Celebromancy

by Michael R. Underwood

  Plus x3, the slow walk gave her time to think.

  Her apartment, which she shared with Sandra Wilson, another of the Rhyming Ladies, was affectionately called The Shithole. The name was meant to ward off evil spirits of make-the-apartment-crappy-ness. The Shithole was a fifth-floor walk-up, which normally meant Ree got a little extra exercise every day, but with a banged-up leg, it was torture—even with the painkillers.

  Maybe I should have just used the teleport after all, she thought as she passed the third floor. It’d be even more of a waste to use it now, of course.

  She shambled into the apartment and flopped over the couch to die for a few minutes and let her leg stop throbbing.

  This is not okay, she thought. There was no way she could make it through a tournament night at Grognard’s on a bum leg, so she’d have to burn some resources to heal up before she went in for work.

  Ree fumbled through her bag for her stack of cards. Gritting her teeth as her leg continued to throb, she scanned cards at the lightning speed she’d developed over a year of card gaming, looking for something applicable. Gorrammit. None of the CCGs used damage points. Things got killed or they didn’t. Damage doesn’t linger like that.

  But it does in Descent . . . she thought, limping back to her room to fetch the bag that held the main store of her Geekomantic resources. She pawed through for a small plastic bag and dug out a cardboard icon for a healing potion. They were coming out with a new edition anyway, and the potions would lose some of their mojo as gamers upgraded, their emotional investment in the potions switching to the new versions.

  One-off props were the instant-gratification approach to Geekomancy. Artifacts had more staying power, with a lightsaber working for minutes straight at times, but when their nostalgia batteries were up, they were just so much plastic and chrome.

  The disposable-props model was the fast food of Geekomancy: quick, easy, and hit the spot, but it cost you in the end. Every single comic, DVD, RPG book, or other physical artifact of a cultural property held a bit of the world’s collective emotional investment. It was the first kind of Geekomancy she’d seen, not that she had recognized it that breezy afternoon last October. The problem was that each use destroyed the artifact in question. The disposable model was incredibly useful, but she felt a bit of her soul cry every time she did it.

  Ree sat herself down on her bed and tore at the cardboard piece. It wasn’t exactly easy to rip. Damned sturdy engineering. This is why Eastwood uses real potions.

  At some point, the universe decided the tear was enough, and Ree felt a wave of magic rush over her. She focused the energy with the idea of a healing potion, the basic unit of explaining why fantasy adventurers don’t all keel over after an hour, and felt the energy rush down her body to her back and to her leg. In about as much time as it’d take her to chug a real potion, she felt her pain evaporate, and the already-mean-looking bruise on her leg faded away.

  Ree exhaled, going limp with relief. Thank Trogdor. Ree savored the extreme lack of pain for a minute, then sat up and got back to business. Her apartment was in pretty bad shape, but not so bad that Sandra had declared martial law and called for a cleaning day.

  She considered, then decided against, shower beer, as much as it would help the cleansing process and calm her down from the craziness of the day. But the shower was nonnegotiable.

  After washing off the funk, she put on a new set of clothes, searching her geeky T-shirt drawer for the Wil Wheaton–designed Roots T-shirt from J!NX that she’d acquired as soon as it had become available. A tiny part of her hoped that she would one day get to meet Wil Wheaton, host of Geek & Sundry’s show TableTop, and that he’d invite her to come on the show for a game. She had invested emotionally in that happening about as much as she had in the idea of winning the lottery, but it still made her smile every time she wore the shirt.

  She was taking a risk not wearing black, but she always kept spare shirts at the bar, so she’d be fine. She matched the shirt with might-as-well-be-black dark-blue jeans. She tied her hair back in a several-times-looped-over braid, one of the designs she’d started using back when she was a barista at Café Xombi to amuse herself and the fangirl customers.

