What We Do to Survive

Janna was already waiting for me when I arrived. She sat primly on one of the stone stools at the corner of the room, hands folded in her lap and face twisted in a disapproving frown. She’d ditched her typically frilly dresses for our meeting, instead wearing a more practical shirt and pants, though still in her favored pastel pink with purple highlights.

I glanced at the clock on the wall, noting that I wasn’t late, rather she had arrived quite a bit early. I set my bag down against the wall, then turned back to look at her.

“Well, glad to see you decided to show up today. It was exceedingly rude to keep me waiting.”

I raised an eyebrow and jerked my head at the clock. “I’m early. You’re just earlier.”

She hmphed, uncrossing and recrossing her legs the other way. “To be on time is the moment before tardiness.” Right, I’d heard Gulivanienes were particularly anal about that.

“Janna. I’m ten minutes early. You normally don’t get to class until max five minutes before we start, you have no ground to bitch about this.”

She pointedly ignored me, choosing instead to stare imperiously at me. “If this is about yesterday, I’m sorry I missed it. Got caught up around the escaped demon yesterday and couldn’t make it down here.”

Her expression softened slightly, though she remained visibly displeased. “Well, that’s something. At least you weren’t caught up with that girl of yours, honestly, what do you see in her?”

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Brenda. Wow, apparently everyone except me thought we were together. I didn’t think I’d ever shared a class with both girls at once so this wasn’t even a first hand opinion.

“Well, I don’t really see much in her, because we aren’t together. I am quite single.”

She looked shocked by my admission, the mask of disapproval briefly vanishing from her expression. “Truly? But you spend so much time together and she hangs off you like a barnacle at all hours of the day.”

I sighed. “That's just how she is. I think. We are not and have never been a couple. Anyway, we aren’t meeting to describe my nonexistent lovelife, so let's get to it.”

She remained skeptical of my claim, but didn’t protest as I dug out the papers I’d prepared and took a seat beside her.

“So, like I said on Tuesday, I need to know where your skills are now so I can work out a proper practice regime. I have a couple of preliminary ideas here,” I separated out several pages and dropped them on the small table, “but I’ll want to adjust it based on what I see.”

“Understandable. Do you wish for me to summarize my current skill level, a demonstration maybe? I am not sure how to display my internal mana manipulation to another.”

“Don’t worry, it shouldn’t be too hard. I just want you to go through a few pure mana exercises, see where you stand. Let's start with this.” Reaching into my bag again, I pulled out a small bag of glass marbles and poured them into a bowl. “I want you to levitate these marbles.”

She seemed somewhat bemused by the request, but seemed content to follow my directions for now. Reaching out over the bowl with one hand, I observed as she slowly floated the entire mass out of the bowl.

“Very good, now flatten them out.”

“What?”

“I mean make, like, a sheet, one layer of marbles in thickness. Don’t drop any.”

“Ah.” She bit her lip as she focused. It took almost a minute, much longer than I had expected, but eventually she had maneuvered the twelve marbles into a rough rectangle. She looked up, gesturing with her other hand at the marbles. “There.”

I hummed contemplatively, “Now make a circle, hollow in the center.”

This too took longer than I would have expected of a mage of her presumed skill level. Her control of the individual marbles was clumsy and she almost dropped several as she carefully arranged them into something that was technically a circle. In all honesty, it was more of an oval when she stopped, but I didn’t say anything.

“Make it spin, vertically, not like a wheel.”

This exercise seemed easier for her, the entire construct gently revolving under her outstretched hand.

“You can stop spinning. Now, I want you to grow the circle outward, then bring the marbles back into the circle.”

She began to move one of the marbles outward, but I interrupted her before it could move far. “No, I mean all at once.”

She nodded, eyes narrowed as she focused intently on the magic. Shakily, the marbles began to move, but then her concentration lapsed for an instant and it all fell apart. The mana collapsed, dispersing into the air around us, and the marbles clattered to the table, several rolling away deeper into the training hall.

She scowled, but made no move to retrieve the marbles. “What was the point of that? I have no idea how to do that last exercise.”

I blinked, “Wait, really? But that's not really a particularly complicated one. We went over it in first year mana studies.”

“Well, yes, but purely as a theoretical exercise. Professor Zim didn’t expect any of us to practice past the fourth chapter.”

“Hold up. You’re saying you haven’t practiced any of the exercises beyond the ones in the first four chapters of ‘Elementary Mana Shaping’?”

She nodded, “Well, I’ve done a few specialized exercises for other magical disciplines, but not really.”

I stared at her, flabbergasted. “You’re saying that you, Janna, are in your third year at Avalon, and you haven’t at least mastered every exercise in that book?”

She looked just as confused as I felt when she responded, “Yes? I mean most people don’t bother. Pure mana manipulation is basically useless in the modern day where we have so many easily accessible structured spells available to us.”

What. The. Fuck. Was that really how most people felt about it? I’d never taken Janna as a slacker, she was a focused and serious student. She also was much better connected than I was and would know if our other classmates had similar practice habits as she did.

“Wait a moment,” she interjected as I sat there, mind racing, “Are you telling me you have mastered every exercise in that book? All ten chapters of them?”

I nodded slowly. “Well, yeah? I finished with most of them before the end of the class and got the rest down the next semester. I mean, none of them are especially hard, there are a couple of tricky ones in the last chapter but I’ve tried loads of more difficult exercises since then.”

We sat in silence for several long moments, both clearly baffled by the other. Eventually she picked up a marble that had bounced into her lap and dropped it in the bowl. “I mean, I knew you were good at pure mana manipulation, it's why I approached you and not one of our other classmates. You had to be at least decent if you got into Lectures in Mana Theory this semester, but what the hell Orion? Why would you ever subject yourself to that sort of torture? I can’t imagine how many hours you wasted slaving away at those things!”

