Ch: 21 Find-a-friend

Edited

Chapter 21

Find-a-Friend

Lily groaned as her phone went off. They weren’t kidding when the description said it was a loud and annoying alarm. It really was. Her head was pounding, but unfortunately it wasn’t because of the alarm. It was because she had just spent roughly eight hours using her trance skill. She didn’t use the skill the entire eight hours, she took breaks, but she was mentally exhausted. It felt like her head was filled with fog and she found it hard to think.

She didn’t bother with Heal Mind this time as it gave diminishing returns. It was the spell the System had recommended to fix her mind after using it. For the first few times it worked like a charm. The only problem she had was that she had to channel the spell. At first, it took roughly three minutes, but the more she used the trance skill the longer she had to channel it. The last time she used it took a half hour to finish. Even then she still felt mentally exhausted and had a mild headache afterwards.

Like last time, to combat her headache she cast her spell Heal. It took much longer than normal to cast, to the point where she had to give up the first time she tried because she couldn’t remember one of the shapes of one of the spell balls. After summoning her grimoire and referencing it, it went much better, and her headache went away. Unfortunately Heal didn’t do anything for her exhaustion. She got up and stumbled towards her couch in her cabin’s living room, and hit the light switch, sending the room into darkness. She dropped her phone on the coffee table and then let herself fall onto the couch. She absently kicked off her shoes as she lay on the very comfortable couch, and she closed her eyes. A few seconds later she was out like a light.

She woke up starving. She sat up and reached for one of her stashes of mushrooms under the couch. Grabbing a handful, she popped one mushroom after another into her mouth until she felt full. Then she laid back down and fell asleep again. The next time she woke up she felt fine, aside from her bladder begging to be emptied. She got up and went to the bathroom. When she was done with her business she sat back down at the kitchen table, only to remember that she had left her phone on the coffee table. Grumbling under her breath, she got up once more and retrieved her phone.

As she sat down she pulled up what she had done so far. About half the videos she had wanted to get done were complete. Each of the videos, from college math, statistics, to calculus, were showing a red line that told her that she had watched them. As she checked where she had left off she thought about the trance skill. The skill wasn’t like she expected it to be. At least not as she thought it would be. It left some gaps. For example, she remembered every formula and when to use it, but only on the clear cut examples. The problem came when more than one formula could be plugged into the math problem, then she started to get confused. If she used one formula instead of the other then she would get two different answers depending on which formula she used. They both couldn’t be right but, at the same time, one of them had to be right.

“I feel like I’m doing something wrong. Maybe I can’t just watch the videos. I know the formulas, but that’s it.” She thought to herself.

With a sigh she closed her eyes and went over what she had learned. The trance, she found, was like a recording in her head. Now that she was taking the time to go over it, she found that she was remembering more than the simple stuff. As she experienced her memories like a recording she found that she was also picking other stuff up as she did so.

In her weird recorded memory she remembered everything from the smell of her kitchen to how the light came in from her backdoor window. The memory came on fast. Much too fast for her to really understand what was going on. She saw a sped up version of a guy standing in front of a whiteboard who lectured to the camera. He sounded funny, with a high, squeaky voice. The good news was that she found that she could control the speed of her memory. It took her a bit to figure it out, but once she did she slowed it down and watched the man talk inside her head. The memory was still going fast, but not as fast as it had been. She found that it was much easier to watch it in her head and things started to make sense as she watched the memory of the lecture.

Two hours later she felt better about what she learned and things started falling into place. She took a break and went outside to her river and stuck her naked feet into the water, relaxing. After a little while, still sitting with her feet in the water, she went back to her memories of the videos and continued to go through them. An hour or so later, with her feet feeling like they were prunes, she got up and went back into her kitchen and set her alarm. After which she brought up another video and set off her trance. Her sense of ‘self’ went away and time ceased to be.

When she came back to herself, she heard the annoyingly loud alarm from her phone. She felt mentally tired, like she had just finished some kind of written test. She felt like she could still go on, but her mind wasn’t as sharp as it had been. She put her phone down and stood up to stretch. One of the first things she learned when she used the Advanced Memory Trance was that her body always felt really stiff afterwards. Mentally she felt fine, if a bit tired, but she decided to use her new spell Heal Mind anyway as she did the day before. She sat down and got ready to use it.

The spell was simple to use. She mentally spoke the spell's name and the System took over. She dipped into her soul and watched it happen. Like her aspect spells there was a half second pause then a yellow root of magic exited her mana well. It traveled up her right arm until it reached her palm. She placed her palm on her head and the mana flowed out of her hand and into her mind. Looking up from her mana well, deep inside her body, she watched as the mana slowly entered her head like food coloring being injected into a glass of water. It took a few seconds before the cloud of mana had spread far enough to completely soak into her brain. Even after it saturated her head she had to keep adding more to keep the mana from fading as it soaked into her brain.

