The Second Wish (Yes, Master Book 2)

by Simon Archer

  When I got to the kitchen, it was surprisingly empty. I called out for the girls just before I heard them giggle from across the foyer. I walked myself to the living room and saw the two of them sitting on the floor with a chessboard between them. Andi had the knight game piece in her hand and proceeded to slam it into Vila’s pawn so hard the pawn went flying across the room. The girls giggled even louder.

  “I didn’t know either of you played chess, and I certainly didn’t assume it would be so violent if you did!” I laughed. I sat on the couch in front of where they were playing and leaned over to watch more.

  “Of course, we play chess, silly!” Andi commented.

  “It is an ancient game, after all,” Vila added.

  “Yeah, ancient. That’s why Vila had to teach me. She was around when they thought it up!” Andi teased her.

  “You just called me old!” Vila squealed in mock-offense. “Look who’s talking, Miss ‘I was already old before I became a genie!’”

  “At least I was out of a training bra!” Andi shot back, sticking her chest out and her nose in the air.

  “I am not that young! And my chest is bigger than yours, anyway!” Vila protested and stuck her chest out as well.

  “In your young little dreams, maybe!” Andi countered.

  “You just dream of getting your youth back so you can look anywhere near as good as I do!” Vila tried to stick her tongue out at Andi, but she was laughing too hard. Andi turned and looked at me.

  “You see, the only reason Vila plays chess and tries to get a checkmate is because she missed her opportunity to sidle up next to a rich royal because she wasn’t of marriageable age yet when she was sent to the lamp,” Andi said to me, joking with Vila.

  “Excuse me,” Vila huffed. “I was most certainly well over age! Marriageable age was like twelve where I was from!” Andi opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out. She tilted her head and looked up out of the corner of her eyes. She looked back to Vila and shrugged.

  “You have a point there,” she said before busting up laughing again. “It was twelve where I was from too!”

  “Ladies, ladies,” I added myself to the conversation. “Let me assure you that neither of you is too old. Neither of you is too young. And, both of you have amazing chests!”

  “Aww, that’s sweet!” Vila said sarcastically. “But thanks for taking her side!”

  “What?” I wasn’t tracking with her thinking suddenly.

  “You said Andi has an amazing chest. Andi said she had an amazing chest too! You’re taking her side!” Vila crossed her arms and pretended to pout while trying her best to keep a straight face.

  “No! He took your side!” Andi called out. She looked at me and scowled sarcastically. “You said she wasn’t too young. She said she wasn’t too young! You took her side!”

  “Umm…” I knew they were messing with me, but technically, neither was wrong. The two of them took to staring directly at me, waiting for a tie-breaker response until they couldn’t keep their laughter in any longer. They started laughing so hard they rolled backward on their backs and were holding their stomachs.

  “You should’ve… seen… your face,” Andi said when she could catch her breath between laughs.

  “He looked… like he wanted to… run away!” Vila could barely talk through her laughter as well. I stayed stiff as a board and fell sideways onto the couch, grabbed a pillow, and covered my head. The girls laughed even harder.

  “Stop… have to stop,” Andi tried to talk.

  “My face… hurts,” Vila was still failing to speak also. I stayed hidden like an ostrich with my head under the pillow until they had calmed enough to breathe properly. Then I lifted the pillow slightly and peeked one eye out.

  “Is it safe? I heard hyenas,” I joked.

  “Yeah, it’s safe,” Andi giggled. Both she and Vila were still breathing hard, trying to completely catch their breath.

  “Are you sure?” I asked again, peering one out at Vila.

  “Yes, yes. You can come out. Just watch out for flying chess pieces!” she answered. She promptly picked up her Rook and smashed it against Andi’s.

  “Aww, I totally didn’t see that coming!” Andi protested, mockingly upset with herself. I came out from under the pillow and sat back up. I started to stand, but Vila reached out and grabbed my hand.

  “Where are you headed? You aren’t going to the office today, remember?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m just going to go grab a cup of coffee. I’ll be right back,” I told her.

  “You had a question you were going to ask us, didn’t you?” Andi predicted.

  “What makes you think that?” I tried to skate by without admitting I was indeed going to ask them something. They both stared at me once more. Then they turned to each other, noses in the air.

  “Andi?” Vila asked sarcastically.

  “Yes, Vila?” she answered, equally sarcastic.

  “Are you a magical genie?” Vila continued.

  “Why, yes. Yes, I am,” Andi replied.

  “As a magical genie, can you sometimes just know things?” Vila tilted her head to make her question as over-the-top ridiculous as possible.

  “Yes, again! You are so smart, Vila!” Andi retorted. The two of them looked back at me with straight faces, and each lifted an eyebrow.

  “Okay, I get it! What is it with women knowing everything about me today?” I asked rhetorically. “I had another wish question.” They jumped up and came to sit on the couch with me.

  “Those kinds of questions can’t just wait!” Andi scolded me. “What did you want to see?”

