It took Celestine several tens of days to figure out how to light the crystal. I felt bad for her and she whined at me every day. Eventually I got tired of her complaining and taught her how to meditate.
Back on Earth, the only reason I would meditate was to practise screwing around with my brain. Part of the process of making a sentient ego is to put yourself into a total state of relaxation and meditation while focussing on the traits you want that ego to possess. It's like creating an imaginary friend at first, then your brain starts putting meaning to the act. They slowly begin to respond through means such as puppetry, or leading by example. After several months of meditation, consciousness gives birth to an ego. I didn't go so far as teach Celestine this, though. It was unnecessary. I've already mastered creating egos to the point where I could do it in my sleep, and often did when I was alive. So if the need arises to where we need more egos, I can make them myself.
No, the reason I taught her meditation was to get her to feel for her magic conduit. The act of sitting in once place of complete silence, mind empty, and feeling every sensation your body reacts to should be enough for her to find it. It was hard to get her to fucking sit still, though. Six year old, attention span of a squirrel. I had to forcibly take control of her body movements to get her to sit still. Day one of this was nothing but bawling because she couldn't move. I still relinquished control so she could eat, do her business, and sleep. I'm not a monster. Day two she finally figured out that this will continue until she does what I tell her, and she shut up. Still no progress. On day three, she could put her mind into the meditative state and relax. It was going well until the system voice chimed in with "
So this is where we're at now. Back in the courtyard with dog boy Warran pacing by a bag. "All right missy, took you long enough. Still, the research material I requested from the library hasn't arrived yet, so we'll put that off for now. First, a test." He pulled out three unpowered light crystals. Seems he won't be satisfied until he sees her activate them himself. "Hold out your hands, palms up." He placed one light crystal in her right hand. "Light." And she lit it a second after he commanded her. Satisfied with that, he did the same for her left hand. "Light." It took her a few seconds longer, but then the light crystal placed in her left hand lit up. Finally, he placed a light crystal against her forehead. "Light." This one took her the longest to figure out, a good ten seconds, then the crystal lit up. "It's important to learn how to channel magic energy to any part of your body at will. The more you practise, the easier it will come. Now then, let's move on to spell casting."
Her eyes lit up like the light crystals when she passed his test and with the promise of being taught spells.
He placed the lit light crystals back into his bag and stood a meter in front of Celestine. "Now then. Simplest magic there is, light magic." He held his right hand out, finger pointed toward Celestine, and then his finger started to glow ET-style. "Simple spells can be achieved just by willing the magic energy to enact it. You want a light at the tip of your finger while you're reading in the dark, you direct your magic power into your finger and think 'light.' With this spell, you are constantly channelling magic power into your finger to keep up the light, so you must continuously will it to work." The glow from his finger dimmed, but then a ball of light grew in his palm. He lifted it up above him and let go of it like placing something on a shelf. The ball of light just sat there, unmoving. Like a mini-sun. "Freeform balls of light are independent of their caster. You charge them with a bit of magic power like the light crystal and they have a life period. There's a bit more too it, of course. You have to have a basic understanding of light as well. Since you weren't born blind, though, you already have this. But when you get to the more complex light spells, things get difficult, fast. Most people stop at creating a simple floating ball of light, so it's considered the easiest, safest, and most >utilitarian?< school to practise."
"How do you make it work? I don't get it." Celestine asked. I want to know too, since it might just be a repeat of last time and he'll tell her to just do it while trotting back to do whatever the heck he does in his room. I know I said I found his teaching method amusing, but half an Erde month to figure out how to channel magic energy kind of made the method lose its charm.
"Not the right question. The right question to ask is... why does it work?"
"B-because I want it to?" Celestine said, trying to please him by parroting a summary of what he said earlier, interpreted by her mind.
"Right. You want light in your hand, be it finger light or a ball of light, so you move magic power from your conduit into your hand and you demand light. Simple."
Celestine brings her hand up and tries to do as he said. She forced magic energy through her bones and into her hand, then kept repeating 'light' in her mind, over and over again. Nothing happened, though. She strained her face and just kept focussing on trying to make light. She got so focussed that she started just repeating out loud, "light light light light light light!"
Then she started getting angry. For several minutes she commanded the energy running to her hand to light, but nothing happened. She got furious and eventually decided to try the idea he mentioned on elementalism instead, to personify her anger. After around an hour of trying to light a light in her hand, she changed the command and shouted, "FIRE!"
That was a bad idea. An explosion of fire blasted out of the palm of her hand, singed her eyebrows, burned through the shoulder-strap and the bottom part of the dress she was wearing, and caught a decent amount of her hair on fire. It was a good thing Warran didn't leave her to her own devices like last time, because he immediately dropped a ball of water right on top of her. Huh, I just noticed that by the bag he had a bucket of water for some reason.
