emergencycomplaints

Book 2, Chapter 31

We walked for about two minutes before I got tired of my mother’s silent judgment. “Just say what’s on your mind,” I told her.

“You should help the rest of them too,” she said after a moment.

“I will, provided the village agrees to my terms.”

Mother shook her head. “You should help them because that’s how we all survive. Everybody works together, everybody helps each other.”

“The way Malra helped herself to our garden?” I asked. “Or our neig...

Book 2, Chapter 30

This time of day, the villagers were busy in the fields or gardens. The children were in school, and only a few of the older generation who’d grown too weak to continue working were relaxing. Of course, that included our nosy neighbor, Malra. She spotted us as soon as we left the hut. I knew because I could feel her mana core, unusually full for a villager’s, right near the window in her hut she liked to spy out of.

A glance over in that direction revealed an older woman with gray h...

Book 2, Chapter 29

Even with a teleportation beacon, the spell was not cheap. If Father hadn’t been the one supplying the mana to keep it active on the scrying mirror I’d left him, it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Keeping it active for over a month had cost him far more mana than it saved me.

I appeared near my parents’ pallet in front of the scrying mirror. It was leaned up against the wall with the bottom wedged in some type of stand that appeared to be a small wooden log cut into a squar...

Book 2, Chapter 28

Under normal circumstances, a mana battery’s job was to provide a source of redundancy to the ambient mana in the air. Most enchantments, at least the ones I’d made or interacted with in my previous life, were designed to keep themselves powered indefinitely, but experiments could have unintended consequences on the local mana pressure, and in order to preserve complex or expensive enchantments, mana batteries functioned as backups just in case the ambient mana temporary dried up.

H...

Book 2, Chapter 27

The only good news was that the aura around Freak faded away as his regrown top-half solidified. My best guess was that it was some sort of life shell that was powered by the souls of victims. He’d probably used it on that cat monster right before he’d cast incendiary organs and blew it to pieces. When my spell dealt him a wound too grievous for the spell to handle on its own, it grabbed hold of a second victim to give it the power needed to keep Freak alive.

Unfortunately for him, ...

Book 2, Chapter 26

The chimeric aberrations were nothing but a distraction at this point. Fighting them was a waste of time, one that I couldn’t afford unless I wanted to let my opponent unleash the entire menagerie on me. I had better uses for my mana, and killing them all now would prevent me from harvesting the creatures later when I put them out of their misery.

Flight was probably overkill, but I fully planned on replenishing any mana spent on this fight at the end, and it defeated the immediate is...

Book 2, Chapter 25

I’d been studying Freak since he’d revealed himself to me, mostly to determine how best to kill him when he made his move. He had a shield ward of some type built into his robe, probably a very basic one. Flexible cloth rarely made for good material for inscription, though I’d seen some mages use a hardened trim to hold the runes in shape.

Freak’s robe was enchanted for strength and movement, possibly to the point where it would reflexively defend him. Physical attacks wouldn’...

Book 2, Chapter 24

Whoever had set up this operation had devoted a lot of mana to keeping it hidden. I breached the mana shielding enchantment right as I passed from the hallway into the main grow chamber. Between one step and the next, I went from being unable to sense any mana at all to it practically exploding in my mind.

The tables were a bit too tall for me to comfortably examine the various plants sitting on top of them, but I could feel the mana in them. Someone had done their best to recreate the ...

Book 2, Chapter 23

I had to be overthinking things. For the past five minutes, I’d been poking at this door, trying to figure out what the trick was. It wasn’t warded at all. There were no magical traps. I’d even gone so far as to waste mana on a second ward scanner spell to confirm there weren’t any sort of magical trip lines directly behind the door, not that it would have mattered since it swung outward toward me.

After confirming there was no trace of magic on or near the door itself, I sent a...

Book 2, Chapter 22

The far side of the lake led to just as much a mess of sewer tunnels as the first part had been, forcing me to scry the tunnels to find a way out. They didn’t seem to be laid out in any sort of logical pattern, though I was suspected they corresponded with the streets above. Maybe if more of them were intact, it would be easier to see how it was all supposed to fit together.

My scry sensor went up and down tunnels, trying different passages more or less at random while I built my ment...

