Walking Outside - Chapter 11 (Patreon)

Clenching my teeth, I stared at the disturbed bit of carpet in Giles’ guest/safe room. A day after my explosive experimentation in the graveyard Giles had cleared the room out and offered it up so I would no longer be couch surfing on his couch. I was now couch surfing on a proper bed in a proper room with a lock and privacy. Not that I thought for a second that Giles wouldn’t be snooping whenever I left. I would in his place.

No, I was staring teeth clenched and frustrated at the disturbed patch of carpet because it was a useful test of the mental effects of black mana and how it differed from white and blue mana. My conclusion? I had royally screwed up. It wasn’t just that I had alienated Buffy and the Scoobie crew. That was almost guaranteed given my age and outsider status. Instead, it was that I had let the two mana types I was most aligned with push my mentality even further out of wack when I was most in need of remaining balanced. I knew that white and blue mana would mess with my body and mind. My magical instincts had insisted that the changes would be minor, noticeable, and controllable. Heck, use of colored mana would slowly enhance my body and mind so using them was even a long term positive! What I hadn’t done is ask my instincts if their was a difference between being connected to a source of mana and channeling that mana.

Their was, and it was significant.

Nothing that couldn’t be noticed and controlled, but channeling colored mana increased the effect by a factor of ten at least and since I was already predisposed to thinking in the ways that white and blue mana enhanced, well…

I hadn’t made the best impression on Giles or the Scoobies and their was very little I could do about it.

White pushed me to think in terms of cultures, societies, groups and community. It strived for unity, structure, and order. Blue mana focused almost purely on thought, introspection, mental enhancement and emotionless control. Combined with white’s rejection of so called ‘negative’ emotions and the result was some seriously skewed thought patterns.

My idea of using trades and agreements to gain templates, always following every part of a deal made sense if I was building a reputation and would make further trades. That didn’t make logical sense if I was planning to jump from the universe, and I was planning to continue traveling. This universe was like a jungle that had been clear cut once in the past. Still wild and dangerous, but a lot of the more interesting things were gone and the unnatural pruning of resources was very clear. I was still going to stick to mostly trades and agreements, for moral reasons if no other, but I wouldn’t ignore the option of taking a template through conquest. Hunting down a fledgling vampire and using my wind based kinetic spell to trap and copy was now on my short term list of goals.

Another goal was recovering the gem of Amara. It was a ring that would make a vampire immune to all their normal weaknesses. Just the thing to copy and give to a new fledgling minion. It would also be a nice thing to give to Angel earlier than he gained it before. Though, I would have to reiterate the whole “don’t sleep with him Buffy!” warning since Angelus would be a heck of a lot more dangerous.

Switching to channeling black mana through my body, brain included, I contemplated my blue focused thoughts and tried to keep from snarling since I hadn’t even noticed how my thoughts had spiraled and failed to actually resolve into actual action. Blue’s weakness, cognition at the cost of action. Countered, mostly, by red mana. None of the different colored mana types were actually in opposition of each other. Black was not the direct opposition to white, red didn’t counter blue, and green wasn’t left hanging alone by itself. It was closer to five sets of hands yanking in every direction on a single plate. All together, they tended to balance out, while unbalanced they would drag my emotions and thoughts around.

Black was decay, death, selfishness, self centered-ness, and destruction. If you needed to break things down, then black was the best choice. It wasn’t evil, but plenty of evil people would resonate with black mana. It was great for laying curses, but also for destroying them. Flowing through my body and mind it destroyed and weakened the cells in my body that were weak or malformed. It attacked plaque build up and dying cells. It made me stronger by destroying my weaknesses, but couldn’t actually make me stronger by it self. White bolstered the surviving cells and pushed them toward health but didn’t promote cell growth and reproduction. I needed green for that. Green’s power lay in evolution, growth, progress, development, regeneration. Red was power, adventure, action, chaos, violence. Cycling through the different manas on a regular basis should slowly improve my body and mind beyond anything a human being could ever achieve. It wouldn’t be a quick or simple process. But after a few years while doing things for my body to overcome, the changes internally would be noticeable.

