July 25th, 5AC
Timothy stumbled out of bed well after dawn, rubbing at sleep-crusted eyes.
Shrugging his shoulders back and forth a few times he stood up and did a few full-body stretches. Trying to touch the ceiling, jumping jacks a few push-ups and toe touches.
He felt like a million bucks. A bit of much-needed extra sleep in his own bed was just what the doctor ordered.
Sleep was an undervalued luxury. Stories the world over, from Xianxia to military sci-fi treated it like the enemy. So and so hero only needed 2 hours a night, and that let him get ahead.
Sure, having more hours in the day would be nice... But life was more than just that. He'd sacrificed many things in favor of work and magic, but sleep? That was a hill two or three too far!
Without some specialized magic going short on sleep had nasty side effects. Starting with just being slower and less sharp and moving on towards mental issues and insanity.
Sleep was how the body and brain reset itself. Dreams were how it dealt with stress and pressure. Sometimes a job needed finishing and you didn't have a choice. The rest of the time? Get that sleep! The mind of a wizard was his weapon. Keep it sharp and in top form whenever possible.
Besides, dreams weren't just for mental health. More than a few times he'd found a missing answer or a moment of inspiration from those murky depths.
He moved over to a cupboard and checked it for breakfast. Empty of course. With a sigh, he poured a cup of water and with a few sharp-edged words, gazed through its surface into the kitchens below.
The pots were on and no hands in the way. He triggered a quick spell and the pot in the bottom of the cupboard filled with a squashmeal. Teleportation might shred anything that passed through, but with liquids, how could you tell the difference?
He picked up a stylus and added a hash mark to his tab. He still had an even dozen prepaid but made a mental note to drop them a few more coins. Debt was a trap. A link as deadly as a name if the debt was large or delinquent enough.
He dished himself a bowl of the unappetizing-looking gloop and took a seat. He stared off into space between bites (or, he grimaced looking down, slurps), What was he going to do about the transportation?
Two weeks away hadn’t provided him with a moment of inspiration to bust through the roadblocks. Neither had his vaunted dreams.
Worse, he had many demands on his time. He couldn't just drop everything and go heads down till he found a solution... as much as he wanted to. He sighed, there were classes to schedule, homework to take a look at and chores that he just knew had been stacking up. Add in those pesky social obligations...
Dammit.
No wonder wizards in fiction were so often hermits. How else would they find time to get anything done?
People! Can’t live with them and it’s torches and pitchforks if you do something about it. Why couldn’t they just tell him what they wanted? Why did they have to beat around the damn bush for a half hour first? Just say, ‘Hey make me x by y.’ Thank you and here's the coin.
No, they had to have their hands held and their egos stroked. Timothy wasn’t any good at it, but if he didn't at least make a token effort Da started getting obnoxious. Haaa, the things he did for family.
Checking his mental list didn't make it any better. He'd be lucky to have a moment free today at all, and not at all before dinner. And if he didn't get started then it would be beyond even luck.
He rinsed out the bowl and took a few minutes to run through his morning ablutions. Then a short walk through his workrooms and to a large stone box beside the outer, heavily enchanted door that led to out into the Hold.
Snapping his fingers, a runed circle embossed on the box came to life. A clattering, bouncing noise rang out for a half dozen seconds, then stopped and the runes lost their glow. He flipped the stone lid up on its hinge and deftly fished out a stack of wooden plaques.
There was a drop box on the bottom floor in the back of the bunker. A bit of levitation and the 'drop' box became a 'rise' box. A work request system. Why oh Google did he ever think this was a good idea?
Haaa.
He flipped through them with all the pleasure he'd once given to a mailbox full of magazines, coupons and bills. A reminder for the scheduled sewage maintenance, the to do immediately pile. The South East bunker’s amplification circle was on the fritz again. He spat out an oath, wincing as it carved a scar into the stone wall.
Why was it always that one? Damn gremlins. The figurative kind, not literal... Or at least he hoped not. Though with how often he blamed them and how belief worked... He made a mental note to be more careful.
The same damn enchantment worked great in all the other bunkers. Just that fucking one that kept acting up. He tossed it onto the immediate pile too.
