Kevin Curry
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Young devil's consultancy 11
🕑 Added 2024-09-02 01:51:01 +0000 UTCOkay, I needed a little extra time to finish this chapter, but don't worry, tomorrow's update is done and scheduled. It's the end of the Fifth life.
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Living life as the children of an old money billionaire wasn’t all fun and games, though. There were expectations, after all. Singing christmas carols was only the start; they had to show that they were becoming cultured as well as intelligent, and there was further expectations of a young lady, to do something athletic so as to remain trim, although only the most odious of high society busybodies dared question Alfred’s control over their diets.
So Tanya had to pick between ballet, figure skating, gymnastics, dressage, and tennis. Further, she had to pick between opera singing, piano, violin, the harp, or clarinet. The thing was, she had learned tennis in her first life, performing… adequately, and learned opera singing in her second.
Alfred was not impressed with her decision. So she had to pick a second thing from each list, so she could actually show she was learning instead of faking it. Which… was fine, she saw the logic. Mostly, the logic was that Richard had to pick something other than gymnastics so as to be seen as becoming cultured instead of just continuing to be a carny, and if he let her get away with previous experience it wouldn’t be fair to the boy.
So it was to roaring applause that Tanya was tossed up into the air by the older boy and then caught before being smoothly put back on her skates, turning once before stopping and taking a bow. Was it wasteful to rent out the skating arena so Bruce can show off his children’s talent and hard work? Oh yes. But it was the kind of waste that, as an old money family, he was expected to do. Just like the eventual plans to rent out the opera house so that Tanya could play the piano while singing in front of an audience with Richard accompanying her on the cello. When they got better at it.
“Man, I’ve missed having an audience.” Richard said cheerily. His unitard was green, of a complementary shade to Tanya’s lavender dress, both elaborately festooned with lace designs. They bowed again to another section of the audience.
“Good for you.” Tanya said through her plastic smile. “Can we leave yet?” They bowed to the third section of the audience.
“Just one more set of bows.” Richard said quietly back. Putting word to deed, they then skated off the arena as the next set of skaters entered. Naturally, Bruce being himself, he sponsored a whole class of underprivileged youth who also got figure skating lessons from the same olympians hired to teach Richard and Tanya, with full-ride college scholarships on the line for ‘promising youths’, which was a lot easier to qualify for than was implied. “What’s wrong? Don’t you speak in front of crowds all the time?”
“Speak.” Tanya reiterated as she grappled with her leotard, “Not dance around with-” Ah, much better. “-a flubbed catch giving me a wedgie for half the routine.”
“Oh.” Richard said, wincing. “Sorry about that. The show must go on, you know? You followed my improv’ed recovery well.”
Tanya took a deep, calming breath, “It’s fine,” He’s just a kid, it was an accident, he apologized. “I’m just in a bad mood after losing all of that clay of life.” Damn Gotham. Waynetech’s insurance on high-value shipments meant that it wasn’t as massive of a financial hit as it could have been, but it takes more than money to convince Themyscira to give up that amount of what used to be their only way to make more of themselves without getting men involved.
The only silver lining to the whole nonsense was that the clay of life wasn’t involved in the fertility ritual, it was for the skin cream, and a component of a few other ideas they had when considering the new magical ingredient. So they would at least be able to still fulfill their part of the deal with the island of women. It just sets them back immensely on other fronts. The trust between them and “Men’s World” was still too thin to ask them for more than they’re already giving up.
“If we’re lucky, it’ll just show up in an underworld auction and we can just buy it back.” Richard said consolingly, repeating Bruce’s words on the subject. Unspoken was ‘or Batman and Robin can bust it up and give it back to the rightful owners, ArcWayne’.
“We’re never that lucky.” Tanya groused, although sometimes the unspoken event does end up happening. They split up and changed outfits, Tanya into an black gothic dress with a fur coat and Richard into a suit that was appropriate for an upper class outing. The braid she had during the figure skating routine was kept, although she swapped out the lace decorations for a simple lotus flower comb she started to wear for no particular reason.
They managed to get back to the VIP box having missed only a single performance. “How did we do, Daddy?” Tanya asked Bruce with her usual ‘cute’ voice with just a dash of Alfred’s British accent, a little girl trying to sound fancy. Others were in the box, after all, and it’s the little things that can give one away, at times.
“You did great.” Bruce said, smiling easily.
“You flubbed the second catch.” Said the man seated next to Bruce, Jacob Kane. He was very recently a Colonel in the United States military, had retired a few months ago to assume the role of CEO of his family’s company, Kane industries. He was also Bruce’s uncle through his mother. He was not a fan of Bruce adopting Richard.
