196, 1/2

It took Candlepoint 3 hours to mostly-evacuate. Well over half of the population had left by the time the sun had fully risen above the horizon. By the time the sun shone directly overhead, even more people had evacuated. Candlepoint was a ghost town of shadelings, former shadelings, and the scant few others who had decided to stay in the face of Erick’s declaration of Wizardry.

The evacuation had gone smoothly, which was something of a surprise to a lot of people, but Erick had been there to end all of the nonsense that could have started, and now the city was calming down.

A lot of people had no idea what to do with themselves because their jobs at various stores were gone, for the people who ran those stores and all their goods were also gone. A lot of people, mostly those who still worked in city hall, had way too much to do, for all the abandoned homes in the city were up for grabs, and a great deal of people wanted stuff that had been left behind. A lot of people filed multiple claims against singular houses, which was obviously a lie in some way for there was no way that ten different people all had prior claim on one of the nicest houses in the city. But it was what it was. Erick almost helped with housing then and there, making multiple mansions for the taking, but there weren’t any actual housing issues. Just plain greed. Now that the city was down to a population count of 5,547 (only about a thousand more people than there were shadelings and former shadelings) from a former high of 21,000, there were more than enough houses to go around.

Mephistopheles and Justine handled those problems as would any mayor and vice mayor. They shoved people around to fix the broken bureaucracy of Candlepoint to make things happen as best they could, while Guard Captain Slip oversaw the keeping of law and order.

The Mind Mages from Spur helped pull out truth from those willing to accept a Mind Mage arbiter, but those Mind Mages kept away from the bigger events. Like politics.

For this day was shaping up to be a true political shit storm.

Poi was handling a lot of that, though. He answered questions from those demanding answers, from the Viridian Throne, to the Wasteland Kingdoms, to the Pearl Kingdom. Treehome called, too. Every single person Erick had ever interacted with, who he had left on good terms with, called, and Poi answered. But he was only one man, and so he called in more Mind Mage help from the rest of the Mind Mages, and Erick [Gate]ed in people from several different places around the world to assist in that untangling of truth.

The Mind Mages weren’t playing political favorites (they told Erick multiple times), but if he wanted the truth of what was happening here to get out there (which he did), then they could certainly ensure that truth flew slightly faster than horrible lies.

Some people, somewhere, were surely going to think that Erick was setting up ritual magic to cause another Sundering, but the Mind Mages could do nothing about those responses; they could just tell people what they saw happening here, on the ground.

Kirginatharp and Stratagold had small words for Erick, mostly along the lines of ‘what the fuck’ and ‘good luck’ and ‘please respond with your true plans at your earliest convenience’. Not a minute after receiving those missives, Erick decided to have Poi respond with those plans. With regard to the evacuation of Candlepoint, Erick was simply telling it like it was, and letting people make their own informed decisions.

To Stratagold, Erick added, ‘The first of the public Gates should be open by tomorrow, or earlier, upon the locations discussed. Candlepoint is ready for trade!’

Candlepoint wasn’t exactly ready for trade, so this was something of a small lie. But it would be the truth soon enough (Erick hoped). The part about having Gates up and running by tomorrow was an enthusiastic and hopeful estimate, but it would be a lie if Erick wasn’t able to deliver, and so, Erick got to work on making a Gate. A real, proper Gate, within which he could set a [Gate].

But first, he needed a Gate workshop.

– – – –

Erick knew he needed a lot more time to play around with [Gate], to learn how the spell truly functioned long before he attempted to stick it into a runic construct. But there was little time to be had.

The world was watching.

And so, Erick got to work. Upon another branch of Yggdrasil, separate from the one holding his house and higher up in the tree, Erick set down long lines of platinum. From there he inscribed them with scratches of a Benevolent knife, and began casting [Fairy Stronghold] onto the runic web. With Kiri and Teressa watching, Erick had made for himself a workshop unlike any other…

But it did look sort of like Redflame’s workshop, which was intended.

