As you rise from your chair and tuck The Illusion back into your pocket, your gaze passes over Amy on its way to the door - and then goes back to your friend, who wears a mild frown of concentration as she mutters to herself.
"Problems, Amy?"
"Kind of yes, kind of no," she acknowledges you vaguely, not looking up.
"How so?"
"It's written in Chinese."
...
Yes?
"So you had to use a Spell to Comprehend Languages?" you venture.
"Yeah."
"And that was the 'kind of no' problem?"
"Uh-huh."
"And the 'kind of yes' problem is...?"
After turning a page, Amy finally pauses in her reading to look up at you. "Okay, so, you've used Comprehend Languages before."
As recently as on your afternoon visit to the library, in fact, you muse silently, even as you nod to the statement.
"So, you know that the spell's translation can be kind of dry."
That's one way of putting it. The magic provides the literal meaning of whatever words you're reading or listening to, so symbolism, metaphor, and poetic turns of phrase can end up sounding stilted and overly technical. It's sort of like Commander Data's inability to use verbal contractions like "can't" or "couldn't," breaking up the flow of common dialogue, only with a side order of the Universal Translator glitching added in.
"Too hard to follow?" you guess.
"No, it's slowing me down a bit and forcing me to re-read a few passages, but it's more annoying than anything else."
Alright, but how about the material itself?
"Well, I'm only in the middle of the second chapter, but the introduction made sense. We'll see how it goes."
You nod and leave her to it, mentioning that you'll be heading out now, if anyone's looking for you.
"Have fun and be back by lights out," she advises, as she goes back to the book.
You step outside-
!
-and pause on the threshold as the deepening shadows of the evening fully register, momentarily tripping your Hellmouth-trained reflexes. You take a moment to reassure yourself that there probably aren't any corpse-demons wandering around the School's campus - and certainly nothing REMOTELY like the numbers to be found in Sunnydale - an effort made easier by the lack of demonic taint in the air.
Then you let out a breath and look around, wondering where to go.
You did get an invitation to join the game, and while you've already opted out of actually taking part, you could still show up to spectate, maybe cheer Larry on...?
Nodding to yourself, you head for the level stretch of open field Larry mentioned earlier, and where you can see a modest crowd kicking a ball around, the steady glow of a number of curiously low-laying lights casting back the deepening twilight. Along the way, you pass an evening class in the courtyard, which at least explains why the game wasn't being held there...
As you draw close enough to start getting a clear picture, you count close to fifty kids assembled on the field. Nearly half of those are your age or close to it, and have split up into two teams of eleven - full sides, in other words - with a few older students and one of the instructors acting as referees. The remaining attendees are sitting or standing around watching, alternately cheering or groaning for their favorite players, heckling or grudgingly applauding their un-favored side, and chatting among themselves.
There's nothing like a scoreboard set up, so you aren't certain who's winning, but from Larry's expression, you would say that his team is, at least, not losing - or at least not badly enough that they can't turn the game around.
The source of the light turns out be over a dozen paper lanterns have been mounted atop or hung from posts that line the field: one at each corner; four more spread out along each of the sidelines; and a pair apiece on the goal lines, equidistant from the corner lamps and one another. The glow coming from within the lanterns is the wrong shade to be lit candles or the like, and as you get closer, you realize that it isn't electric, either - you can sense ki bound up in the material.
From the glances and nods, your arrival has clearly been noted, but the game isn't going to stop just because you turned up.
You look around, considering where to go.
The prospect of expanding your understanding of ki-powered not-exactly-magic items appeals to you more than socializing or just watching the game, and so it is that you wander over to the nearest corner of the field, nod absently at one of the assistant referees when he glances your way, and peer up at the paper lantern.
Under plain sight and passive ki senses, the lantern shows some signs of age. Not outright damage, just that general sense of weathering and wear that tells you it's not of recent manufacture: paper whose original colors have faded or been stained, or whose edges aren't quite as crisp or neatly aligned as they were, once upon a time; some scuff marks on the base of the frame; that sort of thing. It's a little tricky to make out through the paper and against the steady glow - and you can't get an angle to see straight up or straight down into the lantern - but where the candle would normally go a creation like this, you can make out some kind of wire frame. That's where the feeling of ki is focused, although it's pretty faint.
Nudging your Ki Sight into the active range, and squinting reflexively as you sort out the patterns and hues of the energy more clearly revealed, you can see what you think is a piece of paper with both ends caught in a small clamp, leaving it standing up folded over itself. The ki is circling around and radiating from that little strip alone, moving in ways that remind you keenly of magical Scrolls - energy that's been shaped to fulfill a single purpose and then invested into an anchor that can't actually do anything with it on its own, requiring a further nudge from a user to activate and use up its power.
Some variation on prayer strips? It would make sense: as you've seen with Kagome's simple but potent work in the field, priestly ofudas involve an infusion of spiritual energy; and spiritual energy IS a component of ki, so it would give a reasonable starting point for adapting the process to account for the other two-thirds of the applied life-energy, as well as the emergent properties thereof.
You aren't quite sure how you'd go about replicating the results, but you have some ideas...
Gained Ki Infusion C (Plus) (Plus)
...or you suppose you could just ask somebody.
Although you're tempted to approach one of the refs - as much to try and get answers about the ki lanterns as anything else - it occurs to you that bugging one of the designated officials in the middle of the game is probably not the best idea.
Knowing your luck, the moment the ref looked away, something would happen on the field...
With that in mind, you head over to one the larger group of spectators.
"Who's winning?" you inquire.
"Blue Team are up three goals to two," comes the answer.
Larry's wearing one of the blue jerseys, which validates your earlier guess about how well his team was doing.
You stand there for a moment, watching the players chase the ball across the pitch, trying to anticipate who will go where and do what. The thought of using Ki Sight to try and anticipate the plays occurs to you, but there isn't any active ki use on the field, and tactical or strategic prediction isn't what that particular technique is really for.
Which is not to say that it's useless in that regard, but if you want to figure out what the other guy is doing before he does it, that's really more Battle Awareness's field of expertise. Granted, calling a soccer game a "battle" is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but there are similar elements of contest, conflict, and struggle, of larger plan and tactical interruptions thereof.
Perhaps most importantly, this struggle for athletic dominance is one that you're able to observe from the OUTSIDE, rather than being one of the sorry souls stuck right in the middle of it, or even just having to guard yourself while lurking on the fringes. Combined with the less bloodthirsty nature of the competition, this makes it quite a bit easier for you to not only pay attention to what's going on, but to try and anticipate WHERE it's going...
Gained Soccer E (Plus) (Plus)
"Did you want to play?" someone asks.
"What?"
"You looked like you wanted to play, or at least to show them how that last play was supposed to be done," the guy elaborates. "If you want to join in, I don't think there'd be any complaints; most of them were hoping to get you involved to begin with."
"Ah, thanks, but no. I've had enough physical activity for one day, and they're... what, in the second half?"
"About the forty-minute mark, out of an hour," he admits. "Why?"
"It's just, it would feel kind of cheap to jump in near the end, particularly when they were already winning."
"You could play for the other side."
"Red is probably my favorite color," you admit. "Maybe another time."
The speaker shrugs and lets it go.
A little over ten minutes later, the Red Team manages a goal, tying the game at three apiece. Blue makes a solid effort to reclaim their lead in the time remaining - Larry is one of three players to take a shot on the goal - but the Red goalie is on her game, and the rest of her team keep a solid defense, eventually running out the clock.
Given the hour, the head referee doesn't seem to be up for overtime, instead calling for a penalty shootout.
The teams quickly sort themselves out, sending forth five players each to take their shots. Larry is not among the Blue Team's selections, incidentally, but he doesn't appear bothered by that.
Out of five kicks, the Red Team only scores twice, while the Blue Team scores four times, only missing on their last shot, to the visible frustration of that player.
With that, the game is officially called. High-fives, handshakes, and other exchanges are made, and some of the players take responsibility for gathering the loaned-out jerseys, while others move to fetch the lanterns.
Is there anything you wish to say or do at this point, besides congratulating Larry on the win?
"Good game," you tell Larry, as he walks over.
"How much of it were you here for?" he asks.
"Only the last half."
"Ah, you missed some of the best-!"
And that sends him off on an enthusiastic description of the part of the game you weren't here for. From what he says, there weren't any displays of ki-powered football techniques, so you didn't miss anything in that regard, although it does sound like there were some decent mundane-level moves on display all the same.
You inquire about whether or not ki is ever actively used in these pick-up games or other free-time activities around the School.
"Eh, kind of, but also not?" Larry replies. "I mean, I asked, and the general response was that the masters prefer that kids our age not break out the superpowers outside of class, supervised activities, or when we really need to. It still HAPPENS sometimes, but they apparently assign enough extra discipline whenever that happens that most people try to avoid it."
You glance at the instructor who was refereeing the game. Does that not count as supervision?
"It counts for class, or activities when the instructor only has to worry about a few students at a time," comes the answer. "Ten-on-ten seems to be a bit too much going on to be entirely safe with just one teacher, though, at least when ki is involved."
"The School DOES have ki-powered soccer games, and some other activities," one of Larry's recent teammates adds. "We even have our own little intramural league. It's just that everything has to be scheduled ahead of time, instead of pick-up games like this - partly for safety, and partly because it can get really hard on the field and the equipment."
Ah. They don't want to be running through a dozen soccer balls a month?
"Also baseballs, bats, basketballs, hoops, volleyballs and nets, rackets, shuttles, tennis balls, MORE nets..." The guy trails off for a moment, before thinking of something. "Oh, and you have to be pretty good at Ki Infusion, because otherwise your shoes can get torn to pieces, and then your parents get ticked about having to buy you a new set every time you come up to the School."
At that, you have to pause and consider your own shoes. You haven't noticed any particular issues with your footwear as a result of supernaturally enhanced speed, but then again, you tend to go over most of your stuff with minor repair spells on a regular basis - and you're occasionally wearing your Boots of Air Walking, besides, which are tougher than mundane footwear thanks to the enchantments worked into them.
Anyway, there was a question you wanted to ask the instructor before he left to do his own thing, and judging by the mostly-cleared state of the field and the expectant demeanor of the man in question, you should probably get on that.
"Alright," Larry says with a nod. "I'm going to head back to the dorm and have a shower. Was Grandma back yet when you left, or...?"
No, it was just you and Amy, reading.
Larry nods again and heads off, flapping his shirt a bit to help him cool off in the damp night air.
You walk over to the ref and wait for him to finish taking charge of the lanterns from his helpers, most of whom leave to do their own thing after handing over the devices.
"Something I can help you with, Young Mister Harris?" the instructor asks.
"There is, yes. I was wondering about these lanterns..."
The actual LANTERNS are nothing special, being a mix of in-house handiwork and local purchases from years past - you're shown a faded company logo on the bottom of one. As for the light-strips, there are mid-level classes on Ki Infusion that teach qualified students how to go beyond simply reinforcing the structure and basic function of objects with ki and start imbuing new properties into them. The School doesn't cover more than the basics of that as a general class, because as with the crafting of magic items, it can get pricey, and not all of the masters have learned the advanced techniques - meaning those that DO know them aren't numerous enough to handle more than a relatively small number of students.
It isn't said aloud, but you suspect that there's a certain amount of technique-hoarding elitism going on there as well. Then again, that might just be your experiences with and secondhand memories of magic-users talking...
Anyway, the not-prayer strips bound into these lamps are the results of one of the regular projects for the advanced students in the class, as light is a relatively simple and safe effect for them to practice binding to objects, as well as one that's useful enough to merit the expense.
"We keep stockpiles of these things stashed in some of the storerooms, in case the power fails or we have an overnight activity planned," the instructor says, as he undoes the grips inside one lantern and removes the folded piece of paper, which he straightens out to reveal glowing characters - and also small burn marks which are slowly spreading outwards along the paper from the currently-radiant ink. "They're more costly and less convenient to use than electric lights, since you can't turn them off one they're activated, but against that, we can make them ourselves out of renewable local materials, and they don't leave behind any suspicious or difficult to dispose of waste products once they've burnt out."
Huh.
While this is informative, the instructor does not mention enough for you to work out HOW these "ki scrolls" are made. Obviously, that is for the class - which, unfortunately, is not being held this week.
Thanking the man for answering your questions, you turn to continue your walk...
Aside from spectating at Larry's soccer game, the other thing you really felt like doing on this walk was swinging by the central dojo again, and now that the game is over and everyone that was involved in it seems to be heading back to their lodgings for the night - with a detour towards the storage sheds for the "officials" - it seems like the proper time for you to make that visit.
Plus, the School's central building is closer to the dormitory you're staying at than the soccer field, so it's more or less on your way back regardless.
As you cut back across the courtyard, you note that the evening class is still in session, although they're definitely winding down. You give a listen to what the instructor is saying as you pass, but he seems to be discussing a particular move from a school of martial arts that isn't familiar to you, and recommending options for dealing with it - lacking some of the proper context or a live demonstration of how it's done, it wouldn't be a good idea for you to try and follow through on any of this, so you turn your attention elsewhere.
There are lights on about the yard, electric ones this time, a mix of head-sized rounded spheres on tall poles and more varied shapes tucked into nooks and niches here and there along the edges of the court and the paths leading to and away from it. From the look of things, not all of the lights around the tiled area that could be turned on are, only enough of them for the class to have a reasonable amount of light while they train. The paths are more fully lit, although the low-laying lights are small enough and spaced far enough apart that it keeps the illumination to a mild glow - enough for pedestrians to be able to see where they're going, even if they wander out here in the wee hours of the night when there's no moon to speak of, but not much more than that.
...
...unless ki-based night vision is a thing, which upon reflection, it almost certainly IS, although the question then becomes, "How GOOD is it?"
Whatever the answer is, there are enough lights on at the moment that you don't need the assistance - some of said lights, in fact, are coming from your destination, or at least its general vicinity.
The dojo itself is actually dark, the front doors shut and a general "closed for the evening" air hanging about it. Some light is provided by a couple of electric lamps fitted neatly into the tops of the stone stands where, traditionally, torches or braziers would have been set, but the greater amount of local illumination is coming from the office to the left. You can't see or hear anyone moving around in there, but your passive Ki Sense registers three, maybe four people with instructor-level signatures. The more modern training facility that stands to the right of the traditional dojo also has the lights on, with sounds of another evening class in session registering clearly.
What did you want to do here?
You make a left and head for the office, pausing at the door as you consider how to announce yourself. There's no doorbell, and given it IS an office, just walking in uninvited feels presumptuous, so you split the difference and knock while calling out, "Hello?"
There's no immediate response, and after waiting for a moment longer, you try again, with a little more force and volume.
"Hello?"
That appears to get a reaction, as one of the presences inside the building starts moving in your direction, and a moment later you can see a middle-aged man through the front window, who you recognize as one of the masters from the meeting earlier today.
"Mister Harris," he greets you. "Was there something you needed?"
"Yeah, I was just wondering if you'd had a chance to schedule the lectures I'm supposed to speak at?"
"Not quite yet," comes the reply, "although we have ruled out tomorrow as a possibility."
"Too soon?" you guess.
"Oh, yes," he sighs. "Various instructors who insist that their classes can't POSSIBLY be rescheduled on such short notice, individuals arguing that they MUST be allowed to attend the first lecture, so someone ELSE needs to take over their lessons for them..."
Ah.
"That said," the master continues, trying for a more positive note, "while your lectures are still being sorted out, we HAVE worked out when you can take part in the Fish Run."
Oh? When would that be?
"Wednesday afternoon, at three."
He gives you directions to the vendor, which you commit to memory.
Do you have any other questions to ask while you're here?
For all the talking you've done at times in the past, and even counting the extended explanations for various incidents and phenomenon you've offered up to groups of occasionally baffled and sometimes bewildered adults, you've never delivered an hour-long lecture to a crowd of dozens before. With that in mind, you figure it wouldn't be a bad idea to ask a few questions and develop a better idea of what you're getting yourself into, and what sort of things you might need to prepare for over the next day or so.
So you ask, "What can I expect from the crowd while I'm talking?"
"Questions," the master says without missing a beat. "There will DEFINITELY be questions, whether they're requests for you to go into more detail on your current topic or to shift to a different one. Before that, though, I should ask: have you ever spoken to a large audience before?"
"I gave a little speech to the guests and hired help at my last birthday party," you answer. "That was over sixty people."
"Ah, good. Was everyone able to hear you?"
"First thing I made sure of," you reply with a nod. "Didn't even need to use magic to cheat."
"...could you?"
"I could, yes," you admit. Throwing together a Ritual to Let My Words Be Heard would be pretty easy; you'd just have to take the Spell of Ventriloquism as its base, and then make your voice emanate from several different locations at once - SurroundSound as done by magic, as it were.
Heck, you could probably work in a way to recreate the THX intro while you were at it... or you could just take a cue from Thunderbird, cast the Spell of Dragonvoice, and TALK LOUDLY FOR THE DURATION.
"Well, that clears one issue. But have you ever delivered a long speech or a lecture before?"
You admit that you have not, and the master proceeds to offer some advice about not straining your voice, not speaking too quickly or too slowly, having a supply of water nearby to keep your mouth from going dry - but also not overdoing it and drinking too much - and other useful bits of information on how to handle your delivery.
By this point, the master has introduced himself as "Todo" and led you into a sitting room in the front of the office, and here, he gets to the matter of handling the audience. As he said, there will be questions, and you'll need to answer them to keep your listeners engaged, but you have to do so in a way that doesn't diverge too far from the topic at hand. This might result in having to tell someone that you'll get to what they were asking about later on, or that it isn't something you're intending to cover in that lecture.
Which in turn leads to the big point: having a plan for what you want to talk about. An hour is a fairly long time to speak about a topic as broad as magic, and if you don't have specific objectives worked out ahead of time, you could easily end up wandering into realms of the obscure or over-covering one school or style while leaving the rest poorly represented.
Given Lu-sensei's reception and largely unspoken unfriendliness with Master Nielson, you would rather know in advance if you should expect any hecklers in the audience.
Master Todo winces and, somewhat reluctantly, admits that you can probably look forward to a few particularly pointed questions and skeptical attendees, partly on account of your age, and partly, well...
"Because my teacher doesn't get along with some of the other masters?"
"Well, yes."
The first part is fair enough, and not really something you can explain without revealing your status as a conscious reincarnation, which you're not about to do so soon after your first introduction to the larger School of the Five Elements, if you ever do. Doubts about how much a nine-year-old could know about a topic as far-reaching and complicated as magic are entirely natural, and even your demonstrations of advanced Summoning Magic aren't exactly irrefutable proof that you UNDERSTAND what you're actually doing, let alone understand it well enough to educate others on the topic.
After all, typical sorcery is more about instinct and intuition than conscious knowledge and design, and you COULD just be some sort of once-in-a-century magical prodigy who happened to inherit an overdeveloped mystical lineage. That's honestly a MUCH more reasonable explanation for your arcane power than the actual truth.
You can resolve those doubts simply enough, by demonstrating that you really DO have the arcane education to back up your prowess, but your age draws issues from another angle, namely that a lot of adults aren't exactly going to be thrilled about being told that their knowledge and experience in a particular field is insufficient or just plain wrong, especially when the one saying so is young enough to be their grandson.
There is... not a whole lot you can do about that issue...
The masters of the School of Five Elements have already spoken with your priestly tutors, so if there are those among them who are still harboring significant doubts about your competency by dint of your age, further support from the Hyrulean trio is probably not going to resolve it.
As for summoning Batreaux, getting your Dark Master here would require you to break the fifth-circle limit on magic use you've been asked to adhere to, which is a point against the idea. Even if you got permission to perform some higher-level demonstrations, the masters might not be best pleased to have such a powerful otherworldly entity called into their midst, especially given Batreaux's demonic origins and the lingering evidence of his previous nature.
Mostly, though, you would rather face and overcome this obstacle on your own, rather than risk being perceived as hiding behind the adults in your life. So that's what you'll do.
In addition to everything Master Todo has already recommended for or against, you inquire if there are any subjects that you should treat with caution, if they come up in your lecture - things like local or School history better left alone, past dealings with magically capable individuals or groups that need to be taken into account, or similar events.
Todo nods. "For starters, you will definitely want to avoid getting yourself ACTIVELY involved in the quarrel between Master Tze and Master Nielson. You can't completely avoid it, due to being Lu's student, but do your best not to bring it up or comment on it."
You definitely want to ask what the story is there, but this is ABSOLUTELY the sort of thing you should talk with your teacher about first, so you restrain your curiosity.
"I take it there's more?"
"There is, and it is that it would be best to refrain from offering opinions about the events of the latest World Tournament. Saying where you were, what you were doing, or what you saw would be fine, but commenting about other people's actions, motivations, or whether or not they deserved getting their heads punched through a wall would be... poorly received."
Ah yes, the reminder that Master Nielson was one of those fine gentlemen who ended up on the wrong side of a certain vampiric Dark Lady who had NOT been informed that the Tournament was having a ninja problem, that could have posed a threat to the children in her care.
Nothing else too serious comes up. Whether that's because there aren't any such issues to worry about or because neither of you know both sides of the situation well enough to recognize them is another question.
Something to look forward to!
By this point, you've taken up a good quarter-hour of Master Todo's time, and figure you should be letting him get back to his evening paperwork, or whatever it is that's keeping him and the others in the office this late.
The man groans and thanks you for your consideration, and not even completely sarcastically, as he sees you out.
From the way he winces at your words, your response is probably not what Master Todo was hoping to hear.
You feel a bit bad for him, but you're not inclined to change your stance - partly out of loyalty to a friend and the family of said friend, and partly because, if somebody has to be the adult in this situation, it really ought to be the ACTUAL adult in this situation.
If Master Nielson lives up to that responsibility, you'll reciprocate. If he doesn't... well, you'll see when you get there.
Although you had hoped to look in on that late class, the steady flow of people moving out of and away from the building implies that it's already over.
You might be more disappointed about this if some of these people weren't carrying or wearing parts of what appear to be stage costumes.
A drama club meeting, maybe? Man, this place is BUSY...
Anyway, since you've got nowhere you urgently need to be, you decide to take advantage of the fact that you're not spending the night in a hotspot of demonic activity or otherwise potential supernatural danger, fight down that Sunnydale-conditioned part of you that would really like to go inside, and take some time to try and enjoy being able to walk around after dark without getting jumped by something.
With no location that particularly calls to you, you pick a direction at random and start walking.
...
Maybe ten minutes later, you're rounding a corner on the light-lined path when you hear the unmistakable sounds of a scuffle coming from behind a row of bushes up ahead. From the level of noise - grunting, impacts, and some voices not quite raised in protest - and the ki auras you can passively pick up, there are four or five people involved, all of them student-level. Three of the presences are close enough together, moving around enough, and giving off enough of a sense of aggression that they're definitely fighting - or at least two of them are, the third aura doesn't have that violent edge. Somebody trying to break up the fight, maybe? The other two auras are standing together a short distance away, and one of them is the source of the hissed objections.
