We stood opposite each other, gunslingers itching to draw. Hell, I even stood with my hands by my side, finger’s ready to click at a moment's notice. Her entire body was tensed, fists clenching and unclenching in a staccato rhythm.

Threat assessment: I would likely get my ass kicked. According to Nox she had killed the last guy who ticked her off, him not being real an entirely moot point. Answer? Diffuse the situation. How? Balls of steel.

I started chuckling softly, then louder and louder, and before long I was laughing near maniacally. “Oh fuck me, leprechaun boy, good one.” I kept chuckling as I spoke, hoping to god she would be nuts enough to laugh away the nearly homicidal situation.

… she giggled lightly, before sitting down again. “First time anyone’s had the balls to call me a gorilla to my face, at least you’ve got a pair.” Again that lilting voice, contradictory to the insanity coming from her mouth.

Thank fuck I know how to deal with people like her.

And thank fuck it actually worked.

After settling down we chatted some more. Apparently Jeremy, or Jay, as he preferred to be known, was proper british nobility, couple of hundreth in line for the throne or thereabouts. He was also pissed that I had managed spellcasting.

“I thought you were like me, no help from the parents or nothin’, but if you aren’t a legacy mage, where the hell did you get that telekinesis spell. It’s got a fairly sophisticated manastructure, even a bit…. strange. Whoever heard of using a high end polygon scanning system on an Initiate level spell?”

To show off or not? What’s that quote; the truth will set you free?

“I’m not a ‘legacy’ mage, whatever that is, I’m from a family who doesn’t even know about magic. As for the spell…. listen I did the best I could trying to be mana efficient while allowing for lifting bigger stuff okay?”

He gaped at me.

“You…. made the spell…. yourself? You fucking what. HOW? It’s some of the hardest stuff in the world to link a mana structure to your subconscious. Nevermind coming up with the mana structure in the first place. You’re a bloody genius mate.”

“Thanks…. I guess?”

We chatted back and forth a bit, asking each other about how we had fought in our versions of the simulation. It seemed Alex was quite the pyro, having achieved a second tier connection to Fire without having used any of the other elements.

Deaudra used a series of enhancement spells to improve her physical combat. Pretty much opposite to my own wizardry, but different strokes I guess. Over the course of our chat, I formed a fairly solid rapport with each, though I was still fairly sure Alex and Deaudra were nuts.

But maybe that’s just a woman thing. Probably. The dryad I knew notwithstanding.

We chatted for maybe 20 minutes before I was ready to go home. Getting up to leave after saying a quick ‘see you later’, I walked out of the building with a smile on my face. I had contemporaries. Peers, even.

Before I could even get to the end of the street Jay caught me by the shoulder, and raised a finger as he caught his breath.

“Hey there Charlie old boy, you wouldn’t help a fellow out with his spellcasting would you?”

I considered it for a bit.

“Alright, sure, but some ground rules, because I practice best at home, and I need you to keep the peace.”

I explained about how my parents and sister didn’t know about my magic, and I would like to keep it that way. I kept back the family history, but I did give him some tips for dealing with my father. IE, don’t try and argue with him, ever.

We took the metro home, and I introduced Jay as a foreign exchange recruit, who had been offered the opportunity to learn from our policing methods. It wasn’t untrue which as previously mentioned, is the secret to a good lie.

Entering what I now considered my shed, I sat down with Jay and began walking him through how I had constructed my temperature control spell. He took notes as I described the feeling of ‘bottling’ all of the components into a word or motion.

“Have any other original spells?”

I showed him my firebolt.

“Oh wow that’s a really solid firebolt. There’s loads on the market, but I reckon that’d be in the higher end. But I saw your hesitation there mate. Show me what you’ve got.”

“Sԋιҽʅԃ”

He examined the shield spell in silence, occasionally rapping his knuckles on the surface.

“Incredible. This is….I mean I’ve seen Arcanists with worse shields. Where did you get the inspiration…. for…. any of it?”

I explained about hexagons being the strongest shape, and about how I noticed double paned windows when I worked on it. He just started laughing. “You know what, I take back the genius comment. You’re just nuts.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“I didn’t hear a denial there mate.”

Fuck he got me.

“Yeah, fair enough” I replied, matching his grin. “But sanity is highly overrated. For some reason I can’t get any more up and working though.”

He frowned for a second, thinking.

“Ahh you know what mate, it’s probably your current spell cap. How many spells do you have going, just the three you showed me right?”

I paused for a second.

“Don’t tell me you have more…. Have you already made your first breakthrough? You have, haven’t you, you jammy git. Makes sense. Basically you have a certain limit based on your mental fortitude. For me, still at Initiate, I’m at two spells that I keep in my subconscious before I start getting nosebleeds. How many do you have after the first breakthrough, four?”

