Magic is Programming

"What a dump!" Carlos stared at the... thing that was supposedly an inn in front of them. Haphazardly arranged clusters of boards covered two areas that presumably had once been windows, with dim light leaking between the boards. Scratches and overlapping graffiti covered most of the wall. Most of the drawings meant nothing in particular to him, but he spotted a crude sketch of someone in a robe throwing spiky balls at a pair of stick figures wielding daggers, presumably representing Sandaras and the two thieves he'd fought off here. A broken piece of wood leaned against the wall, and another lay flat on the ground, below gaps in the eaves with rough splintered edges. The sign bearing the building's name hung at a slant by one of its corners above the door, with a metal ring on another corner unattached to anything.

He might have thought the building abandoned, but dirt and mud with plenty of footprints encrusted the path in front of the door, and he'd seen someone enter it. Looking up at the second floor, the builders had apparently seen no need to make windows at all, though at least it was out of reach of most graffiti artists.

Amber just sighed and shook her head. "I don't even want to know what the inside looks like." She looked askance at Major Ordens beside her, whose face was twitching towards a smile despite her efforts to suppress it. "What? Go ahead, say it."

Ordens grinned brightly. "Of course, by your command, sir. We were told this was the cheapest inn in Dramos. It actually looks better than I was expecting."

"Ugggh." Amber groaned and raised a hand to her forehead. "There are inns even worse than this? How?"

Carlos chuckled. "I'd bet the food is even worse, and the outside looks so, uh, not completely atrocious because that's what they spend the money on that they save from buying such cheap swill."

Amber shook her head. "No bet. Let's just go. I want that... place out of my sight." She turned around and started walking without waiting for agreement.

Carlos took another look at the sign, hanging from its one attached corner, but couldn't figure out what it was supposed to show under all the graffiti and damage defacing it. He shrugged, and jogged briefly to catch up with Amber. They walked in companiable silence for a few minutes, Carlos following Amber's lead for where to go.

Carlos thought about that travesty of an inn as he walked, and eventually an idea came to him. "Hmm. Maybe we can put a good spin on this. You know, advertise it to people as seeing the depth of squalor that the legend began from."

Amber turned her head and blinked at him. "'Spin'? What?"

Colonel Lorvan answered her confusion. "An explained interpretation that aids the speaker's goals."

Carlos nodded. "Exactly. A way of describing that horrible place that might get people to feel eager and satisfied about seeing it, instead of disgusted and disappointed."

"Hmm." Amber tilted her head contemplatively as she continued walking. "I..." She shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe it might be different if you'd said that before, but I just can't get over the disappointment I felt when we got there. You can try it later if you want to, but I don't think I'll want anything to do with it."

"Fair enough. We're not in a good position for that kind of project yet anyway."

They walked a few more minutes in silence, Amber taking long purposeful strides and barely even glancing at the stores and other buildings they passed. Eventually, Carlos broke the silence. "So, where are we going?"

"Back to our inn. Today's been disappointing, and I want to finish it with something positive. Let's fix those inactive synergy links."

"Ah, ok." Carlos frowned briefly, and mentally reached for their telepathic bond. [Might be wise to not let our guards know details about those.]

Amber's stride hitched for a moment, but she smoothly resumed walking. [Good point. House secrets. Though on the topic of secrets, our ability to talk silently like this is another one.]

[Right.] Thinking of secrets, Carlos was reminded of a certain other secret related to their telepathic bond, one that he'd been ignoring all day, perhaps more than he should have. Tentatively, he directed his thoughts toward another recipient. [Purple? How are you doing?]

[Hmm? Oh. Safe is small. Wards limit mana flows. I careful to not disrupt wards. Gain mana slow, but is safe here. No delvers.]

[You don't mind that we haven't talked since yesterday?]

[Why would I mind?] Purple sent an impression of confusion.

Carlos thought about how best to reply. Any explanation in words he could think of just didn't seem adequate. Words weren't the only form of message this bond could carry, however. He thought back to some of the loneliest times in his life, when he had not only been alone, but had really wanted to have company to talk with, and had missed the presence of other people. He focused on that feeling of loneliness, of longing for social contact, and did his best to bundle that package of emotions into the bond with Purple.

