“You will what…?” She asked me with a clearly confused expression.

“Take you up on that offer, one week of free meals and lodging if I solve your heat problem, right?

“Pardon the late introduction, I’m Aria, a mage specialized in the Fire Magic and in the Arcane, if there is anything magical involved with this place being so hot, I’m fairly confident I can fix it!” I explained, Iris looked pretty proud of me for some reason… Was it for making use of the opportunity? I’m not sure.

She took a few seconds to process that before replying, “Yeah, about that… No thanks, don’t want yet another mage messing with things, you’ll just make it worse…” As if I’ll let my free lodging run away this easily!

“Come on… Let me take a look at it, I’ll tell you if I can’t solve it. I’m a heroine, it’s my job to solve people’s problems!” Please tell me that bringing up the heroes will help me get that free stay…

“… I never heard of you though? Most heroes are pretty famous.” She retorted.

“That’s because I’m still new at it, but I can assure you my intentions are as pure as crystal!” I’m purely interested in free stuff!

“Don’t heroes earn pretty well though…? Why would you need to bargain for a cheap place in this part of the city…?” Come on, don’t be this skeptical!

“Because I spent most of my money traveling here and the jobs I took so far didn’t offset the initial expenses.” I don’t need to tell her that I took no jobs yet…

She stared really hard at me before sighing, “Fine, but I swear to the gods that I will drown you in debt if you mess up.” Yes! Room for the night acquired!

“Don’t worry, for I’ll be sure to solve your troubles!” I proclaimed proudly while she gestured for us to follow her.

As we moved, Iris spoke quietly in my ear while making sure we wouldn’t be overheard, “Are you sure you can do that? You haven’t touched a glyph in months, can you still remember how they work…?”

I wanted to shout in response, but I held back and whispered instead, “I’m not that much of a birdbrain! I’m sure we’ll find a way to get that working, I have you on my side after all… Besides, it’s that or sleeping outside, so we have to succeed.”

“You know I could just go back if we really had to stay outside, right…?” Don’t even bring that up…

“Not an option.” Was my immediate answer.

“Aria…” Iris started, but stopped when the inn’s lady called out to us... I should ask her name already.

“We’re here, this thing is the problem.” In front of us was a big stone oven filled with glyphs carved all over it, but… Gods, what a mess this was, just who made this? I can barely recognize them due to how much clutter is there, did they make multiple attempts at making an enchantment or something?

Also, the fire was turned on even though the owner wasn’t baking anything nor needed to heat up the place with how hot it was right now… “Wow… This thing is worse than I thought.”

“You can’t do it?” She asked me.

I shook my head, “I think I can, but can you tell me what’s the purpose of all those glyphs in what should be a normal oven? It will be easier to fix if I understand what it was intended to do…”

She still seemed a bit worried, but answered nonetheless, “Last winter a traveling enchanter ended up staying here for a few days and started complaining about the cold, so I explained to him we couldn’t simply keep the oven lit the whole day just for the sake of heating up the building, as this would waste too much lumber. He then insisted that he would find a perfect solution to it, and I ended up letting him do as he pleased.

“What followed was that he made the oven stay lit permanently while not consuming any lumber and heating the building more than what it would usually do. That was actually pretty helpful during winter because a lot of guests came for the comfort of a nice heated up place, but now that we’re in spring, the business is dying as nobody wishes to sleep in a place this hot.

“And since the mage already traveled away, I can’t really ask him to fix his mess.” Well, Iris would love to stay here all-year long, but I can agree with her sentiment.

I started looking a bit around the oven and trying to analyze what the glyphs meant while trying to read the flow of mana in it, “I see… It seems like this is drawing mana from the ambient in order to keep itself functioning even without maintenance. Clever, but ultimately caused a huge problem.” I bet this guy was kicked from the local mage’s tower and is making a living by doing this kind of half-baked job, dear gods.

I kept looking over them, but it really was too confusing… Annoying. “Seems like this will take a while, I’ll need to first disable the enchantment and then re-do it all over, and since it was made with carvings, the fixing will involve carving even more stuff into your oven…” Her expression was not looking good at all… She totally thinks I’ll mess up… Way to go traveling mage, you just ruined the reputation of everyone that knows what they’re doing!

Iris came in to the rescue though, “Can you tell us what would be an ideal solution to the problem in your eyes? It shouldn’t be too hard for us to disable the enchantment, but it would be a waste to throw away all the work that was already put into this, so it would be nice if you could tell us what you’d want this enchanted oven to do once solved.” I rapidly nodded in agreement, let’s make sure she gets onboard with the plan so as to not stop us!

 “An ideal solution…? I guess it would be…” She thought for a few seconds before answering, “Being able to control when the fire is lit and when it’s gone while also being able to control how much heat is spread throughout the building by it. Is this possible?”

Such a hard request! You want to be able to control the flow of mana within an enchanted item without any knowledge of magic yourself? You crazy woman! “I can’t promise you I’ll be able to deliver this much as there are a lot of complications that can arise from those that do not understand magic trying to fiddle with it, but I’ll do my utmost to fulfill this duty.” How’s that? I definitely sounded professional right now, didn’t I?

