Onward with my adventure…

So the rest of my day ended up being research via Wiznet on Prisms and Guardians. There’s a couple of treatises about them, but nothing digital.

It’s quite an annoyance that I’ve encountered. Even for advanced as the non-baseline folks can be at times, there’s some areas that have very definite blindspots. And getting digital copies of older non-magical treatises is one of them.

Although, to be entirely fair, even baselines have trouble with that one. I can’t tell you the number of times where I showed up to consult, only to find half of the ‘user documentation’ was on sticky notes at best (and in one case in an obscure file format that only existed on that particular operating system and incapable of being hooked up to a printer).

So the long and the short of Prisms, in addition to what Rennet already told me, they’re essentially a kind of bag of holding, except in a semi-crystalline form. This makes them almost always immediately identifiable unless surrounded by other crystals. As a general rule, there’s usually a phrase or ‘lock’ of some sort to keep just anyone from accessing them.

However, from there, it gets a bit weird.

The interior of a Prism is effectively timeless. This wasn’t to say that time didn’t still pass, but relative to the outside world, the passage of time is… well, think of it as the passage of time within a Prism is a fraction of what it is in the world. Or something like that.

One of the treatises I managed to get a preview of suggested a time differential of 1 year in the real world to 1 second within a Prism. BUT… and here’s the real trick, that’s only on objects. On biological beings (of which all baselines and non-baselines are usually counted), the passage of time within a Prism is more like 1 year within to 1 second outside.

So essentially, you could store a whole army’s worth of food inside a Prism and never worry about it spoiling within your lifetime. But you could hide out in a Prism for half a lifetime and less than a full minute will have gone by when/if you emerge.

It’s practically paradoxical, but magic appears to have a lot of little caveats like that.

In practice, wizards and others tend to store alchemical mixtures and huge libraries within Prisms. That way they can make a big batch of a given mixture and not need to rebrew it within 6 months when the one they have on the shelf is bad. It also means that their books are almost always as fresh and new as the day they were added to the collection.

But, like most equivalent academic professions, wizards are exceptionally competitive, especially in researching and developing new spells. So as you can imagine, there’s a lot of… shall we say, espionage. Such a much nicer word than ‘spying’.

A good Prism as a result tends to be almost jealously guarded in general and often includes a Guardian on the inside.

Guardians… well, they’re not exactly automata, but they’re not exactly biological either. For the purposes of magic, they’re objects, but for the purposes of interaction, they’re more like a… well, according to the research I’d done by that point, like djinns. Like Lucy.

Which would certainly explain why Rennet looked a bit singed.

Upon reading this, I was wondering if I could get away with simply copying the book on Seers and giving it back to Rennet.

Sighing, I resolved that I shouldn’t. I’d agreed to wade into this mess and whether I liked it or not, I couldn’t really refuse the work. Just being inside a Prism was invaluable experience and for a Seer who’s getting their magical consulting business going, it doesn’t hurt to have the extra experience. Although, it is still important to still get paid too.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

The one bonus I could see is that this was a bound djinn. Which effectively means they have essentially no free will. So yes, it does mean they’re a slave, but because of the binding process, they don’t really process it. At least officially. Based on Lucy, I’d wager a wizard who had no experience being on the other side of the equation wrote that.

If I had to guess, djinns who are bound into Prisms as Guardians are more like comatic patients. Able to hear and comprehend, but entirely unable to act on their own. Or having their bodies acting on whatever orders were put in place to have them serving as intelligent Guardians as their consciousness is powerless to act against it.

Which frankly, sounds worse than slavery. But I won’t get on my soapbox for now. Mostly because while wizards of our modern era don’t bind djinns that way (officially) anymore, the mechanism to release djinn Guardians would require unmaking said prisms, which would basically kill the aforementioned djinn. And I promised to get off my soapbox…

So, jumping on ahead to the next morning, I had my nice shiny firearm from the Council in its holster and a loadout of the ‘special’ rounds they’d sent along with it.

Rennet was looking nervous when he let me into his shop and we proceeded to the basement.

The Prism was set up in what I’d come to recognize as a containment circle. While it wasn’t unusual to have a containment circle, I was surprised to see the Prism in the center of it. I looked to Rennet questioningly.

“So this Prism is… special. It takes essentia to enter it. Took me almost a year to figure that out. And given the amount of spells and preparation materials around here, I didn’t want to take any chances,” Rennet said, gesturing at the rest of the room.

I looked between him and the Prism.

“If it takes essentia, how were you planning to get me inside?” I prompted him.

“I’ve accounted for that,” he said and pulled out an essentia crystal. A small one, but still an essentia crystal.

As you’ll recall from one of my earlier entries, this would be like pulling out half a gold bar (or the equivalent in cash). In short, this was an affirmation that Rennet wasn’t holding back on the expenses.

Oh and for comparison, that book I got from him is probably worth a lot more than a dozen large essentia crystals, simply because it’s one of four or five ever drawn up.

I took the crystal and palmed it for a moment to look at him.

“So what kind of Guardian are we facing?” I asked.

“I think it’s a djinn, like Lucy, except much more powerful,” he shrugged a bit.

“That’s.. not very helpful. Can you give me anything else?” I prompted. It was something, but it wasn’t enough.

“Well, the general basis for Prism djinn Guardians is that they’re bound to the Prism. Prisms are by their nature very powerful magic and usually soak up essentia passively from the world around them. Not a lot and not all at once, but it’s not usually a problem. The fact that this one needs essentia to enter it means it’s that much more powerful,” Rennet tried, shuffling those carpet slippers again.

“More powerful? Why wouldn’t it be less?” I asked.

“Think about it like a black hole,” Rennet suggested. He apparently had been doing a bit of reading up on how to talk to me at a guess.

“Makes sense I suppose. What about getting out?” I asked. He had only given me one crystal after all.

“I have an extra with me if we need it, but I didn’t need it to exit last time,” he gestured at a pouch halfway hidden on his robes.

“You were also under fire last time. And frankly, I’d feel safer if I had both crystals on me. Not to say that I don’t trust you, but given the recent developments, it’s safer for us both. If I don’t need it, I’ll happily give it back,” I said, providing no room for negotiation.

Rennet looked unhappy for a moment, but his face quickly conceded and he handed over a second small crystal. I tucked it into a zip pocket on my cargo pants.

“Shall we?” I gestured to the crystal, which seemed to glow all the more ominously at the suggestion.

“Might as well. I’ll need you to repeat the entry phrase with me and then use the crystal,” Rennet said, stepping up and placing a hand on the crystal surface.

“What language is this?” I asked, pointing to the inscriptions.

“Babylonian. I think. It’s definitely an Assyrian derivative, so my pronunciation is close enough to get in,” Rennet seemed almost annoyed I hadn’t touched the crystal yet.

“And if we need to talk to the djinn?” I asked.

“We won’t. Get in, get what we can, get out. That’s the deal,” he said, very firmly.

‘Always up for library robbing,’ I said facetiously in my head.

I placed my hand to the surface of the Prism and held the crystal in my other hand.

“After me,” Rennet said.

“Ah pikh”

“Bith arkey”

“Ah pikh”

I crushed the essentia crystal and saw the essentia flow into my hand and then out the other into the Prism. Rennet’s hand against the crystal was also glowing slightly.

And the basement around us dissolved in a wash of light and I found myself standing in an M.C. Escher house next to a portal and an almost sick looking Rennet.

Oh, and in front of us was an Amazonian blonde who was holding two rather fierce looking fireballs.