August 30th, 5AC
With a sickening snap, a ward broke. The resonating sound of a green-stick fracture or perhaps a breaking neck rang in Timothy's mind. He flinched at the sound almost flubbing the rune he was carving. The wobble from his aborted flinch ate into his mind like a acid or a drop of boiling water splashing out of the pot.
Don’t make it worse! He forced himself to slow down, and finish it properly.
That was only the outermost warning ward. Not even a proper defense, just a trip line. No legit defenses had triggered yet, so it either wasn’t an attack, or the opponent was subtle enough that he never would have tripped the first alarm.
Timothy let his breath out, held a moment then breathed back in. Hard-won discipline reasserting itself as he damped out the raging mana flows and forced them back into place, moving his chisel forward to finish an eye inside a simple triangular depiction of a pyramid. Without moving the chisel out of contact with the stone, he drew it downward, deftly carving out a simplified fern. A simple stem with 10 fronds to either side, curving gently to root at the base of the pyramid.
Reaching to the side, he deftly cut a small chunk from the end of a frond of the oxygen fern sitting against the wall. Crushing the frond between his two hands he pushed the resultant paste into the carved rune.
The all-seeing eye was a surveillance rune. And while that usually meant farsight, it wasn’t limited to only that. In this configuration, it was an oxygen sensor. Monitoring the breathability of air.
Timothy sighed, and leaned backward, massaging his forehead and incipient headache. He closed his eyes, but let his will reach out to the large block of quartz in front of him. That kind of distraction at the wrong moment… Fuck. He traced the logic chains. Runes in three narrow strips that neatly wrapped the block like straps on a chest. Two verticle, one horizontal.
A few moments later, he let out a relieved sigh. There was some damage from the mana surge, but nothing large enough to threaten the integrity of the piece. The delicate connections to a set of digging tools were what he was most worried about, and they were placed nearly on the other side of the piece.
Good enough.
And a damn good thing. Any major failures and he’d have to scrap this piece and start over. The amount of time and coin that would set him back… Timothy shook his head, anger glinting in his eyes. Just sourcing the needed quantities of quartz had been expensive and fusing the resulting lumps into one contiguous crystal had been an even bigger pain in the ass.
Fusing may be a basic, low-level spell, one of the first Timothy had created for that matter, not that he was the only one, but the material you used it on made a massive difference. It worked great on stone, glass and, if you had the skill, even wood. Lining up the layers took a good bit of effort, but it killed the strength of the material if you didn’t.
Quartz wasn't glass or wood. It was crystal. A gemstone in fact, though the cheapest of that set, and gemstones didn't fuse worth a damn. Or rather it was easy to lob them all together, but it left faults that you could see with the naked eye behind. And they’d crack apart again along those fault lines with very little perturbation.
To avoid that you had to get the damn things to line up on a structural level. Not an easy feat when you didn’t have a microscope, nor any background in material sciences. Then again, having talked to a person who did have that background after his first success, he was just as glad he didn’t.
He’d hoped to get some hints to make the task easier and reduce the waste that came from trying over and over while cutting away faults between attempts. Instead, he got a lecture on how what he had already done was impossible and he must be wrong about what he saw.
Heh. Magic 1, physics 0.
So, it continued as something of an art form. Intuiting the structure, and verifying his guesses on small sample pieces. And using those samples, once created as magical guides for the parents.
Then all he had to do, was carve the chunks apart to remove any internal faults, smooth out the boundaries between them, and play legos piecing together a solid usable piece.
All to build up some misshapen chunk that he would then cut down again to get a regular usable structure.
All.
To get a piece this size he'd had to start with triple the weight in raw quartz and scrap the extra.
It was expensive, and it was tedious, and he admitted if only to himself, it was the tedious part that he really minded. If he needed another block, he wouldn’t do it himself!
He’d find a talented guardian looking to retire from hunting for a while to spend time with his family. There were a large number of those. Most couldn’t find a stay-at-home job and had to give the idea up. He’d set him or her up with a business, with first dibs on all their produce.
He'd have to spend a good chunk of time training them but... Timothy made a note on a wooden plaque. It was still a good idea. This wouldn’t be the only time he needed a large transparent block.
