Chapter 2

  I woke up briefly when I was found by a homeless woman and her leashed cat, once in the ambulance, and a few times in the emergency room. I spent a day in the burn unit until I was stable enough to move to regular care. They finally stopped sedating me. The nurses brought me my stuff at that point, and I was able to put back on the ring they’d removed off my unburned hand. Fortunately the perfection cleanse was doing a lot to boost my healing as well, and the entrance and exit wounds didn’t get infected or need grafts. At that point I was also lucid enough for visitors. “Hey dad.” My dad gently hugged me and I gingerly hugged back. “So how are you feeling emotionally? You did almost die.”

  “Like I want to quit my day job.” My dad sighed at that. “I wouldn’t rush, sweetie, you might feel differently in while.”

  “Eh, I feel like the utility district doesn’t really need me, and I need a break. Besides, they are using software and AI for most of my job now anyway. Nobody needs a human hydrologist to pick well sites anymore.”

  Dad flashed a grin. “My grandma said that about dousing when she retired from the oil, gas and coal industry, you know.”

  “Wait, what? I thought she just used the maps!”

  “Nope. I mean, she used maps, but she was a good old fashioned water witch, she was just usually looking for the black gold instead of water. Probably some subliminal trick to it, but she was very good at finding what the companies wanted.”

  “Well, that suddenly makes other things make a lot more sense.”

  “Yup, she was pretty wacky.”

  That wasn’t what I had meant, but I had a feeling I wasn’t supposed to say anything about the maybe-an-angel I’d met, and magic, and the disasters that were coming.

  “Anyway, dad, I think I want to focus on my hobbies for a while. I think I can make enough with online sales to support myself, and I have plenty saved up if I can’t.”

  “I don’t know Marcia, your rent is really high, and you’ll have bills from this.”

  “I wasn’t planning on staying in the studio.”

  “Where…oh, the cabin. That might work, but you’d be off grid. You’d need to find a way to run your equipment.”

  “That sounds like fun, though.”

  Dad sighed and gave me an appraising look. “You really think you can make enough money prospecting and polishing rocks?”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “More than half my savings are from that anyway, Dad. I’ve only kept my job at the water company so I could take all those collection trips and have insurance. I’ll just have to work closer to home.”

  “Well, don’t tell your job until you are healed up and all your bills are paid. We can take a few trips up to the cabin to clean it up and see what you need. But don’t do anything you can’t take back, alright?” I nodded.

  It took about a month from the day I was hit by lightning to actually get the ball rolling on my cabin plans. My dimensional storage turned out to be the satchel that had been found by my unconscious, somewhat crispy body. Inside was a stone wand with a metal hand grip that looked like copper, but my new senses told me was actually a magical alloy of copper, gold and silver. On the base of it was a small white chatoyant quartz ball, looking much like a glass cat’s eye, or fiberoptic bead. On the other end was a light orange topaz crystal point, chisel shaped and streaked with lighter and darker inclusions. It wasn’t my favorite color, but it was still very pretty. It also contained a large metal disk I assumed was for my dungeon, and a fairly ordinary looking set of three leather bound books. They looked like expensive dictionaries, journals, or encyclopedias, not grimoires. However, grimoires they definitely were.

  I waited until I was home from the hospital to actually start training my magic. I started with Geomancy 101. The literal title was “Elementary Principles in Geologic Thaumaturgy” but someone had pasted an insert on the title page that actually said “Geomancy 101, Earth Magic for Dummies.”

  “Wonder if I got a used book?” I muttered, flipping to the next page. It turned out I hadn’t, not really. The book was new, maybe gently used, but someone had heavily annotated it with inserts explaining everything in a different style than the original author.

  Shift Soil would let me move dirt and small rocks around. It was basically for digging or constructing earth works. Stone Sense would help me find different types of rocks and minerals. Fuse Stone would let me use magic to build with rocks without needing any kind of mortar or cement. I mostly practiced under the cover of night. My neighbors were pretty chill about my polishing and cutting equipment running overnight, but I didn’t think they’d be chill about me waving a sparkly stick around while rocks and dirt wiggled across the lawn.

  I’d already figured out how to detect mineral deposits, using both divination and geomancy. I’d discovered I had three overlapping pools of magic inside me. I could draw from each one for the corresponding type of magic, and I had a certain amount that could be converted to any of the three. I’d been training my dimensional magic by cramming stuff into the satchel and then pulling it back out again using a spell instead of the automatic storage feature. That also made it possible to do things like put my rock saw into my storage, when it wouldn’t actually fit through the opening.

  Sadly, “Windows into the Esoteric Senses” hadn’t gotten the same treatment as “Elementary Principles in Geologic Thaumaturgy” and I was forced to wade through prose that was simultaneously flowery and extremely dense. I realized I was going to need help. “Maybe a meditation class would get me started?” I thought. An intensive google revealed a cheap meditation class at a library near the cabin and I signed up.

  I waited to actually break my lease until I knew how much repair and renovation the cabin would need, but I did tell my landlord I was planning to move. Quitting my day job was pretty anticlimactic. I tried to hand in my letter of resignation several times, but nobody was ever in the office. I finally left the letter on my supervisor’s desk, emailed HR, and packed up my stuff.