Chapter 12: To be a manipulator

Whilst meandering aimlessly through the darkness of his mind, Kira was confronted by memories of his late family. Despite having never been close to them, and as such their deaths had had little effect upon him, he thought that he could still imagine how hard it would be for someone to lose someone that they truly loved or viewed as family. This thought made Kira believe that if, by becoming a manipulator, he could use his skills to save people's lives or at least improve people's lives, then his own life would be worthwhile. Having now seen Sadis and Thea in their work, becoming a servant of Krinestadt didn't seem like too much of a sacrifice to achieve this goal. Before he could adequately think this idea through, he gradually regained his awareness of what was going on around him.

This process of returning to reality began with hearing occasional wisps of voices talking in an agitated sense around him, and, though he could make out only a few of the words, he was almost certain that he had heard the term stupid being directed at him at least several times. If he had had control of his body, then perhaps this would have been enough to make him smile because it indicated, to him at least, that Sadis and Thea had become fond enough of him to not be prepared to stand by and let him kill himself. That alone would be enough to use as leverage to force them into teaching him more about manipulations. Eventually, leaving this world of dreams proved inevitable, and he sat up, finding himself back in the low barracks bunkhouse in Kalsin.

The sky outside was now dark and, sitting at the edge of feeble candlelight, Thea sat watching over him. She didn't look very pleased and had her brows furrowed together in the middle as though she were deep in thought. Without bothering to greet him or ask him how he was, she instead immediately began, "That was pretty stupid, wasn't it." thus giving away who had been berating him in his sleep, "So, was this your plan then, did you really get so impatient that you would risk killing yourself just to get some practise in before we arrived? I hope you realize how much trouble you caused us. I'm not fond of having to carry something as heavy as you back down a damn mountain."

"Couldn't Sadis have carried me?" replied Kira cheekily, before immediately regretting having said this as it seemed to set Thea off into another tirade.

"No, after you pulled your little stunt, idiot, he had to go deal with the rest of the bandits and then he had to go explain why so many got away to the town guard…."

Unsure how to respond to Thea showing so much negative emotion, he quietly stuttered an excuse, "But, I thought that we were expecting most of them to escape anyway…."

However, before he could get any further, she cut him off by throwing his weighty pack in his face and saying, "Get up, we're leaving."

"Now?" exclaimed Kira, not confident of his ability to stand, let alone walk reasonable distances with a heavy pack and noting the exterior darkness.

"Yes, we're not welcome here anymore; Sadis is waiting outside the walls."

"We're not welcome?"

"Apparently not. Come on, I'm not going to bother explaining the situation to you as it probably would go over your moronic head."

With that, Kira shakily got to his feet and hurried to follow Thea out into the night as she strode off ahead of him, paying no mind to how he struggled to keep pace. Outside, the sky was clear, and many stars hung flickering in the heavy sky as though they were waiting, with bated breath, for events that were yet to unfold. Mindful of this, he redoubled his efforts to not lose sight of Thea in the pale moonlight ahead of him. The streets were strangely silent and, aside from his and Thea's own footfalls, no sound could be heard and even the normally baying animals of the markets had fallen quiet.

Despite these warning signs, they were allowed to exit the city by stern-faced soldiers through the same gate that they had entered by. On the other side, Sadis was waiting, already laden with his and Thea's packs, and they moved off together back down the road. Reaching the rise from which Kira had first viewed Kalsin, he stopped and took one look back on the silent city, its rooftops flowing like waves in the darkness, before moving on. They left the road and headed in a direction that Kira soon learnt to be east, based on the rising sun, towards Krinestadt.

Not stopping to rest, they continued to march towards the orange dawn and through the following day, stopping only once the sun sunk so low as to touch the horizon now behind them. During this time, Kira had not had a chance to further practise his manipulations as a result of the intensity of the exercise and wondered if that had been intentional on his companion's part because he still couldn't think of a single other reason for having to leave Kalsin in such a hurried manner.

However, this illusion was soon shattered because Sadis commented, before lying down for the night, "We might be willing to teach you some basic stuff in the morning. It'd certainly give you a head start when we arrive in Krinestadt, and you just have to promise not to do anything stupid again, plus don't be frustrated if we don't get far in the limited time that we have before arriving. We aren't more than a fortnight away."

