Misfit Mage

by Michael Taggart

  Squeeze.

  “When he got shot, the liquid robot in there didn’t worry about healing. He just transformed back into the shape he wanted. He was shot, smashed, exploded, lost parts of himself, and still he came back. Just as good as before. He did it by transforming.”

  I wasn’t sure how that applied to me. I wasn’t a liquid metal terminator. It sure sounded nice, though.

  “Do you have your magic sight turned on? I want to show you something.”

  Squeeze.

  He looked the same to me as he always did. He picked up a small paring knife from the floor, pressed it against his forearm, and cut himself.

  It was a long cut, maybe three inches, and it was enough that his skin peeled back a bit. What I saw underneath amazed me.

  He was filled with magic. Filled with it in a way I had never seen before. Even with Sandy or Isobel. The magic was dense and flowed like lava. The light was intense, but somehow it didn’t shine far.

  Before my magic eyes, the cut transformed. It didn’t stitch itself back together or heal from the ends back to the middle again. The cut didn’t even close. It’s just that the section of his arm that had the cut transformed back into a perfect arm again.

  It looked like the cut never even happened.

  “Did you see that?” he asked.

  Squeeze.

  My mind was blown. I didn’t even think something like this was possible. Suddenly I had hope again.

  “You don’t have anywhere near the magic density to do something like this on a large scale. But on a small scale it might be possible.”

  “Sandy has her healing runes working on you and they will help. You are a supernatural now so your body will try to heal perfectly. Most of your recovery will come from healing. But if even some of it could come from transformation then you will be well ahead of the game.”

  I didn’t know how to say thank you so I squeezed his hand a bunch of times.

  “I don’t know how to teach you to do this. It’s just something I’ve figured out with a lot of trial and error. I can tell you that you will need a lot of your magic, and you’ll want it at the place you want to transform. Other than that, you’ll have to figure out how it works on your own.”

  “Good luck.” he said and let me have at it.

  -- Hour 51 --

  I wasn’t having any luck so far. I’d decided to start working on the top right broken rib. I had so many broken bones I could have chosen, but my ribs were the only ones that were moving. I could keep my face and arm still, but I had to breath. Breathing meant using my chest, and the constant irritation on my broken ribs was driving me insane. If I could just heal my ribs, maybe I could get some sleep and escape from all this for a while.

  I’d picked the rib on the right that seemed to be bothering me the most, and zoomed in my magic sight to see what I was dealing with. It was a complete break. The bone was cracked at an angle, but the edges were still together. This was good if I could get the transformation going. It was bad right now because every breath caused the two broken parts to rub against each other.

  I tried coating the edge of the break with magic, but my magic was like a mist, it just floated away. I tried spiraling my magic and this helped a bit. It created a denser core of magic at the center but this caused so much turbulence it didn’t do me any good.

  I tried just squishing the magic together, but the brute force method didn’t work. I could make the fog a bit denser, but it wasn’t enough to cause any sort of change, and as soon as I let go, the fog just swirled away again.

  I’d tried making one of my little cartoon creations, but they couldn’t work inside me.

  I’d seen it happen. I knew it was possible. I just didn’t know how to do it.

  -- Hour 52 --

  I was so frustrated. I wanted to scream and kick my magic. I’d gone back to spinning my magic, except this time I made it like a cyclone. That was a no go. I’d tried making a sphere of magic and slowly decreasing it down. I didn’t really have any way of making the boundary of the sphere and the magic just leaked around my control.

  I could feel my magic was eager to help. It wanted to do what I needed. It just didn’t know how to compress on its own and I didn’t know how to guide it.

  Maybe I was being too detailed. Maybe I needed to go bigger picture. I pulled out to a whole body focus and began pulling magic from Penny. I filled up like I normally did when I was cycling my magic with her, but this time I kept going. I just kept pulling and pulling until I was dizzy and felt like I was about to explode.

  The dizziness felt good. I couldn’t sleep, and my current situation was pure torture. Anything that helped take my mind off of my situation, even a little bit, was welcome. It felt like taking a really deep breath, and then trying to take in even more air. It just didn’t feel possible. I held it all in, though, and sip by sip, crammed in even more.

  I zoomed back into my rib again. There was a lot more misty magic in the area now. There still wasn’t enough for healing, but there was certainly more magic available. I ran through my bag of tricks again, but still nothing worked.

  I needed to condense magic like Penny had when she was filling charms. The final bit of magic that went into the charms was liquid. I needed to get to that.

  Penny was an awakened and aware charm, though. I didn’t have something like that inside me. Or did I? Maybe I could make one. Maybe I could take a cell, stuff it full of magic, and make it like Penny. If I could awaken a string of cells, I could make a coil that would condense magic inside me.

  Nothing else was working so it was worth a shot.

  I zoomed in even more than I had before. I’d been working at the level of the break, now I zoomed in to just one tiny part of that break. Seen this close, the break wasn’t smooth, there was all kinds of jagged surfaces. I picked one and zoomed in even more.

