They went back outside to the same spot in the parking lot where Jeremy had tested the wood-burned enchantment. Zanie stood a little distance away when he instructed her to walk in the direction of the collapsed end of the building and observe it with new eyes, now that they had some idea of what had caused it. Jeremy, too, looked over and paused for a moment to envision a group of hulking ogres in the pre-dawn morning light, smashing huge clubs into the building and whipping up a tornado.
Did they do it for fun, or were they looking for something? Was the use of wind magic just to shove the massive wooden splinters through the drywall like darts, or had they been deliberately sifting through the wreckage? Hazel made them sound fairly unintelligent. It hardly took much to do wind magic, but it did take a little leap of cognition and imagination to do magic at all.
He shook his head and set the rock down on the ground, then poured mana into the runes. It flowed well enough, not as quickly and precisely as it had in the smaller wood-burned plaque, but his marks had been fairly even and there were no missed spots to act as dams and prevent the mana from working its magic. Once the runes were filled, he braced himself for the worst and took a step back. But nothing happened.
He whipped his head up and waved Zanie over. “It didn’t go wrong at least! Come over here and let me see if it worked.”
She jogged over, and he realized with a start that he could already see the little display in addition to her overlay despite the distance between them. When he’d successfully gotten the wood-burned enchantment to go off, he’d only seen Hazel’s display when he came quite close to Jeremy and the plaque. Although he could not remember the exact distance, it was definitely not the same as the twenty feet or so that Zanie was crossing.
Even the scan spell, when cast, only scanned a radius of about ten feet or so from what Jeremy had observed thus far.
“What?” Zanie asked as she came closer, reading the surprise on his face.
“This enchantment works even better than the one I did earlier or the spell itself. Or, well, it covers more distance.”
Zanie crossed her arms and peered down at it. “Doesn’t that make sense? Wouldn’t it get better as you practiced it?”
Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t think so. Your electricity spell won’t get stronger as you practice, only if you add more strengthening modifiers to it, right?”
Zanie only frowned down, apparently unable to think up a response. Jeremy had expected some differences since the rock carving was cruder than the wood burning, but he had expected a difference in the success of the enchantment, not its range. He thought going back to creating the runes with less refined tools and materials meant it would be more likely to misfire, just like the wood-carved one had. Yet, somehow, it not only went off without a hitch, it worked even better.
A meow drew his attention to the side. Atticus had slipped out the door with them and sat on one of the concrete parking lot blocks, which had been knocked diagonal to its space at some point. She flicked her tail at him, and he squinted at her. Just like she had no visible overlay, there was no display, even though she was within range.
Jeremy clicked his tongue and began to think that was increasingly suspicious. Even plants had a faint overlay, down to a blade of grass, but his cat did not? She peered innocently up at him, then turned to observe something behind his back.
“Oh, look,” Zanie pointed in the same direction Atticus was looking, “It’s Caleb and Hazel. What are they doing over there?”
Jeremy turned to see that they were crossing the parking lot toward them, not from the clinic where he thought they had been the whole time he’d been enchanting the rock, but from the road. Caleb was swinging a plastic bag in one hand. Neither of them had displays visible in front of their chests. From this distance, well over twenty feet, Jeremy would not have been able to read the numbers anyway.
He glanced down at the rock to see that all of the mana had dissipated from the runes, so the enchantment had simply run its course already. With a quick check, he realized he also could not see Zanie’s overlay. Then he sighed and pulled his notebook out of his pocket to jot down a quick note in his to-do list that they probably needed to think about the fact that the enchantment showed the read-out on the scanned creature instead of near the person who’d cast it.
“Hey!” Caleb called, making the plastic bag crinkle as he waved it around. Beside him, Hazel was also carrying a box. “We ran over to the hardware store, and it was open! The shelves were wiped clean of a lot of stuff, like, not as bad as the grocery stores, but wow…anyway, nobody cared to buy out the amp meters, though!”
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He handed the bag to Zanie, then gestured to the box in Hazel’s hands, “And we brought you something too, Jer.”
Jeremy took the box from Hazel with a grunt when it was heavier than he expected. He flipped up one of the cardboard flaps and found an electric engraver with many squares of shiny stainless-steel plaques. No wonder the box had been heavy.
“Thanks.” Jeremy picked up the engraver and looked it over. If he was going to use it, they would definitely need to find a reliable source of electricity. But engraving on metal seemed like the next logical step. He had apparently gotten practiced enough at enchanting in general to be able to create successfully, even improved, enchantments despite moving to an unfamiliar material like a rock. So, jumping to steel should also be fine.
