"What? Who's Skitter?" I ask. This only seems to make the kid blink again.
"You? Sorry, I, well, I read about you in a story? Well, not a whole story, more like a bunch of scraps I got together and read?" he says, glancing down.
"Explain," I say, crossing my arms. He read about me?
"I'm a Summoner, Ma'am, it's kind of my thing! Well, I haven't actually managed to summon anyone yet, but I've been getting together all kinds of books and bits from the void. There's a lot of stories about you, and a few of em are even on paper!"
He pulls something out of his pocket, a bunch of burnt pieces of paper, clipped onto the back of a shiny new tablet.
He gesticulates more animatedly, "Skitter, master of escalation, antihero extraordinaire! I got enough information with your name on it to read about you, so I know all sorts of stuff, like how you descended from a dragon, and how you drink tea all the time, and how you've got bug powers."
His voice goes quiet. "Nothing about you being able to backtrace a summoning spell to its source and reverse engineer it though..."
Getting a good look at the kid, it's clear that he's the sort of awkward, bumbling individual who would get along with someone like Greg with ease.
"I'm going to be honest, maybe a third of what you said is actually true. Are you the person who tried to summon me? Who are you?" I say tersely, receiving a meek nod in response.
"Yes ma'am, I'm Seeker," he says quickly.
"My name is Sage, and my power isn't just to control bugs. I haven't even done much with that," I explain conversationally.
I hold up a hand, igniting it with mana. "My power is magic, and your summoning spell is why I have it. I called you here to find out why. Why did you try to summon me? How did you get the spell you used to do it? What are you, and where are you from?" I ask.
He mouths 'oh no' when he sees me manifest magic.
Swallowing, the raccoon-boy rubs his face, flattening what had started to frizz from nervousness. "T-that explains a lot."
"I dunno, I'm a summoner, I fish media out of the void, I've been trying to do my first st-summon for a while now, I didn't think someone would go and somehow get magic from one measly little summons, I didn't even get a response from any of the others," he explains.
"I'm just an animal-person, technically more of a procyonid-person, but that's kind of obscure and there aren't a lot of species in it anyway, and our power works with stuff outside of that so most people just say 'Raccoon Person', and a few people say we should be reclassified as 'Ringtail-People', but..." he says, stumbling over his words.
"I'm a raccoon-person, don't worry about it," he corrects, deciding to simplify and summarize his explanation.
I pull up a chair, suspecting that this conversation is going to take longer than I'm willing to stand. "What do you mean by power? Your magic?"
He shakes his head. "Animal-people have a special appendix that lets us take on any traits we want, so long as it fits us. Bird-people, Lizard-people, Dog-people, stuff like that."
"I can't do much, though, mostly just shrinking and growing," he explains, and in a surprisingly smooth fashion, his avatar begins to shift and distort before my eyes, the dark black fuzz covering him changing colors and patterns as his limbs shift and distort.
"Any animal trait, as long as it's a raccoon or close to it," Seeker finishes, returning to 'normal'.
"Oh, also, don't let a bird-person punch you. It's bad," he comments as an afterthought.
Digesting this little fact, I move on, slowly getting closer to the answers I was after from the start. "Where are you from, Seeker?"
He looks a bit uneasy at this. "Uhh, how long do you want that answer to be?"
"Long enough that I don't have to ask 'and where is that?'," I retort.
Seeker sighs, flopping down onto the ground and sitting in the middle of the circle.
"So, I live in 'Paradise', which is this really dumb boring place, and that's a space station that floats around Miter, which is a really important planet in Earthrealm, which is one of the three dimensions that make up The Trinity, along with the Divine Plains and the Hellscape."
"I see. And everyone on your world has magic?" I ask, cutting to the heart of the matter.
He nods. "Well duh, everywhere in my world is magic. The only things that don't have souls are monsters and really simple lifeforms like plants and small bugs, and sometimes those get souls too," he shrugs.
There. One of the big answers I was after, right on the verge of being spoken. "How," I demand, leaning forward eagerly. This little kid, if he knew how souls appeared, just went from 'the most disappointing wizard' to 'holder of critical info.'
"How do things get souls? I dunno, in my world, something gets a soul if it's supposed to have one. How does it work in yours?" he answers back, uncomfortable at my sudden interest.
"I don't know. What do you mean, 'supposed to have one', what makes something a valid candidate for just getting one?" I insist.
"...I don't know a lot about this stuff, ma'am, I'm sorry," he responds instead of answering.
I mull over his words. He doesn't have the answers I'm after, but the information he has...
"You never told me why you summoned me. Is there something you needed?" I ask, trying to work some kindness into my tone. If this is some kind of eldritch monster disguised as some socially inept kid, then they're doing too good of a job for me to tell.
