The day passed in a blur of tedium. The wear and tear that had built up on the expedition’s runed equipment was ubiquitous. Though she’d done her best the day prior, Reggie’s words once again rang true: do it once right but double-check you didn’t get it wrong.

Simple words. Obvious to most. Ones to live by.

I wonder how the old gnome is getting along?

Talia went from wagon to wagon, cabin to cabin, checking everything from the lowliest arcano-lamp to the complex enchantments engraved onto the spokes of wagon wheels and undercarriages. Most enchantments stood to the test of time quite well. Silverite and mithril were both durable metals, after all. Runedecay, the generic name for the black crud that clogged channels and arrays alike, was only really a worry over the course of years and sometimes decades. Another mystery of arcanistry that had baffled arcanists from the beginning.

Not something to worry about here.

Most of the damage to the expedition’s runescripts stemmed from the culprit many arcanists never considered: sapient error.

A scratch here, a warp there, whether it be from improperly designed arrays or from a sharp rock scored with just the right amount of pressure at just the wrong time. Not to mention, arcanic metals were too expensive to be used frivolously, which meant the underlying material below the enchanted plating played a role.

In the end, it took Talia half the day to go over her work, fluttering ill-temperedly from wagon to wagon. By the time she had finished, the cooks were serving the second meal by the mess table, some kind of meaty stew accompanied by hard mushroom bread.

The young woman spotted Osra seated off on her own on one of the benches around the fire pit and made to join her, sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of her. The apprentice mage hummed a greeting, soaking up the remains of her stew with the dark bread.

“You look…uh,” she said hesitantly.

Talia took a bite of her food and grunted.

“I look about how I feel. Your master is a monster, you know that? Did his best to give me alcohol poisoning. Along with the rest of these brutes.”

Osra giggled at the other girl’s hyperbolized bad mood, one hand in front of her mouth. A smile quirked Talia’s lips at the sight before turning into an evil grin.

“Worst part is, I had to go over all the runework again this morning,” she said, watching Osra nod sympathetically before continuing, “Had to empty the mana out of quite a bit of it…”

The horror that spread across Osra’s face at the realization was like music to Talia’s ears. A balm on her soul.

Misery loves company. Now I get it.

“How many?” Osra asked.

“Oh, well, about half the arcano-lamps in wagon four were nearly dry when I got there, to start. Then the structural enchantments on the undercarriages of both wagons two and six needed major reworking, so they’re completely dry. Most of the wagon wheels also need a top-up, as do pretty much all the air filters…”

The girl’s eyes grew wider and wider as Talia listed off each item that needed refilling, to comical effect, until they looked like they might pop out of her skull.

“Oh by the gods, mercy! Stop! Master Zaric is going to have a field day making me do all of it! You know I’m bad at that stuff, Talia!”

The arcanist’s grin faded into a look of mock pity.

Gotcha! Now to reel her in.

“Oh pshh, I’m sure he’ll help out when I tell him how much there is to do. He’s not that cruel…is he?” she asked, full well knowing that the mage-commandrum would never dream of letting such an opportunity for ‘hands on practice’ to slip by.

Osra glared at her.

“You know he is. I’ll be lucky if get half of what you listed done by the end of our stay…” she lamented.

Talia affected a stricken look, as if the thought had just now occurred to her. A giddy feeling whose provenance she couldn’t pinpoint filled her.

Is this what having friends is like? Gods, I’ve been missing out.

“What?! That’s awful. Such a shame that the only other mage on the team won’t help… Oh the cruelty of fate…”

Osra’s eyes narrowed down to slits.

Oops. Busted…

“What do you want?” Osra ask, her lips pursed and her gaze razor sharp.

Suppressing a giggle, Talia decided to keep the charade going a little while longer.

“Me? Why, only your happiness, of course. I promise, when I tell Zaric about all the runework that needs refilling, I’ll implore him to go easy on you. I’m sure if I’m sincere enough, he’ll take my words to heart. Who knows? He might even do it all himself out of the kindness of his heart.”

Osra crossed her arms, unimpressed.

“You tease me. Need I beg?”

Talia rolled her eyes and scooched over closer to whisper without being overheard.

“Fine, you’re no fun. How about this? I’ve got a few projects I want to work on that would be…greatly accelerated by a skilled metal shaper. Give me a hand, and the list of things requiring a top-up might just end up smaller than expected,” she said.

Osra chewed the proposal for a moment before retorting.

