Me, a Gentleman. What had I gotten myself into?

What would my family say? They were bound to find out eventually. And of course that would lead to some inevitable questions, entirely reasonable ones to be honest, like where I got the money to buy the land, why I would use it for this, and what I planned to do with the land now that I had it. All questions I was really wondering about too; I had precious little in the way of good answers for myself, let alone anyone else!

So what do I do when I have light enough

for one step, and then I take that step

and I'm out of light to see by?

Hold to what you know is true. Do

what's right, and the next light will

come.

Well I hope it comes soon, and I hope

it's got a construction crew attached!

An important part of faith is patience,

Brad. Just because something should

happen doesn't mean it should happen

*right now.* Trust in Meþas and in

his timing.

Yeah. Felicity was as helpful as ever. I really hope I didn't just end up throwing all that money into a sphere of annihilation.

Wednesday was back to more research on the trenna rune. I didn't tell Joanna about what I'd discovered since she hadn't gotten back to me yet about if she even wanted to move forward, so I just kept looking into this rune, and I discovered something odd. If I put a light-aspect rune in front of trenna, the light mana was clearly visible, showing the effect of it fading out across the rune. But if I put one after it... nothing.

Well, that was unexpected. I etched a second ingress on the other side of the light rune and pushed mana into it, and got the same visible fading effect coming from the other side now, but the first light rune never lit up. Channeling power into both ingress runes, I could make trenna light up fully, like I'd expect it to, but there was no sensation of pushing back, of hitting a limit to mana capacity. I was sending power into it, and it was being consumed somehow.

Was this just a kinda weird alternate version of an egress rune, dissipating the mana back out into the environment in an unusual way? That would be kind of disappointing after spending a day and a half working on it.

I went to the supply room and got an æthimiter to verify this hypothesis. After getting the readings for the room, the light-aspect rune, and an egress rune as baselines, I touched the tip of the wand to the trenna rune, and the value it gave me was too low. Curious, I ran it across the rune, and saw the mana fade out to ambient levels just as the visible light did.

That made me nervous, and I quickly shattered the plate. The 6th Law of Ætherics states that runes cannot destroy mana, only move it about or use it to produce effects. With no effects that I could discern, either this rune was flouting the 2nd and 6th Laws... or it was sending it somewhere else, making this rune spatial or possibly even planar in nature.

Suddenly I was very glad I'd been testing it in low-mana conditions!

After documenting this, I sent off a quick æmail to Apogee, asking if he could come up here to look at something with me. If there was a good likelihood that this was planar in nature, why not bring in an expert on planar magic? He came by a bit later and I brought him to the isolation chamber.

"I'm working on trying to figure out an unknown rune I discovered," I said. "And the only thing that makes sense is if its nature is planar or spatial." Using a notepad, not really wanting to inscribe the rune live yet, I sketched out my previous experiments and explained to him what had happened.

Apogee let out a slow whistle. "Where did you come across something like this?" he asked, sounding just a bit awed.

"That's... complicated," I said. "Let's just say I was doing some research in an ancient archive."

"Have your secrets if you wish," he said. "Though I would like to see this archive someday."

I thought about it for a moment. "That might be possible. Not right away, but... I'll see what I can do."

He smiled. "This is what I see. This region here, at the core?" He borrowed my pen and sketched out five other runes. "There is no exact science of understanding what a rune does simply by reading its shape, but there is a certain art to it. You know these runes?"

"Most of them. Yeah, I see what you're getting at. These are all planar runes, and this part here is the same in all of them. So this is planar in nature?"

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"I believe it may well be. Now the surroundings, what do you see?"

"Spikes," I said, "poking out all over, like a porcupine. Is this some sort of..." I waved a hand vaguely. "A shield? Like, you flow mana into this and it uses it to establish something to make it really spiky and uncomfortable for any Incursion to cross over nearby? Or am I way off track and reading too much into it?"

Apogee just laughed. "I think you are reading too much into it. No, I look at this and I see rays. Like light flowing from the sun as it crests the horizon. It is hard to say for certain, but my hypothesis is that it takes the energy and dissipates it out into a different plane, much like an egress rune but transplanar."

I bit my lip, thinking. "Is there any good way at all to test that, with the Fast Keys in place?"

He smiled. "For you, alone, no. With the help of a summoner? I believe there may be."

We made a quick trip to the supply room for a couple of flow meter wristbands, then to a different testing room, a containment chamber. Apogee explained that the room was heavily shielded and the walls lined with adamantite just in case anything went wrong, but the actual danger was minimal as long as we followed safety rules.

