The Restored: Chapter Seventeen

Robert K. Baurm was a very average man, at least as most people in Elderglass would measure such things. He himself wouldn’t dispute his averageness, but instead, embraced it. 

He’d been born in very average circumstances.. Sure, he’d been born and raised in the undercity, but so were a lot of people. His family weren’t forced to live outside of the cordon, and while there were occasional gang fights, it wasn’t anything unusual. Every city across the world had gang fights, after all. 

He’d had very average parents. His mom had worked as a banker for a street city bank, and his dad had been a construction worker. Both were busy with their jobs, but tried to spend time with him when they could. His father had been a bit too prone to falling into the bottle, and his mother had been a bit too fond of casinos, but neither one had fallen completely to their respective vices. They weren’t perfect, but they weren’t cruel.

He’d lived an average childhood. There were occasional schoolyard bullies, the odd childhood crush, and the rare fun event when his parents saved enough to visit one of the large illusion shows or something of the like. Puberty hit him, and he developed into an average looking man, with a scruffy goatee, a low fade that didn’t quite suit him perfectly. He wasn’t ugly, but his legs were a bit too short for him to be perfectly proportioned, and his cheeks had acne scars on them that never fully faded. 

He’d gone to a very average undercity school, learning mathematics, language, history, and the rudimentary science and magical classes that everyone took. It wasn’t a great school, not like one of those fancy preparatory schools that prepared people to get into Bronzelight University, Arcweld College, Reelings, or one of the other big colleges. He hadn’t been top of his class, but he also hadn’t been at the bottom of it either. 

Even when he’d awakened his aura, it had gone very normally, every bit as average as the rest of his life. He had been seventeen, a perfectly average age to awaken an aura naturally. He’d been running to the grocery store with his father, since his mother had mistakenly thought they had more onions left than they actually had. They’d been walking on the street when it had suddenly gotten brighter around him, and his father had gasped. 

When he’d looked in the reflection of the nearest window, he’d spotted the curling orange light around him. The shade of orange was average, the exact shade of a thousand other naval oranges. 

After the awakening, things changed, but they changed in the exact average way that one would expect a normal member of the undercity who didn’t show extreme talent to go. He was shifted into taking some additional mage courses, to ensure that he had the baseline understanding to not accidentally over-fill runes and blow them up, and to teach him to shape some minor effects through the use of glyphs. He had a reasonable aptitude with glyph work and the use of runes, but nothing exceptional. Even among those in his year and his specific school who had awoken an aura or been selected as a recipient of an aura spark transplant, he wasn’t in the top five, nor was he in the bottom five. He was, as always, right in the middle, where he belonged. 

He got an average familiar, a non-sapient dreamscape spirit. It wasn’t intelligent enough to use most spellcraft, but the familiar boon helped him know the truth of what he looked at, usually by dredging up memories he’d half forgotten and comparing them. It was no mage sight, not even as good as a boon to pierce illusions, but it was useful, and could help him on tests.

His normal grades and mediocre skills with magic weren’t enough to get him scholarships for most colleges to pursue higher education, and he needed to work if he wanted to keep paying his portion of the bills, so he didn’t go to a college. He instead, as is often the case when someone from the undercity awakens an aura, went to a vocational school to become an enchanter. 

His time there passed just like the rest of his entire life. He was shown the rituals and runes that were used to transfer and conduct aura across the city, that fed into light glyphs until the stress on the material caused them to burn out, the mixture of universal anchors and more complex anchors that were used to connect houses into the grid. He was shown other things too, like the spells to move heat, conduct plumbing, and reinforce buildings, but the spells that powered devices became his area of focus.

In time, he became a practical expert. He wasn’t a researcher that delved into the great question of ‘why’ magic worked the way it did, nor a spell designer looking to design more efficient methods for things to work, nor a specialist engineer who worked on cutting edge technology like airships.

What he was might have been more humble, but it was also every bit as important. He was an expert of the practical, and went to work at a home repair business. Space is at such a premium in the city that it couldn’t be called house repair, but it was certainly a home repair. When a person’s aura socket stopped working, and they needed it fixed, his business was one of the ones that could be called, and he repaired hundreds of apartments.

On one of his weekends, he met Nguyen at one of the handful of parks that’s open to the sunlight from above. She wasn’t especially pretty by the conventional standards of Elderglass. She had a slight pallor from spending too much time in the undercity, and her abusive ex-wife had left her nose a little too crooked. That had been what caused their split, and now Nguyen and her son lived alone in their undercity apartment. 

