Discovering, or maybe establishing the discipline of Alchemy, or potion-crafting or whatever my current pursuit might be called in the future was a pain. The biggest problem was, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to achieve, or whether my ideas were actually metaphysically feasible and I failed because I made mistakes or the ingredients were wrong, or if my ideas were impossible in the first place, making the experiments redundant. In scientific terms, I lacked a hypothesis I could test and falsify, instead, I was pretty much throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. So far, not a lot.
I had been trying to extract elemental essence from the various magical plants I had gathered over the last few days, trying to increase my understanding of elements that had eluded me so far, like Nature Magic. Expanding my horizons, so to speak, but sadly, I hadn’t managed anything worthwhile.
“What are we going to do tonight, Mistress?” Lia quietly asked me, moving into my laboratory area.
“The same thing we do every night, Carnelia,” I replied, suppressing the snicker at the interaction. “We are trying to take over the world!” I paused, before shrugging, “Well, not really, I think taking over the world would be incredibly stupid. Have you seen the state of the thing, it’s a massive mess, I certainly don’t want to be responsible for cleaning everything up.”
“So, what are we doing instead?” she prodded and I shrugged again. The problem was, I really didn’t know. Maybe I needed to take a break, to simply relax, let the darkness of the night wash over me. Since the change, there hadn’t really been a chance for that, I had tried to keep myself occupied, to make the most of my time. At most, I had been petting Silva, or cuddling with her, that was the closest to a hobby I could claim.
“What do you do for fun? Or what have you done before the change?” I asked, knowing that if I tried to answer that question myself, it wouldn’t help my current situation. The only hobbies I had been involved in were Road to Purgatory and my training with Mrs Wu, neither of which worked any longer. Sure, there was still training, but it no longer served as relaxation, at least not in the sense it did before the change. Which was kind of sad. Similarly, I doubted that my capsule would bring me to Mundus any longer, though I still wanted to take a look at one at some point. But travelling to my old apartment, assuming it hadn’t burned down in the meantime, would take the whole night, at least if I wanted to be careful.
“Stupid stuff, really. Social media, music, books, people at school, it’s all so petty in hindsight. Why did I ever care what some band posted, why did I ever care about some guy, far away, screaming at the moon? So…” she paused, shaking her head, obviously lost for words. Sadly, I didn’t have any words for her either, maybe it was just a problem of a privileged society. A safe society, a place where idling the hours of the day away wasn’t an immediate threat to your continued survival. Maybe that could be called a boring society, a place where entertainment became the most important commodity. Now, the most important commodity was power, or maybe the safety that power provided.
“So, we both need new hobbies? Or at least something to do to keep us from going insane - More insane, that is?” I muttered, knowing that some sort of relaxation was necessary.
“I think I’ll just go for a walk. Not trying to find anything, or fight anything, just to see the night,” I decided, only for a grin to spread across my face when I remembered something. “Say, is there some high building nearby? Maybe a large wind turbine, or some sort of high chimney from a power plant? Anything?” I asked, hoping to find a good destination.
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Lia simply looked at me with confusion across her face but told me about a nearby factory that had a decently high tower. It wasn’t as high as I’d like, at least by her description, but it should be enough.
For once, there was nobody with me as I moved through the night. I had asked Lia and Silva to stay behind, even if that meant I had to keep track of my location as the best navigator amongst the three of us was Silva. It wouldn’t be a real problem, the last few days moving around the fields had given me a good idea where what was, but still, just running blindly wouldn’t work.
It was quite liberating, to move around alone. Simply shrouding myself in the shadows of the night, turning into little more than a ghost, unseen, unheard, unnoticed, thanks to a combination of my cloak and a direct concealment spell. I could move into touching range of sleeping animals, though I never tried actually reaching out, and they failed to notice me. Just out of curiosity, I snuck up on a couple of calves, simply studying their physique and trying to see what differences the change had brought upon them. I couldn’t see any obvious differences, not with the calves at least, but that might just be due to my lack of prior knowledge. I didn’t know the exact anatomy of a calf from before the change, just a relatively basic image of one, so there easily could be changes just no obviously magical ones. No burning hooves, or horns crackling with lightning, as sad as that was. Maybe they needed to be agitated for something fun like that. Alas, baiting cows wasn’t the plan for the night, though I might consider tipping one on the way back. I’d have to see.
Soon, I managed to get to the power plant Lia had told me about, grinning at the fencing around it. Just a simple, three-metre high fence, tipped with barbed wire, nothing that could keep me out. Even before the change, I would have been able to circumvent it, though the cameras would have been a pain, now with magic and my attribute-boosted body? It was almost trivial.
Sadly, I didn’t even need to circumvent the fence, I could simply walk through a broken gate, making me wonder what had destroyed it. It did look like something had pushed it open from the inside, something I considered investigating if it hadn’t been my night of relaxation. Though, did it count as relaxation if the thing I was doing was done because it was interesting, not because it was necessary? What would that make my magic experimentation, because that was both incredibly interesting and, at least somewhat, necessary?
Shaking off such questions of non-immediate concern, I continued my way into the facility and towards the tower, only to stop short of it. The tower itself was nicely high, maybe some thirty, forty metres, but sadly, the lower third of it was integrated into the building itself, making it impossible to climb up. At least when approaching from the outside.
For a moment, I considered whether it would be feasible to conjure up wings, like I had during the dash towards the mountains, and try lifting them with wind magic but that idea died a swift death. While I probably was able to conjure up the wings and make them strong enough to carry my weight, it would be prohibitively large and heavy without using Hard or Eternal Ice. Normal Ice simply didn’t have the strength for that. To say nothing about my lack of power in Wind Magic to carry me and said contraption.
Instead, I used a much simpler solution and conjured myself a ladder. Sure, it took some thirty minutes to set the thing up, but I thought it was stable enough to last the night, so I wouldn’t get stuck on the roof, like some cat in a tree.
Luckily, I didn’t need to prepare anything to climb the tower, there was a ladder going up. Finally, I managed to get up on the tower, allowing me to once again enjoy the night and being high up. Now, after the change, the night was much more interesting than it ever had been. Up here, I didn’t need to worry about stumbling into anyone, I could simply let my gaze sweep the fields and study the distance, where the darkness of the night started to swallow the night of the stars. It was fascinating.
Just as I was losing myself in the void, I felt a vibration pass through me, a change that started out as magical, only to turn physical, the Earth far beneath me starting to shake. With a squeak of outrage, I hung on the maintenance platform I had climbed up on, holding on for dear life. This wasn’t what I had in mind for peaceful relaxation.