Although this violent interruption of your previously peaceful nighttime stroll is rather annoying, you refrain from charging forward to give the parties responsible a piece of your mind or turning and walking off in another direction. Instead, you advance, stepping lightly to avoid giving your presence away.
What can you say? You're curious.
Reaching the bushes, you search around for a moment to find a spot where you can peer through, and then do so. From this angle, you're able to see most of the group, having the best view of the two people that weren't taking part in the fight. One of these is a guy in his mid- to late teens, who is restraining a girl of the same age as she whisper-shouts at the other three people.
Some observers might consider the boy to be the bad guy here-
"-going to get caught, you idiots!" the girl hisses in frustration.
"We definitely will if you keep shouting!" the boy replies in a similar tone.
The girl glares at him, replying, "I am NOT SH-!"
She falls silent as they both flinch and look around.
"...I am not shouting," she repeats, at a lower volume.
-but you suspect that theirs is actual a fairly neutral or even positive relationship.
As for the trio that are actually fighting, it's two guys and another girl in the same age range as the first pair. Your Ki Sense is validated when you realize that one of the boys isn't really trying to fight, so much as he's trying to split the other two members of the scrum apart, but for all that their aggression is primarily focused on one another, the grappling duo have enough effort to spare for their unwanted dance partner that he's not having much luck breaking things up.
There's surprisingly little talking going on among those three, mostly a litany of, "Stop it, cut it out, COME ON already-!" from the guy trying to play peacemaker.
Neither of the actual fighters seems to have a solid advantage. The boy is larger, with the according advantages of mass and reach, but the girl isn't exactly tiny, and she's every bit as physically fit and skilled. Each of them seems to be equally angry at and determined to beat the other, with a certain amount of annoyed afterthought spared for the second boy.
No ki is being expressed externally, but you're close enough now that your passive senses can clearly register it being used to reinforce their moves.
You don't immediately recognize any of the ones involved in this little incident, but given how many people you've been introduced to today, that's unsurprising.
So, what do you want to do?
You aren't sure what's going on here, but the sooner it's brought to a stop, the less likely all parties involved are to get into trouble. Since the guy trying to break up the scuffle isn't having much luck in doing so, the other guy is successfully keeping the girl who isn't shouting from interfering, and nobody else is around - yet, anyway - it would seem to fall to you to intervene.
That does beg the question of how best to do so. The idea of showing up with a group of Wallmasters or Hardhat Beetles has some appeal, but when you consider that the sudden appearance of a bunch of monsters might result in screaming, it seems less practical - plus, how would you explain that later?
"Oh, I was just taking my giant bugs for a walk."
"I never go out at night without my giant dismembered and reanimated hands along for security."
"I always start a friendly conversation with a pack of monsters."
...okay, there IS some truth in at least two of those excuses, but the point remains that pulling out Summoning Magic as your FIRST move could give a somewhat awkward impression. Or maybe just an aggressive one.
Using supernatural means to enhance your voice or presence would be more familiar to the students, given the existence of Ki Shouting and emotion-projection, but if you're going to try and resolve this situation without getting an instructor or master involved, they're probably not the best of ideas, either. Raising your voice is something Mind Blank won't hide, and you'd have to project your presence through the screening; either could easily draw attention that you don't currently see the need for.
In the end, you decide to stick with the simplest approach. Standing up, you walk quickly around the row of bushes, clear your throat, and - when that only draws the attention of the two people not involved in the wrestling match - announce yourself.
"Good evening!" you declare, in a casually cheerful voice loud enough to be heard, but not so much that it would carry.
"What the-!"
"Who the-!"
"Ah-HA!" The peacemaker seizes on the sudden distraction of his two opponents and forces them apart by pushing himself between them.
"Get out of-!"
"Get off-!"
"Both of you, QUIT IT already!" the guy barks in exasperation.
"HE'S the one who-!"
"Don't blame me for YOUR-!"
"Do you wanna go again?"
"Bring it on!"
"Why?!" the boy who put himself in the middle of the fight groans as he's jostled around by his two... friends? They must be, nobody would give this much effort on behalf of people they didn't like.
A little more information could go a long way towards helping you resolve this matter, so you turn to the two-person "audience" and state, "Okay, so, I know I'm new here and that this probably isn't any of my business, but I still feel compelled to ask: what's going on here?"
There is a huff from the girl and a sigh from the boy.
"It's a long story," the girl says, "and like you said, most of it isn't your business, but the version suitable for public consumption is that those two idiots' families have hated each other since the Tang Dynasty, and they're just keeping up the family tradition."
You can't place the Tang Dynasty off the top of your head, but it sounds like it was a while ago.
"When you say 'hate'," you inquire then, "how bad are we talking?"
"The families haven't seriously tried to kill each other since getting chased out of China," the boy answers. "Even before that, from what I understand, they usually only resorted to weapons in times of war."
Ah, so rather than some kind of blood feud where both sides have sworn to end the other's line down to the last child, it's more of a case of lousy neighbors who can't or won't leave each other alone. There are some people in Sunnydale like that, especially around Cordelia's neighborhood, although you can't say that you can see any of those families carrying on a centuries-long quarrel like this.
Then again, you don't know those people terribly well. You suspect that if you looked hard enough in Sunnydale, you'd probably find a few "families" able and willing to hold a grudge that long, AND to pursue a true, murderous vendetta. They might not even all be demons.
In any case, two kids from "merely" unfriendly families should be a lot easier to deal with than two whose clans are sworn enemies going back generations.
"Would there be any objections if I step in?" you ask.
"Not at all!" the girl says with a bright smile. "In fact, if you could get this joker to let me go-"
"Please don't," the boy sighs.
"-or if you're going to be like that, you can help Tan yourself."
"Argh," exclaims the boy in the middle of the snarl, possibly in response to that, possibly just from frustration.
You are tempted to get out your Conjured Book to once again call upon the mysterious and awesome power of the bookslam, but between the worry about attracting attention with too much noise and the fact that your primary targets are so focused on each other that they might ignore it, you decide another approach is called for.
So you make with the magic-
"What are you-?"
-and begin casting a Spell of Deep Slumber at the wrestling trio. Knowing that martial artists are generally tougher and stronger-willed than the average person on the street, you use your understanding of metamagic to Heighten the Spell, intensifying its effects.
It appears to have been a good call, as a few seconds later, the three-way struggle pauses, two of its members suddenly yawning.
"What the-"
"Why am I-"
"Wait, what's- hey!"
While both of the prime offenders pass out almost immediately, Peacemaker Tan actually manages to push through the magically enforced slumber. You aren't sure if that's because too much of the spell's energy was used up knocking out the other two or if Tan is just that strong-willed, but either way, you'll take it as a win.
"What just happened?" the boy in question wonders, looking past the pair who are out on their feet and at the rest of you. "And wait, when did the American guy get here?"
"What happened is, I cast a Spell of Sleep," you offer helpfully, "and I got here right about the part where she" - you point at the girl who's still awake - "was NOT shouting."
"...oh, so that was you that startled them earlier. Well, thanks for that - and for this," Tan adds, nodding at the sleep-standing pair. "I have to ask, though: how long are they going to be like this?"
"As long as they aren't slapped or anything similarly forceful, they'll sleep for the next quarter of an hour," you reply.
"Okay," the still-conscious girl says, "that sounds amazingly useful."
It HAS come in handy at times, although there are limits...
Anyway, after a quick discussion between the three friends, it's agreed that Tan and the other boy - who's released his hold on the girl, now that she's not spoiling to join the fight - will carry their unconscious friend back to their dorm, while the ladies stay put.
As for you, seeing as how you've been told that the roots of the quarrel are a long-standing family issue of the pair who can't currently comment about it, you feel that asking further questions on the matter would be inappropriate.
That said...
Thinking on it, two students being seen hauling a third, unconscious individual around the campus would probably get them in as much trouble as being caught fighting. One girl being found standing watch over a second, unconscious one without trying to wake her up likely wouldn't go over too well, either.
Since you were the one who knocked the quarreling duo out, you offer a couple of safeguards, which the other three students are quite happy to accept.
The necessary modification to the Spell of Levitation to make it affect two targets at once is nothing, and as for hiding everyone from sight, it would be easiest to just cast a Sphere of Invisibility over the entire group, since that will allow all of you to see each other even as it conceals you from the rest of the School. Visually, anyway.
You hold off on casting the Sphere until the three conscious individuals are certain they can move their floating friends about without waking them-
"This is so weird," the girl notes.
"Tell me about it," Tan replies.
-and just get used to seeing people they know hang in mid-air in defiance of gravity, while unconscious.
Once that's done, you disappear everyone and accompany them back to their dormitory.
Do you have anything to say along the way?
Yeah, if you want to maximize everybody's chances of not getting into trouble, keeping quiet is the way to go.
...
Actually, you DO take a moment to speak, but only to warn your three conscious companions that the Spell of Invisibility doesn't interfere with hearing, touch, or smell - not that the last is likely to be an issue, but the first two do bear mentioning.
"I was going to say, 'What happens if we run into someone?'," the girl whose name you still haven't gotten mentions, "but I guess that answers that."
"How long do we have?" the likewise still-unnamed boy asks.
"Both spells will last about fifteen minutes."
"Plenty of time to get back to the dorm, as long as we don't waste any of it," Tan concludes.
After that, the four of you do your best to remain undetected.
As you proceed, you can't help but notice a certain nervousness in the expressions and body language of your temporary associates. It's not a serious thing, but it's there, and it grows particularly pronounced the first time they catch sight of another person out for an evening stroll - and then again the second time.
Such reactions are fairly readily explained by this being the trio's first experience with being invisible, and possibly NOT their first time sneaking around the grounds to avoid getting into trouble.
Regardless, you reach the dorm without incident, which is where Tan finally breaks silence.
"So how do we do this?" he whispers. "Because invisible or not, I have serious doubts we'd be able to walk inside without being noticed, much less make it all the way to the bunks to drop these two off."
It's a bit of a pessimistic statement, but given the number of people you saw in this dorm this afternoon and the amount of activity you can see and hear now, you tend to agree with it.
"I can dismiss the levitation and invisibility," you reply in a hushed tone. "Or you could take them and just walk away from me; the invisibility will wear off past about ten feet-"
"What's that in meters?" the unnamed boy asks.
"-just over three. And the levitation will keep going for... about sixty feet, or eighteen meters."
"So we could carry them in and make it look like they were unconscious for normal reasons?" the guy speculates.
Almost immediately, Tan and the girl shake their heads.
"Not a good idea," Tan says.
"Yeah, some of our roommates would sell us out in a heartbeat."
No loyalty among fellow students?
The girl nods at the two sleepers. "It's more that their arguing has used up most of people's patience and goodwill. The rest of us just get screwed by association."
Ah.
It's shortly decided that the boys will take their snoozing compatriot out of the field of invisibility near the shadowed side of the dorm, where you release him from the Spell of Levitation. Once he's gently on the ground, Tan takes a certain well-earned satisfaction in waking the other guy up.
"I'm up, I'm up! I was- wait, where am I, what happened- oh, did that witch KNOCK ME-!"
"SSSSHHHH!"
"We'll explain in a minute," Tan hisses. "For now, no, Lan didn't knock you out, we got you back to the dorm without anybody seeing you, and shut up while we get inside-!"
There is some silent glaring, but the boy says nothing as he joins his friends in making like everything is Perfectly Normal as they head inside. Neither Tan nor the quarrelsome boy look back, but the last boy does linger for a moment, looking around nervously as if expecting somebody to leap out and catch them.
Or maybe for you and the girls to just appear out of nowhere?
Whatever the case, you wait a minute or so before repeating the process with the girls. Lan is a bit less grouchy when she comes to, although like her opponent, she almost immediately wants to know if "that thug" was responsible for her unconsciousness. Her friend assures her that wasn't the case, and when asked how she managed to carry someone close to her own size all the way back to the dorm, she cheerfully tells her friend, "You're lighter than you look."
Lan looks like she doesn't know how to take that remark, which clearly annoys her, and is grumbling in annoyance as she heads inside. The other girl trails behind long enough to spare a glance and a wave in your general direction before following.
You turn to leave-
!
-and pause as shouting erupts inside the dorm.
From the voices involved, the family feud is on once again.
Maybe you should have waited a bit longer before waking Lan up?
Ah, well. You'll know better next time. If there is a next time...
Seeing as how it's nearly nine o'clock, you decide to cut your wandering walk of the grounds short and start heading back to your dorm.
Taking advantage of the handful of minutes that remain for your Sphere of Invisibility - which is really more like a personal Spell of Invisibility, now that everyone else has left its bounds - you put some distance between yourself and the dormitory.
You make it most of the way back to your current accommodations before the magic threatens to finally lapse. Rather than risk appearing out of thin air in front of some passing stranger, you look around for an out-of-the-way spot with plenty of visual coverage - behind another row of bushes, as it happens - and dismiss the spell while you're walking through it.
You don't run into anybody the rest of the way to the dorm, but it's the thought and the lack of surprised martial artists with highly trained combat reflexes that count.
Surprisingly, you are NOT the last of your group to return to the guest dorm this evening; that honor goes to Cordy and Briar, who wander in a few minutes behind you, about five minutes past nine. When asked how their visit was-
"Great!" Cordelia replies brightly. "You know, as long as you don't count the shouting match two idiots decided to have near the end."
-well, that.
It hasn't been long enough since your magically aided nap for you to start feeling tired, so you're going to stay up and finish reading The Illusion of Separation, and at least get started on the books that you copied.
Among those three, what was your preference?
Must. Resist. Urge. To. Comment.
You're less likely to reveal a secret if you don't let on that you know it in the first place.
You're also less likely to catch any heat from Cordelia for messing up the tail end of her socializing.
And so, although it is an unnatural state of affairs, you hold your tongue.
Lu-sensei was already aware of your unusual sleeping habits, so he doesn't have any objections to your plan to stay up until midnight.
Lily Blaisdell is a bit less easily convinced, but between Lu's assurance that you aren't hurting yourself, Briar's eye- or ear-witness testimony that you've long since mastered the Art of Being Quiet While Everybody Else Is Asleep, your own input about the power of the Restful Blankets, and the simple fact that the combination of teleport lag and your magically aided afternoon nap have left you too awake to sleep any time soon, she eventually concedes the point.
As for the rest of your group, Cordelia is the only one who didn't have a nap at some point since your arrival - but then again, she was operating off of a different time zone to begin with, so she may genuinely not have needed the rest. Whatever the case, she makes no fuss about heading off to bed. Amy accompanies her back to their shared room, her own magically induced but otherwise mundane afternoon nap only having given her so much energy, and while Briar goes along to see those two to sleep, she notes she'll be back to keep an eye on you for the remainder of the night.
You would ask where your partner found this lack of trust in your ability to stay out of trouble in a completely new environment, but prior events have given her far too much ammunition to use against you - so once again, you say nothing.
Larry, on the other hand, does stay up for another hour, leveraging his grandmother's agreement on your part - however grudgingly - to make his own case. Given your plan to spend the time reading, the lack of other kids around to offer a distraction, and a distinct lack of interest in squeezing in even more martial arts training - something Lu-sensei doesn't really support this close to bedtime anyway - there isn't a whole lot left for your friend to do. He spends a while talking with his grandmother about her feelings on the day, as well as her plans for the lectures she'll be participating in, and then some more time chatting with Briar, but it's not even ten o'clock when Larry decides that he is done for the day and heads to your side of the dorm.
In that time, you're able to polish off most of the remainder of The Illusion of Separation.
Chapter Six of the book was dedicated to the foundational exercise of Ki Control. Ki Enhancement's contribution to this technique is to build up the body's natural ability to channel and process ki, not actually changing WHAT it was already doing, instead simply enabling it to do MORE of that in the same span of time. Ki Perception slots in because it's extremely difficult to exert any level of conscious control upon a force you can't detect. Not entirely impossible, the book notes, but frustrating enough that most students with poor awareness of their ki tend to have poor control as well.
Ki Infusion and Ki Projection's interactions with Ki Control would seem to be equally straightforward, allowing you to push your energies through mediums that aren't naturally its domain, whether natural or artificial, biological or elemental, living or dead or non-living. The book notes that this is true enough, but adds that things are a bit trickier; in a way, the basic ability to focus your ki can be viewed as an expression of Ki Infusion or Ki Projection, because for all that ki exists naturally within your body, various techniques require you to direct the energy to and concentrate it within parts of your being that it wouldn't naturally go to. Which side of the Infusion/Projection divide these skills fall upon depends in large part on how long they're meant to operate, with effectively instantaneous moves such as Body Flicker being more akin to Ki Projection, whereas lasting ones like your current use of Ki Literacy are closer to Ki Infusion.
Finally - and aside from yet again being the ultimate power source for everything - Ki Generation's main contribution to Ki Control comes in over time. As one's command of their energies increases, the composition and distribution of one's ki is slowly altered in ways that make it easier to direct and efficiently utilize, in accordance with whatever it's already been used for. The author doesn't go into too much detail about this process, but he compares it to how the body can build muscle in different ways depending on the exercises you engage in; just as runners are built differently from power-lifters, who in turn differ from gymnasts, who are themselves distinct from swimmers, someone who utilizes ki primarily for Enhancement will have a distinctly different aura from one who focused heavily on Projection, and both will be distinct from an adept focused on Perception. It's this process that makes ki-users stand out from regular people when viewed through the various ki-based sensory skills and magical means of detection.
d
Chapter Seven of The Illusion of Separation, not quite the last in the book, covered Ki Generation and how the other fundamental techniques affected its function and uses.
With Ki Enhancement, it was a simple matter of augmenting your body's natural production of ki, first in short bursts of light effort, then in longer stretches, and then alternating between brief bouts of high intensity and extended periods of low but still elevated activity. In this way, an adept gradually accustoms their body to creating more ki in a set period of time and storing more of it over the long run. The author notes that Ki Enhancement can also be used to augment other aspects of ki besides quantity, but doesn't offer any insights into what those qualities are or how such changes might be made.
Ki Perception is noted as a CRITICAL skill to develop if one means to make serious use of those advanced forms of Ki Generation, as without it, your first warning that you've done something wrong may be you blacking out, experiencing a sudden widespread weakness of the body, or any of a score of other ailments that can be the result of poor ki flows. The basic exercises for building up one's ki reserves and recovery are safe enough that such threats are extremely unlikely to occur in an otherwise healthy person, in which cases Ki Perception mostly just serves to make the process quicker and easier.
In their basic interactions with Ki Generation, Ki Infusion and Ki Projection once again go slightly against their common definitions and functions, as they are utilized together to help your body's ki system expand beyond its original bounds. One cannot simply use Ki Enhancement alone to build up power, or the body will eventually reach a level of capacity it cannot safely exceed. To continue growing, one must move a portion of their increased ki into the outer edges of their existing ki channels, gradually reinforcing them to handle greater power and then building them thicker and sturdier, until they are not only able to contain and channel more power, but also become able to support additional connections, making the entire network more robust. In both cases, the process involves pushing ki where it did not originally go, which is where Ki Projection comes in.
Finally, there is Ki Control, whose most outstanding contribution to Ki Generation is the ability to alter your body's production and usage of ki consciously and precisely. With poor Control, an adept would obviously use more energy more quickly, resulting not only in expensive and wasteful effort and greater recovery times, but also the risk of self-harm due to using too much power at once. With good Control, it's not only possible to do the basic full-body Generation exercises more efficiently and safely, it becomes practical to use small-scale techniques, like the cultivation of those additional connections mentioned previously.
This, the book notes, is one area where more power is NOT a good thing, at least not without the commensurate skill to wield it precisely. Trying to force a new ki channel into existence all at once is apparently intensely painful, not to mention potentially crippling or deadly, and even the slow, steady process of developing them is not exactly comfortable - though also not really any worse than the "burn" of physical exercise, once one gets accustomed to it.
The final chapter of the book is largely a summary of the points of previous chapters, although collected all in one place for more convenient comparison and consideration.
All in all, The Illusion of Separation offered no truly groundbreaking insights or ancient secrets, but it did give you some things to think about.
Gained Ki Literacy F (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
And also a good amount of practice with your new technique.
There wouldn't be much point in having brought all the Blankets with you if you didn't at least offer the use of them to your friends.
As it happens, Amy and Cordelia accept the offer and agree to share the two-person Blanket you originally made for your parents, if only to see what the fuss is about.
When you extend the same offer to Larry later, he passes. As rested as he was following that four-hours-in-one afternoon nap, he figures that if he tries for a repeat, he'll probably wake up at midnight and then not be able to get back to sleep at all.
Which is fair.
You go back to your reading, opening up your book to the copy of the pamphlet on Ki Generation. It promises to be a short read...
You get out the Conjured Book and open it up to the page where you copied down the contents of Ki and You, Part Six.
Considering this was just a pamphlet, there isn't a huge amount to take in, and the fact that it's all written as introductory material for new and fairly young trainees means it takes you very little time to read through - you manage it in less than ten minutes.
Even more so than The Illusion of Separation, these pages don't offer any new information or insights about what Ki Generation is or involves. They're not poorly written or anything; indeed, for all that this was a relatively late part of a larger series that was almost certainly intended to be read together, Ki and You avoids making reference to those other sections, and has little footnotes and captions explaining common ki-related terms, the writer(s) clearly having anticipated that their work might not be read in order or even in its entirety.
All in all, it seems like the brochure would be a useful resource for newbie ki adepts. It's just that your own knowledge, incomplete though it might be, is too advanced to gain any real benefit.
That said, you might have to hunt down the other five (or more) "chapters" in the series to make copies. Your friends probably don't need them either, but Zelda IS due to start lessons at Lu-sensei's this fall; give it a few months to a year to make sure she's got a genuine interest in the art, and this "introduction to kung fu magic" might be right up her alley...
Anyway, with that section having been a bit of a bust, you flip to the copied pages of Frame Work. There are quite a few more of them, enough so that even with your speed-reading trick, you still haven't finished the "book" by the time midnight rolls around - more like two-thirds of it. That is more than enough to have verified the quality of the contents that your previous magical summary suggested.
As you expected, while the early chapters talked about the foundational Ki Enhancement technique and the popular Body Flicker, they didn't reveal anything you hadn't already been taught by Lu-sensei, worked out on your own, or stolen from other ki-users you've encountered. The section on Ki Armor proved similarly devoid of useful tips, even though you aren't nearly as practiced in that ability as you are the other two, but you did pick up a few things from the section on Substitution - a skill you really don't use that often, for all that it's supposed to be one of the elementary skills of the ninja.
Or so the (copied) book claims.
