Reflections - 2,374 A.R (After the Ripple) - (4,394 A.D)
Distant Future
The sticky fingers of my past glommed onto the utter lack of caffeine in my system as my mental foci extricated themselves from the glassy mire of the past. Just the thought of my past mistakes and their surrounding events made me want to smash the damn memory crystal.
“What a waste of time. What a sheer waste of opportunity.” So much damn unrealized potential that was just absolutely wasted and honestly, it really wasn’t my fault. How could I have known? How could any of us have known?
I looked in the mirror and watched my aesthetically perfect but haggard face sigh at my old self’s lack of knowledge. At least my flesh sorcery keeps me looking young as well as actually being young. The old fable of carefully minding your words is encapsulated best by the mistake of the foolish son of Morgana the Damned. Instead of asking for eternal youth, he begged for eternal life. Cursed to never die, he lost all agency as his soul was forced to animate a barely living shriveled husk of a body.
“Too depressing. Skipping forward.”
*******
(Part 2) - Gungnir - 0 A.R (2020 A.D)
My internal musings were interrupted on my way home right as I turned onto my street by a blaze of unearthly light. The heat from it wasn’t unbearable at first, but it Rippled.
“THE BLACK HOLE SPOUTS, ANOTHER OCTAVE WAVES.”
The pounding cymbals in my brain rammed me down to the ground with that ethereal announcement. The next thing I knew, I was in the street on my hands and knees retching my guts out. There wasn’t even a warning. With my vision slowly fading, I could barely make out the hazy outline of my house only forty feet away.
“Earth joins the rest, spiral arm in arm.”
Another slam. Another cough heavily flecked with blood. I watched the droplets sizzle on the pavement.
I crawled, one arm over the other. A massive wave of pressure stepped on me over and over, covering every inch of my body like gravity had been turned up to ten and then began grinding into my back with just the right amount of sadism.
A trickle of blood leaked out of my ears, the soft wetness trailing down my neck. The porch laughed as I struggled ten feet away. My magic barely responded to my instinctive call. The green grass stabbed with unearthly heat at every exposed bit of flesh. This is not how I want to die. My fingers desperately clutched at my staff, the raw energy of the Universe barely draining into it while more diverted around me. I feel my staff doing what it could to shield me even as I bled on it, my new instrument absorbing just enough of whatever energy was crushing me.
I felt like an ant meeting a boot.
“Prepare, Remnant. Peace never lasts.”
Safety. A relief from this relentless, invisible pressure. It was all I could think about. The door to the inside of my house seemed like Everest, mocking me with its lofty heights and bitter cold peaks.
The straight lines of solid American construction that defined every angle of my house wavered in front of my eyes. My mind crackled and everything burned. Everything.
Barely controlled panic is the reason I actually physically made it to my house. I don’t even know if what tortured me was fire or heat. Mana burn? Chaos burn? UV burn? I don’t know.
“Ah!” I croaked, finally looking down at my numb hands. [AAAAAAAHHHH!] I screamed internally. [MY HAND MELTED TO MY FUCKING STAFF!] My mind splintered as other useless thoughts ran through my brain. If this is what happened to me, then what the fuck happened to everyone else? Barely coherent thought fragments bounced off each other as they themselves became dangerous entities I couldn’t handle, leashed madness pounding at the edges of my skull for independence.
The shards of my pain-wracked mind scattered, contemplating anything that could be a momentary distraction. Somehow I managed to get one mangled hand on the doorknob and turn it so that I could crawl inside.
I curled into a ball at the entrance of my living room, too hurt to even close the door. The caped butt was shoved into the corner wall and the top crystal spires dug into a widening crack in the floor preventing the door from closing. I gasped with a shred of relief as the immense pressure let off.
“Ackkthpp!” I sputtered, inching forward more and more. At least I was inside and out of the immense arcane pressure that stopped where my magically reinforced house began. The shaking of my limbs made concentration impossible. The basic healing enchantment on my amulet mindlessly dumped untiring streams of energy into my system, speeding my regeneration and preventing me from going into total shock and shutting down completely.
Two shaky kicks knocked my staff free and I barely managed to get a complete pain block going on my nervous system. The shaking stopped after an hour of putting myself to rights. I sank in and out of consciousness as the healing took place. My tipping point came about when I managed to drink conjured water, giving me something to focus on as I pulled my body to the kitchen. Downing vitamins is hard when you can’t feel anything, but being able to force the water where you want it with magic is convenient.
