More Fantasy in the City

Mousie, Mousie!

Where does a go-getting, upwardly mobile magician-about-town park his or her posterior when all the spells have been cast? Where can a sophisticated necromancer rest his head and be sure it will still be attached in the morning? Where will a fashionable witch find a modern range cooker that can accommodate even the deepest cauldron?

Almost anywhere in the city except the old Conway Building.

If said wizard needed one place to sleep in the city, the Connie would probably not be high on his list. It may not even make it onto the bottom either. The Conway was a building that had most definitely seen better days. It could hardly be described as a fashionable address, unless one intended to live in trash-choked slum, infested with every sort of vermin, and whose denizens were not exactly at the top of their game - or even top of the food chain.

It did make rent at the Old Connie cheap though. There are magical practitioners who have not really got the hang of changing lead into gold, so skid row rates were a persuasive argument for the sort of magician who knew a lot less than they should have.

Whatever the class of cut-rate mage that was predominant in the Connie at any one time, it really depended on the day of the month if faerie light brightened the dingy hallways like a sprinkling of stars, or whether roaring geysers of viscid blood erupted from the light fittings. Spell-casting was fairly unreliable, making the continuation of life pretty much unpredictable. Doorbells could become quite the surprise to the unwary visitor. Would a feeble, crackling buzz announce you, or would the sudden manifestation of a tiny mouth brimming with razor-sharp teeth in place of the button deter you? Not surprisingly, the tenants of the Connie did not get many callers.

However, the effects of random magical overflows had a rather more fundamental effect on the structure of the old building. Magical effluent infused it right down to its steel frame, long hidden beneath spalled brickwork and a drab brownstone facade, warping it; deforming the entire structure. From the outside, the Conway Building had a very particular appearance. It was if a giant hand had reached down from the sky, grabbed the nearest cornice and pulled, twisting the fabric of the old Connie, forming a giant masonry candy cane.

This sort of thaumaturgical re-engineering presented all sorts of opportunities for the non-sentient dwellers within the building. Roaches, rats, cats and mice vied with each other for supremacy in a warren of channels, tunnels and burrows opened up by the continually evolving structure, threading their way behind the dry walling, or between floor spaces, or through inter-dimensional vortices.

It wasn't just them either. Apocryphal crocodiles lurked in the basement; there was a chupacabra interfering with the pigeons on the roof; and a peluda that existed in an enchanted forest behind the door of the superintendent's broom closet on the fifth floor. The peluda rarely presented a problem to the super since his tools were still close to the door, but he had to make sure that he kept his wits about him when seeing to the furnace in the basement. A harness of chainmail was the surest way of protecting oneself there. That, and a twelve gauge to keep the pesky varmints back. An enormous rune-drenched pipe-wrench, that a long-departed wizard had used to keep his automaton dragon in fighting trim, was always useful as a last resort if shells for the shotgun failed to stop the more determined pest.

Living among the less conspicuous infestations was a mouse. He was as unremarkable in appearance as the Conway Building used to be. Small, brown and bewhiskered, he was in all respects your average house mouse. Typically, he would scurry through the wainscoting, sniffing at ventilation ducts, marking his territory with a constant dribble of fresh urine, avoiding whatever magical contaminant that came his way. He knew that Mr Ross' (aka Volton the Stupendous) vitriol stores leaked and had long since formed a fuming, toxic lake between the second and third floor. Fellow comrades of mouse-kind had unwittingly strayed into such traps and their sad remains were slowly reduced to scattered rainbow-hued bones by other vitriol-resistant scavengers. To avoid the danger of the lake, he knew of a shortcut. It was a tiny, secret place. Secrets are the stock in trade of most mice. They scurry through the fabric of our lives, hearing all yet understanding nothing.