CHAPTER 6
In Which Most of the Student Body Attends Class
ANGIE. FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. FIRST ORIENTATION OF THE DAY.
The instructor sighed again, looking decidedly irritated. Angie caught her mutter, “Every damned year.”
“Good morning, class,” she began. “Welcome to Pre-Enchanting. I am Instructor Silberfuchs.” A pleasant looking lady of nearly the same height as Angie (Angie might even have been a centimeter or so taller), Mst. Silberfuchs cut a striking figure with a wild, flowing mane of silver-gray hair. Angie typically had a hard time distinguishing age for anyone from their mid-twenties to mid-forties, but with the silver hair and the profession, Mst. Silberfuchs could easily have been anything from mid-twenties to mid-seventies. She looked young, but with an enchanter, that didn’t mean as much as it might on some people, and if she was adept at alchemy at all, it would mean even less.
“You may address me as such, or as Mst. Silberfuchs. I am going to start with roll call.” She proceeded to list twelve names, of which six were in attendance, which explained her apparent irritation. Everyone paid attention except for Circe, who had returned to toying with something behind a folder like she’d been doing before Ardath spoke to Angie.
“Now,” Instructor Silberfuchs continued. “I am going to move on to the safety lecture. I’m afraid you’ll be hearing this a lot, including tomorrow, because somehow, someone causes considerable damage every year by not following these instructions, and because half the class has decided to play hooky for the first day of the year. This school.” She shook her head.
“So. Do Not Do Magic Near Operating Uninsulated Electronics,” Instructor Silberfuchs continued, staccato, emphasizing each word with a sharp delivery and a pause after each. “Do not try to enchant your phone. Do not empower enchanted items with your phone turned on and in your pocket, unless you have it securely contained in a casting case. Do not attempt to refine reagents with a radio playing on the same desk as your circle. Do not attempt to scry using the screen of your Information Pad!”
This all had a highly practiced quality, with the exception of a sense of real emotion behind it that fully memorized spiels tended not to possess. “Do not attempt to brew potions on an electric range! Do not attempt to cast a spell, any spell, in the same room as an operating computer, unless it is thoroughly shielded. Do not, for the love of the Powers Above, try to record video of a summoning ritual! If you need to cast a spell or conduct a ritual of any significant power near other people, get them to turn their phones off first, or you could all find your clothes melting, or disintegrate all the stone in the area, or find yourselves in an inverse gravity zone. And trust me, you don’t want to be in an inverse gravity zone. Particularly outside.
“Now. Phones, IPads, and notebooks off. I want you to make a habit of anytime you enter a magical arts labroom that you immediately turn off all your electronics.”
Everyone had nodded along except for Circe, who seemed to finally start paying attention after the last sentence. “That doesn’t work, my mother won’t allow me to turn off my phone,” she said matter-of-factly, as if that wasn’t both kind of shameful and deeply foolish for someone in an enchanting class.
“A, your mother has no authority here,” Mst. Silberfuchs said just as matter-of-factly. “B, if you are of firstage, you’re an adult, and your mother has no authority over you in general. If you are unable to turn off your electronics for even the length of one enchanting class a day, I’m afraid you will have to drop this course.”
“What?!” Circe cried. “That’s ridiculous! I can’t—this is a fundamentals course! It’s just theory!”
“And if you haven’t made it a complete habit of turning your electronics off,” Mst. Silberfuchs said grimly, “You absolutely will forget and cause a major incident when you reach a practicum course. For the final time, Mst. Pendergast,” she said as she loomed over the tiny girl (not that she was all that large, herself), “Turn that phone off and put it away.”
Circe stared up at the instructor with wide eyes, and then, with a few beeps along the way, retired her phone to her backbag.
EVAN. FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. FIRST PERIOD.
“Okay you lot!” the teacher said, loudly enough to get the room’s attention. “We’re going to get started! First of all, I am Mst. Vanvestraut. You may call me Mst. Vanvestraut, Instructor, or Boss.” She looked pretty much exactly like you think a Mst. Vanvestraut would look like, Evan thought. She didn’t sound or talk anything like you’d think a Mst. Vanvestraut would sound or talk. It was incongruous. Of course, one wouldn’t think a Mst. Vanvestraut would teach a course on computers, so… there was that.
“Second things second, safety! First and foremost, touching electronic components without an anti-static band on can damage the components. You see those elastic bands with the little cords and clamps on your desk? Those are anti-static bands. Before you touch anything, you should put those on and clamp the clamp to the case of the computer you’re working on.
“Second, do not under any circumstances use any sort of magic around unshielded, activated electronic components, and because that is the nature of this class, no magic should ever be used in here. You certainly should all know this, of course, but you’d be surprised how often people just forget. Their own electronics are well shielded, their magic is relatively minor, they don’t think it’s a big deal, and then something or someone is soaked by twenty liters of water and the room is flooded. Or worse.”
Evan still felt a little dazed by the turquoise girl’s eyes, and also did not need this lecture.
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Ryan sighed loudly.
“Yes,” Mst. Vanvestraut said. “Mst. d’Maughn? May I help you?”
“Yes?” Ryan raised an eyebrow. He was very good at raising his eyebrow. “You know me before roll call?”