Gained Substitution E (Plus)
Although it is tempting to stay up and keep reading, breaking your word to your chaperones is no way to end the first day of your vacation. With that in mind, you close and pocket the Conjured Book, turn off the lights-
"Zzzz..."
"Hey, Briar."
"Zzzz..."
"Hey! Listen!"
"Gwah!"
-and wake up your snoozing partner to let her know you're calling it a night, before padding down the hall to the dorm, a grouchy fairy drifting along in your wake. Fortunately, you have your toothbrush and toothpaste stowed in your pocket, so you can just head straight to the bathroom instead of fumbling around in the boys' dorm...
A few minutes later and with that minty fresh tingle in your mouth, you make your way to your room to call it a night.
With the lights off, the Spell of Mind Blank up, and your light footsteps, you are confident in your ability to sneak past Lu-sensei-
"If that's you padding around, Alex, stop making like a ninja already, it upsets my reflexes."
-at least until he goes from "totally asleep" to speaking softly.
You pause for a moment.
As you tuck yourself in, you contemplate your reserves. Your mana and mental energies are high enough that they ought to fully recover by morning, unless of course you go on another involved Dreamwalking expedition. Your ki, on the other hand, is low enough that you're concerned even a low-effort psychic journey might prevent it from reaching full replenishment by morning.
"Good night, Sensei."
Walking a little more obviously, you go to bed.
One round of Dreamwalking every twenty four hours is probably enough, you figure, as you close your eyes to rest.
"Night, Briar."
"Night, Alex."
...
After laying there for maybe a quarter of an hour without feeling the slightest bit sleepy, you give and ritually render yourself unconscious.
Even with that, the next time you open your eyes, it's about five in the morning, and you still feel a little groggy, as if you've overslept. As you wake up a bit more, you run through your energy reserves, noting that all of them have topped off-
?
-except for your ki, which is much lower than it should be after what SHOULD have been the equivalent of an eleven-hour sleep, courtesy of your Restful Blanket.
Unless the Blanket didn't work, because you already used it once today? Or yesterday, whichever. Or maybe it's not the Blanket, per se, but rather your own body's inability to undergo that accelerated resting process twice in the same twenty-four hour period? You know that the Spell of Nap Stacking that you used as the basis for the enchantment on your Restful Blankets could only work once per week for any given subject; you THOUGHT you'd eliminated that function when you empowered the Blankets, but maybe you just reduced it to once per day/night instead?
That you could have missed this trait of your creations for so long is a bit embarrassing, but then again, when was the last time you tried to sleep in your own bed twice in the same day, or thought to make use of one of the Restful Blankets on a trip?
In hindsight, it's a fortunate thing that Larry didn't want to use the Restful Blankets last night.
Anyway, one other point in your morning routine that needs consideration is your Spell of Mind Blank, which is starting to run low. You'll need to do something about that, but it IS an eighth-circle spell, which puts it beyond the limits your hosts have asked you to observe while on their property.
You could theoretically just create a Mirror Hideaway in the bathroom and take care of the issue there; you know from long experience in Sunnydale that the signatures of spells cast on the Mirror Plane don't extend to the Material. That said, you can't be sure the School's wards wouldn't react to you creating the extra-dimensional space. It's not the same as teleportation, but it IS a form of Summoning Magic all the same, and so might set off the same alarm that your arrival did.
Perhaps you should wake up Lu-sensei to get permission, instead? Or, if you'd rather let the old man with the anti-ninja reflexes sleep undisturbed - and you have to admit that you kind of would, if only to ensure you don't get ENLIGHTENED first thing in the morning - you could try to hunt down another master. At five-ish in the morning.
Raising a Private Sanctum is another option, as would be just hiking far enough up the road from the School to be outside the wards. You suppose that NOT using Mind Blank, and instead employing a lesser spell like Nondetection is also technically an option, but it's one that has your self-preservation instincts flaring up in protest.
You've been using the Mirror Hideaway casting trick for a year now without issue, and that on (and around) the Hellmouth, which you know has Mayor Wilkins keeping an eye on it, to say nothing of how many of the local population are magically gifted or just sensitive to supernatural energies. If using a temporary room on the Mirror Plane to cast spells has been that safe for that long in Sunnydale, you can see no reason why it wouldn't be similarly secure here at the School of Five Elements.
Your only concern is whether or not the use of Summoning Magic will trip the wards, and thinking back, nothing was said that really suggested the School's wards will go off in response to a particular TYPE of magic, just the SCALE of it. There's every possibility that it does actually work that way, and the masters were just keeping up some sensible security practices - such as not telling the perfect stranger how your first line of supernatural defense works - but if that's the case, any imminent alarms are as much on them as on you.
And if the wards DON'T go off... well, not only will you get your morning magic routine taken care of, you'll also have identified a potential vulnerability in the School's wards. It occurs to you that the masters might be interested in knowing about such a thing, BEFORE something comes crawling out of their mirrors...
Remembering not to step TOO lightly, on pain of surly Sensei, you exit the dorm room and head for the bath. None of the mirrors behind the sinks are completely ideal for your purpose, due to their limited size and awkward placement when compared to the old security mirror you have in the basement at home, but they're still large enough that you could "crawl" through, and a simple Ritual of Levitation handles most of the issues with elevation and angle.
One additional ritual later, and ripples are expanding across the face of your chosen mirror from the point where you touched it. You pause there and wait for a time, listening for an alarm and scanning for the approach of a master, but when five minutes have gone by without either manifesting, you call it good and pull your floating body through the glass portal - your right side turned towards the floor to ensure you'll fit.
On a side note, you were kind of hoping that being off of the Hellmouth would do something about that sensation of frigid knives sliding along your skin as you enter the mirror. In that regard, you are sadly disappointed.
Once inside the Mirror Hideaway - which doesn't look meaningfully different than the one(s) you've been (re-)using for all these months in Sunnydale - you get on with casting the Spell of Mind Blank. As you're shaping the formula, it occurs to you that you could save a fair bit of time and energy by extending the duration of the ward a couple of degrees. If you simultaneously cut down on the spell's range, you could keep it to the level of a ninth-circle spell, avoiding any potential issues of working tenth-tier magic.
By the time you've exited the Mirror Hideaway and splashed a bit of water on your face to finish waking up and get the sleep out of your eyes, it's still shy of five thirty. There's an early breakfast coming up at six, but what would you like to do until then?
Thinking on it, it would be considerably more efficient for you to cast Mind Blank a couple of times a month, rather than to continue doing so daily. Given your typical use of rituals in setting up the Mirror Hideaway and renewing your anti-scrying defense, and the time necessary to get down to the basement from your bedroom and then back up to the kitchen without making too much noise, that's a good fifteen minutes a day saved, fifteen days out of every sixteen - or about seven hours a month.
Not a huge amount, especially given its spread-out nature, but enough that being able to reclaim it for other purposes - even if those just work out to a little extra time to read, do your morning exercises, or enjoy a good breakfast - make it worthwhile.
With other parts of your daily routine, you might worry about a loss of progress or impact from leaving something undone for such a relatively long period of time, or perhaps forget to do it. That's not really a concern with a spell like Mind Blank: as long as it has the necessary energy, it'll keep performing its job to the best of its (and your) ability; and its presence is too obvious - and its current energy reserves too easily determined - for you to really overlook the need for renewal when it comes around.
You suppose there had to be some upsides to the easily-detected nature of magical enhancements...
With your defense restored and set to continue for a VERY long while, you stand next to your Hideaway's exit portal, lie down on empty air, and haul yourself through the Mirror.
Lu-sensei, who is just about to take the keen edge of a facial razor to a misbehaving bit of his beard, isn't QUITE brandishing the small blade at you as you clamber out of the glass. Then again, the old man can move his hands VERY fast when he wants to, and your hands preceded your head on the way back into the Material...
"...left your other mirror at home, I take it?" your teacher manages after a moment.
"Yeah," you admit, as you pull your legs from the glass. Returning to a more parallel stance with gravity, you add, "But on the up-side, I shouldn't need to do this again while we're here."
"...good. That's... good." He pauses. "It is good, right?"
Probably?
Leaving your master to his morning ablutions, you head back down to the central room and get out Frame Work. Even with Ki Literacy, you're only able to get through another chapter and a half before you feel like you should stop and be on your way to breakfast.
Amy and Cordelia are both up and feeling VERY well-rested after their use of your double-model Restful Blanket, although the two of them also mention waking up briefly around one in the morning and having enough trouble getting back to sleep that Amy ended up working a little witchcraft to help them get through the rest of the wee hours.
That IS part of the reason why you stay up until midnight.
Lily Blaisdell is also awake, but Larry and Briar are both no-shows.
Did you want to wake either of them? Nobody else seems particularly inclined to.
Also, when you get to the dining hall, where did you want to sit?
If two of your friends are tired enough not to get up before six in the morning and nobody else is inclined to wake them, you're not going to be the one to take precious sleep away from them.
Granted, they're going to miss breakfast, but it's not like there isn't a mid-morning meal being served in a few hours.
You figure that you have enough things to discuss with the adults that you should probably sit with them for this meal, so that you aren't talking across half the dining hall.
Plus, you know, you've sat with everyone else (apart from the masters, which would really be presuming), so it's only fair that you spend at least one meal at their table.
As you enter the dining hall, you realize that there's another reason for you to sit with the adults this time, that being how few people there are. Where your previous meals were taken in company with hundreds, a quick head count turns up only about four dozen, most of those being in their third decade of life or later.
After getting a hearty breakfast to start the day, you head to the instructors' table and ask if there's room.
That gets some surprised looks, but when you explain your intentions - and make a brief gesture at the largely empty remainder of the room - a few seats are shuffled to make room.
"So, what brings you to our side of the breakfast table?" one of the teachers asks.
"Well, for starters, I was wondering if you, sir" - you nod at the fellow who seemed to know something about the doomed Antarctic archaeological expedition Elder Tiriaq told you about - "had managed to recall whatever it was that was bugging you about my South Pole story."
"I haven't, actually," he admits with a frustrated frown. "I know I read it in a book, but there's nothing in my own collection about Antarctica, and when I checked with the library, all they had were some atlases, encyclopedia articles, and a few nature books. It's kind of annoying, if I'm being honest."
Huh.
Aside from the Antarctic Question and the matter of the School's wards perhaps not being set up to block unauthorized travel from the Mirror Plane, is there anything else you want to discuss with the adults?
You pause for a bite of toast, swallow, and then say, "If it's causing you that much irritation, I could try to help you remember whatever it is that you've forgotten."
"You're a therapist, now?" someone chuckles.
"No, but I have studied mind magic," you reply. "And while I don't know a spell SPECIFICALLY for helping other people recall lost memories, I do have a few that come close enough that I think they could be useful."
You're thinking of the Spell of the Investigative Mind, in particular. Adapting it to work on another person instead of on yourself would be straightforward enough; the only real issue is whether or not "something about Antarctica that I'm forgetting" is a precise enough topic to properly trigger the magic.
If it doesn't work, you can try a ritual.
"...you know what?" the instructor says after a moment of thoughtful silence. "I think I'll do it."
"What, really?" one of his neighbors asks.
"It's been bugging me off and on since yesterday, and I don't see a reason for it to stop bugging me unless or until I figure out what it is that I'm forgetting." He turns to you. "When would we be doing this, and how long would it take?"
"I'm thinking after breakfast," you admit. "And probably five minutes at the outside - or maybe as little as five seconds, if the first spell I want to try works out."
"Works for me."
As you consider what else to talk about, a thought occurs that has you taking note of the low number of students, and how it will only increase over time.
"While we're on the subject of 'Other Weird Things That I Can Do'," you say in a lower tone that you think shouldn't carry to those kids who are present, "do any of you have any questions specifically for me that you might not want to ask in front of the whole school?"
That gets some startled looks from your friends as well as the instructors, but several of the adults do seem to be considering saying something.
"I've got one," one of those says in a similarly quiet voice, as he leans forward slightly with an intent look. "When you were talking about your Shadow going vampire hunting yesterday, you sounded a little too relaxed with the idea. Now, I get that it's VAMPIRES, and they ABSOLUTELY have it coming-"
There are nods from all around the table.
"-most people find the whole 'possessed walking corpse' thing disgusting on general principle-"
Again with the general bobbing of the heads.
"-and nobody's going to mourn them," he sort-of concludes, to a third round of nodding. "BUT, you were still talking about over thirty... existences... ended in one night, and sounding fairly casual about it."
Ah. You think you know where this is heading...
"So, while I don't mean to offer offense or sound judgmental, I think I have to ask: how often have you seen lethal use of force?"
There is a stir among the instructors at that, and not just for one reason. Some of them look annoyed with their compatriot, while others are visibly startled, and more considering the question and your reponse to it.
For your part, it's not quite what you were expecting; you'd figured the instructor was going to ask you who and what you'd killed.
...then again, he could be leading up to that.
How do you want to answer the question?
You decide to stick to just the number of deadly combat encounters you've had.
...
The fact that you have to stop and count to be sure of them all is a bit concerning, as the change in the expressions of many of your audience makes clear.
"A bit more than a dozen, at least that I can recall off the top of my head," you reply. To the looks of outright dismay that prompts, you add, "Most of those involved undead, demons, spiritual entities, and/or summoned creatures, if that helps any?"
"...it doesn't, honestly," somebody notes.
"I don't know, things that aren't technically alive-"
"-he already said, screw the bloodsuckers-"
"Fighting spirits, though?"
"'Most'," the instructor who started this line of conversation off repeats. "But not 'all'."
"No, not all," you have to admit. "If you want more details, though, I'd prefer to discuss them somewhere less public."
He seriously considers that. "Is Lu Tze aware of your experiences?"
"He is, yes. He was involved with several of them, if a bit indirectly in a couple of cases-"
There's that whole business in Hawaii, for one - or perhaps for three. Your teacher wasn't present for your battle with Arrogante or your final tag-team showdown with the Hawaiian Sorcerer, but he did a thorough job of kicking the man around your hotel room and out the window with a primed-to-go-BOOM Fireball-equivalent still in his hands.
Likewise, there's everything that went down before, during, and after the World Martial Arts Tournament, although as per prior requests, you're not going to bring that up in general conversation if you can reasonably avoid it.
"-and we've discussed most of the others."
"Then I can probably go without the details, at least until I've had a chance to confer with your master on the subject."
You sense a mix of Genuinely Concerned Adult and Inscrutable Martial Arts Etiquette at work here. For the former, it's easily enough to tell that this instructor - and no few of his peers - aren't comfortable with the idea of someone your age having THAT much exposure to lethal combat. For the latter, it's probably a case of, "Thou shalt not interfere with another teacher's student unless thou hast reason to believe that the teacher is not doing right by the student," or words to that effect.
"Leaving matters of mortal combat aside for the time being, then," you continue, looking up and down the table, "was there anything else anyone wanted to ask about that they'd rather not be generally heard?"
You wait a moment.
"...actually, yes," a woman asks. "There is. So, there's a lot of references in the library to wizards throwing around elemental forces, and how they're generally just better at that sort of thing than martial artists-"
You nod, waiting for the actual question.
"-and of course, we've ALL run into some reckless spell-slinger who calls up a Fireball-"
You nod again, the movement echoed by most of the instructors, with those who don't do so instead sighing or snorting.
"-so, I was wondering, regardless of the actual element involved, just how big an explosion could you cause?"
There are some groans.
"Really?"
"Come on..."
"Actually, I kind of want to know..."
"Who doesn't love a good explosion?"
"To answer the question," you say, while idly considering that this is the third conversation in less than a day where this particular piece of magic has come up, "the spell with the largest blast radius that I'm currently capable of reliably casting is called Sunburst..."
Aside from the inquiry about large-scale explosions-
"I mean, I could probably throw together something even bigger than a Sunburst," you admit after describing the solar spell. "It's just that without having worked all the effects out ahead of time, that's the sort of experimentation that can put you in the hospital pretty quickly."
-another of the instructors asks after ways that low-end, relatively widely-available magic might be used to cheat in studies, tests, and training exercises.
The fact that you have to stop and think about THIS question actually seems to amuse some of the teachers-
"Okay, so there's the Spell of Guidance, which can give a small boost to almost any course of action. It only works the one time, but it's a spell of the zeroth-circle, meaning it's so simple to use that even novices can potentially use it endlessly. Then there's the Message Spell..."
-at least until you start listing off magical methods of padding one's grades.
At that point, they start looking concerned again, if for entirely different reasons from before.
After a time, and with the increasing number of students in the dining hall, you let the "forbidden topics" go and ask if these more experienced speakers-in-class have any tips for someone about to give their first lectures at the School of Five Elements.
They do, and while some of it just echoes what guidance Master Todo already offered you on the subject-
Be prepared for questions.
Make sure everyone can hear and understand you, but don't strain your voice.
Have a glass of water available, but don't overdo it.
-you also get a few new pointers.
"Don't let any attending masters intimidate you just because they're there," one says frankly. "You're the lecturer, and they are part of the audience - and in this case, you're also the expert on a subject they have... less understanding of. Their task is to listen, inquire, and learn; yours is to teach - and to not. Lose. Your patience," he adds with a note of old frustration that has you frowning and glancing at some of the other adults for an explanation.
"He's just remembering that time he had to explain to the old masters how the new computer program and the overhead projectors worked together," someone replies teasingly.
"It is NOT that difficu-!" The first speaker catches himself and takes a slow breath. "No. No, I am not going there again."
"'Why does it need so many F buttons?'" another voice quotes in a taunting tone.
"I will break a keyboard over your head, don't think I won't!"
Perhaps it's a coincidence that, at that moment, somebody up at the masters' table cackles in amusement.
You suspect otherwise.
Once the threats of peripheral violence have died down, and perhaps inspired by that instructor's... clearly lingering trauma... you inquire of the adults if they know of anyone that could benefit from magical healing.
"There's nobody in the infirmary at the moment," one of them replies promptly, before glancing at the rest of the table. "Unless something happened since last night...?"
There is a general shaking of heads.
"That's good to know, but I'm not just talking about physical trauma," you say, before providing a slightly more detailed explanation of the sort of conditions you can and have magically treated.
Honesty compels you to admit that you still haven't fully tested Heal on a human subject, a point that - when combined with it effectively being an eighth-tier spell in your hands - makes some of your audience visibly wary.
On the other hand, when you bring up the Spell of Regeneration and get past the standard uses of rapidly re-growing limbs, fusing bones, and undoing organ damage to talk about your experimental use of it to treat Hakuba Kojirou's arthritis and other age-related conditions, the sudden sense of Intent Listening from the masters' table is enough to make you feel a bit like a small forest critter in front of a hungry Wolfos.
From the sidelong glances and uneasy shifting going around, you aren't the only one to have picked up on that.
There are no immediate takers to your offer, but a number of the teachers have that look that says they're thinking about it.
Once you've finished breakfast, you linger a bit while that one instructor with the nagging memory hurries to clean the rest of his plate, and then the two of you step outside for a little magic.
You draw an audience, of course.
You have no particular issue with casting in public, but since you're going to be poking around in someone else's head, you decide to check with the instructor first. "Are you okay with doing this in public?"
"It's not going to make me confess my deepest secrets for all to hear, is it?"
"Definitely not."
"Lesser secrets?"
"No forced confessions of any kind should result," you clarify. "I suppose you COULD blurt something out due to surprise, shock, or some other emotional reaction associated with the recollection, but that would be your reaction, rather than the active intent of my spell."
"In that case, I'm fine with it." He pauses, considers the crowd for a moment, and adds, "At least as long as we find a seat or something..."
So you do that instead, finding a set of moss-padded stones and smoothed-out wood like the place Lu-sensei showed you for that group meditation yesterday. As you and your "patient" take seats across from one another, a crowd forms around you of a couple dozen early-morning risers - mostly from those that were in the mess hall when you were talking about this, with a few later arrivals and a couple of folks who saw the crowd while headed elsewhere and came over to rubberneck.
"Alright," the man says, having settled into a relaxed cross-legged pose atop a rock. "What do you need me to do?"
"Just relax, and try to lower your mental defenses..."
Fortunately, you understand how ki can be used to buffer the mind against various unwanted effects, and also how to voluntarily bring those shields down, so you don't have to spend a minute or three translating arcane terminology into the martial vernacular.
Once he's reached a suitable state, you begin with the Spell of the Investigative Mind, bumping it up to touch range and reaching out to tap the target on the forehead for a little symbolic boost.
Then you ask, "What did you forget about Antarctica?"
The teacher frowns-
?
-and slowly says, "Penguins do not exclusively live there."
...
Okay, so, ignoring the muffled snickers from certain audience members, the spell seems to be working, you just need to give it a more precise question to make sure it's aimed at the right information. Fortunately, you have multiple chances, a fact you explain before using the second such attempt: "What do you know about a university expedition to Antarctica from about a century ago that you're currently forgetting?"
...
The instructor's eyes bug out. "'At the Mountains of Madness'?" he exclaims suddenly. "Are you telling me that LOVECRAFT was RIGHT?"
"I mean, he COULD have been right, or he COULD have just taken inspiration from the incident," you reply. "I haven't actually read any of the man's works, so I can't be sure. Still, considering how hit-and-miss most books about Dracula and the Frankensteins are compared to the real things-"
"Wait, Dracula's real?" somebody in the crowd asks.
"Of course he's real-"
"Who's Frankenstein?"
"You know, the big zombie-looking guy with the bolts in his neck-"
"That's Frankenstein's MONSTER, Frankenstein himself was human. ...well, supposedly."
"-as I was saying," you continue, raising your voice a little, "considering how inaccurate those are, or how modern fairy tales measure up to the originals, I doubt that Lovecraft's works would be much better. Really, it would be surprising if any book available to the general public was even half right about anything mystical."
"So you're saying that there ISN'T an abandoned, antediluvian alien city inhabited by giant blind penguins and at least one immortal, shape-shifting slime monster in the mountains of Antarctica?" the instructor asks intently.
"...maybe?" you offer with some confusion. "What's this about giant penguins and... antewhatsit?"
You aren't sure if your Tongues Spell experienced a brief glitch with that one or not, because it sounds like it tried to translate something said in Chinese to your native English, only to wind up coming out in Latin...?
The instructor explains that, in the book, the protagonists discover six-foot-tall blind penguins wandering about part of the ancient ruins. The animals are unusually docile, which leads the human explorers to speculate that they might be descended from livestock once kept by the aliens. The penguins were also evidently the primary food source for the formless horror dwelling within the abandoned city...
As for the word "antediluvian," someone in the crowd informs you that the term originally referred to the time before the Biblical Flood, "ante" and "diluvium" being the Latin words for "before" and "deluge," respectively. It's since become more broadly applied to describe things of incredible antiquity, such as dinosaurs, ridiculously outdated social mores, or abandoned cities of alien architecture that pre-date the evolution of the human species.
