Chapter 20: Majicka

“Oh shit. I got it.” Arthur looked up from his skill before even reading the whole thing. “I got the skill, Ella.”

“No way. Just like that?” Milo jumped up, ran over, and leapt to wrap Arthur in a big, feathery hug.

“Just like that. I think… Actually, Ella, what happened here? I wasn’t even all that careful with this tea.”

“Tastes pretty good to me,” Chuck said, slurping the last pieces of soggy bread off the bottom of his cup.

“Thanks, but it’s not even really boba yet, honestly. It’s… dessert bread tea, I guess? Which is close. But it’s not the same. I think the flower helped, and the water helped.” Arthur glanced at Mizu to make sure he wasn’t insulting her by downplaying something she had contributed to. “But the work wasn’t my best. And you’d think that would be part of it.”

“Close,” Ella said. “It is part of it. But why do you think I had Milo carting your friends in all day?”

“To keep me company? That’s what you said.”

“Sure. But also because you aren’t a chef. I’ve seen a lot of people get chef classes, Arthur. By the time you finished yesterday, you had optimized how you make tea as much as anyone without a class possibly could. You weren’t going to do much better, no matter what you did.”

“But it’s different for a cook?”

“It is. Because for cooks, the guest is just as important as the meal. More, actually. You didn’t really have to tell me your dream for me to see you were burned out, you know. Your face showed it. And considering you got your class from cooking for me and Milo, it didn’t take a lot to put two and two together on the best way to move forward.”

“It was trickery!” Milo said. “And I was in on it.”

“So were most of us,” Rhodia said, then followed Arthur’s glance over to Mizu, who was still sipping serenely on her tea. “Not Mizu, though. Nobody told her to bring the water. She’s just nice.”

“Anyway,” Ella broke in, bringing things back to focus. “The point is, I thought making drinks for your friends might get you back on track. And it did. Now read us the skill. Everyone’s waiting.”

Arthur had forgotten there was even a description to the skill in his excitement, and dropped his eyes back to his system screen as he called it up in its entirety.

Teashop Brewmaster (Boba Specialty)

You make tea to make people happy. This skill helps with that, in various ways. In addition to increasing your ability to cook in general, this skill takes a special interest in helping you select, brew, and serve the drinks that please your guests best and improve their days the most.

At level 0, your existing cooking skills are codified in your mind, making them easier to duplicate and increasing your consistency. In addition, some of your passive Majicka output seeps into the foods you make, bending reality to make the impossible slightly more possible and the possible slightly tastier.

Leveling the skill increases these effects, as do investments in your perception and wisdom stats.

Synergizes with Food Scientist at all times, but especially when using new ingredients, creating new recipes, and developing new preparation methods.

“Oooh, a wisdom stat emphasis. Interesting,” Ella cooed, the most excited of anyone there but Arthur.

“That’s unusual?”

“A bit. Almost all cooking classes run on perception. Chefs tend to have dexterity or intelligence as a secondary, depending on what they try to do. Cooks are the same, except usually they don’t have a secondary emphasis at all. That’s how my class is. I have a few points in a few other things, but mostly it’s just perspective.”

“What’s that mean for me? For how the skill works, I mean.”

Ella shrugged. “No idea. It probably has something to do with judging your customers a bit better, based on what you read us, getting a better feeling for what they want, whether they say it or not.”

“And it increases majicka output, of course,” Milo said.

Arthur paused to make sure he didn’t hear his friend wrong. “I have no idea what that means. This is the first I’ve heard that word.”

As Arthur finished letting that particular fact slip, the entire room stopped around him. A few people’s jaws went slack with shock, and even Mizu looked noticeably surprised.

“You don’t know what majicka is? How?” Chuck was up from his chair, suddenly. “It’s… well, it’s everything. It’s in everything. How do you not know?”

Arthur shrugged. “I’m new, I guess. Nobody ever said it, and we didn’t have it on Earth.”

“You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure. Nobody ever mentioned it, anyway.”

“A whole planet without majicka,” Chuck said, settling back down into his chair. “How do you do anything?”

Arthur shrugged again.

“Now now. He can’t know everything. And not everything is going to be the same. But how do you explain majicka?” Ella said, rubbing the bottom of her beak.

From the back, the porcupine suddenly made an excited, almost whining sound, raising his hand desperately. Arthur knew the demon by the name Spiny. Milo swore that was normal for his subspecies, something that applied to almost all the young male porcupine demons he had known.

“Please, please let me explain this,” Spiny said. “I’m a librarian class. We gain levels by helping people find information. I don’t know what happens if I successfully explain majicka to an adult who doesn’t know what it is yet. I don’t think anyone knows.”

“Come on down, then.” Ella waved him over, and he pushed his way through the kitchen, naturally creating some space around Arthur as everyone else pulled away to make room for his spines.

“It’s like this. You know how Milo makes daggers, correct? Roughly, I mean. You’ve seen him do it.”

“Not daggers specifically, but I’ve seen him forge metal. He made these straws.”

“Okay, great. Now how do you think he gets better at it?”

“Practice. And I’m guessing the system makes that practice count for more.”

