Consumption

[X] Tell Morgan you're feeling better, wait until Ines and Eugene have given you your share, and explore the town you're currently in. You might spot something useful.
[X] Ask Morgan if he could try to get you some unusual supplies.
-[X] Lightweight cooking tools. You know how to cook real food, but sticks aren't nearly good enough for your purposes.
-[X] Something to detect living creatures.

Your elementals immediately cheer up when you stop moping around and force yourself upright. They still sit on your head and shoulders, forcing you to keep your back consistently straight to avoid dislodging them. You're half convinced they do it on purpose. Your fire elemental circles around your skull in an exceptionally distracting manner.

To your vague surprise, Morgan is sitting just outside, holding up a book bigger than his own chest. He looks up and uses one thumb as a bookmark as you approach.

"Feeling better?"

You nod silently and swallow a mouthful of saliva. When that doesn't help your throat enough, you grab your waterskin, pop the lid open, and swallow a mouthful of it.

It still isn't enough to keep your answer from sounding like a croak.

"Much."

You swallow another mouthful of water and try again. You'd like to drink even more, but unfortunately, you're forced to close it up before your water elemental can dive inside. She knows she's not supposed to go inside your drinking materials, yet that only seems to encourage her.

"Much better," you repeat. "I'm fine with being shown to your friends. Also, could you please add something to detect living creatures to my list of supplies? And lightweight cooking tools would be really nice as well. Calmed-me is apparently fine with eating horrible-tasting crud, but I'm not. Also, if I could borrow some large container to soak my water elementals in, that'd be nice. I'd like to let them take advantage of your world's weird water supply."

Morgan twists his nose to one side and frowns.

"Container, easy. Cooking tools, also easy. I think we can get you a life detector, but it wouldn't give you any extra senses like you might be expecting. It'd just tell you where any moving non-humans happen to be and you'd have to look at it for that. Still want it?"

You nod quickly, not trusting your voice.

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[X] Tell Morgan you're feeling better, wait until Ines and Eugene have given you your share, and explore the town you're currently in. You might spot something useful.

Ines and Eugene don't even say goodbye. Oh, they leave eleven small silver pieces and six larger copper pieces behind, sure, but that's it. Well, that and a note saying 'Personal emergency, stay safe.' Still, not enough. You kinda liked them.

Your attempt to explore the town ends in horribly horrifying h... um... scraw it. It fails, okay? You don't even make it down the full length of the street before someone tries to snatch your coin-pouch and flee. 'Tries' being the operative word; your fire and air elementals immediately dart over and maul his hands until he's forced to drop it. The dark-haired man still manages to escape while you're still grappling with the situation.

The experience is still more than enough to ruin your mood and send you back to the safety of the guild. If it takes less than five minutes for someone to basically attack you when you have a fire elemental floating above your head? This town isn't worth exploring.



[X] Summon your other two water elementals.

Summoning your other two water elementals takes about a quarter of your reserves for the day. You think it was worth it.


[X] Over the next few days, do your utmost to get basic control over your own mana. (Timeskip)

Morgan never does take you out to be gawked at. You think a handful of people—not many and definitely less than ten—might show up with Morgan while you're focused on training. All of them leave after a minute or two.

In the end, your stubborn persistence pays off. Carefully sketching the outlines of your own mana network forces you to distinguish where one pipe ends and the next begins. On top of that, your anchor gives you plenty of false positives and figuring out the difference between it and your own threads helps you get even better.

When you finally get all that down, you're assigned to track and sketch the progress of a single clump of mana as it moves through your body. You end up cheating a little; doing it the normal way seemed just as futile as trying to pick out a single drop of water inside an entire glass. Since each thread seems like it should be traveling in a relatively straight line whenever it needs to pass through a conduit, you focus your attention on where you know the threads should be.

That turns out to be the easy part. You end up focusing your attention on a patch for the brief instant it takes each section to move around a given thread. Tracking it beyond that? You basically need to guess based on how quickly the mana is flowing and hope you can spot something helpful.

Hours of frustrating failure later, you manage to spot a single tiny bead of strange-feeling mana getting stuck on a thread when it should've simply moved around it. The bead is dislodged within seconds and doesn't seem to want to follow the same path as the mana surrounding it; instead, it seems like all your other mana is constantly forcing the bead out of the way. Whenever the bead impacts one of the walls of your conduits, it simply stays there for a few seconds before being dislodged, moved slightly downstream, and forced against a wall again.

Over time, the bead becomes smaller and smaller even as it feels less and less... foreign? You're pretty sure it'll completely vanish long before it would turn completely normal.

You pause as a thought strikes you, losing track of the bead in the process. You quickly grab a nearby cup and swallow a single gulp of water.

Several dozen foreign beads appear in the middle of your main mana reservoir after only a few seconds. You focus your attention on a single one, watching as it exhibits the exact same behavior as the one you discovered by chance.



Two days after you first started, you've finally gotten your personal detection and tracking to the point where you're allowed to start trying to actively manipulate mana inside your own body. You still think Morgan was full of crap when he mentioned 'clumps.' You never found any. Of course, Morgan also says being able to detect environmental mana inside your own supply shouldn't be something you're capable of for several more months. You're not sure if he's a bad teacher or you just perceive it differently.

When it comes to sensing mana outside your body, you're still incapable of doing anything more than vaguely sensing the mana levels of the surrounding area.

