Now that the others have left…

“So you saw the broom, right? Witches fly on brooms, right? When I saw this in the store I instantly thought about magic for flying, and making a flying broom.

Actually sitting on a broom to fly would probably be rather uncomfortable, especially for males… Unless you sit across it, which could lead to stability problems. Hm.

Aaaanyway, I saw an anime recently, about witches. Well, one in particular. About halfway through the show someone tells her the broom is just a tool for making the magic easier, not to actually be used as a vehicle.

In other words, it’s a focus. And with the force rod we have here-”

I hold out the result of our recent experimentation. It looks rather shabby, but I suppose it’s fine as a Work In Progress(WIP). I continue my explanation.

“Flying is just counteracting gravity, right? If you could push the air around you down hard enough, you’d fly. Closer to the ground, you even have the entire earth to push against, so within a certain height levitation would be easier and more efficient.”

I scratch my head with my free left hand.

“Point is, I want more magic for mobility, and flying is as mobile as it gets. If we can figure out a way to levitate with force magic, and then make the broom -or anything else, for that matter- make that easier, that would be cool.”

I can practically see her mind racing at the possibility, but her face shows some doubt.

“If you could make that work, it’d be amazing, but did you have me stay just to tell me that?”

“Uhh, no. Honestly, I think you might be better than me in magic, and either way more heads thinking about a problem means more possible solutions. I just want to discuss how we could make the idea a reality.”

As not to direct her thinking, I first ask her to think for a moment and tell me how she thinks it can be done.

She thought of more or less the same as me: You push the ground and/or air downwards to lift yourself up by Newton’s Third Law(equal and opposite reaction).

She suggest essentially mimicking a jet engine, rapidly pushing the air around you down. She notes that would probably suffocate you or otherwise be harmful, just as I am about to. She also thinks you could use [Force Magic] in such a way as to lift yourself.

We start discussing, and realize it all comes down to whether or not the laws of physics (as we know them) applies to magic. So we decide to find out.

She holds out a hand, and I hold mine over it and try to push it down with magic. With the other hands, we do the same, but reverted. As we gradually increase the power, not much happens at first, but eventually the hands are pushed down.

We both have high enough [Mana Perception] to see that the [Force Magic] is not coming from our hands, or rather, not only from them: We use our entire bodies to push down the other’s hands.

Not to be outdone by how we instinctually cast magic, we soon manage to cast magic from any part of our bodies, and in the process, learn a few useful things.

First, we generally draw mana from our surrounding when we cast magic. Afterwards, it disperses back into the air. It doing so, however, we use some of our own mana. It also disperses into the air.

Hilde realize that’s why it’s so hard to cast magic more than five meters away: Your mana simply disperses and become very hard to control. With this epiphany, we figure we can increase the amount of our own mana we use to increase range.

I point out I felt really tired whenever I used a lot of magic, and postulate it is because my own mana gradually ran out. Why it made me tired I can’t tell, but since the Upheaval, no, Reveal, magic and mana has literally become more and more a part of myself.

In other words: Our personal mana is a finite, but renewable resource. Hilde manages to learn [Mana Absorption], which takes foreign mana and makes it her own. I struggle for a while, but it seems my attempt is a little too brute-force. I’ll get it later.

She says our bodies does the same instinctively, and from what I saw, it is stupidly ineffective and time-consuming. One interesting use is that she can absorb my mana, either from spells or directly. With enough fine control, you could probably use it as a counterspell.

Returning to the topic at hand, casting magic with or from a specific part of one's’ body makes the spell less efficient; you need to input more personal mana, and more of that is lost. The surface area of the part in question seems to be the biggest contributor to efficiency.

With her new skill, she manages to limit the loss somewhat by taking in mana from the air with the rest of her body, not fully making it her own, but instead using it to fuel the magic.

Either way, we both figure out how to cast magic from a specific part, and with it a bunch of other tricks, levelling our abilities in the process.

Now that we have solved that problem, we retry the experiment, and this time we get the expected equal and opposite reaction.

But not necessarily.

Hilde manages to cast the spell from the air, that is, as if the air does the pushing and pulling, and indeed, from any arbitrary location or object.

The catch is that she needs to intentionally let out and disperse quite large amounts of her own mana, or at least the half-integrated mana from [Mana Absorption].

Either way, now that we have learned that the laws of physics applies to magic too, I use [Force Magic] at both the roof above and floor below, and by gradually increasing the power, I eventually lift off the ground, slowly.

