Just another magical crack fic

The Mentor

Annie told me about her days as a trainer occasionally, and it sounded like a complete fucking headache. I don't know how she managed to fulfill her responsibilities as a magical spirit guide for so many people and still remain so even-keeled. I wonder if her actual magical job is zenmaster or gatekeeper of nirvana or something. I know she has experience dealing with "problem cases" -- you know, the people who can't adequately get their shit together to perform their magical duties. Surprisingly, that was not how she met Charlie, but rather how we collected Tate.

The way Tate tells the story, he blushes as much as a Black man can, his gaze averts, he runs a palm across his impeccably trimmed fade, the prominent apples of his cheeks shine, his lips part slightly to reveal his brilliant Crest-worthy smile, and he gushes with quiet pride as he talks about how our friend took him under her wing.

The way Annie tells the story, she was ready to nail his fucking wings to the wall.

Our darling Boys and Girls Club community center volunteer and overall most socially acceptable friend was not always such a golden boy.  In the beforetimes, when he was younger, Tate was a MMA fighter. He was a pretty good one, in fact; hence the fat stacks of cash and jacked muscles. The gorgeous smile has quite a few implants, but don't tell anyone, and well, Black truly don't crack. One less-than-sober evening at Charlie's, we spent about an hour looking up videos of Tate's fights on Youtube, and let me tell you, Twelve Years Ago Tate was fine as hell. Ten Years Ago Tate, however, was a roid rage monster. We got to see a progression from a scrappy young fighter, to a seasoned and well-rounded veteran, and ultimately  to a veiny fucking nutjob who scared people into submission. He got his magic a few months after he retired. He says he got exactly what he needed when he was endowed as a sprite -- some peace and beauty in his life. That's probably true, if you make concession for the hours upon fucking hours of intense psychotherapy and detoxing he did. And of course, like the ray of sunshine he is, he thanks God and his mother for bringing him this far.

Annie is the personification of deadpan at this saccharine display. She was there when he caused the landslide.

So my understanding, which is very, VERY basic, is that sprites are the light of spring. They enchant the morning dew and nurture new life. It's really quite beautiful. It's also bullshit because they only have to work from 6-9 a.m. during the months of March through May. It seems like an extremely sweet gig, seeing as I have a 365-day per year night job with years of repeat customers who require consistent service. If a burrowing rodent arbitrarily displays certain behavior in February or if there's a shift in the pressure patterns off the gulf, Tate gets a little sabbatical. However, when Annie met Tate, he was having a little trouble accepting his situation, and by that I mean he turned six blocks in Toronto into a demolition derby track. Apparently he was very much in denial, and ran away to Canada on a bender the week after the vernal equinox.

When Annie  told me the story of training Tate, I had to hold fast to the fact that she is quite possibly the most credible person in the dimension in which organic life exists. That was the only way to reconcile the Tate I knew with this tale --- simply because I knew Annie didn't have any desire or necessity to exaggerate. If Charlie had told me the same story, I would just assume it was a drug-induced fever dream. But when Annie gave me the backstory of her time with Tate, she actually raised her voice, which is unheard of for her. She described how he changed out steroids and working out with cocaine and hardcore clubbing (which I read between the lines to be graphic scenes in BDSM sex dungeons) once he retired from fighting, possibly as a coping mechanism for his empowerment. As spring drew nearer, he received several notices from the head office. He had a few check-ins, and he still did not make any attempt to usher in the glory of springtime. Without any kind of notice, he flew to Toronto and spent April 3-7 without sleeping or leaving his room in the Ritz-Carlton, snorting coke off hookers' asses. The more energy he collected, the more water vapor was enchanted around him. He developed a miniature climate in the Financial District, and the buildings actually started weeping. All the molecules of dust and dirt in the atmosphere and on structures started to drip down, Dali-esque, and flooded the streets with a seeping muck, teeming with life. It was a giant pond scum experiment. Local reports attributed it to an ozone pocket refracting sunlight through storm clouds or some garbage, but it was a pretty big red flag for the magical world. It was admirable that Tate still lived and breathed. My only assumption is that the head office did not like to acknowledge its mistakes.

On April 8th, Annie was checking into the Ritz. First, she paid the hookers and sent them home, and then she began detoxing our little Tatums. He spent several days in the bathtub in various states of dress, and when he finally emerged without throwing up, Annie went to work and helped him to bring the world into bloom. The most effective quality Annie has is the ability to sound like your mother in your head. She says something that you just hate, but it definitely sounds like the right thing to do. So apparently, over the next sixteen days, she worked her  literal magic on him (voodoo fingers), and over the next sixteen months or so, she got him into therapy, organized his finances, and gave him the support and confidence he needed to become one of the top ten sprites on the east coast. That's the kind of determination and effectiveness Annie has. If only I could harness that power and exploit it for my own means. Oh god, have I become Jack?