Demesne 86 - Experimental Preparation and Contextual Exposition (Patreon)

"Did your parents really give you advice for getting women to go to bed with you?" Rian asked later when they were alone.

"I was being facetious," Lori said as she carefully held the box of glassware on her lap. It was padded, but there was no sense taking chances. "None of the advice they gave me would have worked for you." She paused, considered her words, then amended them. "Little of the advice they gave me would have worked for you. I doubt you would look attractively arousing in a skirt that showed off your ankles, much less your calves."

"You've obviously never seen my legs," Rian said as he operated the tiller. He actually sounded serious. "How old were you when that happened? Because otherwise I'm going to have nightmares about you being given that advice at eight years old or something."

"It was when I started attending school to learn Whispering," Lori said. She sighed. Really, her parents had told her to devote all her time to studying to the unreasonable exclusion of all else with one breath, and encouraging her to charm boys and girls with the other. It hadn't been helpful at all. Quite the opposite. "Why? Do you need more advice on how to get women into your bed?"

"I think we can both agree it will scar my mind to hear it and reopen terrible wounds for you to remember it," Rian said. "So, how about we compromise and just never speak of it again?"

Lori considered. "I will consider it"

Lori's Boat moved lightly over the water. With just the two of them, the occasional waves and swells of the river seemed to affect the boat more. The front was certainly bobbing up and down a lot more than Lori was used to.

"You might want to slow down the boat," Rian said. "We're almost at the edge."

And so they were. Approaching them was the edge of the demesne, the curving line that marked the literal sphere of her influence. Beyond it were the glittering colors of death, shining in a multitude of shades and hues, twinkling like stars as they moved, as the wind made the trees sway, sending shining dust falling from its leaves and branches.

Lori wanted to tell him to keep going, to beach the boat on the river's edge outside… but movement caught her eye. Beasts, somehow so still the layer of Iridescence on them had blended with the trees around them, at least until one had blinked right when she'd been looking at it. Even knowing where it was, it was disturbingly easy to lose sight of.

Rian seemed to have seen it was well. "We might have to clear a safe area before we can do anything," he said. "By which I mean you, of great and powerful Binder, wielder of great and powerful magic."

Lori rolled her eyes. "Shut up and beach the boat," she said, reducing the speed of the waterjets.

"Couldn't we just stay here in the river until all the beasts are dead?" Rian said, looking worried.

"If we did, the boat would be dragged along in the flood," Lori said.

Rian blinked. "What flood?"

"The flood I'm about to cause."

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She caused a flood.

To be more precise, it wasn't exactly a flood. She claimed the waterwisps in the river, bound it to increase its viscosity and so it would stop flowing and start rising, made the water just short of boiling, and then threw it at the shore just outside of her demesne.

It was childishly satisfying to see all the Iridescence just… wash off of the trees, rocks and ground, revealing the admittedly muted tones and colors of what had been underneath. The beasts—there were surprisingly many of them—all let out cries of pain from the hot water and ran into the woods. A few stumbled into her demesne, but then started crying louder and stumbled their way back out again.

Rian lowered the spear he'd been holding. Lori wasn't sure what use he thought that would be, though she was glad he'd moved to stand between her and the beasts. "Well, that… worked? I think?" he said doubtfully. "Now what?"

Truthfully. Lori hadn't expected beasts. She'd thought they find a nice, cleared space to do their experiment, takes notes, and come back. She really should have known better. After all, hadn't they just come this way two days ago?

Not that she'd tell Rian that.

"Now, we clear a space where we can conduct the experiment without worrying about the beasts," Lori said.

"Please tell me by 'we', you mean 'you with me as a spectator'?" Rian said. "Because I don't think I have the tools to be of any help."

"Yes, yes, I'll do it," she said, rolling her eyes. "You just keep an eye out for beasts coming near."

"Right. I can do that. Though next time, I'm bringing a bow and arrows instead of this stupid stick. What was I thinking?"

"I could not possibly comment as to your private thought processes."

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She cleared a space.

It was more complicated and time-consuming than it sounded. The banks of the river were thick with growths of ropeweed, while behind them loomed tall, ancient-looking trees whose branches constantly dropped a rain of fine Iridescence dust from the small beasts and bugs that lived among their branches.

They wouldn't need to cut any trees, only a small patch among the ropeweed that they could comfortably stand in to conduct the experiments. Lori was glad of that. She wasn't quite sure how she'd move that much wood outside her demesne, especially with beasts nearby.

