Where should we archive these fics? (Considering I have never had an account on which to post fanfiction before, this is kind of a Concern for me...)

((So, I wrote this having barely any memory of the Young Wizards series, so hopefully the Ordeal is in line with what works for canon. I sorta spammed this one at Delta over PMs and thought it was good enough to share with y'all, so... enjoy.))

She backed down the corridor, her breaths becoming quick and shallow when she realized the door she'd come through had slammed shut. There was no sign of a handle, or even a crack to show where the door had been; it was just a smooth wall with a mirror. She stared back at her reflection, gaze focusing in on the way her braces-covered teeth jutted out.

Laughter echoed in the maze and she flinched, clutching her Manual closer to her. She couldn't see the source, just an endless corridor full of mirrors. She began walking, her steps hesitant, nervous.

So many mirrors. Her skin crawled as her eyes shifted to glance at her reflection as she passed.

Her knees were too knobby. Her face was covered in acne. She was too tall and gangly. Her jaw looked crooked from the hinge glued to her teeth, and her huge, dorky glasses emphasized how square her face looked.

And those pigtails. God, what had she been thinking? Never mind how much her mother told her the knotted pigtails looked adorable on her, they were hardly considered attractive at her school.

She was too scrawny. Her boobs were too big, to the point where the other girls had tried stealing her clothes, demanding to know if she stuffed her bra.

The laughter echoed down the corridor again.

Her reflections began shifting slightly as she passed, and she knew, in the way one knows when one is dreaming, exactly what each mirror was showing her. She couldn't avoid seeing it. In that one—she was a failure. She was stupid. She was pathetic. She was useless. Worthless. Ugly. A loser.

Useless. Stupid. Pathetic. Worthless. Useless. Stupid. Pathetic. Worthless.

All her worst fears laid out for her to see, and she broke into a run, the laughter getting louder.

She ran into a circular room coated in mirrors, and when she turned around to try a different path, she found the way out had disappeared.

"Stop it!" she screamed.

"Stop it! Stop it!" her voice echoed tauntingly.

"Leave me alone!"

"Leave me alone! Leave me alone!"

She dropped her Manual and covered her eyes, sinking to the floor.

"Crybaby! Crybaby!"

"She thinks she can be a wizard!"

"She can't even pass fifth grade!"

"Hahahaha!"

She screamed, and the mirrors shattered, the glass falling to the floor with a soft tinkle at odds with the reverberating screams.

When she opened her eyes, the room was clear of glass, empty save for her, her Manual, and... herself, staring at her with a curious glee.

She stared back. "Who are you?"

The other her smiled. "You know me," she said. "I've been with you for years now... that little voice in your head, that entity looking over your shoulder, watching every last little mistake you make..." She began circling, eerily reminiscent of a shark. "Do you have any idea how stupid you were to come here? No, probably not. If you did, you wouldn't be in this situation in the first place."

The would be wizard slowly crouched to grab her Manual, not taking her eyes off the doppelgänger. "Why are you doing this?" she whispered.

The doppelgänger laughed. "Why? Because I can. It's not like you've ever tried to stop me before. Loser."

She swallowed; her palms were slick with sweat and her knees were shaking. "You're my Ordeal?"

The doppelgänger rolled her eyes. "Uh, duh." The circling continued. As she walked, she began to change, going from knobby-kneed, acne-covered, to... beautiful. Breathtaking. Poised, confident. The doppelgänger stopped, spreading her hands and smirking. "That's the problem with you... well, one of a really long list of many. You're always too busy overthinking things. Idiot. Of course I'm the Ordeal; what else could this possibly be?"

She lowered her eyes, blinking back tears. Of course. Of course. She should have known from the moment she entered the maze. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

"You are stupid," the doppelgänger said coldly. "But hey, you're not a totally lost cause yet. Maybe if you ditched your Manual and went home, put all this behind you, accept you'll only ever be mediocre at best, you might actually be worth something." She shrugged. "Or you can stay in here and die of starvation. Seems more likely. Too dumb to cut her losses and run, and try to salvage what's left of your pathetic life."