“That’s a big part of it,” the porcupine said, nodding excitedly. “The first way the system makes us better is guidance. It steadies a smith’s hammer, it makes a sword move faster in a swordsman’s hand. The second way is stats. Once it’s guiding the hammer, strength makes the hammer come down harder. At the same time, strength usually makes the guidance better, at the same time. Milo, your smithing skill runs off strength and perspective, right?”

“Right.”

“So the more guidance he has, the better his strength and perspective can work, and the more strength and perspective he has, the better his guidance works?” Arthur asked.

“Right. And it’s the same with you, perspective, wisdom, and your brewing skill. With a theoretically infinite amount of stat points, your skill could guide you to do almost anything. With an infinite skill level, you could make your stats do as much as they possibly could. Theoretically, at least. It’s actually all very interesting, and there are some books I could loan you if…”

“Majicka, spiny,” Ella said. “Let’s focus.”

“I’m getting to that,” the porcupine said, calming himself down. “Now, the daggers that Milo is making right now are pretty normal. Eventually, they’ll be lighter, prettier, and sharper, just from the guidance and his skill. But there’s a limit to what something like iron or steel can do as a material. He’ll hit that ceiling around level ten, if he’s like most smiths.”

“It’s true. That’s about as high as it goes, assuming my smithing skill keeps pace,” Milo confirmed.

“And Chuck, over there, will get pretty strong. His stats will make him faster and stronger than any non-physical class gets, and the guidance will help him put those extra muscles to better use. But even that tops out. And what comes in after that? To break those limits?”

“Majicka?”

“Yup! It’s a force. When Chuck said it was in everything, earlier, he wasn’t quite right. It’s in everyone. It’s a force that people generate, naturally. You have it, I have it, Milo has it, and so on,” the porcupine said. “And there are two kinds. Active and passive.”

Arthur knew that, kind of, from his skill description. He even had guesses for what that meant, but he kept himself from sprouting the speculations. He didn’t want to steal the experience from Spiny if he could help it.

“Only some classes get active majicka. That’s an actual expression of that power outside their bodies, usually something you can see. You know Karbo?”

“I do. Well, I’ve known him for a few days.”

“If Karbo ever starts glowing, you should run. He has battler skills that do that, or so I’ve heard. And when that’s happening, he’s actively burning majicka to make himself stronger and to shield his body from damage. Other fighters can make their swords catch on fire, make their arrows explode. Wizards can throw fireballs. That kind of thing. That’s active majicka.”

“And passive?”

“Passive doesn’t just happen like an on and off switch. You don’t activate a skill to make it go. It just filters into whatever you are working on as you work on it. So for Milo, that means any dagger he makes is just a little better than it should be, judging by his stats and skill. His steel is better and stronger because he’s pumped his own power into it. At a high enough level, smiths can make swords that weigh half what they should, and are all but indestructible.”

“For a cook,” Ella broke in, “it means about the same thing.”

“I can make ultra-durable bread?”

“Not quite. But you can make bread that doesn’t get soggy when the laws of natural things say that it should. Or gets soggy faster. Or tastes better, or is chewier. Or any combination of all those. It all depends on your majicka output.”

“Huh. And does wisdom play into this?”

“Oh, yeah. Wisdom determines how much majicka you can produce and push out per second. More is always better, of course, but most classes can only use so much of it. It’s the kind of thing most people improve as they need to, when they find it’s getting in the way of their work. You seem to need to invest in it for your skill, so if nothing else, you should never have the problem of not having enough majicka.”

“Huh,” Arthur said. It wasn’t that foreign of a concept, overall. Like a lot of things, it tracked with vague ideas from video games and fantasy in his world enough that it wasn’t that hard for him to visualize. “And it’s normal that I can’t feel it?”

“Yes. It’s not something you can feel, in its passive form. Unless you are running out, in which case it hurts a bit,” Spiny said. “Not that I know. I’m a wisdom and intelligence class too, you see.”

“Well, thanks. I think I get it now. Did you get… whatever you were supposed to get, out of that explanation?”

“Not yet. Maybe later, if you ever put any of that to use. Don’t let me down.”

The rest of the night was nice. Arthur offered to cook or make some more tea, and was promptly shut down by Ella, who insisted he was too tired. She wasn’t exactly wrong.

Instead, she shifted into full host mode, showering Arthur, Milo, and the rest with a seemingly unending stream of snacks, drinks, and general calories that left all of them distressingly full. Arthur noticed that nobody held back on eating here. He hadn’t noticed a single person in this new world that wasn’t in pretty decent shape, craftsmen included, and that seemed to have implications for how people approached food. When the opportunity came, people ate well, at least from what he had seen so far.

I wonder if majicka plays a role there. It has to come from somewhere, after all. Maybe being mystical has metabolic implications.

Arthur himself so full by the end of the night that when people staggered out under the weight of cookies, sandwiches, and other goodies that he didn’t even notice as Mizu left. He made a mental note to thank her later, for both the flower and water.

As he drifted off to sleep, it occurred to him that it might mean something beyond the obvious when a water demon gave you a gift of water. He would, he decided, ask Milo about it later.