Serenity’s time reading and talking to the Broken Mirror kept him up late and he didn’t wake the next morning until the first attack hit the Library. It was a good thing that the only thing he had planned for the day was building a spell that wasn’t based on shortening distances to see farther; the last thing he wanted was an attack coming through a portal to hit things it shouldn’t. He could probably take it, but his clothing certainly couldn’t, never mind whatever was around him.
Legion had searched the city and was unable to find anything like a telescope or binoculars. There certainly wasn’t anything mundane and even searching all of the magic shops didn’t reveal anything that would help with seeing distance. There weren’t even corrective glasses for poor vision.
Rissa had tried looking at the planes through Time, but wasn’t able to get a good, clear image of the symbol. If she were able to touch one of the planes, even in a destroyed condition, she would have a good chance of success. Since all she could manage was starting from a distant view of them, she simply didn’t have a good enough connection to get anything more than a few of the previous bombing runs, all at equally bad positions. Even the remains of the attacks didn’t give her anything; they weren’t linked to the planes by anything more than being carried by them for a while.
Even Aide couldn’t really help; Serenity needed a better starting resolution for image enhancement and Aide hadn’t yet figured out how to do that with the limited space in Serenity’s eye; the camera he’d started with simply didn’t get any better than what he had. Serenity was going to have to handle it on his own.
This was a new problem for Serenity; while Vengeance had certainly needed to see farther, he’d always been able to buy enchanted items to take care of the need. The Final Reaper had also had items, but vision was no longer his primary distance sense; that was why Serenity had Eyeless Sight, after all.
The most common way to build a far-vision enchantment was with illusions. They were exactly the kind of illusions that Serenity had trouble with, ones that made exactly no sense. WHY could you use the Illusion Affinity to make an image of something you couldn’t see? If the Space Affinity was involved, it would make some sense, but it usually wasn’t.
That method wouldn’t work at all.
SpaceTime was dangerous because of how Serenity thought. It was almost certainly possible to use it to warp space for light and nothing else, but that didn’t work for Serenity. He might be able to make it so that space was warped differently for different things, like EM as opposed to matter, but it wouldn’t be easy and would take quite a bit of time to wrap his head around. It might be worth doing as a proof of concept at some point; all of the required study would probably result in an increased Concept.
Thinking about light made Serenity think about the Energy affinity, since it included light. That was definitely an Affinity he could make work. Perhaps some sort of amplification? Energy definitely made the list of options.
The Solar Affinity likewise dealt with light. In this case, he probably couldn’t use it directly; it was more of a modifier to other Affinities when he worked with anything related to suns or stars. He could probably even use it on moonlight, since that was simply reflected sunlight. Oddball Affinities like that were usually either capitalized on and turned into the primary Affinity or merged into a related Affinity, but for now Serenity was happy to leave it where it was, just like the oddball Topology Concept he’d picked up somewhere.
Nihility might work but it had all of the problems of SpaceTime plus a few of its own.
Solid, Liquid, Vapor, and Mind were hopeless. There might be a way to apply them, like hardening air into managed distortions or something, but Serenity couldn’t think of any that were better than trying to with with Light using his Energy Affinity (with a small boost from Solar).
Serenity’s first inclination with Magitech was to say that it wasn’t possible; he’d asked Aide and Aide hadn’t come up with anything. At the same time, Aide wasn’t a mage. There might be something there. Serenity wasn’t the best with lenses, but he was certain he could make something work with trial and error. Other people altered their bodies with magic; he could, too. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
That left Liminality. It was one of Serenity’s strangest Affinities because it didn’t deal with things; it dealt with the edges of things. He really wasn’t sure why it was so high, but whatever the reason was, it was clearly innate in Serenity himself.
His Concept was incredibly low for such a high Affinity, which meant he’d spent very little time studying it; a Concept under half his Affinity generally meant it came from simply thinking about the Affinity without much focused study. His other similar Affinity/Concept pairings were Plasma and Mind; the discrepancies for both were less extreme and yet he knew neither had ever been a primary focus of study.
It would be strange to use for this, but it might just work. The bottom of the biplane wasn’t a doorway, but it was a surface, an edge between things. It was probably stretching the definition a little, since the boundary was defined by the edge of the plane and liminal states usually had some fuzziness, but it was about the boundary. The liminal boundary here was exactly the surface Serenity was interested in.
