---Maddy---

The group packed up their limited site and began the morning trek early. Troy had a small stack of nutrition bars in his bag so they all had a energy filled but sad snack then headed out.

Maddy’s contribution was a simple weak spell to kick the tiredness away – ‘Awaken Life’ using her new partial concept was written on her water bottle – a good swig of the altered healing liquid was the equivalent of strong coffee and helped perk the group up.

I hope we find a city soon – it feels like we are kind of just wandering about without a goal.

After a few minutes Maddy decided to go back magic development – it would let her feel productive while they walked.

She had two pressing spells she needed to design – the first was a spell for her mental enhancement. It was a huge ability the blue box had straight up described as more effective with a designed spell instead of just a pump of mana…but Maddy wanted to explore it a bit further before she decided what she wanted to focus on with its actual spell. Did she want to increase her mental ability? Decrease how the mana changed her perspective? Increase it? She could probably swap out different spells but it felt like what she picked would be her committing to it. It felt important.

A more pressing task was her scout creation goal.

Last night she had created long lasting sentinels – it had been a useful tangent but hadn’t been what she had actually wanted.

What she ‘actually wanted’ was something that could head out and tell her what was in the surroundings…a way to find danger early or in the current case, find civilization.

One of the biggest problems in her experimentation seemed to be her lack of a proper movement concept – to make something whose main goal was movement, she would need a kinetic affinity…to make a spell with the ability to move itself about, she’d only need a movement concept.

Her ‘shaping’ and intent hadn’t been enough to fill in the gaps.

If she had a ‘projectile’ type concept she could have her scout throw itself around…if she had a ‘follow’ or ‘fly’ or ‘homing’ or ‘travel’ or – really any method of getting her spells from her to something else she could probably shift things…

But she did have a method of transferring her spells didn’t she? Sound. It’s how she set up her main damage spell – why did she skip over it while trying to transfer her scouts about?

Maybe because she had been too focused on the idea of sound and what it would mean for a scout or for scouting – she didn’t want to hear better she wanted to see what might attack them.

Either way Maddy had already played with this concept. She had already focused on sending seeds out to anything that heard her – or alternatively to grass in range of her voice.

She didn’t actually need long lasting scouts if they could travel in a far enough direction and the spell was cheap enough to cast…if she ignored long lasting she didn’t have to try and link it to a physical medium.

It's also hard to write while walking…

Quietly trying to structure the spell using only her voice – ignoring the good-natured comments from Jess at some of her more nonsensical phrases – Maddy pushed light mana into her tongue. She gave mana to her voice and felt out how it interacted with the air in her mouth as she spoke. Sound was a wave that travelled through the air…light was also a wave that travelled through the air. They were basically the same thing!

The concept of sound and the innate concept of light could be squeezed together, the light piggybacking off the sound and then forming the eye illusion at the site she wanted it to show up…

She felt like she had pieces of the puzzle – she felt like she could see how it might fit together.

She pushed mana into her mind – light mana changing how she thought of the problem and revealing the structure of her half formed spell to her eyes and ears.

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It was off topic but this definitely felt like the best use of her mutation – she wanted to focus on how the mana made her perceive and shape her spells. Should she make glasses and focus the mental spell onto the glasses being linked to her mind so she could see magic more clearly through them? Should she ignore an item that could break or be stolen and try and stick the magic into her real eyes? How would she even draw the spell on her real eyes…should she use the idea of a third eye and draw it on her forehead? She had already practiced shaping eyes this would just be an extension of that plan…Yeah I think I like that idea…I’ll look into it later.

Despite going off on tangents the main section of Maddy’s mind continued to focus on her main problem.

She tried her goal out several times each iteration slightly more in line with her goals than the last.

Using just light mana her picture of a eye was worse. It didn’t have a link to biological sight and the effort to make an eye were useless. Instead of changing directions and attempting to imagine something with lenses and light refracting off of glassy focus points or something, Maddy re-added life mana into the mix.

She could pull life mana out of one core to make the base of her spell – a single seed of life surrounded by light…or she could pull life-light out and have the perfectly combined mana type create the spell instead. That option was much easier to work with – trying to keep them separate would cause the mana construct to fail as soon as she tried to squish it into the sound…

So she kept them combined using the stronger mana type to force through some problems.

Bonus of using life was the innate concept of life letting her attach her spell to living things. It took most of the morning before Maddy was able to speak her spell and have ghostly eyes appear on trees and grass as they passed. Her early eyes could blink twice and “see” the scene for a second before trying to return the garbled mess to her in a garbled disoriented mess – often in a hundred different locations as each of the created eyes tried to show her their vision at once.

Moving from that point If she was flaring life-light mana into her mind as hard as she could when she did this she could mostly piece it together…but making the information sent back simpler was an easier problem to solve. She briefly tried having each eye take a picture and send it back instead of a 1s long video…but abusing her unrelated concepts for this goal wasn’t bearing her any fruit so she returned to the setup she had last night.

The eye would open, look about, then tell her if it saw anything important and what that something might be.

Her concept of sound seemed to really like when she received the response verbally and a lot of the spell fell into place once she let each eye wisper back to her.

Spending some time to create a tiny egg in her or her friends ears let her speak to them like she was sending a message through a one way walkie talky – and using that same image in her scout spell built until she had something functional but not pretty.

The biggest problem was definitely mana cost. Using her spell to a usable ability required her to sink her entire life-light pool into a single cast. Sure it only took a few minutes to fill her mana up completely once more but that was time she was out of her most powerful combined mana.

Trying to lower it artificially by “feeding” the spell less caused it to break.

Trying to “optimize” her spell without more concepts to give it power did nothing.

Trying to limit its scope did increase its ability in random ways and was probably the best way of looking at things. As a default Maddy spoke and caused a dozen eyes to randomly show up over a sphere around four to five hundred feet centered on her. That was mostly just the range of her voice however – the actual range increased if she yelled…but it was still semi random.

Using dark-life and sticking her eyes into life in shadows instead of life based objects…that worked incredibly well but also failed where it mattered the most.

It worked incredibly well as far as sticking the spell went…but darkness broke the vision part of her eye concept.

She had some luck on a tangent to make dark-life ears that heard secrets from the shadows but once again returned to her eyes at this point the goal almost overwhelming all other problems. It was still a useful spell and one Maddy wanted to write down to better create later…but a tangent that cut into her experimental mana budget so one that was shelved for now.

She wanted the eyes to appear beside life – to scout out creatures and monsters instead of appearing randomly.

She wanted to increase the probability of seeing something important.

It took dozens more casts before Maddy started focusing in some properties. She didn’t really remember a lot of physics but there was something that randomly bubbled up in her daze of casts. Something about light being both a particle and a wave? A double slit experiment? Her eyes were the particle that acted like a wave of sound and then condensed down as a particle again when they hit – was sound also a particle and a wave? She was hazy on that right now but that didn’t matter.

What mattered is this was all probability or ‘something’ and she should be able to increase the probability that the eyes saw something important…maybe.

That insight into how her spell might be functioning increased its strength – the number of eyes that appeared almost doubled – but she would have to wait till later to continue with it.

One of the eyes in her last cast had seen something after all.

Roughly forty degrees off their current path, there was the edge of the forest and beyond that what looked like civilization.

They had found a city before nightfall – looks like they wouldn’t have to sleep outdoors for a second day in the row.

Maddy relayed her findings to her friends to a cheer from Jess and a smile from Troy. They wouldn’t need to sleep outdoors for a second day after all.

I hope there’s a shower.