Magic Under Construction: TOMU V2 #6
Apr. 14th, 2011 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinStarted: 1/14/2011
Status: In Progress.
Last Updated: 2:00
Word Count: ~2500 + 500 carried over
Hours Writing: 2
[2 hours. This is going to end up being another longer chapter, probably. Seriously, I am going to make them shorter by and by.]
My schedule for Monday was really pretty light. In my first semester at MU, I'd tried to balance my schedule to begin with, but subsequent shuffling had left me with a long break in the afternoon that I'd come to enjoy and even count on. As I left spellbinding, I found myself really appreciating the placement of my gap this year. It was ten in the morning and I had nothing until two in the afternoon, which meant that every day I could come out of my lab and easily spend an hour or two working on what I'd learned before and after lunch if I needed to, or wanted to.
On that first day, I definitely wanted to. Instead of heading back to Gilcrease immediately, I went to a spell lab that had evocation targets to get a jump start for Wednesday. When broken down to its components, the spell we were supposed to do was nothing but a series of elemental invocations, and I was good at that. My infernal heritage gave me an affinity for pulling fire out from where it lurked inside other elemental matter. That had given me an insight on dealing with the other elements, and things like light or sound that behaved in a pseudoelemental fashion.
It only took a little thought and a few tries for me to make a tiny little thunderclap without using a spell formula. It was just a matter of working out the discrete steps that went into it and writing it out in my workbook.
Step one was to invoke air. That was both easy and hard. Air was all around me. Compared to something like the earth in a brick wall or the unexpressed fire in a candle wick, it was reasonably pure, as elemental manifestations in the physical world went. But air was also nebulous and hard to get a "hold" on. The real trick in invoking air was to pick out a particular bit of it and isolate it.
Step two was to impel it into motion... basically, call forth the elemental air from the extant material air in a particular direction. To push air away from one's body, an invoker had to be able to "pull" it from an external point. That was a little trickier. Trickier still was making it snap. I didn't want a breeze or even a gust, I wanted a clap... air bursting through air. It was like the difference between a wave and a slap. I could do it, but it took a few tries.
Things like this were why formal spells were useful, even if they lacked versatility. I could invoke elements in any way I could imagine all day long, but if I wanted to do something complicated it really helped to have a formula to follow. When I found the trick to making the air snap, I jotted it down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that.
But that was only half of the spell... the stock one had ended with a spark or flash. I could make a flash of light or fire easily enough, and I could string that together with the little mini thunderclap, but that hadn't been what we were doing. The snap was supposed to end in a spark... sort of the reverse of a lightning bolt splitting the air to unleash thunder. That was the really tricky part.
It took me the better part of half an hour of trying to realize that I wasn't going to unlock the secret all by myself right then and there, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I'd identified where the real problem was. I had another day to work on it before the class met again, and even if I made no further progress I would go in armed with this insight into the problem. The less time it took me to unravel the basic spell, the moe time I would have to work on making it my own.
And of course, if I knew where I needed help I wouldn't lose much time if I had to ask Acantha for assistance. I found that I liked her. It was pretty obvious she wasn't used to leading a class... it wasn't so much that her massive verbal outflow style of speaking would have been any better one-on-one, but I imagined it came from inexperience with addressing her instructions to a large group. She had done much better when dealing with individual students.
I especially liked her grading system, and the fact that she'd articulated how it would work for the day... an average grade for efficiently duplicating the spell, higher grades for improving on it. I wondered what would count as an improvement. Things like longer range, a louder snap, and a bigger or brighter spark were obvious improvements. Obviously they would count towards a higher grade, but I had a suspicion that going for less obvious choices might count for more.
But what would qualify? Would something cosmetic, like adding color or other visual highlights, be considered an "improvement"? I didn't know much about fashion, but the way Acantha dressed made me think she was probably pretty style-conscious. Would putting something like a personal stamp on the spell count as an improvement? To play it safe I figured I should probably try for at least two technical improvements in order to secure my grade and then throw in a flourish to try to earn teacher-impressing-points.
If I wanted any chance of reaching that goal during the hour of allotted class time, that would mean trying to crack the secret of the spell before Wednesday's class. That wasn't a big deal. I'd had a somewhat rocky transition from the point where I was able to get most of my classwork done in class to spending as much or more of my own time on it, but at least this was for something related to my major.
Making cheap offensive spells and charging up wands with them was the least of what I wanted to be able to do as an enchanter. These were such easy and basic techniques and they had been around for so long that the catacombs and caves of the world were basically littered with discarded wands, staves, and rods with a handful of charges for some random spell in them.
But it was real enchantment, and I'd be doing it.
Acantha had talked about parallel sequences... that meant that by the end of the semester, I'd be able to load my blank staff up with one instance each of a bunch of spells and dump a ton of energy into it as charges I could expend without burning off any of the spells. I realized as I thought about it that even if I couldn't get a permanent size-changing spell on it, I would be able to put shrinking and expanding spells in it and just recharge it from time to time.
I realized I couldn't do parallel charges yet, but there didn't seem to be any reason I couldn't load up a few instances of size changing in each direction. I'd only be able to trigger them off in sequence, but that was no problem... I knew what order I'd want to use the spells in: shrink, grow, shrink, grow. I decided to let my energy levels regenerate a little over lunch and then I'd go try it out. It might actually impress Callah... Coach Callahan... if when I showed up at her class at the end of the day, I could demonstrate that I was actually carrying my weapon with me at all times.
This wasn't the sort of modern stuff I wanted to do with my life, but it was an important first step and... well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian's dad or the more traditionalist professors.
