What Little Worlds

Twelve

- updated Jan 8, 2016 with extra scenes at the end-

The next day, Adrien was waiting for Amelie outside the ground floor entrance to the warehouse. Rather than fiddling with the rusted door handle, he simply swept his hand and the door pushed itself ajar. He repeated the same trick with the second door and again with the light switch.

Amelie was going to call him a show-off, but there was no air of pride him. It was like he hadn't noticed he'd even used magic. She wondered if that was what life was like for everyone in the Realms.

"I can't believe over all those years I never saw you accidentally do magic. It comes out of you so naturally I can't imagine it's easy to close yourself off from it all the time."

He shrugged, "I have been training since birth to ignore my magical instincts in the human world." He walked around the room, "I think it's like being taught to constantly speak with a British accent every time you visit England. At first it feels like you're faking and everyone around you will notice it's not your real voice. Then, you think you will never master anything so unnatural. But after a while switching between the two accents becomes easy. It's like switching between two separate mind frames."

Amelie liked this clever comparison to languages. "Okay, I get that. I've always thought of a language as a way that someone interacted with the world. Like some languages had eight different words for different shades of blue, or had words for unique feelings that cannot be described in other languages, right?"

"Exactly!" He responded, smiling. "Like English recently stole the German word Wanderlust because I guess people decided they needed a word for that feeling as well! We have plenty of words like that in the Elven language that describe the way magic feels when bursts out of you uncontrollably, or seeps out in small amounts without you noticing."

Amelie released a huff of air, "Ah Adrien, all you're doing now is making me long for those feelings."

He laughed, good naturedly. "Good! Use the longing to motivate you for today's lesson!"

They sat down across from each other again and Adrien pulled out the water bottle he had brought before. This time he wanted Amelie to try to simply make the water in the bottle swirl around a bit. Once again, she failed to produce any sort of magic, nor feel any whips of the connection she had once felt.

Over the next few days, she replayed their conversation about languages over in her head. She knew it was much easier to learn a language as a child than as an adult. The language part of a person's brain was somehow much more open as a child and could understand language as a system rather sets of rules and vocabulary words.

The worst thing she thought about were the studies about kids who were not exposed to language at all until they reached puberty or so. Those kids never learned to communicate through language. It was like the language gyrus of their brain had atrophied from going unused.

What if she ended up the same way with magic?

What if she had been exposed too late and her window to learn was gone?

She tried to keep busy at work, but she had just come to the end of her data processing for her current project so there were no math symphonies to decode and distract her. Instead she was stuck working on a grant application for Cathy.

Unfortunately, such boring work gave her a plethora of idle waiting time to allow these thoughts full reign in her head.

A whole week went by with her making no progress in "unlocking" any magic, as they had taken to calling it. She had met with Adrien five out of seven days, and on the two days she was not working on magic, she was distracted thinking about it.