Chapter 10.

Erik Estabon sat in the car with his girlfriend just beyond the bend that led to his student’s house. She, like him, had awoken with the system that morning. She’d been his first call, and he hadn’t been hers. But after promising to investigate the situation further, he had promised to call her back. So he’d gone to the one kid who seemed to know what was going on and listened in on the meeting, and realized that the fifteen year old Eli Mathews had a better idea of what was going on than the official channels.

And better than he did himself.

“So, this group,” Lucy asked him. “It’s not like a cult is it?”

“You lost twelve pounds overnight and ran six miles this morning, Lucy,” he pointed out. “If it is a cult, they sell pretty good kool-aid.”

She slapped his arm, but it was a playful interaction. She frowned. “They’re not going to be biased against me, do you think? Because my class? I don’t know how I’m going to sew an enemy to death. I mean, I realize I like knitting and sewing, but really, I’d prefer a magic oriented class, I think. You said that’s a thing now, right? One of the kids demonstrated magic for your gathering?”

“Stop confusing terms. This isn’t magic the gathering this is...never mind. Yeah. Eli showed some of the tools he’s made over the last few days with his magic class. You can ask to see him hit something with that bat of his yourself. Even if it’s just off his old T-ball set, the ball goes flying like he’s a pro-athlete. Oh, and he has a faerie.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that. A roman faerie?”

“He’s not roman, Eli just gave up on making him pants so he gave Gabri a toga instead,” Erik explained.

“Maybe I can help with that. Look at us, strategizing on how to make friends with teenagers. That’s not creepy at all.”

“I’m a high school teacher. If I’m creepy I’m very bad at my job,” he pointed out. “And I don’t think I’m bad at my job.”

“You’re great at your job,” she assured him. “Better than I ever was at mine. You think they’ll release the lockdowns anytime soon?”

“Probably not until a few days after the dungeons have been open, if the kid is right on how things will play out. Locking things down will only encourage people to explore the dungeons, and we don’t know what we’ll find when we arrive. All we do know has been filtered through a snarky faerie and a teenage boy who has direct contact with the source of all this, apparently. His description of integration with the system left me with a few questions compared to my own.”

“Like what?” Lucy asked.

“Like it mentioned the Antithesis,” he answered. “Mine just said that earth was being integrated into the system and I was being granted new power in the form of a Trickster class.”

“Funny how your student is a scholar and you’re a trickster,” his girlfriend teased. “Like, shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

Eli sighed and snapped a coin out of his pocket.

Without the intervening step of putting his hand in his pocket.

Trickster magic was handy, and he was still getting used to it.

“I don’t think it cares about the labels of the old world. I think however the system measured and weighed us, it wasn’t based solely upon life experiences,” he said. “Some sort of natural aptitude that we don’t understand to magic. I don’t think it disregards life experience completely either. I think … I don’t know to be honest.”

“You don’t know what you think?”

“I’m complicated, okay? And these are confusing times.”

“Right, sorry,” she said.

He sighed and put the car in gear. “I’ll introduce you when we arrive. We’ll talk about your class with Eli and figure out what to do. Jose, one of the other kid’s father, is a cook. So you’re not the only one who seems to have a class that’s completely unrelated to combat.”

“Yeah,” she said, although she didn’t sound hopeful. “Or maybe I can get a job in a sweatshop in china or something.”

“Let’s not go there,” he said, and they arrived moments later. Just in time to witness the explosion.

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Luke, Eli’s classmate and the party’s true mage, had finally managed to nail one of the spells outlined in his mental spellbook and conjured a fireball which, upon realizing that this time would actually go off, he aimed in the safest direction that he could think of.

Straight up.

He’d thought that it would travel a set distance and explode.

He hadn’t realized that it would be affected by gravity. Nor that it would remain a cohesive ball until it hit something and exploded.

It was Maia, the knight and Luke’s fellow freshman in high school, who dashed in at the last moment and shielded him with her own body. She acted without thinking, but she instinctively acted several abilities at once. One of them was the one that allowed her to tackle Luke and shield him with her own body.

