Jeb quickly sketched out a rough version of the Enchantment. Once he had finished, he showed it to Professor Bearson. Bearson took the page.
“This seems reasonable. Do you plan to start with each Enchantment in parts, or do you plan to make this entire Enchantment at a single time?”
“Neither?” Jeb hesitated. “I was going to separate the measurement from the nutrient depositing, but I was going to make everything within that the same. Do you not think that I should do that?”
Bearson shrugged. “It is your project. Ultimately, I see my role as primarily one of safety officer. So long as what you propose will not be actively harmful, I am willing to let you experience failure. Would you rather that I take a different approach?” He offered the page back to Jeb, who took it, considering the question.
“I think that seems reasonable,” Jeb answered after thinking.
Bearson nodded but did not say anything else. After another long moment, Jeb tried, “is there any reason that I shouldn’t try to make the Enchantment now?” Taking the Professor’s silence as an answer of its own, Jeb left the Library to start working.
Jeb knew that paper was a terrible medium for an Enchantment of any real complexity. As much as he trusted that the runes were all fundamental, a part of him did wonder whether the Enchantment would have burnt out if it had been scratched into metal or some other, stronger medium. Stopping in the hallway, Jeb realized that he should pick a material to Enchant. Or, at least, he should plan on committing to one, even if it would need to change. There was always a chance that whatever medium he picked would end up being incompatible with some portion of the Enchantment he was going to make. If that ended up being the case, he would find something else.
Gold was the first medium to pop into Jeb’s mind, but he tossed the idea aside. There was no chance that he would feel comfortable working with so much of the precious metal, knowing that any mistake he made was suddenly far more costly. Wood, being far cheaper, was the next to come to mind. He discarded it just as readily. Wood was far too variable to be a medium for Enchanting. Looking back on his Woodcarving project, Jeb was honestly surprised that he had ended up as successful as he did.
As the hallway started to close around him, Jeb decided to start moving again. He ended up in the forge. Jeb shrugged. There was a chance that the material idea had not percolated to his conscious mind, but that the Academy caught it. It was just as likely, however, that the Academy had simply decided that iron would be the medium for Jeb’s Enchanting project.
A blast of heat and the sound of hammer striking metal greeted Jeb as he opened the door to the forge. Even after choosing iron as his material of choice, he realized that there were still options. After staring for a long moment, Jeb sighed and reached for a thin sheet of metal. As tempted as he was to work with bar iron, he knew that he would regret having to shape and reshape the material over and over. If he messed up too badly with the iron, he could always just throw the sheet away and start again fresh with another.
Sheet of metal in hand, Jeb started to walk out of the forge, stopping in the doorway. Where would be the best place to work on the Enchantment? After turning around five or so times, stuck between working with iron in the forge, where it belonged, and working in his own space, Jeb committed to another choice. He entered the hallway, careful to keep his sheet from hitting the wall, and moved to the farm. After all, he rationalized, I’m going to need to test the Enchantment eventually. The fact that he would need to return to the forge for each new sheet of iron did not enter Jeb’s mind.
Shifting the barrels aside in the Brewery, Jeb set the sheet of iron down and grabbed a pencil. He quickly marked a vague placement for each of the detection Enchantments he was planning to start with. Once he had that down, he consulted the different books to see what runes, exactly, he needed to add to them for input and output of Mana.
Jeb blinked away the sunshine from his eyes. Figuring out how he could connect the various sets of fundamental runes each Enchantment used had taken far longer than he had expected. His stomach reminded him that he had missed more than one meal the day before, and Jeb sighed, forcing himself to leave his notebook behind as he went to the cafeteria. After eating a quick breakfast, spending most of it debating whether it still counted as breakfast if there was no sleep before it, Jeb went to his classes for the day. Finished with them, he stopped by the cafeteria for another short meal and then returned to his Brewery to resume his work on the Enchantment. Once again, he found himself lost in the details of making different runes connect. Before the sun had fully set, though, he had a preliminary answer for connecting each Enchantment in series.
