Star eagerly alerted his Master he wanted to leave their shared water shelter. She seemed groggy as she tumbled out of bed and hustled to open the barricade for him to leave. She truly was a creature of contradictions. His Master was powerful. Lady Flamewalker, Shaper of the World Soul, Conqueror of the Pit. And yet, he watched as she stubbed her toe and made cursing noises trying to get up the three steps to the door. 

She was weak. Even her skin was fragile and prone to injury, unlike his majestic coat and resilient flesh. He would have to work hard to protect her. He would be her shield, because she is vulnerable. He would be her fangs because she had none of her own.

As the portal opened and he was able to ascend onto the deck of the great water-den, she closed it behind him with a yawn. That was fine. Preferable even. Star had duties to attend to, and knowing she was safe inside would mean he could focus on his goals.

First, he checked the marking he had made before bed and saw that it was untouched. Good. The interlopers hadn’t gone so far as to cover his mark. But, it was time he scouted the perimeter and clear where his territory lay.

A conflict was brewing. A conflict it would be his duty to solve. But, he hoped it would not be today. He was growing stronger, and rapidly! But at his current level, he was not sure he could fend off the intrusive pack. 

Before his scouting mission could begin in earnest, he had to eat. Hopping the great barrier that separated the ‘back yard’ from the outside world was no great challenge. Ever since the night of the pit, Star had found he could leap much greater heights than before. He wasn’t entirely sure how he had gained the power, but he knew it had something to do with Lady Flamewalker’s test. 

The rewards of the Master are the rewards of the subordinate? No, that didn’t quite cover it. It had been a trial for him as well. Perhaps that is why she subjected them both to it? A risky gambit, but it had paid off.

Once in the backyard, Star started sniffing around. He wasn’t certain why his Master had removed the egg layers, but it was presumably for their own safety. That had been his failure. He was the protector. For him to lose one of the egg layers must have proven his inability to protect them. That must be the reason. Still, it was a great loss. There were limited eggs left laying in the grass. He had been consuming four a day, but he might have to slow down to preserve them.

He was loath to do so. The eggs were nicely sustaining his growth. And he had grown! He was larger than he had been just days ago. Larger and stronger as well. But with it came a voracious appetite, and he was sure that if he did not get enough food the growth would slow. He would not let that happen. Even if he must forage further afield. 

Which brought him back to this territory dispute. Once he had had his breakfast of yard eggs, he hopped the wall once more and went about his scouting. Most of his territory markers still smelled of him, but the ones towards the treeline near the dock had been covered by strange scents.

Of course it would be these. They must be closest to the strange pack’s territory. He worked to cover them each up with his own scent once more. No doubt they would be covered once more by the interlopers come tomorrow. Despite that, his message would be clear. 

“This is the line. Here. I will defend this boundary.”

However, that meant he would need to back that up with action should it come to it. Star didn’t like the idea of killing his own kind, and was hopeful it wouldn’t come to that. At worst, he would find the leader and have it out with them. If he won, perhaps he could force the others to leave without more bloodshed.

Assuming he could win, of course. That was the trouble. If he could put off fighting for even another couple weeks, he was sure he could win. He wasn’t ready yet. Unfortunately, he knew trials did not always wait until one was ready.

---

Lily slowly rose to wakefulness, after having gone back to bed from letting Star out. She really didn’t want to get out of bed today. Did she really need to? Well, not really.

She should make a decision about the basement. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if she didn’t get back to La Mancha till tomorrow. Come to think of it, the house and the boat were starting to feel like they needed names too. Okay, the boat was named ‘Beloved Lily’ but she’d feel pretty weird saying it.

Well, if she didn’t go out, what did she want to do around here? Whether she was going into the basement or not, she should probably do some preparation for it. There was some magic stuff she wanted to test around here.

“I wonder if there’s magic I could use to grow crops? I could probably automatically water them with enough time to fiddle with it at this point. But what about making them grow faster or better? I’d love fresh veggies for life.”

The girl let out a sleepy sigh, pulled the blankets up a little higher. Magic then. When she got up. She had just a few simple goals.  First, she wanted to know if she could create a circle with a durable physical material with empty nodes, then fill the glyphs using mana to complete the spell. That way she wouldn’t need to conjure a whole circle every time she cast a spell if she kept easy to use blank circles around in different configurations. At least in her testing zone.

