Val hid the sword under their bed, which I thought was cute and ineffective but figured that no one would actually steal a sword from the kid so kept my mirth to myself. The next step in their education, as far as I’m concerned, is enchantment. Which, of course, means that someone needs to teach Val magic. Which will be difficult because there’s no way in hell Robutt’s going to pay for a magic tutor when he can’t stand the idea of magic in the first place. Which is honestly hypocritical, like, man carries a soul-theft enchanted sword around with him literally everywhere. I saw him take it into the bath once. Like, first off that’s paranoia and secondly, that’s gross. Doesn’t he know what he does with that thing? He kills people with it! Sorry if this is a controversial opinion, but murder weapons shouldn’t take baths with people, there, I said it! 

Back on topic, magic and the teaching of it. Looks like it’s up to me, which is bad because I’m incapable of casting magic. I assume. Because of the whole no-body thing. In the game lore, it was said that the prevailing theory said that mana came from the body, kinda a by-product of cellular respiration. What that means is that I’m effectively mana-less due to the whole “not having a body” thing. Which sucks because I would really like a way to interact with the world besides asking Val to do things. 

Do I know magic? Tons, actually. I was a little obsessed with collecting spells so that I could have more enchantment variety and that led to a number of sticky situations. I kinda want Val to avoid some of those as they can get really, really dicey and I don’t think Val can just throw bodies at the problem like I did. Well, the same body multiple times. If a quest or a dungeon was too hard to do in one go, my solution was never to back down and just keep flinging myself at the brick wall till either it broke or my body did. Considering the fact that pain is registered by the Dive Pod, granted, at a portion of the normal intensity, it meant that I was essentially self-harming. I’m, uh, not proud of that I’ll be honest. Wasn’t in a good place. Val’s been a blessing to my heart and I don’t feel nearly as despondent and useless as I used to so life- ehem, death’s looking up! I would be doing better if I didn’t have Robutt giving me flashbacks to the moment I died every now and then when his expression darkens but beggars can’t be choosers. 

How to teach Val magic without being able to show them magic. That’s the question and I’m stumped. There were two ways to learn magic in the game: The Repeat After Me and the Spelltome. Spelltomes are simple, they’re books with instructions on how to cast spells in them. Magical textbooks if you will. Read them, understand them, and bingo bango you’ve got a spell ready to cast. The Repeat After Me method was more difficult but frequently easier to acquire. Which is to say, you got someone to show you how they cast the spell and then you tried to copy them, rinse and repeat until victory. What this meant is that Spellcaster classes essentially circulated a giant pool of gold among themselves as payment to teach each other the spells they knew. It took pioneers like myself to track down spelltomes and thus introduce new spells to the circuit. Spelltomes, unfortunately, are expensive as all get out to make as they require special inks, parchments, and quills and are overall a pain to manufacture. Finding them normally involved a quest of some kind, or they were rare drops from dungeons. 

This is all to say that I can’t show Val how I cast magic and I’m loathe to send them off to a dungeon on their lonesome only to have them get chewed up by monsters and then bam not only is my only friend dead because of me, but now I’m all alone. That’s unacceptable. So that leaves me with somehow coming up with a way to get in contact with one of my old contacts, assuming they’re still playing the game 8 years on. It was a huge MMO that had only come out a few years prior to my starting playing so I would think that some of them would still be around, even if they’re only on occasionally for new content. Though that seems impossible to do considering I don’t have access to either my friends list or the chat function. Either that or I come up with an amazing argument for Val to have with Robutt and get an actual tutor in here. Which might be necessary anyway as I have no idea how NPC magic differs from player magic. And then there’s the fact that Val is, mechanically, something of a pseudo-player. Argghhhh this sucks, my brain is going to melt!

“-se. Rose. Hey Rose. SNAP OUT OF IT, JEEZ!” 

“WHAAA!” 

“Honestly! You were just sitting there clutching your head and whispering to yourself. It was super creepy and I tried to respect your autonomy or whatever but I’ve had enough! You were spinning in a circle and it was really weird! What on earth are you thinking that hard about?”

“I. Um. Haaaa, ok I’ll come clean. I’m trying to figure out how to teach you magic.”

