Marked Interlude D (Patreon)

The sound of conversations, ware hawking, dray animals, and bustle were a sussurant backdrop to what the dig team was coming to refer to as Muckertown. It was a tongue in cheek nod to the scornful nickname 'mucker' that the orc tribes of the swamps had for archaeologists in general; the druidic traditions of the locals held no love for those who would dig up the landscape in search of history. But knowledge was a treasure more precious than gold or jewels to a well honed mind, and the archaeologists of the continent had long since become accustomed to the disdain of the ignorant who would hold in priority transient plants that would die and grow back over knowledge that, once lost, could be lost forever.

One such archaeologist was an unassuming gnome who, to his fellows, was called Eranil Snarik. It was short for Eranil Famblinkit Zarubal Thumblethumper Snarik the Sixth, those five names and no more. He very assiduously strove to ensure that his family and associates didn't tack on additional nicknames; he wasn't much for the gnomish traditions of accumulating names as he much preferred to keep things simple and short, an irony in that, for a gnome, he was actually rather tall.

Which, to his delight, was unimportant here-- the only thing anyone in Muckertown cared about were the ruins. And what ruins they were! The archaic hobgoblin keep was marvelously hale, but geology being what it was, there was no way for certain to say how many years more that would last. The nature of this land meant that any permanent structure would inevitably sink into the soft earth over a long enough period of time, and all a foundation did was serve to keep it largely intact as it did so.

Eranil found it all fascinating, of course, not merely for what the ruins could teach but also for the reactions of the varying factions jockeying for leverage and knowledge. Biologists and architects and historians and armorsmiths and magewrights all competing for able bodies and skilled hands as each wanted to prioritize their own field for study.

He of course held a degree of bias. Preserved specimens of symbiote weapons and gear entailed intricate biomantic applications; intensive research and dissection permitted magewrights to discern the underlying magical principles of those weapons and equipments, turning them to useful purposes. Of course, the process was also highly profitable. He personally was receiving grants from three separate departments in Morgrave University, as well as two private financiers. And one of those private financiers was scheduled to be making a personal visit today, a retired adventurer and hobbyist dragonshard hunter Nella... something or other. Actually, now that he bothered to think about it, he supposed he didn't actually remember her giving a surname. And Nella was a generic enough name that she could have come from almost anywhere, really. Like Smyth.

But the eccentricities of semi anonymous ex-adventurers wasn't really his concern. What was his concern was the mysterious job she had intimated she had for him at, as she had termed it, a near but imprecisely calculated timeframe wherein the expected tutoring schedule included one to two days of instruction per week. Magical instruction of any sort wasn't a casual affair; it required dedication, zeal, obsession. Magic was unforgiving, dangerous, and the art of infusion dealt with the fundamental forces of magic. He wasn't entirely certain that this tutelage was remotely wise, or at all healthy for him, but Nella paid so well...

He supposed that when she and her beneficiary arrived, he could make a better judgment then.

"Eranil!"

Speak the rakshasha's name and she shall listen, he thought to himself as he spun to face the voice almost directly behind him and threw his arms expansively wide. Out loud, he exclaimed, "Mistress Nella! So very good to see and hear from you again!"

"Spare me your obsequious banalities, Eranil," Nella said, grinning down at him and snatching his feathered hat from his head so she could mess up his hair. "I know you are only lambasting me with them to get into my trousers."

Eranil drew himself up with as much dignity as he could with his hair in disarray around his eyes, nose, and mouth. "Hardly would I consider to attempt to bed a woman so fine as yourself! It would despoil the magnificence of your aura of mystique!" he countered jovially. His eyes turned to look up at the unusually tall girl child in Nella's wake, who looked unfinished in the ways of adolescence yet was easily as tall as some grown human men. Her lankiness and unusually wide mouth gave her an exotic appearance, especially with the smooth, all but unblemished skin and strikingly even features. She was a bit young looking to be deemed a beauty, but she would be one in a few years, especially with that exotic, blue tinged hair. "And is this the prospective student you warned me of?"

Nella glanced over her shoulder at the girl, who looked around the mobile city with eyes that seemed to regard every aspect of it as unfamiliar. "This is my... I suppose you could call her a ward of mine. She goes by Titania in her home but I have taken to calling her Taylor." At the mention of her name, the girl turned her head back towards Eranil, and he realized suddenly that she was wearing remarkably delicate, finely crafted spectacles of some kind. They made her already expressive eyes seem somewhat larger. She smiled shyly back at him, and said a few words in some strange, almost yipping-chirping language. Nella added, "She is a foreigner from... a great ways away."

