Only Villains Do That

So obviously, I made magic my project of the week.

I was at it again the next morning, immediately following a solid night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast of crawn stew. Because, oh yes, here on Ephemera we ate crawns. Lowborn did, anyway; in fact, they seemed to be the chief source of protein for the lower classes in Fflyr Dlemathlys, which might explain why the peasants here were so physically robust, given how abundant they were. Skittering and crawling everywhere, like rats or roaches and filling more or less the same ecological niche. The umbrella term “crawn” referred to dozens of species of little arthropods ranging from mouse-sized to ferret-sized, with between four and eighteen legs, which could be found wherever there was any speck of food to be sniffed out and consumed. You didn’t even have to hunt for meat, just set traps in your kitchen.

For obvious reasons I was leery of this practice; eating tiny scavengers is an excellent way to acquire diseases and parasites. Apparently the Fflyr were aware of this, to judge by how offended Aster was when I asked if they ate rats, too. Biribo claimed the biology of crawns made them a kind of living disinfectant, turning any manner of organic muck into safe and usable protein in which microorganisms couldn’t survive. For the same reason you had to cook them thoroughly as raw crawn meat would make a person sick. I doubted the people here understood about the microbiome in the human gut, but it made sense.

They weren’t bad. Sort of like shellfish. Once the Fflyr got finished putting all their peppers and spices in everything, it all tasted kind of the same anyhow. At least crawn stew was filling and gave you a nice boost of energy to start the day.

Thus, I had a lot more strength and mental focus when I set up in the mess hall with a pot of the spicy-sweet tea (which to my own surprise I had begun to like) to practice my spell combination. Harold and Kasser were off to the side at another table, Harold making crossbow parts while Kasser had switched to crafting lamp stands; already the room was lit by every scavenged wine bottle we could scrape together, each filled with a light slime and corked. They were just kinda sitting around on tables and in the corners, though. Also the light was fairly dim and discolored due to the cheap bottles. I was already planning to see about acquiring some higher-quality glass containers next time I saw Auldmaer.

Actually, I was a little embarrassed I hadn’t thought of doing this before; fire slimes put off too much heat for the purpose but healing slimes also glowed. It was pink mood lighting, but hey, that beat paying for asauthec. And it’d be convenient to have them all over the place, too. Cut your finger? Unscrew the lid off the nearest lamp and stick your hand in it.

On that note, I began my morning’s efforts with the last, much-anticipated simple combinations I’d been too worn out to get to last night. I had packed it in right after discovering Slimeshot and hauled myself to bed, but now I tested what I could make by combining my new base spells with Heal.

Somewhat to my surprise, they both worked.

Heal and Windburst combined to create Breath of Vitality, which was very pretty and not very useful. It created a gentle breeze which smelled of flowers and carried lovely little curls of pink and pale green sparkles. This seemed to have the effect of boosting overall well-being and would work to heal injuries the longer they were exposed to it. That was a factor as this spell had some intriguing components: it could be streamed continuously as long as I concentrated on it, and by focusing I could adjust the width and range of the spray, rather like turning the nozzle on a spray bottle. That fascinated me because neither of its parent spells had such characteristics; Heal and Windburst were both single-shot one-and-done casts.

Junko really enjoyed Breath of Vitality; she liked to chase the sparkles. This was good because she also wanted to chase the sparkles made by Sparkspray and at least this wouldn’t set her fur on fire.

The other healing combination I produced added Heal to Orb of Light’s effect to create Healing Beacon, which was just…an Orb of Light, but pink, and which healed you as long as you were in range of the glow. The effect was more pronounced the closer you were.

Neither was particularly impressive in effect. As Biribo had explained how healing magic worked, it mostly relied on specific spells to treat specific ailments. Vague, broadly “healing” spells needed to be grossly overpowered like Heal itself to be much good, or you could find yourself taking hours to remedy a broken bone, minutes to seal a cut, or just prolong the suffering of someone dying of a terminal illness.

I got to test the potency of these new healing spells because Sakin, passing through the mess hall on his way back to the barracks wing the crew were cleaning out with a fresh bucket of water, immediately volunteered to repeatedly injure himself. Which he then did with absolutely none of the hesitation a human being will normally have to break his foot under a heavy table or stab himself in the arm with a kitchen knife.

I did not ask him to do so, nor would I have, he just up and did it. Grinning cheerfully, and apparently happier to be doing this than cleaning the barracks. Classic Sakin.

