Thellissandra, also called Sandra for simplicity, had come to Earth tracking down a renegade wizard named Elgarin. There she met David West, who had helped her adjust to this world and was assisting her in her quest. They were heading down from his apartment to his car when his cell phone rang. She had never heard this before and jumped slightly.

  “It’s just my cell phone,” David said, then noticed her bnk look. “I’ll try to expin it ter,” he said in response, and then into the phone said “Carol! Hi!”

  The voice on the other end did not pause for pleasantries and went straight to business: “David, do you remember my brother Kevin?”

  “Is he the cop or the actor?”

  “Michael’s the actor,” she said by way of answer, “I just had my twice a week lunch with Kevin and he told me a very bizarre story that, well, makes me think that you might have some expining to do.”

  David felt a slight chill in his blood at this and gnced over at Sandra. “Continue please?”

  “He responded to a report of a gang fight near the convention center st night. They found two members of the Dagas Nocturnas who needed medical care and one dead, plus two others who told a wild tale of a man with a huge backpack and an insane woman with hair in spiky braids who wore some kind of suede outfit and carried - get this - a sword.”

  “Uh huh. Were they tested for drugs?” he asked, saying the first thing that came into his head.

  “Yes. None of them had anything that would cause hallucinations,” Carol replied. “I know about your gamer bag and, well, Sandra. What are you not sharing with me?”

  “Hoo boy,” David replied. “That will take some time and might make me look insane. We’re heading out right now but I’ll call you ter if I can, and arrange to get together, maybe with alcohol involved, to expin everything, okay?”

  There was a pause. “You had better. And the alcohol should be top shelf.”

  David ughed. “There goes the budget for the month, but sure.”

  Carol replied: “If you are tied up in something nasty, let me know, though. We’ve been friends forever and I’d like to stay that way.”

  David smiled at this. “I’d like that too, and I think Thellissandra would as well.”

  “Who?”

  “My friend Sandra. That’s her full name. I’ll tell you as much more of it as I can when we meet up ter, but that will have to be it for now,” he informed his old friend.

  “Fair enough, David. Be careful,” Carol said.

  “Why should I start now?” He teased. She hung up.

  Sandra looked at him quizzically, and he expined: “I have no idea if she’ll accept the real story. For that matter, I am still not one hundred percent convinced that I do, but we should get moving.” As he finished his statement, he opened the car door for her then went around to the driver’s side and slid in.

  He pulled up a map on his phone.

  “That is a very useful device,” she said. “Are you sure it is not magic?”

  He ughed. “At times it sure seems like it, but no.”

  Roughly five minutes ter they were nearing their first stop when David suddenly felt a sharp pain and saw strange lights fsh in front of him. He almost lost control of the car but managed to narrowly avoid hitting another vehicle (earning him a loud horn honk and a very rude hand gesture from the other driver) before regaining control. He immediately began looking for a pce to park as Sandra, worried, asked “what just happened?”

  “I don’t know; I just saw some fshing lights and felt a sharp pain in my head. I think we need to go on foot for a while in case it happens again. I think I see a spot there.”

  They remained silent until he parked the car. “Can you describe the lights?” she suddenly asked as the car came to a stop.

  “Not really. It was just a bunch of colors. There might have been more to it but it was over too fast. Why?”

  “I don’t know, but it seems like it might be important. We should go back to where it happened,” she mused thoughtfully.

  “I had the same idea,” David replied, getting out of the car. They had gone back two blocks closer to where the sudden headache hit when he heard an odd buzzing sound. “Do you hear that?” He asked.

  “The only sounds I hear are the ones of your city. It does not smell as bad as our rger ones but is a lot noisier,” she replied.

  He ughed and then froze. “Is there something floating in front of my face?” He suddenly asked.

  “I do not see anything,” Sandra replied, worry in her voice.

  “It looks like, well, like runes or something. Maybe Hebrew script or Norse runes or something of that sort. Oh, something like the writing on your bracelet.”

  She gnced down at her wrist. “There is no writing on my bracelet.”

  He gave her a puzzled look: “behind the gemstone?”

  She looked closely at it. “Do you also see writing on my neckce?”

  He looked closely at it, trying not to be distracted by the face above, the figure below or her slender throat; it was not an easy task. “Two of the six stones have writing. Ah, this one has a symbol that I’m seeing in front of me as well.”

  She touched the stone he was pointing to. “The Transtion Stone!” She excimed. “Can you, well, can you touch the symbol?”

  “The one in front of me? I can try. Yes! It stopped glowing, but the buzzing seems louder yet different.”

  Sandra took off her neckce. “Stop me if I say something you cannot understand. I am talking in the seven different nguages I know. Kelstock is now,” she said, and he stopped her.

  “There was a word, ‘Kelstok.’ it sounded like, that I didn’t understand, but the rest all sounded like English.”

  “Then you do not know a nguage with a simir concept to that one. You have cast a transtion spell!” she excimed.

  “Come again?”

  Excitedly she asked: “You see several runes in the air around you, right? Can you move them, either with your hands or just a thought?”

  Puzzled, he considered her suggestion. There were several images, in seven different colors. If he thought about one, the whole mass rotated to center on it. “Yes, I see seven colors and about forty or fifty symbols, and can, well, rotate between them. It feels like a HUD from a video game.”

  “And now you use words that I have no concept of,” she replied.

