"I still think this is a bad idea, Master." Dahlia droned over the sounds of Jack's hasty preparation and scribbling. She didn't really expect her warnings to affect Jack's plans in the slightest.
"Magical Limb Augmentation," Jack enunciated as he wrote, not looking up from his notebook and ignoring Dahlia's complaints. "Test number three."
Jack put down his pen and pulled his brace into view. It now had a shiny luster to its surface from the chrome spray-paint Jack had coated it with in order to increase its magical effectiveness. Such an idea had come from Jack himself. Dahlia grinned to herself. Say what you would about Jack, he certainly had a lot of ideas.
Upon closer inspection, one might find that inlaid in the silvery surface of the brace were countless designs of remarkable intricacy. Magical runes Jack had carved under Dahlia's close instruction in order to transform the metal instrument into a magical catalyst. Jack held his impromptu wand to his chest now, muttering softly to himself. Dahlia watched with marked pride as she saw her current master and pupil clear his mind and begin preparations for spellcasting.
As she watched Jack's mouth slowly utter words of arcane power, Dahlia's mind drifted to ponder the few weeks she had spent in her new master's care. At first, she had been pleasantly surprised at her new pupil's diligence and willingness to learn. He wrote almost everything she told him down, and any moment he wasn't spending draining knowledge from Dahlia was spent reviewing that which he had already gleaned. Dahlia was ashamed to admit that his persistence in the pursuit of magical knowledge wore even her patience thin. He seemed to have an endless stream of questions. Any answer she did give him then promoted two or three branches of questioning that Jack was hell-bent on pursuing. But the worst thing about Jack's interrogations was that he almost never answered any of
her
questions.
"What spell does this rune signify?" Jack had asked her as he flipped through her pages one evening. He soon discovered that the pages almost never contained the same content twice. Dahlia had explained earlier on that the knowledge contained within a Grimoire far exceeded the amount of pages deemed "reasonable" to belong to a single book, or even a series of books.
"That is a powerful spell," She had told him. "It allows the user to see the future."
"See the future?" Jack had looked up from his notebook for once, in surprise. "That sounds incredibly useful."
Jack's eyes had then narrowed, "What's the catch?"
"The amount of time one can see into the future depends on how much energy they are able to expend in the usage of the spell. As you can probably imagine, it is incredibly difficult to cast."
At that, Jack didn't seem to falter. Dahlia had thought such a statement would turn Jack's expression sour, make him cross out his notes angrily. She had secretly wanted to see a look of anger or disappointment on his face, if only to find some replacement to the cold mask he normally wore when studying.
"And how far into the future could I see, with my current capacity for magical energy?"
"About half a second." Dahlia delivered the line as coldly and bluntly as she could, but her only reward was Jack lowering his head once more and writing something in his notebook she couldn't quite read.
"So," Dahlia had continued, letting her annoyance get the best of her. "At your level, it's near useless."
"Yes," Jack had said, never slowly the steady crawl of his wrist across the page. "Near useless."
After that, Dahlia had stopped trying to surprise or disappoint Jack.
Dahlia was brought back into the present by a sudden motion from Jack. He'd stopped chanting and was apparently ready to begin his experiment. He got up from his chair and limped to the center of the basement. The room itself was poorly lit and featured unfinished cement flooring, but Dahlia supposed that was why he'd chosen in as the place to conduct his magical experiments. The cement made a convenient surface to place magical runes in chalk, which wiped away easy enough when the fun was all said and done.
Jack stopped and looked over his shoulder at the permanently nude form of Dahlia. She sat on the edge of a dusty workbench, much in the same manner as she had when she first appeared in his bedroom the first night. Jack had discovered that she could talk with him while in her human manifestation as well as when she was just an old book, though Jack had wondered why the book itself remained present even when Dahlia was in her "human form." Jack had tried opening the book while she was human before him, but this only caused Dahlia to slap his hands away and blush profusely. Even since then, she had made sure to keep the book out of his reach while she took on her humanoid manifestation. Jack smiled as he looked at her now, the book clutched protectively to her chest as she watched him, the designs swirling on her skin in an unreadable pattern.
It wasn't that she couldn't wear clothes, or didn't want to, but it was more of a matter of her not understanding the need for clothes. She didn't understand the sexual nature the image of a nude woman conveyed, and the more Jack had tried to explain it, the more embarrassed and unwilling to listen Dahlia became. Jack had initially thought her an inherently sexual creature, based on their first encounter, but soon discovered this was not the case. She apparently only accepted the notion of coitus as a ritualistic gesture, and any other interpretation was shockingly vulgar.
"As I have told you before, Master," She had said, "That was merely meant to bind the contract between you and I."
"Although," She had added with a discreet blush, "That was the first time I'd been 'activated' in a long time."
"You've known other masters then?" Jack had meant to tease the fair-haired beauty, but part of him had risen with a wave of jealousy and curiosity
"O-Of course!" She had spluttered incoherently. "W-Well...a f-few, at least..."
Jack had bit back another sharp question. He realized the rage and disappointment in him and found annoyance at these feelings. So what if she'd masters before him? So what if she fucked them all? She was just a book, a tool to be used for knowledge. Jack had decided to stifle his base desires in his thirst for knowledge. It was what he had always done.
"How long ago was that?" Jack had asked instead.
