A Controlled Pool

October 2
Fourth Period:

Technically, the start of the new month came overnight. For me, I almost didn’t notice it until I saw an orange leaf hanging over the Maple Forest. The crickets sang together late in the evenings. Mina and I had tried turning into different things each day. Ms. Snowfox had insisted that practicing the same thing over and over would be easier on us, but Mina wanted to practice several different forms. On Wednesday, I spent nearly eighteen hours sleeping, and I’d only flown short distances in the past several days. Ms. Snowfox insisted that we never change directly from one form to another, and always turn back into ourselves in between. That meant spending almost twice as many Dames.

I’d been a fox, per our teacher’s suggestion, though I preferred fiery red fur to her frozen white. Then, I’d become a rabbit, my personal favorite so far, despite being awfully exhausted that day. After that, a tortoiseshell cat. Pippa was too exhausted to practice that day, even under Ms. Snowfox’s guidance. She shrieked when she saw me turned into a cat, and she spent the day asking me all kinds of questions. Anytime I said anything, she’d pretend to agree with it, even when I intentionally contradicted myself.

Now, I was a goldfish looking at the edges of a glass bowl. This had been the strangest experience. I kept thinking that I had arms or legs or anything, instead there were little fins that could barely move how I wanted them to. I had to hold my head over the water to talk, but that got uncomfortable quickly, so I only could hold brief conversations. I was diminutive, even by the appearance of a little fish. Though I chose the Dames I used for each transformation, they always came out small. Ms. Snowfox claimed this wasn’t a problem at all. Transformations always followed some basic characteristics of the person casting them, and Dame measurements only came out to approximate sizes for this kind of spell. That was lucky; we didn’t have to describe the exact microdames of every cell in our new bodies. A wholly wrong measurement would just cause the spell to fail.

Friday was the best day to be turned into a fish. We had fewer classes, and none of our outdoor classes like Hiking or Treasure Hunting. It was shorter too, with school ending after fourth period instead of fifth. Some afternoons we had algebra instead of biology. Ms. Crane’s classroom had two floors. While she lectured on the lower floor, some students were permitted to work independently upstairs if they needed to catch up on something. It was a trap, of sorts, as that meant they wouldn’t hear the lesson clearly at all. Then, they would be trying to catch up again the next time they took the class.

While my writing spell worked in the shape of a mouse, a fox, a rabbit, or a cat, trying to make it do anything as a fish was an absolute chore. I had to use my hand, usually, or a paw while transformed to trace the shape of the letters I was trying to write. Like this, I couldn’t have the paper with me in the water, and I couldn’t reach it while it was outside of the water. When I tried explaining this to Ms. Crane, she cleared her throat loudly, then began talking about something else entirely.

She was a tall birdfolk, but she didn’t resemble Bruno at all. She had thick, white feathers across her entire body and a wide, bulbous beak. She resembled a pelican more than a crane, but nobody dared tell her that. Her voice was deep and guttural. She wrote the Quadratic Formula on the board, and started singing a little song meant to help remember its structure. “This is something we should be having hands to take notes on!” She complained.

I tried to splash up out of the water and show my fin to answer questions. It was such a pointless endeavor that I took to just calling out one answer to a difficult problem. I wanted to prove that I was still as focused as I could be. I was awake, and in my opinion that should have been more than enough effort considering the weight of exertion.

Later:

Bruno wrapped his wings under the fishbowl, “Ms. Snowfox said I’d have to take you home, too.”

“It’s down Rose Way, the little cul de sac just off fifth street,” I ducked back under the water as soon as I was done getting the words out.

“I’ve been there before, Alice,” he said, “I guess I wasn’t sure if you wanted to go back home, or if you wanted to come to my place instead.”

“Mina will be missing me.”

“Right, right,” he laughed to himself, “I should have known. I mean… never mind.”

”What, Bruno?”

”You’re a fish right now,” he asserted, “and Mina’s what, a frog or whatever she chose? What if something happens to you, I mean, Mina can’t do anything and your brother’s still just a fairy.”

