Elijah expected so little of the two and yet they still managed to underperform. The man had shouted, to a point where the sound isolation might not have stopped anybody in the store from hearing him, the table, which previously had attained some golden spots, was now given an evenly distributed nuance of yellow, and he could already tell that the growing Sundrop Flower had been prodded to some degree. The pollen on the floor made him certain of that.

“I sincerely hope that the two of you understood why I needed you to stay silent while I had visitors,” Elijah began. “Though one of them barely went inside, they were the head guard of the dungeon, who had been tasked with putting up wanted posters of your faces. If she had gotten any indication I was harboring you, I can promise that you would not have lived for long.”

“... Sorry, it won’t happen again,” Jack apologized after a moment of tenseness.

“A single time is needed before your lives are forfeited,” Elijah replied. Not wanting another talk about making mistakes, he decided to just move on from it. “I hope that your shouting had a good reason behind it, at least.”

“Oh, yeah, it had a great reason,” Jack was quick to confirm, eliciting a sigh from Sasha. The latter interested Elijah more than the former. An hour or so of being locked in the laboratory had made the woman slightly more readable. Not enough that he felt safe around her, but enough to get a few clues about her thought processes. “I was messing around with this plant of yours, spilled a little but I tried to gather it up in this cup, and, as I was talking about gunpowder that I’d touched a few years ago, it just manifested on my finger.”

Not unlike a child showing off a rock they found on the ground, the man showed the finger in question. As promised, the top part was indeed covered in black, a stark contrast to the golden pollen covering just about every other part of the man’s arms.

And the smell…

He’s interacted with enough explosive concoctions in the past to recognize some of the nuances. It was nowhere close to what the Sundrop Flower could produce under any viable condition.

Sending a pulse of Mana through his body, honing in on his sight, Elijah was granted a clear view of the man before him. Though it was subtle at first, the more he focused on the deep silver that he could see before, the more obvious it became.

“You’ve awakened,” Elijah muttered, instantly going through his mental catalog of Affinities. His time in the army had allowed him to meet hundreds of mages, yet none had that deep silvery coloring attached. Strange. “What does the world say your Affinity is?”

“Metamancy,” Jack answered instantly, a grin on the young man’s face. Confirmation about his magical abilities was enough for them to act even more like a child. “Cool, right?”

“It’s a headache is what it is,” he said, a hand on his face for a moment as he wondered how he was going to deal with this. If he was going to have the Royal Mage over for tea, it meant having him in the kitchen. That entailed the other man going through the hallway and past the laboratory.

While Elijah wasn’t back to his old strength, when it came to his magical senses, there was no doubt the Royal Mage would be able to spot the silvery coloring through a wall, metal door or not.

Could he get them out of the house? No, that wouldn’t be possible in broad daylight. If done during the night, he had places deeper in the slums where they could maybe hide, but there wasn’t time for that. And if the mage wanted to inspect the room, the hidden one would be spotted instantly.

The basement?

Rarely if ever used for extended stays, hard-to-spot entrance, and possessing an emergency exit if they ever needed to leave without going through the front or back door. If not for the bad cough you’d get from being down there for more than a few hours, Elijah would’ve already placed them there, but now it would be necessary.

“Have you ever heard of it before?” Jack asked, bringing Elijah out of his thread of thought. “Metamancy, I mean.”

“I can’t say I have,” Elijah answered honestly. “Radically changing a material like this isn’t something I’ve heard being done. What spells do you have?”

“Only one called Transmute Powder, though I’m not exactly sure how I can use it again.”

“You just need to focus on your Core, the thing you pull on when you want to see your Status. From there, trial and error is all you need to perform the spell,” Elijah explained as he once again tried and failed to remember anything about Transmutation. There were legends about it, sure, but nothing with a date and location attached. Was it an Affinity seen before? Most definitely, but it had to be rare. Even if it likely had little potential in combat, it had the ability to be devastating in other areas. “You’ll have plenty of time to hone it soon. I’ll find you some food and drink, and then you’re moving down to the basement for a few hours.”

“Why?”

It was Sasha who questioned his words this time. Fitting, seeing as she was the only one of the two fully paying attention to his words. The way that Jack’s eyes were slightly glazed spoke magnitudes about where his focus was being put.

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“A friend of mine messed up and revealed my magical abilities to one of the Royal Mages,” Elijah explained. That made them both focus properly. “They’ve allegedly promised to keep them a secret, but they want to meet me today in a few hours. That means they’re going to be seated by that kitchen table there.”

“And mages can spot other mages,” Jack said, the man’s eyes widening a moment later as he started to stare down Elijah’s form. By the fact that the silvery Mana inside the young man started to swirl, he was likely trying to figure out how to let his eyes penetrate through the magical veil.

“Do you trust that the basement will stop us from being noticed?” Sasha questioned, not sounding trusting of his plan.

“It’s better than leaving you up here,” Elijah replied. “And there’s an escape route for you in the basement if the Royal Mage gets suspicious.”

