The New Chimera

Dinner went...well. A lot better than Lucas expected, actually. Vithi and Judy seemed to get along well, even going so far as to share a brief hug as Judy left. “So, um…what’d you think? Of Judy, I mean.”

“She was nice. I liked her a lot.” Vithi replied, shrugging. “Hey, tomorrow, skip school if you can. We need to talk, and I would rather we had a bit more time than we do at the moment.”

Lucas frowned. “I can…probably manage that. We have an hour or two before I need to go to sleep, though, are you sure we can’t do it now?”

Vithi shook her head. “You’re going to want more than that, trust me.” She sat down in a chair and booted up a game console, tossing Lucas a controller. “You want to play? I’ve been needing a partner for some endgame content in one of the games I play and don’t trust random people from the internet so you’re basically the only option.”

She went into the game in question, loading up the character select screen. Her character was a warrior that looked remarkably similar to Vithi herself, and it was decently high level already. “You do have a character, right? It’s your game so I just assumed.”

Lucas nodded, sitting down. “Yeah, I’ve got a character.” He opened his account, selecting his wizard. He had made it into the stereotypical wizened old man and had him all decked out in the best gear he found.

He soon started playing with Vithi and found that she was a surprisingly good teammate. He had expected her to be as…combative as she was outside of the game, but she shared resources, tanked when needed, and was generally just…a team player. Lucas had played with far worse people before, so it was a breath of fresh air.

And so, he found himself starting to truly relax for the first time since Vithi had started staying with him. There was always something, school was crazy, work was awful, and trying to get magic to work and failing was really frustrating. And Vithi’s rather standoffish disposition hadn’t helped matters in the slightest, that was for sure.

“So, uh, what do you usually do for fun?” Vithi asked, snapping Lucas out of his reverie.

“I would usually play games out here or watch TV or something.” He said, shrugging. “But now I’m mostly just in my room catching up on homework, trying to do magic, or watching videos on my phone.”

“Oh. Guess I…kinda took control of the living room and locked you out. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I needed to catch up on some projects anyway, so it’s whatever. Why do you want to know?”

“Just curious.” Vithi said, moving her character to intercept a monster on its way to attack Lucas’s, “This is fun. We should do it more often.”

Lucas gave a slight smile but didn’t say anything more.

---

The next morning, Lucas awoke to the smell of something cooking. Confused, he made his way to the kitchen only to find Vithi making breakfast.

“Morning.” She said, giving him a small smile. “I’m making bacon and eggs, want some?”

Lucas frowned. “Yeah, I guess. Look, I’ve been meaning to ask, these past couple of days you’ve been acting different. Are you feeling alright?”

“I’m fine.” Vithi replied, flipping a piece of bacon, “But I’m pretty sure you’re not going to be if you don’t hurry up. I think you’re going to be late.”

Lucas pulled out has phone and to his astonishment, found that he was, indeed, running late. He glanced at the stovetop timer, which was all zeros and blinking.

“There was a power outage this morning.” Vithi explained. “Go get dressed, this should be done by the time you’re finished.”

Lucas nodded hurriedly, not wanting to waste time with any more questions when his boss would have much more pointed questions to ask him if he was even the littlest bit late. He went back to his room, confirmed that his alarm clock had also been reset by the power outage, and began to change into his work clothes.

He made his way back into the kitchen, where Vithi had a plate of eggs and a couple pieces of bacon waiting for him. He scarfed down the eggs, grabbed the bacon, and bade a quick goodbye to Vithi before beginning his walk to work.

Work really wasn’t great, but it never was. People didn’t tend to be kind to fast food workers, and he had a couple of his worst coworkers working with him today, so it was just…draining. But he wasn’t working a full shift because he would normally have school, so he was back home in just over four hours.

“I’m home!” He called.

“Alright.” Vithi responded, “Go get changed or whatever, then we can talk.”

