Greenwich, London

  <1 day remains

  Henry hadn’t been able to sleep well the past night. The slip-up he’d made the day prior would not stop replaying itself over and over in his head. When he’d finally managed to doze off, it had been after several hours of tossing and turning, worrying that he’d blown his chance and that any future meeting between them might end up more awkward than the last.

  He woke up in the morning feeling dizzy from the low-quality sleep he’d managed to cling to. As he sat up on the edge of his bed, the onset of a headache speared deep into his temple. Squeezing his eyes shut from the pain for a moment, he took a moment to regain his bearings and allow the vertigo he was feeling to fade.

  It took several minutes of remaining motionless before he felt confident in his ability to not trip over his own feet. No longer feeling the need to constantly clutch his head, he found himself going through the motions in his dingy apartment not long after.

  He didn’t bother opening the curtains just yet. That might just have been enough to spike his migraine through the roof of his skull. Passing out had to wait until at least after work was through today.

  So, under the cover of darkness, he fumbled blindly through his laundry piles as usual. The dirty pile – being practically overflowing – was easy enough to identify… though that identification came in the form of knocking the whole pile onto the floor. He didn’t dwell on it too long, simply shifted over to where the clean pile was in relation and sifted through the options in there.

  Options that were, as it turned out, exceptionally limited. All he had left were his work clothes – A white button-up dress shirt, some slacks and the appropriate undergarments. All rather wrinkled on account of never being properly folded… something he only had himself to blame for.

  He exited the bedroom and flicked the light switch on the other side. Thankfully, the lights had stayed off for the entire night tonight. But as the switch clicked to the ‘on’ position…

  Nothing happened. He flipped the switch back and forth a few more times, but still to no avail. Henry grunted in frustration, slamming a fist into the casing like a hammer.

  The impact was more than enough to reconnect whatever loose line had been inside. Artificial light flooded the area.

  He was getting real sick of this flat. Now that his plans to leave it behind had fallen short, he wasn’t quite sure what to do.

  Besides recover some of the savings he’d been burning through for the past few months, of course. For the short term, however, he was completely at a loss.

  The headache from earlier prickled in the back of his head again. Not wanting to be stuck with it all day, he stepped into the kitchenette and popped open the door of the mini-fridge. Close to the front, he found what he sought: his half-finished iced coffee from the day prior, and the bottle of ibuprofen he’d haphazardly tossed inside when he realized that keeping it in the bathroom would probably cause more harm to him in the long run.

  “Breakfast of champions,” he murmured as he popped two of the tablets into his mouth, before washing it down with a swig. “Everything a growing boy needs.”

  While he worked his way through the remnants of the tall plastic cup, he picked up the remote to his television with his free hand and flicked it on to a random channel. Flopping down on the one armchair in his possession, he browsed around the available showings. Now, all that was left was to wait, and let mindless entertainment numb the pain away.

  The light from the weak Tech Domain enchantment flashed in the remote, and the picture on screen resolved itself into… some sort of scientific documentary.

  “…But, is there, perhaps, magic that is yet to be explored? Our team reached out to a leading specialist in the field of research with that very question.

  - Dr Rudyard Livingston, P.h.D: Mana Harmonics Expert -

  ‘Well, the shortest answer to that question would be, yes, but the more accurate short answer would be ‘we don’t know’. From what we’ve gathered thus far, there’s no… inherent barrier that prevents the possibility of unknown Domains, but at this juncture, we lack the means to properly observe outside the immediately visible, much less-’”

  “Too verbose,” Henry decided, and the remote’s enchantment flashed again.

  “…thank you Debra. For those of you tuning in, coming up next on BBC: Analysts predict a fall in the stock value of several major corporations headquartered in Great Britain due to a sharp rise in unemployment. More at 11.”

  “Not interested.” Click.

  “…Now, I believe, since there are so many cars entering the market these days that have switched from internal combustion to low intensity enchantment methods or been converted to accept the new, government-mandated, alchemized variants of petrol, I believe it’s high time we take Top Steer for a proper go in a hybrid-”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “… Maybe later.” He pressed the record button, then switched the channel once again.

  “…Foolishness, Sayuki, pure foolishness! Your Cancermancer’s attack has activated my Preparation Card! This card is called Twin Moons of Wotan, which when activated, allows Platinum Fenrir to return from my graveyard and end your turn! And now that I have the advantage, I will activate Urn of Hubris! This card allows me to draw two more-”

  “Isn’t this… a show about a children’s card game?”, Henry asked himself rhetorically. “Actually, never mind. This is exactly what I need right now.”

  Having found the way he intended to spend his morning, he made himself comfortable in his seat and drained the last dregs of the coffee from his cup. It wasn’t quite clear what the stakes were in this battle, but at the same time that wasn’t why this show got airtime, and the producers knew it. An excuse for over-the-top, flashy animations were all any of their viewers wanted or needed. Right now, that sort of might-do attitude appealed to him greatly.

