today is probably only of interest if you use librarything and own a g1, and it's a bit late i guess, but here we go anyway:



sounds like it might be an instructional porn video, ne? (^_^) anyhow my little sister and i took a couple of g1s into my lair and got to work.



first off, of course, you'll need a g1. it's usefuly for more than just this, and i highly recommend it~ (^_^)

second off, you'll need the Barcode Scanner app for your phone. also useful for more than just this, and also highly recommended.

the other thing you'll need is the app called scan paste. this takes the input from Barcode Scanner and puts it on your clipboard. this is the important part, as you'll see in a minute.

i'm assuming you already have a librarything account. if not, get one! it's awesome~

i'm also assuming you already have books. you should get (more) of these, too, whether you have some or not. more always = better when it comes to owning books.

having thus assembled your goods, the process is as follows:

open scanpaste, hit the Scan Barcode button, and scan in the barcode on your book. you want the one that actually represents the ISBN of your book, which should have the ISBN above it, and should start with 978. scan in as many books as you're comfy with, ScanPaste will put them all in the clipboard, so unless you're hoping to scan in 1000+ books in one go, you'll probably be fine. i did mine 50~100 books at a time without incident.



once you're through scanning books, hit the Copy to Clipboard button. you should get a little notification telling you it was successful.

from here, you have two choices, you can either go directly to the librarything website on your phone, or you can email yourself the ISBNs that you've just scanned in and go to librarything on your computer. i chose the latter, coz librarything doesn't look so swell on a tiny little screen. (i say, with my 10" eee netbook as my main computer...)

from the librarything main page (after you've logged in, of course) click on the Add Books tab, and scroll down the page until you find the "import books" link at the bottom of the left-hand column:



click on that link and it should take you to a screen with lots of blue:



paste your ISBNs/barcodes into the box labeled "Paste Text" and then hit the Grab button.

your ISBNs will go into a queue of ISBNs that librarything is looking up at that moment, and it may take some time, depending on how many people are ahead of you and how many codes you put in. the nice thing, is that you don't have to stay on that page (or indeed even logged in) while librarything is looking your codes up, so feel free to browse the wide wonders of the internet whilst you await the outcome.

when you come back, you should find your library expanded. you may find some duplicate entries, so i recommend double checking your newly enlarged library, and if you go back to the import books link, it will tell you how many of your codes failed, so you can go back and find those books and enter them manually if you'd like. i find that as long as you had a code that started with 978, it's very very rare for a code to fail. i had some japanese books with 978 ISBNs that weren't found, but i don't think amazon.co.jp was one of my top three sources, so if you have a lot of foreign-language books, you may want to check that out.

when i was through, i went from 61 to 279 books in my library. it was annoying to put them all in the appropriate Collections (a new tagging-type feature on librarything) but it was so worth it, as i now have a delightfully organized record of all the books i own, accessable from anywhere with internet access (including on my phone!).

i own a g1, why should i have to buy a barcodescanner/cuecat in order to put my (extensive) library on librarything? WHY?

if i were a coder, i wouldn't be having this problem.

if -ing shelves would -ing come out, i wouldn't be having this problem. (^_^)

if i knew what to do with this:

import android
droid = android.Android()
code = droid.scanBarcode()
isbn = int(code['result']['SCAN_RESULT'])
url = “http://books.google.com?q=%d” % isbn
droid.startActivity(’android.intent.action.VIEW’, url)

(from matt cutts's blog)

i wouldn't be having this problem.

etc.

in my ideal world, someone would mashup Barcode Scanner and Librarything's API, and my life would proceed to the awesome phase.

...

okay, during the 45 minutes i've been writing this entry (slow? me? what?) i've found a solution!

ScanPaste + Barcode Scanner + Librarything's bulk add = about five more steps than should have to occur, but i WILL have my library on librarything! i WILL!

p.s. i'm notuboc on librarything. come say hi!
.

aw, i've been featured in a blog~ and a damn nice-lookin' one, too. (^_^) http://handboundweekly.blogspot.com/

almost makes me wanna re-design my blog. almost. (^_^)

i did my sister's, though! now her blog matches her silkfair shop! and it ain't bad, if i do say so myself. my own lowly blog-a-blog matches my store as well, ps. so now there's two different places you can buy my happy books, either silkfair or etsy~

... okay, i'm sure i had more to write about that, but the fact is that i'm watching the happiness of the katakuris, and the fact is that neither the wikipedia article nor the imdb summaries gives even the slightest hit to the incredibly crazydistracting power of this movie. it is, in short, fucked.
.

but of course i'm not. i have a 7 page paper due in about a week, and i've got a 8-10 minute presentation due, uh, day after tomorrow (!) and although i've done plenty of research, i have yet to actually write the paper or make the presentation, so instead of actually working on my school work, i've been fixing up my silkfair shop page:



yup, that's me, hanging out on the front page! here's the shop a little closer up:



doesn't it look SUPER awesomes! i know! i love this whole Custom Store thing. i haven't made a single sale on silkfair yet, but i'm starting to like it even more than etsy. *gasp* how could i say such a thing! well, not that i don't like etsy, but i'm sensing more and more "sale" from etsy, whereas silkfair still seems to have that indie streak that i so covet. not that i didn't have to pay for the custom shop priviledge, but i like that silkfair is willing to give up control over their "brand" so to speak, in order to help me further my business. i'm sure i'll keep my shops on both sites, but the "books" link above points you to my silkfair shop, not my etsy shop. it just looks better. (^_^)

in other news, i've got an update on my goals thread from the NaNo boards. several goals down, slightly less than fifty thousand to go...

things to Finish:

college - still on schedule! (account hold removed, meeting with graduation advisor immenent!)
- english 565 (workshop II) | done!
- anthropology 597 | right on target. paper to be written tonight, presentation to be given thursday~
- summer/fall classes | got into fiction workshop II for the fall, scheduled summer class (rhetoric. yay.)

bills (this one's still big (T_T) )
- mastercard (hereafter known as The Rape Lady) | ZOMG DONE! yaaay!!!
- discovercard | aka rape lady nouveau. payments scheduled, will be done in october!
- car! | 4 payments left, payments also done in october! (yellow and black smart car with little stripes still on the horizon!)
- tuition payments (ouch) | still late, but now significantly more late. i think they qualify for a capital L now. Late.

crafts
- replica of the national treasure 2 president's book for my fav customer in the UK | holy lord am i still working on this? shouldn't it be done by now?
- 20 books made for a church choir outing this weekend. | done. everyone loved it, and it got me a commission for 15 similar books for the discese of southern ohio diaconate's ordination. due june 7...

our fridge died, but we got a new one, and for free, from our priest (yay churches!) and it's beautiful and wonderful and even has a built-in ice maker (wow, we're so bourgeois now~). my summer class wasn't exactly what i wanted, but i should just be thankful that i got anything at all, given the difficulty i had removing the hold from my university account. (^_^)

el ciao,
~meredeth.
-promises to go write her paper now. promise.

just because it's mental doesn't mean it's not considered ill health.

so i took the day off today. after a horrendous day yesterday, this one seemed to be going alright for a while anyway. today's Bad Thing isn't really horrendous, but it's still annoying.

in other news...

well.

more Annoying, i guess. i've got a stack of pages to read for my paper (7 pgs + 15 min presentation, due in a week) that's i've yet to read. i''m writing my paper on patent law, specifically, the patenting of human genes and their relationship to continued research on the genome. sparked by a NOVA episode on the human genome project with robert kurlwich actually. because mr krulwich is awesome.

in other news, photodump:



i signed up for a twibe the other day (this would be a group of twitter people, for those of you who have managed to keep yourselves clean from the twitter menace) for etsy people, and i turned out to be the 667th member. i was so sad! i could have been the devil member! (T_T)



this is the media pc i built for us here at the beckett household. most of the parts were already lying about the place. i bought... a wireless card ($20), and a (marginally) bigger hard drive ($45) and voila la media pc~ so what was the first thing i did on it?

