I walked away from the city, I could hear, just on the edge of earshot, people moving and talking. I could pick up a word in ten, which means that I definitely still need practice. But today I am going to practice something else.
Today I am practicing magic. I speed up to get back quickly, I still need to finish some of my chores before I start. Or do I? Can I instead do both at the same time? I don’t see why I couldn’t do both as long as I can hold a tool while doing the exercises, doing that, I should be able to do both right?
Technically some classes frequently require some tool they hold, [Wizards] use staves to help pull up energy and control it, [Shamans] use their body as a tool, but that’s not quite the same they don’t hold anything, [Witches] use familiars, [Thaumaturges] use tools, a lot of tools. And apparently, most of them can use tools to pull off different effects, like grounding using a stave or using wands or rods to focus and charge spells. Some classes like [Bards] and [Clerics] also work with tools in hand, although they are different.
I should be able to do it, and with my skills, I should be able to hold on and use the tools well enough. As I got to the hill and ran up into the grove, I slowed. I decided to make sure I remembered each action and went in to study the board. They were depicted with words that I attributed as meditation, stretching, finger flexing, visualization, breathing, body movements, discerning energy, shaping, energy adaptation, coercing, sensing currents, channelling, imbuement, projection and centering followed by casting a spell. Each one, a technique or process that different classes use in different proportions. And a basic proficiency with each would allow me to unlock the basic classes related to using mana. I practiced each a little bit, ensuring I got them as correctly as possible with only diagrams and a few practices with guidance from Annabeth.
I practiced for an hour, I think it's hard to keep track of time when I just focus on doing something, but after that, I do my chores, fill the barrel, and then get on with the field after dealing with pots. I held the scythe in my hand as I went to cut the grass, and I started doing one exercise at a time. I held the tool, [Tool handling] helping me use it properly, as I started moving parts of my body with intent. It was weird, as I flexed it, I had to flex my skill harder while wielding it. It failed, I tripped, and the scythe plunged into the ground beside me.
I had fallen over with my mouth open and had to spit out some grass.
“Puh, eh, puh. Gah Stupid. What’s wrong with me? It’s like using two completely different skills, I need to flex them together somehow.” I remembered back to when I had just gotten rapid action.
I had been putting my back into digging, pushing myself and gotten the skill when I slept. You always got skills when you slept, the same thing with classes. It’s hard to remember what happens in those dreams, I don’t even know if we pick skills or just get them given to us every other level. When I had gotten the skill, I had felt great, the next day, I used the skill, and my shovel had gone so fast it flew from my hand and landed ten feet away. My skills worked against one another, the force of moving the shovel exceeded my ability to hold it. In order to use BOTH, I had to wind them in and out like weaving a basket.
I could probably do something similar. It will look wonky as hell, but I can do it.
Double-checking that no one was watching, I stood up and picked up the scythe. I started going through the movements I was shown while cutting the grass down to size, waiting for when it would not work. Waiting for when the movement works against the instinct of the skill.
Wait… Wait… Wait… Then I felt it and corrected. The movement worked with the scythe instead of around it, a kind of pivot spinning motion, but without truly spinning. Now all I had to do was keep doing it until I could recreate that seamlessly and do it automatically. I looked at the few feet of the yard I had covered.
“I have time… I think.”
***
I finished the grass in just under an hour. For a normal person, it would be breakneck speed, for me? That was glacially slow, and while it was labour with a tool, [Toil] only conserved some amount of my effort, and with the funky jig I had been doing to cut the grass, it was still significantly more tiring than normal. It was equal to doing the task twice normally without [Toil]; it was no monumental, heroic effort, but still tiring. With hoeing, I worked on the breathing exercises and almost fell over. Turns out exertion and a specific pattern of breathing where you move funky can work against you. Like the movements, I found the points where there were moments you should move and breathe and two moments where there were lulls in each pattern. Like slots, you could nest them together.
Doing both manually was significantly worse than just the one. Both not perfectly lining up, but close.
