August 5th, 5AC
Timothy leaned back in a hard wooden chair, tapping lightly on the tabletop. He had two tasks ahead, and he blessed the planning that reduced it to only two. The most recent batch of students were through the trying stabilization phase and could be left to self-study while his oldest were stuck in Gov classes.
He’d caught up and then some on maintenance, and even popped out most of his backlog of enchant requests. That left just the big two. Transportation to the Thresholds and a Capstone for his efforts to back out of teaching.
He was on schedule for the second, though without a great deal of slop in the timeline. Graduation wouldn’t move if he wasn’t ready for it.
But that left him with freaking transportation. A dead end and a consistent pain in his ass.
The sound of footsteps bouncing up the elevator shaft outside broke him out of his musings. And would hopefully break up the logjam.
“Hey Ironface, thanks for dropping by.” By the time the older man stepped through the liquid-ish stone door, Timothy was leaning back in his chair massaging his bare feet. Deliberately casual, even irreverent, Timothy grinned up at the man. The years of command had taken their toll, his dark bronze skin stood out against the silver stubble on top of it. His face was seamed and lined.
But despite those heavy burdens, he was still square-shouldered, muscular and fit. A doubly impressive accomplishment considering that growth had shifted his job more towards office bitch than master of arms.
Organizing training schedules and guard rotations was important, Timothy couldn't deny it. It also sounded like watching paint dry. He was deeply grateful that he had someone trustworthy step up and take care of it. Someone else especially!
“Runefather, I’m not prepared to take any complaints on your guard detail-”
Arthur easily caught, and immediately dropped with a grimace, the dirty sock. Timothy made a double pass with his hands cocked into an angular, claw-like shape and barked out a couple guttural words in German, sealing the door into its solid state and pulsing the divination wards active.
“Relax Arthur, I didn’t ask you here to bitch! Besides, Sven’s good-people. I never have a problem when you put him in charge. Some of your other choices-”
“I thought you weren't going to bitch, Timothy?” He folded his large form down into a chair across the table, grabbed a cup and filled it from the green pitcher containing mildly fermented camu camu juice.
“Fine, fine. Let’s drop it. I asked you up here because I need you for your uncompromising dickishness.” He said with a straight face.
The cup froze, halfway to his mouth then descended to sit on the table again. “Excuse me?” His eyes, the only part of his face Timothy could semi-reliably read, weren’t quite angry, but they were… serious. Best not to push the joke too far.
“Dickishness. I sometimes think it's what separates us from the beasts. Humanities unconquerable talent for cheating and loopholing our way to success. You see, I’m a bit stuck with an enchantment, and I need you to find me those loopholes. If you don't want to call it dickishness then we could go with common sense and willingness to tell me when I’m being a dumbass.”
“Ahhh,” The water rotated back through its robotically precise ark for a small, measured drink. “By all means, go on. I always enjoy popping your egg head.” The eyes, always the eyes. From serious, maybe angry to… predatory? Dammit. This was going to suck. If only he wasn't so damn good at this. Or as reliable. He couldn’t afford the loss of prestige that would come from having this conversation with just anyone. He’d carefully crafted his current aura of mystique, and there weren’t that many privy to the man behind it.
It wasn't ego... or at least it wasn't all ego. His reputation was a useful and often used weapon, and not just by Timothy. The Hold leveraged it heavily for trade concessions and for morale.
He needed someone of sufficient status, but not a competitor. One with tight lips. Timothy could afford to appear like an ivory tower idiot at times. It was a useful fiction and as much a part of his reputation as competence.
What he couldn’t tolerate was looking like an incompetent ivory tower idiot. Too many depended on his work, and when faith and belief had their own power, shaking that faith might lead to real consequences. Not that panic wasn't real too. But destabilizing defensive spells wasn’t something they could afford.
That left a fairly small circle of people. Regi fit the bill in part. He wouldn’t talk, was loyal to family and to the hold. He had a great imagination, a great deal of common sense and, equally as important, they weren’t in competition on anything. They sought very different things.