With the worst behind me, I set about actively healing my body, directing the efforts of my healing amulet: banishing the burnt skin and regrowing the new stuff, directing my bone marrow to amp up red blood cell production and for my spleen to release its stores of blood, speeding up my digestive track to process the nutrients that I’m not smart enough to conjure.
As my movement became less impaired, I took off my armor and clothes one piece at a time and examined each body part as I peeled coverings off my skin. Shivers ran down my spine as I tackled one body part at a time.
The peeling of my hand from off of the staff was an exercise of grotesque fascination. Thank all the powers that be for magic. Cutting off all feeling below the wrist allowed me to do the gruesome work carefully and slowly while forcefully healing that awful sight. In about an hour and a half, my body returned to a semblance of normalcy. My mind carefully shoved the flashes of torture into some deep dark closet while my nerves protested the suppressed pain.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The urge to puke was still grasping at the back of my throat but there wasn’t anything left in the tank. Exactly what was that? It felt like the Ripple from three days ago, but this time it hurt. I mean, hurt doesn’t even describe the level of pain experienced at the molecular level. It was definitely different, not just a cosmic loudspeaker telling us shit was coming, but a wave of something Earth had never even considered in its Standard Model of Physics.
I peeked out the window expecting to see only fire and scorched earth combined with a sort of absolute meteoric desolation, but everything looked fine.
[Was I the only one affected?] I wondered, rubbing my hands to get the feeling back in them. [Was that a Ripple of Chaos or a wave of unbridled magic? Did it only hit things soaked with ether?] I whirled around.
“My staff!” I yelped, looking all around to find it. I just got the damn thing made and my shell shocked mind fixated on it.
[Did the Ripple break it? Is it messed up? Please no, please no . . .] I wondered, scrambling for new clothes and hobbling to the kitchen where I had left it on the floor. I poked it with my toe. Meh, seemed normal. It didn’t look any different. Kinda half expected it to do something, like grow arms and break shit. I grabbed it just above the base, avoiding the control ring and silver cap.
The smooth dark brown whorls of oak were cool to the touch. My magical senses were going haywire though. The crystal batteries at the top seemed full and dense in a way that I hadn’t felt before, but that’s not saying much. For that matter, so was the battery on my shield gauntlet and the batteries in my vest. It feels like Change. Like potential, a shard of captured infinite potential. But a whole bunch of them.
My staff has three, vest has ten, and the gauntlet has one. Fourteen pieces of incomplete infinity. I gingerly stumbled to the front door and closed it. I kept asking questions as I looked around like a scared mouse. [Still not prepared for this level of insanity. What the fuck did that voice mean? Is this going to happen again?]
The shakes hit again, harder this time. How many times can this ant get stepped on and live?
[WHERE THE FUCK IS EVERYONE ELSE?]
Unbidden thoughts crashed my efforts at staying focused. My small-yet-dense town seemed strangely depopulated on the way to the river earlier. Now, my fiancée and I were a cute hermit couple, basically best friends that hung out way too much with each other and not enough with family and friends. I’ve always found it hard to care about all of the people I don’t know, but my curiosity was killing me since my mind wasn’t coming up with a good enough explanation for the distinct lack of people in the area.
Fredericksburg is a college town AND a historic area AND halfway between Richmond and D.C. There’s supposed to be many many people here at all times of the year. In fact, during the summers and fall, it’s so crammed with people that traffic sits at a standstill for hours every day. Freaking tourists.
[Crap. Can’t think about that right now. I need a drink.] I thought, figuring that the age-old cope still applied. When in doubt, drink it out. I gingerly grabbed some Jack, two cubes of ice and a Coke. It’s a cardinal sin to spill a drink so I used flesh magic to assist in keeping my hands still as I unsteadily made my drink.
Taking a few deep breaths, I slugged it down and made another, all the while running my magical senses through my body. Not much was out of order at this juncture, now, and it feels new to the point where I probably rebuilt it from scratch with flesh magic. Not a farfetched conjecture after what I just went through, but my mind was definitely shot. I sat my ass down on the couch next to fiancée-tree. Maybe talking about it out loud will help my mind wrap itself around the new reality.
[I’m totally crazy for talking to a damn tree.] I snarked.
