The last girl in the world sat in the driveway of her newly acquired mansion. She had found some chalk while scrounging through one of the garages for something she could throw in the yard for a temporary chicken house.

She hadn't found anything she could use for that, but the chalk had given her an idea.

Lily was going to do another magic test. Well, more precisely, she was going to see if she could rip off the everburning flame spell, wholesale. After all, she knew that spell was stable.

She’d had it for quite some time now, and apart from when it broke it seemed to be still going strong with no real danger. At least, probably. She was still taking more precautions than she had last time.

Lily held aloft the Inscriber of Power(chalk on a stick) in one hand and the Abolisher of Mistakes(garden hose) in the other.

She was ready. She thought. Her first attempt did not go well.

It turned out, drawing a freehand circle at scale was hard! Like, really hard. She had not even bothered closing the circle because it was just... Lopsided. In theory, the circle was supposed to be perfectly balanced, with all these precise lines and flawless circles.

She looked down at her lumpy, oblong monstrosity, put down the Abolisher and went in search of tools. Now armed with a piece of twine, a long stick, and a plank of wood she had returned.

“Yeah, that’s thinking with your brain Lily. You got this.”

Star whined. So she gave him a look.

“Oh shush you. I’m allowed to talk to myself. You’re almost as judgemental as Bay, you know that?”

She used the plank as a straight edge for her straight lines, and she tied one end of the twine to her stick. Then she had Star hold it still while she used it to measure out close to perfect circles by holding the other end in her chalk hand and rotating all the way around the stick.

It took some practice to get Star to hold it still. But that dog was smart. She had taught him the ‘Hold’ command in about thirty tries. Which wasn't as fast as the stuff before but it was also more complicated. Plus, he could do it while sitting and staying. She wondered what his upper limit might be.

“More like pupper limit, right?”

She gave him a smile. He didn’t seem to appreciate her joke.

“Oh whatever, I’m hilarious.”

All in all, the process took her a few hours. Drawing the final circle had taken about thirty minutes. She was certain she could make the process a lot faster, but she was determined to be slow and careful. No more mistakes! Plus, she was still doing this one handed.

Before she drew the line that would complete the circle, Lily had to retrieve something. She needed something to be the central object, like her everburning flame’s piece of wood. This is the bit she wanted to experiment with the most. Why was it wood? Did it have to be wood? What would change if it wasn’t wood? Did size matter? She had so many questions!

So, she looked around until she found a rock. It was big enough that it was a little difficult to lift in one hand, but she managed it. She placed it in the center of the circle.

She picked up the Inscriber again, hand poised to close the circle---and then she thought better of it.

"I should get behind something." she muttered, glancing up from her work.

There were no trees close enough. She could pull the car up, but she didn't want to fuss with the car door one handed... Lily was really looking for something she could get behind at a seconds notice.

After a brief search, she had her solution.

She dragged an end table into place, and rested a couch cushion against it. It… wasn’t perfect, but it was about all she could do with her hand still so injured.

"It's better than nothing, I guess." she muttered, peering over at the circle with naked suspicion. She pulled Star behind the barrier, and told him to stay.

She knew he would. He was such a good boy.

Cautiously, she reached forward with her chalk spear and completed the circle. Then, she dove behind the coffee table and waited. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds.

She hazarded a peek over her barricade. Nothing was happening. Wait, no. It was, just very slowly. It was too bright out for her to see immediately, but a small flame started licking up from the sides of the rock as she watched. It was tiny.

“Huh.”

Why was it so small? As she watched, it concentrated on top of the rock, as if it were a tiny bonfire atop a tiny boulder. Then it seemed to stop changing. It just… sat there. Burning. It was about the same size as the one she found in the wild.

She watched it for a couple more seconds. Star came out from around the barrier too, and let out a low growl towards the fire.

“Danger? Or are you just being protective?”

She looked down at the dog. He was staring at the circle, but he wasn’t nearly as worked up as he’d been before the explosion. Lily took that to mean that there was no immediate danger that Star could see.

She approached with caution. The flame really wasn’t getting bigger. She reached out slowly and carefully to touch it. It wasn’t any hotter than the one she had found either. That was a sort of success, right? It was roughly the same result, right?

But why was it the same? She thought the bigger circle and bigger material would have meant a bigger flame. It was time for some investigation.

“Observation mode, activate!”

The chalk she’d used to write the circle hadn’t changed at all, and it was plenty large. She’d thought that maybe the size of the circle would influence the spell, but that didn’t seem to be doing anything different really. She got down on her knees and took a close look at the chalk marks.

