Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2012-11-01 01:49 am
azurelunatic) wrote2012-11-01 01:49 am
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Cracked Phoenix: Brotherhood of the Salamander: excerpt
This is the fruit of my first hour-and-change of work, and also the excerpt that's up on the NaNo site.
The flight attendant tapped Max on the shoulder, and Max reluctantly turned off his iPod for landing, the sound of Elton John still in his ears. His sort-of-girlfriend Amber had loaded him up with songs she swore would see him through at least the first semester of his freshman year at Oppenheimer-Clark Southwest University of Chemistry and Engineering. The internet said that the college was informally known as U of Blowing Shit Up, and this was why Max had selected it out of all his acceptances. Any university who thought the MythBusters had style, but that they lacked imagination and expertise, was Max’s kind of place. Rumor also had it that it wasn’t a bad place for students with some of Max’s other, more interesting aptitudes.
Max spent the landing nervously focusing on the silent, familiar warmth of the battery of his iPod, to distract himself from all of the interesting things going on outside his window in the plane’s nearest engine. As an elemental magician attuned to fire, he was more at home in the air than he would have been inside a cave or in a submarine, but just barely. He knew better than to focus his worried energies on any sort of engine, let alone an unfamiliar one, after the car incident. To be fair, he had been pretty stressed out trying to make sure that they got to the airport well early enough, and Amber’s car was pretty old and crappy already, but his field depended on leveraging the forces of coincidence to bend the physical universe to his will. There was no such thing as a coincidence around an actively working magician, and he really didn’t want to chance the engines of the plane he was in doing anything out of the ordinary. He’d been able to get to the airport on time in the taxi, and he promised himself he’d text Amber and Raven as soon as he could to make sure everything was okay. Maybe he could divert some of his pizza money, if Amber’s car needed serious repairs?
He tucked his iPod back into the pocket of his hoodie and took out his phone. Even before the seatbelt sign turned off, he was powering it up, anxious to get back in touch with Amber and Raven. Sure, he carried a sense of their living presences in the back of his mind every waking moment, but their long-distance telepathy thing was only good for so much. It did not extend to actual coherent words unless someone was very lucky and their minds happened to be pretty congruent.
Waiting for the message took him into the terminal. He was so focused that he made it into the baggage retrieval lounge before he noticed the hot spot in his pocket.
“Hey! Kid! No smoking in the terminal!” a really pissed-off security guard yelled at him. Max registered the yelling at about the same time the heat registered. He stripped out of the hoodie as fast as he could, shaking it so the sizzling-hot iPod fell to the floor before bursting into flames from the damaged battery.
As airport security hustled him off to a debriefing room, Max swore he was never flying again.
The flight attendant tapped Max on the shoulder, and Max reluctantly turned off his iPod for landing, the sound of Elton John still in his ears. His sort-of-girlfriend Amber had loaded him up with songs she swore would see him through at least the first semester of his freshman year at Oppenheimer-Clark Southwest University of Chemistry and Engineering. The internet said that the college was informally known as U of Blowing Shit Up, and this was why Max had selected it out of all his acceptances. Any university who thought the MythBusters had style, but that they lacked imagination and expertise, was Max’s kind of place. Rumor also had it that it wasn’t a bad place for students with some of Max’s other, more interesting aptitudes.
Max spent the landing nervously focusing on the silent, familiar warmth of the battery of his iPod, to distract himself from all of the interesting things going on outside his window in the plane’s nearest engine. As an elemental magician attuned to fire, he was more at home in the air than he would have been inside a cave or in a submarine, but just barely. He knew better than to focus his worried energies on any sort of engine, let alone an unfamiliar one, after the car incident. To be fair, he had been pretty stressed out trying to make sure that they got to the airport well early enough, and Amber’s car was pretty old and crappy already, but his field depended on leveraging the forces of coincidence to bend the physical universe to his will. There was no such thing as a coincidence around an actively working magician, and he really didn’t want to chance the engines of the plane he was in doing anything out of the ordinary. He’d been able to get to the airport on time in the taxi, and he promised himself he’d text Amber and Raven as soon as he could to make sure everything was okay. Maybe he could divert some of his pizza money, if Amber’s car needed serious repairs?
He tucked his iPod back into the pocket of his hoodie and took out his phone. Even before the seatbelt sign turned off, he was powering it up, anxious to get back in touch with Amber and Raven. Sure, he carried a sense of their living presences in the back of his mind every waking moment, but their long-distance telepathy thing was only good for so much. It did not extend to actual coherent words unless someone was very lucky and their minds happened to be pretty congruent.
Waiting for the message took him into the terminal. He was so focused that he made it into the baggage retrieval lounge before he noticed the hot spot in his pocket.
“Hey! Kid! No smoking in the terminal!” a really pissed-off security guard yelled at him. Max registered the yelling at about the same time the heat registered. He stripped out of the hoodie as fast as he could, shaking it so the sizzling-hot iPod fell to the floor before bursting into flames from the damaged battery.
As airport security hustled him off to a debriefing room, Max swore he was never flying again.
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