I coughed to clear my throat, testing out my voice. “Ok, so reality had two big Ripples. One made me a minor demi-god, and the other nearly killed me.” I concluded, coughing a bit more. “And what else . . . I’ve enchanted badass armor and cheated the system by surviving, then some little punk tried to kill me with black magic and zombies. MY WOMAN IS A TREE!” My voice rose more and more as I ranted to the silent lady.
Couldn’t reasonably stand up without spilling my drink.
My hoarse voice climbed in intensity as I continued on. “My house is made of stone and will be covered in a giant four-trunked oak. And now I have something I do not know how to handle in my kitchen.”
Another full drink to calm the nerves. The sudden urge to pace didn’t help..
“A plan! A real one! I need a plan! I need to redo some things - or everything, I don’t know.”
The alcohol was helping I guess. Maybe. It took about ten more minutes of steady sippin’ for my hands to return to some semblance of a four-year-old’s motor skills on their own. I put my drink down and fumbled around for a sense of my magic in its entirety, trying to see if anything had changed in that department. I didn’t feel anything different soul-wise but these circumstances reminded me of when I was a child playing with my dad’s power tools. I really don’t know what I was doing, but messing about without real knowledge was a surefire way to bumble into serious consequences to my actions that I would have no way of foreseeing. But I do know that I need to prepare.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
You heard the great Ripple, we aren’t alone.
*******
When I got my act together to the point where I could reliably move my hands without shaking and without the assistance of magic, I took stock of the situation. Mid-afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows, bugging me just enough so that I double checked all the windows of the house and made sure they were secure. At each level of the house, I closed the blinds except for the main windows in the living room.
Each door of the house except the front door got its own extraspecial magic ‘door stopper’, a heavy chunk of stone conjured just behind the door so that nothing would barge on in. After that, I conjured and enchanted a pile of flashbang pebbles and rigged a set of five of them at each door just to be extra secure.
After giving into my innate paranoia, I got busy with my own equipment. First, I stripped in front of the dining table in the kitchen and then got working on my clothes to make them as tough as chainmail. Each article of clothing received a stamp-sized piece of pressed metal made up of iron, silver, and gold and each bit of the metal was smeared with my blood to mark it as mine. The metal attachments had as many defensive runes as I could come up with in a short period of time and were molded with my magic so that they bonded to the fabric of the clothes. Then, I took even more time and slowly remade all of my basic gear in case I couldn’t handle or manage to understand what they had become due to the influence of the Ripple. That re-engineering took up the rest of my day.
When dusk came to greet me, I was decked out in everything I needed or could imagine I needed. I replaced the Chaos charged batteries in my vest with new normal batteries in everything except the staff. The staff sat off to the side for now, pulsing a soft blue and purple light. Technically, I was back to where I had started this morning except with raw potential, unchecked potential to do even more than I could before.
The Army boots were enspelled for strength and durability and the leather jacket and thick black working jeans sported the same enchantments. The rest of my kit included a helmet made of conjured bone with quartz eye lenses, a shield plate ensconced in a bone gauntlet for my left arm, and my human weaponry sat in their designated pockets for easy access. Each rune of durability was some form of a shield set into an amalgamation of iron, silver, and gold, all pressed together in thin layers and charged with as much mana as I could force into it without it blowing up in my face.
The next part was hard for me. The crystals filled with Chaos energy sat in the center of the dining table, glistening with untapped power as they emitted their own light. Every time I looked at them, they changed colors just enough to where you could never actually say exactly what color they were. Translucent, fickle, and a bit on the eldritch side of things. I shivered, their emanations excited my spirit in an odd way, and not the same way that the original Chaos crystals did. These emitted a power that scraped at my soul. I tried focusing on them to give me more elemental sorceries like the first ones, but no. My soul was just too raw, screaming at me in a way that my hindbrain has been for the past couple days.
Everytime I tried to grab the condensed power in the crystals, my hairs stood up on the back of my neck and my body kept twitching like I was supposed to go into a flat-out sprint away from a very hungry tiger. Grudgingly, I put the hopes of gaining new powers out of my mind for the time being.