The first time she used the spell she tried to hurry it up by forcing more mana into the spell. That had backfired spectacularly. It caused her a splitting headache and made her lose control of the spell. Once it had faded she had to use the spell she had created years ago, Heal, to remove the headache. After the spell removed the pain she was able to use Heal Mind once more.

She had no idea when to stop the spell, but the System did. When it reached some unknown point, the spell automatically cut off. Like the first time she used it, it cut off right around three minutes. She knew that the next time it would take longer, and each time she used her trance skill back to back she would have to channel her Heal Mind longer and longer for it to work. Once it cut off, she picked up her phone again and set the alarm again, double-checking to make sure it was set, because she was very paranoid of it not going off and being stuck in the trance. Only when she was sure it was set did she start the video and her skill.

Four days later, she was finally done with all of her maths. She still had physics, both mechanical and theoretical, to go through, as well as some chemistry and biology videos, before she could get into the meat and potatoes of mana studies. The math videos were by far the longest, but right behind them in length was physics. Chemistry was not nearly as long as the physics videos. It was followed by biology which was the shortest. Looking at them, she knew that she was looking at roughly eight days if she kept up her schedule of eight hours of being in a trance, seven and a half to nine hours of sleep, plus two to four hours of reflection on what she had learned. That left roughly three hours for her Heal Mind to fix her mind so that she could continue, plus bathroom breaks and to use Cleanse and Heal to clean both herself and her clothes.

Two days later, she was half way through her physics when she was interrupted. She had just come out of her trance and was in the middle of another Heal Mind when her phone started ringing. Lily ignored it thinking that she had accidentally set her alarm twice, but the ringing was different. It sounded more urgent. Still, Lily ignored it until her spell cut off and faded away. Feeling better, she picked up her still ringing phone and tried to dismiss the alarm except it wasn’t an alarm. It was a request for conversation.

Blinking at the flashing request, she accepted it. “Hello?” She asked into her phone. It was the first time someone had called her. She knew the phone had the ability, but no one had ever called her before.

“Lily? It’s Jules.” Jules’ voice came over the phone. “Where are you? I need help.”

Lily felt her shoulders tighten with tension at the sound of Jules’ voice. The other woman sounded scared.

“I’m at home.” She replied. “What’s wrong?”

“What do you mean you’re at home?” Jules said, sounding angry. “I’ve been knocking on your door for the past five minutes. Let me in!”

“I’m not...nevermind. Give me a sec. I’ll be right there.” Lily replied, hanging up on the woman. She quickly got up and rushed out of her cabin and down the path to the barn-looking shed. She quickly pulled the door open and rushed out to her apartment. Seconds later she opened her door to see a very angry looking Jules waiting just outside her door.

“Come in.” Lily said warily. The other woman nodded and stepped into the apartment, still looking upset. Lily closed the door and turned around to see Jules walking towards her bedroom. Looking past the woman, Lily cursed when she saw a bright white light coming from it. She had forgotten to close the door to her world.

She was too late to stop the other woman from entering her bedroom and looking through the open door. Lily rushed over, but stopped when she got next to her friend. She looked through the door which held Jules' frozen gaze and saw her world spread out in front of them. She could barely see her cabin in the distance through the forest, but the river was much more visible from where they were looking in.

“What…?” Jules said finally, sounding and looking stunned.

“Jules, welcome to my world.” Lily told her, giddy to show it off.

“Come on in.” She told Jules, as she stepped into her world. As soon as she was a few feet from the door she turned around to see Jules wave her hand through the door like she didn’t believe what she was seeing.

“Is it an illusion?” Jules said, still waving her hand through the door.

“Nope.” Lily said, shaking her head, amused at her friends' confusion and surprise. “It’s a pocket universe. I created it. Do you like it?” She asked, feeling shy all of a sudden. She was both proud and scared that Jules would find fault with it.

The other woman didn’t comment, but she stepped through the door and looked around. Lily smiled as the woman touched the barn, feeling it up. She found the other door and turned back to Lily. “Where does this go?”

“Right now? No place I would like to visit.” She replied, feeling slightly angry at the door. Her double had recreated it since she still had a home there. She hadn’t opened it yet, and she wasn’t sure if she really wanted to in the future. For now, she had decided to leave it be, as she didn’t want to travel to Woburn and break the connection. She wasn’t sure what Lowell would do and she didn’t trust Woburn not to tell him. She really didn’t want to destroy the connection from inside her world as she knew that would be a really stupid idea. She just got her home back and she didn't want to lose it.