I decided to try adding finger flexing while checking for bugs. That was not a smart idea. The three did not line up at all. It took me three minutes of rolling around like I was having a seizure to decide that I would need to think of something different to do while on the ground, and I decided to stretch and finger flex. They were similar in motion but for the fingers and the whole body.
They ended up working well together, syncing up perfectly. Doing those while checking for bugs was a little weird, but the same kind of weird as I had experienced with the scythe. I finished doing that and watered the garden normally.
I was sweating and short of breath, causing me to huff and puff.
I checked the time, using my arms like a sundial, and found it was early afternoon. So, I went inside to get some food to cook.
And that got me thinking If I can do the practices while doing my chores, why not cooking?
I decided to do breathing and visualization, I tried to visualize mana. It wasn’t very effective. There was that tension, however, so it wasn’t totally worthless. There was something missing, it was important. I felt it. The way it felt wiggly like it was in the wrong shape. I couldn’t just change its shape, theoretically, I was using mana subconsciously, like with a skill. You could shape your body's energy by thinking about it, just not intentionally, that was limited to those who could manipulate it directly. Instead, I tried to change how I was thinking about it, paying attention to the vague feeling of wigglyness it had.
Mana existed in everything, which means everything had mana, paying attention to the air and ground, the wood the fire of the hearth. Everything around me as best I could, I imagined it having that idea I had mana. Some kind of nebulous energy, within every movement the air moved, the smoke carried the air out, with it some kind of mana.
The wiggly feeling corrected itself a little. I felt it started to develop that weave able feeling. Like it was close to being correct as a piece of the puzzle. I had to keep moving to make the food, and while that shook the feeling of the visualization, I could bring it back while I was not moving, just waiting for the food to cook. I could keep the breathing pattern up; I was standing but I decided to do the stretching and finger flexing while I puzzled it out. As I did, I could feel the way the air moved around me, and the feeling grew from wibbly to slightly fuzzy.
No, there’s no way that’s the trick.
That would be too easy.
It’s not possible.
I tried to change each a little, and they grew fuzzy, like sounds as I swivelled my ears. I changed them back to normal, and the feeling faded. I imagined the idea that the motions and the disturbances I made in the air would be making a pattern, and sure enough, they seemed to make a very simple pattern.
It was only the simplest, most vague of patterns, so much of it missing I could barely see it, but it did seem to make one. The finger flexing was off, just a little, they were being interpreted wrong, maybe.
I had to stop the magic jig I was doing to start stirring and adding food. I was, after all making dinner.
After finishing making sure I wouldn’t do something unforgivable like burn soup, I got back to thinking about the fingers. I had never really remembered seeing magic. But I had heard stories, SOOO many stories. Mages casting magic, the literal quintessential thing they did, the very gesture I made with Anna to describe magic. Wiggling of the fingers to cast magic.
If the finger gestures are more than just finger flexing, if they are an intentional movement used to create magic that could do it. I tried doing it again, and it did change, there were small more fine changes in the way the air moved around my hands. Changes that should not be changed. My hand moved in the same pattern, but by simply acknowledging the difference of it being a gesture vs random flexing there was a change. It was fascinating.
I decided to try changing the gesture a little.
Remembering where Annabeth’s hands and fingertips had been and how they had moved, I attempted to modify it for Kobold fingers, which were ever so different. Human hands had fingernails, Kobolds had tiny claws and they could retract. They were slightly thicker at the first knuckle of the finger. Trying to account for that, I felt that the feeling became nearly perfect, so close to perfect that I couldn’t tell if anything was wrong with it. When Anna returned, I could ask if she was up for it. I added this into the equation. And felt the visualization grow barely fuzzy.
I started looking at the components, the pattern, and every little thing, but it never grew less fuzzy.
I could feel that it fit in with the others, that each piece I was doing could weave together to create something. And it was incredibly exciting.
I waited for the food to finish as I tried to enter meditation on a chair instead. I was firmly unable to do it. In my excitement and need to cook, I could not enter a mind state that would allow me to figure out how to remain calm.
