Chapter 37: 40. The Good News Part 4

Ajax and Shaula decide to head to the library that they had visited last time. It’s located in the middle of the neighborhood of Mytif, a working class district of Tritol. There are a lot of apartment buildings in this area, each ten to fourteen floors tall.

They first go to the front desk of the library to pick up their library cards. They then ask the front desk librarian for history books about the Federation. There are no history books under lock and key, so they easily find something useful and comprehensive.

It is a set of seven books forming an encyclopedia. The set is printed by the church and certified by the previous pope of the Federation. This leads both to think that it must be filled with lots of religious and nationalist propaganda.

Still, even propaganda can show them what everyone else believes. It might help them blend in among the crowd by knowing some of this commonly accepted info.

So long as it’s not all lies, they’ll also learn a great deal about the world as well. Furthermore, they can comprehend the text without any difficulty. It reads like a series written for kids in high school, rather than the obscure ramblings of an academic.

Ajax carries this pile while they both continue searching for books. They look only for books about magic. The ones they find are carefully compiled, easily digestible grimoires. 

These grimoires do not show the reader how to cast spells and spells to cast. They’re more about how mana works, how it’s used to construct spells, etc. It seems like important foundational learning since it reads like it’s written for middle schoolers. They have two weeks before they need to return their books.

Next, they head to a nearby general store. Ajax has already been to this store for coin wrappers. This time they are picking up some writing implements and notebooks. They find a selection of pencils and properly bound blank books for their use.

They do not sell ballpoint pens, Shaula’s preferred writing implement. They sell ink bottles to be used with quills made from the feathers of land dragons. There are also fountain pens that are more expensive. They choose pencils so they can avoid any resulting mess.

They learned from the store employees that students normally use loose paper for their note taking. This is why the selection for notebooks is normally very poor. It is interesting to Ajax and Shaula how so much of this world is still recognizable to them.

They return to the inn with their supplies. They first spend time reading through the magic books. They learn some basic information about magic and mana, but stop after going through the first few chapters.

Apparently, mana permeates everything in this world. It is a type of energy that is extremely receptive to mental command, mental images and thought in general. In order for humans to use it, they draw environmental mana into their bodies. They can either do this consciously, or indirectly through their food, water and air.

Each person has a set limit of mana they can absorb until they are “full” and cannot absorb more. This is how a living creature can turn wild mana into their own.

Humans use their mana to activate spells through incantations. Magic casting through incantations is like activating a set of computation instructions. This is how Ajax and Shaula interpret their grimoires. Each incantation line can be spoken in the common tongue one after the other.

These lines must be mentally “applied” onto a specific amount of mana. Depending on the spell, more or less mana is needed with more or less instructions applied.

But, spells with many instructions can take several minutes to properly cast. This is why well trained mages do not use the common tongue to cast incantations. The most commonly used magical language is built specifically for concise incantations.

It’s just like the ice spell that robber mage had used earlier. The mage shouted “Troud Lathim”. When Ajax and Shaula heard that incantation, they heard a very specific meaning attached to it. This meaning would normally take several paragraphs of the common tongue to fully articulate.

Dumbed down, it would be something like “ice spike of a certain length, width and shape, launch speed, temperature, moving from a certain initial position to a certain destination position…” That was the meaning ascribed to the phrase “Troud Lathim”.

By forcing that phrase to have such complexity, that spell was fired extremely quickly. But, the caster must be able to comprehend those very concise, high complexity phrases. The mental imaging and comprehension must also match.

This is why it is difficult to learn how to use magic well enough to become an ice mage of that caliber. That single spell phrase he spoke might have been the only one that man could even use.

Ajax and Shaula confirmed that they could comprehend even this language crafted specifically for magic. While reading the grimoire’s spell phrases, they were bombarded with meaning. There was extreme complexity behind every set of two or three words. They understood all of it.

The grimoire made it clear that the mage’s mental imaging is also important. The precise amount of mana is also quite crucial. Something that the grimoire wasn’t so straightforward about is the “magic circuit”.

Mana within the body cannot be free flowing when used for a spell. It must be collected. Otherwise, it would be like pressurized gas without a container.

This part was much more difficult to understand fully. The grimoire itself said that they would have to learn it from other magicians or magic teachers. It claimed that students normally learn about simple spell casting in their public schooling.

Most students need to learn a lot about magic’s fundamentals to cast even the simplest spells. They go through a few years of magic classes starting from a young age. Much like learning a new language, it is much more difficult to become fluent for adults than children.

Magic didn’t always need words to activate. However, using chantless magic is too complex for commoners to grasp. Only the nobles with their special bloodlines are proficient in that kind of magic. Even they can’t activate more complex spells without incantations.

Magic is different for disabled people as well, but not impossible. Blind people could also use magic, but the way they handled spell “imaging” was quite different. There are also deaf and mute magicians who use sign language to cast incantations.

In fact, it was more valuable for stealth mages to use spell sign language rather than audible phrases. Their grimoires don’t display any diagrams of magic signing, but Ajax and Shaula are curious about something.

They wonder how far their language comprehension power goes. Does it only apply to spoken languages and text? They figure out that they can use an Omicronian sign language as well. A few of them actually.

