Taylor Hebert wants nothing more than to prepare for her cape debut in peace. Unfortunately, her new neighbor from across the street has other plans.
[Worm x Fate] Journeywoman & Apprentice
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Index
fallacies
Puyo Mage
Journeywoman
&
Apprentice
&
Apprentice
Or, the Adventure of the Witch House
Or, I Started My Career as a Costumed Superheroine,
but For Some Reason, My Mentor was a Tsundere Witch
From Another World
but For Some Reason, My Mentor was a Tsundere Witch
From Another World
a Worm x Fate crossover
by fallacies
by fallacies
Taylor Hebert wants nothing more than to prepare for her cape debut in peace. Unfortunately, her new neighbor from across the street has other plans.
001 : Inquiry at the No. 24
002 : Accepting Candy From a Stranger
003 : Sense is Something Made
004 : Breakfast of the Champions
005 : The Cup, Half-Empty
006 : Jerusalem's Lot
007 : A Taste For Slaughter
008 : Chrysalis
009 : Fantasia in F minor
010 : Camelback Riding
011 : Bear These Not When Acting of Benevolence
012 : ???
Notes: Because third time's the charm, right? Note that the target genre for this fic intended to be akin to that in the Atelier game series.
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001 : Inquiry at the No. 24
fallacies
Puyo Mage
I noticed it on the way home after finally being discharged from the hospital, several blocks away from our street. It was kinda difficult not to, all things considered.
Since the moment I awoke, the sphere of insects that my power automatically connected with had become as something of a constant companion — an ever-present awareness of the environment around me, even that it was the middle of winter.
It was rather disconcerting to suddenly run across a dead zone in my field of perception — especially as it was just across the street from where I lived.
More accurately, I'd been able to sense the interior for a couple of seconds before everything within abruptly blanked out.
The No. 24 had been boarded up when I last saw it, several weeks earlier during winter break. I wasn't actually certain as to when precisely we previously had a neighbor there. Maybe back when I was in my second or third year of elementary school?
But right at dusk as we pulled into Arbor Street, I took note that there were lights on in the two-story residence; that somebody had apparently gone through the trouble of refurbishing the exterior and cleaning up the yard and driveway. The pristine coat of paint and the replacement of the various rusted fixtures made the place stand out, given the state of the other houses in the neighborhood.
In the driveway, there was an older-model Volkswagen Beetle.
"Somebody's moved in to the Twenty-Four," I remarked.
"Yeah," Dad replied. "Happened after — well, you know." He paused for a moment. "Really don't know what they were thinking, renovating the place and doing all that yardwork so close to the snowy season. It's gonna be ruined before the spring."
"Have you met them yet?" I asked.
He nodded, bringing the car to a halt in front of our house.
"A woman," he said, pulling the brake and withdrawing the key before unbuckling his belt. "A girl, really — a couple of years older than you. I think she might be attending Brockton U. Seems to have the house all to herself."
"In a place like this?," I asked, wincing as I exited the car. "Why not just dorm or something?"
Our neighborhood was relatively safe, but didn't feel like the sort of place a single female college student would want to live on her own. If Dad were right, and she indeed attended Brockton U, the commute to school was a twenty to thirty minute drive. Not terribly convenient.
Accounting for the interference with my power, it was more than a little suspicious. What were the chances that shortly after I became a parahuman, somebody with the exact ability as to counteract my own would just so happen to move into the neighborhood?
It could be a coincidence, of course — or that I was simply being paranoid and excessively self-conscious; but I couldn't shake the thought that maybe the girl across the street was aware of my status. Weren't there stories about the E88 gang-pressing parahumans into their service?
In response to the question I'd voiced aloud, Dad shrugged — lifting my carry-on of clothing from the back of the car and setting it on to the brick of our driveway.
"Hard to say, really," he said. "Everyone's got their own circumstances. It isn't really our position to pry."
Shutting the trunk, he turned, pulling my luggage toward the entrance of our house. Giving the 24 another glance, I followed after him.
Tomorrow was a Sunday, but Dad had work as usual. I'd have time enough to investigate, assuming that nothing happened tonight.
It was a tin of Danish butter cookies that Dad had received for Christmas from somebody at work.
Being as he and I weren't all too big on pastries, he'd apparently just tossed it into a kitchen cupboard and forgotten its existence entirely.
It was probably some flavor of rude for me to re-gift the thing to a neighbor, but I wasn't too hung up on that. A quick check of the expiration date revealed that the contents wouldn't be bad for half a year yet. Good enough for a cape who had potentially positioned herself to blackmail me into joining a criminal organization.
At half past one, wearing gloves and a light jacket, I opened the front door and stepped out into the yard — steeling myself as I ventured across the street. Likely, I would've been a bundle of nerves if not for the trick I'd picked up by necessity during my stay in the psychiatric ward — offloading my assorted misgivings into the insects behind me.
I'd spent the night reasoning through my options.
Maybe this girl had no idea I was a parahuman. Maybe she didn't belong with a gang. If her presence here truly was a coincidence, this would just be a greeting from a neighbor, and everything would be fine.
If not — well, she'd had the entire night and morning to engage in hostilities, and hadn't yet done so, despite her apparent ability to Trump my power. Probably, she could be reasoned with.
I hoped.
Inexplicably, the house and its white picket fence were a lot more foreboding up close, now that I was standing on the sidewalk before the lawn — just at the boundary of the dead zone. Exhaling a breath of mist and upping the extent of my offloading, I opened the gate and let myself in —
My insects abruptly vanished from my senses, and everything came crashing down.
When I was next aware of myself — maybe seconds later — I was kneeling on the cement of the walkway, overcome with vertigo. The yard — not much larger than our own — felt far too expansive; far too empty.
Not a Trump. A Master? Was this a trap? Some sort of test?
My gut instinct was to retreat, but that made little sense. This girl — whoever she was — had an absolute advantage against my power. Even if I retreated, there wouldn't be a resolution to whatever threat she posed.
Gritting my teeth, I climbed to my feet — unsteadily walking the few meters to the front door.
The door opened before I could ring the bell. The Master; the Trump — whatever she was — wasn't the blonde, blue-eyed girl I'd pictured. Her eyes were indeed a pale blue, but her straight black hair and the cast of her features suggested that she was at least partially Asian.
Not from the Empire, then. It occurred to me a little too late that I should've asked Dad for a few more details before jumping to weird conclusions.
"So, you were the one poking about at my Bounded Field, hm?" she asked — unexpectedly, with a British accent. "The old man sent you to check up on me, I suppose?"
"What?"
"Don't play me for a fool," she said, eyes narrowed. "As a student of the Second, I know a pathway to an Adjacent Reality when I sense one — especially when so many are opened all at once."
"What are you talking about?"
"Yesterday evening, you attempted to subsume the insects on my property as familiars, did you not?"
Familiars? Like in witchcraft or something?
"Look," I said, wincing. "I'm sorry about the bugs, but could you please ease up on whatever it is you're doing to me right now? It's really uncomfortable."
She frowned — and then her expression shifted to realization; maybe a tinge of horror, if I wasn't imagining things.
"You're not a magus, are you?" she asked.
"I have no idea what that is."
She closed eyes and sighed.
"My apologies," she said. "Seems that I've once again made a mess of things. Kündigen."
I wasn't certain what the word meant, but at her utterance, my vertigo instantly cleared — vanishing away as I reconnected with my insects. As I tried to collect myself, she put forth her hand, as if offering to shake on a truce.
"We got off on the wrong foot," she said. "My name is Rin — Rin Zenjou. Pleased to make your acquaintance, neighbor."
This was, I realized, something of a mere formality. By the very fact that I'd forced this encounter, I'd demonstrated a grasp of who she was and where she lived — and so she'd decided to be upfront about her identity. On the opposite end, my face and address were known to her, and it wouldn't take a lot of research for her to learn my name. There wasn't any running away from this.
"Taylor Hebert," I replied, tentatively clasping her hand and shaking it.
She seemed to study me for a moment before withdrawing.
"It's perhaps a little inappropriate for me to mention it at this juncture," she remarked, "but in the future, you should pay mind not to so easily disclose your personal information to a perfect stranger. That said —"
She shot me a vaguely predatory smile.
"I'm in the market for a part-time assistant," she said. "Fair wages. Reasonable hours. Are you interested at all, Ms. Hebert?"
Since the moment I awoke, the sphere of insects that my power automatically connected with had become as something of a constant companion — an ever-present awareness of the environment around me, even that it was the middle of winter.
It was rather disconcerting to suddenly run across a dead zone in my field of perception — especially as it was just across the street from where I lived.
More accurately, I'd been able to sense the interior for a couple of seconds before everything within abruptly blanked out.
The No. 24 had been boarded up when I last saw it, several weeks earlier during winter break. I wasn't actually certain as to when precisely we previously had a neighbor there. Maybe back when I was in my second or third year of elementary school?
But right at dusk as we pulled into Arbor Street, I took note that there were lights on in the two-story residence; that somebody had apparently gone through the trouble of refurbishing the exterior and cleaning up the yard and driveway. The pristine coat of paint and the replacement of the various rusted fixtures made the place stand out, given the state of the other houses in the neighborhood.
In the driveway, there was an older-model Volkswagen Beetle.
"Somebody's moved in to the Twenty-Four," I remarked.
"Yeah," Dad replied. "Happened after — well, you know." He paused for a moment. "Really don't know what they were thinking, renovating the place and doing all that yardwork so close to the snowy season. It's gonna be ruined before the spring."
"Have you met them yet?" I asked.
He nodded, bringing the car to a halt in front of our house.
"A woman," he said, pulling the brake and withdrawing the key before unbuckling his belt. "A girl, really — a couple of years older than you. I think she might be attending Brockton U. Seems to have the house all to herself."
"In a place like this?," I asked, wincing as I exited the car. "Why not just dorm or something?"
Our neighborhood was relatively safe, but didn't feel like the sort of place a single female college student would want to live on her own. If Dad were right, and she indeed attended Brockton U, the commute to school was a twenty to thirty minute drive. Not terribly convenient.
Accounting for the interference with my power, it was more than a little suspicious. What were the chances that shortly after I became a parahuman, somebody with the exact ability as to counteract my own would just so happen to move into the neighborhood?
It could be a coincidence, of course — or that I was simply being paranoid and excessively self-conscious; but I couldn't shake the thought that maybe the girl across the street was aware of my status. Weren't there stories about the E88 gang-pressing parahumans into their service?
In response to the question I'd voiced aloud, Dad shrugged — lifting my carry-on of clothing from the back of the car and setting it on to the brick of our driveway.
"Hard to say, really," he said. "Everyone's got their own circumstances. It isn't really our position to pry."
Shutting the trunk, he turned, pulling my luggage toward the entrance of our house. Giving the 24 another glance, I followed after him.
Tomorrow was a Sunday, but Dad had work as usual. I'd have time enough to investigate, assuming that nothing happened tonight.
It was a tin of Danish butter cookies that Dad had received for Christmas from somebody at work.
Being as he and I weren't all too big on pastries, he'd apparently just tossed it into a kitchen cupboard and forgotten its existence entirely.
It was probably some flavor of rude for me to re-gift the thing to a neighbor, but I wasn't too hung up on that. A quick check of the expiration date revealed that the contents wouldn't be bad for half a year yet. Good enough for a cape who had potentially positioned herself to blackmail me into joining a criminal organization.
At half past one, wearing gloves and a light jacket, I opened the front door and stepped out into the yard — steeling myself as I ventured across the street. Likely, I would've been a bundle of nerves if not for the trick I'd picked up by necessity during my stay in the psychiatric ward — offloading my assorted misgivings into the insects behind me.
I'd spent the night reasoning through my options.
Maybe this girl had no idea I was a parahuman. Maybe she didn't belong with a gang. If her presence here truly was a coincidence, this would just be a greeting from a neighbor, and everything would be fine.
If not — well, she'd had the entire night and morning to engage in hostilities, and hadn't yet done so, despite her apparent ability to Trump my power. Probably, she could be reasoned with.
I hoped.
Inexplicably, the house and its white picket fence were a lot more foreboding up close, now that I was standing on the sidewalk before the lawn — just at the boundary of the dead zone. Exhaling a breath of mist and upping the extent of my offloading, I opened the gate and let myself in —
My insects abruptly vanished from my senses, and everything came crashing down.
When I was next aware of myself — maybe seconds later — I was kneeling on the cement of the walkway, overcome with vertigo. The yard — not much larger than our own — felt far too expansive; far too empty.
Not a Trump. A Master? Was this a trap? Some sort of test?
My gut instinct was to retreat, but that made little sense. This girl — whoever she was — had an absolute advantage against my power. Even if I retreated, there wouldn't be a resolution to whatever threat she posed.
Gritting my teeth, I climbed to my feet — unsteadily walking the few meters to the front door.
The door opened before I could ring the bell. The Master; the Trump — whatever she was — wasn't the blonde, blue-eyed girl I'd pictured. Her eyes were indeed a pale blue, but her straight black hair and the cast of her features suggested that she was at least partially Asian.
Not from the Empire, then. It occurred to me a little too late that I should've asked Dad for a few more details before jumping to weird conclusions.
"So, you were the one poking about at my Bounded Field, hm?" she asked — unexpectedly, with a British accent. "The old man sent you to check up on me, I suppose?"
"What?"
"Don't play me for a fool," she said, eyes narrowed. "As a student of the Second, I know a pathway to an Adjacent Reality when I sense one — especially when so many are opened all at once."
"What are you talking about?"
"Yesterday evening, you attempted to subsume the insects on my property as familiars, did you not?"
Familiars? Like in witchcraft or something?
"Look," I said, wincing. "I'm sorry about the bugs, but could you please ease up on whatever it is you're doing to me right now? It's really uncomfortable."
She frowned — and then her expression shifted to realization; maybe a tinge of horror, if I wasn't imagining things.
"You're not a magus, are you?" she asked.
"I have no idea what that is."
She closed eyes and sighed.
"My apologies," she said. "Seems that I've once again made a mess of things. Kündigen."
I wasn't certain what the word meant, but at her utterance, my vertigo instantly cleared — vanishing away as I reconnected with my insects. As I tried to collect myself, she put forth her hand, as if offering to shake on a truce.
"We got off on the wrong foot," she said. "My name is Rin — Rin Zenjou. Pleased to make your acquaintance, neighbor."
This was, I realized, something of a mere formality. By the very fact that I'd forced this encounter, I'd demonstrated a grasp of who she was and where she lived — and so she'd decided to be upfront about her identity. On the opposite end, my face and address were known to her, and it wouldn't take a lot of research for her to learn my name. There wasn't any running away from this.
"Taylor Hebert," I replied, tentatively clasping her hand and shaking it.
She seemed to study me for a moment before withdrawing.
"It's perhaps a little inappropriate for me to mention it at this juncture," she remarked, "but in the future, you should pay mind not to so easily disclose your personal information to a perfect stranger. That said —"
She shot me a vaguely predatory smile.
"I'm in the market for a part-time assistant," she said. "Fair wages. Reasonable hours. Are you interested at all, Ms. Hebert?"
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002 : Accepting Candy From a Stranger
fallacies
Puyo Mage
Noting the tin of pastries that I'd somehow managed not to drop, she invited me inside to speak about her offer over tea.
Unsurprisingly, the layout of the first floor looked to be approximately identical to most of the other houses in the neighborhood; though at some point, a garage had been added — replacing what would've been the brick driveway that led into the backyard at my house.
She must've spent a bit on renovations. The hardwood floors and the Prussian blue of the walls looked fresh, and the interior was done up in a sort of minimalist French country chic — sparsely furnished, but tasteful. It was surprising that she'd managed to get the work completed in the few weeks I'd been hospitalized. There wasn't even the scent of fresh paint in the air.
There also weren't any insects — not that I could sense, at least, even that my connection without the bounds of her property had been fully restored. Whatever adjustments she'd just now made, it was doing a darn good job of denying me any ability to pose a threat.
"As you can probably tell from my accent, I'm not from around here," said Zenjou, pouring me a cup of tea. "Likewise, I'm not associated with any of the organizations in this area. You're the first parahuman that I've so far encountered face-to-face."
Seated on a couch at right angle to her armchair, I carefully accepted the cup and dish.
"Normally, there would be protocol against revealing myself," she continued, "but being as you're somebody on this side, I trust that you're capable of keeping a secret?"
"I'm not really seeing much of a choice," I said, taking a sip, and noting the vaguely floral scent. This wasn't drugged, was it?
"I think you misunderstand," she said, sipping her own tea. "This isn't on my part anything so crude as blackmail. I earnestly hope to engage you in a partnership of mutual benefit — no strings attached. If you refuse, I ask for nothing more than an agreement of secrecy before we go our separate ways."
Mutual secrecy, backed by the potential of mutually assured destruction — or maybe not so mutual. She was almost certainly aware that I lived with Dad — and so, barring the circumstance that I could get at something dear to her, she could pose a far more immediate danger to me than I could her.
No matter what she said, she held a definite upper hand.
That being the case, I didn't see any downside to playing ball for the time being.
"What sort of benefit are we talking about?" I asked.
Taking a sip of her tea, she set her cup upon her dish.
"For a start, $7.25 an hour," she said. "That's the legal wage per hour here in the state of New Hampshire, no?"
Legal minimum wage, maybe — and of all the things she could've said, I wasn't expecting that.
"That's not much of a benefit," I said.
"I'd also be providing you with useful work experience and training," she said.
"Training in what, exactly?"
"The use of your abilities, of course," she said.
Skeptical that she could help, I frowned. I had more or less an inherent grasp of my power; and as far as I could tell based on the limited information I'd gathered from the internet, parahumans didn't really 'improve' with experience. What little improvement the big name heroes had exhibited over the years was more akin to figuring out clever applications of their powers than any change in their underlying capabilities.
"I don't think there's a lot of room for improvement," I replied. "My power's fine as is."
"I'm not referring to your powers as a parahuman," she said, leaning back into her armchair and crossing her legs. "It's a little complicated to explain right off the cuff, but — tell me, do you practice any martial arts?"
"No?"
She considered me with a raised brow.
"And you intend to go out superheroing, or whatever it is you Americans get up to?"
I was fairly certain that superheroes weren't a phenomenon restricted to the United States. Obviously, it was likely sarcasm on her part, but it felt as if she were making light of the efforts of heroic capes.
"Is there a problem with that?" I asked, slightly glaring.
"If you're fine with it, I suppose it isn't my place to criticize," she said, taking a sip of her tea. "But I would think it rather risky for a young woman to venture out into the night without a proper means of defending herself. What if you were to run into somebody able to nullify your power?"
Aside from Zenjou herself and the creepy axe murderer with the Slaughterhouse Nine, I wasn't aware of any Trumps capable of outright shutting down another parahuman. Granted, I didn't obsessively hang out on PHO — but I imagined that if power nullifiers were so commonplace, I would've been aware of it.
She did have a point, though. I'd been planning anyhow to get myself into shape before making my debut on the cape scene — picking up parkour along the way for purposes of mobility, maybe. So as to deal with the threats that my insects couldn't handle; that I couldn't evade or run away from, I'd been planning to carry around a canister of Mace.
Martial arts wouldn't be of much use against actual Brutes, but a bit of skill in unarmed combat was otherwise a reasonable addition to my repertoire.
"You're offering to teach me self-defense then?" I asked.
