RUET Undersea 2

For each argument Jake's head popped up in a different place--in front of my notes, next to my ears, above me--if there was one thing he knew, it was how to pester someone. No way was I going to agree easily; I new Jake long enough that a quick assent would only set a precedent. Plus, he was just about at the bargaining stage.

"I'll even take care of the equipment and arrangements. You just show up and perform the ritual!" Such a predictable guy isn't he? Not that I'd ever say that to his face, he'd engineer a subtle revenge plan in seconds.

I let out a practiced sigh (and I mean practiced. If he figured out I wanted to come along, I'd be dragged along on many more of his whims). "How long will I be able to study in silence if I agree?" I asked, keeping my attention on the equations in front of me.

Jake stopped and looked upward for a moment and scratched his head, "20 hours, assuming the normal delays, but they've been low on repeater charms, so tack on another 2 hours." Another of his quirks, he'd never lie to a direct question. As long as the question was simple, his answer wouldn't be too deceptive.

"And what are you planning?"

"It's great! You remember the Global Magic Board's recent bulletin? the upcoming rituals? They have the wrong location; I calculated the correct one and got a casting pass. We head down next week and perform the binding. Come back with some minor magic tricks and probably get some reward for smug genius, it looks good on the institute and on our record, and the Reformers get something else to blame on the Board: everybody wins."

"And how did you manage to out do the Board's projection experts?"

"It's a pretty minor binding, I think it's something like 'control over water from the Atlantic ocean in a vapor state,' there's no real priority to it. So they never bothered to check the stars carefully. It has something around a fifty to sixty year cycle so there's no recent data. So they just chose the star which matched closest to the sky coordinates, but when it was initially recorded, there were two stars around that point. From what I can tell, they have the wrong one!"

"Jake, you don't get that large of a shift in location over just fifty years. They'd have to have noticed an imbalance the last time."

"Nope! The last cycle was in 1942! They didn't have the triplanar rift perfected then so it was ruled too risky with all the submarines in the area."

Now that was surprising, Jake's ideas usually had a much more unlikely thread to them; it would probably be perfectly obvious in hindsight, like the null zone which left us hiking for a week during his attempt to undercut the price for unfertilized nether-dragon egg albumen. This one at least sounded like safe excursion. "Sounds reasonable enough," I started, but he vanished before I could add a qualifier.

True to his word, I hardly saw him over the next two days: once when he dropped off the basic underwater gear and again when he took the gear to be packed. I looked up the ritual, it was nothing special. It used the same basic structure as the binding spells every new apprentice learned: you create a seven point star, each point representing a power, release your life force into it and then attach a thread of your life force to the background magic. The only thing abnormal was the long cycle: with sixty-one years between, there were only two recorded rituals.

Of course, the power gained from this one would be stronger than normal, but only because of the limitations; one of the major principles of magic is, "The harder something is to use, the more effective it will be." Take the Institute's current Master Necromancer for example: he could reanimate mice nearly instantly and maintain it with little concentration. One of his favorite demonstrations was to resurrect them after his assistant used a death-spell (and I mean full resurrection, if he got it within a few seconds it was if the mouse had never died)--very impressive. In the more advanced classes, he revealed that he could only perform that trick on a specific breed of mouse that also had a certain fur coloring.

The same thing applied here, this binding granted much easier control over water than normal, but it had to be vapor which originated from the Atlantic Ocean. Even so, I had already thought up several uses, and was prepping as many suppression vials as I could fit in my luggage. A quick heat-spell and I'd have a ready supply of genuine Atlantic-steam. I was on the last batch when Jake dropped by to fetch my things. He was quite excited, bouncing along (and I mean bouncing, he was accentuating his mood with short gravity negations on each step) and whistling. To tell the truth, I was similarly excited, though I was nowhere near as open about it.

Our trip was calm: on the "academic pursuit travel expenditure (misc.)" stipend we patronized only the smallest and most cramped of passenger ships. Surprisingly enough that arrangement turned out very well, with a smaller more familiar crew, Jake was always off leaching knowledge from the crew or learning how some gizmo worked. I couldn't see the point of it; Jake was the only person I knew who kept a paid subscription for the telepathy spell's "Consult" variant.

