The week before Christmas, or Kurisumasu, passed quickly. Paul thought that Inari must have had a quiet word with the rest of their merry band, as he found himself frequently sitting quietly with Inari, Shoko or one of the others… not talking but engrossed in their own business, as he worked on his.

He also found himself smiling at times, for no good reason, but just because he was silently content.

The first time it happened, Inari glanced up and caught him with a slight smile on his face. She raised an eyebrow at him, to which unasked question, Paul just shrugged and returned to the task in hand, still smiling. Inari had made a tiny ‘Eee!’ sound and had the biggest grin on her face for hours afterwards.

The donated presents, in light of the weather, had been stacked in the main hall… and it was only after Paul noticed that the JSDF contingent had made a delivery for the third day running that he went to check it out.

The pile was large enough that he had some immediate concerns about the floor joists.

Spotting Major Yagi he skirted around the perimeter of the small mountain, and caught up with her as she was studying a clipboard.

“Afternoon major… that’s quite the haul!”

“Good afternoon Holmes-san… ah, yes. Although this is only a third of it.”

“Bloody hell! Really?”

“Yes sir! The rest are in a warehouse in town, we’re organising more trucks and volunteers to move them, but I don’t think there’s the space here for it. However, Inari-sama insists that the presents have to come here first.”

“Hm, that’s right. The mana field is strongest here, and that star on top of the tree outside acts as a guidance beacon for the messenger foxes. They’re basically automated drones, in effect. They need a navigational beacon to steer by or they get lost.”

“Oh! Is that how it works? Like radio direction finding in planes… ah, I have a cousin in the air-force.”

“Yes, exactly like that.”

Paul turned to eyeball the pile, a thoughtful look on his face.

“That’s a third of our total?”

“So far, sir. The JPS say they’ve still got donations pouring in from all over the country, even overseas. It seems word has spread. I’m expecting another lorry-load later today, and at least two more before the 24th. That would roughly double the quantity.”

Paul nodded.

“Never underestimate the power of collective guilt I guess.. It’s too much though.”

“Sir?”

“Even delivering to every child, human or yokai, in Kami, we’d only dent that heap a bit. We need to think bigger.”

Major Yagi, who was also in charge of the volunteers folding paper foxes, looked doubtfully at Paul over her glasses.

“Um, how much bigger, sir?”

“Prefecture wide, at least. Depends on if we get a late rush of donations as people realise it’s getting close and those that have been putting it off decide to do something at the last minute.”

Major Yagi sighed, nodding.

“We are going to need a lot more paper folding then… sir.”

“Yeahhh.. pity there isn’t some sort of machine that could do it.”

Major Yagi nodded, then looked thoughtful.

“Umm, maybe someone could make something like that, I’ve seen videos of paper aeroplane folding machines made from Lego stuff. Although the paper fox masks are a lot more complicated.”

Paul’s eyes widened as an idea struck him…

“Not a machine, well not just a machine, but a spell! Some sort of mechanism to deliver a sheet of paper at a time onto a surface, which will print the fox spell upon it then a spell diagram built into it is triggered that folds the paper in the specific pattern making the mask! I could do that! Although.. Inari would still have to initiate them in bulk and imprint directions, program them. She’s the only one with the power to do that.”

“You could? That would free more personnel to wrap presents, a lot more.. I was thinking it was going to be close, and if we got a late surge we wouldn’t get it all done in time, but now we might.”

Paul nodded.

“Yeah, I’m sure of it, leave it to me. Although… then we do have another problem. The beacon isn’t strong enough to reach the whole prefecture, and there’s still dead spots here and there...”

“Couldn’t the foxes carry their own power source? Like a battery?”

“Yeah, that’s easy enough, but the dead spots also interrupt the signal. They’d get lost.”

“Oh… pity you can’t fit them with GPS.”

“Yeah. Wait a minute! RDF, radio direction finding! That’s still a thing right? As a back-up to gps.”

“Yes, of course. All airports have RDF beacons.”

“Right, and radio waves are just an electromagnetic field, which I could tune into with the right spell! We could use the commercial RDF beacons to navigate the drones by.”

Major Yagi frowned.

“I..could be wrong.. but I’m sure my cousin said the accuracy of those wasn’t great.. down to the nearest few tens of feet maybe.”

Paul shook his head.

“That’s all they’d need, the spell animating the messenger foxes can home in on its destination as long as it’s within a half mile.”

“Ah. Ok, how long before you might have the paper folding thing ready to go?”

“This evening, probably, at the latest. I have apprentices now, they can help out in the test phase. Major Yagi, could you find out the information on RDF beacons for Hyogo prefecture?”

“Yes sir! Right away sir!”

