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>>133878 In which a writefag's only trick is to make thread starter images blend in with the Photon background.
“Well we’ll just-”
“CAHMMMMMFPH” Cirno exclaims through your hand.
“-helptidyuptheplacetakeiteasybyenow!” you blurt out, hastily dragging the thrice-damned loudmouth fairy with you towards the doors. Once you’ve got her safely out of earshot, you release her mouth.
“Hey! Hey!”
“Cirno, please shut the-”
“
Listen to me, she’s got cat ears!”
“I KNOW!” you cry, throwing your hands in the air. Duke and Suwako look up from their conversation.
“... that it’s a big mess! That’s why I’m asking you to help!?” you stutter nervously, followed by a brittle laugh. Suwako just shrugs and turns back to her tea, but Duke, you knows you far better, gives you that
god-damned golden-eyed Serious Face again.
You smile crazily.
His eyebrow twitches.
You slash your hand through the air harshly and grimace.
Though you’re too far away to hear it, and his shoulders remain motionless, you can
hear the long, gusty Hound Archon Sigh you know Duke just heaved replay in your head from memory. Suwako says something to him, and he turns back to his conversation, daintily lifting one tiny teacup in his massive hand.
You kneel, speaking low: “Cirno, gods damn you if you say
word one to Patchy about those ears, you hear me!?”
Cirno frowns. “But we need to fix ‘em!”
“Say anything and I’ll fix
YOU!” you growl desperately. “They’ll go away on their own in a little bit, but if you point them out she’ll get pissed and I’ll never get any help from her so keep it under your hat, would you?”
“I don’t have a ha-” Cirno stops, then grabs at her head. “Oh no! Teacher’s spare hat! I- I-”
“Right here,” Sakuya says from behind you. “Found it in the hallway outside.”
“OY!” you exclaim, twirling and backpedaling. You manage to trip over a pile of unshelved books and fall flat on your rear.
“I’m going to need a new ass at this rate,” you complain. Sakuya smiles at you brilliantly as Cirno accepts the hat.
“Done with the bathroom already?” you wonder, creaking to your feet. “Pretty-”
“-fast?” Sakuya finishes, cocking her head slightly.
“Um,” you say stupidly. “Right.”
“I also found this,” she says, handing you the wand you dropped in the hall immediately before Pyonta went eldritch on your ass.
“Oh, thanks,” you say, taking it. “So is this what you do every day, pick the place up after a bunch of magic-users trash it?”
“Only occasionally,” Sakuya says, sighing. “Every now and then we have an Incident, or Patchouli catches Marisa snooping in the stacks, and they have it out...” she looks around at the toppled bookcases and hundreds of tomes scattered everywhere- “but I get to clean it up.”
“It’s not his fault!” Cirno interjects. “He got tackled by a greased tentacle monster.”
“....
Thank you, dear,” you mutter as Sakuya processes that mental image, biting her lip in an obvious effort to suppress laughter.. “Anyways, I can handle this much for you, at least.” You clap your hands, rub them together briefly to limber the joints, and make a few arcane gestures. “
Sirrah Gophero Internus!”
There’s a slight rustle in the air as a veritable horde of
Unseen Servants come into existence. “Right, straighten up this disaster!”
The
Servants hop to, and soon they’re stacking up the scattered books neatly. “The spell lasts a while; once you get those shelves up again, you can have them shelve them.” You look around, shaking your head a bit. “Might have to cast it again tomorrow for ya, or dig out a scroll if they don’t finish by then. By Christ, we did make a mess in here.”
“Who’s Christ?” Cirno asks.
“Oh, he was a famous cleric,” you reply. “Kicked ass on the Imperial Legions two millennia ago, including the Imperial high archmage. Wizards have used Christ’s name as a swear word ever since, though the archmage
was kind of a prick, if you read the histories.”
“Wizards have their own swears?” Cirno wonders.
Sakuya looks at you aghast. “You’re teaching Cirno
wizard swears!?”
“Hey!”
Sakuya smirks again. “Once you get past the surreal insanity, you’re kind of fun to harass.”
Now
she’s messing with
you. You curse Pyonta silently. One greased-tentacle-monster tackle has ruined
everything. Sakuya is clearly amused by your reaction. “Nice change of pace; a visitor that cleans up after themselves. Nice change of pace,
period.”
“I thought you had ‘Incidents’ all the time?”
“Occasionally,” she corrects you. “I said occasionally. And even then, everybody gets to have a danmaku duel, but
I clean
all of it up. The most interesting thing to happen around here lately is Patchouli trying braids.” She fishes a pocketwatch out of her apron and consults it. “I must catch up with my tasks. Try to stay alive until lunch, okay?” There’s a little
click, and the maid vanishes.
You immediately flop onto the end of a toppled bookcase, resting your head in your hands. “Whuh.”
Cirno hops up and takes a seat on the bookcase next to you.
“What’s wrong?”
“Its.... its been a long morning.”
“Yeah,” she replies. She sits in silence for a few more minutes, drumming her hands idly on the bookcase.
“So, uh... are you and teacher going to-”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” you snap.
“Oh,” she says quietly, falling silent. The fairy looks at the floor and starts swinging her legs a little.
Guilt wells in your chest. You’ve been pretty brusque with the little fairy recently. You’ve had an extremely taxing morning, true, but she’s certainly shown a lot of concern for your troubles. A
lot of concern, actually. Which is odd, because at times she doesn’t seem to believe you genuinely care about her.
