Story: Ending Part 2
[[Continuity Note: What? The boys' magical powers are going to go away? No way!]]
The brightening of the lights in the room seemed to draw the audience out of their shocked, contemplative, numbed state. They began exchanging looks with each other, and whispering before too long a large number of people had started heated debates with one another. As though removed from the world, a number of people sat there in contemplative silence. The two magi-scientists seemed a little bit shocked at the outbreak their simple scientific findings had produced. They hadn't even gone into half of it. Just the bits that were relevant to this case.
Before pandemonium grew too far out of control, Mr Aldus calmly stood and raised his hands. Instantly the room was quiet, and every face was staring at the patriarch of the family. The man who was directly descended from the first recorded magic user.
"I have a question," he stated grandly, commanding respect that Alf had forgotten people gave to him without question.
"Of course Mr Aldus," Mr Wiley obliged. "What is it?"
"Why has this only happened now?" he asked, then took his seat in expectation of the answer.
"Well, we have a number of different theories about this," Mr Wiley stated.
Mr Aldus' face showed that he had no patience for 'a number of different theories'.
"Our most likely one is that this is how long it's taken for the family to use amass enough magic to exceed your grounds' capacity for taking it. The fact that you take care of the grounds and the people within it means that the magic in the ground cannot do this. As I mentioned, magic is a fickle creature who comes and goes as it pleases meaning that it doesn't want to stay in the ground. It wants to heal. And if it can't heal because you are all doing it for it, it goes to find a different vessel. And of course, it then starts building up within the boys until it's run out of things to heal within them and can then be used like we use magic."
"We did want to ask," Mary-Ann Aldus stated, looking toward Alf's parents. "Was Alf ill at all as a child? Was he sickly as a baby?"
"Actually, yes," Mrs Struthers stated. "He managed to get pneumonia as a baby. The doctors never thought he'd survive. But he did and he's never been sick since."
"Same with Rock," Aliana stated, looking over at her son who was looking rather depressed. "At two he fell off the third storey balcony... not entirely accidentally since we were trying to test if he did have magic even though everyone said he didn't. He broke nearly every bone in his body that day. But nothing since. In fact, he recovered from that far faster than should have even been magically possible, we thought." Alf was reminded of Harry Potter and wondered if J.K. Rowling was in fact magical, or had a magical friend.
"Fascinating," Mr Wiley clasped his hands together in glee, as though all his dreams were coming true at once.
"How long will the magic last?" Rock asked, looking down at his hands as though seeing them for the first time.
"We're not certain about that," Mary-Ann stated. "We suspect about a year or two depending on how often you use it. We'd need to test you more to see how much you'd built up before we could give you a more accurate estimate."
"Is anyone else likely to develop powers like them?" Adelina Granada asked, ever the thinking council leader. Always wondering about the political ramifications of any situation.
"If the Aldus family ceases to release their magic into the ground, it is highly likely that no one else should come into magic. But the magic may already have built up into some people to that point. And we should all take care not to use magic around the nons. Simply because that magic may also be absorbed by them and taken in, causing the phenomenon to take hold."
"Then we'd better make a council decree that the Aldus family is no longer to release their excess magic into the grounds. In fact," Councillor Granada continued. "We're going to need a number of decrees to cover all the families, as well as take note of where magic is released."
And suddenly the scientific talk turned into a council meeting. Naturally Alf was bored out of his mind within seconds. It was as though his brain didn't want to process what he was hearing. He didn't want to lose his magic. In the short time that he'd had it, it had become a part of his identity. But he refused to think about it and instead counted the tiles on the ceiling of the ballroom and wondered why tiles had been placed there in the first place.
[[I guess it's end scene. Next time, we need all the teens' reactions to the news.]]
posted by Cedric @ 11:43 pm
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