Interlude Five: Science

Sometimes, Josep Scratch hated being an enchanter. Owning an enchanting store was even worse, but that came part and parcel with being an enchanter.

It was a lot of work, which was stressful. His clients were invariably rich, which usually meant noble, and that was stressful too. The work part, though, was the sheer tedium. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to be an enchanter.

Josep had grown up in a solidly middle class Wayrest family. He had two loving parents. He performed well at the School he attended. He had mild, forgettable acquaintances, and even a bland girlfriend or two.

He helped his family by taking care of the books for their grain business. They paid him a small, but respectable wage for it. He was fastidious, had a fantastic eye for detail, and found he loved the mechanics of it all, the learning.

He enjoyed figuring out how the grain was grown, and milled, and winnowed. It was satisfying seeing how the merchants operated, when and where and how they travelled, how much they would buy and sell for. He could even appreciate the intricacies of the ledgers, the importance of their precision, both in form and function.

He had another side, though. Secretly, he rebelled against his vanilla life. At nights, he snuck out to listen to poets recite scathing, seditious poetry. He’d go and dance to counterculture musicians, with their racy, fast-paced beats. He even attended a few meetings of a group called The Redeemers, who hoped to make life in Wayrest fairer for all. He never quite understood exactly what they planned to do, but they sounded nice, grand, even, when they spoke.

It was not that he hated his daily life. If anything, it was the opposite. He loved it. But it wasn’t fulfilling. He needed more.

Everything had changed when he had manifested an Ideal.

It was on his first Reaping. He had been lying on his back at night, regarding the interlocking, interweaving branches of trees above him: the shapes of them, the curls and snarls, the dots made by leaves. The light of the tiny lamp next to him had cast deeper, flickering shadows, twitching and wavering, and the slightly brighter shards of the night sky behind it all had sent his mind down strange paths. It reminded him of the ledgers, at the family business, the letters that he sent and received there. The beautiful, flowing, fanciful scripts that the Redeemer poets wrote in. He had manifested Calligraphy.

His family were overjoyed. Not only had they an Idealist in the family now, but an Ideal perfectly suited to his work. It was a real coup.

Josep was not quite so enthused. On one hand he liked doing the books, but something about it made him itch. The dry, banal, repetitiveness of it abraded his soul. On the other, he loved art, in all its expressions, and Calligraphy was an art. It soothed him, though he rarely got to practise it as it was meant to be practised. It was stifling.

The family business began gradually doing better. Simply having an Idealist working for them was enough for merchants to offer them slightly better deals on grain, even if it wasn’t a mercantile Ideal. It also meant more people went out of their way to buy from them, even if it wasn’t an Ideal of much renown.

It slowly wore him down.

He began sneaking out more, spending more time out and about. He began to turn up to work tired, sometimes late as well. His family began to notice.

They pressured him, in their mild, gentle way. He assured them everything was fine.

Nothing changed. The customers began to notice, so tired was he. His family pushed harder.

He had never been a true rebel. He hadn’t the hatred, the pure strength of loathing in his heart for it. Life had been good to him, for the most part. He had no cause for a grudge against the world.

And so he told his parents, told them everything. Well, not everything, but he told them he had been going out nights, carousing, getting into mischief. Just not the details.

They were shocked, of course. He had Calligraphy! Whatever could he want with going out nights? It was unseemly, this addiction to music and poetry and painting! Why, where had their inquisitive Josep gone, the Josep who loved learning things?

It was a good question, one Josep found harder to shake than he’d like. He was still young, and the temptation was to dismiss his parent’s concerns, as young people are wont to do. But they were right.

He did love learning. He loved knowing how things worked, loved understanding the systems that life moved by. But he also loved art, loved music, loved poetry. He was at an impasse.

Late one night, after a truculent confession and teary discussion with his parents, he lay in bed. Thinking. Thinking about how he worked. About the mechanics that made him Josep. He thought for a long time.

Eventually, he decided he had figured the most part of himself out, but that the rest was pointless. He was a human. He had too many moving pieces, too many variables acting on him, too many wants and desires. There was a part of him, or a product of him, that was inscrutable, indefinable. It was the part that drove him to go to rebellious meetings, to like art.

He decided he liked that part too. It was beautiful. It was inspired. It was creative. It was necessary.

He had a sudden epiphany, and with it, he had manifested Enchanting.

If he thought things had changed after his first Ideal, now, they were unrecognisable.

His parents were stunned. His mother fainted from shock, then cried with joy. His father smiled wider than he’d ever seen, and told him how proud he was.

