These types of prices tend to be like that: memories, sensations, stories, sometimes services (like a quest). So it's within the realm of possibilities that the price be embarrassing stories.

The hut, larger on the inside than it is on the outside, filled with shadow that swirled like a thick fog. From the midst of the fog emerged a haunting cackle of a voice

"So..." the voice croaked as a pair of glowing yellow eyes appeared from the darkness. "Quite the group of hopefuls has come to our little home seeking our magicks."

The cloud of shadow cleared slightly and the inhuman silhouette of the speaker was revealed.

"You must know, that everything has a price..." The form said, a gleeful note in its voice.

"Are you prepared to-" the voice cut of unexpectedly as the fog cleared enough to reveal my party standing in the doorway of the hut more clearly to the speaker.

"GRETA! ASTRID!" the voice suddenly called, all croakiness gone. The voice suddenly sounded like any mother you might find in a hundred different cities. "Kiki is back! She brought her friends!"

As one, the other four members of my party turned to look at me as I half huddled in the doorway. Their expressions very clearly expressing incredulous confusion.

Light suddenly flared in the hut as the shadow-fog vanished, revealing the slightly larger than human sized form of Madame Morrigan, first of the swamp witches, and one of my adopted mothers. Her skin was a pale greenish color, and her hair looked like bunched seaweed. The excited grin on her face softened her otherwise rather alarming features.

There was a matched pair of popping noises as two more figures appeared on either side of Morrigan. The one on Morrigan's left was inhumanly tall and veiled from head to toe in thick black cloth. The top of her head brushed the ceiling of the hut, a good seven and a half feet off the ground. While the figure on Morrigan's right was indistinguishable from any middle-aged human woman you could find anywhere.

​

Clegg's eyebrows had risen so high on his craggy forehead that they had nearly vanished underneath his pot helm. And our priest, Vasta, looked like she torn between fainting in fear or exploding with curiosity.

​

I hastily stepped forward into the space between my party and my mothers.

"Everyone," I said, glad my large hat and high collar were hiding the blush creeping up my face. "These are my adopted parents."

​

The hero, Rexin, made a small choking noise at that, which I chose to ignore. I gestured to the tall black robed figure. "This is Nana Gretta." Gretta gave a willowy bow. "Mother Morrigan," I continued, gesturing to the toadlike form in the center, "And Momma Astrid" I finished, indicating the human-looking woman.

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"Moms," I said, turning towards them. "This is my adventuring party," I pointed at each member as I said their names. "The hero Rexin, our fighter Clegg, Vasta the priest, and Ranger Mordin."

​

There was an awkward silence as both groups looked at each other, with me standing uncomfortably in the center.

​

Thankfully, Astrid broke the silence by sweeping forward. "We're delighted to meet Kiki's friends!" She said, genuinely, beginning to usher my still stunned party towards a side door. "Please, come in, have a cup of tea!" She paused briefly to pull me into a hug as she passed.

​

As my party was mothered out of the room to the kitchen, both Gretta and Morrigan pulled me into their own hugs, though Gretta did pause to speak quietly to me as she did so.

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"You should have said something when you left." She said in a voice that sounded like a hundred whispers. "We were so worried when you just vanished."

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Morrigan nodded as she pulled me into another hug. "The letters have been nice, but we miss you so much!" She said, some real croakiness returning to her voice.

​

I returned Mother's hug, feeling my own eyes starting to prick with tears. "I'm sorry." I said in a small voice. "But I didn't think you would let me go be an adventurer."

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"Certainly not," Nana said as the three of us started for the kitchen too. "You definitely weren't ready to go out into that dangerous world."

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Mother, her arm still around my shoulder, gave me a sideways look, "Now though," she said, sounding thoughtful. "Now you look every inch the black mage we always knew you could be."

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I looked down and smiled, glad again for the hat and coat to hide my embarrassed blush.

​

As we entered the kitchen, Momma was pouring tea from an enormous floating teapot into eight mismatched cups as my party sat around the rough wooden table, looking confused.

"The Hero's party?" Momma was saying, sounding truly impressed and proud. "I always knew our Kiki was destined for great things."

