Geekomancy

by Michael R. Underwood

  Maybe it’s stronger, the more of it I watch?

  Ree walked out to the living room and saw Sandra lounging on the couch in her work clothes.

  “Hey,” Ree said. “Didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Mrr,” Sandra responded.

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t wanna cook.” Sandra rolled her head back around her shoulders, cracking her neck.

  Ree walked around the couch, gathering her energy. “Then we go out. Priya is free tonight, and Anya doesn’t have rehearsal.” Ree grabbed Sandra’s hand, trying to pull the tall woman to her feet. Luckily, Sandra relented and did most of the standing herself.

  “Do you have a master plan?” Sandra asked, stretching the day out.

  Ree raised an eyebrow and squinched up her mouth, thinking. “What’s the tapas place on Wilco called now?”

  “Oh. It’s . . . Bites.”

  Bites was, by Ree’s counting, at least the fourth incarnation of a tapas bar at that one location, each folding after about six months. Inevitably, it would be reopened by another brave and/or foolish entrepreneur who came along and gave the place yet another makeover and slight thematic twist. Then they’d try once again to hit the critical mass of patronage that would let them stay afloat atop the astronomical rent of the U-District. There were other tapas joints in Pearson, but Bites and its predecessors had been the only ones in the area.

  Ree nodded. “Sound good? I can make with the wrangling, if you want to shower or change or sacrifice a goat or whatever.”

  “Fresh out of goats, sadly. They make such good cheese.” Sandra walked toward her bedroom, saying, “Mmm, goat cheese. Add almond shavings, dried cranberries, some herby greens . . .”

  “We’re going out! They’ll have goat cheese salads, love.”

  Sandra made “yeah, yeah” sounds from her room, and Ree’s smile widened.

  Just what the doctor ordered. Girl time, with a side of sword. The sommelier recommends a pinot grigio from the Mariposa Valley with the emerald-crystal lightsaber . . . Ree’s mind trailed off merrily into daydreaming, and when Sandra emerged in jeans and a sweater, Ree remembered to text the rest of the crew.

  • • •

  Bite’s version of a restaurant embodied the approach of New York simplicity-chic with an industrial design and East Asian/Spanish fusion cuisine, complemented by a kick-ass wine selection and art by the new owner’s husband, a painter in the tradition of Anselm Kiefer meets Gustav Klimt. Since it was on the far side of the U-District, Anya and Priya were already there when Sandra and Ree arrived. As she and Sandra walked inside, Ree felt the Buffy mojo fade.

  All right, so now I have to hope the furry doesn’t feel like tapas as an appetizer before chowing down on some broke screenwriter.

  She kept her coat beside her when she sat down, just in case. A bottle of merlot stood on the table, already one third empty. Priya Tharakan (Strength 8, Dexterity 13, Stamina 12, IQ 17, Will 14, and Charisma 15—Geek 5 / Professional 3 / Seamstress 4 / Steampunk 2) had the light brown skin of a North Indian, with awesome caramel eyes and an easy smile. Priya was five-feet-nothing on a good day, leading her to worship four-inch heels, which she managed with grace. The four of them walking somewhere together made quite a sight, with Sandra towering over the three of them like an elf among hobbits.

  Ree’s seat gave her a commanding view of the bar. Several scenes played out between various couples: from the old and comfortable to the middle-aged and tense to, best of all, the young and hilariously transparent.

  Anya poured Ree a glass of wine, which she downed in one long swig.

  “Whoa. Rough day?”

  Ree hrmed and poured herself more wine, then stopped. “How much was this bottle?”

  “Half-off $45,” Anya said, chuckling.

  Oh, my poor, poor credit card, Ree thought, remembering her expenses over this last week of flailing.

  “Oops.” Priya and Sandra traded a look.

  “Rough day. Sushi?” Ree asked.

  Priya curled her nose. “I had sushi for lunch.”

  “Empanadas?” Ree quirked an eyebrow, hands out, to say, How about it?

  Anya nodded, and Sandra shrugged. The sharply dressed server came around, a slim red tie over his crisp white shirt. 2–1 said local actor or acting student.

