Rum paced pack and forth in the shop bedroom. It was evening, and he was trying to figure out how one could rectify confusion magic. And how would he even test the spell, if he could make it? There must be somewhere he could get some confused people.

Rum stopped pacing. He had the beginnings of a plan! There was a permanent supply of confused people in society: the really old, and the really mentally ill. But where could a person get his hands on a really old- or really mentally ill person so late in the evening?

Rum continued pacing back and forth. Old people typically lived with their families, but not that many people managed to get old enough, that they’d be become senile enough, for his purposes. Rum went and opened the door to the workplace. Amez sat by a table drawing on a large piece of paper.

“What are you doing?” Rum asked, walking up to see. “Sketching out tomorrow’s tattoo.” Amez replied monotonously. On the paper was the outline of a person’s back. On the middle of this back Amez drew some kind of dragon perched upon a small mountain of treasure.

Rum stared at it for a few seconds, before slowly stepping in front of the table, facing Amez. After a little while, Amez looked up at his big brother: “What is it?”

“Well, I could need your help a little. Do you know where I could find some really old people, or possibly severely mentally ill people. I need them for my research.”

Amez looked so full of questions for second, then slightly disturbed, then slightly amused. “What” he finally said, “would you do with the old or mentally ill?”

“Well. I’m trying to make that spell Elrith needed of me. But I don’t have any confused people. If I could just get my hands on some confused person, I might be able to figure out how their mind differs from ours, and possibly I could fix it. It probably won’t be a permanent fix, but I have an idea about what I will do: I intend to make a spell of clarity. If my instincts are correct, it’ll be like drinking a hundred cups of the blackest coffee, but without the nervous shaking or constant need to pee.”

“You are gonna cure old people’s confusions with coffee magic?” Amez looked back at Rum with a smile of incredulous amusement.

“Well, not quite so simply. But I am going to need help getting some hot coffee too now that I think about it. I’ll use your money to buy that from some coffee house. They are still open aren’t they?”

“Yeah, there’s one north up the street from here. But I don’t know any confused old people. And the only mentally ill ones I know are the insane beggars you can find five streets west of here, at the beginnings of The Raven’s Slum. But your coffee magic probably won’t work against them… or do you think so?”

“I don’t know,” Rum said, already stepping away and towards the door “but there’s only one way to find out I guess. Wish me luck! I’ll go check out the slum” and as he finished speaking the door closed behind him. Amez looked at the door, not really knowing what to think of it all. But a few seconds passed, and he went back to work. “It’ll probably work itself out” he muttered to himself.

Rum meanwhile ran outside and up the streets to find the coffee shop. Above him was a big moon shining silvery light across the streets, illuminating the evening. After roughly a hundred meters of heavy jogging Rum found the place. He barged into the fine establishment and ran up to the counter where an elegantly moustached, bald old man in fine attire stood.

“Your blackest coffee as quick as possible.” Rum almost shouted, slamming a silver piece on the table.

The coffee shop attendant looked at the coin curiously, then took it, shrugged with his eyebrows and went to the kitchen where he yelled the order. Rum looked around while he waited. A lot of upper-class people where here. Mostly lords, ladies and their soft spoken finely dressed socialite friends. Some of them gave Rum a glance, but not much more. It only took a few minutes before the coffee arrived steaming hot. As he grabbed it from the attendant the bald man yelled “nooo!”. Rum felt an instant burning pain from the cup, and his lips felt on fire. To his credit he didn’t scream or spill the coffee, but merely put it back down gently on the plate.

“Yes, it is perhaps a bit hot.” Rum sent a healing spell through his body, focusing on his lips. “But I need to drink this now.”

The attendant put it down on the counter and suggested “Just let it wait some minutes, and it’ll cool itself down.”