"Why are you so mean?!" She burst out. "What did I ever to to make you hate me?"

The doppelgänger was suddenly standing in front of her, eyes blazing. "Absolutely nothing. And that's what makes it so. Damn. Easy."

They stared at each other for a long minute; the silence stretched between them, tension palpable. She was trembling; the words were familiar, words she'd thought hundreds, thousands of times before, but never had they come from such a familiar face.

The doppelgänger laughed and turned away. "Oh, wow, you really think that?" She turned back, and her face had changed, mirroring the wizard's again. Acne, glasses, braces, and everything else that just emphasized how ugly she was. The doppelgänger opened her mouth, clutching dramatically at her cheeks. "Maybe if I wasn't such a faliure, Mom would love me!"

"You're me," she realized, her heart sinking.

The doppelgänger applauded sarcastically. "Took you long e-freaking-nough."

"But if you're me," she muttered, "then that means I'm..."

"Your own Ordeal, yes, yes. Get on the same page already, gawd."

"Shut up!" she snapped. "I'm thinking."

"In your own slow, dimwitted way, maybe."

"SHUT UP!" Her voice echoed around them. "You're not—you're—you can't just say things like that!"

A soft light flared out from around her, and then faded.

"And why not?" the doppelgänger said, before she had a chance to wonder at the light. "You've been saying them to yourself for years! Why stop now?"

"Because... because..." She trailed off, closing her eyes. Every instinct in her body was screaming at her that she was about to say something she couldn't take back; that what she was about to say couldn't possibly be true, but if this was her Ordeal, and her small act of defiance had caused that light to appear... maybe this was what she had to do. Maybe... she just had to believe. "Because you're wrong."

Light flared out around her again. The doppelgänger flinched back like she'd been struck. "What?"

"Because you're wrong," she repeated, more loudly, and the light brightened. She could see more of her surroundings now; she could have sworn she'd been standing on concrete, but there was grass under her feet now, soft and springy, and gently illuminated by the light coming from her. "Because maybe I'm not the best at everything. And maybe I'm not the bravest, or the smartest, or the prettiest—but I'm doing my best, you hear me?!"

The light kept growing, and she began walking towards the doppelgänger, hands tightening around her Manual. "I took the Oath because it gave me hope! I thought I could finally make something of myself!"

"You were wrong!" the doppelgänger yelled, jerking away from the light as it reached her. "You were wrong, you're going to fail at being a wizard, just like you've failed everything else—"

"I haven't failed yet, though!" she yelled back, and hope swelled in her chest and the light brightened, showing off the grass and flowers under her feet. "And if I haven't failed, there's still a chance! I can keep going and—and improving, and getting better, and nothing you can say will stop me!" She opened her Manual, running her fingers over its pages. "I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so—and I will not be afraid of myself any more!"

The light became painfully bright and she shielded her eyes; when it died down, the doppelgänger was gone. She was standing in a forest glen, surrounded by sunlight and birdsong. In front of her was a small lantern, its flame burning hot and bright.

She knelt and carefully picked it up by the handle, smiling through her tears. It would take more than one moment of defiance to make her really, truly believe the things she'd said—but she knew that she'd been right, about being able to improve.

She was still afraid, dreadfully afraid—but she wasn't going to let the fear hold her down like before. She was a wizard. Maybe not the best, maybe not the brightest, but a wizard all the same.

And surely, that had to count for something.

This right here? This is the PPC. You guys are awesome. ^_^

I wish I could join in, but I have no clue what my Ordeal might be. Like, thinking back to myself in middle school, I really super wanted the world to be bigger than I thought it was, and I wanted to be part of something fantastic like being a wizard, and I sort of thought I might be able to save the world if I could just find the right people to do it with me. And if I had taken the Oath and gone on an Ordeal, I'd probably have failed hard due to overweaningness, if that's a thing, without the requisite resolve. So... not too much of a story there. {= (

~Neshomeh

[Or: that moment when you come up with an entirely different idea from what you've said before...]

Marisa sighed, overdramatic, behind her closed door. (Her. It may have been her and her brother's room, but since he wasn't in here that made it her room for now.) It was better than crying again, which would have made the yelling outside worse.

