077, 2/2

After Vinsez and Powell left, Erick spent the rest of the morning testing out [Cascade Imaging], to find out what it could, and couldn’t do. It did not take long to discover he could influence the distance the spell imaged depended on how high he cast the spell.

If he cast the spell ten meters up, it imaged an area of about one kilometer around him, and spread the resulting image over a three meter wide disk, that floated about waist-high. At this resolution, he could even make out himself standing upon the resulting map. If he focused on searching for himself, when he cast, his miniature replica turned bright blue on the map.

If he cast the spell 20 meters up, it covered a much, much further distance. Maybe twenty kilometers; Erick wasn’t quite sure, but it did manage to catch Oceanside in the resulting image. If he searched for himself, with the spell cast 20 meters up, he was a blue dot directly in the center of the map; his miniature self was too small to actually appear at that resolution. If he searched for ‘people’, the spell lit up bright blue dots all over the heavily radio-shadowed buildings and streets of Oceanside, and himself, and Poi and Kiri, and even more people out in the woods who were not near the house. Whoever they were, they were far enough away that their presence didn’t worry Erick. They were probably just doing whatever they were doing; Erick didn’t pry.

He found out rather quickly that if he came up with a target and cast the spell upon an already active map, to renew the map, the target turned blue. Erick could change up his targets and keep the previous map’s resolution, without having to wait for the map to resolve from the fog again, which usually took ten minutes. But if he wanted a different resolution, he had to recast the whole spell, and start from scratch.

He searched for ‘stone’. The resulting image turned very blue. The same result, but visually very different in a very understandable way, happened when he searched for ‘trees’ and ‘water’, with the map adjusting each time he renewed [Cascade Imaging]. It was here, that he discovered the map was not perfect, at all. Some trees shifted to blue, but some trees that were in the heavy radio-shadows stayed white. This was that ‘the target might appear on your resulting image’ part of the spell, for sure.

He searched for ‘rads’. Sparkles of blue turned up here and there on the map, as radiowaves seemed able to penetrate through flesh easily enough. According to the map, and to what Erick already knew, there were some smaller monsters out in the woods, though that was normal. The monsters of Oceanside were violent, for sure, but the walls around Windy Manor were tall, and secure, and all of the crazy-violent monsters had been weeded out of the island’s populations centuries and centuries ago.

He searched for ‘animals’, and nothing happened. The category was probably too broad. What was an ‘animal’, anyway?

‘Spiders’ turned up way too many blue dots, absolutely everywhere, and even in the [Prismatic Ward]ed Manor. Erick would confront that weirdness later. When Kiri asked what turned up so many results, Erick told her, and she freaked out a little, going so far as to leap backward and say, ‘Shut it off! HOLY SHIT!’ Erick struggled not to laugh as he calmly explained that this [Scan] was likely missing many, many, many spiders, too small for radiowaves to catch. Kiri paled.

‘Cows’ turned up a small herd of the animals in Oceanside, near the [Husbandry] and lifestock buildings, which were just now coming out of the radio-shadows.

It turned out that Erick just had to let the spell run for a little while and it could penetrate most solid surfaces. Glass was not a problem. Stone was okay, too. Radiowaves were pretty sneaky about getting everywhere, after all. Tunnels remained hidden, of course, but soon enough, most of the radio-shadows of the trees around Windy Manor were mostly gone, revealing the solid surface of the land. The trees themselves were still nests of shadows, but those shadows were small, and constantly updating.

After twenty continuous minutes of running at the 20 kilometer resolution, and a small break inside the house, when Erick came back out to the map in the yard, all of Oceanside stood revealed.

From this angle, the city was a pile of organized towers rising out of the crescent remains of a caldera, while smaller buildings stretched down to the harbor, and into the forests surrounding the city. Erick watched as little ships plied the waters of Oceanside’s harbor, like ants atop a glass surface, because apparently [Cascade Imaging] was rather good at penetrating water down to a rather far depth.

And at the bottom of Oceanside’s crater, was flat land, dotted with underwater buildings.

Kiri noticed Erick noticing the submerged structures. She said, “That’s the mid-water training facility and marine biology laboratories. People go there to learn how to fight krakens and stuff like that.”

“Oh?” Erick said, “I didn’t know they did that sort of thing, here.”

“They do everything, here. I was invited to attend some of the classes down there, but I declined. We had the dungeon to make, and I didn’t have a waterbreathing form, anyway. One of the big things they do down there is that the instructors [Polymorph] into a bunch of different sea creatures and you’re expected to defend targets against them, or hunt and track them through a controlled environment.” Kiri added, “And they also study oceaneering. It’s like dungeoneering, but… not. I’m… not actually sure what oceaneering is.”

Erick joked, “Sounds sinister to me.”

