Vegis woke up on his new bed that was more comfy than what it was when he fell asleep. The bed seemed to have an auto-adjust feature. He walked to the calendar on the wall and it held his schedule and main task of those days. He would start in 3 days so he decided to rest and acclimate to not just the climate, but also the people.
Vegis walked out the room after he unpacked his stuff and refreshed himself. In the hall, there was no one else and when Vegis walked down to the first floor, he saw nobody. Vegis decided it was best to do some more magic training since it seemed like he would need to rely on it more for awareness of his surroundings due to his left eye starting to fail him the longer he stayed there. Vegis looked at the map of the outside and looked for an open area where he could use magic without causing any trouble.
Near the building, there was a forest grove that one could walk through. Vegis walked back up to his room to grab a few pieces of snow clothing. On the way up, he saw a fellow employee that was followed by 4 clones. He waved at them and they all waved back. The coat Vegis grabbed was thicker than the one he borrowed yesterday but when he walked outside, he realized that it wasn’t as insulating. Vegis gathered his mana and applied the concept of heat to it as it was slowly released from his pores.
By increasing the circulation of mana in his body whilst releasing heated mana out of his body, he was able to keep warm when he was on his way to the large grove. Eventually, he got to the grove and entered it on one of its many paths. After a while, he saw a small frozen pond and a bench on it. Vegis took a deep breath and shot a small fire onto the snow that had piled on the bench which seemed to haven’t seen a person in decades. He stopped when all the snow had melted, but forgot that it also heated the bench too. This gave him a light burn and Vegis took some of the snow onto the bench until it stopped melting.
He wiped off the residual snow and sat down without burning. Vegis then started to stop releasing mana and started to gather it. The mana circulation in his body had to slow down due to the influx of mana that needed to be processed before use. After 10 minutes passed and his body was fully saturated, Vegis was starting to release small pulses of mana that were still tied to his will. They were infused with the concept of detection and color. His eyes were closed and information about his surroundings slowly drifted into his mind.
At first, the shapes around him were just blurry and in black and white. As he soon fine tuned the concepts and his imagination, the details started to come in. The bench’s green metal, the wood of the nearby tree, the rough texture of the concrete path, and the blue of his coat. Slowly, the details become clearer for objects farther from him like the ice of the pond and the strange plants that seemingly thrived there. As the dome of detection grew, it eventually stopped at 5 meters in diameter. When it stopped growing, Vegis tried to see how much detail he could “see”.
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He shrank the barrier to be 1 meter in diameter and focused on the snow under the bench. At first, the snow looked like a white sand, but as he focused in, he could slowly make out the individual flakes and focused deeper. He started to see the microscopic things in the snowflakes, but just before he could do it with clarity, Vegis got a head splitting headache. He had over extended his focus and was allowing too much information into him at once. Vegis took 5 minutes to let the pain come down and started to walk to the building after retracting all the mana and opening his eyes. When Vegis walked inside, there were people in the lobby.
The 4 of them huddled in a circle near the heater and were playing a board game with the screen nearby on. Vegis waved at them and headed to his room. He put his coat and gloves near the heat vents to dry them out. He walked down and decided to watch the screen with the ones that were already down there. “Hi there, I am Vegis” he said as he waved at the group near the screen. One turned around and raised their eyebrows. “Oh, hey there. I don't recognize you. You must be one of the new guys. I am Jee.” They said after giving a nod.
The other three turned around and started introducing themselves. The one with a mask and green hair said, “Ay there. I am Mac,” before pointing at the one across them and continuing, “and that’s my sister.” They waved and said “And I am Cheez. Yeah, weird name, but our dad was a bit of a jokester and decided to name us Mac and Cheez.” The last one giggled at that and spoke. “It will never not amuse me about how stupid y’alls father was. Don’t your younger siblings have normal names?” This made Mac roll their eyes and Cheez responded annoyed with a single yes. “Hi, I am Oak. I’ve had this job for 10 years now.”
Vegis looked impressed at this and then asked, “What are you guys watching?” to which they all replied in unison, “Fight Night 7”. They started to talk about the series as they played the board game. Over the next few days, all Vegis did was do a little practice and hangout with Jee, Oak, Mac, and Cheez. They talked a bit about their home life and how they got recruited.
Oak apparently was in the reserves in case of a war but was let go due to an accident causing a drop in affinity in mana and compatibility to the implants they needed. Jee had wide stories about planet hopping until they got a near death experience that made them decide to try to find a place to settle down. Mac and Cheez did a bit of streaming and were successful in their younger years but had to quit due to a doxxing incident and 3 attacks. Vegis shared some stories about himself too, like the pillar, a time he was in a game and glitched into a wall, getting stuck until a GM had to take him out, and what his family was like.
This continued until the scheduled time for Vegis to work started.
