“We need new magic,” I said as we walked under the searing sun across the barren wasteland.

“We don’t have time,” said Noel.

“Our traps aren’t working and we can’t hunt at night. These monsters aren’t very strong but they’re great at hiding and even better at running away. In the moonlight, they see us before we see them. With torches, they run away before we’re anywhere near them,” I said.

“The highlands are far away,” said Noel.

“I know, you said it’ll take a few weeks,” I said.

“Did I?” she said.

“You said the number of days, I’m choosing to use weeks because that’s what I learned back home,” I said.

“It’s weird to put seven days together and give it a name,” she said.

“You’re not wrong,” I said. “There were some people who wanted to put ten days together, but they cut off a lot of people’s heads which made some of their ideas a little controversial.”

“Ten days does make more sense,” she said. “One day for each finger.”

“Yeah, well, just don’t go around cutting people’s necks,” I said. “Anyways, magic. You’re right it’ll take too long if we stop, but how about coming up with some magic while we walk?”

“That’ll use energy,” she said. We stopped to make some water to drink. It was Noel’s turn to cast the water magic. “Every time we use magic, I can feel the energy leaving my body. And every time we’ve come up with a new type of magic, we’ve had to cast a lot of magic spells and used a massive amount of energy. Not to mention the time it takes to get it right.”

“True,” I said, pointedly, “but think of how much time we would gain if we had full bellies. And we can reduce the time it takes to come up with new magic by using a system we’ve already worked on before.”

“You want to come up with a new type of motion magic that helps us walk faster?” said Noel.

“That isn’t a bad idea,” I said, “but I think that’s going to be pretty complicated. It’s one thing to help us rush forward in a burst of speed, but the type of magic that would increase our speed at a constant rate? Yeah, that’s gonna take a lot of time and energy to invent.”

“Bursts of speed might help us catch some of those monsters that run away from our torches,” said Noel.

“No, the problem there isn’t speed, it’s the fact we can’t see in the dark,” I said.

“How tough would it be to come up with magic that helps us do that?” asked Noel.

“What, you want to create night vision magic?” I said. “I’m not sure. I think we’ll need to work on a lot of physics based magic before we get to something like light. No, I’m thinking something that’ll help us with our traps.”

“What is with you and traps,” said Noel.

“They make sense in our situation, okay!” I said, a little too loudly. Noel smiled and I rolled my eyes. “Fine, traps are cool. They save time and aren’t as tough to set up as it is to go hunting.”

“Alright, alright,” said Noel. “What kind of magic do we need to make?”

“To save time, let’s use a system we’ve already invented,” I said. “So far, we’ve used chemical processes to create fire magic, elemental and physical systems for water and rain, and physics and mechanics for motion magic. Honestly, we’ve mixed in philosophy, history, and geophysics, but broadly speaking, those are the systems we’ve used.”

“I know I have translation magic now, but that still made no sense,” said Noel, dryly.

Right, got a little carried away there. “What I mean is that we’ve come up with three different types of magic, and we’ve used different systems and processes to develop them. For fire, we used the process that makes things burn. For water, we used the elemental system which says everything is a mix of different elements but we also used the water cycle, which relies on a different system. And for motion magic, we mostly used mechanics, which is the system that makes things move. Although my special ‘still life’ magic uses a weird branch of philosophy.”

“You still need to teach me that magic, by the way,” said Noel.

I pouted. “But I was gonna make it my thing.”

“Your thing?” said Noel.

“You know,” I said, “my thing. Like, my own exclusive magic. Everybody would go: hey, look, that’s the great ‘still life’ magician Cas! He’s the guy who uses ‘still life’ magic!”

Noel wore a deadpan expression as she said: “Nobody’s going to call you that.”

“Yes they will!” I said.

“Fine, I’ll tell people to call you that if you teach me the spell,” she said.

“Actually,” I said, with a small laugh. “Promise to make sure no one ever calls me that, and I’ll teach you.”

“Deal,” she said. “But back to the new magic.”

“Right,” I said. “It’ll be tough setting up traps with fire, and I don’t think we can use that system to come up with something right now.”

“What about the elemental system?” said Noel. “I remember earth and wind are also elements, so we could use earth magic to dig deeper pitfalls or wind magic to cut things into sharper edges.”

I was about to criticize her suggestion like I usually did, but I stopped with my mouth still open. I furrowed my brows as I began thinking. “Actually, that isn’t a bad idea.”

“Right?” said Noel. “We already have all the assumptions in place, we just have to apply them to earth or wind or maybe even both. I know we used a different system for fire, but we could make an elemental version of that too.”

“Wow,” I said, slowly. “Since when did you get so good at inventing magic?”

Noel shrugged. “Remember what the Immortal of Madness said?” Noel smiled. “I’m much older than you!”

“No, wait, that’s not—” I began.

“You used to complain about it,” she said. “But I was right all along. You better be more respectful in the future, child!”

I facepalmed. “Sure,” I said. “Whatever you say, grandma.”

“What do you mean—” she began.

“Oh, back on my Earth, people over a hundred years old aren’t even grandmas. At your age, people became great-grandmas, or even great-great grandmas!” I said with a smile.

We bickered like that as we crossed over the desolate wasteland. There was nothing else to do and neither of us wanted to linger too long on our thoughts. Talking like this was a distraction, and a welcome one, at that.

“What kind of magic did you want to make, anyway?” asked Noel once we ran out of things to say about age.

“What do you mean? Your idea should be good enough. Let’s work some more on elemental magic,” I said.

Noel shook her head. “I could tell you had something else in mind. We won’t be reaching the highlands for a long time. We can make more than a couple of spells.”

“Well, I was thinking about using the system we have for motion magic,” I said. “But instead of magic that causes motion, like our invisible hands that can move and throw things, we come up with a type of magic that detects motion.”

Noel nodded. “Then we can set up a trap that activates when our magic detects motion.”

“Exactly!” I said.

“But what kind of traps would that work with?” asked Noel.

“We could balance something heavy, like a big rock, so that it falls when our magic is activated,” I said.

“We’ve made traps like that, especially for small animals,” said Noel. “We couldn’t make any this time because we didn’t have any plant fibers or sinew.”

I shrugged. It was basically a substitute for rope but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea. “We could also use this magic to set up a perimeter around our camp. That way we don’t have to take turns on night watch. Not like we’ve been doing a great job with that lately.”

“I told you,” said Noel. “The fire will keep away most monsters.”

“But what if there’s another monster like that one star Farro bird? It wasn’t afraid of fire and neither was The Terrible,” I said.

“Fine, fine. We can work on your motion detection magic too,” said Noel.

“Wanna race?” I said.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“You work on your elemental magic and I’ll work on my motion detection magic. My magic is a little more complicated, so you have to do both air and earth. Last one to finish their spells is in charge of water duty for the day!” I said. I instantly began focusing my magic.

“Wait,” said Noel as she focused her magic too. “you started first, that’s not fair!”

I laughed but refused to reply. I breathed deeply as we continued walking. As the sun went down its path in the sky, Noel and I distracted ourselves with a little bit of magic.