”If you want to come inside, you can.”

”Really?” He chirped, “I’ll just be there for a moment, to make sure everything is alright, you know?”

“That sounds great. I should have the endurance to turn back in a total emergency, too, but I’d pass out pretty much instantly.”

”A sleeping fairy isn’t going to do much more than a flopping fish.”

”I’d be able to breathe the air at least. The things we take for granted.”

Bruno held the bowl up, looking through the glass, “Well, you look like you’re having fun.”

“I can’t wait to turn back. It’s like a jail cell, there’s really nowhere to go and nothing to do.”

”What if I put you in a pond somewhere in the forest just for a little? It’d be cute to see you actually swimming around.”

I looked up at him, “Bruno, the water will have other things in it. Even the shallow water by te beach may be safer.”

“Absolutely not, Alice! That’s saltwater. And besides, there’s the current, and if you got pulled all the way out to sea how would I find you?”

“Maybe you’d have to turn into a dolphin or a shark and come after me,” I offered playfully.

”And who would come after both of us?” He asked, “Unless you meant we would stay in the water and just swim away somewhere.”

”Wait, Bruno…” I stopped. I swam to the bottom of the fishbowl before shooting back up, almost bouncing out of the water completely, “Bruno, that’s genius!”

”Alice!” He jolted backward, “Alice, I wasn’t actually asking if you want to… I mean…”

”No, Bruno, it’s a way we could get away from Maple if we ever had to. Going through the forest is difficult, there’s mountains at the edge of the forest, and then just nothing for a long time. But if we were to do that, fish, dolphins, seals, penguins who cares, we could go around Site 91 or Site 84 and follow the highway to the next town!”

“You and I both can fly, so can Mina,” he said, “why don’t we just fly around them if we ever have to leave?”

“They watch to see if anyone is flying that way, I mean, obviously,” I said, “but nobody, somebody, would be crazy enough to try swimming around. There’s sharks in the water around Maple, and there’s dolphins, and probably the Kraken too if Natasha Hardy is to be believed.”

“Her dad is not a pirate captain. She lies about everything.”

“Right, but Ms. Verdant said she was probably telling the truth that time.”

“There’s one thing,” Bruno said in a hushed voice, “what if they thought we were dead when we left, and they tried to resurrect us?”

“Wait…” I said quietly, “I… Bruno, I don’t know.” As far as I knew, nobody had ever tried to resurrect a living person before, the process just didn’t make any sense. In my case, I knew they didn’t have my body to use. That was obvious; even I knew what became of it as soon as I was awake, and I had been dead for the past five days.

They knew I was dead because Bruno went home to his mother in tears, and she told the school herself. She was afraid Bruno would be expelled, and she came pleading to my mother as soon as she was done speaking to Principal Gray. It must have been an awkward discussion.

The school argued that our incident occurred outside of school hours, and used that as justification not to punish Bruno. For a long time, I despised that, and now I was starting to see it as a blessing in disguise. His mother was always a sugary sweet woman, but fearsomely stern when she was unhappy with anything. I was glad I never saw her in tears, and even now, I loved her like an aunt.

Thinking more on it, nobody had ever been expelled from Ledoric’s. It was only used as an empty threat. There was a case where two high school students had intentionally killed a younger student. They knew he would be revived, they intended it. This was treated as an ordinary case of school bullying. The perpetrators were suspended, and it was a story lots of students had heard passed down before. We all thought it was a fish story. One of the perpetrators went on to become the Valedictorian when she graduated. Nobody knew her name anymore.

“There’s a way to find out about resurrection,” I said quietly, “we’d have to try it. Or, we could ask Nurse Var first, maybe she’s done it before.”

“Alice, we couldn’t try it!” Bruno protested, “Resurrecting somebody who is already alive, what if it kills their initial body? What if it kills them and then fails!”

“If such a powerful weapon existed, people would know about it already, right?” I asked, “No, there’s no remote way to just off someone with one spell. And, if it destroyed their original body and remade them where they were, that would be a new kind of magic. Bruno, we might have just discovered teleportation!” I insisted.

