I woke up refreshed after probably 9 hours of sleep and stretched. The room was still dark, and nothing had changed. Hmm. Where's that damn light switch?
After looking for the light switch to no avail, I settled down and ate the fruit (happily) and the vegetables (a bit begrudgingly). After wiping the plates clean, it was time to get to work. Time to open that damn door.
First order of business, attempting to open the door like the aliens. This unfortunately meant haphazardly flinging myself with mana, leaping towards the center of the door, and slapping at it a lot while I slid down the surface. Not particularly graceful, but it worked. It worked in the sense that I learned I can’t open the door like the aliens can. I tried several times, varying how hard I slapped the door and where I hit it, but to no avail.
So that was 20 minutes wasted.
Okay, second order of business: break out. I could just try to punch through the door, but as discussed earlier, it would be loud and slow. I needed a better method, and I had one. Let’s turn my hand into a plasma cutter.
I simply pumped mana into my fingers through my barrier, converting the mana to pure energy. At first, it looked like my hand burst into flames, but it quickly settled down to a white hot glow, heat rippling over its surface. The next step was simple: melt the door.
Using my hand, I shoved it into the metal door and with a hiss, the metal started to give way. It took a few minutes to pierce my hand through, but after that I happily started cutting out a large rectangle out of the metal, in roughly the size and shape of a regular door made for humans. I hummed as I cut, excited to finally be free of this ‘locked in a room’ bullshit.
Using mana properly always gave me a bit of a high, like a runner’s high. I was grinning as I finished chopping out the rectangle and shoved it into the hallway. There, pathway created. It’s like a cat cutting open its own cat door. Hmm, that wasn’t a great metaphor. I’m not a cat.
The lights in the hallway were also off, strangely enough. Only faint blue guiding lights lit up the edges, as if to stop people from walking into walls. My night vision is not amazing, but it’s better than that. Maybe these aliens suck at seeing in the dark. I had another trick up my sleeve though.
Just like turning on a flashlight, my hair started glowing. It’s a very useful method of outputting mana: just channel it into hair and watch it glow! And it doesn’t cause any damage to my otherwise healthy fur.
Now with a glowing head, tail, and a couple other places that glow against my will, I could explore the now dark spaceship in peace. Where was everyone?
After a lap of the hallway it was clear: the aliens were all sleeping. The ship was on autopilot, the cafeteria was shut down, the communal nap room was in use. Okay, good to know! One problem: I’m bored.
I could just go back to sleep, god knows I need to catch up on sleep, but I didn’t really want to. I wasn’t comfortable with the ship to feel at home, and my beanbag bed wasn’t perfectly fluffy and cozy enough to warrant curling up and dozing off again. I may have a bit of a perfectionist streak when it comes to beds. Ugh, the bed in the military complex was awful too.
As i paced the halls, deliberating on what to do, still glowing like a light bulb, I was interrupted by a whirring noise coming from behind one of the doors. It sounded like a quiet vacuum or drone or tiny hovercraft or something. I pressed my ear to the door to listen, my tail swaying for balance.
The noise was slowly getting louder. Whatever it was, it was approaching the door. I backed up. To my surprise, the door slid open! Out came a large, slow moving machine. It was a short cylindrical shape with a flat top, a little shorter than I was. On the bottom, brushes spun as the machine whirred, carefully sweeping over every part of the floor.
Wait. Isn’t this just an alien roomba? Wow, I was excited for nothing. Well, there was one exciting discovery: this little guy could open the doors somehow! I could finally see what was behind them! Intent on sneaking along, I jumped on top and sat down.
“Alright” I said, rubbing my hands together. “Away, mighty steed!” I pointed down the hall to th next closed door.
Okay, new problem. This roomba buddy is really good at making the floor spotless, but that makes it slow. Really slow. About 10 minutes later, we were still bouncing back and forth down the hallway, scouring up every speck of dust. Oh god, this is going to take hours. I wonder if it’s even worth it.
I lay flat on my back on the roomba, staring at the dim ceiling. Thanks to releasing mana via light-up-hair all this time, I was feeling quite a bit lighter, but not really sleepy.
Okay, while I wait, let’s have a magic lesson. Let’s start warp experiments.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Dear reader, do you think magic is difficult? You’d be wrong. But is it hard? Of course. We fexels are an unusual race with an extremely quick understanding of magic. What does that mean, you ask? It means while other people are memorizing calculations and magic formulas to make a fireball or small flame, we can do it by intuition. Yep, just intuition. I’m just better that way.
That doesn’t sound fair, you might say. Well, everyone has their own strengths, I’d argue back. Fexels have the ability to cast magic effortlessly and easily surpass others with magic. Humans have the special ability to complain about it. Seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
Jokes aside, fexels do tend to have a drawback. We hyperspecialize. To compare, a human magician probably has a specialty, let’s say lightning for the sake of the argument, but in a pinch they can use spells of other types. For example, a fireball, or a ball of light, or creating some water to drink. This is because, as far as humans are concerned, mana transmutation (that is, the process of giving mana properties of other things) is a skill itself.