Lily watched as Jules turned away from the shed and slowly spun around, looking at everything with wonder on her face. Then out of nowhere her expression lost its wonder before she turned back to look at Lily.

“Amber is in trouble.” Jules said in a rush.

“What?” How?” Lily replied, shocked.

“She went out on a rescue mission a week and a half ago, and this morning my Emergency bangle went off.” The old woman explained raising her right arm and showing a black and blue checkered bracelet.

“What’s that?” Lily asked, looking at the bangle. From her auras she got a feeling of sucking from the thing like it was sucking at something inside her chest.

“It’s based on the law of contagion. Once a physical object is part of something then it’s forever part of the object. Sort of like a rock is one thing. You break that rock into pieces. While they are different pieces they are still a part of the larger rock. The bangle is part of a tier 6 waterfowl beast core. It’s tier 4 Witch class magic.” Jules replied.

“So?” Lily asked, confused.

“So, if you break the bangle it will alert the person who is wearing the other one that something is wrong.” Jules replied.

Lily had a few more questions, but buried them at the outright fear on her friend's face. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need you to create a tracking spell.” Jules told her. “Something that can’t be jammed by something else.”

LIly didn’t say anything for a few seconds as she thought about the request. She had never created something like that before. She absently summoned her Grimoire and thought about the request as she opened her spell book, hoping that she had something to work off of. To her delight she found a series of spells she had created and worked on a bunch of times. It was work she had done trying to develop a tracking spell that she had hoped to use to find a way out of her hellhole. They didn’t track people, but looked for a way out and would leave a trail for the caster to follow. The problem was that there was no way out of her hellhole. At least, there wasn’t one back then. It had driven her deep into depression, and when she gave up on the spell she had been as close to suicide as she had ever come.

“Can I modify one of these spells?” She wondered as she read over the spell descriptions. She started walking towards her cabin, not really  paying attention to anything anymore, as she thought about which spell she wanted to work on first and how to go about it. She opened her door and left it open for Jules before she went to her kitchen table and sat down.

She picked the third spell and thought it was her best bet. It was a spell designed to find a living being outside her hellhole and show her a way to that being. She absently popped a mushroom that she pulled from her pocket into her mouth and started chewing. She ran through the spell balls and didn’t think she needed to change them just yet. She wanted to see if she could change the intent first. If she had to change the spell balls then it would take a fair amount of time. Time that Amber might not have.

“How do I change the intent from any being to a specific being?” She asked herself. “Can I use the law of … what was that law again? The rock breaks into many pieces but still a rock.”

“What’s that law again?” Lily asked, looking up to find Jules wandering around her living room.

“What law?” Jules asked, rushing into the kitchen. “The law of contagion?”

“Yeah, that law.” Lily said, looking down at her spell book again. She wrote the law in the book then rewrote the spell, spelling out the intent.

“I’m going to need something that used to be her.” She thought to herself. “I can’t use the bracelet. The spell would lead to the bracelet not Amber.”

“I need something that was a part of her.” Lily asked looking up at Jules who was sitting down at the kitchen table again.

“What, like a piece of hair?” Jules said, sounding excited. “I can get an old brush. It might have some hairs on it. Or I know she’s terrible at cleaning up when she cuts her toenails. I bet I can find some under our bed.”

“Okay.” Lily said, closing her book and letting it fade away. “Let's go.”

“You have a spell?” Jules asked, looking really excited.

“Hopefully.” Lily replied, hoping she wasn’t wrong and she could modify the spell.

“Okay, let's go.” Jules said, jumping up, far more excited than Lily had ever seen the woman before. The naked hope on her face worried Lily. Hoping that she wasn’t letting her friend down, she followed her out of the cabin as the woman nearly jogged to the door to the real world.

The diner was closed when they got there, but there were a few cooks in the kitchen who were in the process of cleaning up. They looked worried to Lily, as she followed Jules to the stairs that led to the second floor. There was a door at the top of the stairs which opened at Jules’ wave. Lily wondered how she did it as she followed the other woman into her apartment. She was also a bit nervous at how casually Jules was throwing around magic that she had no clue how to replicate. It made her realize just how powerful her friend really was.

Jules and Amber’s apartment was very nice. The door led to a large, open living room. It was full of stuff; from weapons, some of which were broken while others looked well taken care of, to stuffed animal parts. The biggest animal part was sitting inside a glass case that served as a coffee table. It was a gigantic lizard’s foot, complete with claws instead of toes. The thing was about two and half to three feet tall. It was hard for Lily to guess how wide it was because the foot was lying on its side.