  Pearson had been attracting more and more TV work in the last couple of years, following a move by the mayor that offered massive tax breaks, ridiculous amounts of civic support, and leniency for things like closing downtown to film a scene including an exploding car (for instance). Which had led a lot of would-be actors to flock to the city as well, hoping that standing out in Pearson would be easier than in L.A., Vancouver, or NYC. Ree sent her scripts around Pearson first now, hoping that she could get in with a local producer or catch a company when they were in town filming pilots. She had met several PAs and a couple of other crew here and there, but nothing had really jelled so far.

  Ree ordered a pitcher of Urban Ale-ian, which would make for far more thrifty slammable drink.

  “My box of awesome junk arrived today,” Priya said, her eyes bright.

  Ree raised her glass in toast. “Fantastic! What are you going to make?”

  “I’ve got a commission for a brass gear case mod to a netbook, and I think I’ll use the rest to go on the Ghostbusters backpack.”

  “Can you finish in time for Halloween?” Anya asked.

  Priya shook her head. “Probably not. I have to do the commission first so I can pay for that underbust corset from Jeanine.”

  Ree raised an eyebrow, conspiratorial. “Think you can make three more by next year? We would totally sweep the contest at Trollope’s with Steampunk Ghostbusters.”

  Priya chuckled. “Not unless you all get your asses over to my place and help me with the grunt work.” She looked to Ree. “You’re the one who told me I needed to start charging for these things.”

  “I didn’t mean for us,” Ree said.

  Priya scrunched up her eyebrows in mock frustration.

  “I’m totally up for some sewing parties—Lord of the Rings marathon?” Ree asked.

  Anya piped up, “I vote Harry Potter.”

  Sandra shook her head. “Community. You two need to watch this show.” She beamed, her voice getting faster as she talked excitedly. “Ree showed me the first episode last month, and I can’t get enough. Then they did a paintball episode, a zombie episode, and a gangster episode with fried chicken—”

  Ree added, “And the greatest D&D episode ever.”

  Priya put her hands up, surrendering. “We can figure the media later. Ask me again after New Year’s, and we’ll get started. But if one of you wanted to help me out with my projects this weekend . . .”

  Ree, Sandra, and Anya conspicuously looked away.

  Priya sighed. “That’s what I thought.”

  “I tell you guys, Community is the smartest thing on TV right now. It takes everything stupid about sitcoms and makes it amazing.”

  Ree nodded. “It has genre emulation and fourth-wall breaking so good, it’s a wonder the show ever got renewed. I bought three DVD sets for Christmas last year.” One for her, one for her dad, and one to loan out. She’d started the practice with Firefly after finding that she was constantly loaning out her set and still wanted to watch the epsiodes at will.

  The empanadas arrived, at which point all talking ceased as they worshipped at the temple of deliciousness.

  Ree had gotten some food in her stomach before the wine and beer hit, which kept her from dive-bombing off the ledge of sobriety. Instead, she proceeded to slalom down into intoxication with diligent self-destructiveness.

  This was the third straight night of heavy drinking. This time she couldn’t tell anyone what else was getting to her. History had taught her that getting a good drunk on was excellent therapy, and less expensive than actual therapy.

  Current prescription: more beer and a change of subject. Thankfully, Sandra brought up Darren’s impe
nding birthday and her grandmaster plans to have a big surprise party at The Shithole, despite his expressed request to not have a party.

  Ree and the Rhyming Ladies dove into planning, assisted by the alcohol, until it was decided that they’d host their own private Rocky Horror Picture Show, with Ree as Frank-N-Furter and Sandra as The Creature, Priya and Anya fighting over who was Magenta and who was Columbia. Assuming Darren didn’t run off screaming, they’d get him into the golden Speedo and could change around the roles or not, depending. Darren was a bit of a stick in the mud, but Ree hadn’t met a likes-girls-sexual alive who could resist the Amazonian Sandra in a shiny gold swimsuit and pasties.

