Over the next month, Chadwick mostly forgot about the seemingly unusual results of the slider. A few teachers had shown curiosity about his young age and unique affinity at first, but more and more students were filtering in from around the countryside and he was quickly forgotten about.

It did seem like the students closest to earning the rank of mage got the most attention from the teachers — even from the headmaster himself, who would look in on classes with those students. Those who showed greater potential than Chadwick’s falsely reported number of weights got much more attention to their education, just a bit less than those about to graduate. Those with higher weights were under the most pressure to complete their schooling requirements. Those already close to finishing their schooling requirements were also rushed, but less so if their weights were low.

A teenager, who was apparently at ten small weights when he arrived, was always at the front of classes and the teachers would always call on him for various demonstrations.

Chadwick was slightly annoyed at being mostly ignored by the teachers once they heard that he was at three small weights. He wished he could tell them the real number, but the Dean and Taverish really did seem worried about something. Enough that Chadwick just kept his mouth shut and deliberately didn’t draw any attention to himself.

To be fair to the teachers, he did seem to struggle with some activities that other students found easy. The class he was currently in was about reshaping. It was only taken by those with an affinity for some kind of physical object. For most this was a simple material found in nature. Though the ten-weight boy apparently had a metal affinity and was currently at the front of the class, turning an iron ingot into a long spear.

The boy had worked up a sheen of sweat by the time he was done and the teacher was applauding when he finished.

“As you can see, even for one as magically gifted as Theodore here, changing the shape of your preferred material is very difficult to do. Bertram’s theory states that the further from a natural activity you are trying to achieve, the more difficult it becomes,” said the teacher.

Theodore sat back down and the teacher continued the lecture, “the act of reshaping is fairly intuitive, but the decisions you make will effect how much magic you use. A wood mage, for example, is better off growing something in a natural shape of a branch than trying to force the wood into something smooth and polished like this spear here.”

For Chadwick, it didn’t seem to matter what different approaches he tried, or what material he was trying it on, reshaping was just plain hard for him to achieve anything larger than a thimble’s worth of change. He was currently reshaping the lump of brass on his desk into the shape of a mouse. But it felt like trying to move an entire river just to smooth out a corner.

“Like anything,” the teacher continued, “the more you practice, the easier it becomes. Both because you will be closer to your affinity and because you will be naturally increasing your pool of magic.”

She gestured around the room, “even those struggling now are simply starting from further behind. You will all continue to grow in magical talent and it has something of an exponential curve. Can anyone tell me what that last bit means?”

Most of the class seemed a little lost, so Chadwick tentatively put his hand up.

The teacher looked at him in surprise, he was far and away the youngest in the class and a good foot shorter than anyone else. He had almost never spoken in her class and she mostly ignored him, knowing he had years of growing before he would be ready to be a mage. Even if Chadwick chafed at being ignored, he knew why she did it. Or at least, suspected based on what he had observed.

The teacher had heard some interesting things from Elvera about Chadwick’s literacy levels, perhaps he really did understand the question. The other students likely had no idea what ‘exponential’ meant. Certainly no one was putting their hand up. So, she gestured to him to answer.

“It means that the rate of growth continues to be higher and higher. The more magical ability you have, the faster it will grow,” answered Chadwick quietly.

Some snickering came from a table near the back with Chadwick that had three students gathered around it. The two teenage boys and one girl mostly spent the classes whispering amongst themselves instead of doing any reshaping.

The rude students must have been some sort of normal situation as the teacher simply ignored them and nodded approvingly at Chadwick, “quite right young student. I’m impressed.” She then turned back to the class, “so, as both a factor of time and amount of regular exercising of your magical muscles, your ability to use your magic will grow. But that is no excuse for simply using raw power to get past problems. In a fight between those of equal power, the one who can make smarter decisions about his use of magic will win.”

A distant gong sounded and the students began getting up from their desks, the teacher waved Chadwick over before he could duck out of the class though, “tell me young Chadwick, you obviously have the brains for the academic side of being a student. But what is holding you back with reshaping?”

“I suspect my affinity is very much not suited to the type of method we normally do, Mage,” answered Chadwick.

“How so?” She asked.

