23 – Compression

 

It’s hard to say if it's the pain in her hip, shoulder, or neck that wakes Lacuna up.  She supposes that’s what she gets for allowing herself to fall asleep on her side.  Or maybe it was the thirst, hunger, or need to relieve herself.  In the haze of waking it’s hard to say which woke her and which rudely made its presence known after waking.  Or was it the unfamiliar weight on her shoulder and chest?  Some combination of all of the above, probably.

Still drowsy, she ignores her body’s various protests and tries to go back to sleep on her hard pillow without ever opening her eyes.

Lacuna’s eyes snap open at the realization that she doesn’t have a hard pillow.  

Directly in front of her, a DVD logo lazily bounces around a black TV screen.  Angling her eyes downwards she confirms what her sense of touch is telling her.  Her head is resting on a blanket, and underneath that blanket is…

Oh goddess, she fell asleep on Eris’s lap and that weight on her chest is Eris’s arm wrapped around her like she’s some kind of teddy bear.

 Lacuna feels her heart speed up and her face flush as the muscles around her already-stiff joints somehow become tenser still.  She turns her head to look up as much as she can without shifting her position too much and confirms that Eris is still asleep.  All the more reason to continue ignoring her own body’s demands to get up and take care of it.  If Eris was so exhausted last night that she fell asleep on the couch halfway through her favorite comfort movie (and let Lacuna fall asleep on her in this inappropriate position), then what kind of friend would Lacuna be if she woke her up before she was ready?  A bad one, that’s what kind.  And she’s already been a bad enough one after that (incredibly informative for her own research) accident with Eris’s memory and scars.

Lacuna focuses on the DVD logo bouncing off the edges of the TV screen to distract herself.  Distract herself from her body’s physical discomfort.  Distract herself from the awkwardness of her position.  Distract herself from how nice it feels to be held.  At least she’s well-practiced at ignoring the first of those issues.  Probably unhealthily well-practiced at it, but then again, she’s also well-practiced at ignoring how that’s a problem too.

As she lays there, her mind starts to wander from calculating how the logo positions and bounce angle prevent it from ever touching the corner of the screen to lamenting how DVD has come to be replaced by BluRay as the physical video storage medium of choice.  Sure, BluRay might be the better one from a technological standpoint, but DVD just feels better to say and looks better written out.  It’s the combination of simple acronym and similarity to CD.  Because really, any shiny disk with a hole in the middle that you stick in a computer is a CD at heart, it’s just a difference of compression algorithms for storage capacity.  And at the end of the day, none of that matters if your screen isn’t high enough resolution to make a difference.   Everything’s just pixels in the end if you zoom in enough, even on those modern HDTVs that make everything look uncanny valley crisp.  Even on the giant screens that comprise the walls, floor, and ceiling of her lab’s test chamber.  Even if you vectorize all your shapes so they’re pure math they still have to get rasterized down to pixels to display and will lose detail and sharpness on some minute level. That’s what most likely went wrong with her most recent self-transmutation test; running up against the wall of digital display resolution.

A part of her’s starting to understand why some people are so hung up on analog film and live music performances.  Too bad she can’t somehow generate analog versions of her ritual circle glyphs down to a micrometer, or even nanometer precision.

Or can she?

Compression algorithms.  Vectorization.  Embedded media.  Digital to analog conversion.  Her first ritual.

She’s already enchanting objects to play pre-recording audio for the incantation and she’s already had one such object do a pseudo-spell ritual to generate light in drawn patterns, why not enchant an object to project a pre-programmed ritual circle as conjured light based on stored vector data?  Is there even a theoretical limit to how fine a resolution she could scale down to with that?  Not that she knows of, but it could be worth looking up or asking Ashan.  Or just trying it and seeing what happens.  If she’s on the right track like she thinks she is with regards to the autogenesis problem and her only obstacle now is sufficient resolution for glyph complexity then…

“This could actually work!” Lacuna laughs.

“Hmm… What could work?”

At the sound of her best friend’s voice, Lacuna attempts to bolt upright, disentangles herself from Eris, and scurries to the far end of the couch amidst a flurry of “Sorry”s and “Didn’t mean to wake you”s.  Somewhere in the middle of her guilt and embarrassment, some part of her brain reminds her that she hasn’t shaved in at least forty-eight hours and piles that onto the list of reasons to feel self-conscious.

“No worries,” Eris says.  “I was half awake already anywaaa… what are you doing?”

“I haven’t shaved,” Lacuna says in a voice muffled by her hoodie’s hood pulled sideways around her neck to cover the bottom half of her face.

“You know I don’t care about that, right?”  

“I know, but I care.”

Eris hangs her head and gives Lacuna a look that does more to reiterate the oft-repeated conversation the two of them are on the verge of than could be accomplished by half an hour of words.

“I’m doing it again, aren’t I,” Lacuna says.  It’s more observation than question.

“Uh-huh.”

“Thanks.  You’re right.  It’s fine.  It’s fine.”  The scratch of stubble against pilled cloth screams that it’s no such thing.

“No worries,” Eris says again.  “Besides, I thought you’d landed on a solution to that anyhow.”

“What?”  

Lacuna drops the stretched hood she’d been hesitating to pull away from her face in surprise.  Surprise turns to dread at Eris’s puzzled look.

“Huh.  That’s weird,” Eris observes.

“What?  What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, but you definitely have a couple days worth of stubble that I could have sworn wasn’t there a minute ago.  And I know last night you didn’t have the bit of fuzz you normally have by that point in the evening.”

“I… didn’t?”

