Roland had gone to the basement prepared to do it the old-fashioned way, by fixing a stick to the floor with a rope attached to it and attaching a marker to the other end. It wasn’t fancy, but he figured it should work.
The Primordial Call ritual didn’t need any of that, though. As soon as Roland looked at the area where he planned to put the circle, a virtual overlay appeared on it, green lines of light that showed him the circle and the mystic symbols he needed. All he needed to do was trace the lines. It was about as challenging as painting by numbers.
He didn’t complain. Having a break made for a nice change. He had taken a three-hour nap and gotten started at the crack of dawn, hoping to have everything ready to go before his helpers arrived.
Everyone but Josh had agreed to join in the ritual, which would cut the whole thing down to six hours and hopefully give them some hands-on exposure to magic. Trixie had confirmed it would help them a lot in the Class-choice department.
All four of them were leaning toward becoming a magic-user type. He might as well give them a leg up while they helped him.
And what are those, exactly? I know I’m at the bottom of the barrel, F-Grade and Tin Rank. When are you among the top dogs?
Roland kept working as Trixie’s words bounced inside his head like angry bees. He was still at the bottom of the totem pole, but he already was so high above normal humans they might as well be toddlers. Just last night, he’d broken Josh’s foot while trying pretty hard not to hurt him.
That kind of power could be abused – no, it would definitely be abused. It was almost inevitable. Even with the best intentions, people with superpowers could end up treating normies like pets at best, slaves or playthings at worst.
Once everyone is inducted into the System, they’ll all get some powers, right? Roland asked Trixie as he finished up with the summoning circle.
And I take it that Civilians don’t get a lot of anything.
Any useful Skills?
They sound pretty good. How come I didn’t see those?
Yeah, that’s crap compared to even my Uncommon Skills. Better than nothing, though.
And they are trapped in crap Classes the rest of their lives?
More common than actual cases of people managing it, I bet.
How many get those to start with?
And a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy who works at Starbucks?
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
It could be worse, Roland thought.
Seventy percent would get the short end of the stick but had a chance to upgrade their Class. That was a lot better than pre-industrial civilizations, where ninety percent were firmly down at the bottom of the heap with no real options to improve their lot.
He grimaced as he put the last touches on the last sigil, yet another mystical symbol that looked like something from those Call of Cthulhu games Bob sometimes ran. He only ran them once in a long while. Few players liked when their characters slowly went insane or not-so-slowly were torn to ribbons by unspeakable creatures from beyond reality. Or both.
Bob’s worries had lost some edge after they translated the ritual, which didn’t have any references to doomsday or something fun like the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. He would find out soon enough.
There was a knock on the door at the top of the stairs leading out of the basement-slash-storage room.
“Everyone’s here,” Bob announced. “Wanna grab breakfast before we start?”
“Might as well,” Roland said, getting up. “It’s going to be a long morning.”
* * *
Roland’s breakfast – an egg, sausage and cheese sandwich and lots of black coffee – roiled uneasily in his stomach as he recited the Latin incantation for literally the hundredth time, echoed by his four little helpers:
“Veni foras, O magnificus.
“Veni ex Terra Spirituum et intra mundum nostrum.
“Ego tibi permissionem intrandi do.
“Ego offero pactum.
“Spiritus nostros coniungemus et maiores quam summa partium nostrarum fiemus.”
The abridged version of the chant was, ‘I call you, oh Great One, from the land of the spirits, I let you into our world and offer you a contract of alliance,’ and so on and so forth.
Why did it have to be Latin, he had no idea. Could it be because it was an older language with more significance? Or rather, capital-S Significance, which was a System-designated resource like Essence or Mana.
He’d seen Significance applied to items, but maybe it also extended to languages or cultural symbols.
Roland stowed away the thought for future consideration. His ritual team was working on the last part of the ritual.
Starting at around seven a.m., they had sat around the circle and chanted. The first few repeats had sounded terrible; everyone had butchered the Latin words, even Dahlia, the self-proclaimed expert in the occult. But as they got into a rhythm, they had found themselves chorusing the words at the same time and with the same pronunciation. Roland could tell everyone was getting spooked by their unnatural coordination.
“I need you all to picture a bird in your head,” Roland had told them before the start of the ritual.
“Any specific kind of bird?” Wendy asked.
“A bird related to death. Death and spirits.”
“A psychopomp!” Dahlia had shouted triumphantly.
“Psycho what?” Bob blurted out.
“They guide the spirits of the dead to the afterlife,” the goth girl explained. “Sparrows, for example. Also crows, vultures, condors. Lots of birds can be psychopomps. Did you ever read The Dark Half by Stephen King?”
