[Fall] Chapter 1: Re-Placement

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear…

Minsoo repeated the platitude back to herself. Platitude or no, Minsoo had a history of things bumping into her right when she needed them to. The entity that Jonathan seemed to sense, most of all.

When she gets a name, she nods and keeps quiet. All the talk of keeping their wits about them, and this from a teacher, spooked the girl.

Bigger Bites sounded like the kind of place that a bunch of teenagers could hang out inconspicuously.

>>>"Yeah. I know the place." Jonathan nodded as Corbin noted the meeting place. "The 'greasy spoon' that has the old bikers that eat there and classic car shows in the summer? Yeah." That may not have been the exact vibe of the place but it was what Jonathan remembered most about it. "I'm not really expected home anytime soon so if whoever you're talking about is down, I'm down."
'Uncle' Dudley, Jonathan's guardian, had always given him a long leash to lead his own life. Long enough to hang himself on enough occasions that Jonathan had learned personal responsibilities at a young age. While he still frequently tested the boundaries of that leash, as any teenager would, Jonathan maintained a degree of freedom that made most kids his age jealous.

As promised, Corbin sent a message to whomever it was that Jonathan ought to meet. That greasy spoon was certainly cool in its time, though no teenager would be caught dead there, not when there were more popular cafes and other franchises at the mall. Minsoo wondered if she could do the same. If she wanted to speak with Silverton this evening, it was getting near to 6pm and the school library would be closing. Otherwise she would have to look for her tomorrow. The alternative was to tag along with Jonathan out of curiosity. Another option was the open invitation to Myra's place; as exchanged in their chat, Myra and Joe had headed over, and Kyle had also just said he would join them. Only Wren had gone home first, which was something Minsoo could do as well.

The big thing that Jonathan and Minsoo had discovered was a pivotal one. For it had first seemed as if the school, the institution, the system was watching them, no thanks to the morning's counselling interviews. Thanks to their opening up to Corbin, a teacher, it now seemed as if not all adults were to be guarded against, even if they were meant to still keep their heads low, for Corbin had, without outrightly saying so, implied that it would be risky to be flashing their new abilities willy-nilly. They would hear from Wren later that such a secret had consequences when revealed to one's own parents, but this was something best told to them by Wren herself.

The other thing they learnt was that they needed guidance from others to understand their newfound abilities. Joe, Kyle and Myra would share later that they dug out a whole bunch of information from books and research, detailing the idea of magical traditions and spheres of power. But Jonathan and Minsoo were the ones to first process why learning magic began with seeking a mentor or guide. Could it be that Kirk, who had been hanging around all this while, was Corbin's disciple of sorts?

Outside of the Lockwood Estate - Joe, Kyle, Myra, Wren
Myra's place was a different kind of estate from the suburbia that Wren had left in a perturbed huff. Her skateboard took her further out from the well-manicured rows of family homes, right to the outskirts of Ashford where the old money settlers put down their roots in private landed property. The ivy-covered mansion sat a ways back from the road, partially hidden by the trees lining the way in. The heavy-curtained windows meant little light peeked out from the place. Kyle had made it here just before night fell, but by the time Wren arrived, the stars were already blinking faintly in the night sky, making the Lockwood Estate seem a lot more sombre than it actually was, the only sounds were the wheels of her skateboard rattling unevenly over the gravel driveway. She had already messaged to say she would be coming over, thoughts all awhirl, so Joe, Kyle and Myra were expecting her. Grandma Lockwood had reminded Myra that she would be retiring to her own room, so it was Myra who opened the door when Wren rang the doorbell.

It was too quiet outside.

Hey, Wren. Joe and Kyle are in the the libary and we are making some headway... Myra stops her gushing and actually looks at Wren

Are you okey?
Come inside.

Deciding he needed a short break before getting sucked back into research Kyle left glitch to continue cataloging and tagged along with Myra. Things were happening fast and he kept missing out on event due to focusing to much on his own activities and he was getting tired of learning everything second or third hand.

"No," she said. "Not really." She sighed. "Dad still denies that he knows at least something."

She nodded toward Kyle.

Her eyes moved past Myra into the hall, then back over it, slower.