When we all met for lunch in the old dining hall... somehow nothing more than the plan to check out the Arch's dining facilities for dinner had transformed this one into "the old dining hall" in my mind... everyone was excited about their morning classes. I was, too, but where Amaranth's excitement made her talkative, I just kept thinking about the possibilities... the possible applications for what I'd learned, the possibilities for what I would learn.
Ian was quiet, but it was obvious he felt relieved. Not necessarily happy... it seemed he wouldn't know the results of his audition until some time later, but at this point it was over. He'd made it through it. The world hadn't ended. He hadn't been laughed out of the room. His lute hadn't caught fire or turned into a fish, and neither had his audience or himself. I don't know that he'd actually worried about those things, but whatever worst-case scenario he'd envisioned had not come to pass.
Dee was also quiet, but she seemed to be content. Something about her seemed softer than it had the year before. Maybe I was better at reading her facial expressions, or maybe she'd grown more expressive. She was definitely covering up less, at least when she was indoors. Her cowl was hanging down her back and she was wearing her cloak up off her shoulders. The voluminous priestess robes underneath didn't exactly show off skin, but the fact that she was showing off the robes made her seem a lot more open to the world.
Steff was sketching in her notebook. Seeing this made me happy, because she was an incredible artist... but her full-blooded elven teachers had made her really self-conscious about her artistic endeavors, so I didn't want to call attention to it.
Also there was a good chance that whatever she was drawing wasn't something anyone else would want to see while we were eating. She was an incredible artist, but her tastes tended to run dark... and red.
Strangely, after Amaranth, the most sociable one at the table was Two. She seemed to pick up her friend Hazel's outgoing attitude for a period of time after they hung out. She also made friends easily, or else people easily befriended her... she kept saying hello to what I assumed were classmates and former classmates who went past. She also greeted at least one former floormate of ours.
"Hello, Belinda!" she said as the half-ogre stopped at the edge of the seating area, an almost empty tray held in her massive hands.
"Hey!" she said, suddenly smiling a big tusky smile and striding towards us. "Do you all mind if I join you?" She sat down without waiting for an answer, but from the way she was talking a mile a minute it seemed like it was more absentminded nerves than presumption. "I saw you this morning but I was already sitting with the Skirmish guys and I'm on my own right now, and I saw you all and I thought, you know, it's kind of how last year started, all of us Harlowe peeps eating together... not that you're in Harlowe, anymore. That was a crazy year, wasn't it? We really kind of got off to the wrong foot, I mean on the wrong foot. Or to a bad start."
"Hello, Belinda," Amaranth said. "Sure, feel free. We're all friends here."
"Thanks," she said. "Oh, and it's Bel. I'm going by Bel now. I mean, I think I am. It's something I'm trying."
"Okay, Bel," Amaranth said. She squeezed my hand under the table.
"Hey," I said, hoping I was smiling. I felt like I was smiling, but the half-ogre made me nervous. She'd done a complete one-eighty around the time of Leda's death, but first impressions can be a powerful thing, especially when they're pressed in with seven feet of craggy muscle.
She was one of the people I'd shared a table with a few times in the first few days of the previous fall semester and then never again. She'd landed a position as captain of a squad in the school's Skirmish team on the strength of being a half-ogre, with emphasis on "strength". I guess she'd seen the presence of a supernaturally strong half-demon as an unacceptable challenge to her position... the fact that I had no interest in recreational or real fighting hadn't mollified her at all. It had only made my existence in proximity to her all the more insulting somehow.
To say it charitably: she hadn't exactly dealt with her insecurity well... but who could say they handled everything with perfect grace in their first year at college? I sure couldn't. She'd managed to get over herself.
She was also long over any need to prove herself the biggest and baddest one on the block. She'd toyed with dropping out of Skirmish, but it seemed she had come tor realize that despite being only the second or third strongest person in the Harlowe girls' freshman floor, she was a better fighter than Puddy or I were... and while there was a limit to what she could do about her strength while staying within Skirmish rules, nothing stopped her from becoming the best fighter she could be.
"How are things on the hex?" Amaranth asked her, referring to the six-sided field where the Skirmish matches were fought.
"Pretty good," Belinda... Bel... said. "I think we're going to have a great year, especially with Rocky as co-captain of the squad. We've been working on strategies over the summer. We've also been working with the other squad captains more. You know last year they mostly tried to use as as a sort of secret weapon, but that only really works once. This year we're working more as an actual part of the army."
"I thought you really pulled things together nicely at the end of the season, last year," Amaranth said. "Granted I wasn't watching the whole battle from the healer's tent, but I picked up on the highlights."
"We'll do better this year. We've lost our air support and our skeleton herder, but they weren't exactly team players to begin with, you know?"
Steff had given no sign that she was paying attention, but I heard her let out a derisive snort. If Bel heard it, she didn't react.
Ian joined in the conversation as it continued along the same lines, and I zoned out more. Even if I was taking five hours of melee class, mock combat still wasn't my thing.
After lunch I hurried back to Gilcrease and up to my room so I could see what I could do with my staff. I still couldn't reliably shrink it down to a handy pocket size for very long, which was my eventual goal... but halving it was no problem, and going a little further wasn't that hard. I settled on a length of about two feet, which was short enough that I could have it hanging off a belt loop like my paddle, and also long enough that I could possibly use it as a weapon if I had to.
I'd played around with changing its size enough that it only took me fifteen minutes to write up a workable shrinking spell. It was no different than enhancing the attribute of an item... in this case, the attributes were its dimensions and I was "enhancing" them negatively. I couldn't have effected such a drastic alteration for long with anything else, but my staff was made to be enchanted. It was, in fact, enchanted to be enchanted.