Erick’s new domain of creation was an air hangar that stretched along the flattest 150 meters of Yggdrasil’s branch, and extended left and right all the way to the edges of that branch, about 70 meters. At twenty meters high, it had cost Erick a lot of mana to conjure for even empty space cost mana when it came to [Fairy Stronghold], but Erick had mana to spare and a lot of efficiency multipliers.

And now he had a workshop of mostly-unbreakable solid white floors, nice overhead lighting, lots of windows in every direction to let in the natural lighting of Yggdrasil, and an in-born security system of [Fairy Stronghold] that would keep out all prying eyes and let him work in peace. There would be no [Prismatic Ward] in this space, though, for it was much too large, and so Fairy Moon could probably pop in whenever she wanted…

Erick did not doubt that Fairy Moon could pop into his house, either, even though that space was covered by his own [Prismatic Ward], which he had recast, himself. The dense air around his house in Spur had vanished due to that, since he could only have one Solid Ward active at any one time, but—

Erick was distracting himself again.

What was the point of worrying over Fairy Moon? There was no point. Erick moved on.

By the time he reached this point the sun was already headed back toward the horizon, to set in the west, though it would still be a few hours before it got there. It was time to work, and work fast. Erick briefly cursed himself again for not playing around with [Gate] while he could.

But he was here now, and so there would inevitably be some playing before the real work could commence.

Erick stood upon the white floor of his new workshop, and said to Kiri, “I’ll explain as I work, but I gotta get the first ones out as soon as possible, so I don’t have a lot of time to properly teach right now. There will be more time later, though.”

“You already said that,” Kiri said, smirking. “Where can I help?”

“Right! This is next.” Erick gestured to the left, opening a [Gate] to Yggdrasil down in Stratagold. Large blocks of metal, each one a meter square and five meters long, began to flow through the portal, trundled along by Ophiels in sunform. The transition from the gravity of the Underworld to the gravity of the Surface had each block ‘flinch’ a fraction as it came through, but Ophiel compensated. Soon, three large rectangles of metal rested to the side. “We’ve got normal steel, rustless steel, and prismsteel. All wrought quality. I can get the first two easily enough by paying for them, but the third one needs to go as far as I can make it go.”

Kiri glanced around for a brief moment, looking at Teressa, before looking back to Erick. It was just Erick, Teressa, and Kiri, right now. Jane was over with Poi, providing backup to Poi as Poi oversaw the last of the evacuation.

Kiri sent Erick, ‘We all know you have [Duplicate]. Teressa, Poi, Jane, and I. No one else as far as I know.’

Erick winced.

But Teressa nodded, and silently stared at Erick, probably trying to decipher his wincing.

Erick said, ‘I guess you do. But. Let’s keep the lie going, okay?’

Kiri said, “Make the prismsteel go as far as possible. Sure.”

Erick turned back to his work, “Now I’m going to make an arch out of rustless steel first, in the hope that that will allow me to keep costs down. It’ll still rust, though, and so I hope to be able to make a [Condense Oxygen] or [Anti Oxygen] runic structure to preempt such an occurrence. To start…”

Erick continued to explain as he used a precise cast of [Metalshape] to cleave off a half meter length of rustless steel from the full bar. From there, and to prevent beading and weakness from using [Metalshape], Erick used [Incandescent Aura] to heat up the metal to bright red, stopping just before the point where all the baked-in mana evaporated out of the metal.

The next part was harder, for the proper way to do this would be to use great big machines to roll out the steel into proper bars, but Erick didn’t have that. Eventually he would have that sort of stuff, like they had at Enduring Forge, but for now he used his sunform to crush and stretch the steel.

Benevolent lightning crashed around the red-hot steel, sparking and flashing and crunching inward. Gradually, Erick turned the glowing metal into a long bar, around 50 meters in length. Erick hadn’t really measured anything, and he knew he had lost some steel due to the method of forging, but a 100x100x50 centimeter block of steel becoming a 10x10x5000-ish centimeter length of steel seemed like a good length to go for, and Erick was pretty good with eyeing proper measurements these days. These arches needed to be big enough for someone to drive through—

Not ‘arches’ actually.

