Turns out that shooting a random fireball into the ceiling is a good way to have the university police called on you.

Luckily for me no one was looking at me when it happened, and they couldn't find any accelerant or, well, anything that could make a fireball on me, so I didn't get charged with anything.

They ended up releasing me after a couple hours sitting in the small interview room the one part-time university detective used.

It wasn't until I got home that I could review the doodle I had been making. I've always liked to make up and draw random arcane looking symbols in the margins of my notebooks, it helps me relax.

It was pretty easy to pick out the page, since it was covered in soot. I took the notebook out to the garage of the house I was renting with some friends. My roommate has turned half of it into a welding shop for his side gig, and he was out of town visiting family, so it was probably the best place for some experimentation.

It took two and a bit hours for me to get it right. I finally figured out that it was two symbols, one on the previous page with the second overlayed precisely, the. Simply pressing my thumb on both caused a fist sized fireball to appear when I pulled my thumb away.

Of course, I hit a wall once I figured that out. I had no grasp of why the symbols did that. One of my other roommates had tried to explain computer programming to me once, he had shown me the project he was working on, even with him explaining what the word soup I was looking at was supposed to do I could barely wrap my head around it.

I didn't have the first clue where to begin parsing the geometric shape I had just randomly scribbled in my notebook.

My fruitless tests of variations were interrupted by a knock on the side door of the garage, which was odd, because none of my roommates but Greg ever came out here, and he wouldn't knock.

I closed my notebook, though there wasn't anything particularly odd about it or the workspace. And walked over to the door.

I cracked it slightly to see who was out there. It turned out to be two people. A nondescript looking guy who appeared to be in his mid twenties with unruly black hair was looking down at his phone. Slightly behind him was a woman, with deathly pale skin and slightly red-tinged hair.

The man looked up at me, I caught an upside down glimpse of what he was looking at on his phone, it was my student picture, the same one on my ID card and attached to all my transcripts.

"Joe Tanner?" The man asked in a tone that said he kind of already knew the answer.

"Yes?" I replied uncertainly, "Who are you?"

"You can call me Alex," he replied, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the woman. "This is Natasha, you can call her Nat, or Tasha. I can't tell if switching actually annoys her or not, so I'm doing some experimentation."

The woman just rolled her eyes, but didn't say anything.

"What do you want?" I asked, trying not to sound rude, but feeling unsettled by the odd pair for some reason.

"Today, at around ten thirty A.M." the man said, consulting his phone again. "You conjured a fireball in your advanced English class."

I felt a chill, then immediately realized that it should have been obvious that if magic was real then people would know about it.

The man continued speaking, either not noticing or not caring about the flush rising on my face. "Then starting a couple hours ago you conjured several more fireballs in this garage. Nat could smell the magic from two streets over."

Before I could really get into considering running from what I was sure would be one of those men in black suits disappearing me situations, the man pulled out one of the crappiest business cards I had ever seen. It was obviously printed on the cheap paper they had for students to use in the library, and looked like it had been put together by someone with only the vaguest idea of how the software worked. To top it off, I could see the ragged edges where it looked like the scissors had caught and torn the page.

It was so different from what I was expecting that my mind went blank for a second.

"Between you, Nat, that guy with elemental blood last week and those twins, this is turning into an unseen hotspot." The man said, pulling my attention away from the abomination of kerning in my hand.

"The local council has asked me to put together a support group for newcomers. Next meeting is on Saturday, you can find the details on our Facebook group. There'll be donuts."

"Wait," I said, not really sure what question to ask first. So I was half surprised to hear myself ask, "your magical support group posts about meetings on Facebook?"

"Sure," Alex said cheerfully. "I mean, Zuckerberg is a lizard person you know."