40 Suns- A Pile O' Fluff And Magic

--- Jon ---

Sitting bored in his room, because his Ma decided that he still wasn’t looking good enough to push himself with their morning training, he began looking for something to do to kill a few of the hours until he had to go to the Arcane meeting Ms. Delacroix had told him about.

(Let’s see… Mom is at work, Ying is still probably decompressing after everything from the last few days, Pix is messing with the garden, and I don’t know why but I get the feeling Wolf is busy with something too right now.) He wasn’t sure why he had that last feeling but whenever he started pushing magic into his contract with her, there was a mild resistance. One could push through if he felt like it, but again, he felt that that was a bad idea at the moment. (So, who does that leave?)

“Oh, wait!” Flexing his magic he pushed it into his contractor’s mark for Melon, eventually forming a small ball of light that he tossed forward causing it to spin in the air for a moment before exploding into his flufflepuff familiar.

Melon looked around curiously, eventually spotting him before giving a happy yipping sound as she ran over and began running circles around his legs.

“Heh, good to see you too.” He told her, picking up the little flufflepuff before noting that she seemed to somehow be even fluffier than he remembered.

“Okay, I have a flufflepuff… Now what?” He asked Melon, earning a curious head tilt from said flufflepuff. “No ideas? That’s fine.”

He let his eyes roam around his room a bit before they eventually landed on his copy of the Contractor’s Creature Compendium as he slowly recalled something he’d read in the book back when he’d first discovered the existence of flufflepuffs.

Wandering over and flipping to the correct page he read aloud, “Flufflepuffs despite their lack of combat ability possess two Contracting traits that still make them fairly popular amongst Contracting children.

First is their [Swarm] trait that allows multiple Flufflepuffs to be summoned regardless of a Contractor’s actual limits, with the first Flufflepuff summoned being deemed the true Contracted summons.” He tapped this paragraph twice before turning to Melon. “You know how to do that?”

The fluffy one slowly shook her head while panting happily.

“Right…” He nodded just as slowly as he pondered this detail, before briefly attempting to summon another flufflepuff the same way he did Melon. (This did not work.)

After a moment to reconsider this, he decided to instead see what would happen if instead of just pushing magic into his contractor’s mark he pushed it through the bond between them, much like he would to let Pix use his reserves in an emergency.

“Bum-Bum.”

He blinked as Melon struggled out of his grip and leapt onto the floor where on all four she began to march in place while repeating, “Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum.”

Several spots around his room began to shake and shiver, causing Pix to look up from her task with the garden.

“Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum.”

A ball of white fluff leapt out of his garden causing Pix to shriek in surprise.

“Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum.”

Another flufflepuff crawled out from beneath blanket he’d been sitting on a moment prior.

“Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum.”

A book shot off of his shelf as a flufflepuff popped out of a space too narrow for it.

“Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum.”

As all around him flufflepuffs appeared from seemingly nowhere, Melon hopped onto her hind legs while still marching in place to the same beat that every other flufflepuff was marching on all four to as they fell in line behind her. All the while, every flufflepuff continued to repeat in an oddly harmonious manner, “Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum, Bum-Bum.”

Slowly Melon turned towards him before saluting, and immediately dropping to all fours as the flufflepuffs finally quit repeating the tune now stuck in his head.

“Well, um… that was a thing.” He admitted, as Melon gave him a happy yip.

Pix made a high pitched squealing sound before darting into the swarm of fluff and sending half of the gathered flufflepuffs flying.

“And this is going to be another thing…”

---

Surrounded by a Pile O’ Fluff and with a sleeping fairy on his chest, he wanted to get up and do something, but he didn’t want to disturb the sleeping Flufflepuffs or Pix. -(It took so long to tire them all out…)- Which is why he eventually settled for grabbing his Arcane Affinities for An Arcane Apprentice, in the hopes of at least learning something new while he was stuck sitting still.

