carl@fire

Carl was, despite his expectations and the fact that he was absolutely not playing a game in any sense of the phrase other than the most basic, literal one, having a blast. This is so much better than game-driven tutorials or having to read some guide on the internet. Everything just makes perfect sense! And I can ask questions and get real answers right away!

Upon first taking a seat in the classroom, he'd felt some trepidation that Rebecca was going to be annoying like she'd sort of already been—though he was forced to acknowledge that it did seem like she was making an effort, even if it was imperceptible without an electron microscope—but she'd parked herself in the chair next to him and sat staring ahead with rapt attention that, even if she wasn't scribbling down copious amounts of notes as he'd begun to do—reverting immediately to his own classroom days, when he'd taken notes if only for the extra bit of memory he'd get from writing down what he was supposed to be learning—certainly gave the impression that she was interested and following along rather than having semi-dragged him up here as another means of being annoying.

Yeah, I could maybe imagine doing this in real life. I mean, obviously Annie would be enrolled in the class too, but this is a pretty reasonable way to bond. Still remember studying for that crazy Accounting final with Tim way back when. He tried to imagine Rebecca studying, but it was difficult enough to reconcile his idea of who she was with her recent claim that she'd apparently finished the whole of her higher education in only four years as opposed to the lazy six-ish he'd thought she'd taken.

He glanced over at her during a moment's break in the lesson. Guess maybe I really don't know her that well. Wouldn't have thought she'd wear something… Well, it's definitely more like an Annie dress than a Rebecca dress, that's for sure. Classy.

The magic teacher lady started talking again, which meant that the lesson had re-started, and he dove back in.

Glyphs, he inferred since this was clearly a little ways into the topic, were sort of like itemized magic. Provided that he knew the exact way to transcribe the intended use of magic, anything could be represented as a glyph—though it was pretty dangerous to try if you didn't know what you were doing, apparently, since some types of glyphs could expel the inputted magic power in a sudden rush if created poorly, causing an explosion that, according to the teacher, could range in strength from knocking you over to disintegrating a country. Obviously the last part of that was just some in-game hyperbole, and a number of the students had chuckled along, excluding a certain Gramnorn Efigra, who looked like he was still kinda smarting from getting chewed out for coming late and not even bringing anything to take notes in.

Freaking kids.

With that said, it was apparently not very common for glyphs to be used on a singular basis. When Carl had first gotten the hang of the concept, he'd imagined crafting them onto various objects—like swords, or shields, or maybe even bullets—with, for example, a fire-producing glyph added in order to create a giant fireball when the item struck something, but this was, he learned, just not going to work at all, and it was the mistake that every clueless noob made when they started learning about how glyphs worked.

Obviously—obviously—if you were going to do something like that, you had to also add some glyphs for durability, the most common and well-known type of glyph, or else the glyphed item was likely to break apart as soon as the 'primary' glyph activated—because there were also different orders of glyphs, ranging from primary, which were the ones granting the main effect desired, to secondary, which were the ones necessary for supporting the primary and ensuring it activated properly, then to tertiary, which supported the secondary glyphs, and so on, all the way down to foundational glyphs, which were apparently the ones that could make things more…thingy—and that might be fine for something like a bullet—though even in that case it might mean that the bullet just broke apart upon being fired instead of upon impact due to the force exerted at the moment of acceleration if the proper network of transferrence and isolation glyphs weren't inscribed to protect the primary from certain types of stimulus while amplifying or transmitting other stimuli across surfaces—but was definitely not gonna be at all okay if you wanted to make some kinda cool sword or something.

Carl was absolutely not thinking about doing anything of the sort. He already had his fishing spear, so there was no way he was going to be thinking about how awesome it might be to have a sword that shot lasers, or a gun that shot swords, or maybe some sort of metal ball he could chuck with his ten million Strength that would home in on monsters, cast some giant fireball spell a bunch of times, and then fly back to him to make going out to hunt monsters more efficient if he was going to do that—which he wasn't, obviously, since that sounded like it'd be playing, and if he was playing while logged into the game, then he was playing a game, and he definitely, one thousand percent was not doing anything remotely close to that at the moment.

But he was still in this class and soaking up the information about all this stuff he'd kinda been wondering about—thinking that maybe magic "just worked" or wasn't even a real system beyond having to allocate skill points and then cast spells without further consideration—for a while.