You shake your head. "Like I said, I haven't read anything by Lovecraft, so I can't really comment on the contents - and I haven't visited the site in question, nor am I likely to. As I said yesterday, the local shaman said there was something nasty in the area, and that Bad Things happened to the last group of foreigners who thought they didn't have to listen to the local superstitions and went looking for whatever it was."
Granted, you may end up looking into those mountains one day, because you object to horrible things being allowed to lurk too close to friends and family on general principle. It's just that you have your hands full and your schedule booked for the foreseeable future, without taking on the task of researching, exploring, and possibly fumigating a mountain range-slash-city, not to mention that whatever is out there, it's apparently been content to keep its tentacular pseudopods to itself for centuries or even millennia - as otherwise, the Southern Water Tribe would have more stories about it, even if they ended like, "and the next time someone visited, the entire village had vanished without a trace, and the spirits refused to talk about it."
Honestly, as far as nameless horrors and possibly eldritch abominations go, staying in your own ancient ruin since time immemorial, not casting out arcane, psychic, or biological emanations that threaten to corrupt, consume, and/or drive insane every other living thing within a set radius, and only visiting horrible slimy dooms upon those who intrude on your turf is downright neighborly. Compared to things like corpse-demons and the spiritually corrosive impact of the Hellmouth, whatever's down there at the bottom of the world isn't threatening or even particularly bothering anyone, and as long as it keeps doing so, you're perfectly happy to return the favor and focus your efforts elsewhere.
Is there anything else you want to talk about with this instructor?
With the matter of the annoyingly evasive memory addressed, you return to your dormitory to brush your teeth and check on the two members of your party who are still sleeping in. Whether due to your familiar bond transmitting your enjoyment of breakfast or months of experience at getting up early, you find that Briar is awake - she actually goes tearing past you before you're halfway back to the dorm, heading for the dining hall.
"You could have woken me up for breakfast!" she calls.
"You looked like you were enjoying your sleep!" you retort.
"I was, thanks, but I enjoy food, too!"
And then she's past.
As for Larry, he's still snoozing away when you check in on him.
Since you just ate, you're not keen on engaging in any strenuous activity right away, but fortunately, there are several classes of a less physical nature scheduled. After giving it some thought, you decide to go to...
"Do I even want to know?" the instructor asks warily.
"It's not ALL cosmic horror," you reply.
For one thing, giant animals are fairly common on the supernatural side, whether you're talking about mundane beasts that have been augmented by exposure to mystical forces - deliberately or accidentally - empowered bloodlines descended from various creatures of myth and legend, prehistoric megafauna that have managed to endure into the modern day-
"Wait, there are still DINOSAURS out there?" one of the crowd blurts out in excitement. "Like, actual LIVE dinosaurs?"
"I don't know for sure," you reply, "but a wizard of my acquaintance hinted at it once. I haven't had a chance to get a straight answer out of him about the matter."
-or extraplanar specimens like some of the individuals you've met in Faerie.
On another, more specifically penguin-related point, Sokka has mentioned "penguin sledding" a few times in general conversation and correspondence, which implies the existence of relatively large birds. You know that full-grown emperor penguins are a decent size to start with, but you're not sure if they're so big that one would be able to slide around with a human or Water Tribe child on their back without being harmed.
"And even if they really DO exist, giant blind specimens still wouldn't be the weirdest penguins I've ever heard of. Sokka mentioned something about tap-dancing penguins in a letter once..."
"What?"
"That's what I said!"
If Larry sleeps much longer, he's going to miss his chance to get anything to eat until the nine o'clock mid-morning meal. While that won't exactly starve him, you feel that you should wake him up to make sure he's okay with it - and if not, to tell him to hurry to the dining hall before Briar and the other late early risers clear out what was left of breakfast.
You eventually manage to shake him awake and explain the situation.
"...yeah, I should probably get up and eat something," Larry agrees through several yawns. "Thanks, Alex."
Not a problem.
"I'm just gonna... lie here for a minute..."
Oh, no you don't!
You don't feel like sitting in on a math class, and while the prospect of a history lesson briefly tempts you, in the end, you figure that you can study both subjects on your own time, using resources you know are available back home.
A class in Ki Theory, on the other hand, is something you don't currently have any other immediately available sources for apart from Lu-sensei, or maybe a summoned martial artist - and since you're here and can sit in on the lesson for free, it makes the most sense for you to do so.
The class in question is being held in the same building where you sat in on that biology class the previous day, although this time you're looking for a room on the ground floor instead of the second...
When you reach the classroom, it's to find the instructor just about to enter; hearing your rapid footsteps coming his way, the man pauses to look back at the source, which gives you an opening to ask if he has room for one more and doesn't mind you sitting in.
The answer is yes to the former, and not at all to the latter, though the teacher does ask you if you've read the book he's using, and frowns with slight concern when you admit you haven't.
"You're still welcome to join us, of course, but without the reading-"
"Well, if I could borrow a copy for a moment- oh, hi, Li Fang!" you break off, greeting the helpful senpai from yesterday's anatomy class.
"We meet again," she greets you. "Did I hear right, you need another book to magically absorb?"
"If it's not too much trouble?"
"What's this about absorbing books?" the teacher asks.
Rather than answer with words, Li Fang hands you her textbook, and you cast the Spell of Scholar's Touch - fortunately, after yesterday's brief translation issue, you remembered to cast Comprehend Languages on your way to class. When the minor lightshow fades, you're able to answer several general questions that the instructor puts to you.
Incidentally, the contents of this book were a fair bit easier to digest than the one on anatomy. No doubt that's your relatively extensive education, experience, and experimentation with ki techniques shining through.
"That spell still seems really unfair," Li Fang notes, as you return her book to her and take a seat.
"Actually, on the subject of using ki to read faster..."
"You found something ALREADY?" Li Fang exclaims in disbelief.
The outburst, you note, draws the attention of the teacher and those members of the class in your current field of view - and from the shifts your passive Ki Sense picks up, probably quite a few more.
Judging by the widespread looks of surprise, Li Fang probably isn't normally given to such sudden and loud displays.
"It probably helps that I already knew a derivative of Ki Enhancement specifically for boosting mental processes," you explain. "And while I've been calling the skill 'Ki Literacy' in my head, calling it a proper TECHNIQUE is probably pushing things a bit when it doesn't save me more than a minute or so per chapter..."
"No, no, using ki to improve one's reading ability IS a long-standing technique," the teacher begins.
"Wait, it is?" Li Fang asks.
"Say what?"
"You mean we could have been using ki to SPEED-READ this entire TIME!?"
"Why isn't that mentioned in the curriculum!?"
"SENSEI!?" at least half the class join in on that chorus of disbelieving protest.
Several of the students, however, are looking around at their peers in confusion. "Why would it NEED to be mentioned?" one of them wonders aloud.
"Yeah, I mean, it was OBVIOUS-"
"You've been holding back on me, man?"
"Oh, it's OBVIOUS, is it-?"
"TEACH ME YOUR SECRETS!"
...you're starting to wonder just how much reading the School of Five Elements imposes on its disciples.
There is a particularly loud and clear *CLAP* as the instructor brings his hangs together for attention, and the borderline shouting dies down as heads and eyes turn his way.
Gained Thunder Clap E (Plus)
"Thank you," he says. "Now, to answer some of your questions... yes, the technique exists. No, it isn't mentioned in any of my assigned reading, because this is a class on general Ki THEORY, not specific APPLICATIONS. The point of these lectures is to help give you all a better understanding of ki as a whole, so that you'll be better-equipped to develop your skills in other classes and especially on your own time. Furthermore, even if this was a more 'practical' class, young Mister Harris's speculation was correct: using ki to improve your literacy requires not only a certain level of proficiency in fundamental Ki Enhancement, but also a decent grasp on a secondary technique for focused mental enhancement; and some of you, I have to say, are lacking in one, the other, or both of those areas."
There are some looks of chagrin at that, and others of stubbornness.
"In addition," the instructor continues, "as some of your classmates have noted, it SHOULD have been fairly obvious that enhancing your literacy skills with ki was possible. There's hardly a human skill or ability in existence that CAN'T be augmented with proper use of ki."
You might say something about magic at this point, but the man's on a roll, so you don't.
"And finally," the teacher concludes, "and this goes for ALL of you, equally, I didn't bring the technique up before now because nobody ASKED about it - not whether it was possible, or if they were doing it correctly, or if there were ways to improve on the skill."
At that, there is a general air of chagrin, even from the students who figured the trick out for themselves.
The instructor looks around for a moment, and then nods. "Now, since it HAS been brought up... Young Alexander, would you care to show us how this skill of yours looks?"
You wince. "Uh... I mean, I COULD, but I currently have a spell up to prevent people and things from being able to read my aura, so..."
The teacher blinks, peers at you closer for a moment, and then sighs. "Ah. I'd wondered why your presence was so unremarkable..."
"Why do you need something like that?" Li Fang wonders, giving you a similar searching look that denotes some level of Ki Sight at work.
"I have way too much magical energy for my age," you admit. "So much so that I can't really hide it without resorting to spells like this, which is dangerous pretty much anywhere, but especially in a place like Sunnydale."
"But you're not IN Sunnydale," she points out.
"No, but the Spell of Mind Blank also counters attempts to spy on me at long range. Crystal balls, magic mirrors, big fancy rituals to reveal the secrets of the cosmos - as far as magic like that is concerned, I don't exist for as long as this spell is up."
"Sounds a bit extreme," somebody in the back observes.
"I like not having ninjas and demons knocking on my door - and yes, that HAS actually happened."
The initial half of that statement prompted some looks of surprise and disbelief from your audience; the follow-up dealt with most of the latter expressions before their owners could give voice to their doubts.
Granted, you're exaggerating slightly: the ninja almost certainly found your home address by looking you up in the World Tournament registration and/or by checking the local directory, rather than by using scrying; and the "demon" - that being Beryl's messenger imp - didn't so much knock on your door as she turned up in your yard. Even so, the point remains that supernatural beings and mystically empowered humans you would rather not have had paying you a visit HAVE done so in the past, and taking steps to mitigate or outright prevent future occurrences of the same is therefore only the sensible thing to do.
And this is without considering the Powers you may have annoyed or the hidden nation of spiritual warriors you've ticked off by destroying their super-secret headquarters and killing their god-king, to name a couple of pertinent examples.
Anyway, with you having made it fairly clear that you would really rather not bring down your primary anti-Divination defense, the teacher simply turns to one of his students who had admitted to having developed a version of Ki Literacy and asks them to demonstrate the technique for the class.
You join the rest of the students in observing that guy's aura as he adjusts his ki. The result is not quite the same as what you were doing, suggesting a more advanced or at least more practiced version of the technique; fortunately, it's not so far ahead of where you are that you can't steal some inspiration.
Gained Ki Literacy E
In keeping with the theme of his class, the teacher takes this opportunity to provide a lesson on the underlying mechanisms of the Ki Literacy technique. The way he starts with comparing it to Ki Enhancement and then moves on to Ki Perception and Ki Infusion immediately reminds you of reading The Illusion of Separation, although the language the instructor uses is different enough to make it clear that he didn't write the book.
The breakdown takes about a quarter of the class time, after which the speaker segues into his actually planned lesson. As you'd expected from your quick summary reading of the textbook, you don't have much trouble following along with the lesson, and while that does mean that you don't have insights as numerous or significant as you might have, you certainly can't say that the time was wasted.
Gained Knowledge (Ki) D (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
Was there anything you wanted to talk to Li Fang, the instructor, or somebody else about once the class on Ki Theory is over?
The instructor spends the last few minutes of the class taking general questions. After several other people have had a go, you raise your hand and, when acknowledged, speak.
"You mentioned early on that there was 'hardly a human skill or ability in existence that can't be augmented with proper use of ki'," you quote. "I'm aware that spellcasting is one of those-"
"It is?" Li Fang asks.
You glance at her, and then at the instructor.
He gestures for you to go ahead.
"It is," you affirm. "Although when I say 'spellcasting,' I mean the literal act of casting a spell. Every spell involves tapping into forces that exist outside of the caster in some way: some magic-users have to utilize those forces to get the energy to cast their spells at ALL; and even those of us who rely mainly on our personal reserves for power still have to reach out to call on the elements, tap into the collective unconscious, or summon creatures from beyond. And you can't use ki to make cosmic forces and entities work any faster or better than they already were - they're too MUCH to be affected that way."
Even magic that solely enhances some aspect of the caster works that way: Detect Magic interacts with the energy around you; the Spell of Bull's Strength and its peers reinforce your body or mind with the conceptual powers of various animals; and healing spells draw energy from the Positive Energy Plane to supplement and supercharge the natural healing process, rather than tapping into the body's reserves to get the fuel they need.
Honestly, that last one is for the best, as otherwise you'd be making people older and hungrier every time you healed them - incrementally so, admittedly, but all those increments would add up over time.
"There are some magical traditions that can use ki as a fuel source," you add, "like ninjas-"
"You've met ninjas?"
"Ninja magic is real?"
"-but even then, they've got the same kind of limits on casting speed and spell power as everybody else."
"Are you sure about that?" the instructor interrupts. "I've met a few ninjas who could get elemental techniques off effectively instantaneously."
"That's a skill called 'Quickening'," you explain. "I haven't learned how to do it myself, yet, but I CAN learn it, and I wouldn't need to use ki to pull it off."
"Ah."
"So, yeah. I know that spellcasting can't be augmented by ki, and I was wondering what other skills there are that fall under that umbrella."
"Anything involving electronics, for a start," the teacher answers promptly. "You can speed up and smooth out your input and your retention of the output, and you can use Ki Infusion to hit someone with a keyboard more effectively than without, but you can't make a computer, phone, or peripheral work any faster or better than it already would. Granted, that may just be because nobody's figured out how to DO it yet - the ranks of ki masters are a bit short on electrical engineers."
You nod, your efforts to adapt spells from Hyrule's pre-industrial magical tradition for use on modern Earthly vehicles allowing you to completely understand the problems. "I'm guessing that driving a car or operating machinery would run into similar issues?"
"In general, yes. Theoretically, Ki Infusion can be applied to cars: there are historical records of it being done with carts, wagons, and chariots; bicycles are known to be remarkably compatible; and there are some persistent rumors about motorcyclists who've adapted ki techniques for their rides."
That gets some interested murmurs from the class.
"That being said, cars are larger and heavier than any of those, and other vehicles larger still, so affecting them would call for a level of ki investment that is simply too great to be practical, if even possible, and it may always be so," the teacher goes on. "Moving away from Ki Infusion, I will add that, while there have been some fascinating theoretical works regarding the potential usage of ki in space exploration, the opportunity to test those ideas has, understandably, never come up."
...
...
"...would this be a good time to mention that I've been studying a spell called 'Interplanetary Teleport'?"
The silence which follows your statement is total, and punctuated by many stares.
"Like, to the Moon?" somebody guesses. "Or Mars?"
"Either of those would be valid destinations for the spell, yes," you reply. "Comparatively short-ranged ones, though."
"What's the long range?"
"In theory? Anywhere in the observable universe."
"Bullshit," a girl declares.
Nobody calls her on her language.
"In practice," you continue, "the caster has to have a fairly solid grasp on their intended destination, or the spell won't work. The teleportation spell I used to come here from America can work with map coordinates, a picture, or just having been somewhere before; any of those will work for Interplanetary Teleport as well, but you can also just state, 'the third planet from the Sun' or 'the planet in orbit of the second star to the right,' and if the destination exists and won't kill you just for showing up, it'll take you there."
"And if it isn't safe?" Li Fang asks.
"Then the safeties kick in and you don't go anywhere," you answer with a shrug. "The same thing happens if you plug in a destination that doesn't exist."
"Considering that the lunar surface is a vacuum," the teacher begins.
"I have a spell for that, too," you say.
...
"You've been preparing for a moonwalk," the man states, rather than asks.
"I mean, wouldn't you?"
"...yes, yes I would." He looks mightily tempted. "This other spell that handles vacuum - I assume that covers temperature and pressure as well as the lack of air?"
"It does."
"What about radiation or micro-meteors?"
"Those would take different spells," you concede. "Meteors could be handled by most force-fields; radiation... would be trickier."
While you could attempt to ritually invoke a Spell of Resistance To or Protection From Radiation, the fact that you don't know any spells that specifically interact with radioactivity would hinder your ability to define it in mystical terms, and thus weaken the results of such an effort. It would be safer if you actually studied the topic and devised a proper spell, or found one, but you suspect the latter is unlikely - the topic of radiation came up a couple of times during your assessment of the Silbern loot, and neither Ambrose nor Balthazar mentioned magic for blocking it.
Granted, that doesn't mean that such spells don't exist or that neither man knows of them, they might just not have thought them worth mentioning at the time. You had a LOT of loot to go through...
The point is, you don't have access to any such magic right now, which makes a Moon trip a relatively long-term goal.
The instructor seems to have reached a similar conclusion, adding that, aside from the risks for a trip to the Moon not being covered in the School's legal agreements with the students and their families, this would be the sort of thing that needs to be scheduled well in advance, so that the masters can... sort things out.
Considering what you heard from Master Todo about the ongoing scheduling arguments that your offer to speak at a few lectures on magic have touched off, you can only imagine the intensity of the debate that might ensue when the masters are presented with a chance to very literally make martial arts history by being the first to test out those theories on Space Kung Fu.
...
You haven't lit the spark for an in-house tournament or any grudge matches, have you? Hopefully not...
Conveniently enough, most of the students who were in Ki Theory are also taking Ki Practicals right afterwards, so you just have to follow the group to get there.
The class turns out to be held in the courtyard, with bookbags and the like being set down to one side of the tiled area, well away from where the students are gathering for the actual lesson.
"What do you do for this class if it's raining?" you inquire, glancing at the sunny morning sky.
"On a good day, we hit one of the sparring rooms," you're told.
"...and on a bad day?"
"Be sure to bring a raincoat."
...that is, unfortunately, pretty much exactly the sort of thing that you would expect from the School which trained and accredited Lu-sensei.
After the new instructor arrives and counts heads, she begins dividing the class up into groups based on what they'll be doing for the day.
There is a brief delay as the matter of the Ki Literacy technique comes up - most of the class want to at least TRY to learn it - but you're collectively informed that it will have to wait until the end of the scheduled lesson.
"Some of you still need more work on basic Ki Enhancement, and MOST of you need to improve or even just learn the next level of mentally focused enhancement besides," the teacher states, more or less repeating one of the previous lecturer's points on the matter.
In keeping with that, somewhat less than half the class are put in the group that's going to be working on improving their foundational Ki Enhancement skill. Some careful questioning reveals that everybody here can USE the move, but this bunch are not up to using it in competition for various reasons.
You probably won't be joining that bunch, at least, not as a student...
The remaining students break up into several smaller groups: the largest of these, eight in all, are trying to polish their Body Flicker skills; five more mean to work on their Ki Armor and Ki Strikes; another three are practicing various non-offensive flavors of Ki Projection; and the last two are going to meditate and work on their Ki Generation.
Is there anybody you'd like to offer to work with?
While you do have several Ki Projection techniques that could use work, most of them involve emitting ki in a destructive manner. Given that none of the other students are utilizing such techniques, you figure that you probably shouldn't, either. That leaves your Doppelganger technique, which isn't terrible, and your Ki Aura, which, in all honesty, you don't use very much.
Against that, a chance to work on your Ki Armor and especially your Ki Strike proves more appealing. The defensive technique is pretty well developed, but even so, it could be better - especially if you mean to throw your Shadow into another friendly match with any Japanese death gods - whereas its offensive counterpart could definitely use some improvement.
Plus, you know, it's another chance to spar, which is something you enjoy for its own merits.
With that decided, you volunteer to join the three-guy, two-girl group working on those moves, an offer which is readily accepted due to how it allows everyone involved to be working at once, instead of one person getting left without a partner.
The training is straightforward, in that you simply activate your Ki Armor and Ki Strike and then - lightly - spar with your partner. It's also a little counter-intuitive, though, at least for the Five Elements Style, which is meant to be an aggressive and evasive style, putting the enemy down swiftly while anticipating and avoiding their efforts to do the same to you. This results in you fighting your trained reflexes as much as your unfamiliar sparring partner for the first couple of passes, before you start to find a proper rhythm of strike, block, counter-strike, block into a deflection...
...
"Are you even feeling this?" your partner asks, a few minutes into the light-contact spar. "Because I swear that's the third time I've been blocked by that part of your forearm, and you aren't even flinching."
"A lot of my usual sparring partners are either monsters or magically empowered," you explain, "not to mention fast enough to keep up with the Five Elements Style." As long as you aren't using Maximum Power, anyway. "Throw in a few misadventures, and I've gotten quite a bit of practice using Ki Armor, or just taking hits in general."
"Huh. But not as much with your Ki Strike?" he notes.
"Yeah, I don't use that much in friendly matches, and for the UNfriendly fights, I'm usually either casting spells, swinging a sword, or just up against something I would really rather not touch with my bare hands."
"Spiky, burning, slimy, all of the above?" he guesses.
"You know the type."
"There are lectures, but also, the masters occasionally arrange for somebody to ship slimes to the School..."
You're suddenly picturing some unsuspecting student or assistant-type opening a crate and getting dogpiled by a bunch of Zols, Chus, Bits, and Bots.
"Who even deals in slimes?"
"I don't know," your partner replies, shaking his head. "I've been through that class three times, now, and every time, people spend the next couple of weeks trying to figure it out, with no luck. The containers are always unmarked, they almost always come in different styles - even for the same group - and if anyone's ever managed to find a shipping invoice or the like, they've kept it to themselves."
Unhelpful.
"There are stories about what past students have done, trying to figure out who and where the School keeps getting those things from," he continues, as your spar picks up a bit. "Everything from sneaking into the records and hacking the computers - though that was just the last couple of years - to staking out the road or heading into town to meet the deliveryman."
"And it's never worked?" you query, frowning.
If the School has been using slime monsters as training aides for years, decades, or even generations, you can't really believe that the origins of those creatures haven't been figured out at some point. Even if the masters made a concerted effort to keep their students in the dark about it, the students don't live at the School all year round, and when they go home, they have families, friends, and more distant acquaintances over whom the masters have little if any influence. Sooner or later somebody would have thought to use their "civilian" connections to try and dig into this matter, even if it was just to get a car ride from their parents or ask a few polite questions of a mean old man with an ear to the ground on the supernatural side.
If nothing else, if this has been going on long enough, some of those students would eventually become masters themselves and have to be let in on the secret - and while certain individuals would absolutely keep the joke going, others would gladly reveal the truth to their fellows in frustration.
"Oh, I'm pretty sure it HAS worked, and several times at that," your classmate sighs. "It's just that there's a dozen different stories going around about what people have found out in the end, and every story swears that it is telling the complete truth AND provides just enough evidence to make itself plausible and the other versions doubtful."
