Iris laughed and cheered as she blinked through the trees. She practiced sprinting through the forest, kicking off of large roots or the trunks of trees and then teleporting forward to the next clear patch of ground. Consciously, she reminded herself not to push too hard, but she had never been very good at consciously controlling herself and frequently had to slow down as she felt the mana pains encroaching.
On the way out of the village, where she dared not show her powers yet, she had walked with her head down as she skimmed over every mention of mana that she could recall throughout the collection of books and magazines now in her bottomless bag. It proved to be a surprisingly easy topic to comprehend, and she was helped by her intuitive understanding of the sensations she felt when using it.
Each time she used her teleport power, she expended a small amount of mana. These individual uses were barely perceptible and easy to miss, but longer distance teleports seemed to use exponentially more mana. Whenever she blinked further than twelve feet, or blinked multiple times in rapid succession, the sudden drop of mana demanded to be noticed. It was like feeling physically tired after exercise, or mentally tired after thinking or socializing too much, except it was a distinct third kind of tired that she had never felt before. The sensation fit right in with the way she was already used to naturally monitoring her body's energy levels, finding a spot somewhere between physical and mental energy like it had always belonged there.
The main difference was capacity and recovery time. Short breaks could help to ease the exertion of her mental energy, but did little to renew it, and only prolonged rest could truly restore it. Meanwhile, short breaks did wonders for physical stamina, with long rests or sleep only being needed after extended periods or for topping off a full charge. Mana, though, was much more volatile. If she was careless, she could easily burn through all of it in seconds, but the flip side to that was it would also begin to rapidly recharge after only a moment or two of rest, returning to its maximum in only a few minutes. She also noted that she could feel her mana recharge even while she exerted herself mentally or physically, but it recharged faster when she was completely at rest. Prolonged rest only seemed necessary to recover from severe cases of mana drain, which left her with lingering headaches and a sharp pain that permeated her veins.
Iris soon reached the small lake at the base of the mountain, where the short stretch of beach and her favorite sitting tree were. The open expanse of the beach was too tempting to ignore. She deliberated a moment about the distances she'd tried so far, and how much mana drain she remembered feeling. While she thought, she consciously noticed her mana charging back up. When she felt it was full, she picked a spot about twenty feet away. She took a step forward and blinked out of existence before her foot hit the sand, then reappeared as her step landed in the spot she had chosen. The mana drain was significant, but didn't cause a headache from a full charge. She stood for a moment to be certain she wasn't dizzy -- another symptom of low mana -- and then walked a short distance while her mana recharged before trying it again, this time at a slightly shorter distance.
It wasn't long before she ran out of beach and found herself at the tree line on the southern edge of the lake. A small trail started into the forest, but quickly veered to the right and lead up the mountain. She skipped the forest part entirely, blinking from sand under her feet to the gravely path at the base of the mountain. Her feet landed on the loose rocks and slipped out from under her, driving her chin into the rocks on which she had just appeared.
She groaned and climbed back to her feet, leaned on the cliff face to steady herself and silently hoping that taking falls like this wasn't going to be a trend in her adventuring career. Standing and walking on the gravel was somewhat energy intensive, at least compared to a flat trail, but it wasn't normally difficult. She guessed that something about suddenly appearing on the gravel, or the sudden transition between two very different surfaces, had caused her to slip. She checked her chin for blood, her fingers coming back with a few blotches of red. She laughed aloud at herself for her first blood as an adventurer coming from an embarrassing fall, and promised to mention it in the adventurer magazines she planned to write one day.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
She tugged the drawstring on her bottomless bag, letting it loosen and open itself, and reached in to retrieve her walking stick. Every time she did this, she was amused by pulling the entire length of the staff, hand over hand, out of the tiny shallow bag. She jabbed the stick into the gravel in triumph, congratulating herself for being prepared. Sir Abram Brant's mantra ran through her mind, she had read it a dozen times in every issue of his survival guides. "Prepare for anything, because you can't prepare for everything."
Iris trudged up the path, digging her walking stick into the gravel with each step. When she teleported, she jabbed the stick down to steady herself. Soon she reached a portion of the trail with less gravel, which unfortunately meant more brush had ground up around the trail. She blinked past a spiderweb that spanned between the small trees that stubbornly tried to grow on the edges of the mountain path, then past some crawling vines with gnarly spikes which had laid themselves across the trail. With her next blink, she found herself staring downwards at dirt and rocks crumbling under her feet and tumbling down into a ravine.
She hurriedly stepped back and cursed under her breath. She had hiked this trail before and knew there was a bend with a ravine coming up, but she hadn't expected to come upon it so soon. She made a note to stay conscious that travel times would be very different with a teleport power. The trail curved sharply to the right, following a sharp inward curve of the mountain before curving back out again to continue in roughly the same direction on the other side of the short ravine. Over the edge was a nearly sheer drop dozens of feet down onto jagged piles of rocks.
While she waited for her heart to stop racing from the close call, she panned her gaze across the horizon. She was high enough now that she was looking out over her village below, on the other side of a thick band of woods between the village and the mountain. Past the village, directly across from the mountain where she stood now, was another vein of small mountains that ran almost parallel until the valley began to narrow in the north and close up beneath a peak of the two colliding rows of mountain peaks. Where the valley narrowed at the base of the mountains, a beautiful prairie of wild grass and flowers spanned from edge to edge of the valley, interrupted only by a few large and expensive looking houses and the roads that lead to them.
She looked back at the ravine, and the curving trail. Across the ravine, the trail continued almost directly ahead as if it hadn't been interrupted at all. She eyed the other side of the ravine intently, looking for reasons to talk herself out of her idea. She could simply follow the trail as it hugged the mountain and encircled the ravine, it was narrow but not so much that it was unsafe. If she was careful, there was no reason that sticking to the beaten path would pose her any risk. Iris, however, had just become an adventurer, and she couldn't help herself.
She took a few steps back and crouched down for a launching start. She kicked off, sprinting towards the ledge. When her foot left the last inch of ground she leapt. She soared through the air and for a moment it felt like flight. Then the still distant edge of the cliff on the other side began to rise -- or rather, she began to fall. Just as the surface over the edge of the cliff was about to leave her view, she teleported.
She popped into existence over the path, still hurtling forward with arms and legs flailing. She landed awkwardly, quickly losing her battle for balance and tumbling onto the ground with a poorly executed roll that did little to stop the air being pushed from her lungs.
Iris lay on her back, wheezing and groaning, "this is definitely going to be a trend," she said aloud to herself.