Eranil nodded, and pulled out a pair of spectacles of his own, settling them in place on the bridge of his substantial nose. Until today, he would have called them elegant, but compared to the young girl's own, they seemed almost crude. He felt the magic of their translation enchantment take hold, and he smiled at her. "I greet you, young Miss Titania!" he said with a flourishing half bow. "A pleasure indeed to meet someone who has caught the eye and regard of the illustrious lady Mistress Nella! I am Ser Eranil Famblinkit Zarubal Thumblethumper Snarik the Sixth, first protege and most talented student of Professor Fowjers Meloderius Grimble Haurntorth of the-"

"Stop trying to charm her, Eranil," Nella said with a hint of disapproval. "We are here for you to teach her, nothing more."

Eranil gave a huffy fold of his arms. "Well if you're to take all the fun out of it," he said with a sniff, "I suppose we shall just get down to business. So, young Miss. Tell me of your knowledge of magical theory."

"She has none," Nella interjected. "Her native land has no knowledge of magic whatsoever."

Eranil gaped at her in disbelief. No knowledge of magic at all? Eranil couldn't think of a civilized or even a barbarian tribe in the known world that didn't. Even a large number of animals had some native magical ability, as instinctual as it was. "You're giving me as a student a complete savage?" he sputtered. He looked at the girl again, and asked, "Does she even know what a city is, or anything beyond a cluster of tents?"

"The city I come from has a population of three hundred fifty thousand," the girl retorted preposterously, folding her arms. "We don't have magic, so we use engineering and sciences instead to design our cities, make urban centers livable. Mistress Nella said that my mind was keen and suited to learn what you have to teach me. So I am here to learn."

The indignance in her voice and posture struck him. Regardless of the sheer impossibility of fitting that many people into a city without the use of magic, she certainly believed it to be true. And the way she delivered that 'I am here to learn' was spoken with the same sort of calm surety most people used when teaching their children that the sun would come up in the East. "Hoo!" he said finally. "You don't want for faith in yourself, that's for certain. Alright then. Let's get to work!"

The girl dug out a book from her bag, one that Eranil could immediately identify on sight as a commonly used primer on artifice, and said, "Can we start with what's in this? Is there a way you could translate it for me with magic? I can't read your language yet."

"What do you mean, 'you can't read'? I thought you said you came from a civilized people!" Eranil demanded.

"I can read just fine; I just can't read your writing any more than I can speak your languages yet." The girl frowned. She waggled the book at him. "Otherwise, I could have started by studying this without taking up your time." Titania looked over at Nella with a raised eyebrow. "You would have made me figure that out on my own," she added.

"Eranil, can you or can you not?" Nella asked impatiently. "I could give her basics, but this is your field of expertise and I do not have the time to divert to tutoring. And on the topic OF time, she does not have much time remaining here by my guess; then we will be left waiting for her return in five days or so."

Eranil didn't pry into 'time left here' as he wasn't sure he'd much care for the answer and if they were pressed for time then wasting it was counterproductive and likely to lose him not only tutoring fees but possibly Nella's grant. Still, this sounded like a miserable prospect. "You do not ask small tasks for your coin, do you? If she cannot read nor practice any form of magic yet, then how do you expect me to instruct her in any meaningful fashion?"

"Start by speaking directly to me, instead of to Mistress Nella?" the girl demanded boldly. "I'm not stupid. Explain to me what you wanted to know when you asked me about magical theory. Start with what you would have expected me to know to begin with."

Eranil stared at the girl for several seconds. If nothing else, she was certainly strong willed. If her intellect could match it, then despite the initial handicap of illiteracy, perhaps this wouldn't be a waste of time after all. He beckoned for the girl to follow him; Nella remained behind, speaking to a merchant while Titania followed him. As he walked, he began lecturing. "Hmph. Alright then, to fundamentals. Magic, in its earliest forms, was unpredictable, unreliable, and underwhelming. Most effects that could be accomplished through magic were easier to enact simply by physically doing them. Gathering the magic took time and effort, and the results were typically meager and exhausting..."

---

The girl's attention span was surprisingly solid; from his experience such rapt focus was the purview of middle aged adults or, in VERY brief stretches, young children. She took notes in her own language-- and he was very pleased that she was at least some form of literate-- asked few but pertinent questions, and listened in his tent without wavering for a solid three hours as he spoke, despite how dry the subject matter could be at times. Finally, he broke off from lecturing. "I admit; I am impressed! Tweenagers are usually much more impatient."

"You meen teenagers?" Titania asked.

"No, no. I apologize profusely, I mean the awkward age before adulthood," Eranil clarified. "Although... Hm. Yes, for humans that WOULD fall under 'teens' rather than 'twenties' wouldn't it? So yes, I suppose in this case it WOULD be teenagers. Which I'm assuming you are?"

"Yeah. Fifteen." She gave something of a heavy sigh; Eranil would bet there was a story there, although he wasn't precisely sure what it could be.