Now to clean up the Universe’s mess. Sighing with more than a hint of defeat, I conjured a stone box on my kitchen counter with enough space for the Chaos rocks. I used the kitchen tongs and set each one inside carefully so as to not jostle them too much. Begrudgingly, I sealed the top with stone. I covered the sides with durability runes and then just to be extra safe I placed a rune of concealment on there, charginging it with as much energy as I could put into it.
Hopefully no one will know or be able to see what I have, because I sure don’t. I honestly don’t know if any of my efforts would work, but my Sorcery reassured me with warm gut feelings that the runes I shaped into it would work. Using a bit of Earth’s historic lore, had the perfect rune.
I had inscribed the All-Seeing Eye of Horus on the top, and then put a giant X on it. Haha. I only remembered that symbol from the old cartoon show ‘Mummies’. I think I just proved that intent matters more with this kind of thing. Hopefully this would help people from magically peeping in on me. The Chaos crystals were too valuable for anyone or anything to get a clue that they were down here.
[My staff!] Growling at torturous events of the day would do me no good but I could at least focus my efforts on something I could affect. This particular fucker I had to straighten out; just too much pure potential for raw destruction contained in a ley-line fueled ironwood staff with fragments of who-knows-what in it. This madman’s masterpiece was supposed to be my answer to working magic that was far bigger than myself and targets that I can’t get to. My magics of Nature, Flesh, Earth and Water don’t lend themselves to the latter, but this tool is the answer in changing that.
“What is ‘Chaos’? Really? Is it not change, or the possibility of change, or maybe even the personification of Chance?” I babbled, examining the staff. It pulsed with an inner light as if to agree with my own madness. If it could make me more than what I was, and do that in weird ways to other things, then the only course of action that makes sense is the old classic, say ‘fuck it’.
I pulled out a piece of paper from the kitchen junk drawer and began sketching on it with a marker. My kindergarten level drawing skills really came in handy as I poorly drew the following: an ugly lookin’ bonfire, a lit candle, a tornado, a lightning bolt, anything I could think of magically based that comes from Mother Nature that could wreck someone’s day from a hundred yards away.
These drafts were my first sketches of offensive runes for the concepts I needed to hold in my head if I was going to make this work. Three diamonds were already bonded into the head of the staff but this did not mean that had to be the end of it. Cursing myself for erroneously sealing the other Chaos crystals too early, I spent 30 minutes working to get back into that damn box. Connecting its wards to the house made it like trying to break into your own home when you forgot the key. Finally pulling one out, I set about relocking that box.
Now, a wizard’s staff is awesome sauce. Everyone knows that. And since I can’t use these particular crystals on myself then I figured that there’s really no reason not to beef up my tools.
But what about a wizard’s spear? Never seen a wizard with one of those before.
I might have been going about this the wrong way. My drafted concepts shifted in my head as my ideas evolved. I sat on the ground in the kitchen with my staff laying in front of me with the crystal-studded head pointed directly at me, my feet holding it still behind the head of the staff.
Cupping my hands, I thought about the runes that I had sketched and I tried to picture them in my head and then merge what I drew with what I imagined how they actually looked. I wanted this to be more real, more intense, more capable of affecting the universe. Intent isn’t just power, it’s the direction that power needs to operate, and it comes from me.
The first idea I focused on was a lit candle, pure potential. And what captures the idea of potential?
Candles. Candles burn. Candles illuminate. Candles are also seeds. The greatest wildfires can start with one drunk idiot carelessly sparking a Bic lighter. Channeling a third of the energy from my battery vest into my cupped hands while creating a 3d visual spell matrix of flaming intent was fucking hard. It kept wanting to grow, feast, and live! Keeping the mana compressed, I grabbed all the power I could from my vest and forced it into the first stone.
It was absolutely anti-climactic. Nothing happened. The hologram of the spell matrix just sat outside the Chaos stone, pulsing as if it were magnetically repulsed. The harder I tried to push it in the harder it pushed back.
Sitting back for a moment, I set the staff down while thinking it over. “Ok, this wasn’t a problem when making other enchantments,” I mumbled, gazing in the heatless light of the small flame spell matrix above my hand. Grunting with a bit of effort, I stood up and rustled through the kitchen drawers. “I mean, maybe the problem is that it isn’t real fire. But it couldn’t be real fire because it’s not one of my elements . . .”
I tore a couple pages out of a notepad from the drawer and a Bic lighter. I rolled up the paper with one hand and stuck it in my mouth like an exaggerated cigarette. To test it out, I waved my hand through the spell matrix. No heat. Sticking the end of the ‘cig’ in the spell matrix did nothing either.
