Chapter 40: Chapter 40: Remedial training

It had been a grueling two weeks since Norman had arrived in Grothlosburg and had last seen Toby or Anna. Not because the gron prevented it or anything, just because he had been in training. Why would you need two weeks of training for corpse disposal? You don’t. It was two weeks of ‘how to properly file paperwork’.

By the time Norman was done with the training, he was ready to say screw it with this city, meet up with Toby and Anna and leave this dystopian nightmare of a country.

The city wasn’t even all that bad. The gron were technologically superior to humans, and they integrated magic into their technology in some pretty ingenious ways. The problem was not even the bureaucracy, although that was annoying. It was the people, they were so bland and lifeless that it felt like Norman’s soul was being sucked out of his body with each passing day.

Even their buildings were lifeless square blocks of grey concrete that reminded Norman of pictures from Russian neighborhoods from during the cold war. Even their vehicles looked like the ugly cyber truck only with even less thought put into the design. They were blocky and all painted a utilitarian grey that somehow clashed with the grey of the buildings.

The weird lifelessness of the buildings and vehicles was offset by the absolute glut of advertisements and graffiti that seemed to cover the city at street level. The advertisements made sense to Norman, but the graffiti felt so out of place.

Norman had asked about the graffiti at one point but the gron he asked just stated, “It’s not my job to know that.”

That was another thing that irked Norman. You couldn’t get a  direct answer to a question to save your life if the gron you were talking to wasn’t in that specific position. It was like they went out of their way to avoid even appearing to cross over into another role.

Norman didn’t find out until just a few days ago why that was, thanks to the gron internet. The gron version of the internet was a chaotic mess of porn and popups. Which is pretty much the same as the human internet really. It turned out that the reason why gron acted like answering a question outside their role was anathema was due to how their government was built.

Their government had once been a standard democracy, much like how the United States was before the fall. Then over time, it devolved, forcing the gron to implement a new system that awarded adherence to strict rules and regulations. It seemed to work for them since they had stayed with this system for over a thousand years as far as Norman could discover. But instead of electing their leaders by popular vote, they elected their leader once every decade based on what gron had best circumvented the current rules and regulations through legal loopholes during that time.

To the gron, this was a sign that this person was the most qualified to lead their city/state/country. Yeah, you read that right. Grothlosburg was all three, and the only place on this planet where Gron could be found. They had simply set up teleportation fields – literal fields where you would get teleported from – and abandoned any other piece of land they had once dwelt on.

The whole concept behind the government made Norman’s head hurt. But at least it let him know that there was a good chance other states and countries had been brought to this world. It had been the leading theory in Colorado before they were forced to leave. At least humanity had managed to get something right.

But that’s not what had Norman excited for today. He was done with training and now he got to work with bodies. It would also be the first time he met with Toby since they arrived. Norman’s disappointment with the man hadn’t evaporated during those two weeks but the time apart had given Norman some perspective on the situation. Toby had managed to contact him via his work email to set up the meeting. And after a round of questions to verify Norman was who he said he was, he agreed to meet at a local bar.

Norman hadn’t mingled with any gron after work, he usually just shuffled off to his assigned housing and tried to figure out the little magic he had available in his grimoire. He was kind of excited to see how the gron relaxed.

As for how his magic was going, slow. Painfully so. But he did figure out the issue with replacing the jorik magic powder in his spells.

The experiments toward that revelation had cost him his security deposit though. In hindsight, activating a Bone Wall in his small room was not the best idea. But it had been the only spell he had that he could modify and he simply wasn’t willing to wait to find an ideal location to test out his hypothesis.

The first test had been a simple one, change the Bone Wall to Bone Armor, but without using the jorik magic powder. For this Norman just went back to his roots. He already knew his body contained magical power. Which was no longer being constantly siphoned away by a cruel and vindictive whore. So he simply put it to work.

Blood was the answer, or so he thought, going by his experience with the jorik blood. So Norman drained some of his blood. He was glad he had a healing potion at hand during the test since he went a bit overboard and almost passed out. That would have been bad with an open wound.

Before he even dried the blood, he knew it would work. It had the same shimmering quality that the jorik blood had. Maybe not to the same degree though. He could easily verify that fact if he needed to add more blood powder to his magic to perform the same spells.

The spell worked after adding about half as much more of the blood powder to the spell versus the jorik powder.

There was probably a way to concentrate the powder further but Norman didn’t care about that at the moment. He was just glad to have a full bottle of magic powder at hand again. He held the bottle up to the light in his room. It sparkled like ruby sand in the harsh glare of the overly white light.

