When Norman woke up, he found he had passed out on the couch. It hadn’t been the first time he had slept on the broken thing and probably wouldn’t be the last either. He just didn’t remember falling asleep. The last thing he remembered was taking a huge hit off the bong and laughing it up with Toby.

Perhaps he was getting too old for this lifestyle? Nah, he must have just been tired.

Norman might have been more concerned about falling asleep while partying with his friend but after a quick stretch, he felt great. In fact, this had probably been the best sleep he had had in a long time.

“The magic of the couch strikes again,” he patted the worn arm of the couch which produced a puff of dust.

Norman sneezed and waved the cloud of dust away from his face. Despite the look of the couch, it sure beat the nights when he slept upstairs in his bed. Which might seem contradictory but it was true. When he slept on the couch, he didn’t suffer from sleep paralysis. The demon would always stand in the doorway to his room and just stare at him. Either that or the demon was some remnant hallucination brought on from years of acid use.

Unexpected trips were a real thing and not at all fun. It’s one of the reasons Norman stayed away from acid these days.

It seemed Toby had left sometime during the night. Not that Norman was all that surprised. He would have bounced too if his friend had up and passed out on him. Norman did check his face in a mirror though.

“God dammit,” he sighed. Yup, Toby had drawn a dick on his forehead in black marker. It took Norman a good hour and a lot of rubbing alcohol to remove the marker. If he looked close enough though, he could still see the faint outline.

“Ballcap or bandana day I guess.”

Norman glanced at the table near the sofa. It seemed Toby had either finished off the rest of the weed or had taken it with him when he left. Norman was a bit bummed about that but he had taken enough days off, it was time to get back to work figuring out this magic shit.

“Now where did I put that notebook?” Norman had to root around the destroyed living room – tossing aside plates, clothes, and garbage – for twenty minutes until he found the stupid thing sitting under his weed scale on the table.

He brushed the ash off the notebook and took it into the kitchen. His fancy new grimoire still sat in the plastic bag hanging from the side of one of his chairs. He pulled it out and opened it up.

It was time to transfer some of his working knowledge into the tome. Before he could get started,  his stomach rumbled in protest. “Cereal first, then transferring spells.”

Norman packed away the bowl of cereal in record time. He was starving and antsy to get to work.

The first magic that went in the book was the potion recipe. While it wasn’t a spell, per se, Norman wasn’t about to leave something so beneficial out of his grimoire. He even added notes at the bottom for the alternate ingredients that could be used to make a weaker version if needed. Norman still left out the name of the special ingredient, just marking it as a ‘secret ingredient’, he wasn’t likely to forget what that was any time soon.

He had been tempted to write everything in a coded cipher within the book but Norman didn’t know any. He also didn’t want to have to decode the stupid book every time he wanted to reference a spell he hadn’t used in a long time.

 

It wasn’t until Norman was transferring the soul-reading spell – Norman decided to name it Glimpse from Beyond – over that he felt something was off. He kept going though, knowing the spell worked and not understanding why he felt off.

When Norman got to the soul communion spell, he paused. Not because he felt it was right or wrong, but because the feeling in the back of his head was missing entirely.

“No, no, no!”

Norman frantically flipped to the bone wall spell page. Again there was no feeling whatsoever when he looked at the design. Starting to panic, Norman flipped through every single page of his old notebook until he ran out of spells.

Not a single one of the spells in his notebook tickled that feeling in his mind.

Norman started to hyperventilate. Had he been on one long drug-induced bender and imagined everything? No, no, no. Not even acid or shrooms had that sort of duration.

Was he under the effects of some weird spell?

Norman quickly dismissed that as a plausible explanation. He knew the spells worked, he had proof. That proof was in his cubby, one which Norman ran toward and yanked open. Everything was still there and he let out a small sigh of relief. Norman even unwrapped the bone and stared at the glowing sigil which helped calm his nerves and racing mind.

Gently he put the item back in the cubby before sitting back down at the kitchen table and staring off into nothing as he pondered what could have changed.

Thinking out loud, Norman worked backward to try and figure out what happened.

“Ok, the last time I felt it was when I made the bone wall.” He scratched his face trying to recall how it had felt. “The feeling was weaker, I’m sure of it.” At the time he chalked that up to the spell being not ideal. But Norman hadn’t changed anything about the spell, it just worked. If it hadn’t been ideal, he should have had to alter it at least a bit.

That was also the same day he had summoned the ghost, but other than feeling that the spell wasn’t quite right, he felt like it would work.

Did that mean his spells had some sort of internal component that got used up? He did cast quite a few spells that day. But that didn’t fit quite right either.

Surely if Norman had a mana pool, for lack of a better term, it would have recovered after three days of rest. Unless.

Norman groaned, grabbing the side of his head in both hands. “Unless humans can’t naturally generate this mana.”

It answered a lot of questions Norman had been wondering about. Why the magical items from the Jorik didn’t work for humans, why humans weren’t able to cast Jorik spells, etc.

But humans could cast spells. How were they getting this magical energy then?

The first thought that came to Norman was that they were pulling it from the atmosphere. It made a certain sort of sense for the elemental magics. Water, wind, earth, fire. By their powers combined, they are bullshit.

That might – and he put a heaping dose of skepticism on that might – explain their magic. But what about that witch, or that weird Jedi mind-control kid?

