Inventio MK for the 2006 Yuletide Challenge Diana Wynne Jones' Chronicles of Chrestomanci featuring Christopher. Gen. The best thing about being the next Chrestomanci was inventing. The worst was the lessons. Lessons were boring and repetitive and after awhile, Christopher wanted to know why he had to keep learning things when he could be doing things. The answer was almost always, "Because," followed by more lessons. He had to take lessons on every possible subject and while some of them were interesting, a lot of them were technical and mostly just "Okay, try that again". Practice. Practice was boring and annoying and irritating and really, couldn't Christopher just take a day off and play cricket? Couldn't he do a little wandering? Nope. Nothing past the Castle grounds, and the grounds had all sorts of restrictions ("Don't go there!"). Occasionally (too occasionally), they went to the village, but mostly Christopher went from lessons to studying to eating to lessons to bed. And when he complained, people arched their eyebrows and made comments about how if someone hadn't gone around wasting all his lives maybe he would have been given a little more freedom. There were words like "responsibility" and "maturity" and "reliability" and at the end of it Christopher was bored and peevish and had usually tuned out to focus on dreaming up something fun or silly or just plain wasteful. And as much as he liked reading, and as massive as Chrestomanci's library was, it got old fast when that was your only escape. (Other than Millie. But Millie had soon gone off to boarding school and her letters read like books for teenage girls. Not exactly what Christopher was looking for.) There were, in fact, very few ways to entertain an adolescent boy at the Castle when it came right down to it. So Christopher had to invent some. He started by gathering resources. Some of the resources were hard to get -- he had to sneak into rooms he wasn't supposed to be in at times when he wasn't supposed to be out of his room. There were plant samples and animal products and items from the other worlds, and some of them were rare enough that Christopher had to take only a little bit -- a pinch at a time -- to hide what he was doing. And then he had to keep them separate from each other because who knew how something was going to react and carefully labeled, but he had to hide them somewhere so that no one would know he had them. Suffice to say just gathering the bits and pieces was headache enough and that for a short while, Christopher wondered if it might not be easier to just stay bored. That lasted about a day. And then he had started experimenting. After all, Chrestomanci worked magic all the time, and surely even with all that studying there had to be new magics invented regularly. There had to be new spells made up, or old ones tweaked, or new compounds that no one had ever thought of before. Obviously, Christopher was the perfect person for the job. He was a nine-lifed Enchanter, wasn't he? He was the only person like himself other than Chrestomanci in any series! And one day, whether he liked it or not, he would be in charge of regulating all magic, so he'd better be able to think like the best of them. (That was an excellent strain of reasoning he had worked out and it would be perfect if he ever got caught. It even implied things like "responsibility" without actually saying them. It was sneaky.) For the first while, nothing particularly interesting happened. Once, he turned everything in his room blue, including Millie's letter, and that would have been fine except that it was all the exact same shade of blue and he couldn't tell up from down or ink from paper. It was just blue. It had actually taken longer to fix the blue than it had to make it ("A pinch of this and a pinch of that," followed by a large blue POUF) and maybe that had been half the fun. It was dangerous. What if someone came in and asked him what was going on? What if someone came in and it turned out that Christopher was just as blue as the room and they couldn't see him, or if anyone or anything who entered the room turned blue as well? He'd been half terrified to open the door thinking that the blue might spread, like a cough, spilling through the Castle and then outside to the village and then further. It had only occurred to him later, maybe a month later, that this might be weird -- that fixing something could be more interesting than fixing it. But he shrugged it off and accidentally made lunchÑeaten alone upstairs ostensibly so he could "study" -- upside down. Not like it had fallen or anything, but it had actually stuck itself to the ceiling without any problems. Christopher hated working on an empty stomach. But in the end, that was no big deal. The blue-room, the upside-down spell, the make-inanimate-objects-itchy powder, the invisible goo that he'd had to steal dragon's blood to make, even the translate-sounds spell (Throgmorton wasn't so bad once you knew what he was saying)--- all of his experiments and inventions were okay but no big deal. Fixing them was always more interesting, but as soon as he had finished fixing them he got twitchy, anxious for the next problem, the next invention gone wrong. He was starting to see the appeal of evil genius, kind of. And like every evil genius, he got caught. Not even on something cool, like the bicycle that jumped portions of space, but on something stupid and silly and completely adolescent: the magic that bent forks when you sneezed. So he shouldn't have kept any in his pocket. And so maybe he should have known better than to keep it in his pocket when he went down to dinner. What were the chances that Throgmorton would jump the table (headed straight for the steak, big surprise) and knock a whole pepper shaker to the floor, right beside Christopher? And what were the chances that the pepper would puff up in a cloud just high enough to reach Christopher's nose, causing him to sneeze (repeatedly) and then causing all the forks on the table to jump up and bend in half in order of which you were supposed to use first. Pretty good, apparently. The worst part? They weren't even really mad. Chrestomanci had just sat back in his dressing gown and given Christopher a calculating look before saying, "Glad to see you're finally taking the job seriously," and then asking him to reverse the effects. Throgmorton got steak. Christopher got more homework.