Chapter 20: Midas touch

~~ Delta - Apr/03 - (Earth - Oct/2095) ~~

As per usual, Lee’s place rocked.

James and I were still attending our regular sessions at the Magicians school. However, because we were part of the family if the Wizards did a Sunday and it was a long weekend due to a holiday, we were included.

This public holiday was Lee’s birthday weekend even though Earth time it wasn’t her birthday because our April was about six months out from theirs. Confused, well them’s the joys of planets spinning in their own time.

Plus, we had all the issues of time zones and different hemispheres and two worlds to contend with, if you moved between the two. Many of us still wore the jumpsuits for work and travel because then the weather wasn’t such an issue when you jumped from one hemisphere to another.

We also kept a utility bag, with things like gloves, a hat and a supply of water and energy bars in it. Lee had adopted one not long after she became a wizard and the rest had worked out, she had done it for a good reason and followed suit.

Quite a few of us ex-Earthing’s had just shifted our birthdays to match with the local calendar. It made life easier. Mine, for example, was May the first, so the party was at my place in five weeks. I hadn’t bothered celebrating it after we got here, so I was cool with this.

Oddly, no one grumbled that Lee was making us work on a Sunday. From what I could gather, none of the wizards considered a day being trained by Lee work. It was a fun day of learning and spending time with people like themselves.

The fact they had all managed to get themselves related to someone else in the group probably helped. It was just a family get together and playing at being wizards was part of the entertainment.

Lee would let any of the magicians at her place at the time join in. She liked to see what we had learnt and help if we had issues, so it was a good excuse to get special treatment from the best teacher you could get.

One of the things that surprised me was how much we used our magician’s skills for everyday things. I commented to Lee that I hadn’t realised how much James and I were using our magic until I noticed others doing it as well.

She too looked around and smiled at me, “Now that you mention it, yes they do, don’t they? I’m probably the worst. I have a bad habit of not using the stairs. If I want something from a distant room, I don’t think twice about blinking to get it.”

I grinned as I had noticed I was also developing that habit. It was a bloody useful skill and saved me a lot of travelling time.

I was still having an issue with transmogrification. I’d been trying to learn how to do it like Justin and Kim, but it just didn’t seem to work for me.

I was working in the rock pit as they called it. It was on one side of the large training room. After a dozen failed attempts, I got seriously frustrated and just told the pile of damn rocks to form up into the shape I wanted. They came together and swirled around in a blur of dust and sparks.

The excess material reformed on the ground in its elements or favourite combinations of and the rest took on the shape of the park bench that I was trying to make. I heard a lot of chuckles and giggles and turned to find I had an audience.

They had been distracted by my flurry of dust and sparks of light. Karri grinned at me, “Let me guess, you got cranky and told them to just do it?”

I looked sheepishly at her, and they all laughed again. Justin came and looked at my bench and then frowned. He touched the bench and closed his eyes. He looked at me and asked, “Any particular reason why you wanted a platinum seat?”

“Hum, no, I thought I was thinking of aluminium, but I might have thought of a platinum-like finish,” I told him.

He looked at the rocks in the piles. “Where did you get the platinum and aluminium from?” he asked, frowning at the rocks.

This made me think. “Hum, the rock pile, I don’t think I borrowed it from anywhere else.” We all looked around the room, but all the other objects in it were in their regular places.

Lee also touched the bench and then looked at the rocks still in the pile. “Well that’s an interesting development, she made her own.”

I heard gasps behind me. It still didn’t register with me what I had done. Lee asked if she could touch me while I repeated the exercise and to make another bench for her.

So, I did. They all watched as I pointed at the pile of rocks with my wand and told them to form an aluminium bench with a platinum finish. Rocks flew up into my cloud of dust and sparks and formed me another park bench.

I must have been more selective this time, as I didn’t have any leftovers, just the bench. It looked exactly like the other bench.

“Now that is seriously cool,” Lee said, giving me a big grin. “It was all just a puzzle to you, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I studied those lessons on the different atoms and elements, how they were formed and bonded together as Justin recommended. So, I suppose I just used that information to reorder the structure of what I had to play with, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. But even more amazing you created a shield around the elements, so the energy stayed where you wanted to use it.”

“The first time, I suspect you linked it back to the excess material, but this time you were more selective in picking the primary materials, so you didn’t have any waste.”  

“Yeah, I guess so because I had done it once, I think that I had just filed away what I needed for next time, so I didn’t need to select the extra materials,” I thought out aloud.

Lee passed on what I did to the other wizards. Kim, Justin, Sean, Lee and Kyle found it easiest to use my information and had the most success. Many of the others took a lot more tries and had varying degrees of success.

Lee had strengthened the shield in the room before she let them try my magic out, and it was just as well. I was watching Aeron, and somehow the spell got away from him. His cloud started to expand as if it was going to explode.

I told the elements to behave and reform as they had been, and the rocks dropped to the ground.

Aeron was sweating, “Bloody hell, that was scary, thanks for the save.”

“Your shield wasn’t strong enough. You need to feed the excess energy into it until you pull it back to reform the elements,” I told him. He agreed and decided he’d had enough for the day, as he was exhausted.