played lufia 2

because of NERd.

speaking of NERd:



this is with most (not all!) of our computers in the house on. i think this is all of them that connect to the internet anyway. as you can see, we're a little odd about our naming conventions. our wifi is called Battle of the Rhine. (^_^)

going back in time a little,



these are the books i made for our little thrift shopping excursion. they were a big hit. actually, i just got a thank you card from our priest (who went along for the ride). it had a nice little piece of handmade paper with some leaf/fern/somethings in it. she's so nice!



this is what they looked like on the table. so colorful!

and as proof that i am actually doing something bookbinding-related in amongst all this other bullshit:



this is a block of newsprint i bought from u-haul. eh? what the bleeding hell has that got to do with bookbinding, you ask? i'm making a replica of the presiden't book from national treasure 2, and i need to print out a bunch of the newspapers that were included, cheifly among these of course is the dallas morning whatever from kennedy's date with destiny. (^^;) i bought a reprint of it (shipping was more than the actual paper (X_X) ) and scanned it in, thinking to print it out and artificially age it, but then i realized, i don't have anything that can print more that 8.2 inches wide (if you include print margins, the damn things). the u-haul paper is 20 by 27 inches, so i'll have to cut it down to normal newspaper size, but that still leaves the Printer Problem. my current plan is to employ some creative folding methods (which sounds like creative accounting methods, and is morally quite similar) to make it fit through my printer.

in the meantime, however, it's back to reading that stack of crap for my paper.

god i can't wait to be done with this junk so i can get back to bookbinding, i miss it. (T_T)

alternate title = i super need a retractable katana!

that's right, the fam and i went to see the star trek movie. it was good! not, like, memento good, or like, i don't know, intellectually good, but seriously, shit blew UP in that movie, bones? was super awesome in that movie, spock? i can't even tell you how good spock was, because if i did, i'd spoil the plot. that's how good spock was in that movie. now, granted, i'm a pretty big trekkie. my sister actually can quote line from voyager, which is like, i barely even remember that series, let alone can quote from it. my father used to write star trek fan fiction back in the days when the next generation was on. it's pretty much star trek and MASH that have formed my opinion of language, humor, and how to use them, and so when i say that the new star trek movie is awesome, i think we have to take it as a given that i'm about sixteen times more biased than the next guy, but still. awesome.

the other awesome thing, as i have previously related, is my getting into the fiction workshop class for the fall. i have subsequently released the story to romp on the internets, and you may find it available for your reading (hopefully) pleasure here: Joachim, as yet untitled -delta revision-. it got me into a class, so i'm expecting that it doesn't suck too hard core, but i've been told by several (dozen) people that it could use some more world building. i'm wondering what sort of details of the world you'd like to have, what questions about the world specifically were generated when you read it. of course if you loved it, i'd like to know that too. (^_^) no, seriously, while it's never been especially difficult for me to see where i suck, i'm not so great at pointing to things i do well. if you liked something, tell me. also, my ego would appreciate some niceness mixed in with the "you suck" -ness.

nota bene: http://www.pbs.org/video ftw.

Joachim arrived at Bouchard Park the day before Martose's speech, to confirm his previous impressions of the intimate space and to get into his hiding place. He'd spent many hours in this park during the past week, ever since he had learned of the mayoral candidate's intention to give a speech here. Initially, Joachim had considered a spot high in the branches of the massive oaks that protected the park from the noise of the street and its new automated carts, but the foliage had fallen, along with the temperature, more quickly than he'd hoped, and so his plans had been changed.
He arrived before dawn, just in case Martose's bodyguards had more sense today than they had the previous three weeks that Joachim had been watching them, but no, there were no extra dogs to sniff him out, no extra wards to prevent his often liberal use of magic, no extra guards to prevent Joachim's bullet from finding its mark. This was to be an entrance exam, of a sort, but it was going to be as easy as a summer breeze. He had simply to hide out underneath the wooden platform Martose's men were set to build this morning, and then wait until Martose showed up and kill the man. Joachim's admission into the self-styled Guild of Assassins was all but guaranteed.
Joachim circled the little clearing, a highly styled walking stick in his hand. The cane was sparse, just a darkly stained wooden stick, but an oddly-shaped shallow spot carved out just below the graceful curve that formed the top of the stick belied its true nature. This was Joachim's favorite flintlock rifle. The firing mechanism had been removed and hidden in a special cavity at the tip of the barrel, which was then capped off with a tight-fitting circle of wood. The barrel, constructed of two concentric rings of wood, then slid down to proper cane length.
His initial sweep completed, he triple-checked for anything out of the ordinary with his invisibility spell readied and several sight-enhancing spells already in place. Although he was alone now, in the pre-dawn hours, the fine arrangement of exotic bushes and brilliant flowers that gave way to a wide clearing showed off the grandeur of the city in a way that made it a favorite for political speeches. There were people who knew how to defend this area, even if Martose did not seem interested in hiring any of them.
Joachim himself had never had much love for the park, with its party rallies and high society tea parties; it was much too populated a place for him to feel comfortable. Kerska, Joachim's Guild mentor, had thought Martose's love of crowds and high society a fitting challenge for a new assassin.
Joachim had never had much love for high society either. He was born blind to parents without the time or inclination to tend to his special needs and had been raised by an equally disinterested nanny until age five, when he'd thrown a fit that resulted in one partially singed pillow and one terrified nanny. His parents had seized on the opportunity to ship their little brat off to a series of progressively more prison-like boarding schools. The entire experience had left Joachim with a bad taste in his mouth for both authority figures and the circles in which they traveled.
It wasn't until three years and four schools later that an unusually merciful instructor pointed his parents in the direction of The Saumont Academy for the Magically Gifted. The flouncy name was a thin veil for what amounted to an underfunded and nearly forgotten effort at congregating the city's freaks so they could be ignored en masse, but for Joachim it was a chance to realize that he wasn't the only one with these powers. His parents had dropped him at the gate on his eighth birthday and he'd neither heard from nor seen them since.

~~~

Martose's bodyguards put in their appearance not long after the sun put in its, but their sweep of the area was mediocre at best. Rather than put up an exhausting invisibility spell, Joachim decided he could stay one step ahead of their sweep and avoid them just as well. He wondered, and not for the first time that month, at the incompetence of Martose's organization. The man's every stump speech proclaimed the evils of Saumont's historically enmeshed Guild System, his campaign slogans denounced them as primary school cliques with the means to hire swords, his popularity with the masses was built on his opposition to the entire Guild system. These were the very people who controlled the city, who ran its government, the very people Martose was trying to get himself elected to lead. Martose had even held a prominent seat on the Mayor's council for six years now, and he was declaring himself against it in public places. Did he not think they'd hire someone to take care of the nuisance?
Wandering the circuit behind Martose's guards, Joachim shook his head in disbelief. He'd met the man, not two weeks ago, and Martose hadn't seemed stupid. Perhaps he was just too poor to afford proper security. His campaign war chest was comprised almost entirely of individual contributions, small ones, from people of a class not warranted entrance to the normal channels of business patronage. Not a single person who had contributed to Martose's bid would be admitted entrance to this section of town, let alone to Bouchard Park, but that, too, was part of Martose's plan, to illuminate the class warfare going on under people's noses.
"We all live in the same city, Samuel." Martose arrived earlier than his guards had expected, lecturing his campaign manager on the merits of social equality as the two of them sauntered into the clearing. Joachim scowled. The man's guards weren't even done with their inspection of the area. What was wrong with the man? He put up his invisibility spell as a precaution and fell into step behind the two men.
"I'm not saying we should let slum people move into the old palace," Martose said. "I'm saying we have to start recognizing that this city is only as good as the least of its citizens."
"You're not telling me anything I don't already believe." This was Samuel Wright, Martose's campaign manager and long-suffering best friend. "I just don't see why we need to be here at disgusting hours of the day. Your loving people aren't even out bed yet themselves."
The two men had been friends since childhood, hardly ever seen apart, and they both believed strongly in the moral correctness of their current undertaking. Samuel, who was only ever called Sam by Martose, was more practical of the two, always insisting on logic, security. It had probably been his idea to have the guards here at all.
"Now you know I like to wallow in a place before I speak in it," Martose said. He sounded like a child, begging his nanny for five more minutes of bedtime story.
The two men continued their light banter, but as neither of them were apparently here to help with security, Joachim returned to the tree line to keep his eye on the guards.

