Melody of Mana

My first healing class came by soon enough. I knew that the name of the teacher was Professor Londa, but little else. It was only once a week though so no big deal.

The classroom was one of those set up for more practical work, with tons and tons of room. I stood by with the other bard girls for my year, not that there were all that many of us and we chatted while waiting. Neither of them had opted to take any healing classes either, instead focusing on other subjects.

Soon enough Professor Londa came in. She was perhaps in her mid thirties, with a slim figure and dark hair, currently bound up in a tight, severe bun. Everything about her gave off the feeling of a rather stereotypical cross teacher. Every one of us quieted as her eyes flitted over the room.

"Good morning class. Here you will be learning the very basics of what you should know for healing. We'll be covering a few spells, as well as proper triage. The latter subject will take most of our time and while I don't expect any of you to excel, you do need to earn at least passing marks for my class. Questions?"

She had each of us fill out a few brief questions, mostly on what healing we knew, and then we all had to demonstrate. An older one armed man was brought in.

"This is Roon, he has so generously offered to help us with learning your basic spells. As it's best to demonstrate on a living target, and you lot will be expected to work on humans, he's an ideal candidate."

I could feel my own eyes go a bit wide at her declaration. I wasn't sure how they'd found some poor guy to act as a literal guinea pig, but that was a bit insane. Was she actually going to cut the man up, or poison him, or infect him with diseases? Where were the cute little mice that I'd learned on!?

Apparently she did intend to do all of those things as when the first student came up to demonstrate she took a small knife and made a cut across Roon's hand. He winced, but seemed otherwise fine with the situation, which didn't make me feel any better.

The line went on and on until it was finally my turn. I'd managed to find myself at the back, status being the main determining factor in things meant that I almost always was in these things. By the time I got there there was a small mark on the man's hand, where the skin had been broken and healed so many times.

"Are you ready?" The professor asked with a quirked brow.

"Yes."

She pulled the knife once more over his skin, splitting it and letting the blood flow. I immediately launched into my standard healing spell, knitting it back together as quickly as possible. I watched as the flow stemmed and stopped, and the skin regrew again, smoothing out as if it had never been there in the first place.

"Acceptable, please return to your spot."

She spent the rest of the class going over the basics of theory involved in healing magic. Most of this was a review, or just completely wrong from what I understood from my previous life, but I took notes diligently anyway. While it was no longer than a normal class the whole process was exhausting.

That evening Kala and I were headed up to one of the towers we'd learned we could get to the roof on to watch the sun set. I'd prepped some snacks and blankets so that we could have it rather like a picnic.

She told me about her day as we stood there watching the sky go from blue to pink to deep purple, finally letting night settle in as the golden orb sank below the horizon. She'd had to go down to the temple district to handle some things with her order. The whole trip had apparently been long and involved a stop at a lovely little shop she wanted to go to together at some point, it served some kind of hot fruit drink that she'd really liked.

We found a nice place to lay back and I responded in kind. She listened as I told her all about the healing class and the one armed man who served as our training dummy. I got the feeling that she understood my concerns, nodding along until I'd finished. By that time the stars had come out and decorated the sky with their pale lights.

"That's rather normal Alana. You have to practice on humans for some things, animals work for when you're learning the very, very basics, but humans are quite different and you'll eventually need to work on them too," she said after I'd finished, wrapping a blanket around the both of us and snuggling in close.

"Maybe, but it seems cruel," I pouted.

"Not at all. It takes a lot of time and mana to fix something like a lost limb, just because of how much is gone. That man is likely a volunteer who's being repaid by having his arm restored. Commoners can't often afford that kind of investment, but taking a few weeks where you're given minor injuries? It's really not the worst deal for him."

"So... is that normal?"

"Mmm, yeah, most classes have one such person at a time. That or someone who's got a child or something in the same boat. They don't use the children themselves, but a parent can volunteer."

"I see."

Kala shook her head. She could be a little cold towards those she didn't know sometimes.

We laid there for a good while, looking up at the stars. Without things like electric lights they were truly magnificent, and the few times like this that I'd taken to just stare at them had never disappointed. You could even see something that looked kind of like a purple and yellow cloud that stretched across the sky. I'd heard that the Milky Way was like that too, but I'd never seen it before.