Oh, it's like THAT, then.
Sounds like you might need to break out the Divination if you really want an answer to that - truth spells for a start, and from there... well, whatever.
For the time being, you focus on the lesson before you.
While none of the other five students in your group have the intense reserves of life-force that you do or skills that greatly exceed yours in these particular areas, being able to look at how other people achieve similar results to yours with less potent and abundant ki is instructive all by itself. Likewise, the little individual differences in how these ki adepts employ these particular moves offers hints at how the techniques might develop in the future.
Gained Ki Armor C (Plus)
Gained Ki Strike D
While you're not outright fighting, the practice spars are intense enough - particularly in how you keep getting hit in the process, even if your Ki Armor tanks the blows readily enough - that your active ki techniques have worn out well before the class is over. By this point, your sparring partner is feeling the results of your own strikes and the limitations of HIS Ki Armor enough that he's not particularly enthused about continuing, and since you doubt you'd make much more progress in this area, you're fine with leaving the techniques un-renewed.
You're in the middle of some cooldown exercises when the teacher bows to the hopeful looks of the class and agrees to let them spend the remaining time working on APPLIED Ki Literacy. This naturally leads to a scramble for books.
For your part, you...
You are feeling helpful this morning, particularly towards the nice young lady who has been letting you borrow her textbooks and work mighty minor magic upon them. Mystically speaking, you don't owe Li Fang any debts, as you were casting Scholar's Touch entirely for your own benefit, but socially is another matter, and repaying educational assistance in kind would be the perfect way to return the favor.
"Would you like some pointers, Miss Li?" you ask.
"Please."
"Alright, so, the next level up from basic Ki Enhancement is what I personally call 'Brain Enhancement'..."
You briefly describe the technique and how it emphasizes the mental aspects of its predecessor, stripping out most of the physical components so that the energy which would have been used for them can be dedicated to the desired end - but only MOST of it. Some degree of physical improvement is still going on with Brain Enhancement, so as to allow the brain and the extended nervous system to function safely at higher levels of performance.
...at least, you're ASSUMING that's what's going on there. Your understanding of human biology is a bit iffy, and when developing Brain Enhancement, you mostly just cribbed the appropriate bits of Ki Enhancement and gave them a push.
You're sure it's fine.
From there, you explain how Ki Literacy refines Brain Enhancement further, focusing on those areas of the brain that are most active during reading - as far as you can tell, anyway - as well as the eyes.
"So it wouldn't work for reading Braille," Li Fang notes. "By touch, I mean.
You pause in mid-explanation to consider that, and have to nod. "Given how the technique focuses on the eyes, yeah, this wouldn't work for that. It could probably be refined to work with the fingers instead of the eyes, but I can't read Braille, myself, so I'm not sure how to go about doing that."
She nods in kind, getting the drift of your thoughts.
The fundamental nature of ki is to help you do things better than you could do them before, but when you don't have the requisite knowledge or physical capability to do a thing to begin with, you're kind of stuck.
Maybe you should learn Braille at some point? It's a thought...
Regardless, you get on with the lesson. By her own admission, Li Fang hadn't learned the Brain Enhancement technique yet, but you can see that she had a good grasp on basic Ki Enhancement, so her attempts at putting your description of the second-tier skill into effect go pretty well. Ki Literacy, on the other hand, is something she's definitely going to need more time to work on than this little end-of-class session will allow her.
After observing the lady for a bit and coaching her through a couple of attempts, you leave her to practice on her own and look around at the rest of the class. Several of those nearest to you and your "student" have been shamelessly listening in, while most of the rest of the class have divided up into new groups, clustered around the instructor and those other students that had already worked out Ki Literacy for themselves. Your fellow tutors are demonstrating the skill and allowing the rest to observe it, but aside from the actual teacher in the mix, only a couple of them seem to be having much luck explaining how the trick works. This has had an obvious impact on their listeners' attempts to put it into effect...
Aside from those bunches, there are a few people who have gone off to practice by themselves, some successfully, others not.
You're just considering offering help to some of those people-
"Excuse me?"
-when one of your current batch of eavesdroppers recalls his manners, apologizes for listening in, and then actually asks for help, which prompts several of his neighbors to do the same.
Feeling that such an effort a good manners should be rewarded, you do so, which takes up the remainder of class.
To the best of your recollection, you've never met anyone who's admitted to being able to read Braille - and technically, you still haven't, as Li Fang didn't actually SAY she could read it. Her statements did leave that implication open, but it's also possible that she knows someone else who has the skill, and isn't literate in that particular writing system.
Either way, you're curious, and so as the class starts to break up, you approach Li Fang and ask her if she has a minute to speak with you privately.
"I can spare a couple of minutes," she says. "Just let me get my books..."
You trail along at a slight distance, noting that the older girl waves off a couple of classmates and stops to talk briefly with another before meeting back up with you, bookbag hanging from one shoulder.
"Do you mind if we walk while we talk? I have another class to get to after this."
"That's fine," you reply, letting her set the course, which proves to be the foot of a path that leads up towards the hills.
What class does she have out there?
"So, what did you want to talk about?"
"Well, for starters, I was curious as to why you brought up Braille. Can you read it yourself, or do you happen to know someone who does?"
"Both, actually," she replies. "I learned it from my mother, who learned it from her mother, who was legally blind."
You don't miss the past tense she speaks of her grandparent in.
"Granny Li belonged to a support group for the visually impaired," Li Fang goes on, "and my mother and I still volunteer there."
"...huh."
And here you were, thinking that she might know just ONE person with poor eyesight.
"What sort of visual impairments does your group deal with?" you inquire.
"Most of them," comes the answer. "Everything from congenital blindness and age-related macular degeneration to injury and infection."
Alright, the first of those is an issue, and you aren't sure what the word "macular" means, but the context gives you a decent idea, while for the others...
"Why do you ask?" Li Fang inquires, with a certain suspicion.
"Well, it's just that one of the fields of magic I've been studying of late has been healing magic, and there are spells that can treat some kinds of-"
!
-you are glad for your reflexes and situational awareness, because Li Fang stops so suddenly that you might have walked into her otherwise.
"What kinds?" she asks intently.
"The Spell to Remove Blindness will counteract common magical causes, like the Curse of Blindness, and it can also heal mundane causes of vision loss, provided that the eye is still intact - otherwise, it can't help. It also wouldn't cure a disease that happens to CAUSE blindness, so the person might relapse, and I don't think that it works on people who are born blind."
That last one is a bit of a guess, as you've never had cause to test it, but you're basing the assumption on the fact that even the Spell of Regeneration, which is a much more powerful form of magical healing than Remove Blindness, can't undo conditions inherent from birth. Such are just how the body in question is built, and thus part of the natural state to which Regeneration would restore them from any incurred injuries.
"There's also the Heal Spell, which is a much more powerful piece of magic and WILL cure diseases, as well as a bunch of other physical or mental ailments. Once again, though, it won't regrow an eye that's been physically ruined - for that, you need the Spell of Regeneration, which I also know." You then explain about the issue of mystical debt and why it wouldn't be a good idea for you to go around healing people for free, which causes Li Fang to frown in a mix of exasperation and understanding.
"Knowing that," you conclude, "do you think any of the people you work with would be interested in having me try to restore their sight?"
"Some of them would refuse," she tells you frankly.
"...really?"
"You might not understand it - I know I didn't when Granny Li first explained it to me - but some of the visually impaired identify themselves by their lack of vision just as much as they do by factors like nationality or ethnicity. The same way you might get upset if I insulted your age, your being American, or the fact that you are a magician-"
"Sorcerer," you correct.
"-there, that," Li Fang verbally pounces. "Exactly that. One term is how you perceive and identify yourself, something you take pride in being; the other is not, and even a small suggestion that it IS or that it SHOULD be is at least annoying, if not offensive. Especially if someone were to come along and offer to take it away from you, or simply force the change on you without your consent."
...
You think that comparison might be reaching a bit, but you can (ahem) see where Li Fang is going with it.
"Alright, but if SOME of them wouldn't take the offer..."
"Others would definitely be interested," she agrees, finishing your statement with a nod. "That said... this feels like it's the sort of thing that should REALLY be discussed with the people in question."
And she has class right now, and in days to come, meaning this will have to wait a bit to get sorted out.
You're still wondering just what class Li Fang has out in the hills. Wilderness survival and free-climbing come to mind, both of which are lessons that you might be legitimately unqualified to join in on, depending on how advanced they are - at least without resorting to magic, which would kind of defeat the purpose. Aside from that, you figure you shouldn't go wandering that far from the main School, much less doing something potentially hazardous, without letting Lu-sensei or Mrs. Blaisdell know about it, and preferably in advance.
As such, rather than follow Li Fang, you say goodbye and head back towards the buildings. While it's been long enough since breakfast that you could eat something, that's just your stomach being spoiled; you can wait until lunchtime without issue, and honestly, you probably should.
You don't need six meals a day, and it would be something of an abuse of the School's hospitality besides. Especially with the amounts you can put away when you're really trying.
Besides, you're most curious about seeing another class.
Your little strolling conversation with Li Fang took up enough time that most of the nine o'clock lessons have started, if only just, and you can see several other groups taking advantage of the pleasant weather for an outdoor lesson. You pass a dozen or so people gathered together at one of those out-of-the-way rest spots, apparently engaged in meditation, and you can see another class has taken over the courtyard, this time with a lot of younger students who are being put through their paces by the instructors. A group of about twenty students carrying easels and art supplies are following a teacher toward one of the garden-like patches around the courtyard, and a flicker of movement draws your attention to the top of the two-story building where you've been checking out classes today and yesterday-
!
-just in time to see somebody jump off the ROOF-
!
-and then for a second person to follow suit, while at least four more look on-!
You take a step towards the building, ki building up as you prepare to leap forward - and then you force yourself to stop and take a deep, calming breath as you consider where you are, and what you've been doing here.
After all, you spent a part of yesterday climbing up and then jumping off of the back wall of your dorm. The wall was clearly built for the purpose: it had plenty of obvious, frequently used, and well-maintained handholds; there were crash mats stored in an unlocked shed nearby with clearly marked locations for them to be placed; and Lu-sensei agreed to supervise the exercise with the ease of long familiarity.
People leaping off the roof of another building is clearly just a slightly more advanced version of that training method, and not a tragedy unfolding before your eyes.
...
As long as the students and teachers actually know what they're doing, anyway.
For all that you consciously know that the members of the School are not flinging themselves off the roof of the study hall to their bone-breaking injuries and/or deaths, you clearly haven't quite internalized that knowledge.
It's one thing when you yourself are capable of defying gravity, when somebody you've cast a spell on does so, or when friends and acquaintances you've SEEN use supernatural power to bend the laws of physics in their favor do it - particularly when you're seeing it happen in the middle of combat. Seeing perfect strangers casually fling themselves off a roof and into an actual fall is a bit different, and after this little brush with the practice, you feel you could stand to take some time to contemplate the issue and try to better assimilate it.
So you find an unclaimed seat - an actual seat, this time - and settle in to work on your zen.
...
...
Assuming you go with one of the longer options, what will you do afterwards?
You have reached a point in your practice of meditation where simply sitting in a quiet spot and not-thinking about things comes easily to you, with the only real major issues that remain being how much your legs ache after an extended session and the non-zero possibility of falling asleep if you try to clear your mind when physically or mentally tired.
Still, ever since you began studying and practicing this skill under Lu-sensei's guidance, you have picked up a variety of little hints that say the technique can be taken further, that the empty mind can be achieved more quickly, that silence and stillness are not required to do so, and that there may be other benefits you have yet to discover.
Trying to meditate within earshot of a thirty-plus person class of underage martial artists is something you haven't done before - your classes at Lu Tze's dojo not including so many people in one session, and certainly not as many of those who produce as much noise just by existing as young children - so it might be a good way to further hone your skills.
...which, come to think of it, might explain why the School has these little meditation spots set up so close to the various training areas.
As you're going through the process of clearing your mind, an idle thought occurs regarding other ways that you might test and increase your mastery of meditation. You've speculated upon the potential of using different environments to influence your meditation - and conversely, of using meditation in areas of cold, heat, dryness, damp, and so on as an aid to cultivating your affinities for different elements - you've actually tried it out during one of your trips to the Ethereal Plane, and you've even tested the possibilities of moving meditation, but there's one particular "environment" that has been readily accessible to you for quite a while now that you hadn't considered making use of.
Namely, what happens if you try meditating in mid-air? Not by flying into a thunderstorm or the teeth of an Antarctic gale or even just a light pattering rain, mind you, just... hovering in place? Would the lack of the earth's support beneath you affect your focus for good or ill? Would you be able to maintain the no-mind state if you began to drift or turn in place?
...
The temptation to give this a try is real, but you decide to hold off until you can ask your master if there's some obscure point of etiquette you aren't aware of and might be violating if you used magic for this. You CAN see how it might be considered showing off, or simply cheating - at least, you're pretty sure there was something about meditation masters being able to levitate themselves without using magic...?
Anyway, you settle in and focus, not planning to spend too long on this exercise. You're curious to see just what the art class gets up to, and half an hour or so should be enough time for them to put together some interesting pictures, without having to worry about any end-of-class rush to pack up and head inside.
...
At your current level of proficiency, half an hour is perhaps not enough time to make further significant progress in your mastery of meditation, but on the other hand, it took you a few minutes longer than usual to put aside the voices of the instructors and students - and you DID manage it, which suggests a degree of progress, however limited.
Getting up, you briefly stretch and then head over to see what the art class has to show off.
As you strolling over to the other meditative garden where the art class set up, you cast a glance at the top of the study hall-
Another student goes flying over the edge!
-sigh, shake your head, and wonder at how exactly the School explains that sort of thing to prospective new students, the families thereof, and any legal authorities, before forcibly turning your attention away.
It certainly helps that the building is behind you now...
Anyway, the art class have set up their easels in a roughly circular arrangement, allowing the students to look out at the School grounds to find their subjects. As soon as you see that, you take a closer note of where the nearest artists are standing and looking before glancing over your shoulder, trying to determine if any of their fields of view would have been able to see you while you were meditating.
You don't have any particular objection to being immortalized in paint, you're just wondering if you inadvertently ruined somebody's work by standing up and moving when you did.
On the whole, though, you think you're okay. There's enough visual clutter - a few bushes, a couple of trees, that large rock, and the mass of your former seat, to be specific - between where you were and where the art class are that you wouldn't have been particularly visible to begin with.
As you approach, doing your best to stay out of anyone's forward visual arc, the instructor overseeing the class notices your approach, and pauses in the middle of walking about to regard you with the Eyebrow of Inquisition.
You reply with the Head-Bob of Interest and Permission Sought.
The instructor raises one hand, finger held before his lips in the universal gesture for silence, but he also grants you the Nod of Agreement.
Entering the circle and raising a hand of wordless greeting to those students who spare a moment to acknowledge your presence, you look around at the contents of the paintings.
Most of the works are distinctly simplistic, collections of dabs of color that remind you of art class back at Sunnydale Elementary, only with a few years' more experience behind the brush-strokes. Also like your school-sponsored explorations into the fine arts, there are a few students that show some talent, and one or two whose works look good enough that they might find buyers.
The subject matter is fairly broad. Most of it involves the grounds of the School of Five Elements, of course, but you can see several takes on the training class in session, others that focused on some of the contents of this little garden-like patch, a few showing buildings or the wider landscape beyond, and one girl who has managed a decent imitation of the handful clouds hovering overhead. There are some more imaginative pictures as well: a "snapshot" of two fighters in mid-contest, one of whom isn't wearing the colors of the School; the recreation of a nearby pond that includes a sleeping serpentine dragon which definitely isn't actually there; and a bowl of fruit (which is, incidentally, one of the more realistic paintings).
One thing you don't see or sense is any ki techniques at work. Maybe it's not that kind of class? Or maybe just not yet, and this is part of the establishment and practice of the basic physical skill, before introducing supernatural augmentation?
You spend a few more minutes just looking over the artworks, but none of them really catch your eye - something that might have to do with the fact that none of them are actually finished yet - and the teacher's earlier unspoken request for quiet deters you from asking questions.
Instead, seeing as how there's still a good twenty to twenty-five minutes left in the hour, you decide to go look in on another class.
The one that's currently in session in the courtyard draws your attention again, partly because the students are all around your age and partly because you just enjoy physical activity, but mainly because even if you decide to go check out the study hall again - or the people who are STILL jumping off the roof - you'd have the courtyard in sight and hearing most of the way there anyway. With that in mind, you might as well spare a moment to see what's going on.
The answer to that is a lot of pounding feet, hard breathing, groans of complaint, and a few people either bent over double or sprawled out on the tiles, while the instructors call out a mix of encouragements and warnings.
In other words, laps.
As usually happens when your class runs laps in gym back in Sunnydale, some of the kids circling the outer edge of the courtyard are going as fast as they can, whether because they want to be the first to finish and thus "win" or just want to get the exercise over with, while others are going as slow as they can get away with, speeding up briefly when an instructor chides them only to slow down once more when the authority figure's attention has moved on.
You see a few faces that you recognize from your wanderings about the campus, although none of your Sunnydale friends are present. You also notice, with some curiosity, that despite most of the class having the sort of ki signatures that denote the ability to actively harness one's life-energy, nobody appears to be trying to use it to increase their speed or their endurance.
Given that these are just about the basics of basics for Ki Enhancement, you have to conclude that the teachers have prohibited the use of the technique.
You jog the rest of the short way to the courtyard and pause, running in place, as you call out to the nearest instructor.
When the man in question acknowledges you, you gesture towards the runners. "May I join in?"
"Go ahead!"
"Thanks! How many laps?"
"We're on the fourth of ten! Just remember, no ki!"
"Got it!"
With that, you start running.
Between your natural athleticism and greater level of development than your age-mates, you overtake and pass a solid half of the class before your first lap is complete - but by then, some of the leaders are done their fourth laps, or nearly so. At this rate, they'll easily finish before you're much more than halfway done.
That just won't do, and so you speed up, making sure to keep your ki in check.
By the end of your second lap, you've passed everybody else on the track once, and the kids who were previously bringing up the rear twice - but some of the leaders have been spurred on by the sight of you running past them, even with your late start, and are pushing on towards the end of their fifth circuit.
Even at your current pace, you know you still won't finish before they do, and that just won't do - so you go even faster.
There are some surprised outbursts as you go thundering past most of your chosen opponents twice more before they're able to complete their sixth laps. Some of your success here is due to how many of the previous leaders have started to flag as their endurance fails them, the early push for pure speed proving unsustainable over the relatively long term. Most of them fall into a pattern of slower jogging followed by bursts of sprinting as they try to keep up, but your more consistent pace - and longer legs - allow you to complete two more laps before anyone but the quickest and most determined has finished another.
At six laps to seven, you've basically caught up with or surpassed the majority of the pack, but now it's your turn to feel the burn, as your legs and lungs complain about the recent, intense, and ongoing exertion.
You push through, completing your seventh lap and closing the distance to the current roster of lead runners, several of whom are visibly losing ground as they look over their shoulders at you with alarm. The really determined ones keep their eyes on the road ahead of them, managing to hold a one-lap lead on you for almost all of the next circuit - but then comes your ninth lap, which proves to be a back-and-forth exchange of positions as you and five or six other runners trade possession of the lead position.
One by one, the rest fall away-
!
-and then, with paired yells of challenging exertion, two kids from the mid-group force themselves to catch up, taking the lead-
!
-for all of about half a lap, before one of them groans and slows to a jog, while the other bleeds speed more gradually, but is still overtaken by one, two, and then you as runner number three.
The last lap is almost neck-and-neck between you and these other two, your advantages of leg length and lung size evidently countered by their smaller mass. One of them, a girl, has the sort of practiced form which suggests she either runs competitively or is in training for it; the other, a boy, is less smooth and efficient in his movements, just seeming to be naturally fleet-footed; and then there's you, the comparative runaway freight train.
You give it your all, legs and chest now lodging a full-blown protest at the sheer effort you've demanded of them, and the rest of the body getting in on the action-
!
-and then the girl crosses an unmarked point that suddenly has most of the rest of the class cheering, or at least those not too busy trying to catch their breaths.
For your part, you're pretty sure you managed a second place finish, which you're inclined to think is very acceptable after starting over three laps behind everyone else.
Gained Endurance B (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
And now, you need to take a cooldown walk.
As you're taking your cooldown lap, you start to come up on one of the instructors, who is chivvying the remaining runners along with that special mix of encouragement, subtle menace, and volume used by gym teachers and sports coaches.
Noticing your approach, the man nods. "Very good run, there. Do you compete, or...?"
"No, I just do a lot of running," you reply, thinking of your regular commutes to and from your teleport sites around Sunnydale. "A good part of that is while using extended Body Flickers, admittedly, but..."
"But some of the exercise carries over," the instructor agrees.
"Is that why you have the class NOT using ki?" you inquire curiously. "I mean, does it affect what you gain from the workout?"
"It does, yes. Don't get me wrong, using ki techniques is good for exercising those techniques and your control of them and your energy in general; it's just that when you're relying on ki during a workout, you aren't pushing your body as much as you could or should and end up not getting the full physical benefits. An experienced adept knows that they need to compensate for that and has the skills and self-control to do so, but most students around your age just want to use ki as often and as spectacularly as they can."
"Can you blame them?" you ask frankly.
"Not in the least," the man admits with a grin, before sobering and continuing. "But it's still an issue, particularly since you're all still growing. If you don't train your bodies correctly in the coming years, you won't reach your full physical potential, and for most people, that sets a hard limit on how far their use of ki can take them."
Because most people aren't overflowing with ki any more than they are with magic.
"More than that, though," the instructor goes on, "allowing students to rely too hard on ki in training can give them a skewed impression of what they and other people are naturally capable of, and that can get them into trouble when they go home and try to re-integrate with regular society. I mean, tell me that after seeing someone my size" - a couple of inches shy of six feet and pretty well-built - "get tossed around the ring by a little old master half my size and almost three times my age, you wouldn't be tempted to think you could do the same to some schoolyard bully."
The teacher's chosen example is perhaps not the best one, given that you could manhandle any of the would-be playground terrors, neighborhood menaces, and garden-variety brats attending Sunnydale Elementary without having to resort to any of your supernatural talents. You're the biggest kid in your year, and at least among the biggest in the entire school - some of the fifth- and sixth-graders were competitive with you in that regard even when school let out for the year - which is advantage enough to begin with. Factor in your martial arts training and the abnormally mature and experienced mindset that comes from growing up with intermittent access to Ganondorf's memories, and it's really no contest.
That having been said, you get where the instructor is coming from. It's not just a matter of keeping the School's students from picking fights or accidentally hurting people - although that is definitely part of the issue - it's also about making sure that they don't forget what normal looks or feels like, so that they can continue to pass for it when out in the general population.
