Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 104 (Patreon)

I've been having a really, really hard time writing this story lately.  I'm gonna try to press through to the end of book two, but I might need to take a break.  I don't honestly remember if I've said this before.

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Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 2

Authority : 7

Bind Insect (1, Command)

Fortify Space (2, Domain)

Distant Vision (2, Perceive)

Collect Plant (3, Shape)

See Commands (5, Perceive)

Bind Crop (4, Command)

-

Nobility : 6

Congeal Glimmer (1, Command)

See Domain (1, Perceive)

Claim Construction (2, Domain)

Stone Pylon (2, Shape)

Drain Health (4, War)

Spawn Golem (5, Command)

Empathy : 5 ><

Shift Water (1, Shape)

Imbue Mending (3, Civic)

Bind Willing Avian (1, Command)

Move Water (4, Shape)

-

Spirituality : 6 ><

Shift Wood (1, Shape)

Small Promise (2, Domain)

Make Low Blade (2, War)

Congeal Mantra (1, Command)

Form Party (3, Civic)

-

Ingenuity : 5

Know Material (1, Perceive)

Form Wall (2, Shape)

Link Spellwork (3, Arcane)

Sever Command (4, War)

Collect Material (1, Shape)

Tenacity : 6 ><

Nudge Material (1, Shape)

Bolster Nourishment (2, Civic)

Drain Endurance (2, War)

Pressure Trigger (2, War)

Blinding Trap (5, War)

-

Animosity : - - ><

Amalgamate Human (3, Command)

Congeal Burn (2, Command)

Trepidation : -

Follow Prey (2, Perceive)

Muelly and Kalip carry me down to the lake again, with an escort of a pair of very large bees.  The rest of them are helping Sharpen and Seraha keep a modicum of order around dinner for a brace of new people half of whom hate each other and the other half who hate us.  Smaller, less glimmer-infused bees stay with the children that are currently confined to the fort’s walls, or keep an eye on Yuea to make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid.  And the rest of the large ones that were with us have begun to hurry back to the farm plots, their wings propelling them in short bursts that aren’t really flying but also isn’t running.

I need them to stop Jahn and Vestment from teaching the new gobs how to use my magic.  I need them to do this quickly, because probably Jahn but maybe someone else has figured out how to Collect Plant, or perhaps some equivalent use of Bind Crop, and is using it to scoop the fully grown magical yams out of the dirt.

Directly into my stockpile, which, currently, exists somewhere away from the world itself and I have no way to access.  Unless I can… Form Wall out of yams?

I try prodding the spell’s construction in my mind.  Spinning the wheels of its arcana and trying to understand what the parts of it do and want.  I know already that I can give it material like wood or stone without complaint, and it will pull them out of my inner space.  Would it accept yams?

I don’t think so.  Or rather, if it would, it would require quite a lot of yams, as Form Wall is not what I would call a precision spell.  And those yams would be subject to the same kind of material blending that is used to smooth out wood or rock, merging and blurring the edges of the things I work with.

Maybe that itself is useful.  Maybe Seraha would appreciate a wall of blended yams that requires far less work to peel and mash and prepare.  Well, not Seraha, she doesn’t peel her own yams.  That job goes to Dipan, who is either apologizing for something or being punished for that same thing, and has a whole heap of vegetables to peel and chop sitting next to him in the kitchen.  Dipan will be okay.  I don’t truly know the man’s heart yet, but I suspect that the end of the world isn’t enough to really keep him down.

Another yam pops into my storage, and this time, because I am watching, I see Collect Plant dip ever so slightly.  Far less than if I had done it myself, which is fascinating.  Hopefully my bees get to them before they waste the whole yam crop, though.  I can grow them fast, but not that fast.  Not fast enough now.

Instead of worrying, I let Oob listen in on Kalip and Muelly from where he rides on the man’s shoulder, and share the words with me.

“What are we doing?”  Muelly is asking.  “Because my hooves hurt, and I’ve done this twice today, and-“

“Please.  Stop.”  Kalip’s voice isn’t harsh, but he does sound like a man who has no experience veiling impatience.  “Everyone is tired.  Ask her to give you a boost.”  I don’t see him, since my bees are ahead of the duo and heading toward the lake, but I imagine he’s pointing at me.

Muelly pants as she speaks.  “That’s one of the broken spells.”  She says.  “Besides… I can… walk.”

“I thought you were tired.”

“Shut… up…” Muelly is clearly struggling to keep up with Kalip, both physically, and in terms of the level of irritation both of them have.  Though, to be fair, I remember plenty of times in my old lives where exhaustion overrode annoyance, and Muelly is a village demon who by her own admission wasn’t in peak athleticism before things went bad.  “What are we… doing?!”

My bees break through the treeline around the lake and begin sweeping through the waist tall grasses and reeds, while the duo come through behind them at a less military pace.  “We’re here to ask Lutra for help.”  Kalip says.  “Hopefully to get both the… apparatusees?… healed.”

“Apparatussuses.”  Muelly tries to correct him.

