Chapter 179: Bibliomancy
Alexandra Erin on September 4, 2013 in Volume 2 Book 5: Nasty Disturbing Uncomfortable Things, Volume 2: Sophomore EffortIn Which Two Heads Are Better
Amaranth stared at me like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, which made me about as confused as she looked… she had just offered to help, and she always liked to feel needed, especially for intellectual pursuits.
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“It’s not that I don’t want to help you,” she said. “But… you remember that I can’t do arcana, right?”
“Yeah, but you’ve got your own kind of magic and it’s exactly what I need,” I said. “You’re ten times the bibliomancer I am. I mean, I always thought of myself as the sort of kid who would read ahead in her textbook for fun… but you don’t just read ahead, you read… sideways. You can pick up even really technical things faster than I can, and you’re pretty good at explaining them.”
“So you do pay attention sometimes,” she said.
“Well… sometimes, you read things that I’m interested in,” I said. “I mean, that’s the other thing… you’re interested in everything.”
“Only because everything is interesting,” she said.
“So you should be able to breeze through this the way you breeze through… everything,” I said.
“Well, when you put it like that,” she said, taking the book from me, “I don’t know how I could say no. But you’ll need to tell me what I’m looking for if you don’t want me to literally take all night.”
“Spell-linkage for permanent, item-castable spells and also anything about basic enchanters’ tools,” I said.
“Those things are both in the index,” she said, flipping through the back matter of the book. “Well, they’re mentioned a lot in the index, but still, I’m surprised that you didn’t just jump to those pages.”
“The problem is, when I jump to those sections, I know I’m missing earlier stuff,” I said. “I just don’t know what… that’s what I meant about reading sideways. You have a much better feel for books. I’m guessing between that and being able to pick up things from text faster, you’ll be able to put it together much more easily than I can.”
“Yes, I think I probably… could… do… that,” she said, trailing off as she spoke, since she was already immersing herself in the book.
“Great!” I said. “I can spend the time that you’re doing that focusing on getting my spells blocked out so they’re ready for linking.”
This was by far and away the easiest part of the entire task, but one that would be absolutely useless if I couldn’t get the linkage right. So I’d felt a little bit guilty about focusing on it so much at the outset, and as a result I’d only kind of picked at it without finishing anything. Now that I had someone to share the load with, I could bear down on it with zero guilt and get it out of the way.
Which was good, because “easy” didn’t mean “fast”… this kind of thing required a lot of precision and some difficult decisions about how to best express and encode particular concepts. I’d been measuring magic “by hand” for years without ever having to think much about what I was doing… the techniques I’d learned for measuring other qualities in my basic enhancement class were a little more solid in my head, but I decided to start over from a fresh angle in order to put more of a divination spin on things, since at least at first my focus was going to be on gathering information rather than alteration.
I’d bought a new, up-to-date grammary over the summer, but I mainly used it as a secondary reference for newer techniques… the secondhand one I’d brought with me my freshman year was so much more familiar to me. If cracks in the spine and wrinkles in the pages counted as crafting, it was practically something I’d made by hand, which counted for a lot in enchantment. I had to use both of them to complete the spells I needed.
I did manage to master one entirely new technique that hadn’t been covered in class, though it would be eventually: gapping a spell. In order for an item to cast the spell, it would either have to have a fairly specific target or type of target woven into it, or space in the formula left where that information should go. There was no advantage to gapping a spell when it was the kind of simple charge that we’d been using so far in class because those spells would never be triggered without a conscious caster directing them, but any spell could be gapped.
I tested the spells as I went, using them to determine the properties of several objects around my desk. I bound them into a blank wand as charges, which might have seemed like pretty close to my ultimate goal but it was still me casting them when the charge was released… I was just storing the effort for later. I needed a way for the wand… or another item… to copy the pattern I made and repeat it on its own.
With the necessary base spells fleshed out and appropriately gapped, I turned my attention towards actually crafting the item. This left the question: ring or wand? I felt a slightly stronger affinity for wands, and also I felt that a wand would be easier to make than a ring. There were definite advantages to rings, though, especially when it came to creating a sustained pattern… rings, by definition, being endless. I decided to try the ring first.