Word got around. Within a day, he had enchanters showing up at the family business, enquiring after him. There weren’t many enchanters in Wayrest, but it seemed they all came to call. He and his parents met them all, each and every one, and listened to their offers.

Enchanting was a lucrative business. More lucrative, even, than alchemy, though that was only due to there being less enchanters about. In some places, Josep had heard, it was the other way around.

Every enchanter lived like a king, even the worst of them. They could command whatever prices they wanted, to extremes. There was always someone willing to pay. Always. And therein lay the biggest problem of all enchanters.

They only had so much time.

It made taking an apprentice, even one that would require years and years of training to become halfway competent, an attractive choice. Even increasing their output fractionally could lead to an exponential jump in income for them. And if they eventually became a competitor? Well, they would be one that hopefully remembered their master fondly. If their master hadn’t already retired with a mountain of gold.

Josep found this addiction to income exhausting. He apprenticed to a kindly man of solid renown in his fifties. He spent the next decade learning everything he could from him.

By the time Josep was thirty-five, he was very wealthy in his own right. His parents had long since sold the business. They had no need for it. They would never have to work again. Josep himself owned three houses. Three! Although, truth be told, he didn’t particularly care for any of them.

What he really loved was the work. Enchanting had become his life. Very soon after starting his apprenticeship, he had realised it was a perfect fit for him.

You see, enchanting was equal parts science and art. He could spend every waking moment of his life practising it, and never learn all there was to know about it. He could draw the same rune a thousand times, a hundred thousand, and make each one different, unique.

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Eventually, he began to chafe working under someone else’s supervision. He had dreams of spending his life figuring out all the mysteries of enchanting, and he couldn’t do that while he was spending his every waking hour drawing durability and strengthening runes. They were boring. Even refining them, making them more beautiful, more efficient, only gave him so much respite.

He wanted to tinker. He wanted to try things. He wanted to understand. His mind worked endlessly on intrigues.

Why could you not store spatial storage inside spatial storage? Why did it simply not work, instead of one of the spaces collapsing?

Why could only some Ideals produce certain effects, when some of the effects produced by certain Ideals seemed arbitrary? One of Wayrest’s portal specialists had the Ideal of Steel, and yet, it was from this Ideal that they could summon a steel portal arch. To the best of his knowledge, no Idealist of Speed had ever manifested a portal ability, and no enchanter had managed to use Speed mana to create any kind of portal enchantment. It made no sense. Were they using the wrong runes, or was it simply impossible?

For that matter, why were portal enchantments so ludicrously difficult to make, whereas domain enchantments were easy? Both were incredibly rare skill types. It just didn’t add up.

Certain materials were better for enchanting than others. They could hold more mana, conduct it better. Why? There had to be a reason.

His master told him, “The World works in mysterious ways” so many times he thought he would go insane. The World could go fuck itself! There had to be reasons. It was all so unsatisfying.

After the thousandth time hearing that old refrain, he decided to prove his master wrong. He hatched a plan.

He had heard that those in the far off Tidy Archipelago tattooed enchantments onto their skin. The idea had stuck in his head. The natives there apparently tattooed for certain occasions: coming of age, to signify a great victory in battle, when they were married, and so on.

The enchantments were only of limited application, though. If they were damaged, they would stop working. If they faded over time, which even the best inks applied by the most skilled enchanters would, they would stop working. Human skin was a decent conductor for mana, as you would imagine, but if the rune structure was overloaded, it would stop working too.

Josep thought about it endlessly.

He gathered different inks and hides, and began to try tattooing them with his ritual tool. He failed.

He gathered more, and failed again. And again. He searched high and low through markets for more exotic materials, and ran dry. He refused to let it stop him.

He met up with his old friends in the Redeemers. They had contacts outside the walls. They refused to say who. They agreed to help him with some more exotic materials though. He waited nervously until they were supplied.

Then he tried again.

And it worked.

The hide of a particular lizard, with a particular iteration of durability rune etched into it, had produced the desired effect. It was only at ten percent of the usual efficiency for the rune, but he was overjoyed.

He consulted with an alchemist, and adjusted the ink he was using. He tattooed the same hide until it was but a scrap. The wait for more was agonising.

When he next got his hands on some, he did the same again. And to the next batch as well. Eventually he raised the efficiency on that particular species of lizard leather to eighty percent.

Then he went back to the markets, and found the most similar hides he could. He worked backwards, repeating the process over and over, until once again, he succeeded. He had tattooed a leather hide from a different species of lizard.

He began to buy other hides again. This was the hardest step, but he persisted. He had a working rune on marsupial leather.

From there, it became easier and easier, until eventually he had a working rune tattooed into pig skin. It was apparently the most similar to human skin, for his purposes.