“I saw the movie,” Barton said. “It wasn’t terrible.”
“Never mind the movie.” Dahlia turned to Roland. “That’s what you mean, right? A death bird.”
Roland nodded. “Yeah, I think you’re into something.” He’d never heard of psycho-pumps before, but it fit.
“The Crow.” Bob joined in. “The bird turned Brandon Lee into a zombie vigilante. That was a psycho bomb?”
“Psychopomp,” Barton corrected, casting a glance to Dahlia to see if she had noticed him championing her cause. “Makes sense. The James O’Barr comic was better than the movie, by the way.”
“Okay, think along those lines when you’re visualizing what I’m calling with this ritual,” Roland told them. “A crow or raven would fit, so let’s go with that.”
“Corvids,” Barton said. “Let’s think corvids. They include crows, magpies, jackdaws...”
“Rodan was a death bird, too,” Bob said.
“Do NOT think about freaking Rodan,” Roland said firmly. “Unless you want an actual Kaiju sharing the basement with us.”
“Okay, let’s think smaller.”
“And then there was Deathbird from The Uncanny X-Men,” Barton added.
“This isn’t a comic book,” Dahlia said dismissively.
Barton looked abashed, clearly realizing he had lost whatever brownie points he had accumulated with her.
The only one to remain silent was Wendy, who was staring at the circle with a worried – no, a frightened – look on her face.
“What’s wrong?” Roland asked her. Everyone quieted down when they noticed her expression.
“It’s going to call something big,” she said. “Something powerful. Can you handle it, or will it turn on you?”
“If it was hostile, maybe not,” Roland admitted. “But it’s a friendly. It’s helped me before.”
“Unless that help was its version of people fattening turkeys up before Thanksgiving,” she said.
Nobody had an answer to that. But they went through the ritual anyway. Even Wendy did.
* * *
“Ego offero pactum!” Roland shouted for the hundredth-and-first time, and that was when the basement lights went out.
Someone shrieked – either Dahlia, Wendy or Barton; Roland wasn’t sure – before a deep silence followed.
Roland couldn’t hear anything at first, not even his own breathing. After a long pause, something made a sound. A beating wing. Not a flutter, but a long, heavy single beat, pushing the air aside. Then another, and another.
Wendy had been right. Whatever was drawing near was big. Gigantic. More Rodan than sparrow.
Roland began to make out things within the darkness. Instead of sitting on the edge of a circle inside an unfinished basement floor, he was looking down at a cliff that disappeared in the dark, with hints of deep water a long way down.
He looked up toward a darkened sky, clouds providing hints of gray that broke a sheet of starless blackness. Mountains rose in the distance. And over them, he spotted it, the source of the steady, massive beat. It was very far but its size was unmistakable.
Wings that could span mountains. Glowing eyes that saw All.
The great flier moved inexorably toward him. A monster beyond anything he had seen before. Or maybe this was what a god looked like in the new reality the System had brought on humanity.
“Ego offero pactum,” Roland wheezed, sticking to the script. His lungs seemed to be giving up on him.
The beats were coming closer now. The wind they generated made the mountains below crumble like so many sandcastles.
“Ego offero pactum,” he repeated, his voice steadier.
Whatever else this was, this thing was an animal, a wild beast. Showing weakness would tempt it to treat him as prey. If Roland didn’t stand up to it, some instinct warned him, the bird would take him, leaving nothing behind but some blood spatter, maybe, and nightmares for everyone else.
“Ego offero pactum!” he shouted, and pushed out with his entire aura, ignoring the stabbing pain that exploded in his gut as his damaged – let’s face it, destroyed – Dantian reacted to the energy outburst.
“I offer a contract!” he said in English, damn dead languages, and damn Super-Rodan. “Take it or leave, Big Bird! I offer a partnership!”
He dimly heard shouting – Bob, screaming ‘What’s happening?’ Wendy sobbing uncontrollably – while the bird drew closer, blotting out the horizon and filling Roland’s field of vision like something impossibly vast and unknowable.
It was something that made Rodan look like Tweety Bird, something that wouldn’t get out of bed for anything smaller than a blue whale. And beyond the size was depth and density. It wasn’t just huge, it was impossibly, terribly real. All of humanity was a dream, a fading mirage by comparison.
“Ego!” Roland shouted.
Those wingbeats buffeted him with hurricane force. He held on with his aura.
“Offero!”
Time slowed as eyes the size of skyscrapers met his.
“Pactum!”
I ACCEPT.