Aurora-Watcher

Sharing

The next morning I can't get out of bed until at least 10:00. Staying up through a good part of the night was not the best method to stay in shape for today. I've got to remember that, regardless of anything, everyone is currently aware of the content of the broadcast from yesterday. Until tonight –midnight GMT – the entire world can still remember the message. Many have already been kicked out of the website and, checking Twitter this morning, it's the top trending hashtag. All the social medias are blowing up with people trying their best to share the things they learnt but – even if they use gramarye – it's not working and they can't understand why. Millions of posts can be found that are written in a gibberish of special characters that fall off of the ASCII table.
As soon as I get down to the dining room, I find mum sitting at the table casually lighting and blowing out a candle using the spells we learnt yesterday. I didn't expect her to be one of the lucky few to have passed the first quizzes but I should not be surprised, she's always been very smart. She stops when she see me but, without uttering my version of the casting too loudly, I simply drop a bead of conjured water onto her candle, putting it out. We then immediately start chatting about the possible ramification of this news on the world and we realise then that, without using the correct formulations, even our spoken words become impossible to understand. How on earth did those people make it so difficult to discuss their art?

With coffee and some lovely fresh rice and eggs fried up, I sit down and practice my way through the spells a few times. We then compare and realise that, although we are family, mum had her castings taught in a more archaic language based on her Franco-germanic origines. One of the languages she had to use is old Church Slavonic, a language I only know existes because of The Magicians one of my favourite novels by Lev Grossman. There are so man things for us to discuss that I just end up calling in my two friends who made it through the night and adding mum in to the conversation. Promptly sharing all the variations of the spells we learnt, we all decide to write down each other's versions and try our best to learn it all so as to have all possible variations. This proves to be a lot easier said than done as none of us have mastery of the various complex runic forms and even less drawing skills to copy down the hand gestures. As the gesturers seem to be just as important as the casting – none of the spells work if you make a mistake in this part – we end up having a group video call. Cameras focused on our hands, we all demonstrate our techniques as much as possible and soon realise that there are truly many positions a hand can get into. Some of us argue that there must be other options for this to not discriminate people and I'm sure there are but luckily and sadly we all have two functional hands.
What must have been three hours later, at least five coffees and some extra snacks, we are all finally able to cast each other's versions of the various spells. This is the first step to getting this magic learnt and memorised fully. We can't really go any further until the next step, the one after a majority of the world forget about this. They didn't give enough details for us to know what would happen after then but we still have the website open and it currently just shows a countdown timer to midnight. There is also a small footnote that reads 'dear caster-apprentices, please note that coffee is a mana-regenerating drink and we strongly recommend you drink some after practicing these spells.' Well that explains why, after all those cups of it, I don't feel overly tired. Kaori pointed out that, contrary to Luana, mum and myself, she is having a hard time. We rapidly sponsored a coffee at the nearest coffee shop to her and she came back feeling much better. To think that coffee is really the magical juice that rejuvenates even magicians, how ironic.
As we can't really keep practicing the entire day and forget our normal chores and duties, we decide that we'll call in again just before the timer is set to run out. The only thing we really don't want to do today is go out anywhere – not only is it a public holiday – the entire world is at a standstill because of the 'magical news'. We also avoid spending any further time on social media or internet in general as it is currently just flooded with billions of posts and messages of people stating how unfair this system is, how much they hate those who managed to learn something and the worst of all : governments that are already outlawing magic. Crazy is not even the word I would want to use to describe the world right now, with all the different communities in the world gathering to discuss what they must do about this novel development, many are convening and creating new, arbitrary laws. Not only have they no idea how to control the magic, all their attempts to remove the website or block access to it have failed. The UN, NATO and pretty much all other groups of countries are trying to figure out what to do before a large portion of their representatives forget about it all. Not only their leaders elect but even their ministers have all tried to learn the arts just so that they could figure out how to control them better when the time comes; many if not most of them failed to even get past the first lesson it would seem.
Generally speaking, feeding the chickens, playing with my puppy and randomly exchanging messages with Kaori and Luana is a lot more fun at this point than worrying too much about the madness of the political world. It's during one of these brief message exchanges that I get an emergency notice from the French government. It simply states the following 'as of midnight tonight, magic is hereby formally forbidden within the nation of France and all its dominions.' So we are the first it would seem. Kaori who is in Canada gets the exact opposite : 'Dear residents of Canada and Quebec, as of midnight tonight, this nation will recognise all magic users as a novel social class and grant them special permits pertaining to their new powers. Please visit your local town-office to register.' Well, that's at least a positive-ish version of things. I'm not sure I would want to have them know I'm able in the magical realm before it's clear that there is no ill intent behind it. Luana gets a message stating that the Korean government will not be pronouncing any official statement until the week is over to leave time for things to settle. It's a good thing in many ways that she is there and not in France, at least there is a certain amount fo freedom left in Korea it would seem.
The day feels like it is going by at the sluggish speed of a tractor in reverse, slow and difficult to get through. Mum and I go on with our day, impatiently waiting for tonight and the next step to be announced by the mages or whatever we are supposed to call the people behind this monumental reveal.
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With only minutes to go, I'm back on a call with my two friend – after having had to ignore our other friends all day so as to not reveal too much – and we are counting down. It feels like the count down is going to last forever until we reach the last few seconds and then, as announced, the world randomly forgets. The messages on social media and on the news are gone, the content people shared vanishes, everything just seems to go back to the way it was before. We, the select few who managed to memorise our castings and who were practicing diligently, we don't forget. There is a huge number of people who then try to post about it but nothing works. However, between mum and my two friends, we are all able to discuss magic and the intricacies of it in the same way we could earlier. It's a though – exactly as they said would happen – the people behind all of this have managed to erase their existence form the world of the 'normal.'
Still unsure of what is going to happen next, we wait for the website to refresh again and show us the coming steps.