Despite being excited about this news, it did not take long for Kira to fall asleep, and he woke early the following day following a nightmare involving his deceased relatives. Sadis was already up and was hunched over a small fire, but surprisingly he had awakened before Thea, and the two exchanged muffled greetings to not wake her. When she awoke, Sadis handed around small bowls of soup that he had been warming over the flames and began asking, without even bothering to look at Kira, "So, have you figured out how to see yet?"

As this question had not initially appeared to be directed at him, and he had only just woken himself, he took a moment to reply, "Yeah, I think so. You mean using aura to see other people's manipulations, right?"

"That's correct, so, look at me." whilst holding out his hand with his palm facing upwards.

Following Sadis' command, Kira concentrated his own aura in front of his eyes and saw that Sadis had formed the aura above his hand into a rough four. Sensing that Sadis wanted him to point this out, Kira said, "You've made a four above your hand."

"Good." came Sadis' reply, "Now, did you figure that out on your own? The whole eye thing, that is."

"No," responded Kira, very aware of how obvious the technique appeared now that he knew of it, "Alys gave me a clue for it."

"That's not a big deal," interjected Thea putting her empty bowl aside, "Here's a better question, why did you fall unconscious after doing that dimwitted manipulation yesterday?"

Thinking quickly, Kira immediately jumped to the idea that aura was like stamina in that everyone had a finite supply and certain uses would therefore tire you out; so he responded, "Because using manipulations uses energy or aura, I guess, and I put too much into it and so that happened."

"Kind of," she said, but then she continued with a second question without stating the answer to the first, "Why's everyone got different auras then? Does everyone have a different type of stamina too, I wonder?"

Before Kira could try and reply, Sadis called a start to the day's travelling and they got up, heavy packs balanced behind them, to follow him east. This at least gave Kira some more time to think about Thea's second question.

He already thought that he had found the answer on his own. As everyone had a unique aura, of a single colour, it made sense to him that it was their soul. This could then explain why people made unconscious judgements of others when first meeting them as they were coming into contact with their aura, who they were. As Thea and Sadis seemingly thought that he still needed more time to think about this, he wondered if he had leapt too quickly to a conclusion that seemed fairly obvious from being able to observe the aura. Therefore, to confirm his suspicion, he spent a lot of the day observing the auras of other travellers.

Exactly as expected, each person had an individual aura that never truly seemed to match up with anyone else's. He also noticed how partners and families often had more similar auras than other people in larger groups, which only helped to go along with his own line of thought. If there was any other solution to the problem, what was aura, he simply could not see it. Aura looked to represent a person, and people with similar auras apparently liked sticking together. It all made perfect sense.

He then turned his attention to other observations, such as the wisps of aura that flooded the whole of the space around him despite not being attached to anything. Could they be ghosts? Kira was not sure, but they did not seem conscious. Also, seeing that smaller animals had less aura attached, he wondered if the amount of aura that made up a person's soul had something to do with their intelligence or importance as a living creature. This led cleanly on to the idea that maybe some things had more aura than a human. If this was proved correct, he would like to meet them some time, and it could go some way towards demonstrating the validity of the idea of the gods that various religions put forward.

He wanted to get answers from Thea and Sadis to all of this. However, given that they were around other people now, he guessed that they would not want to speak openly and so he kept his questions to himself, constantly fretting that they might not be answered before he arrived in Krinestadt. Perhaps this gave him another reason to go to Krinestadt to end his constant queries being able to study among the greatest scholars in Anadora.

By the late afternoon, they had covered some reasonable distance, or so Sadis declared, and they headed from the road and into a nearby clearing that's plants were trampled flat by the frequent visitors who must have come here from the road looking for a good place to rest. Here Sadis asked Thea, "Shouldn't you have told him by now? I mean, it's not like we figured this out this quickly when we were trainees."

"Fine," she sighed, dropping her pack and looking over her shoulder back at Kira somewhat menacingly. "Aura isn't aura; that's just what people call it for convenience. What it really is is you, otherwise thought of as a soul."