Why couldn't she just read her Transformers "Seeker Threesome" fic in peace? She'd already done her night's studying for school - in truth, if anyone asked her parents, they'd have said they would expect her transition to middle school to go quite well, as long as her IEP plan came through. Therefore, she should have the right to be untroubled by what went on in the rest of her house, which right now meant quiet!

But no. Instead of giving in to the urge to cry and thus verbalize her frustration (letting her temper get her in trouble one more time), she gave up on reading the fanfic and opened a new tab, tossing anything she could think of into her (her dad's, really) computer's open browser window search function.

Time passed, and nothing caught her interest - hardly a new affair in Marisa's world. But then there was something, after looking up what must have been the nth permutation of an AI-related search term (since she loved those kinds of stories the most - she didn't yet have the nerve to articulate that fact, she just knew it instead).

'AI, Stories, and How the World Works' Bingo, Marisa thought, a smile beginning to come back to her face at just the thought of what that title might mean. A little clicking about, and that smile was replaced by a determined frown.

Should she download this 'AR about AI' program or not? If she did, she'd be allowed to read various stories, fiction and non, about AI (and maybe other humans, too; the site wasn't clear), then prove she had by answering questions about them like she did for her school's AR program, all for free! But was it safe? If she broke her computer, she could only imagine what her Dad would say - or rather, yell.

Fortunately, there was a privacy policy, and she read it thoroughly in the way only determined children can. Ah! There was a security program involved, even its own virus protection! It'd take a lot more reading to understand, sure, but Marisa was invested now, so that was a simple task for her.

Several more tabs (and, surprisingly, no interruptions) later, and she thought she understood what this program was for and, more importantly, that it was legitimate enough that her dad could not complain! The concluding agreement she had to read aloud, sure, but she could do that quietly, right?

'This program doesn't have all the same values that the 'legalese' in other virus programs are supposed to,' she thought. 'But I don't have normal values either! If this will protect me, and my computer, and whatever I put on it, just because I said these words... and mean it, then I'm gonna do it!'

She installed the program (maybe her parents were watching TV to calm down; they still hadn't come in by this point), and when she scrolled to the bottom of the agreement (taking care to read and take notes on what was in the rest of the agreement, since she wasn't stupid and wanted to be able to answer questions when her dad and mom inevitably came back in to check on her), she took a deep breath, read the words over once, twice, and began to recite:

"In Life's Name, and for Life's Sake, I swear that I will use the Art I have been given for this purpose and no other. I swear to guard growth and ease pain, to support Life of all kinds, to respect the free will of all sentient beings-" she grinned, then, for she knew where that line was echoed, having watched the movie with her family within the last year.

"to exchange fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so, 'til universes' End."

Should that comma come before the s? Marisa wondered. Or maybe this is about all the universes I'll be reading about? Of course there'll be more than one! That made things interesting, as far as she was concerned.

"Marisa! Come help with dinner!" her mom called, breaking her concentration. Quickly hitting 'Confirm' and telling the computer to restart itself, she called back.

"Okay!"

She was going to have a lot more reading to do, but she looked forward to it. It was better than stewing in her own emotions.

((AN: Yes, "Marisa" is supposed to be 10. ^.~ 11 might be more accurate, but there are two main episodes in my life where I could plausibly have had an Ordeal and not tackled it in a morally screwed-up way, and this is the earlier one. I can write the intro for the second option and go from there, if anyone is interested?))

My dad, now retired, was a calculus teacher at a preppy Jesuit-run high school here in Arizona. He also ran the bookstore that provided students with the textbooks they needed for the various classes, plus some of the required summer reading novels. At the end of each school year, we had the big buy-back of books, where the students would give back the ones they didn't need any more for a lower-than-sale price. From a very young age, I would help dad with the sales and buy-backs. Early on, I would just count the inventory, but as I got older, I graduated up to tape-and-scissors to repair corners and torn pages, and eventually to using the hallowed glue gun, very carefully, to keep collapsing spines back together.

