Witchcraft 101: Party Trick

The fluorescent glow of their phones cast an eerie light on the faces of Liam, Chloe, Maya, and Noah. Their apartment, usually a chaotic mess of textbooks and instant ramen, was now a digital playground. “Witchcraft 101’s new augmented reality module, promised to turn their mundane world into a realm of mystic energy. They’d downloaded it for kicks, a novel party trick to impress their friends.

“Dude, look!” Liam exclaimed, his voice a mix of awe and amusement. “I’ve got a pentagram shimmering over the pizza box!”

Chloe, ever the skeptic, rolled her eyes but couldn’t help a small gasp as she aimed her phone at their coffee table. An intricate, glowing altar, complete with digital candles and a smoking censer, materialized on the worn surface. “Okay, that’s actually kind of cool,” she admitted, tapping a virtual rune.

They spent hours, giggling, projecting AR spell components, “seeing” swirling magical energies around their houseplants, and attempting to “bind” imaginary spirits in their fridge. It was all a game, a high-tech Ouija board for the digital age. The app’s AI, a chipper, disembodied voice they named “Glyph,” guided them through rudimentary “spells,” each one promising a harmless magical bubble, a playful peek into the unseen.

“Alright, last one,” Maya announced, scrolling through the app’s extensive spell list. “The ‘Greater Sigil of Spatial Aperture.’ Sounds fancy.”

Noah, engrossed in trying to make a digital raven perch on his cat, barely looked up. “Just don’t open a portal to the demon dimension, May.”

Maya scoffed, tracing the complex pattern on her screen. “Please. It’s just AR. Glyph says it creates a ‘localized energetic flux for enhanced spirit communication.’ Probably just makes the ghost look extra glowy.”

As she completed the last swipe, a low hum emanated not from her phone, but from the air itself. The digital altar on the coffee table flickered, and then, with a sharp, pixelated tear, a shimmering, opaque rift appeared in the center of their living room. It wasn’t just on their screens anymore. It was there.

Glyph’s usually cheerful voice crackled, laced with an unfamiliar static. “Warning: Spatial anomaly detected. Coding error in spell matrix. Reality integrity compromised. Initiating emergency shutdown protocol… failed.”

A collective gasp filled the room. The rift, a swirling vortex of green and purple pixels, pulsed with an unnerving energy. Then, a form began to coalesce within it. It was wispy, indistinct, like a broken video file of a human shape, its edges glitching and dissolving.

“What the hell is that?” Chloe whispered, her voice trembling. She dropped her phone, but the image of the flickering entity remained burned into her vision. When she picked it back up, the creature was clearer through the lens, its distorted face contorting in what looked like agony or rage.

Liam, ever the pragmatist, tried to swipe the app closed. Nothing. The rift remained, and now another, smaller, more insect-like phantom began to phase through.

“They’re digital phantoms,” Maya breathed, recalling a line from the app’s lore section. “Unable to fully manifest, but… they can manipulate digital and electrical signals.”

Suddenly, the lights in the apartment flickered wildly. Their smart speaker began to play a cacophony of distorted screams. Noah’s laptop, open on the table, displayed a chaotic stream of corrupted code. The phantoms, visible only through their phones, seemed to feed on the digital chaos.

One of the larger entities, a hunched, spectral figure, reached out a translucent hand towards Chloe’s phone. A jolt coursed through her, and the phone flew from her grasp, landing with a crack. The screen went black, then displayed a single, red error message: “SYSTEM_CORRUPT.”

“They’re becoming more real!” Liam yelled, backing away.

The air grew cold, and a chill seeped into their bones. The phantoms weren’t just a visual trick anymore. They were affecting their world, a new kind of haunting, not of rattling chains and cold spots, but of crashed hard drives and corrupted data.

“Wait,” Noah said, his eyes wide as he stared at his phone, which still displayed the glitching rift and the growing swarm of entities. “Glyph’s warning… ‘Coding error in spell matrix.’ What if… what if we can delete them?”

Chloe, still rubbing her tingling hand, looked up. “Delete a ghost? Noah, that’s insane.”

“But they’re not ghosts, not really,” Maya interjected, a spark of understanding in her eyes. “They’re digital phantoms, right? A glitch in reality created by a coding error. Maybe… maybe they can be patched.”

Just then, a new entity began to emerge from the rift. It was different. Less monstrous, more… geometric. Its form was composed of shimmering, interlocking lines of code, and it moved with a deliberate, almost protective grace. As it fully manifested, it positioned itself between the students and the more aggressive, formless phantoms.

The geometric entity began pulsing with a soft, blue light. On their phones, a new icon appeared on the “Witchcraft 101” app – a glowing wrench. A notification popped up: “Initiating debug sequence. Manual input required. Override corrupted spell matrix? Yes/No.”