Shadow was enjoying watching the pair of them work, while she sat on the ground, slowly eating the small, delicious, cubes of tatzelwurm meat laying on the plate in front of her. She was using a claw to snag each cube individually and then transporting it to her mouth for ‘chewing’. That mainly just amounted to rolling the meat around in her mouth for a little bit before swallowing it. Her teeth were built for shearing a chunk of meat off a creature for immediate ingestion, not chewing.

She found she kind of enjoyed the new eating method. It gave her much more time to savor the flavor of what she was eating, rather than just gobbling it down like she normally did. She did admit it would probably be more annoying if she was actually hungry, or the meat tasted less amazing than the tatzelwurm meat did. The big creature tasted really good.

She hadn’t realized how amazing it smelled during the fight, what with being terrified for her life and all, but she had been salivating at its scent ever since they’d headed over for the autopsy. Even having had a meal less than an hour before, she still couldn’t help asking if she could have some. Jonas had laughed and cut her off a small slab.

That’s where it had gotten interesting. Annie stopped her from grabbing it, and informed her about proper eating etiquette. Normally, that would mean eating with a fork and knife, in addition to the plate, but Shadow wasn’t exactly capable of that. They settled for Jonas cutting the meat into cubes, and Shadow just using her claws like a fork, for now.

Annie said using 'table manners' was less important while they were traveling, but she wanted Shadow to try, so that she could have some practice for when they were back in a settlement.

So here she was, slowly enjoying her cubed tatzelwurm meat, watching her mom and Jonas (her father figure? Did that get some sort of title?) work.

Shadow was really surprised by how skilled Annie was when it came to opening up the tatzelwurm.

She wasn’t surprised that Jonas knew what he was doing, but Annie was always so against hurting anything if she could help it. Shadow had expected her to be terrible at anything resembling causing harm. Apparently, though, once the creature was already dead, she had no issues cutting it up, and seemed rather good at it to boot.

The whole process turned out to be extremely interesting. The pair had started off just examining the creature, with Annie making notes while Jonas pointed out whatever he thought might be of interest, but moved on to removing various bits and pieces, like scales, teeth, and patches of skin. They wrapped the pieces up and stored them in their packs. Samples, Annie informed her.

They had eventually moved on to the inside of the creature, opening it up and starting their documentation process anew.

Shadow had been asking a lot of questions about everything. Annie eventually just started narrating everything she was doing. Shadow would have delayed eating her food to help out, but she didn't have a good enough handle on things to not get in the way.

Annie was worried about her accidentally damaging the wrong thing, which was fair. Shadow really had no idea what half the things she was looking at were until Annie explained. She would be wreaking havoc in there if she tried to cut stuff out. She still wasn’t sure how the humans knew where it was ok to cut and where it wasn’t, or how all the different bits were differentiated. Annie had explained some of it, but Shadow was missing a lot of context for the terminology. She could have asked for clarification on… everything… but there was quite a lot to explain and she didn’t want to slow Annie down too much.

She’d learn it all at some point, and this would all start making sense.

---

Shadow finished with her meal at about the same time as Annie and Jonas finished up their investigation of the tatzelwurm. Well, really just Annie’s investigation, but Jonas was helping with the process.

Shadow found herself just looking at the great creature as the humans finished storing the last samples. There was so much of it to take in. It seemed kind of absurd they had managed to kill it. It didn’t feel real. She looked over at her mom. It really had been her who had beaten it, with her spell, for all that Jonas had been the one to perform the killing blow.

As much as Shadow had managed to delay and confuse it, she hadn’t really managed to do anything to the tatzelwurm. She wanted to be able to cast spells like Annie. If she could have stopped the creature like her mom had, the battle would have ended as soon as she made it there, and they wouldn’t have been so close to death.

‘Hey… Annie. Can I learn a spell like yours? To put things to sleep?’ she asked.

Annie looked over. She was currently rinsing herself off using her water flask. She was quite bloody, despite trying her best to be careful. Shadow hoped it wouldn’t stain.

“Hmm… not exactly. You could learn something similar though… if we could get you access to it. Spells that can impose that kind of effect tend to be restricted,” Annie told her.

‘So… what kind of spell is it? How is it different from your sleep spell?’ Shadow asked. She was a little sad she wouldn’t be able to learn it immediately, but she was still curious about it.

Annie gave her a thoughtful look and then a wry smile.

“How about this… let me tell you about the elemental circle and elemental aspects, and you can try to guess what your similar spell might be, based on what you learn. I’ll let you know if you guess correctly.”

Shadow’s eyes lit up and she grinned. She nodded and sat up straight, ready to listen.

On the one paw, she wanted to know right away, but on the other, she loved this kind of challenge. Challenges made things interesting.

Figuring things out was a lot of fun.

That was probably why she didn’t ask Annie to clarify everything right away. She enjoyed the challenge of working things out on her own when she could.

Unless she was too curious.

It was a constant internal struggle.

“Well then. Let’s talk about this while we walk. There should be a river crossing not too much further down the road. Hopefully, we can wash off more thoroughly there,” Annie said, clipping her flask on her belt and getting everything put away in her pack. Jonas did the same and before long they were walking down the road again.

Shadow noticed Annie had started to look a little bit nervous as they headed out, stealing quick glances at Shadow.

