by Roharp17
Danny was hesitant to move toward the second wall. The floor and walls appeared to be made of moving flame. It was as if the flame was trapped in the surfaces themselves. Once again there were ten pedestals with three books, "Fire Affinity". Like the last area this one contained all his knowledge he had acquired about fire. His chemistry classes helped here, as a flame can be created under many different conditions. Once again he discovered his ruminations on how to create flame with mana. While his logged theories varied, they all seemed to point in a definitive direction.
The remaining three areas housed "Air Affinity", "Water Affinity", and "Life Affinity". The water affinity area appeared to be in the middle of a brook. The pedestals for the air affinity area were floating on clouds. The life affinity area was fleshy, and Danny chose to access these books from afar. Danny was apprentice level three for all affinities. His knowledge gained from his previous life could only take him this far. He wondered if he had specialized in aerospace engineering or studied to become a doctor, whether air or life would have gained any additional levels.
Turning back toward the table in the middle, he noticed it had a bookshelf built into the side opposite the door. Moving closer, he found a single volume of "Mana Manipulation". Focusing on them, he found all the knowledge he gained by being able to move the smallest amount of mana whilst unlocking it. He figured he should explore moving his mana more.
A note from Roharp17
Edited by SkrmnMrgsm
Chapter 6
Danny left his sanctuary and opened his eyes to a dark room with his mother lying next to him. Night must have come while he was exploring his expanded sanctuary. His mom must have carried him upstairs without him waking. He felt tired and realized that visiting the sanctuary could not replace sleep. Yawning, he turned on his side and went to sleep.
In the morning he awoke to the sounds of his mother leaving the bedroom. Most days his family, besides his mother, were gone for the majority of the daylight hours. He hadn't figured out where the other children went. Before his mother came to check on him he decided to try out a little magic.
*Alright, baby steps Danny, baby steps*, he thought, before laughing. Danny's little baby giggle filled and echoed in his empty room. Hearing him, his mother came in smiling.
After breakfast, and some changing, Danny was left in the main room near the hearth. He could not only hold his head up but he could sit up as well. Looking around, he could see farther than a few months before but it was still blurry. Frowning, Danny instead focused on the mana within his body. How much did he have? He could feel the mana coursing through his body and assumed it must be a huge amount! Raising his hand he... didn't know what to do.
Trying again he raised his hand and thought about fire. Fire! Danny quickly stopped thinking about fire, as he realized he couldn't even crawl, let alone run away should something catch on fire. He raised his hand and thought about something safer, like air! The speed, the movement, the flow, the... Nothing was happening. His mana wasn't even leaving his body. It always felt to him as it was about to leap out of his body at a moment’s notice, so why not when he wanted it to?
Danny decided it was time to bring out the good old scientific method. What he wouldn’t give for a good composition notebook to write down his ideas. Even though he had photographic memory, sometimes looking over his ideas brought up new ones. He had already eliminated one theory, it was now time to eliminate a bunch more. He expected, like with all experiments, his discoveries will more than likely come from his failures. History was a long list of discoveries that were not followed by “Exactly what I predicted!” but by “That wasn’t supposed to happen…”, or the more popular “Oh shit! Wait, what?”
His knowledge about mana manipulation was all internal. Maybe he had to learn to move the mana out of his body before he could cast any of the elements. Focusing on the mana within him, he once again gathered a small amount with his will and pushed it out of his hand. This was different than his attempt to unlock his mana, as this mana was constantly in motion. It was like trying to pluck a fish from a moving river, not that he had ever tried that. He occupied himself this way until it was time to eat. One can't focus well on an empty stomach. He called to his mother in the other room in the only way he knew.
Later, Danny continued to try to manipulate his mana. One time he slowed the flow of mana through his arm. It scared him at first but there were no obvious negative side effects. Instead of trying to grab and pull the mana he just redirected it. This worked and, as the mana flowed to his hand, he felt the total amount in his body drop. This continued until he felt dizzy and he quickly stopped redirecting the flow. He had to fall over sideways from his sitting position in an attempt to make the room stop spinning. Lunch threatened to come back up. No, wait... it did. It's surprising what you learn to tolerate when you’re used to sitting in your own half-full diaper, but this really stunk. He let loose another round of skull-rattling screaming and crying, that must have spooked a horse outside because he heard it also cry out. Then he heard a stranger’s voice cursing at it. Danny stopped screaming and scowled.
He couldn't help but think, *Wow, is our house right next to a busy road?*
After she got him cleaned up, his mother chose to bring him into the backyard. There was a small shed out back and he thought he could make out a wall around their modest backyard. Danny considered it modest because his limited eyesight could just barely tell where it ended. The inside of the shed smelled funny, and he was placed in a basket in a relatively empty corner. He sat there and watched his mother work on what appeared to be some type of leather. After some time had passed she showed him the piece she was working on. He pulled himself up on the corner of the basket and saw that it was a landscape with fields and a mountain. It was pretty good. He made sure to do the smiling thing while trying to grab it. Appeased, his mother went back to work.
