Instead of running off to another world planning to search an entire country for a single individual, we stayed on Earth #1. I didn’t even know what I would say to Zentha Qitris if I found her anyway. A few frames of video weren’t enough to determine where she was staying inside a building. At least, not in a parallel world. If we had full access to everything in Earth #2, maybe Calculator could figure something out- though most of his work had a lot to do with familiarity with New Bay in particular. All we really had was an image of someone in a traditional building.
Master Uvithar had told me not to contact him with Sending. Nobody had said the same about Zentha Qitris… maybe because we’d never met. She wasn’t even in the same world as the people I expected to be a problem, and furthermore there was one important detail. I was tired of not learning anything so I had to at least try.
It was time to cast Sending. “This is Turlough, former student of Master Uvithar. I can guarantee I’m not working with whoever you’re hiding from. I want some answers.”
For the sake of making it more probable that she actually received a cross-dimensional Sending, Midnight sent one too. If we were going to get a response, it should come within thirty minutes. The time came and went without anything, during which we recovered slightly more than half the mana spent.
“We can keep spending mana on this,” I said. “But if she’s blocking them, it might take a lot. Or maybe we have to put together a more powerful message somehow, like we did with Scrying. However, if she’s trying that hard to not be contacted, she’d probably just not respond. We need something more that demands a response, but I have no idea what to say.”
“Me neither,” Midnight admitted. “Izzy’s met her, though.”
“Briefly,” I clarified. “For business. They weren’t close friends or anything.” I pondered for a few moments. “Maybe in future messages we should tell her she would be safe here on Earth #1.”
“I don’t know if she’d understand which was #1.”
“Just here, then,” I emphasized. “But I don’t want to spend all our effort on that just yet. Before we try next, I want to have some plan to enhance things. And this is just one of the mysteries on our plate.”
“Are there many others?” Midnight asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Like, what is Flasher up to? What’s up with material components anyway? How did Zeb actually manage to attract squirrel #1?”
“You mean Douglas?”
“Yeah. Her.”
“Dumb luck and persistence, I think,” Midnight said. “Though it kind of is her entire class.”
I nodded. “She was so good with the big things and so bad with squirrels.”
“Totally. So about material components and stuff… do we even have any spells with unresolved ones? We’re pretty sure Contingency is near optimal now, right? And we’ve had Stoneskin covered since early on.”
“What those components were was never in question,” I said. “Just whether we could get some of them. The real question I have is why. Why components… at all? Why those spells? How did people figure that out? It’s written down in the textbooks, but they haven’t just always existed. They were written down by someone at some point, edited, and copied.”
“Well… the spells just don’t work without them, right? So people picked some spells and had to experiment.”
“Right,” I said. “Oh, and there is another one. Scrying. Though we tend to call things that aren’t consumed a ‘focus’. Contingency has both.”
“What makes that one so special?”
“Long term temporal extension of short term effects seems to be the biggest part,” I commented. “Even inactive, it’s essentially extending some spells ten or a hundred times, sometimes more than that.”
“That’s fair. Then hear me out. What makes Stoneskin so different from Energy Ward, that it needs them to be functional?”
“... Diversity?” I asked. “It kind of works against all forms of kinetic impact, which is less specific.”
“It’s also higher level,” Midnight pointed out.
“Maybe it’s further removed from magical context so it’s more difficult,” I suggested.
After we discussed for a while, we came to a conclusion we’d touched on previously. Maybe there could be other things that could use material components. Certainly, it was worth ruling out.
“So it comes back to figuring out what they are,” I said. “I have some spare mana and Advanced Divination Magic, so…” I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll try it.”
“Do you need a mirror?” he asked. “To see things in.”
“That’s not necessary for… many things,” I said. Though I hadn’t used many other forms of Divination, had I? Mostly Arcane Sight and Locate Object, before it all became one specialization or whatever I should call it. “But I kind of want to get… a picture? I should get one of those compact mirrors for convenience.”
The surface of my phone when the display was off would kinda work, but that didn’t sound super reliable. But I didn’t have a compact mirror, so it was off to the Scrying orb. Literally nobody else could use it anyway, so it wasn’t like I would be interrupting anything.
Except I was wrong. Bolster was there. She looked over as the door opened, just nodding before turning back to whatever villain she was trying to track. The image didn’t last that long before fading out.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “Also, congratulations. You’ve learned a very useful new spell.” She’d been having some trouble with that, previously. Mostly because it was near the edge of her fatigue limit. Then again, all of the Portal Squad was surpassing in level where I was when I first came to this world. I’d been pretty behind, but that was still good for a few months.
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“It was about done anyway,” she said. “Do you need this?”
“We can wait until you’re done.”
Bolster shrugged. “I think you’re overestimating my mana capacity. I’ve barely got two castings in me. Speaking of which, now I get to go push myself to the very edge of mana exhaustion for training. Thanks for recommending that one, by the way. I love feeling like I’m about to pass out.”
I had a feeling she was being sarcastic. “Do you want to learn the method where crystals build up inside your blood vessels?”
She made a face. “That sounds terrifying. I’ll pass.”
Thus, we were left with the ‘Scrying orb’. Which hopefully also worked for other divinations.
“Well,” I said. “Any reason not to start at the top?”
Midnight pondered for a moment. “I don’t think so.”
