Lily rose to wakefulness slowly. She didn’t feel extremely rushed this morning, which was a welcome change. Maybe she wouldn’t even need to sleep three times today, since she had gotten a nice full night. Rolling over, she poked Bay on the nose.

“G’morning Bay. Did you sleep well?”

He seemed well rested. And dirty. Very, very dirty. Bay was still coated in purple black ash from yesterday, and it had gotten a bit on her blankets as well. But, Lily didn’t care. She could clean up later. For now, she was just grateful to be finally in a good position to start a day.

She rose from bed and headed into her little kitchen. A big bowl of cereal and an episode of her new favorite (only accessible) sitcom later, she was feeling more ready. She grabbed a rockstar and headed into her new mansion. Her new mansion. Her new mansion. It still didn’t feel real. Well, technically everything was hers now. Or at least the concept of hers and not hers didn’t really exist anymore. Unless she found anyone to argue the point.

Admittedly, a small part of her was still expecting the people of the world to pop back into existence. But, how likely was that? Well, about as likely as them all disappearing in the first place Lily supposed. But, that was a bridge to cross when she came to it.

Entering the massive main room of her new base, Lily hopped down onto the couch and grabbed her laptop. Downloads had been progressing slowly but surely. She added a few more things she had thought of overnight. In this case a batch download of retro roms. Those games would be sooo hard to find once the internet went down. She’d have to source someone with a physical collection, hope they had it, and then dump the data. But, she could get them now nice and easy! So, she did.

From there, she walked around aimlessly for a bit. There were big solar panels on the roof, but she was hoping she would find a display that would show how much power was being used. If it was going down from being totally reliant on the panels, she would need to source some more. But, no such easy to find readout appeared before her, so she shrugged and gave up. Plenty of time for that later.

The house was arranged in roughly an H shape, at least on the bottom floor. The two points in the front of the house were garages, so she was hoping she could find a vehicle in one of them. And keys. She would love to find some keys and not need to search the whole house.

But before she did, she wandered over to the fridge to see what was available. It was a little frightening on some level how easy it was getting to casually exist in someone else’s home, but she was getting used to it.

“Adapting. Yeah. I’m adaptable. That’s what I learned yesterday.”

The fridge was absolutely loaded with ingredients! Lily didn’t really know how to cook. It seemed like whoever had owned this house before had either been a chef or hired one. She’d have to see what she could do with them before they went bad. After all, it was going to be a lot harder to find anything not premade for a while, starting soon. Maybe she should move some of her loot into here?

In either case, next she needed to come up with a plan for the day. Operation secure livestock! How many should she get? She wasn’t sure she wanted more than one cow. They were pretty big. But she could probably get together a number of chickens. It was really… how big did she want that number to be? How many eggs did they lay? Did she need a rooster to get them to lay? Or just to make more chickens? Did she want to make more chickens?

She sat back on the couch and pulled out the laptop to do some research.

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Lily had spent two hours longer than she expected learning everything about chickens, and hadn’t even gotten into cows. She still felt woefully underprepared, but she decided she had to get moving before it got too late in the day. Luckily, there had been three choices of vehicle in the garage, and all of them had keys! Well, keys by the garage door, but she had found them easy enough. She loaded Bay and her neverburning flame up into her new ride, and set off in her new soccer mom SUV.

She had a decent idea of a rural area to check out, but she wasn’t really sure what to expect when she got there. It was only a 45 minute drive though, out to what she understood might be vineyard country? At least google told her there was a vineyard and a couple ranches, and that made her think it must be a wealthy farming area. Which is just what she was looking for!

Unfortunately on arrival she learned that scouting richer rural areas was a little difficult. Mainly because most of them had a lot of land, and fences. Fences that bordered the land, and it made it really difficult to see what exactly was on the property without going in. Lily didn’t really want to go in without being able to see inside. But, it’s not like they would have loose dogs big and scary enough to mess with her in her Mom-mobile right?

She decided to keep driving until she saw animals, since she figured she should at least be able to see a cow pen or something from the road. But, as she continued down the road, she encountered a different problem. The fire had beaten her to it. After a certain point, everything was burned to ash. Huge swaths of land were just black and burned.

“Such a waste… I bet it’s like this all over the world too.”

