The old priest now gone, the Guild Master looks at me, seemingly in a deep reflection.
She slowly stands up. Holy fuck. She’s at least two fifty, I’m a fucking dwarf or what, are we really the same species, the Goddess before said the Eisure females were about the size of human males. Your sister is the human male! WHAT HUMAN MALE? THE HULK?!
I still have larger shoulders I think, barely. My win.
As she walks towards me, I’m forced to look up to see her face. Shit I look like a kid looking up to his mommy.
“You’re quite small.” She says matter-of-factly. No shit, Sherlock, you’re the one who’s a weird size here.
“I like to think I’m of a more practical height, but I’ve indeed yet to meet an Eisure smaller than me, to be fair.” I’m one heighty for fucks sake… Maybe I should’ve really asked to be taller? No, I’m too used to this body size, I don’t even know if I would have managed the emergency landing if I was taller than this.
“Oh there are plenty who are smaller than you, kids, mostly.” I can’t tell if she’s being serious or not. Visibly done speaking, she walks up to a cord hanging on a side wall and reaches out to pull on it three times. Her hands are long and slender, the white gloves she wears open up at the fingertips to let the nails go through, the nails are a bit longer than mine and are capped with gold much like her ears. A few seconds later, a light knocking sound comes from the right side of the room, the same receptionist that greeted us when entering the building comes in from a side door. Did she run up the stairs?
“Guild Master, you called?”
“Prina, go get the man some clothes.” She glances at me, then looks like she’s hit by a divine revelation or something. “Wait, actually, go fetch one of my old uniforms, you know the ones I wore for fencing as a kid, should fit him.”
Excuse me?
“It will be done, Guild Master.” The receptionist bends into a deep bow as she acquiesces. I thought she looked human but the two small curved horns above her ears clearly say otherwise, they were hidden by her hair until now. There’s also something big on her back but she’s almost facing me and I can’t really see.
The small receptionist, well, small compared to everyone else in the room, goes up to a large window on the other side of the room. She’s wearing a backless kind of blue and white maid outfit, same colors as the Guild Master minus the gold. On her back are two neatly folded long leathery wings. The muscles at the base of her wings are larger than my arms, and what little musculature I can make out on her upper back would make any female athlete on Earth hide in shame. It's nuts she manages to hide all this behind her small frame.
Without a word she proceeds to open the window and jumps out. After a second, she passes before the window again, going up this time, her wide wings shooting her up in the sky, creating an updraft sucking some of the air out of the room on the way… I want wings now. I was fucking dumb not to ask for that during character creation was I not? ...
The guild master waves her hand and the window closes by itself in a rather abrupt fashion. Something is moving around in the air but I don’t quite understand what it is, I don’t see nothing.
“Hum, about those clothes…” This time I’m pretty sure she was serious, the winged girl didn’t look like she thought she was joking either. Am I really about to wear this woman’s childhood clothes? Is the world upside down? Or is it me that’s upside down?
“Oh do not worry, you will look great in it I’m sure.” She proceeds to nod to herself multiple times. That’s not really what worries me but I don’t really want to linger on that.
“Veon already filled me in on your whole memory until now. You really went and brawled a Gegeine Monkey on the way here? You don’t look all that bad for it, I can’t see a scratch on you.”
“Well, we spent a lot of time just dodging each other, his meat was disgusting let me tell you.”
“Pahaha, I’ll agree with you on that, we do not usually eat them.” Her ears jiggle up and down as she laughs. Her laughter is quite loud, she’s a loud person in general, maybe it’s the large lungs doing that.
“I’m taking you to the Identity Stone next, do you know how to use mana?” She switched from laughter to seriousness in an instant.
“No idea. I only know you use it to do magic?”
“Ah, that’s what I thought, you didn’t even react when I scanned you earlier.”
Oh so that’s what it was.
“Sit down.” She says after thinking for a second, pointing at a single chair facing a small blackboard in a corner of the room behind me. “I’m giving you a crash course on magic, be thankful Veon is vouching for you, my tuition fees are very high.” As she holds up her open hand, a long metal stick holding a small piece of yellow chalk on top flies from a shelf directly to her palm.
“Just a few years ago this lecture would have been a lot different but there have been some big breakthroughs in our understanding of mana in recent times, I don’t expect you to pick up everything, especially in the theoretical part, but I’ll use you as a test to see how much a kid would understand.” She went into teacher mode real fast, must be something she does often.
The chair is very comfortable but a bit large. She starts by drawing a circle on the board and divides it in quarters.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“About a quarter of our universe is made of pure raw mana” She explains, cross hatching a quarter of the circle. “A small portion is the matter we’re made of, us and everything you can see” She then divides up and colors up a small slice of the circle. “The rest, we have no idea what it is, but the gravitation mages studying the field are adamant it’s there, else the movement of planets would make no sense.”
Wait, this is all awfully familiar. Mana is non baryonic dark matter ?! I traveled space in a magic fuelled ship?... ‘As for what’s considered an artifact, any and all magic items, the dark matter quantum reactor from your ship would have qualified as one’ That’s what the goddess said, I can’t believe I didn’t pick that up! Earth is about to turn into a wholly different place once they find out about this shit, and I don’t doubt they will.