"Something like that," Zenjou replied. "In the immediate future, I'd want to further assess your use of power; but once that's through, certainly. You're what, 17? 18?"
"15," I said.
"Rather tall for a 15-year-old," she remarked. "But moving on, I'd have you here primarily in the afternoons — after classes, and before your father is home from work. You get off around three, I assume?"
"3:30," I said. "And my father is home around 8:30, normally. But I've just gotten out of the hospital, and I'm planning on taking a short break from school."
She frowned at that.
"An ongoing health condition?"
"They got Panacea to see me, so I'm fine, physically," I said. "Just don't feel like dealing with school for awhile."
"Panacea ..." she muttered to herself, as if the name were unfamiliar. "Ah, right. The healer. This won't present an issue, then?"
Even with the offloading to my insects, I didn't think I'd be fully functional anytime soon — but I wasn't about to tell her that. No need to give her more of a grasp of my vulnerabilities than she already possessed.
If I were committing myself to the long game, this wasn't the place to falter.
"Like I said, I'll be fine," I replied. "And I'll take you up on your offer."
"Wonderful," she said. "You can start immediately, if you like."
"What do you want me to do?"
Zenjou set her cup and dish on the coffee table, and picked up the can that she'd brought out with her tea set. Opening the lid, she took out something that looked to be a piece of rock candy — bright red with its artificial coloring.
"Here," she said, holding it before me.
I reached forward and let her drop it into my hand.
"Put it in your mouth, and swallow it whole," she said. "Don't attempt to chew."
I regarded the candy suspiciously.
"This isn't something addictive, is it?" I asked.
"It isn't any sort of drug, if that's what you're asking," she said. "And if I were looking to harm you, I'd have already done so."
Alternatively, she could just be the sort of sadist who toyed with her victims before moving in for the kill.
I didn't voice that aloud. Deciding to trust her for now, I popped the candy into my mouth.
It didn't really taste like anything.
Cool; smooth; hard — more like a piece of glass than any kind of confection. Following her instructions, I didn't bother chewing, and simply swallowed — washing it down with the remainder of my tea. Despite the lubrication, the edges of the thing scraped the insides of my esophagus.
"What was that?" I asked, coughing slightly as I placed my cup and dish on the table.
"Your signing bonus — worth about $8,000," Zenjou replied. "A three-carat pigeon's blood ruby."
What.
"But don't worry," she continued. "It won't tear its way through your digestive tract, or anything so horrendous. Once it activates, it should harmlessly melt away. I do recommend that you make yourself comfortable on the couch, though, as the process that follows might hurt a bit."
"What are you —"
— a terrible heat, burning my body from the inside out as I collapsed into the soft cushions of the couch. The fire spread throughout my organs; upwards along my spinal cord — into the flesh of my brain.
"I imagine you feel as if you're dying at present," said Zenjou, "but that should pass soon enough. The burning, on the other hand — in a reduced state, it'll persist for several weeks yet, until your body fully adjusts."
"Wh- what is this ..." I managed to croak out, despite the pain.
Zenjou placed a finger against her lower lip.
"How is it that they put it again?" she asked. "Ah, yes."
She leaned toward me. grinning.
"Yer a wizard, Hebert," she said. "And this would be a crash course into the discipline of Magic."
Unsurprisingly, the layout of the first floor looked to be approximately identical to most of the other houses in the neighborhood; though at some point, a garage had been added — replacing what would've been the brick driveway that led into the backyard at my house.
She must've spent a bit on renovations. The hardwood floors and the Prussian blue of the walls looked fresh, and the interior was done up in a sort of minimalist French country chic — sparsely furnished, but tasteful. It was surprising that she'd managed to get the work completed in the few weeks I'd been hospitalized. There wasn't even the scent of fresh paint in the air.
There also weren't any insects — not that I could sense, at least, even that my connection without the bounds of her property had been fully restored. Whatever adjustments she'd just now made, it was doing a darn good job of denying me any ability to pose a threat.
"As you can probably tell from my accent, I'm not from around here," said Zenjou, pouring me a cup of tea. "Likewise, I'm not associated with any of the organizations in this area. You're the first parahuman that I've so far encountered face-to-face."
Seated on a couch at right angle to her armchair, I carefully accepted the cup and dish.
"Normally, there would be protocol against revealing myself," she continued, "but being as you're somebody on this side, I trust that you're capable of keeping a secret?"
"I'm not really seeing much of a choice," I said, taking a sip, and noting the vaguely floral scent. This wasn't drugged, was it?
"I think you misunderstand," she said, sipping her own tea. "This isn't on my part anything so crude as blackmail. I earnestly hope to engage you in a partnership of mutual benefit — no strings attached. If you refuse, I ask for nothing more than an agreement of secrecy before we go our separate ways."
Mutual secrecy, backed by the potential of mutually assured destruction — or maybe not so mutual. She was almost certainly aware that I lived with Dad — and so, barring the circumstance that I could get at something dear to her, she could pose a far more immediate danger to me than I could her.
No matter what she said, she held a definite upper hand.
That being the case, I didn't see any downside to playing ball for the time being.
"What sort of benefit are we talking about?" I asked.
Taking a sip of her tea, she set her cup upon her dish.
"For a start, $7.25 an hour," she said. "That's the legal wage per hour here in the state of New Hampshire, no?"
Legal minimum wage, maybe — and of all the things she could've said, I wasn't expecting that.
"That's not much of a benefit," I said.
"I'd also be providing you with useful work experience and training," she said.
"Training in what, exactly?"
"The use of your abilities, of course," she said.
Skeptical that she could help, I frowned. I had more or less an inherent grasp of my power; and as far as I could tell based on the limited information I'd gathered from the internet, parahumans didn't really 'improve' with experience. What little improvement the big name heroes had exhibited over the years was more akin to figuring out clever applications of their powers than any change in their underlying capabilities.
"I don't think there's a lot of room for improvement," I replied. "My power's fine as is."
"I'm not referring to your powers as a parahuman," she said, leaning back into her armchair and crossing her legs. "It's a little complicated to explain right off the cuff, but — tell me, do you practice any martial arts?"
"No?"
She considered me with a raised brow.
"And you intend to go out superheroing, or whatever it is you Americans get up to?"
I was fairly certain that superheroes weren't a phenomenon restricted to the United States. Obviously, it was likely sarcasm on her part, but it felt as if she were making light of the efforts of heroic capes.
"Is there a problem with that?" I asked, slightly glaring.
"If you're fine with it, I suppose it isn't my place to criticize," she said, taking a sip of her tea. "But I would think it rather risky for a young woman to venture out into the night without a proper means of defending herself. What if you were to run into somebody able to nullify your power?"
Aside from Zenjou herself and the creepy axe murderer with the Slaughterhouse Nine, I wasn't aware of any Trumps capable of outright shutting down another parahuman. Granted, I didn't obsessively hang out on PHO — but I imagined that if power nullifiers were so commonplace, I would've been aware of it.
She did have a point, though. I'd been planning anyhow to get myself into shape before making my debut on the cape scene — picking up parkour along the way for purposes of mobility, maybe. So as to deal with the threats that my insects couldn't handle; that I couldn't evade or run away from, I'd been planning to carry around a canister of Mace.
Martial arts wouldn't be of much use against actual Brutes, but a bit of skill in unarmed combat was otherwise a reasonable addition to my repertoire.
"You're offering to teach me self-defense then?" I asked.
"Something like that," Zenjou replied. "In the immediate future, I'd want to further assess your use of power; but once that's through, certainly. You're what, 17? 18?"
"15," I said.
"Rather tall for a 15-year-old," she remarked. "But moving on, I'd have you here primarily in the afternoons — after classes, and before your father is home from work. You get off around three, I assume?"
"3:30," I said. "And my father is home around 8:30, normally. But I've just gotten out of the hospital, and I'm planning on taking a short break from school."
She frowned at that.
"An ongoing health condition?"
"They got Panacea to see me, so I'm fine, physically," I said. "Just don't feel like dealing with school for awhile."
"Panacea ..." she muttered to herself, as if the name were unfamiliar. "Ah, right. The healer. This won't present an issue, then?"
Even with the offloading to my insects, I didn't think I'd be fully functional anytime soon — but I wasn't about to tell her that. No need to give her more of a grasp of my vulnerabilities than she already possessed.
If I were committing myself to the long game, this wasn't the place to falter.
"Like I said, I'll be fine," I replied. "And I'll take you up on your offer."
"Wonderful," she said. "You can start immediately, if you like."
"What do you want me to do?"
Zenjou set her cup and dish on the coffee table, and picked up the can that she'd brought out with her tea set. Opening the lid, she took out something that looked to be a piece of rock candy — bright red with its artificial coloring.
"Here," she said, holding it before me.
I reached forward and let her drop it into my hand.
"Put it in your mouth, and swallow it whole," she said. "Don't attempt to chew."
I regarded the candy suspiciously.
"This isn't something addictive, is it?" I asked.
"It isn't any sort of drug, if that's what you're asking," she said. "And if I were looking to harm you, I'd have already done so."
Alternatively, she could just be the sort of sadist who toyed with her victims before moving in for the kill.
I didn't voice that aloud. Deciding to trust her for now, I popped the candy into my mouth.
It didn't really taste like anything.
Cool; smooth; hard — more like a piece of glass than any kind of confection. Following her instructions, I didn't bother chewing, and simply swallowed — washing it down with the remainder of my tea. Despite the lubrication, the edges of the thing scraped the insides of my esophagus.
"What was that?" I asked, coughing slightly as I placed my cup and dish on the table.
"Your signing bonus — worth about $8,000," Zenjou replied. "A three-carat pigeon's blood ruby."
What.
"But don't worry," she continued. "It won't tear its way through your digestive tract, or anything so horrendous. Once it activates, it should harmlessly melt away. I do recommend that you make yourself comfortable on the couch, though, as the process that follows might hurt a bit."
"What are you —"
— a terrible heat, burning my body from the inside out as I collapsed into the soft cushions of the couch. The fire spread throughout my organs; upwards along my spinal cord — into the flesh of my brain.
"I imagine you feel as if you're dying at present," said Zenjou, "but that should pass soon enough. The burning, on the other hand — in a reduced state, it'll persist for several weeks yet, until your body fully adjusts."
"Wh- what is this ..." I managed to croak out, despite the pain.
Zenjou placed a finger against her lower lip.
"How is it that they put it again?" she asked. "Ah, yes."
She leaned toward me. grinning.
"Yer a wizard, Hebert," she said. "And this would be a crash course into the discipline of Magic."
Last edited:
003 : Sense is Something Made
fallacies
Puyo Mage
'Soon enough' arrived after more than two hours of excruciating, deathly pain.
There was, it turned out, a trick to shutting it off — something like a motor skill that abstractly apprehended the full throttle of my so-called 'Circuits' as a kind of limb; an extension of my body. It wasn't altogether different from my powers as a parahuman.
It did hurt a whole lot, though. In the aftermath, I was out of breath and mildly feverish — drenched in a cold sweat that completely permeated my clothes.
The 'reduced state' of the burning was akin to a full-body acid reflux.
Hunched over on Zenjou's couch with my elbows propped upon my knees, it struck me that there wasn't any way I could independently confirm that all of this wasn't just a product of Zenjou's Master power.
Certainly, I could feel a kind of energy thrumming through my 'Circuits' — but Othala from the E88 was famously the holder of a Striker power that temporarily granted abilities alike to a parahuman. Wasn't there also the one supervillain with the power to grant addictive Thinker abilities that gradually deteriorated?
"So, an affinity for Water," said Zenjou, gathering the spread of Tarot cards across the coffee table into a deck. "I thought there might've been something else, but it's likely an artifact of your status as a parahuman."
She'd lit up a bit of aromatic incense as I was recovering — asked me a battery of questions from what sounded like a personality test, and then performed a tarot reading.
Initially, I thought she was one of those capes who put up a front about their powers being 'magic' — but, really, the more she spoke, the more I got the impression that she used the word in the same sense that a stage magician might.
"You can tell that from a bunch of cards?" I asked. "How does that work?"
"The Tarot itself reveals nothing of incredible relevance," Zenjou replied, slipping the cards into a velvet pouch and pulling taut the strings. "It's merely a matter of confirmation — to ascertain that the answers you provided in the first stage of my assessment were a reasonable indicator of a general orientation. Broadly, there are only five common results in any case — and so, this isn't a terribly complicated process."
"I mean, I saw you shuffle the deck. If you draw a bunch of cards, wouldn't the outcome just be random?"
She met my gaze with a grin.
"A skeptic, are we?" she asked. "Good to see that you've got a head on your shoulders. But to answer your question, 'random' is nothing more than a descriptor we assign to phenomena evaluated to be absent of meaning. Being that meaning is entirely subjective, things are in reality as random or non-random as we're inclined to judge them. Carl Jung would call this Synchronicity."
"Sophistry is what it is," I said. "So long as your deck is well and truly shuffled, the cards you draw are necessarily random and meaningless. No exceptions."
Would a person with the presence of mind to invoke Jung in an argument on the nature of meaning really put any weight into the mystical power of the Tarot?
If not, what was all this superstitious nonsense?
"By your very upbringing," she replied — palpably smug, "you're inclined to interpret new information in the context of the worldview you've so far assembled — doubting the bits that seem improbable. Thus, I won't even attempt to convince you to the contrary. As a student of the sciences, you should cherish that doubt of yours, and carefully dissect the claims that I make. It's a good attitude that you don't trust in my word merely in deference to seniority."
If you're going for the long con, tell the person you're attempting to swindle not to believe you. Paradoxically, it builds rapport, and gives you a veneer of honesty.
I'm not gonna fall for that.
"What did you find out about my Circuits, then?" I asked.
"You have 18 in total," she replied. "A decent Quantity and Quality for somebody absent the bloodline descent of an established thaumaturgical lineage. The Composition, though — it's rather aberrant."
The jargon didn't mean anything to me — but it also didn't sound as if she were making up the words on the spot. If indeed this was all an act, it was skillfully performed.
"What does that mean in practice?" I asked.
"Are you well enough to walk?" she asked, standing up.
I sighed, and with a grimace, pulled myself from her couch.
"Looks like it," I said, ignoring the aching of my muscles.
"Good," she said. "Follow me."
With heavy, halting steps, I trailed after her into the rear of the house. The kitchen — a bit more modern than ours — had an island in the center with a second sink. Walking up, she turned on the tap.
"Hold the faucet and pour your mana into it," she said.
Rolling up the sleeve of my sweater, I grabbed ahold of the metal — willing my Circuits open, and instinctively directing the energy within to flow forth through the flesh of my hand.
The laminar flow of the tap turned into a high pressure spray, splattering all over the counter. Not wanting any more dampness on my sweater, I let go of the faucet — and instantly, the surging water calmed.
"What the hell?" I asked, staring at the sink.
Was there a pump to boost the pressure on demand? A switch, hidden away somewhere?
"Congratulations," said Zenjou, smiling. "You've just cast your very first spell — a Reinforcement in the affinity of Water."
Grabbing a towel from a nearby rack, she tossed it at me. I caught it, confused.
"And now," she said, "for your first task as my assistant — wipe up the mess you've made."
Once every two weeks, Coach Powell forced our PE section to run a full mile. Up until now, I hadn't put in the effort to properly perform the recommended warm-up exercises, and the muscular aches that consequently followed usually lasted a day or two before fading away.
The pain from my Circuit activation was several magnitudes worse — even versus the necrotic rot that Panacea had so recently cleared from my system. However, by nine in the evening — stepping into the hot bath that I'd run for myself — I was pleasantly surprised that my limbs and muscles were miraculously free of discomfort.
The burning sensation of course remained; but Zenjou's claims regarding the side effects of an active circulation of mana seemed to ring true.
The 'mana' employed in this 'magecraft' of hers was fundamentally derived of vital energy — from 'Od,' per the pseudoscience of vitalism; from 'Qi,' per the traditions associated with East Asian martial arts. Within the body, its behavior defaulted to a bolstering of the vital processes; the reassertion of an ideal state of health.
Or so Zenjou alleged.
I wasn't at this point entirely convinced she wasn't a con artist. The 'rock candy' I'd been made to consume was for all I knew some hyper-advanced Tinkertech drug designed to grant temporary powers. Even that I could apparently impose 'Reinforcement' on the flow of water, following the example of the powers bestowed by Othala and that Teacher guy, the potency of my 'spells' were likely to degenerate over time — barring continuous contact with Zenjou.
Which, of course, my informal contract with her virtually guaranteed.
"My first action as a cape," I said, speaking at the water gradually filling the tub. "Giving an overly smug Myrddin wannabe an opening to addict me to her power. Nice going, Taylor. You're a goddamn genius."
Still —
Leaning forward, I grasped the faucet of the tub — activating my Circuits and allowing my mana to flow. As before, the gushing of the water accelerated.
— if Zenjou were attempting a repeat of Teacher's schemes, shouldn't she have endowed me with a power a bit more exciting than mild water manipulation? In a fight between capes, 'Reinforcement' amounted to bringing along a super soaker. It was hardly useful at all.
Alternatively, was this maybe just a taste of power? A starter pack of sorts, to ensure that I go back for more?
I sank into the bathwater up to my chin, allowing my skin to soak up the warmth.
"If I'm not careful," I again said aloud, "Zenjou's gonna turn me into a mindless enforcer."
Bright-eyed and utterly filled with optimism, I embarked upon my career as a magus.
There was, it turned out, a trick to shutting it off — something like a motor skill that abstractly apprehended the full throttle of my so-called 'Circuits' as a kind of limb; an extension of my body. It wasn't altogether different from my powers as a parahuman.
It did hurt a whole lot, though. In the aftermath, I was out of breath and mildly feverish — drenched in a cold sweat that completely permeated my clothes.
The 'reduced state' of the burning was akin to a full-body acid reflux.
Hunched over on Zenjou's couch with my elbows propped upon my knees, it struck me that there wasn't any way I could independently confirm that all of this wasn't just a product of Zenjou's Master power.
Certainly, I could feel a kind of energy thrumming through my 'Circuits' — but Othala from the E88 was famously the holder of a Striker power that temporarily granted abilities alike to a parahuman. Wasn't there also the one supervillain with the power to grant addictive Thinker abilities that gradually deteriorated?
"So, an affinity for Water," said Zenjou, gathering the spread of Tarot cards across the coffee table into a deck. "I thought there might've been something else, but it's likely an artifact of your status as a parahuman."
She'd lit up a bit of aromatic incense as I was recovering — asked me a battery of questions from what sounded like a personality test, and then performed a tarot reading.
Initially, I thought she was one of those capes who put up a front about their powers being 'magic' — but, really, the more she spoke, the more I got the impression that she used the word in the same sense that a stage magician might.
"You can tell that from a bunch of cards?" I asked. "How does that work?"
"The Tarot itself reveals nothing of incredible relevance," Zenjou replied, slipping the cards into a velvet pouch and pulling taut the strings. "It's merely a matter of confirmation — to ascertain that the answers you provided in the first stage of my assessment were a reasonable indicator of a general orientation. Broadly, there are only five common results in any case — and so, this isn't a terribly complicated process."
"I mean, I saw you shuffle the deck. If you draw a bunch of cards, wouldn't the outcome just be random?"
She met my gaze with a grin.