“Can’t you just teach me?”

“That’s the thing, I don’t think I can.”

“Why not?”

“Well for one we don’t have the materials nor do I have the physical capacity to write a spelltome. And for two, I can’t show you how to do it.”

“Why not? You should have mana.”

“What? Of course I don’t, I don’t have a body!”

“Why does that matter?”

“Hello? Earth to Val? You’re smarter than this, did they not teach you that mana comes from processing food in the body?”

“Yeah they taught me that. That it was an outdated theory. Current knowledge says that mana comes from the soul. As far as I’m aware, you’re only a soul so it shouldn’t be a problem, no?”

“I. What? What?!? I could have cast magic this whole time!?”

“Probably yeah. I just thought you didn’t want to get found out. I also thought you knew already.”

It was at this point that I snapped my fingers and, though unfortunately noiseless due to the lack of necessary flesh to make the noise with, a small flame formed in the palm of my hand, which I proceeded to turn green, then dark red, then blue, shaped it like a swan, a teddy bear, and more as I felt entranced by the return of something familiar, some little facet of control returned to me. 

I wasn’t the only one entranced by the ever-shifting flame. Val was staring with eyes the size of dinner plates, making occasional small noises of wonder. Eventually I had the flame turn into a stem that grew into a blooming rose whose petals fell one by one only to be caught in a swirl of imaginary wind, swirling across the empty space of the too-large bedroom we were in. As the flame petals settled against the flagstones and winked out one by one the sound of crying could be heard echoing through the chamber. God I’m such a crybaby, but there was a lot of baggage that has been alleviated by that little show so you’ll have to excuse me. 

“Rose! That was amazing! You have to teach me how to do that!” Val said after a suitable time had passed for me to stop crying. I think that if I had a physical body I could convince Val to be a hugger but as it stands that dream seems impossible. 

“Sure thing. I absolutely will. What you just saw was a combination of two spells: Lesser Flame and Flame Shape. First we’re gonna have to get you used to the feeling of mana. Every spelltome starts roughly the same way so here we go. Envision your body. Start at your toes and move upwards. Try to move one muscle at a time. As you do, breathe deeply and regularly. Feel the air go in and out. Feel your heart beat in time, rhythmically and regularly. The combination of all of these things is mana. Once you have that image in your mind, try to move the essence of your body around. Concentrate it in one place: usually your hands and fingers. Once it’s in your fingers, envision a small flame dancing in your palm. Your fingers are flint, your palm steel. All you need to do now is snap to set your mana alight and bring the flame out.”

Val scrunched up their face when I started the explanation but, as the near meditative practice of sensing mana went on, their face relaxed until I started the bit about concentrating mana in one place at which point the scrunch came back with a vengeance. They raised their arm, fingers in position and as I stopped speaking they snapped their fingers aaaand nothing happened. They stared at their fingers with a look of betrayal and tried snapping a few more times, which put the image of a stovetop pilot light in my head and I couldn’t help but giggle. The look of betrayal turned from their fingers to my face and I had a damn hard time suppressing my giggles as that face just made it so much worse. Fighting off laughter I opened my mouth to reassure them but they interrupted me.

“Nope! No! I don’t want to hear anything from you! Why are you laughing at me? Stop laughing!”

“I. I. I’m sorry, I can’t help it. You just looked so serious and then so betrayed I’m sorry. Please, hehhehe, forgive me Val, hahaha. It’s really out of my control, hehehe.”

“No, I won’t forgive you til you stop laughing at me!”

“But you’re making it worse! Hahahah!”

“Ughhh, you’re unbelievable! Here I am, trying my best to do something nobody in my family has done for thirteen generations, and you’re laughing at me when I fail the first time!”

“Hahaha, wait really? Thirteen generations without a mage? For a noble family? That’s insane! Jeez what happened to your ancestor for your family to hate magic that much? I mean, you don’t seem to have a problem with enchanted items or potions so what gives?”

“Um, I don’t know all the specifics, but I think a mage stole the house progenitor’s soul or something.”

“Wait what? Really? That’s sick as heck!”