Extraordinary people stand out, and that's not always a good thing, even before the supernatural gets involved. Being good at something can impress or inspire other people, but it can also make them jealous or fearful, and the greater your capabilities, the stronger the reactions they'd tend to draw - and speaking from somebody else's experience, losing a serious fight to somebody half your size inspires VERY strong feelings of a wholly negative variety.
You express most of this - leaving out your inherited memories, as always - and the instructor nods, pleased to see that you grasped his point.
"Back to the matter of running," you say then, "are there any particular benchmarks?"
"Not really," comes the reply. "Or at least, not for this particular class. As long as the students complete the assigned number of laps, we aren't too fussy about technique or time. After all," he adds, turning his head and raising his voice to carry, "we can just keep them until they finish, and if they're late to their next class, the teachers will know why!"
"SORRY, INSTRUCTOR!" several voices chorus, to the accompaniment of faster footfalls.
"There are classes that spend more time on developing running stances, speed, stamina, awareness of terrain, and the like," the teacher goes on, returning to a normal voice, "but even then, it's not like we maintain a track team or anything. The closest we have to that is when we get a competitive runner who wants to try and keep up their conditioning while they're here; the masters are fine with making allowances for scheduling, use of the better spots for running, supervision, and the necessary adjustments to their martial arts training, but that's for one person at a time - maybe a small group, depending on the year - not whole classes."
Ah. "Well, that having been said, do you have any advice for me on my running technique?"
"That depends: what do you usually do, that involves using the Body Flicker?"
"Okay, so, it has to do with my teleporting..."
The class will definitely be over by the time you're done talking with the instructor. With that in mind...
The instructor hears out your quick explanation of how and why you keep running to and from various spots a little ways outside Sunnydale to avoid drawing attention to your home when you cast Greater Teleport.
"I admit I don't know much about magic," the man says when you've finished, "but as security precautions go, this seems a little much. Are you sure it's necessary?"
"I have proof that it is," you reply.
Between the response to the overpowered Gate Spell you used to evacuate the Archers, the magical investigator that turned up in response to your sending the Muhlfelds back to Recife via another portal, and the little game of "Scry the Sorcerer" you've been playing with the staff of the Tokyo Tower, you have evidence enough that it doesn't take high-level magic to detect and respond to magical travel in a timely manner, and also that Gates are pretty obvious.
You ALSO have evidence that unshielded magic use in and around Sunnydale can draw attention of the same kind, if not even worse - see the invisible ghoul that was staking out your family's cabin in response to your mass purification of Uncle Rory's haunted taxidermy collection.
...
Actually, now that you're thinking of that spy, when was the last time you checked on them, or the cabin? Might be something to take care of in the near future.
Anyway, getting back to your actual question, the teacher makes some simple recommendations. Whether you want to work on speed or endurance, the most convenient method would be to use a little less ki and a little more muscle power when running back and forth between your preferred teleportation sites. Stamina would obviously be the easier of the two to train this way, as muscle alone can't make up for the kind of speed that your level of Ki Enhancement allows.
...not human muscle, anyway.
Aside from that, the instructor offers tips on things like stance, breathing, hydration, and attire. You can't help but note that having access to magic will make meeting those last two points rather less inconvenient for you than for other people: instead of carrying around an awkward, sloshing bottle, you can just cast Create Water; and your expanded pocket will make carrying a pair of proper running shoes and replacement socks no trouble at all.
Gained Breath Control F
With your talk coming to an end, you thank the instructor for his time, wave at a couple of the students
"Good race." (Honest.)
"You, too," the girl who narrowly beat you replies.
"Yeah, same here," the number three finisher agrees.
"Ah, you're all just saying that 'cause you won," comes a grumbling response from another direction.
"I'll do better next time! Just you wait!"
"At least we didn't do as bad as Lee..."
"I... heard... that!" one kid huffs as he goes running past.
"Last lap, Lee!" the instructor calls after that one. "Almost there!"
"Arrrgh..."
"...is he alright?" you ask the teacher, glancing after the boy still hobbling along.
"He's fine," you're assured. "Lee just hates to run and likes making a production of it to try and get some sympathy."
And like the gym teacher back home, this man is clearly fresh out of mercy.
Shaking your head, you go on your way.
-and depart as quickly as you came, heading for the study hall to see what classes are about to be in session.
Looking over the small crowd moving through the halls, your helpful senpai Li Fang is nowhere in sight. However, you do see some other familiar faces.
There are enough people around, generating enough noise, that you probably won't catch Akio's attention without making a spectacle. Rather than doing that, you just move to follow him, trying to navigate through the crowd to catch up.
Akio ducks into one of the classrooms before you manage that, so you just shrug and head in after him. Spotting the seat the other boy has taken, you pick the one on the far side and circle around behind him to approach it.
"Hey, Akio," you greet him, as you sit down.
"What the-? Since when are you in this class?"
"I've been sitting in or otherwise taking part in random lessons since yesterday," you reply. "You know, stuff that looks new and interesting."
Akio gives you a disbelieving look. "And you picked MATH?"
"...no," you reply after a moment, "I saw you and decided to follow you. ...they seriously teach math here?"
He nods.
"Is it at least martial arts math? Like, calculating the force of a punch or the acceleration curve of a Body Flicker?"
Akio shakes his head.
"...huh." Glancing at his half-opened bookbag, you ask, "May I borrow your textbook for just a minute?"
"Sure."
He digs the volume out and hands it over, and watches as you flip through a few pages.
...there are letters in this math. That's... not the strangest sort of calculation you've ever seen, given your proficiency with arcane formulas, but you have your doubts that these equations are describing things like the value of the color orange or the distance between Order and Chaos.
Just to be sure, you cast the Spell of Scholar's Touch-
"Whoa, neat."
-absorbing a summary of the contents. Yeah, this math is still several years ahead of the mundane side of your education, and without the information that you'd be taught in that intervening period, it would be easy to get these numbers mixed up with your arcane education.
As funny as it might be to see an ordinary math teacher trying to make sense of spell formulas where one plus one may equal two, three, or fire, depending on the context, that's probably not the best use of your time.
"Eh, why not?"
The math used in this class is definitely ahead of your going-on-fourth year education at Sunnydale Elementary, and it's entirely possible that sitting in on the lecture and/or assignments won't teach you anything at all. Weighing against that possibility, however, is the fact that if you just leave the class, you DEFINITELY won't learn anything - and even learning that you don't know enough of the preliminary material to be taking this class would at least be something.
With that in mind, you decide to stay put, at least for now.
Seeing as how the teacher hasn't arrived yet, you set Akio's textbook on the desktop between you and open it to one of the earlier pages, where the letters-as-math start appearing.
"Okay, so, we haven't covered this sort of thing in my math class," you tell your sparring partner. "What is it, why does it have letters in it, and how do they work?"
"Well, first of all, it's called 'algebra'..."
Akio gives you a quick run-through of how these non-magical formulas work-
"You can move the values?"
"As long as the equation balances, yes. For example, a (Plus) 1 = b can also be written as a = b - 1, because you've removed 1 from both sides..."
-which, again, reminds you of some of your magical math, particularly where metamagic and your ritual re-working of spell formulas is involved.
The teacher arrives before Akio has a chance to explain much more than that, and the lesson which commences is definitely ahead of the examples your current study buddy just described, involving multiplications to the power of x, the square root of y, and other *ahem* "arcane" terminology, some of which does go over your head.
That said, there's a fair bit in here you're able to reach out and grab, even if you do so more slowly than any of your classmates.
Gained Mathematics E (Plus)
You think that your future report cards may owe a note of gratitude to Batreaux and the Demon King in your soul.
...
...
You don't mind giving THE DARK MASTER bonus credit for any secondary benefits you derive from his instruction. He's more than earned it, after all the magic he's helped you develop and how that's advanced your pursuit of your various goals - the safety of your self, your family, and your friends foremost among those.
As for Ganondorf... meh. However much you might have benefitted from his legacy, you're not really inclined to actually THANK the King of Evil for anything. Honestly, a very good argument can be made that after all the damage he did, the man's well and truly forfeited the right to any accolades, to say nothing of how - circumstances being what they are - if you ever get the opportunity to actually TALK to Ganondorf, you'll have much, MUCH bigger concerns than expressing gratitude for his contributions to your academic success.
...you still might do it, though. If nothing else, it could buy you a moment's confusion on his part, which would be valuable.
Anyway, though it goes slowly and with some difficulty on your part, the math class does eventually pass.
"What did you think?" Akio asks, as he packs his books away.
"Not the easiest class I've ever sat for," you admit, "but also not the worst."
"What was, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Yesterday's anatomy lecture," you reply promptly. "I actually had to use some mental enhancement techniques to keep up there, and even then, there was a lot that I just didn't have the grounding for. I've at least TAKEN math class before this..."
He nods, getting the idea. "So, where are you off to next?"
"As it happens, I hadn't decided that yet. What's your next class before lunch?"
"I actually have the next period free," Akio replies. "I was planning to spend it in the library, I've got a report to do and some sources to look up."
Oh? "What's the subject?"
"History," he replies, without any real enthusiasm or frustration. "We were assigned to pick a local location or figure of importance to the School - not necessarily a MEMBER, in the latter case - and make a presentation."
"Who or what did you pick?"
"...that's actually what I need to look up," he admits sheepishly.
"...procrastination, or just lack of inspiration?"
"Bit of both, really."
Fair.
Your knowledge of the field of Taiwanese history is scant at best, let alone when it comes to the parts of said history that would be significant to this branch of the School of Five Elements, so you don't have any particular insights to offer in that respect - not even suggestions for a good place or person for Akio to do his report on! And while you could still help him by physically assisting in the research directly or dropping a spell or two to make his own efforts more productive, you figure that you probably shouldn't.
It's supposed to be AKIO's assignment, after all, not a group project, and issues of magical debt aside, study-boosting spells might be considered cheating. Or just establish expectations he'd have trouble meeting in the future.
You wish the older boy good luck in his research, and he heads off, leaving you to consider your next move. While the idea of sitting in on another class does occur to you, you end up going in search of Lu-sensei instead. Akio's mention of the library reminded you that you need a teacher's permission to access the more advanced books on ki techniques, and the sooner you get that sorted out, the more time you'll have to read any such books you check out.
As you leave the study hall, you look around the courtyard and the buildings that surround it, wondering where to begin looking-
!
-only to spot your master in martial arts standing in the yard alongside one of his peers, as a small crowd of adult members of the School gathers.
Hustling over, you inquire, "What's going on, Lu-sensei?"
"Hm?" He looks your way. "Oh, this? Just one of the occupational hazards of being recognized as a master in an established school of martial arts: you're expected to teach." The old man shrugs, as if to ask, 'What can you do?' Then he asks, "Was there something you needed?"
"...uh, yeah, two things, actually. First, when I visited the library yesterday, I was told I needed a master's permission to check out anything more than the basic books on ki use, and-"
"-and I hadn't given it," Lu Tze concludes, nodding. "Sorry about that, I've been a bit distracted by the homecoming and all."
No, no, that's fair. Yesterday WAS only your first day here, and like your teacher says, he had other things to occupy his attention.
"Very understanding of you. I can write you a note, if-"
"Actually, they've apparently switched to computers for that sort of thing," you inform him.
Lu Tze blinks and looks to his counterpart.
The man in question nods. "The librarians made a good case a few years ago about expanding the range of study materials the students could access, making digital copies of our older or more valuable texts to help reduce wear and tear on the originals, and reducing the amount of paperwork... although that last one has yet to come about..." He shakes his head. "Anyway, we were able to secure a grant from the Ministry of Education and some donations from alumni and students' families."
"Huh," your master muses, stroking his light beard. "The things one misses from across the ocean." Shaking his head, he turns back to you. "I'll speak with the librarians after lunch, if that's fine?"
It is. As for your other question...
"'Floating meditation'?" the other master wonders, blinking at you in surprise for a moment before he turns to Lu. "Has he been taking notes from a yogi, or is this a magic thing?"
"Probably the latter," your teacher replies, giving you a brief, inquiring look.
"The only Yogi I know of is a bear," you answer.
Lu Tze nods. "As expected, but given all the summoning, I wanted to be sure."
A reasonable precaution.
"To answer the question, as long as you don't try to pass it off as a ki technique, and take reasonable precautions so that you don't float away or end up falling out of the air and hurting yourself, it's fine."
"Hm? Oh, today they have me giving a demonstration on various techniques for dealing with common kinds of demons."
...it's certainly a topic that he would have more practical experience with than some masters.
"Indeed," your teacher agrees. "The sort you've taken to calling corpse-demons are the most common and widespread, but even then, they're unusual in some places - not to mention that you don't usually see as many of them at one time as you might on the Hellmouth."
Thinking back to the contents of Vampyr, you nod, because the book did mention the typical behaviors of the corpse-demons. While their social behaviors cover much of the same range as those of humans - a trait attributed to the lingering memories of the original owners of their reanimated vessels - when they're actually out hunting, they tend to default to the "solitary predator" paradigm, as that lets them keep all of a kill for themselves. It takes a fair amount of trust for two vampires to hunt together without fighting over and thereby wasting the blood or spoiling its flavor, and the difficulty increases exponentially with each new member added to the pack. Sharing a lair can be similarly fraught, although it's easier for vamps of the same bloodline to get along in close quarters for extended periods of time.
Exceptions to these general tendencies exist, of course, and when it comes to changed hunting behaviors, the most common cause is that another predator in the area has proven itself both willing and able to take down individual blood-rats. A more potent kind of demon, a master vampire (which is kind of saying things twice), a Slayer, or a well-organized group of mortal hunters - any of these can push a population of vampires into flocking together for safety, though it almost always requires the threat to thin their numbers a bit before the survivors get a clue, a fact which can be advantageous.
Sunnydale is dangerous enough that you suspect most independent corpse-demons would have to be newly-raised or recent arrivals from out of town, and not likely to keep their status for long either way.
On a side note, you have to wonder what sort of impact your Shadow's Independence Night hunt had on the behavior of the Hellmouth's undead inhabitants...
Anyway.
The results of your Shadow's Independence Night outing would seem to suggest that you already have a pretty good handle on techniques for dealing with that most ubiquitous of demonic threats, and are pretty well-off when it comes to dealing with less common specimens.
That said, you're hardly averse to adding further options to your anti-corpse-demon kit, particularly if the methods you'd be learning involve the use of martial arts or ki. Your Dark Self's hunt was almost entirely magical in nature, and involved a fair amount of advance preparation besides: the Illusion-based summoning of the Wallmasters (and indeed, of Shadow Alex himself, even if that had been done MUCH earlier); the application of the suite of buff spells; and the conjuration of that batch of weapons which hardly saw use.
If there are ways to make the Five Elements Style more effective against a demon-possessed walking corpse, you'd like to know them. Even it's just simple stuff like, "Don't waste time trying to use choke-holds, because undead bodies don't need to breathe," it's worth knowing, let alone if there are ki techniques that are particularly effective against the things - even if that's just because they affect living and undead bodies the same way and hence don't LOSE any effectiveness against blood-rats.
With that in mind, you ask permission to stay and observe the lesson.
"I have no issue with that," your master replies.
"Would you have issue with me providing visual examples, Sensei?" you ask then.
Your teacher pauses at that, glancing obliquely at the not-quite-midday sun that hangs overhead. "I take it you mean illusions, rather than actually summoning a vampire?"
"I did. I mean, I wouldn't exactly OBJECT to summoning a corpse-demon in broad daylight, but there are limits to how instructive that would be, and it's not really a productive use of the magic anyway, since the REAL creature wouldn't actually be destroyed."
"How do you mean?" the other master asks with a frown of concern.
"Most spells which quickly summon one or more creatures to serve the caster generally don't bring the actual creatures, just a copy of them," you explain. "It's real enough to perform any tasks the original could or share any information they knew, but it's also unreal enough that the original doesn't get hurt by whatever happens to its double."
The frown deepens, taking on a shade of annoyance that doesn't feel like it's directed at you. "Are you saying that if a sorcerer who was in the middle of a fight summoned a pack of demons to try and keep his enemy off of him, and said enemy hit the demons hard enough and often enough that they disintegrated into nasty-smelling clouds of gas, they'd still be alive somewhere?"
You can't help but spare a moment to regard the master with some bemused curiosity, because that was a rather specific example.
"When did this happen?" Lu Tze asks his peer.
From his tone and expression, he's thinking much the same thing you are.
"Three years ago," comes the sour reply. "I was visiting Hong Kong and met some very unpleasant people. Ruined the trip."
The answer to the master's question is, unfortunately, probably "yes." That's not to say that there aren't ways of quickly "summoning" real creatures to your side: the Spell of Hostile Juxtaposition, which forcibly switches the caster's position with that of another creature via teleportation, is close; cracking open a gemstone prison created by the Spell to Trap the Soul would immediately release and rematerialize its occupant's physical form, a process which could easily be mistaken for summoning (especially since an extraplanar being so freed would be compelled to provide one service to whomever released it); and there are doubtlessly other similar examples you just aren't thinking of.
"I didn't catch a name," the master says in response to your question, "but they were humanoid, about so tall" - he holds his hand four feet off the ground - "quite fat, even heavier than they looked, and rather ugly. Aside from the usual fangs and claws, they had strength greater than the average adult's, if not hugely so, surprising toughness and energy for anything so obese, and were able to breathe a cloud of nauseating gas that filled an area some twenty feet across in the span of seconds."
"I think I know what they were," you state, spinning a Spell to Create a Silent Image. "Did they look like this?"
A grossly fat yet surprisingly muscular and honestly somewhat dull-looking demonic humanoid appears in an empty spot in the courtyard. It's a full foot shorter than you, with unpleasantly pinkish-grey flesh mottled with spots of brown and green, and wears little more than a ragged loincloth.
"That's it exactly," Lu Tze's fellow master says. "What's it called?"
"They're called dretches," you reply. "They're pretty much the bottom tier of demonic cannon fodder, though that just means they're 'only' dangerous enough to kill most unarmed civilians one-on-one. How many of them did the sorcerer manage to call up?"
"Three."
Oh? "With one spell?"
"He did, yes. Is that significant?"
"It gives me a better idea of where your former opponent ranked in terms of magical power," you reply.
The third tier iteration of the Spell to Summon a Monster can call up a single dretch, so this sorcerer was most likely either a fourth-circle spellcaster who got lucky with his summoning (though not lucky enough...), or a fifth-circle caster with a more average result. There are a few other possibilities - the sorcerer could have trained himself to be able to summon more creatures than is usual for a single spell, picked up some magic item that provided the power, or just had the ability to do so as part of his mystical lineage - but those are the simplest options.
"As for the demons, I'll note three- make it four things. First, it's possible for summoned creatures to retain the memory of their time answering such spells. Second, the average dretch is pretty unlikely to be able to do that, because of how mystically weak and just plain dumb they are. Third, most more powerful demons aren't going to care what a dretch got summoned to do, if they even notice. And finally, there ARE exceptions to both of the preceding points."
The master inclines his head at that, taking that warning to heart.
Lu-sensei, meanwhile, is looking around at the crowd of adults - some young, some old, some in-between - and nodding.
"Right, then. As that appears to be everyone who's planning on attending, let's begin..."
Lu-sensei's lecture is being held at one of the corners of the courtyard, close enough to one of the various "meditation gardens" you've run into so that the class can avail themselves of the seating if they wish. Some do, mostly among the older members of the class, although one seat is saved for a lady in her twenties who appears to be a few months into a pregnancy; others simply claim one of the courtyard tiles for a seat; and a few more stand around.
Showing some of the skills that TRULY mark a master, Lu Tze drafts you, your Image of the dretch, and his associate who took the sorcerously-interrupted trip to Hong Kong as his assistants. It turns out that your master HAS actually run into some of these things himself over the years, and is even familiar with their ability to summon others of their kind to aid them in battle - at least sometimes, and only when the demon doing the summoning isn't there as the result of a summoning spell itself.
As you noted, a single dretch would be able to kill most unprepared adult humans. A master-ranked martial artist would have better luck, although Lu Tze notes that "these wretched little menaces" can take a surprising amount of punishment if one hasn't honed the Ki Strike ability far enough to overcome their innate resilience.
You still have some work to do in that regard, but then, you weren't exactly planning on getting into a slugging match with any demons any time soon anyway. If you absolutely HAD to enter melee with a creature like this, you'd draw your Blessed Blade; its sanctified nature would allow it to wound dretches and most other low-order demons normally, even if it currently lacks the bite of a true holy weapon.
Lu-sensei mentions that aspect of the creatures' defenses as well. Evidently, when he was a more active member of Sunnydale's nightlife and found himself in need of a blessing or three, he used to go to Father Andrews, the now-retired old priest that you heard about from Amy's parents a while back.
"Temporarily blessing weapons to strike true against evil is a time-honored tradition of many faiths," your teacher notes. "Getting it to work on one's hands can be a little trickier, depending on the skills of the priest, but it is perfectly doable."
After that, Lu Tze gives a quick demonstration of How to Beat a Dretch in Three Moves or Less-
"In general, expending the ki for a Body Flicker against such an opponent as this is wasteful," your master says, "but if it has appeared as part of a group of its kind, which is quite common, this can be a good way to pick several of them off before any of them realize what's going on."
-moving around behind your illusion and unleashing a flurry of strikes-
"Assume I am moving at enhanced speeds."
-all at normal speed.
You do your best to have the Image respond properly, shifting its hideous features from Demonic Snarl #1 to a dumbfounded expression when Lu-sensei "disappears" from in front of it, and then to pained surprise as blows rain down. The demonic illusion staggers forward under the hits, and bursts into a cloud of foul-looking gas as you release the magic.
All in silence, which admittedly lacks something.
After that, Lu-sensei moves on to describing the common undead hemophage, with you whipping up a new Image to suit.
Said Image manifests and then immediately recoils from the sunlight, screaming.
"Yes, yes," Lu Tze sighs. "Direct sunlight would destroy such a creature in a matter of seconds, if it had no means of shielding itself. Sticking to the shadows can work, as can use of physical screens - thick canvas coverings, large panes of solid, opaque material - but even then, they're likely to smolder at the edges."
"Does sunscreen work?" someone asks. "Or was that just a movie thing?"
"I don't actually know," your master admits, "but I would tend to think not - at least not for THIS kind of vampire." He looks your way.
"It isn't mentioned in Vampyr," you reply, "and that's a pretty comprehensive source for the breed."
It might be something for you to test in the future, but it's definitely the kind of experiment that should only be done with a completely real and disposable corpse-demon. You don't want to risk the possibility of using a summoned vampire test subject, finding out that sunscreen actually DOES work, and then having said summon's original self remembering the experience.