Erick decided that square openings were better to make use of the full space provided by a single [Gate]. This meant a steel square around 12 meters on a side. Erick cut this down to 10 meters on a side, though, and used the extra material to square the corners, and provide some structural stability. It cut down on the overall usable space of the [Gate], but it was still ten meters to a side. Big enough.

… Large enough that it needed structural support beyond the small supports up at the corners.

Erick hummed as he gazed up at the 10×10 meter square of steel he had propped vertical in the workshop. The top sagged. The sides bowed. It needed more reinforcement. He was happy to reaffirm that a well-applied [Incandescent Aura] was more than enough to produce really strong welds, which was a plus, but this was not working. This Gate needed a lot more than this.

“This is the proper size, but… I don’t like it,” Erick said.

“Why?” Kiri asked.

“Sagging.”

Kiri looked at the square as best she could. “It’s barely sagging?”

“Well. Yes.” Erick said, “But it’s still sagging… And this isn’t gonna work! Gotta cut it down some.”

And so he did. Ten sagging meters to a side became five-point-five meters to a side, doubling the strength but nearly quartering the available [Gate] surface area. It was fine. Erick shoved the interior corner bracers to the very edge of the Gate, too, ensuring that there was a good five meters of clearance in the center. This, then, was stable.

Erick made a second one as easily as he did the first, though it still took him twenty minutes to do that.

When he had two nearly-identical blank Gates, he got out his adamantium knife, and—

Instantly realized he hadn’t done nearly enough experimentation with [Gate] yet to be sure of anything.

It was time to do that. And so, Erick opened up a [Gate] on one end of the warehouse, taking up a good ten meters of space, and leading to the other end of the warehouse. Erick saw himself through the endless warehouse, and smiled. He waved, but he ended up waving at his turned body, for this was almost like a hall of mirrors ‘infinity mirror’ thing, but it was not like that at all.

Kiri rapidly turned from one [Gate] to the other, trying to catch sight of her front, or something. Erick wasn’t exactly sure. Kiri said, “Okay. That’s weird.”

Wide-eyed, Teressa said, “I can sense myself though it.” She whispered, “Oh that’s so weird.”

Erick smiled as he opened up another set of [Gate]s to the left of the main floor; one ten meters up, one at waist-level, both of them horizontal and facing each other. He added some Shaped [Force Walls] around the [Gate]s, linking them together, and then grabbed a hunk of scrap metal and blipped it into the tube. The hunk of metal rapidly fell into the bottom [Gate]—

—And appeared out the top [Gate], to continue falling.

The ball bearing rapidly picked up speed, and soon the force of the air in the tunnel was enough to affect its fall, brushing it to the side. The ball bearing struck the [Force Wall]s Erick had put up and began skipping through the tunnel, striking the walls every so often as it hit terminal velocity. And it just kept going. The air in the tunnel began to fall through as well, though that happenstance was not nearly as easy to witness as the falling metal.

Erick pulled out another bit of metal from the rustless steel block and began shaping it into smaller Gates for more tests while his current [Gate] experiments ran. He had always closed whichever [Gate]s he had opened before, but now, he just let these ones run. His spell didn’t actually have any limitations on duration, though.

Half an hour later, Erick had an assortment of rustless steel Gates to enchant, ranging from a meter across, to a flimsy thing ten meters across, and he had decided that they would all be useless for this first [Gate]. He didn’t have time to test [Condense Oxygen] runic web structures right now, but these forms had helped him to understand what he needed out of a proper Gate design.

He also had an open [Gate] down below, deep in the waters of the lake, which had an exit point outside of the windows of his workshop. It was a ten-meter wide [Gate], so it wasn’t no small thing like the ball bearing tunnel he had set up inside the workshop.

Water poured out of that hole, a roaring torrent of rushing white that didn’t sound like much here at the top, but down below, where it crashed back into the lake a kilometer below, it was the sound of utter destruction. Of pulverizing. Of weight crashing down.

Teressa stood by the window nearest the waterfall [Gate], watching the water fall down.

And because Erick had no real work for her yet, Kiri had gone over to watch the waterfall, too.