“I wasn’t gonna say anything until you did, but I’d figured you’d just been having success with that personal project of yours that you’ve been working on.  It’s been subtle and I’m not sure if it’s from the project itself or you just finally building up enough self-esteem to start turning your autogenesis around, but you have looked a little different lately.  Healthier maybe, and definitely more energized.”

“You know what I’ve been working on?” Lacuna stammers.

“Sis, no offense but this is you we’re talking about.  What else are you going to be getting up to in your free time with a paratech lab at your disposal?  I’m all for it, of course, even if I don’t get why you’ve been so cagey about it.”

“Force of habit after having that NDA hanging over my head, I guess.”

“Hey, well, as long as it’s working out for you and you’re not gonna blow us all up on accident,” Eris jokes.  “Weird though that the beard came back all at once.  I wonder if -”

“Actually, can you hold that thought?” Lacuna interjects.  “I’ve been, well, holding it, for a while now, so, uh, I should… go…”

Eris’s eyebrows shoot up.  “Oh shit, yeah, go do that.”

“Thanks,” Lacuna says, taking off toward the stairs as quickly as she can without running. 

“Oh, and while you’re up there,” Eris calls after her, “if any of the guests are up, let them know I’m making breakfast.”

“Will do,” Lacuna mumbles, probably too quietly to hear over the squeaky board on the step.

As real as her body’s calls for maintaining homeostasis have been, finally giving in and heeding those calls was a convenient excuse.  The similarity between her suddenly growing stubble once she realized she hadn’t shaved and Eris’s accidentally erased scars reappearing after being remembered is too close for Lacuna’s comfort.  No, that’s not honest.  The similarity is immensely encouraging that she’s on the right track with cracking the autogenesis problem for transmutation.  It’s the conversation with Eris about that similarity that she's avoiding.  

Guilt over what happened hadn’t been enough to stop Lacuna from incorporating what she’d learned from that accidental violation of her best friend’s mind, memory, and body into her own research.  

“It was an accident.  I didn’t do it on purpose.  I just salvaged something good from a bad situation,” she whispers to herself for what feels like the thousandth time as she closes and locks the door to the upstairs bathroom behind her.

It’s even true, so why does she still feel so guilty for having benefited from it?

By what feels like the thousand and fifth repetition of the words, Lacuna’s finished her business (shaving and otherwise) and is giving herself one final check in the mirror.  Does she actually look any different?  She can’t tell, but then again, a certain degree of change blindness would be expected with the workaround for lasting transformation she thinks she’s found.  She pulls out her phone, opens the photo app, and hesitates to pull up the last picture she took of herself.  It was over a year ago when she gave up on taking monthly transition timeline photos that had only wound up as a testament to her lack of progress.

A knock on the bathroom door saves her from having to decide.

“Just a second,” Lacuna apologizes while shoving her phone back in her pocket and unlocking the door.

She finds Tam standing in the short hallway outside.  Or is it Carter?  Yes, they look similar now, but not that similar.  She should be able to tell.  Especially after getting the two of them agree to letting her run scans on them after getting back yesterday.  Her claim that it was a check for lingering curses and potential medical issues was technically true, but it was also partially an excuse to gather data on a pair of shapeshifters.

Mostly an excuse.

At a preliminary glance, it should be useful data.

Was that a violation of trust?

The nearby grandfather clock ticks.

And tocks.

And ticks.

And tocks.

“Eris is making breakfast downstairs I’ll be in the basement,” Lacuna blurts out just as Tam (or Carter?) opens their (or his?) mouth.  She slides past and scurries down the stairs before it can turn into a conversation.

The smell of brewing coffee and the sight of a ceramic mug of microwaved water steeped brown from a teabag of chai greet Lacuna’s arrival in the kitchen.  Disconcertingly, Eris does not.  She’s too busy grimly mixing pancake batter and glaring daggers at a blank spot on the wall. 

“Thanks,” Lacuna says hesitantly as she picks up her chai.  Too hot to drink yet.  The warmth feels good on her hands.  After she finishes her project she’ll quit caffeine again.  She hopes.

“You’re welcome,” Eris says without turning to look at her.

“Are you… okay?  E?”  Lacuna takes a sip.  Burns her tongue.  Why’d she check when she knew the answer?

“Gretchen left.”  The batter is long since mixed.  The whisk scrapes against the metal bowl with a noise that makes Lacuna’s teeth itch.

Lacuna notices the crumpled-re-flattened-and-folded paper note on the table.

“Oh…”

“Yep…”

“I…” Lacuna starts and then trails off.  “If you need…” she tries again.

Eris makes a sound Lacuna fails to interpret.

She takes her chai and heads down the stairs.

She’s never known what to say in these types of situations.

She puts one hand on the doorknob of the door to the basement.

She’s so useless.

She thinks it's strange how normal the doorknob feels.

She really couldn’t think of anything to say?

She could probably feel the bigger-on-the-inside space beyond the door if she were a real mage.

She continues to draw a blank on words that could have helped.

She opens the door.

She’s a bad friend.

The sound of whisk scraping against metal bowl continues.

She closes the door.

She heads back upstairs.

She puts down her chai, retrieves two pans, places them on the stovetop, butters one, greases the other, turns on the heat, retrieves the vegan bacon from the fridge, and starts slicing it into thin steps.

Batter pours into the buttered pan.

“Thanks,” Eris says.

“You’re welcome,” Lacuna says without turning to look at her.

She catches the edge of a smile in her peripheral vision.

 

*******

 

Three hours later Lacuna is wearing her labcoat on top of her hoodie and is in the tail end of performing the longest ritual she’s ever cast.