‘Are you okay?’ Shadow asked, wondering what was up.

“What? Oh. Yes. It's only... I've noticed you’ve been referring to me as Annie. And there’s nothing wrong with that! It was just… I was just wondering if… you would be willing to… Of course, this would be only if you wanted to! And felt comfortable with it. I wouldn’t want you to feel forced, so feel free to say no, and don’t worry about hurting my feelings or anything!” Annie babbled. She was clearly uncomfortable.

Shadow blinked and tilted her head at Annie. She wasn't really sure where this was leading. Hopefully it wasn't anything too bad. Annie sounded really nervous.

“Just… would you mind calling me Mom? Only if you felt comfortable with it of course! Plenty of adopted children don’t—”

Was that all?

Shadow collided with her leg, wrapping her hips in a hug. They both stumbled a bit.

‘Of course I can! I’d be happy to call you Mom, Mom!’ she projected in bold letters.

Shadow was just so used to thinking of her as ‘Annie’, she hadn’t even considered calling her Mom or Mama like Maggie had called her mother. Clearly, there was a lot of significance here, because Annie was so nervous about it. If calling Annie ‘Mom’ would make her happy, Shadow was more than happy to oblige.

“Thank you little one,” Annie whispered, ruffling Shadow’s ears.

Shadow nuzzled her side.

Annie took a deep breath, and cleared her throat.

“Now, hop down. Let’s get on to business. Time to talk about the elemental circle and the aspects represented by the elements themselves.” Annie continued, strength back in her voice.

Shadow obliged, returning to her spot padding along by Annie’s side.

“So, generally, the elemental mana types are arranged in a circle that helps us understand how they interact. The circle goes like this with light at the top.”

Annie pointed to a corresponding spot on an imaginary ‘circle’ in the air as she listed out the elements again. Light, fire, metal, air, dark, water, wood, and earth, with earth ending up directly to the left of light on the circle.

Shadow started bouncing a bit as she walked. This sounded interesting.

‘Why does it help to have them in a circle?’ Shadow wrote out.

“Calm down, I was getting to that.” Annie chuckled. “The main reason to arrange them that way is that it makes the two main interactions between mana types become clear at a glance. It's a good reference tool. The first thing it shows is the opposing nature of elements on opposite sides of the circle. Opposed elements tend to have similar yet opposite effects.”

The light and dark elements were on the opposite sides of the circle. So light was the opposite of dark? Well, that made a lot of sense.

‘We have opposed elements!’ Shadow posted excitedly.

Annie grinned at her.

“We do indeed,” Anne answered.

Shadow suddenly frowned, becoming a little concerned.

‘Is that bad? I don’t want us to be opposed.’ Shadow asked, looking up at her mom.

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s just a term. It’s not at all uncommon for mages with opposing elements to team up on a project, as one can cover the other’s weaknesses.” Annie reassured her.

Shadow relaxed. Right. Just the elements were opposed, not the people.

Shadow nodded at her mom, smiling again.

Annie nodded back and continued with the lesson.

“The other interaction the circle makes more obvious is the order of conversion. Mana of a given element can be converted to the elements directly adjacent itself on the circle with the correct conversion array added to the spell. That means it’s not unreasonable for a light mage to cast earth and fire spells… or a dark mage to cast water and air spells.” Annie gave Shadow a significant look at that last sentence that she wasn't really sure what to make of, but she was too distracted by the information that she might be able to cast with other mana types to ask about it.

Being able to cast water or air spells sounded awesome. She still didn't know what she could do with different mana types, but it was still exciting. She imagined being able to make blobs of water or blow stuff around with wind.

“After doing a conversion, you do only end up with about a third of the mana remaining though, so that does make it somewhat unreasonable to cast spells from the other side of the circle. Not to mention the difficulty memorizing all the conversion arrays and visualizing them all at once for the spell.”

Shadow tilted her head a bit, a little confused.

‘One third?’ Shadow asked.

“Ah. One third is like when you split something into 3 parts, and take one of them, leaving the other two behind. If you do that every time you move one step on the circle, you end up with very little mana once you are on the other side.” Annie explained.

Shadow thought about that for a bit before slowly nodding. She… was pretty sure she understood that.

“I should really just go over basic arithmetic with you. You’d probably have it down in a couple of days.”

Shadow nodded at Annie a bit absent-mindedly. She was a bit distracted thinking about the mana circle. She was specifically considering how Annie’s and her elements were opposites. Was that enough to figure out the puzzle?

If Annie could put things to sleep with light magic… did that mean Shadow could wake things up with dark magic?

Her face scrunched up. Making a creature that was trying to kill them more awake didn’t seem like it would be terribly useful. That couldn’t be right. But maybe… could something be too awake?

‘Does the spell have to do with making monsters over-awake, so that they… can’t do anything... for some reason?’ Shadow asked, her body language not seeming particularly confident.

Annie gave her a confused look for a second before realizing what Shadow was referring to. Then she just chuckled.

“Not quite. Let’s talk about the elemental aspects first, and you can try again.”

She was disappointed she’d gotten it wrong, but she hadn’t been confident in the answer anyway.

She nodded at Annie, her eyes bright, eagerly awaiting more information. She was having a good time.