Chương 16: Day Sixteen

Dear Diary, I've never really gotten the hang of Tuesdays. Mondays are awful, but at least it's an open-faced kind of awful, you know what you're getting into. Wednesday is hump day, everything's downhill after that. Thursday is almost Friday, and everybody loves Fridays. Saturday is party day, with no work and no work the day after. Sunday is for chilling and recharging the batteries. But Tuesdays just kind of sit there like a lump between Monday and Wednesday.

I just have no idea what I'm supposed to do with them. I mean, I know I'm in school and I've got class, so I go to class, but that's just my schedule, not 'Tuesday' in the greater sense of things. So on Tuesdays I've got one of two classes where none of the ROTC squad are there with me.

'Remedial Mana Shaping'. There are only four of us in the class. At least none of the Barbie Brigade are in the class with me. It's also the first time I've taken remedial anything, so I'm not all that happy about being lumped in with the slow kids, but it's not like I have any idea what mana even is. Thankfully that's where the instructor started, although I would have liked an introduction. Calling people 'Mister' or 'Miss' always feels a little rude.

It's also risky sometimes, when you can't tell if the person you're talking to is a guy or a girl. The instructor's face gave nothing away; no beard at all on a completely androgynous face, body completely hidden by a shapeless brown robe; I could barely see a set of overalls beneath the robe, and what looked like a flannel shirt under that. Still, their voice was clear and easy to follow; they knew they were teaching the slow kids, and didn't want to lose any of us, I guess.

"Mana. Life Force. Chi. Power. It goes by as many names as there are cultures, suggesting that the discovery of how to manipulate it is one of the events that creates a culture. Of course, some of those names have migrated, swapped places, or been borrowed by others over the years, so by now it's more accurate to say that it has more names than there are cultures." They paused, wordlessly nodding to us in an attempt to elicit questions while they took a drink from a stein they'd set on the lectern.

I raised my hand, and when they smiled and nodded, I asked, "Does the name matter? Like, does it matter what we call it?" They were nodding before they finished drinking, and spoke the moment the stein left their mouth.

"Excellent question! The answer, unfortunately, is more complicated than 'yes' or 'no', and is why I mentioned cultures. While the name may or may not matter, the cultural assumptions about it do. Almost every bit of magic use outside the realms of Alchemy and Artifice is like that; it's not the words themselves that are important, but all the connotations of their ontological loadout." One of the other students raised a hand at that, simultaneously asking, "uh... whut?" Scintillating conversationalist, that one.

"Ah. Yes. Carruthers. I forgot you're also in Remedial Language Arts. No matter. To put it in more simple terms, when dealing with magic, many things you know but do not realize you know make a difference. The assumptions you make based on your upbringing, the biases of your home culture, the experiences in your life, and even your emotional state as you Shape your Mana can affect the Magic created."

I raised my hand, and when they acknowledged me with a nod, asked, "So if everything about magic is subjective, how do you teach it? How do we study it?"

"Again, a most excellent question. While it is true that there are many variables which are subject to change based on the practitioner, and the interactions of those variables can actually be subject to change for the same reasons, those of us who have studied Magic of multiple cultures have noticed repeating patterns. In addition, each culture generally has one or more Magical traditions, and within those traditions there is far less subjectivity.

The only reason one might need to know how the factors vary is if one is trying to bridge the gap between traditions, or trying to discern what lies in the cracks between them."

"And we're all stuck in the cracks, huh?" They smiled, even chuckling a little.

"Succinctly put, if a bit pithy. That said, I will let you all in on a little secret." They leaned forward, and all of us in the class leaned forward without thinking about how silly we looked.

"I had to take Remedial Mana back at the start of my academic career too. In point of fact, I credit having to learn how to manipulate Mana the hard way with my depth of understanding now, and that understanding is in fact what has made me such a capable Artificer, and has helped my progress in Alchemy as well!" Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Despite myself I felt a little better at hearing that.

Almost like the class wasn't for slow kids, but for kids who just hadn't had any childhood interaction with Magic. Which was spot on for me. Of course, Carruthers was still in the class.

"Now class, I'd like a volunteer; I'm going to walk one of you through drawing forth your own personal Mana reserve in order to power a simple stored Enchantment, and I'll need the rest of you to watch closely; you can never tell what will be the thing that finally makes things 'click' for you!" I volunteered, and they produced one of the glass pens I'd seen during our aptitude tests and a stack of scratch paper.

