The greater the distance from the fight, the more my mind buzzed with excitement. Winning felt better than I expected, better than entertainment media had prepared me for. It was literally as though all my worries melted away for a moment, replacing anxious, needling thoughts with pride and joy. Enhancing all of these good vibes was the affirmation that Grajo and Wysteria survived the fight, the latter walking normally as though she hadn’t just been nearly bitten to death by a giant snake. Magic was cool. Magic saved my friend, and I was thrumming with the urge to go straight back to the inn and crack open the Grimoire di Magi e Mythe to see what had changed, pour over what new spells were available to me and see if I had garnered enough experience to improve my Charisma. Tanis and Red were insistent that we celebrate with a big dinner, completely attainable thanks to the winner’s purse of which we had four hundred gold standard remaining after Tanis’ cut. That sounded like a lovely idea, but I didn’t like how much distance it put between me and the grimoire. Fortunately, I was covered in bug-flavored vomit, and everyone agreed to give me an hour to clean up and change clothes before heading out for a night on the town. If I rushed through the shower, that would give me plenty of time with the book.

What I had planned on being fifteen minutes ended up closer to half an hour as surrendering myself to the warm water beating down on my body revealed how much the tension I was carrying for the last few days had gotten to me. My muscles needed massaged, and since my comfort levels with other people touching me weren’t quite high enough to hire a professional masseuse, I settled for the soothing, hot rain of the shower. Red promised to handle laundering my robes, as usual, but I still wanted to give them a bit of a rinse in hopes that the former occupants of Wysteria’s stomach wouldn’t stain what was supposed to be my fanciest outfit. Lavender and tan splotches remained after my preliminary rinse, and I supposed buying a new set of robes wouldn’t be too hard if they were impossible to remove. The worst thing adding more clothes to my wardrobe did was increase the load we needed to carry from place to place. Perhaps we should invest in a beast of burden and a cart?

Shoving any other thoughts to the back of my mind, I retrieved the grimoire from the chest in my room and sat down cross-legged upon the bed to examine its contents. Resolving to save my personal record for last as to make sure I digested the new content properly and separated its exploration from choosing where and how to spend Xp, I started at the beginning with the Esper Index. There were the expected two new entries, half-obscured in the same vein as the skrat: moss troll and midgarsormr. Scanning both in cursory fashion, I flipped to my spell index and was surprised with the number of new magics on offer to me. Legerdemain and Purge Condition remained available for purchase, and alongside them were two new spells; Proclamation and Arcane Sight. There was also a weird gut feeling welling inside me that there were more spells available, but something was prohibiting me from seeing them. I’d never gotten quite that reaction while reading the grimoire before. Certainly, the intellectual assumption that there was something within the pages of the tome that I couldn’t detect, or the book wasn’t ready to reveal yet, but never in a way that felt so visceral. It was almost like hunger; an urge for knowledge and the conviction it was kept secret just beyond my sight. Perhaps for those reasons, my eyes kept drawing themselves to Arcane Sight. For the cost of a single mana, I could see, read, and interpret magic on a more intrinsic level. The description was so vague, but the pull at my fingers to play over the spell and pour my experience into it was almost inescapable.

Almost. I forced myself to turn the page and examined the Record of Achievement. It was usually a quaint feature, but I swelled with pride seeing Victory in Astonia lit gold, congratulating me for the team’s triumph over Alexsandr. I found myself wondering where the book drew its knowledge from. Had Alexsandr been the Gladiator of Astonia since the book’s creation? Would it alter if someone else took over? How did it know? Was the grimoire in fact an ancient relic as Red theorized, updating with the changes of time’s inevitable march? For some reason it made more sense that the book was so tailored to me and my objectives since it had my name on the cover, but even then, why was that the case? Where did it come from? Was there more at work to my arrival in the Commonwealth than I ever thought to consider? The answers could only lie in patience, but it had been some time since I’d considered the book’s origins. Tanis said the title was in Old High Tongue, a mostly dead language, which suggested the book itself might be from a time when those who spoke it natively were still a thriving part of the world. Perhaps it was something worth looking into when we had some time, if for no other reason than to learn more about Barbavia and its past. There was a second entry in gold for my First Coliseum Victory, making me idly curious as to why those achievements were made to stand out more on the page before flipping to the Esper Records.

