Ch: 20 Crazy homeless person

Edited

Sorry for the delay. If you haven't been on discord then you might not know that my wife has Covid. It's not bad and she is at home getting better. It started with her not being able to smell and then body aches and fatigue. She can smell now, but she has flu-like symptoms.  Yes, we are both vaccinated. My kids are doing fine, but they are not happy that they can't hang out with mom because she's sick. My son is really nervous and has been having nightmares. It's ok though. I've been telling him his own story with him as the MC.  He loves it. Thanks for supporting the story.

Duck.

Chapter 20

Crazy homeless person

Lily smiled at the guard sitting on a wooden box as she passed through the gates to her apartment building. He nodded in return, and as he did she felt a very light tingling sensation across her mana well. It was by far the most gentle Identify she had ever felt. She stopped by the gate and turned around to see that it had come from the guard. Upon seeing that she noticed his skill his left eyebrow rose and a small smile played across his lips.

“Everyone who passes into the building gets Identified.” The guard told her. His voice  was surprisingly deep. “Please don’t take offence.”

“Okay.” Lily told him.

As she replied she realized that she felt a warmth coming from his weapon, indicating some kind of fire affinity element to it. Feeling the warmth she realized that she had somehow been ignoring the information coming from her auras. She had had the passive skills less than a few hours and already the sensations coming from them felt normal. She wondered why that was. As she walked past the courtyard and into the elevator, passing a few people, she started to wonder how her auras worked.

“First home, then research.” She told herself out loud not realizing that she wasn’t alone in the elevator.

She felt her cheeks grow warm as everyone looked at her suspiciously. What made it worse was the elevator stopped twice on the way to her floor, keeping her stuck with the people longer than she wished. Luckily, she was the only one getting off on her floor. She quickly raced out the elevator door, and made a beeline to her room.

Looking around at her messy apartment with its still glowing runes she realized she needed to clean up. With a sigh, she went to work, doing her best to get her chores done as fast as possible. She wanted to go home in the worst way. Twenty minutes later, she stood beside her pile of dirty laundry looking at the runes. They looked nice and, as far as she knew, they weren’t doing any damage so she left them.

Turning to her tiny closet she gently closed its door. Looking at the plain white door she started to feel giddy. She was going home. Her apartment felt comfortable, but nothing like her cabin. Taking a deep breath, she started building the door to her home.

Even though she hadn’t built a door for over a year now, it was absurdly easy to do. She didn’t need to summon her grimoire for reference. She still remembered everything she needed to do like she had just created a portal door to her home yesterday. She just marked the door with mana. Eyeballing the distance between the marks, she put each of the remaining anchors down on the door like she could see exactly where they needed to go. And then she was done. Taking a deep breath she connected the marks. With an invisible snap she felt the door connect to her universe. With a big smile she turned the doorknob and opened the door.

Her world hadn’t changed in the slightest that she could see, as she walked down the path to her cabin which looked exactly like she left it. The door easily opened and she stepped into her living room. A great weight, that she hadn’t realized that she had been feeling for a while, lifted off her shoulders. She felt like she was hovering just above the air. Giddy with excitement she closed the door. She was home.

Hours later, Lily was back in her cabin dumping out a huge pile of mushrooms onto her kitchen table. She grabbed a small one and popped it into her mouth as she started sorting them into piles she could hide away all around her house. Once she was done, she sat down and looked out of her back door to watch the river flow past for a few minutes. Shaking her head she told herself to get to work.

Opening her grimoire, she started to write about what she wanted to research. At the top of the list she put her Auras. Just below that she put her Portal spell, then the rest of her aspect spells under it. Right away she added a note to remind herself that she did not want to mess with the portal spell while in her own world. The last thing she wanted to do was cause some kind of accident to her home. She had no idea what would happen, if anything, to her if she started playing with such a powerful spell in a world as small as hers was.

She removed her finger, which she had been using to write in her book, from the page as she thought about how to test her auras. Right now she wasn’t feeling anything, and, as she thought about it, she realized she hadn’t really felt anything since she had entered her world. Looking up at the river again she smiled as an idea came to her. Picking up her spell book, she opened her back door and went down to the small beach. She put her feet into the cold water and tried to feel water mana, but failed. She felt the mana coming from the water, but it wasn’t water-aspected mana. It felt like normal mana.

