Infinite Mana Theory

“Uncle, Uncle!” I flew above the table and landed in my seat. All the people on the balcony turned in surprise to see me fall out of the sky. “The power went out, and they said it was about mana wells drying up or something. What does that mean?”

The moment I finished speaking, I could feel the air around Miss Luari suddenly climb in temperature along with a vein popping on her forehead. She kept her characteristic smile, but an aura of suppressed rage brewed around her…

“Here we go…” Uncle hid his eyes with his hat and rested his chin on a fist.

“What’s wrong, Mel?” Miss Luari spoke through grit teeth. “It’s not like humanity decided to bandwagon against scientific evidence or anything. Nope! Clearly infinite mana theory is just a lovely little myth!”

She was nearly screaming. All the curious eyes that were once on me for fluttering down now aimed at her, only turning sour and angered by her loud tone.

I think I might have struck a chord that was better off avoided…

“Maybe it might be best if we take this conversation somewhere else, no?” Marek gestured with his eyes at a bunch of people giving us dirty looks. Their hands were reaching for garbage items, preparing to aim at us as if we were trash cans.

“No…I won’t get mad that people try to discredit my field of study and all of magical science. Not me.”

“Woman’s seething,” Indena commented.

“Darn right I am!” There was a fiery passion in Miss Lauri’s eyes, not unlike the kind Indena got when she became determined. This really offended her.

“Uncle, what’s going on?” I tugged his coat.

Uncle put his hat back up and took my hand as he was preparing us to leave. “Here on the surface, Elysium, or as it’s known by scripture, the Heart of the World, is just a myth. Or at least, skeptical people like to push that belief. So instead, they believe that mana comes from hidden pockets they dig up from underground.”

What a bunch of hooey.

“My mom’s a geologist and archeologist.” Yamin finally climbed the stairs and rejoined us. “She studies geo mana streams, especially when they connect with Nazalian ruins.”

Nazalian ruins, eh? I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of those in Elysium. But Nazalian structures and Exceed structures were very different things.

“Hey, where have you been?” I asked her.

“Paying for that cookie you took!” She had a mean look, it kinda looked like her mom,  and by extension, Indena. I felt really bad for accidentally walking out with this thing. But hey, at least it was a tasty cookie. Totally worth the mistake on my part.

Anyway, by this point we were leaving the café, since it was getting a little uncomfortable to continue this conversation with all the mean faces around us. I don’t know if we upset them by being loud, or they didn’t believe Elysium made all the mana in the world. Either could be true, maybe both.

“Something doesn’t make sense about all this,” I started. “Why is the mana running out here even though Elysium never stops producing it?”

“There’s probably something wrong with their infrastructure,” Uncle suggested. “Ever since we fixed Pylon 83, the mana production in Elysium has been just fine. I’m not detecting any anomalies either, so something has to be going on around the surface to cause an issue.”

“If one exists at all,” Miss Lauri clarified.

“A cave in, maybe?” I asked.

“Mana can travel through rocks, and would likely just end up carving out a new vein in no time.” Uncle said. “Something else must be going on.” Uncle turned to Miss Lauri. “You might be able to shed some light on this. Figuratively speaking.”

“I’d say so. But Mel, I thought you had a grasp of all this?”

Uncle shook his head. “We only patrol so far into those caves before we risk being detected by humans.”

Uncle’s always worried that we’d interfere with human development. He and dad figured it was best to let humans advance on their own, rather than become dependent on our work. Miss Lauri was more informed than I thought if Uncle told her that.

“From my understanding, nothing has fundamentally changed about the caves or how we collect mana power from them. So my only theory is that the mana is likely not reaching the collection plants.”

“Like something taking it before it reaches us?” Marek suggested.

“Exactly,” Miss Luari nodded.

It was possible that something could be taking the energy before it reached the surface. But it would be impressive if they were able to control so many veins all at once. There was a lot of mana constantly being brought to the surface.

“We should make sure to bring this up at the meeting tomorrow,” Uncle suggested. “The Queen might have more info then we do right now.”

That was a good idea. This meeting was going to be a big thing, so I started keeping notes in my head of what we’d need to talk about.