A Destructive Prank (An Oumeno Story)

Chapter I

Overall - she was unhappy. The tongue-breaking, higgledy-piggledy, lopsided alphabet used for the incantations in the book she, under no insignificant nor un-eminent effort bought with the hefty currencies of sleep and patience, recently acquired; it was of no justification that the book was from oversees, from some peculiar, and unheard of among all the school's geographers she had asked, country hidden in some cosy European nook. She had experience with those European wonders, but never of a kind so outlandish and - could she have been mistaken? - unpleasant - disgusting - to sight... For all its wavy curvatures and homophonic utterings, the language made sure to keep its dignity, but here the matter stood altogether different. One sunny day, lollygagging on her chair during a marathon of overdue homework, she saw the very book - still ripe following its recent delivery - and strolled through the pages with her fingers, finding the words understandable - nearly resembling the look of other European languages - and then she realised that she was reading it upside down. Was that the trick? A prank cranked up in the head of some outlandish-nooky-Euro-geezer; a secret way of initiating the truly intelligent to the art of magic - ? Now that she considered it - that must've been the case. 

She gripped the book tightly and slowly, and slightly jerkily, she played a windmill and finally held the book upside down. Again - maybe this is it? - Maybe not? - Pshaw! Now is not the time to doubt - or? 

'Nyeh,' we know that in the beginning God created heaven and earth, but what often suffers being ignored - and this not by scribal negligence but by conspiracy - is that He created the light and called it - precisely this - Nyeh! No other reason suffices to explain why Himiko would wish to repeat and chatter this mysterious prefatory utterance so often, were it not because of some divine power that it gave her. So, at the beginning we had nyeh - but now what? She sagely strokes her beardless chin, thinking, thinking - until she's intensely thinking about intensely thinking, maybe that way something will pop up in her mind. She could - yes, this time it was no joke - read those sea-horsed, Euro-geezer-written words, but it seemed like the geezer was slier in his cleverness than she expected; reading every-second letter allowed her to construct words and sentences which she would note down in her dairy. In all respects, a dairy was not suitable to act as the Treasury of Wisdom and the foreseeable misfortunes which could arise from this foolhardy safekeeping quickly formed themselves in her imagination - but she ignored them: a possible outcome of an excess of nyehness. 

'Nasusss,' she lisped and, breathing heavily - too paranoid about all the outcomes that a mispronounced spell could carry - , the reader is not mistaken, held onto the s as if letting go off the lip-drying sibilance would bring her death. Now, the question formed - was the nasus with a tail of ssss tagging along acceptable when saying this spell? Or would pronouncing the remaining words bring something unintended? 

'Tuus,' she continued, lumbering the us a bit.  

'Est,' refreshingly easy. 

'Fal-sus,' she nyehed her last, until a deep concern straggled her nerves as she thought about the last word. She remembered pausing - and what appeared to be an innocuous pause, was rather a decapitation of pronunciation. 

Seeing that no confusing sights made a mess out of her already messy lab, she gasped and rushed to the mirror. There, there - no helter-skelter magical dumbfoundery; everything's in place: the ears, cowering shily between her hairs, the hair itself looking as good, the nervous, droopy eyes, the nose, the donkeyed - or, no, sloped - lips. No difference from what she usually saw every morning. 

Someone knocked on her door. An unannounced guest, that's certain, but at this hour - during the longest break when she had no doubt that a recourse to magical lounging could pass undisturbed. It was the inner voice, impersonating her mother, that forced her not to forego due civility.