Not sure if she was doing it right, she decided to go for a walk. Thirty minutes later, she still hadn’t felt anything. Thinking back, she remembered that she only felt aspect mana from things that had been altered. That meant, she admitted to herself, that she couldn’t test her auras in her world. That left Portal, Time Manipulation, and Gravity Manipulation spells to test out. She had already ruled out Portal as she was not sure it was safe to use in her world. That left Gravity Manipulation and Time Manipulation which each had two parts. Gravity Manipulation had Push and Pull while Time Manipulation had Faster and Slower.

She picked up a rock and activated the spell Push the same way she did when she used Identify. The rock flew off away from her. It only went about five feet and acted like a child had thrown it, but it was something. The biggest thing she noted was that there was no spell casting at all. She activated the skill and the rock moved. She didn’t paint spell symbols in the air nor did she arrange them like she did with her own spells. She felt a pulling sensation from her mana well right before the rock flew out of her hand.

Frowning, she sat down in the dirt and picked up another rock. Slipping into her soul, she executed the spell once more. Everything went very fast again. A root of mana was pulled out of her mana well, flashed up to her hand and then to the rock. That was kind of what she expected. What she didn’t expect was that there was a slight pause before the mana was pulled out of her mana well.

On top of that, her mana was not the normal blue color she was used to seeing. It was a shiny-black color. It acted the same way her normal roots of mana did, with its sharp changes in direction, but the color was very different. The root of mana also felt different. It felt wild. Like her root barely contained it. The mana felt like it wanted to explode outwards in all directions, and the only thing containing it was the root. Which Lily found odd because she had always thought the root was pure mana. Now she was not so sure.

She picked up another rock and fired off her Push spell. She watched it as it activated and sent the rock flying from her hand. She did that over and over, watching everything. She came away with several conclusions. She summoned her grimoire and wrote them down.

Her first conclusion was that something happened in her mana well before the spell went off. She didn’t know what happened, but something was happening in her mana well to change her normal blue mana to shiny-black mana. It happened so fast she had no idea what was happening. Second, her mana wasn’t pushing the rock like she had expected. It exited her hand and surrounded the rock. Once the rock was completely surrounded, it went flying away in the direction she willed it to go when she activated the spell.

It was, she found after repeating the spell a bunch of times, easy to tell it what direction she wanted the rock to go. The problem was, it went in the general direction where she willed it to go as long as it was away from her hand. It was hard to aim in any way more precise than ‘go in that direction’. Thirdly, she could target her body and give herself a push. It was a very weak push, like a child pushing her, but it still felt like a push. The spell diameter was small, about the size of a small child's hand.

Another thing she noted was that she couldn’t shoot the rock at her hand. The spell just fizzled out. It just wasn’t possible no matter how many times she tried. She could send the rock out towards her fingers if she held it in the palm of her hand, but that was as close as she could come to shooting it at her hand.

Pulling, she found, was the exact opposite. She had to think of an object less than five feet away and activate the spell. It would come flying towards her hand. She also realized that, if she moved her hand, the rock would continue on in the same direction once the spell was activated. When she first bought the spells, she thought Pulling and Pushing were the same spell, from the way the System described them, but now it didn’t feel that way to her.

They had the same mechanisms as each other. The same ultra-fast speeds with the same shiny-black mana, but they felt different to her. As different as an equilateral square and one that was not. They were both squares, but they had different shapes. She also noted, while she could use Push on her body, it was a very bad idea. She tried it on her hand and it felt like her hand was in a vice. It lasted about a second, but left her in tears. She concluded that it pulled the flesh and bones in her hand towards a single target point. She had to use Heal to make the pain go away.

She changed spells after she stopped for a quick bathroom break. This time she tried Time Manipulation. The two spells associated with it were Faster and Slower. First she found that she had to cast it on herself. It fizzled out if she tried it on anything else, which went directly against what the description said. The description said ‘target’. The only thing she could think of that made sense was the target had to be living, which nothing besides her was, in her world.

The spells did exactly what they said they would do, however. Faster sped her up. It wasn’t all that notable; like, everything didn’t freeze besides herself, but she did find that she moved slightly master. She tested it by running down the road from the shed where her two doors were to her cabin. She counted the seconds in her head by counting Mississippis.

