That was why it was probably not a stretch to assume that his parents had been snooping through his things long before he had noticed evidence of it. To be honest, he wasn't even mad. It showed they cared in their own nosy, intrusive way. But it couldn't go on, not now when he needed to start keeping a record of the things he had seen. Giant space centipedes and fancy death parties begged to be documented and puzzled over, but not where mundane humans might find the account.
There had been a time when looking to the other side for answers hadn't been possible, but now that it was, Chester considered it only after he contemplated moving out entirely. He came up with the notion of a magical secret code while sitting in the back of Professor Mercer's class, and his sudden grin was an immediate indicator that he wasn't paying attention. All he needed now was a clubhouse and a couple of actual friends and he'd have the best secret society in all of Ashdown.
He spent the rest of the day with ciphers and secrets on his mind, and after all of his classes were over, Chester bought a new composition book at the campus store and settled down to think. If he was going to create a proper code, it would behoove him to begin with the alphabet. He slowly began to write, concentrating on each curve, straight line, and dot as they left the end of his pen.
Chester paused, pondering what he had written with silent curiosity. It certainly wasn't what he had set out to put down, but he wasn't quite sure what use it was either. It was a fairly horrible code, all things considered, a collection of shapes that so closely resembled the letters they were meant to replace that they were functionally useless. The intriguing part was not that he had made up a crappy code, but that he had done so without truly meaning to.
He began to write once more, this time concentrating on obscuring his words with invisible power, keeping them secret. In an effort to constrain his focus to how he was writing instead of what, he chose an old stock phrase, watching each letter take shape again.
Chester smirked, a giddy feeling of accomplishment worming through him. The attempt was amateurish and sloppy. The ciphers that weren't obviously representing real letters were near illegible, strung together in an irregular, indecipherable way. But he had done it again. He had encoded something with magic. This demanded further experimentation. It was something to examine over time, and he was always up for that. With one last look at what he had written, Chester closed his book and started home.