There was a fireplace across from a comfortable couch. In between the couch and the fireplace was a pelt rug that must have been about twenty feet long. The pelt had a large bear head at one end of it that didn’t look like any bear that Lily had ever seen. It was too massive. The fur of the bear was also thick but fuzzy, unlike most pelts she had seen on TV before the invasion, which she remembered having long stringy hair on them.

“I found it.” Jules yelled out from Lily’s right. Turning around she saw Jules coming down a hallway holding up a fat brush that had clumps of Amber’s hair on it.

“I need some place to work.” Lily said, taking the brush from Jules.

“What do you need?” Amber asked.

“A table to sit at.” Lily replied. “Oh, and if you have a mana crystal or core that I could use. It doesn’t have to be powerful. A little one would be ok.”

“I got a Tiny Mana Crystal. Will that work?” Jules asked.

“That will work.” Lily replied, as Jules led her down the hallway towards a fancy-looking room with a long, well-polished wooden table and high-backed chairs.

“Will this work?” Jules asked, waving at the huge table and fancy chairs.

“Yup.” Lily said, sitting down.

Lily put the brush down on the table and summoned her grimoire. Taking a few seconds, she looked around the room. There was a large bookcase that took up much of the wall across from her. It was filled with books with titles like ‘Advanced Runic spells’, and ‘A Witch’s Almanac for Southern Canada.’ She had to stamp down her desire to get up and see what was inside all those books.

A few seconds later Jules returned to the room with a cloudy-white mana crystal. Lily accepted it and put it beside the brush. Then she opened her book and started to write down everything she wanted in her intent so she could modify her old spell. She lost track of time and only came up for air when Jules placed a glass full of grey liquid in front of her. The drink turned out to be lemon juice. Lily, thankful for something to wet her dry mouth, drank it before going back to her work.

Then she was done with the prep work. She pulled as much of Amber’s hair off the brush as she could, and then placed the hair down in front of her. Afterward she took a small tuft of hair and placed it beside the brush. Once that was done she took the Tiny Mana Crystal and placed it next to the brush so it was close at hand. Nodding to herself she looked up and found Jules sitting in front of her across the table.

“Everything ready?” The other woman asked her.

“This is just the first attempt.” Lily warned. “I’m not sure if this is going to work, but it is the fastest method. If this doesn’t work out like I think it will, then I’ll have to create an entirely new spell and I’m not sure how long that will take.”

Jules nodded, her eyes falling to the brush. “If it does work, what’s going to happen?”

Lily took a deep breath and looked down at the brush, biting her lip. “If this goes the way I think it will, then it will point right to where Amber is. While I can anchor it down to the brush, only the caster will be able to see what direction it will point to.” She told her friend.

“No!” Jules said in a very firm tone of voice. “You’re only tier 2. There is no way you’re going with us.”

“I’m sorry, but that is how this spell works.” Lily said before frowning. “Plus, why can’t I go? I created all these spells, Jules. Some of them are tier 9. Can you cast something like that? If this fails, then can you modify it so that it will work? Are you a spell smith?”

“Lily, this isn’t going to be some fun run in the badlands.” Jules said, leaning forward towards Lily. “You haven’t seen what's out there. You have no idea how dangerous it can be. Amber is a powerful witch. For someone like her to go missing, that means there is something much more powerful than her out there. You will just be in the way.”

“I. Don’t. Know?” Lily said, suddenly furious. “I was there when the invasion started. I saw thousands of Demons take Boston when the world ended. I was there! I spent nearly a hundred years trapped in a hellhole without a System. Where do you think all these spells came from? Did you think I was nice and safe there? Fuck, off!”

Lily watched as Jules leaned back from her as if she had slapped the witch. “I am going to cast this spell. If it works, I will give it to you in case something happens to me. But I am going with you. Do we understand each other?” Lily told the other woman softly, so angry that she was shaking.

“I don’t want you to get hurt.” Jules said, straightening up in her seat. “You are too valuable to the human race. Just look at what you did with the Runic Mage class. You think anyone else can do that in, what, a week or two? At Tier 1, for god’s sake. What else can you contribute? You are a bonafide treasure to the entire human race. There is no way I’m going to place you in danger. I like you Lily, but I can't risk you getting hurt or, worse, getting killed.”

“How do you plan to stop me?” Lily said, leaning back in her seat. “The entire city of Lowell tried, and look where that got them. I’ll go where I want to. No one has any say on what I do or where I go. No one!”

“Lily, you’ve got to see where I’m coming from.” Jules told her. “You need to stay safe. It hurts me to say this, but you are more valuable than me or Amber. You can’t risk yourself for something like this.”

Leaning forward, Lily crossed her hands in front of her. “You do not get to tell me what to do, Jules. I do what I want, when I want. Back the fuck off.”

