25. Normal Magic Senses

Somewhere in our subconscious, so deep that even River can’t access it easily, there is a storm of half-formed thoughts and buried emotions. A formless sea of unrealized ideas and stray thoughts, where memory and imagination blend and blur together until it’s impossible to tell one from the other. In the midst of that sea, the five of us stand on nothing and stare up at—

“Hold on,” Allison says, brows furrowing. “What the heck is this? What’s going on?”

“Try not to think too hard about it,” Maggie warns us. “Causality is a bit fucky here.”

“Causality?!” Allie shrieks in alarm.

Around us, the already unstable chaos grows turbulent and agitated until Revi embraces Allie gently from behind.

“It’s only a dream,” she reminds us. “It doesn’t need to make sense until we wake.”

Allie takes a few deep breaths, the turmoil around us calming along with her. “Okay. Okay. Freaky dream stuff, right. Evie, what the frick?”

“I’m as lost as you are,” Evelyn admits. “But I think it was you who led us here.”

“Me?” Allie repeats, eyeing her sceptically. “I don’t remember doing anything of the sort.”

Maggie scoffs and rolls her eyes. “That’s because it wasn’t intentional. I’m still a little pissed about that. I’ve been trying to find this for weeks and you just bounced off of it like a bird on a glass door.”

Violet casts her gaze around us, frowning as her eyes fail to find purchase, sliding off of anything that would allow her to describe this place beyond the abstract.

“I don’t like this,” she mutters. “It feels dangerous and...oddly familiar.”

“It’s very much not your sort of place,” Maggie admits. “But as much as it pains me, I don’t think we can actually do anything with it unless we all work together.”

Allie crosses her arms and pouts, trying to close her eyes to shut out the confusing surroundings, but to no avail. The twisting plane of thought is an experience far beyond mere sight, even imagined.

“Okay, but what the heck is it?” she insists. “You’re the only one who seems to understand what’s happening, so if you could maybe share with the class?”

“Not just me,” Maggie points out. “River gets it too.”

“The shore of the ocean of possibility,” Revi murmurs dreamily.

Allison blinks. “Uh, isn’t that bad? Like super fricking mega bad?”

The Alchemist warned them of its maddening effects—even worse than the magical eternity that mages have to dip their toes into. Gazing into infinity is bad enough that it put Allie off of magic entirely, but the so-called “Ocean of Possibility” is to that endless cosmos what the magical dimension is to regular reality.

“Nah,” Maggie attempts to assure us. “It’s only bad if we try to dive in. Vi was able to skim along the surface and catch the waves until she washed up on Al’s beach. And besides, we’ve got this.”

She raps her knuckles on a plane of nothingness, acting as a barrier of absence between us and the incomprehensible expanse beyond.

“What is it?” Vi asks warily.

“A foundation,” Maggie answers unhelpfully. “It would be difficult—maybe even impossible to build anything here on our own, but that clever bastard gave us a head start.”

Allie groans and rubs her temples. “You’re doing that thing again, Mags. Where you jump to the end without actually explaining.”

Maggie bites back a bitter response and sighs. “I thought it would be obvious, but fine. Normally, we shouldn’t be able to dig this deep—not without going insane, or more likely just waking up. Even Allie brushing up against it during her epic navel gazing session last night should have gone unnoticed.”

“Hey!” Allison protests. “I was stargazing, thank you very much!”

“That’s your objection?” Evie whispers incredulously.

Mags ignores them both and kicks at the barrier of nothing. “But somebody went and made it easier for us. It’s a barrier—both for obstruction and protection—a signpost, and a foundation all in one.”

Vi narrows her eyes as understanding dawns. “The Alchemist. This is the curse he left us.”

“Ding ding ding!” Maggie cheers. “And of all the fucking people, it was Allie who found it.”

“What?” Allison frowns. “But I didn’t do anything!”

Mags snickers gleefully and shakes her head. “Sure you did. You were just too wrapped up in your own shit to notice it. Thankfully, you have yours truly to pay attention to the real shit.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Vi asks.

“Eh, she was in the middle of something,” Maggie sighs, deflating slightly. “It wasn’t a good time.”

“So you just ambushed us with it instead?”

Before Maggie can object, Reverie drifts between them and shakes her head.

“You agreed to this,” she says. “Or will. I’m not sure which comes first, but we’re too deep in the dream. It will make sense when you wake, as you fill in the gaps.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Violet insists.

