18 To Name A Rascal

After getting Diane to safety I had to fight a small skirmish to clear the area of starbanes. They came as a trickle though, and were never numerous enough to overwhelm Anklebiter. So it swiftly reached the point where I searched for another target and just didn’t find one. That done, I used Jump to leap up and onto the roof of the gymnasium.

There was the singed corpse of an arachno that surprised me by becoming my landing spot, and I almost tripped landing on top of it. The resulting scuffle had it sliding down along the slats of the angled roof, and the gutter was too small to catch it when it reached the edge. Moments later, there was a flat sound of something fleshy suddenly stopping.

It wasn’t the only corpse on the roof. They must have covered this place with as much, if not more than the amount I found in the cave, and I really should have expected the results. The arachno corpse that jumpscared me wasn’t even the largest form up here to have gone up with the fire when I introduced some authentic energy to it. If I was recalling correctly, the mana influx had been well over one hundred. Nearly two.

Considering sixballs gave six mana while hookblows reportedly only gave a much more generous seventeen, that was a lot of death.

It had been a… profit, that was only outdone by taking out a growing miasma beacon.

My warning spells were quiet for now, so I pulled on the ribbons on my legs and shoulders to dismiss the associated spell as I picked my way over to the peak where the angled sides of the roof intersected. I tried not to heed the bodies that were in my way as I passed, but soon realised it was better to pick my way around them when I stepped on the arm of what I thought was a hookblow, only to nearly trip and slide with it down the roof. But I didn’t fall and I soon made it to the peak, where I sat to think.

Thankfully, as I peeked over the edge of the roof, nobody was standing in the concrete lounge. The group really had gone inside. I sighed with something that wasn't quite relief and kicked one of my feet as I began to let my thoughts wander.

My Familiar came to sit beside me. The black semi circular voids that were its eyes watched me for several seconds. They seemed even blacker than the darkness in front of me. If there was any light worth speaking of, this would’ve been a rather nice view. Rolling countryside, with the city I lived in far off in the background. As it was, all I could see were the beacons I had cast using spells from the Grumskn Grimoire of Dumb Intelligent Hands, along with the glowing parasite leeches in the river.

[Another miasma beacon has begun growing,] my Familiar eventually informed me.

More death on the way, then. I’d already dealt with so much of it that the announcement barely registered. It really should have, but it didn’t.

“You told me at the start that I could use my wish to break the veil,” I eventually said. “But I used that to keep Diane alive instead.”

It sat there, tail twitching as it waited. It waited for quite some time.

[Is there a question you are meaning to ask us?] it eventually prompted me.

Something was clearly missing. What it was, I couldn’t tell, but it did take me longer than it should have to speak again. “How likely do you think it is that I will survive this, now that I can't wish for it?”

[If we use the initiative and care you displayed since entering a contract with me, the chances are high. Even with elite starbane forms threatening your mortality, the pace at which you master novice spells from the Stoccoro Grimoire for Flashy Rituals indicated you would be more than equipped to face them when the number of miasma beacons exceeded your ability to terminate them.]

“That’s past tense,” I commented.

[It was. If you continue to sit here and not cast spells, the enemy starbane forms will be more than equipped to face you when they arrive. They will kill you. We hesitate to use allusions of the ominous sort, but elite forms have enough intelligence to enjoy prolonging a murder.]

The argument was sound. At the same time, it completely failed to motivate me.

“How soon will help arrive?” I eventually changed the subject. My eyes were looking in the direction of the crowd that had arrived outside the veil, but obviously couldn’t see them. Life Detection, however, pierced the veil and showed me a mass of bodies standing on the road leading into the camp.

A small number of them shined a brighter white than the rest, and I assumed they were friendly magical girls. They were only visible because the roof of the gym was so high up, otherwise the voids that were starbanes got in the way. I hadn’t noticed them until after I sat down.

[A typical veil takes an excess of five hours for a team of human magicians to break,] I was told. [However, a starbane veil is a complex spell that continuously destabilises as time progresses due to the foreign nature of the mana used in the spell. The effect is therefore easier to break in proportion to the amount of time that has passed since casting.]

