Magical Journey 5

It was pretty much a whole day late, so I'll release it publicly a day later too.

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The thunder spirits were rather fickle, so the storm only allowed them to charge one more thunder tome before it calmed to a light shower, a fact that disappointed Mennehl immensely. Still, the mage hurried everyone back to his house to warm up from standing in the rain for so long. 

Clothes were removed to set out to dry in front of the large fireplace, which now held a merrily crackling flame, clean linens were deployed to replace them, and the warm chicken soup that Genivere prepared while her husband was gone was distributed to everyone in the hopes that it would be enough to prevent illness from setting in. 

“All of you are, of course, welcome to stay until the rain fully abates.” Genivere said kindly. Tanya looked at her strangely, but then realized she was probably being extra-polite to L’Arachel, who was probably Genivere’s social superior, as she was just a second-generation knight in service of the local lord, Baron Maxwell. Only one step above a commoner instead of… well, it’d have to be at least four steps for L’Arachel… Although maybe you could count Genivere as two steps? No, she inherited her knighthood, so would a freshly awarded one be above that? It really depended on how little of a change constituted a step, she supposed…

L’Arachel elbowed Tanya in the side, as they were sharing a blanket due to their sizes. Hm? “What?” Tanya asked, realizing that she had gotten distracted on a mental tangent again. She had a harder time focusing at times in this life compared to the last one… 

“Do you want more soup?” Genivere asked, her lips tight. Ah, there’s the usual dislike. 

“Yes, please.” Tanya replied politely. “I’m sorry, I nodded off.”

“That’s normal.” Mennehl said assuringly. “Frankly, I’m surprised you stayed standing for as long as you did. Now that you’re warm and cozy, it’s natural to fall asleep after the stress of making thunder pacts.”

“How do you do it?” Tanya asked, her mouth moving before her head could answer for her. Experience, obviously. 

Instead, Mennehl held up a tiny light brown thing. “I chew these, mostly. I was well rested beforehand, but I popped a few beans after the rain thinned and I’ll be wide awake for another few hours.”

Is that… “Coffee?” Tanya asked, eyes wide. “You… eat them?”

“Yes, that’s what it’s called.” Mennehl confirmed, “They taste terrible, but the art of magic demands hardship, at times.”

Hardship!? He has coffee and he calls it hardship? How is this the first time she’s noticed this? Her brain immediately supplied the answer: because she did, she just assumed he was snacking on some kind of nut, not coffee beans. She probably would have noticed if she lived with him, or if she had ever asked him to share his snacks, like a real child would… Damn it. She can only blame herself. 

Everyone was looking at her strangely, and Tanya realized that she was gripping her bowl so tightly that she would have shattered it if she had any actual muscle. Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, Tanya brought the bowl of soup up and sipped at the broth. The flavor reminded her of instant ramen. Hm, how do you make noodles? She knows eggs are involved on top of flour but beyond that she was unclear. “May I have a coffee bean?” She asked politely,

Mennehl continued to look at her strangely, but eventually nodded slowly. “Here you are.” he said, reaching over and depositing one of the precious beans in her hand. 

Tanya inspected it. She wasn’t exactly an expert, but she did brew her own coffee back home to save money, so she knew a thing or two. For one, either coffee beans look very different here, or this was unroasted. She assumed it was the latter. Getting up, she made sure the linen she had wrapped around her like a towel was affixed properly, and she went to the alchemy bench, grabbing a fortunately clean metal cup with the tongs, deposited the bean inside, and shoved the cup into the fire. She’d prefer something a bit more pan-like for this, but for one bean it’ll suffice. 

After a few seconds, the bean make a cracking sound that she picked out from the background noise a wood fire produced, and she withdrew it, depositing the singular bean into a mortar. She could grind it at this point, but she couldn’t do much with one bean if she did; a mug of coffee took around a hundred beans, so instead she blew it cool and popped it in her mouth. 

