Helen

As a rule, Principal Neilson and I got along quite well.  He respected and encouraged my Würd as a magebane and monster slayer.  Of course, magebanes can be the greatest villains as well as heroes and he expected total disciple from me.  But since I’m an eternal teenage discipline was an impossibility. 

“But without discipline your Würd will dominate you instead of the other way around,” he said.  I sat in his office struggling not to roll my eyes and somehow succeeding.   “You’re too young to understand how dangerous a Würd can be.  On the one hand, it’s the best you can be; on the other, it’s the worse.  My Würd is as a teacher—my ability to enforce oaths upon students makes me an ideal principal.  But my Würd turned evil might be as, well, say a mob boss, exacting oaths of loyalty from favor-seeking people for my own nefarious ends.”

Cooool! I thought.  If that had been meant to get my attention, it did, but my attention flew away just as quickly.  A mob boss who could accept oaths that could be enforced at any time.  Father would love it.  Father must have done it.  No, wait…  Wasn’t that actually Qayin’s power? 

Anyway, I started thinking that the next plane I found should support just such a talent.  There, I could imagine myself as an up and coming wise guy (gal?) and have a powerful mob boss who might just look like Nielson but who had a special fondness for me.  Or maybe I’d make that mob boss my father and I’d be his daughter and potential heir.  The problem with that kind of an arrangement, I knew, was that my real father, or even a brother, could usurp that position and have some fun at my expense.  But sometimes that was even more fun than just—

“Ms. Eden!” Nielson shouted.  I gaped at him.

“I think you aren’t taking this incident as seriously as you ought,” he said.  “A young man is in the hospital because of your inattentiveness.  Now at first I found this inexplicable but now I’m begging to think you’re making a habit of letting your concentration slip.”

“Oh, no sir,” I said.  I must have zoned and I wondered what he said while my mind was out?  “Will Carl be all right.”

“We hope so,” he said, but his voice sounded dubious.

Oh, oh.  “It’s just broken, right?”

“The bone was shattered.  You know how hard it can be to reassemble constituent parts into a whole.”  That wasn’t a nice comment but I bit back a smart reply.  “The problem seems to be—”

And I zoned out again!

This time, though, it was because of what my sister Démia rather annoyingly calls Transplaner Quasi-substantial Projection (TQSPs): we create a flicker-State in a plane and invite another Coreal to share in that place and moment.  For an hour (or a day or two), our minds inhabit quasi-substantial bodies and we can communicate at leisure with friends.  It’s fairly safe: wielding any aggressive superhuman power is difficult since the quasi-substantial body will rip apart.  The worst part was that time differential between planes varies and since you only leave your plane of origin mentally, well, you can spend an hour projecting and when you finish and wake up, you might find that your friends in your plane of origin have hospitalized you.  “Your eyes have been completely vacant for four weeks!” they’ll say.  Fortunately, we can discern time differential and decide whether or not to join the projection.  In this case, the time differential was fine, even wonderful.  An hour would only be a minute.  Great.  But if I zoned out for even another minute, Nielson would throw a hissy fit.  Besides, I didn’t want this call since I knew some family elder was planning to send me off looking for the new addition to our family. Fuck that.

I ignored the call and gave Principal Nielson my full attention. 

But his mouth was slammed shut.  Short, balding, overweight, Nielson suffered from the yellow teeth that come from too many rich magical foods and not enough magical cleaning.  Nielson wasn’t the kind of man who should intimidate.  He did anyway.

I was in big trouble.  “Ah, sorry about that.  I just felt a large flow of magic.  That’s what happened during magic class.”

“And why didn’t I feel this big flow of magic?  Or Mr. Butterfield?”

“Because you are a Provincial twit incapable of sensing the fundamental energies that course between the planes while I’m a Regal who belongs to the first family of the universe.”  That’s what I wanted to say.

Instead, I relied on the oddly articulate, “Umm…”  This interjection, leading as it does to an adult filling in the words for the kid, serves me rather well. 

Not this time.

“I think I’m going to order you to wear a power suspension ring.”

Yikes!  “But Mr. Nielson…”

“I realize that may have an unpredictable effect on your powers but I think you’ve earned a little inconvenience, don’t you?”

“But…”

“I’ve already talked about this matter with your parents.  They’ve agreed that should I feel this step is necessary, I can take it.”

“Then you haven’t decided yet,” I said, my brains now flying back into my ear-holes .

“Well…”

“Mr. Nielson,” I said, in my most serious adult voice (in which I sound like a teenager trying to sound serious), “My powers randomly spiked and I lost control of the staff.  How on earth could anyone predict a transmogrification result?  It’s not something I could repeat in a billion years.  In fact, it’s such an improbable result that I suspect the staff might have been tampered with.  Maybe I should ask for an examination of it though by now any spell cast on it could have been removed.”

“But who…”

“And while it’s true I do have lapses in concentration, my grades show this must be rare.  Nor would coach Thompson have made me the football team’s quarterback if I had such poor concentration.”  This was a pointed way of reminding him that he would have to explain a decision that benches me to the coach and to a host of football loving fathers who knew a good quarterback when the saw one (I was 5-1 as a starter).

“I suppose that’s all true…”

“And my power does disrupt spells, of course.  I’m sure whatever I did to Carl’s arm—not the actual break but the disruption that has limited the healer’s powers—will fade in time.  I point out that my quick actions helped prevent a dangerous, maybe even fatal, transmogrification into a frog.”

“I doubt it would have been fatal,” Nielson said. 

“I actually meant fatal to his social calendar,” I said, with my brightest, toothiest, cutest smile.

He chuckled.  “And what’s a third string receiver compared to the school’s starting quarterback?”

Yikes again!  He was on to me.  How did he get on to me?  That was the best smile from a face that has launched a thousand quips.

“Principal Nielson, I assure you—” That’s what I was saying one second.  The next second I said, “What the fuck are you doing?”