Chapter 9: Magic and the Outdoors

They stayed in a resthouse in the village, then set off the day after. It had all just been fields and crops between Fort Stave and the village. Not along after leaving the village, however, the fields and crops tapered off, turning into grasslands, and then into a sparse, montane forest.

The road here was more uneven, but the footing was still sure. There were dirt rails, those long impressions in the ground left behind by carriages’ wheels. At least the place was well-used. Perhaps they’d even encounter a passing carriage and say hello to a fellow human being rather than to resident birds and foxes.

They’d been walking for several hours already, and all they’d seen were trees. The road swerved sometimes, avoiding ancient trees and immovable boulders and hills, which helped break the monotony. Still, they were hoping to get out of the forest before sundown.

But sundown came, and this was probably what Del had meant by camping out on the second day.

They’d found a fallen ancient tree, nearly petrified from time, its diameter thicker than either of them were tall, and a length so long that they couldn’t find where it started or ended. If it weren’t for a door-sized hole bored through it at one point, they wouldn’t have been able to cross to the other side. It was sufficiently hidden from the road, so they decided to make camp here.

To Jyn’s surprise, this was Kalender’s first time setting up camp in any life. With the extra goodies the Inquisition gifted them, however, they didn’t need to do anything more than set up some magic tools to keep the beasties and bities at bay. The most effort they needed was to set up their tent.

Jyn got Kalender to look for a thick branch, at least half her height, and maybe some more sticks they could use to get a fire going. While he was busy with that, she prepared the spidersilk fabrics that would serve as the floor, roof, and walls of their tent. It was some pretty durable stuff, though remarkably expensive. It was the only thing among their gear that was out of place, cost-wise, but they could handwave it off as a “friend’s gift,” which wasn’t wrong.

Kalender came back with a wrist-thick stem see-sawing on his shoulder. It must’ve been a young tree that met an unfortunate end at the hands of a bear.

“It’s a little bit long, is that okay?” he asked.

“It’s fine. We can cut it up.”

Jyn expertly wielded the hatchet, cutting into the stem as if she had Hatchet Proficiency.

“Huh, you sure you don’t have a skill for that?” Kalender asked.

“I don’t.”

Kalender sat on a log and watched Jyn have at it. Weird. He got Interpersonal Bubble because of stuff he did. Jyn looked like she’d been doing this for a long time, but she wasn’t getting any hatchet-related skills.

“What do you have to do to get a skill?” Kalender asked.

Jyn finally made her last chop. “At least for proficiency skills, you need to have used the budding skill in many different scenarios. Well, sometimes many, sometimes few. No one has an exact understanding of it.”

Kalender helped her string up their tent. They were affixing one side of the tent to the huge fallen trunk, and using Kalender’s fallen stem as a pole to prop up the other side.

“Can’t we just nail the tent down to the ground just like this instead of propping it up? Then we could just go in and out the left and right sides” Kalender asked.

Jyn shook her head. “The wind’s coming parallel the trunk. We would be left open to the wind chill overnight. If we don’t freeze to death, we’d fall ill, at least.”

“Ah. I see.”

Then finally came what Kalender had been waiting for: starting the campfire.

“Why are you so… giddy?” Jyn looked at this—this child.

“Firestarters are cool, you know?” he replied. “So, what’re we gonna do? Flint and steel? A bow drill?”

Jyn sighed and touched the campfire. {Set this on fire} she chanted, and the campfire lit up all at once.

“Was that a spell?” He’d suddenly gotten really close to her face. “Did… did you just say ‘set this on fire’?”

“Huh? No, I said {set this on fire}.”

Kalender pulled himself back. "Yeah, that’s definitely just ‘set this on fire.’ "

Jyn stared at him. ‘Set this on fire’? Was that what {Fuergios} meant?

“Do you have some sort of magic mastery skill?” Jyn asked. Some skills granted knowledge. This could be that.

“Huh? No?” Kalender replied—then looked away, squinted as he brought up his status screen again, and looked back to Jyn. “Yeah, no.”

***

Name: Kalender
Age: 17
Occupation: Champion of Reincarnation
Lvl. 1 Human
HP: <ERROR>
MP: 10/10

[Skills]

All-Language Fluency (MAX)
Interpersonal Bubble (1/10)

[Companions]

Minimine (Flagged)
Vice-Goddess of Reincarnation
Affection: 48

Jyn (Sworn)
Knight of Lyrica
Lvl. 11 Human
Respect: 109
Companion Skills: Stand as Equals (1/5).

[Blessings]

[Blessing of Reincarnation: Champion]
…

[Blessing of the ###### God: Like Moths to a Flame]
…

***

He realized he saw something concerning in the stat screen and opened it again. Minimine’s Affection was at 48.

By quick calculation, it took around a week to get up to [+25 Affection]. It had already been two weeks, so he had around two weeks left to go … which shouldn’t be problem, since they were just a day away from the Temple to Maximine in Clarinets.

He hadn’t been getting notifications about it, though. That just lent credence to the theory that it won’t appear if he’s not directly involved somehow.

“Kalender?” Jyn called. He snapped to attention to her.

“Ah, yes?”

“See something?”

Should I say something about it? How would the people of this world react if he said he’d charmed a goddess? Well, vice-goddess.

It was going to be a non-issue shortly, so he opted—to just tell her anyway.