By the time breakfast was ready, Eris had seemed to be back to her usual self and even seemed to be hitting it off fairly well with Tam and Carter.  That lasted until Glassheart (no, Ashan) and Bridgewood (still too intimidated for a first name basis) arrived.  Bridgewood hadn’t even needed to get up to his usual antagonism to set Eris on edge this time.  Apparently he’d had something to do with the note Gretchen left.  Between Eris dragging him off in private to have it out with him and Lacuna’s attempts to focus on how best to handle Ashan’s counterseal ritual she hadn’t caught many of the details.  Attempts to focus that kept wandering off into puzzling over how best to adjust the ritual generation algorithms to produce and use analog light vectors in the place of digital screens.

When Eris and Bridgewood finally returned, they announced that the two of them would be accompanying Tam and Carter back to their mothers’ house to help with integrating Carter back into mortal society and better prepping Tam for life with knowledge of things Backstage.  Ashan voiced Lacuna’s surprise that Road wouldn’t be the one to handle all that, but apparently they were “unwell” and resting at Bridgewood Manor.  That managed to get Lacuna’s full attention.  Bridgewood and Eris both confirmed that Road had, in fact, not slept for days, possibly weeks.  According to Bridgewood, this was not entirely uncommon for Road but this particular instance had pushed even their heroic stamina.

The idea of someone like Road needing something as mundane as sleep had somehow felt disconcerting to Lacuna.  Hours later, the guilt over feeling that way still lingers in the same far back corner of her mind with all the other tiny guilts that never go away.  She needs to stop putting everyone she likes on unrealistic pedestals.  It’s unfair to them.  She knows she’ll keep doing it anyway.

After they all departed (the idea of Eris and Bridgewood trapped in a car together continues to distress Lacuna when she thinks about it so she doesn’t), Ashan asked about the counterseal ritual she should have performed for him yesterday.  (Would have been able to perform for him if she hadn’t gotten selfishly impatient.)

And so now Lacuna is doing the best she can to keep her mind from straying off-task in the final minutes while a new tattoo-like sigil forms between Ashan’s bare shoulders.  (Why is his appearance less distracting without the robe on?)  Creating an enchantment capable of being applied to a living being that would cancel out the effects of the seal limiting Ashan’s spellcasting to the same type of magic practiced on his mentor’s homeworld had only taken a few days of iterative design, math, and data pool recalibration.  Creating a variant that simulations predicted wouldn’t cause the same adverse reactions Ashan seemed to have to most of Lacuna’s rituals and enchantments took the better part of a month, and even as the procedurally remixed samples of Lacuna’s voice come to an abrupt stop and the glowing fractals covering the testing chamber fade out to stark white she’s still not sure this one won’t make him sick.

Lacuna unclenches her jaw, lets out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, and resists the urge to drop her head onto the desk in front of her.  The last time she headdesked it shook most of the flowers off the miniature jacaranda tree wilting under its sunlamp on the far end of her workstation.  She’s been worse at taking care of that than she’d hoped.

The ritual is complete.  On the nape of Ashan’s neck the old seal in its clean arcane geometries remains in its position just below the start of his long hair that’s been pulled aside to hang over his shoulder and drape down his chest.  The new seal - the “counterseal” as Lacuna’s taken to thinking of it - fills the space between his shoulder blades with organic-looking chaos of twists and coils that resolve into a series of minute sharp angles and overlapping symbols under closer inspection.  Between them the silver choker with a blue stone that serves as Ashan’s translation charm remains fixed in place around the base of his neck.  Its continued presence was non-negotiable, regardless of potential complications from having additional enchanted objects in the test chamber during the ritual.

“How are you feeling?” Lacuna asks into the desk-mounted microphone.  She should get a headset.  It would be more efficient.  The sensation of having one on her head makes her ears hurt and skin crawl just thinking about it.

“I am well,” Ashan replies from inside the testing chamber after a moment’s self-assessment.  “I can feel the presence of the counterseal on my back.  It is not painful but it is continually noticeable.  I suspect I will grow used to it over time.”

“Okay,” Lacuna acknowledges while typing down Ashan’s words.  One of these days she needs to figure out how to get speech-to-text working with his translation charm.  “Whenever you’re ready, try to cast something.  Start with one of your usual conjurations as a baseline and then something the seal wouldn’t let you cast before for comparison.  This counterseal is a temporary test version, so if anything goes wrong, let me know and I can dispel it via voice command.”

“Acknowledged,” Ashan says.

Lacuna switches the displays from four of the eight paratech cameras observing Ashan to show their second sight filters.  It’s a far cry from what a real mage could perceive unaided, but Lacuna will take what she can get.  Ashan left his wand outside the testing chamber lest the presence of additional magic complicate the ritual in unexpected ways, but all he requires to conjure a simple rectangular kinetic barrier are a few quick hand gestures.  On the unfiltered displays the barrier is nearly invisible save for the glass-like reflection and refraction of light, but on the filtered views both the barrier and Ashan’s hand glow with a blue-white light.  On the most zoomed-in filtered view, Lacuna can make out the dimmest glow from portions of both the seal on his neck and the counterseal on his back.  Most likely from the baseline power draw limiter.

A minute later, Ashan dispels his conjuration and creates a new one, a floating oval tall enough and reflective enough to serve as a full length mirror.  Initially, all is as it was with his first test conjuration but then the second sight filters show Ashan’s eyes flash a deep indigo, causing the seal and counterseal to pulse in response.  He takes a step toward the conjured mirror, staggers, touches a hand to his head, takes another step, and then presses a palm to the conjured mirror.

