Alrighty sports fans, I’m back. As it turns out, when a wizard says they mean to send you on a long term expedition, they mean the equivalent of several decades and they become rather upset when you solve their mystery in a matter of weeks.
But I get paid either way and I wasn’t going to be there for longer than a month in any case.
It’s funny to see a grand wizard who has paid for long term leases of equipment and apprentices find out that you’ve solved their mystery and had two pots of jasmine tea in an afternoon. All the usual steps - Anger, Denial, Mourning, and Acceptance.
Well, the usual steps minus Bargaining. After all, my price was set out in the contract up front and if there’s one thing wizards don’t toy with lightly, it’s contracts. I hear the wizard orc baliffs are anything but kind.
So where was I…. oh that’s right, about to go camping in Miss Skuld’s pocket dimension/garden.
As expected, Lucy was not a fan of me going to an extraplanar dimension without some way of getting back, but neither she nor Warren had any suggestions of what I could take for insurance on that count other than my firearm and everything I’d already bought.
Warren was as blank as ever, giving me the impression that he also disapproved, but wasn’t going to be too open about it.
I suspected that Warren wasn’t a fan of witches and warlocks, but I would guess that this was more of a generic bias than a specific one against Miss Skuld. Not that this makes it any better, but a passive dislike/disagreement is a far cry from active harassment.
–
The next afternoon, I went to Miss Skuld’s house/shop and rapped lightly on the door (no, not that kind of rapping, I haven’t got even a proper sense of rhythm to attempt that).
Miss Skuld opened the door a few minutes later and ushered me inside, seeming a bit furtive, which, for her, was unusual.
Her face seemed a bit strained, like she was running on caffeine and willpower. It was an odd look for her, given her usual composure.
“Were you able to get everything you needed?” I asked, deciding to focus on the matter at hand.
“I was. Here is the scroll you’ll need for the garden side,” she said, pulling out a small roll that could easily have been a few sheets at most.
To give you a relative idea of what I am used to, most scrolls tend to be actual proper scrolls - 20 inches across and 10-20 yards long.
I didn’t bother to hide my shock at seeing such a small scroll.
“Another benefit of being a witch. My scrolls don’t need to be as large as most,” she commented, the hint of a smile lurking around her lips.
“What do I need to do to activate it?” I asked, taking it and unrolling it just a bit to see the runes within.
“Just thumb the marker after we’ve disconnected the portal. The spell and the local essentia should take care of the rest,” she said, leading me rather quickly back to the portal. “Are you fully prepared for this?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.
“Oh and take this also. It’s no communicator, but it’s what I could afford to borrow,” she said, reaching into a pocket and pulling out a familiar science fiction looking hologram bee.
I took it and looked at it. Plenty of runes that didn’t make any sense to me and it seemed to glow a bit.
“A tracer?” I guessed.
“Quite so. At a minimum, I’ll be able to put together a one way, one time use portal if I must, but I’m going to hope it doesn’t come to that. My garden has too much work put into it to abandon it now,” she nodded.
“We’ll find a way to make it work. And if you need help, I can make a few calls before I go,” I offered.
“NO!.... Uh… no, thank you,” Miss Skuld seemed very put off by the idea.
“More witch/torquay user stuff I’m not a party to?” I continued guessing.
“Something like that yes. Also, most wizards aren’t a fan of extradimensional portals in their backyard, so to speak. Especially semi-permanent ones.”
“Fair enough. Well, let’s get to work then,” I said and stepped through the portal.
–
On the far side, the garden was almost exactly as we’d left it. A small table and chairs had remained and a barrel of water with a small tap at the end rested nearby.
The golems as one looked up to observe me for a moment and then went right back to their work. It was a little unnerving, but it helped if you thought about it like being in a robotic factory, where the robots can actually move and do more than just a singular task.
It was still an impressive sight.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Certainly an industrial farm could provide far more in terms of quantity, but not in variety and quality. Between the various flowering plants/trees and just the sheer amount of greenery, it was hard to pick out just where the garden ended and the tree perimeter began.
I stared for a long moment before wandering over to the table and set my bag down. At a minimum, I wouldn’t have to worry too much about bad weather while I was here, but at the same time, I would still be stuck here if this wasn’t as simple as we both hoped.
Even with my time in the non-baseline world to date, I still know very little about the difficulties of magic, other than it being a lot like tech support from my side of things.
It helped to be ignorant of an awful lot, but at the same time, it meant that I got a lot of exasperated looks when I needed an explanation for what I was seeing.
There was a small sound, like the whisper of a well kept door hinge accompanied by the grinding of stone.
I looked over and saw the portal by which I had entered was no longer glowing.
I unrolled the scroll to its full size, about 6 feet long. It was done in a runic script I’d never seen before, but it was immaculate.
The marker was at the very bottom and was shaped like a very ornate doorbell. I might have laughed, but I’d seen far more intricate versions on the many wizard scrolls that I’d dealt with. This would be the first one I’d activated without the help of an essentia crystal though.
