Weekly Digest 58 - (#185 - #187) (Patreon)

Schedule Optimization

After her carefully considered and needful afternoon's mental recuperation session—she most definitely didn’t fall asleep!—Lori was feeling refreshed enough to go down to dinner and eat instead of just trying to force food down her throat in defiance of her lethargy so that she wouldn't be weak from hunger and become even MORE lethargic. Down that way was a vicious cycle after all.

"You're looking better," Rian commented, sniffling. Lori hoped he didn't come down with anything. Replacing him would be difficult. "Back to eating normally, I see."

"And you look sick," Lori said, resisting the urge to lean back as they ate. On either side of him, Umu and Mikon both had the closest to looks of disgust she'd ever seen on their faces as Rian wiped his nose with the towel around his shoulders. Lori had to wonder if he had washed that towel this morning, since—no, he probably hadn't washed it had he? And he was still using it as a scarf AND using it to wipe his nose, oh gross, gross, gross, GROSS!

"I'm fine," Rian said as Lori tried not to stare at the abominable towel. "It's perfectly normal for a nose to start dripping uncontrollably when it gets cold. It's your body telling you it hates you and will be trying to kill you by drowning until the situation improves. It'll be gone as soon as I warm up."

Lori stared at Rian, trying to figure out if he actually genuinely believed that, then averted her gaze because even that brought her eyes too close to the towel.

"Anyway, I've talked to the carpenters, who are making a spigot for you," he said. "For the third level. I figured people accidentally leaving it open and flooding the third level was a concern, so I asked the carpenters to make a spigot that would by default be shut if left alone."

That… would actually be useful. "If there's time, tell them to make a bulge at the intake end so I can more securely anchor it to the stone wall. If it's too late, threads of some sort of the surface that will let me anchor it will do."

"I'll tell them. Hopefully it won't be too late."

It was probably too late. "Also, tell them I need four more," Lori said. "I will be installing spigots for drinking water in the baths for ease of access. The water will have passed through the same purification process as the bath water. I assume the taste is gone?" Why had people been tasting bath water in the first place? "Why had people been tasting bath water in the first place?"

"Yes, it's faded. And I think it's because they were trying to see if they could drink it, because the drinking water in the basin was turning to slush and ice? Water's still flowing down to the laundry area, but in the basins it's been kind of freezing solid."

Lori nodded tiredly. "Well, either way, people will have a new source of drinking water that they can get somewhere warm."

"And the people, myself included, appreciate it," Rian said, nodding. "Shall I tell people to not go into a particular bath house tomorrow so you're not bothered?"

"After the spigots are ready," Lori said. "Tomorrow I'll continue working on the reservoir. Take the measurement as you said you would."

"Yes, your Bindership."

"Umu."

The weaver jerked up in surprise at being addressed. "Yes, your Bindership?"

"You have a choice: either teach Rian how to launder that towel around his face so he can do so every day, or do it for him. Either way, that towel is getting cleaned."

"Yes, your Bindership!"

"What's wrong with my towel?" Rian actually had the gall to say.

"It's disgusting," Lori said. Around him, Mikon and Umu both nodded. "How you can endure using that to dry yourself after a bath when you've dripped all over it, I have no idea."

"Well, it's not like I have anything else to use," Rian said, exasperated. "Would you rather I wipe my nose on my sleeve?"

"Yes. You don't have your sleeve wrapped around your face and breathe in through it."

"You know, when I started this job, you wouldn't have cared."

"Yes, well, you're too useful to lose now, and I refuse to let it be from easily avoidable sickness."

Really, he should take better care of himself. Didn't he realize how inconvenient it would be for her if anything happened to him?

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The next day, after breakfast and being assured by Umu that she'd brought Rian to the laundry area and taught him how to wash his own towel, Lori got to work. A part of her felt mildly uncomfortable at delaying expanding her demesne, but Rian had a point. If she was going to be useless for the rest of the day after doing so, best to make it the last thing she did before going to sleep. It would allow her to optimize her schedule by still managing to do substantive work before being rendered all but useless when she expanded her demesne.

The spigot presented to her by the carpenters had been surprisingly large. The thick wooden tube had clearly been shaped in the lathe, and unlike most spigots Lori was familiar with, it had no lever to turn, though it did have a hole on one side of the tube for the water to exit through. As Lori examined it, she realized its function. Inside the tube there was a round plug connected to a rod. When the rod was pushed, the plug would move, allowing water to flow around it and out through the hole of the spigot. When released, the pressure of the water would push the plug back into place, blocking off the water. A wide knob prevented the rod from being depressed too far, as well as giving a convenient surface to press on.