In the mundane, unfiltered view camera feeds not much happens.  In the filtered feeds, the conjuration’s aura shifts from white to indigo and the pulsing of the sigils on Ashan’s skin increases in intensity.  On another screen an alert notifies Lacuna of a sudden drop in temperature within the test chamber.

And then Ashan steps through the mirror.

The temperature readings plummet further, the pulse on Ashan’s skin becomes a solid glow, and a hazy blurred shape extrudes out of the side of the mirror Ashan entered from.  The haze starts to take form.  Ashan begins to sway on his feet and clutch his head.

Ashan falls.

The conjuration and haze disappear.

The second sight filters cease to detect anything outside the mundane visible spectrum.

The temperature stays low.

Lacuna shouts a string of well-practiced nonsense syllables into the microphone and begins running toward the test chamber before she can even see the counterseal evaporate off of Ashan’s back.  She slows down briefly only to snatch the white robe from where it had been left folded over an open cabinet full of drone parts.  It feels silkier than she expected, almost slick to the touch.  She slams her palm against the over-dramatic big red button that opens and closes the test chamber door.  Her heart skips a beat at the sight of Ashan still on the blank white floor.

“Are you okay I’m so sorry what happened are you alright please be awake how do you feel I’m sorry oh goddess what did I do let’s get you out of here please be alright I’m sorry.”

The words pour out into a stream of mist as Lacuna throws the wizard robe over Ashan’s shivering form.  The words change cadence without pause when he starts to push himself back up to his knees.  The words finally cut off when he pulls back from her attempt to help him to his feet.

It is only after Ashan has pulled the dress-like robe over his head and worked his arms through its voluminous sleeves that he calms enough to take her hand.

“I am unharmed,” he claims.  “There was an unexpected onset of vertigo but it is nothing that I will not be able to train myself to adapt to.  It was already ignorable enough when casting my usual barrier spell, and with time I am sure I will get the dizziness when attempting more unfamiliar magic down to a similar level.”

“You really shouldn’t have to adapt like that.”

“Perhaps not, but this is the hand I have been dealt.  It is an improvement over my previous attempts to cast that spell resulting in nothing but exhaustion from inordinate energy expenditure, and that is worth pursuing.  Let us move forward with the permanent seal.”

“We really shouldn’t do that,” Lacuna starts.

“You intend to move forward with your own project despite yesterday morning’s setback, do you not?”

“I - what - oh…”

“Then you understand.”

“But that doesn’t mean we should go ahead with a solution that we know is going to potentially cause you to collapse every time you try casting a spell.  And if you’re going to be out there fighting monsters, sorcerers, and who knows what else, then even a little bit of mild dizziness could get you hurt.  Or worse.”

“I understand that risk, but as I said, it is something that I will be able to train myself to overcome.”

“But you shouldn’t -” 

Lacuna stops herself, closes her eyes, holds up a finger, and takes a deep breath.

“Let me try that again,” she says almost a minute later.  “This morning I think I came up with a new solution that will work better, but I’ll need your help to implement it.”

 

*******

 

The whole concept behind the AI-assisted ritual system is that the universe and reality itself react to certain combinations of shapes, sounds, and substances, and that by analyzing known combinations, new ones can be predicted and accurately correlated to the reactions reality will have to them.  In a lot of ways, it’s less like the sort of so-called “AI art” generation that Lacuna had an ethical crisis about working on before falling Backstage and more like protein structure modeling.  Except for magic instead of biochemistry. 

This means that when she’s constructing a new ritual she isn’t just feeding a bunch of prompts of what she wants into a console and letting the system sample from a library of traditionally-made rituals.  Yes, that’s a part of it, but a bigger part of it is her constantly adjusting the math and weighting of different elements and needing to memorize which originating magic systems for rituals are more or less compatible with one another.  Not to mention fixing edge-case bugs on software that was never fully completed and making updates to the UI so that the inputs settings and diagnostic outputs are actually human readable.  Or at least Lacuna readable.

At Lacuna’s last job they’d kept a wizard and a couple of enchanters on-staff as consultants for the ritual generation project to point out such systemic incompatibilities and synergies between existing rituals in the database.  The sort of expertise that could save hours, or even weeks of time that might have been spent chasing false leads and troubleshooting simulations that were doomed to failure.  Lacuna had been too intimidated to talk to any of them directly most of the time, but at least half of what she knows of magic theory came from listening to them answer questions from other developers on the team and reading through software changelogs referencing their advice.  Ever since leaving she’d been doing a lot of guesswork and workarounds that her self-teaching left her knowing enough to recognize as being inefficient but not knowing enough to find a better way.

Spending the day actively collaborating with Ashan is unexpectedly refreshing.

Trying to get him onboarded onto the project and explaining how the ritual generation works was harder than anticipated though, a reminder that he’s spent most of his life on a world without computers and hasn’t kept up with recent tech trends since returning to this one.  And a sharp reminder how much jargon she thought was common terminology is specialized to her field.  Her go-to metaphors and analogies being opaque to Ashan didn’t help.  Nor did the fact that she has no idea how the simulation portion of the system makes its predictions.

And yet somehow working through all that is proving more invigorating than frustrating.

“It is not so noisome as your usual enchantments, I shall give you that,” Ashan says to a nearby Lacuna as he picks up the freshly-enchanted metal card from the floor of the test chamber.  He turns it over, examining the laser-engraved glyphs on its surface.  “A simpler pattern too.  Or should I say ‘more efficient’?”