You aren't anywhere near to running low on mana, a Minor Image is well within the limits you've agreed to abide by for casting spells, and while you can't reproduce intelligible speech within those bounds, the sort of wordless noises that corpse-demons make - the snarl when they shed their human disguises, the death-shriek, various grunts and screams when they're being pummeled - are entirely doable.
So it is that, when the Image of the vampire cowers from the sunlight, it does so with a cry of utter terror and despair, which has a few of the audience snorting in amusement, and others giving you puzzled looks.
In response to those, you merely shrug.
You like accuracy, and you don't like corpse-demons. What more reason do you need?
"Blade," comes the response.
"The one from a couple of years ago with Wesley Snipes?" you ask, getting a nod. "Huh. Haven't seen that one, yet."
"Well, without giving away too much, there's a scene where a vampire appears in broad daylight, by means of wearing a great deal of sunblock."
Hence the question.
Well, as you go on to say, you're pretty sure that wouldn't work - not COMPLETELY sure, of course, but as this idea was presented in a recent major Hollywood production, as opposed to a a more obscure film, the odds that some idiot blood-rat somewhere probably tried it would be quite a bit higher. The lack of corpse-demons walking around Sunnydale in the daylight hours, then, would seem to suggest that any such attempt didn't work out.
Moving on from the sunscreen thing, Lu Tze gets on with describing the physical advantages and weaknesses of the standard corpse-demon, and how to mitigate the former and exploit the latter.
"To the untrained eye and even to many martial artists unused to dealing with the supernatural, vampires of this type may appear to be universally skilled fighters almost from the moment they crawl out of their graves. This is not the case. A typical corpse-demon is no more SKILLED at combat than the unfortunate human whose body it has stolen; it is simply possessed of sufficient strength, speed, and resilience to allow it to overwhelm and outlast a typical human. For various reasons, most of the bloodsuckers never advance beyond the level of a seasoned brawler: some are too strongly influenced by their base aggression; others frankly too dimwitted; and many simply don't survive long enough; but the ones that overcome those issues are just as capable of developing technical skills as we would be."
"Does that include ki techniques?" someone asks with concern.
"In theory, yes." Your master raises a hand to forestall the murmuring that starts up. "Permit me to elaborate. As I said before, a newly-risen vampire is no more skilled at combat than the human victim originally was - and in the earliest stage of their post-mortem existence, they are almost invariably LESS so, due to how the accompanying physical, mental, and spiritual changes throw them off. Those whose human lives had the discipline to pursue the art in the first place can eventually find it again and properly compensate for their new level of performance, even to the extent of improving upon their starting point. When it comes to ki techniques, however, they face a series of issues."
You aren't the only one listening intently at this point. Even your vampiric Image leans forward slightly.
"First of all, the physical death of the body and the departure of the human soul cause the ki network to collapse. The preservative aspects of the blood demon's essence can prevent this, IF enough of the siring vampire's blood is donated and IF the sire is old enough and strong enough in its own right that this share of its blood provides the necessary energy. If not, then at best, the new vampire retains the knowledge of how to cultivate ki from scratch, and must do so - while accounting for and adapting to the peculiarities of its new demonic nature."
Not easy, you would expect.
"Second," your master continues, "in the event that a ki adept IS successfully turned with their ki network intact, they are still newborns, demonically speaking. Their natural essence is nowhere near as strong or as developed as the ki of the human they used to be, and thus, it cannot be actively utilized to the same extent. Some vampires do so anyway, not knowing any better, and subsequently devolve into mindless bloodthirsters, paralyzed husks, or even long-term coma victims when their animating essence diminishes too far to sustain all of their basic un-vital functions at once. Others, whether more cautious by nature or simply informed of the risk, will attempt to make up for their lack of energy by feeding more often - something which tends to bring them into conflict with others of their kind AND paints a larger target on their backs for hunters."
A bit of damned if they do, damned if they don't.
"Thirdly," Lu Tze goes on, "vampires do not change as readily as humans do, much less GROW as we do. The sort of personal development that a human can achieve in years may require decades for a vampire, and what is a lifetime's work for us may consume centuries of their existence. This should, by rights, make improving upon the fundamental aspects of their 'demonic ki' much more time-consuming, whether they're starting from scratch or working with a co-opted ki system. While I cannot definitively state that a corpse-demon vampire with the self-control to spend decades or centuries working on this particular skillset does NOT exist, I can say that I have yet to meet or hear of one from any sources I would consider reliable and knowledgeable on the subject."
That is... fascinating. Also eerie, and a bit concerning, but fascinating.
Do you have any questions to this point?
You wait a minute, looking around to see if anybody else is going to ask a question-
"What IS the source of your information on... turned ki adepts, Master Lu?" one of the instructors asks, with a certain air of concern.
A couple of the older masters, you note, are either frowning or shaking their heads at the question, or perhaps the one who asked it.
Your teacher sighs. "I regret to say that I HAVE lost students to Sunnydale's corpse-demon infestation, even among my adepts. Overconfidence and a lack of understanding of the full extent of the danger on my part and that of my students - but also on the part of the vampires."
Eh?
You can see that you aren't the only one puzzled by that addendum.
"How do you mean, Lu?" Master Tucker inquires.
"This was about twenty years ago," Lu Tze replies after a moment. "I'd been living in Sunnydale for several years, time enough to establish a class and get half a dozen of the more talented or hard-working members to the point of using ki."
You see a few nods.
"I'd also established myself as a general nuisance for the predatory members of the demonic community," your teacher continues. "I wasn't fool enough to try taking on the entire Hellmouth on my lonesome, or even in concert with some civically minded acquaintances-"
"Mister Blaisdell?" you venture, recalling past comments from Lily about her late husband's hunting activities.
"Among others, yes," Lu-sensei agrees. "Since the local corpse-demon infestation was the most consistent source of unnatural deaths, we tended to focus our attention there, and that inevitably drew the vampires' attention to us. As my training hall was open to the public for business, it did not have a threshold capable of keeping the parasites out, something which they tried to take advantage of several times before I made it thoroughly clear that they were not welcome and would not gain anything from their intrusions. After that, they focused on my students, killing several and turning a young man named Dwight, who was one of my ki adepts. This was when I began to learn of the difficulties involved, as Dwight's corpse did not rise when it should have - the demon was too weak to gain consciousness, and simply lay there as if in a coma. The other vampires that were sent to 'wake him' were both very confused by that, before I put them down."
You are reminded somewhat of the pair of corpse-demons that Shadow Alex saw get attacked by the coffin-infesting demonic bugs. How often do the vamps need to send out "retrieval parties" like that?
"There were two more such failed attempts before the nest in question finally managed to successfully turn a girl named Billie," Lu Tze presses on. "I was only able to piece this together later, but apparently the leader of the group turned her personally and invested enough of his own blood to ensure the process worked. Billie's corpse-demon became my first encounter with their version of a ki-user, and also the first example of the difficulties their sort had to deal with, as well as the long-term dangers. The creature in question suffered from excessive blood-thirst, and while her maker indulged her for a time, it wasn't enough; she turned on him, drained him and the rest of the pack, and then went on a rampage." He shakes his head. "That was not a good couple of months for ANYONE involved, and as far as I can tell, the memory of it has persisted in the community; I have lost other students to vampire attacks in the years since, but none have been turned."
...
Well, then. Seeing as how nobody else seems to have anything further to ask after THAT, you go ahead and raise your hand.
"Yes, lad?"
"Two questions, Sensei. Just general ones," you add, not wanting him to think you're about to pry into what are clearly unhappy memories.
"Go ahead."
"First, since ki can enhance the user's traits and abilities, could a corpse-demon ki adept theoretically use it to make themselves more resistant to their common weaknesses?"
"Theoretically, yes," Lu-sensei replies. "Corpse-demons do get stronger over time and from feeding, and ki could be used to emulate or enhance either process. That said, given the severity of some of those weaknesses, the 'resistance' in question would most likely be a trivial amount - a few more seconds' survival under direct sunlight, slightly more resistance to a stake, that sort of thing - at least unless you were dealing with the equivalent of a ki master."
You nod. "Okay, second question. You mentioned yesterday that the Hellmouth was a bad place to try and cultivate ki, unless one was a demonic cultivator. Would ki-using corpse-demons count for that?"
"Almost certainly," your master agrees grimly.
...
...not the answer you were hoping to hear.
Lu-sensei's lecture resumes, and will continue until it's time for lunch.
Where did you want to sit for this meal?
After the divergence regarding vampiric ki-users, Lu-sensei gets the discussion back on track, describing various individual techniques and overall approaches to fighting that he's found effective and efficient when dealing with vampires.
"A solid, pointy-ended length of wood that you can comfortably grasp with one hand and hide up a sleeve, inside a coat, or in some other manner is an essential tool when you have reason to expect an engagement with corpse-demons," he says, to your complete lack of surprise. "But don't start out by sharpening the tips of your tonfa; practice with a cheap wooden stake until you can comfortably dust a vampire WITHOUT losing the stake in the process, whether that's by pulling it free on reflex, because you've worked out how to use Ki Infusion to render the stake resistant to the demon's death throes, or for preference, both." He pauses, glances at you, and then adds, "If you have access to an ally who can bless or enchant stakes, that can also help to prevent their loss, but the effect does tend to wear off quickly and isn't one hundred percent even when it's active. I've never heard of anyone selling permanent magic stakes...?"
At his trailing statement and direct look, you reply, "It wouldn't be hard to find wood suitable for taking the basic enhancements to accuracy, durability, and striking power, but they'd still be pretty easy to break or lose, and not much to speak of as weapons. So, yeah, you'd likely have to special order them."
He nods and gets back to the subject.
Your vampire Image finally gets put to its intended use, providing one half of the ensuing demonstration of techniques. While it's technically true that your memories of Shadow Alex's hunt give you a better idea of how these undead move and react in a combat situation than you had of how a dretch would behave, your Dark Self's extensive use of magical ambush tactics limits the usefulness of your knowledge. The result is a vampire that lunges about this corner of the courtyard in a display of brute savagery that might not be an accurate reflection of a genuine corpse-demon's skills and style, simple as they've been described to be.
Then again, from Lu-sensei's lack of comment, maybe you're closer to the mark than you realize?
Well, whichever is the case, your master spends a while beating up the Image in what one might call an advanced form of shadow boxing - you spare a moment to be grateful that he isn't moving TOO fast, and that you've seen him giving such "slow" demonstrations many, many times before now - before finally producing one of the aforementioned stakes from somewhere on his person. The weapon is polished and thrums with an aura of ki that is... not the equivalent of a permanent enhancement, but rather the imprint of a technique has been used on this particular item so often that the memory of it lingers.
Without any particular effort or flourishes, Lu Tze bats the Image's arms aside with a one-two backhand-forehand combo, and then brings the stake back in a reverse-grip follow-up stab to the chest.
You have no concerns with the authenticity of the death-cry or disintegration. THOSE, you saw plenty of.
After that demonstration, Lu-sensei covers a few more demonic entities that he's found to be regulars on or at least frequent visitors to the Hellmouth, such as hellhounds-
"There are at least two separate species that are given that name," he adds. "One of them look like actual dogs, only with the ability to breathe fire and intelligence comparable to a rather dull human; the other sort are shaggy humanoids with no particular special abilities, but which are apparently easy to train. Both are pack creatures."
-Fyarl demons-
"They sneeze WHAT?"
-and various other gribblies.
You recognize basically everything that he describes, and are able to provide suitable Images.
Not long after that, the class breaks up for lunch.
Lu-sensei accompanies you to the dining hall after his lecture, and you take a moment to ask him how you did as an assistant.
"Minus points for asking questions," he replies after a moment's thought. "A teacher, even an assistant, letting on that they don't know the material being covered sets a poor example for the students."
Even though the "students" were all instructors and masters themselves?
"Even then, yes. On the other hand," your master continues, "those illusions were very helpful, and saved me no small amount of time and frustration. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a dynamic, interactive image must be the equivalent of a complete book."
When you get to lunch, you see that the thin crowd at this morning's breakfast was a fluke, as the dining hall is once again packed almost from wall to wall. Cordy is already sitting at the students' table, talking with some of the girls, while Amy and Larry are still at the counter, making their meal selections. Briar is seated at the center table, talking to Xiuying, and Mrs. Blaisdell is sitting with the instructors, discussing something intently with several of them and a couple of the kitchen workers.
Maybe she's planning for cookies? Your taste buds are hopeful.
Anyway, you get in line, collect your mid-day meal, and after some thought, decide to join your partner to see what she's been up to.
There is a groan from some of the younger students as you don't sit with them.
"Afternoon, Briar," you greet her. "How was your morning?"
"Mentally tiring," she replies. "I tried sitting through a couple of classes with Xiuying, and, well, let's just say, if I didn't have a line to your brain, I would have been completely lost."
"That is still so weird to hear you say," Xiuying notes. "On several levels, at that."
Is she referring to the bit where Briar was cribbing notes from your brain to keep up, the fact she was doing so from a whole other building, or is it just that you actually HAD the necessary information, despite being only nine?
"In a word, yes."
You take a few minutes to enjoy some of your lunch, all the while feeling the pressure of hopeful eyes and ears turned in your direction.
"Happy to help, sir," you reply. "Are there plans for more lectures like that?"
He nods. "I'm scheduled to give a second presentation on the topic this afternoon, for the benefit of most of those who weren't able to attend the first. If I could prevail upon you to assist again, it would be appreciated."
"What time?"
"Two o'clock."
Reaching a good spot to pause in your meal, you sit back, look at the table behind you, and say, "So, who wants to hear a story about the realm of Faerie?"
"ME!"
"I do!"
"Fairies?"
Xiuying turns to Briar. "Is this how you met, or...?"
"Oh, no, we met WELL before he wandered into Faerie," your partner answers.
"Though that trip DID come about as a result of meeting Briar," you add. "Or more precisely, from meeting her mother..."
"To be fair, you DID ask her for help."
"Yes, I did. Teachable moment, everybody," you add, looking around at the entire room. "The first rule of making a deal with one of the Fae is, 'Don't.'"
Most of the room pause and look at Briar.
"What? He's not wrong."
"Also, Briar is both a minor Fae and technically in the middle of a deal right now, so she can't make new ones-"
"Less 'can't' than 'shouldn't'," she opines.
"-ANYWAY."
You start off by explaining that you had come across someone with an illness that required a magical solution more involved than just "cast a spell at it," and went to Briar's mother for advice because you weren't sure exactly what would work. She in turn eventually directed you to an ancient stronghold that had originally been created by a Roman legion that got pulled into Faerie two thousand years ago - give or take a century - and which was maintained and expanded by their descendants as a bulwark against the Fair Folk.
You have to take a moment to explain that, in English, the word "fair" can be used to designate impartiality, honesty, or beauty, and that when applied to the Fae, it suggests all three - often to dangerous excess. It's a warning to the listener as much as it is a compliment to the subject.
"It can also mean 'circus,'" Amy points out.
You and Briar trade glances and brief flickers of thought.
You're both thinking of the antics of her younger siblings, Lady Chloe's brood, and the various groups that helped you out on your quest in Chloe's domain.
"Same place?" you ask.
"Yes."
"Same bunch of demons?"
"Also yes."
"Alright, I can do that."
"Thank you in advance."
"That... also works, honestly."
"But that's not a comparison that most of them would take as a compliment," you add.
"Except for the ones that would," Briar notes.
"Yes, and their reactions could be anything from amusing or exhausting to 'you are now one of the circus animals' or otherwise deadly."
"Why would getting turned into an animal be deadly?" somebody wonders.
"I mean, it doesn't have to be-"
"Take it from the man who's turned himself into a monkey and back again," Cordelia chimes in then.
"-but some people aren't very nice to animals, and that goes for the Fae as well. Plus, I know of two spells that can not only give someone the physical FORM of an animal, but also the MIND of one. If you can't remember who you were or even that you were ever anything besides a lion or a tiger or a bear, that's basically a kind of death."
You see some of the older members of the audience nod, wince, or shudder at the proposition.
Some of the younger ones, on the other hand, look curious-
"I'd like to be a lion."
"Even if you never turned back?"
"I don't know, maybe?"
"Even if you couldn't play video games anymore?"
"I would find a way!"
-or even interested.
Shaking your head, you return to the tale in progress, describing your team-up with a pair of Japanese priests and your collective descent into the Memorian Outpost. You describe the brief battle with the rogue security golems-
"Ancient magical ROBOTS?!"
"Neat!"
-and the undead-
Everybody just nods at that, completely unsurprised that an ancient magical fortress-turned-battleground would be haunted.
-as well as your discovery of "fairy gold"-
"Oooo."
-your decision to leave it where it was-
"Wait, what?"
-and your later choice to try and return it to its proper owner(s), or rather, their heirs.
...actually, now that you're thinking on it, the potential "curse" on the Faerie Gold will have fully dissipated by this Halloween, after which you'll be free to claim the pouch for your own purposes.
It's decidedly less pressing a matter, now that you have the profits of plundering Silbern to look forward to - both now and for some time going forward, if you understood Ambrose and Balthazar correctly about the time it would take to move all the goods and get the best prices - but still, magical gold shouldn't be forgotten.
"And then we ran into a nest of giant demonic spiders," you state.
"How 'giant'?"
"How 'demonic'?"
"Yipe!"
"To answer those questions," you say, looking to the masters' table, "I would request permission to create some illusions."
You would venture that about a third of the masters and instructors were present to see your handiwork in Lu-sensei's lecture: of those, somewhat more than half either look interested to see what fantastical terrors you'll whip up next, or at least aren't seriously objecting to the idea; most of the remainder look uneasy; and a few have gone very still.
Lu-sensei himself, who has actually SEEN Gohma thanks to your "Greatest Hits" run through the Ring of Trials, is looking at the room, visibly measuring the distance from floor to ceiling, from the tops of the heads of the crowd to the ceiling, and between the walls.
This does not exactly reassure his peers.
"How many images were you considering, Alex?" the old man asks.
"Three, Sensei," you reply. "One for each overall life-stage."
"...there should be room enough for that, then."
"Wait, 'should be'?" one of the masters next to him asks nervously. "For just three? How big ARE these things, Lu?"
"You're about to find out."
As you gather mana for the modified Silent Image, you pulse a mental request to Briar.
"Ah, yes," she says, standing up. "Anyone interested in learning about the appearance and basic life-cycle of the demonic arachnids known as Gohma, please direct your attention to the ceiling. Anybody who does NOT like spiders and does NOT wish to see any such thring, please avert or cover your eyes. We'll let you know when it's not terrifying to look."
It only takes a single tier of Marked Spell Metamagic to boost a normal Silent Image from creating one subject to creating three at once, and your overall skill in the School of Illusion allows you to stagger their appearances.
"To begin with, we have the Hatchling, larval, or baby stage," you declare, as the first and smallest of the spider-forms manifests upside-down on the ceiling. "As you can see, it's about the size of a soccer ball-"
"Ohgodwhy."
"-most of that in the body. They're not really anything to write home about at this stage, as they don't have any special abilities aside from a bite that's more painful than poisonous, being able to climb along most surfaces, and mundane web-spinning. A hit from almost any weapon or attack spell will do one in; I've heard of one guy who could take on entire swarms of hatchlings with just a slingshot-"
"Swarms?!"
"-although he did prefer a sword. Which is about the level of weapon needed for the next stage of development."
You let the image of the Young Gohma appear.
"Whoa!"
"Wow, it's big!"
"I don't want to know."
"As big as a horse!"
"I said I didn't want to know!"
"Look at that eye!"
"Whyyyy-!?"
"Greater size and strength, tougher armor, more dangerous bite," you recite. "It's an improvement over the Hatchling in basically every respect. How long it takes them to get to this stage depends on the environment and the availability of prey, but usually isn't any less time than a few months - and not that many Gohma Hatchlings will live that long, so Gohma Young are much rarer. They still don't have any special attacks, but their armor is strong enough that proper weapons are usually required, though the eye starts becoming a favored weak point at this stage. Next up, we have the ADULT stage-"
There is a round of surprised shouting - and some screaming - as the Image of the Mother Gohma blots out most of the ceiling. Quite a few people duck as if to get out of reach, or just because GIANT SPIDER'S GIANT STARING EYE-!
"-which as you can see," you go on, raising your voice.
"-has continued the established trend for physical growth. At this stage, its armor is hard enough to resist most handheld weapons, particularly those which cut and pierce, and if you look close-"
"I don't want to!"
"Ugh..."
"Come on, you guys, this is so cool!"
"-you can see that it's developed claws on its foremost pair of limbs, similar to a scorpion or a crab. In addition to that, some Adult Gohma are capable of shooting energy beams from their eyes-"
"Say WHAT?!"
"-while others can lay eggs more or less on demand, creating new, combat-capable spawn in a matter of seconds. Fortunately, they can't keep that up for very long, and Gohma that are forced to be born and mature so quickly usually die off just as fast." You pause. "As far as vulnerabilities go, Adult Gohma still retain the obvious weak-point of the eye, but given their height, the threat of the claws, and the fact that they can climb like this, melee can be impractical, which is why the traditional solution is to use a bow and arrows. I'll also note that as strong as their armor is, enough pure force can still crack it. That said, the amount of force required runs towards the level of dropping boulders on them, which isn't always practical."
"What about bug spray?" somebody asks with a hint of desperation.
"Forget that, what about EXPLOSIVES?"
"Funny you should mention those..."
There is groaning and shouts of protest as you explain that Gohma are at least resistant to most poisons, and that explosives have been tried, but aren't really reliable. Oh, you don't doubt that setting off a Bomb close enough to a Gohma's eye could hurt or even kill it outright; the problem is that Gohma know their main weakness and are smart enough to protect it, while Bombs are sufficiently large and slow-moving for the bugs to see coming and do something about, whether that's by shielding their eye, smacking the munition away before it can go off, or even snipping the fuse (if it was a really clever specimen).
You round out this side-presentation by explaining that while these three phases represent the "core" of the Gohma life-cycle, variant specimens have been recorded to exist, some of them quite distinct from the common spider/crab hybrid appearance. These forms are usually the result of some environmental influence upon the Gohma's development, such as exposure to a volcanic environment granting a supernatural tolerance for heat while also further toughening the armor, until a mature specimen is capable of submerging itself in lava in relative comfort-
"AWESOME!"
/ Seriously? / Briar exclaims over the bond. / When did THAT happen? /
/ A different timeline, I think... /
-whereas a Gohma born inside a giant magical tree might develop a more compact form so that it could remain in its "home," even as an adult.
Getting back to the Tale of the Memorian Outpost Raid, you're almost immediately asked HOW you and your allies beat the Mother Gohma.
"Well," you begin, "first, I hit it with a spell called Hold Monster, which prevents the target from moving for anywhere from several seconds to a couple of minutes."
"Oh, that sounds useful."