With a sigh, she started to turn around when she noticed something. In the distance there was a spot of sharp contrast against the burned out remains of whatever farm there had been. It looked like a perfectly circular spot had just… not burned. It was entirely unharmed. Lily sat there staring at it for a moment. Maybe it was another spooky spot?

“Do I investigate, or turn around and look for animals? Hmm. Oh who am I kidding, I’ve gotta check it out.”

Lily drove her car to the closest spot it could reach without going off road, then parked and grabbed her neverburning flame. She wanted to see if it would react, or if she would have better luck learning about it in an already supernaturally inclined environment.

Getting to the spot was surprisingly tricky. Lily was wary of each and every step. She was scared she would find a spot that was still hot, or even just step on nails that the fire had left behind after burning the surrounding wood. She couldn’t even tell where things like fences had been, except in the areas where they used metal posts. Even those looked twisted and burned somehow.

But, despite it being a long process, she eventually found herself in a small bubble of unburned ground. Nothing else seemed immediately supernatural. But the grass here was still a vibrant green, and there was even a tree. The whole area was maybe twenty or thirty feet across. She’d expected to find a glowing rock, or an unnatural fire, or well, anything really. But it just seemed like the fire forgot to burn this spot down. She’d almost conclude that some natural land formation had protected this spot, or something like that. But… It was a perfect circle.

Lily wandered to the center of it and sat down, putting her neverburning flame in front of her.

“What do you think, little buddy?”

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She stared at it, trying to see the strange halo of… stuff around it. She really needed a better word for this stuff. She was trying not to use ‘mana’ because some part of her still balked at the idea that this was magic and not some new realm of physics meant just for her.

“Ah screw it. It’s mana, unless it turns out to work super different from that. There’s no one here to judge me, I can call it what I want.”

She focused and tried to look for the mana. It still took her a second, but it was a lot easier now that she was getting more practice. Could she actually see it more clearly, or was she just better at noticing? She shook her head. Focus. Right.

The mana was flowing around the little chunk of wood, same as last night. But, the broken spot seemed a little different. Instead of mana flowing quickly out of the circle, it seemed to just not be flowing there at all. Did it finally run out? That seemed unlikely, because the circle was still made of the stuff right?

Lily leaned forward and tried to look even closer at that spot specifically when behind her erupted a terrible sound.

WOOF!

Lily screamed, and scrambled to her feet as quick as she could. She spun to face the horrible beast that had made the sound and–

It was a puppy. A large, white, fluffy, puppy. She stared, her heart beating out of her chest. It was large, but still definitely young. She could tell by the shape of it. All white, except for a black splotch on its forehead. It almost looked like a star. The puppy looked… hungry. But, it couldn’t be dangerous. It was a puppy! Lily rolled her eyes, exasperated. Hesitating, she tried to talk to it.

“You scared me! I don’t want a–”

WOOF!

Lily yelped, startled. She glared at the puppy.

“I don’t want a dog! Shoo! Shoo!”

The puppy’s tail wagged.

“Fine. Stay. Whatever. Just don’t bother me. I’m doing something important.”

She sat back down and started looking over her magical item again. Sure enough, the flow of mana had just stopped. It had been like a gas leak last night. Maybe it was that the pressure here was more equalized? Was mana pressure even a thing? Maybe spooky spots just had more? She frowned.

A white nose found its way into her field of view. Lily glanced to her left, and instantly got licked right in the face.

“Eww!”

She pushed the dog away.

“Leave me alone! This is important! Im-por-tant. You understand? Go frolic in the…” she glanced around “...ash. Okay, just. Sit there and don’t bug me.”

The puppy stared at her in confusion, but eventually wandered slightly further away. Lily turned back to what she was doing. She dumped the piece of wood out of its little vase holder and into her hand, and willed herself to understand how it worked. If the mana really was more dense here, this was definitely the spot to do it right? Well, that was an assumption. But Lily thought it was a good one.

Now that it was in her hand here, she did feel like she could sense a little more. She definitely couldn’t see any more, but, holding it she could just… feel it? She felt like she could sense its shape. Not the wood, but the mana. The ‘magic’. Two concentric circles. The inner one was made of three… nodes. The outer one was made of five, but one was broken. Each one had some kind of… something in it. A rune? A glyph? Something like that. She wished she had brought paper. It wasn’t exactly written, and yet, sitting here, she had a clear image of what it would look like on paper in her mind.