  Her stomach grumbled for something more substantial than a milkshake, and she headed to the fridge to see if Sandra had left her any delicious presents. Her roommate had gone to culinary school long enough to learn several marvelous tricks, which she used to fulfill her feed people! instincts. Ree was not above enabling her friend in this matter.

  Seeing Tupperware in the fridge made her stomach clench again, but she deluded herself by insisting it was just her being hungry.

  Goddamnit, heart. You could have made this clear before things got stupidly complicated. Now the best I can hope for is that Drake and Priya live happily ever after and make brilliant, brilliant gadget babies together.

  Fortunately, there was leftover pizza for Ree to use to improve her mood.

  Turbo’s pizza wasn’t nearly as good reheated, but it was still a damned sight better than most of the pie in town, and plus, it was right there.

  Ree tossed a couple of slices in the toaster oven and made herself some more coffee. As the percolator worked its magic, her phone started playing “Piano Man,” the ringtone she’d assigned to her dad.

  Ree scampered over to her phone and picked up.

  “Dad!”

  “Hey, Ree-bee. Are you all right? I’ve seen some scary news.”

  “I’m fine. Just doing my thing. Shall I be vague, or do you want to do the Encryption Tango?”

  Ree cradled the phone between her face and shoulder as she poured a mug of coffee.

  Her dad laughed on the other side of the line. “Sure thing. I’ll call you right back.” He hung up, and Ree waited. Her dad had been a communications tech, and actually kept up with the wild world of IT, so he’d taken to using encrypted lines when they needed to talk about her far-beyond-the-norm adventures.

  She still hadn’t told him about her mom—his wife—who had disappeared over a decade ago. It’d taken him years to get over her disappearance, and he was doing his best to move on with his life. Ree had decided to live with the guilt of withholding the secret rather than facing the emotional carpet-bombing sharing the truth would effect.

  Holding back from him was getting a bit easier, and she didn’t like that, either.

  A minute later, her phone rang again, but the caller ID showed Unknown. She picked up again, saying, “Hello?”

  Her dad answered, “The squid inks at midnight.”

  Ree bit back the same urge she felt every call to just go ahead and spill. Instead, she swallowed the bile of guilt and stuck to the latest crazy thing in her life.

  “Great. So here’s the story,” she said, and launched into her latest travails, again skipping the sexytimes and focusing on the attack in the night and the trouble she’d gotten herself into since.

  “So, are all stars Celebromancers or whatever? Is that how the industry works?” her dad asked.

  “I don’t think so. It seems like only the Big-Leaguers have that much mojo. Though maybe some producers and directors do it for other actors. Yancy wasn’t clear about that.”

  “How does that work with fans and your Geekomancy? Do they take away your power, like kryptonite?”

  “Nope, not that I’ve noticed,” Ree said. “I think that the fandom that powers my stuff isn’t mutually exclusive from the power they get from fans.”

  “That’s good. I’d hate to have to find and rip up your Jane Konrad fan club card.”

  “Dad!” Ree said in the same complaining tone she’d used since forever when he was embarrassing her. “It doesn’t work like that. And don’t you dare touch that card.”

  She’d remembered getting that sad piece of cardboard shortly after mom left, which only made her think of what she wasn’t telling her dad. She
half-started to speak again, her resolve going out like the low tide when her dad chuckled on the other side of the line.

  Then he cleared his voice and asked, “So what are you going to do now?”

  Ree grabbed ahold of his question and pushed back the guilt. “I’ll need to come up with a different way to make a run at MacKenzie, maybe catch her off-set instead of going directly into the belly of the beast. Or find a different ticket in. Maybe I can borrow the psychic paper from Eastwood.”

  Her dad inhaled. “Isn’t he still persona non grata in magic-town?”

  “Yes, but he’s also Hercules with labors left to complete. He’s been paying off his karmic debt bit by bit, mostly by being a reckless sumbitch and running around like Kick-Ass with a lightsaber.”

  “That sounds like a terrible idea.”

  “For sure. But he hasn’t exactly been open to debate. He charges in, blows stuff up, then scowls and storms off.”