But for right now, I needed to overcome the tendency to think but not do that was the hallmark of my own personality and the urgings of blue mana. My first steps were obvious in retrospect, and black’s selfish tendency had me laser focused on gaining any advantage for myself that was possible. I needed magic. Everything else was secondary and would flow from gaining more magic. Magically, I was a wrecking ball, a powerhouse that was barely rivaled by some of the gods or this universe, but without a way to exert my power, I was an easy target.

Lucky for me their was a magic shop only a couple miles from Giles’ house.

I had nearly nothing for funds. Giles’ had reluctantly spared a few hundred bucks for clothing and food but I wasn’t really planning to buy anything at the magic shop. Almost all the spells would revolve around beseeching and requesting assistance from higher powers, something I had less then no interest in. I was hoping to go under the radar as far as possible when it came to the gods and spirits of this dimension. Besides, those ‘spells’ were really prayers with sacrifices of power to request those spirits to enact spells on the supplicant’s behalf. I wanted the spells themselves not the prayers to request those spells. It would be better to watch for myself the spells being cast, but even just seeing the fixed spells and protection wards should teach me as much as the few spells I’ve already read.

Locking up the house behind me, I stepped into the bright Sunnydale morning with a smile on my face.   I might be frustrated with my past actions, but I could still enjoy the moment and push forward. Beyond grabbing whatever knowledge from the store’s ready made spells, I was also planning to take a quick hike out of town and see if I could bond the red-dirt hills and desert areas that surrounded Sunnydale. I wasn’t one for adventure and action, this entire multiversal trip being a steep departure from my normal routine, but for that very reason I needed access to both red and green. They were not in my normal nature. Striving ever forward, the nature of green, was practically my anathema.

While I hadn’t picked up the entitled douche attitude from the other students in my private high school – I just didn’t have the finances they did to enable that kind of delusional behavior – I did accept the lackadaisical and pleasure seeking that some of the students demonstrated. It was really a toss up as to how they went. Some had seen the possibilities of near endless money and drove themselves forward, refusing to do anything but make their own way and prove that they were ‘worth’ having that money, or somehow had ‘earned’ it. The majority went the other route. They descended into some level of bacchanal behavior. Drugs, sex, vapid enjoyment. Not that I was judging them too harshly for it. I did something roughly similar. Games, books, movies, entertainment of all kind were my vices. Avoiding drugs was more a question of finance than any moral character. I’d only worked enough at the pizza place to afford the excesses I spent on dates for Sarah. My apartment was paid for through a trust, actually the apartment was owned by the trust but the details were academic really. I had a small stipend which was more than enough to afford food and my toys. What I wasn’t doing was striving to earn for myself, better myself, or move forward. I had seen how my peers had lived and how they had been handed their success and I had decided to cut out the work that wouldn’t have likely gotten me to their station anyway and simply soothed myself and my broken pride with the distractions that I could afford.

I had simple tastes and had lived a simple and enjoyable, if meaningless, life.

That was no longer an option for me now. Now I had to hustle to build up power and protection or this little adventure of mine would be cut short.

Breathing deeply the mostly fresh air, I spread a wide smile on my face and pulled on the black mana and swirled it through my mind and body. Black wasn’t the best choice for this, but it would keep me out of my head, focused on my needs, and would do my body good in a way that had been missed from my time circulating blue and white.

I’d remembered from the show that the Magic Box was just off one of the side streets from the major thoroughfare of town. It was somewhere off the consumer district, and while that left plenty of area, I was enjoying no longer being so locked in my head and being out in the sunshine. That being said, while I had remembered the general area and look of the store, I had forgotten that Giles had changed the name after he bought it. Before that it was ‘Uncle Bob’s Magic Cabinet,’ or so the yellow pages finally told me after I broke down from failing to find it and simply bothered to pen the directory in the phone booth.

A phone booth, the oddity of being (from my perspective) back in time was jarring.

A small bell jingled as I stepped through the door but my attention was drawn to the thin film of magic that clung to the entrance like thin plastic wrap. Protection, retribution, retention of wealth, and just a hint of subtly. The last was like a large neon sign screaming ‘Nothing is going on here!’ I’m sure it was affective against most magic users in this universe, but unfortunately, mostly it just hide the specifics of the subtly and stealth magic from me.

On the door frame were carved runes that acted as anchors for the web covering the doorway and pressing through the web acted as a weak geas that would protect the store owner, punish theft, and make it easier for the owner to flee if need be.