I decided to instead try and tie everything I had done so far together. Before, I had not gotten it, but I think some pieces are done before others. As I started doing each action, I found that they fit together, so I started to weave each piece together, each action informing the others. When I was done, I could feel that they didn’t fit together perfectly, but they did fit.
I had, in one day, figured out five of sixteen parts of learning magic. If I did it in order, the next would-be distinguishing energy, changing my visualization to account for types of energy. Different things have different types of mana, I didn’t know the right word for it, but the fire was fire, the light was light, wood was wood and so on.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
But the fire gave off light, didn’t it? Maybe that’s what I’m missing from visualization. Accounting for light, adding blooms where light filtered in did make it better, but not all the way finished, it was still a little wrong. It was getting harder and harder to hold the idea of it with my eyes open. I could feel the strain of holding it.
“Everything I do just gives me a worse headache,” I say, stopping the gestures to rub my temples and massage my head before continuing. I looked at the world around me and imagined each material being different. It was, in a way, a separate part to visualization, but also very separate. I could feel it connect there, but it did not fit there. It was hard to figure out this feeling and where it fit.
When I went to put it in order, I realized that I was thinking about it wrong, these did not fit together like weaving a basket, that was simply a product of how they were all similar feeling. I felt the drawing of each piece and rearranged them to connect the parts I had like visualization and differentiation.
Visualization and differentiation
The gestures and the stretching
Movement and Breathing
“There in sets of two? But one of them is casting a spell, if this is a spell, then casting it is like releasing it, while everything I have been doing has been about making the spell, not casting it out like a net. Fifteen is not even though.”
I released the six steps I had put together, ensuring everything was fine. Annabeth was there watching me. I blinked, how long had she been here? I could feel myself flush. Putting each part together had made me feel like a freak, I didn’t want to think about what it would look like from the view of an outside observer.
She grinned, still in the dress she had gone out in staring at me. As I made a mortified face, she started laughing.
I ended up sulking until dinner was served, and she decided to take over cooking in my stead, she shirked out of her dress and finished just a bit after I had realized she was there. How had she snuck up on me? I had been looking at the movement of the air, if nothing else had alerted me, I should have heard her just walk in.
I made a contemplative expression mid-meal after rolling it over in my head. Putting the spoon down into the soup. It was a subpar soup I had made; Anna had put some more stuff in, but it didn’t have enough time to settle in, but it still made it better, it was a 5/10. Anna looked like she was fine with it, however, she looked like the opposite of what she had started the day like. From anxious to bold, reserved to open. It drew the eye, I would say it made her the most beautiful woman in the room, but she was the only one in here other than me, and I wasn’t vapid enough to factor myself into that.
I decided to ask her instead of sitting confused at the table and risking bringing down her mood. I had done more than enough sulking and she looked like she could cure depression.
“How you sneak before?” I asked her, ever so eloquently.
That got her to blink before saying, cheer evident in her voice, “No sneak, you meditate.”
“Huh?” I asked, like the peerless genius I apparently was.
She started snickering, elated at my lack of understanding.
“True?” I asked, still utterly confused. I had never been able to enter a state of meditation, I had been too excited about the idea of casting magic to let myself slip into the trance of meditation. I had tried several times, and never could. And now, just spontaneously, without even trying, I pulled meditation out of my ass?
“How?” I asked her confused. She tittered a little at that, still taken with life and whatever it was that happened to her today.
“Easy, it just happens, focus key.” She said, like the idea was so utterly simple and straightforward, that it was almost more confusing to not understand.
Well than, if it just happens when you focus. Six out of sixteen? I don’t think I can count that as being finished I can’t do it on a whim. And if I can’t, do it when I need to, I might as well not be able to do it at all.
We kept spooning our soup, me with a look of confusion, her with a look of indulgent foe mockery. Then once we finished up and went to the study, we got down to brass tacks. The slate, which was on the side for the techniques I had to do. I wrote down the steps I had done in their pairs and looked at her for confirmation.
“Correct?” I asked her.
