Feeling Groovy

            “I told you this was a bad idea,” Jill whispered to Joe as they gazed at the pandemonium before them.  “If we’re exposed here, no way we won’t cause a scene.”

            Joe nodded curtly.  “You’re right,” he said, “but at the same time, this is our one chance to find him.”  He put his hand in his pocket, nudging his locator charm, a lock of their target’s hair wrapped around an enchanted silver coil.  It was cool to the touch.  “We know for a fact that he’s going to be here.  All we have to do is find him.”

            Jill laughed so hard she snorted.  This task was much, much easier said than done.  On a normal day, finding someone in Golden Gate Park would be daunting, even with their locator charm.  The grassy, lightly wooded area was larger even than central park, an island of green in a city of grey fog and asphalt hills.

            But January 14, 1967, was not a normal day.  The so-called "tribes" of the new era had gathered, in the tens of thousands, for something called a “Human Be-In.”  Stepping out of their car, legions stretched out before them, the brightly colored, the smelly, the vaguely dissatisfied and aroused.  Their target would likely look exactly like the rest of these people, and Joe and Jill both knew he would recognize them long before they recognized him.  Their clothes were an unfortunate necessity of their disguise; in a sea of tie-die and long hair, Joe and Jill were dressed in a black suit and a plain blouse-and-skirt combo.  Jill’s black hair was in a bob, and Joe’s was in a crew cut.  Already, the people on the fringes were looking at them in confusion.  “Whose parents decided to show up,” Joe heard someone mutter, and he fought the urge to start punching.

            “My God,” Jill said, sniffing the air, “I can feel myself becoming a Republican just looking at it.”

            “Oh, shut up,” Joe said.  He looked down at his shiny leather shoes, admiring them.  They would likely be unrecognizable when the day was done.  “Just try to register to vote, see how they handle a construct.  Come on, let’s wade in.”

            In they waded.  For hours, Joe and Jill combed the park.  They got funny looks, but the crowd didn’t make an effort to be more or less difficult to deal with; nobody tried to deck the outsiders, but they still had to shove their way through a few cramped spots.  The pair walked past poets, shouting their verses to the largest audience they’d ever have.  They walked past intense discussions, heated arguments between technicolor hermits over who was more detached from the material world, and they walked past large groups content to simply sit silently, enjoying the brisk chill in their hippie uniform and tapping their feet to the strains of music from nearby areas.  They walked in on people in shrubs or secluded, grassy patches making love.  Sometimes they were asked to join, sometimes to leave, but mostly they were ignored.  They walked in on a birth and, having nothing better to do, helped deliver the baby.  When Joe bit the umbilical cord with his teeth, the mother clapped delightedly.  “All natural!” she giggled.

            As the day stretched on, members of the crowd offered Joe and Jill many things.  Food and drink, usually, but also drugs, in increasing frequency as the day wore on and people slowly realized they had acquired far more dope than they could smoke in one sitting.  There was no shortage of reading materials, either—magazines, pamphlets, and fliers littered the ground, and angry Berkeley students shoved them in their faces at every opportunity.  “You’re a puppet!” one angrily yelled after Joe, as they trudged onwards, “you’re a slave! The only way you can free yourself is to follow the manifesto!”

            It had been almost seven hours before the charm in Joe’s pocket started to warm up.  Spinning in a circle, he determined it grew warmer facing east.  They walked half the length of the park before it heated up again, and when they entered the Panhandle—the narrow strip of parkland a block wide just north of Haight-Ashbury—it was hot enough to sting Joe’s leg through the fabric of his pocket.  “We’re getting close,” Joe said, as he continued eastward, warily eyeing the crowds of hippies.  “It seriously hurts to touch it.  That’s a good sign.”

            “Not a moment too soon, if you ask me,” Jill said, wrinkling her nose.  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

            Joe agreed, though he kept quiet about it.  He was made from less finicky stuff than Jill, but his sense of smell, like hers, was very strong.  Almost everyone present at the park needed a bath.  Suddenly, he was overpowered by a new smell, heavy and smoky, and looked down at his pants.

            “Your pants are on fire,” Jill observed.

