One of the main disadvantages of stalking after a group of rather dull criminals, Felipe came to realize, was that they didn’t do all that much. After a brief stop at a plaza to bandage up Big, the man they had called Masley, the goons spent some time meandering through a city that was for the most part asleep. It didn’t even seem like they were heading anywhere, just walking for the movement of it, ambling around like aimless friends were prone to do. When they split up and went their separate ways, Felipe had a choice to make. Big had talked a good game, but Dumber clearly knew what was up, and he had already taken a licking underestimating the cauliflower eared fuck, so finding out what Dumber was up to it was.

Dumber, as it turned out, wasn’t up to very much. Felipe did observe him exchange some words with a brute of a man seemingly guarding an ostentatious yet seemingly abandoned building that Felipe thought seemed very familiar in a way he couldn’t quite place, after which he went to a tenement building that Felipe had to assume was his home.

Felipe spent some time sniffing around for Dumb and Big after that, but came up with a big load of nothing for his trouble. Dawn was breaking, and the dry itch in his eyeballs was telling him it was past due to get some damn sleep. Other men no doubt would listen to their bodies at this point, but Felipe was a man made of sterner stuff, thus he headed for the provider of a most enabling liquid. The fact that said enabler lived in the Castle, where his bed was also found, was a coincidence more so than anything else.

Felipe opened the door to the Exalted Room, the strange study-like room the Exalted Heroes had made their main hang and de facto office. It had seen gradually less use these days, what with Michael being strictly off premises, and Alicia spending half of her time going either to or from Camp with the trade routes.

“Oh hey, you’re here and awake.” Felipe didn’t intend that to sound like a question, but sound like a question it did. Fortunately he was well aware that the weird European gender fairy that inhabited the room wouldn’t take it as the insult they could have.
“That’s the right ass shitting, right there.” Lex replied, barely moving their eyes off the page of the book they were reading.
“Well that’s obscene,”
“You like?” Lex asked. “It’s a Norwegian expression. Michael taught it to me.”
“Didn’t know you were hanging out with big-‘n-tall” Felipe quipped, too casual by half.
“We chat on occasion. On the phone mostly, he’s very busy.”
“Psh, he’s just faking it for clout.”
“Oh you think so?” Lex asked as they closed their book, it was one of those uncomfortably incisive questions-that-wasn’t-a-question they could hit you with without warning. Felipe had come to fear them. “Sounds like he has his hands full with the trade route and all that.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it…” Felipe almost asked if Michael had asked about him in any of those phone calls, but decided against it at the last moment. “Man has no claim on that whole business and I bet he knows it.”
“I mean… one could argue he has as much claim as anyone, but that’s Thereafter for you.”
“I’ll never understand how lightly you take Law and Order Lex,”
Lex chuckled, it wasn’t insulting in any way Felipe could detect, but it FELT like he was missing something. “As soon as we get any of that anywhere near here I’ll have to get back to ya.”

“Anyway, do you have any Go Juice?” Felipe asked.
Lex face went through a quick flash of what might be irritation or slight concern before their preferred slightly cynical apprehension reasserted itself. “There’s like half a bottle of syrup on the shelf. I’m going to harvest some more of the homunculads today, actually. Want to come along?”
Felipe shrugged. “Might as well, I have been wanting to see how the farms come along.”
“No time like the present then Hastings, let’s go my friend!” Lex bounced to their feet with a pop culture reference Felipe could sense the outline of, if not decipher.

As it turned out, getting ready and going was a bit more of a production than advertised. Part of it, granted, was that Lex had decided to use this occasion to take the Empedoclings, the small semi-sentient creatures Lex had conjured out of the four classic elements, or the most readily available representations of the same, along for the ride. The air ones, miniature dust devils, were particularly mischievous which Felipe figured came with being functionally without a physical form per se. He’d take them over the fire guys, though, as those prickly customers had come to reinforce their flame with whatever small bits of wood they could get their hands on, and in particular guarded a pack of matches like it was the blood of the Savior. The water ones were probably Felipe’s favorite, and he was sure it was mostly a coincidence that those in particular employed the supreme malleability to look like conventionally attractive humans of various genders made out of water and foam. There was, of course, also a certain handyman-esque charm to the lumbering dirt empedoclings, though they now were mostly dust by volume.

