Otherworlde LIN 302: An Influx of Magic

Schrecken was excited about his class on regenerative magic seals. He knew about draining energy from living things already, to some extent, thanks to his experience in the Necromancy department, but he had never done any kind of energy-draining magic with paper before. He wandered out into the forest, papyrus notebook, tape and pencil in hand, ready to stick the paper on a living thing. A tree would be as good as anything else for this assignment, right? That was technically alive, and a big tree had probably been alive for a long enough time that it had a ton of energy to drain without killing it.

Schrecken scribbled the word that he had been taught – an Elvish term for ‘to drain’ – onto a piece of papyrus in the notebook, tore it out, and taped it to the largest tree in the area that he could find. The papyrus began to glow, the word on it glowing more brightly than the rest, as the tree, the grass around it, and even an unwary squirrel started to be drained of their energy. This was going a bit faster than Schrecken had expected… he quickly removed the paper from the tree in order to make sure he didn’t either kill something by accident or cause the paper to explode or something.

He didn’t actually know if the paper would explode. It would actually just disintegrate. He just wanted to make sure.

Once Schrecken had collected enough magical energy – perhaps a bit more than he had intended – he went back up to the Magical Linguistics building, to one of the upper floors. He wanted to be able to show the papyrus, which was still faintly glowing with a soft blue light, to his professor and show her that he had actually done his work. “Professor! Professor Selene!” he called. “Cool magic purple witch lady! Are you there?? I want to show you the magic that I got from a big tree and also some other things by accident!” But Selene was nowhere to be found.

But even if Schrecken could not show Selene his collected magical energy and the process of gaining it for himself, he still wanted to claim that power that he had gathered. All he had to do was tear the paper in half in order to release the magic that he had collected to harvest the energy.

But he had an idea. If tearing the paper in half would give him some power, would tearing it into more pieces give him more power? How could he get as much power as possible from the papyrus as possible? he wondered.

After pondering this for a moment, Schrecken stuffed the magic-filled piece of paper into his mouth, chewed it up, and ate it.

He did indeed harvest the magic that he had collected, but the sudden influx of magic into Schrecken’s body was too much for him. It made him feel very, very sick. His head hurt, his stomach hurt, he was so nauseous. He ran over to the window and opened it…

Far below, a student and visitor to the academy were having a conversation.

“Cloe, when is your next Beast Studies class? The animals there are just adorable~.”

The student huffed indignantly. “Maybe I’d let you come to class more often if you stopped nesting in my room, Magica Obscura.”

Schrecken had not expected there to be anyone down there stuck his head out the window, but there had been, and they barely even had time to look up and hear Schrecken try to shout out a hasty apology before he vomited a large amount of black liquid out the window and all over the two of them. “Oh no!” Schrecken exclaimed. “You have got the bad barf! Hoo hoo hoo!” He thought it was rather funny now that he was feeling better.

Even so, when he finally found Selene, he would probably have to tell her that he had just vomited out the window of her dear Magical Linguistics tower and onto some people down below. Hopefully, they weren’t in her classes. But he did his assignment, and it had worked, so it was probably okay by now, right?