Ahh, I just got the new Monster Hunter Stories, but I'm forcing myself to put it down for just a bit longer to get you all some quality content. This is a story that'll be all over the place by its very nature, but I also love it for that. I hope you all continue to as well.

Chapter 3: Math-A-Magic

OR

Logic? In MY Class? The Hell There Is!

It generally took around, oh, 3 to 5 classes before the students who decided to stick around got adjusted to my general antics enough to not get caught up spending the whole period asking or reacting to stupid questions, and I actually start teaching things. In my own...special way at least.

Walking into my 4th year class, I sat down in my nice velvet-blue plush chair, pulled my legs over a side of it, and threw my arms behind me as I stretched tip to toe, saying my piece.

"Ancient Runes is the one of the biggest piles of horseshit you'll ever try to be sold."

My shared winged class of Ravens and Bird-Lions shared a glance, before one of the bluer ones cautiously raised their hand. He had black hair and wore glasses, but he wasn't Harry, so I called him Not-Harry. Not every nickname was a gem.

"Sir, is this just a random statement like the time you declared Greek Mythology to be too horny, or a leading statement like the time you brought up that a Leprechaun could totally beat up a Centaur?" Not-Harry asked somewhat tiredly, making me grin.

"This time it's both! Also, don't talk like my nonsense doesn't have a point, I know a good majority of you got a kick out of learning how to charm a shillelagh to always strike someone in the danglies(1). This time I'm actually somewhat serious, which I'm sure you all are aware of how rare that is." I nodded sagely, making my students give their own nods or little murmurs of agreement as they dug out actual blank parchment or notebooks as opposed to whatever homework they were going to do during my period instead. Ahh, I'd have been more pissed off if I wasn't the one who originally gave them the okay to do that.

My period would always be productive; either from something I taught, or to give them just that bit more time to self-study. It was little things like that that kept bringing people back to my class, even if they didn't quite track with my lesson plan.

"Now that you're all paying attention to the crazy man again, allow me to extrapolate. I'm sure you all have heard about how useful and important Ancient Runes are, how they hold 'untold secrets of the world and the very nature of magic', that they can 'warp reality', and so many other stupendous things that anyone with half a brain would wan to dive head-first into such a wonderous font of power, right? Wrong. What Ancient Runes does have? The single greatest history of spin-doctoring in Wizarding history, second only to that dumb bastard Merlin." With a flourish of my wand, I had a series of three diagrams pull down from the ceiling, and one from my sweets dish because the little bastards just HAD be be sentient enough to understand the concept of hiding, even if they weren't great at it.

Upon each of the diagrams were the written alphabets of the Celtic, Egyptian, Norwegian, and Chinese characters. I would have posted Japanese as well, but I only had four slides and like hell I was making a fifth, that shit was hard. They still got the job done.

"Now, Ancient Runes can be useful, but there's hell of a difference between what its propertied to do and what they ACTUALLY do. The main bulk of power behind Runes comes from both their Obscurity and, conversely, their Recognition. To break it down to its most basic level, a Rune is just a warning label someone hundreds of years ago put on his shit that gained meaning long past the death of the writer. The older the language, the older the target, the more 'unknown' builds around said rune, all decide how much power the 'Rune', or simple letter or character is granted. However, this is not a one-way process by any means. By having a wide-spread writing system, this energy does jack and squat, leaving the study practically useless until the society that uses the language in question undergoes some major shifts, such as a genocide, or hundreds of years of cultural drift, during which it will teeter back and forth between being a neat party trick to surprisingly usable." As I went through my presentation, I tapped at and underlines certain characters writing besides them symbols previously or now used today to show the transitions.

"And before any of you ask about making up some nonsense language and Time-Turnering yourself into some kind of super-wizard, I'm sorry to say that its been tried and failed more times than count, meaning at least several thousand. This cycles nicely into the other side of this equation, specifically the concept of 'Imaginary Numbers'. The thought process boils down to the fact that the Human Lizard Brain, capitals required, likes and needs to draw similarities to other phenomenon and experiences both for sake of expressing said experiences, but to better process them. It's why we're the one of the only species to categorize time to the minute and second, count things when we're bored, and why sharing a single common language across the world is such a large task. It's this same level of connection that makes Ancient Runes a valid school of magic in the first place, with like drawing to like through understanding, or peoples lack of it.

Picture if you will, a wall. On this wall is a circle, with four lines coming from beneath the circle. What does this bring to mind? A Sun, bearing down upon the land? An animal walking on four legs? Some poorly drawn graffiti? None of it matters, so long as the original person who made the whatever it is knew what it was supposed to be, and that idea was still somewhat viable to whoever was trying to decipher it.

In fact, the most dangerous examples of Ancient Runes, which also do a wonderful job of continuing a number of the previously mentioned misconceptions, come from the fact that modern people who attempt to work them out have zero clue what the fuck their looking at, and thus the breadth of power between fantasy and reality become frightfully real. Cultural appropriation is actually a terrible thing in this case, for a number of reasons. You would not BELIEVE the number of demons who end up on our plane of existence with massive tits or frightening urges to go work at local fast-food corporations; makes getting imps to do your chores so much more expensive." I finished my rant slightly parched, forcing me to leave my comfy chair and reach into my desk for some liquid refreshment. Past the first whisky bottle I emptied out to hold cachaça and not be judged, past the second flask filled with mountain dew, the actual dew, to reach my third empty bottle, filled with Mountain Dew, the soda. God, was I happy to see that still get made, I swear if it didn't I was damning this as the darkest timeline.

I also wonder if it said more about me or my students that I could just take a liquor bottle out of my desk and take three long swigs before setting it down and none of them batted an eye. Hmmm, no, the children are wrong. That was the problem.

Then it was question time. Yay! And homework was to work as groups of four or seven and create a code language while writing down their sources on how they did it, with no pig-Latin.

END OF CHAPTER

(1) Never doubt the power a 3 foot shillelagh can do to a 2 and a quarter foot dong. That's what ya get for leaving a weak point exposed and not investing in pants! Or at least a modest cup.

This story, as I ironically kind of suck at character interactions at certain times, will mostly be about my views on the Magic system of JK and a fair few other things, most of which I think make sense. Ancient Runes whole thing is that it gains magic from the fact that its a now pointless language, and it gets that air of danger thing from people accidently making new connections that the original designers never even thought about. Hope ya enjoyed my ramblings, there's always more.