"But that's exactly what I thought," moaned Kira, still internally satisfied at having it right, "I was trying to tell you earlier…" but he still couldn't understand how manipulations could cost him so much energy given that it was just moving his aura about, kind of like thinking.

"Wait, you actually figured it out? I supposed that it isn't too hard to realize, given that all that there is between a person's ears is a lump of jelly. Once it is removed, you die, and when your body fails, your aura loosens, and so you die unless you have some way to circumnavigate that."

"That's what you attempted to do to those bandits," added Sadis, "You probably didn't quite realize it, but in pushing your aura out at them you were trying to remove their own hence killing them."

"I did realize that!" retorted Kira, "I have done it before, you know! But, I still don't see what this has to do with me falling unconscious because it still seems to me like that was just the result of exhaustion. I don't get why manipulations make you so tired!"

Thea finally got around to openly answering him, "Your aura is like your soul. Yes, actions with it require energy, but the action you were trying to make almost seemed like you were trying to remove your own aura. You can't just attack with your aura like that. You are very lucky that you fell unconscious before succeeding!"

"Oh" was the only response he could manage as he wondered why it had worked the first time, back in Neuverie, and worried again about how easy it would be for him to kill himself without proper tuition.

After that conversation, Kira had quite a bit to think about, but he soon discovered why they had stopped so early because it seemed that Thea and Sadis wanted to see where he was up to with his manipulations, and this kept his mind occupied for the remainder of the day. The tasks that they demanded of him were not particularly tiring, but they were exceedingly technical. Up until this point, he had merely concentrated his aura using his body as a template to build up from, however now they were asking him to warp his aura into complicated patterns to produce symbols and numbers.

Sadis made the exercises look easy when he demonstrated them swiftly forming a five from his purple aura, above his hand, in less than a second whilst replicating this took Kira more than ten minutes of struggling. Fortunately, his tutors were very patient with him as they probably remembered that they too had struggled through these exercises when they first began learning.

After changing the five into an eight, and whilst waiting for Kira to make the same change, Sadis told him, "You're doing quite well for a beginner. I guess that could be because you were practising behind our backs, but taking things slowly, to begin with, shouldn't bother you. Everyone struggles at the start, but becoming proficient is worth the struggle because it's not something that you ever really forget, and basic skills like this will serve you well far into the future."

The final test of the evening was for Kira to warp his light blue aura into two separate interlocking shapes, one being produced from each of his outstretched hands. Having done this, they settled down to sleep for the night, allowing him time to reflect on the day.

Thinking back to the dream he experienced in Neuverie, before becoming aware of his own aura, he decided that the swirling masses of colour he saw could have just been the auras of many living things such as trees or small animals that he had been moving past quickly. This eventually led him to think more about the differences in aura between various people. If different people had different aura representing different personalities and souls, could their aura's outward appearance be used to guess at what they were actually internally thinking? To test this idea, rather than consult his companions, he decided to experiment with it himself.

By midday, when they stopped to ask a passing caravan about the state of the road towards Krinestadt, he watched the two drivers' auras as they talked. From what he could see, they had just ordinary coloured auras that flickered and danced as they spoke. Paying closer attention to this movement, he noticed that it seemed to correlate with what the drivers were saying. One of the drivers mentioned how they had passed a wrecked caravan that looked as though it had been attacked by bandits. This was a warning about how some bandits still dared to patrol the roads this far east towards Krinestadt, and their aura seemed to jump to the side in a particular manner whilst they tried to better recall the scene.

With his hypothesis seeming confirmed, he posed it to Sadis, asking, "Can viewing someone's aura allow you to tell if they are lying when speaking?"

"No," responded Sadis bluntly, breaking his confidence, "Seeing aura may allow you to see a person better if you understand me, but it won't help you understand what they're thinking, just like seeing a person's body won't. However, by observing their aura, you might be able to tell if they are more likely to be lying based on how they look – like you might make a judgement on a person's body – but it isn't exact by any means."

"Then, is there a way for a manipulator to change the appearance of their own aura to make themselves seem more trustworthy to other manipulators?"

"You're so full of questions!" interjected Thea before falling silent again to allow Sadis to respond.

"No, your aura is your own. If it were to substantially be changed your whole personality would change too, and I don't know anyone who can manage that. Maybe someone would have it as an ability, but it seems rather pointless.

