Magira hadn’t expected her question to get Cain so… excited? It was as though the word “how” had sparked something in him; he lit up like a fuse, immediately standing and beginning to pace back and forth in front of her.
“The first thing you’ll need to understand,” he began, “is that this will be a long-term project. It will take a tremendous amount of both time and effort to begin seeing real change.”
Magira nodded.
“Next, is that everyone will be against us. Our only allies, to my knowledge, are an oppressed people. There may be other humans who share our views, but most of them will be too afraid of the backlash to act on it.”
She could feel Cain’s mind whirring into motion, running like well-oiled clockwork. It was a new sensation from him.
“Third, is that it will likely take a war to tackle this — or at least spark one in the process.”
“You’re planning to start a war? Seriously?”
“Yes,” Cain grinned. “But the fourth thing you need to understand is actually just the first thing reworded; we’ll need to gather a lot of resources and establish reliable allies before we get to that point.”
“Okay…” Magira felt dizzy trying to wrap her head around the scope of Cain’s plans. “What’s the first step of all this supposed to be, then?”
“I’m glad you asked!” Cain exclaimed. “Step one is another topic I was planning to consult with you about. The first thing we need before accomplishing anything is self-sufficiency. We need an income, a place to live, and enough free time to establish connections and advance our goals. Currently, we’re living off of reward money from a one-time event, and staying at a room that’s been temporarily gifted to us as part of that reward. That needs fixing.”
“Okay.” Her neck was getting sore following Cain’s pacing. “What’s the plan for that, then?”
“The most immediately available option is to join the Adventurer’s Guild. They’ll likely offer a stable enough income to live off of, and it will provide an opportunity for us both to build up our individual strength, something that will undoubtedly be valuable later. Not to mention, they’ve offered to waive the entrance examination for me because of my actions in the Flutewood raid.”
Magira asked the question that had been weighing on her from the beginning of the conversation. “And… what’s my role in all this?”
“That’s ultimately for you to decide.” Cain stopped pacing to look her in the eyes. “You could help in a variety of ways. That could mean helping me learn about slave crests — within the limits of your safety, of course. It could also mean fighting monsters alongside me, as I get the impression that’s a large part of what joining the Adventurer’s Guild means. You could help me make connections with other demihumans that may be eluding enslavement at the moment. Or you could just tag along for the ride and offer insight every now and then. You could even leave.”
It was… her decision? “Really?”
“Really,” replied Cain.
Magira… was stumped by that. She hadn’t been allowed to decide anything for herself in years. And now he was asking her to choose what she wanted to do. What did she want? When she was little, she’d wanted to be a hunter like her mother and help feed their tribe. After her father succumbed to illness, she’d wanted to become a healer like Delara and save people. After she was taken… she wanted to fight back. She wanted to free herself and others like her. Magira realized that although her will to fight had been eroded by captivity, it hadn’t left her. I still want to fight back. She still wanted to help people, even if it could only manifest in small acts of defiance.
But now she was being offered a real chance to do something. “Anything.”
“Meaning?” Cain prompted.
Magira stood up to meet him at eye level. “Meaning I will do absolutely anything to help the people I care for. If that means fighting monsters with you, I will. If it means helping you learn about slave crests, I will. I want to fight back.”
Cain smiled warmly at her. “Buying you will probably prove to have been the best decision of my life.”
This puzzled her somewhat. “What do you mean?”
“Slavery is an incredibly demoralizing thing, Magira — as I’m sure you know without me having to tell you. The fact that you’re still so determined says more about you than you realize.” His smile widened to a toothy grin. “You are exactly the kind of person that can change the course of history.”
----------------------------------------
“So…”
“Yeah?” Cain answered.
“I can tell you’re doing something, but… what is it?” Cain had returned to sitting on the floor, and was now sitting still with his eyes closed. Only the telepathic link and her mana sight had convinced Magira that he wasn’t just meditating.
“I’m adding another ring to my core. It seems to be very useful for prolonged spellcasting.”
Magira blinked. “You mean… the mana gyre? The one that’s responsible for generating a person’s mana?”
“I mean a mana gyre, but yes. That’s the one.”
“But… a person can only have one of those! Having more is just… impossible. That’s impossible.”
“It’s also impossible for the dead to come back to life, but lo and behold, me. It’s not impossible, Magira. Either people haven’t tried hard enough or the people who have are keeping it a secret. From my conversation with Roberts, that seems like a thing mages would do.”
“Well…” Magira couldn’t really argue that. Mages were notorious for keeping secrets. Especially powerful ones like that.
