Pump you up

Day 2

Gil emerged from his tent in the morning to find Keilnei and Zena occupying themselves with archery. They'd set up a half-rotted log next to the arcane sanctum, and were cheerfully filling it with arrows. Well, Keilnei was. Zena seemed to be a comparatively bad shot.

"You dropped the bow too quickly." Keilnei said gently. "It's best, especially for a novice at this close range, to wait until the arrow strikes before you move your arm again. You knocked the arrow slightly off target."

Gil glanced around, seeing Snow wrapped in blankets against the side of the forge. Gil was fairly sure that blanket was the side of an elven tent, but it was a perfectly good use of the resources they had on hand. Candress was still sleeping, apparently exhausted from all the activity both before and after her capture.

The two girls kept shooting, gathering the arrows, and resuming. Zena wouldn't be mastering combat archery any time soon, but she improved quickly. A couple arrows shattered when they struck the hard side of the sanctum, but ammo wasn't prohibitively expensive. Gil considered it a reasonable expense.

"I never had much opportunity to practice." She admitted between shots, "My hometown fell to the Scourge when I was only a child. They had me running messages, mostly."

"They kept you near the front lines and didn't teach you how to defend yourself?" Keilnei seemed offended at the thought. "Surely they could have found somewhere for the children."

"I could run like a deer." Zena said with a smile, which faded quickly. "I volunteered. Walls weren't safety, they were just a place to keep all the vulnerable people. The enemy wanted us dead, because it could use dead elves against the living. If you fought, you died. If you hid, you died in a group. If you fled by ship, you died to the blockade. Running worked better than most things.

Zena's hollow eyed speech was interrupted by a hug from the nearly 7 foot tall Draenei. She stiffened for a moment, before relaxing into the hug.

"I'm sorry that happened to you." Keilnei whispered. "I can see how that would make your people hard. I'm sorry it led to… what it did."

"Yes, well, we can't change the past, now can we?" Zena said, though she didn't try very hard to squirm away. "Can we focus on the task at hand?"

"If you'd like." Keilnei said with a nod. "How do your arms feel? We don't want to overexert you."

"If you're ready for a break, I'd like to give it a shot." Gil called. "In my experience, it's always valuable to learn more ways of fighting."

The morning was eaten up with practice, with Gil and later Candress proven even less capable with the bow than Zena. By the time Snow called them over to eat lunch, which consisted of the last few Barovian turnips and smoked goat, Gil could generally hit the stump 9 times out of ten. That meant very little against a moving target, while moving himself, while under pressure, or while trying to hit something smaller than a large man's torso, but it was a start. Candress, having always been a mage since she was quite young, had even less practice with archery than Zena and substantially less upper body strength than Gil. Her arms quivered with the tension after only a few shots.

"You'll want to keep trying." Gil encouraged her, after she sent an arrow flying into the void. "This bow is custom made for Keilnei, and she's a big girl. It probably has a fairly high draw strength for you. If you can get up to snuff with this, we won't have to worry about you going without your magic quite so much."

At the mention of magic, both of the elves' eyes drifted towards the Sanctum.

"Later." Gil said severely. "It'll refill, but you'll need to moderate yourselves. If I end up recruiting any more manaphages I don't want them starving because you wanted to indulge. You only need a small amount per day, right Candress?"

"Technically," she admitted, frowning. "We will need to test precise quantities, but the amount we consumed should take the edge off for a full day easily, longer if we broke it up into smaller portions."

"Does using magic for some practical effect help?" Gil asked. "Or do you need to just absorb it."

"Using it makes the hunger return more quickly, but not by much. The act of absorption is what we crave, not the mana itself."

"Then I have some good news for you two." I said. "We aren't just going to learn about archery today."

••••••••••

When the Sanctum was fully charged a few hours later, Gil allowed each of the elves to tap a small quantity of magic from it. Around 5% each, which perked them up nicely. He then had all three new recruits show him every magical ability they knew.

Zena took the opportunity to show him how to tap mana. He allowed it, since it genuinely did seem like a useful thing to know even if Zena was just using it as an excuse to take another 2% hit. It didn't register as arcane magic, and was incredibly simple to do. As a mild rebuke, Gil tapped the mana Zena had absorbed; she minded less than one might expect.

The only other spell she knew was called Fairy Fire. It converted a small amount of an inanimate object into a luminous, ethereal state. A small fraction of an inch, taken from the surface and still both attached and stable. Gil had already seen it mostly negate his bikini armor, though he suspected it would be less effective against any armor not made of a thin sheet of enchanted latex. Even so, making something or someone glow had a lot of potential applications. He decided to let Zena show him how to do it; after all, she seemed very eager to draw mana for the purpose.

Candress had a more robust set of spells under her belt, but not as many as one might expect. First was a set of cantrips that were mostly for training purposes, which she would teach Gil before any more dangerous magic. Spells to warm or cool something by a few degrees, spells to clean, spells to gently levitate an object, and a light spell that Gil's Soul Talent improved senses intuited was a neutered version of Fairy Fire.

Her stronger spells, which each knocked off nearly a full percentage of the sanctum's capacity, were mostly oriented around the necessities of warfare. An invisible sheathe of flexible ice to protect the body, and focused bursts of hot and cold intense enough to cause injury. She could also condense water from the air, which didn't seem likely to be supremely useful to Gil given his unique situation, and create the unpleasant but nourishing bread she'd given the Draenei, which very much did seem likely to be useful.

Keilnei had more magic than Gil had expected. The Gift of the Naaru seemed to be a passively refilling reservoir of healing energy that she could use intuitively when full, but it wasn't all she had. She could also sense animals; when Gil released Blackpaw, Keilnei was able to track his movements from inside the building, even with her eyes closed. If she focused on a single person in her line of sight, she could do the same to Zena for a minute or so. Even better, doing so hardly drew upon the sanctum's reserves at all. She could also slightly overclock her body, sharpening her reflexes and making her a better combatant. Finally, she could conjure bolts of arcane or venomous energy and fire them from her bow as if they were arrows; this was a bit more mana intensive, especially the arcane shot, but that was to be expected.

All of them, save the Gift of the Naaru, made sense to Soul Talent. Gil was certain he could learn them, with some practice. He noted that most of Keilnei's magic seemed like a different kind of magic entirely than Candress's, and when he learned the extreme basics his menu confirmed it: he could now purchase the weave, Azerothian Arcane, or Azerothian Nature Magic.

The main problem, of course, was time and energy. The sanctum could only support a few hours of active use per day and Gil didn't have much mana capacity yet. He could only really hold enough mana to use two or three of Candress's spells before he needed to draw more mana; two at the start of the day, three by the end of the week. It was startlingly fast to the elves, but Gil didn't feel like explaining Talents to them just then.

Of course, the exciting part was when he figured out he could use Aspect of the Monkey as long as he had mana stored in his body. Same with mana tap. It seemed that the gift of the naaru stayed in Keilnei's body even outside of the sanctum, it simply didn't charge. It was an emergency heal, or a hit of mana that Gil could draw upon. That had all sorts of interesting implications.