Out of the five second boost, she got to her destination about one to one and half seconds faster. Faster also felt like she had a tail wind, but in any direction she moved. Slower did the opposite. She felt like an invisible wind was pushing against her. She was also about one to one and half seconds slower than her normal speed.

She also noted that time mana was blue, but a baby blue instead of the normal blue of her regular mana. The time spell reacted very similarly to gravity spells. There was a slight pause after she activated the spell before it went off. The colors were different, but other than that they were the same. Gravity and Time spells enveloped whatever she was aiming at. The only difference was that Gravity had a much smaller target area while the time spells were big enough to cover her entire body.

The one big thing that became apparent was that she had no idea how the spells worked. There were no spell balls involved at all, as far as she could see. There was no, for a lack of a better word, casting for the spells. She was not even sure they were spells in the sense she thought them to be. She could have called them skills and been happy with it. It was only because the System called them spells that she thought of them as spells.

Trying to cast the spells manually turned out to be an exercise in futility, as she couldn’t make her mana do what the spell did without activating the system to cast it for her. Right off the bat, she had no idea how to change her mana to anything but her normal blue color. She also didn’t know how to control her mana outside of her body. Sure, she knew how to turn mana into liquid, but after that she could only drop it onto something. If it dropped on anything but a runic rune then it just sort of splashed on whatever it landed on and evaporated nearly instantly.

She spent hours trying to drip mana onto objects. First she started on a small pebble. But aside from making a tiny puddle for a few seconds, she couldn’t control it at all. She couldn’t get it to envelope the pebble, let alone do anything else with it. She found it deeply frustrating. So much so that she gave up on trying and wrote everything down in her grimoire before going to bed.

When she woke up in the morning she tried again, after a breakfast of leftover diner food, but once more she failed to figure out how to do it. After that she spent hours casting her new spells, trying to see how they worked. She only stopped for bathroom breaks and a single meal consisting of a mushroom. She lasted about two more days before giving up.

She did learn a few things about the mechanics of the spells. Like pulling a root out of her mana well faster. She also learned that she wasn’t limited to casting the spells with her hands. She could cast it from any body part she wanted to. If she wanted to Push a rock from her big toe she could do so. The one drawback, she learned, to casting the Aspected spells was that they could be obstructed by things like clothing. So she had to cast them from a part of her body that was uncovered.

To help her understand her spells better, she broke them down into five parts. The first was the slight pause, which was less than a second, before the spell went off. The pulling of the roots. The release of the mana from whatever body part the spell was set to release from to whatever she targeted. The enveloping of the mana around the targeted area, and finally the spell doing whatever it was supposed to do.

She did have her theories about the spell doing what it did without spell balls. It was only a early working theory, but it was all that she had. She thought the spell effects were based off the aspect of the mana. In other words, gravity mana had an inherent ability that adjusted gravity. If she remembered her high school physics class, gravity was the force of a large object attracting other objects towards itself. She was not sure how the mana affected the object's gravitational forces, but she had a feeling that she was on the right track.

What she didn’t know, but really wanted to figure out, was if neutral mana was the same thing as other aspected mana with just something extra, or if it was something completely different. She wondered if it was like light, where there were different wavelengths and visible light was just how biological things experienced those wavelengths. If all the aspects were the same with just something added, could she measure it? She added those questions to her grimoire, after which she added a note to herself to check the System’s store, mainly to see if anyone had already done that.

That made her want to visit the System Hub to see. Pulling out her phone thingy, she checked the time and saw that she had stayed up all night. According to the clock on her phone, she had about an hour and a half before the sun rose. After almost putting her phone away she remembered to check her messages. To her relief, there were no new messages either from Jules or Amber nor from the System. She did have a bunch of new messages from random people she didn’t know, but she ignored them.

She wanted to head to the Hub right then and there, but knew she had to eat something. She was so hungry that she could eat two meals from Jules’ diner. She got up from her kitchen table and looked for something to make. She had known she was low on a lot of stuff, but in her single-minded research of her spells, she hadn’t realized just how empty her kitchen was of food. Sighing, she went back to the kitchen table and flipped to a new page in her grimoire. There, she started adding on to a new list of things she needed for her home. Most of it was food, but not all.

