He goes in a practised sequence: a tiny Lightning Bolt destroys a poring the size of an apple, a flame brings water to just before boiling and keeps it there, another glass of water becomes a glass of ice, and a paralysed ghostring gets blasted to ectoplasm by a Soul Strike.

"The fire and the ice were not Bolts," she observes.

"Bolts would have been inefficient."

"But they were also not Skills," she adds. Not really a question.

So there's not really an answer. He got the hang of talking to Wizard Mara and it involves sometimes not saying things.

"Hmm. Congratulations, you've actually managed to impress me."

At that he can't help but beam widely.

"But you're not going into spell development? Despite the clear knack for it?"

"...I mean... I can't say I wasn't tempted. But. I really couldn't quite convince myself that that was how I'd be able to do the most good in the world."

"Oh, I think it would've been a waste of your talents," she says, waving a dismissive hand, "but it's my job to ask. But no, you can just develop spells on the field and I'm sure a tower wizard or another will pick it up eventually."

"Pick it up...? Oh. You're a partisan of the collective unconscious theory of Skill creation?"

"Partisan? Scientific theories aren't politics. But yes, I do favour that interpretation; it's the only one that makes sense of what I've seen over the years. And if I'm wrong, well, you can always become a tower wizard when you're a hundred and twenty, hmm? Just don't waste your youth on that like certain people do."

Bjorn flushes but he's in a corner and not officially part of this conversation and Wizard Mara wasn't even looking at him so he'll do his best impression of not having heard it. Besides, it's not like he has any conflicted feelings about that; he wants to be a tower wizard.

"Yes, ma'am."

"In any case, I don't think the Academy has more to offer you and since I'm not taking students I suppose I'll send you off to Geffen."

Yesssssssss! "Thank you so much, Wizard."

"Sure sure. Go grab your things, here's a teleport ticket for Kafra, here's my seal, goodbye see you never."

He accepts the documents then he pauses and decides that, what the hells, he may as well ask.

"Out of curiosity, why are you stationed here at the Academy?" What with how she seems to think so little of tower wizards, being stuck here doesn't sound much better.

"That's none of your business. Now go."

...alright. He goes.

"Well, then."

"Well, then."

"I thought I'd go first."

"This isn't a competition." But if it were Vallynn would've won.

Taharqi laughs. "But if it were you would've won," he says.

He rolls his eyes. "Four out of ten, it was obvious what I was thinking."

"I mean, damn, isn't Wizard Mara meant to be a pain to impress?"

"You're trying to say something else."

He sighs. "I do not think I was really fooling myself about this, it's not like it's not normal, the Academy is meant to be temporary. But, I don't know, I guess I got attached. I'm going to miss you."

...okay that's more vulnerability than he'd been expecting. He gets up from where he was packing his stuff to walk over to Taharqi and hug him.

Taharqi hugs him back, resting his chin on Vallynn's shoulder.

"I'm not dying, you know," he says, pulling away after a few seconds. "You can always visit me in Geffen. I guess I can't visit you so easily since who knows where the Rogues' Guild is."

"Sure, but teleportation is a lot more hassle than sharing a room. We are necessarily going to see each other less often."

"I suppose..." Wait, is Taharqi, like, in love with him or something.

He looks at Vallynn's face and cracks a smile. "No, I'm not."

He grins. "I know you're not. It just occurred to me, is all."

"Well, whenever you start looking for party members, come looking for me."

"I still don't know where your guild is."

"Eden can get ahold of me."

"Fair enough. I will. And you do the same, if you're ready before I am."

"Of course I will. Where else would I find someone with so much dick game?"

Vallynn rolls his eyes, but lifts his arms up to wrap them around Taharqi's neck. "I'm sure if you try hard and believe in yourself you'll find someone. But if you like it so much you should fuck me one last time before I go."

"...were you under the impression I was going to let you go without one last fuck? I would physically pin you to the bed if you tried to leave."

"Is that a threat or a promise?"

"Try it and find out."

A hundred years ago, give or take a couple, the world started to drastically change. Magic became much more abundant over a short span of time; acquiring Skills and improving Stats, which used to be much harder to do to any meaningful degree, suddenly became the sort of thing nearly everyone could do at least a little bit of; monsters became stronger and more numerous; haunted sites became breeding grounds for the undead; the Dark Lord of Glast Heim reappeared after centuries of dormancy; Baphomet and his minions corrupted the forest north of Prontera into a twisted maze where space doesn't make sense; and so on. Many people, including the Church of Odin itself, believe that's when Ragnarök began, and the emergence of Surt from beneath the sands in Morroc a few years ago served only to fan the flames of that belief.

While it took nearly forty years for Eden Group to be founded and for the tides of destruction to be, if not reversed, at least slowed and halted, more mercantile powers were a lot quicker to take advantage of the situation. In particular, teleportation and resurrection—previously closely-guarded secrets by the Church which only its most powerful and prominent members could do (we're talking less than two dozen people at a time in the whole world)—became so much cheaper and easier that an entire company was founded around them: the Kafra Corps. Headquartered in Al De Baran, they provide three main services, for a fee: teleportation to anywhere they have operatives at, remote storage, and resurrection points, plus a subscription service.

Teleportation prices are standardised and proportional to distance between origin and destination, and subscribers get a discount. This is mostly to cover the cases where multiple hops are needed to get where you want to go; it's not particularly more effortful or costly for a given operative to teleport someone anywhere they're attuned to, but since operatives have a limited number of possible attuned destinations at a time it may be necessary to go through multiple people. The main exceptions to that model are the cities of Lighthalzen, Einbroch, and Einbech, in the Schwartzwald Republic, which have anti-teleportation fields that prevent anyone from teleporting in or out of their limits as well as within them. Since the Kafra operatives need to be stationed outside city walls, which can be meaningfully dangerous, the cost of teleportation to those places is substantially higher.

