by S. G. Wilson
Meticulous waved his brush in the air. “Hence, a master class in magical cleaning.”
“This place is barely keeping afloat,” Motor said. “In fact, if we don’t win the big game tonight, we’ll lose a key athletics grant that’s a huge part of the budget. The whole school could shut down. And as a very reluctant member of the team, I can assure you: we don’t stand a chance. After we lose, which we’re certain to do, the school could close its doors for good.”
“I’m starting to find all this dead boring,” said Meticulous. He watched a nearby student order the ghost of an anteater to deep-clean the splattered bugs on her pentacle. “Can we get back to the clue None of Me left?”
“You have two minutes left to finish the test!” Lunt screamed before returning to the scrolls. With the clock about to run down, he and the other teachers seemed more desperate than ever to find something in their rules to bust us.
“Sorry!” I told Motor. “We ruined your final.”
Motor looked around to make sure nobody was watching. Then he grinned. “Don’t worry, I’ve had this covered all along.” He opened up his bag to pull out a quill pen and a few sheets of thick, yellowing paper. “These are blank scrolls. Magically treated paper. Illegal to use in class, but I figure I need all the help I can get.”
He jotted down a rune, and the scroll disappeared, turning into a small puff of blue fire. It spread over the pentacle for just a moment before snuffing out, leaving behind a sparkling-clean surface.
Motor made ta-da hands. “Behold. Sridhar’s Scouring Flame!”
I high-fived Motor. “It’s a regular cheat sheet.”
Meticulous dropped the brush in a huff. “Why didn’t you use that before I started brushing?!”
“You were enjoying yourself so much?” said Motor.
“How’d you figure out this scroll thing, anyway?” I said.
Motor opened his bag wide enough to show a Little Free Library’s worth of books inside. “This school may have fallen on hard times, but the library here is still top-notch. I found a book about runes there. It’s simple stuff once you get the hang of it, like coding. Just write some runes in the correct order, and voilà, the magic happens.”
I gave him a fist bump. “We should start calling you Magic Me.”
Motor grinned. “If I can do it, so can you.” He plopped his pen and a blank sheet into my lap. “Part of the test is cleaning the equipment. Why don’t you try the flame rune on the brushes? Just enough to dry them.”
I took the pen and paper but didn’t even know where to start. Drawing was never really my thing. Still, it was nice to hold a piece of paper in my hands again. Out of habit, I folded the sheet instead of drawing on it, making the first shape that came to mind: the fire rune Motor had just drawn.
Motor fidgeted with the tassels of his carpet. “What are you doing?!”
“Oh, this?” I waved the folded origami in the air. “Just goofin’. It’s harmless. Watch.”
I tossed the paper at Motor’s cleaning supplies. “Fire in the hole!”
“This is not a good deed,” said the MeMinder X.
As the paper struck Motor’s stuff, it bloomed into a fireball, leaping from our spot straight to the teacher table. The scrolls that Lunt and the others had been poring over burst into flames.
That’s the thing about jokes on a magical Earth: they tend to have punch lines you never saw coming.
You’d think extinguishing a small fire would be no sweat for wizard teachers at a magic school. But for that to be true, you’d need a better magic school than the Polymagic Vocational Institute.
Lunt, Pooplaski, and O’Fartly each cast spells that might have put out the flames, if they hadn’t cast them all at the same time. Pooplaski conjured a big wad of fire extinguisher foam, but it melted under the miniature rainstorm conjured by Lunt. The storm might have done the trick if O’Fartly hadn’t cast a magical gust of air that blew the cloud away and fed the fire. The inferno raged on hotter than ever, gobbling up half the table as the teachers squeaked like baby orcs.
Meticulous couldn’t stop laughing. “Look at their faces! Worth the price of admission!”
“You’ve got to stop it!” Motor hissed at me.
“I don’t know how!” I said.
Suddenly, a Twig in a wizard robe much snazzier than ours stepped into the auditorium. She looked confident and beautiful, like all Twigs I’d met, but with the added mystery of magic. She waved her hand, and a wildebeest appeared out of thin air to stand at her side. The creature seemed to be made entirely out of thick wool, and when it leapt onto the burning desk, it unfurled into a huge blanket that snuffed out the flames in a heartbeat.
“Was that like her Patronus?” I asked. “She collects wildebeest dolls and figures, you know.”
“Yes, yes, I knew that about her too,” said Meticulous. “Stop showing off.”
Lunt looked both relieved and embarrassed to see Twig. “If it isn’t my top former student, who transferred to Practical Magical Academy. But I’m not bitter about that. What brings you to these parts?”
Before she could answer, Nash strolled in. He wore a snazzy wizard robe too, plus a very smug look on his face. “We’ll get to that in a moment,” said Nash. “First, are you sure there aren’t any more fires you need us to put out for you?”
O’Fartly forced a laugh, but he wasn’t fooling anybody. “This particular fire was just a fluke. And we were on the verge of finding out who started it.”
I might have come clean, just to spare the other students the grief. But all those times getting in trouble with the Lunt of my world had hardwired me against fessing up to anything around him.
