The forest was dark and quiet. It rustled softly, cutting off light in the way that most shroom-forests did, the stalks of tree-high mushrooms all bending in support of each other's caps. Still, there were pockets of light. Of noise. The ground was littered with their spongy logs and half-sunken caps– large groups brought low by weather and wildlife, to expose the blue and green sky above.
It was in one of these pockets of light that something else lay fallen; a wreck. A smoking, blaring, pearlescent white and alien thing. Blasted off course by a fluctuation in the space it traveled in, it had emerged, sightless and damaged, into a system unknown. Under the direction of its sole occupant, it had then fallen to crash-land on the planet below.
Said occupant – one Harton S. Springer, independent surveyor – bellowed as a broken mana-battery discharged its contents across the panel next to his chair, narrowly missing his leg. “Son of a litch!” He yelled, unstrapping himself from the shock-bracing and diving for the head-sized container. One massive hand slapped itself over the crack in the metal, stemming the flow of lost energy, while his other rummaged for an emergency bag. Once he’d found one, he jammed the whole battery inside and zipped the bag closed. A quick check through the transparent material showed the remaining charge to be around three-fifths capacity.
Harton let out an explosive snort, slumping to the floor. “Well, damn,” he murmured. “That's a great way to cap off the day.” He shook the battery goop from his hand, ignoring how it sparkled and fuzzed as it lost contact with his fur.
“Anything else want to break?” He asked the ceiling of his survey pod. “Come on, don’t be shy! Navigation is fried, atmospheric engines are crushed, the warper looks like someone took a sledgehammer to it, and–” He stood and trudged over to the primary control panel. “–and the solar condensers burnt up in their tubes. Now ain’t that just peachy?”
Grimacing to himself, Harton began to scroll through the rest of the status reports, slowly silencing the blaring alarms as he acknowledged their problems. As a whole, his pod has survived atmospheric entry rather well; the main structure was undamaged, no rooms had blown their walls, and the mana shield had absorbed the pod’s impact with the earth. Still, beyond the large and obvious, a host of smaller issues were making themselves known. The worst of which came when Harton switched to a view of the pod’s spell library and realized that five of its six shelves had destabilized, rendering those contents unusable for all but manual learning.
At that point, more than an hour in, Harton had had enough. He shunted the rest of the alerts off to the side and disabled all but the hazard alarms, rendering the crippled vessel silent for the first time since it'd reemerged in normal space. “Gods, what a mess,” he said to himself. “A half dozen warper-skips out into the middle of nowhere, and a crash-landed pod full of broken survey equipment. You really know how to do it, don’t you Harton?”
The middle-aged minotaur rolled his eyes and, after a few minutes of silent fuming, pulled up the pod's external cameras. “Well, let’s see what the place looks like at least. We’ve got mushrooms – hopefully, that’s regional – some animal nests up in the caps, a whole lot of ferns, insects, mud, and... what do you know, green skies! Oh yes, it’s a wet planet alright,” he griped.
That was going to wreak havoc with his fur. And the mud—minotaur hooves did not do mud. The moisture made them soft; painfully easy to bruise or pierce. He’d need to get some boots out of storage.
Swiping at the control panel again, Harton checked a set of environmental samplers that had managed not to break during the crash. “Oxygen’s good, if not a bit higher than I’m used to. There’s some mana pollution in the atmosphere, which is interesting, but nothing too harmful in the air or earth around the pod...” Harton scowled and shook his head. “Oh, to hell with it. I’m heading outside. The damned place is gonna’ need a visual check anyways.”
Grabbing a pack of sampling gear and swinging himself down the ladder of his pod, he moved to the ground level’s far-left wall. Against it stood the shelves for his spell library, each filled with glass orbs that would, in normal circumstances, shine with carefully balanced imprints of the spells within. With only one shelf's contents still functioning properly, however, that portion of the room had taken on a dim, yellow glow.
Regardless, Harton refused to let the problem stop him. Quickly perusing the contents of the shelf, he came back with six spell-orbs he expected would most benefit his next few days on-planet. They were an eclectic, not-quite-ideal bunch, but they would work, and they were what he had.
The first choice of the bunch was [Condensate].
Condensate
Functions best when cast in a gaseous medium.
It was a pretty cut-and-dry choice, descriptive in its naming convention and made for climates precisely like the one Harton found himself in now. So long as the air was wet enough, the spell was nearly eight times less costly than summoning water from the elemental plane. In fact, if it weren’t so rarely applicable, he might’ve taken the time to learn the spell proper.
Next, though, was [Liqui-jet].
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Liqui-jet Propel an existing liquid source towards a target location at high speeds.
Functions best when made to propel a continuous stream.
