บท 20: Poverty As Weapon
"H-hi! Please t-take a seat..." the girl said as soon as she finished flinching from the door shutting right behind her.
Trying to lighten the mood, Kir introduced himself. "I'm Kir. I'm going to guess you'll be my artist for the day?" He tried to sound reassuring, but for some reason the girl blushed in a way that almost turned the white fluff of her ears pink.
"I-I'm Kordia! Kordia van Mora!" She announced stiffly. Her very-human face trembled with nervousness. This close he could see she had beautiful green-gold eyes.
"Nice to meet you Kordia," Kir said as he sat, careful of his tail on the uncomfortably small object. He crossed his legs right over left, a bit away from the table, and connected his hands on his higher knee. "How do you want me?"
She made a strange noise before, like a popped balloon, she suddenly seemed to deflate. Kir recognized the symptoms of a person reaching maximum shyness. He grimaced to himself as he thought of how to diffuse the tension.
Then he remembered why he was here. Essentially he was submitting himself to racial profiling. Shyness aside, Kir didn't know if the girl in front of him was doing this because she hated his kind...
"So, um... you're going to be a student too?" Kordia asked in a quiet voice.
The look he gave her when he looked up was dark. "Yes. Why are you doing this?" he asked.
"D-drawing? W-well, I'm going to be a second year, b-but I don't have money so I've been working in the city... I used to draw in the park but then one day they said I have to do this and it's a whole silver a day and..."
Kir felt his disposition soften. It was one thing if she'd been doing this willingly, but learning she was being pushed to do it and barely compensated for hours and hours of work... It was the poor being used against the oppressed.
He came out of his thoughts around the time she was complaining about how difficult it was for her to have to walk all the way down here from the Academy.
"Kordia..." Kir asked softly, "Do you want to be doing this?"
Some time during her rant she'd felt comfortable enough to sit down, and he watched as she lowered her head and ears.
"I'd rather be sitting in the park..." She mumbled. "But they say I'm helping people..."
"You don't sound so sure about that," Kir said.
For a moment it looked like she would deny it, but then she exhaled a sigh. "It's because I'm not... everyone I draw here is usually... they try to make it difficult or ask me not to..." She didn't stutter at all as she spoke from the heart.
"That's because what you're doing... you know it will enable other people to hurt us. People like me that is." He spoke softly.
Kordia nodded once.
"It's okay not to follow orders that you know are wrong," Kir said.
"But they told me I have to..." Kordia mumbled.
"Who told you that?" Kir asked.
"The Knight Commander of the Arcane Knights..." she replied. "Madred Tul."
Kir felt a moment of confusion. "Do the Arcane Knights get to tell Academy students what to do?"
"N-not technically... but the Knight Commander is also on the Academy administration and I have to take at least one Knight course before I can graduate and I didn't want to get bullied because..." Kordia sniffed, and Kir felt a surge of guilt. "I'm terrible at confrontations... I shouldn't have let him see my drawings..."
"Look, I know it must have been hard to refuse someone who's got power over you, especially when they're doing something you need like paying you..." Kir sighed, "Never mind... I guess I should just let you do your job."
"I-I was planning on quitting when the semester started..." Kordia mumbled as she put her sketch pad on the table and pulled a case full of lead drawing sticks out. "Or if I earn enough not to need it... It takes at least four gold to live a year on campus... and I only have two..."
Kir winced when he saw the sticks of lead. "You know those are poisonous, right?" he asked.
"Everyone knows that. But they're cheap and... it's not like I'm eating them," Kordia said as she picked one up.
"They're poisonous just to handle... you shouldn't let them get in contact with your skin!" He spoke faster and higher as his mind began to remember the symptoms of lead poisoning. "The nerve damage..."
"But it's all I can afford!" Kordia said.
Kir sighed. Poverty was a terrible weapon. "Look, I don't want you doing this for a lot of reasons, but especially not if you're going to poison yourself just for a silver a day..." He stood off his chair and offered a hand. "Can I see them?" he asked. "I promise I'll make them safe."
"But you just said..."
"I haven't been exposed to lead as long as you have... I take it you've used sticks like this for a while?"
"Since I first learned to draw..." Kordia muttered.
Kir winced again. "That's... you probably need to see a healer..."
