Chapter 77: Doohicky (Patreon)

It was long theorized that extradimensional spaces, also known as pocket realms, could be created using the power of the Fonts. The Fonts, after all, where used by the gods to create the Realm as we know it and the Illusian races had full access to these tools of arcane might. The primary difference, in this context at least, between the gods and men was simply a matter of scale.

-Pocket Realms, From Theory to Fact

—

Kole hadn’t thought it possible for Amara to look any more distressed than she had been at the mention of Kalkin, but when Tallen revealed he had never heard of her mentor Donglefore, Kole thought she would pass out right then and there.

“Are you okay?” Tallen asked Amara with genuine concern.

“PROFESSOR DONGLEFORE!” she shouted in a mix of excitement and outrage once she recovered her voice.

“Uh…” Tallen stammered and looked around the room for aid.

Professor Shalia was intent on her writing, but Kole could tell she was laughing and her friend’s discomfort.

“He probably didn’t want to inconvenience the professor,” Kole said, jumping in to aid the other mage. “A project like this could distract him from the important work he’s doing.”

“Yes! That. Exactly,” Tallen said, quickly, grabbing the lifeline.

Amara’s outrage faded, as she bought the weak excuse.

“Oh no!” She insisted. “He would be delighted to work on a project such as this, especially with—“

“A good friend of the chancellor,” Kole cut in before Amara revealed the secret of Tallen’s identity in front of Doug and Runt—though after spending months with Doug in the dungeon, Kole thought the ranger could be trusted with the secret.

Tallen gave Kole a nod of thanks, and Amara put her hand over her mouth.

“Yes, that.” She said, unconsciously mimicking Tallen’s own response to Kole’s help.

God’s, these two… Kole thought, shaking his head.

Tallen and Amara then began to discuss the details of his designs, and the pair became blind to the rest of the room.

“Mage Tallen,” Kole said, interrupting.

Tallen looked up to Kole.

“Yes?”

“Can we discuss my magic?” Kole asked.

He’d discussed Doug and Rakin’s issues only, forgetting Kole, Runt, and Zale completely.

“Oh! Sorry! Of course,” Tallen said then turned to Runt. “Runt, keep working on your vault. If you don’t create it by the end of the semester break, we will start private tutoring sessions.”

The face of disgust Runt gave at the threat of extended time with the scatterbrained mage proved the lie to her words about liking nerds.

Kole quickly gave Tallen a summary of his progress over the sea voyage and showed him the spells he had created. Tallen seemed the most interested in hearing about Amara’s runes, but Kole managed to steer the conversation away from runes.

“This is good work,” Tallen said, examining the spellform for Kole newest Shield.

Kole beamed at the praise and listened intently as Tallen gave him some pointers on where to go next.

“How about Thunderwave?” Tallen asked, moving on.

A little embarrassed, Kole hesitated to answer.

“I haven’t really made any progress,” Kole finally admitted. “I think you were right in that I needed to start over, but progress has been slow.”

Tallen patted Kole on the back reassuringly.

“Don’t worry, your progress is impressive, but I would try to diversify your study more. The mind grows dull if it wears away at the same task for too long. Why don’t you work on Thunderwave here with Zale today?”

Kole left the two socially inept geniuses to their rune discussion began to work on pathing Thunderwave as Zale tried to detect his connection to the Font.

***

Kole lost himself in his pathing, putting his mind fully into his vault as he watched the path of his spell as it left his mind to traverse the Arcane Realm. By the time Zale poked him to get him out of his trance, he was feeling good about his ability to create the spell.

“Where’d everyone go?” Kole asked Zale, realizing they were alone.

“They all had to go catch up on their school work after being away so long—except Amara who went off to introduce Uncle Tal to Donglefore,” Zale answered, then smiled. “I’d want to see the three of them in a room if I didn’t think that room would become a death trap.”

“Flood,” Kole cursed. “I forgot about homework.”

He tried to recall what he had to do. He had to write about some plant harvesting nonsense and start to develop an offset gate spellform by Tuesday, but couldn’t remember what the history assignment had been.

“Don’t forget the history quiz,” Zale corrected.

Kole let out a groan. He had forgotten about the history quiz.

***

Kole and Zale ate on Zale’s coin.

Or is it on the school? Kole wondered though he wasn’t going to ask. He decided that, much like how one shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, it was also inadvisable to ask how much it cost.

After they ate, they went to the library to study. Kole decided to get the alchemy assignment out of the way first, otherwise he was likely to put the whole thing off until it was too late.

“You know,” Zale said, as Kole grumbled, “For someone who literally lives in the library, you’re a terrible student.”

Kole looked around nervously at her comment, but everyone around them was intent on their own studies.

“Oh relax, no one can hear us.”

“Wait, really?” Kole asked looking around. He could hear people walking around and talking to the library at the desk.

“Yeah, there’s sound wards around each table. They default to being one way but you can switch them off entirely or block sound going in and out.”

Zale pointed to the rune inscribed into the floor around the table. Kole had noticed them but taken them to be decorations if he’d noticed them at all.

Kole pulled out his notebook turned spellbook turned notebook again and began to think out his essay for alchemy. As he began to write about the finer points of harvesting plants, and once more he found the words flowing easily. Not only could he recall the details of every lecture and book he’d read on the topic as needed, the nib made the physical act of writing far simpler. He was writing so fast—with minimal pauses to dip his nib and no stopping to look anything up—that his hand began to cramp after only five minutes.

