“Peezlebub, why do I need to know all this? You’re the daemon. Aren’t you supposed to do the work for me, and I control the magic?” Luos complained.

  “One must have a firm grasp of the fundamentals before employing even simple tools, boy,” the cat replied.

  The two were outside Samsian’s place and Luos had a virtual window open in front of him, navigating the elements of the spiritual realm at Peezlebub’s behest.

  “Now navigate to the location I’ve provided. Do you-“ but Luos cut his tutor off.

  “What part of this involves the earth moving magic Samsian told you to do for me?”

  “We’re getting to it. Patience.” The cat’s voice was full of patience. “Some magic involves knowledge of the parameters. These are the most easily controlled, as you are responsible for how much of the operation occurs.”

  “Again, Peezle,” Luos put his fists on his hips as he chided the daemon, “that’s supposed to be your job. I tell you want I want, and you figure out how it’s done.”

  Peezlebub met Luos’ gaze with the unblinking blank passiveness of a cat’s stare. “Humor me,” he said wryly.

  Luos looked away first. Talking with the daemon was unnerving, and only partly because of the stories he had heard the men in town tell. Now he knew at least some were true.

  The screen stuck in the space in front of him, glowing like an open refrigerator sans the machine itself. He navigated to the address written on a much smaller window which Peezlebub had conjured for him.

  “There’s nothing in here but a transcribe,” Luos grumped. A lonely element named params.txt populated the address.

  “That’s what I wanted to show you. If you recall, the operational element you are to use is located at an address it shares with another element named just as this one is, but it’s not a transcribe. Remind me, boy, what is the difference between a transcribe and an inert?”

  Luos was already bored. He was supposed to be moving dirt by now, which he could imagine was only slightly more enthralling. But he had to play along or else Peezle wouldn’t let him get to the fun part.

  “Transcribes speak in the languages of the ancients, receiving transcriptions from users and operative elements. Inerts are a broad category of elements which support the operative elements in ways not fully understood.”

  The cat nodded along with its eyes closed. “Yes, just as is written. And I see you didn’t access any extelligence to regurgitate it for me.” Luos had come to understand his mental abilities, like tracking finances for his uncle, were a form of magic in and of themselves. Innate abilities granted by the spiritual realm to work with information and operative elements therein, which Samsian referred to as extelligence, or the intelligence of the spiritual realm of the machine.

  “Can you try to tell me why there is both an inert and a transcribe named params-dot-tee-ex-tee?”

  He might as well have asked Luos why birds flew south, or why summer was hot, or why sickles were curved. They just worked that way. But considering the cat was asking, he began to consider the names as more than just a coincidence. It was Peezlebub who had prepared this tutoring session after all. Perhaps he had done something, squirreled this element away in this address.

  “Can I look in the transcribe?”

  The cat nodded, and Luos activated the icon.

  Another window popped up. It contained lines and lines of letters in broken English, with a more coherent header that Luos couldn’t fully read.

  On a hunch, he opened the address of the earth moving operational element. He scrolled until he found the inert named params. His finger hovered over the icon for a second, and then he looked at Peezlebub, whose tail flicked. He gave no sign. Luos activated the icon.

  Nothing happened. No new window popped up. No avatar sprang into being. So Luos hit it again. And again.

  “You aren’t the proper authority for using that element, Luos. It won’t wake for you,” Peezle hinted.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  But Luos kept tapping on it, as though trying to unstick a flow meter.

  Then the name highlighted. It thought he wanted to rename the element.

  Peezlebub noticed and became startled. “Careful, Luos. That’s the master directory.”

  He stole a glance at Peezle, then began writing.

  “I dub you…params….dot-tee-ex-tee.,” he said, typing at his virtual keyboard. Peezle was frozen in his step. He was watching Luos, tail flicking. Perhaps he trusted the boy, but remained poised to intervene.

  Luos activated the icon, and a transcribe readout opened.

  He didn’t even read the screen, he was shocked that his gambit had worked. He gaped and looked at Peezle, who seemed now more embarrassed than afraid.

  “What did I just do?” Luos asked.

  Peezle returned to his graceful sitting position, tail curled around his front paws. “A strange alchemy, yes.”

  “The elements are interchangeable?”

