Chapter 59

Rory twisted, thrust, and caught his opponent in the side with his blade. The other lad gasped and clutched the wound, which would have cost him a kidney were they not using dull swords. As it was, it just hurt like hell to get hit, but didn’t actually pierce the skin. He’d know, Rory had come out the loser of exchanges like these more often than not.

His opponent recovered from the blow and backed off, resetting to go again, but the Sergeant called the exercise to a halt. He ordered them to line up, and they did, and the Sergeant walked in front of them, inspecting them as he went and scoffing.

The sergeant was level twenty-five. Even as a Commoner, that demanded a certain amount of respect. And he got it from these new recruits. He ought to have, after he’d drilled it into their hides that they couldn’t beat him with their stats.

“Right. So, practice is ending early today for a reason,” the Sergeant said. “A young doctor is looking for men and women for some sort of experiment. She wants volunteers. Well, you all are being voluntold, and that’s good enough for me.”

“What sort of experiment?” one of the lads asked.

“We didn’t ask and she didn’t tell,” the Sergeant admitted. “All she said is that it wouldn’t cost you anything more than ten minutes of your time. So, that’s six of you, so shouldn’t take more than an hour. After you’ve all finished, you’re free for the day. We delve deeper into the dungeon tomorrow, and see if it has anything in it other than the burrowers which have been sneaking out of that damn hole since it formed.”

With that said, the sergeant marched them out of the practice yard and into the guardhouse, where they sat and waited for the young doctor to call for them.

The first lad who went in left immediately after emerging from the room with the doctor in it. The second one said nothing more than “It wasn’t that bad, but I’ve had better.” Rory was third.

He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He swallowed nervously in the dim-lit room. He saw the doctor – or at least he assumed that the dark-skinned beautiful woman was the doctor he’d been hearing about – sitting at a table with a sketchpad.

“Wait ten minutes and then you can leave,” the doctor said.

“Excuse me?” Rory asked.

“I asked for volunteers,” the doctor explained. “Your second friend explained that you’re here under orders. I find that to be unethical. However, I don’t wish to get you in trouble with your sergeant. So you may wait ten minutes and then depart and claim to have followed my every instruction with absolute honesty.”

“Oh,” Rory said. “May I at least ask what you need volunteers for?”

The doctor looked up from her sketchpad, then shrugged. “I’m conducting a study on lifelines.”

“You’re experimenting with lifelines?” Rory asked, sounding concerned.

“No, I’m studying them,” the doctor corrected. “An experiment would involve some sort of hypothesis or control group or measured outcomes. This is more an anatomical study than anything else. I’m examining the patterns of lifelines as they appear on the skin. I have a harmless magical ritual here which causes them to glow. I’m looking for volunteers that will stand in the harmless circle of magic for a few minutes and allow me to record the patterns of lights that show up on their bodies. That’s it.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Rory said. “I don’t understand the other stuff, but if you just need to look at them, then I don’t think it sounds bad at all.”

“It’s really not,” Aisha agreed.

“So where exactly do I stand for--”

“The problem is that the light doesn’t shine through one’s clothing, so to participate in the study you must disrobe,” she continued. “Thus the need for volunteers. And since you’re not a volunteer, I don’t expect you to take part in my study. I do thank you for your time and apologize for the inconvenience, but you can keep your clothes on.”

“Oh,” Rory said, feeling more than a little relieved. “Why do you need to study lifelines anyway, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Because the information on them is woefully inadequate,” the doctor answered immediately. “They’re like fingerprints, only they’re magic, so they must serve a purpose. I’m trying to figure out what that purpose is. It’s well known in the healing community that healing magic flows through the lifelines. Or at least, it is to everyone who wasn’t born on another planet. So aside from conducting healing magic, what else does the mana-circulation system do? Why is it unique to the individual? Why does it change, and under what circumstances? There are so many questions to ask, young man, and honestly I’m a little surprised that it’s not a larger field of study in this world.”

“Oh,” Rory said. “Will this study help people?”

The doctor considered. “I don’t know, to be honest. It might just be intellectual curiosity on my part. Perhaps they’re just like fingerprints, and their pattern is just random. Or maybe they follow a strictly defined pattern that I can easily deduce on my own once I begin studying the matter. Maybe what they predict will save or change lives. Maybe not. That’s the thing about scientific inquiry, young man … I’m sorry, what is your name?”

“Rory Johnson,” Rory said.

“Rory. If you go into an inquiry with the answers that you want to obtain, then you obtain the results that you are looking for and not the truth. If you want to truth, you have to question everything. Including your own knowledge and assumptions. For example, when I arrived in this world, I didn’t actually assume that human anatomy was exactly the same as it was on Earth. I asked the king for several cadavres, and I dissected them to compare – oh, sorry, you don’t really need to hear that if it’s making you ill.”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Sorry ma’am,” Rory said. “What did you find out?”

“I couldn’t find a single difference, so I assumed that there were none,” the doctor continued.

“Earth. That means, you’re a hero, right?”