“Is that really how people feel about pure mana exercises?” I asked slowly.

She nodded.

I looked down at the table, rifling through the six theoretical exercise plans I’d prepared for her. Then I balled them all up and dropped them unceremoniously into my bag. Leaning heavily on the table, I studied the earnest expression on her face.

I didn’t think she was pulling my leg. I wasn’t the best judge of honesty but I had been watching her demonstration with more than just my eyes. It was hard to fake how clumsy her mana control had felt to my mana sense and I didn’t think she was the sort to sandbag compared to her peers.

I would definitely have to do some digging of my own, it was impossible that everyone was so very… mediocre at pure mana manipulation. I was definitely better than most people, it was obvious from just surface observations I’d made over the years, but I hadn’t thought the gap was so wide.

For now however, I would need to adapt to her current skill level. At least it was likely her issue was much more simple than I’d thought. It wasn’t that she had a particularly hard bit of mana shaping to do, but rather that her current skills were way worse than I’d expected.

“Have you at least practiced any of the internal exercises we learned?”

“Yes, of course. I mastered the basic eight and practice them on occasion.”

That was worse than I’d hoped but better than I’d feared. The basic eight was the name for the fundamental shapes of mana used in circulations. In rough order of difficulty, they were lines, curves, circles, spirals, twists, parallels, crossovers, and intersections.

“Well that's something at least.” I would have hoped she had gone much further than just the basics, but clearly she was thoroughly deficient in terms of pure mana manipulation. I’d known some mages didn’t really focus on it past the point where they could form spell matrices, but I hadn’t expected that attitude would hold here at Avalon.

“Here,” I pushed my papers and the near empty bowl aside to clear some space on the table. “Lie down and demonstrate them. I’m going to need to touch you for this.”

She seemed sceptical but did as I commanded. She made a bit of a fuss when I told her to pull her shirt up, this would be easier with skin on skin contact, but eventually gave in. The oath we’d sworn, and the safety provided by being in a designated neutral space, gave her enough confidence that I wouldn’t take advantage of her vulnerable state.

I let faint trails of my mana spread through her body, gently probing at the simplistic arrangement of circulations she was maintaining. It was honestly pathetic, I could have managed better after my first semester. No wonder she was having so much trouble with this.

As I’d directed her before we’d started, she formed the basic eight one at a time beside her core, my mana carefully monitoring each structure through the entire process. The line and curve were both pretty good, but they were the most basic of the basics. The circle she formed was slightly uneven, but passable. The spiral was the same, somewhat lopsided but theoretically functional.

The last four however, damn they were bad. She could make them, but they were faint and flickering, barely stable even formed just beside her core. I quickly scanned her body again, examining her current circulations. Just as I’d expected, not a single one contained any of the advanced elements.

I let out a long sigh as I waited for her to emerge from her meditative trance. I couldn’t imagine everyone’s skills were this rubbish, but it really lowered my assessment of my yearmates. No wonder so few people made it to graduation. With skills like this, I wondered how any of them would survive practicing spells above the fourth circle.

Spell matrices got exponentially more complicated with each level of power. Sure she could form spell matrices up to the third circle with this level of control, she had to in order to qualify as a third year student, but I didn’t think her control would be fine enough to form anything much more powerful.

Well, at the very least that wasn’t my problem. I just needed to help her form the circulation required to progress in our body modification class, nothing more. It didn’t matter if she blew herself up next year learning new spells, I would have my payment by then and could just ignore the entire situation.

She woke up slowly, shaking her head to clear the last traces of her meditative trance. It was clear that this was yet another skill she did not practice nearly as much as she should. I let her get her bearings as she clambered off the table and retook her seat. I was greatly amused when she pulled out a small mirror and checked her hair and makeup. She must have noticed because she blushed slightly and stowed the mirror away.

“So,” she asked, adjusting her rumpled shirt, “what's the verdict?”

“Well, honestly you’re pretty abysmal at this, but it's just a matter of practice.” I slid the diagram I’d been studying towards the center of the table. “The issue isn’t quite what I thought it was initially, I overestimated your skill level and made some faulty assumptions. Still, I was right about what part you’re having trouble with, just not entirely the why of it.”

“Ok, so what do I need to do?”

“Well, the professor basically had it right when you asked her. You mostly just need to practice.” I raised a hand to forestall her irritated response. “No, I’m not just going to tell you to try it over and over again. We’re going to do this right.”

Seeing she was about to interrupt me again, I dropped another sheet of paper onto the diagram. “Here’s a list of four exercises, two internal and two external. I want you to practice each of them for at least an hour. If you are struggling too badly with one, move on to the next and come back to it.”

She was clearly unhappy with my advice, but grabbed the paper and slipped it into a pocket nonetheless.

“I know it's going to be a bit boring, but practice is the only way to improve. There are no shortcuts in magic, you should know that.” That was absolutely not true, and we both knew it, but she got the point regardless. Even her family wasn’t rich enough to afford the shortcuts she would need at this level.

“Fine. I’ll make time for that.”

“Very good.” I gathered my things and stood up. “Same time Saturday? I don’t think I have time to meet with you tomorrow. If you have some extra time, just go through the exercise again.”

“Yes, that should work.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Thanks Orion, I don’t like it, but you are probably right.”

“Of course I am, I’m me.”

Her laughter cut off abruptly as I passed through the warded doorway, enchanted to block any sounds coming from inside the training halls. Maybe that hadn’t been the smoothest way to end our meeting…