"You look awfully tired, are you sick?" Helena stuck the back of her hand against Milo's forehead.
"Just having trouble sleeping, this is all new for me" he lightly chuckled.
The two of them were standing side by side in front of an orb-like object, Helena gestured toward it.
A distance away, a few others of similar orbs were resting, lined up and seemingly cared for extensively, for they all came in their own little boxes.
Milo and Helena had finished up with what needed to be done at the farm, and had subsequently come to the city, he didn't know what he was expecting exactly, but Milo had felt like the city looked nothing like his imagination.
It was certainly better looking than the outside, but the streets were also quite filthy, and most residential areas felt quite crowded with buildings, as well as people of course, everything felt narrowed and tighter here.
Milo felt like he shouldn't breath in too deep, lest the rising of his chest would prevent him from moving through the condensed masses of people going in every direction, the ease with which the inhabitants here weaved through was also quite the sight, he totally would have ended up stuck somewhere were it not for Helena's expertise of the area.
She took him by the hand, which he appreciated in more than one aspect, and easily led him to a tall building, which was to say that it was simply taller than two-stories, absolutely unnecessarily enormous in his eyes.
And here they had soon found themselves after going up all the way to the last floor and through a locked door, clearly, the orbs and whatever else were in this room were valuable.
"Hum, where are your instructors?" he asked.
"Oh, they barely even come by anymore, I am just practising the same stuff over and over again until I reach an acceptable level" explaining this to him, she picked up the closest orb and held it up.
"Hold this with both your hands, don't drop it!" she carefully passed him the orb, keeping her own hands on it.
Milo had no clue what she was doing, but Helena was running her mana through the orb to activate its effect.
Removing her hands after a few seconds, the orb shined with a series of differently coloured lights for an instant each, some brighter than others.
"Oh! Is this the thingy used to know someone's affinity?" Milo felt like he had just realised what it was.
"No" she responded immediately.
"That would be the orb over there, this one is meant to give an idea of your reserves in each of the energies, don't bother too much with those for now, most people, including myself, only know anything about mana" she waved off any questions and instead tapped the orb.
"All that aside, your reserves are pretty good, my instructors always tell me how having a lot of mana is just a good thing when you are shit at manipulating it, I think they just say this because they have so little themselves but they are certainly right" she put the orb back in place and moved to another.
Not stopping to say anything and instead using them all to check whatever it was that they each checked for Milo.
Finally, she got to the one meant to assess affinities, it wasn't the last one in line, she was just messing with him because he was clearly most interested in this one.
"The moment of truth, by the way, not having an affinity does not mean than an element is off-limit, far from it, it is just recommended to focus on the uses of basic mana and elements you have affinities for first, since it is much simpler and faster" she explained to him beforehand.
Most people didn't have any affinity at all, or at least, such a small amount of affinity that it wasn't even registered, she was rather lucky having a great affinity for the wind element.
"As you probably have heard, fire, water, wind and earth are the most common, as affinities but also because even without, they are rather easy to get a hang of, as long as you don't go too in depth that is, apparently, anything can be an element, but for those, having a good affinity is pretty much required to get anywhere" she rambled happily as she put the orb in his hands, repeating the same action as she had before.
Taking a step back, she and Milo looked intensely at the orb, it didn't shine for a few moments, leading to them looking at each other, one feeling sorry for himself, the other sorry for him.
The orb shined with a brilliant golden light for an instant, but the brightness was so strong that it couldn't be missed.
It was then followed by a blue glow.
"Oh! Th- Tha- What was that?" he stuttered for a few moments.
Helena rubbed her chin, took a piece of paper and quickly wrote down a bunch of things.
"So… I am not sure what that was, it was bright and looked a lot like light, but it was very golden, gold? Light? Golden light? Something completely different?" she admitted that she had not a single clue as to what his element was, all she knew was that it was an affinity for mana, as indicated by the blue glow that followed it.
She handed him the piece of paper.
"The various orbs inspected various aspects of your energies, and it seems like mana is the only viable option for you to focus on, you have above average or average in most categories straight from the start" she explained, only stopping when she noticed the confused look on his face.
She raised an eyebrow, looked down at the piece of paper and then back up to him.
"Ah… Of course you can't read" she slapped her forehead.
"I can read all the signs around the village…" Milo could somewhat read what was in front of him, or at least, he could have tried but the way Helena wrote and the way peasants wrote on their signs was like night and day.
"Why is everything so tilted?" as it turns out, the way they wrote wasn't simply different, some of the letters were straight up not the same.
"There is plenty of time before the academy opens, I'll teach you how to read and write properly" she gave him a thumbs up.
Milo felt wouldn't be very enjoyable.