The spell to restore it to full size was even easier, because it just had to undo the shrinking spell... and that was where I hit the first hitch in my plan. I'd been thinking of it like a toggle, because I'd always be switching back and forth. But the shrinking spell was a temporary alteration. It could last a good long time given the staff's base enchantment, but it would wear off eventually and every time it did wear off on its own I'd be stuck wasting a charge of the reversal spell before I could shrink it again.
It was possible I could have contrived a shrink spell that would sustain itself like the seal, but that would be getting really complex. It would be weirdly recursive... the charged spell would be sustaining itself before it was cast, and when it discharged it would have to become self-sustaining, too. I couldn't begin to wrap my mind around that.
So in the end I decided to do it halfway: I stacked five copies of the shrinking spell as charges in the staff. When I needed it big, it was no big deal to just peel them off. In fact, I realized that when I got to the point where I was ready to do the spells in parallel it would make more sense to have a shrinking spell and a general purpose enhancement-dispeller
[1 hour. Impressive beginning for a day that was slow to start. I'm thinking of dropping Belinda's appearance in here, since there's nothing else in particular I need to happen during lunch. Need something happening, not just Mackenzie reflecting and planning and thinking.]
My schedule for Monday was really pretty light. In my first semester at MU, I'd tried to balance my schedule to begin with, but subsequent shuffling had left me with a long break in the afternoon that I'd come to enjoy and even count on. As I left spellbinding, I found myself really appreciating the placement of my gap this year. It was ten in the morning and I had nothing until two in the afternoon, which meant that every day I could come out of my lab and easily spend an hour or two working on what I'd learned before and after lunch if I needed to, or wanted to.
On that first day, I definitely wanted to. Instead of heading back to Gilcrease immediately, I went to a spell lab that had evocation targets to get a jump start for Wednesday. When broken down to its components, the spell we were supposed to do was nothing but a series of elemental invocations, and I was good at that. My infernal heritage gave me an affinity for pulling fire out from where it lurked inside other elemental matter. That had given me an insight on dealing with the other elements, and things like light or sound that behaved in a pseudoelemental fashion.
It only took a little thought and a few tries for me to make a tiny little thunderclap without using a spell formula. It was just a matter of working out the discrete steps that went into it and writing it out in my workbook.
Step one was to invoke air. That was both easy and hard. Air was all around me. Compared to something like the earth in a brick wall or the unexpressed fire in a candle wick, it was reasonably pure, as elemental manifestations in the physical world went. But air was also nebulous and hard to get a "hold" on. The real trick in invoking air was to pick out a particular bit of it and isolate it.
Step two was to impel it into motion... basically, call forth the elemental air from the extant material air in a particular direction. To push air away from one's body, an invoker had to be able to "pull" it from an external point. That was a little trickier. Trickier still was making it snap. I didn't want a breeze or even a gust, I wanted a clap... air bursting through air. It was like the difference between a wave and a slap. I could do it, but it took a few tries.
Things like this were why formal spells were useful, even if they lacked versatility. I could invoke elements in any way I could imagine all day long, but if I wanted to do something complicated it really helped to have a formula to follow. When I found the trick to making the air snap, I jotted it down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that.
But that was only half of the spell... the stock one had ended with a spark or flash. I could make a flash of light or fire easily enough, and I could string that together with the little mini thunderclap, but that hadn't been what we were doing. The snap was supposed to end in a spark... sort of the reverse of a lightning bolt splitting the air to unleash thunder. That was the really tricky part.
It took me the better part of half an hour of trying to realize that I wasn't going to unlock the secret all by myself right then and there, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I'd identified where the real problem was. I had another day to work on it before the class met again, and even if I made no further progress I would go in armed with this insight into the problem. The less time it took me to unravel the basic spell, the moe time I would have to work on making it my own.
And of course, if I knew where I needed help I wouldn't lose much time if I had to ask Acantha for assistance. I found that I liked her. It was pretty obvious she wasn't used to leading a class... it wasn't so much that her massive verbal outflow style of speaking would have been any better one-on-one, but I imagined it came from inexperience with addressing her instructions to a large group. She had done much better when dealing with individual students.
I especially liked her grading system, and the fact that she'd articulated how it would work for the day... an average grade for efficiently duplicating the spell, higher grades for improving on it. I wondered what would count as an improvement. Things like longer range, a louder snap, and a bigger or brighter spark were obvious improvements. Obviously they would count towards a higher grade, but I had a suspicion that going for less obvious choices might count for more.
But what would qualify? Would something cosmetic, like adding color or other visual highlights, be considered an "improvement"? I didn't know much about fashion, but the way Acantha dressed made me think she was probably pretty style-conscious. Would putting something like a personal stamp on the spell count as an improvement? To play it safe I figured I should probably try for at least two technical improvements in order to secure my grade and then throw in a flourish to try to earn teacher-impressing-points.
If I wanted any chance of reaching that goal during the hour of allotted class time, that would mean trying to crack the secret of the spell before Wednesday's class. That wasn't a big deal. I'd had a somewhat rocky transition from the point where I was able to get most of my classwork done in class to spending as much or more of my own time on it, but at least this was for something related to my major.
Making cheap offensive spells and charging up wands with them was the least of what I wanted to be able to do as an enchanter. These were such easy and basic techniques and they had been around for so long that the catacombs and caves of the world were basically littered with discarded wands, staves, and rods with a handful of charges for some random spell in them.
But it was real enchantment, and I'd be doing it.
Acantha had talked about parallel sequences... that meant that by the end of the semester, I'd be able to load my blank staff up with one instance each of a bunch of spells and dump a ton of energy into it as charges I could expend without burning off any of the spells. I realized as I thought about it that even if I couldn't get a permanent size-changing spell on it, I would be able to put shrinking and expanding spells in it and just recharge it from time to time.
