Wizards vs. Muggles (Free-form)

Otis ANGB

"You two, set up right here." Warren said as he gestured to one of the Security Forces machine gun teams. " Get yourselves a nice field of fire and cover our advance. We'll be bounding towards whatever's out there, so be ready to lay down lots of cover fire; do what you have to."

"Just in case, use these. " he replied as he tossed a Motorola radio to the woman using the CLU. " Keep an eye open."

"Let's go."

Olivia tried to stay calm, telling herself that, magical defenses or not, panicking now wasn't going to help anyone. She was a medic, her job was to stay calm and help people. But she was a medic, not a priestess, not a witch doctor. The supernatural was something completely foreign to her, aside from that woman that she saved from that crazy Scot, and she wasn't even sure if she had been the real deal.

She fiddled with her shotgun shells, constantly checked her medical supplies, and generally fidgeted nervously the whole time. Occasionally, she'd mutter something about a quick shotgun blast being the best and only magical defense she had, but these occasions became rarer and rarer as time went on.

Not being of any immediate use, she otherwise stayed quiet and stuck with the patrol.

The side of Grace-Ann’s mouth tipped up slightly as Paxton shook her hand, but she remained quiet throughout the rest of the conversation, watching. She rolled her eyes at Paxton’s comment about how terrible it would be if anything happened to her. “I’m pretty shore I kin take care of myself,” she told him quietly while Alzey was talking, “But I thank ya for your concernin’ yourself.”

“Interesting friends ya got, Mister Alzey,” she said when there was a break in the conversation, “Dunno if’n I like ‘em yit, but they're interestin’. Juss…I dunno if subtle’s the right way to tackle things. My trigger finger’s gettin’ a mite itchy. How subtle are ya thinkin’?”

Otis
The Security personnel struggled to emplace their bipod, but eventually they had the weapon pointing in the right direction. The jeep was the only cover in sight and the LMG was propped up on it; both security men fidgeted to keep warm. Ahead there was still sporadic gunfire and the glow of flames, but both had died down.

NCOs directing with hand signals and orders got the men going forward in a rough platoon wedge, maybe fifty yards across—it was difficult to tell due to the limited visibility. They were noisy, too; soldiers had to shout to be heard, their words snatched away by the wind (which had shifted and now was blowing into their faces from dead ahead).

The radios crackled and buzzed: "Contact, contact, heat sigs ahead of you!"

It took a good thirty seconds or so for the squads to settle; having embedded themselves with the individual squads, the Unicorn men could only work out rough directions, though their own radio network were a godsend. When it was finally confirmed that the last of the squads had stopped moving and were on their knees, rifles raised, there was the additional problem that there appeared to be nothing ahead. Captain Wilkins said as much.

"No, there's movement ahead, four signatures," said the CLU operator. "They look like soldiers. Definitely soldiers."

There were flashes up ahead, and distinct automatic gunfire in some unknown direction. On his own initiative one of the NCOs cupped his hand and shouted as loud as he could: "We're friendlies! Army! Army!"

The response was immediate. There were flashes in the snow from ahead and then sonic crack of bullets winging overhead, the whine of ricochets, the tracers that slashed through the murk, and the screams of crumpling Guardsmen and women.

Four soldiers, ahead, firing on them. What happened? Were they allies, confused by the storm? They only started shooting after one of theirs had called out, so something seemed wrong about that. Had they been brainwashed by a spell? Were they whiskeys with guns? It didn't seem like their style, but in this visibility it could let them get around looking like friendlies easily enough; even so, Alex still wouldn't have expected them to use the guns. Perhaps they were some other soldiers, but if so, where did they come from? Brought here by the whiskeys?

There was too much to think and not enough time to think it, and during that time soldiers were getting hit around him. The foremost solution was obvious, but if those were friendlies up there, then...

There was not enough time to think. Consequences be damned, Alex would make the shooting stop, the best... No, quickest way he knew how. Alex went prone, switching the P90 to single-fire and picking out the flashes ahead. Muzzle flashes from the gun barrels, most likely, putting their center mass just a little to the side, depending on the range. Alex started with the leftmost and worked his way right. Four shots to each target, two to the left of the flash, and two to the right. Most soldiers held their weapon right-handed, which would make the first two shots for each near misses in which case, but Alex had to be sure; besides, it wasn't like they'd really have time to do much before the next two shots came, since Alex could get them off so quickly.