Inspired by her diligence, Danny returned to directing mana out through his hand. Turning his back to his mother, he held out his hand and began. This time he didn't wait till he felt dizzy but stopped right before. Well, right before turned out to be right before he almost lost whatever was left in his stomach. After waiting a bit the dizziness passed and he could feel the mana spreading through his body again from the presence above his stomach. He had thought earlier that these were his mana reserves but he was beginning to understand his whole body was the storage. The presence must be like a connection to the source of all mana, or something like that. So his body draws from this source through the lines that seem to follow his circulatory system. Then the mana is distributed throughout his body like a reservoir. So, as long as he didn't empty his body completely he wouldn't lose his lunch.
His body seemed to recover mana very slowly, and after waiting a while he could tell it would be some time before he could try again. It appeared his interruptions from before helped stop him from overtaxing his new abilities... and losing more of his lunch.
A note from Roharp17
Edited by SkrmnMrgsm
Chapter 7
Months passed and Danny worked on not just his mana, but talking and walking. He had learned the names of his family members. Many of the strange sounds required to speak their language held no English comparisons. So he decided to assign them names based on feeling. His father got the name Stan. Stan was a handsome guy with dark auburn hair and blue eyes. Stan was quick with smiles and erred on the skinny side. He liked to play with all the kids of the house at once. Being the smallest Danny just sat nearby until attention was centered on himself.
The two other women in the house he named Sarah and Barb. Sarah was a slender, tall, and a very pretty woman with black hair. When she moved it seemed as if she floated instead of walked. Barb, on the other hand, had short blonde hair and looked like she stepped out of a bodybuilding magazine. Even though she had a serious face, she was always very nice to Danny.
There were two older girls he named Jane and April. He was pretty sure th
ey were Sarah's daughters. They both had dark hair and thin features. He enjoyed playing with them and especially playing the baby card to get them to do things for him.
The only other boy in the house got the name Gary. Gary had light brown hair and Danny assumed he was Barbs kid because he was with her most of the time. He didn't interact so much with Danny as much as near him. Something to do with safety in number he guessed. After debating and agonizing over what to call the current leading lady in his life, Danny finally came up with the perfect name, Mom. It had everything he liked in a name, short, simple, and definitive. Danny was given a name which he memorized and learned to respond to.
Danny had come to a decision, before he learned to speak, that he would reframe from telling others about his condition. He would also play the part of the baby/toddler/child, until he was old enough for his strangeness to be seen as gifted. If a baby or toddler was to start talking in his old life, solving advanced algebra, and doing magic, society would laud them as a genius. If he remembered history right, those people who stood out when they were not supposed in ancient cultures, were deemed evil and killed in gruesome ways. Until Danny could find proof he wouldn’t be tortured, set on fire, or drowned, he was going to be the best unknown child actor in the world.
Walking was harder than he remembered, and why did everything have to be made from stone around here? He seriously needed to figure out how to cast a healing spell to get rid of these bangs and bruises. Danny could only roll his eyes as his mother just kissed them. He could guess she thought it built character to endure.
He eventually managed to make a tour around the first floor of his home. There was the main room, or hall, with the hearth, which was opposite the front door. On one side of the main room was a large dining table and chairs, and on the other was a small sitting area with comfortable looking sofas and chairs.
In separate rooms were the kitchen and pantry to one side. He wasn't allowed in either by himself yet. Stairs ran up behind the hearth in the main room, to what he was sure was more bedrooms besides just his mothers. He hadn't worked up the courage to climb the stairs by himself yet. Under the stairs by the kitchen was a door to the backyard.
On the opposite side of the main room from the kitchen was the room where he usually stayed during the day. Next to that was a small room with a primitive toilet, and another with a bathtub. Danny learned how the toilet worked when he was home alone with his mother and she left the door open so she could watch him play. There was also a spout next to the toilet that was used to fill fresh water in the bucket.
The bathtub was square shaped and made of stone. It had a spout that released warm to cold water depending on the time of day and weather outside. If you wanted hot water that had to be heated over the hearth or in the kitchen and poured in. Mom usually made Danny's bathwater warmer this way. His mother would take baths with him, which he found really awkward.
After his first few baths, Danny had looked over while his mother was drying herself with a towel. She was an attractive woman, but he already classified her as mom in his brain, so he preferred to not dwell on that. What had attracted his attention was the scars on her lower abdomen. At first he thought it was a tattoo, but as he looked closer he could see how someone had finely cut a pattern with great detail into her skin. Three circles, one inside the other, with a repeating pattern in between them. Then in the middle was a symbol similar to the ones for the elements but it was more ornate. Then two long jagged scars starting from outside the circles cut an "X" across them through the middle. Whoever had cut the "X" was someone different or had rushed. Danny reached out to touch it and his mother immediately stopped drying her hair.
