For the backstory: I was on a hike through a forest. It wasn’t too mountainous so the hike was pretty easy and the weather was super nice. I usually go with other people but this time I went by myself so I could just listen to music and not have to talk to anyone. I did this on a day off, which was a saturday, and it was about 8:00 a.m. when it hadn’t gotten hot yet when I came across a little cave. Note that this is a hiking trail I hadn’t gone on before so when I saw this I got curious and decided to explore it. I went inside and the cave seemed to go on forever. I just used my phone’s flashlight and I probably walked for about 5 minutes, without much of the cave really changing at all before it opened up into a room. The weird thing was I felt like there’s a lot of electricity in the air. It was sort of like being extremely excited but different in the way of just feeling like I was being charged up by something, like being connected to a phone charger. The room wasn’t too big, I would say the ceiling was about 15 ft high and the room was about 20x20 ft. I noticed that in one spot of the room that came to a corner there was a crack in the rock that looked to be about an inch or two wide. I went over and shown the flashlight and saw it looks to be a stick, and it was close enough to the edge that I was able to stick my fingers in and grab the end of it. It looked like the Elder wand. I figured someone had brought it in and lost it. I thought it was cool so I decided to keep it and I just continued my hike after that.
Fast forward to Sunday I was just on my computer playing video games and I looked over at the wand on my desk. I decided I wanted to make a video just messing around with it, kind of like a skit. When I did that I was going to make a video about wingardium leviosa-ing a rock and not much more than that. When I set up the camera, hit record, and then did the spell at the Rock I fell back in shock. The Rock was actually hovering in midair, about a foot from the ground. I stared for about 15 seconds and then stood back up and slowly walked over to it. I then bent over and picked it up and it seemed that the spell broke when I touched it because I felt the weight in my hand. I looked around with the rock and then decided to try it again so I dropped it. When I did the spell again it floated but this time up to about chest level. I noticed that it was floating up to the height that I was pointing my wand at, so it was staying in a spot where the wand was pointing at it. I was still in shock but this time I decided to look around and try out other spells. I tried accio with my phone which made it fly over to me, I tried aquamante which made my water bottle that I like to keep by my bed burst open and water fly all over the place. I think I still need to work on that one.
It took a while for the shock to wear off but once that happened I ended up having a panic attack over this but after a few days I got more or less used to it. Over the first week of discovering this wand power I had made a bunch of videos and decided to upload them to youtube, video editing is good enough that people aren’t going to think it’s real. Once I started getting used to it it actually became pretty fun, I was gaining traction on that YouTube channel because I was making better skits and it wasn’t too hard to make them. So far I had only done them either inside the house or in the fenced off backyard. For context I live with my parents, I’m only 18 and I’m an only child and both of my parents work so it’s pretty easy to keep this one hidden from them. And I was having a lot of fun and it was looking like I could make money off of this because it only took about a month to hit 10,000 subscribers and I know it speeds up as it gets bigger. Anyways after about a month I got more confident and decided to take it to school and show my friends.
By this point I was still a senior in high school but we only had two months left in school. Anyways I walked to the cafeteria during lunch with the wand in my backpack and sat at the table that I always sat at with my friends. “Hey I gotta show you something.” “What?” Jerry asked me, “it’s not really something I can show you here, we’re going to have to go behind the school and show you.” “Really Jake?” Tom asked, “I just got my food and haven’t eaten any of it yet.” “Trust me you’ll find this worth it.” The two guys followed me behind the school and my heart was beating really fast. Despite the new confidence I was still pretty anxious about showing them. I had no idea how they would react even though I knew both of them for years.
I got to the back of the school and pulled the Elder wand out of my backpack. Jerry laughed, “Are you serious? You took us away from lunch for that?” Tom looked slightly annoyed, “this better be good because I’m already wishing that I stayed in the cafeteria.” I smirked at them. The anxiety I felt before about showing them was wearing off because of the excitement in proving them wrong and seeing the shock on their faces. I took a pose aiming the wand at some sprinklers that were going about 50 ft away and said aquamante. Immediately the water shooting out of the sprinklers started floating over to us. Both Jerry and Tom ended up screaming, which was surprising and really funny because they never did that even when I would sneak up on them and scare them. But that only lasted about a second and I looked back to see them both on their butts cowaring a little bit and in shock. I made the water swirl around in front of them for a few seconds and then let it drop.
“Wha-whaaa” “bruh. Bruuuh” they couldn’t talk for a minute and they ended up asking me where I got the wand and how I was doing that. I said that I had no idea how it worked but I found the wand in a cave on my solo hike on a previous Saturday and thought it was just a prop that someone left there until I discovered it worked. I also ended up telling them about my YouTube channel and they were amazed but also wondered why I didn’t tell them about the channel. “Eh, I didn’t want to tell you guys yet, or lie about the wand.” I think they were happy that I didn’t want to like to them. “Bro, we should have fun with this. Not just on YouTube but also missing with people in public.” Tom said, “yeah and just make money with it.” Jerry added. “Hold on, we can’t do that.” I said, “how will people react when they find out?”
“They would react in the way we did, but you could become rich and famous man!”
“Thank you for everything you could do to help people in need.”