Once every empedocling was safely stowed in a four-compartment box Lex had prepared for the occasion, and the carrying straps in turn were fastened to the box, and Lex had done a basic stretching routine that Felipe figured he might as well join them in, it was time to head towards the farm.
“You know, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Felipe said as they stepped out of the Castle and into the somewhat-busy streets of Thereafter. “Why didn’t you magic up a carrying solution for your little weirdo parade that needs to be assembled like that? Wouldn’t it be just as easy to magic something that’s in one piece? And… I don’t know, walks on its own or something?
“This is more modular,” Lex indicated the box. “If I end up magic-ing up The Perfect Solution to any old problem I’ll just end up with a bunch of stuff I only need to use once. Besides…”
“It’s not as simple as that, I take it?” Felipe was pretty sure he was getting a handle on this whole magic thing, or at least enough of a handle to know that there was much he did not know.
“No unfortunately,” Lex conceded. “For one, complexity adds a lot of difficulty to conjuring, that is to say magic-ing up something. You have to have a much clearer image of what, for example, a clock is and how it works, than for example a hammer, which becomes kind of a compounding cost because there’s just also plain more to know about a watch. And then there’s the draw. That is how much ambient magic you have to absorb to manifest the construct once it’s clear in your mind, the more complex it is the bigger the draw, and getting enough is always a challenge since the translation field and all the spells holding the city together and keeping atmosphere and all that take their share and then some.”
“Hold on,” Felipe said as he opened the bottle of the golden, slightly honey-like Go Juice syrup and took a healthy swig. As usual it tasted a bit like the ground upon which a cotton candy machine had once stood and went down with the approximate mouthfeel as cod liver oil. Still, though, as Felipe felt his neurons crackle back to life after going into low energy mode, there was really no faulting the effect. “You’re going to have to explain that to me in a little more detail.”
“You know you’re supposed to mix that stuff with water, right?”
“This is more expedient, I don’t have all day.”
Lex shook their head. “Your kidneys being mostly functional still must be a modern day miracle Felipe.”
“They don’t call me the…”
“Yeah yeah, your stupid Teen Crush Magazine nickname, I’m aware.” Lex waved the question as completely as they could without letting go of the carrying strap. “OK, so Magic, it’s… it exists in all things on this side of the calling ritual as best as I can tell, in various quantities, or maybe some aspects of it is just easier for us to detect or draw on, I haven’t been able to establish good experiments on that just yet… or rather I have TRIED but it does feel an awful lot like the dang stuff keeps fucking with my results somehow.”
“Huh, like in Three Body Problem?”
“Yes… wow Felipe, you didn’t strike me as the Hard Sci-Fi type.”
“I’m not,” Felipe shrugged as he avoided a gaggle of scholarly types clearly engaged in a loud, deep, possibly unsolvably deep methodological dispute “But the Netflix show wasn’t terrible and I got bored one afternoon.”
“Figures,” Lex laughed to themselves. “Anyway, as best as I can tell the various traditions around using Magic are in practice using different techniques to shape magic with ones mind. The Steppefolk, for example, draw in ambient magic in the air, some times through breathing techniques, but Alicia’s adventures in the void tells me air isn’t strictly speaking mandatory, so it could be in part metaphorical.”

