Making my own spell weaker by not using a material component I already had would be pretty silly. So it at first seemed like learning I could go without didn’t mean much. However, if I were to try to apply the same logic to other things, I might come out with some significant advantages. For example, if I were to attempt to cast Contingency, I could take the 12 mana that cost plus 4 mana for Energy Ward, set up a trigger like encountering fire, and then-

  Completely fail to cast the spell. Well, that made sense. I hadn’t actually determined if I could go without a focus. Actually, it felt like something lingered for just a few moments. I wasn’t going to try again immediately as it was a costly experiment, but it was interesting to consider. There had to have been some way to cast Contingency before people knew the required focus. Or were spells not an intrinsic thing like I had been taught, instead created by people over time like much of this world’s literature would imply?

  It was an unfamiliar idea, but one that made more sense than spells just… existing. Especially when some of them seemed to have pretty narrow purposes.

  -----

  The next day, Old Shock had printed up some prototype statuettes for Midnight and I. The materials were cheap- comparatively- and there were no extra gemstones or anything… but they certainly looked like us. Just without color. Well, Midnight looked almost correct because his material was black to begin with.

  We had several things we wanted to test, aside from whether or not it would work at all. First, we repeated the same simple test. We had a lighter ready to produce fire so that we could trigger Contingency easily. There could be more obscure conditions than touching fire, but we weren’t ready to delve into something like that so early.

  I did my attempt first. It might not work at all, so drawing from the highest mana pool for testing first was best. I set the trigger conditions, focusing my mana on our statuettes. That was one of the things we were testing- how extending spells to a familiar worked with Contingency. We had certain assumptions, and acting first on what we believed to work was best. From my understanding, believing something would work and it not working meant it was more likely to really just be impossible, but if I didn’t believe something would work- even if it really should- it was unlikely to be as effective.

  If I could fully believe everything I tried, that would make me able to produce the best results all the time- but that just wasn’t possible. Unless I learned to trick myself on purpose.

  16 points of mana drained out of me. It was a good proportion of my most expensive spells. This time, however, I felt something lingering. Not active, but not gone.

  “You feel that?” I asked Midnight.

  He nodded. “It seems to be working. And for both of our statuettes.”

  “So now we try it?” Midnight asked.

  “Or we wait. We have to wait at some point, to test the duration.”

  My mind was on the spell, just lingering there and doing nothing. There was a good chunk of magic, but was the future active part significant? It was difficult to tell. It might be weaker.

  “I suppose we wait,” Midnight said. “Until we can at least estimate the duration.”

  Waiting was boring… but at least I could quickly estimate that something was indeed happening. I could feel the Contingency weakening after just ten minutes. That made it more clear to me that the contained spell was a bit less than intended. After half an hour, I had a good estimate of the total duration. We waited another fifteen minutes to be more certain, and I was confident that it would last about an hour.

  At that point, we triggered the spell. The lighter sparked, and the moment the flames wooshed towards my gloved hand the Contingency triggered. It was good to know that I didn’t have to be burned or even really comprehend the heat, though I knew the source was happening so maybe that was good enough. “We’ll have to test triggers more later,” I said. “Looks like it took hold on you as well. Without the Contingency in the way, it definitely feels weaker.”

  “Isn’t that normal?”

  I shook my head. “It should be the base strength, though if you can prepare it long enough in advance it would be worthwhile even at these extra costs. It should only work with one at a time. I suppose we’ll test that later.”

  “The next test is… me using it?” Midnight asked.

  “We can kind of assume that works,” I shrugged. “But it would be at your fatigue limit for these spells so…”

  “What are my options?” Midnight asked. “Just Energy Ward?”

  “Force Armor, technically, but I can’t see a scenario where you wouldn’t just cast it. Haste is… only within the range if you had upgrades. My fatigue point is 7 higher so I can cover anything up to Stoneskin, Variable Freedom, Fire Shield, or… Dispel?”

  Midnight tilted his head. “How would you even use Dispel in that scenario?”

  “If I knew some specific thing that was going to have a lingering effect on me, I suppose. But Mental or Physical Freedom might be better in that case. I might manage a generic ‘powers linger on me’, but that might be triggered by an ally accidentally?” I shook my head. “I just thought of it because it’s at the limit of the range.”

  “I need to get more levels,” Midnight said. “I feel like spontaneous Haste would be extremely useful. Like, if I get attacked?”

  “I’m not sure how that trigger would work, but yeah.” Another thing to practice. No wonder the good wizards were all old.

  -----

  In the end, we learned a few things. First, we could either enchant both our statuettes or just have the intent to share the spell when it triggered. Either way, we’d both get the effects. With the latter, we could have different Contingencies going for each of us. That meant two separate triggers.

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  “I should probably have Stoneskin,” I said. “That’s the most expensive one to use in the moment that I can frequently see a need for. But for any of these to matter we need to figure out what’s making things weaker, and have a longer duration. At this point, it’s just cheaper to cast Stoneskin ahead of time since the duration is basically the same.”

  “We have gemstones on order,” Midnight said. “It might take a couple weeks to get a high quality print, and longer to get actual carved ivory. What else?”