"I can't afford to..."
An idea struck Kir. "I'll give you enough to do it. How does that sound?" I just need to see the box for a bit.
At the end of her rope, Kordia timidly pushed the box forward and placed the lead she was holding into it.
Kir inspected the contents. There were about a dozen sticks of varying lengths, most about as thick as a finger. "Promise you won't tell anyone what I'm about to do?" he asked.
"I'm probably going to be fired for this..." she muttered to herself, looking away.
After a long pause, Kir took that as a 'yes.'
Magic was an amazing mediator. With greater knowledge, Kir's specialty wasn't actually wielding a lot of it, even though according to his moms, he had a vast capacity for it. Rather, his specialty was getting the most out of every particle as he used magic to alter their states, then let physics handle the rest.
He'd developed his water blades on this principle, using magic only on the surface of the water to generate enormous pressures and then suddenly cutting off the flow of magic, which would then release the blades in a shape that corresponded to how the cutoff occurred.
Unfortunately for the process he was about to try, he knew he would need almost all the magic he had in him. Now, as he stared at the toxic sicks of neurotoxin, he set his magic to work.
Lead was three steps away from what he wanted. In order to safely reduce its atomic weight, he needed places to put the extra protons, neutrons, and electrons.
Fortunately for him, he'd deduced that the atmospheric composition of the world he found himself in was very similar to Earth, albeit with a lot more oxygen. But what he needed wasn't oxygen, it was nitrogen. Thus as he used his magic to step down the lead into gold, he stepped up the nitrogen around his hands into neon.
The whole process occurred in a sphere comprised of two latticed shielding spells designed to allow air in but retain solids. While the process burned the box Kordia had handed him into cinders, he was eventually left with a heavily carbon-scored puddle of heated gold and a small cloud of electrified neon.
The most important thing was that Kir's second shield was safely containing the ionizing radiation until it calmed down enough for the nitrogen to absorb it
He gave both a chance to cool a bit before adjusting the inner lattice to let the carbon sift out, shaking it until he had mostly gotten the gold clean, before he induced cooling in the first sphere by "calming" the electrons down with magic. In the end, he was left with a palm-thick hemisphere of gold, and an invisible amount of neon that would safely disperse into the-
"Fascinating..." Kordia said at his elbow.
When had she come around the table?!
Kir jumped, but quickly recovered, letting his shield spheres disappear and catching the gold as it fell. "Here," he said. "I don't know how much this is worth, but it should get you through the semester at least..."
Kordia reached out tremulously as if disbelieving that Kir would just give her the small fortune he'd just created out of her drawing sticks.
"Th-this is... is this real?" she asked, scratching it with some very claw-like black fingernails.
"Well... yeah," Kir said. "It's unmixed so it's going to be really soft."
Kir saw her eyes light up a bit as she drew mana into them, no doubt trying to detect if it was... "It's not an illusion... It's not going to turn back into lead as soon as I leave the room?"
"I'm one hundred percent sure it's stable," he said. "I did it once to mercury when I was... fourteen I think? My moms thought I stole it so I guessed I could keep things calm by not doing it again..." He chuckled nervously.
Kordia looked up at him, her eyes full of stars and tears. "Who are you?" she asked.
"Umm... I'm Kir. I'm going to be a student at the Academy..." he replied.
"Please let me draw you," she said. "I know it's not much but it'll get you out of here. And I can forget to turn it in when I quit."
"Um... okay..." he grimaced, more than a little confused. "How does that work exactly?"
"I'm supposed to show the drawings to the guards before I leave, but I actually turn them in once I'm inside the city," she replied. "I'll just keep it instead..."
"Oh, I meant I just destroyed your pencils..." Kir scratched at the back of his head.
"I have the ink I use for school!" she said. "I much prefer drawing with it anyway. It's just... more fun using my nails..."
Kir found himself smiling. He also used his claws to write. "I can show you a trick to save the ink after," he said, feeling more than a little drawn to her enthusiasm. "It's magic."
"You're magic..." she said, before blushing profusely and shielding her face with the sketchpad.
"Alright, alright," Kir smiled. "Let me get back in my chair. How do you want me?" He asked as he leaned forward and leaned his chin on his closed hand.
"Just like that!" she said after only a small look.
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