1.2 An Inauspicious Beginning Pt 3

<div id="i4c-draggable-container" style="position: fixed; z-index: 1499; width: 0px; height: 0px;"><div data-reactroot="" class="resolved" style="all: initial;"></div></div>Month 4 Day 14

Coruscant.

48 by 32, sublevel B, Westside.

"Wow you really are as force sensitive as an overcooked meatloaf." Chanim remarks as the kettle finishes boiling.

"Yeah." I grunt. "And you're lit up like a fucking Christmas tree."

"Oh Yeah." The teen does a little fist pump as I pour out another glass of tea

"So you're satisfied that magic is an actual thing now? People are usually fairly sceptical." I ask.

"Well, Yeah. It's a thing. It isn't as awesome as the force but it's pretty cool." She admits in a manner befitting her age.

I snort loudly.

"Yeah yeah. But the mystical bullshit you have in front of you is is always better than the mystical bullshit that isn't. So here is THE PLN." I wave my hand through the air trailing eldritch light.

"Step 1: I learn you some basic magic to help you survive. I am not particularly good at magic but I am I am the best wizard I know. I'm also the only wizard I know so it's a pretty low bar. I'll teach you the basic spells so you can get a feel for each kind of magic.

Step 2: We kit you out properly, because my job isn't all sunshine and rainbows. None of it is sunshine and rainbows actually. But what I do know about the Jedi is that a lot of the truly great ones learned by doing, so if you want to actually learn about the Jedi you will need to have the proper gear and spells so when we do Jedi things don't end up dead because of some stupid reason. This includes going to fencing classes at least three times a week and marksmanship twice a week because things are going to try to kill us regularly and with great gusto.

Those two steps should take us about a fortnight.

Step 3: We go spelunking. The under undercity is full of old ruins, crashed spaceships and all sorts of other bullshit. It's a dangerous place but it's also a place where there are the sites of lots of old battles where important Jedi and Sith bit it. When I meditate in those places I can feel a bit of force juju going on but I'm not force sensitive so I'm only getting half the story at most.

There's also a bunch of old shitty force artefacts lying around just waiting for someone unscrupulous enough to find and sell them.

Do you have any problems with this plan as I have outlined it so far?"

"Yes." She says definitively.

"Cool." I fish out a blank workbook out of a bookshelf (made of books) open it to a fresh page and click my pen.

"Let's start at the top."

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"What about the things in the undercity?' Chanim asks.

"You're going to have to be more specific kiddo there's lots of things in the undercity some of them are nice some of them are not so much."

��Well you know what I mean."

"Okey, Stormtroopers, they are common, especially in the upper levels so they are an almost certain threat so let's give them an occurrence of 2 but I have a Scavengers Licence and the Imperial Officers are some of my best customers so they present an actual hazard rating of A placing them as a Low threat for which no controls are needed. Well that was yesterday at least, they don't like nonhumans so they're going to harass you and by extension me as well. Which bumps them up to a C rated threat and a medium hazard. We need to do some research into what we can do about that. Let's pencil that in for now and figure out more further down the line.

Hive rats however are also pretty common but nowhere near as such as stormies which gives them an occurrence of 3. But they aren't smart and they can be scared off with a bit of blaster fire. If worst comes to worst we can use Recall amulets to get ourselves back to the bikes which means that the most they can do is give us a few nasty bites and take our loot. This gives them a High risk rating.

We can mitigate this risk by using warning runes on probable approaches, motion detectors to let us know that the enemy is coming and most importantly not skipping on combat training so we can fight off the little buggers."

"This is boring." The teenager sighs.

"Yeah it's boring but. And this is important. What we do is a dangerous thing. Going into the undercity for any reason is dangerous, practising magic is dangerous, breathing while being force sensitive is dangerous. I grew up in a technological world and this is one of the things it taught me how to make the dangerous manageable to take the threats that we face and break them down into bite sized chunks which we can deal with so we don't get surprised by some glammed up edgelord with too much eyeshadow. As for magic, the great wizard Balderdash Cumberbund said, You should always put the warnings before the spells."

"They say that?" She asks quizzically.

"Not in these books, these books are pre-Balderdash so we should read the spells and then figure out how to manage the risks so you don't get your senses inverted and end up spending a day smelling through your bum."

She titters at the thought.

"Chanim this is not funny. I tried to teach myself invisibility and spent two whole hours to undo the effect it was No. Fun. At. All."

She collapses in gales of laughter.

....

"Are you done yet." I look down at the small teen.

"Yeah, I'm done." She says with a sigh.

"Alright let's give it another hour or so then we can break for lunch and we can start teaching you your first spell."

"Is it fireball, can it be fireball I'd love it if it was fireball."