“Nah, six.”

He looked fairly impressed. “Wow you must have fairly solid mental control. You can improve the amount you can keep with mental training, but I hear it’s pretty hard. That explains how you’re able to handle that high-end targeting system too.”

Huh, made sense, otherwise you could just have a limitless number of spells for every situation. I was immediately thinking about how to get around it. Some sort of spell storage…. Or maybe an artificial mind of some kind. AI could probably be done….

Jay seemed to have some knowledge of the magical world that I didn’t, so maybe he knew of a pre-existing answer.

“Ok so how do people get around that?”

He smirked, as though he was expecting the question.

“I mean it’s a bit cliche, but a lot of mages use a spellbook, with the manaform drawn into it, as well as the cadence required to cast the spell. Once you’ve had the spell in your subconscious, you can write it down and remove it from your subconscious, and you can still use it for a while after reading it.”

“Like the weird drawings that unlocked each manipulation in the first place?”

“Bang on mate, though those are a bit different, at least I think so, otherwise wouldn’t we have to look at ‘em every couple days?”

Huh, made sense I suppose. I was definitely not getting rid of the combat spells, as well as telekinesis, it was just too damn useful, but my quality of life spells could probably go into a book, or actually, maybe something better….

“Hey Jay, how come you know so much about the wizarding world?”

“Well like I said mate, I’m nobility, and most of us are magic. My parents are both Sixes, but I didn’t want to cheat, y’know.”

“Ahh, fair enough.”

“Anyway, I think the books that have the elemental signatures in ‘em are also different ‘cause anyone can read ‘em. Aside from the mana structure, most of your drawings and notes and stuff will be incomprehensible to everyone else, unless you learn the standard rune language, which I think those books are in. Not sure though.”

We dicked around for a couple more hours, getting to know each other better, and eventually I was able to help him form his own basic telekinesis spell. The structure was fairly similar for the lifting part, using Air, but his targeting was a lot more basic, using a sphere of solid mana.

You do what you can, I suppose.

I was tempted to let him know about the Weave, but I had no idea if he already knew about it and was on it, and I also had no fuckig clue how to make one of those mana signature thingies that Jim and Lira had given me. Another time.

Around seven o’clock he had to head off, and waved goodbye as he sat into a limo I hadn’t seen come down the street. And then…. the limo took off. As in…. flew away. Fuck me that was awesome. I wanted one.

My father walked up behind me, and growled.

“Why’d he leave in an abomination, Charlie?”

“He’s some kind of minor nobility Dad, whoever he was going to meet was probably some kind of higher up noble, and you know how those rich types love to have ma… weird stuff.”

He grunted. Hell yeah, didn’t even need liar mode.

After he walked back inside, I lit a cigarette using a flame from the tip of my finger, and got to thinking, while watching the limo fly away, towards the highrises in the distance. If the only thing holding me back from producing as many spells as I could think of was not having a ‘spell book’, then that was going to be my next project.

And I already had a good start.

Heading back in after I was done with the smoke, I opened up my manaphone and started searching the Weave for what I was looking for. Specifically, information on how the Weave worked.

It seemed the Weave was based on the same structure as the Veil, piggybacking on it’s widespread network. As for how the various ‘websites’ worked, it seemed they were held inside some kind of crystal, and then the spell cast upon the crystal you owned linked it to the greater network, the reflective surface linked to whatever image was inside the crystal.

So the spell itself didn’t actually involve Light, at least on the user end. Interesting.

I looked for someone selling spells and they were surprisingly rare. Apparently spells were mostly sold in physical shops, or not at all. I was able to find a couple basic ones and they went for several hundred dollars.

Luckily, I had been saving.

I was only just able to afford the equivalent of a photograph spell, but that was pretty much what I wanted anyway. I ‘bought’ the spell, and a popup appeared to ask if they could know my location. Nothing ever changes, I suppose.

A small wooden box appeared with a puff of purple smoke. Opening it, inside I saw a scroll with a wax seal, a small crystal in the seal’s center center. Beside that was a small note with the fee.

After removing the scroll, put in the cash I had been saving, closed the box, and fed the crystal on the box’s lid a small amount of mana. In a flash, it was gone, a small thank you note left behind where the box once was.

Feeding another piece of mana to the crystal in the seal, it opened, a neat security measure tied to my mana signature. If the seal was broken without my mana in the crystal, the scroll would’ve burned up.

Reading the scroll with my mana sight, I immediately had a pounding headache and could feel the veins in my temple throbbing. I quickly pulled out the crystal I had prepared, buying one cheaply from the weave.

An information storage spell was pretty simple, it was a pure mana shell, combined with flooding the organised structure of the crystal with mana to hold the info.