Alex would continue this four shots on each of the four muzzle flashes until they stopped, repeating as necessary unless he got hit or ran out of ammo.

Boston
"Pretty subtle, but it'd be difficult," said Alzey, still sizing up the new group; Charmdrummer nodded slightly at Paxton's suggestion. "The suggestion is that we dance her dance, whoever this Nerak is—"

Charmdrummer interrupted, a touch incredulously. "Nerak?"

"Well, yeah. Karen's evil doppelganger. Nerak." Alzey ignored Charmdrummer's pained expression and his mutterings about having to work with 'that damned Yankee clown' and plowed ahead. "—and then trail her home to wherever she's supposed to go." Alzey frowned. "The trouble is, if she breaks cover and just teleports we're back to square zero. I was hoping there'd be an option that didn't involve having to fight her head-on, honestly, if it's a witch or wizard, and avoid alerting them. Again. I get hurt less this way."

Catalonia/Commandos
Through his binoculars Clark could see someone's face silhouetted by the flickering of the flame—male or female indistinct; a momentary shift in movement revealed that the flame came from a wick burning in a dish. Whoever it is, they were joined by a second silhouette, bowed under some heavy weight. A brief flare in the lamplight showed this second person to be male, and dressed in a dark-colored uniform, the insignia of which glinted brass in the lamplight.

The first person shifted about too much for Clark to see who it was. The second man, in contrast, stood passively until the first directed them with an outstretched arm to move; in a moment both were out of sight of the window.

edited 22nd Dec '12 12:00:58 AM by SabresEdge

The second man was obviously a servant or something similar.

"Two people by the third window from the left." Clark said. "One of them looked to be in charge, the other was carrying something heavy."

Otis ANGB

Warren hit the deck as soon as he saw the muzzle flashes ahead of them; taking stock of the situation around him, he took a quick inventory of his assets and began to plan. Good or bad, we've gotta make a decision. he thought to himself as he centered his sights around the closest muzzle flash.

“Gun team, I need you to shift your fire; we're bounding forward.” he said before he tapped Fields on the shoulder. “Get ready to move.”

Chessie shrugs, "You lead, I follow. Not supposed to create international incident this time."

Catalonia/Lita
Gaston eventually frowned; he was drawn more to direct wayward customers around the shop, though he knew Lita well.

"The boss didn't tell me," he said in colloquial Spanish, still frowning. "Just up and hanged that portrait on the wall, oh, the day before yesterday. That's probably the Dr. Mathurin or Maturin," Gaston surmised. He gave a visible, comical shudder. "The man gives me the creeps. Wherever I move it looks like he's staring at me—it'd be much better if he were, you know, living. Dead pictures shouldn't stare like that."

"...the journal," said Garza's voice, snapping out of distortion. "Maturin's journal. It all hinges on that."

Ting, ting—it sounded like Karla was tapping on the glass. Pay attention.

"Why?"

"Because there are a lot of references to the good Doctor Maturin writing in his journal," said Garza, and there was an urgent note to his voice. "He left it to his daughter and it stayed in the family until one of the descendants left it to a museum. Well, it became a minor curiosity—he wrote some sections of it in code, and it was never cracked." A pause. "I don't mean the bulk of his journal—most of that code was eventually broken. No, I mean the segments that were really, really heavily encoded. Never broken, not with trained cryptos, not with computers. Not in his lifetime, not today either. There's even a distributed-computing project." Strange to hear eccentric old Grandpa Garza saying that with every indication that he knew what he was talking about—but then again he always was an avid subscriber to newspapers and magazines, even the more esoteric ones.

"Which means..."

The shuffle of papers. "Here's a photocopied section of one."

"Hmm." Karla tsked. "Do you know, I can't make heads nor tails of this either? I am hardly Bletchley Park or GCHQ, and if a computer could not break this, what do you expect of me?"