  I’d never been this deep before. It was like I was looking at myself with a powerful microscope. The jagged piece, zoomed in, had a rough surface to it also. I picked a part that looked even more rough than normal and zoomed into that.

  I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I thought a cell was just a round thing, like a drop of water. It had a center, a wall lining, and that was it. I thought cells were stacked together like a bunch of water bottles and that made up all the tissue we had.

  What I was seeing was very different from that. These were more oblong, with all sorts of roots coming off of it. The roots all meshed together and it was hard to see where a cell stopped and the next one started. Some of them looked squishy and some of them looked solid, like vines growing together.

  I felt like I was in some strange fantasy land. What I was seeing with my magic sight was so strange and different. Landing on the moon would have felt more familiar that this.

  I took a moment to be amazed at my magic sight. I don’t know what magnification I was at, but I was viewing things at a much more detailed level than I had with the microscopes at high school. That I could see things this small was astonishing.

  Everything was so intertwined I wasn’t sure I could just isolate a cell like I had originally planned. Instead, I just picked out one of the squishy oblong sacks that was at the surface, and decided to pack it with magic and see what happened.

  When I looked around for magic, I realized I couldn’t see the mist. My magic still had to be here, though. This was my body after all. I called for magic and looked around. Nothing happened. There wasn’t the faintest trace of mist that I could see.

  I called again, and this time held the call. At first, nothing happened. I could feel something, though, getting closer. Then a huge nebula of lights appeared.

  It looked like a dust bunny of lights, the size of a large house. The lights were all jumbled together and scattered around, like a galaxy of stars. The lights weren’t spheres, either. They were oblong, and different sizes. It really did look like a giant dust bunny, with all the shapes and sizes of dust tangled in together.

  It c
learly was my magic, though. It was filled with emerald green and sapphire blue illumination.

  I was seeing magic in a whole new way. Just as bone looked so strange and different at this magnification, so did my magic. I’m sure my ‘mist’ was made up of hundreds of thousands of these magical dust bunnies.

  The dust bunny space ship was beautiful. It was like a Christmas wonderland. Despite the seriousness of the situation, I took a moment to appreciate it. Then I pulled it down toward me and the cell I had picked out. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do, other than to try and merge the lights into the cell.

  It ended up being much easier than I thought it would.

  I picked off some of the lights and pushed them toward the oblong cell. They easily floated inside and mostly stayed there. Some of them floated out again, but ended up staying inside the roots of the cell. The cell started glowing from all the magic inside it, then it flashed, and now the lights were a part of it.

  I gathered more lights and pushed them into the next oblong cell. It filled, flashed, and then started glowing too. The light went down the roots to where the two cells were connected.

  I gathered more lights and soon I had a patch of ten cells and their roots all glowing with magic. I needed more lights, so I sent out the call again. Soon, another house sized magical Christmas dust bunny showed up and I kept going.

  I wasn’t sure if this was the right way to heal myself, but I was getting the magic into me at a cellular level. Hopefully, this would result in something good.

  I kept working, stuffing my cells with magic and awakening them. It wasn’t fast work, but it was steady. I kept the call out all the time and now I had lots of magical Christmas dust bunnies ready for me to work with. They bumped up against each other and merged, forming even bigger dust bunnies. Soon the ‘sky’ was filled with light and the ‘land’ was looking like something out of James Cameron’s Avatar movies.

  It was an unearthly supernatural landscape.

  I’d filled everything in my view, and was getting ready to expand my awareness when the first metamorphosis happened. I took a moment to view my handiwork, when I saw a twinkle. It was so fast that I didn’t have time to see what happened. Everything was so new to me that it was difficult to see if anything had changed.

  I stayed there for a while, keeping my awareness open. Looking for it to happen again.

  There! A twinkle. Again I wasn’t sure if anything had changed. This time it almost looked like lightning.

  I waited. The lightning twinkles were happening every few moments now. It seemed like they were happening more often.

  Then it happened right in front of me. It wasn’t so much that lightning came down from the sky. It was more like the ground pulled it down. A cell flashed, and where there was one before, now there were two.

  I did a happy dance. My body was fixing itself!

  I went to the edge of what I’d awakened and kept going. Soon my garden of awakened cells was double the size of before. It also seemed like the cells were easier to awaken.

  I decided to test that theory. Instead of awakening cells that were right next to the mass of already awakened cells, I struck out in a straight line. Very quickly they became harder to transition. I decided to curve the line back toward the mass of awakened cells. That left a group of unawakened cells in the middle.

  I was filling in the middle, when I noticed one cell awakened on its own. Most of its neighbors were already awake, and it just flashed and pulled magic itself. That was interesting.

  It seemed like I should be able to use that somehow, but I couldn’t think of how to make it work to really speed up the transformation. It did allow me to skip some cells, which helped a bit. It wasn’t a big time saver though. Still, every little bit helped.

  I made the mistake of zooming out a few levels to see how much I had done.

  I don’t know how long I’d been at this, but I’d done a tiny fraction of the break. Like maybe one percent of one percent. At the level where I could see the whole break, there was just a little speck of bright light. It was going to take a long, long time to fix this.

