[Las Vegas, Nevada, USA - Gilded Cage Lounge - 21:05 PST]
Magnifico Marco tweaked his sequined, purple tuxedo jacket, checking himself out in the smudgy mirror in the back. The material stretched tautly across his shoulders. His fingers ran slickly through the painstakingly styled black tips that sat atop his head, and he adjusted his thin moustache. Showtime.
"Right, Marco, baby, keep to the script," he grumbled to himself, striking a pose he thought was dashing. "Dazzle them with the standards, sneak in the new 'mentalism' trick – perhaps Svetlana Petrova sees it online? Her type digs sophistication. Phase two: trade minor celeb status for an intro at Bellagio charity dinner. Phase three." He chuckled, envisioning arriving arm-in-arm with both Petrova twins. "legendary..."
His reflection still didn't look convinced. A flicker of something peeked through his forced bravado – a tension he knew well in his chest. Eight years. It still came back to that night. The lights, the noise, the pressure. he shook his head hard, shoving the image away. No panic attack tonight. Tonight was for the magic.
He swaggered onto the small, dim stage of the Gilded Cage, a third-rate club hanging by a tattered thread to the gaudy past of forgotten Vegas. An indifferent crowd nursed stale, expensive drinks.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" Marco proclaimed, flinging out his arms and producing a bouquet of somewhat wilted plastic blooms with a flourish of practice. "Get ready to be amazed! Get ready to be astounded! Get ready. for Magnifico Marco!"
A scattering of polite clapping. He began his act – card tricks, linked rings, disappearing handkerchief. All competent, but with an air of tiredness. He sensed that his audience was drifting. A little something extra was required. It was here that there was meant to be true magic.
He recalled the hum, that strange quivering he'd experienced hours before at an exasperating practice session. It had occurred with a short, dizzying interval, something akin to the onset of one of his bouts. Then, practicing a simple vanish with a coin, the lone silver dollar he'd held between fingers suddenly had become three. They'd seemed real, tangible. He'd attributed it to stress, a hallucination brought on by desperation and an excess of coffee.
Now, onstage, he decided to do it deliberately. The time-honoured cups and balls. He laid out the three little red balls on the table.
"Watch closely!" he announced, his patter smooth around a whirlwind of hopeful anxiety beneath. He concentrated, imagining another ball under that centre cup. Reminded himself of that odd sensation, that inner adjustment.
Come on, actual magic, baby. Daddy requires a date with destiny. and maybe a Petrova.
He picked up the cup with a flourish. Below, there were not one, but four red balls, small as pebbles. A small gasp escaped his mouth before he suppressed it. That was not right.
People murmured, becoming somewhat interested. Had they missed something?
Marco forced a smile, attempting to integrate the error. "Oh, the multiplier of magic! Even I have no idea how many there will be!" To make fewer balls disappear, he tried once again. He picked up a different cup. Six balls sat there now, spilling a little.
Panic started to boil, cold and sharp. No sleight-of-hand, this was pandemonium. Into his finale he rushed: pulling out a dove from an apparently bare pan. A time-tested closer.
He removed the lid. Rather than a single spotless white dove, three doves burst out of the pan, flapping wildly around the little stage, and were then followed mysteriously by a deluge of playing cards – not a single deck, but scores, raining down like tissue paper. One dove landed atop his head.
The crowd burst out – not into applause, but into bewildered, almost startled laughter. Marco's eyes went wide, his well-developed veneer cracking. The atmosphere was heavy, charged with the same pent-up tension he'd sensed beforehand. The tightening sensation in his chest returned, intensified this time. Eight years prior. the stage collapsing. the lights flashing
"Th-that's all folks! Remember share this to the Spanish new outlet Swex Garcia" Leaning against the dusty wall at the back of the theatre, Marco panted for breath, his hands grasping at his chest. The anxiety attack washed over him full strength. Blinded, he staggered. His hands trembled like palsy. It wasn't stage fright alone. It wasn't the remembrance. It was this. this power. Uncontrollable power. More than he could handle.
His cell phone vibrated against the messy makeup table. He reached for it, craving a distraction. A breaking news notification, hazy through his dazed eyes. Italy. a hospital. abnormal energy signals. a physicist out of a coma. eight years.
The figure resonated, piercing through the fear for a clear, chilling moment. Eight years. The same duration. A physicist? Energy levels? An unsettling chill, something apart from fear, spread through him. Was his 'magic' related to this? Was he losing his mind, or was something outlandish going on? He dropped down onto a stool, among discarded feathers and scattered playing cards, the Magnifico Marco utterly disturbed.
[Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt - 04:18 EET]
There was only the hum of the climate-controlled archive and the soft whisper of papyrus for company. Aisha Hassan, leaned forward to study the broken scroll It was Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the oldest alphabets known to exist, and famously tricky to decipher. It had been weeks since she'd been going crazy trying to understand it.
She drew a symbol with her gloved finger, her brow creased with concentration. Decades of study had rendered her proficient at a dozen, both modern and ancient, but this was like running into a brick wall. Her eyes closed for an instant, focusing her mind, letting the shape and context become clear.
It was that moment. No noise, no hum, but an instant, deep understanding. It was as if a door had clicked open within her head, as if a multifaceted translation grid had resolved itself instantly in her mind.
These signs upon this papyrus lost themselves as abstract lines. They addressed her, meaning sluiced into her mind not as translated language, but as concept, as sheer intent out of mind which once inscribed them, so many centuries past.
". the seven stars appear. the great water slumbers. the watcher below stone."
