"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...

I spent the next week or two thinking over the offer in that letter while doing various bits of work in the interconnecting warren of lab rooms.

Many of the experiments were fairly standard, just using known information to test a multitude of hypotheses through experimentation.

Well, I guess I wasn't paying attention one afternoon just over a week before that silly school's orientation day. I accidentally added the wrong ingredient to an already simmering beaker filled with several fluids, and the resulting explosion rocked the building.

I ended up being slammed against the outer wall of the room, let me just say that hurt like hell as that wall is dressed fieldstone.

I took several minutes to closely examine myself, discovering that the only fairly serious injury was the broken thumb on my left hand. As best as I can remember, I threw my hand out in front of me when I realized what was happening, and that poor thumb hit the wall first.

I'm still not sure as to how I avoided breaking any other bones in that hand, or the wrist, honestly. Maybe it was pure dumb luck?

I spent the next little while taking care of my poor thumb, including splinting it and wrapping it in a snug bandage to keep it nice and straight.

I finally decided that I would at least check out this orientation day and perhaps make a decision then on going to the school. I used one of the computers in another of the basement lab rooms to send off an email to Lissa-Lee, saying I would be there for the orientation day.

I'll tell you, it isn't fun trying to type an email when you have a splinted broken thumb that keeps poking at the keyboard while you type.

I talked with Charles several days before the orientation day, and he made arrangements with a friend to take me down there.

Other than that, a lot of my time was used in doing other experiments in one or more of the lab rooms. I'm learning quite a bit, honestly.

The only exception to my working in the labs was the time I set aside each day to work on boosting my skills with magic. That proved to be easier than I had expected, as I found I could draw more and more magical energy to focus and use for casting a variety of spells.

Some of the spells that I was doing were from the grimoire I found at school about a year ago. I had lucked out when visiting a used bookstore in the town here a few weeks after I arrived. The store owner was getting rid of odds and ends that weren't selling, and in amongst the trash in the boxes there, I found two other grimoires, one of the two dating back to the late seventeenth century, 1685 to be more specific.

It seems the original creator of the grimoire had lived in Salem, Massachusetts at that time and had very narrowly escaped being put to death as a witch during the horrendous fiasco that took place there. She fled up to this area, living in a small shack by the shore for fifty years.

What was more interesting was that the grimoire had been in use by her descendants until about twenty years ago. There were inscriptions and notations from those olden days down through the generations to several scribblings that were included in September of 1995.

Then the various writings in the grimoire ended. I have to say I was rather curious as to what had happened to cause whoever had written the inscriptions to stop entering them. A visit to the library and just over three hours spent looking through old news gave me the answer.

The latest writings in it had been done by a mature woman and her teenage daughter. As I said, I was looking at old newspapers when I saw the headline "Mother and only daughter die in fiery crash". Reading it led me to find their names, which matched the ones in the grimoire.

That orientation day is happening in three days. I am waiting for Perry to get here so we can get on the road.

Oh, Perry is the friend that Charles called to help me get to the orientation day, and if necessary, return here afterward. Perry is a big black guy, about 6'2" or 6'3" tall; he looks rather muscular, so I'd say he's about 215 pounds. When I say black, think black as coal.

I had been waiting for about twenty minutes when Perry finally showed up driving a ratty old RV that looked like it was ready to fall apart. The darn thing looks like it had been built somewhere around 1960 or so. It definitely needs a new paint job, some body work, too.

I shrugged and lugged my two duffel bags over to the door leading into the RV, opened it, then up the steps, dropping them on one of the seats in the small kitchen area near the front of the vehicle. Perry waved at me, said hello, then invited me to take the passenger seat.

A bit over ten minutes later, we were rolling along the Trans Canada highway, heading south towards Barrie, then on to Windsor, Ontario. Perry and I had discussed various routes with Charles and had decided to go through the northern states as we made our way to Montana.

I vaguely remember a trip out west not long after we arrived in Canada, I think I was about seven years old at the time?

We reached Barrie about ninety minutes or so after we reached the Trans Canada highway. We took some time for a quick pit stop.

It took about an hour for us to go from Barrie to the northern edges of Toronto, but the big city driving slowed us down a bit. While we made our way through Toronto, we pulled off the highway for a bit, stopping at a Tim Horton's for coffees and refreshments, then we were off again.