“Hey, Hazel.” He set the engraved back down in the box. “I could enchant the rock on the first try, and it worked even better than the wood-burned plaque, even though the runes were more crudely carved. Is there a reason for that?”
Hazel tilted his head to the side. “What do you mean it worked better?”
“It had a larger range.”
“Ah,” he nodded and looked down at the rock at Jeremy’s feet. “That’s because you changed the material. As you practice, you improve your ability to create enchantments that will successfully work as intended. As you improve the material, the enchantment itself works better. Often, our weapons are comprised entirely of steel, shaft and all so that the enchantments on them can be more effective.”
“Oh,” Jeremy looked down at the box. “So not only is it better to use metal because it does not degrade as quickly, but also because it literally makes the enchantment work better.”
“That is correct.”
He wondered if mana shared some of the same properties as electricity. Not only did the mana need to flow through a flawless, uninterrupted circuit of runes, but the material being enchanted also impacted its effectiveness. Electricity could not be conducted as efficiently through wood as it could through metal. And since the amount of mana that was required to power the enchantment seemed to remain the same—too little and it would not go off, and too much and you would destroy the enchanted object—this manifested in a better use of the mana, resulting in a better effect of the enchantment.
He needed to start engraving on metal instead of messing around with wood or stone, even if he was trying to work out a prototype. He glanced at the coffee shop and sighed. After a couple of hours of enchanting and testing the enchantments, he probably had it in him to utilize their current source of electricity and test out the metal with the electric engraver, but he probably would not be able to get through the entire scan enchantment and all its parts, including the inclusion of the crystals, before they should keep heading for his parents. He looked at Zanie fiddling with the amp meter and chewed on his bottom lip.
Then inspiration struck. “Could I create an enchantment that would make electricity? Not just lightning bolts, but that worked like a power outlet?”
Hazel merely shrugged, and before he could repeat once again that he was not an enchanter or say something about how he did not really understand power outlets enough to answer that question, Jeremy waved him off. “I’m mostly thinking out loud.”
But they knew the enchantment runes, how to manifest electricity, and how to add scripts to that manifestation to control the amperage. He grinned down at the box, suddenly excited because he knew how he was going to utilize the rest of their time in the bagel shop.
Everyone else trailed after him as he made his way back inside, Zanie pausing to scoop up the enchanted rock and Hazel pausing to scoop up Atticus. He also seemed pleased that she had popped back up.
As Jeremy pushed aside the wood-burning equipment and set up the engraver instead, Caleb took Hazel into the back of the shop to utilize their kitchen to cook something for everyone to eat. They were almost down to the MREs. With access to a kitchen, they could cook some of the things that were a little less feasible on the move.
Hazel did not have a single cooking pot in all of the depths of his pocket and the entire armory it contained. And he had not been provided one either since the military had just loaded him up with the MREs. Thus, they had been unable to cook the dried beans that he had picked up along the way.
“I actually thought they were seeds,” Hazel had admitted when he pulled them out while taking an inventory of all the things he had collected one time. The three of them had been astonished to find out that, apparently, elves did not dry beans of any kind, eating them only fresh and preserved in a process that sounded just like Jeremy’s dad’s pickling.
In any case, Caleb was pulling them out to soak for a couple of hours while he whipped up some tacos, using the last of the massive pack of corn tortillas they had been slathering peanut butter on and rolling up as snacks on the go. There was a stove in the back and some pans, meaning he could fry up and char the canned chicken and tomatoes into a taco filling. This made it far more delicious than if Zanie had heated the ingredients and then they spooned them over the tortillas. It was the little things at this point.
Since Caleb was soaking beans to cook them up later, Jeremy figured they had decided to spend the night here. Having four walls around them would be nice after several days of camping out in the woods. Not that those four walls necessarily provided actual protection, given how they had readily crumbled before a company of ogres, but it still felt more secure. And there was electricity and a restroom. They should probably try to find a hotel for the next night so they could all take showers, he mused, scratching his chin where his scruff had grown uncomfortable again. Maybe he should give up and let his beard grow out.
He thought all those thoughts while scanning over the instructions for the engraver. Better to get them out before he needed to concentrate on enchanting again. It was a different kind of concentration than most things called for, a kind of meditative state, but which left him more exhausted instead of refreshed. So before engraving the runes for the power outlet enchantment, he ran his idea for putting the enchantment together by the rest of the group as they ate the tacos.