Growing Lilies

Lily was laid out on the floor cuddled up to Star. They’d been laying there for at least half an hour. The game of fetch had taken most of the morning, but eventually Lily had completely tired out her mana reserves. Even having used her charging circle until she couldn’t stand it anymore. With more practice, she was able to do some really wild throws.

Although, what she really wanted was a glyph that could cancel or alter inertia rather than just add to it. As it was, she could make the ball accelerate in any direction, but it would be in addition to its current trajectory. She had plenty of time to learn though. This was a game she and Star would be playing a lot. It was good magic practice for her, and he even seemed pretty tuckered out himself.

It was approaching noon though, and Lily had some other things she needed to do today. So, she was trying half heartedly to rouse herself.

“I suppose we should get moving. I want to stop by La Mancha, and set up some dragon balls to charge. I know where three spooky spots are, assuming they’re still there.”

Star groaned and stretched, so Lily hugged him around the middle tighter. The spots she had in mind were the spot she found Star, her old apartment, and the library. Assuming the library was still mana saturated after the blast.

“I wish I had a way to track these places down. I still need to find four more if I can. Or I guess I can wait longer and just swap them out when they’re charged. But maybe I should go looking.”

As she had that thought, something began nagging at her in the back of her mind. There was something there. Something about tracking the places down. Did she have the tools to do that magically? She hadn’t made a spell like that before, right? She started mentally going over the glyphs she knew.

Conjuration glyphs were out. Something like a light spell attached to ambient mana could tell her how dense the mana in the area was, but not point her somewhere. So, what? The directionality glyphs she’d found were push, the condense type glyph she was using to make balls of light for her light spell, and the other one she found in the pit. It had been making the water go in circles, and it had something to do with– 

“Mana!”

Star sat up, startled. Lily did too. 

“It had something to do with mana! It was sending a direction to the push spell, and it was going in circles. We were in a spooky spot! What does a compass do at the north pole? It’d spin right? I think I heard that somewhere.”

Lily started scrambling for materials. She had an idea and didn’t want to lose it. She grabbed her notebook and a pen, and started in. Two circles covering the page. She wrote in a mana gathering spell for the first one, gathering the ambient mana and making sure it didn’t overflow. The second glyph though, was her new experiment. It was a combination of her [Light] spell, the push glyph, and the glyph she remembered from the pit. It had a bunch of arrows going every which way, but it also had included the mana radical!

Lily completed the circle, and watched her little ball of light form. It floated to the edge of its little circle, and stayed there. It was a little anticlimactic, actually for what she had been expecting. She’d thought it would zip off in some direction or another and she’d have to jump up and follow it. But, it stayed contained on the page.

She picked up the notebook, and turned around. It floated to the opposite side of the page. Lily grinned like a maniac.

“Star, we’re going on an adventure.”

---

Lily had only been driving for about five minutes, when she realized the problem with cars. Her makeshift mana compass continued to point in a consistent direction, but whoever had planned the layout of roads clearly disagreed. She felt like she was navigating a labyrinth. It felt like her compass was always pointing in a direction that would see her driving through a pond, or a park, or a house. 

“Maybe I really do need a motorcycle or something, huh?”

It was still a little creepy driving through suburbia as empty as it was. At this point, there weren’t many lights left on, and with no cars in the road or people on the streets it just felt empty. Even the idea of a ghost town in Lily’s mind involved running into the occasional tourist. As it was, lawns were just starting to look a little unkempt, gardens were wilting, and cobwebs were accumulating. The lack of sound was unnerving too.

“You never really realize how much the sounds of life are in the background every single day, until they’re not.”

There was no response. Lily looked over and saw Star was almost asleep in the passenger seat, curled up with Bay. Oh well, she didn’t need to speak out loud too much.

She still had no idea what she was driving into. It was probably a spooky spot. Was there going to be another anomaly? Just because that’s how she had found the other spooky spots didn’t necessarily mean they all had one. If it didn’t have one, how would she know when she got there? Well, other than the compass spinning again. Assuming she was right about that in the first place.

Lily really hoped she wasn’t wasting her time. She had put the dragon balls in the trunk in case she found anything. Chaos Emeralds? She was starting to think they were more like chaos emeralds than dragon balls, since she hoped they wouldn’t grant a wish then scatter across the world. Maybe she should change naming conventions? It’d make more–

A bolt of lightning struck the hood of her car. Lily screamed, and slammed on the breaks. She threw the car into park, and turned it off, not sure if leaving it on would make it more or less likely to get damaged in this situation.

She sat still, breathing hard for about twenty seconds before she felt Star nuzzle her arm and whine.

“Oh. Yeah. You’re awake. That makes sense. What the hell was that? Lightning hit us!”

Star barked, and Lily looked at where he was looking. The compass was spinning.

“Aww, great. This is some magic bullshit. Not that I couldn’t have guessed from the lightning on a clear day, I guess.”

She sighed. What are you supposed to do in a lightning storm? Stay in the car right? Was the car going to be okay? Lily instinctually pulled out her phone. It was off, and wouldn’t turn on.

“Ugh! You’re so unreliable!”

Not that it’d have helped much anyways. Well, what now? Should she feel out the circle, or try to get out of the perimeter first? 

Lightning struck the car again. Lily screamed again. This time Star started barking wildly until she calmed him down.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. It shouldn’t be able to get us in here! It… it might ruin the car though. Yeah, let’s move.”

She turned the keys. It didn’t even start to turn over.

“Oh, well that’s just perfect! The battery is… Wait. Is it out of energy or fried? I’d have thought it was fried, but wouldn’t it make a sound? Or am I just an idiot about cars?”