“I’ll show you how to do it sometime, but for right now I’m more concerned with working on my mana. This marks roughly the third day since I gained my first aspect.”
“Oh… okay.”
Magira sat and watched Cain do his thing, more than a little dumbfounded. Sure enough, after a few minutes she noticed his mana increase in density. The red-and-purple mass of energy inside him glowed a little brighter than before. He really is from Earth… this is exactly the kind of thing you’d hear about them casually doing. She spent a few moments remarking at how easily Cain seemed to upend her understanding of what was and wasn’t possible. Then he opened his eyes and started pushing mana out of his hands. Within a moment, he was holding a ball of energy, glowing red at the center before fading to purple, like a poor man’s sunset. With nothing but hand gestures, he spread the sphere out into a vertical platter shape. She wanted to ask what he was doing again, but the words died in her throat as his mana started changing.
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The light coming in from the window dimmed a bit, and the edges of the mana-platter now faded from purple to inky black. In another moment, the flickering red glow at the center became a little brighter and much more even. The room’s lighting returned to normal. Is he… changing his aspect? Looking past the small wall of energy revealed that his stored mana had indeed changed to mirror the mana held in his hands. He paused for several moments, seeming to contemplate what to change next. Magira just sat eagerly on the edge of the bed, fully enraptured in the process, trying to study the telepathic link to glean further insight from him.
‘A bit of blue would be nice. But what aspect would give me blue? Likely water, but water is also inherently colorless… ah, but the blue color is a result of the way it distorts light waves as depth increases, and I already have the light aspect, so water might work. Yeah, let’s try that.’
‘Are you… deciding what aspects to take purely based on how they’ll look?’
‘Yes. Let me focus, please.’
The only word to describe Magira’s feelings in that moment was disillusionment. She had thought this to be an important moment — that Cain had been carefully and strategically choosing what aspects to take based on what he thought might help them. But… he was just worried about how it would look. Plenty of useful combinations are ugly and obnoxious to look at; deciding like this is just wasteful! Still feeling bolder than usual from her earlier proclamation, Magira nearly told Cain off then and there for treating such an important decision with such flippancy. She was interrupted for a second time.
Cain’s mana changed once again, incorporating a blue scaling gradient, making his mana look almost exactly like a sunset as opposed to the cheap imitation it was earlier. Then, little specks of light began to appear around the outer edges of the portrait. He was adding stars.
‘It’s still not quite right.’
Magira was confused. If he was trying to make a sunset, he’d succeeded. Just as she wondered what more there could be to add, thin wisps of cloud appeared, and seemed to orbit the imitation sun in a lazy circuit.
‘Not yet…’
Not yet? What was Cain even trying to achieve?
‘What makes sunsets truly beautiful… is that they only last for a little while.’
----------------------------------------
Cain’s world suddenly warped unnaturally. Everything seemed to be moving as if through water; Magira, her thoughts, the birds outside the window… and Cain? He tried to move his body, but found it sluggish and barely responsive. His limbs would barely move, while his eyes now moved only as quickly as his limbs should. He then realized the cause of his torpor; he’d given himself a time aspect without properly channeling it into a spell. Which had probably resulted in him casting one by accident, resulting in his current predicament. Could he cancel—
Cain’s world warped again, in a much more unpleasant manner. Everything seemed to accelerate rapidly, giving him motion sickness and possibly a bit of whiplash. He nearly fell over — impressive, for a seated man — but narrowly recovered his balance. The mana he’d been holding dispersed instantly, and he had to clutch his head to ward off the dizziness. Magira rushed towards him and helped hold him upright.
“What did you even do just then?” She asked with a hint of incredulity.
“Cast time magic without actually deciding what to cast with it.”
“Of all the aspects you could choose to pair with what you have, why time? It’s almost impossible to use and doesn’t even have a color! It… makes no sense, even if you were only trying to make your mana look cool!”
“More than just looks contribute to beauty,” Cain said sagely. The effect was somewhat diminished by his continued swaying.
Magira raised an eyebrow.
“Sunsets are only as beautiful as they are because they’re gone so quickly,” he explained. “Even if you can’t see time, its presence is what makes a lot of things as beautiful as they are. Things are infinitely more precious if they’re fleeting.”
“You decided what aspects to take based on… metaphorical beauty.”
“Partially,” Cain shrugged. “It was a combination of beauty, practicality, and poetic justice.”
“You mean to tell me you were considering the usefulness of your aspects before taking them?”
“Yes! Light and darkness can probably be used in tandem to cast illusions, water has several different potential uses that make it a nice utility to have, and time will… probably do something useful.”
“…”
“…”
Magira sighed. “Okay. Are you done experimenting now?”
