When I mentioned to Midnight it would be a lot easier to use Storage on random objects, Midnight looked at me oddly. “Didn’t Vilhelmiina make you something for just that?”
I looked at him. He looked back. My brain processed things. “Oh yeah. It’s just that we bumped up the limits on Storage shortly after that so it didn’t matter. And I wasn’t thinking about using it offensively in the same way.” The goggles should be in the apartment somewhere.
What we’d learned from our practice session was that taking things in and out required a certain level of physical contact- which wasn’t surprising- though it only really mattered when using something near to the maximum limits. Objects with significantly different dimensions in one direction seemed to be a bit more difficult to work with than something compact like a sphere or cube, but that could have been due to the same reasons.
“Is there anything else we should try?” I asked.
Great Girl was still present. She liked working with magic, it had been a relatively short training session, and it wouldn’t tire her out. Thus her usually busy schedule wasn’t too impacted by our efforts. “You should store some water.”
“We usually have a few water bottles and other emergency supplies,” I commented. That habit was mainly started by Midnight, but with the extra space we ended up with I kept a few things like that myself.
“Not water bottles,” Great Girl shook her head. “Water.”
“Like in cups? I guess it’s not going to spill or go bad and it would be easier to get out in an emergency.”
“Midnight,” she said. “You have to know what I mean.”
“... liquid water? By itself?”
“Exactly!”
Huh. Interesting. “But how would we… at best, we could probably only grab a small amount.”
“Why?” Great Girl asked.
“Because that’s what we’d be touching.”
“Do you touch all of the other things you use Storage on, or just the outside?”
“Well… but those are one object.”
She shook her head. “Maybe you shouldn’t have learned that you have to touch enough of something. It doesn’t seem like it’s helping.”
“Knowing the limits of what I can do is important.”
“You know what you think the limits are,” she said. “Who was it that taught me that I can shrink?”
Wasn’t that different? Obviously shrinking and growing went together. And she kind of kept it going accidentally and I just noticed. But… “I guess there’s no reason we can’t try.”
We did have bottles of water to work with. Opening the top of one I dipped a finger into it. I used a small portion of my last remaining handful of mana points to try to store it. The whole bottle went into storage.
“I’m going to go get a bucket,” Great Girl said. “A big one.”
Midnight gave the same thing one try while Great Girl was gone, with similar results. “I’ve never tried not to grab solid stuff before,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
I felt like Great Girl’s definition of a bucket was different than mine. She might have actually needed to use her powers to carry the big trough she had. She was strong without her powers since her base strength was important, but I felt like she couldn’t have carried that thing at five feet. How heavy was that anyway?
Yeah, I needed to keep those goggles around to not guess.
“We definitely can’t store all that,” I said.
“That’s the point,” Great Girl explained. “Just take as much as you can. Since you can’t take the whole thing, unless you do something really weird you won’t grab the solid parts.”
“It could do nothing,” I considered. But she had already set it down, and I was preparing to use my magic. I guess I should go for the full point? I wanted as much water as possible so it was easy to see what was happening.
My arm sort of sat in the water for a few moments, and I wondered why nothing happened. Maybe because I was trying to get too much water? Yes, it was the same feeling as anything else over mass. I gradually tuned down my efforts while keeping the mana steady until it suddenly took a large chunk of water out of the trough, causing it to splash about as the sides dropped in.
“Hmm,” Great Girl said. “Do you store air and swap it with the things you Store?”
“I… not intentionally, at least,” I said. “But I suppose it must do something like that. Otherwise we’d end up with thunder every time.”
It wouldn’t be difficult for it to have the same volume of air as everything I could store. The only way that would be weird is if I stored a lot of things lighter than air. I wasn’t sure if that was a worthy line of testing, and more importantly I was still working on liquids so intentional gas storage was a bit much.
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Though now that I considered it, I could see reasons I would want to. Having some spare air to pull out might not really be better than Water Breathing in most circumstances, but I might want to replace some sort of toxic gasses around me- which would effectively be the normal use of things.
Trying to release the water I had stored was easy enough, but it sort of splashed everywhere even though I tried to drop it back in the large trough Great Girl had somehow picked up.
“I think that covers everything I can think of aside from gasses,” I shrugged. “We’re pretty low on mana, and that would require some special testing circumstances.” I checked… and we hadn’t gotten a natural increase in Storage. I supposed a hundred or so mana -and more uses than that- simply wasn’t sufficient for a spell that already had eleven upgrades total.
I hadn’t hit anyone by dropping things on them or successfully stolen anything either, so no experience. Midnight got a couple points, since he could get them from study. I shared some of his combat experience, but I couldn’t get the other sorts. A couple points for that much mana certainly wasn’t the most efficient, but it also wasn’t bad when one considered daily and incremental gains. At 2 experience per day, he’d grow from level 27 to 32 in a year. That was quite significant. Obviously, re-treading the same ideas over and over wouldn’t be as useful, so we’d have to keep expanding our learning, but a mage able to dedicate their time to study should grow quickly.