"A skeptic, are we?" she asked. "Good to see that you've got a head on your shoulders. But to answer your question, 'random' is nothing more than a descriptor we assign to phenomena evaluated to be absent of meaning. Being that meaning is entirely subjective, things are in reality as random or non-random as we're inclined to judge them. Carl Jung would call this Synchronicity."
"Sophistry is what it is," I said. "So long as your deck is well and truly shuffled, the cards you draw are necessarily random and meaningless. No exceptions."
Would a person with the presence of mind to invoke Jung in an argument on the nature of meaning really put any weight into the mystical power of the Tarot?
If not, what was all this superstitious nonsense?
"By your very upbringing," she replied — palpably smug, "you're inclined to interpret new information in the context of the worldview you've so far assembled — doubting the bits that seem improbable. Thus, I won't even attempt to convince you to the contrary. As a student of the sciences, you should cherish that doubt of yours, and carefully dissect the claims that I make. It's a good attitude that you don't trust in my word merely in deference to seniority."
If you're going for the long con, tell the person you're attempting to swindle not to believe you. Paradoxically, it builds rapport, and gives you a veneer of honesty.
I'm not gonna fall for that.
"What did you find out about my Circuits, then?" I asked.
"You have 18 in total," she replied. "A decent Quantity and Quality for somebody absent the bloodline descent of an established thaumaturgical lineage. The Composition, though — it's rather aberrant."
The jargon didn't mean anything to me — but it also didn't sound as if she were making up the words on the spot. If indeed this was all an act, it was skillfully performed.
"What does that mean in practice?" I asked.
"Are you well enough to walk?" she asked, standing up.
I sighed, and with a grimace, pulled myself from her couch.
"Looks like it," I said, ignoring the aching of my muscles.
"Good," she said. "Follow me."
With heavy, halting steps, I trailed after her into the rear of the house. The kitchen — a bit more modern than ours — had an island in the center with a second sink. Walking up, she turned on the tap.
"Hold the faucet and pour your mana into it," she said.
Rolling up the sleeve of my sweater, I grabbed ahold of the metal — willing my Circuits open, and instinctively directing the energy within to flow forth through the flesh of my hand.
The laminar flow of the tap turned into a high pressure spray, splattering all over the counter. Not wanting any more dampness on my sweater, I let go of the faucet — and instantly, the surging water calmed.
"What the hell?" I asked, staring at the sink.
Was there a pump to boost the pressure on demand? A switch, hidden away somewhere?
"Congratulations," said Zenjou, smiling. "You've just cast your very first spell — a Reinforcement in the affinity of Water."
Grabbing a towel from a nearby rack, she tossed it at me. I caught it, confused.
"And now," she said, "for your first task as my assistant — wipe up the mess you've made."
Once every two weeks, Coach Powell forced our PE section to run a full mile. Up until now, I hadn't put in the effort to properly perform the recommended warm-up exercises, and the muscular aches that consequently followed usually lasted a day or two before fading away.
The pain from my Circuit activation was several magnitudes worse — even versus the necrotic rot that Panacea had so recently cleared from my system. However, by nine in the evening — stepping into the hot bath that I'd run for myself — I was pleasantly surprised that my limbs and muscles were miraculously free of discomfort.
The burning sensation of course remained; but Zenjou's claims regarding the side effects of an active circulation of mana seemed to ring true.
The 'mana' employed in this 'magecraft' of hers was fundamentally derived of vital energy — from 'Od,' per the pseudoscience of vitalism; from 'Qi,' per the traditions associated with East Asian martial arts. Within the body, its behavior defaulted to a bolstering of the vital processes; the reassertion of an ideal state of health.
Or so Zenjou alleged.
I wasn't at this point entirely convinced she wasn't a con artist. The 'rock candy' I'd been made to consume was for all I knew some hyper-advanced Tinkertech drug designed to grant temporary powers. Even that I could apparently impose 'Reinforcement' on the flow of water, following the example of the powers bestowed by Othala and that Teacher guy, the potency of my 'spells' were likely to degenerate over time — barring continuous contact with Zenjou.
Which, of course, my informal contract with her virtually guaranteed.
"My first action as a cape," I said, speaking at the water gradually filling the tub. "Giving an overly smug Myrddin wannabe an opening to addict me to her power. Nice going, Taylor. You're a goddamn genius."
Still —
Leaning forward, I grasped the faucet of the tub — activating my Circuits and allowing my mana to flow. As before, the gushing of the water accelerated.
— if Zenjou were attempting a repeat of Teacher's schemes, shouldn't she have endowed me with a power a bit more exciting than mild water manipulation? In a fight between capes, 'Reinforcement' amounted to bringing along a super soaker. It was hardly useful at all.
Alternatively, was this maybe just a taste of power? A starter pack of sorts, to ensure that I go back for more?
I sank into the bathwater up to my chin, allowing my skin to soak up the warmth.
"If I'm not careful," I again said aloud, "Zenjou's gonna turn me into a mindless enforcer."
Bright-eyed and utterly filled with optimism, I embarked upon my career as a magus.
Last edited:
004 : Breakfast of the Champions
fallacies
Puyo Mage
Monday morning, I woke to the realization that my tactile perception now extended into Zenjou's yard — even though the interior of her house was still off-limits. I wasn't entirely certain what to make of this, beyond that she must've adjusted her Master effect again. Was I supposed to take it as a message?
It was only 6:30 — quite a bit earlier than I expected to be awake. Descending the stairs in my pajamas, I found Dad in the kitchen, halfway through a bowl of oatmeal.
"Thought you might've wanted to sleep in again," he said. "The doctors said you should take it easy for the next week or so."
"I'm feeling pretty well-rested," I said, pulling a bottle of milk from the fridge. "Don't think I could go back to sleep even if I wanted to."
"Well, if you're sure."
Pouring myself a glass of milk, I put the bottle back in the fridge, and then seated myself at the dining table.
"I'm thinking of using my time off to get my body into shape," I said. "My paunch makes me look like a frog, and I want to get rid of some of the flab."
Dad frowned at that, setting his spoon against the side of his bowl.
"You aren't fat, Taylor," he said. "You're underweight. Borderline anorexic, the doctors said — especially after Panacea healed you."
I gave Dad a look. I'd known for awhile that his eyesight had been getting worse, but it wasn't like him to say things so far removed from reality. Did he not see how huge I was?
"My BMI being lower than some national average doesn't mean I'm not fat, Dad," I said, a little heatedly. "The people who decide what's underweight do it based on a population mean, and things like that aren't applicable across the board to every body type. That's why professional athletes use personalized BMI tests."
Dad sighed, rubbing the arch of his brow with a finger.
"I'll see if I can't schedule a half-day off, and take you to see a nutritionist," he said. "Get them to give you one of these personalized tests, maybe."
"I guess?"
I didn't really see why I would need something like that, but Dad had always been the obstinate sort. Most likely, he wouldn't concede that I knew my body best unless an expert told him so — and thus, I'd obediently play along. Getting a professional opinion on my level of fitness would be useful anyhow.
On my part, this was a conscious effort not to be overly argumentative.
After Mom passed, Dad had thrown himself into his work with machine-like diligence — apparently trying to lose himself in the never-ending drudgery of a 60-hour week. It had taken nothing short of my hospitalization to snap him out of it; and since then, he'd been visibly making an effort to reconnect with me. I appreciated that immensely.
Problem was, there wasn't a lot of common ground between us anymore. At some point, we'd grown apart — not quite to the extent that we were virtually strangers, but incapable of conversing for extended periods without running into a disagreement.
Without ever broaching the issue aloud, we'd learned to compromise — pulling back from the brink whenever we realized that we'd yet again crossed into disputed territory. This tended to make for halting, unproductive conversations, interspersed with awkward silences.
Mom's knack for verbal communications seemed ever beyond my grasp.
Rinsing out his bowl in the sink and leaving it up to dry, Dad asked, "Do we need anything from the store, by the way?"
"Some eggs," I replied. "And we're almost out of milk again."
Drying his hands on a towel, he pulled on the coat that hung from the back of his chair.
"I'll grab some on the way home, then," he said, opening the door into the back yard. "If I'm not back by 8:30, just have dinner without me."
"Got it," I said. "Love you."
"You too," he said, nodding — shutting the door behind him as he stepped out into the cold.
As the engine of the car started up outside, I sighed, retrieving a bag of supermarket sliced bread from the cabinet, and popping two pieces into the toaster. There was always something unpleasantly functional about our conversations when Dad was in a mood. It didn't help that he often didn't explain himself clearly.
What was it about my wanting to lose weight that he found so objectionable anyhow? Wasn't it a good thing that I wanted to get into shape?
"How are you so energetic at such an ungodly hour?" asked Zenjou, squinting at me from within her foyer.
She'd answered the doorbell in fluffy slippers and a bathrobe — loosely tossed over what looked to be an old-fashioned nightgown.
"It's roughly 8:30," I said. "You told me to come over first thing in the morning."
After a small breakfast, I'd had time enough for a jog and a shower afterward. For whatever reason, the mile-long route around the neighborhood had been less exhausting than I anticipated. Maybe it was on account that even absent the activation of my Circuits, there was more mana circulating my body than before? That might explain why I'd woken so early; or how I didn't end up freezing cold, despite the fact that it was 42 degrees out.
But whereas Zenjou should've enjoyed the same sort of benefits, here she was, answering the door a good five minutes after I'd rung the bell — dead on her feet, as if she'd had to forcibly drag herself out of bed.
Maybe she just wasn't a morning person?
Exhaling in exasperation, she opened the door a bit wider.
"Come on in before you let the heat out, then," she said. "And for future reference, 'first thing in the morning' is at a sane hour — preferably after 10."
I didn't know if it came of a mild mysophobia or some cultural thing from Britain or Japan, but like the day before, she'd prepared a pair of guest slippers for me to change into, insisting that I leave my shoes at the door. Changing my footwear, I followed her to the back of the house.
"Have a seat," she said, pointing to one of the tall stools at the kitchen island.
I did so, watching as she flipped on the electric kettle on the counter along the wall. From a cabinet, she retrieved a pour-over dripper and a jar of grounds.
"The day doesn't begin till I've had my coffee," she said. "You'd like a cup?"
"Tea," I said. "Black."
"You've had Oolong before?"
"No."
"Well, that's what you're having."
The 'Oolong' turned out to come in a fancy tetrahedral tea bag.
Once the water had boiled, Zenjou placed the teabag in a mug — sliding it in front of me and filling it from the kettle before turning her attention to her coffee. Experimentally, I pulled the bag upwards by its string — watching as a brownish-red coloration dissolved into the cup from the crushed leaves within.
It didn't really smell like the teas I typically favored, but being an uncultured American, my go-to brand was Lipton. It wasn't bad to occasionally expand my horizons, I supposed.
"Isn't it easier if you use a coffee maker?" I asked — noting that she was still circling the circumference of her dripper with the narrow spout of her kettle. "Or is hand-poured coffee that much better?"
"It isn't, really, regardless of what the so-called connoisseurs would have you believe," she said. "It's merely that I've had — 'disagreements' with coffee machines in the past. Especially the sort with electronic displays."
Come to think of it, despite the modern look of her kitchen, her assorted appliances were all traditional, and there wasn't a microwave in sight. Could it be that she was actually worse off with household electronics than Dad?
Clad in fluffy slippers and speaking about her trouble with coffee machines, Zenjou seemed a lot less threatening than she did the day before.
It wouldn't do to lower my guard, though.
"Yesterday, you said that you wanted to assess my powers," I said, warming my hands against the ceramic of the mug. "What would that entail, exactly?"
Removing the dripper and setting it over an empty cup on the side, Zenjou took a sip of her coffee — gazing into the drink as she swirled it slightly.
"At the moment, there's only a single task I'd like you to perform," she replied. "It isn't by itself terribly involved or time-consuming. However, as you are now, it'd be meaningless for us to proceed, as you haven't yet the requisite skill in mana control."
I blinked, somewhat confused.
"If you're just gonna be looking into my power, why does that even matter?" I asked.
"It matters because I'm not you, and I don't have direct access to your parahuman ability," she replied. "While I'm capable of temporarily suppressing the pathways you access, I can only interact with them from without — as a foreign entity, with predictable restrictions. Thaumaturgical interference within the flesh and mind of another is inherently obstructed by the circulation of the subject's vital force."
In other words, even though her Trump power was broken enough to simply shut me down, the great and powerful Myrddin wannabe didn't actually have the ability to conduct the tests she wanted to perform. It felt like an arbitrary limitation; some sort of special pleading, where her 'magecraft' was multipurpose and all-powerful, except in this one particular capacity.
"So, what are you saying?" I asked. "That you can bypass the restriction once I pick up mana control to the required level?"
"I'm saying that you'll be the one conducting the assessment," she replied. "You trust in yourself more than you would me, no?"
I would. On the other hand, this was the same tact that she'd adopted yesterday — underscoring the fact that she wasn't trustworthy as a strategy to acquire my trust.
"What would I have to be capable of, then?" I asked.
"Hm," she said. "Something like this, perhaps."
Reaching to the sink on the side of the kitchen island, she placed a cover over the drain and turned on the tap. While it filled, she tore a paper towel from its roll and folded it into a thin strip. Once the sink was about half-full, she turned off the water and took a spoon from out of a drawer.
"This is a normal spoon," she said, dropping it into the water. "As you can see, it isn't buoyant at all."
Rolling up her sleeves, she retrieved it from the water. Setting it on the counter, she folded the paper strip halfway along its length and placed one end in the water. Pressing the dry end of the paper with her fingertips, she again dropped the spoon into the sink.
This time, rather than sinking, it bounced against the surface before settling on top — as if the water had turned to gelatin.
Zenjou removed her fingers from the paper towel, and immediately, the spoon sunk to the bottom of the sink.
"A little more complicated than simply allowing energy to flow out and dissipate, as you did yesterday," she said. "This would entail consciously grasping hold of a particular continuous mass as a discrete 'object' — Reinforcing a salient feature that it bears without damaging the mana conduction medium through which you interact with it. In this case, I enhanced amongst other things the surface tension of the water — conducting my mana into it via a paper towel."
She lifted the strip of soggy paper from the sink.
"And this is what can happen if I misapprehend any part of the process," she said.
Unnaturally — as if it were something in a time-lapse video — the paper frayed under its own weight, collapsing into a wet mess upon the countertop.
"Obviously, paper towels are rubbish as a conductor of mana," she said. "But it's an obstacle that can be overcome with sufficient practice."
Sipping my tea, I stared at the sink. On the internet, I'd seen videos of people firing bullets into ballistic gel before. If by Reinforcement, normal water could behave as a solid —
"Can Reinforcement be applied to things besides water?" I asked. "Like my own body?"
"That's one of the standard uses, yes," said Zenjou, wiping up the shreds of the paper towel with a fresh sheet. She regarded me with a frown, "But if you're thinking to resist bullets like a comic book superhero, I wouldn't recommend it. Basic Reinforcement of the flesh can be achieved by circulating mana in sufficient volume, but it would require quite a bit of effort to push that to a practical utility in anything beyond unarmed combat."
She didn't rule out the possibility, though.
I'd thought to postpone my debut on the cape scene until after I'd shored up my defenses — but if I could master this, maybe I could expedite my schedule.
I'd already set a bunch of black widows to the task of fabricating a spider-silk under-suit; and regardless of circumstance, I wouldn't be abandoning the project. Still, if I wanted to act as a cape, I didn't have the luxury to turn down a potential Brute power — even if my use of 'magecraft' was potentially dependent on Zenjou.
The way in which she destroyed the paper towel also had potential. Maybe I could grant myself a Striker power of some sort?
There were points that I'd like a little more clarification on, though. Yesterday, Zenjou stated that I held an affinity for 'water'; but in her explanation just now, she'd more or less confirmed that I'd be capable of applying Reinforcement to my body. From that, it could reasonably be inferred that my 'magecraft' would be more than just a manipulation of water — but if that were the case, what did 'an affinity for water' mean?
And, furthermore —
"You said that Reinforcement could be applied to 'a salient feature,' earlier," I asked. "What does that mean? Are there features that aren't salient?"
For a moment, she didn't answer — taking a long sip from her mug before setting it down.
"It's a topic too involved to delve into so early in the morning," she said. "But to briefly summarize — surface tension is a product of hydrogen bonding, yes?"
"Yeah?"
"The concept of hydrogen bonding would only be known to those acquainted with chemistry at a secondary school level or higher," she said. "Comparatively, surface tension is known to a greater proportion of the World's population. Thus, we can say that it's of greater salience — and therefore easier both to visualize and Reinforce."
"That seems like a really arbitrary restriction," I remarked. "You're saying that the performance of 'magecraft' is limited by what? The perception of the general populace?"
Zenjou sighed.
"Like I said, it's way too early to be getting into a subject like that," she replied. "And if we're to be speaking of arbitrary limitations, how about you explain to me why it is that certain parahuman powers operate under a Manton limit?"
"That's —"
Honestly, I hadn't thought about that. Maybe Manton limits were some kind of unconscious psychological restriction?
Was it on account of a Manton limit that Zenjou couldn't directly assess my power?
"You're right that a proper grasp of the discipline of thaumaturgy requires context on the subject of salience," Zenjou continued. "But that can wait until it's immediately relevant. For the time being, focus on furthering yourself in the manipulation of mana."
I drew in a sip of tea, frowning. It was a little annoying that she'd again evaded my question, but at the least, I'd extracted something akin to a promise of an explanation at some point.
"How will I be training, then?" I asked.
"We'll start with something simple."
Draining the sink, she placed her pour-over dripper within, and then rinsed out the glass cup it'd been sitting upon. Wiping it with a fresh paper towel, she set the towel before me, and the cup on top — tapping it lightly with her finger.
The glass shattered, collapsing into fragments.
"Glass is an amorphous solid," said Zenjou, seating herself back upon her stool. "That means that it's technically capable of flowing." She took a sip of coffee from her mug, and then regarded me with a tight smile. "So — make use of your affinity for Water, and repair this."
Dumbly, I stared at the shards of glass.
"I'm supposed to use Reinforcement for this?" I asked.
"Have I taught you anything else?" she asked. "Get to it, then. Chop chop."
Clearly, Rin Zenjou wasn't above exacting petty revenge for sleep lost.
It was only 6:30 — quite a bit earlier than I expected to be awake. Descending the stairs in my pajamas, I found Dad in the kitchen, halfway through a bowl of oatmeal.
"Thought you might've wanted to sleep in again," he said. "The doctors said you should take it easy for the next week or so."
"I'm feeling pretty well-rested," I said, pulling a bottle of milk from the fridge. "Don't think I could go back to sleep even if I wanted to."
"Well, if you're sure."
Pouring myself a glass of milk, I put the bottle back in the fridge, and then seated myself at the dining table.
"I'm thinking of using my time off to get my body into shape," I said. "My paunch makes me look like a frog, and I want to get rid of some of the flab."
Dad frowned at that, setting his spoon against the side of his bowl.
"You aren't fat, Taylor," he said. "You're underweight. Borderline anorexic, the doctors said — especially after Panacea healed you."
I gave Dad a look. I'd known for awhile that his eyesight had been getting worse, but it wasn't like him to say things so far removed from reality. Did he not see how huge I was?
"My BMI being lower than some national average doesn't mean I'm not fat, Dad," I said, a little heatedly. "The people who decide what's underweight do it based on a population mean, and things like that aren't applicable across the board to every body type. That's why professional athletes use personalized BMI tests."