She'd cut the reeds along a stretch of the river at the border of her demesne with a narrow, powerful stream of water from the river, moving in a swift, cohesive line that punched through any matter in its way. Plays and stories made a big deal about bolts of lightning and fiery explosions, but that was only when a Whisperer didn't have any water nearby.

"Rian, what are you doing?" she said as she watched Rian start bundling the fallen ropeweed together.

"Not being wasteful," he said. "We need this stuff for rope and weaving! It grows fast, but we need every bit we can get."

"You realize there are beasts about, don't you?"

"You realize that if we build a boat, we're going to need a lot of rope for it?" Rian shot back. "Just keep the beasts off my back while I do it, it won't take long."

It took a while, and by the time Rian was done, their previously empty boat was half-full of ropeweed, which was extending over the front and back. Lori had to drive off beasts several times with arcs of hot water and steam from the river, and once Rian had to run back inside her demesne while she decapitated a beast that charged towards them on its two thick, heavy legs. While not one of the fast, sharp-toothed predators, its huge size and long tail meant it had still deal with it.

Draining the blood and encasing it in ice also took a while. They'd float it back with them to add to the food supply.

Eventually, however, Lori lost her patience and told Rian to leave the rest of the ropeweed be so she could get on with her experiment. She'd raised a flat-topped finger of stone to act as a convenient table for her, and used earthwisps to push it along the ground past the border of her demesne, about the length of her foot from the edge. She didn't need it to be far, only outside her demesne.

"Can you talk me through what you're doing?" Rian said, holding a plank of wood in one hand, and a slender branch the length of a hand and about a finger thick in the other. One end of the branch had been whittled to a rough point, and then set on fire to create a rudimentary writing implement. "For the record?"

Lori looked up from where she had opened the padded box of glassware on another stop finger she'd raised to act as another table. It was well inside the demesne, in case another beast became curious and overcame its discomfort at losing the iridescence within it and got too close. "I'm going to see if I can use my blood to imbue water."

Rian nodded, and wrote that down. "Great. Now, would you please have mercy on an ignorant, uneducated lord and give me the context for why and how you think this is going to work? So I can write it down for the benefit of future generations?"

Lori gave him an exasperated look. "Why? It would affect the results."

"But if you don't tell me, how will I understand how great and amazing and intelligent and full of genius the Dungeon Binder I serve is?" he said. His face was utterly innocent and guileless.

"You realize I know you're using base flattery, right?"

"So… you don’t want to explain to me how great and amazing and intelligent you are?"

"If tell you, will you stop with the ridiculous stage-performance baiting silliness?" she said, exasperated.

"Of course, your Bindership," he said. "You need only say so."

"So," she said.

Rian paused, tilted his head, and chuckled. "Good one."

Lori shook her head and picked out the glassware she was going to use. She closed the box, then put down her syringe case on top of it. filling the glassware with boiled water from her waterskin, she placed the syringe in it, and proceeded to make the water boil. "Whisperers," she explained as she watched the water bubble as it slowly turned into vapor, "manipulate the wisps in the world. We do this by taking in magic, passing the magic through parts of our body that contain the sort of wisps we want to manipulate, and then channeling the magic out of our body and into the wisps in question to bind them to our will."

Rian nodded. "All right, sounds simple enough."

"However, this poses certain difficulties," Lori said. "For example, let's say we want to bind the wisps in a pot of boiling water. We would have to touch the water in question."

"I've seen you control rock and water without touching them," Rian said.

"That is because we are a Dungeon Binder," Lori said. "We're different. To a Binder, the entire demesne is like their body. As long as it's inside the demesne, we are technically already touching it."

"But that's limited to inside a demesne," Rian said, nodding. "So outside, like in River's Fork, you need to actually touch something to use magic on it." He tilted his head. "Is that why you touched that rock to your eye when you made it light up? You need to pass light through your eye and even as I say it I realize why."

Huh. Once more she had to acknowledge her lord's intelligence. "Yes," she said. "Your eyes are where light passes through. Binding lightwisps uses the eyes. It's very inconvenient, really."

"What about the ears?"

Lori blinked at the nonsensical question. "What?"

"Your ears," Rian said, tugging at the flap of skin and soft bone in question. "Light sort of passes thought it right? Not like glass of water, but some light clearly passes through the other side if the light is bright enough."

Lori stared at him. "Don't get distracted," she eventually said, even as she was suddenly very conscious of minute amounts of lightwisps on the tips of her ears where they peeked out of her hair. "You were asking about the experiment."