Major Yagi snapped off a salute, and hurried off… leaving Paul chuckling behind her. She’d evidently temporarily forgotten he was a civilian. Although, he supposed that a Herald might outrank a Major.. in much the same way that a Sargent with a plan outranked a Lieutenant with no idea what was going on. Or so it was said.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

A short while later, and Paul and his three apprentices, and one senior witch, convened in his workshop, brainstorming how to make a paper folding spell. The middle one of the three girls, Chiyo, had knack for this form of magic.. and quickly ended up being the unofficial team leader. Akio, the eldest and evidently a closet punk at heart, pouted a bit about that. Paul surmised that she thought that, as eldest, she should be in charge.

So he set her to doing fault testing, I.e finding ways to break the design and finding errors. A task she attacked with glee.

While the girls worked on the spell side of the mechanism, Paul quickly whipped together a crude paper delivery system, mated to a simple ‘wood block’ style printer and mana power supply for the gizmo, and then went on to start designing a spell circuit that would detect the RDF signal and turn it into navigational instructions. Which partly involved looking up the wiring diagrams of radio systems, because what better spell inscription was there, than the actual circuit diagram of the thing the spell was copying the function of? It certainly looked arcane enough to his eyes.

He was testing the concept, having folded a simplified radio-control spell talisman into a paper aeroplane, when Major Yagi came in. The paper aeroplane dive bombed past her, banked, and zipped past her again as she spun in place.

As Paul gestured, it pulled up into a stall turn, and zipped down to land on the work bench. All the while Paul was grinning like the 12 year old boy he’d momentarily become.

“I see you got some sort of spell to work...”

“Yup, turns out, magic and radio-waves synergise quite nicely. You have the data I asked for?”

“Yes sir… luckily it’s not classified, and they didn’t ask for an explanation.”

“Hoo, yeah, that would’ve been an awkward conversation. Thank you Major.”

Paul glanced at the short, mousy, and hesitant army major, and grinned at her.

“Wanna stay and watch the magic at work?”

“Oo! Can I?! Ah… that is..”

Major Yagi didn't get any further as Paul was laughing.

“Major, I am not going to tell anyone if you want to forget about being an adult for a few minutes and play hookie, because this stuff really is that cool, and frankly I get a blast showing off too!”

“Hookie?”

“Cutting class, ducking out of school..”

“Oh! I never..”

“I am not surprised… c’mon, take a walk on the wild side with us, just a bit.”

The Major looked torn for a moment, then carefully took her jacket off, hanging it up over the back of a chair.

“Ok then… just for bit.”

“Atta girl… hey, I can’t keep calling you Major Yagi if you’re off-duty.”

“Oh, yes… call me Hachi.”

“Hm, lots of older siblings?”

“Yes, seven.. I think my parents ran out of ideas when they called me Eight.”

“Right.. ok, watch closely, this is how the magic works...”

Paul showed Hachi how the spell diagram was laid out on the talisman, contained and powered by the circle of iron-oxide ink made from shavings of the iron ore from the mine. He showed her the simple battery powered mana convertor that would act as backup power in the event of a localised dead spot.

Finally he ran a pre-enchanted test sheet through the gizmo, which folded it into a fox mask, which Paul invoked by twisting one of the two calcite crystals in series in the circuit, which polarised the mana flow. He twisted the first crystal, so it aligned with the second, allowing the energy to flow through, and the fox mask sprang to life.

It floated up a few feet, ghostly blue energy swirling around it like clouds of smoke, taking on the form of a small fox. Around it’s neck the cylinder of the mana convertor hung on a silver cord of silken thread, over a red silk bandanna bearing Inari’s Mon, or seal, in gold. Paul handed it a small note, which it clamped in its jaws.

“Take that to Inari.”

The messenger fox bobbed it’s translucent head, and ran off though the air. Hachi watched it all in wide eyed astonishment. Even Maaya seemed impressed, in spite of herself… while the three young girls hopped up and down in glee and excitement.

Paul kept a careful eye on his watch, and within a few minutes the messenger fox returned, dropping the folded over bit of paper into his hand with a yipping bark, before it dissolved into wisps of something not-quite smoke-like that curled upwards and vanished.

“Hmm… three minutes and twelve seconds. Inari is at the town hall, so given the distance, that’s roughly twenty five miles an hour. I can easily increase that, I was being conservative with the power, just in case we have the same problem as the lanterns had with resistance in the circuit producing heat… so, I figure maybe a top speed of seventy five once it’s optimised. That’ll do.”

Hachi finally found her voice..

“That. Is. SO COOL!”

Paul grinned, and bowed like a magician at the successful conclusion of a trick.

“Cool enough to seduce you away from the army life?”

Paul thought he had to give her credit, Hachi actually thought about the suggestion for a moment, then shook her head.

“Tempting..but no. I mean, what would I do? I don’t have your imagination, or their talent.. I’m just a clerk really.”