Actually, Jerry did have a good point with helping people with it. I somehow didn’t think of using it like that but I still didn’t want to go public with it because I was afraid of what people would do, especially to try to get the wand. Plus I didn’t really care much for getting rich and famous. Maybe it was because I was still at the point of life where my parents were paying for pretty much everything that I didn’t care about money very much.
We ended up 10 minutes late to our next period class because of this whole thing and luckily my teacher was pretty cool so he didn’t give me a tardy. I didn’t want to have to explain why to my parents since I still hadn’t told them about the wand yet. After school Tom and Jerry couldn’t hang out because they both had plans but we were planning on meeting up at the weekend. We just had school the next day and then we could mess around with it. Even though I did want to keep it a secret I did want to tell my parents at some point and I also did like the idea of messing with people. And using it to help people.
After getting home I put off working on homework and just laid on my bed with the wand in hand just twirling it around slowly while I looked back and forth between it and the ceiling just thinking. I had suddenly gained a huge amount of potential and I was wondering what to do with it. I knew that I could and probably should be using it to help people but I was worried that people would come after it and me my friends and my family could end up getting hurt. This was probably enough to justify keeping it a secret, which maybe doing the YouTube videos was stupid because of that, but I felt like I should really be using it help people. And I really wanted to do it anyways too. After about 20 minutes of laying there and just thinking I decided I was going to go public with it and start helping people. But I decided to use it to secretly mess with people first to try to get an idea of how they would react.
After school that Friday I met with Tom and Jerry at our lockers, which are right next to each other, and we decided to walk over to the forest we like to hike in. It was different from the one I found the wand at but it’s big enough that there’s a lot of area we could use the wand in without anyone seeing. We spent some time trying to figure it out and I let Tom and Jerry use it too and then we ended up walking over to a grocery store. “Grab that ladies lettuce.” Jerry whispered to me. I smiled and used a spell to levitate a head of lettuce in a ladies cart while she wasn’t looking and when she looked she yelped and threw a bunch of ramen noodle packages that she was holding which landed all over the place. As soon as she yelped I dropped it back in the shopping cart. We were about 30 ft away or so, sort of pretending not to be looking, and we had to stifle our laughter in that moment. Tom said, “Gimme I want to try.” I handed it to him. By that point the lady had stood back up and was gathering her ramen noodles off the floor. Of course that meant that she wasn’t looking when her shopping cart started rolling away. She heard it and looked up and then stood up and started saying “hey, hey!” And she chased after it. Tom slowly accelerated it so she couldn’t catch up to it and by the time the cart rammed into a shelf at the end of the aisle about 50 ft away from us it was going a good 15 miles an hour. That was enough to knock it over and spill out the half field cart worth of groceries on the floor. This time we couldn’t hold it in and just started laughing. The lady ended up glancing at us but she probably didn’t think it could have been us.
I’ll fast forward a bit because there was a lot of messing around with this but over the course of the rest of the school year we ended up messing around with it a lot and we tried to be careful enough to not let people realize it was us. When summer break hit we decided to finally go public. We looked around online for scientists and researchers and inventors and we ended up going to an institute to show people what we had and what our ideas were. We essentially said that we wanted to use it to help people, maybe we could use it for healing or new inventions or gathering resources that were needed, etc.
Of course someone at the institute ended up going public and we became really famous and infamous really quickly. We ended up with news stations coming to our small town and trying to interview us, Jerry was the only one of us three that owned a car and before we would walk around a lot since everything is close together but once the news reporters started trying to talk to us we started driving everywhere because they would just follow us around when we were trying to walk across town. We weren’t telling them where it was found or who owned it, since I think we all just shared it by this point and didn’t really have ownership of it. And of course it kept getting more publicity over time, especially with my YouTube channel. I ended up deciding it was stupid to do it and that it was stupid to not have taken the videos down earlier especially before going public because now everyone knew about it and people had saved my videos and then uploaded them themselves which meant that I couldn’t get rid of them. and when I had gone public my channel shot up to more than a million subscribers before I managed to get the videos down. We were essentially getting harassed and it even got to the point where it was hard to hold down a job because people would be constantly bugging us and we couldn’t really do much. I wondered if famous people ever felt like this.
Anyways long story short it’s been about a year since I found it and I’m still living at home with my parents because of the no job thing. And luckily scientists have studied it enough that they’re starting to use what they’ve learned to help others so we’ve done that at least. But me and my friends ended up signing legal documents to claim ownership of the wand, especially since the original owner never came forward. At least we don’t think they did. There are a whole bunch of people that tried to claim it was theirs but they couldn’t prove it. Now we always have new stations and paparazzi outside of our house and we take turns holding on to the wand and secretly giving it to each other so they don’t know who has it. Each one of us owns a safe now that can hold the wand in it, so at least if someone breaks in they’re not going to be able to use it. That’s especially good because I don’t want anyone using it for destruction. But last week someone broke into my house presumably to try to steal it and about 3 months ago someone broke into Jerry’s house. We’re all living with our parents right now and our lives are just at a standstill for the most part. We spend most of our time at home to avoid the crowds of people, and doing online college so we can do that at least. Tom managed to find a job working completely online at home and Jerry and I are trying to do the same.
Hopefully things turn out better for us.