A Jaded Life

Chapter 1336

After I left the hospital and headed towards the communal mess hall, I just happened to run into Joshua. We spotted each other at roughly the same time, and, for a moment, I wondered if I could have set up a better confrontation if I had tried to. This was just about as perfect as it could be: completely public, with no one I was affiliated with nearby, giving him the initiative and, in his eyes, the advantage.

“Good evening, Miss Morgana,” he greeted me, projecting his voice to make sure everyone in a fairly large area was able to hear him, drawing even more attention to him and, by affiliation, to me. “I have tried to find you these last few days.”

“Evening, Joshua,” I returned the greeting, “Other tasks occupied my time elsewhere,” I shrugged, matching the projection of his voice, while doing my best to sound completely and utterly casual about this, as if I wasn’t bothered by anything, certainly not by the numerous looks we were getting. Well, mostly the looks I was getting, with the vast majority of them being rather hostile, or, in a few cases, scared.

“Have you considered my request?” he asked, his voice just as obsequious as he had sounded when we spoke before. It was creepy enough to send shivers of discomfort down my spine, but I had a feeling that most people would consider it a friendly, very polite and maybe even inviting voice, a voice one wanted to hear speak and listen to.

“You mean the request to teach you magic?” I asked, playing along with his game. Now, with my admission that he had asked for lessons, even more people were looking, and the hostility around me ratcheted up even further, making it obvious that people wanted me to accept his request.

“I have considered it, yes,” I continued, nodding as I spoke, “And I’d be willing to teach you, under certain conditions.” My agreement caused the looks around me to shift a little, and I could see a flash of triumph cross Joshua’s face.

“Wonderful,” he smiled his professionally fake smile, the kind of smile that made you check your wallet and even count your fingers, just to make sure nothing had gone missing. “I’m sure your conditions will be perfectly reasonable,” he continued, challenging me to elaborate.

“The primary condition is that any teaching will be done at Jademoon Tower,” I replied, letting the statement hang in the air for a moment before explaining further. “What you may not know is that teaching magical skills is not always safe. Beginners, stars, anyone who is using magic they are unfamiliar with can create unexpected results. Just that beginners are often the most energetic and unpredictable in their experimentation,” I paused, letting a pensive smile spread over my face.

“I have seen budding arcanists weave magic in ways I had never considered, creating workings that I can only match thanks to my superior power. As you can expect, those workings, the results of their experimentation, are not always safe,” I paused again, noticing that the muttering in the crowd had shifted now, just a little. The fear I had noticed earlier had increased, but it wasn’t directed at me any longer. Instead, quite a bit was focused on Joshua.

“To be honest, I don’t think the majority of those experiments result in something I consider safe, and the discipline you are interested in is one where I doubt any experimental working will ever be safe, simply because Mind Magic is such a delicate topic. Even the smallest alteration can have massive, often unexpected, consequences. You never know what will happen if you start tugging on other people's mental strings. It is something I only undertake when I’m confident that I can work undisturbed and with full knowledge and consent of those I’m working on, to minimise the potential for unexpected circumstances,” I finished my explanation, making it very, very obvious why I was demanding that my condition was met, making it very clear that it was a matter of public safety.

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Meaning, the very public he had been manipulating to get me to teach him would now demand that he acquiesce to my completely reasonable condition. Why, it was for their safety, after all.

“That is an understandable condition, I agree.” Joshua’s mask didn’t crack, but I was fairly confident that there had been a moment in which he had struggled to hold it. Just a second in which his eyes seemed to narrow and his smile twisted into a snarl. But it might have been my imagination.

“Excellent,” I didn’t wait for him to continue; instead, I kept the verbal initiative. “All my students have made their way to Jademoon Tower under their own power. As such, I will meet you when you enter through the gate. Take it as a test of your ingenuity, temerity and resilience,” I challenged, a calm smile on my face, as if this was nothing but ordinary. Which, in actuality, it was; I hadn’t taken a single student to Jademoon Tower, they had all made their own way there. Sure, most had taken a group, but it wasn’t as if I was telling him he couldn’t find others to help him, just that he had to walk there.

“Does that hold for everyone?” someone from the crowd asked before Joshua could get a response in.

“Certainly,” I nodded, “Both this year and last year, I have given lessons to every student who wished to learn and had the requisite minimum amount of power or affinity. Those minimum standards aren’t really negotiable. If you can’t cast magic, I can hardly teach you,” I explained, adding a shrug at the end, making it obvious that my standards weren’t some impossibly high standard but just, as I said, the minimum.

“How does that work?” another person in the crowd asked, and, by now, it seemed as if Joshua had given up, at least for now. He was still there, still looking at me with that smile, but he seemed to be lost in thought.

“By ‘that’, I presume magic in general?” I replied to the question, looking past a few heads to focus on the woman who had asked, who nodded in response, her eyes a little wide when she realised that I had picked her out by voice, despite the general noise all around us.

“To trim down a complicated topic into something manageable, Arcane Magic is the ability to use power drawn from the Astral River, what the system calls Astral Power, to affect reality around you. Generally, the user will channel that magic through one or more domains of the natural world to give the desired effect its fundamental shape. One such domain, a classic one at that, would be the element of Fire. Using Fire Magic, it is possible to create a wide variety of effects, some obvious, others not so much.” I paused, raising one of my hands, the palm upwards and cupped, as if holding something.

“Take Ice, for example,” I began, a simple prism of Hard Ice forming above my hand. “Like this, it is simply Ice, though a lot harder than frozen water. However, I can also use the image of hail, beating down on the ground, or even that of a blizzard to get this,” I continued speaking, and suddenly, the piece of Ice shot up, into the sky as if launched from a rather large cannon.

“Now, that needed a bit more focus, as hail generally falls with gravity, not against it, but I wasn’t about to launch attacks like this in town,” I added with a grin, getting a few soft chuckles.

“But Ice can also be something like this.” Now, the air above my hand was filled with sparkling diamond dust, forming a thick, and freezingly cold, cloud of mist, neatly centred within the palm of my hand.

“Or maybe this,” I had a smile on my face as I turned the mist into snow, forming a neat and fluffy snowball, only to physically toss it up into the air, where it exploded in far more snow than it should have contained, showering the crowd in soft, sparkling fluff.

“Does that give you an idea? Fundamentally, magic takes nature and leverages it to the user’s advantage, allowing countless different applications, from the civil you have seen around town to more martial pursuits. As long as the user is creative and powerful enough, I don’t think anything is impossible. Just, well, difficult,” I finished my impromptu explanation, getting a bit of spontaneous applause.

“And those affinities you mentioned?” another voice asked. Again, I focused on the person who had asked, conveniently ignoring Joshua, who seemed to fade into the background. I would have to keep an eye on him, but at least for now, he wasn’t my priority. This could be a good way to add a few more arcane spellcasters to the world, something I was always happy to do.