Many of the others also mentioned that my spell was bloody hard work. They had been working on smaller projects than my benches. I, however, felt fine. Lee noted this as well, and like me, I think she surmised I hadn’t used much of my own energy but made the elements use theirs. She gave me a very contemplative look.

“You are a very tricky magician, my girl. I’m going to have to keep an eye on what you come up with next,” she said.

I grinned and shrugged, “Well, you did say that no one had told me I couldn’t or shouldn’t do it that way.” Many of them laughed in agreement, and then we all grinned.

Erving said it was lunchtime over the com.

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After lunch, I got to meet all the new babies.

Darla had her two babies, Robin and Riana. They were now nearly three months old. Allan had now fathered a total of thirteen children, seven on Earth and six here that he knew of. Zak was more than happy with the one Darla had for him. Riana was a real sweetie.

Dye’s two children, Elizabeth and Zane, were also nearly three months and she had brought them this weekend for us to see. Professor Essco was one proud dad. Kim told me that he didn’t think he could have children, and when Dye fell pregnant with his daughter and Zan’s son, he had been ecstatic. Apparently, he was a lot nicer person these days.

Donny had just had her daughters as well; Lexis was to Sean and Leif was Lee’s. They were gorgeous kids, and Sean was one happy guy, he was nuts about kids. Yuko had her daughter, so I was glad I had saved her daddy from being blown up. Karri was also pregnant to Aaron and Yuko’s delight.

Prince Don de Nar, Donny’s dad and his Earth wife, Doc Von now had a little girl. Don had also managed to knock Donny’s mother up again since she was now married to them. There were a few others who had dropped their kids in the last couple of months.

So, the place was crammed to the rafters with babies. I was curious as to why Gemma, Nyoni and Kim weren’t pregnant and asked Kim about it.

“Nyoni wants me to have the first, but I’m still only sixteen. So, we decided it was better to wait until I was at least eighteen.”

“We aren’t in any hurry as we have plenty of time and Nyoni said she was happy to wait as she can’t change once she is pregnant and is having too much fun with us just yet. She can control to a degree when she comes into heat as I can.”

“Gemma and Justin had also decided to wait a bit, but they blew that this weekend. A Genteli in heat is very hard for a man to say no to. I don’t think Gemma realised she was coming into heat until too late. The Ubobo men are very potent.”

“I suspect he managed to get Adison pregnant yesterday too,” She told me, and I had to smile. “Her sister Lyndsay is also up the duff with twins.”

“But I don’t think she is going to mind as she wants kids and lots of them. Both Yantell and Brad did her on the trip over here on the Dragonfly. I suspect they will shift to the shuttle crew to the Asteroid dome. It’s only away for two days at a time and once a week.”      

If you want the goss on who is expecting, just ask Kim. I told her Kale had gotten Arnett pregnant. She then told me my dragonets would have some new fuckbuddies. Two of Piper’s cousins that could change to dragon form are both expecting twins from their experiments with the dragons.

They should be able to shapeshift into dragon form. They should also be able to mate with my dragonettes and perpetuate the new dragon shapeshifting line if they so desire.

I mentioned that I was still looking for some cousins for mine. Her face took on this strange look, and she said, “Go to the south side of your range about a hundred klicks from where you are currently located.”

“They are being harassed by fangrinders, and you need to go soon if you wish to save them.” Her face cleared, and she looked at me. “What did I say?”

I repeated what she told me, and she said, “Wow, I thought only Lee got visions like that. I do feel some urgency in this matter. I don’t believe that there are many of them left in the wild on your continent. The fangrinders in your area like to hunt them.”

I too felt her urgency, and we went and found Lee. We determined it was late afternoon in my time zone, but we still had a couple of hours of daylight left if we wanted to have a look. We collected the Mac Batton boys, Karri, Sean and James.

Justin and Alec all expressed a desire to help. James wanted me to stay behind since I was pregnant. I told him I had to go, and Lee and Kim agreed. He stopped arguing with me when Sean, put his hand on his shoulder, “Mate, if Lee and Kim says, she has to go, then the argument is lost.”

He wasn’t happy, and I knew I’d have a shadow. Kim said the ten of us were more than enough and told the others to hold the fort, as we were going hunting. Sean made sure we all had fully loaded trank-dart guns. Lee gave us an extra set of armbands, so we had plenty of energy.

We also loaded up our utility bags with energy bars and extra lamps. They were cool. They were the size of sugar cubes. You stick them to a wall of a tunnel or cave, and they emitted a low light for weeks. You could even string a thin cable between then and hook them up to a solar-cell outside if you wanted them brighter.

Armed and fortified with Erving’s lunch, we popped to the co-ordinates Kim supplied. As we surmised, it was late afternoon and being on a south-east facing slope, the shadows were already getting long. We made our way along a heavily tree-lined ridge, in the general direction, Kim thought the cavern was.

As we rounded the ridge, we could hear screams and a scuffle going on up ahead, we increased our speed. The sound of branches breaking, screeching, and hissing noises indicated things weren’t good for our dragonets. We came into a clearing to find mayhem.

Lee extended her wand and a bolt of light shot at one of the fangrinders. She had tried to immobilise the fangrinder. She was a big girl and topped over 3m in height.

She didn’t enjoy Lee stinging her arse either and turned on us. The spell had little effect on her. She spat the smaller dragonet from her mouth and roared her displeasure. She had not been alone either.