“Heh, thanks,” Lacuna says, rubbing the back of her neck.  “After you pointed out that it was possible to set up a generic recording enchantment to capture audio at the time of the ritual that greatly simplified the glyphwork.  Now it’s mainly just a bunch of vector math for the circle drawing.”

Ashan hands the card to Lacuna.  “I still find myself incredulous that you had been directly encoding aural waveforms.  You may as well have been conjuring lightning by targeting individual air molecules to ionize.”

“You can do that?”

“Technically yes, but not in any sane or practically effective manner.  There is a reason that my own method of doing so is merely a variant of a kinetic force barrier.”

“Huh.  The dangers of being self-taught I suppose.  The more you know.”  Lacuna shrugs.  “Anyway, ready to do this thing?”

Ashan gives a slight raise of the eyebrows that Lacuna’s starting to think counts as excitement for him.

“Exceptionally so,” he says, “but are you sure that you are?  It is very nearly midnight and we have been working since before noon.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lacuna says with enthusiasm making up for confidence.  “That nap I took during the last round of simulation compilation did wonders.”

Ashan nods.  “Very well then.  It would be untruthful of me to deny a certain eagerness in the face of waiting one more day.  Let us begin.”

Lacuna’s face suddenly flushes from aspects not thought through and she averts her eyes.

“Right… About that… You’re gonna need to, well, take off your robe again.”

“That makes sense.”

“And this time I’ll… need to…” Lacuna trails off into a mumble.

“Come again?”

“I’ll need to be making skin contact for the duration of the ritual.”

“Ah.” Ashan swallows.  “I see.”

“Are you… okay with that?”

Ashan hesitates.  “Needs must, I suppose.”

“Right.  Right.  I’ll just, uh, turn around then.”

As she listens to the sound of shuffling fabric behind her, Lacuna wonders if she should have pushed harder to make sure Ashan is okay and not forcing himself.  It wasn’t exactly an enthusiastic response.  Then again, Ashan’s pretty muted all the time.  She reminds herself that he didn’t seem to have an issue with her watching the prior test through the cameras, and it’s not like he doesn’t wear a pair of shorts under the robe.  But should he be subjecting himself to the ritual twice in one day?  Was he actually excited when he said he didn’t want to wait another day or did he just want to get it over with?  It’s probably fine.  It should be harmless, even if something goes wrong.  But what if she overlooked something?  What if that nap earlier wasn’t as helpful as she thought?  It’s one thing to be reckless with her own wellbeing (she has been reckless hasn’t she, no don’t think about that) it’s something else entirely to be reckless with someone else.  Just look at what almost happened to Eris.  Sort of did happen.  What if -

“Do I need to take this back outside again?” Ashan asks.

“What?”

Lacuna snaps out of her spiral and turns back to face Ashan.  Stupid reflex, defeating the point of turning away in the first place.  Wait, what was even the point of turning around when she’s going to have to look at him anyway for the ritual?  Stupid social reflex.

She sees Ashan clutching the carefully folded robe to his chest.  His normally-perfect posture is thrown off from curling inwards around it.  He looks up at her.  For once Lacuna actually makes what she thinks is eye contact, and for once Ashan’s expression is something other than serenity.  Impatience?  Annoyance?  Nervousness?  Embarrassment?  She’s never been good at deciphering faces.  Whatever the expression is, it finally connects for her just how young he is.  A solid decade younger than her, if her math is right.  She knew that, but she didn’t know it until just now.  Maybe it was the perfect makeup.  It suddenly doesn’t feel right that he’s always subconsciously registered as being the older and wiser of the two of them.  She should have her shit together by now.  He shouldn’t have had to go through things she can scarcely imagine.

“You can hang onto it,” Lacuna answers.  “The functionality’s a bit different on this ritual, so it won't’ be an interference concern.”  She hopes so anyway.

“Thank you,” Ashan says.  His expression softens.  Still not the usual serenity.  Gratitude?  Relief maybe?

“Oh, and you should probably hang onto this too,” Lacuna says, passing the enchanted metal card back to him.  “I’ll be the one actually doing the ritual, but if you’re the one activating the enchantment to run the incantation and draw the circle it should theoretically be designed to attune to your magic somewhat.”

“Indeed.” Ashan takes the card.  “As we discussed earlier with regards to lessening the chance of adverse reactions.”

“Right.  Sorry.  Just running over everything one last time.”  Lacuna steps around behind him.  “By the way, this is going to take a fair bit longer than my usual rituals.  Would you prefer to sit down?  Maybe lie down?”

“I can handle standing.”

“Okay,” Lacuna says and starts to reach out a hand.  

Wait.  Something familiar about that answer.  Isn’t that the same sort of response Eris always used to call her out on?  The non-answer that avoids expressing what she actually wants?

“Rephrasing,” Lacua says.  “I’m not sure I can handle standing the whole time while retaining proper concentration.”  She is technically telling the truth.  “Do you mind if I sit down for this?”

“That works for me,” Ashan says and lowers himself into a cross-legged sitting position.  

Lacuna follows suit.

“It is strange,” Ashan says while pulling his long hair out of the way.  This close it is easy to see the streaks of midnight blue amidst the black.  Lacuna wonders if he dyes it or if it’s an autogenesis thing.  “Disrobing in front of another person feels different than doing so with only cameras around, despite the knowledge that you could see me in both cases.  Somehow I did not expect that.”

“It’s an extra layer of abstraction,” Lacuna says.  “Those’ll sneak up on you like that.  Incoming hand.”  