But being family cuts both ways. Timothy needed someone who would call a spade a spade, and not have the message softened from love, or even strong friendship. That wasn’t a problem here.
Timothy sometimes wondered if Arthur even liked him, much less considered him a friend. They’d had more than a few dust-ups over the last few years. But like or not, he did trust Arthur. The man was honor and loyalty. He’d sooner cut his own hands off than do something underhanded. He lived for the hold, and the people in it.
“I have a full dog and pony show. You want to see it?”
“If you're willing to give it.” Arthur said with a snort. Well played, Timothy mused. Despite the teaching routine, he still despised the bureaucratic BS in all its forms. And overdone, more sizzle-than-meat presentations definitely qualified.
That was one bright spot of the change, PowerPoint hadn't survived it!
“Alright, I'll keep it short and simple. Desire: Guardians at the forward thresholds want to have families. For the less nobly motivated, include laundry workers, cleaners, knocking shops, restaurants and whatnot.” You had to focus on what needed to be solved first. Not just on the types of solutions you had in mind, otherwise, the advice wouldn’t be worth much.
“Problem: Without Hold status pregnant ladies have to rotate back to a real hold and weaker individuals can't survive the jungle run to get there. Guardians powerful enough to survive the trip aren’t interested in those kinds of jobs. At least not as more than a sideline and at a much higher price.”
“Solutions. They don't work, but they might with some help or additional study. We noticed something with the threshold wards, once you get lost, you can end up anywhere inside the wards. It isn't teleportation or anything I can nail down, but it also isn't walking. The problem is the movement is by definition, lost. Call it random maybe.”
“I'm also trying to leverage the dimension Shadow Snakes move through. I can get you there, and you can move nearly instantly over the distances I've tested. But! Any light is an impassable barrier. One that can kill you. Then I tried to use material removal spells and keep the material intact. Works great for liquids and if it didn't start as a liquid? Well, it might come out that way.”
He walked Aurthur through the concepts and their major issues. Then like a witness being cross-examined dug deeper in almost every case to explain why. Starting with as close to an exact repeat of the conversation he'd had at Treeholm as he could manage. Which, with a light tap on his mental palace he could perfectly repeat, even if he wasn't much of a mimic for voices or emotions.
Most of a half hour later they sat quietly enjoying a mild, but expensive luncheon. Quality tiered pork sandwich, masterfully purified with wild-herbs and the appropriate sides. You didn’t go chintzy when you were asking for help. Timothy, of course, was not eating nearly so nicely. The mix of fresh vegetables and beans wrapped in a massive lettuce leaf was healthy and filling.
It was also bland and boring. The rune on his chest glowed lightly as he made the best use out of the minor sacrifice.
Arthur crunched down. Taking a large bite out of the delicious, juicy-looking sandwich. Then leaned back, eyes half-lidded while he slowly masticated. Making every impression of a man greatly enjoying himself. Damn him. It was those mocking eyes again. Even half lidded they sparkled sardonically at Timothy. Then he took another large bite and the process started itself over again.
Timothy sighed, and took another bite out of bean wrap, ignoring the second juicy sandwich sitting on the table. Tempting him. Inviting him. Whispering sweet, sweet things to him. I'm delicious, it said, crunchy with just the right hint of vinegar. I'm right here it said. Just reach out, grab me!
He took another bite of beans, keeping the sigh inside. He'd eat that sandwich. But when he chose to, not because of temptation. And not today.
Dammit.
Eventually, Arthur sat his empty glass down, wiped his mouth and showed every sign of being ready to get down to business. “Alright, it's a real problem and you have some interesting ideas for fixing it. I get the roadblocks you've mentioned. Tell me how you've tried to get around them.”
“I've come up with a few, but most of it rests on being too expensive. I want you to understand, that when I say that, I don't mean it would hurt to spend that much, but rather that we aren't capable of such spending.”
“Such as?”