I realized I couldn't do parallel charges yet, but there didn't seem to be any reason I couldn't load up a few instances of size changing in each direction. I'd only be able to trigger them off in sequence, but that was no problem... I knew what order I'd want to use the spells in: shrink, grow, shrink, grow. I decided to let my energy levels regenerate a little over lunch and then I'd go try it out. It might actually impress Callah... Coach Callahan... if when I showed up at her class at the end of the day, I could demonstrate that I was actually carrying my weapon with me at all times.
This wasn't the sort of modern stuff I wanted to do with my life, but it was an important first step and... well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian's dad or the more traditionalist professors.
When we all met for lunch in the old dining hall... somehow nothing more than the plan to check out the Arch's dining facilities for dinner had transformed this one into "the old dining hall" in my mind... everyone was excited about their morning classes. I was, too, but where Amaranth and Two's excitement made them talkative, I just kept thinking about the possibilities... the possible applications for what I'd learned, the possibilities for what I would learn.
Ian was quiet, but it was obvious he felt relieved. Not necessarily happy... it seemed he wouldn't know the results of his audition until some time later, but at this point it was over. He'd made it through it. The world hadn't ended. He hadn't been laughed out of the room. His lute hadn't caught fire or turned into a fish, and neither had his audience or himself. I don't know that he'd actually worried about those things, but whatever worst-case scenario he'd envisioned had not come to pass.
Dee was also quiet, but she seemed to be content. Something about her seemed softer than it had the year before. Maybe I was better at reading her facial expressions, or maybe she'd grown more expressive. She was definitely covering up less, at least when she was indoors. Her cowl was hanging down her back and she was wearing her cloak up off her shoulders. The voluminous priestess robes underneath didn't exactly show off skin, but the fact that she was showing off the robes made her seem a lot more open to the world.
[0.5 hours. I'm not going to dwell on the previous class much beyond the 900 words below. This chapter is going to serve mostly to bridge Mackenzie's first class and her last class, Callahan's, while establishing one of her currently less important classes in the middle.]
My schedule for Monday was really pretty light. In my first semester at MU, I'd tried to balance my schedule to begin with, but subsequent shuffling had left me with a long break in the afternoon that I'd come to enjoy and even count on. As I left spellbinding, I found myself really appreciating the placement of my gap this year. It was ten in the morning and I had nothing until two in the afternoon, which meant that every day I could come out of my lab and easily spend an hour or two working on what I'd learned before and after lunch if I needed to, or wanted to.
On that first day, I definitely wanted to. Instead of heading back to Gilcrease immediately, I went to a spell lab that had evocation targets to get a jump start for Wednesday. When broken down to its components, the spell we were supposed to do was nothing but a series of elemental invocations, and I was good at that. My infernal heritage gave me an affinity for pulling fire out from where it lurked inside other elemental matter. That had given me an insight on dealing with the other elements, and things like light or sound that behaved in a pseudoelemental fashion.
It only took a little thought and a few tries for me to make a tiny little thunderclap without using a spell formula. It was just a matter of working out the discrete steps that went into it and writing it out in my workbook.
Step one was to invoke air. That was both easy and hard. Air was all around me. Compared to something like the earth in a brick wall or the unexpressed fire in a candle wick, it was reasonably pure, as elemental manifestations in the physical world went. But air was also nebulous and hard to get a "hold" on. The real trick in invoking air was to pick out a particular bit of it and isolate it.
Step two was to impel it into motion... basically, call forth the elemental air from the extant material air in a particular direction. To push air away from one's body, an invoker had to be able to "pull" it from an external point. That was a little trickier. Trickier still was making it snap. I didn't want a breeze or even a gust, I wanted a clap... air bursting through air. It was like the difference between a wave and a slap. I could do it, but it took a few tries.
Things like this were why formal spells were useful, even if they lacked versatility. I could invoke elements in any way I could imagine all day long, but if I wanted to do something complicated it really helped to have a formula to follow. When I found the trick to making the air snap, I jotted it down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that.
But that was only half of the spell... the stock one had ended with a spark or flash. I could make a flash of light or fire easily enough, and I could string that together with the little mini thunderclap, but that hadn't been what we were doing. The snap was supposed to end in a spark... sort of the reverse of a lightning bolt splitting the air to unleash thunder. That was the tricky part.
[]
It was a good sign when I came out of a class bursting with excitement for what I'd learned and itching for the next one. I found that I liked Acantha. It was pretty obvious she wasn't used to leading a class... it wasn't so much that her massive verbal outflow style of speaking would have been any better one-on-one, but I imagined it came from inexperience with addressing her instructions to a large group. She had done much better when dealing with individual students. []Note to self: depict this more strongly in the part of chapter 5 where it mentions she's giving advice to individual students.[]
I especially liked her grading system, and the fact that she'd articulated how it would work for the day... an average grade for efficiently duplicating the spell, higher grades for improving on it. I wondered what would count as an improvement. Things like longer range, a louder snap, and a bigger or brighter spark were obvious improvements. That meant []
I didn't know much about fashion, but the way Acantha dressed made me think she was probably pretty style-conscious. Would putting something like a personal stamp on the spell count as an improvement? To play it safe I figured I should probably []
[]
Making cheap offensive spells and charging up wands with them was the least of what I wanted to be able to do as an enchanter. These were such easy and basic techniques and they had been around for so long that the catacombs and caves of the world were basically littered with discarded wands, staves, and rods with a handful of charges for some random spell in them. But it was real enchantment.
It wasn't the modern stuff I wanted to do with my life, but it was an important first step and... well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian's dad or the more traditionalist professors.
Anyway, if making a pop and a spark was more a bit of wasteful showing off than anything else, I had the energy to spare.
Status: In Progress.