Wysteria and Grajo remained unchanged from when I last observed them, and that made me a little sad. Surely their personal growth wasn’t tied to my whims to spend precious experience on their abilities. Was Grajo always so fast, or was this a result of years of training? Perhaps, like spellwork, interfacing with the grimoire was allowing me to speed up the process. Alexsandr noted he’d never seen a fledgling chainer and esper exhibit such mastery over what was apparently a more complex ability for Wysteria in her Venomous Vapors. Perhaps I was gaming the system a bit by pouring the fruits of our labor so directly into their improvement. The concept didn’t make me as uncomfortable as I might have thought it would, reasoning that natives to the region grew up steeped in this culture, an inherent understanding of the rules and base knowledge of both espers and the arcane, whereas I had gotten as far as I had with a few last-minute ‘need-to-know’ instructions and a lot of luck. Resolving that if I felt we were growing too strong, I’d limit my use of the Grimoire di Magi e Mythe, I finally turned to my own Personal Record, and my jaw nearly hit the floor. There, shining brightly and just aching to be used, were sixty-one experience points.

How did this happen? Where were we before? Seventeen? I’d barely done anything in the few days before the coliseum bout to warrant such growth. That was eleven times what I earned at unpredictable intervals, but this much gain in such a small amount of time was utterly unprecedented. Did each victory count? No, that didn’t even begin to make sense, especially since the last fight was a draw. Were they worth more because they were coliseum fights? Was the whole endeavor worth more? Even as my thoughts raced, I couldn’t draw my eyes away from that fat, glowing, golden number, and the connection suddenly slid into place. I really only expected four more experience waiting for me; just over enough to increase my Charisma and see what that got me before moving on with my day. So it stood to reason that I was dealing with only ten times the typical amount being awarded to me… or, as seemed to be the likely conclusion, two rounds of five times my typical yield. Two new achievements highlighted in the same glittery shade of gold that my experience value held when I had enough to spend. Winning at the coliseum had not only lined my pockets, boosted my confidence, and began my qualifications for the tournament, but it had exploded with growth potential for myself and the espers under my care. There was a chance I was off base, but nothing else made sense. I supposed we’d see if I got another huge Xp boost upon reaching another golden achievement. For now, there was great purchasing power at my fingertips, and the time before tonight’s celebration dinner was tick-ticking away.

First things first, I had committed to increase my Charisma days ago and I wanted to lock in that improvement before overwhelming myself with other options. The number ticked from three to four, and along with it my ‘base’ for Persuade went from six to seven. There was also a new Passive Trait called Deep Reserves that hadn’t shown up when I previously previewed the Charisma increase. I still had no clue what it did, but it didn’t have a little skull next to it like Phobia, so I assumed it was a good thing. Out of curiosity I ticked it up again but didn’t commit the change. My base for Persuade increased, as did my potential Connections from a two to a three. Just as before, there was no new Trait available for preview, but now I knew there could be. I wondered how many of my attributes would provide additional bonuses on increase that I couldn’t yet see, how much information the book was really still hiding from me. It was perhaps more those questions than my curiosity over the spell itself that saw me flip to it in my Spell Index and grant myself Arcane Sight. Remembering the most obvious use of spells I’d seen that day, I made an educated guess at its deployment and pointed my index and middle fingers toward my own eyes before willing power into the spell. Immediately a sheen of runes flowed across my vision, not unlike the edges that surrounded my point of contact with the Esperwild when Parting the Veil. When they cleared, I blinked a few times to clear the afterimage of bright light that remained and peered around the room.

At first, everything seemed normal. As I relaxed my eyes, like one of those three-dimensional image puzzles, symbols appeared. They were exactly like the runes I saw a moment ago, but now they had a purpose I understood. For example, there were light enchantments on the walls of the inn itself to protect it from harm and keep it warm inside. Each of these spells was only represented by a single sigil that would otherwise be as anonymous to me as a Japanese kanji, but I had intrinsic knowledge of their meaning, and how that meaning was altered by their color as though they were in my native tongue. Little else around me was magical on first glance, so I braced myself and turned my eyes toward the book in my lap. Instead of the explosion of color and runes I anticipated, it looked more like the kind of high-tech computer interface you’d see in a sci-fi movie. As my intuition believed, there were two more spells available to purchase on the page, hovering like a hologram above the waxy paper itself. Tactician’s Sight was on offer and would allow me to use Arcane Sight to see the condition of my allies and espers. I had to assume that was why Alexsandr used Arcane Sight during our fight; to appraise whether or not Kjersti had taken Wysteria’s venom. The other was attached to Legerdemain (a spell I still hadn’t committed to purchasing) called Gladiator’s Legerdemain that afforded the opportunity to sculpt the terrain of a coliseum battlefield. I didn’t see the need to use that unless I became a Gladiator myself, which might be cool, but wasn’t an avenue I saw myself taking anytime soon.

