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When he was a little boy, Rincewind had thought magic would be easy. It was just wishing things, wasn't it? Wishing them into existence, like all the stories.
He'd figured out when he was older that it probably wouldn't be that simple. He'd expected to have to work. But he hadn't expected it to be this hard.
No, isn't even that. It's that he hadn't expected it to be impossible.
He'd thought, well, a lot of sweat, but steady progress. Bits and pieces of talent emerging from the rubble of revision. Slow understanding dawning. The glow of a job well done.
Instead, he's sitting at his makeshift desk in his small room, puzzling over his homework and fighting back tears.
Not quite up to the standards the glamorous mental image of a future great wizard, are you, he thinks, angrily scrubbing at his eyes. How are you supposed to change the world if you can't even change the air in front of you into a shield?
It's just - he understands the incantation. Languages are the one thing he can do. He's pretty sure he's drawing the symbol correctly, too. He's a terrible artist, and his penmanship is almost as bad, but he's labored long and hard over the sigil on the paper and it's got to be right.
It's just...
just...
The magic won't come.
The world won't change.
He checks the symbol for the fifth time, carefully erasing a tiny stray mark and penciling a line over a piece that looks like it might not be entirely closed. He focuses his mind on the desired outcome: picturing the air in front of him congealing into a springy, solid mass, the way it had when Professor Churn had demonstrated. Then he takes a deep, shaky breath and recites the incantation again.
Nothing happens.
He thunks his head down on the desk, careful to miss the paper because if he gets it wet he'll just have to start all over. His shoulders shake as he tries not to make to much noise. If they hear you crying around here, you're sunk.
"I'm going to be a wizard," he whispers to the desk. "I am."
Unfortunately, the desk is not sapient pearwood, and does not offer any well-chosen gestures of comfort. After a while he takes another deep breath, and pulls the paper towards himself again.
-
"Turn in your essays, please, and then you can go," says Rincewind. He is standing at the head of the classroom - and who knew he'd have a classroom? - where he teaches Introduction to Cruel and Unusual Geography. Mostly it's a class about running away, but he teaches the kids other stuff. Bits of languages they might find useful to survive. Just how cruel and unusual geography can be, too, which is a unit mostly composed of outlining all the weird and dangerous nonsense that goes on around the Disc.
The is an oddly, to him, popular section of the course. Students keep telling him that they like that he has personal experience and can tell interesting stories. Rincewind keeps telling them that he'd rather not have had the experiences at all.
But now the homework, an essay on screaming for help in four languages of the students' choice, are rolling in up the isles. He likes to collect them at the end. He, too, was once an inveterate do-the-homework-during-class-er. A couple of people slink out without turning anything in. Rincewind gives them the eye, and makes a note.
Then the classroom is almost empty, except for one student.
"Ah, Joshua," says Rincewind. "Problem?"
"I...didn't do my essay, sir."
"Again?"
"Yes, sir."
"This is the third essay you've missed."
"I know, sir. I'm sorry." Joshua rubs his eyes, and Rincewind realizes he's probably holding back tears. He has a flash, brief but intense: long walks up to chalkboards with homework he didn't manage to finish in his hands. The jittery white feeling of shame in the pit of his stomach when the teacher sneered his name. Tears in the corner of his eyes when essays were passed back, thinking for sure he'd done better this time -
He sighs. "What's wrong?" he asks.
"I'm sorry, sir?"
"What's keeping you from doing the essays? You must care quite a lot about the class, because you haven't dropped and you don't just walk out when you haven't done your work. You come up and tell me."
The boy rubs his eyes again and sniffles. "It's...I have a hard time reading the books, sir. They're a bit... I can read, you understand, but if I have to read a lot the words get all jumbled and it takes me such a long time and - " There's another sniffle. "I just can't get it done in time, sir."
Rincewind remembers, again, long nights spent drawing sigils and reciting incantations until his throat is hoarse. Symbols formed with shaky hands. He can almost taste the dry way his mouth used to feel before exams.
"Hmm," he says. "We'll see if we can do something about that."
-
By the time Professor Churn's class has come around, Rincewind still hasn't made any progress with the shielding spell.
"Now, then, you've had long enough to practice," says Professor Churn, rubbing his hands together. "Form up into pairs. You'll be tossing fireballs at each other today. Nothing extreme, number tens only. But this should motivate you to get the spell right."
