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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BigTom" data-source="post: 1998661" data-attributes="member: 16366">Big Toms Entry!Finals Week    "Elsorae Magnae Tannas Elvor Massus Mazai!"    Trent had just enough time to see the look of horror cross Jack’s face before the magic took effect.  That was not the expression Trent expected or wanted.  Trent had been working hard on his transformation spells.  Finals were just three days away and he had to get a good transformation grade if he wanted to be a senior next year.  That was why he had turned to Jack.  Jack was the top transformation mage in this year’s senior class.  Jack was also broke and willing to tutor for reasonable rates.  They had spent several hours working on a simple transformation.  The goal had been to give the target wings.  A simple spell that would get Trent past his requirements.  Yet something had gone wrong.  As he watched, Jack began to melt.  His entire body seemed to turn into a thick liquid and melt down before his eyes.  Jack tried to say something, but his mouth was too far-gone to form understandable words.  Then things began to happen rapidly.  The thick liquid began to steam.  Trent knew what this meant.  Jack was shrinking.  The water steaming off was extra essence dispersing.  Trent desperately wanted to stop it, but things were happening too fast and he was too confused.  Finally, the steam cleared, leaving a liquid residue on the ground.  Trent looked in horror at the result of his mage craft.    <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=18492" target="_blank">Jack was now a very large and lively snail.</a>    Several thoughts raced through Trent’s mind.  The first was that he was definitely going to fail transformation.  The second was that Jack was going to exact a very high price for this screw up.  The third was that he had to turn Jack back to Jack without any of the teachers finding out.  If the teachers knew he had muffed a transformation spell this badly they probably wouldn’t even let him take the tests out of fear for their own safety.  This was the thought that stuck.  First, Trent tried to reason through the spell.  If he could find the error, he might be able to reverse it.  Unfortunately, he really had no idea of what he had done wrong.  He chuckled slightly at the irony that the one person who could have easily told him no longer had a mouth because of him.  Finally Trent conceded to himself that he would need help.  He had a few other friends in the senior class who might be able to bail him out.  He just hoped he could get to them quickly.  Scooping up Jack, he headed back to the dorms.    His first stop was Bertol’s room.  Bertol was both a clever mage and a nice guy.  Trent figured Bertol might be willing to help him out for friendships sake.  If not, he hoped he still had a few bucks left for bribery.  His frenzied knock brought Bertol to the door.    “Trent, you look terrible.  What’s wrong?”    “Bert, I just had a little screw up with a spell, I am hoping you can help me reverse it.”    “Sure thing, what kind of spell?”    “Transformation.”    “Well Trent, I can’t imagine any of your transformations would be too tough to reverse.”    Trent winced at the jab.  Normally he would have taken such a joke in stride.  But today he was a bit frazzled.    “Bert, please, this is really serious.  Look!”    Trent held out the snail for Bertol to look at.  Bertol studied it carefully for a few seconds, trying to sense out the magic.    “Wow, nice spell craft.  I can’t read anything on that.  What was that snail originally?”    “Jack!”    Bertol’s face dropped at that.  He’d assumed that Trent had grabbed a lab animal and couldn’t fix it.  He had thought that human transformation would be well beyond Trent’s abilities.  The realization of how serious the situation was and how much trouble his young friend was in hit him hard.    “Trent, you have to take him to professor Higgins right now.  One more screw up in this situation and Jack could be beyond recovery.”    “Bert, I know that.  But if they find out I did a human transformation like this and screwed it up they will flunk me for sure!  My mom sacrificed for 15 years to send me here.  I can’t get thrown out.  Please, you have to help me turn him back before anyone notices!”    Trent wasn’t exaggerating.  His father had left when he was a baby, and his mother had worked two jobs to make ends meet.  When he had been ruled gifted at nine years old, his mother had sworn that she would get him into The Oxley School, where he could get a mages pedigree that would guarantee his future.  She had done it by working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week and praying for him every Sunday morning.  Now all of her work and sacrifice was about to come crashing down unless he could somehow save Jack himself.  Trent couldn’t face his mom if he failed.  