Feeling a burst of energy, she quickly left her cabin and headed to the shed which had her doors. She stopped by the two doors and noted the door to Woburn. She thought about going there to visit Woburn, but then shook her head. She didn’t want to start any trouble with the ghostly boy or Lowell. She turned back to the other door and went back to Quebec.

The first thing she noticed as she stepped back into her apartment was how bright all of her runes were. They were more noticeable because she had turned off all the lights in the apartment before she went back home. The runes shone brightly in the darkness of the early morning prior to the sun rising. She took a second to admire them before turning away.

She left her apartment and headed down the elevator, noting that the courtyard wasn’t as dark as it normally was. Looking up, she saw a full moon above her. It was the first time since she had been living in Woburn that she had seen it. It looked bigger than she remembered it being. She admired the sight for a few seconds before heading to the gate. She nodded to the woman with a metal spear sitting on the wooden crate just outside the gate. The woman nodded back.

Jules' diner, Lily noticed, was closed this early in the morning, but, looking in through the window, Lily spotted a cook in the kitchen preparing for the breakfast rush. She didn’t see Jules, but that didn’t surprise Lily. It was early. She turned away and made her way down the empty street.

Walking down the very empty street felt odd. She wasn’t scared even though it was still very dark. The odd-looking street lights were on, giving her comfort, but they didn’t banish the darkness completely. There were still large pools of darkness between the street lights. Still, Lily wasn’t scared, just fascinated at how different the street looked and yet at the same time it looked the same as when it was daylight. A song popped into her head. Mostly, just the music, but she knew a few parts of the song which ran over and over in her head. She starting singing the parts she knew.

I walk this empty street

On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Where the city sleeps

And I’m the only one

And I walk alone

My shadow

Something, something, something

My shallow

Something, something, something

‘Til then I walk alone

She knew she didn’t get the lyrics right, but it didn’t matter. The song fit her mood so she sang it in her head as she walked down the main street in Quebec. She felt the lonely road was her life and she was stuck on it. It didn’t make her sad or depressed, but she admitted to herself that it was what it was. She knew she was being dramatic, but she didn’t care. It felt right. Plus it was fun. The way the stupid lizards ran away told her in unequivocal terms that her singing wasn’t up to even their standards. Laughing at the thought, she started singing again.

The Hub was surprisingly busy. Not as busy as during the day, but far more people were blinking in and out of reality than Lily expected this early in the morning. Looking at the people with carts loaded down with goods, she kind of had a duh moment as she realized that they were restaurant people getting ready to open.

There was another crowd in and around the Hub. They were heavily-armed and clad in mismatched armor. Looking at them, she guessed they were adventurers like Amber who were getting supplied to head out of the city on jobs. Sitting on the side road by the Hub, there was a line of all sorts of vehicles where the adventurers were hanging out while their fellow crew members went to Hub. The vehicles came in all sorts of sizes and models. From motorcycles that looked like they were built with mismatched parts to brand-new-looking, high-end armored military trucks.

Shaking her head, Lily made her through the traffic towards the Hub. Seconds later, she put her hand on the T-shaped Hub and disappeared into the System store. As always, she found herself in her old room from before the invasion. She quickly found her way towards her desk and her old computer. She sat down and woke it up. Like the times before, except the first couple of times, it asked her if she wanted to view the store from her computer or if she wanted to go to the store directly. Like always, she clicked on her computer.

Her status screen popped up, and she got a pleasant surprise. While her auras hadn’t leveled, her Gravity Manipulation and Time Manipulation had leveled up. Time Manipulation had leveled up to level 4 while her Gravity Manipulation had leveled up to 3. Looking at her status screen, she did notice a few things. First, only her manipulation skills in both categories had leveled. Her spells themselves had not. In fact, looking at them, she noticed that they didn’t have a level like all her other class spells while the manipulation parts did.

Looking at the Aspect spells made her think of her own spells. The spells she created. They too didn’t have levels. She had never realized it, which made her think of why it was that way. Both Amber and Jules had spoken about leveling up those spells, but she had never connected to the fact that she didn’t have any levels in them despite using them regularly. Especially her combat spells which she had created. She wondered if it was because she had created them or if there was some other reason why they didn’t show any level.