"With the pen in your hand and the nib to the paper, I want you to close your eyes and pay attention to your heartbeat." I followed their instructions, feeling less of a fool with my eyes closed. I sat there like that for about sixty seconds, just listening to my own heart beating.

"Now feel the flow of your blood from your heart to your hand. Envision it, watch the blood flowing. Don't open your eyes. Have you got that flow firmly fixed in your head?" I tried, imagining one of the cutaway images of the human circulatory system I'd seen before. When I thought I had it, I nodded.

"Good, good. Now feel the power flowing through your blood, power carried by your blood from your core to your extremities, a steady outward flow carried from your heart to your whole body." That wasn't that hard to imagine, so I nodded.

"Now, once you have that flow of power firmly in your mind, push the flow to your right hand just a little further, into the pen." I did. A fat lot of nothing happened.

"Move the pen across the paper." I did, hearing the nib scratch across the rough surface of the paper.

"Well. That's a little disappointing, but not unexpected. Let's try again, but this time I'll help you out a little. How does that sound?"

"Sure. Can't hurt, right?" They leaned over me from behind, the warmth of their robes settling on my back. Their hand rested on mine, followed by the rest of their arm pressing lightly against mine.

"Now, just move the pen around in circles; you're not trying to write anything, just doodle so you leave a mark when the ink flows. Understand?" I wasn't super copacetic about all the bodily contact, but I wasn't about to make a fuss. I wasn't upset about it, just a little weirded; after all there were at least three layers of cloth between us, two of them being my outer jacket and their heavy robe.

"Sure. What should I do about the mana thing?"

"Just focus on the points of contact between us, try to sense the Mana flowing."

"Okay." I focused on their chest against my back, their arm against mine, their hand resting on the back of my hand as I drew little circles on the paper. I felt something through my back, something warm and cool and... greasy? I hadn't opened my eyes since I first shut them, so the popup in front of me surprised me more than I'd care to admit. Mimic Skill? (Y/N) I figured it couldn't hurt, and responded with a mental 'sure, go for it'.

Between one moment and the next, the steady skritch, skritch, skritch of my dry pen across the scratch paper changed to something more akin to the splurtch you'd expect from slapping a sopping mop against a floor. My eyes popped open, and I dropped the pen and shoved myself back from my desk to avoid the spreading puddle of ink in the middle of the paper. Acting on instinct, I spun and grabbed at the instructors hand just before they fell backwards.

They grabbed my hand with both hands and pulled themselves back onto steady footing, then looked around the class with a beaming smile.

"See! I'm sure all of you here may have thought at some point that if you hadn't been able to manifest Mana by now, you simply didn't have any to manifest. Nothing could be further from the truth! Cadet Diaz is the newest in a long line of Cadets who came to us unable to manifest not because they had a Mana deficiency, but because they'd never been taught the basics!

Frankly, many of those Cadets turned out to have a surplus of Mana, enough that they never felt Mana flowing from one part of them to another because their natural Mana filled them to the point that every nerve in their body remained continually inundated with Mana. Like a smell you become accustomed to; the smell is still there, but you can no longer sense it because of it's ubiquity!" Carruthers chose that moment to say, "Huh?"

"They say you can't feel it moving to your hand 'cause it's already there and always has been."

"Succinctly put! Understanding of theory and practice in just one lesson! Fantastic!" I'm pretty sure I had no idea about the theory or the practice, but I'm not an idiot.

"Can I watch while you work with someone else then?" The rest of the class went by with far less success. I had no idea what the others did or didn't feel, and when I got a look at the instructor working with other students the way they'd worked with me, I lost all sense of violation. I'm pretty sure they saw us as genderless 'Cadets'; their face lit up if and only if someone showed a spark of Mana via ink coming out of the pen.

I wound up wondering if they had some kind of Mana fetish, then wondering how the hell someone would indulge in a Mana fetish. By the time class ended just before lunch, I'd totally lost track of the lesson, although I'd managed to ink-blot two more pages, much to the instructor's satisfaction. Remedial classes only lasted half the day, so I wandered back outside, this time just wandering around the extensive hilly lawn around the school. Idly, I muttered, "How in god's name would you indulge a Mana fetish?"

The, ah... intimately familiar sounds of something vibrating at alternating speeds filled my ears for the next god-knows-how-long, followed by a vaguely masculine giggle fit. Gods shouldn't giggle. I mean, okay, fine, maybe they can, but they shouldn't. Especially about dumb jokes about sex toys.