“I remember you told me Earth is toxic to starbanes,” I commented.

[You are correct to assume that the same idea applies. The local mana saturation continually erodes the veil, weakening the barrier in its entirety. It will not take ten hours for the inner veil to be breached, but it will not take less than six hours beginning from the time of casting.]

“It’s already been an hour.” Diane had just gone into stasis when that happened, and she was moving about again. That had been longer than an hour, but I wasn’t sure by how much. An hour and a half? I had a timer I could glance up at, but the specific times were slipping away from me. I hadn’t been checking them.

[There is another factor to consider,] my Familiar continued. [The Enemy’s first veil was cracked before the second was cast. Your ally outside was using powerful siegebreaker magic to hasten the process of breaking the veil. The fact that we saw the outer veil cracking is a promising indication of their haste in reaching you.]

“So less than ten, but more than five,” I concluded. “I’m going to need to fight for another five hours.” At best. And that assumed the people outside were doing everything they could to breach the veil.

It was funny, in a way. When was the last time someone did their best for me?

The familiar sat beside me with its twitchy tail for another long minute. I used that time to think, and it was difficult. There was an exhaustion settling in my mind that wasn’t matched by what I felt in my body. As it was, I was very much reminded of that feeling I got after spending an hour studying, but coupled with an eight kilometre run. If there were a mattress behind me, I’d flop down and go to sleep.

I guess I was lucky that there was a metal ridge behind me instead, but I didn’t feel that way.

[You are hyper-fixating on the chances,] my Familiar observed. [The more you focus on the outcome, the less or worse your will impact its eventuality. Many obsessions follow this trend.]

My lips thinned. With the questions I’d been asking, that was entirely true. My motivation had gone away with Diane finally making it to someplace safe, and I didn’t have the discipline I needed to stand up right now. “I feel like I’ve lost my objective, I think.”

The tail swooshed all the way from one side to the other. [Please define your objective.]

“I was doing it for someone else, I think. You said red is passion and blue is being vicarious, so isn’t purple just a mix of the two? Action for the purpose of others?” One hand curled into a fist and rapped the metal underneath me. “Everyone else is safe inside now. What’s left? Holding out?” I cast a quick choker crystal and charged it up before setting its position on the roof. It dipped me under two] hundred mana. “I've got crystals for that. Dumb intelligent hands, you call them.”

If the eye holes of the familiar could squint, I’d bet they would have done so there. [We will provide two points of counsel. The hundred souls in the building under us are safe, but remain under siege. I am a being other than you, and I remain in danger, thus requiring your help. Please do it for us.]

“Mm,” I hummed, not willing to admit how easily that deconstructed my point. Nevertheless, my Familiar achieved its aim, and I reached out to pick it up on a whim. Both my hands managed to get a grip around its torso, and I lifted it up like it were a king of the jungle, only facing me instead of its eventual subjects. “You’re good for me.”

It only moved to maintain eye contact with me. Otherwise it was entirely slack. If I tried to lift up my cat this way, he would have started struggling by now, and he would be sinking his claws into me if I didn’t let go in the next five seconds.

“What’s the deal with Familiar names?” I asked. “I haven’t heard of many, like I know of a few, but they aren’t like human names.”

[They are not,] it confirmed.

“Do you really just go around calling yourself a…” I dredged up the memory. It felt so long ago. Then again, two and a half hours was always a long time unless you were having fun. “...fragment of the familiar? And that’s fine with you?”

[We concern ourselves with purpose before identity, and possess an adequate title for your purposes. You have used it several times already.]

I lowered the glowing white thing a little, thinking about it. “Just, Familiar?”

The little white head nodded.

I gave a little huff. “Diane was right. I need to name you.” I set it down in my lap, which felt strangely right. It just adopted the sitting position it always used as I looked out over it. “I had a name in mind, but it doesn’t feel like it fits with the talk you just gave me.”

