To putting the Muthi situation aside for the moment, after all, it’s been an ongoing saga, so we’ll get back to the ‘fun’ there, along with the attempted heist.
Yes, heist. Someone was actually dumb enough to plan one.
Anyway, how many in the crowd have done tech support? Yup, about as many as I expected. What is it about us that makes us such a target for ‘you restarted this machine when it wasn’t working and now it is, now you must solve all the problems’?
Being fair, it’s a nice steady income, especially in the non-baseline community. But clientele… well, they follow that famous tv doctor’s rule: ‘Everyone lies.’
The trick that I’ve discovered is what they’re lying about and why. For master mages, it’s usually something they’re researching to try and get ahead of some competitor, so they think they’re being clever by lying. Or they think I won’t understand what they’re attempting.
The latter is usually fair, but at the same time, telling me that I won’t understand the equivalent of multifactor database dynamic filtering with automatic report generation using a proprietary code base and a really esoteric naming convention, well, you’d be wrong.
If I had a nickel for every time I’d run into something like that, I’d have about 45 cents. Obvious joke about how it really shouldn’t be that common, but it is. Believe me when I say that more often than not, I don’t care. It’s my job to get the Mack truck out of the swimming pool, not ask how it got there.
As you can imagine, doing ‘magical’ tech support for a university is every bit as dull as you might imagine.
Resetting orbs that ‘glitched’ into only showing the locker room of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders (sometimes modern day, others in the early 1990s depending on the ‘user’), overcharged rune scrolls set up to prank someone, dealing with the odd round of ‘why isn’t this infernal machine working’. [P.S. we all know what machine that is.]
And given that I’m expensive on my regular charge, the university and I have a deal. They provide me a certain billable minimum per month and I agree to provide whatever necessary support they need (within reason and allowing for my other work).
Why would they agree to essentially fund me, you might ask?
Well, when one of the most senior wizards accidentally created an unfiltered essentia trap which would have gone critical in about another 30 minutes and taken the university to some pocket dimension from which there may or may not have been any return (to say nothing of essentia), it gives a few tons of lead to the scale in terms of balancing contractual terms.
It was a rather hilarious event though, in retrospect, and proves that even senior wizards can screw up and when they do, there’s usually a minimum safe distance involved.
It was one of my first ‘agree to do the job and whatever you want paid, we’ll pay it’ verbal contracts. And given that it was the University’s Dean and high-most magician making the agreement on my recorded line, I certainly wasn’t about to turn it down, even if I had been burned in my previous office for going out of scope a few times.
And more or less as soon as I agreed, I had to chalk out a runic-recall (think teleport, but less ‘take you apart and put you back together’ and more stuffing you into a pocket dimension for a fraction of a second in one place and opening and yanking you back out on the other end), which got activated as soon as I stood in it.
When any university dean does actual work, you know something is going very wrong and since they were the ones who ‘recalled’ (‘summoned’ worked to, but I’ll… I’ll have to explain that one in a later episode) me, I knew it was bad.
Luckily, it was still 8 a.m. and my coffee mug full of coffee was still with me (as were all my clothes). Not all transport methods retain objects and clothes, so I was grateful to have kept both (although I suspect it had more to do with the sheer amount of essentia the dean had dumped into recalling me).
Now I won’t claim to have acquired anything other than my Seer sight, but I know how to read a room and know this was bad.
Standing in my average t-shirt, jeans, and percussive maintenance boots, I’ll admit having felt out of place around the berobed wizards, but when you’re there to clean up their mess, you could be dressed in frilly lingerie and they still wouldn’t care.
“So what are we dealing with?” I asked, straight to business.
“An unfiltered essentia trap. Anyone or anything, uh, normal that tries to get close gets sucked dry,” one of the wizards said.
It was obvious which of the senior wizards it was by the embarrassed look on their face. I ignored the ‘normal’ comment.
“So what do I need to do to shut it down?” I prompted.
