Also, I decided I should probably put a content warning on here, so:
Content Warning!
This story contains instances, descriptions, and frank discussions of: depression, personality disorders, and other mental health issues; suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts; child abuse and neglect; graphic violence, war crimes, and institutional/systemic violence; gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, and transphobia. Reader discretion is advised.[Previous]
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Chapter 10 tangent: Tats & Stats
“What’s this ‘channel talisman’ spell about,” Phyr asks. “Rayla’s got it like three times!”
“Old magic,” Alice says. “When the gods first brought magic to humanity, there were several ways to cast spells. Nowadays, people pretty much only use words of power - that is, casting by saying the name of the spell. Some have managed to hang on to the art of quietcasting, using spells without saying words. But that requires some other mechanism, like a hand signal or something, and it can go off by accident. Words of power require an intention which several other methods don’t, and needing the intention makes them much less likely to misfire - which is why it’s such a popular method.
“Talismans are a little different from both of them, though. Instead of drawing on the caster’s mana pool for the power source, a talisman is the power source, inscribed with a glyph in Old Zyxish.”
“So does it take mana to inscribe the glyph,” Vector asks, “And is that why Rayla’s mana pool is so weirdly low?”
“Yes to the first, no to the second,” Alice says. “Creating a talisman does require mana, but it’s a high one-time cost, not an ongoing thing that needs to be maintained. Rayla’s mana pool is so low because she was born that way: she’s mana-deprived. When she was young - relatively young, anyway - she found someone who still knew the high art of glyphic talismans.”
“So she’s got a bunch of trinkets that let her get around that problem,” Phyr says. “Neat. Can we steal ‘em?”
“Not… really,” Alice dithers. “The glyphs are tattooed on her body: she is the talisman. That’s what her Augmentative Tattoos feature is for, and why she has to put them in her spell slots: it’s the trade-off for them being theft-proof. When she and Aqu got busted down to first level, that’s one of the features she decided to keep.”
Pannych asks, “So does Aqu have a similar thing going on? Is his mana pool at zero because of that Mana Sink thing?”
“Almost,” Alice says, “But you’ve got it backwards: he’s got access to the Mana Sink feature because he was born with no mana pool at all. But because mana is constantly flowing through all things, it still flows through him - it just doesn’t collect in him. Remember the rain barrel metaphor? Well, instead of collecting it into his ‘barrel,’ what he learned to do was tap into the rainfall directly.”
“So can anyone do that, then,” Phyr asks. “Like, could Pannych learn how to do that, and just have all the mana she needs?”
“No,” Alice says, “It doesn’t work like that. Let’s see, how can I put this? Like, if you’re at a rock concert, you’ve got to shout to be heard by people right next to you. But if it’s real quiet, you can hear a whisper - and if it's totally silent, you can hear your own heartbeat. Tapping into the mana flow requires ‘listening to your own heartbeat,’ so to speak. But having a mana pool is like a constant rock concert. Being capable of the one thing means that you can’t do the other.”
“So was this just a freak accident of birth,” Phyr asks.
“No, not really,” Alice says, cradling her forehead in one hand. “But we’re getting off-topic now. Do you have any more questions about the mechanics of this? Like, information you’ll actually be able to use, not just some bit of historical trivia?”
“C’mon,” Phyr pleads. “We have so much backstory on Rayla, but almost nothing on Aqu! Throw me a bone, here - he’s the other main character based on me, right?”
“All right, fine,” Alice concedes. “The Abbe’nei clan eschewed the use of magic, in all its forms. It’s what the clan name means, in Old Zyxish: ‘no to abbe,’ rejection of performing magic. They believed that since magic was of the gods, it was thereby for the gods alone, not for humanity. Their philosophy - almost a religion, honestly - was that mana is a poison. The weird thing is, they weren’t exactly wrong.”
The adventurers give her a puzzled look, and Alice continues: “Look, if you use your mana, there’s no problem - it flows through you, and keeps flowing. But think about the rain barrel again: if you leave the barrel full, just sitting there and stagnating, it becomes brackish and eventually poisonous. Your mana pool works similarly: if you don’t use mana from time to time, then it becomes toxic. And the more mana you have, the quicker that toxicity builds up if it goes unused.
“Now, there are a few hereditary traits that can change how much mana a person has. Some people are born mana-deprived, though that’s rare - it’s a strong disadvantage, and everyone has a use for spells of some sort. But other people are born mana-enriched; and if they have a really large mana pool, then they can go toxic before they’re even able to use it - and they die as children.
“The Abbe’nei clan saw that, and decided that if people kept using mana all the time, it would create an extinction event where too many people were born with too much mana. The solution, as they saw it, was abstinence - but by letting their mana pools stagnate, they still made themselves vulnerable to mana toxicity. Eventually, mana-deprivation became the norm in their clan. When Aqu was born, there was a disturbance in the flow - all the mystics could see that something was continuously draining the flow of mana, but without producing any abbe or ether. It wasn’t too difficult to infer what was going on, but this created a new kind of problem.
