When I first got to the boarding school, I was already weary of my fellow students. My life up to that point had taught me not to let anyone get too close. My first few days confirmed it. I had always had an erratic magical gift. The second day of school, I had a bad dream and created a tornado in my sleeping dormitory. The other students and their beds were flung against the walls until I woke up. After that night, I was put into a single room. It had stone walls, and the window was so thick you could hardly see through it.
The next day at the midday meal, word had gotten around about what happened. A group of older kids decided to push me around a little. They pushed my face into a bowl of soup, and threw my papers all around the room while the other students laughed. I hardly reacted. I knew I couldn't trust anyone here. The biggest of the bullies tried to grab my arm, and was electrocuted. He spent a day in a coma. No one touched me again.
Four years later, I was still at the school. I had filled my days with every regular class they would let me take to avoid having free time. Free time either led to trouble, or led to me sitting alone in my stone room. But whereas the regular classes were lecture based, and I could sit there unmolested, the specialized classes were practical sessions. I had never finished even one term of a specialized course. Something always happened. I lost my temper and blew up the greenhouse, I fried the circuits of the electric magic class, I made the millions of books in the library levitate off their shelves at the same time, causing a massive panic among the library science students.
My magic power was immense. Not even I knew how far it extended. It was hard to control sometimes, and it would feel like power was simply coursing through me, causing things to happen that I did not intend.
None of the magic classes welcomed me back. I was banned from the library, and the greenhouses. I started a private study, which was difficult without the library, and still led to trouble when people tried to talk to me.
There was one class I hadn't taken. I wasn't sure if it existed. It was called Advanced Magic Studies, and no one could give me any more information about it.
I was sitting by myself under a tree one day when two bullies, the friends of the electrocuted bully, decided to get even. They had been studying all the magics for four years. They felt very advanced, and when they saw me sitting alone, they wanted to show me what they could do.
I watched them approach. I knew what they wanted. As they got within twenty feet, and were starting to build up their magic charges to throw, I gestured them away from me.
They were flung, fast, up onto the roof of the school one hundred yards away.
I smirked, my hand still in the air. Suddenly my hand stiffened and smacked me hard across the face. I couldn't stop it.
"What the f-" I started to shout angrily. It smacked me again, so hard that I fell off of the bench I was sitting on.
Then my hand reached into my bag and pulled out a piece of paper and a pen. I couldn't do anything as I watched it begin to write.
"You are cordially invited to attend my class, Advanced Magic Studies, or more fondly known as 'the class that will teach anyone who has at least two brain cells to rub together.' As you can imagine, it is a very small group of students.
At 1:00, mentally ask for permission to enter the classroom. "
I suddenly had control of my hand again. It felt oddly tingly.
I looked at my watch. It was 1:00. Feeling stupid I thought the words: "...can I enter the classroom?"
An echoing voice answered me in my mind: "May I enter the classroom, PLEASE!"
I scowled. A bolt of electricity jumped from one hand the the other. I took a deep breath to calm down. "May I enter the classroom. ...please." I thought.
I was suddenly no longer under a tree. I was sitting on the floor of a giant room. At the far end were tables and chairs, but the rest of the room was bare except for the many strange things hanging on the walls.
"Welcome!" I heard a voice say. I turned and saw a man I had seen before around the school. (In this dream, he looked like Billy Connolly, and even had his accent.) With him were six other students, all male. They looked at me with hostility.
"What is she doing here?" One of the larger guys complained. "She's a freak."
The instructor looked amused. "Why don't you go tell her how you feel, then."
The student looked surprised. He started towards me. So did the other five students.
I didn't know what was going on. I gestured at them, and five of them were flung backwards all the way across the room, and crashed into the table.
The other student kept coming towards me. I was extremely angry. I had been invited here. How dare they turn on me so soon. It usually took a few classes before I was thrown out for doing something destructive.
I could feel angry heat building up inside of me. The other student stopped a few feet away.
"I've been wanting to try this. I'm going to make you beg me to stop. You have no idea who you're messing with now." he didn't bother keeping his voice down. The instructor was grinning with excited anticipation behind him.
The student took a step towards me. I blew a gentle puff of air at him. He caught fire.
He flailed around the room, screaming. The instructor stepped forward with his hands held out. He was laughing uproariously. He forced his hands together, and the fire snuffed out. The student was not harmed, but he lay there panting wildly. The other students had made their way across the room. They were looking at me incredulously. The instructor continued to laugh long and hard. When he could speak again, he wiped his eyes and said, "Welcome to my class!"
Every day I mentally asked permission to enter the classroom, and spent half the day with that crazy instructor and the grudgingly accepting other students. I couldn't tell where the classroom was. We spent some of the time outside, but the building we were in was in the middle of a vast field surrounded by trees. There were mountains in the distance I did not recognize.
Some of the classes were dedicated to combat skills. We learned to harness our magic against each other. I was amazed by the instructors ability to contain whatever magic got loose from me.
In one lesson, I showed up and I was the only student there. He told me the others were minding other specialized tasks. The floor of the large room was covered in coins, which were laid out in circles radiating out from the center. He told me to sit in the center of all the coins. He sat directly in front of me.
He didn't say anything for a while, so I used the time to calm myself. Whatever he had in mind would take concentration, no doubt, and I was glad the other students were not there to anger me.
"Lift them," he said. "All of them."
It took me a second to realize he was talking about the coins. I looked around.
"But there must be tens of thousands of them!" I said.
He looked at me in that blunt, unblinking way he had. "You lifted every single library book off of its shelf. There are over two million books in that library. You lifted books that were not in the same room as you."
"But that was an accident. I didn't mean to do that." I protested.
The instructor closed his eyes again. "Lift the coins. All of them" he said again.
I tried. I concentrated on the first few circles surrounding me. I wasn't used to this kind of focus. I usually just gestured things away from me quickly. I had a hard time holding them in the air. I managed to lift maybe a thousand coins that day. I thought the lesson would be over, but every day I returned after that, the coins were waiting until I could lift all of them. Then he made me move them in circles while they were in the air. Then every other circle of coins had to move in opposite directions. It took three months before I was able to do these tasks.
That's all I remember about this dream for the most part. There was one class where he brought what looked like a corpse to the large training room. He stared at it for a few minutes, before it suddenly got up and attacked us. We had to combine magic to fight this zombie. The instructor told us that he had not animated the corpse, and that it actually wasn't a corpse at all. It was a species of ghouls that lived in certain areas of the world, and were exceptionally hard to get rid of. Like cockroaches, but humanoid and very dangerous.
We also had a lesson where we learned a certain type of magic that would allow us to have a 100% accurate photographic memory for 24 hours. He said this was only to be used in an emergency because if used too often, it can cause brain hemorrhages.
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