Eventually, the three caught on to our judging looks and when all three's faces shifted colour slightly in embarrassment it took everything we had not to burst into laughter. Like when a parent catches their children in the act of doing something very embarrassing. After our less than relaxing bath, we cooked ourselves some dinner and let the childish ones figure out how to cook for themselves while we enjoyed our evening.
The twins were more curious to see what blood tasted like as they hadn't had any since turning into vampires but were too worried about drawing my ire again to ask me while I enjoyed the company of the obvious favorite. So, they asked the fiend. "Look we were right dinner and a show."
"Oh? Two fledgling vampires are asking me a favour?"
"All we said is we're curious what blood tastes like and don't want to bother them."
"If you want a taste of my blood you know I'm going to demand proper compensation."
"Hey we won that competition fair and square."
"No, you already had what you needed, I had to go get it making me a second later than you. It's not fair if you already have what you need to win before you even start."
"You didn't ask when we established the rules of the game"
"The audacity, to think you could trick someone as wise as I am and get away with it."
"Wise? You look like a child and you act like one too. How can anyone who acts so childishly be any kind of wise."
"And now the children who haven't even survived their first century dare lecture me? If you want my blood you'll have to pay serious compensation for it."
"We don't want your blood we want his… now look all your shouting is making them stare at us."
"They're judging us again" the other twin sadly pointed out.
The grins on our faces as we watched them fight over the stupidest things was clearly visible to them as they had our full attention. "No, please don't stop on our account. We're just trying to enjoy our romantic evening I had planned since she found me here."
"Yeah, it's not like we've been waiting over a decade to have this specific dinner or anything." My fiancé added on. The three now aware of their actions shrunk down on the ground like scolded puppies but got no sympathy from us, as we just laughed. "Isn't the quiet refreshing my dear?"
"Yes, I can almost hear the music now." The attention of the three was soon directed at the furious face of my pet who'd been tirelessly dragging her bow across the strings of her violin her frustration evident as the crescendo was eclipsed by their feud.
It was amusing to watch them squirm but it was almost time for bed and I knew the children would no doubt try to join us. "You can stop after this song and return to the labyrinth if you'd like. The mood's pretty much dead we're probably just going to go to sleep after dinner."
"But sloppy seconds!" the twins complained.
"Yeah, that's not helping." My fiancé said reproachfully. The three soon gave up on the very thing they were betting on earlier when one of the twins seemed to remember something. "Since the mood is dead anyway can we drink your blood?"
"What do you think?" I asked my gaze clearly showing that their question had not even amused me. She began to whimper again hoping it'd make me laugh so she could write it off as my agreement, but I saw through her acting and just gave her a pitying glance. "Just make yourselves some food and go home."
The two sat dejectedly and obeyed my orders after a minute of wallowing in their own sadness. The fiend did worm her way into our bed that night but there wasn't really much we could do about that. And there wasn't really anything she could do to restore the mood so even if she wanted to it wasn't happening tonight.
The next morning I grabbed some of the metals left to me in a pile with a few choice gems and took them into my workshop in the labyrinth where I made a refinery. The things used to refine the materials may not be real but the finished products will be.
At will, I formed casts a forge and the tools needed to work them. I then had my pet watch the materials when we left for class and to let me know when the metals I needed were melted. After a couple of morning classes, I took a minute between classes to pour metals into moulds and prepare the gems for when I set them in the finished rings.
I'd decided against using the blank check as it'd definitely draw attention to myself and after thanking her for her efforts told her I'd just make her a ring out of the probably stolen materials myself. During lunch I checked to see if the rings in the molds had cooled down yet but found them still too hot to handle and left them for later.
At magic club, I asked the vice president if she was ready and she said she'd already cleared our departure with the rest of the club and said we were set to leave. As senior members of the club our presence is important. We're supposed to make ourselves available for if younger members want to learn anything specific about the magic we use.
The whole point of the club is to foster curiosity in the next youngest mages, if their curiosity isn't sated they'd probably never grow. My presence probably won't be missed so much because few ever come to me for help. My perfect recal makes me really good at learning spells but it doesn't help me to teach them. There's a great enough deal of magical jargon that only experienced mages know. I tend to use it all when explaining spells.
This usually doesn't hinder the learning of our older members but when a younger member comes to ask me a question and they can barely comprehend half the things I'm saying we end up in a place where they don't even know what to ask because they don't even know what they aren't clear on, and I have the jargon so ingrained in my head it always slips my mind that younger members still haven't committed the definitions of all the terms we use to memory.
But the vice president's absence would definitely be noticed. She was much more patient when explaining to those younger than her and actively took the time to sit down and explain the jargon to her younger peers. There have been people who've come to me with questions, who'd written down everything I said and then gone to her for a translation. Usually, my explanations tend to take up a page and a half of notes but once they get everything translated, they see just how long it would have taken me to explain it normally and usually try to learn the terminology.
I think about one or two of the younger students can ask me questions and get satisfactory answers right now though there are still times when certain words I use go over their heads and they have to re-read the self-made lexicons they have to find what the words I'm using mean.
All in all people usually only come to me if they want a summarized explanation and tend to go elsewhere for more detailed instruction. So, we got permission to leave to learn transmutation magic while the vice president learns space-time magic.
When we arrived at the school again, we were met with my grandfather who began acting as our guide so the guards wouldn't try to evict us from the premises again. We walked the halls and met with her acquaintance. The teacher was short. Extremely short. She looked like she hadn't grown since the third grade. I'd heard she had an anti-ageing spell cast on her when she was very young because she wanted to be a kid forever… mostly because her family has a disease that tends to show itself in their latter years and she wanted to freeze herself in youth until someone figured out a cure for this strange curse-like disease that has plagued her family for generations.