Relaxing, Lily smiled at Jules. “Besides, what’s to stop me from casting this tracking spell on you? You think I’ll be safer out there on my own? Now go away or stay. I don’t care, but you will never tell me what I can or can’t do again. Only I get that right.”

“Never join the military. You can’t take orders to save your life.” Jules said tiredly, with a slight smile on her face. “Lily… I...Ok. You are in charge of you. You can come with us, but you will obey orders from me or anyone from my crew. I mean it, Lily. I can’t have you putting my friends in danger because you are being too pig-headed. If I say run, you run. I don’t care what is happening around us. You run if I tell you too. It’s that or you don’t go.”

Lily ignored the last warning. Amber was her friend. While she wouldn’t put herself in a no-win situation to save the other woman, that didn’t mean she was going to abandon her. “Agreed.” Lily said with a smile.

“God help me.” Jules muttered to herself. “You going to see if that’s going to work or not?”

Smiling at getting her own way, Lily dipped into her soul. She quickly pulled a regular color root from her mana well and up to her head. Once it was there, she began to paint the spell balls in the air, while keeping what she wanted in her head for the intent. The first left a taste of raspberries on her tongue. The next sounded like a tiny bell being struck as it changed the spell's structure. Eight spell balls later she was finished. It only took a second to reorganize them, and she was ready. Picking up the tuft of hair in her left hand, she held it so it was touching her right. She then targeted her spell towards it before setting it off.

You have created a new spell. Name your spell.

Do you want to name your new spell Find-a-Friend?

Do you wish to share this spell with the rest of humanity?

After clicking yes, Lily smiled as she anchored the spell inside the Tiny Mana Crystal. She placed the mana crystal in between the bristles of the brush to anchor it. Looking up, she saw a white line streaking out of the brush towards her right. Looking around, she saw it was pointing towards the back of the apartment. Being careful not to dislodge the crystal, she stood up and walked out of the room, following the hovering white line.

“Did it work?” Jules asked, sounding anxious.

“I think it did.” Lily said, smiling. “I need to go outside to see, but I’m pretty sure it’s working.”

“Okay. Come this way.” Jules said, leading her to a back stairwell.

They didn’t walk in a straight line, but Lily noted that the white line never stopped pointing in what she hoped was the right direction. To test the theory she stopped on the stairs and turned so that she was facing away from where it was pointing. She noted happily, as she looked at the white line which was now flowing through her, that it was still working.

“So far so good.” She told herself as she continued down the stairs.

There was a thick wooden door at the end of the stairs. Jules was already there and had it open. The door led to a hallway that led in two directions. In front of her the hallway dead-ended at the back door, and, looking in the opposite direction, she saw that the hallway on the other side ended in the kitchen. She spotted a cook who was holding a soapy brush looking at them with a confused expression on his face. Lily smiled and waved at the cook.

She turned around and went out the back door, which Jules was still holding open. The white light was dimmer outside in the direct sunlight, but Lily could still see it. Smiling, she turned to Jules and nodded. “It works.” She told the other woman, who broke into a very large smile which quickly faded.

“Okay, if you’re going then you need to be back here in ten minutes.” Jules told her, suddenly very serious. “Get everything you need for this job. Weapons, extra clothes, whatever else you need while on a job. If you're not back here in ten, then we will leave you behind. Don’t worry if you don’t have everything. We will be stopping at the Hub before we go.”

“Okay.” Lily said, nodding. She handed the other woman the brush. “Here, don’t let the crystal fall out.”

Jules gently took the crystal with her hands then nodded. “Go, stop wasting time.”

Lily took off running back into the diner and then out past the kitchen. She was in the process of opening the door to leave when she stopped and looked back. She had realized that Jules might be lying to her. She looked back, but Jules had already gone back upstairs. Shaking her head, she turned and left the diner, hoping that she was wrong. The street was fairly busy this time of the day, so Lily had to stop fairly often to wait for an opening to pass people by.

It was only when she opened the door to her apartment that she realized that she had no idea what to get. “What should I bring?” She asked herself, as she looked around her apartment.

“Weapons.” She told herself as she closed her door. The problem was the only thing she had that was close to a weapon besides her silverware was her makeshift knife. She quickly went to her closet door and opened the way to her world. She ran to her cabin and then up to her room where she found her knife sitting beside her fairy charm. She put her knife in her pocket and her fairy charm around her neck. While she was still in her bedroom she grabbed her backpack and looked around.

“What else?” She asked herself, then she threw the last of the stash of mushrooms that was in her bedside drawer into her backpack.

