[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]After lunch Damien found himself sitting inside an almost too-spacious room with a very modernist décor. The table itself was made of glass, with long, thin steel legs, and the walls were a clean, crisp white. He felt a stark contrast between himself and the room, with its polished glass and decorative items, but even more disconcerting was the knowledge that he was sat in Katheryn's office. [/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]A computer terminal was set against the wall bearing a window, and around that sat a number of hard drives and odd-looking pieces of electronics. Damien recognised the Geiger counter device from earlier, and he saw what he thought was a printer, but everything else was totally alien. He'd been told to sit quietly and not to touch anything at all, but curiosity, as curiosity was wont to do, got the better of him and he ended up peering at a ticking instrument sat on a smooth black table.[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]Don't touch it,” said Katheryn, entering the room and closing the door behind her. “You'll not like what happens if you do, and I'm afraid that I won't be able to heal you and Megan has gone home.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]Damien withdrew his fingers instantly, cradling them in his hand.[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]Now, then, if you'll sit yourself down in front of the computer we can begin the testing.”[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]What are you actually looking for?” he asked, slipping into the chair, mindful of the fact that anything in the room was potentially a weapon and something that could kill him. Katheryn didn't answer him promptly but instead busied herself with the various cables and bits and pieces that were scattered around the room or held inside ultra-modern casings.[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]You're quite clearly magical. We don't doubt that at all,” she said after a few moments of silence, “but the nature of your magic has so far eluded us. You're inactive, which means you aren't echoing, but in theory my magicounter will tell me how magical you are.”[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]There's a scale?” he asked, looking down at the counter she held in her hand. The screen was totally blank.[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]Yes. I devised it myself, oh, around forty or so years ago. Until then we used the outdated and frankly ridiculous system of 'witch', 'sorcerer' and so on and so forth, but my method makes everything so much more precise,” she replied, tapping the magicounter with her index finger. [/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]The machine lit up with a faint buzz, and quickly Katheryn plugged it into her computer using a long, thin cable.[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]I'm sorry,” said Damien, “but did you say forty years ago? You can't be more than thirty,” he said incredulously, frowning after he'd said it. Katheryn didn't look a day over thirty, with smooth skin and thick, blonde hair.[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]The more powerful a mage is, the older the mage can become. Robert (or as some will call him Lord Black) is far more powerful than I, and so he will age far more gracefully. My scale goes from zero to nine, with nine being the weakest and zero being the first; there are no zero-order mages currently alive in the world to the best of my knowledge, but there are at least a dozen first-order mages. In the old parlance we would call them Lords and Ladies, but since some of us have moved beyond that it makes more sense to call them first-order mages.”[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]What's the difference between each level?” he asked, looking at her warily as she placed electrodes on his temples. [/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]An entire order of magnitude. I am a borderline second-order mage, which means that my power is very nearly third-order, and Robert is first-order. His power is approximately double mine. And so on and so forth until ninth-order mages, who really aren't very powerful at all... Now, just sit there and relax.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]Katheryn stood several feet away from him and then pointed the magicounter directly at a small potted plant in the corner of the room. The only response was a slow, quiet beeping. She swept the device around the room, pausing occasionally to register increased beeps or decreased beeps depending on the object at which it was pointed, and then finally brought it to rest in front of Damien. The device, which had been beeping consistently until then, simply stopped beeping at all.[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]That's not right...” said Katheryn, frowning down at the magicounter. She tapped it again and then restarted it. Then, once again, she swept it around the room registering the same levels of magic as she had done before. When the device reached Damien it fell silent.[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]She stood there for a few moments ignoring Damien's look of confusion until she clicked her fingers and pushed him, complete with the chair, away from the computer. She knelt down in frotn of the terminal and, brushing her fingers across the screen, turned it on.[/FONT]
[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]She navigated a number of different screens and programs before typing furiously into a text-box. Damien had no idea what she was actually doing, but he thought the program was some sort of database. His thoughts were confirmed when Katheryn spoke again.[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]I knew I'd seen this before,” she said, “so I checked my database... and I think I know why the magicounter's not working at all on you. You're not giving off any echoes, which are residual traces of magic that occur naturally for all living mages, so naturally I assumed that you were inactive; I made an erroneous assumption. It's rare, and I have at least one example of it in my database, but sometimes an active mage will be naturally cloaked, or shielded, from outside tampering.”[/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]So, what, I'm insulated?” he said, raising an eyebrow. [/FONT]
“[FONT=Liberation Serif, serif]There are two other explanations,” admitted Katheryn, “but I don't consider them to be important here. You're either too weak or too powerful for my magicounter, and I've calibrated it to be several times higher than a potential zero-order mage could ever hope to be. The most likely explanation is that you, Damien Archer, are a natural shield.”