Not well mind you, it would be closer to a stubbed toe if you steal from the shop or as much as slow persistent bad luck if you killed the owner, but it was something.

A loud fake cough dragged me away from investigating the runes, the magic on them being enough to have made the entire trip worth it ten times over.

“Welcome to the magic cabinet, I’m Zara, how can I help you?” asked the slightly worn looking woman in a peasant dress and sporting a large clunky wooden bead necklace. One of the beads glowed to my magic sight, but I couldn’t see much more than that it had some kind of nasty purpose if it was stolen.

Shrugging at her untrustworthy head-to-toe glance, I blatantly looked around the room, cataloging the few magical items on display, and then faced back to the shop keeper.

“I’m looking for texts on magic, especially healing, none of that beseeching demons or spirits crap either. I’m a bit cash poor at the moment, but I’ve got some things I can offer in trade, especially unique magical services that simply can’t be offered by anyone else in this dimension,” I said while slowly making my way toward her display of herbs and crystals.

While examining the list of potion and ritual ingredients, I kept the woman at the edge of my field of view. It takes practice to watch for facial expressions and body language without focusing dead on with someone, but it’s a useful trick. Focus on someone and they will lock down on their reactions – which at least tells you they are trying to hide their reaction – but if you don’t seem to be paying attention, almost everyone focuses on the lie they are about to say instead of the non-verbal truth. To my surprise, I didn’t see any signs of greed or aggression.

I saw mild fear and some concern.

Facing her, I tilted my head slightly, and she quickly composed herself, but she wasn’t great at hiding her fear and concern.

“For example,” I began, pointing to the bundles of sage resting in one of the wooden apothecary drawers, “I can enhance the purification aspect of your sage. This wouldn’t reduce or hinder the other ritual uses, but it would work far better in purification.” She looked hesitant but intrigued so I just pointed and asked if I could demonstrate.

Pinching her lips tight, she looked to her supplies and then back at me. I waited for a long moment, my finger dangling awkwardly still pointed at her herbs before she finally answered.

“Yes, but I will need to verify the result works as you describe,” she said, to which I simply nodded.

Pulling out a small bundle, I tested the dried plant with a small push of colorless mana and then nodded to myself when I felt the plant’s willingness to take either white, to a lesser degree colorless mana, and to a greater extent my instincts insisted a third mana type that I assumed would be green. Nodding to myself, I pushed in white mana while focusing on purity and cleansing, the idea of purification. In a movie or on TV this would be where things would begin to glow, but nothing of the sort happened here. Instead, their was a magical weight, a subtle pressure that pressed outward gently from the sprigs held in my hand. Once the plants were infused with the idea of purification, I changed my mental focus to the idea of corruption and pulled the white magic out of the plants once again. A few seconds of cycling the white mana through my body and the small conceptual corruption captured in the white mana was processed and broken down.

Focusing back on the room, I realized that somewhere during that process I had closed my eyes and I turned to face the woman. If I had remained focused for longer I might have missed it, but her eyebrows had a lot of distance to travel from so far up on her forehead.

Glancing over the thirty or so drawers of ritual supplies, she nodded, not even bothering to test the sample in my hand since the improved magical properties were blatant. The sage had gone from old, dried, and passable for their purpose to slowly leaching the corruption out of the air. My pile of vampire dust worked quickly to cleanse whatever it came into touch with while sage worked best when burned and used in a ritual. Still, my enhanced sage was working nearly as well as vampire dust while still unburned. To some extent, the two could be used interchangeably, but each had specific uses where the other wouldn’t be an option.

Poking at the new material with my senses I felt the rate of change and guessed that I could probably enhance it maybe once or twice more before any further gains would be marginal at best. Worse, the rate of change drawing it back to its natural state would likely become worse when further enhanced. As it was, this new sage would likely only last a month.

I was drawn out of my introspection by the shop keeper’s voice, her tone mixing fear and eagerness; an odd mix.

“I have one spell that can be used for healing. Beyond the spell, what do you want to enhance the rest of my ritual stocks?” she asked, her hands fretting together as she watched the sage in my hands eagerly.

I glanced over the shelves of real supplies, easy enough to distinguish from the fake tourist items. She had something like twenty herbs, maybe thirty different kinds of stones, gems, metals, and minerals, a few odds and ends like feathers and vials with what I was assuming was ichor and other fluids. It was maybe two or three hours of mental work.

