An hour later, Taz sat down on the couch next to Greg. “Find anything?”
Greg sighed, still staring at his laptop. “Too much. I can’t narrow it down. And it’s not like I have a comprehensive list of supernatural species. In fact, I doubt this,” he gestured to the screen, “is even a fraction of what’s out there.”
When Greg had first learned that magic was real, he asked Jerry why he’d never heard of it before. Was there an entirely magical society, with wizard police that kept everything hush-hush? Or did magic censor itself from those not in the know?
Greg’s daydreams of slinging spells and traveling to fantastical realms were mercilessly shot down by Jerry’s answer. “Kid, listen. We, by that I mean the club,” none of the members could decide on a name for their group, and no one wanted to call it something ridiculous like ‘the coven’ or ‘the conclave,’ and so they ended up waffling between ‘group’ and ‘club,’ “-we don’t know. We are pretty sure that there’s no hidden magic society; it’s all scattered. Knowledge, paranormal creatures, occult history, there’s no large, organized groups out there, as far as we can tell.
“Part of what we want to do is gather that knowledge and preserve it. Anything that we can use to enrich ourselves is just a bonus.
“As for why real magic is not public knowledge, we don’t know. There’s too many mysteries, and not enough clues to even begin to answer them. A history book would be a start, but all there is to work with are fragmented references and snippets of dubious veracity, often contradictory.”
Jerry paused, letting Greg take all of that in. Then, he added, “You did not believe a single word of what we said about magic being real. That changed upon having seen a cup of coffee conjured out of thin air using nothing but a pile of herbs and spices and some guttural sounds.
“Whether or not your disbelief was some kind of magic mental block, or just a mundane cautiousness for not trusting the words of a stranger trying to convince you that physics and other natural laws are just a suggestion, I can’t say.
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“So in short, kid, I don’t know, and I’m not sure if it’s even possible to ever know for sure.”
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“Well, he’s right, at least, with everything being scattered,” Taz said after having listened to Greg’s story. “Demon society, yes we have a society, doesn’t know why the magic in this realm is so scattered. It’s possible that it wasn’t always like this, and something happened. Whether that was the result of magic going haywire, a systemic purging of fantastical elements from the world, or what, we don’t know either. It’s not even clear when things changed, or even if it had changed at all. There were a few attempts to contact higher beings and ask what happened, but they’ve never answered those questions. We would establish communication through rituals or prayer, and converse with them, but when it came to questions of the past, they went silent. Several of our demons were even struck down by the beings they contacted. Many of those people lived but suffered curses or banes. Rotting skin, addled minds, inability to consume anything but their own flesh, partial paralysis. Those were just some of the punishments – as they came to be called – suffered.
“So, yeah, we don’t know much more than you do when it comes to this mystery.”
Greg took a moment to process what Taz had told him. There was a lot to unpack and synthesize. Magic had probably stayed under the radar for a number of reasons. Advances in technology could replace any number of magical effects: long distance communication replaced message spells, scrying replaced by cameras and advances in optical technology, advances in the study of anatomy, biology, and chemistry made alchemy obsolete. Also, magic has been tedious and often inconsistent. Many of the spells, rituals, invocations, and the like that the club had acquired had more reliable, affordable, and available means to achieve similar results. Modern society values consistency and reliability. Uniform products, predictable costs and profits.
The continued secrecy of magic also had a reasonable explanation. Non-human sapients would not be safe from governments and opportunists wishing to study and take advantage of them. Additionally, there would be no significant benefits to revealing themselves. Thus, maintaining a low-profile would be ideal. Humans who discover magic would not freely share it for similar reasons: few, if any, benefits, and too many issues.
Those are just theories, though, with only flimsy reasoning propping them up. Greg thought it likely that those theories were correct, to a degree, but he decided to keep an open mind if, in the future, some new piece of information challenged his theories.
“I see,” Greg said simply. “In any case, we should figure out what we’re going to do about paying rent.”