During the buy-back, students would always try to sell stuff that the book store didn't actually handle, like novels from the literature classes, and random textbooks from . . their houses, I guess? Every year, we would wind up with texts that the school had never even used, for subjects not taught their. We got some French texts once—not for a French class, but for basic classes written in French. All that extra stuff the students didn't want any more, we would collect at he front of the room. At the end of the sale period, Dad would donate all those extra books to the Nurses Auxiliary for their book sale fundraisers. But only after yours truly had picked his way through them and pulled out all the novels (and a little nonfiction) I hadn't read yet. I got quite a hoard out of it; I can't give an exact number since I've read a lot of them by now, but I still have fifty-seven novels and six nonfictions of that set waiting to be read. I'm sure the Manual would have found its way to me through those piles.

Of course, with my reading rate what it is, and the random order I read that pretty much lets the layout of the bookshelf pick my next reading every time, the question then becomes: would I even have read it yet? Or would I have already waited too long, and missed my chance to be a young wizard?

—doctorlit is the next episode of Hoarders: Literary Edition

It would have showed up while on holiday in Wales, tucked in among the railway timetables, tourist leaflets, and mildly outdated walking maps in one of our holiday cottages. That's actually where I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, so a Manual would have been a much better choice.

I'm picturing a title implying it was a history of magic and religion in Wales, without actually coming out and saying so (because that would be a lie). Slightly battered, and bound in a faded pale brown.

Which puts me on Ordeal in the heart of Wales... yeah, I'm going to end up time-travelling, aren't I? Or possibly in a crossover with The Dark is Rising series - we took our holidays in the same parts of Wales as The Grey King and Silver on the Tree take place in, so that's absolutely plausible.

... now I have to somehow keep from writing that...

hS

I know most of y'all are on Discord, but there's a Slack, too!

Invite link is https://youngwizards-slackin.herokuapp.com/

Don't you all flood in at once, now. ;)

Good prompt!

(okay, fair warning: this one may get a little dark. Sorry?)

I was drowning in opportunities, as a child- grew up with shelves upon shelves of books in the house, more at friends' houses, a big library a mile or so up the road... but none of those sit right with me, somehow.

I found fandom and then the PPC mostly thanks to my sister, and a whole world of words and people and ideas I'd never met before, but none of those felt quite like meeting a Manual either. I was too centered, too sure of myself to be ready to accept that my world was but a tiny fraction of a bigger reality.

I grew up and went off to college, as people do, and had opportunities there too. It could have happened while I was wandering through the old section of the library, two buildings and five half-flights of stairs away from the doorway most people used. I could have seen an odd spine on the little shelf in the ACM's little room, or on one of the 'free' shelves that appeared outside professors' offices during break. Perhaps there was a Manual there, perhaps I touched its spine before moving on- but I did move on. I started to question myself, my reality, but I still wasn't ready.

Let's be honest: I hid from it. I tried to fit back into old places, old patterns of thought, but they just didn't fit like they once had.

The moment I was ready to find my Manual was a Saturday afternoon, fading into evening, early in December 2014. Three years out of school, three years into a career, and I finally hit the breaking point and acknowledged that I was missing something fundamental, that I couldn't just ignore away the walls of the corner I'd shut myself into.

I remember walking- it was getting dark early, as Seattle does in that season. It was raining just a little, enough that there weren't many people out. I was as alone as I've ever been in the awkward space between downtown and capitol hill, wandering. Wishing for an adventure, for meaning, for something - and yes, Young Wizards was one of the things that came to mind.

There's a little bookstore, on that hillside- in a world slightly to the left of this, it's run by a pair of witches and a half-dozen cats who won't say if they're familiars. In a world slightly to the left of this, there's a shelf in the back that only shows up when people need to find it. In a world slightly to the left, I would have left the bookstore with a book in my hands and an Ordeal starting as the city lights came on.

I'd still have to deal with being trans, of course- that's not going anywhere, magic or no. What does transness look like among wizards, I wonder? Given that shapeshifting is a thing, it seems like it'd be easy to just... misplace an ill-fitting gender, on the way back.

But, yes. It's an old paper copy for me, a printing that sat and waited until I was ready to find it.