Something cultural? He wasn't in a position to guess or speculate, so he did the next best thing: he chose to pretend it wasn't there. "Then let's find out how well you've understood what I've said so far. What is the first principle of shaping manaflows?"

"Symbolism. Most commonly found in the material components of spells, such as the inclusion of the incendiary combination of guano and sulfer for the fireball spell, or the value implicit in a gemstone component for Clothier's Closet."

"Very good. And I hadn't included the latter spell in my lecture, accurate though it is."

"I keep my ears open."

"So you apparently do." Eranil wasn't yet convinced Titania was as quick on the uptake as Nella had said, but at least she could infer from obvious patterns, a talent more than a few prospective magical students he'd once trained alongside were depressingly lacking. "How good is your memory? The fourth principle of shaping manaflows?"

"Sacrifice, willful destruction of something of varying value. Again, tied to material components. The sacrifice ehances or empowers the effects of the spell." She flips a page back and adds, "But you never finished describing Contagion, you simply said it was the means of propagating the effect from the source to its destination. You didn't describe the mechanisms in the same detail you did the other four you gave me. I was going to wait until you'd described all seven to start asking questions, but since you're quizzing me..."

Eranil rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Yes, he HAD glossed over Contagion, as he usually did when describing magical theory to laypersons, given the principle was somewhat esoteric and delved heavily into minutiae. "Alright, then, lecture continues. Contagion is frequently thought of as infection, as with diseases. But it is, as you repeated back to me, the propagation of a spell. Part of the shaping of a spell is ensuring it goes where you want it to. Case in point, Burning Hands. The contagion of the spell propagates through the air across a conical arc described by the fanning hands on completion of the spell, covering a fixed volume and distance. Contagion can simply be a nascent charge withheld from actualization until physical contact is made; in that sense it is a literal contagion, such as in the case of Shocking Grasp." He watched her as she furiously jotted down her notes, and decided a demonstration was in order. He snapped his fingers twice, the signal for his Unseen Servant to clean the surface of his slate, which under most circumstances he used to sketch out diagrams of the weave of one enchanted object or another, whether theoretical or real. Now, though, he began sketching a simple enchantment, for one of the simplest permanent magic items he could think of, a Watch Lamp. "One of the advantages of a magic item is that in its construction, the potentials of otherwise lackluster spells can be focused into something more useful than the original."

The diagram immediately caught her attention in a big way; her eyes studied it with something akin to hunger. Eranil found this bringing a smile to his lips unbidden; he remembered the first time he'd seen the magical flows with the enchanted goggles used to instruct students of artifice at the Library of Korrenburg. He remembered that first almost rapturous moment, the glimpse that hinted at the fact that there was, in fact, a consistent structure to the power and mysteries of everyday miracles. He resolved to himself to speak to Nella about securing the funds to procure a set. "Now mind you, what is illustrated here is only an approximation in a flat surface, and-" He stopped as she raised a hand slowly.

"I know the differences between two and three dimensional," she said.

"Really? A rather advanced concept for someone not a student of topographical or extradimensional mathemagics," Eranil commented thoughtfully.

"It's a relatively basic concept in geometry," Titania answered. "Middle school math, actually. Although high school is where we start to actually calculate things more tricky than area or volume."

Eranil stroked his chin again. "How long do you take education?" he asked.

"We typically start at four or five. A year of kindergarten, sometimes preschool, twelve years of basic education, the last four of which are referred to as high school. Most jobs require further education of some sort, at least a bachelor's degree, which is two to four years more at a college or university, specialty fields may need a master's degree, and the leading edge of almost anything needs doctorates."

"I see." Even by Khorvaire's enlightened standards, that was a staggering amount of education. Simply assuming that a 'master' or a 'doctorate' took the same amount of time as the bachelor-- which want a given, with how little he actually knew as yet-- implied that upwards of twenty years of training went into educating them. Which, by human standards, was a large percentage of their total expected lifespan. It also explained why she was so rapt a student; her people apparently had a culture and breadth of knowledge that she was expecting fully to experience more years of education than she'd currently lived. And he found himself starting to lend credibility to her statements; she spoke verbosely, and understood at least a few meaningful mathematical concepts that most people on the continent would have trouble with. Although he now was more than a little curious to know what her people knew that could require such a large expanse of time to teach.

"So, can we continue?" Titania asked impatiently after a moment.

"Of course, of course," Eranil answered. Titania turned her eyes back to the slate as he resumed his prior lecture. "The channels scribed by the lines here and here create a flow to the magic. The base spell is a versatile minor magic called 'Dancing Lights' but by creating this interference in the flows here, it restricts the contagion effect into a precisely focused region that allows ancient environmental energies to be harnessed in recursion, allowing for an open ended duration of activation without disrupting the maintenance of the magical charge..."