The storage services they offer come in tiers for different sizes of storage, the smallest one being a medium-sized crate and the largest one (only available to subscribers) being a fairly large room stocked with wardrobes, weapons racks, mannequins for armour, and a refrigerated area. Every time you wish to access one of your storage units you need to pay a fee, plus an extra fee the very first time you access a given tier of storage, which is when you get assigned a personal one. Subscribers don't need to pay any fees past the initial one, and if they wish they can have a Kafra employee fetch whatever it is they want to fetch rather than them having to go themselves.

Finally, the resurrection point service is a way to make death less permanent. It's only available to subscribers, and has an extra cost on top of that every time you die. The way it works is that you are provided with an enchanted jewel attuned to your soul with a contingent trigger; if it notices that your heart has stopped, it automatically teleports you to your saved resurrection point and casts a stasis spell on your body so that an employee can bring you back to life. Since resurrection can only work if the body is sufficiently intact, however, it's still not a get out of jail free card, and even after being resurrected you'll still be weak and damaged and need healing and recovery. You can also set the enchantment to only trigger after a set amount of time, in case you have someone resurrection-capable in your party and want to give them time to bring you back, but again, caveat that if it's been too long since your death you're not guaranteed to be able to come back. The enchantment is one-time, though, so the way they enforce the per-death fee is by only giving you a new one after you've paid.

The service Vallynn wants to make use of today is teleportation to Geffen, and the Criatura Academy specifically has its own Kafra operative on retainer with registered destinations for all of the main guilds the Academy trains you for: Geffen for mages, Payon for archers, Alberta for alchemists, Comodo for bards and dancers, the St. Capitolina Abbey for monks, and whichever mysterious place it is that rogues go to. Swordsmen and priests are the exception, since their guilds are in Prontera which is, roughly, just around the corner from Izlude itself.

With the Academy ticket Wizard Mara gave him, the cost of the teleportation is waived, and he can go straight to Geffen.

Geffen is not a very large city. Sure, it's bigger than Izlude, but that's not saying much, and Prontera definitely puts it to shame in terms of size and activity.

It is nevertheless very impressive.

Its walls form a circle around the tower, and the city itself is arranged in concentric terraced rings of roads and buildings, with rings closer to the tower being lower than those farther out, which means that the tower is actually taller than it looks from outside and that you can see more and more of it as you walk down the radial streets that meet in the middle. Combine that with the fact that it's nearly five times as tall as the next tallest building, easily visible from a distance away from the city itself, and you get an effect of pure awe, that feeling of being very small before something much larger than yourself.

As if that weren't enough, the city is very obviously magical. The streetlights, lit up at this time of day because of the overcast weather, are floating lamps with mage lights inside them. The plaza Vallynn finds himself at once he's gone through the portal is protected from the rain by an invisible dome of force. The fountain next to him has a statue made up of hunks of stone connected to each other by glowing magical tendrils to form the rough silhouette of a wizard with their staff held out in front of them. And though the staff is not physically connected to anything else, that's where the water is spouting from.

It is, indeed, the city of magic.

While that's all very impressive Vallynn is, himself, a mage, so his appreciation of it is less "awe" and more "craftsman seeing ingenuous constructs". He can feel the shapes of the enchantments, the way the dome is paradoxically a water spell that redirects the rain and how the floating statue uses an effect that's similar but not identical to his own telekinesis spell.

Of course, to an onlooker that might be indistinguishable from awe: he's standing in place, staring at the enchantments, mouth hanging slightly open, ignoring the way the magic dome doesn't protect against the cold and he is definitely not wearing enough for it.

Eventually he does get sufficiently cold that it distracts him from the sight, so he finds a guard and asks them where the Mages' Guild is.

The guard is surprised by the question—apparently most people just sort of assume it's in the tower. But they're happy to point at a building right by the plaza that's... not exactly unassuming, per se, but doesn't stand out overmuch, and is downright humble compared to the tower.

Yeah he had a feeling. Apparently most non-mages are under the misapprehension that "mage" and "wizard" are synonyms—Vallynn himself had been, when he arrived at the Academy—but it turns out that there's a formal difference, at least when it comes to the Guild and most importantly to the Eden Group classifications. Anyone who shows enough aptitude for and interest in magic can join the Mages' Guild, but being a wizard is more of a rank. You need to show skill with at least five out of the seven standard elements (Neutral, Fire, Earth, Wind, Water, Shadow, and Light) (Life and Death are typically not seen as "standard" though lots of spells taught by the Church also have those elements, and some people consider Poison an element), and you need to be proficient with at least two of them.

Eden in particular is also interested in that. In addition to their ranking system they have a horizontal progression system called "titles" or "specialisations", which are used for more tailored bounties and missions. Sometimes something needs a Fire Wizard specifically, so if you are a wizard and you have a proficiency in Fire with the Mages' Guild you can apply for the Fire Wizard spec with Eden.

In any case, since those two words aren't synonyms and the tower is always called the Wizard Tower, Vallynn concluded that probably the Mages' Guild might not use it as its main headquarters, or at least as the place they welcome new recruits at.

Into the building he goes.

He finds himself in a modest atrium, its ceiling going up three out of the five stories the building reaches. In the center, a massive blue crystal floats lazily above a circular pool of some glowing liquid, emitting a soft hum that's almost relaxing to listen to. The layout of the room itself is somewhat reminiscent of—if a lot less spacious than—the Eden lounge, an open plan with a handful of pockets of near-privacy made out of carefully arranged sofas and carpets and bookshelves and black boards.

All in all, the inside of the building does a much better job of being fancy and ostentatious than its outside does.

There aren't that many people about, though, and the little reception area across the room from the entrance is easy enough to spot.

Before Vallynn gets there, though, he's intercepted by someone who had been sitting on a sofa watching an old wizard draw diagrams on a black board before she spotted him. "Vallynn!"

"—oh, hey, Astrid. I nearly didn't recognise you."

"Like it?" She twirls in place once to show off the way her new robes swirl around as she does it. She's not literally copying Wizard Mara's style but the resemblance is there, with the fluff at the edges of the skirt and the red and black bodice accentuating her waist.