“Yeah, on top of that his son was badly burned, nearly to the point of death. It’s rumored that the family’s red hair comes from all the fire magic he absorbed during that attack. This is all stuff that happened when the empire was being founded so they were still fighting the Magocracy of Nandria. Apparently they were run in such a way that the more magic power and knowledge you had, the higher your status. The leader, the Archmagi, was said to be a mage of unparalleled skill and wisdom not seen since. He knew over a thousand spells!”

“Just a thousand? I knew like 1200 spells by the time I died. The only achievement I had left was ‘Learn all spells’ so I’m pretty sure my collection was almost complete. Man now I’m bummed because of my death again. Arrrggg I was so close probably!”

“Wait, you knew more spells than THE Archmagi?! That’s incredible!”

“Yeah I was getting a good amount of money selling spells to people. Though I kept all my spelltomes. Figured they’d look good on a shelf back in my house. Man, I wonder what happened to my old house. Haven’t thought of going back in a while.”

“You had a house? Where? Can we go see it?”

“Um, it was in one of the late game cities, well, in the outskirts of one of the late game cities. Ummm, what was it called? Reinhold? Yeah that sounds about right.”

“Isn’t that place dangerous? It’s on the border of two danger zones!”

“Yeah it’s coming back to me. It bordered the Forest of Blackheart and the Fields of Perpetuity. Yeah my house was on the edge of the fields.”

“YOU LIVED ON THE EDGE OF PERPETUITY!?!?”

“Jeez keep your voice down, do you want to get sent to an asylum for shouting at yourself?! And anyway yeah, place was full of monsters that gave great materials and a decent amount of gold. Only problem was that the city wasn’t on a popular trade route. Wasn’t a popular city for anyone but dungeon junkies really. Perpetuity and Blackheart had some great dungeons with some solid loot and fun fights. I had a spellforge, an adamantine anvil, enough materials stockpiled to last me at least two months of full time crafting, and I was set to expand again and actually have a storefront.”

“Wait, you didn’t have a store? I thought you sold to ‘anyone and everyone in the game at one point or another!’” 

“First off, terrible impression of my glorious self, keep working on it. Secondly, yeah I mostly sold things through word of mouth. I tried the whole ‘blanket on the ground’ thing but quickly realized I didn’t have the patience for it. So instead I’d act as a stop-gap member for parties. Like say a dungeon lets you take 5 people in but you only have 3 friends. I was a rando that offered to join any and every party going in order to show off my equipment and offer some free samples and in the end it seemed like either everyone knew me or knew of me. I also tried to make myself easy to find, had my in-game location on at all times and a big ol’ sign on the door with my name and crafting proficiencies. On my profile I had a menu of things I sold in bulk and a text file listing my various crafting options for custom gear. I also-”

“Ok ok I get it, you were a bigshot crafter that just so happened to sell things by being nosy you can stop talking now.”

“Aww ok. But yeah, never owned my own store, always needed to invest in some other crafting gear or material so I never got the chance. Still, my house was cool.”

“That ‘was’ might be an ‘is’, you know?”

“I suppose that’s true enough, but it has been 8 years. If it is still around under my name with all my crafting stations intact, something is probably broken by now. Also the garden’s gonna be a mess. It had 3 types of mint in it. Just one would be enough to choke out the entire place; I shudder to think what’s become of it now.”

“I don’t know much about botany, can you tell me about the plants in the garden?”

“Sure. Let’s start with the mints first off. Violet Hill Honey Mint. Commonly called either Violet Mint or Honey Mint, depending on how much you like Violet Hill. Personally, I think the place is beautiful, especially in the morning when the sun reflects off dew on the thousands of violets covering it. Granted the violets will then emit a toxic pollen that puts creatures to sleep while the pollen is in their lungs. If you go with an air filter of some kind it’s a nice place. The mint that you can find growing on the cliffside has an amazing natural sweet flavor on top of being minty. Alchemically it’s an outstanding neutral; almost nothing interacts with it so it’s safe to be used as a flavoring in tons of applications. We don’t have any here as it is extremely expensive as most of what’s available on the market is harvested from Violet Hill and most people tend to steer clear of the place. It wasn’t easy to cultivate but I managed it in the end. 

Then we have Perfect’s Mint, which was supposedly named after-”