There was always something.
Unfortunately, unless he wanted to use even more expensive gemstones, the only other option was glass. It was man-made, fragile and not all that clear.
Quartz had no such problems. It was nearly transparent, and even after it was processed remained a natural material. The chunks might be joined together, but they remembered being mined. They remembered being and remaining quartz. And that memory was very long indeed.
That history made them able to bear considerably more mana and meaning than glass. Not to mention in this particular case, the symbolic link to the earth and mining was too perfect to give up.
There was a great deal left to do, but he could safely stop here. Timothy grabbed a towel and wiped the sweat from his forehead with one hand while waving the other over the flat water-filled bowl built into the end of his lab table. The water clouded over for a few moments, then cleared to show the bottom floor of his tower. Though it wasn't really his at that level.
It was the East bunker and as a part of the outer hold defenses was currently manned by three older men in guard uniforms, rough hemp fibers and a medallion that turned them into something stronger than a quarter inch of iron.
He watched for a few moments and chuckled wryly. Whatever he’d been expecting, this wasn’t it. The three older men kept glancing backward over their shoulders with wide eyes at a young man standing in the middle of the room. He was staring upwards at the elevator shaft that graced the ceiling. Its mouth was a good 4 feet in diameter and was well-lined with runes. But it was also a good 8 feet off the ground and Timothy wasn't sure how the welp had managed to trigger...
He let out an exasperated sigh as the boy, a man should have more brains, stepped on empty air upwards and reached out to trace the visible runes. He could see his fingers on them, but now that he was present, he could also feel small tethers of will tracing the runes, trying to decipher how they were put together. If the ward was a doorbell, this jackass had unscrewed it from the wall and was checking its wiring.
Timothy was all for youngsters trying to learn something, but touching the wards on a wizard's tower while the wizard was inside... That took a special kind of stupid.
A bit curious, Timothy crooked his hands in a come here gesture, hovering like that, the boy was no longer symbolically rooted to the ground, the still active spell generating lift made it even easier. Timothy claimed the spell and dumped mana into it.
The boy launched upward like a rocket, a shrill scream echoing behind him to complete the image. Both hands shot upward in a crossed, protective gesture as his head shot into the stone plug.
Tempting as it was to end it there, the plug was liquid by the time he hit and the boy went through rather than onto, the stone. With his considerable starting velocity, he was halfway towards the next plug before he stalled out. Timothy's open hand tightened into a clenched fist and the idiot shot sideways through another liquified stone door.
Barely a second had passed in the room below where a trio of guards glanced at each other with harsh amused grins before their eyes returned to the outside and their vigil.
Timothy allowed the image to fade away as the man-shaped boy slid across the polished stone essence floor to stop at his feet. “No common sense and rude to boot. Do you have any redeeming qualities boy?”
He was flat on his stomach, head arched backward to stare at Timothy, mouth flopping like a landed fish, and eyes bulging out to match.
Timothy gave him a few seconds, “Come, come. I require an explanation, not just an impersonation of a fish.”
He sheepishly untangled himself and awkwardly stood. “Umm, sorry! They were so intricate, I was curious... I was just looking...”
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Timothy stared at him for a five count, closely watching both his face and his aura, though the second told him far more. True. Timothy judged at last. Just curious. Stupidly curious. Haaaa.
“Do you look with your hands, hmm? You are not a cat. And as you don’t have nine lives, you might want to put a leash on that curiosity. If you’d traced a bit farther we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I’d be interrogating your Raven Tags.”
He gulped, panic rising in his eyes as his hands rose placatingly.
Timothy continued. “Touching a bug zapper isn’t a pleasant way to go. For that matter, you realize I am well within rights and customs to end you myself, yes? This was impertinent. More it was stupid. It’s a small step from examining another's defenses to planning to break them.”
Timothy hid another sigh. He could kill the boy, that was true, but he wasn't that much of a bastard. Yet. He'd only push it that far if there was intent to harm. He’d only had to do that once when a crazy knife-wielding Bensinite tried to knife him in the baths.