~~~

He heard footsteps coming down the hall outside his bedroom. It was Ephraim Lucas. His footsteps were always light and airy, just like the boy himself. Ephraim seemed never to have a serious thought in his head, a trait that Joachim often found irritating. Ephraim was three years older, but it often seemed as though Joachim were the elder. The footsteps halted just outside Joachim's door and Ephraim knocked.
"Jo?" Ephraim said the syllable as if it were spelled Y-O, a nickname Joachim had always disdained, but tolerated. He opened the door with a spell from his place on his bed.
"Hey there," Ephraim greeted him. "Oh hey! Nice look!" The two boys had been discussing Joachim's blindness the previous day, and Ephraim had suggested half-seriously that Joachim should wear a blindfold, for style purposes. The younger boy had taken the suggestion to heart. "How are you liking it?"
"I wish you wouldn't ask me things like that," Joachim said, his voice cool and quiet. "I'm wearing it, I obviously approve of it."
"You're such a jerk, Jo," Ephraim said. He took a seat at Joachim's desk chair. "You're nine for crying out loud, you should loosen up a little."
"Were you loose when you were nine?"
"When I was nine," Ephraim answered, "I was trying to get used to having an invisible little sister."
Joachim flashed a brief smile at that statement. "What do you want with me?" he asked, suddenly serious again.
"You make it sound like I'm going to drag you out into the street and beat you death."
"Are you going to?"
"I was going," Ephraim protested, "to ask you if you wanted to come have lunch with us."
A girl's voice entered to conversation. "The cook's trying a new pasta thing this week. You should try it, it's really good." This was Ephraim's invisible little sister.
"You need to learn to make some noise, Ghost," Joachim told her, rising from his bed. "I never know when you're here and when you're not. Your brother at least has the good sense to walk heavily."
She was called The Ghost after an accident with an invisibility spell early in life left her permanently invisible. Joachim had never learned her true name; even her brother called her The Ghost. In response to Joachim's observation, she giggled. "No one does," she said. "That's how I like it."
As the three of them started out for the dining hall, Joachim asked, "Have you had this pasta thing?"
"Oh yes," The Ghost answered. "It's really really good!" The new dish was called /ravioli/, and seemed to consist of a small spoonful of meat, or cheese, or both, sandwiched between two squares of pasta. The Ghost was crazy about the things, professing to favor the cheese variety, and described them at length as the trio entered the dining hall.
Joachim smelled the clamor in the hall before he heard it. The entire student body must have been packed into the room from the greedy sweaty stench flooding into the hallway and seeping into Joachim's nostrils. When the noise did arrive, it was like walking into an unexpectedly closed door. Joachim held back, trying to make sense of the chaos, but before he had much of a chance, he felt The Ghost's hand in his, pulling him into the room.
"Good thing we got here early," he heard Ephraim say. "We're going to be here a while."
"Nonsense," The Ghost answered. Joachim felt Ephraim bump into him and The Ghost pulled them both along towards the head of the line.
"These boys are super hungry," she said, to someone whose scent Joachim didn't recognize. "You wouldn't mind letting us all cut in, would you? We promise we won't be any trouble at all."
Without waiting for an answer, she shoved the boys in line ahead of her. "They say somebody's mom taught the cooks how to make it."
Ephraim's gave a contemptuous laugh. "So this is merely a shadow of its true self is what you're telling us?"
"That depends on whose mother it was," Joachim said. To be frank, it was a miracle that anyone's mother cared enough to take such a bold step in improving the life of their magic-tainted child, and given the prospects for such a child in this world, Joachim thought it a waste of energy. Unless things changed fast in this city, they either stayed here in this dusty old school to teach the next generation of disenfranchised mages, or they sold their skills on the black market to the highest bidder. Neither option sounded particularly entrancing.
The line moved at a fair clip, and it was long before they were able to grab their trays and collect their meals. Joachim smelled the cheese before The Ghost noticed it. It did smell good, creamy and smooth, but with a little sharpness from what he detected to be a ridiculous amount of garlic in the tomato sauce.
The siblings questioned a table or two on their way out, but three empty chairs at a single table was apparently too much to ask, and the Lucases weren't willing to let Joachim sit alone. They took their meal outside instead, sitting in the shade of a huge maple on the outskirts of the school playground.
As Ephraim and his sister started in on their lunch with abandon, Joachim started his own ritual, one he repeated with every new food item he came across. He picked up one of the pasta squares, running his fingers over every surface and bringing it to his nose for a deep breath before slipping it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, dissecting the square with his tongue, separating the layers of pasta to study their texture and letting the sweetness of the cheese and the bitterness of the garlic seep onto his tongue. At last he swallowed. "These are good," he admitted.
"See!" The Ghost said, "I told you."
Joachim studied a few more of the pasta squares in abbreviations of his ritual before picking up his fork and finishing the meal like a normal person.
The siblings each had class after lunch, so Joachim wandered back to his room alone. With nothing particular to study, he stretched out on his bed and let his mind wander. Ephraim and his sister were the only friends he had, indeed the only friends he'd ever had. If the word "friends" was even appropriate. They were probably better described as "acquaintances he didn't entirely hate." The trio at meals together, and were often seen together, but on the whole Joachim preferred to spend his time alone. Even such a simple thing as wanting to have lunch at a table in the lunchroom opened him up to yet another opportunity for someone to point out his differences. At first, even the Lucases had looked at him with a wary eye, but they had apparently seen something appealing in him, and they refused to stop pestering him. Gradually, Joachim came to tolerate them, if not actively like them.
As for their part, the siblings seems to have made it their life's mission to drag Joachim out of his shell, kicking and screaming if necessary. They took every opportunity to force him to speak with other students, despite Joachim's clear desire to the contrary. For a while, they'd even taken it upon themselves to invite Joachim to other people's sleepovers. Joachim's naturally antagonistic nature and penchant for getting in fights swiftly put an end to that practice.
Restless, and bored with thinking on the past, Joachim slid beneath the covers and curled up into a ball. He tried to continue his efforts to concoct a sight spell, but he couldn't focus. His mind kept flitting back to his parents, to the way they'd scribbled their names on the admission papers and all but fled from the school building without one word of goodbye to their only child. Even at eight, Joachim had realized that mages were feared and shunned, but that his own mother and father would be so frightened of him shook him that day, despite his normal distaste for their presence.
I don't need them anyway, Joachim thought, throwing off the covers. He sat up in bed, determined to ignore these depressing memories. He had more important things to focus on. He had always been a competitive student, but at the Academy, he had put his all into his studies. To an outside observer, perhaps it seemed that he was afraid that if he didn't prove his worth, he'd be sent away again, but Joachim was under no such illusions. His parents had done with him, no one but the Academy would have him. He was studying not to secure his place in society, but to correct his deficiencies. He was determined to find a spell that would allow him to see. Since his arrival nearly eight months ago, he had spent practically every night researching and experimenting, putting spells together in odd combinations, hoping, praying, that he would find the right one. So far, he'd set fire to a corner of his ceiling, rusted off two sets of door hinges, and exploded one desk chair. He'd been to the headmaster's office so many times, he was on a first name basis with the man.
Poised on the edge of his bed, Joachim put these thoughts out of his head and set up for a new combination. He whispered a series of words in a language so ancient even his teachers only partially understood them, and instantly felt a glowing heat in front of him. He spoke a second phrase, and the first glowing was joined by a second, colder heat. He gave a series of instructions in the common tongue, and could feel the two energies dancing around each other, but whenever they touched, the temperature of the room suddenly intensified and his ears were filled with a popping noise. After a few minutes, the heat began to fade and Joachim put an end to the test with one short syllable.
"Damn." He'd been working eight months without even one hint of success. He was beginning to run out of spells he actually had the skill to cast, and he had long ago run out of new configurations in which to place them. Casting about for something to inspire him, he suddenly remembered the pasta squares. Take a spoonful of meat, or cheese, or both, and sandwich it in between two squares of pasta. He'd never tried that with his spells before. He set about arranging what he considered to be the most likely ingredients in a sight-granting recipe. An advanced sight-enhancement spell for the meat, one curative spell for the cheese, one light-granting spell for the pasta, then we just arrange them like so, seal the whole thing up with a few short words, and...

~~~

The guards had finished with their sweep and the construction crew had arrived. The labor had been donated by the laborers themselves, many of them so sure that Martose's bid for the office would pay off that they were willing to risk the ire of the employer to come here today and work for free. Joachim had found their employer, Mr Bowyer of Bowyer's Builders to be an uncomfortably loud man, rather too large for his desk, and so focused on the bottom line that he overlooked the role worker morale played in production output. The meeting between Martose and Bowyer had gone on far too long for Joachim's taste, especially considering the amount of energy it took to keep an invisibility spell going, but Martose had eventually won Bowyer over with his peculiar combination of savvy charm and flattering naiveté.
Martose was now taking it upon himself to personally greet each member of his temporary construction crew. His nicely tailored suit stood out against the workmen's overalls like a blood stain on a white jacket, but once again Martose's charm took the situation over, and none of the workmen seemed to notice the difference.
Joachim studied the whole congregation of them from a crouching position amongst the line of young pine trees that separated the park from the street, and considered the difference between the workmen and their appointed leader. In studying Martose, Joachim had learned all about Martose's privileged upbringing, the multi-turreted house in which he'd grown up, the expensive Saumont Private Academy for Boys where he'd met and become fast friends with Wright, the massive printing business his father owned. And yet here he was, shaking hands and paling it up with a group of construction workers, hired hands who probably didn't even know what a turret was, let alone live in a house with one of them. What luxuries a person can experience when he doesn't have to fight for recognition with every breath, Joachim thought.