She waits a second for any objections and then places her palm on the bare skin between his shoulder blades.  He’s warm.  She feels the surrounding muscles reflexively tense on contact and then slowly relax.  He’s all muscle beneath the robes, but it feels different from what she’s felt through Eris’s tank tops when pulled into an embrace.  Leaner.  Less bulk but still toned.  She’s heard of mages tapping into their own metabolism for fueling magic to burn excess fat and retain figures in defiance of diet, but that doesn’t build muscle mass.  The skin on his back and arms doesn’t look like it could ever be anywhere near as sickly pale as hers is, but it is noticeably lighter than his hands and face, even accounting for makeup.  She wonders when the last time was that he wore anything with short sleeves.  Does he even have other clothes?  She’s never seen him wear anything else.  

Still less distracting without the robe on than with.  Probably says more about her than him.  Do all wizard robes on Orthon look like sleek dresses with wide sleeves, or is it just because he copied his mentor’s style?

“You good?” Lacuna asks.

“Yes,” Ashan answers.

“Cool.  Activate the enchantment when you’re ready.”

Lacuna feels Ashan’s shoulders rise and fall with one last deep breath and then the lights of the conjured ritual circle begin to glow around them.  It starts as an orbiting ring of tangled threads drawing itself into existence with the card held by Ashan at its center.  The threads then begin growing upwards and downwards like roots and vines along an invisible trellis.  The threads curl, and warp, and split.  They glide organically and then go through a series of jagged geometric corners.  They intersect and weave and repel as they try to align themselves to seven different mathematical function plots at once.  Within seconds Lacuna and Ashan are surrounded by a cocoon of glowing wild ferns and ivy whose leaves split off into layers of details too small to be seen by the naked eye.  It is still just as much of a chaotic mess of butchered symbols and aborted fractals as it ever was when confined to a three-dimensional screen, but now Lacuna feels like she can almost pick out a method to the madness.  A story she could read in the whorling leaves of runes if she just knew the language and if it didn’t keep changing the moment she started to think she found a pattern.  It’s almost more maddening than looking like noise.  She could lose herself in staring for hours if she let herself.

And then the incantation constructed from samples of her own voice begins uttering phoneme strings no human mouth could manage and she focuses her will on her intention for the world to take a new shape of her desire.  The incantation is slow enough for once that if she lets herself listen to it she could almost make out individual “words,” untranslatable gibberish though it all is.  She hasn’t figured out why yet, but after talking with Ashan earlier about which of her rituals and enchantments got the worst reactions from him, there’s some evidence to suggest a loose correlation between ritual acceleration and noisomeness to the magically-sensitive.

She resists the urge to listen for false patterns and visualizes the diagnostic reports from her original scan of the seal on the back of Ashan’s neck.  If there’s an upside to the iterative simulations and adjustments taking a whole month it’s that she’s had plenty of time to practice this part by memorizing those lists of everything the seals are doing and correlating them to individual elements of those arcane shapes.  In her mind’s eye she goes down the lists one item at a time and crosses those items out.  Writes over them.  Scribbles over the corresponding sub-glyph of the seal.  She repeats the visualization over and over for each item before moving onto the next.  Or when her focus wavers too much to visualize, she repeats the verbal description of cancellation in her head as a mantra.  Or failing that, just holds onto the idea of what she is seeking to undo.  It’s the intent that matters, not the specific focusing metaphor.

All along she forces her eyes to stay open, staring at her hand on Ashan’s back until both stop registering to her as being parts of people.  She nearly loses her concentration for a moment when she feels the first line of the counterseal grow hot beneath her palm.  She hadn’t expected a physical sensation.  It is clearly defined enough that she can almost see it through touch alone.  She folds that sense into the focusing metaphor, correlating the cancellation to the new growth.  That heat spreads in jumbled half-organic lines until it at last breaches the boundaries of her hand and she can see the new lines forming on the flesh-colored canvas in front of her.  They grow agonizingly slowly.  A slowness that makes her question her own sanity and perception as to whether they are truly growing at all. And then all at once she will realize that not only have they doubled length but they’ve filled in the gaps between with recursive and overlapping branches.

Her sense of time compresses and distorts.  The visualized focusing metaphors become hazy until all she can see are the lines of new growth that she can no longer tell if they’re in front of her eyes or inside her head.  The parameterized list of effects from the old seal that she needs to cancel out blurs together into a single sense of hurt that had been done to her friend that she is in a position to heal.

When the chaotic circle of the new counterseal closes, it is like jolting awake after a nap she didn’t mean to take.  The glowing cocoon is gone and the voice that both is and isn’t hers is silent.  She lifts a shaky hand and takes in the sight of the counterseal in front of her.  She doesn’t know what else to do right now other than stare.

The exhausted silence of stretched minutes and compressed hours blurs the ability to tell the difference. 

Lacuna begins to allow herself to collapse backwards but catches herself at the unmistakable sound of sniffling. She leans forward and hovers a hand over Ashan’s shoulder. She pulls the hand back. For all that interminable time that very hand had just been in constant contact with him, to resume touch without a clear and practical reason feels like an intrusion.  She knew Eris for a whole year before she was ever the one to initiate a hug or pat on the back. 

And what kind of gesture would it be if it’s her fault something is wrong?

Oh goddess what did she screw up this time?

“Hey,” Lacuna whispers, “what’s wrong?”

One more sniff, followed by a dabbing of the eyes with his folded robe, and Ashan turns around enough to see Lacuna.

