15 A.L.
Irene was watching Ian spar in the training yards at Redfalls. It was nine months since she returned from Chicago with the dependents. Ian didn’t spend much of that time in the square. He was training while wearing the red silks of a fire wizard. Ian claimed not to like the silks, but Irene thought he secretly did. He was wearing them now because blue wizards did.
The silks flowed around him as he shifted before his opponents. He moved like a flame to stay out of the way of their blades. Fighting two at once, Irene decided he must be using his sense weapon spell. He fought back with only spells, mostly using fire curtain, stun and fireball. What Ian called stun, Irene called tier zero lightning. Irene didn’t believe he knew any higher tier version of it, which is why he didn’t know that the higher tier versions were obviously lightning.
As a fire wizard Ian knew a lot of higher tier fire spells. The fireball he was using in the sparring was only tier zero or tier one. He wasn’t trying to kill his fighters, just train them in how to attack a wizard. The training yard weakened spells and blows, but only up to a certain tier. The weakening effect was why Irene surprised the training warrior in Londontown’s yard. He was expecting weakened spells and Irene didn’t hold back with a lower tier spell.
The blues were putting more wizards out onto patrol. The last rumor Irene heard was that they were coming from the oldest of the second generation. Irene didn’t want to think about their children getting pulled into the war. She had visions of Bill from The Heights dying in it. She was well aware that not only was he old enough to fight, he was also a better wizard than most. Whenever she thought of him getting dragged off into the fighting she remembered him jumping joyfully on the newly constructed bed.
Ian defeated both his opponents. He threw a smile Irene’s way before waving in two new fighters. Irene could see he was going to be busy for a while. He visited the square more often since the border stations officially closed. The stations were replaced by roving patrols. The patrols roamed the border making random attacks against the blue squares and their greens while trying to intercept blue patrols doing the same against Chicago and its suburbs.
Redfalls’ crystal continued to shrink. It was clear to Irene that it would not last another year. She thought it might fail before the next leadership meeting in three months. She stepped up her survey of the surrounding area and started scouting the surrounding greens.
Ian told her he was heading back to Chicago tomorrow. Irene was watching him fight as a way to lengthen her time with him. She really didn’t like watching sparring, she never did. Not since her time as an apprentice on the Speedwell when she took lessons in stick fighting. She sucked at stick fighting, although she did learn enough to keep herself alive.
After Ian’s third set of opponents, Irene wandered back into the square proper. This was the time of day she usually spent scavenging and updating her map. She decided she should be doing that instead of mooning over Ian.
She went up to her room to pick up her daypack. Since she started spending so much time near the square she stopped carrying all her belongings with her everyday. She sat on the end of her bed and pulled up her map, trying to decide where she should survey today.
The area around Redfalls was the most revealed area on her map. Even the area around Londontown possessed more blank space. After having that thought, she targeted the largest blank space that she could reach with the time that was left in the day and headed out. The spot was about four stories down. Irene went west to find a stairwell that led down.
She thought she was near the bottom of the structure. She didn’t find any stairways leading down from this floor in any of her surveys. The structure felt like it was a couple thousand stories deep. Irene thought it was actually only fifty or sixty stories in any given spot. The building hugged the land, so as a traveler moved from the mountains to the sea they would continue to travel down. The Speedwell landed high in the mountains, traveling into the structure meant traveling down. Except for the lack of stairs, there was nothing to distinguish this floor from any other. It was impossible to tell if this was the original surface of the planet or underground. Or above the ground, Irene thought to herself. For all she knew another fifty stories stretched below her housing the real machinery of the world.
Her own theories leaned toward this being underground. She thought the nanobots converted the surface mass of this planet into the structure. She suspected they may have even made the atmosphere and seeded the plant life. The dangers of what could happen if control was lost, made Irene doubtful the builders would set nanobots loose on their own home world. She hypothesized that the animals were all descendents of animals from the builders homeworld and the homeworlds of all the visitors since. Irene saw human’s arrival here as an accident and not part of any design.