“Ow,” he said, clasping his hand and pausing his writing.

He noticed then that Zale was staring at him, shaking her head slightly.

"That's just not fair. You hardly pay attention in class and then can just remember it all perfectly when you do the homework."

“What? Do you think this is cheating?” he asked sheepishly.

“I don’t know… probably not,” Zale answered after some thought. “Ensouled artifacts are kinda exceptions to all the rules. If it were a sword or something, you’d be able to use it in the dungeon—though not in training against other students. It’s weird that it’s a book, but I don’t see why that should stop you from using it.”

“Probably not isn’t exactly reassuring. I’d rather write the essay the old-fashioned way than risk getting kicked out.”

“No one’s going to get kicked out without it running through mom’s desk—well, Kelina’s desk, her assistant who does all the actually running of the school. She’s a bit of a fan of creative cheating—which I don’t think this is—so you’ll probably be fine.”

Slightly reassured, Kole went back to work and was done with the mind-numbingly dull essay on harvesting mildly useful alchemical reagents.

After that was done, he asked the librarian for the location of books on offset gates and began to read. The topic was surprisingly interesting to Kole, despite the fact the knowledge served him no practical use. While he’d had no love for spellform theory back home, and only pursued it to achieve his goals, once he’d come to the Academy and started to see tangible and rapid results, he found he actually enjoyed it.

I guess people like what they are good at, he mused.

He read through the books, not bothering to take notes as he would normally to help cement the knowledge in his mind and finished much faster than he expected.

Then, he pulled out his spellbook and got to work. The assignment wasn’t actually that hard. All he had to do was start to plan out the spell, using the general frameworks he’d just read about. He’d already had experience creating paths for Thunderwave, and an offset gate required a similar mindset. Navigating the Arcane Realm required some extra-dimensional thought and took a lot of work to get used to.

For traditional wizards, before the invention of spellforms, they would write down spells as a series step of instructions on how to form each component of the spell effect. It was a laborious process full of odd words made up for the task, but manageable. Before common gateways to fixed locations in the Arcane Realm had been discovered, wizards would take on apprentices with similar arcane affinities to their own, which meant their bridges opened up to similar locations in the Arcane Realm and their paths could be shared to some degree. If two wizards with different affinities wanted to share spells, they’d have to copy over the spell effect, and path out the spell themselves—a process Kole was currently struggling through.

The path components, even for wizards of identical affinities were far more difficult to capture in something as mundane as language. To do so with the path components took ten times the amount of words to explain and took proportionally longer to master than the spell effect.

When gates were discovered—shareable landmarks in the Arcane Realm wizards could open their bridges to and thus share identical spells—they proved equally as complex as paths. Why spells could not be passed directly, the process took weeks or months for master wizards and years for apprentices. It wasn’t until spellforms were invented as vessels to store the complete pattern of a spell that gates really caught on and revolutionized wizardry—just in time for the world to flood and all that knowledge to be hoarded by the surviving wizards.

All this was to say that most wizards—especially those at Kole’s age—had little experience actually building spellforms, since they were so easy to come by. Why spend hours tweaking a spell when you could spend half an hour learning a new one? Kole had spent years studying every detail of the spells he could find to rebuild them, learning the intricacies of their construction. And now, with his developing understanding of the mind-bending layout of the Arcane Realm, this would be easy—even if the end result would be useless for him personally.

“I have to go,” Zale said to Kole, interrupting his work on his offset gate spellform.

“Already?” Kole asked, disappointed.

Zale sighed.

“We’ve been here four hours and you haven’t said a word for the last two.”

“No, we were just talking about… uh… arcane permeability?”

“No. You were mumbling about it under your breath as you wrote.”

Kole gave an embarrassed smile. He hadn’t realized he’d gotten so sucked into the work.

I need to try to sneak into Professor Lonin’s classes, He considered, but then thought better of it. No that didn’t work out well last time. Maybe I could audit.

“Well, it is a frustrating variable.”

Zale rolled her eyes but smiled.

“I’m sorry, I have plans with Harold.”

“Oh… okay. Bye, I guess.” Kole said, disappointed.

“Don’t be like that, I could have left and you wouldn’t have even noticed.”

“It’s not that!” Kole quickly corrected, feeling the need to explain his disappointment away with a lie. “I was just hoping to get another free me.”

Why did I say that?! He screamed internally. He’d just made a point of not bringing up the mooching of meals, and now he’d just blurted it out when hadn’t even really been thinking about it.

Despite Kole’s internal horror, Zale laughed.

“Oh, you’ll be fine. I’ll treat you tomorrow. Use Amara’s doohicky to tell everyone to meet for breakfast tomorrow. It’s about time we used them for something.”

“Doohicky?”

“Yeah,” Zale said, ignoring Kole. “See you then!”

And then she left. She’d packed up her stuff before getting Kole’s attention, and now alone Kole decided to head to his room. The oatmeal the jug produced wasn’t terrible, but he’d been meaning to pick up some nuts and dried fruit to mix in some variety.

“The rat will probably just steal that too,” Kole grumbled to himself. “Stupid time traveling rats.

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The chapter order for the next three chapters is not correct by post time. Click here for Chapter 78