“Because of that, all sorts of powerful people wanted to find Aqu and use him as a weapon. They started out with polite requests, but the Abbe’nei chieftain declined - lavish offers soon followed, but were again rebuffed - then they escalated to violent threats. But Aqu was the chief’s only son, and his mother died in childbirth, so the chief wouldn’t give him up for anything.
“Eventually, the Abbe’nei village was attacked and destroyed by a dragon - the villagers were almost all mighty warriors, but it’s hard to fight a dragon without magic - and Aqu was the only survivor. Rayla found him in the woods, a scared kid all alone. She’s got a soft spot for kids who are being used as pawns in other people’s games, which I’m sure you understand.”
Alice gives Pannych a meaningful look, and she nods in response before saying, “Yeah, I hated when my mother would parade us around in public. She was only ever nice to me when there were other people to watch the show. Otherwise, my little brother was The Good One and I was The Bad One. Which I obviously also hated, because it was still treating me as a thing for her, not letting me just be me. Ugh.”
“Right,” Alice says. “So Rayla took young Aqu under her wing, and taught him the ancient arts she had learned. But she wanted him to be free to choose his own purpose - and Aqu eventually sided with her for just that reason, since everyone else only wanted to use him.”
“So is that how you see me,” Phyr asks, turning to Pannych with a hurt look on his face. “As some kid to be pitied and taken under your wing?”
“What? No,” Pannych protests, looking almost insulted. “I see you as a kindred spirit, someone who dealt with similar issues as me but in different specifics. I mean, I tried to be a force for good in your life - but I try to be a force for good all the time, man. It’s how I rebel against my mother: she drives everyone away from her eventually, because she’s a terrible person, and my greatest fear is becoming her. So I try to be as good as I can, 'cuz I don't want to be like that when I grow up. It’s not about condescending to you, it’s about being unlike her.”
Phyr regards her skeptically for a moment, and says, “Sure, but you do get on your high horse from time to time. Like with the ACT - I said I got a 31, and you were all Little Miss Thirty-Five. ‘Ooh, look at me, I only missed four questions!’ That drove the rest of us nuts.”
“What,” Pannych says, affronted. “You guys asked how I did. I told you the truth. Should I have lied?”
Phyr says, “No, don’t lie - you just gotta downplay it a little.”
“So don’t tell the truth, for other people’s sake? Because they can’t handle it? That sounds condescending to me.”
“It’s only condescending if you say that,” Vector cuts in. “People do this sort of thing all the time, and they shut up about it. It’s a basic social norm, really. Talking about your achievements sounds arrogant, if you achieve lots more than most other people - so to look humble, you downplay it.”
“What?” Pannych is baffled. “But I am humble! I don’t attach any meaning to bullshit standardized tests, they only measure how you do on that test, and leave out whole areas of knowledge that are just harder to quantify! I don’t care about my score, but you’re telling me that other people do, to the point of being offended when they ask me how I did and I tell them? What the fuck kinda Catch 22 bullshit is that?!”
“It’s not enough to be humble, you have to look humble, too,” Vector says. “Listen: you and I both know you don’t attach meaning or personal worth to a test score. But lots of other people do, and you have to take them into account.”
“Also,” Phyr adds, “Seeing a test score as ‘just a number’ and knowing how invalid it is? That’s a pretty advanced perspective that most people don’t get in high school - you can’t expect other teenagers to see it that way. To the rest of us, it looked like you had all this ability and didn’t even care. We grew up being told that this stuff really matters, and we all have to be trained out of it - while you already know it’s bullshit, but you have to be trained into what the rest of us already know. Like Vector said, it’s a basic social norm.”
Pannych folds her arms and pouts. “Well, I didn’t get a lot of ‘basic social norms’ as a kid, I grew up moving around and didn’t have any long-term friends before you came along. And people excluded me a bunch for being the new kid, so I’m sorry if I don’t know your Secret Club Rules. Y’know, it really sounds like you guys are saying I need to take everyone else into account, but nobody ever needs to take me into account. Isn’t respect a two-way street? Shouldn’t this be a mutual effort? Like, when is it someone else’s job to realize that I never learned those rules, so maybe you can just take what I say at face value without attaching Extra Secret Meaning to it?”
“I mean,” Phyr says, “That’s kinda just how it works.”
Pannych stands up so fast she knocks over her chair, and storms off.
“Pannych, wait,” Vector calls after her. She bristles with her back to them, but stops. “What Phyr’s trying to say is that it sucks, and it’s not fair, and it puts a lot on you - but you can’t change it. You say all the time in your twenties that you’re backwards from a lot of people - so backwards that you can’t really be understood by most others, so you have to do some extra work to find common ground.”
