As I wondered whether or not this staff was a good thing or a bad thing, I paused at a rather obvious problem with swinging around a magic staff. "How am I suppose to hide this thing?!", I asked aloud. Binders only recently got accepted by normal people, and even then the maji are so hated that if me, a binder/maji, show up out of the blue swinging a magic time bomb...I shudder at the thought.
I was about to sink down into the depths of despair and uncertainty, until I remembered a certain 800+ year old maji who happened to be both my monster and my master who was just floating there like a flower in the wind. "Vox...Master Voxea. You wouldn't happen to know a way for me to store the staff away so it won't attract attention right?", I asked in a deferential manner. People may not like a sycophant, but they love being sucked up to.
Voxea had this thoughtful look on her face as she contemplated my question. "I can think of...two methods we could try?", she said after a few minutes of thinking had passed.
"Great...wait,what are they exactly and will it kill me in the future"?
"Uhhh...no, but I'll tell you both and we can figure out which one would work better for you from there", Voxea replied.
"Why does everything you do with me seem to have a catch?", I asked her aloud and exasperated.
"Because magic is all about loopholes and it's more fun that way", Voxea responded cheekily.
The first method she explained to me was for me to etch an enchantment into my staff that would allow me to change its size at will. This enchantment was created by a maji who had earned the title, "Great Heavenly Sage", and he was the creator of over a hundred spells. From what Voxea told me, he had instilled the enchantment into his favorite cudgel and would shrink it to the size of a needle to keep it in his ear, while making it as big as a pillar when he was fighting. This sounded super useful...until she told me the drawback.
Apparently, the runes used for the enchantment had to be very precise in their etching or else it wouldn't work. The best case scenarios is that the enchantment doesn't work or it just stops working while the object was in a particular size state, leaving it stuck in a shrunk or grown state forever. The absolute worst case scenario was that the enchantment was faulty, leading to unpredictable bursts of growth and shrinkage. Voxea regaled me of a man who tried to mimic the Sage's carrying a staff in his ear trick, but he got something wrong in his enchantment. The staff ended up regrowing inside his head! He lived, but hearing that story was enough of a deterrent for me to throw that idea out the window.
Her other idea was another enchantment but this was a lot less dangerous, accessory infusion.
"Accessory what"?
"Accessory infusion", Voxea began to explain, "Is a method of carrying magic tools and spells by combining them with accessories like bracelets and rings. Fashionable yet functional".
"Okay that sounds significantly less dangerous than a size erratic staff...what do we need to do"?
"Well first things first, we need a non-magical accessory. Do you have anything like that? Like a bracelet? A ring? Ear rings?", Voxea asked me.
Aside from my necklace, which she was living inside of, I couldn't really think of anything except for...
"I have a belt", I told her.
"A belt?", Voxea said as she looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face.
I fiddled with my coat to show Voxea the belt I had on. It was a rather simple belt with an iron buckle and made of forest viper skin. My father made it for me years ago when I was a baby. Apparently the viper almost attacked me, but he managed to kill it before it could. In retrospect, he might have used one of his monsters for that.
Voxea stared at the belt for a bit, shaking her head side to side as if the thoughts in her head was bouncing around and then nodded. "Alright, this'll do just fine", Voxea declared.
"And now for your first lesson in spellcraft"!