12: Magic
Three days after the festival, Eliza was at the adventurer’s guild, teaching her least favorite class.
Math.
“Ah, Jakob, no, you know how to add, right? When you multiply, it’s just like… adding the first number the amount of times of the second number!” she said, starting over again with one of her students.
Not because she had to explain the same things over and over and over again…
But because both Lily and Mary, who had long since understood the concepts, stayed in the corner playing with their toys rather than making attempts to learn anything.
“So, there’s five and a six there, so just add five by itself six times! Start from nothing, okay?” Eliza said.
Jakob, a seven year old child, stared at the slate and chalk in front of him, confused.
“From… nothing? But if it’s nothing, how do I add five to it? Nothing is nothing?”
Eliza nearly sighed, but she held it in.
“Nothing just means 0… It’s the number less than one. If you add five to nothing… it becomes five, okay?”
Jakob nodded.
“Okay… five… six… seven… eight… nine… ten… eleven? Is that it?”
Eliza scratched her head.
“No, you see….” She continued, trying to explain to Jakob how the math worked, failing for most of it. But eventually, Jakob did learn how to multiply 5 by 6, even if it took some time.
Several hours later, Eliza left the room, now done with teaching for the day, Lily and Mary in tow.
Holding hands with both of them, she started to wonder something.
‘These two are so smart… Maybe I really should get them tested for magic potential? If they have it, they’d be able to make use of it for certain…’
She shook her head.
She may have been making quite a lot of money, but she didn’t even know if the two wanted to be mages.
Of course… She’s never quite asked them what they want, has she?
Even though they were in the middle of the street, going back to the Honeyed Bee Inn, she outright asked them right there and then.
“Lily… Mary… What do you both want to do, when you’re an adult?” Eliza asked.
Lily was excited when she heard this.
“I wanna fight, like you do!” she said, holding her arms as if she was holding an imaginary sword and swinging it. Admittedly, she was swinging the imaginary sword quite well, similar to how Eliza would swing her own sword.
Eliza smiled, but she felt a bit tense about the idea of Lily fighting monsters like she did was… A little bit worrying, to say the least. Even if Lily was guaranteed to become a swordsmaster, Eliza still felt worried for her safety.
“Hm…” Eliza hummed. “Maybe I’ll let you become an adventurer when you’re strong enough to win against me in a duel.”
Lily seemed upset. “Unfair! That’s mean!” she said, frowning. Eliza grinned, seeing her child pout. Lily was putting her arms up into the sky, as if to retaliate.
But on the other side, Mary seemed as if she was thinking about this for the very first time.
“I… wanna make a lot of money. So mom and dad and aunty Eliza and uncle Teddy never have to work again.”
Eliza smiled.
Even though she felt pure joy at hearing how sweet Mary was, it felt a little weird hearing herself be called ‘Aunty’. It wasn’t quite a good feeling, but it wasn’t the worst feeling either.
Eliza tried thinking about jobs in the area that could make a lot of money, but… She was still an outsider to this world, even nearly four months into living in it.
She tried to think about it for a moment. What would Mary be able to do as a job that makes a lot of money?
“Well, there are a lot of jobs that make a lot of money, Mary. You could be a merchant, but that job involves talking with a lot of people to learn things. You’re really good at learning, and learning is really important for merchants. You could go and travel around a lot! You’d go to one city and buy things that are cheap and go to another city and sell them for more!”
Eliza began thinking about it herself. She was an adventurer, so she had the ability to travel around to nearby cities. Could she act as a merchant every now and then?
She considered the spatial storage pouches she had seen when she dealt with the alchemist’s request. She could quite easily be a merchant on the side, in the future… But that was a thought for another day.
Mary seemed to dislike the idea of being a merchant, for whatever reason.
“I don’t wanna be a merchant… I don’t wanna leave mom…” She said, frowning.
Eliza was a bit stunned. She had forgotten for a moment that Mary was a child. She was thinking far, far into Mary’s future. Children in Atlan only began working around the age of 16, so Mary was still over a decade away from needing to think about this type of thing.
“Well… Maybe you could become a mage?” Eliza suggested. “It makes a lot of money! And it’s another job that you learn a lot in, too. Plus, you could stay in The Shelf.”
She had recently heard that being a mage was extraordinarily expensive, with money coming in constantly, but also coming out constantly. It was a job where you had to constantly seek sources of revenue, but it was also a job that opened up countless new sources for you to seek out.
A highly advanced archmage, based on what she had learned, could literally transmute matter.
Though it was highly difficult, one could quite literally create gold. Although, from what she had learned, there were only three archmages on the continent who could do such a thing.