Last Updated: 2:00
Word Count: ~2500 + 500 carried over
Hours Writing: 2
[2 hours. This is going to end up being another longer chapter, probably. Seriously, I am going to make them shorter by and by.]
My schedule for Monday was really pretty light. In my first semester at MU, I'd tried to balance my schedule to begin with, but subsequent shuffling had left me with a long break in the afternoon that I'd come to enjoy and even count on. As I left spellbinding, I found myself really appreciating the placement of my gap this year. It was ten in the morning and I had nothing until two in the afternoon, which meant that every day I could come out of my lab and easily spend an hour or two working on what I'd learned before and after lunch if I needed to, or wanted to.
On that first day, I definitely wanted to. Instead of heading back to Gilcrease immediately, I went to a spell lab that had evocation targets to get a jump start for Wednesday. When broken down to its components, the spell we were supposed to do was nothing but a series of elemental invocations, and I was good at that. My infernal heritage gave me an affinity for pulling fire out from where it lurked inside other elemental matter. That had given me an insight on dealing with the other elements, and things like light or sound that behaved in a pseudoelemental fashion.
It only took a little thought and a few tries for me to make a tiny little thunderclap without using a spell formula. It was just a matter of working out the discrete steps that went into it and writing it out in my workbook.
Step one was to invoke air. That was both easy and hard. Air was all around me. Compared to something like the earth in a brick wall or the unexpressed fire in a candle wick, it was reasonably pure, as elemental manifestations in the physical world went. But air was also nebulous and hard to get a "hold" on. The real trick in invoking air was to pick out a particular bit of it and isolate it.
Step two was to impel it into motion... basically, call forth the elemental air from the extant material air in a particular direction. To push air away from one's body, an invoker had to be able to "pull" it from an external point. That was a little trickier. Trickier still was making it snap. I didn't want a breeze or even a gust, I wanted a clap... air bursting through air. It was like the difference between a wave and a slap. I could do it, but it took a few tries.
Things like this were why formal spells were useful, even if they lacked versatility. I could invoke elements in any way I could imagine all day long, but if I wanted to do something complicated it really helped to have a formula to follow. When I found the trick to making the air snap, I jotted it down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that.
But that was only half of the spell... the stock one had ended with a spark or flash. I could make a flash of light or fire easily enough, and I could string that together with the little mini thunderclap, but that hadn't been what we were doing. The snap was supposed to end in a spark... sort of the reverse of a lightning bolt splitting the air to unleash thunder. That was the really tricky part.
It took me the better part of half an hour of trying to realize that I wasn't going to unlock the secret all by myself right then and there, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I'd identified where the real problem was. I had another day to work on it before the class met again, and even if I made no further progress I would go in armed with this insight into the problem. The less time it took me to unravel the basic spell, the moe time I would have to work on making it my own.
And of course, if I knew where I needed help I wouldn't lose much time if I had to ask Acantha for assistance. I found that I liked her. It was pretty obvious she wasn't used to leading a class... it wasn't so much that her massive verbal outflow style of speaking would have been any better one-on-one, but I imagined it came from inexperience with addressing her instructions to a large group. She had done much better when dealing with individual students.
I especially liked her grading system, and the fact that she'd articulated how it would work for the day... an average grade for efficiently duplicating the spell, higher grades for improving on it. I wondered what would count as an improvement. Things like longer range, a louder snap, and a bigger or brighter spark were obvious improvements. Obviously they would count towards a higher grade, but I had a suspicion that going for less obvious choices might count for more.
But what would qualify? Would something cosmetic, like adding color or other visual highlights, be considered an "improvement"? I didn't know much about fashion, but the way Acantha dressed made me think she was probably pretty style-conscious. Would putting something like a personal stamp on the spell count as an improvement? To play it safe I figured I should probably try for at least two technical improvements in order to secure my grade and then throw in a flourish to try to earn teacher-impressing-points.
If I wanted any chance of reaching that goal during the hour of allotted class time, that would mean trying to crack the secret of the spell before Wednesday's class. That wasn't a big deal. I'd had a somewhat rocky transition from the point where I was able to get most of my classwork done in class to spending as much or more of my own time on it, but at least this was for something related to my major.
Making cheap offensive spells and charging up wands with them was the least of what I wanted to be able to do as an enchanter. These were such easy and basic techniques and they had been around for so long that the catacombs and caves of the world were basically littered with discarded wands, staves, and rods with a handful of charges for some random spell in them.
But it was real enchantment, and I'd be doing it.
Acantha had talked about parallel sequences... that meant that by the end of the semester, I'd be able to load my blank staff up with one instance each of a bunch of spells and dump a ton of energy into it as charges I could expend without burning off any of the spells. I realized as I thought about it that even if I couldn't get a permanent size-changing spell on it, I would be able to put shrinking and expanding spells in it and just recharge it from time to time.
I realized I couldn't do parallel charges yet, but there didn't seem to be any reason I couldn't load up a few instances of size changing in each direction. I'd only be able to trigger them off in sequence, but that was no problem... I knew what order I'd want to use the spells in: shrink, grow, shrink, grow. I decided to let my energy levels regenerate a little over lunch and then I'd go try it out. It might actually impress Callah... Coach Callahan... if when I showed up at her class at the end of the day, I could demonstrate that I was actually carrying my weapon with me at all times.
This wasn't the sort of modern stuff I wanted to do with my life, but it was an important first step and... well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian's dad or the more traditionalist professors.
When we all met for lunch in the old dining hall... somehow nothing more than the plan to check out the Arch's dining facilities for dinner had transformed this one into "the old dining hall" in my mind... everyone was excited about their morning classes. I was, too, but where Amaranth's excitement made her talkative, I just kept thinking about the possibilities... the possible applications for what I'd learned, the possibilities for what I would learn.