The teacher was doing a Mariana Trench-depth dive now on foundational glyphs, which were pretty hard to describe, and it might have been difficult for someone less experienced in understanding complex systems to even begin to do so, but this was Carl Maximus Weathers, so it wasn't like he'd be having any issues here. No, foundational glyphs were… Well, they were glyphs you… You used them when you had a lot—like really a lot, to the point that it seemed impossible—of glyphs on something and that thing was getting all warp-y and bend-y—in the sort of metaphysical sense, which this lady was calling the 'astral' sense—from the unbalanced ratio of magic-to-real, and then you just slap a couple foundational glyphs—though you had to be careful, because if you used too many then the balance would shift the other way and break all the spell glyphs—on it to add more thingyness to the thing so it could handle having so many glyphs.

Foundational glyphs were pretty neat, but now the lesson was getting super interesting because the lecture was finally getting into all this latticed substrate stuff, which… Wow, okay, so that was like instead of putting a whole bunch of glyphs on the outside of something, you put them on the inside, except they're not really inside, because it's just the metaph—astral inside of the thing you're putting glyphs on, so like…

Yeah, so the example here was that there was a rock, and you wanted to make it float, so you could put all these different weight reducing or nullifying glyphs on it and then use a levitation-related glyph—which were apparently super dangerous to noobs, and it shouldn't ever be tried without supervision unless you wanted to just float away like Roberick Ligesthawne, who had tried it on the magic elevator just a few years ago since he was tired of using the stairs and couldn't operate it normally, the result being that he couldn't deactivate the glyphs fast enough and got crushed against the top of the elevator shaft without anyone even noticing since it's not like people at this school had extra time to devote to hall monitoring and babysitting for noobs—or you could just use a single weight-type glyph and levitate-type glyph and stick them inside—that's astral inside, of course—the rock, which was going to be way more effective and reliable due to how the glyphs were aligned and also how, once applied to the substrate of an object—which was apparently how they were going to be referring to putting things inside the astral forms of stuff—it affected the essence of the object, which was short for saying that it was more effective, as near as he could tell.

It was a lot to take in, that was for sure, but Carl wasn't going to shy away from finally getting some of those answers he'd kind-of-but-not-really-but-maybe-a-tiny-bit been wanting for an amount of time now.

And with that said, it wasn't like he was a passive learner. No, just like how he was an active listener, he was the type of person to immediately try and apply new knowledge to verify that he'd learned it properly. So at this point, when the teacher again paused for questions—and he had a lot, but it was seeming like they were going to be veering in a direction to explore the effects of glyph stacking—that is, using multiple glyphs, though he wasn't sure if that explicitly covered the case of glyphs with overlapping locations like he'd become a little curious about—next, which seemed like it would answer most of the questions he had, and he didn't want to be that guy who was holding up the class by asking about things that were about to be covered—and he was really getting the hang of everything that was being taught, to the point that right now he was semi-doodling the glyphs from the room's magic blackboard on the notepad he'd pulled out of his inventory, copying the foundational glyph for 'blackboard' until he felt like he was getting the hang of drawing…

Carl paused, and the very slight bustle of the rest of the class talking among themselves while the teacher answered a question died down, then turned to muted giggles and snickers. Oops.

The magister looked around, finally turning to the board behind her, which was now—though it made no sense to even try to describe it—the piece of paper that Carl had been doodling on, except it was still the blackboard, but it was definitely also the doodled-on paper at the same time.

"I'm glad to see that at least one of you was paying attention, but your glyph craftsmanship needs work," the teacher said in her kind of pompous-sounding voice. She squinted at it, then turned to him. "Carl, your lines are too round when they should be squared."

She pointed at one part of one of the glyphs on the board, which was almost, but not quite a pair of intersecting lines and was instead a little curved—though it was definitely pretty close and probably should've been close enough to work. "If it was done properly, then your paper would have become this board and thus a worthy example of my lesson instead of being nothing more than a disruption." She rapped on the board, and it returned to normal, prompting further unnecessary tittering from the annoying kids who were nowhere near as cool as Mina had been on the occasions he'd made mistakes.

"I thought it was cool," Rebecca whispered out of the side of her mouth.

"Thanks," Carl whispered back automatically, though the exchange prompted a frown as he realized who he was thanking. She really is making an effort, huh.

But then the lesson resumed in earnest, and he got back to focusing on it.