“Boss ! Boss !”, said the clerk barging into the office.
“Yes Jerry, what is it this time ?” asked calmly a tired looking, grey haired, man with a square jaw.
“You remember that incident almost two weeks ago ? The apprentice who disappeared during a malfunction ?”
“Yeah, I got the file somewhere over here” answered the Boss gesturing at a drawer.
“Well, his mentor was quite affected, and said he couldn’t understand the error.”
“I know that Jerry, go to the point please,” muttered the Boss, clearly holding back a sigh.
“Oh yeah, sorry ! Well, his mentor still hasn’t understood why the teleport activated, but he managed to retrieve a rough location where we might find the body.”
“Ah good ! Send the coordinates to the Divination department. I hope they’ll manage to find at least some pieces of the poor soul,” shrugged the boss.
“Roger that Boss !”, exclaimed Jerry before heading out.
///
Calian was walking in an almost empty street. He’d donned black clothes, a simple cap and had a heavy bag hoisted on his right shoulder. He was walking briskly in the last lights of the sunset, his goal was an inconspicuous little tavern in an alley : the Meltdown.
It was a small, unassuming building, with simply a little advertising sign in front of it. No flashy lights or exterior sign that any business was here. As Calian pushed the door the smell of sweat, beer and fried food hit him in the face. Small tables are mostly gathered on the right of the entrance, while bigger tables are arranged to the left of it.
Calian walked to the bartender, just across the door, and asked for a beer, while scanning the smaller tables. His beer in hand he paid and sat at the farthest table he could find, still scanning the room. Since he had yet to find or be found by the person he was waiting for, he simply sat comfortably and sipped his beer. Approximately 20 minutes after he sat, a thin man with almost translucent shoulder length hair sat in front of him. He had worn sneakers, classic jeans, a simple beige shirt with a light jacket on his shoulders and stark blue eyes that looked at every detail in front of him.
Calian didn’t speak, he kept drinking his beer slowly, looking intently into the blue eyes staring back at him. After some time, since none of them seemed inclined to speak he took a flask of a transparent liquid streaked by swirling golden lines. Calian took out a knife, which got the full attention of the blue-eyed man, his whole body reacting to the weapon being drawn. The man’s gaze became sharper, his muscles contracted, any distracting thoughts seemed to have left him. But since Calian never moved fast or seemed to threaten him, the man simply watched.
The mage brought the knife close to his left hand, took a deep breath and slashed. A deep gash appeared on his palm, blood starting to pool in his hand while the blue eyes gazed at him, observing silently the whole process. Calian, ignoring the stinging pain, quickly put the knife on the side of the table, near his beer, and opened the lid of the flask of unknown liquid. He drank half of the liquid, which was just a large gulp to him, before closing the lid and putting it back on the table. He then extended his injured hand, putting it laying it on the table under the curious gaze of the man.
The deep gash was receding visibly. The blood flowing out was stopped, clotting fast on the wound, before a scab formed on his palm. A few seconds later, Calian flexed his fingers, shedding the scab and revealing a tiny white scar underneath it. Satisfied and with a sly smile he leaned back on his chair and met the blue eyes with an unflinching gaze.
Finally blue-eyes decided he was interested enough and straightened. “Alright, you have my attention. What did you call me for ?” he asked, knowing full-well what Calian wanted.
“I want to sell my product”, he stated, pushing the small flask towards blue-eyes.
“Why should I do that ? And most important, why me ?” he retorted. “If it’s as miraculous as you demonstrated you could simply sell it to some business. So either it’s somehow not as good as it seems, or you can’t sell it yourself.”
“You guessed right, I can’t sell it myself. Let’s just say I’m not from here and I don’t want to attract attention,” Calian explained. “But please, don’t doubt my product before trying it,” he explained while pushing the flask towards the man.
Blue-eyes squinted at the swirling golden liquid, before slowly taking out a knife and slashing at his finger without any hesitation. He then proceeded to quickly down the leftover content of the flask and watch intently his wound. As for Calian the wound closed at a visible rate and only left a white scar.
Blue-eyes put the empty bottle back on the table before looking at Calian with a frown. “I’ll handle the sales, but you know your product best. What are the limits ? The target population ? The price of production ?”
“It’s just a simple healing potion, it’s intended to heal small wounds at most. We only cut the surface skin here, but if you had cut any muscle or bones it could have done nothing. I recommend selling to military forces, athletes or fighters. It’s good for bruises as well so a black eye is no issue. It should also be a hit with parents, you know for kids and scratches. Sell it to anyone who asks really, I’ve never seen adverse effects anyway” he shrugged. “I think you can sell it for around 20 to 30 dollars a bottle, but I guess people would still be interested with a higher price.”
Blue-eyes nodded slowly, twirling the now empty flask in his hand. “Okay, I can sell them,” he stopped twirling the flask and looked straight into Calian’s eyes, “But what are your conditions ?”
