Chapter Twenty-Eight

Life is full of little learning experiences, and I was having two of them right then. I felt a vague pulsing from my mana siphon and I twitched involuntarily, it was like an obnoxious kid from middle school that would hover their finger close by and tease me by saying, ‘I’m not touching you’ on a loop until I wanted to throatpunch them.

Loysa noticed immediately. “It looks like your siphon is filling up.” She said, and I blinked.

“But, didn’t I cast a bunch of spells this morning?” I asked.

“Those were low level spells, things a toothless first year student would cast, and you didn’t actually unleash most of them since all you did was burn your hair and freeze your ass. So most of the mana is still cycling.” Loysa explained, and I sighed.

“Besides, even if you had, all that would have meant is a delay of a few hours. You should probably make a habit of just draining it every morning or every evening. Ideally you’d use a sinkstone. But those are expensive to buy and dangerous to acquire.” Loysa explained as we went up the steps to try to board our ship.

“Sinkstone? Like a heat sink?” I asked, I thought of the computer devices that absorb the extra heat to eliminate danger or damage from a computer’s function… having a handy analogy always helps.

“I don’t know what that is, but probably. It lets you drain your mana and then it slowly dissipates it harmlessly over the course of hours. In a pinch you can also use it to augment what’s in your body. Sort of like your siphon, only that,” Loysa pointed to the siphon against the corner of my eye, “is a pale imitation, it can’t disperse, only fill. You have to empty that yourself, into something that will drain it.”

I added ‘Sinkstone’ onto the list of things to get a hold of.

“Just drain that into the receiver when we get ready to board.” She said.

I agreed to that shortly before learning the second thing.

Why Loysa said what she did the previous day about first come first served.

Because when we got to the upper level to pay, the ticket taker, a little goblin in a ruffled little suit said, “Ship to Steelven is full. Wait for the next one.”

“Here?” I asked, my mouth agape, that would be hours.

He pointed to a bench over near a small three by three by three cube with a pulsing glow coming off of it. “Here or leave and try later. Whatever.” He shrugged and shouted, “Next!”

I shuffled away toward the bench with Loysa and Dwarguy following. We sat down, there were other benches, each one large enough to hold four people, and in the back of my mind I wondered if that was based on the standards of the Adventurer’s Guild or the expected size of a traveling family or what?

But overall, I was frankly ashamed. I watched the two of them sit and removed my siphon, holding it against the blue box while looking toward Loysa with a questioning expression.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

She nodded, I was doing it right, and I felt the little tube tingle as the mana was lost.

When the tingling stopped, I put it back on and shuffled back over to my team with my head hanging. I stood in front of them. “I’m sorry. I messed up. Now we’re stuck here till tonight, I should have listened.”

You know something? It’s a fundamental part of my nature I guess, maybe others, I don’t know if anyone else does this, but I have a tendency to make a bigger deal of my mistakes than they really are. I felt absolutely awful about keeping us stuck there at the station for the next six hours or more, and watching another ship board and people leave, just made it even worse in my own mind.

It wasn’t my first indication that I did have a decent little team. But it meant a lot to me, what they did next, I mean.

Dwarguy shrugged, “You bring me a beer and a wee meal before we leave lass, we call it even.”

“Of course!” I exclaimed in a high pitched voice that genuinely surprised me, I almost jumped out of my skin for some reason at his jovial air, like I was expecting him to be mad, really mad, and the fact that he wasn’t was itself almost alarming. “I’ll be happy to!” I all but chirped.

Loysa snorted, “You’re a toothless newb, this was a learning experience that didn’t cost much. You learn from it now, it’s not going to be painful later. Don’t worry about it, Steelven isn’t going anywhere. Save sweating it for the training field. But I’ll take a beer and a small meal too, if you’re going anyway. No rodent!” She added with haste, and I gave her a weak smile that I struggled to make bigger.

“Not to worry! I’ve got this!” I said, and sat down a lot more at ease than I expected to.

I don’t know why I did what I did next, but when it came time to eat, I went down the steps and paused when I was out of view. The steps were empty for now, with no more flights for hours, and with my kitsune ears, I eavesdropped.

I know I said it. But… I don’t know why? Why did I do that? It was rude. It showed a lack of trust, and what did I expect to hear? Did I really want to hear them talk badly about me when I was out of sight? Was I trying to confirm some negative view of me, to myself?

It was shameful. But I did it without thinking.

And they did talk about me.

What they said actually made me more ashamed.

“The wee lass has some stone balls to put herself in with Schnee. ‘Specially bein as she’s not from this world.” Dwarguy chuckled, “I owe her somethin fierce for gett’n me outta the arena like that. Even if I do have to do a few more fights, it’s good be’n out’n the world again.”

“I’d say so. She worries too much, but that’s just newbie nerves. I think she’ll be an excellent adventurer one day, very responsible, and she took accountability for screwing up. Not everybody can do that, some would have blamed me for not expressly telling them what to do. Anyone capable of learning, has a shot at making it in this business. Surprisingly, she’s good hearted too, I can see why my Goddess wanted me to go with her.” Loysa’s words almost made me cry.

I moved away as quickly as I could, just as she started arguing with her Goddess again over ‘rubbing it in’.

The fact that they were saying nice things about me, made me feel so much worse, but I forced myself to focus on the matter at hand.

I returned with a pair of mugs (I paid extra to keep them) and a few newspapers full of ‘filled’ balls of meat. This was an interesting meal, they actually put cooked and sauced vegetables in the middle of balls of meat like a kind of ‘filling’. It was surprisingly good, as the flavors soaked all the way through the lightly crisped outer flesh of the ball.

There was no reason for me to mention my eavesdropping on them, so I didn’t, I just rejoined them and when the sun was setting and the airship descended, we managed to get on it, take our seats, then before we knew it, we were on our way again.