Tomonori knows that food is important for functioning at peak performance. You need to eat every day, frustratingly, to make the human body work right. He is trying to implement this knowledge, he really is. That's a cool glove, though.
"Hey! Can I take a look at your glove," he announces rather than asks, in English, as he stops by Connie's table.
"Uh, sure? She likes showing off."
She's wearing the glove but hasn't activated it yet; she holds her left hand out. It's a well-fitted work glove style, extending a decent way up her wrist but with the fingers cut off at the first knuckle. Wires in three colors weave patterns around the wrist and back and then extend along the backs of her fingers, holding on to thin rings. It looks like it's intended to pick up on motion in the hand area, amplify it, and project it outward, a clever design but executed with a middling-beginner skill.
"Extends my reach outwards, basically, like a grabber claw but without the arm part." She mimes picking up her milk carton. "I'm Connie."
"Cool. I'm Matsumoto Tomonori. Can I watch you grab something? Or does it cost a lot of mana."
"Nah, my affinity is forces so it's easier for me, and what's the first week for if not showing off?" She lets a trickle of mana flow into the pattern and flexes her fingers, then carefully grips her milk carton about six inches away from it and raises it into the air. (She prudently decides not to try to drink out of it.)
Tomonori watches this through his glasses excitedly! Glasses that see magic are the best!
"Can you do any object of around the same size? Does shape matter? Is it just like your hand, do you feel it?"
"Anything I can hold, heavier things take more mana same as they'd make my arm tired- I've got more sensation than I would if it was just the glove moving around my hand but less than if I was touching it directly. I've got some ideas for nice upgrades for her that might help with that, though-" Probably she should not be chattering away about her exact capabilities, tempting as shop talk is. She doesn't even know if this kid is attached to an enclave yet.
"How much can you see, by the way, is that your glasses letting you do it? Where'd you get them?"
"The glasses were a gift from a family friend, but she let me add one of the enchantments."
"Wow, nice. That seems like a tricky enchantment to make stick. Is that an affinity thing?"
"I did the easy part. She made sure they all attached to the lenses properly. It was good practice, though."
Tomonori peers at Vi to see if there's anything magical going on there.
"So I have these earrings"-- Vi moves her hair out of the way so Tomonori can see a pair of iridescent opal studs-- "which protect me a bit. And then, hang on." (She takes the knife out of her backpack and unsheathes it. Like the opals, the blade is showily iridescent, but that's less about any shared magical property and more about the owner's enthusiasms.) "So, you can't hold this or anything (for obvious reasons), but this is a knife that's sharper than a similar mundane knife and the blade degrades slower. There's this artificer at the Santa Barbara Enclave, Imogen Ikuhara, I wish I had pictures to show you--- this is honestly on the basic end but her work gets expensive. If I could get the magic to stick I'd have so many enchanted knives."
"Oh, that's gorgeous. I've never been to Santa Barbara, are you from around there?" Connie leans back and forth to watch the iridescence. "My dad helped me with the prototypes, and with the design some-" and killed the prototype that decided it would rather be a tourniquet actually- "but this one's all mine."
The knife isn't exciting to his magic detection spell, but Tomonori is excited nonetheless. His glasses are the only enchanted object he ever owned."Wow. Imogen Ikuhara," he repeats out loud. He wouldn't remember it, but luckily, Tomonori brought a little paper. He scrawls the name down before he forgets.
"I'm not settled on a track yet- I have equal skills in everything so it's hard to choose. Incantations is the least dangerous but I don't have enough languages and I'm not a uniquely creative thinker."
"Well, that's what language lab is for, right? I tried to get out of it with Mandarin history- I'm going artificing, be a waste of my affinity elsewhere- but it just gave me extra lit classes instead of another shop period."
"I guess lit classes might have spells in them," says someone who is pretty sure literature is just something people who don't have magic do to distract themselves from life's banality. "Freshmen year will be boring and difficult, but it should be better later."
Until graduation. Tomonori tries not to think about graduation.
"Probably yeah- I've got one right after Mal Studies on The Holiness of Death in Southwestern Literature, if that doesn't come with spells I don't know what would. How about you?"
"See, that's not boring, that's actually cool. I got Victor Hugo and Cervantes. That's good on the language front but otherwise I'm kinda with Tomonori. If it's like a normal literature class we're going to be writing essays about tiny bullshit details. On top of everything else. In general, do either of you have any strategies for studying?"
Blink blink.
"I'm going to study the next most interesting thing until I run out of things to study."
"No I mean like... Where the safest spots are, if it's better to make it a group exercise, what techniques you use for memorization. I've been using timed repetition for vocab and grammar and especially hanzi. I wonder if people in here trade flashcards or something."
"Oh hey, I'm in Cervantes too. Thursday double before lunch?" She fidgets with her milk carton. "I've heard you can buy notes off older students, probably flashcards too, and I think the safest place is the library if you don't get lost in the stacks?"
"Yeah, it's Thursday before lunch! I take it you're doing Spanish too? I'm actually pretty good at Spanish but there might be some pretty weird uh, early modern vocab in Cervantes. Might be helpful to have someone to compare notes with, maybe talk about the parts we found confusing? No pressure, though."
"Oh. I don't have a plan for that yet."
He should probably have a plan for that.
"I'm not in Cervantes. Should we compare schedules?"
"Sure, okay."
Connie has:
Monday: Magical Military History (Mandarin), Santa Muerte, Pray for Us: the Holiness of Death in Southwestern Literature, Mathematical Models for Artificing, [lunch, work period], Maleficaria from 1700 to the Present, Freshman Comp
Tuesday: History of Asia from the 19th Century (Mandarin), Intro Incantations, Intro to Shop, [lunch, work period], Number Theory, Romanticism and Realism in 19th-Century Hispanophone Writing
Wednesday: Freshman Maleficaria Studies, Intro to Lab, [lunch, work period], Maleficaria from 1700 to the Present, Freshman Comp
Thursday: History of Asia from the 19th Century (Mandarin), Intro Incantations, Intro to Shop, [lunch, work period], Number Theory, Romanticism and Realism in 19th-Century Hispanophone Writing
Friday: Freshman Maleficaria Studies, Santa Muerte, Pray for Us: the Holiness of Death in Southwestern Literature, Mathematical Models for Artificing, [lunch, work period], Maleficaria from 1700 to the Present, Freshman Comp
Monday: Intro to Economics, History of Mathematics, Borders, Cultures, and Enclaves: How Shanghai Got Its Start, [lunch, work period], Buddhist Mantras from the Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Traditions, The Golden Ratio in Mathematics, Art, and Nature
Tuesday: Intro to Shop, Mechanical Design Fundamentals, [lunch, work period], Akkadian Divination Texts, The Development of the Enclave from Ancient India to the Present Day
Wednesday: Freshman Maleficaria Studies, History of Mathematics, Language lab, [lunch, work period], Buddhist Mantras from the Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Traditions, The Golden Ratio in Mathematics, Art, and Nature
Thursday: Language lab, Egyptian Books of the Dead, [lunch, work period], Akkadian Divination Texts, The Development of the Enclave from Ancient India to the Present Day
Friday: Freshman Maleficaria Studies, Intro to Lab, [lunch, work period], Buddhist Mantras from the Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Traditions, The Golden Ratio in Mathematics, Art, and Nature
"No overlap. Oh well. Mathematical Models for Artificing sounds fun."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
