Jeb’s next draft of the Enchantment did not work. One of the splitting scripts cracked the moment that he poured Mana into it. The third attempt failed a little further downstream. Jeb was entranced by the project.
He was barely able to pull himself away long enough to go to his classes, and most of his Professors noted how much less engaged he seemed. Jeb was still keeping up with the content, though, so most understood that he had other priorities. As the term wound down, he woke to a note from Dean Aquam.
Jeb, please come to my office at your earliest convenience. Dean Aquam
Checking his schedule, Jeb realized that he did not have any courses for a few bells. Assuming that the meeting would not take very long, he walked to the Dean’s office.
“Come in,” Dean Aquam said as Jeb’s first struck the door for the first time. “Have you given any thoughts to the courses you will take next term?” he asked when Jeb took a seat.
“Not really,” Jeb admitted. “I have been fairly caught up in the Enchanting project.”
Dean Aquam nodded, as though he had not been expecting any other answer. He pulled out a page and made a quick note on the first line. Moving to the second, he asked, “how has your Emporium fared with your absence?”
“I don’t know if it’s really fair to call it my Emporium,” Jeb argued, “especially since Declan and Catherine have really taken over most of the operation. It sounds as though it is still faring well, though. It’s still going through about the same amount of Ale.”
“Are you enjoying the break from your Enchanting that Brewing provides?” That question did not appear to come from the list in front of the Dean, so Jeb took his time thinking of a response.
“I am enjoying it, though I don’t know if I really think of it as a break,” Jeb admitted. “Every time that I manage the Essence in a beer, I feel as though I understand the way that Magic wants to flow a little better. That helps me refine my next draft of the Enchantment. More than that, though, taking a few subjective hours away from the process is really helpful for letting me consolidate my thoughts.”
Dean Aquam tilted his head, clearly considering Jeb’s response. “Do you feel as though you have learned a sufficient number of Magical Schools?” That question seemed to come from much lower on the list. Jeb wondered which prompts he had just skipped.
“I don’t know if I understand your question,” Jeb admitted.
Dean Aquam sighed. “I suppose that I was really trying to ask two questions at once. First, do you still wish to learn more Schools of Magic, assuming all the time in the world?”
Jeb nodded.
The Dean nodded, as though he had expected the answer, “second, do you feel as though you have enough time in your schedule to dedicate to learning another School while keeping up with the Magics that you already know?”
“That question feels like it has an implicit question buried within it,” Jeb protested. The Dean gestured for Jeb to continue, “it implies that I want to keep up with all of the Magics that I know.”
“Do you not wish to?” Aquam asked, seeming genuinely curious.
“No, I do,” Jeb said, thinking about how little time he had dedicated to Weaving fire or his lute recently. “I don’t know if time is the right framework, though. If I was not spending so much time on Enchanting, then I would have more time to work on the different Magics I know, but right now I really want to focus on my Enchanting. Adding another Magic would change my priorities, it is true, though I do not know how.”
The two sat in silence with that answer, both digesting what Jeb had said. After a long moment, Dean Aquam shifted in his chair and pulled out a syllabus. Handing it over to Jeb, he began speaking, “I am offering a section of Ritual Magic this coming term. There are a number of political reasons for the course’s offering, which I will not get into here, other than to say that there will be other opportunities for you to take the course if you choose not to do it this coming term.”
“The fact that you gave me a syllabus feels like you already know my answer,” Jeb joked.
Dean Aquam shook his head, face growing more serious. “I gave you the syllabus because I want you to read through the expectations for the course. I know that you are in a relatively easy set of courses this term, and so you have the time and mental space to work on your independent study. That will not be the case if you take Ritual Magic.”
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Jeb looked down at the thick pile of pages. “I don’t know if I can give you an answer right now,” he replied.
“I did not expect you to. Please let me know before the term break ends.”
Jeb nodded, and the two went through the other courses that he would be taking the following term. Now that he was able to Weave fire, there was an option for an independent study with the Weaver, which was tempting. They continued to discuss options until it was time for Jeb to go to his courses for the day.
When he was finished with his daily obligations, Jeb went to the Stacks to read through the Syllabus that the Dean had given him. As he did, he appreciated the deadline that the Dean had given him. If he had finished the Enchantment before the next term started, then he would love to take the course. However, if he still needed to dedicate time to the project, then he would absolutely not be able to succeed at Ritual Magic. The Dean’s question about his Magical priorities also weighed on Jeb. Even though his Class seemed to encourage him to take every Magic available, he did not want to be a slave to the System.
