The Way Ahead

“Got it,” Edwin opened his eyes.

“Wait, really?” she seemed genuinely taken aback, “That was so fast! How did you- What did you settle on?”

“I mean, I do literally have a Skill for Visualization. Anyway, it was…” Edwin decided to be dramatic, “a potion.”

“A potion?”

“Yeah,” he explained, “Like one of the bottles I have in my workshop for illumination. You said it should be simple and easy to visualize, but potent. Well, I work with that sort of thing all the time, and I can pretty readily imagine a bottle of liquid sunlight, or liquid fire. It’s… you know, a potion. There’s a bottle of it and I can pour it out and use it in stuff. It glows and has really fast effects, but it’s also a liquid and that tracks with what I’ve been imagining mana as so far.”

She remained skeptical, “It sounds like you have a very small amount of mana to call on that with that image. Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Edwin shrugged, “I’ve literally never run out of mana. I suppose more potion is being made all the time or something.” He thought for a moment, “Yeah, I can actually imagine it perfectly, a bunch of alembics and pipes and stuff all hooked together constantly adding to the batch. But it works so well! It’s basically just glowing water, so I should be able to call it up pretty quickly, but it also has lots of variety!”

She shook her head, “Leave it to you to make your analogy for magic include magic.”

Edwin kind of shrugged helplessly. “Well, anyway. What’s next?”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting you to be done with that today, let alone before we landed.”

Edwin grinned, glad that he could use Flight with basically no more trouble than just standing around thanks to all the practice he and Rillah had done.

“But since you did, now you just need to keep that image in mind. You got it? Okay, so then in my case I imagine standing in the middle of the storm, and I… make the mana pulse, I guess. Don’t know what else to call it. Then I… you know what, I’ll just show you.”

The two of them stood in his firing range meadow. All the reasons they had used it before- a convenient, yet remote distance from Sheraith, a lack of anything fragile- worked just as well for demonstrating magic as explosives, after all. Plus, they were already halfway there on their flight.

He could definitely feel Rillah’s magic surging from her and around them, a fierce and dry wind whipping from within her core. As time had passed, it had begun taking on a colder and colder tone to it, which was apparently in tune with her magic shifting towards more ice and snow abilities.

Rillah let out a low hum and the air around them thrummed in much the same tone, harmonizing together. She wordlessly sang a few other notes, jilted and harsh that seemed to hang in the air, preparing it for something. There wasn’t any obvious effect, though-

A brilliant bolt of lightning flashed through the air, momentarily blinding Edwin, just before the heat and shockwave blasted past him. He shook his head to clear it slightly, left otherwise unfazed by the veritable explosion- he was probably getting far too comfortable with stuff blowing up in his face, wasn’t he?- and nodded in appreciation.

“And that was without a Skill?” he confirmed, “That’s pretty potent for something you can just do by humming for a minute.”

She beamed at him, green and brown eyes glistening, “Yep! I’ve been offered the Skill a few times- Lightning Strike- but I’ve never used it often enough to make it worth a whole Skill. It takes a lot of wind from my storm, but it doesn’t really matter.”

Edwin nodded, “You said you were tier four, right? I bet that’s a pain and a half to try and deal with every time you want to add a new Skill.”

Rillah nodded, “Be glad you can still add Skills to your set without slowing yourself down too much. I still haven’t gotten my Flying skill chain up to the fourth tier and I’ve had it for three years now. It doesn’t help that all the really good Flying path combinations are sixty points at least, and I can’t even look up a Record because of the species differences!”

“So what was up with the humming?”

“Ah! Well, a storm can’t really be controlled, but a song can be controlled.”

Edwin blinked, “I don’t see the connection.”

“It’s… well, I’ve never really tried to explain it. It makes sense to me? I can sing, or use my flute, and that’s how I can shape what the storm does. It’s kind of like if you have your potion-magic, would you directly make a potion?”

“Is that… not how magic works?”

“Well, no. Did I not explain that?”