  Peezle nodded, his face adopting a pained look. “It-… It’s not a lie when we say there are four elements in the spiritual realm, boy, it-…” he paused to think. “It’s a teaching mechanism, you see. We have to tell you something, but not the whole truth. We don't even know the whole truth, how the ancients really used magic. You have to break that ceiling yourself, when you understand more.”

  Luos was comparing the two transcribe readouts.

  “The one I renamed is….shorter.”

  Peezle, off-balance from the momentum of Luos’ curiosity, said, “Yes. The one you opened first was one I had prepared. I’ve been studying this operation in particular and what I wanted to show you was how to make most effective use. The params it was buried with are simple and trite. Running it as-is merely moves 144 square feet of earth, pulling it from the ground in an eight-by-six-by-three solid. It can do so much more.”

  Luos kept flicking through the params as Peezle was talking. Lines and lines and lines of broken English and numbers.

  “So what do I do?” he asked the cat. And Peezle walked him through the steps. He was to allocate his own space for a twin of everything in the earth moving address to reside. Then he was to replace the params in his own address with a renamed params that Peezlebub had provided.

  “And now you can activate the icon,” Peezle said when the consolidation had finished. “Keep in mind, you are working in my space. This will not be immediately available to you when you have a daemon of your own. When you’ve proven yourself mature and capable, when you have established connection with a daemon, then I might make it available to you.”

  Luos activated the icon.

  At first, nothing had happened. But just as he was about to tell Peezle about it, something appeared in his vision.

  “CAT”, it read. But the A was partially obscured by an orange triangle. When it moved politely to the corner of his vision, shrinking to a third of the size, there was a tiny green circle with a dot right at the focus of his vision.

  “How about it, boy? Did it initialize?” Peezle asked anxiously.

  The green circle wasn’t the only thing, either. The ground he was standing on, the grassy lawn which extended to the edge of the woods which surrounded Samsian’s home on the far reaches of Hill Hill terratory, had been superimposed by yellow hashed lines. They weren’t constant, and seemed to slide over the ground, marking the boundary between the earthosphere and atmosphere. He vocalized in awe.

  “Now, boy, you’ve got access to-“ Peezle started, his anxiety in his voice only growing. Luos cut him off. In the brief moment it took for the cat to say as much, Luos had moved his hand into his view, and that changed everything.

  Suddenly, extending from his arm, was a glowing translucent bucket at the end of a truss of the same material. The bucket was hinged to the arm by the rim, with protrusions like teeth on the opposite end of the rim. The bottom was curved, but the sides between the hinge and joint were flat.

  But the scale was immense. The bucket itself was large, probably five feet wide on the diagonal and four feet deep. The truss which extended from Luos’ arm could go twice his height if he held it straight up. And it merged seamlessly with his forearm. There was no trace of a hand, though he could still feel it there. There was no sensation coming from the construct itself.

  Peezlebub’s fur stood on end, clearly not anticipating Luos to have figured out the earth moving tool so quickly. He made no protest, only watching with bated breath at what this twelve-year-old boy would do with the power.

  Luos lowered the arm to the ground. He gestured, scooping the bucket in the yellow-hashed earth. The bucket filled easily with soil, ripping the roots of the sod as he pulled it back up.

  “Th-this is th-the p-power shovel, available in the full suite of tools,” Peezlebub explained as Luos emptied the soil from whence he had removed it.

  He rounded on the cat suddenly. “Peezle, this is great!” he said. As he moved his arms to say this with emphasis, the shovel tool vanished.

  “Safety first,” said Peezlebub. “The operation temporarily banishes the construct if you move too quickly or if it intersects with a non-earthen object.”

  Luos faced the lawn once more and the construct returned.

  “The arm of the shovel is immaterial. It’s the bucket which interacts with the physical.” Luos tested the cat’s claim by moving his free hand through the truss. He felt no resistance, and it passed right through. “But are you seeing the indicator in the soil? I can’t, as I’m not running the operation myself. Only the matter indicated can be affected by the shovel. That being the non-earthen material I mentioned.”

  Luos looked at the magical object extending from his arm. His pause prompted Peezlebub to ask, “Are you alright, boy?”

  This was it. He was doing magic. Just knowing he was using his first spell was overwhelming. It might just be some simple thing, fit for digging ditches or latrines, but it was a start. He really was a wizard’s apprentice now, transformed literally by magic from blacksmith's son and orphan. And soon he would have a daemon of his own, no longer restricted to using one his master had bound.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m doing just fine.”