Chapter 74 - Tiny

Felix’s brain was trying to process everything.

Tiny was, as is tradition, huge. His chin cleared 6 feet, and he had a deceptive layer of fat over what Felix knew had to be huge muscles. A strong tan, callouses on his hands that Felix could see from where he was standing, and a particular way of holding himself suggested the man worked in construction. A wifebeater and blue jeans completed the look.

And he was standing on his steps.

If he was just over to fix something, why would he know his name? It was a puzzle.

“Well, don’t just stand there! Come on in! Gabriela’s been missing you.”

At Felix’s mom’s name, the boy started and finished dragging his luggage … home.

Strange. In just a few short months, Camelot had started to feel like a second home. How odd.

“Hi. I’m Felix.” Felix said, trying to be polite. Tiny grinned, clearly missing a few teeth.

“I can tell we’re going to get along great!” The man said.

========

To Felix’s never-ending horror, Tiny was dating his mother.

His mom.

Dating.

In all his years growing up, his mom had never dated anyone.

It made Felix feel bad, and somewhat guilty. Was it his fault that his mom had never gone out and tried to find love? Had he been holding her back all these years?

All the dating stuff and thoughts made him want to withdraw into himself and do his homework, which had him around less - especially when Tiny was around - which made him feel even worse that he hadn’t seen his mom properly in months and was now avoiding her.

She was working less, and the fridge was better stocked than when Felix had last been here. 

Was … was Felix bad for his mom?

It would’ve been easy to hate Tiny if the man was a jerk. Except he wasn’t. Tiny was nothing but kind, in a rough way, and took an interest in Felix. He was clearly skeptical about magic, which wasn’t helped by Felix’s utter inability to cast anything in the mundane world, Merlin’s Friction being far too high for Felix to overcome. Still, doubts or not, Tiny kept trying to include Felix in things. Showing him how to fix a car. Basic power tool usage and safety. How to throw a punch.

It gave Felix all sorts of complex feelings, and to his horror, he realized they were very similar to the feelings Paracelsus gave him during their frequent lessons. Like how the man showed him how to properly hold and polish a wand, common mistakes people made with magical books, how to treat with the bwca, broom maintenance, how to tell the quality of a core, and how to magically sign paperwork.

Which, naturally, led him to thinking about his least favorite topic.

His no-good so-called ‘father’.

Felix wanted to be the sort of person who didn’t care. Who’d recognized that the man was gone, never coming back, and the two clearly wanted nothing to do with each other.

They had nothing at all to do with each other. Not a little bit.

Felix refused to acknowledge that he was still hurting, still unhappy. It was a large part of why he didn’t go spend the money to get his core checked out. It was easy to excuse it as a matter of extremely limited funds, but more than that - it’d be a connection to his father. Something that undeniably come from him.

Everything else was a ‘maybe’. Slightly different hair color than his mom? His dad might’ve had the same color, or something radically different, and his color was an awkward ‘halfway’ point between the two. Different face structure? Same thing. Eye color? Yup. Height? That was just good eating and nutrition, nothing to do with his father.

But his core? His magical core, passed along from parent to child? 

That had to be from his father.

Worse, it’d give him clues about who his dad was. If it was a black cat core like Chris’s? He could be closely related to Chris. A fox core like Alexandria? They could be cousins.

It was far more likely that it was a core from America. Europe was far away, but the same questions would haunt him. Who had a skinchanger core? Who had a thunderbird core?

A little less grandiose, a little more down to Earth - A pika? A California condor? A desert bighorn sheep? The last one seemed likely, given that he had a horned rabbit core … but then a sheep core should’ve resonated with him. A jackalope? Lucky, rabbit-like, but how did a leprechaun tie into it all? Maybe it was the rainbow part of the wand? But why would one little side-part resonate so hard…?

Felix shook his head.

No, no, no!

He didn’t care what his core was. A core was a core. The only difference it made was finding a better wand to use, and even then, that was a matter of money, not knowledge. He knew there was a better wand out there. The leprechaun core had resonated with him. It was the best fit in the entire store. Knowing that he had a jackalope core, or whatever, wouldn’t change the best fitting wand in the store. Only having enough money would fix his wand issue.

Plus.

He liked his clover and horned rabbit wand. It was his wand. He’d cast his first spells with it … and the used wand market was bad. 

Also, if he knew, then he might get curious about the Empire of the Sun, and seeing which groups had a jackalope core. That whole excursion sounded time-consuming, time he didn’t have, not to mention wildly expensive. Money he didn’t have, money that would be better spent on a wand or ritual supplies.

