{Status:

Name: Grintel Coddlestahl

Age: 16

Mental:

Acuity:

Perception:

Memory:

8

6

8

Psyche:

Wisdom:

Insight:

Willpower:

5

6

12

Physical:

Strength:

Coordination:

Endurance:

5

5

9

Skills:

Energy Conversion

2.366

Energy Emission

2.212

Energy Control

1.718

Meditation

2.325

Walking

4.581

}

Looking at my stats, it turns out that spending all your time working on your magic muscles doesn’t somehow improve your non-magic ones at all. That would have been way too handy for me. So I was pretty much a skinny twig. The only thing that saved me from being a large oval with lumpy twig appendages was that this world follows the first law of thermodynamics. Magic took energy. Energy has to come from somewhere, it can’t be created or destroyed, only transformed. In this case, energy comes from the user to make stuff happen, and based on my status sheet there was no “mana” or other ambient absorbable energy that I could store and use to power abilities. I just had my physical reserves. Meditation helped some in freeing up the energy internally, probably speeding the metabolic processes or something, sleeping restored it pretty well, as long as I get enough to eat, which hasn’t been a problem. I guess it would be closest to a stamina reserve, but the Basic Guide doesn’t show my health or stamina, only skills and statistics. Using and recovering from my energy stores has helped my endurance increase, which is why it was significantly more developed than my other physical stats. Obviously, training myself to focus over and over came with increases to my willpower as well, and studying the techniques improved my mental stats. I suspect that 6-8 is about average for people in this world.

Skill tracking was a bit surprising to me, each skill was tracked to the thousandth, and substantial changes really only came when it raised tenths place. Some days I’d grow as much as 5 thousandths, but most days I was lucky to get even one or two ups per skill. As you can tell, I spent much of my time on the flashy stuff. While I kept up the practice on my magical skills, life continued to move on in other areas. I completed my coursework, a bit ahead of the standard schedule, which pleased my parents and saved some money, since primary school was communal, but anything after that was privately funded. Secondary school was the limit on what most middle income families could reasonably afford. My parents told me flat out that it’d be all that they would be funding. I’d slacked on the general academics in favor of magic, since I didn’t have any reason to do more than graduate. I knew the material pretty well, but I was too lazy to do too much above the minimum required. Now, I had the age-old quest of modern man. I had to get a job.

After a few tendays of no success in gaining a local position with other shops, and being a bit too old to become a craftsman’s apprentice, I ended up working the counter for my parents’ bookshop. After several more tendays doing this, I received my first “big” break. I got invited for a low-paying entry-level position in Holmberg City, with room and board.

I was to be an assistant data collector and analyst at the magic research department of the state Omniology (what my old world would have called a University.) Based on the letter, the magic club sponsor had sent off a message to one of his friends there, recommending me for one of their math-heavy research assistant jobs.

Math for the WIN!

Even in this world, who you know may be as important as what you know. As the name Omniology implies, they had instructors and researchers literally looking into whatever they could get someone to sponsor. It was the place for the study of everything.

Of course, as the newest hire, I did not get in on any really interesting research for my first study assignment. I got in on the relatively tame research projects, acting in the first one as a test monitor. I spent my time capturing results and writing them down. Basically, I watched small groups of subjects and used a graduated sandglass with 5 second markers as a timer for 8 hours a day, 8 days a tenday. The subjects were in three batches with breaks between, and each group was in the testing area for 2 hours.

For the next six months, I was monitoring and analyzing a test designed to evaluate a variety of focusing chants for faster firepower. Again, since this world has no computers or spreadsheets, that was 2 months of actual testing in the official test, accompanied by half-days of effective unskilled maintenance and janitorial work when there weren’t enough subjects to fill the day. Once the test was completed, I moved into more sedentary work with 4 months of manual tabulation and mathematical analysis. I was literally doing algebra and averages and graphs by hand, to pay my bills and get room and board. It sucked, not because of the math work as some might complain, since math was reasonably light effort, but because my draftsmanship was that of the average modern person from my last world--abysmal.

Everything I did before was typing, my handwriting was mediocre all through my last life, and I’d put about the same effort in on this one. After 4 months of this, though, it had really shot up in my skill list. I moved from the equivalent of the doctor’s hurried scrawl with regard to handwriting of this world, to barely passable. Fortunately most reports were to be accomplished in block print, and not the fancier cursives, because I was still pretty awful with those.

I started to develop nearsightedness during this time, so I ended up needing spectacles. I guess I really haven’t told you much about myself, other than I was twiggy. Let me fix that a bit.

Hi. I go by Grint. I’m just under 6 feet tall now, so hopefully I’ve stopped growing. I’m gangly, and I’ve got the biceps of your average squirrel. On the up side, I also have unruly orange-blond hair, I’m getting freckles, and now I need to wear glasses, which make my ears stick out like two little head wings on some gothic helmet. I like magic and math. Good thing I made it out of school first, there’s no way I’d fly under the radar like this. I guess the good news is… I’m memorable. I’m not sure it’s in a good way.

Experimental design was in line with what I remembered from the last world, so they were using something akin to a scientific method, hypothesis, test, observe, conclude. We had a control group that didn’t do any chanting, and then 3 other groups, one that made up their own chant or chants, one that was assigned a single chant, and one that got assigned unique chants for each action.

Only two of those worked well, and the specific words didn’t matter much. The best performance came from those who made up their own chants and did unique ones for each action, second place was the assigned chants, third was the control group, and dead last by a small margin was chanting the same thing for everything. The ultimate conclusion was that the chant actually interrupted the concentration when it wasn’t tied to the action, but it was a bit of a hand-waving guess. The paper did well for the lead researcher, and we’d have an opportunity to do a more focused study on that, since the Head of College was interested in seeing the follow-up, and she was a key member on the funding committee. I hoped to get in on that followup, since I was already using a set of custom chants in my practice based on the test results I’d been seeing.

I remember some of the games had wizards with required gestures, material components and chants, so I was really interested in knowing if it was just helping the willpower focus, or if this could be part of a key to bigger, faster, and more useful magic. For now my individualized mnemonic-like aid sequence for each action helped to focus my thoughts on that action, resulting in significantly faster energy emissions, sometimes as much as 25%, shaving a minute off the most slow actions for me when I finally passed the 2.0 mark in my energy control skill. I know, it’s not super thrilling fireball action, but it is progress.