New Magic Brothers: A scholar and a tattoo artist walk into a tavern…

Rum paced pack and forth in the shop bedroom. It was evening, and he was trying to figure out how one could rectify confusion magic. And how would he even test the spell, if he could make it? There must be somewhere I could get some confused people.

Rum stopped pacing. A plan! Or at least the beginnings of it. There's always a permanent supply of confused people in society: the really old, and the really mentally ill. But where would I find such people this late...

Rum continued pacing back and forth. Old people typically lived with their families. However, not that many people managed to get old enough that they'd be senile enough for Rum's purposes. He went and opened the door to the workplace. Amez sat by a table drawing on a large piece of paper.

"What are you doing?" Rum walked up to watch his brother work.

"Sketching out tomorrow's tattoo." Amez' expression looked tired. On the paper was the outline of a person's back. In the middle of it, Amez was drawing some kind of dragon perched upon a small mountain of treasure.

Rum stared for a few seconds, before taking a couple of slow steps in front of the table, facing Amez. Shortly afterwards, Amez looked up at his big brother. "What is it?"

"Well, I could need your help a little. Do you know where I could find some really old people, or possibly severely mentally ill people. I need them for research."

Amez's expression morphed into twenty questions all at once, then all these expressions collectively converged into a disturbed one, before a slight amusement overtook his lips. "What?" he finally asked, stupified. "What would you do with the old or mentally ill?"

"I'm trying to make that spell Elrith needed of me. But I don't have any confused people. If I could just get my hands on someone like that, I might be able to figure out how their mind differs from ours, and possibly I could fix it. It may not be a permanent fix, but I have an idea about what I will do: I intend to make a spell of clarity. If my instincts are correct, it'll be like drinking a hundred cups of the blackest coffee, but without the nervous shaking or constant need to pee."

"You are gonna cure old people's confusions with magic coffee?" Amez sat up straight, looking straight up at Rum with a smile of incredulous amusement.

"Well, not quite so simply. But I am going to need help getting some hot coffee too, now that I think about it. I'll use your money to buy that some from a coffee house. They are still open aren't they?"

"Yeah, there's one north up the street from here. But I don't know any confused old people. And the only mentally ill ones I know of, are the insane beggars you can find five streets west of here, at the beginnings of The Raven's Slum. But I can't imagine your magic coffee would ever work on them. Or, do you really think so?"

"I don't know" Rum shrugged, taking steps away and towards the door. "But there's only one way to find out. Wish me luck! I'll go check out the slum!" The door closed behind him. Amez looked at the door, not really knowing what to think of it all. But as the seconds passed, he shook his head, trying to go back to work. "It'll probably work itself out."

Rum ran up the streets to find the coffee shop. Above him was a big moon shining silvery light across the streets, illuminating the evening all over. After roughly a hundred meters of heavy jogging he found the place. He barged into a fine establishment and up to a counter, where he was met by an elegantly moustached bald old man, in tight black cotton vest and -pants.

"Your blackest coffee as quick as possible!" Rum slammed a silver piece on the table.

The coffee shop attendant looked at the coin curiously. He took it, shrugged with his eyebrows and went to the kitchen where he called out the order. The wizard looked around while he waited. A lot of upper-class people where here. Mostly lords, ladies, and their soft spoken finely dressed socialite friends. Several of them gave Rum a glance, but not much more. It only took a few minutes before the coffee arrived steaming hot in a cup on a plate. As Rum grabbed the cup from the attendant the bald man reacted with a "nooo!" AAAAH! Rum's mind screamed and his bulged, as an instant burning pain set his lips on fire. To his credit he didn't share that internal scream with the establishment, nor spill his coffee, but merely put it back down gently on the plate.

"Yes, it is perhaps a bit hot." Rum channeled a healing spell through his body, focusing on his lips. "But I need to drink this now."

The attendant put the plate with coffee down on the counter. "Just let it wait some minutes, and it'll cool itself down."

