“Rule one of magic - preservation. Rule one of life, really. Keep your form together. Rule two’s reproduction, but that’s for later, pretty girl.” She lightly turns my face to face hers, and I see the thousands of gears turning, softly glowing. Two eyes are set into the flat mask covering most of the face, like blue gems set into grey nuts.

I don’t flinch. Does she know? Does she? Does she? Don’t. I do take a long look across her form, though. It’s… attractive, after a strange fashion, in the abstract way that one is always attracted to oneself, in the abstract way that one can see oneself represented in single things. Though with this machine, it’s expanded. Perhaps you could see your frailty in a dandelion, your ferociousness in a lion, your greatness in your empire, but with this machine, it’s like looking at an imperfect mirror. FOCUS, goddamnit. Just because your mind’s a field of meandering doesn’t mean… whatever.

“Right. How?”

“All magic is based on runes. Or on mandalas.”

“Like those eastern buddhist guys?”

“East..? Oh. You mean your old world. Yeah, yeah, probably. Purposeful marks, whatever. I use norse runes as… like, computer shortcuts for the half-mandalas, so I call them runes to you, so you won’t copy my shitty formalistic organisation. That’s the second element of being a good teacher I think, setting you up to be able to learn from other people with different styles. Off-track. Sorry. They’re called half-mandalas, cus all spells need a specification half and an actualisation half. They’re usually not the same size, saying ‘half’ is just pedantic or something whatever the word is cus some early idiot thought they were equal. Expect the actualisation rune half thingy to be bigger with spell or mandala complexity. So. Runes. Runes. Mmm. They’re formed of glyphs, which are formed from three different dialects, Dionysian, Hermetical, and Apollonian-

“Hold on. Dionysus, Hermes, Apollo? Wait, wait, wait. We need to backtrack a fucking bit. I heard those names earlier, in the welcome. Wasn’t thinking about it. Hold on. Why are they gods here? Shouldn’t it be Zeus? Or Christ? I mean, if it’s so familiar, why’s it so random-”

“They’re names, pookie. Götter, das war schrecklich. I’ll try to keep off your sorts’ slang. Scientifically, you can call them Stone, Sky, Sea, Salt, Sand. But Halton’s got a religion, and people get touchy about religions, and gods too. Just follow the form.”

“K.”

“Alright, so the structure’s like Hangul morpho-syllabic block formulations rather than latin left-right word ones-”

“What the fuck is Hangul?”

“...-though you’re not really familiar with that. You’ll learn them later. Get all that? With all the interruptions? Glyphs make runes, and there’s two types of runes, specification and actualisation, and you need a specification and actualisation rune for a single spell. We’ll trace in the sand. You’ll need to memorise it.”

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I sit still, internalising the information, baking them into a formula in my head. Five gods, greek, spells from runes from glyphs. Spec and actual runes, need both for spell. Good. Yeah, I’m good.

I nod, as I speak. “Couldn’t you give me, like, a photo? Drawing in the sand seems weird.”

“One, I can’t be bothered. Two, runes can’t be kept on normal storage, and the way I store them, you’d need a few years of education to decode. Three, it’s not like you’re old enough to have knee problems, so you’ve nothing to complain on in kneeling, so now hush and let me draw.”

“I’ve had enough practice k- ew, no, nevermind, wait, how old are you? That’s weird-”

“Shut up. Draw.”

“Alright.”

We stop walking, and I stay quiet, and watch, as the mechanical lady sketches out some great logo on the sand. Most people wouldn’t be able to memorise these dozens of strokes. It is still a feat for me. Though practice makes easy utilisation of the three or so petabytes of data storage a human brain has. Those meditation classes were worth it.

“Done.” She gets up and stretches. I simply stare. “Well? What’re you waiting for? Copy on.”

I stoop down into the sand a ways to the right and get to work.

“Fast learner. Fucker. Fuck. Forgot the spec half. Eh. That’s for later. This is just for the gist. Memorisation. Won’t power it, anyhow, so it won’t do anything. This rune hardens anything, strengthens the bonds, simply put. Spec rune specifies what, and where, and you’ll need to dynamise it either procedurally or fluidly, depending if the thing being hardened is following a predicted path, or not. That’s because it’s hardening anything in a region rather than the object particularly. Usually, for dynamised objects, we create an imaginary zone that’s a bit larger than the actual object, especially at high speeds, for latency, since there’s a sort of base frame rate to magic and it’s not quite on par with reality, and you wouldn’t want your projectile blowing up halfway from lagging out of the imaginary zone and colliding into the part of itself still inside.”

I stare up at the ceiling and imagine it. “Interesting magic. Could it work as a sort of inbuilt two-stage mechanism?”

“Yes. But that introduces an element of instability we don’t tend to like, unless that’s intended.”

“Damn. Seems like your people’ve got it all figured out. Magic and physics, I mean.”

“Yeah. That’s because we didn’t figure it out, we built it, built physics from the ground-up, and gave ourselves a backdoor and called it magic.”

She pauses.

“I have many questions,” I say, half-ask, awkwardly during the pause.

“Course you do. Search them up in your spare time. Hallucinogens, internet stuff. I know you know what the internet is. We haven’t google but it should be intuitive. Back to the lesson. When you draw the rune, when you’re finished, there’s a wire in your tube, the thing in the back of your head. Reach for it and it’ll jump into your hand. At higher levels, it’ll work with your thoughts. You plug it into the open end of the rune to power it. You tie together runes with a simple canal, and that becomes a sentence. You’ll have a… starter sequencer device that can store a few runes in advance and deploy them either in sequence or on shortcut command, it’s linked to your Hallucinogens. I’ve personally used my clockwork brain to create a more advanced version of this, though most mages rely on innate channels for magic, or carving, essentially, runes into their brains. More efficient for energy, and doesn’t use mana. That’s a lesson for later. You’re pretty new, probably Fugued a bit, so you won’t have an innate channel right away. Next, setting shit on fire. The kids love this one.” She rubs her hands, smiling devilishly.