  I wanted to cry. But that would hurt too much. This was just one break of many. The whole task seemed overwhelming.

  I zoomed back in again, picked a spot on the edge of my cell garden, and kept going. This was a crappy alternative, but it was the only alternative I had.

  -- Hour 60 --

  It seemed like I had been working on this break for forever. I checked my overall progress. Only about a quarter done.

  The sleeplessness and the pain were really getting to me. I had found my balance for a while but it was slipping away. Working on the break at the micro level helped but the progress was so slow. It gave me hope, but it also highlighted just how long this recovery was going to take. I didn’t know if I could last that long.

  I’d found a few other ways to speed up awakening my cells. I brought the ‘sky’ of magic down closer to the cells. With a shorter distance to channel magic, I could now awaken two cells at once. The closer magic also helped the twinkle lightning to occur more often. That was the real goal, new growth. I needed to bridge the gap between the two sides of the bone.

  The sky of magic also slowed me down, though. As the new growth happened, it used up the magic I’d called. I ended up having to pull down more magic, both for myself to use and to cover the parts I’d already awakened. I was now spending almost half my time pulling down more magic dust bunnies over my already awakened area.

  I’d realized this meant that the more area I awakened, the slower my expansion would be. It was so frustrating. I didn’t think I would be able to waken the entire area of the break. I’d have to do it in stages.

  I’d have quit if there were anything else I could have done. I couldn’t talk, move, watch TV, or read. My only option was to just endure the pain and work on my recovery.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation like this before. If things got bad enough, I usually just moved on. Or found a solution to what was bothering me. In this case I couldn’t run way and there was nothing else I could think of to improve my progress. It was soul crushing.

  -- Hour 65 --

  Sandy was here with John and she was giving him an update. Bermuda had gone through surgery ok and was now recovering. They would release him tomorrow but he would be in a body cast for a while. There was still a chance for complications, but recovery was looking good for now.

  Sandy was still processing what she had found out about Jennifer. John was framing this with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. She’d been in denial until the rant from Isobel. Then she’d moved to anger pretty quickly. Sandy said she still had a lot more anger to work out next time she saw Isobel.

  Right now she was feeling depressed. She wanted to make a positive difference in the world. The supernatural world was so cruel and many new sups were exploited for their powers. She wanted to start something new, something safe. The House created a unique haven for new supernaturals, but even then it was filled with politics, secrecy, and hoarding. She wanted to learn everything she could about magic and teach it to others. To create a place for learning and respect, rather than power and exploitation.

  She felt like her goals were good, but her results sucked. Jennifer was dead. I was in bad shape and Annabeth was so different she didn’t know how to teach her. The other Heads of House were not supporting her and now she was in an all-out war with the mages. Being Head of House was a lot harder than she had thought it would be. Life had been much easier when she was just a battle mage. Then you knew where your enemies were and you went out and stomped them. It was a simple good guys–bad guys type of thing. She was thinking that maybe she should have just stayed a fighter.

  John let her talk it out and held her in a big hug. After she wound down, they stayed like that for a while. John was a lot like a mountain; big, solid, and somehow peaceful to be with.

  I guess Sandy didn’t re
alize I was awake and listening to them. She always seemed so confident and knowledgeable to me. I thought a battle mage was exactly what we needed to deal with these Louisville mages. We needed someone that could kick some ass.

  John finally left. Sandy gave me a tiny drink of water. She started reading and I went back to working on awakening my cells again.

  -- hour 70 --

  I had completely bridged the gap between half of the break. When the new cells reached the other half of the rib, they had fused seamlessly. Now the break wasn’t rubbing against itself any more. A part of myself wasn’t hurting as much. This would be cause for major celebration if there wasn’t so much left to do. I was still working on the rest of the break. The last thing I wanted was for the rib to crack again.

  I felt so emotionally exhausted. I hadn’t slept or eaten in a long time and it looked like it was going to be a very long time before that happened again.

  Sandy had switched out for Annabeth and she was humming. Her pink magic and positive energy were working on me, trying to give my spirit a boost. I’m not sure it was working. Or maybe it was. Maybe I’d be feeling even more miserable if she weren’t here. That was a scary thought.

  Annabeth took my hand.

  “Are you awake, Jason?” she asked.

  Of course I was awake. I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t she know that? I felt a surge of irritation.

  It occurred to me that my face was wrapped in bandages and I was staying very still all the time. They probably didn’t know how I was doing at all. I couldn’t tell them, and there wasn’t anything they could see. They probably were assuming that I was sleeping as much as I could. If only that were true.

  She was just trying to be nice. I guess she wanted to talk. Actually, that sounded nice. It was lonely in my own head.

  I gave her hand a squeeze.

  “I’m worried about you,” she said. “I know there is the obvious issues.” She gestured at my bandages. “It’s your music that worries me. You normally have a happy beat when I listen to you, like a chorus of bells. When you first got hurt all your bells sounded the alarm, but you still sounded like bells.”