The bitterness without any of the sweetness that usually came with how she liked her coffee wasn’t the best, but the surge of nostalgia overwhelmed any flaw in the actual flavor. For an instant, she was back in Japan, pausing a tutorial video as she tried to figure out how to use the expensive coffee machine she was gifted, and she had tried a bean out of curiosity. 

“Tanya?” L’Arachel asked, breaking Tanya out of her reminiscing. “Is it that good?”

Tanya blinked, feeling tears run down her cheeks. Ah crap, she broke character. Quick, think of something plausible. She opened her mouth to blame Raikyu, then realized she was going to answer a different question than was asked. “...I don’t know why, but this flavor seems familiar.” She decided to say. “Like I loved it, a long time ago.” Nailed it. She was among non-scientific folk, sufficiently mysterious bullshit should go a long way. 

“Fascinating.” Mennehl said, clearly buying her made up excuse. Hm, she may have erred. “The Church teaches that all life is reborn anew after each life ends, that God shepherds the faithful and virtuous to a higher station in their next life.”

L’Arachel nodded energetically. “Being born a noble is both reward and duty, the first for your heroic acts in your last life, the second in assurance that you will continue them in this one.”

…Hm. Tanya doesn’t remember that part, but then again she never actually read the holy texts, and she wasn’t exactly the most attentive listener when they were read out loud at the orphanage. She made sure she wasn’t the laziest, either, but catching some swats from the nuns for zoning out during scripture readings made sure that none of them got it into their head that she was some burgeoning saint like had been joked about in the Empire. At least she hoped they were jokes. 

Wait… she remembers now. She had filed it away under ‘divine right of kings’ and promptly disregarded it as an important detail. Still, it wasn’t great to be an impoverished orphan and have people start talking like that, but… “I don’t understand.” She said simply, making sure to enunciate it exactly like she did during alchemy lessons, as if this information was no more important than any other piece of knowledge. The right mix of curiosity and neutrality. 

“Well, it’s interesting, is all.” Mennehl demurred, “You not only have a specific opinion on something you’ve likely never eaten before, but knew to roast it.” He deposited another bean in the same metal cup and gripped the tongs, moving the cup into the fire, not even watching it. After a moment, the distinctive crack that you had to listen for roasting occurred, and Tanya resisted the impulse to say anything upon hearing it. Mennehl noticed her reaction and withdrew the bean immediately and popped the now roasted bean in his mouth without bothering to be as careful with the temperature as she was. A glimmer of magic coated his fingers as he handled it, a ‘don’t die when other mages try to blow you up’ trick that Tanya was learning but wasn’t competent enough at to use so casually. “...It’s better this way.” He confirmed. 

“Really?” Dozla asked, having started paying attention a while ago but only now speaking up. Unlike the children, due to his size presumably, he had just wrapped one linen towel around his hips instead of using one to dry himself and another as a covering, his powerlifter’s build on full display. “I’ve never had coffee before, but I know it’s expensive. It grows in southern Jehenna.” Jehenna was a little larger than Rausten on the one map she’s seen, but most of it was desert. She’s never gotten anything resembling a thorough education on geography, so there must be a sufficiently wet portion in the south that serves as a tropical climate equivalent. 

The caffeine in a single unsteeped bean wasn’t very much, but Tanya was already feeling a small, presumably psychosomatic, surge of energy. She fucked up. “Is there something wrong?” She decided to ask, fear lacing her tone. 

Genivere huffed. “Isn’t it obvious?” She said, a note of triumph in her tone. “If being nobility is a reward for a virtuous life, then being born a poor orphan means the opposite; a punishment for a sinful one.” Ah crap, this topic was absolutely bad when someone who hates her is involved. 

“Now, dear, I think you may be jumping to conclusions.” Mennehl said hastily, “That has never been the official stance of the church.” Tanya didn’t like how he emphasized the word ‘official’ in that sentence. 