"Yeah, honestly. You're kind of selling me on this idea of wearing robes, if I can get them to look half as good on me as they do on you."

"Still a flirt, I see."

"I mean it!"

"Of course you do.

"How've you been?"

"Elbow deep in thief bug innards."

"—oh that's disgusting, was there a bounty?" she asks, sympathetically.

"Yeah. Was a bit of a problem, too, turns out there was a mutated bug queen under Prontera that was spawning new bugs faster than you could blink."

"At least that was a bit of a challenge, then...?"

"Yeah. They retroactively marked that bounty as rank 1, once we got back and explained what happened."

"Oh, did you rank up?"

"Not yet, but I'm close. And I got some very decent loot, dragons got nothing on a golden thief bug queen, I still haven't decided what I'm going to buy with the rewards."

"You were just saying you wanted new robes..."

"Not until I find something that looks good. I'd rather be naked than look drab."

"Evidently!"

"So, won't you show me around? And where's Magnhild?"

"She fucked off to Juno."

"...'fucked off'?"

"Let's not talk about her, how about." She starts striding away towards the reception. "You've got Wizard Mara's seal, right?"

...did they have a fight? Must've been a hell of a big fight if Magnhild went all the way to Juno. And he's dreadfully curious about what exactly is in Juno but he feels like he should probably not ask. 

"Right."

"This is Vallynn, he went to the Academy with me a few months ago," Astrid informs the receptionist with no preamble. "He's a genius prodigy and I want to make sure he remembers my name when he's like super famous."

"—hey, now..."

"May I see your Eden badge and the wizard's seal?" the receptionist asks.

"—of course."

He does not like the way that went.

They do something to both things while pointing them at sheets of paper which causes writing to appear on that paper, then start quickly reading what's on there. The report that they extracted from Wizard Mara's seal is rather long and dense, written in very tiny hard-to-read script. As they read, their eyebrows ever so slowly rise up into their fringes, though their face is otherwise unreadable.

Is that a Skill? Surely not. But if it's being done the hard way it looks really complex, and Vallynn is almost certain there wasn't a magical artefact doing the transcribing. So maybe it was a Skill, and thinking about it that's even reasonably likely, it's not like everyone wants to be adventurers and the breadth of possible Skills that could be used in professional contexts is very very wide.

When they're done reading they put the papers down and ask, "No last name?"

"Four of them, actually, but I think my first name is probably rare enough?"

    "Hmm, not wrong. Well, welcome to the Mages' Guild, Vallynn, I believe we'll have a very fruitful partnership. Now I should—"

"I'll show him around," Astrid interrupts. "Don't worry about it."

    "—would you? Thank you."

"Yeah, no prob." She turns around (making sure to do so in a way that makes her robes go whoosh) and says, "Follow me."

"—sure," he says, belatedly realising he never caught the receptionist's name. The moment's passed, though, probably, so he follows Astrid. "Why'd you want to show me around?"

"Like I said, I want you to remember my name when you're super famous for killing Surt or whatever."

"Didn't realise you had quite so much faith in me." They only spent a couple of weeks together at the Academy.

"I hadn't realised how badass your schtick was until I got here and tried it myself."

"Tried what?"

"Spell development. The professor thought I was shitting her when I told her about you."

That kind of makes him uncomfortable! 

"I see. 'Professor'?"

"Yeah, there's classes and stuff. I'm told other guilds are a lot more hung up on properly training people but ours is kind of like the Academy? You can go watch lectures if you want, or ask for one-on-one time with instructors, but you don't have to."

"I don't think our instructor ever had one-on-one sessions with anyone, at the Academy."

"Well, not Wizard Mara, but you know, everyone else."

"Yeah, I got you."

"Anyway that was mostly a joke, I just kinda feel alone here I guess? Because most of the other mages have been here longer and without Magnhild it's been kind of lonely. It'll be good to be someone's senpai."

"Someone's what now?"

She grins. "It's an Amatsu word, they have a whole hierarchical culture thing going on and a senpai is, like, someone who's higher than you in some formal but not too formal hierarchy, or sometimes just older. So having been here a couple of months longer than you means I'm your senpai and you're my kōhai."

"Why does it sound like there's some fine print there?"

"Oh I'm not going to make you fetch me drinks, don't worry. ...or, I will if you can teekay it, but that's just because it's convenient and I want to get some benefit from being friends with a prodigy."

"Do I have to address you with a title?"

"...you know, I would like to be called Astrid-senpai."

"Is that how it goes? Your name then 'senpai'? Am I Vallynn-kōhai?"

"Oh absolutely not, you're just Vallynn."

"Weird. How do you even know all of that?"

"I used to read a lot of books from Amatsu."

Oh so she must be from a pretty rich family, then, interesting. 

"Someday I'll learn the language and the culture. That sounds fun."

"Good luck, it's really hard. You've seen their characters, right?"

"Yeah?"

"There's like ten thousand of them."

"There are not."

"Are too! It's insane."

"Alright that's maybe a longer-term project, then."

"Learning languages is hard, you know."

Vallynn almost says something in Brasilese but showing off like that is the kind of thing that gets you called a "prodigy" and it's been making him kind of uncomfortable (especially with the part of him that's preening) so instead he says, "Yeah, and I'm not even sure how I'll find the time, but still, it sounds interesting."

"Anyway I'm meant to be showing you around, uh, this is the atrium. Sometimes professors like teaching stuff here, there's those little nooks there for that or just chatting and stuff. Then down that way—"

"Wait hold on what about the huge crystal?"

"—right. It's kind of a huge battery? Oh, yeah, uh, you're meant to feed it some magic while you're here."

"I am?"

"It's not, like, required or anything, but everyone's encouraged to try to keep an open channel into it at regeneration rates? And then, like, it's got some cool enchantments to manage and convert magic and whenever you need some quick access to a ton of mana you can fetch from it. So it's, like, meant to be a common resource and stuff for everyone to use and it's polite to contribute back when you're not using it. Some people get the hang of doing the channel thing even while asleep but I haven't managed, yet."