She looked at the steps and shrugged, “Can’t tell, secret. Need to shape then can tell you.” She spoke.
Wait what does she mean can’t tell me? I know she knows how it works, “can’t tell? Why? You know,” I asked her.
She smiled and shrugged, “Can tell steps, can tell steps right, can tell step wrong, but can’t tell that till shape, secret you find.”
Wait so she can tell me the sixteen steps and show them to me so I can do them, she can tell me if I have done them right or wrong. But she can’t tell me if a step is correct before I have done it?
“It’s a damn puzzle. Secret occult stuff.” I spoke. Annabeth looked at me strangely as I spoke my language, but I didn’t know how to explain exactly, I didn’t know what the word for puzzle or occult was. Occult rituals and rites are used to keep things like secrets from leaking to outsiders. Temples and magi and other groups. I never knew how to become a priest; they never told me no matter how much I asked at school. I suppose it makes sense that magi would make sure that someone has to be capable of puzzling out how to do it on their own even if I don’t know why they would require it.
I just nodded and said, “Just talking to me, secrets, priests no tell me how to priests.” To which she just nodded. I ended up tapping my head before just saying, “hurt focusing, why?”
She got that and nodded before drawing a bit more on the slate, making room for it by moving things around, erasing the steps I had done, and making room. She drew another stick figure, presumably to save time, because I knew very well from those paintings that she could draw a normal person. Just like the [Sorcerer] she drew circles in the figure, then lines from them, and wrote down words. She wrote down a word on top before going through the ten things there.
She flexed her tiny arms and patted them like a showoff before writing a word, showing off a stretch before writing another. A few were confusing, but after she got through the ten, she bracketed to one side and wrote down a word for each, with an accompanying gesture. Her body, her eyes, her head, a gesture that I presume means what we’re doing now, which is talking or lecturing? And finally, she slaps her chest.
I would have no idea what that last one means if it was out of context, but based on what we were going over, I’m guessing she’s talking about stats. Which would indicate that the chest slap could be durabilty.
This would be a lot easier if you could just say them like a [class]. Where everyone regardless of language could understand the word and its meaning.
She then begins gesturing a lifting gesture before becoming tired, accompanied with hands on her knees. Before she looks at me and asks, “Get it?”
I shake my head side to side before saying, “little.”
She just shrugged to that, before bringing out a dictionary and we go into a monotonous period of explanation for the rest of the night.
***
The next day went similarly to the second half of the first day. I woke up and groomed myself a little, before going downstairs and practicing some more. I had put together three sets of what I presumed was a spell. Which means today I should put the spell together. Shape it. Last night may have been exhausted but I now knew that casting magic drew on and used my stats. Just like a skill, which was good to know for sure.
That left me thinking about how supposedly I get a skill from this. If I am subconsciously drawing on my stats, or I guess more accurately the attributes that make them, then maybe it’s not just a spell I’m casting.
Each step makes a pattern, but the diagram for shaping isn’t made from what I have been doing so far. It’s not made from the interlocking feelings, which means that the feelings and the thing that I have been visualizing are not the same things.
Presumably, then, I’m working on both the skill and spell simultaneously. Adapting, apparently, is performing each of the steps without feeling the things that were going on yesterday before dinner, that fatigue of drawing on my attributes. I have no idea how shaping nor adapting works, but I also don’t know for sure how the six techniques I haven’t touched on work either. Channelling, currents, and drawing, which I had thought was coercing, centering, projection and imbuement are a bit confusing.
If the feelings are related to a skill, and they use the ten attributes and spell casting is removed like I had thought, that leaves five techniques behind, which is enough to cover the stats. If I look at it like that, I can separate it down to help figure each part of the skill out.
Visualization and Differentiation with an unknown.
Gestures and Stretching with an unknown.
Movements and Breathing with an unknown.
Four of the techniques are missing, and the remaining five go to the stats.
Now that I know that, maybe I can break them down a little bit to help out with that. Anna isn’t awake yet, so I have time.
