Face of Eternity : The Little Angel

-LEVEL UP! (Lv 16)-

-New abilities unlocked! Unpacking Lesser Support Magic data-

-…-

-Data unpacking complete!-

-You may now use the following abilities-

-Lesser Heal : Heal target of small damage-

-Lesser Curse Heal : Heal target of weak curse-

-Stardust Aura-

-Copycat Magecraft, (Lesser)-

Yeah! Level up!

It looked like I was able to use support magic now, which included a few useful things...

Lesser Heal was probably going to be really helpful in fixing up Indena right now. Its use was pretty self explanatory.

Curse Heal sounded cool, but I was afraid to find out what curses were.

Stardust Aura? That sounded interesting. Looks like that was a power that protected the user from darkness attacks by giving them the light affinity. Once again, I was kinda afraid to find out what that meant...

Copycat Magecraft was probably the thing that made me the most curious. What did that mean? Copycats were usually people imitating something, and magecraft was like magic Indena could use. Did that mean I could copy magic from a mage? That's what the description looked like at least.

Anyways, I began to cast the Lesser Heal spell on Indena. A light formed around my hands, but nothing seemed to be happening after that.

Apparently there was a semantic component I had to come up with. Semantic means talking, right? So I guess I needed to speak some sort of incantation.

“Hmm…” I had to think of something. It referenced that it needed to be something that got me excited for the spell, so… “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man! I’ll heal you up as fast as I can!”

The glow that hovered over my hands now sent out a pulse of energy into Indena. The light radiated around her and her whole body seemed to recover instantly.

As the light faded, her strength returned, but she didn't look as happy as I expected.

“Did you just use healing magic on me?” She looked like she’d seen a ghost. “Holy crap…”

Why did she make it sound like I was doing something awful?

"What's wrong?" I asked.

“It’s just…kids don’t usually use that. Nobody uses it. Healing magic takes your life force and gives it to another person. It ages you.”

Hmm…I didn’t feel like my life force was draining at all. I felt perfectly fine. Even my body reading zero changes to my age. Weird.

“I don’t feel different.” I shook my head.

“Maybe it's because you're not human?"

That might have been the case. It'd be worth looking into later. Just to be sure, I'd only sparingly use it for now.

She still looked like she needed a little more help though, so I tried to cast it again, but then a message popped up…

-Not enough IP-

IP? Here we go into the rabbit hole again…

-…-

So the HELP icon was flashing on my hotbar. I opened it up and noticed a few things had been unlocked on the list. I saw something called Mana points, Incantation points and Stardust points had been filed in.

-Mana points (MP) : Mana points indicate the amount of mana available to cast magical abilities, such as elemental magic, wizardry spells, witchcraft…etc. (See types of magic in HELP menu for a full list of ‘known’ magic types)-

-Incantation Points (IP) : Incantation Points are required to use support magic skills. Draws upon Up Mana energy.-

-Stardust Points (SP) : Stardust points indicate how much stardust reserves are available in the body.-

I noticed after reading those, there was a little readout in the upper right of my vision that gave me stats for all those three things. SP was at the top, MP was in the middle, and IP was last.

The gist of it seemed to be that these different points were required to use all types of magic. I only had so much to use at once. I'm assuming the number of points I had must have gone up as I leveled. Or maybe they'd go up the more I trained with them, not sure yet. RPGs can usually go either way with that.

“Hey, Shrimp?” Indena waved her hand in my face. “What’s going on? I thought you were gonna’ heal me again.”

“Oh, sorry. I got distracted looking at my stats.”

“Huh?” She didn’t seem to understand that. “Whatever. Just…are you doing it again or not?”

“I can’t. I’m all out of Incantation Points, so I can’t cast another spell yet.”

She gave me a really funny look, the kind that a caveman might give technology.

“This crap just keeps getting more and more like a video game by the second. Whatever.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

She clarified that she wasn’t mad, just confused at how I talked.

I considered explaining to her what I’d discovered, but I figured it might confuse her more. She was probably tired, so going over it wasn’t a good idea right now.

There was one thing I did want to ask though, it had to do with one of the descriptions I saw…what was Up Mana energy? I asked her that, since my HELP menu didn’t have anything on it.

“Up Mana…” She put a finger to her chin, “You got me there,” she shrugged. “Maybe your dad knows more?”

“It looks like it’s used for support magic.”

“Oh!” she cooed out. “Yeah, that’s something filtered out of mana then, like elemental magic. Didn’t know it was called Up Mana though.”

Her explanation was brief, but here it goes…

She said that mana was one big entity composed of several different parts. Depending on what you filter out of it, you’ll get different effects.

So for instance, Elemental Magic was something filtered out of mana with tattoos, like she had. Up Mana energy was also something filtered out of it as well, but used for support magic. She knew it as Faith, usually used by priests.

There was more stuff, but she was only familiar with Elemental Magic. Based on how there was Up Mana, I had to assume there was a Down Mana as well. Maybe that had to do with debufs.

You know something? Mana kinda’ reminded me of quarks a little bit with those names…I wonder if that was by design, or coincidence? Design being like, when mankind was first made and stuff.

You know what else, how were people made, anyways? Like, who were the first mommy and daddy of the universe? That was something I really wanted to know. I wondered if they were babies at one point, but who would have raised them?

Oh, duh! God must have made people! Paradox solved! But wait...where did God come from then? More mysteries of the universe...

“Hello, Shrimp?” Indena again waved her hand in my face. “Stop spacing out like that, I’m suffering over here.”

Her wounds weren’t so bad anymore, so she was exaggerating. But she did have a few more scratches and bruises that needed to be fixed up soon. She also had a tiny fracture in her forearm.

She asked me to help her bind up her arm with some sticks and cloth from her jacket skirt. We turned it into a makeshift splint. It wasn’t a good job, but it helped.

Thunder crackled above us, small droplets of rain hit our heads. Each moment the droplets become more plentiful. Soon we’d be in the middle of a nasty storm.

“We need to find shelter.” Indena said. “Come on, let's get moving."