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The Adventures of a Warlock
59: Learning Words and Skyscrapers

59: Learning Words and Skyscrapers

It’s been about a month since I realized Richard was from my old world. The moment I had, Duke and I went to his shop to talk to him, but…he’d vanished. The giant piles of equipment, messily strewn about were all gone, leaving the shop completely empty. Rather than being discouraged, this had all but confirmed my suspicions. Richard had realized the same thing that I had, that the two of us were from the same place. But why was he hiding from me now? Shouldn’t he be excited that he finally found someone from his old world? What happened?

Given that he was a friend of Duke, I ended up telling Duke the truth about my life. About coming from a world without magic, how all of the concepts that I used, the concepts I was teaching him, are all functions and manipulations of ‘natural law’ that exist outside the bounds of magic. I explained to him about Sophia, that she was a Demon from another world called Hell, and about the contract that we’d made that brought me here. And I explained to him about how the symbol that I use for batteries is very common on my old world, and that basically anyone from there would be able to recognize it, meaning…that Richard was from the same place.

I asked him to let me know if Richard ended up getting into contact with him, or if he ended up finding him randomly on the street one day, though I somehow doubted it. For some reason, Richard seemed to be avoiding me, and seeing as that’s the case, I doubted he would be stupid enough to try to contact the person that he saw me with last. And as for randomly running into him on the street? Well, assuming that Richard stayed in the capital, this place was just so damn big that it was very likely that just by moving to a different block, we’d never run into him again.

It truly is a shame. For someone from my old world to be here, wouldn’t he have had to contact someone like Sophia? Some sort of Titled demon, or maybe even an angel? Someone I could potentially learn a little more about magical law from, or even just learn about how the place they’re from works, so I have more reference points to use to figure it out myself.

To his credit, Duke took everything really well. Apparently, he’s been theorizing about my origins this entire time, and some-fucking-how, the truth ended up being far less shocking than any of his theories. Out of curiosity I asked him what he had thought I was, and the answers I received varied from “Ridiculously specific insanity where you even came up with all of the background concepts by which your delusion functioned.” All the way to “The last survivor of an ancient and forgotten civilization, or a member of such a civilization that exists in the future, and you somehow traveled back to the past.”

I have to say, despite having no concept of anime or light novels, when Duke was sharing all of his various theories with me, I couldn’t help but call him a damn weeb in my head. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if every single one of his theories also existed as an anime in my old world. Not that fantasy isekai after an accidental demon summoning is exactly new material, but at least it had actually happened!

This past month, as well as telling Duke about where I came from, I’ve also progressed with teaching him English, and honestly, when it comes to languages, Duke is something of a genius. Or maybe not, I’ve never actually taught anyone English as a second language after all, so I can’t be entirely certain how the normal learning pace is, but I’m fairly certain that Duke’s could be considered significantly above average. After just a couple months of study, he’s learned enough to have steady conversations in English without using mana to transfer intent, though he does occasionally make random grammatical mistakes, and often uses the wrong synonyms. Currently, the biggest problem he has is vocabulary, which is partially my fault. I didn’t happen to bring a dictionary to this world with me after all, so the only words I can teach him are the ones I already know, and also remember to tell him, which means that he often gets the precise wording just a little bit off.

“The most complicated part about the English Language, as well as the part that gives you the most opportunity, is the fact that every single word not only has a definition, but also a certain context in which it should be used. Depending on specific word choice, any sentence can be given any specific ‘tone’ or ‘context’. However, this means that if you end up using the wrong word in your enchantments, you can definitely end up with a vastly different ‘tone’ or ‘context’ than you originally planned, which culminates in completely different effects than you intended.” I explained as I marked a sentence he’d written down.

“Wait, any tone? You’re telling me that you can make any terrible thing sound good, or any good thing sound absolutely terrible just by using specific words?” He asked, disbelievingly.

I nodded along. “And not just opposites, when I say any tone I mean ANY tone. Depending on word choice, you can make just about any concept sound good, bad, sexual, violent, irritating, hyper intelligent, or just plain weird. You name it, as long as your vocabulary is varied enough, then despite what you actually say, your words can ‘sound’ like anything. Personally, I suck at this in normal communication, because doing it casually requires a high level of socialization, and the ability to pick up on very subtle cues from body language and facial expressions, which I simply don’t have. However, when it comes to writing, it gets a lot easier because you can take some time, and rework things as many times as you want to find the perfect way to phrase things.”

Duke seemed not to believe me. “Okay then, give me some examples, make ‘I casually ate lunch’ sound violent.”

I took the paper, thought for a second, then wrote down, ‘As I have often done before, I took the desiccated flesh, removed from the corpse of an insignificant existence, and devoured it, ravenous, under the blistering, oppressive heat of the midday sun.’. I then read it aloud, infusing my words with mana to make sure the intent came across correctly. Stunned, Duke said, “Okay, now make forging armor sound sexual.”