The assembled wizards looked aghast.
“You can’t just shut it down! Do you have any idea what that would do?” at least two of the senior wizards said in near simultaneity.
“Keep this college from finding itself in some pocket universe with no way back? Or perhaps simply destroy all of the local ecosphere?” I guessed rather loudly. I wasn’t here to play games or deal with hurt feelings. I was here to do a job.
“I’m told you can channel essentia. Could you channel it into a runic scroll in the process of shutting it down?” the dean asked.
I gave it a bit of thought.
As a baseline, while I don’t generate essentia, I can channel it. It’s a weird trait that carries over and something in that is what gave me Seer sight (we think).
Stolen novel; please report.
Naturally, I’d gotten some practice at it, but nothing like this order of magnitude.
“What kind of scroll did you have in mind and what kind of potency are we looking at?” I pointedly asked the dean.
“Class 7 at the moment, probably Class 9 in another 10 minutes,” one of the few female wizards answered.
I frowned for obvious reasons, but I’ll need to give you some context.
The potency Class scale works similar to how an earthquake scale works. So a Class 7 is already seriously bad news. A Class 9 even moreso. The average spell tops out at a Class 4 with only the most powerful spells needing anything greater (and usually over a broad area of effect and controlling wizards).
The spells needed to ‘re-cement’ the system hiding my apartment building – Class 6 – to give you a sense of scale. Yeah, this was rapidly becoming bad news. But then that’s why they wanted me with a ‘get it done and we’ll pay whatever it takes’ surcharge.
“I have a scroll of light!” suggested one wizard, digging at his bag.
“Not enough and too showy. No, we need something directed or something transplanar,” I said simply.
The wizards seemed to stop and think as a group, undoubtedly thinking through what they could lay their hands on readily.
Needless to say, it was my own suggestion that seemed to break them from their silence.
“Assuming we can’t channel this into making a massive essentia crystal, what about a laser?”
“We don’t have a way to channel that much into making a crystal. Not on hand,” the dean spoke up first. “But we should be able to change that scroll of light into a directed beam. It’s still a problem in terms of being enough though.”
“We just need to make it intense enough to handle it along with containing any plasma that it ends up generating in the process,” I shrugged.
“Fair point. Get out your quills and fix your scroll. I want this man ready in under 5 minutes,” the dean barked at the senior wizard who’d volunteered their scroll.
The wizard in question sat down almost on the spot and began scratching out runes on the scroll.
“Now, tell me how to turn it off,” I demanded of the still very embarrassed looking wizard.
He glanced up at me and immediately back down at my and his shoes.
“I… I didn’t build in a way to turn it off yet,” he admitted.
As one, I could feel the whole room want to slap him up the backside of his head. I resisted the urge and took a long swig off my coffee, wishing I’d had the forethought to put whiskey in it.
“What’s the rig made of?” I asked.
“Grade 3 copper laced silicon with platinum-iron-cobalt ink used for the runes,” the wizard said, matter-of-factly (almost proudly for moment).
“And just what form is that silicon in?” I pressed.
“Glass of course,” was the almost flippant response before the wizard’s face sagged, realizing exactly what I was going to do. “No…”
“Yes,” was all I had to say back.
They turned their eyes pleadingly to their colleagues and the dean, but were met only with disapproving glares.
I already knew nobody in the room liked what I was about to do, but they also were willing to accept the fact that one of their own had screwed up and so a smaller breakage and ego tempering now was better than having to find another university who would take them all.
Within another minute, during which, I finished my coffee, I was handed the scroll. I left my mug next to the recall point and allowed myself to be hurried several buildings over to where the wizards stopped as one.
“We can’t go any further, but it’s the 3rd door from here on the left. It should be obvious,” the dean said.
I just nodded and continued the light jog that we’d been doing down a hallway with widely spaced doors. Behind each one was normally a wizard’s workroom, which could be as much or as little as they needed it to be (wizards tending to follow the ‘bigger on the inside’ principle).