With the spigot in hand, Lori was able to get to work on providing water to the Dungeon farm. First she restored the bindings she deactivated the day before, allowing water to flow once more into the reservoir, where the water level had lowered noticeably. For her peace of mind, she would definitely need some kind of overflow control system for this if she wanted to leave the water running.

…

She'll have to remember to tell Rian to have the carpenters—and probably the smiths as well, in case this required parts better made by metal work—to make one for her.

Now, where was she? Ah, yes, water for the third level. It was relatively easy to form a pipe from the reservoir heading down to the Dungeon farm. Despite how deep the pit looked, when she used her awareness of her demesne's wisps to try to gain a better understanding of where it's bottom lay in comparison to the third level, she found that the reservoir's bottom was, by her estimate, about a pace or two above the floor of the third level. She hadn't really realized how deep she'd been digging. The floor of the second level was seven paces lower than the floor of the first level, and the floor of the third level was a further ten paces below that, or so she estimated.

No wonder her legs had started to ache from climbing the stairs.

Still, that wasn't a detriment. On the contrary, that depth meant there would be sufficient water pressure to force the water down without her having to make and bindings. All that was needed was for her to form the pipes. That was barely an effort. The process of using earthwisps to compact the stone and seal any gaps while forming a hollow tube through which water could flow was simple. The only real difficulty was the choice of starting the pipe from the reservoir and making its way down to the third level or the inverse. One couldn't simply make the pipes inside the stone without an opening to somewhere.

Lori decided to start at the third level so she could start with installing the new spigot and making sure the diameter of the pipe she made was about equal to the spigots opening. Too small, and there wouldn't be enough water, too big and the spigot would under a lot of pressure when closed, leading to leaks or even the spigot itself being pushed out of its mounting, which would lead to flooding as the reservoir drained into the third level.

…

On second thought, perhaps she should position the pipe's intake a little higher in the reservoir than she had initially planned, so the even in the event of such a failure, she wouldn't end up with a flooded farm.

Even with this modification to her intentions, the installation went off with no problems. Lori positioned the spigot in the wall next to the drainage cistern for the plots—she had, of course, been planning installing something like this from the very start! Of course. Of course…—and made a deep catch basin under it so that the runoff would be collected. One end of the basin was positioned so that the overly would be deposited into the drainage cistern.

She'd need to have Rian inform everyone that the spigot was NOT to be used to fill the drainage cistern. It was for drainage, after all. It probably should have been obvious, but unless it was made explicit some idiot would probably feel safe making excuses for whatever stupidity they did.

That done, she spent the rest of the morning making another boiling station, digging an alcove next to the reservoir, and forming the piping and bindings that would let the water be heated to above the temperature water boiled, yet be prevented for actually turning into steam. That way, the water didn't become distilled and develop a terrible base taste. A binding of firewisps would draw the heat out of the water as it was moved to another tank, and from there the water flowed to the bathhouses. There was no reason to separate the drinking water and the bath water, after all, and this way she didn't have to create a new set of piping to carry the drinking water.

It was the second tank that made the difference, since the water all already boiled in the water hub before being sent to the reservoir. Within that second tank, she bound lightwisps that were meant to shine brightly with unseen light.

While there were several kinds of unseen light in existence, not all of them had been taught with any relevancy in her classes, and thus she only learned of some of the most basic, the kinds emitted by the sun in addition to visible light. This unseen light was part of why her demesne's drink water was delivered by aqueduct instead of through pipes, allowing it to be exposed to the sun to cleanse it of dustlife contaminating it. However, with water from the reservoir, she had to provide that light herself with a binding.

Lori did so carefully, first binding the lightwisps in her eyes to allow her to see the unseen light, then carefully binding the lightwisps she had bound in the second tank to alter the light that shone from them, not looking directly at the lightwisps in question but on the stone around her, watching the reflections. To her eyes, the unseen she sought to produce shone light in and impossible shade of purple. Once she thought she had achieved the correct color, she briefly deactivated the bindings on her eyes. The world in her view flickered for a moment as it returned to being in only the colors she knew.

