Elijah looked over all the photos he’d taken of the bookshelves and stacks of books, checking for more magical books, and spotted one more. Looking up which room that photo was taken in, he went there and took it to Casey, who handled it for several minutes without it changing. Elijah took it back and put it with the others.
The first thing Elijah tried to help Casey learn magic was to type out the first chapter into a document on his computer. It turned out that Casey couldn’t read that, either; it looked like gibberish to him. To test it more thoroughly, he tried copying a page longhand in a spiral-bound notebook, which gave similar results. “It looks like that same weird alphabet the book’s printed in,” Casey said.
After that, he was at a loss. The only thing he could think of to do was to keep practicing these spells until chapter two decrypted and he could advance a bit further in his studies. By the Saturday evening of the following week, he found he could read chapter two, which had new spells in the energy-manipulation, information-manipulation and flesh magic fields. The first would let him levitate small objects and move them with his mind while the spell lasted; it said he would gradually be able to manipulate larger objects for longer periods with more practice. The second would help him find lost objects, if they were within a certain range. And the third would remove unwanted hair. He stared at it in consternation. Another spell that wasn’t any use for a man, although he supposed if he were a woman, it would be more convenient for removing armpit and leg hair than waxing or shaving… Did this have something to do with the “Miss Hudnall” on page one? He turned back to the introduction and looked again at the strange title of address, blushing at the idea of being a woman.
He started with the telekinesis spell, which took more tries to cast correctly than any of the spells in chapter one. But eventually he was able to levitate a nickel and “carry” it around while he went about getting ready for bed. By the time he laid down, he had the nickel orbiting his head and doing cool aerial maneuvers. He was delighted; telekinesis had always seemed like one of the coolest super powers, a close second to shapeshifting.
Sunday morning, he was tempted to practice the levitation spell some more, but he remembered he hadn’t read the Bible first thing in the morning for several days, and felt guilty about that. He turned to the gospel of Luke, which the pastor had been preaching out of for the last few Sundays, and read the next chapter after the text of last Sunday’s sermon while he ate breakfast.
After church, he used the restroom before the half-hour drive back to the house. As he was washing and drying his hands, he noticed the hair on his hands and arms, and thought of the spell for removing hair. He told himself he didn’t really want to remove any of his hair, but of course he would have to cast that spell several times if he wanted to decrypt chapter three, wouldn’t he? He wasn’t sure what the criteria were, but he’d mastered all of the spells from chapter one before chapter two had become readable. Would he get stuck entirely if he ran into a spell he refused to use, like mind control or putting a bad luck curse on someone? Could he make up for that by practicing the other new spells extra?
He put off the decision about the hair removal spell, although his mind kept coming back to it, and thought about the spell to find lost objects. The problem was that he hadn’t been living at Casey’s house long enough to lose anything. But the spell description didn’t specifically say the lost objects had to have been lost by the caster, did it? Maybe he could find something Casey had lost. He told Casey about the spell at lunch and asked if he had lost anything there at the house.
Casey frowned. “There is one thing I haven’t seen since I moved in,” he said. “This book I was in the middle of reading before I moved, a collection of short stories by Poul Anderson. I can’t remember the title, and I can’t be sure I didn’t leave it at my parents’ house, or worse, somewhere at Duke, so it would be out of the range of the spell.”
“I’ll give it a try,” Elijah said. He couldn’t remember noticing any Poul Anderson books while he was surveying the library or cataloguing the books in his office; Mr. Taggart had owned some fantasy and science fiction (such as the Oz books), but mostly his fiction tastes seemed to run to nineteenth-century classics and detective stories.
For the first couple of days after Elijah showed him the book and the light spell, Casey had wanted to sit in and watch every time Elijah practiced his magic. But after being bored once too often while Elijah cast the same spell over and over, or tried the hair and nail growth spell multiple times between successful castings, he’d told Elijah to just tell him whenever he mastered a spell and could demonstrate it without needing several tries. Casey went to take a nap after lunch, while Elijah tried casting the lost objects spell, holding the little bit of information he had about the book in mind. When he got to the twelfth try without any success, he started to wonder if the book was out of range, or if he just didn’t know enough about the book to cast the spell correctly.
He tried looking up Poul Anderson’s bibliography online, and was daunted by the number of short story collections the man had published in his lifetime, with more after he died. If he had to recast the spell multiple times for each title on the list, it would take days… He decided he’d show the list to Casey later and see if it jogged his memory.
Instead, he tried with an even vaguer goal in mind, just to procrastinate on trying out the hair-removal spell (which he couldn’t stop thinking about – that, and trying the hair growth spell again). I want to find the last thing Eugene Taggart lost in this house before he died, he thought while casting the spell for the thirteenth time, and all the futile practice on the Anderson book must have done him some good, because he was immediately struck with the conviction that something had fallen down behind the desk in his office.
He wasn’t sure he could extract whatever it was without Casey’s help to move the desk, but he crawled under the desk and felt around in the narrow space between the desk drawers and the wall, as far as he could reach. Behind one set of drawers he found nothing but dust bunnies, but behind the other he could barely touch something that felt like a sheet of paper. He couldn’t quite reach far enough to get a grip on it, and indeed his attempts just pushed it beyond his reach. So he cast the levitation spell on it and pulled it toward him. It turned out to be a year-old investment account statement; he whistled at the amount of money in the account and the size of some of the transactions.