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to fit a wire wrap around one of my blank rings and then fit it on my finger, but I thought it might be useful to have one to use for a model, so I went and retrieved them from the memento box on top of my dresser. I didn’t need to use them to avoid pregnancy… I had an only medicinally necromantic potion that kept me joyously infertile… but the dangers of sexually generated infections rose with the number of partners. Amaranth was immune, but Steff wasn’t, Ian definitely wasn’t, and I wasn’t sure about myself.
“I’m glad those are turning out to be good for something,” Amaranth said. “I was so happy when you stopped with that competitive nonsense.”
“It was never competitive,” I said.
“As I recall, you only started keeping them after Jamie showed you his,” she said.
“Yeah, but I never showed him mine,” I said. “I just thought it was neat… to have a record, you know? At least once we found a brand of rings that didn’t quench my flame. If I was keeping score, it was only with myself. And anyway, I mainly just wanted this for a model… although…”
“Although what?”
“Although now I’m thinking I might have been a little too narrow in my thinking,” I said. “I was thinking wand or ring, but there’s no reason I couldn’t incorporate rings into a wand.”
I was thinking about how I would attach a crystal spire to the end of the wand… just wrapping a ton of wire around the two of them seemed a little haphazard. What I was picturing now was a wand with a ring held out in front of it with a sort of tripod structure, and the crystal at the end in the middle of the ring.
The ring would hold the spell patterns, the crystal would be a focusing element, and the wand itself would be a conduit between the user and the ring.
I could attach one of my powerstones to the wand for a little extra oomph, but that wouldn’t be necessary to begin with.
“Well, don’t take so long figuring it out that you end up not doing it,” Amaranth said. “I think I about have this linkage thing figured out, if not well enough that I could do it myself… if I could do it myself… then at least well enough that I could distill it down to someone who does have a basic understanding of the principles involved.”
“That’s great,” I said. “There isn’t going to be any way to test it without having the actual physical device made, but let’s go over it anyway. There’s not a lot of point in proceeding if I can’t even make it work on paper.”
“Okay, let me just see your rune-book thingy so I can try to put this in the right terms,” she said.
“It’s called a grammary,” I said, handing her the new one. “The symbols are, you know, runic but they’re not true runes. It’s more like… arcane shorthand.”
“Okay,” she said, flipping through the pages faster than even she could read but not so fast that she couldn’t get a feel for where she was, apparently, because she stopped on a page about a third of the way in. “So, these are your basic linking symbols, and it seems to me like what you really need is to… they talk about twining, I’m guessing you probably know what that means… but twine this one and this one, and then you just encircle the whole spell with that and that packages the spell for an item.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“Not quite!” she said. “That just creates a stable pattern, but it’s completely stable… so, inert. It talks about attachment points for the triggers, which you do like… well, like this.”
She took a piece of paper and scrawled out some kind of sketchy but recognizable copies of the necessary symbols.
“And that’s it?” I asked.
“Seems like it,” she said. “I got the impression that the encircling is the hard part.”
“Yeah, it’s going to be really tricky, it’s hard to hold onto a mental thread like that when you’re weaving the spell, but I just expected it to be more complicated in terms of steps,” I said. “That’s something… it’s something I could fail at, but not because it’s actually beyond me, just because it’s not the sort of thing that’s easy to do on the first try.”
“Is there any reason you couldn’t try it more than once?” she asked.
“No, as long as I watch my energy,” I said. “I’m going to try to make the actual thing now… if you can find out how to make item-cast spells relay results, that would be great. I don’t need or want any kind of non-caster interface thing, and I don’t have time to weave separate spells to trigger for every possible result, so if there’s just a…”
“Relay spells,” Amaranth said, taking up the textbook again. “I definitely saw something about that.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I had such a clear idea in my head of what I wanted to do with the wand, but I also had no experience working with copper. The wire wasn’t nearly as malleable as it needed to be for me to be able to wrap it around one of my shaved twigs the way I wanted to, but I found that a little heat and semi-demonic strength could go a long way. I managed to turn some of the wire into something more like a flat strip of really soft copper foil, which I pressed around the thicker end of the wand. I’d wanted to use that end as the handle, but it would make a good anchor for the legs that would hold the ring in place.
