Chapter 66 Very Very Frightening (Patreon)

Nathan looked over at a slightly peeved looking Dalo, standing next to a curious Kullal. Dalo almost started striding in their direction before Kullal grabbed his sleeve and pulled him back. They had a short conversation before taking to the air to fly back to their home.

Doesn’t seem like my place to get involved with family discussions. If Stella wants to keep learning about electricity and magnetism instead of doing magic tutoring with her parents, I’m not gonna say no. We’ll deal with it if it becomes an issue.

They moved back to the practice field, and Nathan launched into the topic of Ampere’s law, which described how a moving charge created a rotating magnetic field. He hadn’t gone into special relativity and the concept of reference frames for this one, but was able to communicate the idea well enough.

It felt like [Lecturing] was pushing at its boundaries, ready to Develop but awaiting an appropriate Insight. It was only low-tier, it made sense that it would be easier to develop.

Stella was examining the latest set of equations as she played with her floating-sand simulation of moving charge. She looked back up at Nathan. “Ok. I think I understand these forces. Now how do I use them to make lightning? And what about light? Is that going to require a whole other set of math? I’m still interested, but…”

Nathan looked back, a bit lost for words. He’d kind of forgotten the ultimate goal of all of this. Allowing Stella to generate new types of Mana without it having to take up a class skill. He scratched the back of his head. “Well, it’s not too much farther to get to light, actually. Though we’ll be missing a lot of the details…”

Stella shook her head. “I can think of so many amazing things I can do with lightning now that I understand how it works! But how do I get there? I need to manipulate charge with magic, but what’s the first step? I don’t just want to understand it, I want to use it!”

She was starting to get frustrated - which was fair. She’d just learned the equivalent of several college classes of math and physics, all with the promise that it would let her shoot lightning.

And now the last leap was the final stumbling block. Nathan thought for a moment.

Natural sources of lightning. Well, there’s the obvious one. And Stella has air mana. Not water mana, but static is all about friction between insulators anyway.

Nathan grinned, then turned to Stella. “Ok. So static electricity is what makes lightning. I haven’t talked about it, but static shocks are imbalances of charge that are generated by rubbing things that don’t conduct electricity well against one another. For normal lightning it’s usually about collisions between water, but static can happen when air rubs against itself too.

“So. I want you to try using air mana to make a bunch of very tightly woven bands of air, which are rubbing against each other pretty tightly. Make all of the flows going one direction converge in one place, of the flows going the other direction converge somewhere close by. Maybe make the flows of two different gas compositions, if you can?”

Stella was frowning at his description, especially when he mentioned making the streams of air be of different compositions. She sighed, and threw up her hands. “Why not! Let’s try it out!”

Then she gestured Nathan a little ways back, and spent a few minutes fiddling with empty air, concentrating intently on something invisible to Nathan. “No. That doesn’t work…. How about this?”

She fiddled with the spell some more. Nathan would have loved to help, but he didn’t really understand how to make a spell all that well, just trust that Stella could figure it out.

After another couple minutes the mage turned back to Nathan, digging her fingers into her auburn hair in frustration. “That doesn’t work. And would seem like cheating, if all I needed to do was rub some air together, and not learn all of that dumb math. Then she paused. “I wonder… force can block lightning, but they start acting strange afterwards. I wonder if they build up charge?”

She turned and jogged back to the suite of rooms that the Heirs had. The sun was setting and people were heading to dinner, but Stella ignored all of them and went into the main room, where she pulled out the generator, and gestured for Nathan to spin it.

He obliged, putting his back into it. He didn’t know what Stella was doing, but she had learned what he had to teach and was trying to apply it. Soon enough there was a faint sparking between the nearly touching wires. Stella stuck her finger into the gap, her face intent. The sparks had to sting, but she just left her hand there for a minute.

Then she withdrew her hand and conjured a small pane of force between the two wires. “Keep turning it. I want to see…” she left the force block there for twenty seconds, then reached her hand back to the device. There was a much larger pop this time as Stella’s hand approached the pane of force. She jumped and shook out her hand.

I think the force pane acted a bit like a capacitor, storing a charge. Wild.

She examined the construct for a moment before dismissing the force pane and making a more complicated force construct with two panes that joined together in a narrow spike aimed at her.

