Auroch, the city of the future, the fruit of Alberal's alliance with Kizamo, the brainchild of hundreds of Kizamoan mages. The magical wonders alone could keep anyone occupied by just staring at them, let alone trying to figure out how they worked, the product of many man-hours of work, partially to show off, partially to rebuild the city after the war that had almost torn the world (literally and figuratively) in half, and partially because it was such a massive undertaking unrivalled in the world save in Kizamo itself and in the darkest, deepest histories of lands long before Kizamo, Alberal and all the rest.
Karin Linden was, by all measurements, fascinated by these wonders.
Of course, they paled in her estimation to the heroes of her childhood, the heroes whose exploits filled the tales her mother told at night and filled Karin's head full of fantastic dreams, but magic was something Karin was deeply fascinated by. She was never able to do it herself, so to speak; though her mother was a healer, Karin had shown no potential, letting her stand out as an oddity in Kizamo, where mages ruled the day and the famous Catherine Hirana (Karin's idol among the heroes of old, though she also liked finding out and reading of Lillian's exploits and her songs and her historical books), a girl who could do no magic. She was, however, deeply familiar with the theory of magic, having taught herself much of it, devouring books on magic with unrivalled voracity if only so she could become more like Catherine; smart, powerful and wise, the type of person Karin was inherently drawn towards.
That was a while ago now, of course. Travelling around the continent, Karin had hoped to become more like her heroes, but everywhere she turned, she realised only one thing; she could never be anything like them. She had not the grace of Ketsuki with the sword, nor the talent with magic to become anything like Catherine, nor Tomik and Senija's legendary toughness. Nestled in her hands was everything she'd learned from Ketsuki's school and her manuals; she'd painstakingly written everything she could down, practiced day and night until her body ached, poured sweat and tears and blood into training, but it wasn't in her to be anything like the legendary swordswoman. It was a painful lesson she learned again and again; hard work was not always a substitute for pure talent, and no matter how much she wanted it, it just wasn't meant to be. The heroes she looked up to were talented, skilled, brave and
heroic; Karin was nothing and nobody in comparison.
But that didn't mean Karin wouldn't
try.
She wasn't here to dwell on that. After all, Auroch was the city of the future, where fortunes could be made. And Karin wanted to make hers; not for her sake, but for her mother. After all, Karin would be mortified at her mother putting up with her for all these years without doing something in return. She insisted she didn't need to, but Karin was well aware that their family wasn't rich; if she could give her mom a nice nest egg to live off of, at least she'd have done something for someone.
And then Jazz speaks, and suddenly Karin was whipped out of her mental world and back to earth. She snaps her book shut (it was on a page depicting a sequence of moves Ketsuki taught to carry the sword through the enemy, to be practiced until her very muscles could do it without conscious thought-and they did-), her eyes snapping up at Jazz, wide and surprised, frazzled by the sudden distraction from her study.
"H-huh? Go Fish? What? Oh. You were talking about....u-um. I don't think they are. Maybe?"
