Unknown time on the 38th day of Winter

Blue-red, orange-green, blue-green, green-green, green-infrared-one, and … I lost it. I raised my hand and Arin stopped the signal. I finished writing what I got from the message on my slate and then looked up at her.

"Is this a recipe?" I asked before she broke out in a wide grin.

"Yep, cinnamon rolls." she said. "My mom makes the best in the city."

A bolt of pain and loss shot through my heart at that but I squash it quickly.

I reach up to adjust some potentiostat resistors on the display I made for this. They change how brightly each of the display LEDs lights and some of them were very dim. The problem is that Signal, the language used by light mages to communicate over great distances, uses three colors outside the visible spectrum. Two infrared and one ultraviolet. As I can't see these colors I needed to make a camera to see them for me and a display to shift them into the visible range. My prototype is crude but functional. Basically, if you just wire up an LED differently it can be used as a photo-sensor. From there I just put a bunch of filters for each wavelength of light and set the sensor under each to trigger a specific combination of LEDs on the display. So far I'm just working with nine sensors and nine display LEDs but it is still finicky.

The biggest problem is that nine colors isn't enough for an alphabet. Hence they send them in pairs. While it's not English, blue-red could be used for the letter 'A', orange-green for the letter 'B' and so on. So, I have to learn what each pair represents to write them down as quickly as Arin can show them to me. I am struggling to say the least.

"The proof of concept works. Now, all I need to do is refine the design and practice." I said.

"That's good I suppose," said Arin. "I've been meaning to ask something. How exactly are you making these things?"

I paused to think about how I wanted to answer her. Arin was very smart. Of course I couldn't tell her the truth but she might see through an outright lie.

"I have magic. But it's a rare kind of magic that lets me make small things." I explained.

"Can I see?" She asked.

I have to think about that. No, even though I've managed to get the radiation from my spell down to below background levels, it is still unstable. If I lose focus for even a moment then I could hurt her. I shake my head.

"No, sorry. Not yet." I said. "Maybe soon. Hey, that reminds me of a question I had for you. What do you know about getting stronger as a mage?"

At that she stood up and stretched her arms and legs.

"In mage service they told us that it's not like a muscle but that's a lie. Or at least a half truth." she said. "They explained that it's a combination of three things: awakening strength, understanding of the spell, and clarity of the spell image."

She ticked off her fingers one at a time as she counted.

"You can't do anything about awakening strength. Either you've got it or you don't. But really understanding something, no matter if it's cinnamon rolls or magic, takes practice." she said. "Same for the spell image. The more practice you get, the better you are. So, I say that it's like training to get stronger at anything. Practice, practice, practice."

I thought about that for a while. I suppose you could also get pretty good through constant study. That's probably why mage houses tend to have large libraries. But the other means is through constant practice. I looked back at Arin, her hair glowing a greenish yellow shifting into oranges and reds.

"Is that what you're doing?" I asked running my hand through my own hair.

She barked out a laugh at that.

"Ya, you got me." she said. "At least that's how I first got started. Now I keep it up more for the look than the practice."

I couldn't help but smile.

"I must admit that it's a great look." I said. "You're like a fairy princess out of a storybook."

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I could see her blush at that, even through the red light of her hair. I could feel my palms get sweaty in embarrassment. Why did I say that? Now would be a good time to change the subject.

"Thank you, regardless. Can I ask a favor? Can you purchase some supplies for me when you get a chance?" I said tossing her a small pouch of gold coins. I had made them myself and this time I even got the alloy right. She looked in the pouch and retrieved a list of items and estimated prices. She did a double take at the gold and then looked at me strangely.

"This is a lot of money." she said. "I don't mind picking up a few things but this seems like … a lot."

I waved my hand in a dismissal.

"The money isn't important." I said.

"Keep whatever you don't spend as your fee. Or hire a runner to do it for you."

I shrugged but she was still looking at me. Then she seemed to come to her senses and shook her head muttering something about spoiled rich boys. Then she nodded to me and turned to leave.

"Thank you Arin." I called after her.

"For everything." I said more softly so that she couldn't hear.

