Magic is Programming

Trinlen whistled a jaunty tune as he casually sauntered along the street, walking at Carlos's left. Other pedestrians cleared out of their path without complaint as soon as they got a good look at the royal guard leading the way. Not that anyone around them knew that Lorvan was a royal guard. No, Lorvan and Ordens had their armor disguised as merely high-quality chainmail, not the majestic gleaming full-plate personal fortresses that they truly were; people still gave them a wide berth anyway. I don't blame them. That dude's got a scary scowl. Amber walked on Carlos's other side, and Ordens brought up the rear alongside Noralt, the stout musclebound adventurer. What did she call herself again, a metal juggernaut? Does she have full plate too that she's hiding somewhere?

"So, I've been wondering." Trinlen smiled cheerfully as Carlos looked at him. "Why'd you pick Dramos? Is it because…" He puffed out his chest and deepened his voice dramatically for a moment. "-the legendary Archmage Sandaras famously visited?"

Carlos laughed, and Amber blushed and hung her head. "Yeah, it was. We didn't know much else to base the decision on." Carlos chuckled again and smirked. "Have you asked Stelras about him yet? You should."

Trinlen raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"I shouldn't spoil it for you. Also, we've arrived." Carlos gestured toward the door ahead of them, which Lorvan was just then pushing open. A squad of city guards greeted them just inside, their leader briefly scanning with a specialized divination wand before he bowed and stood aside.

Trinlen eyed the divination wand curiously. Hmm. I only got a brief glimpse of its spell in action, but I think it reacted to Carlos differently from the rest of us. Checking for specific mana signatures of the people who are authorized to enter? He looked forward again, where Carlos was patiently holding his hand against a recessed square in the wall while several waves of mana swept over him in a much more thorough scan. Seems redundant. Then again, they don't want someone like me embarrassing them for being insufficiently paranoid. Or actual thieves breaking in, of course.

He watched with amusement as they went through a series of heavy doors, layer after layer of powerful wards peeling away, opening holes, or merely not reacting as they passed through. Then at the innermost door, Carlos instructed the royal guards to remain outside while the rest of them went in. Trinlen raised a quizzical eyebrow at Carlos, then shifted to Amber, as the door slammed shut behind them and all the locks re-engaged.

Carlos just stepped over to the right-hand wall to open a disguised panel, but Amber looked back at Trinlen and smiled. "Some house secrets are important for you to know, but not necessary for guarding us, and the Crown intends to respect our secrets."

"Ah." Trinlen nodded, then glanced at the fourth person in the room. "Is she secretly a mage teacher too, then?"

Amber shook her head. "No, Noralt is exactly what she seems. She is sworn to our house, however, and the secrets we're going to reveal here aren't that sensitive."

Carlos finished opening the small hidden safe in the wall, put the House Carlos plaque inside, and stood aside to clear the view of it. "Trinlen, take a look."

Trinlen focused his mana sense on the area first, unsurprised to feel some potent and dangerous wards revealed by the removal of the panel's concealment. He frowned. Behind those wards, he felt something strange but familiar. The aether inside that safe was much more orderly than usual, and there seemed to be hints of mana and even essence threaded through it. Where have I felt that before? Then he crouched to peer inside, and his first glimpse of a floating purple crystal snapped the memory into full clarity. "You have a dungeon core?! … Wait, and it's inside a vault? How did you move it here? Why isn't its domain pushing to expand? How did you prevent it from making that the most heavily-trapped cubic foot of space in existence?" He paused. "Did you somehow copy the Enchanters Guild's ritual for subduing a core, but without an item to attach it to?"

"We have not stolen or copied anything from the Enchanters Guild. As for the rest of your questions, I just asked politely." Carlos smiled and tipped his head towards the safe. "I mentioned we had another introduction for you, and here it is. Trinlen, meet Purple. Reach a hand into his domain, and he'll make a bond so you two can talk directly."

Trinlen cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. "You're not just trying to prank the prankster, are you? I know my reputation, but I haven't done any pranks to you yet to have earned payback. And using something this serious for a prank is bad form."