“Well, good to know the combinations work, but those are a waste of time,” I said after giving him a proper Heal. “With the original spell, piddly stuff like that is completely useless.”

“I can think of a big use for ‘em,” said Aster, who had just come to see what was taking Sakin so long. “Remember how your cover story at the King’s Guild was that you only know a few ‘minor medical spells?’ I thought that would be the end of it, but apparently Rhydion himself remembered, and we know he wants you to come heal for his zombie quest. Well, now if you’re ever backed into a corner and have to bust out weak healing magic to support your claims, you have some. Before yesterday you’d have been forced to reveal you’ve only got the single most potent healing spell in existence. Y’know, the same one the mysterious Healer uses?”

“Hm.” I nodded. “Actually, you’re dead right, Aster. Well spotted. Okay, so we’ve gained nothing in the way of healing capacity, but some useful tricks for subterfuge.”

Junko barked, wagging her tail and staring expectantly at her with her ears up. I sighed and directed a wide stream of Breath of Vitality off to the side, and she began leaping ecstatically through it, snapping at the dissipating sparkles.

“And a new dog toy,” Sakin said solemnly. “This is a vital addition to your resources, Lord Seiji.”

“All right, fun’s over,” Aster ordered, giving him a light shove on the shoulder. “Back to work.”

“You think that was fun?” Sakin protested, albeit with good humor while he headed off toward the hall alongside her. “Did you see what I was doing?”

“Yes, I did, and knowing you? Yes, I do.”

“Well, when you’re right, you’re right!”

Unfortunately, that was the last experiment of the day that qualified as a success.

The next goal on which I set my sights was the combination of Spark, Summon Slime, and Windburst which Slimeshot had inspired in me, because I wanted my damn napalm cannon.

In short, it didn’t work.

It could work, and that kept me trying throughout the morning. I could tell the difference, from the first attempt, between a spell combination that was just not going to be possible and one which I hadn’t managed to make work yet. In the first, there was an obvious barrier, a sense that these two components were not going to click. The big issue with this whole system was that in the latter case, I couldn’t tell how to make it work. It was a process of pure, blind fumbling at the best of times—and when it came to the mental strain of trying to hold three blocks of spell structure in my head at once and fit them all together, it became blind, exhausting fumbling.

I suspected that the “cap” of three spells per combination wasn’t a hard limit, but just something a human brain couldn’t surpass. I tried it with four, and couldn’t manage to make them all coexist simultaneously in the semi-activated state needed to combine them. I tried harder, and immediately had to Heal the splitting headache which ensued.

In fact, I ended up having to do that quite a lot over the course of the morning.

It was just so damn frustrating. If only I understood the rules, could read the luminous text that appeared in my mind’s eye and shifted about in response to my inept manipulation. There was a rational system at the bottom of all this, somewhere; the process was not as vague and intuitive as my practice of it was. I just didn’t know how it worked, and trying to make it work when I couldn’t directly comprehend any of the underlying logic was…well, it was less than optimal.

I was certain of some kind of guiding structure beneath all the flash and spectacle due to the hours I’d spent over the last few weeks pondering the nature of magic; there wasn’t a lot to do but think during my long walks to and from Gwyllthean. The arbitrary specifics of Heal were revelatory once I considered their implications. Why did it not replace lost limbs when it clearly had the capacity to generate mass out of apparently nothing? It obviously wasn’t an issue of figuring out where to put that mass; the rest of what it could do was intricate enough to prove that. Why shouldn’t it work to remedy hunger, thirst, and fatigue? Creating matter and precisely adjusting the body on a molecular level should be able to deal with all of those. And why not mental problems? Some of those I could understand being outside its purview, but the existence of pharmaceutical drugs for mental illness proved there was a brain chemistry component in at least some. Given that anything modern medicine could do, Heal could do much better, why did it not?

The answer to all of those “whys” was that it was designed not to do that. Heal reset the body to someone’s conception of an ideal state—which by itself revealed there was an active intelligence behind it, as that’s not really a thing in biology. And that was before getting into the specific, arbitrary caveats. No replacing major tissue loss, meeting standard biological needs, or fixing mental problems…because…? At that point it became a matter of questioning the motivations of whoever had designed the spell, rather than analyzing its actual function.

