Installment 25 [https://squirrel.dogphilosophy.net/Installment025.png]
The rest of the night was spent in tolerable comfort sleeping in the common rental-room of the Biggest Coop. As they'd discussed with the other villagers who were still present before they bedded down, Rose awakened them at sunrise with a knock on the door. They quickly filled their bellies with the apparently endless scrambled eggs they were offered, then went out to meet up with the entire population of the village at the village's well. The villagers and the party would stay together defensively through the daylight hours so that if the beast did come, it wouldn't be able to separate one of them to victimize.
"You sure you can't shoot magical fire from your fingers at it or something?" Wikwocket had asked.
"No, I can't." Al sighed. But then, he thought. "Well, maybe I can. Give me a few hours."
He fetched the bandits' crossbows and the crossbow bolts they'd recovered, and found a convenient woodpile to use for target practice. He rummaged up a bit of twine and used it to tie carefully-sized bits of wood to the end of the bolts. After cursing at the first crossbow for falling apart when he wound it and picking up a second, he began to practice.
It took a few shots to get used to the extra weight at the end of the crossbow bolts, but Al had practiced with a crossbow even before he joined the army, and then had gotten more practice after. Most of his shots hit what he was aiming at. Some of the assembled villagers cheered him on, and one or two asked to try it out. After an hour or so, all three of the other still-functional crossbows they'd confiscated from the bandits were in use by bored villagers. Those with some hunting experience did reasonably well for people who'd never used one before.
"Now, I'm not formally any sort of magic expert, but to me, this kind of looks like the opposite of shooting magical fire from your fingers." pondered Wikwocket with simulated philosophical interest.
"Not yet," Al countered,"but later when I replace the piece of wood with one of the glass containers of ultraphlogisticated oil, I will be."
"But that's cheating! That's not magic!"
"Oh, but it is!" Al said. "Look at it this way, if I wave my hands a special way and say magic words and my target bursts into flame, you would call that magic, right?"
"Obviously!"
"And what if I was good enough that I didn't even need to say the magic words?"
"That's be even more magical!"
"Exactly! But, what if I needed to use a wand instead of my fingers, would that still be magic?"
"Yes, of course..." Wikwocket answered, wondering where this line of discussion was headed.
"Would it matter what the wand was shaped like?"
"No?"
"Well then, here is my wand", said Al, hefting the crossbow, "and here is my magical gesture."
He wound the crossbow back up, set a bolt in place, aimed, and pulled the trigger as Wikwocket objected.
"But...anybody can do that, that's not magic!"
"I'm telling you, it is!" disputed Al, "It's a very simple kind of magic that's very easy to understand, but it's still fundamentally the same as more difficult magic like throwing lightning or transmuting someone into a dire-squirrel. It's all just a matter of knowing how you want reality to be changed, and knowing how and where to apply one's will to make it want to happen. In this case, When I use a crossbow, I want reality to be changed just enough to transform my target into one with a hole poked in it, and I just need to understand how reality works and how my magical tool works to make it happen. Changing it slightly to make a glass container of alchemical fire break on the target just requires a little bit of adjustment. And that's the lesson beginning students of wizardry are supposed to grasp when they made us practice with a crossbow for endless hours before they let us work with what you would call real magic."
"If that was true, anybody would be able to do magic!"
"I would say, rather, that everyone is doing magic, all the time," observed Bote, who had been watching and listening.
"I mean real magic." complained Wikwocket. "If that's all it is, why doesn't everybody do real magic?"
"Mostly it's because once you get to the that kind of magic the details, complexity, and nuances of the parts of reality that you need to be able to understand and manipulate get very different from most people's day-to-day experience. It takes a lot of study and practice, and the right kind of mind, to get to that point. Most people who are reasonably smart could still do it, but it might take them a long time in dedicated study which might be better spent learning more typical skills."
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"How much time is a long time?" Wikwocket asked.
"Well, I personally have some advantages. My ancestry has a lot of magically-talented people in it, so if there is such a thing as a natural talent for magic I probably have it. My parents are both magical practitioners so I've been exposed to magic-working habits all my life, and I had access to a good start for my education in wizardry and plenty of academic resources. It's taken me about the last 8 years to get to where I am, which I feel like is just barely reaching the level of basic understanding I'll need to build from on my own. Someone without those advantages might have to study and practice for over a decade before finally achieving any level of, uh, real magic at all, and decades more to advance enough to start teaching themselves, and that's assuming they can even get access to the knowledge to get started."