​

"I'm still just a Hero candidate Ma'am." Rexin said modestly as Momma swept around the table, offering cakes and biscuits from a tin that shouldn't have been able to hold quite so many baked goods. "We're still only B ranked at the moment, retrieving a potion from..." he hesitated apparently unwilling to say 'from the three great swamp witches' He cleared his throat to cover his hitch and continued "...From you is part of our promotion exam to rank A."

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"What kind of potion do you need?" Momma said as she swept around the table again, this time catching me in an embrace before I realized what was happening.

Rexin launched into an explanation of how one of the Duke's daughters had fallen ill and needed a special healing draught to recover as my three mothers and I sat ourselves around the table too.

​

I felt myself relaxing as I sipped Momma's excellent tea and took in the indefinable homeliness of this hut. I hadn't realized that I was drifting off until Momma was gently shaking me awake. I glanced at the window, slightly shocked to see that the sun was already setting.

​

"Your friends are going to stay the night." She said, pulling me into another hug as she helped me to my feet. "We'll figure out what kind of potion you need in the morning." She didn't mention what we both knew, that there would still be the matter of cost. The type of magic my mothers practiced involved cost and sacrifice as an integral part of the spellcraft. Even if they didn't inflate the price for us, as they tended to do for others who came seeking boons, the cost of such a potion as we were likely to need would almost certainly not be counted in gold coins.

​

At the door to my old room, Momma paused to give me another hug. "We're so proud of you." She said into my shoulder. I was vaguely surprised to find that I had grown taller than her while I was away.

​

As Momma began to pull away, didn't let go of the hug immediately. "I've missed you Momma," I said, trying valiantly not to start crying "But I can't stay, the party needs me."

​

"I know sweetie," Momma said, sounding slightly tearful herself. "Just be careful, and know you'll always have a place here with us if you need it."

Turns out that shooting a random fireball into the ceiling is a good way to have the university police called on you.

Luckily for me no one was looking at me when it happened, and they couldn't find any accelerant or, well, anything that could make a fireball on me, so I didn't get charged with anything.

They ended up releasing me after a couple hours sitting in the small interview room the one part-time university detective used.

It wasn't until I got home that I could review the doodle I had been making. I've always liked to make up and draw random arcane looking symbols in the margins of my notebooks, it helps me relax.

It was pretty easy to pick out the page, since it was covered in soot. I took the notebook out to the garage of the house I was renting with some friends. My roommate has turned half of it into a welding shop for his side gig, and he was out of town visiting family, so it was probably the best place for some experimentation.

It took two and a bit hours for me to get it right. I finally figured out that it was two symbols, one on the previous page with the second overlayed precisely, the. Simply pressing my thumb on both caused a fist sized fireball to appear when I pulled my thumb away.

Of course, I hit a wall once I figured that out. I had no grasp of why the symbols did that. One of my other roommates had tried to explain computer programming to me once, he had shown me the project he was working on, even with him explaining what the word soup I was looking at was supposed to do I could barely wrap my head around it.

I didn't have the first clue where to begin parsing the geometric shape I had just randomly scribbled in my notebook.

My fruitless tests of variations were interrupted by a knock on the side door of the garage, which was odd, because none of my roommates but Greg ever came out here, and he wouldn't knock.

I closed my notebook, though there wasn't anything particularly odd about it or the workspace. And walked over to the door.

I cracked it slightly to see who was out there. It turned out to be two people. A nondescript looking guy who appeared to be in his mid twenties with unruly black hair was looking down at his phone. Slightly behind him was a woman, with deathly pale skin and slightly red-tinged hair.

The man looked up at me, I caught an upside down glimpse of what he was looking at on his phone, it was my student picture, the same one on my ID card and attached to all my transcripts.

"Joe Tanner?" The man asked in a tone that said he kind of already knew the answer.

"Yes?" I replied uncertainly, "Who are you?"

"You can call me Alex," he replied, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the woman. "This is Natasha, you can call her Nat, or Tasha. I can't tell if switching actually annoys her or not, so I'm doing some experimentation."

The woman just rolled her eyes, but didn't say anything.

"What do you want?" I asked, trying not to sound rude, but feeling unsettled by the odd pair for some reason.

"Today, at around ten thirty A.M." the man said, consulting his phone again. "You conjured a fireball in your advanced English class."

I felt a chill, then immediately realized that it should have been obvious that if magic was real then people would know about it.

