site/writes/area-of-effect.md

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2023-04-19 21:29:22 +00:00
El knew this was a stupid waste of her hard-earned mana. Nearly two years of constant effort to fill up thirteen mana crystals just so she can keep some hope of graduating alive.
But now that she's given it some cold, hard, totally non-depressive thought, maybe it is worth it if it'll keep her going long enough to get there.
That is, if the stupid school would stop giving her books on plague magic.
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If there was one thing that I hated more than the particularly headstrong and entitled breed of enclaver that seemed intent on making every miserable loser of a wizard in their immediate vicinity desire nothing more than to use every last bit of mana they'd stored to shut them up, it would be the friendly reminder of circumstances that at least one of them was in the same, gradually-teetering-towards-inevitable-capsize boat as me. Because then Id have to take the effort to push down the urge to seethe at the mere state of their existence, and remind myself to be the better person and treat them like human beings.
Or something close enough to that that Mum would approve of my actions and, were I still a little kid, give me ice cream or something as a reward for good behavior.
And I say this all due to the wonderful fact that one Miranda from the Austin enclave took the time out of a very productive lunch, in which I was super busy talking to my myriad of social connections, to announce to every other sophomore that she was, in fact, Miranda from the Austin enclave and not whatever other name she'd had before. At which all the other enclavers made absolute sure to vocalize some gesture of support and acceptance while a good half of them poorly concealed the all-too-familiar grimace of discomfort they'd easily give me without a second thought.
This normally wouldn't bother me—not any more than it does on a typical day in the *sanctuary to all the wise-gifted children of the world*—but it just so happened that I had already been having a frustrating ~~week~~ ~~month~~ ~~year~~ existence. Which is why, after yelling into my pillow for about an hour after the start of curfew, I was sitting on the flimsy desk chair at the edge of my room, yelling at the delightful scenery of the void for fucking anything that would make the part of my brain that was increasingly crying bloody murder on the mere concept of also having a physical body of some sort shut the absolute hell up.
"You could at *least* give me something that'd let me do something *useful* for once! Instead of giving me crumbly scrolls to summon the armies of the undead, give me a *fucking* medical book!"
It threw an old, thick book of medical spells and potions written by a pair of French and Spanish healers back in the 1740s directly at my face in petty retaliation, knowing that I'd be sitting here for the remainder of the night translating every last page in hopes that I'd find something at least mildly useful. As well as making clear that it sees the most reasonable response to a student having a hard time to be to throw *more* academia at them. So of *course* it would be the Spanish version of the book that the school would throw at me, not the French that it knew I was more familiar with *because it's the school and could see how I was doing with each language*.
Regardless, I didn't expect much success out of my stupid idea to look for an alternative to a spell so expensive that even the most fortunate enclavers wouldn't blow their abundance of power-shared mana on while still inside this cylinder of misery. Not if they planned on getting out *alive*, after the other members of their enclave realize that over half the mana they'de painstakingly built for years was sucked up by the trans kid. If there were such an alternative, I was pretty sure one of Mum's circles would have managed it in the half-decade since I told her that being a guy just wasn't for me.
The especially fun thing about being trapped in the Scholomance smack in the middle of puberty by design, was that you therefore didnt get to use any Mundane medications for anything, not unless you intended to use them in the brief window before they expired *and* blow a chunk of your weight allocation on at most half a year's supply in the process. If you could, more students would at least be bringing some cold medicine for when they inevitably get a nasty one right before an exam—speaking from experience—and I would have probably brought some of what I wished I had right now.
I had few doubts that, had she tried to, Mum could have easily gotten it anyways. Given her luck, she'd decide she wanted to do so and bump into some fancy doctor who'd be all too willing to give her anything she asked for, in exchange for a few meditation sessions and a chance to face his conscience over some medical error he made a decade prior. Considering the odds of us getting even remotely as much mana as we'd need for me to magically transition, something along those lines was the plan even before I ended up here.
