For as long as I can remember, I have loved learning things. All kinds of things. Random trivia, like the third tallest mountain, or the capital of Parthia, the largest moon around Saturn, the boiling point of alcohol, and so on. I’ve been reading books since I was a kid, and I always went a step further than any of the other kids at school. If I liked a book, I’d look up the author, find the rest of their work, and read that too. I’d grab articles describing the author’s upbringing. The things they liked, disliked, said had inspired them, and decried in other writing. When I listened to music, I researched the artist, looked at the chords, and sometimes, I’d even try to deconstruct any samples they had used purely by sound.
At the cinema, I paid attention to the credits. In restaurants I read every bit of the menu, which led to some strange looks when I was kid pouring over the wine menu. I read all the clauses in my contracts. On websites, I read the privacy guidelines, terms of service, and other legal minutiae. Really, I loved to read, to study, to research, to gather every little bit of knowledge, every fact, every tiny bit of information, that I possibly could.
I wasn’t obsessive. If I couldn’t find anything further on a topic, or had something else to do, I could make myself stop. My idea of having fun was a little different, that’s all. I liked to learn. I liked to study. And I absolutely loved gathering that knowledge and putting it to good use. The only reason I complained about writing papers and stuff was because I rarely felt like that was a good use of the knowledge that I had gathered. Spewing out all I knew on an assignment didn’t achieve something, all it did was prove to someone that I knew what I knew. A truly redundant exercise, as far as I was concerned.
So when I came to this world and learned the way its magic worked, I couldn’t help but feel a little excited. Being able to turn what I had learned, the knowledge that I had gathered with reckless abandon for years upon years, into something tangible, something real. That was a dream come true. The kind of stuff I had always lamented would never be useful outside of bar trivia or a game show, would finally be worth something. It had been the accumulation of this varied knowledge that had contributed to my indecision in college. It had been very hard for me to commit to two majors, and it had been harder still for me to decide what to do later in life, knowing that I would be putting myself inside a proverbial box, unable to use the knowledge I had gathered from various subjects in my real or professional life.
I had been so excited by the ability to turn my knowledge into actual magic spells, that I had pretty much always been the one coming up with new spells. Part of this was because I had the modern knowledge from my Earth. It was a little difficult for the elves, who had just learned how to make fire themselves, or the humans, who hadn’t even discovered metalworking, to suddenly begin exploring the principles of mechanics and chemistry. Still, if I had slowed down a little and taught them how to come up with their own spells through determined observation and experimentation, I was sure smart people like Noel and Kelser would have come up with a few spells by now. But no. Why would anyone try to come up with their own spells when somebody like me existed, ready to give them every spell they could ever want, fed right into their mouths like a mother hen dropping worms into the mouths of her eager but lazy chicks?
Noel’s spell shouldn’t be too difficult to neutralize. It was clearly some sort of visual impairment spell, which meant it could either be targeted at my ability to perceive things or to my surroundings. Judging by the lack of reactions from the people around me, as well as the fact my fire did not light up the area, I was fairly certain it was the former. But if she was somehow manipulating my ability to perceive light, I still had to figure out how she was doing it. Was she doing something to my eyes? Or perhaps she was manipulating my brain’s ability to construct images with light? No, even I couldn’t make spells like that just yet. It would require a lot of intricate equipment and a few samples of eyeballs. I’d have to cut up and analyze the eyes in various ways, while applying what I had learned from light magic to what I saw inside the eyes. My work with lenses and reflection would definitely help with that, but I didn’t think Noel had done anything like that yet. If she had, she would have made much more powerful spells and used them as cover. She also might have chosen a less overcast day to approach, since the weather was making light magic really difficult to pull off.
This meant that her spell was probably some sort of metaphysical spell. She wasn’t manipulating the light, nor my eyes and physical brain. What she was manipulating was my intangible mind. Similar to some of the concepts that went into my mind control resistance magic, Noel must have made a bunch of observations around sight and perception, and wrapped them into a form that she could turn into a spell. I wasn’t sure what those observations were nor the conclusions she had reached from them, but I could at least see the effects of the spell itself. Well, technically, I couldn’t see them, but I figured that was the point.
While I was analyzing her spell in my head, I was still moving my body at breakneck speeds towards where I thought Noel was headed. I was using a lot of motion detection magic, as well as magic hands and memory to guide myself through the area. However, I knew we would be entering the city itself, soon. Even if she ran through the main street, and didn’t veer off into the countless alleyways and side streets, I would still have my hands full weaving through pedestrians, buildings, and all sorts of obstacles with my vision obscured this way. Worse still, I might lose her any minute now. I didn’t even know if I was still following behind her right now!
I knew the sky was overcast and cloudy, with a storm brewing overhead, but I still prepared some light magic. I could tell that I had cast the spell, but the darkness didn’t get much lighter. It was a very strange feeling. I felt like I couldn’t even see the air right in front of me, but yet I could still make out objects fading away as if they were running into a thick fog. It was intensely bizarre, and not something I felt I could ever replicate on my own.
But it did give me an idea. If Noel was somehow specifically removing my ability to perceive the world around me, visually, that meant she must have made some assumptions about vision and perception. She simply did not have the biological or physical knowledge necessary to completely understand the way vision worked. There had to be holes in her knowledge, which meant the spell itself was probably quite weak and inefficient, and I could burst through it with a little bit of clever thinking.
I gathered the little bits and pieces of knowledge that I had gathered over the years. I was no ophthalmologist, heck, I wasn’t even an optician, but I did know a little bit about the eye. Specifically, I knew about the lens, the retina, and the optical nerve. I knew that light enters the eye and hits the lens and then the retina, from where signals leave for the brain along the optical nerve. Then the brain uses this information alongside other functions like memory to reconstruct an image which create the sense of ‘sight’ that we can then experience.
I gathered light magic around my head and used a thin film of water to make a very crude lens, which only really worked because of the way I could manipulate light with magic. The light magic focused through the lens, recreating what I remembered about the city through my memory as well as the information I was receiving through motion detection magic and magic hands. I then imagined all of this information traveling to my brain, and supplanted whatever metaphysical magic Noel was using with the information I was gathering as well as the knowledge I thought I knew. It wasn’t completely ‘justified’ true belief, but I was certain it stood on firmer ground than whatever assumptions Noel had made to cast her spell.
I cast the spell and blinked.
Noel was running just a few feet in front of me. Fairies pointed down the street as Noel and I rushed into the city proper, making our way down the main street heading up to the Senate.
