Agony dances through my entire body, a screaming pain reaching from scalp to toe. Pure and raw, there is nothing but me and the torture. Yet still, my body moves. My voice speaks clearly, and my hands continue their purpose. I do not flinch. Retreating within myself, I am simply content with the reassurance that the parts of me which actually matter are unaffected by the spell.

"You are… remarkably resistant to trauma," Penelope comments.

That line more than anything almost causes me to break my concentration. I look up at her and she shrugs, ending the spell she’s been casting to metaphorically set my nerves on fire. At least, I assume it’s metaphorical. I take the end of her spell as permission to stop repeating cancel commands and take a deep breath, wincing as my focus returns to my physical body. Penelope showed up at our little hidey-hole fairly shortly after Theodora finished torturing me while I practiced cancel commands, and promptly took over the agony herself. She is… even more effective at the job, although at least she doesn’t seem to take gleeful satisfaction in inflicting pain on me.

“You know, Penta said the exact same thing, back when that monster attacked and she bit her own limbs off. You remember that?”

“With unfortunate clarity,” Penelope sighs. “The similarities between myself and the monster that stole my mind aside, you absolutely pass. You are better at not being interrupted than most novice mages.”

I nod, trying to shake off the lingering pins and needles from Penelope’s horribly sadistic spell. Not that using it in this case was sadism, but rather her looking out for my future well-being. I’m about to learn something that can kill me if I lose focus, after all.

“So we can start then?” I ask.

“We may as well. I’m very curious as to what you want to use these eggs for, but you’re just going to pester me about magic until we do this first aren’t you?”

“Definitely, yes.”

Penelope nods, having clearly expected this.

“Well, first things first. You’ll be happy to know that I have officially gotten the permission necessary to train you. If you do learn some spells, you will be legally allowed to cast them. It’s much easier to get this permission for hunters, so that was helpful. Now I have to give you the spiel, though. Channeling is secret. You are not to ever teach anyone about it, not even the slightest hint, because the practice is actually very easy. Unlike the months you spent figuring out your cancel commands, I fully expect you to channel your first chunk of mana in less than an hour. Therein lies the problem; if more people realize that anyone can do it, more idiots will try and you’ll increase the number of people blowing themselves up. Hundreds of people die every year attempting to teach themselves these things, so don’t go and give them any ideas.”

“You mean like you did with me?”

“That,” Penelope says coldly, “was not me. At the time I did not at all agree with that monster’s insistence on teaching you. My opinion of your ability has since risen considerably, however, so here we are now.”

“Here we are now,” I agree, wincing at my second Penta-related faux pas in a row. Practicing cancel commands just makes me think of her, since it was one of the last things we did together. “So, how do I do this?”

“I’ll show you shortly. Since you’re most likely some sort of natural mage, the process will be somewhat instinctive, but there are a few things we can do to help you understand exactly what’s happening. That’s where we’ll start. Theodora, if you would?”

The undead metamancer starts to cast on me and I let her. Suddenly, I start seeing glowing dust everywhere. It’s like I just walked into a thin veil of fog, moving and blowing about the air in beautiful patterns.

“Is this mana sight?” I ask.

“Got it in one,” Penelope confirms, seeming pleased. “Come over here, look at some of these metal runes.”

I follow her, walking over towards one of the many metal-infused ink wards that Theodora and Margarette set up around the room. The glowing particles nearby get sucked into the wards and get immediately replaced, causing a constant stream flowing inward from all directions around them.

“Magical wards like these functionally use metal in place of a soul. Metal draws in mana, so when it is arranged or engraved with proper commands that mana automatically gets converted into a spell effect, changing into whatever sort of energy the spell requires. Even though mana is being consumed, you will never have to worry about running out. Mana is ubiquitous, it is everywhere. There is always more. The only thing you have to worry about is how much you can hold inside yourself. Watch me.”

Penelope starts to channel, which feels much like it always feels to my soul sense. However, thanks to the mana sight spell, I can see the particles of magic swirling inside her soul and quickly changing. The moment it enters her, something about the magic energy alters. It starts moving faster, vibrating almost as if it’s angry.

