The weeks following that incident had been arduous, even now, two years later she didn’t look back on it fondly. Her days had been a routine of eating, sleeping, and lying down, with breaks every few seconds to archive her memories and let them go, it took months of her life and hundreds of hours spent practicing to make the process automatic, but she did and she was quite proud of it. Quite proud and quite miffed at an oversized garter snake, but she was over that, after all she had haggled it to hell and back for her second boon. She still hadn’t even given it a soul, although she had two to spare now. Instead she had given it a collected sum of human knowledge regarding alchemy. It had tried to argue that it wasn’t interested, but she could see it in its inhuman eyes, the snake wasn’t lying when it said they were alike. They were both more curious than was good for them. She sat at her vanity and reminisced at getting the beautiful eye in front of her, recalling the inscription on the obelisk.
“Scribe’s Eye: Allows the user to record information on nearby physical media. The user can designate a specific ink or pigment to be used if it is nearby, but if none is provided this boon will use the user’s blood as a substitute. Allows the user to visually see magic”
For anyone else it would be a pathetic ability, but writing down information was an alchemetrix’s job. They had tried to use printing presses to automate the process, time and time again. They even succeeded on a few simpler ones, but to create a scroll, one needs to take into account a variety of environmental factors. A phosphorous blast scroll created on a rainy day in August looks different from one made on a sunny day in December, it’s simply too expensive and arduous to create a machine that can make all possible permutations of a scroll, and even for those they have, the machines break so often due to the magic flowing through them, even if they’re made out of inert materials and the inscription aren’t fully connected, they have a tendency to channel some magic which inevitably breaks them. This is all to say making a scroll quickly is an impossibility, except now for one exception. The boon “Scribe’s Eye” which looks so lackluster, doesn’t mention one thing which is that it has no speed limit. As long as Cece knows what she’s drawing it appears on paper instantly, and with a mind that can’t forget anything, that means she can scribe a scroll instantly. Her workload had decreased dramatically when she got her first boon and no longer had to reference books to address environmental factors with her scrolls. Now that she had scribes eye, what was originally an eight hour workday had become two hours, and that was with dawdling time, she had never had dawdling time before, she had even been going to a few tea parties these days. Mostly pity invites from her families former allies, but tea parties nonetheless! And now she would get to experiment with something that no other alchemetrix had ever done before, even if she had to wait until the next day for the delivery.
She elected to take a well deserved personal day. She had killed a man, drove all night, and had a meeting with her financial advisor, as far as she was concerned that was all the world could ask of a girl in a given week. It was still morning, but she immediately took of her makeup and drew a bath. While the water heated up she prepared a small meal, and grabbed several books and a pot of tea. She would not be coming out for several hours god willing. As she put a foot into the warm water she felt her muscles untense, and an ever so small part of her anxieties leave her mind. She set up a tray over the porcelain clawfoot tub, and began reading. She doubted she would get through the three books she brought with her, her reading speed had increased slightly with her daemonic mind, but not significantly to her displeasure. Although she supposed there was a certain joy in taking one’s time while reading. Two of the books were trashy romance novels that someone from a mage family wouldn’t be caught dead reading, and the other was the latest edition of the journal “Alchemy”, where all the most important discoveries were published. It defeated the point of taking a personal day, but Cece couldn’t let her competition catch her unaware, and she decided it was fine she did genuinely love alchemy. It was a passion from her youth that had persisted till the present day.
She read and enjoyed herself for several hours before retiring early to make up for her lost sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she got presentable for when the delivery came. When she finally heard the knock she nearly ran to the door. It was the usual delivery men, one was on the shorter side, but well built, likely in his early forties, the other a tall lanky man in his thirties. They were familiar with her and the structure of her apartment already, so they brought the large crate to the usual spot in her sitting room. She preferred to unpack it herself, it was irrational, they were just as capable, but she didn’t like people seeing where she worked. The two men didn’t mind of course, it was less work for them, and Cece was always pleasant. She opened one of the smaller boxes in the crate once the men left, and opened it. Inside were a collection of rubies, they were actually made by another alchemetrix, a recent discovery that she would have to learn as well if her experiments panned out.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
She rolled one of the faceted rubies Sigmund acquired for her in her hand. It’s smooth polish was a pleasing sensation on her fingers. She brought the gemstone to her atelier, which was her flowery term for over half of her apartment that consisted of hundreds of tools and apparatuses, a large workbench, and an overflowing tower of books. The books she no longer needed, but hadn’t had the heart to sell just yet, she was thinking of keeping a few as mementos, but revisiting the information in her head was much more convenient, she hadn’t touched the tomes in months. The books aside, the largest part of the collection were her reagents, shelves upon shelves of magically charged materials, mostly the base twenty one elements, and hundreds of bottles of ink, each with different properties. The shelf sat next to a large crate of custom made paper that she used to write on her scrolls, all a crimson red. Most alchemetrixes had a calling card of sorts, at least the good ones did, something to let the average mundane recognize who made the scrolls they were shopping for, the most common were initials, but several used patterned or colored paper, she chose the latter.
Cece brushed the tools she had previously been using aside and grabbed one of the rubies, placing it gingerly on a velvet cloth. Five years ago Nikola Flamier published a paper on the theoretical use of gemstones as a medium in which to create a scroll. It was an impossible theory to test, but in theory gemstones should be able to store a massive quantity of inscriptions in their crystal structure. More inscriptions didn’t necessarily mean more power, for that ingredients with a higher concentration of magic were better, but it could create far more complex behavior in a spell. Most scrolls had some basic contingencies like “if user would be killed by this scroll, abort”, but with the space of a gemstone Cece could get the kind of behavior that only a grimoire could provide, and those tended to be inordinately bulky, and nigh unusable for combat. And like a grimoire she would be able to fit multiple spells into them with ease.
She decided to start simple with levitation, a rudimentary mercury spell. She had been using scribe’s eye for several weeks now so the sensation was far from unfamiliar, she willed writing to appear and a path was burned away for ink to flow. The ruby glowed a beautiful golden red and she smiled to herself. She picked up the ruby and spoke.
“XJKW6S” Most scrolls were activated by will or keyword, she obviously couldn’t do the former and therefore preferred the latter, but for her personal scrolls she made the keyword a series of numbers and letters, so that she couldn’t have them activated against her will by an opponent. She also keyed them to activate on certain physical gestures in the off-chance she was prevented from speaking.
Her feet gently lifted themselves off the floor as she grinned like a Cheshire cat.
“Well that works, let’s take it up a notch.” She said, focusing her right eye on the stone in her hand.
Hundreds of microscopic channels were etched in seconds, normally she would take her time to think out a design, but she had been waiting for these gemstones for three weeks and had been thinking about potential inscriptions the entire time, so she had a thorough mental model. When she was finally done her eye burned slightly from not blinking, but she was left with what was, essentially, a lightweight mercury grimoire devoted to levitation, combat evasion, and generally preventing her from falling or being hit. Its base behavior was to levitate her at least fifty feet in the air if the space allowed it, and in combat to automatically orbit the nearest enemy to remain a moving target. It used more mercury and a bit of Oressian Gold ink to detect attacks and move around them, and it used a Deorided Sulfur ink to detect if the user was critically injured, and flee the area. There were a variety of smaller failsafes and functions, but that was the gist of it. She looked over her work with a grin thinking of all the things she could do with this, she had barely scratched the surface of the three dimensionality of the medium, she could make these functions far more interconnected, and the best thing was that she hadn’t even used a quarter of the space on the small ruby. Cece’s grin could cut steel, as she stared at her newfound treasure