“We’re going to learn a water spell,” Vixie told me. “It’s one of the two other spells I know, and the other involves the element of air. If you need variety to develop your mana pool, I’m thinking water is the best given that your first spell involved fire, and it will help a little with the problem with plumbing up here. Unless you have a better idea.” She found a flint and steel on the table, and lit a candle with it.

I shook my head.

“There is some water up here, you know.”

“There is?”

“The bathtub has water. But it’s hot water, too hot for drinking.”

“Huh. I wonder how he managed that.” Vixie shrugged. “Magic, huh? Maybe the answer is in one of those books. But enchantments don’t last forever, so it’s good to have a backup. And the water we make will be good to drink. A little tasteless, but healthy.”

I could try learning a spell straight from a book, of course. There were advantages to that, in that I could take my time. But one of the books I’d read suggested that learning in person was better, for reasons that weren’t exactly clear to me. “Sounds good to me.”

“Alright, then. Look into my eyes. Hey, eyes up here buddy.”

“My eyes were up there,” I protested.

“I know,” she said, with a little smile. “Don’t you like curvy girls?”

I liked a wide variety of types, actually. But instead I said, “You’re very attractive. What spell are you going to teach me?”

She made a face at me. “It will concentrate a bit of water from the air in a single place. Your mission is to put out a candle with it.”

It sounded straightforward enough.

I watched as the spirals of arcane symbols formed in her eyes and tried to memorize the patterns. There were little sequences that were familiar to me from the other two spells. I didn’t know what each sequence did yet. I was like a beginning C programmer typing in int main() {, and then ending my program with }, without really understanding what those things meant yet and wondering why you needed all this crap to tell a computer to print “Hello, World.”

Magic was kind of like that. But more like APL, which I’d never bothered to learn.

Vixie demonstrated, and I watched. It was impossible not to feel like there was something intimate about looking into her eyes like that, even if I was focusing on the spiraling symbols. All the flirting she did didn’t help. But I stayed focused on the task.

She created a ball of water, right above the candle. The moment she stopped concentrating on it, it fell, gravity being what it is, snuffed out the flame, and then left a puddle on the table.

“We don’t have to use a candle, do we?” I asked, thinking it made more of a mess that way. I’d have to wait for the candle to dry out before I used it again. In case I was wrong, though, I reached for another candlestick.

“Well, we want a noticeable effect. Would you rather we used my shirt?” she asked.

My eyes might have drifted a little, at that. Vixie’s smirk met me when I brought them back up.

“I was thinking that the puddle on the table was a noticeable effect,” I said.

“You don’t want to get my shirt wet?” she teased.

“I didn’t say that.” I sighed. “Look, you and Laurel clearly have a good thing going. I’m not going to get in the way of that.”

“You’re a good man, aren’t you?” Vixie said.

“I don’t know. Not according to my ex. But I try.”

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” Vixie said. “I would never cheat on Laurel. I was just teasing you.”

“That doesn’t make it better for me,” I said. “Can we keep our minds on business?”

“Doubtful,” she said. “But I’ll try. Okay, one more time.”

She did it without the candle, and the puddle on the table grew.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I rummaged among the glassware until I found a large bowl and put it next to the puddle.

“What’s that for?”

“So we can measure it.”

Vixie nodded. “Okay.”

So she did it once more, which she told me was her limit. It looked to me like the puddle had gotten a little smaller this time, as if some of the water for the spell came from that, and I wished I had used the bowl all along, so I could measure the effects. I didn’t know that it would help me learn magic, but it felt like the sort of thing that should be done.

I poured the water from the bowl into a graduated cylinder that was helpfully right there, and it was just a bit over a pint. Apparently, the cylinder came from a time before metric was common. I wondered if Dumbledalf did some alchemy, given all the glassware.

“Your turn,” Vixie said.

I nodded. “Just a moment.”

I poured the water from the cylinder into another, smaller bowl, which I carried to another table. Then I took the big bowl and set it next to it.

“More measuring?” she asked.

“Yes.”