The man continued speaking, either not noticing or not caring about the flush rising on my face. "Then starting a couple hours ago you conjured several more fireballs in this garage. Nat could smell the magic from two streets over."

Before I could really get into considering running from what I was sure would be one of those men in black suits disappearing me situations, the man pulled out one of the crappiest business cards I had ever seen. It was obviously printed on the cheap paper they had for students to use in the library, and looked like it had been put together by someone with only the vaguest idea of how the software worked. To top it off, I could see the ragged edges where it looked like the scissors had caught and torn the page.

It was so different from what I was expecting that my mind went blank for a second.

"Between you, Nat, that guy with elemental blood last week and those twins, this is turning into an unseen hotspot." The man said, pulling my attention away from the abomination of kerning in my hand.

"The local council has asked me to put together a support group for newcomers. Next meeting is on Saturday, you can find the details on our Facebook group. There'll be donuts."

"Wait," I said, not really sure what question to ask first. So I was half surprised to hear myself ask, "your magical support group posts about meetings on Facebook?"

"Sure," Alex said cheerfully. "I mean, Zuckerberg is a lizard person you know."

I enjoyed the world this prompt inspired. I'll probably write more when I have time.

"How- What-?" he stammered."Magic, and magic." I replied reaching out and placing the index finger of my left hand over his heart.

​

As I touched him, he stopped trying vainly to crawl away and the color drained from his face. I could practically smell the terror coming from him now. Unfortunately, the fear in him would probably not be enough to get me the answers I wanted, so I began to speak.

​

"Did you know that with less effort than it takes to move a finger, a single blood vessel in the brain can be pinched off? Death is nearly instantaneous, and the magic is so subtle that blocking it requires full body warding."

​

The bandit swallowed hard, and I could feel his body tensing as he prepared to run, I could almost see the electrical impulses travel along his nerves to his muscles. The look of confused fear on his face when he didn't take a swing at me and run would have been comical if I was the type of person who enjoyed killing.

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"I'm sure that you were never taught this in whatever school of hard knocks you attended." I said softly. "But the human body runs off electricity, which is the same stuff that lightning bolts are made of, only much much weaker. A very simple spell can disrupt the signals coming from your brain to your muscles, you can tell yourself to punch me in the face all you want, but your fist will never hear the message while you are in my power."

​

The faint smell of urine touched my nostrils. Great, well, that was probably the cue to start asking questions.

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"Who are you after?" I asked quietly enough that no one could overhear, not that anyone from the caravan was likely to willingly come near me now.

​

The bandit swallowed again, looking queasy. "We was supposed to git this fancy bird-" I held back a grimace at the butchery the man was making of the language. "'is some sort'a lordling, what is supposed to inherit or summtin'."

​

Parsing that sentence took me a second, their target was likely a noble heir, probably female, though that was less certain. I was pretty sure that Carvallian inheritance laws allowed for daughters to inherit, though there was some stipulations that I couldn't bring to mind at the moment. In my defense, I had intended NOT to get involved with the nobility during my stay here.

​

Oh well, in for a Pent... or however that saying went. I was certain that I would not get an answer to my next question, but I had to ask it anyway. "Who hired you?" I asked, again, keeping my voice low.

​

The man's jaw slammed shut with such force that I'm sure he would have cracked teeth if he had any remaining. With the magic circulating through my eyes, I could make out the Geas swirling around his neck, breaking that spell was well outside of my expertise.

​

I sighed and tapped him lightly on the chest, his eyes rolled back into his head and he slumped backwards, unconscious.

​

As I turned to tend to the caravan master, I gestured at the bandit while addressing the two guards, who had recovered their weapons from the ground.

​

"Bind him securely and load him on one of the wagons." I said curtly, "I'm sure that someone in the capital would like to question him."

​

As the two men jumped to obey, my eyes found two of the merchants who had joined this caravan, a man and a woman, the man was covertly stowing something distinctly sword-shaped under his robe, and the woman was looking at me with the kind of hard eyed look I associated with nobility.

​

Well, that wasn't hard to figure out.

​

I ignored the noblewoman and her guard as I knelt next to the caravan master, whose name I still couldn't remember. Luckily the sword hadn't hit the heart, or the man would have been dead before I could do anything.

