0 A.R (2020 A.D.)
Come to find out, making temporary melanin tattoos was easy in and of itself, the hard part was planning it so that it would actually work. There were just far too many damn variables to consider. After Johnny’s accidental spark of unwitting genius, I locked myself away in my under-river hideout so I could outline runes on the stone walls of the cavern in peace. I wanted to do this right, but in order to do that successfully I needed to put off this trip. Unfortunately, that was not an option. My deadline was in two days, and I wanted to have my plans laid out and the temporary tattoos on everyone by tomorrow so we could have a day of testing before setting out.
The gleeful part of me that was actually having a good time was my inner psychopath. That sicko had come up with some incredibly wicked ideas just in case it was a no-win situation, but that was something I didn’t want to dwell on. Those particular bits of Joker-esque fun were stashed away in a leather pouch sitting in front of me. The crimson bag almost seemed to have its own presence as I didn’t really want to be near it.
Making sure that the pouch was on the floor a good ten feet away, I sat back down at the stone table and stared at it. Shaking my head to focus on something else, I relished in the fact that my stone seat was cool and that conjured water to sip on was always freezing cold. It was a nice backdrop to the runic outline I had carved out in front of me earlier in the day on the wall. Those simple yet alluring etchings gave off more heat than I was expecting. My almost manic carvings seemed to wiggle with life right in front of me.
The wavy concept of fire grasped in the grip of jagged lightning. A weird sentence but it was how I was imagining it. Literally. The etching in the wall was a gnarled, clenched fist gripping a lightning bolt that radiated living fire. It was how my mind pictured the magical interpretation of plasma. It doesn’t really make perfect technical sense as plasma is superheated gas like the kind that stars produce, but my artistic license was only letting me etch this in a clumsy fashion. How do you really explain the fourth state of matter without a damn textbook at hand?
Using Earth Sorcery, I wiped away another attempt at putting elemental runes together. While the plasma stuff was cool, human bodies are just too frail. The entire morning before Johnny barging into my lab was spent trying to put runes of fire or lightning or plasma on my body and actually attempting to use them resulted in my body getting burned or electrocuted or ‘plasmafied’, if that’s even a word. All I know is that the process fucking hurt.
My invented runes that showed the most promise so far were runes of regeneration, which looked like a miniature salamander with a big smile, strength, which resembled the Arm and Hammer logo that I remembered from the box of baking soda, and hardness/defense, which looked like a Roman tower shield.
Those depictions went on easy. Each one performed well in my initial tests just as expected when mana was channeled into them, and made me feel like I had accomplished something. The others, well, the others made me feel like I had a future in high energy explosives.
Sitting back in my chair staring at a wall of clean slate, a weird thought popped into my head.
[You know . . .] I mused, sipping at my water as I let my mind wander down its new path. [Maybe the rune stuff wasn’t working because it was somewhat against my nature. I am not a sorcerer of fire, or energy, or lightning, but of water, earth, nature, flesh, and mind.]
Not having anywhere near the amount of time that I wanted, I stopped wasting it and got back to work.
Conjuring a small block of granite the size of an orange, I let inspiration take over. Using my Earth Sorcery, I inscribed a defense rune of a basic heater shield on the front of it, a small cartoonish looking bomb nested in a tree on the bottom of the granite block to signify explosive growth, and an emblem of a braided ring of thorns surrounding the bomb image. On the side, I did my best to put a tiny picture of a gnarly thorn bush on it and then pulled a tiny seed from my pocket. Giving it a quick kiss for good luck, I infused energy into it and pushed the seed into the granite cube which willingly swallowed the implant. Conjuring a small bit of quartz the size of a pencil eraser, I filled it with energy and pushed that in the cube so that it was touching the seed.
Chuckling evilly to myself, I quickly made a handful more of these and stuck them in secret compartments in Svalinn. These little bad boys were the magical upgraded version of caltrops. I’d be able to chuck them anywhere and the runes plus the impact would cause the seed to quickly grow into a bush covered in super hard granite thorns. They could be used to clog up doorways, create dangerous obstacles, and what made it even better is that due to the seed, I’d even be able to control the rock covered mutant plant if I wanted. I would totally give some credit to Meliad for helping me with this particular idea. The blend of living plant and impenetrable rock had so many uses that I hadn’t even begun to tap.
