92: Wifi

Work on my grove went well, the lake filled up and then spilled further down the gentle slope of the valley towards the far side, where it spilled over the edge and down into the mists.

As for regrowing the grass that the storm had wiped out, I took inspiration from my previous communion with grasskind. It was fairly easy to create a low level spell that would essentially do the same thing but without forcing the poor plants into unwelcome sentience. I’d be able to track the whereabouts and basic information of anyone standing on my massive lawn with it. Pretty cool, if I did say so myself.

The Order’s village was also well on its way to becoming a real thing. Unlike with my inner sanctum, we were going with stone and wood for the construction, so the place was going to look like a proper medieval village. Well, apart from all the magic shit that would be everywhere.

Mining the stone was actually kinda hilarious in a multitude of different ways. First off, went out into the mundane world and wandered around until I found a nice exposed cliff face. Then I began to slice it up with magic blades.

This produced a small crowd of gawking Avonsiders, who watched from what they probably thought was a safe distance. That is, until one brave dude made his way over to me with some of his friends in tow.

“Why are you, um… cutting the cliff up?” he asked tentatively.

“Hmm?” I turned, pausing in my vivisection of the mountain to see who had interrupted me. “I’m cutting up stone for the new Order of Eleos base.”

He blinked, and behind him his friends passed looks amongst themselves. “Can’t you like, grow buildings and shit out of thin air?”

“Yeah, but as much as I like it, I don’t think living inside a giant tree is for everyone,” I explained calmly, feeling like I had a chance to be nice here, get on their good side. “Well, the Order decided it anyway, so here I am.”

“Where’s the uh… the base going to be?” he asked curiously, seeming to settle into the conversation.

“Inside my grove,” I smiled, then went on to explain further. “Magic users on this big ring world come in a bunch of different shapes and forms. I’m a mage, which is a little bit of a misnomer as we understand it, but that’s besides the point. Every mage has their own little… pocket dimension, you could say, which is called a grove. We’re building the village in there so it’s safe from all the bullshit in the outside world.”

“That’s so cool,” one of the girls in the group blurted, staring at me with open wonder.

“Must be nice,” another grumbled, clearly not sharing her friend’s assessment of me. “You get to boss everyone around and you have your own safe place to hang out in if things get too rough.”

“I mean… I guess,” I shrugged, unsure what to make of her tone. “There is the fact that there’s a power hungry creeper who wants me dead out in the wider world. Wants all of us dead, actually.”

That threw her off guard. “What, why?”

“A whole bunch of reasons, but it really just boils down to the fact that he likes being in power and we’re a threat to him,” I shrugged, turning back to my work.

“Well then stop being a threat to him,” she hissed, taking a step towards my back. “You just chased off a whole shit ton of our guards, now you’re saying some guy wants us dead? Who even is this guy? Does the faculty know?”

“Yo, Rhea, what the heck is your problem right now?” the friendly girl demanded, stepping between the two of us.

Well, guess I wasn’t getting any more stone cutting done until they stopped being annoying.

“I’d like to know that too, actually,” I stated, crossing my arms and levelling a glare at her. Funny how this sort of thing would have terrified me before. Almost a year later though and I had power beyond anything this lot could hope to get their hands on, and it gave me a certain degree of confidence.

“Why the hell did you get magic anyway?” the angry girl named Rhea asked, almost sneering past her friend at me.

“Pure accident,” I smiled, then tilted my head in thought. “Wait no, there was some stupidity involved too actually, on my part.”

Her answer was a simple stare of confused disbelief, a whole host of emotions trampling across her face as she obviously tried to think of what she’d be angry about next. Evidently she didn’t come up with anything, because she turned on her heel and stomped off in a huff.

“Damn, what was that about?” I asked, motioning to the enraged girl with a hand.

“Honestly, I have no damned idea,” the guy who’d originally approached me said, scratching at the back of his neck in confusion. “She’s normally pretty chill. Unless it’s about men being dumb or something, then she gets sorta… obnoxiously feminist.”

“He’s right,” the girl agreed with a wince. “Like, I’m all for girl power and shit, but she goes about it so weird…”

My eyebrow twitched with sudden suspicion, but I didn’t say anything outright. Instead, I began with something simple I needed to establish first. “So, did you know I used to be a student here?” I asked, pretending to change the subject.