“Heroine, technically. Yes, Rory, I am. Anyway, it turns out that my assumption was faulty. There’s no difference between a cadavre on Earth and a cadavre in Welsius. But there’s a difference between a living human on Earth and a Welsian. And that is that Welsians, all of you, have some amount of mana flowing in their bodies.”

“Everyone knows that though,” Rory pointed out.

“Imagine that you were deaf, and that you never knew that farts made sound, Rory. Not until someone told you.” Aisha said. “That’s about what it felt like to realize that I didn’t know something that was completely obvious to everyone in this world, and that should have been obvious to me based on the way that my own powers work!”

“Oh,” Rory said wisely. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, I’m just frustrated, and you’re here to talk to. Actually you could probably leave now if you’d like.”

“What if I want to volunteer?” Rory asked.

The doctor frowned. “I told you, ethically I don’t want anyone who was ordered to partake in--”

“You explained it to me, and it sounds like it’s important. I don’t really understand why, but aside from being a bit embarrassed at you seeing me starkers it won’t hurt me none, right? If it helps someone out someday, then I’ve done a bit of good helping you with your experiment, haven’t I?”

“It’s not an experiment—oh whatever. Fine. If you insist I’m not going to talk you out of it.”

Ten minutes later, after she had sketched out his mana circulation pattern – his lifelines – onto a pre-printed likeness of a generic male body, he was dressed and out the door. Absolutely no worse for the wear.

Better, in fact. Now he knew what his lifelines looked like. Having them glow like that beneath his skin was cooler than he’d been expecting it to be, and the doctor had provided him with a mirror so that he could see for himself. In the end, he was happy to have made a small contribution to science.

~~~~~~

Emil walked along the road behind Tom. The smooth stone road which had been a dirt path moments before. It was wide enough for two carts to pass by each other, and, according to Tom, as durable as the Controller could possibly make it.

Several days had passed since the completion of the water tower, although it would require parts from the kingdom before that project was actually complete. The king had promised that they were working on the pipes and the pump and the valves and all the other items necessary to make Emil’s vision a reality.

In the mean time, Emil had Tom building roads. Or, to put it another way, he and Tom were walking through the city while Tom was exercising his Customize ability to bring pieces of bedrock to the surface and displace the dirt paths which they were following. It was the easiest method of roadbuilding that Emil had ever heard of, although Emil was certain they wouldn’t live up to ‘modern standards’ back home. They weren’t designed to take the stress of an eighteen wheeler driving at ninety miles an hour, that’s for certain. But for foot traffic and horse-drawn carts they should hold up just fine.

Emil was more worried about erosion and water buildup in the ditches beside the roads than the roads themselves. He noted several areas of concern but, rather than instructing Tom to do something to solve the issues he foresaw, he simply made a note of their location in his notes for followup later.

Sometimes you had to let things go wrong in order to study how to prevent the problem in the future. Aside from which, Tom wouldn’t always be around to solve this sort of problem with a wave of his hand, so the kingdom would need to develop techniques to service any roads that the boy would build and leave behind.

The inner parts of the city had mostly been paved already using the local techniques, which Emil meant to study more closely as time allowed. Most of the roadbuilding they were doing was on the outskirts of town.

They had drawn a bit of an audience, although the people who were following and gawking suffered under several misapprehensions. Such as that Tom was Emil’s son, despite the lack of familial similarity. And the idea that Emil was in fact a great wizard who was doing the magic instead of Tom. Which was fine, Emil saw no reason to disabuse them of their notions. Especially the last one, since it gave him some authority when he instructed people to move out of the way.

Emil was just beginning to note signs of Tom flagging – not from mana exhaustion or any physical symptoms other than sheer boredom – when they were confronted.

Two of the council members from the other day appeared with a contingent of guards. One of the city’s leaders, an old man with a constipated expression, stepped forward and demanded “Who authorized this?”

Tom stopped his magic, and turned to Emil, who nodded that he would handle the situation.

“This exact project was authorized by myself,” Emil began, “But my authority to perform feats of engineering related to my--”

“First you sweep in and create a dungeon, and now you begin vandalizing public property?” the councilmember demanded. “Give me one reason not to order your arrest right now!”

Emil considered the question for a minute, then said “Well, I doubt that the king would be too happy about hearing that you’ve arrested someone acting on his own commission to enhance the infrastructure of the kingdom.”

“The king, you said?” the councilwoman asked. “Do you perchance have any sort of official document backing up this claim?”

“I don’t carry it on me, but I do have a document appointing me as a Royal Engineer,” Emil said. “It’s in my things. We were just finishing up here, so if you insist on seeing it I’d be happy to--”

“That’s enough excuse making,” the man said, and the woman shot him an annoyed glance. “For the crime of endangering the citizens of Caseville through the creation of that monstrous dungeon, and the lesser crime of vandalizing our streets, I hereby order the arrest of this wizard and his son.”

Emil sighed. “Madame Silva is going to be most annoyed when she hears about this.”

“Emil? What do we do?” Tom asked.

“I suppose we find out what the prison in Caseville looks like,” Emil answered. “It should only be for a few hours, I think.”