~~~

The walls were brown. Brown. He knew that color, Ephraim had told him, one of the first days they met, the wood paneling was oak, some rich kind of brown. And now he could see it. He'd done it, he, Joachim, had done it. He could see. The walls were oak, the bedspread was dark red, the desk next to the door against the far wall was some other kind of brown, the floor - wow - the floor was great. It was the same oak from the walls, but underneath a pale layer of dust and scuff marks, the floor had been waxed to a brilliant shine. From his place on the bed, Joachim could see shining puddles of light on the floor reflected from the oil lamp on the corner of his desk.
Cautiously, for he was dizzy with excitement, Joachim slid off the corner of his bed onto that shiny floor. He saw his feet touch the floor, saw his arms stretch out for balance, saw his head cock to one side as he began to realize the implications of his success. His sight didn't seem to be like that of other people. He understood that normal people saw only what was in front of their eyes, but his vision came from outside of his body. It was as if someone had built a perfect replica of him and then animated it. He knew for the first time why Ephraim was always calling him a dark boy. He was amazed at how dark his own hair was, dark like his entire world had been until a few short moments ago.
He reached up and tore away the blindfold he was wearing, eager to see his own face without it, to see his own eyes, but the sight spell he had cast seemed to have lodged itself in a corner of his room, up near the ceiling, and his eyes were hidden by shadows. He whispered a few words, trying to coax the spell down to his level, but it didn't move. He would have to figure something out, but that could wait for another day. Right now, he needed to confront his own face.
He first tried climbing on the bed and turning his face up towards the spell, but the shadows from the oil lamp cast big black marks across his face even here, so he had to try something else. He studied the room, moving around the room with his body turned towards the spell, learning how the light played across his face. Finally, he settled on the desk as the most likely spot for success. He could stand on it, put the lamp between himself and the spell, even pick up the lamp if he had to, and at last be able to see his own face for the first time in his life.
He pulled the desk chair out, noting for a moment the way the pattern of light and dark on the wood of the hair back strangely didn't correspond to the smooth way it felt against the back of his palm. He stepped up with one foot, hand still on the back of the chair, and swung the other leg up to step on the desk, but the door swung open at that moment and he lost his balance. The spell lasted just long enough to give Joachim a bird's eye view of Ephraim's shocked features before the boys tumbled to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs. With his concentration broken, the sight spell blinked out of existence, leaving Joachim in the dark once again.
"Jo? Gods, what the hell were you doing up there?" Ephraim gingerly disentangled himself from Joachim and helped the younger boy to his feet. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," Joachim said. His head was throbbing, whether from its collision with the floor or the energy expended casting the spell he wasn't sure, but when he felt Ephraim's hand on his back, guiding him gently towards the bed, he decided not to resist.
"Come on," Ephraim said. "Let's sit you down."
Ephraim sat down on the bed next to him and Joachim heard someone else setting his desk chair right again.
"That was some stunt," The Ghost said. "What were you doing up there? Mapping your ceiling?"
Joachim took a breath to reply, but stopped short. Did he really want to tell anyone, even the Lucases? When he started his experiment, he'd just been trying to see what everyone else could already see, but now that he had succeeded, he might be able to see things no one else could. If he could learn to move the spell around, maybe sent it out to places his body couldn't go, to places no body could go, he could see anything, at any time. He'd have power like no other man on earth. Just the thought of such a thing excited him.
"What?" Ephraim said.
Joachim didn't answer. The Lucases were his friends, his only friends, but if anyone at all knew, the secret would be out. All this power he was imagining would mean nothing if someone else figured out how to do it before him. He had to guard this secret well.
"Joachim, what is wrong with you?" The Ghost asked him, her voice exasperated but concerned. "Is your head alright?"
"Nothing," Joachim said, swatting her hand away from his forehead. "I mean, I fine. There was a thing on the ceiling."
"How would you know?" Ephraim asked pointedly. "Somebody tell you about it?"
"There was," Joachim stammered.
"Liar." The silence that followed Ephraim's accusation was stifling. Joachim could feel the tension in the room rising. He hesitated, but still, he thought, these two have always been good to me, they've always taken care of me. They'd both always been there to explain to him what things looked like, to tell him what things were what colors, to try and drag him out of his dark world. Yes, he could tell them, but just them. Besides, he suddenly realized, he was desperate to tell someone, anyone.
"Listen," he said, "you can't say anything to anyone, you understand? Nothing."
"Okay," The Ghost answered for herself and her brother.
"The walls are brown," Joachim said, his voice deathly serious. When the siblings didn't answer, he continued. "They're brown, like the floor, but not exactly the same. The floor is shiny."
"Jo?"
"I can see," Joachim said. Saying it out loud caused a surge of happiness in his body, and he grinned wide. "I can see. The spell, I finally got it."
"Are you serious?" The Ghost sounded just as excited as Joachim felt. "What spell?"
"It was lunch," he explained. "I put the spells inside of the other spell, just like the ravioli. I've been trying to figure it out ever since I got here, putting spells together like, I don't know, trying to find one that would let me see, and I finally did it."
Ephraim embraced him in a wild hug, and The Ghost played the part of a congratulatory teacher, repeatedly shaking his hand and talking about how proud they were of their littlest student.
In the days that followed, the three of them went on tours of the school, exploring every nook and cranny, teaching Joachim dozens of new things every day. He studied with fervor every name carved into his classroom desk, memorized every scuff mark in the hall outside his bedroom. He spent hours one day in the art room, opening every can of paint he could find, touching every bristle. For the first time, he knew what the giant maple in the play-yard looked like instead of just what it felt like or what it smelled like. For the first time, Joachim saw a sunrise, and a sunset.

~~~

Mid-morning came and went before Martose finally wanted to leave, but Wright and the foreman were having a disagreement about where to place the stage. Joachim took advantage of the distraction to sneak a peak at the blueprints for the platform, which he had hitherto been unable to locate. Joachim had assumed that Martose simply had them under lock and key, perhaps finally giving in to one of Wright's security suggestions, but upon seeing them, he realized it was more likely that the plans had only been drawn up this morning. The collection of indecipherable scribbles and crudely drawn lines only marginally corresponded to the landscape they were meant to represent.
Joachim's backup plan had been to sneak in underneath the stage via some artificially loosen panel in the back on the day of the speech, but after overhearing the guards drawing straws the previous night to see who got stuck back there to keep an eye out for just such a thing, Joachim was forced to formulate a backup for his backup. Keeping an invisibility spell up for that long was going to be exhausting, but if he could pull it off, not only would he pass the Guild exam, he'd get extra points for style, something Kerska had impressed upon him as the hallmark of a good assassin.
"Mister Martose," the foreman said, "you told me you didn't want the crowd to have to squint at you."
"And how much better do you think it's going to be to have him squinting at them?" Wright asked. He appealed to his friend. "They can bring parasols, Sion, you can't."
The foreman turned to Martose to give his next line in the argument, and Joachim had to bring his sight spell around to the foreman's side. The blueprints wavered in and out of focus. The stress of keeping an invisibility spell up, even for half a morning, together with the long distance from the blueprints to Joachim's hiding spot in the trees, made it difficult for the spell to function properly. He frowned and took a deep breath, waiting for the spell to focus itself.
"Sir," the foreman said to Martose, "I'll build it wherever you tell me to, I just think that-"
"This is the sort of thing you pay me to worry about," Wright interrupted. "Now build the damn thing in the north will you?"
The platform was to be nearly fifteen meters across and ten deep, in order to accommodate all the local dignitaries who had looked at his rising poll numbers now couldn't wait to be seen with Martose. The plan was to build the perimeter first, with additional walls at fixed intervals underneath the stage to support its weight. The drawing looked like a honeycomb made by bees obsessed with squares instead of hexagons. Joachim would have to wait around in one all day while they built the stage around him, just so he could be there in the morning to take his target down.
"I told him to put it in the west, Sam," Martose said. "Don't go hard on the man."
"Sion, I don't care-"
"I know," Martose said, "your feelings on the matter, if only because you've told them to me three times now. But I think I'll look better in the west, with the bright morning sun shining right down on me." He held clenched fists up in front of him, perhaps to demonstrate how virile he'd look with those morning rays upon him. "Anyhow, it's supposed to rain that afternoon, so it'll probably be cloudy all morning." To the foreman, Martose said, "Go on, get started, I know your men have a lot of work to do."
The foreman left and Joachim pulled his sight spell back to the tree line. He'd have to wait until the workers took their lunch and hope that they'd built up enough of the stage for him to hide in without risking bumping into people who couldn't see him. Having this damned invisibility spell on all morning was wearing on him, and he was not looking forward to keeping it up for the rest of the day. He sat down, crossing his legs and breathing deeply. Just a few more hours, he told himself. Keep focused.

