I kept turning the mana eating stone over in my hand as I approached the front of the line where Vynrashu was handing out wages. The mystery surrounding this object wasn’t unraveled as he had requested, and I was worried that he might do something weird if I didn’t have results. Then again, this could be some kind of play to test me. He’s been really finicky while interacting with me by saying one thing and doing the other, so perhaps this was another fake out.

Either way, I was going to find out since he stopped joking around with that tan kobold he had been chatting with for the past five minutes.

“Ah Mayrus, how’s your week been? Any luck with that stone? HAH! I’m eager to see what you’ve figured out about it.”

I felt a twang of anger spike through me when he fumbled my name. I’ve heard him say it before, so I know he has to be doing this on purpose. Deep breaths Kay, he’s your boss, you can’t go and fastball the stupid rock into his stupid face. He accepted the writing tablet and pored over the words.

“This object appears to be some kind of mana storing mineral. I’ve been able to measure an equal increase in weight compared to the mana supplied. No physical changes occur beyond that. None of my attempts to extract the mana were successful, as such the object is currently multiple times heavier than when it was left in my care. I appologize if this was not the desired outcome.”

A look of surprise played on his face as he nodded at me.

“Well now, you’re certainly a smarter kobold than most of our other inventors. Usually it takes a few tries before they make any conclusive progress, but you’ve gone and figured out most of the basics all on your own. Give me the stone for a second, I’ll show you what you missed.”

I hadn’t seen him seem so sincere before: it was a little disturbing. I handed him the black orb, and I noticed that even his muscular arms needed a moment to adjust for the golf ball sized rock that weighed nearly ten pounds. He hefted it up and looked at it carefully, and I noticed that a small swirl of mana traced from the stone to his eyes.

“Good, you didn’t damage it. If this thing had even a scratch, I wouldn’t be able to show you how to make it work safely. Here, let me get something from my bag.”

He reached into his hip pouch, from which he produced a short saw-like device with a round slot in the pommel. He slotted the stone, and in an instant I saw the mana appear from within the stone and race to fill the blade. He explained himself as he neared a stack of copper panels leaning against the wall.

“You were right in your assessment: the stone gets heavier the more you feed it. It’s called a Spell-Stealing Stone, or if you work with them often enough they’re just Mana Stones. They eat up the mana that comes into contact with them and pack it in as much as they can. They have an upper limit and you were lucky you didn’t cross that line, because they like to blow up if you fill them up too much.”

He grabbed one of the plates from the stack and hooked it on a peg on the wall. He readied the saw next to the metal before turning to look at me.

“The trick of this kind of mana stone is that it only lets the mana out when its touching something that carries mana but isn’t alive. Silver is a pretty good rune metal because it can use stones like this one just fine. The socket of this magic saw is lined with silver, which feeds into the silver lined runes on the blade. Mine’s made from steel, but just about any metal will work fine if there’s something in the runes that can carry mana. Now that it’s charged I can do this.”

With a single flick of his wrist he cleaved the copper plate diagonally in a scattered burst of sparks. I watched with rapt attention to see how the mana was flowing, and to my surprise it really was only taking power from the stone and forcing the energy along the cutting edge of the saw. Vynrashu chuckled at my slack jawed expression.

“Yeah, quite the handy item isn’t it? All of the mana stored in it can be drawn out to make certain enchanted items work without any toll on the user. Here, look at this one here.”

From the same bag he withdrew a small bag of red cloth, inside was a silverish-yellow stone in the shape of a cone. He handed it to me and chuckled to himself. My questioning stare prompted his explanation.

“So, funny story about this one here: it came from the queen beastie that they killed down in the tunnels. By rite of the kill this was supposed to go to the captain of the guard, but she turned it down. She said, and I'm not exaggerating here, “Give it to Juaki. I was only able to slay that ugly freak because it was busy gnawing on one of my best while I dealt the final blow.” when it was offered to her. Your ma told the lesser elder offering it to her that she wanted it to go to one of her kids because she already had her fire. I was going to do a little poking at it myself before handing it off, but you’ve already shown that you’re not a dung-brained fool that would begin their testing with a hammer.”

I don’t know if that is a compliment, but I’m going to take it as one. As for what he just said about my mom, I find the image of a giant cave monster being completely unable to kill her, even though it has her in its jaws, to be ludicrous, and completely in-line with how ruthless she is in combat. I tilted the stone in my hands, taking note of the hand-filling size and near weightlessness of it. I stashed the stone in a safe place in my bag, then beckoned for him to read my questions.

