The building was coming down around me and all I wanted to do was sleep in. I know that this looks bad, and I promise it’s not my fault… this time anyway. I promise my only goal for today was to sleep in which is why this whole thing is most definitely NOT my fault. It was my neighbor. Jim. He has it out for me I swear to God. Dodging the ceiling tiles and crumbling wall, I grabbed my hamster, Ori, who seemed oblivious to what was happening and darted out of my apartment. 

This was not some huge apartment complex thankfully. It was technically a house that is separated in the middle, you know what I’m talking about. As I burst out of the door Jim was standing happily with a mug of coffee that he raised it towards me in a mocking greeting. Chuckling he took a sip. I glared at him as the dust from the crumbling building was rising high into the air. He’ll regret this. I can get back at him. That’s what I do best. 

I’m sure you are probably wondering how all of this happened so I guess I’ll fill you in seeing as I’m not going to be sleeping. Jim and I used to be friends back at the academy, pretty good ones at that. I’ll admit it, we were not what you would call “Model students”.  The professors pretty much hated us, but we had a great time and we managed to graduate. 

So, the aforementioned Academy, looked exactly how you would expect something labed “the academy” would look on the outside. Big brick buildings, a clock on the tallest tip, and a big brick wall surrounding the entire property with a sign that said “Jonsons Academy school for the gifted”. A good unassuming name. On the inside though, was something extraordinary. At least to you anyway, for us it’s just school. So basically, were “magic”, I don’t want to bore you with all of the history or science that I only remember half of. Like I said not a model student. What you need to know though is that its kept secret to the outside world and there are a couple different kinds of magic, generic magic which the most common, think basic spells and what not, healing magic (basic spells and healing), and chaos magic. 

Chaos magic you can pretty much do all the basic stuff, but you can also do so much more, like you can mess with particles and time and shit. Basically mess with the Chaos theory, which they made us constantly repeat: “Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary theory stating that, within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization. The butterfly effect, an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.” Which the headmaster got off of Wikipedia. I’ve checked. But basically mess with time and patterns, to make something so predictable that it will become unpredictable. I don’t fully understand all the inner workings, all I know is that both Jim and I have chaos magic and we can cause predictably, unpredictable chaos. 

Okay the boring, background stuff is over with, you’re probably just yelling at me to get to the stuff with Jim. Alright alright, I’m on it. So Jim and I were best friends back at Jonsons. We pretty much just caused chaos together. We couldn’t really do the time thing, that’s the most advanced magic out there, also against the rules. Now we didn’t have an issue with the whole “against the rules thing”, but it’s advanced so we wouldn’t mess with it. Jim and I would do everything together, we’d prank the other kids, and teachers, we’d cause paradoxes, show each other our new tricks that we learned, ya know the whole nine yards of a typical trouble maker. 

While Jim and I were both chaos causers, we were also very different. Jim was more outgoing, and energetic and very proud of his shenanigans. While I also loved the absolute chaos that we made, I was more reserved and secretive about the whole thing. We worked together really well.  Everything was great! Up until that last month. We were 18 and about to graduate, and thinking back on our greatest stunts. Like the time we got all of the showers to only shoot water up, or when we manipulated reality to make the hallways by the headmasters office to turn sideways. Great times. One day though, something happened. Neither of us thought too much of it, it seemed small, insignificant, but it changed everything.  

What happened, and it seems stupid, but he ate my last bag of chips. It wasn’t like I was that mad about it, but I wanted to get back at him a little bit because thats how our friendship worked, so I stole the left sock of his favorite pair of socks. When he found out I took it, he wanted to get back at me, so he stole my toothbrush, so then I just used his to get back at him. It kept spirlaining, and did not get magical until he turned my pillow into stone but still made it look normal. I still have a dent in the back of my head from that. After that I made almost all the food he had tasted the exact opposite of what it normally tastes like for like three days straight. We started to get very on edge around each other, we lost the trust, and at some point all of our energy for chaos turned to each other instead of others. It kept going, and then chaos ensued. After we graduated, the pranks got few and farther in between, but there were still times when all of a sudden, one of us would wake up to being a dog for 24 hours or that all of our furniture was floating around in a void somewhere. 

There were no colleges for magic, and we did not really study what most people do most of us just don’t go. Neither of us went, we just kind of got jobs when we graduated. Jim is some sort of mechanic, but I’m well aware that he uses magic to fix everything. I on the other hand work for K.I.M.S. (Keeping Interdisciplinary Magic Secrete) Basically I just cover-up any magical stories or occurrences that come up to keep it a secret from the normal people. I’ve had to cover up a lot of shit that Jim has done, even outside of this borderline war that we are in.

We lived in completely different cities for a couple years after we graduated, until about a year ago. Work moved me to a different city, apparently by complete coincidence he has also moved here. I almost wonder if he had anything to do with it, I  certainly didn’t. Even worse is that we ended up in the same duplex. Once we were aware of our proximity the chaos got more chaotic more often. Which brings us back to my house coming down.

Jim managed to only crumble my side of the house. His was perfectly fine, I just know that I will have to somehow cover this up, as our neighbors are gathering around after they noticed what was going on. None of them, at least to my knowledge are magical. I can’t just fix this house with all of these people around, unless I want to spend the next four days erasing everyone’s memory, and it’s a personal matter so I wouldn’t really be paid for it like I would if I was at work. I always erase people’s memories as a part of my job. But I just need to think of a way to get back at him and win this thing once and for all. He’s the one that started this thing, and I just want it to end. And I have an idea. 