It wasn’t the only human blood on his hands but the others were rightfully convicted. Having been given the chance to prove their innocence under a truth spell and found guilty of significant crimes. There was a substantial difference between lawful execution (they called it banishment, but trying to make the next hold on foot alone and without tools... No, it was an execution.) and an adrenaline-fueled moment of blood.
Oh, he didn't feel guilty for defending himself, but that didn't mean he didn't have a few nightmares afterward. The executions though, oddly enough, he rarely dreamed about those.
Laws, and to an extent people, were less forgiving now. Before the change, they'd had enough slack to be forgiving. At least in the first world, people had enough that theft was unlikely to drive them to starvation and minor assault like in a bar fight was unlikely to leave a man more than bruised.
That was no longer the case. No one had enough to tolerate someone taking it and with spells, no awakened was ever unarmed. Bar fights could get lethal and they could get there fast. It didn't help that with nearly constant low-level conflict, stress levels were always elevated.
The punishments were harsh because they had to be. So while Timothy wasn't willing to simply kill the fool boy, he had a responsibility to impress upon him the seriousness of his mistake. If not for the community, then at least for his own sake. The next wizard might not be so forgiving.
The boy's mouth kept moving, but no sound emerged from his painfully pale face. Timothy was beginning to lose what little patience he had left. With a gesture, he crushed the boy's defensive aura and lifted him bodily into the air. He started drifting back towards the door, and perhaps a long drop with a sudden stop after that!
“S-S-Sorry Runefather! Please don't kill me! I was just look- I didn't mean to –” Breathing rather heavily apologies and excuses continued to fall over themselves from his mouth. Timothy rocked backward under the word soup, leaving him levitating, but no longer moving towards the door. He calmly waited for it to stop. And waited. And waited.
“Alright! Enough!” Timothy interrupted, dropping him back onto the floor. With a sigh Timothy looked away, his heart no longer in this fiasco. It was like kicking a puppy. “Why were you down there poking at things that you shouldn't have?” It was an out-of-the-way corner after all. Frequented almost exclusively by guards and people looking for Timothy.
“Oh, ah sor-” He broke off at Timothy's glare and swallowed awkwardly. “-Ah, I'm here to let you know the results.”
Gritting his teeth, Timothy gave it a five count, trying not to lose what was left of his temper. Finally, he bit out. “The. Results. Of. What?” Timothy glanced toward the doorway longingly. Maybe if he only dropped him a little bit? He wouldn't let him hit the floor too hard.
Something of his thoughts must have been visible on his face, or perhaps his intentions leaked a bit, but Timothy looked back to a swallowing, shivering, young man who stuttered out - “The Tunnels project. I did, well I set it up and the Mayor assigned- Umm-” He took another step backward, towards the door Timothy was happy to see. “- Data! Yes, I have data. Here.” Scrambling he pulled a small woven vine backpack off, Timothy mentally slapped himself for not noticing it before this and pulled out a thick hardwood tablet.
Timothy paused, temptation warring briefly with annoyance, but while he could master many temptations with ease, knowledge was ever his tipple of choice. He snatched the tablet, pushed the boy into a chair before he collapsed and wandered back over to his usual seat on the other side of the lab table.
Snapping his fingers he called up a quick barrier between the two of them, wouldn't be the first time he'd misread someone or the first time Bensen sent a mostly innocent sap with a knife after him.
He was a lot better at reading intent now though. He was fairly confident that a low-level guardian like this boy couldn’t hide an intent to kill. Or even an intent to harm.
Norms, ironically, were a different story. With no connection to mana, their intent was stuck inside their heads. Threats came from those experienced enough to hide their intent, or those too weak to have any.
He pulsed those same senses downward momentarily and immersed himself inside the plaque. A latticework of images and data slid into his head. For all his obnoxiousness, the man-boy could 'write'. A not particularly easy skill to master. Parsing out your intent and organizing the message was difficult enough for most. Their thoughts bounced around like Pong, never focused on just one set of details long enough to package them properly. Injecting that package into carved letters or images was even harder.
One point to him.
Timothy mused, as his thoughts slid through the setup. He paused on a numbered list. The title read: Navigable Tunnels.
