Wednesday, February 15, 2012

My Teacher

Sorry about the inactivity.  I'll try to stick to a M/W/F schedule, see how that works out.  (More after the jump.)


I went back to Renolia the next day, like Catherine told me to.  She was waiting fir me, and said "You look surprised to see me.  Did you think I would forget?"

I said "No, I just kind of thought I was dreaming last time I was here."

She laughed.  "You'll find that Renolia is, in fact, real.  Now, I have prepared a teacher for you.  His name is Theo the Wise."

"A teacher?  For what?"

"Magic, of course.  If you're going to fulfill the prophecy, you'll need to learn how to use magic.  I must return to the castle immediately, or else my father may notice my absence.  Your teacher should be here shortly."

She said a few words in that other language and disappeared.  At this point, I began to speculate on what my teacher, Theo the Wise, would be like.  He would probably be old, having gained much wisdom to the ways of magic through his many years of practicing it.  He would rarely speak, but when he did, only great truths would usher forth from his mouth.  I was startled out of my contemplation by a guy who couldn't have been any older than I was. He said "You, you're that guy from Erd, right?"

"Earth."

He rolled his eyes.  "Whatever.  I'm supposed to teach you magic or something."

"You?  You're just a kid."

Theo's eyes squinted.  "Look pal, I'm no kid.  I'm old enough to be in the royal army, and the only reason I'm not is because the princess hand picked me to be her personal magic tutor.  I know more magic spells than half the so called wizards in the country.  It don't matter to me if I teach you or not, but the princess was very insistent on it."

"Okay, okay.  Where do we start?"

"Let's see... what's your power source?"

I scratched my head.  "My... what now?"

"You don't even...  Oh boy, this could take awhile.  You need to draw energy from some outside source in order to do magic.  Otherwise, the energy required will be taken out of your own body.  You could only fire off a handful of spells before you fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.  Pretty much everyone around here just uses power from Helios."

The more he talked, the less I understood.  I asked "What's Helios?"

"Oh come on!  Do you know anything about this world?  Helios.  The ball of brightness up in the sky that hurts to look at.  Rises every morning, sets every night."

I said "Oh.  On Earth, we just call that the Sun.  Although I suppose it's not the same star."

"We're getting off track here.  Power source.  You need one before I can teach you any magic."

"I could use any source of energy, right?"

Theo said "Well, yes, but Helios is pretty much the only constant source of power."

"What about when it's cloudy?  Or raining?  Or during the night?"

"We get less power then, but we still get enough to do most spells."

I thought for a moment.  "What if I wanted to use heat?  Could I do that?"

He looked at me like I was crazy.  "Heat?  Heat isn't energy.  Heat is just warm things."

"Trust me.  On Earth, our science is much more advanced then yours.  Heat is definitely energy."

Theo shook his head.  "You can try it if you want, but I doubt you'll get results.  Just concentrate on whatever you're drawing energy from when you say the incantation, like this."  He glanced up at the Sun, err, Helios, held out his hand, and said "Fiba!"  A large fireball burst forth from the palm of his hand.  I concentrated on the temperature and said the same thing.  Another fireball appeared.  Theo said "Is it just me, or did it get colder?  Wait... no.  You did not just use heat as your power source."

I said "Sure feels like it to me."

"Just use Helios.  It's reliable, and it doesn't have the downside of making you cold every time you want to use a spell."

"Nah, I'll just use heat."

Theo sighed.  "This is going to be a long, cold day."

We spent the rest of the day going over different magic words to use.  We stopped when Theo couldn't stand how cold it was getting.

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