She hadn’t told him to stop, so Nathan kept spinning. After a moment faint sparks started to bounce around at the point of the force spike. Stella grabbed a spare magnet in one hand and closed her other hand around the point, hiding the sparks. She moved the hand holding the magnet to be next to the hand covering the sparking spike. “I understand that this is just a moving charge, a current. I know how it’s made, by a moving magnetic field. I can guide it with my magic.”

Her hair started to stand up. It was still tied in a tight braid, but strands started to escape and flutter around her head. Then Stella extended the hand holding the magnet out into the room and pointed her finger out. After a moment, faint tendrils of electricity started jumping from her finger, as if it was a van de graaff generator. She started chuckling, ramping up into a full blown cackle as the tendrils grew stronger and the distinctive crackling of electricity discharge ramped up.

“And if I wrap it with a spinning field from the magnet I can guide it…” The manifold tendrils narrowed down to a cone, then to a line of crackling electricity extending a foot away from her hand.

The door opened and Khachi walked into the room, turning to ask about the crackling noise in the room. He nearly walked into the faint line of electricity, which reached out towards his armor. He fell over on his ass as Stella, still laughing, discontinued the spell with a flourish.

She stood there for a moment, cackling and raising both hands in triumph. Her hands were jerking a bit involuntarily, and her hands looked faintly burned. Then she turned to Nathan and gave him a hug, magic robes be damned. Nathan hugged back and was rewarded by a static shock for his trouble. It almost interrupted his attempt to hold back his antimagic as Stella’s still-staticky hair tried to climb up his nose.

After a moment she pushed away, beaming ear-to-ear. “I think I have two new mana types now. One for electricity, another for magnetism! I’ve never heard of that one before, so I doubt there are many existing spells for it. But that just means I get to invent them!”

She spun, full of excitement and hugged Khachi as he was climbing to his feet. He looked down at Stella, then gently patted her on the shoulder. He turned his attention back to Nathan.

“I take it that went well?”

Nathan nodded, also smiling. “I think Stella might need some healing though. Please make it thorough.”

She blinked, looking down at her hands. “Oh. Ow. Yes please.”

Khachi sighed, shaking his head as he bent over Stella’s hands, muttering a quick prayer to heal the electricity burns.

Those can be scary as hell.

He urged Khachi to keep going, and he obliged, sweeping Stella with multiple passes of his healing magic.

Stella was having trouble staying still, prancing around the room with excitement. “Electricity! And Magnetism! Dragon’s breath that’s exciting.”

Her enthusiasm was infectious, and Nathan couldn’t help but prompt her. “And there’s one more part of it. Stella? Light?”

She turned back, a bit flushed. “Don’t you think we’ve done enough for one evening?” Then she stopped talking, mouth still slightly open. “What am I saying. Teach me of light, O master of the mountain!”

Nathan grabbed a slate, quickly sketching. Once you understood Maxwell’s equations, it was easy to make the jump to generalized electromagnetic waves. You could figure it out yourself if you just thought about it, and all Nathan needed to do was guide Stella in the right direction.

“This is simple. Say you have an independent magnetic field, without a source. Don’t worry about how it started. It just goes from nothing to this vector, then dies out again.” Nathan looked up, judging Stella’s reaction.

She was calming down a bit, but looking doubtfully at the slate. “But it can’t come from nothing.”

“Bear with me. But then it goes away, since there’s nothing causing it, it’s a changing magnetic field. So what does that make?” He prompted her by gesturing with the chalk.

“An electric field.”

“Right. Which would be in this direction, perpendicular to the original magnetic field. But it’s a bit offset. But then you have an electric field with no source, so that goes away. And that makes…”

Stella was looking at the slate with some concentration. Nathan could tell she was connecting the dots. “That makes a magnetic field without a source. Just like what you started with. But farther along.”

She looked up at Nathan. “And that’s light? Just alternating electric and magnetic fields? It would just keep going until it ran into something. It’s not a physical thing, just a perpetuating field of alternating forces….”

Nathan smiled. All it had taken was a little push.

{Congratulations, you have developed the [Low-tier Lecturing] utility skill into [Mid-tier Lecturing].

Utility skill: [Mid-Tier Lecturing]

This skill will help you explain concepts in the future, smoothing over gaps and aiding greatly in explanation and understanding. Will not help you convey details you do not know, and will not help you suppress people’s doubts about what you are teaching.}

Nathan commented on her statement. “Effectively right. Light is electromagnetic waves. And more than that. You can’t separate out the two fields in light, and it’s quantized because it’s like a packet of waveforms moving along.  I can explain some of that with math, but it gets even more complicated.”