Several seconds passed before Purple replied. [...I not feel that. I have never felt that. I am dungeon core. Alone is normal.]

[Hmm. Ok, but if you ever want to talk about something, don't hesitate to reach out to me.]

[Ok.]

Carlos faintly felt an impression of attention turning away from him, considered it for a moment, then mentally shrugged. Purple wasn't human. It was entirely possible, or maybe even should be expected, that social isolation simply was not a concern for the normally immobile sapient crystal. He should still try to be mindful about Purple's welfare, but just checking in and talking with him regularly evidently wasn't something to worry about. He focused his attention on just getting back to the inn quickly and without incident.

Back at the Adventurer's Haven, Carlos asked for dinner to be delivered to their suite, and went straight there with no other delay. Before he or Amber even said anything, Lorvan and Ordens both stopped outside the door and took up station on either side of it. Carlos paused and looked at them questioningly.

Lorvan bowed slightly. "We will guard your privacy for what you are about to do, sir."

"Ah. Very good. Continue." Carlos tried to present the calm, confident, and in charge attitude that he thought someone used to high rank and authority would have, and closed the door behind himself as he entered and walked over to the desk where he and Amber had left the notes Trinlen had given them. He stared at the stack of spell incantations, momentarily blanking on what information he actually needed, then set them aside and dug out his own notes on soul structure synergies instead.

"Right. So. Four links left to activate. Which one should we tackle first?" Carlos held out the notes to Amber.

Amber skimmed through the list of synergies, quickly finding and reading the four relevant entries. "They all have to do with learning new spells. And... Hmm. Two of them are for learning a spell from sensing it being cast, and I'm honestly not sure whether that's even possible. Maybe after we develop more?"

"We should at least try it now anyway. If it works, great, and if not, then we'll still be better able to judge the potential for it."

Amber shrugged. "Sure. Might as well see how it goes. That means we need to pick different spells to learn so we can each cast one that the other doesn't know yet. As for the other two links, I think we can do both of them at the same time. They're both synergies with the linker, for helping put a whole spell together, and we just need to focus on applying them appropriately while doing that."

"Right." Carlos paused as an idea occurred to him. Amber had a comprehension aid too, and it had already let her read English. She should be able to understand it spoken too, and it should confuse anyone who might conceivably be listening in. He switched to speaking English. "Focus more on the concept and overall structure of the spell, relying more on the reflex improver to get the right pieces, and hold in mind that a learned spell is actually a miniature structure of mana, so use the mana manipulator to help assemble it."

Amber blinked, and stared vacantly for a moment, before replying in English herself. "That your... That was your language, right? It ha- It. Is. Harder. Than I expected. To speak this way. I... think I'm getting used to it, though? Anyway, good idea to use this when talking about secret details like that. So, which spells should we learn while doing this? You pick first."

Carlos turned back to the desk, picked up the pile of papers there, and started leafing through it. "Hmm. No, no, maybe later, already learned - wait, we should separate those out - not that one... Ah! This one." He took one sheet of paper from the stack and handed the rest to Amber, after quickly flipping through to find and set aside the two sheets with the incantations for levitation and throw.

While Amber made her own selection, Carlos read the spell he'd chosen, and Trinlen's notes on what it would do. The "warmth" spell was intended to improve comfort in cold weather, supplying heat to a person's body as fast as the cold of the environment drained it. Somewhat confusingly, it used two different keywords that both translated to "heat" in English. One was for the effect, and specifically meant the verb definition of "heat", the act of making something hotter. The other was a parameter of that effect, and meant the quantity of thermal energy to add. Carlos considered that, and just as he decided that it would be better to change the translation of one of them, the parameter's name suddenly blurred and became "joules", the scientific unit of energy he was familiar with. Maybe he should try to actually learn the language natively sometime, so translation issues like that would stop happening. He shook his head. That was a project for later; he didn't have nearly enough free time right now.

The spell as written checked the body's temperature and calculated from that how much heat energy to add. According to the notes from talking with Trinlen, it could not be used to cool someone down, and while in theory an altered version of it could overheat someone, or even cook them alive if powered with enough mana, the victim's own mana would instinctively resist any such directly harmful effect. Any enemy powerful enough to be worth trying to cook like that would probably be easier to kill with other methods.

