Alvaro's Testing Day (Patreon)

This story is set two years and four months before the events of Mana Mirror begin

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Alvaro stared at the black door in anticipation. He was sixteen years old today. Most people couldn’t get their mana tested until they were eighteen, but having a Goetíea Librarian as a mother did offer a few benefits.

Even if she was always away on Public Library business, and…

Alvaro squashed that thought before it could get too out of hand.

The black door opened.

“Alvaro?” came a voice from within.

Alvaro rose and stepped inside. The door hissed shut behind him, and he jumped and let out a noise that wasn’t very dignified before looking around the room.

It was all made of dark woods, with old fashioned woodburning sconces set into the wall that made Alvaro think of sixteen hundred Orthodox, or four hundred Mossfordian, though he understood why everyone hated the Mossfordian calendar.

Any country that decided to start a new calendar based on their founding date was just posturing, at least in Alvaro’s opinion. Especially when there was a perfectly serviceable Orthodox one that almost every other country used…

A man coughed, and Alvaro snapped out of his daze and forced himself to meet the woman’s gaze. The man was tall, uncomfortably so, at nearly seven feet, and so slender that he couldn’t help but wonder if it was a medical condition.

Then she spoke, revealing a mouth full of catlike fangs, and Alvaro realized that she wasn’t a human. That explained it.

“Are you Alvaro Pérez, son of Sophía Pérez?” the cat-woman asked.

“Yes,” Alvaro said. The magic inscribed in the floor glowed for a moment, and Alvaro thought he could see the faint glow of mana in the air around him.

“You consent to this early mana and legacy test for humans of your own free will?” she asked.

“I do,” Alvaro said, and once again the floor’s magic flashed.

“Very well,” she said, flicking her fingers out wide. Mana flooded out of her and two lights in the floor began to glow, a blue and pink light swirling together and up Alvaro’s feet, then crawling his legs, then over his head and into his hair. He shifted his glasses subconsciously.

“It seems we may have a potential member of the Notoria or Palina Librarians on our hands. Assuming you want to follow in your mother’s footsteps, of course,” the cat-woman said. “The test indicates mental mana and knowledge mana.”

“Which color is which?” Alvaro asked curiously.

“Pink is mental, blue is knowledge, but that’s really not a very good indicator. That’s entirely cultural and based on the individual. In the old Aleki empire, for example, life was black, and death was white, even though life is usually seen as green now. And even within a culture, it’s shaped by your perception. An Aleki life mage may view life as black, yes, but maybe they view it as yellow. It doesn’t really matter.”

“Interesting,” Alvaro said, and he meant it. If he’d been in his right mind, he might have actually had a full conversation with the woman about it, but right now, he was still jittering with nerves. “Does it say what my legacy is?”

He could only pray that he hadn’t inherited a legacy from his parents. His mother’s legacy, Plenary Destruction, would be completely useless with his mana types.

And his father… He’d prefer to not have to carry a memory of that man with him every day.

“Saturation,” she said after a moment of studying the spell. “I haven’t heard of this one before. It’s interesting looking, though. The more a spell takes up in your mana garden, the more powerful its ingrained effect will be, given that the spell is efficient.”

“That’s true of most spells,” Alvaro pointed out. “I mean, there are exceptions, especially with spells that are built really poorly, but I don’t want a horribly inefficient spell.”

He wasn’t sure how he felt about his legacy, if he was honest with himself. On one hand, he was glad that it wasn’t one of his parents, but on the other hand, it was pretty underwhelming.

“Yes, it is,” she said. “This magnifies that natural effect, however. If you learn the Analyze spells, for example… They usually take up a pretty large amount of the mana-garden, compared to other spells. For you, the ingrained sensory effects that it grants you would be made far stronger than that of other people who had ingrained it. Probably two or three times stronger, in fact.”

His eyes widened as he went through the implications of that.

“That means a full gate consumption type spell would be even stronger for me than for a normal person. It would be maximally strong, in fact, as strong as my legacy would even be able to push it. Maybe an entire order of magnitude stronger.”

The cat-woman’s eyes narrowed to slits as she stared at him.

“Yes indeed… So what are you going to do with that information?”

He began to pace back and forth across the ritual room, thinking out loud.

“Most full gate consumption spells are second gate,” he said. “That way, you can bind them as soon as you become a Spellbinder. I need to do it before that.”

He paused as he felt the need to correct himself.

“Well, either that, or they’re built for Arcanists and beyond, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to wait so long, I need this to be first gate.”

“And give up the jump mana strength?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said seriously. “Those type of spells aren’t going to care too much about mana strength anyways, and my legacy should cover that and then some. Besides, I’m going to need Analyze Mana Garden, which is second gate. I’m also going to need Call Information, Locate Object, ”

“You’re giving up Analyze Mind’s imbued effect, though,” the tiger pointed out.

A small, fierce grin grew over Alvaro’s face. It wasn’t really as confident as he was pretending, but… He funneled his ungated mana into a spell and began to write in the air, glowing lines emerging from his fingertips. After a few minutes, he’d drawn out a spell in the air.

