Free No Hero by Jonathan Wood

he said it last time there wasn’t really meaning attached to it, so I’m not sure if he’s really right, but I’m also not sure if I’m pedantic enough to point it out.
    Clyde nods, briefly manages to make it all the way to fifteen miles per hour but then has to go over a speed bump. “So, you can use electricity to get things between realities. Bigger the thing, the more power you need. Small things are the easiest.” He looks away “Well, the essence of things are the easiest. Say, for example, there’s fire in another reality and you want to bring it here. You could use a decent chunk of electricity to bring over the flame, or you could use a little bit to bring over the essence of the fire—in this case its heat. Bring enough heat over and you’ll probably start a fire anyway.
    “Now to get something as enormous as a Feeder through,” he continues, “would take an absurd amount of power. And then that power would need to be focused. It’s not really feasible. Which is why,” he takes his eyes off the road to give me a significant look, “the Progeny, who probably came here pretty easily, being small and mostly incorporeal, are now having such a hard time doing it.”
    “You focus the power?” Up until now I’ve been buying this, possibly more eagerly than I should be. Any cynicism I possessed has rather had its legs cut out from under it these past few days, but the idea of focusing magical power is beginning to seem a little too New Age mysticism to be real to me.
    “Yes!” Clyde nods enthusiastically. “Hence the tattoos. QED again.”
    “Wait, what? Q E what?”
    “Bugger,” Clyde says. “Sorry. I’m not very good at this. OK. So, the power is electricity. So it flows down the path of greatest conductivity. Now, the body’s a natural conductor so you don’t have to do what I did, but...”
    “What you did?” I ask. For a moment I have an image of Clyde in the middle of some group of death cultists in various states of undress. Possibly accompanied by sacrificial guinea pigs and the like. It doesn’t seem to really match him though. “And this is to do with the tattoos?” I ask.
    “Yes!” Clyde’s head bobs up and down in a few swift nods. “See, different parts of the body are more powerful for doing magic than others. Your chakras, as it happens. So to get the most juice out of, well, the juice, you want it to be concentrated at those points. The tattoos provide the path of least resistance to the chakras. Except, well... like I said, they’re not exactly tattoos. Here, look.”
    His hands come off the wheel, but at this speed it doesn’t really matter. It’s not like we could really do anything any harm. He pushes up a sleeve. There is a fine black line running down the center of his forearm. Occasionally black threads break off from the main line and form small spirals.
    “Holy McPants,” I say, “how did you explain those to your girlfriend?”
    “What?” Clyde says. “Devon? Oh I’m not really sure. I think she thinks it’s a security system for work.”
    “What?”
    “I’m not sure how it happened.” He shakes his head. “Devon has a creative mind.”
    “But how would a tattoo be a security device?”
    “Well.” Clyde hmmms. “It’s not actually ink, you see. It’s copper wire beneath the skin,” he says, finally grabbing the steering wheel in order to dodge a student on a bicycle. “Following the main ley lines of my body. The spirals mark various chakras. And that’s what focuses the power. That and words. Words are important.”
    “Words? What words?”
    “Well, you know.” Clyde oscillates between enthusiasm and sheepishness again. “Once you’ve got the juice to breach realities, then you need to make sure you’re breaching the right ones, that the energy does what you want. You have to shape it. Human will and all that. So there are words to help you do that. All sorts of nonsense. Help you think in the right ways, so you don’t end up