Rhododendron Hold was requesting another ELR charge box with 50 charge cards. He raised an eyebrow. Why did they want those? The Essence Light Rifles were easy for even new guardians to use and very effective against weak enemies. But they were damn near worthless against anything that wasn't weak. Say Tier 2 and up.
Using them didn’t teach you much either. Nothing you couldn’t learn from activating any other enchantment. The only understanding it required was how a magical release and directional latch worked. Point and let the essence of sunlight strike.
He glanced towards the bottom and shrugged. Da signed off on the request and they'd made a 10% down payment. That was something at least. He tossed it onto the do soon, but not today pile.
The next few were suggestions. He made a point of reading them, the elevator shaft had come from such a suggestion. As had the weight and rot-reducing bags.
Both of which he'd made a point of paying heavily for. It was a cheap way to get a good reputation and to make sure the ideas streamed in. He just wished he didn’t have to wade through a mountain of shit for those few gold nuggets.
He tried to keep an open mind, but it was hard. Too much pessimism and he'd see even the gold as sewage. He tried to put a better picture on it. Even the bad ideas could be good for inspiration, or at the very least comedy.
He read through the first one. Composite eggs? Symbolic Yahtzee with ground mushrooms as a sperm symbol, feathers from a psychic buzzard as bird aspects and dino egg shells as a catalyst? Where the fuck… It was Beyond© ridiculous! He went back to the beginning to read it again. That couldn't be right...
Build a chicken egg, the magic version. Wow…
He shook his head in exasperation. How did three aspects and some bad shrooms equal a chicken egg? He really wanted to find this jackass and …. Breath in, hold it, breath out. As tempting as giving – Codder? He'd remember that name- a well-deserved ass kicking was, he couldn't do it.
Not unless he wanted the pipeline of ideas to dry up. And despite this kind of shit, the gems were worth the trouble. The travel sacks alone were worth the pain. They made longer hunting trips possible and some limited degree of meat trade between the Holds and Thresholds.
Then there was the mental cooler. A sort of air conditioner that wasn't that at all. It didn't make the room any colder, it just made you not care. It was a mental construct that made it possible to ignore the effects of the heat. Not perfect, and it didn’t do much for sweating, but at least it didn't come with an ageless face...
There were a number of other successes as well. Self-heating water pots and the tangled light traps that would trap and store an image. Less a camera and more an experience, they certainly made the baths more pleasant. Those and many, many more. All purchased at the low, low price of his sanity.
With a snort, he tossed the plaque upside down and grabbed a joiner to erase it. Then froze... misery shared was... heh, he moved it to a new pile. Call it dinner conversation!
He moved on, tossing each new plaque onto the appropriate pile. He needed some labels, something short and simple. Hmm, now, soon, never and comedy. It took a while, but not nearly as long as completing them would.
Ah well, sooner begun, sooner done.
First though, raising his hands to mid-chest level he took a moment to center himself, then snapped through a series of gestures and chants. Unlocking and releasing a number of wards and failsafes, temporarily of course, then focused on his blood, a name and all the baggage that came with it. And it was a lot of baggage...
Jenney!
WHAT? Timothy? His name, backed by the same knowledge as he’d spoken her’s rocked through him. A deeply unpleasant feeling. Something like being vulnerable, unarmed with the attention of a big predator squarely on you. Or, as Arthur so colorfully put it, like a whore in church.
If only it wasn’t so damn useful. Communication, location and spell matching. There were many benefits that you could gain from the sharing of Names. But it was also a highway past most defenses.
Can I drop by for a visit today?
I don’t need a minder, brother dear.
No minder, just a brother who loves you. Also, I got a reminder to go over the sewer runes.
...Fine. I’ll help with the runes, but the visit will have to wait. I'm busy until sunset.
The connection broke. Or rather she broke it and the frayed ends came snapping back through his mind like an over-tensioned cable. With a grunt and a well-practiced clench, he absorbed the backlash. Grounding it out before it had a chance to damage his gray matter.
That Jenney, always a brass-bound… charmer.
