Ed spent the rest of the day in a daze. Kim and her mom had been driven off into the sunset in a church charter bus of all things while a man in a black suit had driven her van after it. Mr. Garry had spent a good hour or so on the phone with what he was assuming was Cham’s parents. Seth and Liah had gone home and while Cham had stuck around for a while to see him out of the school showers by the time the sun had just about sunk over the horizon it was just him, Mr. Garry, and the school nurse. Though, maybe it would be more accurate to call it just Mr. Garry and him.
Ed poked her arm again as he sat back in one of the hospital beds. The nurses office was rather spacious and on the second floor of the main building. While Ed wasn’t sure if it was on purpose or not, it had a pretty breathtaking view of the sun as it slowly set over the trees and the diamonds. Also a pretty breathtaking view of the nurse. White hair, red eyes, she had a rather ethereal, almost inhuman beauty to her as she sat at her desk, looking over some papers next to him. Though maybe that was a bit on the nose. She was a homunculus after all.
Or so Mr. Garry had said. Ed had always known there’d been something funny about her.
“So…” Ed kicked his feet under the covers. “You don’t happen to have any of those magical books Mr. Garry’d shown me before would you?”
“Tamtilus will be out in a moment.” Serah said softly, not looking up from her papers. Mr. Garry had called her 84A but that had felt all sorts of wrong to him. Though, as she’d been saying that for the last hour or so he was starting to empathize with where he was probably coming from.
Ed was just about to look past her again and perhaps at the sunset, or maybe his phone when she suddenly reached under the desk and smoothly pulled out the two books from before.
“Mudman’s guide to the mystical and baby’s first mana shapes.” She placed them onto his bed. “Tamtilus says to enjoy.”
Ed looked down at them in surprise. He hadn’t been expecting that. “You just… uh… had them there?”
“Tamtilus will be out in a moment.” She didn’t look up from her papers. Though, when a hair fell out of its place she brushed it back over an ear.
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Huh. Well, he supposed he hadn’t actually asked for them before. He’d been rather busy texting Harriet he was fine and that he was just staying late to check out one of the clubs; that and searching through some news feeds to try to figure out the precise scope of the mall fiasco. In fact, if he wasn’t so desensitized to the craziness of the day he might have found it somewhat spooky the amount of nothing he could find about it.
‘Terrorists blow up mall!’
Ed was sure that without magic, there would have been headlines everywhere with that sort of thing.
Though, speaking of magic. He flipped open Mudman’s guide to the mystical and skimmed through a couple of pages. Aberants, Angels, Arachne; the first few pages went over the A’s before changing to the B’s. It seemed like some sort of encyclopedia for various things. There was a brief description about their known territories, interaction guidelines, sometimes a simplistic, if rather graphic anatomical model followed by a small prominence and danger rating. Whatever that meant.
He flipped back to the front, there’d been a brief overview but he hadn’t paid much attention to it at first.
Immortals, in reference to non-mortals. An overview for the intrepid explorer.
He flipped the page over but it was blank. It was just that. Ed shut the cover and put it aside so he could examine the other book.
Ed probably spent another hour like that. It was just that interesting. It went over something called shapes, and how the current modern theory was that all magecraft was built from them and that even bloodlines, sorcery, and witchcraft had been proven to benefit from the practice of them; though Arden was very specific on the fact they were not quite sure why.
In fact, that was really the only thing he might have complained about. The first few chapters had been concise examples in their usage in basic spell forms and when Ed had sent his little magic blob through the required shapes a little flame had appeared.
The exact term used by Arden was ahura, though he seemed to shorten it to aura in the later chapters.
His writing had also become rather scrawled as he got near the end, at first he had thought it was print, but about halfway through he’d realized it was probably written and that Arden had just had very good handwriting.
It was dark by the time Mr. Garry came back. Ed had taken to using the little wisp—that was what he’d apparently summoned—to read by. Serah had switched on a small lamp on her desk as neither of them had gone to turn on the lights, but between that, the starlight through the windows and his apparent grade 0 fire spirit, Ed hadn’t really thought it a problem. In fact, it was actually kind of nice. Especially after the day he’d just had.