“...”

The flame sputtered out. Amy kept staring.

|L14R mode: E N G A G E D|

“Oh damn….This optical illusion tech is proprietary Ames, so you gotta leave and promise not to tell anyone.” She blinked.

“Optical illusion….tech?” she asked.

“Yeah there’s this company, whose name I can’t tell you, that wanted to recreate some of the stuff magic can do but without needing to run on mana.”

“Oh, awesome!” she replied “Can I see it?”

“Did you not hear the stuff about proprietary? I could get sued because of what I just told you.”

“But you didn’t tell me anything?”

“Exactly.”

She sighed and left, slamming the door closed behind her.

|Lie successful, returning to normal parameters|

FUCK ME THAT WAS CLOSE. Good God I was sure that I was screwed.

Deep breaths, calm the mind. Don’t catastrophize.

Fuck my heart is going a mile a minute.

Breathe.

I took out my lighter, cigarette still in my mouth, way too nervous to try lighting up with my own magic.

It’s fine.

As I brought the lighter up to the cigarette, I noticed the violent tremor in my hands, nearly causing me to drop the lighter. Once it was lit, I put the lighter away and clenched my fists, scarcely able to think.

Keep breathing.

Just breathe.

A few minutes later, and as the nicotine kicked in, I couldn’t hear my heart thumping in my chest anymore, and the dizziness and nausea I hadn’t noticed subsided. Lying down on my bed did little to help my headache, but I honestly wasn’t able to do anything else. Before I even realized I was tired, I had drifted off to sleep.

I woke up to a loud banging on my bedroom door, my father yelling my name. Blearily, I got up and let him in, and then returned to sitting on my bed, not even hearing the barrage of questions and accusations I was being subjected to. “WHY did you quit college?!” was the last thing my father asked, before running out of breath. Maybe it was my semi-conscious state, but damn if I couldn’t spin the truth with the best of them.

“I applied for the police academy, and was accepted.” I simply said.

Dad was in the middle of taking a deep breath, doubtless to continue the barrage, but froze after hearing me, his eyes widening. “Oh.” That was it. That’s all he said. He got up to leave, but turned around at the last second. “Is this… because of the Johnsons?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

I fell asleep again, this time to the sounds of arguing below me, a lullaby I was intimately familiar with.

The following morning was perhaps one of the most awkward of my entire life. Family breakfast, a normally fairly jovial affair, was now sombre, hardly anyone speaking, people leaving as soon as they had finished their food. The silence was deafening.

I left the house and walked to the train station, taking the longer route, to avoid… well you know. I was roughly halfway there when I decided that I wasn’t going to stay in this useless, self-pitying mood. I started walking with more confidence and actually became aware of my surroundings. Walking down the suburban street, I was filled with wonder at what I saw.

Kids playing football in the street, human in majority, but every third or fourth kid was something different. What looked like an elf child, whose gender I couldn’t tell but was displaying incredible skills, a dwarven girl getting as rough as any of the boys, even a ratfolk….sorry rodentkin, you aren’t supposed to say ratfolk these days.

But anyway, even a rodentkin boy playing with the others, whiskers twitching as he smiled after scoring, the other kids barely able to keep up with his speed.

Continuing onwards, looking into the sky, remembering, and actually processing what I had seen the day before. Electric birds? Gnomish automaton…. Repairmen? It had been 20 odd hours and I still hadn’t fully processed my new reality. I made it to the train station before I realized I actually had no fucking clue what I was doing here. I didn’t have college to go to.

To hell with it, I had brought my bag, which I had put the book on mana into, y’know, hide stuff in plain sight, and all that. May as well get some practice in.

I bought a ticket to the station nearest to Elysian Park, a really nice place I had gone to and watched the people training when I was younger. For reference, it’s right beside Dodger Stadium. I sat down at the base of a tree, and tried to relax, something I hadn’t been able to do for days.

Re-reading the book, a few things were made obvious.

First: Spells that only had one element were the most basic, and the difficulty of spellcasting went up an order of magnitude for each additional element.

Second: The more you understand an element, the easier it is to use. When I had played around with Fire yesterday, I was using my highly limited understanding of fire in its entirety, and was only able to produce a construct no larger than a quarter, even using a lot of the mana available to me.

Solution? I whipped out my phone and for roughly an hour researched fire, flames, plasma, heat, and just about anything Wikipedia could provide that was related to fire. Afterwards, and after making sure that no one was around, I tried to remake the ball of fire from yesterday in my hand. I proceeded to burn my palm.

The ball I produced was roughly the size of a baseball, and I could feel the heat on my face, nevermind my hand. After some swearing and rubbing my hand in the grass, I tried again, this time remembering to use what I had learned to contain the heat and not get burned.

