Virga: Act 4A

A Virga Mystery: BALANCING ACT

ACT 4a: OF PARENTS AND PROGRAMMING

“But why target me?” Mel said, the frustration in her voice obvious to me, and likely everyone in the room.

Marissa sighed. “Melissa, if we tell you, do you promise that you’ll continue to let us handle it our way?”

[caption id=“attachment_2011” align=“alignright” width=“202”] MELISSA VIRGA
Commission from Shirley[/caption]

“Oh, of course, seeing as your way seems to involve me continually getting attacked,” Mel grumbled.

This time Marissa simply looked startled. “Melissa, did you just get… sarcastic with us?” Marissa shifted her look of disbelief on to me, her expression morphing into one of disapproval. Her father also looked my way.

Caught under the microscope, I found I could only shrug and smile back wanly. “Yeah, maybe she picked that up from me?” I said apologetically.

“Well, this is what we wanted. Less pure analysis, more emotionalism,” Wayne remarked, briefly drumming his fingers on the table.

“Perhaps we should have been monitoring the situation more closely though,” Marissa said, frowning in concern. “Oracles don’t get sarcasm, they take that sort of thing very literally.”

“Well, you know what I think we should have done all along,” Wayne countered, ceasing his drumming to cross his arms.

“Don’t be silly, dear, she’d have spotted a magick listening device in her apartment from a mile away.”

“Hello! Still in the room,” Mel said, seemingly gaining strength as her anger and exasperation started to bubble over. “What. Aren’t. You. Telling. Me.”

As a matter of fact, the way the tables had been completely turned on her usual know-it-all attitude, this might have been humorous under other circumstances. Poor Mel really was out of her element here.

Marissa sighed again. “Very well. Melissa, darling… in about three months time, you will be given a choice. Namely whether to have the supernatural balance of Earth completely restored, or completely shattered.”

Mel peered closer at Marissa, looking for a hint of deception.

“In the former case,” Mel’s mother clarified, “the rules would again be fully enforced, no magick would be done without appropriate consequences, and other realms would be completely shut out, preventing bleed over. In the latter case, supernatural beings would be seen with increasing frequency, and magick could be done not only by more individuals, but wielded against those without implicit consent.”

Mel made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Well, that’s a no brainer. Given order or chaos, I pick order. Let’s do it now and get it over with.”

“Unluckily, it’s not quite so cut and dried,” her father said, frowning. “For one thing, maybe the world could use a little shake-up before everyone becomes tied to the supernatural that at present exists only in their little electronic virtual worlds. While automation keeps taking over every industry, and destroying people’s imaginations.”

“Another rather more key fact,” Marissa put in, “is that if you choose to restore the balance – Melissa, you’re the one who will have to monitor and maintain that balance. Indefinitely.”

Mel stared at her parents before shaking her head. “You’ve lost me.”

“Go back to Merlin,” Wayne suggested.

“We don’t know that it’s Merlin,” his wife countered. “All we know for sure is that there is actually someone doing that job now, and that they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. Trouble is, over time, they’ve lost perspective, and possibly their magick has become corrupted.”

“Which Merlin was smart enough to foresee,” Wayne remarked, stubbornly insisting on using the name. “Hence why he put in this ‘give a promising young witch or wizard a chance to make a choice’ clause that we’re currently faced with. Melissa, you’ll probably want to do the same, if you take over his job.”

With that, Wayne picked up his fork and cut into his pie.

“Dear, how can you eat at a time like this?” Marissa said.

“Hey, now that the truth is out there, I actually feel a whole lot better,” Wayne countered with a shrug. “Not to mention, still hungry.”

Mel still looked a bit uncertain about the whole thing, so I decided to speak up again. “Can I see if I have the gist of this?” I asked. Everyone turned to look at me, and no one objected to my speaking. “So, back in the 12th century, Merlin…”

“Fifth,” Wayne interrupted. “While his stories were from the 12th century, the actual events surrounding Merlin occurred about 700 years before.”

“And we don’t know it was Merlin,” Marissa reminded.

“So, many centuries ago, someone decided that they would monitor the supernatural balance on Earth,” I continued doggedly. “Or possibly they decided to take the job over from someone else, starting at that point. But said person knew that they couldn’t keep it up forever, thus put in some magick clause. And now, in our present, another will be Chosen to either dissolve the position entirely, or take over.”

“Correct,” Marissa said.

I leaned in. “Is it fair to extrapolate, and say that the increase in supernatural incursions over the last few years or decades is because of the current office holder starting to fail at their job?”

“Also likely,” Marissa agreed.

Wayne didn’t respond, as he was now eating his pie.

“Is there some significance as to why August of this year is the turnover?” I continued.

“Not that we’ve been able to determine. Seems random,” answered Mel’s mother.

“Why ME?” Mel said, speaking up again. “I mean, this seems huge. Shouldn’t this be the sort of thing decided by someone older? Or by a full committee, or voted on by a majority of Earth’s population or something?”

“Only one person gets to run this show,” Marissa said in resignation. “As to why you were one of those chosen to receive the earlier Prophecy, and in fact now seem to be the selected Chosen One, all I can say is that power seeks out those who won’t abuse it. Among those, you’ve apparently seemed the most fanatic, or the most insightful, with respect to issues of supernatural balance.”