The other reinforced her entire body with internal energy. What the system called Stamina, but Mattie, Eli’s mother, was referring to as Qi. Because she was into new age BS, Maia thought privately, but she had to admit that the woman’s Tai Chi was a step beyond her own awkward sparring with the thirteen year old warrior in their party.

She gasped as she felt her clothing burned away, and she blushed as she realized that she was … exposed.

But largely unburnt. Or rather, she had somewhere between a sunburn and a first degree burn on her backside where she’d been expecting, from the size of the flare that she’d shielded her classmate from, to be … well, dead.

It was at that moment that her teacher came rushing in and began putting out her burning clothes with the old blanket he kept in his backseat, wrapping the teen in it after the fires were put out.

“Okay, right, so what the hell was that?” their science teacher demanded.

“Magic,” Luke said dumbly.

Erik smacked him on the back of the head. At school he wasn’t supposed to touch the kids, but this was a little beyond what he was used to handling. Besides...he used trickster magic to do it. His hands were in his pockets. “Don’t be a smartass. Why did you—”

“He tried to redirect it at the last moment,” Maia said, jumping to her classmate and friend’s defense. “Because there wasn’t anywhere safe to put it he tried to shoot it into the sky. But then it started falling and I realized it was going to land on him and that he’d die, and… my body just acted on its own. If you’re going to be made at someone, be mad at me.”

“You’re obviously in shock, because that’s the most idiotic thing I’ve heard all day,” Erik said. “Why be mad at one of my idiot students when I can be mad at both! Now come on, I need to call your parents. Your mother needs to look at those burns. And Luke too, I think I see blisters on your arm. Let’s see if the Medico class lives up to the hype.”

At that moment Mattie, Peter and Eli came running around the corner, and it took a few moments to explain what had happened, but fortunately Maia was whisked into the house while Erik did most of the talking for her. She was suddenly very tired, and grateful that the adult was there to take charge of things.

She fell asleep on the surface, and woke up with her mother rubbing sunburn lotion on her back. She blushed as she realized that she was exposed again, but a quick look around showed that it was just her mother there. “How bad is it?”

“Not as bad as it was when I first looked,” Alaina, her mother, admitted. “I wanted to take you into the Emergency Room, but I tried to use my … ability. I tried my ability on you first and I felt exhausted and you were healing at a visible rate. So I held off until it was only a sunburn instead of a full-body first degree burn. Then I healed the boy who did this to you—”

“--It was an accident—”

“Then I came back to check on my baby girl. But at this point I’m pretty sure you’ll heal on your own, and I’m exhausted in a way that’s hard to explain, and besides I think maybe a bit of pain will be good for you so that the next time you see someone in danger from their own stupidity you’ll think twice before sticking your own ass into the fire to pull them out of it.”

“It was an accident, Mom. We’re stupid teenagers with magic and superpowers now,” Maia said. “We’re going to screw up, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay,” her mother said. Then she sighed. “No more magic practice without adult supervision.”

“That’s like saying ‘you need to ask permission to go to the bathroom’ to a middle schooler, mom. These classes, they’re part of us now. You can’t take them away from us like you can take our phone.”

Alaina sighed but didn’t rise to the argument. “I can say that you are out of commission for the rest of the day, young lady. As the party healer, that’s a decision everyone agrees with.”

“I never agreed with that,” Maia said. But then she sat up and felt the way her skin burned when she moved and hissed. “But okay. You’re certain it’s not that bad?”

“I wanted to bring you to a burn ward, Maia,” her mother said seriously. “But my ability...changes things. I don’t know how it works. But I felt you healing as I used it on you. You went from mostly first degree with minor patches of second degree burns over your entire back and backside to a really bad day at the beach in about ten minutes.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for that,” Maia said. “I’m going to sleep until I go from a bad day at the beach to ‘pleasantly warmed.’”

“That’s probably for the best,” her mother said, and Maia turned over on the couch while her mother went to go scream at a magically inclined teenager again.

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