“The healing spell and a sample of every ritual item I enhance with something to carry them in. I will also need a description card with each item and their use. You will also need to guide me through the property you want enhanced for each ingredient,” I said and to my surprise she nodded eagerly.

She moved behind the counter and grabbed a stack of small cotton pull string bags slipping small already written queue cards into them one after another as she went. With a negligent flick of her wrist, the open sign on the front door flipped to closed while she continued her work. I found myself wandering around the store looking at a few of the finished magical trinkets on the shelves while she finished her work. A good luck coin, an amulet that weakly warded away evil, a cup that would tip over when someone tried to add poison. Nothing revolutionary, but each showed me something new and these were my first examples of how to enchant an item.

I was not impressed.

Each item had a weak spell structure that was only loosely tying them to the object. It was almost like someone cast a spell, then glued the spell to the object in question. A caster would need to periodically imbue the structure with magic – with significant waste and inefficiency, their magic spewing everywhere in the process. Even then, these spells would fade since they were obviously working in ways never intended.

I stopped scratching my chin in thought, my mind drawn back to the present when the older woman pulled a rolling cart over with the bags stacked and ready to be stuffed, a few pages of vellum stacked next to them. I was surprised by the fancy writing paper – since nothing so expensive was needed for the spell – but I didn’t comment. If her customers needed her to spice things up so they thought they were getting the worth out of buying information, so be it.

The next few hours were tedious but informative. I continued the process of imbuing and enhancing each ingredient according to her requests but I was surprised that most items had half a dozen different concepts that they resonated with to a greater or lesser degree beyond the few that was on each placard. I didn’t mention this, nor did I offer or try to enhance anything beyond the one requested. For most, I could use white mana (since most of her supplies focused on protection, warding, cleansing and the like) but a few I could only enhance using colorless mana and that was an order of magnitude less effective. Certain properties only ‘wanted’ to work with certain colors. Colorless mana worked for anything, but just not nearly as well. Increasing the mental stress was trying to switch between thinking and ‘pressing’ toward a specific concept and then switching to the exact opposite mindset in order to pull out the mana that I had impressed into the item.

Once I was done, I had one very excited store owner, she had admitted that she was the owner not just a worker during our work, a large hinged wood case containing a excellent supply of ritual ingredients, and a her private phone number along with the shops so I could set an appointment to return for even more work. These supplies were nothing overly expensive, but it was a decent starter kit and worth at least a couple thousand dollars. We finally agreed that I would return again next month near the start of the month and if all went well, she would look for more expensive ingredients for me to enhance and she would work her way through her spell books to find spells that might interest me.

I got the sense from our interaction that she was excited about the finances, but she was very concerned about the spells she would provide. Given in the original story Giles purchased the store because of the profit potential and then had to squirrel away a large number of dark artifacts and spell books, I was betting that Zara had been enticed to work in Sunnydale by money, but was storing things because of moral concerns. Fair enough, I didn’t want the world to end either. It’s currently where I was storing my things, what few of them I have.

Speaking of which, I glanced down at the wooden case packed with little herbs, stones, metals, and doodads and slowly pushed colorless mana into it. I was surprised to feel that I needed one white, and two colorless to ‘fill’ the entirety of the crate. I let the magic sit, while my body felt weak and my head pounded like I’d stood up too quickly. All my mana, each of ‘my’ lands was being used in the crate, either as their color or in their colorless form and I was surprised to find that it left me feeling strained. I was happy to see that the time I had let myself rest had helped with healing the once guttering flame that was centered in my soul.

Once I was sure the crate was fully imbued, I gently pulled the tangle of mana from suffusing the box. Gossamer thin threads of something akin to pure information impressed into the mana slowly unfurled from the box and was pulled into my body and through into my soul. A lump formed somewhere in a direction that I couldn’t point that was both inside me and nowhere close seemed to enfold and encapsulate then cradle my new acquisition. I had worried that the flame would gutter and run low, but this time it was gentle and so right that the flame barely dipped.