Another several hours of walking later, they passed the toppled cart that the drivers had referenced, with a half-rotted corpse of a mule lying before it with its harness still attached. Fortunately, there were no human corpses, but that relief was shattered by Sadis rhetorically commenting, "Slavers, perhaps?" and looking around the cart, it quickly became apparent that all valuables had been taken with even the metal pins missing – ones that had held the covering tarpaulin in place.

After seeing this, Kira had the motivation to try and hurry further down the road before stopping for the night, but Thea and Sadis didn't seem to be concerned. This was probably because they both wore blue robes associated with manipulators, so the average bandit group would leave them a wide berth. Instead of rushing, they started a new conversation with Kira, asking, "So, let's recap, what's the best way to get more aura?"

Kira was fairly sure that he knew the answer to this because, as he had trained with them to become more fluent in the control of his aura, he noticed that he had been able to maintain the exercises for slightly longer. So he was confident to respond, "By practising manipulations to increase your own capacity, that's my guess at least."

"It's not a guess," Thea replied, turning to face him, and walking backwards for a couple of seconds, "Basically, it can help to think of yourself as having an energy reserve behind your manipulations that is used up in them as well having aura being your soul."

"Is there's no faster way to get a higher reserve of aura than practising manipulations?"

"Nope," she replied. "But, by using specialized exercises, it doesn't take long to max yourself out each day. Oh, also, you saying higher reserve makes it sound like you mean that you are increasing the aura you have. That doesn't happen; you just take longer to tire out using it by increasing the amount of energy you have."

At this point, he still had many more questions such as, can you ever reach a point where you can't increase your capacity further, or can some people share their auras? But, these questions were not answered as, despite the manipulator's newfound willingness to tutor him, the roads were steadily becoming more crowded as they neared a town, and they stopped talking to not be overheard.

Arriving outside the town's wooden gate and ramparts, the gates were still open, with the sun high in the sky casting a bright light over the surroundings and only being obscured by the occasional passing of fluffy clouds. Despite the attraction of a night sleeping inside such a welcoming looking town, Sadis led them skirting around the town's wall to reach the road leading on from the other side whilst drawing strange looks from guards atop the wall.

Slightly frustrated with losing out on a good night's rest, Kira called forwards to Sadis to demand a reason for ignoring the town. However, Sadis' response immediately pushed all of Kira's reservations aside because Sadis and Thea were planning to teach him exercises to work on the capacity of his aura and that these were best learnt in private. Eager to learn something that might finally go beyond simply forming interesting shapes from his aura, he silently endured the seemingly endless marching until the end of the day. Ideally, he thought, if he should decide to abandon Thea and Sadis before reaching Krinestadt, then learning these exercises would allow him to continue his progression as a manipulator on his own.

Just when it seemed that the sun would fall behind the western hills signalling the running out of time in the day for learning, Thea and Sadis led him off the road and a distance into the surrounding oak trees. Here Sadis bade him stop and watch what he was going to do.

First, Sadis concentrated his purple aura over his hand like Kira had seen many times before and just like he had when he had first started practising moving his aura. Then, Sadis increased the concentration of aura over his hand until his whole hand was absorbed in it before releasing his hold over the aura. "That's it?" asked Kira sceptically as he had, perhaps wrongly, expected something more complex and recognizing that it was similar to what he had already tried.

"For now, that is it." responded Sadis, "We can add more complexities later, but try it first instead of immediately asking for something harder, and we'll see if you're up to it."

Following the instructions, Kira did as Sadis had and concentrated his blue aura around his hand. Once his hand was fully engulfed, Thea told him to hold it like that for as long as possible but, only a few moments later, he already had noticed the strain from the exercise. This style of brute-force manipulation was much more intensive than any that he had tried before, much like how sprinting was different to jogging. Because of this, it was only a minute later that, gasping for breath, he was forced to release his hold on it to preserve his consciousness, and he sat back onto the ground behind him with his legs feeling unsteady beneath him.

"You still feel ready to progress further?" asked Sadis.

"I didn't think that it would be that hard," he replied once his breathing had returned to normal.

"Manipulations tend to get disproportionally harder when they get bigger."