"Huh! Neat and prosocial."

"People use it a lot for spell development 'cause then it's easier to iterate without having to wait for your mana to replenish, and also it's a backup battery for the wards around the whole city. There's a beefier one in the Wizard Tower that's the main battery because the folks who live there have more mana than they know what to do with."

"That's kind of surprising, aren't more powerful spells a lot more expensive too?"

"Oh heck I know a thing you don't, score! Like, yeah, but when you get really powerful you start getting really damn efficient and there's some artefacts that help with mana management, like stuff that captures some of the spent mana back when it's not all entirely necessary for the effect or shit like that."

"...I want that."

"Yeah, well, get rich and powerful first. Hell, do you even run out of mana doing the stuff you've been doing?"

"Well, it got kinda close with the golden thief bug queen..."

"Yeah, sure, so you don't need it. Don't worry about it. Anyway that way is the mess hall..."

Vallynn has his own room in the Guild building. It's bigger than the one he shared with Taharqi but doesn't have its own washroom. It's also not, technically, free: he is, technically, being employed by the Guild, and he will have to do services for them or for people who hire them and his lodgings are the bulk of his compensation.

If he wants to, he can switch to a different compensation style in which he's no longer on retainer and instead is paid for individual jobs, and then he'd have to rent the room with money. This has higher potential update but requires him to seek jobs more proactively and is less reliable and consistent, so he might need to supplement his earnings somehow.

Yeah he'll probably do that eventually, once he has his bearings and is making good money with adventuring, but being on retainer for the Guild for a bit doesn't sound too bad. It'll let him get some hands on experience with using magic outside combat, see what people do for a living, and it'll let him watch some lectures and interact with other mages without having to worry about managing his time and money.

But for the moment, he's going to find the library.

The library occupies half of the fourth level and isn't, itself, that impressive. It's still a library, of course, and probably one of the best-supplied libraries in the kingdom, at least when it comes to all matters related to magic, but beyond that it's a little bit...

...mundane.

There are bookshelves, there are reading nooks, there are tables, there is a librarian. That's about it. 

A library is a library, Vallynn does not care that it's not some mythical library out of legends (plus his best guess is that the mythical libraries of legends in this city will be in the Tower, not in here). What he does care about are books about magic, books books books, he's gonna learn so much stuff, he doesn't even know what he's going to learn he's going to look at the library sections and find out what there is to read—

"Excuse me."

He turns around, snapping awake from his reverie by...

...a tiny woman with waves of red hair framing sharp features and equally red eyes behind thin-framed glasses. She isn't looking at his face, though; she seems to be carefully measuring him with her eyes, from head to toe, in an almost predatory way.

"...may I help you?"

"Why are you naked?"

"I'm not naked."

She reaches forward into his personal space to grab the edge of his skirt and lift it up to look at what's under it.

He—freezes. "Uh."

She lets go. "Are you very poor? Do you need money for clothes?"

Wow that's really rude. "No."

"Are you robes being washed?"

"I don't have robes."

"You're not going to go around wearing that, surely."

"Why not? Plenty of adventurers wear less, and stranger."

"It's unwizardly," she sniffles.

"Who says I'm a wizard?"

"You're clearly not. You're barely a mage, I've never seen you here before, you don't have a channel open to the crystal downstairs, you looked awestruck by the library. But you do want to be a wizard."

"Maybe I want to be a sage."

"Nope. You want to be a wizard. And that's not something a wizard wears."

"Is everyone really that put off by the balls?" he sighs.

"Oh who cares about the balls, I'm sure we can get you something that shows them off if you really want to, but not this."

...that sentence has so many parts. "'We'? I'm sorry, can we back up a step, hi, I'm Vallynn, I'm new here, you are...?"

"Evelin."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Evelin. You say it's not the balls, so do you usually accost every new mage like this?"

She tsks and waves a hand near her face as if she's being harassed by an annoying mosquito. "Most mages have no raw material to work with. You, though... Do you know how rare fit mages are? And vain ones, too, even the ones that realise you gotta be able to keep up with your party to adventure tend to be so utilitarian about it. But you, clearly you want to show off your body, and you're handsome enough, and I'm sure whatever jungle you came from wouldn't mind this, this, whatever this is, but I do and you need to let me work on you."

He's being read to filth here but it he follows her... "You want to get me new clothes?"

"I charge," she says in a warning tone, lifting one finger up and finally looking him in the face. "It's a job as much as it's an art. But... I could accept a promise of payment, if you promise to wear whatever we create in public. With a face like yours... yes, yes, I do think, hmm..."

"How... expensive... are we talking, here?"

"Oh, not that expensive, I think we can settle here for about a million zeny?"

He makes a sharp hissing noise through his nose. "A million zeny isn't that expensive??"

"Oh that's nothing compared to the enchantments you'll need to buy if you want to amount to anything in life."

"That's later! Much later! I don't have that kind of money!"

"Oh fine, how about this, then, you don't have to pay at all if you don't like it or don't wear it, and I'll let you pay when you have the money."

"...okay that seems like pure upside to me but why do you care so much?"

"I have a vision! And yours is a face and body I can attach my vision to, I can feel that in my bones. ...hmm but on these terms I'll probably need to use the real good stuff, let's say two mil instead."

How is this woman throwing numbers like that around like they're nothing. "But I don't have to pay you a single zeny if I don't like it?"

"Or just don't want it, I'm not trying to work some kind of gotcha into it, I'm just that confident I'll make you something you'll want to wear."

"What if I flee with it and never pay you?"

"You won't," she says, confidently. "I've already got you, I know I have, so stop making this difficult for us and just follow me, hmm? I'm sure you didn't have anything planned."

Why does he feel like he's just signed his soul away? He nods and follows after her as she strides away.