Lily thought for a moment, then decided to reach out and try to feel out the circle. She closed her eyes and focused on that. There was definitely a circle here, but it was huge! It wasn’t detailed at all, just a few nodes, but she was having a hard time due to how spread out it was. Maybe if she focused really hard on one at a time–

Lightning struck again, and Lily screamed.

“FUCK. It is so hard to focus through this! God damn! Okay, think Lily, think! What can you do?”

What could a spell like this be doing, exactly? Lightning was striking. But it was just hitting her car. Was her car the most likely thing to get struck around here?

She looked around. Power poles might be outside the radius, and if that was the case then yes. It was no wonder it was striking her car. Could she give it a better target somehow? What would that even look like? Something metal, higher up and away from the car…?

Oh no. She looked down at the car keys. Really? Was she about to take a note from Benjamin Franklin? But she couldn’t think of anything else off the top of her head. The key ring had more than just a car key on it. The house keys were there too, and she didn’t really need those right?

“This is so dumb. This is so stupid. Okay, listen Star. This will buy us one to two strikes of time, okay? In that time, we’re going to open the car, and run as fast as we can straight away from it, alright? Be careful not to touch the metal of the car. Uh… I don’t know how much you understand. Just– just run when we get out, oka– AH!”

Lightning struck again. Lily swore and focused on her key. She put a small levitation spell on it, fed with a one mana capacitor and ambient mana. It felt weird holding it in her hand. A little like it was suddenly full of helium. 

Lily waited for the next lightning strike, and then… She opened the door and threw the key. It immediately started to rise. She leapt from the vehicle, Bay in her arms and dashed down the road. Star was hot on her heels. She could feel vaguely where the edge of the circle was, but it was so far away!

There was a CRASH. Lily screamed, feeling something jolt through her and tripped, hitting the ground hard. But the lightning hadn’t hit her. She scrambled to her feet while Star nudged her, and kept running. As she passed the edge of the circle, and got another thirty or so feet just in case, she turned around to look.

What she had felt was her key spell breaking. Lightning had struck it, and the key was nowhere to be seen. Lily got down to the ground, and watched for the next bolt. It hit the car again. She breathed a sigh of relief, and glanced over at Star.

Laughter hit her like a truck. All of his fur was standing on end from the static in the air. She wheezed, and doubled over, tears coming to her eyes.

“You look so dumb right now! Pfftahahahaha!”

Star tackled her.

---

The rest of the process was pretty straightforward. Lily noted down the glyphs before erasing them, and finished by breaking the circle.  She waited more than an hour to be sure no more lightning would strike, casually breaking into a nearby house to search for something to drink. While she was there, she discovered some canned food, and decided to run a little experiment.

It turned out she could use the heat glyph like an awesome hot plate, and did so outside to heat the can of ravioli she’d taken. She shared it with Star, even though she was pretty sure the sodium content might be a bit much for a dog. Then again, she wasn’t sure which rules like that even applied to him.

When she was sure there would be no more lightning, she went back to the car and got out one of the chaos emeralds. She chose the yellow one, because it seemed fitting. It didn’t take long to have a charging spell up and running.

The only remaining problem was… her car wasn’t starting. She didn’t really want to walk home, or go car stealing. But, Lily was pretty sure she’d figured out what the spell was doing. It was sapping electricity from everything it could to create the lightning. Ambient electricity, and she thought mana to electricity as well. Truthfully, the first thought she had when she realized that was the horrifying idea that it could have turned off her nervous system. She really wasn’t sure why it hadn’t, but that was a mystery for another time.

For now, she just wanted to get her car moving. The idea that she could turn mana into electricity though was pretty fascinating, although not entirely unexpected. She’d thought it was likely possible since discovering Heat to Mana. She was just not sure how to figure out watts and volts and the like. What was the difference between those two again? She’d have to be careful not to overload devices.

Maybe she could get a multimeter, and then do experiments until she’d figured out a way to standardize it against mana values put into it?

Star barked. Lily realized she’d been in her own little world for a while now.

“I really didn’t realize how often I did that till you came along buddy. Alright, so, why don’t we just try it on the car battery and turn it really really low? We can wait a bit, and try turning over the engine. If it’s not enough, we turn up the spell. Sounds good?”

Star’s tail wagged, hopefully.

“Not that you know anything about cars.”

Lily sighed.

“Not that I know anything about cars either. Oh well, if we ruin this one we can still steal another.”

It was a lot of guesswork, but for once Lily felt like she was working off pretty educated guesses. Mana to Electricity was just a variation of a glyph she already knew. So was the infuse glyph with the electricity radical. And otherwise it was just her battery spell. It should create a light to indicate when the battery was full. This was essentially just her charging spell with a few tweaks.

Sure enough, it worked. Within a few minutes, she was able to get the car to turn over. For now she broke the spell, and started the drive home. None of the dashboard lights were working. Lily figured something electrical must have blown out. But she could fix it later.

“Wait, don’t I still need to go back to my old place and see how that repair spell was working? Star, there’s so much to do! Can’t you drive or something?”

He sat up and reached a paw towards the wheel tentatively. Lily shooed him away and laughed.

“I was kidding. I didn’t expect you to get it! Well, maybe one day we’ll teach you to drive. I don’t know how, but we have plenty of time. For now, I just wish we could communicate better. Sometimes it catches me off guard when you understand me.”

Lily thought to herself for a moment, and then she decided.

“Okay, we’re off to the apartment first. Maybe we can repair the car while we set up another emerald to charge huh?”

Star reached for the wheel again. Lily nearly screamed.