With a snort, he let the port he’d made in his defenses close. Then stepped through the stone of his door, made almost liquid by the spells on it. Nearly a standard for any door leading to something a norm wouldn’t survive. In this case, a 10 feet wide circular access shaft. He floated upward, kicking off the walls of the smooth stone channel.
There were no ladders. If you didn’t know how to activate the coded runes in the elevator, nor how to manage the solid stone plug hatches, then you didn’t belong here.
Elitist? Most definitely!
Meshing briefly with those runes the hatch above him pulsed into a decidedly different liquid state. Not a still pond with a pebble thrown in but a spinning maelstrom... or an old-world toilet. He spent a moment to read the flows then pitched himself into the side and 'swam' along the flow lines through the stone. It was three feet of stone essence, solid when the correct spells weren’t active and tied into a network of the Hold’s general reinforcement spells. The ones that protected the walls from attacks or minor earthquakes.
No one was getting through without siege spells and a lot of time.
Or permission. Sliding out the stone he lept up to kick off the next wall and through an unmarked section of wall. Landing in the third story antechamber. He deftly checked the rune inlays beside the door before snapping through a few chanted passwords and gestures to activate them.
The Hold wards were made before they’d figured out how to create the Cardea, but the Brotherhood’s ability to share the burden of a large spell had much the same utility. It just took far more people and for a lesser effect. On the other hand, it didn’t require a permanent binding either. It was a decent training job.
But that very trait led to significant limitations. Deliberate ones a good portion of the time. A better, more potent defense would almost have to include oversight for those young trainees. Surveillance in other words. Not something Timothy was willing to allow.
Using green troops also limited the complexity of those defenses. Also not something Timothy was willing to risk when in residence. The additional wards he activated had no such problems. Nor were they just structural reinforcement and a few hanging attack spells.
He continued to chant and gesture until he topped off the spells. With the embedded mana and willpower, they’d stay active for half a day. And at a cost that would melt the minds out of a full squad of Brotherhood guardians. Veteran guardians.
It was good to be the wizard.
Understanding and skill went a lot farther than brute power. Of course, if they came under serious attack that time estimate would go out the window.
Structural reinforcements, scrying blocks, True Name masking and diversions, even a general illusion that would redirect any scrys that punched through into seeing a generic image of himself reading reports. Add in a few divination wards to alert him of incoming threats or attempted intrusions and he was ready to dive in.
Timothy was prone to a bit of mono-focus when it came to magic. A great trait when you wanted to cast complex rituals. Not so good for situational awareness and threat recognition. Without fairly extreme defenses he couldn’t bear the risks.
It was also the only way he got anything done sometimes when everyone and their dog wanted something from him. To beg, buy or steal. He didn't have much patience for any of it. They all seemed to have the perfect argument on why they should have some extra enchanted comforts added to their homes that only he could do, or were important enough to purchase something and were too good to sully themselves with a quick message. Not to mention the out-and-out spies.
The buyers were at least honest in their desires and he did need to make money. He generally set aside a day or two per week to fill those orders.
The spies were a different matter. Blinding was about the most merciful defensive ward in his suite. Of course, if they were good enough to punch through without him noticing then they were welcome to do so.
He certainly did!
But interrupt his downtime, whether it be a family dinner or in the baths and he’d black list them. Sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes permanently. It was the only defense that worked.
Of course, he mused as he walked through the antechamber, it only worked because he was strong enough and had something everyone wanted. Stepping through another not-so-solid wall, this time with several additional spells to move the floating spikes inside the wall out of the way, he stepped into his own sanctum sanctorum.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Dodging between a chessboard-like set of small square tables, each boasting a detailed topographical map of a ten-mile square section of territory, he made his way to a raised central platform. The centerpiece of the room. It was a 15-foot cylinder of smoky quartz, all of one piece, lovingly carved, runed and enchanted to the nines. A flat exterior ring had six thin woven mats, plain looking, but looks weren’t everything placed like spokes of a wheel. The central axle of that wheel was a crystal clear and gleaming pool. It was hard to believe it was water and not some liquid crystal.
He approached it with slow, measured steps. A meditative approach to calm his mind and assume the proper attitude. With divination more than any other magical discipline, stray beliefs and uncontrolled emotions would heavily bias results. It was a nebulous enough art, no need to make it worse.