…

“Fine,” Sasha said, seemingly convinced enough by his answer. Without another word, she stepped past him and ventured into the kitchen.

Elijah decided not to comment on the ease at which the woman found the dried fruits. Leading Jack into the kitchen after helping him remove the yellow coloring, he boiled more water for another round of tea, brought out some of the meats and cheeses and just about everything else that might be filling for the youth, and then sat them down by the table to relax for a moment.

“While the basement should provide some noise cancelation like the laboratory, I can not promise that it will stop any shouting from reaching through the floorboards,” Elijah warned as they sat and ate. “You can talk, you can walk, but don’t do anything extreme while you hear footsteps from up here. Even if you can escape, you will still be out on the street alone.”

“And instantly recognized by every person we meet,” Jack guessed, to which… Elijah wasn’t too sure.

“In the higher district, maybe, but in the slum people would barely spare you a second glance,” he said. Posters about wanted criminals had a habit of getting replaced rather often. “But do not take that as an invitation to do something dangerous. They will not recognize you, but that district is still a place where guards do not normally venture into.”

He didn’t like Sasha’s unfocused gaze as he spoke. What was she thinking? Elijah couldn’t tell, though he knew that it couldn’t bode well.

After they finished eating, they gathered all the plates and cups in the sink before he led them to the entrance to the basement. It was at the very end of the hall, just next to the backdoor exit, and hidden behind a decorative carpet that hadn’t been cleaned in a few months. Dirty enough that nobody would want to touch it.

Not that it stopped Elijah from pulling it away and revealing the trapdoor. Opening it up revealed the steep stairs down. Going down them allowed the trio to see the underground area that hadn’t been used for much of anything in the past three or so years. Previously, it had been constantly filled with lines of string to dry herbs on, but all of that had been moved upstairs. One fall getting down here had been enough to convince him of that.

“It stinks,” Jack commented as he skipped the final step and jumped onto the dirt-filled floor, dust flying up because of the action. “I’m starting to believe the part about it being hard to breathe down here.”

“Opening the window made it obvious to any passersby that there was something to steal here,” Elijah explained, walking over to the far end of the basement, going past the wooden stone supports with old notes etched into them. The further he went away from the stairs, the darker it became, but he knew how to lighten it up. “Secrecy is the only way to keep valuables safe here.”

Feeling his fingers against the wall, he finally found the cloth he was looking for. Pulling on it, the fabric gave away and it fell down from where it had been fastened so long ago.

Though it was barely a few rays, light came through old glass panes to reveal the true size of the basement. A few whispers of surprise could be heard, but Elijah ignored them as he finally spotted the wooden boxes stacked in the nearby corner. Bringing them over, he stepped onto them and reached up to open the window just slightly.

Though the hinge was more rusted than he’d like it to be, it would still work well enough.

“You can crawl through here if you need to,” Elijah explained after closing the window again. “It leads into the backstreets about twenty meters away from the back door. With the amount of garbage filling that area, you should be able to go through it without anybody noticing you.”

Hopefully, you won’t need to at all.

“Cool,” Jack replied. The man had already found himself a box to sit on, settling down with the cup of golden pollen in hand. “Before you go up again, do you have any final trick you want to impart on a newly awakened mage? It’s going to be a while, and I’d rather not miss some vital part about this magic stuff.”

At least the man had a way to spend the hours that wouldn’t risk detection too much. With his current magical abilities, Elijah didn’t expect it to be too obvious to anybody upstairs. Yet, if he wanted to do it for so long…

“Since the methods required for using spells are innately tied to your Affinity, I can't do much other than general advice,” Elijah explained. “But, if you intend to spend the next seven hours of your life forcing your Core to transform matter, the best tip I can give you is to take breaks. Your internal reservoirs aren’t infinite in size, and even if you recuperate enough energy to technically continue in your practice, your body will still be worn out.”

“Your magic is like a muscle, and you don’t want to pull a muscle on your first day,” Jack summed up, to which Elijah just nodded. It was close enough. “Gotcha. I’ll take breaks and stop if I feel weird.”

“Good,” Elijah said, hoping that his words would be heeded for once. Taking a moment to inspect Sasha, he saw her already having found a box to sit on as well, being settled not far from Jack. Maybe she intended to watch his fiddling around? “And I trust you can keep an eye on him?”

“There is little else to do.”

… He couldn’t say he expected more. Bidding them both a farewell, he went up the stairs and into the hallway. Closing the trapdoor, he put the carpet back into place before cleaning up the kitchen to make everything look as it had when Grace had visited an hour before.

Three hours until they’re meant to arrive.

Around that time, at least. Even without having interacted with any other mages than the young woman in recent years, their ineptitude at respecting timely schedules had never been forgotten. Elijah was more than prepared to have them show up at his doorstep even now.

But he would have an excuse for not being here if they did that. One which he would readily use while he did the last piece of preparation for the upcoming battle. He needed to visit someone who could give him an edge.