Looking at the list of Aspect knowledge skills she noticed that they all were still at level one except the ones she had paid to advance, which hadn’t leveled up either. She at least expected her Gravity and Time skills to advance, but, outside the Manipulation part, nothing else had changed.

Shaking her head, she dismissed her status screen and went to the System store. Once she was on the homepage she searched for how to measure mana. The results from that led her to the non-system shop, where she found books and videos on the subject. Right away, she knew she was in over her head. There were a ton of books and videos on the subject, but the titles sounded very technical. They sounded so technical that she didn’t understand the words in half the titles.

Not only that, but they had restrictions. When she clicked on one at random she found that she needed to have a working knowledge of advanced maths. The good news was that there was a link to the maths. Which led her down a few links until she got to college algebra. At first she followed the links, trying to see where she should start, but, as one link led to another which led to another, she got discouraged.

She nearly gave up, until her curiosity about two tiny boxes at the bottom left-hand side of the descriptions of all the videos she was looking at overcame her. One box had the letters FA with the word ‘comparable’ written in tiny letters below. The other had the letters AMT with the same tiny word ‘comparable’ under them. She hovered her mouse over the first box and it lit up, telling her it was a link. Curious, she clicked the FA link and found herself looking at a skill in the System store. She clicked on the skill description and found something amazing.

The first box led her to the skill Focused Attention. It was a skill that allowed a person to focus on one thing and put what they saw into their short-term memory. The memory would last, picture-perfect, for roughly two weeks before fading. According to what she read, the information wouldn’t completely leave the person's memory, but the person would lose the picture-perfect recall of the skill. That was, unless the person used the skill several times - then it would transfer to their long-term memory.

The second box led her to the skill Advanced Memory Trance. This skill would put the person in a trance in which they would record everything around them into picture-perfect, long-term memory. It sounded very exciting, but the skill had several warnings. The first was that the person had to have some kind of alarm which would knock them out of the trance, at least in the low levels. Once in the trance, a person couldn’t leave it unless some outside stimulus brought them out.

The second warning was that it was recommended for only thirty minutes before an eight-hour rest. That rest could be reduced with three hours of sleep or using the skill, Meditation. Any longer and it could cause a mental breakdown and extreme mental fatigue. It did say that it could also be avoided by a person who could cast a specific tier 6 healing spell which could remove the effects. The healing spell listed in the description was also a link. Lily hovered her mouse over the link, but didn’t click it just yet as there was one more warning. The last warning was a warning not to use the trance in combat as it would cause PTSD. Again this could be avoided by the same healing spell that allowed a person to use the skill more often.

Once she was done reading the last warning she clicked the link to the healing spell and found herself on the healing spells page. The spell, Heal Mind, was a class spell of five different classes. She was amused to see that one of the classes listed that could cast the spell was a paladin. It brought back memories of the army people who had saved her. Especially the tier 2 paladin woman who sat behind her in the truck.

She noticed that the spell wasn’t greyed out, even though it was three tiers higher than her class. Curious to see if she could get the spell even though she wasn’t a healer, she clicked the buy button. She smiled as the small box asked her if she really wanted to buy the spell. Then she frowned as she saw the price. The cost of buying the spell was six million, one thousand credits because she was trying to buy a non-mage spell. After that, there was another fee for buying a spell which was four tiers above her own. That came to six hundred thousand credits. The total came to six million and seven hundred thousand credits.

She backtracked a bit and looked at both the memory skills. The cost of the first one, Focused Attention, was thirty thousand credits while the second skill, Advanced Memory Trance, cost eighty thousand credits. She minimized the window and went back to the search engine in the System store. This time she looked up information on how to break the trance which could be done by the person who was in the trance. According to the search results, there were a bunch of ways to break a trance, but they all had to be set up before the person went into the trance. She even found a cheap way of doing it using her phone. It was an annoying alarm that was already built in. It was specifically designed to break trances.

Smiling, she went back and bought Advanced Memory Trance and Heal Mind. Then she went back and started buying all sorts of videos on math then on mana theory. She had to stop and buy an upgrade to her phone to increase its memory, but that only cost 100 credits so she didn’t even balk at spending the credits. On the videos, she had to specify which type she wanted: FA or ATM. The ATM videos had less parts to them. For example, college math under FA had six videos, but the ATM version only had two, both of them broken down into thirty-minute videos. The ATM videos therefore worked out cheaper than the FA videos. Both versions of college math cost ten credits per video, but, with less parts, the ATM came out costing much less.