A patient mind. Focused but not opinionated. Willing and able to accept whatever may come.
He mounted the dais and began to trace the runes that lined it, one layer at a time.
He took his time. Like pre-flight checking an airplane. Someday he might not have time to check everything. When that day came, he'd have stored up enough good luck to hold him over.
The pool was a far cry from the simple stone bowl it had once been. Almost organically, it had grown into this sprawling mass. A solid core linked with hundreds of modular extensions.
Even with a modular architecture, he'd been forced to rip out and remake the entire thing no less than three times. Magic was a field of progress. He was always learning, and his tools reflected that.
That and as the complexity grew, the required precision and skill increased apace. His fumbling initial work had no hope of supporting a tenth of what his newest version did.
Organic, he'd mused, that was a good word for it. A standard symbology for growth, but also a warning. Organic was rarely a clean growth. If the fittest were to survive, that implied something stopped the rest from doing the same.
For all of that, it was the apple of his eye. What started as a scouting, and let's face it spying, method had grown into a command control interface. Farsight combined with the power to do something about what he saw. Or more than saw, he could project his conscious mind anywhere his runestone network extended, and a good bit beyond it. He could speak and touch with the appropriate spells, he could clothe his mind in illusions of a body.
He could even fake taste to some small extent. Texture was a bit iffy, but if you didn’t mind everything well blended his illusions could even eat for him. Now that was eating out!
It wasn't easy making a life-like illusion, but with enough time and effort, he’d pulled it off.
It wasn’t just a doppelganger trick either. If his mind was there, then distance penalties on spells applied from his mind's location, not his body. He still had to pay the costs to send his mind there, but it was a hell of a way to project power. Especially when he could bridge a ritual offensive spell with it. It took skill to cast spells at the drop of a hat. A disciplined mind and a well-honed meaning.
Timothy rarely bothered with that. Instead, he’d spend half a day setting up the spell, then leave it to charge for a few more. Then bridging the spell through his illusionary doubles, pretended that it was an off-the-cuff instant cast.
It was a hell of a party trick. And like the best magic acts, his audience wasn’t in on the joke.
Timothy fed his mind into the dense net of runes and geometric shapes. Carefully prepping only the main enchantments. You didn’t get improved performance without additional cost. He couldn’t afford to spend the willpower on modules that weren’t needed and if he needed a souped-up attack spell today, then there was something truly wrong!
He chuckled, and the entrenched defenses should give him the half hour he’d need to safely warm them up.
Donald was wrong, the Threshold enchantment wasn’t the most complex in the Union, it might be the most powerful but this room had it beat by far for complexity. Not that this should be a surprise. A true enchanter's best works would always be the ones he made for himself. Who else had the understanding to use them?
It was five years of effort. Art as much as magic.
Sitting down he ruefully shook his head, ego Timothy, watch the ego!
And he had just the thing to put it back in its place. It was time to fix a sewer…
Completing his prechecks, and reinforcing the chains of meaning and embedded intent that spread like a web beneath him, Timothy finally found his seat. No issues, no tampering and topped off on maintenance. Just like he'd left it.
He took a deep breath and started chanting out a new series of passwords, gesturing in time to unlock the security measures and turn ‘warming up’ into online and ready to rock.
He didn’t have to chant, nor gesture. But it helped. Pomp had its place. A bodybuilder might be able to manhandle a big rock, that didn't mean a lever wouldn't be safer, neater and more effective. So too with magic. Good tools increased the effectiveness of spellwork and when possible, Timothy made a point to use every multiplier available.
Moving through a specific and well-practiced set of chants that had all the musical talent of a career shower singer. Despite the lacking voice, the sheer mana and willpower involved gave it dignified beckoning grace not to mention aura of danger.
He carefully shaped the expanding construct, incorporating the tools he intended to use, projection, sensory mapping and a significant outlay for defense. Projecting himself out realistically enough to fool people had the regrettable side effect of turning his image into a decent voodoo doll. He'd created buffers, damage shunts and a few symbolic disconnects, but it was still a potential weakness. One he tried to keep an eye on.