  Just after 11, they packed it in, deciding to go to Anya’s place for bad movies until sleep o’clock, which on such nights could range from 1 AM to 8 AM, depending on the number of rounds of AMFs consumed.

  As the four women walked through the streets, chatting loudly, four vessels and at least twelve sheets to the wind, Ree’s phone rang.

  It was Eastwood.

  Ree realized that in all the fun, she had successfully put him out of her mind. Go, team booze!

  Screw him, I’ll call back tomorrow, after the hangover is gone. So, maybe Sunday, before work.

  She let the call go to voicemail, and two minutes later, he called again. She waved off her friends’ questions, saying that it was her student loan office. After that she got a text, then another. She didn’t even bother reading them.

  Five minutes later, a block from Anya’s apartment, her phone rang again. She held the button to turn it off, but it kept ringing. When she looked up from the phone, she saw Eastwood across the street, giving her a What the hell are you doing? look. He waved for her to come over.

  Wow. She wasn’t going to be able to shake him. Rather than having to subject the ladies to Eastwood, she decided to peel off. “Guys, I’ve got a headache, I think I’m going to call it early.” She got a few raised eyebrows, but they didn’t object.

  “Good night, Blitz,” Anya said as she walked across the street. And now, on top of it all, she was the Blitz.

  Damn you, Jorge Garcia, she thought as her friends walked on. She waited until they rounded the corner, then walked over to Eastwood.

  Stepping up onto the sidewalk, she asked, “So, what now?”

  Eastwood’s seemingly-customary dourness melted into something that could, if you looked at it right, be interpreted as compassion. “I threw you right into the deep end, and it can be nasty. But we need to talk about this case.”

  “Joke’s on you, I’m hammered,” Ree said, wavering to the side and catching herself on a light pole. In a moment of microsobriety, Ree realized that she was perhaps not taking this whole thing very well. Her recent track record of adult decisions wasn’t exactly stellar. Ree blinked a couple of times and straightened herself out, walking deliberately.

  Eastwood didn’t move. “I can deal with that. Let’s go.”

  “You aren’t much for small talk,” Ree said.

  “All of my problems are big problems. No time to talk about menial go-se. Let’s go.”

  “All right, then. To the Dorkcave!” Ree pumped her right hand in the air, rallying.

  “How’d you know what it was called?” Eastwood asked.

  Instead of answering, Ree just laughed.

  Maniacally, for several blocks.

  Chapter Six

  Plato in the Dorkcave

  When Ree and Eastwood returned to the Dorkcave, they were greeted by John Williams’s “Binary Sunset” playing on the PA. She looked back and gave him the Really? look, and Eastwood shrugged.

  “I put Williams on loop when I need to think.”

  “Fair enough. So here’s what you need to know . . .” Ree ran through an account of her visit to the Moorelys’, punctuated by her questions, which Eastwood waved off until she was done. She got to the breathless voicemail and sighed. The episode with the weresuit seemed more insane in retrospect, albeit more funny and less terrifying.

  Eastwood nodded. “So, like I said, the guy in the fur suit was an Atavist. They channel the power of a primal spirit, and for the truly hard-core Furrymancers, it means suits like that. The more they give in to the spirit, the more real their powers become.”

  “Freaky. And what about ghosts? Could Angela’s spirit still be there somewhere in the house?”

  Eastwood looked down and away, pacing without making eye contact. “Not likely. If she follows the pattern of the last two suicides, her soul is absent from the scene.”

  “So then there are ghosts.”

  “Yes.”

  Ree nodded, processing. “And werewolves, sort of? What about the rest? Vamps, mummies, changelings, succubi, demons?”

  “Most everything is around in one form or another. Vampires used to be the Dracula types, but in the last ten years most of them have become weak, brooding androgynes that only go after teenagers. A friend of mine took the opportunity to rid his whole city of them after the fourth Mormon Vamps book hit and the sparkle meme was at its strongest.”

  “So does that make Ms. Mormon Sparkle Vamp a hero?”

  “Of a sort. Before they started to sparkle, there were a lot of vamps who were tortured antiheroes, thanks to Rice and Whedon.”