Timothy blew out a breath, stood up and walked over to a side table to grab a heavy wooden tablet. Glancing at the scribbled notes he continued, “In order I suppose. I rigged up a demo of the ward's movement effect in my tower. You can try it out if you want, but the issue remains that it's random. You can't choose where you end up. Now that by itself won't stop me. Random means you might randomly get to the right place too and if I can rig it such that we just retry till we roll sixes, then I’d do that.”
“But it doesn't work. To get the effect you need to be lost. Truly lost. And the number of places you can end up are beyond counting. Beyond the stars in the sky sort of thing.”
“Then why hasn't someone gone to Treeholm and ended up in Rageflow?”
“The mana signature of each Threshold is distributed through the wards, otherwise you could just follow the massive beacon to the base. But it's still a beacon and a unique one at that. Once you're in the outer wards, you might not know where in them you are, but you still know if they're Treeholm’s or Rockbasin’s.”
“Huh. And that still counts as lost?”
Timothy snorted, “If you see the sun above you, do you know where you are? Just because you know which way is east, doesn’t mean you’re not lost.” He waved the idea away and continued. “I can isolate an area from outside mana signatures. I can play with the type of wards to keep the occupants away from the edges. Once inside anywhere you step will always be at least two large steps from being able to see out. Because if you could see out, then you wouldn’t be lost.”
“Then I play with the shape of the ward. Set it so that there are only a set number of places large enough to qualify. Places where you can’t see out. Think leaves on a branch. The branch is too skinny, so you can't end up there. But any one of the leaves could work.”
Arthur stared at him blankly for a few moments, then slowly spoke. “That's... I would say outrageous, but the word has begun to lose its meaning.”
“I can relate to that,” Timothy smirked. Suspension of disbelief. Not just for bad Hollywood dramas but for magic in general. “But again, it works. I can take you downstairs and let you try it.”
“I'll take you up on that. But later. If it does work, then why are you sitting here asking me about it? Set it up and let's go!”
Timothy grimaced. “Well, it works in micro not so much over the scale we are talking. So far at least, I can't make two 'identical' wards at some separation. I need that stalk I mentioned to connect them. One ward and they end up somewhere in it. I can't stretch that, not even when it's a really thin band, over 20 miles. The mana costs... well It just doesn't work.”
“This would be the expensive part then.” Arthur nodded. “Even though a set of Threshold wards might cover more total territory than an inch-wide strip 20 miles long, there are those damn distance multipliers.”
Timothy nodded. The man wasn't a pathfinder, but he did direct both defenses and hunters of an entire hold. You couldn't do that without a solid understanding of the basics and limitations of mana usage.
They weren’t really limits, of course, Timothy cheated around them all the time. But they were rules of thumb. There was a difference between bridging a gap, and traveling the entire distance.
“I can't find a way around it. Not yet. I think it’s a long-term viable solution, but it's not ready yet. I just don't understand enough of what makes it tick. I know that it does work. I can semi-reliably replicate it. But that isn't the same thing as understanding why it happens.”
“And I don't think I'll get much farther without making that kind of a jump in understanding.” Arthur stroked his chin in thought, then without agreeing or disagreeing simply gestured for Timothy to continue.
“Next is Shadow Hopping. It works, and with a bit of training, I can let you hopscotch across 40 feet in a step, then another 80 in the next if I set it upright.”
“The problem is somewhat related to what I said above. Any light is deadly when you are a being made of shadows. I can spell a corridor to perfect pitch black. But I can't maintain such a corridor from here to a Threshold. It's not even feasible to set up a series of such wards, and have the hop-scotcher activate each in series as he goes through. You'd have an undefended mana storage sitting out in the wilds. Something would eat it and possibly stick around to eat you.” Arthur nodded in agreement. If anything a bit too enthusiastically.