  Her dad waited a second. “So should I be worried by what I’m hearing about you and Jane? It seems like she’s trouble.” He said hearing about in that generous parental way that meant I know perfectly well what’s going on but will give you the chance to explain.

  Ree huffed. “Don’t trust the paparazzi, Dad. It’s their job to make shit seem more dramatic than it is. And Jane’s no more trouble than any other star. She’s smart, generous, but has a bit of a self-control problem.”

  “I don’t know anyone like that,” her dad said knowingly.

  Touché. Ree let the comment sit there and just kept going. “She’s got this magical whammy on her, and she hasn’t figured out how to manage it very well. And I can handle myself. I know what I’m getting into. Or at least, I know what I don’t know what I’m getting into.”

  “If there’s one thing that I know, it’s you can take care of yourself. However, I am genetically required to worry,” he said.

  Ree wished, for probably the bajillionth time, that he didn’t live so far away, so she could give him a big hug and let the stress bleed off, the way it always did when he was around. Except when he was meeting her significant others, at which point the stress called buddies over for a party in her sinuses and the back of her neck.

  “Thanks, Dad. I’ll keep you in the loop. If I drop off the earth for more than three days at a time, then you can worry.”

  “I’ll hold you to it. Kick the bad guys’ asses, hon.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, smiling as she hung up.

  The world was a bit less scary all of a sudden. Ree checked the time on her phone and tried to budget out the rest of her afternoon.

  She settled into the couch and let The Daily Show run while she pondered, poking around the Internet as she went. Another slew of Google Alerts had come in, most just ping-backs on the original story or re-skins of the same information. Plus Alex Walters was continuing his smear campaign, ranting about how pathetic, embarrassing, and doomed the Awakenings production was.

  But along with them, she had an email from Priya, CC’d to Sandra and Anya, asking for someone to be on standby for her date that evening. All she said about his identity was that the guy was “cute and smart, but more than a little weird” and that she was pretty sure he was harmless but wanted to have someone know where she was just in case.

  It was standard Are You a Psycho date protocol, and if it were any other guy, Ree would do it without blinking. But since Ree knew for certain that Drake was, in fact, weird, and that going out with him could be tremendously dangerous, she was worried.

  And none of that has anything to do with how you feel about him yourself? asked a voice in her mind.

  Shh. I’m deluding myself here, she responded.

  Ree popped off a quick Reply All, saying that her shift started at 6:00 and that she wouldn’t be available. It wasn’t often that she appreciated her job swallowing up her evenings, especially around the weekends, but this time, at least it saved her some angst.

  Too full of nervous energy to do anything restful or productive, Ree stood with a start, grabbed her bag, and decided to fulfill her earlier promise to head down to Café Xombi to say hi to Bryan, maybe catch Charlie or Aidan if they were in. She hadn’t been by more than a couple of times a month since her life had Gotten Weird and Bryan had let her go.

  Which had been totally reasonable, considering she’d had to call off of three shifts in a week and he was within his rights to not want an employee who might draw a targeted monster attack at a moment’s notice, but it still sucked. She’d rocked as a barista, even more than she did as a bartender, and the hours were generally kinder to her social life.

  And at that moment, her phone rang again.

  When it rains, it pours, she said to herself.

  She only recognized the area code. It was a Los Angeles County number.

  What’s the over-under on this being a tabloid, paparazzo, or random creeper from the Internet? she wondered, and let it go to voicemail.

  A minute later, the phone rang again. Same number. Ree closed the call and dialed her voicemail instead.

  “Ree? It’s Yancy. Jane is up, but we’re still holding off on production today. I have Danny staying with her, and I’m planning on restarting tomorrow. You’re welcome to come over anytime. I think Jane would appreciate it. And I’m sorry for the tabloid blowup. I’ve got our publicists on firefighting mode, but there’s only so much you can do these days. This is my personal cell, if you need to reach me. Take care.”

  Well, there’s something to do before work.