Understanding this helped him better appreciate the scale of the manipulations that he had seen Sadis undertake to materialize an arm from aura as it was so much larger than anything that he could dare try himself. However, lying pleasantly warm in his sleeping bag, he fell asleep before getting much more done. The morning was spent pondering similar things, such as how could Thea's ability possible work, but she certainly didn't seem prepared to show him how she had managed it. Instead, the next few days were spent increasing the time that he could maintain the exercise.

Once this time had increased to a couple of minutes, a new aspect of the exercise was added. While covering his hand with his aura, he would stand across from Sadis, and Sadis would do the same. Then Sadis would move the concentration of aura to a different part of his body. Kira would have to try copying the movement and guessing that developing such fluidity of aura movement would be necessary for large scale manipulations; Kira was happy to go along with this sort of training.

The only problem that he had was the nagging feeling that he was running out of time to become a more knowledgeable manipulator before arriving at Krinestadt. Strangely, this worry seemed less important than before. He put this down to him enjoying learning manipulations, meaning that he could probably live quite happily even if he did have to put a condition upon himself to serve the royalty there.

Walking along beside Sadis on a largely overcast day, Kira kept up his barrage of questions for him without honestly expecting any to be answered fully. But, when he asked, "Are any people born aware of their aura?" he got a rather long-winded reply.

"Yes, there exists a classification of species called yokai, who are all born with the ability to manipulate."

"Then how haven't I heard of them before? And wouldn't they be ridiculously powerful?" questioned Kira, wondering why he hadn't heard this before back in Illyria but also realizing that this was a term he had heard used to describe Jaeger. So he also added, "Was Jaeger a yokai?" drawing an odd look from Thea

"They aren't natives of Anadora, much like demi-humans. They originate through the gates and among the other worlds of the nexus. Only very few have ever come here, which is probably why your tutors didn't bother mentioning them as you are likely to never encounter one even if you live a thousand years," stated Sadis, and hearing this Kira thought that should he live one thousand years, he probably would go and journey through a gate, just to see what it would be like.

But he didn't mention this and instead allowed Sadis to continue, "They also aren't as powerful as you may think as a lot of their species seem to be little more than savage beasts. Not just that but the few of their species that can resemble human intelligence tend to have shared abilities; so unlike the range of abilities that humans can develop, they have whole species constricted to a mere few." He then went on to say, "And I have heard that Jaeger was a yokai, but as he was your ancestor, I expect that he must have been human to reproduce with the first Arkadian queen."

Slightly disappointed by this response to his final question, Kira went on to say, "Abilities?" in reply, wanting to know more about how manipulators developed their specialisms.

"Everyone has their own auras, so it makes sense that everyone's aura is suited to different things, right?" said Thea, "Basically, beyond the basic manipulations, skilled manipulators develop abilities that are particular to themselves and so, for example, a sailor might develop an ability to do with the sea."

"So, what led to your abilities?" Kira asked, wondering what it was in Thea's personality or past that could have led to her developing the teleportation technique. He also wanted insight into how he may find an ability of his own. "Also, can abilities change over time?"

"What led to our abilities is personal to us and, yes, abilities can change over time just like aura can as a person develops through their life."

This was the sort of conversation that Kira loved because it allowed him to expand his understanding and knowledge of a topic that he could then use in his own life to improve his own situation. It also served to deepen his interest in manipulations as he devoted himself to its study and memorization of its intricacies.

But it still left him full of questions because, from what he had seen, when Sadis pushed people with his hand, he did not get pushed back at all or seem to feel any force from impacting people with his hand when the victim clearly did. This didn't seem like any normal manipulation that he had seen until this point. Still, from Thea's wording, he was fairly certain that people only maintained one ability at any particular time.

When asking Sadis about this, instead of immediately answering, Sadis took him off to the side of the road by himself and demonstrated pushing against a tree with his hand made of purple aura whilst saying, "I am exerting a force upon this tree and therefore, the tree exerts a force back on me because force does not come from nowhere and so any force that appears as created actually has an equal and opposite force offsetting it."

This did make sense to Kira because he had been taught this by his tutors as one of the fundamental laws of motion, but it still didn't explain how Sadis wasn't being moved at all. Looking closely at Sadis, though, he could see a thin layer of aura covering his body and assumed that this might have something to do with it.