“But - being understood…” Pannych trails off for a moment, hanging her head with her back still turned to them, then continues: “That’s what I want more than anything. I was raised on Happily Ever After stories, and people told me more Happily Ever Afters during all the… stuff. They kept saying, over and over, ‘Just get through this,’ ‘Soon it’ll all be over,’ ‘Things will be so much easier once you’re past this,’ but it’s never over, the bullshit never ends, and things never got easier. I’m always misunderstood, and people always act like it’s my fault for being this way, like I chose it or something.” She sniffs once.
“They were talking about your mother,” Phyr says. “Once you got away from her, your life did get easier - you didn’t have her in the way, her bullshit did stop, you even had a hand in putting a stop to it. I know that was only three years ago for you now, but it’s been twenty years outside. She made it impossible for you to deal with normal life - but now it is easier for you to do normal life things.”
“But this is exactly what I’m talking about,” Pannych says, turning around to face them again. “I know how to handle my mother. That’s what I’m used to. And moving around so much, nothing else really mattered - every year, my life got a reset, and I was in a new school, new town, new people, and everyone knew I was starting over. Those ‘normal life things’ weren’t difficult for me to do - I didn’t have to do them at all.
“Then all of a sudden, Dad’s got custody, everything stops changing all at once, and everyone expects me to just act like everyone else, like things had just been stable the whole time and I was just waiting to get ‘back to normal.’ But the chaos was normal, for me. Everyone else sees it as some ‘dark time’ in my life, something to come back from - but that was all I knew, and there was nothing to come back to. Now I have to deal with a whole other set of things that I’m completely unprepared for, and nobody seems to want to take the time to teach me - they see gifted kids at one end of a spectrum, and problem kids at the other, and the idea that I could be a gifted kid and a problem kid is like a contradiction to them. But I adapted to chaos, I have no coping mechanisms for stability.”
Vector says, “Yeah, most people don’t need to cope with stability.”
Pannych throws up her hands and says, “Exactly! Sure, hard things for you might be easy to me, but easy things to you are damn near impossible to me! And those are the everyday things that people take for granted! Like it’s somehow my fault I had gaps in my curriculum from going to six different schools in six years!”
Phyr says, “Look, I know this doesn’t help you now, but that gets better. Like, the way schools treat problem kids gets better. And you’re part of that change, now that you got your shit sorted - everywhere you go, you’re like the Troubled Kid Whisperer. You understand those kids in a way that almost no other teacher can, and you help them define a new normal instead of expecting them to go ‘back to’ a normal they never knew.”
Pannych looks at him strangely. “Really? I’m a teacher? How the Hell did that happen?”
“I mean,” Phyr stammers, “You spend your twenties in therapy first…”
“Man, fuck therapy,” she spits. “Those fuckers never let me actually talk about my problems, they just talk about ‘letting go’ and ‘moving on’ - like, to what, motherfucker?!”
“Yeah, well, that gets better, too,” Phyr says. “I mean, you find a good one. So there’s that.”
Alice had quietly walked away during the tangent to check in with Derek, and she returns to find them winding down. As she takes her seat, she says, “Right, so the last thing I remember was something about kindred spirits, and that’s how Rayla and Aqu were - she also had no clan as a kid, yadda yadda. And she picked up a bunch of tricks to make up for her deficiency, and those tricks were even more powerful in Aqu’s hands.”
Vector says, “So you’ve got a lady with almost no magical power, but lots of knowledge and skill, mentoring a kid with potentially limitless power - yeah, I can see how they’d take over the world.”
“Oh, yeah,” Alice says. “They teamed up and overthrew the shit-sacks in charge, and when they saw that more would always rise to take their place, they realized they couldn’t just ‘set the world free’ - after all, real freedom is freedom to be good or bad. Instead, they had to rule it well, and put down anyone who got too big for their britches. But look, are there any other questions about, like, spells and stuff?”
“Most of this is pretty self-explanatory,” Phyr says. “Like, Dara has the Furious feature - that means she’s got some other mechanism for her mana pool, right?”
“Right,” Alice confirms.
“So, like, unless there’s an encyclopedia or something we can take with us…” he trails off.
“Hold that thought,” Alice says, leaving the table and returning a minute later with a hardbound book she hands over to Phyr. ”Here, you can have On the Nature of Humanity, and Its Various Features and Foibles. Famous physician wrote it, I don’t really need it, and she’ll see it’s taken good care of,” she says with a nod to Pannych. Phyr takes it with an appraising look, thumbs through a few pages, and gives a nod of approval. “All right,” she continues, “Anything else before we get to your road trip?”
The adventurers look at each other, shrug, and shake their heads No.
To CONTINUE READING CHAPTER 10, click here.
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