For those just tuning in, this challenge is about taking a story idea from bare bones idea into a fully fledged story by writing consistently every week day for fifteen minutes. The sentence I end with on one day, is the sentence I start with on the following. Part one was Bob’s story and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story below. Part Two follows a character named Penelope. I have a few basic sentences to act as road marks on her journey. I am loosely calling that an outline. We will see where she ends up by the time the story is done. For now, we start Part two of the 2025 Fifteen Minute Writing Challenge.
Day 131: She was careful to keep any milk and cereal splatter from the pages as she flicked through them.
She was careful to keep any milk and cereal splatter from the pages as she flicked through them. There was no table of contents and no index so Penelope had to slowly turn the pages, scanning for items related to her question.
“One of my questions,” she said between bites of cereal. The text was dense as thought the author swallowed a thesaurus before writing and now felt compelled to use the most obtuse terms he could find to explain his subject. ‘Or subjects really,’ she thought. Each chapter seemed to focus on a different topic. Finally, when her spoon was scaping the bottom of the bowl, Penelope found a chapter that looked promising.
‘Pre-developmental incidents,’ Penelope read the title. She shrugged. It seemed better than the previous chapter of ‘Antiquated Resonance.’
She set her spoon down and lifted the bowl to her lips, draining the last of the milk from the bottom. She lowered the bowl and left the book open on the counter. Penelope then slipped off the stool, took the bowl and spoon to the sink and washed them out. She knew leaving the remnants of cereal in a bowl would just make the bits adhere to the sides of the bowl as though they were glued if she didn’t rinse it out fast.
‘I think whatever sugar is in the cereal bonds with the milk to make glue.’ She decided as she ste the bowl in the dishrack. She dried her hands and went back to the book. Keeping her fingers to mark the chapter she wanted, Penelope took the book back to the library. Given the author’s word usage she suspected the fat dictionary on the lower shelf might come in handy as she puzzled through the volume.
She settled in the chair and started to read. After only a page she had to slide the dictionary off the shelf to make certain she was understanding the terms being used. Realizing it would more than likely need repeated usage, she moved to the desk taking both the book and the dictionary with her.
It took longer than she liked to puzzle her way through the chapter but by the time she reached the end, she was glad she made the effort. She leaned back in the chair trying to sort out what she learned. Taking away all of the fancy words the concept was fairly simple. Magic tended to lay dormant inside a person carrying one of the bloodlines. However it could act in strange ways when someone was faced with a difficult situation, especially one that could prove harmful.
The author claimed that most claimed it was only the powerful who displayed these kind of events, but he wasn’t convinced. He believed that those who didn’t have a flare of abilities when young simply might not have faced difficulties requiring their magic to act in self-preservation. He also pointed out that often it did not seem like the magic was doing anything and thus incidents might be overlooked as having nothing to do with magic.
‘Because it is more emotional than physical,’ Penelope thought. She expected that if something protected her it would be obvious. A person trying to hit her would instead get clunked in the head themselves. Instead nearly all of the incidents used as examples were where the person with magic faced extreme emotional situations and the ‘defense’ seemed to come after the trauma, not as a means of preventing it.
Ten til Midnight 