An Arcane Engineer in Another World: Book I, Exile, Chapter 11

“You’re crazy!” Mindy said.

So much for keeping an open mind. I sent a little ball of glowing light to get in her eyes. “As crazy as that?”

“That’s… just a trick, some kind of electric…”

“Mindy. You saw how I heated the soup. You saw the dead walking.” I frowned. ”Why is this so hard to believe?”

“Other worlds, magic worlds it’s, it’s…”

“Mindy!” Her sister is looking at her. Not shivering, but she still has blankets around her.

I couldn’t make the place hot after all.

“C’mon sis, this can’t be—“

“There are dead people walking around!”  the older girl lunged up out of her nest of blankets.  “Mindy, why isn’t this—there are dead people walking around!”

“So you’ll listen?” 

Denise turned and lookedat me. “I’ll listen, but… Not uncritically.”

“Great, first of all, you were going to college? What for?”

“I was going to become a teacher.”

I blinked in surprise. “College, for that?”

“Oh, you think girls can’t go to college?” Denise is glaring at me. Which…

Doesn’t make her comment make any more sense.

“No? It’s just that where I come from, teachers normally get trained via apprenticeship, working with another teacher. You have classes, but they’re… mostly informational.” I shrugged. “How else could you learn how to deal with twenty screaming kids?”

“Oh…” Denise looked away, and I caught a bit of a blush on her cheeks. “It’s just that here, some people think that… never mind.”

“Right.” I’m not going to touch that. “Okay, so you don’t have any magic here, at least not before everything got… snowy.” The kids around us nod at that.

“Well, except for Santa Claus!” one girl says.

“Santa…”

“Never mind,” Denise said. “I’ll explain later. But okay, so tell us how magic works.”

“Right, it’s…okay, the field we manipulate, mages call it mana. It can be manipulated in a bunch of ways, but our three main fields are rituals, sorcery, incantations, and pact sorcery, but that’s…” I shook my head. “I’m an arcane engineer. Or, well, an apprentice. I use rituals to gather mana and use it for various purposes, like, oh, heating a room up. Incantations are rituals that can be set to be cast quickly.” I glance around.  “Sorcery is more… inborn. You have to learn how to use it, but you need a gift, say, like a fire mage.”

“So, setting things on fire?”

“Or purifying illness,” I glanced over at Denise. “Fire isn’t just a thing, it’s a concept.  Sorcerers used to be the big thing, but now most of ‘em also know rituals, because rituals can be a lot more flexible if you know enough. At least unless you’re working in the field of your sorcery.”

The kids are giving me a lot of confused looks. I decided to drop all of the stuff about specific schools of ritual and sorcery magic, which was about six hours’ worth of lecture time I never got back.

“And pact sorcery?”  Denise stares at me. “Why’d you trail off on that?”

“Because that could be bad.”  I shook my head. “Okay, sorcery and rituals are both inborn, even if they’re learned in different ways. But I’m casting the ritual, just like a sorceress is shaping her power. Pact sorcery? You get that power from an outside source, usually intelligent. Sometimes it’s not a bad thing. A lot of firefighters have been pacted sorcery to help them fight fires, for example, but if you don’t know where you’re getting the power from or what it wants the power for…”

“Did that happen?” Mindy asked, evidently forgetting her skepticism.

“In the Wyld Age… it was practically the only kind of sorcery around. People worshipped spirits, asked them for power—some of ‘em nice, some of them more like the thing that was outside, but they were all alien.”

“Like flying saucers?”

“I have no idea what those are, Cannibal Girl.”

Stomp-stomp.

“It’s… never mind,” Denise said. “What do you mean?”

“A spirit of fertility might demand human sacrifices. Or it may just mirror the worst impulses of the pacted human.” I shook my head. “And even if they were given it for the best of reasons, it wasn’t our power, and before the end of the Wyld Age, a lot of spirits decided that they enjoyed being the local god.”

Mindy stared at me. “You think that is happening here?”

“I don’t know. But you never had magic before, and now… “ Another little globe of light floats up. “The Wyld Age was when magic was, well, Wyld. But we tamed it, trained it and…”

“Like the difference between Paris today and when Great Courtaud and his wolves terrorized it,” Denise said.

“Pardon?”

She shook her head. “Just a bit of history, but the wolves were dangerous, even in a city. Then we tamed the world and didn’t have to worry about them again.”

“Right,” I said. I started pacing. “Problem here is that since you didn’t have magic before, something brought magic to you…and you don’t have any arcane engineers, any mages, any rituals that damp out the kind of things that form hostile spirits or dangerous elementals.”

“Like goblins?” someone asked from the crowd of kids.

I blinked. “No, goblins are just people.”

“Really?”  Mindy asked.

“What, you don’t have goblins?” She shook her head. “Elves, dragons, forest sprites?” Another headshake followed.  Wow. Boring world.

“So those things… they appeared because…”

“I guess magic is back, or was always here, and for some reason never got catalyzed until now, but yeah.”

“So teach us how to do magic, and we’ll beat them up.” Cannibal Girl smacked her fist into her hand. I guess she’s trying to be intimidating.

“It doesn’t work like that. Magic takes time. Rituals take time to learn.”

“What about sorcery?”

“It’s more inborn, but if you want to do more than make pretty lights… You have both to learn how to do it, and exercise.” I paused. “Think of it like this. Someone using rituals and incantations can be like a… doctor. He has to learn a lot of stuff. Someone using sorcery is more like an athlete. He may not need to learn the same way, but he still has to practice and train.”

“No kids with magic?” Denise said. “I guess Princess of Fire lied.”

“Yeah.” Then I look at her. “Seriously, would you want a ten-year-old with the power to call up fire?”

“Yes!” Cannibal Girl said.

“No,” Mindy and Denise said in unison.

“But…” I frowned. “We can’t stay here forever. But we can’t leave. Not until we find a way to handle those big-ass storms.”

“And the zombies.” Mindy gestured at the door.

“Yeah.” What to do…  “Okay, first thing, are there any jewelry stores or banks?”

“What, why?”  Denise said, taking her glasses off and cleaning them.

“I’m not a sorcerer or an archmage. I’m an arcane engineer.” I looked at her and the others. “I can use rituals, incantations, but that’s not enough. What you see…” I gestured at the lights floating in the air. “Is pretty close to the best I can do on the spot.” 

“Great, we’ll scare them with lights,” Mindy muttered.

“Or we get what I need. I build stuff, silver, gold, gems, if they’re the right kind, is what I need to work real rituals. Hang real incantations on.” Which I’ve never done before because I never expected to be in a place like this. Find my destiny, my ass. “I may be able to ward an entire building, heat it, maybe… work it so we can raise plants in it, at least until the storms decline and we can find some place warm.” And I can make weapons. Sure, the Wyld Age had been scary as shit, but… The people who ended the Wyld Age hadn’t been sorcerers, arcanist, wizards with a thousand years of learning behind them. They didn’t have anything like the book I had. They’d just had to learn by doing…

And they had won.

“We rest tonight,” I said. “And tomorrow, we’ll get to seeing if we can find what we need.”