Richard glared at the former Colonel. “I guarantee you most of that audience didn’t notice. That’s how you get perfect shows, by keeping it going.”
“You recovered wonderfully.” Bruce added.
The two of them sat in their seats, Tanya deliberately putting Richard between Bruce and her, reached into her fur coat, and after double-checking that the volume was muted and the screen’s backlight was off, turned on her gameboy, twirling the stylus in her hand as it loaded. All this skating and piano was really cutting into her gaming time, which was already impeded by her duties with ArcWayne and as Rhine. She hadn’t gotten to play a console all week.
Fortunately, her night vision was stellar, easily augmented with magic without any vocalizations nor with any visual effect that could be detected without careful examination of her eyes, which is awfully hard to do in the dark. She had another gym to defeat.
Eventually, after Mahou, her witch ghost, emerged victorious, Richard elbowed her and she looked up, paying attention to her surroundings once more. Oh, it was time for applause. She smoothly closed her gameboy, stashed the stylus, and slipped the handheld back into her fur coat’s pocket, before giving an energetic but polite applause to… ah, of course. Barbara Gordon and her partner, Jason Bard. While she didn’t exactly fit the bill when it came to ‘underprivileged youth’ that most of the class is, Barbie (as Tanya liked to call her to annoy her) had occasionally, about six times total, been asked to ‘babysit Tanya and Richard’ which was just an excuse to get her safe and sound within the admittedly overblown security umbrella of Wayne Manor, whenever Jim Gordon thought that there was a risk to his family for a weekend or whatever. He was divorced, so it was just the daughter he needed to worry about. So she was connected enough to the family to be let in on the lessons with no one thinking twice.
The point here was that Barbie and Jason were the oldest members of the class, and Barbie was by far the most talented: the sixteen-year old was already an Olympic-qualified gymnast (but with a very low chance of actually being selected for the American team) and a black belt in both Karate and Jujitsu, and she didn’t get those from some strip-mall dojo, either. Jason… managed to keep up with Barbie, which is honestly more than could be reasonably expected of the boy.
So the applause was likely because they did a great performance, and as they were scheduled last, it was also a good time to stop playing. “Thanks.” She whispered to Richard.
“No problem.” He said, glancing at Bruce who definitely noticed her act of petty self-centeredness but pretended not to so as to maintain his image as a bit of an airhead. Jacob might have noticed, but he would ignore it on the basis of blatant favoritism.
Just another evening for the Wayne family.
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There was a set of high-rise luxury apartments that were, through a holding company, owned by the Wayne trust. Actually, something like 28% of the apartments in the city were owned by Bruce through various intermediaries, but most of them were low-income, and while that indirectness had a price of control, the lack of top-level pressure for maximum profit did mean they tended to be cheaper than the market.
Naturally, there were tons of safehouses scattered throughout Gotham in these complexes. In this case, one of the penthouse suites was owned by Tanya’s cover identity as Tanya Degurechaff, Director of ArcWayne. It was deliberately mocked up to be as witchy as was practical, and was, in fact, where she did most of her magical research and less resource-intensive experiments nowadays.
“Experiment number eighteen on project Nadir.” Tanya said softly into a microphone connected to her computer. Waynetech’s incredible text-to-speech technology was primarily motivated by Bruce wanting to increase his efficiency when writing reports, so she’d have it even if it wasn’t out on the market, but the fact that it is out means she can use it in the office, too. Having to use an Imperia-well, German accent was a slight imposition, but it was far less of one than having to listen to her own unmodified voice, as it always reminded her of that one time she didn’t pitch down her voice, warning the Dacians they were about to attack.
Even after being literally executed on stupid and also false charges, that was still a decision that, in hindsight, was probably her most morally indefensible act in the war. At least, that she can remember. A lot of the stuff she did in the war was pretty fuzzy, she only had clear memories of the things she thought about regularly afterwards, and she knew enough neuroscience to know that they were probably pretty inaccurate as well.
The joke about the visas was still hilarious, though. She’ll never apologize for that one. Even if Bruce would probably not see the humor. Alfred might, though. She’s not sure of his stance on gallows humor.
Still, she was almost done with the ritual setup. One of the things that makes the blood purification ritual practical was a magical ingredient called liquid sunlight. Normally, the ritual needed to be done at high noon under an open sky, which was naturally difficult to manage and impossible to keep sterile besides. However, liquid sunlight was something created under those conditions with the specific property of being able to power rituals with that requirement at other times and conditions. The amount created per attempt varied immensely depending on conditions, the ritualist’s skill, and how much supplementary power was provided, but that was far preferable to a consistent amount of varying purities, as it could not only be mixed with the results of other creations of bottled sunlight, but shipped long distances to boot.