Norman highly doubted there was mind mana floating about waiting to be used. No, somehow they figured out how to tap into mana or produce it internally. Just…like…him.

He turned and looked at his cubby, picturing the bottles of Jorik blood hidden within.

“It all started after getting exposed to the blood.” And not the stuff he inhaled, but the bit that landed on his foot. It wasn’t that far-fetched to absorb an unknown substance through the skin. He had an ugly red welt that was left behind for days after the fact to prove something had irritated that location.

Ok, that answered his problem… probably. The blood saturated his body with its magical mojo but the effects had worn off over time. Seemed like a plausible hypothesis.

But how are other people casting magic if it requires an internal reservoir? He doubted they were draining Jorik’s to use as human batteries like he was. Were they just genetically gifted?

While Norman had no evidence to back up this conjecture, he thought it was the most likely case. It would explain the extremely slow uptake in magical potential from humans. It also seemed to be a rare genetic feature seeing as very few people – even after two years – seemed capable of performing magic.

That meant Norman got shafted on the genetic lottery as well – the story of his life – but not entirely. “Maybe it’s a spectrum and not a simple you have it or you don’t.” He scratched his chin in thought, grimacing at the scraggly beard that had grown over the last few days.

That fit. If Norman didn’t have this gene or whatever it was, he would have never been able to produce his first amplified potion. His special ingredient contained the original magical base to “enhance” it.

‘Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth if rubbing one out drained your magical energy?’

Norman chuckled at that thought, but somehow he doubted that was the case. Otherwise, he was certain the Jedi kid would have drained himself dry quite quickly if that were the case, considering he was building a harem.

That meant either genetic or environmental factors. Probably a combination of the two. Norman imagined people were like batteries, slowly charging but able to hold a limited amount of magical energy. He had no way to prove this considering how tight-lipped anyone capable of magic was, but it fits with everything he currently knew.

What did that make him then? A capacitor? He figured that was the closest approximation. He had been able to absorb all of the stored magical energy within the Jorik blood but if he didn’t use it, it leaked away.

Norman rubbed his temples as a headache was beginning to form behind his eyes. If he was right, it was going to suck. If he was wrong, it was still going to suck.

With nothing left to do but to try it and see, Norman got up and retrieved a bottle of the magical powder.

He tapped out a tiny bit on a small mirror. Norman sat there looking at the substance on the mirror for a few minutes before deciding the best way to ingest it. Norman decided that snorting it was out of the question. He didn’t want that shit up his nose.

Then again he didn’t want it anywhere near his body but it seemed he had no choice there. And he wasn’t sure that leaving it on his skin would work. He had already had it on his fingers and nothing happened. That left the same way he ingested it in the garage.

“Fuck.”

Gathering his courage, Norman licked his finger and covered the tip in the powder. It immediately began to tingle unpleasantly. Norman lay down on the floor and took a deep breath.

“You can do this,” he told himself.

Norman opened his mouth and before he could second guess his actions, rubbed the blue substance along his upper lip and gum.

The effect was nearly instantaneous but far different than his previous experience.

Instead of immediately blacking out, it felt like Norman had ingested the world's hottest pepper. That was the easy part. Next came a screaming pain along his entire nervous system, like someone had peeled his skin away and dipped his exposed nerves in lemon juice.

Norman’s entire body shook, but he was unable to scream as his tongue and throat felt like someone was taking a blowtorch to them. He could only rasp out a hoarse squeal as the pain moved from his nerves into his muscles, making his entire body convulse and spasm.

The experience was akin to someone beating the ever-living hell out of him but selectively targeting every single muscle fiber on his body.

While this was happening, Norman’s mind was screaming and wondering why he wasn’t unconscious.

Then the painful heat moved to Norman’s bones to subject him to a new form of torment that nobody should have to experience. It felt like someone had shattered each and every bone into a fine sharpened powder that ground against his abused muscles and sent waves of agony through all of his nerves and straight into his mind like spikes of white-hot fire. Somehow through this agony, Norman managed to turn on his side and let loose a torrent of vomit.

Right before Norman passed out from the pain, he saw the word ‘wow’ spelled out in the regurgitated cereal.

Waking up after the experience was an effort of will that Norman almost refused, he felt way worse than he did the first time he went through this process. Then again, that had only been an accident caused by inhaling a tiny fraction of the blue powder.

Norman should have known better than to go full dose with something so unknown and unstable. You work your way up to that shit or you’re liable to end up dead. It was too late to go back and slap some common sense into his past self though.

This hadn’t been the first time Norman overdosed and that’s exactly what it was. But this experience made those previous times look minor in comparison.

This was going to be a problem though. Norman always stopped taking drugs after the first time he overdosed on them. Only a fool or an addict would continue to suck down drugs that almost killed them. Norman liked a good time, not a near-death experience. But if this magic power wore off, he was going to have to repeat this process again.

Norman decided he was going to work through his notebook as quickly as possible to determine which of his spells worked. If he could figure out all of his working spells, and they were tested, he wouldn’t need that internal reservoir of power. Or so he hoped.

All his spells so far used the magical powder as a substitute and the only thing he used that power for was that feeling in the back of his mind. It might be nice to be able to use the magical items the Jorik had – another thing he would have to test – but it wasn’t worth this pain.