"Hmm." Rum thought out loud. "I'm a mage, cooling a cup of coffee should be an easy task for a mage." The moustached man just glanced at Rum with professional patience, though a slight eyebrow was raised. Inside the wizard though, memories of his days at the university, and the Basic Elemental Magic course ran through his consciousness. However, he didn't remember any spells from that time. And as he now was basically spiting the magic of the gods with his new magics, he wasn't sure they'd even allow him to cast a standard spell. No, if he was going to cool the coffee, he had to use his own magic – or wait. But who has time for that. Although some people could mistake Rum's occasional obsessions for patience, these events were really nothing but the determination stemming from his urge for discovery and innovation.

Rum knew how to cool his own body. He had used such a spell once while travelling through a desert after being chased by bandit riders. He just needed to be able to do the same with an inanimate object that wasn't himself. So he closed his eyes, sensing about the coffee cup with his mana. In some ways this was going to be simpler. Cooling a body – without hurting the body – that had been a difficult task. But cooling a coffee cup, that could allow for a certain margin of error when it came to how much cooling was applied, and where.

Sensing the motion of the particles making up the coffee, Rum abruptly grasped them – forcing them most of them to slow down. Draining the kinetic energy from those particles, he dispersed the energy out into the environment, creating an omnidirectional burst of warm air. Opening his eyes, Rum caught the glimpse of wild flapping in the coffee attendant's magnificent moustache. The other man had partially lost his posture now, and was gaping at him.

The wizard didn't wait anymoer after that. Leaning down he touched the cup. It was only mildly hot now. He grabbed the handle, and drank.

"Was that a spell?" the attendant awed as Rum chugged coffee.

Rum momentarily stopped, burping loudly. "Yes!" he answered, then filled another mouthful of coffee, to which he burped again, and put down an empty cup. "Thank you, it was most certainly black!" He lay a hand on his chest, letting the coffee flow down through his body for a handful of seconds. Then, feeling okay, he turned, and ran out.

He followed the directions down the streets and headed westwards to reach The Raven's Slum. With his run slowing down to brisk walk, Rum passed each street noticing how they got progressively worse in the paintjobs of the buildings, the occasional patched up window or scratched building walls, not to forget the cleanness of the streets with the occasional broken bottle or animal waste. As he came near The Raven's Slum itself, he got to a small dirty river separating the slum from the eastern part of Ermos City. A nearby wooden bridge allowed for travel into the slum, but only a handful of people were nearby, and nobody seemed to want to cross it. Rum didn't have time to consider if there was a reason for that though, and just crossed.

On the other side were a sloppily designed maze of houses that looked more like glorified shacks. Some houses weren't even properly upright but leaned on each other like dominos trying to fall over, but being blocked by the queue of other similarly falling dominos. At a point Rum saw five total such consecutive houses, leaning on each other in the same direction, all effectively relying upon that last house not to collapse, an old overgrown brick house, whose ground floor window were broken, as if the foundations were all that was intact there.

The streets had some people. At one point Rum walked past what must've been a tannery. He couldn't exactly tell because of how it had been clumsily walled in with bricks, but given the foul odors reminiscent of bodily odors, and the noises of scraping coming from there, he could probably guess those same walls were there to shield the community from most of it.

"Something I can help you with?" said a hoarse voice. Rum turned around from the building to see a slightly small, skinny and wrinkled old man, his eyes nearly closed but looking Rum's way. As their faces met, a broad smile came over the man's lips, revealing a nearly complete lack of teeth. Rum looked his counterpart over. A green beanie was on his head. His torso had a brown buttoned shirt which was noticably stained many times, and his legs wore a dark blue cotton set of pants.

"Hi old man, I'm Rum. What's your name?"

The other took a step closer, and almost whispered his weak reply. "Adalas" he said, "that's my name. Though the younger ones call me Toothie, because of my lack of teeth you see" and he gaped wide as if the fact wasn't already obvious.

"Hi Adalas. I come here on an errand. I'm an academic–"

"ACADEMIC?" Adalas, a.k.a. Toothie, went from quiet to loud in a single word.

"Yes" Rum continued, taken aback by greater volume, "and I'm here on a bit of a quest."

"Quest, huh?"