            Joe closed his eyes and focused, deactivating the charm.  The fire disappeared immediately.  “He’s close enough that we can see him,” he said, “so he may have already seen us.  Look for anybody hiding behind trees, or running towards the boundaries of the park, or—“

            “Or inviting us to sit down?” Jill pointed towards a young man seated cross-legged on a green beach towel, gesturing for them to come over and sit with him.  His hair, dark brown and long enough to pool on the towel behind him, was rimmed with a crown of daisies.  His eyes were hidden by blue-tinted spectacles, which matched his ocean-themed silk robe, blue and green with the occasional silhouette of a fish, that seemed to slowly swim away when observed for long enough.  He was smooth and pale everywhere except for his feet, which were bare and black as tar on the soles.  His aesthetic was similar to the other visitors to the park, but Joe instantly knew he was their man.  He had the aura of a powerful sorcerer about him, an atmosphere of power that raised his hackles, but more importantly, he had the jewel.  A smooth, silvery stone, it hung in a dirty bronze locket around his neck.

            Joe and Jill sat down on the towel, staring intently at the man.  He cocked his head and grinned at them.  “Heeeeey,” he said, either stoned or very, very relaxed, “how are you liking the festival?”

            “It’s all right,” Joe said.

            “I don’t care for it,” Jill said.  “There’s no structure or rules and everybody smells funny.”

            The man didn’t seem offended by her remarks.  “I’m sure you’ll get used to it,” he said lightly.  “You’ll have plenty of time.  This here—“ he gestured to the quiet bedlam around them, “this is only the beginning.  I’ve seen the new world in my dreams, folks.  The love is only going to spread.  The winds will carry it throughout this city, up and down the coast, east to west, north to south, everywhere in between.  The world is entering an age of love, and this country will be the center of it.”

            “Nice speech,” Joe said.  “Let’s talk about the relic.”

            The man pouted.  “Do we gotta?” he asked.  “I'm feeling such a groovy vibe flowing between us, man.  Between all three of us.  Can’t you feel it? Our budding friendship, our love, enfolding us? Let it embrace you, dude.”

            “No,” Jill said.  “Archer—“

            “That’s my drone name,” the man said.  “I’m Sunshine now.”

            “I’m not calling you that,” Jill said.

            “Listen, Sunshine,” Joe said, glaring at Jill as she snorted, “your father, Archimedes, was a great, powerful sorcerer.  One of the best of his era.  He was a dear friend to our master, the mage that led Archimedes and many other powerful wizards on a quest to retrieve artifacts of great power.  They were divided amongst the group after their adventure, but now our master requires them once more.  One of them,” he glanced meaningfully at Sunshine’s locket, “is around your neck.”  He extended a hand, trying his best at a smile.  “If we could just borrow it, we’ll be on our way.  It’s what your father would have wanted.”

            It was a good lie, because as far as most in the magical community knew, it was true.  Joe and Jill’s master—their creator—had led Sunshine’s father, alongside several of the most powerful wizards of the modern era, on a quest to obtain the last few magical artifacts unclaimed by museums and eccentrics.  Nobody else knew the rest—that their master had carefully, quietly visited assassinations and accidents on his peers over the decades, gathering their artifacts for himself.  But Sunshine made no move to hand over the locket.

            “My father,” he began, “was a rad sorcerer.  He taught me well.  He was as awesome as he was groovy.”  Jill rolled her eyes; in all the centuries he had known her, Joe had never seen Jill embrace any slang until at least twenty years after people had stopped using it.  “But,” he continued, “He was also a huge square.  When he died, he wanted me to hide this thing behind seals, in, like, a cave.  Lame.”  Suddenly, Sunshine’s smile dropped, and he leaned forward.  Joe and Jill instinctively recoiled backwards.  “But just because I’ve got it out in the open, doesn’t mean I’m going to hand it over to a couple of lying constructs.”

            “Shit,” Jill said, as Joe dove for the locket.  His fingers just brushed against the bronze before they were thrown backwards like tennis balls.  Jill skidded to a halt on the grass a few hundred feet from the towel, but a massive eucalyptus interrupted Joe’s flight.  His vision exploded in pain, and he heard a dull thud as the enchantment pushing him backwards uprooted the tree, carrying it with him as he was thrown back.  Dazed, he looked around; somehow none of the other visitors to the park had noticed anything was wrong.  The Panhandle was warded by some kind of illusionary spell.  Sunshine had been prepared.

            “You okay?” In the blink of an eye, Jill had leapt to his location.  She had shed her disguise, revealing her true form as a construct, a melding of human and beast.  Cats’ eyes looked down at Joe from an orange face, with massive fangs bared in a snarl.  Her arms, like the rest of her, were much larger and more heavily muscled, her claws shining as her black-striped tail flickered behind her impatiently.

