"Oops?" - A Weekend Freewrite

Yesterday was Sunday. It should have been Tuesday but it got messed up. And here I am, now remembering why Time Manipulation magic wasn’t officially taught in our academy, but two things are my weakness and sometimes also my downfall: curiosity, and a friendly pretty face.

How could I say no to Charlotte Aulein when she came to me with an old Spell Scroll and asked me to go forward in time a couple of days so she could bypass some annoying punishment?, thinking about it again, it was quite a stupid reason for manipulating time, quite obviously fake, at least for anyone who wasn’t –like me- staring at her bluish eyelashes flutter about like a Spirit Butterfly. It felt like a spell that, mixed with my recent insomnia, stopped the visions I sometimes had.

So, in the middle of a chaotic scenery of the college campus, with deformed creatures flying around from a giant black portal in the sky, we stared at each other, for different reasons now.

I got down on one knee. I was going to pop the question right then, but... her face changed, not just in the usual “I’m angry/scared”, but rather, it shifted, her features blurring and blinking for a couple of seconds. I knew then and there –not that extra confirmation was needed- that I was, in fact, swindled. Not that my curiosity was, again, aroused by it all.

Damn, the distortion is bigger than I thought…-she said, then looked at me. –Well, it seems like you weren’t a total failure after all, the date is off, but it can work out, thanks dear.

She then inclined, and got close to my frozen self. Her skin was getting paler and paler, and her face had stopped twisting and blinking, now a featurless mask of white and wicked lips that gave me the coldest kiss I’ve ever had. Near us, a bard from the music department screamed something like this isn’t the time for flirting!, while throwing spells left and right from his instrument.

The way the guitar sounded told me he was deadly serious, as deadly as the situation we were in. Seeing the Not-Charlotte going away from me, I searched in my brain for something to do. And I got an idea.

Bard!, play an “Augmented 4th”! –I screamed

What?!, why?! –and another bolt of lightning blasted one of those disgusting flying blobs of meat.

Just do it man! –I answered while flinging my sulphur-covered fingers at some creatures that burned away from the fire I expelled.

I may not have been an expert Bard, but I knew some Old Harmonic Theory, and the dissonance from the Augmented 4th was what I needed to undo some of this chaos. The musician took a breath, raised his hand and strummed down, one, two, three times. At the same time I muttered some incantations, words that I remembered from the Scroll Not-Charlotte showed me. And it happened. The portal didn’t close, but the flying blobs started to be sucked back into it.

With the attacks being slowed down, the campus security could act better, and together with some agents from the Arcane Guard, they’ve managed to completely close the portal. I got into BIG trouble, but was saved from expulsion by a friendly teacher that argued the enemy could have gotten anyone, and it was partially thanks to me that casualities were kept to a minimum. After that, even with my visions, I didn’t get to know the true Implications of it all until years later, when it was too late already.