Something was off.

"Hang on."

She didn't say what for.

Myra is standing in the door, welcoming her inside.

Myra had never felt unsafe on the grounds of Lockwood. This place was where she grew up, and while she wasn't the outdoorsy sort, the surrounding greenery marked a sense of home on the occasions where she would cut through the trees rather than come in through the main driveway. Hence she gave no thought to what the vibe was outside the house. This was the opposite of Wren, who had arrived, emotions all awhirl and alert, hpping that meeting her friends would give her an outlet.

She felt the aura of the mansion as she stood there, and sort of intuited that if she were to extend her senses magically, she would feel something tighten, as if to keep its occupants safe within its bounds. Wren could feel as if if she stepped over the threshhold and into the house, she would experience something different. (Joe and Kyle might've also felt it earlier, and in fact Kyle did get a strange reaction when he was demonstrating his powers to the other two earlier).

But that wasn't what bothered Wren. A presence, something vaguely magical, either because it was slight, or perhaps obscured, was behind her. How far away she couldn't tell, not without using her powers. It was already past sunset, neither Myra nor Kyle who were facing outwards saw anything beyond the shadows of the trees. The other not-unnatural sound that Wren heard was a soft fluttering, which didn't seem odd except for the fact that she distinctly heard it.

The fluttering caught her attention. Outside the threshold.

She turned, shoulders angling toward the trees. Her eyes narrowed.

What's that?

Curious Kyle glances at Wren then outside and at his phones monitoring software, which was still running. Was Wren reacting to the house, similar to Kyle when he was probing earlier in the library, or was there something outside?

Myra has stepped back to allow Wren to enter her home, and being a good host.

Now Kyle found (and there was no better explanation for it), that the house was reacting to him. It wasn't what Glitch was doing that was the problem; the drone was methodically 'reading' all the books they had pulled out with the zeal of a conscientious librarian cataloguing. It was Kyle's use of the primal sense, the one that attempted to scan for magic in its rawest form. He had some feedback on his phone earlier, one of the signs he was learning to read by now: a dropped signal, uneven wifi, processor lag, all meant something was interfering. Now he was trying to cast its sensors outside of the house to see what he could detect, and it wasn't working. He could feel as if it was the house telling him to perform his magic outside its boundaries.

Myra didn't know enough about how the house behaved either, how could she? She had barely learnt about the use of magic herself. At best she might have made an improbable inference about how they never seemed to have any permanent staff employed in the house. They came and went over the years, but otherwise it was just grandma Evelyn Lockwood and herself. But at this very moment she was busy distracted about what gave Wren pause at the doorway instead of simply stepping in when Myra welcomed her. It was night, looking through the well lit hall from the inside past Wren's figure standing there, all was black. A moth fluttered in, attracted by the warm light of the hall. Then another.

Wren couldn't help but hear the sound of the moths' wings as particularly loud. She was already hypertuned in her sense of magical essence, and the house felt suffused with it. Outside she could confirm further that she felt that something (or maybe someone) was also low-key present, but there was nothing she could visually see. Too quiet, except for now a third moth. A fourth.

Okey, please come in Wren, I don't want any more moths inside.

Myra focuses on the moths and lamppost outside. She knew that bugs were attracted to bug-zappers bluelight, and by emphasising that attraction and making the lamppost more blue, the could get the moths to fly out again. Right?

The row of lamp posts furthest out in the main road were too distant to be of any effect. But the nearest one to the front porch of the house began to glow more visibly brightly thanks to Myra tweaking of its wavelength. She manipulated the blue shift, enhancing the ultraviolet emitted as well, to make it more attractive to the moths than the warm glow coming from within the house.

It worked, but what was revealed in the brighter light wasn't just two or three moths fluttering erratically, but a whole whisper of them, flitting about above, and more of them would've flown inside had it not been for Myra's trick. Was it a random phenomenon that gathered so many of them and made them want to enter the house? And did the increased light now let Myra, Wren and Kyle see better if anything else was out there in the shrubbery?

The next thing that happened might suggest otherwise. The lights of the entrance hallway of the mansion now began to flicker and dim...