            “Yeah,” Joe grunted, unbuttoning his suit and shedding his disguise.  His bushy grey tail twitched as he stood, and his nose—no, his snout—sniffed impatiently at the air.  He grinned, showing a mouth of sharp teeth, and howled at the afternoon sun.

            “Cute,” Jill said, “but it would be funnier if you didn’t do it every single time we went out.”

            “I can make you realize how funny that was later,” Joe growled.  Sunshine hadn’t moved form where he sat; he was waiting for them to come back to him.  “We have to keep him busy until she arrives.”

            “Yeah, yeah,” Jill grumbled, but nevertheless she dropped to all fours and sprinted back towards their target.  Joe followed suit, but immediately dove behind a tree when Sunshine took a deep breath and blew a stream of fire straight for him.  The fire passed by his tree, stinging him with white-hot sparks, and burnt out, leaving a singed trail on the lawn.

            “Go!” Joe yelled, making it three feet forwards before the line of burnt grass slithered around him and crushed his spine.  Joe gurgled, feeling something wet dripping from his mouth onto his chin.  It was a feint; the fire was a summoning spell disguised as offensive magic, which required extensive skill in both.  And the repelling enchantment on the beach towel had been powerful, too—Sunshine was a master of all three branches of magic, rare in a modern wizard.

            The snake he had summoned, ash-black and formless enough that it was difficult to discern which end was front and which was back, seemed to grow as it sped after Jill.  There were a few close calls, but Jill managed to just barely evade its lunges.  She reached Sunshine, but went for the towel instead of him, hoping if she destroyed it the enchantment would be broken, or at least weakened.  Joe watched from where he was trapped, unable to breathe, unable to blink.  He saw Jill reach for the towel only to be fired backwards before she could so much as scuff it.  The snake smoothly positioned itself behind her, and its end seemed to split in half, engulfing and swallowing her.  At least they knew which end was the head, now.

            “Well, I’m going to need to cleanse myself of the violence I have been forced to commit,” Sunshine shouted from the beach towel.  “I hope you’re both happy.  I’ll probably have to bathe in a spring or something.  That’ll ruin my streak.  I’ve managed to go—“

            Joe never learned how long Sunshine had managed to go without a bath, because somebody had shot him in the back.  It was a clean shot, right through his heart; all the wizard had time to do was look down in confusion at his silk robes, quickly turning wet and purple with the blood, before he fell down, dead.  Without its summoner to keep it anchored, the snake vanished into the ethereal plane.  Joe fell to the ground, a pile of broken bones and fur mottled with blood.  He could see Jill a good distance away, halfway dissolved by acid and writhing.

            “Good job, you two; he never even thought to try and scan for non-magical threats because you kept him so busy!”  Slowly approaching the beach towel was a young woman, with long red hair and a smile perpetually plastered on her face.  Her floral-pattern sundress pleasantly swayed in the wind as she walked, a smoking pistol held in her left hand and a smooth, jet-black rod of obsidian in her right.  She was Jesse, their master’s apprentice, and the reason they had been sent to serve as a distraction.

            “I’ll just take this,” she giggled, snatching up the amulet from Sunshine’s corpse, “and now you can enjoy the beauty of nature forever!” She waved her magic rod, and the grass grew over Sunshine and his towel, completely covering him before smoothing out.  A single, blue flower grew from the center of his anonymous grave.

            “OKAY, FUCKING GREAT,” Jill screamed, twitching and snarling as the snake’s acid continued to burn her body, “HE’S PART OF NATURE AGAIN GOOD FOR HIM HELP US NOW!”

            Joe couldn’t speak, but he agreed with Jill’s sentiment.  Jesse pouted, miming indecisiveness.  “I don’t know,” she mused, “you guys don’t look that hurt.  Maybe you can get back home on your own…”

            “GO TAKE A FLYING PISS, YOU GINGER SHIT,” Jill screeched.

            “Well, since you asked nicely.”  Jesse waved her rod, and Joe inwardly sighed in relief as the familiar tugging sensation overtook him.  He couldn’t believe he had actually panicked the first time he’d been Called, his body vaporized into a fine dust as his soul was sent to return to the Master’s vessels, to await reassembly.  After six hundred years of missions that often required massive injuries for success, not having a body to injure was almost a relief.  Joe turned his perception downwards, watching the crowd of shouting, sleeping, dancing hippies fade away as his soul was tugged westward, out of the fog and across the sea, shining in the sunlight.  The view was beautiful.  He hoped his next body was part bird.