"Maturin had talent, madam," said Garza. "You know partial squibs with only a touch of magic? Not full wizards but still could conjure up sparks if they think real hard? Our good Dr. Maturin looks like he was one of those. I don't think he even realized he was encoding his diary with magic. But look: he might not have even suspected they were old-style ancient runes, but they are. This stuff is subtly but definitely magically encoded."

"It could be cryptographic padding, it could be nonsense," said Karla, in the same affected tone of puzzlement as before. "It'd hardly be amenable to a simple Aparecium. After all, magical encryption was only developed a few years ago, was it not? The math involved..."

"I sent out a sample page two days ago to a mathemagician contact who said he'd be working on it," persisted Garza. He wasn't banging the table with his fist, but the emphasis he put on the first person made an effect almost as strong. "I expect the results sometime tonight or tomorrow, by owl. I expect confirmation. And by god, though I didn't expect this, I suspect the results would be something in plaintext."

"Why?"

"Because the parts that were already broken had all kinds of tantalizing hints," said Garza. "I think, Q-related things."

"Q did process the Maturin castle," said Karla reflectively. "You were the case officer. It came up clean."

"I didn't have this then," said Garza urgently. The raw intensity in his voice was not something Lita had heard often from him. "And I didn't have access to whatever Dr. Maturin thought was so worth hiding he unconsciously dipped into what magical talent he had to hide it, that he strained himself so heavily that he fractal-encoded it. That doesn't come naturally to people. This is big, madam. It's not just his old house or the filing annexes next door. Dr. Maturin must have found something, whether or not he recognized the implications, and if the local legends are right it's something like Dumbledore assigned me to hunt down years ago. I want your permission to chase this one down to the end."

A pause.

"I will overlook your bringing in unapproved external help this once," said Karla gently. "You have my permission."

Lita listened attentively for a bit. It was tiring. She nodded and muttered a Spanish "thanks" to Gastón, before heading to her room. The first thing she noticed was the dreamcatcher, and she put it on. Maybe that'd help with the nightmares. Then she brushed her teeth.

Her desk was just as she'd left it. A lamp that didn't work unless you yelled at it, a set of mechanical pencils, as well as pens and quills, in a little box, and an open notebook. In the first page it had a drawing of a little, triangular wizard.

So she changed into a sleeping gown, put down the listening device and hopped into bed. Beds didn't lie or keep secrets or weave tangled plotty webs of the secrets and plots and lies. She just wanted to sleep now. It all bothered her, she'd decided. The fact that she'd never seen her grandfather like that before. That Karla hadn't told her anything. That no one, all night, aside from a painting, had bothered to direct two words at her. Her grandfather hadn't even asked her how she'd been. It was all Karla's stuff, spying, secrets, long-dead people, old journals, networks, and so on. Lita felt as little more than a resource to be exploited.

It bothered her and ate at her and made her want to distance herself from the whole situation. If they were just going to talk as though she wasn't there anyway, there was no reason for her to be present.

"You sure that's a good idea right now with incoming fire from straight ahead?" Alex responded to Warren, still firing off shots towards the muzzle flashes. Not that the storm couldn't provide visual cover, but running towards the source of the bullets kind of countered that in Alex's opinion.

edited 27th Dec '12 6:22:01 PM by FirockFinion

Lita woke up very early. She was usually more of a night person than a morning person, but she'd fallen asleep before midnight, so it was expected. What she didn't expect was feeling so incredibly well-rested. She felt alive. As though every night and morning for the past few months had been a grey and bleak dystopian unnamed B-movie, and now she was watching "The Secret of Kells" in blueray.

Colours seemed brighter, the air smelled nicer, everything was wonderful. She had a hot, blisful shower, followed by a change of clothes, and got out of her room to eat breakfast. 

"Any more information on this Nerak that you think you should mention before we decide upon a plan of action?" Paxton asked "And any talents you have that you feel relevent and worth mentioning in regards to this investigation; I think all involved would feel better if they knew what we have going for us"

Judging by the snoring, her grandfather hadn't woken up yet, and Karla was nowhere to be seen, so she was probably sleeping to. Though she might be busy doing more spy things. So Lita began cooking breakfast.