“Counteroffer: you give the list to me and help me with half. No need to get Master involved at all, since it’ll all be done anyway, right? In return, I’ll help you with your…projects until we leave,” she said.

“No, your help until they’re done,” Talia replied.

Osra looked down at her suspiciously. The young arcanist innocently shoved a bite of stew-laden bread into her mouth.

“Deal,” Osra finally said.

Talia wiped a grease-stained hand on the handkerchief she kept for that purpose and stuck her palm out to the other girl. The apprentice mage looked at it like it was a snake before shaking it with the tips of her fingers.

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Then pair stared at each other with serious looks for a while before simultaneously bursting into laughter.

“I—I—hahaha. I would’ve helped you anyway, you know,” Osra stuttered out between peals of laughter.

Talia laughed harder.

“I already did half on my own. The only ones left are too out in the open for me to touch,” she confessed.

Osra’s glare only lasted a few seconds before fading into more mirth.

This is nice. I could get used to this.

----------------------------------------

“So, how does this all work?” Osra asked.

While Osra had gone off to refuel the expedition’s enchantments, Talia gone ahead and pried some bar stock from Copperpike’s stores, to which the dwarf had vehemently protested, clinging to the metal as if it were his own children. The only thing he’d let go willingly was a long length of drearwood that was moderately straight. It took some doing, after a half-hour of explanation, debate and borderline haggling, Talia had gotten the surly dwarf to part with a few more bars of silverite, some mithril, and a good heap of quality steel.

She would have preferred to use only the former two for her artefacts, but even she had to admit that making two dozen wands out of pure mithril and silverite was…extravagant. The final products would be structurally weaker for it, but…

They’re wands. As long as they don’t intentionally bend them, I can’t imagine anything catastrophic will occur. Probably.

“Hmm? Did you say something?” Talia asked, bent over the worktable, double-checking her math and retracing lines on the design sketch she’d come up with.

“I was asking how enchantments work,” Osra reiterated, looking over her shoulder at the drawings.

Talia turned and raised a brow at the other girl.

“You want the simple explanation or the complete one?”

Osra ran her gaze up and down the complex-looking drawings that spilled over two pages of Talia’s journal. Her face scrunched up.

“The simple one, I guess,” she decided.

“Wonderful, why don’t you get started while I explain?” Talia said, patting the small stack of steel bars. “I need them about the length of my forearm, and two fingers thick, about as uniform as you can get.”

She pointed to the exact dimension that she’d hastily scribbled down.

Osra scoffed.

“I know my numbers, you know.”

Talia raised her hands in surrender, favouring the girl with a grin.

“You never know! Now git ter it!”

The metal mage got to work, her magic mesmerizing, as the pile of bar stock melted together into a single orb of steel that she set to float in front of her. The orb pulsed, and a wand extruded from it, severing itself from the mass to fall on the work table. Soon enough the wooden thunk was replaced by a metallic ting as the rods piled up.

“That’s…amazing. I don’t think it’ll ever get old,” Talia breathed.

Osra blushed a little.

“Thanks…” she muttered, “Now, you were going to tell me about enchantments?”

Talia tore her gaze away from the slowly shrinking ball of metal.

“Ahem, right.”

Pulling a chair and setting her journal in her lap, Talia cleared her throat and did her best to mimic the lecturing voice Reggie used when he was teaching the new apprentices.

“Every enchantment starts with an activator of some kind. A switch, a button, or a conditional array. The activator rune signals the capacitors, which send mana down the main channel and into the arrays, either in series or in derivation,” Talia said with a pompous voice, attempting and failing to inject the wisdom of ages into her words.

Osra giggled and urged her to continue.

“Once mana reaches an array, it fills its runes and triggers the desired effect, based on its configuration, and the runes you’ve chosen. Remember, young arcanist, that mana always flows down the channel. If your array is located before the activation rune, then it won’t be triggered unless your main channel loops back around to feed it.”

Talia glanced over at Osra, who had divided her attention between her spell and the lecture.

“Rune arrays create an effect, but they’re limited in size,” Talia said, cupping her hand around her mouth in an aside, “For reasons you shall learn later. Suffice it to say that if you wish to modify the effect of a rune array, you must either connect it to a sub-array that modifies it directly or connect it to another array through a subchannel. Remember to never cross the main channel with the sub-channel. If you do…well, let us just say that you would regret it. Possibly instantly, and for a very short time.”

Osra gave her a questioning glance. Talia leaned back in her chair and mimicked an explosion with her hands. Boom, she mouthed.

