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For Children
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| Maggie no magic Part 2 | |
| By John_O | ||||||
| 16 May 2008 | ||||||
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We discover just how woefully bad Maggie is at magic and
meet a master mage who is taking an interest in her for just this
reason. We also learn of the art of transmogrification and its uses in
the Mageverse. Ohh, and watch out for the hexcrement.....too late! Friday rolled around and Maggie stayed behind after school had finished for extra magical tutoring that her parents had signed her up for, it was tedious but she really did want to succeed and perhaps this was the only way. Today her other two classmates had not turned up so she sat in the classroom by herself and dreamed of all the fabulous things that she would do when she could work magic. She was so caught up in this alternate reality that she failed to notice the tall figure in a slightly baggy grey pinstripe suit carrying a battered red brief case, who came through the door. “Hello.” He said brightly and waited for a response. In her imagination Maggie was in the middle of turning Imelda Sasspot’s hair into a toad infested pile of green slime. “Hello, Maggie isn’t it?” He said more loudly as he stepped into her field of view. “What?” Maggie jerked back at the unexpected figure. Looking up at the tall thin magician she was just a little scared, this was not her usual tutor, a retired teacher by the name of Edward Trulove, who was short, dumpy and entirely non threatening. This new man had a rather craggy face, keen deepset blue eyes and a shock of grey hair. Edward Trulove had nice brown eyes and not a tuft of hair on his shiny head. If the thin lips hadn’t been smiling at her she would have thought the newcomers face more than a little grim and frightening. “Hello.” He said a third time as he laid his case down on the desk between them. “I’m master mage Henry Gravestand, I will be tutoring you for the next few weeks. I’m afraid Mr Trulove has been feeling a bit poorly.” “Oh.” Maggie didn’t exactly welcome a complete stranger learning just how duff she was but he had said something that needed clarifying before anything else. “Excuse me, but did you say master mage?” “I did.” He beamed. “Bit surprising isn’t it? I should be wearing the full regalia I know but somehow I never was one for the blue robes and silver stars on everything, rather vulgar.” He laughed easily. Maggie smiled. She liked his attitude, not at all stuck up and aloof. “So shall we begin?” She nodded, her attention fully upon him. “I understand that you have a problem with delivery…” He began but stopped at her puzzled frown. “I can’t get a spell to work.” She admitted unhappily. “I don’t know about delivery.” He smiled indulgently. “Sorry, it’s mage jargon, I mean that you get the spell right but it doesn’t do anything, we call that a delivery problem. You see you not only have to say the spell correctly but also deliver it convincingly. Think of it like an actor speaking lines. If I just said, there’s a fire, you wouldn’t believe me would you?” “Uhh, no.” Maggie replied. He had been totally deadpan. “Good god! There’s a fire!” He exclaimed with bulging eyes and a sudden pointing finger over her head. She couldn’t help but look over her shoulder with a little palpitation; but there was no fire behind her. He looked back at her cheerfully and held his hands out to each side to take a bow. “It’s all in the delivery.” Maggie smiled at his demonstration he was making excellent sense. “So we have to get a bit more theatrical, think Shakespeare, can you do that?” Maggie nodded happily. “Good.” He snapped open the locks on his case and took out a book to hand it to her. “Macbeth?” She re-read the title again, yes it was still Macbeth, she had been expecting a book of simple spells. “Where better than the master himself to learn about delivery?” Maggie thought about it for a moment and then nodded, learn how to act a part, but which one? “I thought you might like to try one of the witches.” He said with an engaging wink. “Page, oh sixty-six I think.” She flicked through the book until she found the right page and read out the first witches line on it. “When shall we three meet again?” “Mmmm, not quite ready for the stage. You have to think yourself into the part. A witch out on a wild, wild night, stirring up prophecy in your bubbling cauldron.” He told her hunching over an imaginary pot and rubbing his fingers over it as though adding a pinch of some ghastly ingredient. She would have felt a bit stupid doing this in front of her fellow remedial magic students but somehow in the company of this expressive and amusing magician it seemed perfectly cool to act like an ugly old crone stirring up trouble. The hour just flew by as they worked upon her Shakespearean acting skills and her delivery definitely improved. As he put the book back in his case and shut it, she waited expectantly for him to ask her to try a spell but he lifted the case and turned towards the door. “Ummm, don’t you want me to try a spell?” “No, not yet. I find that confident delivery that is totally natural works best and we have to perfect that first. Rushing into spells can be a setback if attempted too quickly. We wouldn’t want that now eh?” “I s’pose not.” “Trust me on this one. I’ll see you next week.” Maggie nodded and watched him walk out of the door with