Although she did sometimes wonder why the colony planners back on Earth targeted this star system. She searched but never found any record of how that choice was made in the Speedwell’s computers. A search of the advance ship’s records showed that it almost chose the moon of a gas giant for the colony site. If it made that choice it would have been a very different colony. The moon was warm enough, with liquid water. It possessed a thick atmosphere of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons, but no oxygen. It was the oxygen in this world's atmosphere that tipped the balance and sent the Speedwell here.
Irene traveled under camouflage and muffle. She didn’t want to draw the attention of any passing animals. She learned the hard way that if she brought back too much meat, everyone in the square seemed to expect her to do all the hunting in the future. She fell into that trap by finding too much joy in using her mop bucket wheels.
Irene was building a theory that by facing the wild for them, she was training the residents to just hide in the safety of the square. It was amazing how fast even the hunters stopped going out. With the crystal shrinking, the square residents needed to be getting better at dealing with the wild, not worse. She pretended the wheels broke and hid them in the bottom of her pack, to get out of the expectation. She still brought back a badger or two, but no more.
She felt no need to kill animals without reason. It was faster to just pass them. When she reached her target area she began running the halls in a grid pattern. She found a rest fairly quickly. She marked it on her map, before checking all the rooms around it. She was looking for resources a suburb could use, prize altars, sanitary facilities, water and food sources. Finding nothing particularly thrilling, she moved on.
If she found time at the end of the day, she would double back and check the rooms between rests. Doing this she found inscriptions, mosaics, floor tiles and specialized rooms that gave her hints to no less than seven tier four spells. She found a lot more tier two and three spells. There were obviously more tier two spells in existence than tier three, but she found more inscriptions that detailed tier three spells. She thought that was interesting. It was like this area was geared to training tier three. She could conclude that that was because most people in this area were tier three, but Irene wasn’t certain that was true. She thought most of the dependents were only tier one or two, and that was the adults. The children were tier zero, with only the oldest reaching tier one.
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The inscriptions in the darkspace The Heights was located in were for tier two and tier one spells. Finding a tier three spell there was hard. Near the entrance to the ruins, the inscriptions were of tier zero and tier one spells.
Inscriptions did appear where there was someone who could learn the spells, but Irene was starting to think there was a second mechanism that set the default inscriptions at certain levels. The density and ferocity of animals increased to the south. She wondered if she went that way would she find tier four spell inscriptions that weren’t triggered by her long term presence, but were just the default for that region?
She could see how the tier four spell hints were being spawned here by her own presence, the tier four warriors that Ian recruited, (although they spend most of their time at the border), or perhaps the presence of the master crafters in Chicago. The spells she found were mixed from the fields of wizard, warrior and crafter. Irene could not explain the tier five spell that was in Redfalls green. Ian was only tier four when she met him the first time. It was Irene’s impression that he reached tier five very shortly before meeting her the second time at the collapse under the green. Not only was he not a tier five very long, he really didn’t spend that much time in Redfalls. Irene didn’t think it was nearly enough time to spawn the spell hints. That spell was a complication that suggested that there was another tier five somewhere near Redfalls. That or her theory was still flawed.
She found a gallery next. This one was in fair condition. It was a long thin space with high ceilings. The upper walls were transparent glass revealing ruined rooms in the floors above. The wall on the right side was entirely glass, opaque at ground level. The left wall was stone at ground level and only changed to glass on the floor above. Irene could see into rooms for three levels above.
There were groupings of ruined furniture along the length of the room. The sets on either side were little more than broken bits of iron and shreds of fiber. The central set was intact, if worn. There was a sofa and chair with a small table between. Sitting on the table was an abstract statue. Opposite the furniture, on the stone wall, was an inscription.
The inscription was in Mosaic. It wasn’t a mosaic, that was just the font. The font was named that because the shapes closely resembled the tile shapes used on walls and floors. Wall and floor mosaics were different from inscriptions in that they couldn’t be decoded, or at least Irene didn’t think so. Irene did not know what tier Mosaic was. There was also another font which Agatha named Egyption. Irene thought that either Mosaic or Egyption must be tier five, with the other being tier six.
