"And thus I clasp the beacon of discovery twixt my fingers, that it may dance and illuminate that which I seek to behold." Oliver finished the cast with a hand motion that involved his fingers pointing down then snaking his hand up. As he did so, rays of light snaked down from above and coiled into a small globe of bluish light held within his grasp, his fingers casting long shadows on the still-dim tunnel he and Alyssa had landed in.
Far above, the weak daylight of the outside could be seen reflecting off the rock walls, making it slightly difficult to tell how bright Oliver's new light was exactly, but it at least gave Oliver and Alyssa's semi-enhanced senses enough to gauge the overall shape of the room they were in. Though he wasn't a geologist, the primary impression he got from the shape of the stone was 'lava tube,' which didn't make sense for so many reasons.
The tunnel they were in stretched off to both their left and right, no real distinguishing features between the two. Oliver looked back and forth, trying to assess their options, but the darkness beat Oliver's dim light spell long before any distinguishing features could be seen.
"This way," Alyssa said, looking at the Window of Words and Winds for a moment before moving into the gloom. "Come on, wizzy, you've got my light!"
"I'm coming, I'm coming," Oliver grumbled.
Now that they were out of The Jungle, speed was far less paramount in favor of Alyssa being able to defend against potential attackers on a moment's notice. Oliver was quite content to be the fragile [Erudite Enchanter] in the back while the [Ranger of Far Lands] took the lead, even if it meant she set the pace and he had to constantly hustle to keep up.
The magic in here was weird anyway. He couldn't even quite identify what it was, exactly, it just was... atypical. Somehow. Some way. The nature of his intuition-based arcanoception meant he didn't have any direct physical sensations to compare it to, which could make identifying unknown magical phenomenon rather difficult. All he could really tell was that the threads of the Tapestry around him weren't behaving as he expected them to, and it was tripping up the 'anticipation' part of his mana sense.
The fact that he couldn't tell anything beyond 'it doesn't work like I expect it to' also made it hard to tell if it was even the same kind of weird he kept running into, or if it was a different weird, but either way it still made the nonexistent hair on the back of his neck stand up, and...
He nearly ran into Alyssa.
"What? Why did you... Oh." Oliver realized even as he asked the question just what had caused Alyssa to stop. The tunnel opened up into... it wasn't a huge cave by any means, but it was a cavern large enough that he couldn't see very much of it, at least not beyond the glimmer of some crystals embedded in the wall.
"Oh!" He realized, "Crystals!"
"Crystals?" Alyssa asked.
"Yeah," he pointed at the wall, "Crystals. You know, the shiny rocks? Only form of stone directly Associated with an element?"
"I know what crystals are," Alyssa replied, and Oliver shrugged. She could be forgetful about the weirdest things sometimes. "I meant, why are they interesting?"
"Oh, that's because of this," Oliver shifted which hand his light-source was in, trading it for his Staff of the New World.
[Scrollcast]
"I am Oliver Smith, the [Erudite Enchanter], and I do carry with me the beacon of day. Within my grasp is the light which shall illuminate the mysteries of this place, and so I shall spread it forth. May the stars of the soil capture my light and remember it, may they bring it forth to present wonder and apothecary reindeer gleam..." he trailed off.
The magic just wasn't taking for whatever reason. He really should have figured out what was up with the weird-feeling magic before trying to basically freehand cast something. Apparently, working mostly in First Tower, specifically the First Forge, had made him oh-so-quickly forget that his freedom with casting had been built, and wasn't innate. A few levels didn't return him to his full capability.
Alyssa looked at him, probably expectantly.
Oliver cleared his throat. "Just a moment. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three, Halation doth emanate, the aureole of those who wait, may the favrile display the wheel, iridescent jewels glimmering, held aloft by the muntin and mullion, you're not doing it either."
He would have thought for sure that Irradic would have gotten some kind of response. The Light-based Magespeech was a right pain to work in, far too flowery and sing-y for his preferences, but it usually got results. It didn't rhyme in the same way as the translation did, of course, but he'd always found it useful to compose the intent in poem to help capture the appropriate nuances of the melodic tongue.
He tried a couple more incantation languages and was about ready to start trying for multilingual speech, when Terric, of all things, finally started to work with the Tapestry. In retrospect, it did make a certain amount of sense, but objectively Oliver doubted it would have ever been his first guess.
"Ah, okay. There we go," he nodded to himself.
"And?" Alyssa asked, probably impatiently.
[Scrollcast]
"Be....hold," Oliver intoned, his voice deep and resonant. It was practically a hum, just slightly more articulated, "the [Erudite Enchanter] brings dawn. Stars alight as he comes. They glimmer and gleam. They awaken and sing. 'See,' they say, 'Oliver Smith does pass. Let there be a foundation. Let him appreciate what we are. Let him behold us. Let him behold this. Let there.... be light.'"
He flicked his fingers, tossing the light-crystal into the air and snagging it before it could fall to the ground. But from the illuminated crystal, a brief pulse of mana, then steadying into a structural trickle, reached out into the surroundings.
