Free Worldweavers: Spellspam by Alma Alexander Page B

ordinariness, but there was something…different. A glitter in the air. A sense of strangeness, and change.
    Someone sneezed explosively.
    “Cease treating the matter with such floccinaucinihilipilification! 2 ” Mr. Siffer shouted, and then stopped, startled at what had just come out of his own mouth. “These are incomprehensibilities!” he roared. “Something is starting to transpire here that I do not comprehend!”
    “And isn’t that a verisimilitude,” Magpie said, and looked just as startled as Mr. Siffer had a moment before.
    “It’s certainly disconcerting…,” Thea began, and then slapped herself on the side of the head with an open palm. “Aaargh! Now I am committing the same ridiculousness! And I haven’t even seen the pestilential spellspam! How did I get afflicted with it?”
    Ben, his eyes still watering from his sneeze, bent forward across his desk, catercorner to the two girls. “We all are,” he said. “Everyone is using hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian 3 words. Right after he said…‘discombobulated.’”
    It took Thea a moment or two, and then she put her face in her hands, shaking her head.
    “Oh, for the love of everything sacred. Thoseoriginal spellspams…the thing that got LaTasha…they never seemed to affect more than just the one person, the first person who saw it. But this one—this one is like the old ones, like the ones Dad cleaned up in the feral libraries. It’s spread by the spoken word…it’s airborne .”

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1.
    T ELL PRINCIPAL HARRIS THAT I will send… Paul Winthrop’s last words after Thea had taken the spellspam problem to her father had seemed to indicate he would send help.
    She didn’t know what kind of help she should be expecting—but when someone did come, it was not what anyone had expected.
    The three visitors arrived almost unnoticed, as the school was frantically trying to cope with the aftermath of the polysyllabic epidemic. Classes had been suspended to avoid further spread of the ‘infection’; the library and the cafeteria were declared out of bounds, and students were asked to remain in their rooms until everyone hadbeen cleared. The teachers, with Mrs. Chen at the head of the team, tried to deal with the most affected cases first—a couple of students, including Ben, had had to be removed to the infirmary because exposure to the spellspam had triggered actual physical symptoms. The whole school was in an uproar, but it was the infirmary that was the most urgent center of concern, and it was there that the three visitors presented themselves to the nurse.
    “What seems to be the problem?” said one of the trio, a young woman with skin the color of milky coffee and her hair in long dreadlocks down her back.
    The nurse, who had been surprised in the act of removing a plastic bucket into which someone had just been sick, looked up in astonishment.
    “I’ve got sick kids,” she said. “That would seem to be the problem. Can I help you?”
    “Luana,” said one of the young woman’s companions in a tone of mild rebuke. He was much older than she, a veteran with deep lines on his face and grizzled salt-and-pepper hair. “My name is Keir Adama,” he said, looking as though he would have stepped forward to shake the nurse’s hand by way of introduction, but thinking betterof it. “We’re from the Federal Bureau of Magic. We’ve been sent to help with the situation. May we speak to someone in charge?”
    The nurse glanced down into the bucket in her hands and pressed her lips together in disapproval.
    “You are. In here, that person would be me. But you probably want Margaret Chen. I,” said the nurse