Chapter Twenty Four

Some Enchanted Evening

Eighty-Three to the Two-hundred-fifty-third power, or 83 253 as he was known to his friends, cursed to himself. He hated that he was low enough on the infinity chain to have to go out searching for their rogue tutorial program. As subordinars went, Eighty-Three to the Two-hundred-fifty-third power was rather high up; there was a reason the peeking order was called an infinity chain, but that was the problem with being a fractal personality, the core self-delegated tasks out to parts of itself it didn’t like. One to the First Power disliked his obsequious nature more than most of his other personality flaws, and so his division most often got the short end stick.

Eighty-Three to the Two-hundred-fifty-third power hated leaving the other to come into the “real” universe. The one that his prime-self had created before the great fracturing was so clean and orderly. One to the Eighth power held a grudge from long ago and took every opportunity to send Eighty-Three to the Two-hundred-fifty-third power outside of the comforting confines of the great lattice.

He now found himself on a literal mudball. The planet Kward was huge and mana rich and looked to be the place that the tutorial and DV-8 had fled to. The energy trail was impossible to miss, and the fractal was certain that it had been a false one, but he still had to investigate it anyway.

In order to investigate 83 253 had to take corporeal form. The thought disgusted him, and the act revolted him to his core. Now, he found himself slogging through muck that came up to his amphibious knees. Kward was a refuge planet for intelligent reptile and amphibian humanoids and creatures. That meant that he had to watch out for dragons, as the world did exist in their zone of contention. 83 253 had been forced to corporeate in the form of a froggish humanoid, and had been scouring the surface for hours but found no sign of the core or the program.

He had hoped that all he would need to do would be to keep an eye open for the spontaneous addition of a new “something” it really didn’t matter what, so long as it was new and not a variant on something else. A new song was still just a song and barely provided them sustenance. A new spell, however, would announce their location to the universe. So far, though, there’d been nary a whisper.

83 253 had found all of the dungeons that they’d known of, which was no surprise, and he hadn’t expected anything less. He might not be an upper-echelon fractal, but he was smart enough to realize that the tutorial would have laid a false trail or three. He was on a wild duck chase. Most people called it a wild goose chase, but geese chased others, not the other way around. On most worlds, they were known as cobra ducks, due to their snake-like necks and bad attitudes. Were the tutorial after him then he would be involved in a wild goose chase.

He would give it a few more days, and then he would look for a second, less obvious trace of the program and the core’s passing. He was certain that his efforts on Kward were fruitless. Before he knew what he was doing his tongue shot out of his mouth and latched onto a passing bird. The avian was dragged from the air and into his gullet in one swift motion that 83 253 barely registered until it was over. He burped and felt the blackbird squirming in his stomach. He let out a long slow croak in protest.

He hated physicality. He cursed his luck, One to the Eighth power, and not having the option of passing off the task to a lower-ranked subordinar. The Prime had learned long ago not to let a subordinar pass on a task it was given to one of lower rank because the job was never done; it just passed hands down the infinity chain forever. The only consolation that the fractal had was that there were others like him searching worlds just as horrifying as the one he was on. The universe was a cruel place and he wanted to get back to the other as soon as possible.

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Dev studied the ring. He’d found the symbol that stood for healing etched into the cardiac muscles themselves, it was represented by a roll of bandages that were slightly unspooled. The heart and arterial system that surrounded the otherwise plain golden band was what had been used to bind the spell to the ring. Dev was starting to notice a pattern on how enchantments were tied to objects. The object itself didn’t matter, it was the connection and the symbol that made the difference. He surmised that he could not use a circulatory system with a razor symbol in the muscle tissues of the heart, and create a sharpness enchantment on a sword. Then again, he also imagined using the proper binding and symbol on the wrong object might not work. Could he make a pillow of bleeding? One that if you laid your head on it for a good night’s rest would end up with the prospective sleeper ending up decapitated? He didn’t think so.

