Processing II

A Ry’ke girl opened the door and said hesitantly, “So…are you a magician?”

The girl was a little shorter than me, had a babyface, and wore her hair in two puffballs to either side of her head. She couldn’t’ve been older than fifteen.

It took my brain a second to catch up and realize who she was.

Lil?

“I’m not a magician,” I said, taking the tray from her. “Why’d you think I was?”

Was this the start of an interrogation? I felt better with Lil here, though. She was a sweet girl.

If anyone knew about magicians, it’d be Lil. She’d been a major character in the original novel, due to being the court magician’s servant, confidant, and only friend. Ky’sy’ana had met her in the palace and, seeing her dissatisfied, had recruited her for the rebellion. As for why a kid was the court magician’s best friend…

The magician himself was a sixteen-year-old boy. He had pretty much the shittiest ‘chosen one’ deal in fiction.

“Try this on.” She held out an armband with an embedded gem. “It lights up if you’re magic.”

“I’m not,” I said, putting it on.

Contrary to my words, it glowed a faint purple.

I slapped my hand over it. After Sai-ee’s magic powers had been exposed, he’d been kidnapped by the government and extorted for years. The same thing wasn’t going to happen to me! But, also—I didn’t think I had magic powers! It must’ve been from the transmigration. Could I cast spells?

Lil pressed her lips together, not meeting my eyes. “Um. But it lit up.”

“I don’t know why it lit up,” I said honestly.

“Can you cast spells?”

“I really don’t think so.”

“I heard someone with magic said that he figured out he had magic after he fell off a cliff and caught himself at the bottom. Maybe if you jump out the window.”

I backed away from Lil. “I’m not jumping out a window. Also, why’d he fall off a cliff?”

“He said he was showing off to his friends who were afraid of heights.”

…Okay, I hadn’t written that bit, but it checked out.

“Only one or two people a generation have magic powers,” I said. “You really think I’m one of them?”

“Then why else would it light up?” Lil persisted.

“Maybe I was exposed to magic,” I hypothesized. “In fact, I remember getting exposed to magic.”

“If it was Sai-ee’s magic, it’d light up green.”

“Well, it wasn’t him. I don’t think.”

“Who was it, then? When and where was it?”

How close could I get to revealing the truth without giving away too much? A detail like being all-knowing or reading about the world in a book would open me up to all kinds of scrutiny even if I didn’t mention anything about being the author. If we’re from a book, who wrote it? they might ask, for starters, or have an existential crisis or think I was crazy.

“It was in my home country, Canada.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s great. Cold, good healthcare, does both the metric and imperial system and prints everything in English and French.”

“What…”

I opened my mouth to explain, but Lil cut me off by asking, “Anyway, what happened?”

“I was teleported here, with the knowledge about a lot of things appearing in my mind, like how to speak the language,” I improvised. “That knowledge hasn’t been wrong yet, so I’ve just gone with it.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know, it just happened.”

“That’s a really weird thing for someone to just randomly do.”

“I know, right? Can’t make sense of it myself.”

Lil furrowed her brow, looking like an elementary schooler trying to make sense of their older sibling’s Calculus AB homework—determined but utterly lost. Eventually she said, “Leave the tray on the table and I’ll come get it in a bit. Don’t leave the room!”

She hurried out, locking the door behind her.

Maybe I should give the books a serious look. They didn’t seem to be all novels, after all.

I could read the titles phonetically in Ry’ke’si. At the same time, the English meaning appeared in my head. There were rows of books about geography, culture, and economics, all of which I might’ve picked up in a library at home. I was interested in geography and culture and considered economics a necessary evil to learn about. Also on the shelf were newspapers in a box and some religious texts. Buried in with the religion were two books on magic.

Lil’s bracelet had glowed purple when I put it on, meaning I was magic or connected to magic. I was betting it was left over from whatever had isekaied me, but knowing more about what that teleportation was certainly wouldn’t hurt.

What I knew about the magic system in this world already was as follows: A very low amount of magic users existed in this world. The ones who did exist were essentially reservoirs, brimming with magical energy but with a limited ability to transmit it. Like Sai-ee falling off that cliff, sometimes a crisis could cause a magical outburst. Magic also often augmented physical abilities when a person had too much of it, and could sometimes improve physical appearance and/or give the magician a strong charisma. Sai-ee had become his clan’s star actor in a matter of months because of his skill at acrobatics and his magnetic draw.

Those were ways to spot a magic user, but to effectively use a magic user, their magic had to be channeled, which was done with runes and metal. The empire’s current channeling equipment had almost 100% retention of energy, which let Sai-ee power every weapon, light, aircon system, and everything else.

I didn’t know how the runes really worked. It was good enough to just give Sai-ee a lot of different spells and abilities and then leave most of them vague because he was too depressed to use them. But this first book was about them.

Apparently, they were something like a programming language; a system reliant on line breaks and hyperspecific specifications. An ordinary person working for a magic user (the book was apparently unaware of reality, where magic users were enslaved to large groups of ordinary persons) would have to use a complex system that matched directly to how the magical energy spoke and understood things, and write it on metal for further translation. The next chapters of the book were providing a dictionary on that system. Meanwhile, a magic user could use runes that were more concise and connected more closely to their native language, and could write on metal, wood, stone, or other fitting materials. They had an inherent ability to communicate with magical energy that others didn’t. And a very, very powerful magic user could make something happen simply by communicating it in words. At the low end of that perspective, they had to be words that were carefully thought over and written down with great intention. At the high end, there was the creator goddess, who was said to have spoken the world into existence.

…

After reading all of that, I took a piece of paper and wrote “A frog appears on the table.”

I waited for some time, but no frog appeared. An inconclusive experiment, then. I couldn’t be completely sure of anything. But that note, that a super-powerful magician could make things happen by writing them down, like, say, a whole world and plot could come into existence…

As ridiculous as it sounded, that could explain my whole predicament, and why this universe existed.

I didn’t know what it might feel like to be magic. If there was power running through my veins, a secret grandeur within me—well, for one, I’d’ve been born with it, so I wouldn’t know how it was different from anything else! I couldn’t exactly log onto r/isthisnormal and ask while I was in Ky’an’th. Aside from that, I wasn’t particularly fast, strong, or pretty—though none of those things were a given.

I could start with the ultra-specific runes; but there I was blocked by another issue. No metal to engrave them on.

Why hadn’t I made my magic system more OP? That sure would have been great for this situation.

I wanted to figure it out for two reasons. First, I wanted to know the truth about myself, why I was transported, and what abilities I had, or if there was someone else in the world who had abilities and had transported me. Second, I wanted to escape. I couldn’t stay here, blindly trusting, anymore. I might be drugged again, or interrogated in a different way, and I had to go find Jayla.

She wasn’t dead. I couldn’t let myself believe that.