The pair hit it off quite well, slowly becoming friends, then eventually growing to become more. Nguyen’s son didn’t like him much on their first meeting, but in time, came to view Robert as a father figure. Two years after their fateful meeting, they were married. It was an average courthouse wedding, with a small reception of friends and family. Neither had the money to throw anything especially lavish, but they went out to a nice restaurant on the twenty-ninth floor of a building in the street city. 

Three years after that, Nguyen was pregnant with another child. Little did anyone know that this child was going to be the thing that finally broke him out of his completely average life. 

Not at first, of course. The child came out healthy and whole. Robert did his best to never show favoritism, and to treat both his daughter and stepson as his children, and he mostly succeeded. He wasn’t perfect, but he mostly did well enough. 

With another mouth to feed, though, Robert and Nguyen both set out to look for higher paying jobs, and to maybe even see about moving to the street city, if they could make enough. That was how Robert found a new job, working for city maintenance, moving through the vast, complex network of power lines, sewer tunnels, and aura siphons to keep them all updated and fixed. 

He wasn’t especially good at his job, never progressing into the higher levels of maintenance, but nor was he bad at it. His performance reviews were all adequate enough to keep the paychecks flowing, and with Nguyen’s new job as a manager at a Zherenian cuisine focused luxury restaurant, they were able to move to the street city and get their children enrolled into the schools there. 

When an order came down from one of the big wigs in the city, demanding that the aura power lines be checked, and that the defenses in particular be triple-checked, Robert was one of the nearly two thousand enchanters called in as a part of the job. It was an all hands on deck situation, with the fancy higher up saying there were rumors that those terrorists would be targeting the power grid. Combing over an entire city’s power grid took a lot of people, after all, but the city maintenance department was up for the task.

The unfortunate thing about the rituals that moved the aura from place to place was that they were old. When they had been built so many decades ago, they had been designed to be taken apart and upgraded every few years. At least once a decade. 

They hadn’t been. By the time the first decade was up, and it was time to take sections down and replace them with new rituals and materials, they’d been supporting far too much critical infrastructure to be turned off and back on. So things were repaired and upgraded when they broke, and left alone as long as they continued to transfer power. They even wrote laws about grandfathering in the old magic. 

When new magical lines were laid, they were laid right alongside the old ones, doubling down on the system that didn’t work, because the other option was shutting off the power to infrastructure that needed it, inconveniencing huge swathes of people, and spending hundreds of millions of thin-panes on replacing everything. 

And that was how Robert found himself walking down an old, cramped sewer tunnel, tracing the lines of power under the light of a glyph, and doing his best to ignore the smell. He had lots of practice with it, fortunately. He slowly ticked them off on his clipboard as he came across the clustered runes that were the defensive formations, looking for them to make sure that they hadn’t been tampered with, hadn’t failed, or undergone any abnormal levels of stress. One or two had been vandalized, forcing him to scrub the paint away, but they were solidly defended, so none had been damaged or sabotaged thus far. 

When he came across his thirty-second checkpoint, one at the intersection of a few of the oddly shaped tunnels, he paused and scratched his chin. 

“Huh,” he said. 

The entire nest of runes was glowing with bright red light. It was faint, faint enough he almost wouldn’t have noticed it if his familiar boon hadn’t pulled up the memory of the other arrays, but it was definitely there. 

He tapped the aura gauge to see if it was still working normally. Power was still flowing from the local reservoir and through the point, and checking over the rates for the last two years only showed average fluctuations. It had been a bit drained, recently, but that could have been explained by an apartment using more power than normal. It was nothing worth looking over. 

He flipped back and forth a few times, gauging if anything had been tampered with. None of the built-in warnings had gone off, which they should have if any foreign, active aura had interfered. 

But the spell was still glowing a bright red. 

He was tempted to check it off and keep walking, but he forced his eyes back to the magic. Robert might have been average, but he was going to do his job, and he was going to do it right. The last thing he needed was a terror attack at a hospital or something like that. 

But he should just go, check it off and keep walking. 

No, he–

He should check–

No–

The mental spell snapped, and his body suddenly went rigid as pain exploded through his chest. The last thing he knew was the blazing red light of the spell array on the wall, a set of three long claws shaped almost like bird talons protruding from his chest, and a voice that sounded like boulders grinding against one another. 

“You should have kept walking, little human. Hmm. Wonder if Alyphize will be upset if I eat him…"