  “A Heads Up Dispy; it refers to copies of controls that appear in front of a pilot, usually reflected by mirrors, so that they can focus on their surroundings and still keep control of their vehicle,” he offered as an expnation.

  “I think I understand what you mean but not the words you are using,” she said. “And the runes are in multiple colors?”

  “Yes, they are,” David replied. “Seven I think.”

  “Red, yellow, blue, white, green, bck and gray?”

  “Yes?”

  “The Fundamental Forces. Fire, Air, Water, Metal, Wood, Void and Spirit. David, you are a Mage!” she excimed, excitedly.

  “I’m a what?” He excimed, incredulously.

  “A wizard a, oh no,” Sandra suddenly went pale. “I had sex with… David, what was the vision that you had after the first,” she hesitated for a moment, then with a smile, corrected herself: “er, no, the second time we made love?”

  “Two children approached me in bed,” he began.

  “A boy and a girl?” She interrupted, “and the girl looked like you, the boy like me?”

  “Kind of,” David replied, shocked at the detail.

  “One of them said something to you?”

  “Yes: she said ‘you found us daddy.’”

  There was a pause then she said, very slowly, ”David, I will not be absolutely certain for twenty to thirty days, but there is a very good chance that, well, that I am pregnant. With twins.”

  “Wait, what?” David cried out, feeling as if the world had been pulled out from under him.

  “There is a legend in the Temple that whenever a Battle Sister conceives with a Mage, both will share a vision of their offspring. I know of none who have done this, but it is a persistent tale.”

  “But, well, um,” David spluttered, trying to form a coherent thought. Finally, he managed: “I always thought magic users needed a lot of training to cast spells?”

  “From what I have heard, the training is to boost the power of their spells and learn new ways to combine the Fundamental Forces; the ability is natural. It tends to be tied to a bloodline, though sometimes there are stories of wizards empowering others,” she answered.

  David had been about to protest this when he remembered a story his dad told him about a friend David only knew as “Uncle Mike.”:

  When David’s father, Nathan, was fresh out of college, the first job he was able to nd had been at a bottling pnt. A week after he started, a new guy named Mike showed up. Mike always dressed a little oddly, made strange comments frequently, and had an accent that nobody could ever quite pce. Some of the other workers teased him about all of this and Nathan often came to his defense, showing what David’s mother called “his Gahad complex” - a trait the son shared with his dad, apparently. The two men became friends and often went out drinking together. One night Mike pointed at a young woman sitting alone in the bar they were at. “I’ve noticed you looking at that dy tonight and on two other occasions. Would you like to meet her?”

  Nathan said that he tried to stammer out a reply but could not make up his mind whether to say yes or no, when he saw Mike moving his hands along the table as if he were operating a keyboard, while muttering something unintelligible. He was about to ask what all that was when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up, and the woman in question was standing there. “Since my ‘boyfriend’ fked out again and left me here alone, I was about to leave when I suddenly felt this strange urge to talk to you,” she said.

  Nathan said that he gnced at Mike, who just smiled back at him and excused himself. A little over a year ter, that woman became David’s mother, after becoming Nathan's wife.

  That night, however, Nathan and the woman, Karen Prentiss, spent nearly an hour chatting before exchanging phone numbers and then she left. Mike had returned as soon as she was gone.

  “How did you do that?” Nathan asked him.

  “Magic. I see it in your bloodline but not in you. Maybe one of your children or grandchildren will have it “

  Nathan never forgot that night, but also never questioned his friend any further, and told his son the story when he was a teenager.

  David summarized the memory for his companion and ended with “I have not seen Uncle Mike in about three years. Should see if he’s still around.”

  “Does he live near here?”. She asked. “He might have some more precise ideas of where to look, if he really knows as much as it sounds like.”

  David took out his phone. First, he checked his address book and saw that Mike’s pce was about five blocks away. Then he tried Mike’s number.

  On the fourth ring it picked up. A woman’s voice called out “Found it Mike. Under your newspapers.”

  “Uh hello?” David asked into the phone mic.

  “Oh, sorry, this is Kim, Mike Ungnaught’s sometimes cleaning dy, sometimes main squeeze. If you are calling to sell him an engagement ring, my size is six.”

  In the background David heard the roaring bellow of Uncle Mike’s distinct “angry” voice: “Kim, stop teasing my callers. And me.”

  What followed was a few seconds of silence, an angry hissed “and you did not ask who it was? And then Mike was on the line: 'if this is a telemarketer, you will regret this.’

  “Hi Uncle Mike, this is…”

  “Dave! David West! How are you, boy?”

  “Let us just say I’ve had a few very interesting days and have started thinking you’re not quite as eccentric as dad thought. And you may be a prophet.”

  “A Prophet? Oh! Really?” David could hear the amusement in his voice.

  After a short pause, both men spoke simultaneously, and their responses were nearly identical: “Do you have an hour or two free so that we can talk?”

  David gnced over at Sandra and she shrugged.

  “Probably not two hours but I have at least one to spare.” was Mike’s reply.

  “Are you still at that walk-up on Church Street?”.

  “The same.”

  “We’ll be there in about five, ten minutes.”

  “We? Your dad with you?”

  “No, just a very close friend from out of town.”

  “See you then,” Mike said, and just before the phone disconnected, David heard him bellow: “Kim, speed clean!”