Ian was quiet, but it was obvious he felt relieved. Not necessarily happy... it seemed he wouldn't know the results of his audition until some time later, but at this point it was over. He'd made it through it. The world hadn't ended. He hadn't been laughed out of the room. His lute hadn't caught fire or turned into a fish, and neither had his audience or himself. I don't know that he'd actually worried about those things, but whatever worst-case scenario he'd envisioned had not come to pass.
Dee was also quiet, but she seemed to be content. Something about her seemed softer than it had the year before. Maybe I was better at reading her facial expressions, or maybe she'd grown more expressive. She was definitely covering up less, at least when she was indoors. Her cowl was hanging down her back and she was wearing her cloak up off her shoulders. The voluminous priestess robes underneath didn't exactly show off skin, but the fact that she was showing off the robes made her seem a lot more open to the world.
Steff was sketching in her notebook. Seeing this made me happy, because she was an incredible artist... but her full-blooded elven teachers had made her really self-conscious about her artistic endeavors, so I didn't want to call attention to it.
Also there was a good chance that whatever she was drawing wasn't something anyone else would want to see while we were eating. She was an incredible artist, but her tastes tended to run dark... and red.
Strangely, after Amaranth, the most sociable one at the table was Two. She seemed to pick up her friend Hazel's outgoing attitude for a period of time after they hung out. She also made friends easily, or else people easily befriended her... she kept saying hello to what I assumed were classmates and former classmates who went past. She also greeted at least one former floormate of ours.
"Hello, Belinda!" she said as the half-ogre stopped at the edge of the seating area, an almost empty tray held in her massive hands.
"Hey!" she said, suddenly smiling a big tusky smile and striding towards us. "Do you all mind if I join you?" She sat down without waiting for an answer, but from the way she was talking a mile a minute it seemed like it was more absentminded nerves than presumption. "I saw you this morning but I was already sitting with the Skirmish guys and I'm on my own right now, and I saw you all and I thought, you know, it's kind of how last year started, all of us Harlowe peeps eating together... not that you're in Harlowe, anymore. That was a crazy year, wasn't it? We really kind of got off to the wrong foot, I mean on the wrong foot. Or to a bad start."
"Hello, Belinda," Amaranth said. "Sure, feel free. We're all friends here."
"Thanks," she said. "Oh, and it's Bel. I'm going by Bel now. I mean, I think I am. It's something I'm trying."
"Okay, Bel," Amaranth said. She squeezed my hand under the table.
"Hey," I said, hoping I was smiling. I felt like I was smiling, but the half-ogre made me nervous. She'd done a complete one-eighty around the time of Leda's death, but first impressions can be a powerful thing, especially when they're pressed in with seven feet of craggy muscle.
She was one of the people I'd shared a table with a few times in the first few days of the previous fall semester and then never again. She'd landed a position as captain of a squad in the school's Skirmish team on the strength of being a half-ogre, with emphasis on "strength". I guess she'd seen the presence of a supernaturally strong half-demon as an unacceptable challenge to her position... the fact that I had no interest in recreational or real fighting hadn't mollified her at all. It had only made my existence in proximity to her all the more insulting somehow.
To say it charitably: she hadn't exactly dealt with her insecurity well... but who could say they handled everything with perfect grace in their first year at college? I sure couldn't. She'd managed to get over herself.
She was also long over any need to prove herself the biggest and baddest one on the block. She'd toyed with dropping out of Skirmish, but it seemed she had come tor realize that despite being only the second or third strongest person in the Harlowe girls' freshman floor, she was a better fighter than Puddy or I were... and while there was a limit to what she could do about her strength while staying within Skirmish rules, nothing stopped her from becoming the best fighter she could be.
"How are things on the hex?" Amaranth asked her, referring to the six-sided field where the Skirmish matches were fought.
"Pretty good," Belinda... Bel... said. "I think we're going to have a great year, especially with Rocky as co-captain of the squad. We've been working on strategies over the summer. We've also been working with the other squad captains more. You know last year they mostly tried to use as as a sort of secret weapon, but that only really works once. This year we're working more as an actual part of the army."
"I thought you really pulled things together nicely at the end of the season, last year," Amaranth said. "Granted I wasn't watching the whole battle from the healer's tent, but I picked up on the highlights."
"We'll do better this year. We've lost our air support and our skeleton herder, but they weren't exactly team players to begin with, you know?"
Steff had given no sign that she was paying attention, but I heard her let out a derisive snort. If Bel heard it, she didn't react.
Ian joined in the conversation as it continued along the same lines, and I zoned out more. Even if I was taking five hours of melee class, mock combat still wasn't my thing.
After lunch I hurried back to Gilcrease and up to my room so I could see what I could do with my staff. I still couldn't reliably shrink it down to a handy pocket size for very long, which was my eventual goal... but halving it was no problem, and going a little further wasn't that hard. I settled on a length of about two feet, which was short enough that I could have it hanging off a belt loop like my paddle, and also long enough that I could possibly use it as a weapon if I had to.
I'd played around with changing its size enough that it only took me fifteen minutes to write up a workable shrinking spell. It was no different than enhancing the attribute of an item... in this case, the attributes were its dimensions and I was "enhancing" them negatively. I couldn't have effected such a drastic alteration for long with anything else, but my staff was made to be enchanted. It was, in fact, enchanted to be enchanted.
The spell to restore it to full size was even easier, because it just had to undo the shrinking spell... and that was where I hit the first hitch in my plan. I'd been thinking of it like a toggle, because I'd always be switching back and forth. But the shrinking spell was a temporary alteration. It could last a good long time given the staff's base enchantment, but it would wear off eventually and every time it did wear off on its own I'd be stuck wasting a charge of the reversal spell before I could shrink it again.