They even spend an hour and a half exploring this novelty. Knowing new spoken languages is one thing, but neither of them had ever learned sign language on Earth. 

In situations where they didn’t want to even whisper, they could speak with their hands. They spend time conversing with each other through their signing.

It is already late into the evening at this point, the sun having just set. At this point, they decide to take a break from their studying and signing. Neither of them are hungry but Ajax decides to get a meal for the two of them from the inn kitchen. They last ate in the early afternoon.

He brings food back to their room, quite delicious horned Miella steaks. The horned blue Miella is an animal in the same family as the riding Miella. However, it cannot be used for transportation and is raised as livestock.

He also brought back a fluffy, red cake. It looks a bit like red velvet, but it doesn’t have any icing and its consistency is different. They still don’t know what the equivalent of this world’s milk and eggs are, but this fluffy cake isn’t lacking any quality. After their meal, they continue speaking to each other in sign language.

{That was really delicious. Ajax, can you get me some water?}

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{Sure, sure. It was really amazing honestly.}

Ajax takes a nearby jug of water and pours it into two cups for him and Shaula. They drink it down without fear of having to go to the washroom later. No matter what they drink, nothing makes them have to excrete waste. It was a bit weird when they first noticed, but it is quite convenient in general.

They just aren’t sure where all the solids and liquids they consume go. After all, it’s not like they feel themselves getting heavier.

{So… I think it’s time we talk about something that I really didn’t want to talk about.}

{Hm? What is it?} Ajax doesn’t know what topic she is referring to.

{Actually, Ajax, there was a reason I wanted to learn magic as quickly as possible. Did… you have the same thought?}

{…Right.}

{You remember, don’t you? When we… used that power to get here.}

{Our power… Can you still feel it? Where it is, I mean? How to reach it?}

{Yeah, and I’m guessing you can too, right?}

{Yeah.}

Ajax and Shaula have a vivid experience using their power. For a brief moment, they felt a connection to it. It is a power that allows them to travel through space from Earth to Omicron. On Earth, their very souls or what they assume to be their souls had manifested this power. But, it wasn’t them who activated it.

Whatever it was that fed their power “instructions” was completely unfathomable. But, they realized that their power was being fed instructions. After Ajax had seen the magic of the ice mage, he had thought that it felt oddly familiar.

Now, they have a working theory in the form of the grimoires they’ve borrowed. Whatever their power is, it works similar to mana and magic in general. The instructions that were fed into their power are quite different however… 

{It was that… star map. You remember it, Ajax?}

{How could I forget that… whatever the fuck that map was…} The instructions being fed into their power was like chantless magic. Their minds were forcibly exposed to a stellar map which provided them with basically two pieces of information. The first piece was a mental representation of everything everywhere in the galaxy.

Every star, every planet, every expanse of void, everything. It was quite detailed as well.

The second piece of information was their origin and destination coordinates. Where Earth was on the map and where Omicron was. They were really given a glimpse of everything just for a brief moment.

Just long enough to feed that “glimpse” into their power.

{I saw… my family.}

{…I see.}

{I could really see everything, Shaula. If I wanted to, I could have seen what Mars or Jupiter looked like from their surfaces to their cores. I bet I could have perceived the black hole at the center of our galaxy. But, all I really focused on then was… my family.}

This is why Ajax didn’t want to even mention this topic. Even though it is important. Even though it is crucial information that might help them get back home… It’s too much.

{I… I saw Rita in her classroom, listening to her teacher. She was just sitting there, watching her teacher explain something. She was wearing what she left home in. She honestly looked bored, last day of school before summer after all, right?}

{…I see.}

{Dad, he was in the office in a meeting. I saw the suit he was wearing. He wasn’t presenting, but I saw him looking at his phone. I didn’t see what was on his phone… His workplace looked like shit honestly, why was he even working there? Just for us?}

{…Ajax—}

{Mom, she was filling out a prescription at the pharmacy she works at. She looked really professional, I forgot that pharmacists wear those lab coats. She looked concerned about the person at the counter, a really really old lady, like late hundreds if I had to guess…}

{…}

{It wasn’t like a video, it felt like I could look into her brain if I wanted to. That’s how fucking nuts that map was. But… at least I got to see them before I… before I…}

Ajax starts to tear up. His eyes tremble as he looks up at the ceiling light. He feels like crying. Has he cried about them while in this world?

What does he have to cry about?

He’s going to be seeing them soon, he shouldn’t cry. He might be here for a few weeks or a month or two, but eventually, he’s going to be back.

Things can continue as they have. Ajax pushes aside his current thoughts. If he’s going to be like this here, what would he have been like living on a university campus? He laughs a little to himself as he wipes away his tears.

Shaula can’t really say anything about what he’s feeling right now. He still hasn’t accepted the reality of their state here. Even she thinks it’ll take them years to figure out a way to get back, at the least. But, she can’t say anything.

She is afraid of forcing him to go through his feelings when he’s not ready. She’s also afraid that if she is the one to force him to see the truth, he’ll shoot the messenger. She would not be willing to lose Ajax like that.

{So, Shaula… What did you see?}

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