Let’s compare that to a fexel. My father specializes in electricity. He can’t create a fireball to save his life. Now, humans would quickly point out his ability to manipulate electricity is leagues above any regular lightning magician, which is true. I saw a military demonstration of a human mage launching a chunk of metal with a magic railgun once. It was less impressive than the pieces of silverware shot at me for misbehaving in my childhood.
So fexels intuitively understand mana manipulation, and generally specialize in one tiny category of magic, while humans and most other races can transmute their mana into a wide variety of physical phenomenon, while fexels can’t.
So what is my specialization, you ask? Something fancy? Nope! My specialization is exceedingly simple: the manipulation of pure mana and energy. I can turn mana into energy, like heat and light and force. That’s it.
What, not impressed? Well, you should be! You see, the process of transmuting mana inherently wastes some of it. It’s like pouring a glass of water by flooding the house: yeah, the glass is technically full, but you’ve also wracked up several thousand dollars in water damage, quadrupled your water bill, and maybe started an electrical fire. Where was I? Right. The benefits of being as special as me. The other major benefit is my ability to handle antimana.
Just like matter has antimatter, mana has antimana. This antimana is basically deadly for most regularly constructed spells. Just like mana and antimana, magic and antimagic do not get along. So a regular magician can’t use antimagic, as they don’t know how to transmute it. I, on the other hand, can handle it just fine. The secret? Don’t transmute it. Also don’t let it touch mana or it’ll explode.
See, it’s that simple! I only almost died a couple of times when trying to figure it out. Extreme bodily harm is a great motivator to get something right.
There’s one other department where fexels absolutely suck. We are awful with magitech. Again, we don’t really… do the whole “carefully create and inscribe spell formulas” thing. So how would we be able to inscribe our spells in the first place? Not to mention, the nitty gritty of integrating magic and technology is sort of pointless.
Yeah, it’s what makes the galactic internet work, and greatly improves people’s lives and can theoretically create a utopia with no pollution and no need for people to work for food, housing, or entertainment, but who cares about that? It’s mostly a pipe dream anyways. At the end of the day, magitech is just a tool. It’s great for making fancier, better tools, but it can’t protect you or improve your own abilities.
So my body, thanks to my wife, the mana singularity, is basically a massive mana generator. That mana generator produces both mana and antimana, and if I wasn’t properly regulating the flow, the singularity would instead put out an immense amount of energy and a smaller amount of mana, as mana is universally more common than antimana. I use these two types of energy to maintain a nigh-indestructible barrier around my skin, protecting myself.
But honestly, just using the barrier is kind of uncomfortable. It’s like having a sugar high while being unable to move, or filling up a tub of water just to let the water slowly drip out, drop by drop. I have to limit the output of my wife to stay alive, and to avoid blasting everything around me to pieces, but these constraints aren’t pleasant.
This is a long and complicated way to say burning mana is like burning off steam. Releasing light pointlessly? That’s opening the valve on the mana a little bit more. Running warp experiments? That’s opening the valve all the way and pouring it out. And it helps me get home. A real win-win!
If something goes wrong, the worst that can happen is I break the spaceship and end up free floating in space again, but I’ve had a bath and a meal and gotten new clothes, so I’d be good for another 6 months or so. I’d just have to start S.O.S signals again. Oh, and I guess all the aliens on this ship would probably die. Whatever.
You may be wondering how i’m able to use warp magic if I’m awful at transmuting my mana to anything but pure energy. The short answer is my aunt Deborah taught me and my sister how to use it through blunt force whenever she was drunk. Again, she was always drunk.
Aunt Deborah is particularly good at manipulating space, so her warp magic is pretty efficient and, in my opinion, less complicated than the stuff taught about in books. Of course, the stuff taught in books is used on spaceships and never individuals. Maybe she’s just a good teacher as long as she’s drunk. She was still a menace sober, in a different way.
To be honest, if I stay missing for several years, it’s very probable that Aunt Deborah would somehow be able to find me, opening a warp portal right above my head. The problem is that she would only be able to do that sober, and the last I checked she has been tipsy for two straight years. It would also require my family noticing I was missing and reporting it to her, so overall I can’t count on it.
The problem? I have no idea where I am, and I don’t know where I’m going. So all I can really do is take random shots in the dark. As I lay atop the roomba, I pressed my palms together before opening them in an ‘O’ shape, making a tiny, hand sized warp portal I could see through. I saw empty space. A miss. I flattened the portal and tried again. Another miss.
It’s not like i’m taking completely random guesses. I’m trying to open portals to magical tethers I had placed as warp points, but I guess I’m too far away. A few more attempts later and I confirm it: I’m not in the same galaxy anymore. What a disaster.
Do you like the complicated discussion of magic and (fake) science?