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“I tried going underground. Turns out those bioluminescent fungi leave spores even in the soil. Try passing through it and you come out on the other side like a radiation victim. With lots of little tiny holes burnt through you-”
“You survived that?” Arthur asked, his mouth in a tight line and his eyes shouting recriminations. “Timothy, we can't afford to lose you, you don't get to take such risks-”
“Arthur, give me a break. I didn't face-check it, that's what animal testing is for! Or at least slime testing. I chucked a couple of them through before I could figure out what was going wrong.”
He froze, stuck somewhere between relief and outrage. Yes, even Arthur apparently had that thought programmed into him. Animal testing = Bad!
Timothy hid his amusement, though from the glare he was getting, perhaps not as well as he'd hoped.
“So, no travel through the earth. So next, despite the road problems and ridiculous work it would take, I made a tunnel. A small one of course. And it worked! Those pesky spores were easy enough to clean out of the air, and they don't refresh themselves without a shroom. For about a week. Then with fresh air, moisture and available resources, mushrooms and moss sprouted and lit the tunnel up again.”
Arthur snorted. Laughter obvious in his eyes. “Mushrooms will do that.”
“Oh, I know. I just didn't think it would be quite that fast. So if making an area stay dark is difficult, what about spells to protect yourself from the light? Localized darkness as a spell, as equipment hell even as a ritual. Ran into a brick wall for the most part. The rules and means of magic don't work the same in the Shadows. Nothing spell-like works how I think it will. Maybe someday that might work, but not anytime soon.”
“You said mostly.” Arthur pointed out.
“I did. I made some armor out of Shadow Snake Skin. It works. It'll take the damage in place of the wearer. But it gets burned in the process. Badly burned. Completely destroyed after a couple short trips. We don't have enough of it to throw it away like that.”
Arthur shook his head again. In agreement this time. “Could you make a full trip on a single set in an emergency?” He asked.
“I... well I don't know. Even the dim glow from a mushroom will badly burn the surface if you get even moderately close. Badly enough that you only get two or three such burns before it's toast. With enough luck, I won't say you can't. But I can’t guarantee you can.”
“Useless then. You can't have someone carry 4 sets and stop in the middle of the jungle to change clothes.”
“Exactly.” Not with how fast an ambush could occur.
Arthur scratched at his chin, thinking again. After a dozen seconds, he looked up, “Might be something there. But I'll have to mull it over a bit more. Go on.”
“Next is the material removal. You know the spell. Started as a chisel, evolved into piranhas taking nibbling bites. If you take a bite out of stone, you get crumbled sand and gravel. I tried to get them to leave to swallow without chewing. Didn't work. Tried making the fish bigger. All the way to leveraging a freaking whale and the story of Jonah and the materials for that weren't cheap to acquire. Never got more than gravel, and not even bigger chunks of it except at random. If there is potential there, it isn’t for living transportation.”
“Unfortunate.” Arthur allowed, leaning back in his chair. He tapped at the table for a bit going through the problem in his head.
Timothy snagged a drink while waiting, but it wasn't that long before Arthur sat back upright.
“Alright. From how I see it, we have two separate problems. First problem is providing a safe way to get norms or the green awakened to and from a Threshold. The second is to make the trip faster. Your issue is that you are treating them like the same problem and they're not. If you break them up, then we have a solution you already mentioned for the first, and we'll just have to wait till your idea's mature for the second.”
Timothy paused, “Alright, I don't think I was doing that, but for the sake of argument go ahead. What solution though?”
“The tunnel. We have robust dependable tunneling spells. We have oxyferns to keep it breathable and easy access to fertilize and water them.”
“But...” Timothy paused, a bit surprised. “you think you can dig 20-30 miles of tunnel? For each Threshold?”
“Most Thresholds are still more forward fortress, not nascent town. It drops it from almost 60 to more like 10 if we keep that in mind. Still, no need to reach for more than we can grasp. Let's stick with just Treeholm as a test case. Now one long tunnel is still a job, but you don't have to do the digging. I expect, with how desperate you made them sound, that we can leverage volunteers for most of it. What is a heavy job for one, is trivial for an entire town. It'll take a while, but we will get it done.”
