Day 6

--- Jon ---

“Everything okay?” He asked, noticing how instead of her workout outfit his mother was dressed in her actual work attire. “You look like you’ve got somewhere to be.”

“Yeah, no, I can’t train with you today.” His ma told him, as he set a plate of breakfast and a mug of coffee on the counter. “There’s this big end of summer festival they’re doing, and they want the force there because of the uptick in gang activity all over the place.”

“Makes sense.” He admitted. “If the whole city is doing like the neighborhood, things must be getting pretty rough all around.”

“Mm-hmm,” His ma agreed as she began eating. “They’ve been running the whole department ragged ever since this new drug hit the street a couple months back. Thing seems to be like cat nip to all of the local Deviants.”

He couldn’t help but grimace at that. “Is Sanctuary at least pulling their weight, or are they offloading it all on you guys again?”

His ma gave a snort of amusement, “Unless it involves fighting, those assholes don’t do much of anything to help anyone these days.”

“Language.” He glared, getting an eye roll in return.

“Still don’t know where you picked that up.” His mother admitted with a shake of her head. “How about you? You’ve got all of your school things together?”

“What do you mean?”

His ma gave him another snort of amusement, this one more honest. “In case you’ve forgotten you’ve only got a few days until school starts for the year.”

He blinked, before grimacing as he leaned against the counter. “Oh, I knew I was forgetting something important!”

“Yeah, I already got you all of the basic stuff but if you need anything specific for any of your classes you’re going to have to go and grab them on your own time.” His ma warned him. “I’m not going to have time to help you with everything going on around the city.”

“I figured as much.” He sighed. (After all what else is new?)

He couldn’t help but frown at that thought, before shaking his head clear. “Since I’ll be going out at some point in the next couple of days, there anything you need while I’m out?”

“Nothing off the top of my head.” His mother shrugged before downing the remains of her mug. “Either way you know where the money is if you need it.”

He nodded. “Alright, well… Stay safe I guess.”

“You know I will.” His ma assured him with a wave over her shoulder.

“Hmm, right…”

Scene Consequences

-Notice: 5 Days until school starts.

---

“Alright, now that ma’s gone we can get started on magic day.” He told Pix as soon as he got back to his room.

Pix jumped into the air, knowing that the point of today was to try and find a way of fixing her power problems.

“Since we’re trying to figure out how to fix your magic, I figure we should start off with doing a catalogue of what kinds of magic we know how to do.” He explained, picking up one of his notebooks. “That way we might be able to figure out a direction we can work from, and even if we can’t, knowing what we’ve got to work with won’t hurt.”

Pix nodded understanding what he meant.

“Okay, so first off, my primary affinity ‘Hunter’ which… I honestly don’t think can help us right now.” He admitted with a bit of reluctance. “I mean between what I learned with Miss Edna and De Sade, I figured out the positive side of Hunter is basically tracking things down and making them easier to find. While the darker side is basically stalking things, sneaking up on them and attacking… stuff like that.”

His fairy companion seemed to think about it a bit. After a moment she raised a single finger in the air and looking around the room with a hand above her eyes, before pointing at his amulet.

“Maybe we could use it to find something to do with magic…” He considered, before shaking his head with a sigh. “No, whatever we found would be more of a ‘place of power’ or ‘magic fount’ than an actual solution.”

Going back through his notes he moved on to his secondary affinities. “Next up would be my Defender affinity, which can protect things… So maybe we could ‘protect’ the magic in the apartment, keeping it from dissipating?” It wasn’t quite what protect meant, but magic was conceptual and surprisingly willing to bend the rules if you were smart about it. “It won’t solve the problem fast but depending on how much magic we use; the apartment would be saturated in magic after just a month or two rather than the years it takes in the wild.”

Pix tilted her head considering it, before nodding in agreement with the plan.

“Right something to add to the to do list than.” He nodded back.

If it worked the way he wanted it’d solve their problem in a couple of months. If it didn’t, well… Adding a random ‘Defender’ Enchantment to use his house couldn’t hurt.

“Let’s keep going, we might be able to find something else.” He moved on to his other sub affinity, “Moon… I know it’s got access to a bunch of other concepts due to how important the moon is, and how many synonyms there are for the word, but aside from that one ‘moonlight’ spell I managed to rig to those lights back at camp, I can’t think of anything that’ll help us here. You?”

He turned to the little fairy next to him, who seemed to think about it for a moment before shaking her head with a sigh.

“You neither, huh?” He sighed himself. “Okay… Well I guess there’s the whole ‘heat’ and ‘cool’ thing Miss Edna taught me, but aside from a magical fridge or microwave, we aren’t getting anything out of that unless we push the whole heat to fire thing to the maximum and distilled it outright. And even that wasn’t beyond my skill level, it’d still be iffy to try and pull.”

Pix nodded with a grimace.

“Alright, so that’s it for my affinities… How about yours?” He asked taking a seat. “I mean we might be able to do something with Nature. Maybe make plants that produce their own magic once grown? But that’ll take a couple months there too, and I’m not even sure what plants would be good for that experiment…” He ran a hand down his face. “If not, your talent for healing might give us something in the way of ‘restore magic’ but there’s no telling what the efficiency of that would be…”

Pix gave him a shrug, having no clue herself since the more, technical side of magic wasn’t something most fairies considered until they reached the rank of High Fairy at the earliest.

“Right… I’m pretty sure Light would have the same problems as Heat.” He admitted thinking over her other two affinities, before giving a chuckle. “And I doubt either of us wants to mix Mischief into what’s going to essentially be a healing spell.”