He took a rune plate and inscribed an ingress rune, fire aspect, and trenna, then linked the trenna to another rune, which he said denoted the plane of fire. "I'm going to call up a small fire sprite," he said, then proceeded to do so, summoning a little figure about a foot tall that danced about like a candle flame. He glanced at the meter. "Thirty-one points of mana. Thirty is typical, so about what I expected." Then he dismissed the summon and reset his meter.

"All right, time to test this. Why don't you push about thirty points into this setup? The local mana environment on the far plane can fluctuate over time, but if you can make it rich with flame essence, it will be much easier for me to pull a second one into the Prime Material."

That made sense. I touched the ingress rune, watching the meter, and let thirty points of mana flow into it. "Now."

Apogee called up another flame sprite that looked exactly like the first one. Maybe it was? Glancing down at his wrist, his face lit up in delight. "Eighteen! Do you know what this means?"

I grumbled a little, just to mess with him. I knew full well what it meant, but I said "it means the process is highly inefficient; you saved less than half of what I spent."

"Forget that, it means it works!" He grabbed both my wrists and began hopping about in a silly little happy-dance. And he was right; this was pretty huge, so I grabbed his wrists in return and danced with him for a minute or so. We laughed as we separated. "Brad, more testing is needed, but I think you can handle it now that you know what you're doing. If this is as useful as it appears, just imagine the bonuses we'll get out of it!" He grinned and headed off, back to work.

Just imagine the bonus. Huh. As I thought about it, I realized I wasn't particularly excited by that thought. Six months ago, I would have been. But now, with a big windfall about to land in my lap in a few more months and a bunch of costs on the horizon that would consume a lot of that anyway, I realized that that motivation wasn't so strong for me anymore. No, what I was imagining now was the potential applications.

Further testing revealed that this rune was surprisingly mana-hungry. No matter how much power I channeled into it, it could accept it. Pressing a small power crystal to a linked ingress rune discharged the whole thing very quickly; pressing the crystal directly against trenna sucked it dry almost instantly and caused it to crack! That was a bit concerning, but could be mitigated easily enough by applying flow-limiting runes ahead of it.

The rest of the day, and the next, went by surprisingly quickly. Elanil proved a very hands-off manager, holding a weekly team meeting on Wednesday just after lunch to make sure everyone was on the same page. They all looked suitably impressed when I said I was researching an undiscovered new planar rune and that I expected to have some results ready to share generally by the end of the week. But otherwise she stayed out of everyone's hair and let us work on our projects unimpeded.

Thursday night at church, I kind of felt like a few people were looking at me funny. I brushed it off, just attributing it to nerves and my own paranoia about people finding out I was a Gentleman and treating me differently. The Esott's reading was from the Book of Bosah, and when he got to the part about everything having an opposite, order and chaos, good and evil, man and woman, fire and water, earth and air, life and death, a thought struck me. Ingress and egress.

Many runes that were complimentary pairs of one another had shapes that were geometrically related. The discovery of trenna was pretty cool from a pure-theory perspective, but my testing hadn't shown that it was particularly useful in terms of practical applications. But if I could come up with a working inverse rune to it, that would be a marvel of marvels: instead of a sink that drains mana into other planes, this could be a tap that draws it into ours!

My mind racing, I skipped eventide school and headed home right after the main service, using my rune tablet to calculate the inverse rune. I ended up with a strange, complex design, looking like two mountains side by side with swirling lines waving between the bases and peaks. I started playing around with designs, sketching out entire pages of my notepad, and it wasn't long before I looked up and realized it was after midnight.

I didn't feel tired, but I knew my body needed sleep. Grumbling to myself, I etched a simple enchantment to put me out for a few hours with a sleep spell so I could get at least a bit of rest.

At work on Friday, I headed to the containment chamber and inscribed some very careful limiting runes and circles. If this tap rune was without inherent limits in its flow rate too, I was going to be extra careful to make sure I didn't accidentally end up creating some sort of grenade!

I linked the filters to an egress rune, and inside the innermost circle I inscribed the symbol for the demiplane of music and linked it to the inverse trenna. Immediately, a low, sweet tone began to emit from the rune plate, like someone dragging a bow endlessly across a violin string. It was working!

A few more tests showed I could pull mana successfully from various different planes. I felt excitement well up in me as I headed to my desk and began writing up my results as a research paper. I ignored trenna entirely and focused on the inverse rune, to which I gave the name "tap."

The Tap rune: an investigation into a potential source of unlimited clean energy

This was going to change the world.