F Trope: White
magic
Current Event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD1SLcyMZRE
Mahamat Abeche
and Liha Beledweyne looked at each other across the table in the Gersthofen
Commons of Göggingen College.
“The thing about
Americans?” Liha said. She watched a gaggle of students mutter on by.
“Which thing
about Americans?” asked Mahamat. Liha looked at him in disgust. For having so
many bad things to say about the US, he certainly had no qualms about the food.
He was stuffing a sheaf of “French” fries into his mouth then washing it down
with a Coke.
“The thing about
Americans is that they’re so…materialistic. They think that what they see is
what they get.” He rolled her eyes and shook her head. Even she picked up
Americanisms without even realizing it. Her father had warned her that America
would badly muffle her perception of the spirit world. She’d figured she could
handle it. She now figured that it was a good thing that the college was so
close to a Somolian neighborhood – while her spiritual sense was nowhere near
as sharp as it had been at home, at least she still had one.
Mahamat looked
up at her over his plate of fried. Once he’d chewed and swallowed, she said,
“You East Africans are so proud of your supposed closeness with the spirit
world. What about us? Chad grew from a population emigrated there in the
seventh millennium B.C.!”
She snorted. “We
were there from the ninth millennium B.C. onward. We were practically there are
the dawn of Human civilization.”
“So you
supposedly know all about everything spiritual because your forebears were
around a couple thousand years before mine were?”
“No, I’m more
spiritual because I’m more spiritual. You’re a brainless blob with so little
spiritual sense that I’ve been dead trees with more spiritual energy than you
have.”
“Hey!” Mahamat
exclaimed. The tip of a fry fell from his mouth.
“So, if you’re
more spiritual than a log, you’re gonna have to prove it.”
He grunted then
said, “I didn’t want to have to bring out the big guns, but now you’ve impugned
my masculinity. I have to...”
“Do you even
know what the word means?”
“What? ‘impugn’
means ‘honesty of (a statement or motive); challenge; call into question.’
See?” He smirked.
“That’s not the
word I meant.”
Scowling, he
said, “I know white magic and I can prove it.”
“What?”
Mahamat lifted
his chin. “In white magic – as it was passed on to me by my mother –
we follow specific ethical codes and adopt social convention. But I know a
spell to protect an item.” He leaned over and grabbed his backpack, opened it
and pulled his laptop out, opened it and powered it up. Sitting back in his
chair, he muttered then looked up at her. “I’ve protected my laptop with a
spell.” He stood up. “I gotta go to the bathroom,” he said loudly and walked
away.
Liha said, “What
are you doing? If you leave your...” He flipped her off and kept going.
She stared after
him incredulously, flipped him back, spun around and walked away. She walked
past the Göggingen Gallery then came back around, unobtrusively watching the
open laptop. It sat just fine for several moments. Four people walked past
going in different directions, but no one made a move for the computer.
Then a
peculiarly shabby male student, long hair obscuring his face, his sweatshirt
slightly rattier than usual walked toward the table. He reached for the laptop…
Names: ♀ Somalia; ♂ Tchad
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