I wake up early the next morning, feeling far better than I did yesterday morning. I glance at my stats and ...

{Status:

Name: Grintel Coddlestahl

Age: 17

Mental:

Acuity:

Perception:

Memory:

10

7

9

Psyche:

Wisdom:

Insight:

Willpower:

7

8

13

Physical:

Strength:

Coordination:

Endurance:

5

5

10

Skills:

Energy Conversion

2.453

Energy Emission

2.527

Energy Control

2.081

Channeling

0.024

Meditation

2.369

Walking

4.992

}

By all the Powers of Grayskull!

What in the actual heck happened with my stats? Gains in wisdom and insight? Know thyself! Or maybe that’s “knowing is half the battle!” I have an almost egregious amount of old children’s cartoon slogans that pop into my head at odd times.

Soooo. Mental health is a psyche thing. I mean I feel better, but that seems like a fantastic indicator that I’m not just feeling better, I am actually getting better. Thank you, Basic Guide. I’ve got to see about getting you upgraded, but I have no idea how that would work. It’s not like I level up or get points to spend in the Guide Shop or whatnot.

I meditate for half an hour, to calm and center myself, but then my bladder intrudes on my concentration. I’d like to keep my 14 year streak of not wetting the bed, so I head to the garderobe in the bathing room to deal with my most pressing business of the day.

I head into the kitchen, scratching idly at my chest and yawning. The yawn wakes me right the heck up as it cracks open my half-healed lip. As I’ve awoken fairly early, even with the extra meditation time, my parents aren’t up yet, so I rummage around looking at what they have in the pantry. There’s a bottle of milk in the delivery box out front, fresh and slightly warm. We do have some eggs still left, but the stove is cold. We haven't used it since yesterday morning, so that’s not a big surprise. I was probably supposed to bank it, but I didn’t remember my mom saying anything about it, so I didn’t. I clean out the firebox, then set a new fire in it, light that with a match, and then concentrate on making heat bursts to speed up the process. A quarter hour and ten successful bursts later, the fire is going well and the stovetop is getting hot. I’m getting a bit lightheaded from the continuous effort, but otherwise good.

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After a minute or two of rest, I pull out the cast iron skillet, and set it on the stove to heat. Some saved lard from cooking up bacon goes in next, but bacon itself is usually a tenday treat, so I don’t even think about looking for it. I crack about a dozen eggs into a bowl and whisk them briskly. The bacon grease is shimmering when I pour the eggs into the pan, evoking a hissing sound that fades in volume as the pan fills. I scrape the pan gently with one of mom’s wooden spatulas, keeping the eggs moving and scraping curds off the bottom of the pan so that it won’t burn. I hear the noises of my parents getting up and dealing with their business, so I take the eggs off the stove with a towel, and place them on a wooden trivet on the table. I almost completely close the damper on the fire, then grab the metal wash basin and take it outside to dump and refill from the pump. I take that back inside, place it on the stove, place the last of yesterday’s bread on the stove to warm, grab a pottery jug and head back outside for drinking water. We’ll probably go to the farmer’s market today for some staples. That’s when we’d gone all through my childhood.

As I pour out cups of milk and water for everyone, my parents are coming out of their room. Mom gets out three plates, while dad goes to the front door and gets the broadsheet. I cap the milk and put a stopper on the water jug, and then set them on a side table.

We exchange our “good mornings” and dig into the food. The eggs are pretty decent, could use some cheese or spices, but those are costly, and I’m not using them. The bacon flavor is enough. The bread is a little stale, but toasted lightly, it works well with the soft scrambled eggs.

Breakfast finished, we moved on to the business of the day.

“Well, I’m off to the market, we’ll need enough food for 3 this tenday, so I’ll get some extra.”

Dad grunts in reply, busy with his broadsheet. I finish off my milk, and pour the last of the bottle into my cup.

“Would you like me to come along?”

“Sure, I could use the extra pair of hands, kiddo. Just get the extra basket down from the top shelf.”

I quickly chug my milk, then bus my dishes. While I clean the egg pan with the water and a brisk scrub, my mom puts the dishes in the basin. I put the pan on the stove to heat up a bit so that it will dry faster while I go get the basket off the top shelf of the pantry. There’s a bunch of random stuff in it, so it takes me a bit to unpack the junk and head back into the kitchen. When I return, I can see that the water has started evaporating from the cast iron, so I put it back on the trivet to cool and dry. I chuck dad on the shoulder while mom gives him a kiss on the cheek, and we walk out the door, leaving dad to finish waking up and reading his news. As we walk to the market, my brain runs off at a league a minute.

