The room itself had two beds across from each other, with nothing but a small table beneath a narrow window between them. Hilda sat on the right and I on the left one, across from her. It seemed she didn't have a roommate (the other mages asking not to room with her for fear of their souls getting destroyed, apparently) and thus it was fine for me to sit there.
"Th-The first spell," Hilda began, her head turned completely to the side such that she was facing the wall and looking nowhere near me, "is Darkness Orb. It's really basic and the first any Cursed mage learns. It looks like this. Yamiyo tekiwonagure." An orb of darkness with purple smoke radiating off it appeared above her hand. "It's like any Elemental attack, you fill it with mana and it grows in size and strength and stuff, but it has some quirks."
"Quirks?" I asked, putting all the interest I could in my voice.
"Yes. Yes, quirks!" she declared, sounding a lot more confident now that she had gotten in the groove of explaining. She was still facing and talking to the wall, though I noticed her eyes glancing my way out of the corner of her eyes despite the rigidity of her head. "The thing is, everyone thinks it's just a ball of darkness, but that doesn't make sense. It obviously doesn't make sense. Right? Right?"
It felt like she wanted an answer here. "Right. Because..." I trailed off, trying to think of any possible answer. "Because normally darkness is the absence of light, and it doesn't make sense for the absence of something to actually hurt stuff."
"Right!" she exclaimed, half-way leaping out of the bed with excitement before abruptly sitting back down, which caused some miscellaneous bouncing which I shan't describe further. "Right. It makes no sense. It's so dumb. How could anyone ever think that actual darkness could hit something? What do they think darkness is, a thing they can touch? Huh? Huh? So dumb. No, what Darkness Ball does is it destroys light. Most Cursed spells are based around destroying stuff in one way or another. If you're ever lost on a Cursed spell, maybe just think about it in the context of destroying stuff." Hilda was talking very fast, breathless due to never pausing to inhale or anything. It felt like she was afraid that even a single second's pause would be enough for me to get bored and leave. "So obviously, Darkness Ball destroys stuff. It destroys light, and makes its energy from that. The ball itself is energy created from destroying the light. The more mana you pour in, the more it destroys light, and the more efficient it gets. Actually, everyone thinks light is naturally good against darkness, but this is why it's not. If you hit it with light, you just make the ball stronger."
"Wow. So the light doesn't just overwhelm it? You can't make a Darkness Ball vanish through light?"
"Weeell..." She trailed off, deflating a bit. "It's a numbers game, kind of. At that point, I mean. A tiny little ball like this wouldn't destroy the sun. It's just an efficiency thing. You would take, like, ten times as much light as there is darkness to destroy a Darkness Ball. It's better, but not invincible. It's... It's better though!" she declared, loudly.
"Cool. That's an awesome spell. Thanks for telling me about it." All I learned was some trivia, so not exactly a huge score, but nothing wrong with biding a little time.
"R-R-Right! Okay. Spell two. This one is a huuuge deal." She gave a kind of strangly-sounding choke while trying to empathize 'huge.' "It's called Soul Spy. All you need to do is eat a little bit of someone's soul and you open a scrying portal to them. You can't look around, only at them, but you can see the background and hear what they say and stuff. It only has a range of 100 meters though. Also, the more soul you eat the bigger and clearer the image gets, but it fades over time when your own soul eats away at theirs until it's gone."
"You... Eat their souls?" I asked. My tone must have sounded noticeably unsettled, given the look of abject horror that dawned on the half of Hilda's face that I could see. Or more like a one/eighth due to all the messy hair.
"Nononono! Yes! But no! Your soul is in your whole body, right?! So you just need to eat some of their body!"
"I..."
"Nononononono! Like their hair! Nails! Blood! Stuff that grows back! The soul grows back with the body!" She was practically shrieking, and trembling. I got the feeling that this was the part of most Cursed lectures that ended up with people avoiding her for the rest of her life, and possibly launching witch hunts against all Cursed mages in the world. Fear not, my friend. I'm already dead inside.
"Fascinating!" I said with faux-energy. To be fair, it was fascinating. Only the energy part was faked. "That's super cool. Since the souls grow back, you can basically have a link with someone at no cost. It's even a little romantic, isn't it?"
"RIGHT?! IT TOTALLY IS!" Hilda exclaimed, actually jumping out of bed this time. She made eye contact in her exuberance, then yelped and sat back down in a hurry, shooting her head back to the side. Boing boing.
"Can you demonstrate it? Do you have it activated for anyone?"
"Yes. I mean no. I do, but I can't. I mean, I said I wouldn't. Emergencies only," she mumbled.
"C'mon, please? The way you put it, they won't even know what happens. It'll just be a second," I said. Was this peer pressure? Yes. Was it morally wrong? Yes. But, the way I saw it, violating the trust of someone in a soon to be eradicated timeline was small cake compared to the heroic justice of giving the protagonist a nifty spell he may or may not ever use in his life. I mean, again, this will sound edgy, but I wasn't much one for moral codes. If you show me a victimless crime in a soon-to-be eradicated timeline, it was basically impossible for me to care, even if hypothetically I would if I subscribed to an all-emcompassing moral code to define my behavior. A believer of the categorical imperative I was not.
"M-M-Maybe. You can. Give me. Some of." Hilda froze, unable to finish her janky sentence.