He wasn’t nearly so much a fan of this spell. Despite pairing well with watery environments and the already chosen [Condensate], its limitation to using pre-existing, nearby liquids instead of summoning it directly made the spell unreliable at the worst of times. Unfortunately, Harton didn’t have much of a choice. The spell’s earth and lightning-based equivalents had destabilized with shelves two and five, and though he knew how to cast a mean fire-bolt, that element didn’t have quite the stopping power of its contemporaries. In the stop-’em-dead department, [Liqui-jet] would have to do.
After that came [Project Noise].
Project Noise Delay the propagation of sound within a bubble around the caster.
Before this spell expires, the caster may project these sounds to a target location at an additional cost.
He’d taken this one a lot, as of late. The ability to move quietly and put off audio-dependent, predatory creatures was incredibly useful, regardless of the spell’s status as a mana-hog. Whenever he next had time to learn spells, [Project Noise] was first on the list.
Finally, there were the last two orbs. They were relatively modern spell concepts, by comparison to the rest, and consequently focused more on utility than effect. He’d chosen them for their ability to work as a pair, rather than for the individual benefits they could provide.
Hydrophobic Imbuement Repel water in a thin layer around a region, object, or being of choice
Time for which this spell may be active is inversely proportional to the surface area imbued.
Weight-less Reduce the amount of weight applied by a creature or object of choice.
Time for which this spell may be active is inversely proportional to the weight reduced.
If they functioned as he expected they would – and he had used them before, if not in combination – then the two spells represented appreciably easier travel on swampy land, keeping him from sinking so deeply into the muck. In the region around his pod, at least, it seemed clear that he would appreciate that.
With all the spell-forms selected, Harton shifted his orbs one by one into the queue for the pod’s imprinter. It was a rugged, almost entirely mechanical device, with a rounded feed-tube for the orbs, a slot on the front that he could reach into, and little else. Once the spell orbs were set, he shoved his right arm into the hole and felt it lock softly into place, his palm face-up in the machine.
The imprinter whirled.
With a clunk, the first glass orb dropped down, and Harton felt the whole thing shudder, gears and levers flicking past his entombed appendage while never quite touching fur or flesh. He winced but kept his hand still. After nearly a minute of startup, the shuddering stopped and a thin needle pierced the pad of his index finger, slowly tracing out a figure with ink.
[Liqui-jet] was the first runic tattoo. It was a small, looping figure that reached down to encircle his top and middle knuckles with braided curves, the physical pattern and ink serving to anchor the imprinted spell. When it was done, the next orb dropped. This one was [Condensate]; A larger working for the longer middle finger. It dripped downwards with tear-drop splotches that spiraled clear of each other at any point they might meet. The third was a series of interlocking chains across his ring finger, the fourth, overlapped scales along his pinky’s edge, and onward and so forth until each finger had been tattooed, along with a connective interface that linked the disparate forms together on the back of his hand.
When it was done, the imprinter let his hand loose again, dispensing the orbs into a tray at its back.
For his own part, Harton pulled out his arm and shook himself, his fur bristling from a mix of nerves and pain. When he flexed his hand, wiggling each finger to work out their stiffness, they each gave a thick, burning throb.
“Gods, I hate this thing.” He grimaced to himself, then rolled his shoulders, straightening until the tips of his horns tapped against the metal ceiling of his pod.
In truth, his complaint was without heat; the imprinter was well worth the pain of using it. Where most surveyors were limited in the environments and situations to which they could properly take on, Harton could do nearly all of them. And while the energy costs – the drain on his mana – were larger when activating the tattoos than when he knew how to cast the spells himself, it was a welcome trade-off, courtesy of one very expensive machine. He did not, after all, have the months or years to spend learning every niche application of magic.
Or at least, he hadn’t. Harton paused, then winced as that observation actually registered. His pod had been forced out of warp far too early, and the resulting displacement could’ve left him just about anywhere. Rescue, were it to happen, would be a long time coming.
He tried not to dwell on that. For now, at least, he'd be happy just to get outside.
Still shaking his head but with his spell preparation complete, Harton moved into a cramped little area designated as the pod’s kitchen. The main and only real feature of the room was the pod’s Nutri-printer – an, admittedly, deathly important machine for anyone who traveled in space – which spat out pre-portioned ‘meals’ consisting of what had been fed into it. To that effect, the opposite wall was stacked high with base macronutrients, joined in purpose by the pod’s disassembler, which sat ready to resupply their stocks.
The minotaur had little doubt he’d be using both machines soon enough. Space travel’s food requirements were all well and good, but calorie consumption skyrocketed after planetfall. He grabbed a couple of meals, a small bottle of vitamins, and a large canteen, then placed the items carefully into the bag that held his sampling gear and headed towards the exit hatch.
There, Harton pulled on a thick pair of appropriately large boots, cranked the locking wheel, and finally – finally – stepped out from the pod.
Green skies and mushroom trees awaited.