Dad sighed, rubbing the arch of his brow with a finger.
"I'll see if I can't schedule a half-day off, and take you to see a nutritionist," he said. "Get them to give you one of these personalized tests, maybe."
"I guess?"
I didn't really see why I would need something like that, but Dad had always been the obstinate sort. Most likely, he wouldn't concede that I knew my body best unless an expert told him so — and thus, I'd obediently play along. Getting a professional opinion on my level of fitness would be useful anyhow.
On my part, this was a conscious effort not to be overly argumentative.
After Mom passed, Dad had thrown himself into his work with machine-like diligence — apparently trying to lose himself in the never-ending drudgery of a 60-hour week. It had taken nothing short of my hospitalization to snap him out of it; and since then, he'd been visibly making an effort to reconnect with me. I appreciated that immensely.
Problem was, there wasn't a lot of common ground between us anymore. At some point, we'd grown apart — not quite to the extent that we were virtually strangers, but incapable of conversing for extended periods without running into a disagreement.
Without ever broaching the issue aloud, we'd learned to compromise — pulling back from the brink whenever we realized that we'd yet again crossed into disputed territory. This tended to make for halting, unproductive conversations, interspersed with awkward silences.
Mom's knack for verbal communications seemed ever beyond my grasp.
Rinsing out his bowl in the sink and leaving it up to dry, Dad asked, "Do we need anything from the store, by the way?"
"Some eggs," I replied. "And we're almost out of milk again."
Drying his hands on a towel, he pulled on the coat that hung from the back of his chair.
"I'll grab some on the way home, then," he said, opening the door into the back yard. "If I'm not back by 8:30, just have dinner without me."
"Got it," I said. "Love you."
"You too," he said, nodding — shutting the door behind him as he stepped out into the cold.
As the engine of the car started up outside, I sighed, retrieving a bag of supermarket sliced bread from the cabinet, and popping two pieces into the toaster. There was always something unpleasantly functional about our conversations when Dad was in a mood. It didn't help that he often didn't explain himself clearly.
What was it about my wanting to lose weight that he found so objectionable anyhow? Wasn't it a good thing that I wanted to get into shape?
"How are you so energetic at such an ungodly hour?" asked Zenjou, squinting at me from within her foyer.
She'd answered the doorbell in fluffy slippers and a bathrobe — loosely tossed over what looked to be an old-fashioned nightgown.
"It's roughly 8:30," I said. "You told me to come over first thing in the morning."
After a small breakfast, I'd had time enough for a jog and a shower afterward. For whatever reason, the mile-long route around the neighborhood had been less exhausting than I anticipated. Maybe it was on account that even absent the activation of my Circuits, there was more mana circulating my body than before? That might explain why I'd woken so early; or how I didn't end up freezing cold, despite the fact that it was 42 degrees out.
But whereas Zenjou should've enjoyed the same sort of benefits, here she was, answering the door a good five minutes after I'd rung the bell — dead on her feet, as if she'd had to forcibly drag herself out of bed.
Maybe she just wasn't a morning person?
Exhaling in exasperation, she opened the door a bit wider.
"Come on in before you let the heat out, then," she said. "And for future reference, 'first thing in the morning' is at a sane hour — preferably after 10."
I didn't know if it came of a mild mysophobia or some cultural thing from Britain or Japan, but like the day before, she'd prepared a pair of guest slippers for me to change into, insisting that I leave my shoes at the door. Changing my footwear, I followed her to the back of the house.
"Have a seat," she said, pointing to one of the tall stools at the kitchen island.
I did so, watching as she flipped on the electric kettle on the counter along the wall. From a cabinet, she retrieved a pour-over dripper and a jar of grounds.
"The day doesn't begin till I've had my coffee," she said. "You'd like a cup?"
"Tea," I said. "Black."
"You've had Oolong before?"
"No."
"Well, that's what you're having."
The 'Oolong' turned out to come in a fancy tetrahedral tea bag.
Once the water had boiled, Zenjou placed the teabag in a mug — sliding it in front of me and filling it from the kettle before turning her attention to her coffee. Experimentally, I pulled the bag upwards by its string — watching as a brownish-red coloration dissolved into the cup from the crushed leaves within.
It didn't really smell like the teas I typically favored, but being an uncultured American, my go-to brand was Lipton. It wasn't bad to occasionally expand my horizons, I supposed.
"Isn't it easier if you use a coffee maker?" I asked — noting that she was still circling the circumference of her dripper with the narrow spout of her kettle. "Or is hand-poured coffee that much better?"
"It isn't, really, regardless of what the so-called connoisseurs would have you believe," she said. "It's merely that I've had — 'disagreements' with coffee machines in the past. Especially the sort with electronic displays."
Come to think of it, despite the modern look of her kitchen, her assorted appliances were all traditional, and there wasn't a microwave in sight. Could it be that she was actually worse off with household electronics than Dad?
Clad in fluffy slippers and speaking about her trouble with coffee machines, Zenjou seemed a lot less threatening than she did the day before.
It wouldn't do to lower my guard, though.
"Yesterday, you said that you wanted to assess my powers," I said, warming my hands against the ceramic of the mug. "What would that entail, exactly?"
Removing the dripper and setting it over an empty cup on the side, Zenjou took a sip of her coffee — gazing into the drink as she swirled it slightly.
"At the moment, there's only a single task I'd like you to perform," she replied. "It isn't by itself terribly involved or time-consuming. However, as you are now, it'd be meaningless for us to proceed, as you haven't yet the requisite skill in mana control."
I blinked, somewhat confused.
"If you're just gonna be looking into my power, why does that even matter?" I asked.
"It matters because I'm not you, and I don't have direct access to your parahuman ability," she replied. "While I'm capable of temporarily suppressing the pathways you access, I can only interact with them from without — as a foreign entity, with predictable restrictions. Thaumaturgical interference within the flesh and mind of another is inherently obstructed by the circulation of the subject's vital force."
In other words, even though her Trump power was broken enough to simply shut me down, the great and powerful Myrddin wannabe didn't actually have the ability to conduct the tests she wanted to perform. It felt like an arbitrary limitation; some sort of special pleading, where her 'magecraft' was multipurpose and all-powerful, except in this one particular capacity.
"So, what are you saying?" I asked. "That you can bypass the restriction once I pick up mana control to the required level?"
"I'm saying that you'll be the one conducting the assessment," she replied. "You trust in yourself more than you would me, no?"
I would. On the other hand, this was the same tact that she'd adopted yesterday — underscoring the fact that she wasn't trustworthy as a strategy to acquire my trust.
"What would I have to be capable of, then?" I asked.
"Hm," she said. "Something like this, perhaps."
Reaching to the sink on the side of the kitchen island, she placed a cover over the drain and turned on the tap. While it filled, she tore a paper towel from its roll and folded it into a thin strip. Once the sink was about half-full, she turned off the water and took a spoon from out of a drawer.
"This is a normal spoon," she said, dropping it into the water. "As you can see, it isn't buoyant at all."
Rolling up her sleeves, she retrieved it from the water. Setting it on the counter, she folded the paper strip halfway along its length and placed one end in the water. Pressing the dry end of the paper with her fingertips, she again dropped the spoon into the sink.
This time, rather than sinking, it bounced against the surface before settling on top — as if the water had turned to gelatin.
Zenjou removed her fingers from the paper towel, and immediately, the spoon sunk to the bottom of the sink.
"A little more complicated than simply allowing energy to flow out and dissipate, as you did yesterday," she said. "This would entail consciously grasping hold of a particular continuous mass as a discrete 'object' — Reinforcing a salient feature that it bears without damaging the mana conduction medium through which you interact with it. In this case, I enhanced amongst other things the surface tension of the water — conducting my mana into it via a paper towel."
She lifted the strip of soggy paper from the sink.
"And this is what can happen if I misapprehend any part of the process," she said.
Unnaturally — as if it were something in a time-lapse video — the paper frayed under its own weight, collapsing into a wet mess upon the countertop.
"Obviously, paper towels are rubbish as a conductor of mana," she said. "But it's an obstacle that can be overcome with sufficient practice."
Sipping my tea, I stared at the sink. On the internet, I'd seen videos of people firing bullets into ballistic gel before. If by Reinforcement, normal water could behave as a solid —
"Can Reinforcement be applied to things besides water?" I asked. "Like my own body?"
"That's one of the standard uses, yes," said Zenjou, wiping up the shreds of the paper towel with a fresh sheet. She regarded me with a frown, "But if you're thinking to resist bullets like a comic book superhero, I wouldn't recommend it. Basic Reinforcement of the flesh can be achieved by circulating mana in sufficient volume, but it would require quite a bit of effort to push that to a practical utility in anything beyond unarmed combat."
She didn't rule out the possibility, though.
I'd thought to postpone my debut on the cape scene until after I'd shored up my defenses — but if I could master this, maybe I could expedite my schedule.
I'd already set a bunch of black widows to the task of fabricating a spider-silk under-suit; and regardless of circumstance, I wouldn't be abandoning the project. Still, if I wanted to act as a cape, I didn't have the luxury to turn down a potential Brute power — even if my use of 'magecraft' was potentially dependent on Zenjou.
The way in which she destroyed the paper towel also had potential. Maybe I could grant myself a Striker power of some sort?
There were points that I'd like a little more clarification on, though. Yesterday, Zenjou stated that I held an affinity for 'water'; but in her explanation just now, she'd more or less confirmed that I'd be capable of applying Reinforcement to my body. From that, it could reasonably be inferred that my 'magecraft' would be more than just a manipulation of water — but if that were the case, what did 'an affinity for water' mean?
And, furthermore —
"You said that Reinforcement could be applied to 'a salient feature,' earlier," I asked. "What does that mean? Are there features that aren't salient?"
For a moment, she didn't answer — taking a long sip from her mug before setting it down.
"It's a topic too involved to delve into so early in the morning," she said. "But to briefly summarize — surface tension is a product of hydrogen bonding, yes?"
"Yeah?"
"The concept of hydrogen bonding would only be known to those acquainted with chemistry at a secondary school level or higher," she said. "Comparatively, surface tension is known to a greater proportion of the World's population. Thus, we can say that it's of greater salience — and therefore easier both to visualize and Reinforce."
"That seems like a really arbitrary restriction," I remarked. "You're saying that the performance of 'magecraft' is limited by what? The perception of the general populace?"
Zenjou sighed.
"Like I said, it's way too early to be getting into a subject like that," she replied. "And if we're to be speaking of arbitrary limitations, how about you explain to me why it is that certain parahuman powers operate under a Manton limit?"
"That's —"
Honestly, I hadn't thought about that. Maybe Manton limits were some kind of unconscious psychological restriction?
Was it on account of a Manton limit that Zenjou couldn't directly assess my power?
"You're right that a proper grasp of the discipline of thaumaturgy requires context on the subject of salience," Zenjou continued. "But that can wait until it's immediately relevant. For the time being, focus on furthering yourself in the manipulation of mana."
I drew in a sip of tea, frowning. It was a little annoying that she'd again evaded my question, but at the least, I'd extracted something akin to a promise of an explanation at some point.
"How will I be training, then?" I asked.
"We'll start with something simple."
Draining the sink, she placed her pour-over dripper within, and then rinsed out the glass cup it'd been sitting upon. Wiping it with a fresh paper towel, she set the towel before me, and the cup on top — tapping it lightly with her finger.
The glass shattered, collapsing into fragments.
"Glass is an amorphous solid," said Zenjou, seating herself back upon her stool. "That means that it's technically capable of flowing." She took a sip of coffee from her mug, and then regarded me with a tight smile. "So — make use of your affinity for Water, and repair this."
Dumbly, I stared at the shards of glass.
"I'm supposed to use Reinforcement for this?" I asked.
"Have I taught you anything else?" she asked. "Get to it, then. Chop chop."
Clearly, Rin Zenjou wasn't above exacting petty revenge for sleep lost.
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005 : The Cup, Half-Empty
fallacies
Puyo Mage
I didn't make a lot of headway on Monday.
Just past eight, Zenjou told me to go home and continue in the morning — handing me a well-worn college chem textbook, and saying that I should skim through the bookmarked section. I spent the evening reading about the physical properties of glass.
Glass was an amorphous solid — absent of a molecular array ordered enough to qualify as a proper crystalline structure. It wasn't, however, capable of flowing at cooler temperatures and average pressure at sea level.
Despite there being anecdotes about church windows thickening at the bottom due to centuries of gravity, the technicality that glass could flow was only 'empirically manifest' if it were heated to its transition temperature — 'approximately 550° Celsius for the standard soda-lime glass used in windows and glassware,' according to the textbook
Zenjou was almost certainly aware of this.
That being the case, what purpose was there in instructing me to make the glass 'flow?' Was it simply to frustrate me? To see if I'd arrive at the 'correct' conclusion that it wasn't possible, and therefore admit defeat?
I could see her doing something like that — but somehow, I doubted that that was the objective.
Assuming that Zenjou wasn't full of shit, I was potentially capable of Reinforcing my own body. Ergo, having 'an affinity for water' didn't mean that my 'magecraft' was fundamentally restricted to the control of water.
If repairing the cup by the use of my water affinity was supposed to be a 'simple' task on account that 'glass can technically flow,' the obvious inference was that 'an affinity for water' related instead to a manipulation of specific physical features — of properties akin to those of water.
Below a temperature of 550°, glass wouldn't exhibit a fluid-like viscosity — but as Zenjou had demonstrated, ordinary tap water could be made to take on the solidity of a hydrogel. It stood to reason that forcing room temperature glass to behave like a fluid wasn't entirely without the realm of possibility.
Practically speaking, though, how would I achieve that?
Simply allowing my mana to flow forth wasn't the solution. My first day of experimentation was proof enough of that. Even if flowing water was receptive to Reinforcement on mere exposure, an undirected emission of mana didn't seem to effectively engage with solid objects.
Thus, a bit before noon on Tuesday, I changed up my approach. Placing my fingertips on a larger fragment of the cup, I pooled my mana within it — permeating unto the boundaries of the piece, as if I were directing my insects.
For the briefest moment, the entirety of the fragment was available to my tactile grasp — no different from my body; from the sphere of my insects. With a bit of effort, I could —
There was a crackling noise before me, and I opened my eyes — frowning as I lifted my hand. Upon the paper towel, the fragment had crumbled into smaller pieces. Apparently, I'd overdone it.
"I'm gonna be here all day again," I complained to the empty kitchen.
Like the day before, Zenjou had gone downstairs to her basement workshop, leaving me to fend for myself — maybe trusting that implicit threat would keep me from snooping about; or remotely monitoring my activities by means that I couldn't perceive.
I wasn't about to test her either way — but I wished that she'd left me a few more pointers.
Pouring myself a cup of water from the pitcher on the counter, I drank, considering the pile of glass before me. It probably didn't count as progress, but I'd at the very least replicated the trick that Zenjou had used to shatter the cup to begin with. Maybe that meant I was on the right track?
Directing my mana as an extension of myself was definitely more on the mark than just expelling it. Even though the glass hadn't responded well to saturation, towards the end, it felt like —
It felt like I could control it directly — not unlike the Circuits within me.
"Wait ..."
Maybe a solution wasn't too far out of reach.
Fitting together two adjacent pieces of glass, I instilled my mana within — attending specifically to the line of the breakage.
Like a limb gone numb, it was burdened with far too much inertia to significantly move — but instinct gave that pushing the bits along the fracture to fluidity was within my means. Somehow — even that I'd never before performed this — the transmutation carried the distinct familiarity of a muscle memory.
Though the surface area of the two pieces combined was less than a square centimeter, it wasn't only a few sites that had to be woven together. It was hundreds; thousands; tens of thousands.
I was equipped to deal with them. Controlling my insects had prepared me.
In concert; in parallel; in multiplicity —
And it was done.
I held up my handiwork to the sunlight that entered from the windows, admiring the seamless joining of the fragments. Really, it wasn't even a big portion of the cup — but after a full day of this nonsense, it seemed like a notable milestone.
"Just another 80-odd pieces to go," I said, looking to the paper towel on the counter.
"Faster than I expected," said Zenjou, regarding the completed cup in her hand through her half-frame reading spectacles. "Given the restrictions I imposed, I'd have thought that you'd take a week or more at least."
It was three in the afternoon when I'd finally pieced together all the bits of the cup. As Zenjou stated, it hadn't taken an incredible amount of time — especially given that half an hour had gone toward sharing the bad Chinese takeout that Zenjou had ordered for lunch; and another 45 minutes were wasted scouring the kitchen floor for the two slivers of glass inexplicably missing from the pile.
Once I'd picked up on the welding trick, the exercise was mostly reduced to the piecing together of a three-dimensional puzzle.
"Pretty competent for a first attempt," Zenjou continued, "but there's certainly room for improvement. Observe."
Setting the cup on the table, she placed a finger against the rim, speaking a foreign word that I couldn't quite catch. Glowing lines appeared on the surface of the glass — tracing out the fractures that I'd just gotten rid of.
"Those are —"
"Irregularities in the substance of the glass," Zenjou explained. "Expose it to a more extreme heat or cold, and it'll shatter soon enough." Tracing her finger to the section that I'd fractured into smaller shards, she said, "Seems like you discovered the hard way the outcome of excessive Reinforcement — and then overcorrected, restricting yourself to a minimal application of mana."
Way to rain on my parade, Zenjou. Next, are you gonna tell me that Santa isn't real?
"How would you have done it, then?" I asked, offloading my annoyance to the swarm.
"Like this," she replied, flicking the cup.
Once again, the glass broke — managing somehow not to scatter beyond the edges of the paper towel.
With her index and middle finger, she touched a larger piece — kneading it into a round lump. Moving her hand, she rolled it around the paper towel, liquifying and accumulating all of the shards into a single mound of transparent putty.
"You don't fill it to the brim," she said — tapping the surface of the gathered glass as if to demonstrate its rigidity. "It takes a bit of experience, but eventually you learn to judge the tolerances of whatever it is you're working with. Glass, for example, isn't known for its incredible storage capacity — but once you sufficiently inundate the molecular mesh with energy, it's easy to manipulate. This is how glass-working is performed, after all."
She curved her hand about the side of the glass lump, and it again deformed — assuming the familiar shape of the unbroken cup.
"And of course, objects are borne of memory," said Zenjou. "It's possible to Reinforce something damaged in the capacity of what it once was. You need simply to remind it."
Her tone of voice was mentorly — amicable enough that I couldn't even be certain if she'd taken my question as a challenge. That demonstration, though — that was one hundred percent just showing off. There was no way I could've done any of that, seeing as she hadn't actually walked me through the process.
Was I supposed to just intuit the stuff about tolerances or something?
"But, as I stated," she continued, "not a poor attempt. To celebrate the occasion, let's have a change of scenery for the evening. Grab your coat."
"We're going somewhere?" I asked.
Or rather, after a weekend of letting me be, was she finally gonna induct me into whatever gang it was that she belonged to?
"You said that your father would be returning late tonight," she said. "In that case, I'll treat you to dinner at the restaurant of your choice — so long as the pricing is reasonable."
"It's like a quarter after three," I said. "Isn't it a little too early?"
"We'll be taking a detour," she replied. "Meeting up with an acquaintance of mine, just for a bit."
This was beginning to sound like everything I didn't want to hear.
"Where, exactly?" I asked.
Enigmatically, Zenjou smiled.
"Massachusetts."