Book 2, Chapter 21

I curved sharply to the left, but even as I altered my flight trajectory, I suspected it was a useless gesture. The gigantic monster that was already chasing my light orb continued to do so, but its friend appeared to be much smarter. It ascended through the water at an angle altered to match my new direction.

Just as the monster hit the surface, I reversed direction. Something massive, covered in pebbly scales and with far too many eyes and teeth, breached the water. Its whole body twi...

Book 2, Chapter 20

Even blinded, I could feel the mana swimming around under the surface of the lake. And it was fast, far faster than I’d be able to move that row boat even if I were a grown man enhancing my muscles with an invocation. The light orb the monster had snatched out of the air had been high up, close to the ceiling even. Crawling over the open water with a spider climb spell was not appealing.

I was confident the monster wasn’t going to drag itself out of the water to come after me, if no...

Book 2, Chapter 19

Almost the entirety of the roof was made of glass. I hadn’t seen a single piece since arriving in Derro, so finding a skylight over a hundred feet wide was unexpected, to say the least. It wasn’t all one piece, of course, but each pane was big enough that I could have used it as a bed, and there were hundreds of them all set into a metal framework that was anchored directly into the stone. The glass itself had some sort of glazing that made everything inside shadowy and indistinct. I’d ...

Book 2, Chapter 18

It was a five-minute walk through the dark to reach the first intersection. I’d have probably broken my neck tripping over rubble if not for my light spell. Tanner sucked in a breath when he saw it, but otherwise just nodded and started walking. I noticed he kept one hand on the wall anyway. Maybe it was just a habit for him, or maybe it was to help with his balance. There was more rubble in the middle, where a channel ran through the dried-up sewer tunnel, but the path wasn’t completely ...

Book 2, Chapter 17

Knocking the last enforcer out was easy. Doing so in a way that allowed the prisoners to go free was not. In fact, it was downright impossible. I’d initially assumed he would have the keys to the large shared cell and the individual cells on him, but that turned out to not be the case. I’d thought to just wait for him to get too close to the bars, close enough for someone to grab the keys off him after I used a strangling hand spell on him, but from the looks of it, that wouldn’t have w...

Book 2, Chapter 16

Unlike the Repository, the enforcers tower had nothing in the way of wards. Perhaps no one thought it was necessary when the place was filled with adepts who specialized in violence. I’d initially mistaken them for true mages, but the more I studied them, the more convinced I became that each knew a handful of spells that they powered through the storage crystals capping their signature batons. They were dangerous due to their numbers, not their individual strength.

The true mages liv...

Book 2, Chapter 15

I was not particularly surprised to find the street kids’ home abandoned. They’d left all their possessions behind, presumably because they planned to return later, but with the enforcers out in number, the best way to keep their home from being discovered was not to be there. I didn’t know how much a bunch of homeless orphans knew about a mage’s ability to sense mana, but I could see it being common knowledge that enforcers could just magically find people.

It did create a prob...

Book 2, Chapter 14

I was up early the next day. It had taken a bit, but I was finally starting to pull my schedule back around to sleeping at night. My first act of the day was to go over my progress, especially important since I planned on invading enemy territory soon.

My phantom space was once more whole and fully charged, and I’d managed to increase its size slightly. My staff was in perfect condition, and the mana crystal was a little under half full. That was enough for twenty or thirty small spel...

Book 2, Chapter 13

My sister was a rare talent when it came to magic, and my father wasn’t that far behind her. I’d tutored four villagers and they’d all performed with varying degrees of competency in different fields. None of them had stuck out to me, but all of them had been able to grasp the basics. To some extent, I’d enjoyed teaching all of them.

I watched Tanner fumble control of the mana again, letting another tendril of it mist into the air and dissipate. We weren’t even using the leech...

Book 2, Chapter 12

The mage wasn’t what I was expecting. For one thing, he was at most seventeen years old. He had a thin, lanky frame and fine brown hair that was in disarray from the wind generated by his own spells. In one hand, he held a baton with a storage crystal capping it. It was relatively big, as far as storage crystals went, but it was already half empty. Either it hadn’t been full to begin with, or the mage was incredibly inefficient with his spells.

Mana built up into a force wave spell,...

