Basement.
She had really tried to ignore the signs. There was a creepy basement under her beach house. At least there was a button on the elevator that said basement. She couldn’t find any other signs that one existed. For that matter, although it had been days she hadn’t explored the second floor either.
Maybe she’d made a mistake looking for a mansion. It was just too big. But, she was settled now. It was a base. Same as the boat, and maybe La Mancha. But, she was getting off track.
She’d noticed the basement on the first trip into the mansion. Later, she’d woken up to characters on TV talking about a basement. Then, in the pit there had been a door with the word scrawled on it. Now, the magnets. The signs were getting a lot harder to ignore.
But why? Was this like her phone messages? Could this be Entity B again? If so, what was the message? Go to the basement? Never go to the basement? Maybe there’s danger in the basement? How was she supposed to know, exactly?
Lily didn’t want to deal with this. Star and Donk were playing, and she wanted to just focus on that and enjoy her day. But now she had all this to think about. She could just pretend she hadn’t noticed. Go about her day like nothing happened.
“Fine. I’ll decide what to do later. I’m not going to head home right now anyway. I still have stuff to do here.”
The girl stood up, suddenly feeling decisive. She did have a lot to do. It’s not like the basement was going anywhere. So, she grabbed her new ice pick and went to work. Her first order of business was with the water troughs that were in the animal pens. Not all of them were the same shape, but all of them served the same purpose. They held water, and refilled through a pipe from the main water silo on the property. Was silo the right word? Maybe it was just called a tank? Whatever.
But, that sort of system didn’t really need to exist anymore. If she wasn’t here every day and one of the hoses broke or something it’d be a big problem. So, she was going to do some magic. There were two potential spell formations she had in mind. The first one would simply gather water and pour it into the container. If it overflowed, it overflowed. But, she thought that she might be able to make a change to one of the various storage glyphs she’d figured out to make it store water instead of mana. In that case, she could probably just make it fill until it was full.
But, that was an experiment. The easiest one would work and be enough to ensure none of the animals went thirsty. It was about to be a lot of carving though. She really needed a method to automate this. Maybe she could get a spell that would cut patterns into things? But then she’d need to power it with her mana.
“Ugh. Why do I have to be so weak? How do I increase my mana pool? I don’t wanna just carry around a bunch of charged up rocks. What if they have some interference with each other or something?”
Well, before anything else she needed to make a prototype. So, she went looking for a bucket. Fortunately, there were plenty of things that would work in the barn. What she found was more of a washing basin or a tub than a bucket, but it’d work.
She found a nice empty patch of dirt, and placed down her container, then started drawing out her circle. It was a simple spell. Gather ambient mana > Gather water > Infuse (Water). The last bit was where it got sketchy. She had a theory about glyphs, and if she was guessing right this ought to fill the container.
Lily called Star over, and had him sit so she could have an audience while she explained what she was doing. Donk seemed disappointed, but Lily was determined to talk to Star like he was a semi intelligent being until that proved true or false.
“Listen, here’s the plan. See, there’s written languages, right? I’m not super familiar with a lot of them, but I took a few japanese lessons when I was younger, and I think these glyphs have something in common. So like, in Japanese and I suspect other languages with a similar writing style, a lot of words can be written out as single symbols. Kanji! There are a lot of symbols to memorize, right? One for every word or concept.”
Star looked over his shoulder at Donk across the courtyard and whined.
“Hey! Listen mister! It’s lesson time. I gotta talk this out for my own safety too, see? So, the thing is, kanji can be broken down into… uh, I think they’re called radicals? Basically, they’re kanji of their own that can be combined to create a symbol with a complicated meaning. For example, three of the radical that means ‘tree’ can be combined to create the singular symbol for ‘forest’. Does that make sense?”
She doodled them as best she could remember while she explained. She was absolutely sure she was misremembering some of this, but plowed on ahead. Star seemed more interested with the visual diagrams.
“When it comes to glyphs, I notice the symbol for mana, this little star looking thing, is in a lot of glyphs. And as far as I can tell, they all fuck with mana in some way. So! What happens if I replace the symbol for mana here, with the one for water? Instead of imbuing an object with mana, I’ll put water into it, right? At least. That’s the plan. If not, maybe I’ll try the capacitor with water instead?”
As Lily finished her thought, she turned to actually draw the glyphs into the circle. Star barked, so Lily turned back around.