Just as her grade in potions class had gone up to an "Exceeds Expectations" due to extra theoretical work and "Outstanding" essays she'd done for Professor Slughorn and later Professor Watermole, Lita's general ability to cook was great only in a theoretical level. Still, just as she'd never had a potion that failed to produce the intended effect(in fact, oftentimes they produced the intended effect just a little TOO well), anything she cooked tasted generally well. Not amazing, but better than most English restaurants, in her opinion— which only spoke of Lita's incredibly low opinion of English food.

And so, Lita began getting fish fillet out of the fridge, and adding in seasoning, whilst happily singing John Lennon's "Imagine" to herself. Five minutes into the cooking process anyone to come in would have seen dozens of small plants, spices and cooking utensils floating about her with the melody as she turned on the stove, cut up the fish, and worked on the salad simultaneously.

Olivia watched, feeling compelled, for some strange reason, to announce this fact to the universe. She was a bleeding medic, but her brain kept itching at her to announce her mental state for some ungodly reason.

"Casters?" she asked, feeling she should say something to make her presence known. And, of course, it would help to know how much of a help she'd be in the fight if it came to that.

After a good three quarters of an hour, food was done, served, and being eaten. She'd grabbed the notebook in her desk, and started writing notes on it at the table while she ate— Lita had forgotten about her little pet project of that year's summer, and she was familiarizing herself with it again, as well as adding to her previous work.

Because of this, she ate her rice and breaded fish at a turtle's pace. Between the song-humming and the note-taking, she was taking longer to eat the food than she had to cook it. After eating all of her breakfast, Lita got a piece of blank paper and decided to follow through with what she told Alex she'd do. The first and easiest thing would be to send the girl an owl. It could fail to work, but owls had some way of finding people wherever they were, and everything else was far too complicated and time-consuming.

She took even longer writing the letter than she had eating her food. Just how was she supposed to write the thing? After a few minutes of indecision, she decided to just start writing the thing.

No, that didn't feel right. She didn't know Sarah Fields.

No, that didn't feel right either. Maybe something more oldish? She'd been taught some formal writing in school...

Lita rubbed her temples for a moment. This was going to take forever.

Otis ANGB

"We've got MG fire, we'll use it to hit their sides." Warren said as he watched the flashes in the distance. "Gun team, cover our advance."

Splitting the men into two groups, Warren waited for the base personnel operating the machine gun to open fire, before he made his way down the side of the runway, and to the enemys' flank.

After starting the long and arduous task of writing the letter, and finishing it with a "Sincerely, a friend" after she realized she was apparently a spy now, and paranoia was key. 

Then the writing of the letter(which she'd had to transcribe onto clean paper because the ridiculous number of strikethroughs made it illegible) was nothing compared to the sending of it. Lita's grandfather had a small owlery out back. One reason for its existence was that he often sent out packages of merchandise, and it was more convenient to own a variety of owls in case he needed to send multiple packages at once. Another reason was that he kept correspondence with quite a few old friends who Lita now thought might or might not be contacts. Lita imagined yet another reason could be to be able to send packages and not be recognized(or tracked) from the comfort of his home. Few people actually knew he owned around a dozen of the creatures, and often he lent them to friends or instructed them to stay with the recipient of the package.

It had always been Lita's least favorite room of the house. The moment she walked into the owlery she was met with dozens of screeches. The owls didn't like her. She'd already pre-knotted the letter, making it far easier to tie it to the owl's leg. Wanting to make everything as painless as possible.

She went over to Gasparin— the youngest owl, and one of the biggest. He was lazy, but he always delivered. Lita approached the screeching owl with caution, and it took the first chance it had to start pecking at her right hand. While clenching her teeth and muttering the odd profanity, Lita managed to get the owl's leg through the hoop, and pull the letter away (tightening the knot) before she told the owl to get it to Sarah Fields, opened the window and yelled out an "Sacate!" and a few other profanities. 

Next came the healing charm, between cringes and the odd whimper, and the cleaning of the splashes on her shirt, Lita went over to her room and started writing in her notebook. The one in her desk with the triangular wizard on the first page.