So far, so predictable; I could well imagine the goddesses had carefully designed each spell they made available as a scroll. But then there was Immolate, and the burning (hah) question: why did it not incinerate clothes?

Because it consistently didn’t, and it should. A person who’d been Immolated would often end up with their clothing singed and smoking, which was really not sufficient damage for the intensity and duration of the fire involved. Heat that could reduce a human body to charcoal would reduce cloth to ash, and there was no reason the regenerative properties of its healing component should work on clothing. Early on, I’d just assumed Ephemeral clothing was made from some khora-based fibers that didn’t burn, like the akorshil they made their furniture from…but then I’d advanced my agenda by burning up a whole shipment of shimmersatin. And then learned further, when I asked Master Auldmaer about acquiring material to be able to clothe my prospective army, that they raised sheep on Dount, and most of the local fabric available to lowborn was just wool.

Wool should burn. Under the kind of abuse Immolate caused, it should burn away to nothing in seconds. That it did not meant the spell had an extra proviso stipulating that—and why in the hell would it? Neither Heal nor Spark should include any feature for mitigating fire damage surrounding the target. This was a wholly new component of Immolate, which did not come from its parent spells. The motivation for leaving clothes intact I understood: it was great for dramatic effect to leave someone dressed in lightly smoldering attire, in a way that wouldn’t quite work if they were just left naked. That was a very psychological element which had to have been added in there deliberately.

By whom? The most superficial answer was me; it wasn’t implausible that I could subconsciously influence the traits a spell would have when I created it. But I’d made Immolate on the fly, under severe duress, having no actual idea what would happen if I combined Spark and Heal into one. It didn’t make sense for my mental state at the time to have created fine nuances calculated to intimidate onlookers. Which only left…

Was I actually creating new spells, or accessing additional ones already in the goddesses’ database that weren’t ordinarily available to people?

These musings only made my efforts more frustrating, as they raised the strong suggestion that spell combination was only difficult because it was designed to be, on purpose.

“I wish I could help you, boss,” said Biribo when I complained, sounding actually sincere. “I know you’re not the first champion of a goddess to have spell combination as their extra gift, but…uh, that makes one person every few centuries who’s got it. So, nobody does know how it works. Even if a previous Hero or Dark Lord figured it all out and bothered to write a manual, it would be useless to basically everyone; this is not something people can do without the specific blessing of one of the goddesses. It’s not likely that knowledge would survive if it was recorded somewhere, much less find its way to one of the only people who might need it at some unknowable point in the distant future.”

“Right,” I said impatiently, “and your familiar powers don’t extend to explaining all this because…?”

He buzzed a bit lower in the air, managing to look abashed despite his limited capacity for facial expression. “Sorry, boss. The Blessing of Wisdom has its limitations, too.”

“You said the goddesses are playing a game, right?” Aster offered, having returned along with the rest of the crew for lunch. Which they were now setting out on one of the tables. Wait, was it already that late in the day? Yeah, now that I thought about it, I was pretty hungry. “If they’re just doing all this to entertain themselves… It makes sense to me they’d want you to fumble around and first and figure out the hard way how things work.”

“Yeah, if you just handed the Hero and the Dark Lord all kinds of powers up front and made ‘em fight, that’s a brief spectacle at best,” Donon agreed, ladling soup into bowls. “You wanna make it a proper story, there’s gotta be a, what’s the word…progression?”

“Well, that’s just tremendous,” I groused, then winced as I got up from my seat at the edge of the dais. “Why the fuck is my body so stiff? I’ve cast Heal on myself half a dozen times this morning.”

“Because you’ve been sitting there working yourself into a knot,” said Aster with a smile. “Come have some food, Lord Seiji, you need it after all that.”

“Dunno about that,” I grumbled, but joined them at the table. “You guys have been doing all the work around here today.”

“She ain’t wrong, boss,” Biribo chirped. “The brain is an organ in your body! You work too hard on any one part and you’ll get tired all over.”

“Yeah, what you’ve been over there doing is some exhausting work, Lord Seiji,” Sakin agreed. “Pure concentration is difficult shit, there’s a reason monks and priests and such have to train for years to meditate that deeply. And that’s just meditation; the only analogs I know for what you’ve been trying to do is the workings of really high-level sorcerers who have spells that let them design their own spells, or Void witches. If it was easy, everybody would be a Void witch.”

