PART 1: Guru

Chapter 1: Night Alley

I was running down a small town’s dirt alley, scraped, bleeding, and naked in the night. I am Devindra Bhat — Davie to my acquaintances and few friends — and I am not living my best life tonight. You want to know how I got into this situation; of course you do. It went down like this…

I’d been riding my bike home from work, late at night, when some drunk asshole yokel kicked out at my bike as I rode past a bar, sending me one direction and the bike the other. Funny stuff, guy. I then proceeded to reduce my forward velocity to zero using a common ablative technique — i.e. the rapid acquisition of road rash.

I quickly stood up, hoping to grab my bike and get away, fast, but my attacker was already between my abused hide and the bike, intent on further humiliating the Other, the weirdo, the adult who dared to ride a bicycle on streets designed for cars! I knew the signs, so instead of going for the bike, I turned and ran.

I expected such a mentally inflexible person to give up at that point and return to his drunken friends, laughing at the little dweeb he’d dumped, but the guy gave chase! I must have activated some kind of predatory instinct.

“Leave me alone, troll!” I shouted.

Insults weren’t a great idea at this point, but I can’t help the way I am. It doesn’t matter what the odds are against me, I just can’t quietly knuckle under to an attack. Even running away, I have to get some licks in. I don’t think it’s pride, just stubborn, blind, irrational defiance. It’s gotten me into trouble plenty of times. This wasn’t my first time in a fight, nor my first time running from one.

Still the troll kept coming. I was faster, being in shape from all the biking, and the troll was drunk and not seeing well, but he had longer legs and apparently some kind of rage-on going. I didn’t have much of a lead, and I wasn’t opening up room very fast.

I skidded around a corner into an alley, really just a bit of dirt-and-gravel road going between a row of houses on one side and a row of shops on the other, barely wide enough for a large SUV to pass. Running down the alley, I saw a concrete stairwell for one of the building’s cellar doors. I jumped the stairwell’s railing, pivoting on one hand, dropping straight down into the cellar alcove, then proceeded to strip naked as fast as possible.

I got my shirt off in a fraction of a second, dropped my shorts around my ankles, kicked the shoes off without unlacing them, then stepped out of the shorts. Total time, maybe two seconds. That was when I noticed I’d landed in a puddle from the brief rain earlier this evening, and that the bottom of the alcove had collected a fair bit of dirt from the alleyway, creating a slimy puddle. Ewww… I bent down, ripped my muddy socks off, then ran up the stairs back to alley level as fast as I could on my mud-slicked feet.

As I was coming up the stairs, my attacker was turning to look down them, seeing me side-lit by the bare bulb over the shop’s back door.

I’d be trapped down here with him if he came at me, so without an instant’s hesitation, I charged him, intending to body-check him and run past. I almost made it, but he grabbed my arm as I was passing and flung me into one of the back yard fences. Ow.

“Goddamn jungle bunny!” he roared in outrage. I knew his sort: fear of the Other quickly turned into anger, a desire to attack.

As I was spinning around, half bouncing off the fence, the guy threw a massive haymaker at my head, intending to catch me on the rebound. I saw the incoming fist just in time and threw up an invisible shield of air, as solid as braced steel plating, accelerating outward from my face, four inches from it when his knuckles cracked under the doubled impact, spraining his wrist. My forward momentum from the rebound pushed the shield forward into his face, his hand caught between the two, bloodying his nose and re-injuring his hand.

As my attacker was curling down and to the side around his fresh injury, I swept his legs out from under him with a blunt blade of hardened air that I called in from the side, dropping him to the cold unforgiving ground, moaning in a fetal position.

Hoping he’d stay down, I danced past his body as close to the fence as I could get, then began to run further down the alleyway.

Mother-bare as I was, you might think my pace would be a lot slower now, what with all the sharp bits on the alley floor: loose gravel, car-crushed plastic one-shot booze bottles, and who knows what else, but I’d grown up on the streets of Mumbai, India, and I’d spent a lot of that time barefoot. My soles were about as tough as double-thick moccasins, so while it wasn’t a pleasant run, I was motivated to get gone now and count the cost later.

My toned dusky buns were blocks away when a police car entered the alley at the same entrance I’d used, lights flashing red-and-blue off the buildings’ back walls in my peripheral vision. I dived to the side, into a weed-choked abandoned lot.

Long endurance training or no, I was breathing hard: I’d just gone through a bike crash, a chase, a fight, and now a rapid strategic withdrawal, which is military jargon for “run away fast.” Given the ancient fight-or-flight choice, I’d taken option C: both, please! Now the cops had shown up, which would have been fine if I’d been clothed, and even better if I’d been white, but I was neither. I had to calm down.

I rolled over onto my back and fluffed the crushed weeds up around me to fully conceal my naked body. Oddly enough, it was soothing there in the patch of tall green weeds. It was definitely an improvement over recent conditions. The crickets had started back up after being startled by my arrival, almost drowning out the noises back down the alleyway, to my ears. At this time of year, just after dark, the air temp was simply perfect; in a just world, public spaces would be clothing-optional if only for nights like this.

Now able to reflect rather than react, I figured the cop had to have been hiding near the bar, hoping to grab a few drunk drivers before his night shift ended and graveyard shift took over patrolling duties. The cop must have seen the guy knock me off my bike and came running to help, not far behind my attacker. It was an awesome response time, but too late for me.

It would take them some time to gather up the drunkard I’d laid out, so I slipped into a trance state.

I’m not talking about stage hypnotism, astral projection, or other bogus mysticism here, I mean the sort of real, EEG-measurable trance state where your body dissociates from your consciousness. Anyone can learn to enter this state through meditation.

There are even drugs like ketamine which can do this on demand, which makes it a useful battlefield surgery analgesic: you can be conscious, bleeding out from a severe wound, and you just don’t care, because the corpsman just slipped you some of the good stuff so you’ll stop yelling and squiggling around, allowing him to get on with sewing you back up. Your squaddies are also happier with you not making a fuss because it means they can get back to fighting off the baddies that took you down. Then when they’re done saving your hide, you’re still conscious, so if you’re mobile by this point, you can help them get you out of there, which you couldn’t if they’d used the same sort of knock-out anaesthesia as in civilian hospitals. That’s not woo-woo mysticism, that’s science.

I didn’t need drugs to enter this state, and I could do it almost instantly. I’d had years of intentional focused practice developing this skill.

I didn’t exactly have battlefield injuries here, but I did need to dissociate my mind from my body — awash as it was in adrenaline and pain — so I could concentrate on my next task: healing myself, having no corpsman at hand to do it for me.

You see, dear reader, I am a mage. Mages tap into nature for their power, and we have to be in our natural state to do it, which is to say, naked. I’d thrown my bare butt into a patch of alley weeds, but that was close enough to “naked in nature” for my immediate purposes.

In my trance state, I envisioned myself pushing down into the Earth to pull up more of the same energetic sustenance that fed the weeds and poured it into my body, using it to heal my road rash and the abrasions to my feet taken running down the alley barefoot. I continued pulling on the natural power source to restore the stored energy I’d used to conjure the air shield and sweeping blade. I then relaxed and began to wait for things to calm down.