> Substitute Teacher
>  by Kawa
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> The whole thing
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Good morning class. I am your substitute teacher for today, Pyrrhic Victory.”

The pale unicorn trotted around on the raised platform, trying to make a good first impression on the class. It wasn’t exactly the CSGU, but it was a class and it was his for today. Vic liked working with foals. He often found them delightfully easy to impress.

“But please, for Sparkle’s sake, just call me Vic.”

Half of the little ponies in the classroom giggled. That’d do.

“Now, who among you can tell me about magic? Show some hooves.”

Vic wasn’t exactly surprised to find that nopony raised any hooves, and in fact some of them were deep in thought, probably wondering what they did know.

“That is about what I expected.”

Suddenly, one little foal raised a hoof.

“You with the dolphins?” Vic acknowledged.

“Umm... Mister Victory, sir?”

“Yes?”

“You talk funny.”

“Well, if you think my manner of speech is a problem, perhaps I oughta accommodate you,” Vic replied in a more natural tone that felt slightly painful for him to use. “Or wouldya rather pay a visit to Princess Luna and tell her she talks funny?”

That shut the kid up good, and most of the rest of the class was laughing at how Vic switched styles on a dime. Not that any of them knew what a dime was.

“So yeah. Nopony knows? I’ll tell you, then.”

Vic turned around and quickly wrote a bullet list on the blackboard, turning back to face the class halfway through.

“There are three basic types of magic,” he started, “namely instinctive, runic, and poetic. Now, does anypony here think they can name an example of instinctive magic? Ah yes. You with the magnets?”

“Levitation, mister?”

“Levitation, excellent guess. Molto bene”, Vic congratulated with no idea where he got that expression from. “Now, why is it considered instinctive? Because you hardly have to think about doing it! Assuming you have the skill and power, you just focus on the thing you want to move – and it doesn’t even need to be a whole lot of focus, skill, or power – and will it to move.”

To demonstrate, Vic picked up a box of crayons in his magic, took out the individual crayons, and quickly sorted them by hue.

“Explaining how all that works is something a little too advanced for this class, though. You’ll learn all about that in a later year. Or maybe you’re the inquisitive sort of pony and read it in a book or something. Though that sort of thing will really help get ahead in school, it has a tendency to really mess up your social life so don’t make a habit of that, okay?”

Most of the class nodded in acceptance, while one pony off on the side asked her neighbor what kind of book to look for. All she got in reply was a shrug.

“Related to this sort of magic is a pegasus pony’s ability to achieve liftoff with disproportionately tiny wingspans, and walk on clouds, and an earth pony’s farming prowess. They hardly even consider the fact that they’re doing it. Now, I’m going to skip runic magic for a bit here, but are you all following so far?”

“Yes mister Victory”, all but one of the foals said in unison.

“Not really mister Victory.”

“Don’t worry, kid. You’ll get it by the end of the day,” Vic said with a wink. “There’s no looking down on anypony here.”

With one deft motion, the first item in the bullet list was struck through.

“Well now. Poetic magic. Can anypony guess why it’s called that? Magnets?”

“Because the spells rhyme?”

“You should stop being so right, kid. You’re making Dolphins look bad.”

“My name’s not ‘Dolphins’,” Fish Tank mumbled to himself.

Vic didn’t care much about it. He was only there for a day and really couldn’t be bothered to learn all these kids’ names.

“But to be honest, they don’t always rhyme. Poetry isn’t that rigid. Now, the way poetic magic works is pretty neat, from a psychological point of view. Reading words, you might’ve noticed, tends to elicit ideas and concepts in a pony’s mind and – yes, Tire Iron?”

“What does ‘elicit’ mean?”

“It means ‘to draw forth’, kid. Now, it’s those concepts and ideas that cause the actual magic to happen, but if any word can cause them, you’d think that unicorns would cast at every other sentence, right? That’s because they’re not always channeling energy to their horns, and not every single concept is magic.”

“But friendship is,” the foal sitting next to Fish Tank joked.

“Damn right it is, kid. Now, a concept is not bound to a specific language. To a zebra, ‘kwato’ refers to the same basic concept as ‘hoof’ does to us.”

To punctuate his meaning, Vic stomped one of his front hooves on the floor.

“So if the concept is the same no matter the language the word was in, the only real limit to poetic magic, aside from the caster’s power and capability of control, is being able to understand the words they’re reading.”

Vic took another piece of chalk in his magic and wrote, as a challenge, a few words on the blackboard.


Kutoka moja hadi nyingine, mwingine kwa moja.
Alama ya hatima ya mtu kuzitaka peke yake, kutimia.


“If any of you ponies read this, you’re unlikely to connect the words to any particular concept. This is because I can speak zebra and you cannot. And, being older and more experienced than you, I have enough control to not accidentally cast it, considering I had an active horn when I was writing.”

The words were gone in a single swipe of the eraser, which was quite a feat, because there were two lines.

“Words… have power, kids, especially to unicorns that leave their horns active and don’t pay attention to what they’re reading.”