Edwin shook his head.

“Oops! I guess that’s what happens when you figure out an image within ten minutes about me first mentioning them, I forget stuff. At least it went well. Well, if you want to make a magical effect you need to control your mana, and I guess you might do your whole potion-brewing thing to make magic? Like, mixing your stuff together or whatever… I can’t help with that, sorry.”

“Well, I’m glad I didn’t go for the hydroelectric dam, then,” he muttered, and waved off Rillah when she perked her eyebrows up, “Doesn’t matter. Just an overcomplicated visualization.”

She nodded in understanding, though still looked somewhat confused.

“So… what else do you have?” Edwin asked.

“Haven’t we been over this?” she retorted.

Edwin shrugged, “I’ll stop asking if you stop looking like you’re about to laugh with every admonishment.”

She considered that for a moment, “Fair enough. I just have one base Skill for each season. This time of year, it’s obviously Autumnal Gust.”

A mana-infused Skill blossomed around her and the wind picked up dramatically, flattening the grass around them. As she continued, Edwin felt another Skill enter the mix and saw crescents of Skill energy scythe through their surroundings, cutting grass and letting the clippings fly into the air, buffeted by the wind and pulled into a tight spiral around Rillah.

She stood in the middle of the miniature tornado, without so much as a hair out of place. Some of her loose clothing fluttered slightly, but Edwin could see she was actually cheating, a Skill manually moving the cloth wholly separate from the localized windstorm. He wasn’t sure what to think about that. A cloth-fluttering Skill was what he expected from Lefi, sure, but not Rillah. Maybe it was the byproduct of a different one?

Then, the wind died down, and the meadow settled back into normalcy.

“No music?” he asked.

“The Skill takes care of most of that for me. Other than providing the mana and unlocking the Skill to begin with, I don’t actually need to do anything. Surely you’re familiar with the idea?”

Edwin nodded. “So can you not use your other magic when it’s not in the right season?”

“Oh, I can. It’s just weaker. The equinoxes and solstices are when my magic is purest, but I can always use all of my magic at any time.”

“Wait, how does that tie into the constant storm? Like ice in a snowstorm or whatever.”

“It… well, it’s more of a symbolic representation, you know? The storm is a common point but it doesn’t always fit with my magic.”

“Weren’t you just telling me how it strictly limited what you could accomplish with magic.”

“Yes, but… Okay, look. I’ve had my magic for more than a dozen years, that’s a lot of time where I can push the limits of my imagination and magic, and it won’t all make sense when I explain it.”

“I suppose that’s fair,” Edwin conceded, “Any chance I could get a demonstration of the other Skills?”

“Ask me again later. Don’t you know it’s rude to ask a lady her Skills?”

“Oh, so it’s fine to ask a guy, then? Does Lefi know your Skills, should I ask him?” he shot back with a grin.

Rillah flashed a mischievous grin in response, and summoned a gust of wind, blowing him into the air. Edwin caught himself without trouble, and dove forward to try and catch her off-guard. She was expecting the move, or at least reacted fast enough he didn’t even come close, but it did set off a midair game of tag, which was… quite nice.

As he lay in bed that night, his Skill aching like a sore muscle, Edwin reflected that it had been quite some time since he’d had quite so much fun.

Edwin held his grenade up to the light, taking one last look before the test. The majority of what he could see through the apparatite, of course, was just the phosphorus. Inside, though, he knew there was a tiny, fragile vial of firevine sap, held in place by a combination of crystal and phosphorus itself. What was empty space in the container around the explosive itself would one day hold tiny bits of shrapnel, including them for this test was just taking a stupid risk. He cared about its potency, not how many iron filings he could pack in around it.

If this worked well, he’d have to see about getting proper casings made up as well. Though apparatite might work just fine for this. It was fragile enough to shatter easily, after all, but not so easy that the grenade should outright fail.