Rincewind focuses on his desk. His hands are shaking slightly as he retraces the sigil on his paper with his fingers, making sure it's perfect. Maybe he can make it work, just this once. It’s not quite a million-to-one chance...
"Rincewind," says an thin voice next to him. "It would appear we have been paired up. Can you even form a fireball?"
He tenses, turning to face Trymon. "No," he says, because there's not much use faking it, and he really can't, not at all.
"Well, don't be too upset about it." Trymon smiles. "I'm sure I'm perfect on the spell. Shall we try you?"
-
Rincewind marches into the High Energy Magic building with a thoughtful frown on his face. He's worried, now. Has he promised something he can't deliver? That'd be crueler on Joshua than just giving him an extension on his essay, which he has also done, but that doesn't help him in his other classes.
Ponder, sitting at HEX and punching something into the keyboard, looks up and smiles briefly when he sees Rincewind bearing down upon him.
"Hello, Rincewind," he says.
He's been smiling at Rincewind more since the Roundworld incidents, which Rincewind finds both gratifying and suspicious, but that's not the issue at hand.
"Can HEX read things out?" he asks.
"In what respect?"
"I've got a student who has trouble reading the materials I'm giving him. He says he can understand better when things are read out loud. I thought maybe you could rig up something with HEX."
Ponder blinks. "I suppose so," he says. "He's got a voice now."
"How could we make him do it?"
Ponder rubs his chin. "Well, I'd have to input the material first, but maybe I can work up some kind of...scanner. And then he could repeat the words back once he'd got them." An expression of interest blooms on his face. "I might even be able to make it portable." He sets aside the keyboard and swivels over to another desk. "Let's see here..."
-
He limps back to his room that evening after dinner, covered in low-grade burns and minus his eyebrows. Sore and tired, he throws himself into bed.
There's still homework for Professor Panter's summoning and scrying class tomorrow, but it hardly matters. Rincewind is not going to be able to summon even the most minor spirit of the air. He knows the symbol you're supposed to draw, he's practiced the whole willing-things-into-existence bit, and he still cannot, cannot, conjur up a demon anywhere other than his own imagination.
It's no use, is it? He might as well give up now. He's never going to be a real wizard.
But...this is all he's ever wanted. There's no place else he can go, and nothing else he can do.
Not that he can do this either, but better the devil you know. He doesn't think he can take failing at another profession. He may be bad at magic, but at least he already knows what that disappointment tastes like.
He drifts off to sleep not long after, dreaming of a world where he doesn’t lie crossways to everything. A world where he fits.
Someplace where he can change things.
-
Three days later, Rincewind's holding a large and somewhat awkward device shaped like a pair of spectacles hooked to a box, but it is portable, he will give Ponder that.
He waits till most of the students have gone, then catches Joshua’s arm.
"Listen, this is for you," he says, holding out the box. "It's a sort of...read-out-loud-er. You just point the spectacles at the book and it sort of hums away for a while and then starts talking. Sounds like nothing on the Disc, but I thought it might help."
Joshua's eyes widen. "Sir, that's... Did you make this?"
"What? Gods, no. I asked Mr. Stibbons. Thank him, if you want to thank somebody."
"But you asked him for it."
"Well, yes."
Joshua clutches the box to his chest. "This... This can't be part of the Unseen program."
"Ha, no. The Unseen program is throw students into the fray with no help whatsoever and assume the ones who survive are the ones who are worth a degree." Rincewind catches the bitterness in his own voice, softens it. "But, well, I sort of know what it's like to - anyway, things can change." He thinks for a moment. "If anyone gives you any trouble, go see Mr. Stibbons, he's probably in charge of enough things to cow them into allowing it."
"Thank you so much, sir."
"Yes. Well. Get your essays in. That'll be thanks enough."
"Yessir."
"And if there's any other problems, you let me know, all right? We can probably work something out."
"Yessir." The boy blinks rapidly. "I'm going to go do my work."
"All right. Have a nice day."
Rincewind leaves the classroom thoughtfully, and goes to his study to grade papers.
How about young Kadir? He walks with a cane and is frequently late to lectures. He'd said, when Rincewind had asked, that he can't get down the halls fast enough when he has back-to-back lessons.
The spaces between classrooms are ridiculous. Perhaps access to the faculty shortcuts... After all, no reason students shouldn't use them, if they need to.
Grading forgotten, Rincewind plots ways to stop his own story from being others'.
Someone has to.