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 tired. On the paper was the outline of a person’s back. On the middle of it Amez drew some kind of dragon perched upon a small mountain of treasure.
Rum stared for a few seconds, before taking a couple of slow steps in front of the table, facing Amez. Shortly, 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 full of questions for second, then his expression became slightly disturbed, before a slight amusement overtook him. “What?” he finally said. “What would you do with the old or mentally ill?”
“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 may not 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 magic coffee?” 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 some from a 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 of, are the insane beggars you can find five streets west of here, at the beginnings of The Raven’s Slum. But your magic coffee would never work on them. Or, do you really think so?”
“I don’t know,” Rum shrugged, taking steps 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.
Rum ran 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 he found the place. He barged into a fine establishment and up to a counter, where he was met by an elegantly moustached, bald old man in fine attire.
“Your blackest coffee as quick as possible” Rum requested, slamming a silver piece on the table.
The coffee shop attendant looked at the coin curiously. He took it, shrugged with his eyebrows and went to the kitchen where he called out 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 in a cup on a plate. As he grabbed the cup from the attendant the bald man reacted with a “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. “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, though a slight eyebrow was raised. Inside of Rum, though, memories of his days at the university, and the Basic Elemental Magic course ran 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. 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, sensing about 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 when it came to how much cooling was applied, and where.
Sensing the motion of the particles making up the coffee, Rum suddenly grasped them – forcing them to slow down. As he drained the kinetic energy from the particles, he then dispersed the energy into the environment, creating an omnidirectional burst of warm air. As Rum opened his eyes, he caught a glimpse of the wild flapping of the coffee attendant’s magnificent moustache. The attendant had partially 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 for the handle, and drank it all.
“Was that a spell?” awed the attendant as Rum chugged coffee.
“Yes!” Rum let, before burping loudly, and then taking in another mouthful of coffee, to which he burped again, and put down an empty cup. “Thank you, it was most certainly black!” He waited a mere three seconds for his body to process the coffee, before he turned, and ran out.
Rum followed the directions down the streets again and headed westwards to reach The Raven’s Slum. With his run slowing down to brisk walk, passed each street noticing 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, he got to a small dirty river separating the slum from the eastern part of Ermos City. 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 how 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 he a many times stained brown button shirt, his legs being covered by a worn dark blue 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 ones 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 – went from quiet to loud in a single word.
“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, tapping 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 understanding before. It should be a fairly recent phenomenon.”
“You are looking for people confused in the head? 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” he stroked his beard in momentary thought, “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 finished with “–experiment on.” The older man made it sound almost like a bad aftertaste made into words. Suckling his tooth some more, he soon continued. “And I can take you there,” his eyes grew a bit 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, challenging the claim.
“Okay. Well, I’m in the rare business of spell crafting. I’m going to try and make a new magic 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.”
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Adalas nodded along firmly as Rum talked, then as the wizard finished, they both were silent. This silence lasted for roughly half a minute before Adalas broke it. “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 eyes.
“It’s a woman?” Rum said, taking a step 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 do whatever it takes to compensate you on that remote possibility. 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 The Flipped University once, and I have 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, nodding very slowly, but firmly. He strolled away for 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 five or six 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 four 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 fear in their faces. They both fell dead 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. The boys looked up at her expectantly. It was their mother’s decision. They trusted their mom.
“Well” she sighed. “Don’t bother the wizard too much, and stay in the corner if you’re gonna be up there! Don’t get in the way of magic.”
“Yeeyh!” the two boys exclaimed, fear turned back to excitement in an instant. Adalas smiled grandfatherly and took this to be the clue to bring Rum upstairs.
As Rum surfaced over 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 shutter was a chair, the room lit by moonlight from cracks in the walls. The old sister had white long hair, a long neck, and was relatively tall. She wore a light-blue nightgown, and turned around slowly as the company of Adalas, Rum and two excited little boys entered the room from below.
“Rhathie, how are you big sister?” Adalas smiled broadly and stepped up to his sister, giving her a wet kiss on the cheek and holding both her hands. His sister stared back at him with confusion, and more than that, anxiety. She looked over at Rum and his entourage of two little boys, grabbing her younger brother Toothie for safety. As Adalas comforted his sister, he tried to explain to her that Rum was here to make her feel better. Lini, meanwhile, revealed her arrival to the scene with a couple of loud CREAK! 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 sucked his tooth concernedly, and looked over 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 Rum couldn’t hear.
“She’s okay with it” Adalas said. “Do your best wizard.” A grim expression overtaking the old man’s face. Or is it regret? It was difficult for Rum to judge, but Rum was sure it 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 five years ago.” Adalas said depressed. “But it’s been much worse the last two years. She almost never knows where she is. Me, Lini and the boys have 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. 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, frail mind as her mind might be, 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 – at which she whinced – but it wasn’t an alarming cold. The second time Rum reached out for her hand, she didn’t whince. He analyzed her power status using Akalios’ Calculus. A method that he’d been taught in his first semester at The Flipped University. Akalios’ Calculus poked a person’s mana for certain evidence of strengths and weaknesses, and involed a method of calculation that was able to determine a 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)
In Aclima, the name of all of their world, everyone naturally gained a total of 70 attribute points over the course of their first 30 years. Most people gain all of these by age 25, and some as early as age twenty, just after entering into adulthood. At the university, these were known to everyone as their natural attribute scores. Rum, like all the mages who’d studied first-year courses at Flipped, knew the theories of how they come about. The learned speculate one is capable of affecting the outcome of naturals by practicing skills associated with the different attribute types. Constitution tending to come from eating healthy and successfully challenge the body against hot climates, cold climates, poisons and disease. The records, I remember, showed that fisherfolk and woodsfolk are especially known for high constitution, but also farmers and adventurous miners. Dexterity is gained by practicing fine motor skills. Sewing, musical instruments, bows, certain sports. Strength is muscle power work, intelligence is reading, counting, analyzing, and absorbing information. Wisdom is practiced using empathy, creativity, doubt. Willpower is not giving into urges for pleasure, staying patient, exercising control over what influences oneself. Luck is a skill my teachers always said scholars disagreed much about. It was either exposing yourself to things like gambling, but gamblers appeared to have generally low average luck, so evidence does not support that.
I think luck must be life experience. Building intuition for the dynamics of the world in general. After all, if we’re exposed to the diversity of the world, we’d be more ready for its surprises.
Rum pondered his knowledge and experience. He was surprised by Rhathie’s very high luck score, but on contemplation this it was perhaps not surprising that he’d end up finding her on this particular evening. Luck was more in her favor than with most others, it seemed. 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 that herself when she became clear of mind. He felt no obligation to fix that.
However, Rhathie’s depleted mana pool was curious. Unless she’s been casting spells, how has her mana pool been so depleted? Is 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 ten attribute points from which to power themselves up. Powering oneself up wasn’t straight-forward though, everyone knew that. One has to convince the world itself about one’s own choice. Everybody has a destiny or a purpose in this world, or so they speculate at Flipped. And nature does not like steering away from its destined course. For that reason, it was also very hard to bully people into becoming what one wants of them. For instance: parents, teachers or army commanders couldn’t easily force their children, students or soldiers to became whatever they wanted. 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 those points would simply reset, and one effectively loses a level for a short period of time until one is ready to level up 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 isn’t just filling herself with luck, she has also truly wanted to be lucky. Luck is a reflection of her true self, her destined self.