~~~

Joachim quickly outgrew the Academy. He'd skipped two grades in the five years since he'd discovered sight, and he was now within one test of skipping another. The teachers viewed him with a mixture of wonder and delight, hoping he would be the one to prove to their peers that mages could be powerful and tame simultaneously, but the students knew he was a freak. The blindfold didn't help matters, he supposed. He'd upgraded to a stark red silk number, and he wore it permanently, as some kind of deranged fashion accessory. He erred on the side of black for his other clothes, throwing in a dark grey every once in a while for variety. Even the Lucases were spending less time with him now, despite their having many of the same classes together.
Joachim made sure he appeared to the outside world as if he didn't care, but he lay awake at night, wrestling with the idea of leaving the Academy altogether. He was fourteen years old, certainly not old enough to make his own way in the world, but there was nothing for him here, not any more. The other day, Ephraim had walked straight past him in the dining room without so much as glancing his direction.
Today, Joachim chose to spend his lunch time wandering the school grounds rather than be ignored by Ephraim again. His sight spell hung around behind him like a pet dog or a carnival balloon. Joachim had been toying with shutting it off completely all day, but the thought of going back into the darkness of five years ago, even for a moment, frightened him in a way he wasn't eager to admit to. As he wandered towards the back of the playground, hoping to find some solace under the maples there, he thought he saw a flash of movement on the edge of his field of vision.
He didn't stop. He experience with bullies had taught him better than to reveal himself, but he sent the spell over to where he had seen the movement. This meant he couldn't see where he was going for a moment, but Joachim kept walking just the same, letting his long-standing knowledge of the area guide his feet.
The spell found nothing. Joachim brought it back close to him, scanning his surrounding for signs of movement. Perhaps the dim enclosure of maples wasn't his safest option.
He stopped short of the tree line, taking a seat under one giant maple that stood apart from the rest of the forest. This was the same tree he'd share ravioli with Ephraim and The Ghost under all those years ago. He had just sat down when he saw it again, that flash of movement, in the grove of trees.
This time, he was sure his sight hadn't failed him, and he sent the spell past the tree line to investigate. Again, this meant that he couldn't see his own surroundings, and this time it proved to be a disadvantage. Joachim was quite unprepared for the arm that reached around his head to cover his mouth and yank him down to the ground.
Their bodies hit the hard dirt, and Joachim reached up to claw his attacker's hand. He had to get it off. Without any words, his spell would stay where he'd sent it - peering at ancient trees. His clawing attempt proved futile, and Joachim felt himself get flipped over. His stomach hit the dirt and his breath tried to leave him. His attacker sat down on him an bend down to whisper in his ear.
"I'm not here to harm you," the voice said. "I'm going to take my hand off your mouth, and you can bring your sight balloon back, but I don't want to hear any other magic from you."
Joachim stopped struggling. The hand released from his face. With a few gasped words, he brought his sight spell back, but he didn't know much more with it than he had without. his attacker was an adult, male, with a tailored black great coat and the shiniest dress shoes Joachim had ever been in the presence of. It was a strange outfit to go mugging in. The man helped Joachim to his feet and brushed them both off.
"Who are you?" Joachim asked.
The man nodded, as if the question had required his approval. "You've heard of the Assassin's Guild?"
Of course he'd heard of the Guild, it was practically legend at the Academy. People in dark suits who snuck into immaculately guarded fortresses and snuffed out people's lives, half the students were scared to death of them and the other half wanted to be one of them.
Joachim took a step to the left, thinking to leave, but the man took a matching step and blocked his path.
"Who are you?" Joachim repeated, his anger seeping into his tone.
"How old are you, Joachim, fourteen? Fifteen?" The man ran his eyes over Joachim. "You know we've never admitted anyone as young as you."
Joachim set his mouth in a hard line. Until now, he'd considered the Guild to be a fantasy, a comforting bedtime story told to give disenfranchised young mages hope for revenge. He gathered the energy for a fireball and prepared to fight his way out.
"I wouldn't if I were you," the man said. "I have more power in my little finger than you have in your entire body, boy. I told you I didn't want any magic from you. I meant it."
Joachim backed off the energy.
"I've come to offer you something, Joachim, something other boys only dream of. Something some boys don't even believe in. I imagine you were one of them until I came along. We take only the brightest and best at my academy, Joachim, none of this dross." He motioned with his chin back towards the school building. "We've been watching your progress," he said. "You've been progressing rather quickly."
"I'm better than most of them," Joachim said. It wasn't a lie.
The man smiled. He must have found Joachim's hubris entertaining. "I think you could do better than all of them. You could outclass any mage that's ever walked those halls, two-, maybe three-fold, if you study hard. How'd you like to join us?"
Behind the man, Joachim's eyes caught a shock of red hair through one of the dining room windows. Ephraim, no doubt with his sister right beside him. The two of them were never caught apart.
"The Guild doesn't really exist," Joachim said. "It's just a fairy tale. Now leave me alone."
He brushed past the man, mildly surprised when the man gave way and let him go. He put his sight spell out in front of him and pointed over his shoulder just in case.
"Why else would I be here?" the man called after him.
Joachim whirled around. He'd had enough of this creepy old man. "Maybe you like to sit on little boys," he said. "You know I've heard of men like you."
The man's expression showed an amused shock at Joachim's insubordination. The look was infuriating.
"It's just stupid, the entire idea," Joachim said. "How many assassins can one city really support? And why on this earth would they want to organize?"
The cocky grin remained on the man's face as he approached Joachim. "There are currently six of us, and we have organized for the same reason any other group of craftsmen organize: for protections of our mutual business interests. We make sure we're not trying for the same marks, that we're not working against each other, that no one of us is underpricing the rest."
He took a final slow step towards Joachim, who desperately resisted the urge to step back. He wasn't about to be afraid of this over-dressed, over-pompous dandy.
"There are six of us," the man repeated, his voice a whisper now. "You'd be the youngest by more than a decade. To be honest, I'm the only one who thinks this is any kind of a good idea."
Joachim felt the man's eyes travel all the way down his body and all the way back up. It was disgusting, like having someone's grandmother run her hand up your thigh.
"But frankly," the man continued, "I small talent all over you."
There was a moment's silence before the man suddenly broke away, throwing his head back and letting out a big laugh. "You don't flinch easily, do you. You'd be perfect, Joachim, come join us. I think you'd have a lot of fun."
Joachim narrowed his eyes. "Why should I?"
The man cocked his head. "Have you ever killed anyone?" he asked, his tone conversational and friendly. He might have been asking if Joachim had ever tried putting his left shoe on first instead of his right for all the import his tone seemed to have.
Joachim shook his head.
"It's an incredibly powerful feeling," the man said. "Sometimes I think I'd do it for free. Except that I like what I can do with money," he added with another big grin. He handed Joachim a small card with an address handwritten on it. "If you wake up tomorrow and think this is what you'd like to do, come see me. Otherwise, I don't expect to hear of you again."

~~~

From a bench just beyond the tree line at Bouchard Park, Joachim shook his head. Kerska always had that way of threatening a person without really threatening them. You never knew what the hell he was talking about, until he showed up in your ceiling joists with a couple of retractable misericordes taped to his wrists.
Joachim folded up the newspaper he'd been pretending to read and grabbed his walking stick from the bench beside him. The workmen behind him were unpacking their lunches, his cue that his own break was over.
Threading his way past the early afternoon shop crowds, he headed for a building across the street and stepped into the alleyway behind it as though he were aiming for the back staircase up to the apartments, but once there, he recast the invisibility spell he'd been resting from and headed back for the park.
He hurried back across the street, past the tree line, and made a quiet beeline for the stage. The workers had managed to set up the entire foundation in the course of a few hours, and Joachim's hiding spot was in place.
He climbed the temporary steps that had been set up in the back and hopped down into one of the honeycomb chambers he'd seen represented on the blueprints. The support walls had turned out to be merely stakes jammed into the ground at regular intervals rather than the full walls he'd been expecting, so it was delightfully easy to make his way between chambers. Unfortunately, the top of the stage had yet to be put in place, and there were far too many workers to risk letting his guard down, so Joachim was going to have to spend the rest of the afternoon invisible.
He made his way in between the support stakes until he reached a shaded corner opposite the stairs, where he settled in for a long and exhausting afternoon.