"Yes, I'm currently researching a spell against confusion, and was in need of some subjects to try it on. I'm specifically looking for someone who might not be quite okay in their head." Rum tapped a finger on his head. "Someone who might forget a lot, or has difficulty understanding things. However, it's important, for my research, that these people weren't forgetful or had difficulty understanding before they suddenly became this way. These problems should be a fairly recent phenomenon."

"You are looking for people confused in the head? Really?" his hoarse voice dragged the words. "And what will you do with them if you find them?"

"Oh, I'm just going to experiment a bit with magic. Nothing too harmful. I might even be able to cure the confusion" he stroked his beard, looking into the blue momentarily. "I hope. Well anyways, if you could help me find someone, I have a bit of money I could give the both you and the confused specimen." Rum fished out the remaining coins from Amez and held them out.

Adalas eyed the coins while sucking on his single remaining front tooth in a way that Rum could only guess was habitual.

"I know one–" Adalas said after a brief pause, his eyes becoming a bit wider, "–that you might make your–" Adalas paused again briefly, "–experiment on." The words sounded like a bad aftertaste in the old man's mouth. Suckling his tooth some more, he continued. "And I can take you there," his eyes firmed, "but that would be on two conditions! And absolutely no less than these conditions." He gave Rum an intense stare of reservation, the pause betweem them tensed for the man to continue. "First, I'll be there to observe what you are doing – I don't want you to do anything that I don't approve of. Second, I want to know about your experiments before I take you there."

Rum nodded along. "Those are fair conditions. But what I will be doing might be difficult for a non-magically trained person to understand–"

"Try me!" Adalas retorted.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Okay. Well, I'm in the rare business of spell crafting. I'm going to try and make a new magic spell. In order to do that I will have to study the mana of the confused specimen – your acquaintance" Rum corrected himself, "and I will have to compare it to the structure and dynamics of the mana of someone experiencing clarity. From this situation I might be able to deduce evidence of corrupting mana in the specimen – and destroy the corruption!"

Adalas firmly nodded along, then as the wizard finished, they both went silent again. This silence lasted for much longer, before Adalas broke it. "Destroy the corruption... what if you somehow destroy the wrong mana? Could that hurt her?" Adalas sucked his tooth thoroughly, his eyes growing concerned.

"It's a woman?" Rum asked, taking a step back from Adalas' close and heart-meltingly concerned stare. "Ye-es, it could. But if you find evidence that I have damaged the mind of your acquaintance: I am willing to do whatever it takes to compensate you on that remote possibility." He waved an assuring finger between them. "Though I doubt that will ever be necessary, I will work with caution. I'm not a novice of magic, Adalas. I have trained at The Flipped University once, and I have crafted many spells before. Never has anyone come to severe harm from my experiments." The wizard interrupted himself to look up in thought for a second. "Okay, let's rephrase that. Not severe lasting harm. Which is the most important kind of harm. Anything temporary is, of course, temporary, and even that only happened once!"

Adalas stood still listening. Then as Rum stopped, his gaze turned away, and soon his feet followed as he strolled a couple of meters in contemplation, scratching the back of his head under his beanie, before stroking a few stubbles on his chin.

"Fine" he faintly said away from Rum. Then he turned, locking eyes with the wizard and stepping back slowly. "I believe you. But know that the woman you'll be seeing is my older sister. If something happens to her, I'll make sure that you'll be CURSED by a powerful witch!"

"Interestingly enough the objective of this spell is to dispel a witch's curse" Rum responded matter-of-factly. "But no problem, if I mess up your older sister, I probably will deserve that curse." And he tried to smile.

To that sentiment Adalas merely nodded firmly in agreement, before they waving him over, as they both set off. Presumably to the location of Rum's specimen.

The two walked for about ten minutes, passing many dirty and barely standing shacks. Outside the shacks people often glared at Rum. He thought they might be curious as to what would bring a wizard out here, and especially such a fine looking one as Rum was today. Some of the older women looked less than kind at him though, and the wizard wondered what that might be about. Are they just having a bad day here, or did I somehow give them one? But this was all soon forgotten when Adalas stopped outside of a two-story building and pointed up to the shut wooden window at the second floor.

"That is where she lives. My sister. Niece runs the house. She's got two young sons here. My sister mostly stays in bed. Mind isn't able to do much else."