No, paying for a test was a dumb idea. Felix had so many better things to do with his time and limited money. His ‘father’ clearly left everything in the past, Felix was also going to leave him where he belonged.

Forgotten, in the past.

He deserved nothing more.

But maybe … just maybe … if he got the chance to check, for free…

Maybe he’d find out. Just to satisfy his own curiosity.

Nothing more.

At least their finances were clearly doing better. Felix’s mom wasn’t working endlessly. Which meant she was around more, and the two of them could spend time with each other, and not constantly pass like strangers in the night. But that meant Tiny was around. Which meant noise.

Noises were the worst thing ever. The kissy noises. The squeals. The –

The walls were too damn thin, and Felix would seriously contemplate murder to get some of the soundproofing wards that Dragon house had. They couldn’t keep it in their pants for one week while he was here?

Instead of soundproofing wards, Felix practiced his mind magic. One of the first aspects of mental magic was to build a mind palace. A building or construct that would house their thoughts and memories, and also protect against intrusions.

It was partly metaphysical, because the wixen’s power and talents mattered a lot more than the building, but that wasn’t the full story. The building did influence things when it came to the mind arts. Some wixen chose to forgo defenses in favor of stronger organization and mental abilities, while others wrapped themselves up in shells, focusing entirely on defense.

Erik had, to nobody’s surprise, chosen to build a replica of Dublin castle in his mind. Most of the others were closed off about what they’d chosen, but had left enough hints that Felix could guess.

Felix, on the other hand, had chosen to go big.

It was his imagination, why not? The only ‘downside’ was it took longer to assemble, and was a bigger pain to deconstruct if he changed his mind later on.

He was building a gigantic spaceship, pulling inspiration from all the different starships he’d heard about and read about. It wasn’t like he was limited to copying an existing ship.

Thick metal hull, shield generators, plasma guns, giant cannons, and more were the start of the defenses. Hazel had given him some odd looks when he was describing the defenses, but she gave everyone weird looks now and then. Felix was used to it, the girl was a little odd but harmless. Hangars for fighters, bombers, and drones combined with devices for electronic warfare - jammers and the like - were the start of some possible offenses in the future, if he ever went for the skills needed. Fighters would double as a harrying defense.

All of this was somewhat conceptual, somewhat metaphysical. If he ever was attacked with mental magic, it would both be a spell, and possibly warfare in his head. It… well, more details on it would come in the later years. For now, they were just starting to build basic defenses and mental improvements.

Sensors were a must, and some of the ones he was pulling from were practically magic. If he got the skills in the future, they’d help represent him reaching out and pulling information from the world around him - or other people’s minds. There was a distinct overlap between Divination and Mind Magic when it came to sensors, where the buildings in his mindscape would help with his skills. Chris and Beatrix had given him good advice when they told him to focus on Mind Magic first.

Felix had rooms to interpret all the sensor readers… and because it was a mind palace and didn’t exactly need to conform to logic, also had designs for rooms with magic mirrors and crystal balls to help him scry. 

Notably, there were no engines. ‘Spaceship’ was possibly a bit of a misnomer - space station was more accurate. Felix thought the shape and design was cool though, and didn’t change the shape. No matter how brutally practical a cube might be. 

Then, there was the inside, which was arguably more important. The command deck was the central nerve station of the entire ship… and since budget wasn’t a concern in the traditional way, he’d built several backup command decks. If one got blown up, somehow, he could always use another one. 

In theory. Felix had no idea how mind to mind combat went, and Professor Mistvale hadn’t exactly been warm and fuzzy towards the boy while he was laying out the basic idea. He’d gotten a wolf on his paper and no comments at all.

The spaceship had four power centers, then everything a space station needed. Batteries, engineering, artificial gravity - because why not - life support, medical bay, cargo, armory, library, computer banks, a time chamber, and more. In theory, the library and time chamber would help Felix organize his thoughts better, improve his recall, and speed up his thinking. Eventually. One day. When it was finished, and more importantly, Felix knew the magic. Expanding on the area was one way Felix could improve his own thinking, and there was a chunk left blank in his design for future expansions.

Critically, a topic that came up every single week, was to never, ever encrypt their thoughts or memories. Hide them, yes. Place defenses around them, absolutely. Put passwords on doors to reach them. But to encrypt them?