While we were there, we caught the end of one of her evening lectures. She was teaching her class the importance of the quality of materials used when casting transmutation magic and the clear image in the head of the caster when changing the shape of an object or merging objects together.
Before I had even noticed my little fiend was sitting atop my shoulders again. "When I said I'd give you a piggyback ride I wasn't expecting you to do so every day."
"pop your horns and I'll get off." She said swinging her legs gently like a playful child.
She knew we were in public and if I did that people might see me as some kind of demon in a human disguise, a thing meant to be hunted and killed for money. She knew I couldn't do as she asked and gave me the unreasonable condition she did. Even went as far as whispering it into my ear so no one else heard it.
"Fine do what you want."
"I always do." She replied. I saw written on the board the 8 best known magical domains. Mind, space-time, necrotic, radiant, transmutation, infernal, illusion, and divination magic. I'm assuming those are the domains I need to completely fill my anti-magic circle. I already have the circles for four of them. I think if I'm remembering my horns correctly, mind is opposite to space-time on the wheel of arrows, divination is opposite to transmutation, and infernal is opposite to illusion. The divine and demonic spell domains backlight and frame the circle when it's done if I'm not mistaken. It's good to have a visual representation of what I need to get and that most of the domains I'll learn might come at a similar cost learning both necrotic and radiant had on me except probably at a greater scale as there'd be two or more domains fighting each other for dominance at that point. I wonder how I'd fare if each of the eleven domains begins a war within me for dominance of my casting choices and how great the pain would be from doing that… and how great the reward for endurance.
Very few have ever actually gotten their marks for all magics in all of history and most of the people who did were either dragons or half-dragons as they tend to be extraordinarily tough to kill and naturally adept at magic. Even then very few dragons bother to do so as it's still not a pleasant or in some cases necessary experience for them to go through.
I've heard the only dragons who'd ever gone through with mastering or at least getting the marks for mastering all magic only did so to prevent their entire clan of dragons from extinction. So it's not something even a dragon could just up and do, yet such is my goal. As I stare at the board determined to attain my goal without having any regard to how it might adversely affect me. I was soon tapped on the shoulder by my classmate.
"c'mon the teacher is waiting for us."
"Right."
And so I entered the room. she began by teaching her the cypher and showing her a few of the theories in the spells before exasperatingly turning to me and pleading that I explained the spells, so I told them the secret to why these were so hard to cast.
"These spells are actually the shortest of any domain I've ever seen the only problem is that this grimoire has so many hidden spells it may as well just be a slew of tangents and borrowed theories. The spellbook is written like the person writing it has the attention span of a goldfish. The spell theories will warp and change the second they so much as mention a similar spell.
But if you look closely you'll see they just give you a sentence from each of the hidden spells as the theory for the actual spell. In other words you have to seek the tangents and read only every third sentence of every tangent to figure out the spell theory for the spell listed as the rest is just an amalgamation of hidden spells that can be fished out and put together later."
As I explained this simple fact of how broken the cypher of this domain was the club vice president asked what about the tangents that last less than three sentences to which I replied, "Just ignore them."
"Ignore them? This happens far too frequently to just be ignored they must have some meaning."
"They do, just not to the spells listed. They tend to give hints linking the theories of the hidden spells by explaining more about the domain as a whole, as this grimoire doesn't like to separate the lore from the theory."
"I noticed. It's amazingly annoying to deal with."
I smiled and continued my lecture. After a brief explanation as to how space-time magic is read they wanted to ask me about the methods in which they are cast but as I primarily use a spell focus I never got around to actually drawing magic circles and setting components in there place. It is written in the grimoire how but I never paid it any attention as I never needed it.
I began to learn it with them and by the end of the lecture I gave to the teacher and student. The professor asked me if she could transcribe a copy of my grimoire, I told her it'd be fine if she let me transcribe a copy of hers to which she said, "No need" and removed two blank books from her tiny yet still oversized lab coat and cast a spell on the ink and tomb she pulled, instantly creating a copy of her grimoire with a transmutation spell.
"The space-time version is a copy of the transmutation spell and thus has drawbacks from it being an imperfect copy but as I know the original, I can make perfect copies every time."
We applauded her performance and let her make a copy of my space-time grimoire, I traded the copy of my copy for her copy of her grimoire. She told us she wanted to meet us again tomorrow and that she'd explain the cypher for transmutation when we returned. Since my fiendish little necklace decided to bother us as we were leaving demanding the ring, I'd promised her instead of heading straight back to the vice president's house to drop her off or back to the magic clubroom in case she needed to pick anything up before leaving we went back to my labyrinth because the little devil on my shoulders was so insistent about it.
When we got back the rings had cooled down enough and I broke the molds. After the three, silver gold and electrum, bands were shown to the artificial light of the labyrinth, the vice president became aware of their significance and turned a bit red in the face. I soon set the gemstones and unceremoniously slipped her ring onto her finger. "Here."
"Hey! What was that?!"
"What do you mean? I gave you your ring didn't I?"
"I wanted you to propose like you did with the other girl!"
"She and I have a longstanding relationship, you and I met a few days ago and you extorted us into starting a harem and inviting you." Overhearing our conversation, not only her face but her chest and ears began to grow red as well. I could almost see steam rising up from her hair.
"I don't care! Propose to me."
"Alright, but you'll owe me another favour."
"As if one of your requests could scare me."
We looked at each other with matching challenging grins as the vice president collapses on the floor flush red and tries to escape the situation by retreating into the other room.