A week has passed sense our marriage and during that time I had made several things and learned more about magic. That first morning I noticed that Charlee had red eyes and dark rings under her eyes. I guess we were too loud again. I made a box spring mattress for both our and Charlee’s room. I turned my old bedroom into a proper bathroom with a shower and working toilet. I made a waste tank deep, deep underground. It was large enough that it should never fill in our life time. I made the walls and floors out of marble and there were windows made with cloudy glass that would let some light in but you couldn’t see through.

I also made some incandescent lights for the entire house. The hardest thing to make was the rubber. My first few attempts at Turing plant fiber into rubber failed and I only got raw rubber sap. It wasn’t until I remember that raw rubber could be volcanized into workable rubber that things started to progress again. I guess that means I can’t make something I don’t at least somewhat understand. That means no Gundam mobile suit or mech armor any time soon. A few buried lead acid batteries and as long as I charge them once every few days there was no problem.

I also learned that I could copy objects quite easily. Like the rubber, once I had made some and had it I could easily replicate it and mold it into any shape or form I wanted. The house has transformed significantly. It no longer had the log house look but was now made of stone and marble. I expanded all of our rooms and redid the whole kitchen. I was planning to make an electric stove but Willow refused so I made a wood fire stove out of steel for her instead. That should save on fuel and keep me away from splitting wood.

Using magic was no longer exhausting as long as I didn’t take from myself and used the energy stored from that other place I now think of as my Well of Power or just Well. That morning when our now growing child was conceived, there was what I believe a large release of life energy. See? Naming magic that cleans, starts small fires and all of those little things that make life more convenient “Life magic” seems dumb now doesn’t it.

It seems that making or changing things that are alive uses a lot more energy. I experimented and tried to change a potato plant into a tomato plant as they are both from the nightshade family but it took a lot more energy than anything else I had ever made. I succeeded but living things seems to need or have that extra something. Makes since, if you have ever seen anyone die, there’s a moment where you can see the very life leave their eyes. In video you can never tell but in person it’s obvious when that happens. In the movies they try to replicate that with a loosening of the grip of a hand and the falling of said hand or a head tilting to the side. Don’t get me wrong that happens but they can never perfectly re-create that moment between life and death.

I had also learned that my magic was not normal. Most mages can only do one thing such as fire magic or wind magic. The most abundant were the elementalist, earth, fire, wind, water, light and dark. There are also healers but they are quite rare. The things I can do have only been heard of in the legends. Male mages are also rare. Only about 1 in 30 mages is a male and the number of people who awaken into mages is already small. The more powerful the bloodline of a mage the greater the chance that one would awaken their magic.

In Blasmar, there are 3 great mage houses. The House of Dawn which is the royal house, the Stormbringers who lead the military and Castos, the richest family in the kingdom. Each house owns one form of power and so they all balance themselves at the moment.

We were starting to run out of supplies and so it was about time to make a trip to the closest town and make some purchases. It took more energy but I conjured up some coins duplicating some of the ones that Willow had shown me. On the coins was the royal crest and on the other side was a blob. Willow said it was an image of the queen sitting on her throne but it just looked like a blob to me.

The coins here are not the perfectly stamped ones like back home. It’s more like some guy tried to stamp the coins with a hammer and always missed but nobody ever bothered to fire him. I also brought some of the knives, pots and pans I had created to trade or sell. The girls had for the last 2 years been living off the money their father had left for them and so didn’t have much of an income. I finally learned what the girls did all day and that was embroidery. As a noble lady they were not allowed to be seen doing manual labor and so embroidery was one of the few ways they could make money.

I had crafted a cart in anticipation for our journey. I want to be able to bring back more supplies so as to improve the livelihood of my family. Thinking of the two girls and our now growing child brought warmness to my heart. Just one night and I got her pregnant. I was both happy and sad. Happy that our family was growing and sad because I had finally experienced sex and now we had to refrain so as to not risk bringing harm to our child. I know it’s not just me that is frustrated. Our nights of extensive petting told me all of that.

The cart I crafted had several hidden modern tech. I had installed ball bearings to make the pulling smoother and spokes to relieve the pressure on the rim and wheel. The frame was constructed out of tubes of aluminum and everything was covered with a thin layer of wood as camouflage. Now we were ready for our trip to Norton Town.