Satisfied with the basic form of the grenade, Edwin set it on his workbench and gave his safety equipment a final check-over. He didn’t want to do this outside for many reasons- mainly that he didn’t want to set off explosives in the city and the meadow was too far away for this sort of thing- but he’d strengthened his blast defenses and was doing this in an otherwise empty room, so it should be fine.

Test one, mundane Phosphorus and firevine oil, he narrated to Almanac, Held in an apparatite container with separate containers for oil, phosphorus pellets, and expanded air canister. When struck, a primed explosive- see PhosphateGrenadePrototypeL- will have the intentionally fragile separators between partitions break and allow the components required for a detonation to intermix and hopefully ignite.

He removed the protective cap, allowing the oh-so-fragile crystal protrusions to stick up above the explosive’s main body. Satisfied, he stepped back to the far side of the room, sheltered behind his blast screen, and threw his detonator pebble.

The tiny rock, smaller than even his fingernail, flew true, perfectly striking the detonator pins. There was a brief, tiny flash of blue light, then…

WHOMP

Smoke and fire billowed into the room, filling it with the ever-familiar scent of garlic that phosphorus produced for whatever reason.

Hm, okay. Definitely good, and certainly a viable alternative for his smoke bombs if he didn’t mind the smoke being both toxic and spreading fires everywhere. So… not really practical for those purposes. But that was fine! It was why he had dedicated smoke bombs anyway. Also, setting things in a wide area on fire wasn’t exactly a bad tool to have, and so long as there wasn’t anything flammable around, he could pretty easily make the phosphorus burn itself out just with some quick applications of Firestarting anyway… which he should definitely do now.

He also knew that his grenade design worked! That was cause for celebration in itself.

It took a little while for the smoke to clear enough for another bomb test, but after some time spent fruitlessly trying to master his newfound- well, newly defined- magical powers, Edwin was eager to move on with his experiments.

His next bomb would be Infused, and Edwin was already expecting a much larger explosion as a result. He hypothesized that the mana he stored within the phosphorus would be released in the detonation, bringing a proper fireball into existence

Test two, infused Phosphorus and firevine oil.Testing methodology a match for PhosphorusExplosivesTest1.

He set his grenade prototype on the counter, took shelter behind his reinforced barricade, triple-checked that all of his protective gear was in place, and threw his detonator pebble. Everything was going just as planned…

Wait, wait, no. Why was-

BANG

-Bomb Throwing activating?

A fireball filled the room, the sudden explosion and shockwave magnifying in volume as it bounced around the enclosed space. The world went orange and then white, and it took Edwin way too long to realize it was because his apparatite face mask had just been coated with phosphorus pentoxide. His ear plugs had probably saved his hearing, and he dispelled them to see if anyone was… ah, there it was.

“Are you okay?” Inion asked, her voice echoing through the room. Apparently the explosion had caught her attention, because she had not been nearby earlier.

“Yeah, yeah!” he called back, wiping off his mask to reveal the workshop was indeed very smoky, but strangely, the workbench was also coated in a thin layer of black dust in the perfect shape of a scorchmark. Where had that come from? It was made of stone, and hadn’t been there with the mundane test. Perhaps just as strange was the distinct lack of phosphor fires anywhere, “I’m fine!”

He coughed more out of a sense of obligation than anything, but he had no doubt that he had just given Fresh Air quite the workout. He frowned at the soot covering the table. What was that stuff, and why was it black? Was it from the firevine? Phosphorus pentoxide- the usual result of burning the element- was white. And yes, there was a lot of that everywhere, but what the heck was this?

>83% Elemental Phosphorus

What the heck?

“It just worked… way better than I had anticipated!” he added, “Way, way better. I’d stay out there if I were you while I clean this up!”

Hm. Why did Bomb Throwing trigger for this one but not the previous? Did it have to do with the amount of magic present in the latter? Why was there a black phosphorus scorch mark on his bench, and was it actually black phosphorus? Where were the lingering remnants of burning white phosphorus spread throughout the room?

What was going on?