Flipping to a random section, and then flipping a few pages back to the start of said section, he found himself delving into the Concept of [Ice]. A magical affinity that while he wasn’t actively familiar with, wasn’t too far outside of his understanding of [Heat]>[Cool], given how the base principals were fairly similar despite a few key differences.

The primary of these differences being that the use of the [Ice] concept required a more sudden and powerful burst of [Cool] while also manipulating moisture in the air to generate the base material for the frost and ice to form.

At first this mention of what was essentially water manipulation stumped him on why [Ice] would be considered a basic affinity instead of actual [Water] which the book seemed to lack a defined section for. But then it clicked when he considered why DeSade would teach him [Heat] instead of [Fire] or [Ice].

(Learning the concepts of [Fire] and [Ice] are supposed to teach people about manipulating heat, while [Water] would simply be the reshaping of material rather than the manipulation of it.)

Blinking at this little revelation he sat up a little bit and flipped the book back to its index, jostling Pix just enough in the process for her to swat him to stay still.

“Sorry.” He apologized idly, as he began to go over the affinities in his head.

([Magic] for a base understanding of Anima and its uses. [Fire] and [Ice] for heat. [Wind] and [Stone] for manipulation of solids and gases. [Electricity] for raw energy manipulation. And then [Shadow] and [Light] for construct generation. All together they’d give a basic grasp of the less complex uses of magic.) He realized looking each over, before a frown made its way to his face. “But then why not cover [Water] for liquids?”

No matter how hard he pondered this he found his understanding of both the Affinities listed and his understanding of magic itself wouldn’t click this last bit of information together.

“Gah, this is going to bug me…”

---

Knowing that he had to attend that meeting with Ms. Delacroix soon, and not entirely trusting the world to work in his favor -(It’s just statistics at this point.)- he decided to try working on something that could help should things go wrong, and Pix not be able to help.

Namely a spell script that could work to heal injuries in a pinch.

Surprisingly this script was relatively straightforward for him, given how for the most part it was the same script he’d created to help restore Pix’s magic in an emergency. Only easier given how the script possessed a singular affinity of [Mending] meaning there weren’t traces of a foriegn magic to work through that healing loophole to a spell system’s resistances. And since he was only working with a single affinity it was a significantly easier task to piece everything together, turning what took him several days before to crack into a simple hour or so process.

“Right, now let’s see if this works.” He told Pix, picking the spell script off of his desk.

He paused for a moment realizing there wasn’t actually anything to heal at the moment before shrugging and pulling out his knife.

A quick flex of his wrist and he had a bleeding cut on his forearm.

A quick flex of his magic through the spell script and it was gone.

“Huh, wasn’t quite sure this would work.” He admitted, earning a look from Pix. “No, I was sure the healing thing would work. What I wasn’t sure about was this thing about magic resistors I found that should help keep my scripts from burning up on use.” He elaborated, waving the unburned script through the air, only to frown as he took a closer look. “Actually, I may have spoken a bit too soon.”

While the spell script hadn’t burned up in use like the ones before it, that didn’t change the fact that there were faint burn marks and a certain crispness to the script. Enough so that, he wasn’t actually sure if the script would survive a second use.

“Okay, so those magic resistors sort of worked…” He grimaced, before shaking his head. “Eh, progress is progress, just got to work out a better resistor, I guess.”

---

Seeing what time it was, he found himself thankful that his ma had gotten stuck pulling an extra shift at the station, leaving him unsupervised and free to leave the apartment for the Arcane meeting.

He just had to figure out one little problem before he left, (A little problem that can easily make herself a big problem in the long run…)

The warning DeSade had given him, echoed in his mind once more as he remembered about how some people might be interested in fairies for one reason or another, (none of which are good if DeSade was the one warning me.)

On the other hand however, having Pix with him would immediately establish that he was a real magic user which would (hopefully) give him a starting point on his street cred, because while he was trying to keep a low profile as far as magic went, both DeSade and his Ma had drilled in how important respect and reputation were when dealing with unknowns.

(Then again, there’s also the fact that Pix’s temper might make both options dangerous in their own ways…)