Its tail twitched. [We admit to curiosity.]

“Was gonna call you Rascal,” I admitted a little shyly, looking down at it. “Because you act like one most of the time.”

[We protest. The accusation suffers from hyperbole and is by definition incorrect.]

A small smile managed to break through and the shyness went away. “Well then okay, Rascal.”

The newly named Familiar’s ears moved with expression for the first time since I’d met the thing. Normally they were folded over to either side, pointing down and to the side when a cat’s would point up, which was the most obvious difference in shape between my cat and my familiar. It was different from Prissy’s aeroplane ears as well, the shape just wasn’t a cat’s expression.

The way its ears drooped more reminded me of a begging dog, one that was begging me to not call it Rascal. Which, tough. Dogs had the handicap of not being able to speak or be all that intelligent. This was an incredibly intelligent creature that had transcended the spoken word who really should have been able to convince me with them. It was no animal as far as sapience was concerned, and that meant it got held to higher standards.

With a slight shake of my head, something to hide how I thought that look was actually extremely cute but not willing to let it affect me, I picked up and set the little rascal beside me. Then I pulled my grimoire from its away space and opened to the Stocorro section.

“What’s next on the list of spells you think I would easily master?” I asked, rubbing a finger along the edge of a page and wishing the text was brighter. The ink began glowing there, helpfully, but it was Tug of War, which I could already cast. “And how many more do I need for the apprentice version?”

[The requirements for the Stoccoro Grimoire for Flashy Bloodsport indicate you need to display proficiency with four more spells from the Stoccoro Grimoire for Flashy Rituals,] Rascal helpfully informed me, and I was going to keep calling it that until I was asked to stop. [As for your next spell, the translation methodology we have been using has again resulted in an interesting name for our recommendation.]

“Is it Paddy Cake?” I asked, having just turned to the page with that spell.

[It is. Beware that proficiency in casting this spell was not measured by its destructive capacity by the Stoccoro. They preferred to measure using the caster’s capacity for flair in this case.]

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“That’s annoying,” I commented, still reading the spell. What little I had read told me that the spell would give me the ability to shove things with great and destructive force. Something I wish I’d read up on before escaping that tunnel with the miasma beacon in it. “What arbitrary task will the Stoccoro have me do this time?”

[Propel a starbane form into the air. Then, when the starbane form is still midair, propel it up once more. Proficiency will be achieved when the caster again propels the starbane form whilst midair, this time into the ground, and lands without stumbling.]

I took a moment to give my Familiar an unimpressed look. Its tail twitched.

“I don’t have that kind of coordination,” I told it. “Ability to jump that high, yes. But unless-” I realised I was literally holding my solution, and huffed before lightly tossing my grimoire up and saying, “Slow Fall.”

The magic took, and the pages of my personal grimoire rapidly turned until they snapped open on a page of the Book of Human Tricks, then slowly descended back into my hands.

“Can I use this on other people?” I asked as I scanned for the casting instructions.

[As the spell scans for lifeforms in the process of descent before applying its effect to found targets, it will.]

“And that goes true for starbanes as well?” I checked. “It won’t disqualify me from the proficiency test?”

[Slow Fall will affect starbane forms if that is your intention,] Rascal told me. [The letter of what you call the proficiency test will not be violated. This test was always intended to be performed in concert with other spells, such as Friendly Race, and the spirit will consequently remain untarnished.]

“Fantastic,” I said, and urged my book to go back to Paddy Cake. “What’s with the translation? You said it was interesting.”

[The literal translation to your language would be “Felling Mountainous Arch” which is in reference to a historical event where thirty seven thousand and one Stoccoro perished, with more than three times that number forced to vagrancy. Their world naturally formed hollow hills and maintains, and after that event they ceased building cities atop them.]

I stewed on that for a moment, my spellbook open in front of me remaining unread for now. “I thought the spells were all kid’s games?”

