Chapter Seventy-Five - Flower Picking

I woke up to something pushing my chest in a very rude place.

I would have dismissed it, but whatever it was was warm and moved a little, and it was very distracting. So I slid one eye open and took in the interior of the tent. The walls were painted in splotches of bright blue where the morning sunlight beat against the canvas, and as I came awake, I noticed the happy birdsong of a forest coming to life.

Then my eyes focused and I noticed the prompt hovering before me.

Congratulations! Through repeated actions your Friendmaking skill has improved and is now eligible for rank up!

Rank C costs one (1) General Point

Had that levelled while I slept?

How?

The warm weight on my chest shifted again and I looked down. Awen was hugging me. One arm over my chest, with a hand pressed up on my tummy where my shirt had ridden up and her head was using me as a pillow.

It was kind of cute. That was, until her mouth worked and I saw a line of drool leak out to stain my shirt.

I giggled, then giggled harder when the noise made Awen smile in her sleep. The poor thing must have been having a nice dream. Determined not to wake her up, I shuffled to the side, carefully extricating myself from her grip with what little agility I had so early in the morning.

When I finally stumbled out of the tent it was to find Amaryllis sitting by the burnt out campfire, a pen in one talon and a metallic tablet on one leg and Orange lounging on the other.

“Morning,” I said.

“You managed to pry her off you,” Amaryllis asked as she finished writing a line down on the paper before her. She signed her name at the bottom with a flourish, then blew across the page.

“Hmm,” I said. “Yeah. I guess she’s not used to sleeping with people and glomped onto the warmth.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s exactly what’s happening,” Amaryllis said. She folded the page carefully, then scribbled something on the back.

“What’re you writing?” I wondered as I turned around and snuck back into the tent. My armour was laying off to one side where I had chucked it off before bed. Once I retrieved it I could start dressing again.

“A letter to my family. I keep them informed.”

“Of our adventures?”

“Amongst other things.” She disappeared the letter and her writing into her ring and then stood up with a groan. Had she been sitting there all throughout her watch? “Hardtack on the road?” Amaryllis asked.

“Sure.” It wasn’t exactly a five-star breakfast, and maybe Awen would be a teensy bit disappointed, but it would allow us to make a bit more headway on our trip.

According to Awen a caravan from Rosenbell to Greenshade took four to five days. On foot, it would take us a bit longer, though it was possible we could take shortcuts where there were no roads.

Once I was all armoured up, we set about cleaning the camp, picking up our things, and generally getting ready for the day until the last thing left to stuff away was the tent and the equipment within.

I crawled under the flap and found Awen curled up in a little ball under a pile of blankets. I almost felt bad for waking her up, but she had gotten her eight hours and then some. “Awen?” I whispered as I shook her shoulder.

She made a little whining noise and shifted to be deeper under the blankets.

I laughed. “Awen, wakey wakey, no eggs and hardtack.”

I wasn’t good at rhyming.

Awen opened her eyes and looked around before locking onto me. “Miss Broccoli?”

“The one and only,” I said. “We’re going to be leaving soon and it wouldn’t do to leave you behind, would it?”

“Awa,” she said as she sat up and rubbed at her eyes. “Okay. Let me get dressed and I’ll be with you.”

I grinned and stepped out.

A few minutes later, Awen was ready to go, the tent was packed away and poofed by Amaryllis and we were off. Pushing through the bush was annoying for a little bit, but as soon as we hit the road it became a whole lot easier to travel.

We set an easy pace at first, just a fast walk that took advantage of the slight incline in the terrain to keep us from getting tired. Awen’s sore feet didn’t make a return that I could tell.

Once we were through the forest the world opened up into another huge plain that stretched out far to the west. The grassy land slowly turned yellow near the horizon. “Is that the desert?” I asked.

“The sand,” Awen said. “It gets kicked up by the wind and covers parts of the plain. The actual desert is farther away, I think.”

“Neat.”

Bored with just walking normally, I started to push mana into my hands, varying the ebb and flow of it, while also making it spin this way and that. It took a bit of focus, but after nearly an hour I had figured it out a little.

My dad had taught me that when you were learning something new, at first you would improve a whole lot in a short while. Then you’d start to learn slower and slower as you perfected what you learned.

I imagined that magic was similar, especially when skills came into play. Initially there would be great leaps in ability and such, but eventually you’d hit a point where learning more took more and more time and effort.

It was something to think on, but not really a problem. I was so close to the very bottom of that learning curve that every hour spent practicing probably increased my ability exponentially.

“Hey, Amaryllis, how do I make Light aspect mana, and what’s it good for?”

