Bob had done a lot of menial work in his time. He'd spent a week doing data entry and two weeks doing data cleanup. He'd sat through three-hour meetings where only one person spoke. He'd sent various turtle icons between his two work accounts, thousands, ten of thousands, maybe even millions of times. And yet setting up a two-man tent with one good arm in the dark was testing Bob to the limits of his frustration.
He'd started off well. In that he'd completely forgotten that his current tent was inappropriate for serious camping. It was his leisure tent, tall-ceilinged, bright blue, airy, comfortable. Of course, Bob only made the discovery after twenty long minutes of faffing around with the thing, pulling everything out of its neat, little packages and spreading it in a wide, disordered circle around the campsite.
He spat out some choice insults (both at the tent and at himself), before settling on a military grade tent he'd found in the system shop. It was a low half-cylinder with barely enough room to sit up and covered in grassland camouflage. Windproof, waterproof, mosquito-proof, proof-proof. Bob might have enjoyed the shop’s description a little much. Anyway he’d marked out the foundation (five feet away from the old tent wreckage) and was in the process of trying to set the thing up.
Trying yes, succeeding no. How do you hold a peg in place and hit it with a mallet at the same time with one hand? Answer—you don’t. You’d think, no problem, just drive the peg firm into the ground first with your hand and then once it was secure, smack it on the head with the mallet. If only life was so easy…
No, the campsite was at the bottom of a depression, meaning it was where water pooled, meaning the ground was a soggy mud-scape, meaning you could jam a peg in as hard as you wanted, but it would slide and squelch and for the love of god, would not go in straight.
Bob lobbed the hammer in frustration. When you imagine the wounded, you think of the pain, of the disability, of walking or driving, what you don’t think of are the endless inconveniences, the little, simple forgettable actions that are turned into grand trials of spirit and nature. You don’t see the accumulation of small victories required to enable an ordinary life. Bob was seeing them now.
Bob had thrown the hammer a fair distance. "Now I’ve got to go pick it up," he complained to himself, "why do I have to be so damn good at throwing with my left hand?" It was fortunate there was a pale half-moon in the sky, because otherwise Bob would have been blind as a bat and he was far too terrified to risk any kind of artificial light.
Bob groped around in the dark. He’d left George tied up to a big stone back beside the inside-out carcass that was supposed to be a tent. Bob searched, but Bob did not find. The night was turning chilly and the long minutes tramping through the mud were doing nothing for Bob’s mood.
No, Bob was fuming. He was seriously considering just going back to the campsite and buying himself another hammer. But Bob was a complete miser. And he’d already bought a hammer. He didn’t see why he should have to pay twice. That hammer had to be around here somewhere. It was probably lying two feet away, nestled silently on a bed of mud, laughing at him. That thought gave Bob an idea.
Bob knelt down and put a hand on the ground. He closed his eyes and let his awareness flow out into the surrounding mud. He pushed further and further. It was the trick he'd discovered in his battle with the spider: using the mud as the medium for his mud sense. Spreading himself out this thin over such a large area did cost some mana, but it was still peanuts compared with resisting Newtonian forces.
The information he got back was muddled and muddy. He hadn’t quite gotten used to the sensation of feeling through the mud. His mind didn't automatically categorize the sensory data dump into tidy concepts and familiar objects. He had to manually shift through the sensory fog.
It was mostly cold, dark feelings. The strongest signal was temperature. He could feel where the sunlight had pooled across the afternoon and which parts had been in shade. He could even sense gradual variations in altitude. And what was that? In a generally cool area, there was a strangely warm patch. Bob wandered over and reached down. There was the hammer. Still warm from his epic struggle with the pegs.
Bob gave a grudging smile; he couldn’t help himself. Sure it had been a bad day, a really bad day. But that didn’t change the fact that Bob was a fricking wizard and had just located an object using magic. Not everything was about fighting and it was good to know that his mud-magic could be useful somewhere.
No, Bob thought as he ambled back to camp, he’d been thinking about magic wrong. He’d been all about direct attacks and flashy moves. He was thinking like a fire mage. Bob wasn’t a fire mage. Bob was a mud magician and he had to get into the mindset.
He crouched down over the defiant peg. He instinctively moved to bring his right arm forward, but the signal died at the broken nerves in his shoulder. Bob felt anger flaring up again. It was so unfair. But he caught himself. He managed one long breath and that made the next one easier. He couldn’t control what he couldn’t control. Conversely, he could control what he could control. He could control how he responded to circumstances. Bob had lost so much and he couldn't afford to hobble himself further.
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Bob focused on the mud cloak. He breathed slowly in and out. The cloth slithered forward. Bob imagined the cloth coiling around the peg and then pulling fast. Instead the cloak knotted around itself and dragged the peg over. Bob groaned and tried picking at the knot with his one good hand. More work for poor Bob. I knew that was a stupid idea. But then he stopped himself. Think like a magician.
Bob pictured the hem of the cloth phasing into true mud and the knot coming undone by itself. The rigid cloth of the hem turned liquid and the knot separated smoothly. At the same time, the main portion of the cloak wrapped around Bob’s shoulders had stayed solid.