1. Check with the tunnels dug, but unused.
2. After a single use,
3. Multiple uses over a few days.
That was a good catch, Timothy reflected. A hole dug in the ground was not a tunnel. A tunnel implied use and while cutting it to travel through could create a link, actually using it was much more potent. As an additional layer, heavy use would significantly improve the symbolism.
The tests were done with an exit inside a set of prototype wards. Then outside by a little bit, then outside by a lot. Good coverage really. He hit up the major points over only 2 weeks. A lot of prep work that he did either by himself or with limited non-magical help and only a few brief periods where the wards were fully up. Good on him, no point paying a dozen plus guardians to keep those monsters up for longer than the needed testing required.
Another point for him.
Satisfied at last, that it was a least planned wisely, he moved on to the results. Tunnels inside the wards that had never been used had nearly no effect. He made a note of that. Having a few escape tunnels wasn’t a bad idea, though the likelihood that once made, no one would use them for smuggling or some such might invalidate the idea.
One use was the same as many. A disaster, dropping the integrity by over half and creating several symbolic disharmonies. They didn’t leave the wards up long enough to check, but Timothy doubted they would have survived more than a day or two, and when they collapsed, it would have collapsed badly.
He wondered, one and many should have had a difference. Unless... huh. Maybe it was the secret that mattered not the symbol of tunnel vs. hole. Shifting back through the data dump he quickly confirmed, the man-boy dug all the tunnels himself and he was the only one who knew about them until he brought in extras to travel through. One man could keep a secret, two only if one of them was dead. No guarantee but Timothy put it in the probable category.
Moving on, the distance outside the wards mattered quite a bit more than he expected. Just outside the wards was marginally better than inside. But the exact distance away seemed a bit variable... ah. Sight distance. Or perhaps perception distance. As long as there was a symbolic break between the two... Maybe a wall or a thick hedge?
Timothy made a few quick notes, carving a simple path rune to the side and embedding his intent in it before moving on. They'd need to check what happened if people used the same route between the tunnel and the wards each time. Paths would develop with time and that was dangerous. Both conceptually and as walkable realities.
He moved on, scribbling a few notes here and there to request additional clarification on some points. To point out some additional tests when he felt something was missing. Finally, he sketched out an additional test and an expensive one he mused, frowning.
That concept of a path was tickling the back of his mind. Both outside the tunnels and inside. When people followed it long enough it would form a powerful connection. So how could he avoid that? The maze of course. Arthur was right. Multiple viable paths to an end and perhaps even letting a few beasts in to wander randomly and confuse things.
Even if that led to constant fights in the transit, it might be necessary. For that matter, if it confused the link enough, maybe it would let them place the tunnel exits inside the wards. It was worth testing at least.
Timothy nodded. Still, one way or another the basic concept was workable. They might have to fudge in a few of the final details, but it was solid enough that Timothy didn't mind spending a bit of time prepping the tunneling enchantments.
Just as well, he glanced over guiltily at the large block of quartz. He'd gotten a bit ahead of himself in that regard and it would be a shame to waste what he'd already put in.
With a sigh, he leaned back in the chair and glanced up at the man-boy. “What are you called?”
“Ahh!” He flinched slightly then managed a mangled “-J-J-Jimmy.” Timothy stared at him for a moment, then he made the connection and had to hold in a laugh.
“Southpark?”
Looking down Jimmy winced and nodded. Timothy shook his head.
“Alright. Do you want the good news or the bad first?”
“Umm, good?”
Timothy tisked. Why didn't people realize how insecure it made them sound to ask instead of state? “You did a good job. Good enough that I am willing to offer you more work. That was your intent in delivering this in person, was it not? Otherwise, it would have been easy enough to deliver the report through my inbox, or the mayor's office.”
“Umm, yes! Thank you Runefather! I'm, uhhh, I'm not the best hunter.” He admitted looking down at his clasped hands with embarrassment. At least he had the good sense to recognize the truth. And the self honestly to feel shame over his lack.