The place she leads him to isn't her room in the guild building; rather, it's a small old building one block away in the direction of the city walls. It's dark by then but the rain's mostly let up, and she walks briskly enough that there isn't really enough time for the cold to set in before they're greeted by a blast of warm enchanted air when she opens the door.

She unclasps the neck of her robe and throws it in the vague direction of a coat rack then leads the way further inside.

"I'd have expected you to treat your clothes better," he says, as by now he has noticed that actually Evelin's robes do look really well-made and well-tailored. The style is completely different from Wizard Mara's but in a sense they're more reminiscent of them then Astrid's were.

"They were made to withstand being ravaged by an aevys, being a little rough with them won't register."

It's still far too dark in here, though, so he lights a small mage light and—

It doesn't help that much, but that's because the place is cluttered with fabrics hanging from hangers everywhere, reams of different types and textures and colours in a cluttered mess. Evelin herself is riffling through them mostly by touch, occasionally leaving a small enchanted marker here and there to remind her to go back to a selection. 

"Do you want to show off your balls? I know I said we could make it work but in my professional opinion—"

"Don't worry about it," he says, shutting the door behind himself. "I don't have a very strong opinion other than, uh, as you guessed, wanting to look hot."

"That's a given, what do you take me for?"

"I don't know, I met you ten minutes ago when you tried to look up my skirt."

"I didn't try. ...but fine, point taken. I'm Evelin, and I'm going to become Rune-Midgard's foremost expert on enchanted garments and number one fashion setter amongst the normies."

"Ambitious. So you're at the Guild to study enchantment?"

"Partly. I'd also been hoping to run into you."

"Me."

"Or someone like you—oh there you are you son of a bitch," she says, snatching a long pane of thick grey fabric and throwing it over one shoulder. "Someone like you, who'd agree to be my experimental subject. Mages are all so tame and boring, they just want to be a bundle of fabric that sets things on fire, but that's the challenge that I wanted because if I can make a mage look good then I can do anything!"

"Wouldn't it be a lot more impressive if you experimented on someone who looks less good than me then?"

She pushes the fabrics out of the way so she can look at him and raise an eyebrow.

"Oh come on, am I meant to demur some more? I'm hot, that's why you fixated on me."

She buries herself in fabrics again. "Not just that. But, yes, you'll make my job easier. It's a confluence of reasons! And I gotta get my name out there. If anyone asks where you got what you're wearing you'll send them my way. And of course that'll be a lot more valuable once you see just how good my stuff is at holding enchantments, but that's for later. I'm going to set the trend for wizards all over the realm."

"Well I'm glad I dithered so long, then, wouldn't have wanted you to pass me by as yet another bundle of fabric who sets things on fire."

"It was a stroke of fate, yes, yes." She pushes the fabrics away, but by now she has enough stuff hanging off her shoulder that she's barely visible under it. "Go over there and strip."

"Naked?"

"If you were going to be bashful you should've worn underwear."

He can't really argue with that.

She dumps a pile of stuff almost as tall as she is next to him then vanishes into another row of fabrics before emerging with measuring tape in hand.

Then she pauses. "Why are the lights off?"

"They were never on."

"Really? Huh." She vanishes once more to turn the lights on then returns. "Much better, tiny mage lights aren't enough for this. Arms out."

He does as instructed.

She starts measuring him: upper arm and forearm length and circumference, distance from the base of the wrist to the tip of each finger, and shoulder width. "Remarkably symmetrical. Right-handed?"

"Yeah."

Neck thickness and length, pectorals and waist and hips and thighs and she looks up at him and lifts an eyebrow again.

"—it's a physiological response! You're really close and touching me all over—"

"Well, get your boy down, I'm not up for partying until I'm done with this and it'll take me a while."

"It'll go down on its own," he says, trying not to think about the implications she's implying because if he does then it'll take longer to go down.

Upper and lower thigh circumference, length, calves, feet, overall height, and she's done. "Now is the time for requests. Colours, shapes, styles..."

"...I like showing skin? And—probably darker colours?"

"How much skin?"

"I don't... really know."

She sighs. "You're making my job a lot harder. Here—" She vanishes a third time and returns carrying a thick tome of what turn out to be sketches. "Go through these, tell me which ones you like and which you don't and what you like about them, we'll build something you like. Are you hungry? I'm hungry."

"I could eat," he says, accepting the book.

"Excellent, you're human, congratulations. I'll assume you meant to answer in the affirmative and I'll get you something."

Sure. And he'll... go through these sketches.

This is really not how he'd imagined his evening would go.

Evelin doesn't let Vallynn go until they have finalised a design he feels happy with, which takes more work than it needs to because Vallynn keeps imagining she's more limited by designs that make sense than she actually is. Her goal is to have something he'll wear forever, and while he's sceptical this is something they can achieve overnight like that he has to admit that if she pulls that off that wouldn't be a look that'd be out of place amidst those powerful adventurers in Eden.

They do, once that's done, end up in bed together. Vallynn has to admit that seeing someone so insanely committed to her goals like that was more than a little bit attractive, even if she's also riding a bit of a manic high, and if the only reason she wanted to sleep with him was because of his looks, well, it's not like he's ever objected to that kind of objectification before. 

The next morning she kicks him out and tells him she'll find him once she's done, and again he's finding himself questioning his judgment—and hers. That was too, too much, too fast, his brain is still reeling from it. And he doesn't know what he's going to do today. 

He didn't know what he was going to do yesterday, either. He supposes he should explore the library? That's what he'd been doing before. But something feels... incomplete. It's...

...he slept well and it's now morning and he has the whole day ahead of him and he doesn't actually know what comes next. He's on retainer so the Guild might call on him if they need him but he doesn't have anything in particular he wants to practise or any plans for what to do and he'd kind of assumed there'd be more structure to this part of his life but it turns out there's less instead and. And.

He wants to be a powerful wizard who does good things in the world but his plans for that had a black box step here at the Mages’ Guild and now that he's opened the box he's found out that it's empty and he needs to fill it with something.