She could see the mana flowing through it if she focused on it. Well, that might be one benefit of drawing it out large. Mana was flowing around the circle clockwise. So, she set out to trace the path. Slowly, she crawled around the outside of the circle. Whenever it got to a node, it flowed through the glyph that was inside it, and reacted. Then the excess seemed to move forward. So, Lily stopped to examine each of the glyphs she didn’t understand. Gather Ambient Mana did seem to be drawing it out of the air and feeding it to the rest of the circle. Heat to Mana, also seemed to be pulling it out of the flame. That was about what she expected. The glyph before Heat to Mana seemed to be pushing mana into the fire. More than was coming out of it. Tentatively, Lily thought that one might be creating the fire in the first place. Then Heat to Mana was siphoning the heat out and returning less mana to the circle.

“Hmm. So, it takes the heat as a byproduct and turns it back into mana? That can’t be efficient… How does this thing keep running in the first place?”

But then she realized, the Gather Ambient Mana node was also pulling from the air. So, that’s how it offset the rest! But, then what was the rest of the circle for? It seemed to be pushing and pulling mana all over the place. The next one was pushing it… into the stone? Why would it need to go into the stone?

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What was more, the smaller circle seemed to be pulling the mana out of the stone again directly after that. She could see it flowing from that final node into the rock, then back out of the rock and into the smaller circle.

Lily got closer and examined the smaller circle. The first glyph looked like the inverse of the one before it. So, it was… put mana into object, and take mana out of object? Then the second one was like… a pool. The mana stopped flowing there until it got to a certain amount, and then it all went at once. Some kind of capacitor? Battery? Lily thought that’s how capacitors worked. It had a little icon of mana inside. Could she replace that with another glyph and change what it held?

Then, the spiral with the arrow. Well, that was easy to guess. It was probably just outputting the mana to the larger circle.

“Hmm. Okay. Let’s try putting it together. Theory time!”

She grabbed Star, and had him sit in front of the circle.

“Listen, listen. I’m going to teach you okay buddy?”

Star yawned.

“Here’s how I think it works. First, the small circle!”

She pointed to the smaller circle.

“The first node takes mana out of the rock. We’ll call it Drain Material. The second one is a Capacitor for mana. The third one is an output for mana. Simple, right? Get mana out of rock, put into big circle. You with me?”

Star almost seemed like he was playing up being bored! Cheeky little jerk!

“Fine, you might not think that’s cool, but I’m gonna blow your pants out of the water with this next part! That’s… not a saying, is it? Oh well! It is now. Listen, the next glyph takes that mana and makes fire. So that one is actually the Flame glyph. The next one is Heat to Mana, so it pulls the heat back out and converts it. Then it drains the mana from around the circle, and puts it all back into the rock, the end!”

Star did not seem impressed at all.

“Oh come on, at least pretend. I think I’ve got it! Well, I mean, I’m probably wrong about some parts, and it seems needlessly complex to achieve the effect… Hmm.”

Lily sat down and leaned against Star.

“But I think I can still do some cool things with just these glyphs. I think that capacitor one is going to be key though. It limits the mana flowing through it. Or… standardizes it. I wonder what happens if it gets more than one charge all at once? Could I draw a line out of it perpendicular to the circle and do more stuff over there with the excess? What do you think, Star, another experiment? I think I have a good idea!”

Star rolled over and looked at Lily with an expression that clearly said ‘no more experiments, rub my belly.’ So, Lily took a break to just lie next to Star, rub his belly, and think.

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Half an hour later, Lily was up again and washing her circle away with the hose. Star had vacated to a safe distance, looking peeved. She had an idea, and she wanted to test it. She had a design in mind for Lily’s Overflow Valve Mk 1!

So, when she had a clean slate again she immediately started drawing. This was going to be a very simple spell. Her first that she created!

Once she had two circles drawn, she started on the first node. Draw Ambient mana. That should pull mana from the air. She wondered if it would be a lot stronger in spooky spots. She moved onto the second node, a capacitor. From there, the circle continued, but it also met her second circle. The main path continued along into an Infuse Material node. The one that was putting mana into the rock before. Her second circle also touched the main one along that node.

Then she got to work on the second one. It was simple, it was just the Flame glyph.

She hoped she got this right… She put the rock from before in the center of her main circle, and finished the spell.

Mana began to flow in, starting at her Draw Ambient Mana glyph. Perfect so far… It got to the capacitor, and filled it up. Then, the output flowed into the stone. Okay, that was good. Wait. How was this supposed to work?

“Hmm. This is going to take forever.”

The point of her test was to see if the overflow would be turned into a little flame and used up. But the ambient mana wasn’t providing enough for there to be excess. How could she get more mana into the spell? She thought about it for a minute. Well, she could use Heat to Mana. She was outside, so it probably wasn’t the end of the world as long as she was using the mana, right?