  The two players went back and forth for a solid half hour, until the cocky one who had mouthed off earlier blundered and ended up losing the match. Henry wasn’t sure if sending him to the ‘Super Mega Death Zone’ was in any way warranted, but it certainly was entertaining.

  “Hahahaha! I might have to record this one more regularly, too...”

  His landline rang as the show cut to commercial. Twisting around in his seat, he was just barely able to reach the phone and pull it off the shelf.

  “Hello?”

  “Tired of your day-to-day routine wearing you down? For a low initial payment of-”

  “Shut the hell up.” He ended the call immediately.

  When he turned back around to put the phone back, however, he noticed that the answering machine had a message waiting for him that he’d neglected to notice earlier. Curious, he began the playback to see what it was about.

  “Ey, it’s Salim again. Just calling if you missed it yesterday, but you still have a motorcycle with us that’s been patched up. Come get it quick, or we’ll have to get rid of it ourselves, yeah?”

  Henry facepalmed, realizing he had forgotten to pick it up yesterday with everything that had happened. Dragging his feet as he went, he began to get himself ready to walk his way down to the repair shop.

  < -|- -|- >

  “Wallahi, Henry. You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”

  “Hm?”, he replied to the balding mechanic, having spaced out a bit near the front of the shop. “Oh, that… just, uh, had trouble sleeping last night, is all.”

  Henry had finally arrived in the confines of Salim’s cluttered repair shop, after about an hour’s walk from his apartment. The trip back, naturally, would be much quicker, but between his bout of sleep deprivation and a physique that could be described as ‘skinny fit’ in the best of times… to say he was feeling out of it in that moment would be an understatement.

  “Not that,” Salim disagreed, gesturing towards the outfit he’d thrown together last minute. “You come into my shop looking like you ended up back on the streets again. You’ve thrown a biker jacket over a button-up that hasn’t seen an iron in months, your tie is doing its best impression of a scarf, and… oh, your shoe’s untied.”

  Henry glanced down and found that to indeed be the case. He hadn’t even noticed on the walk here, he’d been that exhausted. Still, he’d take it over his fly being down any day of the week.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled, bending over to re-tie the knot on his shoelace.

  Salim waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t mention it. Just take your museum piece bike with you so I can make space for something that can actually pay my bills.”

  “Hey, don’t knock it too hard,” he defended. “It’s still running after all these years in use, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, and if it weren’t for me it’d be rusting in some scrap heap somewhere where it belongs, too. Do you have any idea how many janky Tech enchantments it took just to get that thing to accept alchemized petrol?”

  “...Ummm…a lot?”

  “Twenty-seven. Vehicles with twice as many wheels rarely cross two dozen for a full engine replacement.”

  “Oh, um… any trouble with it then?”

  “Trouble? Pah.” Salim spat on the ground. “Enchantments know better than to give me trouble. This is an easy job, could have done it in my sleep.”

  The mechanic rose from his prone position underneath a different bike, which was hanging from chains dangling from the ceiling. As he set down the tools he’d been using for his work, he added slack to the chains holding the second bike in the shop, slowly lowering it to the floor.

  “Every day, Salim hears of Domain this or magic that, or enchantment something-or-other,” he continued, his accent slipping back into his speech as his tirade dragged on. “They think it to be a gift from Heaven, or some grand sign of greater things to come. Then they ask me how much it will cost to fix the enchantments in their fridge, and I tell them. Then I take their crappy, Yugoslav-made example of the Domains and their true potential and I drill the ley lines properly this time.”

  He paused to rev the engine on Henry’s motorbike, ensuring that it was indeed functional. After confirming, he cut the throttle and continued to talk.

  “I don’t even need anything more than tools to reshape the metal with. All the mana needed is already there. Even if I did have that talent, why add more? I’d be taking sand from the beach to make a bigger desert.”

  Salim pulled the key out of the ignition and passed it back to Henry.

  “Magic so great, we use it for everything we could already do, yes?”

  Henry stared down and the key in the palm of his hand, then back up at Salim’s weathered face. He was old, potentially going on 3 times as old as Henry was. And yet, he still ran his shop, moving about like he was still 20 years younger.

  Salim had grown up in a world before Domain magic. Evidently, the blossoming popularity of the subject – and his subsequent reliance on its applications for his income – had left him rather soured on the topic.

  It was an old set of opinions. But not so old that he couldn’t himself see the logic behind it. He didn’t remember it much, but there’d been a short while very early in his life where magic was still nowhere to be found.

  He had the luxury of growing up with it for most his life. Many others did not.

  “I suppose you do have a point,” Henry admitted. “It has gotten a bit boring, hasn’t it?”

  Straddling his bike and putting on the helmet he’d left with it, he walked it out towards the open garage doors and ignited the ley lines that had replaced the engine block. It still revved in a similar fashion to the regular engine that preceded it, but the sound died of much more sharply as it entered an idling state.

  “Well,” he concluded. “Guess I’d better hope something interesting comes of it soon, then.”

  The bike rumbled to life, and he peeled away from Salim’s shop towards his next destination.

  He had a bar to tend.