Bog Standard Isekai
Book 3. Chapter 10

Stepping through the door, he had to stop and make sure [Know What’s Real] didn’t go off, because everything was different. Streamers hung from the ceiling, colorful paper covered Hogg’s more reserved wallpaper, and a big banner covered the living room window that said “Happy Birthday Brin!”

Confetti hung in the air by some magic, swirling around but never landing on anything, sparkling silver and gold. Marksi darted inside and jumped at it, but even the quick pounce of a dragonling couldn’t catch it.

“What? No! You can’t be in here!” Hogg shouted. Sitting on a stool near the oven, Hogg was looking a lot better, and he could even walk around for a little. He huddled protectively over a cake. “It’s still too hot to put the frosting on!”

When had Brin even told Hogg about birthday cakes? They didn’t do cakes here. Sweets, sure, but mostly birthdays here meant dumplings. He might’ve mentioned birthday cakes one time when talking about his world and the old dummy had remembered it.

“Whoa. You guys didn’t have to do all this,” Brin said, looking around in awe. He wasn’t sure what the confetti was made from, but it wasn’t an illusion.

“Nonsense,” said Lumina.

“You couldn’t keep him out for twenty more minutes?” asked Hogg.

“What would be the point? Come, lunch is ready,” said Lumina.

She sat at the table, and rested her chin on her hands with both elbows on the table. Apparently, lunch wouldn’t be a formal event. Did he even remember how to eat without quoting this world’s version of Shakespeare?

Then he saw what was on the table. It was all his favorite things. No, more precisely, it was a few of the things he’d mentioned to Hogg or Lumina that reminded him of home in his old world. Steak sandwiches with fried onions and a cheddar-like cheese, fresh fruit, and fried potato-like tubers. Best of all, absolutely no mato or cold pork gravy to be seen.

None of this was how Hammon’s Bog birthday usually went; they weren’t really a big deal here. The anniversary of their System Day was the main event, which meant that everyone celebrated together. For birthdays there would be dumplings, and maybe a few gifts but also maybe not. No, they’d done all this for him.

He’d missed this. Even in his old world, he’d missed this. His most recent birthday as Mark had been with a few friends that he’d invited out, and he hadn’t even told them it was his birthday. The year before that had been alone, although he’d gotten a call from both his parents. But here he was, a child again, celebrating a birthday at home.

The sudden lump in his throat almost made it so he couldn’t enjoy his meal. Almost.

After lunch, Lumina held out a small package. Too small to be a spear or staff, he realized with a bit of disappointment. In Solia’s name, was he really reverting into such a little brat? Whatever was inside here, he was going to be genuinely grateful.

He opened it, and found a golden ring.

“[Inspect] it!” said Lumina.

Brin did.

The bearer of this ring is Brin isu Yambul. He is a legal ward and heir of Her Radiance Lumina, Lady and [Archmage], peer of the realm in Frenaria.

This ring cannot be worn by anyone except Brin isu Yambul. This ring will notify the owner if stolen. This ring will sound an alarm if stolen.

“This may open some doors if you ever need the goodwill of cooperation of the upper class. But that’s not all. Go on, try it on!”

He wondered if everyone would assume he was married if he wore a golden ring, but he didn’t think that was actually the case. In Hammon’s Bog they signaled their marital status by clothing styles, not jewelry.

Brin tried it on, and felt something a little odd. He’d never really felt this in an item before, but somehow he knew what it was instinctually, because it resembled the way some of his Skills felt. It was an interface for his magic. He could push mana into it, the way he would for [Shape Glass] or [Call Light through Glass].

He pushed mana in, and a large red gemstone popped into the air. It fell, and Marksi jumped to snatch it before it hit the ground. He tapped his teeth against it, considered it for a moment, and then tossed it to the ground. Not a beast core, just a normal gem, but one that had to be worth fifty gold on its own.

“I put some emergency spending money in there, but you fill it up with whatever you wish. I know boys your age like to have some bits and bobs they can’t do without,” said Lumina.

Brin stared at the ring with wide eyes. “This… this is a storage ring!”

Lumina nodded, and then smiled indulgently when he wrapped her in a tight hug. He’d seen a few spatial storage devices again, but they usually worked on compressing the space in a small area. This seemed to be actually storing objects in a separate dimension, or perhaps compressing objects so small they could fit inside the ring? Either way, it was an entirely different scale from anything he’d ever seen before.

Pulling away, he [Inspected] the ring again, but it still didn’t say anything about being a storage ring. Value Sense told Brin that the ring was only worth about one and a half gold. Somehow it was fooling both [Inspect] and Value Sense, and probably a bunch of other Skills besides. This had to have cost thousands of gold. And the fact that it was keyed to him meant that she’d created it specifically for him from the very beginning.