The clouds in the quartz beneath him swirled in time with the rippling waves, then reluctantly dissipated, leaving Timothy perched high in the sky, looking down on the tower he was sitting in. A tower and the large circular wall it was a part of. A hundred yards wide in a near-perfect circle dominating an island in a massive river.
To the north lay the closer riverbank and a field of cleared land a hundred yards wide before it hit the foot of the jungle. The puny edges of it at least. Trees a measly 300 feet in height that boasted a vibrant ecosystem of vines, varmints and aggressive life of all kinds.
To the south, the plains stretched out in a green and gold sea. Grasses of a dozen different kinds rising up ten feet in height and stretching out in a seemingly flat, uniform, endless expanse. If he turned his head just right, a pair of bridges, more cloud than physical bridged both banks to the island.
Home.
Looking down he felt a flush of pride. He’d helped to make this. Survival, but also a legacy.
He blinked and it disappeared. Both bridges and the island itself, gone like a popped soap bubble or a half-remembered dream. Even the banks of the river were different. Uncertain and unfamiliar.
He focused, letting the correct keys surface in his mind, even as he tapped the blood links that tied him as an owner of those wards. The island reappeared with a snap.
With familiar skill, he suppressed the nausea such a sudden shift instigated and briefly considered the hundreds of possible tableau available. Each of the tables in the room he was looking down on was linked to a different geographic area. One already seeded with a runestone and linked to his tower. All were within his reach.
Reluctantly he turned away and willed his view to shift. His disembodied form slid down through the wisps of clouds and mist to the greenery-filled center courtyard. An image that disappeared as rapidly as the island itself had, if in a different direction as it devolved into swirling chaos.
It defied sight, refusing to be seen. Or tried to at least, between stray flows and sparkling bits of mana he spied a few glimpses of greenery and overpoweringly dense mana. But no image lasted more than an instant, and the next was as different as could be.
One moment a fruit tree ripe and waiting to be harvested, the next a set of zucchini plants then a small pond. All in the same place, though not at the same time.
He sighed and skipped past it to appear in the top layers of the city below. Not the first living layer, it was too close to the surface for that, but a very busy layer nevertheless. This was where the proceeds of the hunts were processed. Where hides were tanned, meat butchered and sewage reclaimed. All the smells no one wanted to live near.
His presence, bodyless and ephemeral darted above crowds of busy workers, and the bloody fruit thereof, grateful that the senses he’d activated were the mystical sort, not smell or taste. Passing beyond the work yards, he slid through another reinforced stone rampart into a large rectangular room dominated by two dozen large stone cylinders, like short grain silos but instead of sheet metal and spray paint, they had 5-foot thick stone essence walls webbed in runes.
He reached out his well to feel that web, relying heavily on the filters and buffers built into his pool to make it an almost instant shift. The rune chains were working as intended. He’d have to go deeper to see any subtle problems, but in general, they looked decent.
Decent but worn. The spells weren’t just working, they were overworked. Give it another month or two without maintenance and the entire system would crash.
Let's not do that, he snarked, pushing his sight and intent upwards against the blue glowing ceiling and back against the chaos above it. It wasn't quite a ward, nor really just mana.
It was unique. Part persistent thought construct and part dimensional boundary. Like stepping into an owned Shadow, but without the inherent hostility or lack of a body.
Inherent, but a bit of hostility could be felt even so. Just from its owner instead of unique physics.
That owner wasn't letting him in. He could force the issue, probably, but not without her noticing. And while her defenses were considerably less brutal than his own, that didn't mean she didn’t have them.
Jenney had nearly as many problems with would-be spies as he did.
Then again, Timothy figured he was more merciful. A quick eye fry for the first layer and they were free to go. Painful, debilitating but at least quick. Jenney? Shut up and listen. The lecture will continue until your behavior improves! Oh, and you can weed while you listen.
Timothy shuddered at the thought. Trapped in her garden pulling dandelions and crabgrass for weeks on end? He’d rather be blind. At least eyes could be healed. It might cost a year's wages, but it could be done!