Emboldened by my success, I lift my sitting self about a meter into the air…

And promptly flip around, crashing into the floor almost completely upside down.

“Are you okay?”

I glance over to Hilde, who herself was just about to lift herself off the ground.

“Worth it. Got the ability.” I say as I sit upright.

Note to self: Careful of your center of mass. Either use rotational force to balance yourself or apply most of the lifting force above your center of mass.

“[Force Magic: Levitation], huh. It’s a sub-ability, but I guess that makes sense. ‘The application of [Force Magic] to lift oneself or others.’ Or so it says.”

I rub the side of my right shoulder, which took most of the impact. “Ahh, it hurts a little, but nothing that won’t go away in ten minutes.

After that we repeat what I just did, but with some more care, and only a very short distance off the floor. After a couple minutes, we switch to standing. With the tricks to balancing we’ve already found, we don’t repeat my crash.

All the while, we discuss the possibility of aiding the ability with an item. Learning from the [Force Rod] we made earlier, it should make casting the magic easier, and possibly automate parts of the spell.

We decide a flying (well, levitating) broom would need a stabilization or gyro function, and you would probably want something to assist lift as well as something to assist movement.

That is as far as we get before Hilde has to leave for another appointment, but not before telling me she will experiment with one herself, and that we should compare our results in a few days time.

I return to my computer to make some more notes and write down a couple ideas for both the {Magic Gun} and {Magic Broom}. I also write down a couple ideas for magic tools that would make working with and making artifice and magitek easier, and a concept that would be invaluable if you want to automate the making of such things.

To train my abilities, I forego the chair to levitate, and soon earn the [Mana Absorption] ability and use it to offset the rather steep mana cost of levitating. Pretty comfortable, at least.

Then I turn my thoughts towards tomorrow’s meeting, and after opening a document for that, hover over to the kitchen to prepare a frozen pizza.

Later, I check the usual sites

Oh dear.

…

Several reports of people dying from [System] powers.

One report makes me chuckle and then mentally remind myself that I’m a terrible person for doing so. The death in question was an american in his early thirties who learned learned an ability for jumping, and in drunken stupor deciding to jump up to the fourth floor of a building.

It’s not clear what exactly happened, but after jumping he was limp, and not jumping high enough, he hit the side of the building, just short of his goal… And then fell down, breaking his neck on the pavement below. Of course his friends had the foresight to film his ‘awesome skill’.

In other news, I don’t think recreating the finishing move of of a certain explosion happy fantasy character is very clever. Not when you don’t have a bunker to run and hide in. Luckily this was a sparsely populated area, but several people were injured and multiple building damaged or destroyed.

And then there’s the guy who decided to rob a bank with magic, getting away with a whopping hundred british pounds. Protip: Most money is purely electronic or stored in very secure vaults, as opposed to a building in the middle of a city.

There’s already people snarkily saying to ban ‘assault magic’. Or they might be serious. Lawmaker Poe is a bit of a bastard.

I bookmark some of the thread to check in on later, and then make a post to share some of my new knowledge, mostly theoretical bits.

After some breakfast and checking the bookmarks, I pack the magic tools for the demonstration in my small backpack, along with some equipment for repairing them. That is, my pencilcase, a notebook for paper and some tape.

I also bring my small toolkit and a reserve wooden rod, for good measure. I leave the wand behind, to test the summoning bond over a longer distance.

With that on my back I step out and lock the door. I check the clock. A little bit more than one hour, good enough. I shift to my wolfkin form and walk down the stairs. It’s a bit awkward with digitigrade legs, but I apply the skill I learned for stabilizing myself when levitating to not fall over.

Once I get to the ground I start jogging, then running. It would take about thirty-five minutes to get to the military base by public transport, but I made sure to have double that, in order to try out my mobility.

I notice looks from people as I half run, half leap, with a speed exceeding what I could before. In fact, thanks to traffic lights and intersections, I move faster than cars half the time. So something like thirty kilometers an hour?

Either way, wolfkin form and using levitation to propel and balance myself lets me move through the city rather easily, bypassing crosswalk by jumping over them. As in, several meters into the air.

I wonder if I’m breaking some sorta law? Actually, how high up does the crossings ‘count’? I bet there’s no laws about it, simply because it would previously be impossible to do something like this.

I land right next to a woman, who yelps in surprise. “Woops. Sorry.” Gotta make sure to land away from people, though.

Dang, with this speed I think the metro would be slower. Yush! No adverse effects so far, so from the next large jump, let’s try to sustain my airtime.