Stella barely seemed to hear him. She was looking off into the middle distance, her jaw hanging slightly open. “It’s. Wait. That’s too big…” She sat there, mumbling for a moment.

Khachi was squinting at them like they were speaking a different language. Which they basically were.

Stella, sat down heavily on the couch. It seemed like the idea Nathan had given her was too big for her to process all at once.

And I didn’t even go over the full thing. You kind of need special relativity and frames of reference to properly understand it. And that’s before you even get to wave/particle duality. Maybe later!

Khachi spoke up, looking concerned. “Stella? Is there a problem?”

She looked up at him, gaze a little unfocused. Then she raised a hand in the air and it flashed with vague light and sparks. The sparks were unfocused and jumped back to Stella’s own hand. She twitched and pulled her hand back as it was shocked, her hair jumping.

A scabbarded knife on the table next to her had twitched, and Nathan could feel the magnetism mana from here. It felt like warm wires dragging over his skin. He guessed she’d just poured a bunch of electric and magnetic mana together, trying to make light in the way that Nathan had explained it.

{Mid-tier Identify 5 achieved!}

Khachi looked even more worried. “Stella? This is the wrong time to experiment with new mana types. Look at me.” He stepped closer, wary of the way her braid had started rising on its own. He shot a desperate look to Nathan, who took the hint.

Nathan stepped forward, feeling charged mana sleet off his skin. He grabbed onto Stella’s hand as it reached upwards once again. “Stella, hold on. Don’t go too quickly. Lightning is dangerous, don’t try to make up spells on the fly. That’s how you kill yourself. You know better than this.”

A jolt of mana came out of her hand again, both lightning and magnetism. Nathan absorbed it smoothly, examining the magnetic mana for the second time. Stella’s spell was unfocused, just trying to jam the two mana types together and hope they fitted.

{Mid-tier Spellsense 8 achieved!}

He leaned down and yelled in her ear. “STELLA!”

She shook her head, then her eyes focused on Nathan’s, just a foot in front of her face. They locked eyes for a moment, and Nathan saw lightning crackling in a spiraling pattern inside her pupils.

Then Stella sucked in a breath and looked away. “Sorry. I wanted to try it… I think I need to go talk to my parents. They need to know about this.”

Nathan nodded, then pulled her up. “Do you mean to teach them the Insight?”

Stella wobbled a bit as she rose, her motions jerky. She snorted disdainfully. “No. I don’t know if I can. There’s so much that they would need to understand… and they both have lightning already. And they think of it completely differently. It’s not just another element. It’s a fundamental force. Not a thing. A field.”

Nathan nodded, looking to Khachi. “Should we walk her up there?”

Khachi stroked his chin, then nodded. “I am glad that this lesson seems to have gone well, but it seems that what Stella needs is advice from her parents on handling powerful Insights.”

With that, they escorted their Insight-befuddled teammate up the roads of Gemore to her parent’s mansion. She quickly regained her motor control, and was soon skipping up the mountain. Nathan made sure to mention to Kullal that Stella hadn’t eaten when they dropped her off.

Comparison:

Utility skill: [Low-Tier Lecturing

This skill will help you explain plans and details clearly in the future, smoothing over gaps and aiding in explanation and understanding. Will not help you convey details you do not know, and will not help you suppress people’s doubts about what you are teaching.

Utility skill: [Mid-Tier Lecturing]

This skill will help you explain concepts in the future, smoothing over gaps and aiding greatly in explanation and understanding. Will not help you convey details you do not know, and will not help you suppress people’s doubts about what you are teaching.

Overall Status:

{Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Magic Absorption 6

Permanent Talent 2: High-tier Regeneration 6

Talent 3: None

Class: Spellbreaker Juggernaut level 52

Class skills:

Stamina: 620/620

Juggernaut's Wrath

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Juggernaut's Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Utility skills:

High-tier Focused Mind 6

Mid-tier Earnestness 9

Mid-tier Sprinting 5

Mid-tier Spellsense 7

Mid-tier Notice 6

Mid-tier Identify 4

Mid-tier Dodging Footwork 3

Mid-tier Enhanced Memory 10

Mid-tier Lecturing 1

Low-tier Tumbling 9}