Chapter 126: Majicka Boost

It was a full two minutes before Lily came out of it, glancing at Arthur’s face to Mizu’s and back before breaking out in a huge grin.

“Oh, gods yes. I thought I was close. It’s about time, system.” Lily tore out of Arthur’s arms and jumped up, ignoring his protests that she should take it slow and immediately opening up her system screen.

“Lily, could you please sit down?” Arthur asked as he watched. “You were out for way too long for a skill gain.”

“No. I’m fine, Arthur.” Lily waved her hand at him absentmindedly as she continued looking at her screen. “I think that’s just because I got two skills.”

“Two?”

“Yeah, and they are weird. Look,” Lily said.

She flicked over a few screens to both him and Mizu, who stared at them wide-eyed.

Majicka Lamp (Aura)

Your class doesn’t have an outlet for your passive majicka by default. Since you make no goods, perform no services, and in general work as an extension of everyone else’s labor, this comes as no surprise. But every class gets both active and passive uses for their own majicka. Yours is no exception; it just takes a few extra steps.

When you are both present for and involved in work related to a project, your passive majicka augments that of the primary workers. It does so inefficiently, as compared to their own. It’s a low-double-digit percentage augmentation.

The efficiency can be raised in three ways. First, the normal progression of the skill will eliminate small amounts of inefficiency, especially as your WIS stat progresses. Second, your lamp can shine on multiple targets, reducing the benefit each gets while raising the absolute value of benefit bestowed on the whole group. The number of people who benefit from majicka lamp can be limited, focusing on 1–10 targets of your choice and giving them the bulk of the benefit.

Third, and most importantly, this skill synergizes with Expert Counsel, allowing for significantly increased efficiency when someone is working on a project in accordance with a suggestion you’ve made as prompted by the skill.

This skill runs off majicka regeneration, not majicka stores, and can thus be run indefinitely. However, it only works when you are both conscious and consciously involved in a job, and becomes less effective as your stores of majicka are drained.

“That last line doesn’t even make sense, Lily,” Arthur said. “You don’t have a way to spend your majicka in the first place, and this skill doesn’t change that.”

“That’s why it’s weird,” Lily said. “Look at the second screen already. That’s why I sent both.”

“She’s right, Arthur. Look at it,” Mizu said. “Although I can’t say I like this next one as much.”

Majicka Boost

You don’t have much of an active use for your own majicka stores, and never will. But don’t worry too much, since everyone else does. And since your entire class blurs the line between your own work and everyone else’s, it makes sense for you to be able to use your own stores in an active way that pushes work forward.

At a low level of efficiency, you can send your own majicka stores to someone else, augmenting their own majicka and making it possible for them to push just a little bit longer and harder towards a goal.

The overall efficiency of the transfer averages around 25-50%, and is affected by many factors, including your personal affinity to the person and the task they are trying to complete. In addition, this efficiency rises as your understanding of the work being done climbs.

To clarify, your knowledge of the overall goals of the project are irrelevant here, giving way instead to your knowledge of the specific way another’s class is directly influencing the world around them. The better you understand tailoring and what a tailor is actually doing at a skill level, the better you will be able to provide them with the fuel to do it.

This skill scales with your WIS and INT stats, and is effective for combat classes only when engaged in a purely defensive or non-offensive use of their skills. Defending a crafter or a settlement from a monster counts, albeit at a low efficiency. Almost any application of combat skills in a dungeon does not.

“I don’t like this skill either. It’s too…” Arthur searched for the words. “Sacrificial.”

“You have to think of the whole picture, Arthur. Expert Counsel gives me ideas to help people work better, no majicka used at all. Majicka Lamp gives a buff to those around me. And at the end of the day or when we really need it, I can dump all my majicka on one spot with Majicka Boost, all targeted to what the job needs. Boom.”  **Lily was bouncing off the stone road, clearly jazzed. “And I was thinking the other day, how boring is it to just give ideas? It’s fun to help, but just sitting in a chair watching is dumb, and there’s only so many ideas I can have. But now, I have choices about where my help goes, so I’m monitoring. And since I need to understand things…”

“She gets to learn about the job. Has a reason to.” Mizu got to the implication before Arthur did. “And they have a reason to show her, since it pays off directly in how well she can help them.”

“Oh, no,” Arthur said. “Lily, you’re already a bit… assertive? And now…”

“That’s right.” Lily puffed herself up. “The system is paying me to be a bossy know-it-all. And I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do about it. Mizu, try not to take this.”

“Wait, what?” Mizu tensed up for a moment before the recognition suddenly lit up in her eyes. “Oh, I see. I don’t think I could have blocked that, no.”

“What’s happening?” Arthur asked.

“She sent me her majicka. It filled up my stores about a tenth of the way,” Mizu explained.

“That’s all?” Lily looked disappointed. “That was everything I have, right now.”

“Well, you’re at a low level on those skills. And majicka stores grow with age. Yours are probably tiny,” Mizu said.