“You just said if such a weapon existed, people would know about it already,” he nodded, “I mean, think about the Cold War. Would Soviet magicians have really not used something like that?”

“We would have, too…” I pondered, “I bet it does nothing, then…” I paused, “No, wait! It worked for me because I was already dead, sure. But, I died… somewhere around town. Definitely nowhere near Nurse Var’s office. And, I woke up in her office. That means, resurrection is a feasible mode of teleportation. You need someone capable of reviving you, and you need to be dead already. You just tell someone the exact timing to bring you back, then you overexert yourself until you drop, then teleportation! Just, it’s a copy of your body rather than the original, but it’s still you!”

“I wouldn’t want to be a copy, Alice,” Bruno laughed to himself.

“What a privilege,” I giggled.

“You were around the Maple Forest then, I think. Not even two miles away from school, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter,” he mumbled, “What if it only works up to a certain distance. What if the other person gets the timing wrong, or they just fail altogether? It’s just not practical, Alice.”

I blew a bubble into the water defiantly, “Well, I’m going to write a paper about the method anyway. I have Mr. Archstar’s class, maybe I’ll submit it for my Unit 1 Project.”

“Don’t write too much about how you died,” Bruno kept walking.

“Everyone knows already,” I said, “people are going to be talking about it until 2070 at least, and then it’ll just be an urban legend. It’ll be like the old Valedictorian, they won’t even remember our names.”

“It’s a research paper, right?” Bruno looked away, “in an early 2001 case study, one subject was…”

“Who do I write the citation to? You or me?”

“God, Alice, I don’t know!” He got up to my door. He quietly pushed his hand against the doorbell and waited for it to open. Edward wasn’t able to open the door properly from the inside. The doorknob wasn’t made for a ten-inch tall fairy, much less for me at a quarter of his height. Those were for humans. The student apartments had buttons on the inside of the doors that could open them.

Edward flew up to the fishbowl. He looked through the glass at me, “Even Mina has more self-respect than this.”

“It’s magic practice,” I said, “is she here?”

“I think she’s at a student council meeting,” Edward said, “is she some kind of animal again, today? A cow?”

“Ms. Snowfox said big animals would take way too many Dames for us right now. I think Mina turned into a spadefoot toad,” I explained.

“Oh a toad?” Edward hummed, “That’s even more fitting. I should have thought of that.”

“At least I don’t have to eat as much food as a cat, today,” I kept talking as Bruno carried me inside, “I keep feeling like I’m going to get fat in my normal form.”

“Alice, you’re not going to get fat,” Bruno sighed, “you didn’t even eat anything yesterday even with Ms. Snowfox saying you had to.”

“I can’t eat meat,” I bubbled, “it makes me sick.”

“Cats are carnivores,” Edward rolled his eyes, “and it wouldn’t have been much anyway. You were barely kitten-sized.”

“And, you’re putting yourself through heavy exertion every day,” Bruno put the fishbowl down on the coffee table by the couch, “no matter what you are, you have to force yourself to eat something. If you’re a horse, you have to eat grass.”

“Well, I’m not a horse. I can’t turn into big animals yet.”

“That’s because the exertion would seriously hurt or kill you,” Bruno said sharply, “and it’s not going to get any better if you starve yourself.”

I turned around on the surface of the water. I watched the little ripples spread away from me until they calmed down and disappeared, “I can’t eat meat,” I reiterated.

“Then, I’m going to demand that Ms. Snowfox doesn’t let you turn into any carnivores,” Bruno shrugged, “and, she’ll agree with me.”

“What, why?”

“Because it’s stupid, Alice,” Edward landed on the edge of the fishbowl. He dangled his legs off the side, facing away from the water. He turned his head slightly to face me, “If you don’t want to get sand in your hair, don’t go to the beach. Dad called earlier, he was hoping to speak with you and Mina over the phone.”

