Present Day - 2020 A.D. (0 A.R.) - February - New Richmond - 15 Days left

Stephanie’s little house in the burgeoning town of New Richmond was adorable. I tried to come up with other names or adjectives but the English language fell short here. Even though she was in the middle of her second trimester, that beautiful petite bundle of organization and feminine energy showed me how it was done. Her husband, Toreen the Sun Aelf, quietly suggested that my nascent education in the wonders of wizardry would greatly benefit if I put it to use enchanting small stuff.

But I had to contend with the exacting standards of a woman who brooked zero mischief and only tolerated perfection. Nothing less was allowed. I don’t even know how she could project such an image in my mind, the towering jailer who’s very words encouraged and belittled my work, all the while she hustled and bustled to keep her cottage clean. The woman was not a hair over five feet, always running around barefoot in a nice, light dress and a head full of blonde hair that seemed to capture the sun. It certainly grabbed Toreen’s attention, that poor man was so lost in her spell that he didn’t even realize he was wrapped around her finger. She pointed and shit got done. He was well and truly gone.

I kept my thoughts and my laughs to myself. I know that look, that expression of a man who used to be a dangerous son of a gun but now was one step away from a blithering idiot. That’s love. He’s got it bad. But I could tell that Stephanie put Toreen’s talents to use. The cottage exuded the power of Nature Sorcery, the aura gently seeping in from the walls that had grown from the roots of a nearby cherry tree. Toreen’s affinity for Nature was great but his ability to use magic was quite small, almost unnoticeable. He must have started working on this house the day after he got here. It hadn’t sprung up in a day, the house had grown up over a month, lovingly tended by a man who couldn’t resist big eyes and a bright smile full of promises.

Now, Toreen was putting that painstaking level of attention on my effort, endlessly pointing out mistakes as I tried for the fifth time to enchant a copper skillet using only Centauri rune-script. His long, thin fingers flickered back and forth, marking the metal with light pings as the chalk left red marks up and down its surface.

“The containment rune is sloppy, and the sequence has to go all the way around the cooking surface.” The Aelf’s pale face looked aggrieved. “This would BURN a house down? Have you no shame?! Look at these temperature control systems? Who said use buttons? Dials are the cooking standard for a reason!!!!”

I was one step away from knocking him out with the fucking pan. Maybe it wasn’t good for cooking but its whacking potential was second to none. I know, I’ve seen the kids movie ‘Tangled’. Even swords have to watch out for angry people armed with skillets. Dangerous weapons in the right hands.

Melting the runes back into the copper so I could start over, I tuned out Toreen’s growing rant and reviewed what I needed to do. And I kind of hated it but the timeline doesn’t care about my feelings. My Mana Sorcery is the best tool in my arsenal but my stubborn self wanted to see if I could do this one task without using it to double check my work. I didn’t want to reference my Mana Sorcery. I’ve never even heard of anyone else with Mana Sorcery but it felt too easy.

It took three more failures and an hour’s worth of lecturing from a concerned future parent before I gave in. And it pissed me off to figure out what I was doing wrong. The containment rune sequences actually had to physically stretch so that they encircled the full diameter of the pan. If they left gaps, then heat could leak through. Once I got that boneheaded mistake fixed, the bleed off runes orientation mattered. Any heat that the containment runes couldn’t handle, they needed to be directed into the center of the pan and then upward directly into the air. The steam would alert the pan holder to turn the heat down through the dial on the handle.

I had the heat bleed off runes facing the containment runes, which was creating a feedback loop that would eventually melt the pan. Direction matters. I resigned myself to using my Mana Sorcery as an equation checker, a mathematical spellchecker, something to point out my glaring mistakes. This way, I could bumble through and learn the rune-script in such a fashion that it actually sticks in my brain but also the Mana Sorcery would confirm if I did it right. Think of those middle school Algebra books that had the answers in the back of the book, but better. Imagine if those books with the answers also showed the step by step process of how the answer was correct. My Mana Sorcery had that function.