~~~

Joachim was distracted. He, Ephraim and The Ghost had met at a cafe for lunch, but there were so many people in the area that he was finding it difficult to concentrate. His point of sight was hovering some twenty feet above his head, and he had spent most of the meal learning the layout of the land and predicting the movements of random passersby.
"I swear, Joachim, if you do not relax and enjoy your sandwich," The Ghost was threatening him, "I will personally sit on your lap and play with your hair until it becomes quite socially awkward for you to stand up."
Ephraim burst out laughing as Joachim blushed.
"There are too many people here," Joachim said.
"If you hope to function in this world at all," The Ghost answered, "you're going to have to get used to interacting with people. Eph and I can't always be there to keep them at a distance."
"You've got to make your own way in this world, son," Ephraim added in an exaggeratedly deep tone of voice.
Joachim scowled at Ephraim's frivolity. "Please refrain from doing that again," he said.
Ephraim pouted, and it was The Ghost's turn to burst out laughing. The two carried on teasing each other as Joachim let his mind wander back to his surroundings. There was one person in particular who had caught his interest, a young boy, not older than ten, who was huddled with an even younger girl in the alleyway behind the cafe. The two of them were obviously related, and the boy seemed to be trying to comfort his sister. Neither one of them looked like they'd eaten recently. Or regularly.
"Joachim? Hello?" The Ghost was trying to get his attention.
"What?" he asked distractedly.
"I said, can I have your sandwich?"
Finally turning his full attention to the table, he put his arms protectively around his plate. "Mine."
"Well if all you're going to do is space out and not eat it," she said.
He picked up his sandwich and took a massive bite out of it, mayonnaise spilling out the back of it and plopping onto his plate. "Mmm!" he said. He felt a slap on the side of his head and then a familiar rush of warmth as her scent wafted by his nose.
"Are you over there smacking people, Ghost?" Ephraim asked.
"Indeed I am," she answered. "Is there a problem?"
"Not at all. I was going to encourage you to smack him around more often." Ephraim cast a pointed look in Joachim's direction. "He hardly writes now that he's not forced to hang around with us low-lifes anymore."
Joachim moved his head slightly in Ephraim's direction and frowned, so as to simulate an indignant look back. In the silence that followed, he picked up his sandwich a took another bite.
"So how is your schooling going, son?" Ephraim asked.
Joachim had told the Lucases that his dropping out of Saumont Academy three and a half months earlier had been in order to join a secretive military training project. He'd said that the government wasn't crazy about people knowing that they had found a use for mages after all, and so even the fact that it was military training was to be kept to themselves. Although they'd exchanged a few letters, this was the first real contact he'd had with the Lucases since he left.
"Me?" Joachim asked through his mouthful of turkey and lettuce.
"Well I already know how Ghost's schooling is going."
"Rotten," she interjected.
"It's alright," Joachim answered, smiling a bit at The Ghosts evaluation of her situation. She was still at The Academy and wouldn't graduate for another year. She was getting to be too smart for the place. "Obviously, I'm not supposed to talk about a lot of it, but it's pretty challenging."
"I've been thinking, I'd love to be in that program," Ephraim said. "Do you think you could get me in?"
Joachim raised his eyebrows in surprise.
"Not for the whole thing," Ephraim said. "Maybe just some kind of prelims. I'm not looking to be a military stooge for the rest of my life."
"No, he wants to set himself up as a glorified bodyguard," The Ghost said. She obviously thought this was just as stupid a career path as 'military stooge.'
The young man Joachim had been keeping his eye on left his sister with a wave and started around the cafe. He looked as though he had some business to attend to, and Joachim thought he knew what that business was.
"What's wrong with that?" Ephraim was asking his sister.
"You could do so much better!" she said to him. "You're a mage, not some hired flunky."
The boy slowed his pace as he neared the front of the cafe and ducked down in between a parked car and the side of the building.
"First off," Ephraim said, "I'm not a very good mage, and second off, nobody's going to hire a mage for anything more than a hired flunky anyway. Besides, if I can get super secret government training, I'd be stacks above anybody else. Stick that on my resume smack next to my Academy graduation date and I can charge triple what any other agency in the city would even dare to think about charging."
"How are you going to stick it on your resume if it's super secret?" The Ghost said.
"It's got to come out eventually," Ephraim answered. "It's the government for crying out loud. Can't keep a secret to save its life." He took a swig of his drink. "Anyway, I'll be charging fees so large, they'll be stupid." He turned to Joachim. "Get enough of that stuff in one big pile and life gets a hell of a lot easier, you know. Not that you'll ever retire. You're the ambitious type."
Joachim didn't answer. The boy had crept up as far as he dared and was waiting for one of the waiters to move away from a tray of pastries. Joachim leaned over into the aisle. "Excuse me, waiter? Can I have a refill on my water, please?" he asked.
The waiter reached behind the patio door frame for a pitcher of water and scurried over. As he poured Joachim's glass full again, the boy took advantage of his absence to pilfer a few pastries before scurrying back to his sister.
"Thank you," Joachim said, nodding at the waiter with a smile.
"So what do you think?" Ephraim asked. "You can get me in, right?"
"You've got more than enough skill for it," Joachim answered. What harm would it do to lie to the man, Joachim thought. He could always pass it off on his supposed superiors when the admission failed to materialize.
"Yeah?" Ephraim said, a little incredulous. It was probably the most complimentary thing Joachim had ever said to him.
"Yes. I'll ask them when I get back. I'll let you know."