Tanya had theorized that other forms of magically significant conditions could be similarly bottled, and had been, over the last year and a half or so, attempted to create a similar ritual for the conditions of the zenith of the full moon and the nadir of the new moon, bottled moonlight and bottled midnight respectively. She hasn’t found any references to such a thing, neither Professor Blood, John Constantine, Zatara, nor that new magical member of the Justice League Nabu, alias ‘Doctor Fate’ had heard of any practitioner selling that kind of reagent, but she was reasonably confident that it was possible, and John agreed. He was back in Britain, attempting the same thing, and was promised two million dollars for the patent if he managed it before she did.
The bottled sunlight ritual had four relevant components: The circle, the crucible, the incantation, and the script. It was created by a vampire hunting coven in Romania back in the 15th century, during the Sixth Eternal Eclipse (that is, the sixth time in the last 2000 years that some jumped-up vampire lord decided to attempt world conquest), using Romanian for the incantation and Greek of all things for the script.
Tanya was… as certain as she could be that she had adjusted the circle, script, and incantation appropriately. Professor Blood agreed. The main issue was the crucible. In the sunlight ritual, you needed a very specific glass container which can mercifully be re-used after the output was moved to mirrored bottles… which while a large obstacle way back when, nowadays ordering batches of custom glassware was easy enough that ArcWayne gives them out for free as part of the ritual kit they give out to anyone willing to make bottled sunlight for them, paying twenty dollars per centiliter, which is enough to purify one liter of blood. Given that processing blood the normal way costs two-fifty to three hundred dollars per liter, this is a very sustainable price point, even if it’s nowhere near the only expense in the magical process. Hundreds of minor practitioners in the English-speaking world have revealed themselves to ArcWayne on the promise of gig work, as one of the commonalities of the eclectic bunch that practice magic is that they’re not big fans of proper employment, but creating a magical reagent to be sold to another practitioner is respectable enough to their sensibilities that it overcame their natural inclination against having a regular job.
Unfortunately, glass was a dead-end for both project Nadir and project Luna. She had gotten some progress with a silver vessel for project Luna, but the liquid moonlight wasn’t staying liquid, so she was experimenting with the shape to fix that. Unfortunately, she has had no luck with Project Nadir.
“Circle, script, and incantation are all as per attempt seventeen.” She continued, before rattling off the summarized nuances for clarity’s sake. Science was so tedious sometimes. “Crucible is a discus of obsidian, a perfect circle of one meter diameter, with one micron layer of vantablack paint.” This was not easy to get. The crucible’s role in the ritual was containing and stabilizing the component, which was why she was certain she got the rest right, but while it was an improvement over the control conditions of literally nothing, it didn’t yet create what she was looking for.
Fortunately, Waynetech has plenty of machines that could paint a precisely one micron layer of something on a surface. It just… costs one hundred thousand dollars of labor and materials plus two hundred thousand dollars worth of lost productivity to retool the machine, do the job, and retool it back to layer chemicals on phone processors or whatever it’s normally for. Which came out of ArcWayne’s budget. Fortunately, with the single, solitary success ArcWayne has under its pointy hat she can justify pretty much anything below a million as just a minor R&D expense, and if she runs out of money the board won’t even blink when Bruce authorizes more.
“Executing test when parameters are optimal, ETA two minutes.” She said into the microphone, nervously smoothing out her skirt as she breathed deeply through her nose, using her magic sense to determine when the nadir of the new moon was truly upon them. She set the microphone down and took her coffee thermos, taking a deep pull from it. If this works, she’ll need it.
Her view of the night sky was interrupted by a ground-based spotlight targeting one of the few clouds that remained. The Bat-signal was lit. Commissioner Gordon wanted a meeting with the Batman.
This wouldn’t affect the ritual… sort of. She knows from experience that things like pollution and similar negative conditions reduced the yield of the sunlight ritual, but it didn’t stop it altogether. This ritual should be similar, which is also why she expects that this one will require a dedicated facility set up several miles away from the city once she gets it working to create a significant amount of product.
Still, it was time to commence. “Here we stand on the border of darkness, brushing on the infinity of the abyss.” Tanya intoned in Romanian, the cadence refined over the various attempts to align the magical fluctuations caused by the words with the natural rhythm of the cosmos. She walked in precisely calibrated steps around the line of Greek letters, each rotation taking a precisely calibrated 29.5 steps. Getting that right was a pain, but she had marked a series of dots around the circle to act as an aid. “I entreat Erebus to crystallize the deepest night for our works, to bring a phial of his tenebrousness to the brightest peaks of the world.” Tanya’s heartbeat accelerated as she changed but one word in the chant, not even sure why. But it worked, her enhanced night vision seeing the mystical energies coalesce onto the crucible. She repeated the chant, confident in her last-second inspiration, and even more power flowed to the platform.