We connected with the 401 highway, otherwise known as the McDonald Cartier Freeway, and the westward portion of the journey began.

We made another pit stop on the eastern side of London, then continued onward to the border crossings at Windsor.

The border crossing was a bit of a PITA, we had to wait in a long line-up of vehicles before we finally reached the crossing point. The guard took a few minutes to look over our info, noting that I had only received citizenship along with the rest of the family two years before.

There didn't seem to be anything odd about it all, I guess, as he handed our stuff back and waved us through the crossing.

We were now officially on US soil. This was a definite first for me, I'd been in Canada for seven years and we had never visited the US.

Perry looked at his watch and said it was almost 5 PM. We could stop somewhere for something to eat, then decide what to do.

We found a small family restaurant serving up a variety of home styled foods and both of us ended up stuffing ourselves. The place offered lots of food options, from poutine (loved by many Canadians) to their big favourite, a lovely roast of pork with apple in mouth, to fried cabbages that were a specialty of one of the restaurant owners, to a wide variety of freshly baked pies, including blackberry, pecan and rhubarb.

That led to Perry deciding we would find a motel on the edges of Detroit and relax for the night before resuming our journey.

We spent the next two days working our way west and north toward the town closest to the new school in Montana.

Just after 7 PM on the night before the orientation day, Perry pulled us into the lot of a motel and went in to get us a room.

There was a small diner about half a mile away from the motel, we stopped in there for another home style delicious meal. Like the one in Detroit, they offered a fair variety of options. Perry and I decided on more standard fare, what turned out to be a large serving of roast beef. It came with a huge baked potato and a small amount of green beans on the side. We finished the meal with plates of fresh apple pie.

Once we were back at the motel, we simply relaxed, watching a bit of TV for a while, then I worked on refining my magic skills.

We wound down around 11:30 that evening; both of us were asleep by the time midnight arrived.

Oops! We didn't have an alarm set to wake us up, and we both slept like logs. I finally roused from sleep around 10:30 AM. I was astonished to find that it was already that late, so I shook Perry on the shoulder gently to wake him up, then grabbed a quick shower.

Once I was done in there, Perry had his turn while I rummaged through the clothing I had brought, trying to decide what to wear.

As much as I may be used to looking like a male now, I still don't truly feel male inside. I'll always be a girl in my heart, I guess. That being the case, I suppose people might not be surprised to see that I picked out my best pair of slacks and a nice dress shirt and a tie.

Oh, gods, that has to be one of the worst things about being male. It took me hours and hours to learn how to tie a tie correctly. What makes it worse is that I didn't really figure it out until my older sister Johanna stepped in and showed me, outlining it step by nasty step.

After a fairly quick but nice breakfast of three eggs, ham and home fries at the diner, we were on our way to the school.

We pulled into the main lot at the school just after 12:15 PM, then followed several signs into the gymnasium, where all the orientation info had been set up at some point. I wandered around for about ten minutes or so before I heard my name being called.

While I had been in there, I had seen two girls, both pretty in their own way, being called by one of the teachers or staff.

Anyway, my name was eventually called, and I broke into a weak smile as the teacher led me out of the gym.

It turned out that she was the one that had contacted me about the school, yeah, Lissa-Lee Danifel. She was tall and slim for the most part, well, except for her rather large bosom; if I were still female, I might wish to have been so lucky as to be graced with a bust like hers!

She led me down this hallway, then along another one, turned another corner and continued toward the door at the end of the hall.

We were still about 20 feet or so away from the door when those two pretty girls I saw earlier exited that room, the door closing behind them.

Ms. Danifel nodded to the two girls as they passed us. Me, I just stared at them like a silly git as Ms. Danifel knocked on the door.

A few seconds later, an older woman's voice called out for us to enter, so we did.

It wasn't until I had fully entered the room that I realized my life had just changed quite seriously. I had moved past a rather large male of the naga species when I stopped dead in my tracks near the center of the room. What in the nine hells was Sabrina Portland doing here?

Oh, shit! I'm in deep, deep trouble now. If she's here, they likely know what I did a few months ago.

I turned around to try to leave, only to find myself quite thoroughly blocked by the rather large and suddenly intimidating naga.