Miliam woke feeling strange. There was a knot in her stomach and a wet feeling under her sheets that brought to mind distant memories of wetting the bed as a small child. Groggily, she rolled onto her back, sleep still calling to her and making it hard to focus. Moving was uncomfortable, and the wet spot felt small, so she wasn’t feeling a huge impetus to hurry.
It felt a bit too sticky. Trying to puzzle out what it was and not thinking very clearly, she touched it with a hand and brought her fingers to her eyes.
When she saw what was on her fingers, Miliam’s eyes shot open as she jerked upright, screaming at the sudden flash of blood she beheld. Aoibhe startled awake in the hotel room’s other bed, eyes darting around the room as she tried to figure out what was going on. Aoibhe finally settled down when she saw Miliam staring at her hand, figuring out what was going on at approximately the same time as the shorter woman.
“Ah,” Aoibhe sighed, smacking her forehead with a palm. “Suppose you never got the talk, did you?”
“I, ah, well, I knew it was a thing, but I guess I never really thought it would happen to me? I wasn’t really…prepared. Shit, it’s all over the sheets, how am I going to clean this…” Miliam said, recoiling when she used the wrong hand to lift her blanket and left bloody fingerprints behind.
“Nothing to worry about, I’ll take care of it,” Aoibhe assured her as she slipped out of her bed and grabbed her own grimoire. “Go ahead and climb out of bed and I’ll have it handled.”
Miliam awkwardly kicked the blanket off and rolled out of bed, trying to keep from getting more blood everywhere and failing. Now that she had a better view she realized it wasn’t that much blood, but everything she touched was left a bit bloody. Aoibhe selected a spell on her grimoire and concentrated for a moment, then cast the spell, causing all the blood left behind on the cloth to lift right off of it and drop into the trash can in the corner, leaving pristine sheets behind.
“Utility spell. Just about every woman has a spell for this,” Aoibhe explained as she walked to the closet and came back with a towel that she offered to Miliam. “Go ahead and get yourself cleaned up and we’ll have a talk.”
She took a clean of clothes with her to the bathroom and took a few moments to tidy up. Just when she was trying to figure out what to do about the ongoing bleeding, Aoibhe knocked on the door before sliding something under the bottom. Miliam realized it was a pad, and that there were, blessedly, instructions on the packaging.
“Do you need help with that?” Aoibhe asked.
“I’ll figure it out!” Miliam squeaked, already wanting this ordeal to be over. She’d known this woman for like, less than a month. Going through her first period when sharing a room with her was beyond embarrassing.
Miliam carefully peeled open the packaging, taking care not to damage the instructions. They were fairly simple, so she was able to follow them and get the pad in place, then get dressed in short order. She stepped out of the bathroom with her previous clothes carefully bundled to not make a mess, and Aoibhe wasted no time casting her spell again to clean those off as well.
“Can you send me that spell?” Miliam asked shyly, not about to let embarrassment get in the way of getting her hands on that.
“Already did, just check your mail later. Will you be able to cast it, though?”
“I’ve been studying. I can do most of the spells that came with the grimoire already,” Miliam confirmed with a bit of pride. Since Aoibhe wasn’t a great teacher to begin with and used traditional fay ideography rather than GC standard, Miliam had needed to teach herself everything. “Uh, which version did you send me, though?”
“GC standard. It’s publically available. So…I know you’re an adult, but you weren’t exactly prepared for this by your parents, so are there any questions you’d like to ask? Or should I just give you the whole talk?” The fay woman’s words were a bit stilted, but she seemed to be doing her best to be helpful here.
“I can…just look it up. But I think I know the basics already. I was just caught off guard.”
“Are you feeling alright? Any cramps?”
“A bit, yeah, but I can deal with it. They’re not too bad.”
“Good, good.” They both sat down on their respective beds but the conversation died down for a bit, neither of them really sure what to say about it. It wasn’t really in Aoibhe’s nature to be nurturing and supportive, and Miliam grew up in an environment that treated this sort of thing as a taboo topic, to be kept out of sight of the menfolk like her previous self.
“So…have you been giving any thought to the ship’s name?” Aoibhe asked after a few minutes of them both idling on their grimoires. At hearing the question, Miliam looked her way, finding that Aoibhe hadn’t actually looked up from her grimoire.
“A bit. I kind of like the idea of having ‘astra’ or ‘astrum’ in the name. Maybe something like Astra Vitae? Or Astrum Vitae? Whichever sounds better,” Miliam said.
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“What does that mean?” Aoibhe asked, which seemed a bit odd.
“The translation charm didn’t give you the meaning?” Miliam questioned her instead of answering.
“Nay, it works based on intended meaning, remember? If you’re using it as a name, the meaning is the word itself, rather than the definition of what you’re saying,” Aoibhe explained. Right. Which was why Miliam could hear ‘Aoibhe’ instead of…whatever the root of the name was. She hadn’t really thought about it before, but that did explain a bit.