So, he amended his thoughts. A sharpness enchantment most probably required an edge of some kind, and healing magic would most likely not work on a weapon. The entire procedure would be logical and intuitive. His initial steps would be trial and error until he found an enchanter or got a book on the subject that made things clearer for him. Given his druthers, the core would have preferred testing the waters on his own. Using someone else’s knowledge, something that he didn’t earn, would lead to him simply following along a known or easy path. Who knew? Doing things on his own might just lead to him discovering unknown techniques. Techniques that he would not be able to share.

That thought depressed him. The thought of the things he might achieve as a dungeon core amazed him. He had no restrictions, no controls, he could do anything his mind could conceive of. He just couldn’t share it or let anyone know about it. His non-existent hands were tied. He pushed on. There was no point in dwelling on things he could change at the moment. He just had to think of a way to introduce something completely new and innovative into the world without creating a ripple that the Overseers would notice. Piece of cake. A big slice under a ten-ton rock in a volcano, but still a piece of cake. If he could give the Overseers fits as a dragon, he could most certainly do the same as a dungeon core. That meant he had to focus, so it was back to the healing enchantment!

Dev studied it. He made a three-dimensional representation of it and he rotated it so that he saw it from every possible angle one hundred times. No matter how much he studied the magic he could not see a starting point or an ending point. The spell simply was.

The core decided that he needed to eliminate the ring and just focus on the magic for the moment. A mental twitch later and the model of the ring faded from the air. He placed his consciousness inside of the enchantment and took on the ring’s perspective. That didn’t help either. So far as he could tell the healing charm was a single cohesive piece.

It was time to try something else, he decided. Dev looked at a large vessel and cut it. Like a real artery, it sprayed imaginary magic into the air in rhythm with the heart’s beat. Dev carefully unwound the spell until he had a mass of arteries and veins hanging in the air, but still attached to the heart. He called forth the ring’s representation and carefully wound the vessels around until they were an exact match for the spell prior to the cutting. The slice did not repair itself, and so Dev grafted a micron’s worth of artificial blood vessel to the damaged portion.

Then, he watched as magic, that seeped in from the background on its own, refilled the circulatory system. The heart began beating a moment later, and floating in the air before him was a copy of the spell on the ring. Before he created it in the real world, he duplicated his procedure but used a gold coin in lieu of a ring. He watched it fill up and replicate the ring’s pattern. Magic filled in the empty vessels and the heart started beating.

It was time to test the waters, so to speak, and he looked at the costs to create an enchanted ring. The gold band itself was a single point of mana. The spell would cost him four-hundred points, but the slider bar indicated that he could increase the potency of the spell. He didn’t have enough mana to give the magic its maximum potential, so he slid it until the points were at just below his maximum expenditure. He wanted a little left over for later. Additionally, he opted to simply replicate the ring and did not use the Variety option since it actually cost an additional point of mana to randomize its appearance. He saw no need to worry about whether he had the same ring or not, a gold band was a gold band.

Dev hit Yes when he was asked if he wanted to make the item and as soon as he did so he regretted it. The ring appeared twenty feet from his cubby hole, and the instant that it fully materialized it soundlessly exploded. The walls of the cavern melted and Dev could feel the heat on his core. He observed the rocky walls, ceiling, and floors become molten and for a brief moment he panicked thinking that he was going to melt himself, but the heat dissipated quickly, venting out through the crevice before he could work himself up.

He replayed what had happened in his mind. He saw the ring coalesce into a solid mass, existing for the briefest of seconds before the spell vibrated so fast that it blurred even to his sight, and then it exploded.

He gave his mana time to regenerate. He wanted a full bar and did not want to waste his precious Fear in an unnecessary conversion. Toot had worked hard to gather that for him, and he did not want to waste it. They had nothing but time; no point in rushing.

That said, he only waited until his mana was half full. This time he used the coin and used his slider to reduce the power of the spell to almost nothing. Again, he burned through all but a single point of mana and replicated his item.

