"Oh, stop it with the mind reading, you."

"I mean, damn, isn't Wizard Mara meant to be a pain to impress?"

"You're trying to say something else."

He sighs. "I do not think I was really fooling myself about this, it's not like it's not normal, the Academy is meant to be temporary. But, I don't know, I guess I got attached. I'm going to miss you."

...okay that's more vulnerability than he'd been expecting. He gets up from where he was packing his stuff to walk over to Taharqi and hug him.

Taharqi hugs him back, resting his chin on Vallynn's shoulder.

"I'm not dying, you know," he says, pulling away after a few seconds. "You can always visit me in Geffen. I guess I can't visit you so easily since who knows where the Rogues Guild is."

"Sure, but teleportation is a lot more hassle than sharing a room. We are necessarily going to see each other less often."

"I suppose..." Wait, is Taharqi, like, in love with him or something.

He looks at Vallynn's face and cracks a smile. "No, I'm not."

He grins. "I know you're not. It just occurred to me, is all."

"Well, whenever you start looking for party members, come looking for me."

"I still don't know where your guild is."

"Eden can get ahold of me."

"Fair enough. I will. And you do the same, if you're ready before I am."

"Of course I will. Where else would I find someone with so much dick game?"

Vallynn rolls his eyes, but lifts his arms up to wrap them around Taharqi's neck. "I'm sure if you try hard and believe in yourself you'll find someone. But if you like it so much you should fuck me one last time before I go."

"...were you under the impression I was going to let you go without that? I would physically pin you to the bed if you tried."

"Is that a threat or a promise?"

"Try it and find out."

A hundred years ago, give or take a couple, the world started to drastically change. Magic became much more abundant over a short span of time; acquiring Skills and improving Stats, which used to be much harder to do to any meaningful degree, suddenly became the sort of thing nearly everyone could do at least a little bit of; monsters became stronger and more numerous; haunted sites became breeding grounds for the undead; the Dark Lord of Glast Heim reappeared after centuries of dormancy; Baphomet and his minions twisted the forest north of Prontera into a twisted maze where space doesn't make sense; and so on. Many people, including the Church of Odin itself, believe that's when Ragnarök began, and the emergence of Surt from beneath the sands in Morrocc a few years ago served only to fan the flames of that belief.

While it took nearly forty years for Eden Group to be founded and for the tides of destruction to be, if not reversed, at least slowed nad halted, more mercantile powers were a lot quicker to take advantage of the situation. In particular, teleportation and resurrection—previously closely-guarded secrets by the Church which only its most powerful and prominent members could do (we're talking less than two dozen people at a time in the whole world)—became so much cheaper and easier that an entire company was founded around them: the Kafra Corps. Headquartered in Al De Baran, they provide three main services, for a fee: teleportation to anywhere they have operatives at, remote storage, and resurrection points, plus a subscription service.

Teleportation prices are standardised and proportional to distance between origin and destination, and subscribers get a discount. This is mostly to cover the cases where multiple hops are needed to get where you want to go; it's not particularly more effortful or costly for a given operative to teleport someone anywhere they're attuned to, but since operatives have a limited number of possible attuned destinations at a time it may be necessary to go through multiple people. The main exceptions to that model are the cities of Lighthalzen, Einbroch, and Einbech, in the Schwartzwald Republic, which have anti-teleportation fields that prevent anyone from teleporting in or out of their limits as well as within them. Since the Kafra operatives need to be stationed outside city walls, which can be meaningfully dangerous, the cost of teleportation to those places is substantially higher.

The storage services they offer come in tiers for different sizes of storage, the smallest one being a medium-sized crate and the largest one (only available to subscribers) being a fairly large room stocked with wardrobes, weapons racks, mannequins for armour, and a refrigerated area. Every time you wish to access one of your storage units you need to pay a fee, plus an extra fee the very first time you access a given tier of storage, which is when you get assigned a personal one. Subscribers don't need to pay any fees past the initial one, and if they wish they can have a Kafra employee fetch whatever it is they want to fetch rather than them having to go themselves.

Finally, the resurrection point service is a way to make death less permanent. It's only available to subscribers, and has an extra cost on top of that every time you die. The way it works is that you are provided with an enchanted jewel attuned to your soul with a contingent trigger; if it notices that your heart has stopped, it automatically teleports you to your saved resurrection point and casts a stasis spell on your body so that an employee can bring you back to life. Since resurrection can only work if the body is sufficiently intact, however, it's still not a get out of jail free card, and even after being resurrected you'll still be weak and damaged and need healing and recovery. You can also set the enchantment to only trigger after a set amount of time, in case you have someone resurrection-capable in your party and want to give them time to bring you back, but again, caveat that if it's been too long since your death you're not guaranteed to be able to come back. The enchantment is one-time, though, so the way they enforce the per-death fee is by only giving you a new one after you've paid.

The service Vallynn wants to make use of today is teleportation to Geffen, and the Criatura Academy specifically has its own Kafra operative on retainer with registered destinations for all of the main guilds the Academy trains you for: Geffen for mages, Payon for archers, Alberta for alchemists, Comodo for bards and dancers, the St. Capitolina Abbey for monks, and whichever mysterious place it is that rogues go to. Swordsmen and priests are the exception, since their guilds are in Prontera which is, roughly, just around the corner from Izlude itself.

With the Academy ticket Wizard Mara gave him, the cost of the teleportation is waived, and he can go straight to Geffen.

Geffen is not a very large city. Sure, it's bigger than Izlude, but that's not saying much, and Prontera definitely puts it to shame in terms of size and activity.

It is nevertheless very impressive.

Its walls form a circle around the tower, and the city itself is shaped in rings of increasingly lower level until you get to it, which means that it's taller than it looks from farther out and that you can see more and more of it as you get closer. Combined with the fact that it's nearly five times as tall as the next tallest building, easily visible from a distance away from the city itself, and you get an effect of pure awe, that feeling of being very small before something much larger than yourself.

As if that weren't enough, the city is very obviously magical. The streetlights, lit up at this time of day because of the overcast weather, are floating lamps with mage lights inside them. The plaza Vallynn finds himself at once he's gone through the portal is protected from the rain by an invisible dome of force. The fountain next to him has a statue made up of hunks of stone connected to each other by glowing magical tendrils to form the rough silhouette of a wizard with their staff held out in front of them, and though the staff is not physically connected to anything else that's where the water is spouting from.

It is, indeed, the city of magic.

While that's all very impressive Vallynn is, himself, a mage, so his appreciation of it is less "awe" and more "craftsman seeing ingenuous constructs". He can feel the shapes of the enchantments, the way the dome is paradoxically a water spell that redirects the rain and how the floating statue uses an effect that's similar but not identical to his own telekinesis spell.

Of course, to an onlooker that might be indistinguishable from awe: he's standing in place, staring at the enchantments, mouth hanging slightly open, ignoring the way the magic dome doesn't protect against the cold and he is definitely not wearing enough for it.

Eventually he does get sufficiently cold that it distracts him from the sight, so he finds a guard and asks them where the Mages' Guild is.