Suspension of Belief

At first it had been just one or two, but the more often it happened, the larger the number seemed to grow. Pretty soon Collin was conjuring ten, fifteen, twenty at once, and no one had any idea where they were coming from or how they were getting there. Collin himself was clueless as to how he was even conjuring anything, having disbelieved in magic his entire life.

But when he'd started sneezing up handkerchiefs, coughing up little plastic balls, and shaking coins out of his ears, well, it was a little difficult to continue that disbelief.

His younger sister joked that he must have angered a stage magician. Collin didn't find that joke funny, because in all likelihood, he probably had. After all, he'd spent years writing articles and making films explaining the physics behind a stage magician's tricks. He had probably revealed so many trade secrets that he'd angered more than just one, or even a few.

The so-called magicians with larger arsenals didn't really care, because the simple tricks he'd been exploiting were mere parlor tricks for them, things to entertain and prepare the mind of the audience for the belief that anything was possible.

He would have been a fool to go after some of their tricks, but even then, some of the more interesting ones he did tend to at least explore, in segments he liked to think of as "how it could be done".

This, however... well, he had no idea how to stop it, and no idea who'd caused it in the first place. All Collin could wonder, at this point, was one thing. What would happen next?