Timothy marked another point up in the positive category. The boy hesitated, then continued. “But I can do this! I like doing it, I'm good at it and I can be useful all at the same time!” He looked up at Timothy, hope and expectation mixed into an expression that wouldn't be out of place on a puppy looking at a bone. It almost made Timothy reconsider. Almost.
“That leads to the bad news. You screwed up earlier. Besides nearly killing yourself, you also hit a major taboo. You DO NOT poke at another's wards.” Timothy fixed the boy with a stare, trying to impress on him just how serious he was. “Your behavior was intolerable and I would be remiss in my responsibilities if I don't make sure this doesn't happen again.”
Timothy stared hard at the now pale-faced and quivering young man. “If you can get through this punishment without resentment, and I will check, then I have a great deal of work to pile onto you and I will in turn pay you quite well for it.” It took a different kind of mind to think through experiments, no matter how boring, and get good data out of them. It was a rare enough talent that he was willing to pay a premium for it. IF, he could get through his punishment without resentment. Timothy wasn't about to hire a ticking time bomb.
The boy did the silent landed fish impression again for a few moments. Then visibly struggling, he wet his lips and tried again. “Wh-what punishment?”
“Five lashes, public and no pot.” That meant he'd have the reason announced before the lashes fell, and no potion to numb the pain would be allowed, before or after. Timothy watched as he paled even further, but after swallowing nervously, nodded. Just as well, if he'd argued such a light punishment, Timothy didn't mind doubling it. Since death was on the table, nearly anything short of that was already a mercy and well within his rights to request. Or demand.
For that matter- “Since you didn't complain like a spoiled child, I'll treat you like a man. You can go request the punishment from the mayor yourself.” In a backhanded sort of way that was a compliment. There was a world of difference between being dragged forward and flogged like a delinquent, and walking up yourself and paying off your debts with pride.
With a few more common courtesies and a reminder of where and when to show up, the sea gate and next week, Timothy saw him out the door at last and with a sigh turned back to look at the quartz block.
Picking up his Pen-is-mightier he considered the linked enchantments, all the while the back of his mind was musing on how much the concept of law had changed. Litigious year-long trials? 10-year prison sentences where the non-offenders had to pay to keep the offenders well-fed and healthy? Hell no, ain't nobody got time for that!
With every mana user a loaded weapon, there was little tolerance for 'minor' crimes or 'accidents'. Punishments were quick, public and painful with some mitigation available for owning up before the guards had to come looking for you. They were also mostly one-and-done. You paid your dues and moved on.
It was a necessary shift in perspective, but that didn't mean he was always comfortable with the results. A public flogging was in Timothy’s opinion, kinder than several years in prison. That didn't make it any less vicious or brutal. Nor did it make the next week of lingering pain any more pleasant.
Then again, that was why it was called punishment! He sighed and focused back on his work. The tunnel map wouldn't create itself! Timothy froze, then chuckled at himself. Or rather it would if he set this up right. If he waited till after they started to make the tunnels then it would be work, work, work all the time. No, set it up right from the get-go and it would always take less total time.
And with at least one other major project unfinished, he only had so much of it.
Just a bit more work on the quartz proto-map to go. Then, he double-checked his list, he’d still needed to add some extra Lego-like tunnel shapes for variety. The normal directions, a few turns, a y and a four-way joint plus an elevator shaft type entrance… It was a bit boring as far as a proper maze was concerned, he mused. Not to mention one lacking in traps or those moving walls he’d hoped to include.
He’d also need to turn the leftover quartz scrap, the ones he’d carved off of the finished block, into beacons. A way to link whatever territory they picked to the map in the first place.
It didn’t have to be completely finished. He’d have enough in place in a day or so for Arthur to start digging… Well outside the wards for now. Nothing said they couldn’t backfill later if they found a safe way to put it inside the existing wards.
And in only four days of work. After more than a year of deadlock, Timothy mused. Not sure if he should be ecstatic or annoyed with himself.
Either way, it was a massive weight off his back and a welcome diversion while he waited for the right conditions to line up.
Soon, he mused, very soon now, the full moon would align with the weather and a holiday he’d sponsored. Then he could finally finish the Fan and really have something really fun to work on.