After lunch, the trio took a walk through the streets, ending up in Bouchard Park. The gardens had been there since Saumont was founded, as much as a millennium ago according to some of the city's more sensationalist historians. The landscaping had been designed by Henri Bouchard, most famous for Saumont's elaborate governor's mansion. Truth be told, Joachim thought both the park and the mansion were a bit pretentious, but he didn't have to live there himself, so he chose not to care terribly much. The three of them strolled through the park, Ephraim and his sister bickering as normal.
Joachim let his vision float up once again, examining his surroundings. The park was a huge green rectangle in the midst of urban clutter, the occasional bench or walking trail to break up the geometry. On one such bench Joachim saw a couple of familiar faces - the young thief and his sister. They were polishing off the last of the pastries and giggling to each other.
"I'm thinking of calling it Lucas Foundas." Ephraim asked him.
Joachim frowned. "What?"
"My agency. What do you think?"
Joachim raised his eyebrow. "I think it's ridiculous," he said. "What does it even mean?"
"Wonderful!" Ephraim exclaimed. "It's perfect!"
The brother and sister got up from the park bench, and Joachim sent his sight after them. As the Lucases argued the merits of a nonsensical business name, the younger pair of siblings headed for one of the park's many small ponds, presumably with the intention of washing up. Once there, however, they found wrought iron fences up around the pond, not tall enough to prevent adults from feeding the ducks who lived there, but tall enough to prevent small children from playing in the water.
The two of them stretched their arms between the bars, but when they found that unsatisfactory, the boy pulled his sister back and whispered something to her. She scurried off into the bushes on the other side of the trail.
"You are so distracted today, Joachim!" The Ghost was exclaiming to him. "What the heck is wrong with you?"
"I'm just looking around," Joachim said.
Ephraim grunted. "It's always weird to hear you say that. It's easy to forget about that spell of yours."
"Course," The Ghost said, "that blindfold doesn't help."
"Shut up, you two" Joachim said, as nicely as he could muster.
The Ghost and her brother exchanged mock insulted looks, and Joachim turned his attention back to the little boy. His sister had returned with a thin, rounded piece of wood. It looked roughly like a bowl.
The boy set the bowl down on the ground in front of the fencing. He closed his eyes and whispered a few words. Joachim, Ephraim, and The Ghost, now in the clearing with the pond and the young siblings, all stopped in their tracks. The boy's magic was raw, but it was strong.
A tiny stream of water was flowing from the pond into the boy's bowl. His sister clapped, but he shot her a warning look. They had to keep quiet, or someone would notice his spell. His warning was too late, however, as the girl's giggling had already turned a few heads. One of these heads was on the shoulders of large man with a sneer that spoke of years of bullying.
"Hey! You, boy," the man shouted.
The little boy hurriedly cut his spell off, and the last of the water splashed back into the pond.
"Yeah, I'm talking to you, mage," the man shouted again. He and two other men, no doubt his cronies, walked over to the boy. One of them shoved him to the ground, spilling the meager amount of water he'd managed to collect. The little girl screamed and ran away, hiding herself behind a tree.
Joachim's mood instantly turned black and he started over towards where the men were now throwing the boy to the ground and beginning to kick him. Ephraim and The Ghost were hot on his heels, already warning him not to do what he was about to do. He grabbed one of the men by the shirt and lifted him off the ground. "What is it you think you're doing?" he growled.
The other two men gave protesting shouts. A tiny ball of exhilaration pulsed in Joachim's stomach at the sound. He threw his first victim to the ground and turned to the other two. Their faces showed fear, shock, and then terror as a bright ball of flame formed in Joachim's hand. The little boy saw his moment to run and did so, grabbing his little sister by the arm and heading deeper into the park as fast as his legs would take them.
"How tough you are," Joachim said to the two men, his voice low and growling. "Beating up a little boy." His body was as tight as a drum skin. The sheer amount of magic energy he was concentrating in his hand was making his vision spell blurry, but he was so fevered with power that he didn't care.
"Jo!" Ephraim tried to put himself between Joachim and the men, but Joachim pushed him aside and stalked towards the cronies. They were trying to back up, but couldn't spare the time to get to their feet. Joachim saw the way they skittered back on all fours and another surge of power thrilled through his body.
"I'll teach you some manners," he said to his prey. He was smiling now, a sadistic grin that spoke of the desire to maim and kill.
"Joachim!" The Ghost took her turn to try and stop him. She, too, stepped between Joachim and his potential victims, preventing him from moving by simply standing directly in front of him. Their bodies pressed together, and Joachim was distracted long enough from the men to scramble to their feet. Joachim's fireball fizzled, and he snarled.
"Move, Ghost," he ordered.
"No."
By now, a crowd was gathering and attracting the attention of nearby police.
"Get out of the way," Joachim tried again.
He got the same response. "No."
The two remaining men were long gone, so Joachim turned his attention to his first victim. Ephraim, however, had regained his senses and got there first.
"Joachim, stop it," he said, putting himself in the path of danger.
Joachim didn't stop, but Ephraim was prepared this time, and he picked the younger man clean off the ground. Joachim's victim took his opportunity to follow the conduct of his comrades, and he faded into the crowd. Ephraim held on tight, not letting Joachim out of his grasp until all three assailants were long gone.

~~~

Hidden in place under the center of the now finished stage as the sun rose for another day on Bouchard Park, Joachim could see the massive thunderclouds stretching past the horizon. The workmen had come back shortly after dawn to set up chairs for the crowd and erect the canopy that would protect the dignitaries frail persons should the rain strike early, but the park had otherwise been still, and Joachim had gotten a good night's sleep. He felt refreshed and ready to enjoy his big day.
In front of the stage, Martose's crowd began to gather just after the breakfast hour, overdressed dilettantes every one of them, with jacket cuffs that went up half their arm and orange top hats in deference to the latest trend. These were the people of Martose's parents, of Joachim's parents. These were also the people that Joachim was soon to be counted one of. Even the less skilled of the Guild drew down considerable sums, and Joachim felt certain that he would one day surpass even Kerska. His mentor had trained him hard, but well, and Joachim felt confident he could complete his task with ease.
Martose himself didn't show until mid-morning, a belligerent Wright in tow. Wright was ordering people about in his perpetually exasperated style, complaining about the arrangements of the seats on stage, the precisely wrong position of the podium, the disgusting pink shade of the canopy. Another couple of hours and he was going to have more than mauve canopies to worry about.
Martose, on the other hand, seemed perfectly at ease, breaking away from his entourage to shake a few hands in the crowd before Wright had the bodyguards separate him bodily from his adoring public.
"Sam, you're such a tight-ass," Martose told him. "If anybody were going to kill me, they'd have done it by now. It's three weeks to the election."
Wright only frowned at him.
"Anyhow," Martose said, "I don't intend to give them a chance. We'll have a surge of support in the last week, and nobody'll have time to raise the kind of capital you need to hire an assassin."
Wright looked out at the crowd, now numbering in the hundreds. "Piss off enough people out there today, and you may find yourself of a different opinion, sir."
"Oh none of that 'sir' stuff from you, Sam. Let me piss them off first, than you can start distancing yourself from me."
Secure under the stage, Joachim smiled. The dampness of the grass was refreshing and cool, and on the horizon, he could see clouds. Martose had been right; it was going to rain.