“Huh... Alright. I'm not so sanguine about volunteers sticking with a task for that long, but let’s say it’s true, it still doesn't make this work. You forgot the road effect.”
“I know, I know. Roads and predators are like mana and matter. They come in pairs. Or so you say, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Though I'll point out that we have roads in all of our towns.”
“And they see beast wave attacks.” Timothy pointed out. “Not to mention they already have predators on and around them.” Timothy smiled as he pointed towards his chest.
Arthur stared for a second, his eyes expanding slightly. Practically screaming in shock for him. “Us? Ha! I like that.”
Timothy grinned, “I thought you might.”
He waved it away, chuckling softly. “Like I said, I give you the benefit of the doubt. What about this, instead of a single road, we put in a maze. A set of interlocking tunnels and take our final route at random. Change things up as needed to prevent a singular route from forming.”
It was Timothy's turn to stare at him. “I ah... I hadn't thought of that, but if one tunnel is a lot of work, this will be much worse!”
“Just time. If a couple months don't work, then we give it a six or even a year. If we can prove it works, then the pregnant ladies can stay. We’ll finish the maze long before the kid needs to come back to the Riverlands.”
“That's... ok. Are we pedaling hope instead of results now?”
“That's a leader's job, Timothy. And why you'll never be a good one. You're not supposed to fix things yourself. You're supposed to point people in the right direction and encourage them to help themselves.”
Timothy snorted. But not entirely in disagreement. Oh, he had some issues with what Arthur implied. The new world and the old were not the same. Not even just in threat sources and magic. But in the variance in personal power. When any individual, outside of equipment, was about as powerful as everyone else, it made democracies and all those other ocracies possible, even reasonable. But what happened when that power was concentrated, not by money or political power, but by actual strength, a few into individuals?
A single powerful wizard could do more work than a town full of norms or a tenth of that in guardians. So why bother with motivating the town? Just be the wizard!
Still, when it was easy monotonous work, they and the inciters that led them were welcome to it.
Timothy thought about it for a second, then raised another objection. “A direct connection between Threshold and Hold would drastically weaken a confusion ward. The symbolism's pretty obvious. When you want people wandering lost, leaving a direct path with road signs is hardly going to help.”
Arthur shrugged, “A minor detail. Put the tunnel entrance outside the wards then, and just have a smaller temporary ward to extend outward.”
Timothy nodded, that could work, although- “What happens when beasts make their way into the tunnels? Either by slipping in the undefended entrances or by digging?”
“It will happen. Whether by Murphy, your road law or just time. It will happen. But I'm not terribly worried about it. If there are limited directions you can go, then there are limited threat vectors you have to watch and defend. Not like the jungle, where there are nearly infinite possible angles of attack. Reduce it to two or three and guards before and aft will do the trick.”
“Plus, nothing says you can't rig the game in our favor. Defensive positions, tunnel height and sight lines designed for humans. Those would put any beast that got in at a significant disadvantage.”
“Then hide the entrances. I don't care how you do it, but if you want legends to back it, Ali Baba and the forty thieves seems like an easy one.”
“Open sesame?” Timothy sighed. Everyone knew that one. Made it pretty useless against people.
“Yes.”
Timothy nodded slowly. Through that filter it made sense. He might even be able to do a bit better than just some firing ports and ceilings too low for hogs to fit. Something like a detection and overall control panel tied into the entire maze. If he linked the digging enchantments into it up front he could set up the usual voodoo-style command and control. Every new spot of digging would dig into his map as well. Observation and a possible avenue of attack in one. Like an old top-down dungeon builder... Now that thought gave him ideas.
“I mostly like it, but you might be underestimating how nasty fighting in those tunnels might get. A horde of rats or weasels digging their way in sounds like a horror movie. For that matter, Grandpa had some horror stories about tunnel fighting in ‘Nam.”
“The lesser of two evils, Timothy. It will suck. I guarantee it. Embrace it and move on. It's possible. Walking them through the jungle isn't. I'll take the small win.”
That was… also true.