Satisfied, Lori immediately deactivated the binding of lightwisps. Exposure to unseen light could be dangerous on a body, causing abnormal and dangerous growths that only Deadspeaking could reliably deal with. Lori sealed the second tank first, and the first tank for that matter, before she activated the binding of lightwisps again, filling the inside of the tank with the invisible radiance. She activated the binding on her eyes once more, this time altering it to emphasize the dark unseen light in favor of the more normally visible light. Her vision darkened, and she carefully walked around the tank she had made, looking of any unseen light leaking out.

She patched a few spots where the material was apparently too thin, until there was no more to be seen. Only then did Lori breathe a sigh of relief and undo the binding on her eyes, letting her see clearly again. Ugh, she'd forgotten how nerve wracking and eye-water working with unseen light could be. Human eyes weren't meant to see unseen light, unless one had allowed a particularly adventurous Deadspeaker to have their way with you, and altering the lightwisps in her eyes to allow her to do so, instead of just amplifying visible light or magnifying it… well, it made her eyes itch. There was also the distinct possibility that unseen light could damage her eyes, which was why she hadn't looked directly at it and had kept the binding's intensity low until she had sealed it off from her.

Lori wondered what time it was. That was the problem with working inside her dungeon, she couldn't tell what time it was. She walked towards the dining hall, closing the passageway to the reservoir behind her.

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"Here's the measurement you want, Binder Lori," Rian said as he arrived at her table, handing her his plank of wood. It looked recently washed. "I'll report the rest to you later, it's my turn to get the food." He sounded far too cheerful for a man off to do a menial chore as he walked towards where they were handing out the bowls of food with Umu.

"That man is far too cheerful for someone off to do a menial chore," Lori muttered as she read over the measurement, ignoring the way Mikon was flirting with Riz and the latter seemed to be playing coy and hard to get. She frowned when she saw the plank read 'thirty-nine yustri'. Wait, thirty-nine? That couldn't be right! Had he measured that properly?

Grumbling, Lori decided to accept that for now, though she'd have to arrange a more accurate means of measuring the edge to Rian, in case the method he used was flawed. Shaking her head, Lori set the plank aside. She should probably write this all down, so she'd have a daily record. And maybe write down how she approached expanding the demesne that got those results. Ugh, that means either isolating a new stretch of wall to write on or trying to keep track of stone tablets. Maybe she should start writing on the floor, that was free space…

"Rian," Lori said when he finally appeared with the food, taking her bowl of soup from him, "I need a mechanism."

"You'll have to be more specific, that covers a lot of things," he said as he made the sure women had their own bowls first before he started eating. "What do you want it to do in particular? I'm assuming it's something that you can't magic for yourself? Or at least, don't want to magic for yourself?"

Lori waved a hand dismissively. "I need a mechanism to block the pipe that brings in water from the river one water reaches a certain point so that the reservoir doesn't overflow."

"Ah. That does sound serious," Rian nodded, taking a sip of soup. "How much water are we talking about here? Or did you just build it and don't know because you didn't feel like that sort of detail was important?"

"That detail wasn't important," Lori said. She supped her soup as well. Ah, nice and warm and tasty…

Rian sighed. "Well, no matter how much water it is, it will have to be some kind of float system. And it should be relatively easy for you to adjust the output after the fact, right?"

"Of course."

Rian nodded. "Can we use some of the copper and dragon scale, or would you prefer it be made of wood to preserve materials?"

"I'd prefer it be mostly made from wood, but if there is a component that is best made with metal, do so," Lori said.

"For the hinges maybe, since it means we can make it smaller," Rian muttered, the shook his head. "I'll tell them, though it won't be done as quickly as the spigots. We'll have to think about this one."

Lori nodded. "It's not completely pressing, but given how long we leave the reservoir unsupervised, I want something in place to prevent potential flooding. The alternative is an overflow runoff that that takes the excess water away, and I'd prefer not to add another pipe just for that."

"Yeah, the more pipes there are, the more likely they'll get forgotten in the event of a dragon," Rian agreed. "Don't worry, we'll get it done. Are you still on going through with your plans for the afternoon?"

Lori nodded. Given how paltry yesterday's growth had been, she needed to expand today. "I will begin after lunch." Once her stomach settled and she emptied herself, so that she wouldn't be distracted in the midst of expansion…

Rian nodded. "Can you… leave the hallway open, even if you lock the door? That way I don't have to worry that you can't hear me when I come get you for dinner?

Lori considered that, then sighed. "Fine," she said. Hearing him had been problematic, especially since she wasn't sure if he could hear her in turn.