  “Magic eyelashes,” I said. “Also mercury. Which if I’m honest, I’m a bit concerned about carrying around. Though for Contingency, I think we can keep that in Storage since we won’t have to use it in the moment?”

  “Which do you think is more important?” Midnight asked.

  “The eyelashes,” I said. “I feel like those as a material component should be tied to the strength of the spell. Contingency might naturally make a weak spell without that. This is just a guess, but since the statuette is holding onto the spell that should determine the duration of Contingency. We should grab some mercury and test with just that.”

  -----

  I kept learning new and surprising things about magic. I’d considered myself something of an expert on the topic, but that was foolish. The bad thing was that I’d probably been teaching the Portal Squad wrong. The good news was that I could correct my mistakes. And with natural upgrades available, they were still growing at a more than acceptable rate even if I had been under informed about the truth of magic.

  As for training the Portal Squad, I wasn’t ready to share most of my new discoveries, but I could still answer some questions they had- and send communications to Sir Kalman for those things I didn’t know personally.

  Not every day was spent training. We had rest days, of course- though generally that just meant no experimentation and near-fatigue casting instead of no spellcasting, since it would be a waste to not use the mana we recovered. Natural improvements to spells should always be worked towards.

  Then there were missions. We were called out to deal with nearby villains or to help with certain emergencies where our powers fit. There were also patrols a few times per week, since deterring crime with our presence was even better than stopping it.

  -----

  “Alright,” I said to Midnight. “Mercury about half does it, but neither my eyelashes, yours, or any other portal power person seems to matter.”

  Midnight nodded seriously. “Rositsa’s work a little. Malaliel’s are better, but don’t seem to completely restore power. Do we know anyone more magical? Do we need better mercury?”

  “If we need to mix something else into mercury we’ll never guess it. I doubt we’ll ever get any mercury more pure than what we have.”

  We’d gotten eyelashes from at least a dozen members of the Brigade that seemed vaguely inherently magical, but super powers seemed to not really work. At best, they were less potent than we wanted. Jim might be inherently magical enough, but he didn’t have eyelashes. Relatedly, the one with the most eyelash to spare- Saveliy who watched over the physical library in the Brigade- didn’t count as magic. Well, he was just human. According to him.

  “Do we have to go back to my old world?” I asked. “Malaliel might be willing to keep plucking eyelashes, but at some point we owe her too many favors for that. Other than that, do we just ask Extra to introduce us to magical extradimensional people? I can’t think of anything else except…” as soon as the thought came into my head, I knew it was stupid.

  “Except what?” Midnight asked.

  “What I want to know is why yours didn’t count at all, with your natural bond ability.”

  “It’s not magic,” Midnight said. “That’s all I’ve got for you. It’s also normally really weak. But you avoided answering the question. What else were you thinking of?”

  “Magical girls,” I admitted. “I know it’s stupid but…”

  “Their abilities are magic, right?” Midnight asked. “Some sort of magic based around mana.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “We’ve confirmed that. But if not them, maybe Humuruns?” I pondered for a few moments. “I don’t know if it would make sense, but at least we could annoy a large number of people just a little bit if that works.”

  “It would be kind of inconvenient to go to another world,” Midnight said. “But at least there we’d be safe instead of trying to pluck eyelashes from a… rakshasa?”

  “Yeah, we’d be buying those if we had money,” I said. “Because there’s no way we’re hunting down something that’s extremely magic resistant.” Though maybe with guns…? No, better to not go down that particular rabbit hole.

  “Guys!” Midnight and I both turned to see Zeb running towards the table where we were eating lunch. “Squirrel quest!”

  “... What?” I asked.

  She jumped up and down excitedly. “Squirrel quest! Squirrel quest!”

  “You’re going to have to say more than squirrel quest for us to know what you’re talking about,” Midnight explained.

  “I got approved to go on a squirrel quest! With you guys, because my speech translator isn’t enough for most people to be comfortable with me running around alone.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.” We had agreed to do some sort of mission with Zeb. “So what’s a squirrel quest?”

  “I’m gonna make friends with all the squirrels,” Zeb declared. “Well, one or two of each species. Not literally all of them. I can’t bring Fluffy and Miss Flutter though, so Ceira will be taking care of them.” She put her front paws up on the table to get closer to us. “Since they’ll scare away the squirrels.”

  Zeb was usually the one responsible for that. But maybe she knew something that we didn’t.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll put the squirrel quest into our schedule.”

  “Yesss! Can we leave today? I wanna go now!”

  “We have to at least plan exactly where we’re going,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s easy. I know where every type of squirrel in the world lives!”

  “We have to actually be able to get to those places,” I pointed out.

  “That’s why you’re gonna teleport us!”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that accurate. We’d probably end up in the middle of the forest with no idea where we were.”

  “Perfect! Lots of squirrels live in forests!” Zeb declared.

  I thought about it for a bit. Midnight and I could bring a lot of food. And in the worst case, we could take a roundabout trip through another plane to get back to where we wanted.

  “We still need to make plans,” I said. “And we’re not just supposed to teleport past borders.”

  “That’s what the approval was for!” Zeb said. “You should have gotten the email!”

  “Was that what that was?” Midnight commented, clearly checking his own.

  I didn’t have notifications on. If anything was urgent, the Brigade wouldn’t be contacting me through email.