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Each iteration of the pan got closer and closer to the mark. By the time dinner rolled around, I had what Toreen called ‘barely acceptable’. Ooooh, I almost smack him again, in my head, because I don’t murder annoying Sun Aelves that have been doing magic their entire lives. For now.

After I took the time to notice Toreen’s desperate glances towards Stephanie as she worked dinner but only had the crudest pottery and a small outdoor fire to work with, his intentions clicked in my head. There was more riding on this than just my education. The entire town didn’t really have much in the way of convenience. Prior to the 1950s when technology took off, the amount of labor it took to keep a household running was beyond nuts. The dishwasher, the washing machine and dryer to clean clothes, the vacuum and paper products to easily clean the house, the list of advancements to free up women’s time was endless in the modern era. And the apocalypse shut all that down.

But it provided something else, something better. Magic. Magic was here, is here, full of potential and perfectly straddles the confluence of convenience and clean energy. Leaning back in the chair grown also from the nearby cherry tree, I looked around again. Every single surface was spotless. There was not a speck of dust in sight. Everything that could be made from wood was, and it was a work of art. The bannister on the left side of the house going up to the next level had exotic designs adoring the rails. The window frames were a beautiful imitation of trees holding the glass in place. Tables and chairs looked like they had grown out of the ground as if they were always meant to be there. Even the doors looked natural, so perfectly placed that you had to look twice because your eyes would deceive you, glossing over the wholeness so intentionally placed that the skill it took to do this bordered on the magical.

I was sitting in the house of a master craftsman, one who put time, focus, care, and dedicated attention to detail that would’ve put computers to shame. But he couldn’t work with metal. Even now, I was using my finger as a tracer, a pen, a stylus, pushing it into the metal to function as a medium for my Earth Sorcery to make the exact changes I wanted into the metal. And that’s the hidden reason why Toreen was so intent on getting me to learn. His wife stood to benefit.

Considering the task at hand, I put all of my resources to work for me. Mana Sorcery helped me understand the flow of the task while streamlining a much better design. Earth Sorcery shaped the runes according to my will far better than my finger ever could. Within ten minutes, I shaped a perfect copper skillet capable of frying up a mean breakfast complete with extra rune-script so that the pan was non-stick. The best part wasn’t even my favorite though, I enchanted the pan so that excess heat would be stored away so that it would barely need to draw mana from the user to function.

Riding my wave of efficient self-determinism, I shamelessly used my sorceries to assist my enchanting efforts. Toreen saw the change in me and the products of my labor. Not needing to be told what to do, he sprinted out the door and returned with ingots of steel and copper.

“These too!” I wasn’t used to seeing an Aelf stutter with excitement. It was funny to watch. “Come on! Come on! I see that it finally made sense! Use the inspiration! Craft!”

From my hands to Stephanie’s kitchen, the beautiful little cottage got a full makeover, an arcane upgrade to put Martha Stewart to shame. Pots, pans, kettles, silverware, strainers, and coffee filters, no modern invention from men better than me was safe. I banged out an excellent fridge set into the wall, crafted a convection oven to rival a professional baker’s, designed windows to act as small independent thermostats, and then finished off the day with crystal solar lights that functioned as alarm clocks.

Mana Sorcery fixed my projects, troubleshooted my rune-script, fixed my deficiencies, and even provided instinctive prompts to find better ways to use the materials at hand. Different crystals worked better when the enchantments were related to light but copper was a better material for regulating and outputting heat than steel. Magically speaking, steel was better for absorbing impacts, dispersing heat, or for smaller items that you wanted to be durable and live forever such as kitchen utensils and knives.

My focus was so intense that I didn’t even notice the exhaustion sneak up on me. The light of dusk wasn’t apparent to me, that’s how good my crystal solar lights were. Stephanie noticed me falling asleep, casually turning off the lights as she led her man upstairs to their bedroom. She did however gently put a blanket around me when I passed out on their couch, clutching a stone lamp in my hands that I was going to turn into a little music box for their soon to arrive baby. I had it all planned out too.