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After lunch, she went up to her room and, after writing down how much the demesne had grown the last two times she expanded it, preparing herself, and setting up her corner again so she could nestle there, Lori began expanding her demesne a third time. It was as tiring as it had been before, but this time she could look forward to just going straight to sleep after dinner, which helped her persist in channeling, aligning and gathering wisps on the borders of her demesne for much longer as she sat with her eyes fixed on the palm of her hands, since closing her eyes soon became too tempting as her mind slowly tired.

After reaching to claim and expand her demesne, Lori barely managed to stay awake during dinner to force food down her throat, eating slowly in what she was able to recognize as a tired haze. When she was finished eating, she almost stumbled getting up and had to be assisted to get up to her room where she collapsed onto her bed and fell asleep.

When she woke up in the middle of the night, gagging as she almost vomited from the food in her stomach, Rian barely managed to help her sit up and get everything to flow back down to her stomach again. As she fell asleep sitting up with her pillow at her back while she leaned against her corner, a cup of water having cleansed her mouth of the burning acid taste of her stomach, Lori felt there was something strange about her room. Watching Rian sit on the floor on top of his bedroll, back against a wall and reading her almanac, she tried to figure out what it was.

She was still trying to understand what was so strange as sleep took her again.

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Lori and Rian Wake Up Together

When Dungeon Binder Lolilyuri woke up from restless dreams, she found that in her sleep she had not become a monstrous, verminous bug. This meant that a dragon hadn't descended upon her demesne in the night, which was always to be hoped for.

She didwonder why she had woken slumped upright, as if she had fallen asleep sitting up. Her neck ached from the position, familiar from years of sleeping in crowded dragon shelters where the only space to rest had been up against a wall. Lori straightened up, wincing as the movement brought more aches and pains caused by the position to her attention. Posterior, utterly numb; legs, stiff; back, aching. She had to shuffle a little before she could lean back and stretch, feeling her back popping into position again, then had to stop as the sudden change in position made heat rush to her posterior, and she lay back down on her side while she waited for it to start feeling better.

Ugh, she bet Deadspeakers didn't have to deal with this in the morning! They probably used their magic to fix it first thing when they woke up…

Lori lay there, staring sightlessly at the floor, and it took a while for her to realize she was looking at Rian curled up in his bedroll on the floor next to her table, his blanket half off, his hands inserted into the sleeves of his winter robe for some reason. It lay draped over him like he was wearing it backwards. On the table next to him were two wooden cups and a pitcher.

…

…what?

She looked towards her door, which was shut. Had she forgotten to seal it last night? She must have…

There was a thump, and the hem end of Rian's winter robe leapt up as he started kicking in his sleep. Ah. She'd forgotten that detail about his sleeping habits. She wondered how annoying the three found that habit. Then again, perhaps they all snored, and thus had no grounds to complain…

…

Wait. Rian wasn't supposed to be in her room.

That realization seemed to finally kick her mind properly awake, and she finally pushed herself up. Her posterior still tingled, but that faded as she began to move. Lori looked down at what she was wearing, and found herself still dressed in yesterday's clothes. The ties of her trousers were still knotted tight, so she probably hadn't been molested last night…

And honestly, why would Rian need to when he was hardly starved for more voluntary choice?

Though that still didn't explain what he was doing in her room.

Lori forced herself to get up, her body slowly righting itself as she moved, and grabbed her staff from where it stood beside her bed. She leaned on it a little as she made her way next to Rian's bedroll, where his leg was just starting to kick again. One bare toe nudged against his side. "Rian," she said. Her voice came out a bit too soft, and she tried again louder. "Rian." Much better. "Wake up."

Rian muttered incoherently, spouting off random syllables.

She nudged him again. "Rian! Wake up and tell me what you're doing in my room?"

He turned over, moving away from her nudging toe.

Lori took a moment to consider if sinking him into the ground would work… no, she was above her core room, there was no ground to sink him into. She settled on poking his back with the butt of her staff. "Rian! Wake up!"

"Ouch…" he muttered, raising his head. Finally! Coherence! "Please stop poking me… also, your room is kinda cold… "

"What are you doing in my room?" she demanded again.

"Sleeping," he said, turning over and curling up his legs.

Lori poked him again. "Why are you sleeping in my room?"

