Yes, another crossover.
The real book is great and this crossover doesn’t really do it justice but I just had to get this idea out of my head.
Thirteen-year-old Daria Morgendorffer was running for her life again. She just couldn’t learn to keep her mouth shut. Someone would say or do something stupid, she would react with a sarcastic comment, and the local Neanderthals, who even though they usually had no idea what she was talking about could tell when they or one of their own were being insulted would threaten to pound her face in.
Usually she could out run or hide from them but when she couldn’t the beatings were brutal, she was almost glad her family was moving to Highland soon, maybe there the people wouldn’t be as violent or as dumb.
“There you go again Morgendorffer, being all optimistic.” She scanned the streets for a hiding spot; they were slowly but surely gaining on her. Then she saw it, the one place were no one from her school would be caught dead in, the library.
She ran inside and closed the door behind her. The librarian gave her a dirty look, which Daria returned just as intensely as she walked past the circulation desk.
Daria walked deeper into the library and hid between two bookshelves in the non-fiction section to wait until she was sure her pursuers had past the building. She idly ran her hand along the bookshelf, then something stopped her hand. She looked and found that one of the books, a little library-bound volume in shiny red buckram, had a loose thread at the top of its spine, on which her finger had caught. She pulled the finger free, glanced at the title. It was one of those "So You Want to Be a..." books, a series on careers. So You Want to Be a Pilot, there had been, and So You Want to Be a Scientist... a Nurse... a Writer...
But this one said, So You Want to Be a Wizard.
“A what?”Daria pulled the book off the shelf.
“This has to be a joke”, Daria said to herself. But the book looked exactly like all the others in the series. She opened it carefully, so as not to crack the binding, and turned the first few pages to the table of contents.
Normally Daria was a fast reader and would quickly have finished a page with only a few lines on it; but what she found on that contents page slowed her down a great deal. "Preliminary Determinations: A Question of Aptitude." "Wizardly Preoccupations and Predilections." "Basic Equipment and Milieus." "Introduction to Spells, Bindings, and Geasa." "Familiars and Helpmeets: Advice to the Initiate." "Psychotropic Spelling."
“Psychowhat?” Daria turned to the page on which that chapter began, looking at the boldface paragraph beneath its title.
WARNINGSpells of power sufficient to make temporary changes in the human mind are always subject to sudden and unpredictable backlash on the user. The practitioner is cautioned to make sure that his/her motives are benevolent before attempting spelling aimed at...
“I don't believe this”, Daria thought. She shut the book and stood there holding it in her hand, confused, suspicious – and, as much as she hated to admit it, highly intrigued. She usually wasn’t a big fan of fantasy books, but this didn’t seem to be the usual run of the mill fantasy book, something about it seemed authentic somehow.
“Don't be silly.”She chided herself,
“You’re much too smart to believe in something like this.”She went to put the book back on the shelf but stopped halfway there, another thought had occurred to her, what was a fantasy book doing in the nonfiction section anyway? She flipped through the first few pages and read the copyright information (most of which was illegible, the ink had run or something) and the tags the librarians had put on it, it wasn’t mis shelved, it was really registered as a non fiction book. That didn’t make sense, unless…
“Don’t go there, people already think you’re weird enough already.”“Unless…” “Unless, really is real,” she heard herself whisper.
She shook her head to clear it, this was ridiculous, it was a book. A stupid, old, yellowed, crumbling book. She put the book back on the shelf and marched out of the library.
Three minutes later she ran back in and stuffed the book into her backpack.
::)Stupid censors.
