The Andre Miller Saga

Andre Miller 17 The Card

"Damn it!" yelled Frankie as he blew another hole through the plywood.

"Take it, easy kid, it's only been 2 weeks since we dealt with your karma issues. You're adjusting to a big change." Andre said as he patted Frankie on the shoulder. "Pull it back another 10% you know how to do this; you've been making pusher wards for a couple of years now. You just have to drop it to the point where it's not going to hurt someone.

"I know that, and I'm trying, but it seems like I'm not even putting any effort into it and it still is blowing holes in ¾" plywood."

"OK, maybe we're going at this the wrong direction," Caleb said. "Maybe instead of thinking about this from the top down and trying to reduce it, think from the bottom up and try to increase it from nothing."

"OK, what are you thinking?" asked Tilly.

"Well, when we all learned it, we started out doing the little stuff first so start at nothing and go up from there. Go back to tracing the rune on paper and then try and ward the bathroom door. Start with the screamer, move to detection, then a tripper, but do it the old way, each one goes up a layer at a time. We've been having Frankie try to do the big stuff in the little ways. Maybe try doing the little stuff in little ways, reteaching it from the ground up."

"Well, it couldn't hurt," said Kyle, "because the way we are doing it now is just making scrap lumber." He said sitting on a stack of ruined plywood boards.

"I'm willing to try anything at this point," Frankie said with exasperation in his voice. "So, two hours of tracing the box and squiggle of the screamer and then just trying to get it to work on a door? I can do that."

Caleb summoned a pair of small fire elementals to eat the wood chips the practice had created, and he and Kyle moved the remaining broken lumber into the bed of one of the trucks to be disposed of later.

"Another thing we might want to look at is trying to teach Frankie runes he doesn't know. Let the magic settle into a new form and go from there." Andre said as they walked back into the house.

"I'm not going to learn more attack magic, that's off the table. I'll kill someone. What did you have in mind?" Frankie poured himself and the others coffee and then moved them to the table.

"Well, we never taught you more than the most basic scanning spells, you don't know any of the healing spells at all. A minor purge pulls all the alcohol out of a system giving an instant soberness, albeit with a bit of a mess. There are a lot of basic divination spells that you can't overpower. You're looking for X on Y, that's it. The healing spells, especially the minor ones, can't really be overpowered either. They are just basic skin menders and bone setters." Andre demonstrated the basic forms with his finger in the air without actually casting the runes.

"OK, so, learn it from the ground up and practice new spells that can't get overcharged. That sounds like a big help, and I'll keep using the dampener ring at work so that we can still get stuff done. I just refuse to work at the grade school again. I was being followed by the mini-me squad all day and nobody got anything done."

"Being pure draws the pure to you, kids and animals are especially sensitive to it." Said Tilly, "The old lady knitting circle at the nursing home was cute as hell though. He's such a nice boy!" she said mimicking an old woman's voice.

"Maybe I should go kick a puppy or something to put a mute on the purity thing," Frankie said in jest.

"I very much doubt that you could at this point. Being good is part of your nature, and now that you've got a clean slate it's that much more pronounced." Caleb said as he got up to start making dinner.