My Own True Calling 45 - Eating Our Own Tail (Patreon)

Being forced to spend a couple of days resting in bed by the ship doctor gives us a lot of free time to explore our new condition. Not even Captain Jira will gainsay Talla when it comes to the health and safety of the crew, but we’ve gotten so used to the constant hustle and bustle of ship life over the last month that it’s genuinely difficult to fill the time.

The most obvious thing to do is figure out how exactly [Arcanophage] works. For all that Maggie panicked when the curse attached itself to us without her input, its benefits probably outweigh the newfound need to consume magic like a dungeon monster. It’s just a matter of finding the best way to fulfill that need. Our supply of tinctures and mana candles is limited, so we can’t rely on those forever.

Attempt number one was to simply feed ourselves the same way we’ve been doing for Nipper. The mana candles we occasionally slip him are decadent treats, but not necessary for his continued survival. Usually, it’s enough to just give him little motes of magic that we gather via [Pyrothaumaturgy]. Maggie’s best at it, but at this point even I have enough fine control over the basic form of the skill to create heatless flames full of magic for Nipper to snack on.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. There’s two reasons, as I understand it. First, Nipper is much smaller than we are, even accounting for the extra mass he keeps shunted away into another dimension. He just doesn’t need as much food as we do, magical or otherwise. The second problem is a bit more involved.

“Basically, even though the—let’s call it astral matter—comes from the environment around us,” Maggie explains, “the act of gathering it into a spell is still taxing. It doesn’t feel like much in the moment, but we don’t get enough energy from the spells we create to make up for that cost. We’re just eating our own tail.”

“I thought that magic basically breaks the laws of thermodynamics,” Allie muses. “We’ve always just been making energy from nothing, right?”

“Not nothing,” Maggie clarifies. “But definitely more energy that we’re putting in. What I mean is that it’s physically taxing. We could sit in bed all day without moving a single muscle, and casting enough spells would still tire us out.”

“Could we make up the difference by just eating more?” I ask. “The curse converts both ways, right?”

I bring up the exact wording again, just to be sure.

[Arcanophage]

You are unable to survive without consuming magic. Your body extracts magic from digested materials, converting excess magic into biomass and vice-versa.

“Maybe,” she hedges. “But I don’t know how the curse is going to define ‘excess’ and either way I’m pretty sure it will still feel like we’re starving.”

She’s right about that last part. Since almost the very moment the curse took root, we’ve had a new hunger looming over us. It’s like a craving that regular food just refuses to satisfy. The tincture Talla made Maggie take handled it for a while, but it’s been gradually returning ever since.

“I’ve got a different worry,” Allison chimes in. “If we’re already way bloated with all the extra magic we’ve been carrying around, is it going to start making us fat?”

I almost snap at her for worrying about that at a time like this, but it’s actually not an unreasonable concern. Now that our physical and magical presence have been entwined, is there some kind of balance that we need to maintain? This was all much simpler when we could just turn the trait off.

“I don’t think so, actually,” Maggie says. “The magic we’ve got stored up is already part of us. You can think of it as fully digested and processed. We’ve got a lot of it, but I don’t think any of it is considered ‘excess.’ Otherwise, why would we still be getting hungry?”

“So it’s already like, magical fat?” Allie asks.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Then it stands to reason that ‘excess’ isn’t a matter of balance,” I point out. “So maybe what it means is that if we eat more than we can process—either magically or physically—the other side will feed off of that excess.”

“So we can eat as much as we want without getting fat?!” Allie exclaims excitedly.

“Please focus on something else.”

“Sorry...”

Allie’s already a bit stressed about our appearance. She’s very attached to a particular body image, and even the amount of muscle we’ve been putting on recently has been bothering her. I don’t really hold that against her, but her vanity is creeping back in now that we’re comparatively safe.

“You already have the means to indulge without limit through my [Dreamwalker] class,” Evelyn points out. “Though now that I think of it, might that not be a possible solution to our problem?”

Which leads us directly to attempt number two.

[As Good as Real]

You and any guests retain a portion of experience and satiation from actions taken within your dreams.

The reason Reverie gets to cheat and gain levels while hiding in the depths of our subconscious, and also the reason we take half rations—which is actually closer to a third when accounting for how much smaller we are than the rest of the crew. Talla has repeatedly warned us that magical satiation cannot replace actual nutrients, but as a supplement it allows us to get by on far less food.

But, can it satisfy literal magical hunger? I’m calling this one a partial success. Just as the food we eat in Eva’s dreams can only partially replace our physical diet, it only partially replaces our magical diet as well. However, because the dream food is already magical, we don’t need to turn it into anything specific, and it actually covers our magical needs far more efficiently than our physical ones.

That said, it’s still not enough. After over a day of discussion, experimentation, and more than a little arguing, we all agree on the same conclusion.

“We need an external source of magic to survive,” Maggie sighs. “Either eating things that come from convergence points, or gathered for us by a donor like we’ve been doing for Nipper.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose and lean back against the hull of the ship. It’s not unexpected, but it is a little frustrating.

“So Talla, then,” I surmise. “Nobody else has the ability to gather magic like that.”

