"Jon!"
It seemed like I had just gotten to sleep, and Karyn was already trying to wake me up. Still groggy, I looked over at my alarm clock. 5:42 am. Still dark outside. Still dark in here.
Wait, Karyn?
I sat up in bed. "What are you doing in here? How did you get in?" Mom left for work at 5 am on Saturdays, so Mom couldn't have let her in.
"I'll get to that. You've got to see this!" She held up a black leather laptop bag.
I was still to sleepy to even focus clearly, but I began to realize what was going on. Since Karyn wouldn't know that I knew she had the book, I decided to play along. "Don't get me wrong, but can't your new game wait until sunrise, at least?" I rolled over like I was going back to sleep.
Karyn jerked my covers off the bed and threw them in the floor. "Get up," she insisted.
"Okay, Okay," I mumbled. "Let me get some clothes on." I really did feel a bit exposed there in just my boxers. Especially when Karyn sat indian style on the bed facing me.
"Don't worry about it. This is important," she told me. I shrugged and sat indian style facing her. If she didn't mind that I was just in my boxers, I certainly wasn't going to dwell on it.
She set her laptop bag on the bed between us and opened it. In the recess designed to hold a laptop computer was an unmarked oversize leatherbound book. There were bags of flower petals and bits of metal and ribbon and all kinds of stuff crammed in the panel made to hold disks and cables.
"What is it?" I asked her, still playing along.
"My spell book," she replied. She told me about how she found it in a cave near her family's campsite. She took it home, looked through it, and found that she could understand the script, even though it wasn't English.
I looked through it, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I knew it worked, but I wanted to see it. "I don't believe you."
Karyn picked up the book and started leafing through it. "Hmmm... How about a demonstration?"
"Sure," I replied.
"I know just what to do." She grinned at me, and set the book on my desk. I wondered what she would cast...