“Mmf.” I finished chewing a bite of soup, which was just this morning’s crawn stew thinned with some more broth and extra vegetables—and extra peppers, of course. “That’s another thing I’ve been meaning to ask. People mention this Void occasionally, but it doesn’t seem to come up often. What’s a Void witch? Is that extra magic I can learn?”

“Absolutely not!” Biribo shouted, making me rear back in surprise.

“Yeah, I was just talking hypothetically,” Sakin agreed. “Anybody who messes with the Void is either desperate or suicidal. The lizard’s right, Lord Seiji, that’s not an avenue to anything helpful.”

I opened my mouth to push further, but then noticed his expression. Sakin usually had a look on his face like he was having the time of his life, especially at moments when a normal person would be bored or upset, and I still hadn’t figured out whether he was doing that deliberately or just crazy in that specific way. Now, though, he met my gaze with an intent expression, and once he was sure he had my attention, cut his eyes momentarily toward Biribo and then back to me.

Biribo himself was hovering over the table in front of me, with his back to Sakin, similarly staring as if he could impress on me the dangers of the Void by sheer force of eye contact.

Well, well, well. How about that.

“So, these limits on the Blessing of Wisdom,” I said, at least as much to distract him as because I was curious. “What can you tell me about that?”

Biribo drooped in midair again; he definitely looked distracted. “Ah…yeah. I guess we were gonna have to have this conversation eventually.”

“Well, that’s good and ominous,” I sighed, spearing another bite of bug meat and the stringy alien tuber that wasn’t exactly a yam but seemed related. “Just when I thought I was all settled in and I’d heard all the background info that was gonna piss me off. Is this gonna piss me off, Biribo?”

“He means relative to how much everything pisses him off,” Aster said gravely, causing several of the traitors surrounding me to duck their heads over their soup as if that meant I couldn’t hear the snickers.

“Yeah, may as well rip this scab off,” Biribo agreed. “Okay, boss, the thing about the Blessing of Wisdom is it’s not only the least defined in terms of what it can and can’t do, but you, uh, sort of…have to learn it as you go.”

I chewed, swallowed, and deliberately kept my tone even. “Go on?”

“You already know the basics. You get universal language comprehension, and a familiar who can gather intel, mostly about other people and Blessing related stuff. There’s a whole host of other potential skills and powers that can come with the Blessing of Wisdom, but they’re sort of situationally activated. They’re different for each Blessed and even from that baseline which ones you acquire depend on the circumstances you find yourself in and the things you accomplish. And, uh…fair warning, this is the part that’s probably gonna piss you off.”

“I am aflutter with anticipation,” I said calmly, taking another bite.

“Okay, so, I do know many if not most of the possible extra powers you might get, boss. Any familiar would. But we’ve all learned not to tell you in advance, because…if you try to go for a specific power or gift deliberately, you’ll very likely find yourself blocked from attaining it. We familiars do try to guide our Blessed toward unlocking extra attributes that’ll be helpful for them, but subtly. If the Blessed knows of one in advance, it almost never activates for them, even if they meet the conditions perfectly. The system sort of…enforces working blind.”

I unhurriedly finished chewing and swallowed. “Sounds a lot like how my morning’s been going.”

“Sorry, boss,” he said weakly.

“Well, it’s clearly not your fault, Biribo, unless you designed the system. Just do your best.”

“You bet I will, and that’s a promise!” he said, zooming around my head in a complete circle. Aster was right; I got noticeably better cooperation from the little freak when I tried to be more considerate of him. And I was also right in noting that this whole situation wasn’t his fault. He was as much a prisoner of Ephemera as I—in fact, so was everyone on this planet. I was just the only one who had a frame of reference for life on a world where everything wasn’t completely and unnecessarily stupid.

“It’s like I said,” Aster mused, “and like Donon said. The whole setup seems designed to make you go through a drawn-out process for the goddesses’ entertainment.”

Not to mention yet another mechanism by which they could heavily influence events without being seen brazenly doing so.

I didn’t say anything further, just shoveling soup into my face and already scheming my next scheme.

My next scheme began with introducing my followers to Japanese culture, in a sufficiently offhanded way that it would hopefully look to everyone, even a mystically canny being like a divine familiar, like that was all I was doing.

After a frustrating afternoon in which I wore myself out failing to either create my much-anticipated napalm cannon spell or make either of my new base spells work in any combination for a three-parter, I sat down to dinner with the gang, which I began with the loudest, most cheerful “Itadakimasu!” I could manage.