“Nobody here, anyway,” Maggie agrees.

“How much do we need, exactly?”

“Hard to quantify,” she hedges. “Not much, thanks to Eve’s skills, but I’m not sure how much that might increase once I’ve converted Nipper’s other traits into curses.”

“Wait, you’re still doing that?!” Allie interjects. “After what happened the first time?”

“Yeah? Obviously.” Maggie replies. “It’d be a waste to reject the entire skill just because of one accident, and I still need to get our astral movement back.”

I purse my lips and drum my fingers pensively. We do need that ability back—we’ve spent too long practicing with it to just throw it away now. On the other hand, Maggie’s been pretty unsubtle about her ulterior motives and if I don’t confront her about it now, I might not get another chance.

“Before we do that, I want to know something, Maggie,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Why did you push so hard with that first spell? We should have been able to accomplish the same thing by using two spells instead.”

After all, even Nipper has separate traits for converting food to magic and magic to biomass. We could have avoided all this if she’d just used her skills normally instead of always trying to push them to the limit.

“Pushing is how I got this class in the first place,” she argues. “Exploring the limits of magic is the whole point. I did it because I can. I fucked up—I’ll own that—but I don’t regret it. I learned a lot in the process.”

Maggie’s a terrible liar, but she’s good at hiding her intentions behind audacity. A few months ago, I might have begrudgingly left it at that, but I feel like I’ve gotten better at reading Maggie lately. Maybe it’s a product of all the combat practice forcing us to work together more closely, or maybe I’m just feeling a little more confident today.

“Let me rephrase the question,” I deadpan. “What exactly are you trying to save the [Matter Conversion] trait for?”

“Uh...” she hesitates. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Yes she has. I know she has! But now that I’ve caught her in a lie, I don’t know how to get anything more out of her before she just shuts down and refuses to answer. Thankfully, I don’t have to.

“Wait, yeah!” Allie exclaims. “You’ve been hinting at something for ages! And you already used the trait to mess with m—our body! No more spells or curses until you tell us what the frick you’re trying to do!”

“Ah shit,” Maggie groans. “Look, it’s not something sinister or anything, honestly! I just didn’t want to say anything because like—it might not work and I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I just thought it would be kind of cool if we could, y’know, change stuff. About ourselves.”

“Change stuff?” Allie presses. “Like what?”

“Nothing weird!” Maggie insists. “Just like, the length and color of our hair, or our eyes, make ourselves a bit taller, that sort of thing.”

That is...surprisingly much more tame than I was expecting. And also uncharacteristically vain, considering that Maggie cares least about our physical appearance. After all, back when we first reached the second tier, she was the only one advocating to evolve our species to...demi...fa’aun.

“Were you trying to force us into a species evolution?!” I demand. “To make it so that we’d have no choice but to become non-human with our next tier?”

“What?! No!” she answers with unexpected force. “I mean, not exactly. I—”

“What the frick do you mean ‘not exactly’?!” Allison shouts.

“Let me explain!” she pleads. “I figured that if we could make temporary changes to our body, we could each have our own preferred look. Then people could tell us apart, and we’d all be more comfortable in our body!”

“So you risked making permanent alterations,” I seethe through gritted teeth. “No—caused permanent alterations to my body, just because you’re unhappy that we stayed human?”

“Allie, hold on,” Violet tries to interject.

“No!” I insist. “This is too much. Maggie, I try to be fair to you, but I can’t just let you infringe on—”

“I’m not doing it for me!” she interrupts. “I don’t give half a flying fuck what we look like! Being a sexy witch is a state of mind, not a matter of appearance. But you’re not the only one who feels uncomfortable when your body looks wrong—you’re just the one who’s already got the shape she wants!”

“Wha—” I blink. “You mean Evelyn?”

“Duh!” she retorts. “And I was trying to keep it a secret because I wasn’t sure I could make it work the way I want it to, and I knew you’d freak out the second anybody even hinted at a permanent change. I thought it would be better to just say nothing—then if it works, everyone’s happy and if it doesn’t, then nobody gets let down.”

Ugh, it’s such a Maggie thing to just soak up all the negative possibilities on her own. Did she really think that she couldn’t just talk this over with us? I don’t even think it’s a bad idea, necessarily, but...but she’s probably right that I would have flipped on her about testing out any changes. I sort of already did.

Heck, even now I’m really uncomfortable with the idea. Temporary shapeshifting would be neat and all, but it’s probably way harder than it sounds, and everything between the status quo and the perfect ideal she describes feels all kinds of icky to me.

“Blurgh, I don’t want to think about this right now,” I grumble. “Can we agree not to mess with that kind of magic again until we’ve had a chance to talk it all through. For real this time?”

“Yeah, fine,” she mutters. “I was gonna tell you about it soon anyway.”

“In the meantime, there’s something you can do for us while you’re already in front, Allie,” Violet adds.

I sigh and deflate into the bunk. No rest for the wicked. “Sure, I guess. What’s up?”

“Someone needs to ask Talla if she can let us feed on her magic until we can find a better alternative,” Vi explains.

“And by someone, she means you,” Mags adds.

I cover my face with my hands and groan. “Yeah, I got that. Thanks.”