Chapter Twenty - Magic

Magic.

If Samuel Colt made man equal, than magic made man even.

In theory, anyone could practice the arcane arts. There were several disciplines, and while a number of them required some items and resources to work, an even greater number only required knowledge and perhaps a promise or two made to extremely powerful, otherworldly beings.

In practice, magic was rarely used by the common man or woman. That knowledge was esoteric, the tools needed to practice it were bizarre.

Why spend three hundred hours learning a single spell able to light a candle when you could climb into perpetual debt and come out of it with a bionic finger that had a built-in lighter? There was certainly a certain level of commodification with magic, but a lot of it simply required hard work on the caster's part, and hard work wasn't something a proper capitalist society could sell.

Alyssa looked like she was in her mid-twenties. I couldn't imagine someone like her knowing all that much about magic at her age, but maybe that was just my own older age speaking. There were a few schools in Cambridge which taught some forms of magic to their students from a young age, and she was just old enough to be a college graduate.

"Magic is as beautiful as it is dangerous. It isn't something for people to just pick up on a whim," she said. She was really leaning hard into the whole edgy spellcaster stereotype. "If you mess it up, it can cost you your life, your soul, or worse. Understand?"

Sharp nodded quickly. I wasn't sure, but I suspected that she was primed to agree to anything that Alyssa said to her. "I promise I won't use what you teach me for great evil."

Jenny next to us snorted, then choked on her spaghetti.

"Don't worry, I won't be teaching you any spellwork," Alyssa said.

"You won't?" Sharp asked.

"I hardly have the time for that. Let's just cover the basics. Do you know how many kinds of magic there are?"

"I don't," Sharp admitted. "But I think I know a few? There's stuff with Eidolons, then summoning, casting spells, and... I think there's a kind where you need to move to cast?" She wiggled her arms a little in a mock dance.

Alyssa nodded slowly. "That covers five broad types of magic. In all, there are eighty-four categories for what counts as magic."

"Eighty-four," Sharp repeated. "I don't know if I could memorise that many."

"If you can't memorise things, then most magics aren't going to be for you. Regardless, most magics use some shared principles." The young mage raised a hand, then started counting down on her fingers. "The mage, the body, the mind, the soul, the spirit, and the cant."

"Can't?" Sharp asked.

"Cant, one word," Alyssa corrected. "It means a mantra, saying, incantation, or some other way of binding a spell to the world and activating it. Some cants use motions, others supplications, and there are some kinds of magic that don't seem to use a cant at all, but in reality the cant is just hidden somewhere else."

"I think I got it," Sharp said.

Alyssa eyed her for a moment, and the doubt in her eyes was painfully obvious. "Sure," she settled on. "Most different types of magic are more about taking different approaches to using magic itself to accomplish something."

"What do you mean?" Sharp asked.

Alyssa frowned, then reached over and grabbed a napkin from the centre of the table and placed it between herself and Sharp. She crushed it into a little ball, then set it down. "I want this to move from here." She pointed to where the napkin was. "To here." She pointed to the edge of the table. "I can move it physically, obviously."

Sharp nodded as Alyssa plucked the napkin and placed it back down on the edge. She brought it back a moment later.

"No magic. But I could do the same with magic. As a warlock of the Veilwing Sovereign She Who Whispers in the Dark, I could beg my patreon to move this napkin for me."

Nothing happened.

"But I won't, because testing an Eidolon like that is foolhardy. Instead, I could link this to something similar." She grabbed and crushed another napkin, then set it down. The two were next to each other for a moment while the girl muttered something under her breath and focused hard on both. Then she moved her arm to the right, and the second napkin, without anything touching it, shuffled along the top of the table.

Stolen story; please report.

"Whoa," Sharp said.

It wasn't exactly an impressive sight, but it was still interesting.

"That's synesthetic magic. The linking of two similar items," Alyssa said. "Fewer cants, simpler mental images, but a decently high price to pay in body."

"I don't know what that means," Sharp admitted.

Alyssa shrugged. "It doesn't matter. The point is that this is one way to move an object. Another could be..." She grabbed the original napkin and replaced it. Then she reached over to the end of the table where a small candle sat. "Jenny, have a light?"

Janny shifted to her side and tugged a small lighter out of her shorts. She took the candle and lit it.

Alyssa thanked her with a nod, then carefully fed the second napkin into the flames. It burned rather brightly.

Then she muttered something else, and the first, original napkin rolled over to the edge of the table.

"There are a few types of magic that can do what I just did," Alyssa said. "Voodooism, sacrificial magic, a few others. The point is, I sacrificed something of equal value to affect a peer item. Same result."

"But it was different," Sharp said. "You burned that napkin, is it gone now?"

"Yes. And if I want to move that one back, I'd need another. Sacrificial magic is generally very unpopular for that reason."

She was right. And the matter of cost could be complex to calculate. There were some assassins that had used that kind of magic before, but killing three or four people to maybe kill their target was a lot of bloody work, and it wasn't exactly subtle as far as magical things went. At least, as far as I understood it.

"Is there any magic I could do?" Sharp asked.

"You'd need to be smart for that," Jenny said.

Alyssa gave Jenny the stink eye. "You can't cast any spells either, Jenny," she said, her voice entirely flat.

Rather than be insulted, the smaller woman just laughed. "Okay, fair. You got me."

"As for your question... Sharp, was it?"

"Yup, that's my name," Sharp said as she sat up. "But you can call me Fasmine too. That's my first name. Most people call me Sharp though."

"Can't imagine why," Jenny said.

"Well, Sharp," Alyssa said. "There are some spells that even a newcomer to magic could learn. Some are even pretty useful. Here let me send you something. Do you have an email address?" Sharp nodded, and then grinned as Alyssa sent her something from her phone. "That's the Create Water spell. It's a mage spell, so there's a long incantation with prescribed movements and you need several reagents, but none are complex. Chances are you'll do nothing but wave your arms around and mumble for a few hours and get nothing for it, but hey, if it works, then it works."

"What do I need for it to work?" Sharp asked.

"Reagents wise? Salt, mostly. It won't even be used up by the end. In terms of other things, you'll need to feel that out for yourself."

Sharp's order arrived just then, putting an end to our little Magic 101 course, but not before we were both rewarded for paying attention. Sharp tightened up, and gasped. Fortunately it was in time with the fries arriving, so it could be played off.

I stared at my own prompt in the meantime.

Magic Has Levelled Up!

Magic 0 > 1

That was interesting. Not just the raise in the skill, which I wouldn't say no to, but the fact that we both got a stat increase at the same time and presumably from the same experience.

Did this mean that having someone teach either of us might be a way to grow faster? Not much of what Alyssa said there was beyond common knowledge, though the demonstrations had been novel.

If the value of a trainer was that high... I knew exactly what Sharp and I would be doing the next time we had a day off. Sharp had actually fallen behind me in terms of sheer number of stats, and I felt like that wasn't entirely right.

A few days of concentrated training might help.

"So, Sharp, you busy tomorrow?" Jenny asked. "Because if you're not, I think we could make use of you. Ya know, if you still wanna make some cash."

Or we could lose those training days and end up tugged along into some trouble instead.

***