From the ship we had a small magecraft boat: essentially an inflatable raft with a few basic casting circles already in place (stability, propulsion, rain-shield and so on), but without any power supply. I ended up powering the static spells, not because of my two 400-level channeling courses, but because Jake was way to busy calculating our position with a sextant (needless to say I swapped his results with those from my GPS, I'm pretty sure that taking a few measurements, scribbling for half an hour, then taking another few measurements, more calculations then making another measurement isn't proper procedure). Luckily it took only a day to reach the site Jake had registered; one more triangulation calculation and I would have snapped.

Jake vanished as soon as we reached the site while I deciphered the energy storage settings for the anchor spell. They give you the energy leak equations for each model, without bothering to tell you which model you had in front of you. Once I found the applicable equation, I had to pull out the calculator; why they don't give you the relationship between energy input and running time I'll never know. At least it turns into a simple differential equation (though I gave it a generous margin of error just in case).

He seemed satisfied with the site. While I was struggling with the anchor, the spell capacitors vanished one by one, followed by the guidelines for the planar disjunction and air bubble spells. Fine by me, I was having enough trouble without trying to deal with encapsulated spells (I made sure I was asleep by the time Jake finished, a tirade of what he had to deal with would not be a good way to end the day).

Not that you could argue with the effectiveness; the next morning we started up the units with no trouble. Supposedly the disjunction spell sliced off a chunk of space while keeping it connected through some complex jargon. All I know is that we had an empty cross-section of stone to work off of and any sea weed or fish that came by would vanish on one side and show up a few minutes later on the other. The bubble was a nice and simple one, just producing a temporary breathable atmosphere. Not necessary, but it was somewhat safer than using a breath-suspension or atmosphere conversion spell, especially when in the middle of a binding ritual (releasing your own life energy tends to have a negative effect on any spells you happen to be maintaining).

We started cutting the magic circle immediately after the spell stabilized; we had several hours until the spell's power supply ran low, but there's no point taking chances when powerful magic is involved. Thus no chisels or other archaic tools, I was tracing off lines while Jake pulled off some vanishing trick a few meters behind me (I assume it was teleportation, he was never any good at elemental magic). Whatever he used, it was fast. For ninety minutes, we (well actually just me, Jake was busy watching cross-sections of fish swim through the disjunction spell) rechecked and rechecked the circle and inscribed seven-pointed star.

Jake's chronometer chimed, and we moved to the seventh point; on its second chime we started off in opposite directions around the circle. I passed through my first three points (Ether, Magnetism and Solar) dropping off each symbol with the appropriate word. We passed in perfect sync opposite from the start, and moved on to the remaining points; for these three (Electricity, Fire and Time) I needed only the make the vocalization as the symbols had been dropped by Jake on his pass.

Reaching the last point (or initial point) together, I pricked my finger letting a drop of blood hit the ground (Jake, in his showy fashion, used a quick burst of magic to cause a drop of his blood to pass right through the skin. He had that annoying confidence you need to cast small uncontrolled magics on one's own person).

"Vivos," we said in unison, placing our hands on the edge of the circle. Bursts of light shot around the circle as our bodies when rigid, there was probably some other pyrotechnics, but it's hard to see without being connected to your body.

Or not. I was certainly seeing something, if I had to theorize I'd say it was a direct translation to my life-force's sensory matrix (there's some technical term, but do I look like a biomancer?). Jake was part of my awareness, outwardly appearing normal, though his clothing and even occasionally a body part would randomly change...explains a lot. Also there was a strange figure, vaguely human, coming toward us.

Its clothes (or maybe its skin? the mental image gave little hint as to what I was seeing) shimmered and flowed like water, then changed to a flowing shade of blue, then a clear sparkle. Any and all aspects of water were shown. Jake was providing a steady commentary; direct stimulation of hearing as well as sight? I'd have to visit the library when this was done.

"An elemental! or maybe a bound spirit, or possibly a lesser deity!" Jake's contemplations came, "That could clear up several questions regarding this! It will easily show my terran-stellar calculation to be correct verses the stellar-triangulation." I wished I was corporeal enough to give him the whack that deserved; he had been using a long-shot guess, not just a simple alternate star. You think I'd learn by now to specifically question him on every point.

