Anika leaned back into the smooth, carved stone of the hot pool and let her mind go blank. The alcove was the perfect shape for relaxation, allowing her head to rest just out of the water while providing a perfectly sculpted underwater lounger that curved with the body and required not a single muscle to engage to maintain the position. The pool was the perfect temperature - not so hot that she felt like she was going to slow cook like a lobster but still warm enough to be highly effective in soothing her sore muscles.

  Anika closed her eyes and enjoyed the relative silence of the room. She could hear the sounds of Lily splashing around near her, and hear the gentle bubbling from the corner of the hot spring fed pool. She could absolutely get on board with a day to rest the body - Weyami was now her favorite day of the week. After the exhausting experience at the training course yesterday, her body absolutely required rest. She couldn’t deny that the training was working, though, since she had managed to gain her first extra point of Vitality while desperately trying to hang on to the swinging monkey bars. The distraction of the notification was definitely what caused her to fall, not the feeling of her arms being made of jello. She could pretend in her own head, at least.

  This morning, they had woken up much later than previous days. With no one pounding on the door to wake her and no alarm or other reason to wake up, she had easily fallen back into weekend mode of sleeping in. At home, she would have slept until noon, or later if the previous night had involved a dedicated gaming session. The equivalent height of the midday sun on Etalen was around 3:50. With the longer day here, her body had instead woken her in the second hour of the day, which was usually when she practiced archery. It was a little weird telling time here and she still hadn’t quite gotten used to the fact that there was no AM or PM and that time started with the sunrise. 2:00 AM had always been a perfectly acceptable time to play video games, and maybe consider heading to bed. Now the equivalent middle of the night was around the 9th hour of the day, and her exhaustion every night had sent her to bed far earlier. She was going to lose her gamer card with all these early nights!

  What she really needed to do today was spend some time practicing her magic. That has been falling to the wayside with all the physical practice combined with her frustration the last time she was in the practice room. Perhaps she did need to spend some time out in nature to really connect with her element, like Leka said. Overall, Anika felt like her rigid attention to routine and general stubbornness was a good thing that benefited her in other learning situations, but those characteristics felt more in line with a rock than water. Too bad she didn’t have Earth magic, as that would probably work perfectly with her personality.

  Maybe she should have gone with her friends when they said she needed to ‘loosen up’ and join them at the club. She wasn’t sure how a drunken night of dancing would influence her magic, but she was open to the possibility that her hyperfocused interests may be something of a detriment in her new situation. Maybe she needed some new experiences to help her. As long as those new experiences did not involve Panu. Anika shuddered again at the thought. That guy was absolutely not in his right mind a lot of the time. She assumed his planet was basically some dating paradise reality show with lots of hooking up and drinking. Definitely not her vibe.

  Lily paddled over and perched on Anika’s knees, which were slightly bent and raised due to her lounging position, giving Lily a perfect seat. “I like this pool! We should come back here every day!”

  Anika opened her eyes to look at her companion, “I don’t know if we can find time to come back here every day, but I certainly wouldn’t mind a good soak after working out, now that I know this is here.”

  “Well, we should stay here all day if we can’t come back every day.” Lily practically vibrated in her excitement at this new fun location.

  “I think I would turn into a prune if I stayed too long in the water today. Besides, I have to go practice magic today. I’m falling behind.”

  “Why don’t you just practice your magic here? Then you can relax and practice and I can swim!”

  Anika didn’t have a retort for that. It was actually a good point. She could just practice using her magical abilities while lounging in the warmth of the pool. Maybe being in the water would cause her to connect with her magic better. “That’s a good idea. But don’t you want to practice magic too?”

  “Magic is easy for me!” Lily demonstrated this by picking up a set of towels stacked near the pool and having them fly around the room like a pair of magic carpets.

  Anika resisted the urge to turn a dour look on her companion. She shouldn’t be upset that her companion, who was literally blessed by the gods with magical knowledge, excelled with using her magical abilities. Anika was used to being the best at things and being upstaged by the childlike capybara was not a sensation she liked or was used to. She suppressed those feelings, however, and forced herself to smile and sound cheerful. “You are definitely doing good with your magic. I’m glad you have that to protect you when we go out in the dungeons. I just wish I was having as much success.”

  “Just practice now! I’m going to go swim more!” Lily dropped her flying towels into an unceremonious pile on a small table rather than nearly stacking them back where she had found them and immediately turned to dive off Anika’s knees. At least she didn’t drop a giant rock this time.

  Anika turned her attention to the water in the pool and the magic inside her. She concentrated on the feel of the water in the pool. She felt the passage of Lily’s swimming as ripples against her skin, a gentle caress tickling her shoulders and neck, and as undercurrents swirling around her legs and body. She listened to the delicate bubbling of the spring and the kisses of the water’s tiny waves against the stone edges of the pool. She breathed in the fresh scent of the water, mixed with a slight tang of minerals, unlike the sulfuric springs she had visited on Earth. She let herself stay in the moment with the water, trying to understand its nature as an element. Then, she reached for her magic.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  She lifted a large globe of water from the center of the pool, not as large as she could have lifted, but trying to focus on picking up a reasonable size that used most of her magic, but wasn’t bursting. Perhaps she had tried to contain too much at once, and all of her magic was spent on holding the water, leaving little left to shape it. She focused on the globe of water, thinking about holding it in her magic without defining a specific form, and observing how it naturally formed into a large droplet, the surface rippling gently as it settled into its raw form. She knew that water had a natural cohesion and attraction that would draw it together. The molecules wanted to stay together, the surface tension contributing to its droplet form. That would resist her when she tried to move the water into different forms. Was there a way she could take advantage of water’s nature in this way?