Now that I’ve recovered from the flaming face-plant, it is time to try all the tricks I can think of doing.

What do I know?

I know that imagining and visualizing fire gets me fire bursts. I know that imagining lightning makes the electro snaps. I know that I can speed up the energy emission with meditation and concentration. I know that it is possible to emit energy quickly and more powerfully under severe emotional stress, but that comes at significant risk and high costs. OK, so how do I build on successes, instead of things I can’t currently repeat?

So… what about imagining ice? Would water work? Where would the water come from? Would I self-dehydrate? Is there a way to imagine pure force? Maybe if I tried it as wind?

What about magical healing? Is that possible? Can I focus on healing myself? Can you transfer energy to someone else? Would that be healing? If you can transfer to someone else, can you pull a vampire trick and take energy from someone else?

OK, so those last two I can’t test without a willing partner. Or I could test them on a victim, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself later. Plus, finding said victims, hiding the bodies, developing an evil laugh, growing the mandatory goatee, building a hidden base, and gathering my minions and taking over the world… seems way too much like work.

I have no clue if any of those ideas are viable. I needed to research. No, I will need to experiment on my own, because nobody I know of has any reference materials for this stuff. Maybe somewhere in the depths of the archive stacks there’s a book about this. Maybe. And maybe it’s even listed in the directory or catalogs. But I didn’t get access to the archives at the Omniology as a research assistant and mop wielder, and I couldn’t afford to go there as a student. So, I had what I could get my hands on here. And there wasn’t anything here about non-standard magic. Heck, there wasn’t much here about STANDARD magic. I’d learned an improved method from the one research project, and lucked into a skill of unknown utility from the second one. If I was going to move forward in magic, I was essentially on my own. I need to do it somewhere that I have support, so I’m going to have to do something I hate doing.

Ask for help. Even worse. Ask for help from my parents. Obviously not for the test dummies, but since I’ve already knocked myself out once, I clearly need someone to check on me. I’ll have to do my experimenting on enddays when the shop is closed and they are home.

All this flashes through my head in the time it takes us to get to the market.

“ . . . don’t you think?” A brief silence. “Grint?”

I sheepishly look over at my mom. “Ummm. I can’t say. I was lost in thought.”

She chuckled. “I thought as much. What I said was we could use some extra roots this tenday, don’t you think?”

I ponder for about a heartbeat. “Mmmhmm, and we should get some extra sausages? We could make a nice root and sausage soup? And I used up the last of the eggs, so we probably could use several dozen more, if they aren’t too pricey, we ate a full dozen yesterday. Oh, and some onions or some more garleeks if they look good?”

The rest of the trip was spent with my mom bustling around, picking out the vegetables she liked, some other sundries, and some of the cheaper, less appealing ones that we could chop up or cut out the bad parts and put in the soup. A good soup kept hot on the stove or left covered and reheated to boiling could last us for a couple days. Yes, I know it’s not modern best practice, but we’ve never gotten sick from it, and it’s not like we can chuck it in the fridge. I miss fridges and plentiful cheap spices from all over the world. But I’m genuinely happy to be alive and healthy. Perhaps for the first time in 17 cycles.

We get home, and mom bustles about putting everything where she likes it to be. Dad tried some more advanced cooking back early in my life, but I swear the man could ruin water if he had to add more than three other ingredients to it. He made good breakfast foods, and he could bake really good bread while mom’s was just adequate, so we left that part to him, and he left the cooking to one of us. I left the cooking to mom when I could, but I suspected those days weren’t going to continue too much longer.

“So…” I began, and then faltered.

“Yes?”

“I kinda need some help with my magic.” I mumbled that a bit.

“Sorry, what was that? It sounded like you wanted us to help you with your magic?”

“Yeah, but not how you might be thinking. I have some ideas I want to try out. I don’t think they’re anything dangerous, but I need a place to try them, and I’d like to have you guys around to check on me every so often, just to be safe. I don’t want to make a mess of the root cellar. Is there somewhere else I can practice nearby that’s fairly private? I suspect some or all of my ideas will fail, and I’d rather not do that with an audience.”

“Well, I think the root cellar would be fine. It’s not like you can burn dirt,” Dad opined.

“Your father is right. It’s not all that full at the moment, we haven’t had to store up as much food while you were gone. We can refill it, but not in just one tenday.”

So, that was solved. I didn’t even get CSL 22, 15, or 16. Sweet!

I head downstairs immediately, my excitement about experiments taking priority over a boring, but perhaps more useful visit to the town guard for information.