He smiled and launched himself off the bed and over to the small kitchenette and table in his room. Norman had a few more Bone Wall spells prepared but he was fine with sacrificing them since he hadn’t found the spell to be all that useful yet. So keeping four on hand was overkill.

Besides, if this next experiment bore fruit, Norman wouldn’t have to worry about finding a new body to make the spell with.

Norman opened his grimoire and took out the page of notes he had stuffed inside. With two full weeks to just sit around with nothing to do but study, Norman had studied his spells. Specifically, his Bone Wall and Bone Armor spells, expanding on his earlier notes from when they were on the run.

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He eventually noticed a pattern. Some of the symbols were the same but reversed or oriented differently. Others had additional markings in them but Norman thought they might be the same symbol but with different ‘instructions?’. He wasn’t really sure about that last part. But if his hypothesis turned out correct, it meant some of the symbols acted like logic gates. Not that Norman was well-versed on those, only vaguely remembering some random videos he watched online while being bored out of his mind.

God, he had wasted so much of his life just doing nothing.

Norman shook that thought away and got back to his experiment. The notes he had drawn on the loose sheet contained four variations of the Bone Armor spell. Why that spell in particular?

Well, Norman preferred the way it operated. It also happened to have fewer symbols. Norman was pretty sure the spell was also incomplete, which would explain why the armor only covered his upper torso. But he wasn’t trying to fix it at the moment, he had another use for an altered version of the spell.

After moving everything from the center of the room and tipping the bed against the wall, Norman deployed the Bone Wall as close to the far side of the room as he could. He learned his lesson about not deploying it too close to himself.

The magic of the wall sprang into being as it raced to cut off the opposite side of the room, screeching and squealing as the sharp points scrapped against the linoleum flooring. Eventually, it stopped as it impacted both walls, adding more holes to the ones already there from his first experiment. Then it shot up, nearly five feet, bisecting the room.

Norman ignored the damage he was doing to the room and quickly walked over to the wall, looking for a good spike of bone to carve the symbols into. It didn’t take him long to find a suitably large piece.

He set the page of notes down and concentrated on carving the symbols into the bone as he had written them. It didn’t take him too long to carve the pattern. Norman wanted to say the worst that could happen was the spell wouldn’t activate. But that wasn’t true. The worst thing that could happen was the spell did activate but it did so in a way that got him killed.

He took a step back and paused. He had gotten a bit ahead of himself again and realized he should have done this in a more open area, or in a place where he could hide from any ill effects of his modified spell. His eagerness to experiment had gotten to him again. At least he hadn’t lost that drive when he was forced to kick the jorik blood. Turned out that was all him.

Norman decided to continue with the test despite the possible danger. He activated his Bone Armor to protect himself and had a healing potion on hand just in case. He had gone this far, he might as well finish.

Norman grabbed one last thing from the kitchen before he sprinkled the blood powder onto the pattern in the bone.

There was a loud cracking sound, followed by a tearing groan. Norman quickly covered his junk with the skillet from the kitchen. The wall was condensing down, seeming to pull into itself. But it wasn’t happy about it. Norman dodged a flailing spike of bone from the wall as the muscle it was attached to snapped free of the wall and whipped about the room for a few seconds.

It wasn’t alive, it was just the release of force, almost like a spring going off. As the wall shrunk, more and more cords of muscle burst free and tore around the room. By the time it was done, the wall looked more like a pile of muscle spaghetti than a wall. With the only intact portion being the bit with the pattern carved into it.

How did Norman know the spell had exhausted itself, well the pattern had gone dull and what remained of the construct was starting to decay at an accelerated rate.

Norman gagged at the foul stench that erupted from the failed spell and ran to open the tiny window in his room.

Someone also banged on the wall to yell at him. “Oy, shut up in there! I’m trying to get some sleep. Don’t make me call the noise monitor.”

“Sorry,” Norman called back while he pinched his nose shut with one hand.

With the window open to let some fresh air in, Norman hurried to recall the Bone Wall by recarving the original pattern. Only it didn’t work.

He spent the better part of the next two hours shoveling rotting meat into a small trashcan and running it down to the garbage room due to the failed spell. The smell must have spread through the hallway because people in nearby rooms had come out to glare at him, including the neighbor that had banged on his wall. The funny thing about that was the neighbor seemed impressed for whatever reason. Norman just shook his head, knowing he would never understand gron.

It was obvious something he had done had broken down the magic of the wall. Norman had a pretty good idea of how he fucked up. As for why the material couldn’t be reused, he wasn’t sure. It was another question and future test he jotted down in his notes. But he didn’t have any more time tonight to experiment, he needed to meet Toby soon.

The bar they were meeting at was some four hundred miles away, but Norman just needed to step into one of the nearby teleporters that acted like subways. How hard could that be?

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