The next contraption was even deadlier and proved to be even easier to make than the last idea. I called them ‘cryoshards’. The name wasn’t that inventive, but it was better than the name for the last trap, “planttrops’, the combination of ‘plant’ and ‘caltrops’. This particular invention was much simpler but far deadlier in so many ways. I conjured thin shards of sapphire reminiscent of playing cards. The ‘face’ side was etched with a skull inside a whirlpool and the other side displayed a rock being broken open by a hammer.
Now these suckers worked one of two ways. The first and more clever use is that I could slap the sapphire card to a door or a wall with the skull side down so that the broken rock and hammer rune was showing. The card would then draw in the ambient mana in the air and use it to completely drain the heat out of the object it was touching while pumping cold magic into it rendering the object extremely brittle. Which meant that the brittle object would be extremely vulnerable to blunt force.
The flip side of the card was definitely more on the evil side. This one required that I pump the card full of mana and slap it with the broken rock side down and the skull side whirlpool would only explode out a wave of cold it would suck out all the available magical energy from the object that it was attached to.
Both options had limitless uses if a user had a modicum of creativity.
My Earth Sorcery could function as an easy delivery system for both sets of destructive creations, but my Water Sorcery has been left out of my strategic thinking for too long. It’s obviously an incredible asset if I’m near a body of water, but conjuring large amounts of water to use in battle is far slower than using the resources that I already have around me. Now, don’t get me wrong, conjuring water is fairly quick, but I have so many options available that are simply faster. In a rainstorm though, I’d probably be unstoppable.
Taking off my armor, I set it down in front of me all perfectly laid out. [What if I could take the slower part of Water Sorcery out of the equation?] I thought, tracing the existing rune lines with my hand. [The issue isn’t really that it’s slow, it’s that I only have so much brain power and can only do so many things at a time. Part of this can be mitigated by my Consciousness Sorcery, but I am limited in and of myself. I’m only human after all, or am I?]
Quelling my rambling thoughts, I focused in on the crux of the problem. [The real question is, what exactly limits me? Where is the bottleneck of aquatic combat if I’m not in water? It’s that the presence of water or lack thereof slightly limits me.]
Nature and earth and flesh are either all around me all the time or literally make up my body, but water is in my blood, so using that as a medium for combat isn’t conducive to longevity. I mean, the stuff that literally keeps you alive shouldn't be the stuff you fight with.
Lightly tracing the kinetic runes on my armor that absorbed impacts, the initial blueprint for what I adapted for Johnny, I idly found my finger making squiggly lines that kind of looked like waves. A mental ping went off. Closing my eyes, I started to meditate. Earlier in the week, I realized that even though I had Consciousness Sorcery, I still couldn’t actively use one-hundred percent of my brain. Some of that brain power was already sectioned off for regulating my physical body, a large chunk went into my conscious thinking, but the other part was my unconscious mind. What I discovered was that somehow my unconscious was capable of a lot more than I had ever given it credit for.
It could be put to work to do some of the heavy lifting for me.
Using my Mind Sorcery, I created several auto-thinktank-processes wrapped in a question and sent them into that part of my brain. What I did was the jury-rigged manual input of what normally happens to other people when they go to bed with a problem. A normal person sleeps on their issue and somehow wakes up later with the answer. Their unconscious mind worked out the problem for them. Sometimes, the conscious mind just gets in the way, and that ping noise I heard going off was my unconscious mind spitting out an answer to an open ended question I gave it days ago.
How can I better use my magic?
Water is motion. Motion is kinetic energy. Water is always moving, even if it’s a lake, there’s always the wind making a soft ripple or a fish splashing around. Water also fits the shape of any container it is in, and even frozen water can move too. Glaciers reshape landscapes with inexorable power that grind mountains to dust. Holding these images in my mind, I began to draw runes of oceans on the flat parts of my armor while carefully drawing runes of winding rivers at or near the joints.
