glowfic | The endless waste

"I'm a Witch. About one in five hundred girls on my planet are Witches. We acquire our magic over our first few periods, it peaks in power when we're fifteen to eighteen, and then rapidly declines from there as we get older. The oldest active-duty Witch I know is 31, and she's coming up on retirement any day now. It's hard, fighting so hard at such a young age, but who else is gonna do it?"

"Anyway. All Witches can fly with the right tools - absolute minimum is a stick with twigs at one end, but my steelwing is a lot more sophisticated. We all get mana flashes - those lights - and starbursts, a really wasteful undirected magic blast attack that will exhaust you in a hurry if you rely on it too much. We can also do shields and a little elemental stuff. That's the basics. On top of that, every Witch gets a special thing they're intuitively good at. I'm a copier. I copy magic. It's never quite as easy as the person doing it themselves, but it makes me really versatile."

"Just Witch magic, or any magic?" wonders Saevetei, as she retrieves a chair for Grendyne. "And can you copy things you're not intuitively good at? Like a transit spell?"

Edited 2015-11-20 20:03 (UTC)

"I've never actually seen any non-Witch magic before. I don't know if I can, but it'd be best to try it on something really simple. Mm. It's more like - My intuitive magic is copying. Whatever I copy, I'm never as intuitively good at it as those who have it natively. And I can only keep copied magic for more than an hour or two if it's really simple easy stuff. I could transit-spell a small object across a town right now, but not people, and definitely not to another dimension."

"Ah. Then I suppose I'll have to figure that out if we're to ever get you home. Okay. ... Do you feel up to testing if you can copy my magic, or would you rather pass on that for now?"

"I can try one or two things. But after that I'd like to sleep for about twenty hours. This is good food, by the way, much better than more stinking fish and rice again and again every day."

"Thank you. I can actually make, well, not literally everything, meat's a bit tricky still, but just about everything. Given time. I'll avoid fish and rice if you like." She puts the language-doll on a shelf with other dolls. "I'll put you in my library, if you don't mind? I'll need to make you a bed, but that's not especially hard. You can try copying my magic as I make it?"

"Sure, I'll try to copy some of your magic. I can get feedback about what you're doing even if I can't grab onto it. But first, what the hell happened out there if it wasn't Neuroi?"

"Well," says Saevetei, searching through a shelf for something, "basically - we can use a thing called essence for magic. Everyone, not just certain people. There are naturally wells of essence in the world, and for convenience we moved them to places that were easier to reach." Search search search ah ha! She retrieves a little strange circular device that looks to be made out of some kind of glimmering silver-blue net thing, with a copper frame. "And this turned out to be a really, really bad idea, because new wells of essence - we call them nodes - formed in the empty node-less places, but without any essence themselves. So they stole it from everything in the surrounding area, and this killed everything nearby." She goes looking through another shelf that looks like it's for vials of some kind.

"To make matters worse, the nodes that were all brought to the same location turned out to, ah, eat each other when put in close quarters. And the last node doesn't stop eating essence once it's run out of fellows to eat. Which also kills things." She retrieves a vial of clear liquid. "And both of those together caused that. I'm fixing it, but it takes a while."

Edited 2015-11-20 20:56 (UTC)

"Ouch. I think I could hear the nodes when I listened to life. Glad I decided to avoid them. I'll probably have a better chance at copying anything you do if you explain what the stuff is for, by the way."

Edited 2015-11-20 20:59 (UTC)

"Yes, they're very dangerous, some more than others. And sure, I can explain." She holds up the little net-thing. "This is an essence weave - it's kind of like a pattern for something. This one's for making a bed. The vial is a vial of pure essence - basically essence that is easy to prototype into other things. I'll be forcing the essence to follow the weave's pattern and turn itself into something." She motions for Grendyne to follow her out of the room. "It's possible to make something out of essence without a weave, actually, but it's difficult to do and very inefficient. I'm not very good at it, but I can do some things in a pinch."

Edited 2015-11-20 21:09 (UTC)

"The pure essence smells like starbursts."

"Does it? It doesn't smell like anything to me. Is that a magic sense?"

"Yeah. I usually smell magic, that's how I wrap my head around it enough to copy it. I wonder if starbursts are the same stuff as essence? Should I try one on the roof or something?"

Edited 2015-11-20 21:19 (UTC)

"Sure, if you don't mind. I can sense essence, so I could tell you whether or not it is." Pause. "... For the record, you feel like a huge well of essence to me."

"It's probably the witch-magic. It's strong stuff, I can feel it from half a mile away. They send me cruising across cities to detect new Witches before they hurt someone by accident, sometimes."

She walks back outside. Once there is no longer a roof over her head she takes a deep breath and punches the air sharply. A bolt of white energy shoots up about twenty feet before dissipating, and dumps more essence into the air then thirty seconds of Grendyne just sitting there.

"Egh. That was really weak, I'm too tired."

"Yep, essence," says Saevetei. "I couldn't quite pick out what type, I'm not that sensitive to it, but - it's essence." Pause. "I wonder what drinking pure essence would do for you?"

"It's not likely to hurt me, is it? Then again, you need it to make the bed, so I'd better not drink the stuff."

"It's incredibly unlikely to hurt you - I'd say it wouldn't at all, but I'm not actually sure how you work, so I can't guarantee it. I actually have some more vials of it, I need to make it for fixing the nodes - the only reason why I'm running low now is because I went on a node feeding run earlier today."

[note: changed account because Grendyne got her own.]

"Incredibly unlikely to hurt me. Alright, let's try it then."

Saevetei offers her the vial.

"Just a small sip in case I'm horrifically wrong?"

She takes a small sip. Nothing happens. She takes a bigger sip. "...I think it's just giving me more mana. I don't get numbers, it's an abstract sense, but I feel like I have more than I did a minute ago."

"That... sounds like it could be incredibly useful, if I ever get you back to your world," muses Saevetei, blinking.

"It really, really could. Depending on how hard it is to make this stuff."

"I mean, it was a pain to get this far - I had to get the infrastructure set up - but now? Not really difficult at all, just a bit time consuming. My major problem is space to grow the essence plants, not growing the essence plants themselves."

"I'd probably need a dozen of those vials to go from running on empty to fighting-fit. But I'm barely 17, I'm still at close to peak power. Essence could keep our older, more experienced Witches useful for longer. Plants won't grow over empty nodes because it just eats them?"

Edited 2015-11-23 21:52 (UTC)

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