“Oh, your reputation precedes you, Mst. d’Maughn. I can’t imagine how you think it wouldn’t. All the teachers here have heard about you,” she said. She did not sound impressed or approving. Evan suppressed a smirk.
“I’m getting better,” Ryan said primly. “I didn’t make anyone cry in ninth grade at all. Not a substitute or a teacher’s assistant or anyone.”
“Your commentary, however, continued to the end, or so I’m told.”
“Well a boy has to keep himself entertained somehow, and a lot of things y’all teach are wrong,” Ryan said.
Ms. Vanvestraut pursed her lips. “You will not comment upon my syllabus or subject matter, nor upon the details of what I teach. You are an adult, and acting like a member of the peanut gallery is unacceptable. That includes loud, disruptive sighs and attempting to carry on a conversation such as we have been doing right now. That is unless it is about the subject matter at hand, and if so, you will discuss that politely and without appreciable criticism, including criticism couched as leading questions.
“If you must offer a correction of something that is factually wrong, you may do so politely and without disdain, and with supporting evidence. However, I think you will find that I have my facts straight, as this is a hands-on course and I am very familiar with the history of computational technology. I have twenty-six other students to teach in this class, Mst. d’Maughn, and since the consensus at Asphodel is that you could have skipped the whole thing and gone straight to university at twelve, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to be. I expect you to be considerate of the people who need to be here.”
Ryan blinked a bunch. Then he said, “You got it, Boss.” Then, very quickly, he added, “I just think it’s sad we need this reminder.”
“Mst. d’Maughn,” Mst. Vanvestraut said. “You are already in a squeeze.[1] Don’t make a racket, lest you attract a Beast.”
[1] A term used by dungeon delvers to refer to narrow passages—even if you don’t need to literally squeeze through them, a squeeze is too narrow to fight effectively in without thrusting weapons or firearms, and smaller firearms at that.
Ryan mimed zipping his lips closed, then grinned with teeth. Evan didn’t know if Mst. Vanvestraut would recognize it as the joke that it was.
“So,” she said, “Keep in mind that Mst. d’Maughn thinks its sad that anyone might need reminding about keeping magic and electronics separate, so please follow all safety precautions so that he will not think you, specifically, are sad by messing up. That said, we may find this semester challenging in that regard, as I understand Mst. Ma has some trouble controlling her ability anyway?”
Evan frowned. Mst. Ma… He knew that name…
The girl with the turquoise eyes and hair spoke up and said, “Heh, yeah, not wrong, but I’ve got a new binding charm that should work better so hopefully it won’t be any sort of an issue. I’m unlikely to get too strong an emotion that makes me want to go fast here, so I ought to be okay?” She shrugged. “If not, Mst. Silberfuchs said she could take a look at my charms and see if they can be adjusted to work better around electronics.”
A boy Evan didn’t care about (because he’d attended Asphodel and hadn’t ever talked to them) raised his hand and asked, “Wouldn’t the charms be a problem too?”
“Binding charms are both passive and antimagical,” Ryan piped up conversationally. “It’d be more of a problem if active-use charms were activated in the presence of the unshielded electromagnetic fields, since those are the primary issue with magic and technology. Incidentally, a sufficiently large lodestone or other magnet can similarly throw off magical effects. It’s not just electronics. Lodestones actually used to be carried for defense against magic, even though they’re entirely non-magical.”
“What Mst. d’Maughn said, though I cannot verify defensive lodestones myself,” Mst. Vanvestraut said, a hint of warning in her voice. “Okay. Next we will do roll call, and as we do, we’re going to share an interesting fact about ourselves. After that, we will discuss the syllabus for the semester, and then if we have time we will start going over terminology. Any questions?”
There did not seem to be any, and the rest of class was pretty boring. Turquoise girl seemed to be named Firuzeh Ma, a name that tugged on Evan’s memory, but he couldn’t place it. Her interesting fact was her magical ability, which was to step betweenspace.[1] Evan thought that was pretty fucking cool, and was also kind of jealous. Evan’s “interesting fact” was that he and his family lived in the same boarding house the original Bakili matriarch lived in, which he knew was normally Ryan’s interesting fact. Ryan instead said he lived with Evan, which, fair. People looked confused, but Mst. Vanvestraut hadn’t been allowing a lot of time for elaboration or Q&A, which made sense, and so they just moved on.
[1] The colloquial Fredonic term for the varying sorts of magical pocket spaces that varying magical beings and effects are able to create or utilize. These pocket spaces vary widely, ranging from bags or rooms that are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside to vast hidden magical realms. Some of the realms are like Faerie, difficult to find intentionally but possible to stumble into, and potentially accessible from anywhere in the world, while some of them are like the Hundred Thousand Islands of Lemuria, only accessible at a specific point on the globe. It is believed that the Dreamlands exist in betweenspace, as well, a natural formation from humanity’s collective subconscious. The scientific name for betweenspace is the Spatium Inter, which no one in Fredonia except serious nerdlingers really cares to say.
Distances betweenspace and in the prime universe often fail to match, and those who “step” betweenspace typically move a minuscule distance through Faerie and by doing so travel many meters, sometimes many, many meters, through the prime universe in a single step. Stepping betweenspace is often called blinking.
According to the roll call, Mercy was in the class, she just wasn’t there right then. That was a relief.