Stars Rise

X. Fog

Students of all ages make up the halls of Oz but the teachers encourage everyone to hide their real appearance.

With glamour spells comes a certain skew toward youth. Before Fog and Frost take their first class, they need a disguise glamour. Since they can't cast a glamor spell themselves yet, they're put at the mercy of a teacher who names herself Glinda.

Because she's in a hurry, Glinda's only partially taking requests. Generously, she gives them each a foot of height, then, muttering that teenagers are too skinny, she bulks them out a few pounds. A mirror conjured before them shows that this extra cushioning is flattering for their body type. The thighs and glutes they've been granted are partly muscle, like the developed hamstrings of a pop star who trains eight hours a day to perform high endurance choreographed dancing, and they look good in their jeans and huge wool sweaters.

Then the good witch pumps up their hair with volume and thickness, highlights it yellow and gold, magnifies their eyes as if they've walked out of a manga, adjusts the shapes of their noses (more buttony) and the colors of their irises (bizarrely high contrast ocean blue, not the ocean blue of nature but a cartoony Crayola color). And she's off.

They don't look enough like themselves to be recognized on the street. They still look alike, but a less identical. They look like fairytale divas and the hair feels heavy to carry around.

"Learn glamour spells yourselves so you can customize," a magic-augmented fairy godmother voice calls back to them.

Magic discovery class is the base of all of Oz's classes.

"Every magic spell is discovered through reenactment. Reenactment of its original discovery." That was Prospero's initial explanation.

In the classroom, all ages are represented but Fog would guess the older students take a decade or two off, more years the older they are, until the cohort looks like a combination of real teenagers and the near thirty-year-olds who populated the halls of high school TV shows and movies like Grease and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Scream and The Breakfast Club and The O.C. and Dawson's Creek.

The students, most in disguises made out of illusion spells, cluster toward Prospero, and some meander away on the periphery to listen in for a speech that's clearly introductory even though so many of them aren't beginners. You can tell they're in disguise because they look like characters out of Super Smash or Disney movies, hair dyed Ariel red or Lady Palutena green, wearing angel wings like Pit and revealing body armor like all of them and super hero capes, mostly black or slate in color.

You can tell they aren't beginners not only from the illusions spells that make up their costumes but from the flicks of magic going around, the flashes of parlor tricks.

In the wine cellar, every single day, Fog noticed within three minutes that not everybody was following Prospero's way of the libertarian.

The low gargling sound of low-grade choking is Fog's first hint, and she looks up from her seat to a student whose cape has been tugged such that the collar gagged him.

"Magic discovery is twofold," Prospero is saying. "To cast a spell, to learn it in the first place and later master it, it must first be uncovered, unlocked. Every spell must be discovered."

It happens again half a minute later to a girl straight ahead in a pruney purple cape, and Fog can see without a doubt that the cape was pulled by the yank of a spell; there's no one near to hand to grip the fabric, it's straight-up magic.

A boy with Sonic blue hair in the waistcoat and attire of a tidy pirate captain, complete with a stout curved saber blade, has to keep hiking his breeches back up because some repetitive telekinesis spell has pulled them down every thirty seconds to reveal pink boxer briefs entirely anachronistic to the period of his costume. After the seventh time using his hands to pull his pants up, he gives up and finds a seat in the back where the press of his butt and the pull of gravity between it and the seat will hold his pantaloons in place. He sulks, glaring around for any hint of whodunnit.