The little fairy shivered at the image that presented.

“Yeah… Let’s not do that.” He agreed with a wry grin.

After a moment he shook his head and pushed back the more pessimistic thoughts in his head. “Okay, well, while we may not have found a solution, we did find a couple of options we can look into.” He told her trying to be positive about all of it, after all as long as they had options then they had a chance of success. (And a chance is all you need.)

Scene Consequences

-Thanks to Pix and De Sade’s Books gained 3XP to Occult.

--Currently: Lv. 5 (4/12)

---

Having grown bored of assisting him with his research, Pix wandered off towards the living room to watch TV, leaving him free to dive into the various books Miss Edna had left him on other fields of magic in the hopes of finding a solution their basic magic lacked.

Hence him opening a book on Script Craft, a form of magic that while on the surface level looked a lot like Enchanting -even sharing a certain amount of overlap- was a separate style of magic that revolved around an equal mix of preparation and timing.

While Enchanting shared an aspect of preparation in the fact that, all of the passive effects it gave had to be applied to the equipment in question before they were of use. The prolonged duration of an enchantment’s effect sacrificed a fair amount of power to do what it did. In contrast to this, Script Craft revolved around the idea of taking a complex prebuilt spell effect and activating it at a moment that made it more powerful than its natural effect.

The best comparison he could make was the difference between a small fire that could burn for an hour, and an explosion that could punch a hole through a door in one moment. They had a similar amount of power behind them, but one was more about immediate gains than long term, giving each its own time and place of value.

The fact that Script Craft was apparently considered the most basic foundation of the more common forms of ritual magic known by the Arcane Association, was a separate benefit. One that was further compounded by the fact that also as the cheapest form of Spell Craft -if one of the more complex- made Script Craft quite possibly the most popular form of magic amongst practitioners.

(It actually makes me wonder why Miss Edna taught me Enchanting before it, given how Script Craft would’ve given me a better foundation…) As far as he could tell her primary reason for teaching him the two styles of magic out of order was the fact that -based on his experience and the notes she left in the books- Enchanting alongside Potions were her specialties and while Script Craft had a few uses that helped the two along, they were different enough that she was significantly weaker at it than any other style of magic she practiced.

(And De Sade probably wanted me to discover it all on my own… Well, that or pick up a style that involves me mutilating the corpses of magical creatures.) He was fairly certain De Sade would push for that regardless of what he did on his own time.

Still, regardless of his more mystical mentors’ opinions on the matter, he was able to find that there were a set of Script Craft spells that could allow him to store magic and then restore it to himself or another in a single burst. It wouldn’t fix her power problems, but it would give them both more to work with. At least once he figured out the prerequisite healing spells, (something that should be easy enough with Pix’s help.)

“It’s a good thing most of my Enchanting kit can work for Spell Craft, though we might need to find more specialized materials if we want to work on more complex stuff.” Just looking at the materials for some of the more basic spells made that clear.

Scene Consequences

-New Skill: Script Craft

--Thanks to Occult Skill gained 5XP.

--Due to overlap with Enchanting Skill gained 4XP.

--*Skill Level Up* Script Craft Lv. 2 (5/6)

---

As he’d previously discovered, contracting had two main branches to its power.

The first and most obvious, was that it empowered any contract a person made so that there was a sort of magical enforcement of the terms of said contract. That isn’t to say there was no way to break said contract, just that they had to have the ability to surpass the contractor’s skill and power in order to do so. What’s more the actual extent and punishment possible by a contract was based on the amount of skill and power the contractor possessed. Even with what little experience he had in magic, the most he could enforce on another was a foreboding feeling when they tried to break said contract without actually being able to punish them.

(And even then it’s not that foreboding of a feeling. More like the ‘you shouldn’t talk to strangers’ kind of foreboding, rather than the ‘you will die if you do this’ kind.) He’d gotten a fair bit of experience with that second one over the summer.

The second and while less obvious, better known form of Contracting, was the ability to summon and contract magical entities into ones employ -as De Sade would- or befriend them -as Miss Edna would- into helping one with their goals.

If he was an Arcane there would be numerous benefits to this option -outside of the contracted themselves- due to having a magical core of his own to work with, allowing him to mimic some of the passive abilities of other mystical races.

As a practitioner without his own source of magic however, he wouldn’t have nearly as much to gain in the way of passive abilities, but he might still be able to pick up an esoteric spell or two if he contracted someone long enough.

(Though that’s only if whatever I contract is sapient…) It was fully possible for the summoning ritual to bring forth a creature that while powerful, was little more than a magical animal.

(Still all of that is for after I contract with Pix.) Doing so would establish a connection between them that would allow him to feed whatever magic he’d gathered into his amulet to her, while also enabling him to summon her to his location for a little more. And even if it didn’t quite solve all of Pix’s magical concerns, it would still let her use whatever meager reserves he’d managed to build up himself, meaning she wouldn’t have to rest as long after using her magic.

Unfortunately, -like with a lot of Script Craft- if he wanted to actually summon a creature to contract he was going to need a number of materials that he didn’t possess. Especially if he wanted something specific.

(Really am going to have to look into finding an Arcane store or something if I want to get much further with this…)

Scene Consequences

-New Skill: Contracting

--Thanks to Occult Skill gained 5XP.

--Due to overlap with Script Craft gained 2XP.

--*Skill Level Up* Contracting Lv. 2 (3/6)