It was a conceptual diagram, not an actual spell – funneling mana into that formation wouldn’t actually do anything at all, but it was the kind of thing that, if he went to actually fill it in, would serve as a skeleton for a real spell.

“No, I’m not. I’m going to keep that as one of the points of the spell.”

The cat-woman eyed it curiously.

“You’ve allocated an awful lot into defense and sensory abilities. Most people would try to increase their ability to think. The actual mental enhancements seem to be more in line with strengthening your mental energies, which would help you get through stuff, sure, but it won’t serve as a…”

She trailed off as Alvaro began to draw a second spell in the air. His mana was beginning to run dry, but he had enough for another concept sketch.

“That’s where the knowledge mana comes in. It’s going to handle computations and process information.”

“That will need a lot of mental energies…” she said, then stopped herself. “Which, you’d already have, because you’re enforcing your mind’s framework.”

“The trouble is trying to break open my gate without a spell,” he said. “But I think I should be able to pull it off, at least for my first gate.”

“Indeed,” the cat-woman said. “Someone else could batter them down for you. Less than ideal, but it may be necessary for you. But there’s one very, very big problem that you’ve seemed to have overlooked in your zealousness to get this done.”

“What?” Alvaro asked, tilting his head curiously. The spell diagrams dissolved into the air behind him as he ran out of ungated mana.

“The actual spellwork itself,” she said. “If you’re able to allocate at those percents and get the structures for mental energy and internal knowledge modifications correct, then you’d be a primes-known terror, especially as they had time to grow, and you could add in more functions or enhance the existing ones.”

“I can find them,” he said. “There’s been a huge amount of work done on these sorts of spells, and I know I’ve read about a few mental shielding effects that are full gate consumption spells build for the first gate. Didn’t Lydyth the Mindscraper do something similar?”

“She did, but she was also an Arcanist, who knows what they’re capable of?” the cat asked.

Alvaro shot her a confused look.

“You should know as well as I do? We have plenty of references about the powers of fifth gate spells. Sure, I’m not supposed to read the spells themselves yet, because it’s dangerous, but I still know the general park that the spells are in. Besides, she wasn’t an Arcanist when she built her mind shielding spell.”

“Eh,” the cat said, seemingly unbothered by the fact. “Truth is, I don’t… Care. I’m just here to get paid.”

Alvaro briefly wondered if that was why they were stuck with mana testing duties, rather than actually working with the books, gathering information, designing new things, searching out lost historical knowledge, or working on librarian politics.

Sure, most people hit a plateau around third gate, but if you didn’t love books, why would you want to work in a library?

That was mean, though, so he banished the thoughts.

“Judging by the fact your very first project as a mage is designing a pair of highly ambitious spells, I’m guessing you want to become a Notoria Librarian?”

That actually gave Alvaro pause for a moment. While there was no way that he’d ever want to work in the Goetíea or Theurgia branches, all of the other three did call to him.

The Notoria… He liked spell design, but did he want to spend the rest of his life designing new things?

He wasn’t sure.

“I’m going to become an Almadel librarian,” he said. That was the biggest branch of librarians, the branch that everyone started at in the library without a solid reference. It would give him access to plenty of information for designing his spell. If he wanted to do something with the Notoria or Palina librarians, he’d be able to transfer out of Almadel.

And if he didn’t, he could rise through the ranks of Almadel, and deal with more of the management of the library itself.

The cat stared at him. It was clear she was judging him – which was fair, if he was honest to himself.

And she kept staring at him. And kept staring at him.

“Hello?” Alvaro asked.

The cat-woman did not respond.

Alvaro waved in front of her face.

“Helloooooo?” he asked.

“You don’t lack ambition, do you?” came a kind, feminine voice. It wasn’t his mother’s, not exactly, but it was oddly similar. He turned around, but he couldn’t find the speaker.

“Who are you?” Alvaro asked, unable to keep a quaver out of his voice.

“I am the Owner of the Libraries,” the voice said. “You read through these books. I look forward to watching your development.”

As she finished her sentence, Alvaro suddenly knew which books to read, and where he could find them.

Most of them could be accessed by anyone, general information about the mind, about magic, about math, and about other useful topics.

Some were spells anyone could access.

A few of them were hidden behind Jade access, but that wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

One of them, though… It was technically Jade, but it was locked behind powerful wards – it contained incomplete research notes on mental energy underlays that had been gathered by a horribly unethical mind mage two centuries ago, and it contained some of the methods she’d used to dissect people’s minds.

Not spells. Methods.

He shuddered.

He also knew just how to get past those wards. In a space as complex and layered with wards, enchantments, spatial pockets, and other magical effects, there were always going to be a few weak points.

There was a small hole in the wards, a tiny one. One that was just big enough for him to snake his hand through at just the right angle to disable the wards. It’d only take them down for a few seconds – time enough to grab the book and dash back to his room.

It would also trigger the ward’s self-repair functions, so he could probably only use it twice – once to get it out, and once to get it back in.

He looked into the air, not sure where to look.

“Thank you,” he said.

“If you want to thank me, put the knowledge to good use.”

The cat-woman unpaused and started to speak, but Alvaro ignored her.

He had research to do.