Later that night, everyone was lounging around in Jeremy and Caleb’s room. Zanie had come over to work with Hazel on putting his translation spell into the notes section at the back of the book while Jeremy and Caleb sat on one of the beds, hunched over the tablet to scroll through the book and find the section of illusionary magic.
Unfortunately, the translation spell was incredibly complex and far beyond their reach as little level-one practitioners. The highest step spell they had been able to manage was the three-step life sense or scan spell, and the translation spell was apparently upwards of eight steps. It took a high amount of mana to cast initially, even though maintaining it was only a small drain on Hazel. Then again, Hazel was almost level six, and so his pool of mana was large enough for it to be a small drain. It would suck Jeremy or anyone else who was only level one dry.
Hazel did not have a very scientific understanding of magic and leveling up. This was all rather intuitive to the elves, just like casting spells was more about visualizing the results rather than hard and fast rules like Jeremy could see. They knew that as you practiced, you became more efficient at casting spells, just like when you practiced anything else and got better at it.
And when you reach a certain proficiency, you would have a breakthrough, that expanded the pool of mana from which you were able to draw. Hazel had explained that these breakthroughs often came with epiphanies as well, which became more profound the higher level you reached. These were things like gaining better intuition or becoming more sound in body. When Jeremy told him about being able to see the actual eddies of mana in the air, not just when it was highly concentrated in an overlay or spell, Hazel nodded enthusiastically and said this was likely a manifestation of one of those epiphanies.
Jeremy noted all of that down and tried not to feel too disappointed that he would not be able to read the book like he had thought. Even when Hazel broke down the spell, he constantly ran into one that could be cast for a certain length of time for reading translation only; it was far beyond Jeremy’s reach. In the end, illusionary magic like that was too difficult. The scan spell was simpler since it was only transcribing and showing a single output instead of a constant string of words being read. But it was still not a beginner-level spell.
“Where do we even find mana crystals to enchant?” Jeremy asked the room at large.
“I would assume in dungeons,” Caleb said, “Isn’t that what all those crystals in the last dungeon were?”
“I don’t know because we couldn’t take them. They wouldn’t break off the wall, so I thought maybe they were just a part of the environment created by the dungeon.” Jeremy put his hands behind himself on the bed and leaned back to glance over at Hazel expectantly.
He looked up from the phone, which Zanie and he were bent over, and shrugged. “I know about as much about dungeons as you do.”
“Where would you find them in your world?” Caleb asked.
“Anywhere that there are high amounts of mana,” Hazel said.
Jeremy nodded at that. It would make sense that mana crystals would show up in dungeons then.
“That’s that.” Zanie lowered the phone and looked at Hazel, “Thanks for showing us that spell.”
Hazel just smiled and sat on the edge of the other bed, facing Jeremy and Caleb. “So you wanted me to look at this book and translate some of it for you?”
“If you could,” Jeremy held the tablet out to him. “I want to find a rune to modify the illusion magic so that the output is numeric instead of infrared.”
Hazel took the tablet and looked down at it. The air conditioner kicked on behind him, blowing against the curtains drawn across the window. Then he set the tablet aside and folded his hands in his lap.
“It is not a rune you are looking for, but a modifier.”
“Yes, a…are the modifiers not runes?” Jeremy asked.
Hazel shook his head. “Do you have the piece of paper from earlier?”
Zanie, who had become the keeper of such things over the past couple of days, grabbed her backpack and sat beside Hazel to sort through the front pocket and find the spell. Caleb perked up a little as though reminded of something and pulled out his phone.
“I should try to make some bags of holding for us.” He scrolled through his phone to find the picture he had taken of Hazel’s pocket yesterday.
“That enchantment is likely to be similar to the translation spell in that it is beyond your capabilities at the moment.” Hazel said, then when Caleb sent him disappointed, puppy dog eyes, he tacked on, “Although, given your gift, I’m sure you will be able to create the enchantment in no time.”
Caleb rolled his eyes and dropped his phone to his lap. “We’ll all probably have broken our backs carrying these bags around by then.”
“Here,” Zanie held out the life sense spell to get them all back on track. “Let me put it into the back of the book too.”
She picked up the tablet to do this while Hazel took the paper from her and held it between the beds so they could all see as he pointed to the modifier beneath the illusion rune.
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“This is not a rune, but a language, specific instructions telling the illusion how to manifest,” he told them. “I see it as my language because of the translation spell, so I had assumed it was in English, and you understood that already."
Jeremy pursed his lips and shook his head. “No, it looks like symbols to me, which is why I assumed it was another type of rune.”
Thinking back on it now, he did remember wondering when he first looked at the spell if the modifiers in the life sense spell were some type of language rather than runes. But they had looked so different from what he was used to as words that he just continued to think of them as perhaps a subset of runes of some kind. It turned out his first instinct was correct.
“What does it say?”
Hazel tilted his head to read better while still holding the paper so that Zanie could see it and copy it into the book. “It’s just specifying the color output of the concentrations—exactly what you saw when you cast the spell.”
“So, can the instructions be written in any language?” Caleb asked.
“Yes.” Hazel nodded.
“Oh, cool,” Caleb smacked Jeremy on the side of the arm. “That makes trying to change the output a whole lot easier. All we have to do is write what we want it to show.”
Jeremy nodded.