Adalas led the way inside, opening the door without knocking. The walls on the inside were, as expected, quite plain, with thick wooden doors on either side meeting them in the entrance hallway. As they got further inside, Rum saw hanging on the walls tools, bowls, and other basic items, as well as an unevenly placed shelf with wooden cups. At least those cups won't break if they roll down. Passing the end of the hallway the twi came to an open area with a hearth, a kitchen, a dining table to the left, and a tiny and steep set of stairs to their right.

"Who have you brought into my home?" said a tired woman's voice. Rum noticed it coming from a someone cleaning an iron pot in the kitchen. Rum glanced at here, and saw at her feet two young boys with stained and torn clothes, playing with kitchen ladles. They both looked up at the guest who had arrived.

"Lini, this wizard wants to try and cure my sister. And he's paying money for it, too. I'm just taking him upstairs so that he can make his attempt."

Lini looked at Adalas with some concern. One of the little boys, maybe five or six years old, meanwhile stood up, pointing at Rum. "You a wizard?"

Rum nodded, smiling warmly. "Yes I am little boy. I'm very much a wizard, here on an errand of magic."

"I wanna watch!" the boy exclaimed to his mother. The other little boy, perhaps four years old, got up also and joined his big brother in the excited nagging of their mother.

"No, I don't think that's wise, magic is dangerous boys" she said, "what if the wizard ends up turning you into little rats?"

The boys turned now, and looked up at Rum with utter fear in their faces. They both fell dead silent, clinging to their mothers' skirt.

"Now now", Rum said, "I don't know what you've heard of magic Lini – I assume that's your name – but my magic is not dangerous. This is all going to be quite harmless. I wouldn't mind if they looked."

Lini held her two boys tightly. The boys looked up at her, waiting for their mother's decision, trusting her to understand the situation.

"Well" she sighed. "Don't bother the wizard too much, and stay in the corner if you're gonna be up there!"

"Yeeyh!" the boys exclaimed, fear turned back to excitement in an instant.

"Don't get in the way of magic!" she added as the children came over. Adalas smiled grandfatherly, and took this to be the clue to bring Rum upstairs.

As Rum surfaced over the last step, he saw what would have to be Adalas' sister, sitting on a bed and staring at the wall in front of her. He continued up, eyes scanning the room for details. Next to the bed was a chest, and over at the wall was a closed shutter, under which was a chair. The room was lit by moonlight from cracks in the walls. As his feet stepped onto the floor, he took in the old woman. She had long white hair, a long neck, and was relatively tall. Taller than her brother. She wore a light-blue nightgown, and turned her neck slowly as the company of Adalas, Rum and two excited little boys all formed a group near the top of the stairs.

"Rhathie, how are you big sister?" Adalas smiled broadly and stepped up to her, giving her a wet kiss on the cheek and holding both her hands. His sister stared back at him, confused, and more than that, anxious. She glanced over at Rum and his entourage of two little boys, and grabbed her younger brother Toothie for safety. Adalas stroked his sister's hair, and tried to explain to her that Rum was here to make her feel better. Lini from downstairs, meanwhile, announcing she was joined the scene with a couple of loud CREAK! CREAK! from the wooden stairs.

"Adalas" Rum eventually said, interrupting a low soft-spoken conversation between Adalas and his sister. "Is it okay for me to begin my attempt?" Adalas looked over at him, sucking his tooth concernedly, and stared back into Rhathie's eyes, clearly waiting for her consent. Rhathie grabbed her bed pillow and hugged it, as she looked down and away from everyone. She mumbled something Rum couldn't hear.

"She's okay with it" Adalas said. "Do your best, wizard." A grim expression overtook Adalas' face. Or is that regret? It was difficult for Rum to judge, but the wizard felt that the feeling was not about him, necessarily. Adalas left his sister and joined the group of people. Rum stepped over to the shutter, and the family all looked at him with expectation as Rum pulled the window chair over to the bed, where he sat down, and began examining his subject.

"How old is your sister, Adalas?" Rum didn't take his eyes off of Rhathie as the question was asked.

"74" Adalas replied, hoarsely.

"And when did she start becoming so… confused?"