It took me five tries before I managed to get it. Fortunately, spells that didn’t work didn’t use hardly any mana. Also fortunately, I didn’t accidentally cast some other spell instead. At last, I managed to create a little ball of water over the bigger bowl, let it go, and watched it splash up the sides.

Vixie clapped.

I measured the water I’d created, with Vixie looking over my shoulder. “Mine was eight inches,” she said. “Yours is more like six.”

It was a little less than a pint, so she was right that it was less than hers, but in terms of actual distance on the cylinder, there was no way the difference was even an inch. I was about to correct her, and talk about volume versus distance, when I realized she was teasing again.

“Well,” I said. “I’ll just have to work on it until mine is bigger, hmm?” I asked. If you can’t beat them, join them.

“Uh-huh. With you being a mage and all, that shouldn’t be hard.”

I chuckled politely and then measured the water in the other bowl. “See, actually yours is less. Smaller.” There was less than half as much as there had been before.

Vixie frowned, and then said, “The water you created came from the smaller bowl. At least a lot of it.”

“Yep.”

“I guess that’s useful to know,” she said. “Although as long as it comes from somewhere, it does the job. I never knew that.”

“Unless the job you want to do is clean up some water.”

“Although you’d still be better off using a mop.”

“Well, to get some water you’d be better off finding a pitcher, too.” She paused. “You know, it took me a year to learn to do that spell, and you learned it in a few hours. You want to learn one more?” Vixie asked. “I’m tapped out, but if we find a book with the air spell I know, maybe I can still be helpful.”

Gerald Kenner, Mage

Mana: 1/22

Spells known: Tiny Flame (3), Water Globe (4), Reinforce Greater Shield (X)

“Not unless it uses very little mana. I’m pretty close to tapped out, too.” Vixie had cast Tiny Flame three times yesterday, and Water Globe twice today, so assuming she regenerated mana at the same rate, she had a mana pool between nine and eleven. Maybe I did have some talent for this.

“It doesn’t.”

“I think I’ll go to my car and get my stuff, instead.”

Vixie nodded. “I’ll go do some work, then.” She paused, drifting over to where the pulp magazines were. “Mind if I borrow a book?”

“No, go ahead,” I told her. “Just be careful with it and bring it back. Those are collectibles.” Did that even matter here? I found a towel and mopped up the mess.

“Of course,” she said. She grabbed something from the shelf and hurried down the stairs.

I didn’t see which magazine she took, and when I looked at the shelf later, I wasn’t sure what was missing. Once I had the table dry, I drank the water I’d collected in the bowls. I was parched, and the stuff tasted okay to drink, but flavorless, like distilled water, which it probably was. In order to get more drinking water, I was going to have to draw it from the tub and let it cool, or conjure it. It would require most of my mana to conjure sixty-four ounces of water a day, but since I needed the practice anyway, I might as well do it some.

I went one floor down and used the toilet. I wondered if it was an enchantment that needed to be maintained, like the shield. Possibly. If so, I’d need to learn it before it ran out or I’d have a real problem. More on my to do list.

I changed back into yesterday’s clothes. They might not be pristine, but it was better than walking around outside in a bathrobe and also better than wearing the purple robe with the stars. They might be traditional mage garments, but I didn’t think they’d ever be me.

When I came down, Laurel and Vixie came out of what I thought of as their apartment. I blinked.

Laurel was wearing a little black cocktail dress that hugged her figure, but what I really noticed was her bare legs. She had very long legs, neither spindly nor thick, and her legs looked even longer because she was wearing three-inch heels. She had looked rustic before, but apparently Vixie wasn’t the only one with some Earth clothes.

Laurel blushed at my gaze.

Vixie winked at her.

Laurel tried to wink back. She didn’t quite manage it, but she scrunched up her face on one side. It was kind of cute.

“Hi Laurel,” I said.

“Hi Jerry,” she said back.

I decided I was best off not continuing the conversation if I couldn’t stop from staring at her legs, so I waved and kept going out the door. I wound my way through Scarletdale’s narrow alleys.