Motor started shaking from nerves. The guilt was getting to him. Should I have felt guilty too? Was I so far gone to the dark side that I had no remorse?
“Play it cool,” said Meticulous, stealing the words from my mouth.
“Actually, I’m rather impressed anybody here could do real magic, even by accident,” said Nash.
Twig shot him an 85 percent eyebrow arch. “That’s very rude. I animated my first golem here.”
Nash shrugged. “That was back in this school’s glory days.”
Sighing, Twig turned to the teachers. “You can still do your investigation. I just need to borrow Macadamia Macon.”
“Why do you need Flying Carpet Boy?” asked Lunt. “We have to question him.”
Motor squirmed on his flying carpet so much that a bag of Gargoyle Gulps flipped from the cup holder.
“With all due respect, can it wait?” said Twig. “The game is about to start, and Macadamia’s on the team.”
“We still have a team?” said Lunt. “I thought we were down too many players and had to forfeit.”
“I’ve volunteered to fill in,” said Twig. “Where is Macadamia, anyway?”
She looked around until she found Motor. Her eyes went wide when she took in Meticulous and me beside him. But she rolled with it. “Let’s suit up,” she said. “You can bring your friends. Your doubles can play too. The rules allow it. Right, Nash?”
Nash sighed. “Sure. As long as they’ve been summoned by the player and not magically modified in any way. But I’m more concerned about you playing on the other team, Twig. You’re supposed to be on my team.”
Twig shook her head. “This school might lose funding if they don’t win at least one game this season, and this is their last chance. As a former student here, I’m allowed to step in and play on the team.”
“I want you to understand something, Twig,” said Nash. “I play to win. I won’t be pulling any punches. Even against my favorite point guard.”
“Whatever,” said Twig.
Nash looked embarrassed, but only for a second. I knew I’d cherish that second for days and weeks to come.
“Are you sure you
want to play on a team with Macadamia?” asked Lunt. “Have you considered his…background?”
“Good point,” said Nash. “We all know how that cousin of his turned out.”
Twig ignored him and faced the teachers. “It’s simple,” she said. “If you want to save your school, you have to let Macadamia and the others play on the team with me.”
The teachers looked at each other, desperate to drum up a final argument, but they’d run out of ideas. They never stood a chance anyway. Nobody ever won an argument against Twig.
Meticulous claimed to have a lot of reasons for wanting to ditch the game, but the uniform probably had the most to do with it.
“I’m not wearing that hideous thing!” he said on the locker room bench, scooting away from the denim overalls and worker boots we all had to wear. “This entire game is a bloody waste of time! We need to focus on finding None of Me, not playing some rubbish sport we don’t understand! What the devil is change-a-ball, anyway?!”
Motor still hadn’t explained change-a-ball to us. He’d been too busy rifling through his bag, which was magically bigger on the inside and took forever to search.
“The game won’t take long,” I said, pulling off my robes. “And we don’t want to let the school down.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence,” said Meticulous. “You just want to impress the Twig of this Earth because you struck out with the one on your Earth!”
Something in my head snapped, and I rushed at Meticulous. Even without the fizz, I could take him. He must have had the same idea, because he raised his fists, ready for me.
Before we got any closer, Motor stepped between us, waving a piece of parchment in the air. “Guys, please! This is the clue I told you about, remember? From None of Me’s book?”
Meticulous snatched the paper from him and read over it. His eyes widened in surprise. “Why are the runes…moving?”
I peered over his shoulder. Sure enough, the runes shifted from one shape to another the longer you looked at them.
“The shapes change in a consistent pattern,” said Motor, folding his flying carpet and stuffing it into the pocket of his overalls. “I just can’t figure it out.”
Meticulous chuckled in that superior way of his. “You’ve been away from good old dependable science for too long. You simply need an algorithm to calculate the shifts between shapes. Then you can translate it.”
“Right!” said Motor. “So can you do that, then?”
“Hmmm, let me think,” said Meticulous, cranking up the sarcasm. “We need a calculating machine of some kind. Do they have those on a magic Earth like this one? No? Well, I guess magic can’t do everything, can it?”
Embarrassed, Motor dug through his bag and pulled out his MePad. “Haven’t used this in months.” He blew a cloud of dust off the screen. “Hope the battery hasn’t run down.” He started snapping shots of the parchment every few seconds.
Meticulous watched the MePad with hungry eyes, like he’d been starving for electronics. “Enough shots and the MePad can sort it out,” he said. “I expect it may take a few minutes, though.”
“It’s like magic and science mixing into something new,” I said.
Motor looked thoughtful. “Yeah, that’s pretty cool, actually.”
Meticulous made a gagging sound. “Let’s not get carried away. This is just the MePad doing photo analysis. Magic and science don’t mix. Period.”
Motor set up the program he needed and launched it. Then he pulled out a bag of Cool Ranch Dragon Scalez and passed them around. I’d learned to trust his judgment in alternate-Earth junk food and didn’t hesitate to grab a handful.
