System Lost: My Own Best Friend

It's still dark out when I groggily emerge from the tent with Nipper and begin the now-familiar work of disassembling it. It's earlier than the rangers usually make me get up, but I suspect it's later than they usually do on their own. As evidence of that, Talla and Draga are both already up and active, loading the last few things into the car. I still can't get over the fact that they have a car.

Once the tent is all packed up, I head over to what's left of the campfire to get a breakfast of soup, crackers, and lizard jerky. Talla comes over as I'm feeding Nipper a few bits of jerky.

"Allie?"

Oh, good question.

[Magdalena: Tier 2 Human]

Mmnope! I shake my head silently. How odd—I'm not usually the first one up.

"Maggie, then," she observes. "You're just the person I wanted to talk to!"

How did she know? Shit, is it because I didn't answer verbally? Oh, she is good. Although maybe she shouldn't assume like that. Like, it's nice to be recognized, but what if I was Vi and Talla mistook her for me? Actually nevermind, that would be hilarious.

I belatedly realize that I forgot to actually respond, but Talla takes my silence as a signal to continue.

"You took the [Tamer] class, right?" she asks rhetorically. "I'm not an expert, but I've known other rangers who raise monsters. We should talk about how to properly handle your pet."

Sure did! Allie likes Nipper, but I wouldn't trust her to take proper care of the little guy, and Vi would eat him if she had to. Eva will come around eventually, but she still sees him as a threat. Aaand I didn't actually say a word of that, did I?

Damn, why do I keep doing this? I realize I have to do something to acknowledge her and just nod.

"Great!" Talla says with a smile, politely ignoring how fucking awkward I am. "Now as we've mentioned before, anomalous creatures from convergence points—or 'dungeon monsters' as people colloquially call them—can't really survive outside of their natural habitats without a bit of help. Particularly, they need magic to survive."

Yeah, I had already sort of figured that part out before even meeting the rangers. All the monsters back in the cave kept eating our magic candles—when they weren't eating each other—and Nipper loves to chew on the things. He can also swallow them whole, but despite being able to eat multiple corpses several times his size, one candle will satisfy him for days at a time.

I hold out my arm and nudge Nipper to slither down it. He's too big to sit on my palm anymore, but he happily coils around my arm to rest his head there. I give him a little scritch behind the maw then offer him up to Talla.

After a moment of hesitation, Talla sheepishly tries to mimic my action. As she reaches towards Nipper's face, I feel what can only be described as an extremely bitey urge and yank Nipper back just in time to save Talla's fingers.

I give the misbehaving worm a gentle but firm slap on the head, and he shrinks back a bit. He seems...apologetic isn't the right word. Regret and contrition don't feel right either. Whatever, he knows he messed up. It's an odd feeling, but both it and the premonition I felt are benefits from my new class skill.

Skill - Empathic Nature: Dramatically increased Awareness and Ego when judging the emotions of non-sapient animals.

Basically, I can feel what Nipper feels...sort of. His emotional range is not quite as complex as a person's, but hey—that makes two of us!

Holding my hand out again, I give Nipper a second chance to get it right. Talla is understandably a lot more nervous this time, but she manages to give him a gentle pat on the head before withdrawing her hands out of biting range.

"It really is a lot smarter than it looks, huh?" she notes.

I nod proudly. That's my little Nipper! Cleverest worm you ever met. Which is probably a pretty low bar, but we take those.

"Well, this is a good time to teach you how to feed it," Talla says. "After all, you need rewards to match the punishments."

Oh! She gets operant conditioning. Or at least the gist of it, I guess.

Talla holds her hands up, palms facing each other but not quite touching. I feel...something happening between them, and Nipper perks up slightly.

"Magic isn't really a thing, per se," Talla begins explaining. "It's not a substance or force, but rather a catch-all term for any phenomenon that extends beyond the physical world. Everything has at least a little bit, but with the right skills and some effort, you can focus it."

The inexplicable presence between her palms grows stronger, and I wish I still had the [Quick Sort] skill that I used to measure magic back in the cave. I need to test how all our old skills are affected by [Pyrothaumaturgy] at some point.

"It's lucky that you've got a thaumaturgy skill," Talla adds, as if reading my mind. "Otherwise it would be difficult to raise a creature like this without help or a higher grade class."

"He's got a name," I grumble.

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"Oh! Of course, I'm sorry—Nipper, right?" she corrects herself.

I nod. Her pronunciation is a little strange, since she has to transliterate, but close enough.

"Well, thaumaturgical phenomena are perfect for focusing magic," she goes on. "I can do this because I have a lot of practice," she holds up her empty hand, and Nipper tracks its movement despite having no eyes. "But it's much easier to create a little light, or in your case a flame."

I hold up a finger and focus on [Pyrothaumaturgy].

Skill - Pyrothaumaturgy: You can create and control flames. Up to one previously mastered skill can be combined with this to create unique spells.

I'm not bothering to combine it at the moment, just making a little candle flame at the tip of my finger. It flickers into existence—

"Ow!"

And immediately burns me. I wave my hand then suck on my burnt finger, groaning irritably.