He couldn’t reverse his spell.  Now it was becoming clear he couldn’t get Bertol to save him either.  He did the only thing he could.  Trent began to cry.    “Oh, Trent, I’m really sorry man.  I want to help you, but I just don’t see how.  I can’t tell what you did, man.  The spell is just really knotted together well.  I can’t read it.  You can’t tell me what you did.  But there may be one way out for you.  We both know there is one guy around here who specializes in screwball magic.  Maybe he can sort it out for you.”    Trent immediately knew whom Bertol was talking about.  Mackenzie.  Mackenzie was something of a legend at the school.  He had arrived here on a full scholarship because his mana ratings were the highest ever registered in a child his age.  A lot of folks speculated that the increased amount of mana had also warped his mind.  Certainly Mackenzie was a strange sort.  Mackenzie was perhaps the most random person Trent had ever encountered.  The man seemed to have no impulse control whatsoever.  Add to that the fact he had both the magic and skill to make things happen, and you had a walking field of surrealism on campus.  But, Trent had to concede that if there was anyone who could undo a screwball spell, it was Mackenzie.  The real trick was convincing him he wanted to do it.  Mackenzie neither asked for nor gave favors.  If you wanted something from him, you had to find a way to make him want to do it.  Otherwise, you were on your own.    Mackenzie had his own senior cabin.  More correctly, he had a small laboratory he lived in and no one on the faculty was willing to move him out.  Trent approached the door with a deep sense of dread.  He almost turned and went to the professors.  Almost.  Then deep in his head, he heard the disappointed voice of his mother.  Mackenzie was scary, but a devastated mother was terrifying.  He opened the door and went in.    Trent expected to see many things when he went into Mackenzie’s room.  He never expected the sight before him.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=18493" target="_blank">Mackenzie was wearing some sort of strange Ape costume.  It appeared he had just spread his lunch all over the floor.  Several freshmen cowered against the walls, trying to stay out of his way.</a>  Mackenzie seemed to be in the middle of a long stream of extremely imaginative epithets when he noticed Trent.  Trent was afraid Mackenzie’s rage would be turned on him.  Yet Mackenzie suddenly got very calm.  He quietly stared at Trent through his monkey mask for a few moments, and then spoke quietly and seriously.    “Trent, I need for you to answer a question for me.  Do I look like a real gorilla?”    Trent stammered for a few seconds, suddenly at a loss for words.  It wasn’t that he didn’t know the actual answer.  Mackenzie looked like a geek in a rental costume.  However, Trent was not sure what would happen if he actually gave that answer.  If Mackenzie thought he was supposed to look like a real gorilla and Trent naysayed him, Mackenzie might be sore at him for weeks.  Trent didn’t have weeks.  Luckily for Trent, his stammering seemed to be an adequate response as Mackenzie spoke again.    “Of course I don’t.  This is obviously a costume, and not a very good one.  The problem is, that shouldn’t be obvious.  I put one bad mama jama of an illusion on this thing, and it just fizzled out the minute it was challenged.  See, you can’t eat through this mask because the mouth is closed.  I postulate that if you make a strong enough illusion, however, you can actually defy reality.  My test of this was to try to make this outlandish costume so real; I would fool myself and eat my sandwich.  As you can see, that didn’t work.  It’s too bad, because that was a really good sandwich and I am really hungry.  I don’t suppose you have any food on you?”    Trent saw an opening and decided to try and get on Mackenzie’s good side with sympathy.    “Sorry man, I didn’t bring a lunch today.  I planned on hitting the cafeteria.  It’s Meatloaf day.  It really sucks about your sandwich.  Too bad there isn’t some magic to put it back together.”    Mackenzie stared at him for a few moments, and then slapped his forehead with a big, furry paw.  He laughed slightly and tapped his forehead a few more times before speaking.    “Trent, that’s why I like you.  You may be a pathetic mage, but you have a real knack for pointing out the obvious.  And that’s just what I needed right now.  Stand back and watch some real magic at work!”    At this, two freshmen bolted for the door.  Trent wanted to follow them, but he knew he was getting a positive response from Mackenzie and that meant he still had a chance to save Jack and his high school career, so he gritted his teeth and remained.  Mackenzie began weaving some sort of spell.  Trent could not tell what Mackenzie was doing.  It literally sounded like he was casting in another language.  