Carlos shook his head. "Not a prank, and incidentally, I'm glad to hear that you understand that some things are not appropriate for mischief."

Trinlen looked back and forth between Carlos and the dungeon core, then shrugged. Only one way to find out. He reached into the safe, pushing his hand through the temporarily disarmed wards, and watched closely as a tendril of essence and mana reached out from the dungeon core and attached to him. Then an unfamiliar voice spoke into his mind.

[Hello, Trinlen. As my friend Carlos said, my name is Purple. To answer your questions more fully: Carlos was able to move me because I willingly allowed him to. My domain is not pushing to expand because I know it would be pointless and wasteful, and I am content to stay here and develop in other ways until we are ready to move me to a more suitable location. For the same reasons, Carlos did not need to do anything to prevent me from trapping this spot. I am not subdued, by a ritual or otherwise. I am here by my own willing choice, because for the time being I need protection and this is the safest place for me.]

Trinlen blinked, then blinked again. Then he shook himself a blurted out, "You can talk!?" He paused for a moment. "Wait, wait, wait, dungeon cores are sapient? They can think, and understand language? Or… Wait, no." He looked at Carlos. "Did you make this one sapient somehow? Is that the house secret? And… why are you showing me something this major so soon?"

Carlos crossed his arms and glared reprovingly. "Why are you talking with me about Purple, instead of talking with Purple?"

Trinlen stared briefly, then turned back to face the safe and bowed his head. "My apology. That was rude of me and uncalled for." He sprang back up and smiled brightly. "So, um. My questions?"

He felt an impression of puzzlement before Purple's mental voice spoke again. [Huh. I can sense your sincerity, but I also sense doubt about your sincerity from Carlos and Amber.] Purple mentally shrugged. [I was already sapient when I first spawned, and could already think and understand logic. I learned language after I met Carlos; before then, I heard people speak, but understood no more than grunts. As for our reasons, the main ones are these: First, it gives you and us a way to communicate with each other over long distances. Second, my existence is already known to some potential enemies and will be announced by the Crown alongside the founding of our house, and many details of my capabilities will inevitably be impossible to conceal without forgoing most of their benefits. And finally, I am actually among the less sensitive secrets of House Carlos, for knowledge about me would be of little use to others.]

"Little use?" Trinlen gaped at Purple for a moment. "Are you seriously telling me that the knowledge that someone could just walk up to a dungeon core and wish for the core to go with them is not useful?"

[Have you already forgotten, Trinlen, while speaking with me, that I am sapient? Do you not know that a dungeon wish is compelled only by the threat of destruction and can be denied? That the process of communicating your wish to a core involves connecting your mind to the core so that it can sense your feelings and desires? I agreed to come with Carlos because he offered to help me, motivated purely by sympathy and kindness. How do you imagine a dungeon core would react when someone seeking to exploit it, with selfish ambition and greed clear to sense in their heart, demands that the core must abandon whatever resources it still has in order to place itself more thoroughly at the exploiter's mercy?]

Trinlen opened his mouth as if to talk, but then paused and closed it again. He tilted his head, chewed his lip, and stood in silent thought for several seconds. "Okay, fair point. I don't see an encounter like that going well for anyone. More likely to backfire, actually. They'd have to either destroy the core and give up all future use of the dungeon, or let the core learn that the threat was a bluff."

He shook his head, then clapped his hands together excitedly. "So, sapient friendly dungeon core. That offers so many wonderful possibilities! You can make perfect customized practice arenas! Enchant items without using the guild. Oh, oh, can you supply extra mana for people to use? Wait, could a dungeon learn to cast spells like a mage?" His eyes went wide in startled realization. "Ooooh, I get it. Dungeons can discover new keywords a thousand times easier, can't they? That's how Carlos and Amber can learn a spell from nothing but description, they have you do it for them!"

Carlos burst out laughing, and Amber joined him a moment later. When he finally got his amusement back under control, Carlos shook his head at Trinlen. "I can see why you might guess that, but no. You're right about us discovering keywords easily, but Purple is not how we do it." He took a deep breath and shook his head again. "Speaking of spellcasting, though, we're done with what we came to the vault for, and we should get started on lessons. Are you ready for that, or do you still need to prepare?"

