Mage Catalyst

by George, Christopher

I leaned forward to pick up one of the other mugs and tightly squeezed it with my fingers, trying to get it to crack. It wasn’t even close to snapping in my hands. I felt the plastic flex beneath my fingers but it was nowhere near breaking limit. I simply could not apply the necessary pressure with my fingers to get the mug to even crack, let alone shatter like the other one had.

  How much pressure had I been able to exert before?

  The sound of keys in the door brought me back to reality. Damn, Dad was home. He walked in with his usual after-work expression: slight annoyance and tiredness.

  “I trust you didn’t forget dinner tonight,” he grumbled as he saw me on the couch, then his eyes narrowed with curiosity. He didn’t say anything but I’m sure he was wondering what I was doing with four mugs and a smashed one, lined up in a row on the coffee table.

  “Nope,” I said, getting to my feet to clear up the mess. ”Give me five minutes to get changed and I’m ready to go.”

  “Okay. Wait a minute though, I want to talk to you first,” he called before I could head into my room.

  Great, this was definitely a pre-meet-the-woman-I’m-dating speech. I was a little sick of these – they never went well and the women Dad dated never seemed to hang around that long anyway.

  “Have you given any thought to what you’re doing next year yet?” he started, taking me a little off balance at the unexpected direction. “Your mother says you are only just scraping by in all of your subjects this year.”

  Thanks Mum. Of course both my parents and the school were adamant that I’d go to university. “I’ve looked at a few courses,” I grumbled.

  That was true at least. I had looked at a few courses, but couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm for any of them. All of my friends had a calling. Garry was kind of a jerk and was failing a lot of subjects even worse than me, but he was brilliant on the guitar and aced Music class – both theory and practice. Tony could play at being the fool but his grades were better than mine in every class, apart from Art. Sarah got the best grades in English and had won the year level’s poetry prize. I didn’t seem to be very good at anything much at all and certainly had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

  “That’s what you said last time,” Dad reminded me grimly. “Life is not a free ride, Devon. You have to earn what you want. You’re going to have to take some responsibility and make some serious plans for the future.”

  “I know, Dad,” I groaned. If this was the preamble before the dinner then the actual dinner was sure to be as fun as a root canal.

  “I’ve arranged for you to meet with a friend of mine. He works for a graphic design company. He’s got a proposition for you.”

  This was unexpected – and I wasn’t sure that I liked where this was going.

  “Well, even if you’re not interested, at least be polite. I’ve known Martin for a long time and I will not have you being rude to him,” Dad finished.

  Dinner turned out to be a pleasant surprise, causing me to re-evaluate the powers of perception my old man possessed. Martin Boyd ran a small graphic design company that my father regularly used. The offer was to work for a year after I finished my finals, and get some real work experience. I don’t know what favours Dad had called in for this offer, but this sounded like a much better offer than studying for three or four years at a university.

  Martin was very sure of himself but friendly enough. He and Dad got along very well, which surprised me as I had never heard of Martin before and I thought I knew all of Dad’s close friends. I suppose thinking about it, I didn’t have that much to do with Dad’s professional life. I guess I never asked.

  After a light dinner and some after-dinner drinks I was feeling like things had just fallen into place. I finally knew what I was going to do with myself after high school. I was going to work for a year and not even think about university.

  I was gazing out of the restaurant window feeling excited when I saw Renee. Her bright blue light particles caught my eye. She was standing across the road, leaning against a wall and looking directly at me. I rose so quickly I almost knocked over my bourbon and Coke. She winked at me and walked briskly away.

  I sat back down and turned my attention back to Dad and Martin. She may have given me a false phone number but she had also tracked me down. Perhaps I could learn to track her down just as easily.

  * * * *

  Mondayitis had come with its usual doom and gloom, made worse because it was a particularly wet and miserable morning. Tony and Garry met me at my house as they usually did and we all walked to school together.

  School turned out to be as intellectually stimulating as ever. I’d already sat through English with Saunders and the bloody Heart of Darkness and was now enduring a Maths class. Maths should be outlawed in the afternoon.

  I was bored and the subject matter didn’t appear to be offering much in the way of entertainment. That was okay, I could make my own entertainment. I’d had this stunt up my sleeve for about a month but I just needed the right moment to attempt it. This looked like it.

  I took the small screwdriver that I’d always kept in my pencil case to my calculator, gently removing the four small screws that held the back plate on. I had to do it discreetly, using my books to cover what I was doing. Fortunately Mr Cromby was in the middle of a lecture about something to do with angles so he wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing.

  With a small clunk the calculator came apart and the rubber mat that held the keys and the battery pack were exposed. Using a small cutting knife from my pencil case, I gently cut the plastic numeric mat and very carefully placed the keys back in order, except backwards. The nine key was now in the position of the one key and vice versa. It took me several minutes to get the calculator back together and, jiggling to make certain it was okay, I turned my attention back to the class. Mr Cromby still hadn’t noticed my lack of attention and had just about finished his lecture.

  “Mr Cromby!” I tentatively put up my hand. “I can’t seem to get the same result.”

