suffering builds character | Glowfic Constellation

ivy-covered-walls

It's not that Saira is unfit or out of shape by normal standards. At the mundie school her parents forced her to attend, back home in Karachi, she was, through great effort, solidly middling in gym class.

Physical skills have never come easily to her, her body always slower and clumsier while her mind raced ahead. She didn't walk until she was nearly two, which terrified her parents, but she was casting her first baby spells at a much younger age than most wizard kids. She loves studying magic, learning languages, and reading books on every other academic subject she can get her hands on. Studying is easy, and usually fun. Exercising is difficult, frustrating, and boring, which makes it excellent for mana-building but did not exactly motivate her to put in the hours to persuade her reluctant body to get good at anything. Mediocre is fine. Mediocre lets you run away from mals.

Except that now she's in the Scholomance, where being able to run away from mals faster than everyone else is a survival skill, and most of the other people here have spent much longer than her in this meat grinder of natural selection. A few months into term, most of the people even less prepared than her have already been picked off, and "mediocre" is starting to look like "bottom of the pack".

There's this English saying she read in a book somewhere: "You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you." Saira can run faster than the mals, mostly. But, when a nest of skittering creatures come boiling out of the supply cupboard, everyone else in her Intro to Shop class can run faster than her.

An enclaver with Saira's abilities would be fine. Her aptitude as an incanter would make her valuable enough for her clavemates to protect her at their own expense, or recruit desperate indies to be her human shields. But Saira isn't an enclaver, and she's not good at making friends or sucking up to powerful people—another skillset she neglected because it was harder and less rewarding than academics—and she hasn't found an opportunity to get in with a group for protection yet. For now, she's on her own, surviving on that knife edge where one stumble can be deadly.

She stumbles, and her flailing arm knocks somebody's half-finished artifice off the workbench—

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ivy-covered-walls

"... I think so?" Lady Celestia would have mentioned if this message was that time-sensitive, probably.

togs-of-war

"Great."

He turns back to his conversation about which areas of the forest these knights have scouted for possible bandit hideouts.

ivy-covered-walls

Ooookay. What...is she supposed to do now.

Does she just stand here like she's in a queue to talk to this guy? It's not as though she has anywhere better to be, per se, but this courtyard is loud and busy and smelly and she would rather not be here any longer than necessary.

She has a feeling she'll lose her place in the queue if she leaves, though, so she keeps standing there looking incredibly uncomfortable and waiting for Captain Rolith to get back to her.

togs-of-war

Maybe a minute passes before another knight rushes up to Rolith.

"Captain! We need to do something about these vermin—"

"Report."

ivy-covered-walls

Hmm. What kind of vermin problem is serious enough to get the captain involved when he's already busy dealing with at least three other problems? Something more like mals than rats or bugs, maybe? Saira listens in a bit more intentionally.

Oaklore Keep

"...scouts ran into a group of scavengers in the woods near the Keep, and tracked them back to that bridge—you remember, Captain, the one they were repairing? Well, seems like they finished it, and now they've got a highway over to our side of the cliffs!"

togs-of-war

"And ten to one the vermin have it rigged to blow if we dare to cross it to root them out at the source," Rolith muses. "There might be a way to use that, though; perhaps if we can trigger the explosives ourselves...?"

He diverts a passing servant to fetch someone called Sir Vivor.

ivy-covered-walls

What kind of vermin repair bridges and rig explosives?

—oh no, oh no, they're talking about people—

ivy-covered-walls

Saira doesn't like this dream anymore. She wants to wake up.

Failing that, she wants to help those people. But what can she do? The knights won't even let her deliver a message; they probably won't listen to her about their enemies being people. They probably know that already and just don't care. She doesn't have enough information here to know how to start fixing this.

ivy-covered-walls

...what she does have is a translation spell that will let her talk to anyone she meets. Maybe she could go and talk to some of the "vermin"? She could even offer to take a message from the knights, which would also give her more information about how they view the situation.

togs-of-war

While Saira was thinking, Rolith pivoted to a completely different conversation with some servants about supply logistics and the food stores in the keep. He's now quizzing them about what they'll run out of first if "the current situation" goes on for another month. (The answer is apparently flour, "although it depends how much damage there's been to the garden".)

ivy-covered-walls