1:100 on the 58th day of Winter
In my past life I remember long stretches of intense focus when there was an important project deadline. I would go for days doing very little but work, eat, sleep, and go on the occasional walk. It could even be fun if I had a good team or was working on something really interesting. My current project was definitely interesting but the life-or-death stakes made it difficult to fully enjoy. I needed full infrared and ultraviolet vision. More than that, I needed extremely good eye protection if I was going to keep from blinding myself when throwing around high energy lasers. The goggles were good but they couldn’t protect me from everything. So, I was working on a helmet with integrated cameras.
First, I bought a pre-made helmet along with commissioning my breastplate and other armor. When it came in I would modify the armor with a thin layer of diamond plate on the outside for ablative protection and a layer of aerogel on the inside. Diamond is incredibly hard but it will shatter under impacts. However that will absorb an enormous amount of energy so things like crossbow bolts will have more difficulty piercing. Aerogel is basically a solid glass foam that is one of the best known thermal insulators.
It would offer good protection against fire magic or, for that matter, if anyone gets the bright idea to turn my lasers against me. But today I was working on the helmet.
The smith told me it was called an armet. It completely enclosed my head while being light enough to allow me to look around me without too much difficulty. The first thing I did back at the workshop was to remove the faceplate and start on my own. I wanted to have a camera on the outside display what was going on so I could see it on the inside.
Digital cameras are made with what is essentially a reverse LED. Instead of turning electric current into light, they turn light into electric current. It's actually a lot like the Geiger Muller counter I built except that the light sensors only pick up one color of light each so I need three of them for the visible spectrum and two more for infrared and ultraviolet. Because printing repeating patterns was actually very easy with my spell it only took a few attempts to get an array of what I estimated was in the hundreds of megapixels. It was on a disk the size of a coin. Of course, then I had to think of just how I was going to display all that. My original plan was just to project the image in front of each eye hole to the corresponding eye but that wouldn't work. Having separate perspectives is great for depth perception but it takes a ton of sophisticated biology or technology to work. Each camera would have a lens with a focal length which would need to change mechanically depending on what I wanted to look at. That was way too complicated, at least for now.
Instead I had decided to lean into just how easy it was for me to make a large light sensor array. I simply wired the output of each sensor through the steel plate of the helmet and directly to a transistor based amplifier to drive a corresponding LED of the same color on the other side of the plate. Red sensor to a red LED, green to green, and blue to blue. For the infrared light sensor I simply wired it to another red LED with another amplifier to turn up and down the effect. Lastly I did the same for the ultraviolet sensor and blue. For good measure I added a third amplifier to be able to control the brightness of the main color display. There were a bunch of circuit components I needed to add to saturate the display, rather than overloading the diodes, and improve the black level. Even still, colors came out distorted. I would work on it if I lived long enough to make a second one.
I built the display surface directly into the other half of the prototype coin and powered the whole thing for testing with a small battery. The display lit up and suddenly I was looking at a blurry brown mess. My eyebrows furrowed in confusion. Every photon that hit the sensor should be reproduced by the LEDs on the other side so why didn't it look transparent? Oh, angles. Each sensor was getting light from every angle. I actually remember reading about this on Earth in a description of 3D monitors that didn't need specialized glasses to work. They would track where someone stood in a room and essentially aim light from different LEDs at their left and right eyeballs. It only ever worked for one person at a time so it was never commercialized, at least as far as I knew. I think I could accomplish something similar to that because my eyes would always be in the same spot within the helmet.
To make a surface that looked transparent I would need an array of angled sensors and corresponding angled display lights. To test the idea I made another coin, this time with graphene tubes of different lengths, thicknesses, spacings, and angles with different colored materials at the bottom. I eventually decided on a specific design that worked for all colors and with an angle I could adjust easily. It took another batch to get a design where every other row had a different angle meaning that half of them would point at my left eye while the other half would point at my right eye. I changed the shape to be a square about two centimeters on a side rather than a coin.
I then set out to make a ton of squares in batches. My goal was to make a face shield out of a mosaic of these squares. The total area of the faceplate was about twenty by twenty centimeters so I would need one hundred squares total. The last detail would be the power supply. I decided to go in the other direction from my experiments in the cave and try to make as small an artificial monster core as I could. I ended up getting it down to about the size of a grain of rice. The design had a lower power density than the bigger one but it would be great for embedded applications like this one. I put a mini-core at each of the intersections of the squares and connected them in parallel to provide power to all the adjacent squares. This also made it so that if the faceplate were damaged I would only lose a few squares at a time, rather than a single hit rendering me blind.
It was as I was starting to assemble the squares that I felt a tap on my shoulder. Despite my shock I managed to stop what I was doing and slowly turn to see who was there.
"I called out to you but you must not have heard me." said Hroadant.
"Sorry, I was just absorbed in my work." I said.
He had a concerned look on his face.
"You disappeared without a trace half a season ago and then you show up again and you get back to work without a word?" he said, his voice laced with accusation.
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"Where in the nine realms did you go?!"
I grimaced.
"That's fair. I really should have sent you a note." I said. "I had to leave in a hurry and didn't get to tell anyone but my sister."
"Ya sure but where were you?" he asked again.
Instead of answering I held out my closed hand and formed a light crystal as I had done for Fonsa. When I held it out to him he just looked at me with incredulity.
"I awakened." I said. "I'm a light mage now. But the magic came with some unique aspects that were difficult to adapt to so I have been away learning my new abilities."
The practiced lie came easily.
"Congratulations?" he said. "I'm happy for you. Truly. But I am still upset that you disappeared without sending a letter."