"Because you insisted on eating dinner and then going straight to bed," he muttered, in the tones of someone who knew sleep was a doomed endeavor but was still going to try anyway. "Worried you'd throw up in your sleep and didn't want you to choke on your own vomit."

Oh. Well, that's…

Lori remembered a burning sensation in her throat.

"Ah. Well, good. Now get up, I need to take a bath and get changed, and so do you."

Rian groaned again, but rose to his feet. He moved a lingering petulance like a child, but he didn't say anything. Despite it, he quickly rolled up his bedroll and wrapped his blanket around himself. He did hesitate about the cups and pitcher though.

"Leave those," Lori said, "I'll bring them down."

"Right, right," Rian said. "We'll talk over breakfast then?"

"Yes, yes," Lori said dismissively as she pointed towards her door. "Go."

"Going." Rian managed a sleepy smile before letting out a huge yawn, and thus walked straight into the passageway wall opposite her door. "Ow… "

He shuffled off and Lori shut her door behind him, sealing it with stone to bar the way. Finally alone, she grabbed the pitcher of water and drank, washing the lingering taste of stomach fluids from her mouth. Ugh, she wanted something sweet to chew on…

Sighing, she got ready to face the day.

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Despite a start that was less than auspicious, Lori's new modified routine of conducting all necessary work and construction in the morning, and expanding the demesne in the afternoon was moderately successful, in her opinion. As it was the only opinion that matter, that meant it was successful.

In the mornings, she worked, reshaping her demesne and installing bindings and infrastructure to improve it. Spigots for drinking water in all the baths, which were warm and close to wear people lived. Installing the mechanism that the smiths and carpenters devised to prevent overfilling of the reservoir, a simple nozzle that would be sealed shut when a hollow float was raised up too high by the reservoir's water level. It was the sort of mechanism Lori would have been hard-pressed to devise with her Whispering alone, and once installed—by turning the reservoir's water to ice, then laying planks on top of it so she'd have something to stand on without slipping, with the rest of the water removed from the reservoir temporarily—it allowed her to keep her Dungeon's water running unattended without worry.

Lori also took this opportunity to finally lay gold wire along her demesne so that certain bindings would be powered by the core directly into perpetuity, or at least until she died of boredom dozens of decades in the future and her core went dormant as a result. It was good that gold could be drawn very fine, because she barely had enough wire to go from her core to the reservoir. She'd ordered Rian to tell the smiths to turn the rest of the gold dragon scale into wire, but even then, she'd probably only be able to directly wire some parts of her Dungeon.

Still, it meant that by altering the lightwisps that lit the various levels of the dungeon and combining them into a single massive binding, she was able to keep it imbued with a single metal contact point along the wire. That way she didn't have to run wire down to the other levels to power the bindings of lightwisps there. Adding in the bindings that lit the Dungeon farm had been a bit difficult, since those bindings had been specially tuned to emit light that replicated sunlight, meaning it emitted unseen light as well as visible light, but Lori eventually managed it.

That was the limit of what she could do. She only had a few yustri of wire left after all that, which she decided to save for when she started experimenting with making bound tools. She would need to wait for the new wire from the smiths before she could wire anything else.

There were also other chores, such as regulating the temperature and humidity in the Dungeon farm, to keep the plants thriving and to prevent sudden condensing of water that would be dangerous to those walking around. Distributing the excavated stone around her Dungeon's entryway to better insulate against the cold and to be ready in the event of a dragon. Setting bindings in the kitchen which would do the work of heating the new metal pots, so as to help conserve firewood for people's houses. Making solidified air for their cold rooms to keep the food preserved. Keeping the lights on outside at night.

Then, after a morning's work and a warm lunch, she'd get to work expanding her demesne.

When Lori had initially done this procedure to create her core and found demesne, at the end of the process she'd… well, she'd started laughing manically in triumph. The process, while time-consuming, hadn't been exhausting, and she had been able to start work on the shelters almost immediately.

The process of expanding her demesne, she was coming to realize, wasn't anywhere nearly as pleasant. The first week of expansion left her extremely tired, and according to Rian's measurements the following morning resulted in the demesne growing an average of forty-two yustri. There was a correlation between how long she was channeling magic and affinity to the wisps at the edges of her demesne before she finally pushed outwards to expand, but… well, she needed to find a way to make the process more efficient.

The correlation came about after Rian insisted she set some water clocks to count down how much time it took between the moment she started channeling magic and the moment when… well, she claimed more territory beyond her demesne and she collapsed as a result.

