Engineered Magic

37 AL: Grandmother

When Grandmother woke from her nap, the couch she was laying on possessed a decidedly purple cast to it. She studied the rest of the furniture in the arrangement. They were all the same shades of tan and cream that they were before she slept. She checked the protection crystal and saw that it was returned to a clean clear color. The color change was not the result of her claiming the protection crystal. The sofa must have changed because of her contact with it.

That was a rather annoying development. For years the color of her magic would leech into integrated clothing. It was like Control wanted to warn everyone that she was there. The furniture changing was new. The sofa must be an integrated item. The speed at which her hunter’s outfit changed was also a new development. She wondered if it was a sign that she was close to the next magic tier. That was unexpected. She really hadn’t done anything exceptional lately. She decided long ago when her progress stalled that there must not be another tier.

She made use of the sanitary facilities to give herself and her non-integrated clothing a thorough clean. She unpacked the boar skin and started to process it. She cleaned up again before returning to the couch with an apple in her hand.

The inscription was still there in all its complexity. She made herself comfortable on the couch facing the pond. She laid her hands flat on her lap and stared off into the middle distance. She tried to not focus on anything and just hold her eyes still. When she focused on a point she tended to shift her focus from one eye to the other, which caused enough of a jitter in her eyes to interfere with the command.

A light began to flash just on the right edge of her vision. She used her right hand to herd it to the center of her sight. When it reached the center it stopped moving and she touched it with her palm. Light flashed across her entire field of view and settled into the control display.

If she changed what she was looking at too quickly, either by moving her body or her eyes the display would automatically close. Keeping it open for long periods of time led to sore backs and stiff necks. That was one of many reasons it wasn’t used by many, even though everyone who drank the water ended up with one.

There was no written language on the interface. It was all flashing lights and cryptic icons. Occasionally numbers would appear in the same fonts the wall inscriptions used. The first time Grandmother opened the display the numbers were displayed in one of the simplest scripts. The script Agatha called Roman. As she gained skill in the use of magic and increased her tier, the font changed. The last time she used this interface it used the Mosaic font for numbers. A quick check showed it was still using Mosaic. That was verification that she was still tier five.

The control display was extremely hard to use. Grandmother thought it was designed to be intuitive, so there was no tutorial instructing how to use it. Unfortunately whoever or whatever it was designed for did not have the same worldview as she did. Years of trial and error taught her that it did have a few useful features. The ones that interested her right now were the built in tools for deciphering inscriptions.

It would not automatically decrypt the inscription for her. She needed to decide at each step which tool was needed and apply it.

Four hours later, Grandmother rubbed her neck and studied the result. It was a map. One of the benefits of using the control display to do the work was that the solution was overlaid on the inscription when she looked at it. It showed that the greenspace she was enroute to was very close to the east. The center of the map was dedicated to the greenspace she stayed last night in. The village square was visible adjacent to the western edge of the greenspace. A series of colored lines and rectangles that represented the major corridors and stairwells showed how the two greens, the village square and the gallery she was in were connected.

She knew from experience that the area depicted would be updated on her personal map, with all the details filled in. It would even be accurate as of this date. It was such a map that led her south into the arms of the short sword wielding bears. She never figured out what that map led to, since she was forced to flee.

It looked like she completed this one in reverse. The map clearly showed the route from this gallery to the square. This gallery was equipped with a large protection crystal, while the square had none. It seemed like the inscription was telling her to take this crystal there. Only a protection crystal could not be moved. This was a fact everyone knew. Even the tiny seed crystals of a tier zero rest area were fixed. There was no end to the people who got the bright idea to turn a crystal into an amulet of protection. All of them failed. The most they ever accomplished was to destroy the crystal.

She remembered the miniature integrated crystal she received when she touched the protection crystal. Grandmother pulled her boots off and rolled up her pant legs. If she didn’t at least try she would always wonder. The fish in the pool scurried away from her as she stepped in. The water was cold. She took two quick steps in the pond and put her hands on each side of the crystal. The crystal flooded with color. Very gently she tried to lift it.

It was like trying to move a mountain. She gave it one more tug just to confirm and stepped back out of the cold water. She dried her feet off with the blue wizard’s silks she kept in her backpack. It was integrated cloth and absorbed the water better than a towel.

She thought that miniature integrated crystal meant that she was granted ownership of this protection crystal, like when you bought a shop. Could she have actually been given another crystal? She walked around the inscription wall to the prize altar. She pulled up her integrated inventory and began to loop through it. Ten minutes later she was a bit embarrassed by the amount of stuff she accumulated over the years. Ten minutes after that she decided there was no crystal. She returned to the couch to think it over.

The square was already on her map before she reached it. It seemed heavily populated for not being protected. She did not see anyone there with an upper tier skill level. The highest tier goods available were crafted by a dead man. There were both red and blue warriors, a fairly good mix of crafters but no magic casters. Even the young potentials in the training yard did not have a magic user for their instructor.

This gallery was too high of a tier for the location. The structure's edge was less than a week’s travel to the east. It was an oddity with its protection crystal and missing art. Its entire purpose seemed to be to stand out and draw attention to this inscription.

The inscription was telling her to go to the square, that there was something of value there. Grandmother thought back to the fountain at the green entrance. She knew that hints and spells could be encrypted not just in the wall inscriptions but also in the mosaics in the bottom of a pool or the fitted stones of a courtyard. Did she miss something on her walk through?