With a grin, I tucked the crate under my arms and marched to my temporary home. I now had a present I could give to Giles that I could recreate for myself any time I wanted and all it cost me was just a bit of time and effort. Tomorrow I would find the nearest national park filled with greenery and grab myself my next land and once that had settled, I would move on to red. I was eager to see what I could get up to with each of the colors.Chapter 11

Clenching my teeth, I stared at the disturbed bit of carpet in Giles’ guest/safe room. A day after my explosive experimentation in the graveyard Giles had cleared the room out and offered it up so I would no longer be couch surfing on his couch. I was now couch surfing on a proper bed in a proper room with a lock and privacy. Not that I thought for a second that Giles wouldn’t be snooping whenever I left. I would in his place.

No, I was staring teeth clenched and frustrated at the disturbed patch of carpet because it was a useful test of the mental effects of black mana and how it differed from white and blue mana. My conclusion? I had royally screwed up. It wasn’t just that I had alienated Buffy and the Scoobie crew. That was almost guaranteed given my age and outsider status. Instead, it was that I had let the two mana types I was most aligned with push my mentality even further out of wack when I was most in need of remaining balanced. I knew that white and blue mana would mess with my body and mind. My magical instincts had insisted that the changes would be minor, noticeable, and controllable. Heck, use of colored mana would slowly enhance my body and mind so using them was even a long term positive! What I hadn’t done is ask my instincts if their was a difference between being connected to a source of mana and channeling that mana.

Their was, and it was significant.

Nothing that couldn’t be noticed and controlled, but channeling colored mana increased the effect by a factor of ten at least and since I was already predisposed to thinking in the ways that white and blue mana enhanced, well…

I hadn’t made the best impression on Giles or the Scoobies and their was very little I could do about it.

White pushed me to think in terms of cultures, societies, groups and community. It strived for unity, structure, and order. Blue mana focused almost purely on thought, introspection, mental enhancement and emotionless control. Combined with white’s rejection of so called ‘negative’ emotions and the result was some seriously skewed thought patterns.

My idea of using trades and agreements to gain templates, always following every part of a deal made sense if I was building a reputation and would make further trades. That didn’t make logical sense if I was planning to jump from the universe, and I was planning to continue traveling. This universe was like a jungle that had been clear cut once in the past. Still wild and dangerous, but a lot of the more interesting things were gone and the unnatural pruning of resources was very clear. I was still going to stick to mostly trades and agreements, for moral reasons if no other, but I wouldn’t ignore the option of taking a template through conquest. Hunting down a fledgling vampire and using my wind based kinetic spell to trap and copy was now on my short term list of goals.

Another goal was recovering the gem of Amara. It was a ring that would make a vampire immune to all their normal weaknesses. Just the thing to copy and give to a new fledgling minion. It would also be a nice thing to give to Angel earlier than he gained it before. Though, I would have to reiterate the whole “don’t sleep with him Buffy!” warning since Angelus would be a heck of a lot more dangerous.

Switching to channeling black mana through my body, brain included, I contemplated my blue focused thoughts and tried to keep from snarling since I hadn’t even noticed how my thoughts had spiraled and failed to actually resolve into actual action. Blue’s weakness, cognition at the cost of action. Countered, mostly, by red mana. None of the different colored mana types were actually in opposition of each other. Black was not the direct opposition to white, red didn’t counter blue, and green wasn’t left hanging alone by itself. It was closer to five sets of hands yanking in every direction on a single plate. All together, they tended to balance out, while unbalanced they would drag my emotions and thoughts around.

Black was decay, death, selfishness, self centered-ness, and destruction. If you needed to break things down, then black was the best choice. It wasn’t evil, but plenty of evil people would resonate with black mana. It was great for laying curses, but also for destroying them. Flowing through my body and mind it destroyed and weakened the cells in my body that were weak or malformed. It attacked plaque build up and dying cells. It made me stronger by destroying my weaknesses, but couldn’t actually make me stronger by it self. White bolstered the surviving cells and pushed them toward health but didn’t promote cell growth and reproduction. I needed green for that. Green’s power lay in evolution, growth, progress, development, regeneration. Red was power, adventure, action, chaos, violence. Cycling through the different manas on a regular basis should slowly improve my body and mind beyond anything a human being could ever achieve. It wouldn’t be a quick or simple process. But after a few years while doing things for my body to overcome, the changes internally would be noticeable.

But for right now, I needed to overcome the tendency to think but not do that was the hallmark of my own personality and the urgings of blue mana. My first steps were obvious in retrospect, and black’s selfish tendency had me laser focused on gaining any advantage for myself that was possible. I needed magic. Everything else was secondary and would flow from gaining more magic. Magically, I was a wrecking ball, a powerhouse that was barely rivaled by some of the gods or this universe, but without a way to exert my power, I was an easy target.