You also learned quite a few things you hadn't been aiming for, all of which you relayed to Morgan. You figured you might as well.

- When a bead of environmental mana is dislodged from one of the walls of your network, it leaves a thin layer of itself behind. Over time, the discarded portion is eaten by said network. Or, well, 'is absorbed' or 'sinks into' would probably be more appropriate. You still think your version sounds cooler.

- When a bead of environmental mana is dislodged from your anchor, the part of it which is left behind becomes totally indistinguishable from the rest of the anchor within a minute. It doesn't disappear and seems to act just like every other part of a thread. Based on that, you're pretty sure it's being used to reinforce your anchor.

- Your anchor feels like it's stuck between being made out of your own mana and made out of environmental mana.

- Every single last thread of your anchor overlaps with at least one part of your network at one point or another.

- The 'core' of your anchor, the part which all other threads branch off of, is clinging to the top of your reservoir. Or merely pressed up against it. You're not sure which.

- While your anchor isn't equally thick across all its sections, it seems like individual threads are.

- Something you knew already: mages who completely exhaust their network get sick. You're guessing it's because, without at least a little personal mana to carry it along, environmental mana will just gather wherever it falls instead of spreading itself across your network like it's supposed to. You doubt this will be a problem unless you try to dip below your personal assessment of what constitutes an 'empty' supply.



It turns out you already had the barest basics of mana control down, courtesy of your Talent. All you need to do is strain part of your body in the right way to push mana out from it. Simple, right? Nope. Keeping them open for just long enough to release a specific amount of mana proves to be insanely difficult; any paths so created will automatically close whenever you aren't actively keeping them open. On top of that, exerting twice as much effort won't necessarily give you twice as much mana. The mana itself interferes, making it easier or harder than it should be for any given quantity. Or rather, it's easier to release more mana, but harder to get the amount you'd originally intended.

Apparently, mana hadn't actually left your body all the times you used your Talent. At least you know enough to save you from the uncomfortable gauntlets trainees would usually use to immobilize the other parts of their hand.

The conduits traveling to your your feet, hands, and throat are the only ones close enough to the outside for safe exterior mana usage. Oh, you could use any other part of your body, but it'd would be slower, would have to pass through significantly more flesh, and would 'wreak havoc' along the way.

If you push mana outside of your body without any actual targets, it'll just dissipate uselessly. Spells themselves are instructions for the way mana is meant to be spent. Morgan freely admits he doesn't know why tweaking a single line's angle in a fire spell design could change the temperature, visible light, power requirements, or something completely different.

'It's just the way it is.' At least he's actually trying to understand why the world works like that, I guess. I still hate hearing that.

Since you already somewhat know how to move your own mana, you're given a small glass ball and told to pour mana into it in bursts. Depending on how much power you pour into it, it'll change color from bright yellow all the way to crimson. If you give it too little, it turns yellow, which would be a failure and would mean wasted power if it were a real spell. If you give it too much, it turns red. Your goal color is orange.

To make things even more frustrating, you're told to switch to a different orb with different power requirements every five minutes. You can't decide if it helps you learn faster or slower. It's annoying either way. Pretty much the only thing which keeps you going is watching your fire elemental float behind the glass orb and change color to match it. You hadn't even known they could do that deliberately; you were under the impression they automatically matched whatever fire they were closest to.

Every so often, you take a break to watch your water elementals play in an enclosed glass vase filled with water. You think the girls might be just a teensie bit larger than they were when you first started immersing them in this world's water. Unfortunately, you were forced to use a cloth to cover the vase instead of the proper seal you'd hoped for. Your earth and stone elementals kept 'freeing' them whenever you used anything more solid.


The first time you switched out the slightly-depleted water of your elementals, you poured the old liquid into a mug and slowly drank it yourself. It took five refills (plus the original) for you to develop a headache and the feeling you were in danger of vomiting. Even though you stopped immediately, neither went away for several hours. While unpleasant, at least you know what it feels like when you're nearing the danger zone for mana absorption. Apparently, its official name is 'mana poisoning.'

After working with the orbs from early afternoon until bedtime, you go to sleep with your reserves at about a third of their maximum.



As soon as you wake up, you check on your anchor and try to guess how much time it has left. You're pretty sure that if you keep training your control, you'll empty your reserves later today and have your anchor break the following morning or afternoon. Meanwhile, half of your 'spells' are still yellow while the other half are red.

Or... well, you could try breaking the anchor early. You feel like you're capable of it now. You're rested, you're at full mana, and Morgan might let you take a training orb instead of whatever extra supplies he could gather in the next day or so. You even think you might get something out of an early break—more options? Better options? Both? Something else? The voice in your head isn't being very helpful on that front.

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[X] Automatically included: Pick up the supplies Morgan has gathered so far and ask him if he's figured out anything else.

[] Keep training your control.

[] Switch to focusing on something else. You'd like to prolong your stay here for as long as possible.
-[] Precise inscription. You'll need it if you're going to be using any solid spell designs.
-[] Accurate dictation. Apparently, getting even a single word wrong in a chant can give you explosively unstable results.

[] Gather your supplies, say goodbye to Morgan, and break the anchor early.
-[] Let him watch.

[] Ask Morgan if you can take a training orb with you.

[] Write-in

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Elapsed time (Timeskip): 3 afternoons, 3 evenings, 3 nights, 2 mornings.