  Ree grimaced. “Do you know if she was clued in?”

  Eastwood shrugged. “She’s very secretive, no one in the Underground has been able to say for sure. It’s all rumor. My guess is she lost someone to a vampire and decided the greatest revenge she could inflict was to turn them into a laughing stock.”

  Ree blinked a few times, her head still foggy from the booze. “So, what do we do next? If I keep going investigator on this, the interview list is getting stupid-long, and I have a job.”

  Eastwood stopped a couple of paces from Ree and looked at her. “Next I teach you more about genre emulation.”

  Ree shrugged. “I did the Sherlock thing just fine.”

  “But with more control, you can use more power, longer, and with better effect. I knew a Geekomancer who channeled Star Wars so well she called herself a Jedi and no one questioned her.”

  Ree raised an eyebrow, thinking, Now, that would be cool. She imagined herself in Jedi robes, wielding a real lightsaber, “Duel of the Fates” playing in the background as she faced down Darth Maul.

  Ree shook off the daydream and saw Eastwood smile at her. “Cool, right? Channeling genres takes a lot out of you, and you’ll get better with practice. It’ll also be easier to switch when you need to. For now, you should stick to watching a whole movie or episode, preferably things you already know and love. Your emotional attachment to the material determines how much you can get out of it.”

  “So Die Hard is a better choice for action-fu than Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.”

  Eastwood snarled at the mention of the second film. “I hated that movie so much, I got my ninety-one minutes back.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not relevant.” Eastwood waved his hand, dismissing the thought. He turned to his wall of screens, typing a few things in on one of a half-dozen keyboards. “I’ll handle the witness investigations, but to do that, we need to pick up some things. Ready for a field trip?”

  Ree pulled out her pockets. “I forgot my permission slip. Does this mean we get to raid the stacks?” she asked, eager to dig into his Willy Wonka–level stash. In the short time she’d spent in the Dorkcave, she’d already decided that she could spend a solid month rummaging through all of his loot. You could run practically run Gen Con out of this place, she mused.

  “Are you still channeling anything?”

  Ree shook her head. “Not unless Drunkomancy is a thing.”

  Without missing a beat, Eastwood said, “Dipsomancy is very real, but it takes more than just getting hammered to do anything useful.”

  “I was joking,” Ree said, half apologetic and half amused.

  Eastwood shrugged. “Get yourself some water.” He indicated a watercooler off to one side of his mega-de
sk. “Then find something useful to watch on my computer while I sort out our supplies for the trip. It won’t be particularly safe, but it should be hella instructive.”

  Ree raised an eyebrow. “Hella?”

  “I spent about a decade in NorCal. Deal with it.”

  Ree sat down at Eastwood’s computer and found the Media folder. It popped up to full screen, and she saw what must have been thousands of files. “What were you doing in NorCal?”

  Eastwood had disappeared down an aisle that was mostly boxes marked with D&D module titles, but he’d apparently heard her. “Saving the world.”

  She looked away from the screen and shouted, “Can you expand that a little, Captain Cryptic?”

  Eastwood harrumphed. “My nickname comes from my time there, fighting over the Wild Wild Web, when W-W-W was new. A bunch of techie practitioners discovered how to astrally project into the Internet. Poof: digital cowboys, spiritual boom towns, and then turf wars to decide the Web’s ontological disposition.”

  Ree blinked and stopped for a second. “Are you shitting me?” She looked back at the computers, with several screens open to various webpages. She remembered early Internet browsing, BBSes, Usenet, and the Didn’t Seem So Bad at the Time horror that was AOL.

  “Not in the least. This monster-hunting stuff is my retirement plan, young padawan.”

  Ree followed Eastwood down the row, intrigued. “Forget movies, I want to hear that story right now.”

  “No time. You can borrow my friend’s memoir, though—it covers most of the good stuff. Now pick a movie—we don’t have time for you to watch something through, but I refuse to take you to the market without something awesome kicking around your mind.”

  “Market?” Ree asked.

  “We need stuff. I said that already.” There was impatience in his voice.