He's too young to be having existential crises. And this sounds like maybe the kind of thing he should ask his senpai about.

He'll have to wait a little bit in the mess hall but eventually Astrid does in fact show up to have breakfast. "Morning. Looking for me?"

"Yeah."

"Wait, actually? Okay, sure." She gestures for him to follow her as she grabs her food and goes to a table. "Sup?"

"What do you… do here… all day?"

"...like, general-you or me in particular or…?"

"Yes."

Snort. "Well I've been following the spell dev lectures I told you about and the next one is in half an hour, you could drop in? Might be a bit dense but you'll catch up. And then, uh, there's this spellforms guy who's been helping me with spell variation research one-on-one in exchange for me collecting some reagents for him so I'll probably go hit up the underwater cave for that stuff—"

"Underwater cave?"

"You'll need something to breathe underwater if you wanna come."

"Isn't it a bit dangerous to go alone?"

"I don't go that deep, he's not asking me for like obeaune eggs or anything like that."

"So you just kinda… do stuff?"

"I mean, yeah."

"How does that become—I mean, what's the, like, path from there to becoming an adventurer."

"No clue."

"...uh."

"I mean, a little bit of a clue, I'm shoring up a bunch of skills that are probably gonna be useful? But I'm, like, not the one with a plan, here, that's a you thing. I figure I'll do some stuff and take on some bounties and when I'm high enough rank I'll see if I can't snag a party."

"Do you not have any candidates in mind?"

"I didn't snatch a hot rogue boyfriend, no," she says with a smirk. 

"—we're not dating."

"But you'll party."

"We might, eventually. But that's for, you know, when we do party."

"Which is when?"

"I... don't know."

"So maybe figure it out, since it's important to you."

"...yeah. You're right."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. This was helpful."

"Wow, I feel like a proper senpai, all warm and fuzzy."

He grins. "I think I need to find out what lectures there are and who else is around doing what and go from there. Form a study plan."

"Atta boy. Oh and don't forget to hit up the Wizard Tower, it's really cool."

The professor teaching the spell development lectures Astrid has been recently watching is probably a very central case of what Evelin meant when she said that mages are often a pile of fabric that sets things on fire. She is a stout woman of average height, long curly grey hair, a very pale complexion, and dark grey robes so shapeless you could imagine the woman is actually three goblins in a trenchcoat wizard's robe.

Astrid and Vallynn are the last ones to arrive, and three other mages—all of them clearly older and more experienced than the two of them—are already seated at the sofa and one armchair and a futon surrounding a round carpet and facing the professor herself, who is erasing the contents of the black board.

Vallynn doesn't intend introduce himself to the professor as Astrid's friend, or at all, really. He just shows up and makes a beeline for another one of the armchairs.

Unfortunately for him, Astrid must've told the professor about Vallynn in enough detail that he's recognisable. Which isn't saying much, really, given the givens. "Ah, are you perchance Mr. Vallynn?" she asks, as soon as she notices them.

He shoots Astrid a look.

She shrugs, not looking particularly guilty.

He sighs and looks at the wizard. "Yes, ma'am."

"Splendid! We heard so much about you. Come, come, why don't you demonstrate your spell to the class?"

Some of these mages have definitely been here a while. Who's this upstart who thinks he knows what's what?, they must be thinking. This is going to suck.

Well, he supposes there's nothing to it. "Which spell, professor, ah...?"

"Frij," she introduces herself. "And the one you created, of course!"

Ahhh that's probably the teekay one and on the one hand the smart thing to do if he wants to lay low is to just demonstrate it but another part of him thinks it would be dishonest to not mention the others. That part is also backed by the little traitorous part of him that likes showing off and is enjoying this attention, so unfortunately that's what wins out. "Ah, there are a couple," he says. "The telekinesis spell is the one you probably mean?"

Astrid raises her eyebrows in surprise but the other mages look even more shocked. Or rather, one looks sceptical, one looks curious, and one looks shocked, which cashes out to the same thing, really.

"Why don't we start with that one and you tell us about the others later?" she suggests, agreeably enough.

"Right. Ah..."

"Here," she says, grabbing an inkwell from a table and offering it to Vallynn. An open inkwell which will definitely spill onto the floor if held too unstably.

...oh is that a challenge? Vallynn's hesitation melts in the face of that, replaced by an intense desire to prove himself. He places a hand below the professor's and says, "You can let go now."

She does, pulling her hand away quickly enough that if Vallynn's reaction time isn't good enough he'll definitely spill.

This guy.

Well, Vallynn's reaction time is good enough, actually, and the inkwell barely wobbles before getting locked in place.

"Fascinating. Is there a physical distance limitation, then? Do you have to have your hand close to it?"

Is Vallynn just imagining the challenging tone? Well, regardless, he'll answer honestly. "No," he says, pulling his hand away, too, and starting to move the inkwell in simple patterns in front of him slowly.

"Fascinating," she repeats with a glint in her eye. "What's the range? Are you going slow on purpose? How well must you perceive your target?"

"Range is sight," he says, his feelings once again melting away and being replaced by academic excitement. "I'm going slow on purpose because I don't have very fine control. It's like trying to balance it using only two fingers, one under it and one next to it. And I need to—I guess be able to perceive it well enough to know how to place those fingers? If the inkwell were stoppered I'd be more willing to be daring."

"That's a Skill," scoffs the sceptical mage.

"Is it?" wonders the professor, unruffled. "Pay attention to the flow of magic directly and tell me what you see, Mr. Gaël."

He leans forward in his seat and squints at it, which is of course just for effect, then shrugs and leans back. "The control is shit, there's mana leaking all over the place, it's sloppy work."

—hey!

"Just so," agrees the professor. "If this is a Skill, it's a pretty poor one, and you'd wonder why anyone would bother. It's unrefined and there are points of improvement that are obvious at a glance to anyone who knows what they're doing—"

Ouch.