By now all of the rubble of the crumbling building had settled to the ground.  There’s a few cop cars pulling up the driveway, I guess one of the neighbors called them. I grabbed my Ori’s cage and walked over to them. 

“Termites, am I right?” I joked fakely at one of them as I walked past them towards my car. I don’t want to deal with any of the questions they might have right now. 

I drove to a nearby park, just to get out of there for the time being. I had a plan, at least half of one, I’ll figure out the rest when we get there. I got out of the car, grabbed  Ori and went to my favorite tree. This is my thinking tree. Sometimes I come here when I need to figure out a plan, usually a prank. I sat down and placed Ori next to me. He looked at me and I looked back at him, two guys sitting under a tree, as clueless as ever. My idea had something to do with doors. The concept is that if I were to mess with Jim’s door, he would be transported the exact opposite of where he wanted to go. It could be any door that he opens, he just needs to touch it. 

For example, he’s on his way to work and walks out his front door, he immediately gets transported back to his bedroom. I just want to mess with him, afterall, he did just destroy my side of the house. He’s lucky I can easily fix it later. Once all the people that gathered leave, I can even just fix it slowly so it’s not so suspicious. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do to make this constant back and forth nonsense stop, I’ll mess with his doors. He won’t really be able to mess with me anymore if he cant get to where he wants to go. I started casting the spell to mess with his doors when I noticed Ori escaping from his house. This damn hamster was Hudini in his past life, I swear to God. I caught him in time and held him up to my face. “Ori, why do you always try to run away?” I asked. He didn’t seem to really care that I was holding him up and tried to walk off of my hand, I caught him with my other hand and put him back in the cage. “How have you hamsters survived this long? I swear you have literally no survival instincts” I said and put him back in his cage.

 I went back to focusing and managed to  finish my spell. I don’t really know what you’re picturing when I say doing spells, but it’s probably not exactly what you think. Most of it is kinda just will-power, thinking and ironically meditating. I’ve always kinda loved causing chaos while meditating. I managed to finish what I was doing, but I am even more salty that this freaking hamster just wants to escape from me. 

All of a sudden Ori let out this loud yelp. I quickly looked towards him. He started growing, his entire body was filling up the cage as I stood there in horror. Crap, I think I accidentally did something to him while casting spells on Jim’s doors.  I quickly tried to stop what was happening, but it was hard to focus when my 2 ounce hamster was growing to the size of a house cat. The cage broke open and Ori spilled out, continuing to grow into a giant hamster. He kept squeaking while all of this was happening. I kept trying to make this growing process stop, with anything I could think of, I even tried shouting some counter-spells at him, to help him but none of it was working.  He grew to the size of the oak tree that I sit under. He grew until his body took up the majority of the park. I looked around and thankfully no one was at the park today. Ori stopped growing and looked down at me as I looked up at him. He stopped squeaking and seemed to not care about what had just happened. Of course, he still has nothing going on behind those eyes.  He licked my face like an over excited Labrador Retriever would do and then began to run in the opposite direction. I just noticed how weird hamsters run, its hard to tell when they are small.  He was running so fast I could barely keep up with him. “Ori! Ori! Come back! You ungrateful fuck” I yelled to my giant hamster. He ran into the road and almost squashed an 18-wheeler who swerved out of the way just in time.  I waved to the driver trying to act naturally while running after this overgrown capybara. The monster hamster I made ran into the town and began climbing the highest building. 

What had I done? All these years of trying to conceal magic from the innocence of non magic people and here I am chasing my hamster I accidentally turned giant down main street all for some lousy prank on my neighbor. People were screaming all around me and freaking out (naturally) and pointing to the sky. For a moment all I thought was about how long the next few months of work were going to be, if things ever got better and if I’m not going to be immediately fired. I’m not going to lie, this is bad. 

I looked up and there Ori was, at the top of the highest building. Now, if you have ever owned a hamster, you know that they aren’t the most intelligent of creatures. There are no brain cells bouncing around in their heads. Hamsters will literally walk off of any surface, even high ones, without any regard for their life. I had a bad feeling this is what Ori was about to do. I watched my happy hamster run in circles at the top of the building and just walk off the god-dam ledge. 

I ran towards the building, granted I made myself basically teleport, it didnt matter really that anyone saw me. For one theres a pretty big distraction, secondly magic was obviously involved in this so it wasnt like it was the most surprising thing anyone had seen that day. All the while I was trying to focus on getting him back to a normal size.  Ori was falling fast, but from right underneath him it did not look like he was getting bigger, or even falling. I may not have taken a physics class, but I know things are supposed to get bigger if they are getting closer to you. He suddenly landed in my hands, apparently I was able to get him back to the normal size. All heads were turned towards me, but Ori was just trying to walk out of my hands like normal. I have nothing I can do or say to these people to try and cover this up. The monster hamster was in my hands, I obviously had everything to do with all of this.

 I could always find a way out of trouble back at school both of us could, but not this time. Cop cars and new vans were swarming the area and a helicopter was circling overhead. It was too late to do anything. Anything I did would make things worse. I can only wipe memories one at a time. Magic was out. I fucked up. 

All I can think of as I stand here not knowing what to do is Jim. I wonder what hes doing, was he watching the news and seeing this unfold, or just still relieving his recent victory of his latest turn in tearing my house down unaware of this? The only reason I am here right now is because of what he did this morning. I would have stayed home today. 

None of this would have happened if Jim had not stollen my fucking chips.