He searched for ‘people who want me dead’. Nothing changed. This was obviously a case of ‘not well known enough’, or ‘not seen in the scan’, or maybe something else was going wrong. The monsters outside the walls might have been somewhat ‘docile’, in a very loose interpretation of the word, but they were certainly still killers. But those monsters did have rads, and that was a pretty clear indicator of ‘monster’ or not. [Cascade Imaging] probably couldn’t suss out mental states. That would be strange, if it could.

… He elicited Kiri’s help.

“Kiri.” Erick said, “I want you to think about killing me. Really mean it, too.”

“… I am not comfortable with this, and I will not be doing that.”

Erick bah’d, then turned to Poi. “Same request.”

Poi smirked. “Already doing it.”

“See!” Erick turned to Kiri. “Not that hard.” He looked at the map. Poi’s miniature person was still white. Erick turned to Poi. “Are you sure you really want me dead?”

“I’m more than capable of altering my mental state to a variety of needs.”

When Poi’s miniature did not change to red, or to anything else, Erick called off that test. [Cascade Imaging] was not able to read mental states, obviously.

‘Moths’ turned up a whole lot of the little critters, all over the forest. They liked to fly around the outside lights at night, but during the day they slept around the garden and in the forest. And just like the spiders, there were even a few inside the house.

Erick had never noticed the bugs inside the house until now. Maybe the spiders were doing a really good job of hiding, and bug killing? [Prismatic Ward] obviously needed more testing.

‘Parasites’ turned up nothing. But Erick remained undeterred. ‘Parasites’ was a very broad category, similar to ‘animals’. Erick knew about ‘Dream Worms’, though. They were slick, three inch long worms, and he had even had two of them inside of him, so far. Soon enough, ‘Dream Worms’ turned up a slew of dots at the hospital, and nowhere else. That made sense; they were studying and extracting them there.

‘Teressa’ turned up a blue dot in the hospital ward, exactly next to his next search, which was ‘Jane’.

He tested ‘souls’, and nothing happened. This was just as well. Erick had no idea what a soul actually was.

‘Gold’ revealed some coins in his pockets, and on Kiri and Poi’s person, and scattered throughout Oceanside like the people had been. Metal apparently reacted very strongly to radiowaves, providing a great reflective surface. It took no time at all for quite a few ‘gold’ blue dots to appear across the map.

Erick took the coins in his pocket and [Stoneshape]d them into the ground, to test the penetration of the spell. And then Erick cast the imaging orb inside of the ground. It worked. Used in this way, the map displayed above the orb. He could map the underground for about 20 meters in every direction. It wasn’t a very good image, but 65 feet was 65 feet, and the gold coins turned up like bright blue dots here and there, exactly where Erick had buried them.

How cool was that!

As Erick talked of buried treasure searches, Kiri threw a wet blanket over the idea. Erick’s methods were different than the norm, but [Stone Body] could be turned into [Stone Sense] by a skilled enough practitioner, and that could do a lot better underground detection than whatever it was Erick was doing. Erick knew of this method from his own time in Apell’s dungeoneering class, of course, but it was nice to have a voice of reason around.

‘Lemons’ turned up blue dots stacked against each other, next to Erick, growing in the garden. And also in a plot of land near Oceanside. It was Professor Rue Down’s alchemy gardens, of course. After an interesting discussion in Esoteric Magic, he had given her seeds from all of his plants, to see if she could use them as ingredients for anything. Neither Erick nor Rue expected anything to come out of lemons-for-alchemy, but it was nice to see that her lemon trees were doing well.

‘People using [Polymorph]’ turned up nothing.

“So much for an easy answer there,” Erick said.

Kiri said, “It’s an instant spell, anyway. You only use it to change forms. For instance, I wouldn’t say you’re currently [Getting Dressed]. You [Got Dressed] in the morning. The spell effect is over.”

Erick nodded. He searched for ‘People using [Personal Ward]’. A panoply of dots appeared everywhere; almost as many as when he scanned for ‘people’. Probably more, actually. [Personal Ward] was a specific thing that Erick knew rather well.

Kiri said, “It’s strange that you can search for ‘people’.”

“I don’t pretend to know people, but I certainly know their general shape.”

‘Person with one arm and one leg’ turned up zero results.

“Ah. Right.” Erick said, “Everyone would get that healed.”

‘People with horns’ turned up a smattering of results.

He searched for ‘blood’, and got a predictable amount of results from the hospital where people were wounded, of course, but he also got results from here and there in the rest of the city. It seemed that searching for ‘blood’ and thinking about exposed blood, returned those exact results. Searching for ‘blood inside people’ returned a similar number of dots as when he searched for ‘people’.

Kiri asked, “You know blood rather well?”

