Chapter 7 continues...

“Bet you’re all sorry now, huh? Missed your chance to make friends with a real wizard,” she said to the foci around her.

They expressed their regret by staying silent, as they should.

“Except you,” said Raz to the needle box. “You did your best.” 

Hopefully it would one day find a wizard of its own. For now, it too would have to contend in watching her resonate.

Raz stepped carefully around the trinkets covering the floor and found the center circle. She sat down, set the phone before her and closed her eyes.

If it had felt like a whisper before then now it hummed in her awareness like an engine, looming in the mind’s eye as a colorless silhouette as an intense presence. No breathing exercises or awareness centering required. All she had to do was reach out and touch.

A weight nudged her on a level she could not understand, tilting her world towards the phone. She felt the trickle of energy seeping from its battery, the flakes of arcent falling upon its antennae, feeding it updates on her apps, geographical location, and tightly packet data she had no clue how to parse.

Gasping, Raz opened her eyes to find she not only felt them, but saw.

“Whoa…”

Glowing white flakes of arcnet fell through matter, floating about, orbiting and gathering on the only antennae in the room. Others bounced off of her phone, returning into the skies. Ethereal screens of programs surrounded her phone, showing her flashes of messages apps updating, a new arctube video being uploaded by one of her subscribed channels, and HBW forum doing a query to check her ‘alive’ status. All this with the screen locked!

Raz’s eyes wandered the magic around her, awed into silence. Until she tilted away from the phone and crashed back to a flat, real wonderchamber.

She broke into overjoyed giggles and incoherent gushing. “Aaaaa resonance resonance!” she shouted, bumping her fists and dancing. “It works!”

What it did or how she’d ever use whatever her sight showed, Raz had no clue, and didn’t care yet. The fact that she saw magic was enough. And it meant…

“My eyes!”

Raz hurried back into meditative pose out of habit, did a breathing cycle, and touched her phone again. Sure enough, the world turned phonier. Before the effect could fade, Raz took a couple dozen selfies in various cute wizardy poses that emphasized her eyes. Her eyes, when resonating with the phone, had a big square iris full of blue-white static. They looked cool as heck!

Several more moments were spent in very dignified gushing over the eyes. She spent another resonance recording a video. Upon watching, she found out that the static noise intensified between blinks, and that her resonance lasted around seven seconds.

There were a ton of things she could’ve and maybe should’ve spent her chamber time testing, but none of them matched the temptation of trying out magic for real. Raz relaxed herself, breathed, entered another resonance state, and tried out the first resonance cantrip exercise suggested to every newbie awakened.

She reached out and poked at the stuff.

Arcnet flakes whirled around and through her fingers like flies, evading her grasp. But the ghostly screens were stuck to her phone and unable to flee.

Carefully, fingers trembling, Raz picked out the green hued chat screen. It zapped her fingers a little, like statically charged paper. Since this experiment had a high chance of ending in perfect disaster, she clicked the Marxist Wizard icon GG had as his chat profile picture and tried clicking at everything.

Weird geometrical shapes and half-finished words filled the chat window. Somehow, she sent him a picture of her feet and the wonderchamber floor.

When the resonance ended, Raz checked her phone. Everything looked okay, until she opened the chat with GG. The settings were… Well. Chat bar had switched places, text had been resized and recolored, and her feet had replaced the application background.

GG appeared online.

He sent her a picture of a warding symbol meant to drive away monsters.

GG: “Not subbing to any fetish sites.”

Raz snorted. She started typing a reply, but had a better idea and started sending her best wizard-eyed selfies instead.

Raz: “Guess who?”

She attached a winky face with a tongue poking out.

Raz: “You seen her?”

GG sent her his own cheeky winky face selfie, while flying upside down over a flying castle in the clouds.

Raz: “I’m cuter.”

GG: “you are close second”

GG: “But this is most wondersome news!”

GG: “Knew youd resonate”

GG: “Un hath mercy after all. Good things happen to our Razmaster”

GG: “But why are u a foot wizard?”

Raz: “phone wizard. Awakened”

GG typed. A moment later, a short novel appeared.

GG: “I know this is not the fate you asked for but the world calls upon you. Become the phone wizard the Magogram needs. The horn of liberties and truths. Sow your feet pictures wide and far and with them spread the message of Magogram’s wrongdoings. You may be executed for this, but know that through your sacrifice, the world has become a better place.”

Raz: “:D I’ll consider it”

GG: “Smite them. Smite the oppressive regime with your feet.”

Raz: “Can’t. The old ppl might like it. Anyhow, ttyl. Need to register and tell the others and practice and… yeah.”

GG dropped offline.

Raz sent Capi her best and most saucy selfie and Fen an inoffensive one that couldn’t be interpreted as anything but a friend announcing their awakening to another friend. She considered sending sibs the announcement, but thought better of it. With sudden extra vacation time and no more need to pay wonderchamber visits for the rest of the month, she might as well take the underail a day early and surprise them in person. 

This she would do. Just the thought raised a grin on her lips.

Capi called and Raz answered.

“Hola.”

A muffled party beat pounded in the background of Capi’s upbeat voice, “I thought you failed yesterday what the heck I mean o my gosh this is great but how when did this happen?”

“Like last night, when I was walking home.”

“Natural? Oh gosh, wow. Raz, this is amazing!”

Raz chuckled. “Yeah!”

“Phone foci?”

“Yup.”