  If truth be told – I had no idea of what the equation was, let alone what the result should be, but I would bet that it definitely wouldn’t be the answer my calculator would give.

  “Sit down, Devon.” Mr Cromby sighed wearily, waving me away.

  Damn it! Mr Cromby wasn’t going to fall for it. He must have spotted my expression or seen me tampering with my calculator. It was of course possible that he just simply knew me far too well after three years of teaching me to fall for anything.

  Well, at least it had kept me entertained for a half hour or so.

  The rest of the class passed with too much preamble – of course I couldn’t do the actual work now. I’d tried at first but the mental math of figuring out where the keys on my keypad should be made the calculations even harder. I had just about given up when the class bell rang.

  “Fix your calculator before next class too, Devon,” Mr Cromby called as I walked out the door.

  I couldn’t help but grin to myself. Mr Cromby might not be the flashiest teacher but damn the man was smart. I’d have to come up with something more devious next time.

  “What’s wrong with your calculator?” Garry asked as we entered the hall.

  “Nothing much,” I smiled back, passing it to him. “What’s nine plus nine? Try it.”

  “Two?” Garry murmured. “How’d you do that?”

  “Magic,” I smirked as I enigmatically waved my fingers about in his face.

  “You’re an idiot!” He smiled and threw my calculator back at me.

  I had a free period that afternoon which I spent in the library looking up any reference to magic that I could find. Unfortunately other than fictional references to magic users, magicians and sorcerers, I came up with very little.

  I somehow doubted that figures such as Gandalf, Harry Potter or Merlin would be useful as role models anyway. I needed a non-fiction book – a how-to book. Fictional stories didn’t go deep enough into how these guys controlled the
ir powers – and it was advice about control that I was desperately seeking. Unfortunately they don’t have A Dummies Guide to Magic in our library. The internet too had proved to be a complete loss. There were a variety of groups that claimed to have magical powers, but I doubted that they had anything like this. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to advertise that they were this different from everyone else. They would instinctively hide. They would have had to, otherwise everyone would know about it.

  No. After several hours of useless web surfing I came to the inescapable conclusion. There was only one person who could help me. I just had to find her and convince her to teach me what I needed to know. If I was honest with myself I’d probably have admitted that I might have had other reasons for wanting to see Renee again.

  “Devon?”

  I glanced around to see Tina Higgins gazing at me. She had a pile of books in her hands and a nervous expression. Tina and I had History class together. She was one of the nerdy kids who sat up the front of the class. She was also one of Sarah’s friends, but I hadn’t really spent that much time with her. I didn’t know her that well at all actually. She had curly dark hair and wore tight wire-rim glasses on her freckled face. She wasn’t one of the popular kids, but I wasn’t exactly going to win any competitions for class president either. We had sat together and worked on several group projects, but we weren’t exactly friends.

  ”What are you searching for?” she asked as she logged into the computer terminal next to mine.

  “Just something for English.” I shrugged as I quickly minimised a webpage on Gandalf. “You?”

  “History,” she groaned. I didn’t even know we had something due for History. I really should start paying more attention in class. We sat in uncomfortable silence for a few more seconds.

  “I like your new contacts,” she began. “I didn’t know you needed glasses.”

  That statement had come out of nowhere. Contacts? I wasn’t wearing contacts. Where had that come from? I frowned at her in confusion, searching her face for any sign that she was making fun of me. If she was – I didn’t get the joke.

  My silence couldn’t have been helping with her nervousness as she began nervously twiddling with her hair.

  “I was thinking about getting those coloured lenses too,” she stammered, “but I didn’t think the school would allow them. They’re making your eyes very blue.”

  It finally struck home: she couldn’t see the blue particle lines, but she could see that something was strange with my eyes.

  “Has anyone told you off?” she asked.

  “Not at all. I need contacts for reading,” I said. “I got red eyes from the contacts at first,” I continued.

  I was making it up as I went along and was amazed that it actually made some kind of sense. I’ve always been a bad liar but it looked like Tina was being taken in.

  “I thought the blue contacts would help hide the red-eye,” I finished lamely.

  “Well it seems to have worked.” Tina smiled, gazing into my eyes with a strange expression on her face. “Your eyes are completely free of red!”

  “Yeah,” I said, getting nervous. “I’d better go now.” I shut down the computer.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Well, see you later Devon…” she murmured uncertainly as her sentence kind of trailed off.

  The rest of the day finished without too much grief. No-one else mentioned my eyes. That was good. Mum had phoned me to say she was going to be late and that I’d have to sort my own dinner out. Mum was studying a business course at night school and so every now and then I had to fend for myself. I didn’t mind it actually – it was kind of nice to be self-reliant.

  I fried up sausages for dinner. It was not the most appealing meal, but it was safely within my cooking repertoire. After I finished eating, I did the dishes and went outside. Our house was the rear unit in a lot of three, so I had plenty of privacy. I’d never get a better time to get some more practice.

  I vaguely thought about getting out some more mugs to practice on but it had been pretty obvious from my earlier attempts that I needed to try something different.