"Right. A Whisperer needs to be touching something to bind the wisps in it, which is difficult if it's too hot, or something otherwise not safe to touch. A Dungeon Binder doesn't need to, because they're sort of already touching it already," he said. He frowned. "Wait, I've still seen you manipulate water without touching it even before you became a Dungeon Binder. So… there's another way."

Lori nodded. Was this what her teachers had felt like when she had, of course, immediately understood what they were trying to each? "Metal can conduct magic. It can act as a channel between a wizard and whatever they want to bind."

"The wires wrapped around your staff," Rian said instantly. "And the metal cap on it. It's not just to keep it from being damaged, it's so you can use your magi through it."

"Yes, yes, you're very smart and observant," she said. And he was, she supposed.

Rian's head turned to look towards Lori's Boat. "That's what the metal sticking out of the water jet is for! It's so you don't need to stick your hand into the water, just touch the wire!"

"Are you done?" she said.

He smiled nervously, clearly chagrined. "Sorry, teacher. Please keep teaching me?"

Lori rolled her eyes. "There are other factors, but those are the basics. A Whisperer needs to be touching something to bind and imbue it."

"Question," Rian said. "What is 'imbue'?"

"It's the process of feeding the wisps in the binding magic to be able to control them," Lori said impatiently.

"Fuel," Rian said, nodding. "Like adding firewood to a bonfire. You need to imbue, or the binding… doesn't work?"

"Say rather that the wisps immediately come unbound," Lori said. "Binding is in itself an act of imbuing, just as the act of grabbing something already puts pressure on it, but not as much as deliberately squeezing with all your might."

"Ah," Rian nodded, writing notes on his plank. Lori wondered if he was actually fitting everything in. "Thank you for clarifying. So binding would be like trying to start a fire, and imbuing is giving that fire something to burn."

"If that lets you understand it, then yes, I suppose that's close enough," Lori said. She glanced down and stopped boiling the water. "So, we have a problem."

Rian began writing again. "And this problem is?"

"Technically, we have two problems," Lori said. "The first is a means of powering the waterjet without me. I can imbue it with a considerable amount of magic, but that will still be a finite amount. If I'm not there to further imbue it, it will run out and the water jet becomes useless. Also, without me, the binding on the water jet is locked to the last thing it was set to do, meaning it will keep on trying to draw and thrust water, thereby consuming the magic it was imbued with."

"Question," Rian interrupted. "What happens if we take it out of the water so it's got nothing to draw and thrust?"

Lori blinked. She frowned, tilting her head. Finally, she shook it. "No, that won't work. It will just try to draw in the waterwisps in the air, and will still be using up energy at the same rate."

Rian sighed. "Well, it was worth asking," he said.

"It was," Lori agreed.

"Is there any way we can get the binding to… stop thrusting?"

"Yes," Lori said dryly. "It's called 'making a bound tool'. Something I still haven't managed to do."

"Ah," Rian said.

"I have thought about the problem, Rian," Lori said. "I don't actually like going to River's Fork so that I can be sure the waterjet doesn't run out of magic."

"Uh, you mentioned a second problem?" Rian said.

Lori nodded. "The second problem is the same as the first, but for a different kind of wisp. Binder Shanalorre asked for a way of providing air circulation so that the mine could be properly ventilated. That is an easy binding, but with a considerable problem."

"You can only imbue a finite amount of magic, and you can't make it stop to conserve power," Rian said.

"Exactly. It's the same problem. A limited power source used inefficiently."

"And… this thing we're about to test… it will solve that?"

"It should," Lori said, gingerly touching the syringe. A bit warm, but no longer boiling hot. "All that I've learned tells me it should work."

"Then… why are we testing it?"

Lori hesitated. She considered obfuscating. Lying. Ignoring the question.

Instead, she said, "I've never done this before."

"Ah," Rian said, nodding. "Good a reason as any. If the first step doesn't work, there's no second step to go to."

Lori began pulling her left arm out of the sleeve of her raincoat, exposing her skin there.

"Do you want me to take your coat?" Rian offered.

Lori hesitated, remembering the last time he'd made that offer. "Yes," she said, taking the coat off. "Put it on the boat."

As Rian turned to put her coat on the boat, Lori took the brass syringe, ascertained by the waterwisps in her body were her vein was, drew away the lightningwisps that conducted pain, took a breath to brace herself, and jabbed herself with the syringe to begin drawing blood.