Grimm’s School of Magick: Lesson Three
"Okay everyone, focus together. You’ve all been in Spider’s bookstore. Picture that one closet off the front counter. Now, imagine you’re opening the door from here. That’s really all there is to it. Just open the door with your mind," Kyle said patiently. He looked at the three students before him, tapping a foot. "Come on, it’s really not that hard. Just imagine there’s a door in the air. Then open it." He and Brad, the intrepid pair, were attempting to teach several of the students, notably Charlie, Valerie and Abraham, how to open portals between two points.
It was not going well.
In the city itself, an unusual thing happened. As the students in the island above/within/etc, (it’s difficult to explain the placement of Marius’s island), focused on opening a portal, there was a tear. So infintesimal as to be ignored, the tear would have caused no problems…except for one of those random occurences which manage to screw up everyone’s life for a month or more.
A reality aligned.
Instantly, and only for that single breath, portals opened into the shifting reality. And just as those portals opened, aligned, and then shut, five inhabitants of Brandenburg took a step they would never forget. Luther von Nordenheim, walking silently down the sidewalk in the Residential district, vanished as if stepping through thin air. One moment his highly polished Gucci loafers were on glittering concrete, the next they were sinking into velvety grass too green to be real. Honoria Wingate ap Varich, in the midst of a sparring session with her trainer’s apprentice, Keighley, rolled and sprang into an attack, only to simply…vanish. Michael, the fallen archangel, in the midst of retrieving a CD from his car, stepped through the air and into water, disappearing without a trace. In the bookstore run by Marius’s adepts, the water mage Anne shifted her weight onto her left foot to replace a book and slid through the portal without a word. On the university grounds, one poor undergraduate named Claudia chased her fluttering research draft across the campus commons…and ran smack into the supporting pillar of an abandoned temple.
Five portals opened, five portals shut. Five people vanished without a trace, and a gust of icy air from that other reality brushed across the magickally aware of the city. The macrocosom shifted again, and the realities unaligned.
Turns out, there is a fate worse than death.