Meticulous waved away the snack as he leaned over Motor’s shoulder to check the MePad’s progress bar. “Half a bloody hour? What kind of grotty processor have you got in this thing?!”
“Guess we’ve got no choice but to play some change-a-ball,” I said, reaching for another handful of Dragon Scalez. “So what exactly is change-a-ball, anyway?”
* * *
—
We’d just finished strapping into our overalls when Twig knocked on the locker room door and stepped inside. She looked far cooler in her uniform than we did in ours.
“Ready?” she said.
We nodded together, which made her laugh. Her smile turned my joints into pudding.
“Sorry, but it’s funny when you three are in sync,” she said. “Oh, that reminds me. Since we’re going to be teammates, we need to be honest with each other. I know you’re not really duplicates created by a spell. I know you’re from different Earths.”
We must have given her the exact same look of total bafflement, because she laughed all over again.
“How did you figure that out?” I asked her.
“I didn’t,” she said. “I’m best friends with the Meade of this Earth. Before he locked himself away in his tower, he told me all about the different versions of himself and his theories about the Rip and how he wanted to fix it.”
“Do tell!” said Meticulous. “What were his ideas?”
Twig munched on a clump of her hair just like I’d seen her do a hundred times. “He didn’t go into much detail, just said he’d come up with some magic that might act as a bandage for the Rip until he could find a more permanent solution. After that, he locked himself away in his tower, the vines grew over it, and no one’s heard from him since. That’s when all this Dark Lord silliness started up. Just because Meade’s not around to defend himself, everyone suspects the worst.”
The plucking of a harp wafted through the air.
“That’s the pregame lineup alert,” said Twig. “We’ve got to get on the court. On the way, you can tell me why you’re here.”
As we wound through the halls, we managed to fill Twig in on the highlights of our trip. She laughed at the way Motor and I finished each other’s sentences and bickered with Meticulous.
“You three remind me of my Meade, in your own ways,” she said.
“So what’s your Meade like?” I asked as we approached the player entrance to the stadium. And just how bad is he? I wanted to add but didn’t.
She smiled to herself. I wondered if my Twig ever smiled like that when she thought about me.
“Meade has a big heart and a good sense of humor,” she said, walking up to the door. “And he’s never let all his accomplishments go to his head.” She opened the door for us. “You know, Me Corp. isn’t even his proudest achievement. What really excites him the most is this new type of magic he invented. Origamagic, he calls it.”
I would have asked her more about that, but my brain was too busy doing a cliff dive after seeing who stood waiting for us on the other side of the door.
Mom and Dad.
* * *
—
The Mom and Dad of my Earth had done so much Lord of the Rings cosplay at comic book conventions that I barely batted an eye at the medieval lord and lady outfits on their counterparts from this Earth. No, what got me was the way they held hands. I hadn’t seen them be affectionate like this in ages.
“So it’s true,” said Mom, taking in us Mes with tears in her eyes. “Meade said there might be echoes of himself from different planes of existence.”
Motor and Meticulous had lost their ability to speak. Motor marveled at the sight of Dad, and Meticulous couldn’t take his eyes off Mom.
That left the conversation up to me. I didn’t know where to start. “Uh, when was the last time you talked to him?”
“A few months ago, soon after people started spreading those baseless accusations that he’d created the Rip,” said Dad. “He locked himself away in his tower after that, and we haven’t heard from him since. We’re worried sick about him. But he said you’d be coming to help. And he wanted us to give you a message.”
“The message is this,” said Mom. “
‘I’ll be waiting.’ ”
Motor butted in. “Do you think he meant ‘I’ll be waiting’ as in, ‘Let’s hang out,’ or ‘I’ll be waiting’ as in, ‘I’m going to hurt you when you show up’?”
“Never mind him,” I said. “You wouldn’t know a password or some other way to get into the tower, would you?”
Mom and Dad shook their heads.
More harp chords wafted overhead.
“Meades!” said Twig. “The game’s about to start! Let’s get over there!”
“We won’t keep you any longer,” said Mom, sniffling. “It was nice to see you.”
Dad wrapped an arm around Mom for support. “We haven’t seen or heard from our son for months,” he said, choking up. “Please, do what you can to get him out of that tower and away from whatever experiments have cut him off from the world. Please bring him back to us.”
We three Mes nodded. For a Mom and Dad still alive and still together, no promise was too big.
Hardly any Polymagic Vocational students and faculty bothered to show up to the change-a-ball game, and those who did had an odd way of showing their school pride. As we ran out onto the court, they made fart noises with their hands.
Meticulous got huffy. “Are they having a go at us?”
“Not at all,” Motor told us. “Hand-farts are the way people clap here.”
On the sidelines, a goblin girl and boy in cheerleader uniforms droned a chant that seemed to be more about us surviving the game in one piece than about us winning it.
Meanwhile, the visitor side had filled to the max with Practical Magical Academy fans. Their hand-farts were deafening as Nash and his three equally large and menacing teammates jogged onto the court. Ms. Assan, the drama teacher from my Earth, entered behind them in a cloak with coach in bright red flames on the back.