I flip my notebook three pages back.

"Flare, project flames from one's fingers, known risks, burning, burns, pain, incineration, cooking and conflagration."

"Please." she says pleadingly

"Risk mitigation. Choose the correct location, prepare first aid techniques, have fire protection gear on hand. We don't teach fire in a room full of books, You're going to need to learn Frost first for when you ignite your tail and you need to know Healing before we even think about touching Destruction."

"Awwwww." She gives my the pussy cat eyes.

"Don't make that face at me young lady, I'll teach you healing after we deliver lunch then we can head down to the range and get you a blaster OK?"

"Ok."

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Month 4 Day 18

"Grubs up!" Ryan calls happily a large bag of takeaway cradled in his arms. He places it on the on the ground and unwraps the paper package on the soft matting of the Gym.

The nearest equivalent meal would be English style Fish'n'Chips except, this being Coruscant, there is neither fish nor potatoes. Instead it's StarchSticks'N'Farmbug.

Farmbug tastes like a cross between chicken and lobster, dipped in a batter and deep fried. I'm pretty sure it's actually some kind of giant cockroach grown in the undercity, but it's cheap and fucking tasty, especially with notmayonnaise.

'So magic?" Errai asks as she takes a seat next to us.

"Ain't gotta splain shit." I do the rainbow thing, everyone rolls their eyes at me.

"Yes you do." Djiingo says as he folds his lanky frame into a seated position and plucks a lump of invertebrate from grease mountain.

"Kay you got me." I take a bite of bug, "Woke up, 'bout four? Five? months ago in my apartment and someone had filled the thing with books. Shitloads of the things, one entire wall stacked from floor to ceiling. They also locked the door, I didn't know how at the time, but my key didn't work and half a day of trying to get the damned thing open was spectacularly unsuccessful." I take a breath and snag a few notchips.

"So I started looking at the books and they were all, histories and biographies and shit. Big old stories about wizards, gods and warriors. Not Jedi, nothing like the Jedi at all but all kinds of crazy shit. Eventually I find these old textbooks, just school textbooks but y'know magic."

"I read read the book, more or less magic for peasants, real simple, basic stuff. I find the spell for unlocking things about three days later and manage to unlock my apartment a few days after that. How to find things which aren't specifically hidden was in an intermediate level book and I figured I could make a few easy creds there."

"And that's that." Ryan finishes for me, I shrug and nod.

"So miscellaneous thousand year old engine parts is entry level stuff." Djingo asks.

"Finding objects for which I have a fine and distinctive description which are not hidden or warded is entry level stuff yeah." I spear s lump of meat with a bound dagger. "Most people start with fire though. For some reason people go straight from Magic to FIREBALLS. Pew Pew. Despite the fact that they're in a room filled with delicate books.���

"Hey. Fireballs are cool." Chanim says digging into her dinner.

"Unless you're fighting someone from the Imperial Edgelords Society a blaster is the better choice though."

Chanim shrugs.

"So The Book Of Circles?" Errai asks.

"Magic Sword Bible."

"What's a bible?" She asks.

"I…" I stop.

"Big time religious book. Top teir, lots of followers and in this case lots of swords." I explaain.

"You have a way with words." She snarks dryly, elbowing me gently in the ribs.

"Damn straight I do, Might even wrote a book of my own one day." Everyone shakes their head sadly.

"You're bastards the lot of you." I say with resignation as Errai pats me on the head.

"You know with what you're earning I though you'd have a place topside." Djingo asks. As everyone else munches on their nosh.

"Yeah… Nooo. Fuck that. Topside means I have to soldier my way through the imperial bureaucracy and deal with nosy hobnobs and more importantly explain how I manage a six figure income while working in the undercity. That's on top of the fucking Space Nazis I already have to deal with at the moment."

"So what are you doing with the money?"

"Ryan?" I prompt.

"He's buying a starship." The old cat says.

"A starship? Really?"

"Fuck yeah! Gotta get off this fucking place and somewhere where I won't have Edgelords crawling up my arse the moment I take a wrong step. Since last week Ryan's been acting as my front for the whole affair. Already got like fifty grand down on a nice SCT class scout ship. A pre-loved smuggler's vessel we found on the cheap last week. It's hyperdrive's a little bit fucked and the cannon mounts are fairly garbage but it's got lots of room and engines for days.

I've also got a fuckload of loot kicking around my apartment most of it worth, not only a truckload, but is of super super suspicious providence which means that until I can find a buyer which won't then immediately turn me into the Imps for a reward or strut around with a two thousand year old Jedi force blade in the middle of the Imperial Senate I'm just sitting on all kinds of loot which I can't move."