“Yeah, I heard you were a guy too?” the girl asked, her words setting me on edge until her curious expression registered.

“Something like that, yeah,” I smiled awkwardly. Explaining that inside my head I’d never been a man was… frustrating, when it came to cis people. Sex and gender were so closely intertwined in most people’s heads that it just wasn’t worth my individual effort to untangle them.

“What’s that like?” the guy asked curiously. “I always said if I got turned into a girl for a day, I’d just—“

One of the other guys, silent until now, laughed and punched his friend in the shoulder. “Come on dude! Not in the company of the ladies!”

“What, like we don’t all know what he was going to say?” the girl asked, hands now very firmly planted on hips. “I’ll have you know I fuck myself with a dildo bigger than your dick on the reg, thank you very much.”

“She’d know man,” yet another guy piped up with a guffaw. “She’s your ex after all!”

“Wow, okay,” the small dicked dude laughed good naturedly, putting his hands up in defeat.

“I don’t,” I said, shyly joining in. “I uh… have a girlfriend for that.”

“Nice!” original dude grinned, offering me a high five before wimping out when he realised who he was offering it too. Guess I was still a little intimidating.

Guess I should end things here for now, before it got weird. Too many guys who mean good but are just a little too on the pervy side for my taste.

“Well, I’ve got to get back to cutting this cliff up, but if you stick around you’ll see something pretty great,” I told them all with what I hoped was a mysterious wink.

The surprise greatness turned out to be my buns. I transported a whole cohort of them out into the mundane world to help with stacking the newly carved stone. I had them sort each segment by how intact it was, since stonecutting was an artform all on its own, and I had no idea what I was doing. I’d get the buildy people to come out and sort through it all later.

Rhea the grump came back with another girl, both of which stood off to the side and glared at me, occasionally exchanging a whisper or two. I had suspicions about what her problem with me was, and if I was correct… well, it would be incredibly fucking draining.

On the bright side, I was ambushed by a certain newly acquired sister as I delivered the stone to a stockpile within the grove.

“Ryn! Ryn!” she exclaimed, bounding down the slope towards me. “There you are, I had a breakthrough!”

Goodness, Kit was so adorable, with her huge shirt, short shorts and bare feet spinning dirt in all directions.

“On which of your projects?” I asked with an intrigued smile. Kit had been off doing her own thing with Esra for a while now, basically research and development into a bunch of different spells we’d need.

“Well, two actually, but they’re linked,” she said, bopping up and down on the spot for a moment before going still to explain. “So, we got power working obviously, creating energy is actually infinitely easier than we’d thought. You can convert magic to electricity using a pretty simple spell structure. Wires are easy too, same as usual except they are grown by plants.”

“And the wireless network?” I asked hopefully, suddenly finding myself very excited indeed. If there was one thing I still missed from my old life, it was a connection to the internet. We might not have anything as vast as we used to, but the university network was better than nothing. I bet they already had some sort of new social media app. I was so keen to get my eyes on the gossip that people were spinning there.

“Harder… for now we’re going to have to pilfer a router from somewhere on campus,” she winced, giving me an apologetic look. “We have figured out how to transfer information from the mundane world to the Nameless Garden though! A little plant we designed can do it. It’s so cute actually, it’s basically a flower where the stalk ends in an ethernet plug.”

“Wait, really?” I asked as my eyebrows rose with surprised interest. “How on earth does it get the information between realms?”

“I honestly don’t understand it yet,” Kit told me sheepishly, one hand scrunching itself in the too-big T-shirt she wore. “Esra’s been researching this stuff for years and it’s all way beyond me. I mainly helped with the magic to tech interfacing.”

“Still, that’s helpful,” I commended her with a gentle pat on the shoulder. “When can we have it up and running?”

Cheeky little brown eyes widened with impending mischief. “As soon as we can steal a router and find a sneaky place to plug our flower in.”

Oh dear. Since when had quiet, shy little Kit gotten so subtly naughty? Was I a bad influence on her?

“Well… we could go snooping right now…” I suggested, giving her a sly look.

“That’s what I was thinking!” she nodded, but her vigor fell away into uncertainty as she murmured, “I did want to ask you though…”

“Ask me what?”

The stare I got was full of anxiety and hope, and she mumbled her next words out in a rush. “What do you think of… of the name Catherine?”

QuietValerie

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