The teacher chuckled. “But what I really wanted to show you is this,” the older man said, while he opened a drawer and took an inch-thick document binder from it. With a faint smile, he handed the documents to Sasha. “I take it that your foster parents didn’t tell you a lot about your heritage, if anything. But I think you deserve to know,” he said and turned for the exit. With one foot already through the door, the teacher turned around to face the white haired girl once more. “Take as much time as you want, but please do not try to read anything else in this room. The documents might burn your hands if you did. As in literally.”
Sasha tilted her head and slowly nodded, a shiver running down her spine. Then the teacher was gone, closing the door behind him. She put the binder on an oaken desk and opened it. On the top of the stack Sasha found a photograph of a blonde woman in her early thirties, wearing a black business suit. She was stunningly beautiful, had blue eyes and the sort of a radiant smile that could melt male hearts in mere instants. The caption on the picture read ‘Elizabeth Gregor - Newly appointed professor for Applied Magic, Academy of the Silver Circle, Seattle WA, 1973.’
As Sasha browsed the documents, she learned how a brilliant young mage having extraordinary talents gradually morphed into Scarlet Fire, one of the most dangerous super-powered criminals of her time. She read how the ambitious Elizabeth developed a grudge against non-mages for rejecting and distrusting her kind, how the grudge evolved into hatred and hatred into a total lack of respect for other people’s lives and well-being. Being dismissed from the Silver Circle after various clashes with her fellow teachers and students, Elizabeth had turned to crime, first to fund her life, then to build and expand her power. Blinded by her near limitless hatred and thirst for more power, she ended up being gunned down in her hideout by Tom and Laura Clarkson in 1980 - the year of Sasha’s birth. At that point Scarlet Fire had murdered almost thirty men and women. The last document in the stack was another picture of Sasha’s mother - and if not for the name on the portrait, Sasha would have never guessed it was the same person she had seen on the other photo only minutes ago. The woman on the photo was no longer smiling like she did on the first picture. Her stern and cold glare was rather suggesting that she had never learned how to smile at all, even if Sasha knew that it wasn’t the case. Elizabeth’s hair was now cropped short and dyed red and instead of a business suit she wore a black and red military-cut jumpsuit.
Sasha placed the two photographs next to each other - the warm, smiling teacher and the ruthless, cold criminal the woman had become only a few years later.
The white haired girl slowly shook her head. “Whatever has happened to make you become like this, mom, but I swear it will not happen to me,” Sasha muttered at the photographs, a tear forming in her eyes.
April 5th, 1998
Tom Clarkson’s plane set down right on time on SeaTac International airport, after an uneventful and boring fifty minute hop from Vancouver. He was happy, because he was going to see his daughter for the first time in three months. Sasha haven’t had a chance to visit her parents since the day she had started her training at the Silver Circle Academy, despite Seattle was located only a relative spitting distance away from her Canadian hometown. But the double curriculum of her magic training and completing her high school diploma took its toll on Sasha’s available spare time.
The one thing Tom wasn’t sure about was why the administration of the Silver Circle had asked him to come to such an odd location to see his daughter. But it was their rules to make, so he didn’t question it.
Tom exited the taxi and marched up the short footpath leading to Seattle’s most famous tourist attraction. Making a prominent appearance on a vast portion of all Seattle postcards, the 605 feet high Space Needle used to be the tallest structure in the western part of the continent at the time it was completed in 1962. While it got surpassed by five skyscrapers in its hometown alone by now, it still drew in very large crowds at any given time of the year.
As instructed by the Silver Circle, Tom didn’t queue up for the elevator to the observation platform, but instead headed to a security guard in the far end of the main lobby. From his pocket he pulled the business card sent to him by the Silver Circle – a blank white card with nothing but an engraved silver circle printed on it – and handed it to the guard. The guard inspected the card, nodded politely, and handed it back to Tom. Then he opened a cordon and waved Tom into the room beyond. A woman appearing to be in her thirties looked up at Tom from her desk at the other side of the room.