Choice of sleepwear aside, Zenjou's at-home attire seemed to consist primarily of things that a young female schoolteacher might wear if she were attempting to win a popularity contest amongst her male students. Outdoors in the New England winter, though, she'd be a little underdressed; and so, it wasn't unexpected when she excused herself to change.
The clothes that she donned, on the other hand —
"What are you wearing?" I asked, incredulous.
A form-fitting turtleneck top. Black stockings. Leather thigh-highs. A miniskirt shorter than the ones Emma modelled last spring.
I'd mentally placed her in her mid-twenties at our first encounter — but dressed like this, she might as well have been a college freshman out on the town to party. Per her facial features alone, it was difficult to tell her age; and given that we'd be crossing state lines, on the off chance that we got pulled over by highway police, I didn't look forward to explaining that we weren't involved in anything illicit.
Honestly, the boots made her look like one of the working girls over on Market Street. Hopefully, this wasn't some ritual dress code requisite for 'spellcasting.'
"If you've got it," said Zenjou, "there isn't a point not to show it off." She eyed my jacket and my loose jeans. "Rather, I should be the one asking that question. If this is the way you normally dress for school and so forth, I can safely say that I've been acquainted with nuns less prudish than you."
"Aren't you cold at all, wearing a skirt that short?"
"No, not really. It's one of the more useful benefits of Reinforcement. Dressed the way I am at present, I'd be fine even in the frozen wastes of Scotland."
So saying, Zenjou paced over to her Volkswagen and unlocked the passenger-side door. I was momentarily confused — but actually bothering to look through the windows for the first time, I realized that the driver's seat was on the wrong side. Had she shipped the thing over from the UK or something?
Noticing my gaze, Zenjou laughed.
"In case you were wondering," she said, "yes, my 1953 is indeed roadworthy and legal, per the Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act. And yes, the police would nevertheless be inclined to flag me down — if in the first place they were capable of noticing the placement of my steering wheel."
She was admitting to casually Mastering the police — just so she could drive around in her vehicle of choice, hassle-free.
This woman was utterly impossible.
"Come on, then," she prompted. "Into the car already. I'd like to be back in Brockton before the evening rush at latest."
Just past eight, Zenjou told me to go home and continue in the morning — handing me a well-worn college chem textbook, and saying that I should skim through the bookmarked section. I spent the evening reading about the physical properties of glass.
Glass was an amorphous solid — absent of a molecular array ordered enough to qualify as a proper crystalline structure. It wasn't, however, capable of flowing at cooler temperatures and average pressure at sea level.
Despite there being anecdotes about church windows thickening at the bottom due to centuries of gravity, the technicality that glass could flow was only 'empirically manifest' if it were heated to its transition temperature — 'approximately 550° Celsius for the standard soda-lime glass used in windows and glassware,' according to the textbook
Zenjou was almost certainly aware of this.
That being the case, what purpose was there in instructing me to make the glass 'flow?' Was it simply to frustrate me? To see if I'd arrive at the 'correct' conclusion that it wasn't possible, and therefore admit defeat?
I could see her doing something like that — but somehow, I doubted that that was the objective.
Assuming that Zenjou wasn't full of shit, I was potentially capable of Reinforcing my own body. Ergo, having 'an affinity for water' didn't mean that my 'magecraft' was fundamentally restricted to the control of water.
If repairing the cup by the use of my water affinity was supposed to be a 'simple' task on account that 'glass can technically flow,' the obvious inference was that 'an affinity for water' related instead to a manipulation of specific physical features — of properties akin to those of water.
Below a temperature of 550°, glass wouldn't exhibit a fluid-like viscosity — but as Zenjou had demonstrated, ordinary tap water could be made to take on the solidity of a hydrogel. It stood to reason that forcing room temperature glass to behave like a fluid wasn't entirely without the realm of possibility.
Practically speaking, though, how would I achieve that?
Simply allowing my mana to flow forth wasn't the solution. My first day of experimentation was proof enough of that. Even if flowing water was receptive to Reinforcement on mere exposure, an undirected emission of mana didn't seem to effectively engage with solid objects.
Thus, a bit before noon on Tuesday, I changed up my approach. Placing my fingertips on a larger fragment of the cup, I pooled my mana within it — permeating unto the boundaries of the piece, as if I were directing my insects.
For the briefest moment, the entirety of the fragment was available to my tactile grasp — no different from my body; from the sphere of my insects. With a bit of effort, I could —
There was a crackling noise before me, and I opened my eyes — frowning as I lifted my hand. Upon the paper towel, the fragment had crumbled into smaller pieces. Apparently, I'd overdone it.
"I'm gonna be here all day again," I complained to the empty kitchen.
Like the day before, Zenjou had gone downstairs to her basement workshop, leaving me to fend for myself — maybe trusting that implicit threat would keep me from snooping about; or remotely monitoring my activities by means that I couldn't perceive.
I wasn't about to test her either way — but I wished that she'd left me a few more pointers.
Pouring myself a cup of water from the pitcher on the counter, I drank, considering the pile of glass before me. It probably didn't count as progress, but I'd at the very least replicated the trick that Zenjou had used to shatter the cup to begin with. Maybe that meant I was on the right track?
Directing my mana as an extension of myself was definitely more on the mark than just expelling it. Even though the glass hadn't responded well to saturation, towards the end, it felt like —
It felt like I could control it directly — not unlike the Circuits within me.
"Wait ..."
Maybe a solution wasn't too far out of reach.
Fitting together two adjacent pieces of glass, I instilled my mana within — attending specifically to the line of the breakage.
The glass was a part of me —
— and I was a part of the glass.
Like a limb gone numb, it was burdened with far too much inertia to significantly move — but instinct gave that pushing the bits along the fracture to fluidity was within my means. Somehow — even that I'd never before performed this — the transmutation carried the distinct familiarity of a muscle memory.
Though the surface area of the two pieces combined was less than a square centimeter, it wasn't only a few sites that had to be woven together. It was hundreds; thousands; tens of thousands.
I was equipped to deal with them. Controlling my insects had prepared me.
In concert; in parallel; in multiplicity —
"— weave."
And it was done.
I held up my handiwork to the sunlight that entered from the windows, admiring the seamless joining of the fragments. Really, it wasn't even a big portion of the cup — but after a full day of this nonsense, it seemed like a notable milestone.
"Just another 80-odd pieces to go," I said, looking to the paper towel on the counter.
"Faster than I expected," said Zenjou, regarding the completed cup in her hand through her half-frame reading spectacles. "Given the restrictions I imposed, I'd have thought that you'd take a week or more at least."
It was three in the afternoon when I'd finally pieced together all the bits of the cup. As Zenjou stated, it hadn't taken an incredible amount of time — especially given that half an hour had gone toward sharing the bad Chinese takeout that Zenjou had ordered for lunch; and another 45 minutes were wasted scouring the kitchen floor for the two slivers of glass inexplicably missing from the pile.
Once I'd picked up on the welding trick, the exercise was mostly reduced to the piecing together of a three-dimensional puzzle.
"Pretty competent for a first attempt," Zenjou continued, "but there's certainly room for improvement. Observe."
Setting the cup on the table, she placed a finger against the rim, speaking a foreign word that I couldn't quite catch. Glowing lines appeared on the surface of the glass — tracing out the fractures that I'd just gotten rid of.
"Those are —"
"Irregularities in the substance of the glass," Zenjou explained. "Expose it to a more extreme heat or cold, and it'll shatter soon enough." Tracing her finger to the section that I'd fractured into smaller shards, she said, "Seems like you discovered the hard way the outcome of excessive Reinforcement — and then overcorrected, restricting yourself to a minimal application of mana."
Way to rain on my parade, Zenjou. Next, are you gonna tell me that Santa isn't real?
"How would you have done it, then?" I asked, offloading my annoyance to the swarm.
"Like this," she replied, flicking the cup.
Once again, the glass broke — managing somehow not to scatter beyond the edges of the paper towel.
With her index and middle finger, she touched a larger piece — kneading it into a round lump. Moving her hand, she rolled it around the paper towel, liquifying and accumulating all of the shards into a single mound of transparent putty.
"You don't fill it to the brim," she said — tapping the surface of the gathered glass as if to demonstrate its rigidity. "It takes a bit of experience, but eventually you learn to judge the tolerances of whatever it is you're working with. Glass, for example, isn't known for its incredible storage capacity — but once you sufficiently inundate the molecular mesh with energy, it's easy to manipulate. This is how glass-working is performed, after all."
She curved her hand about the side of the glass lump, and it again deformed — assuming the familiar shape of the unbroken cup.
"And of course, objects are borne of memory," said Zenjou. "It's possible to Reinforce something damaged in the capacity of what it once was. You need simply to remind it."
Her tone of voice was mentorly — amicable enough that I couldn't even be certain if she'd taken my question as a challenge. That demonstration, though — that was one hundred percent just showing off. There was no way I could've done any of that, seeing as she hadn't actually walked me through the process.
Was I supposed to just intuit the stuff about tolerances or something?
"But, as I stated," she continued, "not a poor attempt. To celebrate the occasion, let's have a change of scenery for the evening. Grab your coat."
"We're going somewhere?" I asked.
Or rather, after a weekend of letting me be, was she finally gonna induct me into whatever gang it was that she belonged to?
"You said that your father would be returning late tonight," she said. "In that case, I'll treat you to dinner at the restaurant of your choice — so long as the pricing is reasonable."
"It's like a quarter after three," I said. "Isn't it a little too early?"
"We'll be taking a detour," she replied. "Meeting up with an acquaintance of mine, just for a bit."
This was beginning to sound like everything I didn't want to hear.
"Where, exactly?" I asked.
Enigmatically, Zenjou smiled.
"Massachusetts."
Choice of sleepwear aside, Zenjou's at-home attire seemed to consist primarily of things that a young female schoolteacher might wear if she were attempting to win a popularity contest amongst her male students. Outdoors in the New England winter, though, she'd be a little underdressed; and so, it wasn't unexpected when she excused herself to change.
The clothes that she donned, on the other hand —
"What are you wearing?" I asked, incredulous.
A form-fitting turtleneck top. Black stockings. Leather thigh-highs. A miniskirt shorter than the ones Emma modelled last spring.
I'd mentally placed her in her mid-twenties at our first encounter — but dressed like this, she might as well have been a college freshman out on the town to party. Per her facial features alone, it was difficult to tell her age; and given that we'd be crossing state lines, on the off chance that we got pulled over by highway police, I didn't look forward to explaining that we weren't involved in anything illicit.
Honestly, the boots made her look like one of the working girls over on Market Street. Hopefully, this wasn't some ritual dress code requisite for 'spellcasting.'
"If you've got it," said Zenjou, "there isn't a point not to show it off." She eyed my jacket and my loose jeans. "Rather, I should be the one asking that question. If this is the way you normally dress for school and so forth, I can safely say that I've been acquainted with nuns less prudish than you."
"Aren't you cold at all, wearing a skirt that short?"
"No, not really. It's one of the more useful benefits of Reinforcement. Dressed the way I am at present, I'd be fine even in the frozen wastes of Scotland."
So saying, Zenjou paced over to her Volkswagen and unlocked the passenger-side door. I was momentarily confused — but actually bothering to look through the windows for the first time, I realized that the driver's seat was on the wrong side. Had she shipped the thing over from the UK or something?
Noticing my gaze, Zenjou laughed.
"In case you were wondering," she said, "yes, my 1953 is indeed roadworthy and legal, per the Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act. And yes, the police would nevertheless be inclined to flag me down — if in the first place they were capable of noticing the placement of my steering wheel."
She was admitting to casually Mastering the police — just so she could drive around in her vehicle of choice, hassle-free.
This woman was utterly impossible.
"Come on, then," she prompted. "Into the car already. I'd like to be back in Brockton before the evening rush at latest."
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006 : Jerusalem's Lot
fallacies
Puyo Mage
Apparently to avoid having to pay tolls on the I-95, we were southbound on the US-1; crossing over the Miskatonic just past the Topsfield Fairgrounds — 'Home of America's Oldest County Fair,' according to a signpost I'd read out of boredom.
"So," said Zenjou, finally turning off the godawful country station she'd had on. "Why are you so focused on becoming a caped crusader?"
Probably, she was probing again for personal information — but I wasn't planning to explain the situation at Winslow. It was one less weakness for her to play against me.
"You're asking why I'd want to wear a mask and costume?" I asked. "Or the reason I'm planning to fight crime?"
"Both," Zenjou replied — but before I could respond, she continued: "Or, to be accurate, I can more or less guess at the former. Aside from the practical utility of segregating your exploits as a cape from your private life, you're in essence abiding by established cultural conventions. Costumed vigilantes are an entrenched institution with infrastructural support set in place by the government itself. Therefore, by painting within the lines, you circumvent some of the logistical difficulties of working entirely without the system."
It honestly hadn't crossed my mind to consider things from that sort of angle. Obviously, disassociating any cape business from 'Taylor Hebert' served the purpose of keeping Dad safe; but my thoughts going into this were otherwise mostly along the lines of taking the opportunity to reinvent myself as a person — to give my all to something worthwhile.
I was taking things into my own hands because I didn't trust the system. If Zenjou wanted to imply that I was being a conformist or something — really, I couldn't bring myself to care.
"Seems like you've got me figured out, then," I said. "Why are you asking?"
"I'm asking because I don't in fact see the why of it," Zenjou replied. "Specifically, with insect control at the range you exhibit, it shouldn't be difficult to take down criminals without appearing in person. Even if you don't directly engage, you could make a difference simply by reporting crime to the appropriate authorities. There shouldn't be a need to explicitly assume a cape identity."
In short, Zenjou was being overly optimistic in her evaluation of every mission-critical consideration — gazing down upon us peasants from her ivory tower of Eidolonisms.
"First of all," I said, "I can't reliably see or hear through my insects. Their senses are hard for a human to interpret, and most of the time, I only have a tactile grasp of their immediate surroundings. To correctly contextualize the information they provide, I have to be present in person."
It wasn't very smart of me to disclose the limits of my power — but, given how vastly Zenjou had misjudged things, it wasn't as if telling her would prompt an upwards-revision to whatever countermeasures she'd so far imposed against me.
"Second," I said, "I dunno how things are elsewhere, but 'the appropriate authorities' in Brockton Bay are overworked, understaffed, and under-budgeted. If simply reporting crimes could make a difference, the gangs wouldn't have the run of the city."
Keeping her eyes straight ahead, the edges of Zenjou's lips curled into a frown.
"In that case," she said, "let's go back to my original question. Why do you want to be a superheroine? You're putting yourself at significant personal risk — and all for what? Public recognition? I'm not familiar with the vigilante provisions for the claiming of illegally-held funds here in the States — but the cash reward for bringing common criminals to justice is just about nonexistent."
She thought I was gonna put my life on the line for fifteen minutes in the limelight and a bit of cash? Just how shallow did she think I was?
"Brockton Bay is a shithole," I said, "but it's where I live. Do I need a better reason to act?"
Signaling a left turn, she slowed the car — waiting for the oncoming traffic to pass before turning off the US-1.
"In that case, let's say that you're successful beyond belief," she said. "Against the odds, you manage to bring in every criminal and supervillain within the city — somehow helping to establish a permanent improvement in the city's public safety. What then? Do you retire? Or do you move on to fight crime elsewhere, like a proper ally of justice?"
What sort of question was that? Was Zenjou blind to the opposition that I'd be up against? There was no way that I'd be able to pull off something the Protectorate hadn't managed in a decade and a half.
"I don't know," I replied. "I'd probably just quit or something. It's not like I have endless goodwill for people I haven't met before."
"Hm," she said. "I see. Good to hear that you aren't another hopeless idiot."
Her tone of voice was a little hard to read, but by now it was obvious that she'd been measuring me against a past acquaintance of hers. What to make of that, I wasn't certain. Really, at present, what did I even know about her?
She was independently wealthy, definitely; a bit of a miser. College-educated at the least, with a fair background in chemistry. Culturally British? Caucasian-Japanese by ethnicity.
Beyond that, nothing.
In terms of the relative dirt we had on each other, she had me at a complete disadvantage. It wasn't a good feeling.
"You said that you're bringing me to meet a friend of yours?" I said, taking to the offensive. "Why, exactly?"
"Not a friend," Zenjou replied. "And to understand the reason, you'd need a bit of context."
"Explain, then."
Zenjou tapped the steering wheel with her finger.
"I explained before that mana is vital energy, yes?" she asked.
"Yeah?"
"The Reinforcement that I've had you working on classifies as a single-action personal magecraft, owing that it's fueled upon the vital energy of the spellcaster alone. However, this wouldn't be the case with larger-scale spell protocols."
"... how does this relate to my question?"
"I'll get to that in a moment," Zenjou replied. "As I was saying, once a spell protocol exceeds the scale and duration of a single-action personal magecraft, even the most gifted of magi would be incapable of keeping pace with its energy expenditure. Thus, an alternative is necessary."
Hold on. If mana were vital energy —
"Other living organisms, you mean?" I asked. "As in living sacrifice?"
Humorlessly, Zenjou scoffed.
"You take us for savages?" she asked. "That sort of practice is the resort of sociopaths, monsters, and uncivilized brutes. Not a proper magus."
In other words, even though she didn't personally associate with people who did that, there were in fact people who did that.
That wasn't very reassuring.
"In that case, what's this alternative of yours?" I asked.
"The vital energy of the environment itself," Zenjou replied. "Beneath the earth, there are naturally-occurring pathways of mana referred to as leylines — roughly analogous to the Circuits of a magus. An area in which high-volume leylines junction with frequency is referred to as a Spiritual Ground — a prime location for the enactment of large-scale magecraft. This would be the reason my mentor assisted me in the acquisition of my current residence."
"You mean, your house is —"
"— situated in close proximity to a leyline junction, yes. And on account that such sites are dearly coveted, so as to settle disputes, prevent the unauthorized use of leylines, and otherwise manage the domain, a local representative of the Thaumaturgical Association is generally appointed to act as a '2nd Owner' — a custodian to a Spiritual Ground, vested with the authority to permit or deny the activities of magi within their jurisdiction."
Finally, a name-drop of the organization she belonged to.
By the sound of it, it was less a gang and more a — I dunno. Something akin to the Brockton Bay Housing Authority? The DMV? Except that they were probably self-appointed, and specifically regulated the resources used by the particular subset of the parahuman population whose powers operated on mana.
Depending on how they defined 'unauthorized use,' though — the precise way in which they announced and undertook the process of eviction — there was a chance that their actual mode of operations was closer to mafia racketeering.
At this point, it wasn't as if I really had a choice in the matter, but —
"You're registering me with the 2nd Owner of Brockton Bay as an authorized user of magecraft?" I asked, offloading my anxiety to the insects in the surrounding woodland.
"The 'acting' 2nd Owner," said Zenjou. "As I understand it, the man charged with the custodianship of Brockton Bay is presently indisposed, and lacked in the first place the temperament to fulfill his duties. Being as his biological successor isn't a magus, management of the city has been temporarily assigned to the overseer of a neighboring jurisdiction."
Magic. Spiritual Grounds. Old families. A road trip into Essex County, Massachusetts.
It didn't take a genius to connect the dots.
"We're going to Salem, then?" I asked.
It was actually in Peabody, and not Salem township itself. The entire trip took around an hour.