She wasn’t clear on what the symbols did exactly. They seemed to be each describing a different part of the magic though. Like a simple scripting system, or circuit board, or… Lily wasn’t sure. But she felt like she was finally getting somewhere. Two circles, with this mana stuff flowing through it and reacting to the things in the nodes. Okay, that was simple enough. Now how did she figure out what they each actually did? How did she fix the one that was broken?

She could sense where it was broken now. The thing inside the node was fine, but the circle and the node itself had shattered there. She had the rest of it to reference though. Most of the nodes looked the same, although a few of them were slightly different. Still, if this one was one of the generic ones it should look just like the one across from it right? It was just continuing the pattern. It should look like…

The flame burst to life in Lily’s hand. She screamed and threw it away from her. The everburning flame landed not five feet away in the grass. Lily panted as she looked at it, then laughed at herself. It hadn’t been hot. Of course it hadn’t been hot! It hadn’t before either! She turned to the puppy, who was looking at her quizzically.

“Hah. I did it. Look at me go. I just threw my first fireball! How’s that for–”

WOOF!

Lily yelped.

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An hour later, Lily still had not moved. She wanted to make sure she had memorized every little aspect of these circles before she headed out to finish her work for the day. She would definitely be experimenting with these more when she got home. Maybe she could draw them out in a notebook?

She had also started to suspect she knew why this spooky spot didn’t house an anomaly. Or rather, she thought that she had been wrong about that. Because when her everburning flame got close to the puppy, it definitely grew larger. Only a little bit. It was subtle, so she didn’t notice it at first. But, after some experimentation she was pretty sure.

She didn’t see a circle around the dog or anything like that though. So she wasn’t entirely convinced. Maybe an anomaly had happened to the dog. Like an alteration spell, or a buff, or… she glanced around. A protection spell?

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you like, fireproof?”

The puppy stared up at her, panting slightly. Well, that was one hypothesis she wasn’t about to test. Still, what should she do? On the one hand, she wanted to learn everything she could about this stuff. On the other hand, she really didn’t want the responsibility of an animal. Well, she didn’t have to make this choice right now. She could go get her chickens and cows, and then decide whether or not to circle back for the dog. Yeah, that makes sense. No use dealing with a puppy all day if she didn’t need to, and it’s not like the puppy would likely go anywhere.

So, she started back to her car. The puppy followed her. About thirty feet outside the circle she turned and glared at it.

“I’m not taking you. Go back. Stay. Shoo!”

She turned and started walking again. The puppy followed her.

“Fine, is that how it is?”

Lily broke into a run. She ran as fast as she could. Immediately she realized this was maybe a mistake. Her body was still pretty weak. But she could out run a puppy right? Lily could not outrun a puppy. She got to her car, taking gasping breaths, and immediately doubled over. The puppy was sitting by the front door by the time she reached it.

Lily took a minute to catch her breath, glaring at the little dog. It wagged its tail. Lily spoke to it through gasping breaths.

“Well, I’m not taking you with me. Just because you made it here. You little wretch.”

She opened her door and got in, closing it behind her. There was a whine from outside the door. She started the car. There was a louder whine from outside the door. Lily carefully pulled away. She glanced in her rearview window. The dog followed her, running as fast as it could.

“It’ll stop and turn around. Any… second now.”

The dog did stop. It sat in the road, and looked so, absolutely, heartbreakingly pathetic.

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Lily pulled into the ranch and found a good place to park. It didn’t look too fire damaged. Honestly, Lily was more excited to look into magic right now than collect animals. But, the animals were time sensitive. Magic… probably wasn’t.

“Come to think of it, where am I even going to put chickens in this car…?”

She looked over her vehicle. It wasn’t small, but having a bunch of live loose chickens in here sounded a little scary. Maybe she could find cages around here or something?

Bay, sitting in the back seat, caught her eye. He looked smug.

“Oh yeah, laugh it up buddy. I’m the one who has to clean you up if chickens poop on you, so you better be hoping I’m less tired tonight. You could at least give me some symp–”

WOOF!

Lily yelped. The puppy in the seat beside her, carefully buckled in wagged its tail.