Thundercrash — Roleplayer Guild

Paulina Benson

Unlike most students of The Academy who were permitted to leave over the break, Paulina did not. In fact, she’d spent the majority of the break buried inside a stack of books in the library, occasionally taking a break to roam across the school and examine the enchantments that were tacked into its walls. The school’s faculty, and their government overseers, had been ecstatic when she had demonstrated just how versatile her enchantments were. A good example was the gymnasium: over the summer break they had completed a total renovation of the walls, in which she had overseen the carving of a special enchantment into the concrete that was designed to absorb the energy of kinetic impacts and convert it into electrical energy. That energy was then channeled through conduits buried inside the walls into storage batteries, effectively allowing the student’s rough-housing to help power the school. 

As such, she was also required to inspect all of the enchantments that she had placed and ensure that they were still functioning, as a test of how long they could be sustained. The gymnasium was also a test to see if she could create a self-sustaining enchantment; one that could operate completely independent of her. Time would tell if her theory was correct, but she was reasonably confident in it, after all, it was simple physics. 

Well, it was physics, at any rate. 

The rest of her time was spent memorizing every single anatomy and biology textbook the library possessed, just as she was doing now. She was already working on another theory that she was hoping to test soon, one that, if she was right, would bring her a step closer to her goal. Of course, if she was wrong, then it wouldn't work at all and she'd be at another dead end. Not that that was at all new. Any branch of science, even one with such ill-defined rules as “magic”, was a matter of trial and error. The hard part would be convincing somebody to let her try it on a test subject. 

An alarm on her phone startled her out of her research, and she groaned as she looked at the time. If she didn't get moving now she'd be late for the dumb social that she had to attend. She'd been rather firmly reminded of that after she'd missed last year because she'd been too wrapped up in her work. Well, I suppose I could use a break, she mused, stacking the large pile of books onto a nearby table. The librarians got very irate about wrongly shelved books.

Flipping her laptop into tablet mode, she clicked her shoes together to activate the enchantments melted into the soles and skated in the direction of the gym, reviewing her notes as she went. Along the way, she paused to check on the Chem Lab that had been sealed off since her sophomore year. One of the physics professors, being more skeptical about calling her enchantments “magic”, had argued that there were limits to what they were physically capable of, and had jokingly compared her to the ancient alchemists who tried to convert lead into gold. She had taken it as a challenge, and now there was approximately 50 grams of heavily irradiated gold sitting inside the lab. Despite her assurances that the enchantment circle was completely secure and that it was impossible for the radiation to leak out (technically that wasn’t true, but the discharge was controlled to the point that it was only little above the regular background radiation that people were exposed to all the time), the faculty decided that they weren’t going to allow classes to be held in that particular lab until she came up with a way to get rid of the radiation entirely. 

Of course, when other students had heard about what had happened, she’d been pestered for nearly a month about a repeat performance, only with larger amounts of easier to acquire elements, like iron. Her reply had been that she would be happy to make the conversion, as long as they were okay with not being able to spend their newly-gained gold for about 700 years.

Satisfied that the enchantment circle was still holding, she continued on her way towards the gymnasium, gliding across the floor as effortlessly and gracefully as a figure skater, though with not nearly as much flair. At least until she rounded the corner to the gym, and ran smack into the boy leaning against the wall. 

The disadvantage to having one’s feet float a few centimeters off the floor was that you had even less grip than actual roller skates. As a result, upon colliding with the boy she immediately lost her balance, sending her laptop flying out of her arms and her glasses skittering across the floor. ”Oww, crap, not again,” she mumbled to herself, one hand over her eyes as the other rubbed her now aching butt.

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