1 - Jonathan Wyck

It took the better part of half an hour for Jonathan to walk from school to the main road and from there catch a short bus ride to town. So long as he let his uncle know not to wait for him for dinner, he had much leeway to do as he pleased. Dudley probably knew better than to try to keep Jonathan on too tight a leash; Jonathan had a free-spirited streak about him, something his uncle said he inherited from his father (or was it his mother). Apart from being summoned to school on an occasional basis by Jonathan's teachers, Dudley found him largely sensible in behaviour outside of school, hence the freer rein.

Bigger Bites sat on the same plot for at least half a century, a little ways off Main street where the side roads branched off to a wider block. Jonathan circled past the ice cream parlor at the corner, not wanting to bump into any of his schoolmates, and ventured further until he reached the huge parking lot where the trailers used to pull up, the diner being a favourite pit stop decades ago. Much had changed since then. The greasy spoon cleaned up to keep up with the times, with a thorough renovation illuminating its exterior facade with glass walls and a more open concept, though its owners fought to retain the original neon sign above as well as the dated signage post that used to face the former freeway. The place was now more family-friendly, and still drew an unpretentious crowd as well as the blue-collar regulars. Not too many teenagers frequented the place, but Jonathan wouldn't feel too out of place.

>>>One of the interesting aspects of living in a big city was the sprawling variety of venues and businesses, the wide diversity of cultures mishmashed together into a vibrant crazy-quilt melange. It kept life interesting and dynamic. Bigger Bites couldn't exactly be called 'exotic' but it was a bit of an absurd relic of Route 66 Americana surviving in the 'burbs of 2026 Boston.
>>> Jonathan had been to the diner on more than a few occasions. Being a bit of a nut about older cars, Dudley had brought him here mainly for the classic car shows Bigger Bites hosted on summer weekends. The place also proved to be a popular weekend afternoon stop for older bikers to rally, eat and reminisce while also being a popular spot for the sport bike squidboys to meet up after the sun went down. In the between times, the restaurant hosted mainly blue-collar types and tourists looking for a kitschy place to stop for food.
>>> Jonathan stepped through the chrome and steel glass doors and onto the black & white checkered floor with a bit of trepidation. He usually carried himself with a sometimes intimidating amount of self confidence but since school started back he was in waters so unfamiliar to him that he had begun to question things in ways he hadn't before. Things that led him to impressions he hadn't noticed before... Like how rooted Bigger Bites felt, like it somehow resisted change in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on. How it tried to root him as well but his awareness of it somehow pushed back against that feeling.
>>>He realized that he'd come thru the door and just stood there, unsure of how long that'd been, and people were just looking at him expectantly. "Table or booth, hon?" the waitress, Deloris, spoke from behind the long bar counter and seemingly broke the weird tension. At the sound of her voice it was like the universe blinked and resumed normality after an awkward pause, continuing on as if nothing unusual had occurred. "Booth, I guess." Jonathan met her gaze. "For two. I'm meeting someone, I think..."

Deloris' uniform was likewise a modernised, clean cut service staff button down, but that mismatched frilly white apron was a throwback to retro diner vibes, as was her practical nod towards one of the booths along the glass wall. If Jonathan were an old-school trucker he might've gotten some accompanying lip from her, but a teenage boy, clearly the youngest patron here this evening, deserved and received a friendlier welcome. The rest of the customers went back to minding their own meal, no one was bothered that it was a school night; the easy laidback spirit of the American diner still survived here in this century.

Even before Jonathan had gotten himself seated, the other waitress, a younger, redhaired girl, had already slid a menu on the table, and walked away instead of hovering. This gave Jonathan the chance to slide properly into the booth and catch his breath to survey the room.

There were no familiar faces, wait, the older man at the far end of the L-shaped counter in his unmistakeable khaki work vest, was that 'Mr Bill' Easterton, the retired Shop and Trades instructor? No wonder Jonathan didn't see him at the welcome assembly yesterday!