Amaryllis eyed me for a bit. She had seemed happy to see me practicing earlier so I didn’t think the question would bother her. Also, there was nothing else to do. “Light aspect is one of the stranger ones,” she said. “It’s conceptually simple. Make your mana brighter. At some point you’ll have light or near-light mana.”

She raised a hand and a ball of mana formed in her palm. It crackled and snapped and hummed, but that subsided as the ball began to glow brighter and brighter until it was almost hard to look at.

Amaryllis dismissed it with a wave of her talons. “As for its uses. The obvious ones are all utilitarian. Most harpys have worse night vision than humans, or so I’ve been told. There are some creatures that will be hurt by light mana, but they’re uncommon. At higher ranks light magic can be devastatingly dangerous though. But for all of the speed and accuracy and power of high level light magic, you’re usually better off just calling down lightning on whatever you want to kill that badly.”

“I sense a bias,” I said.

“I notice a lack of practicing,” she snapped right back.

Snorting, I got back to it. Light was... bright? I fiddled with my mana, pouring more into my hands, shifting it this way and that. The light it emitted was bright, but not as Amaryllis’ had been.

Was I meant to think bright thoughts? Maybe I had to think like a photon or something.

I really wish I had access to Google. My last physics class was a few weeks in the past, which was plenty of time to forget a lot of the stuff I had known about electromagnetic spectrums and such.

I could have asked Amaryllis for more help, but I had time to figure this out on my own, and maybe magic was like drawing, where if you spent enough time figuring it out without too much help, you’d learn to develop your own style.

If I couldn’t get my mana to be light mana, then maybe I could at least try something else.

I started to move my hand in the air while pouring out thin streamers of mana, kind of like how Raynald had done, but with none of the grace he had. It kind of worked, and felt more natural besides.

Pushing the mana out into a more complicated shape while gesturing also felt better and easier. I cupped my hands together by my side, gathered mana within in a swirling ball, then shoved my hands out before me.

A teeny tiny fireball leapt ahead of me and dispersed in the air some dozen meters away.

That had been a lot easier than making it from scratch.

Physical Manakinesis

F - 35%

I hummed, then waved my hand in the air in a cutting gesture while firing a burst of cleaning magic. It swept out and pushed against the top of the nearby grass.

I tried the same with fire aspect mana. It wasn’t quite right, and all I did was waste a lot of mana and warm the air up, but it felt right. Not a spell, not really, but pure elemental mana pushed into the world to do something.

Physical Manakinesis

F - 38%

And it seemed as if I was on the right track, more or less. “Neat,” I said.

“Figure something out?” Amaryllis asked.

“I think so. But magic is complicated.”

Amaryllis snorted. “Idiot. If it was easy everyone would be using it. I’m impressed you’re even trying, you strike me more as a ‘hit things hard’ kind of person than a ‘light them on fire’ sort.”

“Awa, I don’t think Broccoli is like that.”

“I don’t want to light people on fire,” I said. Just the world around me. “I should learn more defensive magic, just in case though.”

“There are spells that create bursts of blinding light with light aspect mana. Or you could learn some earth aspect spells for defensive uses, but you’re on the far end of that spectrum with your cleaning focus. I’m afraid that most of the aspects that will be easy for you to use are more intangible.” Amaryllis hummed. “Maybe water? There are some shield spells that use natural water. And air aspect has a few interesting spells that can deflect arrows or weaker blows. It’s not adjacent to cleaning but near enough.”

“That sounds brilliant,” I said.

I bet that air and fire combined really well too. It would be hard to justify using thermobaric spells in the cause of making friends, but I’m sure the use would come up eventually.

“Awa, miss Broccoli, look,” Awen said, neatly cutting off all my glorious daydreams of mushroom clouds.

I followed her pointing finger to a distant patch of the prairies to the west that were covered in colourful flowers. It was a little spot between two hills, protected from the wind coming from the west and probably a nice place for water to gather.

“We should check it out!” I said.

Amaryllis sighed. “It’s not too far out of the way,” she admitted.

“Good eye, Awen,” I said.

“It, it was nothing?” the girl said.

I eyed the ditch on the side of the road, then decided that I ought to help Awen across. So with a grin I scooped her up in a princess carry and hopped over to the other side before she had even finished squeaking.

“Moron,” Amaryllis said as she took a running leap and flapped her arms twice before landing by our side.

“I would have gotten you next,” I said as I lowered a red-faced Awen. Poor girl, she must have been embarrassed that she needed help. I would need to tell her that I was always there to help if she needed it, and that she didn’t need to fuss over it.

“The day you carry me like that is the day I clip my own wings,” Amaryllis said. “Now, let’s go pick some flowers.”

***