"Why the heck are you interrupting me, you silly twit? You what?" Klarion shouted at the older male on the other side of the secret lab room.

"Don't you want your story to be told, Klarion? Everyone thinks you're a total jerk right about now, you know?" Charles yelled back at him.

"Hmmm..." Klarion thought for a moment. Maybe it would be good to tell his story, perhaps he could stop hiding once the truth was known. He stood there, looking down at a machine without noticing it was even there, then chuckled and said, "All right, then, Chuck, this is my story."

I was born Klara Louisa Schellmann in Munich, Germany, daughter of Franck and Johanna, sister to Emil and Sofia, on May 17, 2004.

We lived in Munich for about six years before daddy was transferred to somewhere in Canada, and we left Germany behind forever.

Daddy went over there first, to find us a decent house to live in and start the process of transferring to the new office.

We eventually joined him in mid-June of 2010, arriving at our new five bedroom home in the twin cities of Kitchener and Waterloo.

Why a five bedroom? Well, daddy decided each of us kids should have our own room, and he got the house at a very nice price from what I heard him say to mom a few hours later on the night that we arrived. The house had belonged to a drug boss who was raided and jailed.

It seems the raid turned up the names of several other drug lords and seven more places in the twin cities were raided as a result. The house had been on the market for a few months and dad was the first to express interest, then he got it by paying back taxes and a small fee.

I had no idea that I had magical abilities until they first manifested when I was a few months short of ten years old.

See, I was playing with our big tom cat, Siegel, and everything was fine until I felt an odd shiver pass through me as I touched him to roll him onto his other side. You know, kind of play fighting with a full grown cat? Well, that touch caused that poor cat to yowl at full volume.

He kept yowling for a good five minutes. The weird part is the tone of the yowls went higher and higher before he finally passed out from shock. It wasn't until a few minutes after that that I discovered that Siegel was no longer a tom in any way, shape or form. Oh, dear.

It was only then that I realized that I had been thinking that having a female cat would be cool. Uh oh, when daddy finds out...

Daddy did find out, that very evening, in fact. I guess I can be considered lucky that I was only grounded for a week. That wasn't the worst of it, though. Daddy made a few calls to people he knew, and before I knew what was happening, I was apprenticed to Herr Thom Klausen.

Herr Klausen is a wizard, one of the three types of magic users known to the world at large.

I spent the next two years studying most evenings and for at least six to eight hours every Saturday under Herr Klausen. It wasn't fun. I'd never been much for sticking my nose into books and Herr Klausen had me reading all kinds of magic study books whenever I was with him.

Then the event happened that would change my life forever. To this day, I wish I hadn't done that specific spell. But I did, and so...

I'd just finished reading yet another guide on how to use one's powers and was sitting at my little desk, bored out of my mind.

I'd turned twelve two weeks before, June was just beginning. It was a nice, sunny day out there and I was stuck indoor reading? Hmmph!

Then I had a rather interesting thought cross my mind. There was an old staff in the back room of Herr Klausen's basement, which is where he had put his rooms for various magical activities. There was also a nicely inscribed pentagram on the floor of the third room.

Ooooh, that strangely glowing purple gem in the third drawer of the warded cabinet in his office sure looks nice. Maybe I can use it?

So I grabbed the staff and that glowing gem and stalked into the third room, the one with the pentagram on the floor.

I noticed that there was a point on the pentagram that hadn't been filled in, so I went looking for the special chalk to finish the pentagram.

It didn't take me long to do that, then I spent about fifteen minutes making a pattern of markings on the floor within the pentagram itself. Once that was done, I stood up with the staff in my right hand and that oddly glowing blue gem in my left hand (wasn't it purple before?)

I recited several words in old Latin, then waved the staff three times and tapped the staff's head on the glowing gem.

That was when everything went batshit crazy, a huge flash of blue light tinged with purple knocked me out of the pentagram on the backlash of the explosion that occurred when the normal gem on the top of the staff touched the gem that had been in my hand.

I have no idea how long I was unconscious, but I think it was only a few minutes. Then I roused enough to discover that I was no longer me.

Before then, I had been a young woman who was slowly blooming. I'd had small B cup breasts and a female shape, no surprise there.

I looked down and my chest was flat, no breasts. No breasts? Oh, crap! I looked further down and discovered that the explosion had turned my clothing into tatters at best, there was no way that I would be reasonably covered with what remained. I was just short of being naked.

Yep, almost naked, which meant that I could see all the way down to my belly and what was now there. A penis? My vagina was gone!

I was thinking there was no way it could get any worse when Herr Klausen stomped into the room and glared down at me. "You fool!"

He sent me home an hour later after tanning my backside with a birch switch. If it weren't for the robe he had me wear... You get the idea.

Daddy gave me a piece of his mind, but otherwise left it alone. It was bad enough that Herr Klausen said he would no longer teach me.

It wasn't until another five months had passed that I discovered why the spell I had done that day had turned out the way it had. See, what I hadn't known was that the blue gem (purple?) had a crack in it, and the other gem touching it had shattered the flawed gem.

The shattering of the gem when the two touched triggered the explosion and the huge light effect, and I became a boy.

What made it really hard was that I had been content to be a girl and now being stuck as a male was driving me crazy.

I guess you could say that my being so unhappy about what had happened was one reason I started being a brat at home and at school.

When September rolled around again, I was back in school, but at a different one, one where I likely wouldn't be known.

Honestly, it was boring. I had no trouble doing the course work, I was smart enough to be doing college prep courses, but daddy said I should be around other kids my age. Yeah, right. One thing that made it not so boring was that I found an old grimoire in one of the classrooms.

I spent the next few weeks poring over the information and spells in that grimoire. Many of them seemed to be mentally based? I guess the best way to describe them is that the spells were designed to nudge or influence others without them knowing it was happening.

