Chapter 21: Experiment One
Holding back and not showing off had been surprisingly easy to Wil. There was still most of three months left. They had time to go around town. Wil showed Thomas Mack’s delicious and greasy food, main street’s increasingly diverse shopping options, and then his place for drinks and planning out the next day.
“I’m surprised this place isn’t more enchanted,” Thomas had said when they were sitting around the kitchen table. “What did you do to it?”
Wil pointed around to different spots of the house, listing them off. “Not much, just some basic sensible things. Reinforced windows, fire resistant frame and floors, a sensory thing to let me know if someone is on the grounds when I am in my lab or bed. I should do more, huh?”
“I don’t know about that,” said Darlene, eyeing their drinks. “If I’m going to live here permanently, it’s nice to not have to worry about running into dozens of spells I have no control over.”
“True,” said Wil, “and I like to keep it simple. There aren’t any leylines to tie my spells to here, so I have to recast them fairly often. Anything more difficult or complex would be a pain in the ass.”
Thomas perked up. “I thought you said half the people in here have leylines on their property. You have none?”
He had to think about it for a second. The second turned into a few before he shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. One of the many things I should do is reconnoiter the basin and map out all of the leylines. As far as I can tell, the center of the basin near my house has fewer of them.”
“My farm has two!” Bram said, a little bit tipsier than the rest by then. He knew his capacity and had started early at dinner. “A big one and a little one.”
“Which is exactly why we’ll be using his farm,” said Wil to Thomas. “The bigger one is tied to the fields, which we’re going to need to tear up and fiddle with if we’re going to tweak the leyline there safely.”
“I’m still a bit iffy on that,” Darlene said, sighing and drinking her tea. “Didn’t you say that one guy blew up when trying this stuff? I don’t think the risk of exploding Bram’s house is a necessary one.”
“That does sound like a bad thing for experiments,” Thomas conceded. “But Wil said he redid it already. What do you think the risk is?”
Of course Wil wanted to wave it off as not a worry, but the past while had made him rethink a lot of things. Of course it was easy to sit at his kitchen table and imagine everything working out okay, but he had to be safer. Wil drank his oatmeal stout and sighed.
“I think it’ll be okay, but just to be safe, we should close down the business for a day and make sure no unnecessary bystanders are around. Is that going to be okay, Bram?”
The giant thought about it, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Should be. We might need to take a day to announce it’ll be closed for the day after. We don’t want to lose anymore time than we have to. We could put signs around the property that we’ll be closed on certain days for experiments.”
Darlene chuckled. “It's a start, but what do we do about the people who think that doesn’t apply to them? You’re always going to get like ten percent of people who will ignore the signs and try to buy a drink or potion.”
“Well, easy,” Bram said. “Just put up a couple of repel spells or wards on the outskirts of the property. That should work, right? I’ve actually got a couple of wards ready that need power.”
Thomas stirred. “Did Wil make you some before he left? He told me the two of you assist him with a lot of projects.”
“Knowing Bram,” Wil said with a laugh, “he probably made them himself. They’ll be more meticulously crafted than I’d make ‘em. I’m telling you, it’s rotten luck that he wasn’t born with magic. He’d do better with it than any of us.”
“I don’t know about that.” Bram tried his best to not look too pleased.
“I do,” said Wil. “So, tomorrow we’ll set up the grounds for preliminary testing until we can tell if we’re safe from exploding. How's that sound?"
Everyone agreed. The rest of the evening was spent with drinks and swapping stories, save for Thomas who tired early after his days of traveling and retired to his inn for the night. Wil drove Darlene home in one of the cars Thomas had brought with him, and they had a lovely evening together. Wil even managed to avoid talking about work or the future.
Darlene was right, and the hardest part of the day was setting up. They were at the farm right after breakfast, and already there were people lining up to buy medicine. Bram was already awake and directing his half a dozen employees or so. Even with the barn closed up and signs posted, there was still a line.
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“Some people,” Darlene muttered, standing with her hands supporting her back. “Disrupt their day at all and they don’t know what to do with themselves.”
“On the other hand,” said Wil, putting an arm around her shoulders, “if they’re going to a brewery before noon, maybe their day should be disrupted a little.”
“Big talk from you, as much as you drink.”
“Jealous?”
Darlene sighed. “Gods yes.”
The wards Bram had made really were excellent quality, minus the complete lack of magical activity to them. The lines were clean and even a surprised Thomas had to admit that it was a good job. Funniest to Wil was the fact they were sandwich board signs, with ‘temporarily closed, no trespassing’ written on one side.
“Did you seriously design these to only function after being read?” Wil was delighted.
“Do you think it will work?” Bram asked, suddenly nervous. “Three dimensional configurations are still a bit hard for me, so I tried to go with an Erskine Ring to focus it.” He pointed to an inward spiral on the back side of the warning.