“You can hide if you want. I know what I’m doing a bit better now. At worst, this sprays water everywhere. Or I guess it could try to infuse H2O on like, a molecular scale and something completely unpredictable will happen. But I’m pretty sure!”
Star went quiet and slinked over to her side. Lily gave him a smile and patted his head.
“Oh, well aren’t you sweet protecting me?”
A few seconds later, the glyphs were plugged in. Lily cautiously backed up as mana flowed into the circle. She waited, impatiently. Thirty seconds later, she was less certain that anything was happening. But the mana wasn’t building up, so it had to be doing something, right?
Cautiously, Lily edged forward. She had to shoo Star, who nipped her pant legs and tried to gently pull her back. The beginner mage had to get a better look at her new project.
As she got right up to the basin, she was surprised to see water dripping down the slick inside edges of it. It was pooling at the bottom, just slowly. In the nearly a minute it had been running, it’d filled the bucket about a twentieth of the way up.
“Huh. Okay. Slower than I thought. But it’s working! Star! It’s working! Come look!”
Star edged forward after her, letting out a low growl.
“I know you don’t trust magic, especially the new stuff. But my thought was dead on! Well, in theory. In practice, uh, it’s pretty slow. But hey! Have a drink! It’s water! From the air!”
Star nervously approached the basin and gave it a sniff. He seemed to calm down a little after that, but pointedly refused to have some.
“I guess we’ll have to wait like an hour to see if anything bad happens though. I don’t think it’s gonna explode, but let’s spend that time far away huh? I think it’s time to learn how to milk a cow.”
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Lily had already watched her downloaded youtube videos about how to milk a cow, and it didn’t seem too complicated. The hardest part was getting the cow to the milking station. But these cows had apparently been there often enough that they more or less knew what was happening. Combined with Star helping to herd it in the right direction, that part only took half an hour for the first time.
The problem was… No milk. Lily was pretty sure she was following the instructions well enough, but nothing was coming out. She poked the udder. The cow seemed almost as confused as the girl. Lily had been using the motion in all of the videos for a while now and nothing had come out at all.
“Is… is this cow broken? Or is it me? Do I not have the magic touch? What do you think, Star?”
Star let out a small boof. He seemed to know when he was being talked to whether he understood the words or not. It was encouraging, so Lily was making a habit of it.
“Maybe the basement contains the secret of milking cows? Maybe Entity B just wants me to have milk, huh?”
Lily laughed nervously. She hadn’t been able to get the basement out of her mind, try as she might. But, jokes aside she really did need to figure out what was up with the cow. It was going to be a long process, but she wasn’t getting anywhere with this one. So, it was time to get another.
Unfortunately, the second cow didn’t go any differently. By the time Lily was frustratedly trying to milk the third one to no avail, she wanted to scream.
“What am I doing wrong? Unless all of these cows are defective or something, it’s gotta be me, right? Can they just tell I don’t know what I’m doing, so they won’t give up the milk? What the hell!”
The cow made a loud mooing sound and swished its tail, seemingly a little uncomfortable at Lily’s outburst.
“Yeah yeah, that’s what I’m saying! I’m pissed too! I’ve always heard that cows like to be milked, so what gives huh?”
It was clear this wasn’t going anywhere. So, Lily was going to have to give up for now. Maybe she needed to find an agricultural book after all. Wait, was handling animals even agriculture or was that just plants?
With a heavy sigh, Lily started the process of getting the last cow back into the pen. As the girl got the cow out of the milking station, she noticed a clip board hung on the wall next to it.
It was a schedule. It had cow numbers on it. Were the cows numbered? Lily inspected the cow. Well, that was easy enough. It had an ear tag. What was with the schedule though? She took the clipboard off the wall. It was a simple grid, not a calendar so it didn’t even have the date on it.
“Oh well that’s just great. How am I supposed to know how to read this…?”
It did seem to be some kind of milking schedule though. Wait, there were 24 boxes. Maybe these were months instead of days! Then they wouldn’t really need to be labeled. But, why would only one cow be scheduled for months at a time? Did only one cow at a time work?
Lily realized she was hopelessly out of her depth, and with no real way to know which month was the current month, she decided to give up for now. But, she had a new goal. She needed to research why cows might not work most of the time.
“Good news girl, I no longer think you are defective at least. Sorry for all the uh, milking. You were probably just as confused as me, huh?”