I made a circle with my thumb and middle finger, and spoke.

“ʄɨʀɛ.”

I couldn’t contain the heat completely, as that involved Air, but it was enough that it only felt uncomfortable, like putting your hand on a radiator.

It was beautiful. I held what looked like a small comet in my hand, a tail of flame eddying above it. Dispelling it, I stood up and thrust my hands into the air, my victory feeling like the final thrust in the fight to kill my shit mood.

Sitting back down, a headache from the mental fatigue of telling the universe what to do, I started manipulating small bits of flame, the size of what I could do at most yesterday, now as easy as thinking.

I messed around with my understanding of heat changing the colour of the flames, and burning myself again. It turns out I can’t contain the heat from fire hotter than the sun. Who could’ve guessed it. Still, seeing flame that flickered from blue to green to red and back again was a hell of a lot of fun. I was even able to make my cigarette glow blue for a few seconds, before it burned up and I got the worst drag I’ve ever had.

“The colours are pretty, but could you stop playing with fire beside my tree, Young Wizard?”

I swear to God, why does this shit keep happening to me. I turned to look to my side and saw a young girl, her hair as pale as her face. I was highly tempted to ask if she was a ghost, but what she had said tipped me off.

“Are you a….. Dryad?”

I had read about the Tree Wars in the Amazon at school, when the forest spirits had enough of our deforestation, and fought back. I say fought back, it was a massacre. The dryads could slip in and out of their tree’s at will, and the ones with physical form were nigh indestructible when faced with regular munitions.

She smiled. “Perhaps not so young, having heard of my kind”

“Mundanes learn about... your kind... in school these days, so I can’t claim any arcane knowledge”

“Honest too, almost to a fault. I’m sure you’ll get over that eventually though.”

“Can I ask what a dryad is doing in Elysian Park? And why you... don’t appear to be made of wood? If that…. isn’t insensitive?”

She giggled, because of course she did. “Elysian park is home to a rather large dryad community silly, and only Saplings bother using their barkform for anything that isn’t important.”

“I just did the equivalent of asking your age didn’t I?” I was highly tempted to burn out my vocal chords, so I could make less of a fool of myself. Then again, how was I supposed to know that female customs were universal? Just one of those things I guess.

“No, it's okay, we don’t really care much about that, our tree’s health is our… equivalent.”

‘Fuckin….. sigh’

I looked at the old oak I had been sitting beside. It looked…. majestic. The canopy was in perfect condition, the trunk was devoid of the usual scratched in names, there weren’t even any knots signifying pruning.

“Well, your tree certainly looks…. healthy.” She giggled again, her ethereal form floating closer to me as I inspected the tree. “It’s my birth tree, and I only recently became a Prime recently, so I hope to stay with it a long time.Oh, uh, hmm, I guess we become Primes after… ten of your years? No wait… a hundred! That’s the one. Gosh you mortals have a funny way of measuring things”

Ignoring the fact that the 12-year old looking girl-spirit-thing in front of me was multiple times my age, I had another question. “Wait, so those dryad kids…...uh, Saplings? That I saw yesterday playing with cars are probably older than me?”

She immediately became serious, any trace of humour gone from her face.

“You saw Saplings playing with your metal chariots? By the Grove this is bad. Do you know where? Can you tell me? Oh, pigeon-shit, I can’t leave my tree, I just started the next growth ring. Could you…. could you please find a dryad near to them and get them to tell those kids off?

I’ll um… I know, I’ll give you an insight into your magic in return!”

Quest get, apparently. Now to dance the dance.

“Oh you don’t have to, I would do it anyway. Why, are those kids in danger?”

She nodded. “Yes, as a sapling it’s very dangerous to leave your tree for long periods of time, you can sever your connection to your tree, and be left without the energy to form a new one. I insist on your reward, you are doing the dryad community a service.”

To those unaware, this is the dance commonly known as ‘polite society’. I know, it bothers me too. Unfortunately, it's how you get ahead in the mundane world, and seemingly the magical one too.

I took the metro to Police HQ, and then started walking the same direction as yesterday. I had left my bag with…. I forgot to ask her name. Goddammit. Whatever, not like you can put your foot in it even further. I passed the same streets as I had the day before, but everything was different, or perhaps it was my perspective.

The rundown nature of the sidewalk and fences, the bird crap everywhere, the boarded up windows… I had walked through this area while out of it, and to be honest I’m lucky I wasn’t mugged. Yesterday, I would have been in a bad spot. Today? I might just be able to stand up for myself.