"I just thought it would be cool to meet a superhero. It's boring and annoying where I live. Sorry if I caused any problems," he says, looking away.
I start to feel like I've been kicking a puppy, getting all caught up in trying to squeeze intel out of this kid.
"So, you're a summoner, right? I saw your summon. It was way more advanced than mine. How did you manage that?" I ask, dropping my barriers and creating a second chair using a bit of plant matter.
He watches my work with surprise. "Well, uhh," he says watching the chair grow out of the ground with a bit of intrigue and disgust.
"I'm a wizard," he says, as if that explains it.
snapping out of his staring, he hops up and plops down onto the chair, quickly picking up steam. "It's really easy, way easier than being a channeler, not that there's anything wrong with them, of course, it's just that it's kinda hard messing with all those attunements, shaping mana, patterning it to get effects, I didn't really like it, but spellcraft is really easy, it's mostly just memorization, and I've got a book I dug up on how to talk fast, and it has some really good tips!"
He rummages around in his pocket, pulling out a burnt, half-destroyed book. "So you want to be an Auctioneer" reads proudly on it in half-decayed script.
"So, for the summoning spell, all you really need to know is the target you want to summon, and the spell itself. It doesn't work unless the target is in a different dimension, of course, since it uses extraspacial directions to travel between the caster and the target, and you can't really fit the spell in just a 3D space, but it's really good for a beginner spell,"
He holds up a hand and starts babbling an absolute word-salad of phonems that my power picks up on.
"I find it helps to think of it as a song, you obviously can't really sing it, or the effects are all messed up, but when you're just practicing it, it's really handy," he explains eagerly.
Trailing off for a moment, he glances at me. "So, you're a... Druid. That's nice? Or are you a Green Mage? You aren't a Communer, are you?" he asks, gesturing to my costume.
This time, I shrug at him. "What's the difference?"
He starts holding up fingers "Druids use magic to serve nature, Communers enslave the nature around them, and Green Mages usually just make their own nature to mess around with. Though, if you're a channeler, I guess you'd be a 'Green Channeler',"
I thought about this.
"Well, I don't serve or enslave nature, I'm pretty sure," I said, thinking about whether or not Thoth and my garden counted as "enslavement."
He chuckles nervously. "That's good, Druids are a bit crazy, and communers... Bad news," he says.
"So, what exactly are you then? A channeler? You're pretty good at it, but if you're self taught, I bet you're a mage."
I gesture for him to get on with the explanation. "You're the first person I've met who knows those terms, you're going to have to work with me here, Seeker."
He nods vigorously. "Ok! So, uhh, how did the pneumonic go, Channelers will and Wizards's swill?"
"N-nevermind, so, I don't know how you have it organized, but, the way I was taught it was that we usually have shorthand for what someone uses, First, you've got Sorcerers, they control Thaumic Mana, or just raw mana from their souls in general. Channelers, who use Willpower to control Soul Mana, Wizards, who use Spellcraft to control Thaumic Mana, Mages, who are kinda like the bast- uhh, lovechild of the two," he corrects hastily.
"So, Will, Formality, and Mixed, for Channelers, Wizards and Mages, then there's Espers, they do the same thing but with Mana in the air, Ambient Mana. There are Psychics, Bards, and Shamans, for Ambient Mana, again, Will, Formality, and Mixed,"
His eyes widen. "My mom's a bard, actually, people call her an 'Annihilator Bard', but she's retired, so she doesn't do much nowadays," he trails off, and I detect a hint of negativity in his tone.
"Uhh, right, so, Psychics use Willpower on Ambience, Bards use Formal Music on it, Shamans use a mix of the two. Follow along so far?" he says, and I nod, noting similarities to things I've done or thought of in the past.
"Finally, same thing, Will, Formality, Mixed, but for Bodily Mana. We call those 'Fighters', but honestly, not all of them fight. A lot of people argue over what to call bodily mana, too, but uh, you'll be alright if you just call it that. For those, we've got Aura Users, Martial Artists, and Monks. Aura Users draw the mana out of their body parts and move it around with willpower, Martial Artists use bodily movements to control the mana in them, and Monks kinda mix the two together," he explains.
He leans in, and whispers. "Between you and me, Fighters are really scary. People call them that even though not all of em fight, but when they do, it's really bad."
He claps. "And that's how we classify magic users! Any questions?" he answers, adjusting his glasses, before realizing something else and coughing before I can answer.
"Oh, uh, there's also the people who don't do any of what I just said, but that gets into some really obscure stuff, and a lot of the people that do it specifically try to buck the general descriptions we've come up with over the years, and there's also just some weirdos who don't use magic as far as anyone can tell. I have no clue about them, though, so I'm sorry about that."
I smile. "No, it's alright. I guess that makes me a Mage, then? I've been doing a little bit of everything."