~~~

Ephraim was angry, all but hopping about in front of Joachim, but all Joachim could think about was the raw power that had coursed through his veins when he picked that grown man up off the ground. Kerska was right, having power over a man's life was an incredible feeling. Joachim studied the people scurrying past the window on the street below Ephraim's apartment and wondered how many of them he could pick off from that very spot with the rifle Kerska'd bought him the other day.
"You're lucky the police didn't show," Ephraim was saying.
"The police in this city couldn't catch me anyway," Joachim said, not really listening. "They're only good for target practice."
"Joachim!" The Ghost voice was scolding, disappointed.
This at last brought Joachim's attention back to the room, and he turned to look at Ephraim. He wondered if he shouldn't be feeling something more, something else. All he felt was cold. He wanted to go back to the park, back to that moment of power.
"I'm sorry," he said, getting to his feet. "I should be going."
"Wait, Joachim, listen." Ephraim touched Joachim's elbow. "What's wrong with you today? You've never been so violent."
"You're out of control, Joachim," The Ghost said. "What is your problem? What are these military people doing to you?"
Joachim didn't turn, but the note of anger in The Ghost's voice made him stay long enough to consider her question. Something had changed. He felt distant, not just from the Lucases, but from everything. Thoughts of picking people off from an apartment window given him a bigger rise than the disappointment and anger of two people who'd been his friends for nearly a decade.
But the thought that he should be feeling something more didn't make him feel it, didn't even make him want to feel it. His mind was blessedly quiet, and he wasn't inclined to get it started again. The thoughts and doubts that had swirled in his head his entire life had vanished like gun powder on a windy day. He knew what he wanted now, and what he wanted was power. The rush he'd felt, the way he'd suddenly been alive, so wonderfully alive, when he picked that little worm of a man up off the pavement, when he'd beheld the terrified looks on the other's faces, this was what he wanted to experience, again and again and again.
He shook off Ephraim's hand. They weren't fit for each other's company any longer. He had a different life waiting for him, one with different goals.
"I'm sorry," he said again, and stepped out of the apartment, all but bouncing down the stairs and nearly skipping out into the crowded street. As he made his way home he smiled, a genuine smile for the first time he could remember, more sure of his future now than he had ever been.

~~~

Joachim had hoped that his final exam would be a little more difficult than Martose had turned out to be, but this had been a case fit for the textbooks. All he had to do was pull the trigger and watch Martose fall. At least he could have a little fun with the gathering storm clouds.
Martose started his speech with a load of junk about the equality of men, how those on the top of the pile were only there through luck, how they owed it to those on the bottom to lend their aid. "But for a roll of the dice, but for the pleasant accident of our births, we could be in the self same position as they," he exhorted.
Joachim had a hard time not snorting his disrespect. How many people had thought to be felicitous to him, especially during his youth? One teacher, once, when he was eight years old. And what had it gotten him? Not much. People at the Academy were just as stupid and pointless as those at any other school. If Ephraim and The Ghost were all the world had to offer, Joachim had decided that day in Ephraim's apartment that he could do without. He opened the plug at the end of his walking stick and slid out the firing mechanism and two stout screws. The larger end of the barrel then slid down over the thinner, top end, and the mechanism unfolded to fit into a shallow indentation on the side of what finally resembled the pistol it was. Joachim screwed the mechanism into place, using a bit of magic to tighten them down.
Knowing he had plenty of time, he double checked the outer part of the barrel was locked down, that the screws were secure, that his invisibility spell was perfectly in place. Once the shot was fired, he wouldn't have much time to disassemble the rifle and get himself in position to escape, and so he had to make sure things were in place beforehand.
Finding things satisfactorily set up, he primed the frizzen with a pinch of gunpowder from his jacket pocket and lit the fuse with a tiny fire spell. No one above him noticed the flash of light, least of all Martose, who was busy instructing the rich and over-dressed on the merits of charity work. The planks at the front of the stage prevented Joachim from clearly seeing the audience, but he imagined they were about as impressed as he was. Joachim laid down, flat on his back and aimed his rifle up.
Martose was thanking his audience and promising to see them at the polls in a few weeks. Directly under his target, Joachim whispered a tiny, almost useless incantation he'd learned from Kerska. It was only good for style points, but Joachim couldn't wait to see the looks on his fellow Guild members' faces when he returned successful. He sent the spell into the clouds above, triggering a massive thunderclap, giving everyone in the park a moment's pause. In that moment, he struck, pulling the trigger and unleashing a shot directly through the boards above him into Martose's body.
Martose froze for just an instant and then crumpled into a heap behind his podium. Joachim allowed himself a moment's triumph. He could see the headlines on tomorrow's broadsheets: Sion Martose Killed by Thunderclap! He was only counted successful if he returned to Kerska alive and unseen, however, so he turned his attention to his rifle. He disassembled it with a flurry of practiced movements, unscrewing the firing plate, re-extending the stock. Above him, the audience and the dignitaries alike were scrambling to discover what was happening. Hitherto useless bodyguards swept onto the stage and then off again, Martose's body among them. He wanted badly to see the havoc he had caused, but he knew better than to risk sending his sight spell away.
Joachim blew out the fuse, folded the firing mechanism back up and slid it into the extend barrel before jamming the barrel down onto the wooden cap to fix it tightly in place. He stood up and took his jacket off, ready to turn it inside out and be on his way, when something dripped onto his hair. He put his finger to the damp spot and held it up to his spell, positioned over his right shoulder. It was blood. Stepping back, he turned his sight upwards and saw more of it, dripping through the space between the stage planks. Another peel of thunder sounded, and Joachim couldn't hold back his quiet laughter.
The bodyguards were back, and one of them had noticed the hole in the stage. Joachim put his jacket back on, clean side out, and stepped back out of the rain, weaving around the support planks on his way to the back of the stage. The rain was coming down hard now, with frequent flashes of lightening from the dark clouds overhead. The crowd was growing more and more agitated, and sounds of a stampede reached Joachim's ears.
The bodyguards fanned out around the platform and closed in. One of them kicked in a plank near the stairs, and they all flooded in, their pistols at the ready. Still invisible, Joachim slipped through the newly made hole in the wall onto the grass, now littered with a trail of blood from Martose's body, and shivered just slightly. The air temperature had dropped a few degrees, and the rain he had caused was becoming ice. Not entirely unheard of in late fall, but unusual enough that he could add it to the mystique of his first official assassination. Twirling his walking stick in front of him, Joachim looked up and let the sleet slap onto his face. As he passed through a little grouping of maple trees on his way deeper into the park, he took off his invisibility spell and allowed himself a sigh of relief. He blended into the agitated crowds on their way out of the park, and worked hard to keep the grin off his face. How easy it had been to kill a man, how powerfully easy.