“Your sword? Well let’s not bother with that now. I’ve already been preliminarily trained with a weapon. Admittedly, I’m not too terribly skilled, but it won’t take long to remind me of my previous training.”
“Why don’t we try to get some magic out of me? I remember as a child I used to cause small trinkets to levitate in my sleep, and my parents forbade me from magical training for fear that I would be too weak of will to control it, but there’s nothing like an oncoming attack to strengthen one’s resolve.” A small smile touched her features.

She tried remembering how to do the whole magic thing, but it wasn’t working as planned. Well, she didn’t really know what she’d been expecting. Honestly, after several years of repressing it to oblivion, it’d be a miracle if she’d been able to do even the simplest thing. Yes, it would take some work to remove the block placed within her years ago.

“Okay. So what’s step one? What do I have to do to reactivate this...thing?” she asked, motioning vaguely to herself. “Is there a little gremlin living within me that I have to appease or do I have to do a funny dance? There has to be something.”

In her heart of hearts, Alice knew that she was also a bit frustrated by her inability and distracted by previous events. That wasn’t exactly helping her cause.

“I just… I feel so useless. I sit up there in my tower and sign things but how much of that actually matters? How many people am I actually helping? And then I go and enrage a powerful warlord from a place I’ve hardly heard of and I can’t even help in the battle.”

A pause.

“I’m such a sentimental fool. Forgive me,” she muttered, shaking her head and pausing again before taking a deep breath and looking up to meet Melissa’s eyes.

“Alright. Now that that’s out of my system, let’s get to work!”