That was another thing. She wanted to develop some spell circles that would do safety things. Off the top of her head, keep the temperature within a certain range, or vent off extra mana even if it had to burn it, or so on. If she could get together a number of safety circles that would only need to do anything if one of her tests went poorly, it’d make testing a lot safer.

Finally, she wanted to explore her idea about glyph radicals a lot further. Maybe she could start a sort of glyph alphabet in her notes? She wouldn’t always know how to combine the radicals to describe what she wanted to describe. But it would mean that if she encountered spells in the wild reading them would be a lot easier. And she could try replacing radicals in a glyph one to one if she had a solid hunch. With her safety circles! Yeah.

Oh shoot, and also she wanted to see if she could use circuit board designs to write conditionals. If only she could figure out how to make a magical transistor. That ought to be first on the list, because if it worked it’d make writing safety spells way easier.

On the other hand, it’d make creating prefab spell circles less convenient.  She let out a loud sigh.

“There’s always magic to do. When everyone disappeared I really thought I was gonna be working fields or scavenging all day every day. I didn’t picture this…”

Although, truthfully this was probably better. If she could find magical solutions to a lot of the issues she’d normally have to toil over, that’d be perfect. Until then, she had a nearly limitless supply of canned goods and the like if she needed them.

Still. Every time she learned anything about magic, suddenly she had a billion new formations she wanted to try, and other magical concepts she was thinking of. She didn’t have time to try them all. Which felt like a crazy problem to have in the face of everything else!

Oh well. It was time to get up. She rose and started to get dressed, stuck on the thought of magical transistors.

“If I can make a transistor, I can use computational logic in my spell formations. But how? It’s not like I have magical silicone. I could go for a relay system instead of a transistor, but that’s complicated and it’d only work physically. Ugh, why does this have to be so complicated!? Think Lily, think! I need Star. Maybe if I talk it out…”

Lily fished around in the fridge for an energy drink, and found that she was out. But she still had fruit, so she grabbed a snack and headed out onto the deck.

Star was sniffing around the treeline. Probably seeing if any chicken scraps were left over. Silly hound. She called him, and headed to the driveway in front of the house. Lily retrieved her tools, the legendary Inscriber of Power and Abolisher of Mistakes, and sat Star down for a lesson.

“Okay, listen. I need to talk you through this so that hopefully I can figure it out. There’s these things called transistors, and I need to make one or something like it for my spells. They’re sort of like… Hmm.”

She drew a T shape onto the concrete, with the horizontal bit slightly detached from the vertical one.

“They’re sort of like this. But for electricity, see? Okay, you probably don’t understand electricity. Let’s call it mana, because that’s what we will be working with. So, mana goes through this sideways bit right? But it stops in the middle where they all meet. It can’t pass through there. That’s important. Buuuuut!”

Lily drew an arrow up the side of the vertical line. Star sniffed the chalk, as if that would grant him further understanding. She laughed, appreciating his attempts to follow along.

“If elec– If mana is coming up from this way, it connects the path, see? Then mana can flow normally, as if it were a straight line. It’s just a bridge you can turn on and off with a signal. Not too complicated, right? Easy, even! But it means we can turn circles or even just parts of them on and off. And that means being able to do that selectively, and it spirals into a buuuunch of more complicated stuff from there!”

Lily sighed loudly. Star stopped sniffing around and looked at her intently.

“It’ll open the doors to much, much stronger spells. Safer spells too! Better spells! Better magic. Better Lily. So I have to figure it out. The problem is, in a computer they would use a special material where the lines meet that can only pass along energy when it is powered. But spell circles are made with all kinds of materials, and I don’t know of any that might conduct mana only when they have mana. That seems like a stretch. So I gotta figure out another way.”

Lily sprayed down her diagram and started fresh. She drew a simple circle, and was careful not to connect all the lines so it wouldn’t activate.

“What if I start like this? We can put whole circles inside of a node to nest them. So, let’s say we’re making a transistor node. It needs two inputs. One from the main circle, and one to turn it on and off. And it needs one output, that will either spit mana out or not.”

She paused, and looked down at her little faux circle. That much was simple enough. But now what? She needed to actually put things inside the circle to make it do anything. What could provide the functionality she wanted?

“Well, a capacitor can split the magic that goes into it, right? Send the excess down another path, and only pass along a signal when it becomes full. Oh man, this is gonna get math heavy isn’t it? I hate math!”

Star bounded over and licked her face. She fell over backwards, sputtering.