“I want 80% of the sale price, detailed reports of your sales, and I want you to procure some materials for me should I ever request them.”
“I agree to the detailed reports, and to have access to my distribution network is a given. For the share though… I want 40%”
“30% tops,” deadpanned Calian.
“Deal,” exclaimed blue-eye, extending his hand. While Calian was shaking it he continued, “I’m Alexander by the way, I look shady but I’m not that bad. Have you got a first shipment for me and my guys ?” he asked.
Calian handed him the bag filled with big bottles of the healing potion, before dispensing some advice to Alexander, “Don’t try to reproduce the liquid by yourself, you’ll just lose my trust and your time. There are five liters of the stuff here, and a good 10ml are sufficient to heal a gash like we did”, he explained, agitating his now healed hand.
Alexander nodded, eying the briefcase on his lap before gulping down the rest of his beer and standing up. “Alright, I think we have this wrapped up. We’ll meet here in two weeks exactly, same time, and we’ll see if our partnership can be continued,” he said matter-of-factly.
Calian who still hadn’t finished his beer simply nodded, “I’ll see you in two weeks Mr. Alexander.”
The blue eyed man nodded back, replying on the same tone, “I’ll see you in two weeks Mr. Rhys.”
///
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“How’d it go ?” she asked in a tense voice, worry clouding her eyes.
“It went well Melody, he’s as you described, very much blue eyed and straightforward,” answered Calian, “Still don’t want to expound on his past I guess ? He’s quite the character.”
“As I told you before, he’ll tell you when the time is right if it is meant for you two to get closer. I’d only make it harder for you to work with him if I told you anything about him, and he’d definitely not forgive me for letting something slip,” Melody shrugged, her earlier worry already vanished after seeing Calian relaxed as usual.
“I understand, I’d also hold a grudge if you told any random person about me,” Calian shrugged back. He removed his shoes, and sat in the sofa while stretching his back before continuing, “Alright, want to watch me do some cool magic stuff ?”
The only answer was a serious faced Melody sitting straight next to him while holding a notebook.
“Alright, let’s start with some theory !” Calian said, a smile on his face.
He extended his left arm, pointing to the living room table which caused his notebook to fly at breakneck speed into his opened hand. He then simply opened it to a new page and started sketching.
“We’re going to do dimensionalism today, it’s the study of the effects of magic on space itself. The first step to dimensionalism is made by all apprentice-mages at some point. Every magic user will use their mana to gauge the size and mass of an object or even the volume of a container. Feeling the space using your mana is the first step toward altering it. To “feel” space itself a dimensionally enchanted object is generally used. Once you can feel space, the next logical step is to alter it using you magic. That’s where real dimensionalism starts, and when you reach that stage you’re in for a good fun. Most common folks think that teleportation is harder than extending a bag, but everything is a matter of scale. It’s far easier to teleport an apple from one hand to the other than to enchant a hollow pendant to hold a sword. And push that to the extreme it creates specialization even among the rare specialization that dimensionalism is. Does that make sense ?”
Melody rubbed her forehead, considering the implication of his last statement, “Yeah, it’s like shooting, it’s a large category of activities. Archery and firearms are different paths of shooting. And it’s far easier to shoot an arrow at the ground even if it’s your first time than to shoot an apple using a sniper from large distances.”
“That’s a great way to put it !” nodded Calian before continuing, “I’m a mage specialized in dimensionalism, and I further studied teleportation, but even if I specialized I still studied a bit of all the other path possible. Today we’re not doing teleportation, we’re going to do space compression. We’re going to literally fit more space inside something !”
Calian ripped a page of his notebook and made it hover above his hand. With a crisp crumpling sound the paper folded in a neat square box that landed softly inside Calian’s hand.
As Melody’s eyes sparkled from the casual display of magic from Calian, he resumed his lesson. “This is the container we’re expanding, a little cube of paper. We both agree we can’t fit more than some pebbles in here, and certainly not a pencil, right ?”
Melody nodded, eyeing the paper box.
“I’m going to cram more space inside that box, but to do that I have to follow some rules. The first rule is that however big you want the space inside, if no teleportation is involved, the opening has to be as big as the largest object you want to fit. Second rule, never have anything important inside a spatially expanding space. Third rule, an expanded space is not an isolated space, stuff inside of the container will affect the common space around.”
As Calian opened his mouth to continue Melody raised her hand, “If it’s not isolated, does that mean that there’s a strange boundary at the opening where everything seems distorted ?”
Calian raised his brows, surprised at her perspicacity, “Yeah ! Exactly, it’s almost like looking at the ground below clear water, but not quite like it either. You’ll see for yourself in a minute.” He focused back on the paper cube and while pushing it between him and melody he continued his explanation, “Last thing you need to know when expanding containers is that you aren’t forced to expand everything by the same multiplier. You can leave one dimension of the object completely unaffected, like I could make that cube deep enough to store a pencil, and not any wider. Here I’m going to expand the cube by about five times in all directions, and you’ll be able to use it to store about anything that won’t rip the paper, so not much,” he shrugged.