Lucky for me their was a magic shop only a couple miles from Giles’ house.

I had nearly nothing for funds. Giles’ had reluctantly spared a few hundred bucks for clothing and food but I wasn’t really planning to buy anything at the magic shop. Almost all the spells would revolve around beseeching and requesting assistance from higher powers, something I had less then no interest in. I was hoping to go under the radar as far as possible when it came to the gods and spirits of this dimension. Besides, those ‘spells’ were really prayers with sacrifices of power to request those spirits to enact spells on the supplicant’s behalf. I wanted the spells themselves not the prayers to request those spells. It would be better to watch for myself the spells being cast, but even just seeing the fixed spells and protection wards should teach me as much as the few spells I’ve already read.

Locking up the house behind me, I stepped into the bright Sunnydale morning with a smile on my face.   I might be frustrated with my past actions, but I could still enjoy the moment and push forward. Beyond grabbing whatever knowledge from the store’s ready made spells, I was also planning to take a quick hike out of town and see if I could bond the red-dirt hills and desert areas that surrounded Sunnydale. I wasn’t one for adventure and action, this entire multiversal trip being a steep departure from my normal routine, but for that very reason I needed access to both red and green. They were not in my normal nature. Striving ever forward, the nature of green, was practically my anathema.

While I hadn’t picked up the entitled douche attitude from the other students in my private high school – I just didn’t have the finances they did to enable that kind of delusional behavior – I did accept the lackadaisical and pleasure seeking that some of the students demonstrated. It was really a toss up as to how they went. Some had seen the possibilities of near endless money and drove themselves forward, refusing to do anything but make their own way and prove that they were ‘worth’ having that money, or somehow had ‘earned’ it. The majority went the other route. They descended into some level of bacchanal behavior. Drugs, sex, vapid enjoyment. Not that I was judging them too harshly for it. I did something roughly similar. Games, books, movies, entertainment of all kind were my vices. Avoiding drugs was more a question of finance than any moral character. I’d only worked enough at the pizza place to afford the excesses I spent on dates for Sarah. My apartment was paid for through a trust, actually the apartment was owned by the trust but the details were academic really. I had a small stipend which was more than enough to afford food and my toys. What I wasn’t doing was striving to earn for myself, better myself, or move forward. I had seen how my peers had lived and how they had been handed their success and I had decided to cut out the work that wouldn’t have likely gotten me to their station anyway and simply soothed myself and my broken pride with the distractions that I could afford.

I had simple tastes and had lived a simple and enjoyable, if meaningless, life.

That was no longer an option for me now. Now I had to hustle to build up power and protection or this little adventure of mine would be cut short.

Breathing deeply the mostly fresh air, I spread a wide smile on my face and pulled on the black mana and swirled it through my mind and body. Black wasn’t the best choice for this, but it would keep me out of my head, focused on my needs, and would do my body good in a way that had been missed from my time circulating blue and white.

I’d remembered from the show that the Magic Box was just off one of the side streets from the major thoroughfare of town. It was somewhere off the consumer district, and while that left plenty of area, I was enjoying no longer being so locked in my head and being out in the sunshine. That being said, while I had remembered the general area and look of the store, I had forgotten that Giles had changed the name after he bought it. Before that it was ‘Uncle Bob’s Magic Cabinet,’ or so the yellow pages finally told me after I broke down from failing to find it and simply bothered to pen the directory in the phone booth.

A phone booth, the oddity of being (from my perspective) back in time was jarring.

A small bell jingled as I stepped through the door but my attention was drawn to the thin film of magic that clung to the entrance like thin plastic wrap. Protection, retribution, retention of wealth, and just a hint of subtly. The last was like a large neon sign screaming ‘Nothing is going on here!’ I’m sure it was affective against most magic users in this universe, but unfortunately, mostly it just hide the specifics of the subtly and stealth magic from me.

On the door frame were carved runes that acted as anchors for the web covering the doorway and pressing through the web acted as a weak geas that would protect the store owner, punish theft, and make it easier for the owner to flee if need be.

Not well mind you, it would be closer to a stubbed toe if you steal from the shop or as much as slow persistent bad luck if you killed the owner, but it was something.