Trinlen nodded slowly. "I take it the actual method is one of your more sensitive house secrets, then." He sighed. "Thinking about that is going to bug me. But anyway, I am ready to teach. Shall we go to the mayor's mansion for that?"

"Naturally." Carlos nodded.

Soon, they were settled into a cozy side room in the mansion, and Trinlen rubbed his hands together and launched into his semi-prepared introductory speech. "So, I've never really taught before, and you're looking to learn basically everything the Royal Mage Academy teaches, so I figure copying the order of topics the academy uses is a good way to organize this. First up, there's learning and casting a spell, followed by creating the four basic mage soul structures, but you've already done those. … Uh, you do have all four, right? The ones Sandaras wrote about in his book."

Amber smiled and nodded. "Of course we do."

"Right. After that, there's a lot of learning various specific spells and practicing with them. That was…" Trinlen winced in recollection. "Painfully tedious and slow to get through. Especially having to wait for the whole class to catch up on wrapping everyone's heads around the full and precise meaning of each spell when I was already toying around with it. Ugh. Anyway, you two don't need that part, right? It was all the kind of simple stuff your house secret can cover." He gave Carlos and Amber a brightly hopeful smile.

Carlos shared a look with Amber, then shrugged and turned back to Trinlen. "Yeah, we can probably skip that. Though I guarantee we'd get through it a lot faster than any academy class."

"Good. Next up, take a look at these partial spells." Trinlen handed them two sheets of paper with several lines of precisely written incantation script at the top and bottom of each sheet, leaving blank sections in the middle. "I believe you have already recognized that these sections are identically present in many different spells, yes?"

Carlos skimmed the papers briefly. One paper had everything but the effect keyword and its parameters for a simple one-shot spell, and the other had the same for a simple sustained spell. He sighed. "Okay, Trinlen, I understand why you chose this approach, and maybe I should have seen this coming, but I think our unique situation calls for a different approach. Rather than you running through the academy's course plan in sequence, let's start with us telling you about what we already have and what kinds of things we think we need, and then you figure out what parts of the academy's teachings will fill in the gaps."

Trinlen hesitated, nonplussed. "Uh. Sure, I suppose. So, what spellcasting knowledge do you have, then?"

Carlos waved the papers at him. "These partial spells that you have? We have learned each individual word that is in them. Even the semicolon." He spoke the punctuation mark's name as the syllable that incantations used for it. "We know the technical rules of what ways of arranging those words together are valid. We have soul structures for learning spells as sequences of those words, and for casting spells without the need for fully precise speech. We can discover incantation words easily, of any kind, and if we fail, we can be certain that it's because the word outright does not exist.

"We need to learn principles of how to assemble the incantation elements we know, and any new ones we may learn, into larger and more complex spells. We need to learn how to design our own complex spells, what mistakes to watch out for in doing so, and how to fix them. We need to learn what affects the power and efficiency of a spell, and how. We need to learn about other soul structures that are useful for spellcasting. We need to learn about strategies and tactics for how to best use spells. We need to learn what types of things spells are good at, and what they are not."

"Okay, I can help with all of that, I think." Trinlen got out a pencil and a small notebook. "Could you repeat that for me? I need to take some notes."

Amber cleared her throat and shook her head. "I'll list them for you later. For right now, the first thing we need to learn is everything that is relevant to choosing what soul structures to make."

Trinlen cocked his head. "Don't you already have 10 soul structures? You don't have room to make any more of them."

Amber shook her head. "There is a way for high-rank soul plans to gain more. It's one of the great secrets of the entire noble class; count it as part of our house secrets that you swore an oath to safeguard. We have learned it and achieved it, and now we need to know what new soul structures would best improve our spellcasting, what capabilities spells cannot provide but a soul structure could, and what soul structures would be pointlessly redundant with spells. After that, I think an overview of what the topics you can teach us about are would be best, and then we can discuss which topics to cover first. Do you need time to prepare for that?"

Trinlen frowned. "That is… a rather important secret. Hmm. Alright, this should be interesting. No need to prepare; I can just skip to the classes on advanced mage soul structures and go from there."