As Mason began to do that, Rowan headed inside, saying that he was going to look for a request or two to do tomorrow. As he headed inside, Dally and Anne answered a few of his questions.

“Adventuring is not Common for example in this fairly small to medium sized city of 170,000 there are less than 70 adventurers and only one gold rank team, the Bark Shields.”

As Mason started asking questions about magic of dally she began to explain the basics to him. “Magic is based on the energy inside yourself and the world. Here stop hitting that for a moment.” Mason paused in his attacks on the tree trunk to pay full attention to her. “If you pay attention to what your body is doing you should be able to feel another energy in and around you. Can you?”

Now that he had been told to look at it, he could feel an energy flowing through his body, not like blood more like he was in a stream and it was passing through him. “Yes I can. It’s weird it feels almost like I'm not here.”

“Good now see if you can take hold of it. This is what separates those who can be [Mage]s from those who can’t. Try and control the flow with your mind.

As mason attempted his he felt a resistance to his attempts to move it, however once he pushed harder he could easily separate some of it and control it. He released the amount he had separated back into the flow. He explained how it had felt.

“Ooh you have some talent if you were able to get it on the first try. So once you are able to do that you have to shape it. This involves giving it a substance, an intent and a form. For example.” An arrow of light formed in front of her before shooting out and striking the tree trunk. “There I gave it the substance of light, Intent to harm and the form of an arrow. This doesn’t mean you can mix these in any way. For example fire is inherently tied to the intent to harm. It can deviate slightly from that, such as the intent to move, but it can hardly heal easily. Most mages choose to specialize in one shaping idea. For example an ice mage focuses on the substance of ice, allowing for them to put less of their energy into that and more into the intent and form. This doesn’t mean you can’t cast outside your specialization; it just becomes harder. Also you tend to get skills based on your specialization so it makes it a bad idea to change your specialization. Also animation illusion and enchanting are a form. Lets see you try and do any form of magic okay?”

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Mason thought for a bit before reaching into the flow of mana and drawing some out. He formed it into flames which he then gave the intent to harm. Finally he shaped it into a dagger. With this he thrust his hand forward, Shooting the dagger into the trunk. This proved to be a bad idea as the trunk quickly caught on fire, however dally quickly put this out with a spout of water.

“Wow that had some power to it. However you will obviously have to work on the speed as that took like 5 seconds. Anyway that was pretty impressive for a first day. I'm assuming you are feeling tired now? Why don’t we head inside.”

With that Mason grabbed up his sword and put it back in his sheath before following them into the guild. Rowan got up from talking with some other adventurers. “How did it go?”

“He’s got some good potential. He didn’t look terrible with the sword and I was able to teach him to cast an actual damaging spell.”

“Oh that’s great. I have some good news. There is a request we could take on tonight. One of the farms nearby has some shadowtail foxes going after the hens at night. I was thinking we could go out there and take this on. You guys interested?”

Anne seemed ready to go right now and dally didn’t seem adverse to it. Mason said he was willing to and with that they walked outside. Dally warned mason not to be alarmed before pulling up her left sleeve, revealing a large and intricately done tattoo of a horse. He had also noticed another tattoo in the same style of a hawk on her neck. She touched the horse one and said [Bonds of Ink] And with a confusing twisting, the horse leaped off her skin and realized itself into an actual living breathing horse. Mason took a step backwards.

“Oh don't worry, Ruby wouldn’t hurt a fly. That’s just a skill I have that allows me to keep my bonded animals as tattoos.”

With that they set out towards the south edge of the city. It was already starting to turn to dusk and as they left the city rowan pointed to a farm, about a mile away, only visible because the city was positioned on a rise. To the east of the city lay a wide slow moving river and to the north rose tall craggy mountains. They began heading towards the farm Dally riding on Ruby and the rest walking. Once they arrived it was definitely night at that point. Rowan walked up to the door and knocked. It was answered fairly promptly by a middle-aged man and woman. They explained that there had been attacks on the henhouse the past two nights by a shadowtail fox. The couple told them the chicken coop was right behind the house and it could be watched from their back porch and that it had struck around an hour from now the previous two nights. With that the group headed to the back of the house and began to wait.