I’d envisioned a tripod, but that wasn’t nearly stable or strong enough to support the ring with even the smallest of the quartz crystals, so I went with five.
Using a more moderate application of heat, I managed to wrap some wire around the thin end to build up a grip, and then connected that to the foiled-over part both to bridge the gap between them and to make it more stable. A spot application of heat was enough to make the joins permanent.
In the end, it was definitely a wand… also definitely a first effort, and definitely something a “practical enchanter”, as Professor Stone called us, would come up with. But it had that in common with his ring, so I didn’t think he could fault me for the aesthetics of the things.
It occurred to me that when he’d said that he’d known student enchanters like me, he might not have been speaking only of students he’d taught.
“What do you think?” I asked Amaranth, holding it up for her inspection… then I noticed her scowling at the book. “Problem?”
“No… I just… I’m not sure I care for the tone this book takes on… oh,” she said, her disapproving frown disappearing beneath a look that was harder to place.
“What?”
“We’ve both been terribly short-sighted,” she said. “Well, I mean, metaphorically, I’m always literally short-sighted… but I mean, I’m really not the person you need for this, Mack.”
“I promise you, you are,” I said. “I mean, yeah, okay, it would be better if I had someone with more direct experience that I could ask, but I don’t really know anyone. I mean, I guess I could have asked Professor Stone… I don’t think he’d even think any less of me for asking… but I didn’t think of that at the time. And Acantha is… well, I don’t want to owe her anything. Maybe I should have made the effort to get to know more of the students in the enchantment program, but I don’t make friends easily if they don’t approach me first.”
“You wouldn’t have to approach anyone new, though,” she said. “Listen to this sidebar: ‘While enchanters often make use of rings, wands, or rods carrying commonly-used spells…'”
“I know, that’s what I’m trying to make,” I said.
“Don’t interrupt, baby,” she said. “…and powerstones or other auxiliary energy sources, a living golem can combine the functions of both, acting as both power source and spellcasting tool while also providing another set of eyes and hands when necessary.”
“If it’s taking me this long to make a simple wand, I really don’t think you’d want me to try for a… oh,” I said, as my brain caught up with hers. It was an embarrassingly short leap, especially in hindsight. “Two.”
noooo cliffhanger 🙂
Arg! I’m so torn! I love this technical talk but I also want this all to be done with cause I want to see how well it works with Emily and what Stone thinks and and and!
And at the end, OH, Two!
its funny how it relates to programming
Great chapter, great book. Unrelated commentary below (most of which was written a few days ago).
So…I just finished reading through an entire reread — I spent an afternoon watching the latest season of Dr. Who and copy-pasting into massive word documents, then generating EPUBs. (I’m not going to offer them up, since AE is currently offering for sale similar documents, which I’d advertise as highly worth saving you the tedium). That was a month and a half ago, since which, I read the entire thing.
The document, to date, is 4609 ODT pages, ~2.7 million words. NANO considers a short novella (Farenheit 451, the Great Gatsby, etcetera) 50000 words, making this the equivalent of approximately 54 short novellas.
The date is August 29th 2013, on this posting. It started on June 5th, 2007. 6 years to June 5th, 2013, then another 87 days from that. 08 and 12 are leap years, so that’s 6*365-2+87 = 2275 days of AE writing this story at a “modest” 1186 words a day. (That’s a joke; the feat of writing even 1666 non-judged words a day, as NANO bases itself on, is considered heroic and miraculous. To maintain close to that pace for over 6 years is…prolific).
Those word counts aren’t perfect; I got chapter titles and and numbers and volume numbers, and a few notices and annoucements.
The Epistolary OT’s were excellent, and I’ve really enjoyed the post-reboot material, though I also, in rereading, really enjoyed the pre-reboot material. It seems like Hart and Hall’s class has been really sidelined, last getting a full chapter on Chapter 27, 151 chapters ago. And I really appreciated the recent Barely OT which gave brief mentions to many missing characters: Except Sooni, Kai, Maliko and Suzi, whom I’m mildly curious about despite their interactions not being among my favourites.
My other major joy was a brief reference explaining that Two summoned a demon early on to check if she could successfully contain it — a mystery I dearly wanted explained.
