"Hey, Wizard!" » Places

         The swing in a small playground on Maplewood Avenue squeaked pitifully as it swung backwards and forwards. The playground and street were empty but for a single figure sat upon that swing, staring mournfully at a cyan hat in his lap. With his hair styled up with painstaking care and dressed in designer everything, Matt was considerably overdressed for the end of the world. But of course, when his mother had hawkingly overseen his preparations for the day, she'd been expecting him to be rather more on show than he was now.

He'd have to look his best to stand out from the others, she'd said. Nobody was going to remember the scores of wizards in robes or other silly outfits, but they'd remember the one that looked like a supermodel.

"It's always been about what people thought, hasn't it mom?" Matt muttered, kicking the ground, "About you being better than everyone else, and making sure they know it."

Being a wizard had sounded cool at first, but when his mother had told him that their first order of business was essentially terrorism, Matt had been more than a little turned off from the idea. It was likely she hadn't realised yet that he didn't share her passion for lording it over everyone else, given that he'd always meekly played along with her high-school level scheming to avoid her ire.

He had the feeling most of his wizarding peers shared her viewpoint. It was all about them being better than the 'normals', and how unfair it was that they had to pretend to be so boring and mundane when in reality they were so much more. More embarrassing, maybe. Even before he'd known that they were all wizards, his mother's dinner parties had seemed like something of an occult gathering of the mysteriously-better-than-everyone-else-in-every-way.

Even Matt admitted that there was something to being able to think of himself as 'more' than his peers. He was a wizard, he was powerful. He could make people burst into flames with a flick of his wrist. But unlike some of his mother's clique, he just didn't want to. He hated hurting things - from bugs to feelings. Or as his mother would put it, he was an overly sensitive wet blanket. Sometimes people had to be trodden on to get to the top, but quite frankly Matt was afraid of heights, so he was quite happy on this particular rung of the ladder for the moment, thank you very much.

And so he brooded on. Eventually, he thought, he was going to have to decide what he was going to do next. He certainly wasn't going to go around setting fire to things, he thought, but was he going to do anything else? Maybe he should just keep his head down and then say he'd gone around setting fire to things when everything quieted down (or not, if the wizards lost, he supposed).

He couldn't just sit here, either way. Someone would come by sooner or later and he didn't want to count on them not tattling on him. Sighing, he put his feet on the ground and halted the swing. He shoved his hat back into his backpack and slung it over his shoulder as he stood. Making his way out of the park with apprehension painted plain as day upon his face, Matt started to walk. He had no idea where he was going. He'd probably figure it out when he got there.