“Okay, you have your magic scroll?”
My son rolled his eyes “Mom, please.” He said.
My handsome, solidly built 17 year old waved the roll of paper under my beak. I nodded, but I still felt more than a little bit uncertain.
We were standing in a well decorated hallway outside of a classroom in a section of the Main Office I’d only seen on school tours. The Main Office had a shocking number of schools for children of all species and grade levels. It was potentially very dangerous, but not considerably more so than the Milwaukee school district.
I put my talons around his tiny human hand and squeezed the scroll into it. “Just open this, and you’ll pop right back home, okay? You don’t need to use the Ways.”
He stared at me, impatiently. "Mom, look at me." He raised his hand to cover his face. "I am already a magician, and outside the secure areas, I can-"
He snapped his fingers and vanished.
Instantly I panicked. Oh god! What had he done? Was he-
“Boo.” came a voice from behind me.
I let out a terrified “YAAARP!” and wheeled around to see my adolescent magic prodigy grinning like an idiot.
I staggered back, trying to get my heart to stop pounding, “Johnny, don’t do that!”
Johnny looked like he was going to laugh for a moment, then his expression sank. “Sorry… Sorry mom.” He did his best to compose himself. “My point is, I was mastering apportation magic for months before you even knew what magic was. The magic stuff is about the only thing I’m confident in in this place. But whatever I end up using, I’ll head back to the house if something bad happens. Scout’s honor.”
I raised whatever I had on my wrinkled face that passed for an eyebrow. “You got kicked out of Boy Scouts.”
He scratched at the back of his neck. “Actually it was Cub Scouts… And in my defense, they were super culty. The point is, I’ll bail if I need to, but I really want to make this work.”
He seemed sincere, but I was guilty that he had to be. I know he was, by his own actions, as thoroughly banned from Earth as I was, but I still felt like I’d dragged him here. "I really hope it works for you, too. Just… know there are other options, if it doesn't."
He nodded. “So, aren't you starting class today too?”
I shrugged. “Yeah… maybe I’ll get perspective on all the newfangled stuff you’ve been playing with.”
He snorted. “Mom, if anything, thaumaturgy is oldfangled-”
“Excuse me?” came a voice.
I looked over and saw a large lime green slug with a tiny phonograph hanging from a carved wooden chain on its waist. It was poking its head out of the door to the classroom.
“Were you joining the class?” came a voice from the phonograph. “You didn't come via the Way…”
I blinked at the slug, forced myself to accept them as normal through sheer force of will, and replied. “Oh! I was just dropping off my son.”
I gave Johnny a hug. “Try to make friends?”
He nuzzled into my feathers. “You too.” He looked pretty serious about it.
I smirked. “Don’t worry kid, I’m way ahead of you.”
My new friend puked violently into the toilet.
I rubbed Terra-2 on the back as the poor eagle finally stopped heaving. I offered her a tissue and she wiped down her beak. Once she was cleaned up, she signed back to me “Sorry about all of this.”
I shook my head. “It’s okay,” I signed back —I was really getting the hang of sign language— “those things are hard to look at. And, glass half full, your stomach held out a lot longer this time.”
Terra gripped her now tightly-rolled Map and slipped it into its case. When I first saw the silver map cases the staff handed out to us, they seemed kitschy and cumbersome. Now they seemed critical and if anything, massively unsecured.
A Map of the Multiverse was an incredibly powerful magical item. All you needed to do was whisper the name of anywhere listed in the countless mapped dimensions it would take you there. There were a few exceptions to that, as some particularly dangerous dimensions were marked in red and apparently required a key of some kind, but the access the maps provided was unparalleled.
Unfortunately, maps have serious drawbacks. The Multiverse was big. Really big. Even looking at a sketch of a fraction of it was like staring down a canyon and up a mountain at the same time. It was living inside a centrifuge. It was like having your inner ear smacked around by a professional boxer.
