Lord Feldstal reviewed the calculations silently while Nym, Doliar, and Navarim waited in his office. He sighed and handed the paper back to Doliar. “I’m going to assign two guards instead of one,” he said. “Maintain the gag order on this for now until I figure out what this means. Navarim, please escort our little prodigy to his new home and keep him safe. I’ll send the second guard out to you as soon as I know who it will be.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Doliar, you stay. The rest of you can go. Have a nice night, Nym. Best of luck dealing with my daughter.”
Nym sighed and shook his head. “She’s going to make this difficult.”
Lord Feldstal shrugged and pointed at the paper still held in Doliar’s hands. “Difficulties do tend to arise just when it seems that things are going well.”
“Basically the story of my life,” Nym muttered to himself.
They left Lord Feldstal’s office and walked across the Collective’s headquarters to the teleportation platforms. Navarim led the way, occasionally pointing out some interesting room or person that they passed by. The Collective had a lot of labs for different experiments, and supposedly an archive of thousands of upon thousands of books detailing the results of their research.
“We’re not the first incarnation of the Collective,” Navarim explained. “Reaching for more power isn’t anything new, and while the primary goal is the advancement of humanity’s magic in general to make third circle spells commonplace, there are plenty of other topics we do research on. We’re not even really that secret of a society, to be fair. You just don’t find out about us until you reach a certain threshold.”
“Why hide at all?” Nym asked.
“Between you and me, I think the people in charge just like the grandeur and the mystique. Seems like having the members all swear geases is overkill to me, but… I’m twenty-three. I am not ready to stop growing for the rest of my life, so I’ll play along as long as I get to keep collaborating on finding a way to push to the third circle.”
That was fair. Nym knew he wouldn’t face the same problems most of the people in the Collective had, but there would probably come a day when he couldn’t push his own magic any farther either, and if that was due to his body not being able to keep up with his mind, he wasn’t sure what would look like reasonable actions to correct that.
“Here’s the teleport platform,” Navarim said. “I’m sure you remember these.”
“I do,” Nym said. “I think you were there for almost every single one I’ve ever used.”
“Hah. But did you ever learn how to power them yourself?”
“I did not, no. Teleportation is a third circle spell. Wait, in that case…”
“Right, you’d need to be able to cast third circle magic in order to make new platforms. They can be powered with second circle arcana though. It’s complicated, probably a lot more so than just casting the actual spell, and it requires a ton of maintenance. But since you’re part of the Collective now, you should probably know how to activate one and pick a destination from it.
“Each platform can only contain five or so destinations. Some of the bigger ones have a few more, and there are some small ones that only link directly to one other place, but on average, five is the magic number here. It’s just cheaper to build two platforms next to each other than to build one bigger one that can hold ten links.”
Navarim went on for a bit about localization effects, long-distance synergies, and the cycle warp up speed for powering the platform, none of which Nym understood. Then he moved onto the part that Nym actually needed to know about, powering the arcana battery that the platform drew on to generate the teleportation effect, which was actually five separate batteries. Destination was selected by choosing where to pour arcana in at.
“Wouldn’t there be some conversion loss from using the battery and then having the platform power it instead of just powering the platform directly?” he asked.
“Yes and no. There is, but it’s not very much and it’s much, much simpler to have the attendant just dump arcana into one of five boxes than it is to have them trying to access the platform’s rune sequences directly. In the end, it costs less arcana to keep people who don’t know how to manually operate the platform away from the delicate parts than it would to repair those parts every time they break something.”
There were symbols etched onto each section of the battery stack that denoted the destination. Navarim pointed out the one for Ebalsan and said, “Why don’t you try empowering it? I’ll keep an eye on the battery and let you know when it’s got enough.”
Pushing arcana into the battery was a lot like empowering rune sequences, though it was hungry for far more arcana than he’d ever used to power runes. Teleportation was not a cheap spell, apparently, and doubly so when he was using the wrong layer of arcana. He would have loved to see how the platform managed to spin that around.
“Has the Collective ever tried using this type of magic to create enchanted objects that would allow them to do the necessary changes to their soul well?” Nym asked.
“I believe the principles used in the teleportation platform were first discovered in an attempt to do just that,” Navarim told him. “As it turns out, it’s much easier to use arcana in this manner on a non-living object. Living test subjects who tried it turned… uh… also non-living.”
Nym winced. “Okay then. I won’t be trying that. I think the battery is full now.”
“Good eye,” Navarim said. “That should be enough, but give it a little bit more just to be safe. You will absolutely regret it if you ever get caught at the end of a teleportation spell that ran out of arcana. It’s not fatal or anything, but you’ll be so sick you’ll wish it was.”
