The smell of burning wood and hot metal had gradually filled the bagel shop. Jeremy finished burning the runes into one of the plaques around the same time that Zanie sent out the final version of the newsletter. It was not so different from the educational pamphlets that Moira told Jeremy the adventurer’s guild was making, so some of the material would seem familiar to the people from the guild or refugee camp at large who had signed up for it. But the scan spell would be new and the folks back at the police precinct and power company would have a guide to basic elemental magic now.
Apparently, cell phone coverage was not an issue at the refugee camp where the Adventurer’s Guild had set up. Moira said there were generators running to power charging stations. Jeremy could not imagine the lines there must be for that tent.
“Hey, Zanie?” he asked, holding up his woodburning work to inspect it. “Do you think you could learn to control your electricity to the point where you could charge our electronics?”
That would essentially negate their need to find working power outlets to charge all their stuff. She looked up from her laptop and shook her head, eyes wide. “Man, I’d be too scared of frying them to try.”
“Oh, come on,” Caleb was half-laying across one of the tables, head pillowed on one of his arms as he scrolled lazily through his phone on the table below his face. He rolled his head to look at Zanie. “You just have to practice on something like…aren’t their little meters you can buy that tell you amperage and stuff. You need to practice on something like that.”
“That’s a good idea,” Zanie’s fingers clacked over her keyboard. “Amp meter. Huh. Cell phones draw between 0.5 and 2.4 amps. I guess I could try to get that precise.”
“That would probably be good practice for you,” Jeremy encouraged. “Besides, I think if you were to like hold a cord instead of trying to charge the phone directly, most chargers have built-in limiters to protect the phone, so I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”
“Okay, too bad Amazon is probably not delivering anymore,” She hummed.
“We’re too on the move for that anyway,” Caleb dropped his face back down to look at his phone. “Where is the nearest hardware store? We could probably get a chisel there too.”
While they figured all that out, Jeremy turned back to his enchanted plaque. It was so much easier to burn the runes into the wood than to carve them. They were far more precise, and he could make them small enough that he probably would have been able to fit the scan enchantment in its entirety, although probably not the crystals, onto the small plaque. Hopefully, that also meant that the enchantment would be better as well.
He stood up and looked around the room at all the electronics charging and people and decided it would probably be better to test the enchantment outside. So, he pushed through the door and went to the side of the parking lot that was empty of cars. The weather had cooled off considerably and the leaves of some trees were beginning to change color in earnest. In particular, there was a line of bright red maples lining one side of the parking lot and further down the street, in someone’s yard, there was a tree turning pale yellow.
Jeremy observed the ruined side of the building for a moment. It looked like maybe a hair salon or barber shop had once stood there. A few of that style of chair were strewn about amongst shattered shards from a number of mirrors which the blue sky back on itself and splintered wood from the structure of the building itself. Moira had crushed half of a bar while she was a dragon and it looked like something of a similar caliber had come through here.
He shook his head and positioned himself in the middle of the asphalt, away from anything else, then placed the plaque on the ground in front of his feet, just to the left of a faded, white parking space line. He straightened and held his hand over it, watching the mana cascade down from his palm to fill the little black runes scorched into the wood. Much to his surprise, and delight, the demonic void did not immediately begin creeping over the plaque and parking lot, which hopefully meant it had worked.
He whirled around, searching for something to look at and realized that the error in coming out here had been that now nobody was around for him to scan. He had himself though. He dropped his gaze to his chest and saw that along with his normal view of the overlay and runes, there was a little display with his progression in numeric terms-spectrum 3. He had not included the runes to transform the rings into numbers, nor to scan for the attributes, so this display, along with his single ring—which he could already see—were the only things visible because of the enchantment.
“Did it work?” Hazel called, coming through the door and walking across the parking lot toward him. It was probably fairly obvious given the lack of demonic void that it had, but Jeremy nodded and called back that it had. Hazel stopped beside him and stooped to pick up the plaque. In the last moments that the enchantment was active, Jeremy caught sight of his display as well—spectrum: 9. The same as last time.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“How come you haven’t leveled up yet?” Jeremy asked as the display faded. “You’ve been close for a long time? Are you preventing yourself from doing so?”
Hazel looked from the plaque to Jeremy with another one of those slightly, amused smiles of his. “No, it just becomes increasingly difficult to break through levels the higher you go. What we have been doing has not been enough to level me.”
He turned and pointed with the plaque to the destroyed building. “That might be, whatever it is.”
“Do you have any guesses?” Jeremy asked hopefully.
“No,” Hazel shrugged. “But with a path of destruction like that, we can probably track it. And I bet the people in the doctor’s office over there know what it was.”