In short, staring into the abyss will fuck you up if you ain’t used to it. And Terra wasn’t there yet. Apparently her vector (a hotshot magician with the social skills of a toddler) had rescued her from a two dimensional reality, so it was hardly a surprise that the poor eagle was having trouble processing her Map's spatial distortion.
There was a knock on the bathroom door. “Are you okay in there?” said a familiar voice.
“We’re fine, Sirt-235!” I called out. “Also, you don’t have to wait outside.” The Main Office’s bathrooms were all gender neutral. It was just easier that way.
My favorite pigeon slipped in behind us with a nervous look on his face. He had a bag of chips in his foretalons and looked down on Terra with fear. “Oh dear. Do you need help?”
Tera shook her head, flashed a thumbs up, and picked herself up off the tile floor. She preened her feathers back into place with rapid, mechanical precision and went to the sink to rinse out her beak a bit more thoroughly.
"You're all good? Okay, good, then. That's… good." Sirt coughed, and turned to me. "So Earth-5, how are you? You have the son, right? Everything, uh, go okay with him?"
I flinched a bit internally —I still wasn't used to that name— but I nodded. “He got off to school okay at least. I dunno if I’ll know much more for a while.”
He cooed in understanding. “I have to say. You’re really brave joining the Wandsmen with a kid to take care of.”
I sighed. “I really didn’t have a choice.” Considering the state of my old human body, if I hadn’t joined up, there would be no one left to take care of him.
“Johnny’s older though, right?” Terra signed from the sink. “I mean he’ll be an adult soon?”
“In just a few months he’ll be 18, yeah.” I said, trying not to look in the mirror. “He’s a good kid, smart, talented… but this whole situation is crazy and he’s definitely not prepared for it. I feel the most and least needed I’ve ever been.”
“I mean, I think he’ll be okay.” Sirt said, shoveling more chips into his beak. “Maybe someday he’ll even sign up and join us. Take the map and all that.”
This time I actually did look in the mirror. The hideous, bald, wrinkly vulture head stared back at me. “God I hope not…"
I shook my head. I didn't have time to throw a pity party. "We should talk about us. How long do we have before our class starts?” I asked, changing the subject as quickly as I could.
Sirt pulled out his map and read off an annotation. “About six minutes?”
I tried to center myself. “Great… off to see the wizard I guess.”
Sirt put a talon on my shoulder and cooed softly. "Oh, hey… you're going to be fine. You're already floating pebbles."
I chuckled ruefully. “Yeah, the gods themselves do tremble at my power.” Floating pebbles was the thaumaturgy equivalent of finger painting and I’d barely gotten that down in the past two days… with way too much help from Sirt.
“You’re doing better than me.” Terra signed.
It was technically true, but not the whole story. “Don’t sell yourself short,” I reassured her. It wasn’t just empty pablum either. She may not have floated any pebbles, but she had a mind like a steel trap and could speed-read like no one I’d ever seen. I was sure once she got over the initial “hump” of accessing her power she’d be a name magician in a week.
“So,” Said Sirt, “Any word on who’s teaching Thaumaturgy 101 this week?”
Terra looked very nervous. “Sadly, yes,” she signed. “My vector.”
So it was that Terra, Sirt and I ended up sitting together in the middle row while Terra's vector, the infamous Dr. Bright, paced the bottom of the lecture theater with an unimpressed look on his beak.
He had far from the most intimidating bird form. Cuckoo Wandsmen forms looked a lot like Sirt’s pigeon form. Just grey feathered quasi-humanoids with a few stripes on the belly and tail feathers and not much else.
But Dr. Bright was no ordinary cuckoo. He had this look in his eye that reminded me of a combination between a drug lord and a Chief of Medicine, both of which were the bane of my existence during my medical career. He wore a tight labcoat fitted carefully around his wings and had the most cursed ruby on his breast that I’d ever seen in my life.
I had a suspicion he summoned demons with it in his spare time. It was the kind of thing he’d do.
“So,” he began, looking us up and down. “You all want to learn magic.”
The class didn’t contradict him.