I thought for a little longer, before writing down, ‘I watched him work, his strong hands moving up and down, stroking, lovingly, the clang of metal on metal echoing the sound of my beating heart, as he forced the metal into submission, tracing the curves, the outline, into the perfect shape that he desired.’ Again, I read it aloud to him. Gotta say, reading this to another man felt weird as hell, but given that it was just to teach him about the innate context behind words, I let it slide.

“Okay, how would you make ‘I walked down the street’ sound like just a completely foreign concept?” He pressed. Once more, I thought about it, and once more, I wrote down, ‘Heel, toe, heel, toe. As I made a rolling motion with my foot, using my ankle as a leverage point, and slightly bending at the knee above whatever foot was not rolling, the motion propelled me in a forward direction. In this place, it seemed that there were predetermined routes of movement, and as I propelled myself forwards, I followed these predetermined routes.’

“Okay, last one, and I bet you can’t do it. How would you make, ‘I literally murder infants’ sound like a good thing? Literally one of the worst things that you can do, but make it sound somehow positive.” Duke asked. This one I didn’t even need to think about, and simply said out loud,

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“I provide various stress relieving services for new mothers, including but not limited to retroactive abortion. Like I said, literally any concept can be given any connotation in the English Language. Hell, we have art forms called poetry, something similar to songs, where the entire point is using this particular nature of language to convey different concepts through artistic expression. There are people who spend decades in study, trying to find different ways to phrase the same things, and yet evoke different emotions, different results in whomever reads their work.”. Duke gave me a confused look and asked,

“I think I understand what you mean about word choice, but what exactly is abortion?”

Ahh shit. I kinda stepped into a hornet’s nest with that one didn’t I? “Well,” I began to explain, “Abortion is a process on my old world, where a pregnant woman can go to a doctor and have the pregnancy terminated. Where I’m from, it’s generally accepted that having kids is a large financial and personal responsibility, so people who aren’t prepared for that level of responsibility have the option to ‘cancel it out’ before the child is born. There are other reasons that people can undergo this process, for example, if a child will end up being born with a severe genetic issue, or if the child was conceived during rape, however, these are not nearly as common as the first reason. The reason I called killing infants ‘retroactive abortion’ was just a way to give that same clinical feeling to the act. It’s not something that’s actually done, but by combining the two words, you end up with an entirely new phrase, leading back to my point about word choice.”

Duke seemed astonished at the culture shock. “That makes no sense? Is that common? How do your towns not die out if you aren’t allowing children to be born?”

I chuckled and responded, “As a matter of fact, our world actually has the opposite problem that yours does. Take the Capital for example. All around the world we have several cities that are the same size, and quite a few that are many times larger than the capital. I think the biggest city in my old world has something like 6 times the number of people? Not to mention that the world that I come from is a lot smaller than this world we’re on now. To the point where even hundreds of years ago, people were able to sail all around it. And as technology progressed, and transportation became more efficient, we started to understand just how small the world truly was. To put it this way, we could take a map of the entire world, point at any random spot, and within a day of actual travel time, we’d be able to reach that spot. And why do I mention all this? Simple. Our world suffered not from outside threats or anything like that, but from overpopulation. So no, there was no threat of extinction or anything like that by preventing births.

“Though, the public’s opinion on whether it was something morally okay or something completely reprehensible was very heavily divided. Some people believed that abortion was essentially murder, whereas other people believed that it was no different from having any other sort of irregular growth removed. For the most part this divide depended on when you believe life begins, does it begin at conception, or does it begin at birth? Because there was no real way to answer this question, there was no real way to decide who was right and who was wrong, leading to a lot of conflict.”

Duke, thankfully, didn’t seem to be particularly interested in the complex moral questions surrounding abortion, but instead was highly fascinated by the logistics of my old world, asking, “How could cities that size even exist? I mean, how do they have so many people in them if the world is so small? Wouldn’t all the cities stretch to the point where the entire world is just one massive town?”

I shook my head and laughed, “Nah, because we built upwards. On my old world we had buildings we called skyscrapers, because they were so tall that they said that they literally scraped the sky itself. They had anywhere from 50 to over 100 floors, and each floor could have hundreds of people living there. That way, instead of having to build half a million houses to hold five million people like they did here in the Capital, they could just build a thousand really tall buildings and have thousands of people live in each one. This way, even really big cities don’t actually need to stretch out all that far. New York City is an example from the country I used to live in, and I think it has around 10 million people in it, but it only stretches 40 miles or something.”