To finally explain it outright, Sadis told him, "People can have two abilities, their primary ability, like my arm creation, and a secondary ability which supplements the first. Really, the secondary ability is actually an extension of the first. In my case, my secondary allows me to create a layer of aura around my body that acts as a frame to direct the force into the ground so that I don't have to come under pressure from it." Leaving Kira to wonder for himself if Thea's secondary ability was to do with the knife-like structure she had previously produced with her aura around one of her hands.

With that, they walked back onto the road to rejoin an expectantly waiting Thea and, sensing that he was at a the limit for how many questions he would have answered for the day, he directed his thought towards what his own ability might be whilst chewing on some rye bread. To find an ability, he knew that he would have to find something personal to him, but it seemed difficult to think of anything in particular, so he assumed that he ought to think about what sort of ability he would want to narrow down his choices. This in itself was an interesting question because what exactly did he want to achieve as a manipulator?

He knew that he wanted to try and use his abilities to help people but, beyond this, determining a manner in which to do it was difficult. Alys had developed an ability to guarantee her family and friends a food supply in a time when a good harvest was uncertain, but he couldn't see himself settling down and doing the same.

He also wasn't sure that he necessarily wanted a combat ability because going around fighting and killing people, such as bandits, seemed partially counterproductive for helping people in their everyday lives. Though, not having to contend with bandits probably would improve the life of the average citizen. However, this would only apply so long as there were bandits, and with Krinestadt's expansion to the west, they would soon be forced into hiding or hunted down. In that sense, was he opposed to Krinestadt at all?

He was technically the last of the Arkadian royal line and should have been venomously opposed to them, but if having one nation ruling the entirety of Anadora would improve the life of the average person, who was he to judge? The only gripe that he had with Krinestadt was them allowing slavery, which really meant them promoting the slavery of demi-humans all but in law, but that could be tackled from within easier than from without.

Therefore, working for Krinestadt became even less of an impossibility than before, so much so that he was considering it a definite possibility. The problem with all this thinking was that it left him even more confused than ever as to whether or not he should abandon Thea and Sadis, and it didn't get him anywhere further towards an ability.

He was then taken out of his thoughts when they turned onto a side road to walk towards a nearby town, and Sadis said, "As a reward for your progress, you can have tonight off and we'll stay in the Inn here."

"Thanks," he responded, not certain what progress he had referred to as his progress seemed to be extremely limited in scope. But then, rather than falling silent, he remembered how, when he increased the concentration of aura before his eyes aura had seemed to flow all around him, and so he asked, "Does absolutely everything living have an aura?"

Sadis took a moment to respond but still did, saying, "All living things have aura, not rocks and the like, but plants and animals do…."

Before he could get any further, Kira had interrupted to ask, "Does that mean that plants technically have souls?"

"No," said Sadis, "They have an aura of their own, but it isn't complex enough to give them the same level of awareness as people…."

Kira then interrupted for a second time with what he felt to be a question that naturally led on from this new information, "So, if trees can have an aura but not be aware of themselves, then can inanimate objects have an aura attached to them and maybe become aware of themselves?"

"Yes, but the enchantment of objects is hardly my specialism. As a result of the aura that does surround living things, I guess that you could count all living things merely as enchanted inanimate objects because our bodies are just things until the aura is added. You certainly can count trees and smaller creatures such as worms as enchanted objects anyway!"

Kira went on to continue his barrage of questions, but Sadis bade him stop until the morning. From then on, he only answered one question about whether or not enchanted inanimate objects could regenerate their own stamina surrounding their aura like a person saying, "No, the manipulator has to supply their own energy to keep it active; so not many manipulators are capable of using them in fights."

Outside of the main gate, a sign stated the town's name as Hawthorn, and alongside it were several bored-looking guards. However, they did come to a state of attention upon seeing the blue cloaks of manipulators approaching them. One detached themselves from the group to demand that they state their business. With the short conversation that followed, Sadis and Thea had to use every oratory technique that they could think of to convince the guard that they were not a threat and meant the townsfolk no harm and, begrudgingly, the man eventually agreed with them.