Chadwick was already fairly certain she knew the answer, but she was looking for something, “for the majority, simply increasing the size of the requirements is a good way to test their abilities. If you ask them to make something larger, they either need a bigger magical reservoir to deal with that, or to more smartly apply their reshaping. So, your method will nudge them towards increasing both those things.”

The teacher seemed even more impressed than when he knew about exponential curves, but she just motioned him to continue the thought.

“My affinity appears to be focused on size. The smaller something is, the more control I have over it. There is no natural state that I can identify that helps make reshaping easier. Effectively, no ‘skill’ I can work on to make it easier. Aside from the obvious of working with smaller and smaller portions of something. But, that goes against your method for testing us,” Chadwick responded.

She seemed thoughtful, “and how would you propose I handle that?”

“Well, I could either skip the class entirely, as those with non-physical affinities do. But I suspect the better answer is that I focus in the opposite direction of the rest of the class. Instead of trying to make larger and larger changes. I focus on control. Trying to affect smaller and smaller parts of a material,” responded Chadwick.

“That’s… remarkably insightful. It seems Elvera was even underselling you. I owe her a drink,” she said, “very well. I still won’t have a lot of time for you during the class since I have several who are close to achieving the minimum to take their book and the Chief Mage wants me to focus on them. I want you to spend our classes doing as you just discussed. Provided you are not slacking off, I will leave you to it. If you have any other thoughts on how to improve your training, bring them to me at the end of a class and we will discuss them.”

When Chadwick stepped out of the classroom, the three rude students were whispering at the end of the hallway and all went silent when he stepped out. The girl approached with a smile, “do you have reading classes next?”

Chadwick saw no reason not to answer the question, “no, conditional magic. Why?”

“We were going to walk you there if you had the same reading class as us. Oh well. Have a good day!” she smiled brightly at Chadwick and sped back to the two waiting boys.

Something about it bothered Chadwick. They continued whispering as soon as she rejoined them. And not once did the boys smile or look remotely happy. Yet the girl had a giant smile that dropped off when she no longer thought Chadwick was looking. His best guess was something to do with Chadwick not having to do the same chores as them and not having to do the reading classes. Both those seemed to bother the older students.

Chadwick just shrugged at the odd interaction and carried on.

He saw the same group of students several more times over the next few weeks, even though he only shared the one reshaping class with him. Lots of random occasions where he would step out of a classroom and one of them was nearby. Nothing seemed to be coming from it and they never once talked to him again. But that was much the same as the other students so it was quickly forgotten about.

After Chadwick’s discussions with the teacher, reshaping class actually became near the top of his list of favorite classes. By focusing his efforts on trying to achieve the smallest level of alteration he could. He actually ended up able to effect much larger changes than before. Visualization became his main focus as he needed to be able to picture small amounts of something in order to get greater control. It was slightly counter-intuitive, where focusing on smaller and smaller parts of the material actually resulted in greater overall changes to the material.

His favorite class by far was on conditional magic. The teacher was almost insanely bushy and stalked about his classroom with a cane. He insisted on going by Sal, the only teacher to insist they not use the formal Mage title. He was prone to jab students who failed to listen, but he never once had to do that with Chadwick. Somehow, the subject called to Chadwick.

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The basic premise was tying magic to predetermined conditions and giving them power in advance. Then, that magic could be triggered at a later date and not use up anything from the mage’s current reservoir.

The limits appeared to be how good someone was at thinking through all the possible conditions and how best to trigger them. Then finally how good their visualization and concentration was, as you had to set up all the conditionals you wanted at once. If you needed to make a change, you had to re-do them all again. If all those things came together and you had enough magical weight to create what you wanted, you could make interesting and potentially powerful items.

For most students, they went with simple things like a list of commands that would fire off more launched projectiles. Giving them some extra ability to launch magic, beyond what their current reservoir would support. The teacher called those who settled for basic commands idiots and refused to have them in his classroom once they achieved their bare minimum goal and could be considered done for the purposes of graduation.

During his first lesson, Chadwick remembered the loud clacking noise from Mage Sloan the day he had tried to wake him up by touching his arm when they travelled on the cart. He now realized that had been a very basic conditional magic that triggered from someone touching him while he was asleep.

