Edge Cases

98 - Book 2: Chapter 35: The Basics of Magic

"That's... a good thing, right?" Vex wasn't sure how to phrase his question, exactly, but Misa looked more tense than he would have expected for such a revelation.

"It's not that it going up is a problem," Misa said, but she looked frustrated anyway; her brows furrowing as she spoke. "It's that I don't know what's causing it to go up and down like this, and my my family relies on this. My whole village. It's linked directly to me, and I don't even get a notification when it happens."

"That means something happened to raise it, though," Vex said. "We know that, now. It's more than we knew before. We can figure out what we did... it's probably related to the magic, right?"

"Maybe," Misa grunted. She didn't look too much happier. "We'd have to keep testing. I don't know when this happened, so it could have been from something back in Teque."

"I may be able to fix the notification problem," Derivan said. Misa blinked once, turning her gaze to him and staring, and even Vex looked at Derivan in askance; the armor tilted his head slightly, as if he was confused by the stares being directed at him. "That is the purpose of Patch, is it not? Or it appears to be. Patch allows me to fix issues with the system. I do not know how to use it yet, but with enough practice..."

"Are you sure you can do that?" Misa asked.

"Not sure," Derivan admitted. "But it should be possible."

"We'd be able to change so much, if Patch is able to do what you think," Sev muttered out loud. He shook his head, looking contemplative. "It can't be that easy."

"It likely will not be. But I am willing to try."

"We should work on figuring out what Patch can do," Sev decided. "I mean, we were going to do that anyway, I guess, but we can put together some ideas. Figure out a way for you to train the stat. Maybe smaller problems you can fix?"

"At the moment, the stat appears to let me sense aspects of the system, and influence them in some small way," Derivan said. "But it is rather like wielding a hammer when a smaller tool would do a better job imprecise, and difficult to handle."

"So we need a small problem for you to handle?" Misa frowned. "We know the system has a dozen little errors in it, but..."

"Rather," Derivan said. "We need a problem that does not require an intricate solution; something I can hammer back into place, so to speak."

"I can't think of anything at the moment." Misa glanced around to everyone else. "You guys got anything?"

"We don't have a reference point for errors," Vex said. "The best we can do is wait for the next time an error shows up, and see what it looks like for Derivan."

"The good news is that at the rate we encounter errors, that shouldn't take long at all," Sev said, and a light scattering of chuckles broke the tension in the caravan.

"Any chance we'll encounter any with the next quest?" Misa asked. "You said it was a short one that we should do before we go to Elyra proper, right?"

"It should be a diversion of a couple of hours at most." Sev glanced at the paper he held in his hands, wincing a little bit. "It's another one of those quests a lot of adventurers don't pick up because it's too easy. Need to help someone pick some of her vegetables."

"And... Why do we need to help someone pick their vegetables, again?" Misa gave Sev a bemused stare. Sev shrugged.

"They're magic," he said. "Apparently they're kind of hard to harvest."

"You could've just said she needed help harvesting magical reagents."

"Calling them vegetables was funnier."

"He's got you there," Vex said, grinning a little bit, and Misa rolled her eyes.

"Of the four of us," she grumbled, "I would've expected you to care most about being accurate with terminology."

"I do!" Vex protested. Frustrated as she was, Misa still managed a slight smile at that, and the caravan lapsed into another small silence.

"Do you have a plan for discovering more glyphs?" Derivan asked after a moment passed Vex looked over at him.

"I'm not sure," the lizardkin answered honestly. "I was thinking I was just going to ask Anton for some of the basic ones through the glyph, the next time he... wait. That's right. We have another glyph." Vex's eyes gleamed, though inwardly he felt a little guilty for being so excited about this; the circumstances by which they had been given this glyph were, after all, far from ideal.

He took the glyph they were using to communicate out of his bag a little reverently. It was the only line of contact they had with Anton; Charise was still within the barrier, and Misa could chat with her mother through the system, though Charise informed her that the version of her within the barrier was quickly losing access to both the system itself and the skills offered by the system. It was only because she was in two places at once that she was unaffected the version of her in the new J'rokksur was still fully connected.

Charise was not, however, in contact with Anton and from what they'd been informed from both sides, Fendal and Teque had both been sealed off from one another. Anton was trying to find a way to work through that inner barrier, even now; he claimed that it would be an easier task than working through the outer one, for the nature of the barriers were different, though when pushed he wouldn't explain exactly why or how they were different.

All of which Vex was worried about.

But! Communication glyph! What could he find out from this?

"Is it costing you any mana to cast these new spells?" Sev asked curiously, and Vex blinked; he hadn't even thought about it.

"It does," he answered after a moment. The feeling of mana drain was all the same, even if the process was slightly different; in this case, he used [Splash of Mana], which drew mana out of him and into the glyph and then, as the spell was cast, there was a link formed between him and the spell that continued to consume his mana.

If he tried to paint or draw the glyph himself with something other than mana, they didn't activate and they didn't have a way to directly activate the rune Anton had given them, either. They'd tried, and he'd dismissed it as something he would learn with time; simply pouring mana into the rock didn't seem to work.