a very crisp and confident gait; she wished she could work spells well enough to become a mage. She picked up her bag and trailed out of the classroom then straightened up and shook her shoulders. “It’s all in the delivery.” She told herself and walked out of the school like a mage would. The mages carriage was already well down the road when she reached the school gates and turned in the opposite direction to start walking home. Henry Gravestand wasn’t dwelling upon the lesson he had just given Maggie or its likely consequences, he was concentrating hard on driving, or rather on preventing any number of collisions. “Friday night pedestrians!” He grunted as his left hand performed a blocking spell to stop a particularly wayward specimen step off the pavement right in front of him; the surprised man found his paper squashed flat up against him as though he had run into a brick wall. He hadn’t of course, but it stopped him long enough for Henry to zip by and to wake him up to the next vehicle that was going to very un-magically turn him into dead dogmeat, a horse drawn omnibus going downhill. A ball bounced into the road as Henry swept around a sharp left hand bend and, as sure as night follows day, an inattentive urchin followed the ball. Once more Henry’s left hand performed a complex dance of the fingers as he murmured a floating bubble spell that encapsulated the surprised urchin in a nacreous sphere and lifted him clear over the road to where his ball had come to rest on the far gutter. It was an intervention that almost certainly prevented a massive pile up of wagons, busses and carriages, not to mention a few cyclists, and kept the traffic smoothly flowing. At a particularly dangerous junction just south of the river Henry was obliged to invoke his new kangaroo spell. Another impatient mage had ignored the traffic mages instruction to halt, and whizzed out right under his wheels, the collision was averted by the swift manoeuvre that bounced his own carriage up and over the offender. It was a sensation very similar to going over a humpback bridge at high speed, the feeling that ones stomach had temporarily been left somewhere behind and then twanged back into place as the carriage came down to a rubbery landing safely on the far side of the junction. Henry could have taken the imprudent fellows carriage licence in a trice but left such a prosaic law enforcement matter to the traffic mages. Dobbing up a fellow mage was seen as ‘bad form’, even though it would certainly get quite a few truly dangerous individuals off the roads. However Henry wasn’t above throwing a hexcrement at the offending carriage. A hexcrement, or more properly, an excrement hex is a simple but effective means of letting a miscreant mage know that he or she has upset another mage. It acts as a bird poo magnet to the person or vehicle it is cast upon so that every incontinent sparrow and pigeon within a one mile radius will home in for a silent shit. The expense and inconvenience of clearing up the poo is invariably a better, and more immediate, punishment than any fine the miscreant mage may incur from the authorities. The traffic north of the Thames was even worse and Henry found himself snarled up in the pre-weekend gridlock of commuters and tourists, each set of road users cursing the others for getting in the way, and the omnibus drivers and white wagon drivers cursing them all even more colourfully. In consequence he was not in a very good mood when he finally reached the tranquillity of the precincts of the London School of Enchantment and parked his carriage. He shut the door with a jarring slam and set off towards his lab with hunched shoulders and a slow smouldering ire at the back of his eyes that many a student knew only too well. The night porter saw the set of his shoulders as he pushed open the glass doors of the department; he made himself scarce with an imagined bit of dirt below his cubbyhole’s desk. Henry swept by and on up the stairs in a staccato rattle of footsteps on the stone stairs before another loud door slam announced the ‘all clear’ to the porter so that he could settle into his chair once more and resume his perusal of the form for the weekend’s race meetings. Henry looked up with a scowl at the scratching on his window, he had barely set his case down in the lab and already he was being disturbed. There was a fat cat pawing at it agitatedly. He got up from his work desk to make his way through the litter of magical and alchemical apparatus that cluttered his lab. “What have you to report to me today?” He enquired frostily as he opened the little leaded glass window, which just barely admitted the over plump cat. The cat turned an acerbic amber eye his way before jumping down to the floor with all the delicacy of a rugby player and a similarly hefty thump on landing; it waddled across the room to a chair where a tall glass tube held a revoltingly realistic brain floating in greenish liquid. “Oh, sorry.” Henry muttered as the cat sat before the chair, its tail swishing irritably back and forth. The mage hurried across the room, narrowly missing catching three very fragile alembics with his flapping jacket, and moved the glass jar back onto the little table beside the chair. The cat gave him another amber eyed look before jumping up onto the chair and sitting down. It remained rigidly still for a few moments and then swelled alarmingly in all directions until the chair was filled by a long