He was relieved. He was triumphant.

Until late one night, revelling in creating his eleventh working rune variation tattoo, he received a knock on his door.

It was his old friends from the Redeemers. And some Redeemers he’d never met.

His friends were characteristically serious, but the usual inflamed passion they all carried was of a different variety tonight. Usually, it was an outpouring, a venting. Tonight it burned low, but it burned hot.

His friends explained some things to him. They were desperate. Desperate to change the status quo. They were tired. Tired of living like paupers while nobles lived like kings. Josep could understand, couldn’t he? Certainly, he was rich now, but he hadn’t always been.

They wanted help. Josep was unsure, but the Redeemers his friends had bought were intense. They scared him. They were not people used to being told no.

And besides, they were right, weren’t they? It was all for a good cause. Nobles were insufferable, after all.

He agreed. He gave them a healthy amount of gold, and wished them well. Then one of the new Redeemers spoke.

“What’s all this?” he said, frowning over Josep’s tattooed hides.

Josep was glad to have someone interested in his pet project. He told them all about it. The Redeemers eyes narrowed.

“Could you do it for us?” he asked.

Josep didn’t know. It didn’t seem quite right. He had planned to tattoo a human, eventually, of course. It was the entire point of the project. But he suddenly didn’t think they were interested in the science of it, the art.

He opened his mouth to refuse, and the air in the room suddenly grew very menacing. He realised that he was not the only Idealist in the room.

Agreement poured out of his mouth.

Over the next several months, he tattooed people.

At nights, they would come to his house, clandestine, and he would work through til the early hours.

He was ashamed to say, but his first couple of tries didn’t work. The Redeemers were unhappy. They threatened him. Luckily, he soon produced a working hardness rune, tattooed right on a man’s chest.

From there, his reservations faded. It was working! He had gotten it to work! Now, it was time to refine.

He tried different runes, different iterations, until they worked. The Redeemers no longer cared about his failures, now that they had seen proof it could work. They wanted hardness, durability, and strengthening runes, on all their members. He had his work cut out for him. They had many members, it seemed.

The work soon began to grate on him. He was tattooing the same handful of basic runes over and over. They worked, sure, but this tedium was exactly what he had been trying to avoid in the first place.

And so he began to experiment.

He tried self-repair runes. They didn’t seem to work. The Redeemers didn’t care, so long as the rune they were attached to still worked, which they did. But it irked Josep. It was a mystery.

Put a self-repair rune on a sword, and if it got nicked, it would slowly repair the blade. Put one on a human arm, and if it got cut, it did nothing.

Suddenly, inspiration struck.

When the Redeemers came that night, he linked a healing rune to the ones he was tattooing. Then he asked the woman to test it. She shrugged, and made a small cut on her arm.

It had healed. But the healing rune had faded immediately, and was useless.

It was a failure, but Josep was excited, because it was the good kind of failure. The kind that made for progress. His mind began to spin through possibilities again.

He tried different healing runes, bigger ones, more intricate ones, separate ones, any kind he could think of. They all produced slightly different effects, but they all shared one common flaw. After use, they failed and broke.

He refused to give up, and the Redeemers had no shortage of willing subjects. He figured he must have tattooed at least fifty of them by now.

One fateful night, it finally worked.

He combined a self-repair rune and a healing rune. It was that simple. Or rather, simple for an enchanter.

The new rune worked exactly how he had imagined. When the man he had tattooed took an injury, he slowly healed. The rune didn’t fade. And most importantly, when he made a small cut on the tattoo itself, it slowly repaired itself.

Everything worked slowly, but it worked.

That was when his door exploded inwards.

He found himself pinned to the wall by invisible bonds. The man he had been tattooing, and the other Redeemer that had accompanied him that night, both lay pinned to his floor, bleeding profusely from lacerations all over their bodies. Josep watched through wide, terrified eyes as the tattooed man’s wounds slowly began to close, then stopped halfway. He was dead.

Someone approached him. Someone in a cloak so pale green it was just a sliver away from white. They walked right up to where he was pinned against his own wall, stopping a foot away from his face. They were bedecked in silver jewellery, bright chains hanging from their neck, festooned with pale green stones.

Their subordinates, also dressed in that same pale green, rushed through his house. Two of them confirmed the deaths of the Redeemers.

The Inquisition.

“You’ve been up to no good, Josep Scratch,” the inquisitor said, in a voice that could have been echoing from an abandoned polar mine shaft. He shivered.

“Take him,” the man said, and Joseph was taken away. One of the men smashed him over the head with something hard.

He blacked out.