Kalip sounds the closest I’ve ever heard him to confused.  “Are you sure?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

There is quiet between the two of them for a minute, except for the crunch of their steps through the grass as they follow after the scout bees.  Part of me wants to actually correct their language; not that I know what the proper pluralization for my species is anyway, just that I want to participate and the feeling of being trapped within my mind like a cage is starting to itch somehow. The other part of me, though, feels like a stretched grin as I listen to their attempts to bond.

I hadn’t really considered it, because most of my living memories from the spells I add to my souls are… chaotic.  Very few of them involve humor.  But as I intentionally pore over the old remembered conversations of the six people I once was, I quickly find something interesting.  I don’t think any of them would have found the others that funny.  Not that their jokes would be totally alien to each other, but there are small shifts in delivery and language over time that would have left each one of them just slightly offset with the others.

Except the farmer and the soldier, who I suppose then could be contemporary with each other, and the singer and the merchant, though I think that is more due to shared experiences.

Muelly and Kalip don’t have quite the distance in time or culture that my old lives did, surprisingly.  Despite being a hardened military human and a soft civilian demon, there is a familiarity with the world that they both share.  Even so, I don’t think either of them know if the other is joking.

But they’re trying.

“So… how do you plan to ask Lutra?”  Muelly says, with the voice of someone desperate to cover up an awkward moment.

Kalip keeps walking forward as she stops, approaching the nearest cracked rock sphere sitting in the cleared dirt around the lake.  Well, not approaching all the way, but getting close enough.  I feel Oob’s connection to me flicker slightly; not disrupted, but the beetle simply not putting as much effort into it.  “I thought I’d try talking to the eels.”  Kalip mutters.  “What’s up with these things?”

I do wish I could have passed on this information to him.  I am becoming slightly furious in my silence.

Muelly tugs him back slightly, and Kalip doesn’t even flinch as she moves him back away from the rock.  “They make you not care about things.”  She tells him, her voice not wavering as she repeats the information she told me earlier.  Like it’s becoming routine for her.  “So no one can get close.”

“Oh.”  Kalip idly pets at one of the bees as the large insect runs its head into his knee in a show of concern.  “Okay, that’s not hard to work around.”  He kicks around in the dirt for a short time before bending down and grabbing a chunk of stone.  Without preamble, he flicks his half furred arm and sends the rock spinning through the air to land halfway to the center of the lake.

Nothing happens, so he repeats the process.  After the fifth rock, Muelly finds a log to sit on and watch him, and my bees sit with her as we try to figure out what the man thinks is going to come of this.

I admit, I get the impression that if he was going to attract any attention, it would have been by rock five.  From the looks of things, Lutra has not been having an emotionally stable time, and I would fully expect the other apparatus to be somewhat resistant to communication at all.

Which is why it is somewhat surprising when an eel - an eel the size of a small horse, actually - pops its sinuous head out of the surface of the lake just in time to almost get hit by Kalip’s latest attempt at opening a dialogue.  The silvery blue creature gives a startled hiss and drops back below the surface before reemerging a quarter length away, staring in our group’s direction.

Kalip cups his hands around his mouth and shouts across the distance with no hesitation.  “We need to talk!”  He shouts.  “I know you can’t talk to Shiny right now, but they’re fine!  You’re both hurt in the same way, and I have a stupid idea!”  Kalip glances back at Muelly and the bees, and I open Bind Insect more fully with one of the bees.  Checking with them, making sure they both understand what is being asked fully enough to actually consent to it, and checking their emotions for anything like fear or trepidation.

There isn’t any.  They might not fully know what Lutra is, or why they are important, but the bee understands that the other apparatus matters to some of the people in our fort.  Especially the children, who have grown to find the eels fun.  The bee understands fun. And they understand that Lutra can help.

The insect, with their growing intelligence, gets a last minute refresher of what they have been asked to memorize.  And then they step forward to stand next to Kalip.

He nods at the bee with the respectful gruff attitude of a soldier who knows one of their companions is about to do something dangerous and stupid.  Then he shouts at the eel again, pointing down at the bee that flinches away from the loud words.  “The two of you can still talk, and work out how to solve this!”  He yells at the serpent fish that is staring at him with more curiosity than fish usually have.  “Trade a messenger!  Take your time!  We’ll be here until the sun sets!”

And with that, he steps back and folds his arms, eyes sweeping across the treeline around them like he’s waiting for something to try to kill him again.

But nothing does.  And it only takes a half a candle before we receive Lutra’s response.

The bee on the shore vanishes from Bind Insect, along with a small portion of the spell’s reservoir itself.  If I weren’t watching with my other bee to make sure, I would worry that one of my bound had just died.  But no, the big bug is fine, yellow fur still softly glowing from the dusting of black and blue rune marks on their wings and body.

And also in my mind, a new window to the world forms.  A small sliver of a spell and its machinery is offered to me without question or consent, though I would have said yes this time anyway.  Bind Fish, and one connected creature - a rather nonplussed eel - are now mine.

The eel immediately starts trying to pass off a rambling message from Lutra, and a spike of pain goes through me as my still damaged soul of Empathy that the magic is a part of rattles and screams.

But I push through.  I’ve been healing this one. It’s not that bad.  I can take it.

But this is going to be a long conversation.