***

Unknown time on the 41st day of Winter

"Okey Schrodinger, let's have our daily status meeting." I said, digging into a bowl of oats for lunch.

"I have the flash and invisible light spells replicated with hand held devices. Darkness is still a complete mystery, though I may have a work-around for that."

I was reaching the limits of laser power with non-magical design. I could push materials a lot harder than we could on Earth because I could manufacture it with no defects. It took a while to build a bunch of voltage and current sensors but it was worth it as I could now measure power usage. I could get about one hundred watts out of a laser a bit bigger than a pen. That's enough to set stuff on fire and blind enemies but not really lethal. However it could only last for about a tenth of a second because of the batteries I could fit in it. I needed something better.

That led me to supplementing it with magic. Arin had brought me a whole bunch of supplies to work with. I now had four cores of each common type, fire, air, earth and water, along with another six light-magic cores. I also had several dozen channels to work with. One I was particularly excited about was the ink sack of a kind of monstrous octopus creature that could cast a darkness spell. I would look at that later but for now I wanted to dissect a unicorn horn. It didn't actually come from a unicorn, at least not the kind from Earth legends. These were not benevolent spirits of love and purity. Instead, the horse-like monsters were twice the size of a Clydesdale and had large mouths filled with sharp teeth. Their horns could create an extremely strong burst of light that I was hoping to use to trigger the lasing reaction.

More than that I wanted to learn how it worked. It was a common enough component but nobody actually understood why channels produced specific effects. I dove in with my microscope and could see the structure that made up the surface. A lot of calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, and sulfur, with just a bit of iron, zinc, manganese, and cadmium. There were a bunch of organic meta-material structures like tissues. As I looked harder and harder one thing became clear. I had no idea what I was looking at. I retrieved one of the light magic cores from the box, closed my eyes and pressed it against the activation area at the base of the horn. Even through my eyelids I could see an extremely bright light being emitted from the horn. Within the microscopic world … nothing. I could see a slight increase in the chaotic movements of the atomic structure, just as I had when Arin had used her magic, but I couldn't see anything unique or special going on. I couldn't perceive the light magic itself, only its effects and that didn't tell me anything new.

I tried looking more closely at the activation area. I tried removing the first few layers of structure to see what was underneath. Again and again I couldn't figure out anything about it. The microscope just wasn't the right tool for the job. I ended up spending half the day looking at all the other channels I had on hand. I just couldn't make heads or tails of them. Then I tried to print a small part of the unicorn horn to try and see if I could replicate the effect even without understanding it. The answer was, kinda. The pea sized ball I managed to make after two score measures glowed softly when placed in contact with the light magic core. It also got really hot and burned my fingers a bit. All and all it was a bust. I wasn't going to replicate the effects of monster parts any time soon. They were just too complex and I didn't know what parts of the structure were critical and what parts were superficial.

"Oh well," I said to Schrodinger over lunch. "Plan B then. Or are we on to C by now?"

He sneezed.

"Bless you." I said. Then I had to think about which god I wanted to extend their blessing. Mez probably wasn't happy with me, trying to pry her secrets away from her. Loch was the god of death, which everyone assumed was the patron of death mages. But no, I didn't venerate him and his blessing wouldn't be appropriate for a cat's sneeze anyway. Maybe Anna, the god of non-magical animals? I've clearly been down here too long.

I washed my bowl in the lake and undressed. I swam out to the rope with the horn in hand so that I could get started on a new handheld laser design. Instead of replicating the light creation part of the channel directly, I would simply use it in a pumped laser design. A pumped laser is where you use another strong light source to drive the lasing reaction in a crystal or other material. The very first lasers on Earth were made by wrapping a cylindrical ruby in a flash tube. The light from the flash triggered the cascade and resonance in the ruby. I thought for a minute about what material I should use. Gallium nitride would work to make a powerful blue laser. But why stop there? The band gap of diamond puts its light emissions up in the ultraviolet range. That would actually make safety goggles better as they would only need to block light I couldn't see anyway. There would be an elevated risk of skin cancer for most folks but I was exposed to gamma radiation on a daily basis so what did I care? So diamond it was then.