It took all of five minutes for the Doctor to grow bored with his twin and begin the process of hacking up the “demon” and finding out how it worked. The others watched him hack the thing up for about two hours and then listened to him mutter things about pain receptors that didn’t register heat and compressed layers of cartilage in place of skin for another hour. What it boiled down to was this: it wasn’t flammable and its skin was actually a flexible exoskeleton resistant to multiple forms of damage, and it could probably see extremely well in the dark.
The sword wasn’t actually metal and hadn’t actually been forged. Despite its metallic appearance it was actually a type of stone similar to obsidian and it bore some marks indicating that it had been knapped to a nearly monomolecular edge, which was why it had been able to cut so deeply into the Robot. Striking the Robot had dulled the edge considerably, but it could likely still hack off a flesh and blood limb with great ease.
When the Sorcerer woke up and they got him talking in a language they could all understand, he had some interesting stories to tell. The language he spoke was something that ended up similar to a cross between Russian and German, at least enough that the Robot and Doctor were able to piece it together and get a halfway decent picture of the events that had caused the visitation.
The gist of it was that the Germans were messing with forces far beyond their control and they had no intention of understanding those forces before they got themselves in over their head. Their so called “occultists” were using rituals and machines to play with the very fabric of space, time, and reality itself. The Sorcerer claimed that reality was like an enormous disco ball, this was an interpretation of the Doctor’s, and at its core was one true reality and all others were reflections of light cast on the wall. Earth and the place the Sorcerer was from were two of those reflections that fell close to one another.
The German “occultists” were playing with the light source and drawing one reality close to the other in an attempt to call warriors from the Sorcerer’s world to their own to exterminate their enemies. The Atlanteans were savage and unstoppable warriors, but these creatures, these world hopping mercenaries were exponentially worse. All they asked of the Germans was a death toll, they would kill for the Germans until they reached a certain death toll and then they would fall back into their own world, but if they did not reach that number fighting the foes of the Germans they would turn on those that called them into this world.
To plan for this the Germans had begun breeding Jews and blacks in their camps to help pay the toll, the death camps were where they threw educated Jews and undesirables not the stock they were breeding to pay the toll. What the Germans didn’t realize was that the creatures from the Sorcerer’s world, which he called dayvuhs, valued human life as much as the Germans valued those of the Jews. The Sorcerer had no true knowledge of the complex value system the dayvuhs rated life at, his best estimation was that they could empty the Earth of all life two, perhaps three, times before the agreed upon toll was reached and he only knew that because that was what had happened to his world.
When asked how he was able to travel between worlds, the Sorcerer responded with something that amounted to saying magic did it. The Doctor scoffed when the Robot finished translating and the Robot made the strange clunking noises he always made when his processors were trying to analyze information at high speeds. No one was exactly sure why his insides made noises when he was standing still, he was primarily electrical in nature and aside from some servos and actuators built around his motion centers he didn’t have too many moving parts.
“I believe I have misinterpreted his words.”
“How’s that now,” asked the Doctor.
“We are assuming his language to be some bastardized hybrid of Russian and German and also assigning our own native values to his words, whereas his language could have evolved over time to give alternate names for various concepts and systems. I believe we have incorrectly interpreted his version of science for magic.”
“What are you saying?”
“I believe,”
“If I may interrupt you for a moment,” said the Sorcerer in only slightly accented English.
The Robot was unfazed and said,
“By all means.”
“I believe the golem is accurate in his assessment. I have inaccurately communicated my methods of travel. To travel between words is no mean feat and the rituals required to summon and direct energy in the proper combinations is quite difficult. It took many months to collect and store the necessary energy in the properly anointed receptacles. I did not just wave my hands and wish myself here.”
The Gangster, Doctor, and Driver exchanged looks, and the Doctor said, “That sounds like magic.”
The Sorcerer paused in thought and scrunched his eyebrows together in concentration, trying to find the proper words in this unfamiliar tongue.
“You,” he gestured at the Doctor, “are an artificer, a builder of machines and mechanisms.”
The Doctor nodded.
“You manipulate physical objects with physical forces, correct?”
“For the most part.”
“Good. My skillset is one of invisible forces and their manipulation. With the proper concentration and connection to an adequate source of energy I can manipulate the molecules of the air around us to cause friction and summon fire from thin air. With properly timed blows from my boot heel and the application of the proper amount of energy I can cause an earthquake to be produced from those vibrations. My magic is no less mundane than your own, merely of a different type. As is fitting, you and I are opposite sides of the same coin my friend.”
“Yes, but where do you get this so called “energy” to fuel these “spells”?”
“In my world we have built enormous crystalline obelisks that rise miles into the air. Over the centuries they have absorbed everything from solar radiation to lightning bolts, to the kinetic energy imparted upon them by falling stars as they strike them. They offer nearly limitless energy that can be tapped and directed if one knows the proper formula and incantations.”
“Formula and incantations, you’re back to talking magic again.”
“No, not magic, language barriers are what prevent us from communicating properly. I will show you.”
The Sorcerer began gesturing in the air with a finger and as his finger moved trails of orange light left sigils and shapes hanging in the air, while he gestured he kept up a steady, rhythmic, intonation of foreign words.
The Robot whispered to the Doctor, “Do you understand?”
The Doctor shook his head, “No.”
“Look closely.” He pointed to a string of figures in the growing series and said, “That one, visualize that as an X, the following series as a pair of parentheses surrounding an equation, and that one as an equals signs. Do you understand?”
The Doctor’s jaw dropped, “It’s an algebraic formula or cipher for unlocking the energy stored within a giant battery, his incantations are a voice recognition process aren’t they?”
“Indeed. I can only assume there is some mental adaptation in his people, or perhaps some advance biological wetware that allows their will and intellect to properly direct the energy at their command. ”
The Gangster and Driver had remained silent and in the background, but the Driver leaned to the Gangster’s ear and whispered, “You got any thoughts about all this?”
The Gangster exhaled a cloud of smoke and said, ”Demons seem to die quick enough if you plug em full of enough bullets an we got plenty a those. What’s got me good an concerned is that we got two of the damn nutter leadin us around Chi-town now.”
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