“Someone’s got to keep the books for the temple… but yeah. Although I could teach you the process, and let you come up with your own spells.”

Hachi shook her head once again.

“I wouldn’t dare… it’d be like juggling live grenades.”

“Hmm…true enough. Tell you what though, I was thinking of working on some utilitarian spells, stuff that’d be of use in ordinary life. Would you mind being our beta tester, or one of at least?”

“That I could do, yes. As long as it’s just in my off-duty hours. I don’t know what the JSDF regs are on practising magic while on duty.”

“I’d be a bit surprised if there are any, but only a bit. You have some very ‘detail orientated’ and somewhat weird people writing regulations. I mean, more so than most armies.”

Hachi snorted with laughter, nodding.

“There are regulations covering everything… I’d have to look, but I’d bet that there are some for the use of witchcraft and magic by JSDF personnel.”

Paul opened his mouth, then closed it, looking thoughtful for a few moments, before speaking.

“Major Yagi.. might I ask you to quietly see if there are such regulations, strictly ‘off the books’ as it were. Just in case there’s anything in there that could become a legal landmine later… before we can have a quiet word with an august personage to fix them in case anyone else thinks to look them up.”

Hachi’s eyes widened, and then she pushed her glasses up her nose.

“That is a good point, and one I shall look into. Off duty that is.”

An hour and a bit later, Major Yagi had gone back to her duties, Paul’s apprentices and Mistress Maaya were off elsewhere, comparing his methods and their more traditional ones, in spell casting. Paul had firmly told them to do it outside after Chiyo had exploded the bug she’d been trying to enchant.

The workshop door opened and Inari came in, carefully avoiding going too close to the iron and steel around the place. She stopped to examine the half-constructed Mark II mana convertor Paul had been puttering with while he waited for the special order crystals to grow. She came over, and stared at the fox mask printer, then turned to look at Paul.

“Is that the thing you used to create that messenger fox?”

“It is, what do you think?”

“I think it has disturbing implications… creating a familiar like that. One is supposed to put a fragment or imprint of your own soul into it. But that.. either it did or didn’t. If it did then how many hundreds of fragments can be shorn from your soul.. and if it didn’t, then whence comes the life that imbues it?”

Paul shook his head.

“You’re thinking the wrong way about it. I created a program. Something that behaves as if it’s alive, even though it’s not. You’ve seen my computer, with the right program that too can behave in a way that resembles a living being. We call it an artificial intelligence. I can introduce you to one later, it’s a sort of artificial assistant called Cortana. But either way, what gets imprinted into each one of the messenger foxes is a copy. You can make an infinite number of copies, each one perfect. The rest is just a question of how much mana you can throw at it.”

“Still...”

Paul grinned.

“I know, it’s bringing mass production to spell making. That has to be unsettling for you.”

Inari nodded, and then sighed.

“I shouldn’t complain...your new ways have wrought much good. But still. I wonder if we might take a step too far some day.”

Paul nodded.

“I know, I worry about that too. I mean, with a complicated enough program we could mass produce an army of soldiers, capable of fighting and killing.”

“And if not us, then someone, sometime, will. Eventually.”

“Exactly Inari… but that cat’s already out of the bag. According to the myths, the gods created humans… and look where that ended up.”

Inari snorted.

“Now you sound like Amaterasu, she never did think much of mortals.”

“Well, she kind of has a point.. if you ignore all the good that came of it too. Still, this idea isn’t difficult. I mean, If I don’t put this up on the website along with the others, then someone else will think of it sooner or later… and maybe not as well.”

Inari sighed and nodded. They’d had this discussion back when Paul first invented the mana convertor.

“You’re right of course… we have no right to restrict people from using this knowledge, all we can do is hedge it with warnings. If they then choose to ignore them, it is their responsibility.”

“Well, not quite how I’d phrase it, but true enough. Although I think I’ll take a leaf out of Dr Strange’s notebook, and put the warnings first.”

“Dr Strange?”

“Fictional sorcerer supreme, and Avenger.. and a source of good advice for all he’s a comic book character.”

Inari raised an eyebrow at him.

“We’re taking inspiration from comic books?”

“Hey, don’t knock it. Some of them are written by really smart guys, who thought this stuff through logically.”

Inari still looked dubious, and inwardly Paul sighed, chalking up yet another thing for her to get acquainted with at some indeterminate point in the future.

“Anyway, hypothetical theological implications aside, will this do for our immediate purposes? Can you enchant the few hundred fox masks we’ll produce?”

Inari nodded without hesitation.

“I have no doubt, I’ve done similar in the past and I have a good grasp of my limits now.”

Paul grinned.

“Ok then, Operation North Pole is a go for prefecture-wide delivery. We’ll work on Nation-wide next year, and who knows… maybe even go global!”

Inari laughed, throwing her head back.

“No one could ever accuse you of lacking ambition my Herald!”