Tom smiled at the woman. “Hi. I am...”
“Tom Clarkson. You’re here to see your daughter. I know. One minute, please.”
Tom shook his head in bewilderment. “How did you know that?”
The woman giggled. “Because I can read your thoughts, Mr. Clarkson.” She raised her hands before speaking on. “I know...I know...it’s invasive. I am sorry. I wish I could shut it off, but I can’t. I guess that’s why I was placed down here, where I couldn’t unintentionally eavesdrop too much on the rest.”
“Down here?” Tom pointed upwards. “You mean the Silver Circle building is...?”
The cheerful woman nodded twice in rapid succession. “Yes, of course. It’s on the top floor of the Space Needle. Where else would it be? Just take the door to your side and step into the portal, please.”
Shaking his head, Tom turned around and opened the door in question. The room behind it had the less than generous measurements of a broom closet and didn’t feature a window. Still, there was no artificial lighting in the room. It wasn’t needed. A humming and bright man-sized oval of white light illuminated the entire room. There was nothing else inside the room at all. No furniture. No accessories.
In his line of work, Tom was used to being exposed to metahuman abilities, but mages had a certainly tendency to strike him as a combination of odd and alien. With an uneasy feeling, Tom stepped into the light. A moment later, the room around him dissolved in a flash and Tom felt as if he was being sucked up into a giant vacuum cleaner.
A fraction of a second later, the light was gone and Tom was standing in a large ante hall full of people. Tom looked left and right, not sure what just happened or where he was. He was standing in the middle one of a row of three similar looking teleporters. Across from him, a long receptionist glass desk stretched itself down for the better part of the wall. Three female receptionists in silver uniform dresses were seated behind the counter. Their stations were labelled with ‘Information’, ‘Student Office’ and ‘Library’. All three receptionists were talking to clients, so Tom queued at the Information counter and patiently waited for his turn.
The receptionist smiled at him when Tom approached the fairly attractive young woman. “How can I help you?” she chirped at him with a call-center voice.
“Do I need to tell you, or can you just read my mind like the other girl on the ground level...or wherever that actually was where I have been until half a minute ago?”
The woman giggled. “Oh, you mean Libby? No, I am afraid you will have to use old-fashioned verbal communication with me. I can’t read minds. My speciality is fire.” She lifted her hand and snapped her fingers, making a tiny flame appear on top of her thumb, looking at it for a few seconds and then dispelling it with another snap.
Tom rolled his eyes and chuckled. “Right...my name is Tom Clarkson. I’d like to see my daughter. She’s enrolled here.”
The girl gleamed at him in a way that would have made the actors of most toothpaste commercials jealous. “Oh, you’re Sasha’s dad? It’s so great to meet you! Sasha keeps telling me about you. If you hold on for just one second, I will call someone to take you to her. You can have a seat over there if you want.” the receptionist said, pointing at a lush armchair to Tom’s side, which the cop could swear an oath hadn’t been there one second earlier. He decided that he didn’t want to know and placed himself in the comfortable seat.
The ‘someone’ the receptionist had calle
d to take Tom to his daughter turned out to be the director himself. A bit surprised that the highest ranking person in the entire organization would personally come to greet a visitor, Tom shook the hand of Peter Vanderbilt, who looked every single bit like his brother.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Clarkson. My brother kept telling me about you and your unit, so I just had to meet you in person. And yes...we are obviously twins. Please, come with me, I will lead you to your daughter,” the director said, motioning Tom down a brightly lit, wide corridor bustling with activity. Tom stared in amazement at the diverse potpourri of people scurrying through the halls. Males and females of every race humankind had to offer, clad in everything from casual street wear to genuine wizard robes that looked as if someone had transplanted them straight out of a fantasy movie. Some carried books and writing utensils. A few took sips from coffee mugs while they strolled down the corridor and chit-chatted with their peers. For the most part Tom suspected the crowd could as well have fit into an airport terminal.