His comments slowed and finally stopped as the figure towered before us, "As it was promised, I have come." Each word seemed to ooze significance; nothing was extraneous, even the diminutive 'it' carried a sense of regal importance. "Under steam born of sea and earth, I greet you."

The creature's stance seemed to shift and a wave of uncertainty, "One was expected. Two have come." I tried to retract my life force, this was Jake's undertaking after all, but some force restrained me. "Adjustments are made, it shall proceed," came a final statement. The images faded into the more familiar cascade of sensations that made up a binding ritual. Not that that was any more natural or ordinary to me, but I knew what to do.

The threads came free and attached easier than I had ever experienced, I even pulled two in my first try. The actual binding was similarly easy. It seemed like the threads were almost connecting on their own. Binding complete, I released the pressure on my life energy and let to return to my body. There was the sudden shock and rush of sensations as the connections were restored, and everything was back to normal--except I didn't notice Jake to my left. I became quite apparent something was wrong when his thoughts intruded on my own.

"A clever solution! The binding was only made for a single individual, so it simply combined the two. I probably would have went with an energy divider...or would that be inapplicable in this instance? Probably not, assuming that was an elemental it wouldn't have access to that type of magic. Though it could..."

As soon as the shock passed, I cut his train of thought, "What in the name of Yashana the Learned are you doing in my mind?"

"I'd say a merging, primarily mass-based since we've retained separate consciousness...I suppose technically that would make it a shared mind. It's likely to be a matter-junction if that was an elemental, a greater power manifestation on the other hand would probably create an effect closer to the compression-combination spell...though an elemental could pull that one off too...then again, if we consider a spirit-based--"

Calm, I had dealt with some weird accidents in the past, I'd make it through this. "How do I reverse it," I cut in. How does his mind function with so many tangents going on at once?

"Very well thank you, plenty of tangents means a greater chance of finding the right one. The compression-combination is only a few hours worth of preparation, even assuming a no-memory spell. The matter-junction could take a year or two; those things are tricky, though there was an article on particle-memory...no that doesn't apply...no it does, if the matter-junction was performed with a high-speed low-output casting...no with an elemental that doesn't apply. Have you used the high energy laboratory recently? I think they still take mass-memory images incase of accidents. But in this case we'd need a correction factor..."

I interrupted again, "So what do we do now?"

My arm came up, the command certainly not mine, placing a wrist chronometer into view. "Only twenty minutes left on those planar spells, we probably should start a clean shutdown."

"I meant a temporary solution to our condition."

"Well...maybe..." A morass of equations filled my mind. Though the haze of symbols I was vaguely aware of my arms moving in complex patters. I tried to decipher some of it, a big mistake; Jake was casting something way out of my field. I could recognize a basic summoning pattern here or a naming pattern there, but then I'd run into notations that I'd never seen before. I finally pulled back and watched them fly by. "Nope, nothing I can do for the moment," he pronounced.

"What were you even trying?"

"er...a temporary summoning/manifestation spell using your name in place of a spirit."

"You can't! That would violate the second law of calling!"

"Ah! That assumes that I used a calling! I figured it all out last semester!" Oops, I got him excited again, "You see if you replace the standard calling portion with an equivalent command spell, that opens up a larger variety in the target portion. Then you can add in a spirit mirror so allow a living person to be summoned, provided you add in a visage translocator. Of course that breaks the transition matrix, but you can replace it by patching in this shamanistic spell I found..." his tone grew a bit troubled, "you won't tell anyone how to do this? Master Vashus purchased my silence on the matter plus all my prepared magic circles after a few incidents."

"WHAT kind of incidents got you involved with the PROGRAM CHAIR?"

"...well...I encapsulated a few preparations....and well....sold them to a few students for communications purposes....and...since it's off of a summoning base, the caster chooses where the visage appears and how long it lasts...well...it seemed that creating...well...embarrassing situations for the spell's target was more popular than long-range communication. Then one of the...less-experienced faculty was targeted, and the next day he offered to let me have primary authorship of a paper explaining the principles plus reimbursement for the materials provided it never showed up again."

I took careful note for future reference. "Let's just get our things cleaned up, we can figure this out later."

"You know how you always say I need to show a little restraint? that I need to think things through more often?...Until this gets sorted out, I have a built-in second guesser!"

I've never thought a glared before, before then I wouldn't even know what that meant, but I am quite sure I did it them.