He rapped his will against the barrier in a quick knock. A knock that transmitted his intent, rather than sound. Not just his presence but a brief sketch of his plans, the current state of the sewage system and a bit of extra details on materials they might need.
He didn't have to wait long before he felt her attention, the edges of the garden dipped down to encompass him and the silo’s in a sort of borderlands. Raw chaos to the outside, but not really inside the garden proper. Her emotions pulsed back at him, annoyance and a bit of exhaustion. It wasn’t easy for her to expand like that. He wondered briefly why she bothered. She wasn’t generally as paranoid as he was.
A bit more faith in the common goodness of mankind than Timothy had ever bothered with. Much less retained after all he’d seen.
Annoyance faded into a resigned acceptance and an offered mental hand. Grabbing it they approached the start of the spell chains that linked the cylinders together.
Like so many enchantments, it had started out fairly simple. A compost heap with a few runes to concentrate heat and a few more to mix it. But what worked, if barely, for 500 didn’t for 6000.
Now, numerous rune chains connected complex intent-filled images to catalysts enshrined on symbolic altars and barrels of consumable spell components.
Hundreds of smaller workings fed together into a massive affair of linked effects. Starting with isolation and specific forbidances against disease, contamination and insects.
And that was only on the outside. Inside each cylinder was a composite swill of slimes and fungal growths that fed on the refuse of human life. Each cylinder a single stage of digestion, converting what it could before dumping the rest into a chain of runoffs. From big and easy to handle to small and toxic. With a different set of fungus, runes and slimes to handle each. All of it necessary to do double damage. First to simply deal with the massive outpouring of waste that many people produced.
And second, to provide the fertilizers required to feed a town of the same size! The full circle of human consumption. Food to waste and back. He tried not to think about it too often.
With the number of residents and the tiny size of their above-ground footprint, it wasn't possible to feed everyone the way Paradise did it. Even the mushroom caves weren’t enough. They'd had to get clever. And slimes were the answer, though the cost for that particular idea wasn't one he cared to think about either.
When slimes died, the gelatin portion decayed quickly leaving only the cores behind. It took some doing to automate the process. Maintaining a reasonable population and harvesting only the larger slimes but it worked.
The resulting cores were superpowered plant food, not quite at Minecraft levels of speed, but enough to about triple yields and halve the growing time.
Combine that with Jenney's garden above, the mushroom groves below and the massive amount of meat and foraged foods the hunters brought in and the town was well supplied.
It mostly worked without a hitch.
Mostly.
They'd done what they could to make the process robust, both Jenney and him. And with a great deal of success. But with the kind of usage it saw, maintenance was a constant concern. Guardians handled most of the low-level work, but every six months or so it required its creators to polish and reinforce the intent behind it.
With a mental nudge, he directed Jenney's attention at a section of worn runes and artistic images of herbs. The containment portion drew his attention first. It wasn’t likely to be the problem, but it was the most dangerous thing that could go wrong. Thankfully, the material was handling the strain just fine. Five feet of stone essence anchoring the spells was a bit of overkill frankly.
Letting his mind slide through the tracings of runes and enchantments told a different story. It took a mind to work magic. And while Timothy had fiddled around the edges of that truth a great deal, it remained a truth. Long-term enchantments were the residual will a wizard could embed in an object, sufficient meaning deposited in a framework that resonated with the local Field could even draw mana of its own. But over time that will, meaning and framework would deteriorate. Use themselves up in the pursuit of the goal left in them.
Or you had to reinforce it. Timothy carefully called up the plans for this section. Not just the shape of the runes, but the thought process, symbolic links and any materials used. It took a few seconds to find the file in his mind palace, but little more than that. Bringing them front and center in his mind, before slowly tracing his way through the runes, bringing that embedded purpose back to full power. Retelling the story, in effect while retracing the runework one piece at a time.
Drawing new runes on top of the old in an expanding set of layers, where the bottom layers were slowly decaying away, but leaving the base material slightly changed with their passing.
Changing too fast would destroy the material entirely, but layer by layer, six months at a time, the base stone essence was becoming something else. Something specialized. Better able to contain the magic it was forced to bear.