“It sounds good, but I'll need to do some serious testing before I risk either our wards or Treeholm’s.”
Arthur snorted and glared at him. “Who the hell do you think you're talking to? I'm not the one who delivered a spatula instead of a battle rifle!”
Timothy groaned. “For Google's sake, let it go, Arthur! It's been years already.”
“And will be many years more into the future! Do your tests, Timothy, then hand it to me and I'll do a dozen times as many, and from angles you’d never dream of. The demand may be high, but I won't risk a Threshold on something untried. Not unless I have no other choice.”
And that too was the truth.
Talking with Arthur, Timothy mused later that day, wasn't kind to his ego, but it had a way of keeping him grounded. It was good to be reminded, every now and then, that powerful enchantments weren’t the goal. Useful ones were. Neither Shadow Stepping nor the Lost method were ready for prime time.
But that didn’t mean they would never be. In the meantime, a labyrinth deep underground was an entirely new direction. And that's what he'd needed more than anything else after hitting nothing but roadblocks.
In the labyrinth, he might even be able to leverage some higher magic. Maybe a stone tube, small but kept pitch black that linked areas via a Shadowstep Stone. A fast lane for those powerful enough to use it. Maybe make them register at each stepping stone before they could use it for security? Maybe split the labyrinth into distinct sections with a single connecting tunnel. Add a fortified safe room in each one.
It would help to decrease the construction time that way. Not a huge spread of tunnels the entire way, but big knots on a line. He snickered, of course, that was the excuse. The real reason was so he could call each section a ‘floor!’ Amused he scribbled the idea down before moving on.
He was kicking those space-warping rejection forces outside Jenney's garden around in his head. Shadowstepping might be usable sooner, but long term he was really interested in the Lost mechanic. Not from some linked warding schema, but just as a natural phenomenon.
All forests in the same area looked the same once you were deep enough into uncharted territory. If you could somehow use that effect to travel... well it had a hell of a lot of potential.
He sighed. Someday. He'd figure it out. In the meantime, it was hardly the only avenue to move down. The shadow dimension had issues, but if there was a dimension of shadows, were there other dimensions as well? Would one of them be better?
Of course, he'd have to find that dimension. And worse, a way into it. Blood from an occupant made a hell of a key, but not every beast was a shadow snake, spending half its time in each.
He wasn't even sure where to start looking. He barely recognized a dimensional boundary when he saw one, and even that only came about because of Jenney. And she couldn’t help him either.
They came at magic from very different angles. That, and he didn’t think even she really understood how she’d made her garden. Desire plus power could make some real miracles, but they were rarely repeatable.
But it was there. And repeatable or not, he could and would study the hell out of it. And those observations were a strand. A single bit of string, but if he could just tug on it, he might unravel the whole sweater. Eventually.
He pulled out a thick wooden plaque and jotted down his thoughts. What he wanted, what milestones to look for along the way, and a bit of where he might start. Finding crossovers between Jenney's garden and the Shadow Dimension. What was the same, what was different? How did entry into one compare with the other?
Then it was back to the Thresholds and their wards. How did outside observation affect that movement? It didn’t stop it, but was that because no one was paying attention all of the time? Or was something else going on?
He needed to find some other examples. More data points to add to his mental map. To compare and contrast until he could pull out possible connecting tissue.
Laws, in other words.
And that was more than a milestone. But that didn’t mean he had any other route to take. He’d just have to find puzzle piece after puzzle piece. Till he had enough of a basis to divine the rest.
And not by the scientific method and logic either. He’d form a gestalt image. A mass of impressions and characteristics that encompassed what he did know about the issue, as a hook, like a name, to scry for anything related to it.
It was an evolved form of his simplistic species runes. Those still worked, but they weren't hard to trick. Mostly that took forethought and malice, but not always. There had been a few cases where a destabilized local Field blocked the scry.
Timothy leaned back. It was never simple. Which made it all the weirder that simple spells and effects worked more reliably than complex ones.
