Now Bob had already tried to sense the mud. He had tried and failed. Well slow down there Bob. That wasn't exactly true, was it? Quality Assurance is all about the details. Which order you click the buttons, what you do before and after, the exact user, machine, browser you are on. Everything potentially matters. Magical Quality Assurance (MQA) ought to hold itself to the same standard. Let's keep everything nice, clear and factual.

What had Bob tried? Steps to reproduce:

* close your eyes

* slow your breath

* sit with mud pillared in your hand

* try to feel said mud

And what were the results? Unclear... Explain. Well, truth be told, Bob had kinda thought he had felt some kind of connection to the mud. Of course, everything was, so to speak, muddied by the fact that he was holding the mud in his hand. There was a fair chance he had just been projecting this special "mud sense" on top of his tactile sensations and his knowledge that he was actually holding a ball of mud. Inconclusive, in a word.

What else had Bob tried? Steps to reproduce:

* set up a mud ball a few feet away from yourself

* close your eyes

* slow your breath

* cover your ears

* try to feel said mud.

And what were the results? Definitive. Bob had not been able to feel the mud ball. He hadn't felt a damn thing. No, wait—it's the small incongruities that lead you to the truth. He had felt something or thought he did anyway. It just hadn't come from the direction of the mud ball. Instead he'd felt something surrounding him, something that flowed and shifted. Of course, he'd never been able to find that thing, which had basically undermined any faith he had in his so-called "feelings."

Men need to learn to take their feelings more seriously.

"Bob, I propose we start by assuming all of your "feelings" were not imagined and admit them into the record as evidence."

"But Bob, that seems like highly wishful thinking."

"True, Bob, but how effective has your current approach been? "

"Well Bob, now that you ask... it's complicated... there are moving parts, wheels within wheels you might say."

"Exactly Bob, literally zilch. I propose we assay my approach."

"Very well Bob, I hope you know what you're doing."

"Bob, I hope we know what we're doing. "

Accepting Bob's feelings as fact, Bob was able to draw three conclusions. Conclusion number one: Bob was able to sense the mud ball when it was in his hand. Conclusion number two: Bob could not feel the mud ball from a few feet away. And conclusion number three: Bob was able to sense some other aura/energy/object aside from the mud ball.

Reproducibility is the cornerstone of MQA. How is the wizard supposed to debug the spell if he can't even reproduce it? He can't. Bob would need to start by confirming those conclusions. He could try repeating the above steps exactly as they were, but Bob was an iterator. You're supposed to do better the second time you face the same problem. And Bob had an idea about how to do better.

* Step one: scoop yourself up a handful of mud.

* Step two: find yourself a pebble of similar size and weight.

* Step three: hold the mud in the one hand and the pebble in the other.

* Step four: sit down, close your eyes and still your breathing.

* Step five: feel the mud

The advantages of this adjustment were obvious. It was designed to help Bob isolate his mud-sense. The human hand is one of nature's greatest sensory devices. Your eyes can only parse visible light. Your ears only interpret sound waves. But your hands, your hands can see temperature, texture; they can judge weight and shape; they can feel wetness or dryness, sense vibrations and gauge pressure resistance. This storm of information would drain out any slight trickle of data from Bob's mud perception.

Hence the pebble. The pebble, especially if chosen well (Bob actually changed pebbles to something a little lighter and tried wetting the stone), would give comparable sensory input to the mud ball. The mind is infinitely superior at picking out differences than at generic analysis. If he could just compare sensory streams for pebble and mud, any major differences would have to be attributable to a special "mud sense."

It took Bob a while to normalize the sensory input. To pair off the weights and textures and temperatures. Five minutes went by as Bob honed in on the sensory inputs coming from the two objects. Another three minutes passed before Bob thought he found the corner of a difference. He didn't move. He didn't celebrate or break concentration. MQA was no frivolous enterprise and wouldn't permit such looseness. No Bob sat with the feeling. He stroked the feeling. He smelled it and tasted it. He wallowed in it.

It was a difficult thing to describe. Like picking out one scent in a field of many flowers. The information from his hands and the brain's deep familiarity with its structure and interpretation blunted his pure mud perception. And yet if he had to put the sensation into words, he might have said that he felt closer to the mud.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

You get a curious sensation when you touch one part of your body to another. You feel the contact in two different places at the same time. And your mind sort of blurs those feelings together into one combined sensation. Bob received a similar impression from the mud.

He wasn't just feeling the mud through his own hand, he seemed to be feeling his own hand through the mud at the same time. The effect was subtle. Extremely so. It was only the absence of comparable feedback from the pebble that gave Bob any confidence in his assertion. Without that control, Bob probably would have shook his head and dismissed the whole thing as him simply "feeling funny."