…Of course. Liquid midnight could not exist. Powdered midnight, on the other hand… It took six hours of continuous chanting and walking until this particular ritual’s window for the nadir to close. Exhausted, with sore muscles and even sorer vocal chords, Tanya hurriedly went for her alchemy kit, getting the tools necessary to handle powdered reagents and gently scooped the results of her successful ritual into a container that could be used to measure it. “...okay, so this is certainly more than you get out of a sunlight ritual, which is good, because you can only do it once a month instead of every day. But this is definitely going to be more expensive.” She said to herself after taking a water bottle and draining it in one go. This will require some additional measures…
Still, she took her phone into the restroom and checked her messages. There weren’t any emergency alerts, but apparently all three of the fertility rituals that were occurring during her experiment were successful pending a pregnancy test in a week for the final confirmation, a great step forward for the process. Was it a little ethically ambiguous to attempt these kinds of process refinements with live patients before the government’s approval? Yes. But Themyscira was fully confident in the ritual’s efficacy and safety, and it… probably wouldn’t ruin anything irrevocably if the ritual got botched due to inexperienced ritualists, even if the real reason things got botched was because they tried some way to do things faster or more cheaply.
Idly, she wondered about the sociological implications of the society of amazons getting a whole new generation of Amazons all at once. Well, sort of all at once, but they ordered forty pregnancies over less than two years… Their pre-existing population was less than a thousand, it would definitely have some significant impact. Especially when you consider that these girls would not know of a world where Diana wasn’t a world-famous representative of the Amazons. It was interesting.
Still, she called the office. “Yes, boss?” asked her secretary, a handsome man by the name of Richard Karlo. The man was incredibly disappointed that she had absolutely no interest in fraternizing, but his initial probes in that direction were subtle enough that she didn’t want to raise a fuss. He gave her an autograph of his brother Basil, a reasonably successful heartthrob actor, to apologize, which she politely accepted and then put it somewhere she could ignore it. The thing wasn’t even worth one hundred dollars, she checked.
“I heard that we achieved a one hundred percent success rate.” Tanya said, “Is this true?” Mr. Karlo was aware that she relied on him to be her eyes on the site, when she could not do so in person.
“The witches said it worked.” Mr. Karlo confirmed. He was referring to the magically sensitive people she’d hired two years ago. Coincidentally, all four of them, only minor talents, not only knew each other, but were in a coven together at Gotham University before they were hired. All but one have moved to graduate school by now and can thus help with research, but their primary duty is to sense magic. “Did your thing work?”
“It did.” Tanya said proudly. “I’ll bring in the results after I get some sleep. Try to get one of our consultants on site for the initial examination, at two in the afternoon.”
“You got it, boss.” Mr. Karlo said, “Now get some rest, you sound like you need it.”
“Remind me to finish the log. Good night.” She said in dismissal, hanging up the phone before calling the Batcave. “Alfred? I’m too tired to teleport, can you summon me home? I just gotta lock up.” While yes, she could technically sleep in the penthouse she was currently inside, she’d need to call to inform them of this anyway, and she didn’t have any perishable food, and the bed wasn’t as soft as the one she had in her room at the manor. This was easier.
“Right away, Miss Tanya.” Alfred said easily, “You’ll be just in time to meet Master Bruce arrive home after a long night.”
Tanya smiled. “Does that mean you have food ready?” She asked.
“Always.” He replied before hanging up.
“Rhine, Berechnung, Mahou.” Tanya chanted, using the gathered power to telekinetically shut the skylight, move the powdered midnight into the already open reagent safe, close it, and engage the technological and magical security system after entering the penthouse’s bedroom, locking the place down to give the impression that she existed independently of the Wayne heir. Finally, she used the last of her gathered magic to dissolve the spell letting her assume the form of her second life, shrinking back down to her true form right on time for the gentle tug of her summoning catalyst being used.
The first thing she felt on arrival was the warmth of the Batcave, as while it wasn’t particularly warm by most people’s standards, leaving the skylight open for hours, at night, in October, meant that she had come from a place that was literally below freezing in temperature. She was wearing robes with warming enchantments before she changed back, but it was rough for those seconds between turning back and being summoned. Alfred immediately wrapped her in an electric blanket and put a mug of hot cocoa in her hands. Ooh, toasty…
On cue, the Batmobile entered from the waterfall entrance, and Bruce pulled himself out of the vehicle without grace, and Robin stormed out, somehow still full of energy. “Who does she think she is?” He said indignantly, “Going out with no backup, a stolen cache of tech, and thinking that’s a good idea?”
