Spoiler :

My apologies by many times see next chapter for further explanation

The Other Tests

(Wilhelm Dragonsong)

The test of patience was obviously centered on the ‘ki-less’ meditation for beginners lesson. Besides patience the test also would help me to check if she was better suited to keep her magic and warrior training separate.

Of course if she really wanted to be a magic warrior that did both there were many ways for me to help her even if she was completely incompetent at it but the check helped.

After this test was over I utilized my absolute control over the little pocket dimension to advantage by creating a series of illusions that were so realistic for all intents and purposes they were basically real.

So it seemed like she was transported to various locations for each of the following tests, though in reality she stayed always at the same location at least physically.

For a series of intellectually stimulating tests, she was transported to a mountain valley river seen where the goal was that she had to reach the other side of where she started, using tools and materials provided on site alone. She couldn’t use her warrior strength or what minimal magic she might have picked up in the past at all.

In order to move forward she had to solve a series of riddles and puzzles. From making certain shapes with some sticks to a tricky amusing classic involving a goat a head of cabbage and a wolf.

There were also many pictures and illusions which looked like one thing while being another or didn’t look like one thing while being a completely different thing…there were also some cases where it was being both things at the same time while sharing the same visual.

No matter the case the test was to pick out an object or animal, from pictures which looked like many or few objects or animals.  

Basically, in short,  a lot of brain teasers, and while I say intellectually stimulating it was more to test creativity and out of the box thinking then any traditional smarts.

After she managed to solve everything including seeing past the finish line that wasn’t really the finish line trick that I had added last moment partly for my own amusement she was transported to a labyrinth which was basically designed to be a haunted house, scary as heck but without any real dangers.

However though there wasn’t really any danger at all, to maximize the experience she could fully utilize all her skills and the ‘enemies’ and traps were seemingly genuine.

But as expected from a young lady from a strong warrior bloodline she wasn’t fazed at all and completed this test the most quickly out of all her other tests.

Obviously the labyrinth was to test bravery, and her reactions in the face of danger, amongst other less obvious things.

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After the labyrinth the locations got even more exotic and the challenges even more…well challenging.

Explaining the mechanics for some would for me and my passionate fixations and for others well…I am either too embarrassed because of their design because of their simplicity or complexity or in the case for one…

Well I included it because although from what I have seen most Wizard masters don’t go for such excessive amounts and kinds of tests for their apprentices I do have at least one example of someone similar to uphold as an example.

The one that my Master Vanessa’s Grandmother created and would take out at the slightest opportunity for her own amusement I suspect more than anything else.

For the sake of tradition and because she my Master didn’t make any other kind of usable test that I know of I included it in between two of my awesome self-created designs in order to blunt the impact as much as possible. But still that thing…was at minimal cringe worthy.

You might get a clue, when I say that with me the test did not get the results it was supposedly testing for…instead it was like torture when the theme was supposedly pleasure…and Vanessa while it did work on her correctly more than it ever did on myself…she did manage to pass it quicker than most…

Still it is such a horrendous thing, (in my opinion) that besides making the precursor and subsequent tests a sort of pallet cleansing experience, I also made several obvious signs that I hope put the culpability at least partially on that perverted old woman.

Anyway even for those tests…which I don’t want to talk about, Vanessa passed them all on acceptable levels, or at least even when she ‘failed’, in her reactions I didn’t see anything that made me regret taking her on as an apprentice.

With the help of the tests I understood her weaknesses and her strengths a lot better now and was already coming up with many lesson plans that I thought would be suitable to try on her.

Still despite the benefits in the end I couldn’t really get rid of a somewhat painful sour feeling that was currently boiling in the back underneath it all where I couldn’t really see or confront it. A feeling that was a lot like guilt.

I will now try to admit something that I think I at least hinted at in the past. That is despite all my excuses and justifications the truth was none of these tests were truly necessary, at least for the reasons I told you. All of the things that I said that I was using the tests to find out…all of them could have been found out after a little time and conversation spent together as well as a few more traditional lessons.

All it would take was a little time…and from a logical point of view if nothing else I, no we… had all the time in the world.

So why did I go through all of that trouble? Why did I put my apprentice through so much bothersome and even cringe worth experiences, when I had all the time in the world?

No real reason, or at least not one that I could put in words at that time, for I had hidden it even from myself.