Before Danny could react his mother slapped his hand away. A strange, dead, look was in her eyes before she seemed to come back to her senses. His mother reached down to pick him up, and Danny started to flinch away. His mother’s hands stopped and tears came to her eyes. She then knelt down and opened her arms. Danny ran into them and she hugged him and started to cry. Danny understood something traumatic had happened to cause those scars and wondered if it had something to do with his own special predicament. His mother never bathed with him after that.
* * *
Danny had finally managed to climb into a chair in his room downstairs. The reason was that this chair was next to a cabinet that was used as a bookshelf on top. He suspected that this was a sitting room that doubled as a playroom for the smaller children. He apparently didn't need to sleep as much as a normal baby, so he spent that time training his mana. Standing up on the chair, he reached out across the front of the cabinet. He could just barely reach the books on the shelf. His chubby fingers were able to slowly nudge the book he wanted off the bookshelf. Danny looked quickly behind him and listened. His mother had stepped outside and he knew with him being this young she would probably be back quickly. Getting off the chair he heard his mother come back in through the back door. Falling the last foot, he didn't waste time crying and pushing the book under the table that held the basket they used as his crib. The polished stone floors made sliding them easy. His mom walked in and he immediately rolled on his back and tried to grab his toes. He had seen a panda try this on TV once and remembered thinking it cute. It did the trick and his mom left smiling, thinking him safe and preoccupied. Fortunately she didn't notice the missing book.
Sitting up, Danny pulled the book out from under the bed. Their house had only a few books and, as far as he knew, they were all kept here. He needed one with pictures or this would be useless. He confirmed it was the book he had been after. He had seen Barb work on this book with Gary, who he was slowly suspecting was his half-brother. He had seen Stan be overly affectionate with all three women of this house, and Danny was still trying to decide how he felt about that.
Danny opened the book to find pages with pictures and a single word below each. Jackpot, thought Danny. He read through each page quickly memorizing the word on each page. Now all he needed was to match the letter combinations with the sounds. Danny noted that the symbol for the elements did not look anything like the lettering on these pages. The written language for this area must have evolved before the runes were discovered. Now that he thought about it, Danny had seen Gary and his mother work on this short book most nights. Gary must not have access to his mental sanctuary yet. Otherwise he would memorize it quickly. Maybe there was also a comprehension aspect to this photographic memory. This meant that Gary probably hadn't been taught yet how to meditate to enter it. A child Gary's age probably lacked the attention span to learn meditation. Danny couldn't remember if he had the photographic memory before he gained access to the sanctuary or not. He left that puzzle to figure out later.
Turning to the other books on the shelf, Danny crawled back over to the bookshelf and he climbed the chair. He saw some other books with spines that looked similar to the one he had read. He was impatient to start reading and learning more. Mana manipulating could only be done infrequently. Maybe every two to three hours, then in a few seconds he was almost empty and it was time to wait again. He noticed the number of seconds that it took for his mana to escape was slowly increasing. He had tried casting spells again with little success. He was pretty sure now that the skill books in his sanctuary implanted little hints into his memory that made him believe they were his own. Even with those hints he had hit a wall.
Not wasting any more time Danny grabbed the last two books on the shelf and was able to get them to fall on the chair before eventually falling onto the floor. The first one made it to the floor like a ninja, but the second decided to be a drama queen. With the loud slap of the book on the hard stone floor, Danny momentarily slapped his little hands to his forehead. Of course Danny chose that point to realize that in his impatience to get the new books he forgot to hide the old book back under the table again.
Looking from the old book to the new ones he quickly pushed the new ones as far back behind the cabinet as he could before waddling over to the book besi
de his crib. His mom came in right when he got to it and called out his name. She scolded him as she put the book back up on the bookshelf. She paused momentarily and looked around for something on the floor. Danny held his breath. His mother shrugged then moved the chair back to where it was supposed to be. Turning around she scolded him some more before bending over and picking him up to give him a hug. She then carried him with her out back to work on her leather creations.
It wasn't till the next day that Danny was able to retrieve the books from their hiding place. Fortunately Gary hadn't advanced yet to the books he had stashed, and no one noticed them missing. Opening the two books he found them both to have more pictures. The difference was in the number of words on each page. He chose the obvious next book in the teaching series and sat down to get to work. This book had appeared to teach actions associated with the pictures shown. The third book expanded upon the previous two books, using the words previously learned in sentences so you could understand the new words introduced were. Danny was a bit bewildered why they would stop their education at this point. The books had obviously been previously used, more than likely by the girls when they were younger. Maybe they waited till they could help the children unlock their mental sanctuaries.