“Hmm… “ Rum thought out loud. “I’m a mage, cooling a cup of coffee should be an easy task for a mage.” The bald moustached man just stared at Rum with professional patience. Inside of Rum however, memories of his days at the university, and the Basic Elemental Magic course; was running through his consciousness. But he didn’t remember any spells from that time. And as he now was basically spiting the magic of the gods with his new magics, he wasn’t sure they’d even allow him to cast a standard spell. No, if he was going to cool the coffee, he had to use his own magic, or just wait. But unlike the attendant, Rum wasn’t particularly patient. Although some people could mistake his occasional obsessions for patience, really it was just the determination of his urges for discovery.

Rum knew how to cool his own body. He had used such a spell once while travelling through a desert after being chased by bandit riders. He just needed to be able to do the same with an inanimate object that wasn’t himself. So he closed his eyes, and he sensed the coffee cup with his mana. In some ways this was going to be simpler. Cooling a body – without hurting the body – that had been a difficult task. But cooling a coffee cup, that could allow for a certain margin of error.

Sensing the motion of the particles making up the coffee, Rum suddenly grasped them; forcing them to slow down. Draining the kinetic energy from the particles he then dispersed the energy into the environment, creating an omnidirectional breeze of warm air. As Rum opened his eyes, he caught a glimpse of the wild flapping of the coffee attendant’s magnificent moustache in the wind. The attendant had now lost his posture, and was gaping at him.

Rum didn’t wait any more. He leaned down and touched the coffee cup. It was only mildly hot now. He grabbed it and drank it all.

“Was that a spell?” awed the attendant. “Yes” Rum said, between large slurps, before finishing, burping and putting the cup down. “Thank you, it was most certainly black!” and he ran out.

Rum followed the directions down the streets again and headed westwards to reach The Raven’s Slum. As he walked briskly past each street he noticed how they got progressively worse in the paintjobs of the buildings, the occasional patched up window or scratched walls, not to forget the cleanness of the streets with the occasional broken bottle or animal waste. As he came to The Raven’s Slum, a small dirty river separated the slum from the east of Ermos. A nearby wooden bridge allowed for travel into the slum, but only a handful of people were nearby, and nobody seemed to want to cross it. Rum didn’t have time to consider if there was a reason for that though and just crossed.

On the other side there was a very sloppily designed maze of houses that looked more like glorified shacks. Some of those houses weren’t even properly upright but leaning onto each other. At one point Rum saw a total of five houses leaning on top of each other in the same direction, effectively all being stopped from collapsing by the sturdiness of an old slightly overgrown brick house with a broken ground floor window. The streets had some people. At one point he walked past what must’ve been a tannery, he couldn’t exactly tell because of it had been clumsily walled in, probably to shield the community from most of the foul odors.

“Something I can help the gentleman with?” said an old hoarse voice. Rum turned around to see a slightly small, skinny, wrinkled old man with nearly closed eyes and a broad smile revealing a nearly toothless mouth. On the old man’s head was a green beanie. On his torso the old man wore a many times stained brown button shirt, while his legs were dark blue rough cotton.

Rum found it amusing to be referred to as a gentleman, but that was the power of his magic he guessed. A little bit of magic and one can almost look like the son of someone moderately wealthy.

“Hi old man, I’m Rum, what’s your name?”

The old man took a step closer and almost whispered his reply: “Adalas” he said, “that’s my name. Though the younger people call me Toothie, because of my lack of teeth you see” and he gaped wide as if the facts weren’t already clear on that.

“Hi Adalas. I come here on an errand. I’m an academic–”

“Academic?” Adalas, a.k.a. Toothie, thought aloud.

“Yes. And I’m here on a bit of a quest. I’m currently researching a spell against confusion, and was in need of some subjects to try it on. I’m specifically looking for someone who might not be quite okay in their head.” Rum spoke slowly, laying a finger on his head as if to illustrate. “Someone who might forget a lot, or has difficulty understanding things. However, it’s important they weren’t forgetful or had difficulty understand before. It should be a fairly recent phenomenon.”

“You are looking for confused people? Really? And what will you do with them if you find them?”