A number of people introduced themselves, and I shook some hands. Maybe if I heard their names a second time, I’d remember them. One of the names I recognized from a conversation with Laurel and Vixie, though, and it belonged to a six-foot tall blonde who had a sword swinging from her hip.

“Cassandra,” she said.

“Jerry.”

“The mage,” she said. “Hope you can do your job.”

She was good looking, but a bit intimidating. “I hope so, too.”

“Hmm.” She fixed me with a stare.

“On a mission,” I told her. “I’ll catch up to you later.”

I had two suitcases. As requested, most of what was in it was simple things; clothes, toothpaste, toothbrush, that sort of thing. I’d brought my Kindle, loaded full of books, but I had no expectation that it would work. Usually I used an electric shaver at home, but there I’d listened to what they said about electronics and had packed an old fashioned safety razor, shaving soap, and a shaving brush.

I pulled the Kindle out and checked. Sure enough, it didn’t even turn on. I stuffed it back in the suitcase only because there was no sense leaving it in my derelict car.

On the way back, Laurel popped out again, still in the cocktail dress. “Hi Jerry,” she said, holding a package wrapped in wax paper. “Oh, your hands are full.”

“Hi Laurel,” I said. “What’s this?” I put down a suitcase and took the package. The idea of carrying both suitcases up the stairs at once didn’t really appeal, anyway.

“Lunch. Oh, I forgot. Just a moment.”

She went back into the kitchen, and gave me a quart bottle of water. “You’ll want this, too. It’s important to stay hydrated.”

“Thanks.” I adjusted so that I could hold the suitcase in one hand, hold the lunch like a football in the other arm, and grip the water bottle.

“Do you want me to help you carry?” Laurel asked, taking the bottle from me.

“I can manage,” I said.

“It’s no trouble. But hold this for a moment.” She gave the bottle back to me and then pressed one hand up against the wall to balance while she took a shoe off with the other. She switched hands, then feet, and got the other one off. “Easier in bare feet, I think,” she said, taking the bottle and the wax paper package back.

“I bet,” I said.

“Maybe you should go first. This dress is pretty short.”

“Right.”

That was best, of course. I needed to focus on learning magic. This was a situation that called for fifteen-hour workdays, because I was apparently way behind what was needed.

I got halfway up the stairs, with Laurel following, when I shook my head. That was the rat race I was stuck in at home. I’d put in an honest day’s work, and then some, but I needed to set some boundaries, so I could make not just a living, but a life here in Scarletdale.

I wondered at my willingness to do that. But I’d wanted a fresh start, and this was certainly that, and beyond that, I was needed here.

“It’s a lot of stairs, isn’t it?” Laurel said.

“That it is.”

“How far up are we going?”

“I need to get the suitcase to my bedroom. So not quite the top floor. But you don’t have to go all the way with me.”

“You’re letting us stay here for free. And you’re helping the town. And carrying the heavy thing. It’s the least I can do.”

“Let’s stop here,” I said, at the seventh floor. “I haven’t explored these rooms yet, anyway.”

I opened a door. It appeared to be a storage room, containing all sorts of things, from mops to spare tables and chairs.  That wouldn’t do, quite, so I opened the other door on that floor, and it led to an empty room. I set down the suitcase, pulled the table out and put it in the empty room. “I’ll eat here. No need for you to go up any higher.” I took the wax paper package from her and put it on the table.

She set the water down next to it. “Do you need me to carry your other box up?”

“Suitcase.” I shook my head. “I’ve got it. If you don’t mind me leaving it downstairs for a little bit until I get to it.”

“I don’t mind at all. You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She did a little curtsy and headed back downstairs. I figured I might as well eat my lunch. I got a chair, positioned it at the table, sat down, and then opened the wax paper. Inside was a sandwich on thick, hearty bread that had little bits of visible grain in it, with a slab of meat and tomatoes and lettuce. I took a bite, and decided that the meat was pork, and there was some sort of condiment on it that was creamy and savory.

It was really good.