Scene 21 - November 8th

Interior Townhouse, Continuous

Quinn Kaufman

“...Quinn. Quinn!” Holly said urgently. “You need to breath! You’re having a panic attack!”

I took a deep, gasping breath, my body suddenly covered in sweat. “It’s too much,” I whispered. “I can’t, it’s all so much, I can’t...”

She bit her lip again, seeming to know exactly what I meant. “I can’t block out your ESP. Is there something else that I can...

“Something... something that dad and I didn’t...” I took another heavy, shuddering breath. “Magic!” I gasp in realization. “I had never known anything about magic, tell me about magic! Teach me something!”

She nodded decisively. “That I can do. Magic... Okay. I’m gonna try and teach you a spell. A really simple one - it’s one of the first that I ever learned, back when my parents were first teaching me magic,” she told me.

“You learned... from your parents?” I asked.

“Fuck, that... that won’t help you to know, that...”

“No... it’s fine,” I promised. “Your parents... not mine. Still not my dad. Keep going.”

“Okay. Okay.” She took a deep breath herself, then continued, “I’ve told you that everyone has their own style of casting magic, right? But there tend to be some similarities. Just about everyone uses some kind of physical motion associated with casting - I have hand gestures, Canaveral and Anima both use touch and physical motion in general. My father uses a flute, my mother uses hand signs just like me.”

“Is it like...” I took another deep breath, realizing I hadn’t in a while. “A focusing thing? I had to use hand motions when I first got my powers. I don’t need to anymore, but it’s still easier to use them. More theatrical, too.”

“The drama of it might be why some mages do it as well,” Holly agreed. “But it’s mostly for focusing, yeah. The important thing is that it’s something that you can put attention on, something you can focus your entire mind and soul on doing, because if your mind wanders the spell will go wrong. The more you practice the less focus you need, but especially at first, it needs to be something strong.

“And it needs to be something that works for you - everyone has their own style, remember. That’s why teaching magic is so difficult - what worked for the teacher may not work for the student, not unless their styles are similar enough.” Holly hesitated. “Whatever you come to may not be close enough to mine for my advice to help,” she warned me. “You probably won’t figure it out immediately, either. For some people it comes to them right away, but others have to try tons of different things before they find a focusing method that works for them. There’s a whole semester-long class on it as part of Magical Studies at UNV.”

I thought about it. Something that could occupy my entire mind, something that could get easier with practice... art was my first thought, but I discarded it after a moment. I was already pretty good at art, it was easy to autopilot. I needed something I still had to think about... something like...

“What about people with powers?” I asked. “Do powers ever fit into magical foci?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “A lot of mages start off with a trick of some sort - some minor magical thing that they can do that they expand into everything else. Canaveral’s thing with kinetic energy started as that, I think. The Magnificent Maxwell got his start that way too. Anyway, those tricks could be thought of as a power - especially Canaveral’s, he told me once he started with being able to sense kinetic energy and then began messing with it.”

“My presence, then,” I decided. “My ESP, that is - Dr. Anomnachi suggested a new name for it.”

“I like it. How would your presence be a focus, though?”

“I can mess with how I sensed things using it. Plug it in to my sight or hearing or whatever, or even narrow the scope to get more detail on a smaller area.” I hadn’t tried that yet, actually, but it seemed more than possible.

“Okay, that seems... yeah, I think I have a path to you casting from that,” Holly decided. “Just don’t... don’t hate me if it doesn’t work, okay?”

“I could never hate you.”

There was another one of those moments where I thought she was blushing, but an instant later it was gone. Was she...? No, she wouldn’t hide that from me, would she?

“Anyway,” she quickly said, “I want you to put a hand out, relaxed and a little open. Yeah, like that. Now just... focus in on the area in your hand. Cut out everything else, as much as you can.”

I did my best. My sense of presence began to shrink, the world around me changing from an extension of my own body to something separate from me entirely - a mildly disconcerting feeling, I hadn’t realized how used to it I had grown - until it was gone, just the dust in the air in my hand and my regular human senses.

I hadn’t realized how dusty the house was until now - my presence didn’t usually pick up particles that small. I suppose that without dad or I to...

