Ryuji nudged Karen who reluctantly let go of him. She looked at him and then the smile registered and she realized that he was focused solely on her right now. This feeling was like the first warm rays of sun after the winter snow. She was determined now, even if he was already married she would stay by his side as a mistress or even less as long as he would look at her that way. But he seemed excited to show her something judging by the grin on his face. It was the same one he had any time he was playing a prank on her or telling her really good news.
Ryuji was so relieved that Karen wasn’t still mad at him he felt like he was floating a kilometer off the ground. He wanted to share that feeling and he was pretty sure that Karen already felt it but if not, maybe the present would help. He had gotten it for her anyway so no use in keeping it to himself.
Karen watched in bemusement as Ryuji pulled her along to where his big stack of books and supplies were. When he was there, he untied a cord from the top of the stack and then removed a book from the top. He then handed it to her and she didn’t realized what it was. She cracked open the cover and was enraptured by the graphic nature of the picture on the front page. Before she could turn too red, she quickly turned the page and read a little of the contents.
The page contained some of the most beautiful lines she had ever heard and realized that this was a book of poetry. Only then did the title click in her mind and she had to look at the cover again to make sure. “Lustrous Pink” was actually well known to be very hard to get ahold of due to the graphic nature of the poetry in it. The author was always assumed to be a man because the contents were downright lewd but Karen and a lot of other women were certain, due to the sheer beauty of the poetry, that the author was a woman.
How had he gotten a complete copy? Karen had heard that a lot of the volumes for sale were half the size and only contained the rare few tame poems or those that could be rewritten without any of the wording that made them so lewd. The one poem that she had heard from the original made the fakes pale in comparison. Now she had a whole copy all her own.
Suddenly, Karen realized that she was crying again and looked up to see Ryuji smiling at her. Then he pointed at what had seemed a nondescript box held in the middle of the stack of books. Now that it had been revealed her jaw dropped and her heart just about stopped. Sitting on top of the pile of books was the single most beautiful box she had ever laid eyes on. The box was made of a very dark wood that probably didn’t come from anywhere around Lyrill. The darkness only served to highlight the pinkish opalescent inlays in the lid and sides of the box.
The box was almost the size of both of her hand lengths wide and about one deep. With the lid closed, it was about half a hand tall and the inlays were of various different flowers. Then he unlatched and opened the lid and she was left stunned once again. There were various brushes, pads, and linens in the central compartment with a dazzling array of makeup infusions along the top and bottom. In the top of the lid was a most remarkable mirror so clear that she had never seen the like. Karen was sure that he must have paid in gold for these two items and as the enormity of the gift struck her, Karen found her legs going weak and Ryuji had to hold her up. That was fine with both of them though.
After some time, when Karen had regained her composure a bit, they were all settled at one of the tables. Most of the patrons had lost interest after the love show was over and had left, probably to tell as many people as they could about this bit of juicy gossip. Teresa, Dorn, Karen, Ryuji, and for some reason, two of the regulars, sat around the table drinking ale and discussing things. Teresa was sitting next to Dorn and when she didn’t think anybody was looking, she would stare down at him.
The look reminded Ryuji of some older people he once knew who would get a nostalgic look in their eyes while looking at various things. There was something else there, he was pretty sure it was desire and when she looked over at him, she blushed. He thought it was a neat change to be the one rooting for someone else’s love life. He looked to Karen and she had the same kind of look on her face so she was probably thinking the same thing he was.
After a bit more chat about innocuous things, Ryuji steered the conversation into a direction where he could broach a special subject. He asked Dorn if he knew any spells that would be useful for making a bathhouse. Teresa’s eyes came alive and she was practically beaming. Dorn thought it over and named out a couple ways of doing things but the problem was powering the enchantments.
Ryuji and Dorn went back and forth with ideas and eventually pulled out a sheet of paper and began scribbling notes on it. The discussion took several hours and was very in-depth. Both Teresa and Karen had to excuse themselves to make supper. Strangely, one of the regular pair turned out to be an enchanter of some small skill and threw into the conversation in return for a stream of refills. Ryuji left a silver on his and Dorn’s tab which would take a bit of time to drink away.
The problem of power was because the spells were only meant to be thrown down where a set amount of power was required for the spell to produce an effect. Ryuji opened the book on enchantment runes and the basics of the spell to produce water were quickly laid out. Another enchantment was drawn out that would produce heat for the water.
Ryuji noticed a bunch of glyphs that had vague or conflicting descriptions. The book said they were useful but only seemed to apply in certain circumstances in spell formation and were hard to use. Ryuji asked Dorn and the other mage about these and what he found shocked him a bit. The glyphs were indeed hard to parse out within the limitations of the local language. He then remembered what Dorn had said about lost glyphs and how the books that had them were hard to translate. He had said that the magic language didn’t change, only the local languages.
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What Ryuji saw in front of him was a simple set of programing operators. They meant things like and, or, this and, this or, true, false, as well as a bunch of simple arithmetic operators. This changed the way he looked at the spells on a fundamental level and he began wondering about their creation.