L’Arachel proceeded to have a way too innocent look on her face as she poured more oil on the fire. “I heard a Bishop once say that of a boy that was born with withered legs.” She said, “Uncle said that Saint Latona would never agree with that, though, and that born cripples were sent as tests of compassion for the faithful.” She took a moment to wrack her brain. “I think the scripture he quoted said… ‘Filled with a mother’s wrath, Latona chastised those who cast rotten fruit at the leper. ‘In God’s wisdom, he did not make us perfect, so that we may know deference to our betters, and compassion to our lessers. In this abuse of the sick and weak, you spit upon God’s design.’” She reviewed what she said in her head. “Yeah, I think that was it.” 

Hm. Tanya thinks that was the first time that she had ever heard L’Arachel actually use that religious education she supposedly got to learn how to use staves. 

Mennehl seemed to put a fair amount of weight in the young noblewoman’s words. “Well, that’s that then. Just as someone born with a great burden is not being punished for sin, Tanya’s mysterious knowledge of coffee is also not so.” He turned to Tanya. “But tell me, have you noticed anything else strange like that? Odd dreams, knowing something you’ve never learned?”

Ugh, should she say no? Or continue to be vague? Unlike Lord Raikyu, she can probably just lie… Tanya played up her thinking, pretending to wrack her memory. No, a firm no would be suspicious. “I don’t remember any of my dreams.” She decided to say, seizing on Mennehl’s attempts to prompt something. “But sometimes I wake up scared, or sad, or angry.” Which was easily explainable as just being normal dreams. “Um… I know I was scared or whatever of something specific, but I always forget what it was about.”

“That’s just normal dreams.” Dozla pointed out. 

Thank you, Dozla. “Oh.” Tanya said, the very picture of innocence. “Then… no.”

Conversation was awkward after that event, but soon enough Tanya was able to get her clothes back, nice and dry, and politely leave to the orphanage. 

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L’Arachel had dragged Tanya, both with Mennehl and without, out for another four or so outings to hunt monsters (she had an uncanny knack for running into them, oddly) before leaving to go back ‘home’, wherever that was, three weeks after her initial arrival. Tanya had assumed her exact rank would come up at some point, but even when she gave up and actually asked, Mennehl said that L’Arachel was from the central provinces of Rausten, and that her uncle was an important official, but that she had requested that her presence in the area be kept quiet, which included keeping her exact status on a need-to-know basis. 

Fortunately, while Genivere seemed to be constantly watching her suspiciously, making their interactions even more hostile, Mennehl still continued her education in Staff Alchemy, even if the awkwardness centered around the coffee, which Tanya had never asked about again, never fully went away.  

“So the formulas and procedures for healing staves are well known to you now.” He began one day. Tanya smiled widely and scooted closer. That sounded like he was going to be teaching something new today! “The only real difference between the quality of healing staffs is the specific formulations of the medicine used in creating them, the magical portions are pretty much identical.” He still didn’t teach her how to create something with an extended range, like his physic staff, was that what he was going to teach? “So today we’ll learn how to use a different type of staff. It creates light and some warmth, for use in the dark or in fog.” He takes out a wooden staff with gold inlays and a single round red sphere, distinctly different from the faceted crystals of a healing staff. “It’s called a Torch staff, of course.”

Tanya made an impressed sound, reaching out to touch the new magical implement. “So what is this made of? I assume some kind of oil, if it provides warmth it must use actual fire as illumination, yes?” She tapped the red orb. What was that made of? It felt like… glass, but she’d expect it to not be quite this warm without something going on with it. 

“Oil is involved, yes.” Mennehl confirms, “But it’s a little bit more complicated than that. You can use a torch staff to set something alight, but only if it’s extremely flammable, like dry straw. Just as the magic of a heal staff is more effective than the medicine used, the flames of a torch staff create much more light and a gentler heat than a simple flame.”

