While what I’d call magic in my old world was real, it wasn’t the kind of magic I’d dreamed of or read about. It just didn’t have the same impact. Here, magic wasn’t all that powerful. I know it shouldn’t have shocked me, because “real” magic on the level of the stories from home would be obvious, and I would have noticed it at some point during the first ten years. Sadly, it was more like party tricks got turned up to eleven or even twelve. Also, pretty much everyone could do it.

Here’s how it goes, as far as I can guess: during puberty my new body produced a hormone or caused some gland to activate. This activation allowed for conversion of energy. Often, this is emitted as heat burst or electrical surge forms. Essentially, I could generate what I think is best called bio-fueled magic. There were some stories floating around the school about great and powerful mages, but nobody actually knew one. Anecdotes, family legends, and tall tales, but no evidence.

All that aside, it was clear to me that if there is a grand Creator, clearly that Creator thought this world could use a bit more challenge. I mean, who gives magical powers to teenagers going through all those mood swings? Teenage anger literally could erupt in flaming temper tantrums. At least it wasn’t like fireballs and lightning bolts, more along the lines of flash paper tricks and super-charged static electricity shocks. While my parents kept telling me that my tantrums were “adorable,” I found them hideously embarrassing. I had forgotten how much “fun” the body changes of adolescence can be. Of course my parents found them funny, and when I wasn’t buried in a cloud of hormones, I could laugh, too. It was that or cry, and I’d done plenty of that already.

Since the controlled method took several minutes of concentration, people generally used a match to light a candle. If you lacked the patience for that method, there was also the ability to wildly send out these small bursts of energy. Basically, you built up a serious amount of emotion and then lost control of yourself. Socially, it was a major faux pas if you lost it like that in public. You might get away with it if you were a very young teen, but older teens and adults could not.

So, unlike staring at goats, planting ringers in the audience, or disappearing from “locked” cabinets using misdirection or smoke and mirrors, here I could visibly and provably change something with my mind. I found it captivating. Also, it could be really handy if I were ever lost in the wilderness. Of course, actually going out into the wilderness would be required, and I avoided that if I had a choice. While my parents and many of my classmates didn’t think about it much, I could remember a world where magic wasn’t actually possible. I was fascinated. I poured hours into developing the skills I could. Even though magic might be considered frivolous by some, its sheer ubiquity made it something that nobody could ignore completely. Almost everyone had to control their magic, which meant almost everyone had to control their emotions. It did make for a more polite and formal society, I suppose. While my abilities didn’t change obviously, I could watch my skills progress numerically, which was oddly satisfying.

My next big discovery was that my parents had never heard of a status sheet. I’m a bit surprised that it took that long to come up, but I didn’t really talk about it, since I just assumed everyone had them here. Boy, was I wrong.

Ultimately, that conversation did not go well. What do you say when your parents ask you about why you’re distracted and appear to stare at nothing several times a day? I tried to tell them I was reading my stats, but they looked at me like I just said something in an unknown language. To be fair, it’s possible that I may have, but that’s not the point. I tried to explain, but explaining about things only you can see... that just doesn’t go well. Eventually, I gave up and let them believe what they wanted, and I tried not to check my stats in public. As to what they believed, I still didn’t inhale, but I got the full “not in anger, just in concern” lecture series on mind altering substances and the many risks from using them, some of which I’m relatively sure they made up on the spot. Parental lecture series may just be universal. I filed that one under Coddlestahl standard lecture number twenty-two, CSL 22 for short. The other twenty-one were variations on golden oldies like “close the door, we don’t live in a barn” and “clean your room” and “I can’t see why you spend all your time on that mumbo jumbo” and “you should go outside more.”

Oh, what fond memories!

All in all, I had no major bullies to face down, no self-righteous nobles, no young masters demanding that their entourage kick sand in my face. Nobody really bothered me much, at least no more than anyone else. Physically, I was average. I wasn’t the handsome prince. I wasn’t the ugly duckling. Aside from my magic obsession, I was a nail that didn’t stick out enough to get hammering down. I was not down with the in-crowd, so I didn’t have to prove myself worthy to spend time with them. I didn’t have close friends, but no enemies either. You get the picture. I was capable enough to answer when called on during lectures, saving me from most of the teachers’ wrath, and savvy enough not to have my hand in the air all the time, avoiding the epithet of “brown nose teacher’s pet." I may, or may not have scorched the undersides of all my desks, like any budding firebug playing with magic, but nobody ever caught me. I was a smart alek still, but mostly I kept that to my inner monologue, which was probably for the best. It definitely cut down on being hit in the back of the head by 100%, which was a result I could heartily approve.

My nerdy little not-so-secret was joining a magic club in secondary school. It was a group of us kids who thought that maybe those stories and legends of big magic might be true. We spent a bunch of the time just trash talking each other’s skills, bragging about our powers, or making up wild theories about how to improve our magic. Sometimes we argued about esoteric subjects from the latest broadsheets like the benefits of meditation vs sleep for faster energy recovery. This last one was my favorite long-running argument. I was more passionate about it, wanting to spend time figuring out and testing our ideas since I couldn’t just check my status page and rapidly prove or disprove my theories. We never did reach a satisfying conclusion for that argument. I wonder if the club is still arguing about it.

My parents would often complain about wasting time with the club (CSL 15), and talked about how I should spend more time on “useful” studies (CSL 16), so I did just enough classwork to keep them from pulling me from the club in almost all my classes. Math was the exception to this rule. Don’t judge me too harshly, but I liked math. I understood math in a way I didn’t always get people. Math didn’t change. It was math. Maybe I should clarify. Algebra made sense to me, because it was like a logic puzzle. I loved geometric proofs for much the same reasons. I dove into statistics in self-defense because of all the chicanery used by statisticians in my last world. I merely survived calculus. It was the schoolyard bully of my math life. It kicked curves and exponential growth sums in my face, gave me integral wedgies, and derived great joy from my confusion. Calculus aside, math gave me an area where I could achieve wild successes without great effort, even in my old world. Fortunately, secondary school here didn’t deal with the evils of calculus. None of the math I faced was brand new to me. It wasn’t like learning a new language with all new words, differing grammar structures, or even assigned genders for the words. It was relearning how to ride a bike after several years of not having one, a bit wobbly for a short while, but the skill was rapidly regained. I did have to brush up on the theorems and corollaries, so I could cite them properly for the proof sections, but that wasn’t as hard as learning them the first time. Math, it turned out, would be my ticket out of town.