Eliza, with her knowledge of Earth, had made some simple realizations based on what she had seen so far.
The amount of skill it takes to do something in the field of magic is similar to reactions on Earth. To cause a simple flare, or to move something, would take very little magical skill. But to cause complex chemical reactions by pure imagination alone is much more difficult and requires more magical skill. It was as if they could cause chemical reactions and reverse chemical reactions at will.
Archmages were known to even be able to reverse time, in a way. They could restore a tree from its ashes, or un-cook food. Though Eliza felt things like that were an extension of her idea from earlier.
As long as it was something that was theoretically possible on Earth, she knew they could do it. She assumed that they might not even need the material to cause reactions like normal mages would. They could even execute their magic directly on people, modifying their bodies as they do.
Eliza herself had considered becoming a mage and turning herself back into a man, but she truthfully didn’t want to. Not only did she not want Lily to worry about her sudden change, she actually even enjoyed being a woman to a certain extent.
And with Olivia helping show her all the shops that sell certain supplies, such as pads, pain relieving elixirs, and ‘other things’ to Eliza, she had no reason to dislike it.
Basically, in essence, mages were scholars who were constantly focused on learning in order to further their understanding and imagination, using their magic and imagination to fill in the gaps they are missing in their understanding to cause physical reactions.
Mary looked at Eliza, not quite sure what a mage was… But Eliza felt like she had accidentally lit a spark on Mary’s curiosity and passion, setting it aflame.
“If you want to be a mage… Be sure to study, and learn lots of new things, okay?” Eliza suggested.
“Mhm!” Mary nodded in agreement.
The group continued making their way home, taking breaks along the way to stop and look at the occasional butterfly or odd looking lanternfly.
As she made her way home, the street shined, its cobbled stone somehow more alive than usual. Rumors were spreading like wildfire, rumors that Eliza had no idea about.
“Have you heard the rumor about that one prince from the kingdom? Rumor says he’s dropping his noble title that the union gave him!”
“Why would he do that? Ain’t he loaded?”
Eliza on her way home deliberately slowed down, deciding to listen to the nearby rumors. She had become somewhat of a gossip on her own right, having heard hundreds of rumors in The Shelf.
“They say the prince got tested for magic, an’ he’s droppin everythin’ to become a mage! Some people say he’s trying to earn his father’s love again!”
“Ohh!” an onlooker said. “He’s gamblin’ his future away like that!!”
Eliza clenched her teeth. She hated the kingdom, yes, but she knew that wasn’t why she felt odd.
For some reason, hearing that the prince had magical potential made her quite annoyed. She knew Mary and Lily were extremely intelligent, and she felt that the only difference between the girls and the prince is the resources they’ve had available to them in their lives.
Somehow, she wanted to prove that the kids she cared about were better than the prince, even if she didn’t know it herself.
Unconsciously, she made an unplanned trip to the plaza. While not out of the way to travel to the inn, it wasn’t on the normal path, either.
And just near the plaza… was the magic tower, surrounded by people. Eliza got a really good look at it this time, unlike when she was at the festival.
It had a large purple crystalline roof in an unusual conical structure with forked branches poking out of the top. The rest of the tower followed the usual architecture of The Shelf, with white stone and scarce windows being littered on the tower.
It surely didn’t look like the massive building Eliza had expected it to be, but she knew better than to underestimate mages with all the rumors floating around about them.
"Woooahhh..." Lily said, looking at the tower. It seemed she had already forgotten about all the anger she had before.
Mary, however, seemed a bit intimidated by it, but still excited much as Lily was. She was hiding behind Eliza's leg, avoiding the large crowd in front of the tower.
“Well… You two wanna check it out?” Eliza asked Lily and Mary.
The two rapidly nodded, so Eliza walked to the busy crowd of people outside. She could hear murmurs about it being too expensive, but she ignored them and approached. When she was right in front of the magic tower, she could see a hastily scrawled sign.
‘You want to test your kids magic potential? Fine! 1 gold arrow each!’
Eliza felt… a little hesitant, but…
“Why are they… so upset? And why one gold coin each?” Eliza asked curiously.
At her words, a single person in the crowd smiled, as if they now had a chance to gossip again. A blonde woman with an exaggerated haircut, the gossip herself, approached Eliza.
“I heard that after the prince found out he can become a mage, it inspired a whole new wave of people to test their kids! The mages are probably upset and raised the price to deter people from doing it. This way, they get some money off of it, I’d bet!” she said.
After a minute, she walked inside the magic tower, Mary and Lily in tow.
She was going to at least give it a chance. Maybe even for Lily and Mary's future.