“I’m going to need you to put it on speaker.”

“I-I should go,” Bruno walked slowly toward the door.

Edward flew around, hovering in front of him, “So soon? You haven’t had any tea or juice!”

“Your father won’t want to hear from me,” Bruno laughed awkwardly, “and, I’m sure he’s busy, so I’ll just leave it to Alice.”

“Take a seat,” Edward smiled, “I implore you. Indeed, you haven’t spoken to my father in years, but I’m sure it won’t be too bad. You’re Alice’s friend, aren’t you?”

Bruno reluctantly walked back to the couch. He fell over backward, his tail feathers spreading out behind him as he landed softly on his bottom, “You guys have really normal sized furniture for fairies.”

”Don’t you like having a bed the size of a cloud,” Edward laughed to himself, “we have whatever the school gives us.” My own bed wasn’t so overlarge, but I still could easily spread myself out in it. In the other room, we had a properly sized couch. But, in the front room, we kept this kind of furniture for any guests. There was no use in asking humans or beastfolk to visit us if there was nothing for them to use. And, it wasn’t unpleasant for us to use, also.

“I’ll let you make the call, Alice,” Edward set the landline down in front of my fishbowl. I just glared at the buttons, there was a wall of glass between my useless fins and the phone.

“Do you want me to just cast spells at the phone until it bursts into flaming pieces?”

Bruno grabbed it in his wing. This phone was made for us, and it looked like a little, plastic toy resting on just one of his feathers, “Here, Alice. Just tell me the number!”

“Oh, put it down. I was joking,” Edward shook his head, “you both have no sense of humor.” He took it from Bruno and punched the number into the phone. He waited for it to ring for a moment, then set it down.

“Hey, who is it?” My father’s voice drooped through the phone. He yawned loudly.

“It’s me, Dad. Bruno is here with me too. You’re on speaker.”

“Bruno?” He muttered. He cleared his throat, “A-all right? I’m not going to touch that landmine. What are you doing right now?”

“Swimming.”

“Swimming?” He yelled, “Alice! Get out of there! The surface tension can…”

“She’s a fish right now,” Bruno said, “she turned herself into a fish.”

“Oh. Huh,” I heard the scratching of his fingernails running through his beard, “You know, I sometimes don’t know what kinds of questions to ask you kids. I thought Ed didn’t learn transformation magic until he was in high school.”

”I never learned transformation magic,” Edward leaned back on the couch, “it was assigned to me, and I thought, what the hell. This isn’t worth my time. I got a C in that class anyway.”

“I’m not talking about your grades anymore, not right now,” my father said sharply, “Alice, I only know about magic from you kids talking about it, from politicians droning on about it. Transformation magic, what is it like?”

“Right now? Boring and awful,” I groaned, “I’m stuck in a fishbowl, and I had to have Bruno carry me all the way home from school… since I can’t walk or fly or breathe air.”

“Nobody else could?” My father asked, “I mean, you know him, what if something went wrong, Alice?”

“Mr. Sparrowbane,” Bruno stamped his talon against the ground, his claw ripping a seam in the carpet, “I… You’re right, it should have been somebody else. I don’t know why she asked me.”

“Alice,” my father huffed, “you of all people know that you need to be responsible, especially in the political climate now. And, after what happened last week. If something were to happen to you right now, it would get all the wrong eyes on it.”

“What do you mean?’ I asked.

“The good news first,” he sighed, “President Dreammaker found me in your mother’s office.” For just a moment his voice sounded off, slightly unsure or uncomfortable. There was a slightly higher pitch in his words than usual, and he paused just too much between them, “she was telling me how impressed she was by you, by Mina. She said… Well, she just said you guys were really, very good at magic. She’d never seen kids quite like you.”

“Dad, what’s wrong?” I splashed up over the water.

“Nothing!” He said sharply, “Alice, nothing. Don’t worry about it. You guys need to be careful, that’s all. You too, Bruno.”

