(II)

It took a while for me to reach my stationery and journals. That's the price I have to pay for leaving all my notes strewn about the first time random steam puffs emerged ex nihilo to upend all my inkpots and soak every last paper that wasn't buried deep at the bottom of a drawer. Preferably the bottom-most drawer of a very big desk. One ideally located in a different room. More than just a single wall away to be doubly sure.

In practical terms, this meant that I had one very tightly-bound pocket book on me for taking notes during the day (with custom laminated covers because I'd also invented plastics, may the spirits forgive me for however long it takes this world to also turn it into a paradise for twenty-five billion crabs), but all my actual journals and documents were in my study over in the house proper. If not for the improved recall from the Light's tune-up, I'd miss and forget at least half of all my ideas all the time.

I stopped to check on Dad on the way in, as I did twice a week despite that I hadn't needed to for almost two months. "Time for your tests, old man."

Dad scowled. "Must we? We've not even had dinner yet!" But he let me help him out of the hammock and stomped over to the lounge chair on the porch, grousing the whole way. "To think I'd be poked and prodded like this, are you ever going to stop? I'm fine, for Tyr's sake! Why can't you just trust that the Light knows what it's doing, like everyone else? Oh, to think you don't even know how to be a saint properly, my own son!"

"Yeah yeah, now hold out your arm."

Dad held out his arm. "Not gonna make me strip for your pleasure today?"

"I'm sure your form-fitting button-up will accommodate the stethoscope just fine," I said while putting on the arm cuff. "Don't think I missed how all your shirts are one size smaller now, I know what you've been having Mom do, you were literally strutting through town the other day."

Dad scowled. It utterly failed to distract from his reddening cheeks. "Just for that I'm cutting your allowance."

"I'm sure the big fat zero will be glad to be as lean as you." My short-lived allowance had dried up well before I became the primary breadwinner.

"Light, I'm cursed to suffer the only smart-mouthed saint in the history of the world, what did I do to deserve this?"

"Sex with Mother."

Dad's spluttering was loud and outraged and completely ruined the reliability of his blood pressure test, but for the first time in a while I was willing to let it go. No small thing for me. Domar Hywel was the decidedly December half of my parents' May-December arrangement, he'd been thirty-five when Mom had me at seventeen. The damage to mom's womb from her repeated miscarriages after having me had been relatively easy to deal with, it basically boiled down to a weak cervix (the things you learn reading fan works, honestly). But Dad had been an absolute mess of prematurely aged medieval commoner from the seedier parts of large town Arathor. Arthritis, rheumatism, weakened bones, poor hearing, poor eyesight because of cataracts that were steadily ruining his ability to make an income, diabetes despite us barely affording sugar, back pain, neck pains, breathing problems, emerging heart problems, the only issue he didn't have yet was dementia. Which meant he got to be fully aware of his body failing him and stewing in self-loathing over his encroaching failure to provide for Mother and I.

I'd had to get very creative with when and how I drew on the Holy Light for him. No small task when even the blessings I did recall from my past life had to be created from first principles. And that's without getting into the physical side of things. Human biological systems were no joke, neuroplasticity and telomere decay less so, especially when anatomy was not my specialty. Even then, it still felt like I was negotiating and even teaching the Light at times. Holistic treatments were all well and good for draining fifty years' worth of gunk from every last one of Dad's cells, but not exactly ideal for reconstructing half his pancreas and do cataract rehab surgery. Twice. Also, the Light responds to will intuitively, which means interference from the patient's own will and self-concept, especially when his concept of 'health' differs from the doctor's.

I had much cause to be grateful to the Archbishop for indulging all my questions back then. The whole seals, symbols, songs and recitations thing that priests had going on? Not pointless pageantry. You could learn to instantly silent-cast whatever you wanted on yourself, but to affect other people? Good luck with anything that isn't 'throw glowy stuff at the problem and see what happens'. You needed some way to make sure the Light knew to do what you wanted done and keep doing it, instead of the recipient whose soul and will always had the closer, stronger claim and authority. It explained why random Light exposure could lead to spontaneous revelation in the predisposed, but wouldn't do anything about Garona's mind control or maladaptive core beliefs like Deathwing's nihilistic lunacy, at least unless knowingly and specifically targeted. It was an unfortunate revelation, but at least now I knew what it would take to start doing something about all the tentacle brainwashing.