After he was done, they both stepped onto the platform and Navarim pointed out where to channel a bit of arcana into the battery to connect it to the platform. The teleportation spell took hold immediately and deposited them onto a new platform in Ebalsan. The attendant started forward, but Navarim waved him off.
From there, it was a short trip to their destination, which was in a decidedly middle-class neighborhood. It was still early in the morning, barely past dawn, and the streets were largely empty, which made it easier to nagivate them. Many of the homes were two stories, with businesses being run from the ground floor. They weren’t cramped together, and often had small gardens visible behind them. “Where are we going?” Nym asked. “This looks a little too rich for my budget.”
“I didn’t pick it,” Navarim told him. “It should be near here somewhere. They said to look for a little decorative fence around the property and blue shutters, and that was right next to… Ah! Here it is.”
Nym looked at the house, then back to Navarim. Then he looked at the house again. “You’re kidding, right? This is a joke?”
“Well I didn’t pick it,” the other mage said again, defensively this time.
The house was large, far larger than Nym expected. It was two stories, and just judging by the number of windows he saw on the outside, had to have four or five bedrooms. It was in good shape too, though the yard hadn’t been tended to in some time. There was a paved stone path leading from the streets to the front door, and a wooden fence that came up just past Nym’s waist circled the whole thing. The gate was missing, but otherwise it was whole and sturdy.
Right next to it was an exotic pet store. Nym could hear various squawks, rumblings, and barks from the street, and there was a kind of smell that he couldn’t really identify in the air. He wasn’t sure that he’d necessarily call it foul, but it wasn’t pleasant. It was just kind of an animal smell, not as bad as being at the stockyards in Thrakus, but not something he wanted to get used to.
“Do you think I can argue for a different place?” Nym asked.
“I doubt it.”
He let out a defeated sigh. “Let’s just get inside.”
The house proved to be three bedrooms, with a sitting room, a wash room, and a kitchen all separated out. Nym had never been inside a house this big that didn’t belong to a noble, but then he supposed this one might very well belong to Analia’s father as well. Awful location aside, it was a very nice house that was already furnished.
“Alright, let’s talk about how this whole bodyguard thing is going to work,” Navarim said after they finished touring the place. They were sitting at the kitchen table while waiting for a pot of tea the mage had started using supplies from the pantry.
“Probably a good idea,” Nym agreed.
“What do you know already?” Navarim asked.
“Not much. You follow me around, protect me from stuff.”
The older mage sighed. “Yeah, I was kind of hoping you knew more than that. This isn’t really something I ever saw myself doing, so I’m just about as lost as you are. I think they only picked me because your file indicated we knew each other. I guess we’ll figure it out together.”
“Did they give you any time frames? Like… are you staying here with me? Are you with me indefinitely, or will someone else come relieve you in a few hours?”
“I’m with you for the time being,” Navarim said. “And I guess someone else will be assigned as well, so maybe we’ll… uh… take shifts? I’m not sure. I guess, this is your house, so pick out which bedroom you want and I’ll grab one of the spares. Whoever your other guard is can take the other.”
“Hmm… I don’t think that will work. I’m planning on having a roommate. I should actually send a message spell. I disappeared in the middle of the night and I’m not sure how long I’ve been missing.”
“Roommate, huh? Alright, I’ll give you a minute for that. Let me know when you’re done.”
Nym didn’t have a firm grasp on the message spell. It seemed extremely useful, but Analia was a bit annoying with it, and it turned out the more he used it, the easier it was for other people to send him messages. Nym suspected there was a matching spell that blocked messages in some fashion, but Analia claimed she didn’t know if such a thing existed.
Nym was suspicious, to say the least.
He hadn’t received any messages from her since he’d teleported back to Ebalsan, but it was still very early in the morning. It was possible Analia was asleep still. She might be cranky if he woke her up, but he had been kidnapped in the middle of the night and assumed he’d been gone for at least one full day, considering how much time he’d spent talking to both Lord Feldstal and Doliar. All those tests had taken hours too, plus the time he’d been locked up.
She could be mad at him if she wanted. He spun the message spell out of arcana and infused it with his thoughts, then sent it on its way towards her. [It’s Nym. I got attacked in the middle of the night. Fine now. We got a house out of it. I’ll come meet you at the Silver Gilder and we can pack up the books.]
Part of the spell required at least a rough knowledge of where the recipient was, which probably accounted for why he hadn’t received any messages from her earlier. Between that and being locked in a mage cell for an unknown length of time, he’d been unreachable. The spell unfortunately did not have enough feedback to let the caster know if the recipient had actually received it.
What did let him know the message had gone through was the return message Analia sent him. [You what! Are you okay? Get over here right now. I’m going to let Ophelia and the rest know so we can meet up and figure out what’s going on.]
“That went about as well as can be expected,” he told Navarim with a sigh.