“This is about the limit of magic I can safely keep inside myself. If I go above this amount, I will start risking strain on my body and presumably on my soul. As such, I can cast a vast number of spells at or below this level of power, but there is a very stark limit to the amount I’m willing to risk going above this. I have done it, despite the danger, especially when we are out hunting. Channeling is very much something you have to learn to get a feel for, so it is common for even the most experienced of mages to strain themselves when in high stress situations. Your body will try to pull more mana when you are worked up. Which isn’t always bad; in a dangerous enough situation you’re much more likely to injure yourself by casting a spell that’s too weak then you are by casting a spell so strong that you die. Although, minor internal damage is common.”

I nod along. That all makes sense so far.

“So, about exploding… why does that happen, anyway?”

Penelope chuckles.

“By its very nature, mana is diffuse. You see it in the air now, but it is in fact everywhere. It permeates walls, the ground… it fills everything to almost exactly the same density. The only natural exceptions to this are elevation, as mana is thicker the lower you go, and metal, which draws more mana into an area. But the unnatural exception to this rule is of course that mana is condensed when channeled. When you squeeze it that tightly, it’s constantly attempting to expand back to its normal density. A common misconception is that higher density areas are better for casting mana because there is more mana to use, but again, that doesn’t matter. Mana never runs out. The reality is that denser mana zones mean that there’s less of a difference between the ambient mana density and the density within your soul when you compress it. This makes it safer to channel more mana than normal. Anyway, you see where I’m going with this. If at any point during your channeling your capacity to hold the mana is less than the mana’s capacity to escape, it will escape rather violently.”

Goodness, Penelope can get wordy when she’s explaining stuff. I haven’t heard her talk this much since she explained politics. She seems to be having fun, though. Maybe she’d like being a teacher.

“Okay, so how do I actually channel it?”

She scoffs at me.

“Patience! You have no respect for the theory,” she grumbles. “You have one more thing you need to watch.”

She flicks her fingers around, and as she does so the mana in her soul twists around into strange and alien shapes. I’ve seen this sort of shape before, at least kind of. It reminds me very much of how souls themselves are shaped, somehow appearing to move in directions that don’t seem like they should exist at all to my physical body.

When she completes the cancel command, the mana vanishes, collapsing in on itself like a sinkhole falling in every direction until only nothingness remains.

“That is what a successful cancel command looks like. If you start wiggling your fingers and that doesn’t happen, you need to immediately restart and try again. If you royally fuck up and can’t get it to work, try to let the mana out in as small of bursts as possible so that you don’t blow your own kidneys out.”

I frown, thinking about that.

“Should I also move my soul into my hand or something? That might blow my hand off but I could survive that with you here, right?”

Penelope blinks incredulously.

“Is that… something you can do? Well, I genuinely don’t know how that would affect things, but if things start looking terrible enough that experimentation is our best option, experiment away. I don’t expect you will have many problems, though. Now, here’s how we’re going to do this. Theodora is going to push a very, very small amount of mana inside of you. Keep your soul where it would rest normally for now, and focus on what it feels like to have that mana within you. It should be nearly identical to how it feels right as you start to activate your talent.”

I nod, sitting still as Theodora walks up and puts a hand on my belly. I watch her soul as she starts to channel, flicking her fingers around and soon starting to push the vibrating mana inside her soul through her arm and into my body.

Then the mana enters my soul and I seize, collapsing to the ground as a scream tears itself free from my throat.

Just a few minutes earlier, Penelope had been aggravating every nerve in my body, but this is different. This feels like standing next to Galdra again, but a thousand times worse, the mana burning inside me like fire. Theodora takes her hand off me immediately, shock on her face as Penelope starts to yell.

"Cancel! Cancel command!"

I start to move my hands automatically, but within my body something entirely different also starts to happen. I feel my soul clench, power churning as it starts to smother the mana inside it. I keel over, holding my stomach as, before I even complete the cancel command, the mana inside me gets overwhelmed and destroyed. No sound other than my ragged breaths fills the room for some time afterwards, the Revenants all crowding worriedly around me.

“What the fuck was that?" Penelope snaps, breaking the silence.