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The Esper Index and Record of Achievement weren’t improved at all through Arcane Sight, though the lack of other overlays meant I could see the runes springing off the edges of the book in a prismatic rainbow of colors. It was all too much to discern, runes appearing like motes of light and vanishing almost as soon as they spawned. The grimoire was, obviously, ridiculously magical and that was good enough for me. At a glance I saw a few more entries in the Esper Records, mostly focusing on improving Wysteria’s poison and a simple Trait for both called Trained Esper that advertised access to more Traits. Adding potency to Wysteria’s biggest asset would be a wise choice, but I also knew we had plenty of road to hoe between Brum and the next coliseum, so I was content to wait and see what awaited me in my own Personal Record. I was not prepared. As I turned the page, data expanded outward, well beyond the book’s binding. It seemed to fill the room with details and options well in excess of anything the book provided me before. At first, I wasn’t sure where to look, what to examine, but quickly settled on understanding what I had before trying to poke around what could be improved.

Firstly, my Connections was now glowing the same as my available experience. Touching it showed two names to confirm as Connections; Red and Tanis Vex. Shrugging, I approved both. They were both my friends, and I had no problems making that proclamation official to my magic diary. Besides, my Traits were now filled out in detail and had caught my eye. Pressingly aware of the time, I wanted to look them over and see what abilities I actually had at my disposal. Animal Whisperer, Attractive, Entertainer, and Light Sleeper each made skill checks under the assumed conditions ‘Precise’; interacting with animals, chatting up someone who thinks I’m hot, playing to a crowd, and rousing myself from unconsciousness. I didn’t know what it meant for a check to be ‘Precise’, but I also had no idea what exactly the numerical representation of my ability were supposed to convey beyond the age-old adage of ‘bigger number = better person’. For now I was comfortable assuming Precise was good and moved on. Powerful Relic was indeed the Grimoire di Magi e Mythe as I had assumed, and listed no specific benefits or features of the book beyond that. Phobia, as well, played predictably into my fear of heights. Apparently, when confronted by something that would trigger it, I had to pass a Focus check of fifteen or be Cowed until the end of my next turn. That sounded bad. I had a +2 to Focus, but no clue what kind of dice I was rolling to apply the bonus to, and it seemed unlikely the odds would be in my favor to overcome that difficulty since fifteen was more than twice the ‘base’ of six for Focus. ‘Cow’ in this sense seemed likely to be related more to the root word for ‘coward’ than turning me into an adult bovine, so I assumed I would be confronted with some kind of fear effect in braving this stimulus. Either the climb to reach Grajo hadn’t provoked it, or I passed the Focus check. Either way I resolved to avoid high places as much as possible, which would be pretty easy as that had already been my inclination since I was able to walk.

The final Passive Trait was the new one I received from increasing my Charisma; Deep Reserves. It declared that spending a Willpower would now completely fill my energy and mana. Knowing how much in handy being able to return just a quarter came after the yeti fight made me feel like I’d taken a powerful step on my career as a spellcaster. Idly, I pretended to pump up my Charisma again to see if a new potential Trait was revealed. It was not. But as I tried the same trick on every other Attribute, I was pleased to see that upping my Will would offer me a Trait called Dauntless, and a valuable piece of new information. It read, ‘if you fail a skill check you attempted to force via Willpower, the Willpower is not spent.’ So for the transitive cost of a single Xp, I could “force” a skill check, which I assumed meant I would receive some kind of bonus. While the check could still fail, if I increased my Will and got this Trait, I wouldn’t lose the Willpower in making the attempt. That, and the increase it provided to my base Focus check and Willpower itself made dumping another twenty experience a very tantalizing prospect. Still, it would be foolish to commit to a big investment with only thirty Xp remaining when I hadn’t looked into the breadth of new options that was literally filling the room around me.

Next were the Active Traits I already possessed. Dodge was a reaction I could activate with energy to forsake future movement in order to avoid an attack or area-of-effect power up to my Speed, which was listed as twenty feet. Stick the Landing said I could make an Agility check of 13 to cut all damage I’d receive from falling in half, but as my Agility check had no bonus and the base was only four, it didn’t seem likely I’d be able to hit the target. Perhaps shoring up some of my lower Attributes would be of more merit to the things I already had access to than pumping up my higher ones? Knock on Wood was the final Trait I already possessed, and to my surprise it worked literally exactly as the superstition suggested; if a specific misfortune is mentioned I can knock on wood and spend a quarter of my max energy to gain a +2 bonus for up to twenty-four hours on any skill checks to avoid it. There was a note in the text about limited use, so it didn’t seem like something I could rely too heavily on, but a little bit of a cushion to avoid dire circumstances sounded a hell of a lot better to me than no bonus at all.