“Then we’ll do that.” I made certain the recording swapped over to the next file so that I didn’t get piles of newt eyes mixed in with a villain survey. I made note that we needed something to let people know if the room was in use to not mess up the recordings as well. “Come on magic cube, show me some material components for Storage.”
How much mana should I use? I literally had no idea. I gathered a double handful- about what I would use for Scrying- and just let it flow out of me into the idea I had. If I stuffed too much it might turn into a different spell or just fail.
My instincts settled on 8 as the last points of mana reabsorbed slowly back into me. There were barely any swirling mists of uncertainty before I saw an image of myself using Storage. It didn’t look like much- there was something roundish in my hand, and then there was not. Then an apple appeared in my hand. That repeated several times before everything faded.
“Oh great,” I said. “I guess having a demonstration of a spell isn’t that bad but… that’s pretty expensive. And without the mana flow, it’s kind of useless. I could just cast the spell myself.”
“What were you focused on?” Midnight asked.
“I was focused on the Storage spell and material components,” I said. “Maybe I was thinking about the things that go into Storage and not… the other way things could go into it?” My words even confused myself. “I’ll try something else. Material components for Firebolt, I guess.”
That was the second one. I concentrated, gathering a bit more mana just in case I needed it to get something like what I wanted. However, I instinctually hit the limit at 8 again. So there was some actual spell here that I was tapping into, probably. If I were to name the spell it would be… Display Magic.
Which wasn’t getting me any idea about material components at all. I literally just saw fire gathering in my hand and forming into a Firebolt and setting some target dummy on fire. It was just me using the spell. “Well, this isn’t particularly productive,” I admitted to Midnight. “You wanna try?”
“Sure,” he said. At least he could get experience from trying things out that didn’t have to do with combat.
The next spell was Shocking Grasp, and it showed him using the spell… around his tail. Little zaps of electricity were the distinguishing factor there before he tapped the leg of a target dummy with it.
“... Huh.”
That was all the response I had.
“I wasn’t thinking about using it with my tail,” Midnight said, confused. “I don’t think I’d ever considered it. Doesn’t it have to be used through your hand?”
“Well,” I shrugged. “It can be a whole body thing. It’s just touch, right? And I use it on my staff sometimes.”
“Right,” Midnight said. “I forgot about that. Do you think my tail is… better?”
“For you?” I shrugged. “Keeps your paws on the ground. Depends on if you can hit people with it. Do you think this spell is showing us a better way to cast other spells?”
“I don’t know if that makes sense,” Midnight admitted. “But it could. I guess next is… Grease. I’ll give it one more try to see if we can learn something.”
Midnight once again appeared in the image, though his body didn’t particularly do much until he cast the Grease spell. Then some generic figure walked onto the grease on the undefined floor, slipping and falling.
“Yep, that’s the Grease spell alright,” Midnight said. “I think we’re done here, unless we want to spend another 8 or 16 mana.”
A shame. I wanted some answers, but I didn’t even get useful questions.
-----
Normally, questions went to Calculator. However, Calculator was a busy man and he didn’t need to do more thinking about something that was so obviously useless. Midnight and I did know someone who might appreciate a break to think about stuff, though. Also, she was surprisingly helpful with magic.
We caught Great Girl coming back from a patrol. She went straight to one of the break rooms, just shrinking down into a chair- quite literally. She wasn’t as concerned about looking tall when she was buried in cushions.
“Hey,” I said. “Wanna watch some videos of magic.”
“Anything new?” she asked as she accepted my outstretched phone. “... Were you filming in a void or something? This isn’t one of the training rooms.”
“This is one of the angles on the Scrying orb,” I commented. It didn’t show anything revelatory from a different direction, so I’d just picked one of the video files.
“So you have a thing that shows you… performing magic.” She looked up. “Is that it?”
I shrugged. “It was supposed to help me figure out material components. But this was all it did. I was wondering if you could discover its purpose.”
“Is it cheaper than just casting the spells? Could be for teaching.”
I frowned. “Master Uvithar just cast the spells. So we could feel the flow of mana.” Not that I had the points to learn most things, and spells usually just worked anyway. “Also, it’s not cheaper than most things. It’s 8 mana.”
“Oof. I was thinking it should be a cantrip. Certainly not much more. Uh…” She continued to look at the video as she lazed about in the cushions. “This Firebolt is flashier.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It goes ‘whoosh’ before the real spell begins,” she said, backing up the video. “See?”
“Does it not normally do that?” I couldn’t exactly cast Firebolt in a break room.
“I don’t think so,” Great Girl said. “Though I haven’t been in squads with you using that frequently enough to be sure. Usually you don’t have a lot of extra effects, though. Oooh, tail magic. Cool.” So she’d gotten to Shocking Grasp. “Is that better?”
We repeated our earlier discussion. Maybe it would be, but that didn’t seem like the point, if there was one. Assuming a semi-spell I pulled out of Advanced Divination Magic actually had meaning might be the issue here.
“It’s like a cartoon,” Great Girl said as the non-figure slipped on the Grease spell. “It’s so exaggerated.”
“I don’t know if a spell that shows an exaggerated version of something else is… practical,” I said cautiously.
“Did you try actually displaying a spell?” Great Girl asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, your intent was to get something related to material components. None of these spells have any, do they? But more importantly, you didn’t try to do the thing that got these results. So if you tried to display a spell with your Divination magic, do you get this?”
“Hmm. Got a mirror?”