“It’s a spot of iron inside of a biological structure. So… Maybe?” He added, “But it’s much smaller than I would have thought possible to search for.”

‘DNA’ turned basically the whole map blue, but it also burned out the orb in the sky and the map broke apart. Erick could apparently use radiowaves and magic to search for things that were microscopic, and that he knew very well, but a general scan for such a widespread item burned out the capacity of the spell? But it didn’t do that when he scanned for ‘stone’ or ‘trees’? Odd.

Erick recast the spell into the sky, then searched for his own DNA.

Smears of blue appeared on himself and all throughout Windy Manor, and even in his more well-visited places in town. Did [Cleanse] not clean up all of that? It should have, shouldn’t it?

Erick walked over into the Manor. He cast a [Cleanse] into the space, aiming for his room, which he was pretty sure he already cleaned today. When he came back to the map, it was still the same blue as before.

Maybe [Cleanse] only cleaned 99.95%?

Kiri offered, “Try ‘light essence’. You have at least one of those, now.”

Poi spoke up, “I think we’re going to need more guards.”

Erick frowned at Poi. He didn’t want to think about Poi’s very rational concerns, right now. He wanted to experiment. Erick turned away from his guard and mentally felt around inside of himself, searching for the tiny light essence that was supposed to be somewhere inside of himself; whatever that meant.

But he was too excited to go on such a spiritual journey right now. When he closed his eyes, he found nothing but darkness. He opened his eyes and searched for ‘light essence’, anyway.

Zero results.

Erick said, “I think the search capabilities are based upon my own understanding of what I’m looking for. A proper soulmage might be able to find people with souls.” He looked to Poi, saying, “A proper Mind Mage might be able to find the minds of who they’re looking for.” He added, “But that’s a very broad guess.”

Kiri said, “Probably not.” She offered, “It might only return a positive result for a physical object. [Ward]s are partially physical. Blood is very physical. Feelings and essences are ethereal.”

Erick looked down at the map of his surroundings, floating all around his waist. He searched for ‘Melemizargo’. Briefly, every single remaining radio-shadow everywhere on the map flickered blue, and expanded.

Erick quickly changed the search to ‘pixie’, calming his hammering heart, not bothering to explain his previous search.

Surprisingly, a few dots appeared here and there around Oceanside. Erick was more than willing to let this development fully occupy his mind.

Seeing a pixie outside of his window when Eduard was divulging the particulars of his search for Messalina, to Silverite, was apparently enough to count as a ‘well known target’. Or maybe the Headmaster’s description of their stature and capabilities had been enough. Whatever the case, the dots moved slowly as they flew around the city. Some of them were high in the sky. Some of them were darting in and out of deeper buildings; vanishing into radio-shadows, or reappearing from them.

Erick said, “Poi. Alert the Headmaster. He has pixies in his city.”

 

– – – –

 

The Headmaster stood tall in the crescent, white-map harbor of Oceanside, as he loomed over the miniature version of his city. Lines of telepathic intent flickered from his head, out into the manasphere. His amber eyes glowed dim gold as he tracked a blue dot as it floated through the city.

There were no pleasantries for today’s visit. The Headmaster had appeared in a flash of gold, and after looking up at the white cascading orb above, and at the white map below, he strode right into the map, and saw the problem that Erick had spotted.

He had not said a single word, yet.

Erick just stood to the side, waiting, as the miniature white forests of Oceanside ringed his waist. Kiri and Poi, as well as Vinsez and Powell, all stood well outside of the map. Kiri and Poi stood beside the lemon trees. Vinsez and Powell stood toward the cliffside.

The Headmaster tracked the blue dot as it flew into a harborside building.

The dot suddenly stilled, then flickered back and forth. At the scale of this map, the dot flickered maybe twenty meters at most. But then it stilled, again.

The Headmaster smiled wide. He said, “Got him.”

The tension of the moment seemed to fade like a breaking fog revealing a mountain of gold. The Headmaster smiled well and truly wide, as he laughed loud. The map flickered under the dragon’s mirth, as the Headmaster tossed his head back and laughed like a sudden hurricane. Erick felt his bones vibrate, but he kept his cool, as the Headmaster dispensed with his joy.

The Headmaster calmed down. He brushed away some happy tears from his eyes, then said, “We have pixies on staff, of course. They are a people, after all. They’re not unequivocally beholden to Messalina, but there is a stigma there, so they don’t like to make themselves known. That one, though… That one was not on my staff, and no one else knew about this one.” He sighed. He said, “He might have even been the one who wormed you, or not.” He added, “Or he might be a unknown visiting relative. We’ll find out.” He gazed up, toward the flickering, cascading ball of light above, which was almost in line with the sun, then back down, to the white map. He said, “This is an impressive spell. I can hardly wait to see the equations that describe it all.”

