Mage Catalyst (5 page)

Could I do that?
Surely not?
Why not?
I wouldn’t want to attack anyone with it, but surely it could do other stuff, move things? Lift things? That sounded pretty cool. My face twisted into a curled grin at the thought of all the fun I could have with that kind of power.
My sprained wrist disrupted my train of thought with a violent throb. I looked down and began to lightly stroke it, trying to massage away the discomfort. That only partially worked, but it did make me feel a little better.
Once the pain subsided in my wrist I began to contemplate the lifting stuff concept more. Renee had technically lifted me when she had attacked me – so therefore it must be possible.
With my logic figured out, I tried to visualise how she had actually got the particles to come from her hand like she had. I went over the scene in my mind again and again until I could almost see the scene on the inside of my eyelids.
She had flexed her fingers and the particles had run down her arm to her hand. The more I thought about this the more I could feel the particles buzzing up and down my arm. It was as if they were preparing for something.
Time to give it a go.
I reached out and wiggled my fingers – nothing happened. Okay, I hadn’t seriously expected that to work anyway. I tried pointing my forefinger and said, “Abracadabra”, half thinking something might happen. I felt very foolish but no-one was around so I concentrated and tried something else I had seen in movies. There was an empty glass on the table about two metres away. I focused on it and thought about it moving as hard as I could.
Nothing, not even a twitch.
It took me a good hour before I could even get the blue particles to move with any degree of control, and even then I had to calm myself and breathe steadily. Fortunately I had plenty of time to practice.
I kept focusing on my breath while observing the particles of light.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
Eventually, I could feel the particles begin to move in a pattern of sorts, with a degree of control. I could force them to slowly slide down my arm and then back up. It took about another hour before I felt I had it. Yet no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get them to leap from my hand into that whip-like thing that Renee had used.
Okay, this was getting frustrating. I reached out my hand, straining against the couch, focusing intently on the glass. Zip. Nothing. Infuriating.
I strained with my fingers stretched to their apex. I could see the particles swirling down my hand and across my fingers. Try as hard as I could, I just couldn’t get them to leap from it.
Then it happened. On the out breath – when I had expelled everything.
It felt as if I’d reached my hand through a wall made of water. It gave way before me with laughable resistance. I watched with glee as the particles trailed out from my fingers a few centimetres, curling in on themselves into a tight spiral.
It snapped back and dissipated almost immediately – but I now knew it could be done and that was enough.
I tried again.

It was easier this time. The particles crept from each outstretched finger on my hand, slowly forming something akin to a backbone of particles. They were always in motion, swirling in a circular pattern outwards from my palm. It was so slow at the start but then gained more speed. The particle slivers merged into one solid thread – similar to what I’d seen Renee use, although far less impressive and painfully slow. But it was a start.
With a grunt I snapped my arm forward while flicking my good right wrist and saw the particle whip flow from my fingers. The thread almost immediately dissipated and I felt a shock ripple up my arm. The pain wasn’t too bad, certainly nothing compared to the bruises I was currently sporting on my left side. The shock of the sensation running up my arm was more disconcerting, however. It had caused my arm to go rubbery and limp for a few seconds.
I instinctively recoiled, which caused my back to spasm as it was pulled and led to more complaints from my bruised back muscles. This wasn’t going well. Giving myself a few minutes break, I leaned back down on the couch to rest. I watched intently as more particles spread down my arms towards my wrists. They were slowly circling in tight ovals around the joint of my wrist and then around down into the palms of my hands. Taking a deep breath to ready myself I thrust my hand with a quick flicking motion, palm up at the glass.
It worked! The particles immediately formed a thread of light that lashed from my hands and out several metres. I’d done it! Speed appeared to be the critical component here. This was going to make it difficult to control, but it must be possible! After all, Renee had done it. I tried again.
Damn it! I had missed but I had the distance about right. It took me several more tries before I clipped the glass by accident, causing it to wobble and then eventually fall over. The glass rolled over and threatened to fall off the edge of the table. It was at this point I realised that I could potentially cover the floor with shards of broken glass. Cursing myself for my own stupidity, I went and grabbed a plastic mug from the kitchen.
It took me several more minutes to repeat the success of my previous attempt. The particle whip now leapt from my fingers with a reliable ferocity and smacked the cup firmly, causing it to fly from the coffee table and smack with a resounding thunk against the window on the far side of the room.
It took even more time to try to slow the particle whip to a speed that I could control without slapping the mug off the table. It was infuriating – if I made the particle whip move too slowly it would dissipate, too fast and I wouldn’t be able to control it.
I was so frustrated with the mug flying off the table that I ended up fetching several more mugs and placing them in even intervals. This way I wouldn’t need to get up quite so often as I telekinetically scattered mugs about the apartment.
I was up to my fifth and final mug when finally I managed to slow the whip enough to wrap it around the mug. I was promptly greeted with a shrill shriek of complaint as the plastic mug simply collapsed in on itself as the particle whip tightened around it. The shards of the mug scattered out in an explosive pattern across the surface of the table as the mug exploded under the stress.

Damn, that wasn’t even close to what I was trying to do.
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.