The storm picked up one last time before finally settling down into a blustery drizzle. Jeremy had, on second thought, decided that running straight into the dungeon immediately after it formed might not be the best of plans. Mostly because Caleb was hedging about going in and had made a few good points. Maybe it would be a better idea to wait until a monster came out so they would know what they were walking into. This was a dungeon with a ring, after all, not the lower-level one that Jeremy and Zanie had cleared in Mrs. Jenning’s basement.
“Besides,” Caleb had pointed out while glaring out the window at the dungeon, “I’m the only one who has practiced a bunch of the spells from the book. Zanie’s been too busy scanning it and playing IT with the guardsman to have even figured out her…what did you call it?”
“Unique Personality Trait.” Jeremy had told him.
He snapped his fingers and pointed, “That. She should figure that out before we go into a level-one dungeon. A level one monster just almost kicked out asses.”
“It didn’t, thanks to me,” Zanie interjected. “But he has a point. Plus, we are all tired still from that.”
So, Jeremy had begrudgingly agreed to wait it out for a while before diving straight through the portal. Caleb lectured him about how he’d gone right back to the old version of himself that used to give zero fucks and get himself into trouble way too often instead of the carefully curated rule follower he had become. Jeremy sat in one of the fold-out chairs that Julie lined up in front of the now-opened garage door and stared out at the pitter-patter of rain on the cars and the road. The apocalypse was no excuse for descending into chaos, Caleb declared, and he was pissed off about having to be the one to tell Jeremy that when Jeremy was supposed to be the anal-retentive one.
But his rules kept getting in the way of practicalities, like ducking into some stranger’s house before getting blown away by a storm so strong that it created a dungeon out of thin air.
“Alright, fine,” Jeremy said when he could not take it anymore. “Rule number one: No entering dungeons that have a ring unless you are familiar with your Unique Personality Trait. Zanie?”
“I’m working on it,” she looked up from perusing her phone. “There’s a couple of spells I think I could try. But while it’s still raining, I figured I’d send the compiled digital copy of the book to you guys since I’ve finally finished it.”
“Nice,” Caleb pulled out his phone.
“Jeremy, you can grab the tablet. It probably needs to be charged.” Zanie told him, then turned to Caleb, who gave her the information to send him the book. The tablet was safe in its weatherproof case among the damp clothes. Once the rain stopped, maybe these people would let them hang up their clothes to dry.
Henry stood behind them, nursing a beer and listening curiously. He and Julie, his wife Jeremy guessed, did not seem opposed to magic, although both had not practiced it themselves much. Both their overlays remained dark red.
“Are you sure you kids know what you are doing?” He asked.
“No, not really,” Caleb grinned over his shoulder, “But we are figuring it out.”
“The news says that it’s dangerous to just experiment with magic. People have died from it,” he warned. “They go too far, and it sucks all the life out of them, and they die.”
“Well, we haven’t gotten to that point yet, thank goodness.” Caleb twisted in his chair to sling an arm over the back and face the man. “You just have to practice the small stuff first and move up. Like learning anything else. But it’s a good idea for everybody to learn at least a little since this situation is obviously not going away. What would you do about that dungeon if we weren’t here?”
“Call the police.”
Caleb snorted, “Right, because they are such experts on dungeon clearing.”
“The National Guard, then,” the man said. “Better to leave this kind of thing to professionals. I’ve heard that they are training with magic as we speak. That vice president that they put in charge after the impeachment has started an initiative to train all military personnel with defensive magic and all medical personnel with healing magic. They say if you try to heal somebody with magic, you have a higher chance of killing them than helping them, you know.”
“Is that what the news is saying?” Caleb shook his head. “Might be true if you don’t know what you are doing, but you can practice little spells like healing cuts. Sure, leave the brain surgery to experts, but stuff like defensive magic doesn’t only have to be left up to the military.” He nodded toward a faded NRA poster hanging in the back of the garage between a hook filled with saw blades and a couple of license plates from different states. “That’s like saying it's better to leave the guns to the military. Civilians shouldn’t mess with them.”
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“Huh,” Henry scratched his beard.
“Here,” Jeremy held the tablet out to Zanie, who was able to hook her phone directly to it and transfer a copy of the book through the USB cord. She gave him the tablet back, and he went over to the counter where there was a plug so he could charge it. The digital copy looked just like the real one since Zanie’s phone could scan incredibly well. He flipped through the pages some and played around, tapping on certain spots and making comments.
Later, he wanted to copy all of his notes into the digital book. Zanie said that anything they put into the book would sync with each other’s copies so long as they had internet access. But for now, the rain had petered off, so all three of them wandered out into the yard to practice casting some spells. Jeremy also wanted to practice throwing out mana as an offensive attack.