Book 2, Chapter 11

There was a big rock in the corner of my hideout, about two and a half times the size of the one I’d used for my first mana crystal. If I were in an adult body with an adult-sized mana core, it would have been no problem to start converting it over. But even though my core had grown bigger over the last year, it still wasn’t enough for the project I had in mind, not by itself.

If I wanted to wait two or three more years, my core would probably double in size again, but even that wou...

Book 2, Chapter 10

The odds of Tanner actually coming through with a shard seemed long to me. If he managed it, then fantastic. I’d give him a few remedial lessons, he’d show me how to bypass the wall, and everyone would be happy. In the meantime, I planned to keep looking into alternate ways to sneak into the center of the city. In the extremely likely event that Tanner failed to get the mana he needed, I couldn’t afford to waste my time sitting around.

There was one thing I wanted to do, something...

Book 2, Chapter 9

The plan was simple. I’d go a block or two over and let myself get spotted, run from them for another few blocks, then ambush them and find out what they wanted. I’d only been inside my hideout for a few minutes, so with any luck, they would think I’d just temporarily evaded them and not linger in the area to search it more thoroughly.

Though, even if they did, I doubted they’d find my new home. Between the wards and the physical obstacles preventing entry, I was safe from casua...

Book 2, Chapter 8

I waited on my rooftop hiding spot until the guards had finished sweeping the area. They were thorough and I had no doubt that if I hadn’t been able to fully shield my mana core, they would have found me. In the end, though, there were just too many potential hiding spots and they didn’t have enough time. I saw one of the guards talking to the farmer, who himself snapped back loud enough that I could almost make out what he was saying. Something shifted in the guard’s posture and the fa...

Book 2, Chapter 7

Now that I knew to look for it, it wasn’t hard to spot the leech stones filled with mana all over the city. People kept them in bags or purses regularly, and my biggest issue was in identifying them. They weren’t always full, so a halfshard that was almost empty and a tenner that was almost full often felt very similar. Since I wasn’t trying to rob anybody, I didn’t worry much about the difference.

It was mostly just convenient since it explained some of the weird things I could...

Book 2, Chapter 6

Draw stones stole mana out of the environment around it, not that there was any here to take. It also took it from people or animals who came into contact with it, and it did it quickly. If that were the end of it, draw stones would quickly fill up and become inert. Every draw stone would just be a rock full of mana waiting for somebody to come by and drain it.

Since that obviously wasn’t what happened, some mages started digging. Draw stones had some potentially useful applications o...

Book 2, Chapter 5

I landed in what appeared to be some sort of child-sized nest of ragged cloth scraps. It made my own clothes seem clean by comparison, and I quickly disentangled myself from what I assumed was some homeless kid’s bed. Thankfully, Derro didn’t seem to believe in one-room buildings like my birth village did, so there was no one around to see my entry.

I’d known that before I came in, of course. I could feel the mana in the kids gathered in the building, though admittedly the overall...

Book 2, Chapter 4

I did most of my walking at night when it was far cooler out in the wastelands. There was the added danger of nocturnal predators, but it was outweighed by the mana savings from not having my stamina drained faster from walking in the heat. For the next few days, I’d start out in the evenings, walk through the night, and sometime in the morning, I’d find a temporary spot to hole up while I slept. Usually, that meant some sort of rocky hill with a sharp incline that I could burrow into and...

Book 2, Chapter 3

Monster hunting was boring. At least, it was for me. There was a lot of tedious and time-consuming work finding the monster, a brief moment of action killing it, and then more tedium removing whatever parts of it were useful. Worse, I didn’t actually know what was worth the effort to harvest. Pelts were usually a good choice, but I didn’t have the equipment or the training to do it right.

That was probably why I leaned heavily on transmutation instead. Stone and metal were excellent...

Book 2, Chapter 2

Since my reincarnation in the village of Alkerist, I’d been forced to make do with almost no mana and no equipment. My workshops were a world away in the Night Vale, a place I couldn’t even point in the right direction to right now. I’d made some rudimentary devices by making liberal use of stone shaping spells to form the runes directly into the rock, but they’d been crude by my standards.

The crucible was my first step in rectifying that. It had been designed both to hold my m...