When Tom looked out of a window, he gasped.
The director smiled. “Nice view, isn’t it?”
“Um...yes, very nice. Isn’t that how Seattle looks from the Space Needle Observation Deck?”
“Yes, it is. And why wouldn’t? It’s where we are, after all.”
Tom shook his head and waved with his hand across the endless halls that comprised the Silver Circle headquarters. “How can we be on the Space Needle? I have been up there dozens of times, and this structure would never fit into it. All I have ever seen there is tourists.”
“We’re not exactly occupying the same space, Mr. Clarkson – or have necessarily the same body size we’d have outsides,” the director patiently said.
Tom decided to drop the topic as the director opened a door and ushered Tom through.
To describe the chamber beyond as being huge would have been the understatement of the year. It measured at least forty yards in every direction and appeared to be a giant arboretum, complete with trees, bushes, flowerbeds, a finely groomed lawn and an artificial lake with a number of picnic sites along its shoreline.
Not for the first time today, the policeman shook his head in amazement. Then his jaw dropped as he looked up and spotted the lone figure floating high above ground, between two trees, performing an airborne somersault in slow motion with closed eyes. Sasha looked in complete control as she stretched out her arms and let her body spin around, sailing back and forth, like a wingless bird.
“Sasha can...fly?” Tom said to the director.
The smiling mage nodded. “Among things, she can use telekinetic powers to lift and move most objects with her mind – including herself. Your daughter is very gifted. But it is interesting - she seems to have a less broad spectrum of spells she can use than some mages do. However, the ones she can wield, she can use with extreme power. I have rarely ever seen something like that. It’s almost as if some had picked a few powers for her to possess and tuned them to maximum efficiency.”
You have no idea how close to the truth your guess is, Tom thought.
The policeman smiled up at his daughter who still hadn’t spotted him yet. Sasha looked calm and serene as she performed her art. It seemed to him that his daughter had finally found a place where she could be herself and explore her potential without other people belittling her for what she was. She appeared like a happy little girl who had finally found a playground large enough for her.
“She’s an amazing girl,” Tom said, full of pride.
“Yes, she is. And by the way, she has made great progress. You might like to hear that nobody here believes that there is any danger of this incident in her old school repeating again. She is in complete control now.”
“I am glad to hear that. To be honest, while I really think I know what made her do it, I never understood why she had to put all of her force behind that blast.”
The director’s head turned to Tom. “Mr. Clarkson...she didn’t. Not even remotely. She used a tiny fraction of what she would have been capable of doing. If she had used her full power for that spell, she’d have levelled the entire building.”
A slight shiver ran down Tom’s spine as he regarded his daughter. Of course he had always been aware of Sasha’s talents. He had never thought of his sweet little girl as the human equivalent of a doomsday weapon, though.
“Her true talent isn’t even the offensive sort of spells, did you know that?” the director asked.
Tom shook his head.
“She can create a force field that absorbs energy and reflects objects being thrown against it.”
“Like a magic bulletproof vest? Could she deflect bullets with it?”
“More like artillery shells,” the director said. “As I said, your daughter is able to cast her spells with remarkable power.”
“Right,” Tom said.
“The most intriguing thing she can do is channelling her own life energy into other living beings.”
“I have to admit that I am not really familiar with what magic can or can’t do. What would that be good for?”
“Sasha can heal people. Mend wounds. Align broken limbs. You name it. She could heal most non-fatal wounds that way, I guess. If you don’t have a mobile hospital with you, your daughter would be the next best thing.”
At this moment Sasha opened her eyes and smiled when she recognized her father standing below her. She propelled her body into a steep descent and glided down. At the last possible moment, she erected her body upright in the air and gently touched down close enough to Tom so that she just had to extend her arms to embrace him.
“I missed you, dad,” Sasha whispered.