“Sure.” He replied, heading back to his room to change into something more comfortable, then coming back to the living room to talk with Vithi. “So, what’s up? Why do you need all this time?”

Vithi paused her game, then walked over to the window, though she stayed to its side. “Take a look through here.” She said.

As Lucas walked up and did, she continued. “Do you see that car?” She asked, pointing at a nondescript red car.

“Yeah, what about it?”

“There are people inside, right?”

“Just a guy on his phone, from what I can tell.” Lucas said. The windows were somewhat tinted, but he could barely make the man out. “Your point?”

“He’s been sitting there for hours every day, just watching. I’ve even seen him come out and poke the house with magic, I’m pretty sure he’s from the Society.”

Lucas frowned. “The what?”

Vithi started. “Right, forgot, you wouldn’t know. The Society of the Light is an organization supposedly dedicated to revealing magic to Earth, but in reality, they’re just terrorists, plain and simple.”

“And why isn’t it revealed? It seems like it would be something that would make life nicer for a lot of people.”

Vithi sighed. “It’s a long and complicated story. The general gist of it is that it’s for the safety of non-humans like me, and while some in the magical community agree with you, most would prefer to keep things secret.”

She walked back to her seat and unpaused the game. “I’m working on some contingency plans to deal with things if the Society does make a move, but you can’t confront them right now. They don’t know exactly which house we’re in and they’re narrowing it down. I can’t do anything until they’ve made their move, so you can’t let them know you’re onto them, alright?

“And make no mistake, you won’t be able to do anything about them alone. You’re just not equipped to deal with it, but I wanted you to be at least somewhat in the know, since I’m anticipating having to do something soon. But that’s not all of why I wanted all this time. The other, more important, thing I was wanting to talk about is how magic works.”

“You…already did, though? You focus, say some words, maybe do some gestures or anything, and poof, magic.”

Vithi snickered. “That’s how you do magic, I want to tell you how it works.” She motioned to a seat and Lucas sat, looking at her intently. Vithi smiled, turning to her game and opening up the skill tree. “There are three main types of magic,” she began, “Two of those combine to form the fourth, flashier type of magic that you probably think of when you think ‘magic’. The first and debatably most important is the Domain, which you can think of like the racial benefits games will give your characters.

“Much like this skill tree, each Domain has a set number of abilities contained within and is the same for every member of a particular race. The abilities, called Traits are unlocked basically whenever you do things related whatever part of the Domain you’re trying to unlock. It’s not something that always happens, and you’re not notified whenever you do unlock something, so you kinda have to rely on identification spells to figure it out. It’s a huge pain, to tell you the truth.

“Second is Skills. They’re…strange and pop up seemingly at random. No one’s really sure what exactly triggers you to get one, except that they tend to appear more during times of crisis. And, again, like with Traits, you don’t get notified when you get one, they just sorta…come out and all of a sudden, you’ve done something you couldn’t before and have no clue what you just did.

“And that leads us to the magic we’ve been trying to get you to learn. It’s not strictly a category like the other two, it’s just sort of…everything else. And it’s important to understand how that works if we want to know why you can’t do anything. Any questions before we continue?”

Lucas wasn’t sure where to start, really. It was a lot of information being dumped on him all at once. Yet, at the same time, it all felt oddly…familiar. Like he was remembering something he had known before, not learning something entirely new. Perhaps it was an effect of the wish he had made, helping him learn it faster?

Well, actually, now that he was thinking a little deeper on it, one question stuck out to him more than all the others. “Uh, what’s the human Domain, then? We…have one, right?” Something about Domains was really triggering that remembering something feeling stronger than anything else, and he figured it wouldn’t lead him astray.

Vithi laughed. “Yes, humans have Domains. It’s pretty odd, as far as Domains go, in that it’s really…general. Most Domains specialize you in some aspect of magic, and humans just get a bit of everything. And they get it a lot faster than other races, too. As a tradeoff, however, eternal youth is a lot harder to get than in other Domains, but it’s still plenty doable. Anything else?”