“So, what do we want it to show?”
“A numeric output of some kind, right?” Zanie offered. “That would be easier to understand and track than a color output, right? I mean, it’s more difficult to remember that green is above red on the color spectrum than that seven is higher than three, right?”
“Right, we should base it off the color spectrum since that is what I see, and I’m pretty sure that I’m seeing a true representation of mana. How many colors are there?”
“Um, just basic color wheel colors?” Caleb frowned, picking up his phone. “I think like seven or eight? Did they give us a wifi password?”
“It’s just open internet.” Zanie offered immediately. Caleb hummed in thanks, then fiddled around on his phone to look up how many colors there were. Jeremy shook his head, feeling like maybe none of them should have ever made it past elementary school if they couldn’t remember how many basic colors there were.
“Seven colors in a rainbow,” Caleb said.
Jeremy frowned. If they were going to split up leveling, it would be much easier to do so on a scale of ten rather than seven. Maybe they did not need to actually base it on the colors; they could just tell the spell to split up the spectrum into ten sections regardless of the color output.
Zanie was telling Hazel that he did not need to hold the piece of paper up any longer, and then she turned to Caleb and asked, “The rainbow is the same as the visible color spectrum, right?”
“I think so?” Caleb tapped at his phone and then started reading off of it. “Yes, the visible light spectrum is the section of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum visible to the human eye. It ranges from 400 to 700nm, from violet to red.”
At the mention of nice round numbers like that, Jeremy sat forward. “It’s 300 in length? So, we could theoretically split that up into ten sections?”
“I guess.” Caleb shrugged and kept scrolling through whatever Wikipedia article he had found.
“So the modifier just needs to tell the illusion magic to transcribe the spectrum of mana concentration into an actual numeric scale, then show where on the scale the output from whatever you are scanning falls,” Jeremy leaned back against the mattress so that he could dig his pen and notebook out of his pocket. He clicked the pen, held it over the paper, and froze.
“Can I just write that?” He glanced at Hazel. Writing a whole paragraph of instructions for a spell seemed inefficient, especially if they planned to eventually tack this spell onto the end of the enchantment runes and carve it into a mana crystal. There had to be some way to write it in fewer words.
“You can write whatever you want as long as the instructions are clear,” Hazel assured him.
Jeremy tapped the end of the pen against the notebook and frowned harder. He could literally write ‘transcribe mana spectrum into numeric scale’, but then he would have to explain the parameters of the scale. And if they wanted to split it into ten sections to make the output simpler to understand, he could have to specify that as well. He furrowed his brow.
“Here,” Zanie held out her hands, “Give me that.”
He frowned up at her instead of his notebook. She made a grabby motion with her fingers and smiled. “I’m literally a program developer, remember? Let me take a crack at it.”
She scribbled for a little while, tilting her head and crossing things out, then trying again. At one point, she asked them to remind her of the length of the visible light spectrum, then muttered something under her breath as she tore out the entire page and began again. Finally, she turned the notebook around to show Jeremy.
shift spectrum about the equation (X - 400)/3 = N where N is output and X is the Spectrum, leading to out put from 0 to 100
make 3, 30 get out put in groups of 10
Jeremy furrowed his brow. “What?”
She laughed a him and pointed with the back of the pen, explaining, “This here is setting up the parameters, then this is telling it to put out a number zero through ten depending where on the equation it falls.”
“If you say so,” Jeremy said. It was certainly more efficient than the whole paragraph it would have taken him to explain to the spell what he wanted it to do. He pushed the paper in Hazel’s direction. “Would that work?”
“You humans and your equations,” Hazel joked good-naturedly without hardly glancing at the script. “Everything is about numbers with you.”
“They are the universal language.” Zanie chirped. Caleb let out an agonized groan, and she shot him an indignant look. Then, intent on ignoring him, she said, “Let’s give it a try and see if it works!”
Jeremy took the pen from her and scribbled out the rest of the spell around the script so that it fell into place where the strange language sat in the arrangement of the life-sense spell. He was not really sure how important the arrangement was, but he figured if they were going to experiment with things, it should be one at a time. Then, he held the paper out to Caleb.
“Knock yourself out.”
“You don’t want to try it?”
Jeremy shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll all get some practice in as we tweak it. Even if this works, it’s probably not perfect. After all, Zanie, you said you couldn’t see runes yet.”
“That’s right.”
Caleb took the notebook and looked down at the spell as Jeremy continued talking, “I think it would be important for people to not only see what level they or an enemy is at, but also what type of magic they use. What their unique personality trait is, you know?”
“Oh, cool,” Caleb said almost instantly after casting the spell. “It’s just a regular number, which is neat. It looks like we are all at two while Hazel is at nine. Man, you do have a lot of rings, don’t you?”
He said that the last part to Hazel, who pursed his lips and looked like he might disagree but decided against it. Jeremy rubbed a hand over his smile and made eye contact with Zanie, who looked pretty smug herself.
“Nice job,” he told her, and she beamed at him.
“You guys should figure out how to make the rings into a numeric output, too,” Caleb suggested, handing the notebook back over. “That way, everything is all the same kind of thing.”
Jeremy took the notebook back and smiled down at it. He was certain they could figure out how to do that, just like he was certain they could figure out how to do a lot of things from this spell.