Time was fleeting as I finally began exploring the other Traits available to me, so I didn’t get a chance to have as thorough a read as I desired. I found myself walking around the room to reach those furthest from my line of sight, taking in titles and organization structure more than the text of the Traits themselves. There were at least one hundred available, maybe closer to two. Some augmented Traits I didn’t’ have yet like the Gladiator’s Legerdemain and Tactician’s Sight spells. Others bore skulls like my Phobia, and I wondered if they’d grant me some kind of bonus in exchange for taking them on. A risky prospect, to be sure, but perhaps a good way to gain benefits in a pinch. There were Traits focused on melee combat, wrestling, leadership, stealth, defense, a whole panoply of options to specifically improve my skills, and still more I didn’t have the luxury to examine fully before dinner plans came up. Even with all these fascinating choices at my disposal, I knew how much I was still riding high on our victory, how much I wanted to share that energy with my friends, and how important it was to them that we do so.

Returning to the bed, I leafed through the book one last time to make sure my Arcane Sight hadn’t missed anything and did a double-take when I found a new chapter had been added between the Esper Records and my own entitled ‘Companion Records’. There, in a two-page spread, was an entry on Red, complete with illustration. There were his Attributes, just as I’d seen them in the Esper Records when we were linked, but the entry was expanded to read a bit more like my own character sheet. He had Traits unrelated to combat that I now had access to through the Arcane Sight, as well as the option to improve them like Wysteria and Grajo through a Trait called Skilled Associate. There was also much more detailed information about his history, a personality profile, and other tidbits well in excess of what had previously been provided to me by either himself or the grimoire. I pulled my eyes away from the text and forced myself to stare forward, not wanting to read some hidden secret about my friend that he didn’t care to tell. This chapter was most certainly not there just a few moments ago when I flipped between the pages, so the only logical conclusion I could come to was that my officially confirming Red and Tanis as my Connections had added the chapter itself and entries for them.

… Tanis.

Carefully, I grabbed the page bearing Red’s illustration and Traits from the top corner, pulling it slowly to examine what followed. My first concern was keeping my eyes off of the opposite page so as not to accidentally observe information about Red I wasn’t specifically given permission to have. The second one, although perhaps a bit childish, was that I was concerned the illustration of Tanis on the next page would be au naturel. Red was depicted in the nude, of course, but he almost always was, any potential indecency hidden by his esper physiology. As exciting the prospect of seeing a boob was to my baser urges (bonus points for it being a boob whose owner I was familiar with), it seemed a disgusting violation of privacy to witness it in the pages of my magic encyclopedia without her permission. The grimoire had suddenly become more socially dangerous than ever, but there was a need beyond idle curiosity to see how bad it might be. If she caught me flipping past the page and saw the things I was presently trying not to see, it would be helpful to know exactly what kind of damage control I needed to apply. Tanis’ shoulders were rarely bare, I reasoned. If I could reveal just enough of the illustration to confirm or deny the presence of her typical clothing, it would either be a small load off my mind or another complication to an already difficult situation. Holding my breath, I peeled past her pointed ears and cheeky grin, finally able to exhale as I saw the familiar shapes of her leather armor. I close the book and my eyes, taking the small amount of relief as I could get it.

“You decent, Glenn?” Tanis’ voice came unexpectedly sudden, along with her knock on my door. I almost jumped out of my socks, rushing to deposit the book back in its chest like I’d just been caught looking at some kind of forbidden pornography which I absolutely had not.

“Yeah, I’ll be out in a second! I just need to get my boots on.”

I needed to talk to Tanis and Red about the deeper information the Grimoire di Magi e Mythe now afforded me, get their take on it, and perhaps see about reversing their status as my Connections if they (understandably) weren’t cool with it. That could wait until after we all unwound a bit and enjoyed our night. Before bed, perhaps, or if the evening’s festivities ran long or were particularly exhausting, in the morning after breakfast. Maybe a night’s rest would bring me some clarity, some better words to navigate the ins and outs of this delicate thing I’d made. Either way, we all deserved a little joy, and I was committed to squeezing everything I could out of it.