Wil turned to Thomas, who looked baffled. “Yeah, it’s…It’s clean. I’d only change the anchor rune used at the end there. This is a bit strong for the effect you’d need and might end up with people wandering around semi-intoxicated. But they will wander away.”
That was good enough for them. They set them up around the edges of the farm, then Wil and Thomas powered them up. All that remained was cleaning up the fields themselves. One of the conditions Bram had set for using his property, they had to quickly mature the crops and bring them in to be made into the next batch of beer. Only then could they tear up the fields.
With his focus in earth magic, Wil took charge of that and hastened their lifecycle. It took only minutes for the wheat and barley to grow to full maturation, and then Thomas helped move them to storage. Darlene sat and watched in a comfortable chair under shade they’d moved out there, just for her. Now that there were no customers around, her job was to watch and take notes.
“So,” Thomas clapped his hands together. Unlike the others, he came in clothes too nice for the job, and the warm spring day had him sweating through his shirt. “How do we do this, Wil? Moment of truth. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice is a pattern.”
Wil wiped some sweat from his brow. It was past noon, and after all the prep work and cleaning up the land away from the brewery for their experiment, he wanted lunch or at least a quick breather. Then again, he’d finally be able to share his wonderful accident.
“Open up your senses and touch the leylines first,” said Wil. “Don’t do anything with it, just wrap your focus around it and trace the bounds of the moving power.”
“Oh.” Bram deflated. “This isn’t something I can do, is it?”
Wil and Thomas shared a similar look. On Wil, it was sympathy. On Thomas, pity.
“I don’t think so,” said Wil apologetically. “We can feel it with our wizardsense and it’s like seeing it but better. I know! We can dig up that pair of spectacles I made for seeing through fae magic. We could see the torn leyline with it, but I don’t remember me or Darlene seeing normal ones. We can tweak it.”
“I’ll make a note of it,” Darlene called from her chair. She sipped some lemonade and motioned for them to continue.
“Yeah, no problem,” said Bram. “I’ll leave you two to it, then.” He didn’t seem happy, but he took a spot next to Darlene and watched.
Wil hated that he couldn’t participate this time, or in a lot of what they would be doing. And yet, he needed Bram’s help more than nearly anyone. As far as he was concerned, everyone on the team was crucial. It was a bad start that two of them had to sit out.
“So, open my senses and watch?” Thomas prodded.
Wil broke free from his thoughts and nodded. “Yeah. Close your eyes and search it out. Tell me what you sense.”
He gave Thomas a second before he extended his senses. This leyline was familiar and answered his call immediately. It was one of two, L-shaped rivers framing the farm. The weaker of the two was a ways off, on the other side of the house. The greater one, close to them, fueled the fields and thrummed serenely.
“It’s not that big,” said Thomas in a dreamlike tone. “Not as large as some I’ve seen. But it feels like trying to look at the sun, or touch an electrical line. It’s giving so much to the land around here, and it’s…healthy. What else should I be noticing?”
“The shapes. Of this one and the other one.” Wil breathed it in. They pulsed, one after another. An answer, and a call. “It’s almost like it was one loop, but broke up. They go around and drift off in the distance.”
“Okay,” said Thomas, a hint of impatience entering his voice. “And then what?”
“Watch.”
Wil breathed in and tapped into the leyline. It answered immediately in its steady, thrumming pulse. The sensation of being struck by lightning passed through him, and he channeled it into the earth. Like so many times before, the Stevenson farm came to life under his touch, the dirt and soil vibrating together and parting, infinitesimal pieces of a greater whole on the move.
With a firm grasp on the greater leyline, Wil shifted the land around them. One section rose by ten feet, becoming a small plateau while a patch of dirt spiraled into a sharp valley. Every time Wil became a conduit to its power, it came easier. Shoving around so much earth was as simple as reaching out and molding the land with his heart.
Wil, the leyline, and the land itself, a dance with three partners. As Wil moved, he gently tugged, then firmly dragged on the invisible river of power. The land shifted and moved, and then so did the leyline. Slowly, Wil changed the direction, facing the flow towards its twin on the other side of the farm.
“Impossible,” Thomas gasped, crouched for stability as the earth finally settled.
Wil released everything. The strain caught up to him like a rubber band snapping back, striking him in the brain. It had been a solid effort, and he proved his point. When he opened his eyes, the landscape was chaotic.
“Good job wrecking the fields Wil,” Darlene shouted. “Did it do what you wanted?”
“It worked,” Thomas whispered. “It really worked!”
Bram watched with a thoughtful frown. “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”
Wil breathed in and out, catching his breath. He smiled and said, “I’ll make those glasses next. We’ve got a lot of work to do, so let’s get all the prep work out of the way so we can have some fun!”