"Fucking forgot I'm not safe from my own fire," I grumble around it. "Again."

"Sorry?" Talla says. "I didn't catch that."

I raise an eyebrow at her and take the finger out of my mouth. "What happened to your translation spell?"

"I'm not using it right now," she replies. "Some of us know better than to leave a spell like that constantly active for days at a time."

Then how...holy shit she really is good! I know that Allie and Talla have both been trying to exchange languages, but Talla's way ahead. Or at least, I think she is. It's hard to tell when Eva being around lets us cheat.

"Won't I end up burning Nipper if I try to feed him this way?" I mumble.

"You'll have to speak more clearly," Talla says apologetically.

I grimace. Ugh, I have to talk like Allie for her to understand me. Why am I like this?

"I can just use the translation spell, if you're uncomfortable," she suggests.

Damn it, she's too nice. "No," I grumble. "It's fine."

I bet she's doing this on purpose, just to get me to actually talk. Whatever. I hold up my hand and produce another flame—away from my own skin this time.

"I don't want to hurt him," I say, staring at the flickering fire above my palm. It helps if I pretend I'm just talking to myself.

"Then make the fire less hot," Talla replies. "Like the candles."

Oh right! I guess that's something I can do, huh? If I can control how big the fire is, or where it goes, then I guess it makes sense that I could change its temperature. I already did something similar with the old version of the skill, and even figured out that I could convert it into kinetic energy to make explosions. This new version should probably give me even more precise control.

I furrow my brows and focus on the little candlelight floating over my hand. It's part of me, thanks to my skill, and I can feel it. Creating and moving fire is second nature—I can just do that intuitively as part of the skill—but making more complex changes is harder. Like flexing an unfamiliar muscle.

On my first attempt to make the fire cooler, the entire thing shrinks down and sputters out.

"Gah, this is hard," I groan.

It's like trying to bend my ring finger without moving anything else. Everything's connected by tendons and muscle groups, and it takes a really precise control. It's not that I can't do what I'm trying to do, it's that I reflexively do a bunch of other things at the same time that I don't want to do.

I concentrate even harder, focusing on each individual aspect of the flame. Heat, brightness, size, shape, color, fucking soot content—anything that might matter. I go one at a time, trying to adjust the heat and seeing how it affects other things, how it feels for those things to be changed. Then I try to hold those things still and try again.

The whole process is way harder than it sounds, and I'm a little annoyed at Talla for suggesting it so flippantly. It was a lot easier to just force all of it into exploding, or to shove all of a candle's energy into another candle. Even pulling heat out of the laser geckos' rocks was easier because in that case I was being indiscriminate—it's just that heat and light were the only aspects of "fire" that were there for me to grab.

I'm forced to acknowledge that until now, my approach to magic has been a bit brutish. I've been envisioning what I want and then just forcing my way, assuming that once I smash through Engie's safety rails I'll have limitless power at my disposal.

After a few days to clear my head of both the backlash from magical strain and the lingering effects of the tincture, I now realize that I'd neglected to consider that limitless power with no control is uh...bad, actually. Maybe those guard rails have an important purpose after all.

Is this what Talla is trying to teach me? Or am I just reading too far into incidental lessons picked up in the process of learning how to feed my magical pet worm? I guess it could be both. She must have had to learn this stuff too, right? I've seen the way she adjusts her light on the fly. Talla makes it look easy, but I think she's just practiced.

Weirdly enough, the distraction makes it a little easier for me to isolate the parts of the flame that I want. As I slowly turn down the temperature, I can feel it tugging on the size and brightness—it wants to distribute its energy evenly, and I have to constantly hold it back. The more out of balance it gets, the harder it pulls, threatening to snap back like a slingshot. I wonder if I could use that? A thought for later. By the time I get the candle-sized flame down to just above my own body temperature, I'm sweating from concentration to maintain it.

I crack my eyes open, smiling, to see Talla staring at me with wide eyes.

"Blood and acid, that was fast!" she remarks. "It took me weeks of practice to pull that off the first time!"

"Yeah well," I grunt. "I've had to practice this stuff on the fly. Can I give this to Nipper now?"

"I think so, just be careful."

Who does she think I am? Actually no, never mind, that tracks. I offer the cool flame to Nipper and he happily snaps it up, giving my arm a content squeeze in return. As soon as he eats it, I feel my control over it vanish—kind of like I've fed a little piece of myself to Nipper.

"So I just have to do that every so often?" I ask.

"Magic isn't the easiest thing to measure, but I'd guess what you just gave him is about a thousandth of one of those mana candles," Talla answers.

Huh. Even if he can only eat a candle every few days, that still translates to hundreds of feedings like that one every single day.

"Gonna have to step up my game," I murmur quietly.

"Yep," Talla agrees. "Just keep practicing, and you'll be able to increase how much you're able to control at once."

Wait.

"I barely even said that out loud," I say. "How did you understand me?"

"Ah?" Talla blinks in surprise, looking away innocently. "What was that? Oh, I think Draga needs my help with something. I'll be right back!"

I'm left dumbfounded as she scrambles off to do something with the car. I turn my attention to Nipper and lift him up to my face.

"Did we just get played?"