“How much mana can this hold? How can I tell when it’s going to burst? You said this came from the monster, does that mean it was a part of the creature? How much are these things worth?”

Vynrashu rolled his eyes at my questions, and his obnoxious personality crept back into his voice.

“Gosh you inventors are all alike. Everything has to be a never ending stream of questions that point to danger. First two questions have the same answer: you’ll know when you reach that point. Sometimes they glow, other times they stop taking in any more, but in most the stone will make this sound that you will know means that it's getting very close to rupturing. Some say its a wail of doom, I say it’s the scream of a dying inventor. Hah! That was a terrible joke, my bad. Anyway, yeah this came from a special monster, that’s where a majority of high quality mana stones come from. Big monsters make them in this smelly organ by the stomach, and as they eat spells they grow bigger stones. Every stone is different from the size and shape, to the color, to the way they handle magic. I have a pretty little green and orange speckled stone in my kit that can turn mana to water. Never leave the city without it. Hah! About how they’re valued, it really comes down to what it does. Some of them are mundane and come from weak creatures, so there isn’t a demand for them, but the one you’ve got hasn’t been tested yet and might be quite exceptional. Oh yeah, speaking of money…”

He jerked his head to the wheelbarrow he used for dishing out sacks of Draks before leading me back to the doorway. As before he reached inside for the last remaining bag, but this time he added some coins from his satchel.

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“Another bonus from me. You’re really blowing my expectations away kid, and I reward people who go beyond their duties. I wouldn’t get used to this though, since it might give the others the idea that I’m playing favorites. Hah! We’ve yapped for too long as it is, so it’s in both of our best interests if you get going now so I can close up shop. Don’t blow yourself up with that stone!”

I didn’t bother giving him the satisfaction of seeing my look of utter disappointment. As thankful as I was that he was being nice to me, I still didn’t appreciate his erratic and somewhat concerning behavior. It felt like I was talking to someone who wasn’t really there, just a facade pretending to be alive. I could never trust someone like that again.

Best not to dwell on the past. I would head home on my own, count my coins, and plan accordingly. Keep moving forward.

…

Everyone else was out doing some shopping while I stayed home sick. Tonight was moon-fall, and some part of me was having a reaction to it. At least, that’s what my mom thought. Regardless, I wasn’t up for riding any lifts or bumping shoulders in a crowded market while my guts were in an active rebellion. Today was going to be a rest day, plain and simple.

That was my naivety speaking. I was a busy body: if I wasn’t moving and doing something I felt uneasy and vulnerable. I reached into my satchel hanging by my bed and dug out the contents. A set of throwing daggers, some loose change, the case of lenses that helped me with the black stone, and my own magical rock that was looking especially shiny today. Well, since there were no potential victims, I could try prodding at the stone for a little while.

The stone was a translucent lemon yellow for the most part with blotchy patches of silver scattered over the polished smooth surface. The tip was rounded and the edges beveled, but the bottom was still a relatively flat surface that it could sit on during my inspection. No mana, no surface damage, and there were no visible impurities as I wiggled my finger on one side to see the shadow moving through its crystalline core. It was a pretty stone, if nothing else, and would be a centerpiece for a rock collection if I weren’t aware of its potential.

In a more physical sense, the stone was boring in many ways. Despite filling one of my hands it weighed barely anything on the second scale that we had gotten for the storeroom, only twenty of those lead weights. It seemed unfazed by being pinged by a small hammer, and when submerged in water it had no visible reaction. It was a rock by every metric. Now to see what it did when powered up.

Limiter array online, output 1 Omed per minute, no physical contact with the stone. I was going to watch this thing carefully while taking every precaution available. The mana dripped from my open palm, drifted towards the cone, and passed through the surface effortlessly. Inside of the stone the mana swirled angrily before flattening against the bottom of the object and vanishing from detection. I slowly ramped up the power I fed it for a few minutes, giving the cone around fifty Omed before closing the tap. Like the black stone, it just condensed the mana into weight and did nothing with it.

Alright, let’s go ahead and fill it. A new sensor rune that will inform me of any changes to the stone’s current state was set up and connected to the off switch before I dumped more and more mana into it. I kept my mind focused on the off switch, watching for the moment it popped off. One hundred Omed. Two hundred. Three. One thousand. How hungry was this thing?

