D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

— Lily —

Meg drew out lunch, taking her time to chat with everyone and only eating slowly. By the time the food was finished it was already half past three and Meg ’convinced’ everyone it was better to wait for tomorrow to set out. To pass the rest of the day, Kat, Kamiko, Lily and Bower decided to play cards.

Or more accurately Lily wanted to see if she could replicate a deck of playing cards with her magic and see how long they lasted now that she had a better understanding of shadow magic and had gotten to Rank 3. Sure it’d be a pretty expensive spell for what it was doing… but the cards weren’t intended to be permanent, do any damage or be anything more than basic unempowered cards.

It took a few attempts to get a proper deck. Lily’s first spell gave a deck of cards… but they were all stuck together so it was more accurate to say Lily had mate a single brick that may or may not contain cards. The detailing on the back was nice, and the only face card visible was a nice, if standard ace of spades. An acceptable start considering nothing exploded.

Second attempt Lily made sure to imagine them separately… but lost the proper image of the cards. So instead of a full deck of 52 playing cards Lily summoned a deck of face cards with a few aces thrown in for good measure. They were also able to see that the cards were very floppy, closer to paper then cardstock. Which was fair, Lily was stretching her magical muscles here.

Though, it was worth mentioning that the face cards were correctly coloured for the most part. Sure they were a bit smudged but the reds showed up great. Lily was a little concerned they’d just be black as well… but nope. Colour everywhere! Even bits of gold on the outfits.

It took a few words of encouragement to make another attempt, but eventually Lily was willing. Instead of trying to do them all at once, Lily instead decided to do them one suit at a time. The first set of spades was visually fine, if a little distorted. Perfectly useable and still a bit bendy but a good start.

Lily spread the spades out across the table and focused on them hard, ready to make a proper set of clubs next. Lily managed to make a proper set of cards, even the feel was correct… but they were still spades. She’d messed up somewhere during the casting and had forgotten to imagine clubs instead. With a shrug, Lily decided to brute force it a bit.

She first summoned a bunch of floppy cards on paper that had the correct designs for each suite, separating them two further batches of 2-10 and the face cards alongside the ace. Once the poor copies were made Lily summoned up cardstock replicas of those and all of a sudden they had a perfect set of playing cards!

The edges might be a touch rough and the back was a solid colour that if you really focused on could tell you what suit it was… but nobody really minded.

So they got to playing. This set of cards lasted for around an hour before they started breaking down. Nobody was quite sure why. Lily had been feeding them a small but steady supply of magic for that hour and she was far from empty. Alas, they fell apart in the middle of a game of 500. It was a real shame because Lily was only one good hand away from winning the whole thing.

Lily remade the cards the long way, though managing to skip splitting the suits in half this time. They were still a touch fuzzy but the backs were almost identical. Now you could only work out if they were from red or black suits instead of which one in particular. Though once again that part wasn’t mentioned nor abused… too much.

While this was going on Hunter and Meg were off practicing. Apparently an offer to train together was enough for Meg to free Hunter of her confines… and interesting enough for Hunter to go along with the suggestion instead of simply fleeing once she was free. In the end the pair decided to practice with throwing knives for some reason. How did Kat know that?

It’s because the second set of cards were destroyed by a stray knife. Kat could admit she wasn’t paying proper attention to the forest and any potential dangers it hid… but in fairness to her with Hunter and Meg around it seemed reasonable to assume they’d take care of the danger while they were practicing. Little did everyone else know THEY were the danger.

Luckily nobody was injured, the knife managed to bounce handle first off the ground and then onto the table not so much stabbing the cards as scattering them everywhere. Perhaps the scare caused Lily to loose concentration and make the cards vanish, perhaps it was the damage from a flying knife. Kat wasn’t paying enough attention to see if any of the cards were cut at all.

Though it did lead to some testing. Lily summoned a new deck of cards, this time trying to do it in just two batches one for each colour. It… did not work all that well for the black cards. Instead of thirteen of each it was more accurate to say that there was a combined twenty-six clades? Spubs?

It was some mixture of the two, suits with a point at the top, two rounded bulbs on the side that turned into a flat line at the bottom with the ’handle’ at the bottom looking fairly normal.

Lily was a bit more careful with the diamonds and hearts. In the end they still merged together despite Lily’s additional effort but it was much better. You could tell which set was meant to be the hearts and which were the diamonds… they’d just gained some traits from each other.

The Diamonds were a bit wider then they perhaps should be and the heart was looking a bit like a two-scoop ice cream cone but really that was fine. This set of cards was not just for practice and for card games… BUT SCIENCE!

“So… I just try and rip one of these?” asked Kamiko uncertain.

“Yes exactly,” said Lily with a nod. “I want to see if breaking one card causes the whole set to fall apart,”

“Um… if you’re sure… but… why isn’t Kat doing this?” asked Kamiko.

“Well the easy answer to that was that originally I assumed you’d use your naginata for some reason. I realise that’s silly, even back when I was human intentionally ripping cards was quite possible with just my hands,” answered Lily.

“Not sure you could, but alright,” said Kat with a cheeky grin. Lily pouted back in Kat’s direction only for Kat to lunge forward and kiss Lily quickly on the lips before backing up. Causing Lily to get embarrassed.

“Why did you do that!” hissed Lily a few seconds later after her blush calmed down. “It was super embarrassing. Kamiko and Bower are watching!”

Bower just shrugged as if it wasn’t his problem while Kamiko on the other hand was looking up and away as if trying to avoid intruding. “I wanted to see if the cards would disappear,” answered Kat with a grin.

Lily frowned and looked over at the cards. The cards that were still around. “Ok… why?”

“Because it seemed nicer then trying to scare you? Maybe I need to kiss you more to test it… but seems like a little bit of embarrassment isn’t enough for the cards to vanish,” answered Kat.

Lily blushed again for a few moments as she shook her head to clear it. “No, bad Kat don’t distract me more,” said Lily before turning back to Kamiko. “Now that Kat has, hopefully, gotten all of that out of her system. Could you rip the card for me?”

Kamiko nodded, applying careful pressure to the ace of hearts she had in her hand. Slowly a tear was made and nothing happened for a few moments as the tear got wider and wider… then all of a sudden the cards vanished. The weird thing though, was that BOTH sets of cards vanished. The red cards and the black ones.

“Ok… how does that work? I had to make them separately so why is it that they both vanished at the same time?” asked Lily to the air. “Did you have just the one card?” freewёbnoνel.com

“Um… yes? I… I think so? I mean… even if I didn’t I would’ve only had two hearts. Nobody shuffled them after all…” mumbled Kamiko.

“Sorry, I didn’t meant to sound accusatory,” *because I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t. Hopefully Kamiko isn’t too embarrassed or annoyed or whatever this is.* “I just didn’t know what else could explain… that?” said Lily as she waved at the empty table.

“My personal guess is that ya thought of them as a set when you were making them, and as such they were one ’item’ from a magical perspective. Not sure if ya could separate them in ya mind to test it some more… but we can try if ya want. Otherwise we can just get back to the game. I was just about to win after all,” said Bower.

Lily nodded as she thought about it only to pause. “Wait a moment what are you talking about! You were in third place just ahead of Kamiko, and I’m confident that’s only because she was trying to help everyone else instead of win!”