I also really enjoyed the Untimely Demise of Laurel Anne Blaise, and I dearly hope she comes up more sometime in the next couple of years.
Otherwise, the leap from Chapter 43 of the new book to 44 was the only place where I had trouble:
https://www.talesofmu.com/story/volume-2/chapter-43
This is how the text from 43-44 reads without any breaks:
““Mackenzie, I understand that this is hard to talk about, but you can’t really do this without you,” Ian said. “If it’s too painful, you might have to make a decision about what’s harder: bringing it up or letting it go. Of course, you don’t have to decide that right now.”
“I definitely want to do this,” I said. “The thing is…”
When it was properly morning, I went into the shared bathroom that connected our room to the one that Two shared with Dee and knocked on their door. I wanted to talk about what had happened the night before with someone who could give me a different perspective, and there was a decent chance Dee wouldn’t need any bringing up to speed… though she would politely refrain from acknowledging this unless prompted.
“You may enter, but please close the door behind you,” Dee said from within.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I probably should make a substantial donation…then forget that this exists for 5 years until I can reread it in whole again 😛
That is an amazing number of words per day. I will just tip my hat to AE & try to remember this when anyone starts kvetching about updates.
People seriously do that?!
yes, people seriously do – and this doesn’t even count the OTHER lit she does or has done.
Well, not to offend, but I still count myself in the category of people mildly bitter as to the abrupt end to Void Dogs. That said, I’m not about to gripe too much about anyone who can maintain so form of reasonably steady production.
on that note, what are her other series? Maybe I’ll do the same for them. I’m finding a kindle very convenient these days. Fantasy in Miniture, Void Dogs, Star Harbour Nights, Tribe….and there is a link on Void Dogs to something called The3Seas, but it seems dead. Anything I’m missing?
Star Harbour Nights: 207k words. (Though I’m not sure I got it all due to this note and some broken links: Archive Note – Under Construction
Filed under: Uncategorized — Alexandra Erin @ 6:03 pm
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Attention! If you’re reading through the archive from the beginning and don’t want spoilers, do not go past this page.
Note From The Author:
I’m in the process of transcribing earlier stories for this site. They are going to be progressively added, with most (hopefully all) of them going up over the course of this week. Once the project is complete, this notice will be removed and the entire story will be readable in a single progression. Until then, there will be some gaps between the stories before this point and the ones after it in the archive. If you’ve just started reading, you may want to wait until the transition is complete.
-February 8th, 2010.)
Tribe: 53k words
Void Dogs: 103k words
Total: 363k more, add in the 2.7 million from TalesofMu (more tales, tales of AU, etc) = 3063000 words or so. I haven’t done Fantasy in Miniature (not-Tribe, but the short Story version) or The3Seas yet (not sure if that is actually a thing that exists).
While checking the wayback machine for the3seas (see post below), I came across this page I had forgotten about. If the word count per day you compiled is already heroic and miraculous, there are few adjectives left for this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090511234942/http://www.alexandraerin.com/?page_id=586
The One Called Wander is found at http://theonecalledwander.dreamwidth.org/
Maybe now people will stop giving her a hard time when she misses an update.
(just kidding they will never stop)
Since when is Fahrenheit 451 just a novella?
I think I pointed that out i n the last chapter. Two was made for this kind of thing, and Mackenzie completely forgot about her.
It’s probably more accurate to say that Mack doesn’t think of Two in terms of her function.
Unless you count her function as “being Two”.
heh, nice cover for that misapplied detail in last chapter about who was saving rings on a chain….Two is still going to be hurt when she finds out her sister had trouble with crafting a basic enchanter’s tool and didn’t even think of asking her for help. It was literally her purpose she was created to do and she’d have been happy to help/teach Mac. and she’ll *know* they forgot.
Great chapter. I just finished yet another re-read myself. Hanging out for this to continue 😉
Love your work, AE
The word count gets even more impressive if you take into account the concurrently written material for star harbor nights, void dogs, 3 seas and tribe (did I forget a story off the top of my head?) – all of which I miss dearly.
I looked up my old bookmarks recently and was saddened to see that some are gone entirely – I don’t know if this was a conscious decision, but if it would be nice to keep them online.