"You need information," Rian told her over breakfast after the fourth time she'd expanded her demesne and he'd noticed the number of yustri had increased. "At the very least, you need to know how long you spent concentrating so you could compare it to how much the edge expanded. You need numbers to compare if you want to know how well you're improving. At the very least, we need to make the number of how long you spent concentrating to go down and make the number of how much the demesne grew go up!"

"Rian, have you been sitting outside my room in the passageway again?" she said. While she had grudgingly agreed she might require assistance getting up to her room now after dinner, depending on how tired she was, she had also told him he was not to sleep in her room again… So he'd started sleeping in the hall outside of it.

"I was there to make sure you didn't vomit in your sleep again. Tonight, how about you only drink a little soup and we'll save the rest in a jar that you can eat if you wake up hungry in the middle of the night?"

That… did sound a bit more palatable—no, back on topic! "Rian, stop sleeping in my hallway! You have a perfectly good house with a perfectly… well, with a bed! Sleep there!" Mikon, Umu and Riz all nodded in agreement.

She did allow him to set up the water clocks though, setting up a series of shelves on her wall where they could be placed to flow down into each other. Rather than a single one, they used a series of them so that refilling the clocks didn't become a factor in how long they ran. Then, when it all went to waste because she was too tired to read the time, reluctantly allowed her to monitor the clocks and her, provided he didn't read her almanac as he waited to do so. He sighed and pouted about it but complied, and so they were able to compile more information. Rian wrote on stone tablets she prepared, writing down the time and growth. He seemed to obsess over them, and actually seemed to be far more invested in the growth of the demesne than she was. While she knew full well how important the growth of the demesne was, even she was mildly bewildered at how focused Rian was on watching a number go up!

After a week of this, Rian all but demanded she explain to him what she was doing.

"You need to identify what you're doing so you can break it down into elements that we can individually test the effectiveness off," Rian said as he began preparing the water clocks for that afternoon's expansion. "That way you can test how much each matters so you can focus on the elements that produce the most results. If you can find the right combination, we might be looking at a growth rate of a pace of expansion for half an afternoon's work!"

"You have no idea what you're talking about," Lori pointed out as she got her corner ready. The corner had been altered to better facilitate sitting with one's back against it, and with half of her bedroll as padding, it made for a comfortable semi-reclined seat. "You don't know a thing about Whispering."

"I know, which is why I'm asking you to tell me!" Rian had practically whined plaintively. "Or at least list them down for yourself and then isolate each variable and test what happens if you modify each of them in isolation! Think about it! A pace in half an afternoon! That means you'll have more time to rest! You can get more reading done!"

The idea wasvery appealing…

"Be quiet, I'm about to begin," Lori said instead, settling into her corner and reclining back.

Rian sighed and got read to pull out the wads of wax that sealed the spouts of the water clocks. "Ready," he said.

Lori closed her eyes and began channeling the power of her core. "Begin."

She heard the water start to flow, finally ending down in the catch bucket. The sound gave her something to occupy her senses without being distracting as she began expanding her demesne.

Two days later, a reluctant Lori sat down and began to list what she could identify as the individual variables that were part of the process of expanding her demesne.

Stupid Rian and his stupid good advice…

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Experimenting With Expansion Variables

"Rian, what is this?"

'This' was a plank on her table, held up at an angle by smooth river rocks like some kind of signboard. Numbers were written on it in char.

"This is a little something I had made up to help you keep track of your progress and encourage you," Rian said brightly as he prepared the water clocks.

"My progress?" Lori said warily. There was something very motherly about how he was saying it…

Rian stepped away from the water clocks after stoppering them and went over to the board. "You see, these numbers are, in order," he pointed, "how much the demesne expanded yesterday; the highest amount you've caused the demesne to expand to date; the rate of expansion that's the goal we're striving for; and the dream of how much we wish we could have per expansion that's just big enough to be unreasonable but just close enough to be possibly attainable."

Lori looked at the numbers. Forty-one, forty-seven, one hundred, and one thousand. If they were all in yustri…

She glared at her lord. "What do you mean 'we'? I'm doing all the expanding."

"I like to think everyone helps with that too by making sure you don't have to worry about food," Rian said. "And I measure every day, so I'm a little involved. With yesterday, the growth average has gone up to forty two and three-fourths!"

"Your strange obsession with seeing a number go up is very strange," Lori said.