“Nope. We still haven’t looked at the end result, remember?”
Cain pulled slightly away from Magira, trying to temper his excitement as he began drawing mana to his fingertips once more. Once a decent amount had welled up in his hands, he swept his hands across the open air above himself, willing the mana to remain. As he watched, a window seemed to open up above him, revealing a picturesque sunset on the other side, though there was no horizon for it to dip below. Red and orange light streamed through the portal, leaving both himself and Magira awash in a warm glow. Before, using his magic had been a means to an end. It had been a tool to facilitate his development. Now, looking at a scene of beauty made real solely by the power of his imagination, Cain found it fun for the first time.
“Okay,” exhaled Magira, “that is pretty cool. But it might be better to get something else done while we still have daylight ahead of us.”
“Yeah,” Cain conceded, “you’re right. I said our best option at the moment was the Adventurer’s Guild, but I don’t know much about them. How about you fill me in on any useful information you might have on them?”
“The Adventurer’s Guild…” Magira trailed off, and Cain could feel her start to rack her brain for details. “It’s a very influential guild in the human kingdoms. The winter is a very perilous time, when starvation drives monsters to a murderous frenzy, hunting and eating civilized people to survive when they’d normally avoid us. It’s also the time when Entropy is the most active, making it a busy season for adventurers. Their services are perpetually in demand. As far as the jobs go…”
Cain waited for a moment as Magira fished for a particularly elusive piece of information.
“I don’t really know what kinds of jobs the Guild usually gets, aside from monster hunting in the winter. I lived in a nomadic tribe with my family and a few others for most of my life, since slavers made it hard to settle down.” She paused for a moment. “I do know that exploration and gathering requests are common, though.”
“Do they admit demihumans, or are they racist too?”
“They do admit demihumans, but the pay is halved since we’re only half human, by their reasoning. Also, slaves are disallowed from joining. I should be able to help you with jobs, but I won’t be able to do anything on my own.”
“Hrm,” Cain hrm’d. “Not ideal, but workable. Next question: what kinds of monsters are common? I’ve heard a lot about these things called ‘worgs,’ but I don’t know what they are.”
“You don’t have worgs on Earth?” Magira asked in disbelief.
“Nope.”
“Well, they’re… sort of like wolves? But a bit bigger, hunched, and with slightly more hand-like front paws. They breed like rabbits, have tough hides, sharp claws and teeth, and they hunt in packs, so they can hunt local populations to near extinction if left unchecked. The town or city will usually sponsor standing requests to hunt worgs, and some people will pay you to bring them the corpses to be processed into materials.”
“Oh… so, they’re basically lame werewolves without the anthropomorphism… lycanthropomorphism?”
“Wait, you have werewolves but no worgs?”
“Well, no,” said Cain, “but we have them in stories. We probably have worgs in stories too, but if so I’d never heard of them in my seventeen years of living there.”
“Earth is weird,” decided Magira.
“Definitely. Are there any other common monsters adventurers have to deal with?”
“There are slimes, which are sort of living puddles of ooze that dissolve living things they touch to eat. After they eat enough, they either multiply or grow in size. Bigger slimes are more intelligent and harder to kill, while a swarm of slimes can destroy ecosystems if left alone. Their remains are also useful to alchemists. Being both liquid and acidic makes it hard to fight them with weapons, so it’s mostly only mages who can fight slimes.”
“Of course there are slimes. Anything else?”
“There are only two other ‘common’ monsters I know of, although it’s normal for new strains to pop up or migrate every so often. The first is the ogre — they’re said to be descendants of the Ohrks that became bloodthirsty and malformed over generations of violence in the Imperial War. They have four arms and frequently used improvised weapons. They still have some intelligence, so they can be very dangerous. On the rare occasion a tribe of them forms, it’s common for raid teams to be put together to wipe them out.”
“And the second?” Cain could ask about the orcs later.
“Stitchwalkers.” Magira shivered. “They start out as regular fleshy undead, created through some magical anomaly or the work of a necromancer. Then, instead of eating corpses, they start to graft the parts onto themselves. A Stitchwalker can wind up taking the form of anything from a massive, patchwork bear to a giant serpent. Sometimes they’re just a mass of assorted flesh and limbs. Their sheer mass combined with the effects of undeath make them difficult to kill. On top of that, a lot of them will shed their main body and flee if they start losing a battle. If they’re not caught, they can just amass more flesh and come back again.”
“Please tell me this world has therapists.”
“What’s a ‘therapist?’” She said quizzically.
“Oh, god,” Cain lamented.
“What do the gods have to do with this? And, which one?”