I was fairly sure I could make it better by using binary, but I wasn’t going to try and edit the photo spell because I was pushing fairly close to an aneurysm by using an element two tiers above what I currently could, nevermind editing it.

I took the crystal I had flooded with mana, and attached it to the bottom of the manaphone, mirroring it’s topside. Writing down the mana structures for my three quality of life spells, as well as my affectionately dubbed ‘Sleep’ spell.

Once I had them written down on blank sheets of paper, notes on pronunciation and spell structure filling the page almost entirely, I used the Photograph spell, not even daring to look at the spellform in case I fucked the whole thing up with my lack of understanding.

“p̸̡̣̲̭̯̲̬̳̂̍͂̔̕h̴̯̩̣́͗̒͑o̴̰̭̮̙̦̺̞͖͔͎̎͂̂̋͐̅̊̕͝t̸̻̼̎̇͊ö̵̢̡͎̣̳̹̰́̆́g̷̖̋͂̑̓̓̃͘ŗ̴̛͍̳̖̠̣͚͈̪̿̇̎̄͛͆͆͝͝ͅǎ̷͚̲̝̤͕̣͒̽p̵̣̺͔̪͕̣̞͇͕̪͒̏ḩ̷̡̛̰̘̯͓͕͖̞́̇̂͋̌͐͛”

The result of the spell is a swirling ball of colour, held in place via a shell of mana around it. Through a tiny pinhole I opened in the crystal’s mana shell, I pushed the swirling colours through, their fluid nature freezing as they hit the ordered structure of the quartz.

Repeating this process, I now had four distinct pictures floating inside the crystal. My head felt like it was about to explode, but I pushed on. Looking at the spellform for linking a crystal to the Weave, it seemed fairly simple at first glance, but it hid a subtle complexity.

I was able to pick it apart after a bit, and added the part that linked the image the crystal contained to the reflective surface, using a bit of my telekinesis’ targeting system to pick the right image.

It was nowhere near as comprehensive as I wanted it to be, but I was definitely taking strides towards a full mana based operating system.

Testing it out, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was relatively simple to use, having added a simple plane of mana across the surface to detect being touched, and tying that to the targeting system. I had a mana-digital spellbook. Bitchin’.

Once I was done, I collapsed into bed, my pounding head subsiding as I drifted off into the land of dreams.

‘Wait, was there an actual land of dreams? And if so, did you go there when you dreamt?’ After that thought, I took a few minutes longer to get to sleep.

The following morning, I photographed the spell scroll for Photograph and burned it with a quick telekinesis combined with a quick puff of flame. Couldn’t have that shit left lying around. I knew for a damn fact my parents searched my room from time to time.

Speaking of which, time to get back to some spell creation. I had a couple hours before I needed to get into the academy, so why not prove my suspicions? A quick alarm type spell should be fairly simple.

It took me twenty minutes to get mana to act ‘sticky’. The secret was to not fully consolidate the edges of the structure, the bleed off letting it cling to nearly any surface. Another half hour later and I had woven a thin tube of mana, almost like fibre optic cable, which would stick to any surface, but could break easily.

Inside the ‘fibre optic’ mana wire, I put a small blip of pure mana, using the signal aspect of the Weave spell to make it travel to the manaphone once it had been let out of the wire. I also added a photograph of a ball of flame and a quick vibration to the phone, so that once it received the signal I would get an alert.

Weaving the string of mana all around my room, I created a web mana, finally linking it back to the start, before sending that blip of mana into the wire. Alarm spell, successful.

Before I could start converting it into a proper spell and then writing it down, I got the shout for breakfast. Shit, times up.

Heading over to the Academy after breakfast, I was on the metro before I felt an alert on my phone. Checking my phone I was surprised to not see anything before realising I was looking at the wrong one.

Yeah, there it was. My room had been invaded, as the flame on the manaphone proved. I wasn’t anywhere near able to make a camera with magic, but I felt like it was my sister. She was always nosy.

Looking at the time, I realised that I had enough time to go home for a few minutes and still get to the Academy on time. I got off the metro at the next station, swapping to the reverse line quickly.

Opening my front door, I walked into the kitchen to see my sister staring at a book. My book. The Idiot’s guide to Mana.She had hidden it inside a different cover, but I could see the familiar frayed edges peaking out.

Balls.

She looked up at me, and then back down, nonchalantly asking me if I wasn’t going to be late.

“Sis, I distinctly remember telling you not to go into my room.”

She gaped at me.

“How could you possibly know that I….”

I smirked internally, understanding what Nox felt like for once.

Then I raised an eyebrow. God, this was better than sex…. presumably.

“Yeah well, if you don’t tell me, I’ll tell Mom and Dad that you’re a wizard!”

Double Balls.