Xander Mercurio, Nick Savoy’s best friend and “business” partner, writes the Arcane Diary as an account of the investigation he must follow to ascertain his friend’s whereabouts and mysterious disappearance.
To find Nick, he must consider the intricate complexity of his friend’s life, psychology, and courses of action, which are (whether or not deliberate) shrouded in secrecy and shadows. He must also piece together obscure clues from Nick’s diary of dreams, poems, and an incomplete memoir that is deceptively descriptive in that it paints a fantastic picture but doesn’t use specifics and, therefore, is next to useless to Mercurio.
When I sit and ponder, as I often find myself doing, the life and mystery of Nick Savoy, I cannot help but feel about him as no doubt he felt about himself: not too seriously and more than a bit of disbelief.
Nick was a brilliant and incredibly adaptable creature. Still, he was also plagued with psychological imbalances that were accelerated by the bizarre experiences in his life that, as his best friend and confidante, I was never privy to until I dug through his storage of papers in search of his whereabouts. I had gathered from our years of work together what kind of depth of intelligence and character he was working with, but I, until recently, had only a faint clue as to the indicators that make up a complex person like Nick Savoy.
The most obvious place I thought to look for ideas was the case pile on his desk at the office. While Nick’s investigative skills were second to none in terms of ability and effectiveness, his willingness to commit any of it to paper was practically nonexistent. Nick was used to dealing with high-profile clients who paid large sums for his meticulous expertise, especially for his discretion.
Nick was simultaneously flamboyant yet nondescript; he was consistently surprising with his cunning and charming in his manipulations. He could get what he wanted from people while almost effortlessly leaving them satisfied with the transaction. If a person wouldn’t budge as far as giving Nick what he needed to do whatever he was doing, he almost instantly had an avenue to create favourable conditions for securing the necessary end.
Perhaps it was psychic alchemy or just plain stubborn delusion, but when Nick Savoy put his mind to something come hell or high water, it amazingly seemed to work out in his favour. While I will never be able to continue in Nick’s footsteps as far as our investigative agency is concerned, there are so many things that I have learned from the man that I feel forever indebted to him and will never cease in the search for the conclusion of his story.
From More-slinging desperation to discovering his true destiny and learning the profundity of free will, seemingly incompatible concepts, one must choose whether to accept one’s destiny.
Nick Savoy was an enigmatic being who was always described as very knowledgeable, even as a young child. Interestingly, his adventures made him appear wise beyond his years; he was almost entirely self-taught since one can direct the course of one’s knowledge. He was not particularly fond of authority and detested forced structure to learning. Through elementary school, he was reported to have been exceptionally bright but unusually withdrawn and reluctant to accomplish what his teachers believed he was capable of. He became almost wholly reclusive in high school, forming no lasting friendships with his peers. His slightly above-average grades plummeted to barely passing, yet he managed to graduate with what he called a “miracle” that he had bothered to do that much. He found everything so trivial and dull in his life that he insisted on spending time alone with stories, written or imagined. Reading was his escape because he believed knowledge held the key to power; therefore, the more he knew, the more powerful he could become.