Irene felt a thrill of excitement run through her.
She turned to the two side doors in the glass wall. The first door opened into an overgrown sanitation facility. The room was like a miniature greenspace. Irene could hear a trickle of water from somewhere inside, but she could see no path forward. She shut the door. She moved over to the second door and pushed it open. It was hard to tell what the room beyond once was. Irene was expecting a food service room. She wasn’t certain that was what this room was. There was no food vendor which sometimes appeared. The layout of the debris seemed wrong as well. There were chunks of ceramic, bronze and glass that were not the remnants of components, but rather reminded her of tools. It almost seemed like a workshop to her. Although maybe a ruined stove and temperature box would look the same. If she found a prize altar anywhere around here, she would come back and see if she could convert any of this to scrap.
She dismissed the oddness from her mind and went back out to the inscription. There was a door out into the halls on the other end of the long room. She checked the hallway on that side to ensure there wasn’t a giant spider nest, or herd of rats just waiting for her to open her interface to jump out.
She rechecked the way she came in, to ensure it was still clear. In the months since she discovered the decryption interface she had gotten better at using it. She could decrypt tier two inscriptions in less than an hour. She cast fire curtain at both entrances to the gallery, hopefully that would cut her scent trail. She pulled a notebook and stylus from her pack. She approached the inscription and examined it closely, taking precise notes. It was times like these she wished she still carried her camera.
Her beginning notes finished, she settled down onto the intact sofa. She cast her cloaking spells of camouflage and muffle. Opening her interface with those spells active caused the price of the spells to go up. She would tire quickly and be forced to drop them eventually. If she didn’t she would pass out and then they would fail, not the best of plans. For a couple hours she would be able to work on the inscription without fear of interruption.
Three hours later she was forced to drop the cloaking spells. The decryption was not finished. Irene felt like there was still a long way to go. It was the most complex inscription she had attempted to solve with her interface. She wanted to rest and try again, but it was getting late. Ian was leaving in the morning and she didn’t want to miss him. She marked the location on her map and headed back up.
“Where have you been?” Ian asked, when Irene joined him at dinner.
“I found the most fascinating inscription,” Irene said. “I am still working on decrypting it.” She took a bite of her meal.
“I was worried about you,” Ian said. “In these uncertain times, I hope you're being careful and keeping close.”
“Oh, it's close,” Irene said, “just below us. I think it might be a tier five spell.” She took another bite as she considered that statement. She had Ian’s attention now.
“What do the numbers look like?” Ian asked.
“You mean what font is it in? I call it Mosaic because they are very similar shapes to some of the wall tiles,” Irene explained.
“The teardrops or the hexagons?” Ian asked.
“Teardrops,” Irene replied. Ian nodded his head, as he agreed that was tier five. His interface transformed into Mosaic when he reached tier five.
“You’ll have to tell me when I get back what you find out,” Ian responded.
“I will,” she said. Irene ate a few more bites of her food, as her mind continued to think about it. “Actually, it might be the same tier five spell as the one in the green. I think it is located below the collapse, only upstream from it. I didn’t find an inscription for that spell yet, so this might be it.”
“Well I hope that won’t be a disappointment for you,” Ian said. He wanted it to be a new spell. Having Irene do all the work to find spells was rather convenient. He finally mastered the ring. He was on his way to Chicago to send Allen to Londontown to drop hints about the location of Redfalls. The ring was all that he hoped it to be. He tried it out in a green to the north. The circle of dead animals was impressive. He cast it from the hallway beside the green and it propagated through the wall. A last test from below proved it went through floors as well.
Ian’s only regret with it was that the spell was from force magic tree. Since it wasn’t fire based Ian’s fire wizard bonus didn’t apply to it. If he could find a fire version, the area of effect was bound to be larger. Luckily he knew tier four shield, which was a force tree spell and it qualified him to learn the ring.
“No, not at all,” Irene said. “Having all that other information about the spell should help me figure out what all the hint images in the inscription mean. The images are often reused, so learning them will make it easier for the next one.”