Just past the Northshore Mall and the clover-leaf interchange on the Yankee Division Highway, we turned off Andover Street, and into a wooded driveway. Our destination was the only house on the road.
The house itself was kind of unassuming — a three-story building in the classic New England Colonial style, sided in whitewashed weatherboard. However, the presence it exuded —
It felt as if I were standing in front of a radiator — and yet, the insects in the house and garden indicated nothing of the sort.
"Is it supposed to be this warm?" I asked, unbuttoning my jacket as I stepped out from the Volkswagen.
"You experience it as warmth, do you?" asked Zenjou. "Makes sense, considering your predisposition to the tactile sense. Do keep your coat on, though, as it isn't actually an increase of temperature that you're feeling. Your brain merely interprets it as such."
"What is this?" I asked.
"A defensive perimeter — generally known as a Bounded Field," Zenjou replied. "An example of such would be the pyramidal 'dead zone' you sensed about my residence, prior to the adjustments I made on Sunday. The one before you now is oriented primarily as to dissuade visitations from individuals absent of Thaumaturgical Circuits."
It was doing a pretty good job of dissuading me at present, despite my Circuits.
"The one around your house doesn't make me feel like I'm walking through a microwave," I said, following after Zenjou to the wrought-iron gates.
"Mine works by a different set of mechanics," said Zenjou, ringing the doorbell. "This is more the general sort that you're likely to encounter. Now, shush."
After a brief wait, a tall, pale man with a neatly trimmed goatee opened the front door — placidly approaching the gateway along the garden pathway. His features were cultured — almost Latin; and beneath his white dress shirt, he was fairly well-built. If he weren't close to Dad's age —
I shunted that line of thought to the swarm. Now wasn't the time.
In hindsight, it was blatantly obvious why it was that Zenjou had elected to dress the way she had. She was pining after a guy who looked like a hot mafia hitman from a gangster movie.
"Whateley," Zenjou greeted.
"Miss Zenjou," the man replied, speaking with an oddly resonant voice. "Mother is expecting you."
He undid the latch of the gate, and pulled open the left side, allowing us to enter. In silence, we followed him into the foyer — up the stairs to the second floor and along a corridor. Opening the door to what appeared to be a well-decorated study, he stood to the side and gestured for us to enter.
"Please," he said.
I followed Zenjou within — taking note of the leather-bound volumes that lined the shelves surrounding the room. Surprisingly, there were hardly any booklice that I could grasp ahold of.
"Good of you to drop by, Miss Zenjou," said a white-haired woman, seated in an armchair beside a crackling fireplace. "How are things coming along with the project?"
At first glance, I mistook her for an elderly lady; but noted after a moment that in truth, she didn't look much older than 30 or 35 — entirely absent the telltale blemishes of age. Like her 'son' — if indeed he was her son — she was excessively pale; but hers was the translucent pallor of albinism.
Her figure, though —
Clad in a thin black dress that clung to her skin, she had wide hips and a generous bust, despite her otherwise slender build. If not for her albinism; if not for the pale red of her oddly small irises, and the dark rings beneath her eyes — she had the sort of looks that wouldn't have been out of place in a teenage boy's porn collection.
Sorry Zenjou, but if the guy's mom looks like that, you don't stand a chance.
"Slow and steady as usual," Zenjou replied. "But that's a subject for another time. I've come today to introduce my new apprentice."
She gestured to me.
"Taylor Hebert," she continued. "The girl I called ahead about. First-gen, with Circuits of uncommonly decent Quality and Quantity. No lineage that I'm aware of — though admittedly, I haven't had the opportunity to research her genealogy."
"Uh, hi," I said, feeling a little put upon the spot.
The albino woman looked to me with a smile.
"My name is Lavinia Whateley, dearie," she said. "Presently, I act as the 2nd Owner of Brockton Bay. Pleased to meet you." She turned to regard Zenjou. "But I do have to say, Miss Zenjou — isn't it rather abrupt for you to be taking an apprentice? You've been in this area for a little more than a month. I'd have thought that you'd want a little more time to settle in."
Zenjou seemed to have expected the question.
"I have reason to believe that my encounter with Taylor was pre-arranged," she replied. "It wasn't by random chance or serendipity — and so, based on past experience, I decided to act upon the opportunity."
That explained a few things — but it also raised some questions. For a start, pre-arranged by who?
"Well, if you've made up your mind to sponsor an apprentice," said Mrs. Whateley, "I see no reason to object." Looking at me, she said, "I welcome you to our fraternity, Miss Hebert. I trust that Miss Zenjou has familiarized you with our policy against the disclosure of Mystery?"
Like in a medieval mystery play? Zenjou hadn't mentioned anything of the sort, but overall, I'd gotten the gist from her bit about keeping things a secret. The first rule of fight club is — you don't talk about the fight club.
"Yeah," I said, nodding.
"Very good," said Mrs. Whateley. Looking again to Zenjou, she said, "Do you have any other business today?"
"Not in particular," Zenjou replied. "Just dropping in to say hi."
"In that case," said Mrs. Whateley, "do keep me posted on your progress. Wilbur!"
At the door of the study, Wilbur Whateley peered within.
"Mother," he said.
"Be a dear and show the young ladies to the gates," said Mrs. Whateley. She nodded to us. "Have a pleasant evening."
"You too," said Zenjou, giving her a casual wave before exiting into the corridor.
Out of politeness, I nodded at Mrs. Whateley before following suit.
Back on the road and northbound, I felt a little better about being inducted into Zenjou's coven against my will. Mrs. Whateley — despite her, uh, unique appearance — was friendly enough; not at all an overlap with my mental image of a regional boss to the magical mafia. Aside from getting me to assent to a Harry Potter-esque Statute of Secrecy, she hadn't even made an unreasonable demand of me.
Probably, my poor initial reaction to this business with magecraft and so forth was grounded entirely in Zenjou's shitty personality.
"Don't buy into the kindly grandmother act," said Zenjou, slowing the car at a traffic light. "Lavinia Whateley's an inhuman monstrosity. The Association ceded to her the custodianship of the Spiritual Ground of Salem on account that she singlehandedly neutralized the forces they dispatched to lay claim to it, way back when."
And here she was, poisoning the well. Mrs. Whateley was hardly a 'grandmother.'
"She seemed pretty nice to me," I said. "And don't pretend you didn't dress up to impress her incredibly hot son."
Zenjou looked to me with an expression of disbelief.
"You think I'm attracted to Wilbur Whateley, of all people?" she asked. "Do you even know what he is?"
She turned her eyes back to the road, shaking her head as if to clear it.
"No, never mind," she said. "That was unfair of me. You wouldn't have the context to understand."
What was that all about?
"But no," Zenjou continued, "it isn't particularly to present myself to any male gaze that I dress up. I do it at my own pleasure. Doesn't your American education teach you anything about women's empowerment?"
I was pretty certain that women's empowerment had nothing to do with dressing like a tramp.
"In any case," said Zenjou, "where are we headed for dinner? I'm not footing the bill if it's too expensive."
I thought about it for a moment.
Me and Dad didn't often eat out; but so long as it wasn't seafood, the places we'd been to generally didn't edge into the hundred-dollar range. Probably, I could just name something, and it'd be fine — but I wasn't certain what Zenjou considered expensive.
"You ever had diner food before?" I asked.
"So," said Zenjou, finally turning off the godawful country station she'd had on. "Why are you so focused on becoming a caped crusader?"
Probably, she was probing again for personal information — but I wasn't planning to explain the situation at Winslow. It was one less weakness for her to play against me.
"You're asking why I'd want to wear a mask and costume?" I asked. "Or the reason I'm planning to fight crime?"
"Both," Zenjou replied — but before I could respond, she continued: "Or, to be accurate, I can more or less guess at the former. Aside from the practical utility of segregating your exploits as a cape from your private life, you're in essence abiding by established cultural conventions. Costumed vigilantes are an entrenched institution with infrastructural support set in place by the government itself. Therefore, by painting within the lines, you circumvent some of the logistical difficulties of working entirely without the system."
It honestly hadn't crossed my mind to consider things from that sort of angle. Obviously, disassociating any cape business from 'Taylor Hebert' served the purpose of keeping Dad safe; but my thoughts going into this were otherwise mostly along the lines of taking the opportunity to reinvent myself as a person — to give my all to something worthwhile.
I was taking things into my own hands because I didn't trust the system. If Zenjou wanted to imply that I was being a conformist or something — really, I couldn't bring myself to care.
"Seems like you've got me figured out, then," I said. "Why are you asking?"
"I'm asking because I don't in fact see the why of it," Zenjou replied. "Specifically, with insect control at the range you exhibit, it shouldn't be difficult to take down criminals without appearing in person. Even if you don't directly engage, you could make a difference simply by reporting crime to the appropriate authorities. There shouldn't be a need to explicitly assume a cape identity."
In short, Zenjou was being overly optimistic in her evaluation of every mission-critical consideration — gazing down upon us peasants from her ivory tower of Eidolonisms.
"First of all," I said, "I can't reliably see or hear through my insects. Their senses are hard for a human to interpret, and most of the time, I only have a tactile grasp of their immediate surroundings. To correctly contextualize the information they provide, I have to be present in person."
It wasn't very smart of me to disclose the limits of my power — but, given how vastly Zenjou had misjudged things, it wasn't as if telling her would prompt an upwards-revision to whatever countermeasures she'd so far imposed against me.
"Second," I said, "I dunno how things are elsewhere, but 'the appropriate authorities' in Brockton Bay are overworked, understaffed, and under-budgeted. If simply reporting crimes could make a difference, the gangs wouldn't have the run of the city."
Keeping her eyes straight ahead, the edges of Zenjou's lips curled into a frown.
"In that case," she said, "let's go back to my original question. Why do you want to be a superheroine? You're putting yourself at significant personal risk — and all for what? Public recognition? I'm not familiar with the vigilante provisions for the claiming of illegally-held funds here in the States — but the cash reward for bringing common criminals to justice is just about nonexistent."
She thought I was gonna put my life on the line for fifteen minutes in the limelight and a bit of cash? Just how shallow did she think I was?
"Brockton Bay is a shithole," I said, "but it's where I live. Do I need a better reason to act?"
Signaling a left turn, she slowed the car — waiting for the oncoming traffic to pass before turning off the US-1.
"In that case, let's say that you're successful beyond belief," she said. "Against the odds, you manage to bring in every criminal and supervillain within the city — somehow helping to establish a permanent improvement in the city's public safety. What then? Do you retire? Or do you move on to fight crime elsewhere, like a proper ally of justice?"
What sort of question was that? Was Zenjou blind to the opposition that I'd be up against? There was no way that I'd be able to pull off something the Protectorate hadn't managed in a decade and a half.
"I don't know," I replied. "I'd probably just quit or something. It's not like I have endless goodwill for people I haven't met before."
"Hm," she said. "I see. Good to hear that you aren't another hopeless idiot."
Her tone of voice was a little hard to read, but by now it was obvious that she'd been measuring me against a past acquaintance of hers. What to make of that, I wasn't certain. Really, at present, what did I even know about her?
She was independently wealthy, definitely; a bit of a miser. College-educated at the least, with a fair background in chemistry. Culturally British? Caucasian-Japanese by ethnicity.
Beyond that, nothing.
In terms of the relative dirt we had on each other, she had me at a complete disadvantage. It wasn't a good feeling.
"You said that you're bringing me to meet a friend of yours?" I said, taking to the offensive. "Why, exactly?"
"Not a friend," Zenjou replied. "And to understand the reason, you'd need a bit of context."
"Explain, then."
Zenjou tapped the steering wheel with her finger.
"I explained before that mana is vital energy, yes?" she asked.
"Yeah?"
"The Reinforcement that I've had you working on classifies as a single-action personal magecraft, owing that it's fueled upon the vital energy of the spellcaster alone. However, this wouldn't be the case with larger-scale spell protocols."
"... how does this relate to my question?"
"I'll get to that in a moment," Zenjou replied. "As I was saying, once a spell protocol exceeds the scale and duration of a single-action personal magecraft, even the most gifted of magi would be incapable of keeping pace with its energy expenditure. Thus, an alternative is necessary."
Hold on. If mana were vital energy —
"Other living organisms, you mean?" I asked. "As in living sacrifice?"
Humorlessly, Zenjou scoffed.
"You take us for savages?" she asked. "That sort of practice is the resort of sociopaths, monsters, and uncivilized brutes. Not a proper magus."
In other words, even though she didn't personally associate with people who did that, there were in fact people who did that.
That wasn't very reassuring.
"In that case, what's this alternative of yours?" I asked.
"The vital energy of the environment itself," Zenjou replied. "Beneath the earth, there are naturally-occurring pathways of mana referred to as leylines — roughly analogous to the Circuits of a magus. An area in which high-volume leylines junction with frequency is referred to as a Spiritual Ground — a prime location for the enactment of large-scale magecraft. This would be the reason my mentor assisted me in the acquisition of my current residence."
"You mean, your house is —"
"— situated in close proximity to a leyline junction, yes. And on account that such sites are dearly coveted, so as to settle disputes, prevent the unauthorized use of leylines, and otherwise manage the domain, a local representative of the Thaumaturgical Association is generally appointed to act as a '2nd Owner' — a custodian to a Spiritual Ground, vested with the authority to permit or deny the activities of magi within their jurisdiction."
Finally, a name-drop of the organization she belonged to.
By the sound of it, it was less a gang and more a — I dunno. Something akin to the Brockton Bay Housing Authority? The DMV? Except that they were probably self-appointed, and specifically regulated the resources used by the particular subset of the parahuman population whose powers operated on mana.
Depending on how they defined 'unauthorized use,' though — the precise way in which they announced and undertook the process of eviction — there was a chance that their actual mode of operations was closer to mafia racketeering.
At this point, it wasn't as if I really had a choice in the matter, but —
"You're registering me with the 2nd Owner of Brockton Bay as an authorized user of magecraft?" I asked, offloading my anxiety to the insects in the surrounding woodland.
"The 'acting' 2nd Owner," said Zenjou. "As I understand it, the man charged with the custodianship of Brockton Bay is presently indisposed, and lacked in the first place the temperament to fulfill his duties. Being as his biological successor isn't a magus, management of the city has been temporarily assigned to the overseer of a neighboring jurisdiction."
Magic. Spiritual Grounds. Old families. A road trip into Essex County, Massachusetts.
It didn't take a genius to connect the dots.
"We're going to Salem, then?" I asked.
It was actually in Peabody, and not Salem township itself. The entire trip took around an hour.
Just past the Northshore Mall and the clover-leaf interchange on the Yankee Division Highway, we turned off Andover Street, and into a wooded driveway. Our destination was the only house on the road.
The house itself was kind of unassuming — a three-story building in the classic New England Colonial style, sided in whitewashed weatherboard. However, the presence it exuded —
It felt as if I were standing in front of a radiator — and yet, the insects in the house and garden indicated nothing of the sort.
"Is it supposed to be this warm?" I asked, unbuttoning my jacket as I stepped out from the Volkswagen.
"You experience it as warmth, do you?" asked Zenjou. "Makes sense, considering your predisposition to the tactile sense. Do keep your coat on, though, as it isn't actually an increase of temperature that you're feeling. Your brain merely interprets it as such."
"What is this?" I asked.
"A defensive perimeter — generally known as a Bounded Field," Zenjou replied. "An example of such would be the pyramidal 'dead zone' you sensed about my residence, prior to the adjustments I made on Sunday. The one before you now is oriented primarily as to dissuade visitations from individuals absent of Thaumaturgical Circuits."
It was doing a pretty good job of dissuading me at present, despite my Circuits.
"The one around your house doesn't make me feel like I'm walking through a microwave," I said, following after Zenjou to the wrought-iron gates.
"Mine works by a different set of mechanics," said Zenjou, ringing the doorbell. "This is more the general sort that you're likely to encounter. Now, shush."
After a brief wait, a tall, pale man with a neatly trimmed goatee opened the front door — placidly approaching the gateway along the garden pathway. His features were cultured — almost Latin; and beneath his white dress shirt, he was fairly well-built. If he weren't close to Dad's age —
I shunted that line of thought to the swarm. Now wasn't the time.
In hindsight, it was blatantly obvious why it was that Zenjou had elected to dress the way she had. She was pining after a guy who looked like a hot mafia hitman from a gangster movie.
"Whateley," Zenjou greeted.
"Miss Zenjou," the man replied, speaking with an oddly resonant voice. "Mother is expecting you."
He undid the latch of the gate, and pulled open the left side, allowing us to enter. In silence, we followed him into the foyer — up the stairs to the second floor and along a corridor. Opening the door to what appeared to be a well-decorated study, he stood to the side and gestured for us to enter.
"Please," he said.
I followed Zenjou within — taking note of the leather-bound volumes that lined the shelves surrounding the room. Surprisingly, there were hardly any booklice that I could grasp ahold of.
"Good of you to drop by, Miss Zenjou," said a white-haired woman, seated in an armchair beside a crackling fireplace. "How are things coming along with the project?"
At first glance, I mistook her for an elderly lady; but noted after a moment that in truth, she didn't look much older than 30 or 35 — entirely absent the telltale blemishes of age. Like her 'son' — if indeed he was her son — she was excessively pale; but hers was the translucent pallor of albinism.
Her figure, though —
Clad in a thin black dress that clung to her skin, she had wide hips and a generous bust, despite her otherwise slender build. If not for her albinism; if not for the pale red of her oddly small irises, and the dark rings beneath her eyes — she had the sort of looks that wouldn't have been out of place in a teenage boy's porn collection.
Sorry Zenjou, but if the guy's mom looks like that, you don't stand a chance.
"Slow and steady as usual," Zenjou replied. "But that's a subject for another time. I've come today to introduce my new apprentice."
She gestured to me.
"Taylor Hebert," she continued. "The girl I called ahead about. First-gen, with Circuits of uncommonly decent Quality and Quantity. No lineage that I'm aware of — though admittedly, I haven't had the opportunity to research her genealogy."
"Uh, hi," I said, feeling a little put upon the spot.
The albino woman looked to me with a smile.
"My name is Lavinia Whateley, dearie," she said. "Presently, I act as the 2nd Owner of Brockton Bay. Pleased to meet you." She turned to regard Zenjou. "But I do have to say, Miss Zenjou — isn't it rather abrupt for you to be taking an apprentice? You've been in this area for a little more than a month. I'd have thought that you'd want a little more time to settle in."
Zenjou seemed to have expected the question.
"I have reason to believe that my encounter with Taylor was pre-arranged," she replied. "It wasn't by random chance or serendipity — and so, based on past experience, I decided to act upon the opportunity."
That explained a few things — but it also raised some questions. For a start, pre-arranged by who?
"Well, if you've made up your mind to sponsor an apprentice," said Mrs. Whateley, "I see no reason to object." Looking at me, she said, "I welcome you to our fraternity, Miss Hebert. I trust that Miss Zenjou has familiarized you with our policy against the disclosure of Mystery?"
Like in a medieval mystery play? Zenjou hadn't mentioned anything of the sort, but overall, I'd gotten the gist from her bit about keeping things a secret. The first rule of fight club is — you don't talk about the fight club.
"Yeah," I said, nodding.
"Very good," said Mrs. Whateley. Looking again to Zenjou, she said, "Do you have any other business today?"
"Not in particular," Zenjou replied. "Just dropping in to say hi."
"In that case," said Mrs. Whateley, "do keep me posted on your progress. Wilbur!"