Species runes worked like an if tree. If a mammal. Look for four legs. If a mammal has four legs, look for hair, look for tusks. Leverage a few common characteristics that while not unique themselves, were unique as a set, and use it to tag anything that fit the list.
Then link the tags to a map and you could see what was coming.
Most of the time. But what happened when a member of the species was missing something? A boar was a quadruped, split-hooved, non-furred (bristly hair was not the same) beast with tusks (yes the sows had them too). But what if it lost a leg somewhere? Would quadruped still apply? Or was born with only one tusk?
For boars, it wasn't much of an issue. They traveled in groups, and the likelihood that every member of the group was mutated or mutilated was vanishingly small. But for solitary hunters, it was a much bigger problem.
Even more so for humans. Humans loved loopholes, even when they were friendly! Timothy watched different Hunting groups fuck with them all the time. Everything from tying their legs together, spelling them to look like one and hopping. Which worked, to Timothy's shock. To walking on all fours, which didn't.
Timothy guessed that it came down to their thoughts and leaking intent. Hopping took attention and focus. The would-be quadrupeds were just aping, pardon the pun, the movements. They were touching the ground with their hands, not really walking on them. Nor did they think of themselves that way.
Either way, it was a loophole. Not a deadly one, not yet. But one that small bits and pieces could, and did, slip through.
The gestalt was Timothy's solution. An advancement on the concept. It was a collection of all that he knew about the creatures, what they felt like, how they acted. A mental knot of information that was more organic memory than the code approach he'd started with.
The human mind knew what a dog was, even when a chihuahua probably should’ve been mistaken for a rat. People didn't go through a checklist and once all points were checked, nod and say, ‘Yes, this too is a dog!’
The mind was far better at it than any simple code he could think up.
The mistake he'd made, and still made far too often, was to limit magic to programming logic.
Magic was will made manifest. And will came from the mind. If his mind could make the connection between an 8-inch twitching, hairless rodent-looking thing and a dog, why couldn't his magic tell that a pig missing a leg was still a pig?
Of course, the mind knew far more about what a dog was than a dimension. He wouldn't be able to create a usable gestalt till he could nail down considerably more information on them.
He spent a few more minutes throwing together notes and odd factoids, before setting it aside. He couldn't rush it. Not without some facts to base it off.
In the meantime, he snagged the earlier plaque and started to sketch something else out. A select-a-tile labyrinth. Just because magic wasn’t code, didn’t mean you couldn’t leverage ideas from it.
“Let’s see.” He muttered as he sketched out a few simple shapes. A straight tunnel, a four-way tunnel, a T, a left and right turn. Throw in a few descending/ascending tunnels and the labyrinth was three-dimensional. No right-hand rule BS here!
Put a small indent in the center of each tile for the caster to place the next enchanted card, with four tabs to align directions. Set it upright, and each tunnel would 'snap' to the previous and the next. Yes indeed, that would work. That would work quite well.
The added benefit was that if each tunnel was exactly like every other tunnel, down to the scuff marks on the walls and imperfections in the ceiling, it'd be a hell of a maze! Whip up a little additional something to check for obstructions. Rock formations he could deal with easily, but he wasn't going to cut through any major roots.
A long life gave even something as dumb as a tree ample time to reinforce itself with mana, the roots of a living giant were the next best thing to indestructible. Even if that wasn’t so, he was NOT going to be responsible for a dead forest giant. Just the damage the fall of its rotting carcass could cause... Not to mention a possible forest fire... No.
Hell No.
He threw in a few more small notes, then froze. That... that would work even better. He scanned up the page for his earlier notes about voodoo linking and added some details to it. A large block of glass or quartz tied to the shaping tools, and thus to the tunnels as they were made...
Even if he just occasionally cast detection spells it would be worth the time, and he was already planning far more than that. He nodded. Tossing another line or two outlining a movable wall and some pit traps. He sighed and regretfully put his pen-is-mightier down. They were good ideas, but spending time on it before he verified their effects on the wards wasn't smart.