At the center of my chest plate and the center of my back plate, I carefully molded a fist sized circle with even more runes inside. A book to represent knowledge and the mind, all of the elements that I had control of and a miniature stick figure to represent my armor. Then, sectioning off a small piece of my mind and forming it into a situation specific subroutine, I devoted that portion of my brain to ‘water auto-conjuration duty’ via the runes of my armor.
Perfect. Not only would the kinetic and water runes work together to absorb impacts and keep the joints working smoothly, but in the midst of combat, I could just order my suit via the water runes to constantly conjure water and that would free me up to use it. Cutting out an entire step might just save my ass in combat, and because water doesn’t get in the way in the same manner as earth or nature, it shouldn’t cause any issue in regards to impeding movement. I just added a mental switch to my standard ‘oh shit’ reaction. Ha!
After shaping some more runes on my armor and checking to make sure that nothing was out of order, I turned my attention to another evil precaution. Pulling out a few seeds from a thorny vine I’d collected earlier, I molded them into various points of my armor so that they were just below the surface. Embedding a matrix of control runes surrounding a weave of fast growth ones on top of each kernel was easy and the thoughts of using these quirked my face into an evil grin, again. Nobody would suspect me of sprouting vampiric vines if combat got too close for comfort.
I grinned. [Now for the pièce de résistance!] Gotta put away my internal evil alter-ego.
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I pulled out a sealed stone box from my workbench that I had stored away what felt like eons ago. Some of my Chaos altered minerals and metals from during the Sixth Ripple had been tucked away and I had almost forgotten about them. Outfitting Johnny and Reeanth with awesome gear actually wasn’t that much of a plus or minus for me in any personal way. Sure, it gave me brownie points in their eyes but I made sure that I didn’t give them anything too powerful.
In reality, their gear was simply practice for me. Some of those runes I had to redo over and over due to impractical resonance and working on different projects with different intents helped me to learn more than anything here so far. The truly epic items at my disposal were Svalinn and Gungnir and those were only for me. Although, losing the active slice of Gungnir seriously hurt my combat potential. The upgraded armor I wore made up for it some and the Consciousness Sorcery picked up a bit of the slack, but there had to be something else that I could make.
Touching the box with my finger, my Earth Sorcery cracked the lid open. A hunk of Chaos infused gold sat next to a hefty bar of silver that seemed to undulate in the yellow light of the firestone. These, plus a perfectly preserved dragon corpse that I still had in stasis, had the potential to make gear epic enough that nerds would tell tall tales about it for centuries, if only I had the fucking know how to actually use the resources at my disposal.
Again, having Gungnir hack the brains in the crystal brain vat would have been useful, but another ping kicked an idea from my unconscious to the forefront of my mind. Who truly deserves lovingly crafted, handmade magical gear other than my most faithful companion?
Shaping the right gauntlet of Svalinn to protrude a ten inch razor from the side, I walked over to the giant freezer where Rath’s body lay. The section of his body that I wanted was easy to get to. After climbing over and around the massive blocks of conjured ice and walking into the freezer, I hacked at the knobby wing joint where the bone connected to the shoulder via ligaments and tendons until the entire wing came free of the body. Then I did the same for the other one.
With both wings sliced off, I tossed them to the side and began the worst part, getting to the hamstring in the back of an oversized dragon leg. An hour of delicate cutting and cuss-word laden hacking later, I pulled yards of thick tendon out of the dead dragon and laid it next to the severed wings.
I cursed even as I celebrated internally. [Damn, this is gonna take forever.]
Suffice to say, I didn’t get to sleep as much that night as I wanted. It took two hours just to splice the thick tendons up the way I wanted, and the skin of the wing was plenty soft for what I intended. But the real prize was the skin on the tops of the bones. It was the toughest stretch of skin but the most useful that I could get to. Weaving it all together into a giant collar took forever. Everything wanted to stick together and I had to keep conjuring water to keep the bloody mess clean while using my own blood to animate the dead flesh long enough to shape it right.
The workload of that effort though wasn’t that much compared to the three straight hours of mind-bending enchanting I put into it. Nothing wanted to work correctly right off the bat. The antagonistic flesh of the fire dragon seemed to have a mind of its own, fighting me at every turn. I had to go slow, coax the inimical fibers into shifting how I wanted, easing the intended enchantments deep into the tissue as I tenderly carved more and more runes into the slick flesh with Svalinn’s blade. More and more of my own blood soaked into the skin and tissue as I kept playing god.