...Though, come to think of it, that was a rather distinct difference between how he used glyphs, and how the residents of Teque evidently used them. They almost exclusively drew their glyphs onto surfaces, and then channeled into them.

But there was another rather crucial difference there, wasn't there? Each time someone in Teque used a spell, they had a massive river of living mana above them to fuel it; the magic would flow down towards them as if called. Vex didn't have anything like that; if he drew a glyph without magic, the ambient mana simply didn't react.

Vex wondered what made this different, even as he Signed his own Sign of Research, and noted down the information as it poured into his head.

Glyph of Communication

A coalesced wish, born from a woman whose husband left for war; every day, she would write letters, yet no couriers came to her house to fetch them. When he came home, he read them all and cried.

This glyph allows the communication of thoughts and ideas across vast distances, after pairing with another glyph.

Another little snippet of history. Vex wondered what it was like for that woman, that her letters were considered a great work of art, to be remembered and preserved by the mana. He wondered if he would ever do something like that of his own, some day.

"Are you doing okay?" Misa asked him. A note of worry entered her voice. "That is a communications glyph, right?"

"It is," Vex answered, realizing how his silence must have looked. "Don't worry. I was just distracted."

"Learned something interesting?" Sev cocked a brow at him.

"Just that this glyph came from some letters someone wrote." Vex stared at the rock in his hands for a moment. The communication glyph appeared to be a series of looping letters, though closer inspection would reveal that those letters were not real letters at all, just a looping cursive made to imitate. It was nothing nearly so complex as a series of letters one might send their love. He wondered how the mana decided, exactly, what a glyph looked like. Or when a given work of art transformed into a glyph.

But there was something else that was a little more exciting.

Vex knew two glyphs now. General glyphs that could be combined with one another, if he understood what he'd learned from his Sign correctly, and it wouldn't even be all that complicated to combine these two the glyph for light was a relatively simple circle, surrounded on four points by a series of simple flames, and all Vex had to do was write the false script of the glyph for communication along the inner circle.

He wasn't sure how he knew that was the way to combine the glyphs, only that it made the most sense that way; the looping letters of Communication fit perfectly on the inside of the circle for Light, and Vex barely even realized that he was painting this with mana, not merely scribbling it in his notes.

His tongue stuck out the side of his mouth in concentration as he finished the last looping latter

mana flared. A yellow-green light erupted from the glyph, throwing the caravan's cabin into stark contrast and bathing all four of them in light; Vex flinched at first, and Misa reached out for her mace like she was expecting to have to block an explosion, but nothing further happened, and Misa slowly lowered her mace, although she still stared suspiciously at the rune.

"What was that?" she asked.

"I, uh... don't know." It had been, it occured to Vex, a little reckless of him to cast that spell in an enclosed space. Especially since he didn't know what it did. There was no reason to expect that anything bad would happen 'light' and 'communication' hardly spelled an explosion but still.

"Vex," Misa said, a touch of fond exasperation in her tone, and Vex squeaked.

"I'll be more careful next time!" he said. "I got excited."

And he was still excited, because he had another confirmed spell he could look at with his Sign, and he did, taking down his notes as he did so.

Glyph of Letterlight

A combination of the glyphs of Light and Communication, the glyph of Letterlight represents the desire to share meaning through the visual mediums of art.

This glyph is capable of one-way transmission of thoughts, concepts and ideas to any being that comes in contact with the light emitted from it.

Ah. That made sense.

Vex hadn't been particularly prepared for the spell, and so the only thought he'd put into it while the spell was casting was that he hoped it worked; the thought had been easy enough to dismiss, though each of the three others did admit they felt something along those lines when Vex had cast his spell.

"Lotta applications for that spell," Misa said with a low whistle when Vex described what it did. "As long as you can direct that light."

"It may be worth experimenting with," Derivan agreed.

"No slivers for that combination, though," Vex noted, looking a little bit worried. "What if I can't get any more?"

"You didn't give all your slivers to Noram, did you?" Misa asked.

"No," Vex said; he rummaged around in his tailpouch, trying to find the one sliver he'd kept for himself. "But I was hoping we'd be able to get more now that we know how magic works..."

He paused.

His fingers had brushed against the sliver in his tailpouch, and the system had responded.

[Unknown Shard] [Grade: Unknown]

Item description still processing.

"...The system recognizes the slivers, now," Vex said slowly, staring at the box. He didn't know how he felt about it. For some reason, he felt a strange, creeping dread.

"Does it tell you what it is?" Derivan asked.

"No. It says it's still processing." Vex fidgeted. "But this does mean that the system is actively studying the slivers... I'm worried about what will happen when it's done."

"Next time Anton contacts us," Misa suggested. "You should ask about glyphs for making this trip faster. Just in case."

"Was there any change in integrity?" Vex asked. The half-orc glanced at her status and sighed.

"Too small for now, if there was anything," she said. "But let me know the next time you work on this magic, and I'll keep an eye on it."

Vex nodded. "I need to know what other base glyphs there are," he said, his tone complative. He was always excited about new magic, of course, but this was something new, and here he was just starting to get a glimpse at it...

He wanted to learn more.

And it would help him with his family in Elyra, too, he hoped.