At the door of the study, Wilbur Whateley peered within.
"Mother," he said.
"Be a dear and show the young ladies to the gates," said Mrs. Whateley. She nodded to us. "Have a pleasant evening."
"You too," said Zenjou, giving her a casual wave before exiting into the corridor.
Out of politeness, I nodded at Mrs. Whateley before following suit.
Back on the road and northbound, I felt a little better about being inducted into Zenjou's coven against my will. Mrs. Whateley — despite her, uh, unique appearance — was friendly enough; not at all an overlap with my mental image of a regional boss to the magical mafia. Aside from getting me to assent to a Harry Potter-esque Statute of Secrecy, she hadn't even made an unreasonable demand of me.
Probably, my poor initial reaction to this business with magecraft and so forth was grounded entirely in Zenjou's shitty personality.
"Don't buy into the kindly grandmother act," said Zenjou, slowing the car at a traffic light. "Lavinia Whateley's an inhuman monstrosity. The Association ceded to her the custodianship of the Spiritual Ground of Salem on account that she singlehandedly neutralized the forces they dispatched to lay claim to it, way back when."
And here she was, poisoning the well. Mrs. Whateley was hardly a 'grandmother.'
"She seemed pretty nice to me," I said. "And don't pretend you didn't dress up to impress her incredibly hot son."
Zenjou looked to me with an expression of disbelief.
"You think I'm attracted to Wilbur Whateley, of all people?" she asked. "Do you even know what he is?"
She turned her eyes back to the road, shaking her head as if to clear it.
"No, never mind," she said. "That was unfair of me. You wouldn't have the context to understand."
What was that all about?
"But no," Zenjou continued, "it isn't particularly to present myself to any male gaze that I dress up. I do it at my own pleasure. Doesn't your American education teach you anything about women's empowerment?"
I was pretty certain that women's empowerment had nothing to do with dressing like a tramp.
"In any case," said Zenjou, "where are we headed for dinner? I'm not footing the bill if it's too expensive."
I thought about it for a moment.
Me and Dad didn't often eat out; but so long as it wasn't seafood, the places we'd been to generally didn't edge into the hundred-dollar range. Probably, I could just name something, and it'd be fine — but I wasn't certain what Zenjou considered expensive.
"You ever had diner food before?" I asked.
Last edited:
Stop: Just... No.
Ellf
Apprentice Wizard
- Location
- Virginia
just... no.
@The Dude, the posts I quoted are problematic. They violate Rule 2 in the way that you're pretty much shitting on modern feminism, and in fact, that's what you admit to doing. I will be issuing you a 25 point infraction and a three day threadban under this.
The only reason it was not a Rule 4 violation as well was because you did stop yourself from becoming too disruptive.
@The Dude, the posts I quoted are problematic. They violate Rule 2 in the way that you're pretty much shitting on modern feminism, and in fact, that's what you admit to doing. I will be issuing you a 25 point infraction and a three day threadban under this.
The only reason it was not a Rule 4 violation as well was because you did stop yourself from becoming too disruptive.
007 : A Taste For Slaughter
fallacies
Puyo Mage
Benedict's was an 'authentic' 24-hour diner — whatever it was that 'authentic' was supposed to mean in the restaurant industry.
That wasn't a slight against the place on my part, as the food was consistently delicious. It's just that — for all that it rocked the art deco look of a vintage 50's diner, and legitimately serviced a long-distance trucking route — it had actually been built in the mid-to-late 90's, shortly after I was born. Not to mention, it was part of a restaurant chain that was wholly owned by the McDonell's Corporation.
I couldn't remember when it was that I'd last visited, but in happier times, me, Mom, and Dad would occasionally drop by on the way home from a weekend trip to Gran's place down in Martin's Beach.
For me, personally, the defining feature of diner fare was the availability of breakfast at any hour of the day; and so, quite naturally, I ended up ordering scrambled eggs and pancakes with a side of sausage, coated all over with a generous helping of maple syrup. It wasn't the healthiest of meals, I knew, but for whatever reason, I was inordinately hungry today.
Probably, then, it was a little hypocritical of me to get on Zenjou's case for choosing what she did — but, following a bowl of New England clam chowder, her main dish for the evening was the one item on the menu that I absolutely couldn't stomach.
The Maxi Burger Classic was a one-pound double bacon cheeseburger deluxe served with fries and onion rings — a staple at any restaurant associated with the McDonell's brand, franchised or otherwise. Fugly Bob's up by Market, for example, famously offered the Challenger — a nearly-identical burger, but topped with chili instead of lettuce and tomatoes.
The nutritional information on the menu here at Benedict's helpfully supplied that the burger alone was worth about 1,775 calories, give or take — a little over the lower limit of the recommended daily caloric intake for an adult woman.
"You had more than half a carton of egg fried rice for lunch," I said, staring at Zenjou's plate. "You're going to get fat."
Having cut the burger with a steak knife, Zenjou lifted the half of the sandwich closer to her and took a bite — taking the time to slowly chew before washing it down with a sip of coke.
"Weight management isn't solely about controlling intake," she said, setting down her glass. "Maintaining a regular caloric expenditure is critical. Thankfully — alike to constantly running a fever — the escalated metabolism come of a constant use of Reinforcement burns up a significant amount of energy." She popped a smaller onion ring into her mouth and chewed. "I'd actually recommend that you aim to consume 3,500 calories a day at a minimum. Put a little meat on those bones of yours."
What are you? The witch from Hansel and Gretel?
This was exactly the sort of opinion I'd expect from a conventionally-attractive girl genetically predisposed to slimness. Benefits of Reinforcement aside, her baseline metabolism was probably fast enough that irrelevant of whatever she ate, she'd never have to contend with obesity.
On the upside, a metabolism like hers practically guaranteed that she'd never naturally develop the kind of curves that Mrs. Whateley sported.
If I weren't basically in the same boat, maybe I might've taken a petty pleasure in that.
"It's really alright to just casually talk about magecraft like this?" I asked. "I know you said that the Bounded Field you set up takes care of that, but —"
"Aside from the two of us and the waitress assigned to this aisle," said Zenjou, lifting another onion ring from her plate, "every human within a range of ten meters is imposed with a mild mental interference that substitutes an apprehension of our conversation with generic dialogue supplied by their own minds." She bit into the ring and chewed. "But, that's only to preempt the perception that our table is unnaturally absent of noise. In fact, as a countermeasure to electronic recording, no sound that we make passes significantly beyond the boundaries of our booth; and at distance, the movements of our lips would look to be entirely randomized."
In other words, the Master-Stranger effect implemented was mostly fool-proof against potential eavesdroppers, barring the slim possibility that somebody had physically bugged the booth. I supposed it was proof enough of the Bounded Field's efficacy that nobody within earshot responded at all to Zenjou's candid admission to Mastering them.
Accepting her explanation at face value, though, it sounded as if the complexity and the sustained nature of effect rather exceeded the scope of what she'd earlier described as a 'single-action spell protocol.' Was she tapping into a nearby leyline for mana?
Honestly, I couldn't tell. All that I knew for certain was, she hadn't bothered to divert away the looks she received from the male patrons within view of our table — faintly smiling as she basked in the attention.
I did my best to ignore that.
"So," I said. "Seeing as I can't follow a regulation that I don't understand, what's this 'mystery' thing that Mrs. Whateley mentioned?"
Swallowing a bite of her burger, Zenjou wiped her lips with her napkin.
"One of the things I didn't intend to touch upon quite yet," she replied. "The short of it is that the revelation of the existence of magecraft would produce an outcome that the Association cannot tolerate. Thus, the consequences they visit upon those who breach the rule of secrecy are deadly serious. I imagine that if a particular magus were to present their use of magecraft as a parahuman power, the Association would default to looking the other way; but public disclosure of the underlying mechanics is absolutely forbidden."
She sipped her coke.
"Before you ask," she continued, "it isn't some Harry Potter thing, where the terrible outcome that must be avoided is just a matter of persecution. There's a more technical explanation for the underlying justification, but at this juncture, you're likely to dismiss it as hogwash if I were to go into detail."
Once again, Zenjou had drawn a distinction between 'magecraft' and 'parahuman powers' — as if they weren't both a load of bullshit not yet accounted for by modern science.
Personally, I didn't see a need to distinguish; but as it was apparently a matter of critical importance to the secret fraternity of Myrddin wannabes, I supposed that there wasn't any harm in playing ball. Follow the rules, and they wouldn't bother me. Simple enough.
Assuming, of course, that Zenjou hadn't just hired a pair of actors to help maintain her ruse.
— not that I had the leeway to seriously entertain a take like that. Yes, it was definitely prudent to approach things with a healthy dose of skepticism; but if regarding something as a falsehood was certain to provoke serious repercussions, at some point, you'd have to take the equivalent of Pascal's wager.
Being as power dynamics ensured that Dad and I were effectively at Zenjou's mercy, I honestly couldn't think of a pragmatic reason for her to invest significant time and resources to the sole purpose of misrepresenting the nature of 'magecraft.'
For the sake of argument, it could be that she legitimately got off on 'persuading' a 15-year-old to buy into a worldview from out of a young adult fantasy novel; but —
Really, for all that she tolerated my verbal sniping and general lack of respect — if she told me to jump, circumstances were such that my only choice was to ask 'how high?' To my mind, at least, that significantly diminished the likelihood she was lying.
"Explain it so I understand, then," I said. "I'm not that close-minded."
She hmm'd in contemplation — chewing through a bite of her burger before speaking.
"Let's start with some basic concepts," she said. "Yesterday morning, I mentioned the matter of 'salience' — that when working with water, Reinforcement more easily applies to surface tension than hydrogen bonding, as the former is a feature more commonly apprehended. Taking that into consideration, what precisely did you Reinforce when repairing my cup this afternoon?"
"Its ability to flow?"
"Correct. And why is that 'salient,' if per the strictures of physics, normal glass isn't capable of flowing at room temperature?"
'Salience' was in Zenjou's usage something that emerged in the consciousness of the population at large. If it could be said that the capacity of glass to flow at room temperature was in fact 'salient,' it would have to be in the context of —
"It's those anecdotes about church windows thickening at the bottom, no?" I asked. "They even turn up in textbooks on occasion."
The one from my freshman chemistry class, for example — because, apparently, Winslow couldn't even be trusted not to have misinformation in the textbooks they ordered.
"Correct again," Zenjou replied, nodding in approval. "And Mystery is in general the term for items of salience descriptive of phenomena that don't fall strictly within the dictates of the established laws of physics — the engravement of which within the Collective Unconscious of Man is referred to as a Thaumaturgical Foundation. To vastly oversimplify, magecraft accesses Foundations as to make use of Mysteries in the rendition of possible outcomes."
If I wasn't misremembering Mom's explanation from when I was in middle school, 'the collective unconscious' was a term from Jungian psychology — a pattern of unconsciousness that manifested in common across the human species, emerging from the standard response that our brains had evolved to handle with the acquisition of common elements in culture.
I had a distinct feeling this wasn't the definition that Zenjou was using — but I could grasp the gist: If an irrational belief about the way things worked persisted within the public mind, magecraft had a use for it.
"Why the emphasis on 'possible,' though?" I asked. "If something violates the laws of physics, isn't it just outright impossible? Like, I shouldn't have been able to reshape glass at room temperature, period."
"It isn't 'impossibility' in the legitimate sense," said Zenjou, "and it persists only so long as mana is available. Removed of such, the 'possibility' that remains as an outcome is nothing that can't be achieved within the boundaries of science and technology — attained at a resource expenditure of approximately equivalent value to a parallel use of technology. Ergo, magecraft is in summary more or less a circumvention of the due process demanded by the laws of physics."
I bit off the end of a piece of sausage, looking down to my plate as I chewed. So far, I could roughly follow Zenjou's logic — but some of the things she'd mentioned didn't quite add up.
"But, taking that glass thing as an example of a Mystery," I said, "what would 'disclosure' entail, exactly? Two billion people watching a YouTube tutorial on how to Reinforce a cup to liquefaction?"
Midway through a bite into her burger, Zenjou paused — making a weird expression before following through and swallowing.
"That isn't what 'disclosure' would typically entail, no," she said, sipping her coke. "Setting aside the consequences that would snowball from the revelation of mana, science would in such an event quickly bring the demonstrated phenomenon to quantification — assimilating it to the corpus of human comprehension, or otherwise amending the corpus as to accommodate." She paused. "And should that come to pass — is there a need to yet hold faith in the neighborhood milkman?"
I blinked at her non sequitur.
"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
"Not read up on your Pratchett, are you?" said Zenjou. "With particular exceptions irrelevant to the present discussion, Mystery encompasses for our purposes here those items taken in faith — the things that people suspect to be true; that they hold to fall within the realm of possibility. Rhetorically, if it comes to pass that a given Mystery is wholly quantified to scientific comprehension, is it still a Mystery?"
The milkman existed. There wasn't a need to suspect his existence; to hold it in faith. His being was objectively confirmable.
Magecraft, in other words, required whatever it justified itself upon to exist in the capacity of a Mystery — held in faith to the level of carrying 'salience.' Conversely, if by the advance of science, something no longer qualified as a Mystery —
Like I'd surmised on Sunday afternoon, what Zenjou practiced was akin to stage magic — impressive-looking, but only on account that the know-how to perform it was scarce.
It was a power held in scarcity; because — like in that animated cape flick from Earth Aleph — if everyone's super, no-one is.
"But what's the point, then?" I asked. "If magecraft only produces outcomes achievable via tech, why bother with it at all? I mean, you said that the resource expenditure is about the same either way, right?"
Somehow, in the time that we'd been speaking, Zenjou had finished the first half of her burger. Wiping her lips again, she casually pointed to the street-facing window of the diner.
"See that car across the street?" she asked. "The red one."
I glanced in the direction she was pointing, but in the dim light of the dusk, it took a moment to find what she was talking about. Across the diner's parking lot; across the 4-lane street beyond, there was a red automobile parked in front of a building — just outside the range of my swarm.
"What about it?" I asked.
"Activate your Circuits," she said. "Abiding by instinct, fill your eyes with mana. Don't force it."
Closing my eyes, I inhaled and did as asked. A warmth entered into my eye sockets.
"Now," said Zenjou, "remove your eyeglasses, and look again beneath the car."
Taking my glasses off, I blinked open my eyes —
"Huh."
A little jarringly, the environment around me had entered into sharp focus. This extended beyond the windows of the diner to the landscape without — revealing the details the dusk had concealed, even as the contrast and brightness were entirely unchanged.
In the shadow of the car across the street, there was a small black cat.
"To glimpse that kitten at a comparable clarity via technological means," said Zenjou, "you'd have to acquire a fairly costly pair of night-vision binoculars. Yet, merely by an expenditure of mana in equivalent value, you've just now circumvented the need for such a thing." She lifted the second half of her burger. "This is really only possible for magecraft at a personal scale, however."
— because, beyond the scale of personal magecraft, the kind of resources required escalated to real estate, of all things.
Still, I supposed that answered part of my question — even if in all seriousness, I couldn't buy the claim that a couple of seconds of Circuit activation was of the same monetary worth as a pair of night-vision binoculars. Those things were an upwards of two hundred bucks at the least.
"Alright," I said, cancelling my Reinforcement and putting my glasses back on. "So there's a practical convenience in the substitution of costs. Outside of tapping into a leyline indefinitely, though, you're eventually gonna end up with an outcome that could've been achieved without the use of magecraft. What's the point of magecraft, then — cost substitution aside?"
Swallowing a bite, Zenjou exhaled.
"The majority of magi aren't so focused on utility in a practical context," she said, sounding a little exasperated. "Also, higher-order magecraft does frequently make use of a leyline as to indefinitely render that a Fantasy supersedes the strictures of physics."
Picking up a French fry, she dipped it into the condiment cup at the edge of her plate.
"I don't know that it'll satisfy you as an answer," she continued, biting off the ketchup-covered end of the fry and chewing. "But — setting aside the matter of cost substitution as you've asked — what do you figure it means when I say that 'the due process of physics' is circumvented?"
The due process of physics, outside of cost substitution?
"As in like, the laws of physics require things to happen a certain way, but magecraft overrules it?" I asked.
Zenjou nodded.
"If I were to heat a piece of glass in excess of 550° C," she said, "physics would have it undergo the process of glass transition. However, if I were to simultaneously Reinforce it in its capacity as a rigid solid —"
Glass transition could be denied.
It wouldn't persist if mana provision were discontinued — but in a very literal sense, on a temporary basis, magecraft permitted that 'Fantasy' could supersede reality.
I felt like a bit of an idiot for not having comprehended right off the bat. The concept itself was blatantly obvious; practically staring me in the face the entire time — but for whatever reason, my mind had glossed right past it until Zenjou had pointed it out.
Now, my imagination was aflame.
"Say," I said. "How can I tell if something's salient enough to qualify as a Mystery?"
Wednesday morning was the first that I attempted to jog with full-body Reinforcement. As the temperature was about the same as the day prior, I'd gone out in a hoodie, t-shirt, and pair of sweatpants — not having yet saved up the money for actual jogging gear.
The hoodie turned out to be a mistake.
Not even five minutes in, I was sweating like crazy, and I had to take the thing off. Tying the sleeves around my waist, I resumed my jog — sort of going on autopilot as I mulled over the topics that Zenjou had covered at dinner.
The original intent had just been to go a little further than I had the past two days; to feel out the limits of my body during the active use of magecraft. Unfortunately, I'd let my mind wander a little too far; and by the time I realized it, I was straight across the Docks and well past the limits of the Trainyard.
Aside from the tracks and facilities still in active use, much of the area appeared to be completely derelict. I'd have thought that the druggies or the homeless would make use of the abandoned boxcars to stay out of the cold; but in the zone that I was in, at least, there wasn't a single human within range of my swarm.
It was only seven, and I wasn't yet tired at all. Not in a particular rush, I decided to take it easy for a bit — slowing down to a walk as I navigated the skeletal remains of an abandoned freight station.
Along one of the walls at the edge of the complex, there was a broken-down automobile, heavily rusted and missing its wheels. On a moment's whim, I approached the wreck — removing my glove and touching the door.
Instilling my mana within, I directed the individual motes of energy to form into a vertical line upon the surface — raising the saturation to the limit.
There was a crackling noise, and I quickly pulled my hand away — stepping back as the exterior chassis of the door shattered along the line that I'd made.
Zenjou had broken her glass cup with nothing more than a single tap of her finger. Comparatively, I'd taken far too long.
"I can work with this, though," I said aloud.
That wasn't a slight against the place on my part, as the food was consistently delicious. It's just that — for all that it rocked the art deco look of a vintage 50's diner, and legitimately serviced a long-distance trucking route — it had actually been built in the mid-to-late 90's, shortly after I was born. Not to mention, it was part of a restaurant chain that was wholly owned by the McDonell's Corporation.
I couldn't remember when it was that I'd last visited, but in happier times, me, Mom, and Dad would occasionally drop by on the way home from a weekend trip to Gran's place down in Martin's Beach.
For me, personally, the defining feature of diner fare was the availability of breakfast at any hour of the day; and so, quite naturally, I ended up ordering scrambled eggs and pancakes with a side of sausage, coated all over with a generous helping of maple syrup. It wasn't the healthiest of meals, I knew, but for whatever reason, I was inordinately hungry today.