Eventually, the project came together even with all the breaks I had to take to heal back up. Sitting proudly with well earned exhaustion, I gazed at my latest effort.
Where a metal name tag would sit on a normal dog collar sat a hunk of Chaos-infused gold that I had shaped into a shield shaped like a thickly bordered pentagon. The center of the medallion glowed with the firestone at the center of it. Then, using Earth Sorcery, I stroked the rippling silver until it became super thin wire which I wove into and around the fibers of the makeshift collar so that the entire weave glistened.
Figuring that in order to be more efficient with my time, I should have several things going at once. I hooked up the gold pendant with a mana link to the river kinetic converter runes so it could charge up to its storage limit while I worked. Surprisingly, the gold filled up extremely slowly. Eyeballing it, I guesstimated that it could hold about fifty times the amount of energy than all of my crystal batteries did put together. I stored that useful tidbit away for later.
While the charging was going on, I etched into the firestone the most complicated set of dependency runes that I could. An unconscious control rune denoted by a brain with z’s floating around it was the big one forming the base for the entire enchantment, and inside of it floated runes of fire control mixed with regeneration-based healing combined with durability and energy containment sigils.
My goal of making this elaborate collar was two-fold. The first was to beef up my part dragon, fire and flesh sorcery wielding mutt as much as magically possible, but the second was also a test case. Does enchanting with resonating materials create a better product?
*******
“Stupid, nasty, icky, fuckin useless ass lump of half-living leather! BITCH!”
The process of carrying the heavy woven enchanted leather collar for Spot wasn’t hard, or it wasn’t supposed to be hard. In fact, it was plain weird. Lucky for Spot but unlucky for me, enchanting things whose nature is the exact opposite of your own carries strange side effects. I was more than physically capable of actually lifting the collar, but moving it almost made the damn thing come alive. The rebellious collar kept twisting and turning and undulating like a snake that had bit its own tail, wouldn’t let go yet still wanted to get the fuck away from me. I had imbued too much power, too much life into the mutinous thing.
“I MADE YOU!” I screamed at it, both hands gripping the gold medallion as I vengefully shook it like a nasty protein shake. I could almost hear it hiss in displeasure, but my mind reassured me that it didn’t have a mouth or lungs. It was the middle of the night and all I wanted to do was sleep, but this thing did not want to cooperate with me. I had mentally pinged Spot twenty minutes ago so that he would meet me at the under-tree hideout entrance, and he was excitedly barking his head, jumping for joy even though he couldn’t see me.
“I will curse you, I will drag you, I will fucking UNDO YOU if you don’t just come with me!” I growled, cracking the medallion up and down like a whip. “You know what? Fine, you wanna play this way, let’s fuckin do it, let’s go bitch!”
Losing my patience with something I’d made wasn’t new, but the last one that talked back was Gungnir, and I don’t really like it when inanimate things talk back. Lack of sleep contributed to most of the frustration I was feeling. Conjuring buckets and buckets of sand, I used Earth Sorcery to encase the medallion and the giant dragon-leather collar into a ball of wet sand.
“How do you like me now, asshole?!” I celebrated, easily rolling the collar along now that it was encased in the ball of wet sand. Kicking open the door from the tunnel to the under-tree hideout, I smugly skipped through my living room.
“What’s with the giant tennis ball?” Johnny said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He lay sprawled out on a bed slapped together from spruce boughs and moss. “It’s too damn late to be playing fetch with that big ass dog! What the fuck man?”
Reeanth stepped out of the kitchen doorway squinting with irritation. “Silence runt,” she commanded. “The lord of the land has no need to explain himself to you.” Turning her head to face me and the wayward collar, her eyes lit up scanning the makeshift container. “Did you make an enchanted snake with a heart of gold? Are you creating living things now my lord?”
