RAY VAN CAMARO

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A year after we started learning jynx, my parents made a breakthrough and discovered a new category—summoning.

It worked by materializing one’s mana into some sort of creature and using your mana to give it sentience. The first summoning my parents made was a rabid man with pale skin. Its skin hugged its skeletal frame and a muzzle of flesh was formed in front of its sharpened teeth. It also had a rapier on its hip.

“Isn’t this cool, Ray?” Father asked. “We can summon things now.”

“It’s creepier than Mother’s doll collection.”

For some reason, Mother liked collecting all sorts of dolls. There was a wall dedicated to shelves stocked with dolls in the living room. Sometimes it felt like their eyes were following me every time I walked past them.

Father laughed. “I’m going to have to disagree with you. Your mother’s collection is way creepier.”

Mother responded by smacking him over the head with a thick book.

“What’s its name?” I asked.

“We’re still workshopping it,” Mother said. “Do you want to try summoning him?”

They drew an incantation circle on the floor and had me stand on it. I had never used an incantation circle before and was surprised when all I had to do to cast a spell was direct my mana through it.

I snapped my fingers and, just a couple of feet from me, the creepy summoning materialized from the feet up and just stared.

“It feels like he and I are connected.”

“Yeah, there’s a string of mana going from your gates to your summoning,” Mother said. “You can control him.”

I had him raise a hand and then stand on one foot.

“Can I show this to Trisha and Czeslaw?”

“Sure, but only them. We’ll draw the circle on your bicep, but wear this fake incantation glove. We’re going to have Grandpa Orsted submit our research to the Capital first. After our name is put on it, you can teach it to them.”

“What if they want to try using the glove?”

“Just say the glove only works for you. They should believe that.”

When we gathered at the field the next day, I summoned one to show off. Trisha dropped to the ground and crawled backwards to the tree. Czeslaw, surprisingly, used Rock Bust successfully and managed to kill it.

I guess he can perform jynx in desperate situations.

“What the hell is that?!” Czeslaw said. “That’s evil incarnate!”

“No, it’s not. Just relax. I can control it.”

“What if you can’t and it goes berserk?! It’s gonna go wild and use its sword to chop off my head. I don’t want to die getting decapitated. I hear that you remain conscious for a bit after your neck’s been snipped.”

“First of all, the sword is a rapier and it can’t cut. Two, I’m not going to lose control. If I do, I’ll just unsummon him.”

“Well,” Trisha climbed the tree, “I’m going to stay up here just in case.”

Hmm… These two were always playing pranks on me before. I wonder if this is a good time for payback.

I summoned the pale man and had it hack me with its sword. I made it miss on purpose—but barely.

“I lost control!” I screamed.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Czeslaw stuttered. “Unsummon it right now.”

From the nearby tree’s branches, Trisha had her fingers formed into a pistol and was firing small bullets of water at the pale man.

I had the summoning then jitter and raise its rapier towards Czeslaw who stared at it with wide eyes. It was a chilly day too, but his breath wasn’t forming.

“I’m messing around,” I said, snapping and unsummoning the pale man. “I told you, I’m in control.”

Czeslaw collapsed on the floor in tears. “That’s messed up, Ray. Why would you do that?”

“Hey, this is payback for when you and Trish used to play pranks on me.”

“We never took our jokes this far,” he cried, wiping his tears.

Trisha hopped down the tree. “Are you okay, Czes?”

He showed his hands. “Look, I can’t stop shaking.”

Trisha put her hand on his chest to feel for his rapid heart rate. “Damn. You have a heart?” she chuckled.

“It’s not funny!” he screamed, storming back to the village. “Fine, I can’t use jynx as good as you two. If you’re just going to pick on me, I’m not hanging out with you guys anymore!”

When he was gone, Trisha shook her head. “You shouldn’t have played that prank on him.”

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“It was your comment that made him mad.”

“Hey, I say comments like that all the time.”

Czeslaw refused to talk to us for the next couple of days. He would just hide in the library with Pops, forcing himself to read. When we went there to visit him, he would ignore us and slip off when we weren’t looking. After a while, he stopped going to the library and hid somewhere else.

Father noticed something was off. “What’s wrong?”

“I think I messed up. I used the summoning to play a prank on Czeslaw and he won’t talk to me or Trish now. We’ve tried everything, but he just doesn’t want to hear any of it.”

“You shouldn’t be using the summoning to play pranks on people in the first place. Especially the pale man. It looks too terrifying.” Father paused for a beat before rubbing my shoulders. “But I’ll talk to you about that another time. Right now, Czeslaw feels like you and Trisha are getting way ahead of him. He feels left out.”

“So what do we do?”

“Nothing. Sometimes not doing anything is the best course of action. Czeslaw wants to be alone right now, so you should respect that. But he knows you only scared him for a prank. He’ll come around eventually and he’ll be awkward about it. You have to make sure all’s forgiven. Make it up to him.”

A couple of days after Father gave that advice, Czeslaw showed up at the field while Trisha and I were practicing more advanced spells.

He waved at us awkwardly. “Hey.”

“Get out of here!” Trisha yelled. “Why are you here? Shoo!”