“Nothing is wrong, only this counterseal is more effective than the earlier test.  Without the power draw limiter it is like someone has pulled a dark, heavy, wet cloth off my face after I had gotten used to breathing and seeing through it.  I had a similar sensation upon visiting Bridgewood Manor after having gotten used to this world’s lack of an ambient aether analogue, but this is moreso.”

“Ah.  Yeah.  I feel you.  Okay, probably not really the same, but I’ve had some experience with sensory overstimulation.  It sucks.” Lacuna looks around the stark white testing chamber lit from every surface at once.  “Set test chamber lighting preset nineteen,” she says to the hidden microphones and the floor and walls go dark while the ceiling dims to a muted warm night-mode-screen glow.  Just bright enough to comfortably see by with the eye-straining blue spectrum filtered out.  “That help any?”

“More than I would have expected.  My thanks,” Ashan says.  “Alas, the greater part of my discomposure was due to the unblocked memories being more vivid than expected.  They are rather much to process all at once.”

“Oh, I see.”  This is why she’d left that part out of the test counterseal’s cancellation.  It seemed unnecessarily cruel to potentially yo-yo him in and out of remembering.  “Want some time to yourself?”

“Truthfully, I would prefer a distraction,” Ashan says, pulling his robe over his head as he stands.  “Shall we resume testing?”

“Can do,” Lacuna replies, leaping to her feet.  The world spins around her, and she puts one hand to her head and the other out for balance.

“Are you well?” Ashan inquires.

“I’m fine.  Just stood up too fast.  Normally I’m more careful about avoiding that.  Maybe a bit tired from the ritual too.  But I’m fine.  Let’s do this.”

“Do you not need to return to your computer?” Ashan asks when Lacuna makes no motion to leave.

“Eh, the monitoring system’s still recording from when I set it up for the ritual and this room’s rigged up with voice commands in the off chance there’s an emergency.  Oh!  Unless you’d rather me go.  I can do that.  I should go.”  

Ashan puffs a sharp exhalation that Lacuna thinks passes for a laugh and shakes his head.  “You may stay, my friend, though it may be best if you stand back.  I will not be attempting anything with a danger of collateral backlash should anything fail, but we know not yet how the changes to power draw may affect energy redistribution.  I would hate to give you frostbite.”

“Oof, yeah, good point.” Lacuna retreats to a point by the exit door, nearly invisible from the inside now that it’s closed.  She taps a spot on the wall, gives a voice command, and a small portion of the screen comes back to life to display temperature readings for the test chamber.  Just in case.

A quick gesture and Ashan conjures another simple rectangular barrier in front of him.  He tilts his head, hums curiously, and then rotates his wrist, causing the conjuration to spin in place like a revolving glass door.  A wave of his hand slides the first conjuration away and a quick circle traced with the other hand creates a transparent floating shield.  Ashan nods to himself, hums once more and allows the conjurations to flicker out.

Lacuna opens her mouth to ask if he’s feeling any adverse effects from the counterseal but catches herself when he raises his hands to his face to stare through a box created by thumbs and forefingers.  A new conjured square appears in front of him.  He makes a series of quick yet precise gestures and the conjuration morphs to follow the motions; widening, stretching long, tilting upwards into a steep ramp, coiling into a spiral, and then splitting into segments that snap into flat stairsteps.  Ashan glides up the conjured staircase, drawing railings into existence as with trailing fingertips as he ascends.

At the top of the stairs, with his head nearly touching the test chamber’s ceiling, his wand slides out from his sleeve and into his hand.  When he raises the wand, Lacuna’s first thought is of a conductor about to begin a concert, but it is a painter’s brushstrokes that the motion falls into.  New conjurations begin appearing throughout the test chamber, simple at first - circles, wires, domes - and then building in complexity - spider webs, chains, trellises - until he gives a nod of satisfaction and steps off the edge of the staircase, lands upright upon a floating tightrope, and slides down it to the far end of the test chamber.

What follows next Lacuna can only call a dance as Ashan moves around, between, and over his conjurations.  Most are the usual transparent glass-like distortion in the air, but others outright glow with a blue-white light.  Some persist throughout the dance, some move and change shape, and others flicker out to make way for new ones to be drawn.

Lacuna shivers and checks the temperature readings.  Steadily declining, but less rapidly than she would have expected based on prior observations of Ashan’s twisting of thermodynamics to fuel his magic.

Ashan raises his wand straight above his head and his conjurations gather towards him, falling into a single mote of light at the wand’s tip.  He touches his wand to the ground and slowly raises it, turning as he does.  Within seconds he has conjured a great coiling glass serpent around him, smaller than the one that he used to lift the ferry boat on that first mission but still larger and more detailed than any single conjuration Lacuna has seen him create since then.

She lets out an involuntary gasp of wonder at the beauty of it.

Ashan blinks at the sound of her voice and the serpent briefly flickers from lost focus.

“Forgive me.  I seem to have gotten carried away in the moment,” Ashan says through heavy breathing.  “As I said, I was in need of distraction, and there was a feeling of exercising for the first time without a great weight slowing me down.”

“Can I touch it?” Lacuna says without thinking or taking her eyes off the serpentine conjuration.

After a flicker of surprise, Ashan smiles (unmistakably a smile for once), nods, and stretches out his free hand.  The glass serpent uncoils from around him and drifts in Lacuna’s direction.  Lacuna meets it halfway, feeling the sharp drop in temperature as she gets closer to Ashan.  She reaches out a hand, flinches back, tries again, and rests her palm on the serpent’s snout.

“I can feel individual scales,” she says in awe.  “Hard to believe this is just a massless kinetic barrier.”  She gives in to the urge to pet the giant hovering glass snake with both hands.  “It’s not as slick as I expected.  Less like glass and more like…” She tries to think of a fitting analogy.  “Like freshly-dried paint over wood.”

