By the time night started to fall, Sophie found herself surrounded by a pile of scrolls and musty old tomes, but no cookbook in sight.

“I’m really not sure if she had anything like that,” Elowen unhelpfully reiterated, referring to the former priestess again. It seemed like Elowen didn’t recall much of their life together, but it had likely been decades after all.

Sophie wasn’t sure she would remember anything after decades of being alone and slowly fading into the ether, either.

She sighed, finally giving up on this tactic. She really didn’t know how to cook. She could boil water, but…

She pushed all of the books into a pile for further sorting another day. She still wanted to look through those letters some time as well. That would just have to wait. Her stomach couldn’t tolerate any further delay. It would already take such a long time for the water to heat up in this terrible world without microwaves.

She made her way back into the kitchen area and opened one of the cabinets where she had stored yesterday’s purchases. The bread was long gone by now – already finished off at the beginning of her quest to find a cookbook – but she pulled out some vegetables that had different names in the fantasyland language, but appeared to be regular old potatoes, carrots, and onions. Although the carrots were a little more on the purple side than she strictly thought was typical.

Surely if she boiled these together, though, it would make some sort of soup. Right? She wished she had spices to go with it, but none of the spice names in the market had been familiar to her. Most of the spices looked the same to her when it came down to it – smelly, dried leaves and strange pungent powders. Potentially she wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart even if the names were in English, but that was neither here nor there. She didn’t want to spend her precious coin on an uncertainty like that.

At least these looked like vegetables from her previous life.

She set them on the counter and grabbed the bucket, heading out to pull some more well water. She felt way more confident about the water after Briony checked out the well. She would boil most of it again tonight for the soup, but save some for drinking as well. At least she hoped she wouldn’t poison herself with it. But she also didn’t want to have to only drink boiled water for the rest of her time here…

However long that might be.

She felt the odd sensation of eyes watching her as she pulled the water up, but it was a little too dim outside to see anything in the trees. Probably that creepy little dragon thing again, she thought. Hopefully it was harmless. She scampered back inside with the bucket as quickly as she could go without sloshing it, just in case something less harmless lurked in the darkness.

Once she got inside, she set the water up to boil over the fire and then frowned at the vegetables on the counter. At the very least, she probably needed to chop them into smaller pieces. She found a knife among the dishes and cutlery she had washed earlier and got to work.

She realized halfway through that she probably should have pulled the papery bits off of the onion before cutting it, and she tried to pick out as much of that as possible. When the water started boiling, she dumped the various pieces of onion and carrot and potato into it and stared at the results. She had no idea how long she should wait…

Elowen peered curiously into the pot as well. “How fascinating,” she said, and she sounded completely serious. “Do you think it will work?”

“Let’s hope so,” Sophie muttered and sat down at the table, watching as Elowen watched the water boil.

“So…” she said, after Elowen eventually got bored and made her way back towards Sophie. “Can you tell me more about the magic system here?”

It felt like as good of a time as any to learn more about the world. It wasn’t like she had anything better to do other than more cleaning, and she was way too hungry for that, now.

“Magic system?” Elowen replied, frowning. “What do you mean by that?”

“Like mages, crafters, all of that stuff,” Sophie tried to elaborate. “How do all of the classes work? How did Briony do – well, whatever it is that she did to the well to make sure it was holding up okay? And then whatever she did to the window?”

Elowen looked thoughtful at the question. “Well, let’s see… you started to learn how to channel mana into mana stone yesterday, right? Mana can be channeled into other things, too. Crafters like Briony can channel mana into the things they are crafting or things that have been crafted previously.”

“What does that do?”

“Oh, lots of things. It depends on the crafter’s abilities. They can analyze the composition of things, and sometimes even determine who made the item in the first place. But as far as the window goes, she probably made it a little stronger than it would be using the materials that she used. She might have added things like weather resistance and soundproofing.”

“Soundproofing? Weather resistance?” Sophie interrupted, a little surprised that they had those kinds of concepts.

“Sure,” Elowen nodded. She seemed pleased at Sophie’s interest. “Mana can be used in many different ways!”

So maybe it wasn’t exactly like the kind of magic Sophie had hoped it would be, but it did sound like there were some useful applications other than turning on some dim rock lamps. “Can you teach me how to do any of that stuff?”

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Elowen shook her head. “The priestess class is a little different. We'll work on more channeling together and eventually purification.”

“Wait – purification?” Sophie asked, visions of horror movies suddenly popping in her head. “What, am I going to learn how to exorcize demons?”

Elowen frowned slightly at the phrasing. “Demons are just a silly human myth,” she said, and she suddenly looked skeptical. “How could you possibly know about demons, anyway?”

Sophie laughed, though. “I guess our worlds aren’t so different in some ways,” she said. “We have the same kinds of myths.”