Erick chuckled, saying, “Maybe in 50 years when someone else invents those.”

The Headmaster smiled, saying, “That is my expected timetable, too.” He added, “You seem to have this aversion to the math side of magic, but it really does help the rest of us to understand the unknowable. Magic is screwy. Math is a bridge, so that mortal minds might come to eventually comprehend the uncomprehendable.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“… is that why Rozeta doesn’t tell anyone how magic works? Because it’s too hard to explain?”

“Partially, I’m sure.” The Headmaster looked back down to the map. He asked, “Could you please search for a few things for me? I would like to test this spell’s capabilities. The Problem of [Polymorph] might not be a problem for a spell like this, if you’re clever enough.” He added, “But I’m sure you will need to do something more to solve that particular conundrum.”

Erick said, “Sure. What’s the first thing?”

The first thing was ‘soul’, or more particularly, ‘Erick’s Soul’. This met with a predictable failure. Erick had no concrete idea what a ‘soul’ actually was.

“How can you not know what a soul is?” the Headmaster asked, smirking and disbelieving.

“I am pretty sure I have one, but beyond that… Where is it? What is it? Is it me, or is it a part of me?”

The Headmaster simply nodded, and moved on, repeating many of the same queries Erick had already performed, along with a few he did not think to test, like ‘people possessing [Polymorph]’. Of that query, the people all around Erick got a blue dot, because he was pretty darn sure that everyone here had the skill, but only one dot appeared all the way over in Oceanside; Jane’s dot.

‘Orcol’, ‘Incani’, ‘Human’, all produced predictable results.

‘Dragon’ highlighted the Headmaster, while the Headmaster was in human form. His was the only such dot on the map. Strangely enough, the Headmaster was also highlighted when Erick searched for ‘human’. The Headmaster smirked at that. Running through a few different tests with ‘light slime’ highlighted himself, while ‘unicorn’ highlighted Jane over in the hospital.

Identifying active spells, like [Ward] and [Scry] were easy enough, and those spells seemed to suffer no effects from being detected. Searching for [Telepathy] revealed a haze of magic layered over the city, and multiplied the radio-shadows so much that Erick might as well have started the spell from scratch; which he then did. This earned Erick a raised eyebrow from the Headmaster. Apparently [Cascade Imaging] could detect active magic that Erick understood; ‘understood’ being the keyword, there. Searching for [Invisible] turned up nothing. Erick had never experienced the spell, himself.

The Headmaster then asked him to search for several things that Erick had never heard of before. ‘Drakenslag’, ‘woodholly’, ‘Gnarled Pine’. Nothing showed on the map. When that round of tests were over, the Headmaster conjured lightwards shaped like trees. He indicated that drakenslag was a red tree with three-pointed leaves, with undersides of the brightest red; almost neon. Woodholly and Gnarled Pine were also trees. Once Erick knew what he was scanning for, blue dots appeared in the forests all around Oceanside.

The Headmaster eventually said, “[Cascade Imaging] seems to operate based on personal knowledge linked to form, in a standard [Find Target] sort of way, and with all those same assorted nuances. This is a problem, since you want this kind of magic to be a completely separate entity from your own understanding. You want more [Identify]; less [Find Target]. [Find Target] lies sometimes.” He added, “Without a proper [Identify] like quality, [Cascade Imaging] is more a mapping spell and a parlor trick than anything truly useful. But maybe I am not giving you enough credit; we’ll see.” He looked up, adding, “And that orb is rather prominent, but I suppose it is necessary.” He looked back down to Erick, asking, “Do you want me to send you my books on [Identify]?”

“Yes. I’ll try to get through them tonight.” He asked, “But I’d much prefer the short, oral version.”

The Headmaster smirked, then said, “[Identify] is a major spell, much larger than you might think. A generalized casting of the spell would draw on your entire personal knowledge base in order to work, including whatever facts you might not fully remember, but used in this way, [Identify] is similarly as flawed as [Find Target]. The difference is, is that [Find Target] will just fail, while [Identify] might give you some clues as to what you are trying to understand, based on your own knowledge.

“If you want to [Identify] something properly, you must use something outside of your own faulty personal knowledge, and then you must enchant that item to use in your [Identify] magics. The Identinomicon, which is a yearly publication produced by the Arcanaeum Consortium, is specifically published for this exact reason. Each copy costs a grand rad, and it takes one more grand rad to enchant the book. Another, much more difficult method to [Identify] in a larger manner is to produce the spell [Libarium], which comes from [Identify], and then enchant a suitable library space with this second spell.”

“How is that different from [Find Target]?”

“Open the spells, and find out.”

 

 

 

“Ah.” Erick said, “They’re similar, but one is for understanding, while the other is for finding.”