“Something to sleep in.” She replied to herself while looking at her bed. The problem was that she didn’t have anything like that. She could grab her comforter, but it was very big and bulky. It wouldn’t fit into her backpack without sticking out of the top. Then she got an idea. Grinning, she upended her backpack on her bed then turned the backpack inside out.

Summoning her grimoire, she opened her book and found herself staring at the runic spell, Bottomless Storage Space. Smiling, she started to draw it with her makeshift knife. Once she was done, she started dripping mana into the lightly carved runes on the bottom of the backpack. The runes drank up the mana like they were a dying man in the desert. By the time she was done she was dizzy and her mana was almost completely gone. But it worked. The runes snapped much like her spells did and the bottom of the backpack turned black.

Smiling tiredly, she returned her backpack right side in before dropping a mushroom into the darkness. The mushroom disappeared into it without slowing. Her first test successful, she lowered her hand into the darkness and found the mushroom floating just inside the darkness. She pulled it out and found it unharmed. Smiling, she ate the mushroom and then went to work stuffing her backpack with her comforter. She was still limited by how big the opening of her backpack was, but once she stuffed it down into the darkness, it took the entire thing without a problem. Picking her backpack up she saw that it looked like it was still empty and saggy. She quickly went down to her kitchen and grabbed a bunch of stuff from her cupboards and refrigerator, and put them into her backpack. When she was done she looked around wildly for anything else she needed, but, aside from soap and dish towels, she couldn’t think of anything else.

Grabbing her still empty-looking backpack she threw the straps around her shoulders, noting it felt as light as if it really was empty. She ran out of her cabin and then into her apartment. As she closed the door to her world she heard someone banging on the door to her apartment. She quickly ran to the door to find Jules standing there with a funny green beret on her head, looking furious.

“I said ten minutes.” The woman told her. “It’s been twenty.”

“Sorry, I was creating this.” Lily said, pulling her backpack off her back and showing it to her angry friend.

“What?” Jules said, taking the backpack and opening it. She looked down into it before she smiled. “How much does it hold?”

“I don’t know.” Lily replied, going onto her tippy toes to look into the backpack. “I have my comforter, a bunch of food, and some essentials in there, and it still looks like there is more room.”

“That’s… good.” Jules said, looking up at her. “Tell me exactly what you have. But as we walk. We need to meet up with the rest of my group. Plus, you need to visit the store. Now, do you have something to keep the weather off you? Also, where is your armor? Did you pack it?”

“My spells are my armor.” Lily said, then looked up at the brim of her witch's hat. “Oh, and this.” She said, flicking the brim of her hat with a smile.

“No… just no.” Jules said, shaking her head as waved for Lily to come with her. She waited for Lily to lock the door to her apartment then started walking fast towards the elevator.

“You’re going to need armor. Your spells are good, but they aren’t that good. In fact...” Jules said, as she summoned her own grimoire and the weird pen that most of the mages that Lily had seen since she left her hellhole used. Once they were in the elevator, she started asking Lily a bunch of questions on what she had and what she didn’t while she wrote in her book.

The questioning didn’t stop as they walked out of the apartment building and down the street towards the System Hub. Some of the questions embarrassed Lily, like the question ‘what kind of backup weapons do you have’. Lily could only show her friend the makeshift knife. The woman had stopped writing and gave Lily a look that made her feel like she was three feet tall.

Halfway to the Hub, Jules stopped asking her questions, but kept writing in her book. Lily was too scared to bring up any of her questions as the other woman stormed down the street barely looking at the people in her way as she kept writing in her book. Lily felt the tension fade away when they got to the Hub. Beside her, Jules snapped her book shut and pulled out what looked like a skill book and handed it to her.

“This is a list of what you need. Get everything on the list. I know you’re rich, so get the best of what you can. If you have it already, make sure it’s exactly like what I wrote. If it’s not, then get a new one that has everything that I listed down.”

“I can’t believe you survived all these years without the basics.” She told Lily, shaking her head. “We’re already late. We will leave as soon as you get back.” Jules told her, meeting her eyes with a steely look.

She followed Jules as she stomped up to an open area on the pipe that was the Hub. She watched as her friend bent down and touched the Hub and disappeared for less than a second before reappearing on the other side with a bunch of stuff next to her.

“Hand me your backpack.” Jules asked, not looking at her. Lily tossed her backpack to her before bending down and touching the Hub herself. Seconds later, she found herself in her old room sitting at her computer chair. She found herself still holding the small book that Jules had given her.

Smiling, she opened the book and found a huge list that seemed overly specific to her. Like a jacket that was enchanted to keep a person at a specific temperature while at the same time reduce sound and smells coming from the wearer. It also had to add more than ten points to her bioshield while at the same time not being a bright color. Another example was shoes that would eliminate sounds around a person, be waterproof, aid in walking long distances, have steel toes, be able to be used in combat and a few other things. The note also stated to get the expensive ones that did their job whether the wearer was moving in them or not. It also stated she needed to get them in a dark color. Jules underlined the sentence where she was not to get any bright colors of any kind on any of the equipment.