The dungeon entrance seemed to have stabilized just fine. It looked exactly like the one that had been in the state park, a near-perfect globe of blue energy that zapped and fizzled with little bits of electricity. Jeremy wondered exactly how the one in the state park had formed since there had been a drought up until a couple of hours ago, so no lightning would have struck the spot. It seemed like the creation of this one had been due to a concentration of mana brought on by the storm, so perhaps there were other things that concentrated mana.
“Here, I go.” Zanie held up her phone and squinted at the spell she had zoomed in on to try. It looked like a simple one-step spell with three runes – manipulate, her magic type, and an unknown modifier. A good place to start, although Jeremy peered over her shoulder and asked, “How come you are doing one with a modifier to start with?”
“I already tried to just manipulate the rune,” Zanie explained. “It just heated up my hand. I almost burned myself. So, I think you were right when you said that the magic type has something to do with heat.”
“Alright,” Jeremy took a step back, and she put out a hand, palm facing up, then cast the spell. The runes materialized above her widely spaced fingers, and a bolt of electricity arced out of her hand and zapped her phone. The screen fritzed out and went black.
“Oh shit.” Zanie furrowed her brow and pressed the power button on the side of the phone. Amazingly, it turned on just fine, which had to be some kind of magic, even though Jeremy did not see her use any runes. She set it on one of the chairs in the garage, then returned. “It’s lucky that didn’t kill the phone. Better make sure I’m not holding it.”
“Electricity, huh?” Caleb asked from where he had crouched down on the ground and was practicing his terrifying decapitating spell by splitting blades of grass in half. This also appeared to be a somewhat simple one-step spell with two runes and a modifier. If Jeremy had to guess, they were manipulate, space, and something along the lines of apartor add. Caleb twirled a perfectly sliced blade of grass between his fingers. “I guess electricity makes sense; I mean, lightning happens because of particle charges and heat stuff, right?”
“Sounds like you know more than I do,” Zanie shrugged. “I’ll have to look it up.”
She held her hands out and cast the spell again, except this time, the bolt of electricity arced so small and rapidly that Jeremy hardly saw anything except a flash of white light. Zanie yelped and jumped back from the spot where she had been standing, rubbing the palm of one of her hands. She frowned at it.
“It zapped me,” she complained, showing them a reddening splotch on her palm.
“There, you see!” The man called from inside the garage. He lifted his beer toward them and then took a sip, “You’re playing around with dangerous stuff.”
“It’ll always be dangerous unless we actually learn about it.” Jeremy countered, then turned back and inspected Zanie’s palm. It was a small burn, not even first-degree – the type of redness that might happen if you wrapped your hand around a scalding panhandle for a second before your brain caught up. But still, “You should go run that under some cool water.”
Zanie grumbled and returned to the garage to run her hand under the faucet for a minute or so. In the meantime, Jeremy cast the spell to chuck mana as a projectile a couple of times. It was not very satisfying because he could not actually see the mana, just like how he could not actually see the barriers when they were created from mana. Apparently, there needed to be a significant concentration of it, such as what supplied the creation of the dungeon, to be able to see the iridescent shimmer of it.
“Are you going to try something different?” Caleb asked when Zanie marched back out to join them.
“No,” she shook her head, “If it could zap me that good without me even trying, and on the second time I cast the spell, it will make a pretty good attack. I just have to figure out how to control it.”
“Try only holding out one hand.” Caleb said, “Maybe having two out was like creating a circuit for the electricity.” He started fiddling with the blade of grass between his fingers thoughtfully, tearing it into little strips. “And maybe point your hand at the ground instead of in the air so the bolt is directed at something.”
She shrugged and held her hand out, palm down this time, the other tucked behind her back. This time, when she cast the spell, the bolt arced directly into the ground. She grinned down at the little spot of grass, from which a few tendrils of rapidly vaporized rainwater rose in tendrils of steam.
“Nice,” Jeremy clapped a couple of times. “Now you just have to figure out how to direct it purposefully. That’s probably like any other spell, where you just have to direct it by intentionality.”
“Or you could use it the way healing spells work,” Caleb suggested, “By touching the thing that you are targeting.”
“Yeah, but didn’t you say you wanted to try to learn some more long-distance stuff?” Jeremy asked.
Zanie grimaced as though remembering her close encounter with the blood spewing from the weird tree-hating creature’s neck. “I guess I just don’t want to have to go hacking through monsters with a tiny dragon scale. But I don’t mind getting up close to them. Both of you are really focusing on like…barriers and teleporting stuff around, right? So, one of us has to be able to get up close and personal with the monsters if need be. I’d just rather have a better weapon.”
“We just have to find you a spear or something.” Caleb mused. “Then you can channel your electricity through it, and that would be awesome and terrifying.”
Jeremy wondered where the hell they were going to find a spear.