Chapter 16: The Bear Takes a Rainy Day Off Part Two

Chapter 16:
The Bear Takes a Rainy Day Off
Part Two

 

I GAVE UP ON WORKING OUT and I decided to look for things to do downstairs. The dining room was packed like it was during lunch, but right now no one was eating. Elena sat at the counter, looking tired.

“Oh, Ms. Yuna,” she said, “sorry about earlier.”

“I didn’t mind.”

“So, what do you need?”

“I’m just trying to kill some time.” I sat down at the counter.

“We don’t really have anything for that.”

“Well, could I get something to drink?”

“Yes, you may.” She went into the back and came back with two glasses, one of which she handed to me. “Here, try this. It’s mira fruit juice.”

I thanked her and accepted the juice. It was a little sweet and sour, if a bit lukewarm, unfortunately. Then again, if it was lukewarm…I just had to cool it down. I put the black bear hand on the cup, called up some mana, and pictured ice forming into neat cubes. There was a plunking sound, and ice floated in the cup.

“Wait, what is that?”

“I just put some ice in the juice,” I said. “I thought it’d be better cooled down.”

I took a sip. I’d made it several levels more delicious.

“C-could you do that for me, too?”

Elena offered her cup to me as I savored my juice. I didn’t have a reason to turn her down, so I dropped some ice into her cup.

“Thank you so much.” Elena swished the ice around in the cup and drank it once it was cool. “It—it’s so good. I can’t believe it tastes so much better when it’s colder! This might be great on hot days. But I don’t really have space in the refrigerator to keep juice cool.”

Refrigerators existed in this world. You could make a basic one with any old mana gem, so long as you charged it with ice magic, but if you wanted a fridge with a freezer, you needed an ice-type mana gem. Up north, my bestiary explained, you could find ice-aligned monsters to harvest them from, but the difficulty and the distance involved meant refrigerators with a freezer compartment were luxury items.

“If only my refrigerator were a little bigger…” Elena sipped wistfully at the iced juice.

“Can you not use magic, Elena?”

“Of course not. If I could, I wouldn’t be the daughter of an innkeeper. I’m jealous you can, Yuna.”

The user’s guide for the bear gear said that you had to channel mana through it, so I knew I at least possessed mana, like all the people of this world. And yet, I couldn’t use magic if I wasn’t wearing the bear gear. Elena also had mana, but she was saying she couldn’t use magic. I didn’t really get what the relationship between mana and magic was in this world, but maybe she was the same as me when I wasn’t wearing the bear gear.

Maybe, with time, I might be able to get to a point where I could use magic without the bears?

In the end, Elena and I chatted until it was time for dinner. I was happy to have found something to do, but Elena got a talking-to from her mom for not doing her work.