“Today, I won’t summon a god,” Harriett said in her mind for the millionth time as she made her way down the well-lit, black and tan palleted walls that led to her next class. She had only been attending the magical college called Nebula for two weeks, but already she had unwillingly made a name for herself as “Demon God Girl”. It wasn’t the catchiest of names what with people outside the college probably believing her to be some type of devil worshipper if they ever were told of her “exploits”, but to Harriett, well… it wasn’t that far off.

It wasn’t her fault though. In fact, usually, she blamed genetics entirely for logical purposes, as non-magical sounding of a reason as that was. Her father was one of the most powerful warlocks alive, part of the secret governmental entity of magical personnel that worked in the shadows behind the nations of the world. It was a job that pulled him away from home more often than naught, but that didn’t make him a bad father in any way. After all, with the handy ability of teleportation magic, High Warlock Roy Carefree, Harriett’s esteemed father, always made it one of his absolute goals to hang with his favorite, yet only, god-powered daughter at least once a week. Harriett never knew though if her father was merely checking up on her out of fatherly love, or squashing any public signs of her power’s touch so that the main amount of the public, those humans of Earth whom did not wield nor know about magic, would not get exposed to it just yet. In her mind, she liked to think the former.

Harriett took a right turn down another hallway, passing students, professors, and magical creatures alike. A fairy student, no more than four feet tall and radiating some type of pink and white dust from her skin, nearly tripped over Harriett’s feet as Harriett rounded the corner. Harriett barely managed to maneuver out of the way in a very non-athletic fashion, the fairy merely glancing up and giving a “hmph” sound from between her lips before disappearing around the corner Harriett had just come from. Harriett took a second to contemplate if she should go back around the corner to apologize to the fairy for not seeing her (Despite the incandescent glow she had been overly radiating), but soon realized that her class was about to start in five minutes and so kicked her pace into double time.

As she proceeded, her thoughts trailed back to the other half of her genetics, for you couldn’t blame one person alone for the genetic anomaly that was Harriett. Her mother, Priestess Caroline Carefree, was a spiritual genius. Though her mother’s magical energy was quite low, she more than made up for it in terms of spiritual energy, another powerful energy type those of the magical world could be born or blessed with. Spirit energy differed from magic energy only in terms of its uses. Magic and its energy came from both within a person and from the nature around them. With magic, one could make fantasy into reality, and reality into eternal possibilities. If you wanted to summon flowers made of candy and had the magical inclination, the vision, and the proper incantation, if necessary, you could make it a reality. But if one couldn’t channel their magic into their words properly, those same candy flowers might end up eating them. And no one wanted to be eaten by their own conjured food, despite how hilarious that might be.

Spirit energy, on the other hand, was more based in terms of realist uses, such as for healing, communicating between planes, and controlling the natural abilities already present in a being, but to a higher degree. For instance, just last week, Harriett’s mother had been asked to attend a meeting between a clan of golems that had been peacefully sleeping underneath the subways of Chicago for nearly fifty years and a group of various half-demons that had decided to build a literal underground tunnel on the outskirts of the city to establish another sector of their ‘business’, as Harriett’s mom had both told her before leaving the conversation at that. For her mother, the typical magical meeting happened. The half-demons woke the golems, the golems got mad, the half-demons got mad at the golems for sleeping in the same place for so long, the golems got madder that the half-demons got mad, and then Harriett’s mom singlehandedly made each and every golem and half-demon apologize to each other before working out a deal between the two groups. When Harriett had asked her mom how she had calmed such eccentric sounding groups, her mom responded as she always did. By rolling up a sleeve, pointing to her bicep, and claiming that she was just built to be a mom to everyone. Harriett always raised an eyebrow to her at that, but never questioned it further.

Yet the further explaining of genetics would have to wait for she had finally reached the open double doors that led to her next lecture: Natural Magic of Nature. It was a class that her mom had suggested upon her choosing classes before school had started. However, Harriett assumed that her mother thought that anything to do with nature and Harriett’s overly potent magical abilities couldn’t possibly cause much damage. Harriett thought otherwise.

She glanced about the brightly illuminated large room. It was a typical looking lecture hall with seats rising higher to her left only to then filter down in a descending fashion towards an empty podium in the front of the class and a giant blackboard behind it that appeared so clean that Harriett thought it was brand new.

She stepped into the room and proceeded to the left immediately. Her route was already clear to her, a seat in the far back corner near one of the emergency doors where she could easily make a dash for the exit should (Or rather when, her mind included) her magic led her astray in any way. As she passed a handful of students, she could already feel their judging gazes and even her already spreading nickname escaping from their mouths. “It’s Demon God Girl,” they whispered as she clutched the straps of her backpack tighter. Once again, it was a nickname she didn’t care for, but it strangely defined Harriett well when she thought back to all of her exploits from birth to college.