“I knew it. Guessed right away from the eyes. We’ve got one in the class. An Earth girl named Natalie. Has squares like yours, but pink. Okay, so a phone wizard. Wow. Did you resonate yet? Of course you did, duh, the selfies. Okay, so we’re gonna need to organize an awakening party when you visit. Are you bringing your siblings? On the weekend, they’ve got a week-long visa right…”

“Capi.”

“...and get your foci sorted. We can find something better at Magogram proper. Did you narrow down the exact aspect yet? Maybe you’ll want to switch. Hmm– uh yes Raz? What did you say?”

“I haven’t planned anything at all. I’m still registering.”

“Oh no… sorry, I’m bothering you?”

“No no.” Raz chuckled. “Never. But this is gonna take a hot sec to sort out. And I haven’t had time to plan sib visit yet either. I’ll get back to you about the weekend?”

“Yeah! Of course. Everyone will be ragged out after hanging out with the WACA students so my weekend will be open. These guys are crazy! They don’t even know where the academy is going next month! Nobody does! It just picks up new students and poof! Wanders away! I need to tell you everything. But that’s later. I better stop bothering you on your big moment.” 

“It’s fine.”

Capi made kissy noises. “Raz luv you. So glad aaaahhh! Maybe we can go to the same academy?!”

Raz laughed and returned the kissy noises. “Maybe? Okay if I ask you when I start looking at the options.”

“Yessss. We can do a party tour at all your favorite candidates to check them out.”

Raz made an unimpressed noise.

“Or! Or, we get some booze and look at the course selections. Anything works!”

“No, honestly. Maybe I should give parties a go? I don’t know, get back to you later tho.”

“You must! Bybyyy!”

“Bybyy!”

Raz cut it. She had a new message.

Fen: “I’m glad for you : )”

She winced at the bitter little smiley at the end. This friendship thing might be a bit harder to salvage with Fen than she thought. Or maybe she was reading into it a bit too much? No matter. Right now she had some magical goofing off to do!

Raz resonated again and sacrificed her chat with GG for the greater good. She played around by moving the window, changing elements, throwing pictures at it, taking pictures, and then doing it all hands free. That didn’t work out. No surprise, she’d just resonated. However, she did have some luck with sending voice messages without opening her phone! How useful was magic like that? Maybe one out of ten on the wizard scale, but doing magic was such a rush that Raz didn’t care. She just let herself enjoy playing around with the phone through resonance.

Which, in hindsight, was a bit of a crayon snorter idea. She’d moved on to test other apps after mutilating GG’s chat and the results were devastating. Her settings were screwed up big time. So much so that she couldn’t even unlock it properly anymore.

On the flip-side, she had the camera pretty much figured out and could open chats while keeping the phone in her pocket, which was wiz. Only the seven second time limit made that a bit troublesome. Every time a resonance ended, she felt like her mind was booted out of home. It left her empty-headed and more than a little disoriented. 

The timer chime jingled when she’d just began trying to catch the arcnet flakes with her phone. 

“Already? Oh, wizshit.” She’d forgotten to register!

Raz filed out of the wonderchamber to find a small queue of elderly people in the lobby. The grandma who she’d made wait wrinkled her nose at Raz. She ignored her.

“Sorry, I forgot to call you in,” she said to the clerk. “Can I just show a picture?”

He shook his head, eyes on the screen. “Need to see it.”

“Phuu… Okay.” 

She could do this. Wonderchamber only amplified magic, it didn’t let her do anything she couldn’t otherwise. And now that she had the hang of it, full resonance shouldn’t be too difficult.

Raz breathed, closed her eyes, and leaned her being towards the phone. It took a lot more mental pushing, but they aligned. She opened her magesight to see arcnet flakes all around people’s pockets and the computer. Tiny ghostly screens floated near other people’s phones, though she couldn’t make out the details.

“That’ll do.”

Raz turned to meet a pair of pale blue eyes folding inward like animated kaleidoscopes. The clerk blinked his magesight off and set a gnarly wooden wand on the table.

“Awakening confirmed. Foci: Phone. Registered under Razandra Hopkins. Aspects?” 

“Oh.”

The clerk pursed his lips, unamused.

“Totally forgot.” Her resonance faded, a little quicker than before. Raz braced herself against the table and held up a finger. “Woozy,” she explained.

“Aspects: Unconfirmed. You will want to get them sorted before enrolling.”

She straightened as her head returned to normal. “That’s the plan.”

He pressed a button. A stunted bearded statue with oddly leonine features began grumbling next to the desk. Its stiff whiskers bristled and chafed audibly, scratching lines of ink on the paper that slowly puked out of its mouth. The clerk caught it, waited for the second copy to print out, and placed them on the table. He stamped both of them with a shiny ceremonial stamper that left behind the glowing Maroque-red sigil of Magogram.

Raz gathered her new awakened ID and paid ten for wonderchamber usage and another ten as registration fee.

When she was leaving, the clerk said, “By the way.”

Raz turned around. “Yes?”

“Congratulations.”

She beamed at him. “Thanks!”

He nodded, returning to his advloggers.

Raz tied on her new shoes with a bit of extra buzz in her bust. She tipped her imaginary hat at everyone on the way out and skipped to the Castleyard unstation with a bit of extra cheer in her step.

She was officially awakened! Now all she needed was to get into a wizard academy and Allie and Faham could move into Oor. The thought made her dizzy, like this was a dream she would wake up from any moment now. But, at the same time it felt as solid as that first moment of returning from Un.