Selen felt a weird sense of connection, aware of the nacent spell that her "aunt" held for her. Different element, and better contained, but the idea was the same. The older bird's head-feathers were mostly covered but she still had an encouraging look to her eyes. Selen tried not to let her down. She focused on the bit of lightning, then on molding the Mana between her own fingers to make it almost the same. It rapidly leaked out, draining eight Mana points beyond the three-point trickle she'd wasted so far, and her vision blurred blue for a second in warning. Selen let go of Tradewind's spell and put both hands into her own, containing what she had.

"Good! Now try to flow that back into yourself instead of wasting it." She watched Selen try, and chirped in amusement as Selen's feathers stood up with static. "No, more like this. Oh well; you should still have some left. Next, copy this." She tried some slightly different flavor.

Selen studied this one: sort of heavy, more tangible than the others. "Could this be stone or ground?"

"You tell me."

It was chilly. "Cold, ice, water? It's a little slippery."

"Cold, yes. Now, see if you can copy it."

Tradewind got her to tune magic to this element too, feeling a spell that threatened to turn into ice. "Why not let it activate?" she asked.

"You're still shaky. I want to do another lesson before having you turn the potential into real things."

"Matter and energy," Selen said. "Does it obey the conversation rules? Is there some E equals m c squared for Mana?"

They stood outside the magic shop as the sun's last rays faded. Aunt Tradewind studied her and said, "Little owl, I heard that you were saying strange things to the Duke's men."

Selen looked aside, her vision clouded from Mana drain and the deepening night. The bluejay woman stood out brightly. "I know I've been forgetful since the trouble the other day. I'll get better."

"But you said something about memories of other worlds. Is there any truth to that? Did the gods give you a vision?"

How much to tell her? Selen sighed and said, "Something like that. There's at least one other world; I'm sure of it. More machines, much less magic, different rules. I want to learn more, and compare."

Tradewind ruffled Selen. "I believe you probably saw something real. What it means, I don't know. Just don't let whatever favor the gods did you, go to your head."

"I'll try. I need to work hard and improve. And... I want to earn my keep."

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"That's my girl. If your father doesn't pay your admission fee for the Society, I will."

#

Selen trained. She regularly leaped off of whatever low roofs she could find, sometimes adding magic-assisted flaps, hardly ever crashing into anyone. Most of her Mana she saved to spend as quickly as it came in, on gathering the motes of an air spell and trying to find the tuning of other elements. In between, she carried letters and boxes across the city, often holding off on using her enchanted pack. She wasn't prepared to draw attention to it and answer questions about it anyway.

The work paid off. On the same day, she got a flurry of notices: [Skill gain: Elemental Magic (Learning).] Then [Skill gain: Hiking (Toughness)], and again for Flight (Agility). Which was great, but now she had a problem.

"I need three of the same stat," Selen said over lunch. "I was thinking of Sanity, since that's the one that boosts Stamina and Mana. But what do I need to do to earn that one? Look at monsters from another dimension?"

Tradewind gave her a strange look, but answered, "There are some ways to gain it from war. But for you, there are a few common options."

Selen suffered. Her family gave the basement crew the evening off and let Selen spend all night sorting, filing and cleaning. Then she got hardly an hour's sleep before having to get up and work on the second floor. The big round room was an office of desks and shelves with a flight takeoff balcony she hadn't tried out yet. In its center stood a brass mechanical clock, the fanciest piece of technology she'd seen yet. It predated the use of the Two Hoots tower as a post office; in fact it was said to be one of the first things ever built by someone who mastered the Engineer class. Which Selen hadn't known existed. There were Craftsmen but the gods had hinted that advanced machinery was something new.

Selen found herself dozing off while contemplating the clock. But she had to stay up! The Sanity stat was a measure of mental toughness, a bit different from the more social Will. She talked to herself while cleaning and filing, learning the office's setup in the process. "I met a traveler from an antique land, who said, two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert..."

A red-feathered Aves startled and hopped away from her. "Selen! What are you doing up so late?"

Selen squawked. "Cleaning! I mean trying to earn the Vigil skill!"

"Oh, ha, that explains it. I heard the noise and came down. What were you muttering just now?"

She'd been using English, not instinctively knowing how to translate the words of Percy Shelley. "An obscure poem that I heard, once." Nobody in all the world knew of it.

"If you're trying to stay awake you might as well let me pester you. They don't have you sorting all these bins tonight, do they?"

"Unfortunately yes. Maybe I can get something to read tomorrow night." She returned to her work. Who was this, anyway? She looked him over and saw: [Sunflare, Agent 2.] Same effect as when she looked at other people she was supposed to know already.

"So, what's the poem?" he asked.

She struggled to convert it. "Strange," said Sunflare. "Is that something from one of the other kingdoms?"

"Yeah. I... think I know a few other stories from places like that." She yawned. "Some other time, maybe."

He left her alone but checked on her again an hour later, when she was on the verge of falling asleep again. She waved weakly and returned to looking through random papers to better understand the filing system. "Pigeonholing," she muttered.

The next night Tradewind loaned her a book about river trade from her shop, so that was enough to keep her up more easily. The Starry River was apparently a nightmare of shifting banks that had even helped to spark the recent war against the western Kobold-run country. She wondered if it could be tamed.