Bob grinned. Yes, he had yet to secure the peg. Yes, he hadn’t made any progress towards shelter. But learning a new piece of magic was worth celebrating in its own right. Bob hadn’t known his cloak could phase between solid and liquid states until the fight that afternoon. Even then he hadn’t consciously willed the change. All he’d envisioned was the cloak tying itself around the insect’s waist and pulling tight. Sure when he saw the insect preparing to slice the cloak in half, he had hoped something would happen. But it was the cloak itself that had made the decision to phase.
Didn’t that mean the cloak was sentient? Or was Bob reading too much into the episode? Maybe the cloak phased out whenever it was in danger of taking serious damage. But what about when the cloak had tangled itself about the insect’s sword arm as the creature made to cut off its own legs? Bob’s memories were a little vague. He’d been on the edge of consciousness. He thought that had been at his explicit direction.
Either way it was nice to know that the power was freely accessible to Bob and further that it could be partially applied. Once again, it wasn’t quite a combat ability, but Bob could think up a couple creative uses. Now back to the peg. Let's just say, it was harder than it looked. Bob had to wrap the edge of the cloth around a five millimeter diameter peg, then twist it together into a knot, all using his imagination.
Bob knew for sure that, if he had his good hand available, he would have given up after thirty seconds. The task was just that boring and frustrating. He could already feel the stress getting to him, manifesting as a dull headache and low heartburn. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, he didn’t. His cloak would have to stand in the place of his lost appendage. So he struggled on, maintaining his motivation only by the knowledge that if he succeeded, he would be able to give the evil peg a massive wallop on the head with the mallet.
He started to make progress around the ten minute mark. That was when he stopped looking at the cloak. He’d trapped himself in something of a feedback loop. He had been trying to move the cloak as though he was driving a car or manipulating a crane. He’d twitch it with his mind, check with his eyes if it was where he thought it should be, and then adjust. Now that isn’t how you move your hand is it? You just know where your hand is at all times. You don’t have to watch your hand to catch an incoming ball. You watch the ball.
Bob needed that level of awareness for his cloak. He had to stop thinking of connecting with his cloak as an on-off switch. You didn’t have to make a conscious decision to check in with your foot: left foot on, ah I see the problem, I’ve got a blister on the third toe. No, he needed to be continuously and subconsciously aware of the cloak. He wasn’t going to achieve that in five minutes but committing to the process was the first step.
Bob closed his eyes. He shouldn’t need his eyes. He should be able to feel the peg through the cloak. With his eyes closed, he felt blind and helpless. An assessment not far off the truth. But he could feel the peg. He edged the cloak around the object, double and triple checking that he’d maintained contact the whole time. He reached himself (as the cloak) on the other side. So he’d circled the peg. Now he just had to tie the thing off. Or wait a moment, he let the touching edges slide into true mud and then solidified them together. He opened his eyes. He’d made a tight loop around the peg. Magic.
"I’ve been looking forward to this for longer than you know," Bob’s grin had drifted into manic territory. He kept his focus on pulling the peg down and straight with the cloak. He gripped the mallet hard and brought it up in his left hand. And then he swung.
Bob was right handed and an energetic swing aimed at a small target was a high-difficulty proposition. Suffice it to say, Bob missed. And then he missed again. The peg hadn’t shifted an inch. There was no one to blame. Finally, he had to give up on his jack-hammer swings and make neat taps from a few inches away. So much for righteous justice.
But Bob soon forgot the harsh injustices of a cruel world. Don’t we all? He was wrapped up playing with his new toy. He’d said before and he’d say it again, the mud cloak was an absolute marvel. It could take any form he desired. He could melt it and reform it at a thought.
The tent-building process received a hefty efficient bump as Bob refined his peg grasping process. Why bother wrapping the firm cloth around the peg? No, use the mud Bob. He could just position a length of cloak over the peg, shift it and after it dripped down and surrounded the peg, shift it back into firm cloth. One instantly secured peg.
Bob had started to think of the cloak as his mud arm. His mud arm had a couple serious advantages over his real arm. For one, he didn’t feel any pain when his hammer-swings inevitably missed their bullseye and thumped against where his fingers would have been. For another, it could shift and turn in any direction; he could hover up a small item for closer inspection or pick things off the ground without having to bend down.
There were disadvantages. The dullness of sensation through the arm made him clumsy with delicate work. His grasping strategy also had the unfortunate side effect of picking up unwanted things like small stones and dust. Though if he really concentrated, he could expel them from the mud with his mind. He also didn’t have the same level of strength when working through the mud arm. He figured this would all improve with time.
After much struggle and many lessons, Bob had erected their tent. It felt like the moment man first discovered shelter. Bob almost burst into tears. But he was too tired and it had really gotten unpleasantly cold in the meantime. Bob collected up the scattered pieces of the old tent, the camp chair and any of the evidence of their presence and lobbed it all inside the tent. Then Bob untied George and shepherded him inside, before ducking in himself and zipping up the flap. Time for some well deserved rest.