As I unfastened the arm cuff and switched to the stethoscope, I wondered at my spasmodic fortune and whether the lack of conventional training in the Light had been a hindrance or a help. I certainly made more progress there than with what was supposed to be my most solid and reliable skill.

"Okay Dad, lie down now."

"You may as well have left me in the hammock." But Dad did as I asked and bore through my stethoscope and percussive examination with well-worn patience. "One of these days I'll kick you in the face."

"Entirely accidentally, I'm sure. ᚨᚠᚺᛃÚᛈᚨ Óᚺᛖᛁᛚᛁᚾᛞᛁ ᚠᛁᚱᛁᚱ ᛊᚲᛁᚾᛃᚢᚾ ᛗᛁᚾᚾᛁ."

Father's body shimmered alight, but what I experienced went well beyond the mere sight of gold. Of every application of the Light I'd come up with, the diagnosis spell may just be my best work. My attempts to create a tricorder spell had flopped. I assume that despite all the robots in Azeroth's founding myth, the Light didn't naturally operate on ultimately Arcane principles. That didn't mean it couldn't do what I needed, though. The incantation roughly translated to "reveal unwellness to my senses." Doctors diagnosed symptoms through sight, touch, hearing, even smell and taste given the right samples. Animals had a foundation in this for even longer, some knowing disease by smell and all of them subconsciously accounting for physical abnormalities when looking for a mate. My spell didn't replicate that, anymore, after my first few attempts flooded all my senses at once with foreign impressions. It had been extremely nauseating, and not just because of the sensory overload, I felt and smelled and tasted everything. I quickly developed both feedback control and an iron stomach, but my ultimate goal had been psychometry. And, once I figured out how to use those natural reference points as mere guidelines for the Light's natural propensity towards revelation, I got it.

Needless to say, I was very glad I'd taken a gander at the Old Norse runes that one time, in my previous life. They were still just a writing system at the end of the day, but using the Light itself for 'ink' made for some elaborate effects, I'd found. To a much greater extent than could be achieved with the grand total of three runes that survived here from the time of Tyr to the present. All of which were already in the Terran rune poems. Turns out there's a reason why Earth's myth and folklore said the runes were discovered and not made.

It was a damned tragedy that almost nothing of the mystical scripts of ancient days had made it down to humanity. The Church didn't really have any written history to explain why the people from Tyr's time didn't pass down any sort of written word, but the Archbishop assumed a lack of literacy, and I tended to agree. The vrykul that fled with their 'ugly, misshapen spawn' probably didn't know enough to pass down themselves. I don't think theirs was exactly a universally literate society, and spellcasting scripts would have been hoarded in any case. Presumably this was why rune-based magic only came into play after the Wrathgate in the games – the Northrend vrykul hadn't woken up before then. Also explained why personal symbols like 'seal of Uther' and 'rune of Tyr' were such a big deal too – when lacking the appropriate knowledge and tools, you did your best with whatever your predecessors left behind, in this case personal sigils that the Light will maybe, hopefully associate enough with its favoured agents to call up an echo of their feats. When your situation was similar enough. And your need was great enough.

And then there were bindrunes, where you merged two or more runes to form a new symbol. Something not given to bizarre or catastrophic failure like I generally understood was the case with research done by arcanists. I had a lot of ideas for that.

Just as soon as I figured out enchanting.

Considering that all attempts to get a sitdown with a mage have amounted to a big fat 'zero progress' despite me offering to pay the best rate for a consultation, I wasn't very optimistic about that particular timeline.

"Daydreaming again, son?"

"Apparently." I shook my head to clear it of the afterimages of cellular molecules. As always, Dad wasn't as enthused as I was about being my practice dummy while I lost track of time being my own electron microscope, but he reaped most of the benefits so I had no regrets. "Rejoice, Dad, I think we can stretch things out so you only need to be poked and prodded once a month from now on."