“It’s been way too long, honey.” Tom said and pressed his daughter close.
“It should become a bit better soon. Three more months and I will have my high-school diploma.”
“That’s awesome, honey! Have you decided what to do afterwards? I guess we’d have to start looking for a university, if that’s what would like to do.”
“How does Mathematics and Astrophysics at UBC sound to you? They said they’d take me in.”
Tom smiled. It would mean that his girl would return home to him and Laura to stay with them for a while longer. And UBC was a fairly prestigious school on top of it.
“That sounds actually great,” Tom said.
“On the danger that your father might not like to hear this suggestion, but you could also always stay here with us if you want,” Vanderbilt said. “As much as I admire and respect science as a career choice, but I don’t think you could make much use of your magic talents there.”
Sasha smiled. “I know. And thank you so much for the offer, Mr. Vanderbilt. I really love to be here. But in the end, I think what I really want to have is a plain, regular, normal life.”
“That is of course up to you, Sasha. I will respect your decision either way. Just keep in mind that you aren’t really a normal person. I wish you that you will get what you want, but please don’t be overly disappointed if your life will turn out to never be really normal. Because chances are that it won’t.”
January 17th, 2008
Sasha’s office was certainly small, but it was all hers and came with its own door and a window. That was certainly more than most young professionals could say about their workplace, most of who had to work in tiny, impersonal cubicles at the start of their career - and sometimes for the entire remainder of it. The much nicer work environment was one of the benefits of working at a university.
Sasha loved her job. As a younger girl she had never dreamt of becoming a professor one day. But after completing her two summa cum laude Ph.D. degrees in record time, she had been encouraged to apply for an open position, and gladly jumped at the chance. At first, the prospect of having to teach students had given the shy girl the creeps, but after she had to lecture in front of an audience of four hundred people one day, the stage-fright had suddenly vanished, never to return. She had grown to actually enjoy public speaki
ng now and got regularly complimented for her ability to explain complex matter in clear and simple words.
Her true love was still the research side of her job, though. It allowed her to bury herself in a pile of books, brooding over algorithms and numbers for endless hours, and contributing in a small way to increasing human knowledge. Sasha didn’t think of her work as being all that ground-breaking or even important - but every bit of new insight, no matter how small, still might allow others to step on and develop greater things with. While the science community wasn’t all too different from others in the regard that only a few select of its members ever reached a state of fame and public recognition, it still took many more researchers than a few Nobel Prize winners to advance human knowledge and everyone working in science had at least a small part in that.
The one thing about her job Sasha couldn’t stand at all was the administrative red tape that sometimes came with the position, too. The finer aspects of assembling and managing project teams, trying to squeeze a bit more funding out of various tight-pocketed stakeholders, or the seemingly endless variety of overcomplicated forms regulating all possible aspects of any imaginable university work process sometimes made Sasha want to smack her head into the closest wall in frustration.
With a sigh, Sasha opened her e-mail client and checked her inbox, expecting to see more of the unwelcome overhead sort of assignments that tended to invade her office taking this specific route of communication. It was the usual mixture of mildly interesting “FYI” type of mails people often sent to half-random colleagues to make themselves look more important, calls for papers for low profile conferences Sasha had never even heard about, and the occasional spam mail the university’s filter hadn’t managed to catch. One particular subject line made her raise her eyebrows, though. Sasha clicked on the mail to open it, and then smiled as she read in the official announcement that she had been chosen for the university’s annual honorary award of “Most promising young scientist”.
Sasha had been an assistant professor for only one and a half years and the sheer thought to be already lined-up for praise like that hadn’t remotely occurred to her. Not that she would complain. Smiling, she glanced at the photo of her parents she kept on her desk, next to her screen. Sasha knew that they were proud that their daughter had become a professor, the first in either Tom’s or Laura’s family. With the award backing her up, Sasha might eventually even get the tenure track position she was secretly dreaming of.
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