Disappointment

Failure. Failure. Failure.

Loali explained to me that organic materials, like bones, meat, or plants, if they themselves had or could store magic, naturally reacted to and tried to absorb magic from the things around them. They did this regardless of whether they were dead or alive, but if they were alive they could stop this process from taking place selectively to protect themselves from magic of the incorrect affinities. Nonliving organic materials couldn't do this anymore, and would keep absorbing magic until eventually they overfilled or polluted themselves too thoroughly with the wrong affinities. This property made such materials somewhat easy to work with for experienced magic device makers, as they readily accepted magic, but since this also led to them quickly degrading they could only be used in cheap, one-use items, had to be stored carefully, and were harder to handle for people with multiple affinities.

Each of the bones Loali handed me were intended to use this absorbing property to react to my magic. If I had the right affinities, we should've seen the bones reacting; color, state, movement, depending on what each bone was supposed to test the reactions would differ. If I had different affinities than the bones could handle, they were supposed to start to show signs of degradation after being held for a while, like cracks or becoming gummy, but so far none of the bones had reacted at all.

I could practically see the light draining out of Loali's eyes with the last failed result, but a moment after she retrieved the last bone from my hand she suddenly adopted a wide smile.

"Alright, then, you don't have these common affinities. Not earth, water, wind, fire, or darkness..." Her expression faltered for just a moment with the twitch of her brow, but quickly corrected itself. "Anyway! That just leaves room for some rarer affinities and common ones I haven't tested, huh? It'd make more sense for you to have a light affinity than a darkness affinity, anyway, so you might have that one. There's still gravity, electricity, sensory, any number of narrow and reliant affinity types, and-"

"Or I could have no magic,” I reluctantly suggested. “You said if I had magic affinities the bones couldn't absorb they'd start to degrade, right?" When I finished, she finally couldn't help but pass back a frown.

"It's possible, maybe, but highly unlikely."

"Where I came from-"

"I know, I know, but you didn't have scales there either, right? You said when you woke up here loads of things with your body changed, things you really wanted to change. Why shouldn't that include magic? You want magic, right?"

"I do, and I guess I did want it even before I came here, but..." My voice trailed off as I picked a bit at one of the black, coaly scales on my shoulder, recalling again the sunset glow that I’d seen under my skin when I woke up here. Itelber could make himself glow in a similar way, though his glow was more teal in color, but I still couldn’t help but feel like that wasn’t the only difference.

“What is it?” Loali asked, and I returned my hand from my shoulder to the table as I tilted my head.

“I kind of want to try something, but I don’t know what’ll happen if I do.”

“Try what?”

“When I woke up I was glowing, and I could sort of control it.”

“Oh.” It was easy to read the slight disappointment on her face, and I couldn’t exactly blame her for it. I had no real reason, besides some “odd feeling,” to believe that it had anything to do with magic, and she was already well accustomed to bioluminescent people.

“Well, we can test that out later, then,” she said, “for now, let’s just focus on getting these light glasses made, I guess.”

So began my first real lesson on magic device creation, even if I couldn’t quite participate in it. Both of the materials Loali was using, even if she and her family could make one of them, were too valuable to be used as teaching materials, especially when we weren’t sure if I even had the affinities to try and use them properly.

The whole function of light glasses was to amplify light which, aside from the fact that the light glasses would allow me to see in color, fit what I knew about night vision goggles. I couldn’t really understand how the color of the light could be preserved, however. If I remembered correctly, night vision goggles were able to help people see so well because they relied on a different wavelength of light which they then converted back to visible light, but not the full visible light spectrum. Maybe these glasses did something similar by utilizing other forms of light, and somehow “magically” converted that to full color.

When I asked about how the light glasses worked and explained my own knowledge, Loali didn’t seem to have a concept of what I was talking about but encouraged me to explain it more later. She went on to say that in order to make the glasses she needed to visualize a device that took in light and “made it louder,” like her own eyes would when she walked from a place that was lighter into a place that was darker. Hearing her describe it like that, I began to understand what she actually meant by being able to visualize a device’s function.

As I understood it, she didn’t need to understand every tiny piece of a motor, for example. If she could clearly imagine the effects it generated and how it accomplished that, at least in a way that magic could accomplish, then she could make it work. Whether or not she perfectly understood the physical mechanisms behind it was irrelevant so long as she believed what she was trying to do was possible, could imagine it clearly, and her magic and materials were sufficient enough to make it happen.

Since Loali's eyes could already adjust some way or other to make even colors clear in a dark environment, and because she could imagine that change clearly and understood it firmly as her eyes “amplifying” the light she could, if she could imagine the glasses doing the same, make the glasses do the same. Whether or not that was how her eyes actually improved her ability to see didn’t matter, so long as she could visualize it firmly enough and the magic she had was capable of making it happen in the way she imagined it.

So, if she didn’t have a light affinity, she wouldn’t be able to make a device that could do that even if she could clearly imagine it... but whether or not something can theoretically be done in the same way without magic might not matter? There's a fair chance that I'm misunderstanding something about how light works, but if I'm not does that mean magic here can do things that aren't physically possible? Like making matter out of nothing or something like that?

Having known what I did about eyes, and light, I felt a pit form in my stomach at the thought of trying to do the same thing she did, and found myself hoping I didn’t have a light affinity afterall. I was not as well versed in the way light worked as a physicist might be, for example, but I knew enough to make it impossible for my mind not to keep asking questions about how the light glasses worked. I would probably find it difficult, if not impossible, to replicate what she was doing to make them. I did not grow up in a world where magic could influence the way natural phenomena worked and, unlike someone who did, my mind couldn’t easily accept that natural phenomena could potentially be altered, or maybe ignored entirely, like that.

What if her eyes already use magic to enhance light, and she is actually replicating the way her eyes work?

“Huh?!”

I let that thought slip away as she nonchalantly placed the “glasses,” which looked like a visor framed by spiky metal, on my face and allowed them to change their shape to fit against my nose, brow, and around the back of my head perfectly.

“You were zoned out, so I went ahead and put them on you. I still need to adjust them so they amplify light to the levels you need, but now they’re the right shape at least. Stay where you are.” When I looked her way through the continuous lens everything looked the same as it had before except for a slight cloudiness, but a few moments later I nearly went blind.