Ignoring their gazes and inappropriately appropriate nickname, she reached her seat and plumped down. She placed her brown bookbag on the desk in front of her next to an orange pot that contained fresh soil and a lone, green seed resting peacefully on top of it. As she stared at the seed, her mind remembered that on the syllabus for this particular class, today’s lecture would be about using one’s own magical energy to germinate a seed. In theory, it sounded simple and harmless enough to Harriett. No matter how much magical energy she contained, she was sure that simply funneling it into a seed couldn’t cause the seed to grow any larger than the entirety of the pot before her. Harriett doubted that the seed was from a magical plane of existence either. In fact, as she rotated the pot, she found that a sticker was taped to the back of it: “Apple Seed”, it read. Her confidence grew.

Yet, deep down, Harriett’s mind, which was fueled more by anxiety and less by healthy nutrients, suddenly retaliated with the reason as to how she had received her college nickname of “Demon God Girl” within her first two weeks of attending Nebula. It had been during her first day of her Summoning class that had started her college experience off with a bang. The professor, Professor Lamas, a highly renowned demonic creature tamer and researcher of multiple black arts, had instructed the class to perform a simple magical summoning incantation to summon a small, low-tiered cat demon. It was such a simple sounding spell that Professor Lamas reassured everyone in the class multiple times that everyone would be successful with this one.

Harriett had a great deal of knowledge concerning the basic theory of how magic, spells and incantation worked for her father was a high warlock. “Magic is all about intent, power, and concentration, sweetie,” her dad always said to her before she attempted to cast anything as a child. “If you have the intent, but not the concentration or power, the spell will fail. If you have the concentration and power, but not the intent, the spell may happen, but with errors. And if you have power, but no concentration or intent, well…,” her father would always glare at her before breaking into laughter and changing the topic, much to her childish annoyance at such a young age.

But Harriett was 18 now and a college student. She had the intellect, the concentration, and the aptitude. However, just as her own human abilities had increased with age and study had her power exponentially increased in order to spite her. So when the time came for Harriett to summon her demon cat, she began like all the other students. She pictured the demon cat in her mind from a picture Professor Lamas had conjured on the blackboard. She focused for thirty seconds until the image refused to leave her mind. Then, she began to concentrate the necessary magical energy in her body until she was sure that it didn’t feel like too much. Finally, with her concentration and intent at their peaks, she outstretched her hand over her desk and commanded with full authority for a demon cat to reveal itself to her.

The next few minutes were a catastrophic blur of fire, brimstone, and wise cracks as no demonic cat appeared before Harriett’s hand. Instead, and much to her usual disarray, stood one of the nine demon lords from the Underworld. The room had lit up immediately upon his entry in a blue radiance for the demon lord’s body had been covered in blue flames that barely masked crimson faded gray skin, two outlandishly large horns, white eyes with no pupils, and a long, hairless tail. Harriett found out a few things that day. For one, she found out that demon lords could be quelled with her mom’s lemon cakes and witch gossip. But she only found those things out after she begged the demon lord for five minutes straight to stop raining brimstone and blue hellfire about the room while screaming at the top of his lungs as to how a little human girl was able to summon ‘he’, a demon lord of the highest magnitude (He stressed highest at least several more times as if he were trying to compensate for something, Harriett had concluded). But due to the demon lord answering the call of Harriett, he was “mentally suggested” by her magical summoning to slightly listen to her call, and the lemon cakes didn’t hurt either. So finally, after five minutes of literal hell, the class resumed, with all of the other students agitatedly sitting with demon cats purring on their desks, and an angry, yet satisfied demon lord grumpily sitting next to Harriett with his flames heavily subdued and his mouth stuffed with Harriett’s desserts. 

But today felt different. Today, Harriett was not the summoner of demons and chaos. Today, Harriett was just a timid black girl with big-rimmed reading glasses, bushy brown hair in a pony tail, and the concentration of the gods themselves. Though she quickly shifted her thinking away from the word of “gods” as to not jinx herself.

Nevertheless, today still felt like her day, a day where perhaps for the first time in her entire life, she could control her nearly limitless power in order to be a normal magical teenager. Perhaps, just this once, her energy would cause the seed before her to germinate into just a barely juvenile apple tree and nothing more. Somewhere, deep in her mind, she heard a low laugh that she was unsure as to whether it was from her anxiety taking a jab at her or the demon lord once again telepathically tuning into her thoughts. For ever since the summoning catastrophe, the demon lord, Lord Aesir as he liked to be called, enjoyed mentally calling Harriett once in a while, much to her high, high irritation for usually the calls, if they didn’t consist of constant laughter at Harriett’s woes, surrounded the constant question of, “So, did your mom make any more lemon cakes?” After the demon lord had called for the ninth time, this one occurring at 3 am in the morning last Tuesday, September 5^th, Harriett had had enough and decided to tell her parents. However, instead of somehow magically taking care of the problem as one would expect their magical parents to do, Harriett’s mom ended up entering Harriett’s thoughts and linking to Lord Aesir’s mind only to return ten minutes later not with a resolution, but with dinner plans with Lord Aesir and his family that were to involve him bringing over his wife and youngest daughter in a few weeks. Harriett had facepalmed so hard that day that the demon lord hadn’t stopped chuckling for the rest of the night.