“You don’t have to say that... I’m more adult then that...” she had said, after you’d promised to teach her magic.
.... wait.
“Hey, Cirno,” you say conspiratorially, leaning in a bit. “I think it’s time for you to learn...
wizard magic!”
“Really?” she asks you suspiciously.
“Of
course! We’re in the Voile library, and I – well, you weren’t afraid to come hug me when I was all crazy, so you can definitely handle this.”
“Oh boy!” she says, excited again. “Are you gonna show me that Fireball! Or the Skadoosh spell? Or what?”
“Not sure yet,” you say, getting up and gesturing for Cirno to follow. You both walk a little deeper into the stacks, until you have complete privacy. The towering bookshelves with their moldy tomes deadens even the sounds of your footsteps. You come across a reading nook with a table and a few chairs, and bid Cirno to take a seat. She perches Keine’s spare hat upon her head, adopts a studious expression, and touches her chin in a fairly good impersonation of Keine when she’s feeling thoughtful.
“Wait,” Cirno says, suddenly apprehensive. “I have to read your books, right? I’m not very good at reading, yet.”
“Actually, no. I’m just... wait, I need to explain this to you.” You sit back in your chair and get comfortable. “See, as a fairy, you use magic instinctively; it runs in your blood. On my world they call people like that sorcerers.” Equating human sorcerers to fey creatures that embody elemental, wild magic isn’t an exact analogy, but close enough for your purposes. “Wizards, though, we come to understand magic academically.”
“That still means I can’t learn your magic without reading books,” Cirno says glumly.
“Au contraire.”
“You take that back!” Cirno demands.
“No, it means – nevermind. The point is,
magic is magic. It’s a multiuniversal constant. Sorcerers and wizards cast the same spells, just in different ways.”
“How?” Cirno asks, some of her excitement returning.
“Wizards, we have to ‘prepare’ spells. That’s what I’m doing in the morning with my books. I’m actually casting most of the spell, right there. There’s an interrupt point ‘built-in’ to the spell, and when I want to uncork it, I just utter the last few words of the spell and bam!” – you snap your fingers – “it’s finished.”
“So why don’t you prepare like a billion spells and set them all off at once?” Cirno asks.
“It’s complex. Magic is a lot like... water,” you decide, realizing that Cirno probably doesn’t know what electricity is. “Once you tap it, it
wants to flow. My mind is actually holding the potential of those spells like a dam.”
“Sooo...” Cirno says, musing. “The better your brainmeats are, the more magic you can hold in it?”
“Succinctly put,” you say, amused. Cirno nods with finality, as if this confirms a theory of hers. “Anyways... sorcerers needn’t prepare spells like I do. You know how when you use your ice magic, it’s almost as natural as breathing?” Cirno nods. “That’s the way sorcerers use it. They don’t ‘prepare’ anything because casing the
entire spell is internalized like that, intimately familiar.”
“So why don’t they whup ya?” Cirno puzzles. “If they can cast until they get tired, but you only got so much?”
“Because their repertoire is very limited,” you explain. With a wide sweep of your hand, you indicate the many bookshelves around you. “There’s an ancient saying, ‘a wizard who reads a thousand books is wise. A wizard who memorizes a thousand books is insane.’ That’s because it’s impossible to memorize a thousand books without going loopy... and it’s just as impossible for a sorcerer to completely memorize a thousand spells.”
Cirno rubs her chin, hunkering into a thinker’s pose. “But... you have all those books. And you were reading Marisa’s books... you can prepare any magic you can read?”
“Exactly!” you say, delighted. “But a true sorcerer can’t, because they haven’t spent years doing the study required to understand magic in a more academic sense. Still, they can learn almost any spell a wizard uses, given time.”
“So
I can learn!?” Cirno says, excited.
“Yeah!”
“What’cha gonna teach me!?”
“
Presdignition!” you say dramatically.
“Awww,” Cirno says, disappointed. “Not
Fireball?”
A quick mental image of a fireball-hurling Cirno flits through your mind, and you blanch. “Not quite yet. And don’t knock Presdignition. It can do all sorts of awesome things. Light campfires with wet wood, flavor food when you don’t have any salt, clean stains out of your clothes without having to wash’em, stuff like that! And it’s pretty easy to learn.”
“Okay, show me!” Cirno says, excited. You reach into your pocket and pull out your oldest workbook, from when you were still an academy brat. “Right, here’s how you do it...”
You lose track of time as you demonstrate
Presdignition for Cirno a few times, walking her through the steps of the spell, and encouraging her to practice it a few times. The fairy revels in the attention, and focuses on the task with single-minded determination.
A good thirty minutes later, you tousle her hair affectionately and call an end to practice. “That was excellent,” you say, and mean it. You should have expected it, of course – fey in general and fairies in particular are almost wild magic made tangible, and Cirno is an especially powerful example of her kind. Despite that, Cirno still surprised you.
“Time to get my tour,” you say, pointing to the front of the library, Cirno following. After only a few steps, she runs up beside you and starts tugging on your robe energetically.
“Hey, what, what?” The fairy grabs your sleeve and hauls on it, forcing you to crouch till she can whisper in your ear.
“I hear somebody following us!” You doubt she’s mistaken; the fairy has unusually sharp ears, as you’ve discovered more then once to your detriment.
[ ] GET OUT OF HERE STALKER!
[ ] Let Patchouli deal with it; it’s her library.
-----------------------------
Yes, I’ll be dealing with Mind Blank quite soon.