“Okay then!” Dr. Bright began, clapping his talons together and grinning. “How about we start with something classic eh? How about a big old fireball!”
Before anyone could react, the front of the room exploded.
It was no mere firecracker either. Dr. Bright whipped his wing out and a straight-up biblical pillar of flame burst out of it, filling the room with the sickening smells of burning flesh and melting feathers.
The room was in uproar. Everyone was squawking and reaching for their maps, hurrying to the back seats and rushing for the exits in a flurry of feathers and blind panic.
And then all of a sudden, it just stopped.
The fire went out. Dr. Bright was left in a small crater with a charred stump of a right wing. “Sit down.” he said, making the strangest little wave with his unburnt talon.
Everyone sat down. A sobbing shoebill's eyes dried immediately. A starling who'd burst through the exit door calmly closed it and walked back in. Every single Wandsman in the room stopped their fleeing, stopped their shouting, walked back to their seats and just sat down, sporting glassy eyes and vacant expressions.
Dr. Bright grabbed his blackened right wing with his left and snapped it off with a crunch of bone and charcoal. “Make no mistake,” The cuckoo said. “You have all been handed a loaded gun.”
He reached into his labcoat pocket and produced a small flask, popping the cork out of it and downing the contents.
Slowly, with a sickening crackle of shifting bone and slop of growing muscle, the wing grew back.
He reached it out. “Right now, every single one of you is a ticking time bomb. Most of you aren’t sociopaths, but for the few of you who are, I guarantee the blast is just as likely to rip you apart as everyone else around you.”
He narrowed his eyes at the crowd. “You are not here to learn magic because it’s some brilliant ancient art practiced throughout the ages. You’re here to learn how not to tear open a hole in the fabric of reality when you want to conjure up a plate of pancakes.”
He pulled up a slightly scorched chair and flipped it around, sitting down. “Let me tell you all a story. Once upon a time, in a dimension far, far away, I was a researcher at a little place called the SCP Foundation.”
I felt Terra tense beside me. I’d heard that name before. Sirt was just silent, glassy eyed like all the rest.
Bright continued, “We had an interesting gig. We’d lock up anything that we thought was a threat to the planet and try to make sure it didn’t hurt anyone. Make no mistake, were I still affiliated with that organization, I’d lock every last one of you up in a cage before you could even blink.”
Terra let out the tiniest whimper.
“But, lucky for you, that planet, and that dimension’s Foundation, is ash. Almost no one escaped.” He looked away for a moment. “I watched everyone I care about get dissolved into dust. And you know what did that? Magic.”
Terra was crying now, soft, silent tears dripping onto her feathers. I looked to the cuckoo in the chair and felt a little flame light inside me.
“The only one left who I could save was in a tiny space between spaces on a half burnt scrap of currency drifting in the winds of a dead world. That’s what-”
"What the hell is your problem!?"
Someone had stood up and shouted, fully snapped at Bright, and I realised with horror that it was me.
Bright paused. He blinked, slowly, and titled his head, to take me in. "Huh," he said. "You stood up."
“Don’t you ‘huh’ me you, you… lunatic!” I snapped back. I gathered myself up and made my way down to his chair. I was done with this of this piece of shit's abuse. “You could have killed everyone in this room! And now you’re sitting here rubbing in how much we all need to be afraid. As if any one of us didn’t already know that! Not only that, but you're rubbing salt into the very specific wound of a very specific person who has had more than enough of your shit! So yeah, I'm standing-”
He pointed over my shoulder. I paused.
I looked back at the crowd. Everyone but me was stock still, listless, and unresponsive.
Bright clapped his talons together and the class stirred back to a semblance of life, looking confused and disturbed. A low murmur filled the room as all of them stared down at me, wondering why I'd been spared.
Dr Bright, unphased, just continued his lecture. “Congratulations on breaking an elementary enchantment, Earth-5. Another fun fact about magic: it’s ludicrously unfair and biased, favoring some people vastly more than others.”
He gestured to me. “Most of you are sticks of dynamite. This one’s a hydrogen bomb.”