Hogg was staring off into space, clenching his jaw.

“You seem like you really want to say something,” Brin told him.

“No. You don’t need me ruining your moment.”

Brin laughed. “You can’t.”

Hogg grit his teeth, at war with himself.

“Oh, just say it,” said Lumina.

“It’s a very fine gift, Lumina. I don’t think there are princes who would expect to receive something so fine.”

“Go on,” she said.

“But it’s a ring! Why does it have to be a ring?” Hogg threw his hands down, exasperated. “It’s right on his hand, where everyone can see it! If it were a medallion, he could pull it out when someone needs to see it and then tuck it away again. And whenever he uses the spatial effect, he’s going to have to pretend to pull something out of a bag, so why not use a bag? You could’ve given him a medallion and a bag and taken half a thousand gold off the construction price.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Money is no object,” Lumina said suspiciously. “And everyone would expect a bag.”

“And if I don’t want people to see it, I could just put it on a string and wear it over my neck. Ta da! Medallion. Also, there’s no reason I couldn’t just bring a bag of holding, too. This is more like a secret, emergency storage.”

Hogg tilted his head side to side, considering. “I guess… but never reach into a bag of holding if that ring is on your finger, or it’ll blow your hand off.”

“It won’t explode!” objected Lumina. “But yes, seriously never do that.”

“Got it,” said Brin.

“What’s the storage capacity?” asked Hogg.

“Around Five pounds by weight,” said Lumina.

Hogg rubbed his chin. “Hm. Glass is pretty light. You could put some of your best weapons in there, and when you pull them out it’ll look like you’re summoning them. A spear, some bullets, maybe a potion or two…”

“He can decide for himself,” said Lumina. “For now, come, let me show you how to operate it.”

Working the thing was fairly complex. Just pushing mana in randomly would make something fall out, but getting exactly what he wanted took some practice. There were exact methods for putting something in, for examining the contents of the ring, and then for selecting and pulling out the exact item he was thinking of.

Lumina had stuffed it full of gemstones, which meant he’d need to take some out before putting anything else in. He found an obsidian stone inside, and it actually reacted to his glass magic. He’d assumed it would, but it was nice to have it confirmed.

He tested putting in a few things and found the size and shape of the object didn’t seem to matter, only its weight, or more likely its mass.

“Right. I guess I’m next,” said Hogg.

He stood, and with slow, deliberate movements, walked over to his writing desk and picked up a sheaf of papers. Brin stood to help him, but he held up a hand. He stepped over on his own power, handed Brin the papers, then walked over to his usual reclining chair and sat down with a sigh.

Brin looked through the papers. They were all in the Language. Some long, others shorter. There were titles on top of each one. Invisible Eye. Copy Light. Self-Invisibility. Fire Starter. That last one was the shortest.

“I wrote out a few [Illusionist] tricks for you to practice. Once you have a Split Focus and Persistent Casting, none of this will be hard to do, but you’ll never get that far if you can’t get any levels.”

Brin started looking through them immediately. Which one did he want to learn first? It had to be the Fire Starter one, that looked sweet. How much fire was he talking here?

Lumina clapped her hands. “Time for cake.”

Brin had luckily never mentioned that people usually sang a birthday song at this point, so he was spared that indignity. The cake was extremely sweet and made with forest berries. It was absolutely delicious, although he was sure that few people around here would appreciate it. No one seemed to like sugar quite as much as he did.

Lumina seemed to enjoy it, and even Marksi had a little slice. His eyes popped wide open from the first bite, and it sent him into a sugar frenzy that had him running across the room, up the walls, and even literally jumping off the ceiling.

Brin would have to keep this in mind for future bribes.

After that, he expected to get into magic practice, but Lumina told him she’d already canceled their group lesson for today. He couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed by that. He liked learning magic. He wasn’t doing all this because he hated it.

Still, one day off wouldn’t hurt. Instead, they played games. Hogg showed him how to play a card game sort of like Rummy. Predictably, Brin lost terribly, but unpredictably, Lumina gave Hogg a pretty good fight.

After that, Lumina finally relented when Brin asked for a magic lesson, but it wasn’t the one that he had in mind. She asked Hogg to build a ladder into the sky from hard light, and a viewing platform. Hogg did it all with a wave. It was always surprising to Brin that he could do things like that so easily. Walking was still difficult, but there was nothing wrong with his magic. Performing miracles was literally easier for him than lifting a finger.

