Grim walked into the classroom and the students stopped whatever they were doing to look at him. He was nervous, and tried not to show it.
“Morning,” he said, and stood behind the desk. No, he reminded himself, don’t be afraid, stand in front of the desk, it shows you’re confident…He walked around to the front of the desk as the students were responding “good mornings”. “I’m going to be your teacher for this course on basic summoning.”
Grim had been disgusted at the fact that the Academy he tried to build never took off. All that work for nothing, he thought, getting ready to sell off the warehouse and move on with his life with Ben. But then he had a revelation while reading his tarot cards: combine forces. The next day, he went to the university dean, who told him to create a curriculum and the board would look at it.
Grim went online and found the courses that they offered, and noticed a whole slew of them on demon summoning. No wonder so many demons were running rampant; demon summoning was not easy for the novice, or even the adept. Demons happily came where you summoned them – and then ate you if you couldn’t control them.
Grim proposed a basic summoning class, and developed a lesson plan. He handed it to the Dean who called him three days later and told him that his class was on the website, and he would be expected to start teaching in two weeks.
Now he stood in front of this class, all the seats full. The class had filled up pretty quickly. He chose not to dress like a mage, to dress like a normal person. After Ben’s good luck kiss, he felt ready to take them on – until he walked in the door.
Luckily, he had index cards on what he wanted to say so he could stay on track. He pulled one out from his pocket and glanced at it. “Okay, so who can tell me the difference between summoning and conjuring?” He looked up expectantly at the class. A woman in the back raised her hand slowly, and Grim nodded to her.
“You make something come to you?”
“You’re on the right track,” Grim said, and went back to the whiteboard. He frowned; he hadn’t brought anything to write with or to erase. Well, he’d have to make do. He waved his hand over the whiteboard and all the writing on it disappeared. He placed his hand on one side, and the board seemed to bleed letters through it in his own fancy script.
“Summoning means you bring something to you from somewhere else. Conjuring means you make it appear out of thin air. Which is easier?”
“Summoning,” said a man’s voice.
“Most of the time, yes.” He turned back to the group. “Who here knows magic?”
A couple of hands came up. Grim studied the group – they were a mix of those who looked like they were just curious, to serious people who looked like this was their first class in magic. “Hm, maybe I’d better start teaching a class on Magic 101.”
Some in the class chuckled. “Okay, the ones who do know magic: How do you summon things?”
“With a spell.”
“There’s more.”
“An artifact?”
Someone else said, “Don’t artifacts have spells in ’em?”
“Yes, sometimes.” Crap, Grim thought. I have a smart class. “Artifacts are usually keyed to a particular type of thing to summon, such a certain creature.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Now, does anyone here know what the similarities are between conjuring and summoning?”
“Something appears?”
“Yes.” Grim looked for more. When none was forthcoming he contiued: “You have to know what you want. Or, in the case of the artifact, it has to know what it wants. And you have to really want it.”
He came back around to the front of the class. “In this class I hope to at least teach you how to summon something inanimate. This is a basic class. If you wanted to have fun with demons, you should have looked further down the class lists. But the problem with being complicated and fun is that you can lose control of creatures very, very fast – and the creature that you summon may not be the creature you want.” Grim firmly decided to develop a Magic 101 class, as the people who were not magical had no clue.
“I did not require textbooks for this class because most of the magical tomes out there are meant for you to screw up. Even if you follow them to the letter, they’re made by magicians to keep magic away from the masses. What’s a few corpses here and there, so long as secrets are kept? Does that sound like many a mage to you?”
There were some nods around. “Look,” Grim said, and leaned against the desk. “Magic should be for everyone. If you have the wherewithall, the moxie, and the guts to use magic, then fine, good for you, have a ball with it. Want to rule the world? Good luck with that. But if you want to kill the teacher to prove that you’re better, then we’ll have issues. Everyone got that?”
There were some nods. Grim smiled, glad that the ground rules were set. He turned back to the whiteboard and said, “Tell me what you want to summon. Inanimate, animate, doesn’t matter.”
Words appeared on the whiteboard. A dog. Books. A chair. Pizza. A certain person. Demons – that got a look from Grim, and the word disappeared from the board. A familiar. A spirit. Grim stopped when everyone had said something at least once. The words all disappeared except for one: Pizza.
“First I will tell you that this is the simplest thing out of this list to summon. Why? Because it’s easy to picture. Everyone knows what a pizza looks like. Everyone has a favorite pizza place, right?” He looked out at the class, wondering if there were any culturally inept people. There didn’t seem to be any. “These other things, there are to many variables. What kind of dog, book, chair?” He went to the front row and stood in front of the first desk.
“I’ll go through this quickly, just so you get an idea. First, you need to have the thing in mind that you want. You need to concentrate on it – ” he glanced at the clock, nodded, and turned his attention to the desk. “You need to have seen the object – or, at the very least, have a very, very clear picture in your mind of it. It also helps greatly if you know where it’s from. Then, once you know that, you force it to come to you.” He took his index finger and drew a symbol on the desk, then drew a circle around it. People gathered around to watch. As soon as he completed the circle, the symbol shimmered.
“Now, what I did, was I already had a shortcut – that symbol means, to me, pizza from a special place in King’s Row in Paragon City that I used to go. It puts me in the right mindset to think, ‘I summon a pizza’.” The symbol disappeared, and in its place was a pizza box. “You always have a circle around what you plan to summon because, like I said, you never know if what you’re summoning is what you’ll get.” He broke the circle with a chopping motion of his hand. Grim opened the pizza box a little, peered underneath, and then tipped it back with a flourish. There was a pepperoni pizza in the box, still smoking.
“Take some, anyone. The bad thing is that someone who ordered a pepperoni pizza isn’t getting it right now.”
The class laughed, as the pizza disappeared in a flash. “The other thing about summoning is that you know that what you summoned is more ‘correct’ than what you conjure. You could have conjured a pepperoni pizza that tasted like chocolate by mistake.”
He tossed the box, and then turned back to the class. “Your homework. I want a book report for next week. Find one of those books I just mentioned about magic or summoning. You’ll write a book review of it, and then I want one thing in that report about what you suspect is not true. Try to keep it to summoning, but if the book doesn’t go into it, I’ll take anything. Three pages, the usual school format, yada, yada, yada. Please put it on paper; it doesn’t take that much extra time to print it and I believe in wasting trees.”
The group chuckled and gathered their books, the hour-long class over. Grim said he’d see them all on Friday morning, when it was 2 hours because 1 hour was considered “lab”. Grim wasn’t sure if he should have done that, but he had to do this all in three hours a week for twelve weeks.
He watched the last student leave, and he put his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth, grinning. Today a class. Tomorrow, the university.
Words: 1527
Comments: It first started with Grim bringing people into the Academy, and then I realized that that wasn’t really happening. Grim had been a teacher at the University before, in Paragon, when Jack Masterson was there teaching anthropology (a year ago? Gods, time flies…)