But Bob did have his control and was correspondingly confident in his conclusion. The system hadn't deceived him. Young Puddler Bob could feel the mud. And he hadn't needed any hidden spell chants or dramatic hand gestures. He could sense the mud entirely with his mind.

Conclusion number one: tick. MQA's first victory. Time to take up conclusion two. Could Bob sense the mud ball at a distance? Here again Bob would iterate. He'd assume nothing. He wouldn't let himself be swayed by dramatic anime portrayals. He would start small, very small, as small as he could manage. He sketched up a testing plan:

* (Step zero: reuse pebble and mud ball)

* Step one: acquire a pad of waterproof paper (Only 200 credits in the system shop).

* Step two: tear out two sheets.

* Step three: place both mud ball and pebble on top of a sheet of paper and balance on hands

* Step four: sit down, close your eyes and still your breathing.

* Step five: feel the mud

A natural progression on his first experiment. Bob had established that he could "sense" mud when in direct contact with it. But if his previous, less formal experience was to be trusted, he couldn't sense the mud from a few feet away. Time to figure out if it was a problem of distance or capacity.

In this variation, Bob would have no direct skin contact with either pebble or mud ball. Instead a mere 0.1 millimeter thick piece of paper would separate his hand from the target. If he could sense mud at range, he would surely be able to sense the mud ball resting on top of the paper. Moment of truth. Bob focused in on his mud sense.

Nothing happened immediately. But that didn't worry Bob. He sat there for ten full minutes. He didn't rush. Some bugs were all timing. You had to wait for exactly the right moment, and then strike.

Except the right moment never came. Ten minutes of deep focus, trying to reach out and connect with the imperially calm ball of mud, and yet Bob couldn't feel a thing. The mental silence was absolute. If Bob hadn't known beforehand, he wouldn't have been able to tell you what was sitting on top of the paper: mud, a stone, a ball of clay, a water balloon.

Just to make sure, Bob removed the paper and let his hand touch the mud. There it was: the old sensation. He found it almost immediately, that double, echoed sensation like he was touching his own skin. He put the paper back, clinging onto that feeling, but he couldn't find it. One measly sheet of paper completely shut out his mud sense. He persisted for a few more minutes more out of stubbornness than hope, but Bob found out the hard way that the truth doesn't change the longer we wait for it.

"Dammit all." It was maddening. How underwhelming of an ability.

Bob the magician: "Gather around children. I'll show you some real magic. See this ball of mud. Now when I place this ball of mud right here on my hand. Watch closely now. I can... feel it."

The children did not look impressed.

"No, no, you don't understand I can feel the mud without using my hand."

"Take off your hand then."

"Ah... No, it's complicated, I need my hand, but I don't need my hand."

"He's boring."

Nobody appreciates real magic.

"Bob, get a hold of yourself. Are you not a proud and noble member of the order of MQA? There is still much to be tested."

"I apologize to the noble order of the MQA."

Yes, perhaps the paper was blocking his mud sense. A millimeter of opaque substance was more than enough to block out all visible light and plunge the world into darkness. This hypothesis was easily testable. Bob would put the mud ball on the ground and hold his hand as close as he could without touching.

The attempt was quickly made and any hope was quickly dashed. Nope, even half a millimeter of empty air was a dark curtain over his mud eyes and he couldn't sense a thing. Grand conclusion: Bob could only sense mud when it was directly touching his hand. Talk about a useless power.

Conclusion one: tick. He could sense mud. Conclusion two: tick. He couldn't sense mud at a distance. What about conclusion three: could Bob sense something other than the mud ball? He quickly recreated the original experiment. He minimized all his external senses and focused on the space around. Thirty seconds of quiet contemplation later and he found what he was looking for. There was something there...

It was a new sense for Bob and he felt like a bumbling child. The information was confusing and disordered; his mind didn't know what to do with it, how to turn that raw data into a picture of the world. It actually started to make Bob's head hurt a little, but he persisted and did his best to piece out his impressions.

There was something around him. It wasn't static like a shell or the walls of a room. He got the impression it was swaying softly. And then, but it was so hard to make anything out clearly, he might have said he felt internal currents. Movement within the energy or object. Almost like the winds in the sky.

He sat with it. Trying to shape out the information. And he realized that it wasn't uniform. It didn't surround him like a haze. Instead it was concentrated in some places and entirely absent in others. For example, he couldn't sense anything around his head or at his hands and feet. And yet the signal around the back of his neck was particularly strong.

Bob opened his eyes and quickly looked behind him. As though he might catch the sensation red-handed. Of course, there was nothing and nobody there. He squinted at the air and clicked his tongue. He'd definitely felt something. He still had the aftermath of a faint headache to prove it. He swiped a hand at the space behind him. Maybe there was an invisible presence, but his hand completed its motion without interference.

"Don't tell me I'm haunted." He sniffed around his shoulder. It all just smelled like mud to him.