“Uh…bless you?” Goose said uncertainly while they all stared at me.

“It’s a table prayer,” I explained. “An expression of appreciation for the food, those who prepared it, and nature itself for providing us the resources.”

“Well, hey, you’re welcome,” said Donon with a pleased smile. I suspected he most commonly put himself on cooking duty because he preferred it to helping clean up the fortress, but since he was the best cook I had never bothered to call him out for it.

“It has occurred to me that among its many, and I mean many shortcomings, Fflyr culture lacks the little verbal rituals to which I am accustomed that mark the many passages we make through time and the events of life. Respectful phrases which signify the beginning and ending of a meal, entering someone’s home, leaving your own home or returning to it, greeting a teacher or superior, thanking coworkers for their efforts when one leaves the office for the day…”

“You’ve got ritual chants for all of that?” Kasser demanded, his eyebrows climbing. “And I thought we Fflyr were obsessed with everyone’s social place. That sounds fucking exhausting.”

Harold leaned over and nudged him.

“Ah, no offense, Lord Seiji,” Kasser added belatedly.

“It’s okay,” I assured him with good humor. “I’m not going to insist any of you follow along. You’re not Japanese and trying to make you would be foolish. Hell, I’m such a poor example of a Japanese person in general that if my government knew I was one of our country’s two representatives on an alien world someone in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have a stroke. Still. Living without these things for a while has made me appreciate them, I find.”

“It’s funny how that can happen,” Twigs murmured, eyes on her plate. Goose gave her a pensive sidelong look, but said nothing.

“You don’t truly appreciate what you have until you lose it,” I agreed. “So! I’m going to…casually institute a few practices, in which all of you are welcome to join me, but it will not be required. I think you might find they add to your quality of life. To begin with, there will be a schedule for the bath after dinner, since we only have the one bathing chamber. And tub, for that matter. For the sake of avoiding any embarrassment, there will be one hour assigned for men’s use, and one for women’s. Alternating each day for the sake of fairness. And beginning tonight, the men will go first, because I am shamelessly pulling rank.”

“The…bath?” Harold said warily. “I, uh. I thought that was a you thing, Lord Seiji.”

“Yeah, all due respect, we don’t really have a problem getting clean the old-fashioned way,” Donon added.

“Pouring and scrubbing is to clean you,” I intoned. “A proper bath is to cleanse you. Body, mind, and spirit. Seriously, you should all try it.”

A round of awkward glances passed around the table. Aster shook her head and tucked back into her food.

“This sounds like a setup for somebody to ‘accidentally’ walk in on the girls all naked,” Goose said skeptically.

“I thought I’d made it clear that I expect there to be harmony and civility within the organization,” I replied. “But to be plain, there will be consequences if anybody tries that. Bath time is a sacred thing. Peeking will not be tolerated. That includes familiars,” I added.

“Yeah, yeah,” Biribo huffed, hovering over the table as usual. “You and your bath time. D’you know how many people I’ve seen naked over the years?”

“That’s not the point, Biribo. It’s the principle.”

“And to be extra clear,” Kasser said carefully, “this is not mandatory?”

“No, Kasser, it is not. It’s encouraged, and I’ll be disappointed if you decline to share in one of the finer offerings of my culture, but it would defeat the purpose if you were forced to participate. A bath is relaxing. Just wouldn’t work if you were all tense from being compelled to be there.”

“Well, hey, I’ll try anything once,” Sakin declared lightly.

Yeah, I had a feeling he would.

“As for things which are mandatory,” I said, noting the position of the wagging tail which emerged from behind the table, “all of you quit sneaking scraps to my dog. I feed her plenty; you’re gonna make her sick.”

Five pairs of hands were immediately and innocently placed on the tabletop.

“That was neatly done, Lord Seiji,” Sakin said with a knowing little smirk an hour later as soon as we were both up to our shoulders in the steaming tub, with the doors to the old stable firmly shut and Biribo on the other side of them. None of the other gentlemen had decided to join us, which suited my plans perfectly. “Y’know—and I mean this quite sincerely—for an amateur, you’ve got good instincts for this stuff. I think we’ll shape you into a properly terrifying operator yet!”

“Mmhm,” I murmured, lounging back against the curved rim of the old trough. “Glad to hear it. Now that we have privacy, tell me about the Void.”