“Heave… ho.” I breathed a sigh of relief as I dropped my suitcase on the floor of Danielle’s guest room. I immediately went to deploy my laptop on the bed — I needed to get the connection to the supercomputer back at work up and running fast. Just a matter of asking Danielle for the wifi password, I supposed.

The room was, for lack of a better word, roomy. What little space was used by furniture served mainly as shelf room for the leftover knicks and knacks of Danielle’s past interests. Half-empty tubes of paint here, knitting needles still attached to a single sleeve there; she struggled with the notion of a one true calling in a way I couldn’t relate to.

I considered getting my clothes out of my luggage too, but that wasn’t what had brought me here. For now, I armed myself with my spellbook, a pencil and my tablet, and headed back to the living room.

“So how’s the room?” Danielle asked from the couch, putting her phone back in her pocket. Frankie was sitting on her lap, getting caresses behind his ears.

“Adequate,” I replied, sitting by their side. “There’s a lot of your stuff left in there.” I flipped to the end of my spellbook, where I had put on paper the Leitmotiv I had invented for Frankie one month ago. Since just staring at it wasn’t helping me decipher where it had gone wrong, I had opted for my next plan to be reverse-engineering it bit by bit. 

“I do kind of use it as a storage room, yeah… Well, that’s life in a flat. You make do with the space you have.” She moved her hand down to the kitty’s back. Any other cat and the room would be saturated with purrs by now.

Every mage had a different thing they liked to liken magic to. For many of my colleagues and the teachers I’ve had, it was programming, or their native language. But to me, with how musical magic was, there was no reason to go for any comparison but music itself. It completely eliminated the risk of a mistake in translation, after all; though on the flip side, it was a lot of information to keep in mind at once, especially with how thoroughly you needed to look out for any unintended interaction. With the whole spell translated to code or into a sentence, it was easy to spot what was wrong, but the translation was the hard part, with too much of a risk of some interaction or another being missed. With the melody itself, the spell was entirely laid out as it was, but keeping track of how each element could potentially change the meaning of any other was like looking at a big corkboard covered in strings.

And that was about the structure that quickly started to cover my spellbook’s page. I pulled apart each facet of the musical tapestry of the Leitmotiv, drew the interaction lines between each of them — even the order of the notes itself could change what their effect was, and therefore had to be written down. The end result was about three or four times the amount of each component of the melody being written down, sometimes alone, sometimes as a unit. Nothing short of that level of accuracy would suffice.

“Wow,” Danielle said, looking over my shoulder, “that looks… structured. And complicated.”

“It’s got to be if I want to track down the problem.” I flipped my pencil in my hand and tapped at the terminator with the eraser. “See those three notes? This is a specific element that ends every effect of the spell the moment magic energy stops flowing in, no questions asked. There are a couple edge cases where it won’t work, but nothing in the rest of my spell makes me think I’d have created such a situation. Not to mention we’ve already checked and there’s no spell on Frankie right now. So this part is probably not at fault.”

“That’s good, right? You can cross it off, or something.”

“No. Its presence does have an effect on other elements of the spell,” I gestured along each connection I’ve drawn to other aspects of the melody, “so I have to keep it in a corner of my mind if I want the full picture.”

She took on a concerned look. “All by yourself?”

Her question actually did remind me of something I could be doing. “Usually yes, but…” I stuck the pencil in as a bookmark and flipped back through my grimoire until I found ‘Enhance Short Term Memory’. I continued explaining as I took out my flute. “I don’t usually use those types of spell because they come with the risk of overworking your brain, if you get what I mean by that? Thinking harder and faster is good when you need it, but the killer headache afterwards is not fun. And even at work I can rely on other people to help.” ‘But with this being more personal…’, I kept unsaid. Still, I quickly enchanted myself and smiled at her to quell her worries. “I know what I’m doing. I’m in control of the situation.”

She glanced at me for one last moment, before turning her attention back to the kitty.

I downed an aspirin and a glass of water and sat back on the couch, feeling nauseous. I tucked my legs under my butt and sighed.

I won’t say that had been fruitless, but I certainly didn’t feel any closer to an answer. I had pulled apart the spell in all its details and genuinely couldn’t understand what had been the problem. I’d done everything right the first time around. It was set to dispel itself, I’d scaled it down appropriately. Either some element I had used had a property that had gone unnoticed until now, or the fault wasn’t on magic.

A mewl to my side grabbed my attention. Frankie was looking at me, sniffing the air. I gave him a pet on the head, and followed it by a scritch of the chin. His head leaned forward under my touch, before he pushed himself off and jumped off the couch. He trotted to his buttons and spent about ten seconds considering them. He hovered his paw over one, placed it back down, targeted another, and pressed it. “Hello!” 

“Hello to you too—” I started, before noticing he was still searching through his words.

He circled his little corner a few times before meowing twice.

“What word do you want Frankie baby?” Danielle said, switching her attention off her phone and placing it down on the couch.

Frankie came back towards us. Towards… me.

“Oh.” I gulped.

“Well, if you’re here to stay a while, it only makes sense to!” Danielle cheered, getting up. “One new button for my baby boy with your name on it, J—”

“The mage. Make it say ‘the mage’,” I interrupted.

Danielle turned her head to me, frowning and raising an eyebrow. “Sssure,” she snarled, walking off to the entrance.

I shrank in my seat a bit, knowing I’d disappointed her.

She grabbed a new button out of the box on the shelf. “The mage,” she growled into it, rolling her eyes. Then she placed it down next to Frankie.

Frankie pressed it. “The mage,” it said, with the same sneering attitude Danielle had given me. He moved to another button. “Hello!” it cheered. “The mage,” it complained. “Hello!” Happy. “The mage.” Irritated.

Danielle sat back down next to me and grabbed her phone, keeping her eyes on scrolling through social media. “Have you seriously been shirking that off this entire time?”

I glanced away, twisting my thumb in my hand.

“Mom!” “Give.” “Food!” rang out from the other side of the room.

“In an hour, Frankie baby,” she replied. 

I gladly turned my attention back to the kitty.

He walked circles around the living room, before going back to his buttons. “Arlinn!” “Is.” “Where?”

“I think he left his bee in the bedroom.” Danielle got back up, and made a point of walking past me. “Be right back.”

“Are the verb buttons new?” I asked.

Danielle ignored me, walking into her room and closing the door.

I decided that now was the right time to go take care of my luggage and silently made my escape.