It was just short of fatal. It was an excellent way for a student to never be able to think ever again. Because their thoughts would be encrypted, and complete gibberish. It wouldn’t be possible for a student to know their own mind, and hence, they couldn’t enter in their own password to be able to think properly again. If they could even remember the password, since that would also be under a cypher!

The last step in Felix’s grand plan was to fill the ship with guards. Should someone invade his mind, and somehow pass through all of his protections, the guards should hopefully swarm the invaders. In the odd logic of mind magic, the big guns on the ship were both better than the guards, but not that much better.

One of the aspects he’d chosen to entirely eschew was hiding his knowledge. The layout was not tricky in the slightest. If someone breached his mind, and got into his spaceship, it’d be easy enough to find the memory banks, AKA where everything he knew was stored. It’d be hard to erase the knowledge - hurray for backups and redundancies - but he wasn’t playing any sort of shell games. 

That wasn’t to say he didn’t have bulkheads, traps, and other defenses - just that being tricky about it wasn’t on his list.

Felix’s meditations on his project were part of how he built the defenses. Right now, he was still building the ‘industry’ of his project, mentally creating steel mills and fancy factories that were churning out the parts to build more industry. It was all a mental construct - a way to tell his magic to slowly build his defenses in the background. It was a good way for a young wixen to exercise their magic, and with proper safeguards and mental buildings, didn’t even interfere with normal casting. It was recommended to leave the ‘industry’ portions around when the mind palace was done.

It did interfere with a wixen’s ability to regenerate their spent reserves, and everyone handled it differently. Felix was lucky that he was a regenerator - he couldn’t spend magic faster than he restored it. His friends all had to make their own choices. Most of them elected to have their reserves fully refill before diverting any ‘excess’ to their own mind magic.

Some wixen chose to hand-build their fortress. They mentally laid down every stone themselves, poured their magic and being into every fiber of their protection and minds. More powerful, but vastly more limited in the final conclusion, and infinitely more time-consuming. A simple cottage would have walls that were nearly impossible to breach, no matter how humble-looking… but also wouldn’t have any other protection, organization, or other mental benefits. Plus, it would still have a door that could be opened, and the wixen building such defenses would spend months and months getting something so simple down, and still need to hand-build everything else.

Of all the hundreds of students in Camelot, there was one student building it that way, and only because his family tradition demanded it.

When there were no sounds causing problems, Felix did a hundred other things. When his mom was around, of course he spent time with her. When she wasn’t?

The first thing Felix did was grab the needed ritual supplies. ‘Hearth’ was traditionally a fireplace, but naturally, they didn’t have one. Instead, Felix swept up the dust near the radiator, and since that wasn’t nearly enough, went under the trailer. He spent about an hour working out the critical spots, like under his table and bed. Using his hands and nails, he dug into the dusty dirt, and mixed the results in with the dust he’d swept up.

Not perfect dirt, but far more significant than a random shovelful.

The tapwater was far more questionable, but the air was about as perfect as it could get. Fire had its own separate criteria - nobody was expecting people to carry flames great distances, even when the ritual was designed - and Felix carried his blood with him. An old, treasured cup was easy enough to find, but it hurt him to potentially use it. They had so few cups in the first place.

At the same time, sacrifice was the fundamental core of dark magic. The more it hurt, the more powerful it’d be.

His ingredients went into three jars on the first day, and Felix carefully wrapped them up in clothes before putting them into his luggage.

Shopping … shopping was a novel experience. He entered Sephora, and immediately got looks from the girls in the shop that could give Vivian a run for her money in the attractiveness department. One of them had come up to Felix, asking suspiciously what he wanted.

The moment he pulled out his list, all suspicion vanished, and he endured good-natured teasing by the girls, who all loved the idea of him shopping ‘for his girl’.

Felix flushed at it, but didn’t bother correcting them. The fallout and change of attitude wasn’t worth it, and he managed to leave with Vivian’s shopping list nearly complete, plus a few more items the girls swore by in his bag.

Everything else he wanted to get was far simpler. There were a number of ideas that had been bandied around … and Felix also went for the bare-bones vices — candy bars and soda. 

He thought about buying a Playboy magazine or something similar, but found he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Just … no. The whole thing was far too awkward and embarrassing, especially when he thought about what and who it could be for.

Would it sell? Yes. Would he be able to look anyone in the eye ever again? No.

When he wasn’t shopping, Felix was studying the grease spell the Praetorians had recommended, or doing his homework. He blinked, and in no time at all, it was time to head off to Dublin.

Tiny and his mom, of course, wanted to see him off.