As she turned her mind back to the settlement she found herself thinking of the young girl sitting on the floor of a market stall tracing the pattern of the courtyard stone on vellum.

She tended to think of Control as a psycho killer with a personal vendetta against her but that wasn’t really its role. It was the narrator. It progressed the story. Maybe Grandmother was looking at the pieces the wrong way. She turned it around in her head and told herself a story.

There is a settlement full of young people on the edge of the wilds. They are brave people who have broken free from their wizard overlords. They were led by a high level crafter but he was killed in the last migration. The settlement still has no protection crystal and will face future migrations. A powerful traveling wizard wanders through.

Oh yes, Grandmother thought, she could visualize that story. Unfortunately there were multiple potential endings to it and most of them were not in her favor. The wizard saves the settlement and becomes its absolute ruler. The settlement is the seed that grows into an empire large enough to challenge the old empires in the north. The northern empires unite to crush the upstart.

Or the traveling wizard could just as easily die in the fighting, leaving behind a secured settlement that is the start of a new wizard free society. Or the wizard lives to become the leader, only to be stabbed in the back days later by a group of low tier warriors who want it all for themselves.

Actually none of those options appealed to her. She needed a version where the wizard saves the day, gets a thank you and then travels away again. Because implicit in the story told from this perspective was that if the settlement didn’t get help, it would die. She knew that was its likely fate when she passed through. Knowing that would be its fate in some vague future was different from knowing it would happen soon, in the next migration.

She looked at the map. The color of each line indicated its elevation. The gallery was higher in the structure than the bottom of the square. It looked like if she went up three more levels, there was a fairly direct path back. It would drop her down onto the top of the square. There were four large stairwells in Squares that allowed access from the courtyard to the apartments above. In a protected square the stairwells would be sealed top and bottom to only allow access from within the square. If she was reading the color coding correctly, this map indicated that two of them were open at the top and one was open at the bottom.

She pulled open her personal map and confirmed it there. The residents should have barricaded the stairwells. If they were she would need to overshoot the square before descending down to the main level entrances.

It was getting late in the day. She slept several hours in the afternoon. The bright light from the high ceilings was dimming into the half light of evening. If she left early in the morning she thought she could make it back by late afternoon.

“All right,” she said aloud, looking at the protection crystal. “I will go back for a couple days but I am not staying longer than that. Migration or no migration.” She swore the crystal flashed at her but it was just the changing light reflecting off the falling water and metallic fish. Control didn’t speak any human languages and never had.

She dumped the contents of her pack out on the floor. She needed to lighten her load if she wanted to travel fast. She would leave her extra items here. They should remain for several days. She could pick them back up later.

She picked the blue silks up from where she dropped them on the floor. She saw smudges of discolor appear on the fabric as she folded it. This was really starting to get ridiculous. The smudges weren’t actually purple but they were definitely not the same deep blue as the rest of the garment. She thought about wearing them. People swore that the clothing granted bonuses for casting. Grandmother always thought the effect, if there was one, was too slight to make up for the inconvenience of wearing them. She liked the fit of the hunter's greens better. They looked like they were made from a cotton or heavy canvas and were cut to allow a hunter to stalk prey in them.

The one property of integrated cloth that Grandmother couldn’t deny was its ability to be repaired. The leathers she wore couldn’t take much more damage before they fell apart. Still they were better than walking around in all violet. Since the hunter's clothing discolored so quickly last time, she wouldn’t bother with them.

She put all her integrated clothing into the leave pile and continued sorting. In the end she set aside about two thirds of the contents of her pack. It was all items she was unlikely to need in the next few days and could be replaced if she didn’t make it back before the structure absorbed them. She looked around thinking about where she would leave them. She wanted them as hidden as possible so if by odd chance someone else found this gallery in her absence they might miss them.

She remembered the shelving and cubby holes behind the inscription wall. She carried her bag of apples around to the shelves. She found one of the cubbies that was small but deep. It was low enough down on the wall that she needed to lean over to see into the very back of it. She set the gathering bag into the opening and pushed it all the way back.

As soon as her hands left the opening a pile of shadowed coins appeared on the edge of the shelf. It startled her. This was the standard method Control requested payment. The food vending system used it. Grandmother was uncertain what it was requesting payment for here. The amount requested was small. Curious, she made the hand motion of pulling coins from her purse and setting them on the shelf.

The opening at the front of the cubby frosted in. The front solidified into an opaque glass. Grandmother was astonished. It was years since she discovered anything new. She was starting to feel like she knew it all. Now she had seen multiple new things in the same day. She remembered seeing this shelving before. She thought back, wondering if she never set anything down on them.

She touched the opaque glass and a crack appeared in it. She tapped the crack and the glass thinned and frosted away. She loaded up everything else she was leaving except for the boar hide, before paying the fee again and sealing up the cubby. The hide still needed several days of processing to go. She would salt and bundle it but depending on how long she was gone the results were bound to be variable. If it didn’t work out she would just have to kill another boar.

When the overhead glass went dark with the night cycle, Grandmother was delighted to discover that lights embedded in the pool shined up through the crystal. She fell asleep on the sofa watching points of lights dance across the walls.