Unfortunately, I had increasingly strong doubts about getting to the point where a plan like that would be reasonable. Instead, I was still awake far later than was advisable, trying to figure out if I could do something monumentally stupid without screwing myself over.
I was at least lucky enough that the text had a—mildly singed and faded and only partially readable—table of contents in the front, so any other healer smack in the middle of some medical emergency could potentially figure out what to do in the nick of time to stop someone from dying of dysentery. Or whatever health problems were common to mid-18th century wizards.
Unfortunately, the authors also decided it would be useful to throw in information about a wide variety of spells that would *cause* a significant portion of the ailments their text provided solutions for, presumably so others could verify that their cures worked in a controlled environment or something. At least, that's what I gathered from the slightly out-of-date Spanish prose.
Which probably explained why the Scholomance even decided to give me a potentially useful book so quickly: because these idiots spent a good seven pages going over every way the bubonic plague had been inflicted by some dickhead wizard who was angry at his neighbor or something, and the minor ways the passage of time and variations in translation made the spell incantations increasingly deadly and destructive. And then they spent two pages on some incredibly long spell that would cleanse one whole person of the most common variants of the plague, before jumping into another half dozen pages on smallpox.
Which I guess would be useful if I ever decided to attempt to give my enemies a slow and painful death via infectious diseases they were probably immune to. Now that I thought about it, time had probably made those into some of the *least* deadly spells the school had given me. Hurrah for modern medicine, I suppose.
After some continued searching, I found a spell of immediate notice: a Farsi translation of an old Scythian alchemical recipe to synthesize conjugated estrogens out of, among other things, equine urine. Which, if you hadn't noticed, was neither within my affinity for magic nor comprised of resources one might have easy access to in the Scholomance. Furthermore, I didn't *know* Farsi. And, with it being a relatively uncommon language for spell distribution, I certainly didn't personally know any students I could ask for help. Assuming they'd even give me the chance to ask them for it.
So, I took note of the page in my notebook and continued searching the tome for anything else that might possibly allow me to do anything about the lump of meat known as the Body of El Higgins. Which I continued to do for about 40 minutes before coming across, to my luck, a seemingly useful spell in French, about half a page long, noted in the text for alternating hormone production on a group of people—with a particular focus on its uses for treating sex-based diseases in individuals. According to the Spanish description, the spell was used by a group of healers on both themselves and a patient, and they would then isolate themselves from the patient and recast the spell to undo possible side effects. It was tradeoff to make what would typically be an even more mana-intensive spell considerably less so: potential risks to the casters and their surroundings.
It took me a moment to fully process the consequences of this spell, and why the school may have placed given to me, before I realized. "You gave me a forced transition spell because you knew it would count as 'destructive' enough, didn't you." I deadpanned at the void across my desk. It didn't respond.
Considering I had no other choices due to my affinity for mass destruction, the following evening had me searching for as isolated of a lab room as I could possibly find—one as far down and centered as humanly possible, so to avoid any chance of hitting students up above in their rooms—and preparing to cast an unreasonably cheap transition spell that might accidentally give every cis person in the school dysphoria. And, because of how hormones work, I wouldn't know if anyone had been affected for a *while*. Which was just great. I certainly didn't notice any immediate effect when I cast it on me, that's for sure.
I honestly didn't really *mind* my body *too* much before I actually went ahead with the incantation. I had no issue being tall, I looked feminine enough that many didn't even realize what I am, and I was rather happy about the hints of muscle that daily mana-building exercise had given me over time. I just knew that it was starting to focus on *changing* in ways I was most definitely *not* looking forward to.
So I took *extra* care to make sure I was casting this right and with ideally minimal damage (which is incredibly hard if you're me) and, when I was done, I was pleased to see it had barely even touched my personal mana store, let alone affecting Mum's crystals. I got what I wanted, and I didn't even have to *think* about cheating.
Now hopefully nobody else got caught in the crossfire.