Alright, stopping whining now. Here’s hoping…
the one called wander springs to mind. I’m hoping that will have a resurgence, and the lit in miniture shorts are always fun
Can anyone find me 3seas in Waybackmachine? I’d like to read it.
My first answer was from my mobile, sorry for not responding to the right post.
You can read the first 23 pages (not as long as ToMU chapters) here http://web.archive.org/web/20090628082139/http://www.the3seas.com/pages/1
There are a few later ones that are “alive” as well, but of course I don’t recommend jumping ahead. 😉
I just checked, available pages are:
1-23
32-47
77
In particular, the last grab of the archive page (up to 61) is not final. See http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.the3seas.com/pages/*
I guess we are going to find out,
whether or not
TWO can play at that game.
Great chapter and I love how Mackenzie keeping the rings is thrown in there, but another little thing stuck at me. From what I remember, I thought she was adamant about not using the necro infertility potion? The line about not wanting death magic in her vagina really stood out. I think something was said about looking for other alternatives and then the subject was dropped. I guess she didn’t find anything else?
As I recall, there were two potions. One that was like a morning after pill that would definitely work to make sure she didn’t conceive… and also put her in a state of pseudo-unlife temporarily. The other one, taken at that moment, had a very good chance of preventing conception(if, indeed, it would have occurred anyway!) and didn’t have such unpleasant side-effects.
I’m fairly certain they were both necromantic, just a matter of degree. She wasn’t thrilled with either option, but then it turned out having her fertility turned off had great side benefits!
The quote displaying the adamancy in question was “What’s silly about not wanting death magic in my vagina?” That was way back in chapter 201 of book 6 of volume 1. That was nearly a year ago, story time, and before she took the fertility-dampening necromantic potion. So my guess is her attitude’s changed, especially since she discovered what it does for her scent (regarding predators).
I believe she decided it was worth it when it dampened her scent so man eaters don’t want to eat her as much.
Have been re-reading TOMU for the second time, and a random question came to my mind (not very related to this particular chapter). What happens to demons/half-demons when they can’t feed? I mean, we’ve seen what happens to Mack and Prof. Bohd (the 1/16th demon professor, if I remember correctly) when they are hungry (cravings and moving towards a more feral state of mind). But what happens when a demon cannot feed for a long time? Would he die, or would he just go completely crazy and feral and stay in that state? I cannot imagine there are many humans down there in the infernal planes, where most of the demons are trapped in these days… Maybe they just go feral, and someone who summons them needs to make a sacrifice to feed a demon so he can communicate normally?
I do so LOVE LOVE LOVE it when you get technical. You don’t ever commit the dread sin of making ‘techno-babble’ which is meaningless. Which means every step is logical, and interesting to follow.
And I do so luv when Mac gets her geek out.
Pure enjoyment for the world building inherent to the piece.
So, I see Amaranth finally went and read the comments to the last chapter. Took her long enough.
Also: Now we see why Two was created. Golem power!
So… the real world equivalent of this would be trying to build an electrical circuit out of condom wrappers?
I think it might be closer to building a volt meter out of a used condom (and your embarrassed girlfriends Wicca supplies)
Still… ick.
I was thinking of it more as a hand-held plectron scanner
I suspect since they are items of jewelry and don’t get covered in spooge in the process of being used, used rings are viewed as less viscerally gross than used condoms.
Question: What would an
Impractical enchanter
Have developed here?
Does she mean asking Two for help with the divination wand, or just bypassing that completely and asking for her help communicating with Emily?
I’m getting a little uneasy here.
The Wand with the copper handle and five-point ring mount.
The Crystal mounted INSIDE the Ring ?
This could be bad.
I think she’s invented a sort of magic Transistor-amplifier.
(This has other similarities to how an FM Antenna is tuned, by moving the coil up and down the antenna bar.)
I kind of see the spell, after being cast by the user, captured by the Ring as a memory circuit, and then focused through the Crystal in repeated pulses…
You know what this REALLY sounds like?
A Light Emitting Transistor.
Or in modern parlance, a LASER.
If this was only used for Divination, that would be okay.
Kind of like using a FM radio to tune in on very weak signals, amplifying them, and running them through a speaker.
But given that the Ring can store a magic spell, the Crystal can power a spell beyond the power reserve of the caster, and the wand handles trigger input from the user…
You’ve got a weapon.