The real question was which way he wanted to go with it. No matter which one he picked, it would be a new spell. Light was the most straightforward but also the most boring; actually, he could combine Light with magitech and really have something. That would be interesting and so would Liminality.
Maybe he could combine all three? Liminality for targeting, Magitech because of the location and so that Aide could handle the manual adjustments to match the targeting, and Energy (Light) for actually moving the information? He could probably skip using Energy and directly use Liminality, but only if he moved it to another surface.
Could he move it to the outside of his eyeball? That was another surface; it would require careful fiddling with the spell’s parameters but it should be equally liminal and that very equality felt important somehow. Define what he was moving with his energy Affinity, tie it together with Magitech, get Aide’s help …
Before Serenity thought any further about his options, he was deep into designing the spell he would use. It was going to be the first time he really used his Magitech Affinity, but with Aide’s help he was certain he could put something together. If things went really wrong, well, it wasn’t intended to be permanent. He could release the spell and it should all return to normal. If it didn’t, well, that was what his healing was for.
His first few tests weren’t on biplanes, which was a good thing because they were completely unsuccessful. Fortunately, he only had to heal himself once; after that time, he figured out where he’d gone wrong and was able to simply dismiss the spell. It probably helped that he decided to use only one eye; binocular vision was definitely not required for this.
It wasn’t all that complex a spell, so he was able to build it, let Aide attempt to tune his eye, observe the effects, and dismiss it in ten to fifteen minutes each time after he built the basic spellform. It wasn’t even close to ready when the second plane went overhead; he even missed the next pair two hours later. Three hours after that, however, it was ready when the third wave of the day appeared in the distance.
Despite the testing, Serenity couldn’t focus on the first biplane’s image. It was farther away than anything he’d tested against, and his eye simply wasn’t large enough to get the image sharp. A few adjustments to the spell and one test later, Serenity thought he was ready for the second biplane in the pair.
That time, the spell worked as intended. Serenity was thrilled; he’d been prepared to wait for a possible fourth wave or until the first wave the next day if necessary.
The next step was sketching out the improved version of the runescript; that took longer than expected because of the level of detail. As soon as he finished, he headed over to Old Man Rinsetti’s; he’d said that Serenity could come over again whenever he had an improved drawing and it was still early enough in the day that the old runemage should be available.
As it happened, Old Man Rinsetti had just returned from visiting a friend when Serenity arrived; he didn’t say much, but he was happy for the distraction of the runescript.
Almost two hours later, they were arguing about the details of the runescript when a host from downstairs led an unfamiliar man up to see them. It took Serenity a moment before he recognized the man; he was Legion, but not one of the bodies that Legion usually used to talk to Serenity. He must have been the one closest to the runemaster’s building. “Legion?”
The host took the question as a sign that he could leave and disappeared back down the stairs.
Legion nodded at his name. “Good news and bad news; I’ve tracked the biplanes back as far as I can without being noticed. I don’t think I’ll be able to track them any farther. I don’t know how it happened, but both of the last pair flew to roughly the same spot, turned, then accelerated to at least double their previous best speed in a straight line. I think it was higher than that, but it’s hard to judge when they’re headed away from you. The only thing I could see pushing them was a brightly glowing spot on the bottom of the plane. It’s where that symbol you were talking about is, but I couldn’t even see it when it was lit up. It was that bright.”
There were several reasons a runescript could let off a lot of light, but the most obvious was something he’d argued with Old Man Rinsetti about. “You were right about the runescript’s efficiency.”
The old runemage laughed. “And you were right that it’s still usable. I don’t care whose idea it was; I just want to know where all the mana’s coming from. They have to be in something that’s providing the mana. Did they make a giant mana transfer runescript? That’s not very believable.”
Serenity shook his head. The answer was obvious as soon as Legion pointed out that they had to turn and travel in a straight line. “They’re in a ley line. I bet those little details in the input section are modifiers to transpose raw mana in. It wouldn’t be able to grab much, but in a ley line I bet it’d still work.”
That led to a discussion that lasted over an hour; before it was finished, Legion was long since gone from the room. When Old Man Rinsetti declared that he was going to head downstairs for supper, Serenity took his leave.
It was a nice walk back to the Library, but Serenity’s attention wasn’t on the walk. His attention was on the ley line and the question of why they didn’t ride any of the ley lines that actually ran into Takinat. He didn’t have a map of the ley lines and neither did Old Man Rinsetti, but he bet the Library did. Maybe it would tell him something.
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