's seen the bottom of the rabbit hole it turns out to be, quote 'another freight train coming up' unquote. No, I didnae expect the next sticking point to be underwear, though I probably should've guessed it was going to come up, I realised she doesn't tighten her laces at all some point the first week in the digs - but anyway, that's what's with Alice. I thought she'd got shellshock too on top of it but I'm starting to wonder if she hasn't after all."

"She's certainly got the fixed stare for it," said Trish.

"I don't know, it only sometimes turns up though it's been getting more common the last while," Fiona told her, figuring that the odd vibe she'd been getting off Trish in relation to Alice all evening was probably down to this; it didn't entirely tally with the way Trish had downright flinched at her first glance at the girl from another world but it made more sense than anything Fiona could think of. "In the end, it's almost like she's an alien. Things we take for granted are totally new to her, and I doubt this'll be the last thing she runs face-first into like that."

"Well," said Keiko with a sigh and a shake of her head, "It's probably a good thing I dinnae think she can understand a word out of my mouth then."

"Aye," said Trish. "You did get pretty descriptive there."

"We dinnae believe in mincing words in Buckie," said Keiko with a shrug.

"Nah, you believe in mangling them with an accent thicker than concrete in Buckie," said Trish; Keiko stuck her tongue out at Trish, and Fiona deemed her damage control successful.

-/-/-/-/-/-