Lord Feldstal reviewed the calculations silently while Nym, Doliar, and Navarim waited in his office. He sighed and handed the paper back to Doliar. “I’m going to assign two guards instead of one,” he said. “Maintain the gag order on this for now until I figure out what this means. Navarim, please escort our little prodigy to his new home and keep him safe. I’ll send the second guard out to you as soon as I know who it will be.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Doliar, you stay. The rest of you can go. Have a nice night, Nym. Best of luck dealing with my daughter.”
Nym sighed and shook his head. “She’s going to make this difficult.”
Lord Feldstal shrugged and pointed at the paper still held in Doliar’s hands. “Difficulties do tend to arise just when it seems that things are going well.”
“Basically the story of my life,” Nym muttered to himself.
They left Lord Feldstal’s office and walked across the Collective’s headquarters to the teleportation platforms. Navarim led the way, occasionally pointing out some interesting room or person that they passed by. The Collective had a lot of labs for different experiments, and supposedly an archive of thousands of upon thousands of books detailing the results of their research.
“We’re not the first incarnation of the Collective,” Navarim explained. “Reaching for more power isn’t anything new, and while the primary goal is the advancement of humanity’s magic in general to make third circle spells commonplace, there are plenty of other topics we do research on. We’re not even really that secret of a society, to be fair. You just don’t find out about us until you reach a certain threshold.”
“Why hide at all?” Nym asked.
“Between you and me, I think the people in charge just like the grandeur and the mystique. Seems like having the members all swear geases is overkill to me, but… I’m twenty-three. I am not ready to stop growing for the rest of my life, so I’ll play along as long as I get to keep collaborating on finding a way to push to the third circle.”
That was fair. Nym knew he wouldn’t face the same problems most of the people in the Collective had, but there would probably come a day when he couldn’t push his own magic any farther either, and if that was due to his body not being able to keep up with his mind, he wasn’t sure what would look like reasonable actions to correct that.
“Here’s the teleport platform,” Navarim said. “I’m sure you remember these.”
“I do,” Nym said. “I think you were there for almost every single one I’ve ever used.”
“Hah. But did you ever learn how to power them yourself?”
“I did not, no. Teleportation is a third circle spell. Wait, in that case…”
“Right, you’d need to be able to cast third circle magic in order to make new platforms. They can be powered with second circle arcana though. It’s complicated, probably a lot more so than just casting the actual spell, and it requires a ton of maintenance. But since you’re part of the Collective now, you should probably know how to activate one and pick a destination from it.
“Each platform can only contain five or so destinations. Some of the bigger ones have a few more, and there are some small ones that only link directly to one other place, but on average, five is the magic number here. It’s just cheaper to build two platforms next to each other than to build one bigger one that can hold ten links.”
Navarim went on for a bit about localization effects, long-distance synergies, and the cycle warp up speed for powering the platform, none of which Nym understood. Then he moved onto the part that Nym actually needed to know about, powering the arcana battery that the platform drew on to generate the teleportation effect, which was actually five separate batteries. Destination was selected by choosing where to pour arcana in at.
“Wouldn’t there be some conversion loss from using the battery and then having the platform power it instead of just powering the platform directly?” he asked.
“Yes and no. There is, but it’s not very much and it’s much, much simpler to have the attendant just dump arcana into one of five boxes than it is to have them trying to access the platform’s rune sequences directly. In the end, it costs less arcana to keep people who don’t know how to manually operate the platform away from the delicate parts than it would to repair those parts every time they break something.”
There were symbols etched onto each section of the battery stack that denoted the destination. Navarim pointed out the one for Ebalsan and said, “Why don’t you try empowering it? I’ll keep an eye on the battery and let you know when it’s got enough.”
Pushing arcana into the battery was a lot like empowering rune sequences, though it was hungry for far more arcana than he’d ever used to power runes. Teleportation was not a cheap spell, apparently, and doubly so when he was using the wrong layer of arcana. He would have loved to see how the platform managed to spin that around.
“Has the Collective ever tried using this type of magic to create enchanted objects that would allow them to do the necessary changes to their soul well?” Nym asked.
“I believe the principles used in the teleportation platform were first discovered in an attempt to do just that,” Navarim told him. “As it turns out, it’s much easier to use arcana in this manner on a non-living object. Living test subjects who tried it turned… uh… also non-living.”
Nym winced. “Okay then. I won’t be trying that. I think the battery is full now.”
“Good eye,” Navarim said. “That should be enough, but give it a little bit more just to be safe. You will absolutely regret it if you ever get caught at the end of a teleportation spell that ran out of arcana. It’s not fatal or anything, but you’ll be so sick you’ll wish it was.”