The number that finally tipped it over was staggering. After taking in over fifty trillion the switch went off, and there was an ever so faint resonating sound coming from the stone. It was full, and it was letting me know with both the hum and the new glow that was coming from it. Just looking at this thing made my brain scream in alarms of danger.

Okay, so now I had a cone filled to the brim with a form of energy that existed inside of the matter holding it. This needed to be put into perspective somehow, since I doubted that people in this world were measuring mana in the trillions. Maybe it went back to the runes somehow, since they had a minimum charge needed to activate them. Stay right there glowing cone, I need to check on something important.

I made two specific systems that would give me an accurate number of mana particles needed to start up a rune. One was just a variable limiter connected to a thunder rune. The other was a series of sensors that would scan the rune and tell me how much mana was inside of it when it finally turned on. A quick test gave me a number: Ten billion to activate the rune.

Every rune had that minimum power needed. Heat, cool, wind, even the limiters. So if that’s true, then I can assume that a rune needs ten of what people here would call “mana”, even though it’s really ten billion mana. Let’s see, fifty trillion divided by ten billion gives me five thousand mana. Okay, so even if my math is right, that still feels wrong. Five thousand drops of mana has more volume than the cone, so where was it keeping the excess? Was there some way to condense mana? Then again, I think I'm living proof that such a thing is possible. I just charged this stone up to the bursting point, and my mana looks just as full as before.

Back on track now that I had a sense of scale, I could do some more math based on this information. Breaking this down further, this thing was holding enough juice to light up five hundred runes at once, though for how long I was unsure. As I had noticed before, the output of mana did some funky exponential growth when it became physical, so perhaps that was what was going on when it came to weight or storage values. Wait, I haven’t tried lifting this thing since before charging it.

I slowly reached for the stone, only to pull my hand back. The mana appeared in an instant as my fingers drew close, then returned to its dormant state. New rune systems were necessary for handling this. How about something like the limiter, but it will simply push the mana back the way it had come. Blocker rune, here we go. Put a limiter rune on each line, a blocker at the end, and a sensor behind it to tell me if anything fails. Magical insulator set is ready to go.

I reached for the cone again and just as before it tried to wake itself. My hand came to rest on its cool surface, though the mana gained no purchase to enter the blocked lines. Alright, all going according to plan. I tried to raise the cone from the ground with a mighty heave, only for the damn thing to come up as if it weighed nothing. I caught myself like a hangaroo with the stone in hand, utterly bewildered by what I was seeing.

Wait, perhaps mana only had weight if it were inactive, in a “solid” state, but once it was flowing in its “gaseous” state it would lose that weight. That made everything make sense! That was how I wasn’t bogged down by my immense mana supply, and how Vynrashu was wielding that saw so effortlessly. Mana was weightless when moving!

Now that I thought about it, there looked to be mana that was passing through other mana, as if they were unbound by the laws of physics and could exist in the same space simultaneously. Oh no, my head’s starting to spin now. This had really awful implications, since now my theory of learning the mana capacity of the stone was now irrelevant when the mana was moving.

Mana capacity. What was my mana capacity?

The mana in my source was never still, and following the rules I had previously established, that meant that there might be way more than I thought.

I had to be sure. I needed to take back the mana from the cone carefully before testing this theory. One blocker was removed, and in a few moments the five thousand mana points were siphoned into my core. Alright, I was topped off completely, so now I can do this next test knowing that all of my mana was in place.

I made a sensor. A big sensor. It would look into my source and count the mana in mana points, meaning that it was divided by ten billion. Alright, let’s turn this on and…nothing. The rune can’t do it. It’s trying, but it just can’t handle the number it’s picking up.

Let’s try a bigger rune, less limiters and full power. Surely this has to…no response. Again, it just couldn’t make a number out of the received data. I could feel my breath catching in my chest as a wave of panic rose up.

Last chance. Just divide it into the trillions, quadrillions, something! The rune shuddered as if it were finally making some kind of progress only to disconnect itself. The rune had somehow destroyed itself in an attempt to read my mana pool. I had to calm down. I can’t fall into another panic attack hoping that Tokols will come sprinting back here.

Deep breaths, just count down from one hundred. That was it, just focus on what’s real, what’s right there in front of you. The den was right here, stay focused, get yourself a drink. Sit down with your eyes closed and feel the room with your hands. Stay in the present.

Crisis averted, for now. Just have to wait until someone comes home. Please hurry, I'm feeling faint.