A loud fake cough dragged me away from investigating the runes, the magic on them being enough to have made the entire trip worth it ten times over.

“Welcome to the magic cabinet, I’m Zara, how can I help you?” asked the slightly worn looking woman in a peasant dress and sporting a large clunky wooden bead necklace. One of the beads glowed to my magic sight, but I couldn’t see much more than that it had some kind of nasty purpose if it was stolen.

Shrugging at her untrustworthy head-to-toe glance, I blatantly looked around the room, cataloging the few magical items on display, and then faced back to the shop keeper.

“I’m looking for texts on magic, especially healing, none of that beseeching demons or spirits crap either. I’m a bit cash poor at the moment, but I’ve got some things I can offer in trade, especially unique magical services that simply can’t be offered by anyone else in this dimension,” I said while slowly making my way toward her display of herbs and crystals.

While examining the list of potion and ritual ingredients, I kept the woman at the edge of my field of view. It takes practice to watch for facial expressions and body language without focusing dead on with someone, but it’s a useful trick. Focus on someone and they will lock down on their reactions – which at least tells you they are trying to hide their reaction – but if you don’t seem to be paying attention, almost everyone focuses on the lie they are about to say instead of the non-verbal truth. To my surprise, I didn’t see any signs of greed or aggression.

I saw mild fear and some concern.

Facing her, I tilted my head slightly, and she quickly composed herself, but she wasn’t great at hiding her fear and concern.

“For example,” I began, pointing to the bundles of sage resting in one of the wooden apothecary drawers, “I can enhance the purification aspect of your sage. This wouldn’t reduce or hinder the other ritual uses, but it would work far better in purification.” She looked hesitant but intrigued so I just pointed and asked if I could demonstrate.

Pinching her lips tight, she looked to her supplies and then back at me. I waited for a long moment, my finger dangling awkwardly still pointed at her herbs before she finally answered.

“Yes, but I will need to verify the result works as you describe,” she said, to which I simply nodded.

Pulling out a small bundle, I tested the dried plant with a small push of colorless mana and then nodded to myself when I felt the plant’s willingness to take either white, to a lesser degree colorless mana, and to a greater extent my instincts insisted a third mana type that I assumed would be green. Nodding to myself, I pushed in white mana while focusing on purity and cleansing, the idea of purification. In a movie or on TV this would be where things would begin to glow, but nothing of the sort happened here. Instead, their was a magical weight, a subtle pressure that pressed outward gently from the sprigs held in my hand. Once the plants were infused with the idea of purification, I changed my mental focus to the idea of corruption and pulled the white magic out of the plants once again. A few seconds of cycling the white mana through my body and the small conceptual corruption captured in the white mana was processed and broken down.

Focusing back on the room, I realized that somewhere during that process I had closed my eyes and I turned to face the woman. If I had remained focused for longer I might have missed it, but her eyebrows had a lot of distance to travel from so far up on her forehead.

Glancing over the thirty or so drawers of ritual supplies, she nodded, not even bothering to test the sample in my hand since the improved magical properties were blatant. The sage had gone from old, dried, and passable for their purpose to slowly leaching the corruption out of the air. My pile of vampire dust worked quickly to cleanse whatever it came into touch with while sage worked best when burned and used in a ritual. Still, my enhanced sage was working nearly as well as vampire dust while still unburned. To some extent, the two could be used interchangeably, but each had specific uses where the other wouldn’t be an option.

Poking at the new material with my senses I felt the rate of change and guessed that I could probably enhance it maybe once or twice more before any further gains would be marginal at best. Worse, the rate of change drawing it back to its natural state would likely become worse when further enhanced. As it was, this new sage would likely only last a month.

I was drawn out of my introspection by the shop keeper’s voice, her tone mixing fear and eagerness; an odd mix.

“I have one spell that can be used for healing. Beyond the spell, what do you want to enhance the rest of my ritual stocks?” she asked, her hands fretting together as she watched the sage in my hands eagerly.

I glanced over the shelves of real supplies, easy enough to distinguish from the fake tourist items. She had something like twenty herbs, maybe thirty different kinds of stones, gems, metals, and minerals, a few odds and ends like feathers and vials with what I was assuming was ichor and other fluids. It was maybe two or three hours of mental work.