Erick joined them.

Kiri glanced his way, then turned back to the waterfall. “It’s so weird. The water comes out of the hole in the world, and it keeps coming. This has passed all known limits of the [Gate] you can buy in the Script. I feel like it shouldn’t work like this.” She added, “But it obviously does work like this.”

“I thought weight limits mattered,” Teressa said. “But they don’t.”

“Well. It’s only water.” Erick said, “I am aware how much water weighs, but I have a net of Force surrounding the intake [Gate], filtering out all the actual life that could go through the intake. So this is just weight testing; not ‘transporting creatures testing’.”

“I almost want to try plunging through that intake [Gate]. Jane would certainly be up for that.” Teressa asked, “If you’re interested in sending people through?”

Erick perked up. “Oh! She would. Wouldn’t she?” He glanced through Ophiel. “Ah. Poi is still organizing the exodus and the initial chaos, and Jane is still with him. A waterfall ride might be fun, though.” He turned his attention back to the mostly-quiet start of the waterfall right outside his window, saying, “But, I’ve already sent thousands of people through the other [Gate]s I have set up outside Candlepoint, and none of those have broken with all the thousands of people going through. Thousands is not the same as millions, though, which is what I expect to happen someday. This weight was just another test that I needed to run, to see where my limitations lay.”

Teressa paused, realizing that Erick was already on the case. “Huh. Yeah.”

Kiri postulated, “Maybe you’re only limited by someone actively breaking the [Gate]?”

“Maybe. I do need to ask around about how normal [Gate] functions, to see where my own [Gate] differs.” Erick scrunched his eyebrows together as he glanced around his workshop, saying, “Maybe these questions I’m testing have already been answered.”

He knew the broad strokes already, but these little nuances were piling up. They made him feel as though he hadn’t done nearly enough research into this whole thing.

Kiri shook her head. “I researched as much as I could while you were gone and all of these tests have already been answered by explorations of the Script-granted [Gate], but I’ve got nothing on self-made [Gate]s.”

Erick smiled brightly. “You did!”

“Don’t get too excited, now.” Kiri gestured to the ball bearing tunnel. “That should have cut out after maybe ten cycles.” She gestured to the very large [Gate] open at both ends of the warehouse. “That is way too large. The size of a normal [Gate], cast as large as it could be, is about 5 or 7 meters in diameter.” She gestured to the waterfall outside the window. “And that breaks everything I assumed I knew about [Gate]. Not to mention the ones you already have open at Candlepoint right now. People are still moving through those, too, and those don’t seem to be stressed at all; I’ve been watching.”

… And now Erick was a bit worried.

Perhaps the limitations on the Script [Gate] were to prevent a finite resource from running out?

He quickly opened a new [Gate] into Benevolence. A white lightning hole in reality led to a land of similar lightning… But it looked fine? Same size as before? A bit bigger, actually. Everything was slightly larger, in fact. Glancing inside, Erick noted that the stone fountain in the center of the land was about twice the size it had been last time he had looked, and the Yggdrasil inside the space was about 20 meters tall now; Yggdrasil had doubled in size. He was growing just fine.

And the space was naturally growing, too.

Kiri looked over Erick’s shoulder, asking, “Is that the [Gate Space]?”

“Yup!” Erick stepped away from the portal, closing it as he said, “That appears normal, so it’s not like I’m ‘draining’ some resource to keep these other portals open.” He looked outside again, and then back to his warehouse. He shut off the waterfall and the [Gate]s at the end of the building, but he left the ball bearing tunnel going. He refreshed the [Force Wall]s around that experiment, saying, “Keeping that one. As for making these Gates…” Erick shrugged. “Maybe all I need is some way to be alerted when a [Gate] actually breaks, and needs to be recast? Maybe I don’t need to care about the duration enhancing power of runes?”

Which made a lot of sense, actually.

Teressa offered, “Like what we saw with the Twisted Vision? It came back after being disturbed.”

Erick nodded, his thoughts already having gone that way. “I didn’t think it was that simple, but maybe it is? So how can blank metal do that…” Erick fell silent in thought.

And Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye, which had been watching all this time, began bouncing up and down in front of him.

Erick smiled. He and Yggdrasil had already had this small discussion before, but Erick hadn’t found a way to correctly inform Yggdrasil that what he wanted was not actually what he wanted at all. Perhaps today might be different? Erick tried, “I know you want to help, but I don’t want to make you into a teleportation service for everyone who asks. You don’t want to do that, either. It might be fun for a while, but long term, this is not a solution, not when there might eventually be thousands upon thousands of call requests every second, 24 hours a day, all year long.”

Yggdrasil paused his bouncing. Yeah. That didn’t seem like fun.

And then he resumed bouncing, and his voice came through the ground of the warehouse, “I still want to help. Use a branch!”

Before Erick could say anything else, a sudden branching spike of glowing wood erupted from the floor ten meters in front of Erick. Yggdrasil’s egress rapidly grew, and then twisted, forming right angles, becoming a 5×5 meter-thick square of white wood; the same shape as the Gates Erick had been making. Smaller branches curled up and out from the upper part of the main square, followed by flaming green leaves bursting out of those twigs, forming a scattered canopy with a faint rainbow crown glowing on top.

Erick lightly smiled.

Ah. This was going to be difficult, then? Or maybe Erick could use this, anyway. He had been wanting to experiment with wood from Yggdrasil, anyway, and now was as good a time as any.

Kiri and Teressa both stared at the floor, though. Both of them rapidly reassessed the danger of living on Yggdrasil, and then rapidly came to the conclusion that they were probably still safe.

“That’s wonderful, Yggdrasil.” Erick said, “I’ll see what I can do with it, but it might not look like this when I am done. I might need you to help in a different way, okay?”

“Okay!” Yggdrasil said, “I’ll help whatever!”

Erick reached over and touched the wooden square near where it still connected with the branch sticking out of the floor. “Can you break it here, Yggdrasil?”

“Yes!”

The white glows of Yggdrasil retreated from the square branch to end exactly where Erick pointed, and then, with a flicker of light, the branch snapped off right there. Erick supported the square with his sunform before it could fall more than a few centimeters. It didn’t weigh much; maybe only a few hundred kilos.

… And now he had a 5×5 meter square of meter-thick, rather light wood. Yggdrasil had pulled his light from the wood, though. It was still bright white wood with brilliant green leaves, but the crown of rainbows was gone, the wood was simply white without any light, and the leaves were no longer on emerald fire.

Erick pondered.

Strangely enough, Erick’s first instinct was to see if he could have Yggdrasil reflexively open up a [Gate]. Perhaps… Like how a doctor tested the reflexes of a knee by tapping the knee with a rubber mallet, perhaps knocking on a Gate made of Yggdrasil could open a [Gate] without active participation on Yggdrasil’s part.

Erick said, “I don’t want to hurt you by working on this bit of wood. Can you still feel this square now that it’s separated, Yggdrasil?”

“Nope!”

There went that idea. Of course it wouldn’t be as simple as having someone physically knock on a Gate and Yggdrasil reflexively opening the portal. Perhaps, though…

Erick had no intrinsic idea of where the [Gate]s were once he cast them, much like how he had no feeling for where all his currently-running spellwork still existed, across the globe. And yet, Erick was still connected, intrinsically, to all the magic he had running out there. He could still cancel every spellwork he had ever cast, just by willing all that magic to collapse.

Was it possible to train some sort of magic sense? In order to know when a particular magic that should be running, was not running anymore?

Perhaps Yggdrasil could gain that sort of sense, and if a [Gate] collapses, he could recast that [Gate].

Erick asked, “Can you tell where the [Gate]s I opened are?”

With a bit of wariness in his voice, Yggdrasil said, “… No?”

Erick smiled, and said, “I can’t tell where I put them either, so don’t worry about not being able to either, okay? I might need to work on a Magic Sense, or something like that, but I have never even heard of this sort of magic, so… I’m not sure.”

Kiri shrugged. She had never heard of a ‘Magic Sense’ either.