Right, he had talked about that. The amount of medicine used in a healing staff and in a vulnerary was actually pretty comparable; with the same materials (well, the active ingredients were the same, anyway) used in creating two satchels of the medicine, which could be used to tend to maybe half a dozen serious injuries, or two or three times that number of minor ones. Alternatively, one could make a single staff that could, in the hands of even a novice priestess, heal five times as many injuries. In the hands of a powerful and experienced mage like Mennehl? More like ten times or even more than that. The difference was the magic, transforming antibacterial paste that also encouraged scab growth to turn into the same kind of magical healing that prevented her from getting any visible scarring from Norden. 

“So how do you make it work?” Tanya asked, giving her best expression of curious excitement. 

“The tricky bit is the glass, so we’re going to mostly talk about that today.” Mennehl said, before going into it. 

Still, her success with the Harm staff made her ideas drift towards other applications. If the difference between a physical torch and a magical one is the intent of the artisan… couldn’t she use similar principles to, say, set a copse of trees hiding enemies or monsters ablaze at a long distance? That probably wouldn’t be able to come up much without massive collateral damage, but it gave her ideas, to say the least. 

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It was about six months after L’Arachel had left that Tanya’s routine, composed of chores at the orphanage, lessons and work with Mennehl, patrols with Genivere’s progressively less incompetent knights, and nothing else, was broken. 

Tanya had been researching herb guides and alchemically potent plants, Mennehl even acquiring a few extra books on the topic. Thus, on an orphanage day she had decided to join the herb gathering group once more with the intention of locating some specific plants while under the protective aegis of Sister Leanne and Dorac, the woodsman who had finally managed to pass whatever tests the nun had been evaluating him on: they were engaged to be married by now. 

The sentiment among the nuns, near as Tanya could tell, was ‘about time’. Sister Leanne was twenty-two, and that age was considered on the older side for marriage in this world, although still within a ‘normal’ range. As a nine year old girl, this was a rather unsettling reminder of the practically medieval world she had been reborn in, but nevertheless, one advantage to being a commoner without status was that she didn’t have any arranged marriages, so she can worry about that after she marinates her brain in puberty hormones for a few years, maybe the idea won’t be so terrifying once biology has had a say in matters. She hadn’t lived long enough in her last life to know. 

…Wait, has she already outlived her life in the Empire? That was… quite depressing, actually. Even if she might have a few more months… When was her birthday in her last life again? It hadn’t really been celebrated much, so it seemed to have slipped her mind. 

Anyway, Tanya had collected a fair few of the usual herbs, of course, but she wandered out of the usual collection area so she could find those other materials. Specifically, she found a cave. Humming a tune she had learned in her first life and reinforced in her second during singing practice, she placed the herb basket on a tree branch outside the cave and wandered inside, searching the ground for mushroom patches. 

“Those look right…” Tanya murmured as she kneeled next to a thick patch. She took out the notes she had taken as well as the magical light that Mennehl had let her borrow; the glass orb was fueled by the user’s personal magic, lasted a long time, and was a bit brighter than a candle, but not by much. “The color of clean teeth, speckled with black seed-like spores, the stem looks the right thickness… Yes. This is a moldcap.” gently, she harvested the mushrooms and placed them into her basket. It wasn’t the only thing she was looking for, but she wanted as much as she could get. As long as she only harvested the mature specimens, there should be no issue with overharvesting. 

Moldcaps, black buds, spider rolls… the cave had an incredible selection of poisonous and otherwise alchemically useful mushrooms. There was even some bloodweep to scrape off the rocks, a reddish slime mold that was frequently mistaken for bloodstains. That she had to contain in its own wooden jar. 

“And that should be enough.” Tanya whispered to herself, “Any more and they’ll break containment…” She stood up, double-checked her various jars, vials, and basket, then turned to leave. 

Or, at least, she tried. There appeared to be a man blocking her path, and she just walked right into him. 

The man was tall, but not muscular. He wore black robes, and his hood concealed the top half of his face. What she could see, however, was a pale purple beard coming out of rounded cheeks that was the kind of messy that indicated that it had never seen a comb or razor, concealing not much of his face but all of his neck. He was frowning, and his eyes glimmered from underneath his hood with malice. 