  Except that going back would mean yet another big serving of awkward to top her off before she had to go to work and be on for eight hours.

  Ree leaned back and forth, considering. It’d take an hour round trip to visit the set, which she could make.

  She felt pulled in a dozen directions at once, and knew that doing any one thing, she’d be thinking about something else the whole time. It was bad enough that she’d undoubtedly be off her game at work. A nap could reset her world, but she had about as much chance of sleeping now as getting an email out of the blue saying she’d won a MacArthur Genius Grant.

  Torn by indecision, Ree did what she usually did in that position. She sat back down and fired up her Xbox to get her game on.

  She mentally scrolled through her game library and settled on Mass Effect 3. She’d finished the campaign already, but the multiplayer was pleasantly engrossing, especially with the free DLC. She jumped through the hoops and slotted in her Geth Infiltrator, a masterpiece of sneaky.

  Playing the Infiltrator let her take the annoyance of Geth Hunters, who snuck around invisible to shotgun your teammates in the head, and turn it against the enemy, running around the battlefield immune to detection and taking fool enemies’ heads off at two hundred feet.

  Ree’s team was a mixed bunch. They had a sharp, conservative Turian Soldier who killed at medium range, moving effectively across the field and reinforcing other players, and a Quarian Engineer with a hell-on-wheels drone, but their fourth was an overaggressive Krogan Battlemaster who jumped around the battlefield like he was soloing the mission, leaving his team behind to pick fights on the other side of the map and then grousing on team chat when he died under a tag team by a Brute and a pair of Marauders.

  Ree did her best to play guardian ninja for the Battlemaster, leaving the Engineer and Soldier to handle the rest of the heat. She fell into the rhythm of the game. Cloak, sneak, shoot, hide. Lather, rinse, and reload. In this game, she could look out for people, keep herself out of danger, and even if she failed, she could try again. Playing magic guardian angel in real life was a lot harder, and she didn’t get any extra lives.

  The team pulled it off despite the Battlemaster’s apparent death wish, and when the mission was over, she hopped up to get herself more coffee, the troubles of the world seeming just a bit less impossible.

  But kicking arou
nd at home wasn’t going to cut it anymore. She poured the new cup into a travel mug and retrieved her bag.

  • • •

  Café Xombi carved out its existence in Pearson’s University District, a half block off the main drag, where the restaurants, coffee shops, bars, a few more coffee shops, and upscale clothing boutiques vied for college students’ attention.

  It was a small storefront, only 20x20 in the front, with a small back room and two cellars, one of which Ree hadn’t known was even there until her former boss had taken her down to reveal his secret stash of Geekomancy-ready memorabilia.

  Ree stepped into the café, the familiar theremin chime registering her arrival. A trio sat at one of the tables, several open packs of HeroClix open between them as they chatted. Bryan had kept the same arrangement as when she’d left, with a wall of miniatures and RPG books on one side, graphic novels lined opposite, with tables for gaming and chatting dotting the front room as densely as possible without impeding traffic (much).

  It looked like Bryan wasn’t in, but Charlie, her former work BFF, was. He was crouched behind the counter, restocking their card game boxes. Charlie French (Strength 13, Dexterity 13, Stamina 15, Will 15, IQ 16, and Charisma 14—Geek 5 / Barista 3 / Social Media Ninja 4 / Trekker 2) was almost five-six, though his wavy mop of sandy-red-blond hair added a couple of inches on top of that. Charlie had stepped into the role of head baker/barista after Ree left, keeping the café in fabulous nerdy baked goods and generally making sure that Bryan didn’t lose his mind.

  “Ree!” Charlie said as he looked up from boxes of CCG packs. He shimmied out from behind the bake station and joined Ree among the tables to give her a big hug.

  “Hey, Charlie. How’s it going?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Cardboard crack never goes out of season, and lattes sell.” Charlie took a step back and reached behind the counter. Something rattled against ceramics, and Charlie pulled out two d20s.