“Okay,” I splashed across the water, getting as close to the phone as I could without leaving the tank. “Dad, I…”

“Where’s Mina?” He demanded. His voice was rough, crackling through the phone, “She has to hear this too. She needs to hear it right away.”

“She’s at…” I started. Bruno covered the phone with his wing. He put one of his other feathers up to her beak. “What are you doing?” I whispered to him.

“Lie,” Bruno whispered back, “something he’d never believe.”

My mouth hung open. It was a face that would have looked surprised on a creature with any dignity, “F-fine,” I turned back toward the phone.

Bruno removed his wing to my father’s voice still coming through unclearly, “Hey! Hey, are you still there?”

“I just broke up for a moment,” I said, “Mina is going on a date with Terrance Thunder. I told you all about him a couple weeks ago!” I’d never mentioned Terrance to him. If Mina had, it would be clear that she would never go out with him.

“Oh, that’s right,” he said politely, “he goes by Terry, doesn’t he? I hear he’s quite unusual at your school.”

I looked down into the water, my eyes seeing the little reflections in the bottom of the glass bowl. Light refracting through the water. Finally, I glanced at the phone again, “I think he’s fine. Where did you say you are right now?”

“I’m in your mother’s office,” he said, “isn’t that clear?”

“Look, I’ve got to go…” I said suddenly.

“Oh, is something wrong, Alice Sparrowbane?” The phone crackled. My father’s voice came through it, but the tone, his cadence, they were just slightly wrong.

“You never call me by my full name.”

“Dreams Come True,” he repeated as he hung up the phone. It was the same text in the odd note we’d received from my mother shortly after she disappeared. Edward flinched as he heard it quoted.

“What have you guys gotten into?” Edward folded over himself, hiding his face in his bent knees, “Didn’t I tell you to stay out of these things?”

“They did the right thing,” Bruno stood up, “we had to help someone.”

”Who cares if we help someone if we lose everyone in the process?” Edward got up. He quickly walked away, slamming the door to his room behind him.

“Bruno,” I looked up at him, “how did you know?”

“Your father has never been willing to talk to me, even when we were just little kids. Until things went wrong, he barely even knew my name,” Bruno folded his wings in front of him, “suddenly he just plays along with me being on the call. He said some noncommittal thing about me, but it didn’t sit right. I imagined he would panic when he heard me. That’s what he would do before.”

“Really?” I asked, “That’s an incredible guess, then.”

“I could hear something felt off too,” he said, “Owl hearing. But, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure.”

“Hey, take me out of the water,” I said quietly. Bruno reached in, slowly hoisting me up in his wings. I barely moved my fin, and I was surrounded in a silver light. I returned to my original form immediately. I blinked, the world spinning around me. I took a slow, deep breath, my eyes struggling to stay open.

“Alice!” Bruno quickly set me down, “That was too early! Are you alright?”

“I’m not going to die,” my voice trailed off, “I’ve only heard my father over the phone for months.”

Bruno grabbed the fishbowl in his hands. He left me lying flat on the coffee table, my wings finally spreading out behind me again. He splashed the pointless water into the sink and watched it go down, “You haven’t seen him in months?”

“How long have I not noticed anything wrong with that voice for?”

“Only today, Alice,” Bruno said reassuringly, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

I barely managed to force myself onto my knees, my head rocking back and forth and the heavy world trembling over me, crushing like the pressure of deep water. My wings flicked to life behind me, and as I got off the ground, I immediately sunk in the air. I could hardly manage any lift, and my body felt heavier than stone.

“Alice, what are you doing!” Bruno snatched me out of the air in his wings.

“Let me- let me go!” I wheezed, “I n-need to find Mina.”

“You can’t fly right now,” he set me down forcefully, “what if there’s something dangerous on the way?”

“Then, she’s in danger, too,” my breathing slowed, “she’s in… I stumbled backward, collapsing onto my back, “Bruno…”

Bruno carried me into my room. He set me on my bed and slowly pushed my covers over me, “She’ll be fine. Alice, she’ll be fine.” The world faded away around me as I blacked out.