All around them, the crystals in the walls and the ceiling began to glow. Blues, purples, reds, even a couple of greens self-illuminated and cast the cavern in a breathtaking kaleidoscope of light, and Oliver needed to blink a few times as he adjusted to the substantially higher light levels.
It also shone semi-bright light directly onto the van-sized dragon sleeping in the middle of it, but it was still quite cool.
Oliver backed up rapidly as Alyssa charged the groggy but seemingly-irate creature. "A little warning next time would be nice!" she called back.
"Sorry!" Oliver responded, looking for a good way to protect himself. He settled for a fairly basic Arcane deflection spell mostly because he couldn't stretch the Staff of the New World much further than that. It had been [Cogniprint]ed from Shelter's Mana-Smoothing Ward, and even using it as a means to deflect air was a stretch only made possible to the Wind Wall Ward he'd also set up at the time of the [Cogniprint].
Fortunately, Alyssa seemed to have it well in hand. One of her axes had been lodged between some scales at the base of the creature's neck, and she swung herself up to the top of its head, held out her hand, and... nothing. Oliver picked up on a few wisps of magic around her, but nothing strong enough to become an actual spell.
"Oh, come on!" she protested, loudly enough that Oliver could hear it over the protesting roars of the dragon she had mounted. "Fine then!"
Alyssa stomped her foot down, somersaulting backwards even as the creature's head slammed into the ground. It turned around to where she'd landed, only to be met with a blast of fire. That seemed to disorient it long enough that Alyssa caught one eye with the pointed back of her axe, dragged its head down, and then finished blinding it.
Then, in a seeming excessive amount of good measure, she brought first the axe, then her leg down on its foreleg, snapping it with a literal bone-crunching crack, and then sweeping its other leg.
She walked back towards Oliver, studying him for some reason.
He picked up the Window of Words and Winds from where she'd dropped it on the ground, it being fortunately unscathed, and held it out to her.
"That should at least keep us safe from it, even if it's not dead dead yet," Alyssa said as she accepted the tablet. A pulse of magic rearranged the screen, and she glanced down. "Actually, how do you get this thing to show you skills? I thought I knew how, but it's not working for me."
Oliver shrugged. "I haven't actually tried? I could probably figure it out though. Could I?" He held out his hand.
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"That won't be needed," Alyssa swept it up into a tighter grasp, fiddling with the controls, "I just want to see how many levels are left before I can use [Flamewind] freely."
[Appraise], and... "Four." Oliver answered. "Five-level penalty, you're at level two, any skill needs level one before it can be used without external assistance."
"Hey," Alyssa said, "I was getting there."
"I got it faster," Oliver shrugged.
"You sure it's not level three? I feel like it should be level three."
"Didn't you get the skill yesterday?" Oliver asked, a bit incredulous, "If anything, level two is already pretty good."
"Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we're going that way." Alyssa pointed towards the left, where the crystals grew thicker along the walls.
They left the dying dragon to its demise and continued deeper into the bowels of the earth to investigate the source of a magical anomaly, their steps illuminated by crystals glowing in every color of the rainbow.
Damn, Oliver loved his job.
"You know, if I wasn't sensing this myself, I never would believe it's the actual place," Oliver remarked.
"You and me both. But hey, Sally's here!" Alyssa pointed to the salamander dominating the room, waving its tail intimidatingly even as it practically radiated Metal, Technology, Arcane, and Fire mana. Around it, several mid-sized dragons lay burned and half-eaten. Apparently, Oliver's dreams for a First Flame of Mankind weren't dead, just trapped in the heart of a rogue elemental spawned from the wreckage of his first artifact in the world. That was probably an improvement.
"Sally?" he still had to ask, "Have you been taking naming lessons from Clark?"
"Fight me."
Oliver didn't want to spare too much brainpower to that particular back and forth, because he was too enraptured by the sight around him.
His crystal-light spell was still going strong, and it was illuminating literally every surface around them. It was like they were inside of an enormous geode filled with glowing purple and yellow and orange gems, a tapestry of light mirroring the woven Tapestry still holding onto the patterns Oliver had given it. It looked completely and totally different, but the magic didn't lie. This was Shelter, just... crystallized into something new. Something more.
"Maybe later," he absently replied, "But I do need the tablet back."
Alyssa passed it off, her own focus split between the firstflame salamander and the two tunnels leading to the transformed Shelter. Every so often, a small dragon would scamper in, and Alyssa would either dispatch it with a strike to the head and smack the body over to the salamander, or the salamander itself would dart forwards and grab the dragon itself before retreating to its gleaming nest of crystal.
It seemed to be wary of Alyssa, which was fortunate. If they'd been forced to kill it, there was no way he'd have the ability to preserve whatever portion of its heartflame might be processable into something useful. Alyssa didn't have any instant-process skills either, so... better to keep it alive.
He grabbed the Window of Words and Winds from Alyssa and began to [Appraise] their surroundings. Between that, his normal senses adjusting to the conditions in the area, and a couple of basic Autonomous Divination scripts pulling information and displaying it for him, he could get a bit of a sense for what he was working with, and well...