"Can't your Magic Powahs find the way." Errai says making appropriately cheezy hand gestures.

"I wish. Finding a person isn't too hard, finding a specific person fitting specific conditions is way outta my league."

"Well I do know a few sword collectors." She says seductively.

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I Practice the Kata, led by Djingo while Errai watches carefully. I'm not in shape for this, not even slightly. It's been about four months since I escaped my apartment and only two since I started attending lessons and I'm only now slowly losing my paunch. The healing magic really takes the edge off when I overexert myself though.

The book of circles is first and foremost a sword manual, one with detailed diagrams showing stances, Katas and fifty thousand ways with the blade. It's also a philosophical treatise of a kind, why to sword, where to sword, the purpose of a sword, the purpose of action, reaction and existence.

It predates most mystic texts and more than a few of them rip off passages verbatim from the venerable holy book.

The sword cuts through the air horizontally for the tenth time and we move to overhead strikes smoothly, quick sudden overhead strikes like we have done literally one hundred times before.

The Ragarda, Redguard had their own ancient order of knights, the Ansei, Sword Saints. They were, in many ways, similar to the Jedi. They combined magic of movement and songs into fantastic abilities and trusted their chants and Katas to lead them to the places where they needed to be.

Same same, but different.

So I let myself fall into the meditation the movements allow, there is a right way to do this, one written in a history of blood and adventure. The movements are supposed to be like This and the cut is meant to be like This. I can feel the imprint of the ancient arts in Errais teachings but it's muted muffled by something deep inside of her.

The correct method echoes in my minds eyes for a fleeting moment and a soft song escapes my lips.

"Stop." The song crashes to a halt.

"Wait what?"

"Alex you were glowing and Chanim you don't need to fight the blade, you need to make want to go where you want it to go. If you fight it all that you'll do is tire yourself out ." She says gently.

"And you Alex, you started glowing?" Djingo questions.

"I... Yeah, it's magic bullshit. Mystycisym of some kind, I'll show you once we're done practising."

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Month 4 Day 18

Somewhere Deep

"Alex what are we doing here, and why do we have Game Fowl?" Chanim says as we cruise through an abandoned section of the undercity.

"Short answer Magic. Long answer is we need somewhere private for some pretty nasty shit. What's your opinion on ritual sacrifice by the way?" I ask cheerfully.

"Uhhhhhhh?" She stammers.

"Good Answer, there's an old hall down here which I've re-purposed into an enchantment circle and we need those Chickens to power the magic."

"What?"

"On Nirn, you enchant things by taking a nonsapient creature and trapping it's soul in a soul stone. Then you take the stone to a prepared enchanting table with magic runes and shit to help you use the power of the soul escaping to the afterlife to burn a spell into whatever object you're enchanting. However, because I can't exactly buy soul gems in shops I sort of kinda have to cut out the middle-rock and do it long hand."

"You aren't trapping the souls of the fowl in the things?" She asks worriedly.

"Nooo. That's A: horrifically obsolete and B: Asking for trouble. Back in the day." I put on a creaky voice "Baaaack in the daay, Nirnites used to bind the actual soul of a creature into the object instead of just the imprint. It gave a slightly more powerful object and it would automatically regenerate power a fair bit faster than modern methods. BUT. The soul was in the object and it would try to do things which souls do. So we put a chicken in a rock and it will try to eat corn and other chicken things, if we put a Sando Aqua Monster in the same rock and we are not going to be having a fun time. Ultimately the difference in power was negligable and the use of powerful extraplanar creatures in enchanted item has backfired far too many times for it to be a popular technique."

We cruise through the depths of the undercity. This is a peaceful area, unloved, unpatrolled, far from anything worth paying attention to and more importantly thoroughly looted. We set down on the edge of the large enchantment circle I've carved into the floor, The circle was actually already there, part of the architecture, but a few runes painted in blood and proper energy paths tun the series of decorative circles from a interesting conversation piece into a macabre piece of thaumatoligal engineering.

"This is disgusting." Chanim recoils in disgust.

"You shoulda seen it before I put the recess in, blood fucking everywhere."

"Remind me why we're doing this again?"

"We are trying to make a recall amulet for you and some spellsticks for me. The recall amulet will let you teleport from wherever you happen to be back to your mark in less than half a second. Single shot, get out of jail free card which can't be interrupted, can't run out of magika and can't backfire in your face. Any chooks we have left over once we manage to get the recall working we'll make into spell sticks, Waterbreathing first then levitation if we have any left."

"You mean we can fly?"

"Fly is a bit of a strong word but. Yeah they can let you fly for about ten seconds by my numbers."

"Cool."

"Yeah, thought you'd like the idea."

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