"A little over five years ago" Adalas said, depressed. "But it's been much worse the last two years. She almost never knows where she is. Me, Lini, and the boys have to care for her. Feed her sometimes, when she forgets about meals. Keep her safe, when she starts getting scared. She barely knows how to attend to her own needs anymore. I'm afraid that if I hadn't told you about her, or if you end up unable to help he, then something bad will eventually happen, soon. And she might be gone then. Dead, in the mind, or dead, in the body. Don't know which I fear most."

The old woman, frail mind as her mind might be, appeared sufficiently well-fed in Rum's eyes. She wasn't overly skinny, and there was some color to her face. She was a bit cold as Rum touched her hands – at which she whinced – but it wasn't an alarming cold. The second time Rum reached out for her hand, she didn't withdraw it. He analyzed her power status using Akalios' Calculus, a method he'd been taught in his first semester at The Flipped University. This method poked a person's magical being for certain evidence of strengths and weaknesses, and involed a method of calculation that was able to determine a target's level, attribute scores, and for those skilled enough with the method, one could even discover magical and natural effects on the target. Rum hadn't mastered the skill very far, but was competent enough to see the most basic effects. He calculated Rhathie's power status as follows.

Rhathie (female human)

In Aclima, the name of their world, everyone naturally gained a total of 70 attribute points over the course of their first 30 years. Most people gained all of these by age 25, and some as early as age twenty, just after entering into adulthood. At the university, these were known to everyone as their natural attribute scores. Rum, like all mages who'd studied first-year courses at the university, knew the theories of how they come about. The learned speculate one is capable of affecting the outcome of naturals by practicing skills associated with the different attribute types. Constitution tending to come from eating healthy and successfully challenge the body against hot climates, cold climates, poisons, and disease. The records, I remember, hinted that fisherfolk and woodsfolk are especially known for high constitution, but also farmers and adventurous miners. Dexterity is gained by practicing fine motor skills. Sewing, musical instruments, bows, certain sports. Strength is muscle power work, intelligence is reading, counting, analyzing, and absorbing information. Wisdom is practiced using empathy, creativity, doubt. Willpower is not giving into misplaced urges for pleasure, staying patient, exercising control over what influences oneself, being exceedingly driven by logical aims. Luck is a skill my teachers always said scholars disagreed much about. Some argued it was about exposing oneself to things like gambling, but gamblers generally have low average luck, so the evidence did not support that theory.

I think luck must be life experience. Building intuition for the dynamics of the world in general. After all, if we're exposed to the diversity of the world, would'nt we be more ready for its surprises?

Rum pondered his knowledge and experiences. He was surprised by Rhathie's high luck score, but on contemplation this was perhaps not so surprising, given that he'd end up finding her on this particular evening. Luck was more in her favor than with most others, it seemed. The constipation also came as a surprise, but he ignored that effect for now. After all: if he was successful here, Rhathie would be able to deal with that herself when she became clear of mind. He felt no immediate need to fix that for her.

However, Rhathie's depleted mana pool was curious. Unless she's been casting spells, how has her mana pool been so depleted? Is this a consequence of her dementia perhaps? Was this a roundabout way for him to determine the consequences of her condition? He pondered the question some more, but saw no leads to follow, and so ignored the issue. As for her level and the rest of her stats: as a person levels up, they gain ten attribute points from which to power themselves up. Powering oneself up wasn't straight-forward though, everyone knew that. One has to convince the world itself about one's own choice. Everybody has a destiny or a purpose in this world, or so they speculate at Flipped. And nature does not like steering away from its destined course.

For that reason, it was also very hard to bully people into becoming what one wants of them. For instance: parents, teachers, or army commanders couldn't easily force their children, students, or soldiers to became whatever they wanted. If the person powering up assigns points that reflect a self they don't truly want to pursue, the points assigned will misbehave. In some instances those points would simply reset, and one effectively loses a level for a short period of time until one is ready to level up again. In other instances the points from a power-up will forcibly redistribute themselves to better match a person's true desires. So this woman isn't just filling herself with luck, she has also truly wanted to be lucky. Luck is a reflection of her true self. Or, at least, her destined self.