Duke’s eyes lit up, as the apparent desire to build one of these skyscrapers filled him. He began asking me all sorts of in depth questions relating to skyscrapers and their design, which I interrupted by raising my hand, saying, “Before you try to delve too far into architecture,” I cut off his daydream, “you first need to understand concepts like force displacement, as well as security measures. For example, you’re probably thinking about trying to build one out of the sturdiest materials you could find right?”

Duke nodded, as in his mind, if you were going to make something that huge, of course you’d use the heaviest, most durable materials you could find, why wouldn’t you? “Well that would make it collapse. After all, you’d end up making the building’s center of gravity something like 300 feet off the ground if you built it that way, so any sort of hurricane, earthquake, or even a really strong mage would be able to just push it over, killing everyone inside, as well as anyone who happens to be in the area where it falls. You’d also risk a kind of domino effect, where one tower would fall into another, which falls into another, killing millions of people at the same time. Ironically, the key is to make the bottom of the towers really heavy and sturdy, and the higher you go, the lighter and more fragile you need to make it. That way, any outside force wouldn’t topple it over.”

I used my index finger to push his chest, toppling him over to demonstrate what would happen if he built topheavy apartments, then had him squat down a bit to lower his center of gravity, then pushed his forehead, which was now in the same spot where his chest had been. This time, just his head leaned back, but he stayed balanced, demonstrating my point.

“Then, in order to prevent the domino effect I mentioned from happening, you need to design these buildings so that in the event that they collapse, they’ll completely fall apart inwards and downwards. While this will make it so that there are many fewer survivors inside of the building if the worst case scenario occurs, the damage will also be isolated to JUST that one building, meaning that that’s the only one you’ll need to rebuild. Fewer deaths in the long run, as well as being a better decision economically.”

Duke nodded, understanding the gravity of what he wanted to try. After all, by building these apartment buildings, he would be potentially dictating the lives of millions of people. That’s a massive responsibility, even for someone like me who doesn’t particularly care about the lives of strangers.

Since he seemed to be interested in pursuing this project, I spent the day teaching him about the physics behind architecture. This included things such as center of gravity, the mindset of designing intentional weak points so that failures could be controlled, and weight distribution, including a lot of geometry relating to Circles and Triangles. I was never particularly big into architecture, but my studies in Vector Calculus and Applied Physics gave me a solid enough foundation where I was comfortable with teaching the basics to someone else. For him to accomplish building a skyscraper though, he’d have to do a lot of experiments and figure a lot of things out for himself. After all, I can’t exactly tell him what materials to use, as I myself don’t know what materials are in the skyscrapers of my old world. Not to mention the fact that completely different magical materials that I have no way to know about or understand exist here, as in the case of Spectral Quartz.

This past month, Duke and I had gone on several tangents like this, most of them still educational, but some of them simply spiraling into a web of nonsense. By this point, we had a ludicrous number of inside jokes, most of which were…well, let’s say not exactly politically correct. Due to Duke’s nature that didn’t particularly care about anything but his craft, and my nature of not particularly caring about what people think of me and my tendencies towards dark humor, basically every terrible and offensive thing that we could imagine ended up becoming some sort of punch line.

We also managed to make a lot of progress on our enchanting work. Primarily, I finally had an enchantment that could dish out long ranged attacks. As it so happened, I was simply overthinking things. Rather than making an enchantment specifically designed to attack at a distance, the targeting enchantment inherently provided the ability to attack at long range. The way this ended up working is that when I had my drone knives in the sky, I’d see the target through my eye enchantment, then I’d activate the targeting enchantment, putting a little crosshair in my window, which I’d then place over the target, then I’d activate a flame enchantment that I put on the knives. Mana would stretch from the battery towards the target, and once the mana reached it, the target would immediately burst into flames.

Now, this did have three inherent weaknesses. For starters, I currently only had this attack, and haven’t yet tested out any others, so any enemy that has a resistance to fire will be able to tank it. Secondly, the time that mana took to get from the knife to the target took anywhere from 1-4 seconds, depending on distance traveled. This means that hitting a moving target is functionally impossible, and if the target in question has a high enough mana sensitivity, they’ll be able to tell that something’s coming and be able to react and put up magical defenses. Thirdly, due to the fact that my knives were fairly small, the batteries that I carved into them could only get so big, so just one attack could take half of the stored charge within them.

For the first weakness, I needed to give each knife options. Due to the circuit design I was comfortable with implementing, I could place a few different options for attacks on a knife, and have each option be closed off by a switch. This way, when I have a target in my crosshairs, I could then select between different options for how to attack based on what I know about it.

For the second and third weakness though, I had a solution in mind, though it would take a lot of work. It involved the next step in my plans for Project Horizon, and I believed that now I had the ability to store more mana through just engraving larger batteries, I’d be able to make it work. Basically, my answer was: Aircraft Carrier.