“The spell needed to choose someone young too,” Wayne said offhandedly between bites. “Given the job takes centuries, you’ll want to start early. Then again, maybe there was a lack of correction factor for how long people live these days?”

“So, then… I have three months to decide whether I want this job, or whether I want to plunge the Earth into chaos,” Melissa said, numbly.

“Well, that’s just it, not necessarily,” Marissa said, now looking a bit happier. “We’ve found a work-around. A spell which can be performed to re-energize the person already managing the supernatural balance.”

“Merlin,” Wayne noted, with his mouth half full of pie.

Marissa shot her husband a look before continuing. “The spell itself will reverse any magick corruption and put off the problem for several centuries, getting you off the hook.” She smiled at her daughter.

“Put that way, it seems like we’re merely delaying the situation, sticking it on someone else,” Mel pointed out.

“Well, yes," Marissa yielded. “But if you ask me, that’s what was happening anyway. As things are now, you’d end up on the hook for handing the balancing act, until you’d also have to look towards sticking the problem on someone else. With our plan, the only difference is that we skip over your involvement, so that you can live out a proper life.”

I shook my head. It didn’t seem like passing the buck could be as easy as Marissa made it out to be. Otherwise surely this solution would have been attempted already. I said as much, also suggesting, “Is it that the spell itself is incredibly complicated?”

“Oh no,” Marissa said dismissively. “Spell’s fairly simple, just needs about five people to cast. They do give up some of their own essence, but we already found some volunteers for that, myself included.”

“Then what’s the twist?” I pressed.

“The spell can’t be focused onto the right place while there’s electronic devices functioning on the planet,” Wayne said, dropping his fork back down onto his empty plate. “There’s your twist, it’s all about the bloody tech. Well, and related to that, there’s the fact that this spell hasn’t been cast in 300 years, but it seems legit.”

I stared. “You mean to make this work, you have to hit the Earth with some kind of giant electromagnetic pulse first??” I said in shock.

“Oh, of course not, that would be terribly irresponsible,” Wayne objected, shaking his head. “Planes dropping out of the sky, life support machines failing, food spoiling in refrigerators…”

“We have found a way of shutting down, or rather, suspending the entire world’s electronic infrastructure,” Marissa cut back in. “With another spell. For only the couple of seconds we need. But the coordination involved in that is rather intense; we’re still pulling together a group of people both willing and able to invoke it.”

“So that’s the more difficult spell,” I realized.

“Partly,” Marissa yielded. “Also, it’s been determined that the optimal time to shut down all electronics is right around the time when the prophecy decision is going to be handed down anyway.”

“Globally speaking, we need a time with the fewest vehicles on the road, the least number of surgical operations in progress, all those sorts of variables,” Wayne muttered. “And yet it’s always daylight somewhere, so there’s lots to coordinate.”

“I have wondered if the timing of both events is not coincidence,” Marissa admitted. “A calmer time also being good for handing over the responsibility of the balance, assuming it’s not released entirely.”

Mel cleared her throat. “But then, what you’re saying is that I won’t have to make this decision after all.”

“That’s the plan, yes,” Marissa agreed with a smile.

“So what if I want to?”

Marissa’s smile faded. “Anyone wanting to make such a decision probably shouldn’t. But even so, Melissa, why would you take on such a huge responsibility? Honestly, we’d rather hoped to have it all figured out by now, such that you wouldn’t have had to deal with ANY of the Prophecy’s consequences, chief among them being those beings trying to kill you. Obviously, we’ve fallen short. For that, we are sorry.”

The young witch’s forehead creased slightly. “You were going to tell me all this either way though, yes?” There was a pause as her parents exchanged glances yet another time. “YES?”

“Doing that would have been the responsible choice, of course,” Wayne seemed to hedge. “As I’m sure you would have worked it all out eventually.”

Mel’s mother went for a slight shift in the topic. “So as things stand, Melissa, I’m afraid you’re liable to be accosted by three types of people over the summer. Based on our research, and owing to the three-month window between your official nomination, as it were, and the actual decision.”

“Oh, this should be good,” Mel sighed.

“The first group, as you saw, is the crazy ones, who believe that killing you will resolve this entire supernatural balance problem,” Wayne said, seizing the topic shift.

“Will it?” Mel interjected.

“No, darling, don’t be silly,” Marissa said, gesturing vaguely. “The decision would just pass on to one of the other Chosen Ones in the world, we said there were a few. But I suppose when you’re crazy, you think you can eliminate them all, or perhaps it’s merely that they believe one of the others would have viewpoints more compatible with them.”

“Who knows, when you don’t perceive reality properly?” Wayne muttered. “Figures one of them would be a lycan.”

“Couldn’t one of the other possible Chosen Ones send out a hit squad or something too?” I interjected. “To take out Mel and the other candidates?”

“It’s unlikely that they’d want to pull the attention towards themselves,” Marissa pointed out. “But even if that were the case, the Prophecy itself would then reject them as being a suitable candidate for deciding the balance.”

“Merlin still has some control,” Wayne agreed.

Marissa looked towards her husband. “Would you stop already with the Merl–”

“We’re getting off track,” Mel interjected. “Who are the other groups? Who will be after me, aside from the Crazies?”