“Well, it means ‘Star of Life’, I think. It’s Latin.” She didn’t know a whole lot of Latin, but she’d heard a few phrases like ‘aqua vitae’ and ‘per aspera ad astra.’ “The ship kind of saved our lives, so…I wanted to honor that.”
“Star of Life…aye, that sounds rather nice,” Aoibhe replied, nodding. “Don’t forget to let the mechanic know.”
Miliam already had their contacts, so she went ahead and sent them a message. Astrum Vitae. That would be the name of her ship. She just sat there for a bit as she processed the enormity of that statement, while Aoibhe moved around the room getting ready to leave.
“I’m heading out to make some arrangements for supplies,” Aoibhe said as she finished. “If your cramps get worse, just stay in bed and try not to move and I’ll bring you a warm compress later. Should still be some leftovers from last night in the fridge if you get hungry.”
“Thanks, I’ll be fine.”
Aoibhe headed out, leaving Miliam to her own devices for a while. She had plenty of studying to do, but…she wasn’t really feeling it right now. Thinking of other things she could do with her time, she realized she still hadn’t gotten around to doing a whole lot with her hair. Although she didn’t have any hair ties, she could probably learn how to braid, and at least check how she would look with various styles.
Miliam pulled up some instructions on hair styles on her grimoire and padded over to the bathroom, where she could see herself in the mirror- an amenity that had gone hundreds of years seemingly unchanged. The only improvements she’d noticed were that the mirror didn’t fog up when she showered, nor could smudges be left on its surface.
Looking herself in the eyes, she decided to go with something simple first. She held her hair in one hand, simulating a ponytail, and turned her head from side to side so she could see how it looked from several angles. Simple, cute. Can’t go wrong with that one, really. She tried a side tail next, but it didn’t look right, somehow. Maybe because she associated it with gyaru-style anime characters and she wasn’t dressed up that way?
Twin tails were the next thing that came to mind, but they made her look like a child, so Miliam let that one drop pretty quickly with a shudder of distaste. Next she tried twisting her hair into a bun, first at the top of her head and then the nape of her neck. The former she thought was a poor match for her features, and the latter didn’t make her look much different than a ponytail did- though it might be useful if she needed her hair out of the way.
With those quick and obvious styles out of the way, Miliam moved onto braiding next. It looked a lot easier than it was. She re-watched an instruction video over and over again trying to get it right, though she seemed to have more success at getting her hair tangled than she did at braiding it. A few times she thought she got it right only for it to fall apart the instant she let go, and she couldn’t quite decide if the woman in the video was using a hair tie that she failed to spot or if she was simply inept.
As she looked through various articles and videos, Miliam bookmarked a few she liked. She thought the fishtail side braid looked cute on herself, but couldn’t maintain it without a pin. Even so, she held it in place for a few minutes, basking in the happy feeling she got from it. There was also a type of crown braid that looked nice, one with a looped, hanging braid on each side that she wanted to try but could only do on one said during her test run.
Some others she intended to try later, but would need an assortment of pins, clips, ties, and other hair accessories to even attempt. Still, Miliam felt she made good progress in the…three whole hours she spent absorbed playing with her hair. She had definitely lost track of time, and wasn’t sure whether it had been a good use of it, but she’d had a lot of fun and felt good about herself right now, so that was a win in her book.
Her stomach was growling angrily though, so she probably needed to get on that.
Grabbing her grimoire off the counter, she headed back into the main room and opened up the minifridge, fishing out a box of takeout from the previous night. Aoibhe had made her try fay cuisine, and she had ordered some kind of seasoned meat with savory fruit. It wasn’t bad, really, but she didn’t have words to describe the taste. Made with seasoning that was quite literally alien to her, it tasted like nothing she’d ever eaten before, in a way that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
Just strange.
Then again, Miliam had grown up in a pretty backwards family and her palate was hardly refined, so maybe she would have said the same of some food cultures on Earth. One of these days she would have to get around to sampling some of those foods, just to see what she had missed out on growing up.
For now, she heated up her food in a magic tool similar to a microwave that apparently used magic to simply alter the temperature of its contents directly. According to Aoibhe the containers their food came in were made of a material specifically exempted from the spell carved into the heater, and that allowed her to easily retrieve the container once her food was ready without burning her fingers.
Miliam sat down to eat her food in bed and started considering what to study today.
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Codex Entry: Utility Magic
A catch-all term, utility magic refers to the sort of spell that may be useful in everyday civilian life. These spells are simple and easy to both learn cast. Most utility magic can be classified under other schools, and often is, but typically when categorizing magic it is included as a category for ease of searching.
Examples of utility magic are fire starting, conjuring water, telekinetically moving small objects, and separating materials. Some spells are so ubiquitous that they come preinstalled on commercially sold grimoires, and mastering the usage of them is a common requirement for passing beginner magic courses. While many spells are automatically disabled in certain public places, utility magic is frequently exempted from this rule, as anything one can do with it can generally be done without magic as well, just less conveniently.
Although few societies develop utility magic as a category until the proliferation of an internet equivalent, spells that fall under its umbrella are the first any civilization develop. The desire to complete a task with less effort is universal.