"Your lack of enthusiasm of seeing the literal growth your demesne is what's strange here!"

Yes, this obsession with rising numbers was doing very strange things with Rian's attitude. Rates of growth went up and went down. One learned to stop being excited about it. What was important was that her demesne was growing. It had already grown by eleven paces since she'd started expanding it. She considered that good, reasonable progress. Really, a hundred yustri of expansion to the demesne's radius every day…

…

All right that wouldbe nice, but she hadn't even managed to consistently go over forty-four yustri of expansion, a hundred was definitely unreasonable right now.

Lori shook her head and ignored her lord's foolishness. "Stop distracting me, I need to devise what changes can be made to the process," she said, sitting at her table and looking down at the list she had written. She ignored the plank with the numbers.

The process was simple enough, and taught to every Whisperer while at the same time informing them that actually going out beyond the demesne to try it out will result in their death for treason. One used wisps and materials extracted from one's body, where applicable, so that there would still have an affinity to it. Using that affinity, because it would be difficult to use conducting wires, imbue the wisps with a large amount of magic. Have the wisps and materials make contact with wisps and materials from the area in question one was trying to form a Dungeon at, and from there, with Iridescence. The Iridescence would begin to encapsulate and traps wisps while feeding on the imbuement, but it wouldn’t do so instantly. And in that time was an opening for a Whisperer to claim and bind the Iridescence itself, creating a dungeon's core and founding a demesne.

Lori… wasn't quite sure what she had reached out to claim in the Iridescence when she had made her core and in the recent days that she had used a modification of this procedure to expand her demesne. It wasn't wisps. The Iridescence didn't have wisps, didn't correspond to any wisps. It wasn't the wisps that were being trapped in the Iridescence, those were still under her control, contested and slowly degrading as that was…

She shook he head. Not important right them. What mattered was that it worked, and as long as she kept doing it, if not the same way then the right way, kept working. However, that didn't mean that there wasn't any room for changes.

In her hands were a list of variables that she had identified with the procedure for expanding her demesne… once she actually bothered to try an identify them. Originally, she had viewed the whole thing as one complete, distinct process, with no possible variable she could reasonably change except for how long she kept doing it… but as she had sat down to consider it… that wasn't exactly true, was it?

"Affinity… alignment… distribution… concentration… Iridescence?"

Lori blinked, then looked over her shoulder in annoyance. "Stop that. It's annoying."

Rian shrugged and stepped back. "Is that the list of variables?" he said, sounding excited.

She turned in her seat and kicked him in the shin.

"Ow!" he cried, hopping back and starting to rub his abused leg.

"I mean it," she said. "It's annoying."

"All right, I get it, no more reading over your shoulder," Rian said, wincing and hopping as he tried to rub the pain away. "I'm sorry, it won't happen again."

Lori nodded curtly, satisfied. "Yes, these are the variables I've identified. I'm trying to decide which of them I'd test and how, to see how it affects the expansion rate."

"Ah," Rian nodded, putting down his foot, even as he still winced, and limbed over to grab his tablet, which he'd left next to the water clocks. "Do you currently have a preference? Whichever you decide, I need to write down exactly what—"

"YesRian, I am aware of how you're supposed to properly conduct an experiment," Lori snapped, still annoyed, though not enough to kick him again.

"Right, sorry," Rian said. "I'm just excited. It's been a while since we've done experiments together, and I'll admit, it's a nice change of pace from what I usually do."

Lori frowned. "What is it you do?"

"Keep you from having to talk to other people, tell you how cold or hot is it, feed you during meals, measure how much the demesne has grown, talk to people to follow up on the things you asked me to ask them to make, resolve disputes between people, keep morale up, keep parents from killing horny teenagers who've been euphemisming with their horny teenager—"

"Euphemisming?" Was that actually a word? "Is that actually a word?"

"I'm using 'euphemism' as a verb."

"I have no idea what a verb is." Some kind of… grammar thing?

"Probably not considered very important for wizards," Rian said. He held up his plank and the latest charred stick he used to write. Where did he keep finding those? Lori would have thought that every small twig within walking range of the dungeon would have been picked up for firewood by now. "So, what are the differences between the variables? I assume we're going to be using the past week's results as the control group. Though as time goes one, you're probably going to have to do 'control' expansions every so often to recalibrate for you increasing familiarity with the process."

That… hadn't occurred to her, but then, she'd only been doing this for a little over a week. "Of course, of course. But it's still a bit too early to need to do that."

