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It's been a bit of a long day, but rather relievingly, a long day of the boring kind. Boring means nobody got shot at by a Neuroi today, so she'll take it and maybe even call it a good day.
There's card games every day at six, with whoever's not too busy to attend. She changes out of her itchy uniform into more ordinary clothes and makes her way to the breakroom.
...This is not the breakroom. This is a bar.
witchwatcher
witchwatcher
She stops reading the napkin. "Hullo! Please don't be alarmed, this place is weird but nice."
witchwatcher
"The bar is a person, the first drink is free, and since it's between worlds she likely has interesting food and devices you've never heard of. And you get to meet interesting people too, apparently. You've got magic that's really exotic to me, I can smell it all the way over here."
witchwatcher
"Yeah, I smell it and copy it, that's my special. Oh, something in here is translating for us by the way so the word might not sound familiar, but have you heard of witches?"
witchwatcher
"Well, I'm a witch. It's a thing I was born as, not something I learned, in case that was in question. What kind of magic are you?"
thaumobabble
"Several. I'm a magician, which means I study multiple kinds of magic more than casually. Witchcraft of my native variety among them."
witchwatcher
"Ooh, you get multiple kinds. Nice. I wonder if you can make any more sense of this place's magic than me?"
thaumobabble
"Well, I can't smell it -"
She reaches into her sleeve and pulls out peculiar spectacles with too many lenses. She puts them on. Flips a few lenses into and out of her field of vision.
"I can however see it. Make sense of it - bit beyond me."
She reaches into her sleeve and pulls out peculiar spectacles with too many lenses. She puts them on. Flips a few lenses into and out of her field of vision.
"I can however see it. Make sense of it - bit beyond me."
witchwatcher
"Then this inner workings of this place will remain a mystery for now. I might be able to copy magic from you. Probably not the original way you're doing it, more of a version translated into what my mana can understand how to do. But you're capable of so much different stuff I'm having trouble picking individual spells out. D'you want a drink? The first one's free, apparently."
witchwatcher
"I've never hurt any person with magic, I've got no nefarious intentions, and probably better or as good versions of most of what you have already? I swear to use anything I get for the good of many by trying to prevent the nasty city-destroying monsters called Neuroi from turning another town to ash every few days? That's what this uniform is for, by the way. Witch wings, we fight Neuroi since witches are about the only thing that can survive a fight with a Neuroi."
witchwatcher
"Grendyne, call me Gren. Nice to meet you. If you've got lie-detection somewhere in there I won't fault you for using it, by the way. Does your world have monsters too? I hope it doesn't, nobody needs monsters."
thaumobabble
"Nothing quite as systematically troubling as it sounds like Neuroi are, but there's manticores and such."
witchwatcher
"How do manticores be monstrous? Hey bar, if you have everything you probably have Perrot's A History of the Invasion, right? There's an illustration on the cover that I think is a particularly good example of a Neuroi. They come in all shapes and sizes, though."
thaumobabble
Bar produces the book in question.
"Manticores are sharp on most of their ends and very bad-tempered and poisonous. Not common where I live though. Wow, that's an unpleasant-looking creature."
"Manticores are sharp on most of their ends and very bad-tempered and poisonous. Not common where I live though. Wow, that's an unpleasant-looking creature."
witchwatcher
"Yup. That's the one that got most of Berlin. Moved its core around, which is something Neuroi hadn't done before then. I was in that fight, along with about three hundred other witches. That's the only way to kill them - getting the core. But enough depressing stuff about monsters and so on." She goes back to reading that napkin about communication things.
witchwatcher
Gren shifts a little to give her a better view. It's a fairly comprehensive description of small communication devices that are, apparently, not magic at all.
"Bar's got stuff from worlds that have probably had hundreds and hundreds of years of science. I already knew you could do some pretty amazing stuff with physics - telegraphs, steam trains. But these are something else, aren't they?"
"Bar's got stuff from worlds that have probably had hundreds and hundreds of years of science. I already knew you could do some pretty amazing stuff with physics - telegraphs, steam trains. But these are something else, aren't they?"
witchwatcher
"Maybe you can find some things here that would be useful back home. I am assured that the door will lead back to whichever door it hijacked if you open it. How do your lenses work? We don't get to create magic items. Or if we do, they're so rare as to be legendary."
thaumobabble
"...I get to create magic items, is how. Each lens has a different sort of spell woven onto each other for seeing magic, and the whole set have a spell to make them cooperate okay with each other."
witchwatcher
"I'd be willing to buy some things from you if you have them or can make them on short notice. Healing, protection... Though I still need to budget for books and things bought from bar. I'm definitely bringing lots of stuff home, though."
"Say, can you tell anything about my magic? A way to keep witches from losing all their mana when we get older would be revolutionary. We don't know why it happens."
"Say, can you tell anything about my magic? A way to keep witches from losing all their mana when we get older would be revolutionary. We don't know why it happens."