Today I fired off my first real detection ritual. A full negative. I wonder whether they had somebody check at the air base. Probably they did. Who said that war is boredom mixed with occasional terror? I miss my phone. Though I am a responsible online player. I transfered leadership of our online game group to another player as soon as I had talked with my lawyer neighbor about my draft notice.

Instructor von Bülow looked at me with an expression I could not read, but I did not like it. Apparently they had recorded our speed at performing the essence ritual and I was fastest by twentytwo seconds. Thus I had earned the dubious honor of performing under his gaze in front of all other trainees. That man did not like me and standing out made me harder to forget.

vB: You used a lot of lesser cores.

P: Yes, sir.

Silence. What to say that wouldn’t make it worse? The man was not impressive physically speaking, yet still intimidating. And we were under enhanced discipline.

vB: Very well, we cannot use more spirit coins for training. We are cutting this training short. Tomorrow will be your last day here. Questions?

W: Why does nobody build a machine to do these rituals?

vB: I meant practical questions. But anyway. Cost. In these versions of the ritual the caster’s mind is a part of the process. It stops working as soon as the caster drops out and only he can see the results without a perception power. That can be compensated for, but then you get a machine that is prohibitively expensive in terms of construction without the right essence ability to power it at this scale. You just cannot scrap up nearly enough from the ambient to run low end materials. Class dismissed.

Thank you for that question, buddy, you got him to stop focusing on me. Chances are I won’t be able to repay you during this crisis, though.

--

I went for laundry to the basement. The room wasn’t empty.

P: Hi Thomas, not in the game room?

T: Hi yourself. Test tomorrow, I think, I was almost as fast as you. I want to get a full night of sleep. I think we’ll be moved out tomorrow and who knows when we’ll have a washer/dryer available again?

P: Great minds think alike. You know, I was really surprised to see the faces behind the user names. And now we are wizards.

Thomas snorted.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

T: Turning sunlight into mana hardly makes you a great wizard.

P: Which essence?

T: Coral. Though, why are you turning nostalgic on me?

P: Von Bülow. This guy gives me the creeps. That makes me happy to get away from here. That in turn takes me feel guilty.

T: He just doesn’t like muggles being taught ritual magic.

P: This isn’t Harry Potter.

T: Dude, we are in a wizarding school. Literally.

I shut up. That was a very good point. I needed a counter point. Fast.

P: But you don’t get expelled for disciplinary infractions.

T: But you might be expelled for wasting spirit coins, so I want to get it right tomorrow. I don’t want to end up cleaning toilets, as you like to put it. Besides what do you mean by nobody getting expelled?

P: Didn’t you hear about the guy who caused them to disable Netflix?

T: Nope, no Mandalorian. I don’t care.

P: Have you considered what the evacuations will do to the film industry?

Revenge is best served in the Klingon original. I was too cheap to pay that much money on streaming services.

P: Anyway, he had smuggeled in a Raspberry Pi and used the ethernet the TVs are connected to.

The military had soon corrected the hotels mistake of letting the terminals run.

P: They told him off, but nothing happened to him. They must really need us. Things are going to get rough.

T: Come on, if they really need us so much they’ll give us escorts.

He had a point. Again.

T: If pessimism became an Olympic discipline, you’d get silver at least.

Why did I like this guy?

--

They let the TV run during dinner and afterwards. That made sense. If they let us out tomorrow, we’ll need to know what’s going on and we’ll get the news soon anyway. Not that we were that eager. Our hacker had used his device to watch cat videos. Maybe this species did not deserve to survive.

» The government of national unity has broken apart with the Green Party leaving it.

» All other parties but the nationalists, who decried the criticism as „an hour of telling fairy tales“,

» deplored the move as irresponsible in a time of crisis

» The spokeswoman of the Green Party declared that the law about lifting restrictions on private

» ownership of firearms by citizens was one step to far

» we are getting reports of a troop of masked superheroes coming to the rescue of the Australian

» city of Broken Hill

» the ministry of economics has refused to endorse proposals to lower the driving age to 16 to aid

» pupils finding themelves without transportation to school in the wake of the government seizing

» most busses for evacuations

» He stated that the country could not afford the inevitable spike in the price of used cars needed

» to get essential workers to their jobs now that public transport has been severely curtailed

» and announced the possibility that even schools in urban areas would have to be seized in full

» to house refugees

» the Society for the Promotion of Sports has condemned the seizure of school sports facilities

» claiming that we are growing a generation of couch potatoes

» the council of state ministers of education has welcomed the emergency legislation lifting

» data protection standards to allow for online schooling citing a need to keep displaced pupils

» connected to their teachers and classes

Superheros?