Jeb put the question aside and started working on his Enchantment again. Now that he had a deadline, however arbitrary, he found a new sense of pressure looming on the project. When Professor Bearson came back, muttering something about over zealous Farmers, Jeb almost had a working prototype. It was a vastly different Enchantment than what the Professor had last seen.
For all that Jeb had been encouraged to use existing Enchantments as much as possible, his different drafts had taught him that he could not simply plug all the different pieces together. More than that, though, Jeb had grown tired of constantly failing to produce a working Enchantment. In a stroke of inspiration and desperation, he had given up on measuring everything, deciding that it was better to monitor the moisture content of the plants than to not be able to measure anything. As he watched the Magic flow through the Enchantment, Jeb thought that he understood why none of his Enchantments had worked.
Each measuring Enchantment took in the same inputs, Mana and an observation of the plant, and returned the same outputs, Mana and information about the plant. The difference between information and observation was slight, but it compounded quickly. Once he had realized that, Jeb started to see where all of his old draft Enchantments had broken. He spent a long and tedious few days rewriting each of the measuring Enchantments to take in a standardized input and return a standardized output. Once he had, though, the process was far faster.
The system had become almost entirely parallelized, and it no longer seemed to be a number of Enchantments hastily connected together. It was still a very crude draft, Jeb knew, but it did what it was supposed to do. Bearson seemed impressed by Jeb’s progress, and asked if he had made any progress in deciding how small of an area the Enchantment would work on.
Jeb frowned. “No, you told me that was something to work on after I had a working Enchantment,” he said.
Bearson nodded. “What would you call this?”
“A working detector,” Jeb replied. “I still don’t have an Enchantment to fix whatever is wrong with the plant.”
“How long do you think that it would take you to make a minimally viable Enchantment to correct issues in a plant?”
Jeb had already started to look at the Enchantments he would need, and he felt like he had a good grasp on how they worked. “A day?” he guessed, “assuming that I do nothing else during the day.”
“What a coincidence!” Bearson replied happily, “tomorrow is the first day of the term break. I will come back in two days. If you come up with a working prototype, please consider how much area you would like each iteration of this Enchantment to cover.”
Jeb nodded and got back to work. The next two days passed in a blur, and Jeb felt as though he was almost in a trance. When he had a working version of the Enchantment, a part of him tried to pull back to decide how large of an area he wanted it to cover. The rest of him, however, refused to let go of the project. For just a moment, he felt as though he had a complete picture of what the perfect version of this Enchantment would look like. The image crystallized in his mind and faded even as he sketched out notes from what he had seen. It called for runes and syntax that he had never seen before, and Jeb quickly gave up on understanding it.
When Bearson came back to check on him, though, he immediately honed in on the page that Jeb had sketched and tossed aside. “Where did you see this?” he demanded, tone suddenly very tense.
“Nowhere?” Jeb replied hesitantly, “it just kind of came to me in a dream. Why?”
Bearson quickly relaxed. “No reason. I would not advise you to work on implementing this Enchantment until you are at least Seventh Tier, however. The syntax it uses requires a level of power that you would not be able to express right now.” Seeing that Jeb was going to ask a question, he continued, “please do not ask me what that means. As a Professor, it is my duty to guide you to knowledge in a safe fashion. Experience has shown the field and myself that it is unsafe to even explain what higher power syntax means to low Tier students.”
The conversation died there, and both stood around awkwardly. Jeb debated asking Margaret if she could give him a book on high Tier syntax, but ended up deciding not to. He did, after all, trust the Professor to have his best interests at heart.
“Well then,” Bearson said, picking up the Enchantment Jeb had been working on when he came in, “it appears as though you were successful in making the Enchantment modular.”
Jeb nodded. “As long as the entire system is connected, I only need to power it from a single location and have the different materials that a plant could need in a single hopper each. Right now, the biggest barrier I’m facing is making the Enchantment small enough. I think that I want it to cover an area about half the size of the current script.”
“Is there a reason that you have decided on that size?” Bearson asked, nodding along.
Jeb explained his logic, and the Professor helped Jeb with a few methods to shrink the footprint of the Enchantment. As the sun sank below the horizon, Jeb started working on the hundreds of small modular Enchantments he would need to cover his field.