>>>Jonathan strolled towards the booth with an appreciative nod to Deloris. It was hard to shake the unusual feeling he'd experienced at the door but maybe he was just a bit more 'on edge' and observant about such things given the events of the the last couple of days. He still wasn't sure he was just imagining it all despite there being other students just as involved as he was with the mysterious goings-on.
>>>He nodded and smiled flatly at the red-haired waitress as she slid the laminated menu at him and retreated. With the growing dusk approaching, the big windows of the diner slowly took on a mirrored appearance as the bright lights in the diner outshone the sun as it sank behind the trees and buildings to the west. If Jonathan had paid closer attention, or been less distracted by his own thoughts about who (or what) he was about meet, he might've noticed that the image in each big window pane reflected things a little differently than they appeared in reality.
>>>He drummed his thumbs on the tabletop for a lack of anything else to fidget with. His eyes wandered over the diner's other clientele, finally noticing Mr. Bill at the counter and giving him a curt nod should the older man's gaze stray his way. Given the man's school association, Jonathan wondered if Corbin had sent Mr. Bill or if it was a coincidence the two of them ended up here at the same time...if coincidences were even real anymore under the circumstances.
>>>"Coffee. Black, please " he answered the red-haired waitress preemptively as she completed her circuit checking on her customers.

"Wyck? Jonathan!" Bill slid himself over into the booth without an invitation when Jonathan looked up at him, beer mug in one hand, and a slice of apple pie in another. The retiree looked slightly less spry than just a year ago when he was seeing his last batch of students. Tradesmanship wasn't a class that Jonathan bothered to sign up for, that seemed to take him away from his art endeavours, so he didn't get much of a chance to get to know Mr Bill better apart from the compulsory introductory course in sophmore year.

Still, he only heard positive things about Mr Bill from his students; the man had a genuine affection for his apprentices, as he liked to call them. Jonathan now wondered if Mr Bill was the one he was supposed to meet, and suddenly the term 'apprentice' took on another level of meaning. "No need to get up, this ain't school. Well, maybe the school of life." He took a little swig from his mug, and look to see if Deloris would bring him another scoop of ice cream for his pie. "Coach says you need a little extra curricular help with your project, but tuition these days, oof. I told him you could come and see me if you wanted to learn how to fix things." Bill leveled his gaze at the teen, his eyes saying more than his actual words.

>>>"'School of Life' has probably taught more people than any other kinda school...but I guess that depends on what you're trying to learn." he mused as the old Shop Teacher settled opposite him in the booth. Between the both of them they looked like a 'Before and After' picture; one at the beginning of life's journey and the other at its polar opposite end.
>>>Jonathan tapped his fingers on the checkered linoleum countertop and bounced his leg as he fidgeted trying to figure out the best way to just clear the air between them and get down to business. He hated all the subterfuge and secrecy that had spun up around things after The Blackout. There were those amongst the other students that had prestige or status to lose by just being upfront with whatever was happening but Jonathan existed outside all that. He had nothing to lose in that department so he just spoke his Truth and cut to the chase.
>>>"Look. Things have gotten strange lately around School. Lotsa Capital W weirdness." he looked the older man in the eye, dead serious in the way he was known for. "Everyone is skirting around what's going on like they're playing some covert game. I want some straight up Capital A answers. I need help figuring out what's going on and what's happening to me."
>>>To illustrate his point, Jonathan grabbed the salt shaker and spun it with a twist of his wrist and focused his will on it, urging it to keep spinning for an improbably long time

The shaker continued its circular motion, seconds, more seconds, a minute, more than a minute. Mr Bill's smile crooked to one side of his face, prompting another swig of his glass. The salt in the shaker began to trickle upwards, impossibly, until its grains started to come out of the holes in the cap, almost like the opposite of the sands of an hourglass. "How come you never took one of my shop classes? Could learn yourself a thing or two about how to start things up and when to wind them down." He put down his glass again.

"Sure, something's going on in school. It's been on for years. I've seen some of it, good and bad. Sworn to keep my mouth shut, but I'm no longer on staff am I?" He chuckled. " "You're a wizard 'Arry", the sooner you get that, the sooner you can do something about it. What you want to do is up to you, though I much rather teach someone who isn't going to bring the world down around them."

"I think Corbin sent you to me precisely cause you might be able to do just that. The end of things, you can make that happen." The salt shaker began to slow down as more and more of the salt flowed out until it was empty, whereupon the cap started to unscrew. "Think you can fill it up again? That's how things work, order and entropy."