Lily went down the list buying the most expensive ones that she could. For most of the items she found them in the non-system store, but a few of them, the most expensive ones, she had to buy from the System itself. Nearly every piece of the gear she bought added to her bioshield, and some even helped her regeneration or restored her bioshield faster.

She bought a nice slipover white shirt that would help with her bioshield. It looked really nice, and Lily couldn’t wait to put it on. It wasn’t that expensive and it would aid in keeping low level bugs away from her. Next, she bought a black leather vest that greatly added to her bioshield. She also found a pair of pants in her size on the same leatherworker’s page. It was the same type of leather that her vest was made of. It was something called a vestume panther. It added a whole ton to her bioshield. Much more than both her shirt and vest combined.

Sticking with the same leatherworker, she found a coat that was made from the same panther as her vest and pants were. It was black, and it added a small amount to her bioshield. It was more than her vest, but not as much as what her pants added. The coat came to her knees and would protect her from all sorts of weather, from rain and snow to sand from sandstorms. It had a high collar that she could raise that would protect her face. It didn’t cover her eyes, but, then again, she told herself she did need to see.

She didn’t find what Jules wanted her to buy for shoes in the non-System store so she had to switch over to the System store to find what she was looking for. She found a pair of black, shiny, army boots with thick soles. She had never worn boots like these before so she didn’t know what to look for. She ended up picking a pair that had everything that Jules wanted her to get, plus a few other things. The boots cost her more than everything else she bought put together. Even the camping equipment that she bought, which was expensive, wasn’t as costly as her boots. Still, she thought they looked badass, so she wasn’t too upset. And they more than doubled her bioshield, on top of everything else that she bought.

The camping equipment she bought started off with a portable mana stove. She didn’t have to buy the mana crystals because she simply took them from her collection from the mana crystal farm in Woburn. If she had to, she could use beast or monster cores, since they were basically the same thing except one came from a buildup of extra mana and the other from a dead thing.

She also picked up a shelter. It was basically a sleeping bag that kept her temperature regulated from being too hot or too cold. She bought the one that said it would protect up to two users from -100 to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. It also had a quick release so that the users could leave the shelter quickly. It too required mana crystals, but Lily had more than enough that she was taking from her stash so she didn’t think she needed to buy any more.

The only thing Lily didn’t follow was the food stuff. Jules wanted her to get all sorts of emergency food stuff. They looked horrible and inedible. Instead of doing that, Lily bought a lot of normal food. Some needed to be cooked, while others just needed to be opened and eaten. She did buy a crap-ton of water, which Jules had recommended, but nearly ten times the amount that Jules had put on the list. The only thing she did when she bought it was to make sure the stuff would fit through the top of her backpack.

She then went on to buy potions. The potions, she found when she was done, cost almost as much as her boots. She followed Jules’ recommendation on what potions to buy, but she splurged and bought a lot more than what Jules had written down. She ended up getting five revival potions that would bring back a person from the dead as long as it was given to them less than seven minutes after death. She would have bought more, but she could only find five of them for sale. They cost a crap-ton of credits each and took up nearly two thirds of her budget for potions.

After she was done with buying all the potions, she went on to buy a side weapon. Jules recommended a pistol. She even recommended a Remington Mark Nine over-and-under pistol. Reading the description of the gun, she found the top barrel of the gun fired a 11mm mana bolt. According to the description, it was designed to bring down a bioshield faster, but it wouldn’t do as much damage to the target itself unless the being was similar to the bioshield. The under barrel shot a 9mm penetrator mana bolt. Unlike the larger mana bolt, this one, Lily read, was designed to penetrate deep into a target and then splinter into smaller mana slices and do massive internal damage.

The ammo the pistol required was four small mana crystals, which would give it thirty rounds before it drained the crystals. The gun had a place in the butt of the gun for a rectangular-looking magazine that had four slots in it, so that someone could fit the four required mana crystals. For a few credits more, she bought ten more magazines that came with forty mana crystals already inside them. She would have to replace them when they were drained, but for now she was ready in case of an emergency.

She also followed Jules’ recommendation and bought a holster that had pouches for her magazines. It didn’t act like a belt like she thought it would, but it would go around her waist over her belt. It did have straps on it that she could attach to her belt so it wouldn’t slip. She bought a black one that kind of looked like a cowboy’s holster from what she remembered from TV and movies, if you ignored the pouches.