Elowen still looked a bit skeptical, and Sophie stood to check on the soup. She poked at some of the potatoes with a long wooden spoon, but they looked about the same as they had a few minutes ago, so she sat back down again. “Okay, so no demons. Got it. But then what am I purifying?”

“Mana, of course,” Elowen replied, as if it should be obvious.

Sophie shook her head, not getting it at all. “Does it go bad or something?” she half-joked, but she was surprised when Elowen nodded.

“Sometimes mana can become corrupted, and even things that are imbued with mana can carry that corruption. Sometimes it causes problems…” Elowen trailed off frowning. She had a strange faraway look in her eyes.

“So I’ll learn how to purify those? Corrupted things?”

“Oh, yes,” Elowen replied. “It’s one of the core duties of the shrine priestess. Other than watching over the shrine, of course. But for now, we’ve got to start with the basics like being able to move mana back and forth between things, like the lights. The more you do it, the more your skills will improve. And you'll gain new abilities over time.”

Sophie nodded, thinking it over. That all seemed fairly logical. She wasn’t sure how into the whole idea of purifying corrupted mana she was, but she liked the idea of being helpful in some way.

She stood up again to check on her potato-carrot-onion concoction. It looked the same as before. She carefully lifted a potato out of the water with the spoon and blew on it before biting into it. It was a little crunchy and tasteless but probably edible. She really didn’t want to wait any longer.

She scooped some of the soup into a bowl and sat back down at the table. She tried a sip of the broth, but it tasted like old, onion-scented water. Even the bottom-shelf canned soups tasted better than this. She belatedly realized that at the very least, she should have found some salt at the market. A little salt and maybe some pepper would have gone a long way.

Oh well, at least she wouldn’t starve.

“And the other classes? What do they do?” she asked, trying to distract herself from the lackluster meal.

“Hmmm, there are lots of classes, and they each have different abilities,” Elowen started. “But for the basics, there are casting classes, also called Mages, that are able to manifest mana into certain elements. Some are able to manipulate earth, fire, water – things like that. There are Healers who can use mana to heal. There are also Warrior classes that use mana to enhance their physical capabilities. And then there are the everyday sort of classes.”

“Like a Clerk?” Sophie prompted.

Elowen nodded. “Exactly like a Clerk.”

It all seemed like a lot, and Sophie’s head was already spinning. “And I have to remember all of this?”

Elowen laughed. “I’ll help,” she promised. “I’ll teach you.”

Sophie glanced back down at her bowl thinking she had a lot of things she was going to have to learn if she was going to make it in this world. Classes, mana, the lack of the modern conveniences she was used to… it was all a lot. She felt adrift, with only Elowen to fall back on, and the spirit really didn’t know much about the world outside of the shrine.

Maybe she should at least leave cooking to the professionals like she did in the old world. The food she had from the market was wonderful. And the bread from the bakery… She could potentially live off of a steady stream of baked goods.

If she could figure out a way to make enough money to pay for them, of course. Her little coin purse would only hold out for so much longer, and she still needed to figure out the whole bathing situation. Surely the town’s bathhouse would cost money as well.

Sophie took another bite of her bland, weirdly crunchy soup, and sighed. She was, perhaps, not cut out to make it in a world without microwaves and boring office jobs.

***

Sophie woke up the next morning to the sound of a bell ringing from the front of the shrine. She sat up from her place on the old folding mattress she had braved the night before and waited to see if the sound repeated itself.

“Elowen?” she called out after she didn’t hear it again, and the spirit appeared suddenly, floating in through the wall between the living quarters and the front of the shrine.

“Someone’s here!” Elowen said. She seemed more corporeal than ever today in her excitement.

“Is Briony back?” Sophie asked, confused and already rising from her spot on the bed. She was still a little groggy with sleep, but ultimately hopeful that the chill box, whatever it might be, might be here already.

Elowen shook her head, though. “No – it’s someone who’s come to get a class.”

Sophie’s stomach immediately filled with dread, completely counter to Elowen’s obvious excitement. “What? What do we do? I don’t know how to do that!”

Elowen giggled. “It’s easy, silly. I do all of the work, anyways. I’ll tell you exactly what to do.”

Somehow this was not reassuring.

Elowen frowned suddenly, though, her eyes scanning up and down Sophie’s body like they had the very first day. “You really can’t wear that,” she demanded. “You just can’t. I’d rather turn them away than have them see you like that!”

Sophie glanced down at her clothes. Elowen had a point. She had been living in these clothes for going on three full days now, and although she had been doing her best to bathe using heated well-water, these were the only clothes she had. They were… a little worse for the wear and probably needed to be laundered.

She thought longingly of the fabrics she picked out at the tailor and realized she should probably stop by there later today to see when her outfits might be done, especially if they were going to start getting official shrine business.

The bell rang again, jolting Sophie into action. “Fine,” she sighed at Elowen’s panicked look. “Fine, I’ll put on the damn dress. Just this once!”