Tanya was not ashamed to admit that fear bubbled up in her chest at the sight of the man. Whatever automatic threat calculation her hindbrain had performed based on what she could see, it did not seem favorable to her. After all, it was a large man that was practically announcing himself as a practitioner of dark magic, who had snuck up on her without announcing himself. 

The tension broke pretty fast, as the man immediately recoiled backwards, his hands immediately going to his ears, at the scream Tanya let out, high-pitched and loud. There may not be a choir to join in this life, but she remembered the tricks pretty well. 

When Tanya voice cracked and she took a deep breath, she noticed that the path had been cleared, and she ran out of the cave. 

Right as she approached the exist, a ghostly figure rushed over her and stood in the way, causing her to once more be stopped by running into someone. Unlike last time, the entity grabbed her, floated one foot up, and gripped her jaw shut. Well… shit. 

Mennehl had explained the various monster types, and this one was a ‘phantom’. It was characterized primarily as something that was too fragile and unstable magically to survive for very long, so pretty much all sightings were because of the magical efforts of a dark magic user calling the power of the Demon King and summoning one to themselves. 

“That’s better.” The man grumbled as he approached again. His hood had fallen, and he looked a lot less intimidating now that he more resembled an overweight otaku who gets way into Dungeons and Dragons rather than a dangerous dark magic user. “Now, why is a little girl picking mushrooms in my cave?” He asked. 

Tanya cursed, but was muffled by the grip of the phantom. 

“Oh.” The man said, “Right. Do you promise not to scream if I let you speak?” He asked. Tanya nodded. “Okay.”

Without him explicitly ordering the phantom, it released her jaw. Interesting… and useful. “I’m the apothecary’s apprentice.” She explained, “I’m getting components for experiments.”

That seemed to intrigue the man. “Experiments? From Mennehl?” He asked, incredulously. “That handsome fucker would never.” Tanya could suddenly very clearly imagine this man saying ‘riaju go die’. 

“They’re my experiments.” Tanya quickly clarified. “I wanted to know what happens when you make a poison staff.”

“So you picked poison mushrooms?” He asked, looking at her collection. 

“These should be less painful but more damaging.” Tanya said, “The last one did basically nothing to bonewalkers, I need to fix that for the next recipe.” That was a scary fight…

“You’ve already…” He seemed surprised to hear that she was already iterating. “Well, far be it from me to stop a promising young mage from research.” He said, much more friendly now. “I’ll let you leave on three conditions.” He said, counting them out. “One, tell no one about this place, or me.” 

“Of course.” Tanya immediately agreed. 

“Two, give me your recipe for a poison staff.” He insisted. 

Eh… that might be a bad idea. “Mennehl has my notes.” She deflected, “I don’t remember all what I used, or didn’t use, in the prototype.” She could probably get him 80% of the way there by memory, but a lot of the steps were complicated enough that she needed to reference them as she went. 

He frowned, but accepted the explanation. “Finally… come back when you’re not being watched by that priestess. I’d like to have a long talk about your experiments.” After a moment, he added: “I’m sure I could teach you things that Mennehl never learned.” His hand drifted to the book he had strapped to his side, clearly a Dark Magic tome. The offer was, admittedly, somewhat intriguing…

Nevertheless… “I promise.” Tanya lied, it was an agreement made under duress, didn’t count at all. “But… What’s your name, Mister?”

The man ran his hands through his unclean beard. “Oh…” He took a moment to weigh the risks involved in such a thing, carefully judging her level of fear. “I’m Knossus. Again, tell no one.”

“Absolutely.” She said, and the phantom released her. She quickly walked outside, grabbed her basket of healing herbs, double-checked everything, and jogged back to Sister Leanne. 

That was close… It’s a good thing she’s cute and adorable, or else she probably wouldn’t have been able to talk her way out of that.