First, let it be clear that I had genuine respect for how she was managing to get so sweaty that even her pitch-black robes had visible sweat-stains forming in the parts caught under her arms; spots so damp the sight of them actually made me feel I would somehow drown from a distance. I wasn't even sure how it was possible to make pitch-black clothes darker, but Hilda had managed it, and for that she had my undying respect.
Second, let it be clear that she did not feel any romantic attraction for me. By my measure, at least, there was no romance or love going on here. She had almost certainly not fallen for a guy she just met during their first-ever conversation (from her perspective). At times like this, I found it valuable to flip the chessboard of gender, so to speak, and think about it from the opposite perspective. Imagine a nerdy dude. He's natty ultramaxxed due to exercising in his room and posting on fitness forums online, but due to his lack of fashion sense and tendency to rant about video games, everyone avoids him. Now imagine a, well, let's say a fairly attractive girl walks up to him. (I didn't know what my own face looked like now, but if it was improving with my muscles, it had to be at least decent now.) Let's say that attractive girl expresses an interest in video games, invites him to spend some time alone, and then listens with rapt attention as he mostly one-sidedly rants about video games. Would there be any love there? Would the nerd fall in love with the girl? I say no. I say there would be a moderate amount of sexual tension, perhaps, but that's it. There would be stammering, perhaps an offer to eat the girl's hair and/or nails, but it would be platonic in nature. Just two new friends working out some potential sexual tension. Nothing more, nothing less. It was a challenge that all male/female friends had to face, however briefly, and that was what was happening here.
Thus, understanding that she was just being polite and offering to use Soul Spy on me simply to satiate my curiosity, I shook my head. "Maybe we can just both close our eyes, you use the spell, and I feel its energy in the air. Sound good? Nobody will see anything, no privacy broken."
She peeked this way. "Wh-What? But why?"
I shrugged. "I want to be in its presence more than anything," I said, which was honestly the most pathetic half-truth I had said yet.
"Um." (I think she noticed). "Okay," she said cautiously, like a nerd re-evaluating an attractive girl who had claimed to be interested in video games, then revealed she only played Candy Crush or somethin of the like. "Turn around so you can't see. I'll hear if you turn again."
"Sure." Darn, not trusting me to not open my eyes. Wise girl. I was totally planning to, thereby establishing me as an edgelord breaker of promises.
I turned, and once I was finished, she made the chant. "Tamashinozoki," she said, and after a pause, she continued. "Okay, you can turn back around."
I did so, and once I was back in place, I realized she was looking straight at me. I think she was so confused by that exchange that she had forgotten to stare at the wall instead of staring at me with her wide, dark purple eyes. God, I don't mean this in a "I'm so in love I get absorbed in them" kind of way, but seriously, ye gods, talk about bottomless pits of despair. It's like I can feel my soul getting sucked out of me just by making eye contact. Look at me now, I'm not even saying anything, I'm just monologuing as the purple fills my vision and the vortex sweeps me away. I wasn't even really seeing her face or anything, it was just a circle of smooth white surrounding all... the... purple...
"Um," she said, turning her head and snapping me out of it. "Was that okay?"
"Huh?"
"The second spell. Soul Spy."
"Oh... Yeah, yeah. Being in its presence definitely, er, definitely gave me the spiritual and emotional peace I was looking for. Thanks." Not sure if I'll be able to replicate the spell just from hearing it, but it was going to be hard to experiment.
"G-G-Good," she stammered, sounding relieved. There was a pause. "You know, I like the Heir too. The stories I mean. The prophecies."
"Huh?"
"Th-The Heir. You know." She glanced at my chest. Mirin? She flicked her eyes up, then stared back at the wall. "Don't you?"
"You lost me. Who's the Heir?"
She shook her head violently, messy hair getting even more messy. When she stopped it all but covered her face, with strand after strand sliding off. She apparently had no compulsion to speed things up and wipe it off herself.
"Nevermind. I'm dumb. One more? I must be boring you by now. I always talk too much. You must just want to see the spells. Who cares about me? I just rant and rant and rant." She shifted on the bed a bit, causing some of the robe caught under her arm to slip out. By god, it was a massive circle of darker-than-black. "And rant and rant. About creepy stuff, too. Eating souls and stuff, I mean, it's just Cursed magic, I think it's nice and romantic and nice, but like, nobody else does. You know a lot of Cursed mages don't even like what they do? They hate that they were born with it. Everyone wants another Arcana. Boo hoo. Not me. I like it, so I'm a freak among freaks. 'There Hilda goes again, eating souls for fun!' they all said. It wasn't for fun, it was for research. They should know that. They should know that!"
I got the impression her demonstrating a spell that required the consuming of someone else's soul, followed by me silently staring at her, had made her nervous. It was time for damage control.
"That's messed up. In my opinion, eating someone's soul is a very personal and, like I said, potentially romantic thing. It's like connecting to someone on a deep level, via consuming then slowly destroying their soul. You can't get that kind of connection elsewhere. It's just dumb to mock that or hate it. They were probably just jealous of your handling of the spells. Incidentally, where did you get the souls to consume?"
"Oh, I just pulled hairs off the girls I didn't like and ate it all in front of them," she said casually. A truly tragic past; to think she was bullied so unfairly and without just cause.