“The healing spell and a sample of every ritual item I enhance with something to carry them in. I will also need a description card with each item and their use. You will also need to guide me through the property you want enhanced for each ingredient,” I said and to my surprise she nodded eagerly.

She moved behind the counter and grabbed a stack of small cotton pull string bags slipping small already written queue cards into them one after another as she went. With a negligent flick of her wrist, the open sign on the front door flipped to closed while she continued her work. I found myself wandering around the store looking at a few of the finished magical trinkets on the shelves while she finished her work. A good luck coin, an amulet that weakly warded away evil, a cup that would tip over when someone tried to add poison. Nothing revolutionary, but each showed me something new and these were my first examples of how to enchant an item.

I was not impressed.

Each item had a weak spell structure that was only loosely tying them to the object. It was almost like someone cast a spell, then glued the spell to the object in question. A caster would need to periodically imbue the structure with magic – with significant waste and inefficiency, their magic spewing everywhere in the process. Even then, these spells would fade since they were obviously working in ways never intended.

I stopped scratching my chin in thought, my mind drawn back to the present when the older woman pulled a rolling cart over with the bags stacked and ready to be stuffed, a few pages of vellum stacked next to them. I was surprised by the fancy writing paper – since nothing so expensive was needed for the spell – but I didn’t comment. If her customers needed her to spice things up so they thought they were getting the worth out of buying information, so be it.

The next few hours were tedious but informative. I continued the process of imbuing and enhancing each ingredient according to her requests but I was surprised that most items had half a dozen different concepts that they resonated with to a greater or lesser degree beyond the few that was on each placard. I didn’t mention this, nor did I offer or try to enhance anything beyond the one requested. For most, I could use white mana (since most of her supplies focused on protection, warding, cleansing and the like) but a few I could only enhance using colorless mana and that was an order of magnitude less effective. Certain properties only ‘wanted’ to work with certain colors. Colorless mana worked for anything, but just not nearly as well. Increasing the mental stress was trying to switch between thinking and ‘pressing’ toward a specific concept and then switching to the exact opposite mindset in order to pull out the mana that I had impressed into the item.

Once I was done, I had one very excited store owner, she had admitted that she was the owner not just a worker during our work, a large hinged wood case containing a excellent supply of ritual ingredients, and a her private phone number along with the shops so I could set an appointment to return for even more work. These supplies were nothing overly expensive, but it was a decent starter kit and worth at least a couple thousand dollars. We finally agreed that I would return again next month near the start of the month and if all went well, she would look for more expensive ingredients for me to enhance and she would work her way through her spell books to find spells that might interest me.

I got the sense from our interaction that she was excited about the finances, but she was very concerned about the spells she would provide. Given in the original story Giles purchased the store because of the profit potential and then had to squirrel away a large number of dark artifacts and spell books, I was betting that Zara had been enticed to work in Sunnydale by money, but was storing things because of moral concerns. Fair enough, I didn’t want the world to end either. It’s currently where I was storing my things, what few of them I have.

Speaking of which, I glanced down at the wooden case packed with little herbs, stones, metals, and doodads and slowly pushed colorless mana into it. I was surprised to feel that I needed one white, and two colorless to ‘fill’ the entirety of the crate. I let the magic sit, while my body felt weak and my head pounded like I’d stood up too quickly. All my mana, each of ‘my’ lands was being used in the crate, either as their color or in their colorless form and I was surprised to find that it left me feeling strained. I was happy to see that the time I had let myself rest had helped with healing the once guttering flame that was centered in my soul.

Once I was sure the crate was fully imbued, I gently pulled the tangle of mana from suffusing the box. Gossamer thin threads of something akin to pure information impressed into the mana slowly unfurled from the box and was pulled into my body and through into my soul. A lump formed somewhere in a direction that I couldn’t point that was both inside me and nowhere close seemed to enfold and encapsulate then cradle my new acquisition. I had worried that the flame would gutter and run low, but this time it was gentle and so right that the flame barely dipped.

With a grin, I tucked the crate under my arms and marched to my temporary home. I now had a present I could give to Giles that I could recreate for myself any time I wanted and all it cost me was just a bit of time and effort. Tomorrow I would find the nearest national park filled with greenery and grab myself my next land and once that had settled, I would move on to red. I was eager to see what I could get up to with each of the colors.