Probably, then, it was a little hypocritical of me to get on Zenjou's case for choosing what she did — but, following a bowl of New England clam chowder, her main dish for the evening was the one item on the menu that I absolutely couldn't stomach.
The Maxi Burger Classic was a one-pound double bacon cheeseburger deluxe served with fries and onion rings — a staple at any restaurant associated with the McDonell's brand, franchised or otherwise. Fugly Bob's up by Market, for example, famously offered the Challenger — a nearly-identical burger, but topped with chili instead of lettuce and tomatoes.
The nutritional information on the menu here at Benedict's helpfully supplied that the burger alone was worth about 1,775 calories, give or take — a little over the lower limit of the recommended daily caloric intake for an adult woman.
"You had more than half a carton of egg fried rice for lunch," I said, staring at Zenjou's plate. "You're going to get fat."
Having cut the burger with a steak knife, Zenjou lifted the half of the sandwich closer to her and took a bite — taking the time to slowly chew before washing it down with a sip of coke.
"Weight management isn't solely about controlling intake," she said, setting down her glass. "Maintaining a regular caloric expenditure is critical. Thankfully — alike to constantly running a fever — the escalated metabolism come of a constant use of Reinforcement burns up a significant amount of energy." She popped a smaller onion ring into her mouth and chewed. "I'd actually recommend that you aim to consume 3,500 calories a day at a minimum. Put a little meat on those bones of yours."
What are you? The witch from Hansel and Gretel?
This was exactly the sort of opinion I'd expect from a conventionally-attractive girl genetically predisposed to slimness. Benefits of Reinforcement aside, her baseline metabolism was probably fast enough that irrelevant of whatever she ate, she'd never have to contend with obesity.
On the upside, a metabolism like hers practically guaranteed that she'd never naturally develop the kind of curves that Mrs. Whateley sported.
If I weren't basically in the same boat, maybe I might've taken a petty pleasure in that.
"It's really alright to just casually talk about magecraft like this?" I asked. "I know you said that the Bounded Field you set up takes care of that, but —"
"Aside from the two of us and the waitress assigned to this aisle," said Zenjou, lifting another onion ring from her plate, "every human within a range of ten meters is imposed with a mild mental interference that substitutes an apprehension of our conversation with generic dialogue supplied by their own minds." She bit into the ring and chewed. "But, that's only to preempt the perception that our table is unnaturally absent of noise. In fact, as a countermeasure to electronic recording, no sound that we make passes significantly beyond the boundaries of our booth; and at distance, the movements of our lips would look to be entirely randomized."
In other words, the Master-Stranger effect implemented was mostly fool-proof against potential eavesdroppers, barring the slim possibility that somebody had physically bugged the booth. I supposed it was proof enough of the Bounded Field's efficacy that nobody within earshot responded at all to Zenjou's candid admission to Mastering them.
Accepting her explanation at face value, though, it sounded as if the complexity and the sustained nature of effect rather exceeded the scope of what she'd earlier described as a 'single-action spell protocol.' Was she tapping into a nearby leyline for mana?
Honestly, I couldn't tell. All that I knew for certain was, she hadn't bothered to divert away the looks she received from the male patrons within view of our table — faintly smiling as she basked in the attention.
I did my best to ignore that.
"So," I said. "Seeing as I can't follow a regulation that I don't understand, what's this 'mystery' thing that Mrs. Whateley mentioned?"
Swallowing a bite of her burger, Zenjou wiped her lips with her napkin.
"One of the things I didn't intend to touch upon quite yet," she replied. "The short of it is that the revelation of the existence of magecraft would produce an outcome that the Association cannot tolerate. Thus, the consequences they visit upon those who breach the rule of secrecy are deadly serious. I imagine that if a particular magus were to present their use of magecraft as a parahuman power, the Association would default to looking the other way; but public disclosure of the underlying mechanics is absolutely forbidden."
She sipped her coke.
"Before you ask," she continued, "it isn't some Harry Potter thing, where the terrible outcome that must be avoided is just a matter of persecution. There's a more technical explanation for the underlying justification, but at this juncture, you're likely to dismiss it as hogwash if I were to go into detail."
Once again, Zenjou had drawn a distinction between 'magecraft' and 'parahuman powers' — as if they weren't both a load of bullshit not yet accounted for by modern science.
Personally, I didn't see a need to distinguish; but as it was apparently a matter of critical importance to the secret fraternity of Myrddin wannabes, I supposed that there wasn't any harm in playing ball. Follow the rules, and they wouldn't bother me. Simple enough.
Assuming, of course, that Zenjou hadn't just hired a pair of actors to help maintain her ruse.
— not that I had the leeway to seriously entertain a take like that. Yes, it was definitely prudent to approach things with a healthy dose of skepticism; but if regarding something as a falsehood was certain to provoke serious repercussions, at some point, you'd have to take the equivalent of Pascal's wager.
Being as power dynamics ensured that Dad and I were effectively at Zenjou's mercy, I honestly couldn't think of a pragmatic reason for her to invest significant time and resources to the sole purpose of misrepresenting the nature of 'magecraft.'
For the sake of argument, it could be that she legitimately got off on 'persuading' a 15-year-old to buy into a worldview from out of a young adult fantasy novel; but —
Really, for all that she tolerated my verbal sniping and general lack of respect — if she told me to jump, circumstances were such that my only choice was to ask 'how high?' To my mind, at least, that significantly diminished the likelihood she was lying.
"Explain it so I understand, then," I said. "I'm not that close-minded."
She hmm'd in contemplation — chewing through a bite of her burger before speaking.
"Let's start with some basic concepts," she said. "Yesterday morning, I mentioned the matter of 'salience' — that when working with water, Reinforcement more easily applies to surface tension than hydrogen bonding, as the former is a feature more commonly apprehended. Taking that into consideration, what precisely did you Reinforce when repairing my cup this afternoon?"
"Its ability to flow?"
"Correct. And why is that 'salient,' if per the strictures of physics, normal glass isn't capable of flowing at room temperature?"
'Salience' was in Zenjou's usage something that emerged in the consciousness of the population at large. If it could be said that the capacity of glass to flow at room temperature was in fact 'salient,' it would have to be in the context of —
"It's those anecdotes about church windows thickening at the bottom, no?" I asked. "They even turn up in textbooks on occasion."
The one from my freshman chemistry class, for example — because, apparently, Winslow couldn't even be trusted not to have misinformation in the textbooks they ordered.
"Correct again," Zenjou replied, nodding in approval. "And Mystery is in general the term for items of salience descriptive of phenomena that don't fall strictly within the dictates of the established laws of physics — the engravement of which within the Collective Unconscious of Man is referred to as a Thaumaturgical Foundation. To vastly oversimplify, magecraft accesses Foundations as to make use of Mysteries in the rendition of possible outcomes."
If I wasn't misremembering Mom's explanation from when I was in middle school, 'the collective unconscious' was a term from Jungian psychology — a pattern of unconsciousness that manifested in common across the human species, emerging from the standard response that our brains had evolved to handle with the acquisition of common elements in culture.
I had a distinct feeling this wasn't the definition that Zenjou was using — but I could grasp the gist: If an irrational belief about the way things worked persisted within the public mind, magecraft had a use for it.
"Why the emphasis on 'possible,' though?" I asked. "If something violates the laws of physics, isn't it just outright impossible? Like, I shouldn't have been able to reshape glass at room temperature, period."
"It isn't 'impossibility' in the legitimate sense," said Zenjou, "and it persists only so long as mana is available. Removed of such, the 'possibility' that remains as an outcome is nothing that can't be achieved within the boundaries of science and technology — attained at a resource expenditure of approximately equivalent value to a parallel use of technology. Ergo, magecraft is in summary more or less a circumvention of the due process demanded by the laws of physics."
I bit off the end of a piece of sausage, looking down to my plate as I chewed. So far, I could roughly follow Zenjou's logic — but some of the things she'd mentioned didn't quite add up.
"But, taking that glass thing as an example of a Mystery," I said, "what would 'disclosure' entail, exactly? Two billion people watching a YouTube tutorial on how to Reinforce a cup to liquefaction?"
Midway through a bite into her burger, Zenjou paused — making a weird expression before following through and swallowing.
"That isn't what 'disclosure' would typically entail, no," she said, sipping her coke. "Setting aside the consequences that would snowball from the revelation of mana, science would in such an event quickly bring the demonstrated phenomenon to quantification — assimilating it to the corpus of human comprehension, or otherwise amending the corpus as to accommodate." She paused. "And should that come to pass — is there a need to yet hold faith in the neighborhood milkman?"
I blinked at her non sequitur.
"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
"Not read up on your Pratchett, are you?" said Zenjou. "With particular exceptions irrelevant to the present discussion, Mystery encompasses for our purposes here those items taken in faith — the things that people suspect to be true; that they hold to fall within the realm of possibility. Rhetorically, if it comes to pass that a given Mystery is wholly quantified to scientific comprehension, is it still a Mystery?"
The milkman existed. There wasn't a need to suspect his existence; to hold it in faith. His being was objectively confirmable.
Magecraft, in other words, required whatever it justified itself upon to exist in the capacity of a Mystery — held in faith to the level of carrying 'salience.' Conversely, if by the advance of science, something no longer qualified as a Mystery —
Like I'd surmised on Sunday afternoon, what Zenjou practiced was akin to stage magic — impressive-looking, but only on account that the know-how to perform it was scarce.
It was a power held in scarcity; because — like in that animated cape flick from Earth Aleph — if everyone's super, no-one is.
"But what's the point, then?" I asked. "If magecraft only produces outcomes achievable via tech, why bother with it at all? I mean, you said that the resource expenditure is about the same either way, right?"
Somehow, in the time that we'd been speaking, Zenjou had finished the first half of her burger. Wiping her lips again, she casually pointed to the street-facing window of the diner.
"See that car across the street?" she asked. "The red one."
I glanced in the direction she was pointing, but in the dim light of the dusk, it took a moment to find what she was talking about. Across the diner's parking lot; across the 4-lane street beyond, there was a red automobile parked in front of a building — just outside the range of my swarm.
"What about it?" I asked.
"Activate your Circuits," she said. "Abiding by instinct, fill your eyes with mana. Don't force it."
Closing my eyes, I inhaled and did as asked. A warmth entered into my eye sockets.
"Now," said Zenjou, "remove your eyeglasses, and look again beneath the car."
Taking my glasses off, I blinked open my eyes —
"Huh."
A little jarringly, the environment around me had entered into sharp focus. This extended beyond the windows of the diner to the landscape without — revealing the details the dusk had concealed, even as the contrast and brightness were entirely unchanged.
In the shadow of the car across the street, there was a small black cat.
"To glimpse that kitten at a comparable clarity via technological means," said Zenjou, "you'd have to acquire a fairly costly pair of night-vision binoculars. Yet, merely by an expenditure of mana in equivalent value, you've just now circumvented the need for such a thing." She lifted the second half of her burger. "This is really only possible for magecraft at a personal scale, however."
— because, beyond the scale of personal magecraft, the kind of resources required escalated to real estate, of all things.
Still, I supposed that answered part of my question — even if in all seriousness, I couldn't buy the claim that a couple of seconds of Circuit activation was of the same monetary worth as a pair of night-vision binoculars. Those things were an upwards of two hundred bucks at the least.
"Alright," I said, cancelling my Reinforcement and putting my glasses back on. "So there's a practical convenience in the substitution of costs. Outside of tapping into a leyline indefinitely, though, you're eventually gonna end up with an outcome that could've been achieved without the use of magecraft. What's the point of magecraft, then — cost substitution aside?"
Swallowing a bite, Zenjou exhaled.
"The majority of magi aren't so focused on utility in a practical context," she said, sounding a little exasperated. "Also, higher-order magecraft does frequently make use of a leyline as to indefinitely render that a Fantasy supersedes the strictures of physics."
Picking up a French fry, she dipped it into the condiment cup at the edge of her plate.
"I don't know that it'll satisfy you as an answer," she continued, biting off the ketchup-covered end of the fry and chewing. "But — setting aside the matter of cost substitution as you've asked — what do you figure it means when I say that 'the due process of physics' is circumvented?"
The due process of physics, outside of cost substitution?
"As in like, the laws of physics require things to happen a certain way, but magecraft overrules it?" I asked.
Zenjou nodded.
"If I were to heat a piece of glass in excess of 550° C," she said, "physics would have it undergo the process of glass transition. However, if I were to simultaneously Reinforce it in its capacity as a rigid solid —"
Glass transition could be denied.
It wouldn't persist if mana provision were discontinued — but in a very literal sense, on a temporary basis, magecraft permitted that 'Fantasy' could supersede reality.
I felt like a bit of an idiot for not having comprehended right off the bat. The concept itself was blatantly obvious; practically staring me in the face the entire time — but for whatever reason, my mind had glossed right past it until Zenjou had pointed it out.
Now, my imagination was aflame.
"Say," I said. "How can I tell if something's salient enough to qualify as a Mystery?"
Wednesday morning was the first that I attempted to jog with full-body Reinforcement. As the temperature was about the same as the day prior, I'd gone out in a hoodie, t-shirt, and pair of sweatpants — not having yet saved up the money for actual jogging gear.
The hoodie turned out to be a mistake.
Not even five minutes in, I was sweating like crazy, and I had to take the thing off. Tying the sleeves around my waist, I resumed my jog — sort of going on autopilot as I mulled over the topics that Zenjou had covered at dinner.
The original intent had just been to go a little further than I had the past two days; to feel out the limits of my body during the active use of magecraft. Unfortunately, I'd let my mind wander a little too far; and by the time I realized it, I was straight across the Docks and well past the limits of the Trainyard.
Aside from the tracks and facilities still in active use, much of the area appeared to be completely derelict. I'd have thought that the druggies or the homeless would make use of the abandoned boxcars to stay out of the cold; but in the zone that I was in, at least, there wasn't a single human within range of my swarm.
It was only seven, and I wasn't yet tired at all. Not in a particular rush, I decided to take it easy for a bit — slowing down to a walk as I navigated the skeletal remains of an abandoned freight station.
Along one of the walls at the edge of the complex, there was a broken-down automobile, heavily rusted and missing its wheels. On a moment's whim, I approached the wreck — removing my glove and touching the door.
Instilling my mana within, I directed the individual motes of energy to form into a vertical line upon the surface — raising the saturation to the limit.
There was a crackling noise, and I quickly pulled my hand away — stepping back as the exterior chassis of the door shattered along the line that I'd made.
Zenjou had broken her glass cup with nothing more than a single tap of her finger. Comparatively, I'd taken far too long.
"I can work with this, though," I said aloud.
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Use of Reinforcement in FSN
fallacies
Puyo Mage
Use of Reinforcement in FSN:
This is a non-exhaustive but mostly comprehensive survey of the descriptions of Reinforcement in FSN. Items excluded primarily fall in the category one-line mentions that don't really go into detail, or repeats of the same information.
Moving on, from Nasu's official tweets during the launch of UBW (2014):
The glossary entry on Reinforcement from Side Material:
On an unrelated note, the glossary entry on Thaumaturgical Foundations in Case File Material:
This is a non-exhaustive but mostly comprehensive survey of the descriptions of Reinforcement in FSN. Items excluded primarily fall in the category one-line mentions that don't really go into detail, or repeats of the same information.
FATE - Day 01 - 15 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- Reinforcement is rendered by way of permeating (通す, tohsu) a target with mana.
- As of FATE - Day 01, Shirou believes that rendering mana permeation without proper structural grasp would only hasten the target's annihilation. Ergo, he seeks only to permeate "the unoccupied interstices" (空いている透き間, suiteiru sukima) of the object.
FATE - Day 01 - 15 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- Objects originally borne of Form (カタチ, katachi) are difficult to Reinforce.
- Relatedly, Shirou compares Reinforcement to the act of adding brushstrokes to a completed artwork, giving that doing so runs the risk of reducing the completeness of the object being processed. He gives that this is the reason that Reinforcement is difficult despite being straightforward — maybe linking it to its lack of popularity amongst magi.
FATE - Day 07 - 01 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- According to Rin, capacity to stockpile mana in objects aside from one's own body is uncommon.
- Objects permeated with mana undergo some manner of change — rendering the consumption of the mana used. This is part of the reason thaumaturgical phenomena are short-lived, and don't persist in perpetuity.
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
On FATE - Day 07, Rin approaches the task of training Shirou in Reinforcement with a presumption that he should be able to master it by the end of the day.MirrorMoon said:
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
Shirou ends up breaking all 30 of the lamps that Rin prepared. At this, Rin gives that her presumption was overly naive.MirrorMoon said:
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- Reinforcement applies to an object's effects / capabilities.
- Alteration entails affixing capabilities without an object's native features.
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
Shirou refers to Reinforcement as "the easiest of all" magecraft.MirrorMoon said:
FATE - Day 07 - 27 said:
MirrorMoon said:
- In Shirou's opinion, his incapacity to perform Reinforcement comes of an inability to properly control his mana.
- This came as a response to an assessment by Rin that he was being overly forceful; that he was using too much mana; that he wasn't strictly acting to Reinforce the target's weaknesses.
- Shirou takes Rin's critique to imply that he should be cutting corners.
FATE (Realta Nua) - Day 11 - 18 said:
In the loredump that replaces the FATE - Day 11 sex scene in Realta Nua, it's revealed that in Shirou's opinion, his use of Reinforcement comes with Circuit activation to the level of "one through four." The phrasing makes it sound like he's numbered his commonly-used Circuits in his head or something ...
FATE - Day 15 - 09 said:
As of FATE - Day 15, Shirou is actually still incapable of determining whether or not he's successfully Reinforced an object after doing so.MirrorMoon said:
Moving on, from Nasu's official tweets during the launch of UBW (2014):
Official FSN Anime Twitter said:
Official FSN Anime Twitter said:
Beasts' Lair said:
- Ergo, per WoG, Reinforcement of the body and the 5 senses is "a fundamental amongst fundamentals."
- Temporary Reinforcement of the flesh is rendered by permeating one's own body with mana; by infusing one's own blood with mana. Nasu gives that this is a simple feat.
- On account that it's difficult to permeate non-self objects / implements with mana, the Reinforcement of such is typically rendered by way of encompassing the exterior with "a single layer of armor." Nasu gives that this is cheap, quick, and strong.
The glossary entry on Reinforcement from Side Material:
Side Material said:
And from CM3:TMDict said:
Complete Material III said:
Unfortunately, the Theory of Magic Google Doc doesn't allow me to copypaste.
On an unrelated note, the glossary entry on Thaumaturgical Foundations in Case File Material:
Lord El-Melloi II Case Files Material said:
TMDict said:
- Faith and the unconscious of the people reinforces the strength of a Mystery.
- However, propagation (広まる, hiromaru) weakens the strength of a Mystery.
- Thaumaturgical Foundations are Thaumaturgical Principles / Theories (魔術理論, majutsu riron) engraved upon the World, and render the paradoxical effect of stabilizing Mysteries to the extent of their prevalence / popularity (知名度, chimeido, lit. "degree of being well-known"). Note that Case Files Material also states that the qualification of the Cause Rank is "the establishment and stabilization of a Foundation."
- The TMDict translation doesn't really properly render the bit about "families." The nuance is actually that (all?) magecraft (strictly?) passed down as of a single family would be unreliant upon Foundations, and are instead established upon personal / personalized spell protocols / formulas. That is, this may be a common occurrence without the purview of the Association.
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