“Dreams seldom do.”

Most of us are inclined to defer to Revi’s expertise here, and while Vi isn’t completely convinced, she’s willing to let it go for now.

“So what are we actually here for anyway?” Allie asks, bringing us back on track. “You keep calling it a ‘foundation’ but what are we supposed to build? I thought the point was to break the curse.”

“Nah, that’d be a huge waste,” Maggie replies. “Al’s already done the hard part for us. This is where we can build our own beachhead, like the one where Violet first met him.”

Violet sighs heavily, her shoulders sagging. “That sounds stupid and dangerous, and I can already tell there’s no stopping you. But I’ll ask anyway—why?”

Maggie grins mischievously, then hesitates and reconsiders whatever she’s about to say.

“Look,” she sighs instead. “I could rant for hours about power, and becoming the supreme chaos-witch we were always meant to be—and I still want all that, don’t get me wrong—but I think we need this.”

“For what?” Vi presses.

“There’s five of us sharing this body,” she says, then glances at Reverie and wiggles her palm uncertainly. “Eh, four and a half—not that River’s less of a person, but she doesn’t exactly make any demands on our time.”

Reverie nods gratefully.

“But that’s beside the point,” Mags continues. “We’ve got a sort of schedule or whatever, but it’s pretty basic and doesn’t cover everything. Hell, Allie’s basically been stuck in fucking limbo for more than half of this little camping adventure. We need something to do when others are fronting aside from just watching over their shoulder or unexisting for a bit.”

Allie winces at the phrasing. We’ve mostly preferred to refer to it as “sleeping” or some similar euphemism, but leave it to Maggie to artlessly tear down that facade to make a point.

“Is my dreamwalking skill not sufficient?” Evelyn asks. “You’ve already alluded to using it for something like this before.”

“It’s a start,” Maggie concedes. “But it’s entirely reliant on you specifically, and the limitations of what Engie provides through the skill. It only works as long as you have the skill, or something similar, only with your cooperation, and only while our body sleeps.”

“And you hope to create something more permanent?”

“Exactly! Your dreaming skills give us the tools to practice, and Al’s curse is the perfect foundation to build on. The only thing left is raw material, which is exactly what I’ve been choking those damn candles down for.”

“Again, why?” Vi interrupts. “Does this really need to be a magical solution? We’ve been able to handle exceptions to our schedule just fine so far.”

Maggie worries at her lip and adjusts her glasses. “With just us, so far, sure. But what if there are more of us?”

Allie’s eyes widen in alarm. “Are there more of us?!”

“I don’t know, maybe.” Maggie shrugs. “I feel like there could be. I also—and don’t take this the wrong way—but I also don’t think we should need magic for this.”

Vi raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t interrupt, waiting for Mags to elaborate.

“We shouldn’t, but we do,” Maggie continues. “Whatever our core class actually is, or how the “module” that our mystery entity placed on us works, I think it’s made us into something more than we were. We’re real, and we always have been, but we’ve been given...substance—albeit not the physical sort.”

“This is another of your intuitions,” Violet says, not quite making it a question.

Maggie shrugs again. “I guess.”

Vi purses her lips, but doesn’t argue immediately, instead looking up at the roiling chaos around them thoughtfully.

“If I accept the premise, then it follows that any place for us to exist when not actively occupying our body would also need the same kind of substance,” she reasons. “It makes a certain sort of sense.”

“And it would give us something to do that isn’t tagging along up front or intruding on Eve’s dreams.”

We don’t really need to say anything more about that. All of us feel the ripple of emotion, one of those rare moments where we’re each in sync. We want this. Even if we’re not sure what to call it, or what it will ultimately look like—and there is bound to be arguments over that—it’s agreed without another word that this is something worth pursuing.

“Just one question,” Allison says, meeting each of our gazes with a small frown. “How?”

Maggie cackles menacingly and rubs her hands together. “I have no fucking idea!”

* * *

We end up camping out on the plateau for a few more days, taking full advantage of the window for stargazing. Allie and Vi are too afraid of heights to hang around during the day, which leaves just me and Eve to keep Talla company—and Nipper, of course. It’s ironic that the scaredy-cats are only comfortable coming out at night, when the risk of falling over a ledge is much higher. Idiots.

