I’m pretty sure I’d be much better off if I didn’t experiment on anything completely new today. That will give my mom some more time to get over the Great Befouling of the Cellar. I do go check on the cellar, and fortunately the smell is much reduced. There’s a slight lingering of the ammonia overtone, but it’s no longer the unmitigated disaster of last night. I could work down here if I had to, but I get out and close it up before I draw any more attention to it.

Before the day gets too warm, or worse, too sunny, I go for a long walk, first to the edge of town, then back to the middle and home. It takes me only 35 minutes to the edge of town, but another 2 hours to complete the walk, as we live a bit more than halfway from the town center. The guard is open, but I don’t want to spend my time there today, and I should probably dress a little less comfy but worn for making my first impressions. On the good side, I’ve never been in trouble with the guard, so there’s not any records or bad impressions. On the bad side, I weigh like 10 stone, and I look like a stiff breeze might blow me away, so I’ll need all the help I can get. I’m pretty sure there will be a physical entrance exam. I need to know what it is, for practice purposes, and I may need to pay someone to help me train. Speaking of money, I need to give my folks some rent or at least food money while I prepare. I’m eating like mad between energy spent on magic and exercise.

Returning home, I grab and rinse the bucket, then use it for arm strength exercises. I start with it full, doing upper arm exercises with my right arm until I can’t get the bucket up again, then changing arms and starting over. When both arms are done, I plunge my head in the bucket, giving me a bit of a refreshment and reducing the contents by half. Then I start again on the right arm. After that, I empty the bucket over my head and do one last set with the empty bucket.

Next up, calisthenics again. I can’t do much for the legs but walk around town. The town’s pretty flat, no grand sweeping staircases or large monuments for me to run up and down the steps. I do get in a step-aerobics style workout, doing up and down step work over in the corner where I dug up the dirt for basement replacement. Since there’s some shade over there I don’t have to run inside and hide from the great ball of doom in the sky. It’s now the hours of danger, that part of each day that should come with consumption warnings for me.

It would have been handy if the Guide came with a warning, maybe something like

DANGER DANGER DANGER

You have entered a high sunshine area, you have:

10 minutes until you get a sunburn ailment.

15 minutes until you develop sunburn blisters.

30 minutes until you perform a vampire death pyre imitation.

But it doesn’t.

Once all the workouts are done, I do a couple more bucket lifts, essentially filling it and then dumping it over my head. It’s a pulse-style shower head with a really slow 1 minute, fully manual pulse cycle. My arms are complaining as I work the pump, and shaking a bit as I lift the bucket over my head to dump it, but it’s nice and cool. I air dry for a while in the shade, away from the puddle I just made. I do some magic to cool myself off. And no, I don’t mean I created yellow ice.

As I mentioned before, I’ve discovered that magic effectively appears to be following thermodynamics laws, and you can get some nice side effects out of the transfer of energy, under the right conditions. When I make a heat burst, the heat comes from me. Yesterday, when I did 10 flame bursts in 15 minutes, I got pretty tired like I had been running for 15 minutes, but I was not sweating. In fact, I should have been sweating, just from environmental factors. Instead, there I was, standing over a hot stove, and I was downright comfy, instead of hot and sweating.

My stomach growls loudly as I walk into the house, leaving my shoes at the door, since they are kinda damp, squishy, and more than a bit dirty. I skipped breakfast and I’m ready for some food, followed by some meditation. I may or may not snore during that meditation. I check my stats quickly, but only walking has changed, halving the remaining distance to level 5. Just a bit more… should happen tomorrow or the next day. Mom has the soup on the stove, but it’s not ready now, it’s clearly for supper, so I munch on some old apples and a generous hunk of the sausage we got yesterday.

Time for my meditations.

I totally didn’t snore and that’s not drool on my shirt, it just didn’t get completely dry.

OK, so I only got a minute or two before contemplating my navel became a short-term eyelid leak test, during which I confirmed that my eyelids do not leak.

I stretch briefly, and all the muscles twinge a bit. I refrain from another stats check. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, a couple of days of exercise are not going to fix a ten cycles of avoiding it, and all I’ve done since the last check is the na… meditation. Sore, but refreshed, I head back to the backyard and fill the bucket. Time for some heat experiments. First on the docket, developing a constant drain instead of fire burst mode. After several failures, I do get a mild success. I picture heat coming off my hand in shimmering waves, while chanting softly to myself a new mnemonic phrase, just for this purpose.

“Slow and steady, cook the frog.” I say it in my original tongue, so it’s obfuscated. It’s a bit odd, but I’m basing it off some half remembered adage about not putting a frog in boiling water, but rather putting it in cooler water and then slowly heating to boiling. I’m not sure why you don’t pith the frog first, as it seems kinda cruel to me to cook anything alive, not to mention what if the frog does its froggy business in your soup since you're cooking it alive. Chunks of excrement floating in the soup seem bad to me, even if that makes me unadventurous. Heck in my old world, one of the most expensive coffees was made from pooped out beans. If there’s literally crap coffee, maybe frog poo stew is a thing somewhere.

But it’s not my adage, it’s just trying to speed up the process with the customized chants. Nothing seems to be happening for a while, but when I reach up to scratch my face, I’m hit with a wave of warm air. My hand is considerably cooler than the air. I place my hand in the bucket. The minutes pass without much incident, the water feels about the same temperature as my hand. I guesstimate that about 30 minutes have passed when I can’t keep my hand in the bucket any longer, because it’s too hot. I don’t have a thermometer, but I’d guess it’s slightly more than halfway to boiling. I’m a bit tired, but no worse than when I’d been walking for about the same amount of time. I dump the bucket out and refill it. This time when I place my hand into the water, I imagine the shimmering waves going faster. I can feel the drain on my energy, something akin to how I feel when running at my maximum sustainable speed. Maybe three-quarters of my sprinting speed. It takes much less time for this round to get to the point that I pull my hand out, but I’m breathing more quickly as though I’ve been exercising heavily for the last quarter hour, and not just sitting here with my hand in a bucket.

Much better than yesterday’s fiasco. I dump the bucket of warm water on the stink-pile to water down the stink, then trudge over to the shed and put the bucket away. I’m pretty wiped out, but I do move my protesting muscles in light patterns to keep them from going stiff like they did during my medi-nap-tion.

After a bit of a wash up, I fill up the water jug, and I go back in and sit at the kitchen table to relax for a bit, drink some water, and wait for supper.

I startle awake when my mom places a large bowl of soup in front of me. I mumble a quick “thank you” before I start slurping away at it. I’m done with firsts, seconds, and thirds about the time they finish up their bowls.

“I’m gonna head to the guard tomorrow to see what the entrance requirements are. Do you want me to fetch any staples from the general store while I’m out? I need to pull my weight around here, I’m eating about half the food.”

“I’ll make you a list.” Mom replies.

“Make sure you put flour and salt on it. Oh and some bread starter from Holcrumt’s bakery would be good, I think the one in the cellar has died off.”

“Um. Sorry about that dad, it’s probably my fault. I don’t think it’s the starter that’s gone bad, that’s just the residue of some magic that didn’t go quite right.”

Not waiting for a response, I head off to bed with a full belly and a weary head, and fall asleep to the sound of them building up the list of needs for the household.