After collecting the squirrel tails, similar to their Scurry Captain kill the previous day, Leka took them back to the temple and shooed them off into the magic training rooms. Unlike yesterday, Leka didn’t accompany Anika, saying that Anika should continue practicing the skills she had already demonstrated. As a plus, there were no other trainees in the room. They had gotten back from the dungeon a little later than expected, so Anika assumed that other trainees were already washing up and preparing for dinner. Leka had indicated there would only be a little time to practice before dinner at 6:50. At least Anika could keep track of the time on her own now and find her way to the dining hall when appropriate.
With Lily returning to the Aether magic training rooms, Anika was left blessedly alone. Not that she minded being with Lily, as the capybara was an adorable companion, alternating between cheering her on and napping in a corner. But she was very tired of being around people. People watching her, people telling her what to do, people making noise… she wanted solitude (outside of her early morning showers).
Taking a deep breath, and allowing her tension to ease, Anika went through the movements from the day before. Practice time, however, did not go as well as Anika had planned. She could lift the water from the pool easily, and the initial ball shape came easily, since that was a shape she could replicate with her hands and easily visualize how the control worked. But for other shapes, controlling the water was like trying to grab a small bar of soap from the bottom of a shower. Every time she thought she had a good grip and began to manipulate a portion of the water, stray water would spray from her ethereal grip, slipping between her imagined magical fingers or overflowing out of the top as she applied too much pressure from the outside in an attempt to stop the flow from the sides.
She thought a cube would be easy - all she had to do was flatten the sides of a sphere. But water did not want to make straight lines. After trying and failing for a dozen or so attempts, she gave up on the cube for the day and moved on to another shape. The trench shape she had made the first day had been vaguely triangular, but with gently curving sides and corners. Anika thought that, perhaps, she would be able to mold that into a more angular shape and, because she could simulate the shape with her hands better, it would be more successful. When she tried to flatten the sides of the trench into a true triangle, she had the same problems as she did with the cube. The straight lines would bulge if she didn’t apply enough magical pressure and overflow if she applied too much. The corners would spray like fountains from the top or leak like a badly welded seam on the bottom. No matter what shape she tried with angles, her frustration grew at her inability to complete what seemed like a basic task.
When it was time for dinner, Anika did not place the water gently back into the pool. She mentally threw it back into the pool and watched in satisfaction as it cannonballed into the still waters, splashing back up at her from where she stood on the platform and churning the water like waves in a storm. After lifting a large amount of water on day one had been relatively easy, her inadequacy at the current task struck her deeper than she would like. In the past, if she hadn’t taken quickly to a task, she had dropped it rather than work through it, letting her natural talents take her places rather than her perseverance. If she was going to be in a magical world, though, she wanted to be good at magic and her usual pattern of behavior would not be viable for fostering advanced magical skill. Right now, all she was good at was brute force. At least if she needed to put out a literal fire she’d be helpful. She sighed and headed towards the Aether magic room to pick up Lily.
The Aether training room was the kind of chaos that Anika would generally rather avoid. There were a huge amount of objects of various sizes and weights strewn around the room and resting on shelves and in bins as well as some of the hanging rings and shapes like in the water training room that could be used to create a magical obstacle course to practice agility of manipulation. Lily was standing on top of a tower that had a ramp winding around it like the spire of a castle. Her body swerved back and forth like a kid on a thrill ride at a theme park. In the air above her, a beach ball sized rock zoomed around corners and through hoops in a feat of agility that Anika could barely track with her eyes, much less do herself.
Anika knew that she should be happy that Lily was doing so well with her magical abilities, as that would help keep her safe when they were in the dungeons. Anika also knew that Lily was literally created by the Gods, so it made sense that she would be given an absurdly unnatural grasp of magical abilities and take to them as if she had been born to them, because she had. The rational side of Anika’s brain, however, was not winning today. Anika felt embarrassment that she was progressing so slowly, and jealousy that Lily expertly manipulated her magic with only a minimum amount of practice. She knew these feelings were not going to help her get better at Water magic, and that Lily was completely supportive of her less than stellar skills in combat and did not deserve anything but the same support in return.
Anika rolled her head side to side, stretching out the tension that came from everything she knew turning upside down over the last two days. The simple motion was enough to help rebalance her emotions and bring her back into a headspace that did not harbor unnecessary anger or jealousy towards her capybara companion. Taking a few deep breaths, she recentered herself and let it wash over her - without the use of Lily’s calming aura.
“Lily, are you ready for dinner?” Anika called out as she watched Lily levitating the rock .
”Anika!” Lily turned around and immediately started bounding down the ramp, the rock she had been levitating forgotten. The rock, no longer held aloft by Lily’s attention, immediately became reacquainted with gravity as it plummeted towards the floor..
”Lily, the rock!” Anika tried to call out and warn Lily of her abandoned practice item, but it had not been very far above another obstacle. The rock crashed into a wood arch that formed part of a tunnel, a crack forming where it hit the top before rebounding to the side.
Lily stopped midway down the ramp and turned towards the center of the room just in time to see the rock make contact with the wood arch.
”Oops.”
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
“I think you need to work on not getting distracted… even if it’s me distracting you.” Anika commented, wondering if they would get in trouble for breaking something.
“I should have put the rock away but I was so excited to go to dinner I forgot!” Lily finished trotting down the ramp and arrived at Anika’s feet.
Anika leaned down to pat Lily’s head, eliciting a warbling coo as Lily leaned into the pets. “That’s okay, sometimes I get excited and forget what I’m doing too. Well… more than sometimes. I actually am really bad at remembering what was going on as soon as something interrupts me.”