"Damn, son, you've been a saint for nigh on two years and it's only now you start working miracles, what took you so long?"

Breadwinning in your stead, but a dutiful man's pride wasn't anyone else's to trample, least of all his own child. "Just be glad you aren't a walking sack of sickness anymore. Feel free to congratulate me on my good work."

"Congratulations," Dad grunted as I helped him up. "I'll make sure to mention it to Tyr himself when I see him in heaven."

For a given meaning of heaven anyway. "He's not there, I'm pretty sure. Yet, anyway."

Dad gave me a funny look, but I got up and left before he could ask. While he might never get used to me spouting strange things at odd times, he was very well used to pretending it never happened. Later.

Finally in my study – the part of the basement not underneath any of the other construction, just in case – I turned on the lights, basked in the feeling of triumph I still got every time I did that, and sat down at my desk to chronicle the day because the only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down.

"April 13, Year 580 of the King's Calendar," I said in English as I wrote, because I needed the practice. Also, rogues went around spying and stealing everything off people while invisible through totally-not-shadow-magic. It was probably still useless, I expect that divination magic made it much easier to translate things in this world, language barriers certainly didn't seem to exist outside game chat for any practical purposes. Still, a completely foreign language should be a better obstacle than any mere cypher. Back on Earth I'd been following a story where some Irish overachiever had undergone something similar to me, but wound up in some Japanese manga about ninjas instead. Unfortunately, much as I'd like to do like him and write things in six different languages and two or three alphabets, I only knew English and German. The thought of combining those made me break out in hives. Also, I couldn't see anyone entirely sane taking notes in triplicate, never mind enjoying it and translating into however many additional copies and mixed scripts that guy used just to fuck with people. It had to be some sort of autism.

How he found the time was also a mystery to me. All my spare time these days was wasted on corralling freak accidents of nature instead of doing science or, oh, learning literally any other profession seeing as I was ahead of every smith and engineer in Alterac City already. Not that I'd get far very when I had to start those from first principles too.

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Profession trainers ready to dispense their grandest secrets for a pittance weren't a thing in this world, it turns out. Yet, anyway. The Church provided basic schooling on its own dime to everyone in the human kingdoms, but for anything beyond letters, arithmetic, and basic history, it was either the army, a full apprenticeship, or very big favours with the right people. The Church or a noble patron could pull strings, but eventually you still arrived at a guild that needed to be both able and willing to spare their specialist's time to teach random nobodies. Unlike back on Earth, this wasn't even the guilds' fault and I was getting side-tracked again, as usual.

Then again, this train of thought might deserve its own entry.

I pulled over my other log book, the one where I collected my bursts of insight on the world I now lived in. "The economic system used by the Legacy Kingdoms was inherited wholesale from the Empire of Arathor. It imposes an upper limit on the number of members in a guild, variable based on multiple factors like population and number of tradesmen in the area during the latest census. It also encourages business models based around return on capital investment, but forbids usury on pain of severed limbs. This effectively makes sure that no monopolies can ever form and that the market always has a healthy level of competition with a minimum of malicious embargos or swindling, but otherwise allows people to act in their own best interest." That was just scratching the surface of how clever the Empire had been about literally everything. Too bad it didn't incentivise the dissemination of marketable skills any more than usual. Right now, neither the demand nor the need for open professional trainers existed. Never mind class trainers, ask about that and people will look at you like you're speaking fish. The world hadn't lost a vast swath of its best hands and minds through three existential world wars, nor was there a perpetually looming apocalypse around to demand that knowledge and skill be disseminated as widely and quickly as possible lest civilization entirely collapse and regress to the stone age. It wasn't even an exaggeration, that was literally what happened to the trolls.

Oh well.

I idly sent out a blast of searing Light. When no invisible interlopers cried out in shock, I returned to my first ledger.

