Chapter 3: Retrieval

I waited long enough to let the cops leave the alley via a side street, taking my assailant off to the drunk tank. Bye-bye, bubba!

I thought about my next step. I didn’t want to go back for my biking clothes: they were a muddy mess at the bottom of the alley stairwell. There was something I wanted more than clothes at this moment: my wallet, mobile phone, and other precious personal items, and those were in the trunk bag on the rack bolted behind the seat of my bike, which was still up by the bar!

Getting the bike itself back was secondary. It’s a pretty expensive model, since I used it every weekday and on most weekends as my primary mode of transportation, but bikes can be replaced, and I’m well enough off that buying another wasn’t going to wreck my finances. But my personal items… I had to get them back, quick, before someone stole them. Or worse, before the cops seized them and worked out from that who I was.

And how, you may be wondering, am I going to pull that off while naked? Getting away with it in a darkened alley is one thing, but I needed to cross Main Street, then go up a side street to a busy bar and pull the bike off the street. How can I avoid getting caught a dozen times along the way?

Hello, nature mage here, remember? Still in trance, I pulled some more power from the Earth, concentrated, grabbed the photons streaming past and bent them into a bubble around myself. I was now invisible: light from one side bent around and went out the other side on the same course as before, all around my body.

That’s a tricky spell for me to pull off even in a lush forest with plenty of power to pull from. Doing it here in this weed-choked lot was like sucking a milkshake through a coffee stirrer.

Keeping the spell running was another matter: once established and stable, I could keep the spell running with much less power, even what little I could pull up from the Earth out in the middle of the nearly sterile vehicle-pounded dirt alley. The real trick was when I got back onto pavement: I’d be cut off from nature again and have to pull from internal reserves to keep the spell running. I’d just charged those back up, but the spell would quickly deplete those reserves. It wasn’t far. I had enough magical mojo stored up to pull it off. I’d just need to move fast once I left the alley.

Plan settled, I got up, brushed the weed fragments off of my bare backside, and trotted gingerly back down the alleyway the way I’d come in.

Is it indecent exposure if you’re running naked in public inside a magical bubble of invisibility? It turns out, modern legal codes do not answer this question due to a strange historical oversight by our most wise legislature, and my mama’s smart little boy Davie didn’t want to be the test case that settled the matter.

I ran as fast as I could, making slap-slap sounds on the sidewalk for the first bit, then slowing as I approached the bar, not wanting to make enough noise to attract the attention of anyone standing around outside. Fortunately, music was spilling out the bar’s front doors, open to the mid-Spring night air, so I had musical cover as well as the magical sort. “We got both kinds of music here, Davie: country and western!”

There was the bike, jammed between two parked cars where it had slid in the crash, which probably explains why no one had noticed it and swiped it yet. It’d only been there a few minutes, after all.

The trick was, how do I pull it away from the scene of the attack? Even at night in small-town America, an apparently-riderless bicycle will attract some attention if rolling down the street under its own power, braking at STOP signs, and waiting for traffic to clear before proceeding in an orderly fashion through the intersection. Besides, I was running out of magical mojo and needed to get gone before the light-bending bubble popped, which would leave me starkers on the streets at night, visible to all. Getting caught that way wouldn’t go very well for me.

The bar was on the border of a semi-residential neighborhood, so the side of the street opposite from the bar was lined with houses. I ran up that side of the street, reached between the cars, and dragged my bike low and slow up onto the sidewalk. Now the bar patrons’ cars lining that side of the street gave me cover from watchers at the bar, and the poorly lit residential neighborhood side of the street gave me plenty of shadows to work with.

In seconds, I was away.