"Must be nice, being able to just sort of do stuff like this, huh? Paradise kinda sucks for making giant tree domes and stuff," he says, kicking his feet in the air as he speaks.
"I wouldn't know. What's it like, then? With a name like Paradise..." I start, waiting for him to answer.
He puts his head in his hands, grimacing. "It sucks. The meal-delivery bots there steal and replace your food when it gets cold or stale, or even a little bit past expired, the cleaners clean up all the messes, even if the mess is something like street art, the repair drones take your tv in for repairs if it gets so much as a scratch on it, so there goes four hours of my life," he throws his arms up.
"I know a bunch of my friends are thinking about moving, because they want to mess with mutagenic compounds, but the autodocs can't tell if something is mutated on purpose or by accident, so they just fix everything."
"They'd have this big ol tree thing turned back into a houseplant by the end of the hour," he says, jabbing a finger at the wooden dome I made to contain the summoning.
"And of course, those stuck-up elites living in The Heap lord it over us, living it up in the garbage! No preset dietary plans, no robots messing up your stuff. I have to hide the stuff I fish out of the void, or it'll get sent straight to the heap with the rest of the trash," he says, frowning as impetuously as a short little raccoon can.
"That's why I picked the name I did. I'm Seeker of Trash, and one day I'll find it," he says.
I thought about asking why he didn't just move, but then, if he was anything like I was, then I got why. Well, I didn't, here was a kid in immaculate, spotless-clean clothes who renamed himself after garbage, complaining about how the robots that do everything for him don't do it perfectly, envious as all hell of people who apparently live in an actual dump.
But I guess for him, it's just home.
"What was your name before you called yourself Seeker?" I ask, humoring him.
His head tilts like a confused puppy. "What do you mean?"
I notice his avatar beginning to fade, the mana comprising it beginning to dissipate.
He notices this as well. "Well, I guess that's it for now. Will we meet again, Sage?" he asks curiously.
I give him a thumbs up. "I'm not through with you and your weird little world yet."
He gives me an awkward smile, and then disappears entirely.
I grab my notebook from the duffel bag nearby, crossing my leg as I begin to write down the things I've learned, feeling Queen Administrator's needy request for data beginning to rear its head.
Before anything else, I go down to where I had been theorizing about the world that my magic came from, jotting down a single line.
"Full of weirdos (Obsessed with trash? Possibly a City of Racoons?)"
After that, I began to note down other obvious things. It was a trio of dimensions, (More evidence for the symbolism of the number 'three'), it apparently had space stations and tinkertech robots, at the very least, most, if not all sapients there had magic like mine, and far more advanced, if a kid who had to be at least somewhat younger than myself was able to cast that impossibly advanced summoning spell.
Some metals, precious metals, would undo attunements if repeatedly attuned to, and I could use that to make consistent mana engines that turned all dust into a particular kind of mana.
Mana lasted longer than I thought, if the spices I made were able to apparently affect Accord in a meaningful way. It demonstrated that my ability to detect mana was lacking. I thought mana was utterly eradicated after a maximum of three days, but something about that theory wasn't fully correct. Was it destroyed completely in that period of time? Was it destroyed at all, or merely made unusable and undetectable to me? What ways could I use to find out?
It may have been a mistake, rebuffing Accord's demands so quickly as I did. He seemed polite enough as he left, but at the same time, he apparently saw something in my magically created spices that I couldn't, once they were exhausted of magic.
What did he see? Why did he really want my mana engines?
Questions for later.
Lisa was a godsend. Thanks to her, I also knew now that Mana followed a "Last-In-First-Out" system. With that, I could, if not predict mana attunement, then at least get an idea of why particular mana chains did particular things. Recursive mana attunements becoming increasingly bizarre and esoteric made a bit more sense, knowing that.
What else did I know? Was there anything I hadn't outright thought of yet, some sort of revelation that was sitting just on the tip of my tongue?
[][New Theories] Write-in
Finishing my writing, I closed my book, and began to unmake the dome, the wood began to flow down into the soil, transforming into mundane plant life once again. Seeker of Trash was wrong about one thing. I absolutely wanted this thing gone once I was done with it. The last thing I needed was people poking around here, or worse, actually finding something if they did.
I still didn't know what caused a person to awaken their soul to magic, so my caution would be prudent in the days to come. Thankfully, I knew it wouldn't be insurmountable to find out.
I had a native who seemed all too willing to exposit at me everything they knew, after all. One who, if need be, could help me access this world, this... Trinity of Realities.
Thoth trilled as I summoned them, pecking at me gently as I swung myself over their back.
I should fly over to wherever Amy is healing, I bet she's having a ball, with her new 'healing tinkertech' doing all the work for her.