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If there was one skill that Theoretical Enchanting had truly engraved into Jeb, it was carving Enchantments without using his hands. None of the measurement Enchantments were particularly difficult, and it only took him an hour to engrave them all onto the piece of iron. Deciding on exactly which rune to form the syntax he wanted took a few hours more, but Jeb finished his first version of the Enchantment as the sun rose again.
It’s a little annoying to be so keyed into the passage of time, Jeb thought, realizing that he had spent another day without sleep. The fact that his Class let him go so long without sleep wasn’t necessarily healthy, he knew, even though it was convenient. By the time that his classes were over for the day, though, he felt the need to sleep again. Jeb woke as the final bells of the day chimed out. Whether it was a great idea to shift his sleep schedule so much or not, Jeb was comfortable with the fact that he slept when he was tired.
Jeb carefully picked up the sheet of iron before pausing and setting it back down. After rushing to the Library, he realized that Professor Bearson had most likely returned to his office at some point in the past two days. To his relief, Bearson opened the door when he knocked on it.
“Good,” Bearson ducked behind his door again, “morning, I suppose. Is there some help that I can offer you at this late hour?”
“Um,” Jeb replied, realizing that his schedule was not the default, “I just finished my Enchantment, and I was wondering if you would be willing to look at it before I try running Mana through it.”
The Professor blinked a few times, clearly surprised by something that Jeb had said. “I will be leaving for a few days in the morning, so now would be a fantastic time.”
“Where are you going?” Jeb asked as the two began walking towards his plot of land.
“There is a Magical creature infestation that has continued to spread over the past few terms. The fact that they have continued to spread is worrying some people, even though they have yet to do anything actively hostile. As one of the resident experts on Magical creatures, I have been tasked with determining next steps.”
“That makes sense!” Jeb replied happily, opening the door to his Brewery. Only after he stepped through did he realize how tight the space would be once Professor Bearson came inside. “I can take it outside if you would like,” he offered.
Bearson shook a head and stooped to come inside. “That is quite alright.” His gaze quickly passed over the script that Jeb had written. “Hmm,” he said quietly.
“Is something wrong?” Jeb asked.
Bearson shook his head. “There is nothing that would preclude you safely testing this Enchantment,” he replied somewhat cryptically.
Jeb shrugged and started pouring Mana into the Enchantment. The first few pieces started to glow, and he tskd at the waste of Mana. Still, it was good confirmation that they were working.
As the Magic sluggishly moved through the lines of runes, it grew dimmer and dimmer. It faded to nothingnness less than halfway through the Enchantment. Shrugging, Jeb pushed more Magic into the Enchantment.
At first, it seemed to work. More and more of the Enchantment started to glow as he forced more and more Magic through the system. Before he managed to reach the end, however, the iron itself began to glow and melt, distorting and breaking the Enchantment. With a loud pop, all of Jeb’s work over the past few days went up in a quick flash of light.
“I would just like to ask one confirming question,” Professor Bearson said when the ringing had faded out of Jeb’s ears. “did you continue to add more Magic into the Enchantment until it failed?” Seeing Jeb nod, he continued, “was your goal to stress test it?”
Jeb shook his head. “The Magic didn’t seem to be tracing all the way through the system, so I thought that putting more in might help.”
“Is there a reason that you wrote the Enchantments strictly in series?” Bearson asked, seeming to ignore Jeb’s response. Before Jeb had time to answer, the first bell rang out and Bearson jumped. “I will be late if I do not leave now. Do let me know what progress you have made when I return.”
Jeb stared at the slag in front of him. Bearson’s comment about running in series continued to bounce around his head. Enchanting in series made sense, since it caused the Magic to flow from Enchantment to Enchantment in order. However, that was most useful when one piece of the Enchantment directly caused another. With the measuring Enchantments, Jeb’s goal was to measure all the different pieces independently of one another.
His next instinct was to try to run the entire Enchantment in parallel, but after filling a few pages of his notebook with ideas, Jeb realized that there were far too many for his skill as an Enchanter. “Let’s see,” he mused to himself, “with a standard Magical throughput, I was able to see the first five pieces of the Enchantment glow...”
Jeb ran to the forge, took another sheet of metal, and sketched out his next idea.