I snapped, splashing a ball of water on her face. “Stop it.” I turned to Czeslaw. “What’s up?”

“Can I hang out with you guys?”

“Of course. Trish, let’s take the day off and make it up to Czeslaw.”

“It’s okay, really,” he said. “I overreacted.”

“No, I’ve been thinking of a way to say sorry. I know the kids that used to bug us when we were younger started to pick on you these last couple of weeks because you weren’t with us.”

Czeslaw tilted his head. “Were you stalking me?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were alright.”

His face turned red. “So, what do you want to do?”

The three of us snuck around the village and found the kids that were picking on Czeslaw taking a swim by the lake. I summoned a couple of pale men in the water and shore, scaring away the kids into the village.

The prank was a convincing success. Maybe a bit too convincing.

The kids were so terrified that the villagers reported a monster sighting to Pops. He rallied soldiers and adventurers to find these monsters.

There was no way out of this one, so I confessed to my parents that I used the summonings for a prank. From that day forward, they prohibited me from using the summoning. They even shaved my head as punishment—but I covered it up with a hat.

“Haha, we’re matching now,” Czeslaw said. “I feel bad because you pranked the other kids for me. I’ll get you something from the general store. On me. You don’t have toupee.”

“Shut up.”

Czeslaw and Trisha then made it a game to try and take off my hat to see what my shaved head looked like. Miraculously, I managed to evade their attacks until my hair grew back.

A couple of weeks after my parents submitted their research to the Capital, they got a response from the lead jynxists. Unfortunately, the results were not what they hoped for.

Since summonings created a creature and not much was known about the process, the jynxists wanted my parents to stop their research and keep it under wraps. They believed that summonings were some sort of necromancy. That a soul that had passed was somehow disturbed from its rest and forced to act as energy for the summonings.

They could’ve lied a little better.

The jynxists made an offer. They wanted the rest of my parents’ notes so they can continue the research in their stead, but they will still be awarded the discovery.

My parents were smart enough not to submit all their research. They must’ve foreseen something like this happening.

A couple of weeks after they declined the offer, our house burned down while my friends and I were practicing outside the village.

I returned to my home in ashes—soldiers and adventurers worked together to put out the fire. Even the lemon tree I liked to sit under had turned to charcoal.

There were two charred bodies all wrinkled with crisp black skin.

Pops knelt beside me and tried as hard as he could to explain what was going on. All it took were four words to understand what happened.

“My parents are dead…”

I stayed with Pops and Czeslaw for a bit while the village investigated what happened. After a while, Uncle Tristan and Auntie Alayne, who were Trisha’s parents and were close friends with Mother and Father, took me in.

What the soldiers believed happened was that my parents were doing research on fire jynx when their experiment got out of hand. Since their lab was in the basement, they had no way of escape.

The evidence was there, but everyone saw the truth within the truth.

My parents were murdered. There was no doubt about that. And I knew all too well what the reason was.

Despite the entire house burning down, there were no signs of any books in the rubble. They were killed to keep quiet about the discovery of summoning jynx and their research was stolen.

A couple of months after my parents’ deaths, news of summoning jynx was released. They were awarded with the discovery and a tribute to them was built in front of the Fern University in the Capital.

When the list of summoning spells came to us, Pops gave them to me and had me try them out.

None of the summonings (which were now called Fetishes) featured the pale man my parents taught me. The biggest difference was that when summoning a Fetish, you must now let it borrow a certain number of gates while one must always remain on you to control them.

I guess they couldn’t decipher my parents’ research. They had to fill in the cracks which resulted in a more limited summoning.

I snapped my fingers, summoning about thirty of the creepy pale men before my gates were about to break. None of them needed to borrow any gates.

A number of jynxists from the Capital visited me to ask how I summoned the pale men Fetishes, but I told them I didn’t know. A wave of them kept visiting me for questions.

The last one was the lead jynxist, Dr Creed. He was the nicest out of all of them, making sure the questions he asked weren’t too overwhelming.

“Ray doesn’t know,” he told the others. “His parents let him use the summonings, but they never explained it to him. They didn’t even teach him the incantation and instead gave him a glove and it appears only he can use that glove. All he knows is how to summon by instinct. We must leave the boy alone, I’m sure every time we question him, wounds that have turned to scars open up.” Dr Creed ruffled up my hair. “We better give it up, the secret is staying with the Camaros. Whether it be in their graves or Ray’s head.”

Dr Creed was right. The secret lived in my head—more specifically on it.

Back when I used the pale men to prank the other kids and caused the village to panic, my parents saw an opportunity. I was willing to help them however I could. So they shaved my head and tattooed the incantation circle for the pale men on my scalp, masking it as a punishment for messing around. It was a struggle to keep my hat on, especially with Trisha and Czeslaw wanting to rip it off.

But after my messy thick black hair grew back, their secret stayed safe with me.

I couldn’t continue to call my parents’ Fetishes pale men. They needed proper names. I dedicated them after my parents and named them Marching Dolls.

Named after the marching band my father loved to play in and the dolls my mother loved to collect.

My parents entrusted me with these Dolls. I couldn’t protect them with it, but I can still protect everyone I care about. I will use my Marching Dolls to achieve that goal.