"I SAID LIGHT, NOT FIRE!" Warran shouted at her. "Elementalism is too unpredictable for you to even try right now, girl!" He reverted himself to his old old elf form and began casting some spell on her to reverse the damage to her clothes, the burns on her hand, and regrew her eyebrows. "Don't do that again." He said sternly, knocking his knuckle on her head. "We'll end this for today. Go tell your mother what you did and have her fix your hair. Needing to regrow your hair back for a few years should be decent enough punishment for not listening!" Celestine had just been staring at her hand before the attack on her noggin. Did she even feel the burns?
She looked up at him, nodded softly, and took off into the mansion. Didn't take long to find Sylvianna because she was watching them the whole time from a window. She chopped her daughter over the head enough to hurt her, but not do damage. No explanation needed. Sylvianna drug her daughter into the dining hall by gripping her hair, sat her on a tall chair, and started snipping away at her hair. By the end of the day, Celestine's long black hair was replaced with hair that only reached to her shoulders with side-part bangs. It wasn't anything fancy because losing her butt-length long hair was supposed to be punishment.
Actually, I haven't really seen many women in this world do anything fancy with their hair. Most we've seen is some braids and ponytails. Perhaps they have more to worry about than looking fancy here? I hope Celestine gets some more freedom in the future so we can look through Arture some more.
----
It took Celestine four days with three hour classes with Warran to finally get her finger to light. She could make fire, but she had problems with light magic. All the while, Warran, in his dog boy form, was either reading or writing in a journal.
At most, she could just get the tip of her finger to light up. And nowhere near as bright as Warran could. "So light clearly isn't your affinity. In fact, it might be your weakest. Like mother, like daughter I suppose. Next up, elementalism. You've already proven to me that you can make fire. I was never planning on teaching you that anyway until you're older, so we'll avoid it. Elementalism is the largest school because it has several subsets. The most used, of course, are fire, air, water, and earth. That's earth and in rock, dirt, not our planet." Reminder: they call their world Earth similar to how we call ours Earth. It's the same word as ground and dirt. He's explaining this to a child, so it might be needed in his eyes.
I had high hopes for this school because it is the most similar to traditional magic in Earth fiction. Throw magic around and crap like that. Fire balls, ice spikes, rock bullets, etcetera. I didn't quite know how it tied into celestial magic, but I was glad it existed.
"Okay, first thing's first, air." Warran said, clapping.
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
Celestine had been changed into a pair of overalls and one of her brother's old t-shirts so she wouldn't damage her clothes. So she was safe to get dirty from earth magic or wet from water magic. Fire was to be avoided.
The courtyard had been set up like a little practice arena. There were some straw dummies set up close by, some wood stakes holding glass bottles in the distance for range practice, a barrel of water was placed by Warran's bag, and some boulders had been supplied so they don't tear up the ground with earth magic.
"There's more to the other elements than just thinking them up like fire. Fire is simple, it can be conjured up immediately, like you know." Dog boy Warran walked up to her and patted her short-haired head now to emphasize this. "Air is also simple, but requires a bit more precision. Air is already all around us. So what we need is wind!" He held his left hand out and a gust of wind blasted one of the straw dummies. The air was moving so fast that it caused distortions enough to where you could actually see it. Now that I think of it, the overalls might have been Sylvianna's choice for another reason now that I see this air magic. There was a back draft caused by using air magic. Warran's sleeveless robe rose up behind him, revealing a fluffy brown dog tail. "Now then, you try. Like with light, you need an understanding of wind in order to force your magic energy to manipulate it. Unlike light, though, your magic energy doesn't create the wind, it moves the air and that creates the wind. Like breathing, you push air out of your lungs. Your magic pushes the air around you into an attack. Watch me again." He held out his left hand and like before, an almost visible wind attack assailed the straw dummy. Celestine's gaze was on Warran, though. His robe was first forced forward, against his back, with the first rush of wind. Then the back draft rushed in to replaced the displaced air. This could be seriously dangerous. A strong enough air mage could create a vacuum.
Celestine stood upright, held her right hand in front of her, forced magic energy into her hand, and shouted, "wind!" Following this, a gust of wind blasted against her back and pushed her over forward. She caught herself on the ground with both hands in front of her.
"Not bad! As I thought, you have a deficiency with light magic. But all that practice might have widened the conduit you're using right now. Keep practising light magic in your spare time, nothing else. Now, try to knock one of those bottles off the posts over there. Footing is key with air magic, so plant your feet on the ground. If you keep falling over, I might have to have your father hire a physical trainer to strengthen your body."
She threw a few more gusts of wind, falling down each time. She was aiming for the bottles, which were a good distance away, perhaps 20 meters. All she could make them do is wiggle a bit.