“No no, it’s fine! It’s not that bad. I’m just bad at it. It’s okay boy! I’m gonna be fine! Pleh!”

He calmed down a bit, and she hugged him tightly.

“There, you can keep me company. Okay, here’s what we are going to do. Capacitors have a minimum setting. Found that out in the pit. So, let’s call that minimum one mana okay? We’ll standardize it! For the sake of math and designs! Incidentally, that’s about what can fit in my body apparently. Gonna have to solve that mystery sometime too. Ugh.. There’s so much shit Star!”

Star licked her again, and she giggled. Hugging him closer, she rolled around on the ground back and forth for a second, lifting him with her.

“You’re heavier. Like, a lot heavier. Gotta be up ten pounds since we met. Ohhh, who’s a good boy? Putting on a ton of muscle! And… size. You’re still puppy shaped though, what’s up with that huh?”

Star woofed quietly. Lily smiled and kissed his snout.

“Yeah, I wish you could talk back to me too buddy. We’ll figure it out sometime, okay? Even if we gotta make you a giant keyboard and teach you how to use it or something.”

Stretching and sitting, Lily returned to the problem at hand. Transistors. Math. Standardization.

“Okay, so if that is one mana, and we can make it pass anything less than one mana down one path, and exactly one down the other… It feels like there’s something there. It’s on the tip of my. Um. Brain? I’m so close! But if I just put a capacitor in there set like that it doesn’t account for everything. Sure, we can make it pass excess down this way when it is powered with one mana exactly from here. But it’ll STILL pass it down that way even if it’s not! I need to make a flowchart. Maybe if I double them up?”

She pushed Star off of her and got up, suddenly feeling like she was onto something. The Inscriber of Power flashed across the ground as she started writing in earnest, the flow chart forming quickly.

“Two inputs. One of them can pass along any amount of signal, as long as it’s a known value. The other will only pass along one mana, or discard it if it’s a fraction. All the lines that are for discarding mana can go to a simple version of the eternal flame spell that will show visually how much excess there is by how bright it gets. Now, if the main input is supposed to be ten mana as an example, and the switch on or off is one mana, then they both lead to a capacitor set for eleven. If it gets eleven, it passes the mana along this way, if it’s less or there is excess it goes to the eternal flame spell. And… And. Wait. Is that it? I’m done?”

She looked over her chart carefully, and did some mental testing. If the Main Input got 8 mana and the Switch Input got 1, it would all go to excess and be discarded. If Main Input had 12, a capacitor would lower it to ten, and the main bit would still only pass it along if Switch Input still was active.

“Huh. Did I do it? I think I did it. Wait, there’s some problems. But they’re just limitations. Like, I can’t pass along a variable amount, only a set number. But that’s not so bad, right? Can I make it better?”

Lily was in the zone. The world faded out around her. There was only her and the spell. She hadn’t felt like this in a long time. The creative energy was really flowing. The rest of the world didn’t matter now. She had this.

“Okay, what if I have a repeating set of capacitors? I can have a maximum signal from the input, and just have a capacitor for every whole number after that, and still only pass it along if it gets that plus one from the switch input right? That way it will pass along any signal strength, as long as I’m willing to draw that many capacitors. If it’s less than 20 or so, that’s no big deal. Let’s hope I’m never dealing with hundreds, huh?”

The Abolisher of Mistakes sprayed away a portion of the diagram, and her Inscriber of power flowed back over the spots filling in a series of circles meant to represent capacitors of decreasing size.

“If this is a working transistor though, I should be able to use it to create some simple logic gates right? At least simple checks like AND, OR, and NOT? How would those look…?”

The answer instantly came to her. She could do this! She could apply some simple computational logic using her new tool! It was time for a real circle. A proof of concept! What should she make? The possibilities suddenly felt endless!

She had it. The circle came together in her mind in an instant. Simple. She made a circle focused on infusing mana into an object, and set it up so the excess would activate a NOT gate that diverted mana from entering the infuse glyph. For now she just grabbed a stone to put in the center, and watched as mana started to flow into the circle.

“YES! I did it! It will charge up an object to capacity and then overflow will stop! No more exploding pages! I did it Star! … Star?”

Lily’s eyes found Star, he was looking at the house and growling. And as power flowed into her circle, she noticed something else. Rather than the magic collecting in her stone and staying there, it was flowing out of the stone and towards–

“Oh. Well. I guess that changes my priorities huh?”

The mana was flowing towards the house, and down.