It was possible I could have contrived a shrink spell that would sustain itself like the seal, but that would be getting really complex. It would be weirdly recursive... the charged spell would be sustaining itself before it was cast, and when it discharged it would have to become self-sustaining, too. I couldn't begin to wrap my mind around that.
So in the end I decided to do it halfway: I stacked five copies of the shrinking spell as charges in the staff. When I needed it big, it was no big deal to just peel them off. In fact, I realized that when I got to the point where I was ready to do the spells in parallel it would make more sense to have a shrinking spell and a general purpose enhancement-dispeller
[1 hour. Impressive beginning for a day that was slow to start. I'm thinking of dropping Belinda's appearance in here, since there's nothing else in particular I need to happen during lunch. Need something happening, not just Mackenzie reflecting and planning and thinking.]
My schedule for Monday was really pretty light. In my first semester at MU, I'd tried to balance my schedule to begin with, but subsequent shuffling had left me with a long break in the afternoon that I'd come to enjoy and even count on. As I left spellbinding, I found myself really appreciating the placement of my gap this year. It was ten in the morning and I had nothing until two in the afternoon, which meant that every day I could come out of my lab and easily spend an hour or two working on what I'd learned before and after lunch if I needed to, or wanted to.
On that first day, I definitely wanted to. Instead of heading back to Gilcrease immediately, I went to a spell lab that had evocation targets to get a jump start for Wednesday. When broken down to its components, the spell we were supposed to do was nothing but a series of elemental invocations, and I was good at that. My infernal heritage gave me an affinity for pulling fire out from where it lurked inside other elemental matter. That had given me an insight on dealing with the other elements, and things like light or sound that behaved in a pseudoelemental fashion.
It only took a little thought and a few tries for me to make a tiny little thunderclap without using a spell formula. It was just a matter of working out the discrete steps that went into it and writing it out in my workbook.
Step one was to invoke air. That was both easy and hard. Air was all around me. Compared to something like the earth in a brick wall or the unexpressed fire in a candle wick, it was reasonably pure, as elemental manifestations in the physical world went. But air was also nebulous and hard to get a "hold" on. The real trick in invoking air was to pick out a particular bit of it and isolate it.
Step two was to impel it into motion... basically, call forth the elemental air from the extant material air in a particular direction. To push air away from one's body, an invoker had to be able to "pull" it from an external point. That was a little trickier. Trickier still was making it snap. I didn't want a breeze or even a gust, I wanted a clap... air bursting through air. It was like the difference between a wave and a slap. I could do it, but it took a few tries.
Things like this were why formal spells were useful, even if they lacked versatility. I could invoke elements in any way I could imagine all day long, but if I wanted to do something complicated it really helped to have a formula to follow. When I found the trick to making the air snap, I jotted it down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that.
But that was only half of the spell... the stock one had ended with a spark or flash. I could make a flash of light or fire easily enough, and I could string that together with the little mini thunderclap, but that hadn't been what we were doing. The snap was supposed to end in a spark... sort of the reverse of a lightning bolt splitting the air to unleash thunder. That was the really tricky part.
It took me the better part of half an hour of trying to realize that I wasn't going to unlock the secret all by myself right then and there, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I'd identified where the real problem was. I had another day to work on it before the class met again, and even if I made no further progress I would go in armed with this insight into the problem. The less time it took me to unravel the basic spell, the moe time I would have to work on making it my own.
And of course, if I knew where I needed help I wouldn't lose much time if I had to ask Acantha for assistance. I found that I liked her. It was pretty obvious she wasn't used to leading a class... it wasn't so much that her massive verbal outflow style of speaking would have been any better one-on-one, but I imagined it came from inexperience with addressing her instructions to a large group. She had done much better when dealing with individual students.
I especially liked her grading system, and the fact that she'd articulated how it would work for the day... an average grade for efficiently duplicating the spell, higher grades for improving on it. I wondered what would count as an improvement. Things like longer range, a louder snap, and a bigger or brighter spark were obvious improvements. Obviously they would count towards a higher grade, but I had a suspicion that going for less obvious choices might count for more.
But what would qualify? Would something cosmetic, like adding color or other visual highlights, be considered an "improvement"? I didn't know much about fashion, but the way Acantha dressed made me think she was probably pretty style-conscious. Would putting something like a personal stamp on the spell count as an improvement? To play it safe I figured I should probably try for at least two technical improvements in order to secure my grade and then throw in a flourish to try to earn teacher-impressing-points.
If I wanted any chance of reaching that goal during the hour of allotted class time, that would mean trying to crack the secret of the spell before Wednesday's class. That wasn't a big deal. I'd had a somewhat rocky transition from the point where I was able to get most of my classwork done in class to spending as much or more of my own time on it, but at least this was for something related to my major.
Making cheap offensive spells and charging up wands with them was the least of what I wanted to be able to do as an enchanter. These were such easy and basic techniques and they had been around for so long that the catacombs and caves of the world were basically littered with discarded wands, staves, and rods with a handful of charges for some random spell in them.
But it was real enchantment, and I'd be doing it.
Acantha had talked about parallel sequences... that meant that by the end of the semester, I'd be able to load my blank staff up with one instance each of a bunch of spells and dump a ton of energy into it as charges I could expend without burning off any of the spells. I realized as I thought about it that even if I couldn't get a permanent size-changing spell on it, I would be able to put shrinking and expanding spells in it and just recharge it from time to time.