  “I was wondering what it would turn out like if I wished I could have very certain superpowers,” I told her.

  “What kinds of superpowers?” Vila chimed in.

  “The kind that would let me predict weather patterns in time to help people in danger, and also the ability to get them out of the path of destruction.”

  “Like flying around, picking them up and moving them?” Vila asked for clarification.

  “No, more along the line of mass telekinesis to induce them to move, even if they didn’t know why until later,” I tried to explain. The girls traded glances, and then both nodded their heads. Without another word, they grabbed my shoulders, I closed my eyes, and they squeezed. When I opened my eyes, I was still sitting in my living room. I looked at each of them.

  “Are we waiting for something?” I asked.

  “Yep, we are waiting for…” Andi started.

  “Three, two, one,” Vila said.

  Instantly my body started tingling like I had just eaten a candy bar made of straight caffeine. The feeling intensified until suddenly, a vision came to me while my eyes were still wide open. There was a massive earthquake happening somewhere, and I was scanning the earth to find it. I was searching Asia, and I simply knew it was going on far away somehow. I concentrated and tried to determine if the feeling was coming from any one direction.

  It was. It took me less than another split second to locate it. The earthquake was happening deep below the ocean floor, just off the coast of California. I saw a crack form in the ocean floor, and dirt heaved up into the water. Then the earth on one side of the crack dropped down two feet. The moment I saw the earth move, I snapped back to see my living room.

  “That was trippy!” I yelled out, my body still tingling. I attempted to stand up, but both girls grabbed my hands and pulled me back down.

  It was a good thing they did because my vision changed again. I was floating on the water in the middle of the ocean suddenly. If I hadn’t known it was an ocean, I felt like it could’ve been no different than lazing around in a pool. Then something changed. Energy surged underneath me, and the water started to move and carry me with it. It was like a slow-moving wave pool at first but built quickly. Next thing I knew, I was vertical in the middle of a tidal wave.

  The bottom of the wave kept getting further and further out from under my feet until I was at le
ast one hundred feet in the air, with water at my back. The adrenaline rush was unmatched by anything I’d ever experienced in life. My heart pounded in my ears, my chest heaved, and my face flushed. The higher I got on the wave, the more incredibly free I was. I was continually pushed through the air faster, which added to the thrill. I closed my eyes and let the power of the water soak into my skin and was almost drunk with it. Then I opened my eyes.

  Unexpectedly, I saw something in the distance. My mind focused instantly, and it was as though I was looking through a telescope. The vision in the distance was San Francisco Bay. I looked beneath me. I was now closer to two-hundred feet in the air on the wave. The reality of the perilous situation started to sink in. The wave was an enormous tsunami headed straight for San Francisco. A jolt of panic shot through my chest so hard I doubled up, squeezing my eyes shut against the pain. The pain subsided almost as quickly as it came, and I opened my eyes. I was in my living room once more. I shot up off the couch and turned to the girls.

  “California is going to be underwater!” I yelled. I frantically looked all around me, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. “What do I do?”

  “Sit back down,” Andi replied calmly. In fact, her response was so overly-calm that it was eerie. I slowly made my way back to the couch and sat.

  “Now what?” I was trying my best not to sound impatient.

  “Close your eyes,” she instructed me.

  I closed my eyes. It took a few seconds, but soon, I could picture San Francisco, as well as all the other places that would be devastated by the tsunami. Tiny rays of light start to beam up out of them and arch towards me. I was somewhere in the sky. The thin rays grew closer to me. I reached out my hand, and they arched into my palm. Once each beam touched my hand, it turned into a tiny dot of light. Dozens of dots of light turned into hundreds. Hundreds turned into thousands, and they just kept coming. It seemed as though hours went by while I floated in the sky, collecting tiny light spots on my hand. Finally, the last one came.

  The sky around me fell dark now that there were no more beams traveling to me. I don’t know how I knew to do it, but I closed my hand around the lights and started speaking.

  “You are all in danger. You have to leave for high ground immediately. If you can fly out of the state, fly east as fast as you can. Tell everyone. A tsunami is coming in less than a day and will destroy you and your homes if you do not leave NOW!” Then I opened my hand.

  The light dots instantly started moving in the opposite direction, as beams, once more. Several more hours passed as all the lights arched their way back to where they’d come from. I sucked in a huge breath and held it for a moment before letting it out. My job wasn’t over, however. Even with a full day’s warning, and the knowledge of impending disaster, there was no way everyone would get out in time. They needed more of just that… time.

  I blinked and was once again on my couch.

  “I have to slow the wave down,” I whispered. Terror struck me suddenly. I hadn’t wished for the power to do something like that.

  “We expanded your wish for you just a little,” Vila told me as though reading my mind. “Just concentrate.”

  Once again, I closed my eyes and waited for my new powers to tell me what to do. Then I was back on the top of the tsunami, this time holding my hand out in front of me like I had when I was in the sky. That time, however, beams of light that were so tiny they were hardly visible started arching out of the water and landing in my hand. There were millions of them, and they didn’t seem to be slowing down. For hours, they just kept coming. Then they stopped, all at once. I closed my hand and pictured every living organism within the water.