“Oh I’m just going to experiment a bit with magic. Nothing too harmful. I might even be able to cure the confusion… I hope. Well anyways, if you could help me find someone, I have a bit of money I could give both you and the confused specimen for your troubles.” Rum fished out the remaining coins from Amez.

Adalas eyed the coins while sucking on his single remaining front tooth in a way that Rum could only guess was habitual.

“I know one” He said after a brief pause, his eyes a bit wider. “that you might make your… “ Adalas paused again briefly, and then said the words “experiment on” almost like a bad aftertaste made into words. Suckling his tooth a bit more he eventually continued:

“And I can take you there,” his eyes growing firmer, “but that would be on two conditions! And absolutely no less than these conditions.” He gave Rum an intense stare of reservation, before elaborating “First, I’ll be there to observe what you are doing; I don’t want you to do anything that I don’t approve of. Second, I want to know about your experiments before I take you there.”

Rum nodded along. “Those are fair conditions. But what I will be doing might be difficult for a non-magically trained person to understand-“

“Try me!” Adalas retorted, in a manner challenging and a bit insulted.

“Okay. Well, I’m in the rare business of spell crafting. I’m going to try and make a new spell. In order to do that I will have to study the mana of the confused specimen – your acquaintance – and I will have to compare it to the structure and dynamics of the mana of someone experiencing clarity. From this situation I might be able to deduce evidence of corrupting mana in the specimen, and destroy the corrupting mana.”

Adalas nodded along firmly as Rum talked, then got silent. At that point it took roughly half a minute before anyone of them spoke again, Adalas breaking the silence first:

“Destroy the corrupting mana… what if you somehow destroy the wrong mana. Could that hurt her?” Adalas sucked his tooth thoroughly, eyes concerned and looking up into Rum’s.

“It’s a woman?” Rum said pulling back from Adalas’ close and heart-meltingly concerned stare. “Well yes it could. But if you find evidence that I have damaged the mind of your acquaintance: I am willing to pay five times as much to both of you in compensation. Though I doubt that will ever be necessary, I will work with caution. I’m not a novice of magic, Adalas. I have trained at Flip University once, and I crafted many spells before. Never has anyone come to severe harm from my experiments…” Rum looked up in thought for a second, “Okay, let’s rephrase that. Not severe lasting harm. Which is the most important kind of harm. Anything temporary is, of course, temporary, and even that only happened once!”

Adalas stood still first, just nodding slowly, but firmly. Then he strolled off a couple of meters in clear contemplation, scratching the back of his head and stroking a few stubbles on his chin.

“Fine.” He finally said, “I believe you. But know that the woman you’ll be seeing is my older sister. If something happens to her, I’ll make sure that you’ll be cursed by a powerful witch!”

“Interestingly enough the objective of this spell is to dispel a witch’s curse.” Rum said matter-of-factly. “But no problem, if I mess up your older sister I probably will deserve that curse.” And he tried to smile.

To that sentiment Adalas nodded firmly in agreement, before setting off with Rum.

The two walked for about ten minutes, passing many dirty and barely standing shacks. Outside the shacks were people glaring at Rum. He thought they might be curious as to what would bring a wizard out here. Some of the older women looked less than kind at him though, and Rum wondered what that might be about. If they were just having a bad day, or if he’d somehow given them one. But this was all soon forgotten when Adalas stopped outside of a two-story building and pointed up to the shut wooden window at the second floor.

“That’s where she lives, my sister. My niece runs this house. She’s got two young sons here too. My sister mostly stays in bed, her mind isn’t able to do much else.”

Adalas led the way inside. The walls on the inside were as expected quite plain in themselves, with lockless wooden doors on either side. As they got further inside there hang tools, bowls and other basic items on the walls, as well as an unevenly placed shelf with wooden cups. Passing the end of the entrance hallway they came to an open area with a hearth, kitchen and dining table to the left, and a tiny steep set of stairs to right.