I quite enjoyed learning those spells and decided to try them out at school one day. Oh, boy, was that ever fun!

I decided to do it on the Friday just before Hallowe'en. The school cafeteria was almost always full of kids at lunch time.

I started it off by nudging a few specific students, all three of them were rather anti-gay/les, etc.

So I first nudged Todd Cavell, getting him to pick up Bobby Farr's chocolate cream pie and turned it into a small but perfect chocolate golem. The creature jumped right into Melissa Samm's face, splattering all over her and two girls beside her, then slightly smaller, moved onward.

The next nudge was directed at Lisa Smink, a preppy looking girl who grabbed Jo-Beth Thomas' large homemade lemon meringue pie and went to throw it at Doreen Nickelson. Well, in mid-flight, that pie became another food golem, this one yellow and white in colour.

The third nudge was to Bellamy Vincent, who grabbed a chocolate mousse belonging to Serena Belmont and threw it at Paul Overton, one of the few known gay boys in the school and one who had seriously outstanding handsome looks. Yep, you guessed it, the mousse became another food creature like the other two and made a serious mess of Paul's nice white long sleeve shirt and pale blue blazer.

That was all it took, honestly. Within seconds, the food critters were causing havoc and actual food was flying everywhere in the cafeteria. I can't be absolutely sure, but I think I spawned two other food golems that day. I know there were at least five of them present in the fight.

I ducked under my table and stayed there, waiting for the whole thing to die down.

At one point, I noticed that I was being watched, so I looked around to find out who it was and spotted Sabrina Portland giving me the eye.

Hmmm... Perhaps I can use her, she seems to know about magic in one way or another.

Once I was home that afternoon, I sat down in my room and thought about what had happened that day in the cafeteria. According to several of the guides and other books of magic that I had read, nudging more than two or three people at once should totally drain a wizard's energy.

Then add in that I seemed to have spawned two of the creatures myself. Those books all said that should not have been possible.

I continued to think about it while waiting for supper to be ready. Eventually, I came to only one conclusion that made any sense at all.

Magic, or more specifically the essence of magic, had to be growing, not declining. The amounts of raw magical energy available to be used were far higher than they had been since not long after the founding of the Christian church in the first century or so after Christ's birth.

If that were correct, then the more I learned, the more I would be able to do. That caused me to smile, then chuckle quietly.

After I figured out that magic was on the rise, I did several experiments to test the hypothesis and discovered it to be true.

I had a bit more fun pulling stunts on people. Not in school, though, I didn't want to draw attention to myself there.

Then one afternoon I found about about the three were-cat kids, triplets actually, and thought about maybe having one as a familiar.

The only problem is my skills all seem to be either in nudging people to do things or in casting illusions to confuse or disorient people.

That was when I thought of Sabrina, the girl in the cafeteria that day that had been watching me while the food fight happened there.

It took me nearly two weeks to get her somewhere alone, then I gave her a slight nudge to get her to agree to meet me somewhere else. That ended up being at an A&W restaurant, where I further nudged her, suggesting that she find a way to grab one or more of the were-kitties.

It was made even easier when I realized that she had a bit of a crush on me. Huh, I'll use any advantage I have, yeppers!

Silly git, thinking she could somehow get me to go out with her or something along that line. I decided to teach her a lesson.

It was all quite the bit of fun, I had a good laugh over it afterward.

See, I decided that getting her in trouble would be far better in the long run for me than actually getting one of the were-kitties. That potion that I gave her, which would "open" her abilities even more, was nothing more than an unusual flavour of Kool-Aid mixed with a bit of cola.

I waited until she was on her way to do it, then called the were-cat home, and disguising my voice, warned them to be on the lookout.

Apparently, that was all it took. They sent the kids off to be safe, waited there and her parents found Sabrina in the woods behind her own house. The best part is that she was acting totally silly, another one of my little nudges, cooing about having were-kitties as familiars/friends?

I didn't know whether she would tattle on me or not, and I didn't care much for life at home with Dad being a macho jerk a lot of the time, so I packed a bunch of stuff into a duffel and a backpack, then left the house and headed for my hideout a few hours ride out from the city.

I managed to find a woman going the direction I needed to go, and soon reached the town closest to the hideout, waving goodbye to her.

The hideout? It's an old worn-down house on the edge of this town, with a huge basement where Charles and I have our lab rooms.

Georgian Bay is just a few steps outside the back door of the house, I sometimes find myself staring out over the water there.

I met Charles about a year ago, online actually, and found out we shared quite a few interests in the studies of magic. He was a fair bit older, not quite thirty and had bought the old house, leaving the outside looking rather shabby, but fixed the inside as needed to meet specifications.

I've been sharing the house with Charles for a while now. No, I'm not going to tell you how long I've been here or where it is.

Charles always takes care of the payments for the house and the procurement of groceries and other necessities. That meant that I could pretty much stay out of sight and those avoid notice of the people in the town. I'm sure there are notices out there about me being missing.

Hmmm... what's this? An email from someone named Lissa-Lee Danifel? A teacher at some new school called M.Y.T.H.? Wait, how the heck do they know about me? And even stranger, how the heck did they know to contact me using this email, which is rather private in nature?

I read the email. Oh, my, it seems they know about some of what I've done; Sabrina did tattle, painting me as the bad guy, of course.

What had me thinking was one paragraph in the email, which I'll quote here:

"Klarion, we know about your abilities. You haven't truly harmed anyone yet, which is the only thing preventing you from being taken to jail for your actions, especially regarding Sabrina. You need training to use your abilities in a more responsible way, training you can get here."

I'm going to think about it. The orientation day she mentioned will take place in a few weeks. Maybe I'll check it out...