Chapter Forty-Five - Easy Enough

Chapter Forty-Five - Easy Enough Work started off easily enough. I got in more or less on time, rode the elevator up to the floor I usually found Squad B in, and then waited around. Eventually Terry came in, and she bounced over to me and asked me what I was doing. When I said waiting, she laughed and dragged me across the floor to a space where she had a room. In fact, everyone in the squad had a room there. I had a room there. My room was... maybe the size of my apartment back home, with a desk and chair and a sofa and nothing else. It was a lot of empty square footage. "It's lame, but you'll make it nice," Terry said before showing me to her room, which was a mess. A clean mess, but... yeah, it looked like a hyperactive teenager's bedroom. She had a bed in one corner and shelves on all the walls, except the one where a big screen TV sat. She had three videogame consoles under it. The shelves were filled with knick-knacks. Anime figurines and books and what looked like unfinished projects across three different art forms. "Nice... place?" I asked. "The corp has space to spare, and space makes us happy, so we get to decorate. It's never really yours though," Terry said. Interesting. When I was an E-ranker I got a locker. I mean, it had been a pretty wide locker, not the typical high school thing with a shitty padlock, but still, it didn't have a widescreen TV and a couch. Terry and I talked, and apparently we weren't doing anything today. That was also not how things worked as an E-ranker. We had quiet, boring days, but there was always something to do. But no, free time. The company expected us to just... train or relax or learn new spells. I asked about the last, and Terry pulled me along to one of the lower floors. "I'll show you what I've been working on," she said excitedly. "What is it?" I asked. I was half curious and half amusing her. Terry was... not bad, as far as workplace colleagues went. She was cute, too, but also not batting for the right team, at least according to my well-honed gaydar. She was just friendly. "It's a level three spell called Ball Lightning! It's real cool!" I blinked. "Level three? That's still D-rank, right?" "Mhm! The highest level in D-rank," Terry said. "I'll show you!" And she did just that. We entered a reinforced basement room with bare concrete walls and some mannequins and other targets in a storage room nearby. Terry had me move some around more or less at random at the far end of the room until they were spread out. Then I stood a few steps behind her while she cast. I wasn't sure what to expect. I'd seen some fancy spells in like, movies, and a few devastating spells during the breach, but like most people--I imagined--my experience with magic was mostly tied to entertainment. So, I sat back and watched as Terry cast what might be the first level three spell I saw. I was immediately disappointed when she created a tiny mote of light that bobbed and bounced ahead of her. Then it started to move faster, still weaving through the air like a drunk moth, but a moth that just took a shot of espresso. The light reached the mannequins, then exploded. It turned from a match-stick-flame size flicker of light into something like a novelty beach ball. Large, searingly bright bolts of electrical energy shot out of the ball, caught on the mannequins, then completed their circuits in the ground with humming discharges that made the hairs all across my body stand on end. Terry giggled as the ball rolled around, seemingly at random. It started to shrink, though, each massive bolt of electrical energy sapping some of its size until it was nothing but a mote once more that disappeared with a puff. "Whoa," I said. The mannequins, a half dozen of them, now all sported deep black burns on their plastic bodies. The stands that kept them up were red in some places. "Cool, huh?" Terry asked. "Been working on that one for almost a month!" "That's very impressive," I said. "I can't wait to use it in a portal! Eldur's gonna make it hard though. It's hard to control, and magic intensive. But hey, I have huuuge reserves, so I can cast that all day... as long as it's not more than three times a day! Hah!" "How complicated is it?" I asked. "Is that your strongest spell?" A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Terry glanced at me, then shook her head. "I know Thunderfield and Jiwa's Magical Buzz Kill." "That last one's called what?" I asked. "If you invent the spell, you get to name it!" Terry said. "I can't wait to invent Terry's Terrific Terrorstorm!" "Uh-huh," I said. "So, how complicated do those spells look? Like, compared to a cantrip." Terry snorted. "Wanna see? I'm totally not allowed to show you, but who cares." She opened her arm, which made me do a double-take because I'd forgotten that her arm was cybernetic, and deployed a small three-dimensional projector. It was the kind of tech I'd seen used for ads near high-end places, showing images of the latest supercar or extremely expensive cyberware. I'd never seen a projector as part of someone's body though. "This is a cantrip," Terry said, as she projected a vague shape. It looked like a fork with two prongs, a little thicker at one end, but not too complex. I squinted at it. It looked... about as complicated as the shape for Soothe Minor Pain, actually, though that cantrip didn't have a split. I wasn't even sure how to carve a split. "What spell is it?" I asked. "Spark Sense," Terry said. "Let's you feel current, voltage, and amperage. Let you know if you can lick a wire or not." "Uh," I said. She giggled, then switched the spells out. This time I found myself blinking back. The new spell had three separate parts, each one joining at a different point. There were a few thin segments, and some that were thicker. It was... more or less flat, but complicated, like some sort of Chinese pictogram or something. "Flashbang," Terry said. She changed the spell again. This time the spell was in full three dimensions. About as complex, but now parts were over others, higher and lower and with maybe a few more splits. "Overload Pulse, this one's a second level spell." I let out a breath. It reminded me of... those little toys I saw in doctor's clinics, with wooden blocks that had wires running through them that could be moved around. "And this is what I just cast," Terry said. Ball Lightning was a nightmare. It was a tangled mess of loops and thin 'wires' with some segments growing thicker than others, and... there was a loop in the centre that wasn't connected to anything else. How... how did you carve something without it being connected? Was it a second spell... inside the other spell? It was one big confusing ball, like an abstract statue. "What the hell," I said. Terry placed her free hand over her mouth. "Yeah! Magic is complicated!" "Yeah," I agreed. This was an order of magnitude worse than the cantrips I'd seen. "And this is one of my level fours," Terry said. "Jiwa's Magical Buzz Kill." It was a rod. I almost asked Terry if it was a joke, then she moved her hand, and the rod broke apart. So, it wasn't a rod. The spell structure was just wrapped up in the same magical energy that I used to construct the carving for my cantrips. Within was an intricate web of wires. It was spaghetti, and yet I felt like it was also somehow very, very purposeful spaghetti. "How do you even start with that?" I asked. "Iunno," Terry said. "I tried spell crafting a few years ago, but gave up after a few weeks. A C-rank spell like this can take months to carve, and that's if you're real good at it. You need to do it special since it's so easy to mess up, so it needs to be done in parts and then kind of assembled? That means carving other spells that let you move the bits of spell around your core so that they line up later. It can take years to make from scratch." "And here I was hoping to be good at magic." Terry shrugged. "It gets easier. I can help!" "Thanks," I replied. That help suddenly felt a lot more valuable now that I knew how much work was ahead of me. The rest of the day passed surprisingly quick for a day spent at work. Sometimes I was tempted to ditch the job, but there were advantages. Terry helped me improve my Soothe Minor Pain a little, and then insisted that I talk to Dharti about picking a level one spell to begin with, since she was the expert. I told her that I'd do just that... some other day. After work, I had to deal with Jane, and that was either going to be great or a pain in the ass. ***