Oddly enough, I didn’t think my apprentice mages grew that much. They were only a bit ahead of the expected level. If they had gained multiple points of experience every day, then after ten years they should have hit level 50. Then again, mana regeneration was quicker here which allowed for more training, and there could be any number of other factors influencing things.
-----
After we finished the last of our training, I took the bent and battered barbell with me to find Khithae. It was her job to repair things, and I would prefer to have it restored before bringing it back.
My gecko-adjacent friend gave me a look as I approached. “It doesn’t appear that your metal staff replacement is working out for you.”
“This?” I held it up. “It’s just a barbell.” I wondered if Vilhelmiina could make a staff entirely out of the same thing as the daggers. Surely it would be able to hold more mana, right? Though that would mean fighting more elf-ninjas. Now that I thought about it, they were kind of weird. I hadn’t interacted with any assassins in my previous life, so maybe they were just all like that. “I was hoping you could repair it before I returned it.”
“Of course you bring me more work.”
“I can just bring it back,” I shrugged.
“It’s fine, it looks pretty fixable. How did you even do this?”
“I dropped it from really high up.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to see if I could. Turns out, I can drop things from Storage through Mage’s Reach.”
“... Huh. I guess if it extends your effective presence around it, it’s not that weird,” she said. “Just somewhat weird.”
“You have magic too,” I pointed out.
“And magic is weird. I was a normal engineer where I came from.”
“... I asked you about going back to your world, right? I didn’t just pass you over?”
“Yes yes,” she waved her hand. “Perhaps some day I will wish to see it again for a different perspective. But I like this world now. Even if there are few people exactly like me.”
“Good. Because you were my first friend here. And it’s easy enough to bring people back… when I’m not out of mana, I mean.”
-----
It was Christmas time again, and that meant two things. Fake snow, and people trying to steal Christmas. Well, occasionally some weather powered individuals made real snow, but New Bay didn’t naturally get any. It was the wrong climate and the wrong elevation.
“I think you should focus on support this time,” Shockwave said. “You get experience for that, right? I promise to punch like, ten people per second.”
“Unfortunately,” I said. “Christmas stuff lasts all evening.” I knew they wanted me to Haste them, obviously. “Having like twenty minutes of one extremely effective individual just isn’t enough.”
“Bleh,” Shockwave hung their head in disappointment. “... Can you save me one, at least?”
“If we work in adjacent areas, I’ll keep one for emergencies,” I said. “Aren’t you getting faster yourself, anyway?”
“Marginal improvements on speed year over year isn’t the same as suddenly going double or quadruple speed,” Shockwave pointed out.
I nodded. “How do you feel about teleportation?”
“Boring. If you don’t feel everything the whole way, are you really even moving? I certainly wouldn’t call it fast. Good for deliveries, I guess. The only thing I deliver is punches.”
“I distinctly remember you having a knife.”
“I don’t knife people,” Shockwave said.
They of course also did a lot of grappling and tying people up. Because if you twisted someone’s arm really fast it rarely mattered how strong they were. So if Shockwave had access to restraints that could hold someone, making a quick pretzel out of them was great.
Midnight and I did end up in a support role, but as an addition to Great Girl’s team. Great Girl herself did well with any of our bolstering spells, and we could also provide additional firepower. Specifically, the less-physical kind. There weren’t many things that a combination of Great Girl, Mono, and Grasp couldn’t handle, but if it existed it would need to be a different sort of attack entirely. Midnight and I could freeze, burn, or shock- and Sonic Lance might be useful too.
My goggles didn’t like looking at Great Girl or at Santa. Any of the Santas, because they all had their own bag that held far too much stuff. Great Girl was a problem because she kept changing, so the readout was usually cycling to something new and throwing errors.
But if I just focused on other things, like the villains who were trying to steal from our local Santa, it was fine. I couldn’t yet make use of it the way I wanted to by stealing stuff into Storage, but having information available was fine as long as I didn’t let it distract me.
The first part of the night didn’t have many villains I had fought before, which was great because new people provided opportunities for experience. There was one guy who had a giant magnet which was supposed to draw in Santa’s sleigh… somehow… but it mostly ripped HVAC units from the roof around him. The guy got knocked out by one good Shocking Grasp- delivered via Mage’s Reach- indicating he didn’t have very competent defenses.
I was pretty sure the fact that a giant horseshoe shaped magnet didn’t have an on/off switch normally meant he was a tech super. Probably the worst I’d ever seen. There were a few other early fools who seemed unconcerned about ending up on the naughty list, but the real hard hitters would come later.