"It also sounds kind of unreliable..."
"It depends a lot on the caster's power and the target's strength of will," you admit. "The more determined, capable, or just plain hard-headed the target is, the more likely they are to throw the paralysis off early, or just ignore it outright. Anyway, once I had the spider stuck in place, I hit it with the Boneshatter Spell, which is a nasty piece of work designed to splinter the target's skeleton - or exoskeleton, in this case."
"Ewww..."
"So basically, you broke its bones?"
"Cool!"
"I tried to," you clarify. "I'm fairly sure the Gohma resisted the spell, so it only had... slightly leaky cracks in its shell, instead of... well, worse."
"Ugh!"
"Anyway, after that, I set off a Fireball underneath it, because a bunch of its spawn were coming up through the opening it had smashed through the floor-"
"Wait, it BROKE the floor?"
"-and while that cleared out the oncoming swarm, it also ticked off Momma Spider enough to finally throw off my paralysis spell and charge. Fortunately, the lingering pain of the Boneshatter Spell slowed her down enough that I was able to get and stay out of her way until I finished putting together another Evocation Spell - it was kind of like the Fireball, only made of pure Light and Holy power instead of Fire."
"So, a Lightball? Holyball? ...man, neither of those sound good."
"Naming spells is an art form," you admit. "One that not even a lot of magic-users are very good at... Anyway, that was enough to take a very large piece out of the Gohma, after which I finished it off with a sword-thrust to the eye."
Nobody in the audience seems to notice or even consider that you're leaving anything significant out, such as, for example, the casting of a curse-gone-awry.
"So you DIDN'T just set the whole room on fire that time?" Cordelia wonders.
People turn to her.
"Not that time, no," you reply. "I hadn't learned the Spell to Burn Corruption yet, and none of my other Fire Spells would have been as effective or efficient." You shrug. "Anyway, after that I sent a few clouds of holy water mist down into the tunnels where the remaining Gohma were nesting, to drive them out - about a hundred or so survivors fled the Outpost and ran straight into Briar's mother, who was waiting for us outside."
"It was a bad day to be a spider, all told," Briar says cheerfully.
The Gohma recoil as if struck, silently shudder as if screaming, and "fall over" onto their backs on the ceiling, legs curling up.
"Oh, god, now they're doing the thing where they curl up and die!" somebody cries out.
"Hey, we told you not to look!"
You'd idly considered concluding the show by having the "corpses" burn away, but that isn't actually how Gohma typically die - not unless fire is actually involved, which you didn't include a representation of for this demonstration. Just doing so anyway feels a bit dishonest.
So, instead, the Images rapidly lose all color, darkening to near total black before bursting into skull-shaped clouds of smoke, which hover about the roof for a moment before dissipating as you end your spell.
"What's that about?" comes the puzzled question.
"That's what usually happens to a Gohma's body after death," Briar informs the boy in question.
"...what, with the skulls and all?"
"Most monsters from the realm the Gohma originate in go out like that, at least if their demonic heritage is strong enough," you offer. "But that place is tale for another time..."
You continue your current story from there, covering your meeting with, awakening of, and subsequent agreement to assist Captain Marcus in re-taking his command. You also add a warning for your audience that, regardless of whatever impression your tale might give to the contrary, making a deal with intelligent undead is not something to be done lightly.
After all, you had a lot of magic to call upon, as well as a pair of priests who weren't exactly slouches in the mystical department themselves, and there was a powerful, friendly Fae waiting just outside the base. Your chances of dealing with the Captain if he'd turned out to be evil, crazy, or both were pretty good, and the odds of long-term injury pretty low, given how capable Briar's mother is at magical healing.
"But then he led us to the base's command center, recruited the lingering spirit of a mage of his command, and issued a base-wide summons to all remaining loyal forces," you go on. "That left me, Briar, and the priests surrounded by over fifty very angry undead legionaries, a lot of whom had some magical training to go with their martial skills. If the Captain hadn't spoken for us and they hadn't had valid targets for their rage crawling around, things could still have gotten VERY unpleasant."
"But they didn't, right?" you're asked.
"No, they didn't."
"And you ended up getting a ghost army out of the deal."
"We ended up working WITH a ghost army," you clarify, "and even then, we spent the better part of the battle working in a different area from them."
"Wait, there was a battle?!"
"Like, not just a few guys having matches at the same time or one guy fighting off a crowd, but a real battle?!"
"There was... but that, too, is going to have to wait for another time."
"Aw, no!"
"Come on!"
Alas, there's nothing you can do about it; lunch is nearly over, and people have classes to be getting to.
"Argh!"
"Why is school a thing?"
"Dinner!" comes the urgent call. "What time are you going to have dinner, three or six?"
"Six," you say without hesitation.
"Then we'll be here, right guys?"
"RIGHT!"
With the meal ending and your volunteer spot in Lu-sensei's next lecture set for two, you still have an hour of time on your hands.
A thought occurs that has you making sure to clean your plate and return your dishes before the lunch period is over, so that you have time to approach the masters' table.
"Do you come seeking wisdom, permission, or forgiveness?" Lu-sensei inquires, once you've drawn near.
"Permission to seek wisdom, I'd say," you reply after a moment's thought. "Specifically, I figured that, unless you're going to be busy over the next hour, now might be a good time to sort out my permission to check out the intermediary books on ki techniques in the library."
"You believe you're ready for such?" Master Vincent inquires. He doesn't seem to doubt you or find your behavior presumptuous, but then again, one guy sitting at the other end of the table from him and Lu-sensei gives off enough scowling disapproval to make up for that.
Is that the Master Nielson you've heard about?
"I've checked out a couple of the recommended books on the basics, and looked through a few others, sir," you answer the question. "They haven't been uninstructive, but most of what I've gotten out of them so far has just been review or better context for things I already knew."
"Which books?"
"I looked through a pamphlet called 'Ki and You, Part Six' and a book titled 'Frame Work', neither of which were particularly useful - although I should probably go back and finish the book, just to be sure," you reply, tiptoeing around the fact that you copied the books rather than checked them out or perused them in the library. "I also got through 'The Illusion of Separation' and have one called 'Roots of the Volcano' I haven't started yet."
The names draw looks of recognition from the masters shamelessly listening in on the conversation, some of them clearly recognizing the titles while others appear to be only vaguely familiar with the names. In fairness to that second group, the School's library is by no means a small one, and even so, once a neighbor offers a reminder or two, they quickly place the titles.
"The pamphlets I can definitely understand being below your skill level," Master Nielson replies, "and The Illusion being so isn't unsurprising, either. I always found that one very easy to read, despite the technical elements."
You tend to agree with him.
"Frame Work is a bit unexpected, though," the man goes on. "You say you didn't finish it?"
"I got through the first few chapters without finding anything new, even a different take on what I'd already learned. I would have written it off entirely if not for the section on the Substitution technique, and that's mostly because I've hardly ever USED that move since I first worked it out."
"Oh, really? When was that, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I met a few ninjas at the World Tournament," you say simply. "Took some notes."
Most of the masters collectively nod in understanding.
"I just haven't really needed it because Ki Enhancement, Body Flicker, and my strength- and speed-enhancement spells have made me faster than most people and things I've had to fight since then-"
More nods of comprehension.
"-and in most of those cases, I've had a few defensive forcefields up and running as well, so dodging wasn't QUITE as essential."
That stops the nodding and prompts a few puzzled or considering looks instead.
Regardless, Lu-sensei doesn't have anything that urgently needs doing, and agrees he might as well get you registered with the library before it slips his mind.
As you're about to leave the dining hall, you think to ask your teacher if he should add Cordelia's name to the permission list, too, provided he thinks she's ready for the books.
"Ready? Most likely. Interested... actually, one moment."
And the old man shuffles over to where Cordy is still sitting with her crowd of new friends. Words are casually exchanged, a thoughtful look comes over Queen C's face, and she nods, getting up from her chair and excusing herself to the rest of the group before falling in alongside your teacher.
Briar catches sight of this and invites herself along as well, noting as she shrinks down to her customary size that you've basically been out from under her watchful eye all morning, and now something has apparently come of it.
"Also, I just need a break from being big and hiding my wings," she adds, giving the appendages in question a good stretch.
"Bigness IS a trial..."
"You're NOT going to tell me that you don't enjoy being bigger and stronger than most kids your age."
"Not at all," you agree easily. "But that's kind of my point. So many people look at being big and only see the positives, like strength, reach, or being able to go on a 'you must be this tall to' ride; they never consider the negatives, like standing out in a crowd even when you don't want to, having to buy all your clothes in extra-large sizes, or how you're always the one GIVING the piggy-back rides instead of being carried."
"Such hardship," your partner drawls.
"And that's just right now!" you continue. "We've already caught glimpses of what it'll be like when I finally finish growing. Low doorways! Cramped seats! Suspicion or avoidance from smaller people! ...although to be fair, a lot of that last one may have had to do with my colorful outfit making me look like a Yakuza."
"How colorful are we talking, here?" Lu-sensei wonders.
After a moment, you shrug and cast a quick, short-ranged Silent Image of the adult guise you've used to visit Karakura, wearing a magically scaled-up Red Suit.
"Isn't that the outfit Mrs. Drake gave you for your birthday?" Cordelia says, identifying the outfit with her usual keen eye and memory for fashion - or the lack of it.
"It is."
Lu-sensei, meanwhile, is studying the image. After a moment, he nods, admitting, "I can see where people might get the wrong idea. At least you don't have any tattoos."
"Yeah, Mrs. Arisawa mentioned that..."
The library isn't busy when you get there, allowing you a chance to speak with Miss Mei at the counter almost immediately. With Lu-sensei's permission given, it's a very simple matter for her to get you and Cordelia logged in, taking no more than five minutes.
Gained Five Elements Library Pass (Intermediate)
Once that's done, your master goes on his way, saying that he'll see you at two, while Cordelia opts to go have a look at the intermediate-level books on ki techniques.
"Not much point having an electronic permission slip if I don't use it," she says simply.
It's a reasonable point, especially when you're only going to be at the School for the remainder of the week. You've already checked out your limit of library books, but you do have The Illusion of Separation in your pocket, and could return it to check out a different volume in its stead.
Whether or not you hand that book in...
Returned The Illusion of Separation
"You finished already?" Miss Mei asks with mild interest, as she accepts the book from you.
"It's not even ten chapters, and I did spend the better part of last night reading it," you reply with a shrug.
"What did you think?"
"Well..."
While you repeat the thoughts you expressed to the masters, she logs the book in as returned.
"Just to be clear," Mei says, "you aren't done with Roots of the Volcano?"
"I haven't even started reading it yet," you admit. "Am I still allowed to check out another book in place of The Illusion?"
"You are, but just the one."
Good to know.
With that in mind, you head after Cordelia to peruse the books on intermediate-level ki techniques, which are located up on the second floor of the library. When you get up there and take a look around, you find that the demographics have shifted a bit; where visitors to the ground floor had a pretty even distribution of age categories, most of the dozen-plus people you can see searching the stacks, sitting down and reading, or quietly talking with one another are well into the "teens and up" range, with the youngest person you catch sight of other than Cordelia being thirteen if he's a day.
This does get the two of you some looks - more of them aimed at Cordy than you, no doubt thanks to your size throwing people off about your true age - but nobody seems particularly put out by your presence.
"Hey, Alex," Cordelia says as you approach. "Any suggestions for what sort of books I should get, while we're here?"
"Well, first of all, how well can you read Chinese?"
Frowning, Cordelia takes down a book at random, opens it up, and reads for a moment.
"Not that great," she admits. "Mind if I buy a translation spell off of you?"
"Not at all. As far as topics go, meanwhile, we've only got access for the week, so I'd say..."
"...something on the spiritual side. Lu-sensei has admitted he's kind of weak in that area."
You've known since the World Tournament that Cordelia was under some kind of long-term, god-sent curse, and you've had a tentative plan to deal with the matter by getting her to convert to the faith of the Golden Goddesses for just as long. Said plan took a distinct step forward when you started studying with the priestly trio, and received some additional support when Cordy ran the Ring of Trials and won her Ring of Curse Resistance - which, by the by, has been on her finger pretty much constantly ever since - but the actual "end game" of the matter still lies some way off.
This leaves open the possibility that the curse will be triggered before you're prepared to deal with it, and while your investigations into the matter have made that seem unlikely, it IS still a scenario that should be taken into consideration and prepared for accordingly.
As such, anything that could help to build up Cordy's spiritual strength would be a boon. Not only will this improve her chances of resisting the curse and its effects if and when it activates, it could also contribute to the eradication of the malignant magic, especially if Cordelia ends up a Dinnite like yourself and has to operate under the "do it yourself" ethos.
Quite aside from Cordelia's personal matters, Lu-sensei's self-admitted shortcomings on the spiritual side of the Five Elements' philosophy and techniques have left all of his students a bit under-prepared for dealing with matters of that nature. As one example of such, you've been warned by Mrs. Arisawa that external ki techniques are a poor fit for fighting Hollows - and by extension, other spectral undead - but the School of Five Elements and the wider Style have been around long enough that they ought to have learned that lesson a long, long time ago, and come up with techniques to address such problems.
And unlike you, Cordelia doesn't have an oversized Bag of Holding's worth of Abjuration and Necromancy to throw at angry spooks. Hence, looking for spiritual guidance would benefit her twice over.
Your friend accepts your recommendation with a nod and starts looking over book titles for a minute.
Then she huffs, digs into one pocket, and draws out a little purse.
"I think I need that spell, now," she admits. "Do you want cash, coin, or crystals?"
Nice alliteration.
"Thanks."
While you could certainly stand to look into the Five Elements' spiritual teachings yourself, your needs in that area aren't so urgent as Cordy's: as noted, when it comes to defense, you've got your own magic to fall back on; and for matters of personal health and wellness, you have Briar, your tutors, and the Goddesses beyond them.
Plus, you just think your friend should be allowed first dibs.
With that in mind, you turn your attention to the matter of Ki Generation. As a technique, it's the least developed of your ki fundamentals, and as a branch of ki use, it's likewise heavily under-represented. Ki Perception is just as bad in that latter respect, but you USE your ki senses basically every waking minute on some level, whereas Ki Generation techniques... okay, from a certain point of view, you're ALSO using them every minute, but their effects are just so subtle, self-contained, and slow to accomplish anything that it FEELS like a huge difference.
So, after giving Cordelia's Chinese literacy a temporary boost, you start poking through the stacks, looking for promising titles on ki cultivation.
In short order, you've found a book entitled "Foot of the Volcano," which you're quite certain is written by the same person that penned "Roots of the Volcano" and is almost certainly a sequel to that tome.
There's also a book called "Cultivating Patience," although when you leaf through that one, it appears to be mostly about meditation rather than Ki Generation. Given how well-practiced you are at meditation by now and how little the introductory books had to offer you in areas similarly honed by use, you aren't sure if this would be worthwhile. Still...
Guided by a whim and a pun, you also poke around for books that related to the use of ki in gardening, and are a little surprised when you find THREE tomes on the topic.
Cash is readily available through transactions on Earth, gold and silver are used pretty much anywhere you can reach via magic, and the liquidation of your share of the Silbern loot will be bringing in significant quantities of one, the other, or both currencies in the not-too-distant future.
Rupees are a lot harder to come by, and consequently, the chance to net a few appeals to you more.
Cordelia seems to agree. "Even if the fairy kingdom's magic church guys have agreed to mostly pay us in gold, some of it's always in gems, and I don't have a lot else I can spend them on besides hiring you."
...when she puts it that way, it almost sounds like you're her hireling, which is barely a step up from minion.
You have... some conflicted feelings about that.
Not that they stop you from pocketing the profits, of course.
Gained 13 Rupees (3 Green, 1 Yellow)
Looking over the titles that have caught your eye, you figure that it probably makes the most sense to check out the second Volcano book. Diversifying your skillset is all well and good, but your main concern here was building up your knowledge of Ki Generation, a task best accomplished by focusing on that topic - something that two books in a series seem a lot more likely to do rather than reading more unrelated tomes.
You wait a minute to see if Cordelia's made her choices, and when you find that she has, the two of you and Briar head back down to the desk to sign out your selections.
Gained Foot of the Volcano
It's only about a quarter-after one, so how would you like to spend the time before you're due to appear at Lu-sensei's lesson?
It wouldn't make sense to start reading Foot of the Volcano before you'd gone through its predecessor, and while the forty-odd minutes before you're expected to assist in Lu-sensei's next lecture would probably be time enough for you to peruse a couple of chapters, there is the matter of you having handed Roots of the Volcano off to Amy last night. Knowing Amy, the book is most likely in her room with the rest of her stuff.
Even if you did loan her the book in the first place, you're not about to go through a friend's things without permission, but the odds of Amy being in the dorm right now are pretty small, and you don't particularly feel like chasing her around the campus - or maybe it's just that, despite having just checked out a new library book, you're not really in the mood to read anything right now?
You spend a few minutes looking through the section on entry-level ki techniques, to see if you can find more of the Ki and You booklets. Your search turns up Parts One, Three, and Four, as well as the already copied and read Part Six, and after making sure nobody's around-
"Cover me, Briar."
"With what?"
-you quickly copy the contents of the other three parts into one of your books with the Ritual of Photocopying, for later investigation.
Gained Ki and You, Part One: Enhancement
Gained Ki and You, Part Three: Infusion
Gained Ki and You, Part Four: Projection
Although the absence of Parts Two and Five is a bit annoying, you have other things you'd rather be doing right now than continue looking for them. As such, you slip the pamphlets back into their places and head back to the corner of the courtyard where your teacher will be speaking again in about half an hour.
Since you've got time and have been told that there's nothing prohibiting it, you ask your partner to spot you while you cast a Spell of Levitation and assume a sitting pose.
"Is that kung fu legal?" Briar wonders.
"I actually asked Lu-sensei about it earlier. As long as I don't tell people I'm doing it with ki and have taken reasonable precautions, it's fine."
"Ah. Well, call me 'Reasonable,' then."
It's always nice when your friends are on the same page as you, you think as you close your eyes and clear your mind.
...
"You're drifting, Alex."
Darned wind. "Could you push me back-?"
"Sure, just a second..."
*Pop!*
...
"...I'm turning upside-down, aren't I?"
"Starting to, yeah; I'd give it another ten minutes. Do you want me to right you, or-?"
"No," you reply, opening your eyes, "I think that's about all the time I have to try that right now."
You've been sensing instructor- and master-level ki signatures approaching and gathering in the area for a few minutes, indicating that the lesson approaches. Twenty-some minutes wasn't quite enough time for a proper meditation session, but you feel like you're right on the edge of something...
You'll have to try that again later, maybe somewhere less traveled. Or less breezy...
What did you want to do AFTER Lu-sensei's second lecture of the day?
Lu-sensei's second lecture on common demonic threats goes a bit more smoothly than the first one did. In part, this is because the two of you have a better idea of how to combine your respective aspects of the presentation, but you must admit that the greater part of the improvement was down to this being your second attempt at mimicking all these demonic species and their movements in combat. Thus, when it came time for the "shadow boxing" segments, you were able to put on what you felt was a more convincing show, with Lu-sensei's "opponents" moving more smoothly and naturally for their inhuman physiology, rather than looking quite so much like stuntmen in costumes.
Also, this time around, you went with Minor Images from the start, allowing for snarls, grunts, the impacts of fists and feet against demonic hide, and other noises. Even if you're probably not getting the sounds exactly correct for several of the species, due to not having personally encountered them yet - whether in combat or out of it - you have a whole mental library of monstrous and/or demonic vocalizations to call upon.
If your choice to substitute the battle-bellows and pained shrieks of a Taros for the noises a Fyarl would make is inaccurate, Lu-sensei doesn't comment on it.
The sense of wry recognition coming down the familiar bond tells you clearly that Briar noticed the creative license, but she doesn't remark on the matter beyond that.
While your show was improved, the questions that it prompts the audience to ask are much the same as before.
As the lesson winds up, you ask Lu-sensei if there's somewhere you could find a proper schedule for the School's classes, as your previous approach of random visitations has been yielding less than spectacular results.
He directs you back to the main office, and after a few minutes' conversation with the lady at the desk this afternoon, you get a copy of the next week's planned activities. After ruling out introductory-level classes which wouldn't have a lot to offer you and advanced classes that you likely aren't ready for, you've got a few choices.
While that class on Ki Enhancement is tempting, your proficiency with the foundational technique is just about as good as it's likely to get, short of permanent magical enhancements and a few more years' worth of practice and growth, and that last point is responsible for Lu-sensei's "you're too young to learn this without getting hurt" teaching embargo on some of the Five Elements Style's more advanced techniques - which a more potent form of Ki Enhancement would undoubtedly qualify as.
Of course, it's possible that this class is meant to cover Ki Enhancement as a branch of the art, but if that's the case, most of the techniques you know in this field are still fairly rudimentary and unlikely to get the full benefits of a mid-level class. The main exception to that is Body Flicker, which, again, you've been told you can't learn the next iteration of until you're older, for safety's sake.
All in all, it seems like the class may not be the best use of your time.
With that in mind, you head to Falling 201, which caught your attention in no small part because of those people you saw leaping off the roof of the study hall earlier. Your grasp of the Slow Fall technique might not be up to taking a fall from that height, but you won't know that for sure unless you ask, and you could undoubtedly scrape up some tips on what (not) to do just by showing up and paying attention to the demonstration(s).
You're good at that.
Learning through observation aside, you kind of just want to see what's going on, and so you head to the class, which is being held behind the study hall, as expected.
It's not too different from the set-up Lu-sensei helped you and Amy put up behind the dorm yesterday evening, with several large crash mats set up and spotters in place before the building wall, which is covered by many handholds. As you approach - a few minutes late, due to your detour to the office - you see that not everyone taking part in the lesson is climbing the wall; a couple of students just go in the nearest door, obviously heading to the roof in the more conventional manner.
You spare a moment to wonder whether going up the stairs would require more effort than climbing the wall, before shaking your head and approaching the instructor.
After a brief discussion to determine how skilled you are at handling long falls, the teacher proves your earlier thinking correct, stating that you're not quite ready for a two-story drop. That said, you aren't the only student in the class to whom that applies, and you're allowed to join a group of those who are either still working on their basic skills or trying to overcome a fear of heights, and only climbing up to the top of the first floor before letting go.
As this is another opportunity to train your Ki Grip as well as the Slow Fall technique, you go ahead and activate both, and then get to climbing.
"Hup, hup, hup..."
...
"Whaaaa-!"
*Whoomph!*
And then again.
"Hup, hup, hup..."
...
"Whaaaa-!"
*Whoomph!*
And so it goes once more.
Gained Ki Grip E
Gained Slow Fall E
You're definitely falling a bit slower by the end of class! Now, if only you could climb back up a bit faster to match that... ah, well.