“Okay,” Yggdrasil said, a bit sadder. And then he excitedly tried, “But I can feel Benevolence everywhere! I can feel that! Flows like sticky air! I get spiderweb feelings.”

Erick was surprised, and happy.

But he was also suddenly, horrifically terrified of Yggdrasil getting spider feelings of any sort. How did he even know that phrase? Were there talking spiders inside a Yggdrasil somewhere, that Erick didn’t know about? Some spiders out there talked, after all—

Wait.

The Big Guy had likely heard Jane talking, or something.

Erick asked, “Has Jane ever visited you as a spider, and talked about being a spider? What it feels like to be a spider.”

“I got spiders at Holorulo! They talk sometimes.”

Terror.

Erick strangled that emotion away, feeling strange both for the power of that particular emotion, and for how it had caught him completely off guard. He let that go.

“… Okay.” That was a thing to be investigated, for sure. Erick asked, “How long have they been there? Are they in your canopy?”

“Long time. Swimming spiders. Root dwellers, fishy-catchers.”

“… Okay.” For now, Erick said, “Okay. Well. I’ll talk to them another day. For now, since you can feel Benevolence, that’s wonderful. That gives me an idea.”

Erick set down the square of Yggdrasil wood and used a concentrated blade of his sunform to trim off one of the smaller branches on the top. It was like cutting stone with a buzzsaw. He barely cut the white wood even with applying all his force. So instead of doing more of that, he used a very small cast of [Eternal Stonestreeshape] to turn that bit of white wood into a solid cylinder about a meter long, and ten centimeters thick. Another Shaping turned the wood into a tuning fork with the ‘tines’ actually being the rune for [Renew].

It held no power, for it was not an enchanted item, but maybe Yggdrasil could ‘feel’ it anyway?

… This was probably not going to work, and that was fine.

Erick held the ‘tuning fork’ in his right hand and zapped it with his [Pristine Benevolence]. Iridescent white lightning soaked into the ‘runic’ working to dance back and forth between the closest point where the tines almost touched, at the top. Erick asked, “Can you feel that, Yggdrasil?”

“… Yes.”

Erick was impressed.

Yggdrasil had lied, and not about something small like ‘being tired’.

“It’s okay if you can’t feel it, Yggdrasil.” Erick said, “I won’t be mad at all.”

With a deeply worried tone, Yggdrasil exclaimed, “I can’t feel it! Is something wrong with me?”

Erick smiled calmly, and said, “Nothing is wrong, Yggdrasil. But now that you have told the truth, I can put together some more advanced thoughts, and make some more advanced designs. Telling the truth is important when it comes to magic, no matter who you will make mad by telling the truth.”

With a questioning tone, Yggdrasil asked, “People ask if you’re a Wizard and I still say no?”

“Just don’t tell anyone about me, Yggdrasil. No need to lie, or tell the truth. Just don’t tell them about me when they ask.”

“Okay!” Yggdrasil happily said, “This is easier!”

Erick smiled.

And then he had another idea. The basic idea of a piece of Yggdrasil, soaked in Benevolence and then chiming off power, probably still had merit, if Yggdrasil could indeed feel all the Benevolence around him with ‘spiderweb feelings’. Perhaps the problem was one of scale? Or maybe strength of signal?

Erick asked, “Can you feel me, Yggdrasil? When I walk around?”

“Yes!” Yggdrasil said, “I know where you are, always. Very comfortable. Better that you live here now.”

“I like living here, too.”

Erick turned his attentions inward.

… He felt like he should be able to have such ‘spiderweb feelings’ as Yggdrasil. But he did not. Maybe he needed to actually experiment more with Benevolence to understand it better? The answer to that question came as soon as Erick had that thought: yes, you fool. You need to experiment more with Benevolence.

Erick had too many fun and interesting new toys and not enough time in the day—

And, he needed to get on with Time Magic, too! With Phagar!

— to learn about all of them, and what they could do.

Well. He was here and experimenting. So he focused again on the thought of ‘spiderweb feelings’.

And he got nothing.

“What do I feel like to you?” Erick asked.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“Like a river flowing. I feel you brush against me. I know where the river starts.”

