Himitsu Yume ch.4

Everything appeared as normal. The cafeteria was in the same organized disorder it had been in before the spell. The students were all exactly as they had been, no visible difference at all.

“See Mia, you worried for nothing. I guess the spell just doesn’t work if you don’t whisper it,” Quin reassured her sister.

“I guess you’re right. It looks like nothing happened. You should be more careful next time though; you were lucky with this spell, you might not be so lucky with another.”

They began walking back towards Rika and Sho, when a crowd began to gather around a table they passed. They stopped in their tracks, afraid to turn around and see what was going on.

“That’s so cool! How are you doing that?” one student asked.

“I don’t know, I just waved my hand and it flew up, its like I have telekinetic powers or something,” the student at the center of the crowd answered.

“Don’t be stupid, it’s probably electrostatic energy or magnetism. Telekinesis doesn’t exist. It’s like magic, it belongs in fairy tales and children’s books,” another student remarked.

The whole cafeteria was now centered on this student, when the skeptical student waved his arm to knock down the bento that the other student was currently spinning in the air. She missed, and instead moved a backpack off of the table, leaving it suspended in the air. She gazed at her hands in shock. After this moment, successively, more and more students tested out their new abilities. Mia and Quin slowly turned to each other.

“You didn’t just hear all that, did you? It was just me, right? Please tell me I’m losing my mind and hearing things.”

Quin looked at her sister uneasily, and slowly turned to face the rest of the cafeteria, “I’m so sorry Mia.”

Quin broke into tears, knelt down to Mia’s feet, and held on for dear life because she knew how big a mistake she had just made, and to her there was no way out.

“Get a grip on yourself. It’s not irreversible. We can fix this,” Quin continued to sob through Mia’s words. Mia knelt down, hugged Quin, and led her to the corner of the cafeteria where they had spoken. “Stay here, ok?”

Mia began to walk towards the group, trying not to let Quin know how hard it really is to reverse a spell on such a large number of people.

“Well at least they’re all still in the cafeteria. It’ll make it a little easier this way,” Mia rationalized.

As she was about to do her first attempt of a reversal spell, the student council president walked into the cafeteria.

“Hey, what’s going on here? This is no time for games, everyone who’s done eating lunch needs to return to the academic ring this instant. Anyone who doesn’t head to their next class now, will be reported to the headmaster. Furthermore…”

“Oh no! What am I gonna do now? If everyone leaves I’ll have to track down every single person who was in here individually,” Mia exclaimed in a hushed tone, as the president continued his speech.

She looked back at Quin, who was calming down a little now.

“Quin, can you—”

“I’m on it,” cutting Mia off, Quin walked over to the door and whispered to the handle. She made it to three out of the four doors before anyone walked out; however, two students slipped by her as she was working on the other doors. A stampede of students, all worried they’d be expelled for what appeared like a food-fight to the student council president, and would be reported as worse to the headmaster, ran for the door. Quin barely evaded them, as a frantic uproar arose once they realized: all the doors were locked.

Mia nodded to Quin and they returned to the corner where they had argued. Meanwhile the president noticed the problem and headed over towards the door. He grabbed the handle and began pushing force into the door.

“Why hasn’t anyone left yet?”

“It’s locked,” a student replied as the president put his entire body weight into the door.

“This is impossible, the doors were open just a minute ago. These doors can’t lock. It’s a school rule that the cafeteria should always be open, no matter the time. They didn’t even put locks on these doors.”

In the corner, Mia and Quin began discussing the situation.

“What kind of lock did you use on the doors, quin?”

“Just the basic lock-me spell, the one we learned in elementary school. Is that ok?”

“I guess. That one is easy to break, so we just have to hope no one realizes they can say spells to do magic as well. If they figure out a poem in any language will do some form or magic, we’re toast.”

“So what do we do now? You said you knew how to solve this.”

“I lied,” Quin stared at Mia in disbelief, almost began to cry again, but instead began to laugh nervously. “So what do we do now?”

Mia thought for a moment, then took out a notebook and pencil, “What’s the reversal spell for the similarity one?”

“ummm… I think it’s—”

“Stop. Write it down so nothing else happens,” Quin scribbled some words onto a blank page of the notebook.

Mia looked at the spell for a few minutes, and then began crossing words out and rewriting it, “Ok, so if we change this and this, it might work. But I think we’re going to have to say it to every single person.”

“How do we go up to every one here and say the spell to their face without revealing ourselves or letting them on to the spells?”

“Well… if I change the words around to inanimatey, I could bless an object and the first person to touch the object would lose their powers. There’s more, though: either way we do it, for the spell to work, they have to want to give up their powers. Can you help me convince everyone to want this?”