Something shifts in the way the serpent refracts the light passing through it and Lacuna’s hands slide off.

“Friction is a variable I was taught to adjust early on,” Ashan explains.  “It would do no good to lose my footing on a platform I created or for bindings to slip right off a foe, but at other times a slide or a slick shield is desirable.”  Ashan gasps and the serpent flickers and fades away.  “Best that I not push myself too much more with it though.  We still have another test to run.”

“Are you alright?”

“A moment to catch my breath and I shall recover anon.  There is a reason most of my creations are simpler in form.” 

“If you say so.  I’ll go see if I can turn the heat back up in here.”

A few minutes later the air in the test chamber is no longer quite so chill and Ashan is no longer breathing quite so hard.  For safety’s sake, this time he and Lacuna are standing on opposite ends of the room.  She really should have gone back out to observe the more detailed readings from her workstation, but now that she’s had a taste of it, the draw of seeing new magic up close is too strong to resist.

Once again Ashan conjures a mirror in front of him.  Once again he steps forward and places a palm on its surface.  This time he does not stagger.  This time when he steps through the mirror and out the other side his reflection steps out of the side he entered  from.

The mirror disappears.  Ashan and his reflection turn in sync to look at one another.  Ashan’s eyebrows raise slightly and his reflection gives a toothy grin of excitement.  Ashan walks around the test chamber, occasionally pausing to go through a series of test motions.  His illusory double stays broadly in sync with him, but the details of its motions are far more energetic and its face is openly delighted while Ashan maintains his signature cool placidity.  Ashan stops moving, focuses intently, and his copy begins independently doing a lap around the test chamber.  For a moment the bounce in its step smooths out into a better imitation of Ashan’s elegant glide but once the real Ashan starts moving again the excitability returns to its animation.

“No vertigo, nausea, or other adverse reactions to the counterseal,” Ashan reports once he and his double return to Lacuna.  “This illusion feels as natural to create and control as my conjurations.”  He glances over at said illusion practically bouncing up and down in excitement.  “Well, almost as natural.  Thank you, truly.”

With those last words Ashan lightly puts a hand on Lacuna’s shoulder.  When his double tries to do the same it passes through her slightly and becomes both there and not there to her vision, like an object only visible through one eye.

“You’re wel- whoa, that’s weird,” Lacuna stumbles her words in surprise.

Ashan pulls his hand back with a puff of exhalation and the illusion throws its head back in silent laughter.

“Ah.  My apologies.  Illusions can be like that when exposed for what they are.”

“It’s fine.  Kind of cool actually.  Do they normally reflect the caster’s emotions like that too?  That’s not something I’ve read about.”

Ashan’s reflection has just enough time to blush hard enough to be seen through the perfect makeup before flickering out of existence.

“Merely a random aberration born from tiredness, I am sure,” the real Ashan says coolly and evenly.  “It must be well after midnight by now.”

“Sure it is.” Lacuna grins and chooses not to poke more fun at the matter.  “Let’s call it a night.  Morning?  Whatever.  Either way, I think we can call this experiment a resounding success.  What do you say?”

“Indeed,” Ashan agrees.

The two of them leave the test chamber and make their way back out through the lab.  Now that the excitement of testing is winding down, the exhaustion from the long day and the extensive ritual casting is catching up to Lacuna.  She nearly leaves without checking on her workstation.

“Just a sec,” she says as she hangs her labcoat on its hook by the door.  “Need to shut everything down for the night.”

She bends over to use the keyboard and mouse, foregoing sitting down for fear of not wanting to get back up again.  She stops the recordings and takes a brief glance at compiled readouts.  Nothing catches her eye as out of the ordinary, but she’ll need to check it again in the morning when she’s more awake.  She shuts down the test chamber, starts to shut down the computer, and then remembers she forgot to check her email all day.  Nothing urgent, thankfully, but there’s an unexpected message from RevaTech asking if she’d be interested in scheduling an interview and reconsidering working for them.  Weird.  Maybe someone from her old team heard it had taken her a while to find a new job?

She nearly deletes the email but then thinks better of it, flagging and archiving it instead.  Not that she has any intention of leaving where she is now.  Still… It’d be a heck of a coincidence, but with what she gathered yesterday evening and this morning over breakfast about Sullivan and Road looking into something involving robots, it couldn’t hurt to keep open as an avenue to explore later.

“All done,” she says as she puts the system into sleep mode.  She looks up to see Ashan staring at her poor wilted bonsai jacaranda.  “What’s up?”

“Would you mind if I attempted one more spell for the night?” Ashan asks.  “As a thank you gift.”

“Thanks, but you don’t need to give me anything.  I was happy to do this.”

“Call it another test of the counterseal allowing me to access other magic systems then.”

“Fair enough.  Go ahead.”

Heart beat beneath snow

Long waiting, ready to grow

Weathers the cold storms.

 

Dream of some place warm,

Finding sunlight in the gray.

Do more than survive.

 

BLOSSOM!

 

The browning leaves on the tiny tree uncurl and become green once more.  New purple flowers bud and bloom before Lacuna’s eyes.  Lacuna’s mind wanders back to the growing ferns and vines of the analog light vectors surrounding her and grows giddy all over again.

“Thank you,” she gasps without taking her eyes off the blossoming tree.

Everything is nearly in place.  Theories and concepts seem to be confirmed.  She just needs a chance to rest and run the final compilations.

It’ll be her turn to blossom soon.