An effective alarm to prevent getting robbed, but hardly very imaginative. Though stone mages were not known for their creativity. They usually preferred solving problems with large walls. Or very big, fast-moving rocks. To be fair to stone mages, many problems of battle could be solved with large enough walls and big enough rocks applied at speed. Why change something that worked?

Chadwick didn’t have many interesting things that he had found he could do yet with his magic. So, the results of triggering a piece of conditional magic were often lackluster for him. But his ability to create multiple, complex bits of logic were his pride and joy.

Once the teacher had weeded out those who just wanted to learn how to make extra fireballs by shouting “fireball one” and “fireball two” he got down to some serious theorizing with his students.

He would pose a complicated problem and then see if they could create something to handle it. He didn’t just want the theory of it though, he expected you to build it.

He had a simple series of devices that would light up, or buzz, when triggered. Depending on what he wanted, he would hand the applicable ones out to students and then have them tie their conditional magic to them. This was apparently also the basis for enchanted items.

At the end of each lesson, he would test those who thought they had achieved the result.

Today’s one was a scenario of creating an alarm system and locks for a warehouse. The parameters were that there were three people who were allowed access to the warehouse. Each had a key to the warehouse, but it would take at least two of them to open the vault inside the warehouse. During their regular duties, a single one of them at a time was allowed inside.

When one was inside, another couldn’t come in without setting off the alarm. The end result being that it only took two keys to open the vault, but if they did so without three of them present, the alarm would go off when one of them went into the vault. This would mean that if one of the three lost his key, or died. The other two could still open the vault, but not enter it without alerting the owners.

Chadwick was examining the problem and sketching out the possible issues with it, once he was certain he had it. He constructed the logic in his mind and tied the various portions to the little disks on his desk that represented the three workers, the three keys, the front door, the vault door and the little light that represented the alarm going off.

The difficulty of this one was not just in the logic of it all, but how many moving parts existed. It required a lot of visualization to have all those in his mind and create it fully before tying it off.

Three desks over from Chadwick, one girl said she was complete and the teacher stalked over to test it. After asking the student a few questions he began moving various warehouse workers with their keys and watching the little alarm disk go off when appropriate. He was nodding his approval as he went.

Chadwick mimicked everything that was happening so he could see if his worked the same way.

It all seemed to match up right up into the teacher suddenly asked the student, “so, what happens if one of the warehouse workers steals the other two keys?”

She was sweating as the instructor moved two of the warehouse workers to one side and stuck all three ‘key’ tokens on one warehouse worker and the entire class watched as he slid that worker all the way up to the vault door. Which neatly unlocked, as shown by the little color change on the vault icon.

The alarm disc stayed unlit as the worker entered the vault.

“I encourage finding simple solutions to problems. Shortcuts are not the same thing,” the teacher announced to the classroom.

Chadwick tried the same thing with his, knowing his would work correctly. The vault icon remained locked and the alarm disc went off. He was smiling down proudly at his work when he was brought out of his daydream by a barking laugh.

“Ha, the young lad appears to have done what the rest of you apparently couldn’t,” the teacher said loudly.

Chadwick flushed red with embarrassment with the whole class suddenly staring at him. The girl who had just failed was glaring at him.

“So, how did you solve it? Added a conditional for stolen keys?” Asked the teacher, leaning down to stare at him, seemingly uncaring about how uncomfortable he was making Chadwick. “Well, come on boy, the gong is about to go off.”

Since it was obvious the teacher wasn’t going to let him wait for the rest of the students to leave to answer, he calmed himself with a deep breath, “no, I just included the warehouse workers and the keys completely separately. The condition was based on the worker and the key being present, not one or the other. Each key is locked to a specific individual.”

The girl who had been glaring at him now just looked surprised.

“Well, that’s thorough lad. That’s quite some visualization,” the teacher said. Now looking at him with a bit more consideration.

The gong for the end of class went off and the teacher stood, “anyone who plans to stay in this class better have mastered this one by next week.”

The class groaned, Chadwick’s display mostly forgotten now that they were faced with the prospect of using their free time to try and visualize the logic.

The teacher leaned down to Chadwick and quietly said, “I’ll be giving you harder ones lad. If you can handle eight discs tied to conditionals already, it’s time to stretch those mental muscles.”