>>>"Shop classes always conflicted with Art and the other classes on my schedule." he shrugged casually as the fluted glass shaker finally rolled to a stop. "Seemed kinda intentional if you ask me... Art and Shop are skill-adjacent." Jonathan was far from the type to avoid getting his hands dirty, after all.
>>>Mr. Bill's assessment about bring the world down around them resonated with Jonathan a bit too much. He'd been accused of being an anarchist, a nihilist, all too often and it'd be far to dishonest of him to deny the Truth of those feelings. It brought up memories of that conversation in the Hidden Courtyard with the veiled woman, the crow and that slithering fountain thing from yesterday when he'd gotten lost. "Been a lotta talk about Magick and Wizards goin' on and a lot of stuff pointing to that but what does it mean though? " Jonathan looked at Bill through the wisps of his black bangs, "Ashford, as far as I know, isn't exactly Hogwarts..." he said, a bit derisively. He knew of a solid twenty kids at Ashford for whom Hogwarts, or magic, being real would be their heart's desire come true. He felt like it wasn't going to be as easy as all that and the irony of both he and Potter being orphans suddenly struck him as darkly humorous. "We're all flying by the seat of our pants, me and the others, and I feel like it's gonna get us in over our heads real quick if we don't start learning the rules of this game. I'm not dumb enough to think we're the only people like this and if we're not then that means we're at a big disadvantage against the ones that DO know the rules." Bill's admonition to see if Jonathan could get the salt back in the shaker felt more like a challenge or a test of some sort rather than intellectual curiosity. He could feel the inherent disorder in the grains scattered over the linoleum countertop, the urge towards random distribution in each tiny grain, and the urge to 'magic' them back into the shaker was strong but Jonathan's stubborn streak was stronger. He scooped up the spilled salt into a pile on the counter with his hand, brushed it into his palm and returned what he could into the salt shaker.

"Smart lad," Bill nearly beamed when Jonathan chose to physically sweep the salt back into the shaker. "That's rule number two, or three. Don't do with magic what can be achieved through regular action. Also, for entropy to work, you have to set it up first. Someone has to put the salt back in before you can shake it out. Law of energy conservation. Don't need Strom to teach you that. In fact, just stay out of his way." Did Mr Bill just badmouth Professor Strom, the Head of Department for Physics?

"Ashford isn't magic school." Bill was clear that the students weren't there to learn how to do magic. "But they've put a whole bunch of you potential ones there for a reason. And don't bother asking, I don't know what that reason is, keeping you all together. Maybe it's to keep you safe. Maybe it's to use you. Turns out some of you learned about yourselves earlier than others. As far as I could tell, no teacher was supposed to nudge anyone towards it. Corbin's taking a big risk talking about it with you." Bill pursed his lips over the rim of his mug in a frown.

"If it's magic you want to catch up on; I can show you a trick or two. Corbin says you're seeing death. That's the source of your power, entropy. Knowing about the end, letting it define you, lets you use that to affect everything before the end arrives. At a cost." Jonathan would realise much later what that cost meant for a person like Bill Easterton, unlucky in love, stuck in a rut his entire career, no notable achievements in his lifetime. "Can you also see who's at the end? If you can, it also means you can try to get them to do stuff for you. Also means you can see beyond the veil. Don't be too unnerved by it, same beings, different form."

"If you need a name for who can do all these, although I don't particularly care for the Greek, it's Euthanatos." Myra had earlier described to their group what she read up on, for some book referred to what was known as traditions of magic. It seemed like Jonathan found himself adherent to one of these traditions.

>>>Jonathan tapped his fingers on the cool linoleum countertop as he listened to Mr. Bill explained things in that roundabout way that grown-ups liked to do. Sound all smart and cryptic but ultimately not very helpful. He put two-and-two together from the framework that Bill laid out for him, halting self-discoveries and lining up things he once thought of as coincidence, into a piece or two of the big puzzle he'd be asked to solve.
>>>"There was this underground band I went to see over the summer. Snuck out of the house and caught a ride over towards the docks; it was in an abandoned cannery. Youth-In-Asia. That was the name of the band." he confessed, beginning to draw some parallels between his experiences and what Bill was telling him. "I think that was when things suddenly started being different for me. A lot of their songs and sets were about endings and beginnings; being able to choose the reality of the things between those two points." He stopped drumming his fingers and looked at Bill, "You said the name for people that can do the things I'm capable of was Euthanatos..." The two did have remarkably similar sounding names, despite the linguistic sophistry.
>>>"Yeah, I get what you mean about knowing the end result and being able to guide things in the direction you want. I do that a lot in my art." he changed subjects quickly, possibly to avoid thinking about how 'guided' his life might've been when he fancied himself a rebel and free-spirit. "I see the end result in my head and guide how I want to render it onto a medium using the skills and supplies I choose."
>>>He stopped awkwardly, ending his comparison of art and Magick, "Wait. See who's at the End? " that part brought him to a halt. "I've been seeing a whole lot of crazy stuff lately. Things on different levels than us, expiration dates on people, stuff like that. I'm definitely gonna need some help understanding all that."