She wanted to take some time to look over some spells, but after sending her clothes to her room and getting dressed she had run out of time. She did take the last thirty seconds to look at her new look in the mirror. She looked stupid. She felt like one of those cosplayers on the internet back before the invasion. She took her jacket off and she thought she looked better, but with the jacket on, she felt like she looked too much like a comic book hero. Like Batgirl without the sexiness. With a sigh, she put her coat back on as the timer finished the countdown and she found herself standing in the middle of a large pile of the stuff she had bought.

She looked down, surprised at how much stuff she bought, as she heard Jules start to laugh. Seeing the other woman, who was bent over laughing, she felt really embarrassed. She reached out and grabbed her backpack from her laughing friend and started stuffing everything into it. She could feel the stares of other people around her as she did so and felt her face getting hot. She kept her head down as she piled everything into her backpack. It was only when she finished putting the shelter into her backpack that she felt a bit better. She picked up the empty-looking backpack and slung it on her back and turned to her friend, who wasn’t laughing anymore. In fact the woman was giving her a strange look.

“What?” Lily asked, a bit defensively, thinking Jules was still making fun of her.

“I… nevermind. We need to go. The others are waiting for us.” Jules told her, before she turned around and started walking out of the parking-lot-looking place where the Hub was located.

Lily had a feeling that Jules stopped laughing because she was trying to be nice. Feeling that everyone was silently laughing at her, she kept her gaze on the cement road under her. “I bought everything she told me to buy. Okay, maybe getting everything in black was a bit of a mistake. I just thought it would be better… Dammit, I look stupid.” She thought to herself, as she kept her head down, hating the fact that other people could see her. She reached up and pulled off her witch's hat.

After pulling her backpack off she yanked her coat off and stuffed both her hat and the coat into it before she put it back on. Looking down at her boots she could only shake her head at the waste of the money she had used to buy the stuff. What was worse was that she found she had to move her arms out wide around her waist so that they didn’t hit her gun as she walked. She felt it made her look even more stupid than she had before. She regretted getting it, and now she was stuck with it until she could come back and buy a new one in the store. She wanted to pull the stupid thing off, but knew that it was too important to take off.

“Goddammit.” She muttered to herself, feeling more depressed than she had felt in a long time.

“I hope Amber is ok.” She thought to herself as Jules came to a stop. Looking up, Lily found that they had stopped by an old, beat-up-looking, military vehicle. Standing around them were a hard-looking bunch of people. They didn’t look pleased to have been kept waiting. What was worse was they were all looking at her. They weren’t friendly looks they were directing at her either. She knew she had made a mistake by insisting to go with Jules as they looked at her. What could she do except get in their way? This wasn’t about her, but about rescuing Amber. Cursing herself, she looked down at her feet again, telling herself she should have listened to Jules back at the diner.

“You got the tracking spell?” An older-looking man who had a shield slung over his shoulder asked.

“Right here.” Jules replied. Lily looked up as Jules reached into her pocket and pulled out the brush. She saw that Jules had taped the crystal and hair to the brush. “Lily here bought the spell for me. She also agreed to come along in case there were any demons.”

The older man’s gaze snapped back to Lily. She felt the weird feather-light feeling as she was targeted with Identify. He frowned at her a second later. “Tier two. I don’t know the class, but it does come back gold. Low, but rare. Fine. Follow Jules’ orders. Don’t do anything stupid, and stay out of our way.” He told her.

“Yes, sir.” Lily told him.

The older man nodded then turned his head before spitting on the ground. He motioned with his thumb towards the beat-up-looking truck. “Get in.” He said, as he opened the passenger door. “Jack, you got top. Jules, can you check out the spells? Make sure they’re full up and working.”

“Sure.” Jules said, sounding like she was in a better mood. Lily watched her adjust her funny-looking green beret before following her friend, who had started walking towards the truck.

“Junior caster, you need something to stand out. Ask Jules for something if you don’t have anything.” He told her before she could take more than a few steps towards the back of the truck.

In response, Lily pulled her backpack off, and pulled out her witch’s hat and slapped it on. Then, knowing she had to get it over with, she pulled her coat back out and put it on as well. She looked back at the old guy, who had a small smirk on his face. “That’ll do.” He told her, before he climbed into the truck.

Lily released a long sigh and hunched her shoulders as she put her backpack back on. She waited her turn as Jules got in the back of the beat-up truck. The others were already in and were getting settled. Lily was the last one in, and as she walked into the truck her hat got knocked off by the low ceiling. She quickly pulled it off as she found an empty seat in the rear of the truck. She knew this was going to be a long trip, and she was starting to regret tagging along. The truck gave a loud growl as the engine started up. Then they were moving down the nearly empty side street.