“The point of what?”

Liah gave him a funny look. She waved around at the players. “You got a thumb in their heads. I’ve watched you for the past week, but I can’t figure out what the purpose is. I’ll admit you have me beat, so tell me.”

A football player rushed past him, before being tackled by one of Liah’s. Ed’d noticed pretty early on that it was only the blue jerseys who were charmed and that Liah seemed to be manufacturing some sort of beatdown situation.

“Uh, practice?” Ed said. “I mean, that’s what you’re doing too, right?”

He wasn’t sure what else it could be after all.

“Well, if you don’t want to tell me that’s fine.” Her grassy mound slowly morphed itself into a sort of chair and a primitive table rose up between them. “So? Want to have a match?”

Another mound of dirt rose next to the table before breaking open to reveal the snout of a large, perhaps golden retriever sized mole. It appeared to be made of brown sluggishly moving dirt and moss though and its eyes were closed.

Liah made a gimme motion with a hand and its front paws broke out of the ground. The mole rubbed them together a couple times and Liah reached down to pick out what he was pretty sure was a black stone chess queen from between them.

“Thank you Simon.” She set the queen on the board. Ed found it quietly amusing she’d given it to herself first. “While he does that, since I’ve already got the blue team that leaves you with the red. I don’t know much about football so lets say first to four touchdowns wins?”

She made a strained motion as if pushing apart a pair of sliding doors and the players broke away from each other and lined up at the scrimmage line.

“It’s tough doing them all at once like that.” She explained.

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Ed hesitated for a moment. On one hand, he had reservations up the waloo for messing around with people's heads. But on the other… he was pretty sure he was going to want some hands-on experience sooner rather than later.

After a couple of seconds of that, the latter eventually won out. Having what he was pretty sure was as close to an expert as he was going to ever get for this sort of thing around while he potentially messed things up felt very valuable. Well, that and the fact that while he still felt somewhat guilty about even thinking about it this way, magical human proxy football sounded really fun for some reason.

“Err, are you sure Serah’s not going to be mad about this?” Ed said.

“I can revert them,” Liah waved dismissively. “If it’s not death, I can bring them back too.”

Surprising. Even the most minor healing magics were strangely expensive given their effects, but Ed supposed they were going to be relatively careful so it probably wasn’t going to be that bad.

“Alright, sure, I’ll bite.”

He was probably going to lose very badly, and while he still wasn’t sure what prompted this, it also sounded like an opportunity he wouldn’t exactly want to pass up. Till now, Liah had pretty much ignored him in the halls or at lunches. And despite reading up on witches, most of the literature seemed to have simply copied and pasted that one short paragraph on them out of mudman's guide to the mystical.

“Nice!” Liah cheered to herself. “Just to double down, first four balls across the line wins,” She pointed to a touchdown line. “Anything goes, I’ll patch them up if we break anything. Simon?”

Simon made a motion as if swishing mouthwash between his teeth before quickly spitting what appeared to be a white pawn up into a rather high sort of arc.

“Go when it hits the ground?”

Ed wasn’t too sure how he was supposed to find that, at least until he realized it’d been charged with an aura and he could simply lay a thin layer of his own over the field and check when it passed through.

Hastily, he made the same sort of tearing motion Liah had done earlier and his heart did a little jump as his players dutifully fanned out into a staggered array on his side.

Somatic components weren’t actually necessary and were actually a bit of a crutch, but Helig had rather reluctantly described them as a sort of necessary evil, and that even an experienced archmage would usually fall back to them when performing especially complex spell combinations.

Basically, Liah’s motion was a lot more useful than expected. Especially since all he’d done was rapidly flip through the vector knobs.

The pawn hit the ground.