Second of One, Harvest, 236 CR
We weren’t late to breakfast, but only because magic beds were the greatest invention of the epoch.
The atmosphere was… not exactly somber, and not exactly worried. There was a tension in the air, a concern, but the people I’d come to understand were the powerhouses of the village were around and being visibly unworried. What exactly they might otherwise have been worried about wasn’t something people mentioned, but the way people drifted in and out of Rafa’s and Meredith’s ambit spoke of the reassurance they were drawing from the women’s presence.
Even Farmer got into the game, so to speak. They were sitting with a cross-generational smattering of people that ranged from Matron Zeva—the vicious old biddy whose almost savage rudeness to me had been oddly reassuring—to Aliza, five years old and a free-roaming, spirited child determined to climb every wall. The conversation flowed around Farmer, for the most part, like they were a small island splitting a stream, but occasionally they would field an answer to some question or another as everyone from the nearby tables fought to not visibly lean over to listen.
My focus was entirely elsewhere, though. I had more important concerns than questions like should I be worried and what the fuck is going on—like should I be going on fucking, to which the answer was most definitely no, I’m hungry.
“Two bowls of yogurt?” I raised my eyebrow at Ketka.
“One is for me,” she said with a firm nod.
“And the other?”
She dropped it in front of me, predictably. “For a woman whose strength is growing, and who eats not a sufficiency of protein.”
I opened my mouth to object, then glanced down at the plate of food I’d picked up for myself. Complex carbohydrates and sugars abounded, along with a fair bit of fiber—and, sure enough, very little in the way of protein or fat. “You think I’m getting stronger?”
“Little bird, of course.” She ran her fingers along my upper arm while I flushed crimson. “With every draw of the string, with every release; how could you not?”
“With every release, huh,” I muttered, blushing harder at the memory of how she’d, in her words, made me sing. “Sit down and look to your breakfast,” I managed after a moment. “You need your strength too, and I’m going to be doing alchemy all morning. So I need to eat, not flirt.”
“As you will.”
She smirked as she watched me, and I smirked as I watched her. We ate in silence, companionable and more than pleasant. Enjoying the company and the leftover endorphins, losing long moments in the incidental contact of our bodies, I savored the slow morning and the food alike.
And eventually, we were done with our food and it was time to part ways—with a long kiss and in no particular hurry. As was proper, and as was delightful.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
“So, the pen thing,” I said to Kelly as soon as my boots were on the workshop floor.
She gave me a narrow, sidelong look. “The pen thing? Sophie! Where’s your sense of style? Your sense of wonder?”
“Fucked right out of my head,” I said without thinking, then grinned broadly enough to hurt my face. “Which is funny, ‘cause you’d think it would be the other way around.”
“Well, I—hmph.” Kelly looked like she had a thousand things going through her head, each discarded unsaid. She hugged me suddenly, hugged me hard, burying her face in my shoulder.
I’d have asked her what was wrong, but I could feel the way she was shaking and could hear her giggling, so the answer would simply have been nothing.
“Project Quill,” she said once she had control of herself again. “It’s a good name, and we don’t know that it’ll be suitable for pens, right?”
“There’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t work with a pen,” I protested. “No reason at all! The proof of concept for the infusion transference was done with a quill, sure, but there’s no essential component in the actual vehicle.”
“Sure.” Kelly nodded. “So are we going to start with a pen?”
“I… shut up, you stinker. Smugness looks too damn good on you, it’s practically criminal.” I reached for my notebook, scribbling out a diagram. “Obviously we’ll start with a quill. Prove out the prior art, then branch out.”
“Which approach are we taking first?”
I almost answered off the cuff, then realized I hadn’t actually updated my plans to account for having been asked to… well.
To not create a self-perpetuating engine for turning limitless divine power into universal mana batteries, as far as I could tell, though the question of whether the Gods in question would have cooperated with that remained an open one.
In return, James had given me—us, since Kelly was as much a part of this project as I was—a substantial store of more standard batteries, and the village was going to pay Hitz to keep them topped off. So we didn’t need to do the batteries experiment, which is what I’d expected to spend at least the next fortnight working on, and that meant…
“Let’s validate the existing prior art in both directions,” I murmured. “I know I kept insisting that it’s no good if I can’t make it without you, and I still think that’s true. But there’s a lot to be said for making sure that what people have written down is true and accurate.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“So we make sure that I can draw mana from the battery through ink and draw a charged rune with it,” Kelly agreed. “But what’s the other direction?”
“Making sure that you can charge an existing, uncharged rune through the same process,” I reminded her. “We shouldn’t assume that the two are the same. We know that compositional constraints on a receiver affects what the draw is from one of the batteries—”
“—so even if it’s just to confirm that the difference doesn’t break the infusional effect,” Kelly said, nodding rapidly, “we need to make sure the baseline experiment works.”
“I’m glad you agree.” I paused, feeling like that was inadequate, and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “I’m glad you’re here with me,” I said eventually, looking back at her as she waited patiently for me. Reaching out, I pulled her into a sort of sideways hug, my hip bumping against hers with my arm around her shoulder. “You’re a damn good lab partner; together, we make a way better research team than I would make alone. And your company can’t be beat.”
Kelly didn’t say anything for a few seconds, just wrapping one arm around my waist and leaning a little of her weight into me. She relaxed slowly, the first I noticed of her being particularly tense, and a bit more of her weight fell onto me.
“You’re not usually this touchy,” she murmured. “Little touches, yeah, a bump and a brush, but not something like this. It surprised me, at Ease—we all thought you were touch-shy. I hope you haven’t been thinking we’re standoffish.”