​

Instead the blade had only pierced a lung, the wound was clean enough, in the sense that it was a single cut that wasn't particularly ragged. I doubted the bandit's sword was particularly sanitary.

​

Stitching the wound was a matter of a few minutes concentration, and cleansing any potential infection took another couple of seconds.

​

In that time the patrol of guards I had been half expecting rode up and demanded to know what had happened. The guards were no doubt there to "discover" the dead noblewoman so that whoever wanted her dead could capitalize on it right away. But finding a distinctly not dead caravan threw a wrench into the plan.

​

I'm not the best at reading people, but I was pretty sure that the leader of the patrol was the only one who expected to find us, the rest of the group seemed to react normally.

As we set off under the protection of the patrol, I could practically feel the eyes of the noblewoman fixed on me the entire way into the capitol.

So much for staying out of politics I guess.

The leader of this bandit group had the most unfortunate face I had ever seen, it looked like he had made a habit of running headlong into every wall he came across since childhood. His face was strangely flattened, and he had more scars than teeth, and I could only see two scars.

​

He laughed heartily as the pair of 'guards' hired by the caravan master dropped their weapons and raised their hands. They both looked to have no more battle experience than the merchant who had let me ride on the back of his cart.

​

I sighed and carefully marked my place in the book I had been reading and prepared to be shaken down... again.

​

Luckily, my most valuable possessions weren't valuable to anyone aside from myself. The group of bandits were unlikely to want my few books, and my staff didn't look like much more than a stick. I had spent the last of my money paying for my spot on this caravan. I was hoping to make it to the university in the rather pompously named Imperial City, where my healing magic would be valued rather more than it was out among the unwashed masses.

​

By all rights, the caravan master should have been paying me twice what he was paying his guards to accompany his wagons, and even then he would be getting a fantastic bargain. But anything aside from martial strength or flashy offensive magic was looked down on in the Carvallian Empire. Which was unfortunate as the Carvallian Imperial University was widely regarded as one of the greatest centers of magical knowledge in the world, rivaling even the fabled libraries of the long dead Aaragean people.

​

A scream of pain pulled me from my contemplation. I looked up just in time to see the fat caravan master fall to the ground. The bandit leader pulled his sword free and grinned evilly at the rest of us. He made a gesture to his men and they started forward, death in their eyes.

I frowned deeply, robbing caravans this close to the Imperial City was brazen enough, but murdering the entire group? Either these men had a death wish or...

​

I sighed, pulling my staff from the back of my belt. In its current form it appeared to be a simple foot long stick, one that might have been taken from the branch of any of the hundreds of trees that lined the road. The only difference was that this particular stick had been polished and oiled to a rich brown.

​

I ran a trickle of magic through the stick and it instantly expanded in my hand to a six foot long pole, richly engraved with arcane symbols inlaid with silver. These symbols began to glow faintly as I pointed the staff at the nearest bandit, a scrawny man whom I could smell from six feet away. The man jerked slightly, as though he had been stung by an insect, and fell forward onto his face. Dead.

​

I don't think any of the next six bandits even registered me as a threat. They had all fallen to the ground, unmarked but also unmoving, when the leader finally noticed the small woman, apparently barely out of her teens, waving a staff at his men, and those men falling inexplicably dead to the ground.

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This bandit leader was apparently ready for magical resistance, he shouted at a black robed figure who had been standing back from the road. This figure also produced a staff and started towards me.

​

The mage was undoubtedly warded against all sorts of magical effects, fire, ice, and lightning would be unlikely to do more than ruffle his clothes, and he would be prepared with active wards if any large objects were thrown at him. Mage duels tended to be flashy showy things with the winner decided by the mage with a larger magic reserve.

​

The bandit mage fell dead as easily as the rest of his crew. Seeing their trump card fall with apparently no effort put the fear of God, or rather, the fear of Me into them. The three survivors turned and fled, while the leader stumbled and tried to run, but found his legs wouldn't work properly, jerking and twitching, sending him sprawling to the ground.

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I stalked forward, pausing to place a hand over the wound in the caravan master's chest, which immediately stopped bleeding. A quick fix to be sure, but it would keep the poor fool from dying while I dealt with the bandit.

​

The bandit, who I was pretty sure was actually an assassin of some sort, was blubbering and nearly crying as I stepped carefully over his dropped sword and crouched down next to him.