limbed young man who wobbled a little then pushed his hand through his long ginger hair. “Odins bulls,” he cursed softly, “I hate this.” Henry opened his mouth but the man glared back at him and raised finger. “Not a damn word until I get my head back together.” Henry held back his own cutting remark, he knew just how stressful detransmogrification could be. Instead he went to another chair, which he had to clear of a pile of thaumaturgy essays he had yet to mark, then sat down to await his apprentices full restoration. The man popped the top off the glass jar and fished out the slimy brain from its resting place to hold it on top of his head while greenish slime dribbled down his hair and onto his shoulders. His eyes went glassy then opened wide as the contents of the spare brain cascaded back into his own brain and he remembered all the irritating little things he was supposed to have done by now but had forgotten about doing while he had been a cat. He gave a little sigh and placed the now shrunken brain back into the jar and resealed it, then waved his right hand airily to remove all the goo from his person and regarded his mentor. Transmogrification, or the arcane art of transmuting oneself into a cat, is a well established procedure that has been on the magic scene for over three centuries. As it involves actual physical alteration certain protective and insurance clauses have to be invoked in order that the transmogrifier can return to their former self, correct in every detail. The most noticeable item utilised in this regard is the spare brain. A cat’s head is just too small to accommodate the contents of a human brain so all the un-required knowledge, memories and to a lesser extent personality, has to be decanted into the spare brain. There they will remain, safely locked away in the protective brain jar, until their owner returns to their former form and the missing bits are decanted back into their head. There have been some spectacular failures of detransmogrification in which the unfortunate wizard or witch either didn’t decant the excess memories etc into their spare brain or indeed tried to do without a spare. They returned to their correct shape but couldn’t remember much past last Tuesday, and had a serious tendency to attempt to lick themselves in anatomically impossible positions. I well recall the much celebrated case of Theobald Crotaxis, a wizard of high standing but with a very shrewish wife, who not only omitted to make use of a spare brain but actually forgot to place a time limit on his transmogrified state. Suffice it to say he remained a very handsome black tom cat to the end of his days. Some unkind commentators have snidely remarked that this was all in his game plan, for the neighbourhood around Theo’s house was thereafter overrun with the offspring of a certain black cat. This is refuted by Theo’s close friends and associates who point to the fact that Theo would serenade his lovely wife every night from the safety of the garden wall! Actually while I’m on the subject, Professor Daneal Danderburg once transcodified. Upon his return to normal his fellow professors asked him what it had been like to be a cod. He stared at them vaguely for a few minutes opening and closing his mouth and waving his hands gently in the air. They all thought that he was still feeling a bit disoriented and sat him down in a chair with a nice stiff gin and tonic, which certainly brought the colour back to his cheeks. But when challenged again to tell them what it had been like to be a cod, Professor Danderburg got very huffy and stormed out of the room muttering loudly “I’m not going to tell you twice!”. “You have no idea how good it feels to be human again.” Henry nodded indulgently, he knew full well as he had been something of a transmogrification prodigy when he had been an apprentice, though he had always preferred transmuttation, as dogs had more fun, as a rule, than cats. “Are you ready to report now?” He enquired more mildly than he felt. “Yes. It looks like we were wrong.” “Wrong? How so?” “The subject worked a spell very competently in my sight.” “Then why are the school reports so lacking in evidence of spellcraft?” Henry pondered. “Bone idle.” “Eh?” “The subject is so lazy that they only worked a spell in order to get out of having to write an essay, that one is not Imagick.” “So we are back to subject thirty one.” “Looks that way.” “You had better resume observation next week then.” The man looked vaguely disgusted at the prospect. “You have no idea just what being a cat does to your guts.” He complained, moments before a cheek clenchingly bad thwarp erupted in the room. “Oh I think I do.” Henry sympathised as he gestured the offending fart out of existence or at least out of his laboratory. “You get off Errol, the report can be written up next week.” “Thanks.” Errol grunted and snapped his fingers just so. Whereas he had been stark naked the moment before he was now fully clothed and ready to head off for the nearest student bar to have a few stiff drinks and a laugh with his mates. He briefly thought about enquiring as to his mentor’s absence, he had been waiting on the window ledge for over two hours trying very hard not to go and gorge himself on all the stupid pigeons that roosted on the School’s many nooks and crannies. He simply left the room quickly and quietly, leaving the mardy mage to stew in isolation.
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