There’s not a whole lot to do during the day, aside from the busywork of maintaining camp. Vi’s such a tryhard that we’ve got enough leftover food to last us the whole trip back, so I don’t really need to worry about hunting or whatever. Instead, I’ve got lots of time on my hands to ponder the problem of actively shaping all this extra magic we’ve been hoarding into something more permanent and substantial.

I’ve yet to reveal my true intentions, of course. My schemes within schemes. But for now, the puzzle of constructing a sort of literal mind palace is good enough to serve as practice before I attempt anything, uh, risky.

Mind you, I wasn’t joking when I said I have no idea how to do it. Drawing on our reserves for spellcasting is easy—as if there’s some underlying principle in Engie’s canned powers that’s made to allow for exactly that—and Nipper’s [Matter Conversion] is largely automatic. I can sort of focus it on things like healing specific wounds or replacing lost blood, but otherwise it just quietly supports our regular bodily functions.

To make matters worse, while I was able to get there with River and Eve’s help, actually sensing the Alchemist’s curse while we’re awake is proving a lot harder than expected. Knowing where to look doesn’t help when I don’t know how to look. Whatever Allie did, it’s not trivial to repeat.

Wasting a night staring up at the stars didn’t help, so I’ve taken to focusing intently on Nipper and trying to compare the way he naturally utilizes magic with my own processes. So it’s naturally while I’m sitting by the fire, feeding our pet worm a steady stream of rocks, that Talla finds me.

Once. Just once, could she not catch me doing something fucking weird? No, no, that would require me to ever be doing normal stuff to begin with. Unthinkable.

“That can’t be good for his digestion,” she muses.

“Sure it is,” I lie. “He’s like a bird. Uses the rocks to help break up the food since he swallows most things whole.”

Talla hesitates. “Really? Wait—they do?”

“No,” I snicker. “I mean, birds, yes. Nipper, no. He doesn’t actually have a stomach, everything he eats just disintegrates.”

She squats down next to me and rests her chin in her hands. “That’s quite potent. Though I imagine that they have to be dead first—it’s much harder to directly affect living things that way.”

Didn’t stop Eve’s [Disintegrate], but we’re still not exactly sure how that spell works and it’s a real bitch to test.

“The little ones drop on prey when they hatch,” I explain. “Tie it down with webbing, then bleed it out with paralyzing venom.”

No idea what they do after that, but I’ve spent a lot of time considering the fate that I nearly walked us into before we picked up our deadly little cutie.

“So why are you feeding him rocks?”

I purse my lips, considering my answer. Come on, me, Talla’s an academic. She’s smart! Just tell her, and she’ll understand.

“To see what happens.”

Fuck. I can feel her blank stare, even if I don’t dare to look at her face.

“I mean magically!” I add hastily. “Nipper’s a monster—his body is part magic. Those are the parts I’m looking at, trying to see how they work.”

Unspoken is the part where I’ve been doing this with Nipper, mana candles, my own spells, Talla’s spells whenever I can get away with it, various skills, and even attributes themselves without actually making much progress towards replicating them. Before getting the [Firecaster] class, I was able to make tiny useless bits of flame—which is probably how I got the class in the first place—but despite all my best efforts, I’ve never actually managed to do much more than slightly edit the skills that Engie already provides.

These things take time, but I’ll admit that it’s a little embarrassing—especially when Eve and Vi never hesitate to remind me how little actual progress I’ve made. Talla knows all this, but she’s nice enough not to mention it. Instead, she leans forward to inspect Nipper herself, humming thoughtfully.

“I didn’t think you had a skill like that,” she notes. “Part of your tamer class?”

I blink, then shake my head. “Uh, no? Just normal magic senses.”

The same trick I’ve been using to analyze every scrap of magic I can get my hands on since the beginning. How I’m able to follow Nipper through his astral tunnels, or get a feel for when my headmates are awake and what they’re doing—the most basic of the basics. It’s the very trick that allowed me to witness the magical dimension in the first place—though in hindsight, I guess that was actually Allie. Again.

Hm.

Oh shit, Talla’s saying something!

“—normal at all,” I tune in quickly enough to catch. “Any initiate has a certain degree of inherent magical sense, but without a skill, it can’t do much more than detect the presence of magic. You’re telling me that you can perceive the actual structure of the astral field with innate magic sense alone?”

“Uh...yes?”

...

“Can you teach me?”