The resulting explosion was less spectacular. The coin vanished in a puff of smoke in a manner similar to when he absorbed an object. So, Dev congratulated himself on learning from the first incident.

This time, he replayed the explosion over and watched it in a much slower frame rate than he had before. He noted that the enchantment did not start to shake until it came into contact with the magic in the surrounding area. The external “radiation” seemed like it was trying to force its way into the spell, and the internal power resisted the entrance of the outside energy.

He pulled up his internal schematics and repeated the process, and he noted that even in his “loading bay” that the magic did not enter the spell until after it was completed. Once he had fused the cut vessel together the magic poured in.

Dev began to wonder where the magic came from in his simulation. Surely it was not real magic? Was it? Was it something along the lines of the actual enchanter did not have his weaving filled with power until after he finished? It made sense. The spell would be inert until it was completed, then it would activate and begin pulling in power. What he was doing was creating the spell, and then recreating it in reality. The spell should have remained empty in his simulation, and then filled in the real world like it normally would have.

The implications of what it meant if he was right staggered him. Dev hadn’t taken magic as an option, but he could replicate it in his design stage. He was using artificial magic and then sending it out to compete with real magic. If he knew what he was doing he would never have cottoned on to that fact. So far as the real world was concerned the spell was new, and magic had tried to do what it was mean to, energizing an enchantment. His imitation magic was just as real so far as reality would be concerned, but it was not meant to go out into the world. He was supposed to design the enchantment, not let it fill up, and then let the world do what came naturally. Nature abhorred a void, and so did magic. It was everywhere.

What he had done was to block it from doing its job. So far as reality was concerned a new enchantment had come into being and tried to do what it always did. The duplicate mana resisted because the spell was already full and it pushed back. The spell was not a filter feeder, it didn’t continuously siphon magic from the air, once it was full the spell was self-contained. That meant that all he needed to do was to prevent his imaginary mana from filling up the spell before translating it to the real world. Once it entered reality it transitioned into authentic mana and therein laid the problem.

Hoping he was on the right track; Dev created a vacuum that was void of all energies. He waited until he had half mana again and redesigned the coin, without letting the magic in his design kit fill in the empty vessels. The spell was utterly inert but looked proper otherwise. The core reset himself and prepared to recreate the coin. Dev figured if he could get it to work on the coin then he could get it to work on anything.

Dev rolled his core a little to the left of his opening and hit the Yes option again. He slowed down time by speeding up his senses, and he watched as the coin appeared, void of magic but with a fully functional enchantment on it. Glowing molecules began to fill the spell configuration so quickly that even his hyper-observational powers missed it. In the span of time that it takes a photo to travel across a room nothing happened and then the enchantment’s heart began to beat.

He watched as the spell began working and he could see that while it was a weak spell it would provide one health point per three hours. It wouldn’t save a life, but it could cure small wounds faster than normal.

Then he began to think. He probably didn’t need to ravage the spell and then reconnect it. He could weave his objects around the enchantments themselves. He’d been looking at it as if he had to fit the magic to the object when it was the other way around. He could absolutely control the mesh of a ring or a dagger so that it adjusted to the magic. At least that was how he planned on doing it until he had a better grasp on the subject.

Dev turned his attention to the diamond mesh that he’d created and began to accommodate it to the spell’s framework. Things were finally looking up. He had designs for shops and could now apply fire resistance spells as well as repair spells on every single item that he used to make the buildings from. By the time he was done, they would be nigh impossible to destroy, but he had a diamond to create.

“Gold,” came a voice from the darkness.

Dev looked around, thinking that Toot had returned, but he saw no one. His vision told him that his companion had just entered the book shop and he was no longer visible until he stepped back out into the street. Dev was utterly alone.

“Gold,” came the voice again. This time it was louder and fiercer than before, and Dev knew where it had come from this time. It had come from the recesses of his mind. That walled off part of himself was waking up, and it wanted more gold.