“I’ve prepared a gentle meal to quell your no-doubt rumbling stomachs, sirs.” Alfred announced, taking the lid off of a tray to reveal bowls of soup and some very appealingly seasoned toast. “In the morning, I must insist on something hearty, however.”
Tanya immediately took one of the bowls herself and started to eat. It was chicken noodle soup, perfect for someone who had just spent hours out in the cold.
Robin took off his mask and sat down to enjoy a bowl himself. “What happened to you?” Richard asked Tanya.
“My ritual worked.” She summarized, “Which meant I had to actually go through the whole six hour ordeal instead of cutting it off after the first fifteen minutes.” She took a big bite out of the toast.
“...Can I see it?” Richard asked.
“Left it.” She said dismissively. “It’s not much to look at, anyway.” Well, it was actually slightly darker than the vantablack paint, and probably could be mixed into a paint compound to create an even darker coloring, but that just has to go on the list of experiments. “You’ve seen vantablack, it’s basically just that but in powder form.” She could barely discern the difference between the two, and that was with magically augmented vision. Once you’ve seen one incredibly dark paint, you’ve seen them all.
Alfred finally dragged Bruce from typing out his report on the night’s events and sat him in front of them, the man obligingly took his own bowl of soup, twice the size as the other two. Tanya smiled. Good, he was eating. How that man managed to maintain the same muscles she did in her first life while being so resistant to taking care of himself was beyond her. Being X could learn a thing or two from Alfred about miracles.
“So what did Commissioner Gordon want?” Tanya asked, just to keep conversation.
“Some odd cases.” Bruce explained between spoonfuls of soup. “There’s a new metahuman in Gotham. They’re some kind of fluid entity, leaving behind traces of clay.” Uh oh… “The exact makeup of the clay is hard to discern, as it’s so thoroughly contaminated with local materials, particularly sewage, but one thing stands out: a type of pozzolana that’s only found in one place: Mediterranean volcanic islands. Like Themyscira.”
“It looks like that clay of life that was stolen has finally resurfaced.” Tanya said sadly. “The truly horrible thing is that it’s entirely possible that this entity could just be the clay literally getting up by itself and wandering off.”
“Unlikely.” Bruce said, “The crimes aren’t random enough for that. Someone’s guiding this thing to do something specific. Unfortunately, whatever that thing is, it’s not something obvious, or else Jim wouldn’t have come to me with it. I took some evidence from the crime scenes, but I’ll need hours to process them, search the databases for additional connections… It’s going to be a busy morning.”
“Or you could leave it for after you’ve had a proper rest.” Alfred suggested instead.
“There is a parent-teacher conference today.” Richard reminded him.
Bruce winced. “On a Saturday?”
“You’re the one who scheduled it that way.” Tanya pointed out, “Gotham Academy’s very accommodating, but there are limits. You have to actually go if you don’t want Margie to get one up on you.”
At the mention of the odious woman who somehow manages to get under the billionaire’s skin despite being a middle-aged housewife whose only scrap of power is being on the board of the parent-teacher association, Bruce scowled. “Tanya-” He began.
“You’ve skipped sleep the last three days in a row, Daddy.” Tanya said immediately, using the affectionate title to defray his annoyance. “Alfred threatened my ice cream.” She added, shrugging. “Nothing I can do.” With the matter settled, she turned to Richard. “Who’s ‘she’?”
The boy was clearly aching to tell the story. “Okay, so you know how last month one of our caches got hacked and looted?” He asked rhetorically. “Apparently, some girl made her own Batman outfit with our stuff and has started copying us! Calls herself Batgirl.”
Hmmm. “She beat you up?” Tanya asked. From Richard’s immediate blush, she hit the nail on the head.
“She surprised me!” He stammered, “Next time, I’ll kick her butt!”
“Next time, call me instead of engaging her yourself.” Bruce corrected, “There’s quite a bit that she has that we don’t want to fall into the wrong hands.”
“It is in the wrong hands!” Richard insisted. Bruce grunted a dismissal of the statement.
“I’ll help you track her down.” Tanya promised, “Tomorrow night. But first, finish your soup.”
Comments
Eldar ortell
Love seeing the development of a magical gig economy! The world building around societies and magic is always some of my favorite parts of fantasy, and of course you can't make liquid midnight! It needs to be powdere, but liquid starlight mayhaps, that might be doable