My Manual would likely be in my own house, hidden in the study in amongst the really, really old books that my hoarder antiques dealer grandad collected before his untimely death. They are absolutely everywhere, and the overwhelming majority have a sort of forest-green binding and cream pages that feel like they have a magic all of their own.

Now, a PPC Manual, well... there's no actual rule talking about how big a Manual has to be, right? Or what form it has to take. We already know that a lot of agents started out answering want-ads in the classified sections of their local newspaper. Why couldn't a Manual take that kind of form, with an intriguingly bananas front page headline (my favourite one, and this is real, is "ALIEN OYSTERS INVADE") to draw in and ensnare some curious soul who might make for a willing/vaguely competent agent. Just my two cents. =]

At a dusty second-hand bookshop, where my family stopped to rest during an interstate car trip, and said we could pick two books. I expect I would've picked up two other books, started walking towards the till, and then noticed the Manual and swapped one of the books, on a complete whim...

^The true story of the day I found a copy of SYWTBAW, which led me to fanfic, which led me to the PPC, which led me to meet hS and marry him, which led to basically my entire life. But I'm still bloomin' miffed that the Oath never took for me.

-Kaitlyn, on Errantry

I'd get my wizardry manual at Twice-Sold Tales, a used bookstore near my college. And then when I sat down to give it a read-through, I'd end up reading more than I intended, getting interested, and becoming a wizard because Twice-Sold Tales has bookstore cats, and one of them would definitely sit on my lap, start purring, and not get off until it was too late.

My PPC manual, I'd probably find in the little personal library I've collected over time.

If Min Ra were recruited to the PPC via a manual, she would probably have snuck into her dad's office and found it among the many scrolls/books/papers lying around. It would have stood out to her because most of the other papers were adult stuff, and it would have been tucked away in some corner, so she would have figured that he wouldn't miss it and stolen it for her own use.

Effie Raptor wouldn't really have a manual, as she was recruited directly by Min Ra.

Though, to be more accurate, my high school's library might have been better.

And it'd be a book, of course! =P

I can think of a few places the Powers might have given it to me. It might have been in the school library that I spent so many days in because [Rude Language Regarding Pollen]. But I think it probably would have actually been my iPod itself. It's how I got the book, and if I were to take the Oath, it probably would have been via me repeating after the narrator and waiting to see what happened.

Some kind of library, not just the one at my school seems to be the most likely option.

(Also should I be happy I caught the reference right away? I wonder if I should go back to those books...)

(Which, as it so happens, is where I found the first Young Wizards book! But only the first. I'd like to read the others sometime.)

I was always hiding in the library in my free time when I was in school, and I was actually a library assistant in middle school. I probably would have found my Manual while re-shelving books, and been curious about this new tome I couldn't remember seeing before...

Before I clicked, I was pretty sure you were talking about YW, but it crossed my mind it could have been the PPC, too.

Then I thought, what if the Flowers got in on the Powers' strategy of presenting Manuals to people under the right circumstances? That might be an interesting way to recruit from supernatural-friendly universes. Or even mundane ones, if they slipped a few dog-eared hard copies on library shelves, random used book stands, those Little Free Libraries that keep popping up, and the like. Most people would pick the thing up, go "yeah right," and walk away, but every so often, a fan with the right balance of keen and crazy would come along and follow the instructions on the back cover... {= )

Well, when I say "the PPC Manual," I probably just mean Volume One: So You've Decided to Become a PPC Agent.

~Neshomeh

Probably middle school, too. I remember hanging out on the floor in the corner where they had the fantasy/sci-fi books, looking for the next McCaffrey or L'Engle I hadn't read yet.

Trivia: I was actually banned from having novels with me in class, because if I got bored in math I'd read instead of listen. Maybe math class should have been more interesting. {= P

Could potentially have been one of the first to access a Manual on a computer, too, back in Ye Olden Days of Dial-up. They were fairly common in schools when and where I was a kid, and I had an MSN chat habit for a while. Eventually turned into an AIM habit, and a fan board habit, and a Neopets RP habit, and a PPC habit...

Y'know, I could see the Manual hiding out on ff.net and other such archives.

~Neshomeh