Eternal youth? That was an attractive idea, and something he intended on getting as soon as possible. Well, once he knew how, anyway. “Some other stuff but that can wait until after you explain the other type of magic.”

Vithi nodded. “So, the important part is that all magic draws on your Domain when being cast. And I got frustrated and did some investigation, and you don’t have a Domain, or any Skills. Or, well, if you do, not any that can be detected normally. As far as that goes, you’ve got less magic than the trees out back.”

Lucas frowned. “How did you find that out? Is there an easy way you can teach me?”

Vithi paused briefly. “It’s a matter of being able to feel the magic.” She said. “You have to learn how to feel magic first and you’ve got none of that feel. It’d be faster to teach you regular magic first.”

That didn’t sound right, as she had just mentioned that you needed an identification spell, but he didn’t want to sour her mood and make her stop talking, so he didn’t question her. “So, is…not having a Domain or Skills normal?” Lucas asked, though he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

“No. In fact, it’s so far from normal I’ve never heard of anything remotely similar. Everyone has a Domain, period, end of sentence. Humans born here on Earth have theirs restricted due to some old and extremely powerful magic, but they do have one.”

“But I don’t? What does that mean? Did the wish backfire?”

Vithi shrugged. “Honestly, I have no clue what it means, but the wish didn’t backfire. Backfires result in nothing happening, not…this. I’m really not an expert on this sort of thing and I don’t think even an expert would know what to make of it. But I’m pretty sure it’s why you’re unable to use magic normally. Magic is trying to access your Domain to see if it should have any bonuses and since you don’t have one it just fails entirely. This is all just conjecture, but I’m pretty sure that the way we’ve been going at teaching you magic just won’t work.”

Lucas frowned. That was really disappointing to hear, since it made his life a whole lot more difficult. “So, what now?”

“I’m not sure. I have a couple of ideas, but I’m not sure how they’ll help. And then I have one last-resort method, but that’s going to be…less than ideal, so I’m trying to avoid it if at all possible. We can start running down the list of my ideas tomorrow and see where we get.”

From there the conversation turned to the finer details of how magic worked, and after another hour or two of talking about the details of magic, Lucas felt like he had an oddly solid grasp on how everything worked. And, if what Vithi was saying was true and he didn’t have a Domain, then he really was in a pickle when it came to doing any kind of magic.

But, as the conversation began to wind down, there was one more thing that had been on his mind as he had been conversing with Vithi. “Hey, these past couple of days you’ve been acting really differently, are you OK?”

Vithi paused for a moment before replying. “I’m fine. I basically realized I was throwing a tantrum and being rude to you when you really didn’t deserve it. I was taking out frustration at being imprisoned on the person who freed me, I was being a child. So, I decided to actually start acting my age and try and make up for my behavior.”

There was another pause as she seemed to struggle on what to say next. “Um…sorry, I guess.” She eventually said.

Lucas shrugged. “It’s whatever. You were in a stressful situation, it’s acceptable to let out some steam once in a while.”

“No, it’s not.” Vithi said flatly. “Not when it’s directly making someone else who had nothing to do with it feel worse. So, what I’m getting at is that I’m fine. Behavioral changes are just because I started to listen to my conscience.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” And it was. It was good to hear that she wasn’t having some sort of mental breakdown or anything.

The conversation just sort of awkwardly died there, and eventually Lucas made an excuse about doing homework and went back to his room. And then…days passed. When Lucas got home, he and Vithi would try and figure out what was going on with his Domain. And nothing would happen, and he would fall asleep, and then the next day they would try something else.

And every day the threat of the Society grew larger in Lucas’s mind. Whenever he asked Vithi about it, she just said it was under control and to wait until she told him to do something. So, he did, waiting both for his magic to get worked out and for the Society to make their move. And, if he was being honest, he didn’t care which happened first. He just wanted something to change.