She broke the circle, and swapped Gather Ambient Mana to Heat to Mana, and added a node that took mana back out of the rock. That way, it would certainly get to the point that there was enough to fill the capacitor in one pass and she could see if her idea worked in theory.

It did! She could see it. Mana got drawn from inside the circle, presumably cooling it down, then it was put in the rock, then a bunch was pulled from the rock and fed back into the circle. And now, when it was too much for the capacitor… a little flame started.

Lily cheered, and broke the circle again, and just removed the Drain Material node. She was finally onto something! Finally! She got out her notebook and started writing it out on the page. She wondered if there was a way to customize the capacitor to be able to store more or less.

So, she got down on her hands and knees and paid special attention to the capacitor. It looked like an ordinary node with just mana inside it. The main difference was that this node had a diamond like shape along the node itself rather than just an empty circle. Lily put her palm on it, and willed it to accept more than it was accepting.

Nothing happened. So she tried again. She’d seen circles respond to her will before. This was a simple change! Change a 1 to a 2! She focused. She imagined it having more mana in it before discharging. No, it wouldn’t look like that. It’d look like… Oh. Of course. The circle under her palm warped, and shifted. She felt as though that node was turning like a dial. She almost jumped away, but controlled herself. Yes, she could just… alter it. It was subtle. It didn’t seem to change the structure of the circle visually, but she could just feel things flowing differently there.

She stepped back to take a look. Sure enough, the node was filling up slower, and it let out a bigger burst when it did release a charge. Excited, Lily ran back over to her notebook and jotted this down.

The diagram was simple. She could make modular circles! This one accepted mana, and you had to set the capacitor rate manually, but.. If she was doing what she really thought it was going to be so useful! She could put this into a lot of her circles from here. It accepts mana, and puts it into a material. Any excess becomes a flame and is burned away, so she doesn’t have to worry about overloading and explosions!

This was perfect! She could update it later when she figured out how to expend mana in a less dangerous way than fire too. Maybe just a light? Then she could watch to see if it got too bright, and that could be like, an indicator?

Her mind was racing. But, more than that… She had to find more glyphs. If she understood the basic idea of how a spell could work now, she needed to figure out more glyphs! But to do that, she’d need to find more magic in the wild. More spooky spots, probably. And…

Lily looked down at her hand, and was suddenly aware of just how tired and beat up she was.

“Aww man. I probably shouldn’t though, huh? Not till I’ve recovered…”

For now, Lily let the rock charge up until she could sense the mana on it, and then broke the circle. She could test one thing while resting; would the mana stay or drain away?

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Lily had one other thing she could do while resting. It was beyond time. It was time to wash Bay. She gathered him up and brought him to the master bathroom. There she ran a bath for him. Well, in the sink. There were some very nice sinks, and she didn’t want to get her kitchen all covered in possibly magical ash. As it finished filling, she turned and addressed him.

“Alright Bay. You will tell me everything you know. For you see, we have ways of making you talk.”

Star panted happily, watching Lily play her role. She reached for Bay, and carefully lowered him into the warm water.

“The launch codes, agent Bay! This can all stop if you give me the launch codes. What is that?”

She held Bay out of the water for a moment. Lily turned to Star.

“He said ‘Fuck you’. Do you think those are the launch codes?”

Star wagged his tail.

“No, no. I don’t think those are the launch codes, and I doubt the famous secret agent Mr. Bay is making a pass at me. So, I think he takes another dunk in the pool.”

She dipped him back in, and hummed while giving him a scrub. Sometimes you just had to play a little. It was hard doing this with mostly one hand, but at least the pain killers had been helping. She’d been alternating between ibuprofen and acetaminophen every three hours and she was feeling just fine. She was probably taking too much, but it was enough to keep her not in agony so it was probably worth it.

“Don’t do this at home, kids.”

Lily giggled at her play at breaking the fourth wall. She lifted bay out of the water. The ash was coming off just fine… but the purple was not. It seemed to have dyed him. He was just white originally, but now he had purple splotches. Particularly on his belly, where he normally touched the ground. Oh well, if it didn’t come out he still looked pretty cool.

She let Star have a sniff to see if he still smelled. Star seemed interested but satisfied. So, Lily plopped Bay onto the counter and grabbed the hair dryer that was in the drawer next to the sink. She’d noticed it earlier while looking for pills. She plugged it in and pointed it at bay.

“Do I still expect you to talk? No, Mr. Bay. I expect you to dry.”

She started the dryer. Sometimes, you just had to laugh. Even at the end of the world.