"Kids sneaking out of the house," Bill harrumphed in reminiscence, "still the same schtick. Mine was a long bike ride out by the interstate, fall of 76, freewheeling band by the name of Convoy Jones. Caught a truck on the way back, smashed both legs, somehow they got put back together. Give you the long version when you're old enough to drink." The older man veered off a bit, but came back to the point.

"You got it. Remember what you're seeing is not necessarily the end, but one possible end. Work backwards from there, and you can affect probability, make something more or less likely to happen, spot what might make something more or less likely to happen, because you might be able to see a thing before it happens. Expiration dates, heh," Bill leaned back, "If you can see it, it means you have a part to play in it. Had a part to play. Will have a part to play. Who knows. Means you can influence its outcome, prevent it from happening. If you could wiggle time, you might even be able to prevent the circumstances leading to it." It sounded like the retiree was referring to an adjacent domain of magic which could complement this entropy he was going on about.

To Jonathan's question about what else he could see, "Don't want to spook you out, but often those who see death also see the spirits of the other world. Doesn't matter if you're religious or not. If you hear voices or see things, and you are tempted to talk back, you're not going crazy. They talk weird, but once you figure them out, there's a bunch of insight there even I can't help you with."

"Look kid, there's a helluva lot more I can tell you about if you wanna listen to the ramblings of a retiree. You know Hank Torques? That garage south of Williamson Street? You'll find this retired shop teacher there tinkering. Swing by, but don't cut class for it. Evenings I'm here." He waggled a finger. "School of life," he chuckled. Jonathan actually knew the place, one of the old-timer garages that still called itself a garage instead of service station, or autocare.

>>>"Yeah. I know the place." Jonathan agreed. "Uncle Dudley, he's not really my uncle but yeah, he's ordered a lot of parts from there for the old cars he likes to drive. If driving is what you'd call it..." It wasn't that Jonathan couldn't appreciate those old cars for their clean linework or design style, they were roomy and easy to work on. It had to be the rebellious streak that must teenagers share with thinking whatever their parents or caregivers were into was somehow essentially uncool. "I'll swing by when I can and look for you. There's got to be a LOT more to this than you've told me so far... I mean, of Magick exists, why isn't it everywhere? Why have I, and I guess everyone else, been told it's not real for all this time?"

>>>"And if you don't know about the other stuff I'm seeing, know anybody who does? Anybody that I can talk to about that? You guys seem to have a cabal 'round here of secretly magical folks..." With all the sudden revelations of the secret lives of people around him all coming into the light, it made Jonathan question everyone and everything. How would he know the reality of anyone around him? If Magick was real, what else might be lurking out there ready to step out of of legend and into his life?

"Some of them think of themselves as cabals, secret societies, magical orders, hmph," Jonathan could tell on which side of the fence Bill sat. "The least annoying term is Tradition, what clique you belong to, because you tend to do the same kind of magic. Even so, there's a whole lotta difference within a tradition on how that magic is done. Spirit talker as well ay?" Bill wondered what he could suggest for Jonathan in that regard.

""That big question of yours is the hardest." Bill thought about the best way he could explain it to a sixteen year old kid, like a teacher would. "Magic is everywhere, but using it breaks reality as we know it. You get that right? Reality is a bunch of consistent rules that cohere with each other. Magic says let's bend those rules. Bend them too much and it snaps back. There's a cost. Too many people bending them, something comes crashing down. So while magic is real, magic is also the opposite of reality. This is what keeps people from just doing what they want with it; they could magic themselves out of existence if they think themselves beyond the rules."

Jonathan smiled darkly, "Well, I been bending the rules til they squeal for a long time now...so Magick probably won't be any different once I learn what rules we're supposed to play by." He thrummed his fingertips on the table nervously, "Guess that'll be the first lesson. The Rules. Before I end up in Magick Court or something." He pulled a $5 bill out of his pocket and laid it under the saucer of the white coffee mug as he drained half of it in big gulps. "Thanks for the 'heads up'. I'll drop by the garage after school tomorrow if nothing else holds me up.I need to head out. School comes early and I've got some thinking to do about everything you said."

"Take this with you," Bill tossed the salt shaker to Jonathan. "Don't let it run out." The retiree caught Deloris' frown when the waitress saw him do that, but all he did was quaff the rest of his beer and grinned at her for another round.