*Sigh*
She didn't respond, but her emotions were the opposite of my own annoyance. She was beaming after being told she'd gotten better at magic, even if it was from some stupid servitor I made on a whim a year ago and that threw her life into disarray. She stood back up, spread her legs wide to try to give herself a wider foundation so she wouldn't fall over again, and shot out another blast of wind to try to knock over a bottle. She just barely managed to stay on her feet this time.
"Keep experimenting! All you're doing right now is pushing the wind. Try to shape it." Warran said, casting another wind spell, this time the air was more visible, the effect of the spell sharper, and it twisted around a bottle in the distance, making it spin in place, but not fall over. Show off.
Celestine planted her feet to the ground and focussed magic energy into her hand again. She commanded the energy to manipulate the wind like she had been doing, but she also compressed it. By pulling in air around the area that the wind would pass and forcing it to halt, she tried to make a pipe of air. This backfired and instead of forcing her forward, the back blow threw her a meter behind her right onto her butt.
"Keep it up. Simple manipulation requires practice. We'll continue on to water after you knock all those bottles down with air magic."
Her idea to create a pipe of air failed. But she kept experimenting. The next attempt, she tried to collect and compress the air in her hand and throw it out like a ball. That one failed because as soon as it left her hand, it expanded and blew her all the way back into a bush. After she returned to her standing spot, she tried to create a whip of air, but her control of the air only extended about six meters in front of her. She then tried just throwing more wind at the bottles like before, but nothing. After the extended attempts at casting spells, she was breathing heavily. Controlling the magic power through her body put a big strain on her physically and mentally. Also, trying to just keep standing up was also tiresome.
The lesson continued on for several hours. Warran occasionally demonstrated some simple air manipulation. Simple to him maybe. Celestine was left guessing at how he did what he did.
I was getting bored of her many failed attempts and I wanted to try it myself.
We switched control of the body like the last time in her bedroom with the light crystal. Warran noticed Celestine acting differently and chimed in.
"Hey, don't tell me you're giving up!"
"Hey Warran. It's Novos. I was getting bored and I want to give it ago myself." I waved at him with her hand.
"Huh, uh, I... guess?" He was extremely wary now because of me. He probably should be.
I was from another world. I probably have a greater understanding of air than any being on this planet. "
"Also, don't tell Celestine what I'm about to do. She needs to figure it out herself." I say to Warran and he nodded.
I had full access to her memories, I could pull on her own experience of manipulating the air, so I am not starting from square one.
Step one, compression. I started pulling all of the O2 out of the air and compressing it. Atomic theory still exists here at least. It was beginning to form into an incredibly cold ball of liquid oxygen in my hand. I forced magic energy into the other hand to suspend the ball so the hands wouldn't get too cold.
"How did you make water? The air around here is too dry." Warran said, watching me carefully to stop me if anything were to happen to Celestine. He even reverted to his old old elf self to have full access to his magic conduit, preparing for the worst.
"This... isn't... water." All of my concentration was on forcing the ball of liquid oxygen to compress further. The worms of magic energy burned through the bones as more and more magic power was being utilized to suspend the ball with air currents and to compress it. I don't know how long it took, but eventually I could force the atoms to a state where they were tightly packed together and stopped moving as frequently as regular air does. It was stable enough for use as a projectile now. A blue shard of solid oxygen held suspended in front of me. I forced the energy to keep it suspended in the left hand and controlled the propelling force with the right hand. I tried creating a mini-cyclone by spinning air in a circle in front of me. It was starting to pick up too much dust though, so I let it dissipate slowly. How to propel the solid oxygen... It was slowly losing mass as it evaporated back to gas just like dry ice. I've heard of tornadoes throwing objects right through concrete, but I can't go making a tornado in the middle of the city like this.
"Well'p, I give up. I made a projectile, but I can't figure out how to fire it accurately." I shrugged. I let the solid oxygen shard drop to the ground and I step on it to break it up and let it evaporate quicker. Warran was just staring at the ice-like shards. "I'm going to give control back to Celestine. Good day." I wave to him and relinquish control to her suspended consciousness.
"<-IR!>" Celestine shouted, without realizing she had control of the body again. She looked around, saw Warran wide-eyed, then looked at the bottles, none of which moved. "What did Novos do?" The bits of solid oxygen were already evaporated and only whiffs of still not fully evaporated oxygen vapor remained.
It was a good experiment. Perhaps I shouldn't call this elementalism any more. It's not elementalism, you're not limited to just the elements. It's atomic manipulation, at least when I'm in control.
In hindsight, maybe I should have tried to just command the solid oxygen shard to fly at the bottle at mach speed? That probably would have hit a bottle. My Earth human experience distracted me and made me think I needed something to propel it... Hmm...