[The translation is indirect,] Rascal explained. [Stoccoran flashy rituals are the equivalent of humanity’s sports and games for youth. “Felling Mountainous Arch” was a popular pastime for young Stoccoro, just as Paddy Cake is for young humans. This is the spirit of the translation we have been providing.]

My eyes stopped on a word midway through a sentence for several seconds. Inertia, specifically. I wanted to ask a question, get it to expand on… all of that.

But it wasn’t the time, as hypocritical as a notion that had become.

“Tell me more about that later,” I settled on saying.

[We intend to educate you more about the Stoccoro as a whole, but will wait for an appropriate time and place to deliver the full historical package.]

It was promising me an extensive lesson, and for the first time in a long time the idea didn’t fill me with dread. Recent events had really shifted my perspective, I supposed. I hummed as my eyes scanned the rest of the spell for the stuff that seemed most important. Once I was satisfied, I snapped the book shut and discarded it by letting it tip out of my hand as I swung my legs back up onto the solid roof. The book shimmered out of existence with a purple glow before it fully left my field of view.

“Right,” I said, then took a breath, only to pause as a passing thought made me chuckle. “Didn’t get any morale…”

The glowing mostly white Rascal ran on the air to end up just beside my head, where it endeavoured to stay. [Have you discovered a reason for this discussion?]

“Uh… I couldn’t say. Where to for the next beacon?”

_______

For the next two, three, or maybe four hours, I don’t really remember what happened. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing, or that there were some ghastly surprises that I entirely failed to put into words. If anything, it was the opposite. I knew what I was doing, and what surprises did occur were simply more of the same.

Two new forms of lowly starbanes started to harry me in that time. First was a flying little thing about as wide as the main body of a sixball. They were called spinners, and they tried to kill me by doing that against my skin. Their bodies were small disks with six limbs going out equidistantly, and at the end of each of those limbs was another disk. It was those second disks that spun, fast enough to give the little things lift, and then the whole thing would turn into a spinning plate of death when it got close.

Just like the legs of a sixball, the disks were sharp, and a few managed to find gaps in my armour before I could deal with them. To top it off, they only gave me seven mana when harvested. They earned their spot near the top of my most hated starbane list.

The second form was comparatively benign. ‘Big Bad Beavers’ as named by some magical guy called Himbo-Man, started appearing a good while after the spinners. Unlike an actual beaver, they ignored trees and instead dug holes in the earth like a mole. There was a good chance I would’ve never found one of them if they didn’t stop what they were doing in favour of attacking me whenever I was nearby, and they weren’t that fast so I was always alerted in time to turn an anklebiter in one’s direction.

Big bad beavers, or threebies as I took to calling them, went to the bottom of my new list of most hated starbane forms. Honestly, I was running so ragged when they started showing up that I almost didn’t register them at all. But I pressed on.

After dropping Diane off and having my little pep talk with the newly named Rascal, my modus operandi set itself and didn’t really change. I would be directed to a forming miasma beacon and break the defences surrounding it, then set up enough choker crystals to make a mana profit off of killing the thing before moving on and repeating that process.

Rascal always pointed me towards the one nearest to completion, but if there was a newer one along the way, there was no reason to ignore it. The one hundred and seventy something mana I had after charging the false me and setting up what defences I had quickly skyrocketed as a result.

With it just being me and my Familiar I lost the wherewithal to banter quickly, and my pace of spell mastery slowed as well. That being said, I did successfully ‘pass’ three stoccoro spells. They were Walk the Dog, Nice Beam, and Phasefoil. Paddy Cake unfortunately turned out to be immensely frustrating. Things just fell too fast for me to do its stupid task, even with the Slow Fall spell making things easier. In some cases they died too fast as well. The grand slam was supposed to be the finisher, so the one time I actually managed the trick with a hookblow that died in midair didn't count.

Rascal ended up spending a lot of time and effort to calm me down after finding that out.

The other three spells were much simpler. Walk the Dog was a spell that summoned a spinning wheel of death tethered to me, and its task was simply to have it continually cast for a period of time that was basically an hour. It ended up eating two thousand mana in total before Rascal told me I had passed the arbitrary task, something I would not have done if not for each miasma beacon yielding upwards of 500 mana.