I realized I couldn't do parallel charges yet, but there didn't seem to be any reason I couldn't load up a few instances of size changing in each direction. I'd only be able to trigger them off in sequence, but that was no problem... I knew what order I'd want to use the spells in: shrink, grow, shrink, grow. I decided to let my energy levels regenerate a little over lunch and then I'd go try it out. It might actually impress Callah... Coach Callahan... if when I showed up at her class at the end of the day, I could demonstrate that I was actually carrying my weapon with me at all times.
This wasn't the sort of modern stuff I wanted to do with my life, but it was an important first step and... well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian's dad or the more traditionalist professors.
When we all met for lunch in the old dining hall... somehow nothing more than the plan to check out the Arch's dining facilities for dinner had transformed this one into "the old dining hall" in my mind... everyone was excited about their morning classes. I was, too, but where Amaranth and Two's excitement made them talkative, I just kept thinking about the possibilities... the possible applications for what I'd learned, the possibilities for what I would learn.
Ian was quiet, but it was obvious he felt relieved. Not necessarily happy... it seemed he wouldn't know the results of his audition until some time later, but at this point it was over. He'd made it through it. The world hadn't ended. He hadn't been laughed out of the room. His lute hadn't caught fire or turned into a fish, and neither had his audience or himself. I don't know that he'd actually worried about those things, but whatever worst-case scenario he'd envisioned had not come to pass.
Dee was also quiet, but she seemed to be content. Something about her seemed softer than it had the year before. Maybe I was better at reading her facial expressions, or maybe she'd grown more expressive. She was definitely covering up less, at least when she was indoors. Her cowl was hanging down her back and she was wearing her cloak up off her shoulders. The voluminous priestess robes underneath didn't exactly show off skin, but the fact that she was showing off the robes made her seem a lot more open to the world.
[0.5 hours. I'm not going to dwell on the previous class much beyond the 900 words below. This chapter is going to serve mostly to bridge Mackenzie's first class and her last class, Callahan's, while establishing one of her currently less important classes in the middle.]
My schedule for Monday was really pretty light. In my first semester at MU, I'd tried to balance my schedule to begin with, but subsequent shuffling had left me with a long break in the afternoon that I'd come to enjoy and even count on. As I left spellbinding, I found myself really appreciating the placement of my gap this year. It was ten in the morning and I had nothing until two in the afternoon, which meant that every day I could come out of my lab and easily spend an hour or two working on what I'd learned before and after lunch if I needed to, or wanted to.
On that first day, I definitely wanted to. Instead of heading back to Gilcrease immediately, I went to a spell lab that had evocation targets to get a jump start for Wednesday. When broken down to its components, the spell we were supposed to do was nothing but a series of elemental invocations, and I was good at that. My infernal heritage gave me an affinity for pulling fire out from where it lurked inside other elemental matter. That had given me an insight on dealing with the other elements, and things like light or sound that behaved in a pseudoelemental fashion.
It only took a little thought and a few tries for me to make a tiny little thunderclap without using a spell formula. It was just a matter of working out the discrete steps that went into it and writing it out in my workbook.
Step one was to invoke air. That was both easy and hard. Air was all around me. Compared to something like the earth in a brick wall or the unexpressed fire in a candle wick, it was reasonably pure, as elemental manifestations in the physical world went. But air was also nebulous and hard to get a "hold" on. The real trick in invoking air was to pick out a particular bit of it and isolate it.
Step two was to impel it into motion... basically, call forth the elemental air from the extant material air in a particular direction. To push air away from one's body, an invoker had to be able to "pull" it from an external point. That was a little trickier. Trickier still was making it snap. I didn't want a breeze or even a gust, I wanted a clap... air bursting through air. It was like the difference between a wave and a slap. I could do it, but it took a few tries.
Things like this were why formal spells were useful, even if they lacked versatility. I could invoke elements in any way I could imagine all day long, but if I wanted to do something complicated it really helped to have a formula to follow. When I found the trick to making the air snap, I jotted it down a rough draft of it in the symbolic language of spells and then followed that.
But that was only half of the spell... the stock one had ended with a spark or flash. I could make a flash of light or fire easily enough, and I could string that together with the little mini thunderclap, but that hadn't been what we were doing. The snap was supposed to end in a spark... sort of the reverse of a lightning bolt splitting the air to unleash thunder. That was the tricky part.
[]
It was a good sign when I came out of a class bursting with excitement for what I'd learned and itching for the next one. I found that I liked Acantha. It was pretty obvious she wasn't used to leading a class... it wasn't so much that her massive verbal outflow style of speaking would have been any better one-on-one, but I imagined it came from inexperience with addressing her instructions to a large group. She had done much better when dealing with individual students. []Note to self: depict this more strongly in the part of chapter 5 where it mentions she's giving advice to individual students.[]
I especially liked her grading system, and the fact that she'd articulated how it would work for the day... an average grade for efficiently duplicating the spell, higher grades for improving on it. I wondered what would count as an improvement. Things like longer range, a louder snap, and a bigger or brighter spark were obvious improvements. That meant []
I didn't know much about fashion, but the way Acantha dressed made me think she was probably pretty style-conscious. Would putting something like a personal stamp on the spell count as an improvement? To play it safe I figured I should probably []
[]
Making cheap offensive spells and charging up wands with them was the least of what I wanted to be able to do as an enchanter. These were such easy and basic techniques and they had been around for so long that the catacombs and caves of the world were basically littered with discarded wands, staves, and rods with a handful of charges for some random spell in them. But it was real enchantment.
It wasn't the modern stuff I wanted to do with my life, but it was an important first step and... well, I had to admit that part of me found the wizardly trappings pretty cool. I would never put on a robe and hat like Ian's dad or the more traditionalist professors.
Anyway, if making a pop and a spark was more a bit of wasteful showing off than anything else, I had the energy to spare.