Ryuji only had the most basic of programing knowledge from a single semester of computer sciences. The basic ideas were all the same though. It was a good thing they were basic because that’s all the knowledge he had on the subject. He wondered briefly why these existed in enchanting but not in caster or summoner magics but it was pretty obvious, writing the spell took too much time if you had all this in it. Caster and summoner magic had to be performed quickly while enchanter magic could be planned meticulously and was usually made beforehand.
Ryuji began writing a new set of glyphic scripts for the idea he just had using these operators. He was so absorbed in his work he almost didn’t notice when Karen sat a bowl of stew next to him with a butter loaf and a side of steaming vegetables. He took a break to eat with Karen while Dorn and the other mage looked over his scripts. The pair just kept exclaiming about how they didn’t see how this or that would work.
Karen sat the food in front of Ryuji and at first, she didn’t think he saw it at all. He was so absorbed in the spell that he was working on; she could finally understand how he was having a hard time finding time to do everything and his studies did look to be rather strenuous and time-consuming. As she was setting the stew down, she looked over the magic stuff he was writing and it made no sense to her and then she heard Dorn saying that it made no sense to him and felt a little bad for Ryuji. For him to be praised so highly earlier and now this.
Before she could pull her hand back, his shot out and grabbed hers and he smiled up at her. He looked at the tray and when he noticed two sets of food, he began pulling her down into the seat beside him. Karen was only too happy to sit with him and share a meal together. She spent most of the meal snuggled up next to him and he even went so far as to feed her before she got embarrassed and sat up straight to a chorus of chuckles.
Ryuji managed to make some progress on the magic script after supper. The basics of the script revolved around if-then statements. If the person had magic, then the circle would activate. If the person had enough mana to fully empower the spell, then it would all come out at once. If the mana was insufficient, then it would be drawn at a percentage rate until the person reached one-quarter of their mana. If there were multiple people, then the spell would siphon mana from them in proportion to their reserves of mana. That was the basics of the script that he set up to run the water creation and water heating spell.
He then drew up a counter-spell that would deactivate the water production once it reached where that spell was to be inscribed on the side of the tub. This one would only take a tiny amount of mana. It would have to be charged ahead of time and would activate once the water reached the desired depth.
Ryuji had a bit more trouble with the heating spell. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be any way of making a reliable thermostat. There were no values of temperature in the language besides ice and fire or hot and cold. Ryuji considered the problem from a percentage base and decided that trying for a percentage of body temperature wouldn’t really work fundamentally because as the person bathed their temp would rise and then so would the percentage.
For a long time, Ryuji was stumped and was just laying his head on the table in a funk. He was staring absently off into the distance when he saw Karen approaching a table with a tray of food. His own table was garnering a lot of the conversation for the evening so he hadn’t bothered listening in. suddenly, his eyes caught on one aspect of the meal they were being served. There was steam rising from the stew and that’s when it hit him. he would use steam as the indicator for the spell to turn on and off. If the spell detected steam, it would turn the heat spell off and if the water cooled to the point it wasn’t steaming, it would be turned back on.
Ryuji finished the scripting for the tub and when he explained the concept for it, he thought that both of the mages were going to faint. They both went almost white before turning to look at one another and back to him. Almost in perfect unison, they yelled “What?!”
Dorn explained that without bothering to stop at this part, Ryuji had managed to make a Glyphic script that could be used to gauge someone’s mana capacity. They seemed to find this to be among the greater contributions to magic in recent history. They began arguing over how to have the final spell express the outcome of spell. Ryuji asked them to list the types of currency and they looked at him a little perplexed.
Ryuji was prompted to explain. “What if the spell triggered a series of illumination spells that ranged from bottom to top in the ten categories of currency. Someone with too little mana wouldn’t trigger the spell at all but the next lowest amount would register as a small copper. The next level of mana would be a large copper, then a small silver, then a large silver, then a small gold, large gold, cobalt, mithril, orichalcum, and finally dragonite. Although, I doubt anyone except a dragon would likely trigger that level.”
The concept was finalized and the three began working on the exact magic circle inscriptions to make it work. They then continued with the work on the bathhouse enchantments. It took a very long time to finalize the concepts and the three of them fell asleep at the table.
Ryuji woke to the feeling of Karen hoisting him up from his chair and walking him to the stairs. He was only mildly buzzed earlier and had only finished perhaps two mugs of ale. He had fallen asleep because he was just tired but he wasn’t going to tell Karen that. When she had pushed him into his bed, he half expected that she might give him a kiss but he definitely didn’t expect what happened. Instead of kissing him, she then sat on the side of his bed and took her own boots off before crawling under the cover with him. She proceeded to cuddle up next to him and pulled his arm over the top of her. He was reminded of times when his older sister, Haruko, would get in his bed during the coldest parts of winter. He drifted off to sleep thinking of his family that he would almost certainly never see again.