“Uh, yeah, but, before we get to that, you wanna get a rundown of my skills, first?”

Jyn straightened her back, wondering what the issue was that had him padding it with an offer of relevant information.

“Go on,” she said.

“I only have two skills, Interpersonal Bubble and All-Language Fluency.”

“Huh,” she remembered that Reincarnators normally had All-Language Fluency, which wasn’t really a problem in the first place. Interpersonal Bubble clearly had nothing to do with magic.

… Come to think of it, the spell chants were actually in a dead language, weren’t they? She faced Kalender again.

“Do you mind reading the description for All-Language Fluency?”

“Sure?”

[All-Language Fluency] (MAX): You did it. You finally did it. You know all the languages across space and time. Even the dead ones.

That was perhaps the most … tired description that Jyn’s ever heard from the System.

“Kalender.”

“Yes?”

“I am no mage or academic, but spell chants are in a dead language. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

He didn’t … until he did. He felt, at once, such power coursing through his veins, but also incredibly miffed that he had all of 10 MP to play with. These emotions showed clearly on his face, and Jyn was giggling by the end of it. He decided not to say anything about it, because her giggling was also pretty nice.

Ah, but he needed to experiment with this for a moment.

It felt like the skill had two switches, not just one—one for comprehension, and one for actually producing the language.

“Hey Jyn, you’re pretty,” he said in English.

“Sorry?”

“So it does work…”

“What language was that? And what did you say?”

“It’s English, from my old world. Also I was saying you’re pretty.” He shot finger guns at her.

“You jest,” she smiled, then paused. “Right? You do jest?”

Kalender just laughed. Jyn sighed. She was coming to settle to a default reaction whenever Kalender thoughtlessly sent compliments her way.

“Hey, to be sure, is magic—safe?” Kalender asked.

“How do you mean?” Jyn leaned forward.

“I mean, if I say random things, will the spell explode? Will it just be confused and fizzle out? What happens when my MP hits zero?”

Jyn took a while to parse all these questions. “No. Yes. Depression.”

“Cool—what?”

“You will fall into an acute depression which will remain until you recover at least half of your MP. Ah, of course, there is also fatigue, but I believe that also comes with depression.”

… What amazing recoil.

Kalender picked up a twig and crept closer to the campfire. “I’ll just see if this… dead language spell chanting business is how I think it works.”

He was a programmer in his old life, and he had a pretty good hunch about how magic worked here. There was a style of programming called Declarative Programming, which was to say, one didn’t tell a program what, exactly, to do, but instead, just what sorts of results the programmer was expecting, and then a second program would try to figure out how to make it happen for you.

The whole concept already sounded pretty magical when he’d encountered it, really.

It was a suggestive way of doing things, so the programmer never really knew how the entire process was executed in a step-by-step way. In exchange for locking out the programmer from any sort of fine control, however, it made it possible to program things really fast without so much as a care in the world.

It got really buggy too, sometimes. Hopefully magic wasn’t like that. Hopefully.

He theorized that there was some sort of language processing step during chanting that figured out what the spell caster actually wanted. It’d definitely need to know the context of the chant, though; if someone touched a house and chanted {Set this on fire}, the magic system would most likely think the caster wanted to set the whole house on fire.

Same chant, different context, different results—am I right?

He explained what he thought to Jyn, leaving out the programming stuff.

“… We are generally warned not to use spells outside of their intended usage. Now that you speak of this, it is most likely because of this ‘different context, different result’ that you speak of.”

Satisfied with Jyn’s thoughts, he attempted his first spell.

“{Set this on fire}.” … and nothing happened.

He looked to Jyn. “Am I missing something? It didn’t activate.”

“Did you put MP into it?”

“Huh. How do I do that?”

“Just think about it. 0.05 MP should suffice for a twig such as that.”

There’s decimal MP? Well, if the System needed to accommodate things like setting a twig on fire and stay reasonable about it, decimal MP made sense.

He tried again. “{Set this on fire},” then he willed 0.05 MP into the spell.

Two centimeters of the twig’s tip caught on fire. It didn’t burst into flames or anything. It was just weakly wrapped in a yellow glow. Even a candle had a stronger flame than this.

“Neat,” Kalender remarked. Next, he picked up a small pebble. Jyn raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t interrupt.

“{Set this on fire},” he said, then he willed 0.1 MP into the spell. It felt like it got—rejected? The MP didn’t feel like it came back. It probably got wasted. He looked to Jyn.

“It likely won’t work if you’re asking the impossible,” she suggested. Makes sense.

He was getting fired up. “{Crack this},” he said. The pebble in his hand slightly vibrated with 0.1 MP, so he put another 0.1, and another, until a crack formed on the face of the pebble.

Then he dumped a full MP into it, splitting the pebble in two.

“Wohoah … I can feel … the power!”

He stood up, victoriously clutching the pieces of the broken pebble in his hand. Jyn giggled—but she was also interested in something else.

“What was that spell you used?” she asked.

“Hm? {Crack this}?”

“Yes, that one. Could you repeat it slowly this time?”

Thus, they spent the night with Jyn using Kalender as a chant mass-production machine. They completely forgot all about the main issue.

***

[Jyn’s new spells]:

Crack this.
Make this faster.
You are drunk. <- Possibly needs a sacrificial bottle of alcohol in-hand, or so Kalender hypothesizes.