Eventually a light snow started to fall. A bit strange as the night was rather clear, but not impossible. I took a few moments to sing up a light wind to keep it off of us and a drying spell to be rid of it completely if it landed anyway.

"What no warming spell too?" Kala asked when I'd finished.

"No, the cold is nice, and with the blanket it's fine." I also wanted an excuse to keep close, as I absolutely loved cuddling.

"You know this is fairly impressive magic right?"

"It's not like I'm making it stop snowing."

"No, but it's clever, and the control is really good."

"Mmm, well feel free to keep complimenting me."

She laughed and we went back to watching the sky. The added snow really made the view that much nicer, and when the moon joined us it seemed to make the falling flakes glow a pale white. We stayed like that for a long while, until it eventually got late and we had to return to our dorm.

The next few weeks were hectic. They were spent mostly ironing out my weather magic and the other spells I'd learned since coming to school. We also spent a lot of time learning about forming magical items.

There was a certain trick to the shape of magic items. While they could be any shape and still work there were some that ended up being slightly more efficient. This had to do with a number of factors involving the materials used and the amount of mana you were adding to something, as well as how it was being expelled. Geometric shapes were favored, of course particularly if they could be made into regular 3d ones, but this simply wasn't practical for many uses.

While going through these I finalized my design for my light. The item itself would be a small sphere of silver alloy, something rather like Sterling silver. Silver was perfect for many applications due to it's insanely high mana conductivity, and only avoided use due to price. The alloy was a nice middle ground for this, not too pricey, since the item would be small, but highly effective.

The sphere would be held in a small lantern that had a plain white fabric covering. It looked rather unassuming but should put off a large amount of gentle yellow-white light. It also didn't put off any heat, and so would serve well for me.

We'd moved on to actually forming things in the practical side of Magical Item Creation. The circles on our desks allowed for the visualization and molding of materials to a certain degree. It was limited, as they were mostly set up to make the geometric solids that were best for items, but after you made something into the general shape using them you could easily form it into other shapes. I used my practice time in there to form the lamp's cover, which Professor Hern allowed after looking over my designs.

For the item itself I approached Rooke. I'd finally finished up my sequences for it. It was a standard lighting enchantment with an on and off function that I'd set up to work on voice commands. The last bit I'd had to pull the details on out of the 'guide' section of the core. I'd checked with older students that that was a normal thing to have, it was, and tried to get them to show me how, but most of them had told me that it was beyond me.

Voice commands weren't all that difficult to set up in all honesty. Well, the training on how to do them might be a bit weird, but my personal reference source made it rather simple. The guide, for all of its weirdness, was rather clear on directions such as these, telling you what commands for simple operations like that were, and what each part of the code for it was. An on/off switch using verbal commands was even one of its example exercises.

I handed over the code I'd written down to Professor Rooke and watched as his eyebrows rose right at the end. It wasn't all that long, the whole thing fitting easily on one sheet of paper.

"You put in voice commands?"

"Yes, I wanted a way to control it without having to fiddle with the item itself. I'm going to put it in a holder and having to open that up to mess with it would be a bit of a pain."

"Those are not normally covered until much later in your education."

"I asked a few of the older students to help me a bit, is that a problem?"

"Not at all. It's just a bit more than most people try for their first item. Everything here looks good to me, though your choice of command words is a bit strange 'illuminate' and 'deluminate' are certainly original."

"I like them." I also really happened to like films from the early 90s, but he didn't need to know that.

"Fair enough then. What shape and material will you be using?"

"Sphere, one of the standard silver alloys. Professor Hern already agreed that those should work well."

He nodded. "Yes, for simple emanation effects like this a sphere will be best. Spending the extra to make it out of silver is a good choice too, even if it's a bit on the costly side."

I shrugged, it wasn't like I was short on money or anything. I could have made it out of pure silver with no issues, or even gold if I'd really wanted to. That seemed like a bit of a waste though, so I'd not bothered.

Professor Rooke had a few more questions about the overall design of the holder and the like. He seemed at least satisfied that I'd put proper thought into this after looking at the designs. By the end of the meeting he nodded and gave his blessing to go ahead and make the item itself.