(no subject)

3.

At this moment the clatter of voices brought everything to a stand still.

Mickey looked up to see what it was all about and was himself a bit stunned.

Standing at, rather more properly filling up, the doorway was the largest human the boy had every seen in person.

The behemoth stood about 6 foot tall and must have weighed in at 450-500 pounds. The man had a sad, weary face and looked to be about 50 years old. He looked to be asking permission to
enter as he stared at Dr. Thursday.

She smiled at him and pointed at the back of the room. The large man walked down the aisle and sat in a double sized bench that Mickey hadn’t even noticed until now.

Whispers shot around the room like ping pong balls thrown into a barrel.

“People!” Dr. Thursday brought the talking to a halt.

The girl next to Mickey whispered to someone near her, “That’s ‘The Ton’ he’s supposed to be crazy and dangerous.”

The Doctor cleared her throat and all talking ceased.

Mickey tried not to look back at the man, but found he couldn’t help it. The man was balding and looked like he was in pain. He actually looked to be near tears.

The boy smiled at the man. The man’s lower face attempted to curl into something nearing a smile.

“We’re going to start again,” Doctor Thursday said slowly, “Some of you didn’t get a good initiation into our world and we need for you to. The world needs for you to be ready.”

The Doctor pulled a large easel from the closet. Some kind of book was hanging on it, waiting to be flipped over and seen, page by page.

“I want your opinion. You are all on about the same level. You all know that you had the potential for ‘extended abilities’ from birth. You also know that some sort of trauma was needed to spark them.
Like . . .”

“Getting hit by lightning?” Mickey offered up.

Everyone laughed.

“Not always as spectacular as that, but yes. Some had some sort of allergic shock, or emotional high point.”

“I almost drowned,” Said the girl who had whispered before.

“Exactly,” The Doctor said, “But, at that point, you joined the world of the Inheritors. Now, I will try to give you an idea of what that world is like.

Shell flipped the first page of the paper on the easel. There was a picture of a tiger.

“I just want you to tell me, are the things in these pictures real, extinct but once real, or always fictional. How about this?”

Everybody laughed. “It’s a tiger?” someone shouted out.

“Real?” The Doctor asked.

Everyone shouted “Real.”

The next page showed a dragon.

A noticeably smaller amount of voices shouted (with some amount of glee) “Real”

Mickey thought of his friend Rugglestump and thought he should go by after class and see if the dragon would like to eat some of his favorite treat. The reptile was a sucker for grapes.

The next picture was of a unicorn.

One girl said, “Extinct.”

A boy scoffed, “Never real.”

Doctor Thursday said nothing, just flipped to a picture of a Pegasus like creature.

A group shouted, “Never real.”

“Creatures of the group called ‘Hippo-equis’ still exist, but most of their story is left to legend.”

“Which one, the unicorn or the flying horse?” The scoffing boy asked.

“They are the same. The youthful Hippogriffin, as they were called (a word that was transformed by humans into both Hippogriff and Griffin, and used for different mythic animals) are born with the golden horn and sport it for the first year of their lives. When they move into the second year of their lives they develop the wings that usually take the place of their horn. Some have been seen with both at the same time, but that is an anomaly. Then, when they are about 5, quite old for them, they are consumed by the heat of their own inherent magic and burst into flame.”

There was a small gasp from some of the females in the room. Perhaps the thought of burning unicorns was hard to accept.

“But,” The Doctor raised her tone just enough to top the room chatter, “Their conversion from their horsier form to their bird form is now complete, and from their own magical ashes they rise as . . .”

She flipped the page and showed the most magnificently plumed creature Mickey had ever seen.

“The Phoenix” Escaped from the boy's lips, and there was general agreement.

“The Phoenix,” agreed their teacher, “Real as daylight. And all the same creature.”

There was some energy in the room that still did not want to accept this. This was not real. This could not be real.

Mickey grinned like a four year old who finally gets what Christmas is about.

Doctor Thursday reached for another page to flip over and the room held their breath.

© 2005 by C. Wayne Owens