“Yo! I don’t fuck wit’ snakes man . . .” Johnny said, falling out of bed and backing up with his hands partly up in the air. “They’re all kindz uh messed up. Poison, chokin, hidin’ and sneakin’ round. Oh no, sounds like my last girlfriend, so hell no.”
Before I laughed or could say anything at all he bolted back out into the room I had tunneled out for him. Reeanth turned her eyes towards me.
“Ah come on!” I yelled, levitating the giant floating ball of sand in between us. “Turn that shit off! You know it burns!”
“I’m sorry my lord,” she said, cutting off the sorcerous eye beams. “I do forget the side effects of my own abilities at times.”
“Well put some practice into it, and get some sleep. We got a long day tomorrow.”
But my day, or night really, wasn’t over yet. Opening the door to the outside caught me off guard as Spot’s mouth was wide open right in front of the door, his tongue lashing around and his horrible dog breath coming in hot.
“Back up mutt! I got a present for you!” I reassured him lovingly. “And I’m sure it can’t wait to see you either!”
Spot bounded back and tore around the edge of the glade like a puppy hunting for a place to pee. Tossing the wet sand ball in the middle of the clearing, I banished all the sand and let the collar fall. What I hadn’t anticipated in the beginning but was clear to my mana-vision now were that the minute sparks of Chaos that had remained in the firestone. The errant leftovers combined with the living silver to form a semi-intelligent rote bundle of instincts. What was worse was that I couldn’t really grasp what the collar was looking for. All I could figure out is that a sum greater than its parts had emerged.
In hindsight, my stumbling attempts at resonance enchanting might have been totally brilliant. The leather came from a fire-aspected dragon, and dragons love treasure, and making the collar was combining things that really should go together from a mythological standpoint, such as dragon leather with Chaos-altered gold and silver and an altered firestone. I was just sticking to the trope of throwing dragons and jewelry together.
The whole rest of the idea was then to give the completed project to a mutated canine that had eaten part of a dragon and gained characteristics of said dragon from the flesh sorcery that I had given it. Maybe, just maybe, pray that all of these pieces would line up and make my canine even more badass.
Hopefully.
I crouched right in front of the entrance of my home ready to haul ass if I had to. One hand stayed on the door while the other gripped Gungnir. Never sure how shits’ gonna go. The now free magical collar reared up, its medallion seeming to look around as if it were the head of an angry cobra.
Spot crouched low, growling deep and angry. I sent a mental picture of what I wanted to Spot, for him to dominate and put on the collar. I also sent the feeling that it might even be better than a treat, but I definitely had a treat for him when he was done.
With a giant bark and leap, Spot landed on the collar with his two front paws, growling at it as he exuded waves of raw mana so hot they almost set the air on fire. The collar almost let out a squeak as it went limp. My faithful canine snatched up the medallion with his teeth and flung it into the air, pointing his snout perfectly up. As if an artist painted the scene, the collar opened up and fell down perfectly snug around his neck. I watched as the golden medallion shimmered and then melted, molding to Spot's chest.
My trusty canine’s tail thumped like a machine gun against the ground almost causing me to fall.
“Don’t look smug.” I laughed, grinning my butt off. “I made it just for you boy.”
Spot hopped towards me with a short bark.
“Hey now, I know you want the treat. Stay.” I commanded. “I’ll be right back.”
Ten minutes later, I watched Spot devour a beach ball sized chunk of dragon meat and I kept my vigil to make sure he didn’t go into another metamorphosis coma. It was fascinating to observe with my flesh sorcery what was going on. Seeing that he was happy and that there were no immediate negative effects, I lay down on his haunch and felt Spot’s kernel of flesh sorcery that I had given him, only, it wasn’t a seed anymore. The implanted magic had grown and woven itself into every fiber of his being, and the DNA or magical parts of fire and dragon had been integrated as well.
Sport laid his head down on a rock and turned so that I could be more comfortable on his leg. I turned my attention to Spot’s stomach where the chunk of dragon was sitting. Spot hadn’t even chewed or gnawed on it, simply swallowed the whole thing as if I actively starved him. The bloody chunk of raw dragon/alien meat was dissolving in his stomach acid super fast, as if it was a furnace in there. I waited for twenty minutes just to make sure that nothing weird happened and then called it a night.