029

Erick had a long way to go before he started experimenting with electricity. He needed targets. He had no targets, except for the single jut of stone in the center of the roof that Al had put there so Erick could practice Aurifying spells.

… He needed to finish Aurifying [Force Shrapnel], now that he thought of it.

But first! [Stoneshape]!

[Stoneshape].

Nothing seemed to happen.

“A bit anti-climactic.”

Poi asked, “Were you expecting a quake?”

“No… Not really. But you understand my apprehension with new magics.”

“Quite.”

Erick focused on the stone roof under his feet. Ah. No. That was a bad idea. He focused instead on the stone seat Al had made. He pushed at the 3 foot tall stone cylinder with [Stoneshape].

Nothing.

No! Wait! There was something. A piece of chipped stone at the base of the cylinder wobbled.

Erick focused on the wobbling chip and it lifted into the air.

“Ah ha!”

Erick moved the chip—

The spell cut. A minute had passed. The chip skipped across the ground.

“‘Minor’ is very small, isn’t it.”

Poi did not answer. Erick didn’t really need an answer, since the answer was self evident.

[Stoneshape].

Erick practiced with the chipped stone. He moved it this way and that. He spun the stone in the air. He struck the stone into the roof, creating more chips. He gathered up the chips—

He crumbled the chips into sand.

Ohhh. Now that was interesting. He floated the sand—

The spell cut.

Mmm.

Aurify.

[Stoneshape].

Erick picked up all the sand, all around him. Ohh. That was impressive. Aurifying [Stoneshape] took a stream of constant mental energy, but the mental energy needed seemed to be directly comparable to the mana it consumed per second. Aurifying [Stoneshape] only took 5 mana a minute, which was an immediate 1 mana, then some small amount of mana per second. That fraction was too small for Erick to bother calculating. Al would probably know. Whatever the number, this was much less effort than a 1 pound dumbbell over his head; he could hold this mental strain for a while. So he did.

Soon, a blue box appeared.

As the next round of [Stoneshape] began, Erick felt a difference in the spell. Not only did it cost more, but it moved everything around him faster. The sand and chipped stone moved like water though the air, instead of like molasses. He didn’t have any fine control, but he could move sand in streams and chips in swirls. [Stoneshape] itself felt more like a second sense, too. An earthsense—

No. Not an earthsense. A Veirdsense.

But, as Erick thought about how to translate that to Poi, there was a problem. Ecks didn’t have a word for the ground like English had ‘earth’ back on Earth. The ground was either ‘stone’ or ‘dirt’ or ‘sand’ or some other descriptor. They didn’t pick up a handful of dirt and say ‘hmm, this is good veird’. They would say it was good dirt. The closest to the English equivalent to ‘earth’ would be ‘stone’ in Ecks.

So Erick ignored trying to properly translate his new magical sense, and just said to Poi, “It’s almost like I have a Veirdsense.”

Poi looked at Erick with a strange scrunched expression. “I don’t get it, sir.”

“That’s okay.”

Erick went back to playing in the dirt.

Now this? This felt good. He stepped, and the stone under his feet flexed. Not very fast, mind you, but fast enough to be felt. Like he was walking on molasses that he could control. ‘Small’ seemed to be a great deal more than ‘minor’.

Wow. Aurify was great. Stoneshape was great. He could see where the skill was going, and it looked highly promising. If he had started on this route instead of that experiment with lightning at dinner…

Everything would have been different, wouldn’t it?

Erick smiled. He had learned long ago not to yearn for the might-have-beens. [Stoneshape] was pretty cool, but lightning was pretty damn cool, too. And so was rain—

Erick had a realization.

“That’s where I get the water for my personal hot tubs! From the sky! Duh!”

Erick played in the stone for a while, but while his stonesense dipped into the ceiling of his apartment, he kept his play to the topmost layer of the roof. [Stoneshape] was a hammer and the world was putty. He picked apart the jut of stone in the middle like a child would destroy a sandcastle; in great big splashes of power, scattering sand and stone into the air. Fine control eluded him, but Erick mostly controlled the fall of stone. With enough material floating around him, he had an idea. He began to smash rocks together, forming irregular stones. That wouldn’t do, so he ground them against each other to shape 9 spheres of various sizes. The largest one was head-sized. The one Erick focused most of his attention on was only fist-sized.

Poi watched as Erick formed Earth’s Solar System.

Erick explained:

“My Very Eager Mother Allegedly Just Served Us Nine Pies.

“This one is Mercury. It’s a tiny red thing, blasted by the Sun, which is me in this scenario.

“This one is Venus. It’s a cloudy average sized planet, where acid rains from the sky and the very air would crush you to stand on the surface.

“This one is Earth. It’s where Jane and I are from. Only humans. No magic. This is the only place with current life in the Solar System. We landed on our moon, Luna, before I was born, and everyone thought we’d have houses up there by now. That never happened.

“This one is Mars. This red planet might have had life in the distant past, along with a breathable atmosphere. Some of us want to send people to Mars to see if we could live there. Seems farfetched to me. But who knows? Personally, I think we should try to live on Luna, first.

“This string of debris is the Asteroid Belt. It might have been a planet in the very distant past, or maybe this is just where the forces of gravity decided to put all the floating junk in the system. I certainly don’t know.

“This big one is Jupiter. A great big gas giant. The largest planet in the Solar System. Something like 1300 Earths could fit inside one Jupiter. It has a perpetual storm we call the Great Red Spot that we’ve never seen stop storming in all our observations. I tried to recreate that storm here on the sphere. See? I think I did okay.

“This is Saturn. A bit smaller than Jupiter, but it’s beautiful because of the giant rings. These giant rings might be from some ancient collision; we don’t really know. But the ring of orbiting ice and stone is constantly grinding itself up; there’s no chance for it to ever reconstitute into a moon.

“This is Uranus. Another gas giant, but smaller than Saturn. Uranus rotates on its side. It’s the only one that does that; it’s a little funky that way.

“This is Neptune. Another gas giant, about the same size as Uranus. Not much that I could tell you about this one. It’s named after an old god of the oceans.

“This little one is Pluto. It’s rather small. Smaller than Earth’s Moon.”

Erick moved the planets more or less on their corrects orbits. He did a terrible job of swinging them around at the correct speeds. They weren’t rightly sized, or correctly distanced. None of the spheres of orange stone matched the actual planets they represented, except maybe Saturn and Jupiter. But while exactitude was lacking, the emotion was there. The Solar System was Erick’s previous home, and something very similar to that old place floated around Erick.

Keeping the spheres orbiting was rather easy, actually. After some adjustments and some rearranging, everything flowed around Erick in a lazy, beautiful, diorama of a far away, eternal dance.

It was too much. Not physically; Erick felt that [Stoneshape] could do a great deal more than this, and especially when he got to a higher level. The spell was only level 4 right now; it had leveled somewhere in making the miniature Solar System.

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This was too much emotionally.

He gradually gathered the planets and set them to the side. He looked up at the blue sky. Veird’s sun was still hours away from setting in the west. The color of the sky and the stars were close to Earth’s, but the three moons rising in the east were not like Luna at all. One was small and pink. The next was large and grey; almost the same color as Luna. The last moon was small and white.

Where am I? How would I find out where this is?

As if knowing what Erick was thinking, Poi said, “You should consider visiting the Mage Guild Library.”

Erick looked at him.

“No, sir. I am not reading your mind, but humans are easy to read.”

“Ha! I am, am I?”