… Iris seemed to be holding back her laughter… Don’t ruin it.

The lady thought for a small while before sighing in resignation, “Alright, I’ll let you work on it, just make sure to not make things worse.” We did it!

“Understood, is there anything else we need to know? Like a time you’ll need to use it to prepare food for the guests?” I asked just in case.

“Don’t worry about it, nobody is staying here right now, so you can take your time.” She answered dejectedly. “If that is all, I’ll be leaving you to get back to the counter.”

“Ah, just… What’s your name? I haven’t asked it yet…” I said while feeling a bit embarrassed of how long it took me to ask.

“Shaina. Well, good luck Aria, I hope for your success.” She turned around and left… Ah, I forgot to introduce Iris to her… I suppose I can do that later.

As she left the room, we got to work. Or rather, we would, if we had a clue on how to do all that in the first place. I mean… Just look at this mess! How are we supposed to even understand all those glyphs!

Not to mention this heat, it’s even worse near the oven, dear gods. I wonder how Shaina even managed to cook in these conditions… I honestly want to strip and work in my underwear, but I can’t imagine what would happen if she came back and saw me in this kind of situation, so I refrained…

Iris on the other hand was humming to herself while she looked over it… “I’m so jealous of you right now…” I complained.

“What? Of me being a fire fairy? It’s great now, but you know how troubling it can be when it gets cold. You wouldn’t want that.” She answered.

“Of course I would! I would be able to stay near you all day every day if I was one!” I said while still examining the glyphs.

“Y-you…” I’m fairly sure she was blushing, but I didn’t look, “How can you say such embarrassing things while trying to understand this mess of an enchantment!?”

“Because I always have time for you, silly.” I giggled.

Her voice came out as a mix of exasperation and embarrassment. It was cute. “Oh gods, you’re so corny at times… Are you sure you’re working over there, you aren’t just looking at them and pretending you understand, right?”

“Hey! I can understand glyphs just fine, okay? It’s nothing as complicated as reading.” I replied.

“If you told that to anyone else, they’d call you crazy…” She giggled.

“That’s just because they never bothered to look much into them… Oh, there we go, I just need to fix this…” I took out a chisel and a hammer from my bag and started lightly hitting the oven in the area its core glyph was in, after putting a large cut right in its middle, the enchantment stopped working and the flames died down, with this the place finally became a bit cooler. Thank gods.

“You could say the exact same thing in regards to reading, you know that? And good job out there.” At about the time Iris finished saying this, Shaina rushed inside the room looking panicked… Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t undress here.

“Just what did you do!?” Don’t look at me like that! I didn’t mess up, alright?

“I simply damaged the core glyph of the enchantment in order to make the whole thing fizzle… Now I can work in fixing it without sweating buckets.” I explained.

“But that was so… Fast! I thought you destroyed the oven or something.” Do I look that clumsy!?

“I told you I could do it…” I pouted. “Canceling the enchantment was the easy part, the tough one is to adapt it to something functional that won’t drive your clients away…”

She seemed genuinely impressed… That hurts a bit, you know? “Alright… Then I’ll leave you to your business I suppose… Thank you.”

“You’re welcome!” I waved while she left, and then we got back to work.

The following hour was spent with me and Iris chit chatting while looking over the whole thing, we occasionally needed to stop at a given part and start discussing what that glyph was supposed to do. Once we finally reached a conclusion, we got back to looking at the rest.

After we finally understood what the whole enchantment was doing, we came to the obvious conclusion that… This guy was a complete amateur and he was terrible at his job. There was just so much redundancy and wrongly carved glyphs in this to the point that it made us wonder if he didn’t just randomly carve it out and pray for success.

Luckily though, a lot of it could be reused into new functions, so we started brainstorming how to make use of all that to make a new enchantment that fit into Shaina’s needs. We had the concept in head, but it was hard to think of a method that would work with someone that didn’t know how to handle mana.

After about half an hour of back and forth discussion, we figured we could make an enchantment that sucked a bit of her mana if she touched a specific part of the oven, which would lead to a specific command being executed. If we did a few of those we’d be able to have a spot in which she’d be able to turn the entire magic circuit on or offline; a spot to increase the intensity of the heat; another to decrease it; one to spread it to the whole building; and a last one to gather all the heat in the oven itself.

With the plan in head we started analyzing how to adapt the glyphs for the new functions for another half an hour, and then two more hours carving the whole thing and getting it to work, followed by double checking to see if everything is fine.

“Alright, we’re finally done, now we only need to call Shaina here and let her test it out herself!” I proudly commented, this took a lot of work, but I was pretty happy with the result.

“Great work Aria, rest up a bit, I’ll call Shaina over.” She flew to the top of my head and caressed my ears a bit while praising me, it felt really comfortable and my tail started involuntarily wagging… I’m never letting anyone else see this, but I’m glad it’s Iris the one causing it.

It was only when she left the room that I realized Shaina’s offer only needed us to fix the heat problem… Did I really waste this many hours on something completely unnecessary!? Being a hero sucks!