"This is such a mess," he muttered with dismay. Even setting aside the inevitable roughness that had come with him making the Ward in an actual cave with nothing but twigs and rocks, Oliver simply did not understand what he'd been thinking with some of his previous decisions. Why were there Light and Dark threads being sustained in a pattern that looked like he was trying to create something out of Light and Shadow? Why had he used Binding there, and not something like Law... actually, he didn't have ready access to that element even now, so that would be why.
He'd set up competing definitions for glyphs, structured several tension-conditionals which would behave differently practically at random, and what was that thread of Air even doing? Why had he integrated so much Earth into everything? Why hadn't he connected two points of Technology that looked like they should obviously create a circuit?
Why hadn't he made any notes. Literally, there were no labels, no comments anywhere. He knew he was looking for something photosensitive, but that could be the result of so, so many things.
It was infuriating. Even if the lack of comments was entirely understandable, objectively.
He sighed. This was going to take a while.
"Ahh, okay," Oliver's eyes lit up.
"You figure something out?" Alyssa asked, then yawned and shook her head. The firstflame salamander eyed the two of them, probably not from hunger given how many dragon corpses it had to feast upon.
Oliver idly chewed on a bit of food. "I kept looking for a bug in some of the more Light-heavy areas of the enchantment, but it isn't. It's an actual, probably-intentional enchantment that's actually resonating with Law, like I put an actual boolean toggle into the enchantment without realizing it."
"Uh huh."
"But actually, I really did create a boolean toggle switch into the enchantment. From what I can tell, it's now static, because I had a conditional in there to just turn it off, but nothing to turn it on again. I just need to switch it back on, then make something to reset the enchantment whenever it gets tripped again. It's really just acting like a circuit breaker, it got a condition to turn off when shadows overtook it, and so it did, turning off the rest of the enchantment along with it."
"And you can't just remove it?" Alyssa asked. "Can't you just, I don't know, take the malfunctioning switch out, considering you don't actually want this enchantment to ever turn off?"
Oliver double checked that he couldn't in fact do so before responding, "No. It's not really just a switch. If we're using an electrical metaphor, it's also the wire. And it's load-bearing. I can't cut it out or even replace it without everything else crashing down around me, not without some specialized tooling that doesn't even exist on this world."
"Then what about protecting it, so you don't have to reset it so often?"
That... might work, actually. "Maybe. It depends on what seems possible as I'm in working on it. Live enchantments can be finicky to do too much with? Hmm."
Fixing the 'toggle' was easy enough. He just needed to spin up a [Scrollcast] patterned off the enchantment itself, wipe the 'memory' of the Light-dependent enchantment, and nudge the rest of the enchantment in a few key ways to get it all started again.
From there, he could create a kind of... light simulator. That he did by using his ongoing crystal-illumination spell as a loose template, adjusting the magic such that it didn't conjure actual 'physical' Light, but instead a specific flavor of mostly-pure Light mana, and plugged that constant stream into the photosensitive condition. That way, even if some Darkness or Shadow threatened it, it would still need to overpower the Light, which... well, Shadow could overpower Light, but it didn't do the best job at it most of the time.
Unfortunately, when he went to actually set everything up, withdrawing his direct mana-threads from the construct, it began to fall apart. His crystal-illumination spell was dependent on the light-focus in his hand, but he'd hoped that he could simply leave the focus there and make it all work. However, it seemed like he was too much of an active casting participant, and he'd need a new source of magic...
His eyes flicked over to the salamander. It... was a source of mana, and while it was mostly Fire and Technology... there was enough light coming off it that he could take advantage of that. It did mean that if the salamander left this room for too long, he might face another collapse, but Oliver was able to offset that possibility by including a kind of 'capacitor' for the mana, a buffer that would serve as the direct 'power' source for the light enchantment and could recharge and discharge easily. And for good measure, Oliver made sure to hard-set the enchantment to active, so that if it did ever fail, it would keep trying to restart until it ran out of power altogether and completely fell apart.
This time, when Oliver pulled his mana away from the construct, it stayed together. A little unsteady, yes, but it was definitely working.
As the enchantment hummed to life, Oliver pulled out the motion slide he was using to ensure everything worked, and a smile crept across his face as the two bits of metal slid across each other with a bit of a grinding screech.
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Discord. At least for now. Who knows what might happen if they go through with their stupid ID-checking plans.
Elements: Cosmic, Knowledge, Void
Role: Intuition (Astronomy)
Major Stats: Mind, Dexterity, Power
Minor Stats: Strength, Generation, Recovery
Base Stats: 15 Mind, 3 Power, 1 Dexterity, 1 Skill (knowledge)
Description: The cosmological oceans of the Realms of Void are deep indeed. Whether truly infinite, or if they stretch back to the beginnings of all reality is an open question, one which the Deepsky Astronomer actively seeks to answer. Peering into the eternal blackness between even the stars, they hunt for the deepest truths of reality, searching for the merest scraps of knowledge... whether for good or ill, fruitfully or pointlessly, none can say except for perhaps they themselves.