He climbed a green ladder into the sky, sixty feet into the air, to stand on a wide orange platform. He could see above the tops of the trees all the way out to the horizon.

Hogg had done this for him once or twice, and it always made him feel oddly isolated. In town they stacked the buildings high enough that it felt like he was in civilization. But from up here, he could see how small Hammon’s Bog really was. A tiny island in a sea of green.

The sun was just about to set, growing red and beginning to paint the clouds with specks of purple and orange.

Lumina arrived after him, and sat on the platform, gazing out at the sunset.

“We work on glass usually, and I fear that we’ve neglected your other magics. Today, we’ll increase your understanding of light. Observe this sunset. Feel the things that it makes you feel and watch the way that changing light can change the world. Ever the same question: What does light mean to you?”

Brin sighed. This was the real trap with Lumina’s magic lessons. He’d expected her to go hard all the time like she had the first day, but more often than not her lessons were calm and relaxing. Even if he pushed himself during the few free hours he had, there had never been a chance that he’d be able to overwork himself.

He thought of channeling his inner Perris and shaking his fists at the heavens. Curses! Foiled again!

He smiled at the thought, and sat. Lumina and Hogg were doing what they thought was best, but his nightmares hadn’t gone away. He didn’t think they would, not until he buried them under a mountain of work. That’s the only thing that had helped him move on after Travin’s Bog.

He watched the sunset. The sun was really bright. What does that mean to me? He hated questions like that. Why couldn’t she ask him questions that actually had an answer?

He couldn’t even use [Directed Meditation] for this. It would help him concentrate, sure, but it was mostly a tool for hyper-focusing on something. Feeling the emotions that a beautiful sunset elicited wasn’t something you could force by hyperfocus, though. You just kind of had to wait and let it happen. Sᴇaʀch* Thᴇ ɴ0velFɪre.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of nøvels early and in the highest quality.

So he waited. He watched the sun draw gradually closer to the earth, growing dimmer, redder, and more beautiful.

Sometimes he wondered if this was really a magic lesson at all, or if Lumina just wanted him to calm down and take some time to smell the flowers. He disregarded that idea. He knew Lumina well enough by now to know that to her, magic was everything. Life was beautiful because it was magical, not the other way around. She would make him go slower if she thought that’s what was best for his mental health, but at the end of the day she wanted to teach him as badly as he wanted to learn.

He thought of a piece of glass he had in his room, and realized it was just barely inside his range. He pulled it towards him, guiding it mentally out of his room and then out the door and up to him. It was a darkly tinted piece of glass he’d made so that he could watch Ademsi welding without burning his eyes.

Looking through it, he could look at the sun directly without hurting his eyes, but he could only see the sun. One perfect ball of light with blackness all around. Without the glass, the boundaries of the sun seemed blurry; it seemed to grow into the air around it. It was an artist, painting the world around it with new and interesting colors. With the glass, a blank and empty but precise circle in a black world.

Both of those things were true. Both of them were real, [Know What’s Real] didn’t take issue with either interpretation. But how could both be true when they were both so different?

He handed the darkened glass to Lumina. “Oh! How clever!” She seemed fascinated by it. Actually, did they have sunglasses in this world? His ability with glass had improved a lot during the last few months. He bet he’d be able to make those really nice sunglasses, the kind that let you stare at the sun while also not making the world around it seem darker.

After that, he did what he was supposed to be doing. He cleared his mind and lived in the moment, just experiencing life without thought.

He felt it, the insight he was supposed to be getting from this. It wasn’t really something he needed to put into words, it was more the feeling of watching a sunset. He had a feeling that he’d be able to put that into his light, to make things more vibrant and colorful by pushing this feeling into his creations. He didn’t get a point for it, but he knew his magic had improved in some way.

“” he said, putting the new understanding into his words. The light he summoned wasn’t a flashlight. It was dimmer, but the colors it shone onto the skin of his arms and his clothes were deeper and more complex.

Call Light through Glass 26 -> 27

There was that point. These lessons were often helpful for his magic, but he didn’t usually get a new point for it. Not unless his new insight was especially profound.

Just after the sun peeked below the horizon and the sky was still purple with a faint line of orange, he saw something else out of the corner of his eye. A torch, waiving on a watchtower in Hammon’s Bog. A bell started ringing.

He made eye contact with Lumina. She jumped down, and he turned to hustle down the ladder.

Inside the house Hogg held up a hand, eyes distant. “A call went up, something was spotted in the woods. I’m searching…”

Then Hogg smiled. “Oh! Jeffrey and Kevim have returned, with Davi and Zilly. And there’s… it looks like… something like two hundred people are with them.”

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