Tablino

             Luke forced himself to pay attention to the nice lady who called herself his teacher.
             "This week we'll be starting a Brand New Project!" Mrs. Elleda said, the flashing teeth of her fake, plastic smile not reassuring them at all, as was intended, that this project was going to be Fun. Instead, it told them that it was going to be Excruciating, Back-Breaking in difficulty, and maybe even Fatal. This they knew from experience.
            History was Luke's best subject, though you'd never know it from the low C he had in History 101: Bramish History from Year 0 After Purging. He felt he could never perform for a teacher whose entire career was a performance. Her efforts to convince the board to hire her in spite of the low rank she held in her college class, (and that incident over one spring break with the lampshade and the parsley) was a horrible joke. An even bigger but less nauseating joke was trying to convince her students that, even though it wasn't any fun, Learning was Fun! Like the doctor who says, "Don't worry, this shard of metal I'm about to punch through several inches of skin, vein, and muscle so as to suck the blood from a major artery won't hurt a bit!"
            Luke was somewhat better at projects than ordinary classwork, largely because he could do it at home and not under the fascist eyes of the "Attitude: A Big Word That Goes A Long Way" posters pasted all over the here-and-there of the classroom. So he perked up and paid what attention he had left.
            "You have to choose one subject that has to do with Bramish History from the past century, and do a five-page essay on it explaining how it affects modern culture."
            Mm-hmm. This Luke felt at home with; professing his know-how to a blank piece of paper, not to a blank face belonging to a person who was only a history teacher because that was available at the time she was looking for work.
            And what would his masterpiece be? Luke pondered and flipped idly through his notebook, all history notes nestled among semi-expert, much-shaded dragons and things with wings that ought not to have wings. And when he was done with that, he did it again.
            "Yes, Tug, what subject do you want to examine?" Mrs. Elleda called out from the front of the classroom, the effrontery of the false warmth in her voice setting Luke's teeth on edge (but no, keep concentrated; got to think of a new way to show up the rest of the class with your comparative brilliance).
            "I'm gunna do duh Great War," said the red-headed Anthony "Tug" Taggrett. (he didn't really sound like dis, but to Luke's imagination he might as well have).
             "Yes, things that go boom are amusing, you dumb thug," mumbled Luke as he flipped a pencil between two fingers.
            "Very good, Tug," said Mrs. Elleda. She was doing her best to pretend she hadn't heard that remark, because trying to punish Luke Mason was like trying to castrate a starfish. "And you, Amanda?"
            "I think I'll do the westernization of Samr'ia and the Dwarven Nations," said Amanda, and in Luke's mind her voice was piercing and loud, of a nearly equine tone, because that's how he saw her.
            He snorted. "You would," he murmured.
            Mrs. Elleda pursed her lips, and narrowed her eyes. She thought of herself as a good teacher, and wondered what she'd done in her life (besides the parsley thing) to deserve Luke Mason. She made a final, spirited attempt to allow the boy a chance to shut up, though she doubted anything would come of it.
            "How about you, Thomas? What do you plan on writing about?" she asked, all the while glaring at Luke, who did not seem to notice because his attention was being wholly entertained by a little griffon in his notebook -- the shading of which was apparently just a tad off.
            "Huh?" said Thomas. "I didn't have my hand up!"
            Luke laughed out loud.
            "Well, then how about you, Mr. Mason?"
            Luke looked up.
            He didn't look like anything special, really, Mrs. Elleda thought. He had brown hair, not buzz-cut but not so long as to be untidy. His eyes were brown as well and always shone slightly, as if he was either ill or psychopathic or both. Perhaps he was a bit pale, but he had a splash of freckles across cheeks that still held an emergency supply of baby-fat. It would probably be gone in a year or two, leaving sallow, high cheekbones to the evening wind and anyone who wished to see. His eyebrows, like two fuzzy sausages, sat astride his skull.

            But the smile…the smile was special, the same way monsters under the bed are special, or sharks with blood in their nose. It was crooked, self-serving, and could learn anything in ten minutes if it worked to its owner's advantage. It was arrogance incarnated, and she wished the school board would get the kid some counseling before people started to go missing.
            Okay, so maybe it wasn't as bad as all that, but he still bugged her with his attitude. It said no one in the world mattered quite the same amount as he did, and that he was the most intelligent person in Bram, despite all of  the evidence which pointed to him as being only somewhat smarter than average.
            Luke looked at his teacher, and then at his notebook. He smiled.
            "I think I'll do a report on magic," he said, grinning crocodilianly.
            Mrs. Elleda raised her eyebrows.
             Well, there was bound to be a fascination with magic. Many children had it, but it usually went away by the time they reached secondary school, like those kids who wanted to be astronauts or pop superstars. However, they soon wake up to the realities of achievement and minimum wage. She found it ridiculous, personally; children should be attempting to get their lives together at this point, preparing for fifty years or so of cubicles, data entry, or "do you want fries with that?" rather than planning out dreams that wouldn't, with almost no exceptions, come true.
            And they were discouraged from talking about magic. Magic was illegal, as everyone knew.
 But somehow, she could not bring herself to deny Luke Mason the right to report on the Magical Taboo—or the Arcanathema, as some called it (or didn't call it; they were discouraged, remember?)—because, somehow, that would mean that he won. He was, she was certain, only saying this to rattle her. She wondered what he would do if he found out he actually had to go through with it.
            "Alright," she said, without batting an eyelash, and was rewarded with the momentarily uncertain set of Luke's mouth. The smile was back in a moment, but that brief fraction of a second was worth the half-cocked explanation she was going to give the head of the History Department at the end of the day.

            Luke walked home. He'd been banned from the bus since the sixth grade for reasons that will not, in the interest of good taste, be chronicled here, and no parent would car-pool him around.
            Whatever. He didn't need them anyway.
            His mind was a little worried. He was expecting Mrs. Elleda to spit his essay request right back at him, proving once again what a closed-minded nasty-word she was.
            Hmm. Luke wasn't certain if he liked open-minded Mrs. Elleda.
            Most of the things he wrote for classes were subjects he already knew about, because he and he alone was paying attention back in grade school when whatever-it-was was being taught for the first time, by bleary-eyed teachers who knew (or at least were pretty much certain) that absolutely nothing of what they were saying was being absorbed by the nose-picking, glue-snacking masses. He could remember his first biology class inside out (almost literally, when considering some of the diagrams), and could stretch a school geography project over several years by using the same one countless times. They never checked, after all. The organizational skills of his would-be instructors were atrocious, and he would certainly have mentioned something about it before now had it not worked so well to his advantage.
            But magic wasn't taught, for whatever reason. He knew the same amount about it as that idiot Tug (I mean, come on, get a real name!).
             Sure, he knew what magic was, essentially. Well, sort of. Everyone did. It was…like…doing stuff, only without science. And it also involved dragons. And turning lead into gold without risking the destruction of the entire city. And summoning things -- spirits, demons, monsters, and the like.
            Now that he thought about it, Luke had no idea why they would ban something like that. He sped his pace as he walked through the motionless day.
             It seemed useful, to acknowledge the very most plain description. Why was it not allowed? And how, exactly, could they stop a prospective sorcerer from practicing if magic was so mighty?
             How dangerous could magic really be?
            ….So he'd have to do actual work to pull this through.
            Hmm.