“Will you be able to take on something like that?” Jeremy raised his eyebrows at the destruction, imagining Hazel fighting a tornado or something of the like.
“Maybe,” Hazel turned away from the building, looking unconcerned. “Depends on what it actually is. Some things I would not want to fight without the backup of a properly leveled mage, although I imagine you and your friends could be somewhat helpful.”
Jeremy held his hand out for the plaque and Hazel handed it back with a warning. “I probably wouldn’t use it again. My guess is that the integrity of the runes is probably already compromised.”
“We’ve got to find a stone,” Caleb announced, joining them, and peering down at the plaque curiously. “There is a hardware store just down the road that we can hit and pick up a chisel and amp meter. Zanie can hang with the electronics while they charge if we want to go check it out.”
“A dragon scale will still probably be easier to use than an ordinary chisel,” Hazel reminded him.
He snapped his fingers and pointed at Hazel. “That’s right! I forgot about that. Then we just need to find a rock.”
He peered around and spotted a target—the pile of rocks layered around a culvert that went beneath the road and into a drainage ditch just past the row of scarlet maple trees. He held his hands out, muttering under his breath about increasing his range, and nothing happened.
“I think you are too far away,” Jeremy crossed his arms and watched the runes of his spell go off successfully, but to no effect. Caleb huffed and walked forward about ten feet before trying again. Then repeated the action until he was close enough for one of the rocks to lift into the air, float over, and drop into his hand. He lifted it up in triumph and marched back over.
“Here,” he held the rock out and Jeremy unfolded his arms to take it. The surface was rough and warmed by the sun. It was just ordinary riprap and there was a smooth surface about the side of his palm on one end that he could probably use to carve the runes. It would be akin to trying to carve on the wood instead of using the wood burner, cruder and blockier. And, since it was rock, more difficult he imagined.
“Will carving into this even be precise enough to make a good enchantment?” Jeremy asked.
Hazel shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that material and it’s up to your ability to carve and skill in enchantment. The only way to find out is to try.”
“Jeeze, okay.” Jeremy looked at the difference between the larger rock and small, precise plaque. Burning the runes into the wood had also taken far less time than carving them. He heaved a sigh and started back toward the bagel shop, leaving Caleb and Hazel behind. Caleb began making guesses about what had crushed the end of the building, while Hazel pulled his hair out of its tie and began carding his fingers through it, humming and either agreeing or disagreeing with each of Caleb’s guesses.
Inside the shop, Zanie was still in front of her laptop, although she was sitting back with her arms crossed and her feet kicked up on a chair now. From the sounds, it appeared she had taken to catching up on the news while they had wifi. Jeremy tuned the sounds out and pulled the dragon scale that he kept on his belt beside his knife out.
He frowned at it, a little sad because Hazel said it had probably lost its bulletproof qualities by now, but hopeful that it was still hard enough to chisel away at the rock. It had a sharp enough edge that he could probably carve pretty precisely, but he needed a hammer of some kind if he was going to use it as a chisel. Too bad Caleb had not gotten him two rocks. He glanced around in thought for something else he could use and caught sight of someone opening the door.
It was actually several someone’s, two young women and a man in scrubs.
“Hello,” one woman said, looking around at their sprawl of electronics plugged into the wall, the few bags that weren’t tucked away in Hazel’s pocket slumped on the ground, and the carbines laying across one of the tables.
“Hi.” Jeremy said. Zanie did not move a muscle, just sitting with her arms crossed, eyes on the group, and news playing softly in the background.
They obviously did not mean any harm. For one, they were completely unarmed. And also, they had come into the bagel shop while Hazel and Caleb were still outside to their backs. Most likely, they were just from the doctors office and were curious about who was crashing the closed-down bagel shops a few doors away.
“We’re just charging our stuff, then we’ll move on,” Jeremy said. “Not trying to make any trouble. The door was open.”
“Alright,” the first woman nodded.
The other woman glanced back at the door, and then at the flashing open sign. She rolled her eyes and said, “That’s what Theresa gets for sending her kid over to lock the place up.”
“We saw your friend out there levitating a rock!” the guy jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Oh yeah, that’s Caleb,” Jeremy nodded, surprised that was what they focused on rather than Hazel, although perhaps they were far enough away that his ears were not so obvious.
“Okay,” the first woman to speak shot the man a look. “We just wanted to see what was going on because we thought that they’d closed up the shop over here.”
“Is it alright if we finish charging our stuff?” Jeremy asked.
The woman’s eyes cut to the pile of guns. “Sure.”
“Hey,” Zanie interjected. “Do you know what messed up the other end of the building?”