Magic had its own language, and even if you couldn’t handle the particulars, you could usually get the general idea of what another mage was doing if you could hear the spell.  Trent could not understand a single syllable of this magic.  He could, however, sense the immense power that Mackenzie was building up.  Suddenly the entire room seemed to bend and twist, and Trent had a sick feeling in his stomach.  It felt like he had ridden a roller coaster 10 times in two seconds.  He closed his eyes to try and fight the disorientation.  When he felt that the magic was subsiding, he opened his eyes.  The sight he beheld was truly awesome.    Mackenzie was now a real Gorilla.  More, he was some sort of infernal gorilla with flaming eyes.  Trent was frozen with fear at the sight of this awesome beast.  The gorilla looked at him and smiled.  Then it raised a huge sandwich in one great paw and bellowed.  It thrust the sandwich towards its mouth with a great sweep of its arm.  In the next instant, Mackenzie was a man in a bad ape suit and there was a sandwich tossed all over the floor.    “Gee, Mac, I guess that spell didn’t quite do what you expected it to do.  I mean, it didn’t really fix your sandwich.”    “Nonsense, Trent.  The spell fixed my sandwich perfectly well.  I just got lost in my own illusion and made the same mistake.  I just turned back time on that action to before when I tossed the sandwich.  I forgot that doing so would also turn back the illusion on the suit.”    “Oh, I see,” said Trent, “instead of repairing the sandwich, you altered time so that the sandwich never was destroyed.  That is really amazing.”    “Actually Trent, it isn’t that hard.  Too hard for you probably, but not that hard.  I have saved more lab equipment that way.”    And Trent knew the answer to his problem.    “Look, Mac, I screwed up a spell earlier today.  If you will reverse that spell for me, I will personally get you two meatloaf dinners and deliver them to your room.  That will solve your food problem without dealing with the sandwich and the illusion.”    Mackenzie seemed to ponder this for some time.  He finally looked at Trent and removed the mask.  He was smiling beneath the mask.  The smile slowly turned into a laugh.    “What the heck did you do that has you so worried?”    Trent decided honesty was the best policy at this point.  Slowly, he opened his hands and showed the snail.    “What’s that?” Mackenzie asked.    “Jack.  I told you, I screwed up.”    Mackenzie’s laugh grew stronger and stronger until he dropped to his knees, helpless with mirth. It took him some time to recover enough to speak.    “Ok, let me guess, you have no idea how you did that, and Jack is the only one you know who could undo it.  So you come to Mackenzie the magnificent hoping for a miracle.  Well, Trent, today is your lucky day.  I have one miracle left, and the asking price is two meatloaf dinners and the best laugh I have had this semester.”    Mackenzie again chanted, and again Trent felt the magic.  Then everything seemed to reverse.  Black was white, white was black, and the colors were all over.  He had a strange sense of motion and realized he was returning to the point where he cast the transformation.  He floated by the old wizards Oak, and the sight of it in this strange twilight place was had to describe.  <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=18494" target="_blank">It appeared that everything but the Oak existed, and the Oak was a bright light of non-existence, while strange energies crackled all around.</a>  Then, as suddenly as it had started, it ended.  Trent was standing by the road with Jack and heard himself chanting.    “Elsorae Magnae Tannas Elvor…”    He realized he only had a second to fix the spell and no idea how to do it.  In desperation, he tried to twist the final word so that the spell would fizzle out.    “…Massus Mackenzie!”    Jack stared at him.  Then he shook his head sadly.    “Trent, that wasn’t even close.”    Trent knew it wasn’t close and was grateful for it.  He didn’t want to tell Jack that though.  He just wanted to rest from a very harrowing day.    “Yeah Jack, I know.  Listen, I am just tired.  Let me rest and maybe I can do this on a smaller scale later.”    Jack and Trent turned to go back to the dorms, and stopped in their tracks.  They stood slack jawed for a few moments.  Finally, Jack found words.    “Well Trent, your transformations may be sub standard, but apparently you are making great strides in teleportations.”    <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=18495" target="_blank">Hanging from the power cables was the Principals car.</a>  Suddenly expulsion didn’t seem like such a bad fate to Trent.  But he sucked it up as best he could.    “Jack, we are going to return to the dorm.  And we will never speak of this day again.”</blockquote>

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