Meditation seems like it would be mental, but at the same time it's not the same as a finger movement or intentional breathing it was more of a descriptor. It was different which means it might be related to a stat instead of an attribute. Based on that, projection and imbuement are also actions along with shaping. Which leaves one remaining attribute and only five possible choices which makes it much easier.
Visualization and differentiation are both visual in nature, it makes sense that they are related to senses. The movements, breathing gestures and stretches are all physical, but breathing is less about the body than stretching. I filed that away as durability and the other two as body.
That gave:
Build () | Strength (Gestures); Dexterity (Stretching)
Senses () | Perception (Visualization); Accuity (Differentiation)
Durability () | Endurance (Movement); Spirit (Breathing)
Mind (Meditation) | Wisdom (); Resilience ()
Social () | Charisma (); Intellect ()
I decided to test the three techniques that I believed were related to attributes and found out rather quickly that I had to be doing the other steps. Once I had those I started, trying to work on projection. The shape I was making out of what was presumably mana, moving out from me. I was doing it wrong. It was like someone blowing a smoke ring from pipe smoke, expanding and distorting as it moved away from the mouth, only in this case, it was a ripple in front of me. So, I practiced it. Like blowing a smoke ring but with my fingers and stretches, movements and breathing.
Annabeth came down and ended up poking me in the face to get me to eat breakfast. By that point I had gotten it to the point where I think I could use It, the pattern being able to reach 5 feet away from me and the feeling had well defined boarder like the others.
I had chores to do, but that didn’t mean my training stopped, I decided to do what I had been practicing while working like yesterday. Each step was harder, and I ended up getting very little done in the way of progress. It limited my ability to project, which was quite counter intuitive. By midday I had decided to try out imbuing instead, pulling the pattern in towards me.
Annabeth just watched me from the porch, her days’ work finished early, so she had decided to watch me instead of doing anything else.
Pulling the mana towards myself was much easier than projecting it, as it turned out, so I decided to do that for the rest of the workday. It cost me time wise, but it was also good training, and I ended up being able to do the technique with a tool in hand by the end of the day. I had also found out two things of note, one it fit with projection which made a kind of sense. Push and pull connected, even if it was not immediately apparent. The second thing I figured out was that imbuement seemed to drain intellect.
When I tested each and looked it followed the pattern which filled in the social category.
I decided to work on adapting and shaping next. Shaping was all about making sure that the spells shape was crisp. Demanding the image of what the spell was came from the mostly complete image I was making in the air, holding that image in my head as I made it, repeating it like a mantra to give it meaning. Adapting was about me, and came with continuous repetition of the spell, minor adjustments like yesterday where I accounted for my fingers while gesturing that made the spell drain me more than needed. I after all wasn’t casting the spell, just practicing it. Sketching it out.
If I exhausted myself after doing it 100 times, then did it for real, it might knock me on my ass.
When the feelings were only minorly fuzzy, and it was dinner I had found that they seemed to be linked to mind.
I had also dipped into meditation again, so Anna scared the crap out of me, which apparently never got old for her.
That night we did more work on speaking, and I got confirmation that my steps were about where I thought they were.
Tomorrow would mark the day that I started putting the finishing touches on it. And then I would be a mage. I went to bed and dreamed of stories of magic and heroes.
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I it wasn’t long after I had given Saphine her confirmation about what she had gotten right that she was off like a lamp. I decided to not linger and read all night. Watching Saphine try and figure out how to cast her first spell alone and gain the skill [Magi] was a treat. I wonder if I looked like that when I was learning to cast my first spell.
She’s making good headway for her apparent age. It took me a week to actually figure it out, but I was also younger. And it took me a lot longer because of the strain. It will probably take her four days, one more to figure out the combination techniques and then she will probably get to casting it the day after.
Ill be out for most of the day, the priests told me they would have a copy of the scripture they have finished by then.
I laid down in my bed and thought about the prior day. What an utterly bizarre experience. Strause and tea party made no sense put together.
“What a bizarre thing to come out of a letter.”