Thumbing the marker as Miss Skuld had mentioned, the scroll lit up and began to float away from my hands.
Since this was unusual, but not entirely unexpected, I let go and stepped back a bit.
The edges of the scroll seemed to catch fire, but without burning. The fire seemed to flicker almost tempermentally before beginning to stream to the portal’s edges.
If not for the intricate designs already present along the whole of the portal, I probably could have made out the changes that were being made by the fiery magic. As it was, all I could see was the flames burying themselves into the artistically formed wood and seeing the wood move in ways undreamed of by anyone save perhaps HR Giger or HP Lovecraft.
It seemed almost impossible, but it kept going.
After 10 minutes worth of the magic streaming into the portal and reconfiguring it, I decided to sit down with a wooden mug of water.
The barrel of water proved to be ice cold and as delicious as any water I’m ever likely to drink.
It was almost odd to sit and watch the magic work, but there was nothing else for it. I had no idea how long this would take, so there was no point in being uncomfortable for the duration.
After two hours, during which I read, drank more water than I should have, and worked out with one of the golems a bathroom solution, the stream of flames finished and the scroll rolled itself back up and dropped to the ground with a light ‘plop’.
The portal remained silent and likely would for some time, I surmised, so I decided to continue reading.
I’d managed to locate a book some months prior, a treatise by ‘The Winter Warlock’ on torquay manipulation. I’d picked it up on a whim (and because it was in the bargain bin at Rennet’s).
As it turned out, it was a rather well thought-out thesis on comparing torquay manipulation to ‘standard’ magics, pointing out the key differences as well as pros and cons between both. It even went into attempting to dispel some of the myths surrounding torquay manipulation.
When Miss Skuld had mentioned it being an oversimplification of ‘other magics’, she wasn’t kidding.
The extraplanar manipulation chapter alone was nearly incomprehensible excepting that I had a LOT of experience with Prisms and so it made a kind of absolute sense.
The extraplanar connections actually connected to N+1 type dimensions, and yet were all part of the same extraplanar dimension. The author described it as a kind of hypercube combined with Escher-esque sensibilities, which made perfect sense or seemed to.
For your benefit, imagine a room built by Escher connected with other rooms in the same house, also built by Escher. In theory, you can get from room to room, but first you have to be able to leave the room you’re in. And even if you can get to a different room, you’re still in the same house and you’re still just as internalized in this new room.
And all of this assumes you can even find the room exits (or looping exits).
Compared with standard plane concerns, it’s wild, but having ventured into Prisms, I can honestly say that I’m anything but surprised.
Torquay powers in a non-extraplanar environment were actually pretty tame by comparison. Oh you still got fireballs, portals, and runic magic, but it was nowhere near as potent as a good rune wizard might be with the right kind of prep.
A torquay witch or warlock could work the front lines or logistics, but a well equipped wizard could work an army.
That said, torquay users were comparatively anomalous, appearing at semi-random in the population and often being frightened and alone when they started learning their abilities. Which is largely why when a torquay user starts wielding fireballs and summoning creatures from other realms, there’s an understandable backlash by the baselines.
This isn’t to say that wizards don’t have a similar problem, but given that their magic tends to be far more compartmentalized and generational, it’s not unheard of for them to have some idea of what they are well in advance of coming into their magic.
By the time I was about a third of the way through it (speed reading because I didn’t want to get too bogged down in the details for the moment), I was starting to get hungry and the portal hadn’t so much as flickered.
Checking my watch, it was going on 5 hours since I’d crossed over and the portal deactivated, so I decided some dinner was in order.
I also decided that it would probably be worth going ahead and figuring out my sleeping accommodations.
With the help of one of the golem gardeners, I got two posts with support arms sufficient to be able to strap my hammock up embedded near the table.
The light showed no signs of darkening, so I decided to treat this like a trip to the Arctic during the midnight sun. I’d never been, but I did my best to remember what little I could remember from my job hunting several years back before I joined the consulting firm (pre-Apartment times).
It only took a few minutes to get my hammock set up and some food arranged. The helpful golem even brought me some fresh vegetables and fruit (some radishes and a bowl of golden cherries).
Between that, the beef jerky, and two mugs of cider, I was certainly feeling quite comfortable in this place. It wasn’t home, but it wasn’t entirely like camping either. It almost felt too simple, but that was just my brain backfiring at the whole scenario.
I finished out my evening listening to some punk-core and setting up the folding/roll-up solar cell that I’d brought with.
Sleep took me not long after and I remember dreaming about a windstorm on a submarine. No idea why, but it made dream logic sense.
When the thunderclap erupted through the bubble and woke me from a dead sleep then, I was obviously far from prepared, but I managed to scramble for my firearm all the same. The golems all were staring in the same direction and started moving, some appearing to be guarding me, others moving towards whatever it was that they were sensing.
I stared into the distance where the golems appeared to be heading and saw a flicker of something. Not like a flame, but also not like lightning. It wasn’t something fast, but it also wasn’t slow.
What was obvious at least was that it wasn’t Terran and that most likely meant trouble.