“I don’t think you are supposed to use that skill very often, anyway,” Arthur added. “Maybe at the end of the day, like you said. Or when it’s very specifically a very good idea. The system likes… I don’t know how to put it.”

“Well aimed throws.” Mizu tried to help Arthur out. “The system likes well aimed throws. You should focus on that.”

“Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind.” Lily was very visibly only hearing bits and pieces of what the others were saying. “Well, that should be enough majicka to work with for now. I’m going to go tell everyone while my tanks recharge. Where’s Skal, Arthur?”

“At the plaza,” Arthur said.

“I’m showing him first. I want to help him catch a big fish. A big, big fish.”

And she was off to the races after that. Arthur and Mizu both watched her go until she zigzagged around a building and disappeared from view.

“This is going to be terrible, isn’t it?” Arthur said. “Not the class. But teaching her to hold still and use it right.”

“Oh, certainly.” Mizu looped through Arthur’s arm. “But that’s the job you signed up for. Isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Arthur smiled. “I guess it is.”

—

“So it’s all done?” Rhodia said, looking down at the barely-visible scratches in the rocks. “I thought it would be bigger.”

“No, this is the easy part.” Mizu put her finger on the rocks. “See, there’s a lot of space between each of the lines, on purpose. When I lay down a new rune, it fits into that space, and only intersects with the old rune where it should. It’s not all done. It needs a few more etchings and some majicka.”

“Are you doing that now?” Rhodia asked, standing strategically between Mizu and the rest of the city. Arthur, who was not all that tricky, was impressed. It all seemed very natural indeed.

“No, I can’t. I was telling Onna earlier how much dirt and sediment this whole disaster stirred up. The channels are filled with it. When I was etching the well-to-well communication channels, I had to actually wipe the dirt out of the way,” Mizu said. “It will take days to clean, and it needs to be spotless.”

“Oh. Well then.” Rhodia winked at Arthur. “I could help. Arthur probably would, too. You can pretty much get him to do anything you want.”

Mizu thought about that, then looked slightly sad for a reluctant moment before shaking her head. “No, I can’t do that to you two. It’s silly, classless work. You all have more important things to do.”

Corbin suddenly materialized off to the side of everyone else. “She really believes that, doesn’t she?”

Arthur nodded, smirking slightly. “She really does.”

Mizu looked from face to face, then grimaced. “Oh no. What did you do? I can tell I’m not going to like this.”

“Wrong.” Onna laughed as she moved around the corner with Milo, Karra, and Lily in tow. “You’re going to pretend not to like this while loving it, like Arthur does. You know, it took us a while to figure out how to do it so quickly. You were only going to be down in the well for an hour or so. Then Lily pointed out that we could get it all done in an hour or so, just so long as…” Mizu looked horrified. “Just so long as every single person in the town helped at once. Good job, Rhodia. You can move out of the way now.”

As Rhodia’s distraction and physical blocking of the view ceased, Mizu got a good look at the clean-up crew’s clean-up crew finishing all the work they had done, resetting bricks, and getting everything back into position for the restart of the water system. They were down to the last twenty or thirty yards of open channel, mortaring almost as fast as the crew could walk.

“There’s not a speck of sand in the whole thing now. We got it over and over.” Lily puffed haughtily around the area. “Everything is fixed and perfect now. Go finish up, Mizu. Get it running.”

Mizu opened her mouth to protest, then closed it, then opened it again, then gave up, shrugged, and beamed at everyone.

“Thank you,” Mizu said.

She almost dove into the open staircase leading down to her runes, and seconds later a soft scratching noise started echoing up from the darkness.

“Huh.” Arthur looked down into the hole, quizzically. “I thought that would be harder.”

“It would have, if it was you,” Milo said. “See, Mizu is a reasonable person. She’s just a bit shy. You’re a whole different type of difficult.”

“Ready?” Mizu yelled up from the hole. “Is the trench closed?”

“Just about.” Onna watched as the last few bricks dropped into place. “The mortar is probably still a bit wet, but that shouldn’t matter. Wait just a second… and now. Go ahead.”

A click of an etching needle sounded and a soft glow issued from the hole. The sounds of rushing water began to build and build as the well sprang back to life, sending water speeding through the channels towards the town at large.

“Oh,” Arthur said. “We should probably have everyone go to their houses and turn off all the faucets. I bet a bunch of them were left open. We could flood the whole town.”

“Oh, dang, that’s right.” Milo looked abashed, then ran off towards his house. “Everyone! Go turn off your faucets! You probably left them on!”

After the flood was averted and Arthur got a surprising number of props for thinking ahead, the town settled quickly into celebration mode, cheering Mizu as they all made their way back to the plaza to finish lunch. Arthur thought for sure that she would be uncomfortable with that level of attention, and was pleased to find she looked okay with it. After all, she knew all these people. It was fine.

What was less fine, though, was when the wagon arrived right after the celebrations.