Even though Erick wasn’t currently releasing Benevolen—

Wait. He was currently releasing Elemental Benevolence out into the world. His [Pristine Benevolence] and his [Lodestar]. Erick turned off his sunform.

He asked, “Do you still feel me?”

Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye squinted at Erick. “Yes. But not like before. Something changed?” Yggdrasil’s [Scry] eye stared at him. “What happened?”

Erick turned his sunform back on.

“There you are!” Yggdrasil said, “I feel you lots. You are here, father!”

Okay. So. Actively casting Benevolence caused his mana to flow away and he was fully sensible to Yggdrasil. Made sense. Mana that got used was often tainted with the magic that it was used for. In Erick’s case, his constantly-active sunform was doing exactly that. But since he was a Wizard, and all his mana was usually his own, unlike the vast majority of most people on Veird, would other constant magic allow Yggdrasil to sense him, even if it wasn’t Benevolence-based? His own mana was all Benevolence mana after his recent transformation, after all; that was his particular ‘flavor’ of personal mana.

There was the slight nuance that Yggdrasil could always feel where Erick was, anyway, but that might not be completely relevant to this sort of discussion.

Erick cut his sunform and turned on his [Physical Domain] aura, but kept it small and close by. “Can you sense this, Yggdrasil?”

“… Nooo? … Yes? No. Maybe. No— Yes.” Yggdrasil spoke solidly, “Yes. You are there. I see you.”

Seemed inconclusively affirmative of Erick’s hypothesis.

Oh! Erick had another idea; another way to get an automagic [Gate] system set up.

Erick asked Kiri, “Do you know if [Scry] can be used to call the sight of a particular person, or entity?”

Kiri and Teressa both had been standing to the side, watching and listening while Erick worked. Now, though, Teressa had absolutely no answer so she glanced down at Kiri, and Kiri blinked at the unexpected question.

“Uh…” Kiri said, “Not that I am aware of—” She realized something and instantly said, “You can call the Sight of a god by calling their name. Other than that; no idea.”

“I don’t want Yggdrasil to be a constant porter, but reflexes can be trained…” Erick paused. “The wording in the roots of the Twin Trees that held the [Gate] into the Twisted Vision was not Ecks, at all. It wasn’t any language I have ever seen. It was, in fact, just a way to designate that space as a place for the Twisted Vision to attach.” He paused. “… But that [Gate] was there to make an entrance into the Gate Space of Ar’Cosmos. What I want is point-to-point [Gate]s, and to bypass my own Gate Space completely.”

Okay. So.

If Erick continued along this line of inquiry, he could probably create a reflexive opening into the [Gate Space] of his [Gate]. This was not what he wanted, actually.

There was so much nuance to making a Gate; so much more than Erick had originally thought, way back when he was working with Tenebrae to understand that entrance to Ar’Cosmos, back before Erick knew it was an entrance to Fairy, to the land of the dragons.

And yet…

“I’m probably overthinking this.” Erick tried the first idea that came to mind; he tried to make a key. So he grabbed his adamantium knife and began carving into the runic tuning fork, slicing english words into steel-strength, balsa-weight wood. In two minutes he was 95% done. He looked it over, and it was good enough. And then he looked to Kiri and Teressa, sending, ‘You didn’t see this next part.’

They both nodded, mostly seriously, but Kiri had a small lilt to her lips; a tiny smile.

Erick added, ‘I mean it. This is a politically dangerous spell that might tank relations with Stratagold if they found out.’

Kiri lost her smile at that. Teressa just nodded, looking the same as she had before Erick added that next part. Teressa had known that Erick’s warning was real, and not just paranoia talking. It was probably ridiculous to still think of [Duplicate] as something to be kept hidden, especially since all the other stuff Erick was no longer hiding, but [Duplicate] was a political mess of a spell.

Erick [Duplicate]d the key.

And now, with two keys, he carved a few more English words at the bottom of the keys. For the original, he carved it with ‘to my other twin, beta’ and on the copy, he carved ‘to my other twin, alpha’.