Chadwick gulped, the threat of harder work didn’t seem to have come with the same threat of being ejected from the class if he couldn’t achieve it. But it didn’t sound promising.

The following week, Chadwick was arriving to his conditional class early and walked into the middle of an argument between the Dean and Sal, the conditional magic teacher.

“He’s got the potential to replace me you dunderhead, why in all that is holy is he wasting his day off with that meathead Taverish?” Sal demanded, waving his arms at the Dean.

The Dean just sighed, about to respond when he saw Chadwick come in, “speaking of young Chadwick,” he motioned him over, “he is spending time trying to catch up on his launching because his affinity is poorly suited to it. Surely you understand, Sal?”

Sal harrumphed, “I still say his time would be better spent with me. We need someone else around here who can make enchantments. Or your pesky blue rod supply will eventually run out.”

The Dean shook his head, “understandable, but until Taverish says the boy is likely to earn two pipes within a year. I can’t pull him away from that. I assume he would get a passing grade from you well before then?”

Sal glared at him, caught in the logic, “just because I would give him a passing grade required for a book doesn’t make him ready for the world outside.”

“Of course not, and I promise you that the moment Taverish feels that Chadwick has caught up to where he needs to be, you will be at the top of the list. Though perhaps Chadwick will want his days off to himself by then,” responded the Dean.

The door opened and several more students came in, pausing at the sight of the Dean.

The Dean waved them in and then turned back to Sal, “you have my word. Best make this a class that Chadwick will want to spend his free time on when he has the choice, hmm?”

Sal glared at him and then turned to his students, “I hope you lot have mastered the warehouse.” He turned to Chadwick, “here, stick the required pieces on everyone’s desks while we wait to see who was brave enough to turn up will you?”

Chadwick nodded and took the crate from the professor. On top of it was a bag with a note with his name on it. Puzzled, he put the bag on his own desk and then proceeded to divvy up the little discs used for the vault, alarm and warehouse workers and keys.

The gong had sounded as Chadwick sat at his desk. He looked around and noted that there were three less students than the day before. Apparently some decided to take Sal’s threat seriously and decided to simply not show up.

No other class in the tower allowed students to quit of their own volition. But, apparently, Sal liked it this way.

Chadwick read the note and saw that he had been handed 12 discs and a puzzle involving sending messages across long distances. He jumped straight into it and planned out his logic on paper before attempting to create the needed visualization.

It took him the entire lesson to get all the pieces together in his mind and build the conditional magic.

Sal stalked his way around the classroom testing each student’s warehouse logic, the occasional correction being handed out. Though, Chadwick noted that even those that hadn’t fully worked it out didn’t seem to be getting ejected from the classroom. It seemed Sal was more interested in scaring away those who didn’t want to try, not so much those that wanted to do it but just needed a little nudge in the right direction.

When Sal got to Chadwick’s desk he stared intently at the pieces on his desk, “so, lad. Think you got this one down?”

Chadwick was currently red in the face and sweating profusely from the effort it had taken him to get all the parts locked into his mind and locking it into the conditional magic. 12 parts ended up being almost twice as hard as the 8 he had done the previous week.

“Almost, I couldn’t seem to add in the logic for what happens when a messenger decides to skip a tower. I got all twelve pieces in, but it falls apart there,” answered Chadwick.

Sal nodded, “the logic falls apart further if multiple messenger towers do the same. The king got awfully mad at me when I had to redo that whole section. Since he had to send back every messenger stone so I could fix them all at once.”

Chadwick stared at him, “you mean, this one was a real scenario?”

Sal looked serious for a moment, “oh, they’re all real, young lad. That’s why I always know exactly what bits get overlooked. Real life experience. You did better than I did on that warehouse vault by the way. Nobody lost a very expensive shipment of brandy in your example.”

Sal moved on and went back to examining the warehouse puzzles being presented by the other students.

Chadwick looked down at his 12 discs and the logic puzzle presented by the messenger system. Suddenly it wasn’t just a game if it didn’t work as expected. Communications breaking down over hundreds of miles was a little more dramatic than them not working over the length of the table in front of him.