Rian nodded. "Yes, I suppose… but we're getting off topic. What variable will you be experimenting with?" He frowned. "Actually, what variables have you narrowed down, anyway? I didn't really understand what I was reading."

"Of course not. You're not a wizard."

"That, I am not. But I still need you to explain it to me, otherwise I won't be able to record it properly."

"I don't feel like explaining."

"All right then. So, which one are you planning to test?"

Lori sighed. Still, she looked at the list

Affinity. Alignment. Distribution. Concentration. Iridescence. Wisp preparation. For the moment, she'd narrowed down the variables to those sick, mostly because they were the most simple to isolate, even if not all of them could reasonably be tested. Testing if affinity had an effect on demesne expansion, for example would necessitate using wisps from her body, which… well, she doubted that she could extract enough for it to make an appreciable difference.

Alignment was normally a factor in binding wisps for Whisperers, since the magic one drew in needed to be aligned to the kind of wisp one was going to claim and bind before it could do so, but while she had done it as a step in expanding her demesne, she wasn't quite sure if it was actually needed, as such. She'd never needed to align her magic when binding wisps inside her demesne… but on the other hand, she also knew firsthand that trying to claim and bind wisps outside your body without first aligning your magic to the wisps just didn't work. Still, if she could eliminate the need for that stage… well, it would at least make things simpler for her.

Distribution and concentration were two inter-related factors she had identified. Distribution was where the aligned wisps she would use to expand the demesne were positioned, while concentration was how heavily the aligned wisps were… concentrated. While the concentration naturally rose the longer she gathered wisps on the borders of her demesne, it occurred to her to wonder if would make a difference if she, instead of spreading and claiming evenly from all across the borders of her demesne at once, instead claimed outwards from a singular point. While the demesne would always be spherical in shape, perhaps concentrating her wisps—and her attention—at a single point would make things easier for her?

The Iridescence and whether the wisps being claimed had been prepared ahead of time had occurred to her late as she was trying to think of any more variables that could be tested, when she had ruled out other factors as being too circumstantial, like whether the weather had an effect on the expansion rate. But those two…

When she'd been getting her core ready, she had added a container of Iridescence she'd gathered. After all, it was what she had found in her own independent research, as while the official lessons about it in class had been vague, the information she'd been able to pull together from several different biographies, books on historical Whispering, and older textbooks that had been removed from the syllabus but were still in the library. But there was Iridescence everywhere, wasn't there?  Her sources couldn't have known they'd been washing the cave they'd been expanding so it could be safely mind. Yet different sources that she'd read had still specified the inclusion of an amount of Iridescence, even if they didn't all agree on the amount. Shouldn't the text have simply assumed that Iridescence would be present?

And of course, there was preparing the wisps.

Lori hadn't founded her demesne right away. They had spent days preparing the cave, using her Whispering to soften the stone so that it could be more easily removed with the tools they had. At the same time, she had spent that time building a waterbreak around their encampment as a deterrent against beasts, which had involved claiming, binding and regularly imbuing the water she had poured into it. She had also performed other bindings in the area, mostly on earthwisps, as well as hunting beasts for food with narrow cutting streams of waterwisps. Could that have had some sort of effect in defining the area that would later become her demesne, produced some sort of small amount of affinity that had proven beneficial.

She didn't know. it would need to be tested.

Isolate each variable. Test what happens if you modify each. Record the results. Apply the acquired data—

"Lori? Lori?"

Lori blinked, looking up from her list. "What?" she snapped.

Rian pointed at the waterclocks. "While those aren't actually running yet, you arekind of running out of time if you still want to expand this afternoon."

Oh. Right.

Lori shook her head, then glared down at her list one last time. Then she raised her hand and, in the fine tradition of all students trying to find the right answer among several options when they didn't actually have any idea which one it was and no preference, closed her eyes and poked her finger down at random. She opened her eyes, and, since she'd landed between two options, picked the one her finger was physically closest to. "Rian, take notes," she said. "I will be testing whether concentration is a factor in the demesne's expansion."

Rian nodded, writing it down. "Understood." There was a pause. "Can you define what you mean be 'concentration'? Are you talking about how hard you concentrate on the task or something else? Because we're going to need a clear definition of terms, otherwise this record is going to be extremely vague and unhelpful to future generations otherwise."

Lori sighed. "Just write it down, Rian."

"Fine, fine. But you're going to have to explain this later!"