“Ok, sure. What are you going to bless though?” Quin and Mia thought for a moment.
“The food,” they said simultaneously.

“I’ll go bless the food. I need you to convince people to not want their powers anymore, and then instigate a food fight. Can you do that?”

Quin nodded, and walked away, heading to the center of the cafeteria. She waved her hand and spun some food from a nearby table in the air, until several students noticed her.

“Hey, this is fun,” she continued to spin the food, and whispered a spell. Her hand began to turn green. “AHH! It’s turning me green! I don’t want to have these powers anymore.”

“Why aren’t any of us turning green? You probably did it wrong,” remarked a student.

Quin looked for help from Mia, who was closer to the front of the cafeteria, by the food. Mia recognized Quin’s method, as one that has been played on her before to prompt punishment from her parents. She said another spell, waved her arm to the entire cafeteria, and turned back to the other task at hand.

“You’re not? Maybe something is wrong with me,” Quin began to fake tears, and then looked up. “What’s on your arm?”

The other student noticed his arm was now also turning green. A panic rose from the students, when from an obscure, seemingly deserted end of the cafeteria, flew a bowl of natto. The natto hit a target student, a yankee, who for some reason was in school that day, and would no doubt want a fight. She picked up some cold soba noodles and tossed them across the room. Before the student council president could even blink, nonetheless stop the fight, the blessed food was flying through the air. Quin sneaked away, to a hidden Mia on the other side of the cafeteria.

“As long as we stay out of the way, everything should work out now. I just have to reverse the green skin and then no one will be able to connect magic to either of us, but best yet, no one will have any more magic,” Mia watched intently as the fight continued.

“What about the green? Don’t we have to get rid of that too?”

“As soon as the fight is over and everyone has lost their magic, I’ll reverse the spell.”

“What about me though? I don’t want to stay green, I was already a weird color today! Everyone will think I’m an alien,” Quin said sullenly.

Mia gave her sister a strange look, “You are an alien.”

Mia smiled, and then whispered a reversal spell onto Quin, “You know, you really should learn some of these simpler spells. It was a little sad that you couldn’t reverse the spots this morning on your own.” Mia paused for a moment, and then took back her statement, “Then again, the less you know, the better.”

Quin scowled and crossed her arms, and Mia, relating that her statement was a joke, hugged her sister and laughed. As they sat together, whispering their plans and jokes, a looming figure appeared behind them.

“Don’t think I didn’t see that it was you who started the food fight!” Mia and Quin both jumped at the student council president’s voice. “The principal is going to hear about this, and you’re going to be in big trouble.”

As Mia noticed the speech was directed towards Quin, she snuck away to avoid punishment. As Quin watched in fear, the president’s speech, a specialty onigiri hit the side of his head.

“Who threw that?!” The president turned and a bombardment of onigiri his entire front.

Quin took advantage of this moment and snuck off with Mia. The president’s attention was turned, and he ran off after the food flinging students, attempting yet again to stop the fight. As the fight raged on, the bell rang loud through the cafeteria. Everyone stopped their fight and stood still upon the realization that they’d all be late for class, and would actually get in horrendous trouble. Mia noticed this, the perfect moment, to dispel the green coloring from all the students, while they were too distracted to notice. With a whispered spell and another wave of the hand, all the green was gone. Yet another dilemma built up, as a frantic crowd ran towards the still locked doors.

Mia thought for a moment, and then walked over to Sho and Rika, who were now standing on the outskirts of the frantic crowd.

“So Sho, what exactly happened? Quin and I were just talking and missed the whole thing. Does this usually happen? What did they do last time?”

Sho stared suspiciously at Mia, “The doors are locked. Everyone turned green from the weird powers and then there was a food fight. It’s never happened before, actually, and according to the president it’s impossible. Well, the food fight, powers, and locked doors. Food fights are perfectly possible, just not accepted.”

Mia walked through the crowd, pushed on the handle, and the door opened. For a moment people stared at her, but as the second warning bell rang, they ran out the door, too worried to wonder. After the rush was gone, Mia and Quin subtly walked out the door, as if nothing peculiar had happened.

“Well, at least that’s over with,” Mia said as she and Quin walked down the hall to their next class.

Quin stopped and turned to Mia, “I’m sorry. I really messed up there.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mia kept walking.

In the hallway behind them, another student was walking briskly. The student dropped some books and they floated up before him, “thanks.”

“No problem,” the student took the floating books and walked away. The other, who raised the books, stared at his hands. A smile curled upon his lips.