Lily ended up getting all the prerequisites to understand the book she wanted to read. On top of that, she also bought a bunch of books and videos on the subject of mana and the different aspects of it. The books, she noted, had auto-turning pages so that, while in a trance, she wouldn’t be staring at the same page for half an hour. She was still browsing the books and videos when she got the notification that she had five minutes left on her time in the store. She quickly backed out of the page she was looking at before she went to the food section.

She started buying a bunch of food, only to realize that she couldn’t carry it all. She remembered all the people with their carts and went looking for one she could use. She found one that was fairly cheap in the non-system store and bought it. Then she went back to buying food for her home in her world. She realized that she missed having someone deliver it like she had back when she lived in Woburn. She knew she didn’t have time to look for someone to do it in the store, but she promised herself that she would the next time she came back. She left the store with one minute left on her time.

No time had passed since she had entered the store in the Hub so everything was still the same. The big difference was that she was standing beside her new three-wheeled cart. It was already filled with her food so she didn’t have to do any manual labor except drag the cart behind her. Even then she didn’t have to do anything but steer it, as it had a small crystal core engine that, according to the description, would last for a month without needing a charge.

A charge that she, as mage, could fill herself or she could buy a new mana crystal or use the ones she had in storage in the store from the mana crystal farm in Woburn. The farm, to her surprise, hadn’t been taken away from her when she deserted Lowell’s army. She did lose a whole lot of crystals, but they were starting to stack up again in the System storage.

She had found that out after she bought the cart when she got a prompt asking her if she wanted to use a crystal from her storage account. She had then gone to her account and found a small pile of crystals waiting on her. The storage, which Woburn had set up, according to the history tab under her account, had its fees being taken out of her apartment account. The information had been sent out in a message which she hadn’t read. She told herself she would take a day and go over all of her messages sometime soon.

The cart had a strap that went around her waist. It was set up so that when she started walking, the cart would power up and follow her. She didn’t have to do anything but walk. Taking a moment, she strapped the belt around her waist. Once she was done, she took a step and got pulled back a step as the cart took a second to turn on and start moving. She quickly got the hang of it as she learned that she needed to lean forward a bit to start the cart before she started walking. As soon as she got it going, she started back towards her apartment. She was about fifty feet from the large empty lot where the Hub was located when someone called out her name.

“Lily, thank God I found you,” said male’s voice from the shadows between two street lights. A quick look showed her a thin man with ripped and worn clothing and a wild thick beard that was mostly grey with a few strands of black in it. She immediately took him for a homeless person.

Lily reacted instantly. She hit the quick release on her belt and stepped away from her cart as it came to a stop. At the same time she cast Mobile barrier with her left hand, anchoring it onto her chest. While she was doing that she cast Greater flamethrower with her right hand, holding it ready. It took all of three seconds, but the man hadn’t moved from the shadows nor had he done anything threatening that she could see. He remained where he was, not doing anything.

“Who are you, and what do you want?” She asked him.

“I just wanted to say that it wasn’t your fault. None of it was. Goodbye, Saint Sage Wilson. It was an honor.” He told her as he brought his hand up to his forehead with his palm out, in a move that looked well-rehearsed. He then bowed and let his hand fall to his side.

Lily blinked as the crazy homeless man took a step backwards into the shadows a second later. She lost sight of him almost immediately. She held her position, trying to find the crazy guy in the shadows, but he was gone. She let her Greater flamethrower fade away, but kept her Mobile barrier up as she quickly strapped her cart belt back on. Spooked, she made her way back to her apartment, only to be pulled back as she forgot to lean forward to start the mana engine. She corrected her mistake while looking into the shadows for the odd man.

As she jogged back to her apartment she wondered how the man knew she was a Sage and what he meant when he called her Saint Sage Wilson. She slowed down after a while as she started passing people setting up their wares on the tables on the street. By the time she passed Jules’ diner she had dismissed the incident as a weird encounter with a crazy homeless person. She dropped her Mobile barrier, and relaxed.