“Gotcha,” I said, biting my cheek as I puzzled this out. “So, maybe if I used real fire and the spell matrix . . .”
A few flicks on the lighter made it come to life and I used it to light the rolled up paper. Almost immediately it sprang to life. I felt the magnetic repulsion of the Chaos stone lessen. Acting on a hunch, I quickly grabbed the lighter and the flaming paper and sat back next to my staff. Holding the two fire-related items in one hand, I lowered them down towards the uppermost bonded Chaos stone and passed them through the spell matrix.
The greedy stone sucked it right down. The flaming paper and lighter disintegrated as they fell through the spell matrix into a spray of sparks and everything cycloned down into the rune including the bundled up power stored in my battery packs.
Sweat dripped from my nose from the rapid rise in temperature. I watched as two drops fell on the newly minted stone of Chaos and fire. There, in the streak made from the sweat, I could see something different just before the drops hissed and evaporated.
I shined the stone with my sleeve. There was a rune there, a small rune that looked like a candle, and it was dancing in slow motion.
“Yes!”
Laughing with anticipation, I ran around the house gathering other things I would need. Setting it all in front of Elizabeth who still didn’t care about my discoveries, I talked at her anyway.
“Okay, it kinda makes sense!” I gushed, alive with excitement. “I couldn’t initially make enchantments that would have any sort of power with elements that weren’t mine because I wasn’t actually using the necessary elements. The fire rune needed actual fire and fire based items to join with the Chaos stone and for it to work.”
I pointed at the other items I laid out on the coffee table next to the staff. “Lightning needs a spark, which is pretty easy, right? A small outdoor radio that charges when you crank it and a pack of D batteries. And the air or wind part, a portable fan and windchimes and a straw that I’ll blow air through just before I drop it.”
Still no response. “Goddamnit woman, you make me feel like that dude in that movie where he got stranded and ended up going crazy talking to a volleyball named Wilson, uh . . . Castaway!” I rambled, snapping my fingers as I finally remembered the name of the movie.
Figuring that I could ignore my general descent into lonely madness, I buried myself in my work. As I proved the initial concept, I had to mentally prepare for the other parts. Fire, done. Second: What compliments fire? Air. Laughing mentally at how I was perverting the standard cycle of elements (Earth, Water, Air, Fire), I decided to make my quadfecta of power. Lightning, lightning would be the third and final piece for the generating aspects of the staff. What was getting me really excited was the final part, the tip of the spear forming the fourth part, the Shard of Chaos.
At the end of the whole process, I envisioned having a spear that would both function as a staff and be able to manipulate the energy that I myself had no affinity for. Breathing a bit heavy from the exertion of heavy mana working, I decided that I was not ready for this. My battery vest was empty and my stomach was reminding me that I was still definitely human. Dinner was two cans of discount tuna with some good ol’ Duke’s mayo and pepper with a thirty minute break of calm breathing exercises. Just enough to keep me going.
I took my staff (and the future spear point) and went to the basement. I personally may not be able to hold the excessive amount of energy that I need for this project, but who cares? I have generators.
“Work smarter not harder.” I grumbled, carefully rounding the doorway from the finished part of the basement to the storage part.
My dad used to say crap like that, casually throwing out wisdom just as I stopped listening to whatever lecture I was receiving. God, I hope he’s still alive. The fifty mile hike north to get to where my family lives would take me days and I’m definitely not ready for that yet. But back to the experiment, I’m pretty sure something amazing would happen if I worked harder AND smarter.
The generator to the right hummed as I turned it on. My personal stores of mana refilled within ten seconds when I cranked it up to max flow. With this ever-growing flood of energy coursing through me, I couldn’t wait for the next steps, imparting the two remaining conceptual essence runes of a lightning bolt and a windstorm and then powering them up.
Forcing myself to hold on and concentrate through the sheer agonizing pleasure from the mana overload, the actual working was cake. The flood of mana easily allowed me to ignore my discomfort of working with elements not aligned to my own nature, the sterile flavor of the generator’s power insulating my soul and condensing the spell workings at the same time. Using my ideas and bolstering the spell matrices one at a time with the items symbolically and actually related to the element, each Chaos stone was perfectly enchanted.