  “Go back,” was all I said, then I opened my hand again.

  Instantly, the wave was pushed back with a force I imagined would be similar to the stop brakes at the bottom of a rollercoaster. Every living thing in the water had started moving in the opposite direction of where the wave was traveling, and it created enough friction to slow the water. The wave didn’t diminish in size. It just slowed down. That is what I needed it to do. Having gotten the hang of my transportation method by then, I blinked myself back to my living room.

  “They have another two days to evacuate,” I told the girls. “That should be enough time, hopefully.”

  Andi reached her hand into the air and snapped her fingers. The next thing I knew, the TV was on, and the news was reporting on the tsunami. It was also reporting the mass psychic phenomena that caused everyone in California to have knowledge of their impending danger.

  “It looks like you’ve managed to save a lot of people,” Vila commented. There was something in her voice that warned me I might not be done with the vision.

  “So, why is nobody here, including me, all that excited about it?” I asked her. “I’m not done, am I?”

  “Nope,” she said and snapped her fingers. The TV began flipping through news stations at an unbelievably fast pace. Then it would pause just long enough to hear a headline.

  “January seventh, thirty saved by a message from the ‘unknown.’”

  “March eighteenth, Omaha tornado deaths down by eighty-four percent due to reported ‘psychic message.’”

  “November twenty-first, prediction of a lightning strike saved thousands of acres from being burned.”

  The headlines continued, reporting for years into the future. Then the TV stopped on a single channel and played one last headline.

  “The National Weather Service Special Sciences division has been secretly working on a way to pinpoint the energy waves causing the so-called ‘psychic’ messages that have saved thousands from natural disasters. Today, they believe they have a location from which the energy is being emitted. Stay tuned as we go live to their location.”

  My heart skipped a beat when the doorbell started playing Andi’s favorite Irish melody. “They aren’t here, are they?”

  I jumped up and ran to the window, barely opening the curtain to peer out. The entire drive was packed full of news trucks, camera crews, and reporters.

  “They are, indeed,” Vila answered. “They don’t know it’s you just yet, though.”

  “That will take them what, half a second, to figure out if they get in here?” I was genuinely scared. I was no longer free. Flashes of being locked up and experimented on crossed my mind, one after another. “What should I do?”

  “You can choose what to do. Did you think of simply walking out and letting yourself be studied?” Andi asked.

  I stared at her until I realized she was serious.

  “No! Why would I do that? I don’t have any actual super-powers! They all came from you!” I yelled.

  Neither of them said anything back, and then it hit me. If I were to be studied, whether voluntary or not, eventually, the scientists would be led back to the girls. They saw the realization in my eyes, and Vila raised her arm. She snapped her fingers again, and the three of us were back on the couch, one last time. The girls jumped off the couch and sat back down on the floor with their chess game.

  I remained where I was, blinking at them.

  “Well, that didn’t go as planned,” I said to them, curious as to why they weren’t phased at all.

  “Sure, it did,” Vila replied.

  “How so? If nothing else, it proved that humans can’t accept that something might simply be good for them, and leave it at that!” I was a bit worked up by then.

  “Humans have always been that way, though,” Andi explained. “It goes in cycles. The only difference is that most of the things they discover, dissect, and make new innovative creations with, are naturally occurring. Your abilities were not naturally occurring, in the general sense of the term.”

  “So, if I had been born with the ability, it would’ve been different?” I understood where she was coming from about humans destroying new discoveries to make better of them, but this was different somehow.

  “It would be different. There would be a cause that would eventuall
y be figured out as part of your DNA, or a mutation, or something. Because we spelled you with the ability, they wouldn’t have anywhere to trace the ability to,” she replied.

  “Except for us, that is,” Vila added.

  “I realized that was the case at first, but now I’m wondering, how would they have connected it to you?” I needed to know because if scientists couldn’t really trace the power to Vila and Andi, then I needed to ask myself if all those lives would be worth saving even if I did end up a guinea pig.

  “If they found a way to trace the power to you, it wouldn’t have been long before they refined their technology and were able to detect us, most likely,” Andi answered. “As of right now, only magic can sense magic. If that were to ever change, humans would be destroying magic all over the place, trying to figure it out.”

  “And it can’t be ‘figured’ out the way science is understood currently. The magic would simply end up destroyed or torn apart and ineffective,” Vila said, bringing together the missing link in my mind. It wasn’t that it couldn’t have turned out good for science to figure it out, humans just weren’t advanced enough yet to have developed the right kind of science to make anything useful out of what they would find.

  “You two seem so calm about it all,” I commented after thinking the concept through a bit more.

  “We knew you wouldn’t jeopardize us. There wasn’t anything to get worked up over,” Andi replied happily. “It was pretty awesome being up on that wave, though, wasn’t it?” She smiled slyly and looked up from the floor at me.