Jessica Dunbar stood at the front of the wood-paneled room, her hands folded in front of her as she leaned against the empty whiteboard. She gave her notebook one last regretful look, but it would be no help. She had never given this particular briefing before. That was the point, after all. No one had. It would be important. It would set the tone. But it was also so very new.
The dozen or so tables in the room were already occupied, two men or women to a table. Jess surveyed the group, nodding to a few familiar faces. Agent Nash was there, from the Secret Service, who had been in what went down in Washington. Steve Reynolds, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, had been working with her for a month now, mostly helping her get things stood up. This marked a change in that relationship. She was pretty sure this was the first time she'd seen Ann Gardner out of her uniform; the woman was from her unit in the Reserves.
That left a good twenty people who she'd never truly met. She'd been in on their interviews, she'd read all their resumes, but so many people at once were beyond her ability to process. To her they had blurred together and to her other self they were total strangers. It was, to at least some extent, mutual; she saw them flipping through the notebooks she'd set out on all the desks with some curiosity, looking at her, talking to each other. All of them knew what they wanted to get from this, but none of them knew what was coming.
A soft chime sounded in her ear. It was time. She stood up, taking a step away from the whiteboard, and gestured sharply through the air. The spell trigger satisfied, a red marker flew through the air and began writing on the board behind her.
"Good morning," she said, projecting, "and welcome to the National College of Mages. For those of you who may have forgotten, my name is Jessica Dunbar and I will, to the extent that is possible, be your instructor in our inaugural induction course. The reason I say it that way is because we are all in this together. None of us in this room knows what will work. None of us knows how long it will take. But every single person in this room is here because they want to be a mage."
She glanced at the whiteboard behind her. The marker had dropped itself to the tray, leaving several neatly written rows of text in English. She nodded to herself, then kept going, holding up her hand to each row as she touched on it. "Here is the rough plan: we're going to make sure that everyone in this room can at least cast a basic spell. We're going to get everyone started on learning Arcane, writing circles, and basic enchantment. Then we start getting more complicated with triggers, nested circles, and eventually, we'll wrap up with the graduating project: one of these."
Jess raised her braceletted arm and tapped the wrist with her other hand, causing the spells tied to her wrist gestures to light up. She ran her fingers up her arm, and spells lit in a sequence from red to green to purple. She went back to the light blue, scanned the runes to make sure it was the right spell, and tugged it 'off' her arm. Grabbing the ring in both hands, she held it for a second, and what looked like a golden racquetball dropped out of the air. She released the ring, which vanished, and caught the ball.
She tossed the ball up in the air, looked around the room, and said, "Before we get started, any questions?"
One of the men - she didn't remember his name, but she was pretty sure he had been in the State Department - leaned forward, raising two fingers. "Why will we be making our own bracelet things?"
Jess pursed her lips and caught the ball. "For a couple reasons. First of all, these are really complicated, so if you can make one, we know you're capable of all the things we need you to know. That's what makes it a graduation project. Maybe you won't be able to read Arcane without a dictionary yet, but you'll be able to enchant an object with multiple nested commands, triggers, replaceable spells, and so on. Second, my triggers may not be the best. You may come up with a better version, and we'll be able to share that with the college. Third, this bracelet is an object holding a complex enchantment. It's entirely possible to wipe the enchantment, and you might need to make a replacement yourself. You may also want to make a temporary change. Maybe you're working in another country and you want to make sure the thing you're using to hold your spells can't be taken from you, or will stop working after it is, or will only work until sundown."
He nodded and leaned back. A younger man, who was one of their recent college grads, raised his own hand. "Um, what, exactly, will we be doing after we're done with this class?"
Jess flashed him a bright smile, then raised her shoulders in a shrug. "In terms of what, exactly, you will be doing, right now your guess is as good as mine. What I can tell you right now is that we will *not* be lacking for work. Some of you will be turning right back around, taking what we learn from this run of the course and teaching it to our next class of recruits. You may have noticed we currently take up half a floor in a four storey building. We will be changing that, but that will take more teachers, more classes, more students."
She shrugged again. "Some of you will be seconded back to the organizations you came from, figuring out what the typical member of that organization needs to know and teaching it, figuring out what the specialist needs to know and teaching. Some may be working in research. Some will be doing things that right now we think is impossible." The smile faded from her face. "Over the course of this class, the Secretary and I will be working with each and every one of you to figure out where you are needed most."
Nash tilted her head. "What's with the ball?"
Jess caught the ball again. "This? Oh, it's to keep the disruption to a minimum."
Nash frowned. "What disruption?"
As if on cue, a black thunderbolt rammed through the open door. Everyone in the class twisted to see what it was, and the creature - a scaled, winged lizard almost three feet long from nose to tail, paused on one table, glorying in the attention.
"Hey there, Charlie," Jess said, smiling. "Were you looking for something?"
The dragon's head snapped to look at her, then at the golden ball in her hand.
"Do you want this?" She tossed it up in the air again.
The ball rose, fell, and was caught once more. Charlie followed it with his whole head, his attention transfixed.
"Then go get it!"
The ball bounced off the door, hit the corridor, and accelerated. The dragon vanished after it, claws skittering on the tiles.
Jess looked back at the class. She shrugged. "Like I said, you may be doing things we think are impossible."
