Sera awoke staring at an unfamiliar wall.

It took some time for to remember where she was and how she’d gotten there. Once she did, it was hard to stop herself from falling into the despair hole again, but her growling stomach distracted her from the dark thoughts. She was suddenly reminded that she’d eaten almost none of what she was given the night before, her appetite suppressed due to the day she’d had.

So Sera dragged herself out of bed and stretched before heading downstairs. Finding the room empty, she made for the kitchen, but stopped halfway when she noticed the plate from last night wrapped in cheesecloth. Figuring it wouldn’t be rude to eat food she had already been offered, she sat in the same place and unwrapped the food.

She was about halfway through the cheese and bread when the door opened and Tiriana stepped in. The elf paused for a moment and Sera felt a faint sensation before the other woman began to speak.

“Good morning. Did you sleep well?”

“I guess so. I kind of blacked out until morning.”

“I imagine you’d like a bath at this point. We have showers, but I’ll need to show you how to circulate mana before you can use them. Do you mind if we start with that?”

“I thought circulation was for warriors. Don’t I still need to make a decision on that?”

“Sorry, I must have been unclear. You’ll begin with circulation because it is the easiest method of manipulating mana. Once you are capable of that, you’ll also be able to compress it, or use it to activate tools.”

Tiriana approached the table and motioned for permission to touch Sera, to which she just nodded.

“Normally this is a skill one would learn as a child from their parents. Remember to never let anyone use magic on you unless it is someone you trust, such as a doctor. Once you can control mana you will also be able to resist what I am about to do. It may be a bit uncomfortable to have someone else move mana through your body, but try to remember the sensation, as it makes it significantly easier to replicate for yourself.”

With all of that said, Tiriana began. Sera felt a heat in her shoulder, where Tiriana had rested her hand, and then she felt as if her blood was flowing backwards. Her heart still beat as normal, her pulse did not change, but it was hard to ignore the feeling, and she grit her teeth in discomfort. After several seconds the sensation passed, and she gulped for air, having forgotten to breathe.

“It won’t feel like that when you do it for yourself. The mana in your body doesn’t want to be controlled by another person and fights back to some extent, even with your minimal resistance. Try it for yourself now; I’ll monitor your progress and tell you when you’ve managed it.” Tiriana smiled and patted Sera’s shoulder, seeing her nervousness. “Don’t worry, it’s so easy a child can do it. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

Sera nodded and took a deep breath, then closed her eyes and focused. Mana passing through the body was like a second, parallel circulatory system, independent of the blood stream. That’s what she grasped from Tiriana’s example. It had to pass through every inch of her body, and the flow was constant, more like a river than the intermittent flow of blood pumped by her heart.

First she felt for the small of mana in her body, brought in by air and food. It reacted readily to her thoughts, making her realize that mana was somehow psychically reactive. But while it was easy to move, it was harder to control. She prodded at it for a minute or two before she found an image that seemed to work.

A pan appeared in her mind’s eye, filled with water. As she moved it gently in a circle, the water moved with it, circling the pan, guided by its curves. The mana in her body reacted accordingly, and she realized she didn’t need to manually send it through her limbs; it simply did that naturally, once guided into motion.

Sera opened her eyes and looked up at Tiriana, who smiled down at her.

“Good job. Come, I’ll show you to the showers.”

The lodging building they were in seemed to have all the amenities of a modern bed and breakfast. Sera followed Tiriana back upstairs and to the end of the hall, where they entered a dorm style bathroom with several shower stalls on one side and toilet stalls on the other. The far wall had a few sinks. She was glad to find that the doors stretched from the ceiling to the floor, as opposed to the usual American style stall doors with a large gap to reduce expenses.

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“All of it works the same way, so I’ll show you how to work the sinks, and you can transfer that experience to the showers.” Tiriana led her to the sinks. Sera found that they had a faucet like the sinks she was used to, but no knobs. Instead there was a small panel above the faucet with a pair of bars on it that she would have assumed were electronic lights if she didn’t know any better. “Just press a finger to each of the bars on this panel and circulate your mana, then direct some of it into the panel. Left side is temperature control, right side is pressure. It doesn’t take much to activate the tool, so be careful, or you might scald yourself.”

Tiriana demonstrated by injecting a small amount of mana into the panel, slowly raising the throughput until it peaked.