I didn’t mean to fell as many trees as I did when I was running around with that thing, but it did turn out to be helpful when several starbane forms decided to rush me. Something they did pretty much every time one of them found me.

As for the trees, the camp would probably make walkways with the paths that vicious little wheel carved out.

Nice Beam was a gimmie, thankfully, but also the last ‘simple’ task in the grimoire. The spell was a beam that bent towards targets, but with the caveat that it bent away from ‘critical points.’ Those were Rascal’s words, it claimed to be quoting multiple ‘entertainment simulations.’ It spent a lot of time explaining to me why it had the name that it did, since it burned the things it touched in the nicest and most polite way possible.

The task was to kill something by hitting the critical points, and a sixball was mostly head. A critical point by any other name. I painstakingly used the spell to clear the defences around a miasma beacon, learning the intricacies of angling the beam, how it affected the targeting, and figuring out how to intensify the relatively weak stoccoro spell. Results were tepid and disappointing.

Then a singular purple murderball tried to jump at my face and I passed the test.

At that point I was so tired that I just moved on to the next spell.

When I cast Phasefoil, the spell made a glowing purple foil for me to pick up. The task was to stab some ridiculous number of foes which turned out to be tricky.

I was averse to letting any starbane get close for obvious reasons, but that wasn’t the real issue. The foil was entirely made out of magic and wasn’t actually solid except at the hilt, so the blade part of it just went through things and burned them. It also did mana injection, which Rascal assured me was the actually deadly part of the spell. That was nice and all, but the spell did more damage when I slashed it through something.

Rascal informed me after I slashed through I-don’t-know-how-many starbanes that I only had one effective point towards passing the task. It cited that slashes were not stabs, and I didn’t manage to make it budge on the topic. It wasn’t like I was diving headfirst into battle with the spell either. I only ever used the spell on stragglers after a fight, isolated starbanes that were usually already injured, and even that was riskier than I was comfortable with.

As a whole, the experience was a dangerous slog and I ended up needing to refer to my healing spellbook multiple times. Still, Rascal kept me appraised of progress when it occurred.

Foundation serpents were a fantastic target for the spell, I found. While Phasefoil wasn’t solid, it did have a pinning effect on living things. I had thus taken to only casting seven choker crystals by the time I returned to the cave I got my first perfect eight to deal with the replacement snakes which had taken up residence. The starbanes hadn’t learned, they tried to defend the cave using arachnos, so the second wave was dealt with the same way as the first.

At the same time, I was so out of it at that point that I finished up before I looked over and realised I could have just moved the old choker crystals over to save some mana.

“Next,” I said once I was done, rising and mechanically lifting the foil in front of me like I was saluting to pay respect to an opponent. It was how to properly reclaim the mana of the spell, and the purple blade dissolved into purple motes from the tip.

I wasn’t woosy or unstable after spending so much time doing what I had been doing, but my efforts had taken me to the edges of the veil’s insides and back far too many times to leave me with any grace. The damnable serpents had seeded themselves all over, and I had ranged far and wide as a result. To think I had hiked over one measly little hill and felt drained just two days ago.

And despite all my efforts, there were still so many miasma beacons underway that the list went down below what I could see of the Doom Counter. The next beacon was thankfully still two hours out from completion.

That alone was the solitary proof of my efforts.

[Pause, Donna.]

The words were not what I was expecting. So much so that I took an extra step before stopping with a frown and looking back at where I thought Rascal was. I ended up searching for a few seconds, since it was walking upside down along the ceiling of the cave and that was actually quite a distance above me.

“Why?” I asked, lacking the energy to really emote.

[Exit the cave and look left.]

I didn’t have the energy to really question it either. Instead, I just did what it said in the hopes that it would get us back on track sooner. The fact that all the corpses of starbanes that had once blocked the cave entrance were gone didn’t hit me until I had left the cave for the second time. It distracted me briefly, then I looked in the direction Rascal had told me to and realised there was something blue there.