“How is Alicia doing these days anyway? I feel like I’ve hardly spoken to her lately.” Felipe asked, interrupting before he was quite aware of what he was doing as they crossed a plaza in part occupied by what was either a very oddly paced argument or some sort of improv exercise between a man in star-studded robes and some bedraggled-looking knight.
“Oh you know,” It was Lex’ turn to shrug, but it was a stiffer movement than the casual dismissal it was intended as. “She’s off doing her Space Hero thing with the Scavengers a lot. Last I got was some pictures of some new Steppefolk-inspired armor she was testing out for them.”
“Yes, I got those too,” Felipe said, and sat with the question just a second before asking it “is it just me or has she gotten…”
“God, yes.” Lex looked briefly beatific, “she is SO HOT now.”
“I know, right?” Felipe couldn’t help but feel slightly amused at Lex’ religiously sapphic awe. “I mean, I know she had some concerns back when the Camp diet started hitting, but mother of god every pound has been a benediction from above.”
While Alicia had always been an attractive woman, Felipe would admit that a lot of her Influencer vibe wasn’t his favorite, at least compared to the absolutely blazing confidence getting some bulking weight had empowered her with. It didn’t hurt, Felipe supposed, that Alicia chiefly had gained the weight in her thighs and hips, with the paunch that followed more as punctuation to her increased mass than a chief topic. It was a good look, it, and she, felt strong in the very practical way that people who use their muscles for a living could grow strong, quite the contrast to the overspecialization of the athlete. “Anyway,” Felipe pulled his brain out of the only slightly embarrassing infatuation he felt for his friend, lover, and fellow Exalted Hero. By the look on Lex’ face they were going through a similar process. “You were talking about how all these various magic nerds had different methods for doing the same thing, or something?”

“Yeah, or at least that’s my working hypothesis… Oi, no fighting in there,” Lex jostled the Empedocling box, a choir of incensed, high-pitched voices complained in reply. “Every one of these disciplines, at least the ones I’ve had access to any info on, figured out how to make magic do cool shit for them and then largely ignore the question of what’s actually going on, though I suppose there were some that got kind of alchemical with it but… OK listen, Felipe. I know you think this shit is stupid and complicated for no reason, but I am trying to get a handle on this for a good reason.”
“If I can correct you real quick,” Felipe found himself grinning. “I think that shit is stupid and complicated for SOME reason, and it seems we’re agreeing about that.”
Lex suppressed a snort, probably of laughter and not derision but you could never be 100% sure of such things. “You’ll hear no argument from me on that. It’s just… we could solve so many problems with magic if we could get a clearer picture of how it works. Just think, if we can make magic accumulators and batteries like I’m theorizing we can, that could open up the door to so much incredible stuff that would make everyone’s lives so much better. and it’s kinda driving me insane that I seem to be the only one who have even tried to put that whole thing into any kind of system.”
“It’s in your nature,” Felipe felt the conclusion form as naturally as breathing. “Me, I take most things on faith. Sun shines, grass grows, magic does a bunch of bullshit half the time and the wrong bunch of bullshit the other half, it is not for Felipe to Know, but you? You have the ability to understand, to check the Almighty on his math. I think it’s cool. Way beyond me, but I’m glad someone’s working on it, and I can scarcely imagine anyone better than you Lex.”
“That’s sweet of you Felipe,” Lex said, a brief moment of genuine emotion before the cynical follow-up they both knew was coming. “And I’ll take that to mean you’re not going to be much help in understanding this whole thing, then.”
“A man must know his limits,” Felipe said with the absolute certainty of a man who was only partially telling the truth.
“Right, Mr Olympiad says this. Anyway, it’s right up here.” Lex motioned for a set of stairs up some blocky houses mostly assembled by largely-continuous fragments of sandstone.

Author’s Notes: I originally wasn’t going to have Felipe getting into how magic works at all in this book, but the plot ended up evolving in such a way that at least a basic primer could be useful. We’re not going hardcore academic on it yet though, that’s for Lex’ book, which is up next. Anyway, one other thing of note in this is that I get a little bit into character description, and how hot a character is getting in particular. Normally I don’t do this, but I felt that Alicia’s ongoing journey with weight and workouts deserved some running commentary. It also sets up quite nicely for a thing I am doing a little bit later in the book, stay tuned for whatever that turns out to be!

Catch you next time.

VSD