"Again, I am very sorry." I said. After a few moments I figured out how to change the subject.
"Where is everyone? I have been back for a few days but you are the first person I've seen." I said.
He gave me another scrutinizing look.
"Everyone has been pulled onto military projects." he said. "We have been checking and reinforcing the city defenses, and armor enchantments since the demons attacked the walls."
I was interested but not surprised. Then he got a speculative look.
"Hey Theod." he said. "Have you done any joint casting since awakening?"
"No…" I said. "Why do you ask?"
"Because Flood has pulled all the mages under him onto a special project in a couple of days." he said. "He and a bunch of others are doing a summoning ritual."
My eyes went wide as I flashed back to the last time I was in a ritual chamber. My heart started racing and I broke out in a cold sweat. Hroadant saw my reaction and quickly followed up.
"You don't have to go." he said. "Flood doesn't even know you've awakened and I can say I just forgot to mention it."
I held up a hand for him to wait as I tried to think about it rationally. Summoning was an entirely different kind of magic from anything I was familiar with from magic items. Like life magic, summoning had never been replicated in items. Perhaps there was some equally crazy mechanism or principle that it was based on.
"I'll go." I said. "I'm honestly not sure if I will be able to help, but I would like to see it."
I steeled my resolve. Summonings could be dangerous but were normally perfectly safe, even routine. If I can just keep my nerve then I may just learn something.
***
2:140 on the 58th day of Winter
The night was cold and quiet. The violet glow city's bright leaf orchards provided some illumination through even the darkest night. However it was sporadic, with wide spans of darkness between areas of light. I had my helmet on so I could see just fine as I made my way home for a few hours of sleep. I had just managed to finish it so I was making the walk home into an opportunity to test it. I had worked through most of the previous night and was running on fumes now. My boots crunched through a fresh layer of snow and I could hear the sound of it echo off of the buildings around me. It was a bit disorienting in my current state and I had gotten turned around twice already. Cinder was called the city that never sleeps but I sure needed some right now.
"Meow." said Schrodinger from his basket. He was wrapped up in blankets to stay warm.
"We'll be home soon." I said.
I felt a bit weird toting him around in one of the baskets I used for tools in the workshop but I was wearing my cold steel armor so it would have been cruel to carry him. We turned a corner and entered another span of darkness. We were passing through the government district, now only about a mile from Aegis manor. The cold had driven most people inside so the folks still out either had places to go in a hurry or no place to go at all.
Just after entering the next patch of bright leaf, several toughs moved out of a narrow doorway to intercept my path. I slowed and, after a moment to assess, moved Schrodinger's basket to my left hand so I could rest my right on my new laser rod. There were four of them and they each held a metal pipe or sheathed dagger loosely.
"Hey there." said the one in front. "Got any spare change?"
He had light skin and a unibrow, which curved with his serious expression. My heart was racing, an instinctive reaction but probably not warranted in the situation. I wasn't in danger here. I was a mage now.
That thought had me looking at the whole situation in another light. They were ready for a fight but didn't seem to want to start one. They'd asked me if I had anything to spare rather than demanding I hand over my money. These weren't toughs, these were men who'd found themselves in some sort of desperate situation that they thought money could help them out of. I was so used to being the one without power that I almost just killed these people. That wasn't who I wanted to be.
I took my hand off my laser and reached into a pocket of my cloak.
"Sure, I've got a bit." I said, pulling air into my closed hand to print four silver pennies in as many marks. It would be enough for a night's rest and a good meal for all of them at an inn, if not in this part of town.
I held out my hand. They were all looking at me wearily. They couldn't see my face so that made sense. Then the guy in front took the coins. I was ready for a doublecross so when a loud scream echoed through the street my laser rod was in my hand before the guy in front of me could blink. But the scream didn't come from nearby. I looked up and saw dark winged shapes floating high above us.
"Air raid!!" I called out.
Just then a dark shape dropped from the sky. The large mass bounced unnaturally off of a building and then the street, a telltale sign of earth magic. Before it could drift up any farther it unfolded sixteen leg blades arranged in a circle.
"Sekteth! Get inside!" I yelled to the men who had frozen at the sight of the demon. I shoved the guy back in the direction of the narrow door.
"Go now or die!" I said.
Schrodinger hopped out of his basket and darted away. He could take care of himself. Finally the men started running. But then I looked back and saw that the sekteth was moving too. It closed the distance rapidly, having regained its mass. I aimed my laser rod at its eyes and fired. The spider demon let out a hissing scream as the laser cut into its flesh. Sekteth are much less armored than kith but I was still surprised when it collapsed and curled into its death-ball after only a few seconds of sustained laser fire.
Looking around I could see other dark shapes dropping into the street but nothing close. Neither the men nor Schrodinger were anywhere in sight so I decided to keep moving toward Aegis manor. I took out a second laser rod and turned on their infrared laser sight feature to help me aim. As I walked I came across bodies, or at least the scattered parts of bodies. These demons had cut a bloody path wherever they landed. While jogging, I came across a warehouse with three sekteth trying to break in. I cut them down in less than ten marks and kept running.
I detoured whenever I saw a fight and ended up backtracking and going in circles a few times. It had been over a score of measures before I made it to the front gates of Aegis manor. As soon as it came into view I could see that there was a battle out front. Mistila and Ingo were fighting off two dozen demon spiders while a small group of civilians were ushered through the gates by the guards. Three explosions went off in quick succession and two of the monsters went down but there were more behind them.
As I was running up behind them I saw one going for Mistila. Ingo used his metal magic to pull his armored body in the way at the last second but both of them were hit hard. My siblings fell and I saw red. These damn spiders were going to die.