The Apprentice's Apprentice

Part 11

The scanslator's credit page filled Cora's browser as she finished the latest chapter of One Piece. She leaned back and sighed. She loved the manga but always hated when she finished the chapter since it meant she had a whole week to wait for the next one. Still, this had been a great chapter, and she thought the latest devil fruit had been pretty sweet.

That thought brought her back to Warren and what had happened that morning. She frowned and then brought up Google. Her fingers fluttered over the keyboard as she typed in Magic and she hit enter. The whole first page was a mix of pages for the card game, the basketball team, and magicians.

Cora grimaced and tried Real Magic next. Every page she checked dealt with Wiccans and Paganism. From the little Warren had said, Cora got the impression that none of this was even close to what he meant by magic. If he wasn't crazy.

And that got her thinking about all the rest of it. If magic was real, how was it hidden from everyone? Was this like Harry Potter with a hidden world within the ordinary one? But then why was Warren at her school and not at some secret magic one? Was it just kept quiet and within the ranks of mages, but if that was true, how was it that no one found out by secret? Was there some way of making people forget stuff they'd seen or keep it invisible from them in the first place?

She dropped her head back against her chair. There was no real way of knowing. And while she wanted to ask, indulging Warren in his delusions wasn't likely to be good for either of them. Though if he could somehow prove what he was saying was true, that magic was real...

Cora wrinkled her nose. She'd been reading too much manga lately to even be considering what Warren had said was true. But it was so hard to explain why everyone else had known him. She'd tried to think of some other explanation other than Warren was telling the truth or that she was going crazy, but hadn't been able to come up with anything. It wasn't as if her whole school could have had a mass hallucination, or been drugged, or been scientifically tested on to implant a false memory. Every theory she came up was even more bizarre than her having selective amnesia or Warren actually having done magic.

Maybe she was going crazy. Maybe she'd spent too much time out in the sun over the last two months and cooked her brain. Maybe she'd hit her head on her daily trip up the stairs and was now lying in a coma, hallucinating. Maybe she was still asleep and dreaming.

Cora rolled her shoulders and tilted her neck to each side, trying to crack it. There really was no point dwelling on it she supposed. Thinking about it would drive her crazy if she wasn't already, and really, it wasn't like there was anything she could actually do. She might as well do something productive and do the review sheet she had from French class instead of doing it lunch break. With a sigh, she got up and headed towards the corner where she'd dropped her backpack.