The Veela’s nose twitched at Alzey’s admission that he preferred a far more subtle approach than what she’d hoped for, but she was quickly distracted by his words. “Whoa, now,” Grace-Ann said, holding up her hands, “Lemme set this straight.” She looked at Alzey incredulously. “You want us to jus’ follow the doppel back home?” She put her hands on her hips and the corners of her mouth turned down. “What fer?”

Extracts from London Journal of Sorcery, Fall 2017 ed.
Whither Mathemagics? —by Eskarina Smith
"It is ironic that most wizards today would barely recognize a computer if they had to stare at one; nevertheness, I believe that in fifty years' time, it would be no exaggeration to say that men like Alan Turing, Richard Feynman, and John von Neumann—known in the Muggle world for, among other things, pioneering computer science—would be recognized as the forerunners of an entirely new branch of magic."

I first wrote those words in the preface to the 'Codex Mathemagica' almost a decade ago. Even then I had the faint sense that I was onto something big, something potentially earth-shaking, but I had no conception just how big it would be. Instead of a new branch of magic, I am now convinced that the systems of formulae developed from the marriage of computer science and pure magic could become universal to magic as a whole. Make no mistake, magic in all its forms is not as random or as haphazard as it appears—there are patterns, and mathematical formulae that could be used to describe those patterns. But it took until the development of Muggle computer science that the right framework was in place to develop and manipulate those formulae; after that, it just took someone with enough of a background in both to develop them. Standing on the shoulders of giants, as Isaac Newton said. I am convinced that we could now begin to crack them, and to make strides in magic unimaginable as little as ten years ago.

In the years since the publication of the first edition of the Codex, we've seen truly fine work in refining and reworking the admittedly rather clumsy formulae that I worked out. It is debugging, as a programmer might say—but then again, so is 99% of all matter of science. In particular, the work of the College of Arithmancy in Edinburgh has been amazing, particularly the fine minds of the Applied Magics division, and I applaud them for their work. (As for their colleagues in the Predictive Future division, I would just like to note that American muggles have several times now successfully predicted their own political future using their method of arithmancy, which they call "statistics", and which also doesn't involve seven-sided stars or thirteen-branched candelabras. Look into it—or don't, if you want to continue losing galleons to me over the results of the British Quidditch Cup...)

Otis
Somewhere behind them the machine-gun opened up, sending tracers slashing forward through a gap in the infantry line. The gun crew tried to walk them towards the source of the fire, but accuracy was limited at best.

There were still screaming from the Guardsmen and women hit, curled up protectively around their wounds as best as they could. Far up in front a flash of flame briefly silhouetted the charred outline of another helicopter and the dome of a helmet head, before machine gun fire raked the line. The sharp crack of a grenade explosion came with the whisper of flying fragments and a fountain of snow and sleet, well short of them. In a moment the few Guardsmen who had picked themselves up to follow Warren flung themselves flat again, despite cursing and exhortation from their sergeants.

The radios buzzed and crackled, message after message being interrupted or else cut off. Behind them the light machine gun on the jeep was the only thing firing. Abruptly it stopped its continual chatter, and resumed immediately with short bursts into the snow, reaching well forward. On the Occulus private circuit, Price: "Occulus, stay low. The Javelin gunner's going to adjust fire from the 240."

Catalonia/Commandos
The lieutenant shook his head. "They were not supposed to be in the castle itself," he muttered. "Only in the new buildings. Shall we move ahead and in, sir? I have most of a platoon roving around..."

He reached for his radio and demanded, in Spanish, if anyone had seen the light from the window. One group reported yes, but could not make out any details; negative answers from everyone else.

Clark thought carefully. Wizards were highly mobile on the battlefield and could leave at a moment's notice, so whoever was up there would need to be taken by stealth, and in as short an amount of time as possible.

I'd prefer not to break the search pattern, he thought to himself, but we've made contact and we don't know how long they'll be there.

"Move in on the castle." Clark said. "Put priority on not getting lost and on stealth—if whoever's in there knows we're coming they can evacuate in seconds."