  In a burst of inspiration I hurried into the garage and rummaged through the storage boxes. It wasn’t long before I found what I was looking for. It was an old horseshoe game. It was something that I’d played as a kid. I think it was a gift from my grandmother for one of my birthdays. I hadn’t played it in years.

  I sat down on the concrete floor in the garage, a ring held balanced on my palm while I slowly let the particles wrap around it. I didn’t have much trouble looping the thread through the hole and around the ring. I didn’t need anywhere near as much control. The family cat looked at me, annoyed that I had disturbed it when I had been looking for the horseshoe game.

  There was a noticeable creaking noise and an indent on the ring where the thread was gripping it. The ring didn’t break, but it did look like it was undergoing an enormous amount of pressure. I held the ring in one hand and had the particle whip around the other. All I needed to do now was remove my hand.

  The ring fell to the ground. The particle whip had stretched from my hand to accommodate the distance. I tried several more times before I figured out the trick. I focused the particles from both hands into one thread, trapping the object between my two hands. The ring hovered in mid-air. I could cause it to rise and fall by altering the pressure from either hand.

  Brilliant!

  The cat and I exchanged brief amazed glances at the ring floating in mid-air. It didn’t take long before I figured out how to get the ring to rotate and turn in the air, but I soon grew bored of this. What I really wanted to try was throwing the ring at the post telekinetically. My eyes narrowed with concentration as I tried to gently throw the ring onto the wooden pole about three metres away. ‘Gently’ being the operative word. The results were spectacular. I applied what I thought was a little amount of power as I attempted to launch the ring at the post. I hadn’t even really aimed at the post. Anywhere close to the post would have been fine.

  The ring left my hands with a speed I hadn’t anticipated and disappeared with a shower of leaves as it tore through the bushes on the far side of the yard. There was a dull thunking noise as it hit the brick wall that separated our houses. The cat glanced at me with curiosity before heading over to inspect the damage.

  Investigating, I found it had gouged a chunk out of the brick wall. The impact had wrecked the rope ring. Now that it was broken I could see that the rope had been wrapped around a small metal ring.

  The metal was also snapped neatly in two. I stared at the ring in disbelief. I had broken it in two by doing nothing more than throwing it. I investigated the chunk missing from the brick wall and realised that the only way I’d normally be able to do this kind of damage was with a sledge hammer. It was frightening, awe inspiring and so totally cool all at once. I needed to try again, but I’d take a little more care this time and avoid throwing things at the wall.

  I grabbed another ring from the collection and tried again. It was a little easier to wrap the particles around it this time. I was so elated by my supposed improvement that I lost control of what I was doing and ended up jerking the particles to one side.

  With a metallic shriek the ring tore itself into two. The first piece imbedded itself in the ground inches from my foot. The second piece shot straight up past my face. I felt the air whoosh past me and my hair flutter in its passing. It took several seconds before it returned back to the ground. There was a horrible crash as the piece returned to the ground right through the garage roof, leaving a fist-sized hole.

  Damn. That would be hard to cover up, I concluded as I inspected the damage. My God, what if that had hit me on the way down? This was too dangerous to continue. I could seriously hurt someone. Perhaps even kill them. I needed help with this before I continued. I could tell from the way that the cat was nowhere to be seen that he agreed with me.

  Fortunately Mum didn’t comment on the damage to the garag
e or she never noticed. If she did notice she must have assumed something else as it wasn’t the type of damage that she would normally attribute to her eighteen-year-old son. The next week was subtle torture. I now knew that I lacked the necessary control to experiment on my own. I needed to find Renee more than ever. I resolved more firmly to track Renee down and insist that she teach me what she knows.

  Friday seemed to take forever to come around. I had called Dad earlier that week and said I would be busy Friday night and that I’d crash at his place at around twelve. He didn’t comment other than a curt acknowledgment, so I figured he must have been busy with work.

  That meant I’d have the whole night to hunt for Renee. I figured that I’d start at the Fitzroy pub where I’d first met her. She was there last Friday so it wasn’t totally out of the question that she’d be there again.

  * * * *

  I arrived very early to the club and it was pretty much empty. Tony had wanted to come but I hadn’t let him – I wanted Renee all to myself without Tony getting in the way.

  The band that was playing was simply awful. It sounded like a mixture of screeching and droning. I’d heard Tony comment that the good bands didn’t come on until after nine. He was obviously right. I resolved to sit and wait for Renee to turn up.

  I sat through three torturous bands before I finally lost my patience. All the while my eyes scanned the almost empty room for the tell-tale sign of a particle halo. Every new face that entered the room was examined and Renee’s face was definitely not among them. I was so frustrated. By the time I decided to leave the club was starting to get busy and the bands had notably improved but I didn’t care.

  On a whim I decided to check the alley where she had thrown me down. Yes, the alley was pretty much as I’d remembered it, but Renee wasn’t there. I nodded sourly and returned to my seat inside. It had been a long shot anyway. Why would she be hanging out in an alley?

  The fourth band was just setting up when I resumed my seat.

  “Hey, Twitch!”

  My stomach lurched in fright. Finally. She was wearing a tight black dress and I wanted to kiss her again straight away, but that probably wouldn’t have been a good idea.