"—which is evidence that this isn't a Skill, is it not? This spell was created by someone who didn't know what they were doing, and hasn't been refined since. Yes, I am perfectly ready to believe that Mr. Vallynn here created this, as a teenager, on his own, with no instruction."

Gaël... doesn't really have a rebuttal to that.

"Do you believe you could pick it up and improve it?"

"Obviously."

"I do, too. So Mr. Vallynn is going to keep using this spell and slowly moving the inkwell around for the rest of this lecture and you will all try to learn enough about it from watching it to replicate it. Then, hmm, two days from now, I want to see your improved versions of it. All of you," she adds, addressing the whole class now. "And then you will explain to us—and to Mr. Vallynn in particular, if he chooses to join us again—what improvements you made, why, and what difficulties you encountered while doing so."

Aah.

"How'd you do it?" asks the mage that looked curious, earlier. "Just—on instinct?"

...oh he's being addressed, uh. "Yeah, I guess. I didn't want to get any Skills before joining the Academy and I'd read up on some theoretical foundations and wanted to try something small and inoffensive."

"Wait," says Astrid. "Didn't you say, back then, when you picked up Lightning Bolt, didn't you say you'd already studied it? So you only studied theory?"

"—ah. I, ah, fibbed a bit? I didn't want Pierre to feel bad. I'd studied it a bit the day before, out of curiosity."

"You're such bullshit, Vallynn," she laughs.

"Mr. Vallynn, you might wish to start drawing from the crystal. The upkeep cost of your spell right now is outpacing your regeneration."

Wait, it is? Ah, shit. Okay, he, uh, he hopes the mental motion is obvious? He hasn't actually tried it yet... Yeah, okay, it is, he's fine.

"Now, so you don't feel like we are all just criticising you, I want to assure you that that is very impressive work, Mr. Vallynn. Developing a spell from scratch is something none of them can do yet—"

"Don't compare us to the prodigy, professor, you'll just make us feel bad," sighs Astrid.

"You mustn't feel like that. Natural variation in ability is just a fact of life, but most importantly it is washed out by experience and practice. Once all of you have a decade of adventuring under your belts these differences will seem inconsequential. Mr. Vallynn may always be better than all of us at coming up with new things on the fly, but there are many reasons we use Skills and one of the most important is, simply, that they work."

...okay, Vallynn's got to admit this professor is good. He himself has been known to occasionally act like awkwardness isn't there in order to make it go away but she's got that down to an art. Even Gaël looks sort of mollified.

"Mr. Vallynn, why don't you take a seat?" she suggests, gesturing at the armchair he'd been aiming for at the start of the lesson. "I had been planning on continuing from where we left off last class but I think your colleagues are going to be too busy paying attention to and taking notes about your spell to be able to truly follow anything I say, and I think this practical example will be more instructive overall than what I had planned."

Yeah, okay, he'll take a seat. "Why my spell?" he wonders, though he has a guess already. "There are other spells that probably work better?"

"Just so. The very fact that yours isn't very refined is a better example than anything I could come up with, and usually the very first time students encounter an unrefined spell like this is when they're trying to create their own. Even if I tried to create a new spell myself and mimic the mistakes and inefficiencies of a more inexperienced mage, I would almost certainly fall trap to assuming things are obvious or easy that actually aren't, so I didn't try." She leans forward conspiratorially and stage whispers, "And, between you and me, I believe it'd take me a lot longer than you to do it," then winks.

Yeah, that was his guess. "—can you stopper it? I don't want to spill it and it's hard to concentrate otherwise—"

"Can you not do it yourself?"

"—I mean, I can't hold two things at the same time."

"Not with your mind, but you, also, have hands," she observes.

...right. He's being stupid. He reaches forward to grab the inkwell out of the air then brings the stopper to his other hand with the spell.

"Ms. Astrid, what did you just observe?"

"...like... he switched targets?"

"In more detail? What did it look like when he was switching."

"Ah..."

"He started holding the stopper before he'd fully let go of the inkwell," says curious guy.

"Did he? Mr. van Wal, do you concur with Mr. Janus's assessment?"

"...no," says erstwhile-shocked guy. "It was more continuous?"

"Like he was letting go of one and starting to grab the other at the same time, but the total flow of mana was the same throughout," says Astrid, understanding dawning on her.

"Just so! Mr. Vallynn did something that would look very strange, if this were a Skill, but it also looks very strange, knowing that it is not. Why?" This last question is directed at Vallynn himself.

He's being tested again, and he has no idea what the answer is. "Uh..."

"You can figure it out if you think about it," she assures him.

...alright. Challenge accepted, then.

What about what he did was strange if you assumed this is a Skill? The answer is obvious: Skills are discrete, and smoothly transitioning between targets the way he did is roughly impossible to do if you don't know how to do at least most of the work the hard way. Stronger versions of Fire Bolt can fit multiple bolts into a single cast but if all you know is the Skill form of that spell you won't be able to have multiple targets for each individual bolt of a single cast.

And what about what he did was strange if you assumed this isn't a Skill? ...the fact that the total flow of magic was constant in the handoff.

"Please resume floating the inkwell while you think, Mr. Vallynn."

—right yes he does that. With the stopper he feels a lot more confident and less scared he'll dump it all on the floor.

Why was the total flow of magic constant? He doesn't think he was trying to do that... "It just felt natural?"

"What did?"

"The thing where I sort of slid between one target and the other while keeping the amount of magic constant. Like it was a Skill. It just felt natural."

"I'm sure it did. Do you know why?"

"I have guesses."

"Let's hear them."

"Something about how I originally developed the spell with one target in mind and practised with one target in mind so now I kind of subconsciously hold that subjective feeling solid in mind?"

"That seems probable! And there are theories related to the formation of Skills that would imply there are external forces nudging you in the direction of treating spells as discrete units, but if so, these nudges tend to be reasonably easy to ignore or work around. If nothing else, you will almost certainly be able to create less wasteful, more precise versions of this spell if you iterate on it.

"Anything else?"

...is there anything else? He feels inclined to say "no" but he should actually think about it.

