Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Practical Magic

Mana shuffled the deck of cards and spread it in front of Shitaka. The punk didn't require any additional encouragement to pick a card. He looked at the card that he chose with a beaming smile. It would have been an otherwise unremarkable three of clubs if it weren't for the "Choice" scribbled onto it with a marker pen.

"Oh, wow, you've actually marked the card that I'd choose, huh? That's rocking!" Shitaka beamed a sheepish smile, thoroughly entertained by Mana's elementary stretching of her magician chops as he offered to slide the card back into the deck.

"If you think that you had a choice to make, my illusion worked," Mana smiled in return after she turned all of the cards over, revealing that all of them had the same marking of "Choice" on them. The magician's hands worked the deck with the chosen card back in it and handed the deck to Shitaka.

"Huh? What am I supposed to do with it? I don't gamble..." Shitaka stroked the back of his head, ruffling his greasy hair.

"Just try it. There's nothing else to do for days while we cross the Land of Frost, is there?" Mana shrugged. She found practicing her magic a valid occupation of her time for now though who knew for how long that would last. At least she had a number of tricks to practice that would have occupied her for days.

Boredom on trips such as these was a curious thing. It set in almost immediately, just minutes after the caravan left its starting point and head out toward its destination. Just after the novelty of the snowy fields had overstayed its welcome and given how the horizon promised nothing but the same stuff for days on end, there was not much of said welcome, to begin with. Once Mana's brain got used to the frozen tundra, days, hours and minutes stretched out to infinity.

The fact that she hadn't experienced this trip beforehand was the worst part of it. It fooled Mana's brain into keeping close attention to the details of the trip which only served to frustrate her more and therefore didn't allow her brain to lull itself. Without that tranquility, making peace with the boredom and letting one's mind just skip and vault through it was impossible so practicing magic was the only way out of it. This bothersome worry only got recycled once the caravan began riding the mountain path and the landscape shifted.

"Yo, Junichi, you wanna see a rocking magic trick?" Shitaka offered the squad leader to pick a card from the deck.

"I've already seen through the trick, there's no use in it anymore," Junichi replied with a grumpy look on his face. He didn't look like much of a fan of stage magic.

"Yo, Cailar, you've gotta try it now that Junichi refused!" Shitaka turned to the flamboyant member of the Allied Ninja who just sighed and drew a card from the middle.

"Oh, the burden of garishness..." Cailar said as he showed the card to the disinterested caravan and revealed it to be a four of diamonds with "Choice" marked on it. "Ah, the illusion of free choice, what a ravishing trick!" Cailar mocked the would-be trickster with clearly faked interest in his tone.

"Yeah, rocking ain't it? You think you had a choice but you really didn't the whole time... Look, they're all..." Shitaka flipped over the deck only to gasp and burst into laughter as he witnessed that Mana had handed him a perfectly normal deck of cards, without any markings on them with the only marked card being the one in Cailar's hand. "Holy shit, how did you do it!?"

"Well... I can't say I don't appreciate the pizzazz," Cailar nodded with a long, sly smile as he looked to Mana and handed her back the deck.

"You think this is pizzazz? I'm pretty sure I accidentally mixed up some of my combat cards into the deck during all of the mad commotion in the Fire Country. If you drew the wrong card, we could have gotten flash-bombed in this caravan..." Mana replied as she promptly shuffled the deck and waved her hands before the dazzled pair as it had disappeared from her hands in its entirety.