The Lightning Mage

5 | The Sea Quest, Part II

ϟ☁ϟ☁ϟ

Lyn bolted out of the restaurant. Sure enough, she spotted Cydney a few yards away, walking back to the hotel that they were living in and looking deep in thought.

"Cinna!" she called out.

Cydney saw her, but instead of smiling or greeting, she swiftly turned her head away and continued walking. Well, that was not a reaction Lyn was used to at all. Picking up her pace, she caught up to the petite girl.

"Cinna, why'd you leave?" Lyn grabbed her hand. "Come back, there's this really good cake that I think you'll like."

Cydney's eyebrows twitched. "I'm tired. I'm going back to the hotel to rest." She glanced at Lyn before adding, "You should go back to your Pumpkin."

So Cydney did overhear the conversation. Lyn gulped. She had never seen the sweet little Cinnamon this angry before.

"Cinna..." she asked, staring at the sulking girl delicately, "are you... are you jealous?"

"N- No!" Cydney's face turned pink. "Why would I be?" With that, she started marching even faster towards the hotel.

Lyn was not sure if she should be feeling happy or sad about this. A strange, tingling sensation filled her chest, and she let out an exasperated chuckle. "Cinna, why would you even be jealous of a random girl? You know I'm the nicest to you."

"You're nice to everyone."

"But I'm the nicest to you. Look, I'm not going back to the restaurant, I'm going back to the hotel with you."

"Whatever..." Cydney mumbled, but her tone was softening.

The city had arranged a hotel suite for the five of them, with a spacious living room connected to three bedrooms. Raph, being the only dude on the team, got a room to himself. Cydney and Millie shared a room while Lyn and Irene shared the other. When they reached the hotel, Cydney grabbed a bag from her room and emptied the contents onto the coffee table in the living room.

It was a strange assortment of items: a pair of large, emerald earrings; a stained clutch wallet that was tearing on the sides; an old mascara tube; and lastly, a strange, rectangular piece of metal. Along with all of that was also a standard textbook for enhancer magic that Lyn recognized.

Lyn frowned. "Oh, are you enhancing something right now? Making your new weapon?"

Cydney nodded. "These are the only objects I can do magic on."

"Just these?"

Lyn stared curiously at the items. She could sense nothing special about them, but then again, she wasn't an enhancer mage. She picked up the strange metal object and examined it. It was black and glossy and had a flat, rectangular shape that fits nicely on the palm. Dirty plastic covered one side of the object, and a layer of glass covered the other. She had never seen anything like this before.

"This should be perfect," she suggested. "It's metal, so it should be the easiest for you to transmute to a sword."

Cydney shook her head. "That's too important. I don't want to touch that."

Instead, she selected one of the emerald earrings. Tossing it into the air, she floated and twirled the gemstone around her fingers. It pulsated with different brightness, molded into different shapes, and stretched into different sizes. While working on these transformations, Cydney flipped through the pages in the textbook, frowning in concentration and muttering to herself.

This was the standard enhancer magic routine. Lyn had seen a few of her fighter friends study their new designated weapons like this before. From experience, she knew that it was going to take a couple of hours. Resigning herself to be ignored, she laid on the couch and picked up the strange metal object again.