"Steam elementals continue to survive, with minimal changes in behavioural complexity despite wild fluctuations in their perceivable size, density and presumably mass. Unclear if this is because simple water steam is insufficient nourishment, for lack of a better term, or if this is just part of their lifecycle. Experiments with exposure to more complex steams such as tea, milk or broth remain inconclusive. They also merge and divide at seeming random. Plans to contact the Wildhammer Dwarves about shaman assistance are still on hold due to the rudimentary state of mail." The pan-spatial mail system portrayed in the game was either waiting for the Alliance and/or Horde to form first, or was a convenient game mechanic that never actually existed in real life. Right now, formal mail systems were internal to the big cities and some of the larger towns. For anything outside them, you needed to wait for a caravan or hire an expensive courier if they weren't already on a job for some noble or the king's taxman. You could get a hold of a freelance mercenary somewhat more easily, but then good luck trying to get anything past customs, never mind past all human territories into the lands of the dwarves with vague instructions to find a shaman willing to trek all the way back because some random human doesn't know technology from mysticism. Never mind the odds of the package arriving at its destination intact to begin with, or at all. I still hadn't heard back from the package I sent to the Archbishop with my rune primer, at the Cathedral of Light in Capital.

Fun fact, 'Capital City' came before the use of 'capital' for primary municipalities in Common. Everyone wanted their own 'Crowning Jewel' after Lordaeron proved that Dalaran wasn't a fluke.

I seriously need to crack arcane magic. I craved to be a wizard, I wanted portals even more, and I needed to figure out what the hell was causing my entirely mundane proto-industrial technology to create elemental spirits. Suspicion and speculation didn't cut it.

"Trial runs of the waterwheel-powered electrical generator remain comparatively innocuous. While measurement and control of voltage and amperage has proven more complicated than expected, the technology otherwise continues to exhibit no abnormalities." I speculated that it was the earth-based methods. Mystically speaking, lightning was the domain of air elementals, but what I was using was wholly of the earth – metals, magnets, rubber, plastics, even the motive force came from a stream instead of the wind. "No freak accidents anticipated for any of the electricity-derived projects on the timetable." I was really just waiting for my orders of glass bulbs and filaments to be delivered. That said… "Caution still advised for any eventual foray into tesla towers or radio-wave communications. However, for anything else I would tentatively rule the technology marketable."

Azeroth was seriously overdue on electric lights and arc welding. Also, batteries. I had a vague recollection of one or three in-game items with 'weld' in the name, but I think they only showed up in the fourth war and relied on blow torches. Of which I'd found no hints of anywhere either, so far. The gnomes probably had something if they could make robots, but not necessarily depending on the clockwork involved, and the in-game welding items I recalled were all from goblins. And mekagnomes, I suppose, but Ulduar was a bigger outside context problem than I was. Equally likely was that current technology relied on entirely mechanical nuts, bolts, hinges and fastenings for their machines. It was a shame that dwarves and gnomes didn't much travel outside Khaz Modan, I'd love to discuss technology with some of them a while. There's clearly some way to make steam technology work without huff and puff ex machinas out of nowhere. I don't even want to think what might happen if I actually put together my internal combustion engine.

"Requests to meet with the mages responsible for the magical aspects of auction security and banking conveyances continue to receive no reply." I was probably being stonewalled. Again. Because why wouldn't problems come home to roost on the regular? "Absent of progress on this front, my attempts to dissect the Earthen blueprints for inadvertent arcane principles have stalled."

I didn't want much, just to be pointed in the right direction. Hell, just a primer for their most basic symbology would be enough to get me going, I didn't want to make magic (yet), right now I just wanted to figure out how to stop it from happening where it shouldn't. I was even willing to pay good money for a null magic zone and I was perfectly willing to spend another year figuring the rest out from first principles on my own. But I first needed to know those first principles, and my attempts to use the Light to 'see' the Arcane have been inconclusive at best. Which is to say, sometimes I saw it (maybe), sometimes I didn't (maybe), and at all times I couldn't tell apart jack from shit. All the moping I'd done over this was the entire reason why Mom decided to dust off her old and very basic herbalism skills. I wasn't desperate enough to try and figure out vision quests from first principles, but I was getting there almost as fast as Mother was mastering her rediscovered passion for mind-expanding draughts.

Wait.