He put it on on Casey’s desk with a post-it note, and decided that a nap sounded good about now.
Later Sunday evening, he talked with Casey about his find, and showed Casey the Poul Anderson bibliography just in case. “Though I’m pretty sure the book is at your parents’ house, or anyway out of range – I found those papers with a much vaguer goal than I had with your book.”
“Oh, this is the one,” Casey said, scrolling down the list. “The Unicorn Trade – oh, and it’s a collaboration with his wife Karen. I forgot about that.”
“Huh, maybe that messed up the spell. Let me give it a try.” He picked up the spellbook and tried the spell again, this time using the title and full byline. He still couldn’t find it, but this time he got a conviction that the book was outside the spell’s range. He told Casey what he’d found out.
“Well, great – at least I know to look for it next time I visit my parents. Say, what was the third spell in this chapter?”
Elijah blushed and glanced away. “Uh, it’s for removing unwanted body hair.”
Casey looked very interested when Elijah glanced back. “Does it work on anybody or just the caster?”
“I think just the caster – I’ll have to look again to check.” He wondered what hair Casey wanted removed while he read the spell description again. “Yeah, sorry, it only works on me. I’ll let you know if I get one that works on other people, okay?”
Casey looked disappointed, but nodded. “Sure. Let me know when you unlock the next chapter, okay?”
Monday morning, some men arrived and started digging a trench along the side of the driveway to put in a fiber line. They continued working on it for several days, threading the line through the walls of the house on Wednesday, which required moving some shelves out from the walls of a couple of rooms temporarily.
Monday evening, after a day of cataloguing and reshelving books, Elijah finally tried the hair removal spell. He decided to cast it on his chest hair, since it wouldn’t show unless he went swimming later in the summer – and maybe it would grow back by then? But after he got a patch of hair to disappear on his fifth try, and extended the hairless area to cover most of his chest on subsequent attempts, he decided he actually liked the way it looked, and started hoping it wouldn’t grow back any time soon. (He still didn’t know if it worked like shaving or waxing or what. It looked and felt smoother than a shave could easily be, but that wasn’t proof.)
He had to work to resist the inclination to try it on his arms and armpits. Instead, he practiced the levitation spell a couple of more times before bed.
Tuesday, he practiced the levitation spell over and over, keeping a coin or paper clip hovering near him while he catalogued and reshelved books. He had started moving fiction by authors with “A” or “B” names to the shelf to the left of his bed, and removing the scattered nonfiction from his room to the living room to make room for them. By the end of the day, he was able to lift larger objects, including a slim chapbook of poetry.
By Thursday morning, he had succumbed to temptation and removed his facial hair, his armpit hair, and all the hair that would be covered by shorts. He was at a loss for how to practice the finding spell for a couple of days, having found two more items Mr. Taggart had lost before he died and then been unable to get any more results. Then he hit upon the idea of tossing up a handful of small coins in the air while closing his eyes and spinning in place. With the finding spell, he was able to find them wherever in the room they’d fallen or rolled to. Not long after supper, after casting the lost objects spell a few more times, he found that he had unlocked the third chapter.
Before he started working through the theory part of the chapter, he glanced ahead and looked at the spells. He stared in consternation. There was another flesh magic spell, this one to improve one’s complexion – smoothen skin, remove moles or scars, and so on. He supposed he had a few acne scars he wouldn’t mind getting rid of, but why was the book – or the “editors” – giving him so many spells like this? He was pretty sure he wasn’t vain – certainly not about his appearance – though he knew he had a horrible tendency to be proud of his intellectual abilities. If he had a way to contact the editors, he’d tell them “Look, I’m Mr. Hudnall, not Miss Hudnall, and I don’t need any more beauty or hair care spells. Enough! More information magic, please.”
Because there were no information magic spells in this chapter. He’d gotten a third energy manipulation spell, which would suppress sound within a few yards of him for half an hour. He wouldn’t be able to speak or hear, nor would his footsteps or other motions make any sound until the spell wore off – or was dispelled.
And he’d finally gotten his first spell in the field of meta magic. This one allowed him to interrupt another spell in progress before it ran its natural course, but only if he’d cast it himself – it wouldn’t work on spells cast by other people. Not that he had any spells cast by other people to test it with, but he figured he could practice it with the light spell, the levitation spell, and the sound-suppressing spell.
He told Casey about the new spells before he went to bed, though he glossed over the complexion spell and made it sound like it was just for removing scars. That backfired a couple of days later when he started practicing the “scar removal” spell and, once he got it working, made his whole face look surprisingly different. Casey noticed right away.
“That spell is pretty amazing,” he said. “You look good… Are you sure it just removed your acne scars?”
Elijah blushed and mumbled something about “complexion,” and Casey nodded.
“Well, if you figure out how to cast it on other people, let me know.”
A couple of people at church noticed, too. Sarah, one of the grad students who was staying in town over the summer, complimented him and asked him what kind of skin treatment he’d been using. He stammered and made something up about it being a lotion his fiancee had recommended, he couldn’t remember the name of it.
“Does it work on anybody or just the caster?”
poor girl, hopefully she'll get some spells that work on you soon xD
An egg in denial and a transgirl in yearning.
a close second to shapeshifting
Thanks for the chapter.
But after being bored once too often while Casey cast the same spell over
while Elijah
Fixed, thanks.