The origin of my sigfig

[Tereglith]

Aside from LEGO, my other big hobby is writing. I've coauthored a YA novel with my dad (it's been described as an "action-packed, weird, spy-fi, fantasy novel". If you're interested in purchasing one, PM for a link to our self-publishing site), and have decided to strike out on my own on a steampunk technothriller. I've got a couple chapters done, and this is an exerpt from Chapter 1, about the first two pages. I figured I'd share it with the community. Enjoy!

The figures appeared, shadows in front of the frosted glass door panel. Conrad counted three of them, but there could be more, behind, obscured, on other parts of the metal walkway that hung out over the two-story plaza courtyard. Each one held either a pair of side-swords or wore a brace of pistols. Conrad took off his top hat, and clutched his staff, tense. This would mark the third time the shop had been broken into since it was established two months ago. It also meant that they had had more crooks than customers in.

Beside her typewriter, the cat tensed as well, claws flexing. She looked up at Conrad, who nodded, standing up from the chair. With a brief but complex movement of his free hand, he pulled out of thin air what looked vaguely like a cloak woven of purple lightning, and flourished it in front of his body. It seemed to become unwoven, loosening up and shooting threads around his body. The magic quickly settled into the faintest of violets, hardly perceptible even to the cat. Then it began pumping light, taking the view from behind Conrad, pulling it around, and projecting it in front of him. He was rendered invisible from the front.

And not a moment too soon. A heavy boot shattered the glass of the window, hundreds of tiny shards sprinkling the wooden floor. The magic framework of Conrad’s last repair job sparked in the empty pane, then fizzled and dispersed.

The head crook pulled his boot back through the door, standing in front of the door-frame. He wasn’t particularly tall, but was imposing all the same, a piratical face under a blonde head of hair, held high above broad, muscular, leather-clad shoulders. He carried a pair of cutlasses, six pistols hanging all over his shirt, and a pair of pneumatic flechette guns hooked up to a small air tank on his back. Definitely the worst kind of mechanoid bounty hunter, Conrad thought.

The bounty hunter surveyed the room for threats. An ornate wooden desk, with a cat, a typewriter, an empty teacup and saucer, a few papers riffled by the sudden draft, and a top hat on it, sat in front of a back wall covered with book-cases. A set of three matching chairs collected dust against the wall to his right, and a doorway punched a hole in more book-cases on the wall to his left. But what caught his attention was the thick round carpet that sat in the middle of the wooden floor. He ran a practiced eye over it.

“Ruts. So they have one. But I saw that magic in the door. A wizard lives here, and they can be tricky,” he growled, seeming to move his top lip more than his bottom one. “Flaherty, Meln, you two check it out.” Two of the low-ranking bounty hunters who had been standing near the back of the group of six pushed forward, pulling out their swords, their boots crunching on the glass.

Flaherty opened up a mouth filled with gold and silver teeth, swishing his sword over the top of the chair. “Ain’t nobody here but the kitty, sir. Here, kit- Oi! What the hell?”

The cat leapt up, a tabby blur, tearing open the thug’s finger and racing up his arm. He dropped his sword on the desk, reaching over his head and spinning around in an effort to get the cat from his leather-clad shoulders.

“Grab his tail!” shouted Meln, shifting his weight and trying to figure out how to get in to the fray.

“’E ain’t got no tail!” Flaherty shot back. The cat was dodging around his shoulders, avoiding the thug’s groping hand while at the same time pulling down his jacket collar. “’Ere, what the ‘ell is ‘e doing?”

The cat finally pulled down both Flaherty’s jacket and shirt collars, and clawed the base of the neck where the nerves for the arm went down, cutting a thin pink line. Flaherty’s arm went limp immediately, centrifugal force causing him to backhand Meln hard across the face. The cat propelled herself off of Flaherty, who fell from dizziness, larger shards of glass cutting his legs, and hit Meln just as he hit the wall, her back paw pushing into the notch of his ribcage and knocking the wind out of him. While he struggled for breath, she scrabbled up to his shoulders, pressing both pressure points deep with her hind paws as she jumped off of him. Meln slumped against the wall as the cat landed lightly next to Flaherty.

She found the head bounty hunter’s sword tip touching her nose, and froze.

“I don’t know how you’ve been enchanted, but you would make a great addition to my group. You’re obviously a more valuable fighter than Flaherty and Meln put together…” this drew some appreciative chuckles from the rest of the group still outside on the walkway. “So it makes me almost sad to slice you in half. Almost.” He raised his blade high…

Conrad saw what was about to happen, and scattered the magic he had been using to keep himself invisible, jumping across the floor. He thought the command to his staff, and magic lines pulled taut around the wood, like ropes pulling a tarp across the top of a dinghy, making the lower part of the wood as hard and sharp as a sword. He swung it around, slamming the side-sword out of the bounty hunter’s hand so hard that it stuck into the top of the doorframe, quivering. The man was startled for a moment, all that Conrad needed to do a one-eighty and slam the cast-iron bat at the other end of his staff into the man’s head. It hit so hard that the wings vibrated. Conrad heard the crack of the man’s nose as it broke. The thug fell backwards, hitting his head on the pommel of his own sword, sticking out behind him. That closed the door on his consciousness, and the bounty hunter slumped down onto the floor, knocked out, his back arched up over the bottom of the empty windowpane.

The remaining three thugs standing on the mesh walkway outside looked at him, as if unsure what to do. Then, as one, they pulled out pairs of pistols. Six hollow clicks. Conrad Smiled and held up a gloved hand. He opened it, and a dozen bullets that he had just teleported dropped to the floor, joining the bits of glass.

“Now thayut’s not fair,” drawled the one that Conrad judged to rank just above Flaherty and Meln in a thick southern accent.

The whine of a pneumatic gun charging up told him that he had let his guard down for too long considering the ranks of the thugs, and he was barely able to drop his staff and swish his cape around in front of him before the tiny finned flechettes began pummeling it up and down. But they were weapons designed to take down mechanoids, cutting through one thin layer of steel then stopping to discharge their electricity, so they punctured the fabric and stayed there. The inside of his cape was alive with blue arcs of charge.

He completed his turn and came back up to see the bounty hunters turned sideways, looking up and down the walkway. Of course, they had expected him to teleport himself with the theatrical cape twirl. Even he wouldn’t trust himself with magic that complex. With a wave of his hand he made each tiny dart caught in his cape barrel backwards through the air, finned tails first, spinning quickly down a predetermined, faintly purple path. Before the bounty hunters could even figure out what happened, the flechettes had reached the end of their trails, each one’s tiny tail locking into the grooves of a screw head and twisting it out. The entire section of wire mesh catwalk fell off, taking the bounty hunters with it. With a jarring crash, they landed on the catwalk below Conrad’s level, which crumpled and buckled down, dumping them into the deserted courtyard. The one with the pneumatic rolled until he bumped up against a community notice board holding his wanted poster.

Basically, the plot goes on to involve an extraordinarily complex mystery that all goes back to (what else?) an evil mad-man's plan to take over the world.

Now, you may be wondering about the topic title. If you haven't already figured it out, my sigfig is Conrad.