She patted the huge beast gently, and led it back to the pen. After getting the cow secured she found a nice place in the grass to sit, and called Star over. The dog happily bounded to her side and laid down next to her. The tired girl pet him and yawned.
“I’d like to start solving some of these mysteries rather than constantly getting served more. Why do cows only work some of the time? What’s in the basement? Who is Entity B? What or who is Entity A? Why did magic come into being? There are just so many things I don’t know. I don’t even know what you are.”
Star panted and nudged her leg with his head. Rolling her eyes, Lily rubbed him behind the ears.
“What’s the opposite of the Dunning Kruger effect? Because I think I’m discovering it in real time. When all this started, I felt hopelessly out of my depth. But the more I learn and grow, and the more I discover, the more I find that I’m WAY more hopelessly out of my depth than I even knew! Every time I learn something, I end up with a thousand more questions and everything gets a million times more complicated! I just wanna scream!”
As the silence settled around her, Lily realized nothing was stopping her. So, she screamed. As loud as she could, at the top of her lungs, just to get some of these feelings out. It did make her feel a little better.
Donk trotted into view, just close enough to see her. Then seeming to realize nothing was wrong, started to amble away slowly.
“Well, nice of him to check on us I guess. Huh, Star?”
The dog rolled over and pointedly exposed his belly to his master. She obliged.
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The spell hadn’t exploded. That was the good news. The bad news was, the basin had overflowed. In fact, it had overflowed to the point that it had destroyed the circle powering it. Lily had to laugh at that.
“Hey, that’s actually a good idea though. I can make spells out of chalk or something, and have a failsafe that breaks the circle with water or whatever else if something goes wrong. Going to file that tidbit away for later.”
She really wished she had some kind of If-Then clause she could use in circle creation. There had to be a way to do that. She knew how it would look on a circuit board. Although she was more familiar with how it would look in Minecraft using redstone. Could she just do something like that? If mana ran along the path of a circle sort of like electricity, is there any reason it wouldn’t work…?
Well, that was going to be a whole other complicated litany of tests. Not to mention, since her guess about glyph radicals had come to fruition, she had a million more glyphs she could test. What happens if she separates the two radicals in the flame glyph for example? What did they represent? Heat to Mana used one of them, so was that flame looking one actually just heat? In which case, what was the other half? Could she plug in those radicals elsewhere? There were a million questions to answer.
“I guess I have all the time in the world, huh?”
Somehow, that felt like a melancholy thought rather than a reassurance. For now, Lily grabbed the basin of water and dumped about 10% out nearby. Then she went and got a second container. This one was just a glass cup from the kitchen.
Time for test number two. She filled the circle back in, and added a bit that should send overflow to the cup, just like how she could divert overflow from a capacitor to another circle. Sure enough, the cup started to fill when the bucket was full.
How could it tell the bucket was full?
“Um… magic, I guess huh?”
Lily decided that was a question for far further down the line. For now, it worked. That was the most important part. Which meant she had her work cut out for her. Because now it was time to replicate this spell on each of the animal water containers, and position a basin for overflow outside the pens so if it flooded it didn’t turn their pen into a mud pit. But there were so many places she’d have to draw this circle!
It was becoming clear that this was not one day’s work. She’d just have to come back to La Mancha a few more times over the next couple days to get it all done. With a sigh of defeat, she spoke to herself.
“Alright. Let’s feed the animals and go home.”
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By the time Lily returned home, it was getting dark and she was beyond exhausted. She’d gotten a lot of good done, and even if she went to sleep right when she returned she’d be on a more normal sleep schedule again.
Even Bay looked tired in the back seat. Star slept most of the way home. Lily almost had to pull over and take a nap once or twice. But, she made it.
Maybe it was still anxiety about the basement, and maybe it was just how tired she was, but she didn’t bother going to the main house. She grabbed Bay and walked around the side, heading down the dock to her boat. As she got to the dock though, Star started letting out a low growl.
Lily turned to look around, suddenly cautious. Star was staring at the treeline where the chicken had gone missing. Lily hurried onto her boat. She looked back and saw Star peeing near the entrance to the dock.
“Oh for the love of–”
She was about to complain, but then she realized that it might actually keep the wild dogs away. So she gave up. Star came trotting up the dock looking proud of himself. Lily rolled her eyes but praised him.
“Good boy. Now let’s go in, get some food, and sleep huh?”
A happy bark seemed to agree with her.