To say that it was obvious at this point would be an understatement. While I can’t see essentia, I could definitely see the effects and the currents of such a strong pull, so there was no doubt as to where this trap was.
Reaching the door, I opened it easily and walked in.
As promised, the intricate glass structure with almost dark runes compared with the massive ball of energy being barely contained was almost disturbingly obvious.
I looked around the room. It didn’t appear that there were any secondary dimensions to worry about (bigger on the inside can cause problems to what I had in mind).
One thing that hadn’t been mentioned was that the glass structure was moving. Like a watch.
I remembered my tech support rule 0 – Everyone lies – including master mages.
Walking up to the structure, which hurt to look at directly at the moment, I tried to see what I could discern.
Given the amount of essentia being channeled through the device, I had no doubts as to the wizard’s abilities in creation. Just in their abilities to temper their runic programming.
One of the moving arms of the device was clearly one of the collection points.
I looked around for elements, especially liquid.
I didn’t find what I was looking for, so Plan A was back on the table.
Grabbing a metal tube which had clearly been used to help create this masterwork in glass, I swung it at the first collection point. It shattered and the device groaned, clearly unhappy with that.
I looked for any other collection points and found two more, smashing each one in turn.
The device was still humming, but I couldn’t see the obvious flow anymore. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to at least keep it from going critical for now.
That part of the job being done, it was time for the next part. I looked up at the ceiling’s skylight and pointed my hand holding the scroll like a sword.
The next part I hated and still hate. Why? Because it’s like being struck by lightning, except a lot slower and a lot more jarring than the average electric fence (although thankfully without the concomitant reflexive bladder/bowels emptying).
Grabbing a loop of primary conductance or what I guessed to being one, the trapped essentia erupted through me, looking for a way out. Finding the scroll, it locked in that line and sent a blade of light that could have boiled away a space shuttle into nothingness through the skylight and hopefully into deep space, away from anything important.
I would like to say that I had it aimed well, but other than my initial estimated attempt, I wasn’t in control.
About a minute after I felt the scroll burst into flames and turn to ash at my feet, I managed to remove my clenched fingers from the loop.
It no longer hurt to look at and the glow was conspicuously absent. I couldn’t tell if it was still collecting, but at the time, I was still having trouble hearing, seeing, and even standing up straight. To say it hurt would be an understatement.
I might liken it to having gone through labor, but that would be a false equivalence. More along the lines of having every muscle in your body clench and cramp involuntarily for a whole minute, with the associated pains that follow such involuntary actions.
The wizards were standing in the doorway by this point, looking at me somewhat shocked. That is except for the dean, who simply nodded sagely.
“Make sure that damn thing is disabled until further notice,” the dean ordered the assembled wizards and in the midst of the rush by the wizards to the device, managed to lead me away.
“You… you realize my bill is going to be substantial,” I croaked out, about halfway back to the recall point.
“As it should be,” was the dean’s placid response as they helped me stagger. “Alas, we need someone on hand to stop these sorts of things before they reach this point.”
“If that’s a job offer, I’m sure we can work something out,” I managed.
“I do have to ask. Could you have stopped it without breaking it?” the dean queried.
“Given time or the right elements sure.”
“And what would you have suggested if asked to consult on it before it got switched on?” the dean pressed.
“Smaller scale to check the runic structure and lead jacketing on the collection points,” were the only two thoughts that managed to make it to the top of my brain, which was still doing loop-d-loops.
The dean and I managed to walk the rest of the way to the recall point in near silence.
“Draft up your bill and a service contract. I’m happy to look at both,” the dean said, handing me my mug and centering me in the recall point.
“It’ll be expensive,” I mumbled.
“Good help usually is,” the dean said, a tight grin finally making its way across his lips.
And he sent me on my way.
And that’s how I got started doing tech support for the local university.