“Is anything near?” I asked when I realised it wasn’t approaching.

[Two spinners have spotted you.]

I closed my eyes and turned my head up. Life detection was still running, and highlighted the odd shapes against the blue that the spell used as a background. The spells I knew ran through my head until I settled on one that would solve this situation with the least effort. Then I had to spend another few seconds remembering the name.

“Nice Beam,” I cast, summoning a purple circle with a handle not unlike Anklebiter’s, though the make of the handle was different. I squeezed and the purple beam lit up the world in front of me, though I only knew that from the light cast on my eyelids. Life detection didn’t detect spells, and the first silhouette shortly vanished from my sight. I didn’t bother stopping and recasting the spell, since I knew it would correct itself soon enough, and shortly the second spinner stopped being alive.

I let the spell go and allowed my hand to fall to my side, my eyes still closed. Things were still bad. This was a crisis and I could get ambushed at any moment. Starbanes forms frequently did exactly that, and if it weren’t for their constant screams telling me where they were before they triggered Proximity Alarm, they may have succeeded.

All the same, I let the moment stretch out. I was tired. My body was physically exhausted, even with a bolstering spell or two I could remember casting from the androkan grimoire, though the names eluded me at that moment.

[Donna,] my Familiar roused me by beaming my own name into my head.

I opened my eyes. “I’m awake,” I said, then raised my voice. “It’s safe!”

The tiny authority fairy hesitantly flitted out from where it had been hiding in a canopy. I raised my hand for it to land on as it got close, but ended up letting my hand fall again. There was a weight on my eyelids, and I had to blink a few times. Burning ribbons were covering my arms anyway.

“I’m surprised you’re still around here,” I continued.

“You left behind enough starbanes that I didn’t think it was safe to move. They did chase you at first,” she explained, and a stab of guilt made it through my fatigue. “But… forgive me. You should not be on your feet.”

My eyes dropped to the blasted and bloodstained ground. “Only magical girl under the veil,” I mumbled. “Don’t even have an apprentice tomb.”

[Tome,] Rascal corrected me.

“Know what I said.”

[You are close to gaining access to the Stoccoro Grimoire for Flashy Bloodsport, Donna. You need only show proficiency in one more spell from the Stoccoro Grimoire for Flashy Rituals.]

It clicked then that I was done with Foil, but I couldn’t muster up the energy to celebrate.

“Gotta keep pushing back doom,” I said, finishing what must have seemed like a mad series of rambles with my glowing cat thing who had dog ears and didn’t have the decency to walk on the ground or let gravity affect it in the right direction.

“Respectfully, Donna,” Authority began, and I braced for something that wasn’t respectful. “You need to cast Napnip on yourself.”

That brought my eyes up, and I quickly looked to my Familiar for an explanation.

[It is a spell from the Book of Human Tricks that places the target in a state of accelerated unconsciousness,] it explained. [Caution should be exercised, as disrupting the spell midcast is difficult and has severe side effects for the target.]

“It sounds like some kind of drug,” I said.

“I think so too,” the authority fairy said, bringing my attention back to it. “But it’s not really a drug, and it’s what I think you need right now.”

“But-” I started to yawn but I cut it off. “Hsshh! What I need is to push something up twice and then down before it hits the floor.” I did a few paddy cake claps to illustrate, but fumbled the last one. “Y’know. A spell.”

The tiny Authority just hovered in front of me, drifting down a little bit over multiple seconds.

“It’s my proficiency task, and it’s needlessly difficult and obtuse,” I tried to explain, but my voice sounded petulant even to me. “Last one, I swear.”

Authority didn’t respond. She just flapped her wings to regain the height she had lost.

Another yawn snuck up on me, and this time I wasn’t able to head it off. My efforts seemed to make it longer than it would have been otherwise, and I turned away from the fairy, who I could feel judging me.

“Fine, I’ll do the stupid Napnip thing,” I finally conceded.