“Just cut off the flow when you have it where you want it, and it will keep going until you feed it mana again.” She removed her fingers, then touched the panel and sent a pulse into it that immediately cut off the flow. “Easy. Give it a shot.”

“Sounds easy enough. I think.”

Sera copied Tiriana, touching the panel with two fingers. She found her mana had stagnated when she stopped focusing on it, and she needed a moment to get it going again. This time she imagined some of the water spilling out of the pan, a little at a time, and the bars rose in fits and starts. It wasn’t smooth in any way, unlike Tiriana’s example, but it got the job done.

“Looks like you got it! You’ll get better at providing a gradual flow over time. I’ll be downstairs when you’re done. I’ll leave a change of clothes for you; just put what you’re wearing in the basket and I’ll show you the laundry room later.”

With that, Tiriana departed, leaving Sera to figure out the showers for herself. She entered a stall and found that it had two sections, one a small dressing room and the next the actual shower, separated by a curtain. As she took her clothes off, she realized how disgusting they had gotten, stained with blood, sweat, and mud in equal measures.

She couldn’t smell much, but that probably just meant she’d been desensitized to the stink over time. No wonder Tiriana had been so quick to get her into the shower this morning; she’d probably said that bit about how Sera must be wanting a shower to politely sidestep telling her she smelled awful.

Sera stepped into the shower and carefully turned the temperature and pressure up. Rising in bursts as it was, she accidentally made it too hot the first time, and increased the pressure until it was a bit painful the second. She finally managed to get it right by doing them one at a time, instead of trying to cut off the flow to just one when she got it where she wanted it.

The warm water was blissful and seemed to wash away her worries along with the grime. A scentless bar of soap – homemade? – and a bottle of what she hoped was shampoo sat in a holder above the controls, and she made liberal use of both as she cleansed herself. It felt cathartic and comforting, a luxury she wouldn’t have expected from this world.

It was easy to extrapolate from the showers and easy access to water in even a small camp on the edge of the world that the technological level of this world had to be quite high. Tiriana had told her the standard of living in the central ring was high. Sera hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but now she realized that the distant civilization at the center of the world was likely equal, if not superior, to Earth’s current level of advancement, only using mana as a power source instead of electricity.

How mana provided energy she didn’t really understand. If she decided to be a mage, perhaps Tiriana would explain that at some point, given the important of comprehension when casting spells. Tiriana seemed to hope she would choose that path given the level of detail she tried to go into the night before; maybe she was hoping for an apprentice.

It was hard to see what else Tiriana had to gain from helping her. It seemed a bit too much to hope she was simply doing it out of the kindness of her heart. Almost no one was that altruistic. As it stood, Tiriana came across as almost flawless, and the cynic in Sera told her to watch out for whatever it was that lay beneath the surface.

Sera was also concerned about the fact she’d met none of the supposed others in this camp. Were they out, or were they staying away because they didn’t approve of helping some random stranger that came stumbling out of the woods? Surely the news of her arrival had gotten out by now. Tiriana did say the other explorers were loners, but that didn’t explain the absence of the support members.

Or maybe she was being overly paranoid, and she had simply gotten up late and missed them as a result.

After a shower long enough that she was turning into a prune, Sera finally stopped the water. Peaking out of the stall door, she saw the clothes she had been promised in a basket along with a towel, which she used to dry off. She was surprised to find the clothes were adjustable, and was able to make them fit her quite well; she slipped on the surprisingly modern underwear, a red tunic, and pants, then the provided sandals – her boots being just as filthy as the rest of her outfit.

Refreshed, Sera headed back downstairs to find Tiriana snacking on a type of fruit she’d never seen before; silver, with white flesh and a wide, almost flat shape. Spotting Sera, Tiriana hurried to finish it, polishing it off in a few more bites before Sera reached her table and discarding the core into a wastebasket with a throw Sera thought was almost certainly magic-assisted.

“Now that you’re all cleaned up, we should probably get your first lesson out of the way. Well, second, I suppose. You’ll probably want to learn Sylvan and Atlantean eventually, but it will be quicker to start by teaching you to cast Translate on yourself.”

Sera had to admit: getting to learn magic was something of a silver lining. She sat down, prepared to learn.