  Anika shook her head, not sure how she could use any scientific knowledge of the behavior of water to assist with her magic. She just had to find some way to feel it and shape it. She took a slow, deep breath… in through the nose, out through the mouth, trying to keep her mind calm and focused. She had raised up the water without using her hands, but decided that she should use the crutch for now. She tried to form the water into a pyramid.

  Previously, she had tried to form the trench, but that was fighting against the shape the water wanted to take. Maybe she would have more luck if she started with a shape that concentrated the bulk of the water in the bottom rather than the top. She pushed down with her hands as if she was shaping clay, and watched the water undulate as it pulsed with the magic, resisting the straight lines of the pyramids sides.

  Not wanting to allow her frustration to get the better of her, Anika took another deep breath. She reformed her hands into a ball shape and watched as the water relaxed back into its natural droplet shape. This time, she tried to slowly coax the water to a point, not worrying so much about how straight the sides were and more focused on the general shape, like a first draft. The water responded by taking on a slightly more cone shaped appearance, the bottom flattening ever so slightly and the top of the droplet coming to a more pronounced point. She then imagined slowly shaping the sides, like a carpenter planing off thin slivers of wood with each passing moment, pressing inward so that the pointed blob started to have four distinct sides, though they still bowed out with natural surface tension.

  The water was starting to look more like a pyramid than a blob, so she continued to make slow, small changes to the water. Last time she practiced, she had tried to force the water into its shape all at once, expecting everything to fall in line like using a cookie cutter on dough. Now, she approached it like a potter at the wheel, allowing the shape to change with each pass of her hands along the edges of her liquid clay. This seemed to be a better method, as now, after a few minutes of work, the pyramid had almost straight walls and an only slightly curved bottom, with no spurts of water escaping her magical grasp and no unseemly bulges pushing out of her hands.

  Deciding to call success success, despite not forming a perfect pyramid, she relaxed her hold on the magic and allowed the water to return to its natural shape. If she practiced success, she would learn the right things to do. If she continued to practice until she failed, she would just be practicing failure. Perfect practice makes perfect is what her old band director had said back in middle school when her mother insisted she pick up an instrument. She liked music, but she had no interest in being in the college marching band, so her Clarinet had been gathering dust in the closet since she graduated high school.

  She refocused her attention - now was not the time to get caught up in a reverie. She looked at the water and tried to shape the water into the same pyramid as before, hoping to reinforce the pathways of success from her first attempt. The water floating in front of her pulsed as she began to magically shape the top and sides, still using her hands to help channel her magical touch. Her progress was steady, but she felt like it took just as long as the first time to arrive at the final mostly pyramid shaped blob of water.

  Sighing, Anika reset her magical globe of water again. She supposed she couldn’t expect to increase rapidly in pace after only one or two attempts, and she should be happy enough that the water seemed more controlled than it was last time she tried to bring the water to the corners and straight lines contrary to its nature. She probably needed to stop using her hands before she could expect much change in how quickly she could manipulate the element.

  After another 21 repetitions of the pyramid shape, Anika was happier with the overall shape. She’d managed to get most of the sides to stay flat, with a barely imperceptible bulging on the bottom, as fighting both the pull of gravity and surface tension was a struggle. Bored of the pyramid, she decided to try the cube again. As she relaxed the water back into a globe, Lily suddenly swam up and burst out of the water in front of her face. Anika immediately lost all concentration on the water she had been controlling, and it splashed back into the pool, the resulting wave spraying water droplets into her face.

  “Anika, I’m hungry! Can we go eat lunch now?”

  Anika brushed some water droplets off her face and looked around, realizing there was no way to tell how much time had passed. She was really bad about keeping track of time when she got hyperfocused on an activity. “Sorry, I didn’t think about lunch. We ate breakfast late, and usually I would skip lunch at home, but the days are a little longer now, so I could definitely use a snack.”

  Anika pushed Lily off her towards the edge of the pool so she could climb out, then scrambled out of the water after her. Lily shook herself adorably like a puppy while Anika grabbed the towels Lily had unceremoniously dumped on the table after her earlier magical display and threw one on top of Lily, covering her completely. Lily squeaked in affronted surprise as Anika wrapped the towel around her and checked her time tablet.

  “It’s already 4:63! I don’t even know if lunch will still be open. We haven’t been there when it isn’t meal time, but maybe they will have snacks left.”

  Lily tried to shake the towel off of her, but managed to get herself tangled up in it, muffling her voice, “Get this off of me! I hope they still have fruit”

  Laughing, Anika untangled the capybara and patted her dry with the towel before throwing a robe over her damp swim clothes. She realized that other people had come in while she was practicing, as there were several underwater loungers occupied with bodies she didn’t recognize. She hoped she hadn’t distracted anyone from their relaxation by practicing her magic. Of course, it was more likely that Lily was the distraction zooming around the pool.

  “Let’s hurry up and go to the dining hall, then we can go to the library until dinner!”

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