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” Theodora answers, glancing at me with genuine concern. “She didn’t cast anything, but the mana got destroyed.”

I grimace, slowly sitting up.

“I-I take it that this isn’t normal, then?”

Theodora shakes her head, eyes sharp. Behind them she is clearly thinking a mile a minute.

“With the amount of mana I channeled into you, even if you catastrophically failed a spell it wouldn’t have done more than a minuscule amount of internal damage. There simply wasn’t enough magic for anything else. It shouldn’t have even been painful if you let it burst, let alone simply having it within you. But you didn’t even release the mana as a chaos effect, you destroyed it somehow.”

More silence descends on the room, Vitamin crawling up on my lap to give me a reassuring squeeze. This sucks. It’s almost sad how a spell explicitly designed to cause pain doesn’t faze me enough to make an impact, but a tiny bit of mana in my soul knocks my ass to the floor. Am I not going to be able to learn magic?

“Vita has mentioned before that her soul isn’t human,” Penelope mutters. “Here I thought she was just being dramatic. You had the same reaction around Galdra, and that woman called it a sensitivity to channeled mana. I’ve never heard of such a thing, however.”

“She said in a private talk that it implies animancy involvement,” I croak. “But how does that work?”

“I don’t know. My guess would be that they don’t know either, and that they’ve simply witnessed animancers or people affected by animancy suffer a similar problem.”

“But Theodora channels magic just fine,” I point out. “And so does Capita. So other people affected by animancy and other people who are animancers both seem to not scream and die because of this. Although…I guess I’ve only ever seen Capita use a talent. I don’t know if she’s a learned mage.”

“Part of the reason this is so confusing is because that shouldn’t make a single bit of difference,” Penelope insists, shaking her head. “Watch me use my talent, Vita.”

I glance at her, mana sight still active from before. She takes a deep breath and I feel the stirring in her soul, mana flowing inside and getting aggravated in exactly the same way that she was showing me before. The only difference is that instead of using her fingers to shape the mana, she pulls it through a series of complicated channels inside her soul, which act like a mold that forces the mana into the desired shape. She completes the spell, and while nothing seems to happen I am probably now inhaling some sort of hopefully-harmless disease.

“You see?” Penelope says.

“You’re still pulling in and channeling mana even when you just use a talent,” I confirm, and she nods.

“Remove someone's soul, Vita,” Penelope orders. ”Not mine, obviously. Vitamin or Margarette. Theodora, you said your talent could detect Vita doing that, right?”

“Absolutely,” Theodora says. “It just seems like a normal spell to me, albeit a complicated and interesting one. So you’re right, Vita should have mana in her soul whenever she does that.”

I shrug, bouncing Vitamin on my lap a little. She grins happily at me, and I murder her again. My daughter’s body, still squeezing me tight in a hug, goes limp.

“Did you see that?” Penelope mutters.

Theodora nods slowly.

“I have no idea what that is. Something the mana sight spell isn’t designed for at all.”

“I didn’t see anything,” I say. There hadn’t been any mana particles flying around in my soul during that, at least as far as I could tell.

Theodora and Penelope look at each other, some sort of nonverbal communication exclusive to huge nerds occurring between them.

“You know what, how about we do this,” Penelope starts. “Vita, I’m going to teach you a very, very simple spell. It just converts magical energy into a weak light. It’s about the shortest and one of the most useless spells there is, since it lacks any of the focusing elements that would normally make a light spell worthwhile. Still, if we make it dark enough in here it should be a good measurement to figure out if you can even cast at all.”

“What the hell do you mean ‘even cast at all?’” I demand. “I thought you said I definitely use a spell to soul-steal.”

“I’m not sure of anything right now, Vita. Just watch my hand and do what I do.”

It really is a simple spell, and about ten minutes later Penelope confirms that I have it down.

“Right, so this time I just want you to imagine that you are trying to pull someone’s soul out. But rather than complete that spell, take the feeling of the absolute start, the instant where you start to feel the magic take hold, and just pause. Hold it, push it into your hands, and perform the spell I showed you.”

“That sounds like a lot of steps for something I’ve never done before,” I complain.

“It is, but if you’re a natural mage of… some sort, you should pick it up fairly quickly.”