“It’s okay, we can try again,” Holly said when I came back to myself. “Do you still want to?”

I nodded. “Yes, I do. It’s... it’s helping, I think. Making a new memory that has nothing to do with... well.”

“Alright. Focus back in on your hand, then.”

I did so with a little effort, the world sinking back into normalcy again. “I’m focused,” I whispered, worried that I would lose balance in the mental tightrope that focusing my presence like this seemed to require.

“If you have the mental capacity to speak, you’re not focused enough,” Holly gently scolded me. “Go deeper, if you can. Focus only on your hand and my voice.”

I did my best. I shut out the feeling of my clothes on my skin, the slight pressure of sitting on the floor. I closed my eyes and tried to set aside even the light that filtered through my eyelids. I tried to blot out everything there was, and... was doing so, with some success!

“When you have a perfect focus, your mind is like the tip of a arrow.”

I could still hear Holly’s voice encouraging me, but it wasn’t coming through my ears, now.

“The full power of your thoughts and will and soul all brought to bear on a single point.”

There were no ears, there was no body to bear them, there was no Quinn to use them.

“An arrow can pierce plate armor, with sufficient force.”

All there was was a small patch of space containing 0.01 pounds of air vibrating in patterns corresponding to the voice of my best friend

“When the force of your whole self is arrayed such, how could the universe break as well?”

and that air was made of 1.19 moles of nitrogen and 0.28 moles of oxygen and and trace amount of argon and carbon dioxide and

“So thrust your mind forward, pierce through all that says reality must be static...”

and Holly’s voice was layered over lesser patterns of shockwaves that matched up to the sounds of two people breathing and a radiator humming and a dog barking in the distance and

“...and let there be light.”

and there was light.

The sudden burst of light was blindingly bright and completely knocked me off the razor’s edge of my focus. Even through my closed eyes, it was incredibly bright - enough that I could feel an instant of warmth on my skin, enough that I was blinking and trying to regain my sight. Holly swore in pain, diving back and rubbing at her own eyes.

“Well, I think we can call that a success,” she declared when our sights had returned. “That definitely works for you. Maybe even a bit too well,” she joked, offering me a hand up.

“I think I might have gone too deep,” I agreed. “I may need to learn restraint.”

“Hey, it’s an effective flashbang,” she pointed out. “Well, the flash part, anyway. All you have to do is practice enough to pull it off without spending fifteen minutes build up to it.”

I paused. “Fifteen minutes?”

“Yeah. Lost track of time?”

“Completely,” I admitted.

“Pretty common when you’re putting together a new spell,” she promised me. “But you’ve clearly got a knack for this. Most people take way longer to find their method of casting.”

I shrugged. “I guess. How long does it usually take to get a spell to be quicker and easier?”

She shrugged. “Depends on how complex the spell is, depends how much you practice it, depends how much practice you have in general. I can usually put together a new construct in a day or two if it’s something simple, like... I dunno, a baseball... but the more complex it is, the longer it takes. The earpieces took two and a half years to get down to a usable 30 seconds, and I could probably cut the casting time further.”

“How long for me?” I clarified.

“For you? No clue, sorry,” she said apologetically. “But... probably a while. you’re not going to have a ton of time to mess with magic now that you’re doing school and heroing. And while you picked it up really quickly, you are a complete novice.”

“That’s true,” I said, deflating.

“It’s a pretty simple spell, though... maybe a month, if you find time to practice for fifteen minutes or half an hour every day? Whatever you pick next will probably come faster,” she promised.

“Great!” I grinned at her, feeling better. After a moment, I tried to school my face into something more serious. “I really do appreciate... everything,” I told her. “I know that... I probably seem like a bit of a shitty friend, putting all this on you so soon after we met-”

“Stop it,” Holly told me sternly. “Don’t worry about ‘putting this on me’ or whatever bullcrap. You didn’t ask for this to happen. You need support and I’m giving it to you, that’s all there is to it.” She smiled. “You’d do the same for me, right?”

I smiled back. “Yeah, of course,” I promised.

“Then don’t beat yourself up about it.” She leaned towards me a little then, as though changing her mind about something, pulled back and took my hand in hers instead. “Now let’s get this stuff back to the Compound.”