I was about to get to the park I had seen the dryad kids playing beside when I heard a scream from that direction. Looking around at nearby pedestrians, I couldn’t tell if they weren’t able to hear it, because the veil made it sound like something else, or they were just used to it in this neighbourhood. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

Running as fast as I could, I rounded the corner to see one of the Saplings from before, being attacked by…. a human. Three humans. Three regular old teenagers, as far as I could tell.

Some people will tell you they would always go help the person being beaten up, some will tell you that they would never help, and they’re getting what they deserve. Me? I make no such extreme claims. I did the sensible thing, and thought about the situation in front of me.

What did I know?

- A sapling is getting beaten up.

What appear to be regular teens are doing it. Dryad BarkForms are incredibly strong I’m excluded from the veil, but other illusions still work on me.

….dryad barkforms are INCREDIBLY STRONG. Of course. It clicked together in my head. Elysian Park. A place I hadn’t been since childhood, watching the training. A convenient challenge, made more complex by an moral dilemma. Who writes this stuff anyway?

I walked forward towards the ‘dryad’ and ‘teenagers’ and started clapping. “Marvelous, really well done, the audiovisual syncing is just bang on. Once I’ve started learning Light, I’d really love some tips.”

As I spoke the situation before me vanished, with an anxious looking man with a clipboard, alongside Nox and…. what appeared to be a gnome. Nox tried to speak, but before he could the anxious man decided he was done with anxiety, and would like to try out fury.

“What the fuck Nox, did you tip him off? Now we’re gonna have to schedule a mind-wipe, and you know just how fuckin’ much the Chief loooooves authorising those. Then we’re gonna have to set up a whole new scenario. Why on earth would you let him in on this? I could have your badge y’know!”

Nox just keeps that knowing smirk on his face, and points at me, and then the shouting official. This appeared to tick the guy off even more.

“Hey Kid, what the fuck are you doing, why not just try to pass the test, then let on that Nox told you about it?”

“Uhm… He didn’t?” I may be a pretty good sleuth but I never said I was a smooth operator.

The guy just gaped at me, looking back at forth between myself and Nox several times before storming over to me, picking me up by the collar, dragging me over to stand beside Nox, and said one word, in a very quiet voice, which scared me a hell of a lot more than the shouting earlier.

“Explain”

I don’t know if you have ever heard a voice that made you shiver, but this guy did it with one word. You had best believe I got to ‘splaining right quick.

“Uhm…. So it was pretty obvious that a Sapling wouldn’t be hurt by some teenagers, so that left three possibilities. Either it was an illusion, the Sapling was faking it, or those weren’t human teenagers. Looking at it objectively only two of those have any real merit, One and Three."

"Looking at Three, there was a chance that it was some kind of glamoured creatures or people but I can’t think of any reason why anyone would want to attack a dryad sapling. There probably is such a reason, but I don’t know what it is, so I have to assume it’s number One. "

"An illusion? For what purpose. Why make an illusion of a magical creature if your purpose is to hide something, because the veil would just hide it from the mundane anyway. So it has to be for someone who the veil doesn’t affect. "

"I was just sent to this exact spot, because dryad saplings may be in danger. Low and behold, when I show up, not only is there a dryad in danger, humans are the ones responsible. That’s perhaps the most basic moral dilemma I’ve ever heard."

"The place where I received this noble quest? About 200 yards from the local Police Academy. A place I haven’t thought about in over 10 years. "

"Conclusion? I was put under some kind of mental compulsion to return to somewhere in my past, nearby to a police presence, so they could have influence over local magical fauna, so that I could undergo an asinine morality test a five year old would pass, given by someone too dense to realize when they’ve informed someone they want to erase their memories, and somehow expect them not to run away. Does that sound about right?”

I fully admit, I got a bit heated there, the idea of my memories being erased, nevermind being put under a mental compulsion! Had me a bit stressed, and this guy wasn’t doing anything to make me want to reform my initial opinion of him.

The guy opened his mouth, paled, closed it again, stood up, harrumphed, and then vanished with a popping noise.

“Ho ho, my lad ye got ‘im good, dat dere’s de best look I ever did see on dat donkey’s ass. T’row me a call w’en yer learnin’ Light, I’ll teach ye better’n any o’ them wankers at de academy. G’luck.”

He tossed me a golden coin, and vanished as well, the same strange popping noise echoing. On the coin was the gnome’s face embossed alongside a telephone number, a weird glowing seal, and…. Six sets of coordinates?

“That’s Jim for you, he’s one of our best Light specialists. Works on commission.” Nox began.

This time I held up the hand to stop the conversation.

“Nox, what the fuck?”

I was starting to hate him.