Of course, it didn’t always work quite so neatly. Case and point. There was more wear in this section than he’d expected, and with that in mind, Timothy slid back through the runes for a second look. Knowing what the likely suspects were, he quickly found what he expected. A rune whose meaning had shifted. Not a great deal, but significantly. He tasted the last minor layer and nodded. A decent patch job, but made by someone who didn’t understand the entire process. Limited understanding was enough to repair the rune, but not to keep it in tune with its neighbors.
Removing the patch wasn’t really possible. Not without stripping some of those lovely underlayers and significantly harming the material's structure. So Timothy just overwrote it. Shifting the meaning back by tracing and retracing the concepts it should hold over and over. When that layer decayed, which would occur far faster than one of Timothy’s layers, its confused meaning would conflict with the previous changes. Setting the process back months.
A factor that many guardians were quite well aware of. Personal weapons and armor were personal. Repair and recharge them the same way, every time, and with an understanding close enough to their creator and they could grow with time. But if there was a conflict of understanding, or poor control with repairs the inconsistencies would slowly destroy the base material, not improve it.
That applied to persistent constructs as much as to equipment. And the base material there was the person.
For this project, guardians could keep the spells working, they could do some minor maintenance and refill the consumable stores, but Jenney and Timothy had to deal with anything more than that.
He still had hope, that with better training and perhaps the simplified runic language he'd been working on, he could get someone else to a high enough level of understanding to take it over.
Until then this tedious job- this critically important tedious job, was on them.
He took a bit of pleasure in sharing the misery as he felt Jenney’s mind ahead of him, waiting at a series of floral pictures.
Alchemy was sort of her thing, though she didn't call it that. She didn't appreciate 'witches brew' either. But call it what you will, it worked. The plants carved into the wall were the ingredients and correct quantities required to make a reproductive enhancement potion for slimes. The process and steps involved were in the linked series of images.
Symbolically creating the potion, rather than physically. It wasn’t a feat Timothy was capable of. The true knowledge of those plants, what they were, how they grew, chemical and mana interactions, Timothy couldn’t say what all. But Jenney could, and she’d embedded that knowledge into the images carved here. Embedded it accurately enough to draw in mana to create a spiritual copy of the plants.
It created a semi-permanent effect instead of a single-use consumable.
A minor semi-permanent effect.
Meaning and mana went a long way, but it couldn’t replace the potency of years of growth. Of overcoming the hurdles of life. Between the maintenance and mana costs it was still a net win due to convenience, but hardly a revolutionary one.
For most usages, you’d be better off having a potion on hand.
Then again, for a constant process, a dozen overlapping minor effects added up to something far beyond minor.
It wasn’t the finest piece of work he’d been a part of, but it was one of the first where he’d cooperated with another Origin. The lessons learned paved the way to many future successes. That history, along with the history of constant use, was why he wasn’t willing to just start over with a better design.
With well-practiced ease, he extended his mental hand to her again then together moved to work over the mana constructs. Jenney focused on the alchemical interconnections and reactions while Timothy fortified the symbolic architecture before moving on to the linkages. The mana and will lines that connected the enchantment to the control hut where a set of four Guardians waited, one of 6 shifts, responsible for powering this monstrosity. Both as active minds and for the mana. It was too big for Timothy's passive regen to handle more than half.
He met her at the edges for a hand-off, then moved on to the outer linkages while she moved on to check the mycelium nets. He’d leave the health checks on the slimes to her as well. He enjoyed searching for new mutations, but it was more her area than his.
Slimes were weird little shits. Ah well, he had more than enough to do still on his own. It was a familiar chore and he worked through each section with a will.
It wasn’t glamorous, repairing the shit recycling system, but it beat the alternatives. The hunter teams brought in a considerable amount of food and resources, but asking them to handle all of it would be a dick move. Not to mention being pretty damn wasteful to feed mana-rich foods to norms. Unless they boiled the value out of it, it was no different from poison.
No. A reliable self-sustaining food supply that would remain viable in the coming decades and possibly centuries of population growth was an absolute necessity. That much, at least, he and his grumpy sibling could completely agree on.
It was still going to be a long morning.
And that amplification circle wasn't going to fix itself.