“Yes, mister Victory,” the entire class acknowledged.

“Good,” Vic said mostly to himself as he struck out the third item on the list. “That just leaves the most interesting, ubiquitous, and powerful magic available to the common unicorn… runic magic.”

Vic had to force himself not to ham it out and darken the room when he made the announcement, though it would certainly make the trick he was thinking of more impressive.

“Runic magic is not to be confused with glyphic magic, which we’ll cover shortly, though the two are intimately related – yes, what is it, Beaker?”

“What does ‘ubiquitous’ mean, sir?” asked a weak-looking colt in the back.

“It means it’s used pretty much everywhere,” Vic sighed. “Now, if poetic magic depends on words yielding concepts, what would happen if you created a sort of language meant specifically for magic?”

Vic turned to the blackboard, focused, and drew an interesting compound character. At the last stroke, it almost seemed to glow. The substitute teacher nodded at the confirmation he saw in it.

“You’ll have noticed, no doubt, that oftentimes unicorns around you will use magic to perform tasks beyond the power of instinctive magic, but without actually saying any incantations. This is because they learned to use runic magic, and know a few.”

The glow on Vic’s horn intensified and to the surprise of the class, the intricate compound on the blackboard slowly drifted apart into four distinct characters.

“The way runic magic works is that you visualize in your mind’s eye how you put together, as it were, a sentence made of these characters. Now, you might’ve noticed just now that they’re not written left-to-right like a regular sentence, but formed into a compound. For example if I were to take the characters, or runes, for ‘light’ and ‘sphere’, and put one above the other, the effect would be different from when I put them side-by-side.”

With a quick nod in the right direction, Vic flicked the light switch.

“You’re all aware of the Lantern spell, right? That’s an instinctive magic, for the record.”

As Vic spoke, the tip of his horn lit up. He could just make out how the kids in the front rows nodded, and then extinguished his horn again.

“But with runic magic, specifically the ‘light’ and ‘sphere’ runes and a few others, I can do this.”

A small sphere appeared a few centimeters in front of Vic’s horn, shining with a purple-white light.

“I can now safely shut off my horn and if I’m careful, move around this light source with nothing but my hooves and muzzle”, Vic demonstrated. “But not my horn, because that’ll pop it. That’s what the ‘few others’ are for. All in all, if I don’t pop it myself, it’d last for a good five minutes or so, considering the amount of power I put into it.”

Vic turned the light on again, and poked his magic light bubble. It burst in a small shower of purple, to the applause of the foals.

“But runic magic can also do this!” Vic announced as he thrust his front-left hoof out above his desk. With a sudden flash, his hoof caught on fire.

“Don’t worry, it doesn’t burn. I could make it burn if I left out a few specific runes, but then I’d just hurt myself and severely endanger an innocent classroom.”

Vic paused to wave his hoof around and extinguish the flames.

“The way it works is, you focus, put together the spell in your mind, aim, and just sort of… push it out through your horn. Which, obviously, needs to be powered at the time. Yes, Magnets?”

“You said you only put enough power into the bubble to last five minutes. How do you do that?”

“That’s an excellent question, kid. Imagine writing something and placing emphasis on a specific word. You could underline it, but you could also write bolder. Thicker strokes, stuff like that. It’s the same way with runes, and the amount of force you put into ‘writing’ and, finally, pushing.”

Suddenly, the characters on the blackboard dissolved.

“Who even needs erasers when you can just will the chalk to be gone? Anyway, that just leaves one bonus topic, and that’s glyphic magic.”

Vic paused to strike out the second item on the list, by displacing the cloud of chalk dust he had removed, then wrote “bonus: glyphic” underneath. It looked a bit out of place, being written in a more angular style than the rest.

“Who can tell me how many runes went into that? Bandage?”

“None, sir. That was levitation.”

“You have a bright future ahead of you, kid. Now, glyphic magic is one of the few options available to non-unicorns. The only thing you need is a medium, a steady hoof, and the knowledge of what to draw.”

Vic took out a fresh crayon and drew a perfect circle on the blackboard, then another slightly smaller one inside it.

“Glyphic magic,” he explained, “basically takes one of a few ‘base circles’ and encodes, as it were, a runic spell into its design.”

With a deft horn, Vic drew an intricate pattern on the blackboard. Even if the kids knew the runes, they’d be hard pressed to find them among the base design. When he was almost done, Vic paused.

“Now then,” Vic said as he held his crayon up to a spot where a diamond shape was missing. The kids in the audience could infer as much – there were three others on the other sides of the design.

“Flame, please.”

As soon as the drawing was complete, a burst of illusionary fire spewed forth from the blackboard, as big as the circle itself, and engulfed the substitute teacher, along with a big part of his desk. When it disappeared ten agonizing seconds later, the only thing left on the blackboard was the bullet list, and Vic was gone.

“Where’d he go?” asked Fish Tank.

“Did he just… Did mister Victory…” 

“Nope,” a disembodied but recognizable voice called out. “Class dismissed. And remember: play safe, kids.”