Carlos wondered if he might be able to bypass the restriction against using it for cooling the same way he'd made levitation push down instead of up, but he wasn't ready to investigate that bug properly yet. For now, the main focus needed to be developing their souls as much and as efficiently as possible, and that meant fixing those synergy links. He learned the new keywords for this spell easily. It was almost perfunctory, even, with them being just single words and the improvements in learning spells from the synergies they had already fixed the day before.

With that done, all that remained was to put all the pieces together, and to do it in the manner he'd just described. Really, "learning" a spell wasn't an accurate description of what the process actually involved. He was building a mana construct, an extremely miniaturized soul structure of sorts, that encoded the spell's instructions. If a spell was a program, he was writing that program as an executable file into the metaphorical hard drive of his soul. Carlos pushed and pulled at various parts of an amorphous blob of mana, forming the first few links to the tiny structures that encoded each individual word as he was used to doing, but then remembered there was another change to the process that he needed to make.

Carlos took a mental step back, and experimentally tried to focus on a whole line at once, loosening his conscious direct control of each single word's encoding. The encoding of that line formed easily on his first attempt. Too easily, he realized. The number of words in it was still well within his natural capacity for holding multiple things in mind at once, and he'd linked all of them with enough conscious focus still that there had been no room for his reflex improver to help. He'd read a piece of psychology trivia that the maximum number of separate pieces of information a person can actively hold in mind at the same time ranges from five to nine for most people, and he thought he probably needed to exceed that limit, focusing on a grouping that contained ten or more words, to give his reflex improver something to do.

He considered for a moment, shrugged, and decided he might as well jump to trying to do the entire incantation all at once. He knew, in the conventional intellectual sense, what the spell was supposed to do, and how the instruction sequence for it had to be arranged. He tried to hold that knowledge in mind without focusing on any specific part, and somewhat clumsily fumbled around with his efforts to shape the remaining blobby portions of the mana construct into the proper form. He shook his head; this wasn't quite right either. The details of each part did need to be there. He was just trying to offload and delegate the mental effort of specifying them.

He paused to consider. What other approaches could he try? Perhaps more to the point, what other approach would better match how his reflex improver worked? He rechecked his notes about their soul structures. It wasn't actually supposed to do things for him, but rather improve the speed, efficiency, and correctness of his actions. He tried focusing on one line for just the briefest instant he could, too little time to actually form the needed links, and took a moment to consider his impression of the result. Something definitely had happened. The mana had moved and changed shape, just not far enough, the change halted incomplete.

Carlos tried again, focusing his attention for just a little longer on encoding one line of the incantation into the partially formed mana construct, but still too short a time to actually finish it, and then quickly shifting his focus to the next line, and then the next. It was an exercise in rapidity, both in trying to finish something before his arbitrary time limit per line, and in correctly changing for each new line which links he was trying to form with the mana. Twice, he caught himself after a moment beginning to create a link to a word from the previous line.

He got to the end of the incantation and went back to the beginning, encouraged by a report from his introspector that his reflex improver actually was getting involved in this. With the second pass through, he allowed a little more time on each line, and the progress he'd already made in the first pass also left less work still to do, though a portion of that progress had decayed. Several links to appropriate encoded words formed fully at various places in the increasingly structured arrangement of mana, and he didn't notice any more mistakes. The third pass completed the entire spell, and he double checked with a fourth pass, comparing manually to the written incantation, before allowing it to enter his spells database.

The new spell settled into him, and he knew he could cast it. More importantly, his introspector gave him a series of alerts.

Synergy links activated:

spells linker and mana manipulator

spells linker and reflex improver

Active synergy links: 43 / 45

Overall mana absorption and development efficiency increased from 92% to 96%.

Carlos smiled, and looked up to find Amber. She was sitting in another chair, leaning forward on her elbows, staring at Carlos and waiting.

Seeing him meet her eyes, Amber sat up straight and grinned broadly. "Ah, you finished. You only took a few minutes longer than I did. Now we can try the last two!"