Anika straightened and turned to head towards the door. “I suppose I should try to focus more on what I am doing in the moment, as forgetting what I’m doing in a dungeon may be bad.”
”When we are in the dungeon you are always very focused, Anika.” Lily moved through the door as Anika opened it and then fell into step beside her.
”True, I feel like when we are in a situation with monsters I get hyper focused, even when something unexpected happens. I think it’s because I used to play a lot of video games where a lot of things were going on.”
”What’s a video games?”
“Well…” Anika wasn’t sure how to explain a video game when she hadn’t seen anything on this world similar to a computer, or television, or moving picture of any kind. Did they even have photographs here? “It’s a type of game in my world. You have a fancy picture that moves and talks and you have to control a character on the picture to make it do things. It could be a puzzle, or a story, or something like when we are in the dungeons where you have to make the character kill monsters.”
”Ohhh…” Lily paused, “I’m not sure I get it, but if it is like being in dungeons, that makes sense why you gave Philip lots of instructions and strategy!”
”Yeah. I usually played a lot of strategy games. I used to play games with lots of people where I had to tell everyone what to do. We called it raiding. We would fight big monsters and use lots of magic spells.”
”So your world does have magic!” Lily said excitedly.
”No, it was all just make believe in the game. We didn’t have real magic, not like here. We just pretended to have magic and the game helped us pretend by making it colorful and as realistic as a small moving picture could be, even if it was only made up. I never imagined magic would be real. A big part of me still doubts this is real because it is so far from my reality at home. But I also don’t know if this is even something I could have dreamed up. And I am excited about magic… but- but I also miss home.” Anika’s voice hitched with a note of sadness despite trying not to focus on the negative.
”You don’t have to be sad when you’re around me! I can make you feel better and then you don’t have to miss home or be sad.” Lily’s ever cheery voice and a feeling of calm starting to extend out from Lily to tickle Anika’s brain reminded her of how Lily had used her ability before to calm her when she was sad about home. It wasn’t right to just use magic as a crutch to ignore the feelings and Anika didn’t want to just forget about her past and her home.
”Lily, you can’t just magic away sad feelings. I can feel you trying to calm me, but you have to let me feel things. There is a time and a place for using your magic to keep people calm, like if there is an emergency, or if someone is going to hurt themselves. But you can’t just make me forget my sadness. I have to be allowed to work through my own feelings or I’ll feel like I’m being controlled.”
Lily stopped walking and looked up at Anika, her little rodent face alien, but her eyes conveyed confusion and sorrow. “I’m sorry Anika. I just wanted to help and I thought I was here to keep you calm and happy when you get upset because that is what will help you.”
”You can help me without using magic on me. Sometimes, we just need someone to listen to us talk and a shoulder to cry on. We have to be allowed to be in the moment with our emotions and just feel. Burying the emotions without expressing them will cause more pain in the long run. The priests said that our companions were here to help and guide us, but that can mean a lot of things. I want you to help me navigate this crazy new world with whatever knowledge the gods gave you, and I want you to fight with me and help me kill monsters and figure out whatever it is we need to figure out about this magical problem here. But most of all, I want you to be my friend in a world where I’ve been taken from all my friends and family. That is what I need you for the most.”
Lily nudged Anika’s leg with her nose, “I can be your friend! And your partner! We will become powerful together and I will help protect you.”
Anika knelt down to give Lily a hug, “I appreciate it.”
She stood and began walking towards the dining hall again, the sentimental, emotional hallway conversation being a bit much for her to handle with all the other thoughts going on in her head, and she wasn’t sure she could manage more in that vein. The distraction of dinner would be welcome.
“Let’s hurry up and get some food!”
—-
Time entered the research room of the Pantheon, its walls filled with ethereal windows displaying scenes from around the planet. Yet more windows, these covered in text, floated in front of plush arm chairs with various control features built into the arms of the chairs. The room allowed the gods to research anything that happened on the planet, from a viewport into any person’s daily life to logs of text of all conversation that happened on the planet. As each god represented their specific domain, they did not have omniscient knowledge about their planet as a whole. That’s why the demigods spent more of their time studying and researching the small happenings of the planet while the Primaries focused their attention on the larger details.
Light and Shadow studied the monitors that displayed planetary scenes. Since all things were either in light or shadow, they were the best demigods to monitor the visual data. Essence and Space searched the logs from armchairs on either side of the room, each focusing on different types of conversation.
”Have we found any new information about the Chaos eruption? Any sign that it will manifest as part of a specific dungeon?”
”Nothing so far,” Shadow and Light answered simultaneously, not moving their eyes from the monitor.
“I found out someone is working to invent a new kind of pastry that will provide a Potency buff!” Essence supplied.
”That is not what we are looking for.” Time answered. “I am narrowing in on when the eruption will occur, but we need to provide the Primaries a location soon. They must alert the priests to prepare.”
”You told them that it will be around the area of the Temple where they summoned the heroes - isn’t that enough information?”
”There are nine dungeons in the vicinity of the training Temple. They are all in different directions and threaten different towns.” Light knew well the locations of the towns and dungeons around the temple.
”We are looking for signs of additional monsters in a dungeon to give us a clue about which dungeon may overload, but there just isn’t enough information yet.” Shadow added.
Time sighed. He hated waiting ‘til the last minute.
https://www.youtube.com/@avelyndavee but my Patreon gets the newest songs before they go on Youtube - "It's Kinda my Thing" is up now! )