I stared at the magnificent work. Each of the small Chaos stones had a personalized rune on it, slowly shifting as if it were alive. The second crystal, focused on wind, sported a rune of a black tornado slowly twisting with little stick figures and cars being hurled around it while the third crystal gleamed with a basic-ass lightning bolt striking a kite. Suck it Ben Franklin.
With the supporting elemental Chaos stones embedded in the base of where the speartip was going to go, I focused on the ‘main blade’ portion. The tip of the spear. Grasping the main focus piece, the large Chaos shard, in one hand and my staff in the other, I stared into the core of the Chaos crystal as its inner purple flame danced with eerie hints of yellow and green.
[Flexibility of purpose. Versatile joining . . . a penultimate combination of purposes.] I first shaped the speartip crystal using my Earth Sorcery into the shape of a twisting three-bladed spear point similar to an M-48 cyclone knife. The base of the spear point, the part that would attach to the wood of the staff, molded into a thin cylinder with thick hooks sticking downwards and a bit out.
My nature magic opened up the wooden top of the staff, the ironwood flowing around and welcoming its deadly crown. Slowly working my power, I shaped the head of the staff again to envelop the hooks of the crystal so that it could never be unseated. I watched to make sure that the hooks didn’t protrude from the sides of the staff and in fact keep the speartip seated. After a minute of pushing and prodding with my magic, I was satisfied that both the staff and its blade were joined properly.
I felt a pull on my stores of mana as my spear began draining more and more power from me. I cranked up the governor on the generator a bit more as I kept working. Feeling every part of the spear, I kept molding it until the base of the three-sided blade touched on the top to the three crystals that were next to the base of the spear point.
[Almost done.] For the last part, I took the feed of the generator, quickly disconnected it from myself and joined it directly to the golden control ring on the spear. As the raw mana flowed through the increasingly brightening staff, I intuitively held a firm grip on the connection between the feed and my staff while spending most of my attention on joining the individual components and melding them together to make the spear a perfectly joined whole not just a machine of many parts. One spear with one epic function; to fuck shit up.
Raw Chaos fused the crystals together as the unearthly light reacted to my enchantments and the wide open mana-feed almost joyously. The symphonic whole eagerly made the impossible just a bit more within a mortal’s reach, allowing me to do what I wanted to do for less than what it would cost others. Just before it finished, I threw my last inspired Hail Mary idea at it, a shard of bone grown from my knuckle with a unique spell matrix shaped in its center. My power flared and set it in the very core of my spear. The ironwood easily swallowed the bone shard and healed over the implant. I sat there, chest heaving as I contemplated the weapon. Its grueling construction was over.
Eldritch light played over the length of the staff as the melded parts continue to intermix with each other. The vast power from the generator kept dumping a constant flow of mana into my weapon fueling the arcane metamorphosis. The end result was absolutely beautiful in the most deadly sense of the word.
Gray ironwood glimmered with diamond flecks throughout the length of the staff but it was still nothing to compare to the crowning tri-point of death. I could feel the seed of the bone matrix in the core slowly drawing on the Chaos and mana, assimilating to the combination of materials in the spear.
I laughed with a sort of mad joy. “A spear fit for Odin!” I roared with triumph, running up stairs to show it to Elizabeth. “Oh right,” I said, with a bit more calm as I rounded the corner and stared at the uncaring wooden visage. My face fell but I forced a smile on my face. “You don’t really care because I’m the nerd of the house. Well, for your knowledge hun, he’s supposedly the wise king of the Norse gods. Probably a badass with magic as well.”
I ran the staff back downstairs as the mana feed connection thinned significantly with distance. Setting my spear down in front of the generator, I stared at my mad creation with pride. It continuously drank in the everpresent waves of power being emitted by the generator.
“Bet you’d be a damn good backup power source if my batteries ever run low in combat.”
Ten more minutes of full-on unhindered power outflow from the generator later, I sensed my new weapon was full. Cranking the generator back to low, I set the crystal batteries in their slots to charge. With nothing else pressing for my attention at the moment, I took thirty minutes to carefully watch the charging process. My careful examination of my batteries filling up showed that the matter-to-mana function on the generator’s enchantment displayed zero signs of degradation. That’s a relief. One less thing to not have to worry about.
[Hmmm. Maybe tonight I’ll hunt that fucker that was scratching on my door.]