“Who have you brought into my home?” said a warm but tired woman’s voice. Rum noticed it came from a woman cleaning an iron pot in the kitchen. At the woman’s feet were two young boys with stained and torn clothes playing with kitchen tools. They both looked up at the guest that’d arrived.

“Lini, this gentleman wants to try and cure my sister. And he’s paying money for it too. I’m just taking him upstairs so that he can make his attempt!”

The woman, Lini, looked up at Adalas with some concern. One of the little boys, maybe 5 or 6 years old, stood up meanwhile, and pointed at Rum:

“Are you a wizard?” the boy said.

Rum nodded and smiled warmly. “Yes I am little boy. I’m very much a wizard, here on an errand of magic.”

“I wanna watch!” the boy exclaimed to his mother. The other little boy, perhaps 4 years old, got up too and joined his big brother in an excited nagging of their mother.

“No I don’t think that’s wise, magic is dangerous boys!” she said, “what if this wizard ends up turning you into little rats?”

The boys turned around and now looked at Rum with some fright in their faces, and both fell silent.

“Now now”, Rum said, “I don’t know what you’ve heard of magic Lini – I assume that’s your name – but my magic is not dangerous. This is all going to be quite harmless. I wouldn’t mind if they looked either.”

The woman Lini held her two boys tightly, both now looking up at her expectantly.

“Well.” she sighed. “Don’t bother the wizard too much, and stay in the corner if you’re gonna be up there! And don’t get in the way of the magic!”

“Yeeyh!” the two boys exclaimed. Adalas smiled grandfatherly and took this to be his clue for bringing Rum upstairs.

As Rum surfaced above the last step of the stairs, he saw what would have to be Adalas’ sister sitting on a bed, staring at the wall in front of her. Next to the bed was a chest, and next to a closed window was a chair, the room lit by moonlight from the cracks in the walls. The old sister had white long hair, a long neck and was relatively tall. She wore a light-blue nightgown. She turned around slowly as the company of Adalas, Rum and two excited little boys entered the room.

“Rhathie, how are you big sister?” Adalas smiled broadly and walked up to his sister, giving her a wet kiss on the cheek and holding both her hands. His sister Rhathie stared back at him with confusion, and more than that: anxiety. She looked over at me and my entourage of two little boys, grabbing her younger brother Toothie for safety. And as Adalas comforted his sister, and tried to explain to her that Rum was here to make her feel better, Lini revealed her arrival with a loud creak at the top of the wooden stairs.

“Adalas” Rum eventually said, interrupting a low soft-spoken conversation between Adalas and his sister. “Is it okay for me to begin my attempt?” Adalas concernedly sucked his tooth while looking into Rhathie’s eyes, clearly waiting for her consent. Rhathie grabbed her bed pillow and hugged it as she looked down and away from everyone. She mumbled something. “She’s okay with it. Do your best wizard” Adalas said, and a somewhat grim expression overtook his face. Or was that regret? It was difficult for Rum to judge, but Rum was sure this would be fine. The family couldn’t know this though, and they all looked at him with expectation as Rum pulled the window chair over to the bed and started closely examining his subject’s appearance.

“How old is your sister, Adalas?” Rum didn’t take his eyes off of Rhathie as the question was asked.

“74” Adalas spoke softly.

“And when did she start becoming so… confused?”

“It started just a little bit 5 years ago.” Adalas said looking depressed. “But it’s been much worse the last two years. She almost never knows where she is. Me, Lini and the boys have had to care for her. Feed her sometimes, when she forgets about meals. Keep her safe, when she starts getting scared. She barely knows how to attend to her own needs anymore too. I’m afraid that if I hadn’t told you about her, or if you end up unable to help her now, then something bad will eventually happen soon, and she might be gone. Dead in the mind, or dead in the body. I don’t know which I fear most.”