I scowl, closing my eyes and trying to do as she says. The feeling of pulling out a soul… it’s empowering. Something from deep within surges outward whenever I grasp someone’s being and pull. It’s part of what I am, whatever that may be. Mana is all around me, it’s within everything, but I noticed that in its natural state it is never within a person’s soul. It only enters when being channeled, and then it’s not quite in its natural state anymore. It’s more energized, more volatile. Yet to some extent it is still where it belongs. It matches its temporary home. Mana in Penelope’s soul is like a square peg in a square hole. But my soul…

“…It reminded me of an immune system,” Penelope mutters quietly to Theodora. “The mana you put in her attacked like a virus and was destroyed like one.”

I don’t know what that means, but I feel the power building inside me so I focus on it instead. The strength to kill and shape and shatter. I already know how to push it into my hands, I did that many times before my tentacles were freed from my shell. I move how I was taught, and the power starts to wane away. I open my eyes.

“Holy shit,” Margarette whispers.

It’s dark in the room, except for a low, almost useless glow on the edges of my fingers. But there is undoubtedly a glow. I've casted a spell. Everyone in the room, except for Vitamin’s corpse, obviously, stares at me with an open jaw.

“So, what does this mean?” I ask.

“Well, it means you can cast spells,” Penelope says carefully. “So that’s good.”

“I feel like there’s a ‘but’ coming.”

“But you can more or less toss out every single thing they just taught you, because you don’t seem to be doing it by channeling,” Margarette explains.

"I didn't realize there was an alternative," I say slowly.

"Yes, well…" Penelope answers, a deeply confused scowl on her face. "There isn't."

I stare blankly at everyone, waiting for them to explain.

“Don’t look at me,” Penelope says tiredly. “Literally everything casts magic the same way. Mana goes in soul, soul shapes mana, mana transforms into spell effects. That’s it, that’s magic. Doing it without mana at all, which is what you seem to be doing, makes absolutely zero sense. You’re not just breaking the laws of magic at this point, you’re breaking conservation of energy.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I say.

Penelope massages her forehead.

“Theodora? Any ideas?”

“By all appearances, and according to my talent, she is using mana,” Theodora insists. “We just can’t see it for some reason.”

“It doesn’t make any sense for her to just be turning mana invisible,” Penelope grumbles. “Well, more invisible. Margarette?”

The slime-Revenant shrugs.

“She’s gotta be using mana. Maybe she just uses a different kind of mana. Like, I don’t know, the whole rest of the world uses vanilla mana and she can only use chocolate.”

“But there aren’t ‘kinds’ of mana, there’s just mana,” Penelope insists.

“What if there is though? Like, yeah, I would have agreed with that statement literally one minute ago, but something is happening here that we don’t understand. Some of our prior conceptions might just be wrong.”

“But if there’s such a thing as ‘chocolate mana’ how has no one in the history of the world ever detected or used it for anything? Surely we would have noticed by now if some creatures existed that used a kind of mana that we can’t see with standard spells. And surely if this mana existed in nature, it would be causing some sort of effects that we could observe and notice. Someone would say ‘there’s this magical effect happening but we don’t see the mana causing it,’ but that has never happened. This mana can’t be natural, yet if it doesn’t exist in nature, where would Vita be getting it?”

No one has an answer to that, so the nerds get back to thinking. I join them, trying to figure out the answers to those questions as well. Where am I getting the mana? I close my eyes, taking a deep breath and trying to draw on that power again. I look as far inward as I can, paying attention to the minute moments when I first start to feel the strength that flows through me. It’s a comforting, exciting feeling. From somewhere, I draw out strength, pulling it from one of the many impossible directions into which souls reach. But of course, since my soul reaches there, wherever I pull from… isn’t that still me?

“I’m making it,” I realize.

All eyes turn to me. Except Vitamin’s, I guess, so I put her soul back in her body.

“Eh? What’d I miss?” she asks, blinking blearily.

Margarette clears her throat, answering awkwardly.

“Well I’m not entirely sure what the implications of that would be, but uhh… I think your mom just claimed to be a god.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Vitamin nods matter-of-factly. “That checks out.”