“Hey are you even listening? You’ll need to understand the basics to activate the Identity Stone. I’m serious.”
“Sorry I was lost in thoughts. Please continue.”
“Mana exists in what we would call a fourth dimension. It has mass but no form. To say it simply, it can interact with the world but the world generally cannot interact with it.”
“Despite that mana is everywhere, so it’s obvious that your body, and everyone’s, would be full of it. Our brains produce a powder that’s naturally able to react with mana, the body then stores that powder in a cavity near the heart, in the center of the torso, which slowly accumulates and forms a crystal.”
“We call that powder manalite, and the crystal is usually referred to as a mana crystal, even though it’s made of compressed manalite.”
“It’s believed insects are unable to use mana because their brain is too different and inadequate to produce manalite. The mana crystals are these purple stones you have in your bag, they can get about as big as a fist. Some very select creatures may have bigger ones but that is quite rare. At birth they are about the size of a grain of sand”
“Let me reiterate, as this is very important, you have no mana stocked inside you, only the crystal made of manalite, this is what we use to do magic. This means that if you were to somehow find yourself in an environment deprived of mana, the manalite would be useless. There are some spells and creatures able to scatter the ambient mana, making you unable to use any magic, staying away from such things is the golden rule of any half decent mage.”
“The spells you can use are dependent on your natural affinities, you can only use spells of that kind. Manalite in itself doesn’t have an affinity, but you can only use manalite you produced yourself. For that reason mana crystals that you harvest from the dead cannot be used to cast spells.”
Damn she isn’t giving me any time to think.
“You will probably want to take some lessons on artifacts and runecrafting later on but I won’t be the one to teach you that. All you need to remember about extracted mana crystals is that we can still use them to produce energy from mana which is why we use it as a currency.” She continues with a steady voice.
“Wait, can you change your natural affinities, how are they determined in the first place ?”
She’s a bit too enthusiastic about teaching, it's hard to find the timing to ask a question, but I need to know this.
“Oh, good question, a good part of it is built up by what you do and how you think during your childhood. It is determined by the experiences you have, your understanding of the world, and sometimes just what you want it to be. A farmer might develop a general affinity for water or healing from taking care of plants. But the same farmer with dreams of becoming a knight might gain an affinity for body reinforcement instead, since he’s actively working with his body all day.”
While explaining all of this, she illustrates things with crude drawings, she’s really, really bad at drawing, her characters look like gingerbread cookies.
“Changing affinity is a bit harder once it is developed but it can be done by radically changing your lifestyle, however the more you actually use it to cast spells the harder it becomes to change, when you reach a level where your crystal is the size of a coin it’s essentially set in stone. Does this answer your question?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“As for how exactly the manalite is able to turn the mana into the spells we use, nobody knows exactly, but it has to do with your brain. When you cast magic, a part of the crystal turns back to powder, and makes its way to the brain before moving to the part of the body that will utilize the magic. When it’s there it reacts with the ambient mana to have it produce the effects you imbued it with.”
That means you can no longer affect the magic after you cast it, no? Good to know.
“The amount of the crystal we can consume this way at any given time is limited but the more you use it, the more you’re able to use it in the future, like a muscle, the maximum size of your crystal is also limited by this, you can use about a tenth of your crystal per day as a general rule with it still being safe, this is also about what you regenerate in a day.”
“You’ll know when you’re starting to use too much of your crystal when your whole body starts to be sluggish, and you get a piercing headache, you can’t miss it really. Going further is dangerous and if you pass a breaking point, you will suffer more lasting damage depending on how far you go, ranging from the simple inability to use magic for a few days, to a complete shattering of your crystal, which means you’ll never be able to use magic again.”
“As for your body’s creation of the manalite, there are a few ways to speed up the process, but the widely accepted rule is eat well and get enough sleep. Most of the manalite replenishment occurring during deep sleep, your crystal is usually fully rebuilt by the time you wake up.”
She crosses her arms under her chest, making her bust appear a lot bigger, although not much can be seen under the loose uniform jacket. Her face is expressing the satisfaction of transmitting her knowledge. She really seems to enjoy teaching a lot.
“With that we are done with the theory, any questions?”
“Earlier you referred to spells, what do you exactly mean by that?”
“Ok, so, uhm, when you use magic, the manalite goes from your crystal to your brain. You must think about what exactly you want the magic to do, in order for the manalite to be able to react correctly with mana and produce the effect you want. This requires a lot of focus. What we call a spell is a magic you’ve cast enough time that you no longer need any focus to use it. When you have a spell mastered well, you then have the options to either focus more when you cast it to fine tune it, try to expand on it and maybe create a new spell from the roots of the old one, or just use it as is with minimum effort.”
She pauses as if to let me some time to reflect and understand, something she had not done until then.
“Alright, now is the practical session.”
Already! That was a five seconds pause! I need time to ponder on all this, lady!
But I don’t dare say anything, with me sitting and her standing up, her head is at least a full meter higher than mine, which is quite intimidating, also, I just don’t want to ruin her fun.
I have a highly trained memory anyway, I’m not forgetting a word of this.