My pen froze above the page.

I turned to look up and to my right towards the kitchen where there were things unfolding that no amount of walls could hide from me.

I dropped the pen, surged out of my study and all but flew up the stairs and down the hall, only stopping when I reached the kitchen. Then I stood there in the door, staring at my mother. Or, rather, a certain part of her where the most vivid lightshow was taking place, streaks of might and maybe whorling together like protoplanetary discs before they merged and erupted, twin stars shining faintly with all the colours of possibility woven together from the threads of the past and the future. They weren't here yet, they wouldn't be for weeks, and it would be months before the lights themselves became self-sustaining, but I could see their coming as clearly as I only ever saw the ripples of my future feats whenever I closed my eyes and looked inward.

"Wayland?"

My mother's words snapped me back to awareness. Outside, the sun had almost disappeared behind the mountain face.

"Of course he'd hear you," Dad groused from behind me. "Son, you really need-"

"You've conceived."

Mother's ladle clattered to the floor.

"Twins," I pronounced. "Fraternal." Two distinct faces flashed behind my eyes, then faded before the shadows of helms and potential. "Boys."

Mother placed her hands on her belly, open-mouthed.

Dad was more vocal. "What!? But she's been taking tea!"

I blinked and turned to look at him.

He wasn't looking at me though. "You've been taking tea, tell me you didn't stop taking the tea!" Dad rushed past me to Mother, stopping next to her with face white and wringing hands. "Dammit, woman, if you can't stomach the tea anymore, why didn't you just say so!? I'd have done my part if it came down to it, the last one almost killed you!"

Oh.

I relaxed.

"Don't you dare look so happy, boy, this is all your fault!" Dad snarled at me, before turning back to fret over mother. "Agnes, how-why-?"

"Unlike you, I do trust our son." The quiet reply carried clearly despite the sound of the bubbling pot. Mother crouched to pick up the ladle and set about washing it in the kitchen sink. "And if he says I'm fine now, I'm fine."

"Agnes, that's not-"

"Oh stop it, Domar, this is exactly why I didn't tell you." Mother huffed and stirred the soup one last time before pulling it off the stove burner. "I'm fine. I'd even be happy if you found it in yourself to be happy too. We're going to have children again. Apparently."

"Well don't everyone cry out in joy at once," I huffed, ambling over to put a hand on Mother's belly. "Don't mind the old grump, kids, he just likes being dramatic."

"DRAMATIC!?"

"The help are watching," I sing-songed, acutely aware of the farmhands awkwardly hovering in the hallway.

Dad reddened, though to his credit you couldn't tell if I'd embarrassed him or if he was just that riled up. "You knew about this!"

"Nope. Mom's will is all her own, don't you know."

"Yes," Mom said dryly. "Don't you know. Howard, please carry the pot to the dining room, my men are both indisposed."

"I'll show you indisposed," Dad grumbled as our farmhand rushed to comply as fast as he could extricate himself from the situation. But by the time it took him and the others to vacate the premises, Dad's glare finally thawed into something less thorny. Hesitant, even. "You said twins?"

"Unless one or both of them decide to duplicate in the next week or two, in which case it could be even more."

"They can do that!?"

Common knowledge varied rather widely on Azeroth.

Because we're such wonderful employers, Howard, Bart and Barney threw us a surprise baby shower just a week later. This, of course, meant my various business partners caught wind of it fast enough to join in because village urchins blab, especially when said business partners go out of their way to give them jobs on the days when Mother doesn't need them. Corporate espionage may not be the same everywhere, but this was still Alterac at the end of the day.

On the bright side, I got to meet a man called Narett. The Narett that may or may not end up in the Theramore city that didn't exist yet. The Narett that looked almost exactly the same as he would look in a few decades. The alchemist.

Sure, he thought Mother was the up-and-coming alchemist of the family, but blowing away his preconceptions was just good fun.

Not so good fun was that our very engaging and horribly portentous private conversation completely distracted me while everyone else embroiled my parents into a vastly premature talk about baby names.

They settled on Falric and Marwyn.

Synchronicity is a most wily mistress.