After he was done, they both stepped onto the platform and Navarim pointed out where to channel a bit of arcana into the battery to connect it to the platform. The teleportation spell took hold immediately and deposited them onto a new platform in Ebalsan. The attendant started forward, but Navarim waved him off.
From there, it was a short trip to their destination, which was in a decidedly middle-class neighborhood. It was still early in the morning, barely past dawn, and the streets were largely empty, which made it easier to nagivate them. Many of the homes were two stories, with businesses being run from the ground floor. They weren’t cramped together, and often had small gardens visible behind them. “Where are we going?” Nym asked. “This looks a little too rich for my budget.”
“I didn’t pick it,” Navarim told him. “It should be near here somewhere. They said to look for a little decorative fence around the property and blue shutters, and that was right next to… Ah! Here it is.”
Nym looked at the house, then back to Navarim. Then he looked at the house again. “You’re kidding, right? This is a joke?”
“Well I didn’t pick it,” the other mage said again, defensively this time.
The house was large, far larger than Nym expected. It was two stories, and just judging by the number of windows he saw on the outside, had to have four or five bedrooms. It was in good shape too, though the yard hadn’t been tended to in some time. There was a paved stone path leading from the streets to the front door, and a wooden fence that came up just past Nym’s waist circled the whole thing. The gate was missing, but otherwise it was whole and sturdy.
Right next to it was an exotic pet store. Nym could hear various squawks, rumblings, and barks from the street, and there was a kind of smell that he couldn’t really identify in the air. He wasn’t sure that he’d necessarily call it foul, but it wasn’t pleasant. It was just kind of an animal smell, not as bad as being at the stockyards in Thrakus, but not something he wanted to get used to.
“Do you think I can argue for a different place?” Nym asked.
“I doubt it.”
He let out a defeated sigh. “Let’s just get inside.”
The house proved to be three bedrooms, with a sitting room, a wash room, and a kitchen all separated out. Nym had never been inside a house this big that didn’t belong to a noble, but then he supposed this one might very well belong to Analia’s father as well. Awful location aside, it was a very nice house that was already furnished.
“Alright, let’s talk about how this whole bodyguard thing is going to work,” Navarim said after they finished touring the place. They were sitting at the kitchen table while waiting for a pot of tea the mage had started using supplies from the pantry.
“Probably a good idea,” Nym agreed.
“What do you know already?” Navarim asked.
“Not much. You follow me around, protect me from stuff.”
The older mage sighed. “Yeah, I was kind of hoping you knew more than that. This isn’t really something I ever saw myself doing, so I’m just about as lost as you are. I think they only picked me because your file indicated we knew each other. I guess we’ll figure it out together.”
“Did they give you any time frames? Like… are you staying here with me? Are you with me indefinitely, or will someone else come relieve you in a few hours?”
“I’m with you for the time being,” Navarim said. “And I guess someone else will be assigned as well, so maybe we’ll… uh… take shifts? I’m not sure. I guess, this is your house, so pick out which bedroom you want and I’ll grab one of the spares. Whoever your other guard is can take the other.”
“Hmm… I don’t think that will work. I’m planning on having a roommate. I should actually send a message spell. I disappeared in the middle of the night and I’m not sure how long I’ve been missing.”
“Roommate, huh? Alright, I’ll give you a minute for that. Let me know when you’re done.”
Nym didn’t have a firm grasp on the message spell. It seemed extremely useful, but Analia was a bit annoying with it, and it turned out the more he used it, the easier it was for other people to send him messages. Nym suspected there was a matching spell that blocked messages in some fashion, but Analia claimed she didn’t know if such a thing existed.
Nym was suspicious, to say the least.
He hadn’t received any messages from her since he’d teleported back to Ebalsan, but it was still very early in the morning. It was possible Analia was asleep still. She might be cranky if he woke her up, but he had been kidnapped in the middle of the night and assumed he’d been gone for at least one full day, considering how much time he’d spent talking to both Lord Feldstal and Doliar. All those tests had taken hours too, plus the time he’d been locked up.
She could be mad at him if she wanted. He spun the message spell out of arcana and infused it with his thoughts, then sent it on its way towards her. [It’s Nym. I got attacked in the middle of the night. Fine now. We got a house out of it. I’ll come meet you at the Silver Gilder and we can pack up the books.]
Part of the spell required at least a rough knowledge of where the recipient was, which probably accounted for why he hadn’t received any messages from her earlier. Between that and being locked in a mage cell for an unknown length of time, he’d been unreachable. The spell unfortunately did not have enough feedback to let the caster know if the recipient had actually received it.
What did let him know the message had gone through was the return message Analia sent him. [You what! Are you okay? Get over here right now. I’m going to let Ophelia and the rest know so we can meet up and figure out what’s going on.]
“That went about as well as can be expected,” he told Navarim with a sigh.