"Well, that's not fair," Wikwocket pouted. "Here, let me try one of those crossbows."
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Gruntle was very disappointed that none of the new clan-members wanted to punch him. The more of his extended clan that he met, the stranger they seemed. If he was a creature with a greater sense of curiosity, this would give him plenty to think about. As it was, he was merely restless and bored. At a moment when everyone's attention was on their own conversations or the crossbow practice the others were indulging in, he quietly stepped away to sniff around.
The scent of chicken was everywhere. Virtually every dwelling had a chicken coop next to it. For a while, Gruntle amused himself by trying to sneak up on the chickens as he meandered around the village, and watching them all scramble frantically for their coops each time they finally noticed him.
Towards the southern end of the village, Gruntle encountered a novelty - one of the chickens wanted to fight. As the hens ran for cover in the coop, a rooster charged to their defense. As it leapt at him, flapping its wings, slashing with its talons and clucking angrily, Gruntle hesitated. What, exactly, the chickens were to the clan wasn't clear. He knew they were frequently eaten by the clan, but that didn't necessarily mean anything - the clan he had originally been born into occasionally ate other clan-members. After all, why waste meat? On the other hand, it was far too small to seriously injure or challenge him. Was it like a cub?
He reached to grab the belligerent bird, but its wild flapping made its movement hard to predict. It jabbed his hand with a spur as it dodged away. Gruntle grinned. What a fun game!
By the time he finally managed to grab the rooster, Gruntle's hand was bleeding from several shallow slashes and stabs. The chicken refused to give up, desperately pecking and kicking at Gruntle even as he held it by the neck. Gruntle let out a barking laugh of approval.
A loud crash nearby interrupted the recreational violence. Gruntle dropped the rooster and loped quietly towards where the noise had come from. The rooster, seeing his hens had all made it to safety, decided he'd punished Gruntle enough and ran for the coop himself to join them.
Gruntle reached the corner of the cabin he'd heard the noise from, when another crash was heard a short distance away. He peeked carefully around the corner.
The door to the cabin had been smashed in. A little ways off, the door of a second cabin appeared to also be broken down. From inside that cabin, there were the sounds of objects being violently thrown about, and frustrated growling. Gruntle crouched down on all fours and crept quietly forward. As he passed the entry to the nearer cabin, he looked inside to see the place had been hastily ransacked - blankets torn from the bedding, table overturned. There was a faint sulfurous scent in the air that was alien and yet, almost familiar.
Gruntle continued towards the other cabin, still hunched low. He froze when the beast emerged as he got to about halfway.
Horace's description of it being the size of a horse hadn't been much of an exaggeration. It walked on four legs, its shoulders and hips at the same height that Al's head would have been. It somewhat resembled a wolf in the same way a wolf resembles a lapdog. It had wide ears and a too-long snout unevenly filled with sharp teeth. Its forepaws were stretched, as though someone had started pulling them out to make hands out of them but had stopped halfway through the process. It was covered with patchy dark-grey fur, with tumorous lumps that flexed like muscle underneath. It appeared to be at least double Gruntle's own bulk. It was large enough that it had to duck slightly and struggled to squeeze back out through the cabin's doorway, snarling angrily as it did. It saw Gruntle as it shook itself free. It stared, perhaps shocked to see someone else inhuman there.
Gruntle held still, considering paths for escape from the larger beast. His instincts drove a need to protect the survival of his clan, and since he was the only clan-member present, that meant himself. He grinned excitedly all the same - if he couldn't escape the beast, at least there would be a lot of gratifying violence in the fight to survive. He would find out as soon as the beast charged at him.
But it never did.
Its disordered collection of muscle tensed to spring, but stopped. The beast stared at Gruntle's slashed and bleeding right hand for a long moment, then slowly raised its gaze to look Gruntle in the eyes. Gruntle met its gaze and stared back.
The muscles of the beast's face writhed, and with an effort that seemed to cause it pain, it vocalized. The sound meant nothing to Gruntle, but the tone of the single utterance seemed like an attempt at speech. It resembled the sounds of a gnollish cub, still trying to learn to talk. When the beast repeated the sound, it seemed almost to be pleading. Without looking away, Gruntle cocked his head to the side questioningly.
The beast finally looked away, towards the south along the road, then back to Gruntle's wounded hand, and finally back to Gruntle's face. Again, quietly, the beast made the same pained sound. Then it slowly backed away a step, turned, and trotted towards the south road. It looked back one last time as it passed the edge of the village, then broke into a run.