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NanoSteps Brainstorming 3 - And a Step to the Right
 
#28
"Miss Price." I nodded toward her, then to her adult companion. "Mister Brown." The three children who were apparently accompanying them hung back, silently hanging on our words.

I glanced at the string-tied bundle of medieval manuscript pages that I had just ... creatively acquired from a bookseller on Portobello Road. It was about half of a genuine grimoire, which to judge by its fragmentary title page had been written by a spellcaster who knew much more about magic than he did about the Canaanite fertility goddess whose name he had taken for himself. Or maybe he'd gotten the moniker from one of those dubious works of demonology which took every pre-Christian god and assigned them jobs in Hell, in which case I needed to be careful in case there were boobytraps laid in among the spell formulas.

Anyway, I looked back up at the pair in front of me and evaluated their body language carefully before taking a glance at them in magesight. To my surprise they were both mage-gifted -- the woman very strongly, the man... far less so. And that was the last thing I was expecting to encounter in London during the Blitz. Their reasons for confronting me suddenly became obvious.

"Let me guess," I said, and brandished the bundle. "You have the other half of this document."

They glanced at each other, exchanging looks of surprise. Oh, come on, it wasn't that hard to guess. Brown gave a resigned sigh, before Price turned back to me and briskly replied, "As a matter of fact, we do. And we have need of that part of it. It's vital to the war effort."

I raised an eyebrow. "Vital how? From my quick skim of its contents it appears to hold no combat magic. Certainly nothing on a strategic scale. Transmutations, transformations -- the author appears to have been something of a bioalchemist -- soul and mind magics, and of most interest to me dimensional magic. But nothing with an immediate application to battle." An unpleasant possibility occurred to me. "Unless you're looking to make an army of half-human abominations or unleash a demon on the Nazis. I don't care how evil they are, I will not be party to such acts," I growled.

Both of them looked genuinely repulsed. "Oh, good heavens, no," Brown snapped out as Price said, "Certainly not!" Behind them, the younger boy squeaked.

I took another look at their souls with my magesight, drew a deep breath, and made a snap decision. "Look, maybe we can come to a compromise?" I asked in gentler tones.

Brown eyed me suspiciously. "What kind of compromise?"

I smiled and held up the bundle again. "You want this. Naturally, so do I, otherwise I would not have ... acquired it. However, once I've gone through its contents and have extracted what I need, it will be little more than a souvenir to me. Let me read your half, and you can have mine when I'm done with it. And if I do not find it morally repugnant, I will help you with your own project."

"You'll what?" they both said together.

I allowed myself an ever-so-slightly smug smile. "Miss Price. Do you seriously think that you are the only mage in all of England? Or even in all of London?" I shook my head and released my field just a little. "Not by a long shot."
Edit:  Fixed a grammar error that I just noticed.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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