Still focused on the cube Calian made it float to him and held it between his hands. Without any words or gestures he closed his eyes and concentrated. His personal mana flooded the area around the cube, feeling like another limb capable of seeing the cube from both inside and outside at the same time. He concentrated, the mage wanted to go deeper, beyond simply the cube and what he saw at first glance.
Soon the familiar sensation hit him, he felt the weave of space, like thin strands aligned to the local gravity well, weaved through everything, tightly giving reality it’s playground. Calian relished in the familiar sensation, it was something he knew, something he could control in that somewhat crazy world he was lost in. He focused his mana on the weave inside the cube, pulling, stretching and pushing around. He forced the weave of space to be tighter inside the cube, he had to pull the weave outside the cube inside of it, he pushed from outside the cube to force everything inside. When he felt his control almost slip and the fabric of space oppose more and more resistance, he decided it was enough. Calian closed his fists.
He had sealed everything inside of the cube, forcing space on earth to bend to the will of a mage for the first time. With a large grin he snatched the floating cube and opened his hand palm toward the ceiling, magically snatching a pen from the far away desk. He opened the face of the cube he had marked earlier, it was like opening a miniature chest. Pen in hand, he neared the opened cube and, under the scrutinizing gaze of Melody, he simply dropped it inside the cube. The pen went inside flawlessly, defying physical laws. The pen that was about twice the size of the cube had fully disappeared.
Melody, incapable of restraining herself further snatched the cube and watched what was inside through the opened face. And there it was, laying at the bottom of the cube, the pen. She wanted to grab it, but her hand was too big, so she tried to grab the pen using two fingers but her fingers were too short. She eventually reached the conclusion she wouldn’t be able to reach the pen and simply flipped the box upside down, which led to the pen crashing on the ground, between her and Calian.
“You have no idea how physics defying what you just did is,” whispered Melody, her eyes darting around the room, following ideas only her could see.
Calian simply shrugged, “I dunno, I’ll just need it because I don’t want to travel back and forth to get the greenhouse to the Clearing. That way we only have to do one big trip. It’s not that crazy you know, just hard to get to work the first few times you practice the spell.”
Melody looked at him like he said the most offensive thing she’d ever heard but she simply shook her head and sighed, “You have no idea how many scientists would go crazy over what you did.” After some silence between the two Melody decided it was time to move on, “Anyway, want some help to enlarge that big chest ?”
///
Calian’s Notebook – Summary of events :
Once again it has been a few days since my last entry. Melody and I have recently scouted my new house location, it’s in the middle of a forest, quite isolated from everything. While it’s not the ideal location, the distance from everything else should let me experiment in peace and prevent any curious individuals from snooping. Secondly, I plan on turning the whole forest into a mana generator for my personal use. It is exceedingly hard and draining to only use personal mana to cast spells, I want to go back to using ambient mana to assist myself.
When I cleared the space I had designated as my property the spell I used gave quite a shock to Melody. Admittedly it was her first time witnessing any of my offensive spell, but I didn’t expect it to have such an effect on her. I think her vision of me might have changed slightly, I simply hope she won’t come to see me as a threat. While I have a thousand spells to kill a non-mage like her, I have no intention of making use of any violence when it is not absolutely needed.
The following morning the healing plants were ready for harvesting, so while Melody was at work I picked and cleaned any parts of the plant I could refine. I was about done processing all the harvested plants when Melody came home from work, which allowed her to assist me in making the healing potions.
We first mashed the plants and extracted as much juice as possible. The juice contains over 85% of the healing properties, so while at home I could have also processed the waste materials with the proper tools, I chose to discard the dry pulp for this batch. We collected all the plant juice in a big pot that Melody lent me for the day. The juice had to be filtered from any impurity, since the materials Melody had at home were not enough to make a decent filter I had to use a Distill spell. While using spell is not recommended for a correct end-result, I didn’t care much because the healing potion is not meant for any heavy duty or further refining. The use of any spell not specifically meant for it is frowned upon during potion making because most magical properties come from the aspected mana inside of the ingredients. The use of any spell can disrupt that mana and reduce the potion potency. Once the juice was distilled, I had to dilute it which gave me about five liter of usable healing potion. It wasn’t my best work, but it’ll do fine for the non-magic population, from what I’ve seen on earth healing annoying but not threatening wounds can be a great source of income.
My next problem was effectively distributing said healing potion and making a profit from it. I had, and still have, no motivation to waste my time trying to sell the stuff to uninterested people, so I asked Melody for advice. Melody was a bit lost too, especially since I didn’t want to sell my potion to any big company. She ended up referring me to a guy, Alexander, who deals in shady stuff and strange business deals. While the deal went nicely and the guy didn’t seem too unreliable, I’ll have to see if following Melody’s advice was a good idea.