Because if you can cast any type of spell on the Ring, fine-tune it by adjusting the position of the Crystal for the magic equivalent of LR feedback, and then fire it off in a straight, narrow beam…
Well, let’s just say a common Fire spell would be focused and amplified enough to produce Balefire.
Quite sufficient to cut through steel.
Quite possibly enough to create an “armor swiss-cheese”.
Or punch a hole in our friendly neighborhood enchanter. Maybe a lot of holes.
What happens if an enchanter invents a weapon that can take out a Greater Dragon, and the local Greater Dragon doesn’t want those plans getting out?
Now, if Mackenzie gets the idea of going upscale with this, with multiple rings, three feet, then two feet, then one foot, then six inches, then focused on the crystal…
I think they’re going to have to rebuild the Campus again.
Wouldn’t a Light Emitting Transistor be, well, an LED? I’m pretty sure those are significantly less dangerous than a laser 🙂
On the other hand, her building a laser gun (or laser sword?) would be pretty awesome. On the other other hand, if it was so powerful in a direct military sense, and yet so easy to make that a sophomore enchantment major can build it out of spare parts, isn’t it likely to have already been figured out by someone else?
oh, it is just so much easier to be a brilliant inventor,
when someone else has already done the hard work for you.
Study the history of patents and how many were invented by women but registered and credited in men’s names.
Scientific discovery’s and developments, the credit for which at last should include the women involved.
You ‘know’ Newton, did you also think of Émilie du Châtelet?
You ‘know’ Einstein, do you also ‘know’ his wife’s name?
By the way, in your own lives, if you are employed in any technological or industrial mechanical or scientific fields.
Do you understand the legal concept behind that ‘Yellow-Dog’ contractual agreement you signed?
Law of balance will kick in after the first one exists.
No… semiconductor lasers are generally Light Emitting Transistors.
The cheap laser pointers will use an LED to excite the LET.
If you stared straight down the barrel of a cheap green laser pointer, when the battery is too low for it to work, you’d see a red LED firing.
The breakthrough, if Mackenzie IS the first to hit on it, is the Memory Circuit.
Consider; the first computers were made with relays.
Power up a relay, it mechanically moves from point A to point B; you’ve stored a Bit.
Come back later, and read the position of the relay, and you’ve read the Bit.
It’s possible to build the equivalent of a common Integrated Circuit with relays.
Motor Starter circuits, for example, are used to switch on motors, and the Relay is called a “memory circuit” because of the early MARK I computer at Harvard.
You see where this is going? The ability to store a spell and cast it over and over and over and over until the powerstone runs down?
Magic Computers.
Read Rick Cook’s Wizardry Compiled.
Genius.
Wizardry Compiled: A good read, not applicable in the setting of the MUverse.
It has been clearly stated that any attempt to turn magic into science will fail as the universe itself doesn’t like science.
The ability to store a spell and cast it over and over again is nothing but the ability to store a spell and cast it over and over again…unless the universe thinks you’re trying to cheat, and refuses to cooperate.
So, yes, while there might be superficial similarities to Macks techniques here, and science in our world, the form and effect-bonuses of our worlds science does not translate directly into similar bonuses for the magic of MUverse. As an example: There are loads of televisions in MUverse, but to surf the weave, you use a crystal ball. A television is like a stage, and therefore fitting to show entertainment on, but it is not, unlike a crystal ball, a divination tool, and therefore it is not used to find information.
My humble opinion/conclusion, which is in no way to be considered Canon, just as statistics cannot be considered truth.
Personally, it sounds like what she’s making looks like a microphone.
Linky: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/231/453253053_2bd22ff6f8.jpg
A microphone with a built-in amplifier, sure.
As long as the only spell cast on the Ring is “listen”.
You know that all speakers are microphones and all microphones can produce sound, right?
It’s just in our physical universe, they’re best at ONE thing.
In the Magical universe, it’s quite possible that reversing the “software” component can entirely reverse the effects of the device.
Love the comment about the “crafted book”. A comment I’ve heard said about someone’s library….you know one of those experts who has opinions but no clue… The passing comment by someone was “oh your books are in such excellent condition” ….