"Still guessing, but it's maybe easier to keep a constant flow of magic going than to change it." Which isn't the case for most Skills since they tend to be once and done but then again they basically hijack your body and brain.

"Interesting theory! How would you test that?"

"By trying to change? And seeing if it's harder or not. Except that'd be confounded to hell and back and I'm not sure how to actually isolate it..."

"The answer is that you're right, at least probably, but the main piece of evidence we have about this comes from the field of thaumodynamics, which studies the quasi-physical properties of the flow of magic itself. It's a very new field but it's produced some promising research already, and one of the central observations we have about it is that magic has a certain type of inertia. In the physical sense, that is, of there being certain qualities to a magical flow that tend to remain the same unless some outside influence is exerted on it.

"But that's a rather more complex topic that these lectures could not hope to properly address; suffice to say that you are very likely perceiving a real phenomenon, however indirectly. But you are perceiving it, are you not? It wasn't a random guess."

"...yeah, I guess it wasn't." He's still moving the inkwell around, and after doing it this long it's become almost mindless—which is only possible because he's draining enough mana from the battery crystal that he can keep it up approximately indefinitely—so he can pay more direct attention stuff like his subjective experience of what's happening.

"I hope you'll continue to come to these lectures, Mr. Vallynn. They're a bit ahead of you on the theory but clearly you have a good grasp on the basics of the practice, and I believe this would be useful. —well, I'm biased, of course, as this is enough of an interest of mine to spend my retirement years studying and teaching it, but still, even people who do not wish to go into spell development would benefit from understanding its basics to apply to their practice."

He smiles a bit, at that. "I'm not sure Wizard Mara would agree."

"Oh, that girl. Don't believe half the things that come out of her mouth; she doesn't mean them."

That lecture was—grounding, in a way. He felt like he was barely not out of his depth and even then only because the professor was clearly helping him up, which means that he's got a lot to learn. Not that he didn't know that, of course, but it's one thing to know and quite another to understand. And, most importantly, it did actually feel like he could learn things there that will help with being an adventurer. He came up with the Fire Bolt example himself, after all; being able to understand his Skills well enough to be able to flexibilise them on the fly will probably be really useful.

It also occurred to him, after the lecture, while he was thinking about the spell cost of his TK—and the other spells he made but according to Professor Frij they were a lot better, probably courtesy of him having developed them after having acquired his first Skill—that efficiency and cost optimisation of highly powerful spells are probably one of the things that distinguish a good wizard from a great wizard.

He's sure there'll be diminishing returns, eventually, but he's nowhere near them, and he shouldn't worry so much about how all of this will help him be a good adventurer, because it just obviously will. He can think more about this later.

This is all really exciting.

The next day, Evelin grabs Vallynn's arm on his way to lunch with a group of mages (including Gaël, who warmed up to him reasonably quickly once Vallynn turned out not to be acting insufferably) and says, "I'm done. Come see my masterpiece."

Gaël blinks when he hears her voice and turns around to look at her. "Evelin?"

"Yes, yes, me, good to see you, long time, I'm borrowing him, goodbye."

Vallynn shoots the mages a resigned look and shrugs. Better to just go along with what she wants.

Al.......right. "Good luck," he calls after the dust left behind by the typhoon that just kidnapped Vallynn.

Once they're back at her place she says, "Tada! ...why is it so dark. Ugh." Lights on. "Tada! Actually, tada nothing, put it on, now's the time for any further adjustments that you might want. Not that you will, because it's perfect, but still, it's good to pretend."

"You're going to need better bed manners if you want to attract customers."

"My bed manners have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of my work," she sniffles. "Now put it on, I want to see my vision realised."

"Alright, alright," he says, walking over to the mannequin to inspect the robes. "...okay, I am kind of impressed, actually, this does look good."

"Oh now you're teasing me, I see. You know I have absolutely no patience for that shit."

He grins. "You have no patience at all. Except, apparently, for this, have you been working on it for two days?"

"Twenty hours with two six-hour sleep breaks."

"...you're a machine."

"Leave the compliments for after you've looked yourself in the mirror."

"Alright, alright, give me a minute," he says because she looks liable to explode out of her skin if he dawdles too much longer.

...it's actually kind of hard to put it on, which he maybe should've seen coming, but, well, what's done is done. And when he looks in the mirror...

"Wow."

"Yesssssss, it's perfect!"

As for what it is:

He's wearing a dark red belt that is wrapped around his hips twice, forming an X shape in the front and back. The top V section of that X shape follows his V-lines, and the sides are bare, showing the sides of his thighs and glutes. The lower part of the belt holds a pair of dark grey trousers, which start out skintight but flare out nearer the shins to give space for a pair of slightly less dark grey boots with black soles.

His forearms and most of his hands, except for his thumbs and middle and ring fingers, are covered by a pair of skintight gloves, the same grey as the trousers except for a few dark red accents.

And finally, the main piece of the ensemble, the robe. It's sleeveless, and the shoulders are hard and angled, pointing out away from him. It has clasps holding it together from his Adam's apple to the middle of his chest, with a single, large, blood-red jewel attached to that last clasp, but below that it splits open to highlight his bare chest and abs. The outside is a similar less dark grey to that of the boots, but the fabric on the inside is the same dark red as that of the belt and the accents on his gloves.

Everything is made out of incredibly high-quality enchantable materials: despite the skin-tightness of the gloves and trousers, they are flexible and stretchy enough to permit the full breadth of movement without rubbing against his skin; the boots are sturdy lava leather, highly resistant to damage and temperature extremes; and the robe is a light yet warm fabric that swishes pleasantly when he moves and feels very soft to the touch.

"Okay, I. Wow," he repeats, a bit breathless. "I could almost pretend to be powerful, wearing this."

"Become powerful, wearing this, Vallynn. Become famous, become renowned, achieve greatness and become the stuff of legends. And then pay me the money you owe me, when it no longer means anything to either of us," she says, grinning a sharklike grin.