The next 6 months was supposed to be a project using electricity as an energy input to empower stronger magic. I ended up getting pulled in as a last minute test subject, because I was willing, and they had several people back out.

Overall, the test was a disaster. It did have one good result, at least for me. I developed the channeling skill, during the second tenday of testing when they’d ramped things down to just barely tolerable pain levels, I managed to get off flame burst while being tested. Then a few days later, during a subsequent test round, I managed it again, and that’s when a new skill showed up on my status sheet. It didn’t heat the water more than my baseline flameburst, so it was a failure from the experimental side, but a success for me nonetheless. There wasn't a third tenday of tests as too many of the people who were actually getting the shocks had refused to continue. With a sample size of only 10 people remaining in the test group, it was called to a halt.

It looked like once I had a skill at .010 or better, it would start tracking and be listed on my sheet. It might have been nice if it showed everything I tried. Then again, make that a nope. It was bad enough with the ones it showed. I didn’t need to know my tooth-brushing, eating, cleaning, reading, or sleeping skills, among the many other things, both mundane and embarrassing. Seriously, I want to know why the guide even HAS an excretion skill in the tracking. Then again, maybe I DON’T want to know. I wish I had more than the Basic Guide, but even what I had was a significant advantage over blindly wondering about my situation. I was just glad I figured out how to get the Basic Guide to hide some of that crap from me. I’ve been editing out most of the odd bits for you, and leaving only the parts that allow for some comparison, like walking. What can I say, you’re welcome. For some reason I hear that phrase in my head sung in a man’s voice.

{

Skills:

Energy Conversion

2.428

Energy Emission

2.292

Energy Control

2.064

Channeling

0.024

Meditation

2.348

Walking

4.987

}

I decided not to work on channeling for now. Since I didn’t know of a way outside of electro shock to raise the skill, and it was clearly bad on the risk-reward ratio to mess with that outside of supervised tests, I needed a better plan for the skill. Perhaps I can submit a proposal for review by the test director of the failed electro experiment, if she doesn’t lose her test director position.

Since this had been planned for roughly 5 more months than it lasted, I got stuck in the janitorial pool. None of the other tests going on wanted to bring in an outsider and get them up to speed. I now had more time for the physical side of the job until the next planned experiment, but since I can’t practice magic all day, there wasn’t a big loss in my progress. I still got room, board, and pay, so I had no major complaints.

What was left of my job for this time didn’t use much of my mental capacity, so I could plan and dream while mopping the floor, emptying trash, cleaning windows, or making minor repairs. Heck, most days I would even get some energy control practice in while doing the repetitious work. I used heat bursts to keep the mop water a bit warmer making that job go faster, but never found a use for the electro snap other than making a waste bin smell a little bit better. Having both mind and body busy made the days flow faster, so I kept looking for ways to combine my practice with my work. The manual labor also was a decent help in building muscles and removing the flab I’d been gaining from sitting all day during the last 6 months. While normally, that'd be handled by energy spent on magic practive, I'd been unable to spend any significant time on magic. Not as much time spent on magic meant less energy burned, and less energy burned meant more of Grint. With nobody making me “eat right”, and no real desire to limit myself, I tended toward as rich and sweet as I could find in this world, and only made token efforts toward eating healthy. Of course this was made worse by the lack of fresh produce except in season, and my general distaste for pickled or otherwise preserved ones. Refrigeration and large scale transport have huge benefits. We had both, but not on a scale that put them in the cafeteria for the students or the low staff. I never got into the professor's dining hall, so I have no idea if they got better food. I suspect they did, but it might have merely been done to have a place to grumble about the students in privacy.

It was at the beginning of the next test that I finally ran into someone that I just couldn’t get out of my head. Her name was Lunette Vedlimdt, and she wasn’t the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. In many ways, she was just… average-ish? I know that makes no sense, but it’s the best I can do. It’s not like she was some world famous billionaire bikini supermodel. I’ve already been older once, and learned that beauty fades far faster than the mind does, and an ugly attitude is way worse than any physical flaws, not that she had physical flaws.

Crap.

I even sound like a lovestruck teenager in my own head.

Anyway. She was a second year student at the Omniology, and she was fascinating. I immediately felt a twinge of guilt, since she was so young. Then again, I justified it to myself since in this world she was older than I was. My inner old man was ashamed of me. Who was I to be ogling some young coed? I waivered back and forth between elation and shame. Finally, I decided I would do my best to ignore her, at least in that way. Being a physical age of seventeen, my best was … not completely awful.

Look, I know I HAVE willpower, but you have to want to do something in order to apply it. It’s like just because you have the strength to bench press a car doesn’t mean you use all of that strength to pet your dog. It doesn’t help when you are having a brain/body fight with yourself, and the brain is only 60% on your side, and that maybe only 80% of the time. I’d find myself daydreaming at times about her easy smile or her kind, brown eyes, or the way her voice would send shivers down my spine. My work would have suffered more if setting up and documenting this test wasn’t so darn simple.

The test this time was rather boring from my perspective, using electro snaps to align iron filings sandwiched between two glass panels in an oil suspension, a form of basic electromagnetism from my perspective. I'm honestly not sure what they were trying to test, and I never thought to ask. Which should tell you how distracted I was. The upside was that it required two monitors for each test run, to chart the results of the multiple stations and replace the test boxes. So I was regularly assigned to the same observational section as Lunette. The resulting tree-and-branch structures built of aligned and partly melted iron filings that happened in the test boxes were kind of beautiful, and watching Lunette deal with the test subjects was an education in kindness and grace. She knew the details of their lives, kids names, a bunch of little things I had never paid much attention to. I was amazed at how she would light up a room. I swear that she was doing some unknown kind of magic, or maybe had a hidden charisma stat. I was more than a bit jealous of the time she spent on each of them but otherwise the testing settled into an easy rhythm where she was recording results and talking with the subjects as they recovered from each snap and I did the test box replacements, played fetch for any food or drinks from the provided recuperation materials, and catalogued each test box with date, subject, and index numbers.

It was the best 2 months of this life so far. It was somehow also the worst. As I was becoming more and more attracted to Lunette, I would still get flashes of memories of my previous life and my wife. I know I died, and I know that covers me on the oath, but knowing and feeling are two different things. Not only did it make me still think of myself as married, but also as a creepy old man. The acid drops of guilt were eating at me as I found myself thinking more and more about Lunette. But neither the memories nor the guilt managed to stop my body from responding to her presence when she was near.

Stupid teenage hormones.