“Touch is complicated where I come from. I… never got enough of it, honestly, and as much as I did get, it always came with… not strings, never strings, the kinds of people who would put strings on a hug weren’t the type to be interested in me. But maybe expectations? Like physical closeness couldn’t be non-sexual, and sex was romantic, and the first could work out just fine but the second meant we were on a highway to disaster.”
“What changed? Wait, never mind.” Kelly shifted against me, like she was fidgeting outside of my line of sight. “We had that conversation.”
“And since then we’ve known where we are, who we are to each other.” I smiled over at her, then finally brought my gaze back towards my workbench. “So I’m glad that you’re around. And now that I’ve said that, I’m ready to get to work, if you are.”
“Proving out the prior art.” Kelly looked as happy as I’d ever seen her, lighting up the room with her grin. “Where do we start? I only know a few runes, and I’ve been keeping all of ours topped up, but there’s a few that don’t so much get charged as take an activation stream.”
“Getting ahead of yourself,” I chided her. “What comes before testing whether we can charge a rune with a flow of essential or magical energies through a binding or carrying medium?”
Kelly frowned, pushing gently off from me to pace. “I know what you’re about to say, Sophie, and it’s that we should first be testing whether I can draw the energy into the ink in the first place. But there’s no point in testing that, because—and I know this is going into the esoterica, and this wouldn’t apply to someone who can really do magic—I can’t set up the draw without doing it from the rune.”
“Oh, shit. I honestly hadn’t thought about that,” I admitted. “I just sort of assumed that of course you can draw into or through the ink. I was going to say that we need to test whether the ink will bind or carry, by using a neutral storage medium that isn’t as purposeful as a rune.”
“Medraud’s Theorem,” Kelly murmured, eyes narrowing. “You think that the intent-shaping of the rune’s time-displaced effects and products could back-propagate?”
“I have literally no—actually, that’s not true.” I’d been about to say I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was more incredulous than confused. “Are you saying that sometimes the effects of magic will retroactively change what happens when you feed mana into it? How?”
“Not retroactively.” She frowned at nothing in particular. “I don’t actually understand it well enough to really explain it, but it’s like it happens forwards, but not in a way that respects the… the direction of time? So you get interference, sometimes. Hitz taught me a while back, but it was sort of a side thing that was just, um, tangentially related to the dimensional interference patterns they were dealing with when they were hyperstacking their warehouse.”
“I swear, that shouldn’t even be a word,” I grumbled. “Hyperstacking? Really?”
A vastly superior term may be found in interleaving, as the warehouses occupy not distinct lateral spaces when convolved.
“Tangents, Sophie, Spark. Focus!”
I shot her what was almost a glare, but it dissolved into a snickering when I saw the humor glinting in her eyes. “A touch, a touch, truly a touch,” I said instead. “But no, I actually had no idea about any of that, and I really hope it won’t get involved because that sounds like an absolute pain in the ass. Instead, what I was thinking was just that an empty, unaspected essence battery is the easiest and simplest case. What if runes have a ceiling or floor of flow, or whatever?”
“Or whatever,” my lab partner said firmly. “I know that at least a couple of the runes we use here in the workshop can take as much or as little flow as I can feed them, but you’re right that they’re more complicated. And… I’m not actually sure that they can take any essence, I just know I haven’t run into any trouble feeding them from myself or from something stored.”
“Right. So what if anything flowing through the ink becomes, uh, ink-aspected essence or mana or whatever, and that happens to not be eligible to fuel the rune?”
“Right.” Kelly took two quick, long steps and wrapped me in a sudden and brief hug. Spinning away from it, she strode towards the racks of storage bins. “Okay! So. Full neutral mana battery, empty neutral mana battery, ink. How are we actually setting up the experiment, though?”
“Do you need physical contact between the battery and medium?”
“Maybe if I were a hack.” She snorted inelegantly. “Kartom would never talk to me again if I couldn’t jump a binding over at least a few inches. Kids can do that.”
“I can’t.”
She choked like her words had turned to ashes in her mouth, spluttering. “Sorry,” she managed eventually. “That was thoughtless.”
“It’s fine,” I said genially, suppressing my laughter. “Really, it’s fine. Then how about just… an inkwell? It’s most like what we’re hoping to get done anyway.”
“An inkwell.” Kelly nodded, not looking back at me as she rummaged through the bins. “I… don’t know where we have inkwells. But I’ll find one! Who needs inkwells, anyway? What is this, the First Millenium? An inkwell. Empty battery, full battery, inkwell, and the usual just-in-cases—hood for a shield, nullifier.”
“What’s the full-discharge look like for the full battery?”
Within the fullest realm of safety, as the manifestation of the discharge in the form of force is of the nature of a penumbra, and no more.
“What Spark said. Rattle a table, maybe, but the hood is rated to hold even if the battery’s strapped to it.”
I grinned at her back, remembering when I’d demonstrated to her the difference between a shockwave mediated by some distance through air and the same explosion in the strapped-on position. “Alright. Spark? Anything else?”
A second bridge may prove of use.
“I’ll keep every step as distinct as I can so that you can follow me,” Kelly promised, eyes sparkling. “And that’ll help test to make sure it’s not just me.”
“Yeah.” I stretched for a moment, left-right-left while grabbing my elbows above my head. Still grinning, I picked up a pencil and spun it dramatically between my fingers, refraining from cackling by dint of my immense fortitude and willpower. “Now let’s do some science.”