“Ahhh.”

The apprentice mage’s gaze lingered on the open journal thoughtfully, with a touch more respect than before.

“Every enchantment, be it macro-scale, artefact or trinket, ends with a deceptively named stop rune. The stop rune is what completes the enchantment, and tells the mana to be released in the form of the effect you have created.”

Talia let out a breath and cleared her throat for real this time. The last bit of liquid steel took shape and clinked down to join its friends on the table.

“Phew, I don’t know how Reggie does it for so long. He used to sit us all down in a room for hours. And I thought I was the one being tortured! Anyways, that’s the basic, baaasic jist of it. If you knew runic, I’d teach you how to read an enchantment. It’s pretty simple, just follow the main channel—usually the largest— from the activation rune to the stop rune,” Talia said, moving over to set her journal next to the stack of runeless wands, “Buut— you probably couldn’t even tell the two from each other, so we can skip that part. Any questions?”

“Er— if it’s that simple, why all the math and the triangles?” Osra hazarded, “ couldn’t you just draw the runes and the channels and be done with it?”

Talia chuckled.

“It sounds simple because that was the simple answer. There’s a lot more involved than just that. Some runes contradict each other, and some are incredibly inefficient when placed with others for example. Then there’s spacing. Each rune has its own, completely arbitrary distance that it needs to maintain for other runes, to avoid jumps,” she explained.

Osra frowned.

“Jumps?”

Talia nodded.

“Stupid name, I know. Remember what I said about crossing channels? Well… a jump is when mana leaps out of a channel towards a rune, usually out of order. Take the simple fireball enchantment I have here for example.”

The arcanist pointed to the diagram where she’d already done all the math. She traced her finger along the main channel, pointing to a grouping of rune arrays.

“This tells the enchantment what distance to project the fireball. These back here are all the minutiae of producing a flame and compressing it into a ball. Now say the mana jumped, because I have my distance rune too close to the main channel. Suddenly, your wand is projecting a bunch of compressed air, followed by a loose stream of sparks. Get it?”

Osra frowned, eyes flickering back and forth, lips purse in concentration.

“I…think? Doesn’t seem very useful in any case,” she replied.

“Exactly. And that’s a simple enchantment. The larger and more complex the enchantment, the higher the likelihood that a jump will land you in what Reggie calls a ‘bad logic’ scenario. Basically, where the part that was skipped was required to merge two contradictory rune arrays. And let me tell you, mana does not like contradictory instructions,” Talia said.

Osra’s confused expression had only gotten worse, so Talia changed tacks.

“Look at it this way. Consider that enchantment is just a big list of instructions. The only rule is that you start at the top. Keep it simple and assume that the instructions are this: pick up rock, toss rock in the air, catch rock, put rock down. Got that?” Talia asked, flipping to a new page and writing it down.

“Got it.”

“Now imagine one of these steps got skipped, or happened too fast. Suddenly, you’re being told to toss a rock that you haven’t picked up in the air. Or put down a rock that you haven’t caught. Now imagine the rock isn’t a rock, but some kind of explosive, or a sharp knife. You might just end up blowing yourself up, or cutting yourself.”

“Ahhh… yea…that wouldn’t be ideal,” Osra said.

Talia nodded emphatically, a crooked smile on her face.

“Yup. Now consider that if I told an enchantment to throw a rock it hadn’t picked up yet, the best case scenario is that it throws nothing. The more likely result is that the logic error causes the whole thing to explode, and in the worst case, implode.”

The respect that the apprentice mage had gained for runescript turned into fear, right in front of Talia’s eyes.

Good. Never pays to have someone underestimating the dangers of arcanistry.

“But—But then, all the enchantments on the wagons, the manalights, the water closet. You’re telling me that at any point, they could all just…explode?”

Talia smiled at the burgeoning panic in her new friend.

“Yep! But also no, because math. And redundancies, and lots and lots of practice. Most enchantments have been vetted, recreated and rethought so many times that even if the worst happens, the results are relatively harmless. It would take catastrophic damage to the enchantment’s structure to screw it up that bad,” the young arcanist explained.

“But…”

Talia had to catch herself before she patted the other girl on the shoulder, remembering the last time she’d casually touched her.

“Bah, don’t worry. You’re more likely to trip and smash your brains out than die to a faulty enchantment. In most professions at least.”

Hmm. Delving probably counts as high risk, if I’m honest. I’ll just…keep that to myself.