The woman obviously had a frail mind. But her body seemed sufficiently well-fed. She wasn’t too skinny, and there was some color to her face. She was a bit cold as Rum touched her hands, but not alarmingly so. Rum also analyzed her power status using a basic method known as Akalios’ Calculus, that he’d been taught in his first semester at Flip University. Akalios’ Calculus poked a person’s mana for certain evidence of strengths and weaknesses, and then using a method of calculation it was able to determine a passive target’s level, attribute scores, and for those skilled enough with the method one could even discover magical and natural effects on the target. Rum hadn’t mastered the skill very far, but was competent enough to see the most basic effects on a target. He calculated Rhathie’s power status as follows:

Rhathie (female human)

Level

16

Health Pool

220

Stamina Pool

270

Mana Pool

140/280

Constitution Score

6 (natural) + 16 (level)

Strength Score

10 (natural) + 17 (level)

Dexterity Score

8 (natural) + 19 (level)

Intelligence Score

11 (natural) + 17 (level)

Wisdom Score

12 (natural) + 28 (level)

Willpower Score

11 (natural) + 26 (level)

Luck Score

12 (natural) + 37 (level)

Known Basic Effects

· Anxiety (reduces effective Willpower)

· Dementia (reduces effective Intelligence and -Wisdom)

· Constipation (reduces effective Dexterity)

Everyone in this world naturally gains a total of 70 attribute points over the course of their first 30 years in this world. Most people have gained all of these by age 25, and some gain all of them as early as 20 just after entering adulthood. These are known to everyone as one’s natural attribute scores. It is speculated that one is capable of affecting the outcome of these by practicing skills associated with different attribute types. For instance some people believe constitution tend to come about in people who eat healthy and successfully challenge their body against the various dangers of this world, including hot climates, cold climates, poisons and disease. Fisherfolk and woodsfolk are especially known for high constitution, but also farmers and some of the more adventurous miners. Likewise, dexterity is gained by practicing fine motor skills, which includes anything from sewing, to musical instruments, bows and certain sports. Strength is muscle power work, intelligence is using skills of the mind such as reading, counting, analyzing and absorbing information. Wisdom is practiced using empathy, creativity and doubt. Willpower by not giving into urges for pleasure, by staying patient, and having control over what influences oneself. Luck meanwhile is a skill for which the academics are in some disagreement about. Many people think that luck can be trained by exposing oneself to random chance, such as gambling. But the truth is that gamblers are often less lucky than the average.

Personally I think luck is trained by life experience; by building intuition for the dynamics of the world in general. Because when one has been exposed to the world one is more likely to be ready for trouble when it arrives. Rum thought to himself. He was surprised by Rhathie’s very high luck score, but on contemplation it was perhaps not surprising that he’d end up finding this particular woman on this particular evening. Luck was more in her favor than most here after all. The constipation also came as a surprise, but he ignored that effect for now. After all: if he was successful here Rhathie would be able to deal with it herself when she became clear of mind.

But Rhathie’s depleted mana pool, that was curious. Unless she had been casting spells, how was her mana pool so depleted? Was this a consequence of her dementia perhaps? Was this a roundabout way for him to determine the consequences of her condition? He pondered the question some more, but saw no leads to follow, and so ignored the issue for now. As for her level and the rest of her stats: as a person levels up, they gain 10 attribute points from which to power themselves up. Powering oneself up wasn’t straight-forward though, one has to convince the world itself about one’s own choice. Everybody has a destiny or a purpose in this world, it has been speculated, and nature does not like steering away from its destined course. Because of this it’s very hard to bully people into becoming what one wants them to. For instance parents, teachers or army commanders cannot easily force their children, students or soldiers to became whatever they want. If the person powering up assigns points that reflect a self they don’t truly want to pursue, the points assigned will misbehave. In some instances the points will simply reset, and one has to pick again. In other instances the points from a power-up will forcibly redistribute themselves to better match a person’s true desires. So this woman wasn’t just filling herself with luck, she also truly wanted to be lucky. Luck was a reflection of her true self, her destined self.