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I massaged my temples. A wand? A goddamn WAND! I don’t even have my own wand. Hell, Alice just earned hers when we finally fought. Know what, I’m going to make my own. I technically don’t need one, but I’ve always wanted to make one. I have some friends who owe me, so the materials should be of no problem… oh… that’s right, my enthusiasm quickly simmered down, they were almost all dead. I switched gears and moved my thoughts away from that depressing subject. No matter, I can make a halfway decent one with materials I could find here. I refocused on the girl and brought my thoughts back to the real world. If the wand she speaks about was in any way like Alice’s then she should have the ability to create a hurricane by herself without it. I felt a phantom sting of phantom pain from a large slash mark on my chest thinking about that sword made of solid divinity.

So, our definitions of a wand are probably very different. Then it's probably the old witch wands, a crutch in other words. My mind flashed back to the funny hand thing the girl did that barely gathered mana strands before sending them off in what could barely be called a slight breeze. The problem is that she lacks control. Barely even a practitioner in my eyes. A glint of malice and expectation flashed through the girl’s eyes, pulling me out of my thoughts. Even without sensing her intentions, I could tell that look from anywhere, the desire for revenge. I smiled inwardly but kept my face ever impassive. This is the perfect opportunity to learn about things about this world.

With our different understandings of magic and her desire for revenge, I can take her in as an apprentice and guide her down a more powerful path. In exchange, I get to learn about common knowledge and practices. Hmm, it shouldn’t be hard at all to get her under my wing. Before the question could even leave my mouth, she surprised me by bowing asking, “Great shaman, is there a way I can study under you? I’m willing to become your servant in exchange!”

An interesting proposition to be sure, and one I might just take up. I could use a servant in power. The small bit of demon in my blood latched on to her words and set them in stone by drilling them into her soul. With an uncontrollable smile on my face, I nodded, “A good exchange.”

As if sensing something wrong the girl shrunk back a little bit before gathering the courage to nod. I wiped the wide smile off my face and went to walk off into the woods. My human skin was becoming uncomfortable and loose, I needed to go for a stretch and renew it. As I walked, I thought about methods that could be used to teach her control. Control was the basis of all magic and without it, magic is impossible to use. Thinking back, the way I learned control was by reaching into my body and using it to sew up ripped skin and busted arteries as well as setting bones. But I can’t just go breaking my new student’s bones, now can I? I also need to teach her proper build-up as well as release. I tend to find combat to be the best teacher in these areas, that’s how I learned most of what I know at least. And I won’t put it past myself to chuck my first student in quite a few years onto a battlefield. Know what, that is exactly what I should do.

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I’m getting ahead of myself now, I need to teach her the basics. I also need to learn how she was taught magic. For whatever reason, she seems to need a wand to practice magic so maybe I should start with that. Should be simple. I snapped off a low-hanging branch and debated on how to go about it. If I had to guess it was more than likely that a control rune would do the trick, so I did just that. Of course, before that I made the wand look more presentable. Now, let's go check out her combat capabilities.

I renewed and tightened my skin after shifting around a bit to get comfortable, I don’t know how doppelgangers could do this for years at a time with no break. I smiled to myself as I watched my bones and muscles writhe under the pseudo skin, it was almost calming. I inspected my makeshift magic stick and went about trying to cast a thing or two with it. With a little bit of ingenuity, I could shape the surrounding magic into a compressed bolt much like the sentry’s guns use. Using the wand was a bit strange since it was at odds with a few principles of my own school of magic, but it wasn’t that unfamiliar. It almost felt like the druid’s way of casting, using the natural magic in the surroundings and coercing it into something like a rune, something that I was intimately familiar with.

I pocketed the wand and made my way back, encountering a few sprites and the hidebehind on my way back. It looked like the sprites chased the dog-like creature up a tree for, presumably, just existing. They can be annoyances sometimes. I found it amusing so I left them to their thing, even after the hidebehind looked at me pitifully. That’s what he gets for breaking my stairs. By the time I got back, the sun was annoyingly trying to rise. I haven't tried it out here yet but I had set up a large array that should reflect the radiation and most of the light that tend to give me problems. Hopefully, it works because I don’t want to be stuck with a migraine for the rest of the day. The girl was still sitting nervously on her log when I got back and that nervousness multiplied by two-fold when she saw me. But with a quick flick of my wrist, that nervousness turned into excitement when my makeshift wand landed on her lap.