Aisha's eyes flew open, her heart pounding. Looking at the scroll words, sentences, entire stories unfolded to her, as clear as if penned in her own Arabic. It wasn't decipherment, but understanding, instant and intuitive.
Aghast, she grabbed for a sheet of paper lying nearby – a tablet with Linear A, still unread script of the Minoans. She looked at the complex signs.
". sacrifices of oil and grain. the cow leaps forth. earth goddess demands."
Impossible. Years of study, philological scrutiny, computational attempts – everything skirted around and passed by with a stroke of incomprehensible intuition. This wasn't what she'd learned. This wasn't hyper concentration or a fluke guess. It was. inherent.
Her calm, systematic mind took over, bypassing initial shock. Test the hypothesis. Her news feed came up on her tablet – Russian. Cyrillic letters unscrambled into clear meaning. A scientific paper in German. Easy comprehension. A blog entry in Mandarin. Smooth understanding.
She rapidly typed out search requests for examples of Voynich manuscript pages, the notoriously undecipherable encoded writing. The bizarre, extraterrestrial script scrolled onto the screen. For an instant, nothing. Then, as if catching a radio station on the proper wavelength, meaning broke through the odd characters. It wasn't a language, not as she knew one, but aggregated biological and astronomical notes encoded with a singular symbolic reason, and suddenly, she could read it.
Aisha relaxed, easing out of her gloves. Initial amazement was now mixed with a profound disquiet. Where did this originate? It broke all established rules of linguistics and cognition. Had she had a neurological incident? A stroke? But she was fine, clearer-headed than ever, really.
She reflected upon yesterday. Had anything out of the usual occurred? There was that peculiar, barely perceptible hum she had experienced, deep and resonant, which seemed to reverberate through the stone of the library for an instant. She'd attributed it to construction sounds or tectonic shifts. Could it be related?
This talent. it was incredible, a scientist's dream. But it was unsettling, too. Knowledge is power, but unknown knowledge is dangerous. It's like an unseen sender sending a mysterious message.
She gazed back at the Proto-Sinaitic scroll, Proto-Sinaitic letters starkly clear. ". the watcher beneath stone."
A chill ran down her back, not because of the archive's chill. Which watcher, and what, specifically, had just stirred deep within her? Aisha Hassan, who loved order and verifiable truth, found herself at the threshold of an enormous, inexplicable enigma. The hush of the archive no longer seemed so tranquil, but full of expectation.
Rome, Italy - Hospital Room 307 - 04:25 EET (03:25 CET): Ranger Ikoo lay awake, pretending to sleep when the nurse checked on him. The resonance, the hum, had faded, but the memory of it, the feeling of potentiality, lingered. He subtly focused on the new glass of water by his bedside. With intense concentration, he managed to create the tiniest, almost imperceptible ripple on its surface. A grim smile touched his lips. Variables confirmed. Time to calculate the escape vector. He needed data, his data. And he suspected he wasn't the only variable that had changed.
Rome, Italy - Olympic Training Centre - 03:28 CET: Tyzi scrolled through articles on her phone in the empty locker room, ignoring the concerned texts from her teammates. The news report about the physicist, Dr. Reyes/Ikoo, waking up after eight years with reports of "energy surges" wouldn't leave her mind. Eight years. A strange coincidence? Or was the impossible vault she'd performed, the feeling of manipulating forces, part of the same phenomenon? Her coach's suspicion ("performance enhancers") stung, but the truth felt even stranger. She needed answers. Maybe this physicist had some.
[Las Vegas, Nevada, USA - Backstage, Gilded Cage Lounge - 21:35 PST]
Marco staring at his phone, eight years…. and energy readings echoing beneath his skin. He scrolled to find more information.
He squeezed his eyes shut. It's not real. Stress. Breakdown. Too much pressure. Need to nail the Petrova plan. But the feeling, the chaotic energy that had erupted on stage, felt utterly real. The doves, the cards... it wasn't a trick. It was something else.
A magician notices things others miss. Deception, misdirection, hidden mechanics. But Marco now noticed something new – a crack in the facade of reality itself. And terrifyingly, he seemed to be one of the things slipping through. He looked at his trembling hands, no longer seeing tools of illusion, but potential conduits for a chaos he couldn't comprehend, let alone control. Magnifico Marco, the master of illusion, was suddenly terrified of what was real.
[Somewhere within the Colombian Rainforest - Approx. Local Time 15:55]
Rain fell from massive leaves, and each drop burst against wet ground. Huddled under cover of dense foliage, a little girl, not much older than seven, with large, dark eyes and muddy, bare feet, cocked her head back, mouth agape to the sky. She laughed… a clear, innocent sound lost to the enormity of the green. For her, the rain wasn't just water-tasting today. It was sunlight, it was the blue morpho butterfly who had just danced by it was the hidden roar of jaguar she sometimes heard as she slept, it was everything.
[Global Resonance – Simultaneous]
Around the world, oceans and time zones apart, a subtle phenomenon happened. For Neon, sitting in his Tokyo class, sketching vectors that seemed to subtly move the motes of dust suspended in the sunlight; for Winx, sensing deep ice breathe out beneath him, down at Antarctica's edge; for Ikoo, lying in his hospital bed, shaking water into motion; for Tyzi, stretching cramped and charged muscles; for Aisha, gazing at warning signs that were millennia old; and for Marco, holding a mysterious button – there was a faint, barely perceptible echo. It was not the first, loud hum, but an instant, brief, shared sensing, like the slightest flash of static upon a psychic wave. A silent recognition, across space, that there were no longer solitary occupants of their new world. The connections, invisible and unspecified, were growing. Protocol 10 was binding its subjects.